If you give news sites the power to summarize, who enforces that the summary has anything to do with the story? If you read the ACAP standard, you'll see nothing like that. Instead, the news sites get to say how the link is summarized: you may specify a "snippet" (which is a summary computeed by the search-engine, not the news service), or an excerpt, or the whole web-page (think Google image search or those annoying pop-ups that a lot of blogs are now using on their links).
if the news sources don't want Google indexing their site, they can use robots.txt. Technically speaking, since ACAP consists of extensions to robots.txt, the sites *will* be doing just that. I imagine that we'll start seeing lots of files that start with "Disallow: *" and then use the ACAP extensions to allow indexing. And that sword cuts both ways: Once enough sites start doing that, search engines that don't understand the extensions will have less content than the ones that do.
I see many good results from this. Right now, if someone kills someone else in a restaurant, news search sites will often include unrelated content, like a review of said restaurant. Likewise, I find search results that point to non-existent pages. In both cases, the ACAP extensions can tell the engine that this page isn't breaking news and that page will be gone tomorrow.
It has happened several times with the Internet Archive. Legally damaging information gets found there all the time, usually five minutes before the site decides that having a robots.txt file is a good idea. Then the site starts complaining that the IA should honor the file for content that was archived before the file was in place.
In brief, part 1 extends the robots.txt file, while part 2 extends the robot-related meta-tags. They allow spiders to be identified by both User Agent info and purpose (news, images, reviews). They add an "include" statement that can direct specific search engines to specific files, for example sending googlebot to robots/googlebot.txt; besides reducing bandwidth, this can confine any damage caused by coding errors. They also allow more granularity of indexing: You can specify if data from an old cache copy can be presented to a user, or if only the most recent copy should be used, and you can specify if links, snippets, thumbnails, or full content (i.e. a frame containing the originating site) can be shown to the search engine user. They add better retention controls; you can specify how long an engine should keep information (N days, until YYYY-MM-DD, or just until the next time the spider visits). And finally, they add a crude macro facility, so you don't have to create huge files that repeat themselves.
All in all, I don't see anything that's especially bad, and a lot of it is stuff that arguably should have been in robots.txt from the beginning.
I have two seven-year-olds, one boy and one girl, and they're constantly borrowing my DS to play games. They like Mario Kart DS a lot.
I bought Datel's Games 'N' Music; it's similar to the R4, is easy to find at Walmart and Best Buy, but is generally held in low esteem by the homebrew community. That said, all of the homebrew works with it, although I haven't found anything the kids want to keep playing.
There are DS demo download stations installed in game stores and airports across the country, and many of these demos have been captured by the community for play on homebrew cards. Both of my twins are fond of the demo for Clubhouse Games, my son is in love with True Swing Golf, and my daughter was fond of Elite Beat Agents but tired of having just one scenario. All three are now planned as Christmas presents.
BTW, I'd like to recommend Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. The advertising hype seems true. I know someone who adopted a child with fetal alcohol syndrome who swore by the book after giving up on the public schools, so I got it for my kids and it's worked great. There's also video and audio tapes, flashcards, etc, but I've never felt the need to use them; the book and a willingness to spend time with your child is really all that you need.
If AOL/Netflix would've done the same thing and replaced those unique words/names with a generic word, the
researchers would've had much more trouble matching up the users. The problem is, if you replace words with other words, you're destroying the semantic meaning of the text, and IIRC the winning algorithm used that semantic meaning to assign scores. Specifically, they looked for common words in movie titles; if you rent several movies with "pirate" in the title, it's reasonable that you might be interested in other movies with "pirate" in the title. Now, you could build a hash-table that consistantly replaced words with meaningless strings (i.e., "pirate" becomes "nhy6mju7ki8") but that (a) destroys your ability to compare "pirate" with "pirates", and (b) just adds a step to the de-anonymizing process (i.e. building a reverse hash-table based on word frequncies).
