I think you summed up my feelings more eloquently than I would have. I think the problem here is that Slashdot caters to a geek audience, and geeks tend to find the idea of a robot probe more interesting than most non-geek people do. To most people, even the Mars rovers and the Voyager probes were just curiosities. I think the general attitude is "well, if we can put a man on the Moon, of course we can put a robot on Mars...duh."
It doesn't matter what NASA does with robots -- they could send them to Pluto and have them building robot cities and making little robots and god knows what else -- but most people would still regard the high-water-mark of the space program as July 20, 1969. There is a fundamental difference between robotic exploration and human exploration, and it doesn't matter what kind of pictures you take or what kind of data you bring back, if it's not a person, it's just a bunch of geeks dorking around with expensive R/C toys.
The day we put a person on Mars, people will be gathered around their TV sets, the same way they were in 1969. But no number of robots or probes are going to engender that kind of interest.
The imagery from unmanned missions is somewhat interesting, but I doubt it's going to be enough to keep the funding coming. Particularly since as CG systems get better, you can fake all sorts of psuedo-space shots for (basically) free.
The reason the recent manned missions haven't kept interest up is because they're hardly exploration. The Shuttle just ferries people back and forth to places we've already been: boring.
The interest in space in the 1960s wasn't a fluke, it's because we were really doing something new; going somewhere that nobody had been before. If NASA had continued to do missions like that, it would have kept the public's interest. It's because the current manned missions don't do that, that they're uninteresting to most people. They're not 'explorative' enough.
That said, the manned missions today have managed to keep up a low level of public interest; I suspect that if it weren't for them, lame as they are, NASA would have disappeared in the 80s.
It's pretty easy to do. If you want, you can try it by setting up a virtual machine using VMWare (so you can roll it back later).
First, you install Windows, say XP SP1, and leave it in its default state. Then you fire up IE and navigate around to some pages. Preferably seedy ones. Googling "free porn," "warez," or "serial numbers" ought to do it. Then when you see some incomprehensible message about an ActiveX control, click OK. Congratulations, you've probably got yourself some spyware or a rootkit. This is pretty much the guaranteed way; if you surf around long enough, you can probably find sites that use vulnerabilities in IE to bypass the "click OK" step -- for so-called "drive-by downloading" and arbitrary code execution. Here's a list of the most popular exploitware. Older versions of IE are particularly vulnerable, so basically surfing using any machine that hasn't been patched is a ticket to rootville. And unfortunately, many people would rather just start surfing than update their computer's security patches first.
Alternately, you can just plug an unpatched pre-SP2 box directly into a broadband connection (as in, without a router or firewall in the way) and leave it there for a while; that should get you something. This is somewhat harder to do with SP2, since it has a firewall turned on by default and fewer services running.
The net result is that many people who have older machines get compromised and can't fix them, either because they don't have re-install/recovery media, or because they haven't backed up their data, so the problem just gets worse until the computer is unusably infested. Then they get a new machine, with a new version of Windows, and for a short time it's more secure (because it'll probably be SP2). After a few months or years of neglect, though, it's the same pattern over again.
Flags and footprints is a waste of time and money.
Those "flags and footprints" sustained the space program and kept it going for well-on 30 years. I think they were worth every penny. It's just more unfortunate that in putting them there, we didn't do something more permanent as well. But if we hadn't gone there and at least done that, the space program would have fizzled long ago. It's because NASA hasn't done anything like that lately that it's dying.
You're correct that unmanned probes are cheaper, but what I think you're ignoring is that even as we've sent these robotic probes all over the solar system, public interest in space exploration has waned. And when interest wanes, so does funding.
Robotic probes are not the answer. Unless NASA can put a human being in a spacesuit further from home than a person has ever been before, and keep doing that consistently, year after year, they're going to be ignored by the public and butchered by Congress. It doesn't matter how many probes they send out or how much data they return. Particularly since the only kind of manned 'exploration' they're doing now (going up to LEO and back) is rapidly becoming a tourist attraction. It's tough to come off looking like a modern-day Magellan when any businessman with a few million bucks can do the same thing.
