> [Columbus went around the world 'cuz he thought he could get rich by finding a way to China, not because he wanted to explore for the hell of it]. > > Something tells me that there's no immediate profit in some random rich guy blowing money for thrills.
Depends on how rich and what the thrill is.
If I had the wealth of Bill Gates, I'd fund a Zubrinesque Mars Direct mission leading to a semi-permanent manned Martian outpost, with the condition that I be on the first flight. Out of technical necessity, I'd have to start that project by funding the development of a cheap heavy-lift vehicle.
And if I had Bill's wealth, and I started today, I might even live long enough to set foot on Mars.
No profit for me at all (beyond one very expensive "cheap thrill") in doing that. But there'd probably be one hell of a long-term benefit for in technological progress for the rest of the species.
I wouldn't be doing it for the good of the species. I just wanna go to Mars. The benefit to the rest of the species is just a lucky accident.
> I'm so rich that I think I'm going to blow my money on breaking records for my personal glory rather than trying to help people in need or advancing technology to help everyone.
"I'm a greedy l33ch! I'm so greedy that I'm not only content to spend my money on inner-city literacy and AIDS research and other things I think are important, I want to spend Steve's money too!"
> I can't help but think that Mister Fosset could get significantly more head-rush for his
money by doing something like sky-diving than building vast, record-breaking projects that have
very little effect on advancing technology. Imagine for a second that, rather than attempting to circle the globe in a baloon eight or nine times, he had held back a few years, used the money to improve his balloon technology, and tried again with better technology than the same technology over and over again. [... ] if he
had spent *half* the funds from his balloon venture on something like inner-city literacy campaigns or AIDS research, I can't help but feel like the world would be a better place
If Steve could get "more headrush for his money" by indulging in the inexpensive sport of sky-diving, building a cheaper balloon, and funding your pet social causes with the balance of his funds, I suspect he would do so.
Which leaves me curious - how is it that you know Steve so well that you know (even better than he knows!) how he can get more bang for his hard-earned head-rush budget?
Are you, like, his psychiatrist or something? Can you get me his autograph?
> Besides, dude, what the hell are you thinking trying to watch NTSC on a 40" TV?? The human eye can resolve about a point about six arc-seconds across. Given that NTSC only broadcasts 480 visible lines, you'd have to be, like, fifteen or twenty feet away from your 40" TV before you started seeing a decent picture. Any closer, and you're just looking at pixels.
What you said.
For NTSC, a comfy chair, a computer, and a 21" monitor at 2-3 feet from the screen, plus a pair of headphones is fine. Best of all, you can minimize the window and read Slashdot during the commercials.
> What, an image of your install CD isn't good enough for you?
Actually, on a 'doze box, at least for me, it ain't.
1) Win9x install CD != any way to FDISK or third-party-partitioning-utility a brand-new drive safely. (Granted, not something you do everyday, but something you probably do want to do if you're using it as an emergency boot disk. Maybe you just had an emergency:-)
2) Win9x install CD == over-1h install time for a "virgin" install". Nuff said.
3) WinAnything install CD == another 20-60 minutes going through the checklist to un-dumb-down the "virgin" install ("HELL YES, I want to see file extensions and full path names, you w33nb@gz!"), regedits to disable dumb things like warning me that I'm "low" on disk space with 100M left on a 1G boot/OS partition, setting X-Follows-Mouse activation, etc.
4) Win9x install CD != third-party video/audio/other-hardware drivers. (Granted, once you do this, you need one disk image per box)
5) WinAnything install CD != basic set of appz - Nutscrape/Mozilla, M$Orifice, MP3/DiVX players of choice, SysInternals utilities, M$ PowerTools, etc.
6) WinAnything install CD != however many twisty mazes of service packs you want installed, and in the correct order.
7) AnyOtherOperatingSystem: "dd" is a heck of a lot easier to use anyways:)
Disk images rule. Install disks drool:)
I'll grant that everything depends on the quality of the disk image -- doing it yourself gives you a recovery to a known cruft-free point on your boot (or windoze) partition without disturbing the data (or other OSses) sitting on other partitions.
Using a vendor-supplied "recovery CD" as a disk image, of course, is a whole different story, and sucks supermassive black holes through buckytubes. Then again, I don't buy from brand-name vendors for precisely that reason.
> No, I'm with you, brother. I could see replacing the humble 1.4M floppy with a beefier 100M (or 200M, or whatever) ZIP drive (or whatever), but DO NOT take away my ability to alternate boot the machine! Boot from CD is not a "nice" option for me:(
Better yet, why not CompactFlash?
8M CF cards are cheap, and would make great boot disks with more than enough room for a good set of utilities.
256M CF cards aren't as cheap, but you can fit a pretty decent OS on one, or most of a compressed boot partition.
(FWIW, yeah, I still have my 1.44M floppy. Haven't used it in ages, but it's nice to know it's there Just In Case. I can't be bothered with a bootable CD-ROM on a 'doze box, but I've got floppies with real-mode DOS drivers that'll let me load what I need from any CD-ROM, bootable or not.)
> Reference please? Everything I have read in the last 30 years indicates that NORAD does not have the capability to detect asteroids. A high-angle asteroid strike from over the Atlantic would look very much like a FOBS shot from a ship or submarine.