"The question is why does exercise work in obesity? Because it burns calories? That's ridiculous. Twenty minutes of jogging is one chocolate chip cookie, I mean you can't do it. One Big Mac requires three hours of vigorous exercise to work that off, that's not the reason that exercise is important, exercise is important for three reasons exclusive of the fact that it burns calories."
"Some people say, I've heard obesity experts say, well it's surprising that will all the ready availability of food that we're not fatter. In other words that we are actually controlling our appetite pretty well given that we've probably been evolutionary designed to eat anything that goes, and there's anything that goes all around us, so why aren't we actually fatter?"
"If you look at the Atkins diet, the Atkins diet was no-carb, high-fat, no-carb and it worked. We look at the Japanese diet, high-carb, no-fat, it also worked. When you put them together you get something called McDonalds and clearly that doesn't work. So the question is what is it about the Japanese diet, even though they eat all of this white rice, that still allows this phenomenon to be OK?"
Remember the scene in "The Voyage Home" where Bones visits a 20th century hospital and is outraged by its barbarous practices ("What is this, the Dark Ages?")? I've pretty much felt the same way about medicine for all of my adult life, and it increasingly seems like others share Bone's and my opinions.
A related article based on the same interview turned up this gem:
When I spoke to Mr. Allard, he was up front about Microsoft's slow start. But he defended the approach of "fail fast" and learn. And in typical Microsoft fashion, he talked about the first generations of Zune as early moves in a long-term strategy. Yeah, the older Zune's can have their firmware upgraded, but try asking the people and companies who invested in 'plays for sure' what *they* think about fail-fast strategies. Fail-fast is just another word for moving R&D out of your budget and onto the shoulders of your customers. The bad news for you is, eventually they will wise up to their actual costs and migrate to new suppliers.
The most interesting part of the research paper was this: "More specifically, if movie i was rated x days later than movie j, we multiply their similarity by exp(-x/600). The denominator 600 (days) was determined by cross validation, and reflects the fact that after two years, similarity decays by approximately a factor of 3." Apparently Joe Average's tastes in movies slowly evolve over time, and something you liked three years ago may not be that attractive today.
This raises the question, should someone's age affect the denominator? People in or just out of college generally see their tastes evolve quickly, while people in retirement homes might take decades to get tired of something.
I also wonder if this decay factor applies to other fields. Not just books or music, but toothpaste or politicians. In the US, your representative is presumably re-elected before your opinion has time to change much; the president just as you're getting tired of him. It makes me wonder how Senators get re-elected at all.
My three kids (9, 7 and 7) are being home-schooled by my wife, a former teacher. Our biggest problem is finding decent textbooks, especially science. Apparently, most home schoolers believe in intelligent design, and the science books reflect this. So we gather stuff from Wikipedia and other sources and she writes here own tests. I've been thinking about releasing everything under a Creative Commons license, but they could use some cleaning up so I've also thought about putting them on Sourceforge or something. Does anyone know of anything similar? Anyone have any ideas or suggestions? Thanks.
Hey, I've found *lots* of ways over the years to destroy a CMOS; damn few of them require building a cluster.;-)
Obviously, you don't build a cluster out of VMs to get performance. You do it to get experience with everything that you listed, without having to also worry about hardware issues. Then once the bugs are worked out of your design, you can move over to actual hardware and experience a whole new learning curve without having to also worry about software issues.
The cheapest way to play with a Beowulf cluster is to set one up a cluster of virtual machines, using Xen or VMware. I'm more familar with the VMware products, so I'll describe them. You don't want VMware Player, since it is optimized to provide good graphics for playing games and the like. Instead you want VMware Server, which only supports standard VGA but is optimized to run lots of VMs in the background. Both of these are free, btw. Once you have your hypervisor set up, install several identical single-core VMs. Try for twice as many VMs as you have real processor cores. You almost certainly want to do this on a 2-way or 4-way processor, to get plenty of multiprocessing. You don't want to set up multi-core VMs, because they tend to perform much worse than virtual single-cores. "Attach" everything to a virtual switch than isn't connected to the outside world. Now you can experiment with all sorts of Beowulf configurations. Only when you get something that you like (say, for ray tracing) should you consider translating it into real hardware.
