Are solar panels really that heavy? Are they that inefficient? The article says there was only a six-month time period between the contest announcement and the contest, but there isn't much in the way of new technology needed here.
I think maybe they are going about this the wrong way... Most people are thinking heavier than air object lifts. What they really should need is a hellium ballon that can make the lift from 0-50km and where lighter than air (or lighter than the atmosphere around it) no longer become feasible for the life and to move on it's own power up the tether.
Still that is 50km away before you can really acheive true orbit, but every bit in the situation would help.
I wish I could simply ban certain domains from my search, ie ign owned sites, experts exchange or whatever it is called, etc.
Maybe a little rant of mine but you brought up a pet peave of mine with google with that Expert Exchange site...
That Expert exchange is the bane for my existence for what I do for a livng. I hate them with a passion... Everytime I type an exact error message into Google these jokers come as the top hit. But obviously they don't provide the answer... I can't believe people would legitametly link to them since it obvious they are covered with ads and no information.
Though apparently some one spent a great deal of time capturing all possible Microsoft Knowledge base error messages to put up a page for each on on that site to get people to visit. That or they stole subjects from computer repair forums. Grrr...
That is why I usually search google groups first before hitting the main search.
It is extremely frustrating when Google returns nothing useful, but I've yet to find a search engine that works better. Google's level of results seems to be the best anyone can achieve at the moment (and it's not really google that's setting the level of excellence).
Most of the time Google does find revalent things when you can't make money off the subject of what you are searching for, but when you can then you always end up with one group or another trying to get the highest page rank when obiviously they have little use for whatever you are searching for.
Personally, I wish Google would have a reporting or moderation feature in which you could report bad searches to google and after 10,000 unique IPs reported "THIS SITE IS CRAP" or "THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE SEARCH" then google will remove or demote their rankings.
This of course could be abused by people who have bot nets and report their competitors in the searches as useless pages, but I think that would be a rare exception for most sites.
We're still a long ways off. If I had to guess I'd say not within the next 50 years. Perhaps much longer.
I'd have to look up this on Wikipedia, but I can't think of the links off hand...
If Moore's Law holds true for the next century, then we'll have a computer in 87 years that will be able to calculate all the position of all atoms in the universe. Certainly that would be able to simulate the universe from the big bang and randomly create a simulation of the universe that has life in such that it could be extrapolated into new life in the non-simulated world.
Then again according to predictions based on observations, if the current population growth of man continues at this rate for 17,000 years they will be more humans than atoms at that point. (And I don't know how that will work either.)
That "bug" just uses hand-tailored, pre-activated, energy-packed components which are fed to it by the experimenter and degrades them according to a carefully hand-defined pathway. Evolution of the inner processes is utterly impossible because, essentially, there is no real "inner process". It's just like fire - a downwards, energy releasing reaction without any self-regulation.
What you just described is a virus.
Like a fire a virus burns resources without aquiring them. Doens't mean both a virus and fire can get out of control. Take a forest fire or a building burning.
Sure, it'd make us understand him better but what use is it for the masses? He raped someone.
We can catch him and punish him and hold him responsible for his actions, but shouldn't we also be responsible if we did nothing to stop others in the future from carrying out the same crime.
Think of it as a infestation. You find ants crawling in your kitchen. You can keep killing them over and over again, but it won't keep more ants from coming in. "Shame on you ants!" you scream, but they keep coming and coming. Later you find an open bag of sugar that you forgot about and then you clean the mess up and the ants stop coming.
It is the same with terrorism. We can kill as many terrorists as they throw at us, but until we get rid of the proverbial "bag of sugar", they are going to keep coming at us regardless of how many laws we pass or how much tax money we dump into security or how many cells we destroy.
It only takes one of them to slip through the net to be successful. You have to solve the problem at the core to make the solution permanent.
Like I said... We should not use this to exscuse their actions, but we must also put forth and effort to fix the problem that leads to their actions or else we are doomed to have it happen again.
A soldier's job is to do what he/she's told, not what they think is right.
I know a few soldiers who would disagree with you. A soldier is supposed to think for themselves and not be a robot. That way they can act on their own if the chain of command fails (ie they are surrounded with no communication or their commander is killed).
Secondly, (at least in the US forces) you are not supposed to follow orders that contradict certain rules of engagement such as shooting POWs and civilians with no just cause or following orders that overly endanger fellow soldiers. Example, following an order to drop a payload on a certain target when you know damn well that your own men are there would result in court martial.
