Ever see that perforated metal sheet in the window of your microwave oven? It stops the microwaves from escaping, because their wavelength is larger than the hole diameter.
So, buy the apartment, and put up a similar metal sheeting against the walls and windows facing the microwave tower.
If you do it right, it'll actually affect the antennas to the point it will set off some alarms on the systems monitoring the antennas.
Hopefully you don't subscribe to a cellular service utilizing that tower, or don't expect service to continue in your new apartment.
The nice thing is, if we stopped RIGHT NOW, Darwin's invisible dead hand would be on our side... if there is no reason for the germs to have a resistance to antibiotics because they're everywhere, those germs lacking the resistance become more 'fit' since they use less energy supporting the requirements of that resistance. Instead they put their energy to reproduction or getting by on less sustenance, and will breed out the resistant bugs in fairly short order.
What would impress me would be if it did facial recognition to find the face, then tried drawing using the arm, compared the drawing to the image and adjusted as it went until it was finally graded 'acceptable' by a human, at which point it would lock down its algorithm.
When I was a child, there was no public Internet. In my late teens we had dial-up web sites that would pass messages back and forth with each other as far as a local call would go.
I don't miss those days - I think information should be available more or less instantly 24/7 if possible.
However, the current constant phone texting, Facebook, etc crap is just that, crap. It's electronic substitution for true socializing, and I can't help but feel that when a bunch of people stand around unable to interact with the people in their immediate vicinity because they're texting with someone who couldn't be bothered to actually show up... well, I think there's something wrong with that.
Sometimes the younger generations ARE wrong. I think the problem is these technologies are fad technologies and the people making them popular haven't outgrown them yet.
Call me if the text-aholics of today are still rabidly texting when they're 30.
Minor tweaks to improve an existing design? I guess it depends on how integrated the sensor packages are, and how flexible the communication system is. You don't want to send the same rover every time.
You need something like a standard truck frame onto which you can put any shell you like.
Not just tourism... business travel too. Vegas (and several other destinations) are popular business convention destinations, and some specialized training is easier to get down there than up here. I've turned down or failed to pursue opportunities in both categories because I don't like the way things are done in the USA right now.
You know what? I'm not a NASA planetary exploration scientist, but that sounds like an interesting idea.
Send rovers in pairs, each with half the instrumentation load, but tethered together by a cable. One gets stuck, the other pulls it out. Give the cable a release so if one rover dies, the other can continue with the remaining instruments.
God help me for entering into a racist off topic flamefest, but...
There's plenty of rednecks in my neighbourhood with white children who are far less civilized and more ignorant than a number of non-white children I've met. Believe it or not, there ARE black people who don't worship ignorance and violence and surprisingly enough, they raise their kids with the same attitudes.
Now, take a black kid and have him raised by rednecks (assuming the rednecks would take him) and you'd still get a thug... probably with a rifle and a buck knife instead of a handgun, but still a thug.
Your 'anti-racist' response had quite a bit of racist attitude in it.
On the other hand, you have to be careful not to cry 'racist' too easily - you get too touchy about it and then you can't even investigate things like whether the average Kenyan has a mechanical advantage that leads to better performance in marathons...
Yeah... I'm still not sure it counts as merely 'stoned' when the cumulative mass of the lines of coke you've just snorted is several times greater than that of your body.
I'd love to go on the show Deal or no deal (The one with the women holding the suitcases), and select my suitcases in numerical order (1, 2, 3, etc)-- because my chances are EXACTLY THE SAME as someone who selects the cases according to their own numerological theory.
I'm not so sure about that. The only thing required to make the game fair is to ensure the contestant has no idea which suitcases contain which prizes. There is no reason some person on the show can't be distributing the cases according to their own idea of 'randomness'.
You can make any argument look ridiculous by taking it to extremes.
And to answer your slight - yes, for something like a manned Mars mission with 128:129 odds of surviving I'd be first in line if I could. I probably wouldn't because thousands of others would be trying to get the #1 spot as well.
