I saw that too, and I still don't get the soap box reference, can someone explain that to me?
Re:But the point is...?
on
Melting Europa
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· Score: 2, Informative
One of the mission profiles I read a while ago had the submersible tethered to the lander. I.E. the lander would land, the submersible would detach, melt through the ice, and swim around returning telemetry to the lander through the tether and then the lander would transmit the data back to earth via the DSN.
According to wikipedia it was powered by an rtg. Now it's entirely possible that wikipedia is wrong, so if you can show me something credible that says otherwise I'll go change it...
I'd agree with you in that money spent developing defense systems is largely wasted, but I do think we need to put MUCH more effort into detection systems. If we can detect an asteroid 10 years before it hits us, I'm pretty confident that it'll get handled. But if we don't even know it's there - we're fucked.
As well, detection systems have other benifits (think advances in optics or radio-imaging, and the discovery of other inner-solarsystem bodies that may be scientifically interesting).
Ok, sounds like a plan. I'll be generous and offer to set up a bank account in my name - once donations reach $3,950,000 I'll buy the place and invite some slashdotters over...
Yea, but the Clinton administration produced a budgetary surplus in his second term. It was the first time in a long time, granted, but you americans have slid a long way since then.
Re:Aren't you actually required to have a prototyp
on
Pop Up Ads in Space
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· Score: 1
nope, a prototype isn't needed in american patent law. This is how things like perpetual motion machines get patented (true story, do some googling).
Well, actually, it does. I can legally go and download as much music as I want and listen to it and it's perfectly legal. If you want proof, go the the Canadian Justice site and read section 80 of the Copyright Act, it explicitly states this.
There is a catch however - you can't redistribute what you don't own, so if you're sharing files on kazaa (or anything else) that you don't own personally, you can get sued.
Man I love being Canadian - it gives me an excuse to be a leech!:-)
The difference is that parents who encourage their kids to read at the level of James Patterson books are usually good enough parents to also instill some sense of moral values in the kid. As well, these kinds of parents are generally better educated, and they recognize that they have a responsibility for the behaviour of their children - they can't just blame it on someone/something else.
Now, I've gone and made some very sweeping generalizations which are going to offend a lot of people (and rightly so I might add), but in general I think this trend is evident.
Can you imagine the chaos if/. had an edit? imagine how little sense my post would make if you could fix your post - and that's just a little typo. When people get into huge flame-wars it would be unintelligible(sp?).
Damn, everything I write sounds like I'm trying to prove you wrong, I just wanted to add this sentance to say it's all in good fun...
Suppose you have a really competent roobmba, that keeps the floor nice and clean. So much so that you no longer have a vaccuum, becuase the roomba is the tool for the job. When the roomba breaks, you are sol.
On the slashdot of the 1950s:
Suppose you have a really competent vacuum, that keeps the floor nice and clean. So much so that you no longer have a broom, becuase the vacuum is the tool for the job. When the vacuum breaks, you are sol.
If your roomba breaks, while it's getting fixed you bite the bullet and sweep the damn floor, just like you'd do if you vacuum quits tommorrow. If your fancy dish washing & collector robot breaks, you scrub the dishes in the sink - just like you'd do if you dishwasher died.
That said, I agree with you on the point, but not the rationale. I think a single intellegent domestic robot would, once the appropriate AI is developed, be cheaper than automating a gazillion home systems, fitting them all with effective voice recognition, and integrating them all. I think when the day of robotic domestic servants finally arrives, their market will be driving by cost, not the fact that you can fill in for them when they break:-).
I can't tell if this a troll or an honest question, but if you look at the ultimate evolution of robots, having two legs makes sense. While today's robots aren't capable of walking well enough to make walking preferred over wheels or catapillars tracks (or whatever else), walking is eventually the only way to have robots which can navigate all environments with reasonable speed. Walking allows one to use stairs, step over objects, jump up, crouch down, and other things that are much more difficul to do with wheels (though not impossible). However, the key reason walking is better is that it allows you to do these things at speed, a human can be running along and effortlessly (for the fitter ones at least:-) jump over a log and then go up some stairs, jump over a gap and and keep running. With today's technology, wheeled robots have to use gyroscopic stabilization and complicated double-wheel systems to climb stairs, and even tracked robots (which can handle logs and stairs better) can't be jumping over gaps. Tracked robots also have disadvantages in the amount of space they take up and in how hard they are on surfaces (i.e. floors, lawns). In all, if you want to ever have domestic robots that can fully integrate into our environment, legs are the only option. Four can work, but two is ultimately better if more difficult. There's a reason many animals in this world evolved legs.
As an aside, other things to think about in robots are the possibility that they can have both wheels and legs, using the wheels when they need to go fast on level surfaces, and legs otherwise. And while looking at how animals evolved to move, the only other real options other than legs are flying, swimming, or peristaltic motion (like snakes). Peristaltic motion has serious potential, but we know even less about implementing it in robots than walking.
