"It may be nothing, it may be everything" said Sims. The object could be one of the explosive bolts used to secure the probe to its host during take-off. More worryingly, it could be something that broke off Beagle 2, or a wrinkle in the insulation wrapping the probe.
The Shoe was lost for want of a Nail;
The Horse was lost for want of a Shoe;
The Rider was lost for want of a Horse;
The Battle was lost for want of a Rider;
The Challenger was lost for want of an O-ring;
The Columbia was lost for want of a Ceramic Tile;
The Beagle was lost (probably) for want of Undamaged Insulation;
And on and on it goes. Kingdoms and spacecraft get lost on a dime, these days.
Since most quality hotels are quite willing to offer free cable internet access within their rooms, why shouldn't airports and public areas with lots of retail/food businesses (such as shopping malls) follow suit? You provide an extra reason for well-heeled Wi-Fi users (who generally have more money to spend than your average joe) to stick around and spend money on coffeeshops, etc. Plus they will be more likely to return.
I bet those places that offer free Wi-Fi will soon be satisfied that it's a cost that pays for itself, and we can expect the trend to continue.
Like his previous project, K-bot, Hanson sculpted Hertz to resemble his girlfriend.
This is either the sincerest form of flattery, or he's obsessively building a replacement for his girlfriend whose behaviour is controllable, and governed by logic.
Actually, low voter turnout doesn't bother me so much. Actual voters are a self-selecting sample from the total population of eligible voters. People who are too lazy, uninformed, or stupid to vote don't deserve to have a say in decisions that will affect the rest of our lives.
The provision granting increased power was little more than a single line of legislation. But Dempsey said it was written in such a cryptic manner that no one noticed its significance until it was too late.
Isn't democracy grand? I wonder how many more infringements upon freedom and privacy intelligence agencies can sneak past our apathetic, uninformed legislators.
According to the official website of Incubus (Shatner's 1965 Esperanto masterpiece):
Co-star Ann Atmar committed suicide in 1965 shortly after appearing in Incubus.
Not that this should in any way be taken as a commentary on Mr. Shatner's thespian abilities, but when your co-stars feel compelled to off themselves before the movie is even released...
Nah, Shatner couldn't have been that bad. Or... could... he...?
Perry, our hero, (in reality a thinly veiled version of Heinlein himself), is involved in a car accident in 1939, and wakes up in the year 2086 in the body of someone who looks very much like himself, but the original inhabitant of the body chose to end his life (shades of Stranger in a Strange Land here). Our Hero was discovered in the snowy Nevada mountains by a woman named Diana, who is a professional dancer and lives in the mountains. She takes him back to her place to recover, and they're lounging around her house naked by the second page of the book.
Well, come on. The poor guy hasn't had an erection in 147 years. I'm surprised he waited until the second page to start getting it on.
The New Zealand government has been pretty agressive about exploiting the success of the LOTR movies to make millions of dollars in tourism revenues.
I guess they don't want those befuddled tourists who knock on doors aking where Frodo lives to accidentally stumble upon a homemade cruise missile silo instead.
I know that this argument sounds rather hollow in the face of the enormous commercial success of certain error-prone software and operating systems, but...
The best consumer market approval should be (and will probably always be) the almighty consumer dollar.
We're not talking about machines that can be quantifiably tested for quality control in labs and upheld to rigid engineering standards. We're talking intangibles. Creating and enforcing regulatory standards for bits and bytes is far to complex and ambiguous a task to be trusted to the government.
DeBeers claims that a "natural" diamond is worth much, much more than a visually indistinguishable and chemically identical diamond made in the lab last Tuesday. It is priceless simply because it came from deep inside the earth, formed by intense heat and pressure over millions of years.
Similarly, a few tiny chunks of the moon are worth $50,000 while a chemically identical chunk of rock from Colorado (olivine, with traces of ilmenite and iron oxides) is basically worthless (maybe $5/ton if you bought itin bulk).It's all about the brand, baby. Symbolism sells.
