Someone said you could link up to four of these together, so that's 2 pounds. If you can put a thruster on board, of any kind then what about just lifting a pound of BBs up high enough that the orbit won't decay any time soon? Call it the flying saucer defense system. they have to fly in through a hail of BBs.
That is one thing space can do that antarctica can't... You can do whatever you damn please up there because in the end if you're willing to never come home, there will be no consequences.
I wish emacs would not put stuff in/usr/local/share. I just deleted the contents of/usr/local on my debian box via a script that puts my custom stuff there since I assumed it wouldn't break anything and now emacs complains it's gone. Boo.
There I vented my gripe.
3. Cops... I like cops, I appreciate cops, I have cops in the family; it's not really the cops, it's the people who drop below the speed limit simply because one is nearby.
No it's not the cops themselves, but I do drop below the speed limit at times if I do not really know what the speed limit is. On many streets, traffic moves well above the speed limit, so that you could get a ticket for moving with traffic. When this happens, the police post cruisers on that street to get people to slow the heck down. Sometimes I look at the speed limit signs, but not all the time. Most police, even if you were speeding, will decide not to pull you over if you've slowed down on seeing them.
Police aren't going to ticket you if you weren't speeding and you slow down to below the speed limit. No law has been broken.
If you speed by them, then they would either not pull you over, pull you over and give you a warning, or pull you over and give you a ticket.
If they were not going to pull you over or were going to pull you over and give you a warning, then if you've substantially slowed down on seeing them, then you've acknowledged that you were speeding, and on seeing the cop realized it. There is no longer a reason for them to pull you over and give you a warning.
If you speed by them then you were either oblivious to the speed limit and need a warning/ticket, or think you can go that much over the speed limit even in front of a cop and so need a ticket - what would you do if you DIDN'T see a cop? Or you were oblivious to the cop and either oblivious or willfully disregarding of the speed limit, and may be distracted or on a cell phone or on drugs not to have seen either or to have used such poor judgement as to willfully ignore them. What the hell is up with you? You need to be pulled over and possibly given a ticket.
If you speed by the cop then he/she is going to think: Who the hell do you think you are?
The best thing to do when pulled over for a minor traffic offense is to act compliant, polite but not particularly talkative, almost bored as if you are doing a transaction at a job. Be mentally fatalistic about what is going to happen. Be uninteresting and unflustered, just an average Joe. The cop probably doesn't want to ticket an average Joe, unless there's a quota on. It's ok to show disappointment that you were pulled over on your face, but never direct any emotion at the cop, and don't let it in your voice.
I've been pulled over about ten times since my last ticket ( years and years ago ). I've always been given a warning rather than a ticket, even if I've had a headlight out or a missing registration slip/expired sticker/no seatbelt worn or been speeding ( slightly ) or appeared drunk. ( Once I had to do the funky chicken for possible DUI, but I was completely sober ( no alcohol in the past week ) so I got no ticket that time. )
I must be good at dealing with cops because although I get pulled over often, I don't get tickets. My brother on the other hand can't get away with anything. He's pulled over often and always given a ticket.
It makes sense to turn it on always because it prevents spying. It's possible to know for instance that I posted this slashdot message by looking at my network traffic. If slashdot had https turned on, then it would better protect my privacy.
It's possible for visa/mastercard/etc to run sites that accept their credit cards. You go to their site, enter your info and there you are. You don't enter your CC number anywhere but visa.com/mastercard.com/discover.com/americanexpress.com etc. Sites with merchant accounts send you to wlog https://visa.com/ccinfo/get_info?merchantaccount_id=12345&transaction_id=543210
Then the merchant account site queries a visa.com web service to get the information or just processes the transaction using their merchantaccount_id and transaction_id.
This service is kind of like what paypal does.
And you should know what the domain of your banking site is. Maybe browsers should bold the domain name that matched the cert and make it a different color for https sites. Some folks don't even have the url bar enabled. It should maybe be replaced with a non-optional notice of the domain you are visiting in that case.
If it really matters, the site can have a passphrase or random pic you recognize, and banks do this already.
Even having your full name echoed prominantly on the screen can help. If you login as jdoe and your name is Jerrome Doe, then seeing Welcome John Doe on the screen is going to make you wonder.
