I don't know if you are who you say you are, but if so, I want to tell you that Dragonrealms still stands as my all-time favorite game!
I started playing DR in 6th grade when my parents had AOL by the minute. I convinced them to get unlimited so I could play. I played for years. I still remember everything about DR... From char creation, rat killing at the shipyard, learning how to skin, moving to goblin killing... Etc.
I still reference DR to my friends at work when we talk about online RPGs. No other game, especially graphical ones, have had anything close to the mechanics I love in DR like the stealth, stealing, and lock picking. I would lock pick all day long.
The only moral moment I've ever had in a game occurred in DR. I stole coin from someone and was caught, she chased me yelling to 'give me back my money!'. She chased me out of town and my friend killed her. I felt so bad I gave her the money and watched her grave and items. I still feel bad about it. Warcraft never gave me those feelings.
I could go on and on but I will stop. I just wanted to tell you how much I loved DR. I hope you were able to make some money off of it.
The NASA team was expecting metric units and the contractor, Lockheed Martin, who was operating the spacecraft, submitted english units to the navigation system instead of metric.
Lockheed Martin, which was performing the calculations, was sending thruster data in English units -- in this case, pounds -- while NASA's navigation team was expecting metric units, Newtons. One pound is equal to 4.48 Newtons. Over the course of the journey this led to the spacecraft being something like 60 miles off course when it reached Mars.
Lockheed martin was mostly to blame, but there should have been a safeguard to detect this somehow on the nasa side.
I used to have a friend who went bankrupt and lost everything. Did this happen because of gambling? No. He would spend all his money on the latest car modifications for his corvette that he couldn't afford. Every month he was buying stuff or making mods or getting tests done on his corvette. He got way behind on his credit card bills and apartment rent but kept buying crap.
Another example is I used to have a friend who kept buying the newest and greatest home theater stuff. It never ended and our friendship ended at a time when he was getting hounded by debt collectors over who knows what.
I know lots of people who gamble, including relatives, and none of them have ever gone broke. Why? Because it's ENTERTAINMENT. If I want to spend $200 a month on poker, why shouldn't that be just as free to do as spending $200 a month on car upgrades? On audio upgrades? On a single football game?
People go broke doing anything you can imagine, it's not fair to only hone in gambling
I can tell from comments that not many of you are private pilots. They are paying for this with yet another tax on fuel for private planes. The FAA keeps raising fees on everything associated with having a private plane while giving big breaks to commercial companies. I'm sick of it.
When you consider how much you and your company spent to cover you while you were employed, and the fact you almost never used it, it's a huge financial drain with the only winner being the insurance companies.
I don't think you understand the whole point of insurance. When you buy insurance you are making an agreement with other citizens that you are all paying into this group fund when you are healthy and in return this group fund will cover your butt when you need some serious medical treatment. How is this bad? Or do you just expect someone to cover your bills when you get sick when you didn't pay when you were healthy?
I quit using Quicken years ago because of that very reason. I think it's called a Sunset Policy or something. They want you to upgrade every 3 years so they disable certain features.
I found a free, open source program that I have been using for almost 2 years now. It's called GnuCash. They have a nice tutorial to learn how to set things up.
I don't know if gnucash will do the auto-download from the bank, because I stopped doing that in Quicken a long time ago. I enter everything manually from receipts then verify my online data. I do this because I got in the habit of downloading the data and never really looking at it to see if something was messed up.
Why doesn't it decrease as the cost of producing music decreases? Look at how much it cost to record an album in 1980 vs. now.
This reminded me of a commercial I saw over 10 years ago. It was a guy in a corporation staring at a bottle of olives, trying to figure out how to save money for the company. He runs into his boss's (bosses?) office and tells him that if they just remove 1 olive from each bottle, it will save them such and such millions of dollars.
So they lowered the quantity of olives that you would buy in the bottle, but kept the sale price the same.
That's what almost every single company does. When cost goes down, it's just profit for them.
I actually just finished (as in last week) "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (DADOES). Since that time I have been working on "Ubik". While reading, I never once correlated the Nexus One phone to the andys in DADOES.
