If you slowly push away from the space station, you won't keep moving away from it in a straight line, because you and the space station are both orbiting the earth. In 46 minutes or so you may find yourself passing by it again.
The parent actually has an interesting point but is simply bad at explaining himself, stop modding him down:) 1) The height of one's orbit is directly related to the speed - the higher the speed, the higher your orbit 2) If you push yourself away so that your earth-relative speed changes (e.g. forward or backward), you will get to a higher or lower orbit, and cannot get back to the station 3) However, if your earth-relative speed doesn't change (e.g. if you push yourself off perpendicularly), you will keep orbiting the Earth at the same height as before. So we'll have two orbits (ISS and you) with a) same height and speed b) slightly different angles c) you were at the same point at some point in time These orbits will keep intersecting in two points, the original point, and one right across the Earth, so it's actually possible to get back.
It would have been nicer if they make patches available as soon as possible with or without strong customer sentiment.
This doesn't make any sense. All patch release dates are a function of: 1) impact of the problem 2) complexity of required testing The idea being that the patch shouldn't cause more harm than the original flaw. If the impact is huge, testing of more obscure cases can be deferred somewhat. If the impact is small, more time can be taken. So if there hadn't been any customer sentiment (i.e. no one cared), it would make no sense to rush the patch and risk breaking something.
In the USA, they're not only laying off IT and CS staff, they're even letting H1-B visas go unused, not that that's keeping Bill and others from lobbying to raise the H1-B cap anyway.
Don't lie. Microsoft has literally thousands of vacancies (http://members.microsoft.com/careers/search/defau lt.aspx) in the US, and they pay decent money. I am leading a team of developers myself, and I have an open position, you just have to have some coding/design/intellectual skills above the regular Slashdot wannabe level to get it.
And the yearly H1B cap gets filled in the first 2 months of the year, as some friends from my native country found out.
Well, this is simply absurd, who is moderating this troll up? For the background: I work at Microsoft, and our team is currently hiring.
1) Four years of one of the most time intensive majors in colleges
I was able to work part time (as a programmer) while going to college, so it really wasn't all that time intensive.
2) Going through Microsoft's dehumanizing interview process
You are interviewed by your future peers. I ask mostly coding (e.g. write code that generates all permutations of letters in a word), logic, or design/algorithm (e.g. how would you design a memory manager) questions. If this is dehumanizing for you then yes, perhaps this is not the right field for you.
3) Getting free soda in exchange for 80 hour work weeks at minimum wage
You are really full of it. Even the entry level (straight from college) Microsoft developer salary is more than twice Washington state's median plus 100% health benefits, free sports club membership and many other things. Neither me nor anyone in my team is working 80 hour weeks.
I have the sure-fire way to make Microsoft fail: I'll invest in it. My history with investments is legend: Iomega, Syquest, Alcatel, to name some.
There was a joke in Communist Poland a while ago. An old jew has 1000 zlotys (Polish currency). A guy from the local savings bank advises that he should put it in the bank. - But what if the bank goes bankrupt? the jew asks - The savings in the bank are guaranteed buy the Polish state! - But what if the state goes bankrupt? - Then your savings would be guaranteed by the whole league of Socialist nations, led by Soviet Union! - But what if the Soviet Union goes bankrupt? - Well, would you really be sorry to sacrifice 1000 zlotys for that?
The claims are so absurd I don't even know where to start. 1) His whole theory is based on the "fact" that the only way in the world to find his pages is to use site:www.sitename.com in Google, implying that Google has cached the results from an earlier crawl. Of course, there is no way that the Microsoft search couldn't have also cached it. 2) Then, he claims that Microsoft is probably screen-scraping Google's results (for all the millions of sites out there), and using these results to recrawl those sites? This doesn't even make any sense. 3) And last but not least, Microsoft is certainly basing its whole search architecture on the assumption that Google wouldn't ever notice MSN mirroring its whole index. Yeah right.
