Relax, we're not going to break the Moon. It's been hit by much bigger blows than any nuclear explosive we might ever use for mining; just look at all those craters!
Oh, and there is no space junk in our atmosphere. It's all up above the atmosphere; once a bit of junk sinks down into the atmosphere, air resistance kills its orbit and it falls in, burning up on the way down.
The eventual re-entry of the ISS probably isn't much to worry about. The Russians did a fine job keeping Mir on track when it came down, and the Pacific is a large target, hard to miss... (although NASA did manage to hit Australia when Skylab came down...)
Yup, no worries there if you have one of those South Pole sites with permanent daylight. Anywhere else you'll have to deal with a two-week night illuminated by the Earth. Batteries or fuel cells, perhaps, to store the surplus from the daylight phase, but I'd want a nuclear reactor handy as a backup.
#2 - Oxygen: Converting CO2 back to O2 with plants is one possibility, however, this may take awhile to get up and running. Power should be a nonissue for using filters similar to the space station. O2 can always be obtained from water but on the moon.... water isn't the best choice.
Mir technology ought to do it, assuming we have plenty of power.
#3 - Speaking of water- transporting water up is one issue. Once you get enough, hopefully systems for purifying, using plants, etc can be used.
Shipping up all that water is a non-starter. Water recycling is _essential_. Using plants for this, as well as for O2 production, would be nice, but we can probably do it with machines more reliably to begin with. Again, it's all been done on Mir for years.
#4 - food - would require routine trips of food up until you got a large enough installation of plants. What would happen if you had a challenger disaster again and the people need foor?
You don't use the Space Shuttle to launch food supplies! Use the Progress drones to ship it to the Station, then some sort of orbital transfer vehicle (most likely yet another variant on the general theme of Soyuz) to ship it to the Moon.
#5 - sex and internet - not necessarily in that order? hmmm...
For psychological reasons you'd probably want a roughly equal gender balance... Getting a net link would be interesting. You'd have immense bandwidth, but ping times from hell.
I think you'll be fighting a losing battle. Spam is no longer just meat... But the generally accepted term for 'one who spams' is 'spammer', with two 'm's. So, go forth and spelling-flame!
Incidentally, Hormel, the company that actually makes SPAM tinned meat, gets picky about this too. They have no problem with 'spam' being used to mean 'junk email' but prefer it to be lower-case. Their trademark is SPAM. So you haven't been sent SPAM, you've been sent spam...
The military are weird. There's no R in Colonel. There's no F in Lieutenant. And it's a little-known curio of some smaller Welsh regiments that 'Sergeant' is actually pronounced 'Wibble'.
Nintendo want to keep the best back for a while. Release SMB3 first, and the punters won't be all that impressed with SMB2. Now that they have Super Mario World, though, it's safe to release the big one.
Yes, I think SMB 3 is better than SMW. I thought so first time round too...
I'd like to see a Zelda collection cart on GBA... Legend of Zelda and Adventure of Link (NES), the SNES Zelda, and Zelda DX from GBC. That would be a real monster. And all within a single megabyte.
If I write and publish an e-book reader in Russia, should I be held accountable for the laws on e-book publishing in the United States?
No way. If they want to prevent certain internet sites (or e-book readers in this case) from propagating to their people, that's their own right as a government (hypothetically... no I don't believe in government censorship but they would do it anyway)... but it's not my responsibility to make sure that my work is compliant with ALL LAWS EVERYWHERE.
When Sega started releasing Sonic games on PC, they apparently used the freeware KGen emulator. If someone's already written a public-domain NES emu for GBA, why should Nintendo bother to write their own?
Super Mario World already has been ported to GBA. It's called Super Mario Advance 2, which is a bit confusing, because Super Mario Advance was actually Super Mario Bros. 2, except it wasn't, because Super Mario Bros. 2 was actually Doki Doki Panic, and the real Super Mario Bros. 2 only ever appeared in the West as Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels on the SNES Super Mario All-Stars pack...
(gasp)...
Like I said, confusing...
The next SNES port will apparently be Yoshi's Island.
It should play video games at least as well as the original gameboy.
I think most modern palmtops are quite capable of running a Gameboy emulator, and storing lots and lots of games. NES, too. So that's Tetris sorted, and all the classic eighties Marioes, and Zelda 1, 2 and 4. Who needs a life?
