And allow me to blow your mind by predicting that one day we will reach 100000 and that therefore we might as well start right now writing it 002008!
No one now writes 100 A.D. as 0100 A.D. Why do you predict they'll change this in the future?
Good Lord how bloody obvious must a sarcasm be so that I don't get a dozen such remarks?? I mean look at the first half of the very line you quoted, how serious do you think that sounds for God's sake?!?
I see you're one of slashdot's many elitists. I'm sorry we don't get your 'humor'.
No really, you've got to be shitting me. If you don't see the sarcasm in the original post, you either expect other people to be abysmally absurd/stupid or you're yourself abysmally dense.
But yeah, sorry about my elitism, I shouldn't expect as much as basic sarcasm detection from people like you.
I've wanted to see a Mars probe doing this. Not for any significant study, but I'd love to attach a camera to one of these and drift about snapping photos of some of the great Martian geological features. I'm sure the photos would rival anything you'll see a sci-fi artist render.
Not such a great idea. Firstly we've got very high-resolution pictures of Mars, with elevation data and all of that. Then we are able to make Mars landers roll on the planet. And lastly, Mars' atmosphere is so thin that if you'd have to catapult your average Cessna at like 2,000 km/h for it to take off, and I'm talking about surface level pressure, not even about a few kilometers high.
So Dutch researchers cracked the public transportation pass for London? Boy they're gonna be pretty down when they'll realise they need to travel all the way to London just to get free public transportation.
Fortunately being Dutch they'll surely find a place to forget about all of this within a walking distance.
No, it makes perfect sense, the guy is just a visionary.
Currently we only think of 4 digit years, but the guy thinks out the box and has foreseen that one day, sooner or later, probably in a few millenniums, we will have 5 digit years, and that then just like we already put a bunch of zeros for years before the year 1000 we will one day put zeros for years before the year 10000!
And allow me to blow your mind by predicting that one day we will reach 100000 and that therefore we might as well start right now writing it 002008!
No, obviously since it starts with a zero it's in octal. Mmmmh.. except for some reason calc.exe doesn't like 8s and 9s when I try to punch these as octal numbers...
Video games are fun, and making your own video games is fun too.
Start by making him learn text game programming, like the price is right. That's both on the very basic level of programming, and a quickly gratifying game to learn.
Then, maybe I suggest low level game program. And by low level I mean no SDL (well, maybe a wrapper), but writing your own pixels to a frame buffer is more gratifying. As in, teach him how to make a function that write a rectangle on a frame buffer depending on the rectangle's size and the coordinates of its center, then make him move the rectangle around by pressing keys.
Build on top of that by making he do a very basic game like pong. My first graphical video game was a pong and I coded it in two days, that's how easy it is.
From that point on, he will probably start to get ambitions. As in, he'll want to draw lines, load sprites, rotate them, use physics, learn about tcp/ip network, signal processing theory and techniques, etc, to achieve a precise purpose. All of these things will fuel his interest towards mathematics and physics, and give him a good reason to learn about and understand these things.
Finally, introduce him to more "real world" type of programming, by giving him some of the stuff you have to do at work, for uhh.. the sake of his education!
As many people have pointed out this is obviously infeasible in the foreseeable future (and I believe we're talking at the very least 50 years here), however it may be an interesting idea as a space probe. Technically gets there like a lander probe, except that at some point during the descent after the parachute slowed things down enough the probe would inflate a blimp, and thus float in the atmosphere at tolerable temperatures and pressures.
That would be good to study the atmosphere and also study the surface a bit closer, but what would be really really neat is if it could be the "aircraft carrier" for a UAV or two specially designed to go fly close to the surface, take pictures, and come back for a refuelling, which would be electrical, the source of energy being the solar panels on the blimp (or "solar paint") during day time (which would last I believe about 120 days). It should work fairly well because the skies must be pretty clear at a 50 km altitude, and a blimp can be pretty large so if its entire surface can be covered in "solar paint".. And during night the whole thing could stay idle.
Scientifically this would be very interesting as it would allow to study the atmosphere in situ for an extended period of time (several Venus days) on distances (since the blimp would be carried by the winds, but also the UAVs would explore up and down thereby teaching us so much about the atmosphere, its temperatures, pressures, winds, clouds, chemical compositions) and also we would get to see a lot of Venus' geology thanks to the UAV that would fly close enough to the ground. The question would be how hard would it be to conceive an electrical UAV that could fly in such an atmosphere with the chemistry it has under pressures of up to 95 bars and temperatures of up to 500 C? If it's impossible, would there be any chance to have a camera on the end of a 50 km long cable? (the question being I believe how much would such a long cable weight, considered it can't melt at 500 C or be corroded)
A bit off topic but I see so many people missing jokes on Slashdot and people replying "whoosh" that I seriously think we should have a -1, Whoosh moderation option.
