Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you made the spring and the crank larger (say 5 feet across) you could store much more energy in it, maybe have the it power the computer for a day?
Then add a second spring-and-crank mechanism, and a way to 'hot-swap' from the first to the second and back without interrupting the power flow, and you could have a web server that would run continuously, as long as you remembered to wind it up every morning.
Either nobody will buy the cds, or people will buy the cds and rip them anyway (using any of a variety of means, from "special" sound drivers to plain old analog capture and resampling).
This case turned out like the board game "Risk". The GOP had more "armies" (supreme court justices, etc.) in the relevant territories than the Democrats when the dice were thrown. It may not be ideal, but how else are you going to decide it?
Personally, I think a run-off election (either just for Florida or nationally) wouldn't have been a bad solution...
I'd be highly surprised if "Headcasting" had anything to do with videoconferencing wireframe heads
I agree, I don't think Matrox is doing this either. But come to think of it, it would be kind of a neat way to do teleconferencing--have the software use a webcam to make a 'skin' of each person's face, once, send that once at connect time, and then map it onto a wireframe model and just send info on how to animate the model, instead of video packets. This could be much lower bandwidth (read: higher frame rate / smoother animation) than actual video, and quite engaging in a cartoony sort of way. Has anyone attempted such a thing?
....and what percentage of cell phone users have EVER used their phone for any emergency purpose?
I agree with most of your post, but this line stuck me as rather thoughtless--why not also ask, what percentage of air bag owners have EVER used them in an emergency?
My point is that even a simple number, in context, gives massive ammounts of information.
No it doesn't. The context holds the information. To continue with your example, if the checkbook-balancer left the room and I walked up to see the number on his calculator, I would have no idea (and no way of knowing) what the number meant.
Over-the-air power transmission on any scale larger than what's needed to power a bug (I
believe the Russians did this) is too much of a risk
Compared to the risk of melting the polar ice caps and flooding much of the world's landmass, or of fouling the world's atmosphere to the point that people can't breathe it without getting cancer or emphysema, maybe the risk isn't so bad.
Putting it out in the middle of nowhere isn't really going the help when you still run the risk of frying anything that flies through the beam (last I checked I didn't think it was common practice for airplanes to reroute around deserts...)
You must not have checked recently, because it's a very common practice. Anytime the military sets up a bombing range or testing ground out in the desert, the whole area gets marked as off-limits to civilian traffic, and everybody has to fly around it.
And what, pray tell, makes this any more fantastic than, say, nuclear power would have seemed to people in the 1920's, or airplanes to people in the 1700's? All the technology to make this happen is there, there is nothing in the plan that relies on new processes to be discovered. It's just a matter of willpower and investment.
If you discount a new idea because it's possible to accidentally kill people with it, well, enjoy your cave.
WHAT? You would allow any old person to spend their time in a hole in the side of a mountain, under thousands of tons of rock?? Do you know what would happen to them during the next earthquake? Not to mention the obvious problems with grizzly bears, vampire bats, mold...
I'll do you one better than that... spend your pie-in-the-sky R&D money developing some sort of photovoltaic asphault. Then, every time a road needs to be repaved (and they all do, every 10-20 years), repave it with this stuff instead of regular old asphault. Hey presto, all that land area that we've already given over to roads now dows double duty generating electricity for us, and no extra space needs to be used. Hell, you wouldn't even need to transmit the electricity very far, as it could be used right there to help power the cars travelling on the road at the time. And since installation would be part of the repaving process that you're going to have to do anyway, the cost might not be too high.
I have no idea if such a thing is possible or feasible, of course... probably worth looking into though.
With all of Bush's rhetoric about an energy crisis, why doesn't NASA latch onto this idea to secure more funding?
Because they know that when Bush says 'we need to produce more energy', he means 'we need to dig up and burn some more dinosaurs'. He don't believe in any of that alternative energy mumbo-jumbo.
Re:Help me understand this better...
on
Mundie Responds
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· Score: 1
If I write some software and it's good and it works and I get paid for it, what precisely is my reason for giving the source code away? Why should I allow anyone to use my source code?
There are several reasons I can think of:
To improve code quality. If many people are using your code, bugs in the code will be found more quickly. Also, if you know the world is going to be examining your code, you may be more motivated to make sure the code is done 'right', rather than allowing ugly hacks to exist in it (pride of ownership?).
To allow people to help expand its capabilities. Any extensions that someone else writes on top of your code, you get for 'free'.
To increase the general wealth. Any code you release that helps other people/companies do their jobs better increases their productivity, and has a beneficial effect on the economy.
To increase your prestige. If people are impressed by your code or product, they will turn to you for expertise later on.
Karma. In the long run, fostering an atmostphere of open code will come back to help you, by raising the chances of there being an open source product that meets your needs some time.
