Realistically, are we ever going to see this thing in action? The current polls and prediction markets suggest that Obama is going to crush McCain like an insect- and some kind of soft, squishy insect, not a hard one, like a beetle- on election day. Obama has previously said that he's willing to delay funding the Constellation program of manned spacecraft to fund his education initiatives. I think he may have backed away from this, but at any rate, I think it suggests that manned space exploration is not high the list of priorities for the (likely) future president of the United States.
And it's hard to see how it could be. We're currently fighting two wars, have a massive deficit, and may be on the brink of a global recession. In this climate, space exploration is the kind of thing where most people will decide that it could wait a few years. I know it's not popular to talk about this stuff, but NASA is a government agency, and ultimately it's dependent upon federal dollars to either make this happen, or not. Personally, I happen to agree with Obama. If our money was unlimited, I'd be in favor of manned exploration, but when research budgets are finite, I think that unmanned missions accomplish vastly more science for each dollar spent.
You know, perhaps to stimulate this form of banking, we could allow people to buy up the various loans, then bundle them into securities, and sell the securities off on the market. Think of the tremendous impact we could have on the economy of the developing world.
Yeah, but the serfs under the Czars? What a bunch of slackers.
Re:blah the emporer has his new clothes on again.
on
The Walking House
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· Score: 1
Don't know about that, a motorhome typically costs over $100,000 [rvbrokers.com]. This thing only cost about $50,000 (current exchange rate). It is solar and wind powered, and can go over any terrain. I could totally see it used as a cabin off in the mountains somewhere. When you get tired of one place, walk off to the next. Great place to become a philosopher. The Thoreau of the mechanical age.
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It would be cheaper and easier to do this the way the Mongols do. Get a ger- which can be put up or taken down in a matter of hours- and a herd of animals to help carry it, and to provide a source of food. Use a small wind generator or some solar cells for power. The Mongols have been doing the nomadic living thing for thousands of years, they've got it figured out pretty well.
The other possibility, of course: get a sailboat. There are vast stretches of uninhabited ocean and coast you can visit, and many of the world's major metropolises. Boats aren't cheap, but they are relatively fast (at least, compared to this thing) and open up huge areas that you can't see any other way.
Which is odd, since she has more executive experience than the other three folks involved in the race -- combined.
By your logic, the average student council president has more "executive experience" and is therefore ready to lead the nation. Give me a break. If McCain died of a heart attack, or got so old he withered away and dissolved into dust like that dude in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Palin took power... I'd say that Russia would reclaim Alaska withing 72 hours. You betcha!
The only thing a e-voting machine should be used for is printing a paper ballot.
Count the paper ballots.
Anything else means you have to trust the voting machine, or the people who verified the voting machine.
(You have to make sure that there are no hidden things in any of the chips, the software, any memory card that comes into contact with the machine, the network that the machine is connected to, etc. Seriously, who can possibly think that a E-voting machine with a Sprint data card in it is secure?)
Nonsense. The vast majority of computer security experts agree that electronic voting machines are the safest, most secure way to conduct an election, and that they are virtually immune to tampering or forging of votes.*
*results of a poll of 1000 experts conducted using Diebold voting machines. 93 of 1000 said electronic voting was not secure, 1237 out of 1000 said that it was.
Given that numerous individuals -- who have enough ill will towards her that they were willing to break the law in order to influence the election process -- did not find a single example to present makes it seem likely that nothing wrong was done here.
You're missing the point. It's hardly surprising that no evidence was found, simply because she can delete anything she wants, whenever she wants, since its not an official email address. Let's just assume for a moment that she did email one of her staff with a message along the lines of, "Hey, thanks for helping me abuse the power of the governor's office to pursue grudges against my sister's ex-husband! Now I know why Nixon did what he did- abusing government power is awesome!"
As soon as the scandal started to erupt, she could just delete that email, and ask her staff to do the same. It's not just that the personal accounts are difficult to access, it's that you can magically 'lose' their contents, much as the White House did, and there are no backups.
I agree completely. Yes, immigration does have its downsides. Letting in an additional 10,000 foreigners to work in or immigrate to the U.S. should, in the short term, increase competition. But the long-term payoff is potentially huge. If just one of those immigrants turns around and helps found a major company like Google (co-founded by Sergei Brin, whose parents immigrated from Russia when he was six) the job creation by that company, and indirect job creation caused by economic benefit to other companies, will vastly outweigh the short-term losses.