I don't have any "information" (anyone who does had damn well better not be posting to Slashdot!:), I just like playing armchair general - all the speculative fun stuff, with none of the risk, of the real job. So, to clarify:
Yeah, I assumed that we have enough satellite coverage of the ground to detect a launch from anywhere. I could be wrong, but I doubt it. (Rationale: Both sides in the Cold War knew where the other side's satellites flew. If our side had left a big gap in its coverage, their side have sailed their subs there, prompting us to ask "What are all their subs doing off the shore of Antarctica? Oh, right, the same thing ours are! Hiding where nobody can see the launch!":-)
I'd forgotten about sub-launched FOBS (thanks for the reminder), but will add that my statement was predicated on the assumption that everyone abandoned the idea in the 60s/70s. (And I think that today, any nation capable of building such a sub would rather build a sub full of SLCMs for the arsenal instead. Much less destabilizing, still a good deterrent, and doubles as a great conventional weapon the rest of the time. Win-win-win.)
As for ground-launched FOBS hanging around up there, I've assumed they were a non-starter on all sides, for treaty reasons, budget reasons, and finally, because I don't think anyone's been spending much money on ASAT work lately. I've therefore assumed that no such system was ever deployed by either side.
All that said - had such a rock hit in the middle of the Cold War, when about half the land mass of the planet was a target in one way or the other, and we didn't have launch detection, and we didn't have any idea whether either side had orbital bombardment tech - it could have sucked mightily.
The one good thing about the limited/regional conflicts we're faced with today is that we can afford to wait a few hours for the fallout data to come in before deciding if it was a rock or a nuke. With "Use 'em or lose 'em" out of the equation, we have the time to think before we act.
> It would be a real shame if, for lack of public intrest, we were unprepaired for a planatary September 11th.
HIGHLY-PROPAGABLE MEME ALERT
"Planetary September 11th" - an unanticipated asteroid collision resulting in local or regional devastation. You wake up in the morning, turn on the TV, and read that $CITY is a smoking ruin, or that there's a 30 mile hole in the Australian outback, or that 500 miles of coastland have been swamped. And you see footage of the resulting devastation for days on end.
I like this meme. I like it a lot.
Up until now, we've been talking about "impact scenarios", and "probability of impact", and other scientific-sounding stuff that means nothing to Joe Sixpack other than "Huh? Big rock. Guys in white coats. Whutever."
Unlike current literature on asteroid impact risks, the meme "Planetary September 11th" works - it sticks in the head not just for the image of being caught unawares, but because our response would be just like our repsonse to 9/11 - lots of fingerpointing from politications about how NASA, ESA, NEO should have seen it coming, lots of requests for more funding, lots of bureaucratic crap - all of which happens after the rock's hit us and tens of thousands are dead.
Anyone in a PR/news position who wants to support visibility for NEO searches - try passing the phrase "planetary September 11th" in front of a few focus groups and see if they "get it" any faster.
Re:Believe it or not, we ARE killing the Earth !
on
What, Me Worry?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
> Silly question, but what the hell is the Earth's atmosphere dragging on, apart from satellites and the odd passing rock?
"Ether, man! Invisible ether! Or maybe Phlogiston! Where the hell do you think homeopathic medicines come from? We have to stop polluting the ether of space with our evil nookyular space probes or Gaia will be consumed by the Great Sun God!"
(The sad thing is, despite the fact that the original author was just trolling, I'm sure there's some envirol00n group out there that believes something like this.)
> Dude, the idea of a big asteroid hitting us is scary enough, you don't need to make stuff up. I'm pretty sure that NORAD can tell the difference between an asteroid and a missle. Not to mention people on the ground, who would presumably see a big fireball streaking toward the impact site, which a missle wouldn't have.
Absolutely correct.
Unfortunately, given that an asteroid's gonna hit, there's a small - but certainly real - probability that the rock's gonna land in the Middle East, a land whose governments don't have distant early warning systems, nor satellites to detect missile launches.
You try convincing a billion illiterate peasants that the rock that landed in the middle of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, or Iran wasn't a nuke. (The absence of fallout would be obvious - but it's not like every desert nomad's packin' a Geiger counter.)
Hell, given our recent flip-flopping of policy on appeasement for the Palestinians, I think we'd be hard pressed to convince Israel we weren't bullshitting 'em if said rock landed in the Mediterranean and swamped the country. (Although at least the Israelis would check for fallout before deciding whether or not to launch the retaliatory strike.)
(Evil Genius Idea - suppose we stick an ion engine onto a smallish 1-2t rock and smack it straight into Mecca - ya think we could spin-doctor it into saying "Dudes, it's just God giving you another Kabaa stone to go with your first one! He wants you to ditch the terrorism now or you'll collect the whole set!":-)
> Perhaps because the Hop-on phone just recieved FCC approval [fcc.gov] and therefore must now exist as a working product?
Interesting.
If you go to the FCC's approval record, you can get internal photos of the device.
Can anyone with a Nokia 8260 pop it open to see if it's the came circuit board of an 8260 or other commonly-available cellphone?
Does anyone know if the circuit board pictured can be fabbed for $30 a pop? (Then again, without an LCD display, maybe it can be made cheaper than a Nokia 8260. Come to think of it, I don't see anything on the circuit board that looks like it was designed to hook into an LCD, so maybe they really do have their own design this time.)
Can anyone in the know on cellfone design give a yea or nay on whether the FCC filing looks legit?
> It's people who think that, just because they are buying Pampers and falafel, that they don't need to worry about government search/seizure issues.
And that's the worst part.
I've got nothing against the proper use of profiling and data mining to hunt down the enemies in our midst - but what's proposed is too-easily defeated. It smells like a scam to bring in consulting bucks, and offers no real security.
