If the loose mystery objects were the lost bolts, then their mere presence wasted a full day of head-scratching.
If a bolt settled in the bay and bounced during landing, causing damage to the panels as discovered this week, then their mere presence has not been harmless either.
There are many useful orbits below the ISS and those satellites don't want runaway bolts accelerating toward them, either.
Need I remind you that it was a few-ounce piece of foam that everyone THOUGHT was harmless yet destroyed a Shuttle and scared the whole space program out of relevance for several years?
During the last trip, there was a lot of ISS construction work in EVA. There was a lot of commentary about a bunch of bolts and other small items that got "lost" (dropped) during the activity.
Then there was talk about unknown objects which were sharing the orbit with the shuttle before it descended. They delayed for a whole day just to look at the shuttle again, and to keep looking for lots of parts. But none of the news commentary seemed to draw any connection to the lost bolts.
Now we are hearing about damage done to some radiator panels that are stowed inside the payload bay during landing. Maybe another bolt that bounced around inside the bay during descent and landing?
The EVA crew used little baggies to collect the construction garbage. What other information is available on detritus collection planning? Is the bag's interior sticky? Is it magnetic? Can a space suit or the robotic boom have a large chunk of magnet on it to help "gather" loose untethered parts while they're still nearby but not in easy hand-reach?
Even if it wasn't the lost bolts, it sure looks like the crew is going to have to be super-vigilant about that sort of thing during the next umpteen missions between now and the decommissioning. I doubt ANYONE has any illusions that we'll actually finish the ISS according to plan on time, but the ISS will still need to make the most of the shuttle before it's grounded again and forever.
You can't underestimate the lowest rank of society, but I think a large portion of the general population would understand the issue a lot more if the mainstream press were to rephrase all those headlines by one word:
Reminds me of one of Lord Dunsany's shortest stories.
A MISTAKEN IDENTITY
Fame as she walked at evening in a city saw the painted face of Notoriety flaunting beneath a gas-lamp, and many kneeled unto her in the dirt of the road.
"Who are you?" Fame said to her.
"I am Fame," said Notoriety.
Then Fame stole softly away so that no one knew she had gone.
And Notoriety presently went forth and all her worshippers rose and followed after, and she led them, as was most meet, to her native Pit.
Suddenly there are fewer genuine teenagers in an online forum? It's obvious that the ranking scheme is now able to measure the age of FBI agents and Congressfolk more accurately.
Why not just set up a scheme by which I can forward some of my spam-phish filter hits to their receiver?
if it mentions [a known financial institution],
if it doesn't mention [my own few known financial institutions],
if it mentions "login" or "password" or "activity",
it's a phish.
When I get a new one I've never seen, I just add the name of the institution to the top of the rule. It doesn't take ME long to rule out all mails claiming to be from First Mutual of Podunk, even though there may exist some legitimate mails from FMoP to their customers, wherever that is.
In some companies, all it takes is a look into the personal stock portfolio of the operations managers. Oh, look, this manager holds a few thousand shares of Dell. Oh, look, this company has standardized on Dell and it takes an act of ghod to buy a non-Dell machine. Oh, look, the current Dell installations are not *quite* up to snuff with the next rollout of Windows. What a co-inky-dink.
Hrm, funny, every time we complain that slashdot should go through the process of automating a simple mirror process to avoid hammering an unsuspecting server into rubble, all the "editors" go pointing at the FAQ as some sort of ironclad reasoning against doing so. But here we have an "editor" instructing the readership to do slashdot's work for them. This all just points to the fact that OSTG will pay the bandwidth bills if it means ad revenue, but doesn't want to actually foot the bill to use their server complex for disseminating information.
Can this for-profit site get any MORE lame and unprofessional? I wonder if OSTG actually thinks there's more ad revenue in leetspeek and sloppy anti-journalism than in insightful and accurate industry discussion. Apparently yes, they do.
There are auditory and visual cues to detect stress, not particularly lies. Even for an "old hand" at speaking to the media, it is stressful to face dozens of cameras and hot lamps to answer a question accurately (even whether they walked their dog that morning). Mix that with the threat of slander/libel, indicating that a powerful official was a likely liar, and you can easily see why the media doesn't do this. Not everything in a scifi novella actually translates to real life.
