I am not an engineer, but I imagine it wouldn't be too great a hurdle to vent that heat into space somehow and away from the interior of the station. Or I could be completely wrong.
So you're looking down your nose at a strawman you think is looking down its nose at you.
Haha, I knew somebody would come back with that:)
You're right, though, and I see your point. But I believe the point I was making is still valid. As much as we can agree to disagree, as it were, there are others that are not so open-minded. It's like that OO.org ad that was in some NYC paper a little while back. This is the face that the open-source community is starting to show the world, and it's bound to be compared to the proprietary products it's trying to emulate. And when it doesn't have that same spit-n-polish to it, people will just say "You get what you pay for" and continue using those other "better" products.
Again, this is just my opinion. And for what it's worth, I did know an artsy snob-type guy once. And he did wear a beret;)
The people who say these sorts of things are the people whom I envision sitting in smoke-filled coffee houses in the wee hours, wearing black long-sleeved shirts and berets and hipster glasses, and snapping at each others' bongo-accompanied 'artsy' poetry, then leaving to go to some artsy movie festival where something like this movie would be playing. Staring down their noses at people too uncouth to understand the deeper symbolism and meaning behind their higher artforms. In short, I look at them like Litchfield from Instant Classic.
Like the parent, I'm not trying to troll, but I'd wager my views are held by a lot of your everyday people. And most professional graphic artists are just everyday people off the clock. If they're trying to send this message out as an example of the 'open-source' mentality, I think they're making a little bit of a mistake.
Yes, the movie looks amazing. As an example of what their software is capable of in the right hands (regardless of what people have been saying about it being user-unfriendly (IANA3DA)), it's a shoo-in. Anyone can see that. But as the first example of an 'Open Movie' (don't get me started) - and one that's probably going to get some press at that - I don't know what to think of it.
To the contrary, I remember hearing a case (maybe here on/. though I can't find it now) in which a kiddie porn ring was busted because the owner of an internet cafe noticed a man in a stereotypical child mollester van sitting outside his business every day with a laptop, leeching his wifi. He called the cops, and when they questioned him, they found him looking up kiddie porn and trying to seduce some kids in an IRC chat. Or some such, I don't remember the details exactly.
In any case, the man was brought in, and it was discovered that he was part of a larger ring, which were also busted. The owner of the cafe (and therefore the wifi connection through which the illegal porn was being downloaded) was not held liable in any way.
From another, colder (no pun intended) perspective:
Would it be worth all the money and hassle (from the point of view of the military) just to save one guy? Unless, as the GP had said, his 'return trip' was just returning him to the front. IANAD, but all those procedures seem like they would take a long time, and time is invaluable on the battlefield. Also as someone else mentioned, is the issue of tissue rejection, and other such worries. Yes, this is saving a life, and to you and me this is worth it. But from a purely pragmatic point of view, this turns into a lengthly and expensive rigmarole. And the alternative is just a $.30 stamp and some paper on which is written "Sorry, your son/daughter/father/mother/sister/brother/etc was KIA today. Blown clean in two. Here's your Purple Heart."
Of course, this is an extreme example. But it is food for thought.
As I said before, I'm not trying to forward that Ken Lay is a good person, or that he wasn't responsible for the things he was responsible for. I am saying that not ALL the blame falls on him for the people who lost EVERYTHING. The people who lost their entire retirement/investment savings/whatever really don't have anyone but themselves to blame for that. Regardless of Enron's practices regarding their restrictive 401(k) plans, the employees working there had every oportunity to independantly diversify, and they did not. That is not Ken Lay's fault.
Yes, let me say this again, for everyone with a thick skull: Ken Lay is a bad person. He deserved whatever jail time he [probably] would [not] have gotten, and whatever other penalty besides. This is not the issue I am trying to argue. I am trying to say that (as the parent of this thread put forward) comparing Ken Lay to a serial killer is an overexaggeration, and is implying that the employees of Enron had no blame whatsoever for their eventual financial downfall.
First off, stop making shit up. Where exactly have people been saying "I hate Clinton, but what Lay did was A-OK!"? Right, noplace. You're just making unfounded assumptions. Bringing a 10-year-old political debate into this one won't illuminate anything. All you're trying to do is start a flame war. So again, go away troll.
If you think the Ken Lay discussion isn't a political one, who is being naive now??