BTW: a colour, backlit screen is possible, but it _eats_ power. Remember the Sega GameGear? Battery life on 6xAA ~ 2 hours? Nintendo managed to get colour sorted, but sacrificed the backlight; neither GBC nor GBA have lit screens, but they have long, LONG battery lives.
Strange how we've never spotted the emission line corresponding to transitions to this below-ground-state in the hydrogen spectrum, isn't it?
Strange how a bunch of perpetual motion merchants wave Quantum Mechanics around the place for the explanation of how their gadget works. Sometimes. When no actual physicists are looking, but often when potential investors are around.
Strange how many cranks the NASA Breakthrough Physics Program gives respectability to. NASA's least-funded irrelevant sideshow picks up every nut that comes along, investigates their claim, and nothing comes of it. Nut carries on with career saying 'Yep, NASA were interested, and then they covered it up! Big oil interests leaning on the gub'mint, see, don't care for the little guy, with one of these you could be rich!'
I suppose NASA have to be doing something Trekkish - the man in the street expects them to be working towards the Starship Enterprise, after all. Just a shame about the fallout.
Personally, I'm backing Schrodinger to win this one:-)
Just what's going on out there, anyway? South Korea beat Poland - OK, the Poles aren't _that_ big a name, and Korea have the home advantage. The US beat Portugal - bloody hell, indeed. Portugal are on a level with England and Holland at the very least.
But how in the name of sanity did _Senegal_ beat the _French_? It's just plain absurd...
The dinosaurs kept the robots down for a long time in my world. The robots were:-¦ everywhere, but since most of the land was jungle, the dinos were:-) and generally did better. Of course, sooner or later climate change did for large areas of jungle, and the robots pulled ahead...
They don't seem to spontaneously take to the water, but if some disaster (or Hand of God) dumps them in the water they'll thrive there.
The first Robot civilisation advanced absurdly quickly - they jump _straight_ to Info Age, being, as they are, robots:-) I ended up sitting and staring as civilisation after civilisation arose, spread worldwide and then left the planet. Look out, galaxy... Of course they trashed the place, the oceans boiled off and I had a planet that made Venus look like Risa, but the robots didn't mind... And since they aren't on the 'place life' menu, you can't genocide them automatically. You have to go hunting them with volcanoes and meteors.
Incidentally, I've still got my SimEarth manual at home. When I get back from uni in a few weeks I'll mail a copy of the planet data to anyone who needs it; I doubt Maxis are too concerned about piracy after all this time.
Soon accurate telescopes will be installed to make extremely careful measurements of Mercury's orbit to analyze the accuracy of Newton's theories. One of the lead researchers says that if Newton's theory is not right, it will only need minor adjustments, due to its deadly accurate precision.
The SimEarth manual was _amazing_. While I was playing SimEarth I got given a geography essay thing (I was, what, thirteen?) on ecology etc.
_crunch!_
Two dozen pages later, into which I dragged all sorts of impressive long words, Gaia theory with added daisies, some handy biology, a bit of geology and a healthy dollop of futurology, I had to stop to eat. And get some more ink. And go play SimEarth some more.
By the way - did you ever discover the robots? They were an undocumented sixteenth species, which appeared if a nanotech city got nuked. They were seriously tough customers and took over the world if you weren't careful. I set up a jungle world once with two large continents: Robot Armageddon Land and the Lost World of the Dinosaurs. Then I built a land bridge and watched the fun. Japanese monster movies on a global scale - muhahahaha!
Some religious rules break down even on Earth in regions where their underlying assumptions are false.
Take Ramadan, for instance. For one month, Muslims are forbidden to eat or drink during the hours of daylight. Fine in Arabia, but potentially lethal in an Antarctic summer. How do they manage?
Oh, wait, let me guess... they all arrange to be stationed in the Arctic instead, so they spend Ramadan in permanent night;-)
Leicester University create Mars-in-a-box...
on
Mars on Earth
·
· Score: 1
... put Beagle 2 probe inside, save millions on interplanetary transport costs.... put Damon Albarn inside, save having to hear the fscking Gorillaz ever again.... put Damien Hirst inside, save innocent cows.
The emails we are sending out are 'opt in' emails (and not just some bullshit line of text saying 'See our XXX sluts, you opted into this email'). These emails are sent to a legitimate user base, who have selected to be contacted via email.
Are you running _confirmed_ opt-in, though? In other words, the first email you send to a new subscriber says something like 'Your address was entered into our form at whatever.example.com, if you really want to subscribe please {reply to this mail / click here / whatever} to confirm. If you don't we will send no more mails.'
