> I don't trust GM food, I see no reason for it given that organic food tastes just great and has worked fine for thousands of years.
You don't eat corn, do you?:)
Re:It's Open Mic Night at the Astrophysics Lounge!
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 1
> You haven't completely assumed the worst case. >...they want revenge. >(/joke)
The Europans, for many, should damn well better welcome their Terran radioactive robotic probe overlords:)
Re:It's Open Mic Night at the Astrophysics Lounge!
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 3, Informative
> > It may have sucked to have been a coral at Bikini Atoll in the 50s, but the ecosystem
didn't even blink, and in fact, the Atoll is one of the planet's greatest recreational diving sites. > > You're pretty ignorant, aren't you? Why not look at how the tests changed the lives of many of the people living around the test areas.
I did say "It sucked to be there in the 50s". OK, so it also sucked to be a primate, as well a coral-secreting organism:-)
> One minute with Google would have disclosed plenty of information to rebut that ridiculous claim.
Yeah, he's trolling.
But for those who might have fallen for his troll, sure. Just enter bikini atoll diving into Google.
You get back dozens of sites, not the least of which include www.bikiniatoll.com and Pacific Island Travel, specifically touting the former nuclear test site as one of the world's premier dive locations.
> And who would do the 'giving', the present owner?
> > Or the UN maybe?
As I understand it, the only reason the Moon, or Mars, cannot be "owned" by US citizens is because the US is a signatory to a treaty.
All the US would have to do is say "We withdraw from this convention, on the grounds that property rights are the means by which all persons - Terran or Martian - exercise their unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Mars belongs to the Martians."
Re:It's Open Mic Night at the Astrophysics Lounge!
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
> The real threat of any contamination from a probe is not so much from radiation as from heavy metals leaching into the environment, but then if the floor of the Europan ocean is anything like the black smokers of Earth's oceans any life should be used to heavy metals.
Suppose we look at the worst-case scenario. There's life on Europa to endanger. Probe melts through. Probe lands on sea floor. Probe just happens to land near a vent with a population of living organisms, where it fails catastrophically and spews its deadly cargo.
Folks, Europa's oceans are big and deep. We're talking about a volume of water that exceeds all the water on Earth by an order of magnitude. If the Europan ecosystem is fragile enough to be destroyed by anything humans can put in a package small enough to send to the seafloor, life on Europa would either be undetectable -- because there's so little of it that the odds of landing on it are nearly zero, or life on Europa would already be extinct.
Look at Earth. We detonated atomic bombs both above and below the ocean surface, spraying tons of transuranics into our seas and atmosphere. It may have sucked to have been a coral at Bikini Atoll in the 50s, but the ecosystem didn't even blink, and in fact, the Atoll is one of the planet's greatest recreational diving sites.
If life doesn't exist on Europa, who cares - there's nothing to contaminate.
If life does exist on Europa, and there's so little of it that we can't find it, odds are our probe isn't going to harm it, because we're going to be thousands of miles and trillions of gallons of water away from it. No harm.
If life exists on Europa and it's sufficiently omnipresent in the Europan biosphere that our probe lands on enough of lifeforms to detect them, then it won't matter if the probe is made out of tofu from sustainably-grown soy fields, or if it contains a nuclear bomb that detonates and vaporizes everything within 10 miles -- a Europan biosphere, like the Terran one, is big enough to take anything we're capable of throwing at it.
> Man, this beats the heck out of money pits like the ISS, eh? Nothing like a little old fashioned get-the-prize competition to turn up some interesting stuff. Maybe a $100 billion prize for the first company to land people on Mars and bring them back ought to be next -- get the government to cooperate with permits and NASA to share their tech. I'd bet you'd see people there inside a decade.
Proposal: The first human being(s) to survive one year on Mars and return safely to earth... gets their choice: $100B of Government Pr0k, or ownership of Mars. Mars becomes his/her/their personal property, to sell to anyone whom he/she/they please, most likely the employer who put him there and brought him back.