I had a similar experience this spring when visiting the otherwise nice state of Louisiana. I had been recording our trip by taking pictures of all kinds of random stuff that we saw, and one day we saw some cool-looking oil refinery by the roadside. I stopped, got out my camera and snapped a pic of it, then continued the drive. ONE MINUTE later there was a police car behind us; they made us stop and forced me to erase that picture. Being an immigrant with less than zero rights in this country, I complied. The absurdity of the whole situation (real terrorists would not have stopped, and would have just taken a picture, or even better, found it on the web on the official homepage of the plant) didn't really get to the cops. Or perhaps, this is all just part of the game. Nobody really cares about the terrorists, and the government is simply and blatantly trying to scare people into submission.
Before voting even began in Philadelphia -- poll watchers found nearly 2000 votes already planted on machines scattered throughout the city...
Is any major news channel covering any of this? The thing I'm most worried about is mainstream news dropping the ball (just as they did with the Iraq war, Patriot Act, and many other things).
Hi all, I cannot yet vote in this country but I would like to remind you of the importance of this, and encourage you to vote. There are certain ideas and principles that are central to the political heritage of our country: freedom of speech and free assembly without fear of persecution, the right to be secure against arbitrary search and seizure, the right to a fair and speedy public trial, and above all, the idea that all people are created equal, and have these unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of race, origin or religion. These principles have often distinguished the U.S. from other, less fortunate places places in the world. People have admired it because of that, and the country has been able to hold the moral high ground because of adherence to these ideas. However, although these rights should be unalienable as values common to all human beings, they cannot be taken for granted unless people take an active role in participating in the political process and ensuring that these values are held up. I have lived under three quite different political systems in my life, and not all of them have allowed its citizens to have these liberties. Through my own experiences and memories of my friends, I have seen how they can be granted and taken away, and it always happens because of either the activity or inactivity of common people, people like you and me. So please go out and vote, and encourage your friends to do the same. And whatever your political affiliation is, I hope you think about these rights when making your choice. Thank you.
Hi all, I cannot yet vote in this country but I would like to remind you of the importance of this, and encourage you to vote. There are certain ideas and principles that are central to the political heritage of our country: freedom of speech and free assembly without fear of persecution, the right to be secure against arbitrary search and seizure, the right to a fair and speedy public trial, and above all, the idea that all people are created equal, and have these unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of race, origin or religion. These principles have often distinguished the U.S. from other, less fortunate places places in the world. People have admired it because of that, and the country has been able to hold the moral high ground because of adherence to these ideas. However, although these rights should be unalienable as values common to all human beings, they cannot be taken for granted unless people take an active role in participating in the political process and ensuring that these values are held up. I have lived under three quite different political systems in my life, and not all of them have allowed its citizens to have these liberties. Through my own experiences and memories of my friends, I have seen how they can be granted and taken away, and it always happens because of either the activity or inactivity of common people, people like you and me. So please go out and vote, and encourage your friends to do the same. And whatever your political affiliation is, I hope you think about these rights when making your choice. Thank you.
We have all these programs for trying to find patterns in signals from space but are we doing anything to make life easier for anyone that is trying to find us? Sure, we are emitting a bunch of electromagnetic radiation from our broadcasts but how far would it actually reach to be detectable? Wouldn't it be more efficient to send powerful laser pulses that are specifically targeted at "promising" nearby star systems? Is anybody in the world doing something like this?
I've been playing poker for about 6 months now (pretty seriously, been competing in tournaments and reading some of the classic poker books), and I consider myself to be fairly accomplished
Btw, would you (or anyone else for that matter) care to suggest a few books that were most valuable to you? Also, where did you start playing, e.g. what's the best environment for a beginner?
The coming election is probably one of the most important ones in the last few decades, and nothing can really be done to save it from abuses any more. And after the vote is over, the topic will probably disappear from public consciousness anyway.
Does everybody in SF already has free medical facilities ? Free shelter ?
There are so many posts like the parent under this article that I started wondering - when did Slashdot stop being a geek site and become a political whining ground? When I read articles like this, the primary instinct in me is to say: 'hey, this is so cool, I wish I lived in SF' because I'm a geek first and foremost. And on the prime geek web site of the world, I would expect the discussion to be about the technical aspects of the solution, projected capabilities etc. But instead there's a bunch of whining about universal healthcare! What's up with that?