Suppose we tune our food-purchasing-database scanners to look for of Arab males under 30 who happen to live, work, and travel together. (Snide remark:...because we know goddamn well the fucktwaddles at the airport won't catch them, as said fucktwaddles are too busy patting down your mother and feeling up your daughter to watch for groups of Arab males under 30 travelling together.)
But because Joe Camel knows we're looking for single Arab males under 30 who claim to live alone, yet still buy enough falafel for five people, he'll adjust his purchases to match, perhaps by buying a box of Pampers when he buys falafel for the gang. (If he's smart, he'll upgrade the size of the Pampers every few months, then start buying baby clothes.) The databases will conclude that Joe Camel has a wife and brand-new kid, which doesn't fit the profile of "terrorist", and he'll slip through the cracks.
Meanwhile, Joe Slashdotter, who hosts the dorm LAN party every week where he swaps grocery cards with his friends, gets h0z3d at 3am by the f3i, because two of his friends were vegetarian, and the food-tracking software rang the alarm because his purchase records didn't make any sense. (He bought nothing for a week, then ten pounds of falafel, then nothing for another week! WTF? Call the cops!)
Food profiling is a lousy idea because it's too easily-defeated by knowledgeable adversaries, and results in too many false positives even when not under attack by adversaries.
> Perhaps if: >
> People did what they knew was "right"
"Quaker Oats. It's the right thing to do."
> Companies didn't take advantage of their own power
That commercial where the lovely guys at Philip Morris send a truckload of Kraft Dinner to some flood-ruined podunk town. Gee, what a nice happy ccompany! Or all the Exxon "Who cares about the environment? People do." ads after the Valdez spill? Wow, Exxon cares more about cute birds than anyone!
> Litigation wasn't a career path, but a means to correct problems
That luser in the $10 suit saying he's the "people's lawyer", and he'll "work for you against the big bad insurance companies that want to deny you your accident coverage".
> We had more faith in our government
Any public service ad, with double points for linking the War on Terror to [continued funding for] the War on Drugs.
> We used our influence as the populace in goverment
Any "Proposition" or "voter initiative" ad, whether it be for the left (usually environment) or right (usually insurance industry), fits this bill. It's never about the industry/lobby group sponsoring/opposing the initative, it's always about people needing to voice their concerns.
> We cared about other people
Any other PSA, or the infomercials to raise gazillions for "charities" that spend 5% of the money raised to the starving chiiildrun in $THIRD_WORLD_SHITHOLE and 95% in administrative expenses.
> . we might live in a better place and all be happier. > > But to do that, we'd have to stop living the way the commercials tell us to.
Au contraire -- Your utopia exists only in the commercials.
> About the time that started programming I picked up the first 2 years of Byte at a library sale for $10. No investment I've made since has taught me as much about computers.
What you said. I started programming by typing in listings from BYTE.
The nicest part was that unlike the other magazines I read, there weren't many program listings - BYTE was really about new tech, or about new ways to solve problems (whether in software or in build-it-yourself hardware). And the listings that did show up weren't necessarily for my platform, so I had to think about whether or not it could be ported/implemented on my hardware, rather than just jump in and blindly start typing.
For most of the 10+ years I was a subscriber, BYTE rocked. It was a sad day whan I realized I wasn't gonna renew.
> 2) the effects of the weapon last for decades. If you blind 10,000 enemy troops, they will then be an economic burden on their country for the rest of their lives.
And that is precisely why no General will ever use such a weapon to cause mass blindness.
1942: Germany, Japan: Evil bastard countries we were blowin' up.
1972: Germany, Japan: Half of Germany was an important military ally, and Japan was teaching us how to build cars that didn't suck.
2002: Germany, Japan: The rest of Germany is now also a great trading partner, and the Japanese sell us Vaios and Aibos.
A good General thinks of the long term, even if the war is for a short-term objective.
> > blinding people violates geneva convention Only if that was the intended effect of the weapon. If it's a laser weapon that is designed for use against planes, anti-aircraft installations, and ground vehicles that could accidentally blind someone standing nearby, it's considered legit" > >
So, what if you're trying to burn off their eyebrows?
Certain types of.50 caliber weapons are also against the Geneva Convention when targeted at personnel, but OK when used against materiel.
Thus, "Officer, during the firefight, I was shooting at that backpack radio that guy's carrying! Danged.50cal round went clean through the radio and out his chest, and through the three guys standing behind him!" (Good shooting! Carry on, Corporal!:-)
More seriously -- the 100kW laser would make a pretty lousy battlefield weapon for ground troops. If someone's pointing a 100kW laser at the barrels you're hiding behind, you've got more to worry about than blindness.
Finally, and most importantly -- this weapon still reduces casualties. Suppose you're targeting a 5-ton truck with a squad of troops in the back. You can do it the laser way - burn through the tires or engine compartment, and risk blinding the driver, or you can do it the old-fashioned way - lob a 500lb bomb at the truck and blow everyone to hell.
If the truck's carrying reinforcements and is half a mile from an ongoing firefight, the 10 soldiers in the back are still a danger to your troops on the ground, and the 500lb bomb may be the right weapon to use.
But if the truck is 20 miles away from the front, the laser might be the better weapon to use - immobilize the truck, neutralizing 10 enemy troops without killing anyone. (And you can fire the laser as many times as you like - no need to turn around and load up with more bombs for your next sortie!)
The ACLU has a a long
track record of defending spam as somehow Frea Speach that's worthy of First Amendment protection.
