I mean come on. Everyone is pissed at the money being spent in Iraq (and yes I understand that I comparing billions to millions) but NASA still spent years of time and almost a third of a billion dollars to get some particles from the Sun and this is BEST idea to get their investment back safely that they can come up with??????
When is this agency going to get off its ass and come up with something that is meaningful to our nation and humanity as a whole instead of just pure science? I completely understand the need for pure scientific research but that is only going to lead to the slow death of interest and funding for space research and exploration. Everyone mocks Bush for his manned Mars plans and while I agree that they have issues, at least the administration is trying to push the envelope a little bit. We went to the moon decades ago based on responding to a challenge and national will and we haven't done shit since.
Just think of what could have been done with the money wasted on this project and the billions blown on the ISS if NASA had some true leadership, vision, and instituational courage to do something great. Instead we have a bloated bureaocracy that spends extreme amounts of money on safety and paperwork and STILL screws things up.
The Nazis were more concerned about developing technology that could directly lead to weapons, resulting in chemical weapons, jet aircraft, new artillery, ballistic rockets, etc. The Allies on the other hand were do more "big picture" scientific research into new areas such as nuclear reactions, radar, and computers. These all had military uses and applications, but also formed the basis for our dominance and technological revolution in the decades following WWII.
And it's definately not an American thing - most of the scientists responsible for these incredible achievments were not Americans (Bohr, Einstein, von Braun, Fermi, etc) and a large portion of the work was accomplished in England.
Oh yes......if you do find yourself in the company of an interesting female you may further increase your odds by asking for what you want. We can't read your minds.
Why is it that some people always bring up the "looks so fake" argument over every CGI heavy movie. No matter how well done the effects are there are plenty of people who seem to pride themselves on pointing out that they look fake. Hmm, really? 100ft tall robots look fake? Gee, is it because they did a crappy job with the CGI or is it because your brain has never seen a realy one? Gimme a break - just enjoy the damn movie.
This year Fox and CBS are carrying several games each week in glorious HD. If you are a HD subscriber and a Sunday Ticket subscriber you get several of those games in HD each, plus every game in SD, plus the Sunday night ESPN games.
It was a REPUBLICAN administration who ALLOWED (and possibly orchestrated) the 9/11 attack on this country
That statement alone makes your entire comment completely worthless. Lets see - they allow an attack that kills thousands of people and destroys trillions in capital and infrastructure for what possible reason? And don't give me the oil excuse. I don't care how big your tinfoil hat is no sane person can possible believe that the Bush administration perpetrated 9/11 to simply make some more oil money for their cronies.
It's because of ulterior motives...
on
Capturing Genesis
·
· Score: 1
Scientific issues like evolution have been hijacked by people who are only looking for ways to disprove religion and God and will use whatever they can to advance their own cause. And it's unfortunate because evolution does not necessarily exclude the existence of God and vice versa.
The worst part is that this sort of attack forces the religous hordes to counterattack in an effort to debunk that which is being used to attack them. In the end you have 2 groups fighting over an issue that they really have no right to and it's a shame because the science and the search for the truth end up getting lost in the FUD.
I would think a really good reason why we lag behind is because of the huge area we would have to cover to lay fat pipes to everyone in the U.S. South Korea and the other countries mentioned are much smaller in area than the U.S.
One minor part of the Shuttle's excessive risk is caused by the winged landing: To land the Shuttle, you need a aircraft pilot, who's otherwise useless. His presence onboard adds mass, and increases the number of lives that would be lost in an accident.
Actually, no. The current shuttle is fully capable of landing under complete autopilot. The astronauts do it because they are pilots and can't stand to let the machine handle it.
The whole hype surrounding ringtones makes me laugh because they are basically the only "killer app" for modern mobile phones, at least here in the US where text messaging hasn't caught on like in Japan and the EU. All this hype about smart phones and 3G networks and prices of $100+ for a phone and the most used user feature is custom ringtones? How sad is that? So with ringtones being the only service that people actually want and use of course the cell phone companies will make it as difficult as possible to do without paying an arm and a leg to do it their way.