In Estonia, my native country, banks created a cross-payment system in 1993 (over ten years ago!). Since then it has been possible for anyone with bank account in any Estonian bank to pay anyone else with a bank account. Shortly after that most banks made the system available over the Internet. It became quite common for me to go out to lunch with my colleagues so that someone would pay the bill, and later everyone else would transfer some money instantaneously to his bank account. When I moved to the US in 1999, I was most puzzled by people having to mess with personal checks for such things, and the inconvenience they had to go through whenever they needed to make payments to anyone (e.g. utility bills). Things like PayPal, various (paid!) bill payment systems and other things like that are simply hacks built on top of an antiquated banking system and would not be necessary if we had a decent cross-payment system between the banks. So can anyone please enlighten me and tell why we still don't have one??
Would anybody know if there are any plants here on Earth that could survive on Mars itself? Not in some closed dome but in the actual atmosphere? If we ever want to have successful Mars colonization then we also have to perform some terrafroming there; I can't imagine too many people wanting to live their whole lives in a cramped, closed environment. Creating some oxygen in the atmosphere would probably be essential for such an endeavour but would it be possible with anything that we've got today?
I don't care a lot about Shatner as an entertainer but I'm thankful to him and anybody else that is putting dollars into private space industry. Getting in space myself one day is my biggest dream; I have been giving a few hundred bucks to X-prize foundation and other similar organizations every year but obviously I could never realize my goal without guys like Shatner chipping in and advancing the cause. Thanks again!
Oh, I don't necessarily blame the soldiers. I know I would personally fare even worse. However, the British used to govern 40% of the World by relying mostly on existing social structures as opposed to raw strength of technology, and I don't recall them getting stuck like we currently are. Not that the British imperial model and motives should be something to admire but there are certainly some lessons to be learned.
I read one of the blogs about life in Baghdad a few months ago and there was one observation that captured my mind: Americans are basically like aliens from a different world. They even don't look human with all the body armor and gear. And if they patrol in a city then everyone escapes from their way, the society opens up before them and closes immediately after they have passed. The patrol moves essentially in a vacuum, the streets desert at the sight of a Bradley, and they don't have any contact with the real world around them. It is similar to shooting an octopus with a shotgun - the bullet passes right through the soft tissue and doesn't do any significant damage. So it makes me wonder - would we have been any more successful if we didn't put that much effort into technology but human contact instead?
If you care so much about global opinion why are you trashing this fine international coalition that our heroic president has formed. What do you say to Tony Blair? What do you say to Poland? Poland! Why does everybody forget that we were supported by Poland!
I know you're being sarcastic here but it should be noted that the governments of American allies pretty much went to war against the public opinion of their population (and some of them are paying for it now), that includes both Britain and Poland. In many cases (including Estonia, my own native country), "official" approval for US policy was achieved by simple bribery and threats. There was probably no country in the world but the US (where it took a lot of brainwashing and spineless media parroting everything the administration said) where the people would actually have believed the story of Bush administration.
How did he manage to keep track of this on a M$ box without catching a few of those viruses?
Beause contrary to the popular opinion on Slashdot, you actually have to open and run the attachment yourself in Outlook in order for it to do anything. None of the big e-mail viruses have been able to spread without active help from the user. I have been running Outlook for 6 years by now and never had any problems.
And we want you to give Microsoft a copy of all of your important business documents. Who could think that was not a good idea?
"Being an online service" doesn't necessarily mean that Microsoft is hosting it. This is actually geared more towards individual companies setting up internal document management and collaboration servers (like SharePoint), Slashdot summary is simply misleading in that regard.
Collaborative PowerPoints? Um... Ok. Isn't that what source code control systems are for, even for binaries? Pure vaporware, baby.
It is significantly easier and more efficient (no need to learn other programs and switch context) for the average office worker if the "source control system" is integrated into the application itself, for example, if you get actions like check-out/check-in/view history right in your File menu. On the vaporware comment: Office has supported version control features natively since Office XP but has so far always relied on another product (like SharePoint) to implement actual versioning logic, so it is definitely for real. You have also been able to do really useful collaborative things like view other people's changes to the same document etc for a while now. So this is just another step on the already established path.
Slashdot Mirror
If you slowly push away from the space station, you won't keep moving away from it in a straight line, because you and the space station are both orbiting the earth. In 46 minutes or so you may find yourself passing by it again.