I pulled numbers from the same place I store my collection of flying monkeys, simply for the sake of argument. They weren't meant to be taken as absolutes based on expert research of the situation.
It amazes me that this is a serious concern. There IS a price for manned spaceflight and if it goes too high, it's over. Astronauts know the risks and willingly take them.
If 1:1000 is achievable with the same budget as 1:129 then it'd be evil not to do it - but if it increases costs by even 2:1 it is stupid to even suggest it.
I like it. A giant magnet - suck up all the metal particles, never mind the big chunks! Give the nuclear power an ion engine and let it sweep clean whatever orbit you want.
In the end, you get a big(ger) metal ball, which you can keep in orbit as a useful mass, or drop on your chosen enemy.
Re:While I don't have any use for the program
on
Microsoft COFEE Leaked
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Most warrants are specific... not that I'd want to defend myself on that basis, but I'm sure a good lawyer could help you if you were investigated for child porn and the only thing they find is some evidence of Internet gambling.
On the other hand, I'd stop the Internet gambling right away, because you know they'd be looking for a way to justify getting you for that having 'lost' the child porn case.
There was once an experiment to breed sheep with more teats. It was a failure, not because they failed to get another pair of milk-producing teats, but because the sheep rudely refused to produce bigger litters of offspring to make use of the new milk taps.
It's probably not too difficult to genetically engineer a four-breasted woman (nature often produces people with additional nipples below the normal ones) but it won't happen due to medical research and experimentation ethics. Also, you'd be creating a sideshow freak even if you got it right on the first try.
It's far more likely we'll create women with a third breast on the back (for dancing).
It may well be true that extremely bright people are generally less successful breeders... you can blame that on social awkwardness or indifference or whatever, it doesn't matter.
Humans are SMART. I don't think there is any doubt we have the best general intelligence on the planet, and evolution got us to that state. I'd bet that people who are _slightly_ more intelligent than average are better breeders, because there seems to be a very long term pressure for smarter people.
Of course, we don't know where the wall is for intelligence - at some point the biological trade off of supporting a smarter brain just won't be worth it.
Any GP or OB/GYN will tell you that there is a minimum percentage of body fat below which a woman won't even menstruate.
They'll also tell you a woman should gain some weight during pregnancy, and that generally speaking the outcome of the pregnancy is better if a certain amount of weight is gained (unless the woman is already overweight, of course).
Again, I don't think they're saying thinner = bad, I think they're saying the population is shifting towards the optimum range. Skinny women have less, and less healthy children on average, so the average weight is rising by a small amount as they're outbred by heavier women.
There will be an upper limit to this effect as well - morbid obesity is not a good thing for getting or being pregnant, either.
I doubt it. It probably reflects the fact that skinny women are less fit hosts for a fetus than heavier women. At some point, you run into high weight causing health issues that also make the woman a less fit incubator.
Earlier maturity and later menopause extend the fertility period (duh)... in times past women needed more time to build up a healthy body to have children, and there was no genetic point in delaying menopause since pregnancies towards the end of female fertility were less likely to be viable. Modern medicine and diet are probably the enabler here, making girls healthy and heavy enough quickly enough to bear children when younger without significant risk of death, and making a higher percentage of near-menopause pregnacies successful.
Regardless of the speed and mass abilities of the excavators, I'd be interested in seeing a system that can excavate, process, and create something from simulated regolith in a high-static, near-vacuum environment.
Specifically, I recall seeing articles about how it might be easy to create low-efficiency solar cells and a form of concrete from regolith.
Assuming that works, I'd like to see a 'bot that can dig up some regolith, make a concrete igloo big enough to be useful, and cover it and the surroundings with solar cells. I suppose we're decades away from that...
Slashdot Mirror
Ever see that perforated metal sheet in the window of your microwave oven? It stops the microwaves from escaping, because their wavelength is larger than the hole diameter.
So, buy the apartment, and put up a similar metal sheeting against the walls and windows facing the microwave tower.
