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User: HughPickens.com

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  1. Re:The "up in the sky" URL ... on Engineers Plan The Most Expensive Object Ever Built (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Here's my original submission with correct URL's and "on Earth" in title.

    Engineers Plan the Most Expensive Object Ever Built on Earth

    Ed Davey has an interesting story at BBC about the proposed nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset , UK which at $35 billion will be the most expensive object ever put together on Earth. For that sum you could build a small forest of Burj Khalifas - the world's tallest building, in Dubai, which each cost $1.5bn, you could build almost six Large Hadron Colliders, built under the border between France and Switzerland to unlock the secrets of the universe, and at a cost a mere $5.8bn, or you could build five Oakland Bay Bridges in San Francisco, designed to withstand the strongest earthquake seismologists would expect within the next 1,500 years at a cost of $6.5bn. "Nuclear power plants are the most complicated piece of equipment we make," says Steve Thomas. "Cost of nuclear power plants has tended to go up throughout history as accidents happen and we design measures to deal with the risk."

    But what about historical buildings like the the pyramids. Although working out the cost of something built more than 4,500 years ago presents numerous challenges, in 2012 the Turner Construction Company estimated it could build the Great Pyramid of Giza for $5.0bn. That includes about $730m for stone and $58m for 12 cranes. Labor is a minor cost as it is projected that a mere 600 staff would be necessary. In contrast, it took 20,000 people to build the original pyramid with a total of 77.6 million days' labor. Using the current Egyptian minimum wage of $5.73 a day, that gives a labor cost of $445m. But whatever the most expensive object on Earth is, up in the sky is something that eclipses all of these things. The International Space Station. Price tag: $110bn.

  2. Re:Well... on DNA On Pizza Crust Leads To Quadruple Murder Suspect · · Score: 2

    If you click on the first link in the story it says that the suspect has been arrested.

    However at the time the story was submitted (May 20, 7:20 pm CST) the suspect had not yet been apprehended. Same link, different story.

    This is something I have seen news operations do before that I really don't agree with. They keep the same URL but they change the content of the story.

    If a news organization changes the content of the story I think they should put an "UPDATE" at the end of the original story to reflect the changes. The NY Times does this when they make a correction or an update to a story.

    Another alternative is to issue an entirely new story with a new headline and a new URL and keep the original story and URL archived for historical purposes.

    One thing that I like about Wikipedia is that you can go back and look at the history of an article to see when changes are made and find out how the article looked at any specific date. I wish news organizations would use a similar methodology to track changes they make to stories.

  3. Re:Reader on The Abandoned Google Project Memorial Page · · Score: 1

    I loved reader and used it for hours every day. When Google abandoned reader I started using newsblur which is even better.

  4. Re:Nauseated. on Developers Race To Develop VR Headsets That Won't Make Users Nauseous · · Score: 1

    http://www.merriam-webster.com...

    Full Definition of NAUSEOUS

    1
    : causing nausea or disgust : nauseating
    2
    : affected with nausea or disgust

    Usage Discussion of NAUSEOUS
    Those who insist that nauseous can properly be used only in sense 1 and that in sense 2 it is an error for nauseated are mistaken. Current evidence shows these facts: nauseous is most frequently used to mean physically affected with nausea, usually after a linking verb such as feel or become; figurative use is quite a bit less frequent. Use of nauseous in sense 1 is much more often figurative than literal, and this use appears to be losing ground to nauseating. Nauseated is used more widely than nauseous in sense 2.
    Examples of NAUSEOUS

    The smell of gasoline makes me nauseous.
    I began to feel nauseous.
    Instead what they do is all sit together and feel really bad, and pray. Nobody does anything as nauseous as try to make everybody all pray together or pray aloud or anything, but you can tell what they're doing. â"David Foster Wallace, Rolling Stone, 25 Oct. 2001

  5. Re:A lack of details for this technical audience on NJ Museum Revives TIROS Satellite Dish After 40 Years · · Score: 2

    You are thinking of Echo - 1 and Echo-2 which were just large metalized balloon satellites that acted as passive reflectors of microwave signals (although they did have beacons to provide telemetry). Echo 2 was the more impressive with a diameter of 41.1-meters. Echo 2 orbited in a near polar orbit, and was conspicuously visible to the unaided eye over all of the Earth. I remember our high school physics class going out at night to watch it pass overhead. It was huge. Echo 2 reentered Earth's atmosphere and burned up on June 7, 1969.

  6. Re:Hellooooo is anybody home? on Silicon Valley Security Experts Give 'Blackhat' a Thumbs-Up; Do You? · · Score: 1

    For the first half hour after the story went up, when you clicked on "Read," you couldn't leave comments. i was going to send an email but then it went good.

  7. One Potential Application For Rock Bands on High Speed DIY M&M Sorting Machine Uses iPhone Brain · · Score: 5, Informative

    "One practical application of the sorter could be creating a bowl of M&Ms - with all the brown ones removed."

    According to Dan and Chip Heath, that's just what rock band Van Halen demand in one of the riders to their standard contract. The band's "M&M clause" was written into its contract to serve a very speciïc purpose. It was called Article 126, and it read as follows: "There will be no brown M&M's in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation." The article was buried in the middle of countless technical speciïcations. When David Lee Roth would arrive at a new venue, he'd immediately walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he'd demand a line check of the entire production. "Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error," said Roth. "They didn't read the contract. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show."

  8. Re:In Reverse on Extreme Shrimp May Hold Clues To Alien Life On Europa · · Score: 1

    The Killing Star, one of my favorite sf books of the past twenty years, explores this idea among many others. The book also presents a very interesting hypothesis that resolves the Fermi Paradox.

  9. Re:I love Model Ms. I still have two of them. on The Greatest Keyboard Ever Made · · Score: 4, Informative

    Vintage IBM ps/2 keyboards pull up to 100x more current compared to modern keyboards. There is a special USB converter available that can handle the current:

    http://www.clickykeyboards.com...