1997: "commercial speech restrictions on telemarketing
calls and unsolicited fax advertisements have passed First
Amendment challenges but direct mail and door-to-door
solicitations enjoy much greater protection. Given the Supreme
Court decision in ACLU v. Reno, on-line messages should receive
the same First Amendment protection given traditional print media,
which includes commercial mailings."
2000: "...and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union that oppose any restrictions on commercial e-mail"
2001:The argument raised by the ACLU and other memters of the First Amendment lobby is that spam, like junk mail in our offline mailboxes, is a nuisance that still must be protected."
In fact, ACLU has always supported spammers, going back to 1995.
This issue of CuD quotes from Canter and Siegel's (the original "Green Card Lawyers" spammers) as follows:
"In May of 1994, believing that the EFF really did support freedom of speech in the same broad and democratic manner as did the
ACLU, we initiated a discussion with Mike Godwin, an EFF lawyer.
We wanted his views on the censorship issues raised by the
behavior of electronic vandals and access providers who had pulled our account for performing the perfectly legal act of Internet advertising. We were amazed when Godwin stated to us that he was so busy sympathizing with those who opposed us, that he had no sympathy left for the other side. So much for freedom of speech (p. 194)."
-- Canter and Siegel, "How to make a FORTUNE on the Information Superhighway: Everyone's Guerilla Guide to Marketing on the Internet and other On-line Services", 1995
To which I can only add:
"Fuck the ACLU and the pigload of potted meat product it rode in under."
> Thank god I wasn't driving the other direction on that "country road" when you were learning. geezus.
Given that I don't think I exceeded the posted 25mph at any point on the road (never mind the posted 30, albeit with warning-10 and warning-15s on every corner, you just couldn't get past 25, even if you were trying), I'd think you were pretty safe - at least, as safe as you would have been driving down that road even facing an experienced driver.
The point of having an adult in the vehicle was essentially to have a voice saying "OK, blind corner up ahead. Take it slow and tight. Someone coming the other way can't see you 'cuz of the tree they had to dig around to make the road. Watch out for the bumpy roots, they can throw you into the other lane if you hit 'em hard. Now, see how you can see around that next corner from all the way back here? You can make that turn a bit wider to avoid the muddy ruts on this side of the road."
An experienced driver has that voice in his head - always looking ahead for trouble, always looking for blind spots, always looking for poor road conditions. An inexperienced driver doesn't. The only way to develop that voice is through experience. The best way to develop that experience is under controlled conditions. Better to learn how mud-slippery bumps affect steering on an empty road in broad daylight than on packed ice on the highway off-ramp.
As for oncoming traffic, I don't think we saw another car during any of our excursions down the road. Anyone actually going from A to B would have used the almost-as-windy, but 2-lane-blacktop paved road nearby, that covered the same route. (Thinking it over, maybe "my" road was a special case - I think the only reason it road still existed was because the town couldn't be bothered with the paperwork to track down the descendants of whoever owned the abandoned farm that constituted the only property with frontage on said road. Small towns are weird like that. Either that, or my Dad was way smarter than he was letting on in his choice of roads:-)
Finally, my original point wasn't so much to encourage such experimentation as merely to recognize that it happens, and given that it happens, it's better that it happen under adult or professional supervision. (Note also that my Dad knew and recognized his limitations - leaving the emergency-manoeuvers stuff to the professionals.)
Put another way, would you have preferred to be driving the other direction against an alternate-universe version of me who found out about the same road with a "Hey, man, we're goin' to the pizza place in the next town, gonna try this new scenic route we heard about. Bet you can't keep up with us, Tack!"
> Besides, nothing like this will ever stop the experimentation kids do in cars. In my younger days, I did donuts in the empty church parking lot, caught air on the Spooner St. bridge, drove my car over a lawn or two, etc. No excessive speed involved (you'd jump Spooner doing 35).
Similar stories here. I learned a lot about skid recovery while messing around at 10-20mph in empty parking lots after snowfalls. It's even saved my ass a few times in real life.
> IMO, your best bet is to buy your kid a fairly modern, safe car without too much extra juice (try a Toyota with side-curtain airbags with traction control and ABS, or a Volvo if it's in your means) -- buying kids old cars is actually
more dangerous due to the lack of modern safety gear. Those parents buying their kids Z3's... well, that's just natural selection at work.
Good ideas all-round. I'd add one more, though.
If you have kids, drive with them. (And then send 'em to a good driving school anyways.)
After my first week or so of informal lessons from Dad, he told me to "turn down that road, yeah, that one over there."
It was an old dirt road, 2 lanes wide, with narrow spots down to one lane, and went up and down steep grades. And it had rained less than a day before. In short, driving hell.
First hill: "Uh, Dad, where's the road? I can't see the road from the dropoff."
Hairpin at the bottom of first hill: "Shit! *crawls around corner*"
Hairpin at the bottom of the tenth hill: "Hey, this is pretty fun, whups, almost lost it there, now I'm back, OK, gettin' the hang of it..."
That ride - and others like it - did two things:
1) Gave me a life-long appreciation for driving, 2) Taught me to respect the car and the road, 3)...but that when given such respect, I could make the car go where I wanted to, even in poor conditions.
Was Dad nuts? No - he left the real emergency manoeuvers (brake-and-avoid, higher-speed skid prevention/recovery) course for the driving school.
But by having the confidence in me to take me down that crazy winding road, he built my confidence, not so much in my own driving skills (which after all, were nonexistent at the time), but in my ability to develop those skills over time.