If you do it right, it'll actually affect the antennas to the point it will set off some alarms on the systems monitoring the antennas.
Hopefully you don't subscribe to a cellular service utilizing that tower, or don't expect service to continue in your new apartment.
The nice thing is, if we stopped RIGHT NOW, Darwin's invisible dead hand would be on our side... if there is no reason for the germs to have a resistance to antibiotics because they're everywhere, those germs lacking the resistance become more 'fit' since they use less energy supporting the requirements of that resistance. Instead they put their energy to reproduction or getting by on less sustenance, and will breed out the resistant bugs in fairly short order.
I'd RTFA, but it's down...
What would impress me would be if it did facial recognition to find the face, then tried drawing using the arm, compared the drawing to the image and adjusted as it went until it was finally graded 'acceptable' by a human, at which point it would lock down its algorithm.
Maybe I should buy it, and deliberately break the contract.
I can then put it on display in a gallery as a new piece of art representing the corruption of man.
D'oh. Spence BBS, IIRC, was the most popular software for the boards I visited. Usually running off a C=64 and a bunch of 1541 drives.
Gimme a break, my RAM is old and it's non-CRC.
When I was a child, there was no public Internet. In my late teens we had dial-up web sites that would pass messages back and forth with each other as far as a local call would go.
I don't miss those days - I think information should be available more or less instantly 24/7 if possible.
However, the current constant phone texting, Facebook, etc crap is just that, crap. It's electronic substitution for true socializing, and I can't help but feel that when a bunch of people stand around unable to interact with the people in their immediate vicinity because they're texting with someone who couldn't be bothered to actually show up... well, I think there's something wrong with that.
Sometimes the younger generations ARE wrong. I think the problem is these technologies are fad technologies and the people making them popular haven't outgrown them yet.
Call me if the text-aholics of today are still rabidly texting when they're 30.
Minor tweaks to improve an existing design? I guess it depends on how integrated the sensor packages are, and how flexible the communication system is. You don't want to send the same rover every time.
You need something like a standard truck frame onto which you can put any shell you like.
Not just tourism... business travel too. Vegas (and several other destinations) are popular business convention destinations, and some specialized training is easier to get down there than up here. I've turned down or failed to pursue opportunities in both categories because I don't like the way things are done in the USA right now.
You know what? I'm not a NASA planetary exploration scientist, but that sounds like an interesting idea.
Send rovers in pairs, each with half the instrumentation load, but tethered together by a cable. One gets stuck, the other pulls it out. Give the cable a release so if one rover dies, the other can continue with the remaining instruments.
God help me for entering into a racist off topic flamefest, but...
There's plenty of rednecks in my neighbourhood with white children who are far less civilized and more ignorant than a number of non-white children I've met. Believe it or not, there ARE black people who don't worship ignorance and violence and surprisingly enough, they raise their kids with the same attitudes.
Now, take a black kid and have him raised by rednecks (assuming the rednecks would take him) and you'd still get a thug... probably with a rifle and a buck knife instead of a handgun, but still a thug.
Your 'anti-racist' response had quite a bit of racist attitude in it.
On the other hand, you have to be careful not to cry 'racist' too easily - you get too touchy about it and then you can't even investigate things like whether the average Kenyan has a mechanical advantage that leads to better performance in marathons...
Yeah... I'm still not sure it counts as merely 'stoned' when the cumulative mass of the lines of coke you've just snorted is several times greater than that of your body.
I'd love to go on the show Deal or no deal (The one with the women holding the suitcases), and select my suitcases in numerical order (1, 2, 3, etc)-- because my chances are EXACTLY THE SAME as someone who selects the cases according to their own numerological theory.
I'm not so sure about that. The only thing required to make the game fair is to ensure the contestant has no idea which suitcases contain which prizes. There is no reason some person on the show can't be distributing the cases according to their own idea of 'randomness'.
It's amazing YOUR insanity got mod points at all.
You can make any argument look ridiculous by taking it to extremes.
