And here Blizzard has a trick : WoW requires a monthly fee. So used games resell aren't a "threat" to its income.
I haven't seen anything that indicates that Diablo III or StarCraft 2 would require any kind of pay account.
Sure, you might need a battle.net-account, but there are no requirements for payment of any kind.
To be sure, I just created a new one. I own no Blizzard games. But I could still create an account. No requests for credit card or other payment options, no questions about what game I own (i.e. CD key) etc.
There IS a chance, that once I've added a game key to my account, I can't remove it afterwards, but since I don't have an account, I can't say for sure if that's the case. I also don't know, if you can have a key attached to multiple accounts.
But Diablo and Diablo II had none of those issues.
It was always... odd to see the space shuttle consume vast quantities of booster fuel to hover stationary above the earth before pulling away slowly.
I suspect that's simply because of the amount of outside air, you'd need to pull in to fuel the engines otherwise.
I only have enough of a clue of what it might involve to redo the calculations, that I know I haven't a clue. But I really do believe that available oxygen is the limiting factor.
NASA says they use 500,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Liquid oxygen weighs 1141 g/L and 16 g/mol. This gives us 71.3125 mol/liter. That means for every litre of liquid oxygen we need 142.625 mol liquid hydrogen. Hydrogen is 1 g/mol and liquid hydrogen weighs 67.8 g/l so we need 142.625 grams of hydrogen which is 2.104 litres. So we have a 2.1:1 ratio.
This gives us about 162.000 gallons of liquid oxygen. That's 613,000 litres or about 43,523,000 mol of oxygen. Oxygen at surface pressure and 0C weighs 1.429 g/L. It's still 16 g/mol, so one litre of oxygen contains 0.089 mol. So we need 487.300.000 litre of pure oxygen. And since air only contains 21% oxygen, we'd need 2.320.000.000 litres of air, at 1 atmosphere and 0C.
It takes the shuttle 9 minutes to have spent all the fuel in the external tank. That means we're looking at around 4,296 m^3/s, just to supply that much oxygen. The three nozzles are 2.4 m in diameter. This gives us a total engine "surface area" of 13.6 m^2. If we assume the intake nozzles are the same size, the air would have to move at 316 m/s to supply it.
Obviously - if we remove 700 tons of liquid oxygen, we reduce the mass required and so on, and my back of the envelope here doesn't account for that. That's why we have rocket scientists.
If it is capable of propelling whatever it's carrying to 11.2 km/s (just under Mach 33 at the Earth's surface). Since this one only goes to 6, there's still a ways to go.
Just as a foot note - if you're travelling at 11.2 km/s in a circle with a 6,378 km radius (Earth's equator), you will experience an acceleration opposite to gravity of 19.67 m/s^2 (aka 2 g). Just slightly slower if you do it at an altitude of 10 km (19.64 m/s^2). At the altitude this one reached, you'd hit 19.6 m/s^2
I'm not sure, but while MI5 does have agents, they are informants. If you just search through the page on MI5, pretty much all references to agents are as double agents (informants within MI5 for the enemy) or foreign spies.
First off, fashion occupies a unique niche in culture and purchasing decisions
You mean unlike furniture - an industry that according to the graph in the presentation has higher annual sales numbers than movies, books and music combined?
The entire point of IP is to encourage social and cultural development through the protection of initial investment. The fashion industry demonstrates what happens when IP is weakened or non-existant - a disincentive to create and develop
Yes... because the fashion industry has absolutely no new designs comming out ever. The last time I saw something new in fashion was 1973!
He also doesn't care if you're a guy, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, atheist, gay, straight, asexual, loves to fuck rabbits during the weekend or root against his favourite team.
However - when you work in customer service (read phone support), and realise that about 90% of the people who complain that their printer is now doing shoddy printing, ink not drying properly, getting smeared by the next page, getting smeared by touch etc., are all using refilled cartridges, you realise that people are also idiots.
they are unwilling to think of themselves like that so some mental gymnastics occur so that they can believe they were in the right and I was just... evil?
