It took a hundred flights for the Columbia failure mode to occur. There has been no other flight where an in-flight emergency occured such that rescue might be considered.
> >Bearing this in mind, what's the point in having a rescue shuttle ready for the next two flights only?
The point is - like all Generals more concerned with keeping their stars than the welfare of the troops under their command - to fight the last war.
To understand NASA, you need to stop thinking like and engineer and start thinking like a bureaucrat or politician.
I advise reading the last Slashdot thread on "Political Software Development" while under the influence of large quantities of alcohol. (And if you're a NASA administrator and something goes wrong on your watch, re-read the thread while switching to Valium.)
> While this is a great advancement for the Indians I just can't get excited. Been there, done that. Landers, orbiters, impacters... Who cares!!! We had PEOPLE on the moon 35 years ago!
The early bird gets the worm.
The second mouse gets the cheese.
You don't get bragging rights for flags and footprints. You get 'em for economic development. India and China have pwn3d our asses in that department for decades.
> We are not poor due to our stupidity. We are poor by design. Just a 100 years ago, we were the richest nation on earth. Then we were split up into two countries and made to go at each other's throat. The Indo-Pak cold war has cost us an entire civilization. > >Our political system is bankrupt. Most politicians are plain goons. But we also have the vision to elect a woman to rule us. Every second President of India is from the minorities. How many black presidents, how many women presidents has USA had? How about a Jew for the Prez?
Apart from a Jewish guy as President, I'm confused. Were you talking about India or the US up there? We not only elected H.R. Clinton and Condi Rice as President, we re-elected both of 'em!
> If Valve didn't protect their interests, people would steal HL2 with wreckless abandon, but since they do, now they are abusing DRM simply by ensuring you paid for the game.
Forgive me for joining with the throngs of users going all AOL on you, but...
<AOL>Me too</AOL>
If Steam had not been required for offline play, I'd have been in the first-day lineups at Fry's. Because Steam was required, and because Valve is "protecting their interests", I have neither warezed nor purchased HL2. Nor will I.
If that means the middleman remains, so be it. The alternative (running Steam for HL2, st-EA-m for EA's games, Steamyvision for Activision's games, and Steam-Two for Take-Two's games, and a dozen more Steamclones, one for each studio's attempt to squeeze out their middlemen) sucks donkey balls through Gabe's clenched fist.
> I think Steam system is pretty cool. You can download the game and play it on whatever computer you want, whenver you want. No need to worry about having the cd around.
Holy crap! We found the only guy to buy an Infinium Phantom console. (You know, that vaporware company that sued HardOCP for calling it umm... vaporware...
Hey... where is Phantom anyway?
"You got your Steam in my Phantom!"
"You got your Phantom in my Valve!"
"Two shitty tastes that taste even worse together! Infinium Steamy Fecal Cups!"
> I also happen to remember when piracy wasn't so bad too.
You owe me a cup of coffee. And the guy in the cubicle down from me, who still has a 4-level bookshelf full of 5.25" floppy disks of warezed games from the 8-bit era.
Re:Offline can still work-Righteous Steam.
on
Steam Users Steamed
·
· Score: 2, Informative
> > "This is only half-true.
Once Half-Life 2 is decrypted and fully running, it is possible to set it to be playable offline, hence not needing an internet connection to run it, and the original single player games can be played from their original applications, not through steam."
> >SHHHHSH! People around here are just building up a full head of steam, and you're going to ruin it.
Incorrect. Once HL2 is up and running, and in offline mode, it only remains in offline mode so long as the "ticket" is valid. The tickets have expiry dates and times.
Sorry bud. Offline mode is still pay-to-play. You currently pay $0.00 and a few TCP/IP packets per subscription period, but you're still on the subscription model.
Re:Online authentication unavailable for one night
on
Steam Users Steamed
·
· Score: 1
> What the hell. Put Steam into Offline mode. You can play Half-Life 2 in single player mode then.
Only for as long as the ticket on your PC remains validated. What happens next week? Next month? After you come back from your year-long tour of duty in the Gulf? After Valve goes bankrupt from fucking its customers over ten times harder than Vivendi even fantasized about, and there are no more Steam servers with which to authenticate?
