You are correct, the JPL page I linked to states the "Roundtrip Light Time From The Sun" for both V'gers (Voyager 1 - 33:13:28, Voyager 2 - 27:05:23 as of writing this). Somehow the Round in Roundtrip just whizzed by me. Anyway, both Voyagers are over half a light day away.
The distance at which the Voyagers are still collecting and transmitting useful data back to Earth, is mind boggling. Over a light day away!
Back in 1989, when Voyager 2 flew past Neptune, the JPL command center was probably dismantled and refitted for the next glamor project, while the long final phase of the Voyager mission was relocated to a much tinier space, probably the basement, with a couple of old-school, hardcore Voyager geeks down there, living on Doritos, pizza and Usenet, a rickety AC rattling and slowly dripping water over a puddle, unfixed for months because the Maintenance Department is constantly needed up at Voyager's old stomping ground, kept immaculate for the Galileo probe people, or Cassini, or the Mars Rovers, whatever the Flavor Of The Lustrum was / is.
Nice and quiet down there among the rusted ceiling pipes and aged Crays, though. They didn't bother nobody, nobody bothered them. Beer could be smuggled to work and no one would notice, everybody upstairs would be swooning over Neil DeGrasse Tyson filming a segment on Pluto and the Horizons mission. Only time anybody saw the strange Voyager geeks, was when they went up to the ground floor vending machines, as the supply guy always forgot to restock the one in the JPL basement, forgot there was one in the basement.
Little did anybody know (except for these guys) that the Voyagers were like an aging boxer with one good fight left in them, very low bitrate coupled with an ultra-weak signal perhaps, but with still one final, grand potential payoff - a peek at the outside, which may end up being the longest lasting legacy of all.
Look at it now bitches, it's on the other side of the heliopause!
A dastardly tycoon builds a cruise ship in Earth orbit and calls it "Titanic II". What only he and the contractor know, without the architect's knowledge, is that pennies were pinched in construction materials, so that crucial safety features are missing. To make a long story short, due to a series of malfunctions and human error, on the gala maiden voyage, "Titanic II" crashes into the ISS and its' orbit begins to decay, with not enough escape pods available to all passengers. There's a very dramatic scene when all hell is breaking loose, the architect grabs the dazed tycoon by the lapels of his tux, shakes him and screams "My god, what have you done? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?"
But anyways, it's really about a geeky girl with a heart of gold and her douchebag Wall Street fiancee, who's given her an unobtanium engagement ring, and...
Oh lordy, I can't go on with this. But it ends with a zero-g Bollywood dance number, in the steerage compartment.
Maybe he's a bricklayer. My cousin is one. He works like hell 3 seasons a year, then takes the winter off.
Or an Alaska fisherman, those guys can make around a hundred grand for a few months of extremely grueling (and dangerous) work. Or at least they used to earn that much back in the early nineties, when a guy I know went up there.
Never done the Twitter thing, I found the following posted on some humor blog, nice response to someone paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do the 7 cent thing.
- @KhloeKardashian: "OMG! Wheat Thins has a new limited time sweet cinnamon flavor. Why am I so excited about this?” - @Kris_Humphries (Not Kris Humphries): "Because you’re an idiot."
Good memory there, I first heard this drivel about HST twenty years ago, when it was launched with the original warped mirror and before the "contact lens" was installed. Yeah, some pundit on the teevee made the predictably pedantic comment, and the very next day my college roommate spit out the "ditto", as a "very earnest and personal opinion", LOL.
Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains."
Funny how rote, meaningless phrases tend to stick around for so long... well, maybe because they serve to substitute actual thought, justifying certain points of view.
Working up the ladder, non-copyrighted names: K - Key Lime Pie, L - Lollipop, M - Meringue, N - Napoleon, O - Orange Sherbet, P - Profiterole, Q - Quince or Quiche, R - Rice Pudding, S - Shortcake, T- Tiramisu, can't think of satisfactory "U" terms, "Upside Down Pineapple Cake" is too much of a... err... mouthful.
Gmail stems from an earlier google aquisition, FYI. That only leaves the search engine. Lulz
Not quite. From Wikipedia: Gmail was a project started by Google developer Paul Buchheit several years before it was announced to the public. Initially the software was available only internally as an email client for Google employees. The project was known by the code name Caribou, a reference to a Dilbert comic strip about Project Caribou.
I suggest a transporter. Now, where did Scotty get off to...
