"There are numerous criteria, and the specific combination varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The absence of a heart beat is always involved, the lack of spontaneous respiration is usually a component, and the failure to respond to reflex stimuli is often included. (Pupils don't contract when exposed to bright light, that sort of thing.)"
I think one way to break people's misconceptions about the different types of EM radiation (radio, microwave, infrared, visible, uv, xray, gamma) is to explain that the difference is not in the light itself, but in the scale of the things that the light interacts with.
The reason that they seem so different to us is because their wavelengths are larger/similar to/smaller than various atoms and molecules that we can observe them interacting with, so the net effect can be drastically different. If someone were able to magically scale matter to a larger or smaller size with correspondingly changed energy levels, the apparent properties of the different frequencies of light would change accordingly, even though maxwell's laws would remain unchanged.
"So... how long until we have a bunch of these go haywire and eat people in a theme park somewhere?"
Elementary chaos theory tells us that all robots will eventually turn against their masters and run amok, in an orgy of blood and the kicking and the biting with the metal teeth and the hurting and shoving. According to my calculations, the robots won't go berserk for at least 24 hours.
Somehow, the idea of random joe schmoe's doing this kind of thing is a lot more endearing. Looking back at what the Wright brothers did, while running a bicycle shop, is pretty cool, and I'm sure many of their less successful peers were also coming from modest backgrounds.
Nowadays, technology has advanced to the point that it takes some serious cash to do anything like this on an interesting scale. For some reason, watching bored rich people kill their idle time is pretty lame compared to watching someone who has to work a 9-5 job to pay their bills stay up late chasing a dream.
"I have a TV but have nothing in the form of an aerial or lead in my flat, so i don't even get a slight temptation to watch it. the result? Sometimes i can be bored, but instead of watching mindless tv, i sit and read and/or educate myself about something. Not bad really."
Or post on slashdot.
Anti-TV pseudo-elitist jerkwads, as parodied in the onion, are annoying enough, but internet hypocrites are just plain hilarious.
Do you REALLY think that posting on an internet messageboard like slashdot is ANY less a waste of time than TV?
BTW, play any RPGs? That'd just be icing on the cake.
The bottom line isn't whether you do this worthless thing or that other waste of time, it's what ELSE you do with yourself. At the end of the day, have you accomplished something you're happy about? Do you think that the things you've wasted time on during the day have seriously compromised your efforts to accomplish something worthwhile?
It's the same criteria I'd apply to ask whether someone has a drug problem.
"Every administration, of whatever party, has overseen the growth of the government in one form or another. And virtually every one has overseen unprecedented growth, in that no previous administration had grown it that much."
"(If you figure there are 2 songs you'll actually listen to on a $15ish cd.)"
I haven't bought a CD that was like that in many years. Bands that put out albums with only 2 good songs on them tend to not be all that good in the first place.
To be fair, some basic cable channels (like comedy central) do use profanity late at night. They aired chris rock's bigger and blacker as well as south park the movie uncut, so as far as language goes its not going to get much "worse".
I don't know of any broadcast channels that approach that.
First off, I have to say that the government has no business getting involved here. But, practically speaking, the government gets involved in all sorts of places I believe it has no business in, so automatically assuming that we'd be able to keep it out is possible too optimistic.
Maybe a reasonable compromise is to require that cable operators offer a "family safe" package of channels. They can receive all the broadcast networks and any basic cable networks who self censor sufficiently.
It's clearly a compromise, and I hate letting the govt get their foot in the door in yet another area, but maybe in this post janet jackson era it's inevitable. Hopefully this whole wave of hypersensitivity will settle back down, but really I doubt that people in this country will ever relearn the level of disdain for a nanny state that our forefathers had.
They want us to download the songs with our network connections that we pay for, in lieu of them pressing CDs and printing inserts, and now we're supposed to pay MORE than you pay in a store for a CD? At $1 a track, it's already not a very good deal. For more than that, the only thing they'll be stimulating is a new resurgence in p2p.
"Then, you, Mr. Troll claim that illegal aliens have no impact on the housing market because they all just sleep in the fields or the streets."
I didn't claim they had NO impact on real estate in California. I, as 1 single homeowner, have an impact on real estate in California. I had issues with the original poster's claim
"The latter (legal/illegal aliens) is the cause of the high prices of apartments and residential homes."
Not part of the cause, THE cause. That's a load, particularly for illegals. Their impact is only going to be felt on the lowest end of the shittiest apartments. Are you bummed about the high prices of shithole apartments in east san jose?
