The things Ed didn't mentioned
on
Space Blog
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Each spaceflight has a number of fun events and ceremonies that never go to official press releases. For instance, I hoped that Ed wouldn't be a hypocrite and will clearly state that he had to piss on a Russian bus as a part of the 'piss ceremony' (scroll down to the Baikonur piece), but no, he shamefully tosses that fact and tells us the dull story of leaving signature at the apartment's wall. He didn't even mention that every single Soyuz spacecraft carrier gets 'Tatiana' name hand-painted on it shortly before launch.
I think if NASA wants to popularize space exploration among the youth, it should openly declare that antisocial behaviour and graffiti are mandatory parts of space travel.
About the time Estonia became a "republic". Estonia was a very prosperous *independent* country until Stalin invaded in 1939 as part of the Non-Aggression pact with Hitler.
However, it has nothing to do with hot water shortage.
The problems with hot water begun in early 90s, when USSR imposed sancitons to Estonia shortly after its declaration of independence, barring it from energy supplies. By that time, there was *plenty* of water, power lines, railroads, highways and other relatively modern infrastructure, while your comment implies that Esti had no hot water until the very fall of the Iron Curtain.
While USSR was sufficiently lagging in some aspects of technology from the Western world, it definitely mastered the craft of warming water and delivering it to households.
Is this a sign that 'joe user' starting to realize that software is no longer requiring upgrades every 6 months?
Or he may realize that these days you can't decently upgrade your year-old system anyway. When the time comes, you find that the motherboard doesn't supports the ultra-new 1GHz-bus DRSDDRAM, GeForce MMIII 1024++ now requires AGP 48x, your HD controller doesn't supports that Ultra-Fast-Wide-DMA mode on the newer drives and the latest Pathetion VI CPU won't fit in the old processor slot anyway. So why bother?
I'm sorry, but I like the album format too, and definitely don't want it to go away! Singles are great, of course, but what better to listen to than a group of songs that fit together?
Nothing prevents you from buying all the songs of an album online (at iTunes or wherever). But I don't think it is fair to demand that the albums should only be wholesold, without ability to pick the specific tracks you like.
Yes, there are some masterworks that are better enjoyed when you listen through the complete album. However, in mainstream music industry albums became a vehicle of selling you craploads along with one or two remarkable tracks. Pay-per-track system breaks that, so music industry is of course opposed to it.
Merchants are allowed to store the customer name, card number, and expiration date from the magnetic stripe.
What does a customer name, card number, and expiration date get you?
It gives enough data to reliably identify you.
Consider the following scenario: during a 'terrorism-supporting' street protest, police scans all RFID tags present in the crowd. Then, based on ID numbers, it determines the set of retailers the items were purchased through. The authority queries reatailers' databases for association of RFID tags with bank card purchases, and after that sends inquiries to the banks to determine the identity of the persons in question. It ends up with a nice file that would make Hoover envy.
If the tags get wider acceptance, everyone is likely to carry several of them, making the scanning process statistically robust (i.e. if a person has several tags associated with the same credit card record, it is very likely that he is the card owner).
Of course, if RFID tags will be legislated for use on packages only, this wouldn't happen. However, this issue is still open.
It also directs the Justice Department to develop programs to educate the American public on why copyright violation is bad.
Why copyright violation is called a 'crime' if it isn't even obvious to an average Joe that it's bad? People usually don't have any problems identifying common criminal activities as such; you don't have to explain to a person that murder, fraud, piracy (the real one), rape, blackmail are bad, pretty much regardless of the person's citizenship and cultural background.
Disclaimer: I *do* consider copyright violation a.. well, violation, but I think it is stetched too far these days. Humanity somehow existed for centuries without copyright protection, and, while authors often suffered from copycats, there always was an opportunity for a creative person to get food on table.
Practically speaking, if timesaving devices really saved time, there would be more time available to us now than ever before in history. But, strangely enough, we seem to have less time than even a few years ago. It's really great fun to go someplace where there are no timesaving devices because, when you do, you find that you have LOTS OF TIME. Elsewhere, you're too busy working to pay for machines to save you time so you won't have to work so hard.
I call this mindset a 'vacation syndrome', because such great insigths often visit people when they are at holidays. Sure, it feels like you get plenty of time for Nature, meditation, entartainment when you are off hiking or spending two weeks at Bahamas.
But try living away from civilization for any cosniderable period (grow crops, hack wood, darn - look after baby without dispensable diapers), and suddenly flush toilet, microwave oven and supermarkets start to make sense again.
The final stand at Stalingrad and the subsequent victory was only possible b/c the German forces were weakened from the Russian Winter.
