Air travel is still one of the safest (albiet nowhere near the most comfortable these days) ways to travel. I argue it IS the most comfortable way to travel. A few hours of being uncomfortable and annoyed and pissy is better than a 4 day road trip that is mildly comfortable.
The problem is air travel you get all your lack of comfort all at once. A road trip you spread it out.
Let's not even think about what it would be like to travel by boat across the ocean. And I'm not talking a cruise, I'm talking mass transportation.
The real scary thing for me is they say 90% of people aren't bothered and go through with it. Bullshit.
When the alternative is a pat-down.... I'd go through the scanner. That doesn't mean I agree with any of it. And to say it means I do, is insulting.
I was reading another article here, something about censorship. Usually, the/. crowd gets very animated when you talk about censorship. You don't do it. There's even seemingly a large group that agree you shouldn't even censor/monitor for child pornography. Which I get... Go after the people commiting the acts, not the people who may be weird or perverted but wouldn't actually hurt anyone.
So, seeing this article, I thought to myself... Well, here's a liberal issue. Save the Elephants versus censorship? Hopefully they are just as against this as they are any other form of the same thing. But I start reading comments, and not seeing many people up in arms. Not seeing the same arguments. Isn't that hypocritcal? I even saw one person arguing about the demand for ivory causes the crime of hunting them. Does that same person believe we should be jailing the consumers of piracy/childporn/etc instead of the people commiting the crime? Usually/. seems to be against that.
Anyway, interesting to see how people's opinions stand up when it's an issue leaning the other direction.
Mod parent up. Grandparent is a douche. Just because it says it's from hotmail doesn't mean the mail was routed through email. I could send you an email from bill gates in about 10 seconds with telnet and an open relay.
Not understanding the real technical problems of spam, but then acting like you do so you can bash MS is so... Slashdot.
This news story is lame. At least, the presentation of it here. It's worded to make people think this is a registrar-business decision. Like they are somehow fucking with DNS standards.
This is if you host your site on their web servers. Be intelligent and learn to seperate their registrar business from their hosting business. A lot of vhosting providers do funny stuff with 404's and such.
http://omgwtfbbq.cnn.com/ isn't suddenly going to start being a Verisign ad page. Seeming to imply that's the case is slashdot front-page flaimbait.
Government blaming terrorism gets just as old and tired as slashdot zealots proclaiming Linux is the end all and be all to the world's problems.
Seriously... Pick any article on slashdot, no matter how unrelated, and some fool will go on about the miracle powers of Linux to fix it.
Oh well, you made your 'I'm hip and cool' post that even made my pixels cringe at having to display that nonsense yet again.
Well, thanks for the education about the McDonald's case. Though it's really irrelvent to my point, which would have stood just as well without the example. Relax.:)
There's a lot of posts about why we shouldn't have warning labels if they don't protect the person, or if the person doesn't listen, etc. I think everyone is missing the point. Warning labels are not about protecting the reader. It's about protecting the person who made the product. I like to think we as a society aren't so stupid as to think warning labels make a difference. Everyone knows they don't. To keep pointing out the obvious that they won't stop anyone from doing something stupid and expecting the system to change is a complete failure to understand the system.
Warning labels exist not because a woman was stupid and burned her lap with hot coffee. She was stupid. Everyone knows that. They exist because she decided to sue and wasn't laughed out of court. She wasn't laughed out of court because everyone likes to attack the big companies. Because if yer on a jury with this poor burned woman on one side, and a megacorporation on the other, yer going to make the coorporation pay just because it's the liberal-ish thing to do. And so now companies have to protect themselves. I would too, if some person could sue me for a hundred billion gajillion USD. I'd put warning labels on every single thing I made.
When you see a warning label, replace 'warning' with 'disclaimer' and suddenly the whole system makes a lot more sense. Warning labels are not indicative of a nanny state or anything like that, it's indicative of there being a huge risk of someone deciding to sue you, and actually winning.
