Long term effects? What about the guinea pigs?
on
Lunar Dustbusters
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Let's look at the guinea pigs we sent to the moon:
Still kicking: Buzz Aldrin is still alive. He's 77. Neil Armstrong is still alive. He's 76. Alan Bean is still alive. 75. Edgar Mitchell. 77 and counting. David Scott. 75 and counting. John Young, 77. Charles Duke, 72. Eugene Cernan, 73. Harrison Schmidt, 73.
Died, accident: Pete Conrad died in 1999 at age 69. (Accident, crash)
Died, disease Alan Shephard died at age 75 from leukemia. James Irwin in 1991 at age 61. (Heart failure, which may have been a preexisting condition and caused him to suffer a heart attack during Apollo 15)
Not bad, actually. They should be healthier than the normal person, sure, but I don't see rampant cancer, lung or cardiovascular disease running roughshod over the ranks of the men who've been on the moon.
A cheaper option would be to simply piggyback on other agencies' telescopes, a cost of about $300 million, also rejected.
Thats $1 per American. There shouldnt even be a debate.
That's about $.05 per person on the planet. Lemme know when you manage to collect India and China's fair share, and I'll rummage through my couch for my family's.
Ahh, so a useful user-interface feature disappears because he's clicked on something else?
So the monologue for millions of users is going to go something like:
"I wonder what's in here...? Oh, a history list. Nothing I wanted. Now where'd that other thing go to..?"
That's not farking it, that's just getting to know the interface. And now the user's farked. Because unless you work with computer geeks, you know the conversation with them in a few weeks is going to start off:
"...sometimes it's there, and sometimes it's not...."
I was at the International Auto Show this weekend.
Agreed on the concept cars thoughts. That these folks here who spend weekends building replicas of light sabres and Star Trek PADD's suddenly get uppity at a car company building a completely impractical, non-functioning, set-piece to show off design ideas cracks me up.
Concept cars tend to go two ways. Sometimes they'll take the current model year and add fins and call that a "concept" car. Hummer added a fabric sunroof, and I think Honda hybridized some of their current models. On the other extreme, a car company will come out with something completely different like the Airstream.
I got a good look at this car in person. The actual concept car does not appear to be polished aluminum. It's actually a metallic paint finish.
Some people are *very* sensitive to the color and brightness of the light in their surroundings. My wife claims I'm solar powered and I'd have to agree. If I were to arrange a scale of light that I'd find pleasing, sunlight would be far and away the light source I'd prefer.
The *only* flourescent bulb that I've even remotely liked is my Blue Max desk lamp.
I can't imagine paying $28/bulb to light my house though. I know the Mrs. wants to use CF's in as many places as she can, but we'll have to negotiate a bit on which bulbs become CF's, how warm they are, and how much we're willing to pay.
That was my original thought when I read the article. 7.5 days?!?
Then I considered that my "car" might not be the only one on the cable at that time. If the plan is for multiple cars on the cable, yeah, they'll have to travel at a relatively slow rate so that cars could be properly attached at the bottom of the cable at a reasonable speed to not put too much stress on the cable.
What is the issue is is this a natural process, a man-made process or a combination?
Why is that the issue? Are we looking to assign blame? Or should we be more interested in what to do about it? Cheaper to reduce it or cheaper to deal with the results? Or should we just ask more rhetorical questions? Anybody know for sure?
For me, it's not about blame at all.
Let's say this is a natural processes cause by -- just for example -- the Sun. Then there's really little we can do about it. (Move to higher ground? Bigger dikes around New Orleans and Holland? Sell short on glacier sighseeing companies?) If this is the same kind of warming that the article talks about in the Medieval Warming Period then humanity will survive quite nicely through it. If it's something more severe than that, well, we'll figure it out by then and build a giant cooling reflecting ring around the earth or somesuch rot.
If mankind's activities are the direct cause of the warming trend, and the apocalyptic doomsayers have any credibility, then we should investigate how to change our behavior to minimize the impact.
It's all a question of where we direct our efforts -- or undertake them at all. There are some things that are just beyond mankind's ability to control. (Plate tectonics, solar activity, deep ocean currents) It's a big planet and it takes quite a bit of hubris to assume we're the cause of (and solution to) all of its problems.
The environmentalists have been harping for years that we're stuck with the planet we're on, so we'd better take care of it. By the same token, it's not a perfect Big Blue Marble. It's got cracks. The thermostat is a bit wonky. And it leaks all over. Deal with it.