Did you expect them to sit down, think about what they'd been doing and conclude with "well, I guess I'm the evil one here?
No one ever thinks they're evil. Some will realise and accept that what they did was wrong. But evil? No, never.
He said it's NOT important whether it's 5K barrels or 200K barrels -- we'd be doing the same thing in either case, and so it would be a waste of time and resources trying to figure out a number that, in the end, would be at least 50 percent speculation anyway.
It's not a waste of time nor resources, if the time spent is that of a PR person who simply has to forward a (bunch of) video to scientists, and the resources spent are those of people who aren't otherwise occupied with this. Like, for instance, scientists who aren't useful for fieldwork.
As for what you'd get out of it? Well, what's the point in telling people if they're going to be hit by a category 4 or a category 5 hurricane? Their house is going to be blown away either way, and they'll die if they stay. Why bother? Because accurate and reliable information is a good thing. Having hostile claims that vary by a factor of 20 (5k vs 100k) does no one any good. Especially when the ones with the raw data are the ones with the financial stake in it.
but the environmentalists don't want us to use nuclear power because.... actually, I've never really understood why.
Because the waste products are highly toxic, needs high levels of security around them because OMG terrorists, needs to be kept safe for millennia and they don't like the idea of having a Chernobyl type malfunction in their backyard.
Now, some of these complaints are valid - the waste from the plants we have now isn't exactly something you can just stow away until it's composted in a hundred years, like you can with most types of regular landfills. Same with security and long term prospectives.
Chernobyl type plants aren't built in the west, so that's an irrelevant complaint. Might as well complain that cars are really unsafe, because the Ford T had no kind of passenger protection.
Waste is still an issue, but it can be solved. Not with the current types of plants, as they only use a tiny amount of the total fuel, leaving behind long lived radioactive waste. Change the type of plant to something like Thorium (Google tech talk), and maybe we don't have that waste issue, or rather, we have reduced the amount of waste. Less waste means easier handling. And security wise, we might want to consider subduction techniques, though I'm not sure if that's feasible.
However, getting political (and thus financial) support for a new type of nuclear plant is generally tricky in the west, not to mention that fanatics don't really care about arguments or logic, and the anti-nuclear lobby tend to be rather fanatic.
It's still a tiny sliver. Even if we assume that there are bacteria living and reproducing at 200 km above the surface of the earth and 10 km under the surface, that still only makes it a 210 km zone on a sphere with a radius of 6,578 km (6378 + 200 km atmosphere). That's 3.2% of the Earth - which, to my mind, qualifies as a sliver.
How the hell did my mention of some cutting edge cosmology hypothesis lead to a creationism debate
I didn't realise that discussing the possibilities presented to us by natural history and evolution was akin to creationism. But that might not have been aimed at me.
Yes, erm - no mammals ever saw one, the earliest mammals were the Morganocodontids, who did live before the K/T event, but not THAT long before. Pterosaur is as far in the past of the earliest mammal as Tyranosaurus is in ours
According to the evolution of mammals page, the earliest known marsupial, Sinodelphys, appeared 125 million years ago.
And Pterosaurs existed from the late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous Period (220 to 65.5 million years ago). That gives us an overlap of about 60 million years where mammals and Pterosaurs co-existed.
every culture, every dragon story get the same basic body shape. A creature that has four legs AND wings. A vertebrate with six limbs
Not correct. The Chinese dragon very rarely have wings, and when they do, they're essentially bat-like in that they're extending from the front limbs. They also don't breathe fire. Same with the Japanese dragons. In fact if you look at the Dragon article, only the European ones have wings. And even the article on European dragons have very few mentions of wings.
