I noticed that, too. And they got it from one inch below the surface. Not impossible, but quite a feat for a remotely controlled robot with a teeny-tiny scoop and a relatively short arm.
IIRC (twenty years between me and the USAF), a paratrooper with all his gear (chute, rifle, rucksack, etc.) came in at around 260#. Ramp that up a little for a guy with a extra specialized gear, and you're headed straight for the 400# limit of the aircraft. I'm just sayin', it seems like a better (or more likely) application of the technology, particularly because the plane is evidently quiet, small, and obviously expendable after delivering its cargo.
As a guy who used to airdrop cargo and troops in the Air Force, I'm skeptical about the utility of this vehicle. 400 pounds is about one fully-loaded CDS (container delivery system) bundle, which is about enough stuff for a handful of troops for a day if it includes any munitions at all. To be useful, I believe a ton of cargo is a better target capacity.
OTOH, 400 pounds is a nice package size for one clandestine operative and all his gear. Hmm...
Other than the fact that my wife laundered my phone the other day (it's drying out, working some), I've not had any significant problems with Sprint in 12 years other than billing and customer support. Those aspects are abysmal. At this point, I can't tell what the costs of AT&T's 3G plans for the iPhone are going to be, but I'm sure going to be doing some hard comparison between the 3G iPhone and the "Instinct" that Sprint is coming out with in a couple weeks. Their $100 "everything" plan would be a small price increase over what I'm currently paying for 800 minutes with a few features added on.
For those who don't want to go digging for the crunchy bits:
If you create, transmit, or display health or other information while using Google Health, you may provide only information that you own or have the right to use. When you provide your information through Google Health, you give Google a license to use and distribute it in connection with Google Health and other Google services. However, Google may only use health information you provide as permitted by the Google Health Privacy Policy, your Sharing Authorization, and applicable law. Google is not a "covered entity" under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and the regulations promulgated thereunder ("HIPAA"). As a result, HIPAA does not apply to the transmission of health information by Google to any third party.
Thank you for this post. I read the blurb and thought Dyson had died when I wasn't looking. I'm not a huge follower of physics people (I was about to say I wasn't a huge follower of physics, but that whole gravity thing holding me in my chair changed my mind), but I know a few names. Missing the passing of Dyson would make me feel like I wasn't paying attention.
Regarding Wheeler, I didn't know who he was. That's sad, as he evidently did good work.
Safe journey, Mr. Wheeler.
Hmm... It seems like it's a short leap from P2P to worm-based file distribution. How about wrapping a media file with self-replicating code? In a friendly world (yeah, I know, a fiction), software on a destination machine would advertise things it was interested in. The replicant wrapper would seek out machines that wanted it, then start sending. Once the send completed, the item would be removed from the "want" list. If the packages were signed by the creator, you could whitelist known-good packagers to attempt to ensure quality data.
This is somewhat different than torrents, where you have to actively seek out a particular file to start the download process. To keep down NetBEUI-like probe storms where replicant datafiles are looking for hosts that want them, a well-known want-list tracker could be employed. There are privacy issues with that, but it's not like torrents would go away if this sort of thing were employed.
We in Portland are (as a group) typical of the "think green" group, wherein we want to consume energy, feel good about where it comes from, and not think too deeply about the sensibility of it all. Oddly, solar and wind energy are good (this makes me happy, because I work for a wind energy company), but hydo is bad (think of the fish!). Few people stop to think that they're all forms of solar power. Furthermore, natural gas is okay for heating your home and making hot water, not to mention the popularity of gas fireplaces here, but gas fired power generation is viewed with suspicion, and there's a huge movement to keep someone from building an LNG terminal on some fallow industrial land down river from here. And, while we have several large low-sulphur coal-fired power plants East of the Cascade mountains doing a fair job of supplying large amounts of cheap power, no one likes those at all.
So, if this plastic generates electricity when it's deformed mechanically, why not hang sheets of it cut into strips somewhere that a breeze blows regularly? Seems to me like the wind blows a lot more than the rain falls, even here in Portland.
That all sounds reasonable. I was replying to: some times you arn't even allowed to see where you are going. That conjures up visions of blindfolded agents in the back of black sedans being taken to "undisclosed locations" for receipt of classified information. That sounds like somewhat of a stretch to me.
IANASA, but I would bet that, if you're at such a clearance level that you're allowed to see "ultra super top secret, eyes only" type information, they don't care if you know where you went to look at it. I suspect that a lot of the stuff you see in movies is for dramatic purposes only. But then, how would we know?