It is kind of like suggesting that GM no longer sell cars.
oddly enough, many people suggest GM doing just that. GM makes the bulk of its money through its lending arm GMAC. GM has often been called a bank that happens to make cars for a hobby.
It's even worse than that. They're actually a health care and pension management company posing as an auto manufacturer. (Dad's a GM retiree and UAW official...)
Maybe not so far off the mark: try running a session connected to the machine via VNC or Terminal Services. Especially over dialup or otherwise constricted network. The slow redraw might give you time to figure out what it is.
I *have* had a finger get chewed through by a table saw.
I was cutting a piece of wood that was way too small for a table saw to cut safely and it got my index finger. An avulsion laceration about 1/8" wide, right across the fleshy pad of the finger, down but not quite to the bone.
My fault, I know. I didn't sue anyone, and wouldn't have thought to even if it took my hand. [For a cut that small and precise, I should have walked out to the workshop and used a band saw or built a jig. But I was lazy...]
This is a great idea, but like another poster said it has to be cheap, and it has to be non-obtrusive. The safety of the device is a trade off against its utility. If the saw stops working because of a faulty safety switch, the safety switch will get removed. If it's expensive to replace, it will probably not be replaced.
For example, my table saw has a kick-guard that goes over and behind the blade. It's an incredible pain in the ass because gets in the way, it's hard to see around, and makes some cuts damned-near impossible. It was removed.
Make it cheap and make it reliable, and then it'll actually save some fingers.
What would you do if you were sitting there for 3-5 years and no hope of ever getting out or even getting a trial. [sic]
Spend a lot of time contemplating the hatred I've followed, and the the company I've kept that got me into this mess. Contemplate being denied the right to make a public spectacle out of myself by being an non-uniformed combatant. Wishing that my captors had just killed me outright, instead of letting me languish in anonymous obscurity.
Also knowing that my captors will feed me, clothe me, and medicate me in this state to keep me alive aginst my will for endless decades without human contact...
Begging for death but knowing it's abhorrent to Allah to commit suicide.
Their ship is pretty big, One- fourth the size of the moon, although an object that size in near-Earth orbitmight be expected to cause tidal waves, there are none!
The ship may have been the 1/4 the size of the moon, but it was at least partially hollow. Hollow means, not as much mass, not as much gravitational attraction. (This also the reason that I only buy solid chocolate Easter bunnies.)
It wasn't always that far from Earth. Rumor has it that at one time it was actually *on* the planet. It's hard for the tree huggers to believe that we've built a nuclear power source that's functioned flawlessly for 30 years, but it's true.
At it's root, the SCOTUS decision of Dred Scott was a property issue. He was property being taken away from his owner without due proces of law.
This has nothing to do fugitives fleeing over state lines.
Re:And make sure it burns up on re-entry too!
on
Golf in Space
·
· Score: 1
Gotta disagree with baseball. Any sport you can play while actively drinking a beer is not a sport. Baseball, shuffleboard, golf, bowling, curling, and darts for example are not "sports".
Replace baseball with ice hockey on Carlin's list and you've sold me.
I play volleyball a lot. I've been looking for a thin but shock resistant watch to wear when I need to play but keep an eye on the time. (Strapping one to my ankle or someplace else isn't just inconvenient, it's.. well, really dorky.)
Car makers would manufacture only for fleet buyers. Arms manufacturers would only market to military sales. Food processing plants would only sell to volume buyers (fast food chains, etc..) Toy and clothes manufactureres would only sell to Wal Mart.
Manufacturers aren't really interested in retail.
Face it: individual consumers are finicky, difficult people to work with. A manufacturer is going to take a *large* cut in up-front sales profits to reap the benefits of lower pre (R&D, customizations) and after-market (support & service) costs. If I can sell 10,000 units of anything to one buyer, or have to sell 10,000 units to 10,000 buyers, I'm gonna do the former!
Even if I have to sell them more cheaply.
This is precisely why the "middle man" has evolved in most markets. He's not there to benefit you the consumer, but the manufacturer and wholesaler.
The one danger in all of this, of course, is that as the number of buyers decreases the prices you can get on the manufacturing side will decrease. If only Wal Mart buys your widgets, then Wal Mart can demand almost any price for them including selling them for a loss.
However, audio blogs somehow defy Sturgeon's Law and 98% of those are crap. I expect video blogs to be even worse.
Audio blogs are such a jarring disturbance to the way I work in front of a computer, I can't listen to them at all. I pretty much have to stop everything else I'm doing and listen. That blows up multitasking for me. And there is no-one online interesting enough to have 100% of my undivided attention for the length of a blog entry.
