It's more topical than you think. Not only the robot part, but the overlords part too. They will all be networked to a central government facility. Big Brother, anybody?
It's an odd coincidence, today, I've been reading "With Folded Hands" by Jack Williamson. It's about a guy who sells robots (scarcely more than voice-controlled Roombas that can retrieve the dirty dishes from your table) for home automation, who is put unexpectedly and immediately out of business when technologically advanced centrally controlled robots show up, intending to do everything for humans so that humans no longer need to (or indeed, are allowed to) lift a finger. They force themselves on a mostly willing populace and take ownership of everything.
Er, anyway, my point was about the central control and the possibilities therein. I guess I'm glad it's happening in Korea, rather than my location.
Hmm...I thought they just had temperature-controlled seats, music, aromatherapy, and integrated bidet. I didn't realize they had variable flush control too. I've gotta get me a Japanese toilet!
For example I am sure the same people that complain about water-free urinal technology were buying grey market toilets when congress mandated low flush technology. Sure there were problems in the beginning, but nothing some hard working engineers can't sort out. Frankly I think not flushing relatively scarce fresh water down the not-so-proberbial toilet is a good idea, but hey I am a tree hugging, dirt worshipper.
I'm tired of flushing -> waiting forever for toilet to reload -> re-flushing. I'm more tired of plunging. I don't have city water; my well is a very abundant supply of water, although sometimes lacking in pressure/flow volume. How does the illegality of a reasonably functional (for me) toilet save the environment?
Why, oh why, don't toilets have multiple flush options? One toilet is subject to vastly differing jobs from one usage to the next; why is it expected to do all those jobs efficiently with a single function?
I want a toilet with a quiet and low usage liquid-only function, a mid-range normal-sounding function, and a high power WHOOSH function that can move whatever evils exit from my bowels and uses whatever water necessary to ensure that I can walk away without having to watch my excrement like a hawk (er, not that hawks generally spend a lot of time watching my excrement...stupid colloquialism). Hell, I'm trying to get rid of it, I don't want to watch it and see it regurgitate from the drain or have to shove a plunger into a pile of it...
Not to be pedantic (because you are basically right), but if you are scraping ice off of a windshield then the dew point would have been pretty close to the ambient temp at some point (meaning the relative humidity was high). In a 20% RH environment, there will not be any condensation unless the surface where the ice forms is MUCH cooler than ambient.
Er...not to be pedantic (because you, too, are basically right), but ice on a windshield may have come from freezing rain or melted snow refreezing, among other sources.
I wear sandals AND a vest, but luckily for you, I always manage to wear at least a T-shirt under my vest. If I try to grow a ponytail, however, the best I can do is a fr0, so I just keep my hair short.
I wear my sandals all year, even while shoveling snow. I wish there were actively ventilated shoes.
Re:Less challenges on the moon?
on
US Plans Lunar Motel
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The problem is that NASA has yet to grasp the idea of a fully independent spacecraft. It works out reasonably well to have astronauts swap out complete assemblies in LEO, where you can send up and down the stuff, if you are talking about going to Mars or Io or Titan or even near-earth-asteroids, you are going to be too far to pull stunts like that.
I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Er, no, seriously, you make a good point.
We barely know how to weld and solder in space and nobody's ever tried to make a set of machine shop tools for space like lathes and mills. The moon would be a great place to research such things, but that also depends on NASA breaking with tradition and not blowing a good chance yet again.
Your examples actually don't sound so difficult. I'm surprised welding in space isn't already common; I figured it was necessary for such things as assembling/repairing Mir and ISS. I imagine it scarcely differs from welding on Earth; no air is required* (I guess depending on which type of welding), and gravity (which exists enough on the moon for this) is only helpful for securing materials and predictability of flying stray materials/sparks. Soldering is even easier. Machine shop tools could use air to control dust, but I can't think of any other than a tablesaw that use gravity (and the tablesaw is easy to modify to work in zero-G; just add a spring-loaded track/table above it).
