Postscript is my relaxation language of choice. You can draw some amazing things in raw, handcoded postscript. If you haven't tried it, you don't know what you're missing. Get a copy of ghostview, grab the r/g/b books (or the modern all-in-one brick) and start hacking!
That doesn't make sense to me. Are you saying that the modulation of the carrier (for the data) was weaker than the dopler effect? That seems nutty. If it's true, how were they expecting to recover the data in the first place?
I mean, think about it--both the data and the dopler effect are going to show up as variations in the frequency of the carrier wave (or, if you prefer, in a change in the amplitude of the signals received at frequencies near the nominal carrier frequency). From the point of view of the system as designed, one of these was "signal" and the other "noise." Are you telling me that they designed the system to have more noise than signal?
Yeah,
10100000111010101110011011010000010000001110111011 01000011000010111010000111111
looks about right. Let's see, adding a zero on the front gives
01010000 01110101 01110011 01101000 00100000 01110111 01101000 01100001 01110100 00111111 or 50 75 73 68 20 77 68 61 74 3F.
The head of the space probe mission to Titan said today that much of the data from a botched experiment designed by a University of Idaho professor was recovered by radio telescopes on Earth...Idaho scientist David Atkinson said that someone failed to turn on a radio receiver for the instrument he needed to measure the winds on Saturn's largest moon. Because of that error, data transmitted by the gear on the Huygens lander was not received by the Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft for relay to Earth.
It sounds to me like they were able to receive the data from Earth, without needing to have it relayed by Cassini. It doesn't say anything about them attempting to reconstruct the path from here, but rather that they picked up the data transmitted by the wind-speed instrument directly.
We can't get our act together on dealing with things that we know are going to happen within out lifetimes but we're supposed to worry about escaping the heat death of the universe?
What are you doing as a Republican to fix your party? And what does party membership do for you, your benefit while you put up with the abuses of those who have taken over your party?
I'm talking to other Republicans, pointing out things like 1) isn't it odd that so many of us object to Bush, yet (according to the media) we all support him, 100%? 2) what's "conservative" about spending like there's no tomorrow, invading other countries based on lies, etc.? 3) My "moral values" don't include sending people with guard dogs to other countries so they can force people to mastrabate, do yours?
And so forth...
What keeping my registration does for me is give credibility to my points. I'm not the one walking away from what we stand for, Bush is. He's the one who should change to another party. The rest of us will get along quite nicely without him.
As an American, I do all that I can, including actually driving other Americans to the polls all day Election Day if they'd vote to stop the people who have taken over your party, and are using its entire bulk, including *you*, to take over the rest of our country - without the agreement of most of us (unlike in your party).
So, one way I differ from you: I don't withhold aid based on how I think people will vote. Instead, I try to make sure that everyone has full access to the facts, and expect that they will make rational choices.
As for your argument about the Neo-cons using "the bulk" of the Republican party, etc., doesn't the same thing apply to the country as a whole? Have you given up your citizenship, or refused to pay taxes?
But to push the point further--why do you think most Republicans support the Neo-con agenda? Because the administration tells you so? Aren't they the same people who've been telling the world that America gave them a mandate? And that the Iraqi's love them? And so many other things...why would you believe them?
Let's not argue over the toast while they're aiming at our skulls.
The vast majority of Republicans are good and honest people. Our party has been usurped by a small, vicious band of "Neo-Cons" who claim to speak for us, but do not. This exactly parallels the national situation; the vast majority of Americans are good and honest people, but their country has been usurped by the same jerks.
Now, in addition to being dishonest the usurpers are also devious. One of their favorite tricks is to sow conflict amongst their enimies. Presently, they have the good and honest Americans divided into two roughly equal camps, and have them convinced that they have nothing in common--so there's no point in banding together to route out corruption. Besides (as they paint it) the problem isn't really corruption, it's red vs. blue, and which ever colour you got assigned you should blame everything on the entirety of the other team.
I, on the other hand, am doing my best to convince people of both parties that the real enemy is the corrupt politicians of both parties. We can always go back to fighting amonst ourselves about who should pay for health care, and how much, once we make sure we won't be living in a police state run by the people who "count" our votes--or a glass crater created by other nations holding us all accountable for the acts of a few, just as you want to hold all Republicans accountable for the acts of a few.
I have heard this point many times. I do not accept it, at least as presented. I don't dispute that there may at some point in history be more active corruption in one party than in the other (Tamany Hall was a Democrats-only institution, Watergate was a Republicans-only scandal), but that is no reason to change parties.
