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From TFA:

Pixels: 6.22 million (number of RGB sub-pixels)

Yes, that's 1920 x 1080 x 3 = 6220800. I can't wait until the camera manufacturers catch onto this new method to inflate the number of "megapixels" in their cameras. Fifteen megapixels here we come!

(Just don't mention the bayer pattern used on CCD's)

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/wireless-network 2.htm

Check out the whole article to find out more about the various 802.11x standards (excluding the new 's' one).

CDRWs are NOT magnetic. Old style WORM and MO drives used magneto-optical technology, but current CDRWs use a dye that can be altered between transparent and opaque states by the laser.

How do CD-RWs Work

"An older, hybrid technology called magneto-optical (MO) is seldom used anymore. MO uses a laser to heat the surface of the media. Once the surface reaches a particular temperature, a magnetic head moves across the media, changing the polarity of the particles as needed."

Reference

Back in my day, this was fairly common. I keep forgetting that I'm getting old. It's been over ten years since I used magneto-optical disks, but it seems like yesterday.

Where did you hear that?

From How Stuff Works

"To create a rewriteable CD (CD-RW), you need a dye layer that can be changed back and forth between opaque and transparent. This page discusses the special material that CD-RW's use. The material has the property that it can change its transparency depending on temperature. Heated to one temperature, the material cools to a transparent state; heated to another temperature, it cools to a cloudy state. By changing the power (and therefore the temperature) of the writing laser, the data on the CD can be changed, or "rewritten.""

Exactly.

As expensive as it is to get mass up into orbit, which would be cheaper:

Shuttle weighs 4.5 million pounds
Hubble telescope weighs 24,500 pounds

Cost per pound to orbit is something like $10k per pound, low ball.

So launch costs for a new hubble would be about $245 million.
Launch cost for the shuttle seem to run around 1Billion per shot. That leaves 755 million to build a new hubble and apply the refits. The original hubble cost 1.5 Billion at launch, which I presume includes launch costs, development costs and such, of which building costs would actually be pretty cheap, seeing as how we still have the plans to use in building another one.

a super weapon that can hit an enemy anywhere -- provided he stands right here on this spot marked X

I think it's called a mine.

I mentioned this in another post, but it bears repeating. eBay is--first and foremost--an auction house.

They behave like other auction houses do, and increase bids in an incremental fashion. This prevents ninja-bidders at the last second from bidding pennies more then someone else and winning the auction. (Imagine that you're bidding on a 4.1M dollar house, and someone comes in with 0.01 seconds to go and bids $4,100,000.01).

This practice is NOTHING NEW. Where eBay had to modernize the concept was the fact that everyone is a proxy bidder on their site, no one is bidding in person. This means that they follow the other rules that auction houses follow, which is that when two proxy bids are registered for the same amount, the first person whose proxy bid arrives gets the bid, and the other person has already been outbid.

This is effectively the same thing that would happen were one to visit an actual, honest-to-God auction house. Two people would raise their paddles at the same time. The auctioneer would pick one of them (probably the one whom he sees first), and would accept a bid from them. The other person would either then keep their paddle up for the next bid increment, or they would put it down because that really was the highest dollar amount they were willing to pay.

Ignorance of how auctions work shouldn't entitle one to any amount of payout in a lawsuit. It should entitle one to a swift "ha ha" and a kick in the pants for wasting the rest of our time.

But at the minummum I can say something about causaution, and can see that an atmosphere with 10% CO2 might be a wee bit low on Oxygen.

Let's see, shall we? According to wikipedia, normal concentration of oxygen is 20.946%. A 10% dilution would drop that to an incredible 19.042%. I mean, choke! choke! A dilution of oxygen like would be barely even noticable - it's like an altitude of around 1km.

*Being a memeber of the Big Money Global Warming Religion, you operate on Dogma, not reason. As do members of any religion.

But as the toxicity of carbon dioxide is nothing to do with global warming (on which I'm agnostic anyway) this point is moot. Let me remind you of what you wrote: "CO2 Is NOT toxic in any way shape or form.".

** It' a well known fact that anal-retentve people who go around correcting poples grammer and spelling have no sense of humor.

One last thing, I suppose the reason that submarines have scrubbers is just part of a big money conspiracy too? Which one this time? The military-industrial complex? Shapeshifting lizards?

"During the submerged periods of missions, the LiOH cartridges are changed whenever the CO2 level in the confinement approaches the allowed limit." Surely, if you were right, they wouldn't be concerned about an upper limit for CO2, they'd only be concerned about a minimum for O2.

