Things will go wrong. Learning how to cope when the evil wind blows is critical. In this case, we now know that the thing can be flown with one actuator in upside down. If the bottom one malfs, swap it out in orbit with the top one, and you still might get home.
Um, not likely in orbit. From the article:
Discovery flew safely 30 times with the defective actuator since its first launch August 30, 1984, and no one suspected a problem until the actuator was taken apart to check for corrosion.
We're talking about an assembly that has to be taken apart to get to the offending part. That assembly is part of another assembly, and so on... most likely, getting to it requires a large winch to connect to the rudder itself as you unbolt it from the vertical stabilizer, and disassembly of several massive, yet intricate parts.
On every spacewalk I've seen, just turning a bolt requires intense physical and mental effort. Not likely to replace this particular part in space.
Besides, note when the fault will present itself:
When a shuttle returns to Earth, the rudder brakes the craft to a speed that is safe for landing. [...] the faulty actuator could not have handled the most extreme forces during landing if it had been in the bottom position.
By the time the thing fails, you're already a flying brick that can do very little but fall with style.
You're main point is well taken -- we're learning as we go along. Just nit picking about the details, that's all.
This is actually done with PREVENTION in mind. Given an existing legitamite threat, this is well-spent money.
Prevention? Against groups for whom "getting caught" is a negative, sure. But last I heard, the groups we're most worried about don't care whether they are identified. And as for getting caught -- the 9/11 hijackers didn't care about getting caught, 'cause their final reward would come with the act itself.
As important as this research is, it shouldn't be confused with any sort of "prevention". That's the same sort of pre-9/11 thinking that made us think that planes were safe, because hijackers would behave with their own self-preservation as a goal. If your goal includes your own death, capture isn't a deterrent... if it includes spreading fear of your organization, identification is desirable.
it doesn't matter how you regulate them, or what you call them... they do a service that i like... i will continue to use them until i have a problem with them.
Agreed -- I use their BillPay regularly, the debit card occasionally, and they're handy for eBay. I were running a business, I don't think I'd be willing to take a chance on having my account frozen without recourse. But for my nickel-dime transactions, they're the best game in town at the moment.
As for cookies getting eaten by trojans (yummy!), I could see even non-password information being useful for spoofing. The more real your scam letter looks, the more likely you'll convince some poor schmuck to hit your sham site.
So, what does "bobej" mean? I couldn't find any clarification on a Google search. "jebob" returned a cute baby, but I don't think he's posting on Slashdot yet.
Inquiring minds want to know! And they have karma to burn!
As a casual fan of science, this looks way cool for detecting viruses* that we already know about, by using the antibodies that attach to the virus protein as the detection agent. But aren't we limited to viruses for whom we've already isolated antibodies?
I wonder how hard it will be to expand this into a more general virus detection/identification tool? It seems like you could break up your suite of antibody-derived proteins into smaller, more generic chunks that would be more likely to bind to the virus. But I'm getting beyond my depth -- would like to hear from someone who knows what they're talking about!
* I've heard virii is now passe' -- any confirmation?
Problem is, about 99% of viruses that have come into our firm in the last 6 months have been nothing but virus - no legitimate content. Despite this, our antivirus tool has no option to use its 'knowledge' of the 100% illegitimate messages and simply delete these outright.
My company has configured our PC-based/network-controlled Norton antivirus to be very aggressive in deleting possibly bad content. So aggressive, in fact, that it detected a virus signature in my Eudora.mbx file before Eudora had a chance to move the attachment to the appropriate directory. Poof! My whole Inbox is gone!
The reply from Data Security: "Eudora is not an approved application. Get rid of it." This was back when Outlook would still auto-execute from the preview pane.
Be careful what you ask for... you just might get it. Automatically deleting known bad content sounds fine, but it depends on a support department that's robust and flexible enough to distinguish the good from the bad. Ours was already overworked, starting from the day the VP opened that message from his secret admirer, with the subject "I love you!"
Now I know where our friend Orlando Soto buys his computers.
Hmmm... has anyone ever actually seen "Michael Gonzales" and "Orlando Soto" together? Put glasses on this guy, and he looks an awful lot like this guy...
Re:Relax. Europa's not going anywhere.