Robotic probes don't capture the imagination of the public. Here's an experiment: how many people do you think could identify the first words that a person spoke on the Moon? And how many people know what the first thing sent back by the Mars rover on arrival was? How many people even know what the first robotic Mars probe was? And if you told them, how many would care? Not many, I'll wager. Putting a person out further than we've ever gone before is significant, it's a tangible achievement. Robotic probes are cute toys by comparison; to most people they're nothing but radio-controlled airplanes, albeit done at very long range.
Robotic exploration is what's killing NASA; if they don't restart manned exploratory missions, they're going to go into a death spiral. First they do robotic missions and lose the public's interest, then they get their budgets cut; in response they cut more manned missions in favor of robotic ones, and lose more public interest. I think anyone can see where that leads. An unmanned space program isn't sustainable; it's a "cost center" that's just going to get axed the next time some Senator needs to find a source for their pork-barrel project funding.
If NASA doesn't survive, it won't be doing any science. If NASA doesn't get the next generation of voters and tax-payers interested, they're going to be dead of apathy within the decade.
The nice thing about GMail is that having your email on the server, and having it on your desktop, are not mutually exclusive. It's trivial, if you know what you're doing, to set up your GMail account so that it's always backed up to a local machine. There are even step by step instructions for doing it. You just set up a POP connection and suck down your entire mailfile, and then set up your local mailreader to download the new ones periodically.
Google rightly doesn't make any QoS promises, because it's giving you a free service. However, it's a pretty good bang for the (lack of) buck; and it doesn't preclude you from doing things to protect your data on your end. Until Google came along, I don't think most free webmail services let you have this level of desktop/web-service cooperation. (Though I think Yahoo's mail does POP access now. Not sure about Hotmail.)
And I've seen users actually throw out working hardware because it was "clogged" with spyware, and they didn't have any installation media with which to reformat the machine. It is an absolutely real threat, and I suspect that it drives a not-insignificant number of new hardware purchases in the low-price segment (the $300 systems from WalMart, etc.).
Though I can't really complain; I have two nice Ubuntu servers as a result of this practice. I like to think they're happier this way.
They don't care because it's been a while since NASA has really done anything interesting. It's tough to get excited about space exploration when it's a handful of people riding up and down in a vehicle that's older than most young people's cars, and doing incomprehensible/boring stuff when they get there.
Space exploration was exciting when it meant putting people on the moon; the public has lost interest when it just means sending people up to LEO over and over again, and the people in question aren't them.
I suspect that if we put a person on Mars, you would see an immediate renewed interest in space exploration. But seeing the state to which NASA and the government in general has fallen, I suspect most young people are (wisely) too cynical to believe that will ever occur. Thus they don't care, and turn their attentions to things that seem to be actually progressing.
I don't think he's suggesting -- or that his suggestion requires, anyway -- that you eliminate the tag-specific close tags in favor of a universal one; you could easily have both. Most people would probably use the universal one, unless they really needed to close tags out of order, in which case they could use the traditional tag-specific closers.
So, Mr. AC, I suppose that means we won't see you around Slashdot much either?
From the Slashdot/OSTG ToS:
In each such case, the submitting user grants OSTG the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable license.
As others have pointed out, what makes this clause non-evil is that it's not an exclusive license. By posting to Slashdot, you don't lose the right to post the same content elsewhere; you just give OSTG the right to post/summarize/publish/whatever it. Many situations where you are writing and being paid for it, require that you transfer all rights to the produced work, to the person paying for its creation. In not requiring an exclusive transfer of ownership, while paying you for it, Helium is actually rather liberal.
True, although you could say that for most tools. How often do most people use a hand saw or a hammer? Probably not very often. But when you need one, you need one; a lot of special-purpose tools are worth their purchase price the first time you have to use one. That goes for both the ones in the basement/garage, and in the kitchen.
