Except that Microsoft is so mind-bogglingly bad at accomplishing that task technically. Sure, their marketing department is top-notch, what with securing a virtual monopoly and all. But the programming staff seems to miss the boat time and time again.
Why not dust off last year's OS, add a few bells and whistles, and then throw in the following:
void* waste_of_space = malloc(UPGRADE_CYCLE_DRIVING_WASTE_OF_RAM);... and be done with it?;)
And while we're on the topic, we might as well mention Rob Hubbard for his contributions to the genre as well. No doubt you've played Commando or Skate or Die.
I just had to post and say that this anecdote is chock full of awesome. Thank you for sharing this with us.
Another, possibly unintended, outcome of this was that you helped instill a good parenting instinct in your daughter by giving her a powerful story to couple to the appropriate response. Odds are, she won't forget this one, just as you haven't.:)
I'll bite: I think the reason is purely psychological. Moreover, its tied to our cultural values here in the USA.
Take a look at any documentary that features the hard working folks that actually make shuttle parts - like the guys that tackled the foam shedding problem on the external tank. These people have a boatload of pride in what they do, even if its spraying foam insulation on a massive gas tank. In their own way, they're putting stuff, and people, into space.
I'd like to belive that this kind of enthusiasm exists on every level of the STS program. From the astronauts, to mission control, right down to the guy who drives the crawler out to the launch platform.
Now add to that the "suicide mission" nature of what you suggest and you can see the problem. Nobody is going to be able to put their heart into something that *absolutely will* kill someone, no matter how noble or humane their demise. Especially after they've put together so many successful missions of sending people to orbit and back. At that point, you're more or less asking for a mission failure of some kind, since depressed people make mistakes they wouldn't make otherwise. That in turn, represents and unacceptable mission risk in it's own right, so you're just better off making sure that they have a way home.
Also, there's the part where success is always defined as going there and back if there's people involved. I've never seen or read anything to the contrary ever being suggested; I think it's an assumed, cultural bias.
Now, in a country with a proud heritage of sending heroes off to certain doom, the science yielded from the mission would be worth the loss of a few well-trained astronauts. Interestingly enough, rescuing said crew would probably motivate the USA moreso than any other objective since we seem to have such an intense distaste for such things (e.g. leave no man behind)- but I digress.
As for privitizing space exporation - there's just no money in it, so you'll never see the investment money needed to pull it off. Besides, no company has enough in the margins to pull it off alone, and I'm sure that those with big piles of cash on hand (like MSFT and GOOG) have other things in mind. If you look back, every advancement in exploration or transportaion was paid for by someone looking forward to a whopping return on their investment, or looking to flaunt their wealth. Given the expense and scale of leaving Earth's gravity well, neither of those two are really possible.
So basically, it's not gonna happen unless we discover an obscene amount of platinum off-world, or we discover some radical form of propulsion that can out-perform and/or out-price chemical rockets.
Any word on when the bugfix for #212 Androgenic Alopecia is going to be done? The recommended workaround, running the Monoxodil UI, is costing me a fortune in license fees.
Re:I wish that they would hit geo-thermal
on
Google Goes Green
·
· Score: 1
Mod parent up.
Solar power, and it's derivitave forms (wind and hydroelectric), have limitations based on geography, climate and land use (solar panels on crop land = bad). Geothermal has the one advantage that it's technically feasable anywhere, provided you can dig deep enough.
All that's needed is for industry to re-direct its resouces from drilling for oil, to drilling for hot rocks. While I'm sure its not as simple as all that, its still nice to know that we don't necessarily have to invent anything wildly new to pull this off.
Like the parent mentions, passive heating/cooling is another smart way to go. Any hole/cave that's deep enough will maintain a steady temperature (the average for the region) year-round, all by itself.
LiPo batteries are only the half of it. I'm not saying that we should bail on this kind of development, but we should hope that safety standards for EV's and hybrids take into consideration what other cars may have on-board.
Consider that we're moving fast into a transition period of sorts, where we'll have a multitude of different fuel types on the road at once. IMHO, it's going to stay like this for a while:
- Gas/Diesel/Ethanol - Natural Gas - Hydrogen - Batteries or Super-Capacitors
Now imagine you work for the local fire department, and there's a 15 car pileup on a foggy freeway, and there's probably at least two cars involved representing each of the types above. How do you start rescuing people from such a mess when you have several huge potential ignition sources, shock hazards and gaseous and/or liquid fuel all over the place? Also, what happens well before the FD gets there? I'm not saying it's an intractable situation, but it's a sobering thought.
