Billions of dollars, and this is what they plan?
on
Marsoweb
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Methinks I smell the sickly scent of a public relations campaign. I mean, are we really supposed to believe, that, even with their huge budget, NASA is incapable of finding a good landing site on Mars? They already landed on the planet a few times, they know places it is possible. For a manned mission it may be a bit more complicated, with water (or ice) needed, and perhaps a few other things, but seriously, a website to decide this sort of stuff? They are showing, what was it, 44,000 images, to scientists who may find (at a guess) a few thousand possible landing sites. I am supposed to believe a NASA bigwig is going to say to his dedicated team, "Hold everything, we've just had an email from someone who works at a high school in Belgium. He reckons slide 38,233 is a good spot. That's the breakthrough we were looking for." Yeah, right!
Actually in Australia, it is legal to scan police frequencies. I am doing it now. I get your point though, that allowing something that will lead to a crime is a silly thing to make legal.
The fact that scanning police frequencies is illegal where you are, but legal where I am, also demonstrates that these type of laws lead to contraditions in what is increasingly a borderless world.
What if I have just moved to the UK from China, where for some reason (hypothetically), it is considered legal to reprogramme your phone? As I land in England, have I just broken the law by having a phone that has been rewired?
"Overpeer will respond by randomizing the names." If the names are randomized, how will they be picked up in searches? Even if the meta tags have the info, surely only a complete nit-wit is going to download #fe*&(^.mpg if they are searching for "Grateful Dead". A few people have asked what can be done to stop Overpeer. IMHO they probably are pretty harmless. But what they are doing is a form of spam, and may someone like www.spews.org may be willing to help.
Re:Criticism of foreigners unwarranted?
on
Greenbacks No More
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· Score: 1
As someone who was a foreigner in New York once, I can attest to the fact that all your money looks like the same is not all bad.
Given you seem to tip everyone for doing just about anything, it can actually come in handy.
I could only afford to catch taxis because I used to roll a couple of dollar notes up and hand them to the driver, with him probably thinking they were fives.
Am I a Cheapskate? You betcha, but I am only talking about the tip, I still paid the full price for the trip.
In Australia we moved about 15 years ago to plastic notes. If you guys are changing your money anyway, why don't you go all the way, and get rid of the paper ones. Plastic notes are almost impossible to counterfeit; They can be put through the wash without falling apart; they last years longer than paper notes, and you don't need to cut down a forest to make them.
It has always surprised me that the US, that is supposed to be among the most technological countries in the world, is still using basically the same technique to make its money that it did 100 years ago!
I once found a cache of credit card details. As luck would have it the website was one based in my city in Australia. I contacted the webmaster, who made them inaccessible, but it raises an interesting issue as to whether or not the cache is a little too comprehensive. Of course, it could also be argued that given Google is the world's biggest search engine, webmasters should keep in mind caching issues when they create their sites.
The writer says the explosions in Star Trek are unrealistic because they make noise, and the sounds of the explosion and the vision of the explosion come through at the same time.
I note that in my experience watching Star Trek the sounds of the other ship exploding are not heard. What is heard is the affect of the debris hitting the Enterprise/Voyager/Deep Space IX. People (the good guys) often seem to brace for the impact of shock waves from exploding stars, and given they are in the vacuum of space, I guess they would not get shock waves the same way they do in an atmosphere, but it is not inconceivable that gravity waves could create a force that would knock them around a bit.
In regards to the marriage of sound and vision, I think that given the battleships are usually very close to each other (sometimes they appear just a few hundred metres apart) the gap between the explosion and the sound would be almost negligible to a human ear. In any case, as I wrote above, it is not the sound of the attack that is heard, but the debris hitting the attacking craft.