Although you're right about medium-to-large appliances; they're like having a table saw or a drill press that you never use.
I think a lot of them have changed over to soybeans. Not enough to make it the dominant crop in the midwest, perhaps, but enough for beans to be a huge cash crop in many parts of the country. I think a lot of the resistance is because of the investment in harvesting equipment for corn, plus accumulated knowledge about its growth and production.
I doubt sugarcane would be suitable for most of the North American agricultural belt. Given that it was being grown in the West Indies at the same time that the U.S. was being settled, if it was practical to grow here, I suspect it already would be. I think the problem is rainfall; sugarcane requires much more rain than most places in the midwest get, and you wouldn't want to have to irrigate heavily enough to support it. Temperature/sunlight and season may also play a part.
I have heard that other fast-growing grasses, like switchgrass and even bamboo, would be suitable for biomass production in N. America, but I don't think sugarcane would do it.
A reasonable question. But I think the easiest answer is just to say that assuming that the Earth is at the center of the Universe and the stars and galaxies are retreating from it at wildly different rates, introduces needless complication when compared to the more obvious solution.
It's possible to posit that the Earth is still at the center of the universe, but to do so leaves several questions open: first, why are the stars so unevenly distributed? It's easy to tell (with the naked eye, even) that the stars aren't evenly distributed throughout the sky. And with instruments you can tell that the galaxies aren't either. An Earth-centric Universe doesn't account for this. Second, you'd have to come up with a plausible explanation for why all the stars and galaxies on one side of the Earth are moving faster than ones on the other, if the Earth is indeed at rest (with respect to some absolute frame of reference).
Lacking answers to those two questions -- which are both elegantly answered by putting the Earth not at the center, but moving along somewhere near the edge -- the Earth-centered model is unsatisfying and therefore not well-regarded.
If you have two competing theories, and one of them explains more observations than the other, it's the way of science to go with the one that matches most of the data.
A good book to read on this subject is "Big Bang" by Simon Singh (the same guy who wrote 'Code Book,' which is likewise excellent). It goes through the history of the modern cosmological model and the ones which preceded it, and illustrates why the currently accepted one has supplanted the previous models.
I used to love that ride. The version of it I used to go on obsessively was called "The Rotor." It was basically a centrifuge-like cylinder where you stood, and then spun up to somewhere in excess of 1g. It was definitely more than 1g, because I recall it being quite difficult to raise your hands away from the wall once it got going. I suspect it might have been more like 3g. Once you were quite stuck to the wall, they would drop the floor out from under you, leaving you pinned there, held up by friction until they slowed the rotation down and you slid down (and got a rather terrible wedgie).
I'm not sure I would have wanted to stay in the Rotor at full speed for more than a few minutes, but it certainly wasn't harmful as far as I could tell. I suspect any reasonably healthy person ought to be able to withstand 2g, applied perpendicular to their chest (so, lying down, and 'feeling' as though they're twice as heavy as normal), for a short-haul flight. The biggest problem would probably be obese people.
Oh, honestly. It's people like you that make it so that we can't have cool toys anymore.
Have you looked in a chemistry set lately? They've taken all the fun stuff out. What fun is a chemistry set supposed to be when you don't even have any potassium nitrate? Lame.
Now, you can't even get an alarm clock with radium dials on it anymore, because "oh noes, the terrorists will get it!" Well, let me tell you: if a kid can't play with radioactive materials in the privacy of his parents home anymore, the terrorists have already won.
That's because the Green widget in OS X is not a maximize button, okay?
If Apple had wanted to put in a Maximize button, they probably could have done it in five minutes, and ditched all the logic that's actually present behind that green button. It's not a Maximize button, it's an Autosize button. It enlarges (or shrinks) the current window to try and match the displayed content without scrollbars, in both the x and y directions. If it can't do that, it'll maximize it out to the current screen.