The deal is, you don't have to buy all of those pieces. For instance, I already have a beign box, KVM switch and smallish power supply lying around. ("Smallish" os OK because ClubIT quotes "maximum power draw of just 20 watts and idle power as low as 2 watts".) I'd like to get one and add a couple of big honking disks. Newegg has "Western Digital Caviar SE WD5000AAJS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM" at $99 right now. Mirror two of those babies and I'd have a fine home server for Gallery, email and rsnapshot backups. Even adding some RAM, the whole thing'll cost less than $300.
Well, I was going to ask about your public key, but I've run into a roadblock of sorts. Like many sites,/. lets you post personal information about yourself, such as AIM info, ICQ UIN, Yahoo! ID, Jaber, a public Calendar, a Mobile Text Address, and a Public Key. Some of it, such as Jabber info, is displayed on my user page. However, I can't seem to figure out how to view anyone's public key. Before I dive into the source, anyone got a clue? Thanks!
I've seen cases like this before in the hardware business. Not very often, but it does happen occasionally. After a long hard sales cycle, Neal Nanotech decides to buy something from that hot new startup, Tyrell Corpration. The sales team from Cyberdyne Systems decides that they can't afford to lose NN as a customer, since they'll lose not only future sales and the income from the maintenance contract, but Tyrell will be able to use NN as a refernce in future ad campaigns. So, there's one last big push to a Senior VP, the President, or even the CEO. Typically, Cyberdyne offers a trade-in allowance for all of the Tyrell product at NN's full purchase price, while discounting Cyberdyne's prduct just enough to equal the trade-in. This way, NN isn't out any money (at least not initially) while Cyberdyne avoids violations of any anti-dumping laws. Cyberdyne then sends the brand-new Tyrell products straight to the recycling center. (Or maybe they resell it on eBay, with a good long offer period. "Look here, Mr. Potential Customer! How good can Tyrell's product be if people are dumping unopened boxes of it on eBay?")
You do realize that your sentences contradict each other, don't you? Your statement, "out of plane momentum can't be turned into momentum in the ring plane", applies to both positive and negative momentum. You can't use out of plane momentum to slow down nor speed up your orbit; this means that particles won't be falling into Saturn. (In-plane transfers are another matter, of course. Even so, you won't see cinematic meteor showers raining down over the planet.) See for more info. Be warned, there's a lot of math to wrap your head around, but note that ring particles will only change their orbits as they pass through the ring's plane.
Re: sadness... I recall a game (I won't name it, let someone else post a spoiler) where you play an attorney. You've gone through several cases and learned the "tricks" of winning. Then comes your most important case yet, and nothing works. You try and try *everything* and you keep getting shot down. Finally, you give up let the defense rest. Now you have to talk to your client and face the consequences of your failure. It left me feeling so upset that when a Deus Ex Machina appeared, I wasn't irritated, I was thankful. Now that was a great game, even if it didn't have any re-playability.
First, I must solicit your strictest confidence in this transaction. This is by virtue of its nature as being utterly confidential and 'top secret'. I am sure and have confidence of your ability and reliability to prosecute a transaction of this great magnitude involving a pending transaction requiring maximum confidence.
I am a physics undergraduate in northern Nigeria who is interested in production of helicopters with funds which are presently trapped in Nigeria. In order to commence this business we solicit your assistance to enable us to transfer into your account the said trapped funds.
The source of this fund is as follows; during the last military regime here in Nigeria, the government officials set up aircraft companies and awarded themselves contracts which were grossly over-invoiced in various ministries. The present civilian government set up a contract review panel and we have identified a lot of inflated military contract funds which are presently floating in the central bank of Nigeria ready for payment.