While reading about the robot exerting forces to balance itself, I imagined human behavior. if a human is falling down, it will try to correct itself as well. It may brace itself on another human, or step on someone's toes, etc.
How does this work with a robot, if it loses balance, how can it uphold the law to hurt no human? Perhaps we say stepping on our toes is okay. Then, how much harm can a robot inflict on a human? What if a robot is shoved into a human? Should it optimize the fall for minimal damage to the human it's falling on, or try to right itself regardless of the forces it might exert on the human? What if a robot kills someone by accidentally stepping on the person's neck trying to right itself?
I'm guessing that's a figure based on dividing the total cost of a trip into space into the various parts that get launched. If we have to send up more air in a hurry, I'm sure that cost could easilly grow, and not linearly.
Actually, they did the reverse, and it's worked VERY well. The only people buying gold now are typically the newbies who need 10-100 gold to get started. 5000g costs an astronomical amount of money because it takes so long for a low-level player to get.
Bzzzt. Wrong answer. Gold is not astronomical at all, it's a market. Gold prices go up and down depending on supply and demand. What you mean to say is you can't afford it. That's fine. The other fallicy is that only newbies buy gold. I consider myself a very good WoW player, I've played a long time. I usually kick ass in PvP, and I do high end instances, and I'm in a guild. But I buy gold. For me it's a simple cost vs reward calculation. I can spend hours farming gold, or buy it (pay someone else to farm it). At some point, the scales tip and it becomes a better cost/reward ratio for me to buy gold.
I'm sorry if people consider that cheating, but it's not. The economics of it are simply that I paid someone else to go spend the time farming that I would have otherwise had to do. It's kin to having a helpful friend. You've never gotten gifts from your guild/friends/whatever to help you get your 5000g mount?
I'm not ruining the economy by buying gold. I'm participating in it. The gold still comes from the game. It still stays in the game. The people farming my gold for me are still finding the cool items and putting them up for auction so you can buy them.
If people could look at it from the point of view that I've hired someone to go farm for me, instead of the point of view of 'buying gold'... people might be more open to it. Buying gold invokes feelings of cheating because you get the impression I've paid to have gold created out of thin air. THAT would be cheating. But that is not what's happening.
I'm a layman about astrophysics, so excuse the question...
But how is a mini black hole any different than a large black hole? Isn't the definition of a black hole that of a singularity with inifinite mass at an infinitely small point? How can you have lesser or greater infinity?
Let's see scientists create life without matter. I find this statement to be fascinating. There was a time when life was something that the religious folk said was the explicit domain of God. Now you've simply taken that rule, and minimized it so you can maintain his domain. Like: 'Okay, fine, so man can create life, too. But I bet you can't do it without matter!' What happens when we create matter? How will you defend his domain then?
I mean, at least the real nutjobs stand by their convictions, and don't let those horrible scientists pick at them. Soon you'll be picked away at and have nothing left, or what you are left with, you'll realize is too ridiculous to make sense.
So, I ask you to go ahead and think about the ramifications of the Bible, and if you start interpreting it, then you have to bring into question what should be interpreted and what shouldn't. And what then is the role of religion (as opposed to faith)? Isn't it to be the steady hand of interpretation? If you are going to interpret it yourself, then you don't need religion. So how about we ditch the whole concept of religion and stick with personal faith. I honestly think everyone could get along a lot better that way.
I was accused of being too pessimistic, so I went and read a little about the subject. The most interesting thing I found was a book by Julie Norem called "The Positive Power of Negative Thinking". So although you cleverly came off as though you were being open minded to people calling you a pessimist, and wanted to get a fresh look, all you really did was go out and find the backup to defend your status quo.
We all love our status quo, and honestly I would hold nothing against you for defending it. Human nature. But to try and pass it off as though you weren't looking to defend it and instead having an open mind, you came off as completely dishonest in a very deliberate way.
