And, according to the blurb, won't someone please think of all those children who are allowed to play MATURE-ONLY games being taught to . . . disrespect prostitutes . . . whoa, that's kinky in some weird sense. So, we could conclude that the widespread use of GTA by minors is actually a planned conspiracy by the morally righteous to stop prostitution, while their (Thompson) tools decry the situation. And finally, the difference between good and evil is obvious to all.
(Well, it's not all that obvious to me, but Beyond Good & Evil was a really good game.:)
Instead, they said the rovers had a 3 month life expectancy, and everyone is slapping Nasa on the back after 2 years into the mission. I think Nasa purposely make the 3 months comment just to reap the benefits of finally having a successful mission to mars.
Then you would be wrong. The 3-month designed life expectancy is the period it takes to accomplish the mission's primary goals. If the primary goals are accomplished, the mission is a success, if not it is considered a failure. Anything after that is gravy. Generally, mission operations are initially approved/funded only for the designed life expectancy, and any operations after that requires additional approval and funding. Try to remember that the satellite in space or a rover on another planet is only a part of a mission's costs.
Barring any significant dust or wind storms, there is no reason why the rovers should not have lasted this long if they are solar powered and reasonably well engineered.
Stuff happens. Like when they unexpectedly found what appeared to be saline mud under the rover wheels that certainly weren't designed for it. Supposedly, the Titanic was "reasonably well engineered", and we had far more experience with ship building at the time than we do now with building semi-autonomous exploration vehicles for other planets.
What is unbelievable is that Nasa designed something that didn't f*ck up in the first 3 months, or even on landing.
Over twenty years ago, NASA launched a satellite with a 3-year mission. There have been 13 points of failure, but thanks to built in redundancy, some clever engineers, and the ability to reprogram (for lack of a better term) the craft, it is still doing its job. Some years back NASA sent up a satellite with an experimental sensor and a 1-year maximum mission. Due to scientific interest in the data being returned, it is still flying after more than 5 years although it is out of fuel. First, you claim NASA over-engineered the rovers and then claim that NASA can't engineer anything in the first place.
Your car would last a century if some company put 800+ million into creating it, I would expect the same from a couple of 400 million dollar platforms with wheels on them.
The actual cost of the vehicle is a small part of the mission cost. The satellite I just mentioned was built for under $500,000, while the cost of the mission has been much greater. Royal Caribbean is building a cruise ship for over a billion dollars. Even with people to service and repair it, I doubt it will still be sailing cruises in 100 years (and that doesn't include operations costs as long as we're comparing cruise ships to Mars rovers).
I guess I do qualify as a "grey gamer", and I've been gaming since Pong. I do like FPS games as well as games like Myst. I like GTA and other action games too. Just because you get older doesn't mean you stop liking games. If it wasn't for older gamers, there never would have been a gaming industry or the hardware to play the current games. The game industry might want to consider that older gamers have more disposable income to waste on their wares.
Well, Microsoft decided to make it a big marketing point.. So now we all think it's very important.
That's true enough. To Microsoft, cryptic macros and embedded VBA are features and advantages. The rest of the world writes a little Perl script to do the job. Ah, the power of marketing.
The programming I do has no relation to games, and I could be all wet on this, but I do remember reading some things on the subject of PS2 programming. IIRC, Sony offered help/advice to game companies, but I don't know if that cost anything or not. The help would make sense since Sony depends on other companies to make most of the games that keeps the Playstation on top.
I also remember reading an article where Sony was asking PS2 developers to use the system's resources to better advantage, whatever that might mean. Whatever, games coming from SCEA, like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, seem to have awesome graphics, good frame rates, and great controls.
The important thing to take from all of this is that the slashdot editors are DESPERATE for new info on the PS3 and will put ANYTHING up.
Actually, I'd guess the Slashdot editors realize that we PS2 fanbois will hit on anything that might contain some real news about the new console, and the usual flamewars will ensue. Oh, you are new here.:)
If that sends more gamers (and thus developers) running back to good ol' reliable PC gaming, I'm all for it.
What is "old" or "reliable" about PC gaming? The only thing you can _rely_ on is that you will need the latest very expensive and (literally) screaming video card from one of two makers, a processor that needs water cooling (okay, minor exaggeration), a large drive, and a machine running a very recent version of Windows to get decent frame rate at the advertised resolution.