That's actually surprising to me. I thought only the Chinese dragons were wingless creatures. And interestingly enough, a lot of the dragons in the European article have only four limbs - i.e. if they have wings, they don't have four legs (making them Wyverns). This made me curious, and looking at the Saint George and the Dragon article, a lot of the drawings/paintings do not show the dragon with four legs plus wings. This is odd, because they alternate in age. I.e. Saint George and the Dragon, by Rogier van der Weyden is from the early 1400s - two legs plus wings. Then Lyfe of Seynt George (Westminster, 1515) shows four legs plus wings. And Saint George and the Dragon by Gustave Moreau mid 1800s has two legs plus wings again. The treatment by artists list also shows a mix, though the earliest all seem to show a Wyvern.
I don't think Dragons ever existed (cool as it would be too be wrong)
I agree. But the post I responded to was talking about going to a dimension where Dragons did exist. My post was about the posibility of this from the perspective of what we have seen possible in our natural history. And nothing really stops the dragon from being a flying lizard that can breathe a fire-like substance. Size wouldn't nescesarily be a problem either... get the air dense enough and rich with oxygen and you could have them huge. Pteranodon managed a wingspan of up to 9 meters (no weight estimates though). It's still a long way to what most of us here think of when we say Dragon (i.e. Smaug or one of the ones from Reign of Fire) though.
Just because titanium anodic films cannot be made thicker than about 300 nm, doesn't mean they can't... uhm... you know... make you a 600 nm thick card?
*clears throat*
Okay, so that was me forgetting a rather basic fact.
I suspect it was because I started out with the punch card idea. The hole goes straight through... so if we replace the hole with a colour, that'll work as well...
If properly stored. Notice the possible disasters I mentioned? Or even if you store them properly. What happens when you start looking at them? Accidents happen.
And just how small can you make the characters, to make them readable later? The smaller the ink dot, the easier it is for it do disappear over time.
I've been thinking about long term storage solutions for a while, and if we're looking at solutions that would survive floods, EMPs etc., pretty much all methods we have available today are done for. Also they require access to readers that may be ruined for whatever reasons.
Essentially I keep coming back to punch-cards or similar. Not into paper, but into something like anodized titanium. The colour spectrum available there could allow something like 4 or 8 bit encoding per dot. Not entirely sure about how small you can make the dots, nor how close together you can put them if you want more than just two colours.
It'd be somewhat human readable, in that you just need a microscope to view the dots, and then it's just the usual translation method of course. And you could store a simple "dictionary" of cards with large dots + words/characters to make it easy to translate (a Rosetta Stone). And since it's titanium it's unlikely to be affected by the usual disasters. It doesn't melt until 1,668 C, so it's probably going to be quite stable in most types of fires, it pretty resistant to acids, the anodizing should go through the metal, so even sandblasting it won't remove the information (unless you cut through it of course).
Depending on the size of the dots, I think you could even make a simple credit card sized object, that you could show to a web cam to use as a private key for private/public key encryption, logging on to your workstation, getting in to a secure facility and so on.
And if done properly, you could probably disguise the key if necessary. You can already get custom backs/covers for your iPod/iPhone. Why not get one with this kind of back on it? Hide the key via something like steganography, making every n pixel a part of the key.
Flying lizard-like creature? I give you the Pterosaur.
Fire breathing creature? Not quite, but the bombardier beetles is somewhat there. It's not real fire, but getting hit by a liquid close to 100 C is going to feel like being burned. And if that compound is also acidic or caustic, it gets even worse, and anyone hit by a decent amount of it would certainly feel like they're on fire.
These two aren't exactly along the same evolutionary branches, but a combination of the two aren't beyond the realms of realism.
First they have to be convicted of a crime at a trial. Once that is done, they may now be locked up indefinitely. If you remove the conviction, they have no grounds for holding you (outside of contempt of court), and without even starting a trial, they have even less grounds.
I seem to remember an ad in an old computer magazine.
First picture is of a very proud admin standing in front of three racks of equipment. "Real men don't use backups." No indication of any kind of brand or anything. Nothing on the next pages either.