(Yes, this is a shameless alteration of a more ideologically-proposed proposal I found here -- in which the only prize in the original scheme is ownership of Mars with the government pr0k option removed.)
> Reminds me of an oxygen canister I saw at home depot a little bit ago. It carried a warning label on it stating that oxygen was known to cause cancer in the state of california. This label was about as big as the one letting you know that it was flammable.
"For users in the State of California, USA.
Place the following sticker in a blank area of the product manual.
WARNING: Handling the cord on this product will expose you to lead, a chemical known to the State of California to cause birth defects or other reproductive harm. Wash hands after handling."
From an actual sticker included with purchase of a piece of hardware that included an AC adaptor and a power cord. CA also got snookered by the lead-pthalate pseudoscientists, whose claims are almost as baseless as the ones on DHMO.org.
> I wonder if all these dumbed down anti-drug, pro high school graduate, get help for your baby, etc. ads seem condescending to me because I am not their target audience.
Yeah, but watching the ads and thinking about the target audience -- man, that's the best motivator to go to school and get good grades that was ever invented.
"Hi. I'm a fucking moron. See the kid I just shat out? It's going to be a retard, and it's going to cost the taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars a year. You're all going to pay for it. But the only thing worse than being one of the suckers who has to pay for it is being a broke-ass drunk welfare bum like me. So get your fucking ass to school, or end up in poverty, and end up so stupid you'll think these ads are effective.
> The problem is that politicians see themselves as capable of correctly legislating everything (proof: They legislate things all the time they can't possibly be educated about). I also see this as proof that politicians aren't generally interested in truth, but rather are more interested in looking important/effective.
And that is why - even after having been exposed for the drooling acephalitic fucknozzle he is (apologies to any acephalitic fucknozzles who suffer from excessive salivation) - the guy who got trolled stayed on message with "If you get Styrofoam into the water and it breaks apart, it's
virtually impossible to clean up".
Smell that? That's stupid. Five gallons of it, condensed and unsweetened. Even the next door's neighbor's dog isn't dim enough to sample the stuff.
But your elected officials are. Because from the Government, and they're here to help.
> Tricked by a 14 year old, what is the government in CA coming to?
According to CA State Senator John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara) -- yes, Santa Clara, same county as got trolled -- 14- and 15-year olds should get 1/4 votes.
(Link goes to OC Register editorial pointing out in many ways, precisely how moronic Sen. Vasconcellos' proposal is.)
Tip the US on its left, and everything loose will land in the People's Republic of California, the land of fruits, nuts, and vegetables - because you are what you eat.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Foo is dying.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered metasyntactic variable community when IDC confirmed that foo's market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all variables. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that foo has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Foo is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent survey of variable usage in the latest IOCCC contest...*WHAM* *WHAM* *WHAM* NO CARRIER
You know what else they say... and in my spams, it sure ain't "the family that spams together, stays together".
Unless the glue that keeps the family together in a spammer's twisted mind is composed gallons of ho+ donk3y s3m3n for s|s+er, a few g1an+ h0r5e c0ck for d4d, and sometimes the occasional e1ephan+ or badg3r for m0m (Or a snake! A snake! But never a mushroom, at least not yet... any spammers out there need a new niche? Whole untapped market out there for mushroom 1nc3st pr0n, guaranteed to make ya millyuns), but whatever part of the barnyard is involved, the family's together, man.
Spammer Family Values. Gotta love 'em man. (Well, for values of "love" approaching "retch".)
> I propose Rebar's constraint: Do NOT make a Hitler comparison in general conversation with
Mike Godwin, no matter how valid your point.
Question to Mike Godwin: "A lot of people are advising people not to make Hitler comparisons when debating with you. What are you, some kind of Nazi?":-)
> > SCIENTISTS have found a new world orbiting the solar system - more than 3 billion kilometres further away from the Sun than Pluto and 40 years away from Earth in a space shuttle.
> >
Forty years away from Earth in a space shuttle that somehow mysteriously made it away from Earth in the first place?