*I just realized that air is necessary for the cooling of everything above, except possibly shop tools. However, I imagine it's pretty unlikely that much fabrication would be done in airless environments. The risk of cutting off a finger is bad enough when earth is so far away, but it'd be even worse when you weld or cut a hole in your spacesuit in a depressurized area.
I assume that these tools would be used for fabrication; raw materials would be kind of difficult to come up with. Better to load 1 ton of easier-to-fabricate materials than 1 ton of equipment, maybe? Think fiberglass-like materials. Sure, we can fabricate new parts for the Mars base out of Bondo!;)
Speaking of their TOS, does anybody know if they'd allow lightly commercial content? I'd like to advertise for my local extracareercular (can I invent that word?) computer work, a la http://ronanian.googlepages.com/ -- and when will they offer gDNS for virtual hosting?
His tagline doesn't say he intends to marry; he merely states he is searching for a wife. He doesn't, in fact, declare his intentions for the event in which he actually locates a wife. For that reason, I will not divulge the location of my wife...
Gnomes GUI configurator for printers is _HORRIBLE_. If the package manager depended on you, then you did some tweaking you shouldn't have done.
I don't use Gnome, in either SuSE or Ubuntu. I did, however, use Gnome's printer configurator once on another Ubuntu system, and it had a couple glitches installing a network printer -- I had to manually type in the path for it, and I had to choose a different driver than it recommended.
SuSE's YaST package manager started first with the dependency issue; only then was I forced to tweak it. Either way, installing the same programs in U's friendly "Add programs" and/or in Synaptic is seamless and trouble-free.
We already have tons of newbie-friendly distros, but hardware support is still somewhat lacking.
You say that, and theoretically you're right. Practically, results matter. I've used both SuSE and Ubuntu, and Ubuntu (mostly) Just Plain Works. SuSE was hell to try and get a printer working, I never got my usb Quickcam working, and the package manager depended on me to deal with dependencies.
I was finally convinced to try Ubuntu a month or two ago, and I'm totally amazed at how much Just Plain Works. The aforementioned peripherals Just Plain Worked. Three printers (two usb and one parallel) Just Plain Worked after a windows-like installation wizard. The usb Quickcam Just Plain Worked without any installation. The package manager not only resolves dependencies automatically and updates the OS automatically, but the package repositories are chock-full of almost every package I want...and those packages Just Plain Work.
I'm even tempted to try installing a scanner.
OTOH, what DOESN'T Just Plain Work is 1280x1024. I can't seem to find a Ubuntu-style wizard or GUI way to do it, and am considering resorting to my old Slackware habits of just hacking up a config-text-file somewhere...
Regardless of all that, the question was if SuSE can replace Windows for the "Average office user". These users have entirely different needs. None of their needs are addressed by the Ubuntu qualities that have so impressed me. Average office users have professionals to maintain their computers; and those professionals maintain dozens of identical computers running identical software, so they can spend the time to solve things properly and manually and merely replicate their solutions.
Where's my mod points when I need them? I let three expire recently because I just didn't care, and now here's a post that needs to be modded up!
I played console video games on the Atari 2600, the NES, the Sega Genesis, and of course computer games from those eras...and then when smooth-motion FPS games came out, and other games adopted the same type of motion, I couldn't play anymore - so I didn't.
If I really feel like playing a game, I find a telnet BBS and play some Land Of Devastation, or I play something old-fashioned like a Breakout-derivative or Tetris. One day last weekend I actually had an urge to play a modern game, and fooled around with Tuxracer for a few minutes without getting sick, but I didn't care to play for long...
that's no excuse for not reading the submission. It's not just "broadband", it's at speeds competitive with those of fibre.
So, what's your excuse for not reading TFA? It's about using cable-tv-coax that's already inside peoples' walls instead of fishing new Cat5 inside houses when they get fiber service installed. The broadband is brought to the house with fiber.
Oh yeah, and one more thing -- maybe it's time for biologists to stop spending time in labs, on boats, and in the forest; and instead, go to Laos and Korea and wander around in markets...since that seems to be the most productive way of finding stuff worth studying.
