I didn't read that story about the missing Microsoft researcher because I knew there'd be nothing but really bad taste "jokes". It's interesting that we feel less emotional connection to people we communicate with through the net than those who we know were living where we live now, without the benefit of (much) technology.
Excellent detective work! I did half-wonder if I wanted to reveal all those clues to my ICBM coordinates on Slashdot, didn't quite expect this though.
The write-ups are correct but the map ref is wrong -- as you say, there are lots of similar lumps and bumps around the area. this is the best Google Maps can do, not terribly impressive I'm afraid. images search finds it OK, though. Incidentally there's another local legend, that the grooves you can see running down from the top were to allow blood from the (still-beating?) heart of a human sacrifice to trickle down the sides. AFAIk there's no evidence whatsoever for that, and to my (non-geologist) eyes they look like erosion along the bedding planes of the rock.
Nothing to do with Stonehenge per se, just an anecdote. We have a neolithic stone, known as the Long Stone, a ten minute walk down the road from where I'm writing this, which is on the edge of the Wye Valley , right up against the Welsh border. It's a single stone, sticking up at an angle of about 75 degrees, perhaps seven feet tall. A few years ago I had to walk from my village to the nearest town to sign on the dole - a tedious 40 minute slog along unmaintained road verges - but passing the stone, I always felt compelled to reach out and give it a pat. I'm a hardcore, Dawkins-type rationalist, but I don't see any contradiction between that and a consciously irrational but of behaviour like patting the stone... it fits my brain, somehow, and it feels good to be connected with the people who lived here four thousand years ago. Poor bastards, it must have been miserable during the winter nights.
...and as a founder member (well, OK, one of the first thousand:) could I point out to UK readers that this would be a great time to join us. Very cheap! Recursive acronym! Promotional T-shirts coming soon!;)
Lack of courage?? How about a disinclination to take a 50/50 chance (to a first order of magnitude) of being roasted alive on live TV? Not my idea of a good time. I never understood why a willingness to take extreme risks was an admirable trait. Take an absurdly high risk because it looks like fun? (in the words of Saint Hicks) "...youuuuuuu're a moron!"
We have to spend hundreds of billions on a massive white elephant because it's in our genes?? Ten out of ten for originality, minus several million for realism. "We have to grow a second brain on top of our existing ones so that we become much smarter! If we don't, we'll still be living in caves." Do you not know circular logic when you see it?
A friend on my psychology degree had a couple of phrases that he always used in every essay he submitted. One was "...and hence is reductionist", the other was "further research is required". Of course further research is required! What else is there for the denizens of our mighty universities to do?
You're either out of your mind, or have no clue what you're talking about. let's look at (1):
Launch will be provided by any number of transports. My belief is that spaceX and scaled composites will capture the bulk of this within another 4 years.
Scaled composites are going to build an orbital vehicle out of carbon fibre and powered by tyre rubber and kerosine, are they? No, of course not. You realise SS1 just went straight up and straight back down again, not, like, "round and round", yes? You realise one takes 27,000mph whilst the other barely required Mach1?
I'll do you a favour and stop there. I suggest you do, too.
Sure, and some nice gentlemen called at my house the other day to lay out a case for Jesus and explain why my immortal soul would be grateful forever. Sorry, Zubrin's a nutter with a penchant for wishful thinking that makes a Star Trek convention look like a meeting of the Realist Society.
But we can do an awful lot of science without humans, for the forseeable future anyway. How do you quantify whether it's worth spending $200B for some applied science that's not going to tell us anything of direct relevance to us here on Earth? I've been following the MER rovers for the last three years, watching the raw data at the Exploratorium - there's more raw data from those two rovers than there are planetary scientists available to work it over thoroughly. There's plenty of stuff these rovers can't do , of course, and personally I'm looking forward to seeing more and more fantastic science from the surface of Mars in the years to come.
If we are ever going to have some sort of (semi-) permanent presence on Mars, we must have water.