Once I realized all this, I was able to continue making contingency plans to keep my own stress under control, but I am now more careful about voicing my internal thought process around people who I know are optimists. You also presented an argument that a pessimist is much better equipped to deal with problems, since they internalize where the optimist will externalize. However, your statement here is basically saying that the problem is external to you and you will hide from them, which kind of flies in the face of your whole argument that pessimists are better because they are 'self improving'.
Basically your whole post came off as a huge cloud of self-satisfying smugness, to paraphrase South Park a bit.
'Anger' happens, and can be healthy to express. 'Anger Issues' mean you cannot control your anger, and you become unable to debate with reason.
I like to think I was angry, yet still presented valid points. If I want to call you a redneck, you can ignore it or not, or add that to the debate even if you want, but to say being angry invalidates the points is hardly a response.
Uhm. You're possibly the only post here on slashdot to ever get me actually angry. You must be a moron. 'Mere' torture? Capital punishment, fine. After due process, of course. (Which is woefully missing today) But even after due process, you don't torture someone for information. First of all, all it will get you is whatever it is you want to hear, it's completely unreliable, as has been studied. If we believe you're conspiring to kill us, and we go at you with a rusty saw, a blowtorch, and a pair of pliers, you can bet you'll tell us whatever the heck it is you think we want you to say, whether it's true or not, just to get us to stop. I can't believe we've reached a point where we're back to defending torture in our society. Seiously, wtf? How much more ignorant can you get? It screams redneck, how did you even find a computer to post on?
And to those who might be confused about why capital punishment is okay, and torture isn't? Capital punishment is... a punishment. The ultimate, but a punishment. Torture is a flawed method of control and removing a person's choice. People should always have a choice of their behavior. Even if it leads them to a punishment (such as capital). It's why Cops should tase to incapacitate and protect themselves or others, but NEVER to 'convince' a person to take a certain action. It's why non-leathal weapons are possibly even more dangerous than leathal ones.
Your simple minded ignorant statements are contrary to every bit of decency and morality we as a society have come to achieve. You're what makes me lose faith in humanity having evolved above anything but apes.
I'd argue internet bandwidth is ahead of storage technology. I can easily fill up my local storage downloading things. I'll hit my storage cap before I wish I had more bandwidth. Not saying we couldn't use more bandwidth, everyone wants a faster fatter internet. Just saying that storage should be well ahead of what we can easily fill up by now.
Oh please. Wish people would STFU about 'I can read the source, and know it's safe.' At best, it's a wrong statement. Who reads the source to everything they put on their system? Nobody, you just trust other people to look at it for you. Open source gives more the code more eyes to look at it, but wording it in such a way that makes it sound like you read every line so you know it's safe? Bullshit.
Bah. Having a name for somethin doesn't mean it happens often, it only means it's thought about and discussed often. Which I hope to god it is. What would be scary is, 'Sir, we never even came up with a plan for this...' Them having a term and a plan or at least thoughts for recovery is a good thing.
'inability (read: apathy)' is editorializing. Which, fine, that happens on slashdot. But the idea that people have that 'if the damn users would just learn aboud WEP versus WPA, duh' is moronic. People USE computers, and may not know every detail or security concept, and they shouldn't have to. We 'techno elite' should provide the simple tools to work with confusing concepts. And we should default to good security. Which is not always possible, if you want your product to just work with the rest of yoru network.
But blaming the users and callign them apathetic? Get over yourself. Not everyone should have to or needs to know dirty security details or how to configure their router. If you MUST sustain your ego by blaming someone you can call an idiot, at least blame 'The Geek Squad' or whatever other support people set up the layman's network. Not the layman.
As others have noted in this discussion, this isn't merely about freedom of speech, it is a spontaneous and massive civil disobedience, basically highlighting how the citizens affected by these DMCA do not respect the law, do not want the law, and increasingly do not tolerate the law.
Civil disobedience only really works if you disobey, and then stand up and say, 'I broke the law! Arrest me!'. Until you do that, you are just some underground pirate, criminal, whatever they are calling people nowadays.
