We won't see it in our lifetimes. Our children won't see it either. By time it's built, IF it's built, there will be all kinds of other interesting forms of propulsion available.
They said the same thing about heavier than air powered aircraft just a little more than 100 years ago.
It only takes one breakthrough, one moment of genius, and your expectations are blown out of the water - yet by your reasoning because it seems almost impossible now we should just give up and try something else because something better will come along, sooner or later.
The truth of the matter is that, yes, at this moment a space elevator is not possible, but NOBODY knows when it might become possible, it could be in 3 years, it could be in 1000 years, the only way we will find out is to continue the research and development.
I personally think it may be technically possible in 50 to 100 years, politicially however I would pick closer to between 200 and 500 years.
The last day of the tax year is 31 December (it's also the last day of Q4 for those filing quarterly business returns)
That depends on where you live, and presumes that you havn't changed it by request (provided your government permits that). In many (most?) parts of the world the tax year is different to the calendar year, this is generally considered a good thing because people usually have better things to do at the end of the calendar year than taxes.
Example, in New Zealand the tax year by default runs 1st April - 31st March, returns are due 7th of July, and payments 7th of February.
PayPal is the easiest, it allows your customers flexability in how they pay (either from thier Credit Card, or for US customers from thier bank, or if they already have money with PayPal from there), and it has a number of ways you can implement it from very simple buy now button, to properly integrating with thier IPN (Instant Payment Notification) system.
MoneyBookers (moneybookers.com) is fairly straight forward too, but doesn't have the brand recognition of PayPal, and it a bit more cumbersome.
2Checkout, again, not the brand recognition, it's pretty cumbersome too, it's a bit costly.
Authorize.Net, last I looked it was just a (very popular, almost a defacto standard) merchant gateway, you still need a merchant account with your bank, which may or may not be suitable.
The thing with Merchant accounts is that they will be cheaper, providing you are doing enough transactions to make it worthwhile, if you are just doing a few dollars here and there then I think PayPal is a better option - particularly now your customers do not need a PayPal account.
Each of these clients has good points, and bad points, it's really a matter of trying them each for a while and seeing what happens. Use IMAP and you can do just that, all at the same time if you want.
I personally, currently, use Evolution - I like it's vFolders, I have a vFolder set to show me all unread mail from the last 2 days, across all my IMAP and local email accounts, one for the last week's mail and one to show me all flagged email and emails related to them (my "to do" threads).
I have the last 2 days vFolder open most of the time, as email comes in I can quickly read it, if it's junk then delete it right there, if it needs some attention (work needs doing) I flag it so it goes into my to do list unless it's a reply to something that's already in there.
Then when I want to work on a job, I open the "To Do" vFolder, and I can see all the jobs I have on the go, including all emails related to them (unfortunatly I can't get it to include emails I've sent in reply in the threads..yet), I also use the flag to keep a record of how long I've spent on the job, and use the "Completed" switch in the flag to indicate when I'm done and it's ready to be billed out (when it's billed I clear the flag and the thread drops out of the "To Do" vFolder).
It makes it very easy to manage the large amounts of incoming mail I tend to get, provides a pretty good timesheet system (for me, when I'm working on a job, it's always related to an email, so that's the perfect place to record time spent) and saves me from being frustrated at an INBOX containing several thousand messages!
HTMLArea is, afaik, no longer under any real development (at least, Interactive Tools no longer develops it, mishoo does bits and pieces on it every now and then I think but not with any viguer last time I looked).
Xinha was forked from HTMLArea about a year ago, and is under active development by a small group of developers. You'll find it much more stable and usable than HTMLArea, as well as having a large number of plugins that HTMLArea lacks.
Granted I took the example to an extreme to illustrate my point, but the truth is that introverts can be subjected to this mindset from (granted, extreme) extroverts often enough to be irritating.
I never said that getting drunk, verbal diahhorea and hitting on anything with legs was inferior - if that's (and I'm talking generalities for extrovert pasttimes here, not specifically those three activities) what somebody finds enjoyable then more power to them, but it's NOT something generally that introverts would enjoy.