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Melting Europa
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· Score: 3, Funny
Dinosaurs on Sedna? I think they'd just fly off, there couldn't be enough gravity on a rock 2000meters wide to hold down those "gentle giants"
First, for fans who came to the game late: the quote "What next? Drill Sedna for oil?" was in the original version of the story, but was removed after a few minutes. This is known in the business as "closing the barn door after the cat is out of the bag and turning your butt into hamburger."
Anyway, back to the oil. This story about Sedna's discovery points out that the planet(oid) is very dark and very red. Don't forget the far-out but plausible theory that Earth's hydrocarbons came from comets, not dinosaurs.
Now imagine... what if Sedna is a big ball of frozen, red transmission fluid? I see NASA getting some new funding for KBO research real quick!
So log onto ebay and get an old laptop for two or three hundred. Look for the good brands, IBM, Apple, Toshiba, and plan on buying a replacement battery. Then get a good 502.11g card for it. Use the os you wish, you can probably get knoppix running really fast, although windos 98se is ubiquitous and easy to set up. (please! no flame wars!)
Better than eBay, I'd suggest RetroBox. I bought a $35 Compaq PII from them to try out Knoppix. The only problem I've had is that I can't get the sound card to work, and that's only 'cause I've been too lazy to open the hood and see what's going on.
Their current selection ranges from a P4 Thinkpad (latch broken) for $892, down to an HP PII for $98. When I first heard about them (on Slashdot, of course), they had laptops down in the $70s. YMMV.
And if you really need Windows, they'll install WinExPee for $109 extra (the price of four of their lowest-priced PII desktops).
You're being silly, but the tin-foil hat crowd is going to have a field day with this baby. Consider the links that they'll find to their planet-killing Nemesis object:
* Highly eccentric orbit with a period ~10k years. They'll make up a mass extinction event to match the planetoid's period, you watch.
* According to this article, Sedna is the reddest object found in the solar system except for Mars. Watch the Nemesisians find deep significance in this fact -- we could start a pool to guess when they start calling it "blood red".
* In the "just enough facts to be dangerous" department, they'll point out that its size can't be determined directly -- that it depends on assumptions about the planet's albedo. If it's darker than expected, then it'll be bigger than expected. Ergo, the scientists are conspiring (as usual) to make it smaller than Pluto. Their "scientific" conclusion: it's the brown dwarf companion to Sol that they've been predicting all along.
Interestingly (to me at least), I submitted this story as soon as I saw it... and it was rejected almost as quickly. I suspect the editors were looking for a submission without tinfoil hat references -- a laudable goal. But even if we Slashdotters are gathered to discuss the real science, our less-informed Internet brethren haven't had much to talk about since the Martians quit shooting down spacecraft...
Re:A Wonderful Innovation for the Culinary Industr
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Reanimated Lobsters?
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· Score: 4, Funny
just freeze 'em til you need your customer to pick out his lobster, then kill him and cook it!
But if you kill your customer, who will pay for your delicious lobster dinnner?
(Comment is particularly disconcerting coming from a user named "Meneudo"...)
Darn! My Swatch has seen better days, so I was really excited about the "OVO DecisionMaker Watch":
I relish the impracticality of a watch that makes you sit through a 10-second animation before showing you the time, and which periodically goes into "naughty mode" where it distorts the time so that you can't read it until you give it a "corrective shake" that's hard enough to trip the built-in motion-sensor.
The author makes some really dead-on points, and it's plenty enough to make investors in Nintendo shares shake in their boots.
But I think he's badly underestimating the creativity of the companies that do survive -- whoever they happen to be.
Take board games as an example. How many ways can you move a playing piece from point A to point B? Isn't Life just the same as Monopoly, which is no different from Trivial Pursuit, which is an obvious ripoff of Chutes and Ladders?
You get the idea. Those four games hugely different variations on the same "platform" -- a flat piece of cardboard. What's more, they're still around after decades. Monopoly keeps coming out with special editions that are no more than "different cars" in GTA-LXXVI -- but they still sell.
And a stroll down Toys-R-Profit's game aisle shows a dizzying variety of board games. Many of them are lame variations on the theme (roll 1d6 to see if Barbie gets a good parking space at the mall) and won't last a year. But while they're around, someone will buy them, and next year we'll have another lame variant.