Weirdest use of "FUD" I've seen in a while, but then again I don't read this site often.
"Another angle here is that the liberal f*ckwad wants to have poor people in the world. The f*ckwad says that we need to have poor, desperate people in the world so that we Americans can live well.
Mainstream Americans say that we can still live comfortably even if there are no desperate, poor people in this world."
I accept the fact that my lifestyle as it is depends on the fact that there are poor people in the world, and by poor I mean poorer than me. Apparently you (and you claim mainstream america) can't accept that. Am I happy that there are poor people? No.
Is it possible that technology will continue to improve and the standards of living of people across the globe can be improved to match ours? Sure, why not. But given the way that a typical country is going to do its best to improve things for its own population relative to the rest of the world, it's hard to imagine that there won't always be inequities, and that coutries won't always leverage those to their own citizens' advantage.
"The difference between this and the sludge from stores is nothing short of remarkable - no bitterness, tastes kinda like it smells - what coffee should be like"
While I'll buy that the self-roasted beans make better coffee than Folger's, is it really better than the coffee that you go down and buy from Peet's or whatever? Any idea why?
I mean, I can honestly say I'm in better shape than say, Louie Anderson, but what exactly does that tell you? (other than that I'm too old to know any young fat guys to refer to)
I picked up on the inclusion of illegal immigrants as it was to me the objectionable part of the parent post. Did he say "legal/illegal" and really just mean legal? If not, then I'm assuming that he was arguing that illegal aliens are a non negligible part of the problem, and the direction of my response to that part of the post is sensible.
The issue of legal immigrants is a whole other can of worms for many reasons, not the least of which is the typical types of jobs affected is entirely different.
"if there were no illegal immigrants, then the entire American population will starve because no one is picking the vegetables."
This is most certainly not true, but I would think that due to the higher wages required to pay American workers, the cost of food would rise and our overall standard of living would drop.
I have no idea how significant the effect would be just for illegal immigrants into california, but if we decided to stop using any labor from other countries with lower standards of living in areas like manufacturing, we'd see a pretty drastic effect.
But I guess it's cool to have some Asians in a sweatshop someplace far away making our jeans and sneakers, but can't they find a way for Mexicans to work the fields without coming into our country?
If you detect gravity waves from sources like supernovae, black hole collisions, etc. you're confirming that Einstein's GR works and that the properties of the waves (ie amplitude, duration) make sense for that particular source.
If you can detect primordial gravity waves from the very early universe(harder!), you now have an indication that inflation (rapid expansion) of the universe is a reasonable cosmological model rather than its current somewhat ad hoc status. It nicely explains away some problems with simpler models, but no real direct test has been performed to show that it happened.
If you've got the room in your house and the money for supercooled kiloton Aluminum bars, I'm quite sure they could find a way to hook the readout up to your USB port.
"the number of legal/illegal immigrants flooding into the state. The latter is the cause of the high prices of apartments and residential homes."
Say what now?
What fraction of the homes in california are populated by illegal immigrants? Now, what fraction of the NICE houses? Do you think that most illegal immigrants are taking high paying jobs and moving to Los Altos and Palo Alto and driving up the cost of property? You really think they're having such a dominant effect on the market, or are you just scapegoating?
I'm all for creating and enforcing reasonable immigration laws rather than the current don't as/don't tell open border situation, but someone's gotta pick the lettuce and I'm quite sure that nobody posting here is doing it.
Firm believers in the "Everything old is new again" adage, they waited a few years in hopes that the aging fleet would come back around to being the latest and greatest thing again.
Well, I was actually thinking of something that didn't come completely off, but sat off to the side, either crinkled or rolled up. So it'd have to be stretched to cover the cells(hence the "tensioned" part of the original post)
the continues film on rollers idea another person posted is nice too. As long as the thing in front of the cells is clear, how bad can failure be? If it doesn't come off, it's no worse than if it weren't there.
you'd just have to be damn sure it didn't come off completely and jam in some other system, but i think that's true for just about every part of the rover.
Slashdot Mirror
"There are numerous criteria, and the specific combination varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The absence of a heart beat is always involved, the lack of spontaneous respiration is usually a component, and the failure to respond to reflex stimuli is often included. (Pupils don't contract when exposed to bright light, that sort of thing.)"
Cows meet all of those criteria.
"I've actually found that the Linux version of UT2004 actually runs a bit better under Linux than under windows."