Where you get the problem is the extroverts who don't, or can't understand that, and think that what's good for them, show by rights be good for EVERYBODY.
For a long time I was a big advocate of gecko based browsers. Then firefox started to suck a bit, ok, it started to suck memory and CPU a LOT, not all the time, but enough to be incredibly annoying.
A few months ago I started using Opera again (I've used it since Windows 3.1 days, but not seriously since then) full time, it took some configuring, I changed some keyboard shortcuts (CTRL-T to open a new tab for a start), added a web developer type toolbar, rearranged some stuff, and got a nice skin for it. But man, it's just so much faster and more responsive than Firefox.
There are only three things I miss.. the abundance of plugins (some I miss particularly - live headers , url navigator and the flash click to play thingee), Venkman, and a designMode/contentEditable API (rich text (html) editing in the browser). Opera 9 implements designMode now, so that just leaves 2 before Gecko browsers earn the "browser of 2nd to last resort" badge from me.
People really should give Opera a fair try, it really is better than Gecko IMHO. And now it's free (beer), there's not much of a reason not to give it a shot.
I've always felt that the politicians are just the usually extroverted front people, they provide an interface to the population for the civil servants, who are the usually introverted behind the scenes people who actually do the work.
The extroverts get the fame, glory and attention. The introverts get to solve the problems. Everybody's happy.
Ever wondered why meeting people is easier when tipsy? It makes your brain shut up.
Typical extrovert thinking... "hey why don't you get drunk then you'd have fun just like me". I don't blame you for thinking that, an extrovert can't help it, they have no chance of understanding what makes an introvert tick because not only do we not care to spend the time to tell you, but you won't sit still long enough to hear it.
Here's the thing. Introverts don't want your kind of fun, we're quite happy doing our own thing, sitting down, talking quietly and thinking about stuff - that is what is fun for us, not mindless verbal diahhorea (sp?), getting drunk and hitting on anything with legs.
No they wont. Provided it's setup correctly your hosts file or own DNS will return the result you want, it won't lookup the "real" one because it's already got an authoritative answer.
Re:Great, now what about hosting companies
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PHP 5.1.0 Released
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Simple psychology 101 stuff. People want what they can't have, they more they can't have it, the more they want it.
Microsoft ships a small amount of 360s for a period of time, this builds hype because it will be in an state of "sold out" for some time, people see this and think "hey, this must be pretty hot stuff, I want one", eventually supply will increase to a more reasonable level, but only after the hype has been built.
Hey, everybody! Check out the all new Cartmanland! It's our Graaand Opening! Cartmanland has over a hundred fabulous rides, six roller coasters, and tons of great surprises! And the best part is: You can't come!! That's right, because at Cartmanland, only I, Eric Cartman, can get in! That means only I can ride the all-new Tornado Twister, a roller coaster that splashes in the water! Wow! It's the greatest amusement park in the Colorado area! And nobody can go!! Especially Stan and Kyle!! HAHA!! So come on down to Cartmanland now! But don't plan on getting past the parking lot, 'cause remember: So much to do at Cartmanland, but you can't come! Especially you, Stan and Kyle.
What?! GMT doesn't change with the seasons, GMT == UTC == Zulu for all intents and purposes. Infact, I don't know of any timezones that change during the year - people switch to seasonal timezones, but the timezones themselves don't change.
New Zealand only has one director of any note, who's only done one film of any note.
Eh? New Zealand has more than Peter Jackson. For example, Roger Donaldson who is about to premiere "The Fastest Indian" starring Anthony Hopkins, playing a New Zealand character, filmed in New Zealand and to be premiered in New Zealand. Or Niki Caro of "Whale Rider" fame. Or Jane Campion who directed "The Piano" amongst other films. Or Lee Tamahori who's directing credits include "Once were Warriors", an episode of "The Sopranos" and even the James Bond film "Die another Day". Or Andrew Adamson who directed Shrek, Shrek2 and the upcoming "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe". All New Zealanders.
