This is kind of a continuation of an earlier post in a different thread, but I wonder who owns these probes? When we eventually send colonists to Mars, are they free to pick apart these things, lug them back to base as decorations, etc. I am guessing the "possession is 9/10ths of the law" fits pretty well here, even though I would bet NASA would throw a hissy fit if some other country took one of the rovers back to base to use as a boot scraper.
I always wondered why so many spacecraft get burned up in the athmosphere after they are no longer useful. I mean considering how expensive it is to get this stuff up into orbit, wouldn't it be better to boost it higher and save it for later scavanging? I realize they toss them into the ocean to make sure they don't plunk down on some city later, but is it really beyond our capabilities to boost these things out into a safe long-term orbit?
I just looked at the Comcast site, and no where do I even see the word "unlimited". I do however see "always connected" type phrases. Where does Comcast promise unlimited downloads (Not to be confused with "unlimited connect time")?
I can see the reason for the monkey, and everything can use duct tape, but I'm unsure on the reason for the explosives. Could you elaborate more?
Ok.... lets see if I can remember the conversation that gave me the idea for this sig. I was talking to my fiance' the other night, discussing how Albuquerque seems to be the bank robbery capital of the U.S. and then the perfect bank robbery scheme dawned on me: send in a trained monkey, with some explosives and a sign that says "fill the bag with money and I won't blow up" or something along those lines. Then presumably the monkey takes the money out to a waiting car. Maybe include a wirless radio to talk to the chimp and tellers. Ok so it probably isn't cheap to find and train a monkey for this, but hey you asked.
Actually I keep waiting for the opposite to be released. I think it was a NOVA episode that had this little rat pressing a bar, which would in turn stimulate the pleasure center in his brain (needless to say, the rat was a little white blur as he pressed that bar, even forgoing eating if I recall correctly. Think one long continual orgasm). Anyway, I keep waiting for some company to release something like this for people. The upside would be things like exercise could be made to be lots more fun, but I suppose that people sitting in their chairs at home pressing a button until they starve to death might keep something like this from making it past the FDA.
Ok great the computer fits under my collar, but does it have a jack to plug right into my brain? Or must I wear those uber-geeky display glasses with a one handed keyboard to use it, which would seem to defeat the purpose of yet another ultra small computer. It seems we need to work on the interface for wearables more than anything.
If the files were supposed to be confidential, shouldn't they have been protected?
If I find the master key to a building, does that give me the right to rummage through people's offices? Or if someone forgets to lock their door, should I then be able to rummage through their office?
And if the Republicans are hackers doesn't that mean we should be supporting them??Well I suppose I could instead vote based on issues and agendas, but what the heck.
And from the article:
Manuel Miranda....now is the chief judicial nominee adviser in the Senate majority leader's office...argued that the only wrongdoing was on the part of the Democrats -- both for the content of their memos, and for their negligence in placing them where they could be seen.
You mean, somewhere where Mr. Miranda shouldn't have been able to look, but did anyway?
Umm, what happens if it breaks somewhere high up? I can't imagine I would want to be anywhere near where the "stalk" came crashing down. Don't get me wrong, I am not real keen on nuclear filled rockets that could explode on or soon after launch either.
200,000 years, far less time than the dinosaurs were around (150 million years compared to human's measly 200 thou)
This has always bothered me, why didn't super-smart dinosaurs who built cities and such exist? I keep thinking that since we evolved under pretty harsh conditions (ice ages and all) the extra brains helped us, while the conditions the dinosaurs evolved in were pretty stable (at least until the big rock came) so intelligence wasn't particularly useful. This makes me wonder if the formation of intelligent life is very rare, even though life may be common.
If a laptop box says it is "powered by 1000 midget hamsters" in big red letters you can be sure that it is. Or you could read the specifications. Now if the specifications say it is powered by a 1000 midget hamsters, make sure you pick up plenty of hamster food before you leave the store.
...that shows it is possible to turn a GeForce FX5900 into a FX5950 Ultra (which is NVIDIA's top of the line video card chipset currently available) through simply using the FX5950 Ultra BIOS on the FX5900 video card."
Poor sales figures for the FX950 because people are buying a cheaper one instead? Simply post a way for people to easily fry their cheaper card so they can then upgrade to the better one!