This system is only as complex as necessary. If it could be simplified, it would. Do you have any idea of how recovery of spacecraft components works, such as recovery of the solid rocket motors? The first parachutes, the small ones, help to slow down the capsule. These parachutes can withstand a certain amount of load. Do you know what dynamic pressure is and how it drives the aero forces in atmo? The next batch of parachutes can withstand another set of forces, and finally the huge babies are released when the dynamic pressure is just right and those 'chutes will bring the capsule in for a landing.
They don't have all those 'chutes just for the fun of it. The budget is just too tight to do crap like that.
First stage recovery has more than 1 set of 'chutes as well.
I'm assuming that you have gone straight through school to get your PhD and haven't had a job in industry yet. If I'm wrong, then I'm sorry.
One thing that I learned after graduating with my degrees and getting a real job is that real science and engineering is much different than school and research science.
Real science is when you are working on a spacecraft (or some other physical product) and trying to get a real vehicle in the air. School science and lots of research science is plagued by lots of bad things that get mentioned in PhD Comic. I work on trying to get a vehicle in the air and I get really frustrated with some groups out there that we work with that are mainly for research and they don't get the big picture.
The deadline will be delayed because the children who's parents are too dumb to know about the switch will not be able to watch 4 hours of tv every morning, therefore the dumb parents will have to actually play with their kids. The aforementioned parents don't want to do this.
You don't want to deprive mind-improving and stimulating tv to the children, do you?
In addition to the cybernetic cannon for the pitcher, I gave all my baserunners a laser sword and battled the second baseman when I wanted to steal second.
It's unfortunate that Joe Public is such an idiot. Yes, he doesn't benefit directly from space exploration, but he has many indirect benefits.
You have to be seriously ignorant to not see the benefit of the space program.
Ever used a cordless power tool? A smoke detector? Modern water filtration? Infrared thermometer? Edible toothpaste (this one is now used for baby toothpaste and we probably all used it as babies)? Composite forceps in the delivery room? Global communications?
I have an honest question, and I'm not trying to be sarcastic or anything. 2 of my friends are elementary school teachers, and I know that they, like you, work more than 40 hours most weeks. However they only work for 9 months of the year (also depending on your school system, anywhere from a full 1 to 3 weeks off for christmas break).
At my job, I work 40 hours a week for 12 months, coming out to around 2040 hours a year.
My question is, after adding up all your weeks of over 40 hours for the 9 month period, what is your total hours of work for the year? Is it above or below 2040?
I have another friend who teaches at a college during fall and spring semester. Together we added up the hours that he works and calculated his pay per hour. His pay per hour was actually higher than mine because I had to work almost double the hours, but my salary was not double!
You mean like increased ability to forecast the weather, among tons of other things? Get your head out of your butt. NASA contributes greatly to things you probably experience every day. Google it, or in light of a recent story today, Cuil it.
One example: In 1978, Seasat-A extended our view of the Earth from the land to the oceans. The satellite carried five microwave instruments and their antennae, and the use of active as well as passive microwave sensors achieved the first all-weather remote sensing capability in space.
Most recently, monitoring of another independent variable affecting the Earth's weather has been added to the tools as the service of the meteorologist. Starting at the end of 1997, real-time data from NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer satellite were incorporated into the daily weather forecasting system. It is positioned between the Sun and the Earth, and intercepts the solar wind and measures geomagnetic activity, allowing forecasters to warn in advance those who might be affected by geomagnetic storms, such as satellite users and electric power grid control centers, of increased solar activity that could be a threat to their systems.
If you are trying to find a solution that doesn't exist you might have to derive a new equation so the excel monkeys can plug in the values. Where do you think all the equations come from? Obtaining an equation from a natural physical law can be really complex. For instance, the derivations of some simple physics equations from Newtons 2nd law can be exceedingly complex and you need all your math skills to pull it off.
Mathematica is a tool to use to help with really complex derivations, but you need an in-depth knowledge of math to get the result you need.
Understanding the 'mundane' math is an important part of this process. What's mundane to you is not mundane to a student. I think calculus is mundane, but I did not when I was initially taking the class. I had friends in other classes who were allowed to use a TI-89 in their calculus classes, and they were always getting stumped when concepts from calculus had to be applied in future engineering classes when the TI-89 wouldn't spit out the answer.
Contrast Ratio is not misleading if you have any idea of what it means. Contrast ratio is a measure of how black your blacks will be on the tv. Black levels are one of the most important parameters in determining how good the picture quality will be on a tv.