That aspect of standing up and making youself go thru the legal system is how you make the statement. Record DVDs to your computer. Never share them. Do nothing underhanded. Make sure you are otherwise a model citizen. Then call NBC, FOX, etc. Tell them you are turning yourself in. Go to the police station. Get arrested. When they laugh at you, insist. Explain which laws you broke, and that you are a criminal, and need to be arrested. Plead guilty. Ask for the maximum sentence allowed by law. Get sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for a stupid crime. That's how you make people realize the law is dumb.
None of us wants to go through all of that. Very few of us are great like that. But don't call ripping DVDs in the privacy of your own home civil disobedience. It's just you gettign what you want.:)
I'm curious, not knowing much about it, so thought I'd post and see if anyone else may know..
They indicated that they don't know which orbit the probe will crash into the moon, so if this thing is orbiting the moon, how do they even know where on the moon it will crash? Couldn't the orbit decay and finally crash on the far side of the moon? i.e. orbit 1.5?
Or is the orbit around the earth? In that case I suppose it might make sense, however again, if they don't know which orbit, couldn't it also come close enough to be thrown off by the gravity of the moon into a different orbit?
Yes, probably idiot questions from a non-astronomer.
The difference is, when a microsoft.com website gets hacked, you all jump on the 'stupid microsoft software' bandwagon. When an OSS site gets hacked, you all jump on the 'why didn't the admins patch?'. Sounds like a pretty extreme double-standard to me. Most microsoft hacks could be prevented by patching, too. So which is it?
Anyone else notice the transparency is more than just transparency? It seems to blur the covered content for some reason. I wonder why that is?
Tho, thinking about it, it might make sense. Pure transparency can be a bit overwhelming seeing text on top of text on top of text, etc. Blurring it lets the user know there is text there, but doesn't make it an overlapping mess.
I have to assume MS has done usability testing and found the blurring effect to be helpful. Was just interesting to notice in the screenshots. I'll have to keep this in mind in my game UI design.:)
They tone it down for the suspension of disbelief factor. If the characters are extremely human-like, then small little artifacts look strange. Imagine walking down the street and seeing someone in real life have a small glitch like a framerate drop or something. You would be very creeped out. Not in a good way, in a bad way. You would question if you were in the Matrix or something. It would be disturbing.
When you see glitches like this in a game, it doesn't interrupt your suspension of disbelief as much if the characters still look like game characters rather than real people.
The more 'real' your characters/environment is, the stricter it has to be perfect. Imagine any human you've ever seen animated. It's easy to see flaws. We are intimate with how humans move and behave. We see it every day (well, unless you're a slashdotter). Now imagine an out-of-this world monster. You can't see flaws as easily, we don't have pre-conceived notions of how these other beings would move or behave, so we are more open to nuances.
Slashdot Mirror
The real scary thing for me is they say 90% of people aren't bothered and go through with it. Bullshit. When the alternative is a pat-down.... I'd go through the scanner. That doesn't mean I agree with any of it. And to say it means I do, is insulting.
I was reading another article here, something about censorship. Usually, the /. crowd gets very animated when you talk about censorship. You don't do it. There's even seemingly a large group that agree you shouldn't even censor/monitor for child pornography. Which I get... Go after the people commiting the acts, not the people who may be weird or perverted but wouldn't actually hurt anyone.
/. seems to be against that.
So, seeing this article, I thought to myself... Well, here's a liberal issue. Save the Elephants versus censorship? Hopefully they are just as against this as they are any other form of the same thing. But I start reading comments, and not seeing many people up in arms. Not seeing the same arguments. Isn't that hypocritcal? I even saw one person arguing about the demand for ivory causes the crime of hunting them. Does that same person believe we should be jailing the consumers of piracy/childporn/etc instead of the people commiting the crime? Usually
Anyway, interesting to see how people's opinions stand up when it's an issue leaning the other direction.
Mod parent up. Grandparent is a douche. Just because it says it's from hotmail doesn't mean the mail was routed through email. I could send you an email from bill gates in about 10 seconds with telnet and an open relay.