Not only that but Peter Jackson is much more than "Lord of the Rings", his directing credits also include many films such as "The Frighteners" and the Oscar nominated "Heavenly Creatures".
And those are just some of the big names I picked off the top of my head.
New Zealand has a lot of directorial talent for it's paltry 4 million population.
Huh. I'm actually amazed someone was able to glide commercial airliner in for a safe landing.
The funny thing about commercial airliners is that they use quite a lot of fuel, and the funny thing about fuel is that it costs quite a bit of money.
Once you know that, it's not much of a jump to see that it's incredibly important for an airline to have really really good fuel efficiency for it's aircraft. For aircraft fuel efficiency means they have to have as little drag as possible and generate a lot of lift for the amount of thrust, not surprisingly, a low drag high lift aircraft makes a not half bad glider, at least in terms of distance. An airliner is a far far far better glider than most conventional light aircraft (unfortunatly they generally have to glide far far far further to find somewhere good to land).
Just because your engines quit doesn't make the plane stop flying, infact when the engine stops the most important rule in handling the situation is - "Fly The Plane!"
Australia is home to dozens of species that are only endangered because in the last couple centuries man brought animals from other parts of the world there.
I'm a Kiwi, you don't have to tell me about introduced species being threat to defenseless native wildlife (especially certain flightless birds). But for something this radically out of place I don't think even DOC (NZ Department of Conservation) would go in shoot to kill without scoping it in the wild first to see what kind of population it was associated with before figuring a way to remove them.
Even then, they'd much more likely trap it than hunt it, far more effective and efficient.
Killing a lone example doesn't help get statistics on population size, area, or other factors that would be essential information for removal purposes.
NZ has it's own mystery creatures like this, big cat sightings similar to these are not unheard of, and moose down in fiordland are quite possible (even probable perhaps).
this seems fishy to me. Firstly, the hunter reckons his bullet blew the feline's head apart, and from the photo it really looks like there is NOTHING left of it... would a RIFLE bullet really do that much damage? I mean, if it was a shot gun, fired into it's face, then yea, but a rifle fired from behind, passing in behind the ear and THEN blowing the head apart?
Secondly, rather than pack out this surely important find, he cuts off the tail and just takes that with him, I mean, if it were me, I'd be carrying the whole carcass out, or at least marking and burying it so they can come back and retrieve it. It's not even like he had to carry it, he could have strapped it on like a backpack (I believe this is how hunters carry deer), tied it on the back of the bike, or even towed it behind the bike wrapped in a tarpaulin or something, it was dead anyway not like he could have hurt it any more than it was.
Thirdly, the fact that he shot the thing, when it was not a threat (he says it turned away, side on), with a rifle. I've never shot a gun, rifle or otherwise, but I imagine that with a rifle there needs to be some aiming involved, he was calm enough to aim, and fire the gun, making a clean shot into the cats head... if a big cat graced my path, I think I'd be frozen stiff, hoping like hell it won't be interested in me, not tracking it with the sights on my rifle.
I dunno, this whole thing just seems really fishy to me. Not that there couldn't be a few big cats roaming the Australian countryside, but have a sneaking suspicion that this was not one of them.
What is different is that the tool use has not only been just indirectly related to attaining food, but some of it hasn't been involved in attaining food at all - simply getting from A to B.
For example, the extraction, reposition and use of the trunk of a dead shrub as an anchor point for leaning on, and later a bridge enabled the gorilla to reach food (without getting wet) but didn't *directly* get food for it, where as the typical tool usage example of using a stick to fish out termites or whatever is a very direct tool use - tool gets food which would seem to be a much easier relationship to come across.
I think that's whats really impressive here, that the gorilla (or some gorilla in the past that passed the knowledge on) made that indirect link - "hmm, there's probably tasty stuff down there, but I don't want to get all wet, so whats lying around that could help me do that".
Ok, Google is a company based around providing Search services, and they do that well. All thier services are in some way related to information mining (searching), from web search, to geographical search, it's all search in the end.
But what incredible need does NASA have for a partner to provide search? Sure, data mining is a useful tool for NASA I'm sure, but why do they need Google to actually set up shop there with them to do this?