Offline mode is a fig leaf. You're still on a subscription plan.
> 2. So they can release patches and content quickly and effectively - or did you enjoy having to go out and download a 50+ MB patch from one of fifty mirrors at 2kb/s?
What about Joe Sixpack who lives in the middle of East Buttfuck, Montana, and who only has dialup?
Maybe Joe Sixpack wants to download the 50MB patches on his schedule, not Gabe's.
> I'd pick Steam over having to manage and update Half-Life (2) the many mods associated with those two games.
Even if I had infinite bandwidth, I'd pick downloading mods on my schedule, not someone else's.
> I can also understand valve wanting to bypass their producers to deliver new content and updates for their games.
My computer is for my use. It's not Gabe's content delivery mechanism. Pity about yours.
> > It's not a healthy thing to lock yourself in a room and create your own reality.' Which means most slashdotters basically have a get out of jail free card."
> >Don't you mean a "locked yourself into jail already" card?
Yeah, but if SVCHOST.EXE could run chrooted, we wouldn't be having this conversation, would we?
In other news, linksandlaw.com sued by the Clerk of the Norwegian Supreme Court for $1,337,455 dollars in translastion fees and $45,570,534 in court transcription fees following Slashdot effect.
I'd link to that other news, but I can't afford to.
> > > > > 97.576% of all statistics are inaccurate.
> > > > And 33.23456% are made up right there on the spot.
> > > And 74.3572% are made up on the spot
> >... And apparently most statistics carry a margin of error of approximately 41.12264%
> I'm not sure your figure is precisely correct.
...and nevertheless, 100% of us have a better grasp of business reality than the deluded wankburger who claimed with straight face that WiFi hotspots were responsible for a ($12,000,000,000) entry on his employer's balance sheet. What a horrible existence - to be delusional (even by phone company standards), without any of the mind candy of psychopathy and megalomania that come with being part of RIAA or MPAA respectively.
We don't have all the answers, but we know it involves executives from Intel and Motorola sticking their hands up the FTC and ITU commissioners' asses and some sort of sock-puppet Kabuki theatre.
If a CD-R weighs 20 grams and holds 700MB, then a spindle of 50 CD-Rs (35 GB) weighs about a kilo, or 2.2 pounds. 14 spindles * 35 GB = 30 pounds.
So you're breaking even (pound for pound as you pound the pud) after about three weeks.
Conversion to Libraries of Congress full of dead-tree editions of Mayfair (it is the UK after all) is left as an exercise for the rest of you wankers. Er, for the student.
> I'm actually surprised that co-workers aren't a bigger piece of the statistical pie on this one. They often have access to records, PCs, the all important "work number" and so on. I've run across those incidents, and am amazed they're not more common.
You forgot the most important factor: cow orkers overhear everything within a 3-cube radius.
With the web, it's not too bad -- but sometimes you have to deal with IVR (interactive voice response) systems, and that's when you get into trouble.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard a cow orker enunciating a credit card number (or SSN, or bank number, and sometimes both), one digit at a time, into an IVR mechanism.
Adding insult to injury, the IVR system is sometimes used as a front-end to enter the "numbers" data without human input before the call gets sent to India. I can tell when this is happened when I hear a pause between the numbers, the usual "Hi, I'm calling about... (pause)...her name was Florence."
Thanks, buddy! Now I've got your mother's maiden name, too!
> Because I want those crushbone orcs to think about how I might feel emotionally before they fire some magic lightning at me or club me. Or they can say "Well he's level 65 and I'm level 10, so maybe I will not chase after him today!"
Look on the bright side: in your typical MMORPG, NPC AI is probably ten times sparter than the typical PC AI.
(All you have to do to turn a single-player game like Morrowind into a MMORPG, for instance, would be to give the Cliff Racers the personality of Crassius Curio, and to replace most of the dialog trees with strings like "u got ne gld 4 me" and "asl? u wanna s3x0r?")
