Oh, I wasn't thinking about subsidies necessarily. Mostly I was thinking that there should be laws around how a country might make a claim to an asteriod. What is required for a country or corporation to stake a valid claim? How long is the claim good for? What resources are required to maintain the claim? At some point, there will likely be an economic threshold where mining asteroids is feasable and doing some preplanning before the rush might be a good idea.
There's an old but interesting article on the challenges of mining asteroids. From the article:
Substantial legal issues have to be addressed before any of this can happen, of course; & for Lunar mining in particular (the issues involving asteroid mining are rather different), these issues are likely to be the most intractable in the short term. Commercial operations on the Moon are currently banned under the Moon Treaty; & - given that only the US-Americans currently claim to have any motivation to industrialise space - there's little or no motivation on the part of the rest of the world to change this situation (Australia has made some noises about trying to change this treat as some bureaucrats can smell a cheap buck here; but noises are all that Australian politicians are generally any good at). Asteroid mining may be legal in the absence of any contradictory precedents; but few financiers are likely to invest in a project where the final product can be legally hijacked by independent parties because there is no legally enforceable ownership.
There's a fair amount of landfills out there that probably have useful amounts of copper. That'll probably be the first place to dig. The hard part is separation and removing toxic waste from useful minerals.
Mining the asteroids is currently prohibitively expensive, but costs will eventually go down. I'd like to see some legislation to encourage such endeavors, which might be the next profitable commercial activity after space tourism.
Of course, we could always wait for them to fall to the Earth, but that requires lots of patience.
The obvious choice is some sort of gaming-related scholarship, fitting in with the theme of their site.
It might be interesting to instead give away a scholarship for study in any field, but only to those who are deemed "worthy". High gaming scores? Cancer survivors (working with the same Child's Play hospitals)? Other comic artists?
What about conventional fission reactors?
on
Return to the Moon
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Basing policy on technology that doesn't exist seems rather silly at this point.
If the energy crisis is so severe, why isn't America investing in things like pebble bed reactors? With the Iraq war potentially costing $2 trillion dollars, that's a lot of money that could be invested in alternative energy sources.
My hope is that as spam becomes less effective (e.g. it gets to few people and fewer people take action based on it), the spammers will start giving up. The problem is that sending spam is so cheap, it's hard to do anything as cost effective.
The poor guys sound like they're trying hard to draw in subscribers, but so far the latest changes have been met with extremely negative reviews. I think they're down to 250,000 subscribers, but it's hard to get accurate numbers.
At work, I get very little spam. My company's filter, coupled with SpamBayes with a year of training does extremely well. The bigger problem is that I occasional miss e-mails that vanish in the ether.
With my GMail account, about 30% of my e-mail is spam that gets through. I'm hopeful that number will go down with training or Google tweaking their service.
It does seem that the days of getting wildly pornographic images in my work e-mail are long gone. Sniff.
In our current environment of detainees, secret wiretaps, torture, and the like, I find this article quite timely. The closing paragraph seems rather foreboding:
Nothing more is known of this Skylab photography incident than the fact that the photograph was not released. NASA and the State Department clearly lost the argument. But the opponents of releasing it preserved national security, as they defined it.
It seems that similar discussions are happening around current issues, with leaks aplenty. I wonder who will win the argument now?
When I was a kid, educational software like Zork really helped, typing and spelling especially. Plus I learned never to go into a dark room lest I be eaten by a grue.
Ah, but you know their names. To me, that's part of the phrase "interesting". If you never heard of the girl licking the PSP photo, it's likely that's not really interesting. Gabe and Carmack, even if you disagree with their points of view, might be considered quite interesting. Gabe's certainly made a bunch of people upset when he lied about HL2's release, and made even more mad when he linked Steam to HL2, but it's hard to argue that his actions haven't affected a large number of gamers, publishers, and hardware makers over the last few years. Carmack's in a similar boat, upsetting some people and evoking worship from others. Plus he makes serious rockets in his spare time.