This Ken Lay discussion isn't. It's a moral and ethical one. If you want debates where everything has to be drug through the political shitter, try http://www.moveon.org/.
There you people go again, with your horrible analogies. When Hitler scooped up Jews (and homosexuals and the infirm and pretty much anyone else he didn't like) and ploped them down into death camps, they didn't have much choice in the matter. I can choose to do my research before I put my money into a stock that doesn't exist. I can choose not to buy stuff from the back of some guy's van down an alley in New York. The people at Enron could chose to diversify (God knows you can't watch TV for ten minutes without some commercial or other telling you to) instead of putting all their eggs in one basket, then soaking up the media attention with their sob stories.
I'm not defending what Lay, or any other con-man does, but there comes a point when you have to accept personal responsibility for making stupid choices. This is something Amercians are not very good at.
And this makes it his fault how? If I go to Hong Kong and someone sells me a 'Rolex', does that make it their fault? Personally, I don't have much problem with people preying on the chronically stupid. Of course he's a bad bad man, but I'd like you to show me any broker that doesn't push the stocks he's paid to push, whether or not they're in the best interests of their clients' portfolio.
There are plenty of pump and dump scammers out there, idiots are ruined by them every day. Do they get major media coverage? The fact that Lay was a high-ranking employee of a major corporation is beside the point, IMO. All he did was swindle money out of people who would probably have had that money swinded out of them some other way.
It reminds me of the saying... "A fool and his money are soon parted."
Taking that train of thought even further, having such a pedigree to show that you really have 'pure' WASP ancestry (for example, though practically impossible) would be a badge of honor for white supremisist groups (and any other hatemongering clubs). Though kimvette is right, it wouldn't do anything but inflame cultural disparity, as racism isn't based on anything logical or rational, but is a completely irrational hatred of anyone different than they are.
Keep in mind that a government can deal with a 1% failure rate, a private company would be gone before a tenth of the lawyers even get there.
That's a place where I think NASA is treading increasingly shakey territory. A failure rate that might have been marginally acceptable 10 or 20 years ago is now considered criminally unacceptable. After the cold war, and the pressure of the space race was off, NASA shifted its goals from rushing to one-up the Soviets in their program to long-term scientific exploration. But congress did not. Every victory is downplayed, and every setback is a major disaster. Congress is not made up of scientists, it's made up of lawyers and businessmen, who want to see immediate and tangable ROI, and since they don't see that, they continually cut the budget on this program which they're increasingly seeing as a waste of time and money.
Add that to the fact that the American people are notoriously short-sighted and intolerant of any loss of life. Since the advent of the shuttle program (and even since the moon landing), the media covers space launches like just any other mundane thing the government does. They portray it as an easy, run-of-the-mill, mundane, everyday occurance. In our modern world, people fly around on planes, they use rediculously powerful PCs, they watch the news being broadcast simultainiously around the planet, and space shuttles go up; it's just another miracle of modern science, just another thing in our world that just works.
So when disaster strikes, instead of the public thinking, "Well, space flight is dangerous, this is sad and unfortunate, but probably bound to happen sooner or later..." they think "What the hell is that NASA doing? How can you botch a shuttle launch that badly? That's like botching trying to make a cup of coffee!"
Anyone who doesn't think that the Bush administration isn't pushing around NASA scientists for political gain needs only look at this launch to see what's really going on.
Admittedly. But no more so, I think, than NASA has been 'pushed around' by any other high-ranking political figure throughout its history. NASA is a PR organization that happens to occasionally have the happy side-effect of scientific exploration.
Reading your horrendous comparison between war and scientific exploration, I don't know whether you're being serious or not.
But suffice it to say that just because space travel is inherently unsafe, it doesn't meean NASA engineers have to invite disaster when they know conditions are more unsafe than usual. I guess it's a good thing NASA mostly hires people with brains and not know-it-alls from/. (politically motivated department heads aside).
Personally, I believe that any delays, scrubs, cancelations and PR disasters at this point can only help space exploration as a whole. No, of course I don't want to see another shuttle go up in flames with the loss of anoter crew, but a PR disaster in the form of an indefinite launch hold is another story. Sadly, I think that political and budgetary pressures will force this shuttle up, ready or not.