This is IMO a far more intelligent and useful feature than a simple maximize. On large displays, I hardly ever actually fill the entire screen with a single window (the exception being when I'm watching movies, and then I use a special fullscreen command because I want it to take over the display completely). Maximizing a single window to take over an entire display seems like a concept that was probably necessary and useful back in the days of 17" 800x600 monitors, but on a 21" or 22" widescreen display it's just annoying. I don't want my web browser to take over my screen, I just want it to fit the width of the current page and then take up the full vertical height (that way, I can still have my instant messenger / email / whatever visible in the background to the side of it). The very small number of applications that really need full use of the screen (graphics and video editing come to mind) can have special options.
If Apple ever replaces the autosize button with a maximize one, I'll be sorely disappointed. MacOS doesn't emulate Windows, and shouldn't try. It's built like it is for a reason.
Well if they have a brain, they won't distribute the cleartext list to ISPs, they'll distribute a table of hashed URLs, or something, and then the ISP can run each requested URL against the table to see if it turns up a hit, and then block it. (Over time, that might allow someone at an ISP to recover all the addresses on the list, but it wouldn't give them the "Kiddie Porn Top 800" on request.)
Of course, I think this whole plan is not-very-well thought out, so I suspect that every ISP will get a copy of the list, and the list will eventually leak out, and it'll be very popular with pedophiles (and just other persons who are interested in seeing what sort of things the Canucks are blocking, or who want to verify the accuracy of the list, or whatever -- "ban lists" of any kind always incite curiosity) throughout the rest of the world.
There was a time when I had started to believe that Canada was perhaps slightly more calm and rational than the United States, but I think it's pretty clear that they are just about 5 years behind, and the people there seem to be learning from censorship attempts down here and are less bald-faced about it.
Well actually you can show that the Earth is not in the center of the Universe, because you can watch the recession rates of various stars and quasars, and determine that some stars are receding from the Earth at a greater rate than others. If the Earth was indeed in the center of the Universe, than all stars would have to be expanding away from it at a basically equal rate. That there are some stars moving more slowly (with respect to our frame of reference) than others, we can show that we are not in the center, but are somewhere on one side of the center. I am fairly certain that this has been shown via redshifts and other Doppler effects.
Good to know it's not universal. For what it's worth, they were definitely doing it down in Northern Virginia as of about six months ago (I know a few folks who signed up; they were all Hams and not concerned about having copper POTS service for emergency communications), and the Wikipedia article on FIOS states that they're doing it elsewhere. Not sure which is more common, or if they were doing it and have since stopped, or what.
From WP:
For residential installations, Verizon generally requires any existing analog phone lines to be "cut over" to FiOS. Note that this is a permanent modification: once converted to fiber, one can never again go back to DSL service as the copper line is made inactive (and in some cases removed). Verizon's justification for this is that installations cost them over $500 per home, and they do not want to make that investment twice. The pricing of POTS over FiOS is identical to POTS over traditional copper. No differences exist billing-wise as only the delivery system changes. The same packages, rates, deals and telephone taxes exist on FiOS POTS and copper wire POTS. The phone pricing on traditional copper will migrate to FiOS phone when FiOS is installed.
The DD-WRT firmware for WRT-54GL routers will do this. It can de-prioritize various kinds of packets, I suspect based on header inspection. I don't know whether it's smart enough to pick up on the obfuscated Bittorrent packets used by newer versions of Azureus (which was designed to be resistant to this sort of inspection), but it will get some of it.
I'm the "unofficial sysadmin" for my house, which is shared with several other single guys, by virtue of having the router in my room, and DD-WRT makes QoS fairly simple. Things that require real-time performance like SSH, Citrix, and online games get high priority, HTTP text transfers get medium, HTTP and FTP file transfers (don't ask me how it can tell the difference between HTTP text and HTTP file transfer) get low, and P2P apps get "bulk." This doesn't prevent P2P use, in fact at night it pretty much saturates the connection, but it does fairly well at keeping them from making other services impossible to use.
The other thing to do is just go to each of the client computers and kindly insist that they turn the maximum up and down speeds on their P2P apps down to something reasonable; that can improve the situation dramatically.
