They're looking for evidence of life in Mars' past; carbon and such. It's doubtful (but possible) there's any there now. It would take an ultra-extreme extremophile to live on that little air or water. And with a microscope, how do you know if it's a cell or just something that looks like a cell? The rover will be doing chemistry.
I'd bet the chances of life on one of the gas giants' moons would be more likely, if there's anough tidal heating for liquid water.
Too much work done on a human female by a plastic surgeon, hair stylist, body piercer, tattoo artist, or makeup artist makes her look really weird
I always found fat women who wear too much makeup to be hilarious. Bad plastic surgery is just bad plastic surgery, I've known two women who had to have their faces repaired, one from a car wreck and one from an abusive husband. One was really good looking, the other was the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. Of course, the seventy year olds who have their faces lifted do look creepy. Personally, I find any tattoos and piercings ugly and gross.
Well, for you maybe, but not everyone. I find war movies like Saving Private Ryan or We Were Soldiers to be far more disturbing, especially when the events in Soldiers were NOT fiction, and the gruesome details enacted really happened. Much of Private Ryan was real as well, especially the D-Day landing. That movie gave WWII veterans who had been there flashbacks.
Just about every single skill can be learned for free online.
Nothing has changed except now you don't have to drive. Before the internet you only had to go to the public library. That's where I learned electronics in the '60s (that and hacking around) and computers in the '80s. Any good encyclopedia would give you a start on a subject, with cited sources you could use to examine the subject in greater detail. I probably read 500 books on computing (including the TTL Cookbook) before I had a real handle on them.
It would have been a lot easier learning assembly if I'd had someone knowledgable to ask questions of. That's where college shines. Instead, it was trial and error and very time-consuming.
Odd that you got modded insightful when you would know this if you'd ever been to college. If you have gone to college, your college really sucked bad and you should tell us which one, so slashdotters getting ready to attend can avoid it.
Did I miss a memo? When did charitable giving become a bad thing?
Charitable giving has always been a bad thing to the people who worship money. Unfortunately, that seems to be most Americans (don't know about the rest of the world).
I guess I'll have to go back and re-read them, but I never saw the "acted unnaturally" in any of the stories. Rather, people were simply afraid of losing their jobs to robots. In I, Robot (and its sequel, both collections of the stories you refer to) there was even a robot so real that you couldn't distinguish it from a human and it went on to become President of the world. The Elijia Baily books had R. Daneel, a fully humaniform robot you couldn't tell from the real McCoy (or maybe that's the "real Sarton). That robot (later in Asimov's life) put psychohistory in Seldon's head and went on to rule the galaxy (by proxy, he was Chief of Staff to the Emperor)!
I had an uncle who died of stroke at age 28. Don't wait until you're thirty to get sleep. Not enough sleep has a few other bad effects, too, one of which is aging rapidly. Those people you see who are 40 and look 60? They smoke and don't get enough sleep.
The left is trying to take away some rights, the right is trying to take away different rights, both are trying to take away some of the same rights, but as to the economy, that one's simple: Bush was the only President to leave office with fewer Americans employed than when he took office. He went into office in a booming economy and left the economy in the worst shape it's been in since the Great Depression. Of course, Clinton is partly responsible for the housing/banking collapse (along with the Republican congress that passed the deregulation that caused it). Two wars depleted the treasury, Bush inherited a balanced budget and left Obama with the biggest defecit in history.
And now the Republicans are running another businessman like Bush. One who says "I like to fire people" and who got rich doing just that.
Neither side cares about you. It's who gives the biggest campaign bribes.
Of course, nobody's completely to blame for the shitty economy, right now the European debt crisis is dragging the whole world down.
Um, I believe you're referring to 'ho's (contraction of whores). A hoe is a tool used for gardening. As to Star Trek, I've attempted to debunk that bit of fiction with more fiction. At to Dabo girls, That messed up nose kind of ruins it for me. And you relize that sex with a different species is bestiality, right? Who know Star Trek was so kinky?
Now would please someone explain how studying supernova can tell us how elements are formed? I like the slashdot jokes, but I like learning even more.
Actually, that's what they're going to do! Seriously! They're not crashing the rover, but they're crashing the lander. The lander is a flying crane that will lower the rover by cable, fly off, and crash somewhere else on Mars.
I'm surprised that nobody's submitted a story I saw on Google News this morning about possible teflon contamination of samples, and how they plan on remediating it.
When I worked at Disney in the '80s, Randall lost his name tag. When he got a new one, rather than the formal Christian name he used the shortened nickname that everyone knew him by. The first British lady who saw his new tag, "Randy," turned bright red and started laughing uncontrollably (and of course apologized profusely for her laughter, the poor woman).