With the hard date set for the retirement of the current shuttle fleet, I think NASA is wasting its efforts and budget on the dying program instead of trying develop alternate space vehicles faster. (Of course, I admittedly know very little about NASA budgetary constraints. For all I know, they may be forced by congress to use that part of their budget on the shuttle fleet or lose it. I've seen beurocracy do sillier things.) Doing so may be the only way to revitalize a space program that's been in decline since the end of the cold war.
However, like many, I believe that the real future of space travel lies in the private sector. With privately-funded quasi-space-progams like Virgin Galactic (is that what it's called?) which may someday fund private research and exploration (all in the name of commerce, of course, as opposed to pure science or strategic advantage), and state-funded programs failing to keep up, what other course could there be?
Of course, this is just be rambling, feel free to tell me I'm full of it. But this is the way I see it: private space progams will continue to make space travel more affordable and accessable, and that can only be a good thing in the long run.
That's very informative, thanks. I honestly didn't know about that.
But it still seems worded to indicate that in the case of an emergency (motionless operator state) it can be used to find that person to help them (location-transmitting beacon). Unless my ignorance of GPS and GPS-related technologies is making me misunderstand what TFA is trying to say again.
Additionally, the device's tilt sensor can be used to detect motionless operator states, while a built-in GPS receiver and "dead reckoning" technology enable the device to serve as a location-transmitting beacon.
Is that supposed to be a joke? If you forget to take off your computer before bed, it will alert the authorities that you've passed away?
As someone who works in the same field, I love Geek Squad. The fact that their ad campaigns are so prevalent around this area and that there are several BBs here (and a good porton of the population that doesn't know any better) means that not only do I never have a lack of work, I also have excellent word-of-mouth advertising.
"That guy fixed all the stuff that even the Geek Squad didnt fix. And he charged half what they did!"
Slashdot Mirror
I am not an engineer, but I imagine it wouldn't be too great a hurdle to vent that heat into space somehow and away from the interior of the station. Or I could be completely wrong.
[Insert Average Joe Sixpack user vs Linux geek user debate here]
So you're looking down your nose at a strawman you think is looking down its nose at you.
:)
;)
Haha, I knew somebody would come back with that
You're right, though, and I see your point. But I believe the point I was making is still valid. As much as we can agree to disagree, as it were, there are others that are not so open-minded. It's like that OO.org ad that was in some NYC paper a little while back. This is the face that the open-source community is starting to show the world, and it's bound to be compared to the proprietary products it's trying to emulate. And when it doesn't have that same spit-n-polish to it, people will just say "You get what you pay for" and continue using those other "better" products.
Again, this is just my opinion. And for what it's worth, I did know an artsy snob-type guy once. And he did wear a beret
The people who say these sorts of things are the people whom I envision sitting in smoke-filled coffee houses in the wee hours, wearing black long-sleeved shirts and berets and hipster glasses, and snapping at each others' bongo-accompanied 'artsy' poetry, then leaving to go to some artsy movie festival where something like this movie would be playing. Staring down their noses at people too uncouth to understand the deeper symbolism and meaning behind their higher artforms. In short, I look at them like Litchfield from Instant Classic.
Like the parent, I'm not trying to troll, but I'd wager my views are held by a lot of your everyday people. And most professional graphic artists are just everyday people off the clock. If they're trying to send this message out as an example of the 'open-source' mentality, I think they're making a little bit of a mistake.
Yes, the movie looks amazing. As an example of what their software is capable of in the right hands (regardless of what people have been saying about it being user-unfriendly (IANA3DA)), it's a shoo-in. Anyone can see that. But as the first example of an 'Open Movie' (don't get me started) - and one that's probably going to get some press at that - I don't know what to think of it.
You are my new favourite /.er ;)
It's hard to think in terms of an ordinary user,
So you're the guy that makes all those horrible, counterintuitive UIs!
And he gets modded Informative. Good job mods. It's no wonder nobody RsTFA around here. They can't even RTF Grandparent.
To the contrary, I remember hearing a case (maybe here on /. though I can't find it now) in which a kiddie porn ring was busted because the owner of an internet cafe noticed a man in a stereotypical child mollester van sitting outside his business every day with a laptop, leeching his wifi. He called the cops, and when they questioned him, they found him looking up kiddie porn and trying to seduce some kids in an IRC chat. Or some such, I don't remember the details exactly.
