There have been a number of people out there who have been busted for stalking by placing gps on their ex's car... does this open a new venue for stalking??? Should their convictions be overturned?
Sure you can't expect total privacy in public, but it's not out of line to expect not to be stalked. In fact, something that makes public spaces bearable is to know that you can avoid people if you choose.
Funny you should mention Fort Wayne, I was being heavily recruited to work there... Other places in the Midwest seem to be doing well too: Chicago, Green Bay, Madison... I found that while it was a bear to find even a temp job in Feburary, by August/September I was getting several offers a day.
The market is still weak in the Twin Cities and other tech centers you'd think would be booming. It seems the regions that were late in getting on the high tech bandwagon of the 90's (and never bought foosball tables) are driving the train out of the crash.
It seems employers are still trying to digest their losses from the dotcom fallout and are cautious to move forward. They are realizing the offshore outsourcing isn't the silver bullet once assumed. As things like security concerns and the cost effective technologies of the internet that have really come about since the bust start to become big every company is going to be falling overthemselve to stock up on techies.
Historically, the companies that are slow to rebuild their staffs after a recession get left behind. And nobody wants that.
Actually, they do this now. In Illinois they have the IPass for motorists' "convenience" on the tollways to avoid waiting in line. They are planning on doubling the cost for people who don't use the radio cards.
Additionally they are setting up radio readers on freeways to track vehicles. I think it's going to be mandatory for trucks. Sure for now you can opt by paying more... but freedom has its price -- for now it'll be double tolls.
All this crap people are saying about having talent is rubbish when it comes to graphic arts. In graphic arts talent only gets in the way! If you can understand the golden ratio your set.
#1 Steal.
#2
keep your graphics simple. If your clients don't like it, add a drop shadow or whatever is big.
#3 learn how to look at your art. One of the biggest threats to graphic design is "store blindness" -- you look at it so much you don't see it anymore. The easiest way to really look at a design is to close your eyes, relax and blink your eyes open really quick. What you see in that flash is what will first catch a viewers eyes.
#4 Keep it simple: Reduce your palatte look at a book on color theory to learn the classic color compositions. Don't use more than two fonts -- a san serf for headlines and a serif for text works easy. Classic colors and simple fonts go a long way.
#5 Read the autobiography of Andy Warhol -- one of the great books on design
#6 Steal mercilessly. Steal only good stuff. Just don't rip off artists >> pay em if you contract them!
The only fake in the holocaust was that it was just 6 million jews... there were over 12 million people put to death in the Nazi death camps --the other 6 million+ were Slavs, Catholics, homosexuals, capitalists, communists, gypsies....
The point of treaties vs. pillaging post is that a big chunk of land was stolen from natives through either broken treaties or largely through fraudulent land deals.
If you had a car that you bought from someone who bought it from someone who stole it and forged a title for it, you would more likely be looking at a charge of possessing stolen goods rather than market value for the car.
I am not claiming that any remaining Huron descendants are going to get back the Ohio Valley, however there are big chunks of Ontario, Minnesota and other places that were stolen through forged deeds. Those should go back to their rightful owners -- the autonomous Nations from whom they were stolen.
There is a big difference between breaking treaties and military conquest. The U.S. and Canada stole land by breaking treaties with the Natives because they either weren't strong enough militarily or weren't totally lacking in morals to do the genocide BleckyWelcky seems to advocate.
The basic pattern started with the fledgeling US not recognizing the treaties with the Hurons. They were a huge nation and we made a peace treaty with them and gave them the infamous small pox blankets -- the first use of biological weapons. This travesty let us claim stake to the Ohio Valley and open our way to the Great Lakes and manifest destiny.
In contrast the Vikings came in and generally kicked ass. When a nation can't fully subjegate a people, they go home or make treaties. Just as the English did with the Scots and the US and Canada did with the First Nations people.
The Euros, despite being technologically advanced could not compete with the Natives militarily until fairly late in the struggle. Heck, even the Vikings didn't have the stones to conquor North America and abandoned that plan pretty much right away.
Numerically, it was a different story. The Natives ceded a good deal of their territories to the Europeans at first just to trade. Later, to avoid being wiped out by the sheer number of Europeans flooding into their home. The rub lies in how those treaties were constructed and how they were respected.