Just out of curiosity, does that four hours include getting IR support working? From what I hear, getting a working remote control can be a real killer.
If you did, four hours has to be something like a record. You must have really lucked out in terms of hardware compatibility. Any chance you'd want to list your configuration?
Slashdot Mirror
I think you summed up my feelings more eloquently than I would have. I think the problem here is that Slashdot caters to a geek audience, and geeks tend to find the idea of a robot probe more interesting than most non-geek people do. To most people, even the Mars rovers and the Voyager probes were just curiosities. I think the general attitude is "well, if we can put a man on the Moon, of course we can put a robot on Mars...duh."
It doesn't matter what NASA does with robots -- they could send them to Pluto and have them building robot cities and making little robots and god knows what else -- but most people would still regard the high-water-mark of the space program as July 20, 1969. There is a fundamental difference between robotic exploration and human exploration, and it doesn't matter what kind of pictures you take or what kind of data you bring back, if it's not a person, it's just a bunch of geeks dorking around with expensive R/C toys.
The day we put a person on Mars, people will be gathered around their TV sets, the same way they were in 1969. But no number of robots or probes are going to engender that kind of interest.
The imagery from unmanned missions is somewhat interesting, but I doubt it's going to be enough to keep the funding coming. Particularly since as CG systems get better, you can fake all sorts of psuedo-space shots for (basically) free.
The reason the recent manned missions haven't kept interest up is because they're hardly exploration. The Shuttle just ferries people back and forth to places we've already been: boring.
The interest in space in the 1960s wasn't a fluke, it's because we were really doing something new; going somewhere that nobody had been before. If NASA had continued to do missions like that, it would have kept the public's interest. It's because the current manned missions don't do that, that they're uninteresting to most people. They're not 'explorative' enough.
That said, the manned missions today have managed to keep up a low level of public interest; I suspect that if it weren't for them, lame as they are, NASA would have disappeared in the 80s.
"Ubisoft has pushed back the genre's limits in terms of quality and innovation so that we are now one of tinsel town's choice partners."
Well, at least they were honest about that part.
It's pretty easy to do. If you want, you can try it by setting up a virtual machine using VMWare (so you can roll it back later).
First, you install Windows, say XP SP1, and leave it in its default state. Then you fire up IE and navigate around to some pages. Preferably seedy ones. Googling "free porn," "warez," or "serial numbers" ought to do it. Then when you see some incomprehensible message about an ActiveX control, click OK. Congratulations, you've probably got yourself some spyware or a rootkit. This is pretty much the guaranteed way; if you surf around long enough, you can probably find sites that use vulnerabilities in IE to bypass the "click OK" step -- for so-called "drive-by downloading" and arbitrary code execution. Here's a list of the most popular exploitware. Older versions of IE are particularly vulnerable, so basically surfing using any machine that hasn't been patched is a ticket to rootville. And unfortunately, many people would rather just start surfing than update their computer's security patches first.
Alternately, you can just plug an unpatched pre-SP2 box directly into a broadband connection (as in, without a router or firewall in the way) and leave it there for a while; that should get you something. This is somewhat harder to do with SP2, since it has a firewall turned on by default and fewer services running.
The net result is that many people who have older machines get compromised and can't fix them, either because they don't have re-install/recovery media, or because they haven't backed up their data, so the problem just gets worse until the computer is unusably infested. Then they get a new machine, with a new version of Windows, and for a short time it's more secure (because it'll probably be SP2). After a few months or years of neglect, though, it's the same pattern over again.
Flags and footprints is a waste of time and money.
Those "flags and footprints" sustained the space program and kept it going for well-on 30 years. I think they were worth every penny. It's just more unfortunate that in putting them there, we didn't do something more permanent as well. But if we hadn't gone there and at least done that, the space program would have fizzled long ago. It's because NASA hasn't done anything like that lately that it's dying.