Fermi's paradox?
on
Lonely Planets
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I have to admit, the idea of intelligent life out there somewhere is an interesting topic, but I am beginning to wonder based on Fermi's paradox (which I believe is summed up below):
David Grinspoon: I agree that, given the time and energy constraints, any intelligent creatures would have to be nuts to attempt interstellar travel. But you would also have to be nuts to attempt to cross the ocean in a rowboat, and people have done that. Why do we need to go one-tenth the speed of light? What's the hurry? So what if travel times are thousands of years? From the perspective of an individual human life at this stage in our evolution, this seems like a long time. But will the galaxy never, ever, anywhere, produce a creature or cultural entity that doesn't find this span of time daunting? Even at these slow speeds, if someone decided to start spreading across the galaxy they would be able to spread across the whole Milky Way in a few hundred million years, tops, which is still short compared to the life of the galaxy.
(This was ripped straight from here for those who wish to read more.
They should start a new reality show where Americans try to survive in various countries with only this device to translate for them. "How is your wife this evening" turns into "Where may I find a lady of the evening".
In order to build public interest in the Mars Exploration Rovers 2004 missions landing in January, NASA has released a series of movie trailers (Flash enabled page, Windows Media and Quicktime formats) for what they are calling "M2K4".
If the movie is anything like the trailer, this is gonna be the most anticipated movie event ever!
Actually the stress came from, "we have a million dollars worth of transactions running through a pile of undocumented crap code, we have a deadline we can't miss in twenty minutes, we have no test environment that is even close to what is really running in production, and you have the pager, fix whatever broke NOOOWWWWWWW". I don't recall exactly how many lines of code there were either, that was just a random guess. Oh yeah, did I mention that code that was running in production for months (or even years) would fail with syntax errors (since it was Tcl you could have syntax errors and the code would still run until the line with the error is actually reached), with the added bonus that many of the errors were not caught, so you would get page upon page of Tcl spewage when there was a problem? The best part of all, when I tried to diplomatically explain these kinds of things to my boss, it pretty much fell on deaf ears, with comments like, "well Jimmy here [who wrote something like 80% of the initial code] doesn't have any problem fixing pager issues, what is your problem?" Wow, now was that a rant or what?:-)
Yep, after that job I really realize how important comments and documentation are. No class I ever had came close to making this lesson so painfully apparent.
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This is kind of a continuation of an earlier post in a different thread, but I wonder who owns these probes? When we eventually send colonists to Mars, are they free to pick apart these things, lug them back to base as decorations, etc. I am guessing the "possession is 9/10ths of the law" fits pretty well here, even though I would bet NASA would throw a hissy fit if some other country took one of the rovers back to base to use as a boot scraper.
I always wondered why so many spacecraft get burned up in the athmosphere after they are no longer useful. I mean considering how expensive it is to get this stuff up into orbit, wouldn't it be better to boost it higher and save it for later scavanging? I realize they toss them into the ocean to make sure they don't plunk down on some city later, but is it really beyond our capabilities to boost these things out into a safe long-term orbit?
I just looked at the Comcast site, and no where do I even see the word "unlimited". I do however see "always connected" type phrases. Where does Comcast promise unlimited downloads (Not to be confused with "unlimited connect time")?
If your potential date discovers you sell penis enlargement items on the internet for a living, will that help or hurt your chances?
Ok.... lets see if I can remember the conversation that gave me the idea for this sig. I was talking to my fiance' the other night, discussing how Albuquerque seems to be the bank robbery capital of the U.S. and then the perfect bank robbery scheme dawned on me: send in a trained monkey, with some explosives and a sign that says "fill the bag with money and I won't blow up" or something along those lines. Then presumably the monkey takes the money out to a waiting car. Maybe include a wirless radio to talk to the chimp and tellers. Ok so it probably isn't cheap to find and train a monkey for this, but hey you asked.
Actually I keep waiting for the opposite to be released. I think it was a NOVA episode that had this little rat pressing a bar, which would in turn stimulate the pleasure center in his brain (needless to say, the rat was a little white blur as he pressed that bar, even forgoing eating if I recall correctly. Think one long continual orgasm). Anyway, I keep waiting for some company to release something like this for people. The upside would be things like exercise could be made to be lots more fun, but I suppose that people sitting in their chairs at home pressing a button until they starve to death might keep something like this from making it past the FDA.