So yeah - doughnuts, country roads, all that experimentation - are a good thing. And if you've got kids, you might even enjoy sharing it with 'em. (I have a hunch my Dad did. He probably hadn't driven that road in 20 years until I drove by it:)
> >> 60 feet long is enough for a lot of calimari. >> > > Yes, and studying too little in English class is not enough for a lot of studying. > > Yes, and studying too little in English class is not enough for a lot of studing.
Fair enough, but how's studying in English class gonna help the guy improve his Itilian, which is the real problem here.
> The rule these guys have to learn is that Copy Protection Does Not Work. And the snottier and more abusive they are about pushing it down the public's throat, the more 16 year old kids are going to enjoy thumbing their nose at them by breaking the next "unbreakable" scheme. It'll happen - you watch. That sound you hear in the distance is Jack Valenti tearing out his hairplugs.
And that other sound you hear is your own hard drive, furiously writing a (non-copy-crippled) MPEG of it:-)
> Same situation, but in an airport. Can a federal employee search you, without cause, without suspicion, just because you happen to be there?
No, not just because you happen to be there, but because you've agreed - by being in certain "theres" - to let them.
Even before-9/11, whenever I visited any airport, there were nice friendly signs all over the place that said that by crossing this line, I consented to a search of my persons and belongings.
The signs were even nice enough to tell me that if I didn't consent to such a search, I could freely turn around and walk away from said line.
It's like a software EULA - you wanna use the warez, you play by the rulez of the d00dz that wrote the warez. You don't like the EULA, you're free to rm -rf the software and go on as before.
Likewise - if you wanna fly on a someone else's privately-owned airplane, (or even fly your own plane from somebody else's airport), you can only do so by the rules of those who own the airplane and/or the airport.
Slashdot Mirror
>
> Something tells me that there's no immediate profit in some random rich guy blowing money for thrills.
Depends on how rich and what the thrill is.
If I had the wealth of Bill Gates, I'd fund a Zubrinesque Mars Direct mission leading to a semi-permanent manned Martian outpost, with the condition that I be on the first flight. Out of technical necessity, I'd have to start that project by funding the development of a cheap heavy-lift vehicle.
And if I had Bill's wealth, and I started today, I might even live long enough to set foot on Mars.
No profit for me at all (beyond one very expensive "cheap thrill") in doing that. But there'd probably be one hell of a long-term benefit for in technological progress for the rest of the species.
I wouldn't be doing it for the good of the species. I just wanna go to Mars. The benefit to the rest of the species is just a lucky accident.
"I'm a greedy l33ch! I'm so greedy that I'm not only content to spend my money on inner-city literacy and AIDS research and other things I think are important, I want to spend Steve's money too!"
> I can't help but think that Mister Fosset could get significantly more head-rush for his money by doing something like sky-diving than building vast, record-breaking projects that have very little effect on advancing technology. Imagine for a second that, rather than attempting to circle the globe in a baloon eight or nine times, he had held back a few years, used the money to improve his balloon technology, and tried again with better technology than the same technology over and over again. [ ... ] if he
had spent *half* the funds from his balloon venture on something like inner-city literacy campaigns or AIDS research, I can't help but feel like the world would be a better place
If Steve could get "more headrush for his money" by indulging in the inexpensive sport of sky-diving, building a cheaper balloon, and funding your pet social causes with the balance of his funds, I suspect he would do so.
Which leaves me curious - how is it that you know Steve so well that you know (even better than he knows!) how he can get more bang for his hard-earned head-rush budget? Are you, like, his psychiatrist or something? Can you get me his autograph?
What you said.
For NTSC, a comfy chair, a computer, and a 21" monitor at 2-3 feet from the screen, plus a pair of headphones is fine. Best of all, you can minimize the window and read Slashdot during the commercials.
Fsck overcompressed "digital" TV.
How 'bout "d". Yeah. Bread.
We consumers know what we knead.
Actually, on a 'doze box, at least for me, it ain't.
1) Win9x install CD != any way to FDISK or third-party-partitioning-utility a brand-new drive safely. (Granted, not something you do everyday, but something you probably do want to do if you're using it as an emergency boot disk. Maybe you just had an emergency :-)
2) Win9x install CD == over-1h install time for a "virgin" install". Nuff said.
3) WinAnything install CD == another 20-60 minutes going through the checklist to un-dumb-down the "virgin" install ("HELL YES, I want to see file extensions and full path names, you w33nb@gz!"), regedits to disable dumb things like warning me that I'm "low" on disk space with 100M left on a 1G boot/OS partition, setting X-Follows-Mouse activation, etc.
4) Win9x install CD != third-party video/audio/other-hardware drivers. (Granted, once you do this, you need one disk image per box)
5) WinAnything install CD != basic set of appz - Nutscrape/Mozilla, M$Orifice, MP3/DiVX players of choice, SysInternals utilities, M$ PowerTools, etc.
6) WinAnything install CD != however many twisty mazes of service packs you want installed, and in the correct order.
7) AnyOtherOperatingSystem: "dd" is a heck of a lot easier to use anyways :)
Disk images rule. Install disks drool :)
I'll grant that everything depends on the quality of the disk image -- doing it yourself gives you a recovery to a known cruft-free point on your boot (or windoze) partition without disturbing the data (or other OSses) sitting on other partitions.
Using a vendor-supplied "recovery CD" as a disk image, of course, is a whole different story, and sucks supermassive black holes through buckytubes. Then again, I don't buy from brand-name vendors for precisely that reason.
Better yet, why not CompactFlash?
8M CF cards are cheap, and would make great boot disks with more than enough room for a good set of utilities.