Unless you install a floppy drive, there won't be anything "old" about the system. I prefer to pay for a (less expensive) nice quiet game console that is guaranteed to handle every title for the next five year.
What you describe won't work. Your satellite would orbit Earth once a day, backwards.
That's what would be needed, so I think your corrected numbers are correct - it would take one orbit per "day". Of course it is not a "good idea", it was an answer to a ridiculous question. Nor am I going to "do this". Surprisingly, I am not allowed to build, launch, or run the MOC on satellites at my whim, even though I am allowed to post on Slashdot - who can figure?
What you are looking for is to position your satellite at the Earth-Sun Lagrange point (hard-core space geeks will gripe that it should be orbiting L1, but let's keep it simple). That's much further away than geo-sync, so you won't get very good views of specific targets on Earth.
No kidding? (And it's not MY satellite.) The discussion was about spy satellites, so there is no point in looking to the Lagrange points for a solution. It was a nonsense question as I tried to point out with my answer. (Unfortunately, I screwed up the mechanics by 1/2.)
A similar-to-geosynchronous orbit (equatorial, same distance) in the opposite direction should keep you close to permanent daylight if the satellite starts in the proper position, yes? That doesn't account for the Earth's orbit and changing position around the Sun. Hence the need for a slightly different orbit/speed to keep a satellite in such a pretty useless orbit. It was an answer to a very strange requirement for an Earth observing satellite. Feel free to offer something if you have it, Scotty. Dilithium crystals are always welcome.:)
As I said, the "in the sun" position wouldn't apply to all observers. We could also discuss polar orbits, but that would never be "in the sun" at all times.
Can a satellite be parked so that it is always "in the sun" (sol-synchronous?)?
That way only chromosphere observers would see it.
Just off the cuff, a reversed geosynchronous orbit at a slightly different speed/orbit to match the sun's relative position would seem possible, but that wouldn't keep observers at high or low latitudes from being able to spot the satellite. And it certainly wouldn't be a good orbit for Earth observation.
I can't seem to find those books in the non-fiction section.
Arthur C. Clarke also wrote a lot of fiction based on the real world, and Clancy has also written non-fiction works. Just because someone writes novels doesn't mean they don't know their field of interest.
It's more of a new hybrid species, like mules and triticale.
Mules don't replicate. I don't think the analogy works.
Just spend a few seconds thinking through the math. A bad influenza pandemic would kill around 1% of young, healthy people (1918 flu killed 2.5% of those infected). The U.S. has about 75 million people in the 15-34 age group, so that would mean about a million would die. About $500k/person/lifetime in economic productivity would be lost, destroying roughly $500 billion dollars of future GDP.
Forgive me, but your "math" seems more like incomplete statistics. The elderly are typically hit hardest by influenza. Given our current problems supporting the entitlement programs (and as harsh as it may seem), such a pandemic might prove economically helpful. As someone who is about to become part of that unwanted drain on the economy, I can say that. And the flu isn't a bad way to go. I nearly died from it about twenty-five years ago, and I just wanted to go to sleep. I wasn't all that happy at the time when my fiance and some of my relatives dragged me into the emergency room.
As for the whole productivity/GDP thing, I think that's more bad statistics. It assumes there are no replacements, and that everyone is productive. It's like those statistics showing how much smoking costs the country. They always ignore the costs from dying from other causes and the increased costs from old-age entitlements (and no, I don't smoke). If you're going to pump billions into preventative medicine, then it should go into further cancer research, but that won't get headlines on prime-time TV.
Hard drives are not commonly used for distribution of anything.
Please tell that to the RIAA, MPAA, and FBI. You're also mistaken on another front - external USB hard drives are being used to distribute large amounts of data. We buy and deliver about 50 drives per month.
Biology is not my field, but the thing that bothers me is that the virus has to mutate before it will readily transfer between humans.
Not necessarily. What can happen is that avian and human flu can infect one host at the same time. Even by viral standards, influenza is sloppy, so new viruses would be made with genes from both types. If a combination virus includes an avian virulence factor and a human transmissibility factor, you get the Martian Death Flu.