> Lawmakers - imagine what how other countries are using propaganda when you make laws against *EVIL* games. You may be making your country look more like a repressive communist society.
By banning BFV, FIFA 2005, and Sims2, the Chinese are doing it to protect their society from the misconceptions that America was the "good guy" in Vietnam, from the notion that Taiwan is sufficiently independent to get a soccer team, and a game featuring characters that elevate their moods by "meditating" with pseudoscientific mysticism, see "ghosts", can enter same-sex relationships, and who frequently hop into a bed for pixelated "woo-hoo" -- the latter of which oughta be grounds for a ban in any civilized nation. But all three games are being banned for the same fundamental reason: they threaten the stability of the Chinese government.
When our lawmakers do it, it's for the freedom and security of our children.
40 years ago, Ted Kennedy had to leave his girlfriend to drown so he could continue defending our children's future. And the Senators from Disney probably had to snort a lot of cocaine from between a lot of plastic starlets' tits before deciding it was time to ban the internets.
That's the difference between freedom and repressive communism. Honestly, we have no idea the sacrifices our lawmakers make for us.
> GPS-enhanced searches from University of Maryland, Shape Retrieval and Analysis from Princeton, musical search engine from New Zealand Digital Library Project, and some of the projects that A9 and Ask.com
Jeeves, what sort of music would you recommend to my friends if I told you I was listening to a sculptor singing the plaintext of the curvy-shaped thingy that talks about 38 57' 6.5" N 77 8' 44" W to the tune of The Hymn of the Soviet Union?
> Rojo, a venture-funded startup RSS aggregator. [... ]a social network harnessed by web search techniques can perform relevance-tuning that will save me from drowning in the tidal wave of blogged newsbits that I find so addicting. They are using a viral marketing approach of spreading membership by invitations from existing members.
Venture-funded (ding!)
RSS (ding!)
aggregator (ding!)
social network (ding!)
so addicting (ding!)
viral marketing (ding!)
Damn. All I need is "I find Rojo intriguing and I wish to invest in its newsletter to get a Free iPod", and I can yell "BINGO!"
> There are also arguments that this leads to fragmentation and marginalization. There is some truth in these arguments but there are a lot of benefits which are often overlooked.
Well, WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON, bud? Huh?
You can't post a juicy title like "Flame Wars, Forks and Freedom" without taking a side.
What are you, some kind of GNU/Commie? ESR-Capitalist? Microsoft Nazi? (Or a paid OS X shill?)
And if you're just trying to present both sides of the argument in a fair and balanced fashion (sorry, I know a friend who worked at FOX, but since his facts are licensed FreeBSD-style, it's OK if I use them on Slashdot), then what are you doing whining about it on Slashdot? For chrissakes, man, just do a CVS branch and start coding your own facts, dammit!
> I was there when AOL enabled usenet access. > The > flood of users with no netiquette or, as it seemed > to me at > the time, common sense, drove me out of >almost > every newsgroup I followed.
> Well congrats to Ben. All the best at Google. But I do wonder how Firefox could be MORE integrated with Google?
> >I mean.. you start it up.. you have google at the top right, and if you use the default home page, you will link to the google search engine. There are google toolbar plugins available. What else can there be?
> has launched a P2P network called Bellster that allows users to share their private lines to make calls anywhere on the public-switched telephone network.
f0ne: *RING*
d00d: Hello?
k1ddi3: Hi, is your server running?
d00d: Yeah.
k1ddi3: Well, you'd better catch it!
d00d: *slam*
k1ddi3: PWN3D!
Slashdot Mirror
>
>Bearing this in mind, what's the point in having a rescue shuttle ready for the next two flights only?
The point is - like all Generals more concerned with keeping their stars than the welfare of the troops under their command - to fight the last war.
To understand NASA, you need to stop thinking like and engineer and start thinking like a bureaucrat or politician.
I advise reading the last Slashdot thread on "Political Software Development" while under the influence of large quantities of alcohol. (And if you're a NASA administrator and something goes wrong on your watch, re-read the thread while switching to Valium.)
The early bird gets the worm.