I hit your link and searched for both "car" and "automobile". Neither word was in the story. It did say "Arthur C Clarke saw the future coming and in a series of magazine essays 50 years ago helped us get ready for it."
Isaac Asimov had self-driving driving cars in 2020 in a story he wrote 59 years ago.
The story portrays a future where the only cars allowed on the road are those that contain positronic brains, so they do not require a human driver.
You jest, but that sort of thing actually happens. My flip phone has a button on the side that lets you speak commands to it instead of opening it up. So I'm in a meeting with the boss, the phone's in my pocket, and the damned thing starts screaming "PLEASE SAY A COMMAND" over and over until I shut the damned thing off.
I need a new phone, the one with the "command" button somehow got the screen broken off...
I'm not young and can afford cable, but it's just too damned expensive for what you get. Out of the 200+ channels I'd have to pay for, only four or five are worth watching. Back in 1980 it was different; for ten bucks you got maybe ten channels -- HBO, Discovery, A&E, CNN, empty-v, a few others I watched. The cable channels had no ads, either. Now there is as much or more advertising as OTA, even with ads popping up during a regular show (History is especially bad about that). Most of the cable channels have gone rapidly downhill. Discovery used to be mostly science, now it's stupid shit like "trick my truck." The last time I had cable the only show I watched on Discovery was MythBusters. Empty-v used to be music videos, now it's all reality shows and rich rappers' bling. In fact, most TV these days is "reality" shows and boring game shows. Completely worthless.
You have five or more sports channels, including GOLF (jesus but that's almost as bad as watching a tiddlywinks game), five more "news" channels that talk about Lindsay Lohan's drug problems and how much money Justin Beiber's making. Womens' channels, BET... I just refuse to pay for that shit. I guess I got spoiled in the old days. Plus, movie rentals were just starting back then and I didn't have a VCR.
Plus, most of it's on the internet anyway, and I use my TV as a monitor. Cable is just not a good way to spend my money, OTA and the internet do the job of cable just fine. If I could pick fifteen channels out of their 200+ and pay fifteen bucks a month, I'd sign up in a heartbeat. But I refuse to pay for Golf, the Food Channel, Home and Gardening and BET.
Ok, I'm turning right and you're going straight. I'm already waiting for you to get the hell out of my way but you can't. If you don't, you're an asshole plain and simple. What's worse is you texters getting caught up in your texting and take off just as the light turns yellow and I have to waith through the light AGAIN. If there are ten cars behind me, your one second delay makess car 10 wait through the light again.
Texting while at the wheel, unless parked, is antisocial and maybe even sociopathic. JUST STOP IT you damned rude brat! Kids, I swear...
"Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. 2Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. 3But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: 4That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly."
Clearly, Gates is no Christian. Of course, many here would consider that a GOOD thing.
Much as the first laptops were entirely forgettable, underpowered, and mostly novelties
No, they weren't. The first portable computer I ever saw was around 1983 or so, the size of a small suitcase, heavy, with a standard 8088 (same as an IBM PC, it was in fact an IBM), 64k of memory, a five inch monochrome screen and a 5 meg hard drive. Most computers smaller than minis then didn't even have hard drives, they used floppies only, and 64-128k was in most desktops.
In the early nineties we had a Compaq portable at work with a larger screen, better CPU, and it was as powerful as the best PC we had in the office.
When laptops came out they weren't as powerful as desktop computers, but they were more powerful than five year old desktops and would run any office software you threw at them. Not forgettable, not underpowered, and certainly not novelties.
Jobs do actually create wealth when they flow money around. That's how you create wealth. I give you 20k to sit on your arse, you spend 20k to buy a house, which creates a house and increases the number of houses by one.
That's the broken window fallacy. If you give me 20k to sit on my ass, wealth is transferred but none is created. The carpenters and plumbers and electricians actually building the house are creating wealth. However, there are some jobs that don't directly create wealth, but support the creation of wealth -- the CEOs and accountants, etc.
Yeah, what were they thinking when they dared to include web browser in their OS so that people could actually get online (and maybe get their favorite browsers' install files).
They used to have these stores that sold software. My first browser was the one the U of I developed (Mosaic? I don't remember), before IE came with the OS. I had no problem with MS including IE with Windows, I did (and still do) have a problem with not being able to delete it. Unneeded data are a waste of drive space.
Slashdot Mirror
They're looking for evidence of life in Mars' past; carbon and such. It's doubtful (but possible) there's any there now. It would take an ultra-extreme extremophile to live on that little air or water. And with a microscope, how do you know if it's a cell or just something that looks like a cell? The rover will be doing chemistry.
I'd bet the chances of life on one of the gas giants' moons would be more likely, if there's anough tidal heating for liquid water.