What's sad is that we're seeing the end of the beginning. We 30-somethings watched video games go from homebuilt to primitive to amazing... to commodity. I expect the children of the 1860s experienced the same thing with board games.
Before anyone complains -- shameless karma whoring in support of an otherwise valid point is legitimate.
Yes, please, no Karma Whoring complaints! I swore off Karma Whoring after this unfortunate incident knocked my "Excellent" down past "Good" all the way to "Positive". Thanks, AC, for your support!
In that December 2001 article, we have statements like this: "Their conclusion is that there was nothing in the data at all to suggest the Higgs is out there - certainly not at energy masses of up to 115 Gigaelectronvolts (GeV), way past the level of 80 GeV where the boson was expected to show itself."
Contrast with March 2004: "Dr Renton cites indirect evidence taken from observations of the behaviour of other particles in colliders that agrees with the figure of 115 gigaelectronvolts for the mass of the Higgs boson."
The great thing, though, is how science done right is self-correcting. As soon as this boson was declared unlikely, researchers apparently began to attempt to prove that it did exist. Now that there's a theory that it exists, more researchers will begin trying to prove them wrong. Eventually, with all the facts out in the open, science will discover something approaching the ideal theory, which will likely be something unexpected.
It's like Microsoft vs. open source... find a bug in Windows, and it takes 9 months to patch it. Find a bug in Linux, and someone will patch it the same day...
(Obligatory disclaimer: I'm no physicist, and talk of "energy masses" and "gigaelectronvolts" makes my head spin. May as well be talking about Vitamegavegamin.)
Foo: I'm in favor of detonating lots of nukes on mars, just to see what happens. Bar: Not sure, but I think seeing Venus's atmosphere sent outwards a few hundred kilometres would look pretty cool. Baz: Yeah, maybe they could have a pay-per view special to fund the costs.
Interestingly, I just listened to someone discuss the awesome power of a sight that fewer and fewer people have seen: nuking the Earth.
On NPR's Fresh Air, former Secretary of the Air Force Thomas Reed talked about his new book, At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War. In addition to his policial role, he was for a while a "consultant to the director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a well-known center for nuclear weapons research." As such, he helped design nuclear weapons, and was present during their testing.
He pointed out that witnessing an above-ground nuclear detonation was itself a life-changing event, and that the experience colored the decisions of all who saw and felt it. The light, he said of a Christmas Island blast, wasn't just bright -- it was all-enveloping, even through the way-beyond-dark goggles. And the instant blast of heat, that made you want to run away, anywhere, just to get away.
But nuke tests are now performed underground, where the awesome power is visible only as instrument ticks and a dimple in the ground. As the old scientists die, there are fewer and fewer people who have witnessed a nuclear blast as it would occur in the above-ground world.
The whole concept is so abstract, we can now discuss the idea of blowing one up on another planet, without even breaking into a sweat. Unfortunately, there are plenty of folks in the militaries of the world who can do the same sort of abstract thinking in reference to their own planet.
Damn, that got a lot deeper than I thought it would...
I was explaining the Dish/Viacom dispute to my 8-year-old, who was going through Spongebob withdrawal last night.
Viacom, I explained, wants Dish to buy a whole package of stations, even though Dish thinks some of the channels aren't worth it. Dish wants to pick and choose the stations they buy.
Fair enough. Except I realized that when I signed up for Dish, I also thought some of the channels aren't worth paying for. But in this case, Dish sees things differently:
Allowing customers to substitute channels or add a favorite channel to their package would force us to raise prices. To prevent this, we do not allow channel substitutions. We strive to make satellite programming as affordable as possible. Our packages have been setup in balance with cost effectiveness and consumer demand. One way to help keep our customer?s programming costs low is to provide stations in packages, rather than ala carte.
Apparently, Dish wants it both ways. Packages are a great idea when Dish forces them on me, but not acceptable when Viacom forces them on them.
The aforementioned 8-year-old got it right: "They're just fighting like 3-year-olds over a toy, aren't they?" And picking which side to root for is about as silly.
What I WOULD suggest to the parties involved is to look into tieing into some naturalist activities. This way you can have a double edged story AND increase your possible audience at the same time.