The second mouse gets the cheese.
You don't get bragging rights for flags and footprints. You get 'em for economic development. India and China have pwn3d our asses in that department for decades.
>
>Our political system is bankrupt. Most politicians are plain goons. But we also have the vision to elect a woman to rule us. Every second President of India is from the minorities. How many black presidents, how many women presidents has USA had? How about a Jew for the Prez?
Apart from a Jewish guy as President, I'm confused. Were you talking about India or the US up there? We not only elected H.R. Clinton and Condi Rice as President, we re-elected both of 'em!
Forgive me for joining with the throngs of users going all AOL on you, but...
<AOL>Me too</AOL>
If Steam had not been required for offline play, I'd have been in the first-day lineups at Fry's. Because Steam was required, and because Valve is "protecting their interests", I have neither warezed nor purchased HL2. Nor will I.
If that means the middleman remains, so be it. The alternative (running Steam for HL2, st-EA-m for EA's games, Steamyvision for Activision's games, and Steam-Two for Take-Two's games, and a dozen more Steamclones, one for each studio's attempt to squeeze out their middlemen) sucks donkey balls through Gabe's clenched fist.
Holy crap! We found the only guy to buy an Infinium Phantom console. (You know, that vaporware company that sued HardOCP for calling it umm... vaporware...
Hey... where is Phantom anyway?
"You got your Steam in my Phantom!"
"You got your Phantom in my Valve!"
"Two shitty tastes that taste even worse together! Infinium Steamy Fecal Cups!"
You owe me a cup of coffee. And the guy in the cubicle down from me, who still has a 4-level bookshelf full of 5.25" floppy disks of warezed games from the 8-bit era.
>
>SHHHHSH! People around here are just building up a full head of steam, and you're going to ruin it.
Incorrect. Once HL2 is up and running, and in offline mode, it only remains in offline mode so long as the "ticket" is valid. The tickets have expiry dates and times.
Sorry bud. Offline mode is still pay-to-play. You currently pay $0.00 and a few TCP/IP packets per subscription period, but you're still on the subscription model.
Only for as long as the ticket on your PC remains validated. What happens next week? Next month? After you come back from your year-long tour of duty in the Gulf? After Valve goes bankrupt from fucking its customers over ten times harder than Vivendi even fantasized about, and there are no more Steam servers with which to authenticate?
Offline mode is a fig leaf. You're still on a subscription plan.
What about Joe Sixpack who lives in the middle of East Buttfuck, Montana, and who only has dialup? Maybe Joe Sixpack wants to download the 50MB patches on his schedule, not Gabe's.
> I'd pick Steam over having to manage and update Half-Life (2) the many mods associated with those two games.
Even if I had infinite bandwidth, I'd pick downloading mods on my schedule, not someone else's.
> I can also understand valve wanting to bypass their producers to deliver new content and updates for their games.
My computer is for my use. It's not Gabe's content delivery mechanism. Pity about yours.
The last time I looked for "spanking the human", I ended up spanking the monkey. Turnabout's fair play, I guess.
(There's a perpetual motion machine joke in here somewhere, but it probably involves goats.)
>
>Don't you mean a "locked yourself into jail already" card?
Yeah, but if SVCHOST.EXE could run chrooted, we wouldn't be having this conversation, would we?
In other news, linksandlaw.com sued by the Clerk of the Norwegian Supreme Court for $1,337,455 dollars in translastion fees and $45,570,534 in court transcription fees following Slashdot effect.
I'd link to that other news, but I can't afford to.
> > > > And 33.23456% are made up right there on the spot.
> > > And 74.3572% are made up on the spot
> >
> I'm not sure your figure is precisely correct.
We don't have all the answers, but we know it involves executives from Intel and Motorola sticking their hands up the FTC and ITU commissioners' asses and some sort of sock-puppet Kabuki theatre.
It depends. How much cheese is in it for me if I press the lever that indicates that I feel cheated?
"and there's a monthly download cap of 500GB"
OK, bub, let's see you carry that much pr0n.
