Isn't it like $10000/lb to get stuff to orbit? You'd need to do that once for earth, and then once for mars.
Earth has a stronger gravitational field than Mars, so it takes more fuel to get stuff off Earth than it is to get the same stuff off Mars.
Plus it would be more expensive since you have to carry fuel to get to and from Mars, etc, etc.
There is a clever trick to get around this problem: instead of bringing heavy fuel to Mars, bring a lightweight but powerful energy supply and some hydrogen. On Mars, use carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the hydrogen you brought to make methane-oxygen fuel.
I think the most expensive part of selling bottled Mars water on Earth would be convincing governments that it's safe to drink.
Windows? Those are browser problems, not OS problems. It just happens that Internet Explorer, also made by Microsoft, is one of the few modern browsers that doesn't allow you to block pop-up ads, prevent web pages from resizing their windows, etc. Also, I think Internet Explorer is the only browser that lets a web site open a window with no title bar, which makes the window very hard to close using the mouse.
Here's hoping that Netscape doesn't strip out Mozilla's pop-up blocking feature when they make their next 6.x release.
Perhaps you should file a bug to remove tabbed MDI browsing (MS's current GUI recommendations agree with you)
Someone else already filed it, and I voted for it after it got wontfixed.
instead of letting your opinions on the matter color the issues of getting tabbed browsing to the 100% level
It's not "I don't use tabs", it's "I think tabs shouldn't be there because I think they're bad UI". Why should I fight for "getting tabbed browsing to the 100% level" if a) I think tabbed browsing should be removed as soon as new windows open quickly and b) doing so would interfere with normal keyboard navigation?
It's not a question of how you measure the particle's position. A particle with a definite position (at some point in time) does not have a definite speed. That's because particle's location is a sum of a bunch of waves. The only way you can get the sum of waves to have a single sharp peak is to use a whole bunch of frequencies, which correspond to multiple momenta. The thinner and taller you try to make the peak, the larger the spread in frequencies becomes.
You're not alone in being uncomfortable with the idea of particles not having definite positions. Einstein didn't mind the statistical methods used when talking about gas molecules, but he didn't like the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM and the uncertainty principle, which describes individual particles as having probabalistic properties. I think Einstein's "God does not play dice with the universe" quote comes from this debate.
At least, that's what I got out of the first month of quantum. (And I thought I could escape quantum homework by reading Slashdot. Hah!)
Are you talking about obfuscating it in source code (mailto:)? If so tell me how! I always figured that if a browser could read it so could a harvester, but would love to be proved wrong.
Mitch Stoltz does that with his name on http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/component s/. He wraps the mailto: address in javascript. If you do that, visitors who have disabled javascript won't see or be able to use your mailto: link.
The reason for this is that IE is mostly preloaded into memory at boot time. You can do this with Mozilla also on windows. I have heard that if you do then Mozilla starts as fast or maybe faster (people exagerate sometimes...) as IE.
Here's what I've found:
* If I use IE continuously for 30 minutes (opening and closing windows often), and then launch Mozilla, Mozilla takes a while to launch.
* If I use Mozilla continuously for 30 minutes (with quick launch enabled), and then launch IE, IE takes even longer to launch.
* Both browsers start slowly right after I boot Windows 98.
* The browsers seem to be comparable in new-window speed, with IE making more hard disk noise. It's hard to compare the speeds precisely because both browsers become faster if you use them for a while.
My setup is a 400 Mhz PII with 128MB ram. I've only been using Mozilla as my main browser for a week, but I've reported hundred of bugs over the last few years.
Well all browsers have this by default, except its less of a holding motion than a tapping motion. Try tapping your right mouse button moving the mouse, to the right and slighly down, tap again. Bingo you just went back. A bit farther down, you just went up. Try doing this freqently, and you will find its just as fast as opera gestures. -grin- I'm serious.
In Netscape 4, it's even faster: push the right mouse button down, move down and right a little, and lift the right mouse button. For some reason, Mozilla has duplicated this behavior on Linux but not on Windows.