It's been pointed out many times before, but worth repeating: the whole boneheaded "Humans as batteries" idea was the weakest link (perhaps the only weak link) in the first movie. Newsflash: humans cannot be a primary energy source. Perpetual motion machines are impossible. Humans can't even store energy very well. Come to think of it, humans are pretty crappy batteries compared to about a billion more efficient energy storage alternatives, both organic and inorganic, that don't require the construction of a cumbersome artificial reality.
I had been hoping that in the sequels a more plausible explanation for the Matrix would emerge. Perhaps the machines depend on the combined processing power of a billion human brains, in some kind of distributed neural network. No such luck. Dammit!
Anyways, maybe your fantasy "Matrix Ressurected" plot shouldn't hinge on a premise that anyone with a basic understanding of physics or logic would find laughable. But then again, logic and coherence don't seem to be much of a priority for the Wachowskis these days. Judging by their latest creation, they prefer dazzlingly artificial fight scenes, cheesy melodrama and "symbolic" philosophical hackwork
Too bad they're not so keen on good old-fashioned storytelling, audience empathy with the characters, believability, and common sense.
The built-in 25W laser is powerful enough to burn quickly through paper and cardboard without leaving so much as a charred edge.
Coming soon to a store near you... the VersaTattoo! It burns the most intricate designs on your skin with hardly any charred flesh! Warning: some swelling, blistering, or permanent scarring may result. Hold away from eyes. Use at own risk.
There is believed to be tension within NASA between safety experts who fear the ISS is becoming dangerously dilapidated and astronauts and managers who do not want to leave the outpost unmanned for fear it could become vulnerable to an accident that would make it spiral out of control.
Space travel is generally acknowledged to be risky. The astronauts are certainly aware of this. NASA should do all they can to repair the ISS, but it makes no sense to jettison a project that cost tens of billions of dollars (not to mention millions of man-hours) simply because the risk levels have increased.
It is projected that sales of all types of domestic robots (vacuum cleaning, lawn-mowing, window cleaning and other types) in the period 2003-2006 can reach some 638,000 units.
Domestic services have been a massive yet hidden part of the economy for hundreds of years. Now, they've finally found a way to take humans out of the equation altogether.
Perhaps the poor Mexican cleaning ladies will unionize and go on strike--just like the auto workers did when their jobs were threatened by robots. But I don't think so. As automation displaces menial, low-income jobs, the unskilled workers on the bottom rung will have nowhere to turn. As usual, the rich will get richer and the poor get poorer. So much for technology empowering the working class.
Richard Clark came to us two days after taking the job following 9/11, and I told him, "There are 13 geographically dispersed data centers. You really couldn't take it out." And he said, "What if I drove a truck up to each one and blew them up at the same time?" OK, then you'd take them out. So, there's this notion of what's resilient enough and what's your recovery time.
The notion that Al Qaeda or some other terrorist group would launch a coordinated strike to take out DNS servers is totally absurd. Even if they had the ability to launch a co-ordinated bomb strike with this kind of sophistication and ingenuity (highly unlikely), I'm sure they'd go after targets that had a bit more of a visible impact.... for example, the power grid.
The entire population of Canada can fit in one or two of our major cities. It is no surprise you can manually count the ballots quickly.
The population of Canada, 32 million, is about 1/10 of the United States. Just use ten times as many counters as we do, and you should be able to count the ballots in an equal amount of time.
This isn't rocket science, eh? It's democracy, and common sense.
Harris acknowledged no proof exists that anyone rigged the election systems, but she said, "We'll never know exactly what happened in Georgia because there's no paper trail to verify the votes."
You can't beat the Canadian ballot for simplicity and effectiveness. The voter uses a pen to mark a box next to the candidate's name on a simple, clearly laid out paper card. The voter then places the card in the ballot box. It's basically idiot-proof.
The ballots are fully counted, by humans, within hours of the polls closing. No hanging chads, no electronic errors or confusion. A paper trail exists, so recounts are simple. It's been this way for decades and there have never been any real issues with the system.