Unfortunately, we're losing sight of that because of post 9-11 hysteria. Yes, some of those foreigners might want to blow up your house. But I'll bet that the vast majority just want to work hard and to see their kids do better than they did. Ivy League schools are just packed with the children of immigrants for that reason. And I'd be willing to bet that the people who legally arrive in this country are vastly less likely to cause problems than the average American. We have no shortage of home-grown murderers, drug dealers, serial killers, sexual predators, white collar criminals and domestic terrorists... it's arguable that a group of carefully screened legal immigrants is vastly less of a threat to the American way of life than a group of average Americans.
It's not that Verizon exposed "the wrong" 1200 emails, it's that Verizon exposed any email addresses at all.
While I agree that the email slip-up was pretty bad, I was more concerned about some of the other sensitive information that Verizon publicized. In addition to those 1200 emails, Verizon also emailed other sensitive information including:
1.the secret herbs and spices that go into KFC's chicken
2. the combination to the door of the Bat Cave
3.The location of Dick Cheney's 'undisclosed location'
4. The chemical composition of Kryptonite
5. The burial site of Jimmy Hoffa
6. the nuclear launch codes for U.S. Trident nuclear missile submarines
7. the full name, post office box address, and social security number of the The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly's Man with No Name
8. the address and repository information for that government warehouse that contains the Ark of the Covenant (it's on rack 12, shelf 7, box 336)
The algorithms is installed using a liquid sold in cans and bottles, usually labeled as "beer."
It just hit me. You could have a special pair of goggles, sort of like night vision goggles- there's a camera, it adjusts the image, and then broadcasts it onto screens in front of your eyes. But instead of amplifying the light, the camera would feed images to software, which would recognize faces, and then make them pretty using this algorithm. Making this work in real time might require some major advances in computing, particularly face recognition, but in principle, it's practical. We could actually build a pair of beer goggles.
Of course, I still prefer to get beer goggles the old fashioned way.
I mean, the dude flew around the world in a balloon. Flew around the world again, nonstop, solo, in an aircraft. Set all kinds of records in sailboats and sailplanes. He was building a submarine to "fly" to the deepest point on earth, but meanwhile he killed himself while scouting for a location to run his 800 mph rocket car and break the land speed record.
My first thought was, "man, this guy has a freakin' deathwish, or else he's a goddamn idiot. It's amazing that someone with so little sense of self-preservation lived this long." Doesn't the guy know that there are old pilots, and bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots?
But after thinking about it for a while... he probably did know that. He was flying long enough that he must have come to understand that if he kept it up the way he did, he wasn't going to die in his bed. Any one of his record-setting endeavors could have resulted in his death. But he must have decided that he'd rather live a brief life on his own terms, than a long, safe, boring life. After reading his Wikipedia entry, it's no surprise that he didn't die in an assisted living facility, but I think he'd probably be OK with the way he went out. Vicious downdrafts smashed his plane into bite-sized pieces against a granite escarpment of the Sierra Nevada mountains, while he was scouting a location to break the land speed record in a jet car, and he wasn't found for a year... the man had a hell of an interesting life, and one hell of a death, and packed more living into 63 years than most people could pack into 100. He did things on his terms, took chances, pushed things, and went out doing so. Personally, I'll play things a bit safer, but I do respect the guy's choices.
The CNN article misses some important details. According to the AP:
The information on the pilot license -- including Fossett's name, address, date of birth and certificate number -- was sent in a photograph to the Federal Aviation Administration, and all matched the agency's records, spokesman Ian Gregor said.
"We're trying to determine the authenticity of the document," Gregor said.
The hiker, Preston Morrow, said he found an FAA identity card, a pilot's license, a third ID and $1,005 in cash tangled in a bush off a trail just west of the town of Mammoth Lakes on Monday. He said he turned the items over to local police Wednesday after unsuccessful attempts to contact Fossett's family.
