Comment Re:To all the right wing drivelists (Score 1) 262
I authored the previous comment; I didn't realize that I was logged out when I did, so it showed up as AC. But it's me.
Go old-school - Radium!
I bought my Casio in 2005, it's solar rechargeable. I've worn it daily with the original batter every since I bought it, never a problem and the time is always right. I'm too utilitarian to want something that needs constant attention. Maybe it comes from being a tech, I get tired of fixing problems and see no reason to generate them.
And the NASA HEMD guys say that to do that, you first need to have a deep space flight "with training wheels," i.e., one to something like high retrograde lunar orbit (far away to be serious, and actually test the deep space parts of the mission, but close enough you can meaningfully abort) and that, in practice, to both get the money for the test AND to make the test more realistic, the astronauts need some goal for spending 2 weeks orbiting outside the Moon, and the ARM provides that.
If the Earth had a well placed "mini-Moon" at the present, we could go to that, but as of right now, we don't appear to.
He seems to be looking at money spent on an asteroid project as money that could have been spent on HIS asteroid project. Meanwhile the money that is being spent is ultimately being spent to reduce further expenses on future space projects, maybe even his if he considered the potential merits of this mission he's seeking to squash.
I am not 100% sure that he is, but you are correct, he gives that impression. What is (IMHO) much more likely is that, if his ideas carry the day, ARM will be canceled and nothing will take its place and (with all due respect to Elon Musk) we will be set back another decade on going to Mars.
Note, however, that the asteroid survey mission could not be finished in time to provide a target for the first stage of ARM (or, to put it the other way, the ARM timetable does not allow for starting and running a survey mission from scratch). That means that HEMD (human space flight) is lukewarm on the survey mission and is not going to pay for it. Now, I regard that as a mistake, but I understand it.
Also, note that $ 200 million will not pay for a survey mission. That would be more like discovery class, i.e., $ 500 million or more.
So now Motorola phones will have spyware and bugware like the Huawei ones?
Don't forget Xiaomi as well. Their mi5 software is actually given away because Xiaomi wants to become a cloud company and not a hardware company (i.e., they don't want to follow Apple's footsteps in making nice phones, but Google's footsteps by making nice phones that collect data).
The mi5 software is part of that and is why they give it away - to help collect data for the cloud.
Even Williams Electronics, an arcade game maker that used an upside-down Motorola logo, spun off its video game business to Midway, which is now part of Time Warner.
Actually, when it was spun off, it was Williams-Bally-Midway. In the 80s, Williams experimented with arcade games, and then acquired Midway to be their arcade division. (WIlliams also acquired Bally for pinball). Depending on the mood, the game would either be released under Williams or Midway (likewise for pinballs under Williams or Bally). Eventually more and more of it just went towards Midway until it was basically doing all the arcade games and got spun off later.
Williams-Bally today makes gaming devices (slot machines), having decided to shut down their pinball division instead of either suspending or spinning it off.
He has been saying this for a while, most recently (to my knowledge) at the recent Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG) meeting in DC. I was there and have to say that the community (at least, the sample of the community in that room) did not come to even rough consensus on his proposal, and was in fact split roughly 50-50. There is, however, a pretty strong consensus on the funding of a asteroid survey mission, an infrared telescope on an interior orbit to the Earth to find most of the possible "city-buster" NEA. This is pretty much what the B612 foundation is proposing, but they haven't raised the money yet, nor is on any NASA funding plans.
My own personal opinion, FWIW, is that Binzel is wrong and that the ARM mission is a first good step to Mars.
Thank you, I will be using the analogy in the future! Where are my mod points when I need them?
Sure hope that's a typo, or heart attacks are really fatal over there.
It's probably due to the conversion from metric. Notice how 100 KPH was rounded off to 60 MPH in the summary? The submitter rounded off whatever 8% in metric is.
The use of a decimal type instead of integer type was the key to figuring this one out.
AT&T agreed to offer $10 DSL as a condition of merging with Bell South. I tried many times, calling AT&T, Googled a ton, etc. They fucked us. They probably offered the $10 DSL to exactly one rich ass hole. Why should we expect better this time around?
You know that you don't have to just add useless and uninteresting words to something that already had substance, right? At least borrow some quotes from Socrates' Dialogues to spice things up: There is admirable truth in that. That is not to be denied. That appears to be true. All this seems to flow necessarily out of our previous admissions. I think that what you say is entirely true. That, replied Cebes, is quite my notion. To that we are quite agreed. By all means. I entirely agree and go along with you in that. I quite understand you. I shall still say that you are the Daedalus who sets arguments in motion; not I, certainly, but you make them move or go round, for they would never have stirred, as far as I am concerned. If you're going to say _nothing_, at least be interesting about it, post anonymously, or risk looking more clueless / foolish. This is why the moderation system is in place, and mods typically don't listen to inanities like "Well said" when deciding on what to spend their points.
1. I'm too busy to sit around thinking up additional words to throw in so I can score "mod" points
2. The people I like on Slashdot are too busy to read a bunch of additional words I only threw in so I can score "mod" points
3. It's not in my nature to waste words, or to waste time
where Gates & Jobs got all their ideas from.
Actually, Jobs just brought people over to see the demo. No one actually saw any code.
It's why Woz had to invent (and patent) "regions" which was needed because it's the way to handle overlapping windows. (Woz got in a plane accident a short while later where he supposedly told Jobs when he visisted, "Don't worry, I didn't forget regions").
It was only after it was all said and done did someone from Xerox tell Woz their Alto didn't have overlapping windows.
If other posts here on Slashdot are any indication, "Mr. Councilman" is just as likely to lose political points by supporting the poor.
Actually this particular councilman represents an extremely high-rent district--Manhattan's upper east side. I doubt there are many wealthier neighborhoods in the world. He's not doing this to 'score points', he's doing it to do the right thing.
so I started working on a telepresence bot.
Pics?
[If you mean Comicon-like conventions, have you "cosplayed" the casing as a SF/comic/video-game robot?]
painting the output onto the inside of a sphere with the viewer at the origin; the viewer also looks from inside the sphere, but isn't tied to the actual camera angle.
That is not just clever, but the more superior "obvious in hindsight" clever.
"Engineering without management is art." -- Jeff Johnson