TFA is actually very good and does an excellent job of explaining it.
Too much work done on a human female by a plastic surgeon, hair stylist, body piercer, tattoo artist, or makeup artist makes her look really weird
I always found fat women who wear too much makeup to be hilarious. Bad plastic surgery is just bad plastic surgery, I've known two women who had to have their faces repaired, one from a car wreck and one from an abusive husband. One was really good looking, the other was the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. Of course, the seventy year olds who have their faces lifted do look creepy. Personally, I find any tattoos and piercings ugly and gross.
Well, for you maybe, but not everyone. I find war movies like Saving Private Ryan or We Were Soldiers to be far more disturbing, especially when the events in Soldiers were NOT fiction, and the gruesome details enacted really happened. Much of Private Ryan was real as well, especially the D-Day landing. That movie gave WWII veterans who had been there flashbacks.
Just about every single skill can be learned for free online.
Nothing has changed except now you don't have to drive. Before the internet you only had to go to the public library. That's where I learned electronics in the '60s (that and hacking around) and computers in the '80s. Any good encyclopedia would give you a start on a subject, with cited sources you could use to examine the subject in greater detail. I probably read 500 books on computing (including the TTL Cookbook) before I had a real handle on them.
It would have been a lot easier learning assembly if I'd had someone knowledgable to ask questions of. That's where college shines. Instead, it was trial and error and very time-consuming.
Odd that you got modded insightful when you would know this if you'd ever been to college. If you have gone to college, your college really sucked bad and you should tell us which one, so slashdotters getting ready to attend can avoid it.
Did I miss a memo? When did charitable giving become a bad thing?
Charitable giving has always been a bad thing to the people who worship money. Unfortunately, that seems to be most Americans (don't know about the rest of the world).
I guess I'll have to go back and re-read them, but I never saw the "acted unnaturally" in any of the stories. Rather, people were simply afraid of losing their jobs to robots. In I, Robot (and its sequel, both collections of the stories you refer to) there was even a robot so real that you couldn't distinguish it from a human and it went on to become President of the world. The Elijia Baily books had R. Daneel, a fully humaniform robot you couldn't tell from the real McCoy (or maybe that's the "real Sarton). That robot (later in Asimov's life) put psychohistory in Seldon's head and went on to rule the galaxy (by proxy, he was Chief of Staff to the Emperor)!
When I was in school, only one of my textbooks was written by the instructor. However, it was an excellent book and I still have it.
I had an uncle who died of stroke at age 28. Don't wait until you're thirty to get sleep. Not enough sleep has a few other bad effects, too, one of which is aging rapidly. Those people you see who are 40 and look 60? They smoke and don't get enough sleep.
The left is trying to take away some rights, the right is trying to take away different rights, both are trying to take away some of the same rights, but as to the economy, that one's simple: Bush was the only President to leave office with fewer Americans employed than when he took office. He went into office in a booming economy and left the economy in the worst shape it's been in since the Great Depression. Of course, Clinton is partly responsible for the housing/banking collapse (along with the Republican congress that passed the deregulation that caused it). Two wars depleted the treasury, Bush inherited a balanced budget and left Obama with the biggest defecit in history.
And now the Republicans are running another businessman like Bush. One who says "I like to fire people" and who got rich doing just that.
Neither side cares about you. It's who gives the biggest campaign bribes.
Of course, nobody's completely to blame for the shitty economy, right now the European debt crisis is dragging the whole world down.
Um, I believe you're referring to 'ho's (contraction of whores). A hoe is a tool used for gardening. As to Star Trek, I've attempted to debunk that bit of fiction with more fiction. At to Dabo girls, That messed up nose kind of ruins it for me. And you relize that sex with a different species is bestiality, right? Who know Star Trek was so kinky?
Now would please someone explain how studying supernova can tell us how elements are formed? I like the slashdot jokes, but I like learning even more.
How can you blame bad programming on the hardware? Early computers weren't paralell, so how can you blame that on Turing?
There's an old saying: a poor workman blames his tools. If your programs suck, you suck at programming. Period. Find a different field!
...if you smash land into the damn thing.
Actually, that's what they're going to do! Seriously! They're not crashing the rover, but they're crashing the lander. The lander is a flying crane that will lower the rover by cable, fly off, and crash somewhere else on Mars.
I'm surprised that nobody's submitted a story I saw on Google News this morning about possible teflon contamination of samples, and how they plan on remediating it.
When I worked at Disney in the '80s, Randall lost his name tag. When he got a new one, rather than the formal Christian name he used the shortened nickname that everyone knew him by. The first British lady who saw his new tag, "Randy," turned bright red and started laughing uncontrollably (and of course apologized profusely for her laughter, the poor woman).