How stupid of the so-called engineers! Didn't they realise that there's no problem with carbon dioxide, and all they had to do was top up the oxygen from bottles or something! And silly silly NASA. I mean, it's not rocket science, is it?

Site with popups
Note that it doesn't always pop-up.

The spirit of the Festival de Cannes is one of friendship and universal cooperation.
Its aim is to reveal and focus attention on works of quality in order to contribute to the progress of the motion picture arts and to encourage the development of the film industry throughout the world.

I looked up some links after this.

There's a general article at
How Stuff Works.

A study of several cases at
Federation of American Scientists. Death rates will depend a lot on the thresholds for closing an area and moving people out. Meaning that cancer rates climb but not enough to evacuate the area. I think the numbers in the FAS article assume people stick around. Say rich people move out, poor people move in. FAS death rate numbers assume more things. Like no advance in cancer treatment in the next 40 years. And little protective measures.

And an article at
American Institute of Physics that says don't make such a fuss.

I mean, we're just going to end up killing it all and http://science.howstuffworks.com/terraforming.htmt erraforming the whole friggin' place anyways.

I use a particle accelerator with Windows all the time.

I can't stand LCD monitors, CRT all the way ;)

EZPASS and Fastlane tags are powered transmitters - there's a lithium battery inside them. This is a complelety different beast from the RFID tags in the casino chips (and other small passive devices).

First, let's assume the mass at 0,0 can be passed through without slowing us down. In that case, if we start at 0,-10 rather than 1,-10, we have no lateral (delta x) movement at all, the velocity at 0,-10 is equal to the velocity at 0,10 (becuase the moving object would accelerate from 0,-10 to 0,0 and decelerate from 0,0 to 0,10 by the exact same amount). This is exactly the case that you are referring to in your post.

Second, let's look at an object that is stationary at 4,0. Gravity would pull that object toward 0,0, even if both objects were initially motionless. Remember, position = x0 + v0 * t + (a * t^2) / 2 ... This is a situation where we are converting potential energy (distance from a large mass - meaning using gravity) to kinetic energy (motion). This change from potential to kinetic is how we avoid violating conservation of energy. The moving mass also (slightly) pulls the larger mass at 0,0 closer, so they might strike at 0.01,0 ... this is how conservation of momentum is maintained (because momentum is mass * velocity and velocity is a directional vector, while speed is an absolute value of the length of the vector... thus, with the vectors in perfectly opposite directions, the net momentum is always 0 [with both at rest at the beginning of the exercise]).

So provided that the velocity is high enough that the velocity in Y is >> than the acquired velocity in X from the second case, we are OK. In fact, the velocity in Y at the closest point of approach should be at least the escape velocity of the mass. In that case, the velocity is high enough that the entry angle and the exit angle of the moving object should vary by less than PI/2 radians (you will note this is true in the case of the path of Cassini linked to from my other post). In this case, the direction of the object was changed, but it still has enough velocity to escape the gravity from the mass at 0,0. The net velocity is also faster than when it went past the large object, because it converted potential energy into kinetic energy.

However, if the velocity in Y is too slow, then one of two things will happen. If velocity is too low, the object will do some small arc around the mass until it actually strikes it (this now assumes the mass has some volume). If the velocity is slightly faster, such that it is not low enough to strike the object, but not fast enough to escape from the object, then the moving object has functionally undergone what would be called orbital insertion. The velocity threshold here (between striking and not striking the mass) is called the orbital velocity. Thus, the moving object would permanently be a satellite of the mass at 0,0 (though the orbit may be irregular for some time). For some more on thse velocity thresholds, visit How satellites work

And for some more backround I recommend reading How Stuff Works' How Terraforming Mars Will Work

With a small department's worth of exceptions, the function of my employees is not to understand computers. Instead the computers are there solely to make balancing the books, producing reports, making presentations, gathering data and other revenue generating and/or support tasks simpler.

I also don't think I should have to send my grandmother to get a CS degree, so I can send her email or video of her greatgranddaughter.

Microsoft is bad in a number of ways and have done a number of bad things attempting to deliever on the goal, but the doesn't mean that making computers easier is wrong. The tool's purpose is to make the task easier.

It is possible to make a multifunction tool that doesn't add a lot of it's own complexity even for reasonably complex tools.

Thus LCD displays should also be recycled or disposed of properly, not just incinerated or buried.

What I've never understood: what are the benefits of space exploration? Sure it gives information about space, but what's the use?

• Asteroid mining.

