Comment Re:Now these guys have some balls (Score 1) 663
Have you ever bought something on eBay before? They always rip you off on the postage.
The list is clearly stolen from elsewhere. A quick Google of some of the more obscure phrases, such as "Purina Princess" yields this:
http://outsports.com/nfl/2005/0301nflshopnaughtywords.htm
Surely that's not a coincidence?
Indeed, I think it's a very sensible idea to put a lot of focus on unmanned exploration (comparatively cheap) while we simply don't have the money for big bucks manned missions. Don't forget that while we did some bloody amazing things in the 70's, we did it on the back of frankly obscene levels of government funding. The US, as one economist recently put it, is currently so much in denial about its debt that it's akin to hiding the dead body in the closet.
Bear in mind that in the heydey, the NASA budget was around 4.5% of the federal budget and it's now 0.6% - that works out to be about half the money in constant dollars. Double the money and almost all of it was being poured into the Apollo program. Now NASA has less money, is a larger organisation and has more projects on the go.
This is a golden opportunity to focus our attention on enhancing robotic exploration and unmanned experiments. Thus when we do have another golden age, we'll be a lot more ready for it. There is no point at all throwing small amounts of money at human spaceflight, it is and always will be expensive and cutting corners leads to wasted research hours and costs lives.
Only an American English-based machine would. TheRaven64 is from Britain, judging by previous posts (thought I'd check before making baseless assumptions), and over here we call it maths, as a contraction of mathematics. Similarly would it be hard to add in a function that randomly selects whether to use the digit or the word when referring to a number depending on the context (which could conceivably be taught)?
I thought that "may be" as opposed to "maybe" was a bigger giveaway.
Either way, a smart AI attempting to trick humans should deliberately add in mistakes because this is exactly what we perceive as human.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cerro_Prieto_Geothermal_Power_Station
It's not in the US, for starters (though granted that's a complex of 5 circa 170MW stations). Neither is the largest single plant in the world in the USA either, that's in the Philippines. Uncle Sam clocks in at number 6, with Salton Sea - which I think the parent post is referring to. The US does have the largest total installed power, however, at around 3GW.
Salton Sea itself has a pretty toxic seabed, with arsenic, selenium, DDT and lead amongst other things. It's right on top of the San Andreas fault and has been of environmental concern long before we started building geothermal stations. Oh, and it's evaporating.
Pretty much all geothermal power plants simply dump the water back where they found it, so the vast majority of the contaminants go back underground and don't cause any additional problems. Dissolved gas from the steam can cause some problems, but similarly you can either filter/extract this or re-inject it underground.
As for cleaning turbines, there are efforts by CalEnergy to extract some of the more useful materials from the waste water, like zinc. Additional benefits are the materials being very pure - commercial grade - so you don't need to waste more energy on refinement. Arsenic, it's nasty stuff, but surely more easily stored than nuclear waste for example (not to open that can of worms)? You just put it in big sealed vats and hide it away, or you export it for use in industrial processes, for example as a dopant for the semiconductor industry. I think the effort of cleaning/switching the blades out every once in a while is worth it, personally.
You'll learn to write good reports with practice, two or three years of a degree does it for most people. Far, far more important than proposal writing is presentation. You can write the best statement of purpose in the world, but unless you can deliver it to the interviewer without sending them to sleep, it's worthless. English would help, but it's not really the right sort of training. It's very good if you want to know how to critique a text and structure your arguments, however unless you are really interested in some quite obscure literature, I would give it a miss. You would get more out of taking a heavy CS/Maths/Eng route and joining a debating society.
If you want to improve your written skills, buy some books and start reading. Most of the people I know who can't write very well also don't really read anything or they only read tabloids. And by reading I mean novels, not just dry, verbose text books.
Arguing on the internet helps too.
Saliva causes cancer, but only if swallowed in small amounts over a long period of time. -- George Carlin
