> Actually, this sending tomatoes in orbit to see how they react is important. Just how do you think that the astronauts are going to eat on Mars?
The most important part of that article was the reiteration that we already know how astronauts respond to zero-G environments.
(And they sure ain't eating tomatoes, unless they're bringing seeds with them and growing them in water thawed from beneath the Martian surface. Those tomatoes will be growing in a non-zero-G environment.)
The real point of that article wasn't what the astronauts will eat on Mars, because it's a moot point - it doesn't matter what they'll eat, because as long as we pour money into the Shuttle and ISS, there will be no astronauts going to Mars. EVER.
> It really WAS a fan - I saw it on Movie Secrets on Bravo - a lot of people thought the transformer voices were done with same device you mention. Leonard Nimoy often talks about speaking into a fan for the voices he did for the older cartoon. I'm not sure if they still do that for Transformers Armada or not.
Aaw, smeg!
Not only was it done with $10 in parts back then... it'll probably cost $100 in DSP prototyping tools to reproduce today. That's inflation for ya.
> Forget a Commodore - on the series they used 36" blade fans and swirled a 2ft plastic pipe to make the "eye" swoosh sound - I'm guessing on the second one - that's how they did the "cylon eye" on KIT on Knight Rider.
Come to think of it, the closest I could get to the Cylon Centurion (robot) voice in 1979 was by speaking into a 36" fan, so maybe I wasn't too far off:)
Anyone have a circuit diagram for the vocoder they actually used for that robot voice effect, that most of us kids didn't know how to build back then? Gotta be doable for $10 worth of parts these days.
> I mean, in the last series it took them 20 years, and a weedy space albino, to figure out that if they run for Earth then the Cylons can just hang back and fry them and our mostly harmless selves when contact's made. What's a two decade wait to a galactic empire of robots? How's about this time we organise an online petition to tell those dumbass Galacticans to stay the hell away from Earth?
Dude. MOO3 has only been out for three days. Stop with the spoilers already!!!
> My "way of life" isn't the sort of cowardice that gives up privacy in the interests of security. I don't give my phone number to the good folks at Radio Shack. I don't let the police in to my home without a legitimate warrant.
Nor do I - the guy at Radio Shack doesn't need my phone number to give me my parts, so long as I have my Federal Reserve Notes. If I use a credit card, I'm automatically giving RatShack my phone number, though. (And I'm also giving him something more useful - my CC number!)
Nor would I permit the cops into my place without a warrant. I wouldn't resist, but I'd continually repeat that they were unwelcome here, and I'd continually ask them to leave, and I'd sue 'em into the Stone Age after they left.
At an airport, however, I've consented to a search of myself and my belongings - by virtue of all the large friendly signs saying, in a vaguely EULA-like way, that by Crossing This Line, I consent to such a search. If I don't want to be searched at the airport, the sign reminds me that I have a right to leave the airport.
> Giving up something so personal as my banking records is so entirely contrary to my way of life that I can find no conceivable grounds that your statement should apply.
Then I presume you've never filed for income tax, nor had the IRS come looking for you? Dude! You da man! How do you pull that off? Inquiring minds wanna evade!
Free clue: The drone at the airport sees "Green", "Yellow", or "Red". Maybe he sees your name and your flight itinerary. He sees none of the information that goes into the "green", "yellow", or "red", because he has no need to know.
Better clue: The alternative is to rely on the personal judgement of the drone. After eight hours of repeating "go ahead" at 10-second intervals, punctuated only by "hunh, that wun looks like an ay-rab, search him" and "ohfug, done to many ay-rabz, gunna get in trubl, better feel up that guy's grandma", the drone at the ticket counter or checkpoint would be highly unlikely to recognize Osama bin Ladin himself. The job is that mind-numbing.
So you start by building a system that does as much of the recognizing as practical for your drone. Even after eight hours of staring at a screen of "green" blocks, and even considering the drone is a government employee, there should be enough neurons still functioning at the end of the day to recognize that "yellow" (maybe one in a thousand) is not "green", and that "red" (probably one in a million) is also not "green".
