It seems like there must have been a breakdown in communication somewhere. I remember reading on a news site as the storm was subsiding, someone important (governor I think) quoted as saying "we were lucky." At that point, mention had been made about the roof blowing off the Superdome, but little seemed to be known about the flooding. A couple hours later, all the reports are focusing on the levy breaches.
PS - the only bombs we can get anywhere in the world in a couple minutes are the ones we most hope to never use.
The grandparent was making the typical slashdot joke about nerds never having sex. That is, breeding as it relates to sex rather than breeding as it relates to neutron doping.
Anyway, I thought your comment was very interesting (and his was very funny) and confirmed my suspicions about the irrational fear surrounding the word nuclear. I remember once someone even posting about the dangers of nucleotides, which are just the monomers of DNA.
Sometimes, I swear it is. Mostly whenever I try to preview or submit a comment and end up waiting 5 minutes. Lately, though, I've begun to suspect instead that the DNS server at work just has Alzheimer's.
Probably the biggest benefit of fusion is no emissions and no long-term radioactive waste. Is this going to be a problem to get the public to accept since the process includes the word "nuclear" or are we going to have to sacrifice 10,000 virgin physicists to appease the hippies?
Really minor nitpick: 16 MW isn't a truly impressive amount of power, but it's a lot bigger than the largest wind turbines in existance or planned. GE's largest model is a 3.6 MW, and I believe they're still in the validation process (which is lengthy because of all the people who got upset by the sound of turbines breaking from fatigue in California in the 80's). I believe a Dutch company is at about the same point with a 5 MW design, and their long term plans include building an 8 MW turbine for offshore use only. By comparison, Chernobyl's max electrical generating capacity was 4 gigaWatts (wikipedia).
I've always planned to, when it becomes cheaper to get a mobile phone than maintain my "Hidden Fees Plus" account with Qwest, get a barebones cellular phone to replace the house phone. That time hasn't quite come, but I just moved and everyone who calls (ie, my parents) complains that I never answer the phone (sitting by the phone waiting for a call hardly qualifies as life), so I guess I might as well go for it.
I've found, however, that because of the constant special deals for buying a phone and rate plan together, it generally ends up being the same price for 12 buttons, speaker, mic, and antenna as it is to toss in CID, color display, data, and Java support. The plans make the choice even more frustrating, because the lowest you can possibly get is 300 minutes a month, which is a little excessive for someone who once had a 10 minute phone card expire (after 3 years) before using all the minutes.
Then again, there are prepaid options like the Tracfone, but an unfortunate bug bit me when I pondered the capabilities of GPS, data transfer, and J2ME application support on a portable device. Suddenly I find myself wanting to create an application that would allow me to track my travels via my webserver (linked to google maps??? Ooh the possibilities).
Of course, such schemes are never as straight-forward as they seem. The features it requires aren't available on Tracfones. Furthermore, manufacturer's are seldom clear on which phones do or don't support J2ME, and there's the question of how much effort am I getting into, especially with some phones having different levels of GPS support, and AGPS thrown in to confuse the issue.
So I guess I've strayed a little bit from talking about viruses, but the point is that there are reasons to want those potentially exploitable features on phones, even for minimalists like the parent poster and myself.
That was a great game. I actually never played in until sometime around 2000 (ie: after Diablo 2 became all the rage), when one of my high school teachers gave me a PC copy. I still have it and play it from time to time. Only beat it once, but my code wouldn't work in Wizardry 2 to import my characters, and apparently the identify item-9 cheat was removed on the version I had, because it definitely never worked.
Objects, particularly distant objects, appear different on the moon because there is essentially no atmosphere to diffuse or refract light. Painters talk about an effect called atmospheric perspective that is used in art to create a sense of depth. It's the way things become less sharp and lose contrast in the distance. This doesn't happen on the moon and probably causes some of the comments about things being the wrong distance or appearing flat. I wouldn't expect them to fully simulate this effect, but it definitely sounds like it might be worth seeing.
It goes even further back than that. Try the Tech Update section of Popular Mechanics from around 1990.
If you really want to rain on the article, the first satellites weren't much bigger than we're talking here. Sputnik 1 was a 23 inch sphere. Vanguard 1 (the US's 2nd satellite) was only 6 inches in diameter. Both were genuine scientific mission, providing some of the first data we got about atmospheric density, temperature, radiation, and micrometorites from a low earth orbit. In fact, the solar powered Vanguard provided a strong enough radio signal for tracking for 7 years, which helped to determine that the earth isn't quite round. In fact, the Vanguard 1 is actually still in orbit, currently the oldest artificial satellite, and should continue orbiting for almost 200 more years.