What, you're wanting to get it on the FOX network now?
However, not that many departments could possibly want to run such vast queries regularly. It would also be extremely difficult to justify a $4.7 million investment unless that work was seen as vital and speed was a main consideration in that work. It is also peculiar that such a large purchase could be approved at a time of tightening belts.
Honestly, I wonder what the author was smoking?
* However, not that many departments could possibly want to run such vast queries regularly.
You don't think so? I think *every* DBA would like to have a few extra TB of RAM. Maybe the Department of Transportation just wants a more efficient way to keep track of US Highway routes?
* It would also be extremely difficult to justify a $4.7 million investment...
What country is this guy living in? If you're high up enough, it's trivially easy to justify $5 million. That's hardly enough to build one Interstate highway intersection.
* It is also peculiar that such a large purchase could be approved at a time of tightening belts.
Oh, now I know the problem. The author has been in a coma for the past 18 months. Wake up, dude, and smell the money!
As part of my Ghosts of Slashdot project, I grabbed a copy of this article before it went "live". There was a Slashdot outage at about that time, so I don't know if CmdrTaco & co. decided to change the text, or if it was lost and had to be re-created.
Same submitter, same "dept."... just the title and story text has changed.
Play Those Classic Video Games Virtually Anywhere Posted by CmdrTaco in The Mysterious Future! from the emulating-the-classics dept. Iphtashu Fitz writes "If you're like me your introduction to video games decades ago was something like the Atari 2600, and you also pumped untold hundreds of quarters into arcade games like Space Invaders, Defender, and Asteroids. Well according to a Wired News article you can now play these and many more of those classic games in their original format on your PC, Mac, Playstation, XBox, or Gamecube. X-Arcade has an emulator & arcade-style interface that they claim will let you play over 4000 of the classic games on any of these modern gaming systems. Or if you'd prefer to play the actual arcade games from the 1980's then it might be time for you to take a trip to New York where the American Museum of the Moving Image is holding an exhibition where you can play these classics. Game emulators can be found linked from the museums website as well as through Retrogames." Much easier than building your own Cabinet.
If you like learning random things, you should try out the Wikipedia random page feature.
Oh, I'm familiar with the random Wikipedia page. In fact, just trying out your link has delayed my post by at least five minutes, as I attempt to figure out the concept of Pentagonal numbers.
And I'm doing my best to create random articles of my own... that's not something I could do with my old World Books, since I was taught not to write in the margins...
Back in the old pre-Internet days, I spent a lot of time researching school reports in a set of 1964 World Book Encyclopedias. Even though this was in the early 1980s, the basics were there... or at least enough to suit my needs.
But what I learned was almost never what I was actually attempting to research! I'd have to do a report on, say, George Washington, and instead I'd read through the article on Water. I can still picture the experiment they showed: two valleys built from plywood, one with a dam, one without. Pour a bunch of water into the top of the valley, and compare the results. Cool! Or the "Races of Man" article, with its diagrams of hair patterns and lip shape... now, it's a commentary on how pseudo-science can be twisted to support almost any worldview.
I hope my family didn't throw those old encyclopedias away... it would be cool to look at them, now that I have a better perspective on history.
I learned so much trivia... and spent a painfully long time before actually getting anything done.
Odd how, with the Internet, we've traded random pages for random Google results.
4GB Compact Flash for $200?
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iPod Mini Sells Out
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The MuVo2, which also has 4 GB of capacity, uses a CompactFlash card (which can be used in a digital camera). People have been buying the MP3 player and taking it apart for the card, which would cost more than the $200 dollars for the MuVo2.
More is right... a lot more! I was just pricing cards for my new digital camera (the $12 Ritz model got me hooked), and found out that the going price for 4GB is a whopping $1,130! Yikes!
After dividing out, that came to 28c/meg -- about a penny more per meg than the Lexar-brand 256 MB cards ($70). So I figured a kilobuck must not be bad, if you need that kind of storage.
But 4096 meg for $200 is less than 5c/meg!
How on earth did MuVo get such a low price on their components?
Slashdot Mirror
Things will go wrong. Learning how to cope when the evil wind blows is critical. In this case, we now know that the thing can be flown with one actuator in upside down. If the bottom one malfs, swap it out in orbit with the top one, and you still might get home.