You don't do that for privacy - you do it so that the system of "OK", "suspicious", and "terminate" works. (And so that it takes no more than a few seconds for most passengers, because it has to work for millions of people per day.)
But boiling down everything about someone into a block of green, yellow, or red pixels also protects your privacy pretty well.
The only other way I've seen of passenger profiling - the "El Al" method of a 5-minute heart-to-heart between a security guard (who has no sense of humor, as well he shouldn't) and every passenger. That method won't work here - because the air traffic volume in the US is vastly higher than that of Israel. But again, a happy side effect of automation of the profiling process is that your privacy is actually more protected than with a manual system.
> When others, who work just as hard as they ever did, live in abject poverty--unable to provide for the basic needs of there families.
There's a fundamental flaw in this part of your argument - that "how hard you work" should determine one's standard of living.
10 subsistence farmers in a third-world nation, working 16 hours a day digging in a dusty 10-acre plots, carrying water back and forth in big jugs filled from a nearby stream, are barely able to keep their families fed. Every few months, they might have enough surplus food to go to market and come back with a couple of dollars that they can use in replacing/repairing their tools (hand tools, jugs for water) as they break.
A farmer, a manager, a maintenance guy, and seven plow drivers in America, who sit on their asses (be it in a chair in a farm vehicle, or be it in front of a desk that tells him how well his robotically-controlled irrigation system is doing) for 8 hours a day, are able not only to feed themselves, but tens of thousands of other people as the application of technology has enabled them to farm 1000 acres, as well as to get several times as much crop output per acre. Every day, hundreds of pounds of produce make it to market, and the money that flows back is enough to buy a better tractor, a better plow, or genetically-enhanced seeds that require less pesticides next year.
How hard you work has nothing to do with how productive you are.
> The patent system in "our brand of capitalism" is just one way of exploiting selfishness to bring good to everybody. Even if 14 years seems like a huge amount of time, it means that 86 of the next 100 years get to use this for free. (Unlike copyrighted works, which if copyrighted today will still be restricted 100 years from now, but that's another rant.)
And in the case of drugs, 14 years really isn't that long.
Think about it. Spend a billion dollars and develop a cure for AIDS - the government says you can charge as high a price as you want for the next 14 years, but after your 14 years are up, you're assumed to have made all the money you can reasonably be expected to out of it, and afterwards, anyone can copy your drug and sell it for cheap.
But draw a fucking cartoon mouse. Hey, man, 75 years plus lifetime of creator, and it should be longer! We gotta protect the rights of people who produce the important things, y'know.
> Now even the clocks are on strike! Chavez, you know it's time to step down when time itself refuses to advance while you're in power.
Great. Now everyone's local Bolivarian Circle will be by tonight with baseball bats, clubs, and columbian neckties to beat the hell out of, and then incinerate, their capitalist running-dog timepieces. Oh well, that means more jobs (namely beating on clocks) for the poor! Viva la Revolucion!
> Those that didn't join, but had to stop anyway because couldn't deliver due to the stopping of the industry, are now without a job as the government has set its sights in firing every possible employee. >[...] >
As a funny note (if this can be funny at all), the disorganization is so large, that there are employees that have been fired twice in the same week as well as government designated employees who has been fired by the same government.
> Why then, if someone were to pay VeriSign for a service, should VeriSign not be accountable for said paid for service?
Because if they'd really wanted a vendor who was accountable to the customer, and who delivered what was paid for, why the fuck'd they choose Verisign in the first place?
Old joke:
Q: How do you know someone in your office is talking to someone at Verisign?
A: You hear someone three cubes away, screaming at the top of their lungs into the telephone "you dumb motherfucker!"
> > You hit "Decline". On the other end, they see:
> > Abort, Retry, Fail? > > Phuleeeze. These are telemarketers. It'll be: > Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?
Puhleeeze. These are TELEMARKETERS. Itll be:
Retry, Retry, Retry, Retry?