:)
The parent actually has an interesting point but is simply bad at explaining himself, stop modding him down
1) The height of one's orbit is directly related to the speed - the higher the speed, the higher your orbit
2) If you push yourself away so that your earth-relative speed changes (e.g. forward or backward), you will get to a higher or lower orbit, and cannot get back to the station
3) However, if your earth-relative speed doesn't change (e.g. if you push yourself off perpendicularly), you will keep orbiting the Earth at the same height as before. So we'll have two orbits (ISS and you) with
a) same height and speed
b) slightly different angles
c) you were at the same point at some point in time
These orbits will keep intersecting in two points, the original point, and one right across the Earth, so it's actually possible to get back.
It would have been nicer if they make patches available as soon as possible with or without strong customer sentiment.
This doesn't make any sense. All patch release dates are a function of:
1) impact of the problem
2) complexity of required testing
The idea being that the patch shouldn't cause more harm than the original flaw.
If the impact is huge, testing of more obscure cases can be deferred somewhat. If the impact is small, more time can be taken.
So if there hadn't been any customer sentiment (i.e. no one cared), it would make no sense to rush the patch and risk breaking something.
In the USA, they're not only laying off IT and CS staff, they're even letting H1-B visas go unused, not that that's keeping Bill and others from lobbying to raise the H1-B cap anyway.
u lt.aspx) in the US, and they pay decent money.
Don't lie. Microsoft has literally thousands of vacancies (http://members.microsoft.com/careers/search/defa
I am leading a team of developers myself, and I have an open position, you just have to have some coding/design/intellectual skills above the regular Slashdot wannabe level to get it.
And the yearly H1B cap gets filled in the first 2 months of the year, as some friends from my native country found out.
Well, this is simply absurd, who is moderating this troll up?
For the background: I work at Microsoft, and our team is currently hiring.
1) Four years of one of the most time intensive majors in colleges
I was able to work part time (as a programmer) while going to college, so it really wasn't all that time intensive.
2) Going through Microsoft's dehumanizing interview process
You are interviewed by your future peers. I ask mostly coding (e.g. write code that generates all permutations of letters in a word), logic, or design/algorithm (e.g. how would you design a memory manager) questions. If this is dehumanizing for you then yes, perhaps this is not the right field for you.
3) Getting free soda in exchange for 80 hour work weeks at minimum wage
You are really full of it. Even the entry level (straight from college) Microsoft developer salary is more than twice Washington state's median plus 100% health benefits, free sports club membership and many other things.
Neither me nor anyone in my team is working 80 hour weeks.
4) Getting fired at age 28 for being too old
Most people in my team are older than that.
I have the sure-fire way to make Microsoft fail: I'll invest in it. My history with investments is legend: Iomega, Syquest, Alcatel, to name some.
There was a joke in Communist Poland a while ago.
An old jew has 1000 zlotys (Polish currency). A guy from the local savings bank advises that he should put it in the bank.
- But what if the bank goes bankrupt? the jew asks
- The savings in the bank are guaranteed buy the Polish state!
- But what if the state goes bankrupt?
- Then your savings would be guaranteed by the whole league of Socialist nations, led by Soviet Union!
- But what if the Soviet Union goes bankrupt?
- Well, would you really be sorry to sacrifice 1000 zlotys for that?
The claims are so absurd I don't even know where to start.
1) His whole theory is based on the "fact" that the only way in the world to find his pages is to use site:www.sitename.com in Google, implying that Google has cached the results from an earlier crawl. Of course, there is no way that the Microsoft search couldn't have also cached it.
2) Then, he claims that Microsoft is probably screen-scraping Google's results (for all the millions of sites out there), and using these results to recrawl those sites? This doesn't even make any sense.
3) And last but not least, Microsoft is certainly basing its whole search architecture on the assumption that Google wouldn't ever notice MSN mirroring its whole index. Yeah right.
I had a similar experience this spring when visiting the otherwise nice state of Louisiana.
I had been recording our trip by taking pictures of all kinds of random stuff that we saw, and one day we saw some cool-looking oil refinery by the roadside. I stopped, got out my camera and snapped a pic of it, then continued the drive. ONE MINUTE later there was a police car behind us; they made us stop and forced me to erase that picture. Being an immigrant with less than zero rights in this country, I complied.