A pragmatic solution would be to say, "I don't care whose fault it is, we will disable/filter our automatic reply system on our end for a couple days until a real solution can be found." The chances of someone being pragmatic on ONE side is pretty good, and while it wouldn't be necessary, the chances of someone being pragmatic on BOTH sides isn't too terrible to contemplate either.
Once you turn off the water at an upstream valve, fixing the actual pipe rupture gets a lot easier. Just git 'er done.
I've heard that the ancient greek civilization has come on hard times too. Since they were the ones who actually created the Eris / Discordia mythology, shouldn't they get a spare dime too? I mean, it's nice to rework some old public domain ideas into a story and copyright it (see Disney), and it's nice to be generous to your fellow man, etc., but I don't get this call to action slashdot article stuff.
Kazuma in particular is a surprisingly broadly written and human protagonist; along with busting in teeth and staring down hardened killers, he is not above escorting little girls to safety and searching out dog food for a starving puppy.
I haven't seen the game and I would like to give it a shot. Sometimes reviews include strange minor elements that don't seem to fit. I read the above, and imagined the game team decision making progress:
Producer: Throw in some more minigames so we can boost the checkbox count.
Developer: We racked our brains but can't figure out any more in-character minigames that won't bust the budget in terms of complexity.
Producer: I don't care about that, just copy some ideas from Sims2 or Mario or FF5 or something.
Developer:...
Beta testers are ALSO not a focus group. If they report a flaw, the team triages that report. The maker decides if they want to file the burr off the edge, or record the flaw for future improvements, or ignore the complaint. If they report that they don't like something, the chances that their opinion will be heard is vanishingly small.
Actually, I beg to differ on the characterization that the world's blog is being considered like a big focus group. When a real focus group pans a product idea, the maker doesn't try to rationalize the current design, the maker drops it or improves it and starts over. Blog writers are howling into the wind, and it doesn't matter if they are heard or not: Microsoft will just go on doing what Microsoft wants to do, because they're big enough and the market is big enough that they feel they can ignore the whiners.
Explanation: one of their brighter marketdroids included sixaxis on a short list for a focus group. Other choices of names for the new six degree of freedom controller which were NOT picked: "six doof," "sixtoy," "axis six," "funxxy," "wiiconsiide."
Just wait for the court cases when friends or family are injured by these booby-trapped phones. They borrowed/found the phone, and someone forgot to tell/remind/remember that the loan/find took place, or the borrower/finder tries to call the owner's other line to return it.
My daughter doesn't have unsupervised time on the Internet. She's too young for that. But as she gets older, she will learn the risks as my wife and I can explain them best. We hope to foster in her the ability to share with us those things she's confused about, to ignore/resist the things she knows about but doesn't want, and to keep us in the loop on how her life is unfolding. At first that means we read over her shoulder. Later that means we talk about it daily but give her some space.
By the time she's grown up, she has to be fully competent at dealing with grown up decision-making. We can't (and don't want) to cover her eyes from all possible smut and evil that is a part of her future world.
The safe 216 has nothing to do with colors that appear the same on all displays. There can be no such "guarantee" of similar appearance on different hardware. It has to do with the fact that a byte can only index so many colors, so a simple even distribution of 6^3 colors fits within a palette of 2^8.
To make the colors produced by two displays (even of the same make and model) look alike, you need much more math to (1) profile the abilities and biases of the device in question, and (2) a video card which can take such a profile and compensate for it in the video signal. Even then, you still can't guarantee that the devices will be able to cover anywhere near the same gamut.
If you are somehow GIMP-challenged to the point of not understanding the eyedropper tool, here are a few I snagged from graphics on a breast cancer site:
#ff99cc
#eeaac3
#f594cb
#f197c0
#fbd9e1
#f50f95
The first one is a "safe 216" color, which I threw in as a bonus for the really ancient websites and video cards stuck in 256-color modes.
I hear that the new machines will have anti-cheating technology built in. With the integrated keylogger, persistent dial modem, and gigabit snitch-on-lan ports, the risk of anyone cheating in online games is a thing of the past. Also included is a one year subscription to a fully customized* client version of a popular identity fraud monitoring service.
The new gui is just a fraction of what Vista offers and i'm amazed at home many people praise it or deteste it based on that single aspect alone.