Well, that stands to reason. I'd wager that the Windows version of UT2004 runs better under Windows than Linux.
I think one way to break people's misconceptions about the different types of EM radiation (radio, microwave, infrared, visible, uv, xray, gamma) is to explain that the difference is not in the light itself, but in the scale of the things that the light interacts with.
The reason that they seem so different to us is because their wavelengths are larger/similar to/smaller than various atoms and molecules that we can observe them interacting with, so the net effect can be drastically different. If someone were able to magically scale matter to a larger or smaller size with correspondingly changed energy levels, the apparent properties of the different frequencies of light would change accordingly, even though maxwell's laws would remain unchanged.
"So... how long until we have a bunch of these go haywire and eat people in a theme park somewhere?"
Elementary chaos theory tells us that all robots will eventually turn against their masters and run amok, in an orgy of blood and the kicking and the biting with the metal teeth and the hurting and shoving. According to my calculations, the robots won't go berserk for at least 24 hours.
(robots go berserk)
Oh. I forgot to carry the one.
Somehow, the idea of random joe schmoe's doing this kind of thing is a lot more endearing. Looking back at what the Wright brothers did, while running a bicycle shop, is pretty cool, and I'm sure many of their less successful peers were also coming from modest backgrounds.
Nowadays, technology has advanced to the point that it takes some serious cash to do anything like this on an interesting scale. For some reason, watching bored rich people kill their idle time is pretty lame compared to watching someone who has to work a 9-5 job to pay their bills stay up late chasing a dream.
Let's see what you're saying in a story on limiting internet access.
"I have a TV but have nothing in the form of an aerial or lead in my flat, so i don't even get a slight temptation to watch it. the result? Sometimes i can be bored, but instead of watching mindless tv, i sit and read and/or educate myself about something. Not bad really."
Or post on slashdot.
Anti-TV pseudo-elitist jerkwads, as parodied in the onion, are annoying enough, but internet hypocrites are just plain hilarious.
Do you REALLY think that posting on an internet messageboard like slashdot is ANY less a waste of time than TV?
BTW, play any RPGs? That'd just be icing on the cake.
The bottom line isn't whether you do this worthless thing or that other waste of time, it's what ELSE you do with yourself. At the end of the day, have you accomplished something you're happy about? Do you think that the things you've wasted time on during the day have seriously compromised your efforts to accomplish something worthwhile?
It's the same criteria I'd apply to ask whether someone has a drug problem.
"Every administration, of whatever party, has overseen the growth of the government in one form or another. And virtually every one has overseen unprecedented growth, in that no previous administration had grown it that much."
So, you're saying that government is a cancer?
I'll buy that.
"(If you figure there are 2 songs you'll actually listen to on a $15ish cd.)"
I haven't bought a CD that was like that in many years. Bands that put out albums with only 2 good songs on them tend to not be all that good in the first place.
To be fair, some basic cable channels (like comedy central) do use profanity late at night. They aired chris rock's bigger and blacker as well as south park the movie uncut, so as far as language goes its not going to get much "worse".
I don't know of any broadcast channels that approach that.
First off, I have to say that the government has no business getting involved here. But, practically speaking, the government gets involved in all sorts of places I believe it has no business in, so automatically assuming that we'd be able to keep it out is possible too optimistic.
Maybe a reasonable compromise is to require that cable operators offer a "family safe" package of channels. They can receive all the broadcast networks and any basic cable networks who self censor sufficiently.
It's clearly a compromise, and I hate letting the govt get their foot in the door in yet another area, but maybe in this post janet jackson era it's inevitable. Hopefully this whole wave of hypersensitivity will settle back down, but really I doubt that people in this country will ever relearn the level of disdain for a nanny state that our forefathers had.
They want us to download the songs with our network connections that we pay for, in lieu of them pressing CDs and printing inserts, and now we're supposed to pay MORE than you pay in a store for a CD? At $1 a track, it's already not a very good deal. For more than that, the only thing they'll be stimulating is a new resurgence in p2p.
make fun of one (very heavily overused) sentence in a fairly innocuous way and get modded down? What a world!
"Then, you, Mr. Troll claim that illegal aliens have no impact on the housing market because they all just sleep in the fields or the streets."
I didn't claim they had NO impact on real estate in California. I, as 1 single homeowner, have an impact on real estate in California. I had issues with the original poster's claim
"The latter (legal/illegal aliens) is the cause of the high prices of apartments and residential homes."