> It's BB&N... er, GTEI... er, Genuity that's getting pounded. They provide caching DNS servers to the entire Internet at 4.2.2.1 (.2,...) and because they're so easily memorizable, I've never met a sysadmin who didn't put them in a hosts' configuration in a pinch.
Yeah, but if the spam from verizon-dsl.net luzers (spammers and proxies on DSL) in reclaimed chunks of 4.0.0.0/8 doesn't slow up soon, those pounded DNS servers are gonna be the only bits left of BBN that's not blocked.
Remember when living in 4.0.0.0/8 used to be a badge of honor?
> The only way we are going to get broadband across the board is if the government mandates it, and takes it upon themselves to install and run it.
Absolutely right! The House Subcommittee on Government-Mandated Broadband has finally released its joint report after reaching consensus the Senate Committee on Government-Mandated Broadband!
Yahoo! We're all getting video phones over ISDN! And it's gonna be so much faster than the TTY for the Deaf narrowband solution, man, the future's gonna rock!
> Will [peace] happen by selling Harpoon missiles and anthrax bacteria to Saddam Hussein, like Rumsfeld did when he was Reagan's special envoy to the middle east?
No. But given that it happened, how will refusing correct our mistake bring about this "peace" thing you seem to wish for?
Google for "Osirak". 20 years ago, a group of Israeli F-16s accomplished more for disarmament in 20 minutes than the UN has done for 20 years.
> Unfortunately, due to the Columbia disaster, they will have even more ammunition. Obviously, Columbia and the Pluto-Rocket (Plutocket;-)) wouldn't have the same types of probabilities of hitting a populated area, but that doesn't matter to the general public.
RANT
FUCK Greenpeace.
During the 50s and 60s - the era of atmospheric nuclear testing - we dumped 3300 KILOGRAMS of plutonium.
And didn't just disperse this 3300 kilos of Pu by means of Skylabbing or Columbi-izing a few hundred space probes' worth of nicely-encapsulated RTGs, we dispersed it all by vaporizing it with giant-azz atomic bombs.
If there were any risk to public health posed by the (unlikely) re-entry of a failed space probe and the (even more unlikely) disintegration of a few pounds of Pu in an RTG on re-entry, we'd already be dead, hundreds of times over, because we've already had the worst-case scenario played out, hundreds of times over.
> but that doesn't matter to the general public.
Yeah, you're right, "that doesn't matter to the general public". Scientific illiteracy among the general public is the subject for another rant, another day.
While I think the Shuttle's a waste of time and money, I lament the end of manned space exploration, because when I was growing up in public school, I could at least dream of a day when I could board a rocketship and get away from these morons, forever.
> If NASA could figure out how Pluto could give us a strategic advantage in wartime Congress might add a few zeros to their budget!
Easy! Just say that's where Plutonium comes from!
Given the clue level of the typical Congressdrone on any matter involving science or technology, it'd be almost impossible for this plan not to fail. *G*
Money for science is money taken away from the Shuttle/ISS pork barrel.
NASA does damn good science, but now that the accountants are in charge instead of the engineers, the aforementioned damn good science only gets done when NASA is browbeaten into doing it.
> You don't like her style. PERIOD. A lot of Heavy Metal bands also write simplistic and nonsense (like some lyrics that look like the script for an Anime episode) lyrics and some people think that they are the biggest geniuses of the entire humanity If I listen only to one song I will also think that they are big loosers (nerdy loosers, btw) with no musical abilities at all. Even worse, if the song I heard is on of the nonsense ones, I'll end up thinking that Heavy Metal composers are all lunatics.
WHAT THE HELL IS THIS!?!
That bit about coming in the night... you know, with Trogdor the Burninator? YOu mean to say that wasn't art?
And what about the burninating! Peasants, countryside, thatched-roof... damn, my feet are a-tappin' just thinkin' about it! What about all the BURNINATING? You tryin' to tell us THAT WASN'T GENIUS?!?!?