IMHO I think Apple would make a killing and a serious dent in the desktop OS market if they released an X86-compatible version of OS X. I know it would be difficult to make it work with all the endless permeutations of X86 hardware and peripherals out there but even if they just made it compatible with the big ones, like SB, nForce, intel chipsets, etc. they would still hit a pretty big market share.
I dont know of any serious computer users that I have talked to that wouldn't switch to OS X instead of windoze.
Two big factors in to why the shuttle sucks so bad:
1) It was supposed to simply be a ferry between the ground and an orbiting space station. but the space station part never got built
2) It required so many deals to get the funding passed through Congress. Take a look at how many states in the Union supply components for the shuttle and you will start to realize why it costs so much. Not to mention that it isn't reusble - it's rebuildable.
In space terms the Shuttle is basically a dinghy. It has trouble even reaching the ISS at only ~350km of altitude. Don't even think about getting out to GEO which is 22,300 miles away.
"The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB" is an excellent book detailing the KGB side of espionage. The co-author was a KGB agent for 40 years in charge of archiving the documents of the Foreign Intelligence Directorate. He defected in 1992 bringings 10,000+ pages of documents with him.
The book details Soviet intelligence operations from the revolution through the Gorbechev era and it quite stunning in the depth and expertise of the Soviet intelligence system. And some humor too. For example, they were estimating 2 billion rubles a year were being pumped into their economy through industrial espionage but had to tiptoe around when asked to explain to their superiors why the "superior" Soviet economic system couldn't keep up with the West.
There is an interesting "feature" of Windows 2000 that will not let you make a bootable image of the OS. To put it simply, when you make an image the OS doesn't give root access to the swapfile. So when it goes to startup it can't access the swapfile. The catch-22 is that with win2k you can't load the shell without a swapfile and you can't fix the swapfile without the shell.
The only fix is to either move to WinXP and turn off the swapfile or change a registry setting to delete the swapfile on shutdown and recreate on startup. And this problem happens with Partition Magic (my tool of choice), Drive Image, and Ghost.
Because Apple doesn't want the RIAA backing out...
on
Update on Playfair
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· Score: 1
You are right that Apple does not control the license for the music. But it is in their best interests to act on behalf of the real license holder (the RIAA members).
The RIAA considers itself to be doing Apple a favor by allowing Apple to sell it's property. It would not hesitate to revoke this right at any time. In fact, the RIAA considers this whole digital music thing to be unsafe and will revoke it at the slightest hint that they are jeopardizing their revenue stream (read: cash cow).
Think of what would happen if the RIAA determined that Playfair will hurt their revenue and pulled licensing from Apple and maybe even the other digital music stores. Of course, this would be completly insane of them - why kill a 100% profit business model - but they have never been known for their foresight and business acumen.
on a geologic timescale. Heck, anything under 1,000 years is pretty much meaningless. I don't really care if you prove to me that temps have gone up over the last few decades. We are talking about the lifespan of the Earth here, not a human's lifespan.
Now, show me that over the last 10,000 years it has been getting warmer and warmer and that we are breaking new records every century and you have an argument.
Does the RIAA even understand economics anymore?
on
RIAA's Nasty Easter Egg
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Let me get this straight. They have a delivery system for their content which costs them nothing and gives them 100% profit revenue stream. And they want to kill it by jacking up the price to try and slow the deathmarch of their other revenue stream?
iTunes makes no money off the service and the labels get a cut of every track downloaded for simply allowing Apple to sell their intellectual property. I would guess that they have the same deal with all the other services but I don't know for a fact.
How stupid are these people? Are they just scared blind?
As an officer in the Air Force who has friends fighting over in Iraq and Afghanistan, I know that they went for both reasons and one more. The vast majority of the military believes in what Bush is doing and in the war with Iraq and those that don't went because they are professional soldiers and it's their job. But the third reason has to do with September 11th. The feeling across was the military was one of shock that it had happened, then failure that we the soldiers who are charged with protecting this great nation let it happen, and then anger directed at those who launched the attacks.