Felstein, Marin & Co literally ran for their lives from our lawyer, they had a very close shave indeed and were extremely lucky the Judge accepted their pleas for dismissal.
This may just be a pet peeve of mine, but why is it that so many educated people use the word "literally" when they mean precisely the opposite?
The sentence conjures up images of screaming shysters fleeing desperately from the good guy's lawyer, who in a frenzy of righteous anger is attempting to chase them down and cut their throats. That may be how the judicial system works in Afghanistan, but not in America, the land of the Free and Non-Literal.
President Hu Jintao watched the blast-off at the Jiuquan Launch Center and hailed the launch as "the glory of our great motherland."
Hu said the culmination of the 11-year space program was a "historic step of the Chinese people in the advance of climbing over the peak of the world's science and technology."
Is it just me, or is there something ominous in the way this is worded? The Chinese government believes that the motherland will inevitably surpass other nations in science and technology, and this is a major advance towards the goal of global supremacy.
To pay the extensive costs, the utilities and the DOE advocate increases in utility rates. The costs involved would certainly be in the tens of billions of dollars. Thus, deregulation would result in large cost increases to consumers, not the savings once promised.
I think that for many areas in North America, re-regulation is the answer. State and provincial governments should buy grid infrastructure back from the mismanaged, ailing private companies. They could then form public trusts (with the consumers as "shareholders") and contract out the new grid construction to private companies.
The advantage to this is that a public trust wouldn't be beholden to shareholders and the stock market. They could effectively plan for the long term, rather than shy away from desperately needed capital outlays simply because the managers need to show a profit in the next quarter.
Slashdot Mirror
"It may be nothing, it may be everything" said Sims. The object could be one of the explosive bolts used to secure the probe to its host during take-off. More worryingly, it could be something that broke off Beagle 2, or a wrinkle in the insulation wrapping the probe.
And on and on it goes. Kingdoms and spacecraft get lost on a dime, these days.
"The law of unintended consequences in this case has the potential to be huge," Brodsky said.
Actually, I think the law of unintended consequences has been licensed and copyrighted to the Elect Ralph Nader Committee for quite some time now.
"Pain requires conscious attention. Humans have a limited amount of this and it's hard to do two things at once," he said.
I truly relish the day they give this VR "distraction therapy" to women giving birth...
Wife: OH MY GOD, THE PAIN!
Husband: Keep pushing, love! Keep pushing!
Wife: I AM! I'm trying, but he won't come out! Enough of this natural childbirth shit, I WANT AN EPIDURAL... oooh... hey, look over there...
Anxious Husband: What? What is it, honey?
Wife: it's a polar bear!
Since most quality hotels are quite willing to offer free cable internet access within their rooms, why shouldn't airports and public areas with lots of retail/food businesses (such as shopping malls) follow suit? You provide an extra reason for well-heeled Wi-Fi users (who generally have more money to spend than your average joe) to stick around and spend money on coffeeshops, etc. Plus they will be more likely to return.
I bet those places that offer free Wi-Fi will soon be satisfied that it's a cost that pays for itself, and we can expect the trend to continue.
Like his previous project, K-bot, Hanson sculpted Hertz to resemble his girlfriend.
This is either the sincerest form of flattery, or he's obsessively building a replacement for his girlfriend whose behaviour is controllable, and governed by logic.
It sort of makes you think...
Actually, low voter turnout doesn't bother me so much. Actual voters are a self-selecting sample from the total population of eligible voters. People who are too lazy, uninformed, or stupid to vote don't deserve to have a say in decisions that will affect the rest of our lives.
The provision granting increased power was little more than a single line of legislation. But Dempsey said it was written in such a cryptic manner that no one noticed its significance until it was too late.
Isn't democracy grand? I wonder how many more infringements upon freedom and privacy intelligence agencies can sneak past our apathetic, uninformed legislators.
According to the official website of Incubus (Shatner's 1965 Esperanto masterpiece) :
Co-star Ann Atmar committed suicide in 1965 shortly after appearing in Incubus.