> I bet everyone is very corteous, civilized and good-manered. Nobody says "fuck you" or tells you you're a "dumbass" while hiding under a table. No asbestos suits are used or otherwise present. They all shake hands in the end and promise to send postcards.
I was all lookin' forward to it until I read your post. Hmph! Fuck that!
> Suppose they remove your US citizenship. How do you get a lawyer to represent you? Can you even
be represented in a US court? Do they purge your social security number/tax ID? If so, what happens to your bank accounts and property?
*blink*
Wow, you mean non-US-citizens in the US can't be represented in US courts of law? That is, US courts have no jurisdiction over them? Non-US-citizens in the US have no SSNs nor tax IDs, and are therefore not subject to US taxation?
Wow, that sounds like more fun than diplomatic immunity! What country treats non-citizens this way, and where can I sign up?:-)
Seriously - take a look at the law before you spout. Noncitizens can be represented in court by lawyers, just as citizens can be. Noncitizens have SSNs and pay taxes, just like citizens do. Noncitizens can open bank accounts and hold property, just like citizens do.
As to how you get citizenship back, well, that would have been up to INS, which has since been reorganized under HomeSec. So no, if you renounce your citizenship (or have it renounced for you), the bad news is that you won't be able to get it back for at least 8-10 years...
...but the good news is that's probably twice as fast as it takes INS to grant citizenship to anyone:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The most important part of that article was the reiteration that we already know how astronauts respond to zero-G environments.
(And they sure ain't eating tomatoes, unless they're bringing seeds with them and growing them in water thawed from beneath the Martian surface. Those tomatoes will be growing in a non-zero-G environment.)
The real point of that article wasn't what the astronauts will eat on Mars, because it's a moot point - it doesn't matter what they'll eat, because as long as we pour money into the Shuttle and ISS, there will be no astronauts going to Mars. EVER.
Aaw, smeg!
Not only was it done with $10 in parts back then... it'll probably cost $100 in DSP prototyping tools to reproduce today. That's inflation for ya.
D'oh! I misread it as intercontinental and went for the (+1, Funny) way too soon.
Come to think of it, the closest I could get to the Cylon Centurion (robot) voice in 1979 was by speaking into a 36" fan, so maybe I wasn't too far off :)
Anyone have a circuit diagram for the vocoder they actually used for that robot voice effect, that most of us kids didn't know how to build back then? Gotta be doable for $10 worth of parts these days.
Dude. MOO3 has only been out for three days. Stop with the spoilers already!!!
Last I heard, the Northern polar ice cap is a bitch of a commute. Doubly so in summer. *g*
Nor do I - the guy at Radio Shack doesn't need my phone number to give me my parts, so long as I have my Federal Reserve Notes. If I use a credit card, I'm automatically giving RatShack my phone number, though. (And I'm also giving him something more useful - my CC number!)
Nor would I permit the cops into my place without a warrant. I wouldn't resist, but I'd continually repeat that they were unwelcome here, and I'd continually ask them to leave, and I'd sue 'em into the Stone Age after they left.
At an airport, however, I've consented to a search of myself and my belongings - by virtue of all the large friendly signs saying, in a vaguely EULA-like way, that by Crossing This Line, I consent to such a search. If I don't want to be searched at the airport, the sign reminds me that I have a right to leave the airport.
> Giving up something so personal as my banking records is so entirely contrary to my way of life that I can find no conceivable grounds that your statement should apply.
Then I presume you've never filed for income tax, nor had the IRS come looking for you? Dude! You da man! How do you pull that off? Inquiring minds wanna evade!
Free clue: The drone at the airport sees "Green", "Yellow", or "Red". Maybe he sees your name and your flight itinerary. He sees none of the information that goes into the "green", "yellow", or "red", because he has no need to know.
Better clue: The alternative is to rely on the personal judgement of the drone. After eight hours of repeating "go ahead" at 10-second intervals, punctuated only by "hunh, that wun looks like an ay-rab, search him" and "ohfug, done to many ay-rabz, gunna get in trubl, better feel up that guy's grandma", the drone at the ticket counter or checkpoint would be highly unlikely to recognize Osama bin Ladin himself. The job is that mind-numbing.