256M CF cards aren't as cheap, but you can fit a pretty decent OS on one, or most of a compressed boot partition.
(FWIW, yeah, I still have my 1.44M floppy. Haven't used it in ages, but it's nice to know it's there Just In Case. I can't be bothered with a bootable CD-ROM on a 'doze box, but I've got floppies with real-mode DOS drivers that'll let me load what I need from any CD-ROM, bootable or not.)
I don't have any "information" (anyone who does had damn well better not be posting to Slashdot! :), I just like playing armchair general - all the speculative fun stuff, with none of the risk, of the real job. So, to clarify:
Yeah, I assumed that we have enough satellite coverage of the ground to detect a launch from anywhere. I could be wrong, but I doubt it. (Rationale: Both sides in the Cold War knew where the other side's satellites flew. If our side had left a big gap in its coverage, their side have sailed their subs there, prompting us to ask "What are all their subs doing off the shore of Antarctica? Oh, right, the same thing ours are! Hiding where nobody can see the launch!" :-)
I'd forgotten about sub-launched FOBS (thanks for the reminder), but will add that my statement was predicated on the assumption that everyone abandoned the idea in the 60s/70s. (And I think that today, any nation capable of building such a sub would rather build a sub full of SLCMs for the arsenal instead. Much less destabilizing, still a good deterrent, and doubles as a great conventional weapon the rest of the time. Win-win-win.)
As for ground-launched FOBS hanging around up there, I've assumed they were a non-starter on all sides, for treaty reasons, budget reasons, and finally, because I don't think anyone's been spending much money on ASAT work lately. I've therefore assumed that no such system was ever deployed by either side.
All that said - had such a rock hit in the middle of the Cold War, when about half the land mass of the planet was a target in one way or the other, and we didn't have launch detection, and we didn't have any idea whether either side had orbital bombardment tech - it could have sucked mightily.
The one good thing about the limited/regional conflicts we're faced with today is that we can afford to wait a few hours for the fallout data to come in before deciding if it was a rock or a nuke. With "Use 'em or lose 'em" out of the equation, we have the time to think before we act.
HIGHLY-PROPAGABLE MEME ALERT
"Planetary September 11th" - an unanticipated asteroid collision resulting in local or regional devastation. You wake up in the morning, turn on the TV, and read that $CITY is a smoking ruin, or that there's a 30 mile hole in the Australian outback, or that 500 miles of coastland have been swamped. And you see footage of the resulting devastation for days on end.
I like this meme. I like it a lot.
Up until now, we've been talking about "impact scenarios", and "probability of impact", and other scientific-sounding stuff that means nothing to Joe Sixpack other than "Huh? Big rock. Guys in white coats. Whutever."
Unlike current literature on asteroid impact risks, the meme "Planetary September 11th" works - it sticks in the head not just for the image of being caught unawares, but because our response would be just like our repsonse to 9/11 - lots of fingerpointing from politications about how NASA, ESA, NEO should have seen it coming, lots of requests for more funding, lots of bureaucratic crap - all of which happens after the rock's hit us and tens of thousands are dead.
Anyone in a PR/news position who wants to support visibility for NEO searches - try passing the phrase "planetary September 11th" in front of a few focus groups and see if they "get it" any faster.
"Ether, man! Invisible ether! Or maybe Phlogiston! Where the hell do you think homeopathic medicines come from? We have to stop polluting the ether of space with our evil nookyular space probes or Gaia will be consumed by the Great Sun God!"
(The sad thing is, despite the fact that the original author was just trolling, I'm sure there's some envirol00n group out there that believes something like this.)
Absolutely correct.
Unfortunately, given that an asteroid's gonna hit, there's a small - but certainly real - probability that the rock's gonna land in the Middle East, a land whose governments don't have distant early warning systems, nor satellites to detect missile launches.
You try convincing a billion illiterate peasants that the rock that landed in the middle of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, or Iran wasn't a nuke. (The absence of fallout would be obvious - but it's not like every desert nomad's packin' a Geiger counter.)
Hell, given our recent flip-flopping of policy on appeasement for the Palestinians, I think we'd be hard pressed to convince Israel we weren't bullshitting 'em if said rock landed in the Mediterranean and swamped the country. (Although at least the Israelis would check for fallout before deciding whether or not to launch the retaliatory strike.)
(Evil Genius Idea - suppose we stick an ion engine onto a smallish 1-2t rock and smack it straight into Mecca - ya think we could spin-doctor it into saying "Dudes, it's just God giving you another Kabaa stone to go with your first one! He wants you to ditch the terrorism now or you'll collect the whole set!" :-)
Interesting. If you go to the FCC's approval record, you can get internal photos of the device.
Can anyone with a Nokia 8260 pop it open to see if it's the came circuit board of an 8260 or other commonly-available cellphone?
Does anyone know if the circuit board pictured can be fabbed for $30 a pop? (Then again, without an LCD display, maybe it can be made cheaper than a Nokia 8260. Come to think of it, I don't see anything on the circuit board that looks like it was designed to hook into an LCD, so maybe they really do have their own design this time.)
Can anyone in the know on cellfone design give a yea or nay on whether the FCC filing looks legit?
And that's the worst part.
I've got nothing against the proper use of profiling and data mining to hunt down the enemies in our midst - but what's proposed is too-easily defeated. It smells like a scam to bring in consulting bucks, and offers no real security.
Suppose we tune our food-purchasing-database scanners to look for of Arab males under 30 who happen to live, work, and travel together. (Snide remark: ...because we know goddamn well the fucktwaddles at the airport won't catch them, as said fucktwaddles are too busy patting down your mother and feeling up your daughter to watch for groups of Arab males under 30 travelling together.)