No, the parent is actually correct - i've seen this effect too on (Canadian) quarters and it is waaay more pronounced than 51% - I can regularly guess the results 7 out of ten coin tosses right, and frequently two out of the ten tosses I get wrong only because I screw up and allow the coin to flip over or something when it lands in my hand. In fact, when I first saw this story - my first reaction was "duh, who didn't know that?"
It's also worth noting that this effect seems to work best if you catch the coin at the same level you launched it from.
This is more than all other military spending by all other nations combined.
Well, actually it means that you're spending more than the next 25 highest spending nations combined - not quite all nations. I've done some debating on the space programs recently and you have to have you statistics right unless you want to get shot down badly.
All told, spending more on defense than your next 25 competitors combined does still seem a little silly - especially considering that the top few of those are britain, france, russia, and other key allies.
What's to stop a holder of a watermarked image from just adding even more noise on top of the image. Sure, it would degrade image quality a bit, but then so does the original watermark. Then, when the noise pattern in the distributed image is compared, it wouldn't match. Now, IANAEE, so it's possible that there are algorithms which can detect the underlying first layer of noise originally applied, or that obscuring the watermark would unacceptably degrade the signal, but it otherwise seems like a pretty simple way to defeat the process to me.
As well, aren't there signal processing algorithms which can remove noise from an image? Sure it won't be anywhere near matching the original, but all it has to do is change the noise signal enough...
The trick is you paint the rock white, not black (i.e. you increase its albedo). The act of reflecting light imparts double the momentum of the act of absorbing it, thereby changing its orbit. Further, it doesn't matter that the asteroid rotates as you paint the whole asteroid. And actually, surprisingly, some of the guys at JPL have calculated that the area is actually enough - provided that the paint is applied early enough (several years prior to the predicted impact). The Yarkovsky effect is pretty small, but if you give it long enough, it will change the asteroid's orbit.
Um, that's going to mercury, not venus. All the same, it looks pretty cool. It's too bad they canceled the lander - it would have been really sweet to see pictures from the surface of mars.
Slashdot Mirror
AHHHH! Thank you.
I saw that too, and I still don't get the soap box reference, can someone explain that to me?
One of the mission profiles I read a while ago had the submersible tethered to the lander. I.E. the lander would land, the submersible would detach, melt through the ice, and swim around returning telemetry to the lander through the tether and then the lander would transmit the data back to earth via the DSN.
According to wikipedia it was powered by an rtg. Now it's entirely possible that wikipedia is wrong, so if you can show me something credible that says otherwise I'll go change it...
I'd agree with you in that money spent developing defense systems is largely wasted, but I do think we need to put MUCH more effort into detection systems. If we can detect an asteroid 10 years before it hits us, I'm pretty confident that it'll get handled. But if we don't even know it's there - we're fucked.
As well, detection systems have other benifits (think advances in optics or radio-imaging, and the discovery of other inner-solarsystem bodies that may be scientifically interesting).
thanks - you made my day
Ok, sounds like a plan. I'll be generous and offer to set up a bank account in my name - once donations reach $3,950,000 I'll buy the place and invite some slashdotters over...
Yea, but the Clinton administration produced a budgetary surplus in his second term. It was the first time in a long time, granted, but you americans have slid a long way since then.
nope, a prototype isn't needed in american patent law. This is how things like perpetual motion machines get patented (true story, do some googling).
Well, actually, it does. I can legally go and download as much music as I want and listen to it and it's perfectly legal. If you want proof, go the the Canadian Justice site and read section 80 of the Copyright Act, it explicitly states this.
:-)
There is a catch however - you can't redistribute what you don't own, so if you're sharing files on kazaa (or anything else) that you don't own personally, you can get sued.
Man I love being Canadian - it gives me an excuse to be a leech!
The difference is that parents who encourage their kids to read at the level of James Patterson books are usually good enough parents to also instill some sense of moral values in the kid. As well, these kinds of parents are generally better educated, and they recognize that they have a responsibility for the behaviour of their children - they can't just blame it on someone/something else.
Now, I've gone and made some very sweeping generalizations which are going to offend a lot of people (and rightly so I might add), but in general I think this trend is evident.
Are there any broadcast stations on MW and LW? I wasn't aware of any - maybe it's just where I live though...
Can you imagine the chaos if /. had an edit? imagine how little sense my post would make if you could fix your post - and that's just a little typo. When people get into huge flame-wars it would be unintelligible(sp?).
Damn, everything I write sounds like I'm trying to prove you wrong, I just wanted to add this sentance to say it's all in good fun...
(e.g. H+H=He, He+He=Li, etc.)