Gotta hand it to the engineers in old-school NASA, though. Cramming a 2000-mile diameter ball of ice and rock into a space shuttle is a pretty impressive accomplishment. Especially considering they did it five years before the first Moon landing!
One Bernard Balan, or two?
on
Spam Bits
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· Score: 1
> So we have a name, of Bernard Balan, and it looks like he's living in the Muskoka regions of Ontario, Canada. How long before he gets Ralskyed?
And according to the article, he's "just down the road" from a place called "Cow Shit Valley Farms".
Heh. If that's true, I can't think of a better place for a spammer to live.
I wonder if the Bernard Balan in the Ottawa Citizen article is the same Bernard Balan against whom some interesting allegations were raised in this 1996 Google thread from alt.allsysop, and whether there is any substance to the allegations raised against that Bernard Balan (that is, the one in the alt.allsysop thread).
Certainly, the Bernard Balan from the 1996 thread, (who had the email address "glasswords@neon.win.net") appears to have had... an interesting history of spamming USENET advertising dialup pr0n BBSes in 1995. And it's interesting to note that the BBSes in question were in area code 905, which, if I know my area codes, is pretty darn close to Muskoka, which just happens to be the last known whereabouts of the Bernard Balan mentioned in today's article.
I wonder if the two Bernard Balans are the same individual or not.
Google is a truly fascinating resource, is it not?
From the article: > There's a reason why people still go to operas while live gladiator contests and public witch burnings are both rare and poorly-attended.
Paging FOX executives... if our government's going to ban GTA4 before it hits the shelves and force us to watch TV to get our fix, can you guys at least buy some legislation to change the unfortunate situation described here?
> When they offshored for the coal miners, I did not speak out, because I was not a coal miner. > When they offshored the steel workers, I did not speak out, because I was not a steel worker. > When they offshored the textile workers, I did not speak out, because I was not a textile worker. > Now they offshore me, the IT specialist. But there is nobody left to speak out for me.
When they offshored the coal miners, I spoke with my wallet - I sold shares in domestic coal miners and bought shares in the multinationals.
When they offshored the steel workers, I spoke with my wallet - I invested in non-union mini-mills that were able to produce higher quality products at lower costs than the old integrated steel producers.
When they offshored the textile workers, I spoke with my wallet - I invested in Nike and took advantage of the lower cost of labor available overseas.
Now they offshore me, the IT specialist. And because I spent my time studying how best to adapt to a dynamic planetary economy, I have the capital to speak for myself, and I say bring it on!
> I always take a series of shots showing scalability from 640x480 up through at least 1280x1024,
You're probably doing this, but many other sites (heh, usually IE-only sites) sure as heck aren't. What about 320x480, 400x600, 640x1024?
Not everybody browses with their web browser taking up the full window! Half a window, aligned portrait-style, is easier on the eyes because it requires less horizontal eye movement than "fullscreen". Horizontal scrolling is evil -- doubly so to users who go out of their way to minimize read-speed and comprehension-slowing horizontal eye movement by resizing their browsers to prevent it.
> If you look at the DIMES combo images in the press release section, you will see the heat shield impact seems to have occurred on the far side of the Bonneville crater. That is probably the shiny object seen in these pictures of the crater. I hope they drive around the crater to see the hole they made with the shield.
Likewise.
Seems obvious to my layman's mind that it'd be interesting -- we know how much mass the heatshield had, we know its composition, we know its altitude at the time of separation, and therefore we know how fast it was going on impact and what sort of energy it delivered to the ground.
The heatshield is the closest thing to a "hammer" that this mission could provide. Seems to me that observing how deep it burrowed into the ground, or if it cracked a rock (or was cracked/dented by a rock) on impact, would tell us things that we'd be unable to learn through use of the RAT or through trenching with a wheel.
Any NASA geeks know if there
are plans to check out the heatshield impact site?
M.C. Escher + Robots. Because a man's home is his castle...