If you go over many of the treaties, it becomes fairly obvious that they were a sham. For Example in the Ojibiway's case, the lawyers getting the indians to sign the treaties and deeds claimed to be travelling by canoe hundreds of miles in a day (carrying a buttload of provisions like desks, china and silverware) The distances they documented in these treaties are a big drive to cover in a single day on paved roads. Signatures were blatently forged on deeded sales.
It's some really shady paperwork that ceded Native lands to whites. Legally there is a mounting case that much of this stolen land could be repatriated in a court of law. And it is slowly beginning to happen. Now you might down play these documents as old papers, but nobody dismisses the US constitution, Ammendments or Bill of Rights on these grounds and they are generally older.
You might say this happend a long time ago to people who are dead. Regardless, the descendants of these actions have to live with the consequences and while the whites are living the lush life, Native lives are excluded from this "melting pot" exploited and forced to live in third world poverty. Outcasts in their own native land.
I have spent a bit of time in the North setting up networks for remote fly-in communities. They have some wicked bandwidth and some smart, talented people. Many bands have blatently turned down offers from M$ for free software because they say they don't need Bill Gates.
As far a shrewd traders, the Oji-Cree could teach a Wall Street player a thing or two. Additionally, they have autonomy and could leapfrog the industrial age to be a dominant nation in the information age. Still that is far off. Places like Pikangikum still claim the highest suicide rate in the world and they are ironically only a few miles from the largest gold reserve in the world. It's a long road, but the native people are a strong underdog.
Rape, murder, and pillaging occurred in every war and military action of the time - not that it was a very nice thing to do, but back then "might makes right" was a valid statement.
Isn't that what we're doing today, only instead of smallpox blankets we got bombs and bullets laced with Plutonium?
Pierre Trudeau mandated there be comedy shows on Canadian Television about current events on advice from Marshall McCluhan who said roughly that in comedy there is a piece of criticism that needs to be expressed. Thus SNL news et al are all descendants of This Hour Has 22 Minutes and other Canadian comedy classics(and of course Monty Python)
For real news, however there is nothing like financial news to offer the most objective information since they are mostly motivated by making the most money off of a situation and will do the most to get the best and most current info. Economics journalists like to brag that Wall Street knew the outcome of the battle of Gettysburg before Washington did.
I'd add the Economist, WSJ, Financial Times and Financial Post as my list of credible news sources along with the New Yorker (gotta love their cartoons) who is willing to publish longer articles that give one an insight to up and coming memes... i.e.: The New Yorker published Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point before it was a book.
Yeah, this is the case in the US as well. Even to work slinging burgers at McD's you need two forms of ID (driver's license & ss card: both of these need two forms of ID to get). The fact that I could walk into one of the largest banks in the US (and the world) and have total unmitigated access to the computer network and high ranking executive computers without having to show anything in the way of ID is completely mind boggling. Particularily now seeing their ads on tv claiming to have secure online banking services...
It would have been so easy to extract passwords and other interesting data to store on a USB fob, floppy or 50 cent pocket notepad. I found this a bit disconcerting seeing that it was my first job in the US and it had been 2 years after the Patriot act so supposedly all of america had been on red alert... I wonder what it was like before the patriot act... did they just give everybody full network privledges from the street corner ATM??
... I did an outsourcing gig earlier this year. I was flogging my resume trying to find work when this recruiter called me and asked me to do a weekend job doing an upgrade rollout at a major bank.
I was told to show up on Friday afternoon and that I'd be working with a group pretty much all weekend. No one took a look at my ID, or had me sign anything. They believed me that I was eligible to work in the US even though most of my resume was working outside of the states. Asking around I found that this was the case with most of the forty odd nerds they had rounded up for the job.
We were all working for a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a major IT firm from Texas. We were all given pretty much free reign of the executive offices and all shared the same username and password. There was basically no supervision what so ever.
It would have been so easy to install a good deal of malicious software... heck, it wouldn't have been that hard to swap out the master image to take over pretty much every machine on the network.