Some 50 pages later, we see the same admin in front of the same racks. Now the racks are on fire, and the guy is covering his face, tears rolling down his cheeks: "Real men use Kleenex!"
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't seen anything that indicates that Diablo III or StarCraft 2 would require any kind of pay account.
Sure, you might need a battle.net-account, but there are no requirements for payment of any kind.
To be sure, I just created a new one. I own no Blizzard games. But I could still create an account. No requests for credit card or other payment options, no questions about what game I own (i.e. CD key) etc.
There IS a chance, that once I've added a game key to my account, I can't remove it afterwards, but since I don't have an account, I can't say for sure if that's the case. I also don't know, if you can have a key attached to multiple accounts.
But Diablo and Diablo II had none of those issues.
It was always ... odd to see the space shuttle consume vast quantities of booster fuel to hover stationary above the earth before pulling away slowly.
I suspect that's simply because of the amount of outside air, you'd need to pull in to fuel the engines otherwise.
I only have enough of a clue of what it might involve to redo the calculations, that I know I haven't a clue. But I really do believe that available oxygen is the limiting factor.
NASA says they use 500,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Liquid oxygen weighs 1141 g/L and 16 g/mol. This gives us 71.3125 mol/liter. That means for every litre of liquid oxygen we need 142.625 mol liquid hydrogen. Hydrogen is 1 g/mol and liquid hydrogen weighs 67.8 g/l so we need 142.625 grams of hydrogen which is 2.104 litres. So we have a 2.1:1 ratio.
This gives us about 162.000 gallons of liquid oxygen. That's 613,000 litres or about 43,523,000 mol of oxygen. Oxygen at surface pressure and 0C weighs 1.429 g/L. It's still 16 g/mol, so one litre of oxygen contains 0.089 mol. So we need 487.300.000 litre of pure oxygen. And since air only contains 21% oxygen, we'd need 2.320.000.000 litres of air, at 1 atmosphere and 0C.
It takes the shuttle 9 minutes to have spent all the fuel in the external tank. That means we're looking at around 4,296 m^3/s, just to supply that much oxygen. The three nozzles are 2.4 m in diameter. This gives us a total engine "surface area" of 13.6 m^2. If we assume the intake nozzles are the same size, the air would have to move at 316 m/s to supply it.
Obviously - if we remove 700 tons of liquid oxygen, we reduce the mass required and so on, and my back of the envelope here doesn't account for that. That's why we have rocket scientists.
But it's a fun thought.
If it is capable of propelling whatever it's carrying to 11.2 km/s (just under Mach 33 at the Earth's surface). Since this one only goes to 6, there's still a ways to go.
Just as a foot note - if you're travelling at 11.2 km/s in a circle with a 6,378 km radius (Earth's equator), you will experience an acceleration opposite to gravity of 19.67 m/s^2 (aka 2 g). Just slightly slower if you do it at an altitude of 10 km (19.64 m/s^2). At the altitude this one reached, you'd hit 19.6 m/s^2
They're extremely indecent themselves! Not to mention outright violent. I mean - look at that name.
The Parents Television Council
That's just an anagram to cover up their actual name
Cunts Shiv A Lipton Electioneer
The bastard!
I'm not sure, but while MI5 does have agents, they are informants. If you just search through the page on MI5, pretty much all references to agents are as double agents (informants within MI5 for the enemy) or foreign spies.
James Bond isn't an MI5 agent. He's an intelligence officer. Agents are informants.
You mean unlike furniture - an industry that according to the graph in the presentation has higher annual sales numbers than movies, books and music combined?
Yes ... because the fashion industry has absolutely no new designs comming out ever. The last time I saw something new in fashion was 1973!
He also doesn't care if you're a guy, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, atheist, gay, straight, asexual, loves to fuck rabbits during the weekend or root against his favourite team.
I think we can both agree on that point.