Um, not likely in orbit. From the article:
Discovery flew safely 30 times with the defective actuator since its first launch August 30, 1984, and no one suspected a problem until the actuator was taken apart to check for corrosion.
We're talking about an assembly that has to be taken apart to get to the offending part. That assembly is part of another assembly, and so on... most likely, getting to it requires a large winch to connect to the rudder itself as you unbolt it from the vertical stabilizer, and disassembly of several massive, yet intricate parts.
On every spacewalk I've seen, just turning a bolt requires intense physical and mental effort. Not likely to replace this particular part in space.
Besides, note when the fault will present itself:
When a shuttle returns to Earth, the rudder brakes the craft to a speed that is safe for landing. [...] the faulty actuator could not have handled the most extreme forces during landing if it had been in the bottom position.
By the time the thing fails, you're already a flying brick that can do very little but fall with style.
You're main point is well taken -- we're learning as we go along. Just nit picking about the details, that's all.
This is actually done with PREVENTION in mind. Given an existing legitamite threat, this is well-spent money.
Prevention? Against groups for whom "getting caught" is a negative, sure. But last I heard, the groups we're most worried about don't care whether they are identified. And as for getting caught -- the 9/11 hijackers didn't care about getting caught, 'cause their final reward would come with the act itself.
As important as this research is, it shouldn't be confused with any sort of "prevention". That's the same sort of pre-9/11 thinking that made us think that planes were safe, because hijackers would behave with their own self-preservation as a goal. If your goal includes your own death, capture isn't a deterrent... if it includes spreading fear of your organization, identification is desirable.
I suppose I'm the only one who read the title as "U.S. Prepares to Get Naked".
Which, of course, would have been a dupe of this article, right?
(And just when I'd gotten my karma back, too!)
Google
...
Thanks for the link! Now I can finally learn all the things I never knew about Lingerie Paypal:
PayPal - How Does Paypal Work
paypalrandomizer2004.com; paypal account; paypal visa; accept paypal; Paypal
Problems; make money with paypal; lingerie paypal; paypal money loan;
www.pay-pal-infocenter.com/ - 29k - Mar 17, 2004 - Cached - Similar pages
(Yeah, Google is my friend? With friends like that...)
it doesn't matter how you regulate them, or what you call them... they do a service that i like... i will continue to use them until i have a problem with them.
Agreed -- I use their BillPay regularly, the debit card occasionally, and they're handy for eBay. I were running a business, I don't think I'd be willing to take a chance on having my account frozen without recourse. But for my nickel-dime transactions, they're the best game in town at the moment.
As for cookies getting eaten by trojans (yummy!), I could see even non-password information being useful for spoofing. The more real your scam letter looks, the more likely you'll convince some poor schmuck to hit your sham site.
Read on for examples of what bobej means.
So, what does "bobej" mean? I couldn't find any clarification on a Google search. "jebob" returned a cute baby, but I don't think he's posting on Slashdot yet.
Inquiring minds want to know! And they have karma to burn!
As a casual fan of science, this looks way cool for detecting viruses* that we already know about, by using the antibodies that attach to the virus protein as the detection agent. But aren't we limited to viruses for whom we've already isolated antibodies?
I wonder how hard it will be to expand this into a more general virus detection/identification tool? It seems like you could break up your suite of antibody-derived proteins into smaller, more generic chunks that would be more likely to bind to the virus. But I'm getting beyond my depth -- would like to hear from someone who knows what they're talking about!
* I've heard virii is now passe' -- any confirmation?
Problem is, about 99% of viruses that have come into our firm in the last 6 months have been nothing but virus - no legitimate content. Despite this, our antivirus tool has no option to use its 'knowledge' of the 100% illegitimate messages and simply delete these outright.
.mbx file before Eudora had a chance to move the attachment to the appropriate directory. Poof! My whole Inbox is gone!
My company has configured our PC-based/network-controlled Norton antivirus to be very aggressive in deleting possibly bad content. So aggressive, in fact, that it detected a virus signature in my Eudora
The reply from Data Security: "Eudora is not an approved application. Get rid of it." This was back when Outlook would still auto-execute from the preview pane.