Russian troops suffered from winter no less than Germans. The reason for the victory was more-or-less decent operational planning that led to encirclement of German forces, and the inhuman, fanatical will of defenders.
Otherwise your point is perfectly valid - Red Army retreat in 1941-42 was not a bait, but a necessity. Red Army just wasn't on par with Wermacht in terms of armament and planning skills until the very 1943.
Well, what does that have to do with #define or ||?
Nothing. The point of macros facility in question isn't C-like preprocessor string substitution, but the availability of full language at compile time to do code generation.
Think of defining your own object systems, domain-specific languages, encapsulating boilerplate code and similar rather than of defining constants and changing language keywords to silly names.
My alarm was a few minutes early; can't set an alarm for 1:58 PM:)
In Palm OS, you can set how many minutes before the appointment you want thing to beep. E.g. you could set an appointment to 2 PM, and set the alarm for 2 minutes before.
To try to prevent distribution based on 80 lines of code of a program with thousands of lines is ridiculous.
Hey, these 80 lines of code comprise the tremendous SCO innovation that made Linux enterprise-ready! They worth a billion dollars!
Personally, I think that SCO should license the code snippet in question. Then, developers could just cut and paste it into their products to assure their scalability and instant enterprise-readiness.
Yes, it was written in Common Lisp and ran on a special verson of Xanalys LispWorks runtime with realtime garbage collector. The experiment intended to demonstrate the approach on test set of problems; however, the Remote Agent software found and helped to fix one very real unanticipated bug on the spacecraft.
Nowdays, the project is under rewrite to C++ for political reasons. You can read the story from one of the RAX developers here.
Most of the failures occured during the orbital entry phase, during which time they shut off the transmitter, and therefore don't have up to the second data on the reason for the failure.
That's why some folks at NASA develop more sophisticated control software that can take of failures. The RAX experiment on DS1 probe successfully demonstrated this approach viable. However, at the moment the project suffers major rewrite in C++, notorious for its 'safety', for reasons having very little to do with engineering...
How will NASA react to this news after being the dominant space agency over the past three decades?
Do you really mean that Soviet space programme in early 70's was incomparable with the one of NASA, in terms of launches, manned flights, interpanetary missions or deployed satellites?
It is independent of the military, actually; the Pentagon did have input in the Shuttle program early on (they wanted to be able to use it for launching and servicing/upgrading spy satellites, which can't be done with a rocket) but these days they launch their own stuff, on rockets from Lockheed Martin.
This is yet another legal vs. de-facto status thing. Yes, NASA isn't under Pentagon jurisdiction, but consider that both NASA and Pentagon share good part of research, launch, communication and support infrastructure, and use same contractors. Hell, even commertcal comsats were used by military during Iraq war!
Space programs were always tightly interveined with military, and will remain so in observable future, thus it doesn't really matter if your institution is called Peaceful Space Exploration Agency or Rapid Space Militarization Headquarters.
Try Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, one of the best New Wave sci-fi authors. The language of book is delicious, and the mix of Hindu/Buddhist philosophy with technology and one man anti-authoritarian struggle is very thought-provoking.
..so the Normande Battle didn 't happened, the Battle of Britain also didn 't happened, the thousands of US *volunteers* that figthed in Europe (mainly joining the RAF)
It did happened. It is the ignorance of other aspects of conflict which make it look for people like you to be the decisive battles of WWII.
Sovet Russia (like it or not) was the place where wermacht broke its spine. Not Battle of Birtain, Overlord or minor action in Africa.
The history of WWI and WWII on the European theatre is full of actions which wouldn't have resulted in Allied success (or semi-success, in the case of WWI) if there wasn't a big action on the other side which forced the Germans to split their resources.
Some will argue that the second front was opened when German military defeat was already imment, give or take few months and some million people. I don't like to speculate on 'what if' history scenarios though, and am personally quite happy that operation Overlord was commited: at very least, it gave a chance to democracy in Western Europe and saved numerous lives.
So let us just agree on the point that victory over Nazis was collective effort.
Slashdot Mirror
Each spaceflight has a number of fun events and ceremonies that never go to official press releases. For instance, I hoped that Ed wouldn't be a hypocrite and will clearly state that he had to piss on a Russian bus as a part of the 'piss ceremony' (scroll down to the Baikonur piece), but no, he shamefully tosses that fact and tells us the dull story of leaving signature at the apartment's wall. He didn't even mention that every single Soyuz spacecraft carrier gets 'Tatiana' name hand-painted on it shortly before launch.
I think if NASA wants to popularize space exploration among the youth, it should openly declare that antisocial behaviour and graffiti are mandatory parts of space travel.
About the time Estonia became a "republic".
Estonia was a very prosperous *independent* country until Stalin invaded in 1939 as part of the Non-Aggression pact with Hitler.