Seems to me like Google is expanding out of it's domain. And that's not usually a good thing. Pick one thing and do it well, don't try to be Jack of all trades.
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We won't see it in our lifetimes. Our children won't see it either. By time it's built, IF it's built, there will be all kinds of other interesting forms of propulsion available.
They said the same thing about heavier than air powered aircraft just a little more than 100 years ago.
It only takes one breakthrough, one moment of genius, and your expectations are blown out of the water - yet by your reasoning because it seems almost impossible now we should just give up and try something else because something better will come along, sooner or later.
The truth of the matter is that, yes, at this moment a space elevator is not possible, but NOBODY knows when it might become possible, it could be in 3 years, it could be in 1000 years, the only way we will find out is to continue the research and development.
I personally think it may be technically possible in 50 to 100 years, politicially however I would pick closer to between 200 and 500 years.
You're thinking of Mosaic, not Mozilla.
Ric Romero has started working for IBM now?
Strapping tiny jet engines to your ankles and jumping out of a balloon, that's cool and all, but let me know when they can take off under thier power!
:)
"Hey Ma' I'm just going down the shops, you want anything?" as the engines spool up out in the backyard
The last day of the tax year is 31 December (it's also the last day of Q4 for those filing quarterly business returns) That depends on where you live, and presumes that you havn't changed it by request (provided your government permits that). In many (most?) parts of the world the tax year is different to the calendar year, this is generally considered a good thing because people usually have better things to do at the end of the calendar year than taxes. Example, in New Zealand the tax year by default runs 1st April - 31st March, returns are due 7th of July, and payments 7th of February.
PayPal is the easiest, it allows your customers flexability in how they pay (either from thier Credit Card, or for US customers from thier bank, or if they already have money with PayPal from there), and it has a number of ways you can implement it from very simple buy now button, to properly integrating with thier IPN (Instant Payment Notification) system.
MoneyBookers (moneybookers.com) is fairly straight forward too, but doesn't have the brand recognition of PayPal, and it a bit more cumbersome.
2Checkout, again, not the brand recognition, it's pretty cumbersome too, it's a bit costly.
Authorize.Net, last I looked it was just a (very popular, almost a defacto standard) merchant gateway, you still need a merchant account with your bank, which may or may not be suitable.
The thing with Merchant accounts is that they will be cheaper, providing you are doing enough transactions to make it worthwhile, if you are just doing a few dollars here and there then I think PayPal is a better option - particularly now your customers do not need a PayPal account.
Each of these clients has good points, and bad points, it's really a matter of trying them each for a while and seeing what happens. Use IMAP and you can do just that, all at the same time if you want.
I personally, currently, use Evolution - I like it's vFolders, I have a vFolder set to show me all unread mail from the last 2 days, across all my IMAP and local email accounts, one for the last week's mail and one to show me all flagged email and emails related to them (my "to do" threads).
I have the last 2 days vFolder open most of the time, as email comes in I can quickly read it, if it's junk then delete it right there, if it needs some attention (work needs doing) I flag it so it goes into my to do list unless it's a reply to something that's already in there.
Then when I want to work on a job, I open the "To Do" vFolder, and I can see all the jobs I have on the go, including all emails related to them (unfortunatly I can't get it to include emails I've sent in reply in the threads..yet), I also use the flag to keep a record of how long I've spent on the job, and use the "Completed" switch in the flag to indicate when I'm done and it's ready to be billed out (when it's billed I clear the flag and the thread drops out of the "To Do" vFolder).
It makes it very easy to manage the large amounts of incoming mail I tend to get, provides a pretty good timesheet system (for me, when I'm working on a job, it's always related to an email, so that's the perfect place to record time spent) and saves me from being frustrated at an INBOX containing several thousand messages!
HTMLArea is, afaik, no longer under any real development (at least, Interactive Tools no longer develops it, mishoo does bits and pieces on it every now and then I think but not with any viguer last time I looked).
