Someone above mentioned looking for a dating site with the lowest riffraff factor -- indeed it varies considerably, and there's a strong inverse correlation between riffraff and cost. Yahoo personals was free, so there were lots of window-shoppers, and a fair number of, well, let's call them "pros". Match.com charged a bit, so it was a bit better. eHarmony cost a bunch, and had an exhaustive (well, exhausting, at least, as it lacked the ability to specify non-starters other than smokin) entrance survey -- both of which served to *drastically* weed out those who weren't serious about a relationship.
I'm not sure I agree. I think specialist sites (even free ones) cut down on the riffraff much more than expensive sites. In fact, I think a lot of sane people don't like the idea of paying a lot of money every month for a dating site. It's mostly the desperate who do that. I think a site that allows (limited) free access (at least the ability to respond to someone who contacted you) are a lot more effective.
So don't go to big commercial sites for "normal people", find one that specialises in people like you. Could be nerds, highly educated people, fans of a particular subculture, whatever. I found my wife on a free/low-cost non-commercial christian social network site for more than just dating, and while I admit it had its share of crazies and fundies, they were pretty easy to recognise and filter out, and I had no problem finding sane, well-adjusted people interested in long-term relationships. I married one of them.
It is important that a dating site allows you to select for long-term relationships, as well as various other issues that you consider important. A search feature with a free text field is also more useful than some fancy match-making technology.
does anyone know if this dude can get payback legally in any form? (and by payback i mean something like getting the entire police force fired or something...)
Or at least his 800 pounds back.
The police clearly overstepped their bounds. If there was ever a reason to sue the police, this is it. (Okay, of course there have been far worse examples of police abuse, but this one sounds like a pretty clear cut case to me.)
I recently saw a report that showed IE6 sharing the top spot with IE8. Apparently a lot of big corporations still use IE6 because they're too scared to touch anything.
Actually, our cats greet us at the door too, and most of the time, they still have plenty of food at the time. They're actually very sociable.
My cat used to really miss me. When I was away, he say at the door meowing pathetically. He loved to hang around me, but he was scared of strangers, always hiding under the bed.
In fact, my cat had some serious personality development during his life. When he was young, he was scared and timid, especially when he got a personality clash with the downstairs neighbour's husband. He was her cat until that time. I got him after he couldn't live with her husband anymore. During his stay with me, he very slowly got a bit more confident, until eventually (after many years) he was confident enough to walk through the room while there were strangers.
Eventually (because I got a project abroad) I found him another home where two other cats already lived. He quickly became the dominant cat there, and aparently even terrorised some other cats in that area.
My cat could recognise a couple of phrases. He could recognise his own name, of course (I tested if it wasn't just the tone of my voice by calling a different name in the same tone, and he looked at me as if saying: "who are you calling? there's nobody else here"), and he always obeyed "on the floor", which I'd say whenever I found him on a table or kitchen counter. He quickly learned he wasn't allowed on the kitchen counter if I was nearby (they're like overtrained neural networks), and he'd obediently jump off the table whenever I told him to. And then he'd jump on the table again until I (immediately) told him to get off again.
Cats are smart in a really stupid way. Or stupid in a really clever way.
If the entire world had enough motive. But why would they? Most apps are made for windows
Exactly, and that's the problem. People don't buy Windows for its own quality, but only because of the many third party apps. And third parties only develop for Windows, because that's where the majority of users are. It has nothing whatsoever to do with any perceived quality of Windows. That's how the Windows monopoly works, and MS helped that monopoly get where it is by punishing hardware sellers if they dared to sell PCs with different OSs.
Nobody is complaining about hotmail/msn monopoly because there isn't one
Exactly, so why do you keep going on about it?
You keep twisting the issue and diverting attention to issues that have nothing to do with it, pretending that that helps your argument about how there's no Windows monopoly. But it's completely irrelevant, so stop bringing it up.
just like their isn't a windows monopoly.
Despite what you just said about everybody using Windows and everybody writing software just for windows?