Stealing from the poor to give to the rich is Dennis Moore, not Robin Hood.
I hit your link and searched for both "car" and "automobile". Neither word was in the story. It did say "Arthur C Clarke saw the future coming and in a series of magazine essays 50 years ago helped us get ready for it."
Isaac Asimov had self-driving driving cars in 2020 in a story he wrote 59 years ago.
You jest, but that sort of thing actually happens. My flip phone has a button on the side that lets you speak commands to it instead of opening it up. So I'm in a meeting with the boss, the phone's in my pocket, and the damned thing starts screaming "PLEASE SAY A COMMAND" over and over until I shut the damned thing off.
I need a new phone, the one with the "command" button somehow got the screen broken off...
Why was this article even posted? "Why aren't you using KDE?" sounds like an advertisement.
I'm glad it was posted, I've seen so many positive comments about Lubuntu and XFCE I'm going to try them out. I'm using kubuntu now.
I'm not young and can afford cable, but it's just too damned expensive for what you get. Out of the 200+ channels I'd have to pay for, only four or five are worth watching. Back in 1980 it was different; for ten bucks you got maybe ten channels -- HBO, Discovery, A&E, CNN, empty-v, a few others I watched. The cable channels had no ads, either. Now there is as much or more advertising as OTA, even with ads popping up during a regular show (History is especially bad about that). Most of the cable channels have gone rapidly downhill. Discovery used to be mostly science, now it's stupid shit like "trick my truck." The last time I had cable the only show I watched on Discovery was MythBusters. Empty-v used to be music videos, now it's all reality shows and rich rappers' bling. In fact, most TV these days is "reality" shows and boring game shows. Completely worthless.
You have five or more sports channels, including GOLF (jesus but that's almost as bad as watching a tiddlywinks game), five more "news" channels that talk about Lindsay Lohan's drug problems and how much money Justin Beiber's making. Womens' channels, BET... I just refuse to pay for that shit. I guess I got spoiled in the old days. Plus, movie rentals were just starting back then and I didn't have a VCR.
Plus, most of it's on the internet anyway, and I use my TV as a monitor. Cable is just not a good way to spend my money, OTA and the internet do the job of cable just fine. If I could pick fifteen channels out of their 200+ and pay fifteen bucks a month, I'd sign up in a heartbeat. But I refuse to pay for Golf, the Food Channel, Home and Gardening and BET.
Ok, I'm turning right and you're going straight. I'm already waiting for you to get the hell out of my way but you can't. If you don't, you're an asshole plain and simple. What's worse is you texters getting caught up in your texting and take off just as the light turns yellow and I have to waith through the light AGAIN. If there are ten cars behind me, your one second delay makess car 10 wait through the light again.
Texting while at the wheel, unless parked, is antisocial and maybe even sociopathic. JUST STOP IT you damned rude brat! Kids, I swear...
"Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.
2Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. 3But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: 4That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly."
Clearly, Gates is no Christian. Of course, many here would consider that a GOOD thing.
Much as the first laptops were entirely forgettable, underpowered, and mostly novelties
No, they weren't. The first portable computer I ever saw was around 1983 or so, the size of a small suitcase, heavy, with a standard 8088 (same as an IBM PC, it was in fact an IBM), 64k of memory, a five inch monochrome screen and a 5 meg hard drive. Most computers smaller than minis then didn't even have hard drives, they used floppies only, and 64-128k was in most desktops.
In the early nineties we had a Compaq portable at work with a larger screen, better CPU, and it was as powerful as the best PC we had in the office.
When laptops came out they weren't as powerful as desktop computers, but they were more powerful than five year old desktops and would run any office software you threw at them. Not forgettable, not underpowered, and certainly not novelties.
Jobs do actually create wealth when they flow money around. That's how you create wealth. I give you 20k to sit on your arse, you spend 20k to buy a house, which creates a house and increases the number of houses by one.
That's the broken window fallacy. If you give me 20k to sit on my ass, wealth is transferred but none is created. The carpenters and plumbers and electricians actually building the house are creating wealth. However, there are some jobs that don't directly create wealth, but support the creation of wealth -- the CEOs and accountants, etc.
I know a few combat veterans who wouldn't get in a KIA; that's the acronym for Killed In Action. I doubt many dyslexics will buy a Dodge Stratus.
Yeah, what were they thinking when they dared to include web browser in their OS so that people could actually get online (and maybe get their favorite browsers' install files).
They used to have these stores that sold software. My first browser was the one the U of I developed (Mosaic? I don't remember), before IE came with the OS. I had no problem with MS including IE with Windows, I did (and still do) have a problem with not being able to delete it. Unneeded data are a waste of drive space.