It's the same kind of feeling a mother gets when her childern are attacked or threatened. Most of us took it personally that we had failed to stop the attacks. When the Bush administration made the conscious choice not to back down and to face the terrorists we were given an outlet for our anger and a chance to redeem ourselves. When the first group of Rangers went into Afghanistan on a night mission they left behind nothing but bodies and a photo of the wreckage of the twin towers. The message? We will not be intimidated and if they thought they could crush this nation through one cowardly act they were very mistaken.
War is an evil thing but unfortunately it is a necessity in our world. Of course in the perfect world there would be no need for a military or warfare or any of this but that only exists in academia or in some people's minds. Whatever hatred or anger you may have for the Bush administration please remember that we the professional soldiers of this nation would be doing the same thing for ANY President that asked it of us, no matter what we think of his politics or morals. Civilians have that choice - we do not.
Jackson had no choice in the matter. He was forced by the studios to cut his movies to 3 hours for theater release. He knew this would alter the story and leave out important points and plotlines. So he requested that he be able to release the extended versions on DVD before the next theatrical movie came out. They refused, he threatened to quit, the studios relented.
If it wasn't for Jackson we would have never gotten the extended versions before seeing the next one and as we all know the extended versions are the TRUE versions of the LOTR films. PJ did us all a favor. IMHO he set the gold standard for value when to comes to making an extended edition.
The thick clouds that come with heavy rains and/or thunderstorms are what cause signal degradation. And yes, snow on your dish will do the same thing. Why? Because in order for the dish to work the signal has to reflect off the dish to the antenna.
If you remember your high school math, every ray the intersects a parabola get reflected through the vertex. Translation - every signal from the satellite that hits the surface of your dish gets reflected to the LNB at the vertex. If part or all of it is covered with snow it will not reflect properly. Bigger dish = bigger area = more signals getting reflected = more strength at the vertex.
I've been a happy DirectTV subsriber since 1998. Why did I get it? FOOTBALL. DirectTV is the only provider that offers IMHO the BEST programming package anyways - Sunday Ticket. For $140 you get every NFL game every Sunday. And as of this year they showed 3 of them in HD (two 1080i, one 480p) every Sunday plus ESPN Sunday Night Football in HD.
The Samsung HD reciever that I got as part of a $399 package deal for existing DirectTV subscribers is pretty good. It will decode OTA, satellite, and cable HD signals and has both component and DVI outputs.
I run Win2k and for the longest time I could not make an image boot successfully. I would use Partition Magic to copy the partition to a backup hard drive. But there would always be an error concerning a missing swap file when I booted the image. The a version of the problem can be found MS Knowledge Base Article 249321
Put briefly, when you make a win2k image somehow root is not given access to the swapfile. Win2k will not work without a swapfile and will not start the shell unless it has one. But, you cannot point it to the swapfile or create a new one until you get into the shell.
You have two choices. One is to use M$ sysprep tool as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. An easier method that I have found is to force win2k to delete the swap file on exit using the instructions found in the PowerQuest Knowledge Base
After making this change, reboot and create a copy of the partition. The copied partition will now be bootable.
I have not worked much with WinXP so I am not sure what the problems inherent to it are, but this method works with win2k.
We went to the moon and made the national effort because of the political will and leadership of this country. Once that will disappeared it was never the same again.
The original plan proposed by Goddard to go to the moon was Earth Orbit Rendezvous, as opposed to the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous we used. The Earth Orbit version had us building a space station and then launching the lunar craft from there. Goddard and others had the forsight to realize that without a permenant station in space it would be very difficult to maintain/repeat the exploration endeavors of the Apollo program.
Sure, it would cost more and take more time to do it with the space station but it would then be the launching pad for all the rest of the launches. Of course, it was decided to go with Lunar Orbit rendezvous because it was faster and cheaper.