Well, yeah, but that's like saying "if we're going to have a human colony on the surface of the sun, we must have a way to survive temperatures of hundreds of millions of degrees". Of course we're not going to have permanent colonies on Mars; the idea's preposterous to everyone who got over being 13 and reading too much bad science fiction. Oh, wait, this is Slashdot... Delusion Central. My mistake, sorry, mind you don't trip over my karma on the way out.
I have a deeply unpopular opinion round here which is that, even if humans actually walk on Mars in our lifetimes (I'd put the chances of that at 5/1), the chances of any permanent settlement are nil, zip, zilch, nada. You have to understand how much it would cost, and that there would be no economic benefits at all apart from the teflon/tang/spacepen type spin-offs; and if that's the aim, there are plenty of much more useful projects that could be run which would have just as many technological spin-off benefits. You have to understand how hard it would be to get there and maintain life support in such a hostile environment. How long would the US settlers have lasted if they'd had no natural resources apart from lots of very very salty / acidic dusts and regolith, a dim sun, low gravity, and had faced instant death in the event of a loss of air pressure / failure of any of several thousand literally "mission-critical" systems? Oh wait, for some of those failure modes, death would be slow, lingering, and unpleasant. And we'd all have to watch it on TV every night. *shudder* no, thanks.
See, I said it was unpopular. Bye-bye karma, I barely knew ye;)
Yes, although the specific tactics used have changed, the community of spam-fighters (commercial and otherwise) generally keep up well. It's the volume increase which is causing problems. As others have pointed out, large organisations doing filtering on their own mail servers are already paying for the bandwidth and cycles needed to receive and filter it out. Seems like the network service provider market should be competing on spam-filtering services. If the the cost to pay someone else to do it are the same as the cost to do it yourself, personally I'd come down on the side of paying someone else to make it their problem. Life's too short.
Incidentally it's also IMO been one reason for the continuing growth of Gmail (I don't use Hotmail, but I've heard people saying they get a fair bit of spam. I get one or two a month through Gmail, but there's a nice obvious "report as spam" button on every page, presumably that data feeds back into the training corpus... clever technology, distribute the job of catching new samples to all your end-users. Every Gmail user benefits from the filtering decisions made by all the other users. (is that a network effect?)
Annoyingly I've not been able to google it up, and I can't remember where I read about it, but I read somewhere that a Brazilian bank went bankrupt following fraud enabled by hacking attacks which lost them (IIRC) over $300m. Please, someone, spare my sanity and find me a link? It would have been an Infosec story on the net -- I thought CryptoGram at first, but apparently not. Help!:)
Hey, with the automated nightly builds I've been enjoying inline spellchecking, post-crash session recovery and a few other nice features for a while, and only had to clean out my profile, nuke the whole thing and revert to a released version a couple of times.
But I wish they would fix printing. I print stuff all the time, I much prefer the higher res, higher contrast and massive convenience factor of paper over screen - and it's still ignoring the "shrink to fit" checkbox and trimming the top / bottom lines on each page -- bloody annoying. Someone once pointed me at the bug and it's dependencies, and when the deps are fixed there'll be a whole nice domino effect of commits that will improve a lot of stuff. Come on devs, pitch in & help out, I'm happy to test the nightlies & file the odd bug if only someone would SR those patches!!:)
All these comments about field tests are interesting. How many simultaneous incoming RPGs is the system designed to handle? Cos whilst it'd probably be very hard to get to the position where an attacker could fire an RPG at a low-flying aircraft, it wouldn't be very much harder to put two, three or four attackers a few hundred meters apart.
At the risk of a second troll mod in a day, I nearly choked on my potato when I read "According to Zubrin,.." . Zubrin's a nut. "According to Zubrin..." monkeys will fly out of my behind.
Between running Deerpark alphas (Firefox 3.0a1, a2) , multiple OS kernel and lib recompilations, and then an abortive attempt to upgrade from Mandriva 2006 --> 2007 that broke ACPI, Java and (most vital for me) PPTPConfig -- so no VPN == no working from home -- I've ended up without a working Flash plug-in. Oh, the horror. I tried installing it on the new installation but it killed Firefox stone dead every time, so I removed it. You know how much I miss it? Not at all. Every time I see a grey square with the dreaded "click here to download the plug-in" label, I smile and the thought that it's just another annoying advert I am happy not to see. What the hell else is it used for? YouT00b? Pfffft, I hardly watch any TV anyway, why would I want to see a bunch of home-video crap that was turned down by the lamest of camcorder clip programmes?