Consider: I am male, and I oppose rape. Should the fact that most rapists are male motivate me to get a sex-change operation?
No, of course not.
But the fact that there are rapists (of either gender) or corrupt politicians (of either party) should motivate me to work to oppose them, to stop rape, to stop corruption.
The problem isn't Democrats vs. Republicans, it's honest people of both parties vs. corrupt people of either party.
I happen to be a Republican, but I'm quite willing to accept Democratic politicians when they win honestly. When they win by cheating, I want to see them (and/or whoever cheated on their behalf) behind bars. Likewise, when someone "of my party" cheats to win, I want them nailed.
The problem is, it's very hard to get the leaders of either party to take a stand on this issue because they know (as many of us are begining to realize) just how often there is cheating by both parties. Instead, they try to get is tangled up with us vs. them debates as if one side was pure as the driven snow and the other was corrupt to the core. That's not the way it is.
There are a lot of honest people in both parties. They are being run into the ground by the cheats, and "we the people" need to put a stop to it.
Random events aren't nearly as big a threat as things that have non-random effects.
In everything from the allocation of resources to polling places to the determination of the order of candidates, non-random, systematic "errors" can be surprisingly powerful in a democracy such as ours.
Ummm. there were no video/picture that were "censored from the US".
Except for the more graphic images of US military personel torturing foreigners. And killing them during "questioning." And the bodies of US service men coming home. And who knows what else, because when stuff is being censored you don't necessarily know it.
Remember, this is the country that routinely dropped colour from video taken "behind the iron curtain", leaving the impression that everything there was black-and-white. The country that loudly objected to the development of biological weapons anywhere, by anyone, until some of our congress critters got mailed samples of weaponized anthrax we had made in our biological weapons labs. Oops.
Our legislators pass laws without reading them, in some cases without being allowed to read them and/or discuss them, and we pass laws which average citizens are not allowed to own a copy of.
If you think there are no images censored from the US, you are nuts.
I'm a Republican, as are most of the people in my family, and for that matter most of the people in my state. And I don't know anyone who approves of what was done in this last election, once they are confronted with the facts. The closest is a sort of lame "well, they probably meant well" or "it must have been overly enthusiastic grunts"--but you can see in their faces that they don't buy it.
But none of them are happy about it. We were raised, I guess, with those "moral values" that everyone's talking about. And I don't recall cheating on that list, anywhere. No, I take that back. There was "Cheaters never prosper" and "If you cheat, you only cheat yourself" and "Better to die for the truth then live a lie."
But to hear the media tell it, we're all a bunch of saps that aprove of doing anything to win (When in fact we were taught "The ends don't justify the means." and "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.").
As my brother said at Thanksgiving, "I want my party back!"
If you do the math on the machine shortages, it becomes clear that, just by fudging which precincts get more machines, and which get fewer, someone could set an arbitrary absolute cap on the number of votes a candidate could get, by forcing their strongholds to be resource-limited rather than voter-limited. A little more math shows that this effect could be sufficient to tip a close race. If you look at the distribution of the long lines and the votes in Ohio, it becomes hard not to believe that this was in fact done.
If you look at the racial pattern of the lines, it also starts to look like whoever did it was a racist jerk.
--MarkusQ
Two words: Paper Ballots
on
The Year In Ideas
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The real trick was much simpler: they didn't send enough voting machines or polling booths to predominantly Democratic precincts. Bingo--the number of votes for the opposition is limited to something you can beat.
Somebody wants to take the attention off the simple trick that actually was used to rig the election:
Don't send enough poll booths/voting machines to the Democratic precincts.
It's cheap, it's easy, and it really really works. You can set an upper limit on the number of people who get to vote for your opponent in his strongholds, and...ta da!
And if any one notices, flood the media with stories about Black Helicopter style conspiracy theories.
Google is your friend. This guy has been accusing the same people (Feeney, etc.) of everything from overbilling the Florida Department of Transportation to spying for the Chinese for years now.
The real story is the uneven distribution of resources (e.g. voting booths & machines) to precincts based on their voting history. Traditionally Democratic precincts had their vote capped by doing this, preventing large numbers of people from voting, and the trick probably swung the presidential election. As that fact began to come out, sudenly there is an enourmous movement pushing the Black Helicopter theories.
I think Freeman Dyson was speaking about nanoassemblers in the 50s...I can't imagine how it feels to publicly embarass yourself by posting a 'new idea' that is 60 years old.
Well, assuming you're right about Dyson, you'll have to wait another five to fifteen years before you can find out.