I don't even want to think of what goes on in third world countries. That weekend really made me second guess what goes on in the US. If the bank had it's own IT staff, seven people who could work together could have done the same job that it took about sixty including supervisors and honchos and I am sure the cost of their salaries for a year was less than was wasted on that crew. The upside was they did buy us good pizza!!!
The pseudo-scientific horsesh** is that none of these scientists have adequately addressed the fact that the Arctic and Antarctic are very delicate ecosystems. The Perry Caribou, named after the explorer who used its meat to feed his fake expedition to the North Pole, is still depleted from Perry's harvest nearly a century ago.
There are about 4,000 people down there working in a number of stations spread out through the continent. All of them are heated by diesel and other fossil fuels to temperatures similar to an office building, all of their power is generated by fossil fuels and they run a lot of massive diesel equipment to maintain roadways, runways and for travel.
That is a lot more than eight snowmobiles. Even the hundreds of snowmobiles down there produce a good deal more pollution than if it were thousands of cars in a warm climate. In addition to the all that fuel burned, there is the amount of fuel spilled either when transfering fuel or losing vehicles due to accidents or cravasses.
I am just inquiring as to what consideration has been spent examining these possibilities and to what extent scientist are responsible for not damaging the environments they are studying.
Perry didn't suspect his harvest would affect the caribou population a hundred years later. What will be the results on the Antarctic environment and the Earth's a century from now by such a population explosion in the Antarctic and how are scientists addressing this?
Yes they do cross over, but it is my understanding that the seal parvo and dog parvo are different species and the dog type doesn't infect seals. Additionally with the severe cold the parvo would be very difficult to migrate since anything at 40 below dies really quick. Finally, it wouldn't be hard to keep only healthy dogs down there.
On the other hand, if cross over from species is that simple, why allow humans?
Okay, this is more a dumb question rather than a troll, but is it really a good idea to have so much activity down there??? With the amount of Diesel being burned is it any co-incidence that the ozone layer down there is getting burned out???
I know they need to do research, but isn't there anyway to be more ecologically careful? They banned dogs over a decade ago because people were afraid that they would spread parvo to the seals (something scientifically impossible since it is an entirely different species) and now everyone scoots around on motors that must kick out a heck of a lot of pollution (in cold weather combustable engine efficiency dives to nada).
Maybe they should ban fossil fuels or more strictly regulate the emmissions.
Admunsen had it right to live and travel like an Inuk. His expeditions were quite comfortable and efficient. It seems like we should follow his lead and tread much more lightly down there rather than following Scott's standard of living like a British Gentleman hauling his living room with him to the far reaches of the earth.
There are many claims to Antartica
on
Exploring Antarctica
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Particularily by Argentina and Chile, but I think the French, Russians,Brits and maybe Chinese have some claims. Mostly it's an Argentine and Chilean thing since they are closest.
Between Yazeran's (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=127215&cid=10 651046) and cdipierr's posts I have to admit I was going on bad info. At Cassini's launch time I had read so much of the dangers in the press yet nowhere did any of these articles (and I stick to mainstream press for the most part) was the NASA viewpoint allowed to be voiced as clearly and comprehensively as these two posts.
I did read up before the launch and I couldn't help wondering how this sort of thing could be justified. It broke international space treaties signed by the US and its danger was far under reported.
If it had blown up it would have been the worst ecological disaster caused by humans.
Even the most optimistic worst case scenario would have the Titan rocket ( a rocket with a 10% failure rate ) blowing up over Africa, Madagascar and/or New Zeland distributing only 30-60% of the 72 lbs of Plutonium Pu-238 across this area.
So maybe the claims that Cassini would have blown up the world were overstated tinfoil hat paranoia, I certainly wouldn't have wanted to see the best worst case scenario either: exploding without an explosion distributing 22 pounds of highly radioactive material dispersed in inhalable particles less than 10 microns (These figures are from pages 4-51 of the June 1995 EIS)across some of the most fertile regions of the earth and transmitting lethal cancer to any creature unfortunate to breathe even one particle.
No I am probably overblowing the danger. The risk is well worth the gigs of data we may or may never receive. I trust NASA.
The cassini launch was a big controversy since if it blew up before leaving the atmosphere it would have been enough explosives to blow the earth up leaving Mars as the third planet from the sun....
glad they used the right "O" rings!