There are probably other good reasons too, but that's what I can think of at the moment.
(Paraphrased: We need profession PR people to give us our rhetoric, or Microsoft's PR guys will roast us alive
I disagree. The average person these days can tell when he's being talked to openly and honestly by a real person, and when he's being bullshitted by the slick PR professionals. If the OpenSource guys come across as real people with valid points, and Microsoft ends up looking like a bunch of slick used car salesmen, so much the better for us. For further thoughts along these lines, read the Cluetrain Manifesto.
Or just look at which candidate won the recent US presidential election....
"Look at me, I can post pithy comments to Slashdot to show how incredibly high-brow and mature I am". How tragic that you've forgotten what it's like to have fun.
Your analogy would worry me, if the problem was that some terrorist might suddenly stop the Earth from spinning. However, a better experiment might be to spin around with your bullwhip, and then suddenly let go of it. (even that isn't a good analogy though, as you aren't the primary gravitational force on the whip)
Here is a slightly outdated MPEG computer rendering of the flight, stolen from his web site
-Jeremy (playing the karma whore today)
Re:This is why I drive a 4 door 4 cylinder family
on
Hi-Tech Repo Man
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· Score: 1
Overspending is a serious problem in our
society. Why don't people value living within their means?!
Perhaps it is because their TV set, their government, their magazines, and practically everything else in our culture is constantly urging them to buy, buy, buy! Gotta keep the economy rolling, you know....
Your Dad was right to be confused. Any OS that uses the file's name as a typing system is fundamentally broken. Renaming a file should not change the file's behaviour, and having it do so makes absolutely no sense at all.
Because it's funny as hell, and it makes a effective political statement.
The Digital Convergence people were nice enough to give away a pretty cool little toy for free, and then what do people do?
To butcher a common aphorism, the CueCat is only free if your privacy has no value. Don't you find a product whose sole purpose is to provide marketers info about which products you own just a little bit underhanded?
It's not illegal to call your mother unimaginable names, [...] But you don't see people doing this, right? Well, why not? After all, it's not illegal, is it?
You don't, and the reason is that your mother doesn't try treat you like a gullible consumer, waiting to be exploited. The whole CueCat scheme is right up there with 'MAKE $$$ FAST' in terms of the way it views its marks... er, users.
When we essentially take a crap on somebody who's trying to do us a favor by giving us a neat gadget for free, this gives the Bill Gates of the world some ammunition.
Give us? Who is 'us'? Did Digital Convergence come out with a Linux version of there software while I wasn't looking? And even if they have, does the fact that they are trying to exploit Linux users with their Trojan Cat mean that we owe them any favors?
It lets them point at us and call us names like "juvenile, snotty, and subversive."
BFD. I'd rather be thought of a juvenile, snotty, and subversive, than as a corporate sheep who does whatever his television tells him to.
True, but they are still projecting the final output onto a two dimensional surface as I understand it, its just that this surface is spinning very quickly. So you are still generating 2 dimensional images, you just need to generate 360 (or however many) different 2d images per revolution. So my thought is that perhaps there is a way to form an intelligible 3D display based just on the 360 different 2d polygonal images, rather than having to (render into a voxel array first, and then render the 2d images out of that). But maybe not (except for certain simple images)
Well, your client is connected to a p2p network, and presumably at least some of the other clients on the network will have access to an aim.exe file... why not send out some sort of 'please compute this checksum for me' broadcast message, and one of your fellow users' clients can send the md5 checksum back to you, ready to send to AOL?
Of course, the real solution is to come up with a open system that's so good that all the AOLers switch to that, and then invite AOL to shove its stupid little power games right up its (deleted)
Must a display like this only show voxel graphics, or could it (in theory) be programmed to show polygon-style graphics (as produced by your garden variety 3D gamer card) instead?
Slashdot Mirror
Then add a second spring-and-crank mechanism, and a way to 'hot-swap' from the first to the second and back without interrupting the power flow, and you could have a web server that would run continuously, as long as you remembered to wind it up every morning.
Either nobody will buy the cds, or people will buy the cds and rip them anyway (using any of a variety of means, from "special" sound drivers to plain old analog capture and resampling).
Personally, I think a run-off election (either just for Florida or nationally) wouldn't have been a bad solution...
I agree, I don't think Matrox is doing this either. But come to think of it, it would be kind of a neat way to do teleconferencing--have the software use a webcam to make a 'skin' of each person's face, once, send that once at connect time, and then map it onto a wireframe model and just send info on how to animate the model, instead of video packets. This could be much lower bandwidth (read: higher frame rate / smoother animation) than actual video, and quite engaging in a cartoony sort of way. Has anyone attempted such a thing?
I agree with most of your post, but this line stuck me as rather thoughtless--why not also ask, what percentage of air bag owners have EVER used them in an emergency?