Ok great the computer fits under my collar, but does it have a jack to plug right into my brain? Or must I wear those uber-geeky display glasses with a one handed keyboard to use it, which would seem to defeat the purpose of yet another ultra small computer. It seems we need to work on the interface for wearables more than anything.
Now if we could only get spammers to use their ingenuity for good rather than evil, we could solve all of the worlds problems.
But the people searching can't spell either, so wouldn't that even things out?
I hear the RIAA police on their way now. Shoulda left out that one word....
If I find the master key to a building, does that give me the right to rummage through people's offices? Or if someone forgets to lock their door, should I then be able to rummage through their office?
And if the Republicans are hackers doesn't that mean we should be supporting them??Well I suppose I could instead vote based on issues and agendas, but what the heck.
And from the article:
Manuel Miranda....now is the chief judicial nominee adviser in the Senate majority leader's office...argued that the only wrongdoing was on the part of the Democrats -- both for the content of their memos, and for their negligence in placing them where they could be seen.
You mean, somewhere where Mr. Miranda shouldn't have been able to look, but did anyway?
Until they come rip my 386 laptop with nethack on it out of my dead hands, I am safe.
Umm, what happens if it breaks somewhere high up? I can't imagine I would want to be anywhere near where the "stalk" came crashing down. Don't get me wrong, I am not real keen on nuclear filled rockets that could explode on or soon after launch either.
Luckily, if it does it will cauterize the wound at least (can't say that about your kitchen cheese cutter eh?)
This has always bothered me, why didn't super-smart dinosaurs who built cities and such exist? I keep thinking that since we evolved under pretty harsh conditions (ice ages and all) the extra brains helped us, while the conditions the dinosaurs evolved in were pretty stable (at least until the big rock came) so intelligence wasn't particularly useful. This makes me wonder if the formation of intelligent life is very rare, even though life may be common.
If a laptop box says it is "powered by 1000 midget hamsters" in big red letters you can be sure that it is. Or you could read the specifications. Now if the specifications say it is powered by a 1000 midget hamsters, make sure you pick up plenty of hamster food before you leave the store.
Poor sales figures for the FX950 because people are buying a cheaper one instead? Simply post a way for people to easily fry their cheaper card so they can then upgrade to the better one!
Actually, even doctors aren't safe (see here)
David Grinspoon: I agree that, given the time and energy constraints, any intelligent creatures would have to be nuts to attempt interstellar travel. But you would also have to be nuts to attempt to cross the ocean in a rowboat, and people have done that. Why do we need to go one-tenth the speed of light? What's the hurry? So what if travel times are thousands of years? From the perspective of an individual human life at this stage in our evolution, this seems like a long time. But will the galaxy never, ever, anywhere, produce a creature or cultural entity that doesn't find this span of time daunting? Even at these slow speeds, if someone decided to start spreading across the galaxy they would be able to spread across the whole Milky Way in a few hundred million years, tops, which is still short compared to the life of the galaxy.
(This was ripped straight from here for those who wish to read more.
They should start a new reality show where Americans try to survive in various countries with only this device to translate for them. "How is your wife this evening" turns into "Where may I find a lady of the evening".
If the movie is anything like the trailer, this is gonna be the most anticipated movie event ever!
Yeah who would ever want to buy music online. Oh wait a minute...
Actually the stress came from, "we have a million dollars worth of transactions running through a pile of undocumented crap code, we have a deadline we can't miss in twenty minutes, we have no test environment that is even close to what is really running in production, and you have the pager, fix whatever broke NOOOWWWWWWW". I don't recall exactly how many lines of code there were either, that was just a random guess. Oh yeah, did I mention that code that was running in production for months (or even years) would fail with syntax errors (since it was Tcl you could have syntax errors and the code would still run until the line with the error is actually reached), with the added bonus that many of the errors were not caught, so you would get page upon page of Tcl spewage when there was a problem? The best part of all, when I tried to diplomatically explain these kinds of things to my boss, it pretty much fell on deaf ears, with comments like, "well Jimmy here [who wrote something like 80% of the initial code] doesn't have any problem fixing pager issues, what is your problem?" Wow, now was that a rant or what? :-)
They will, if you consider getting attacked by a pack of randy pit-bulls "getting laid".
Yep, after that job I really realize how important comments and documentation are. No class I ever had came close to making this lesson so painfully apparent.