Alright, now how do you switch tabs using the keyboard?
Ctrl+pgup, Ctrl+pgdn.
I would have expected Ctrl-Tab to do it, but it doesn't work...
Ctrl+tab has traditionally been used for "switch between frames and the url bar" by web browsers and "switch tabs" by tabbed dialogs. See bug 114974 and the linked bugs for some heated controversy on the subject of what Ctrl+tab should do in the tabbed browser.
I'm a member of the "that's what windows are for" camp. That is, I think the tabbed-browser feature is an unnecessary duplication of what window managers do, a waste of screen space, and a waste of keyboard shortcuts. Thus, I sided with keeping Ctrl+tab for switching frames. I could see a compromise in which Ctrl+tab does both, since then it would have its old behavior in the case where you only have one tab open.
What I don't want to see is for this to be turned into an argument for full keyboard configurability. I like being able to sit down at my friend's computer without having to worry about them having completely different keybindings than I do, and I don't want that to change.
under Linux there are multiple different browsers, you don't know what email client might be available, there is no central place to grab system/user info and there is no easy way to automate the process
Security through obscurity? No thanks. That only makes it harder to write a payload for a worm or virus; it doesn't make propogation much harder.
They simply tell a fib to get you to click on over to their site, which upon being rendered throws a half-dozen pop-up windows on the desktop. Let's aim higher rather than just taking out the con artists alone.
The FTC has gone after "trap" sites -- sites with extremely high numbers of pop-ups, or "hydra" ads. In that case, the domain names were misspellings of other popular domains, but I don't think it's a huge leap from misspelled domain names to misleading spam with forged headers.
I'd also like to see the FTC sue advertisers on both porn and non-porn sites that make their banner ads look like browser dialogs windows.
Galeon: Settings -> Uncheck 'allow popups':-) Unfortunately, I know of no other graphical browser with such option.
Mozilla 0.9.7 and higher has a similar option under Advanced. Instead of "[x] allow popups", it's called "allow web sites to... [x] open unrequested windows".
When's the last time _you_ clicked on a google sponsor because of their compelling attraction?
Google's ads tend to be relevant to what I'm searching for, so I click on them often.
Last summer I looked up filk music after seeing something about a "space-themed filk concert featuring Kathy Mar and..." at Stanford the day before the Mars Society convention. I searched for filk, and there was an ad to download some of Kathy Mar's music from mp3.com! I listened to what mp3.com had and then went to the concert. During the concert, I met Kathy and also met the guy who put the ad up.
Oh, did you mean "What was the last time I bought something through Google adwords"? I haven't yet, but I am now a filk fan and plan to buy Prometeus Music's Space CD when it comes out. (Kathy's CD, which I didn't buy, is also a Prometheus CD.)
I also ran $50 worth of ads for my non-revenue-generating bookmarklets site because I thought it would be a cool way to give Google money. I don't know how many people run ads without the intent of making money, though.
Re:Why does google get a slashdot-patent-pass?
on
Google's Search Appliance
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I agree with the "many are silly, but this one is worthwhile". Google's approach was non-obvious, innovative, and really advanced the state of the art.
Since the "state of the art" advances more quickly in CS than it does in most areas, should we expect Google to place its original patent in the public domain after several years? Or do you think that in several years, someone will invent a completely different algorithm that yields better search results, rendering Google's patent obsolete?
That's true in general. Google cares about that image, too: when spyware targeted search engines, Google said on its front page that it doesn't use pop-up ads and gave a link to some spyware-removal software. But here's one (minor) case where Google does fuck with your browser:
1. Search Google for XML.
2. Ctrl+click (Mozilla) or Shift+click (IE) on one of the banner-shaped text ads.
Expected: ad opens in a new window.
Result: ad opens in search window *and* in the new window.
Admittedly, that's benign in comparison to pop-up ads.
How about adding the option to have google understand what I *mean* to search for, not what I tell it to search for.