Not part of the cause, THE cause. That's a load, particularly for illegals. Their impact is only going to be felt on the lowest end of the shittiest apartments. Are you bummed about the high prices of shithole apartments in east san jose?
Weirdest use of "FUD" I've seen in a while, but then again I don't read this site often.
"gravitational wave detectors will provide us with a new window to the universe"
Yeesh, boilerplate proposal material on slashdot?
"Another angle here is that the liberal f*ckwad wants to have poor people in the world. The f*ckwad says that we need to have poor, desperate people in the world so that we Americans can live well.
Mainstream Americans say that we can still live comfortably even if there are no desperate, poor people in this world."
I accept the fact that my lifestyle as it is depends on the fact that there are poor people in the world, and by poor I mean poorer than me. Apparently you (and you claim mainstream america) can't accept that. Am I happy that there are poor people? No.
Is it possible that technology will continue to improve and the standards of living of people across the globe can be improved to match ours? Sure, why not. But given the way that a typical country is going to do its best to improve things for its own population relative to the rest of the world, it's hard to imagine that there won't always be inequities, and that coutries won't always leverage those to their own citizens' advantage.
Also, what's with all the swearing?
"The difference between this and the sludge from stores is nothing short of remarkable - no bitterness, tastes kinda like it smells - what coffee should be like"
While I'll buy that the self-roasted beans make better coffee than Folger's, is it really better than the coffee that you go down and buy from Peet's or whatever? Any idea why?
I mean, I can honestly say I'm in better shape than say, Louie Anderson, but what exactly does that tell you? (other than that I'm too old to know any young fat guys to refer to)
I picked up on the inclusion of illegal immigrants as it was to me the objectionable part of the parent post. Did he say "legal/illegal" and really just mean legal? If not, then I'm assuming that he was arguing that illegal aliens are a non negligible part of the problem, and the direction of my response to that part of the post is sensible.
The issue of legal immigrants is a whole other can of worms for many reasons, not the least of which is the typical types of jobs affected is entirely different.
"if there were no illegal immigrants, then the entire American population will starve because no one is picking the vegetables."
This is most certainly not true, but I would think that due to the higher wages required to pay American workers, the cost of food would rise and our overall standard of living would drop.
I have no idea how significant the effect would be just for illegal immigrants into california, but if we decided to stop using any labor from other countries with lower standards of living in areas like manufacturing, we'd see a pretty drastic effect.
But I guess it's cool to have some Asians in a sweatshop someplace far away making our jeans and sneakers, but can't they find a way for Mexicans to work the fields without coming into our country?
If you detect gravity waves from sources like supernovae, black hole collisions, etc. you're confirming that Einstein's GR works and that the properties of the waves (ie amplitude, duration) make sense for that particular source.
If you can detect primordial gravity waves from the very early universe(harder!), you now have an indication that inflation (rapid expansion) of the universe is a reasonable cosmological model rather than its current somewhat ad hoc status. It nicely explains away some problems with simpler models, but no real direct test has been performed to show that it happened.
If you've got the room in your house and the money for supercooled kiloton Aluminum bars, I'm quite sure they could find a way to hook the readout up to your USB port.
"the number of legal/illegal immigrants flooding into the state. The latter is the cause of the high prices of apartments and residential homes."
Say what now?
What fraction of the homes in california are populated by illegal immigrants? Now, what fraction of the NICE houses? Do you think that most illegal immigrants are taking high paying jobs and moving to Los Altos and Palo Alto and driving up the cost of property? You really think they're having such a dominant effect on the market, or are you just scapegoating?
I'm all for creating and enforcing reasonable immigration laws rather than the current don't as/don't tell open border situation, but someone's gotta pick the lettuce and I'm quite sure that nobody posting here is doing it.
Firm believers in the "Everything old is new again" adage, they waited a few years in hopes that the aging fleet would come back around to being the latest and greatest thing again.
Well, I was actually thinking of something that didn't come completely off, but sat off to the side, either crinkled or rolled up. So it'd have to be stretched to cover the cells(hence the "tensioned" part of the original post)
the continues film on rollers idea another person posted is nice too. As long as the thing in front of the cells is clear, how bad can failure be? If it doesn't come off, it's no worse than if it weren't there.
you'd just have to be damn sure it didn't come off completely and jam in some other system, but i think that's true for just about every part of the rover.
I don't know, I just thought I'd throw it out. It's quite possible they've thought about and rejected those sorts of solutions.
Really, I'm just hoping for some positive moderation so I can include a link to this post on my NASA job application.