The hubris of the whole mission leaves me ambivilant about the accomplishment.
The one interesting thing about fads is they create a much bigger user base. For instance, more surf boards are sold now than during the surfing craze of the Beach Boys, et al., more people run now than during the days of Jim Fixx and more people use computers than during the internet fad.
So while many people will get out of poker and move on to a new fad, poker in general should have a much larger user base five to ten years from now than it does now and that user base will be more devoted.
I guess I have passed the threshold where I even think of these jokes. That actually was funny and I didn't even realize it. er, my mistake...
It's not too difficult to become immune to it talking about semen all day. We even have post it notes and pens with pictures of semen on them.
I guess that is the fate of working in AI. On the upside, it must have an effect on overall fertility. Most of the people in this company seem to have 3 kids minimum!
If you compare the advances to Science and Knowledge due to mistakes rather than deliberate acts, it might come out that everything is a mistake.
Recently I took a class on AI (insemination, not intelligence) and apparently the two biggest breakthroughs by Dr. Polge, in preserving semen were due to mistakes. First, his lab mislabeled glycerol as fructose and they were able to find a good medium for suspension. Secondly, he blew off finishing freezing semen to go get a few pints and didn't make it back to the lab until the next day thus discovering that it was actually better to not freeze the stuff right away.
Mistakes are some of the best parts of science and life in general. It's best to try to make more mistakes (i.e. take risks) than it is to try and always be right. (unless you are obsessive compulsive).
I think the point of agricultural subsidies as homeland security is that we will still be able to supply ourselves with these products in the case of war rather than be cut off from them once we are isolated from the rest of the world. Additionally, peanut oil is an outstanding sorce of biodiesel -- in fact, it was Diesel's first source.
In politics, it's not as much what you would do in office ... but rather, what you would have to do to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been a number of people out there who have been busted for stalking by placing gps on their ex's car... does this open a new venue for stalking??? Should their convictions be overturned?
, 00 .html
http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,57576
Sure you can't expect total privacy in public, but it's not out of line to expect not to be stalked. In fact, something that makes public spaces bearable is to know that you can avoid people if you choose.
And don't forget the most important one: Molson's and Coor's .... this is far scarrier than Peoplesoft and Oracle!!!!
How many times has IBM claimed to be getting out of the PC market over the years???
What next, Barney's Gumble going to give up the sauce?
Funny you should mention Fort Wayne, I was being heavily recruited to work there... Other places in the Midwest seem to be doing well too: Chicago, Green Bay, Madison... I found that while it was a bear to find even a temp job in Feburary, by August/September I was getting several offers a day.
The market is still weak in the Twin Cities and other tech centers you'd think would be booming. It seems the regions that were late in getting on the high tech bandwagon of the 90's (and never bought foosball tables) are driving the train out of the crash.
It seems employers are still trying to digest their losses from the dotcom fallout and are cautious to move forward. They are realizing the offshore outsourcing isn't the silver bullet once assumed. As things like security concerns and the cost effective technologies of the internet that have really come about since the bust start to become big every company is going to be falling overthemselve to stock up on techies.
Historically, the companies that are slow to rebuild their staffs after a recession get left behind. And nobody wants that.
Actually, they do this now. In Illinois they have the IPass for motorists' "convenience" on the tollways to avoid waiting in line. They are planning on doubling the cost for people who don't use the radio cards.
Additionally they are setting up radio readers on freeways to track vehicles. I think it's going to be mandatory for trucks. Sure for now you can opt by paying more... but freedom has its price -- for now it'll be double tolls.
All this crap people are saying about having talent is rubbish when it comes to graphic arts. In graphic arts talent only gets in the way! If you can understand the golden ratio your set.
#1 Steal.
#2 keep your graphics simple. If your clients don't like it, add a drop shadow or whatever is big.
#3 learn how to look at your art. One of the biggest threats to graphic design is "store blindness" -- you look at it so much you don't see it anymore. The easiest way to really look at a design is to close your eyes, relax and blink your eyes open really quick. What you see in that flash is what will first catch a viewers eyes.
