Well back in the days of pulp, a writer named William Wallace (not Braveheart) Cook wrote a book called Plotto. He combined all the plot points of the day into a system for making stories.
So you aren't even original with this idea. Cook wrote it in 1928 when he got paid a couple cents a word for his pulp stories. a used copy will cost you up to $300 these days.
There is a more modern book called Plots Unlimited that while not the original, won't cost you 3 bills either.
There are plenty of writer's books out there, and a handful out there for GAME writers, but I have only read the Chris Crawford book so I can't say much about the others.
My greatest shuttle waste story is from one of the MIT open courseware series. Aerospace students listening to lectures from NASA folks that worked on developing the shuttle.
Because of the shuttle takes off and lands with different amounts of weight in its cargo bay, they had to pad launch vehicle with lead in order to keep the center of gravity in the right place for reentry.
Supposedly this was a problem the Russians discovered building Buran as well.
So in addition to untold amounts of liquid H2, untold tons of lead have been sent up, and returned via the shuttle.
If you haven't listened to the series, I highly recommend it.
Well at least in your article from 2000 the system was under development, the 2005 article I quoted from Wired had Water Security (the company that commercialized the technology) toting the system around in a Toyota pickup and using it in a foot powered configuration and taking it to villages in Iraq that had no clean water.
So the system was viable in 2005, not just under development like it was in 2000. Its the years from 2005 to now that should concern you, though some of those years they weren't flying the shuttle. Who knows if this thing would fit on a Soyuz or Progress module.
Wired did an article on this tech in August of 2005, and the estimate was that it sanitized water at a rate of 5 gallons per minute for 3 cents per gallon.
Likewise NASA funded this because they spent $60 million over 5 years sending fresh water into space at a cost of $40,000 per gallon. It should cut the volume of water sent to the ISS by two thirds.
I have been waiting for them to finally deploy this tech, and IIRC this predated Dean Kamen's water filtering system as well.
I'm not certain you're right. Sometimes people want at least the illusion of control that comes with contract work. Maybe he has a deadline, or a vision he doesn't see coming from a community dev project. I have an idea for a project, a video game in fact, and a MMO to boot. Yeah, I know how 'those guys' are treated on the internet.
However, instead of just saying I have this idea, I am also writing requirements docs, a story bible, and have paid artists to create 2D concept art and 3D models for the game. When I'm ready I intend to solicit bids against the requirements doc, and run this thing like a real SW dev project. Later I would like to Open Source parts of the game as appropriate. Most likely the client, server, and any 3D models and textures we can spare.
I don't have much interest in relying on the community development model to get me to release. When the game is released, or maybe around beta I'd like to release the code as OSS, and a community can develop around it or not, but I don't want to have to rely on that to get me through demo/alpha/beta status.
I have the possibly misguided belief that there needs to be some structure or critical mass to build around first. Something for people to get excited about before you can attract a community.
The live CD it comes with is based off SLAX, but should with a tiny bit of handholding be useful to Windows admins that have never used UNIX/Linux before.
I work in IT Security, I meet folks all the time, successful people, that do not know UNIX/Linux. The only UNIX/Linux in my environment are security machines that I have built for IDS and running other tools.
I have a Masters graduate, and Master candidate both from good schools that work for me, and neither one of them knew any UNIX/Linux when they came on the job. One bought an EEEPC and built an Ubuntu box at home because he recognized the blind spot in his training. The other one really wants to learn and sat with me last week while I put a DISA STIG on a CentOS Snort box.
We hired them because they were smart, hard working, and eager to learn things, not because they are uber UNIX admins. We can teach them the tools, and the tools we use with few exceptions, happen to all be *NIX based.
If your shop is primarily UNIX/Linux based then I understand your criticism, but there are plenty of people in non-UNIX/Linux environments that can benefit from better security. Isn't that the whole point. A Grep/Vi tutorial couldn't have been too much a strain on the page count.
I actually started putting up some tutorials on my website when I decided give them people I met a knoppix CD, was closer to giving them fish, than teaching them to fish.
Now I give them VMWare Server and teach them to build images. RAM and Hard Drives are so cheap now that there really is no excuse for someone not to learn to use a UNIX/Linux.