The absurdity of the whole situation (real terrorists would not have stopped, and would have just taken a picture, or even better, found it on the web on the official homepage of the plant) didn't really get to the cops.
Or perhaps, this is all just part of the game. Nobody really cares about the terrorists, and the government is simply and blatantly trying to scare people into submission.
Before voting even began in Philadelphia -- poll watchers found nearly 2000 votes already planted on machines scattered throughout the city...
Is any major news channel covering any of this? The thing I'm most worried about is mainstream news dropping the ball (just as they did with the Iraq war, Patriot Act, and many other things).
Hi all,
I cannot yet vote in this country but I would like to remind you of the importance of this, and encourage you to vote.
There are certain ideas and principles that are central to the political heritage of our country: freedom of speech and free assembly without fear of persecution, the right to be secure against arbitrary search and seizure, the right to a fair and speedy public trial, and above all, the idea that all people are created equal, and have these unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of race, origin or religion.
These principles have often distinguished the U.S. from other, less fortunate places places in the world. People have admired it because of that, and the country has been able to hold the moral high ground because of adherence to these ideas.
However, although these rights should be unalienable as values common to all human beings, they cannot be taken for granted unless people take an active role in participating in the political process and ensuring that these values are held up. I have lived under three quite different political systems in my life, and not all of them have allowed its citizens to have these liberties. Through my own experiences and memories of my friends, I have seen how they can be granted and taken away, and it always happens because of either the activity or inactivity of common people, people like you and me.
So please go out and vote, and encourage your friends to do the same. And whatever your political affiliation is, I hope you think about these rights when making your choice.
Thank you.
Targo
Hi all,
I cannot yet vote in this country but I would like to remind you of the importance of this, and encourage you to vote.
There are certain ideas and principles that are central to the political heritage of our country: freedom of speech and free assembly without fear of persecution, the right to be secure against arbitrary search and seizure, the right to a fair and speedy public trial, and above all, the idea that all people are created equal, and have these unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of race, origin or religion.
These principles have often distinguished the U.S. from other, less fortunate places places in the world. People have admired it because of that, and the country has been able to hold the moral high ground because of adherence to these ideas.
However, although these rights should be unalienable as values common to all human beings, they cannot be taken for granted unless people take an active role in participating in the political process and ensuring that these values are held up. I have lived under three quite different political systems in my life, and not all of them have allowed its citizens to have these liberties. Through my own experiences and memories of my friends, I have seen how they can be granted and taken away, and it always happens because of either the activity or inactivity of common people, people like you and me.
So please go out and vote, and encourage your friends to do the same. And whatever your political affiliation is, I hope you think about these rights when making your choice.
Thank you.
Targo
piss on you too!
We have all these programs for trying to find patterns in signals from space but are we doing anything to make life easier for anyone that is trying to find us? Sure, we are emitting a bunch of electromagnetic radiation from our broadcasts but how far would it actually reach to be detectable? Wouldn't it be more efficient to send powerful laser pulses that are specifically targeted at "promising" nearby star systems?
Is anybody in the world doing something like this?
I've been playing poker for about 6 months now (pretty seriously, been competing in tournaments and reading some of the classic poker books), and I consider myself to be fairly accomplished
Btw, would you (or anyone else for that matter) care to suggest a few books that were most valuable to you? Also, where did you start playing, e.g. what's the best environment for a beginner?
The coming election is probably one of the most important ones in the last few decades, and nothing can really be done to save it from abuses any more.
And after the vote is over, the topic will probably disappear from public consciousness anyway.
Does everybody in SF already has free medical facilities ? Free shelter ?
There are so many posts like the parent under this article that I started wondering - when did Slashdot stop being a geek site and become a political whining ground?
When I read articles like this, the primary instinct in me is to say: 'hey, this is so cool, I wish I lived in SF' because I'm a geek first and foremost. And on the prime geek web site of the world, I would expect the discussion to be about the technical aspects of the solution, projected capabilities etc. But instead there's a bunch of whining about universal healthcare! What's up with that?
In Estonia, my native country, banks created a cross-payment system in 1993 (over ten years ago!). Since then it has been possible for anyone with bank account in any Estonian bank to pay anyone else with a bank account. Shortly after that most banks made the system available over the Internet.