AFAIK, a basic tenet of the Muslim faith is that The Prophet's (Muhammad's) image won't be used. Now, not being a Muslim (or Christian or Jew), I'm not sure if this is just a fragment of what the Qur'an says on the subject (like the Bible's "an eye for an eye" thing, where the popular meme has the forgiveness part dropped off). I will say, though, that not being able to use Muhammad's image has put a serious damper on the penetration of understanding of the faith in the Western world. After reading Reza Aslan's "No God But God," I thought, "Hey, this would make a good Discovery Channel documentary." On further consideration, they could never do it, as it would require re-enactment scenes showing the life of Muhammad. Fear of reprisal will keep such a show from ever being made, no matter how helpful to the world situation it would be.
While not quite as vehemently pushed as the above-mentioned proscription against using Muhammad's image, Christian Protestants don't use crosses with Jesus hung on them. That's how you can tell a Protestant church from a Catholic one at a glance: does the cross outside have Jesus on it? Catholic. Bare cross? Protestant. Though, as I said, IANAC (nor Muslim, nor Jew).
I think you meant verbs to nouns, but you've probably realized that by now. I didn't know WTF Twitter was, either, but I use Firefox, and did a double-click, right-click on the word, selected "Search for 'Twitter' in Google," and read the resulting first hit. It's another social networking service, evidently for those who can't stand the idea that everyone in the world won't know what they're up to at any given moment. Yuck.
I'll be curious to see if XMPP makes it into the world of intra-application messaging for "get crap done" apps rather than the current "waste my time" apps (I can't believe I actually posted this on Slashdot). It seems like it would be useful for distributing blocks of data to app nodes for work (someone tagged the story "grid," so I suppose they agree), or enabling clustering.
To the Chinese (AFAIK), "X" is pronounced like the English "sh", making this "shmpp", sort of like the sound of a sack of flour hitting the floor. Mind you, IANACL (Chinese linguist), nor someone who regularly handles large sacks of flour.
AJAX is an ugly hack...[instead], the server can push XML fragments to the client whenever it wants and some client-side JavaScript could then process them into the DOM
Now, there you go, starting one of those Slashdot-special meta arguments about what the nature of this "web" thing is. Back in the day, "web" was everything HTML, mostly running on port 80. One could argue that "web" is anything meant for direct consumption by a user (y'know, like through a browser), but that's blown on several fronts. Mail has become part of the web. So, where are the edges of the web? Where does it stop? Where does it start?
That is, if you consider roughly 66% a "reasonable" level of confidence. Of course, there's a bunch of fancy math that would use your given population of rooms and an unknown total population of spiders to better estimate the distribution of spiders across rooms. I find it easier to remember that, with one random sample of an unknown population, there's about a 2 in 3 chance that it's representative of the whole. Two samples that show up the same (two rooms surveyed, each with two spiders) should give you around 95% confidence.
At least that's the way I remember my statistics class. It's been a long time.
YMMV. My wife and I have been virtually glued to the HD versions of The Discovery Network channels since upgrading to high def at Christmas. Not sure that HBO is worth it. I want to drop it and go with a movie download service, and am researching STBs right now. Not sure I want to put the effort into a custom job; might go with ATV, though I'm not sure I can put up with the "watch it in 24 hours" part; might get an ATV and hack it, particularly if it would work with Netflix' service.
5) as good as HBO/showtime/movie on demand but with no subscription fee.
This is a key consideration for us. Right now we have DirecTV with a premium channel (actually, we're on a trial two-for-one right now with HBO and Showtime), and we're surprised at the general lack of selection for movies. We haven't done any "on demand" (can you even do that with DirecTV?) or pay-per-view. The idea of browsing an iTunes store, finding something to watch, and watching it for a small rental fee without going to Hollywood Video is attractive (we waste a lot of time in travel and browsing the shelves, which only sort alphabetically, and don't really filter much). The one hitch we see is that sometimes we want to pause a movie and watch the rest another day. With the AppleTV/iTunes solution, it has to be within 24 hours of the time you started watching.
We'd be happy to pay whatever we're paying for the premium channel (~$17/mo) and send it to the likes of NetFlix for an all-you-can-consume download service. It would end up being three to five movies a month, which I don't consider abusive at that price. They should consider the Safari Online model (which is for technical books) where you can have N books on your shelf and use them as much as you want. Need a different book? Swap it for one you're not using as much. It's essentially the same model that NetFlix uses now for the snail-mail DVD thing, but with downloads, it scales well ($15 per month for three movie slots, $25 for six...).
Well, you see, since helium is in short supply, its price is going to go up. Dramatically. Once its up, you start looking for places to get it. One known place is through the distillation of oil into petroleum products. Once you establish that, then you need large quantities of oil, because, dammit, there's helium in it, and we need that stuff to sustain our American way of life. When you need large quantities of oil, well, there's always Iran, who has a bunch of it. When we're done with them, we'll look around in the neighborhood over there and see who else we can take. If no one over there looks good, we might take a look at Mexico, because, you know, we kinda know how to talk their lingo, and that would be gooder than fooling around with those Arabs.