Be careful what you ask for... you just might get it. Automatically deleting known bad content sounds fine, but it depends on a support department that's robust and flexible enough to distinguish the good from the bad. Ours was already overworked, starting from the day the VP opened that message from his secret admirer, with the subject "I love you!"
Now I know where our friend Orlando Soto buys his computers.
Hmmm... has anyone ever actually seen "Michael Gonzales" and "Orlando Soto" together? Put glasses on this guy, and he looks an awful lot like this guy...
Dinosaurs on Sedna? I think they'd just fly off, there couldn't be enough gravity on a rock 2000meters wide to hold down those "gentle giants"
First, for fans who came to the game late: the quote "What next? Drill Sedna for oil?" was in the original version of the story, but was removed after a few minutes. This is known in the business as "closing the barn door after the cat is out of the bag and turning your butt into hamburger."
Anyway, back to the oil. This story about Sedna's discovery points out that the planet(oid) is very dark and very red. Don't forget the far-out but plausible theory that Earth's hydrocarbons came from comets, not dinosaurs.
Now imagine... what if Sedna is a big ball of frozen, red transmission fluid? I see NASA getting some new funding for KBO research real quick!
So log onto ebay and get an old laptop for two or three hundred. Look for the good brands, IBM, Apple, Toshiba, and plan on buying a replacement battery. Then get a good 502.11g card for it. Use the os you wish, you can probably get knoppix running really fast, although windos 98se is ubiquitous and easy to set up. (please! no flame wars!)
Better than eBay, I'd suggest RetroBox. I bought a $35 Compaq PII from them to try out Knoppix. The only problem I've had is that I can't get the sound card to work, and that's only 'cause I've been too lazy to open the hood and see what's going on.
Their current selection ranges from a P4 Thinkpad (latch broken) for $892, down to an HP PII for $98. When I first heard about them (on Slashdot, of course), they had laptops down in the $70s. YMMV.
And if you really need Windows, they'll install WinExPee for $109 extra (the price of four of their lowest-priced PII desktops).
Ya ya, I'm being silly.
You're being silly, but the tin-foil hat crowd is going to have a field day with this baby. Consider the links that they'll find to their planet-killing Nemesis object:
* Highly eccentric orbit with a period ~10k years. They'll make up a mass extinction event to match the planetoid's period, you watch.
* According to this article, Sedna is the reddest object found in the solar system except for Mars. Watch the Nemesisians find deep significance in this fact -- we could start a pool to guess when they start calling it "blood red".
* In the "just enough facts to be dangerous" department, they'll point out that its size can't be determined directly -- that it depends on assumptions about the planet's albedo. If it's darker than expected, then it'll be bigger than expected. Ergo, the scientists are conspiring (as usual) to make it smaller than Pluto. Their "scientific" conclusion: it's the brown dwarf companion to Sol that they've been predicting all along.
Interestingly (to me at least), I submitted this story as soon as I saw it... and it was rejected almost as quickly. I suspect the editors were looking for a submission without tinfoil hat references -- a laudable goal. But even if we Slashdotters are gathered to discuss the real science, our less-informed Internet brethren haven't had much to talk about since the Martians quit shooting down spacecraft...
just freeze 'em til you need your customer to pick out his lobster, then kill him and cook it!
But if you kill your customer, who will pay for your delicious lobster dinnner?
(Comment is particularly disconcerting coming from a user named "Meneudo"...)
Darn! My Swatch has seen better days, so I was really excited about the "OVO DecisionMaker Watch":
I relish the impracticality of a watch that makes you sit through a 10-second animation before showing you the time, and which periodically goes into "naughty mode" where it distorts the time so that you can't read it until you give it a "corrective shake" that's hard enough to trip the built-in motion-sensor.
Well, the link from Cory "who the heck is this guy?" Doctorow's page was 404, so I googled around a bit and found out the bad news: they're sold out and can't get anymore. "Previously sold at Tokyoflash. Sorry, we can't get any more." Crap!
Time to add another saved search on eBay...
The author makes some really dead-on points, and it's plenty enough to make investors in Nintendo shares shake in their boots.
But I think he's badly underestimating the creativity of the companies that do survive -- whoever they happen to be.