Okay. That still sounds like a mutation to me.
Is a vaccine developed now going to be effective against a virus that doesn't exist yet?
The odds are decent it will. . .
"Decent odds" are hard to quantify and cover a very wide range depending on your POV. Everything is a tradeoff. Apparently, we already have a leg up on the appropriate process for producing a vaccine if the need should arise. I still haven't heard anything that supports spending the billions you want to put into immediate reaction to a possible threat. It's not an attack on your expertise, just a pragmatic view of the real world.
Sixty seconds of listening to John Madden's commentary deadens all my sensory inputs. But maybe that's just the result of being an old L.A. Rams fan.:)
Seriously though, arthritis runs in the family, and while I get twinges in my thumbs and wrists (amongst other places), the more I play (PS2), the better my thumbs are. It doesn't do anything for the wrists - perhaps a tennis game with a small virtual racket, ala DDR? . . . Nevermind, that would only work if you had to play using both hands.
My mother, who has advanced RA, enjoys sudoku, so getting absorbed in something that takes concentration does help.
I'm not going to dispute all that, but I'd give the "common folk" a little more credit. While they might have problems with the flourescent pigs mentioned on Slashdot recently, the production of vaccines isn't all that strange. It has long been common to apply a mild infection to prevent worse. It used to be a tradition for parents to take their children to a household where another child had measles or chicken pox to get it over with early before it became a life-threatening illness later in life.
There weren't any noticable problems getting religous parents into line so their kids could get smallpox or polio vaccinations. I've got the scars to prove it.
Isn't there a so-called chicken cancer virus that is also RNA-based and has been known about for over a century without spreading to humans?
Biology is not my field, but the thing that bothers me is that the virus has to mutate before it will readily transfer between humans. Is a vaccine developed now going to be effective against a virus that doesn't exist yet? The article skirted that question at the end and didn't sound all that positive.
Slashdot Mirror
Won't someone please think of the prostitutes!
And, according to the blurb, won't someone please think of all those children who are allowed to play MATURE-ONLY games being taught to . . . disrespect prostitutes . . . whoa, that's kinky in some weird sense. So, we could conclude that the widespread use of GTA by minors is actually a planned conspiracy by the morally righteous to stop prostitution, while their (Thompson) tools decry the situation. And finally, the difference between good and evil is obvious to all.
(Well, it's not all that obvious to me, but Beyond Good & Evil was a really good game. :)
True, and he did contribute only $2,000. That should teach the rest of 'em. :)
I promise, I won't do ANYTHING bad to him *whistles innocently* really! *Loads gun behind his back* :P
. . . and accidentally shoots a nearby lawyer, leading to a case of conflicting emotions for the observers.
(I couldn't help it. Really, I hope the old guy pulls through okay.)
Instead, they said the rovers had a 3 month life expectancy, and everyone is slapping Nasa on the back after 2 years into the mission. I think Nasa purposely make the 3 months comment just to reap the benefits of finally having a successful mission to mars.
Then you would be wrong. The 3-month designed life expectancy is the period it takes to accomplish the mission's primary goals. If the primary goals are accomplished, the mission is a success, if not it is considered a failure. Anything after that is gravy. Generally, mission operations are initially approved/funded only for the designed life expectancy, and any operations after that requires additional approval and funding. Try to remember that the satellite in space or a rover on another planet is only a part of a mission's costs.
Barring any significant dust or wind storms, there is no reason why the rovers should not have lasted this long if they are solar powered and reasonably well engineered.
Stuff happens. Like when they unexpectedly found what appeared to be saline mud under the rover wheels that certainly weren't designed for it. Supposedly, the Titanic was "reasonably well engineered", and we had far more experience with ship building at the time than we do now with building semi-autonomous exploration vehicles for other planets.
What is unbelievable is that Nasa designed something that didn't f*ck up in the first 3 months, or even on landing.
Over twenty years ago, NASA launched a satellite with a 3-year mission. There have been 13 points of failure, but thanks to built in redundancy, some clever engineers, and the ability to reprogram (for lack of a better term) the craft, it is still doing its job. Some years back NASA sent up a satellite with an experimental sensor and a 1-year maximum mission. Due to scientific interest in the data being returned, it is still flying after more than 5 years although it is out of fuel. First, you claim NASA over-engineered the rovers and then claim that NASA can't engineer anything in the first place.