Slashdot Mirror
I noticed that, too. And they got it from one inch below the surface. Not impossible, but quite a feat for a remotely controlled robot with a teeny-tiny scoop and a relatively short arm.
.thatswhatshesaid
IIRC (twenty years between me and the USAF), a paratrooper with all his gear (chute, rifle, rucksack, etc.) came in at around 260#. Ramp that up a little for a guy with a extra specialized gear, and you're headed straight for the 400# limit of the aircraft. I'm just sayin', it seems like a better (or more likely) application of the technology, particularly because the plane is evidently quiet, small, and obviously expendable after delivering its cargo.
As a guy who used to airdrop cargo and troops in the Air Force, I'm skeptical about the utility of this vehicle. 400 pounds is about one fully-loaded CDS (container delivery system) bundle, which is about enough stuff for a handful of troops for a day if it includes any munitions at all. To be useful, I believe a ton of cargo is a better target capacity.
OTOH, 400 pounds is a nice package size for one clandestine operative and all his gear. Hmm...
Other than the fact that my wife laundered my phone the other day (it's drying out, working some), I've not had any significant problems with Sprint in 12 years other than billing and customer support. Those aspects are abysmal. At this point, I can't tell what the costs of AT&T's 3G plans for the iPhone are going to be, but I'm sure going to be doing some hard comparison between the 3G iPhone and the "Instinct" that Sprint is coming out with in a couple weeks. Their $100 "everything" plan would be a small price increase over what I'm currently paying for 800 minutes with a few features added on.
Thank you for this post. I read the blurb and thought Dyson had died when I wasn't looking. I'm not a huge follower of physics people (I was about to say I wasn't a huge follower of physics, but that whole gravity thing holding me in my chair changed my mind), but I know a few names. Missing the passing of Dyson would make me feel like I wasn't paying attention. Regarding Wheeler, I didn't know who he was. That's sad, as he evidently did good work. Safe journey, Mr. Wheeler.
BTW, the first is pronounced "nuh-HAY-lem", as in Nehalem Bay, Oregon.
Hmm... It seems like it's a short leap from P2P to worm-based file distribution. How about wrapping a media file with self-replicating code? In a friendly world (yeah, I know, a fiction), software on a destination machine would advertise things it was interested in. The replicant wrapper would seek out machines that wanted it, then start sending. Once the send completed, the item would be removed from the "want" list. If the packages were signed by the creator, you could whitelist known-good packagers to attempt to ensure quality data.
This is somewhat different than torrents, where you have to actively seek out a particular file to start the download process. To keep down NetBEUI-like probe storms where replicant datafiles are looking for hosts that want them, a well-known want-list tracker could be employed. There are privacy issues with that, but it's not like torrents would go away if this sort of thing were employed.
We in Portland are (as a group) typical of the "think green" group, wherein we want to consume energy, feel good about where it comes from, and not think too deeply about the sensibility of it all. Oddly, solar and wind energy are good (this makes me happy, because I work for a wind energy company), but hydo is bad (think of the fish!). Few people stop to think that they're all forms of solar power. Furthermore, natural gas is okay for heating your home and making hot water, not to mention the popularity of gas fireplaces here, but gas fired power generation is viewed with suspicion, and there's a huge movement to keep someone from building an LNG terminal on some fallow industrial land down river from here. And, while we have several large low-sulphur coal-fired power plants East of the Cascade mountains doing a fair job of supplying large amounts of cheap power, no one likes those at all.
So, if this plastic generates electricity when it's deformed mechanically, why not hang sheets of it cut into strips somewhere that a breeze blows regularly? Seems to me like the wind blows a lot more than the rain falls, even here in Portland.
That all sounds reasonable. I was replying to: some times you arn't even allowed to see where you are going. That conjures up visions of blindfolded agents in the back of black sedans being taken to "undisclosed locations" for receipt of classified information. That sounds like somewhat of a stretch to me.
IANASA, but I would bet that, if you're at such a clearance level that you're allowed to see "ultra super top secret, eyes only" type information, they don't care if you know where you went to look at it. I suspect that a lot of the stuff you see in movies is for dramatic purposes only. But then, how would we know?
AFAIK, a basic tenet of the Muslim faith is that The Prophet's (Muhammad's) image won't be used. Now, not being a Muslim (or Christian or Jew), I'm not sure if this is just a fragment of what the Qur'an says on the subject (like the Bible's "an eye for an eye" thing, where the popular meme has the forgiveness part dropped off). I will say, though, that not being able to use Muhammad's image has put a serious damper on the penetration of understanding of the faith in the Western world. After reading Reza Aslan's "No God But God," I thought, "Hey, this would make a good Discovery Channel documentary." On further consideration, they could never do it, as it would require re-enactment scenes showing the life of Muhammad. Fear of reprisal will keep such a show from ever being made, no matter how helpful to the world situation it would be.