Take board games as an example. How many ways can you move a playing piece from point A to point B? Isn't Life just the same as Monopoly, which is no different from Trivial Pursuit, which is an obvious ripoff of Chutes and Ladders?
You get the idea. Those four games hugely different variations on the same "platform" -- a flat piece of cardboard. What's more, they're still around after decades. Monopoly keeps coming out with special editions that are no more than "different cars" in GTA-LXXVI -- but they still sell.
And a stroll down Toys-R-Profit's game aisle shows a dizzying variety of board games. Many of them are lame variations on the theme (roll 1d6 to see if Barbie gets a good parking space at the mall) and won't last a year. But while they're around, someone will buy them, and next year we'll have another lame variant.
What's sad is that we're seeing the end of the beginning. We 30-somethings watched video games go from homebuilt to primitive to amazing... to commodity. I expect the children of the 1860s experienced the same thing with board games.
Before anyone complains -- shameless karma whoring in support of an otherwise valid point is legitimate.
Yes, please, no Karma Whoring complaints! I swore off Karma Whoring after this unfortunate incident knocked my "Excellent" down past "Good" all the way to "Positive". Thanks, AC, for your support!
The funny thing is this article in the "related links" section: 'God particle may not exist'
In that December 2001 article, we have statements like this: "Their conclusion is that there was nothing in the data at all to suggest the Higgs is out there - certainly not at energy masses of up to 115 Gigaelectronvolts (GeV), way past the level of 80 GeV where the boson was expected to show itself."
Contrast with March 2004: "Dr Renton cites indirect evidence taken from observations of the behaviour of other particles in colliders that agrees with the figure of 115 gigaelectronvolts for the mass of the Higgs boson."
The great thing, though, is how science done right is self-correcting. As soon as this boson was declared unlikely, researchers apparently began to attempt to prove that it did exist. Now that there's a theory that it exists, more researchers will begin trying to prove them wrong. Eventually, with all the facts out in the open, science will discover something approaching the ideal theory, which will likely be something unexpected.
It's like Microsoft vs. open source... find a bug in Windows, and it takes 9 months to patch it. Find a bug in Linux, and someone will patch it the same day...
(Obligatory disclaimer: I'm no physicist, and talk of "energy masses" and "gigaelectronvolts" makes my head spin. May as well be talking about Vitamegavegamin.)
Foo: I'm in favor of detonating lots of nukes on mars, just to see what happens.
Bar: Not sure, but I think seeing Venus's atmosphere sent outwards a few hundred kilometres would look pretty cool.
Baz: Yeah, maybe they could have a pay-per view special to fund the costs.
Interestingly, I just listened to someone discuss the awesome power of a sight that fewer and fewer people have seen: nuking the Earth.
On NPR's Fresh Air, former Secretary of the Air Force Thomas Reed talked about his new book, At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War. In addition to his policial role, he was for a while a "consultant to the director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a well-known center for nuclear weapons research." As such, he helped design nuclear weapons, and was present during their testing.
He pointed out that witnessing an above-ground nuclear detonation was itself a life-changing event, and that the experience colored the decisions of all who saw and felt it. The light, he said of a Christmas Island blast, wasn't just bright -- it was all-enveloping, even through the way-beyond-dark goggles. And the instant blast of heat, that made you want to run away, anywhere, just to get away.
But nuke tests are now performed underground, where the awesome power is visible only as instrument ticks and a dimple in the ground. As the old scientists die, there are fewer and fewer people who have witnessed a nuclear blast as it would occur in the above-ground world.
The whole concept is so abstract, we can now discuss the idea of blowing one up on another planet, without even breaking into a sweat. Unfortunately, there are plenty of folks in the militaries of the world who can do the same sort of abstract thinking in reference to their own planet.
Damn, that got a lot deeper than I thought it would...
Viacom, I explained, wants Dish to buy a whole package of stations, even though Dish thinks some of the channels aren't worth it. Dish wants to pick and choose the stations they buy.
Fair enough. Except I realized that when I signed up for Dish, I also thought some of the channels aren't worth paying for. But in this case, Dish sees things differently:Apparently, Dish wants it both ways. Packages are a great idea when Dish forces them on me, but not acceptable when Viacom forces them on them.
The aforementioned 8-year-old got it right: "They're just fighting like 3-year-olds over a toy, aren't they?" And picking which side to root for is about as silly.