Otherwise you could end up being used as part of some mass-subscribe attack.
Boba Fet: Hello, my name is Boba Fet. You killed my father. Prepare to die.
Mace Windu: STOP SAYING THAT!!!
Actually, it's more like:
MACE: Looks like me and Obi-Wan caught you at breakfast, sorry 'bout that. What'cha eatin'?
BOBA FETT: Banthaburgers.
MACE: Banthaburgers. The cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast. What kinda banthaburgers?
BOBA: Cheesebanthaburgers.
MACE: No, I mean where did you get'em? Mos Eisley, Owen's, Tatooine Greasy Spoon, where?
BOBA:
Big Jabba Burger.
MACE:
Big Jabba Burger. That's that Huttese banthaburger joint. I heard they got some tasty burgers. I ain't never had one myself, how are they?
BOBA:
They're good.
MACE:
Mind if I try one of yours?
BOBA FETT:
No.
MACE:
Yours is this one, right?
BOBA FETT:
Yeah.
MACE:
Uuummmm, that's a tasty burger. You know what they call a Banthaburger on Naboo?...
(at which point BOBA FETT's anonymous bigchested female assassin associate bursts into the room and fires twenty blaster rounds straight at MACE's head)...
I think evesham.com do something similar. Big screen, AiW, surround, DVD, yadda, yadda... It's much the same as the basic Athlon job except they've replaced the nVidia card with the ATi. Tempting, but I'll wait for Hammer before I jump.
Didn't Jesus walk on water? I think perhaps you mean Moses.
Yep, Moses... or possibly the other geezer. God often does repeats of his most popular stunts (compare the almost identical feedings of 5000 and 4000, which literalists will presumably insist were separate occasions because the number's different), and this was no exception. Some fellow working for God did the same trick, but with the river Jordan, rather than the Red Sea.
Slashdot Mirror
Do I get frequent flier miles for my trips to and from the moon?
Only on PanAm...
Relax, we're not going to break the Moon. It's been hit by much bigger blows than any nuclear explosive we might ever use for mining; just look at all those craters! Oh, and there is no space junk in our atmosphere. It's all up above the atmosphere; once a bit of junk sinks down into the atmosphere, air resistance kills its orbit and it falls in, burning up on the way down. The eventual re-entry of the ISS probably isn't much to worry about. The Russians did a fine job keeping Mir on track when it came down, and the Pacific is a large target, hard to miss... (although NASA did manage to hit Australia when Skylab came down...)
#1 - Power: Solar energy is readily available.
Yup, no worries there if you have one of those South Pole sites with permanent daylight. Anywhere else you'll have to deal with a two-week night illuminated by the Earth. Batteries or fuel cells, perhaps, to store the surplus from the daylight phase, but I'd want a nuclear reactor handy as a backup.
#2 - Oxygen: Converting CO2 back to O2 with plants is one possibility, however, this may take awhile to get up and running. Power should be a nonissue for using filters similar to the space station. O2 can always be obtained from water but on the moon.... water isn't the best choice.
Mir technology ought to do it, assuming we have plenty of power.
#3 - Speaking of water- transporting water up is one issue. Once you get enough, hopefully systems for purifying, using plants, etc can be used.
Shipping up all that water is a non-starter. Water recycling is _essential_. Using plants for this, as well as for O2 production, would be nice, but we can probably do it with machines more reliably to begin with. Again, it's all been done on Mir for years.
#4 - food - would require routine trips of food up until you got a large enough installation of plants. What would happen if you had a challenger disaster again and the people need foor?
You don't use the Space Shuttle to launch food supplies! Use the Progress drones to ship it to the Station, then some sort of orbital transfer vehicle (most likely yet another variant on the general theme of Soyuz) to ship it to the Moon.
#5 - sex and internet - not necessarily in that order? hmmm...
For psychological reasons you'd probably want a roughly equal gender balance... Getting a net link would be interesting. You'd have immense bandwidth, but ping times from hell.
... in future, they should have Sir Killalot guarding the exit...
(How long before someone enters an entirely AI robot, I wonder? Terrifying mental image of Razer with nobody in control...)
I think you'll be fighting a losing battle. Spam is no longer just meat... But the generally accepted term for 'one who spams' is 'spammer', with two 'm's. So, go forth and spelling-flame!
Incidentally, Hormel, the company that actually makes SPAM tinned meat, gets picky about this too. They have no problem with 'spam' being used to mean 'junk email' but prefer it to be lower-case. Their trademark is SPAM. So you haven't been sent SPAM, you've been sent spam...
