How is that smug superiority. It's what he did and likely he didn't think anything of saying that.

People do say "firing up calculator", "firing up google", "firing up IE". when they do those things.

And running a calulator program on a computer is hardly "elite" or smug.

I'm not sure who you are calling the middle men ... the publisher? Isn't Amazon/Apple just the new conjoined distributor/marketer/wholesaler middle man?

With this new model many authors are going to miss the work of the middle men. For instance, the first big sell is from book rep. to bookstore purchaser. I used to buy books for an independent bookshop and let me tell you, for anything that wasn't Oprah-popular, we were the gatekeepers as to quantity and shelf space. Without the hard sell of the book rep it would be "two/next" and a they'd be a spine amidst many other spines. And let me tell you, authoring is not music writing ... you don't have the luxury of having only 1 out of 15 being a commercial success in order to pay the bills.

What I'm hoping for is actually a huge increase in the number of publisher "middle men", and growth of the smaller independents. They now have the tools to compete where once distribution power was reserved for the kings. And authors still need somebody out there hawking and flogging ... they're mostly too eclectic a crowd to do it themselves.

To be fair, in Asia people tend to be smaller, and they look more ridiculous on a full-size motorcycle than on a scooter.

I haven't been to China, but in SE Asia there are more motorbikes (scooters) on the road than cars and it works great. It's scarier to drive a car there than a motorbike. I, as a somewhat large white male, may look ridiculous on some of the smaller scooters - but you simply have to choose well when renting.

Even the silliest looking machines I saw didn't look *that* silly with a tiny Thai person riding them, and over there even foreigners look a little silly riding the larger bikes.

Actually, the funniest thing is that they're so ubiquitous that people tend to know more about them than they do about cars. Here in the US, everyone at least knows the difference between the different sizes of cars, and can probably tell a "nice" car from a cheap one. In Thailand, while I could tell motorbikes apart by size and style, I noticed that the Thais have all kinds of ways to classify them and can tell how good one is visually where I could tell no difference. Really, it is not hard to impress girls if you have the right motorbike (which I did, luckily...) as even they can tell.

Of course, you're right, there are no absolutes here. It's better to hit an animal than swerve into oncoming traffic. And, by animals, I wasn't talking about bunnies, I was assuming deer or moose. Hitting a moose at high speed would be disastrous, so avoiding it would be a priority, but that would have to be weighed against anything else you might hit.

"Pump the brakes" was only for low-traction conditions. No one should ever pump the brakes for anything else, unless they experience a skid/lockup.

True, but it's more complicated than that. I live in a cold climate, and icy roads are common for 5-6 months of the year. My first driver's ed outing was the day after freezing rain; trial by fire, as it were. Your advice for braking is mostly right, but there are some important caveats.

To stop the fastest, yes, locking the brakes while throwing it in neutral is the best option. However, sometimes it is better to avoid the hazard. To regain control on a vehicle without ABS, releasing the brakes is required to unlock the brakes. On sheer ice, the brakes can lock with very little pressure on the pedal, requiring you to release the brake very shortly after depressing it to gain a bit of traction. This gives you a short window to redirect your vehicle during a slide. Repeat rapidly and you can gain the ability to turn away from your original trajectory.
Needing to stop quickly or with some control is not necessarily caused by a driver screwing up or being a moron; black ice exists and can be virtually invisible, animals can run onto the road from the forest, people can run onto the street from behind a building... there are numerous hazards that can't be anticipated.

It's even worse now with ABS, and that does the pumping for you (and has the specific goal of *not* stopping you as fast as possible, but instead purposefully reducing your braking power in order to maintain greatly increased maneuverability).

This is the most important part of your post. With ABS, in either situation, press firmly on the brakes an DO NOT PUMP. If possible, try to avoid the hazard, as you should have some steering control. However, you will not be able to stop as quickly as a vehicle without ABS. Personally, since I was trained on a vehicle without it, I prefer a vehicle that doesn't have it. Unfortunately, they are becoming more and more rare. I do understand why they have included it in most vehicles these days - most people aren't exposed to these kind of driving conditions, and don't know what to do when it happens. I find that people just freeze, turn the steering wheel and jam on the brakes when sliding on ice. In a vehicle without ABS, this will likely send them directly into the object they were trying to avoid.

And if your brakes start to fade and you are losing control, put your brake foot to the floor, pull (or step on) your emergency brake, and hold on. You'll skid, and you'll stop, but with no control at all.

As I mentioned above, there are times when that is exactly the wrong thing to do. It's better to avoid a large animal than to hit it at a slightly lower speed. You don't want your vehicle spinning out of control on a highway. If the ice isn't too bad, jamming the brakes will make you skid, while holding the brakes less firmly will slow you down without putting you into a skid. If you are heading for a bridge or cliff, you want to steer away, not head straight for it. (And if you're on ice, I personally guarantee you won't melt your tires!)

I have no experience with brake assist, so I can't comment on it.