Remember My Lai massacre in which US soldiers killed Vietnamese civilians... There were several soldiers in the group that refused (or at least claimed) to participate (ie not follow orders).
Much like muslim terrorists, I think it's always better to have an understanding of what's going on with the people who try to screw us over so hard, instead of just imagining them as mustachio twirling villains who are out to get us because, well, they're the bad guys.
That is the most insightful thing I have seen in a while and totally agree...
Like the UK Transit bombings when someone says "Maybe they bombed us because we have troops in Iraq?" they get shouted down as providing excuses for the Terrorists, but the fact of the matter is that people just don't wake up one morning and say "Well I am going to blow myself up today for no good reason!"
Whatever reason they may have is actually important to the situation, but I stress it is not excusable to go and murder, steal, and scam people, but if you want to defeat the enemy you must know their motives.
It is how the detective and intelligence catches these criminal... To psychologically understand who this person maybe and also recognize signs of another possible criminal.
And it irks me to no end when I see police or soldiers refer to the enemy as "the bad guys" with no respect to understanding why they do the things they do. Sure it is there job to kill or apprehend the criminal/enemy, but these people are doing it for reasons that may seem justified in their own eyes.
If you sit back and recognize these justification you might have a better chance of avoiding and preventing being scammed, assaulted, or surviving the attach when it happens.
As Sun Tzu said "Know thyself, know thy enemy and win the battle every time.". (paraphrased)
From the article: "'I'm fuming mad,' said Sarah Gadye, the San Francisco middle school teacher who discovered the problem Thursday -- three years after the district purchased the service for elementary and middle school teachers. 'My own child could go into this, figure it out and get all this data on all these students. It's mind-boggling.'"
Just because you couldn't figure it out and your child could doens't mean you have to get pissy about it.
In your system, if I try buying something at 1500 hours, I'll get a strange look from people and they'll say 'you're not from around here, are you?' So you've made it worse for me - not only am I jetlagged, I also have no ideas at what time I'm supposed to do what things - I'll simply be the laughing stock of the hotel employess when I demand my breakfast at 0800 hours.
Maybe I am too used to things always being available 24 hours... But from my perspective I don't travel, but I always communicate with people at other locations. Personally, I think things should run 24 hours like the stockmarket or liquor stores but perhaps the world is not ready for that.
It would make things simple and just go by UTC. So when we mean we are going to have a meeting in New York at 15:00, we mean we are going to have a meeting in California at 15:00.
You make the time different based on what you are and work around the time... No the other way around. I wake up at 13:00 and you can wake up at 18:00 whever you may be. It would save the trouble of having to talk with other people in other time zones and always manually adjust the time.
So, yes, the US does censor content coming from foreign countries, the same as this Al-Shamshoons does in Arabia.
Let us compare...
In Arabia the punishment is flogging by order of the local Iman.
In the US it is a $400,000 fine by the order of the FCC.
Hrm... This is a tough one... One will put me in the hospital for a very long time. The other will make cost me more money than I will see in my lifetime. Hrm... How much are hospital costs again?
At the very least concider that the "kids" the GP mensions already (in the hypothetical situation) exist.
Then how will an 80 hour work week figure into the equation of raising a family? One chooses to have kids then same as one chooses to work a highly involved job. It is a choice and simply that.
If the kids are already there when you decide to take this career, then that was a choice you made in the past and will weigh in on the choice you make today. Raising a family is a choice and not an infliction. If you have one when you didn't plan one then that was because of your choices to have them or not use protection or what have you. If you have a family here and now, then you deal with it as a responible parent. If you can raise them in a loving family by being an 80 hour a week game developer (or any type of job that has you working 70+ hours a week for that matter) and still have time to have super with you kids, help them with their homework, and be there when they need you then more power to you! And I am sure there are countless people who do this and hats off to them... But when the parents only live for their job and have no time for their kids... That is when the kids suffer and that was the parents fault and they cannot simply get out of the responsibility.
Let us see if they still are willing to work for free when...umm... they graduate or have a family. This author is a moron!
Then they shouldn't have kids then... Sometimes having a particular career means not having a family because you won't be able to support them (that or you wouldn't make a responsible parent anyways).
Look... No one is forcing you to have kids or buy a house or a fancy car. I can live off $20K a year if I wanted to (but I wouldn't want).