Anyone who violates 'policies' and sticks around long enough for 'the proper channels' to take them out should probably not have been taken down because they weren't doing anything criminal. IF they were doing something criminal, they won't be there long enough for them to care about being taken down by a lawsuit. They are going to do their damage, get their info, turn it into cash and get the hell out of dodge as fast as they can, which if they know what they are doing, will be quite fast indeed.
Hmmm. I use ssh this way all the time. I always answer yes I want to accept the other site's cert. I might wonder only if I had already accepted the site's cert and then I was being prompted again.
Here's the thing though with https: ANYONE can get a certificate from a trusted certificate signer. All the baddies have to do is get some drugged out loser to give them the necessary info request a signed certificate in their name. If someone's willing to be a crack ho for their drugs, something tells me they don't have compunctions about providing personal information so some dudes can register a domain for fifty bucks. It's really no skin off their nose if they lose their ability to register a domain name. And if they are civilly liable for financial damages, nobody can squeeze blood from a rock. Anyway they can just claim their identity was stolen. They can honestly claim they don't have a clue what a domain name is or how to register one.
So a baddie can get a cert for https://bankofamericasux.com/ and no funny windows pop up. ( I actually don't know if registrars look for domains that superficially resemble likely targets of baddies. It might be a good idea, though someone who thinks bank of america sucks ought to be able to get a certificate for bankofamericasux if they want to. Maybe they want to sell t-shirts that say Bank of America Sucks, and need to take credit card info...
Here's a story about a 'clever idea' I wanted to vet. I wanted to vet it because although it seemed clever to me I didn't know enough about it to know if it was just plain silly. I know very little about physics and electronics, so I posted it in sci.physics.
A while back a guy named James Woodward did an experiment where he attached capacitors to piezoelectric elements which vibrated them back and forth at a certain frequency. The capacitors would be charged and discharged in time with their vibrations. Woodward claims that the mass of the capacitors changes when charged and discharged in such a way that when they are being pushed by the piezoelectric vibrator they have a different mass than when they are being pulled thus producing net thrust. ( I have no idea or ability to judge the silliness or not of this basic idea ) however he claims to have seen the effect on a tabletop device.
Suppose it's not real. Then whooptee doo nothing to see here.
Suppose it is real. Another dude, figured out that the thrust is affected by ( I don't remember was it the 4th power? of the frequency of vibration . I can't find the paper any more. ). Woodward's device vibrated in the X kilohertz range, which was about as much as such a device could do, and produced ( he claims ) a small signal. However if you could devise something that operated in the megahertz range you'd have a clear and undeniable yes/no, as well as probably a practical device that could be used for flying jetson cars etc.
It seemed to me that the basic problem was to find something that could store and release energy as a capacitor does which can also be vibrated at megahertz frequencies. An answer that seemed plausable to me was: Why not have a piezoelectric crystal that is also phosphorescent? You could have say a drum shaped piezo crystal and shine a light on the center to charge it with energy as it vibrates in one direction, and then it would release that energy as it moved to it's other extreme and vibrate back and forth. There are phosphorescent substances that release their energy quite fast, so megahertz operation should be possible.
Anyway, I posted this on usenet, and guess what - nobody cared. It was a dumb idea probably. If you have to ask experts about your idea then it's probably not a good idea to begin with. This is because you don't know what the heck you are talking about.
CDRS that state they have recorded successfully have a substantially nonzero chance of not working IMMEDIATELY after being burned ( 10% is conservative ). Also CDRS that have been used, have likely been left sitting in grit and dust and quickly get scratched into uselessness. In my experience, CDRS that have worked at least once and have been sitting in a jacket pretty much unused, fairly reliably retain their data over at least a couple of years. YMMV.
One cool thing that Shoemaker/Levy had that this doesn't is a known cause. There was a known comet, on course to hit Jupiter, and lo and behold, after it was expected to hit Jupiter, there were new spots. This is just a new spot that looks similar to the Shoemaker/Levy spots but which could plausably have another cause other than impact.