After getting drunk with Piccard on the holodeck, becoming friends with LaForge and saving the Enterprise-D in a most outlandish manner, it seems he's continuing his retirement and roaming about the galaxy on a shuttlecraft.
There's a story about a chaotic, badly-run gas station in my neighborhood, hopefully someone here on/. can clarify if the following story has elements of urban legend.
Around ten years ago, as said gas station was being rebuilt on a deadline and way behind schedule, one of the workers got quite sprayed by leftover petrol while dismantling the piping system, was advised to change but as he had no spare clothes, he said "Nah, I'm fine". A few hours later the shift ended, and the workers brought out the six packs and lit a bonfire in a contiguous vacant lot (you can see where this is going). The soaked worker approached the fire to rearrange the logs, sparks flew when wood bumped against wood... and the guy caught fire.
As the story goes, the guy's clothes were soaked several hours before, can the fibers remain that volatile?
As for the gas station, ten years later it remains halfway built, construction suddenly stopped, and a day or two later I heard about the fatal accident through the grapevine (I was manager of another gas station at that time), yet I neglected to look for the story in the local newspaper.
First thing that came to mind was Aborigines gathered around a bonfire, playing the didgeridoo as John Glenn passes overhead, specifically Parkes being part of the tracking network since the Mercury Program. But it seems that no, the historically correct stations would be Honeysuckle, Tidbinbilla, Muchea and Carnarvon.
That urinal is considered to be worth a couple of million.
The whereabouts of the original urinal are unknown, only a Man Ray photo of it survives, what you see nowadays are replicas authorized by Duchamp, about 40 years after the original piece.
Apple may not have invented the GUI nor the mouse, they just refined the combo for commercial use. There's a great anonymous quote (modified and attributed to a bunch of people over the years), which applies nicely, just substitute the term poet for artist, engineer or just about anything:
"One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different."
There are inventors and innovators and there are business men who sell the resulting products.
The point has been made elsewhere in this thread, many times over - If it wasn't for Jobs, it's quite likely computing would still be confined to boxy, unwieldy bastards in the workplace. With Jobs at the helm, Apple has had quite a few eccentric experiments that have cut deeply into the profit margins, just one example is a prolonged insistence on not installing fans into the hardware, because of their "lack of elegance", to the point where Jobs was kicked out of his own company, enter the Sculley/Spindler/Amelio era, and they would be your business men who sell the resulting products. How did that turn out?
Jobs had long-term vision that required TONS of money, it's easy to forget how skeptical the industry and its' pundits were about all of it for years on end, perennially near-sighted bastards. Then there's the strictly business-side aspect, such as the Apple Stores. It's said that Jobs even personally approved the screws and wires that fasten the shelves to the walls, and it's that "devil in the details" focus at the helm that took a nearly bankrupt company 13-14 years ago and last month surged it ahead of Exxon (!!!).
Duchamp took a urinal and stuck it in a gallery wall, stating "this is art".
Jobs took a powerful yet arid piece of digital machinery, eliminated the aridness (command line interface), and as the object grew more powerful, turned it smaller and sleeker, time and time again.
All in all, a brilliant, earnest response to Duchamp's rhetorical provocation.
Considering that the distance between 2 or more synchronized antennae becomes part of the radio telescope itself, the RadioAstron gives me chills just thinking about it, some astonishing science should come out of this bad boy.
But this is a case of Snoopy setting off to the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm to find his original owner, or to Needles to find his cousin Spike, or Petaluma for the arm wrestling world championship. Yeah, that's right - obscure Peanuts references, get 'em out of yer system while they're still on topic!
Back in the early eighties, there was a series of books called "Charlie Brown's Book Of Questions And Answers", the second volume had a section on space exploration, and the Apollo 10 mission was one of the subjects, although the phrasing of the question was pretty lame, even for a nerdy young reader: "Have Charlie Brown and Snoopy ever been to space?" Here's another question for ya: "Is that the best you could do within the question-and-answer format?"
Slashdot Mirror
What, no mention of "Home Soil"", you insensitive ugly bags of mostly water?
Uh? 120 AU is only 0.7 light days..
You are correct, the JPL page I linked to states the "Roundtrip Light Time From The Sun" for both V'gers (Voyager 1 - 33:13:28, Voyager 2 - 27:05:23 as of writing this). Somehow the Round in Roundtrip just whizzed by me. Anyway, both Voyagers are over half a light day away.
The distance at which the Voyagers are still collecting and transmitting useful data back to Earth, is mind boggling.
Over a light day away!