If you have dreams follow them. Wait til your 30 to have kids or just not have them at all unless you have some breeder desire. Me... I think I am going to spare the world a few more mouths and get a vasectomy and adopt if I ever settle down.
Don't get me wrong, you can still have your dream career and still have a family, but you have work extra hard for it and give up things that you had before you started to raise a family.
This I disagree with entirely. These are human beings; I think it's rather dehumanizing to say that, "well, barring freedom and the other cornerstones for civilization, as least they'll be distracted." I would say it's our duty as a human race to fight for them and help them get land and jobs and freedom.
I know. I didn't mean to across like that. I think what I was trying to say if I personally had a choice between being opressed and not having technology and still be oppressed with ability to use technology to distract myself I would choose the latter.
That is a futile outlook on life, but sometimes we have no control over what we are given, but I believe it is technology that makes life better even if it does nothing more than keep you connected to the rest of the world.
Simple. Buy a Mac laptop with OS X and turn the firewall on.;)
But seriously, Joe Schmoe is just as likley to get infected on his DSL line than WiFi because they most likley haven't bought a hardware firewall much less a normal NAT router. If I was leary about my windows boxen being directly on the internet via wifi, I'd buy a Wifi bridge and run a cable it through a NAT/Firewall Router directly to windows box, but I doubt Joe would go that far. His only hope is that the Winxp computer had Sp2 installed before he got it and has with firewall turned on with anti-virus and anti-spyware programs already preinstalled.
That are helpful relatives or friends that can do it for him... *coughs*
Slashdot Mirror
Are solar panels really that heavy? Are they that inefficient? The article says there was only a six-month time period between the contest announcement and the contest, but there isn't much in the way of new technology needed here.
I think maybe they are going about this the wrong way... Most people are thinking heavier than air object lifts. What they really should need is a hellium ballon that can make the lift from 0-50km and where lighter than air (or lighter than the atmosphere around it) no longer become feasible for the life and to move on it's own power up the tether.
Still that is 50km away before you can really acheive true orbit, but every bit in the situation would help.
So if I have an xbox 360 will it affect my remote control changing channels... Oh wait... ;)
But seriously, think this would have an effect on wireless networks/devices?
And if Sony or Apple were to call me up and say, "Hey, we want to some special things with the 360,"
Dear Microsoft,
Would Blu-Ray count as special?
Your boossum buddy,
-Sony
What are they saying.
I wish I could simply ban certain domains from my search, ie ign owned sites, experts exchange or whatever it is called, etc.
Maybe a little rant of mine but you brought up a pet peave of mine with google with that Expert Exchange site...
That Expert exchange is the bane for my existence for what I do for a livng. I hate them with a passion... Everytime I type an exact error message into Google these jokers come as the top hit. But obviously they don't provide the answer... I can't believe people would legitametly link to them since it obvious they are covered with ads and no information.
Though apparently some one spent a great deal of time capturing all possible Microsoft Knowledge base error messages to put up a page for each on on that site to get people to visit. That or they stole subjects from computer repair forums. Grrr...
That is why I usually search google groups first before hitting the main search.
But... But... How else will we secretly carry out our test of the Infinite Monkey Theorem?
It is extremely frustrating when Google returns nothing useful, but I've yet to find a search engine that works better. Google's level of results seems to be the best anyone can achieve at the moment (and it's not really google that's setting the level of excellence).
Most of the time Google does find revalent things when you can't make money off the subject of what you are searching for, but when you can then you always end up with one group or another trying to get the highest page rank when obiviously they have little use for whatever you are searching for.
Personally, I wish Google would have a reporting or moderation feature in which you could report bad searches to google and after 10,000 unique IPs reported "THIS SITE IS CRAP" or "THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE SEARCH" then google will remove or demote their rankings.
This of course could be abused by people who have bot nets and report their competitors in the searches as useless pages, but I think that would be a rare exception for most sites.
We're still a long ways off. If I had to guess I'd say not within the next 50 years. Perhaps much longer.
I'd have to look up this on Wikipedia, but I can't think of the links off hand...
If Moore's Law holds true for the next century, then we'll have a computer in 87 years that will be able to calculate all the position of all atoms in the universe. Certainly that would be able to simulate the universe from the big bang and randomly create a simulation of the universe that has life in such that it could be extrapolated into new life in the non-simulated world.
Then again according to predictions based on observations, if the current population growth of man continues at this rate for 17,000 years they will be more humans than atoms at that point. (And I don't know how that will work either.)