Not understanding the real technical problems of spam, but then acting like you do so you can bash MS is so... Slashdot.
This news story is lame. At least, the presentation of it here. It's worded to make people think this is a registrar-business decision. Like they are somehow fucking with DNS standards.
This is if you host your site on their web servers. Be intelligent and learn to seperate their registrar business from their hosting business. A lot of vhosting providers do funny stuff with 404's and such.
http://omgwtfbbq.cnn.com/ isn't suddenly going to start being a Verisign ad page. Seeming to imply that's the case is slashdot front-page flaimbait.
Par for the course I suppose...
Government blaming terrorism gets just as old and tired as slashdot zealots proclaiming Linux is the end all and be all to the world's problems. Seriously... Pick any article on slashdot, no matter how unrelated, and some fool will go on about the miracle powers of Linux to fix it. Oh well, you made your 'I'm hip and cool' post that even made my pixels cringe at having to display that nonsense yet again.
Well, thanks for the education about the McDonald's case. Though it's really irrelvent to my point, which would have stood just as well without the example. Relax. :)
There's a lot of posts about why we shouldn't have warning labels if they don't protect the person, or if the person doesn't listen, etc. I think everyone is missing the point. Warning labels are not about protecting the reader. It's about protecting the person who made the product. I like to think we as a society aren't so stupid as to think warning labels make a difference. Everyone knows they don't. To keep pointing out the obvious that they won't stop anyone from doing something stupid and expecting the system to change is a complete failure to understand the system.
Warning labels exist not because a woman was stupid and burned her lap with hot coffee. She was stupid. Everyone knows that. They exist because she decided to sue and wasn't laughed out of court. She wasn't laughed out of court because everyone likes to attack the big companies. Because if yer on a jury with this poor burned woman on one side, and a megacorporation on the other, yer going to make the coorporation pay just because it's the liberal-ish thing to do. And so now companies have to protect themselves. I would too, if some person could sue me for a hundred billion gajillion USD. I'd put warning labels on every single thing I made.
When you see a warning label, replace 'warning' with 'disclaimer' and suddenly the whole system makes a lot more sense. Warning labels are not indicative of a nanny state or anything like that, it's indicative of there being a huge risk of someone deciding to sue you, and actually winning.
While reading about the robot exerting forces to balance itself, I imagined human behavior. if a human is falling down, it will try to correct itself as well. It may brace itself on another human, or step on someone's toes, etc.
How does this work with a robot, if it loses balance, how can it uphold the law to hurt no human? Perhaps we say stepping on our toes is okay. Then, how much harm can a robot inflict on a human? What if a robot is shoved into a human? Should it optimize the fall for minimal damage to the human it's falling on, or try to right itself regardless of the forces it might exert on the human? What if a robot kills someone by accidentally stepping on the person's neck trying to right itself?
I'm guessing that's a figure based on dividing the total cost of a trip into space into the various parts that get launched. If we have to send up more air in a hurry, I'm sure that cost could easilly grow, and not linearly.
Bzzzt. Wrong answer. Gold is not astronomical at all, it's a market. Gold prices go up and down depending on supply and demand. What you mean to say is you can't afford it. That's fine. The other fallicy is that only newbies buy gold. I consider myself a very good WoW player, I've played a long time. I usually kick ass in PvP, and I do high end instances, and I'm in a guild. But I buy gold. For me it's a simple cost vs reward calculation. I can spend hours farming gold, or buy it (pay someone else to farm it). At some point, the scales tip and it becomes a better cost/reward ratio for me to buy gold.
I'm sorry if people consider that cheating, but it's not. The economics of it are simply that I paid someone else to go spend the time farming that I would have otherwise had to do. It's kin to having a helpful friend. You've never gotten gifts from your guild/friends/whatever to help you get your 5000g mount?
I'm not ruining the economy by buying gold. I'm participating in it. The gold still comes from the game. It still stays in the game. The people farming my gold for me are still finding the cool items and putting them up for auction so you can buy them.