So our hoaxer forges 3 separate IDs, in one case getting all the original information that was on Fossett's FAA card, and adds $1005? That's one heck of a hoax. I suppose you could argue that's he's trying to get a reward from Fossett's rich widow for "finding" her husband's final resting place... but after he couldn't get ahold of the family's lawyers, he went to the police. Seems that would be the last thing a hoaxer would want to do, is get the police and authorities involved; I imagine forging federal IDs is a pretty serious offense. Doesn't make sense.
True, finding the contents of his wallet off on their own is odd... but animals are curious and like to chew on things, especially when they're hungry. In the middle of winter in the Sierra mountains, a bear or fox might decide that a leather wallet was better to eat than nothing and tear the wallet apart for a snack. Bears in particular will eat damn near anything, edible or not.
If everyone were buying solar panels like they were going out of style, there'd of course be some price fluctuations, but eventually we'd know how to make them for much cheaper than we do now.
As I see it, the free market is like a game, and the government sets up the rules and acts and referee. If you want the game to favor a particular outcome, change the rules of the game. There are a number of ways you could do this.
For one, you could create tax breaks for companies that manufacture solar cells; that would get more people into the business and allow them to sell the product for cheaper, making it more cost competitive. You could also create tax deductions for consumers and businesses installing solar panels. If a solar panel costs $1000 but can be deducted against $1000 of personal or business income such that you avoid $250 of taxes, then the actual cost to you would be $750 dollars.
There are also more direct ways of encouraging the development of solar power. One method would be to have the government purchase more solar cells, for installation on government buildings, or perhaps to help power military outposts and patrols in desert countries. They carry enough electronics in Iraq and Afghanistan these days that it would probably help to be able to use solar to power them. You could also buy solar cells and give them away to Iraqis, Afghans, or people in developing nations as a means of simultaneously (1) building a domestic industry, (2) building infrastructure in these countries, and (3) building goodwill. You could also fund large-scale projects by major research agencies, such as NASA, the NSF, and DARPA, into developing cheaper, more efficient cells.
The solar industry is probably small enough that just applying a little pressure in the right place could make a major difference. I think it's like the internet- a little bit of government support early on will prove crucial in getting the solar industry to the critical mass needed for the industry to take off on its own, but a few taxpayer dollars now would be repaid many times over in decades to come.
Instead we're faced with the new controversy that every skin cell you shed can be considered an embryo that, with the correct application of medical science, can now become a child.
Everything is the president's fault. Everything.
The devastating hurricanes we've experienced in his administration? Yep, Bush caused them.
My toilet is broken: that's his fault, too. I haven't mowed my lawn in 3 years. You know why? Bush. I can't even see my truck sitting in my yard, which is currently rusting away. Bush caused that. Our president is so selfish and ignorant, that it even caused my internet connection to be horribly slow around 2:30 every day.
Not everything is Bush's fault, but a lot is. Bin Laden launching an attack on the U.S. isn't Bush's fault. But failing to watch Bin Laden beforehand is his fault. Failing to catch him afterwards is his fault.
Sunnis and Shiites hate each other. That's not Bush's fault, but when the administration invades Iraq without an occupation plan or enough forces, dismantles their army, and then ignores the growing insurgency and civil war, that is Bush's fault.
Hurricane Katrina isn't Bush's fault. Hiring incompetent guys like Brown, and failing to respond to the disaster, that is Bush's fault.
Afghanistan being a failed state, that's not Bush's fault. But not being able to secure it because you invaded Iraq, that is Bush's fault.
Bush isn't to blame for everything that's gone wrong in 8 years, but he has a lot to owe up to. That's why he's in the running for the title of Worst President in U.S. History. And finally, it's worth considering that not everything that happens to the U.S. is Bush's fault. But everything that happens to the U.S. is his responsibility. It's just sad that he never seems to have understood that.
I just have to wonder, who writes a story like this? Did these people go to a regular journalism school, or some kind of Bizarro-world journalism school where they teach a combination of news writing and creative writing? Are the people making up this story the same guys who photoshopped missiles for the Iranians? Or is it just some dude living in his mom's basement who enjoys writing Star Trek fanfic?
Personally, I'm not all that impressed by this incident. The Chinese lied about putting people in orbit? Please. Our government faked an entire moon landing. They have a long way to go before they'll catch up with us.