Google is the most used search engine - are you calling them a monopoly? Here let's take your statement "But it's the search engine where Google rules, and taht's where I can't ignore them no matter how much I'd like to, because a lot of third-party software is only being published for the monopolist's website, because no other search engine matters enough"
What third-party software is there that's developed for Google? How does any third-party force me to use Google despite my wish not to use it?
Alright, so Google is the default search engine in Firefox, but I can easily change that to another search engine if I want to. I'm not being forced to anything. I've never heard anyone complain that they were forced to use Google when they'd rather use Yahoo or Ask or Bing instead. There's no lock-in. There's free choice, free competition, and it just so happens that most people think Google is doing a pretty good job.
But wait a moment, son, you said third party publishers are producing these apps...so MS is to blame because XYZ company produces for MS exclusively? I swore that each person/group was responsible for their own actions. MS was responsible for pressuring retailers...now that they are no longer pressuring retailers they are responsible for third party vendors who want to produce only for MS?
They are indeed responsible for creating this situation by pressuring retailers. And they're not automatically absolved of that just because they got what they wanted. Do you seriously not see that third party developers develop for Windows only because of MS pressuring retailers?
The least thing MS could do to allow free competition is by opening up their entire API and allowing everybody to reimplement it for different platforms, but instead it needs to be reverse-engineered, and as soon as people have figured it out, MS changes everything around again. It's a fucking mess, and MS should definitely be held responsible for their actions. They don't get off the hook just because you happen to like them.
I have no problem investing more money at NASA. I'm 25 and haven't seen anyone set foot on the moon - I expect that to happen in my lifetime too, dammit!
Nah, we've been to the moon already. I want to go to Mars.
A permanent base on the moon would be nice, though. But what are they going to do there?
Are you claiming that the fact that you personally cannot imagine something is a valid argument that it must be impossible? Are the people who say that evolution is impossible because they cannot imagine how it would be possible, are correct? Are the people who believe the earth is flat because it appears that way to them, correct because they cannot imagine it to be round?
The limitations of your imagination do not make for a convincing scientific argument.
How unimaginable do you think computers, cars and airplanes would have been to people living hundreds of years ago? Much more outrageous things than a trip to Mars have been done in the past.
I'm a little dense there bucko? You're argument on what MS did years ago (in an industry where 2 years is a lifetime away)
Do you think that in 2 years the entire world will switch from Windows to something else? No, the GP had it right. You're a little dense, and your going off a tangent about affirmative action doesn't help much to hide that fact.
Interesting though - you neglected to mention FireFox, iTunes (very prevalent on windows machines). FireFox spready like wildfire via grassroots. Then there is google search engine, google e-mail, and other google products which slame MSN/Hotmail into the ground.
Did you notice that none of those are desktop operating systems?
Nobody is complaining about a Hotmail or MSN monopoly. And despite its success, Firefox is still not bigger than IE6. But it's the desktop where MS rules, and that's where I can't ignore them no matter how much I'd like to, because a lot of third-party software is only being published for the monopolist's platform, because no other OS matters enough.
Of course not. You generate the fuel on Mars, send the food and return vehicle on a slow, fuel conserving path, and send only the astronauts and enough food for a one-way trip on a fast trip to Mars.
sorry to go off topic, but the only purpose of manned space exploration is political gain. the same scientific results can be obtained at a fraction of the cost using robotic missions.
Some day perhaps, but at the moment we still don't have any robot that's as mobile or creative as a human.
when it comes to mars, it's more like 200 days for a fuel conserving path.
I don't think we'll be that eager to conserve fuel when we're sending humans. It's a trade-off between how much space they're gonna have, and how long they're gonna stay cooped up in that space.
In any case, Valeri Polyakov has spent over 400 continuous days in Mir, which definitely counts as very cramped.
jupiter? cassini took 7 years.
That's nice, but I'm not talking about Jupiter, but about Mars, which is quite a bit closer.
the logistics of keeping 1 or more people alive, fed, and not insane for 400+ days (round trip) is unimaginable to me considering the current state of our technology.