You're correct that unmanned probes are cheaper, but what I think you're ignoring is that even as we've sent these robotic probes all over the solar system, public interest in space exploration has waned. And when interest wanes, so does funding.
Robotic probes are not the answer. Unless NASA can put a human being in a spacesuit further from home than a person has ever been before, and keep doing that consistently, year after year, they're going to be ignored by the public and butchered by Congress. It doesn't matter how many probes they send out or how much data they return. Particularly since the only kind of manned 'exploration' they're doing now (going up to LEO and back) is rapidly becoming a tourist attraction. It's tough to come off looking like a modern-day Magellan when any businessman with a few million bucks can do the same thing.
Robotic probes don't capture the imagination of the public. Here's an experiment: how many people do you think could identify the first words that a person spoke on the Moon? And how many people know what the first thing sent back by the Mars rover on arrival was? How many people even know what the first robotic Mars probe was? And if you told them, how many would care? Not many, I'll wager. Putting a person out further than we've ever gone before is significant, it's a tangible achievement. Robotic probes are cute toys by comparison; to most people they're nothing but radio-controlled airplanes, albeit done at very long range.
Robotic exploration is what's killing NASA; if they don't restart manned exploratory missions, they're going to go into a death spiral. First they do robotic missions and lose the public's interest, then they get their budgets cut; in response they cut more manned missions in favor of robotic ones, and lose more public interest. I think anyone can see where that leads. An unmanned space program isn't sustainable; it's a "cost center" that's just going to get axed the next time some Senator needs to find a source for their pork-barrel project funding.
If NASA doesn't survive, it won't be doing any science. If NASA doesn't get the next generation of voters and tax-payers interested, they're going to be dead of apathy within the decade.
The nice thing about GMail is that having your email on the server, and having it on your desktop, are not mutually exclusive. It's trivial, if you know what you're doing, to set up your GMail account so that it's always backed up to a local machine. There are even step by step instructions for doing it. You just set up a POP connection and suck down your entire mailfile, and then set up your local mailreader to download the new ones periodically.
Google rightly doesn't make any QoS promises, because it's giving you a free service. However, it's a pretty good bang for the (lack of) buck; and it doesn't preclude you from doing things to protect your data on your end. Until Google came along, I don't think most free webmail services let you have this level of desktop/web-service cooperation. (Though I think Yahoo's mail does POP access now. Not sure about Hotmail.)
And I've seen users actually throw out working hardware because it was "clogged" with spyware, and they didn't have any installation media with which to reformat the machine. It is an absolutely real threat, and I suspect that it drives a not-insignificant number of new hardware purchases in the low-price segment (the $300 systems from WalMart, etc.).
Though I can't really complain; I have two nice Ubuntu servers as a result of this practice. I like to think they're happier this way.
They don't care because it's been a while since NASA has really done anything interesting. It's tough to get excited about space exploration when it's a handful of people riding up and down in a vehicle that's older than most young people's cars, and doing incomprehensible/boring stuff when they get there.
Space exploration was exciting when it meant putting people on the moon; the public has lost interest when it just means sending people up to LEO over and over again, and the people in question aren't them.
I suspect that if we put a person on Mars, you would see an immediate renewed interest in space exploration. But seeing the state to which NASA and the government in general has fallen, I suspect most young people are (wisely) too cynical to believe that will ever occur. Thus they don't care, and turn their attentions to things that seem to be actually progressing.
I don't think he's suggesting -- or that his suggestion requires, anyway -- that you eliminate the tag-specific close tags in favor of a universal one; you could easily have both. Most people would probably use the universal one, unless they really needed to close tags out of order, in which case they could use the traditional tag-specific closers.
From the Slashdot/OSTG ToS:As others have pointed out, what makes this clause non-evil is that it's not an exclusive license. By posting to Slashdot, you don't lose the right to post the same content elsewhere; you just give OSTG the right to post/summarize/publish/whatever it. Many situations where you are writing and being paid for it, require that you transfer all rights to the produced work, to the person paying for its creation. In not requiring an exclusive transfer of ownership, while paying you for it, Helium is actually rather liberal.