• Build really big solar energy collectors, put them into space, and beam the energy to Earth with microwaves.

  Or just use a giant collector mirror and convert to electricity on Earth - such a design could also be used as orbital beam-weapon.

• Self-sufficient space colonies - survival of the species in case of a large meteor strike or something similar is a benefit.
• Zero-g manufacturing - I've heard that it's possibly to build some materials only in zero-g, because gravity distorts the forming crystal structure. Does someone know more about this ?

• Inspiration. People need something to look up to. They need heroes. Currently, movie- rock- and sports stars are fulfulling this role, and of course this leads to a culture completely obsessed with entertainment - it's not the only reason for this problem, but it is a contributing factor.

  It's a bit like politicians starting wars to drown their problems under the flood of patriotism, but channeled with a positive goal, rather than negative.

Sounds a bit like a smartcard.

FYI legal info.

Forgot to include sources. HowStuffWorks' blurb on ratings is here and Nielsen's site is here.

The parent post doesn't really make much sense.

I don't understand why projecting something on a larger screen would require a higher DPI. In fact, because the audience is farther from the screen, it would be precisely the opposite (i.e. individual pixels implicitly look small, simply because they are far away).

Furthermore, digital cinema simply does not use a resolution far beyond that of modern PC video. Doing a quick Google search for "digital cinema resolution", I ended up at a little blurb which mentions that the digital version of Attack of the Clones was recorded at 1920x1080 (which, granted, is higher than the 352x240 NTSC output needed by a console, but not by the discussed orders of magnitude.) Even looking at DPX (digital picture exchange) 2K, we only get a resolution of 2048x1556.

Let's do one thing at a time...

First we have to "escape" to another planet, then we can think bigger.
...
...

We can't even go to Mars, people!

Good thing we already are thinking about a "Space Internet" so we can spend our time reading Slashdot all the way to the Stars...

Its nothing to do with NTSC, but could possibly be different type of CRTs being more popular in your part of the world.
The trinitron was/is the main alternative to shadow mask CRT displays, and that does display as horizontal strips (like most LCDs) theres a comparison here:
http://qube.s-ses.mb.edus.si/~ppeter/zgradba/crt.h tm

Its not in english, but we are just interested in the pictures anyway.

Theres another link listing the differences in display technology.

These differences may explain why some CRT users see benefits from using cleartype, and others just see fuzzyness.

LINK

LINK

Oh darn. You 800 and 1900Mhz CDMA cell phones no longer work inside? Guess you'll have to go outside. Whoops. There's that sun vs geek factor again.

Gee, your pager doesn't work inside either? Your employer wouldn't require you to wear one, would they?

Having trouble with your garage door opener? Guess you'll just have to get out of the car and push the button yourself.

Having trouble getting your favorite radio station on your home stereo? Guess you'd better start stringing coax through the roof for a new antenna. (This brings up an interesting question. Since most home-use APs use an omni-directional antenna, do you have to also have to coat your roof in something prior to shingling it? Interesting question.)

Lets see. What else won't work. Hmm, your emergency weather radio. Your police/fire scanner. Your CB. Your HAM radio. Your Satellite Radio (since it broadcasts in the S band at 2.3Ghz)

What else am I missing? I'm sure this paint has it's applications. It's not very useful for the average home owner but I imagine a collector of tin foil beenies would love to buy a couple dozen gallons.

I'm more worried about these: Stinger

I don't want marketing, I want real space travel, and that requires being a little harsh on all the marketing that surrounds this.

How would you define "real space travel"?

Judging by the cockpit view, this sure seems like space travel as far as I'm concerned.

The Wright Brother's big advance was controlled, powered flight. Lots of people could shoot a projectile from one end of the field to the other, which is all (effectively) that was accomplished by Burt Rutan.

SpaceShipOne is equipped with (and makes heavy use of) a reaction control system, which operates in the same general fashion as the reaction control systems on other spacecraft.

wide area wimax networks offer a lot of hope for connecting rural areas. A department (think county) in France has already started rolling it out (sorry, in French).

I was curious about the "Elektron Oxygen Generator" and found a brief description
here:

1. The Russian Elektron generator will make oxygen by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen (electrolysis).
2. Solid fuel oxygen generators or oxygen candles will be burned to make additional oxygen, if required.
3. The space shuttle or Progress supply ships will bring nitrogen from Earth, and store it in external tanks on the station.
4. In later phases of construction, external tanks will supply oxygen; these tanks can be refilled by the space shuttle. In the final stage, an additional electrolysis oxygen generator will be added to the station.
5. The pressure control assembly (a system of pumps and valves) will mix the nitrogen and oxygen in the right percentages, monitor the atmospheric pressure and depressurize the station when necessary to prevent overpressure or to extinguish a fire during an emergency.