No. According to TFA, your DNA is still ripped to shreds, but the drug supresses your cells' suicide mechanism that having 'corrupted data' in the DNA activated. The suicide mechanism helps keep damaged cells from becoming cancerous cells. Instead they become dead cells. In the case of lethal radiation poisoning, this happens to too many cells. Now, your cells already do have mechanisms to repair DNA damage. If something seems out of place, they can often make the right guess as to how to patch things back together. There are corrupt hard drive repair utilities that do this too. But sometimes they make the wrong guess or can't repair the DNA to original condition. That's why you have the suicide mechanism. A cell that has been so severely damaged that the suicide mechanism is activated has an unacceptably high likelihood of being sufficiently damage that it won't be able to be repaired back to 'manufacturers specifications'.
Rather than take the chance that the repairs that get done will leave the cell cancerous, the cell is programmed to suicide. Another cell will take it's place. But in the case of fatal radiation poisoning, this happens to too many cells at once.
'Unacceptable risk' that a cell might turn cancerous might be a very low risk indeed, since cancer is fatal 'in the wild'. Most radiation damaged cells might very well be able to repair themselves perfectly if only they didn't suicide. Deactivating the suicide mechanism temporarily gives them time to repair themselves. Once repaired, they no longer want to suicide. However in the case where many cells were radiation damaged, this likely means some cells were repaired incorrectly and will now cause cancer. Maybe this is not as likely as it may seem at first? How well does radiation cause cancer? How exactly does it happen? I've heard that a speck of plutonium inhaled has a 100% chance of causing lung cancer. But that speck is emmitting radiation 24x7 killing and damaging neighboring cells all the time. Is it the nuclear damage to the cells that causes the cancer, or is it the constant healing? Doesn't the body send stem cells to repair damaged areas? Aren't stem cells more cancer prone?
Maybe in the case of radiation poisoning, the cells are damaged, and if prevented from suiciding, they will be fine. This isn't chronic radiation damage caused by contamination, but rather acute radiation poisoning caused by having rads of radiation shined through you.
Maybe not. Excessive X-Ray photographs cause cancer don't they? Maybe the irradiated mice and monkeys will be teeming with tumors in short order. Maybe some of them will touch their keepers and pick up some genetic material. Then they will mutate to be more humanlike, including having intelligence, and natural talent at karate. They will go live in the sewers and protect us from evil ninja gangs with their elite Kung Fu skillz.
I wonder if they will be able to tag memories from a certain time onward ala Paycheck. Maybe give a drug that binds harmlessly to all previously stored memories, but also protects those from the wipe...
Rocket based spaceflight just isn't capable of providing escape and no amount of incremental improvements are going to help. It's like trying to improve hot air balloon technology to achieve supersonic flight. The wing needed to be invented first.
If people stopped making hot air balloons prior to the Wright Bros, then they still would have invented their airplane. It took the internal combustion engine. Then the winged aircraft were eventually fitted with jet engines and THOSE were incrementally improved to achieve supersonic flight.
Because the technology currently used to reach orbit ( rockets ) can not be improved to reach the $100.00/lb target, there is no need to maintain a 'manned spaceflight infrastructure' based upon that technology. There will never be enough
incremental improvements to rocket based spaceflight to make it economical to send astronaughts to space.
Human spaceflight should be human spaceflight *in style* which means adequate safety measures and backups that a disaster is somewhat unlikely, and that barring disasters nobody will be harmed. This means for instance that a mission to Mars should not expose astronaughts to much more radiation than they would recieve had they stayed home. This means lots of heavy lead sheilding. If that's prohibitively expensive, then humans should not go. If humans can't bring enough supplies to stay a while in comfort and also enough instruments to do meaningful science then they shouldn't go either.
With the the price per pound to orbit forced by having to use rockets it makes more sense to employ robots. If they blow up on the launch pad, then make another one, and you don't need to provide air, transportation, supplies, or a return ticket home, and you can optimise reliability to maximize expected scientific knowledge per cost
instead of having to consider risk to human life.
Well hopefully, there will be no moon or mars missions in the forseeable future. These would be probably just as useless as the ISS, and more expensive and dangerous.
Manned spaceflight should end until earth to orbit costs $100/lb or less.
However space probes and experiments should continue to be sent up. In fact if the entire budget that is being used for manned spaceflight were redirected to unmanned space exploration and science it would be good.
If you can find a person who eats less calories than they burn, then the other robot overlords and I are going to breed such people, in tanks of pink slime hooked up to brain implanted VR in order to provide electricity for our robotic civilization.