Maybe they could just write "NOT EVIL" in magic marker or something, that would make ME feel better.
How about "Don't Panic" in nice, friendly letters?
True, although you could say that for most tools. How often do most people use a hand saw or a hammer? Probably not very often. But when you need one, you need one; a lot of special-purpose tools are worth their purchase price the first time you have to use one. That goes for both the ones in the basement/garage, and in the kitchen.
Although you're right about medium-to-large appliances; they're like having a table saw or a drill press that you never use.
LOOK UP!
Why, to see if the basement's ceiling is leaking?
Reminds me of one of the opening taglines on a Futurama episode:
"Not a substitute for human interaction."
I think a lot of them have changed over to soybeans. Not enough to make it the dominant crop in the midwest, perhaps, but enough for beans to be a huge cash crop in many parts of the country. I think a lot of the resistance is because of the investment in harvesting equipment for corn, plus accumulated knowledge about its growth and production.
I doubt sugarcane would be suitable for most of the North American agricultural belt. Given that it was being grown in the West Indies at the same time that the U.S. was being settled, if it was practical to grow here, I suspect it already would be. I think the problem is rainfall; sugarcane requires much more rain than most places in the midwest get, and you wouldn't want to have to irrigate heavily enough to support it. Temperature/sunlight and season may also play a part.
I have heard that other fast-growing grasses, like switchgrass and even bamboo, would be suitable for biomass production in N. America, but I don't think sugarcane would do it.
A reasonable question. But I think the easiest answer is just to say that assuming that the Earth is at the center of the Universe and the stars and galaxies are retreating from it at wildly different rates, introduces needless complication when compared to the more obvious solution.
It's possible to posit that the Earth is still at the center of the universe, but to do so leaves several questions open: first, why are the stars so unevenly distributed? It's easy to tell (with the naked eye, even) that the stars aren't evenly distributed throughout the sky. And with instruments you can tell that the galaxies aren't either. An Earth-centric Universe doesn't account for this. Second, you'd have to come up with a plausible explanation for why all the stars and galaxies on one side of the Earth are moving faster than ones on the other, if the Earth is indeed at rest (with respect to some absolute frame of reference).
Lacking answers to those two questions -- which are both elegantly answered by putting the Earth not at the center, but moving along somewhere near the edge -- the Earth-centered model is unsatisfying and therefore not well-regarded.
If you have two competing theories, and one of them explains more observations than the other, it's the way of science to go with the one that matches most of the data.
A good book to read on this subject is "Big Bang" by Simon Singh (the same guy who wrote 'Code Book,' which is likewise excellent). It goes through the history of the modern cosmological model and the ones which preceded it, and illustrates why the currently accepted one has supplanted the previous models.
I used to love that ride. The version of it I used to go on obsessively was called "The Rotor." It was basically a centrifuge-like cylinder where you stood, and then spun up to somewhere in excess of 1g. It was definitely more than 1g, because I recall it being quite difficult to raise your hands away from the wall once it got going. I suspect it might have been more like 3g. Once you were quite stuck to the wall, they would drop the floor out from under you, leaving you pinned there, held up by friction until they slowed the rotation down and you slid down (and got a rather terrible wedgie).
I'm not sure I would have wanted to stay in the Rotor at full speed for more than a few minutes, but it certainly wasn't harmful as far as I could tell. I suspect any reasonably healthy person ought to be able to withstand 2g, applied perpendicular to their chest (so, lying down, and 'feeling' as though they're twice as heavy as normal), for a short-haul flight. The biggest problem would probably be obese people.
Oh, honestly. It's people like you that make it so that we can't have cool toys anymore.
Have you looked in a chemistry set lately? They've taken all the fun stuff out. What fun is a chemistry set supposed to be when you don't even have any potassium nitrate? Lame.
Now, you can't even get an alarm clock with radium dials on it anymore, because "oh noes, the terrorists will get it!" Well, let me tell you: if a kid can't play with radioactive materials in the privacy of his parents home anymore, the terrorists have already won.