So you start by building a system that does as much of the recognizing as practical for your drone. Even after eight hours of staring at a screen of "green" blocks, and even considering the drone is a government employee, there should be enough neurons still functioning at the end of the day to recognize that "yellow" (maybe one in a thousand) is not "green", and that "red" (probably one in a million) is also not "green".
You don't do that for privacy - you do it so that the system of "OK", "suspicious", and "terminate" works. (And so that it takes no more than a few seconds for most passengers, because it has to work for millions of people per day.)
But boiling down everything about someone into a block of green, yellow, or red pixels also protects your privacy pretty well.
The only other way I've seen of passenger profiling - the "El Al" method of a 5-minute heart-to-heart between a security guard (who has no sense of humor, as well he shouldn't) and every passenger. That method won't work here - because the air traffic volume in the US is vastly higher than that of Israel. But again, a happy side effect of automation of the profiling process is that your privacy is actually more protected than with a manual system.
There's a fundamental flaw in this part of your argument - that "how hard you work" should determine one's standard of living.
10 subsistence farmers in a third-world nation, working 16 hours a day digging in a dusty 10-acre plots, carrying water back and forth in big jugs filled from a nearby stream, are barely able to keep their families fed. Every few months, they might have enough surplus food to go to market and come back with a couple of dollars that they can use in replacing/repairing their tools (hand tools, jugs for water) as they break.
A farmer, a manager, a maintenance guy, and seven plow drivers in America, who sit on their asses (be it in a chair in a farm vehicle, or be it in front of a desk that tells him how well his robotically-controlled irrigation system is doing) for 8 hours a day, are able not only to feed themselves, but tens of thousands of other people as the application of technology has enabled them to farm 1000 acres, as well as to get several times as much crop output per acre. Every day, hundreds of pounds of produce make it to market, and the money that flows back is enough to buy a better tractor, a better plow, or genetically-enhanced seeds that require less pesticides next year.
How hard you work has nothing to do with how productive you are.
And in the case of drugs, 14 years really isn't that long.
Think about it. Spend a billion dollars and develop a cure for AIDS - the government says you can charge as high a price as you want for the next 14 years, but after your 14 years are up, you're assumed to have made all the money you can reasonably be expected to out of it, and afterwards, anyone can copy your drug and sell it for cheap.
But draw a fucking cartoon mouse. Hey, man, 75 years plus lifetime of creator, and it should be longer! We gotta protect the rights of people who produce the important things, y'know.
Great. Now everyone's local Bolivarian Circle will be by tonight with baseball bats, clubs, and columbian neckties to beat the hell out of, and then incinerate, their capitalist running-dog timepieces. Oh well, that means more jobs (namely beating on clocks) for the poor! Viva la Revolucion!
>[...]
> As a funny note (if this can be funny at all), the disorganization is so large, that there are employees that have been fired twice in the same week as well as government designated employees who has been fired by the same government.
Sad but true.
I remember when I thought Atlas Shrugged was fiction.
Because if they'd really wanted a vendor who was accountable to the customer, and who delivered what was paid for, why the fuck'd they choose Verisign in the first place?
Old joke:
Q: How do you know someone in your office is talking to someone at Verisign?
A: You hear someone three cubes away, screaming at the top of their lungs into the telephone "you dumb motherfucker!"
> > Abort, Retry, Fail?
>
> Phuleeeze. These are telemarketers. It'll be:
> Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?
Puhleeeze. These are TELEMARKETERS. Itll be:
Retry, Retry, Retry, Retry?
Yeah, but if the spam from verizon-dsl.net luzers (spammers and proxies on DSL) in reclaimed chunks of 4.0.0.0/8 doesn't slow up soon, those pounded DNS servers are gonna be the only bits left of BBN that's not blocked.
Remember when living in 4.0.0.0/8 used to be a badge of honor?
Absolutely right! The House Subcommittee on Government-Mandated Broadband has finally released its joint report after reaching consensus the Senate Committee on Government-Mandated Broadband!