Google tried exactly that a few April Fool's Days ago. In fact, you didn't even have to tell it what to search for; it just figured out what you wanted to searched for and gave you the most relevant results.
Wow, I didn't know that anyone liked that feature of IE. I always found it annoying that clicking a link in an e-mail would take a random browser window and blows away its contents.
I also did homework during the football parts of the superbowl. Maybe I'm weird, but out of the 25 people I watched the superbowl with, three were doing the same thing as me.
Am I the only person who looks at ads after clicking a link to another page? If a site screws with IE's back button, they get about 50% fewer clicks from me. Also, if I scroll down before leaving the page with the ad (and then hit Back), I won't see the double-counted ad because it is still scrolled off the screen.
Advertisers should penalize sites that use no-cache to increase ad impression counts. It slows down browsing, doesn't increase the total nubmer of times a user sees ads, and annoys users who are actually interested in the ads. And, now, the double-counting effect is harder for advertisers to account for because some browsers (eg Mozilla) correctly ignore no-cache for the Back button in most situations.
and then goes on to mention the 6 new bugs introduced with this.
If you look at the bugs in question, they're all bidirectional-text bugs. For example, the "pasting is busted" bug is really "Hebrew text pasted from Mozilla appears as question marks". Hebrew text wasn't supported at all before the change, so I can't see why that made you decide to wait for 1.0.
The most effective method is a random ratio schedule, and the rat is rewarded after it presses the lever a random number of times. Because the rat cannot predict precisely when it will be rewarded even though it knows it has to press the lever to get food, the rat presses the lever more consistently than in the other schedules.
Aha, that must be why I'm always reloading slashdot!
Adcritic is down, and it doesn't sound like the PBS show will actually re-air all of the commercials. Does anyone know where I might be able to watch the ads without sitting through hours of football?
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't it like $10000/lb to get stuff to orbit? You'd need to do that once for earth, and then once for mars.
Earth has a stronger gravitational field than Mars, so it takes more fuel to get stuff off Earth than it is to get the same stuff off Mars.
Plus it would be more expensive since you have to carry fuel to get to and from Mars, etc, etc.
There is a clever trick to get around this problem: instead of bringing heavy fuel to Mars, bring a lightweight but powerful energy supply and some hydrogen. On Mars, use carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the hydrogen you brought to make methane-oxygen fuel.
I think the most expensive part of selling bottled Mars water on Earth would be convincing governments that it's safe to drink.
Windows? Those are browser problems, not OS problems. It just happens that Internet Explorer, also made by Microsoft, is one of the few modern browsers that doesn't allow you to block pop-up ads, prevent web pages from resizing their windows, etc. Also, I think Internet Explorer is the only browser that lets a web site open a window with no title bar, which makes the window very hard to close using the mouse.
Here's hoping that Netscape doesn't strip out Mozilla's pop-up blocking feature when they make their next 6.x release.
Perhaps you should file a bug to remove tabbed MDI browsing (MS's current GUI recommendations agree with you)
Someone else already filed it, and I voted for it after it got wontfixed.
instead of letting your opinions on the matter color the issues of getting tabbed browsing to the 100% level
It's not "I don't use tabs", it's "I think tabs shouldn't be there because I think they're bad UI". Why should I fight for "getting tabbed browsing to the 100% level" if a) I think tabbed browsing should be removed as soon as new windows open quickly and b) doing so would interfere with normal keyboard navigation?
It's not a question of how you measure the particle's position. A particle with a definite position (at some point in time) does not have a definite speed. That's because particle's location is a sum of a bunch of waves. The only way you can get the sum of waves to have a single sharp peak is to use a whole bunch of frequencies, which correspond to multiple momenta. The thinner and taller you try to make the peak, the larger the spread in frequencies becomes.
You're not alone in being uncomfortable with the idea of particles not having definite positions. Einstein didn't mind the statistical methods used when talking about gas molecules, but he didn't like the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM and the uncertainty principle, which describes individual particles as having probabalistic properties. I think Einstein's "God does not play dice with the universe" quote comes from this debate.