Because what the Rovers have accomplished in [roughly] 4000 rover days could have been done in [roughly] 20 man days and probably done better to boot.
Are we talking Earth days are we talking Martian days? What's the basis of your estimate? For the cost of getting a man to Mars and back how much research could we do into robotic exploration? How much better could we make them? I'm still not seeing the value proposition of sending humans there.

That's the theory. In practice, the missions are almost always one shots, if a probe is lost it's game over for that mission. (The sole exception on Mars to date is the Phoenix lander, a cobbled together low budget 'replacement' for the lost Mars Polar Lander.)
Yeah and if the mission fails it's a pity and you move on. End of story. If a human dies in space it's a national tragedy and a huge failure. Either one is at risk of failure it's just that a failed non-manned mission is nowhere near as much of a setback in terms of moral or otherwise.

There are people out there that believe that we live INSIDE the hollow Earth. If you cannot change their minds, do you really expect to be able to change everyone mind on this?

You want all the religious nuts? Sure, take all of them.

Though I find it funny, this family is complaining about the government forcing stuff down their throats, yet you can bet your life that if they were in power, you'd be burning on a stick for witchcraft.
Not to mention the old (+new) US governments funding for 'faith based projects' like abstinence only projects.

I got a little riled up, I'll admit, issues with the room mate lately.

I have nothing against those who hold religious views, as I sort of fall into that category, but it upsets me when they discredit science in the name of religion.

What I mean is, there are some very factual principles upon which our technology is derived. These same principles are fundamental throughout the observed universe, and we have used those principles to determine a fossil was created 65 million years ago. If you choose not to believe those fossils were created by a dead animal, than you should not be part of the club that firmly believes so. Everyone on Slashdot (Being News for Nerds) is of a scientific or technical inclination. To claim to be scientific and then refute reproducable scientific evidence is ridiculous, and should be treated as such.

So what exactly are you looking for that would've made this the next great thing?

I use the hell out of my iphone, and in my view the two things that most limit its usefulness are the slowness of 3G, and the size of the screen.

The benefits of a larger screen size obvious have some tradeoffs with regards to portability. But I see no problem with Apple offering two sides of the spectrum and letting consumers decide which features are more compelling.

humanity will go to the stars again.

Humanity has never gone farther than the moon. Our probes aren't much past the heliosphere.

"All spelling and grammar errors are intentional. Grammar Nazis' need entertainment."

Head spinning... Brain failing... fingers convulsing over keyboard...

Thanks for that!

The PS3 actually works amazingly well with Windows 7 media sharing ability, why someone would want to go to such lengths as to use a 3rd party app just blows me away. Microsoft sure went all out when it comes to the media sharing in Win7, its flawless IMO, there's no slowdowns, refreshing the media library and adding new files takes seconds in WMP12. Pretty much every format that the PS3 supports will play back with out any issues...I use mkv2vob for my mkv's and for anything that isn't an mkv and does not happen to play on the PS3, i just use RipBot264 and make a h264 MP4 file. I have found that 3rd party apps only use up ram, slow shit down and sometimes don't work properly at all. Win7+WMP12 seem to be perfect for sharing media to the PS3 and the 360 (i own both consoles).

Definition:
      sff = science fiction and fantasy, 99.999% of which is written, and has *nothing* to do with anything ever filmed/video'd/gamed

This is nothing new. Too bad it'll be a one-day wonder on slashdot, and ignored thereafter.

When I first got into fandom (we're talking Real fandom, not media fandom (Trekkie/Who/etc) in the mid-sixties, there was a lot of talk about sff as being the bridge between the two cultures. The two cultures were liberal arts and the sciences. As Snow pointed out, he knew plenty of scientists and engineers who could quote Shakespeare, chapter and verse, but not a single liberal arts person who knew even the simplified version of the Three Laws of Thermodynamics.

It's gotten *WAY* worse as the right, esp., has pushed the dumbing down of the American educational system the last 35 years. ("we value education", but we'll only fund it with property taxes, no income taxes, and we'll put a cap on property taxes). The result is that too many people in the US conflate electricity with magic.

One result of this is that sf is looked down on by the majority of Americans, except for maybe movies, and they're 90% made by producers and directors and scriptwriters who can't figure out how to have a consistent storyline, much less keep the real world in mind (Armageddon being a perfect example, where, on top of every other thing that's wrong with it, has Willis just sort of pushing the button... without paying any attention to whether he was doing it at the right instant).

SF, yeah, that "Buck Rogers stuff", it's all fantastic (the speaker being unable to distinguish between sf & fantasy, since they live in a fantasy world in their heads). Yeah, laser beams, I mean, ray guns, and asteroids hitting the Earth, and designer diseases, yup, all fantasy.

Yeah, it is pro-survival. We get to worry about things 20-30 years before the rest of you do, and come to some kinds of answers (got gray goo? microwave it!) But does the majority care? They think Godzilla movies are sf.

In the meantime, I can point to any number of books with serious literary merit (ranging from Brunner's Stand On Zanzibar, using the style of Dos Passos' USA, to Stephenson's Anathem, and a ton in between), that I'd love to see brought into any English class, and give kids things to think about... but science is hard, as Barbie said.

                      mark

sounds right since they decrease in the list