However, by virtue of my position as a physics undergraduate, I cannot acquire this money in my name. I have therefore, been delegated as a matter of trust by my colleagues of the university to look for an overseas partner into whose account we would transfer the sum of US$21,320,000.00 (twenty one million, three hundred and twenty thousand US dollars). Hence we are writing you this letter. We have agreed to share the money thus; 1. 20% for the account owner 2. 70% for us (the students) 3. 10% to be used in settling taxation and all local and foreign expenses. It is from the 70% that we wish to commence the helicopter manufacturing business.
Please, note that this transaction is 100% safe and we hope to commence the transfer latest seven (7) banking days from the date of the receipt of the following information by telephone/fax; 234-1-7740449, your signed and stamped letterhead paper. The above information will enable us write letters of claim and job description respectively. This way we will use your name to apply for payment and re-award the contract in your name.
We are looking forward to doing this business with you and solicit your confidentiality in this transaction. Please acknowledge the receipt of this letter using the above telephone/fax numbers. I will send you detailed information of this pending project when I have heard from you.
Last time that I counted, there were six US flags planted on the moon, not one.
Also, sending a probe to another star won't be done for a long time; I'd be surprised if NASA (or even the US) is the sponsor of such a mission. (In fact, I doubt NASA will still be in existence, mostly because there's little chance that anything we'd recognize as the United States would be around that long.) Not that I have anything against the US; it's just that Alpha Centauri is, IIRC, 4.3 light-years from the Sun. That's 271,930 AU. Voyager 1 is departing the Solar System at a speed of 3.6 AU per year. If it were aimed in that direction, it would take it 75,536 years to get there. You'd need to travel at least 12.37 times that speed simply to arrive before the scheduled opening of the Crypt of Civilization in 8113. (When the Crypt was sealed in 1940, it was intended that it remain closed for as long as all of recorded history to that point.) Since energy requirements increase as the square of velocity, I doubt we'll see it happen anytime soon.
A couple of ideas, but I don't know if you'll like either of them.
First, I tend to skip the cutting edge games. Too many times I've been sucked in by things that just aren't any good, so now I don't play anything unless it's been on the shelf for a year. This automatically solves the WINE problem.
Another idea is to boot Windows and then run your favorite flavor of Linux in a VM. Some hypervisors let you run a client in full screen mode with excellent performance; until you hit a hot-key, you (and your friends) will never know you're in a VM. When you want to play a game, suspend the VM to disk and have at it. Windows is pretty stable if you aren't using it for anything;-) and suspending your VM will save you if it crashes during a game.
A variation on that last idea (which I haven't tried, YMMV) is to run a minimal Windows (perhaps built using Bart PE), and use it to run both a Linux VM (for work) and a full blown Windows (for play). VMware Player is getting pretty good at passing through DirectX commands from the guest OS to the hosting OS, so your game may be perfectly playable even in a VM.
Slashdot Mirror
The good news is, ACAP extends the current robots.txt, so it doesn't pollute the namespace any more than it already is.
I see many good results from this. Right now, if someone kills someone else in a restaurant, news search sites will often include unrelated content, like a review of said restaurant. Likewise, I find search results that point to non-existent pages. In both cases, the ACAP extensions can tell the engine that this page isn't breaking news and that page will be gone tomorrow.
It has happened several times with the Internet Archive. Legally damaging information gets found there all the time, usually five minutes before the site decides that having a robots.txt file is a good idea. Then the site starts complaining that the IA should honor the file for content that was archived before the file was in place.
http://www.the-acap.org/download.php?ACAP-TF-CrawlerCommunications-Part1-V1.0.pdf
http://www.the-acap.org/download.php?ACAP-TF-CrawlerCommunications-Part2-V1.0.pdf
In brief, part 1 extends the robots.txt file, while part 2 extends the robot-related meta-tags. They allow spiders to be identified by both User Agent info and purpose (news, images, reviews). They add an "include" statement that can direct specific search engines to specific files, for example sending googlebot to robots/googlebot.txt; besides reducing bandwidth, this can confine any damage caused by coding errors. They also allow more granularity of indexing: You can specify if data from an old cache copy can be presented to a user, or if only the most recent copy should be used, and you can specify if links, snippets, thumbnails, or full content (i.e. a frame containing the originating site) can be shown to the search engine user. They add better retention controls; you can specify how long an engine should keep information (N days, until YYYY-MM-DD, or just until the next time the spider visits). And finally, they add a crude macro facility, so you don't have to create huge files that repeat themselves.