The proposal is ludicrous is one considers the amount of royalties that would have to be paid. Assuming it is, say, 10 per cent of the sale price, that could be $4 on a CD originally bought in the mid 1980s (when CDs first came out I remember them costing $40) and only $2 on a CD bought more recently. A CD reseller would have to know how much someone paid for the CD originally, and this sounds pretty difficult. If they had to pay 10 per cent of the current sale price, they would have to know if the CD is currently on sale in retail outlets and how much it costs. What if it is in the bargain bin at one outlet and in Old Time Classics in another? If it is no longer sold, they would have to find out how much it last sold for.
Theoretical conversation in a future world: Clerk: "Yes Sir, that's right, we are selling the Gyspsy Kings Greatest Hits. You can buy it new for $15, or second hand for $12. Of course, since it originally sold for $35 we will have to charge you $3.50 royalty charge on the second hand recording"
Customer: "Gee, can I swap it for my 3 Doors CDs?"
Clerk: "Certainly sir. We pay $2 for second hand CDs, but have to pay $2.50 royalties. So you can hand over your CDs and get the second-hand Gyspy Kings recording for $17"
I think the problem is that Hobbex doesn't know much about Australian politics. Because of an historical anomoly, the right wing conservative party in Australia (equivalent to the Republicans in the USA) are known as the Liberals (see their website liberals.org.au. It's confusing for those in Oz, and the difference between Liberal and liberal is that the former are known as "big L liberals" while the latter are known as "small l liberals". Given in the posting, Liberals is written in caps, it is a fair bet that the writer was referring to the Liberal political party, ie the conservative party. In case you are wondering, the Labor Party in Australia is not actually a party of workers anymore, and the National Party, came out strongly against an Australian republic a couple of years ago. So there you go, Australia is a place of contradictions, but the original posting was in fact, correct.
Most people writing in reply to this news are pooh poohing the idea that a few rocks may hold any importance. Take a look at this story and it may jog your memory that it was in martian meteorites that there came the first good evidence for life on another planet. There are also theories that it was from Mars that life on our planet was 'seeded'. Without Martian meteorites there may have been no life on earth, and you know what that means? That's right, no Internet. So next time you laugh at a few rocks, remember how important studying this type of stuff really is.
Before the GST (a new tax system) was brought in in Australia, it cost $60 per month for Telstra igpond cable, plus $90 initial set up costs. After the GST came in, I got a quote for setting up the same service, the monthly fee has jumped to $67 (a rise of more than the tax of 10 per cent) while the installation fee has leapt to $360. You can't say broadband in Australia is cheap, if you take into consideration all the other costs. This article explains that at the beginning of the year Microsoft was complaining about the cost of broadband in Australia. The price has not fallen.
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Methinks I smell the sickly scent of a public relations campaign. I mean, are we really supposed to believe, that, even with their huge budget, NASA is incapable of finding a good landing site on Mars? They already landed on the planet a few times, they know places it is possible. For a manned mission it may be a bit more complicated, with water (or ice) needed, and perhaps a few other things, but seriously, a website to decide this sort of stuff? They are showing, what was it, 44,000 images, to scientists who may find (at a guess) a few thousand possible landing sites. I am supposed to believe a NASA bigwig is going to say to his dedicated team, "Hold everything, we've just had an email from someone who works at a high school in Belgium. He reckons slide 38,233 is a good spot. That's the breakthrough we were looking for."
Yeah, right!
The fact that scanning police frequencies is illegal where you are, but legal where I am, also demonstrates that these type of laws lead to contraditions in what is increasingly a borderless world.
What if I have just moved to the UK from China, where for some reason (hypothetically), it is considered legal to reprogramme your phone?
As I land in England, have I just broken the law by having a phone that has been rewired?
"Overpeer will respond by randomizing the names."
If the names are randomized, how will they be picked up in searches? Even if the meta tags have the info, surely only a complete nit-wit is going to download #fe*&(^.mpg if they are searching for "Grateful Dead".
A few people have asked what can be done to stop Overpeer. IMHO they probably are pretty harmless. But what they are doing is a form of spam, and may someone like www.spews.org may be willing to help.