Now, there may be a way to tweak your diet so that you metabolize less of the calories you consume - for instance, eat Hay. Goats can grow fat on a diet of Hay proving that hay contains plenty of calories, but lucky us, people can eat all they hay they want and not put on a single pound!
Slashdot Mirror
Someone said you could link up to four of these together, so that's 2 pounds. If you can put a thruster on board, of any kind then what about just lifting a pound of BBs up high enough that the orbit won't decay any time soon? Call it the flying saucer defense system. they have to fly in through a hail of BBs.
That is one thing space can do that antarctica can't... You can do whatever you damn please up there because in the end if you're willing to never come home, there will be no consequences.
I thought gorillas had tiny peni.
I wish emacs would not put stuff in /usr/local/share. I just deleted the contents of /usr/local on my debian box via a script that puts my custom stuff there since I assumed it wouldn't break anything and now emacs complains it's gone. Boo.
There I vented my gripe.
No it's not the cops themselves, but I do drop below the speed limit at times if I do not really know what the speed limit is. On many streets, traffic moves well above the speed limit, so that you could get a ticket for moving with traffic. When this happens, the police post cruisers on that street to get people to slow the heck down. Sometimes I look at the speed limit signs, but not all the time. Most police, even if you were speeding, will decide not to pull you over if you've slowed down on seeing them.
Police aren't going to ticket you if you weren't speeding and you slow down to below the speed limit. No law has been broken.
If you speed by them, then they would either not pull you over, pull you over and give you a warning, or pull you over and give you a ticket.
If they were not going to pull you over or were going to pull you over and give you a warning, then if you've substantially slowed down on seeing them, then you've acknowledged that you were speeding, and on seeing the cop realized it. There is no longer a reason for them to pull you over and give you a warning.
If you speed by them then you were either oblivious to the speed limit and need a warning/ticket, or think you can go that much over the speed limit even in front of a cop and so need a ticket - what would you do if you DIDN'T see a cop? Or you were oblivious to the cop and either oblivious or willfully disregarding of the speed limit, and may be distracted or on a cell phone or on drugs not to have seen either or to have used such poor judgement as to willfully ignore them. What the hell is up with you? You need to be pulled over and possibly given a ticket.
If you speed by the cop then he/she is going to think: Who the hell do you think you are?
The best thing to do when pulled over for a minor traffic offense is to act compliant, polite but not particularly talkative, almost bored as if you are doing a transaction at a job. Be mentally fatalistic about what is going to happen. Be uninteresting and unflustered, just an average Joe. The cop probably doesn't want to ticket an average Joe, unless there's a quota on. It's ok to show disappointment that you were pulled over on your face, but never direct any emotion at the cop, and don't let it in your voice.
I've been pulled over about ten times since my last ticket ( years and years ago ). I've always been given a warning rather than a ticket, even if I've had a headlight out or a missing registration slip/expired sticker/no seatbelt worn or been speeding ( slightly ) or appeared drunk. ( Once I had to do the funky chicken for possible DUI, but I was completely sober ( no alcohol in the past week ) so I got no ticket that time. )
I must be good at dealing with cops because although I get pulled over often, I don't get tickets. My brother on the other hand can't get away with anything. He's pulled over often and always given a ticket.
Here dude, this will get you HIGH!!!
Next day -
Holy shit dude. You're blue!
This is better than that sleeping drunk girl whose friends write all over her.
It makes sense to turn it on always because it prevents spying. It's possible to know for instance that I posted this slashdot message by looking at my network traffic. If slashdot had https turned on, then it would better protect my privacy.
It's possible for visa/mastercard/etc to run sites that accept their credit cards. You go to their site, enter your info and there you are. You don't enter your CC number anywhere but visa.com/mastercard.com/discover.com/americanexpress.com etc. Sites with merchant accounts send you to wlog https://visa.com/ccinfo/get_info?merchantaccount_id=12345&transaction_id=543210
Then the merchant account site queries a visa.com web service to get the information or just processes the transaction using their merchantaccount_id and transaction_id.
This service is kind of like what paypal does.
And you should know what the domain of your banking site is. Maybe browsers should bold the domain name that matched the cert and make it a different color for https sites. Some folks don't even have the url bar enabled. It should maybe be replaced with a non-optional notice of the domain you are visiting in that case.
If it really matters, the site can have a passphrase or random pic you recognize, and banks do this already.