Did he deserve to be disbarred? Perhaps. But there is such a thing as going too far. I mean, I really don't think it was appropriate when the judge ordered Mr. Thompson to lie down on the floor, and then repeatedly squatted over his head while yelling "PWNED!!!! PWNED!!!"
In my high school, there was a kid in the class that graduated the year before my class came in as freshman who only showed up to classes for quizes and tests all four years. He graduated with a B or B- average.
That's not an example of a school failing to challenge a student. That's an example of a lazy student. Maybe he's a smart slacker, but at the end of the day, he's still just a slacker. What the hell does it matter if he's smart if he won't apply himself?
As Edison said, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. You'll get much further in life being moderately smart and really hardworking, than extraordinarily brilliant but too lazy to do anything with your intelligence.
In any case, we now know Saturn's rings were there a good couple of years before the republican candidate, at least.
Indeed, Saturn's rings are ancient. Perhaps as old as 6,000 years (according to Sarah Palin)!
Re:No Income No Job or Assets?
on
The Ninja Handbook
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Go to http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Archive.aspx and listen to episode 355, "The Giant Pool of Money". It's a really excellent piece of journalism, that examines the financial crisis from multiple perspectives. They interview the people taking out mortgages, the people selling them, and the bankers repackaging the mortages into securities. Who's guilty? In short, everyone.
Borrowers were irresponsible, borrowing money they knew they would have trouble repaying, or trying to make a quick buck buying into the housing bubble. And lenders were irresponsible, lending money to people who had no income, no job, no assets. But they just sold off the mortgages, so the risk didn't affect them. And investment bankers were irresponsible. They created these crazy financial schemes to sell high-risk mortgages; in theory they were supposed to minimize financial risk but in practice they did the opposite. In short... a lot of greed, a lot of foolishness, and there's more than enough blame to go around.
Slashdot Mirror
And it's hard to see how it could be. We're currently fighting two wars, have a massive deficit, and may be on the brink of a global recession. In this climate, space exploration is the kind of thing where most people will decide that it could wait a few years. I know it's not popular to talk about this stuff, but NASA is a government agency, and ultimately it's dependent upon federal dollars to either make this happen, or not. Personally, I happen to agree with Obama. If our money was unlimited, I'd be in favor of manned exploration, but when research budgets are finite, I think that unmanned missions accomplish vastly more science for each dollar spent.
Placebo(TM): the name trusted by half of America's doctors! Ask your doctor if Placebo(TM) is right for you.
You know, perhaps to stimulate this form of banking, we could allow people to buy up the various loans, then bundle them into securities, and sell the securities off on the market. Think of the tremendous impact we could have on the economy of the developing world.
Yeah, but the serfs under the Czars? What a bunch of slackers.
It would be cheaper and easier to do this the way the Mongols do. Get a ger- which can be put up or taken down in a matter of hours- and a herd of animals to help carry it, and to provide a source of food. Use a small wind generator or some solar cells for power. The Mongols have been doing the nomadic living thing for thousands of years, they've got it figured out pretty well.
The other possibility, of course: get a sailboat. There are vast stretches of uninhabited ocean and coast you can visit, and many of the world's major metropolises. Boats aren't cheap, but they are relatively fast (at least, compared to this thing) and open up huge areas that you can't see any other way.
Come to think of it, that might explain why there's always a "CowboyNeal" option in the polls...
By your logic, the average student council president has more "executive experience" and is therefore ready to lead the nation. Give me a break. If McCain died of a heart attack, or got so old he withered away and dissolved into dust like that dude in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Palin took power... I'd say that Russia would reclaim Alaska withing 72 hours. You betcha!
Nonsense. The vast majority of computer security experts agree that electronic voting machines are the safest, most secure way to conduct an election, and that they are virtually immune to tampering or forging of votes.*
*results of a poll of 1000 experts conducted using Diebold voting machines. 93 of 1000 said electronic voting was not secure, 1237 out of 1000 said that it was.
You're missing the point. It's hardly surprising that no evidence was found, simply because she can delete anything she wants, whenever she wants, since its not an official email address. Let's just assume for a moment that she did email one of her staff with a message along the lines of, "Hey, thanks for helping me abuse the power of the governor's office to pursue grudges against my sister's ex-husband! Now I know why Nixon did what he did- abusing government power is awesome!"