This mission is landing in a more difficult spot, near the pole instead of at the equator like the rovers. It's also on a slightly smaller budger: $350 million instead of $820 million for the 2 rovers (quantity discount included). More importantly, it's goal is not a survey of a broad area of the surface of Mars, but rather a more detailed look at the ground below what Spirit and Opportunity can get to simply by spinning their wheels. It may even directly encounter water ice.
There's more to it than the above, but in a nutshell, it's hard to dig a hole in the ground when you're driving cross country.
As far as going all out, there comes a limit to the practicality of it. Suppose we really went "all out" and spent $100 billion on a manned mission banking it all on farming in the Martian soil only to get there and find there wasn't enough nutrients in the dirt and we should've brought a truckload of miracle grow.
I'm almost positive that my copy of Command and Conquer: Renegade came with a virus on it. I forget which one, but it was a memory hog and it was a pain in the butt to remove, especially since the Symantec article was woefully inaccurate. The game would always run slowly after playing for 20-30 minutes and I thought it had a memory leak, until I googled the process using all my RAM. Perhaps I genuinely messed up and something crawled off the school network to infect me while I was screwing around with permissions for a friend, but after clearing it off, I got reinfected twice more, and I had no more problems after I beat the game.
I believe it's a publicity thing rather than a time capsule. Honestly, how many people are going to know anything about this mission besides geeks and the few who happen to read CNN's Science/Space page on launch day? This gives people a reason to talk about it and be aware that NASA is doing more than wrenching on the space shuttle with their $14 billion worth of taxpayer money. It's cheap PR, which is pretty important for NASA.
If I remember right, Cassini is also carrying a CD with a couple thousand names written on it. Of course, when they say they're sending your name, they're not talking about writing it out on a slip of paper and putting it in a box.
Ok, so I wasn't on usenet in 1993. Maybe I'm a lamer newb and I don't get it, but isn't that a rather large Wikipedia article for someone whose only accomplishment in life is coming up with crackpot science and trolling on the primordial precursor to message boards? I mean, seriously! On a hunch I searched for Commander Taco, and his article is only 3 really short paragraphs and a picture, which by the way, sort of spoils some of the mystique behind slashdot. He's not even wearing a "Bow before me, for I am root." T-shirt.
The specifics of how RXF1 is made are secret because a patent on the material is pending.
My hunch is that it's just a fiberglass or carbon fiber composite, with polyethylene as the binder. In which case we already are building cars out similar materials. Then again, I'd doubt that's actually new. I'm working with parts right now that are fiberglass and nylon. Either way, the article overhypes it.
Well, you didn't have to go so far as to use stupid media catch-phrases like ****osphere or ***casting (*'d out to pass the yuppie filter), the latter of which is hardly new or a geek endeavor, what with the fact that it's really just streaming audio by another name and even talk show hosts who can't figure out to use their phone systems are doing it, but your post is pretty much right on. I don't think, though, that is any particular direction the "geeks are moving" right now, they're just being displaced in the area of online authoring due to the way they've made it so easy, through blogger and the rest, for non-technical people to get started.
Yep. I think they call it "salvage fused." It always kills me when I see a movie where the missile flies circles after an airplane. If it doesn't hit on the first pass, it'll never have enough energy for a second chance, so rather than risk it coming down on friendly or civillian heads, modern missiles self-destruct. I think the term actually comes from the idea that you don't want the enemy to be able to salvage the weapon for their own use or study.
Incidentally, the ancient Romans did the same thing. The heads of their pilae were made of soft iron so they would bend when the hit anything hard. That way the enemy couldn't pick them up and throw them back if they missed.
In case you haven't been paying attention to the news, a significant portion of the insurgents aren't even Iraqis (and have killed more Iraqi civillians than they have coalition soldiers). This is the same war in which coalition forces were greeted as liberators in Baghdad weeks after it began. The Iraqi military under Hussein became non-existant in well under 6 months. Now there's that pesky problem of all those assholes out there with RPG's who have grown up believing the US is evil and will happily kill anyone they even see loitering around a police recruiting station. Yes, Iraq is still mired in conflict, but Hussein had his smelly dictatorship crammed down his throat in a spider hole and that part of it is over.
This is using off-the-shelf ammo, but I've dug 5.56x45 rounds out of both dirt and wooden backstops and find them almost always bent (from tumbling?) and usually in sideways.
Any number of PHDs will be fevorishly amending their projects to fit into this new domain.
The stock price is going to rocket based on yet more speculation of features and we will have even less reason to leave google.
Google tomorrow??? Stock prices rocketing??? Are you suggesting that Google is about to release a time machine? I knew it! I'd better call my broker.
This will probably get modded down by those American Boeing supporters, who have made nothing but new versions of 40 year old aircraft.