Even having your full name echoed prominantly on the screen can help. If you login as jdoe and your name is Jerrome Doe, then seeing Welcome John Doe on the screen is going to make you wonder.
Anyone who violates 'policies' and sticks around long enough for 'the proper channels' to take them out should probably not have been taken down because they weren't doing anything criminal. IF they were doing something criminal, they won't be there long enough for them to care about being taken down by a lawsuit. They are going to do their damage, get their info, turn it into cash and get the hell out of dodge as fast as they can, which if they know what they are doing, will be quite fast indeed.
Hmmm. I use ssh this way all the time. I always answer yes I want to accept the other site's cert. I might wonder only if I had already accepted the site's cert and then I was being prompted again.
Here's the thing though with https: ANYONE can get a certificate from a trusted certificate signer. All the baddies have to do is get some drugged out loser to give them the necessary info request a signed certificate in their name. If someone's willing to be a crack ho for their drugs, something tells me they don't have compunctions about providing personal information so some dudes can register a domain for fifty bucks. It's really no skin off their nose if they lose their ability to register a domain name. And if they are civilly liable for financial damages, nobody can squeeze blood from a rock. Anyway they can just claim their identity was stolen. They can honestly claim they don't have a clue what a domain name is or how to register one.
So a baddie can get a cert for https://bankofamericasux.com/ and no funny windows pop up. ( I actually don't know if registrars look for domains that superficially resemble likely targets of baddies. It might be a good idea, though someone who thinks bank of america sucks ought to be able to get a certificate for bankofamericasux if they want to. Maybe they want to sell t-shirts that say Bank of America Sucks, and need to take credit card info...
Here's a story about a 'clever idea' I wanted to vet. I wanted to vet it because although it seemed clever to me I didn't know enough about it to know if it was just plain silly. I know very little about physics and electronics, so I posted it in sci.physics.
A while back a guy named James Woodward did an experiment where he attached capacitors to piezoelectric elements which vibrated them back and forth at a certain frequency. The capacitors would be charged and discharged in time with their vibrations. Woodward claims that the mass of the capacitors changes when charged and discharged in such a way that when they are being pushed by the piezoelectric vibrator they have a different mass than when they are being pulled thus producing net thrust. ( I have no idea or ability to judge the silliness or not of this basic idea ) however he claims to have seen the effect on a tabletop device.
Suppose it's not real. Then whooptee doo nothing to see here.
Suppose it is real. Another dude, figured out that the thrust is affected by ( I don't remember was it the 4th power? of the frequency of vibration . I can't find the paper any more. ). Woodward's device vibrated in the X kilohertz range, which was about as much as such a device could do, and produced ( he claims ) a small signal. However if you could devise something that operated in the megahertz range you'd have a clear and undeniable yes/no, as well as probably a practical device that could be used for flying jetson cars etc.
It seemed to me that the basic problem was to find something that could store and release energy as a capacitor does which can also be vibrated at megahertz frequencies. An answer that seemed plausable to me was: Why not have a piezoelectric crystal that is also phosphorescent? You could have say a drum shaped piezo crystal and shine a light on the center to charge it with energy as it vibrates in one direction, and then it would release that energy as it moved to it's other extreme and vibrate back and forth. There are phosphorescent substances that release their energy quite fast, so megahertz operation should be possible.
Anyway, I posted this on usenet, and guess what - nobody cared. It was a dumb idea probably. If you have to ask experts about your idea then it's probably not a good idea to begin with. This is because you don't know what the heck you are talking about.
Anyway, the technical term is Zillions.
CDRS that state they have recorded successfully have a substantially nonzero chance of not working IMMEDIATELY after being burned ( 10% is conservative ). Also CDRS that have been used, have likely been left sitting in grit and dust and quickly get scratched into uselessness. In my experience, CDRS that have worked at least once and have been sitting in a jacket pretty much unused, fairly reliably retain their data over at least a couple of years. YMMV.
One cool thing that Shoemaker/Levy had that this doesn't is a known cause. There was a known comet, on course to hit Jupiter, and lo and behold, after it was expected to hit Jupiter, there were new spots. This is just a new spot that looks similar to the Shoemaker/Levy spots but which could plausably have another cause other than impact.
Rather than take the chance that the repairs that get done will leave the cell cancerous, the cell is programmed to suicide. Another cell will take it's place. But in the case of fatal radiation poisoning, this happens to too many cells at once.
