I'd be tempted to replace the innards of those cannons with some flare launchers and load the suckers up with nautical distress flares... of course, that would be very illegal. Fun, though.
If one can make a plate that vibrates up and down for people standing up, one can make one that vibrates back and forth for those lying down - though I suspect it wouldn't be as effective. I'd rather see a chair set up to vibrate anyway - Martian gravity might be enough to get the vibration to have effect, and people are far more likely to sit for 30 minutes than stand in place. While in space, the Russian bungee cord solution would probably be just as effective.
As for your final point, I suspect that you'd still be worried about bone loss on Mars - you need your bones even in Martian gravity, but your body isn't designed to maintain them at Martian gravity. So, even for people just staying on Mars, a vibrating chair would be more or less a necessity unless and until we get drugs that solve the problem.
There is evidence that being vibrated at the right frequency stimulates bone growth, not tension/compression from muscles. It may therefore be possible to send a vibrating bed along with the astronauts to keep their bone mass up. The theory is that muscles in use cause these vibrations naturally, and bones use that as a trigger for growth.
Nature didn't anticipate birth control or uncontrolled overpopulation, thus our reproductive drives cause us to desire sex, not children... though some people do seem to get the itch for children. It's that excess meat between our ears causing all these problems.
Nature prefers 'population control' using disease, starvation, and predation to 'birth control'. I prefer it the other way around.
Humans are social creatures. A large portion of that social behaviour revolves around sex. Survival of life demands it: if you don't reproduce, then when you die, something that DID will take your place.
As such, we're programmed to be happy when surrounded by friends and to be happier when we have a mate... forgetting for a moment that we also seem to be programmed to want a new mate about every 1.5-3 years and manage (mostly) to ignore that in favour of monogamy.
So, those people who totally ignore finding a mate are, in fact, messed up - abberant - strange. Given the 6 billion people on Earth at the moment, I'm sure a few more non-breeders added to the sterile, gay, or whatever can only help us, but it still isn't 'normal'. Now, if we could only manage to ensure that all the anti-social and gays, etc were male, it would give the rest of us guys a much better chance of scoring that harem we've always wanted.
I've always wondered why it wasn't done that way in the first place...
Of course, it would stop ISPs from worrying at all about SPAM, and there would be no central mail server to do blacklist lookups... maybe instead of providing a mail server, ISPs could provide a local queriable blacklist server.
Now you're talking about:
Adding and implementing new server and client protocols everywhere
Supporting both the old and new protocols until you have critical mass
Setting up local blacklist servers in place of mail servers
This strikes me as very doable for the open source community, but I doubt you'd get Apple or Microsoft interested, and since between them they essentially own the client base the system wouldn't easy to spread beyond *nix geeks.
There are several problems with this... You can't predict breakthroughs. The odds are loooooong. Until the breakthrough (that may never come), you are stuck where you are if all you do is wait.
Does that mean that once there is a space elevator, it'll be surrounded by a protective swarm of American military jets, missile batteriers, etc every time the alignment is right to target the moon?
It's a joke now, but if the thing ever gets built it will be a serious consideration - and the cost of protecting the ribbon needs to be accounted for in any cost analysis.
Well, I was having fun with the concept of an interplanetary sling... but in all seriousness, all you'd need to do is put a couple of rockets on the counterweight that could be fired in an emergency to change its trajectory. Not a biggie at all, compared to the space elevator itself.
Try breaking the cable high enough above the planet that the counterweight exits Earth orbit. Now, imagine TIMING such an event so that the counterweight ends up headed right for a lunar base.
Earth may not have much to worry about, but I wouldn't want to be a lunar scientist listening to an Earth broadcast about an attack on the elevator. Perhaps that's a worry for another day, though... let's build the elevator and found a moon base first.
The ribbon would end up fluttering down and wouldn't be dangerous at all
The counterweight would fly off into space
Any load ON the ribbon would be a different matter, but hey, the space shuttles fell without causing planet-wide destruction.
Also, the base of the ribbon would probably be a floating platform in the middle of an ocean, so any falling load would be extremely unlikely to hit land.