The real reason the Space Shuttle failed is because of politics. In order to get it funded they needed the support of Senators and Reps. So, you have a machine whose major parts need to be rebuilt every launch. And where do those parts come from? Various congressional districts across the nation. And I do mean various, because the more districts you have the more Congressmen will get the jobs and money.
Of course, the second part of the plan - the Space Station - never materialized. Without it the Space Shuttle ended up being nothing more than an an extrememly expensive publicity machine searching for meaning.
Take away the grand storyline and good vs. evil and incredible scenery and awesome fights and you still have the characters.
What really struck me when I read the books the first few times was how attached I became to the characters. The range of human emotions that were present in the book - from fear to happiness to despair to anger to love - came through loud and clear. And it had nothing to do with the standard Hollywood method of forcing it down your throat (see Pearl Harbor or Armageddon for examples).
Also, don't forget that the original stories were published decades ago and spawned the entire fantasy genre. We look at them today and think they are just ripping off Dungeons and Dragons or Magic. Most people fail to realize how old LOTR is and that the above examples are actually rip offs of it not the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
When is this agency going to get off its ass and come up with something that is meaningful to our nation and humanity as a whole instead of just pure science? I completely understand the need for pure scientific research but that is only going to lead to the slow death of interest and funding for space research and exploration. Everyone mocks Bush for his manned Mars plans and while I agree that they have issues, at least the administration is trying to push the envelope a little bit. We went to the moon decades ago based on responding to a challenge and national will and we haven't done shit since.
Just think of what could have been done with the money wasted on this project and the billions blown on the ISS if NASA had some true leadership, vision, and instituational courage to do something great. Instead we have a bloated bureaocracy that spends extreme amounts of money on safety and paperwork and STILL screws things up.
And it's definately not an American thing - most of the scientists responsible for these incredible achievments were not Americans (Bohr, Einstein, von Braun, Fermi, etc) and a large portion of the work was accomplished in England.
Isn't that supposed to be OUR line?
She gets pretty damn naked with Antonio Banderas. Not XXX but what do you expect from a "respected actress".
Why is it that some people always bring up the "looks so fake" argument over every CGI heavy movie. No matter how well done the effects are there are plenty of people who seem to pride themselves on pointing out that they look fake. Hmm, really? 100ft tall robots look fake? Gee, is it because they did a crappy job with the CGI or is it because your brain has never seen a realy one? Gimme a break - just enjoy the damn movie.
"How to Cook for Forty Humans"
I'm drooling already waiting for Sunday.
That statement alone makes your entire comment completely worthless. Lets see - they allow an attack that kills thousands of people and destroys trillions in capital and infrastructure for what possible reason? And don't give me the oil excuse. I don't care how big your tinfoil hat is no sane person can possible believe that the Bush administration perpetrated 9/11 to simply make some more oil money for their cronies.
The worst part is that this sort of attack forces the religous hordes to counterattack in an effort to debunk that which is being used to attack them. In the end you have 2 groups fighting over an issue that they really have no right to and it's a shame because the science and the search for the truth end up getting lost in the FUD.
I would think a really good reason why we lag behind is because of the huge area we would have to cover to lay fat pipes to everyone in the U.S. South Korea and the other countries mentioned are much smaller in area than the U.S.
One minor part of the Shuttle's excessive risk is caused by the winged landing: To land the Shuttle, you need a aircraft pilot, who's otherwise useless. His presence onboard adds mass, and increases the number of lives that would be lost in an accident. Actually, no. The current shuttle is fully capable of landing under complete autopilot. The astronauts do it because they are pilots and can't stand to let the machine handle it.
The whole hype surrounding ringtones makes me laugh because they are basically the only "killer app" for modern mobile phones, at least here in the US where text messaging hasn't caught on like in Japan and the EU. All this hype about smart phones and 3G networks and prices of $100+ for a phone and the most used user feature is custom ringtones? How sad is that? So with ringtones being the only service that people actually want and use of course the cell phone companies will make it as difficult as possible to do without paying an arm and a leg to do it their way.