The military are weird. There's no R in Colonel. There's no F in Lieutenant. And it's a little-known curio of some smaller Welsh regiments that 'Sergeant' is actually pronounced 'Wibble'.
Yes, exactly. They couldn't release SMB 3 or SMW first, otherwise SMB 2 would be a bit disappointing.
Nintendo want to keep the best back for a while. Release SMB3 first, and the punters won't be all that impressed with SMB2. Now that they have Super Mario World, though, it's safe to release the big one. Yes, I think SMB 3 is better than SMW. I thought so first time round too... I'd like to see a Zelda collection cart on GBA... Legend of Zelda and Adventure of Link (NES), the SNES Zelda, and Zelda DX from GBC. That would be a real monster. And all within a single megabyte.
If I write and publish an e-book reader in Russia, should I be held accountable for the laws on e-book publishing in the United States?
No way. If they want to prevent certain internet sites (or e-book readers in this case) from propagating to their people, that's their own right as a government (hypothetically ... no I don't believe in government censorship but they would do it anyway) ... but it's not my responsibility to make sure that my work is compliant with ALL LAWS EVERYWHERE.
When Sega started releasing Sonic games on PC, they apparently used the freeware KGen emulator. If someone's already written a public-domain NES emu for GBA, why should Nintendo bother to write their own?
Super Mario World already has been ported to GBA. It's called Super Mario Advance 2, which is a bit confusing, because Super Mario Advance was actually Super Mario Bros. 2, except it wasn't, because Super Mario Bros. 2 was actually Doki Doki Panic, and the real Super Mario Bros. 2 only ever appeared in the West as Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels on the SNES Super Mario All-Stars pack...
(gasp)...
Like I said, confusing...
The next SNES port will apparently be Yoshi's Island.
Actually, the Morris Internet Worm struck way, way back in 1988...
It should play video games at least as well as the original gameboy.
I think most modern palmtops are quite capable of running a Gameboy emulator, and storing lots and lots of games. NES, too. So that's Tetris sorted, and all the classic eighties Marioes, and Zelda 1, 2 and 4. Who needs a life?
BTW: a colour, backlit screen is possible, but it _eats_ power. Remember the Sega GameGear? Battery life on 6xAA ~ 2 hours? Nintendo managed to get colour sorted, but sacrificed the backlight; neither GBC nor GBA have lit screens, but they have long, LONG battery lives.
Strange how we've never spotted the emission line corresponding to transitions to this below-ground-state in the hydrogen spectrum, isn't it?
Strange how a bunch of perpetual motion merchants wave Quantum Mechanics around the place for the explanation of how their gadget works. Sometimes. When no actual physicists are looking, but often when potential investors are around.
Strange how many cranks the NASA Breakthrough Physics Program gives respectability to. NASA's least-funded irrelevant sideshow picks up every nut that comes along, investigates their claim, and nothing comes of it. Nut carries on with career saying 'Yep, NASA were interested, and then they covered it up! Big oil interests leaning on the gub'mint, see, don't care for the little guy, with one of these you could be rich!'
I suppose NASA have to be doing something Trekkish - the man in the street expects them to be working towards the Starship Enterprise, after all. Just a shame about the fallout.
Personally, I'm backing Schrodinger to win this one :-)
Poland weren't terribly good, were they?
Just what's going on out there, anyway? South Korea beat Poland - OK, the Poles aren't _that_ big a name, and Korea have the home advantage. The US beat Portugal - bloody hell, indeed. Portugal are on a level with England and Holland at the very least.
But how in the name of sanity did _Senegal_ beat the _French_? It's just plain absurd...
The dinosaurs kept the robots down for a long time in my world. The robots were :-¦ everywhere, but since most of the land was jungle, the dinos were :-) and generally did better. Of course, sooner or later climate change did for large areas of jungle, and the robots pulled ahead...
They don't seem to spontaneously take to the water, but if some disaster (or Hand of God) dumps them in the water they'll thrive there.
The first Robot civilisation advanced absurdly quickly - they jump _straight_ to Info Age, being, as they are, robots :-) I ended up sitting and staring as civilisation after civilisation arose, spread worldwide and then left the planet. Look out, galaxy... Of course they trashed the place, the oceans boiled off and I had a planet that made Venus look like Risa, but the robots didn't mind... And since they aren't on the 'place life' menu, you can't genocide them automatically. You have to go hunting them with volcanoes and meteors.