Let me know when someone does something actually useful in Flash, that wouldn't be better done in plain ol' HTML and images.
PS Adobe suck fat donkey's cock anyway -- how long is it that the universal cross-site-scripting issue was supposedly fixed? (months) and where's the advisory? Still no sign of it. So we don't know which versions are safe and which aren't. I'm grabbing every excuse possible to show colleagues at work that look, I can read PDFs on my Linux machine without tainting it with a 100Mb (yes 100Mb!!!) binary, when Xpdf can do it with 2Mb.
Internet Explorer is shipped with practically every OEM machine in the United States. Correction -- MSIE is shipped with every Windows computer in the world.
"balance"? This is science, not some greasy local election! Balance emerges through peer review and replication (or refutation) of results, and testing against predictions.
"Balance", honestly, what a dumb idea.
OK, do the math on how many icebergs you'd need to tow to shore and then carry overland to the site of the new lake to lower the global sea level 1cm. For extra points, discuss the implications for the local ecosystems where you dump this ice, and calculate the amount of energy required to do the moving.
Now consider that if Greenland lets go, we're looking at 6m-7m sealevel rise, so multiply your figures by 600 and 700.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't read that story about the missing Microsoft researcher because I knew there'd be nothing but really bad taste "jokes". It's interesting that we feel less emotional connection to people we communicate with through the net than those who we know were living where we live now, without the benefit of (much) technology.
Excellent detective work! I did half-wonder if I wanted to reveal all those clues to my ICBM coordinates on Slashdot, didn't quite expect this though. The write-ups are correct but the map ref is wrong -- as you say, there are lots of similar lumps and bumps around the area. this is the best Google Maps can do, not terribly impressive I'm afraid. images search finds it OK, though. Incidentally there's another local legend, that the grooves you can see running down from the top were to allow blood from the (still-beating?) heart of a human sacrifice to trickle down the sides. AFAIk there's no evidence whatsoever for that, and to my (non-geologist) eyes they look like erosion along the bedding planes of the rock.
Nothing to do with Stonehenge per se, just an anecdote. We have a neolithic stone, known as the Long Stone, a ten minute walk down the road from where I'm writing this, which is on the edge of the Wye Valley , right up against the Welsh border. It's a single stone, sticking up at an angle of about 75 degrees, perhaps seven feet tall. A few years ago I had to walk from my village to the nearest town to sign on the dole - a tedious 40 minute slog along unmaintained road verges - but passing the stone, I always felt compelled to reach out and give it a pat. I'm a hardcore, Dawkins-type rationalist, but I don't see any contradiction between that and a consciously irrational but of behaviour like patting the stone... it fits my brain, somehow, and it feels good to be connected with the people who lived here four thousand years ago. Poor bastards, it must have been miserable during the winter nights.
Mitchell & Webb have a TV show?? I had no idea, I'll have to check it out; I've been enjoying their stuff on the radio for the last few years.
...and as a founder member (well, OK, one of the first thousand :) could I point out to UK readers that this would be a great time to join us. Very cheap! Recursive acronym! Promotional T-shirts coming soon! ;)
Lack of courage?? How about a disinclination to take a 50/50 chance (to a first order of magnitude) of being roasted alive on live TV? Not my idea of a good time. I never understood why a willingness to take extreme risks was an admirable trait. Take an absurdly high risk because it looks like fun? (in the words of Saint Hicks) "...youuuuuuu're a moron!"
Congratulations! You've got it. Now go back and read the PP and GP again...
We have to spend hundreds of billions on a massive white elephant because it's in our genes?? Ten out of ten for originality, minus several million for realism. "We have to grow a second brain on top of our existing ones so that we become much smarter! If we don't, we'll still be living in caves." Do you not know circular logic when you see it?
Thermodynamics. Next! ;)
A friend on my psychology degree had a couple of phrases that he always used in every essay he submitted. One was "...and hence is reductionist", the other was "further research is required". Of course further research is required! What else is there for the denizens of our mighty universities to do?