That's because the Green widget in OS X is not a maximize button, okay?
If Apple had wanted to put in a Maximize button, they probably could have done it in five minutes, and ditched all the logic that's actually present behind that green button. It's not a Maximize button, it's an Autosize button. It enlarges (or shrinks) the current window to try and match the displayed content without scrollbars, in both the x and y directions. If it can't do that, it'll maximize it out to the current screen.
This is IMO a far more intelligent and useful feature than a simple maximize. On large displays, I hardly ever actually fill the entire screen with a single window (the exception being when I'm watching movies, and then I use a special fullscreen command because I want it to take over the display completely). Maximizing a single window to take over an entire display seems like a concept that was probably necessary and useful back in the days of 17" 800x600 monitors, but on a 21" or 22" widescreen display it's just annoying. I don't want my web browser to take over my screen, I just want it to fit the width of the current page and then take up the full vertical height (that way, I can still have my instant messenger / email / whatever visible in the background to the side of it). The very small number of applications that really need full use of the screen (graphics and video editing come to mind) can have special options.
If Apple ever replaces the autosize button with a maximize one, I'll be sorely disappointed. MacOS doesn't emulate Windows, and shouldn't try. It's built like it is for a reason.
Well if they have a brain, they won't distribute the cleartext list to ISPs, they'll distribute a table of hashed URLs, or something, and then the ISP can run each requested URL against the table to see if it turns up a hit, and then block it. (Over time, that might allow someone at an ISP to recover all the addresses on the list, but it wouldn't give them the "Kiddie Porn Top 800" on request.)
Of course, I think this whole plan is not-very-well thought out, so I suspect that every ISP will get a copy of the list, and the list will eventually leak out, and it'll be very popular with pedophiles (and just other persons who are interested in seeing what sort of things the Canucks are blocking, or who want to verify the accuracy of the list, or whatever -- "ban lists" of any kind always incite curiosity) throughout the rest of the world.
There was a time when I had started to believe that Canada was perhaps slightly more calm and rational than the United States, but I think it's pretty clear that they are just about 5 years behind, and the people there seem to be learning from censorship attempts down here and are less bald-faced about it.
Well actually you can show that the Earth is not in the center of the Universe, because you can watch the recession rates of various stars and quasars, and determine that some stars are receding from the Earth at a greater rate than others. If the Earth was indeed in the center of the Universe, than all stars would have to be expanding away from it at a basically equal rate. That there are some stars moving more slowly (with respect to our frame of reference) than others, we can show that we are not in the center, but are somewhere on one side of the center. I am fairly certain that this has been shown via redshifts and other Doppler effects.
From WP:Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Verizon
The DD-WRT firmware for WRT-54GL routers will do this. It can de-prioritize various kinds of packets, I suspect based on header inspection. I don't know whether it's smart enough to pick up on the obfuscated Bittorrent packets used by newer versions of Azureus (which was designed to be resistant to this sort of inspection), but it will get some of it.
I'm the "unofficial sysadmin" for my house, which is shared with several other single guys, by virtue of having the router in my room, and DD-WRT makes QoS fairly simple. Things that require real-time performance like SSH, Citrix, and online games get high priority, HTTP text transfers get medium, HTTP and FTP file transfers (don't ask me how it can tell the difference between HTTP text and HTTP file transfer) get low, and P2P apps get "bulk." This doesn't prevent P2P use, in fact at night it pretty much saturates the connection, but it does fairly well at keeping them from making other services impossible to use.
The other thing to do is just go to each of the client computers and kindly insist that they turn the maximum up and down speeds on their P2P apps down to something reasonable; that can improve the situation dramatically.
Just out of curiosity, does that four hours include getting IR support working? From what I hear, getting a working remote control can be a real killer.
If you did, four hours has to be something like a record. You must have really lucked out in terms of hardware compatibility. Any chance you'd want to list your configuration?