When wandering through a hunter's market in Laos, Robert Timmins of the Wildlife Conservation Society happened upon a previously unknown rodent.
Why do these always start with a scientist in a street market in Laos or Korea, and then go on to "The locals call it {whatever}, which translates as {whatever}"? Does anybody else remember the fish (or whatever sea creature it was) that was found this way a few months ago?
You fail to understand the purpose of Opera's automatic session saving.
Daily stuff, pages you want to check every day, are easy; I have a "Daily" folder on my personal toolbar; every day, I click on "Daily"->"Open All Folder Items" (I'm pretty sure that Firefox has this function in every bookmark folder too). That's fine for stuff I want to load daily.
The tabs I have open are stuff that I don't want to bookmark; I want to deal with it and be done, or I want it to be in my face to remind me of something. For example, some Fatwallet posts for deals that I want to get into; a bunch of slashdot and digg links that I want to read later; some documentation for things I want to do later; and a homework assignment that I should have done two weeks ago.
A high-geek-value home page would be one that loads all your comics, just the comic itself (not the ads and the author's blog and such), into frames or just one after another in a long-scrolling page...along with Woot and Hack-a-day.
Hah! Amateur...you think twenty tabs is something? Us Opera users are really messy folk. I did a major cleaning this morning and I've still got 29 tabs open.
Slashdot Mirror
It's more topical than you think. Not only the robot part, but the overlords part too. They will all be networked to a central government facility. Big Brother, anybody?
It's an odd coincidence, today, I've been reading "With Folded Hands" by Jack Williamson. It's about a guy who sells robots (scarcely more than voice-controlled Roombas that can retrieve the dirty dishes from your table) for home automation, who is put unexpectedly and immediately out of business when technologically advanced centrally controlled robots show up, intending to do everything for humans so that humans no longer need to (or indeed, are allowed to) lift a finger. They force themselves on a mostly willing populace and take ownership of everything.
Er, anyway, my point was about the central control and the possibilities therein. I guess I'm glad it's happening in Korea, rather than my location.
if houston_500.men / houston_500.women > slashdot.men / slashdot.women then
doItLikeDementedBunnies()
else
doItLikeFermentedBunnies()
fi
if this.message.readBy(wife) then
buyFlowers()
prepareForDogHouse()
fi
Hmm...I thought they just had temperature-controlled seats, music, aromatherapy, and integrated bidet. I didn't realize they had variable flush control too. I've gotta get me a Japanese toilet!
Why, oh why, don't toilets have multiple flush options? One toilet is subject to vastly differing jobs from one usage to the next; why is it expected to do all those jobs efficiently with a single function?
I want a toilet with a quiet and low usage liquid-only function, a mid-range normal-sounding function, and a high power WHOOSH function that can move whatever evils exit from my bowels and uses whatever water necessary to ensure that I can walk away without having to watch my excrement like a hawk (er, not that hawks generally spend a lot of time watching my excrement...stupid colloquialism). Hell, I'm trying to get rid of it, I don't want to watch it and see it regurgitate from the drain or have to shove a plunger into a pile of it...
The imagery brought to mind by this makes me think of a handicapped dude in a Pontiac Aztek...or, uh, something.
Cool...Tool rule.
I wear sandals AND a vest, but luckily for you, I always manage to wear at least a T-shirt under my vest. If I try to grow a ponytail, however, the best I can do is a fr0, so I just keep my hair short.
I wear my sandals all year, even while shoveling snow. I wish there were actively ventilated shoes.
*I just realized that air is necessary for the cooling of everything above, except possibly shop tools. However, I imagine it's pretty unlikely that much fabrication would be done in airless environments. The risk of cutting off a finger is bad enough when earth is so far away, but it'd be even worse when you weld or cut a hole in your spacesuit in a depressurized area.