People rate the quality of a new road solely on the smooth pothole-free surface they encounter when the construction trucks finally leave. They don't know about, are not curious about, and don't want to be curious about the improved fiber trunks, water reclamation system, ice resistant tarmac, or wear-resistant striping polymers. This is really pretty much the nature of 99% of humanity: unless you have some specific field knowledge, then superficial gloss is all you have any way of measuring quality or desirability.
Slashdot Mirror
If the loose mystery objects were the lost bolts, then their mere presence wasted a full day of head-scratching.
If a bolt settled in the bay and bounced during landing, causing damage to the panels as discovered this week, then their mere presence has not been harmless either.
There are many useful orbits below the ISS and those satellites don't want runaway bolts accelerating toward them, either.
Need I remind you that it was a few-ounce piece of foam that everyone THOUGHT was harmless yet destroyed a Shuttle and scared the whole space program out of relevance for several years?
During the last trip, there was a lot of ISS construction work in EVA. There was a lot of commentary about a bunch of bolts and other small items that got "lost" (dropped) during the activity.
Then there was talk about unknown objects which were sharing the orbit with the shuttle before it descended. They delayed for a whole day just to look at the shuttle again, and to keep looking for lots of parts. But none of the news commentary seemed to draw any connection to the lost bolts.
Now we are hearing about damage done to some radiator panels that are stowed inside the payload bay during landing. Maybe another bolt that bounced around inside the bay during descent and landing?
The EVA crew used little baggies to collect the construction garbage. What other information is available on detritus collection planning? Is the bag's interior sticky? Is it magnetic? Can a space suit or the robotic boom have a large chunk of magnet on it to help "gather" loose untethered parts while they're still nearby but not in easy hand-reach?
Even if it wasn't the lost bolts, it sure looks like the crew is going to have to be super-vigilant about that sort of thing during the next umpteen missions between now and the decommissioning. I doubt ANYONE has any illusions that we'll actually finish the ISS according to plan on time, but the ISS will still need to make the most of the shuttle before it's grounded again and forever.
You can't underestimate the lowest rank of society, but I think a large portion of the general population would understand the issue a lot more if the mainstream press were to rephrase all those headlines by one word:
Reminds me of one of Lord Dunsany's shortest stories.
Suddenly there are fewer genuine teenagers in an online forum? It's obvious that the ranking scheme is now able to measure the age of FBI agents and Congressfolk more accurately.
Why not just set up a scheme by which I can forward some of my spam-phish filter hits to their receiver?
When I get a new one I've never seen, I just add the name of the institution to the top of the rule. It doesn't take ME long to rule out all mails claiming to be from First Mutual of Podunk, even though there may exist some legitimate mails from FMoP to their customers, wherever that is.
Take me apart, take me apart,
What a way to roam.
But if you have to take me apart to get me there,
I'd rather stay at home.
In some companies, all it takes is a look into the personal stock portfolio of the operations managers. Oh, look, this manager holds a few thousand shares of Dell. Oh, look, this company has standardized on Dell and it takes an act of ghod to buy a non-Dell machine. Oh, look, the current Dell installations are not *quite* up to snuff with the next rollout of Windows. What a co-inky-dink.
Hrm, funny, every time we complain that slashdot should go through the process of automating a simple mirror process to avoid hammering an unsuspecting server into rubble, all the "editors" go pointing at the FAQ as some sort of ironclad reasoning against doing so. But here we have an "editor" instructing the readership to do slashdot's work for them. This all just points to the fact that OSTG will pay the bandwidth bills if it means ad revenue, but doesn't want to actually foot the bill to use their server complex for disseminating information.
Can this for-profit site get any MORE lame and unprofessional? I wonder if OSTG actually thinks there's more ad revenue in leetspeek and sloppy anti-journalism than in insightful and accurate industry discussion. Apparently yes, they do.
There are auditory and visual cues to detect stress, not particularly lies. Even for an "old hand" at speaking to the media, it is stressful to face dozens of cameras and hot lamps to answer a question accurately (even whether they walked their dog that morning). Mix that with the threat of slander/libel, indicating that a powerful official was a likely liar, and you can easily see why the media doesn't do this. Not everything in a scifi novella actually translates to real life.