'Unacceptable risk' that a cell might turn cancerous might be a very low risk indeed, since cancer is fatal 'in the wild'. Most radiation damaged cells might very well be able to repair themselves perfectly if only they didn't suicide. Deactivating the suicide mechanism temporarily gives them time to repair themselves. Once repaired, they no longer want to suicide. However in the case where many cells were radiation damaged, this likely means some cells were repaired incorrectly and will now cause cancer. Maybe this is not as likely as it may seem at first? How well does radiation cause cancer? How exactly does it happen? I've heard that a speck of plutonium inhaled has a 100% chance of causing lung cancer. But that speck is emmitting radiation 24x7 killing and damaging neighboring cells all the time. Is it the nuclear damage to the cells that causes the cancer, or is it the constant healing? Doesn't the body send stem cells to repair damaged areas? Aren't stem cells more cancer prone?
Maybe in the case of radiation poisoning, the cells are damaged, and if prevented from suiciding, they will be fine. This isn't chronic radiation damage caused by contamination, but rather acute radiation poisoning caused by having rads of radiation shined through you.
Maybe not. Excessive X-Ray photographs cause cancer don't they? Maybe the irradiated mice and monkeys will be teeming with tumors in short order. Maybe some of them will touch their keepers and pick up some genetic material. Then they will mutate to be more humanlike, including having intelligence, and natural talent at karate. They will go live in the sewers and protect us from evil ninja gangs with their elite Kung Fu skillz.
Indeed, the space program has done wonders to further the sciences of project management and bureaucratic masturbation.
I wonder if they will be able to tag memories from a certain time onward ala Paycheck. Maybe give a drug that binds harmlessly to all previously stored memories, but also protects those from the wipe...
Only to a point. You're never going to develop supersonic hot air balloon travel. You need the wing.
Rocket based spaceflight just isn't capable of providing escape and no amount of incremental improvements are going to help. It's like trying to improve hot air balloon technology to achieve supersonic flight. The wing needed to be invented first. If people stopped making hot air balloons prior to the Wright Bros, then they still would have invented their airplane. It took the internal combustion engine. Then the winged aircraft were eventually fitted with jet engines and THOSE were incrementally improved to achieve supersonic flight.
There's a ridiculous picture of Gargamel wearing a spacesuit floating around. Ridiculous is the key thing about it.
Because the technology currently used to reach orbit ( rockets ) can not be improved to reach the $100.00/lb target, there is no need to maintain a 'manned spaceflight infrastructure' based upon that technology. There will never be enough incremental improvements to rocket based spaceflight to make it economical to send astronaughts to space.
Human spaceflight should be human spaceflight *in style* which means adequate safety measures and backups that a disaster is somewhat unlikely, and that barring disasters nobody will be harmed. This means for instance that a mission to Mars should not expose astronaughts to much more radiation than they would recieve had they stayed home. This means lots of heavy lead sheilding. If that's prohibitively expensive, then humans should not go. If humans can't bring enough supplies to stay a while in comfort and also enough instruments to do meaningful science then they shouldn't go either.
With the the price per pound to orbit forced by having to use rockets it makes more sense to employ robots. If they blow up on the launch pad, then make another one, and you don't need to provide air, transportation, supplies, or a return ticket home, and you can optimise reliability to maximize expected scientific knowledge per cost instead of having to consider risk to human life.
Well hopefully, there will be no moon or mars missions in the forseeable future. These would be probably just as useless as the ISS, and more expensive and dangerous.
Manned spaceflight should end until earth to orbit costs $100/lb or less.
However space probes and experiments should continue to be sent up. In fact if the entire budget that is being used for manned spaceflight were redirected to unmanned space exploration and science it would be good.
It will stay there for a decade or two longer because those sucking the tit will find a way to keep the milk coming.
If you can find a person who eats less calories than they burn, then the other robot overlords and I are going to breed such people, in tanks of pink slime hooked up to brain implanted VR in order to provide electricity for our robotic civilization.
Now, there may be a way to tweak your diet so that you metabolize less of the calories you consume - for instance, eat Hay. Goats can grow fat on a diet of Hay proving that hay contains plenty of calories, but lucky us, people can eat all they hay they want and not put on a single pound!