As soon as the scandal started to erupt, she could just delete that email, and ask her staff to do the same. It's not just that the personal accounts are difficult to access, it's that you can magically 'lose' their contents, much as the White House did, and there are no backups.
Unfortunately, we're losing sight of that because of post 9-11 hysteria. Yes, some of those foreigners might want to blow up your house. But I'll bet that the vast majority just want to work hard and to see their kids do better than they did. Ivy League schools are just packed with the children of immigrants for that reason. And I'd be willing to bet that the people who legally arrive in this country are vastly less likely to cause problems than the average American. We have no shortage of home-grown murderers, drug dealers, serial killers, sexual predators, white collar criminals and domestic terrorists... it's arguable that a group of carefully screened legal immigrants is vastly less of a threat to the American way of life than a group of average Americans.
While I agree that the email slip-up was pretty bad, I was more concerned about some of the other sensitive information that Verizon publicized. In addition to those 1200 emails, Verizon also emailed other sensitive information including:
1.the secret herbs and spices that go into KFC's chicken
2. the combination to the door of the Bat Cave
3.The location of Dick Cheney's 'undisclosed location'
4. The chemical composition of Kryptonite
5. The burial site of Jimmy Hoffa
6. the nuclear launch codes for U.S. Trident nuclear missile submarines
7. the full name, post office box address, and social security number of the The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly's Man with No Name
8. the address and repository information for that government warehouse that contains the Ark of the Covenant (it's on rack 12, shelf 7, box 336)
It just hit me. You could have a special pair of goggles, sort of like night vision goggles- there's a camera, it adjusts the image, and then broadcasts it onto screens in front of your eyes. But instead of amplifying the light, the camera would feed images to software, which would recognize faces, and then make them pretty using this algorithm. Making this work in real time might require some major advances in computing, particularly face recognition, but in principle, it's practical. We could actually build a pair of beer goggles.
Of course, I still prefer to get beer goggles the old fashioned way.
I mean, the dude flew around the world in a balloon. Flew around the world again, nonstop, solo, in an aircraft. Set all kinds of records in sailboats and sailplanes. He was building a submarine to "fly" to the deepest point on earth, but meanwhile he killed himself while scouting for a location to run his 800 mph rocket car and break the land speed record.
My first thought was, "man, this guy has a freakin' deathwish, or else he's a goddamn idiot. It's amazing that someone with so little sense of self-preservation lived this long." Doesn't the guy know that there are old pilots, and bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots?
But after thinking about it for a while... he probably did know that. He was flying long enough that he must have come to understand that if he kept it up the way he did, he wasn't going to die in his bed. Any one of his record-setting endeavors could have resulted in his death. But he must have decided that he'd rather live a brief life on his own terms, than a long, safe, boring life. After reading his Wikipedia entry, it's no surprise that he didn't die in an assisted living facility, but I think he'd probably be OK with the way he went out. Vicious downdrafts smashed his plane into bite-sized pieces against a granite escarpment of the Sierra Nevada mountains, while he was scouting a location to break the land speed record in a jet car, and he wasn't found for a year... the man had a hell of an interesting life, and one hell of a death, and packed more living into 63 years than most people could pack into 100. He did things on his terms, took chances, pushed things, and went out doing so. Personally, I'll play things a bit safer, but I do respect the guy's choices.
So our hoaxer forges 3 separate IDs, in one case getting all the original information that was on Fossett's FAA card, and adds $1005? That's one heck of a hoax. I suppose you could argue that's he's trying to get a reward from Fossett's rich widow for "finding" her husband's final resting place... but after he couldn't get ahold of the family's lawyers, he went to the police. Seems that would be the last thing a hoaxer would want to do, is get the police and authorities involved; I imagine forging federal IDs is a pretty serious offense. Doesn't make sense.
True, finding the contents of his wallet off on their own is odd... but animals are curious and like to chew on things, especially when they're hungry. In the middle of winter in the Sierra mountains, a bear or fox might decide that a leather wallet was better to eat than nothing and tear the wallet apart for a snack. Bears in particular will eat damn near anything, edible or not.
You know I'm not certain, but I'm pretty sure that the Tsunami Invisibility Cloak is an item you get in one of the quests in World of Warcraft.