Your car would last a century if some company put 800+ million into creating it, I would expect the same from a couple of 400 million dollar platforms with wheels on them.
The actual cost of the vehicle is a small part of the mission cost. The satellite I just mentioned was built for under $500,000, while the cost of the mission has been much greater. Royal Caribbean is building a cruise ship for over a billion dollars. Even with people to service and repair it, I doubt it will still be sailing cruises in 100 years (and that doesn't include operations costs as long as we're comparing cruise ships to Mars rovers).
I guess I do qualify as a "grey gamer", and I've been gaming since Pong. I do like FPS games as well as games like Myst. I like GTA and other action games too. Just because you get older doesn't mean you stop liking games. If it wasn't for older gamers, there never would have been a gaming industry or the hardware to play the current games. The game industry might want to consider that older gamers have more disposable income to waste on their wares.
Yes, having used some of Microsoft's development tools, "wicked" is a fair description. It matches their management. I'm glad we could agree.
Even microsoft has a bunch of totally free "express edition" offerings which are surprisingly good
Crippleware is not a new concept. It looks like yet another example of "embrace and extend".
So buy a PS3.
Well, Microsoft decided to make it a big marketing point.. So now we all think it's very important.
That's true enough. To Microsoft, cryptic macros and embedded VBA are features and advantages. The rest of the world writes a little Perl script to do the job. Ah, the power of marketing.
The programming I do has no relation to games, and I could be all wet on this, but I do remember reading some things on the subject of PS2 programming. IIRC, Sony offered help/advice to game companies, but I don't know if that cost anything or not. The help would make sense since Sony depends on other companies to make most of the games that keeps the Playstation on top.
I also remember reading an article where Sony was asking PS2 developers to use the system's resources to better advantage, whatever that might mean. Whatever, games coming from SCEA, like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, seem to have awesome graphics, good frame rates, and great controls.
The important thing to take from all of this is that the slashdot editors are DESPERATE for new info on the PS3 and will put ANYTHING up.
Actually, I'd guess the Slashdot editors realize that we PS2 fanbois will hit on anything that might contain some real news about the new console, and the usual flamewars will ensue. Oh, you are new here. :)
If that sends more gamers (and thus developers) running back to good ol' reliable PC gaming, I'm all for it.
What is "old" or "reliable" about PC gaming? The only thing you can _rely_ on is that you will need the latest very expensive and (literally) screaming video card from one of two makers, a processor that needs water cooling (okay, minor exaggeration), a large drive, and a machine running a very recent version of Windows to get decent frame rate at the advertised resolution.
Unless you install a floppy drive, there won't be anything "old" about the system. I prefer to pay for a (less expensive) nice quiet game console that is guaranteed to handle every title for the next five year.
What you describe won't work. Your satellite would orbit Earth once a day, backwards.
That's what would be needed, so I think your corrected numbers are correct - it would take one orbit per "day". Of course it is not a "good idea", it was an answer to a ridiculous question. Nor am I going to "do this". Surprisingly, I am not allowed to build, launch, or run the MOC on satellites at my whim, even though I am allowed to post on Slashdot - who can figure?
What you are looking for is to position your satellite at the Earth-Sun Lagrange point (hard-core space geeks will gripe that it should be orbiting L1, but let's keep it simple). That's much further away than geo-sync, so you won't get very good views of specific targets on Earth.
No kidding? (And it's not MY satellite.) The discussion was about spy satellites, so there is no point in looking to the Lagrange points for a solution. It was a nonsense question as I tried to point out with my answer. (Unfortunately, I screwed up the mechanics by 1/2.)
A similar-to-geosynchronous orbit (equatorial, same distance) in the opposite direction should keep you close to permanent daylight if the satellite starts in the proper position, yes? That doesn't account for the Earth's orbit and changing position around the Sun. Hence the need for a slightly different orbit/speed to keep a satellite in such a pretty useless orbit. It was an answer to a very strange requirement for an Earth observing satellite. Feel free to offer something if you have it, Scotty. Dilithium crystals are always welcome. :)
As I said, the "in the sun" position wouldn't apply to all observers. We could also discuss polar orbits, but that would never be "in the sun" at all times.