IMHO I think Apple would make a killing and a serious dent in the desktop OS market if they released an X86-compatible version of OS X. I know it would be difficult to make it work with all the endless permeutations of X86 hardware and peripherals out there but even if they just made it compatible with the big ones, like SB, nForce, intel chipsets, etc. they would still hit a pretty big market share. I dont know of any serious computer users that I have talked to that wouldn't switch to OS X instead of windoze.
Two big factors in to why the shuttle sucks so bad: 1) It was supposed to simply be a ferry between the ground and an orbiting space station. but the space station part never got built 2) It required so many deals to get the funding passed through Congress. Take a look at how many states in the Union supply components for the shuttle and you will start to realize why it costs so much. Not to mention that it isn't reusble - it's rebuildable. In space terms the Shuttle is basically a dinghy. It has trouble even reaching the ISS at only ~350km of altitude. Don't even think about getting out to GEO which is 22,300 miles away.
"The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB" is an excellent book detailing the KGB side of espionage. The co-author was a KGB agent for 40 years in charge of archiving the documents of the Foreign Intelligence Directorate. He defected in 1992 bringings 10,000+ pages of documents with him. The book details Soviet intelligence operations from the revolution through the Gorbechev era and it quite stunning in the depth and expertise of the Soviet intelligence system. And some humor too. For example, they were estimating 2 billion rubles a year were being pumped into their economy through industrial espionage but had to tiptoe around when asked to explain to their superiors why the "superior" Soviet economic system couldn't keep up with the West.
There is an interesting "feature" of Windows 2000 that will not let you make a bootable image of the OS. To put it simply, when you make an image the OS doesn't give root access to the swapfile. So when it goes to startup it can't access the swapfile. The catch-22 is that with win2k you can't load the shell without a swapfile and you can't fix the swapfile without the shell.
The only fix is to either move to WinXP and turn off the swapfile or change a registry setting to delete the swapfile on shutdown and recreate on startup. And this problem happens with Partition Magic (my tool of choice), Drive Image, and Ghost.
You are right that Apple does not control the license for the music. But it is in their best interests to act on behalf of the real license holder (the RIAA members).
The RIAA considers itself to be doing Apple a favor by allowing Apple to sell it's property. It would not hesitate to revoke this right at any time. In fact, the RIAA considers this whole digital music thing to be unsafe and will revoke it at the slightest hint that they are jeopardizing their revenue stream (read: cash cow).
Think of what would happen if the RIAA determined that Playfair will hurt their revenue and pulled licensing from Apple and maybe even the other digital music stores. Of course, this would be completly insane of them - why kill a 100% profit business model - but they have never been known for their foresight and business acumen.
on a geologic timescale. Heck, anything under 1,000 years is pretty much meaningless. I don't really care if you prove to me that temps have gone up over the last few decades. We are talking about the lifespan of the Earth here, not a human's lifespan.
Now, show me that over the last 10,000 years it has been getting warmer and warmer and that we are breaking new records every century and you have an argument.
Let me get this straight. They have a delivery system for their content which costs them nothing and gives them 100% profit revenue stream. And they want to kill it by jacking up the price to try and slow the deathmarch of their other revenue stream? iTunes makes no money off the service and the labels get a cut of every track downloaded for simply allowing Apple to sell their intellectual property. I would guess that they have the same deal with all the other services but I don't know for a fact. How stupid are these people? Are they just scared blind?
It's the same kind of feeling a mother gets when her childern are attacked or threatened. Most of us took it personally that we had failed to stop the attacks. When the Bush administration made the conscious choice not to back down and to face the terrorists we were given an outlet for our anger and a chance to redeem ourselves. When the first group of Rangers went into Afghanistan on a night mission they left behind nothing but bodies and a photo of the wreckage of the twin towers. The message? We will not be intimidated and if they thought they could crush this nation through one cowardly act they were very mistaken.