Slashdot Mirror
Postscript is my relaxation language of choice. You can draw some amazing things in raw, handcoded postscript. If you haven't tried it, you don't know what you're missing. Get a copy of ghostview, grab the r/g/b books (or the modern all-in-one brick) and start hacking!
A few ideas to get you started:
--MarkusQ
I mean, think about it--both the data and the dopler effect are going to show up as variations in the frequency of the carrier wave (or, if you prefer, in a change in the amplitude of the signals received at frequencies near the nominal carrier frequency). From the point of view of the system as designed, one of these was "signal" and the other "noise." Are you telling me that they designed the system to have more noise than signal?
--MarkusQ
Claims are unsubstantiated.
Source?
--MQ
Yeah, 1010000011101010111001101101000001000000111011101
Or just try:
ruby -e 'n=379955903618604798669887;puts (1..10).collect {i=n % 256;n=n/256;i.chr}.reverse.join' --MarkusQ
It sounds to me like they were able to receive the data from Earth, without needing to have it relayed by Cassini. It doesn't say anything about them attempting to reconstruct the path from here, but rather that they picked up the data transmitted by the wind-speed instrument directly.
--MarkusQ
*smile* Decimal. It sure is a Bignum, isn't it? --MarkusQ
379955903618604798669887 --MarkusQ
--MarkusQ
--MarkusQ
P.S. We're not all using MSWindows...at least (and this is sufficient to disprove a universal) I'm not all using MSWindows.
--MarkusQ
That's just nuts.
Why on earth would you think Janet Jackson has any more of an "in" with Diebold, et al, than Kerry does?
--MarkusQ
I'm talking to other Republicans, pointing out things like 1) isn't it odd that so many of us object to Bush, yet (according to the media) we all support him, 100%? 2) what's "conservative" about spending like there's no tomorrow, invading other countries based on lies, etc.? 3) My "moral values" don't include sending people with guard dogs to other countries so they can force people to mastrabate, do yours?
And so forth...
What keeping my registration does for me is give credibility to my points. I'm not the one walking away from what we stand for, Bush is. He's the one who should change to another party. The rest of us will get along quite nicely without him.
So, one way I differ from you: I don't withhold aid based on how I think people will vote. Instead, I try to make sure that everyone has full access to the facts, and expect that they will make rational choices.As for your argument about the Neo-cons using "the bulk" of the Republican party, etc., doesn't the same thing apply to the country as a whole? Have you given up your citizenship, or refused to pay taxes?
But to push the point further--why do you think most Republicans support the Neo-con agenda? Because the administration tells you so? Aren't they the same people who've been telling the world that America gave them a mandate? And that the Iraqi's love them? And so many other things...why would you believe them?
On that, I 100% agree.--MarkusQ
The vast majority of Republicans are good and honest people. Our party has been usurped by a small, vicious band of "Neo-Cons" who claim to speak for us, but do not. This exactly parallels the national situation; the vast majority of Americans are good and honest people, but their country has been usurped by the same jerks.
Now, in addition to being dishonest the usurpers are also devious. One of their favorite tricks is to sow conflict amongst their enimies. Presently, they have the good and honest Americans divided into two roughly equal camps, and have them convinced that they have nothing in common--so there's no point in banding together to route out corruption. Besides (as they paint it) the problem isn't really corruption, it's red vs. blue, and which ever colour you got assigned you should blame everything on the entirety of the other team.
I, on the other hand, am doing my best to convince people of both parties that the real enemy is the corrupt politicians of both parties. We can always go back to fighting amonst ourselves about who should pay for health care, and how much, once we make sure we won't be living in a police state run by the people who "count" our votes--or a glass crater created by other nations holding us all accountable for the acts of a few, just as you want to hold all Republicans accountable for the acts of a few.
--MarkusQ
I have heard this point many times. I do not accept it, at least as presented. I don't dispute that there may at some point in history be more active corruption in one party than in the other (Tamany Hall was a Democrats-only institution, Watergate was a Republicans-only scandal), but that is no reason to change parties.
Consider: I am male, and I oppose rape. Should the fact that most rapists are male motivate me to get a sex-change operation?
No, of course not.
But the fact that there are rapists (of either gender) or corrupt politicians (of either party) should motivate me to work to oppose them, to stop rape, to stop corruption.
And that I do.
--MarkusQ
The problem isn't Democrats vs. Republicans, it's honest people of both parties vs. corrupt people of either party.
