>> ^dag:

I've been following this for a while - and I'm seriously rooting for this mission, but count me as one of the people who thinks this is crazy, hubristic and over-engineered with too many points of failure.
Mars is a graveyard of failed missions. The most successful method of getting a rover on Mars to date has been the bouncing cushion balls method. Why wouldn't you try and improve on that method instead of going with a completely, untested extremely complicated new method? I suspect personalities and nerd egos are involved.
I understand that the sheer size of this rover (small car) makes it too big for a single bouncing-ball drop, but why not then, do two and let them come together and connect on landing?
If this mission succeeds, I promise to post a Sift Talk post saying sorry for being a dick about this mission and lacking faith in our scientists. promote.



I hope they send two JPL scientists over to kick your ass for this little morale building exercise. They do it too.. I've heard Sagan was actually killed while kicking ass. For planetary science. I'll assume you know that Hawking is a gangster.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I've been following this for a while - and I'm seriously rooting for this mission, but count me as one of the people who thinks this is crazy, hubristic and over-engineered with too many points of failure.

Mars is a graveyard of failed missions. The most successful method of getting a rover on Mars to date has been the bouncing cushion balls method. Why wouldn't you try and improve on that method instead of going with a completely, untested extremely complicated new method? I suspect personalities and nerd egos are involved.

I understand that the sheer size of this rover (small car) makes it too big for a single bouncing-ball drop, but why not then, do two and let them come together and connect on landing?

If this mission succeeds, I promise to post a Sift Talk post saying sorry for being a dick about this mission and lacking faith in our scientists. *promote.

More likely it was, "University Academics" "created computer models" that have been tested using "soccer players"... and other federally funded researchers are studying new methods of sound recording, which could be used by the Video Game Industry (a multi-billion dollar industry BTW). Maybe we should give some money to study the effects of prayer.

There's the whole temporal aspect of the issue. Who knows how long we'll be using electromagnetic radiation for communication. Perhaps in like, 100 to 1000 years we'll have invented some new method. Maybe we'll have changed so much by then that our current conceptions of technology and existence won't even be relevant anymore.

Say there's been, like, 1000 intelligent, space-faring species throughout our galaxy since the beginning of the universe. If we assume it took them roughly as long to evolve as it took to get complex life here on earth, we can assume that the first intelligent aliens took flight perhaps a billion years ago. And then, at even intervals a new species develops a technological society. Even with 1000 intelligent, technological species in our galaxy alone, there'd be like, on average, a million years between them. Chances of two of them evolving at the same time are relatively small. And even if they used radio-signals for like 10,000 years, before becoming something that we can't even conceive, or destroying themselves, that would still be an average of 990,000 years of radio-silence per 1,000,000 years. Thus, if we stick around even for thousands of years, we still only have a tiny, tiny chance of ever picking up a radio-signal from another intelligent species.

Anger Test - A new method of determining if someone has used steroids.

How to implement:

1. Write hurtful messages on paper sealed in an envelope.

2. Hand envelope to contestant.

3. Gage reaction.

[If Contestant Failed] 4. Move away from metal chairs.

There's more than one video floating around on this site talking about what the Exxon spill did to animals and people alike. What is said in this video is very similar to those, and all of them are from different people that I've seen. I think it's more likely that government is full of shit in anything they do to downplay it versus what these individuals are saying that are in the medical field and have been studying it trying to cure people since Exxon.

Because we already know that government and oil have not invested in new methods to clean up oil spills, so it's very unlikely they would also invest money into research on what exposure does to people during and after clean up from the Exxon.

If this oil leak is not taken of when they estimate it will be which from what I've read is late July and August for the relief wells to come online. If it keeps spilling out even with the additional wells, I don't see how anyone in this part of the world will be safe from it's effects given weather patterns and ocean currents. I saw on Craig Fergeson they had I believe his name is Jean Cousteau, son of Jacques Cousteau, who was talking about how the oil in the gulf would begin appearing in England due to the water currents and how saturated the water column is because of the disperants.