There were a tremendous number of people on the list that I'd never heard of, which suggests a fair amount of creativity when picking names. Where's John Carmack, who's building rockets? What about Bono, who's helping back elevation? Then there's Gabe Newell, who's work with Steam is slowly changing how game publishing is done.
Perhaps girls who lick PSPs are more interesting, but somehow less important than the above.
Re:From a healthcare perspective
on
Insider Threat
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· Score: 1
The key for bullet point #4 is "most users". So, if a celebrity is coming in for a particular procedure and doesn't want it known, we can secure access to a handful of users. Of course, if a physician doesn't have access and has a need to get it, security can be granted in a matter of minutes.
From a healthcare perspective
on
Insider Threat
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I work in healthcare and one of my roles is to help in auditing.
The main issue is that most people can look at any patient. This is considered a "necessary evil" as sometimes unexpected clinicians might be looking at a patient's information and we don't want to block access in a life threatening situation. Instead, we review access after the fact, in addition to putting certain blocks in place:
Unusual access is audited. This includes people looking at patients who happen to be employees, specific audits of local celebrities, and so on.
Random audits. Periodically, someone will check to see what a random person is doing.
Probation. New users are audited at certain points, to make sure they're not abusing their new power.
Hiding patients Certain patients are hidden from most users - this might include celebrities, legal issues, or patients who have requested it.
I see trust as a necessary part of functioning within an organization, though trust must be tempered with watchfulness. I'm a big fan of letting people do what they want, and then "break their kneecaps" if they abuse that trust. In real terms, this means prosecution and the like. Of course, I don't decide such things - that gets passed on to our legal department and I try not to follow up after that.
Unfortunately, the Gamecube hasn't been selling very well lately, so hopefully this makes up for that. I have a soft spot in my heart for Nintendo, who somehow seems less evil than Sony and Microsoft.
Take the research that's been done to create a virus that causes sterility. Make it airborne or easily transmissible. The vast majority of the world's population would likely be rendered sterile.
Since the virus stimulates the woman's immune system to attack their own eggs, most in vivo fertilization techniques would fail. All faithful Catholics would be unable to reproduce. All countries without access to expensive technology would be unable to reproduce. The world's population would dramatically age and then plummet.
If you're curious as to what all they do, you can take a look here. A sample quote from the article:
In some cases, particularly when the Internet Explorer browser is involved, the testing process "becomes a significant undertaking," Toulouse said. "It's not easy to test an IE update. There are six or seven supported versions and then we're dealing with all the different languages. Our commitment is to protect all customers in all languages on all supported products at the same time, so it becomes a huge undertaking."
I certainly feel your pain. Going into a QA phase with little or no guidance as to what sort of game you're testing is a pain.
The problem, of course, is that a full, formal design document can often lead to a project's downfall. It works well if there are few unknowns (e.g. the technology, genre, and gameplay is well established), but for many other project types it can be a killer. For example, if the design document calls for one thing to happen, which turns out to be programmatically difficult or impossible, developers may find themselves churning out ugly workarounds or taking far more time than they should.
Most development these days doesn't follow the classic Waterfall model (design, build, test, complete), and instead goes for more evolutionary approaches (design, build, test, repeat until done). Of course, having a general plan of where you want to go is good, otherwise you won't know when you get there.
Some bacteria have a neat rotary motor. There's way more flagellated bacteria than humans on the earth, so I wouldn't classify it as "almost entirely missing".
Even better, sperm has a rotary joint. Just think, you could be holding a counterexample to the above post in 5-10 minutes (well, male Slashdotters anyway - female ones might have to drive a bit).
We don't have sales tax. Of course, the property tax is a killer, so you can then complain that online stores can be located in very inexpensive locations.
Perhaps Google just wants more premium subscribers. From the detailed article: The Adsense Trojan Horse attacks small publishers. The premium publishers and ads displayed by Google's websites are apparently unaffected.