Your own router will route them to internal hosts unless it has filtering rules to tell it to do otherwise.

I don't get this, since the hosts behind the NAT are using private IPs, how could the NAT knows which host to send the packets to?

Say, someone initiate a TCP connection to port 80 to the NAT host, which has a real IP of 123.123.123.123, when the NAT receives the packets, how could it know which internal host to forward the packets to?

Maybe it's because I'm too get used to Linux's IP Masquerade, but I suppose a NAT maintains a "database" of connections initiated from INSIDE the NAT, when packets from the OUTSIDE arrives, it matches against the database to see which host the packets should then be forwarded to. As the way implemented in the Netfilter's stateful firewall.

Therefore, when an outside initiated connection comes to the NAT at an arbitrary port, and the NAT found that there are no records of connections with regards to that, it doesn't know where to forward the packets to (I suppose it won't randomly forward packets to internal hosts...), so the packets will be rejected or dropped.

Or maybe, this is only ONE type of the NAT and oops... There are static NATs (just Googled it...)?

I agree.
Also, with the current ceiling its going to be hard for any visiting girls to get a tan (via sunbathing) since steel doesn't usually give of the required UVA radiation to get a tan.

People are working on exactly what you're asking for. The field is often called "Augmented Reality". There are numerous problems though, and the prototypes that works decently are expensive 20-kg packpacks.

GPS is not the end-all solution unfortunately, since:
1) It works really crappy indoors
2) You need some way of knowing exactly which direction the user is facing. Compases are easily confused so you need gyros. Good gyros are expensive and big.

... but it is a really cool field of research.

UPC

Yes, you must have skipped that whole year. LCD= Liquid Crystal Display.

Kids these days have no respect for the older stuff. Why, I remember when my grandpa showed me this black and white TV. I remember thinking: This TV is awesome! Why on earth did I buy a 34" Sony DLP Hi-Def set when I could have a classic like this 1965 Zenith with tuner knob!

You can keep it old-school if that's what you're into.

doing some research would have been nice.

summary: a very efficient scheme is to use a 2-stroke diesel engine that runs at constant rpm and powers an electric motor (akkus would be a bonus).

The scheme does indeed have drawbacks - like requiring a turbo/super-charger.

The electric motor is the only motor that drives the wheels - the gas engine runs a genset that generates the electric.

That's not how the Prius works. " the electric motor can power the car by itself, the gas engine can power the car by itself or they can power the car together." http://auto.howstuffworks.com/hybrid-car16.htm

Of course, I wasn't right either. The gas engine in the Prius is only 76 horsepower. The electric is 67 horsepower. In order to get maximum power, you've gotta run both engines at once.

There are two routes to killing an RFID chip:

1. Some RFID chips (such as EPCglobal Gen2 tags) have a kill password that can be issued to command erasure of the entire PROM, or otherwise totally disable the tag. Gen2 tags have a 32-bit kill password.

2. Virtually all RFID chips can be killed by subjecting them to strong RF radiation. This will induce a lethal voltage and blow out the internal circuitry. Some existing EAS systems use this technique to disable their tags.

not so true.

For iron to become iron oxide, three things are required: iron, water and oxygen.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/question445.htm

There has been some discussion about using DNA as a massively parallel computer. Suppose you encode data in a DNA sequence (input), then somehow act on it (running a program), and then read the resulting altered DNA. You have a computer, albeit somewhat slow and not terribly practical. Now imagine you start with not one but *billions* of different DNA sequences.You "run" the program over all these inputs simultaneously, and obtain billions of possible outputs. You can then use some chemical tag that binds itself to the 'correct' answer. You now have a massively parallel computer with negligible power consumption in a test tube.

This sort of DNA computer could be useful for a number of problems that involve a lot of trial and error, such as protein folding. In a paper some years ago some scientist managed to solve a traveling salesman problem using one such computer. They generated different strands corresponding to each city, and let them mix in a tube randomly to produce different candidate 'paths'. Then, they used some chemical selector (the tricky part) to eliminate the strands corresponding to invalid paths. Left in the tube were all valid paths, which could then be easily replicated using PCR.