However - when you work in customer service (read phone support), and realise that about 90% of the people who complain that their printer is now doing shoddy printing, ink not drying properly, getting smeared by the next page, getting smeared by touch etc., are all using refilled cartridges, you realise that people are also idiots.
Don't use the bundled software.
You can scan through MSPaint in Windows just fine, as long as there is a basic TWAIN driver available.
Did you expect them to sit down, think about what they'd been doing and conclude with "well, I guess I'm the evil one here?
No one ever thinks they're evil. Some will realise and accept that what they did was wrong. But evil? No, never.
It's worse than that. They start out as socio- and psychopaths.
I thought you had plenty of that in the US? I think you call them something else though ... like school shootings?
It's not a waste of time nor resources, if the time spent is that of a PR person who simply has to forward a (bunch of) video to scientists, and the resources spent are those of people who aren't otherwise occupied with this. Like, for instance, scientists who aren't useful for fieldwork.
As for what you'd get out of it? Well, what's the point in telling people if they're going to be hit by a category 4 or a category 5 hurricane? Their house is going to be blown away either way, and they'll die if they stay. Why bother? Because accurate and reliable information is a good thing. Having hostile claims that vary by a factor of 20 (5k vs 100k) does no one any good. Especially when the ones with the raw data are the ones with the financial stake in it.
Cannot confirm. Contains false information.
Because the waste products are highly toxic, needs high levels of security around them because OMG terrorists, needs to be kept safe for millennia and they don't like the idea of having a Chernobyl type malfunction in their backyard.
Now, some of these complaints are valid - the waste from the plants we have now isn't exactly something you can just stow away until it's composted in a hundred years, like you can with most types of regular landfills. Same with security and long term prospectives.
Chernobyl type plants aren't built in the west, so that's an irrelevant complaint. Might as well complain that cars are really unsafe, because the Ford T had no kind of passenger protection.
Waste is still an issue, but it can be solved. Not with the current types of plants, as they only use a tiny amount of the total fuel, leaving behind long lived radioactive waste. Change the type of plant to something like Thorium (Google tech talk), and maybe we don't have that waste issue, or rather, we have reduced the amount of waste. Less waste means easier handling. And security wise, we might want to consider subduction techniques, though I'm not sure if that's feasible.
However, getting political (and thus financial) support for a new type of nuclear plant is generally tricky in the west, not to mention that fanatics don't really care about arguments or logic, and the anti-nuclear lobby tend to be rather fanatic.
It's still a tiny sliver. Even if we assume that there are bacteria living and reproducing at 200 km above the surface of the earth and 10 km under the surface, that still only makes it a 210 km zone on a sphere with a radius of 6,578 km (6378 + 200 km atmosphere). That's 3.2% of the Earth - which, to my mind, qualifies as a sliver.
I didn't realise that discussing the possibilities presented to us by natural history and evolution was akin to creationism. But that might not have been aimed at me.
According to the evolution of mammals page, the earliest known marsupial, Sinodelphys, appeared 125 million years ago.
And Pterosaurs existed from the late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous Period (220 to 65.5 million years ago). That gives us an overlap of about 60 million years where mammals and Pterosaurs co-existed.
Not correct. The Chinese dragon very rarely have wings, and when they do, they're essentially bat-like in that they're extending from the front limbs. They also don't breathe fire. Same with the Japanese dragons. In fact if you look at the Dragon article, only the European ones have wings. And even the article on European dragons have very few mentions of wings.
That's actually surprising to me. I thought only the Chinese dragons were wingless creatures. And interestingly enough, a lot of the dragons in the European article have only four limbs - i.e. if they have wings, they don't have four legs (making them Wyverns). This made me curious, and looking at the Saint George and the Dragon article, a lot of the drawings/paintings do not show the dragon with four legs plus wings. This is odd, because they alternate in age. I.e. Saint George and the Dragon, by Rogier van der Weyden is from the early 1400s - two legs plus wings. Then Lyfe of Seynt George (Westminster, 1515) shows four legs plus wings. And Saint George and the Dragon by Gustave Moreau mid 1800s has two legs plus wings again. The treatment by artists list also shows a mix, though the earliest all seem to show a Wyvern.