While not quite as vehemently pushed as the above-mentioned proscription against using Muhammad's image, Christian Protestants don't use crosses with Jesus hung on them. That's how you can tell a Protestant church from a Catholic one at a glance: does the cross outside have Jesus on it? Catholic. Bare cross? Protestant. Though, as I said, IANAC (nor Muslim, nor Jew).
I think you meant verbs to nouns, but you've probably realized that by now. I didn't know WTF Twitter was, either, but I use Firefox, and did a double-click, right-click on the word, selected "Search for 'Twitter' in Google," and read the resulting first hit. It's another social networking service, evidently for those who can't stand the idea that everyone in the world won't know what they're up to at any given moment. Yuck.
I'll be curious to see if XMPP makes it into the world of intra-application messaging for "get crap done" apps rather than the current "waste my time" apps (I can't believe I actually posted this on Slashdot). It seems like it would be useful for distributing blocks of data to app nodes for work (someone tagged the story "grid," so I suppose they agree), or enabling clustering.
To the Chinese (AFAIK), "X" is pronounced like the English "sh", making this "shmpp", sort of like the sound of a sack of flour hitting the floor. Mind you, IANACL (Chinese linguist), nor someone who regularly handles large sacks of flour.
AJAX is an ugly hack...[instead], the server can push XML fragments to the client whenever it wants and some client-side JavaScript could then process them into the DOM
Umm... Isn't that just a different ugly hack?
Now, there you go, starting one of those Slashdot-special meta arguments about what the nature of this "web" thing is. Back in the day, "web" was everything HTML, mostly running on port 80. One could argue that "web" is anything meant for direct consumption by a user (y'know, like through a browser), but that's blown on several fronts. Mail has become part of the web. So, where are the edges of the web? Where does it stop? Where does it start?
Remember, YMMV.
That is, if you consider roughly 66% a "reasonable" level of confidence. Of course, there's a bunch of fancy math that would use your given population of rooms and an unknown total population of spiders to better estimate the distribution of spiders across rooms. I find it easier to remember that, with one random sample of an unknown population, there's about a 2 in 3 chance that it's representative of the whole. Two samples that show up the same (two rooms surveyed, each with two spiders) should give you around 95% confidence.
At least that's the way I remember my statistics class. It's been a long time.
"There are the known-knowns, the known-unknowns, the unknown-knowns, and the unknown-unknowns..." -- Donald Rumsfeld (possibly mis-quoted)
I'd lay 1:1 odds on you being correct.
YMMV. My wife and I have been virtually glued to the HD versions of The Discovery Network channels since upgrading to high def at Christmas. Not sure that HBO is worth it. I want to drop it and go with a movie download service, and am researching STBs right now. Not sure I want to put the effort into a custom job; might go with ATV, though I'm not sure I can put up with the "watch it in 24 hours" part; might get an ATV and hack it, particularly if it would work with Netflix' service.
5) as good as HBO/showtime/movie on demand but with no subscription fee.
This is a key consideration for us. Right now we have DirecTV with a premium channel (actually, we're on a trial two-for-one right now with HBO and Showtime), and we're surprised at the general lack of selection for movies. We haven't done any "on demand" (can you even do that with DirecTV?) or pay-per-view. The idea of browsing an iTunes store, finding something to watch, and watching it for a small rental fee without going to Hollywood Video is attractive (we waste a lot of time in travel and browsing the shelves, which only sort alphabetically, and don't really filter much). The one hitch we see is that sometimes we want to pause a movie and watch the rest another day. With the AppleTV/iTunes solution, it has to be within 24 hours of the time you started watching.
We'd be happy to pay whatever we're paying for the premium channel (~$17/mo) and send it to the likes of NetFlix for an all-you-can-consume download service. It would end up being three to five movies a month, which I don't consider abusive at that price. They should consider the Safari Online model (which is for technical books) where you can have N books on your shelf and use them as much as you want. Need a different book? Swap it for one you're not using as much. It's essentially the same model that NetFlix uses now for the snail-mail DVD thing, but with downloads, it scales well ($15 per month for three movie slots, $25 for six...).
Maybe:
"Number two is, unsurprisingly about the iPhone."
Okay, eeew!
Well, you see, since helium is in short supply, its price is going to go up. Dramatically. Once its up, you start looking for places to get it. One known place is through the distillation of oil into petroleum products. Once you establish that, then you need large quantities of oil, because, dammit, there's helium in it, and we need that stuff to sustain our American way of life. When you need large quantities of oil, well, there's always Iran, who has a bunch of it. When we're done with them, we'll look around in the neighborhood over there and see who else we can take. If no one over there looks good, we might take a look at Mexico, because, you know, we kinda know how to talk their lingo, and that would be gooder than fooling around with those Arabs.