If people could look at it from the point of view that I've hired someone to go farm for me, instead of the point of view of 'buying gold'... people might be more open to it. Buying gold invokes feelings of cheating because you get the impression I've paid to have gold created out of thin air. THAT would be cheating. But that is not what's happening.
I'm a layman about astrophysics, so excuse the question...
But how is a mini black hole any different than a large black hole? Isn't the definition of a black hole that of a singularity with inifinite mass at an infinitely small point? How can you have lesser or greater infinity?
I mean, at least the real nutjobs stand by their convictions, and don't let those horrible scientists pick at them. Soon you'll be picked away at and have nothing left, or what you are left with, you'll realize is too ridiculous to make sense.
So, I ask you to go ahead and think about the ramifications of the Bible, and if you start interpreting it, then you have to bring into question what should be interpreted and what shouldn't. And what then is the role of religion (as opposed to faith)? Isn't it to be the steady hand of interpretation? If you are going to interpret it yourself, then you don't need religion. So how about we ditch the whole concept of religion and stick with personal faith. I honestly think everyone could get along a lot better that way.
We all love our status quo, and honestly I would hold nothing against you for defending it. Human nature. But to try and pass it off as though you weren't looking to defend it and instead having an open mind, you came off as completely dishonest in a very deliberate way. Once I realized all this, I was able to continue making contingency plans to keep my own stress under control, but I am now more careful about voicing my internal thought process around people who I know are optimists. You also presented an argument that a pessimist is much better equipped to deal with problems, since they internalize where the optimist will externalize. However, your statement here is basically saying that the problem is external to you and you will hide from them, which kind of flies in the face of your whole argument that pessimists are better because they are 'self improving'.
Basically your whole post came off as a huge cloud of self-satisfying smugness, to paraphrase South Park a bit.
Anger versus Anger Issues:
'Anger' happens, and can be healthy to express.
'Anger Issues' mean you cannot control your anger, and you become unable to debate with reason.
I like to think I was angry, yet still presented valid points. If I want to call you a redneck, you can ignore it or not, or add that to the debate even if you want, but to say being angry invalidates the points is hardly a response.
Uhm. You're possibly the only post here on slashdot to ever get me actually angry. You must be a moron. 'Mere' torture? Capital punishment, fine. After due process, of course. (Which is woefully missing today) But even after due process, you don't torture someone for information. First of all, all it will get you is whatever it is you want to hear, it's completely unreliable, as has been studied. If we believe you're conspiring to kill us, and we go at you with a rusty saw, a blowtorch, and a pair of pliers, you can bet you'll tell us whatever the heck it is you think we want you to say, whether it's true or not, just to get us to stop. I can't believe we've reached a point where we're back to defending torture in our society. Seiously, wtf? How much more ignorant can you get? It screams redneck, how did you even find a computer to post on?
And to those who might be confused about why capital punishment is okay, and torture isn't? Capital punishment is... a punishment. The ultimate, but a punishment. Torture is a flawed method of control and removing a person's choice. People should always have a choice of their behavior. Even if it leads them to a punishment (such as capital). It's why Cops should tase to incapacitate and protect themselves or others, but NEVER to 'convince' a person to take a certain action. It's why non-leathal weapons are possibly even more dangerous than leathal ones.
Your simple minded ignorant statements are contrary to every bit of decency and morality we as a society have come to achieve. You're what makes me lose faith in humanity having evolved above anything but apes.
I'd argue internet bandwidth is ahead of storage technology. I can easily fill up my local storage downloading things. I'll hit my storage cap before I wish I had more bandwidth. Not saying we couldn't use more bandwidth, everyone wants a faster fatter internet. Just saying that storage should be well ahead of what we can easily fill up by now.
Oh please. Wish people would STFU about 'I can read the source, and know it's safe.' At best, it's a wrong statement. Who reads the source to everything they put on their system? Nobody, you just trust other people to look at it for you. Open source gives more the code more eyes to look at it, but wording it in such a way that makes it sound like you read every line so you know it's safe? Bullshit.