You reminded me of the time my friends and I tried to "beat" Gauntlet on the C64.
I think we made it to something like level 54, playing two people at a time, in shifts.
It took hours, and several dozen sodas. It felt like we spent as much time watching levels load as we spent playing them. It kind of made those "bonus" levels a penalty of sorts: 2 minutes loading, 20 seconds playing, another 2 minutes loading, etc.
Gauntlet most certainly falls in the "game data loaded from disk" category. The old SSI AD&D games were another good example of that, with dungeons, towns and the overworld each being requiring data from disk.//should have sprung for a fastload cart.
Society has a habit of latching onto a name-brand as the name for a thing. It's nothing new.
* Would you like a xerox copy of that? * How about I scotch-tape that back together for you? * The spots? Yea, I spilled some clorox on them while doing the laundry.
Using these as verbs is just as common: xeroxed, scotch-taped, cloroxed.
Excellent point. I've been wondering why a DS "cellphone cartridge" hasn't been made available yet. It would seem like the easiest and cheapest way to get this off the ground.
Come to think of it, an intrepid hacker could probably pull this off with the right cellphone parts.
This isn't entirely suprising. This has been a long-standing tradition here.
Here's a good example. Along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway you have BWI airport, Goddard Space Flight Center, and then downtown, Andrews Airforce Base. Now you could have this be a wonderful haven for aerospace and defense contracting, but instead, most of the contractors here have field offices over in Tyson's Corner, Reston or even Dulles (all very much in VA). To add insult to injury: GSFC itself was built 50 years ago.
So, MD has a huge budget deficit and what do they do? Encourage the growth of business, so they can gather more taxes next year? Of course not, they raise taxes on everyone who's already here, and encourage them to move money across the river. Nice. How about taxing people who are exporting business instead?
Cochetti said the tax could encourage Maryland IT users to outsource computer services.
For anyone not familiar with the geography of the DC-metro area, "outsourcing" from any of the commercialized areas around the MD side of the beltway means a 25-45 minute drive over to Tysons (non-rush-hour of course). It's that close and that convenient. Even from Baltimore, it's not that bad of a haul.
And as a bonus, it's not like you're traveling to some nameless sea of office-parks: the dining is pretty damn good over there. So you send a broker to make a day of it, get some precious face-time with a few e-businesses, laugh it up at Morton's, and save a buttload on your next website, data bunker, co-lo, or what-have-you.
Someone commented on TFA about incorporating in Delaware. That's certainly an option, although the bay bridge is quite an impediment to face-time. However, I can easily see stuff going to PA or even WV if you're north or west of Baltimore (respectively).
As for being fat. If you eat like a predator, you'll have a body like a predator. If you eat like a herbivore, you'll look like one.
I know this is tongue in cheek, and I tend to agree, but it made me think. I sure do want some BBQ right about now.
To be fair about it, predators also eat the bone, blood, organs, entrails and even the ruminate inside. They need to since flesh (muscle and skin) doesn't have the mineral and vitamin content an animal needs to survive.
So, be sure to have a nice slice of kidney pie, bone meal, some chitins, and liver with that hamburger! Yum-o.
Honestly, you'll get farther eating like the omnivore you are: meat, vegetables, herbs, fruit and few processed carbs and sugars.
Slashdot Mirror
In some small way, I can't help but think that maybe this is what high-energy particle physics is for.
Don't forget: For the love of bob, don't make it resemble any well-known fictional race of homicidal machines:
http://www.lifeformz.com/weblog/uploaded_images/cylon-797954.jpg
(Checked out the station in your sig. My EBM station playlist is getting stale, and you came along just in time - thanks!)
Thank you all (parent and siblings):
- BSG Cylon Reference (does it come in chrome?)
- Futurama's Bender Reference
- Obligatory "REEM-A" Anal sex joke
I came in here for all of the above, but I didn't expect them all in one thread.
I think those all fall under one or more branches of Bistromathematics.