Don't know about the status angle, but when I took my current job, my old company brought up their non compete clause. My current firm's counsel called their attempts to block me from taking the new job, vexatious. This was in Virginia, they did stop harassing me shortly after receiving the letter.
A quick google search turned up several cases where people in Virginia were found to be vexatious litigants, but I haven't found the statute.
It has switches for changing it into Read/Write mode, but you have to break off a piece of the case to get to them. On the Read/Write model there is no cover over the switches.
As another poster wrote, the Helix Tools are very good as well.
As Bio-diesel it has all the problems of cellulose derived ethanol, meaning trees, switchgrass, corn stalks, but not necessarily food crops.
The forests aren't in direct competition to food crops, until the prices for biomass feed stocks are high enough for someone to plow under his corn, soy, and other food crops to grow trees, or switchgrass.
If the corn farmer sells his corn stalks for biomass, then he's depleting his land faster than if he composted them, but he's probably already selling those for livestock feed anyways.
As with all bio-fuels, it has the additional problems of depleting drinking water available to humans and livestock. It possibly also creates fertilizer runoff to pollute yet more water.
I don't see this raising food crop prices as much, as say secondary markets like, livestock feed. There will be a corresponding rise in meat, dairy and poultry costs.
My parents came to me in the 90s to ask me about that game I played with my friends. I had seen the Chick tracts, heard about people's drug addicted cousins killing themselves, I knew my hobby was over.
Then my parents told me they were writing letters to a soldier in Iraq ('90-91) and among his hobbies, he said he liked to play D&D.
They wanted me to tell them what books they should get to send to him.
One might then assume that the Earth's field would intersect the Moon's field, and the Sun's field would intersect the Moon's field, meaning we'd have 3 portals now...
As I replied to Parent Post. I have downloaded p2p files directly from Microsoft, so far this has been support or developer packages, not regular updates, but they are learning.
Package Management through Yum, or the Package Manager is easy to use, works fine and is much easier than loading individual packages through Rpm and divining dependencies on your own.
I assume you problems with Rpm are with the package installation program and not the file format itself.
The weirdest problem I have had lately was uninstalling Samba ripped Nautilus off a system, and my Desktop icons disappeared. Reinstalling Nautilus fixed the problem, and also re-loaded some tiny piece of Samba it thinks it needs.
During a Forensics training session I attended, we were told by the instructor who works in Law Enforcement that the hashes are sent to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They have a database of hashes for known images and videos. Like an anti-virus vendor, if they don't have a matching hash for a previously unknown, but verified file they can add it to their database.
Whether the DOJ, FBI or anyone else has their own version, I do not know.
Don't forget there was a time when boats were not so seaworthy, navigation not so advanced and sailors stayed close to the shore. The overland route to Asia was the only sure fire way to get there.
I don't know if you ever did survey work, but in the article you'll note the survey was conducted by the OSR Group. This means they created the questionnaire, randomly selected 500 folks from the Economists that said they would reply to surveys, and very likely processed and analyzed the results.
I used to work for a Market Research company and they did a lot of what you are calling "dressing up". The focus for them would have been telling you which group (Demographics) to sell your widget to. So 80% of Republicans in this case, and 88% Democrats is still statistically valid if you want to know what Republicans/Democrats are thinking. Most of this type of research if focused on Demographic slices of the survey group. You don't get anywhere with "Everybody likes Pizza" or 'Obama' for that matter, you have to cut it up a little in order to really draw any conclusions from it. Its worth noting that 20% of the Republicans surveyed don't think McCain is the man for the Economy, or maybe they are part of the 8% Neither Candidate would make a difference camp.
A Marketing firm might also tell McCain to court the Independent Economists largely working in Academia that were 27% of the survey and 39% thought he'd be better vs. Obama. They'd also likely tell him to focus on the No Difference segment.
Adams probably got a few tables of numbers and maybe a presentation with some trends, maybe an XY Scatter chart or two, and is basing his editorial on that with who knows how much actual stats training.
It'd be very interesting if he gave away the survey data, and let other more statistically knowledgeable people 'do for their country' as well.
And nobody has pointed out, but what happens when a site reaches 100% Truthiness with no gaming of the system whatsoever, then simply fails to renew its domain name and is taken over by a Porn site? Political Site? Cult Website? 911 Consiracy Theory site?