#4 Keep it simple: Reduce your palatte look at a book on color theory to learn the classic color compositions. Don't use more than two fonts -- a san serf for headlines and a serif for text works easy. Classic colors and simple fonts go a long way.
#5 Read the autobiography of Andy Warhol -- one of the great books on design
#6 Steal mercilessly. Steal only good stuff. Just don't rip off artists >> pay em if you contract them!
The only fake in the holocaust was that it was just 6 million jews... there were over 12 million people put to death in the Nazi death camps --the other 6 million+ were Slavs, Catholics, homosexuals, capitalists, communists, gypsies....
The number six million is a vast understatement.
The point of treaties vs. pillaging post is that a big chunk of land was stolen from natives through either broken treaties or largely through fraudulent land deals.
If you had a car that you bought from someone who bought it from someone who stole it and forged a title for it, you would more likely be looking at a charge of possessing stolen goods rather than market value for the car.
I am not claiming that any remaining Huron descendants are going to get back the Ohio Valley, however there are big chunks of Ontario, Minnesota and other places that were stolen through forged deeds. Those should go back to their rightful owners -- the autonomous Nations from whom they were stolen.
There is a big difference between breaking treaties and military conquest. The U.S. and Canada stole land by breaking treaties with the Natives because they either weren't strong enough militarily or weren't totally lacking in morals to do the genocide BleckyWelcky seems to advocate.
The basic pattern started with the fledgeling US not recognizing the treaties with the Hurons. They were a huge nation and we made a peace treaty with them and gave them the infamous small pox blankets -- the first use of biological weapons. This travesty let us claim stake to the Ohio Valley and open our way to the Great Lakes and manifest destiny.
In contrast the Vikings came in and generally kicked ass. When a nation can't fully subjegate a people, they go home or make treaties. Just as the English did with the Scots and the US and Canada did with the First Nations people.
The Euros, despite being technologically advanced could not compete with the Natives militarily until fairly late in the struggle. Heck, even the Vikings didn't have the stones to conquor North America and abandoned that plan pretty much right away.
Numerically, it was a different story. The Natives ceded a good deal of their territories to the Europeans at first just to trade. Later, to avoid being wiped out by the sheer number of Europeans flooding into their home. The rub lies in how those treaties were constructed and how they were respected.
If you go over many of the treaties, it becomes fairly obvious that they were a sham. For Example in the Ojibiway's case, the lawyers getting the indians to sign the treaties and deeds claimed to be travelling by canoe hundreds of miles in a day (carrying a buttload of provisions like desks, china and silverware) The distances they documented in these treaties are a big drive to cover in a single day on paved roads. Signatures were blatently forged on deeded sales.
It's some really shady paperwork that ceded Native lands to whites. Legally there is a mounting case that much of this stolen land could be repatriated in a court of law. And it is slowly beginning to happen. Now you might down play these documents as old papers, but nobody dismisses the US constitution, Ammendments or Bill of Rights on these grounds and they are generally older.
You might say this happend a long time ago to people who are dead. Regardless, the descendants of these actions have to live with the consequences and while the whites are living the lush life, Native lives are excluded from this "melting pot" exploited and forced to live in third world poverty. Outcasts in their own native land.
I have spent a bit of time in the North setting up networks for remote fly-in communities. They have some wicked bandwidth and some smart, talented people. Many bands have blatently turned down offers from M$ for free software because they say they don't need Bill Gates.
As far a shrewd traders, the Oji-Cree could teach a Wall Street player a thing or two. Additionally, they have autonomy and could leapfrog the industrial age to be a dominant nation in the information age. Still that is far off. Places like Pikangikum still claim the highest suicide rate in the world and they are ironically only a few miles from the largest gold reserve in the world. It's a long road, but the native people are a strong underdog.
Rape, murder, and pillaging occurred in every war and military action of the time - not that it was a very nice thing to do, but back then "might makes right" was a valid statement. Isn't that what we're doing today, only instead of smallpox blankets we got bombs and bullets laced with Plutonium?
My Uncle used to tell me: Unions are the club workers have to protect themselves from exploitation.