My favorite two episodes (and those of many fans) were in the last season. The Devil's Hands and Jurassic Bark weren't just good Futurama, they were great television.
Slashdot Mirror
May he rest in peace.
Face down, 9 edge first.
Let's look at the guinea pigs we sent to the moon:
Still kicking:
Buzz Aldrin is still alive. He's 77.
Neil Armstrong is still alive. He's 76.
Alan Bean is still alive. 75.
Edgar Mitchell. 77 and counting.
David Scott. 75 and counting.
John Young, 77.
Charles Duke, 72.
Eugene Cernan, 73.
Harrison Schmidt, 73.
Died, accident:
Pete Conrad died in 1999 at age 69. (Accident, crash)
Died, disease
Alan Shephard died at age 75 from leukemia.
James Irwin in 1991 at age 61. (Heart failure, which may have been a preexisting condition and caused him to suffer a heart attack during Apollo 15)
Not bad, actually. They should be healthier than the normal person, sure, but I don't see rampant cancer, lung or cardiovascular disease running roughshod over the ranks of the men who've been on the moon.
I call Bullshit.
That's about $.05 per person on the planet. Lemme know when you manage to collect India and China's fair share, and I'll rummage through my couch for my family's.
Ahh, so a useful user-interface feature disappears because he's clicked on something else?
So the monologue for millions of users is going to go something like:
"I wonder what's in here...?
Oh, a history list. Nothing I wanted.
Now where'd that other thing go to..?"
That's not farking it, that's just getting to know the interface. And now the user's farked. Because unless you work with computer geeks, you know the conversation with them in a few weeks is going to start off:
"...sometimes it's there, and sometimes it's not...."
And they won't know why.
I was at the International Auto Show this weekend.
Agreed on the concept cars thoughts. That these folks here who spend weekends building replicas of light sabres and Star Trek PADD's suddenly get uppity at a car company building a completely impractical, non-functioning, set-piece to show off design ideas cracks me up.
Concept cars tend to go two ways. Sometimes they'll take the current model year and add fins and call that a "concept" car. Hummer added a fabric sunroof, and I think Honda hybridized some of their current models. On the other extreme, a car company will come out with something completely different like the Airstream.
I got a good look at this car in person. The actual concept car does not appear to be polished aluminum. It's actually a metallic paint finish.
When did the financial pundits spewing pseudofacts about income inequity become "News for nerds. Stuff that matters."?
Some people are *very* sensitive to the color and brightness of the light in their surroundings. My wife claims I'm solar powered and I'd have to agree. If I were to arrange a scale of light that I'd find pleasing, sunlight would be far and away the light source I'd prefer.
The *only* flourescent bulb that I've even remotely liked is my Blue Max desk lamp.
I can't imagine paying $28/bulb to light my house though. I know the Mrs. wants to use CF's in as many places as she can, but we'll have to negotiate a bit on which bulbs become CF's, how warm they are, and how much we're willing to pay.
That was my original thought when I read the article. 7.5 days?!?
Then I considered that my "car" might not be the only one on the cable at that time. If the plan is for multiple cars on the cable, yeah, they'll have to travel at a relatively slow rate so that cars could be properly attached at the bottom of the cable at a reasonable speed to not put too much stress on the cable.
But a single car? Fire it up!
Let's say this is a natural processes cause by -- just for example -- the Sun. Then there's really little we can do about it. (Move to higher ground? Bigger dikes around New Orleans and Holland? Sell short on glacier sighseeing companies?) If this is the same kind of warming that the article talks about in the Medieval Warming Period then humanity will survive quite nicely through it. If it's something more severe than that, well, we'll figure it out by then and build a giant cooling reflecting ring around the earth or somesuch rot.
If mankind's activities are the direct cause of the warming trend, and the apocalyptic doomsayers have any credibility, then we should investigate how to change our behavior to minimize the impact.
It's all a question of where we direct our efforts -- or undertake them at all. There are some things that are just beyond mankind's ability to control. (Plate tectonics, solar activity, deep ocean currents) It's a big planet and it takes quite a bit of hubris to assume we're the cause of (and solution to) all of its problems.
The environmentalists have been harping for years that we're stuck with the planet we're on, so we'd better take care of it. By the same token, it's not a perfect Big Blue Marble. It's got cracks. The thermostat is a bit wonky. And it leaks all over. Deal with it.