No it doesn't. The context holds the information. To continue with your example, if the checkbook-balancer left the room and I walked up to see the number on his calculator, I would have no idea (and no way of knowing) what the number meant.
Compared to the risk of melting the polar ice caps and flooding much of the world's landmass, or of fouling the world's atmosphere to the point that people can't breathe it without getting cancer or emphysema, maybe the risk isn't so bad.
Putting it out in the middle of nowhere isn't really going the help when you still run the risk of frying anything that flies through the beam (last I checked I didn't think it was common practice for airplanes to reroute around deserts...)
You must not have checked recently, because it's a very common practice. Anytime the military sets up a bombing range or testing ground out in the desert, the whole area gets marked as off-limits to civilian traffic, and everybody has to fly around it.
And what, pray tell, makes this any more fantastic than, say, nuclear power would have seemed to people in the 1920's, or airplanes to people in the 1700's? All the technology to make this happen is there, there is nothing in the plan that relies on new processes to be discovered. It's just a matter of willpower and investment.
WHAT? You would allow any old person to spend their time in a hole in the side of a mountain, under thousands of tons of rock?? Do you know what would happen to them during the next earthquake? Not to mention the obvious problems with grizzly bears, vampire bats, mold...
Sorry, couldn't resist...
I have no idea if such a thing is possible or feasible, of course... probably worth looking into though.
Because they know that when Bush says 'we need to produce more energy', he means 'we need to dig up and burn some more dinosaurs'. He don't believe in any of that alternative energy mumbo-jumbo.
There are several reasons I can think of:
There are probably other good reasons too, but that's what I can think of at the moment.
I disagree. The average person these days can tell when he's being talked to openly and honestly by a real person, and when he's being bullshitted by the slick PR professionals. If the OpenSource guys come across as real people with valid points, and Microsoft ends up looking like a bunch of slick used car salesmen, so much the better for us. For further thoughts along these lines, read the Cluetrain Manifesto.
Or just look at which candidate won the recent US presidential election....
"Look at me, I can post pithy comments to Slashdot to show how incredibly high-brow and mature I am". How tragic that you've forgotten what it's like to have fun.
Your analogy would worry me, if the problem was that some terrorist might suddenly stop the Earth from spinning. However, a better experiment might be to spin around with your bullwhip, and then suddenly let go of it. (even that isn't a good analogy though, as you aren't the primary gravitational force on the whip)
-Jeremy (playing the karma whore today)
Perhaps it is because their TV set, their government, their magazines, and practically everything else in our culture is constantly urging them to buy, buy, buy! Gotta keep the economy rolling, you know....
Your Dad was right to be confused. Any OS that uses the file's name as a typing system is fundamentally broken. Renaming a file should not change the file's behaviour, and having it do so makes absolutely no sense at all.
Copying != taking.
Because it's funny as hell, and it makes a effective political statement.
The Digital Convergence people were nice enough to give away a pretty cool little toy for free, and then what do people do?
To butcher a common aphorism, the CueCat is only free if your privacy has no value. Don't you find a product whose sole purpose is to provide marketers info about which products you own just a little bit underhanded?
It's not illegal to call your mother unimaginable names, [...] But you don't see people doing this, right? Well, why not? After all, it's not illegal, is it?
You don't, and the reason is that your mother doesn't try treat you like a gullible consumer, waiting to be exploited. The whole CueCat scheme is right up there with 'MAKE $$$ FAST' in terms of the way it views its marks... er, users.
When we essentially take a crap on somebody who's trying to do us a favor by giving us a neat gadget for free, this gives the Bill Gates of the world some ammunition.
Give us? Who is 'us'? Did Digital Convergence come out with a Linux version of there software while I wasn't looking? And even if they have, does the fact that they are trying to exploit Linux users with their Trojan Cat mean that we owe them any favors?
It lets them point at us and call us names like "juvenile, snotty, and subversive."
BFD. I'd rather be thought of a juvenile, snotty, and subversive, than as a corporate sheep who does whatever his television tells him to.
If Saddam is willing to provide the United States with free baby food, why not take it?
I'd like to have a tent made out of this fabric, to power my laptop while camping.
True, but they are still projecting the final output onto a two dimensional surface as I understand it, its just that this surface is spinning very quickly. So you are still generating 2 dimensional images, you just need to generate 360 (or however many) different 2d images per revolution. So my thought is that perhaps there is a way to form an intelligible 3D display based just on the 360 different 2d polygonal images, rather than having to (render into a voxel array first, and then render the 2d images out of that). But maybe not (except for certain simple images)
Of course, the real solution is to come up with a open system that's so good that all the AOLers switch to that, and then invite AOL to shove its stupid little power games right up its (deleted)
Must a display like this only show voxel graphics, or could it (in theory) be programmed to show polygon-style graphics (as produced by your garden variety 3D gamer card) instead?