Unless you're a leading rocket scientist, what's unimaginable to you is hardly relevant, is it? Read Zubrin's, proposal. He deals with exactly those logistics.
Basically, the Mars base, return vehicle and food are going to be sent on an unmanned fuel-conserving path, and only once we're sure everything is in place, are the humans sent on a much faster path. It takes a bit of fuel, but they don't have to bring food, fuel or equipment for the stay on Mars or the return trip. That makes quite a lot of difference.
Do you seriously believe NASA is currently as efficient as it can be? There's too much politics and bureaucracy involved. I'm not too impressed by official budget claims from NASA.
You might want to read some of Robert Zubrin's ideas. He claims NASA could send people to Mars for 20 million, and a more efficient organisation could do it for 3 billion. 100 billion is quite a lot of money.
So? Both would end up being short-term projects. The difference being that a Mars trip would be mostly travel, with a brief period of exploration and science. With the ISS, even 15 years before de-orbit is still 15 years of science. That puts the ISS at a full 12 years ahead on science (even estimating a full Mars mission with 1 year of on-planet exploration and experiments during a 1-year transit there and another on the way back).
Scientific value is not a direct function of the number of years put into it. The ISS is not the first of its kind. We've had Mir and Skylab, and the ISS is basically just a bigger version of those. Sending people to Mars would be something completely new. It's an accomplishment on the scale of putting the first people on the moon. And people on Mars would be able to investigate things that all those Mars rovers never can.
The question is, whey it has no scientific value. Then create some experiments that give it value.
You mean, now that we have a cool solution, we need to create a cool problem for it to solve? My impression was that it's not really all that suitable for a lot of experiments that scientists wanted to do in space. Or it's too expensive for what we get in return.
I fully agree the ISS is really cool, but not everything that's cool is really worth $100 billion.
Have you read that link? It says the ISS does have engines, which it needs regularly to stop from dropping out of the sky. The idea of a plasma drive on the ISS so it's cheaper to keep it up there is an interesting one.
(I may have started by expressing the hope that the ISS stays up there for a while, but I'm not at all sure that's a good idea. Critics say it's a waste of money with no scientific value whatsoever. So why did we put it up there in the first place? Shouldn't we be figuring out how to mine asteroids instead?)
You could say the same thing about Hubble, the Mars Rovers, Cassini, LHC, etc.
I could but won't. Hubble has let us look further than ever before. Sure it's an expensive telescope with its share of problems, but the lack of atmosphere matters a lot. The Mars Rovers were quite cheap, especially in comparison with the ISS, but we now know a lot more about Mars than we did 15 years ago. The LHC hasn't gotten us anything yet, but it's something we need if we want to look at even smaller particles than we have so far.
There's no other location where we can do long-term scientific research in zero gravity, so we would do well to keep the ISS if we plan to keep learning from it.
We could do it in a cheaper space station. We've done it in the Shuttle, Mir and Skylab. Also, I heard that the ISS isn't even all the useful for real zero g research. It's more microgravity, what with people moving about on board, atmospheric drag, regularly needing a boost to a higher orbit, etc.
Sure you can do research there, but is it the best way to do that research?
That takes way too much energy. It'd be a very big mission in itself, and it's not something that ISS is designed to do. A higher orbit might be an option, but still costs a lot of energy. De-orbiting is cheap.
$100 billion dollars is a lot of money just to burn it up in less than 20 years,
We could have put people on Mars for that money.
Of course then you burn that money in an even short amount of time, but then at least we'd have put people on Mars. The amount of money you spend is irrelevant if you don't take into account what you get back for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone above mentioned looking for a dating site with the lowest riffraff factor -- indeed it varies considerably, and there's a strong inverse correlation between riffraff and cost. Yahoo personals was free, so there were lots of window-shoppers, and a fair number of, well, let's call them "pros". Match.com charged a bit, so it was a bit better. eHarmony cost a bunch, and had an exhaustive (well, exhausting, at least, as it lacked the ability to specify non-starters other than smokin) entrance survey -- both of which served to *drastically* weed out those who weren't serious about a relationship.