All in all, I don't see anything that's especially bad, and a lot of it is stuff that arguably should have been in robots.txt from the beginning.
I have two seven-year-olds, one boy and one girl, and they're constantly borrowing my DS to play games. They like Mario Kart DS a lot.
I bought Datel's Games 'N' Music; it's similar to the R4, is easy to find at Walmart and Best Buy, but is generally held in low esteem by the homebrew community. That said, all of the homebrew works with it, although I haven't found anything the kids want to keep playing.
There are DS demo download stations installed in game stores and airports across the country, and many of these demos have been captured by the community for play on homebrew cards. Both of my twins are fond of the demo for Clubhouse Games, my son is in love with True Swing Golf, and my daughter was fond of Elite Beat Agents but tired of having just one scenario. All three are now planned as Christmas presents.
BTW, I'd like to recommend Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. The advertising hype seems true. I know someone who adopted a child with fetal alcohol syndrome who swore by the book after giving up on the public schools, so I got it for my kids and it's worked great. There's also video and audio tapes, flashcards, etc, but I've never felt the need to use them; the book and a willingness to spend time with your child is really all that you need.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/healthreport/stories/2007/1969924.htm
"The question is why does exercise work in obesity? Because it burns calories? That's ridiculous. Twenty minutes of jogging is one chocolate chip cookie, I mean you can't do it. One Big Mac requires three hours of vigorous exercise to work that off, that's not the reason that exercise is important, exercise is important for three reasons exclusive of the fact that it burns calories."
"Some people say, I've heard obesity experts say, well it's surprising that will all the ready availability of food that we're not fatter. In other words that we are actually controlling our appetite pretty well given that we've probably been evolutionary designed to eat anything that goes, and there's anything that goes all around us, so why aren't we actually fatter?"
"If you look at the Atkins diet, the Atkins diet was no-carb, high-fat, no-carb and it worked. We look at the Japanese diet, high-carb, no-fat, it also worked. When you put them together you get something called McDonalds and clearly that doesn't work. So the question is what is it about the Japanese diet, even though they eat all of this white rice, that still allows this phenomenon to be OK?"
Remember the scene in "The Voyage Home" where Bones visits a 20th century hospital and is outraged by its barbarous practices ("What is this, the Dark Ages?")? I've pretty much felt the same way about medicine for all of my adult life, and it increasingly seems like others share Bone's and my opinions.
The most interesting part of the research paper was this: "More specifically, if movie i was rated x days later than movie j, we multiply their similarity by exp(-x/600). The denominator 600 (days) was determined by cross validation, and reflects the fact that after two years, similarity decays by approximately a factor of 3." Apparently Joe Average's tastes in movies slowly evolve over time, and something you liked three years ago may not be that attractive today.
This raises the question, should someone's age affect the denominator? People in or just out of college generally see their tastes evolve quickly, while people in retirement homes might take decades to get tired of something.
I also wonder if this decay factor applies to other fields. Not just books or music, but toothpaste or politicians. In the US, your representative is presumably re-elected before your opinion has time to change much; the president just as you're getting tired of him. It makes me wonder how Senators get re-elected at all.
My three kids (9, 7 and 7) are being home-schooled by my wife, a former teacher. Our biggest problem is finding decent textbooks, especially science. Apparently, most home schoolers believe in intelligent design, and the science books reflect this. So we gather stuff from Wikipedia and other sources and she writes here own tests. I've been thinking about releasing everything under a Creative Commons license, but they could use some cleaning up so I've also thought about putting them on Sourceforge or something. Does anyone know of anything similar? Anyone have any ideas or suggestions? Thanks.