(Cue the chameleon breaking down into tears at the sight of a piece of plaid (or a mirror!) screaming "I can't do it! I can't do it! I just can't do it!")
> > And that guy next door to you who has a house designed to look like a giant vagina is now
reducing the resale value of your house... > >Or increasing the property values, if you live in an area with a lot of geeks... especially if your own house is designed to look like a giant penis...
No, decreasing property values.
Supply and demand. Giant penis-shaped robotic houses programmed extrude vagina-shaped houses increase supply of housing, while simultaneously reducing demand for housing.
But they're still pretty fucking cool, so I'm all for it.
> The company I work for hosts some of the largest porn sites on the web - we have 4 gigs -
Internet, and all the latest Cisco toys: iSCSI SANs, 6500's with load balancing, IDS, and firewall modules, gig E everywhere, real-time geographical load distribution, you name it. > > My last two gigs were Universal and Sony (I'm in LA) and both were tiny Internet
environments compared to this. > > Our SAN has 7TB of content so far & we're adding 1/2 a TB a month...
/squirms in chair awkwardly
So, umm... got, uh... any pics of the server room? Webcam in the colo so's we can watchen das blinkenlights at night? Man, I love the sight a nice rack.
> > I'd also like to note that a couple of DVD features, such as multiple angels > > Nah. The "multiple angels" fantasy predates DVD by quite a bit. It's been the #1 male fantasy since porn was invented.
God: "So, Number Two, what would you do if you had a million bucks?"
Lucifer: "Two angels at once."
Slashdot Mirror
You don't eat corn, do you? :)
>
>(/joke)
The Europans, for many, should damn well better welcome their Terran radioactive robotic probe overlords :)
>
> You're pretty ignorant, aren't you? Why not look at how the tests changed the lives of many of the people living around the test areas.
I did say "It sucked to be there in the 50s". OK, so it also sucked to be a primate, as well a coral-secreting organism :-)
> One minute with Google would have disclosed plenty of information to rebut that ridiculous claim.
Yeah, he's trolling.
But for those who might have fallen for his troll, sure. Just enter bikini atoll diving into Google.
You get back dozens of sites, not the least of which include www.bikiniatoll.com and Pacific Island Travel, specifically touting the former nuclear test site as one of the world's premier dive locations.
>
> Or the UN maybe?
As I understand it, the only reason the Moon, or Mars, cannot be "owned" by US citizens is because the US is a signatory to a treaty.
All the US would have to do is say "We withdraw from this convention, on the grounds that property rights are the means by which all persons - Terran or Martian - exercise their unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Mars belongs to the Martians."
Suppose we look at the worst-case scenario. There's life on Europa to endanger. Probe melts through. Probe lands on sea floor. Probe just happens to land near a vent with a population of living organisms, where it fails catastrophically and spews its deadly cargo.
Folks, Europa's oceans are big and deep. We're talking about a volume of water that exceeds all the water on Earth by an order of magnitude. If the Europan ecosystem is fragile enough to be destroyed by anything humans can put in a package small enough to send to the seafloor, life on Europa would either be undetectable -- because there's so little of it that the odds of landing on it are nearly zero, or life on Europa would already be extinct.
Look at Earth. We detonated atomic bombs both above and below the ocean surface, spraying tons of transuranics into our seas and atmosphere. It may have sucked to have been a coral at Bikini Atoll in the 50s, but the ecosystem didn't even blink, and in fact, the Atoll is one of the planet's greatest recreational diving sites.
If life doesn't exist on Europa, who cares - there's nothing to contaminate.
If life does exist on Europa, and there's so little of it that we can't find it, odds are our probe isn't going to harm it, because we're going to be thousands of miles and trillions of gallons of water away from it. No harm.
If life exists on Europa and it's sufficiently omnipresent in the Europan biosphere that our probe lands on enough of lifeforms to detect them, then it won't matter if the probe is made out of tofu from sustainably-grown soy fields, or if it contains a nuclear bomb that detonates and vaporizes everything within 10 miles -- a Europan biosphere, like the Terran one, is big enough to take anything we're capable of throwing at it.