Incidentally, I've still got my SimEarth manual at home. When I get back from uni in a few weeks I'll mail a copy of the planet data to anyone who needs it; I doubt Maxis are too concerned about piracy after all this time.
Soon accurate telescopes will be installed to make extremely careful measurements of Mercury's orbit to analyze the accuracy of Newton's theories. One of the lead researchers says that if Newton's theory is not right, it will only need minor adjustments, due to its deadly accurate precision.
The SimEarth manual was _amazing_. While I was playing SimEarth I got given a geography essay thing (I was, what, thirteen?) on ecology etc.
_crunch!_
Two dozen pages later, into which I dragged all sorts of impressive long words, Gaia theory with added daisies, some handy biology, a bit of geology and a healthy dollop of futurology, I had to stop to eat. And get some more ink. And go play SimEarth some more.
By the way - did you ever discover the robots? They were an undocumented sixteenth species, which appeared if a nanotech city got nuked. They were seriously tough customers and took over the world if you weren't careful. I set up a jungle world once with two large continents: Robot Armageddon Land and the Lost World of the Dinosaurs. Then I built a land bridge and watched the fun. Japanese monster movies on a global scale - muhahahaha!
Some religious rules break down even on Earth in regions where their underlying assumptions are false. Take Ramadan, for instance. For one month, Muslims are forbidden to eat or drink during the hours of daylight. Fine in Arabia, but potentially lethal in an Antarctic summer. How do they manage? Oh, wait, let me guess... they all arrange to be stationed in the Arctic instead, so they spend Ramadan in permanent night ;-)
... put Beagle 2 probe inside, save millions on interplanetary transport costs. ... put Damon Albarn inside, save having to hear the fscking Gorillaz ever again. ... put Damien Hirst inside, save innocent cows.
The emails we are sending out are 'opt in' emails (and not just some bullshit line of text saying 'See our XXX sluts, you opted into this email'). These emails are sent to a legitimate user base, who have selected to be contacted via email.
Are you running _confirmed_ opt-in, though? In other words, the first email you send to a new subscriber says something like 'Your address was entered into our form at whatever.example.com, if you really want to subscribe please {reply to this mail / click here / whatever} to confirm. If you don't we will send no more mails.'
Otherwise you could end up being used as part of some mass-subscribe attack.
Boba Fet: Hello, my name is Boba Fet. You killed my father. Prepare to die.
Mace Windu: STOP SAYING THAT!!!
Actually, it's more like:
MACE:
Looks like me and Obi-Wan caught you at breakfast, sorry 'bout that. What'cha eatin'?
BOBA FETT:
Banthaburgers.
MACE:
Banthaburgers. The cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast. What kinda banthaburgers?
BOBA:
Cheesebanthaburgers.
MACE:
No, I mean where did you get'em? Mos Eisley, Owen's, Tatooine Greasy Spoon, where?
BOBA:
Big Jabba Burger.
MACE:
Big Jabba Burger. That's that Huttese banthaburger joint. I heard they got some tasty burgers. I ain't never had one myself, how are they?
BOBA:
They're good.
MACE:
Mind if I try one of yours?
BOBA FETT:
No.
MACE:
Yours is this one, right?
BOBA FETT:
Yeah.
MACE:
Uuummmm, that's a tasty burger. You know what they call a Banthaburger on Naboo?...
(at which point BOBA FETT's anonymous bigchested female assassin associate bursts into the room and fires twenty blaster rounds straight at MACE's head)...
I think evesham.com do something similar. Big screen, AiW, surround, DVD, yadda, yadda... It's much the same as the basic Athlon job except they've replaced the nVidia card with the ATi. Tempting, but I'll wait for Hammer before I jump.
You sick, sick bastard.
I clicked this link in high spirits, knowing full well that nothing bad could possibly happened.
Then I remembered that this isn't *my* computer, it's the university's computer.
Then I remembered that this isn't Mozilla, nor is it Konqueror, but it's MSIE.
Then I just hit Ctrl-Alt-Del damn fast. Ugh. Three hundred goatse all over the screen.
Didn't Jesus walk on water? I think perhaps you mean Moses. Yep, Moses... or possibly the other geezer. God often does repeats of his most popular stunts (compare the almost identical feedings of 5000 and 4000, which literalists will presumably insist were separate occasions because the number's different), and this was no exception. Some fellow working for God did the same trick, but with the river Jordan, rather than the Red Sea.