What I WOULD suggest to the parties involved is to look into tieing into some naturalist activities. This way you can have a double edged story AND increase your possible audience at the same time.
What, you're wanting to get it on the FOX network now?
Oh, sorry, I thought you said naturist activities. My bad.
However, not that many departments could possibly want to run such vast queries regularly. It would also be extremely difficult to justify a $4.7 million investment unless that work was seen as vital and speed was a main consideration in that work. It is also peculiar that such a large purchase could be approved at a time of tightening belts.
Honestly, I wonder what the author was smoking?
* However, not that many departments could possibly want to run such vast queries regularly.
You don't think so? I think *every* DBA would like to have a few extra TB of RAM. Maybe the Department of Transportation just wants a more efficient way to keep track of US Highway routes?
* It would also be extremely difficult to justify a $4.7 million investment...
What country is this guy living in? If you're high up enough, it's trivially easy to justify $5 million. That's hardly enough to build one Interstate highway intersection.
* It is also peculiar that such a large purchase could be approved at a time of tightening belts.
Oh, now I know the problem. The author has been in a coma for the past 18 months. Wake up, dude, and smell the money!
As part of my Ghosts of Slashdot project, I grabbed a copy of this article before it went "live". There was a Slashdot outage at about that time, so I don't know if CmdrTaco & co. decided to change the text, or if it was lost and had to be re-created.
Same submitter, same "dept."... just the title and story text has changed.
Play Those Classic Video Games Virtually Anywhere
Posted by CmdrTaco in The Mysterious Future!
from the emulating-the-classics dept.
Iphtashu Fitz writes "If you're like me your introduction to video games decades ago was something like the Atari 2600, and you also pumped untold hundreds of quarters into arcade games like Space Invaders, Defender, and Asteroids. Well according to a Wired News article you can now play these and many more of those classic games in their original format on your PC, Mac, Playstation, XBox, or Gamecube. X-Arcade has an emulator & arcade-style interface that they claim will let you play over 4000 of the classic games on any of these modern gaming systems. Or if you'd prefer to play the actual arcade games from the 1980's then it might be time for you to take a trip to New York where the American Museum of the Moving Image is holding an exhibition where you can play these classics. Game emulators can be found linked from the museums website as well as through Retrogames." Much easier than building your own Cabinet.
If you like learning random things, you should try out the Wikipedia random page feature.
Oh, I'm familiar with the random Wikipedia page. In fact, just trying out your link has delayed my post by at least five minutes, as I attempt to figure out the concept of Pentagonal numbers.
And I'm doing my best to create random articles of my own... that's not something I could do with my old World Books, since I was taught not to write in the margins...
Back in the old pre-Internet days, I spent a lot of time researching school reports in a set of 1964 World Book Encyclopedias. Even though this was in the early 1980s, the basics were there... or at least enough to suit my needs.
But what I learned was almost never what I was actually attempting to research! I'd have to do a report on, say, George Washington, and instead I'd read through the article on Water. I can still picture the experiment they showed: two valleys built from plywood, one with a dam, one without. Pour a bunch of water into the top of the valley, and compare the results. Cool! Or the "Races of Man" article, with its diagrams of hair patterns and lip shape... now, it's a commentary on how pseudo-science can be twisted to support almost any worldview.
I hope my family didn't throw those old encyclopedias away... it would be cool to look at them, now that I have a better perspective on history.
I learned so much trivia... and spent a painfully long time before actually getting anything done.
Odd how, with the Internet, we've traded random pages for random Google results.
The MuVo2, which also has 4 GB of capacity, uses a CompactFlash card (which can be used in a digital camera). People have been buying the MP3 player and taking it apart for the card, which would cost more than the $200 dollars for the MuVo2.
More is right... a lot more! I was just pricing cards for my new digital camera (the $12 Ritz model got me hooked), and found out that the going price for 4GB is a whopping $1,130! Yikes!
After dividing out, that came to 28c/meg -- about a penny more per meg than the Lexar-brand 256 MB cards ($70). So I figured a kilobuck must not be bad, if you need that kind of storage.
But 4096 meg for $200 is less than 5c/meg!
How on earth did MuVo get such a low price on their components?