Xinha was forked from HTMLArea about a year ago, and is under active development by a small group of developers. You'll find it much more stable and usable than HTMLArea, as well as having a large number of plugins that HTMLArea lacks.
http://www.xinha.org/
Linux mortimer 2.6.12.3 #1 Sat Sep 17 22:57:14 NZST 2005 i686 GNU/Linux
CTRL-W is the de-facto standard for "Close", in most applications, not just web browsers.
Granted I took the example to an extreme to illustrate my point, but the truth is that introverts can be subjected to this mindset from (granted, extreme) extroverts often enough to be irritating.
I never said that getting drunk, verbal diahhorea and hitting on anything with legs was inferior - if that's (and I'm talking generalities for extrovert pasttimes here, not specifically those three activities) what somebody finds enjoyable then more power to them, but it's NOT something generally that introverts would enjoy.
Where you get the problem is the extroverts who don't, or can't understand that, and think that what's good for them, show by rights be good for EVERYBODY.
For a long time I was a big advocate of gecko based browsers. Then firefox started to suck a bit, ok, it started to suck memory and CPU a LOT, not all the time, but enough to be incredibly annoying.
A few months ago I started using Opera again (I've used it since Windows 3.1 days, but not seriously since then) full time, it took some configuring, I changed some keyboard shortcuts (CTRL-T to open a new tab for a start), added a web developer type toolbar, rearranged some stuff, and got a nice skin for it. But man, it's just so much faster and more responsive than Firefox.
There are only three things I miss.. the abundance of plugins (some I miss particularly - live headers , url navigator and the flash click to play thingee), Venkman, and a designMode/contentEditable API (rich text (html) editing in the browser). Opera 9 implements designMode now, so that just leaves 2 before Gecko browsers earn the "browser of 2nd to last resort" badge from me.
People really should give Opera a fair try, it really is better than Gecko IMHO. And now it's free (beer), there's not much of a reason not to give it a shot.
I've always felt that the politicians are just the usually extroverted front people, they provide an interface to the population for the civil servants, who are the usually introverted behind the scenes people who actually do the work.
The extroverts get the fame, glory and attention. The introverts get to solve the problems. Everybody's happy.
Ever wondered why meeting people is easier when tipsy? It makes your brain shut up.
Typical extrovert thinking... "hey why don't you get drunk then you'd have fun just like me". I don't blame you for thinking that, an extrovert can't help it, they have no chance of understanding what makes an introvert tick because not only do we not care to spend the time to tell you, but you won't sit still long enough to hear it.
Here's the thing. Introverts don't want your kind of fun, we're quite happy doing our own thing, sitting down, talking quietly and thinking about stuff - that is what is fun for us, not mindless verbal diahhorea (sp?), getting drunk and hitting on anything with legs.
No they wont. Provided it's setup correctly your hosts file or own DNS will return the result you want, it won't lookup the "real" one because it's already got an authoritative answer.
Excuse the shamless plug :-)
Microsoft ships a small amount of 360s for a period of time, this builds hype because it will be in an state of "sold out" for some time, people see this and think "hey, this must be pretty hot stuff, I want one", eventually supply will increase to a more reasonable level, but only after the hype has been built.
Don't you watch South Park?
What?! GMT doesn't change with the seasons, GMT == UTC == Zulu for all intents and purposes. Infact, I don't know of any timezones that change during the year - people switch to seasonal timezones, but the timezones themselves don't change.
New Zealand only has one director of any note, who's only done one film of any note.
Eh? New Zealand has more than Peter Jackson. For example, Roger Donaldson who is about to premiere "The Fastest Indian" starring Anthony Hopkins, playing a New Zealand character, filmed in New Zealand and to be premiered in New Zealand. Or Niki Caro of "Whale Rider" fame. Or Jane Campion who directed "The Piano" amongst other films. Or Lee Tamahori who's directing credits include "Once were Warriors", an episode of "The Sopranos" and even the James Bond film "Die another Day". Or Andrew Adamson who directed Shrek, Shrek2 and the upcoming "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe". All New Zealanders.