Back in 1989, when Voyager 2 flew past Neptune, the JPL command center was probably dismantled and refitted for the next glamor project, while the long final phase of the Voyager mission was relocated to a much tinier space, probably the basement, with a couple of old-school, hardcore Voyager geeks down there, living on Doritos, pizza and Usenet, a rickety AC rattling and slowly dripping water over a puddle, unfixed for months because the Maintenance Department is constantly needed up at Voyager's old stomping ground, kept immaculate for the Galileo probe people, or Cassini, or the Mars Rovers, whatever the Flavor Of The Lustrum was / is.
Nice and quiet down there among the rusted ceiling pipes and aged Crays, though. They didn't bother nobody, nobody bothered them. Beer could be smuggled to work and no one would notice, everybody upstairs would be swooning over Neil DeGrasse Tyson filming a segment on Pluto and the Horizons mission. Only time anybody saw the strange Voyager geeks, was when they went up to the ground floor vending machines, as the supply guy always forgot to restock the one in the JPL basement, forgot there was one in the basement.
Little did anybody know (except for these guys) that the Voyagers were like an aging boxer with one good fight left in them, very low bitrate coupled with an ultra-weak signal perhaps, but with still one final, grand potential payoff - a peek at the outside, which may end up being the longest lasting legacy of all.
Look at it now bitches, it's on the other side of the heliopause!
Wait... There was a sequel to Titanic?
Yup, and it's a beauty!
A dastardly tycoon builds a cruise ship in Earth orbit and calls it "Titanic II". What only he and the contractor know, without the architect's knowledge, is that pennies were pinched in construction materials, so that crucial safety features are missing.
To make a long story short, due to a series of malfunctions and human error, on the gala maiden voyage, "Titanic II" crashes into the ISS and its' orbit begins to decay, with not enough escape pods available to all passengers. There's a very dramatic scene when all hell is breaking loose, the architect grabs the dazed tycoon by the lapels of his tux, shakes him and screams "My god, what have you done? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?"
But anyways, it's really about a geeky girl with a heart of gold and her douchebag Wall Street fiancee, who's given her an unobtanium engagement ring, and...
Oh lordy, I can't go on with this. But it ends with a zero-g Bollywood dance number, in the steerage compartment.
Maybe he's a bricklayer. My cousin is one. He works like hell 3 seasons a year, then takes the winter off.
Or an Alaska fisherman, those guys can make around a hundred grand for a few months of extremely grueling (and dangerous) work. Or at least they used to earn that much back in the early nineties, when a guy I know went up there.
Never done the Twitter thing, I found the following posted on some humor blog, nice response to someone paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do the 7 cent thing.
- @KhloeKardashian: "OMG! Wheat Thins has a new limited time sweet cinnamon flavor. Why am I so excited about this?”
- @Kris_Humphries (Not Kris Humphries): "Because you’re an idiot."
I think it just spells "Welcome Alien Overlords" in Mandarin or something.
Maybe it's a gigantic takeout menu, so the EeTees can order "A fourteen, a seven, a nine and lychees".
Good memory there, I first heard this drivel about HST twenty years ago, when it was launched with the original warped mirror and before the "contact lens" was installed. Yeah, some pundit on the teevee made the predictably pedantic comment, and the very next day my college roommate spit out the "ditto", as a "very earnest and personal opinion", LOL.
Yeah. I'm gonna call my company "Water" and send my fleet of lawyers to anybody else using that word in print.
Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains."
Funny how rote, meaningless phrases tend to stick around for so long... well, maybe because they serve to substitute actual thought, justifying certain points of view.
The official term is "Sex By Surprise", as absurd an excuse to reel someone in as there ever has been.
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=%22sex+by+surprise%22&btnG=Google+Search
Maybe it already has, and we just haven't gotten the message yet.
Maybe it already has, and we just haven't gotten the memo yet.
There, fixed that for you.
Check this calendar proposal, I remember seeing it twenty years ago on Omni Magazine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tranquility_Calendar
Working up the ladder, non-copyrighted names: K - Key Lime Pie, L - Lollipop, M - Meringue, N - Napoleon, O - Orange Sherbet, P - Profiterole, Q - Quince or Quiche, R - Rice Pudding, S - Shortcake, T- Tiramisu, can't think of satisfactory "U" terms, "Upside Down Pineapple Cake" is too much of a... err... mouthful.