I've gotta say, it's a relief, because so far the situation was pretty abysmal. I regularly browse the web from my N95, both with the built-in Nokia-Apple browser as well as Opera Mini 4.1. The experience is quite abysmal.
Both of them fare quite poorly at rendering the layout of web pages, the Nokia browser is incredibly bloated memory-wise and crashes silently all the time. Opera Mini is much more stable, but functionality wise pretty poor. And both have glaring flaws. For example, on the Nokia one, editing a comment on a forum will often duplicate it. On Opera Mini, it annoyingly leaves the pages everytime you have to type something into a form. Slashdot is pretty much broken in both iirc.
So hallulejah for proper browsers! They're much needed.
Why not just use duct tape on the US and see if that fixes anything.....
There, fixed it for you. There ain't no problem that duct tape can't fix!
You know, I think you're on to something. The reason why we haven't solved global warming yet is because nobody has tried duct tape!! Quick, get me a patent lawyer!
Indeed.. I think we should try catching carbon molecules in the air with duct tape! May I suggest vast arrays of duct tape in a desert area in the American south-west?
Slashdot Mirror
I hope this catches on so I finally can say I have a 6 digit salary ($000,460).
If you want a 6 figure salary THAT bad (or close), ask for a raise. A few cents would do it.
I hope they don't want butt sex in return.
Butt sex? Certainly not. But bukkake? Who knows.. This time NASA may wipe more than just sweat off their foreheads.
it doesn't have to be obvious, but it can at least be funny.
You don't have to find it funny, but you can at least realise it's not serious
Oh and it's at +5 Funny, the invisible hand of moderation has spoken, or rather, laughed.
And allow me to blow your mind by predicting that one day we will reach 100000 and that therefore we might as well start right now writing it 002008! No one now writes 100 A.D. as 0100 A.D. Why do you predict they'll change this in the future?
Good Lord how bloody obvious must a sarcasm be so that I don't get a dozen such remarks?? I mean look at the first half of the very line you quoted, how serious do you think that sounds for God's sake?!?
I see you're one of slashdot's many elitists. I'm sorry we don't get your 'humor'.
No really, you've got to be shitting me. If you don't see the sarcasm in the original post, you either expect other people to be abysmally absurd/stupid or you're yourself abysmally dense.
But yeah, sorry about my elitism, I shouldn't expect as much as basic sarcasm detection from people like you.
Stop wooshing. If that many people didn't get 'it', you had to be clearer.
Sure, if by "be clearer" you mean "stop being even the slightest bit subtle and sarcastic".
For that matter, shouldn't it be 0September 09, 02008?
There, fixed it for you!
I've wanted to see a Mars probe doing this. Not for any significant study, but I'd love to attach a camera to one of these and drift about snapping photos of some of the great Martian geological features. I'm sure the photos would rival anything you'll see a sci-fi artist render.
Not such a great idea. Firstly we've got very high-resolution pictures of Mars, with elevation data and all of that. Then we are able to make Mars landers roll on the planet. And lastly, Mars' atmosphere is so thin that if you'd have to catapult your average Cessna at like 2,000 km/h for it to take off, and I'm talking about surface level pressure, not even about a few kilometers high.
1) Nobody talked about Y2K. It was all in your head.
2) *sigh* whoosh..
Why would we? We don't prefix years before 1000 A.D. with a 0.
WHOOOOOSH! Oh shit, and there we go again! Now I'm going to have to explain a dozen times again how I was being sarcastic.
So Dutch researchers cracked the public transportation pass for London? Boy they're gonna be pretty down when they'll realise they need to travel all the way to London just to get free public transportation.
Fortunately being Dutch they'll surely find a place to forget about all of this within a walking distance.
No, it makes perfect sense, the guy is just a visionary.
Currently we only think of 4 digit years, but the guy thinks out the box and has foreseen that one day, sooner or later, probably in a few millenniums, we will have 5 digit years, and that then just like we already put a bunch of zeros for years before the year 1000 we will one day put zeros for years before the year 10000!
And allow me to blow your mind by predicting that one day we will reach 100000 and that therefore we might as well start right now writing it 002008!
No, obviously since it starts with a zero it's in octal. Mmmmh.. except for some reason calc.exe doesn't like 8s and 9s when I try to punch these as octal numbers...
Video games are fun, and making your own video games is fun too.
