At least in Norway, electricity is not nearly as cheap as it could have been, if it hadn't been for the power companies (helped by the government) only thinking about maximizing short term profits instead of long term maintenance of the the power grid. (And as well, selling off the cheap hydro power to other countries in summer, forcing us to buy back expensive power in winter because they emptied the reservoirs. Every year. As men in the middle, they make money anyway.)
And people unwilling to build more wind-power because it "ruins the view" (on some mountain they go once a year, instead of the one next to it...) and supposedly kills birds...
we'd invent a whole new way of getting video from a DVD player or other device to our TVs. I didn't know we had DVD-players back in 1977 when SCART first appeared...
I'd be concerned about coordinated pranks I think the key is that he figured out how to detect *subtle* movements (according to TFA), rather than just the obvious ones. (Otherwise, how could he ever hope to detect pre-quakes as a warning agains major ones ahead of time?
I'm more skeptical as to how accurate he can geolocate each laptop. I've had IP-geolocation tools tell me I'm in a city 500km away...
Why give away free shirts? Seems to work plenty fine to charge people for the privilege of walking around with advertisment. At least it works for sporting equipment companies...
This is similar to the services available on several ferries. The increased fee is advertised as "cost might differ from your regular service" or something like that. Usually in small print.
Also, like with the ferries, as long as you can connect to you own network, you are not affected by their prices. No idea what kind of ground-based coverage you get at 30 000 feet though...
Hope the prices are high enough for people to only make the mistake once of making a non-essential call.
While I have seen HD-rips in Divx or Xvid, most of them, by far, has been done in H264. And two hours of video nicely fits a single 4.7gb DVD-R with acceptable quality.
The big space-saver (and CPU as well) is resizing that 1920x1080 stream down to a more reasonable (and closer to your average laptop resolutions) of 1280x720.
The little funny quote at the bottom of the page at the moment read "What's done to children, they will do to society."
Would be great if this is the children that have been sued bankrupt for musicdownloads that finally (in time) sues the MAFIAA out of business. But being pesimi... erh, I mean, realistic, I'm not going to hold my breath...
If you can even stand watching a screen larger than 28" in SD, you must either be in Europe, or blind.
A few years ago, visiting the US, I walked into a few electronics stores. I couldn't believe how horrible the picture look at anything above a certain size (about 28-30"). I mean, the individual lines on the screens were clearly enough visible for easy counting!
Of course, a LCD/Plasma could help with the visible-line issue, but those weren't common at the time.
(Now, 720p vs 1080p is another story, except for games that needs lots of space for HUD/etc...)
Sitting 6 feet away from my 40" TV is about the equivalent of sitting in front of my 20" PC monitor in terms of filling my vision. It's nice if you like to enjoy a good movie, especially in HD...
But if you move up to 3 feet, a 40" would sure be like a cinema front row. (I ended up with front row at one of the Star Wars S.E. and I couldn't see both edges of the screen within the frames of my glasses. It was surprisingly cool, given that it was an eye-candy loaded movie that I'd seen before, but I clearly prefer a bit further back if possible...)
But what to do when they only assign a 400px column (can't risk those running 800x600 missing the ads on the sides...)? Sometimes when reading a lot it's good to increase the font size for comfort/speed, but that doesn't really help when you end up with 5 words per line. (or less if there are lots of long words)
(PS. don't say "use opera", I like my firefox extensions thank you very much...)
Reentry temperatures typically reach 1400 degrees Celsius. Steel melts around 1370 degrees Celsius.
Still wanna try to claim that tank would survive reentry? Assuming your reentry temperature is correct, it still depends on the time exposure, thickness of steel, and what kind of steel.
If the tank is sufficiently thick (or protected), if could still survive.
But how likely it is is another thing... (Can't be bothered to read up on details of reentry, and don't know exactly what kind of steel they used...)
I just read the other day about the TGV replacement, called AGV or something. The Old TGV "only" travels at 320km/h, while the new ones would do 360km/h.
While NY-LA is 4000km, you're highly unlikely to make it in a straight line. By the road it's about 4500km. That happens to also be the straight lines connecting LA, Dallas, Chicago and NY. (Just did a path between the first major cities to show up on Google Earth.)
Heck, I'll even assume you need 5000km of tracks to get a decent route between NY and LA. (Assume we want a roughly 8-shaped track, going up/down the west/east coasts as well as at least one complete connection between them.)