I happen to be a Republican, but I'm quite willing to accept Democratic politicians when they win honestly. When they win by cheating, I want to see them (and/or whoever cheated on their behalf) behind bars. Likewise, when someone "of my party" cheats to win, I want them nailed.
The problem is, it's very hard to get the leaders of either party to take a stand on this issue because they know (as many of us are begining to realize) just how often there is cheating by both parties. Instead, they try to get is tangled up with us vs. them debates as if one side was pure as the driven snow and the other was corrupt to the core. That's not the way it is.
There are a lot of honest people in both parties. They are being run into the ground by the cheats, and "we the people" need to put a stop to it.
--MarkusQ
Random events aren't nearly as big a threat as things that have non-random effects.
In everything from the allocation of resources to polling places to the determination of the order of candidates, non-random, systematic "errors" can be surprisingly powerful in a democracy such as ours.
--MarkusQ
- Great coffee
- More nice people per capita than pretty much anywhere
- Wonderful coffee
- Delightful climate
- You actually [i]arrest[/i] your crooked politicians
- The coffee is outstanding
- Picture book scenery
I could go on, but I've got a cup of your coffee sitting here just waiting for me...--MarkusQ
Ummm. there were no video/picture that were "censored from the US".
Except for the more graphic images of US military personel torturing foreigners. And killing them during "questioning." And the bodies of US service men coming home. And who knows what else, because when stuff is being censored you don't necessarily know it.
Remember, this is the country that routinely dropped colour from video taken "behind the iron curtain", leaving the impression that everything there was black-and-white. The country that loudly objected to the development of biological weapons anywhere, by anyone, until some of our congress critters got mailed samples of weaponized anthrax we had made in our biological weapons labs. Oops.
Our legislators pass laws without reading them, in some cases without being allowed to read them and/or discuss them, and we pass laws which average citizens are not allowed to own a copy of.
If you think there are no images censored from the US, you are nuts.
--MarkusQ
I'm a Republican, as are most of the people in my family, and for that matter most of the people in my state. And I don't know anyone who approves of what was done in this last election, once they are confronted with the facts. The closest is a sort of lame "well, they probably meant well" or "it must have been overly enthusiastic grunts"--but you can see in their faces that they don't buy it.
But none of them are happy about it. We were raised, I guess, with those "moral values" that everyone's talking about. And I don't recall cheating on that list, anywhere. No, I take that back. There was "Cheaters never prosper" and "If you cheat, you only cheat yourself" and "Better to die for the truth then live a lie."
But to hear the media tell it, we're all a bunch of saps that aprove of doing anything to win (When in fact we were taught "The ends don't justify the means." and "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.").
As my brother said at Thanksgiving, "I want my party back!"
--MarkusQ
If you do the math on the machine shortages, it becomes clear that, just by fudging which precincts get more machines, and which get fewer, someone could set an arbitrary absolute cap on the number of votes a candidate could get, by forcing their strongholds to be resource-limited rather than voter-limited. A little more math shows that this effect could be sufficient to tip a close race. If you look at the distribution of the long lines and the votes in Ohio, it becomes hard not to believe that this was in fact done.
If you look at the racial pattern of the lines, it also starts to look like whoever did it was a racist jerk.
--MarkusQ
Two more words: Counted Honestly --MarkusQ
It's a red herring.
The real trick was much simpler: they didn't send enough voting machines or polling booths to predominantly Democratic precincts. Bingo--the number of votes for the opposition is limited to something you can beat.
--MarkusQ
Somebody wants to take the attention off the simple trick that actually was used to rig the election: It's cheap, it's easy, and it really really works. You can set an upper limit on the number of people who get to vote for your opponent in his strongholds, and...ta da!
And if any one notices, flood the media with stories about Black Helicopter style conspiracy theories.
--MarkusQ
Google is your friend. This guy has been accusing the same people (Feeney, etc.) of everything from overbilling the Florida Department of Transportation to spying for the Chinese for years now.
The real story is the uneven distribution of resources (e.g. voting booths & machines) to precincts based on their voting history. Traditionally Democratic precincts had their vote capped by doing this, preventing large numbers of people from voting, and the trick probably swung the presidential election. As that fact began to come out, sudenly there is an enourmous movement pushing the Black Helicopter theories.
Go figure.
--MarkusQ
I think Freeman Dyson was speaking about nanoassemblers in the 50s...I can't imagine how it feels to publicly embarass yourself by posting a 'new idea' that is 60 years old.
Well, assuming you're right about Dyson, you'll have to wait another five to fifteen years before you can find out.
--MarkusQ