Start by making him learn text game programming, like the price is right. That's both on the very basic level of programming, and a quickly gratifying game to learn.
Then, maybe I suggest low level game program. And by low level I mean no SDL (well, maybe a wrapper), but writing your own pixels to a frame buffer is more gratifying. As in, teach him how to make a function that write a rectangle on a frame buffer depending on the rectangle's size and the coordinates of its center, then make him move the rectangle around by pressing keys.
Build on top of that by making he do a very basic game like pong. My first graphical video game was a pong and I coded it in two days, that's how easy it is.
From that point on, he will probably start to get ambitions. As in, he'll want to draw lines, load sprites, rotate them, use physics, learn about tcp/ip network, signal processing theory and techniques, etc, to achieve a precise purpose. All of these things will fuel his interest towards mathematics and physics, and give him a good reason to learn about and understand these things.
Finally, introduce him to more "real world" type of programming, by giving him some of the stuff you have to do at work, for uhh.. the sake of his education!
I will not, however, wear goofy glasses (especially because i wear prescription eyewear as it is) just so jon stewart pops out at me.
In Soviet Russia, you pop out at Jon Stewart.
Just checked it out and it kinda sucks actually. Version 8.65 I mean. Doesn't even display the layout..
As many people have pointed out this is obviously infeasible in the foreseeable future (and I believe we're talking at the very least 50 years here), however it may be an interesting idea as a space probe. Technically gets there like a lander probe, except that at some point during the descent after the parachute slowed things down enough the probe would inflate a blimp, and thus float in the atmosphere at tolerable temperatures and pressures.
That would be good to study the atmosphere and also study the surface a bit closer, but what would be really really neat is if it could be the "aircraft carrier" for a UAV or two specially designed to go fly close to the surface, take pictures, and come back for a refuelling, which would be electrical, the source of energy being the solar panels on the blimp (or "solar paint") during day time (which would last I believe about 120 days). It should work fairly well because the skies must be pretty clear at a 50 km altitude, and a blimp can be pretty large so if its entire surface can be covered in "solar paint".. And during night the whole thing could stay idle.
Scientifically this would be very interesting as it would allow to study the atmosphere in situ for an extended period of time (several Venus days) on distances (since the blimp would be carried by the winds, but also the UAVs would explore up and down thereby teaching us so much about the atmosphere, its temperatures, pressures, winds, clouds, chemical compositions) and also we would get to see a lot of Venus' geology thanks to the UAV that would fly close enough to the ground. The question would be how hard would it be to conceive an electrical UAV that could fly in such an atmosphere with the chemistry it has under pressures of up to 95 bars and temperatures of up to 500 C? If it's impossible, would there be any chance to have a camera on the end of a 50 km long cable? (the question being I believe how much would such a long cable weight, considered it can't melt at 500 C or be corroded)
Los Angeles has never had acid rain, and probably never will.
Correct! If it did, Los Angeles would have been the epicentre of the hippie movement in the place of San Francisco.
Those parts of the world will have people that cannot AFFORD to take those kinds of precautions.
Which means that they will eventually die or move out and thus the pollution will diminish a level of equilibrium again.
The invisible hand of free market will once again make everything come right!
*woosh*
A bit off topic but I see so many people missing jokes on Slashdot and people replying "whoosh" that I seriously think we should have a -1, Whoosh moderation option.
Well I wasn't even aware it existed until now :-/
I've gotta say, it's a relief, because so far the situation was pretty abysmal. I regularly browse the web from my N95, both with the built-in Nokia-Apple browser as well as Opera Mini 4.1. The experience is quite abysmal.
Both of them fare quite poorly at rendering the layout of web pages, the Nokia browser is incredibly bloated memory-wise and crashes silently all the time. Opera Mini is much more stable, but functionality wise pretty poor. And both have glaring flaws. For example, on the Nokia one, editing a comment on a forum will often duplicate it. On Opera Mini, it annoyingly leaves the pages everytime you have to type something into a form. Slashdot is pretty much broken in both iirc.
So hallulejah for proper browsers! They're much needed.
And? Who cares?
Why not just use duct tape on the US and see if that fixes anything.....
There, fixed it for you. There ain't no problem that duct tape can't fix!
You know, I think you're on to something. The reason why we haven't solved global warming yet is because nobody has tried duct tape!! Quick, get me a patent lawyer!
Indeed.. I think we should try catching carbon molecules in the air with duct tape! May I suggest vast arrays of duct tape in a desert area in the American south-west?
woooosh!
Ha! The whoosh is on you! My post was a joke.