Hey, I've found *lots* of ways over the years to destroy a CMOS; damn few of them require building a cluster. ;-)
Obviously, you don't build a cluster out of VMs to get performance. You do it to get experience with everything that you listed, without having to also worry about hardware issues. Then once the bugs are worked out of your design, you can move over to actual hardware and experience a whole new learning curve without having to also worry about software issues.
The cheapest way to play with a Beowulf cluster is to set one up a cluster of virtual machines, using Xen or VMware. I'm more familar with the VMware products, so I'll describe them. You don't want VMware Player, since it is optimized to provide good graphics for playing games and the like. Instead you want VMware Server, which only supports standard VGA but is optimized to run lots of VMs in the background. Both of these are free, btw. Once you have your hypervisor set up, install several identical single-core VMs. Try for twice as many VMs as you have real processor cores. You almost certainly want to do this on a 2-way or 4-way processor, to get plenty of multiprocessing. You don't want to set up multi-core VMs, because they tend to perform much worse than virtual single-cores. "Attach" everything to a virtual switch than isn't connected to the outside world. Now you can experiment with all sorts of Beowulf configurations. Only when you get something that you like (say, for ray tracing) should you consider translating it into real hardware.
The deal is, you don't have to buy all of those pieces. For instance, I already have a beign box, KVM switch and smallish power supply lying around. ("Smallish" os OK because ClubIT quotes "maximum power draw of just 20 watts and idle power as low as 2 watts".) I'd like to get one and add a couple of big honking disks. Newegg has "Western Digital Caviar SE WD5000AAJS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM" at $99 right now. Mirror two of those babies and I'd have a fine home server for Gallery, email and rsnapshot backups. Even adding some RAM, the whole thing'll cost less than $300.
Well, I was going to ask about your public key, but I've run into a roadblock of sorts. Like many sites, /. lets you post personal information about yourself, such as AIM info, ICQ UIN, Yahoo! ID, Jaber, a public Calendar, a Mobile Text Address, and a Public Key. Some of it, such as Jabber info, is displayed on my user page. However, I can't seem to figure out how to view anyone's public key. Before I dive into the source, anyone got a clue? Thanks!
I've seen cases like this before in the hardware business. Not very often, but it does happen occasionally. After a long hard sales cycle, Neal Nanotech decides to buy something from that hot new startup, Tyrell Corpration. The sales team from Cyberdyne Systems decides that they can't afford to lose NN as a customer, since they'll lose not only future sales and the income from the maintenance contract, but Tyrell will be able to use NN as a refernce in future ad campaigns. So, there's one last big push to a Senior VP, the President, or even the CEO. Typically, Cyberdyne offers a trade-in allowance for all of the Tyrell product at NN's full purchase price, while discounting Cyberdyne's prduct just enough to equal the trade-in. This way, NN isn't out any money (at least not initially) while Cyberdyne avoids violations of any anti-dumping laws. Cyberdyne then sends the brand-new Tyrell products straight to the recycling center. (Or maybe they resell it on eBay, with a good long offer period. "Look here, Mr. Potential Customer! How good can Tyrell's product be if people are dumping unopened boxes of it on eBay?")
Damn typo! I meant to say "See http://www.braeunig.us/space/orbmech.htm#maneuver for more info."
You do realize that your sentences contradict each other, don't you? Your statement, "out of plane momentum can't be turned into momentum in the ring plane", applies to both positive and negative momentum. You can't use out of plane momentum to slow down nor speed up your orbit; this means that particles won't be falling into Saturn. (In-plane transfers are another matter, of course. Even so, you won't see cinematic meteor showers raining down over the planet.) See for more info. Be warned, there's a lot of math to wrap your head around, but note that ring particles will only change their orbits as they pass through the ring's plane.
Re: sadness... I recall a game (I won't name it, let someone else post a spoiler) where you play an attorney. You've gone through several cases and learned the "tricks" of winning. Then comes your most important case yet, and nothing works. You try and try *everything* and you keep getting shot down. Finally, you give up let the defense rest. Now you have to talk to your client and face the consequences of your failure. It left me feeling so upset that when a Deus Ex Machina appeared, I wasn't irritated, I was thankful. Now that was a great game, even if it didn't have any re-playability.