Lots of very disturbing videos out there regarding what the oil spill has done already. People on the water who were vomiting over the side because the fumes from the water was cutting off the oxygen and causing nausea. Fish so disoriented they were swimming into boats, swimming on their sides and upside down with their mouths sticking out of the water trying to breath. No sightings of dolphins in Florida for a long while, so they are either dead, dieing, or left the area. Kids breaking out in rashes who mysteriously recover shortly after leaving the areas in proximity to tainted zones. Fishermen who are aiding in the clean up, coming down with upper respiratory problems, going to their doctors and being told their lungs look like they've been smoking 3 packs a day when they are in fact non-smokers.

The same responders who at 911 telling people they should wear respirators for the clean up, who say that firemen who refused to wear them in 911 rescues came down with "the crud" from exposure to toxins. They say every person helping clean up the oil spill is offered a respirator, but BP took over distribution of them. And they won't allow people to have respirators without proper training in how to use them, which they will provide. But they won't begin the training until they feel people need the respirators. So you have the right to a respirator, they will give you one when you are trained, but they won't provide training until you need one. Makes perfect sense, like everything else associated with the handling of this.

Crops are diseased and dieing already from just the rain carrying the chemicals used to "clean up" the oil spill. I can't imagine that people out on the water aren't already severely exposed to these same chemicals if it can travel via water evaporation into the clouds to come down as rain...it has to be in the air for them all.

From other sources, they call exposure in Exxon and 911 "the crud" or "The Exxon crud". And people exposed to it have it for the rest of their life and eventually die because of it. I could see people in 911 being exposed just because it was a fast response situation and people were trying to do the right thing in a very short period of time. But there is no excuse for what is happening now, especially with the Exxon spill being there as evidence and proof of what can and will happen to people exposed to the oil and the chemicals used in it's clean up. A disaster caused by BP for money/time saving measures is one thing, but then allowing people trying to help contain a problem they had nothing to do with but bear all of the consequences of it to become ill and probably die from their efforts to help....that's something that can not stand.

I'm always impressed by the way people get so fixated on doing things the way they've always done them in the past, regardless of whether what they're used to makes sense.

It's mostly harmless, and mildly annoying when talking about application UI, but it leads to absolutely crazy behavior when we start talking about things that are really important, like political and economic systems.

Even if a new method is universally and demonstrably superior to the old one, there's always a nontrivial number of people who put up massive resistance towards having to alter their behavior, simply because they don't want to have to do things in a new way.

only a very small part of Christianity attempts to teach people to get along with each other. The rest of it is doctrine set up to encourage obedience to centralized power. This is all terribly ironic, since in the small portion of the bible actually dedicated to the teachings of jesus it presents the notion that because of jesus, anyone and everyone can have a direct connection to the magical abusive drunken old guy in the sky. Jesus spent much of his teachings tearing down the notion of centralized authority, and controlled access to spirituality.

Christianity became the political tool that we see today back in 325 when Roman Emperor Constantine paid a bunch of religious leaders to vote on which documents were representative of Christian faith - as long as they left room for the Emperor to be part of that power structure. It's much easier to control the people if they all worship the same god, instead of having multiple gods all with different agendas.

There's this small little bit of good stuff in the bible which is a decent chunk of what jesus says. The rest is filled with genealogies, tales of war, killings, an angry god, and Paul of tarsus, calling on the newly enlightened Christians to maintain the oppressive and intolerant orders of the old testament. All of that contrary to what jesus claimed was the entire purpose of his time on earth. Jesus talked about how his purpose was to do away with all of those old laws, and to create a new method of gaining favor with his dad (who is also somehow himself).

The bible itself is so clouded with mountains of useless if not dangerous and contrary garbage that people use to justify their own hatred. If the bible really was there to create a moral compass for people, it would be much, much shorter and clearer. It is quite possibly the most poorly written instruction manual ever created, and I've read some really terrible Engrish manuals before.