That "bug" just uses hand-tailored, pre-activated, energy-packed components which are fed to it by the experimenter and degrades them according to a carefully hand-defined pathway. Evolution of the inner processes is utterly impossible because, essentially, there is no real "inner process". It's just like fire - a downwards, energy releasing reaction without any self-regulation.
What you just described is a virus.
Like a fire a virus burns resources without aquiring them. Doens't mean both a virus and fire can get out of control. Take a forest fire or a building burning.
So real question should be "is a virus alive?"
Call me old-fashioned (at 30), but... this is a joke, right? Space mission != sex camp.
Quiet you! You'll ruin our plans! How else do you expect hopeful astronaut nerds to get laid we more than one woman in a years time!
The other problem is that if you can tell wether the light bulb is on or off, you can't find out where it is.
Also, if you can locate where the light bulb is in your house, you won't be able to tell if it is on or off.
Haven't these people seen Star Trek? Kirk did it with every green woman in space, and that crew turned out fine...
Every time Kirk bags a space chic, god kills a red shirt.
I'm sorry but are you a fucking retard? The point of a raid is to go in and find indisputalable evidence that the crime was committed.
They do notify you before they enter the premise. This usually means they knock on the door and tell you that they are about to do so in 5 seconds.
Sure, it'd make us understand him better but what use is it for the masses? He raped someone.
We can catch him and punish him and hold him responsible for his actions, but shouldn't we also be responsible if we did nothing to stop others in the future from carrying out the same crime.
Think of it as a infestation. You find ants crawling in your kitchen. You can keep killing them over and over again, but it won't keep more ants from coming in. "Shame on you ants!" you scream, but they keep coming and coming. Later you find an open bag of sugar that you forgot about and then you clean the mess up and the ants stop coming.
It is the same with terrorism. We can kill as many terrorists as they throw at us, but until we get rid of the proverbial "bag of sugar", they are going to keep coming at us regardless of how many laws we pass or how much tax money we dump into security or how many cells we destroy.
It only takes one of them to slip through the net to be successful. You have to solve the problem at the core to make the solution permanent.
Like I said... We should not use this to exscuse their actions, but we must also put forth and effort to fix the problem that leads to their actions or else we are doomed to have it happen again.
A soldier's job is to do what he/she's told, not what they think is right.
I know a few soldiers who would disagree with you. A soldier is supposed to think for themselves and not be a robot. That way they can act on their own if the chain of command fails (ie they are surrounded with no communication or their commander is killed).
Secondly, (at least in the US forces) you are not supposed to follow orders that contradict certain rules of engagement such as shooting POWs and civilians with no just cause or following orders that overly endanger fellow soldiers. Example, following an order to drop a payload on a certain target when you know damn well that your own men are there would result in court martial.
Remember My Lai massacre in which US soldiers killed Vietnamese civilians... There were several soldiers in the group that refused (or at least claimed) to participate (ie not follow orders).
Much like muslim terrorists, I think it's always better to have an understanding of what's going on with the people who try to screw us over so hard, instead of just imagining them as mustachio twirling villains who are out to get us because, well, they're the bad guys.
That is the most insightful thing I have seen in a while and totally agree...
Like the UK Transit bombings when someone says "Maybe they bombed us because we have troops in Iraq?" they get shouted down as providing excuses for the Terrorists, but the fact of the matter is that people just don't wake up one morning and say "Well I am going to blow myself up today for no good reason!"
Whatever reason they may have is actually important to the situation, but I stress it is not excusable to go and murder, steal, and scam people, but if you want to defeat the enemy you must know their motives.
It is how the detective and intelligence catches these criminal... To psychologically understand who this person maybe and also recognize signs of another possible criminal.
And it irks me to no end when I see police or soldiers refer to the enemy as "the bad guys" with no respect to understanding why they do the things they do. Sure it is there job to kill or apprehend the criminal/enemy, but these people are doing it for reasons that may seem justified in their own eyes.
If you sit back and recognize these justification you might have a better chance of avoiding and preventing being scammed, assaulted, or surviving the attach when it happens.
As Sun Tzu said "Know thyself, know thy enemy and win the battle every time.". (paraphrased)
From the article: "'I'm fuming mad,' said Sarah Gadye, the San Francisco middle school teacher who discovered the problem Thursday -- three years after the district purchased the service for elementary and middle school teachers. 'My own child could go into this, figure it out and get all this data on all these students. It's mind-boggling.'"