Launch will be provided by any number of transports. My belief is that spaceX and scaled composites will capture the bulk of this within another 4 years.
Scaled composites are going to build an orbital vehicle out of carbon fibre and powered by tyre rubber and kerosine, are they? No, of course not. You realise SS1 just went straight up and straight back down again, not, like, "round and round", yes? You realise one takes 27,000mph whilst the other barely required Mach1? I'll do you a favour and stop there. I suggest you do, too.Sure, and some nice gentlemen called at my house the other day to lay out a case for Jesus and explain why my immortal soul would be grateful forever. Sorry, Zubrin's a nutter with a penchant for wishful thinking that makes a Star Trek convention look like a meeting of the Realist Society.
But we can do an awful lot of science without humans, for the forseeable future anyway. How do you quantify whether it's worth spending $200B for some applied science that's not going to tell us anything of direct relevance to us here on Earth? I've been following the MER rovers for the last three years, watching the raw data at the Exploratorium - there's more raw data from those two rovers than there are planetary scientists available to work it over thoroughly. There's plenty of stuff these rovers can't do , of course, and personally I'm looking forward to seeing more and more fantastic science from the surface of Mars in the years to come.
Well, yeah, but that's like saying "if we're going to have a human colony on the surface of the sun, we must have a way to survive temperatures of hundreds of millions of degrees". Of course we're not going to have permanent colonies on Mars; the idea's preposterous to everyone who got over being 13 and reading too much bad science fiction. Oh, wait, this is Slashdot... Delusion Central. My mistake, sorry, mind you don't trip over my karma on the way out.
See, I said it was unpopular. Bye-bye karma, I barely knew ye ;)
Incidentally it's also IMO been one reason for the continuing growth of Gmail (I don't use Hotmail, but I've heard people saying they get a fair bit of spam. I get one or two a month through Gmail, but there's a nice obvious "report as spam" button on every page, presumably that data feeds back into the training corpus... clever technology, distribute the job of catching new samples to all your end-users. Every Gmail user benefits from the filtering decisions made by all the other users. (is that a network effect?)
Annoyingly I've not been able to google it up, and I can't remember where I read about it, but I read somewhere that a Brazilian bank went bankrupt following fraud enabled by hacking attacks which lost them (IIRC) over $300m. Please, someone, spare my sanity and find me a link? It would have been an Infosec story on the net -- I thought CryptoGram at first, but apparently not. Help! :)
But I wish they would fix printing. I print stuff all the time, I much prefer the higher res, higher contrast and massive convenience factor of paper over screen - and it's still ignoring the "shrink to fit" checkbox and trimming the top / bottom lines on each page -- bloody annoying. Someone once pointed me at the bug and it's dependencies, and when the deps are fixed there'll be a whole nice domino effect of commits that will improve a lot of stuff. Come on devs, pitch in & help out, I'm happy to test the nightlies & file the odd bug if only someone would SR those patches!! :)
All these comments about field tests are interesting. How many simultaneous incoming RPGs is the system designed to handle? Cos whilst it'd probably be very hard to get to the position where an attacker could fire an RPG at a low-flying aircraft, it wouldn't be very much harder to put two, three or four attackers a few hundred meters apart.
At the risk of a second troll mod in a day, I nearly choked on my potato when I read "According to Zubrin,.." . Zubrin's a nut. "According to Zubrin..." monkeys will fly out of my behind.
Let me know when someone does something actually useful in Flash, that wouldn't be better done in plain ol' HTML and images.
PS Adobe suck fat donkey's cock anyway -- how long is it that the universal cross-site-scripting issue was supposedly fixed? (months) and where's the advisory? Still no sign of it. So we don't know which versions are safe and which aren't. I'm grabbing every excuse possible to show colleagues at work that look, I can read PDFs on my Linux machine without tainting it with a 100Mb (yes 100Mb!!!) binary, when Xpdf can do it with 2Mb.
Now consider that if Greenland lets go, we're looking at 6m-7m sealevel rise, so multiply your figures by 600 and 700.