Black levels are not focused on enough in the TV buying world, and many consumers are buying inferior displays because of it.
Not talking about blacks would be like not talking about bass in an audio system. Professionals, reviewers, calibrators all agree blacks are hugely important. They cannot be talked about enough, imo. Unfortunately in the Best buys of the world they are talked about very little.
You might ask about the deepness of a color? Black levels is where it comes from. This is the main reason why blacks are so important. Light leakage kills those colors, and if a display can't create black, it can't create deep, pleasing colors. Of course a displays inability to display black shades kills detail in shadows as well. Really a display that can't display black properly is crippled in a technical sense.
I'm sorry but anyone who says black level isn't important to picture quality doesn't know what he's talking about.
The only thing you are correct on is that for lower tier manufacturers will try to lie about their black levels. They will list a black level that is only achievable in an extremely rare viewing condition. The good manufacturers (at least for plasmas) are panasonic and pioneer and they are pretty accurate in their marketing.
You know that the new X-Files movie has nothing to do with aliens? The X-Files started with each episode as a stand-alone story about a new crazy monster of the week. The new movie is a mystery story about a monster just like most of the episodes.
Have you been over to the Ubuntu support forums, and seen how many posts there are about people trying to get their wireless cards to work in Ubuntu? There are several different fixes and you have to try them until one works. I reformmated an old laptop and put XP and Ubuntu on it. XP worked flawlessly but it took an hour or two to get Ubuntu running with the wireless card.
I guess I could use your words and say it takes half a day to get a fresh Ubuntu configured if it doesn't support your hardware.
You need to learn to read. I said GTO orbit not LEO. In fact the wikipedia links you deliver show both of the payloads for each orbit, and they match what I posted.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if you are who you say you are, but if so, I want to tell you that Dragonrealms still stands as my all-time favorite game!
I started playing DR in 6th grade when my parents had AOL by the minute. I convinced them to get unlimited so I could play. I played for years. I still remember everything about DR... From char creation, rat killing at the shipyard, learning how to skin, moving to goblin killing... Etc.
I still reference DR to my friends at work when we talk about online RPGs. No other game, especially graphical ones, have had anything close to the mechanics I love in DR like the stealth, stealing, and lock picking. I would lock pick all day long.
The only moral moment I've ever had in a game occurred in DR. I stole coin from someone and was caught, she chased me yelling to 'give me back my money!'. She chased me out of town and my friend killed her. I felt so bad I gave her the money and watched her grave and items. I still feel bad about it. Warcraft never gave me those feelings.
I could go on and on but I will stop. I just wanted to tell you how much I loved DR. I hope you were able to make some money off of it.
Obviously this subject has bread some interest
How many comments can we harvest from this fielded subject?
I could never make a living searching for lost cats!
I beg to differ. Apparently you have never heard of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective? Munch on that.
The NASA team was expecting metric units and the contractor, Lockheed Martin, who was operating the spacecraft, submitted english units to the navigation system instead of metric.
Lockheed Martin, which was performing the calculations, was sending thruster data in English units -- in this case, pounds -- while NASA's navigation team was expecting metric units, Newtons. One pound is equal to 4.48 Newtons. Over the course of the journey this led to the spacecraft being something like 60 miles off course when it reached Mars.
Lockheed martin was mostly to blame, but there should have been a safeguard to detect this somehow on the nasa side.
I used to have a friend who went bankrupt and lost everything. Did this happen because of gambling? No. He would spend all his money on the latest car modifications for his corvette that he couldn't afford. Every month he was buying stuff or making mods or getting tests done on his corvette. He got way behind on his credit card bills and apartment rent but kept buying crap.
Another example is I used to have a friend who kept buying the newest and greatest home theater stuff. It never ended and our friendship ended at a time when he was getting hounded by debt collectors over who knows what.
I know lots of people who gamble, including relatives, and none of them have ever gone broke. Why? Because it's ENTERTAINMENT. If I want to spend $200 a month on poker, why shouldn't that be just as free to do as spending $200 a month on car upgrades? On audio upgrades? On a single football game?
People go broke doing anything you can imagine, it's not fair to only hone in gambling
I can tell from comments that not many of you are private pilots. They are paying for this with yet another tax on fuel for private planes. The FAA keeps raising fees on everything associated with having a private plane while giving big breaks to commercial companies. I'm sick of it.