Except that Microsoft is so mind-bogglingly bad at accomplishing that task technically. Sure, their marketing department is top-notch, what with securing a virtual monopoly and all. But the programming staff seems to miss the boat time and time again.
... and be done with it? ;)
Why not dust off last year's OS, add a few bells and whistles, and then throw in the following:
void* waste_of_space = malloc(UPGRADE_CYCLE_DRIVING_WASTE_OF_RAM);
Thanks, that flash ad gave me a chuckle. It has to be by the same guys who did this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRuNxHqwazs (also awesome)
My vote goes for the C64 Last Ninja soundtrack. Absolutely awesome.
Ben Daglish* FTW. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Daglish
And while we're on the topic, we might as well mention Rob Hubbard for his contributions to the genre as well. No doubt you've played Commando or Skate or Die.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Hubbard
(*Not an anagram of "Bad English", as far as a know)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkie_defense
FTFY.
The reason you don't understand the problem is that you have no history, and you have too much space.
Take heart, as some of us yanks understand this all too well. There's an old saying:
In America, 100 years is a long time.
In England, 100 miles is a long way.
The QOS on this spectrum is going to make slogans like "more bars in more places" seem downright antiquitated in comparison.
Well.. I don't, but at least I have cake.
I just had to post and say that this anecdote is chock full of awesome. Thank you for sharing this with us.
:)
Another, possibly unintended, outcome of this was that you helped instill a good parenting instinct in your daughter by giving her a powerful story to couple to the appropriate response. Odds are, she won't forget this one, just as you haven't.
I'll bite: I think the reason is purely psychological. Moreover, its tied to our cultural values here in the USA.
Take a look at any documentary that features the hard working folks that actually make shuttle parts - like the guys that tackled the foam shedding problem on the external tank. These people have a boatload of pride in what they do, even if its spraying foam insulation on a massive gas tank. In their own way, they're putting stuff, and people, into space.
I'd like to belive that this kind of enthusiasm exists on every level of the STS program. From the astronauts, to mission control, right down to the guy who drives the crawler out to the launch platform.
Now add to that the "suicide mission" nature of what you suggest and you can see the problem. Nobody is going to be able to put their heart into something that *absolutely will* kill someone, no matter how noble or humane their demise. Especially after they've put together so many successful missions of sending people to orbit and back. At that point, you're more or less asking for a mission failure of some kind, since depressed people make mistakes they wouldn't make otherwise. That in turn, represents and unacceptable mission risk in it's own right, so you're just better off making sure that they have a way home.
Also, there's the part where success is always defined as going there and back if there's people involved. I've never seen or read anything to the contrary ever being suggested; I think it's an assumed, cultural bias.
Now, in a country with a proud heritage of sending heroes off to certain doom, the science yielded from the mission would be worth the loss of a few well-trained astronauts. Interestingly enough, rescuing said crew would probably motivate the USA moreso than any other objective since we seem to have such an intense distaste for such things (e.g. leave no man behind)- but I digress.
As for privitizing space exporation - there's just no money in it, so you'll never see the investment money needed to pull it off. Besides, no company has enough in the margins to pull it off alone, and I'm sure that those with big piles of cash on hand (like MSFT and GOOG) have other things in mind. If you look back, every advancement in exploration or transportaion was paid for by someone looking forward to a whopping return on their investment, or looking to flaunt their wealth. Given the expense and scale of leaving Earth's gravity well, neither of those two are really possible.
So basically, it's not gonna happen unless we discover an obscene amount of platinum off-world, or we discover some radical form of propulsion that can out-perform and/or out-price chemical rockets.
I didn't think about using existing oil wells - thanks for the info. I googled around and found this to be a great starting point on the topic:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Geothermal_Oil_Wells
Apparently the wells can be used without extra drilling. Just uncap and re-use, as you say.
Sweet.
Any word on when the bugfix for #212 Androgenic Alopecia is going to be done? The recommended workaround, running the Monoxodil UI, is costing me a fortune in license fees.
Mod parent up.
Solar power, and it's derivitave forms (wind and hydroelectric), have limitations based on geography, climate and land use (solar panels on crop land = bad). Geothermal has the one advantage that it's technically feasable anywhere, provided you can dig deep enough.