Pierre Trudeau mandated there be comedy shows on Canadian Television about current events on advice from Marshall McCluhan who said roughly that in comedy there is a piece of criticism that needs to be expressed. Thus SNL news et al are all descendants of This Hour Has 22 Minutes and other Canadian comedy classics(and of course Monty Python)
For real news, however there is nothing like financial news to offer the most objective information since they are mostly motivated by making the most money off of a situation and will do the most to get the best and most current info. Economics journalists like to brag that Wall Street knew the outcome of the battle of Gettysburg before Washington did.
I'd add the Economist, WSJ, Financial Times and Financial Post as my list of credible news sources along with the New Yorker (gotta love their cartoons) who is willing to publish longer articles that give one an insight to up and coming memes... i.e.: The New Yorker published Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point before it was a book.
Yeah, this is the case in the US as well. Even to work slinging burgers at McD's you need two forms of ID (driver's license & ss card: both of these need two forms of ID to get). The fact that I could walk into one of the largest banks in the US (and the world) and have total unmitigated access to the computer network and high ranking executive computers without having to show anything in the way of ID is completely mind boggling. Particularily now seeing their ads on tv claiming to have secure online banking services...
It would have been so easy to extract passwords and other interesting data to store on a USB fob, floppy or 50 cent pocket notepad. I found this a bit disconcerting seeing that it was my first job in the US and it had been 2 years after the Patriot act so supposedly all of america had been on red alert... I wonder what it was like before the patriot act... did they just give everybody full network privledges from the street corner ATM??
... I did an outsourcing gig earlier this year. I was flogging my resume trying to find work when this recruiter called me and asked me to do a weekend job doing an upgrade rollout at a major bank.
I was told to show up on Friday afternoon and that I'd be working with a group pretty much all weekend. No one took a look at my ID, or had me sign anything. They believed me that I was eligible to work in the US even though most of my resume was working outside of the states. Asking around I found that this was the case with most of the forty odd nerds they had rounded up for the job.
We were all working for a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a major IT firm from Texas. We were all given pretty much free reign of the executive offices and all shared the same username and password. There was basically no supervision what so ever.
It would have been so easy to install a good deal of malicious software... heck, it wouldn't have been that hard to swap out the master image to take over pretty much every machine on the network.
I don't even want to think of what goes on in third world countries. That weekend really made me second guess what goes on in the US. If the bank had it's own IT staff, seven people who could work together could have done the same job that it took about sixty including supervisors and honchos and I am sure the cost of their salaries for a year was less than was wasted on that crew. The upside was they did buy us good pizza!!!
The pseudo-scientific horsesh** is that none of these scientists have adequately addressed the fact that the Arctic and Antarctic are very delicate ecosystems. The Perry Caribou, named after the explorer who used its meat to feed his fake expedition to the North Pole, is still depleted from Perry's harvest nearly a century ago.
There are about 4,000 people down there working in a number of stations spread out through the continent. All of them are heated by diesel and other fossil fuels to temperatures similar to an office building, all of their power is generated by fossil fuels and they run a lot of massive diesel equipment to maintain roadways, runways and for travel.
That is a lot more than eight snowmobiles. Even the hundreds of snowmobiles down there produce a good deal more pollution than if it were thousands of cars in a warm climate. In addition to the all that fuel burned, there is the amount of fuel spilled either when transfering fuel or losing vehicles due to accidents or cravasses.
I am just inquiring as to what consideration has been spent examining these possibilities and to what extent scientist are responsible for not damaging the environments they are studying.
Perry didn't suspect his harvest would affect the caribou population a hundred years later. What will be the results on the Antarctic environment and the Earth's a century from now by such a population explosion in the Antarctic and how are scientists addressing this?
Yes they do cross over, but it is my understanding that the seal parvo and dog parvo are different species and the dog type doesn't infect seals. Additionally with the severe cold the parvo would be very difficult to migrate since anything at 40 below dies really quick. Finally, it wouldn't be hard to keep only healthy dogs down there.
On the other hand, if cross over from species is that simple, why allow humans?
Okay, this is more a dumb question rather than a troll, but is it really a good idea to have so much activity down there??? With the amount of Diesel being burned is it any co-incidence that the ozone layer down there is getting burned out???