I agree. But the post I responded to was talking about going to a dimension where Dragons did exist. My post was about the posibility of this from the perspective of what we have seen possible in our natural history. And nothing really stops the dragon from being a flying lizard that can breathe a fire-like substance. Size wouldn't nescesarily be a problem either ... get the air dense enough and rich with oxygen and you could have them huge. Pteranodon managed a wingspan of up to 9 meters (no weight estimates though). It's still a long way to what most of us here think of when we say Dragon (i.e. Smaug or one of the ones from Reign of Fire) though.
And who gets the patent(s), money etc. for this particular protein?
Not at all.
Just because titanium anodic films cannot be made thicker than about 300 nm, doesn't mean they can't ... uhm ... you know ... make you a 600 nm thick card?
*clears throat*
Okay, so that was me forgetting a rather basic fact.
I suspect it was because I started out with the punch card idea. The hole goes straight through ... so if we replace the hole with a colour, that'll work as well ...
If properly stored. Notice the possible disasters I mentioned? Or even if you store them properly. What happens when you start looking at them? Accidents happen.
And just how small can you make the characters, to make them readable later? The smaller the ink dot, the easier it is for it do disappear over time.
I've been thinking about long term storage solutions for a while, and if we're looking at solutions that would survive floods, EMPs etc., pretty much all methods we have available today are done for. Also they require access to readers that may be ruined for whatever reasons.
Essentially I keep coming back to punch-cards or similar. Not into paper, but into something like anodized titanium. The colour spectrum available there could allow something like 4 or 8 bit encoding per dot. Not entirely sure about how small you can make the dots, nor how close together you can put them if you want more than just two colours.
It'd be somewhat human readable, in that you just need a microscope to view the dots, and then it's just the usual translation method of course. And you could store a simple "dictionary" of cards with large dots + words/characters to make it easy to translate (a Rosetta Stone). And since it's titanium it's unlikely to be affected by the usual disasters. It doesn't melt until 1,668 C, so it's probably going to be quite stable in most types of fires, it pretty resistant to acids, the anodizing should go through the metal, so even sandblasting it won't remove the information (unless you cut through it of course).
Depending on the size of the dots, I think you could even make a simple credit card sized object, that you could show to a web cam to use as a private key for private/public key encryption, logging on to your workstation, getting in to a secure facility and so on.
And if done properly, you could probably disguise the key if necessary. You can already get custom backs/covers for your iPod/iPhone. Why not get one with this kind of back on it? Hide the key via something like steganography, making every n pixel a part of the key.
Well, define dragon.
Flying lizard-like creature? I give you the Pterosaur.
Fire breathing creature? Not quite, but the bombardier beetles is somewhat there. It's not real fire, but getting hit by a liquid close to 100 C is going to feel like being burned. And if that compound is also acidic or caustic, it gets even worse, and anyone hit by a decent amount of it would certainly feel like they're on fire.
These two aren't exactly along the same evolutionary branches, but a combination of the two aren't beyond the realms of realism.
They cannot be locked up forever without a trial.
First they have to be convicted of a crime at a trial. Once that is done, they may now be locked up indefinitely. If you remove the conviction, they have no grounds for holding you (outside of contempt of court), and without even starting a trial, they have even less grounds.
I seem to remember an ad in an old computer magazine.
First picture is of a very proud admin standing in front of three racks of equipment. "Real men don't use backups."
No indication of any kind of brand or anything. Nothing on the next pages either.
Some 50 pages later, we see the same admin in front of the same racks. Now the racks are on fire, and the guy is covering his face, tears rolling down his cheeks: "Real men use Kleenex!"