I'm not sure I agree. I think specialist sites (even free ones) cut down on the riffraff much more than expensive sites. In fact, I think a lot of sane people don't like the idea of paying a lot of money every month for a dating site. It's mostly the desperate who do that. I think a site that allows (limited) free access (at least the ability to respond to someone who contacted you) are a lot more effective.
So don't go to big commercial sites for "normal people", find one that specialises in people like you. Could be nerds, highly educated people, fans of a particular subculture, whatever. I found my wife on a free/low-cost non-commercial christian social network site for more than just dating, and while I admit it had its share of crazies and fundies, they were pretty easy to recognise and filter out, and I had no problem finding sane, well-adjusted people interested in long-term relationships. I married one of them.
It is important that a dating site allows you to select for long-term relationships, as well as various other issues that you consider important. A search feature with a free text field is also more useful than some fancy match-making technology.
does anyone know if this dude can get payback legally in any form? (and by payback i mean something like getting the entire police force fired or something...)
Or at least his 800 pounds back.
The police clearly overstepped their bounds. If there was ever a reason to sue the police, this is it. (Okay, of course there have been far worse examples of police abuse, but this one sounds like a pretty clear cut case to me.)
It was probably quail.
He shot Dan?
IE6 > NS4.
That's as far as it goes.
True, but then, every single browser in the history of the world was better than NS4.
I recently saw a report that showed IE6 sharing the top spot with IE8. Apparently a lot of big corporations still use IE6 because they're too scared to touch anything.
Exactly. They learn it's not okay to jump on the table when the human is present. When the human is gone, they own the house.
Actually, our cats greet us at the door too, and most of the time, they still have plenty of food at the time. They're actually very sociable.
My cat used to really miss me. When I was away, he say at the door meowing pathetically. He loved to hang around me, but he was scared of strangers, always hiding under the bed.
In fact, my cat had some serious personality development during his life. When he was young, he was scared and timid, especially when he got a personality clash with the downstairs neighbour's husband. He was her cat until that time. I got him after he couldn't live with her husband anymore. During his stay with me, he very slowly got a bit more confident, until eventually (after many years) he was confident enough to walk through the room while there were strangers.
Eventually (because I got a project abroad) I found him another home where two other cats already lived. He quickly became the dominant cat there, and aparently even terrorised some other cats in that area.
My cat could recognise a couple of phrases. He could recognise his own name, of course (I tested if it wasn't just the tone of my voice by calling a different name in the same tone, and he looked at me as if saying: "who are you calling? there's nobody else here"), and he always obeyed "on the floor", which I'd say whenever I found him on a table or kitchen counter. He quickly learned he wasn't allowed on the kitchen counter if I was nearby (they're like overtrained neural networks), and he'd obediently jump off the table whenever I told him to. And then he'd jump on the table again until I (immediately) told him to get off again.
Cats are smart in a really stupid way. Or stupid in a really clever way.
If the entire world had enough motive. But why would they? Most apps are made for windows
Exactly, and that's the problem. People don't buy Windows for its own quality, but only because of the many third party apps. And third parties only develop for Windows, because that's where the majority of users are. It has nothing whatsoever to do with any perceived quality of Windows. That's how the Windows monopoly works, and MS helped that monopoly get where it is by punishing hardware sellers if they dared to sell PCs with different OSs.
Nobody is complaining about hotmail/msn monopoly because there isn't one
Exactly, so why do you keep going on about it?
You keep twisting the issue and diverting attention to issues that have nothing to do with it, pretending that that helps your argument about how there's no Windows monopoly. But it's completely irrelevant, so stop bringing it up.
just like their isn't a windows monopoly.
Despite what you just said about everybody using Windows and everybody writing software just for windows?
Google is the most used search engine - are you calling them a monopoly? Here let's take your statement "But it's the search engine where Google rules, and taht's where I can't ignore them no matter how much I'd like to, because a lot of third-party software is only being published for the monopolist's website, because no other search engine matters enough"
What third-party software is there that's developed for Google? How does any third-party force me to use Google despite my wish not to use it?