Proposal: The first human being(s) to survive one year on Mars and return safely to earth... gets their choice: $100B of Government Pr0k, or ownership of Mars. Mars becomes his/her/their personal property, to sell to anyone whom he/she/they please, most likely the employer who put him there and brought him back.
(Yes, this is a shameless alteration of a more ideologically-proposed proposal I found here -- in which the only prize in the original scheme is ownership of Mars with the government pr0k option removed.)
From an actual sticker included with purchase of a piece of hardware that included an AC adaptor and a power cord. CA also got snookered by the lead-pthalate pseudoscientists, whose claims are almost as baseless as the ones on DHMO.org.
Yeah, but watching the ads and thinking about the target audience -- man, that's the best motivator to go to school and get good grades that was ever invented.
"Hi. I'm a fucking moron. See the kid I just shat out? It's going to be a retard, and it's going to cost the taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars a year. You're all going to pay for it. But the only thing worse than being one of the suckers who has to pay for it is being a broke-ass drunk welfare bum like me. So get your fucking ass to school, or end up in poverty, and end up so stupid you'll think these ads are effective.
Fear of poverty. My anti-drug."
And that is why - even after having been exposed for the drooling acephalitic fucknozzle he is (apologies to any acephalitic fucknozzles who suffer from excessive salivation) - the guy who got trolled stayed on message with "If you get Styrofoam into the water and it breaks apart, it's virtually impossible to clean up".
Smell that? That's stupid. Five gallons of it, condensed and unsweetened. Even the next door's neighbor's dog isn't dim enough to sample the stuff.
But your elected officials are. Because from the Government, and they're here to help.
According to CA State Senator John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara) -- yes, Santa Clara, same county as got trolled -- 14- and 15-year olds should get 1/4 votes.
No, I'm not making that up.
(Link goes to OC Register editorial pointing out in many ways, precisely how moronic Sen. Vasconcellos' proposal is.)
Tip the US on its left, and everything loose will land in the People's Republic of California, the land of fruits, nuts, and vegetables - because you are what you eat.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Foo is dying. One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered metasyntactic variable community when IDC confirmed that foo's market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all variables. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that foo has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Foo is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent survey of variable usage in the latest IOCCC contest...*WHAM* *WHAM* *WHAM*
NO CARRIER
You know what else they say... and in my spams, it sure ain't "the family that spams together, stays together".
Unless the glue that keeps the family together in a spammer's twisted mind is composed gallons of ho+ donk3y s3m3n for s|s+er, a few g1an+ h0r5e c0ck for d4d, and sometimes the occasional e1ephan+ or badg3r for m0m (Or a snake! A snake! But never a mushroom, at least not yet... any spammers out there need a new niche? Whole untapped market out there for mushroom 1nc3st pr0n, guaranteed to make ya millyuns), but whatever part of the barnyard is involved, the family's together, man.
Spammer Family Values. Gotta love 'em man. (Well, for values of "love" approaching "retch".)
Question to Mike Godwin: "A lot of people are advising people not to make Hitler comparisons when debating with you. What are you, some kind of Nazi?" :-)
>
> Forty years away from Earth in a space shuttle that somehow mysteriously made it away from Earth in the first place?
Gotta hand it to the engineers in old-school NASA, though. Cramming a 2000-mile diameter ball of ice and rock into a space shuttle is a pretty impressive accomplishment. Especially considering they did it five years before the first Moon landing!
And according to the article, he's "just down the road" from a place called "Cow Shit Valley Farms".
Heh. If that's true, I can't think of a better place for a spammer to live.
I wonder if the Bernard Balan in the Ottawa Citizen article is the same Bernard Balan against whom some interesting allegations were raised in this 1996 Google thread from alt.allsysop, and whether there is any substance to the allegations raised against that Bernard Balan (that is, the one in the alt.allsysop thread).
