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User: Hammer79

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  1. Re:Sorry, but many of us disagree on Lucas Promises Star Wars on Blu-Ray in 2011 · · Score: 1

    I agree that much of the acting in the prequel was bad; Jake Lloyd as kid Anikan and Natalie Portman as Padmé stuck out as the worst. I do think though that the reason for the vanilla dialog was to make it easier to translate and dub the movie for international audiences. The more colorful dialog from Harrison Ford in the original series probably was somewhat lost in translation. The romance in the second film between Anikan and Padmé just came off as cliché. There were also large plot holes. With the advanced technology of Star Wars, one would think that the doctors would have detected that Padmé was pregnant with twins a lot sooner than when she went into labor. Also, the 'She died of a broken heart' line was just way too corny.

  2. The out of touch generation on Kid Health Experts Attack Video Game Summer Camp · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Sounds like the complaints are coming from people who missed the computer revolution as children and are failing to see the big picture. I went to a computer camp in the 1989 as a 10 year old, and I had a blast. There were outdoor activities mixed in as well, but I still remember how amazed I was with even the most primitive of coding. Today, I do most of my coding on PIC's, but that early exposure to computers is what sparked my interest in this career path, and led me to pursue education in that field.

  3. Re:Panspermia on New Evidence For Ancient Life On Mars · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If the Earth is leaving a dust & bacteria trail behind, the dust would still be caught in orbit around the Sun. The dust would orbit the galaxies core at the same speed as the Sun unless it was forced out the Sun's orbit by something else.

  4. Re:Desoldering old stuff? on Low-Budget Electronics Projects For High School? · · Score: 1

    What about getting junked electronics (thinking Goodwill here, or possibly even donated) and desoldering components to build other projects with?

    That would pretty much be a waste of time. Your time is more valuable to you than you would save by salvaging components. Finding the resistor value that you need for example would be like finding a needle in a haystack. However, stuff like stepper motors are worth salvaging off old printers...

  5. No Thermistors on Panasonic Begins To Lock Out 3d-Party Camera Batteries · · Score: 2, Informative

    I use third party Li-ion camera batteries in my electronics projects to provide portable, rechargeable power solutions, and most of the cheap knock-offs will have the same pins; Positive, Negative and Thermistor. However, the Thermistor pin will just be hooking into an internal 10K resistor that doesn't change with temperature. The battery will still fit in the camera, but the temp sense pin is merely a dummy pin. From that perspective, I can see a safety concern... In this case though, I think Panasonic is just trying to tie their camera to their preferred battery suppliers.

  6. Re:Stumbling blocks on Best Way To Build A DIY UAV? · · Score: 1

    Indeed, the problems I listed don't even take into account the code required to make it fly. Collision avoidance sensors (maybe an ultrasonic rangefinder) are a must for such a project, because you can't anticipate every obstacle before flight. Of course that leads to a whole other set of questions, do you go with a run-of-the-mill Microchip Pic as the processing brains, or do you go with something with more processing power (Blackfin pops to mind) and subsequently more power consumption? Do you build in a redundancy system with plane crashes in mind, like an auto parachute or something, or is the weight gain too significant? So many questions, and there are so many directions to go with such a project...

  7. Stumbling blocks on Best Way To Build A DIY UAV? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I have thought about doing a similar project for a long time, one where you can just enter GPS coordinates at get the plane to fly to those coordinates and take a picture, maybe take some weather readings as well, and send it back to a base station. A big problem that I see would be that it's hard to know how much a finished board would weigh, and how much power consumption would the instruments impose on the battery pack? Would I get an advantage from a more powerful engine from more lift, or would it just lead to power waste for the sake of a bit of extra speed? I'd also need to know that I have enough lift from the planes wings to carry the UAV circuit too or else it will be bogged down or not fly at all. The project seems to be more mech eng heavy than I'd like to take on as an elec techy.

  8. Poor dog on Is a $72.5m Opening Weekend Enough For Star Trek? · · Score: 1

    That's another thing, why did Scotty use Archer's dog as his guinea pig for his transporter experiment and not just some insect? Why the Admiral's dog? Did he have to be on Saturn on a tight deadline?

  9. Hammer79 on Is a $72.5m Opening Weekend Enough For Star Trek? · · Score: 1

    Way too many plot holes... I found myself laughing at the movie more than I was sucked in. Fine, I get the whole alternate time-line thing and I'll bite for the sake of a story, but the tech was way off base from the original. In Next Gen, they constantly had to worry about staying in orbit to stay within transporter range. In the movie, 'Scotty' informs us that he can beam stuff between planets in the same solar system "which is easy by the way" as he says. So how did technology regress by next gen? Also, what the hell is red matter? What a crock, we are supposed to buy that? Also, the shameless ripping off from Wrath of Khan and Nemesis got tiring. Nero was a ripoff of Nemesis' villian, while the abandoning of Spock was too reminiscent of Kirk being abandoned in Wrath of Khan. Also, the captain would not lead a tactical assault team on Nemo's ship, just not starfleet regs... Spocks story made little sense, as did Nero's reason for hating him. Apparently Spock didn't try to save Romulus hard enough, but since when was it his responsibility to rescue Romulus? What about the times the federation helped the Romulans with the Borg or Species 8472? I guess earth got no credit for that lol... Awful reboot IMO, panders to the lowest common denominator.