The question would be, what is the effect of an impact on a ribbon, and it's detachment from it's anchors, going to do for any load going up or down that ribbon? My feeling is that it's not particularly healthy to be riding that ribbon, unless your elevator car is actually able to transfer to another ribbon even after it's anchors have detached. Might be a good idea to not be under any likely fall paths from a given spot on a strand either.

From the perspective of over-engineering the project, I would suspect that what you would want to do is have elevators using some combination of 3 or more ribbons, oriented in different directions, with the ability of the load to be handled on any single strand, but with the expectation that at any given time the loss of no more than one strand would be acceptable, and passengers would be expected to evacuate (with appropriate suits and chutes) and cargo loads would be "aimed" at uninhabited areas. (Agreed that may be "interesting" at certain altitudes....)

Become a father at your earliest opportunity! Onset of puberty being optimal it appears.

Disclaimer - this is to be taken in a sarcastic vein.

Not necessarily in a substantially more pleasant way of reaching that end.

Again, how is this really different from any other colonization project? Look at the history of colonization in the Americas, and you'll see that many died out entirely as a result of being unprepared for the environment that they encountered. I suspect that you'll see similar results in the history of colonization into Australia, and if records existed, for pretty much any migration into areas where humans had not been before.

The general idea would be to find a way to draw the O2 out of the rust initially, and supplant that and the nitrogen we need from supplies sent from earth. Not cheap by any means, but then the colony would be working to grow plants to recover the O2 from CO2. Some water would be brought from Earth, but some would be recovered from ice on the planet. And food would be one of the other reasons to grow plants.

I'm not saying that the colony would survive. I wouldn't plan on giving even 10:1 against, but presumably we would learn things that could be applied to help the next colonization attempt. But then I'm not expecting the described mission to happen either. If it does, great. If it doesn't, hopefully another will before too much longer.

The reason to buy (if at all) one on the black market, is for the appearance of authenticity. As far as how one would be used would be to "stage" a bomb incident, with the bot "disarming" the bomb, an "inspection/cleanup" team (in paramilitary gear to mask their identity) "clearing" the area, then as everyone thinks the area is clear, the real bomb, or bombs are triggered in the crowd. Not only do you end up having the effects of the bombing, but you end up discrediting the security forces being used to protect the events.

I would not be surprised if the legitimate bots were used in other situations besides bomb inspection tasks. They are used in other situations already, I would expect that some will be used to inspect sewers and storm drains in the area of the stadium to insure that people are not using those as ways to get past entry gates, getting a better picture of what is happening in hostage situations, and so on. I don't know that a "fake" can't be used in one of these types of situations either as a bomb, or to emplace a bomb of some sort. Or again do other things to leave the legitimate security forces looking bad.

But yes, all of these things could easily be done without going to any effort to make it look "real". The only problem I can see with "calling them up" is that I wouldn't be at all surprised if the devices are going to be considered highly suspect through the legitimate shipping channels. For that matter I would not be surprised if all packages from iRobot over the next several months were "delayed in transit." But well over half of the people here could probably make a believable mock up of one of these things with off the shelf compnents at hardware and electronics stores, even in some of the most tightly controlled areas.

But even he was unable to forsee the Mule.

Since these bots have been as widely used in combat zones, I'm wondering how many are in the black market, and of that population, how many are already in Brazil, and outside of the control of the local security forces that will be using the ones that are authorized. As a result I wonder if the ones that are being delivered to the security forces are going to be branded in some way to make it difficult for people possessing the black market variety devices (or since there are many pictures and videos of them in action, it's not like someone interested in doing so would have any problem manufacturing counterfeits) setting them up as bombs themselves, hiding them in plain sight within the crowds of spectators.

A couple of possibilities could be to brand the 30 with team colors of all but the Brazil and Spain teams, or team logos. Granted that would require approval of Fifa, but if it is their security teams, I would suspect tha tthey would approve.

Not so much. Same flaws apply as addresses are still allocated through dhcp, and someone who has a given address now, very probably won't have that address the next time they go to a website.

To embellish smash's response, no there is no privacy benefit to using NAT. If you want some sort of a privacy benefit, you still need to add a firewall to your connection that can monitor your traffic for the very same things it would have to monitor for if you use global addressing. The only thing that NAT provides is an address translation interface, too allow you to have a larger pool of addresses to use than your provider can grant. If there is a port forward for a service set up either statically or dynamically (upnp) any flaws in the service that is being forwarded can be exploited in the same way it would be if there were no NAT involved.

...no one observes that the Jelly Doughnut rock on mars was where the complaints about Beta might have been thrown?

I don't personally consider 'nul' to be a character, but if you do, so be it.

In a single deck of cards, there are not 52^2 ways of dealing two cards. Once you have dealt a card, you no longer have 52 cards in the deck. To calculate the number of permutations of 2 cards being dealt out of 52 cards, you multiply 52 for the first card, by 51 for the number of possible second cards. Unless you think the odds of dealing two ace of spades out of a standard poker deck of 52 cards is reasonable. The principle is also true for key chording.

Using open source does not require that you release your code. It's distributing open source software that requires that you make available (at a nominal cost) the changes you have made to that code, or the entirity of the source code if you are the original generator of it.

I suspect that the analogy that more accurately describes your intent is a big company finding an image in the Creative Commons with the allowance to use freely with attribution, allowing the use of the image in commercial products, and distributing material (manuals, advertising, or using the image on their public website, and Not providing attribution. Or possibly an embeded system from a company that sells routers, and includes open source software in the router, but does not make available the modifications to the source code needed to make the binaries usable on the embeded system. Then again, I could be wrong.

The standard american keyboard has 101 keys. the 7bit ascii character set consists of 127 characters. Most character sets in use today represent 255 symbols or more. We use a variety of means to access the characters in excess of the keyboard keys, either by using key sequences, or key chords. Examples of Key Chords in common use include various Ctrl key combinations, such as Ctrl-q and Ctrl-s and in console use, many of the Ctrl key combinations that represent the first 26 or so characters are still commonly available. That said, some of those map to dedicated keys, such as Ctrl-J for Backspace, Ctrl-T for Tab, and Ctrl-M for Return. Another example of chording is the way that most people, who have been using their computer for more than a year, use the 'Shift' key to access upper case characters. Key sequences are often used in combination with the right 'Alt' key and the numeric keypad. Some of us remember using this for basic ascii art line and fill characters.

It is trivially easy to add support for various asian keybord solutions that allow you to typekey combinations to access character sets of several hundred characters. As an excersize for the reader to prove, consider the 26 characters of the english alphabet, and chording up to four keys per hand or 8 characters to select characters. That gives you 62,990,928,000 possible characters that you could access. Without using the shift keys.

That said, mapping a symbol to a character, and a key combination to a symbol/character is trivial compared to maping a set of instructions for a computer to perform based on that symbol. However if I understand correctly, that may be what the developers of Slashdot Beta have attempted.

Don't fall prey to these trendy attempt to get you away from truely understanding what you are doing when programing. Write to the bare metal. Ada did.

...on a google chromestick, sell i to Samsung, Visio, Westinghouse, Sharp and Sony, then when Panasonic comes knocking, say "See Charles Shultz."