Certainly, the Bernard Balan from the 1996 thread, (who had the email address "glasswords@neon.win.net") appears to have had... an interesting history of spamming USENET advertising dialup pr0n BBSes in 1995. And it's interesting to note that the BBSes in question were in area code 905, which, if I know my area codes, is pretty darn close to Muskoka, which just happens to be the last known whereabouts of the Bernard Balan mentioned in today's article.
I wonder if the two Bernard Balans are the same individual or not.
Google is a truly fascinating resource, is it not?
> There's a reason why people still go to operas while live gladiator contests and public witch burnings are both rare and poorly-attended.
Paging FOX executives... if our government's going to ban GTA4 before it hits the shelves and force us to watch TV to get our fix, can you guys at least buy some legislation to change the unfortunate situation described here?
> When they offshored the steel workers, I did not speak out, because I was not a steel worker.
> When they offshored the textile workers, I did not speak out, because I was not a textile worker.
> Now they offshore me, the IT specialist. But there is nobody left to speak out for me.
When they offshored the coal miners, I spoke with my wallet - I sold shares in domestic coal miners and bought shares in the multinationals.
When they offshored the steel workers, I spoke with my wallet - I invested in non-union mini-mills that were able to produce higher quality products at lower costs than the old integrated steel producers.
When they offshored the textile workers, I spoke with my wallet - I invested in Nike and took advantage of the lower cost of labor available overseas.
Now they offshore me, the IT specialist. And because I spent my time studying how best to adapt to a dynamic planetary economy, I have the capital to speak for myself, and I say bring it on!
You're probably doing this, but many other sites (heh, usually IE-only sites) sure as heck aren't. What about 320x480, 400x600, 640x1024?
Not everybody browses with their web browser taking up the full window! Half a window, aligned portrait-style, is easier on the eyes because it requires less horizontal eye movement than "fullscreen". Horizontal scrolling is evil -- doubly so to users who go out of their way to minimize read-speed and comprehension-slowing horizontal eye movement by resizing their browsers to prevent it.
Likewise.
Seems obvious to my layman's mind that it'd be interesting -- we know how much mass the heatshield had, we know its composition, we know its altitude at the time of separation, and therefore we know how fast it was going on impact and what sort of energy it delivered to the ground. The heatshield is the closest thing to a "hammer" that this mission could provide. Seems to me that observing how deep it burrowed into the ground, or if it cracked a rock (or was cracked/dented by a rock) on impact, would tell us things that we'd be unable to learn through use of the RAT or through trenching with a wheel.
Any NASA geeks know if there are plans to check out the heatshield impact site?
If not, why not?
Screw that. I want to feed some M.C. Escher code into it.
Either I get a Relatively sane place, or the robot turns itself inside out while trying to do the damned recursive stairs. But if the robot survives the traumatic experience, I can live in a really nice subdivision.
M.C. Escher + Robots. Because a man's home is his castle...
(Cue the chameleon breaking down into tears at the sight of a piece of plaid (or a mirror!) screaming "I can't do it! I can't do it! I just can't do it!")
>
>Or increasing the property values, if you live in an area with a lot of geeks... especially if your own house is designed to look like a giant penis...
No, decreasing property values.
Supply and demand. Giant penis-shaped robotic houses programmed extrude vagina-shaped houses increase supply of housing, while simultaneously reducing demand for housing.
But they're still pretty fucking cool, so I'm all for it.
>
> My last two gigs were Universal and Sony (I'm in LA) and both were tiny Internet environments compared to this.
>
> Our SAN has 7TB of content so far & we're adding 1/2 a TB a month...
So, umm... got, uh... any pics of the server room? Webcam in the colo so's we can watchen das blinkenlights at night? Man, I love the sight a nice rack.
"I may not understand the question, but I know what I like!"
>
> Nah. The "multiple angels" fantasy predates DVD by quite a bit. It's been the #1 male fantasy since porn was invented.
God: "So, Number Two, what would you do if you had a million bucks?"
Lucifer: "Two angels at once."
Hollings! A Hollings!