When you consider how much you and your company spent to cover you while you were employed, and the fact you almost never used it, it's a huge financial drain with the only winner being the insurance companies.
I don't think you understand the whole point of insurance. When you buy insurance you are making an agreement with other citizens that you are all paying into this group fund when you are healthy and in return this group fund will cover your butt when you need some serious medical treatment. How is this bad? Or do you just expect someone to cover your bills when you get sick when you didn't pay when you were healthy?
I quit using Quicken years ago because of that very reason. I think it's called a Sunset Policy or something. They want you to upgrade every 3 years so they disable certain features.
I found a free, open source program that I have been using for almost 2 years now. It's called GnuCash. They have a nice tutorial to learn how to set things up.
http://www.gnucash.org/
I don't know if gnucash will do the auto-download from the bank, because I stopped doing that in Quicken a long time ago. I enter everything manually from receipts then verify my online data. I do this because I got in the habit of downloading the data and never really looking at it to see if something was messed up.
Why doesn't it decrease as the cost of producing music decreases? Look at how much it cost to record an album in 1980 vs. now.
This reminded me of a commercial I saw over 10 years ago. It was a guy in a corporation staring at a bottle of olives, trying to figure out how to save money for the company. He runs into his boss's (bosses?) office and tells him that if they just remove 1 olive from each bottle, it will save them such and such millions of dollars.
So they lowered the quantity of olives that you would buy in the bottle, but kept the sale price the same.
That's what almost every single company does. When cost goes down, it's just profit for them.
Are you serious?
I actually just finished (as in last week) "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (DADOES). Since that time I have been working on "Ubik". While reading, I never once correlated the Nexus One phone to the andys in DADOES.
The kids of PKD are insane, and ugly.
Doh, Typo in my main response title. It should say "Complex, Yes. Overly-Complex, No." Sorry.
This system is only as complex as necessary. If it could be simplified, it would. Do you have any idea of how recovery of spacecraft components works, such as recovery of the solid rocket motors? The first parachutes, the small ones, help to slow down the capsule. These parachutes can withstand a certain amount of load. Do you know what dynamic pressure is and how it drives the aero forces in atmo? The next batch of parachutes can withstand another set of forces, and finally the huge babies are released when the dynamic pressure is just right and those 'chutes will bring the capsule in for a landing.
They don't have all those 'chutes just for the fun of it. The budget is just too tight to do crap like that.
First stage recovery has more than 1 set of 'chutes as well.
All we need is IDDQD in every game. Simple.
I'm assuming that you have gone straight through school to get your PhD and haven't had a job in industry yet. If I'm wrong, then I'm sorry.
One thing that I learned after graduating with my degrees and getting a real job is that real science and engineering is much different than school and research science.
Real science is when you are working on a spacecraft (or some other physical product) and trying to get a real vehicle in the air. School science and lots of research science is plagued by lots of bad things that get mentioned in PhD Comic. I work on trying to get a vehicle in the air and I get really frustrated with some groups out there that we work with that are mainly for research and they don't get the big picture.
The deadline will be delayed because the children who's parents are too dumb to know about the switch will not be able to watch 4 hours of tv every morning, therefore the dumb parents will have to actually play with their kids. The aforementioned parents don't want to do this.
You don't want to deprive mind-improving and stimulating tv to the children, do you?
In addition to the cybernetic cannon for the pitcher, I gave all my baserunners a laser sword and battled the second baseman when I wanted to steal second.
http://classicgaming.gamespy.com/View.php?view=GameMuseum.Detail&id=306
It's unfortunate that Joe Public is such an idiot. Yes, he doesn't benefit directly from space exploration, but he has many indirect benefits.
You have to be seriously ignorant to not see the benefit of the space program.
Ever used a cordless power tool? A smoke detector? Modern water filtration? Infrared thermometer? Edible toothpaste (this one is now used for baby toothpaste and we probably all used it as babies)? Composite forceps in the delivery room? Global communications?
Here is a kid friendly site that Joe Public might be able to comprehend
http://techtran.msfc.nasa.gov/at_home.html
What books did they exactly keep in there, or were they the books any kid at a young age wouldn't wanna come across?
They weren't books at all. My guess is homemade movies from the master suite...