Just because you couldn't figure it out and your child could doens't mean you have to get pissy about it.
In your system, if I try buying something at 1500 hours, I'll get a strange look from people and they'll say 'you're not from around here, are you?' So you've made it worse for me - not only am I jetlagged, I also have no ideas at what time I'm supposed to do what things - I'll simply be the laughing stock of the hotel employess when I demand my breakfast at 0800 hours.
Maybe I am too used to things always being available 24 hours... But from my perspective I don't travel, but I always communicate with people at other locations. Personally, I think things should run 24 hours like the stockmarket or liquor stores but perhaps the world is not ready for that.
It would make things simple and just go by UTC. So when we mean we are going to have a meeting in New York at 15:00, we mean we are going to have a meeting in California at 15:00.
You make the time different based on what you are and work around the time... No the other way around. I wake up at 13:00 and you can wake up at 18:00 whever you may be. It would save the trouble of having to talk with other people in other time zones and always manually adjust the time.
In the year 2020, the only way to block 24/7 ads is to gougue out your eyes and pop your eardrums.
However, by 2021 nanobots will constantly press on the skin of the deaf and blind with brail ads.
So, yes, the US does censor content coming from foreign countries, the same as this Al-Shamshoons does in Arabia.
Let us compare...
In Arabia the punishment is flogging by order of the local Iman.
In the US it is a $400,000 fine by the order of the FCC.
Hrm... This is a tough one... One will put me in the hospital for a very long time. The other will make cost me more money than I will see in my lifetime. Hrm... How much are hospital costs again?
At the very least concider that the "kids" the GP mensions already (in the hypothetical situation) exist.
Then how will an 80 hour work week figure into the equation of raising a family? One chooses to have kids then same as one chooses to work a highly involved job. It is a choice and simply that.
If the kids are already there when you decide to take this career, then that was a choice you made in the past and will weigh in on the choice you make today. Raising a family is a choice and not an infliction. If you have one when you didn't plan one then that was because of your choices to have them or not use protection or what have you. If you have a family here and now, then you deal with it as a responible parent. If you can raise them in a loving family by being an 80 hour a week game developer (or any type of job that has you working 70+ hours a week for that matter) and still have time to have super with you kids, help them with their homework, and be there when they need you then more power to you! And I am sure there are countless people who do this and hats off to them... But when the parents only live for their job and have no time for their kids... That is when the kids suffer and that was the parents fault and they cannot simply get out of the responsibility.
Let us see if they still are willing to work for free when...umm... they graduate or have a family. This author is a moron!
Then they shouldn't have kids then... Sometimes having a particular career means not having a family because you won't be able to support them (that or you wouldn't make a responsible parent anyways).
Look... No one is forcing you to have kids or buy a house or a fancy car. I can live off $20K a year if I wanted to (but I wouldn't want).
If you have dreams follow them. Wait til your 30 to have kids or just not have them at all unless you have some breeder desire. Me... I think I am going to spare the world a few more mouths and get a vasectomy and adopt if I ever settle down.
Don't get me wrong, you can still have your dream career and still have a family, but you have work extra hard for it and give up things that you had before you started to raise a family.
This I disagree with entirely. These are human beings; I think it's rather dehumanizing to say that, "well, barring freedom and the other cornerstones for civilization, as least they'll be distracted." I would say it's our duty as a human race to fight for them and help them get land and jobs and freedom.
I know. I didn't mean to across like that. I think what I was trying to say if I personally had a choice between being opressed and not having technology and still be oppressed with ability to use technology to distract myself I would choose the latter.
That is a futile outlook on life, but sometimes we have no control over what we are given, but I believe it is technology that makes life better even if it does nothing more than keep you connected to the rest of the world.
What can one do to protect themselves?
;)
Simple. Buy a Mac laptop with OS X and turn the firewall on.
But seriously, Joe Schmoe is just as likley to get infected on his DSL line than WiFi because they most likley haven't bought a hardware firewall much less a normal NAT router. If I was leary about my windows boxen being directly on the internet via wifi, I'd buy a Wifi bridge and run a cable it through a NAT/Firewall Router directly to windows box, but I doubt Joe would go that far. His only hope is that the Winxp computer had Sp2 installed before he got it and has with firewall turned on with anti-virus and anti-spyware programs already preinstalled.
That are helpful relatives or friends that can do it for him... *coughs*