I couldn't find the original paper, but a pretty good explanation can be found here

I was watching CSI the other night and caught a number of simple scientific inaccuracies that really bothered me. Such as the lead scientist guy saying "terminal velocity is 9.8 meters per second squared" and having the misconception that you are safe in a car during a thunderstorm because it sits on rubber tires go uncorrected. I've seen what happens when lightning hits a vehicle "protected" by its rubber tires, every thing was fine EXCEPT the rubber tires. Do you actually think that after going through a mile of free air that a half inch of rubber is going to stop a lightning strike?

Every year the local university has a festival where each department gets to show its stuff to the community and the students' families. The physics department puts on a wonderful show of applied physics which is always packed as they keep things light hearted and very educational. The biology department had experiments with banana DNA. The chemistry department showed how many calories were in a gummie bear by burning it. Many of the departments and clubs (such as solar car and robot projects) have very good displays and would likely give good ideas on reaching the general populace and especially high school students (which are targeted as potential students for the university).

May I suggest doing a regular how things work presentation. Perhaps bring in clips from popular TV shows and show how they got it wrong. Like the CSI episode I mentioned or why the antagonist that cut the air hoses on the racing tractor-trailer will not have it go speeding out of control but will in fact bring it to a sudden, spectactular, and usually quite safe stop.

Such misconceptions in television and movies not only insult the intelligence of those watching but perpetuate myths that may cost people lives. That sheet metal lawn tractor shed will not stop a .45 calibre round. A car that has been in a crash should not cause one to grab the occupants quickly because "O my God! It's gonna blow!" but have them call 911 so the crash victims can be safely extracted by those trained to do so.

What's the point of my rant? I'm not sure. Maybe it's that Mythbusters is must see TV.

... Here ;-)

I still reckon the best game networking in the world is that in Quake and its successors, such as Half-Life and its sequel. Unlike Halo and Halo 2, where co-operative play online was apparently an insurmountable technical challenge, in Quake-based stuff even single-player games are inherently client-server anyway.

From the article, it sounds like Halo 2 multiplayer has moved in that direction away from the all-clients-equal approach of Marathon and Doom, with a single server accepting or denying player-damaging events. Although each client apparently still has a full version of the game world at hand, unlike Quake-style games where a client is only sent relevant stuff - might this allow for some audacious, map-spanning ultra-vision hacks and so on?

Still, that's how they do the recovery thing if the server gets unexpectedly removed from play...

Sort of like this? (From the original patent application... ^_^

Ok, do you see why I "fall back to defending nuclear"?

As a consumer I want clean & cheap power. I've looked up how much it's costing the australians to build their solar plant, I've looked up how much it's costing to build the PBMR. I've spent some time trying to sort between the political, research (it is a first), and some allegations of corruption. I see China planing to build something like a hundred of them.

Yes, nuclear plants are run at full power all the time. But because of the nature of the fuel, smart companies will turn down other plants more than nuclear ones. For example, gas plants are very cheap to build, but the fuel costs you. So you shut down the gas plants first...

Solar thermal air-conditioning looks like it will be used soon in large installions which will cut the power consumption. Why use solar generated power to run heating elements to expand the gas on a hot day when you can use solar on the hot side of the cycle?

Well, for one your standard electric air conditioner doesn't use heating elements
Solar thermal air-conditioning looks like neat technology! Why hasn't there been a slashdot article on this? Sure, it's expensive, can't cool very well compared to traditional AC, but it can help. It maybe doesn't help that it's being touted by a gas comany, which mostly touts it for use when electricity is expensive, when you're making steam anyways, or to flatten your usage during 'peak' hours (when electric companies nail big users with bigger rates). However, by combining it with solar, you don't have to use gas. I guess it comes down to the guys with calculators and charts for considering when it's worth it to install it. There's plenty of charts in the pdf file. At a cost three times that of a good quality electric AC system, electricity needs to be pretty expensive, no?
Solar AC: $9,000/ton
Traditional AC: $7,000/3 tons.(SEER 19.2, just about the best available).

Definitely, but I think the "one true power" ethos from anyone is silly.
Like I said, I'd like to see the green powers used where economical. It's just that they aren't economical enough to beat nuclear all the time.

...it was called "Independence Day."

I'm hoping that http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425638/ will be a better War of the Worlds than Cruise's version.
You can see the trailer http://stuffo.howstuffworks.com/wotw-videos.htm

Horseshit. Just check out machine gun or gearbox to see how powerful flash can be in the right hands.

Flash doesn't kill websites, bozos do .

Horseshit. Just check out machine gun or gearbox to see how powerful flash can be in the right hands.

Flash doesn't kill websites, bozos do .