But because Joe Camel knows we're looking for single Arab males under 30 who claim to live alone, yet still buy enough falafel for five people, he'll adjust his purchases to match, perhaps by buying a box of Pampers when he buys falafel for the gang. (If he's smart, he'll upgrade the size of the Pampers every few months, then start buying baby clothes.) The databases will conclude that Joe Camel has a wife and brand-new kid, which doesn't fit the profile of "terrorist", and he'll slip through the cracks.
Meanwhile, Joe Slashdotter, who hosts the dorm LAN party every week where he swaps grocery cards with his friends, gets h0z3d at 3am by the f3i, because two of his friends were vegetarian, and the food-tracking software rang the alarm because his purchase records didn't make any sense. (He bought nothing for a week, then ten pounds of falafel, then nothing for another week! WTF? Call the cops!)
Food profiling is a lousy idea because it's too easily-defeated by knowledgeable adversaries, and results in too many false positives even when not under attack by adversaries.
Yeah, but this is Hollywood we're talking about. You think they're gonna put restrictions on evil? Hell, no! How about this:
"See no content, hear no content, publish no content."
> > People did what they knew was "right"
"Quaker Oats. It's the right thing to do."
> Companies didn't take advantage of their own power
That commercial where the lovely guys at Philip Morris send a truckload of Kraft Dinner to some flood-ruined podunk town. Gee, what a nice happy ccompany! Or all the Exxon "Who cares about the environment? People do." ads after the Valdez spill? Wow, Exxon cares more about cute birds than anyone!
> Litigation wasn't a career path, but a means to correct problems
That luser in the $10 suit saying he's the "people's lawyer", and he'll "work for you against the big bad insurance companies that want to deny you your accident coverage".
> We had more faith in our government
Any public service ad, with double points for linking the War on Terror to [continued funding for] the War on Drugs.
> We used our influence as the populace in goverment
Any "Proposition" or "voter initiative" ad, whether it be for the left (usually environment) or right (usually insurance industry), fits this bill. It's never about the industry/lobby group sponsoring/opposing the initative, it's always about people needing to voice their concerns.
> We cared about other people
Any other PSA, or the infomercials to raise gazillions for "charities" that spend 5% of the money raised to the starving chiiildrun in $THIRD_WORLD_SHITHOLE and 95% in administrative expenses.
> . we might live in a better place and all be happier.
>
> But to do that, we'd have to stop living the way the commercials tell us to.
Au contraire -- Your utopia exists only in the commercials.
What you said. I started programming by typing in listings from BYTE.
The nicest part was that unlike the other magazines I read, there weren't many program listings - BYTE was really about new tech, or about new ways to solve problems (whether in software or in build-it-yourself hardware). And the listings that did show up weren't necessarily for my platform, so I had to think about whether or not it could be ported/implemented on my hardware, rather than just jump in and blindly start typing.
For most of the 10+ years I was a subscriber, BYTE rocked. It was a sad day whan I realized I wasn't gonna renew.
And that is precisely why no General will ever use such a weapon to cause mass blindness.
1942: Germany, Japan: Evil bastard countries we were blowin' up.
1972: Germany, Japan: Half of Germany was an important military ally, and Japan was teaching us how to build cars that didn't suck.
2002: Germany, Japan: The rest of Germany is now also a great trading partner, and the Japanese sell us Vaios and Aibos.
A good General thinks of the long term, even if the war is for a short-term objective.
>
> So, what if you're trying to burn off their eyebrows?
Certain types of .50 caliber weapons are also against the Geneva Convention when targeted at personnel, but OK when used against materiel.
Thus, "Officer, during the firefight, I was shooting at that backpack radio that guy's carrying! Danged .50cal round went clean through the radio and out his chest, and through the three guys standing behind him!" (Good shooting! Carry on, Corporal! :-)
More seriously -- the 100kW laser would make a pretty lousy battlefield weapon for ground troops. If someone's pointing a 100kW laser at the barrels you're hiding behind, you've got more to worry about than blindness.
Finally, and most importantly -- this weapon still reduces casualties. Suppose you're targeting a 5-ton truck with a squad of troops in the back. You can do it the laser way - burn through the tires or engine compartment, and risk blinding the driver, or you can do it the old-fashioned way - lob a 500lb bomb at the truck and blow everyone to hell.
If the truck's carrying reinforcements and is half a mile from an ongoing firefight, the 10 soldiers in the back are still a danger to your troops on the ground, and the 500lb bomb may be the right weapon to use.
But if the truck is 20 miles away from the front, the laser might be the better weapon to use - immobilize the truck, neutralizing 10 enemy troops without killing anyone. (And you can fire the laser as many times as you like - no need to turn around and load up with more bombs for your next sortie!)
And if that isn't enough, how 'bout another word:
Spammer.
The ACLU has a a long track record of defending spam as somehow Frea Speach that's worthy of First Amendment protection.
1997: "commercial speech restrictions on telemarketing calls and unsolicited fax advertisements have passed First Amendment challenges but direct mail and door-to-door solicitations enjoy much greater protection. Given the Supreme Court decision in ACLU v. Reno, on-line messages should receive the same First Amendment protection given traditional print media, which includes commercial mailings."
2000: "...and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union that oppose any restrictions on commercial e-mail"
2001:The argument raised by the ACLU and other memters of the First Amendment lobby is that spam, like junk mail in our offline mailboxes, is a nuisance that still must be protected."