However, it has nothing to do with hot water shortage.
The problems with hot water begun in early 90s, when USSR imposed sancitons to Estonia shortly after its declaration of independence, barring it from energy supplies. By that time, there was *plenty* of water, power lines, railroads, highways and other relatively modern infrastructure, while your comment implies that Esti had no hot water until the very fall of the Iron Curtain.
While USSR was sufficiently lagging in some aspects of technology from the Western world, it definitely mastered the craft of warming water and delivering it to households.
Is this a sign that 'joe user' starting to realize that software is no longer requiring upgrades every 6 months?
Or he may realize that these days you can't decently upgrade your year-old system anyway. When the time comes, you find that the motherboard doesn't supports the ultra-new 1GHz-bus DRSDDRAM, GeForce MMIII 1024++ now requires AGP 48x, your HD controller doesn't supports that Ultra-Fast-Wide-DMA mode on the newer drives and the latest Pathetion VI CPU won't fit in the old processor slot anyway. So why bother?
I'm sorry, but I like the album format too, and definitely don't want it to go away! Singles are great, of course, but what better to listen to than a group of songs that fit together?
Nothing prevents you from buying all the songs of an album online (at iTunes or wherever). But I don't think it is fair to demand that the albums should only be wholesold, without ability to pick the specific tracks you like.
Yes, there are some masterworks that are better enjoyed when you listen through the complete album. However, in mainstream music industry albums became a vehicle of selling you craploads along with one or two remarkable tracks. Pay-per-track system breaks that, so music industry is of course opposed to it.
Merchants are allowed to store the customer name, card number, and expiration date from the magnetic stripe.
What does a customer name, card number, and expiration date get you?
It gives enough data to reliably identify you.
Consider the following scenario: during a 'terrorism-supporting' street protest, police scans all RFID tags present in the crowd. Then, based on ID numbers, it determines the set of retailers the items were purchased through. The authority queries reatailers' databases for association of RFID tags with bank card purchases, and after that sends inquiries to the banks to determine the identity of the persons in question. It ends up with a nice file that would make Hoover envy.
If the tags get wider acceptance, everyone is likely to carry several of them, making the scanning process statistically robust (i.e. if a person has several tags associated with the same credit card record, it is very likely that he is the card owner).
Of course, if RFID tags will be legislated for use on packages only, this wouldn't happen. However, this issue is still open.
I'm wondering if there are any kids out there who do similar things with /boot/vmlinuz. Of course, they'd have to have root privileges...
Isn't Lindows user gets root by default?
..is paved with little spammers' corpses.
It also directs the Justice Department to develop programs to educate the American public on why copyright violation is bad.
Why copyright violation is called a 'crime' if it isn't even obvious to an average Joe that it's bad? People usually don't have any problems identifying common criminal activities as such; you don't have to explain to a person that murder, fraud, piracy (the real one), rape, blackmail are bad, pretty much regardless of the person's citizenship and cultural background.
Disclaimer: I *do* consider copyright violation a.. well, violation, but I think it is stetched too far these days. Humanity somehow existed for centuries without copyright protection, and, while authors often suffered from copycats, there always was an opportunity for a creative person to get food on table.
Practically speaking, if timesaving devices really saved time, there would be more time available to us now than ever before in history. But, strangely enough, we seem to have less time than even a few years ago. It's really great fun to go someplace where there are no timesaving devices because, when you do, you find that you have LOTS OF TIME. Elsewhere, you're too busy working to pay for machines to save you time so you won't have to work so hard.
I call this mindset a 'vacation syndrome', because such great insigths often visit people when they are at holidays. Sure, it feels like you get plenty of time for Nature, meditation, entartainment when you are off hiking or spending two weeks at Bahamas.
But try living away from civilization for any cosniderable period (grow crops, hack wood, darn - look after baby without dispensable diapers), and suddenly flush toilet, microwave oven and supermarkets start to make sense again.
The final stand at Stalingrad and the subsequent victory was only possible b/c the German forces were weakened from the Russian Winter.
Russian troops suffered from winter no less than Germans. The reason for the victory was more-or-less decent operational planning that led to encirclement of German forces, and the inhuman, fanatical will of defenders.
Otherwise your point is perfectly valid - Red Army retreat in 1941-42 was not a bait, but a necessity. Red Army just wasn't on par with Wermacht in terms of armament and planning skills until the very 1943.
That resolution, a victory of an anti-semitic (indeed, anti-religion in general) Soviet government, has been overturned.
You seem to equate anti-zionism with anti-semitism, while they aren't the same. Would you percieve a person opposed to Apartheid as anti-caucasian?
Besides, the resolution couldn't be passed by the USSR alone. It's the UN.