Griffin only addressed the conflicts for the Vehicle Assembly Building, and Michoud Assembly facility. He makes no mention of the Orion/Constellation problem for the Crawlerway (its too heavy for the road) and no mention of the Launch Pad, Crawler itself, or the Gantries that hold the stack in place, fuel the rockets, etc.
It looks like they will continue to use Launch Pad 39A for shuttles, and 39B for Constellation.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/main/Constellationfacilities.html
I think the link above handles all my concerns except the launch pad and crawlerway problems with the heavly load of Ares V. This and all other issues can certainly be addressed under Griffin's scenario where extra money is made available to extend the Shuttle program.
That would be great if Orion didn't reuse the Crawler, Launch Pads, Assembly Buildings, Gantries and all of the other Launch infrastructure that the shuttle uses now, same as Apollo and the Shuttle couldn't cohabitate because the equipment they are reusing has to be repurposed for the new system.
Launch facilities and equipment are reused to save the costs of building an entirely new infrastructure for each new launch system.
What really concerns me is that we had parts of the launch pad fly off when the Shuttle launched with Kibo because it was the heaviest launch ever. Isn't Orion supposed to be heavier?
The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer is not just slow to renew, it is not going to renew naturally in our lifetimes.
People need to know about this because the aquifer covers 8 states including corn growing ones where ethanol projects are literally pumping the aquifer into their gas tanks at the expense of drinking water.
How does that reconcile with this one?
A man does not have himself killed for a half-pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him.Napoleon
Slashdot Mirror
Well back in the days of pulp, a writer named William Wallace (not Braveheart) Cook wrote a book called Plotto. He combined all the plot points of the day into a system for making stories.
So you aren't even original with this idea. Cook wrote it in 1928 when he got paid a couple cents a word for his pulp stories. a used copy will cost you up to $300 these days.
There is a more modern book called Plots Unlimited that while not the original, won't cost you 3 bills either.
There are plenty of writer's books out there, and a handful out there for GAME writers, but I have only read the Chris Crawford book so I can't say much about the others.
My greatest shuttle waste story is from one of the MIT open courseware series. Aerospace students listening to lectures from NASA folks that worked on developing the shuttle.
Because of the shuttle takes off and lands with different amounts of weight in its cargo bay, they had to pad launch vehicle with lead in order to keep the center of gravity in the right place for reentry.
Supposedly this was a problem the Russians discovered building Buran as well.
So in addition to untold amounts of liquid H2, untold tons of lead have been sent up, and returned via the shuttle.
If you haven't listened to the series, I highly recommend it.
Well at least in your article from 2000 the system was under development, the 2005 article I quoted from Wired had Water Security (the company that commercialized the technology) toting the system around in a Toyota pickup and using it in a foot powered configuration and taking it to villages in Iraq that had no clean water.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/urine.html
So the system was viable in 2005, not just under development like it was in 2000. Its the years from 2005 to now that should concern you, though some of those years they weren't flying the shuttle. Who knows if this thing would fit on a Soyuz or Progress module.
Don't aspire to malice and all that
Wired did an article on this tech in August of 2005, and the estimate was that it sanitized water at a rate of 5 gallons per minute for 3 cents per gallon.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/urine.html
Likewise NASA funded this because they spent $60 million over 5 years sending fresh water into space at a cost of $40,000 per gallon. It should cut the volume of water sent to the ISS by two thirds.
I have been waiting for them to finally deploy this tech, and IIRC this predated Dean Kamen's water filtering system as well.
I'm not certain you're right. Sometimes people want at least the illusion of control that comes with contract work. Maybe he has a deadline, or a vision he doesn't see coming from a community dev project. I have an idea for a project, a video game in fact, and a MMO to boot. Yeah, I know how 'those guys' are treated on the internet.
However, instead of just saying I have this idea, I am also writing requirements docs, a story bible, and have paid artists to create 2D concept art and 3D models for the game. When I'm ready I intend to solicit bids against the requirements doc, and run this thing like a real SW dev project. Later I would like to Open Source parts of the game as appropriate. Most likely the client, server, and any 3D models and textures we can spare.
I don't have much interest in relying on the community development model to get me to release. When the game is released, or maybe around beta I'd like to release the code as OSS, and a community can develop around it or not, but I don't want to have to rely on that to get me through demo/alpha/beta status.