War is an evil thing but unfortunately it is a necessity in our world. Of course in the perfect world there would be no need for a military or warfare or any of this but that only exists in academia or in some people's minds. Whatever hatred or anger you may have for the Bush administration please remember that we the professional soldiers of this nation would be doing the same thing for ANY President that asked it of us, no matter what we think of his politics or morals. Civilians have that choice - we do not.
Jackson had no choice in the matter. He was forced by the studios to cut his movies to 3 hours for theater release. He knew this would alter the story and leave out important points and plotlines. So he requested that he be able to release the extended versions on DVD before the next theatrical movie came out. They refused, he threatened to quit, the studios relented. If it wasn't for Jackson we would have never gotten the extended versions before seeing the next one and as we all know the extended versions are the TRUE versions of the LOTR films. PJ did us all a favor. IMHO he set the gold standard for value when to comes to making an extended edition.
The thick clouds that come with heavy rains and/or thunderstorms are what cause signal degradation. And yes, snow on your dish will do the same thing. Why? Because in order for the dish to work the signal has to reflect off the dish to the antenna. If you remember your high school math, every ray the intersects a parabola get reflected through the vertex. Translation - every signal from the satellite that hits the surface of your dish gets reflected to the LNB at the vertex. If part or all of it is covered with snow it will not reflect properly. Bigger dish = bigger area = more signals getting reflected = more strength at the vertex. I've been a happy DirectTV subsriber since 1998. Why did I get it? FOOTBALL. DirectTV is the only provider that offers IMHO the BEST programming package anyways - Sunday Ticket. For $140 you get every NFL game every Sunday. And as of this year they showed 3 of them in HD (two 1080i, one 480p) every Sunday plus ESPN Sunday Night Football in HD. The Samsung HD reciever that I got as part of a $399 package deal for existing DirectTV subscribers is pretty good. It will decode OTA, satellite, and cable HD signals and has both component and DVI outputs.
Put briefly, when you make a win2k image somehow root is not given access to the swapfile. Win2k will not work without a swapfile and will not start the shell unless it has one. But, you cannot point it to the swapfile or create a new one until you get into the shell.
You have two choices. One is to use M$ sysprep tool as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. An easier method that I have found is to force win2k to delete the swap file on exit using the instructions found in the PowerQuest Knowledge Base
After making this change, reboot and create a copy of the partition. The copied partition will now be bootable.
I have not worked much with WinXP so I am not sure what the problems inherent to it are, but this method works with win2k.
The original plan proposed by Goddard to go to the moon was Earth Orbit Rendezvous, as opposed to the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous we used. The Earth Orbit version had us building a space station and then launching the lunar craft from there. Goddard and others had the forsight to realize that without a permenant station in space it would be very difficult to maintain/repeat the exploration endeavors of the Apollo program.
Sure, it would cost more and take more time to do it with the space station but it would then be the launching pad for all the rest of the launches. Of course, it was decided to go with Lunar Orbit rendezvous because it was faster and cheaper.
The real reason the Space Shuttle failed is because of politics. In order to get it funded they needed the support of Senators and Reps. So, you have a machine whose major parts need to be rebuilt every launch. And where do those parts come from? Various congressional districts across the nation. And I do mean various, because the more districts you have the more Congressmen will get the jobs and money.
Of course, the second part of the plan - the Space Station - never materialized. Without it the Space Shuttle ended up being nothing more than an an extrememly expensive publicity machine searching for meaning.
What really struck me when I read the books the first few times was how attached I became to the characters. The range of human emotions that were present in the book - from fear to happiness to despair to anger to love - came through loud and clear. And it had nothing to do with the standard Hollywood method of forcing it down your throat (see Pearl Harbor or Armageddon for examples).
Also, don't forget that the original stories were published decades ago and spawned the entire fantasy genre. We look at them today and think they are just ripping off Dungeons and Dragons or Magic. Most people fail to realize how old LOTR is and that the above examples are actually rip offs of it not the other way around.