In fact, ACLU has always supported spammers, going back to 1995.
Source: CuD (Computer underground Digest) 7.50
This issue of CuD quotes from Canter and Siegel's (the original "Green Card Lawyers" spammers) as follows:
To which I can only add:
Given that I don't think I exceeded the posted 25mph at any point on the road (never mind the posted 30, albeit with warning-10 and warning-15s on every corner, you just couldn't get past 25, even if you were trying), I'd think you were pretty safe - at least, as safe as you would have been driving down that road even facing an experienced driver.
The point of having an adult in the vehicle was essentially to have a voice saying "OK, blind corner up ahead. Take it slow and tight. Someone coming the other way can't see you 'cuz of the tree they had to dig around to make the road. Watch out for the bumpy roots, they can throw you into the other lane if you hit 'em hard. Now, see how you can see around that next corner from all the way back here? You can make that turn a bit wider to avoid the muddy ruts on this side of the road."
An experienced driver has that voice in his head - always looking ahead for trouble, always looking for blind spots, always looking for poor road conditions. An inexperienced driver doesn't. The only way to develop that voice is through experience. The best way to develop that experience is under controlled conditions. Better to learn how mud-slippery bumps affect steering on an empty road in broad daylight than on packed ice on the highway off-ramp.
As for oncoming traffic, I don't think we saw another car during any of our excursions down the road. Anyone actually going from A to B would have used the almost-as-windy, but 2-lane-blacktop paved road nearby, that covered the same route. (Thinking it over, maybe "my" road was a special case - I think the only reason it road still existed was because the town couldn't be bothered with the paperwork to track down the descendants of whoever owned the abandoned farm that constituted the only property with frontage on said road. Small towns are weird like that. Either that, or my Dad was way smarter than he was letting on in his choice of roads :-)
Finally, my original point wasn't so much to encourage such experimentation as merely to recognize that it happens, and given that it happens, it's better that it happen under adult or professional supervision. (Note also that my Dad knew and recognized his limitations - leaving the emergency-manoeuvers stuff to the professionals.)
Put another way, would you have preferred to be driving the other direction against an alternate-universe version of me who found out about the same road with a "Hey, man, we're goin' to the pizza place in the next town, gonna try this new scenic route we heard about. Bet you can't keep up with us, Tack!"
Similar stories here. I learned a lot about skid recovery while messing around at 10-20mph in empty parking lots after snowfalls. It's even saved my ass a few times in real life.
> IMO, your best bet is to buy your kid a fairly modern, safe car without too much extra juice (try a Toyota with side-curtain airbags with traction control and ABS, or a Volvo if it's in your means) -- buying kids old cars is actually more dangerous due to the lack of modern safety gear. Those parents buying their kids Z3's... well, that's just natural selection at work.
Good ideas all-round. I'd add one more, though.
If you have kids, drive with them. (And then send 'em to a good driving school anyways.)
After my first week or so of informal lessons from Dad, he told me to "turn down that road, yeah, that one over there."
It was an old dirt road, 2 lanes wide, with narrow spots down to one lane, and went up and down steep grades. And it had rained less than a day before. In short, driving hell.
First hill: "Uh, Dad, where's the road? I can't see the road from the dropoff."
Hairpin at the bottom of first hill: "Shit! *crawls around corner*"
Hairpin at the bottom of the tenth hill: "Hey, this is pretty fun, whups, almost lost it there, now I'm back, OK, gettin' the hang of it..."
That ride - and others like it - did two things:
1) Gave me a life-long appreciation for driving, ...but that when given such respect, I could make the car go where I wanted to, even in poor conditions.
2) Taught me to respect the car and the road,
3)
Was Dad nuts? No - he left the real emergency manoeuvers (brake-and-avoid, higher-speed skid prevention/recovery) course for the driving school.
But by having the confidence in me to take me down that crazy winding road, he built my confidence, not so much in my own driving skills (which after all, were nonexistent at the time), but in my ability to develop those skills over time.
So yeah - doughnuts, country roads, all that experimentation - are a good thing. And if you've got kids, you might even enjoy sharing it with 'em. (I have a hunch my Dad did. He probably hadn't driven that road in 20 years until I drove by it :)
So Great Cthulhu's a Vulcan? Someone tell Paramount Pictures! We've got a great set up: "Star Trek XVIII: Call of Shatner's Toupee".
>>
> > Yes, and studying too little in English class is not enough for a lot of studying.
>
> Yes, and studying too little in English class is not enough for a lot of studing.
Fair enough, but how's studying in English class gonna help the guy improve his Itilian, which is the real problem here.
And that other sound you hear is your own hard drive, furiously writing a (non-copy-crippled) MPEG of it :-)
>
>Truth is often the most devious of lies.
"If I were to ask you what your answer to the question 'will you lie when answering this question' would be, how would you answer?" ;-)
No, not just because you happen to be there, but because you've agreed - by being in certain "theres" - to let them.
Even before-9/11, whenever I visited any airport, there were nice friendly signs all over the place that said that by crossing this line, I consented to a search of my persons and belongings.
The signs were even nice enough to tell me that if I didn't consent to such a search, I could freely turn around and walk away from said line.
It's like a software EULA - you wanna use the warez, you play by the rulez of the d00dz that wrote the warez. You don't like the EULA, you're free to rm -rf the software and go on as before.
Likewise - if you wanna fly on a someone else's privately-owned airplane, (or even fly your own plane from somebody else's airport), you can only do so by the rules of those who own the airplane and/or the airport.