And to answer your slight - yes, for something like a manned Mars mission with 128:129 odds of surviving I'd be first in line if I could. I probably wouldn't because thousands of others would be trying to get the #1 spot as well.
I pulled numbers from the same place I store my collection of flying monkeys, simply for the sake of argument. They weren't meant to be taken as absolutes based on expert research of the situation.
I really hope English is your second language. Even so, the lack of thought behind your post is breathtaking.
It amazes me that this is a serious concern. There IS a price for manned spaceflight and if it goes too high, it's over. Astronauts know the risks and willingly take them.
If 1:1000 is achievable with the same budget as 1:129 then it'd be evil not to do it - but if it increases costs by even 2:1 it is stupid to even suggest it.
America's losing its balls.
I like it. A giant magnet - suck up all the metal particles, never mind the big chunks! Give the nuclear power an ion engine and let it sweep clean whatever orbit you want.
In the end, you get a big(ger) metal ball, which you can keep in orbit as a useful mass, or drop on your chosen enemy.
Most warrants are specific... not that I'd want to defend myself on that basis, but I'm sure a good lawyer could help you if you were investigated for child porn and the only thing they find is some evidence of Internet gambling.
On the other hand, I'd stop the Internet gambling right away, because you know they'd be looking for a way to justify getting you for that having 'lost' the child porn case.
There was once an experiment to breed sheep with more teats. It was a failure, not because they failed to get another pair of milk-producing teats, but because the sheep rudely refused to produce bigger litters of offspring to make use of the new milk taps.
It's probably not too difficult to genetically engineer a four-breasted woman (nature often produces people with additional nipples below the normal ones) but it won't happen due to medical research and experimentation ethics. Also, you'd be creating a sideshow freak even if you got it right on the first try.
It's far more likely we'll create women with a third breast on the back (for dancing).
It may well be true that extremely bright people are generally less successful breeders... you can blame that on social awkwardness or indifference or whatever, it doesn't matter.
Humans are SMART. I don't think there is any doubt we have the best general intelligence on the planet, and evolution got us to that state. I'd bet that people who are _slightly_ more intelligent than average are better breeders, because there seems to be a very long term pressure for smarter people.
Of course, we don't know where the wall is for intelligence - at some point the biological trade off of supporting a smarter brain just won't be worth it.
Any GP or OB/GYN will tell you that there is a minimum percentage of body fat below which a woman won't even menstruate.
They'll also tell you a woman should gain some weight during pregnancy, and that generally speaking the outcome of the pregnancy is better if a certain amount of weight is gained (unless the woman is already overweight, of course).
Again, I don't think they're saying thinner = bad, I think they're saying the population is shifting towards the optimum range. Skinny women have less, and less healthy children on average, so the average weight is rising by a small amount as they're outbred by heavier women.
There will be an upper limit to this effect as well - morbid obesity is not a good thing for getting or being pregnant, either.
I doubt it. It probably reflects the fact that skinny women are less fit hosts for a fetus than heavier women. At some point, you run into high weight causing health issues that also make the woman a less fit incubator.
Earlier maturity and later menopause extend the fertility period (duh)... in times past women needed more time to build up a healthy body to have children, and there was no genetic point in delaying menopause since pregnancies towards the end of female fertility were less likely to be viable. Modern medicine and diet are probably the enabler here, making girls healthy and heavy enough quickly enough to bear children when younger without significant risk of death, and making a higher percentage of near-menopause pregnacies successful.
I'm married so... no, she won't let me!
And I'd rather see a robot that looks like Angelina Jolie and does whatever I want.
Regardless of the speed and mass abilities of the excavators, I'd be interested in seeing a system that can excavate, process, and create something from simulated regolith in a high-static, near-vacuum environment.
Specifically, I recall seeing articles about how it might be easy to create low-efficiency solar cells and a form of concrete from regolith.
Assuming that works, I'd like to see a 'bot that can dig up some regolith, make a concrete igloo big enough to be useful, and cover it and the surroundings with solar cells. I suppose we're decades away from that...