Request for urgent business relationship
First, I must solicit your strictest confidence in this transaction. This is by virtue of its nature as being utterly confidential and 'top secret'. I am sure and have confidence of your ability and reliability to prosecute a transaction of this great magnitude involving a pending transaction requiring maximum confidence.
I am a physics undergraduate in northern Nigeria who is interested in production of helicopters with funds which are presently trapped in Nigeria. In order to commence this business we solicit your assistance to enable us to transfer into your account the said trapped funds.
The source of this fund is as follows; during the last military regime here in Nigeria, the government officials set up aircraft companies and awarded themselves contracts which were grossly over-invoiced in various ministries. The present civilian government set up a contract review panel and we have identified a lot of inflated military contract funds which are presently floating in the central bank of Nigeria ready for payment.
However, by virtue of my position as a physics undergraduate, I cannot acquire this money in my name. I have therefore, been delegated as a matter of trust by my colleagues of the university to look for an overseas partner into whose account we would transfer the sum of US$21,320,000.00 (twenty one million, three hundred and twenty thousand US dollars). Hence we are writing you this letter. We have agreed to share the money thus; 1. 20% for the account owner 2. 70% for us (the students) 3. 10% to be used in settling taxation and all local and foreign expenses. It is from the 70% that we wish to commence the helicopter manufacturing business.
Please, note that this transaction is 100% safe and we hope to commence the transfer latest seven (7) banking days from the date of the receipt of the following information by telephone/fax; 234-1-7740449, your signed and stamped letterhead paper. The above information will enable us write letters of claim and job description respectively. This way we will use your name to apply for payment and re-award the contract in your name.
We are looking forward to doing this business with you and solicit your confidentiality in this transaction. Please acknowledge the receipt of this letter using the above telephone/fax numbers. I will send you detailed information of this pending project when I have heard from you.
Yours faithfully,
Dr Mubarak Muhammad Abdullahi
Last time that I counted, there were six US flags planted on the moon, not one.
Also, sending a probe to another star won't be done for a long time; I'd be surprised if NASA (or even the US) is the sponsor of such a mission. (In fact, I doubt NASA will still be in existence, mostly because there's little chance that anything we'd recognize as the United States would be around that long.) Not that I have anything against the US; it's just that Alpha Centauri is, IIRC, 4.3 light-years from the Sun. That's 271,930 AU. Voyager 1 is departing the Solar System at a speed of 3.6 AU per year. If it were aimed in that direction, it would take it 75,536 years to get there. You'd need to travel at least 12.37 times that speed simply to arrive before the scheduled opening of the Crypt of Civilization in 8113. (When the Crypt was sealed in 1940, it was intended that it remain closed for as long as all of recorded history to that point.) Since energy requirements increase as the square of velocity, I doubt we'll see it happen anytime soon.
A couple of ideas, but I don't know if you'll like either of them.
;-) and suspending your VM will save you if it crashes during a game.
First, I tend to skip the cutting edge games. Too many times I've been sucked in by things that just aren't any good, so now I don't play anything unless it's been on the shelf for a year. This automatically solves the WINE problem.
Another idea is to boot Windows and then run your favorite flavor of Linux in a VM. Some hypervisors let you run a client in full screen mode with excellent performance; until you hit a hot-key, you (and your friends) will never know you're in a VM. When you want to play a game, suspend the VM to disk and have at it. Windows is pretty stable if you aren't using it for anything
A variation on that last idea (which I haven't tried, YMMV) is to run a minimal Windows (perhaps built using Bart PE), and use it to run both a Linux VM (for work) and a full blown Windows (for play). VMware Player is getting pretty good at passing through DirectX commands from the guest OS to the hosting OS, so your game may be perfectly playable even in a VM.
Hey, I'll give you a dollar a digit for yours!