Not that this should in any way be taken as a commentary on Mr. Shatner's thespian abilities, but when your co-stars feel compelled to off themselves before the movie is even released...
Nah, Shatner couldn't have been that bad. Or... could... he...?
Perry, our hero, (in reality a thinly veiled version of Heinlein himself), is involved in a car accident in 1939, and wakes up in the year 2086 in the body of someone who looks very much like himself, but the original inhabitant of the body chose to end his life (shades of Stranger in a Strange Land here). Our Hero was discovered in the snowy Nevada mountains by a woman named Diana, who is a professional dancer and lives in the mountains. She takes him back to her place to recover, and they're lounging around her house naked by the second page of the book.
Well, come on. The poor guy hasn't had an erection in 147 years. I'm surprised he waited until the second page to start getting it on.
The New Zealand government has been pretty agressive about exploiting the success of the LOTR movies to make millions of dollars in tourism revenues.
I guess they don't want those befuddled tourists who knock on doors aking where Frodo lives to accidentally stumble upon a homemade cruise missile silo instead.
I know that this argument sounds rather hollow in the face of the enormous commercial success of certain error-prone software and operating systems, but...
The best consumer market approval should be (and will probably always be) the almighty consumer dollar.
We're not talking about machines that can be quantifiably tested for quality control in labs and upheld to rigid engineering standards. We're talking intangibles. Creating and enforcing regulatory standards for bits and bytes is far to complex and ambiguous a task to be trusted to the government.
DeBeers claims that a "natural" diamond is worth much, much more than a visually indistinguishable and chemically identical diamond made in the lab last Tuesday. It is priceless simply because it came from deep inside the earth, formed by intense heat and pressure over millions of years.
Similarly, a few tiny chunks of the moon are worth $50,000 while a chemically identical chunk of rock from Colorado (olivine, with traces of ilmenite and iron oxides) is basically worthless (maybe $5/ton if you bought itin bulk).It's all about the brand, baby. Symbolism sells.
It's been pointed out many times before, but worth repeating: the whole boneheaded "Humans as batteries" idea was the weakest link (perhaps the only weak link) in the first movie. Newsflash: humans cannot be a primary energy source. Perpetual motion machines are impossible. Humans can't even store energy very well. Come to think of it, humans are pretty crappy batteries compared to about a billion more efficient energy storage alternatives, both organic and inorganic, that don't require the construction of a cumbersome artificial reality.
I had been hoping that in the sequels a more plausible explanation for the Matrix would emerge. Perhaps the machines depend on the combined processing power of a billion human brains, in some kind of distributed neural network. No such luck. Dammit!
Anyways, maybe your fantasy "Matrix Ressurected" plot shouldn't hinge on a premise that anyone with a basic understanding of physics or logic would find laughable. But then again, logic and coherence don't seem to be much of a priority for the Wachowskis these days. Judging by their latest creation, they prefer dazzlingly artificial fight scenes, cheesy melodrama and "symbolic" philosophical hackwork
Too bad they're not so keen on good old-fashioned storytelling, audience empathy with the characters, believability, and common sense.
Imagine hacking one of these things...
Shopping Cart:: "Hey! One bag of Fritos is enough, fatty!"
Befuddled Shopper: "OK, Mr. Magic Shopping Cart, whatever you say..." (puts Fritos back)
Shopping Cart: "Now fix my damn squeaky wheel!"
It's good to know that if Jacques Chirac loses the next French election, he can fall back on his natural talents as a nasal ranger.
The built-in 25W laser is powerful enough to burn quickly through paper and cardboard without leaving so much as a charred edge.
Coming soon to a store near you... the VersaTattoo! It burns the most intricate designs on your skin with hardly any charred flesh! Warning: some swelling, blistering, or permanent scarring may result. Hold away from eyes. Use at own risk.
I usally look DOWN to find Velcro. That's where my sneakers are.
There is believed to be tension within NASA between safety experts who fear the ISS is becoming dangerously dilapidated and astronauts and managers who do not want to leave the outpost unmanned for fear it could become vulnerable to an accident that would make it spiral out of control.