As I see it, the free market is like a game, and the government sets up the rules and acts and referee. If you want the game to favor a particular outcome, change the rules of the game. There are a number of ways you could do this.
For one, you could create tax breaks for companies that manufacture solar cells; that would get more people into the business and allow them to sell the product for cheaper, making it more cost competitive. You could also create tax deductions for consumers and businesses installing solar panels. If a solar panel costs $1000 but can be deducted against $1000 of personal or business income such that you avoid $250 of taxes, then the actual cost to you would be $750 dollars.
There are also more direct ways of encouraging the development of solar power. One method would be to have the government purchase more solar cells, for installation on government buildings, or perhaps to help power military outposts and patrols in desert countries. They carry enough electronics in Iraq and Afghanistan these days that it would probably help to be able to use solar to power them. You could also buy solar cells and give them away to Iraqis, Afghans, or people in developing nations as a means of simultaneously (1) building a domestic industry, (2) building infrastructure in these countries, and (3) building goodwill. You could also fund large-scale projects by major research agencies, such as NASA, the NSF, and DARPA, into developing cheaper, more efficient cells.
The solar industry is probably small enough that just applying a little pressure in the right place could make a major difference. I think it's like the internet- a little bit of government support early on will prove crucial in getting the solar industry to the critical mass needed for the industry to take off on its own, but a few taxpayer dollars now would be repaid many times over in decades to come.
Well obviously Obama believes that Allah controls his affairs.
Exfoliation is MURDER!!!
Not everything is Bush's fault, but a lot is. Bin Laden launching an attack on the U.S. isn't Bush's fault. But failing to watch Bin Laden beforehand is his fault. Failing to catch him afterwards is his fault.
Sunnis and Shiites hate each other. That's not Bush's fault, but when the administration invades Iraq without an occupation plan or enough forces, dismantles their army, and then ignores the growing insurgency and civil war, that is Bush's fault.
Hurricane Katrina isn't Bush's fault. Hiring incompetent guys like Brown, and failing to respond to the disaster, that is Bush's fault.
Afghanistan being a failed state, that's not Bush's fault. But not being able to secure it because you invaded Iraq, that is Bush's fault.
Bush isn't to blame for everything that's gone wrong in 8 years, but he has a lot to owe up to. That's why he's in the running for the title of Worst President in U.S. History. And finally, it's worth considering that not everything that happens to the U.S. is Bush's fault. But everything that happens to the U.S. is his responsibility. It's just sad that he never seems to have understood that.
I just have to wonder, who writes a story like this? Did these people go to a regular journalism school, or some kind of Bizarro-world journalism school where they teach a combination of news writing and creative writing? Are the people making up this story the same guys who photoshopped missiles for the Iranians? Or is it just some dude living in his mom's basement who enjoys writing Star Trek fanfic?
Personally, I'm not all that impressed by this incident. The Chinese lied about putting people in orbit? Please. Our government faked an entire moon landing. They have a long way to go before they'll catch up with us.
Did he deserve to be disbarred? Perhaps. But there is such a thing as going too far. I mean, I really don't think it was appropriate when the judge ordered Mr. Thompson to lie down on the floor, and then repeatedly squatted over his head while yelling "PWNED!!!! PWNED!!!"
That's not an example of a school failing to challenge a student. That's an example of a lazy student. Maybe he's a smart slacker, but at the end of the day, he's still just a slacker. What the hell does it matter if he's smart if he won't apply himself?
As Edison said, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. You'll get much further in life being moderately smart and really hardworking, than extraordinarily brilliant but too lazy to do anything with your intelligence.
Indeed, Saturn's rings are ancient. Perhaps as old as 6,000 years (according to Sarah Palin)!
Borrowers were irresponsible, borrowing money they knew they would have trouble repaying, or trying to make a quick buck buying into the housing bubble. And lenders were irresponsible, lending money to people who had no income, no job, no assets. But they just sold off the mortgages, so the risk didn't affect them. And investment bankers were irresponsible. They created these crazy financial schemes to sell high-risk mortgages; in theory they were supposed to minimize financial risk but in practice they did the opposite. In short... a lot of greed, a lot of foolishness, and there's more than enough blame to go around.