At least, that's what I got out of the first month of quantum. (And I thought I could escape quantum homework by reading Slashdot. Hah!)
Why isn't the links bar a useful navigation aid? (That's what I was trying to ask, but I worded the question poorly.)
Are you talking about obfuscating it in source code (mailto:)? If so tell me how! I always figured that if a browser could read it so could a harvester, but would love to be proved wrong.
t s/. He wraps the mailto: address in javascript. If you do that, visitors who have disabled javascript won't see or be able to use your mailto: link.
Mitch Stoltz does that with his name on http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/componen
The reason for this is that IE is mostly preloaded into memory at boot time. You can do this with Mozilla also on windows. I have heard that if you do then Mozilla starts as fast or maybe faster (people exagerate sometimes...) as IE.
Here's what I've found:
* If I use IE continuously for 30 minutes (opening and closing windows often), and then launch Mozilla, Mozilla takes a while to launch.
* If I use Mozilla continuously for 30 minutes (with quick launch enabled), and then launch IE, IE takes even longer to launch.
* Both browsers start slowly right after I boot Windows 98.
* The browsers seem to be comparable in new-window speed, with IE making more hard disk noise. It's hard to compare the speeds precisely because both browsers become faster if you use them for a while.
My setup is a 400 Mhz PII with 128MB ram. I've only been using Mozilla as my main browser for a week, but I've reported hundred of bugs over the last few years.
the links bar behaves like it's been written as an afterthought to add various sponsored links to your browser, not as a useful navigational aid
What's wrong with the links bar as a navigational aid?
Well all browsers have this by default, except its less of a holding motion than a tapping motion. Try tapping your right mouse button moving the mouse, to the right and slighly down, tap again. Bingo you just went back. A bit farther down, you just went up. Try doing this freqently, and you will find its just as fast as opera gestures. -grin- I'm serious.
In Netscape 4, it's even faster: push the right mouse button down, move down and right a little, and lift the right mouse button. For some reason, Mozilla has duplicated this behavior on Linux but not on Windows.
Alright, now how do you switch tabs using the keyboard?
Ctrl+pgup, Ctrl+pgdn.
I would have expected Ctrl-Tab to do it, but it doesn't work...
Ctrl+tab has traditionally been used for "switch between frames and the url bar" by web browsers and "switch tabs" by tabbed dialogs. See bug 114974 and the linked bugs for some heated controversy on the subject of what Ctrl+tab should do in the tabbed browser.
I'm a member of the "that's what windows are for" camp. That is, I think the tabbed-browser feature is an unnecessary duplication of what window managers do, a waste of screen space, and a waste of keyboard shortcuts. Thus, I sided with keeping Ctrl+tab for switching frames. I could see a compromise in which Ctrl+tab does both, since then it would have its old behavior in the case where you only have one tab open.
What I don't want to see is for this to be turned into an argument for full keyboard configurability. I like being able to sit down at my friend's computer without having to worry about them having completely different keybindings than I do, and I don't want that to change.
under Linux there are multiple different browsers, you don't know what email client might be available, there is no central place to grab system/user info and there is no easy way to automate the process
Security through obscurity? No thanks. That only makes it harder to write a payload for a worm or virus; it doesn't make propogation much harder.
One guy ended up getting busted cause he LOOKED like one of the criminals on camera.
That kind of thing happens with or without technology. Eyewitnesses do make mistakes, especially under stress.
They simply tell a fib to get you to click on over to their site, which upon being rendered throws a half-dozen pop-up windows on the desktop. Let's aim higher rather than just taking out the con artists alone.
The FTC has gone after "trap" sites -- sites with extremely high numbers of pop-ups, or "hydra" ads. In that case, the domain names were misspellings of other popular domains, but I don't think it's a huge leap from misspelled domain names to misleading spam with forged headers.
I'd also like to see the FTC sue advertisers on both porn and non-porn sites that make their banner ads look like browser dialogs windows.