Alright, so Google is the default search engine in Firefox, but I can easily change that to another search engine if I want to. I'm not being forced to anything. I've never heard anyone complain that they were forced to use Google when they'd rather use Yahoo or Ask or Bing instead. There's no lock-in. There's free choice, free competition, and it just so happens that most people think Google is doing a pretty good job.
But wait a moment, son, you said third party publishers are producing these apps...so MS is to blame because XYZ company produces for MS exclusively? I swore that each person/group was responsible for their own actions. MS was responsible for pressuring retailers...now that they are no longer pressuring retailers they are responsible for third party vendors who want to produce only for MS?
They are indeed responsible for creating this situation by pressuring retailers. And they're not automatically absolved of that just because they got what they wanted. Do you seriously not see that third party developers develop for Windows only because of MS pressuring retailers?
The least thing MS could do to allow free competition is by opening up their entire API and allowing everybody to reimplement it for different platforms, but instead it needs to be reverse-engineered, and as soon as people have figured it out, MS changes everything around again. It's a fucking mess, and MS should definitely be held responsible for their actions. They don't get off the hook just because you happen to like them.
I have no problem investing more money at NASA. I'm 25 and haven't seen anyone set foot on the moon - I expect that to happen in my lifetime too, dammit!
Nah, we've been to the moon already. I want to go to Mars.
A permanent base on the moon would be nice, though. But what are they going to do there?
Are you claiming that the fact that you personally cannot imagine something is a valid argument that it must be impossible? Are the people who say that evolution is impossible because they cannot imagine how it would be possible, are correct? Are the people who believe the earth is flat because it appears that way to them, correct because they cannot imagine it to be round?
The limitations of your imagination do not make for a convincing scientific argument.
How unimaginable do you think computers, cars and airplanes would have been to people living hundreds of years ago? Much more outrageous things than a trip to Mars have been done in the past.
Are you suggesting that the ISS can travel to places where Skylab and Mir couldn't?
It's just a bigger speedboat. Cool, but hardly worthwhile when there's more interesting stuff to spend 100 billion on.
Blizzard keeps WoW working well with Wine.
But not natively on linux.
I'm a little dense there bucko? You're argument on what MS did years ago (in an industry where 2 years is a lifetime away)
Do you think that in 2 years the entire world will switch from Windows to something else? No, the GP had it right. You're a little dense, and your going off a tangent about affirmative action doesn't help much to hide that fact.
Interesting though - you neglected to mention FireFox, iTunes (very prevalent on windows machines). FireFox spready like wildfire via grassroots. Then there is google search engine, google e-mail, and other google products which slame MSN/Hotmail into the ground.
Did you notice that none of those are desktop operating systems?
Nobody is complaining about a Hotmail or MSN monopoly. And despite its success, Firefox is still not bigger than IE6. But it's the desktop where MS rules, and that's where I can't ignore them no matter how much I'd like to, because a lot of third-party software is only being published for the monopolist's platform, because no other OS matters enough.
Of course not. You generate the fuel on Mars, send the food and return vehicle on a slow, fuel conserving path, and send only the astronauts and enough food for a one-way trip on a fast trip to Mars.
NASA - 20 million
Billion, obviously. Fortunately others here were smart enough to figure that one out.
sorry to go off topic, but the only purpose of manned space exploration is political gain. the same scientific results can be obtained at a fraction of the cost using robotic missions.
Some day perhaps, but at the moment we still don't have any robot that's as mobile or creative as a human.
when it comes to mars, it's more like 200 days for a fuel conserving path.
I don't think we'll be that eager to conserve fuel when we're sending humans. It's a trade-off between how much space they're gonna have, and how long they're gonna stay cooped up in that space.
In any case, Valeri Polyakov has spent over 400 continuous days in Mir, which definitely counts as very cramped.
jupiter? cassini took 7 years.