In any case, the man was brought in, and it was discovered that he was part of a larger ring, which were also busted. The owner of the cafe (and therefore the wifi connection through which the illegal porn was being downloaded) was not held liable in any way.
Yeah, but he got his car stolen, so it wasn't like he got off scott-free.
From another, colder (no pun intended) perspective:
Would it be worth all the money and hassle (from the point of view of the military) just to save one guy? Unless, as the GP had said, his 'return trip' was just returning him to the front. IANAD, but all those procedures seem like they would take a long time, and time is invaluable on the battlefield. Also as someone else mentioned, is the issue of tissue rejection, and other such worries. Yes, this is saving a life, and to you and me this is worth it. But from a purely pragmatic point of view, this turns into a lengthly and expensive rigmarole. And the alternative is just a $.30 stamp and some paper on which is written "Sorry, your son/daughter/father/mother/sister/brother/etc was KIA today. Blown clean in two. Here's your Purple Heart."
Of course, this is an extreme example. But it is food for thought.
As I said before, I'm not trying to forward that Ken Lay is a good person, or that he wasn't responsible for the things he was responsible for. I am saying that not ALL the blame falls on him for the people who lost EVERYTHING. The people who lost their entire retirement/investment savings/whatever really don't have anyone but themselves to blame for that. Regardless of Enron's practices regarding their restrictive 401(k) plans, the employees working there had every oportunity to independantly diversify, and they did not. That is not Ken Lay's fault.
Yes, let me say this again, for everyone with a thick skull: Ken Lay is a bad person. He deserved whatever jail time he [probably] would [not] have gotten, and whatever other penalty besides. This is not the issue I am trying to argue. I am trying to say that (as the parent of this thread put forward) comparing Ken Lay to a serial killer is an overexaggeration, and is implying that the employees of Enron had no blame whatsoever for their eventual financial downfall.
Really? I always thought that was to swindle people out of their money.
First off, stop making shit up. Where exactly have people been saying "I hate Clinton, but what Lay did was A-OK!"? Right, noplace. You're just making unfounded assumptions. Bringing a 10-year-old political debate into this one won't illuminate anything. All you're trying to do is start a flame war. So again, go away troll.
If you think the Ken Lay discussion isn't a political one, who is being naive now??
This Ken Lay discussion isn't. It's a moral and ethical one. If you want debates where everything has to be drug through the political shitter, try http://www.moveon.org/.
Unless you are President Clinton, then you get impeached.. And which side of the line did you stand on that issue, I wonder...
What does that have to do with anything except trying to inflame a political flame war? Go away, troll.
There you people go again, with your horrible analogies. When Hitler scooped up Jews (and homosexuals and the infirm and pretty much anyone else he didn't like) and ploped them down into death camps, they didn't have much choice in the matter. I can choose to do my research before I put my money into a stock that doesn't exist. I can choose not to buy stuff from the back of some guy's van down an alley in New York. The people at Enron could chose to diversify (God knows you can't watch TV for ten minutes without some commercial or other telling you to) instead of putting all their eggs in one basket, then soaking up the media attention with their sob stories.
I'm not defending what Lay, or any other con-man does, but there comes a point when you have to accept personal responsibility for making stupid choices. This is something Amercians are not very good at.
And this makes it his fault how? If I go to Hong Kong and someone sells me a 'Rolex', does that make it their fault? Personally, I don't have much problem with people preying on the chronically stupid. Of course he's a bad bad man, but I'd like you to show me any broker that doesn't push the stocks he's paid to push, whether or not they're in the best interests of their clients' portfolio.
There are plenty of pump and dump scammers out there, idiots are ruined by them every day. Do they get major media coverage? The fact that Lay was a high-ranking employee of a major corporation is beside the point, IMO. All he did was swindle money out of people who would probably have had that money swinded out of them some other way.
It reminds me of the saying... "A fool and his money are soon parted."
Taking that train of thought even further, having such a pedigree to show that you really have 'pure' WASP ancestry (for example, though practically impossible) would be a badge of honor for white supremisist groups (and any other hatemongering clubs). Though kimvette is right, it wouldn't do anything but inflame cultural disparity, as racism isn't based on anything logical or rational, but is a completely irrational hatred of anyone different than they are.