All that's needed is for industry to re-direct its resouces from drilling for oil, to drilling for hot rocks. While I'm sure its not as simple as all that, its still nice to know that we don't necessarily have to invent anything wildly new to pull this off.
Like the parent mentions, passive heating/cooling is another smart way to go. Any hole/cave that's deep enough will maintain a steady temperature (the average for the region) year-round, all by itself.
Well, they could always have a few more episodes where the patient has Lupus.
LiPo batteries are only the half of it. I'm not saying that we should bail on this kind of development, but we should hope that safety standards for EV's and hybrids take into consideration what other cars may have on-board.
Consider that we're moving fast into a transition period of sorts, where we'll have a multitude of different fuel types on the road at once. IMHO, it's going to stay like this for a while:
- Gas/Diesel/Ethanol
- Natural Gas
- Hydrogen
- Batteries or Super-Capacitors
Now imagine you work for the local fire department, and there's a 15 car pileup on a foggy freeway, and there's probably at least two cars involved representing each of the types above. How do you start rescuing people from such a mess when you have several huge potential ignition sources, shock hazards and gaseous and/or liquid fuel all over the place? Also, what happens well before the FD gets there? I'm not saying it's an intractable situation, but it's a sobering thought.
You reminded me of the time my friends and I tried to "beat" Gauntlet on the C64.
//should have sprung for a fastload cart.
I think we made it to something like level 54, playing two people at a time, in shifts.
It took hours, and several dozen sodas. It felt like we spent as much time watching levels load as we spent playing them. It kind of made those "bonus" levels a penalty of sorts: 2 minutes loading, 20 seconds playing, another 2 minutes loading, etc.
Gauntlet most certainly falls in the "game data loaded from disk" category. The old SSI AD&D games were another good example of that, with dungeons, towns and the overworld each being requiring data from disk.
Society has a habit of latching onto a name-brand as the name for a thing. It's nothing new.
* Would you like a xerox copy of that?
* How about I scotch-tape that back together for you?
* The spots? Yea, I spilled some clorox on them while doing the laundry.
Using these as verbs is just as common: xeroxed, scotch-taped, cloroxed.
Excellent point. I've been wondering why a DS "cellphone cartridge" hasn't been made available yet. It would seem like the easiest and cheapest way to get this off the ground.
Come to think of it, an intrepid hacker could probably pull this off with the right cellphone parts.
Here's a good example. Along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway you have BWI airport, Goddard Space Flight Center, and then downtown, Andrews Airforce Base. Now you could have this be a wonderful haven for aerospace and defense contracting, but instead, most of the contractors here have field offices over in Tyson's Corner, Reston or even Dulles (all very much in VA). To add insult to injury: GSFC itself was built 50 years ago.
So, MD has a huge budget deficit and what do they do? Encourage the growth of business, so they can gather more taxes next year? Of course not, they raise taxes on everyone who's already here, and encourage them to move money across the river. Nice. How about taxing people who are exporting business instead?
For anyone not familiar with the geography of the DC-metro area, "outsourcing" from any of the commercialized areas around the MD side of the beltway means a 25-45 minute drive over to Tysons (non-rush-hour of course). It's that close and that convenient. Even from Baltimore, it's not that bad of a haul.
And as a bonus, it's not like you're traveling to some nameless sea of office-parks: the dining is pretty damn good over there. So you send a broker to make a day of it, get some precious face-time with a few e-businesses, laugh it up at Morton's, and save a buttload on your next website, data bunker, co-lo, or what-have-you.
Someone commented on TFA about incorporating in Delaware. That's certainly an option, although the bay bridge is quite an impediment to face-time. However, I can easily see stuff going to PA or even WV if you're north or west of Baltimore (respectively).
I'm curious: So what say you of the whole HFCS vs Cane Sugar debate?
:)
Thanks.
To be fair about it, predators also eat the bone, blood, organs, entrails and even the ruminate inside. They need to since flesh (muscle and skin) doesn't have the mineral and vitamin content an animal needs to survive.
So, be sure to have a nice slice of kidney pie, bone meal, some chitins, and liver with that hamburger! Yum-o.
Honestly, you'll get farther eating like the omnivore you are: meat, vegetables, herbs, fruit and few processed carbs and sugars.
Mod parent up.
ATT/SBC needs to develop a taste for their own dog food, or start making a better product.