I have an honest question, and I'm not trying to be sarcastic or anything. 2 of my friends are elementary school teachers, and I know that they, like you, work more than 40 hours most weeks. However they only work for 9 months of the year (also depending on your school system, anywhere from a full 1 to 3 weeks off for christmas break).
At my job, I work 40 hours a week for 12 months, coming out to around 2040 hours a year.
My question is, after adding up all your weeks of over 40 hours for the 9 month period, what is your total hours of work for the year? Is it above or below 2040?
I have another friend who teaches at a college during fall and spring semester. Together we added up the hours that he works and calculated his pay per hour. His pay per hour was actually higher than mine because I had to work almost double the hours, but my salary was not double!
You mean like increased ability to forecast the weather, among tons of other things? Get your head out of your butt. NASA contributes greatly to things you probably experience every day. Google it, or in light of a recent story today, Cuil it.
One example:
In 1978, Seasat-A extended our view of the Earth from the land to the oceans. The satellite carried five microwave instruments and their antennae, and the use of active as well as passive microwave sensors achieved the first all-weather remote sensing capability in space.
Most recently, monitoring of another independent variable affecting the Earth's weather has been added to the tools as the service of the meteorologist. Starting at the end of 1997, real-time data from NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer satellite were incorporated into the daily weather forecasting system. It is positioned between the Sun and the Earth, and intercepts the solar wind and measures geomagnetic activity, allowing forecasters to warn in advance those who might be affected by geomagnetic storms, such as satellite users and electric power grid control centers, of increased solar activity that could be a threat to their systems.
If you are trying to find a solution that doesn't exist you might have to derive a new equation so the excel monkeys can plug in the values. Where do you think all the equations come from? Obtaining an equation from a natural physical law can be really complex. For instance, the derivations of some simple physics equations from Newtons 2nd law can be exceedingly complex and you need all your math skills to pull it off.
Mathematica is a tool to use to help with really complex derivations, but you need an in-depth knowledge of math to get the result you need.
Understanding the 'mundane' math is an important part of this process. What's mundane to you is not mundane to a student. I think calculus is mundane, but I did not when I was initially taking the class. I had friends in other classes who were allowed to use a TI-89 in their calculus classes, and they were always getting stumped when concepts from calculus had to be applied in future engineering classes when the TI-89 wouldn't spit out the answer.
Contrast Ratio is not misleading if you have any idea of what it means. Contrast ratio is a measure of how black your blacks will be on the tv. Black levels are one of the most important parameters in determining how good the picture quality will be on a tv.
Black levels are not focused on enough in the TV buying world, and many consumers are buying inferior displays because of it.
Not talking about blacks would be like not talking about bass in an audio system. Professionals, reviewers, calibrators all agree blacks are hugely important. They cannot be talked about enough, imo. Unfortunately in the Best buys of the world they are talked about very little.
You might ask about the deepness of a color? Black levels is where it comes from. This is the main reason why blacks are so important. Light leakage kills those colors, and if a display can't create black, it can't create deep, pleasing colors. Of course a displays inability to display black shades kills detail in shadows as well. Really a display that can't display black properly is crippled in a technical sense.
I'm sorry but anyone who says black level isn't important to picture quality doesn't know what he's talking about.
The only thing you are correct on is that for lower tier manufacturers will try to lie about their black levels. They will list a black level that is only achievable in an extremely rare viewing condition. The good manufacturers (at least for plasmas) are panasonic and pioneer and they are pretty accurate in their marketing.
Nerd Alert:
You know that the new X-Files movie has nothing to do with aliens? The X-Files started with each episode as a stand-alone story about a new crazy monster of the week. The new movie is a mystery story about a monster just like most of the episodes.
quick question -- are you serious?
Have you been over to the Ubuntu support forums, and seen how many posts there are about people trying to get their wireless cards to work in Ubuntu? There are several different fixes and you have to try them until one works.
I reformmated an old laptop and put XP and Ubuntu on it. XP worked flawlessly but it took an hour or two to get Ubuntu running with the wireless card.
I guess I could use your words and say it takes half a day to get a fresh Ubuntu configured if it doesn't support your hardware.
You need to learn to read. I said GTO orbit not LEO. In fact the wikipedia links you deliver show both of the payloads for each orbit, and they match what I posted.