Boeing investigated the idea of a high subsonic passenger aircraft as a more economical alternative to the supersonic idea. It would've been about 20% faster, cutting 2 hours off a 10 hour trans-Pacific flight. They put a couple years of preliminary R&D into it, but were never able to sell the idea to the airlines, who wanted lower operating cost rather than speed. Boeing had previously performed work on a supersonic transport, but that went nowhere, as well.
From my awesome experience with one in particular, perhaps it would be better if they funneled development money into a pre-existing IM client. Maybe with enough it could be renamed:
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like there must have been a breakdown in communication somewhere. I remember reading on a news site as the storm was subsiding, someone important (governor I think) quoted as saying "we were lucky." At that point, mention had been made about the roof blowing off the Superdome, but little seemed to be known about the flooding. A couple hours later, all the reports are focusing on the levy breaches.
PS - the only bombs we can get anywhere in the world in a couple minutes are the ones we most hope to never use.
The grandparent was making the typical slashdot joke about nerds never having sex. That is, breeding as it relates to sex rather than breeding as it relates to neutron doping.
Anyway, I thought your comment was very interesting (and his was very funny) and confirmed my suspicions about the irrational fear surrounding the word nuclear. I remember once someone even posting about the dangers of nucleotides, which are just the monomers of DNA.
Sometimes, I swear it is. Mostly whenever I try to preview or submit a comment and end up waiting 5 minutes. Lately, though, I've begun to suspect instead that the DNS server at work just has Alzheimer's.
Probably the biggest benefit of fusion is no emissions and no long-term radioactive waste. Is this going to be a problem to get the public to accept since the process includes the word "nuclear" or are we going to have to sacrifice 10,000 virgin physicists to appease the hippies?
Really minor nitpick: 16 MW isn't a truly impressive amount of power, but it's a lot bigger than the largest wind turbines in existance or planned. GE's largest model is a 3.6 MW, and I believe they're still in the validation process (which is lengthy because of all the people who got upset by the sound of turbines breaking from fatigue in California in the 80's). I believe a Dutch company is at about the same point with a 5 MW design, and their long term plans include building an 8 MW turbine for offshore use only. By comparison, Chernobyl's max electrical generating capacity was 4 gigaWatts (wikipedia).
It's so freaking blatant, I'm pretty sure the first post was meant to be a joke...then again, he did post as AC.
Fine then. It's too massive to be a space station.
I've always planned to, when it becomes cheaper to get a mobile phone than maintain my "Hidden Fees Plus" account with Qwest, get a barebones cellular phone to replace the house phone. That time hasn't quite come, but I just moved and everyone who calls (ie, my parents) complains that I never answer the phone (sitting by the phone waiting for a call hardly qualifies as life), so I guess I might as well go for it.
I've found, however, that because of the constant special deals for buying a phone and rate plan together, it generally ends up being the same price for 12 buttons, speaker, mic, and antenna as it is to toss in CID, color display, data, and Java support. The plans make the choice even more frustrating, because the lowest you can possibly get is 300 minutes a month, which is a little excessive for someone who once had a 10 minute phone card expire (after 3 years) before using all the minutes.
Then again, there are prepaid options like the Tracfone, but an unfortunate bug bit me when I pondered the capabilities of GPS, data transfer, and J2ME application support on a portable device. Suddenly I find myself wanting to create an application that would allow me to track my travels via my webserver (linked to google maps??? Ooh the possibilities).
Of course, such schemes are never as straight-forward as they seem. The features it requires aren't available on Tracfones. Furthermore, manufacturer's are seldom clear on which phones do or don't support J2ME, and there's the question of how much effort am I getting into, especially with some phones having different levels of GPS support, and AGPS thrown in to confuse the issue.
So I guess I've strayed a little bit from talking about viruses, but the point is that there are reasons to want those potentially exploitable features on phones, even for minimalists like the parent poster and myself.
That was a great game. I actually never played in until sometime around 2000 (ie: after Diablo 2 became all the rage), when one of my high school teachers gave me a PC copy. I still have it and play it from time to time. Only beat it once, but my code wouldn't work in Wizardry 2 to import my characters, and apparently the identify item-9 cheat was removed on the version I had, because it definitely never worked.
PS - Werdna can kick Trebor's butt!
Objects, particularly distant objects, appear different on the moon because there is essentially no atmosphere to diffuse or refract light. Painters talk about an effect called atmospheric perspective that is used in art to create a sense of depth. It's the way things become less sharp and lose contrast in the distance. This doesn't happen on the moon and probably causes some of the comments about things being the wrong distance or appearing flat. I wouldn't expect them to fully simulate this effect, but it definitely sounds like it might be worth seeing.
It goes even further back than that. Try the Tech Update section of Popular Mechanics from around 1990.