Those who play it still call it conkers, at least in my area (Toronto, Ontario, Canada).
Mind you, it just isn't an interesting enough game to keep going against all the various other games and toys competing for a kid's attention these days... I know the brief revival the game experienced at my school (about 15 years ago) lasted less than a week before it drifted back into obscurity.
Should it not be relatively easy to detect a brute force E-mail guessing attempt? I'd say that if you get a series of emails to several different bad email addresses in a very short period of time, you should automatically block the IP address from which they are coming.
Of course, I also regularly see dictionary attacks against mailservers where someone's script is trying to get in as 'root' 'admin' or 'administrator'. One of these days I need to get around to logging and blocking that.
It's easy enough to add an SPF record to your domain (in fact, I just did it for mine), whatever your DNS server software... but what about implementing SPF on your mailserver?
I see plenty of instructions for various *nix mail services, but I suppose I'll have to wait for a $$$ 3rd party solution before I can add this functionality to my Exchange server. Bleh.
However, I'll offer a guess or two - First, a gas giant will collect anything in a solar system's disk that is slowly spiralling inwards, as even if it isn't very close, it only has to pass close enough to perturb the path, drawing the object closer for the next pass. Second, (and this is a wild-ass guess) there may be other effects of a large gravitational field on chaotic structures (like asteroid belts?) that keep them dynamically stable and less likely to plummet bits of themselves towards the Sun.
Anybody who actually understands this in enough detail to explain the current theory is invited to confirm, correct, or expand on this.
Primarily, I was thinking about saving space on the case front when you want a minimum of three bays, and didn't even consider speed and reliability (I assumed equivalence to 3.5" drives)
Having said that, the speed issue would be less significant given the increased transfer due to striping, and I think it's possible that the higher failure rates for laptop drives could be due to the fact that they're normally in laptops... poorer ventilation and frequent jostling come to mind.
Damn, but I love it when you get a nice server, plug in those SCSI drives to a backplane mounted in the drive bay, and they all auto-address.
It'd be nice if hot-swappable RAID5 IDE (complete with LED status lights) was worked out as a new standard for the home PC - one cable to the drive bay board, then plug in your drives without worrying about jumpers. It'd be even better if it used laptop-sized drives.
I wonder if economy of scale would make that affordable if all the next generation of PCs were sold that way?
It appears that there are several factors for creating a 'potential life zone' in the galaxy.
Given our sample of one known case, we assume you need a Sun-like star, with an Earth-like planet in an Earth-like orbit, probably with an Earth-like moon. You also need outer gas giants to reduce the inbound crap that would otherwise beat the hell out of us. That's just the local stuff.
You also need to have a solar system that won't pass through a dangerous region of space while life is trying to evolve... that means no 'stellar nurseries' nearby, or anything likely to go 'boom' in a big way.
In other words, even if there are very large numbers of potentially Earth-like planets, with conditions nearly exactly like the ones we're familiar with, they might indeed be sterilized frequently enough to prevent life from ever getting anywhere - and maybe even one sterilization could render a rock permanently hostile to life.
Still, mankind knows relatively little about the galaxy and the probabilities of the many factors we suspect are related to the chance of life getting started, never mind developing life with a penchant for coming to visit us and mutilate our cows and cornfields while rectally probing drunken hicks.
The galaxy has completed two rotations since the event, and given that the various components of the galaxy don't rotate perfectly synchronously, the remenant nebula is either not where you'd expect, or smeared out of all recognition.
I borrowed a game from a friend, and wanted to copy it. Of course, it had the classic 'deliberate bad checksum' anti-copy protection, which meant nothing more than loading a disk copying program that would handle it.
About half way through the first phase of copying, it suddenly dawned on me that I was using my disk copying floppy as my destination disk. I immediately pulled it out of the drive, thus ensuring I had neither a copy of the game nor a copy of the software required to try again!
Slashdot Mirror
My thinking is along the lines of 'one destination=cheaper than two'...
- Make my DNS server authoritative for the unicast domain, and add not a single entry?
- Add lines to my HOSTS file for every unicast server I discover, and point them to 127.0.0.1?
- Simply put a *unicast* filter in my Mozilla Firebird Adblock plugin?