A pragmatic solution would be to say, "I don't care whose fault it is, we will disable/filter our automatic reply system on our end for a couple days until a real solution can be found." The chances of someone being pragmatic on ONE side is pretty good, and while it wouldn't be necessary, the chances of someone being pragmatic on BOTH sides isn't too terrible to contemplate either.
Once you turn off the water at an upstream valve, fixing the actual pipe rupture gets a lot easier. Just git 'er done.
I've heard that the ancient greek civilization has come on hard times too. Since they were the ones who actually created the Eris / Discordia mythology, shouldn't they get a spare dime too? I mean, it's nice to rework some old public domain ideas into a story and copyright it (see Disney), and it's nice to be generous to your fellow man, etc., but I don't get this call to action slashdot article stuff.
I haven't seen the game and I would like to give it a shot. Sometimes reviews include strange minor elements that don't seem to fit. I read the above, and imagined the game team decision making progress:
Producer: Throw in some more minigames so we can boost the checkbox count. ...
Developer: We racked our brains but can't figure out any more in-character minigames that won't bust the budget in terms of complexity.
Producer: I don't care about that, just copy some ideas from Sims2 or Mario or FF5 or something.
Developer:
Beta testers are ALSO not a focus group. If they report a flaw, the team triages that report. The maker decides if they want to file the burr off the edge, or record the flaw for future improvements, or ignore the complaint. If they report that they don't like something, the chances that their opinion will be heard is vanishingly small.
Actually, I beg to differ on the characterization that the world's blog is being considered like a big focus group. When a real focus group pans a product idea, the maker doesn't try to rationalize the current design, the maker drops it or improves it and starts over. Blog writers are howling into the wind, and it doesn't matter if they are heard or not: Microsoft will just go on doing what Microsoft wants to do, because they're big enough and the market is big enough that they feel they can ignore the whiners.
Explanation: one of their brighter marketdroids included sixaxis on a short list for a focus group. Other choices of names for the new six degree of freedom controller which were NOT picked: "six doof," "sixtoy," "axis six," "funxxy," "wiiconsiide."
No, silly, that's RNC interference.
having appropriate ethical behavior
having been appropriated for one's sole use
Just wait for the court cases when friends or family are injured by these booby-trapped phones. They borrowed/found the phone, and someone forgot to tell/remind/remember that the loan/find took place, or the borrower/finder tries to call the owner's other line to return it.
My daughter doesn't have unsupervised time on the Internet. She's too young for that. But as she gets older, she will learn the risks as my wife and I can explain them best. We hope to foster in her the ability to share with us those things she's confused about, to ignore/resist the things she knows about but doesn't want, and to keep us in the loop on how her life is unfolding. At first that means we read over her shoulder. Later that means we talk about it daily but give her some space.
By the time she's grown up, she has to be fully competent at dealing with grown up decision-making. We can't (and don't want) to cover her eyes from all possible smut and evil that is a part of her future world.
The safe 216 has nothing to do with colors that appear the same on all displays. There can be no such "guarantee" of similar appearance on different hardware. It has to do with the fact that a byte can only index so many colors, so a simple even distribution of 6^3 colors fits within a palette of 2^8.
To make the colors produced by two displays (even of the same make and model) look alike, you need much more math to (1) profile the abilities and biases of the device in question, and (2) a video card which can take such a profile and compensate for it in the video signal. Even then, you still can't guarantee that the devices will be able to cover anywhere near the same gamut.
- #ff99cc
- #eeaac3
- #f594cb
- #f197c0
- #fbd9e1
- #f50f95
The first one is a "safe 216" color, which I threw in as a bonus for the really ancient websites and video cards stuck in 256-color modes.I hear that the new machines will have anti-cheating technology built in. With the integrated keylogger, persistent dial modem, and gigabit snitch-on-lan ports, the risk of anyone cheating in online games is a thing of the past. Also included is a one year subscription to a fully customized* client version of a popular identity fraud monitoring service.
People rate the quality of a new road solely on the smooth pothole-free surface they encounter when the construction trucks finally leave. They don't know about, are not curious about, and don't want to be curious about the improved fiber trunks, water reclamation system, ice resistant tarmac, or wear-resistant striping polymers. This is really pretty much the nature of 99% of humanity: unless you have some specific field knowledge, then superficial gloss is all you have any way of measuring quality or desirability.