Remember that evolution isn't a purposeful thing. There's no "why" in science, only "how". If the reproductive success of people with things like hard shells is increased relative to those without one, then yes, humans will evolve shells. There will likely be intermediate steps, since shells are relatively complex, though it's statistically possible for someone to be born with a full-formed shell.
One could argue that Harlequin Ichthosis is a step down that path, though I wouldn't wish the disease on anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
My kids will love this, especially my son. It makes a nice contrast to my daughter's Barbie Princess dress-up game.
There's an old but interesting article on the challenges of mining asteroids. From the article:
There's a fair amount of landfills out there that probably have useful amounts of copper. That'll probably be the first place to dig. The hard part is separation and removing toxic waste from useful minerals.
Mining the asteroids is currently prohibitively expensive, but costs will eventually go down. I'd like to see some legislation to encourage such endeavors, which might be the next profitable commercial activity after space tourism.
Of course, we could always wait for them to fall to the Earth, but that requires lots of patience.
The obvious choice is some sort of gaming-related scholarship, fitting in with the theme of their site.
It might be interesting to instead give away a scholarship for study in any field, but only to those who are deemed "worthy". High gaming scores? Cancer survivors (working with the same Child's Play hospitals)? Other comic artists?
Basing policy on technology that doesn't exist seems rather silly at this point.
If the energy crisis is so severe, why isn't America investing in things like pebble bed reactors? With the Iraq war potentially costing $2 trillion dollars, that's a lot of money that could be invested in alternative energy sources.
True.
My hope is that as spam becomes less effective (e.g. it gets to few people and fewer people take action based on it), the spammers will start giving up. The problem is that sending spam is so cheap, it's hard to do anything as cost effective.
The poor guys sound like they're trying hard to draw in subscribers, but so far the latest changes have been met with extremely negative reviews. I think they're down to 250,000 subscribers, but it's hard to get accurate numbers.
There's lots of factors.
At work, I get very little spam. My company's filter, coupled with SpamBayes with a year of training does extremely well. The bigger problem is that I occasional miss e-mails that vanish in the ether.
With my GMail account, about 30% of my e-mail is spam that gets through. I'm hopeful that number will go down with training or Google tweaking their service.
It does seem that the days of getting wildly pornographic images in my work e-mail are long gone. Sniff.
Are you implying that Arik Hesseldahl (the article's author) want's to get in Steve Job's pants?
My God, man, is Slashdot no better than high school?
In our current environment of detainees, secret wiretaps, torture, and the like, I find this article quite timely. The closing paragraph seems rather foreboding:
Nothing more is known of this Skylab photography incident than the fact that the photograph was not released. NASA and the State Department clearly lost the argument. But the opponents of releasing it preserved national security, as they defined it.
It seems that similar discussions are happening around current issues, with leaks aplenty. I wonder who will win the argument now?
When I was a kid, educational software like Zork really helped, typing and spelling especially. Plus I learned never to go into a dark room lest I be eaten by a grue.
Ah, but you know their names. To me, that's part of the phrase "interesting". If you never heard of the girl licking the PSP photo, it's likely that's not really interesting. Gabe and Carmack, even if you disagree with their points of view, might be considered quite interesting. Gabe's certainly made a bunch of people upset when he lied about HL2's release, and made even more mad when he linked Steam to HL2, but it's hard to argue that his actions haven't affected a large number of gamers, publishers, and hardware makers over the last few years. Carmack's in a similar boat, upsetting some people and evoking worship from others. Plus he makes serious rockets in his spare time.
To me, those things are interesting.
There were a tremendous number of people on the list that I'd never heard of, which suggests a fair amount of creativity when picking names. Where's John Carmack, who's building rockets? What about Bono, who's helping back elevation? Then there's Gabe Newell, who's work with Steam is slowly changing how game publishing is done.
Perhaps girls who lick PSPs are more interesting, but somehow less important than the above.