Not only that but Peter Jackson is much more than "Lord of the Rings", his directing credits also include many films such as "The Frighteners" and the Oscar nominated "Heavenly Creatures".
And those are just some of the big names I picked off the top of my head.
New Zealand has a lot of directorial talent for it's paltry 4 million population.
The funny thing about commercial airliners is that they use quite a lot of fuel, and the funny thing about fuel is that it costs quite a bit of money.
Once you know that, it's not much of a jump to see that it's incredibly important for an airline to have really really good fuel efficiency for it's aircraft. For aircraft fuel efficiency means they have to have as little drag as possible and generate a lot of lift for the amount of thrust, not surprisingly, a low drag high lift aircraft makes a not half bad glider, at least in terms of distance. An airliner is a far far far better glider than most conventional light aircraft (unfortunatly they generally have to glide far far far further to find somewhere good to land).
Just because your engines quit doesn't make the plane stop flying, infact when the engine stops the most important rule in handling the situation is - "Fly The Plane!"
I'm a Kiwi, you don't have to tell me about introduced species being threat to defenseless native wildlife (especially certain flightless birds). But for something this radically out of place I don't think even DOC (NZ Department of Conservation) would go in shoot to kill without scoping it in the wild first to see what kind of population it was associated with before figuring a way to remove them.
Even then, they'd much more likely trap it than hunt it, far more effective and efficient.
Killing a lone example doesn't help get statistics on population size, area, or other factors that would be essential information for removal purposes.
NZ has it's own mystery creatures like this, big cat sightings similar to these are not unheard of, and moose down in fiordland are quite possible (even probable perhaps).
this seems fishy to me. Firstly, the hunter reckons his bullet blew the feline's head apart, and from the photo it really looks like there is NOTHING left of it... would a RIFLE bullet really do that much damage? I mean, if it was a shot gun, fired into it's face, then yea, but a rifle fired from behind, passing in behind the ear and THEN blowing the head apart?
Secondly, rather than pack out this surely important find, he cuts off the tail and just takes that with him, I mean, if it were me, I'd be carrying the whole carcass out, or at least marking and burying it so they can come back and retrieve it. It's not even like he had to carry it, he could have strapped it on like a backpack (I believe this is how hunters carry deer), tied it on the back of the bike, or even towed it behind the bike wrapped in a tarpaulin or something, it was dead anyway not like he could have hurt it any more than it was.
Thirdly, the fact that he shot the thing, when it was not a threat (he says it turned away, side on), with a rifle. I've never shot a gun, rifle or otherwise, but I imagine that with a rifle there needs to be some aiming involved, he was calm enough to aim, and fire the gun, making a clean shot into the cats head... if a big cat graced my path, I think I'd be frozen stiff, hoping like hell it won't be interested in me, not tracking it with the sights on my rifle.
I dunno, this whole thing just seems really fishy to me. Not that there couldn't be a few big cats roaming the Australian countryside, but have a sneaking suspicion that this was not one of them.
What is different is that the tool use has not only been just indirectly related to attaining food, but some of it hasn't been involved in attaining food at all - simply getting from A to B.
For example, the extraction, reposition and use of the trunk of a dead shrub as an anchor point for leaning on, and later a bridge enabled the gorilla to reach food (without getting wet) but didn't *directly* get food for it, where as the typical tool usage example of using a stick to fish out termites or whatever is a very direct tool use - tool gets food which would seem to be a much easier relationship to come across.
I think that's whats really impressive here, that the gorilla (or some gorilla in the past that passed the knowledge on) made that indirect link - "hmm, there's probably tasty stuff down there, but I don't want to get all wet, so whats lying around that could help me do that".
Ok, Google is a company based around providing Search services, and they do that well. All thier services are in some way related to information mining (searching), from web search, to geographical search, it's all search in the end.
But what incredible need does NASA have for a partner to provide search? Sure, data mining is a useful tool for NASA I'm sure, but why do they need Google to actually set up shop there with them to do this?
Seems to me like Google is expanding out of it's domain. And that's not usually a good thing. Pick one thing and do it well, don't try to be Jack of all trades.