Set up the machines to run in a VM environment. When the host OS boots and logs in, make a copy of the VM and run that. When they exit, destroy it.
It's even worse than that. They're actually a health care and pension management company posing as an auto manufacturer. (Dad's a GM retiree and UAW official...)
Maybe not so far off the mark: try running a session connected to the machine via VNC or Terminal Services. Especially over dialup or otherwise constricted network. The slow redraw might give you time to figure out what it is.
I *have* had a finger get chewed through by a table saw.
I was cutting a piece of wood that was way too small for a table saw to cut safely and it got my index finger. An avulsion laceration about 1/8" wide, right across the fleshy pad of the finger, down but not quite to the bone.
My fault, I know. I didn't sue anyone, and wouldn't have thought to even if it took my hand. [For a cut that small and precise, I should have walked out to the workshop and used a band saw or built a jig. But I was lazy...]
This is a great idea, but like another poster said it has to be cheap, and it has to be non-obtrusive. The safety of the device is a trade off against its utility. If the saw stops working because of a faulty safety switch, the safety switch will get removed. If it's expensive to replace, it will probably not be replaced.
For example, my table saw has a kick-guard that goes over and behind the blade. It's an incredible pain in the ass because gets in the way, it's hard to see around, and makes some cuts damned-near impossible. It was removed.
Make it cheap and make it reliable, and then it'll actually save some fingers.
Spend a lot of time contemplating the hatred I've followed, and the the company I've kept that got me into this mess. Contemplate being denied the right to make a public spectacle out of myself by being an non-uniformed combatant. Wishing that my captors had just killed me outright, instead of letting me languish in anonymous obscurity.
Also knowing that my captors will feed me, clothe me, and medicate me in this state to keep me alive aginst my will for endless decades without human contact...
Begging for death but knowing it's abhorrent to Allah to commit suicide.
I'd say there's a lot to do.
The ship may have been the 1/4 the size of the moon, but it was at least partially hollow. Hollow means, not as much mass, not as much gravitational attraction. (This also the reason that I only buy solid chocolate Easter bunnies.)
It wasn't always that far from Earth. Rumor has it that at one time it was actually *on* the planet. It's hard for the tree huggers to believe that we've built a nuclear power source that's functioned flawlessly for 30 years, but it's true.
At it's root, the SCOTUS decision of Dred Scott was a property issue. He was property being taken away from his owner without due proces of law.
This has nothing to do fugitives fleeing over state lines.
Gotta disagree with baseball. Any sport you can play while actively drinking a beer is not a sport. Baseball, shuffleboard, golf, bowling, curling, and darts for example are not "sports".
Replace baseball with ice hockey on Carlin's list and you've sold me.
I play volleyball a lot. I've been looking for a thin but shock resistant watch to wear when I need to play but keep an eye on the time. (Strapping one to my ankle or someplace else isn't just inconvenient, it's.. well, really dorky.)
Suggestions?
[The fact that the target engine for Perl is named for a hoax, just makes this all ooze with irony.]
Given their choice...
Car makers would manufacture only for fleet buyers.
Arms manufacturers would only market to military sales.
Food processing plants would only sell to volume buyers (fast food chains, etc..)
Toy and clothes manufactureres would only sell to Wal Mart.
Manufacturers aren't really interested in retail.
Face it: individual consumers are finicky, difficult people to work with. A manufacturer is going to take a *large* cut in up-front sales profits to reap the benefits of lower pre (R&D, customizations) and after-market (support & service) costs. If I can sell 10,000 units of anything to one buyer, or have to sell 10,000 units to 10,000 buyers, I'm gonna do the former!
Even if I have to sell them more cheaply.
This is precisely why the "middle man" has evolved in most markets. He's not there to benefit you the consumer, but the manufacturer and wholesaler.
The one danger in all of this, of course, is that as the number of buyers decreases the prices you can get on the manufacturing side will decrease. If only Wal Mart buys your widgets, then Wal Mart can demand almost any price for them including selling them for a loss.
90% of everything sucks.
However, audio blogs somehow defy Sturgeon's Law and 98% of those are crap. I expect video blogs to be even worse.
Audio blogs are such a jarring disturbance to the way I work in front of a computer, I can't listen to them at all. I pretty much have to stop everything else I'm doing and listen. That blows up multitasking for me. And there is no-one online interesting enough to have 100% of my undivided attention for the length of a blog entry.
My favorite two episodes (and those of many fans) were in the last season. The Devil's Hands and Jurassic Bark weren't just good Futurama, they were great television.