If a CD-R weighs 20 grams and holds 700MB, then a spindle of 50 CD-Rs (35 GB) weighs about a kilo, or 2.2 pounds. 14 spindles * 35 GB = 30 pounds.
So you're breaking even (pound for pound as you pound the pud) after about three weeks.
Conversion to Libraries of Congress full of dead-tree editions of Mayfair (it is the UK after all) is left as an exercise for the rest of you wankers. Er, for the student.
You forgot the most important factor: cow orkers overhear everything within a 3-cube radius.
With the web, it's not too bad -- but sometimes you have to deal with IVR (interactive voice response) systems, and that's when you get into trouble.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard a cow orker enunciating a credit card number (or SSN, or bank number, and sometimes both), one digit at a time, into an IVR mechanism.
Adding insult to injury, the IVR system is sometimes used as a front-end to enter the "numbers" data without human input before the call gets sent to India. I can tell when this is happened when I hear a pause between the numbers, the usual "Hi, I'm calling about... (pause) ...her name was Florence."
Thanks, buddy! Now I've got your mother's maiden name, too!
Look on the bright side: in your typical MMORPG, NPC AI is probably ten times sparter than the typical PC AI.
(All you have to do to turn a single-player game like Morrowind into a MMORPG, for instance, would be to give the Cliff Racers the personality of Crassius Curio, and to replace most of the dialog trees with strings like "u got ne gld 4 me" and "asl? u wanna s3x0r?")
By banning BFV, FIFA 2005, and Sims2, the Chinese are doing it to protect their society from the misconceptions that America was the "good guy" in Vietnam, from the notion that Taiwan is sufficiently independent to get a soccer team, and a game featuring characters that elevate their moods by "meditating" with pseudoscientific mysticism, see "ghosts", can enter same-sex relationships, and who frequently hop into a bed for pixelated "woo-hoo" -- the latter of which oughta be grounds for a ban in any civilized nation. But all three games are being banned for the same fundamental reason: they threaten the stability of the Chinese government.
When our lawmakers do it, it's for the freedom and security of our children.
40 years ago, Ted Kennedy had to leave his girlfriend to drown so he could continue defending our children's future. And the Senators from Disney probably had to snort a lot of cocaine from between a lot of plastic starlets' tits before deciding it was time to ban the internets.
That's the difference between freedom and repressive communism. Honestly, we have no idea the sacrifices our lawmakers make for us.
Jeeves, what sort of music would you recommend to my friends if I told you I was listening to a sculptor singing the plaintext of the curvy-shaped thingy that talks about 38 57' 6.5" N 77 8' 44" W to the tune of The Hymn of the Soviet Union?
Venture-funded (ding!)
RSS (ding!)
aggregator (ding!)
social network (ding!)
so addicting (ding!)
viral marketing (ding!)
Damn. All I need is "I find Rojo intriguing and I wish to invest in its newsletter to get a Free iPod", and I can yell "BINGO!"
Well, WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON, bud? Huh?
You can't post a juicy title like "Flame Wars, Forks and Freedom" without taking a side.
What are you, some kind of GNU/Commie? ESR-Capitalist? Microsoft Nazi? (Or a paid OS X shill?)
And if you're just trying to present both sides of the argument in a fair and balanced fashion (sorry, I know a friend who worked at FOX, but since his facts are licensed FreeBSD-style, it's OK if I use them on Slashdot), then what are you doing whining about it on Slashdot? For chrissakes, man, just do a CVS branch and start coding your own facts, dammit!
> I was there when AOL enabled usenet access.
> The
> flood of users with no netiquette or, as it seemed
> to me at
> the time, common sense, drove me out of
>almost
> every newsgroup I followed.
>
>I mean.. you start it up.. you have google at the top right, and if you use the default home page, you will link to the google search engine. There are google toolbar plugins available. What else can there be?
He could tell us we must search in russian?
f0ne: *RING*
d00d: Hello?
k1ddi3: Hi, is your server running?
d00d: Yeah.
k1ddi3: Well, you'd better catch it!
d00d: *slam*
k1ddi3: PWN3D!