I know they need to do research, but isn't there anyway to be more ecologically careful? They banned dogs over a decade ago because people were afraid that they would spread parvo to the seals (something scientifically impossible since it is an entirely different species) and now everyone scoots around on motors that must kick out a heck of a lot of pollution (in cold weather combustable engine efficiency dives to nada).
Maybe they should ban fossil fuels or more strictly regulate the emmissions.
Admunsen had it right to live and travel like an Inuk. His expeditions were quite comfortable and efficient. It seems like we should follow his lead and tread much more lightly down there rather than following Scott's standard of living like a British Gentleman hauling his living room with him to the far reaches of the earth.
Particularily by Argentina and Chile, but I think the French, Russians,Brits and maybe Chinese have some claims. Mostly it's an Argentine and Chilean thing since they are closest.
Between Yazeran's (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=127215&cid=10 651046) and cdipierr's posts I have to admit I was going on bad info. At Cassini's launch time I had read so much of the dangers in the press yet nowhere did any of these articles (and I stick to mainstream press for the most part) was the NASA viewpoint allowed to be voiced as clearly and comprehensively as these two posts.
Thank you.
if it did explode there would be no explosion
Good double speak! Who do you work for, InSoc?
I did read up before the launch and I couldn't help wondering how this sort of thing could be justified. It broke international space treaties signed by the US and its danger was far under reported.
If it had blown up it would have been the worst ecological disaster caused by humans.
Even the most optimistic worst case scenario would have the Titan rocket ( a rocket with a 10% failure rate ) blowing up over Africa, Madagascar and/or New Zeland distributing only 30-60% of the 72 lbs of Plutonium Pu-238 across this area.
So maybe the claims that Cassini would have blown up the world were overstated tinfoil hat paranoia, I certainly wouldn't have wanted to see the best worst case scenario either: exploding without an explosion distributing 22 pounds of highly radioactive material dispersed in inhalable particles less than 10 microns (These figures are from pages 4-51 of the June 1995 EIS)across some of the most fertile regions of the earth and transmitting lethal cancer to any creature unfortunate to breathe even one particle.
No I am probably overblowing the danger. The risk is well worth the gigs of data we may or may never receive. I trust NASA.
The cassini launch was a big controversy since if it blew up before leaving the atmosphere it would have been enough explosives to blow the earth up leaving Mars as the third planet from the sun....
glad they used the right "O" rings!
The hubris of the whole mission leaves me ambivilant about the accomplishment.
The one interesting thing about fads is they create a much bigger user base. For instance, more surf boards are sold now than during the surfing craze of the Beach Boys, et al., more people run now than during the days of Jim Fixx and more people use computers than during the internet fad.
So while many people will get out of poker and move on to a new fad, poker in general should have a much larger user base five to ten years from now than it does now and that user base will be more devoted.
I guess I have passed the threshold where I even think of these jokes. That actually was funny and I didn't even realize it. er, my mistake...
It's not too difficult to become immune to it talking about semen all day. We even have post it notes and pens with pictures of semen on them.
I guess that is the fate of working in AI. On the upside, it must have an effect on overall fertility. Most of the people in this company seem to have 3 kids minimum!
If you compare the advances to Science and Knowledge due to mistakes rather than deliberate acts, it might come out that everything is a mistake.
Recently I took a class on AI (insemination, not intelligence) and apparently the two biggest breakthroughs by Dr. Polge, in preserving semen were due to mistakes. First, his lab mislabeled glycerol as fructose and they were able to find a good medium for suspension. Secondly, he blew off finishing freezing semen to go get a few pints and didn't make it back to the lab until the next day thus discovering that it was actually better to not freeze the stuff right away.
Mistakes are some of the best parts of science and life in general. It's best to try to make more mistakes (i.e. take risks) than it is to try and always be right. (unless you are obsessive compulsive).
I think the point of agricultural subsidies as homeland security is that we will still be able to supply ourselves with these products in the case of war rather than be cut off from them once we are isolated from the rest of the world. Additionally, peanut oil is an outstanding sorce of biodiesel -- in fact, it was Diesel's first source.
In politics, it's not as much what you would do in office
... but rather, what you would have to do to do it.