I have the possibly misguided belief that there needs to be some structure or critical mass to build around first. Something for people to get excited about before you can attract a community.
Some of the Concept Art is up at http://www.evilrobotgames.com/
Not everyone knows UNIX, or Linux.
The live CD it comes with is based off SLAX, but should with a tiny bit of handholding be useful to Windows admins that have never used UNIX/Linux before.
I work in IT Security, I meet folks all the time, successful people, that do not know UNIX/Linux. The only UNIX/Linux in my environment are security machines that I have built for IDS and running other tools.
I have a Masters graduate, and Master candidate both from good schools that work for me, and neither one of them knew any UNIX/Linux when they came on the job. One bought an EEEPC and built an Ubuntu box at home because he recognized the blind spot in his training. The other one really wants to learn and sat with me last week while I put a DISA STIG on a CentOS Snort box.
We hired them because they were smart, hard working, and eager to learn things, not because they are uber UNIX admins. We can teach them the tools, and the tools we use with few exceptions, happen to all be *NIX based.
If your shop is primarily UNIX/Linux based then I understand your criticism, but there are plenty of people in non-UNIX/Linux environments that can benefit from better security. Isn't that the whole point. A Grep/Vi tutorial couldn't have been too much a strain on the page count.
I actually started putting up some tutorials on my website when I decided give them people I met a knoppix CD, was closer to giving them fish, than teaching them to fish.
Now I give them VMWare Server and teach them to build images. RAM and Hard Drives are so cheap now that there really is no excuse for someone not to learn to use a UNIX/Linux.
Don't know about the status angle, but when I took my current job, my old company brought up their non compete clause. My current firm's counsel called their attempts to block me from taking the new job, vexatious. This was in Virginia, they did stop harassing me shortly after receiving the letter.
A quick google search turned up several cases where people in Virginia were found to be vexatious litigants, but I haven't found the statute.
Florida seems to have one though.
At my job we use one of these, it does IDE and SATA. $350 isn't a lot of money to pay if you have to do forensics work.
http://www.digitalintelligence.com/products/ultrablock_ide-sata_ro/
It has switches for changing it into Read/Write mode, but you have to break off a piece of the case to get to them. On the Read/Write model there is no cover over the switches.
As another poster wrote, the Helix Tools are very good as well.
As Bio-diesel it has all the problems of cellulose derived ethanol, meaning trees, switchgrass, corn stalks, but not necessarily food crops.
The forests aren't in direct competition to food crops, until the prices for biomass feed stocks are high enough for someone to plow under his corn, soy, and other food crops to grow trees, or switchgrass.
If the corn farmer sells his corn stalks for biomass, then he's depleting his land faster than if he composted them, but he's probably already selling those for livestock feed anyways.
As with all bio-fuels, it has the additional problems of depleting drinking water available to humans and livestock. It possibly also creates fertilizer runoff to pollute yet more water.
I don't see this raising food crop prices as much, as say secondary markets like, livestock feed. There will be a corresponding rise in meat, dairy and poultry costs.
I had quite a different experience.
My parents came to me in the 90s to ask me about that game I played with my friends. I had seen the Chick tracts, heard about people's drug addicted cousins killing themselves, I knew my hobby was over.
Then my parents told me they were writing letters to a soldier in Iraq ('90-91) and among his hobbies, he said he liked to play D&D.
They wanted me to tell them what books they should get to send to him.
As opposed to files from Microsoft seeded at Piratebay, these torrent trackers were hosted at Microsoft.
To correct my previous statements though now that I'm at home, I downloaded XP SP2 and Photosynth from MS via torrent.
One might then assume that the Earth's field would intersect the Moon's field, and the Sun's field would intersect the Moon's field, meaning we'd have 3 portals now...
Sun - Earth
Sun - Moon
Earth - Moon
All opening and closing on different intervals
As I replied to Parent Post. I have downloaded p2p files directly from Microsoft, so far this has been support or developer packages, not regular updates, but they are learning.
I've actually downloaded things from Microsoft.com as Torrents, one of them was the XNA SDK IIRC.
I don't want to start an argument, but
Have you tried Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS lately?
Package Management through Yum, or the Package Manager is easy to use, works fine and is much easier than loading individual packages through Rpm and divining dependencies on your own.