Space travel is generally acknowledged to be risky. The astronauts are certainly aware of this. NASA should do all they can to repair the ISS, but it makes no sense to jettison a project that cost tens of billions of dollars (not to mention millions of man-hours) simply because the risk levels have increased.
It is projected that sales of all types of domestic robots (vacuum cleaning, lawn-mowing, window cleaning and other types) in the period 2003-2006 can reach some 638,000 units.
Domestic services have been a massive yet hidden part of the economy for hundreds of years. Now, they've finally found a way to take humans out of the equation altogether.
Perhaps the poor Mexican cleaning ladies will unionize and go on strike--just like the auto workers did when their jobs were threatened by robots. But I don't think so. As automation displaces menial, low-income jobs, the unskilled workers on the bottom rung will have nowhere to turn. As usual, the rich will get richer and the poor get poorer. So much for technology empowering the working class.
Richard Clark came to us two days after taking the job following 9/11, and I told him, "There are 13 geographically dispersed data centers. You really couldn't take it out." And he said, "What if I drove a truck up to each one and blew them up at the same time?" OK, then you'd take them out. So, there's this notion of what's resilient enough and what's your recovery time.
The notion that Al Qaeda or some other terrorist group would launch a coordinated strike to take out DNS servers is totally absurd. Even if they had the ability to launch a co-ordinated bomb strike with this kind of sophistication and ingenuity (highly unlikely), I'm sure they'd go after targets that had a bit more of a visible impact.... for example, the power grid.
The entire population of Canada can fit in one or two of our major cities. It is no surprise you can manually count the ballots quickly.
The population of Canada, 32 million, is about 1/10 of the United States. Just use ten times as many counters as we do, and you should be able to count the ballots in an equal amount of time.
This isn't rocket science, eh? It's democracy, and common sense.
Harris acknowledged no proof exists that anyone rigged the election systems, but she said, "We'll never know exactly what happened in Georgia because there's no paper trail to verify the votes."
You can't beat the Canadian ballot for simplicity and effectiveness. The voter uses a pen to mark a box next to the candidate's name on a simple, clearly laid out paper card. The voter then places the card in the ballot box. It's basically idiot-proof.
The ballots are fully counted, by humans, within hours of the polls closing. No hanging chads, no electronic errors or confusion. A paper trail exists, so recounts are simple. It's been this way for decades and there have never been any real issues with the system.
What's so hard about that?
Felstein, Marin & Co literally ran for their lives from our lawyer, they had a very close shave indeed and were extremely lucky the Judge accepted their pleas for dismissal.
This may just be a pet peeve of mine, but why is it that so many educated people use the word "literally" when they mean precisely the opposite?
The sentence conjures up images of screaming shysters fleeing desperately from the good guy's lawyer, who in a frenzy of righteous anger is attempting to chase them down and cut their throats. That may be how the judicial system works in Afghanistan, but not in America, the land of the Free and Non-Literal.
President Hu Jintao watched the blast-off at the Jiuquan Launch Center and hailed the launch as "the glory of our great motherland."
Hu said the culmination of the 11-year space program was a "historic step of the Chinese people in the advance of climbing over the peak of the world's science and technology."
Is it just me, or is there something ominous in the way this is worded? The Chinese government believes that the motherland will inevitably surpass other nations in science and technology, and this is a major advance towards the goal of global supremacy.
To pay the extensive costs, the utilities and the DOE advocate increases in utility rates. The costs involved would certainly be in the tens of billions of dollars. Thus, deregulation would result in large cost increases to consumers, not the savings once promised.
I think that for many areas in North America, re-regulation is the answer. State and provincial governments should buy grid infrastructure back from the mismanaged, ailing private companies. They could then form public trusts (with the consumers as "shareholders") and contract out the new grid construction to private companies.
The advantage to this is that a public trust wouldn't be beholden to shareholders and the stock market. They could effectively plan for the long term, rather than shy away from desperately needed capital outlays simply because the managers need to show a profit in the next quarter.