The key for bullet point #4 is "most users". So, if a celebrity is coming in for a particular procedure and doesn't want it known, we can secure access to a handful of users. Of course, if a physician doesn't have access and has a need to get it, security can be granted in a matter of minutes.
The main issue is that most people can look at any patient. This is considered a "necessary evil" as sometimes unexpected clinicians might be looking at a patient's information and we don't want to block access in a life threatening situation. Instead, we review access after the fact, in addition to putting certain blocks in place:
- Unusual access is audited. This includes people looking at patients who happen to be employees, specific audits of local celebrities, and so on.
- Random audits. Periodically, someone will check to see what a random person is doing.
- Probation. New users are audited at certain points, to make sure they're not abusing their new power.
- Hiding patients Certain patients are hidden from most users - this might include celebrities, legal issues, or patients who have requested it.
I see trust as a necessary part of functioning within an organization, though trust must be tempered with watchfulness. I'm a big fan of letting people do what they want, and then "break their kneecaps" if they abuse that trust. In real terms, this means prosecution and the like. Of course, I don't decide such things - that gets passed on to our legal department and I try not to follow up after that.I'm an idiot. The article I linked in the above post was way too old.
Try this article, which makes it look more promising.
Unfortunately, the Gamecube hasn't been selling very well lately, so hopefully this makes up for that. I have a soft spot in my heart for Nintendo, who somehow seems less evil than Sony and Microsoft.
Take the research that's been done to create a virus that causes sterility. Make it airborne or easily transmissible. The vast majority of the world's population would likely be rendered sterile.
Since the virus stimulates the woman's immune system to attack their own eggs, most in vivo fertilization techniques would fail. All faithful Catholics would be unable to reproduce. All countries without access to expensive technology would be unable to reproduce. The world's population would dramatically age and then plummet.
Freaks me out just posting it here.
If you're curious as to what all they do, you can take a look here. A sample quote from the article:
In some cases, particularly when the Internet Explorer browser is involved, the testing process "becomes a significant undertaking," Toulouse said. "It's not easy to test an IE update. There are six or seven supported versions and then we're dealing with all the different languages. Our commitment is to protect all customers in all languages on all supported products at the same time, so it becomes a huge undertaking."
I certainly feel your pain. Going into a QA phase with little or no guidance as to what sort of game you're testing is a pain.
The problem, of course, is that a full, formal design document can often lead to a project's downfall. It works well if there are few unknowns (e.g. the technology, genre, and gameplay is well established), but for many other project types it can be a killer. For example, if the design document calls for one thing to happen, which turns out to be programmatically difficult or impossible, developers may find themselves churning out ugly workarounds or taking far more time than they should.
Most development these days doesn't follow the classic Waterfall model (design, build, test, complete), and instead goes for more evolutionary approaches (design, build, test, repeat until done). Of course, having a general plan of where you want to go is good, otherwise you won't know when you get there.
Some bacteria have a neat rotary motor. There's way more flagellated bacteria than humans on the earth, so I wouldn't classify it as "almost entirely missing".
Even better, sperm has a rotary joint. Just think, you could be holding a counterexample to the above post in 5-10 minutes (well, male Slashdotters anyway - female ones might have to drive a bit).
We don't have sales tax. Of course, the property tax is a killer, so you can then complain that online stores can be located in very inexpensive locations.
Remember to make my sarcastic posts more obvious.
Perhaps Google just wants more premium subscribers. From the detailed article:
The Adsense Trojan Horse attacks small publishers. The premium publishers and ads displayed by Google's websites are apparently unaffected.
Remember that evolution isn't a purposeful thing. There's no "why" in science, only "how". If the reproductive success of people with things like hard shells is increased relative to those without one, then yes, humans will evolve shells. There will likely be intermediate steps, since shells are relatively complex, though it's statistically possible for someone to be born with a full-formed shell.
One could argue that Harlequin Ichthosis is a step down that path, though I wouldn't wish the disease on anyone.