Given you seem to tip everyone for doing just about anything, it can actually come in handy.
I could only afford to catch taxis because I used to roll a couple of dollar notes up and hand them to the driver, with him probably thinking they were fives.
Am I a Cheapskate? You betcha, but I am only talking about the tip, I still paid the full price for the trip.
In Australia we moved about 15 years ago to plastic notes.
If you guys are changing your money anyway, why don't you go all the way, and get rid of the paper ones.
Plastic notes are almost impossible to counterfeit; They can be put through the wash without falling apart; they last years longer than paper notes, and you don't need to cut down a forest to make them.
It has always surprised me that the US, that is supposed to be among the most technological countries in the world, is still using basically the same technique to make its money that it did 100 years ago!
I once found a cache of credit card details. As luck would have it the website was one based in my city in Australia. I contacted the webmaster, who made them inaccessible, but it raises an interesting issue as to whether or not the cache is a little too comprehensive. Of course, it could also be argued that given Google is the world's biggest search engine, webmasters should keep in mind caching issues when they create their sites.
I note that in my experience watching Star Trek the sounds of the other ship exploding are not heard. What is heard is the affect of the debris hitting the Enterprise/Voyager/Deep Space IX. People (the good guys) often seem to brace for the impact of shock waves from exploding stars, and given they are in the vacuum of space, I guess they would not get shock waves the same way they do in an atmosphere, but it is not inconceivable that gravity waves could create a force that would knock them around a bit.
In regards to the marriage of sound and vision, I think that given the battleships are usually very close to each other (sometimes they appear just a few hundred metres apart) the gap between the explosion and the sound would be almost negligible to a human ear. In any case, as I wrote above, it is not the sound of the attack that is heard, but the debris hitting the attacking craft.
If it is no longer sold, they would have to find out how much it last sold for.
Theoretical conversation in a future world:
Clerk: "Yes Sir, that's right, we are selling the Gyspsy Kings Greatest Hits. You can buy it new for $15, or second hand for $12. Of course, since it originally sold for $35 we will have to charge you $3.50 royalty charge on the second hand recording"
Customer: "Gee, can I swap it for my 3 Doors CDs?"
Clerk: "Certainly sir. We pay $2 for second hand CDs, but have to pay $2.50 royalties. So you can hand over your CDs and get the second-hand Gyspy Kings recording for $17"
I think the problem is that Hobbex doesn't know much about Australian politics. Because of an historical anomoly, the right wing conservative party in Australia (equivalent to the Republicans in the USA) are known as the Liberals (see their website liberals.org.au. It's confusing for those in Oz, and the difference between Liberal and liberal is that the former are known as "big L liberals" while the latter are known as "small l liberals". Given in the posting, Liberals is written in caps, it is a fair bet that the writer was referring to the Liberal political party, ie the conservative party. In case you are wondering, the Labor Party in Australia is not actually a party of workers anymore, and the National Party, came out strongly against an Australian republic a couple of years ago. So there you go, Australia is a place of contradictions, but the original posting was in fact, correct.
Most people writing in reply to this news are pooh poohing the idea that a few rocks may hold any importance. Take a look at this story and it may jog your memory that it was in martian meteorites that there came the first good evidence for life on another planet. There are also theories that it was from Mars that life on our planet was 'seeded'. Without Martian meteorites there may have been no life on earth, and you know what that means? That's right, no Internet. So next time you laugh at a few rocks, remember how important studying this type of stuff really is.
Before the GST (a new tax system) was brought in in Australia, it cost $60 per month for Telstra igpond cable, plus $90 initial set up costs. After the GST came in, I got a quote for setting up the same service, the monthly fee has jumped to $67 (a rise of more than the tax of 10 per cent) while the installation fee has leapt to $360. You can't say broadband in Australia is cheap, if you take into consideration all the other costs. This article explains that at the beginning of the year Microsoft was complaining about the cost of broadband in Australia. The price has not fallen.