Yahoo! We're all getting video phones over ISDN! And it's gonna be so much faster than the TTY for the Deaf narrowband solution, man, the future's gonna rock!
No. But given that it happened, how will refusing correct our mistake bring about this "peace" thing you seem to wish for?
Google for "Osirak". 20 years ago, a group of Israeli F-16s accomplished more for disarmament in 20 minutes than the UN has done for 20 years.
> They'll crash the probe into the planet before getting pictures.
Naw, no pork in that. (12 years of sitting around waiting for it to pancake doesn't qualify for a budget allocation.)
Instead, I'll bet they'll pull some strings so that it can only be launched on the Shuttle, and so that the probe fails a day or two after launch.
The "solution" will be another $300M to build a new probe - and another $500M for another Shuttle flight to launch it.
Stop thinking like an engineer and start thinking like an accountant :-/
RANT
FUCK Greenpeace.
During the 50s and 60s - the era of atmospheric nuclear testing - we dumped 3300 KILOGRAMS of plutonium.
And didn't just disperse this 3300 kilos of Pu by means of Skylabbing or Columbi-izing a few hundred space probes' worth of nicely-encapsulated RTGs, we dispersed it all by vaporizing it with giant-azz atomic bombs.
If there were any risk to public health posed by the (unlikely) re-entry of a failed space probe and the (even more unlikely) disintegration of a few pounds of Pu in an RTG on re-entry, we'd already be dead, hundreds of times over, because we've already had the worst-case scenario played out, hundreds of times over.
> but that doesn't matter to the general public.
Yeah, you're right, "that doesn't matter to the general public". Scientific illiteracy among the general public is the subject for another rant, another day.
While I think the Shuttle's a waste of time and money, I lament the end of manned space exploration, because when I was growing up in public school, I could at least dream of a day when I could board a rocketship and get away from these morons, forever.
End rant.
Easy! Just say that's where Plutonium comes from!
Given the clue level of the typical Congressdrone on any matter involving science or technology, it'd be almost impossible for this plan not to fail. *G*
Money for science is money taken away from the Shuttle/ISS pork barrel.
NASA does damn good science, but now that the accountants are in charge instead of the engineers, the aforementioned damn good science only gets done when NASA is browbeaten into doing it.
WHAT THE HELL IS THIS!?!
That bit about coming in the night... you know, with Trogdor the Burninator? YOu mean to say that wasn't art?
And what about the burninating! Peasants, countryside, thatched-roof... damn, my feet are a-tappin' just thinkin' about it! What about all the BURNINATING? You tryin' to tell us THAT WASN'T GENIUS?!?!?
Naw, that's the Department of Great Justice. You know, the guys who don't just redirect web sites. They redirect ZIG!
ACLU opposes DSEA. .50cal handgun.
Peacenik opposes Bush policy.
NRA opposes move to ban new
Jew opposes Palestinian state.
Palestinian opposes Jewish state.
EFF opposes enhancements to DMCA.
RIAA and MPAA oppose Berman fair-use rights bill.
Slashdotter opposes Microsoft.
Pud opposes Salon.com.
I was all lookin' forward to it until I read your post. Hmph! Fuck that!
*blink*
Wow, you mean non-US-citizens in the US can't be represented in US courts of law? That is, US courts have no jurisdiction over them? Non-US-citizens in the US have no SSNs nor tax IDs, and are therefore not subject to US taxation?
Wow, that sounds like more fun than diplomatic immunity! What country treats non-citizens this way, and where can I sign up? :-)
Seriously - take a look at the law before you spout. Noncitizens can be represented in court by lawyers, just as citizens can be. Noncitizens have SSNs and pay taxes, just like citizens do. Noncitizens can open bank accounts and hold property, just like citizens do.
As to how you get citizenship back, well, that would have been up to INS, which has since been reorganized under HomeSec. So no, if you renounce your citizenship (or have it renounced for you), the bad news is that you won't be able to get it back for at least 8-10 years...