That's nice, but I'm not talking about Jupiter, but about Mars, which is quite a bit closer.
the logistics of keeping 1 or more people alive, fed, and not insane for 400+ days (round trip) is unimaginable to me considering the current state of our technology.
Unless you're a leading rocket scientist, what's unimaginable to you is hardly relevant, is it? Read Zubrin's, proposal. He deals with exactly those logistics.
Basically, the Mars base, return vehicle and food are going to be sent on an unmanned fuel-conserving path, and only once we're sure everything is in place, are the humans sent on a much faster path. It takes a bit of fuel, but they don't have to bring food, fuel or equipment for the stay on Mars or the return trip. That makes quite a lot of difference.
Do you seriously believe NASA is currently as efficient as it can be? There's too much politics and bureaucracy involved. I'm not too impressed by official budget claims from NASA.
OS-X is not a viable competing good?
Can I get my games working on it? If not, I'll be forced to use Windows, which I'd really rather not.
You might want to read some of Robert Zubrin's ideas. He claims NASA could send people to Mars for 20 million, and a more efficient organisation could do it for 3 billion. 100 billion is quite a lot of money.
So? Both would end up being short-term projects. The difference being that a Mars trip would be mostly travel, with a brief period of exploration and science. With the ISS, even 15 years before de-orbit is still 15 years of science. That puts the ISS at a full 12 years ahead on science (even estimating a full Mars mission with 1 year of on-planet exploration and experiments during a 1-year transit there and another on the way back).
Scientific value is not a direct function of the number of years put into it. The ISS is not the first of its kind. We've had Mir and Skylab, and the ISS is basically just a bigger version of those. Sending people to Mars would be something completely new. It's an accomplishment on the scale of putting the first people on the moon. And people on Mars would be able to investigate things that all those Mars rovers never can.
The question is, whey it has no scientific value. Then create some experiments that give it value.
You mean, now that we have a cool solution, we need to create a cool problem for it to solve? My impression was that it's not really all that suitable for a lot of experiments that scientists wanted to do in space. Or it's too expensive for what we get in return.
I fully agree the ISS is really cool, but not everything that's cool is really worth $100 billion.
Yes, the ISS has no engines and will fall out of the sky eventually, much like Skylab. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Altitude_control
Have you read that link? It says the ISS does have engines, which it needs regularly to stop from dropping out of the sky. The idea of a plasma drive on the ISS so it's cheaper to keep it up there is an interesting one.
(I may have started by expressing the hope that the ISS stays up there for a while, but I'm not at all sure that's a good idea. Critics say it's a waste of money with no scientific value whatsoever. So why did we put it up there in the first place? Shouldn't we be figuring out how to mine asteroids instead?)
You could say the same thing about Hubble, the Mars Rovers, Cassini, LHC, etc.
I could but won't. Hubble has let us look further than ever before. Sure it's an expensive telescope with its share of problems, but the lack of atmosphere matters a lot. The Mars Rovers were quite cheap, especially in comparison with the ISS, but we now know a lot more about Mars than we did 15 years ago. The LHC hasn't gotten us anything yet, but it's something we need if we want to look at even smaller particles than we have so far.
There's no other location where we can do long-term scientific research in zero gravity, so we would do well to keep the ISS if we plan to keep learning from it.
We could do it in a cheaper space station. We've done it in the Shuttle, Mir and Skylab. Also, I heard that the ISS isn't even all the useful for real zero g research. It's more microgravity, what with people moving about on board, atmospheric drag, regularly needing a boost to a higher orbit, etc.
Sure you can do research there, but is it the best way to do that research?
That takes way too much energy. It'd be a very big mission in itself, and it's not something that ISS is designed to do. A higher orbit might be an option, but still costs a lot of energy. De-orbiting is cheap.
$100 billion dollars is a lot of money just to burn it up in less than 20 years,
We could have put people on Mars for that money.
Of course then you burn that money in an even short amount of time, but then at least we'd have put people on Mars. The amount of money you spend is irrelevant if you don't take into account what you get back for it.