Regarding whether secular Zionism racist or not, another poster's followup perfectly matches my opinion.
Zionism isn't normally equated with racism in the U.S.
Zionism was considered a racist ideology by United Nations.
I can imagine the argument, but it's a bit of a stretch to go from the textbook definition to inherent racial hatred.
Zionism discriminates people by their race, and as such is racist.
Islamists call the people of Israel and all countries that support Israel (esp. the U.S.) 'Zionists', referring I'm sure to Mt. Zion...
To be precise, they are referring to Zionism, a racist ideology very popular in Israel.
Please re-read the original post I was replying to and the one I wrote. Thanks.
I was browsing at +4, and the direct parent didn't make it through. Sorry for the way-off reply.
Well, what does that have to do with #define or ||?
Nothing. The point of macros facility in question isn't C-like preprocessor string substitution, but the availability of full language at compile time to do code generation.
Think of defining your own object systems, domain-specific languages, encapsulating boilerplate code and similar rather than of defining constants and changing language keywords to silly names.
My alarm was a few minutes early; can't set an alarm for 1:58 PM :)
In Palm OS, you can set how many minutes before the appointment you want thing to beep. E.g. you could set an appointment to 2 PM, and set the alarm for 2 minutes before.
To try to prevent distribution based on 80 lines of code of a program with thousands of lines is ridiculous.
Hey, these 80 lines of code comprise the tremendous SCO innovation that made Linux enterprise-ready! They worth a billion dollars!
Personally, I think that SCO should license the code snippet in question. Then, developers could just cut and paste it into their products to assure their scalability and instant enterprise-readiness.
Yes, it was written in Common Lisp and ran on a special verson of Xanalys LispWorks runtime with realtime garbage collector. The experiment intended to demonstrate the approach on test set of problems; however, the Remote Agent software found and helped to fix one very real unanticipated bug on the spacecraft.
Nowdays, the project is under rewrite to C++ for political reasons. You can read the story from one of the RAX developers here.
Most of the failures occured during the orbital entry phase, during which time they shut off the transmitter, and therefore don't have up to the second data on the reason for the failure.
That's why some folks at NASA develop more sophisticated control software that can take of failures. The RAX experiment on DS1 probe successfully demonstrated this approach viable.
However, at the moment the project suffers major rewrite in C++, notorious for its 'safety', for reasons having very little to do with engineering...
GIFs were known for preserving appearance, but with less compression than JPG.
IMHO in most situations it is meaningless to speak of 'preserving appearance' by 8-bit color depth format.
I seriously doubt your average consumer will care about the added layers and alpha "stuff" that's supported by the PNG format.
You wouldn't have problems with channels if you don't use them. It wouldn't get any worse than if you were just using GIF.
How will NASA react to this news after being the dominant space agency over the past three decades?
Do you really mean that Soviet space programme in early 70's was incomparable with the one of NASA, in terms of launches, manned flights, interpanetary missions or deployed satellites?
It is independent of the military, actually; the Pentagon did have input in the Shuttle program early on (they wanted to be able to use it for launching and servicing/upgrading spy satellites, which can't be done with a rocket) but these days they launch their own stuff, on rockets from Lockheed Martin.
This is yet another legal vs. de-facto status thing. Yes, NASA isn't under Pentagon jurisdiction, but consider that both NASA and Pentagon share good part of research, launch, communication and support infrastructure, and use same contractors. Hell, even commertcal comsats were used by military during Iraq war!
Space programs were always tightly interveined with military, and will remain so in observable future, thus it doesn't really matter if your institution is called Peaceful Space Exploration Agency or Rapid Space Militarization Headquarters.
Try Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, one of the best New Wave sci-fi authors. The language of book is delicious, and the mix of Hindu/Buddhist philosophy with technology and one man anti-authoritarian struggle is very thought-provoking.
..so the Normande Battle didn 't happened, the Battle of Britain also didn 't happened, the thousands of US *volunteers* that figthed in Europe (mainly joining the RAF)
It did happened. It is the ignorance of other aspects of conflict which make it look for people like you to be the decisive battles of WWII.
Sovet Russia (like it or not) was the place where wermacht broke its spine. Not Battle of Birtain, Overlord or minor action in Africa.
The history of WWI and WWII on the European theatre is full of actions which wouldn't have resulted in Allied success (or semi-success, in the case of WWI) if there wasn't a big action on the other side which forced the Germans to split their resources.
Some will argue that the second front was opened when German military defeat was already imment, give or take few months and some million people. I don't like to speculate on 'what if' history scenarios though, and am personally quite happy that operation Overlord was commited: at very least, it gave a chance to democracy in Western Europe and saved numerous lives.
So let us just agree on the point that victory over Nazis was collective effort.