Can a satellite be parked so that it is always "in the sun" (sol-synchronous?)? That way only chromosphere observers would see it.
Just off the cuff, a reversed geosynchronous orbit at a slightly different speed/orbit to match the sun's relative position would seem possible, but that wouldn't keep observers at high or low latitudes from being able to spot the satellite. And it certainly wouldn't be a good orbit for Earth observation.
I can't seem to find those books in the non-fiction section.
Arthur C. Clarke also wrote a lot of fiction based on the real world, and Clancy has also written non-fiction works. Just because someone writes novels doesn't mean they don't know their field of interest.
Oh, you were there too? Good memory!
And what did I tell you about smoking that stuff?
It's more of a new hybrid species, like mules and triticale.
Mules don't replicate. I don't think the analogy works.
Just spend a few seconds thinking through the math. A bad influenza pandemic would kill around 1% of young, healthy people (1918 flu killed 2.5% of those infected). The U.S. has about 75 million people in the 15-34 age group, so that would mean about a million would die. About $500k/person/lifetime in economic productivity would be lost, destroying roughly $500 billion dollars of future GDP.
Forgive me, but your "math" seems more like incomplete statistics. The elderly are typically hit hardest by influenza. Given our current problems supporting the entitlement programs (and as harsh as it may seem), such a pandemic might prove economically helpful. As someone who is about to become part of that unwanted drain on the economy, I can say that. And the flu isn't a bad way to go. I nearly died from it about twenty-five years ago, and I just wanted to go to sleep. I wasn't all that happy at the time when my fiance and some of my relatives dragged me into the emergency room.
As for the whole productivity/GDP thing, I think that's more bad statistics. It assumes there are no replacements, and that everyone is productive. It's like those statistics showing how much smoking costs the country. They always ignore the costs from dying from other causes and the increased costs from old-age entitlements (and no, I don't smoke). If you're going to pump billions into preventative medicine, then it should go into further cancer research, but that won't get headlines on prime-time TV.
Hard drives are not commonly used for distribution of anything.
Please tell that to the RIAA, MPAA, and FBI. You're also mistaken on another front - external USB hard drives are being used to distribute large amounts of data. We buy and deliver about 50 drives per month.
Okay. That still sounds like a mutation to me.
The odds are decent it will. . ."Decent odds" are hard to quantify and cover a very wide range depending on your POV. Everything is a tradeoff. Apparently, we already have a leg up on the appropriate process for producing a vaccine if the need should arise. I still haven't heard anything that supports spending the billions you want to put into immediate reaction to a possible threat. It's not an attack on your expertise, just a pragmatic view of the real world.
Play from a good office chair with armrests, height adjustment, and lumbar support. If you don't have one, put in a req. (Sheesh . . . amateurs . .)
Sixty seconds of listening to John Madden's commentary deadens all my sensory inputs. But maybe that's just the result of being an old L.A. Rams fan. :)
Seriously though, arthritis runs in the family, and while I get twinges in my thumbs and wrists (amongst other places), the more I play (PS2), the better my thumbs are. It doesn't do anything for the wrists - perhaps a tennis game with a small virtual racket, ala DDR? . . . Nevermind, that would only work if you had to play using both hands.
My mother, who has advanced RA, enjoys sudoku, so getting absorbed in something that takes concentration does help.
I'm not going to dispute all that, but I'd give the "common folk" a little more credit. While they might have problems with the flourescent pigs mentioned on Slashdot recently, the production of vaccines isn't all that strange. It has long been common to apply a mild infection to prevent worse. It used to be a tradition for parents to take their children to a household where another child had measles or chicken pox to get it over with early before it became a life-threatening illness later in life.
There weren't any noticable problems getting religous parents into line so their kids could get smallpox or polio vaccinations. I've got the scars to prove it.
Isn't there a so-called chicken cancer virus that is also RNA-based and has been known about for over a century without spreading to humans?
Biology is not my field, but the thing that bothers me is that the virus has to mutate before it will readily transfer between humans. Is a vaccine developed now going to be effective against a virus that doesn't exist yet? The article skirted that question at the end and didn't sound all that positive.