5000km at 360km/h is 14 hours. Lets further assume the long-haul trains only stop ever 3-5 hours, giving 4 stops on the way, each costing 30 minutes (including the time spent braking/accelerating.) Still a total time for NY-LA of "only" 16 hours.
While 16 hours of course is a lot longer than flying, even including airport hassles, anything but coast to coast would be very competitive. But then, comfortable overnight travel is quite feasible with trains. Imagine boarding a train in NY at 18:00, (someone leave in Chicago around 22:00), and you're walking off in LA at 10:00 the next morning, after a good nights sleep. (unless you're too cheap to pay for a bed...)
And that all with *current* technology!
If I remember correctly, math as well as NIMBY's contributed to the Concorde's poor effect on the environment. People weren't too keen on having sonic booms regularly occur over their neighborhoods I didn't read TFA, but I read about this somewhere else a few days ago. (The main difference being Brussels-Sydney.)
The idea was to go north across the Atlantic, over the north pole, and then down over the pacific.
The plane is also capable of flying at sub-sonic speeds, so no need for sonic booms next the airport. I have no idea how high it would be before needing to break the barrier, and if it will still be a problem for people on the ground at that distance...
Your idea sounds like a individual/complicated/short distance version of the old idea of running trains through vacuum tubes.
It involves trains leaving a station, going through a vacuum-gate, and then speeding off at ridiculous-speed for a few thousand kilometers before exiting at the other station. Usually underground, or through a submerged tunnel crossing oceans. With speeds of up to 2-3000km/h.
The quote at the bottom of the page as I'm reading this...:
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann
I was in a Zoo in Kenya 20 years ago.
For the lions there was only a small (2m) fence, and another one (to keep the humans on the track) a few meters away.
For the leopards or whatever, the inner fence was over 5 meters high.
For the tigers it was 10 meters high, and had a roof! (They did have some trees or something for them to climb in, so the 10 meters wasn't that extreme)
(No idea if the "chicken wire" was actually strong enough to stop a tiger at full thrust, but that's a different story...)
This being Switzerland, where you can the the public voting on anything, as long as you gather 50.000(?) signature, why can't someone "just" campaign to get a vote for sensible copyright laws in the first place?
I have seen a few German routers that ships with a default wireless password (practically) equal to their MAC address. So it clearly is possible to do.
(German laws apparently make you responsible for whatever people do using your connection, so you better not leave it open...)
Slashdot Mirror
At least in Norway, electricity is not nearly as cheap as it could have been, if it hadn't been for the power companies (helped by the government) only thinking about maximizing short term profits instead of long term maintenance of the the power grid. (And as well, selling off the cheap hydro power to other countries in summer, forcing us to buy back expensive power in winter because they emptied the reservoirs. Every year. As men in the middle, they make money anyway.)
And people unwilling to build more wind-power because it "ruins the view" (on some mountain they go once a year, instead of the one next to it...) and supposedly kills birds...
I'm more skeptical as to how accurate he can geolocate each laptop. I've had IP-geolocation tools tell me I'm in a city 500km away...
Why give away free shirts? Seems to work plenty fine to charge people for the privilege of walking around with advertisment. At least it works for sporting equipment companies...
...the Human-Robot projects! Will someone please think of the sharks?
This is similar to the services available on several ferries. The increased fee is advertised as "cost might differ from your regular service" or something like that. Usually in small print.
Also, like with the ferries, as long as you can connect to you own network, you are not affected by their prices. No idea what kind of ground-based coverage you get at 30 000 feet though...
Hope the prices are high enough for people to only make the mistake once of making a non-essential call.
"Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them."
(Q8:12)
Yes, possibly a bit out of context, but while I'm too lazy to read too much of the koran, my quick search gave me many other similar passages...
// insert soviet russia joke here //
If it is 3 times "stronger", at 1/4th the size, why not say it is 12 times as efficient as a conventional fan?
Now, just integrate the camera and screen directly into the glasses, and give me a Terminator style head-up display!
Bonus for running ROM dumps of the Apple II O/S on the edges...
How many of those "thousands" went on "spending a year dead for tax reasons" before bothering to clear things up?
While I have seen HD-rips in Divx or Xvid, most of them, by far, has been done in H264. And two hours of video nicely fits a single 4.7gb DVD-R with acceptable quality.