Galeon: Settings -> Uncheck 'allow popups' :-) Unfortunately, I know of no other graphical browser with such option.
Mozilla 0.9.7 and higher has a similar option under Advanced. Instead of "[x] allow popups", it's called "allow web sites to... [x] open unrequested windows".
When's the last time _you_ clicked on a google sponsor because of their compelling attraction?
Google's ads tend to be relevant to what I'm searching for, so I click on them often.
Last summer I looked up filk music after seeing something about a "space-themed filk concert featuring Kathy Mar and..." at Stanford the day before the Mars Society convention. I searched for filk, and there was an ad to download some of Kathy Mar's music from mp3.com! I listened to what mp3.com had and then went to the concert. During the concert, I met Kathy and also met the guy who put the ad up.
Oh, did you mean "What was the last time I bought something through Google adwords"? I haven't yet, but I am now a filk fan and plan to buy Prometeus Music's Space CD when it comes out. (Kathy's CD, which I didn't buy, is also a Prometheus CD.)
I also ran $50 worth of ads for my non-revenue-generating bookmarklets site because I thought it would be a cool way to give Google money. I don't know how many people run ads without the intent of making money, though.
I agree with the "many are silly, but this one is worthwhile". Google's approach was non-obvious, innovative, and really advanced the state of the art.
Since the "state of the art" advances more quickly in CS than it does in most areas, should we expect Google to place its original patent in the public domain after several years? Or do you think that in several years, someone will invent a completely different algorithm that yields better search results, rendering Google's patent obsolete?
they don't fuck with your browser
That's true in general. Google cares about that image, too: when spyware targeted search engines, Google said on its front page that it doesn't use pop-up ads and gave a link to some spyware-removal software. But here's one (minor) case where Google does fuck with your browser:
1. Search Google for XML.
2. Ctrl+click (Mozilla) or Shift+click (IE) on one of the banner-shaped text ads.
Expected: ad opens in a new window.
Result: ad opens in search window *and* in the new window.
Admittedly, that's benign in comparison to pop-up ads.
Find the minimum number of clicks to get from here to porn.
How about adding the option to have google understand what I *mean* to search for, not what I tell it to search for.
Google tried exactly that a few April Fool's Days ago. In fact, you didn't even have to tell it what to search for; it just figured out what you wanted to searched for and gave you the most relevant results.
Wow, I didn't know that anyone liked that feature of IE. I always found it annoying that clicking a link in an e-mail would take a random browser window and blows away its contents.
I also did homework during the football parts of the superbowl. Maybe I'm weird, but out of the 25 people I watched the superbowl with, three were doing the same thing as me.
Am I the only person who looks at ads after clicking a link to another page? If a site screws with IE's back button, they get about 50% fewer clicks from me. Also, if I scroll down before leaving the page with the ad (and then hit Back), I won't see the double-counted ad because it is still scrolled off the screen.
Advertisers should penalize sites that use no-cache to increase ad impression counts. It slows down browsing, doesn't increase the total nubmer of times a user sees ads, and annoys users who are actually interested in the ads. And, now, the double-counting effect is harder for advertisers to account for because some browsers (eg Mozilla) correctly ignore no-cache for the Back button in most situations.
and then goes on to mention the 6 new bugs introduced with this.
If you look at the bugs in question, they're all bidirectional-text bugs. For example, the "pasting is busted" bug is really "Hebrew text pasted from Mozilla appears as question marks". Hebrew text wasn't supported at all before the change, so I can't see why that made you decide to wait for 1.0.
From your link:
The most effective method is a random ratio schedule, and the rat is rewarded after it presses the lever a random number of times. Because the rat cannot predict precisely when it will be rewarded even though it knows it has to press the lever to get food, the rat presses the lever more consistently than in the other schedules.
Aha, that must be why I'm always reloading slashdot!
Adcritic is down, and it doesn't sound like the PBS show will actually re-air all of the commercials. Does anyone know where I might be able to watch the ads without sitting through hours of football?