Any portion of the web made unusable by these ads will simply be amputated as far as I'm concerned.I'd be tempted to replace the innards of those cannons with some flare launchers and load the suckers up with nautical distress flares... of course, that would be very illegal. Fun, though.
If one can make a plate that vibrates up and down for people standing up, one can make one that vibrates back and forth for those lying down - though I suspect it wouldn't be as effective. I'd rather see a chair set up to vibrate anyway - Martian gravity might be enough to get the vibration to have effect, and people are far more likely to sit for 30 minutes than stand in place. While in space, the Russian bungee cord solution would probably be just as effective.
As for your final point, I suspect that you'd still be worried about bone loss on Mars - you need your bones even in Martian gravity, but your body isn't designed to maintain them at Martian gravity. So, even for people just staying on Mars, a vibrating chair would be more or less a necessity unless and until we get drugs that solve the problem.
How about this?
There is evidence that being vibrated at the right frequency stimulates bone growth, not tension/compression from muscles. It may therefore be possible to send a vibrating bed along with the astronauts to keep their bone mass up. The theory is that muscles in use cause these vibrations naturally, and bones use that as a trigger for growth.
Nature didn't anticipate birth control or uncontrolled overpopulation, thus our reproductive drives cause us to desire sex, not children... though some people do seem to get the itch for children. It's that excess meat between our ears causing all these problems.
Nature prefers 'population control' using disease, starvation, and predation to 'birth control'. I prefer it the other way around.
Oh, and grow a pair and don't post as an AC!
Humans are social creatures. A large portion of that social behaviour revolves around sex. Survival of life demands it: if you don't reproduce, then when you die, something that DID will take your place.
As such, we're programmed to be happy when surrounded by friends and to be happier when we have a mate... forgetting for a moment that we also seem to be programmed to want a new mate about every 1.5-3 years and manage (mostly) to ignore that in favour of monogamy.
So, those people who totally ignore finding a mate are, in fact, messed up - abberant - strange. Given the 6 billion people on Earth at the moment, I'm sure a few more non-breeders added to the sterile, gay, or whatever can only help us, but it still isn't 'normal'. Now, if we could only manage to ensure that all the anti-social and gays, etc were male, it would give the rest of us guys a much better chance of scoring that harem we've always wanted.
I've always wondered why it wasn't done that way in the first place...
Of course, it would stop ISPs from worrying at all about SPAM, and there would be no central mail server to do blacklist lookups... maybe instead of providing a mail server, ISPs could provide a local queriable blacklist server.
Now you're talking about:
This strikes me as very doable for the open source community, but I doubt you'd get Apple or Microsoft interested, and since between them they essentially own the client base the system wouldn't easy to spread beyond *nix geeks.
Now, try imagining you meet those three criteria and also have semetic features and an Arab or muslim name.
There are several problems with this... You can't predict breakthroughs. The odds are loooooong. Until the breakthrough (that may never come), you are stuck where you are if all you do is wait.
Does that mean that once there is a space elevator, it'll be surrounded by a protective swarm of American military jets, missile batteriers, etc every time the alignment is right to target the moon?
It's a joke now, but if the thing ever gets built it will be a serious consideration - and the cost of protecting the ribbon needs to be accounted for in any cost analysis.
Well, I was having fun with the concept of an interplanetary sling... but in all seriousness, all you'd need to do is put a couple of rockets on the counterweight that could be fired in an emergency to change its trajectory. Not a biggie at all, compared to the space elevator itself.
Try breaking the cable high enough above the planet that the counterweight exits Earth orbit. Now, imagine TIMING such an event so that the counterweight ends up headed right for a lunar base.
Earth may not have much to worry about, but I wouldn't want to be a lunar scientist listening to an Earth broadcast about an attack on the elevator. Perhaps that's a worry for another day, though... let's build the elevator and found a moon base first.
- The ribbon would end up fluttering down and wouldn't be dangerous at all
- The counterweight would fly off into space
- Any load ON the ribbon would be a different matter, but hey, the space shuttles fell without causing planet-wide destruction.