Gmail stems from an earlier google aquisition, FYI. That only leaves the search engine. Lulz
Not quite. From Wikipedia:
Gmail was a project started by Google developer Paul Buchheit several years before it was announced to the public. Initially the software was available only internally as an email client for Google employees. The project was known by the code name Caribou, a reference to a Dilbert comic strip about Project Caribou.
This exchange could have gone either -1 Offtopic or +5 Funny. Not quite as classic as this bad boy, but pretty funny nonetheless.
I suggest a transporter. Now, where did Scotty get off to...
After getting drunk with Piccard on the holodeck, becoming friends with LaForge and saving the Enterprise-D in a most outlandish manner, it seems he's continuing his retirement and roaming about the galaxy on a shuttlecraft.
How pedestrian. Send one to Titan!
There's a story about a chaotic, badly-run gas station in my neighborhood, hopefully someone here on /. can clarify if the following story has elements of urban legend.
Around ten years ago, as said gas station was being rebuilt on a deadline and way behind schedule, one of the workers got quite sprayed by leftover petrol while dismantling the piping system, was advised to change but as he had no spare clothes, he said "Nah, I'm fine".
A few hours later the shift ended, and the workers brought out the six packs and lit a bonfire in a contiguous vacant lot (you can see where this is going). The soaked worker approached the fire to rearrange the logs, sparks flew when wood bumped against wood... and the guy caught fire.
As the story goes, the guy's clothes were soaked several hours before, can the fibers remain that volatile?
As for the gas station, ten years later it remains halfway built, construction suddenly stopped, and a day or two later I heard about the fatal accident through the grapevine (I was manager of another gas station at that time), yet I neglected to look for the story in the local newspaper.
First thing that came to mind was Aborigines gathered around a bonfire, playing the didgeridoo as John Glenn passes overhead, specifically Parkes being part of the tracking network since the Mercury Program. But it seems that no, the historically correct stations would be Honeysuckle, Tidbinbilla, Muchea and Carnarvon.
Who's Steve Jobs?
Some guy.
That urinal is considered to be worth a couple of million.
The whereabouts of the original urinal are unknown, only a Man Ray photo of it survives, what you see nowadays are replicas authorized by Duchamp, about 40 years after the original piece.
Apple may not have invented the GUI nor the mouse, they just refined the combo for commercial use. There's a great anonymous quote (modified and attributed to a bunch of people over the years), which applies nicely, just substitute the term poet for artist, engineer or just about anything:
"One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take,
and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different."
There are inventors and innovators and there are business men who sell the resulting products.
The point has been made elsewhere in this thread, many times over - If it wasn't for Jobs, it's quite likely computing would still be confined to boxy, unwieldy bastards in the workplace.
With Jobs at the helm, Apple has had quite a few eccentric experiments that have cut deeply into the profit margins, just one example is a prolonged insistence on not installing fans into the hardware, because of their "lack of elegance", to the point where Jobs was kicked out of his own company, enter the Sculley/Spindler/Amelio era, and they would be your business men who sell the resulting products. How did that turn out?
Jobs had long-term vision that required TONS of money, it's easy to forget how skeptical the industry and its' pundits were about all of it for years on end, perennially near-sighted bastards.
Then there's the strictly business-side aspect, such as the Apple Stores. It's said that Jobs even personally approved the screws and wires that fasten the shelves to the walls, and it's that "devil in the details" focus at the helm that took a nearly bankrupt company 13-14 years ago and last month surged it ahead of Exxon (!!!).
Duchamp took a urinal and stuck it in a gallery wall, stating "this is art".
Jobs took a powerful yet arid piece of digital machinery, eliminated the aridness (command line interface), and as the object grew more powerful, turned it smaller and sleeker, time and time again.
All in all, a brilliant, earnest response to Duchamp's rhetorical provocation.
Considering that the distance between 2 or more synchronized antennae becomes part of the radio telescope itself, the RadioAstron gives me chills just thinking about it, some astonishing science should come out of this bad boy.
But this is a case of Snoopy setting off to the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm to find his original owner, or to Needles to find his cousin Spike, or Petaluma for the arm wrestling world championship.
Yeah, that's right - obscure Peanuts references, get 'em out of yer system while they're still on topic!
Back in the early eighties, there was a series of books called "Charlie Brown's Book Of Questions And Answers", the second volume had a section on space exploration, and the Apollo 10 mission was one of the subjects, although the phrasing of the question was pretty lame, even for a nerdy young reader: "Have Charlie Brown and Snoopy ever been to space?" Here's another question for ya: "Is that the best you could do within the question-and-answer format?"