It became quite common for me to go out to lunch with my colleagues so that someone would pay the bill, and later everyone else would transfer some money instantaneously to his bank account. When I moved to the US in 1999, I was most puzzled by people having to mess with personal checks for such things, and the inconvenience they had to go through whenever they needed to make payments to anyone (e.g. utility bills).
Things like PayPal, various (paid!) bill payment systems and other things like that are simply hacks built on top of an antiquated banking system and would not be necessary if we had a decent cross-payment system between the banks. So can anyone please enlighten me and tell why we still don't have one??
Would anybody know if there are any plants here on Earth that could survive on Mars itself? Not in some closed dome but in the actual atmosphere?
If we ever want to have successful Mars colonization then we also have to perform some terrafroming there; I can't imagine too many people wanting to live their whole lives in a cramped, closed environment. Creating some oxygen in the atmosphere would probably be essential for such an endeavour but would it be possible with anything that we've got today?
I don't care a lot about Shatner as an entertainer but I'm thankful to him and anybody else that is putting dollars into private space industry.
Getting in space myself one day is my biggest dream; I have been giving a few hundred bucks to X-prize foundation and other similar organizations every year but obviously I could never realize my goal without guys like Shatner chipping in and advancing the cause.
Thanks again!
Now, if we could also make a Lego Solver for it, it would be a geek nirvana.
He says from the safe comfort of his home...
Oh, I don't necessarily blame the soldiers. I know I would personally fare even worse. However, the British used to govern 40% of the World by relying mostly on existing social structures as opposed to raw strength of technology, and I don't recall them getting stuck like we currently are. Not that the British imperial model and motives should be something to admire but there are certainly some lessons to be learned.
I read one of the blogs about life in Baghdad a few months ago and there was one observation that captured my mind:
Americans are basically like aliens from a different world. They even don't look human with all the body armor and gear. And if they patrol in a city then everyone escapes from their way, the society opens up before them and closes immediately after they have passed. The patrol moves essentially in a vacuum, the streets desert at the sight of a Bradley, and they don't have any contact with the real world around them.
It is similar to shooting an octopus with a shotgun - the bullet passes right through the soft tissue and doesn't do any significant damage.
So it makes me wonder - would we have been any more successful if we didn't put that much effort into technology but human contact instead?
If you care so much about global opinion why are you trashing this fine international coalition that our heroic president has formed. What do you say to Tony Blair? What do you say to Poland? Poland! Why does everybody forget that we were supported by Poland!
I know you're being sarcastic here but it should be noted that the governments of American allies pretty much went to war against the public opinion of their population (and some of them are paying for it now), that includes both Britain and Poland. In many cases (including Estonia, my own native country), "official" approval for US policy was achieved by simple bribery and threats. There was probably no country in the world but the US (where it took a lot of brainwashing and spineless media parroting everything the administration said) where the people would actually have believed the story of Bush administration.
How did he manage to keep track of this on a M$ box without catching a few of those viruses?
Beause contrary to the popular opinion on Slashdot, you actually have to open and run the attachment yourself in Outlook in order for it to do anything. None of the big e-mail viruses have been able to spread without active help from the user. I have been running Outlook for 6 years by now and never had any problems.
we want to be in the forefront
And we want you to give Microsoft a copy of all of your important business documents. Who could think that was not a good idea?
"Being an online service" doesn't necessarily mean that Microsoft is hosting it. This is actually geared more towards individual companies setting up internal document management and collaboration servers (like SharePoint), Slashdot summary is simply misleading in that regard.
Collaborative PowerPoints? Um... Ok. Isn't that what source code control systems are for, even for binaries? Pure vaporware, baby.
It is significantly easier and more efficient (no need to learn other programs and switch context) for the average office worker if the "source control system" is integrated into the application itself, for example, if you get actions like check-out/check-in/view history right in your File menu.
On the vaporware comment: Office has supported version control features natively since Office XP but has so far always relied on another product (like SharePoint) to implement actual versioning logic, so it is definitely for real. You have also been able to do really useful collaborative things like view other people's changes to the same document etc for a while now.
So this is just another step on the already established path.