Keep in mind that a government can deal with a 1% failure rate, a private company would be gone before a tenth of the lawyers even get there.
That's a place where I think NASA is treading increasingly shakey territory. A failure rate that might have been marginally acceptable 10 or 20 years ago is now considered criminally unacceptable. After the cold war, and the pressure of the space race was off, NASA shifted its goals from rushing to one-up the Soviets in their program to long-term scientific exploration. But congress did not. Every victory is downplayed, and every setback is a major disaster. Congress is not made up of scientists, it's made up of lawyers and businessmen, who want to see immediate and tangable ROI, and since they don't see that, they continually cut the budget on this program which they're increasingly seeing as a waste of time and money.
Add that to the fact that the American people are notoriously short-sighted and intolerant of any loss of life. Since the advent of the shuttle program (and even since the moon landing), the media covers space launches like just any other mundane thing the government does. They portray it as an easy, run-of-the-mill, mundane, everyday occurance. In our modern world, people fly around on planes, they use rediculously powerful PCs, they watch the news being broadcast simultainiously around the planet, and space shuttles go up; it's just another miracle of modern science, just another thing in our world that just works.
So when disaster strikes, instead of the public thinking, "Well, space flight is dangerous, this is sad and unfortunate, but probably bound to happen sooner or later..." they think "What the hell is that NASA doing? How can you botch a shuttle launch that badly? That's like botching trying to make a cup of coffee!"
Anyone who doesn't think that the Bush administration isn't pushing around NASA scientists for political gain needs only look at this launch to see what's really going on.
Admittedly. But no more so, I think, than NASA has been 'pushed around' by any other high-ranking political figure throughout its history. NASA is a PR organization that happens to occasionally have the happy side-effect of scientific exploration.
I think you'll find that major news network stories often differ from what is actually happening :P
Reading your horrendous comparison between war and scientific exploration, I don't know whether you're being serious or not.
/. (politically motivated department heads aside).
But suffice it to say that just because space travel is inherently unsafe, it doesn't meean NASA engineers have to invite disaster when they know conditions are more unsafe than usual. I guess it's a good thing NASA mostly hires people with brains and not know-it-alls from
Personally, I believe that any delays, scrubs, cancelations and PR disasters at this point can only help space exploration as a whole. No, of course I don't want to see another shuttle go up in flames with the loss of anoter crew, but a PR disaster in the form of an indefinite launch hold is another story. Sadly, I think that political and budgetary pressures will force this shuttle up, ready or not.
With the hard date set for the retirement of the current shuttle fleet, I think NASA is wasting its efforts and budget on the dying program instead of trying develop alternate space vehicles faster. (Of course, I admittedly know very little about NASA budgetary constraints. For all I know, they may be forced by congress to use that part of their budget on the shuttle fleet or lose it. I've seen beurocracy do sillier things.) Doing so may be the only way to revitalize a space program that's been in decline since the end of the cold war.
However, like many, I believe that the real future of space travel lies in the private sector. With privately-funded quasi-space-progams like Virgin Galactic (is that what it's called?) which may someday fund private research and exploration (all in the name of commerce, of course, as opposed to pure science or strategic advantage), and state-funded programs failing to keep up, what other course could there be?
Of course, this is just be rambling, feel free to tell me I'm full of it. But this is the way I see it: private space progams will continue to make space travel more affordable and accessable, and that can only be a good thing in the long run.
That's very informative, thanks. I honestly didn't know about that. But it still seems worded to indicate that in the case of an emergency (motionless operator state) it can be used to find that person to help them (location-transmitting beacon). Unless my ignorance of GPS and GPS-related technologies is making me misunderstand what TFA is trying to say again.
Additionally, the device's tilt sensor can be used to detect motionless operator states, while a built-in GPS receiver and "dead reckoning" technology enable the device to serve as a location-transmitting beacon.
Is that supposed to be a joke? If you forget to take off your computer before bed, it will alert the authorities that you've passed away?
As someone who works in the same field, I love Geek Squad. The fact that their ad campaigns are so prevalent around this area and that there are several BBs here (and a good porton of the population that doesn't know any better) means that not only do I never have a lack of work, I also have excellent word-of-mouth advertising.
"That guy fixed all the stuff that even the Geek Squad didnt fix. And he charged half what they did!"