I assume that these tools would be used for fabrication; raw materials would be kind of difficult to come up with. Better to load 1 ton of easier-to-fabricate materials than 1 ton of equipment, maybe? Think fiberglass-like materials. Sure, we can fabricate new parts for the Mars base out of Bondo!
Come on! Troll? I was asking a question, looking for an answer so I knew whether or not to do something I was planning!
Somebody moderated without reading the parent...
It should be modded "troll", then, as he was trolling for mods who don't read TFA.
Speaking of their TOS, does anybody know if they'd allow lightly commercial content? I'd like to advertise for my local extracareercular (can I invent that word?) computer work, a la http://ronanian.googlepages.com/ -- and when will they offer gDNS for virtual hosting?
Keep your greasy Google off my wife!
His tagline doesn't say he intends to marry; he merely states he is searching for a wife. He doesn't, in fact, declare his intentions for the event in which he actually locates a wife. For that reason, I will not divulge the location of my wife...
SuSE's YaST package manager started first with the dependency issue; only then was I forced to tweak it. Either way, installing the same programs in U's friendly "Add programs" and/or in Synaptic is seamless and trouble-free.
I was finally convinced to try Ubuntu a month or two ago, and I'm totally amazed at how much Just Plain Works. The aforementioned peripherals Just Plain Worked. Three printers (two usb and one parallel) Just Plain Worked after a windows-like installation wizard. The usb Quickcam Just Plain Worked without any installation. The package manager not only resolves dependencies automatically and updates the OS automatically, but the package repositories are chock-full of almost every package I want...and those packages Just Plain Work.
I'm even tempted to try installing a scanner.
OTOH, what DOESN'T Just Plain Work is 1280x1024. I can't seem to find a Ubuntu-style wizard or GUI way to do it, and am considering resorting to my old Slackware habits of just hacking up a config-text-file somewhere...
Regardless of all that, the question was if SuSE can replace Windows for the "Average office user". These users have entirely different needs. None of their needs are addressed by the Ubuntu qualities that have so impressed me. Average office users have professionals to maintain their computers; and those professionals maintain dozens of identical computers running identical software, so they can spend the time to solve things properly and manually and merely replicate their solutions.
Where's my mod points when I need them? I let three expire recently because I just didn't care, and now here's a post that needs to be modded up!
I played console video games on the Atari 2600, the NES, the Sega Genesis, and of course computer games from those eras...and then when smooth-motion FPS games came out, and other games adopted the same type of motion, I couldn't play anymore - so I didn't.
If I really feel like playing a game, I find a telnet BBS and play some Land Of Devastation, or I play something old-fashioned like a Breakout-derivative or Tetris. One day last weekend I actually had an urge to play a modern game, and fooled around with Tuxracer for a few minutes without getting sick, but I didn't care to play for long...
Sounds like a awful idea to me.
He obviously stays in and reads Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency when he's not making music...but maybe he works for WayForward Technologies...
Oh yeah, and one more thing -- maybe it's time for biologists to stop spending time in labs, on boats, and in the forest; and instead, go to Laos and Korea and wander around in markets...since that seems to be the most productive way of finding stuff worth studying.
You fail to understand the purpose of Opera's automatic session saving.
Daily stuff, pages you want to check every day, are easy; I have a "Daily" folder on my personal toolbar; every day, I click on "Daily"->"Open All Folder Items" (I'm pretty sure that Firefox has this function in every bookmark folder too). That's fine for stuff I want to load daily.
The tabs I have open are stuff that I don't want to bookmark; I want to deal with it and be done, or I want it to be in my face to remind me of something. For example, some Fatwallet posts for deals that I want to get into; a bunch of slashdot and digg links that I want to read later; some documentation for things I want to do later; and a homework assignment that I should have done two weeks ago.
A high-geek-value home page would be one that loads all your comics, just the comic itself (not the ads and the author's blog and such), into frames or just one after another in a long-scrolling page...along with Woot and Hack-a-day.
Hah! Amateur...you think twenty tabs is something? Us Opera users are really messy folk. I did a major cleaning this morning and I've still got 29 tabs open.