Bah. Having a name for somethin doesn't mean it happens often, it only means it's thought about and discussed often. Which I hope to god it is. What would be scary is, 'Sir, we never even came up with a plan for this...' Them having a term and a plan or at least thoughts for recovery is a good thing.
'inability (read: apathy)' is editorializing. Which, fine, that happens on slashdot. But the idea that people have that 'if the damn users would just learn aboud WEP versus WPA, duh' is moronic. People USE computers, and may not know every detail or security concept, and they shouldn't have to. We 'techno elite' should provide the simple tools to work with confusing concepts. And we should default to good security. Which is not always possible, if you want your product to just work with the rest of yoru network.
But blaming the users and callign them apathetic? Get over yourself. Not everyone should have to or needs to know dirty security details or how to configure their router. If you MUST sustain your ego by blaming someone you can call an idiot, at least blame 'The Geek Squad' or whatever other support people set up the layman's network. Not the layman.
Civil disobedience only really works if you disobey, and then stand up and say, 'I broke the law! Arrest me!'. Until you do that, you are just some underground pirate, criminal, whatever they are calling people nowadays.
That aspect of standing up and making youself go thru the legal system is how you make the statement. Record DVDs to your computer. Never share them. Do nothing underhanded. Make sure you are otherwise a model citizen. Then call NBC, FOX, etc. Tell them you are turning yourself in. Go to the police station. Get arrested. When they laugh at you, insist. Explain which laws you broke, and that you are a criminal, and need to be arrested. Plead guilty. Ask for the maximum sentence allowed by law. Get sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for a stupid crime. That's how you make people realize the law is dumb.
None of us wants to go through all of that. Very few of us are great like that. But don't call ripping DVDs in the privacy of your own home civil disobedience. It's just you gettign what you want. :)
I'm curious, not knowing much about it, so thought I'd post and see if anyone else may know..
They indicated that they don't know which orbit the probe will crash into the moon, so if this thing is orbiting the moon, how do they even know where on the moon it will crash? Couldn't the orbit decay and finally crash on the far side of the moon? i.e. orbit 1.5?
Or is the orbit around the earth? In that case I suppose it might make sense, however again, if they don't know which orbit, couldn't it also come close enough to be thrown off by the gravity of the moon into a different orbit?
Yes, probably idiot questions from a non-astronomer.
Keith
The difference is, when a microsoft.com website gets hacked, you all jump on the 'stupid microsoft software' bandwagon. When an OSS site gets hacked, you all jump on the 'why didn't the admins patch?'. Sounds like a pretty extreme double-standard to me. Most microsoft hacks could be prevented by patching, too. So which is it?
Keith
Anyone else notice the transparency is more than just transparency? It seems to blur the covered content for some reason. I wonder why that is?
Tho, thinking about it, it might make sense. Pure transparency can be a bit overwhelming seeing text on top of text on top of text, etc. Blurring it lets the user know there is text there, but doesn't make it an overlapping mess.
I have to assume MS has done usability testing and found the blurring effect to be helpful. Was just interesting to notice in the screenshots. I'll have to keep this in mind in my game UI design. :)
Keith
They tone it down for the suspension of disbelief factor. If the characters are extremely human-like, then small little artifacts look strange. Imagine walking down the street and seeing someone in real life have a small glitch like a framerate drop or something. You would be very creeped out. Not in a good way, in a bad way. You would question if you were in the Matrix or something. It would be disturbing.
When you see glitches like this in a game, it doesn't interrupt your suspension of disbelief as much if the characters still look like game characters rather than real people.
The more 'real' your characters/environment is, the stricter it has to be perfect. Imagine any human you've ever seen animated. It's easy to see flaws. We are intimate with how humans move and behave. We see it every day (well, unless you're a slashdotter). Now imagine an out-of-this world monster. You can't see flaws as easily, we don't have pre-conceived notions of how these other beings would move or behave, so we are more open to nuances.
Hope that sheds some light.
Keith