Also, the base of the ribbon would probably be a floating platform in the middle of an ocean, so any falling load would be extremely unlikely to hit land.Those who play it still call it conkers, at least in my area (Toronto, Ontario, Canada).
Mind you, it just isn't an interesting enough game to keep going against all the various other games and toys competing for a kid's attention these days... I know the brief revival the game experienced at my school (about 15 years ago) lasted less than a week before it drifted back into obscurity.
Should it not be relatively easy to detect a brute force E-mail guessing attempt? I'd say that if you get a series of emails to several different bad email addresses in a very short period of time, you should automatically block the IP address from which they are coming.
Of course, I also regularly see dictionary attacks against mailservers where someone's script is trying to get in as 'root' 'admin' or 'administrator'. One of these days I need to get around to logging and blocking that.
It's easy enough to add an SPF record to your domain (in fact, I just did it for mine), whatever your DNS server software... but what about implementing SPF on your mailserver?
I see plenty of instructions for various *nix mail services, but I suppose I'll have to wait for a $$$ 3rd party solution before I can add this functionality to my Exchange server. Bleh.
is insufficient to answer you with any authority.
However, I'll offer a guess or two - First, a gas giant will collect anything in a solar system's disk that is slowly spiralling inwards, as even if it isn't very close, it only has to pass close enough to perturb the path, drawing the object closer for the next pass. Second, (and this is a wild-ass guess) there may be other effects of a large gravitational field on chaotic structures (like asteroid belts?) that keep them dynamically stable and less likely to plummet bits of themselves towards the Sun.
Anybody who actually understands this in enough detail to explain the current theory is invited to confirm, correct, or expand on this.
Primarily, I was thinking about saving space on the case front when you want a minimum of three bays, and didn't even consider speed and reliability (I assumed equivalence to 3.5" drives)
Having said that, the speed issue would be less significant given the increased transfer due to striping, and I think it's possible that the higher failure rates for laptop drives could be due to the fact that they're normally in laptops... poorer ventilation and frequent jostling come to mind.
Damn, but I love it when you get a nice server, plug in those SCSI drives to a backplane mounted in the drive bay, and they all auto-address.
It'd be nice if hot-swappable RAID5 IDE (complete with LED status lights) was worked out as a new standard for the home PC - one cable to the drive bay board, then plug in your drives without worrying about jumpers. It'd be even better if it used laptop-sized drives.
I wonder if economy of scale would make that affordable if all the next generation of PCs were sold that way?
It appears that there are several factors for creating a 'potential life zone' in the galaxy.
Given our sample of one known case, we assume you need a Sun-like star, with an Earth-like planet in an Earth-like orbit, probably with an Earth-like moon. You also need outer gas giants to reduce the inbound crap that would otherwise beat the hell out of us. That's just the local stuff.
You also need to have a solar system that won't pass through a dangerous region of space while life is trying to evolve... that means no 'stellar nurseries' nearby, or anything likely to go 'boom' in a big way.
In other words, even if there are very large numbers of potentially Earth-like planets, with conditions nearly exactly like the ones we're familiar with, they might indeed be sterilized frequently enough to prevent life from ever getting anywhere - and maybe even one sterilization could render a rock permanently hostile to life.
Still, mankind knows relatively little about the galaxy and the probabilities of the many factors we suspect are related to the chance of life getting started, never mind developing life with a penchant for coming to visit us and mutilate our cows and cornfields while rectally probing drunken hicks.
is in the article.
The galaxy has completed two rotations since the event, and given that the various components of the galaxy don't rotate perfectly synchronously, the remenant nebula is either not where you'd expect, or smeared out of all recognition.
I did something similar on my beloved C=64.
I borrowed a game from a friend, and wanted to copy it. Of course, it had the classic 'deliberate bad checksum' anti-copy protection, which meant nothing more than loading a disk copying program that would handle it.
About half way through the first phase of copying, it suddenly dawned on me that I was using my disk copying floppy as my destination disk. I immediately pulled it out of the drive, thus ensuring I had neither a copy of the game nor a copy of the software required to try again!
Bleh. How dare you interrupt my karma-whoring rant with facts, sir. :)