If you really want to rain on the article, the first satellites weren't much bigger than we're talking here. Sputnik 1 was a 23 inch sphere. Vanguard 1 (the US's 2nd satellite) was only 6 inches in diameter. Both were genuine scientific mission, providing some of the first data we got about atmospheric density, temperature, radiation, and micrometorites from a low earth orbit. In fact, the solar powered Vanguard provided a strong enough radio signal for tracking for 7 years, which helped to determine that the earth isn't quite round. In fact, the Vanguard 1 is actually still in orbit, currently the oldest artificial satellite, and should continue orbiting for almost 200 more years.
"Yay! We're doomed!"
"I'm going to sing the doom song. Doom doom doom doom..." (different episode, but...)
This mission is landing in a more difficult spot, near the pole instead of at the equator like the rovers. It's also on a slightly smaller budger: $350 million instead of $820 million for the 2 rovers (quantity discount included). More importantly, it's goal is not a survey of a broad area of the surface of Mars, but rather a more detailed look at the ground below what Spirit and Opportunity can get to simply by spinning their wheels. It may even directly encounter water ice.
There's more to it than the above, but in a nutshell, it's hard to dig a hole in the ground when you're driving cross country.
As far as going all out, there comes a limit to the practicality of it. Suppose we really went "all out" and spent $100 billion on a manned mission banking it all on farming in the Martian soil only to get there and find there wasn't enough nutrients in the dirt and we should've brought a truckload of miracle grow.
I'm almost positive that my copy of Command and Conquer: Renegade came with a virus on it. I forget which one, but it was a memory hog and it was a pain in the butt to remove, especially since the Symantec article was woefully inaccurate. The game would always run slowly after playing for 20-30 minutes and I thought it had a memory leak, until I googled the process using all my RAM. Perhaps I genuinely messed up and something crawled off the school network to infect me while I was screwing around with permissions for a friend, but after clearing it off, I got reinfected twice more, and I had no more problems after I beat the game.
I believe it's a publicity thing rather than a time capsule. Honestly, how many people are going to know anything about this mission besides geeks and the few who happen to read CNN's Science/Space page on launch day? This gives people a reason to talk about it and be aware that NASA is doing more than wrenching on the space shuttle with their $14 billion worth of taxpayer money. It's cheap PR, which is pretty important for NASA.
If I remember right, Cassini is also carrying a CD with a couple thousand names written on it. Of course, when they say they're sending your name, they're not talking about writing it out on a slip of paper and putting it in a box.
Ok, so I wasn't on usenet in 1993. Maybe I'm a lamer newb and I don't get it, but isn't that a rather large Wikipedia article for someone whose only accomplishment in life is coming up with crackpot science and trolling on the primordial precursor to message boards? I mean, seriously! On a hunch I searched for Commander Taco, and his article is only 3 really short paragraphs and a picture, which by the way, sort of spoils some of the mystique behind slashdot. He's not even wearing a "Bow before me, for I am root." T-shirt.
Netcraft confirms it.
Mods: -1: old and painfully overused joke
Well, you didn't have to go so far as to use stupid media catch-phrases like ****osphere or ***casting (*'d out to pass the yuppie filter), the latter of which is hardly new or a geek endeavor, what with the fact that it's really just streaming audio by another name and even talk show hosts who can't figure out to use their phone systems are doing it, but your post is pretty much right on. I don't think, though, that is any particular direction the "geeks are moving" right now, they're just being displaced in the area of online authoring due to the way they've made it so easy, through blogger and the rest, for non-technical people to get started.
Yep. I think they call it "salvage fused." It always kills me when I see a movie where the missile flies circles after an airplane. If it doesn't hit on the first pass, it'll never have enough energy for a second chance, so rather than risk it coming down on friendly or civillian heads, modern missiles self-destruct. I think the term actually comes from the idea that you don't want the enemy to be able to salvage the weapon for their own use or study.
Incidentally, the ancient Romans did the same thing. The heads of their pilae were made of soft iron so they would bend when the hit anything hard. That way the enemy couldn't pick them up and throw them back if they missed.
And which war are you watching?
In case you haven't been paying attention to the news, a significant portion of the insurgents aren't even Iraqis (and have killed more Iraqi civillians than they have coalition soldiers). This is the same war in which coalition forces were greeted as liberators in Baghdad weeks after it began. The Iraqi military under Hussein became non-existant in well under 6 months. Now there's that pesky problem of all those assholes out there with RPG's who have grown up believing the US is evil and will happily kill anyone they even see loitering around a police recruiting station. Yes, Iraq is still mired in conflict, but Hussein had his smelly dictatorship crammed down his throat in a spider hole and that part of it is over.
This is using off-the-shelf ammo, but I've dug 5.56x45 rounds out of both dirt and wooden backstops and find them almost always bent (from tumbling?) and usually in sideways.
From my awesome experience with one in particular, perhaps it would be better if they funneled development money into a pre-existing IM client. Maybe with enough it could be renamed:
Google's Awesome Instant Messenger, anyone?