I assume you problems with Rpm are with the package installation program and not the file format itself.
The weirdest problem I have had lately was uninstalling Samba ripped Nautilus off a system, and my Desktop icons disappeared. Reinstalling Nautilus fixed the problem, and also re-loaded some tiny piece of Samba it thinks it needs.
During a Forensics training session I attended, we were told by the instructor who works in Law Enforcement that the hashes are sent to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They have a database of hashes for known images and videos. Like an anti-virus vendor, if they don't have a matching hash for a previously unknown, but verified file they can add it to their database.
Whether the DOJ, FBI or anyone else has their own version, I do not know.
Space travel, on the other hand, is not about cheaper resources. Everything is cheaper on Earth.
Everything is cheaper on Earth, RIGHT NOW.
Everything is more abundant in Space, Full Stop.
When the cost of getting things to orbit gets cheaper, and the technology robust enough to repair en route we will have to re-evaluate the comparison.
And yes I've read Roland Brak's thoughts on Asteroid Mining.
http://ronaldbrak.blogspot.com/2006/02/great-asteroid-mining-con.html
Don't forget there was a time when boats were not so seaworthy, navigation not so advanced and sailors stayed close to the shore. The overland route to Asia was the only sure fire way to get there.
I don't know if you ever did survey work, but in the article you'll note the survey was conducted by the OSR Group. This means they created the questionnaire, randomly selected 500 folks from the Economists that said they would reply to surveys, and very likely processed and analyzed the results.
I used to work for a Market Research company and they did a lot of what you are calling "dressing up". The focus for them would have been telling you which group (Demographics) to sell your widget to. So 80% of Republicans in this case, and 88% Democrats is still statistically valid if you want to know what Republicans/Democrats are thinking. Most of this type of research if focused on Demographic slices of the survey group. You don't get anywhere with "Everybody likes Pizza" or 'Obama' for that matter, you have to cut it up a little in order to really draw any conclusions from it. Its worth noting that 20% of the Republicans surveyed don't think McCain is the man for the Economy, or maybe they are part of the 8% Neither Candidate would make a difference camp.
A Marketing firm might also tell McCain to court the Independent Economists largely working in Academia that were 27% of the survey and 39% thought he'd be better vs. Obama. They'd also likely tell him to focus on the No Difference segment.
Adams probably got a few tables of numbers and maybe a presentation with some trends, maybe an XY Scatter chart or two, and is basing his editorial on that with who knows how much actual stats training.
It'd be very interesting if he gave away the survey data, and let other more statistically knowledgeable people 'do for their country' as well.
And nobody has pointed out, but what happens when a site reaches 100% Truthiness with no gaming of the system whatsoever, then simply fails to renew its domain name and is taken over by a Porn site? Political Site? Cult Website? 911 Consiracy Theory site?
Griffin only addressed the conflicts for the Vehicle Assembly Building, and Michoud Assembly facility. He makes no mention of the Orion/Constellation problem for the Crawlerway (its too heavy for the road) and no mention of the Launch Pad, Crawler itself, or the Gantries that hold the stack in place, fuel the rockets, etc. It looks like they will continue to use Launch Pad 39A for shuttles, and 39B for Constellation. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/main/Constellationfacilities.html I think the link above handles all my concerns except the launch pad and crawlerway problems with the heavly load of Ares V. This and all other issues can certainly be addressed under Griffin's scenario where extra money is made available to extend the Shuttle program.
What not Carbon Nanotubes?
That would be great if Orion didn't reuse the Crawler, Launch Pads, Assembly Buildings, Gantries and all of the other Launch infrastructure that the shuttle uses now, same as Apollo and the Shuttle couldn't cohabitate because the equipment they are reusing has to be repurposed for the new system. Launch facilities and equipment are reused to save the costs of building an entirely new infrastructure for each new launch system. What really concerns me is that we had parts of the launch pad fly off when the Shuttle launched with Kibo because it was the heaviest launch ever. Isn't Orion supposed to be heavier?
The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer is not just slow to renew, it is not going to renew naturally in our lifetimes. People need to know about this because the aquifer covers 8 states including corn growing ones where ethanol projects are literally pumping the aquifer into their gas tanks at the expense of drinking water.
How does that reconcile with this one? A man does not have himself killed for a half-pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him .Napoleon
are you a cop?