:-)
Um, actually, He+He=Be, it's He+H=Li -> protons are conserved. Just thought I'd be pedantic and point that out
Suppose you have a really competent roobmba, that keeps the floor nice and clean. So much so that you no longer have a vaccuum, becuase the roomba is the tool for the job. When the roomba breaks, you are sol.
:-).
On the slashdot of the 1950s:
Suppose you have a really competent vacuum, that keeps the floor nice and clean. So much so that you no longer have a broom, becuase the vacuum is the tool for the job. When the vacuum breaks, you are sol.
If your roomba breaks, while it's getting fixed you bite the bullet and sweep the damn floor, just like you'd do if you vacuum quits tommorrow. If your fancy dish washing & collector robot breaks, you scrub the dishes in the sink - just like you'd do if you dishwasher died.
That said, I agree with you on the point, but not the rationale. I think a single intellegent domestic robot would, once the appropriate AI is developed, be cheaper than automating a gazillion home systems, fitting them all with effective voice recognition, and integrating them all. I think when the day of robotic domestic servants finally arrives, their market will be driving by cost, not the fact that you can fill in for them when they break
I can't tell if this a troll or an honest question, but if you look at the ultimate evolution of robots, having two legs makes sense. While today's robots aren't capable of walking well enough to make walking preferred over wheels or catapillars tracks (or whatever else), walking is eventually the only way to have robots which can navigate all environments with reasonable speed. Walking allows one to use stairs, step over objects, jump up, crouch down, and other things that are much more difficul to do with wheels (though not impossible). However, the key reason walking is better is that it allows you to do these things at speed, a human can be running along and effortlessly (for the fitter ones at least :-) jump over a log and then go up some stairs, jump over a gap and and keep running. With today's technology, wheeled robots have to use gyroscopic stabilization and complicated double-wheel systems to climb stairs, and even tracked robots (which can handle logs and stairs better) can't be jumping over gaps. Tracked robots also have disadvantages in the amount of space they take up and in how hard they are on surfaces (i.e. floors, lawns). In all, if you want to ever have domestic robots that can fully integrate into our environment, legs are the only option. Four can work, but two is ultimately better if more difficult. There's a reason many animals in this world evolved legs.
As an aside, other things to think about in robots are the possibility that they can have both wheels and legs, using the wheels when they need to go fast on level surfaces, and legs otherwise. And while looking at how animals evolved to move, the only other real options other than legs are flying, swimming, or peristaltic motion (like snakes). Peristaltic motion has serious potential, but we know even less about implementing it in robots than walking.
the thing is, I get >7 out of 10 regularly, which is a hell of a lot better than 17.2%...
No, the parent is actually correct - i've seen this effect too on (Canadian) quarters and it is waaay more pronounced than 51% - I can regularly guess the results 7 out of ten coin tosses right, and frequently two out of the ten tosses I get wrong only because I screw up and allow the coin to flip over or something when it lands in my hand. In fact, when I first saw this story - my first reaction was "duh, who didn't know that?"
It's also worth noting that this effect seems to work best if you catch the coin at the same level you launched it from.
This is more than all other military spending by all other nations combined.
Well, actually it means that you're spending more than the next 25 highest spending nations combined - not quite all nations. I've done some debating on the space programs recently and you have to have you statistics right unless you want to get shot down badly.
All told, spending more on defense than your next 25 competitors combined does still seem a little silly - especially considering that the top few of those are britain, france, russia, and other key allies.
What's to stop a holder of a watermarked image from just adding even more noise on top of the image. Sure, it would degrade image quality a bit, but then so does the original watermark. Then, when the noise pattern in the distributed image is compared, it wouldn't match. Now, IANAEE, so it's possible that there are algorithms which can detect the underlying first layer of noise originally applied, or that obscuring the watermark would unacceptably degrade the signal, but it otherwise seems like a pretty simple way to defeat the process to me.
As well, aren't there signal processing algorithms which can remove noise from an image? Sure it won't be anywhere near matching the original, but all it has to do is change the noise signal enough...
Wrong, Wrong and, Wrong. Please Play again.
The trick is you paint the rock white, not black (i.e. you increase its albedo). The act of reflecting light imparts double the momentum of the act of absorbing it, thereby changing its orbit. Further, it doesn't matter that the asteroid rotates as you paint the whole asteroid. And actually, surprisingly, some of the guys at JPL have calculated that the area is actually enough - provided that the paint is applied early enough (several years prior to the predicted impact). The Yarkovsky effect is pretty small, but if you give it long enough, it will change the asteroid's orbit.
I dunno, I think the CAN-SPAM act is pretty appropriately named - it seems to legalize exactly what the title says.
I wasn't aware that there were any american venus landers. Does anyone have any info on these (if they exist)?
Um, that's going to mercury, not venus. All the same, it looks pretty cool. It's too bad they canceled the lander - it would have been really sweet to see pictures from the surface of mars.
You asked two questions, and gave two possible answers, and both are surprisingly 100% correct.