The big space-saver (and CPU as well) is resizing that 1920x1080 stream down to a more reasonable (and closer to your average laptop resolutions) of 1280x720.
The little funny quote at the bottom of the page at the moment read "What's done to children, they will do to society."
Would be great if this is the children that have been sued bankrupt for musicdownloads that finally (in time) sues the MAFIAA out of business. But being pesimi... erh, I mean, realistic, I'm not going to hold my breath...
Try telling that to the MAFIAA...
If you can even stand watching a screen larger than 28" in SD, you must either be in Europe, or blind.
A few years ago, visiting the US, I walked into a few electronics stores. I couldn't believe how horrible the picture look at anything above a certain size (about 28-30"). I mean, the individual lines on the screens were clearly enough visible for easy counting!
Of course, a LCD/Plasma could help with the visible-line issue, but those weren't common at the time.
(Now, 720p vs 1080p is another story, except for games that needs lots of space for HUD/etc...)
Sitting 6 feet away from my 40" TV is about the equivalent of sitting in front of my 20" PC monitor in terms of filling my vision. It's nice if you like to enjoy a good movie, especially in HD...
But if you move up to 3 feet, a 40" would sure be like a cinema front row. (I ended up with front row at one of the Star Wars S.E. and I couldn't see both edges of the screen within the frames of my glasses. It was surprisingly cool, given that it was an eye-candy loaded movie that I'd seen before, but I clearly prefer a bit further back if possible...)
But what to do when they only assign a 400px column (can't risk those running 800x600 missing the ads on the sides...)? Sometimes when reading a lot it's good to increase the font size for comfort/speed, but that doesn't really help when you end up with 5 words per line. (or less if there are lots of long words)
(PS. don't say "use opera", I like my firefox extensions thank you very much...)
Still wanna try to claim that tank would survive reentry?
Assuming your reentry temperature is correct, it still depends on the time exposure, thickness of steel, and what kind of steel. If the tank is sufficiently thick (or protected), if could still survive.
But how likely it is is another thing... (Can't be bothered to read up on details of reentry, and don't know exactly what kind of steel they used...)
I just read the other day about the TGV replacement, called AGV or something. The Old TGV "only" travels at 320km/h, while the new ones would do 360km/h. While NY-LA is 4000km, you're highly unlikely to make it in a straight line. By the road it's about 4500km. That happens to also be the straight lines connecting LA, Dallas, Chicago and NY. (Just did a path between the first major cities to show up on Google Earth.) Heck, I'll even assume you need 5000km of tracks to get a decent route between NY and LA. (Assume we want a roughly 8-shaped track, going up/down the west/east coasts as well as at least one complete connection between them.) 5000km at 360km/h is 14 hours. Lets further assume the long-haul trains only stop ever 3-5 hours, giving 4 stops on the way, each costing 30 minutes (including the time spent braking/accelerating.) Still a total time for NY-LA of "only" 16 hours. While 16 hours of course is a lot longer than flying, even including airport hassles, anything but coast to coast would be very competitive. But then, comfortable overnight travel is quite feasible with trains. Imagine boarding a train in NY at 18:00, (someone leave in Chicago around 22:00), and you're walking off in LA at 10:00 the next morning, after a good nights sleep. (unless you're too cheap to pay for a bed...) And that all with *current* technology!
Your idea sounds like a individual/complicated/short distance version of the old idea of running trains through vacuum tubes. It involves trains leaving a station, going through a vacuum-gate, and then speeding off at ridiculous-speed for a few thousand kilometers before exiting at the other station. Usually underground, or through a submerged tunnel crossing oceans. With speeds of up to 2-3000km/h.
I was in a Zoo in Kenya 20 years ago. For the lions there was only a small (2m) fence, and another one (to keep the humans on the track) a few meters away. For the leopards or whatever, the inner fence was over 5 meters high. For the tigers it was 10 meters high, and had a roof! (They did have some trees or something for them to climb in, so the 10 meters wasn't that extreme) (No idea if the "chicken wire" was actually strong enough to stop a tiger at full thrust, but that's a different story...)
This being Switzerland, where you can the the public voting on anything, as long as you gather 50.000(?) signature, why can't someone "just" campaign to get a vote for sensible copyright laws in the first place?
I have seen a few German routers that ships with a default wireless password (practically) equal to their MAC address. So it clearly is possible to do. (German laws apparently make you responsible for whatever people do using your connection, so you better not leave it open...)