There are 1189 chapters in the bible. Does it really take 789,626 words to say "don't be a dick"? you'd think that the creator of the universe would make better use of text, and possibly reveal some genuinely useful information, like the nature of viruses and bacteria, techniques for better agriculture, methods of international diplomacy that don't involve "shoot first, ask questions later", or even something as basic as "slavery is bad".

A protest turns into a riot when people force you to give it up; in other words I would like to know if this was a botched police action (or over reaction). I don't know the details of course, but it seems the new method of control is to suppress first and apologize later.

After budget cuts the military turns to new methods to keep hair length down.

pffffffff I can see the lines...

...excel n00b

Anyway, from what I'm gathering this has nothing to do with adding to the limit of channels per each video right? This just has to do with how you select the channel on the video submission page?

I personally don't think it's broken as it is. This won't make it any easier...in fact it could make it harder. If I know something belongs in the "brain" channel I can use my alphabet skills and figure out where its at using a complex but accurate algorithm. There's even a song that helps young children learn this sorting algorithm. However if I wanted to find the "brain" channel under your new method, I'd have to try and determine where somebody else, or a consensus of the people decided where "brain" goes. That might not be how my mind works and I'd be confused and a little pissed.

I've tried out this interface, and it's absolutely terrible. I totally agree that we need a new method of approaching desktop interactivity to take us beyond the windows/macos era, but even those old standby's are lightyears more intuitive and usable than this gimmicky system.

yes! thank you volumptuous, i'll second your notion to ban siftquisitions. the system of "law" here is rooted in the word "inquisition" for god sakes.

the people conducting siftquisitions are the the same type of people who have been burning people at the stake for the last 10,000 years--only difference is now they do it on internet web forums. i do not consider that "progress".

new methods, but still the same, terrible, people.

>> ^thain:
@HollywoodBob: You're right, it really isn't the American way. Not only is it why we're in this predicament to begin with, it's why the government has picked up so many social programs that could be handled so much better on a local level.

Unfortunately though we can't deal with things like health care and the economy at the local level anymore. Maybe we could have after WWII, but now they've grown too big to deal with locally.


>> ^Ryjkyj:
"Ask not what your country can do for you. But what you can do for your country."

A great sentiment, too bad it was forgotten before it was ever uttered. If you look at the social programs in most of the industrialized world after WW2, the US is the one that followed the "Why should I help anyone but myself" creed. Though much of Europe was in rubble but they picked themselves up and built social programs to care for their citizens. What'd the US do? We built corporations that exploit and swindle their customers. And we still see it today, from the majority of conservatives, lower taxes, no social programs, basically "I work for what I have, if other people don't have that, they're lazy and/or stupid." The foolish part being that most Americans end up paying a far larger share of their income to taxes, insurance and university, than any European citizen does in taxes. Greed became the priority in the US not the wellbeing of our citizens. Is it any wonder that the countries of Europe are looking for new methods to measure the success of a country other than it's GDP.

>> ^charliem:
= CERN invented the internet, they invented MRI, they invented the concentrated x-ray for blasting cancer sites, they invented super conductors, as Brian mentioned, they've also come up with a new method of cooling, they've even invented and built a brand new parallel internet with massive capacity and the ability to have distributed processing / applications running over it (google "The GRID - CERN"), they invented the integrated circuit, the transistor (and as a result, PLENTY of other complex digital structures)...


CERN:

1)invented the internet. False, invented at MIT. Though it is true, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

2) they invented MRI. False, it was invented at Stony Brook.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_resonance_imaging

3) they invented the concentrated x-ray for blasting cancer sites.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godfrey_Hounsfield

4) they invented super conductors. False, discovered by Onnes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heike_Kamerlingh_Onnes

I don't have the time to debunk all of this. Most it is wrong, half truths, or misguided.
Here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN is where you can see there accomplishments.