First, as for that statement, it is wrong, so fuck you.
Yes, I think that we would be better as a nation under the OT law...
So you don't think we should be allowed to eat pork or shellfish? Oh, you're just a crazy moralist dick that wants to impose his own set of arbitrary values on the rest of the society in which he lives. I get it.
So, that's nice that the government wants to crack down on sites like Facebook, but I think there are data mining things going on that most folk (even some on slashdot) are unaware of. For instance, awhile back I decided to switch my car insurance policy from company A to company B. When I contacted company B and had them quote me a rate, they said there was an at-fault accident on my record that shouldn't have been there. I asked them where they got that information because my DMV record was clean. They explained that they got their info. from a third party company that gets that kind of information from DMV. They told me I could contact the company to have the accident removed from my record, as there seemed to be no problem with the insurance company disputing the alleged incident (in other words, I am not paying for the accident). Well, I did some Googling and internet browsing and found the company. They list themselves as a data aggregation company (one that I had never heard of) that will sell information to any party interested (information like my personal driving record). There was a whole process you could go through to "opt-out" of their aggregation service, effectively limiting them from collecting information on you. I started the process which involved a few forms asking for personal information. Not wanting to give this company much more information, I just decided to call them instead.
I talked to a customer service rep. and they helped me get though the opt-out process without giving up much more in the way of personal info. The rep. quipped, however, that my efforts were pretty futile because there were countless other companies providing the same services. So I asked for those company names and, sure enough, eventually found their web presence with similar business-descriptions and opt-out policies. All of this data aggregation was happening unbeknown to myself and probably most folk that are not in the car insurance industry. Many of them had outdated records (they only mine DMV so often), and showed various false information about my driving record in their records. This was the info. that would be used to analyze my driving habits for insurance rates. All in all, it was breathtaking how flawed and vast this info. gathering network was.
So, long story short, the privacy thing goes a lot deeper than Facebook. Frankly, I have a Facebook profile and I couldn't give a damn about my privacy settings on there (I never want to work for someone that takes things I say on a site like Facebook seriously). What I do give a damn about is companies that turn a profit off of data-mining me without my permission (I NEVER requested any of these company's services, why the hell do they have the right to gather a profile on me?)
Anyways, I would much prefer to see legislation regarding issues like mine rather than crap directed at Facebook or Google. Either way, it was a few months back that I went through all of this and I forget the name of the first company I contacted. I think I still have it written on a post-it note at home. I'll try to find it and dig it up to post in a response to this message later.
This might be a bit of a flame-bating stretch but I'll take a shot at it. The JWST will be able to see as far back to a few moments (on a cosmic scale) just after the big bang. The amount of evidence (and pretty pictures) gathered regarding the origin of the universe stemming from a single, brilliant explosion will increase (and NASA will publicize it, they have a great PR program). Each bit of evidence ingested by young minds that are being raised in creationist households (or just generally uneducated households) will contribute to that young mind wanting to learn more about our origin and the wonders of the universe. It probably will even go on to inspire a few more kids to study science, math, and other such fields. This will produce a few more college graduates, a few more rational beings, and a few less emotion driven doofuses. It might even go on to squelch some of the more outspoken religious nutjobs once and for all.
Fast forward some years and those minds are now voting on important issues, like hunger, the poor, disease, etc. When they vote, since they are a bit more educated, they will vote a little less passionately and more reasonably. Those minds will now vote for funding to go to projects like the JWST, rather than killing "them damn Muslims!" over a religious pissing match. When they look for jobs, they will find jobs in the sciences. Jobs that may continue to help the fight against disease, or hunger, etc. And little by little the big social problems that you list will get chipped away at with successive generations of students (and even grown adults being exposed to evidence for the Big Bang for the first time) growing more intelligent.
Projects like the JWST and other scientific undertakings combat the problems you list indirectly through attrition. Public education regarding, and access to, scientific knowledge helps battle social problems through a war of attrition. The reality is that the problems you listed are symptomatic of society's attitude, not it's technology. We can produce enough food to feed everyone. We have enough smart people to educate everyone. We choose, as a society, not to do such things because we do not value them as much as other distractions presently. Every project like the JWST helps to shift those social values a little further away from emotional and sensual satiation towards scientific progress and the development of the human species.
In other words, your list of problems cannot be solved by technology (or, more appropriately, they already have been). They must be solved by social attitude. Projects like the JWST help shift that social attitude in the right direction over time.
' However in this case, I'd imagine the logic is more like 'hey you're pulling really hard on the arm right now, and there is a lot of resistance, meaning the guy needs more help, so pull harder!'
That's not really how control programs tend to work in applications like these. Generally speaking (and I do mean very generally) in some sort of advanced control system you have a set of commanded states that you want to achieve (force, acceleration, velocity, whatever). This command set gets fed into what is known as a plant which is a complicated set of matrices that models the dynamics the system being controlled (so maybe this would exist for each joint motor, or something like that). The plant calculates, based on a set of inputs, a probable outcome of states (it won't be exactly the same as the commanded because of system loss and unmodeled dynamics and such). These output states are then fed through some other sort of control block (maybe a simple gain, maybe a state-estimator, it depends on the application) and circulated back to the input of the plant. They are combined with the commanded states via a negative combination (you take the difference between the two states, commanded and output from the last cycle) and used again to produce another set of state outputs. This cycle continues many times a second allowing the system to "damp" perturbations and disturbances in the state variables, thus achieving a highly accurate approximation of the commanded state in a short amount of time.
The feedback, therefore, is primarily used to ensure the commanded state is achieved correctly.
The danger you are speaking of generally gets handled through the commanded rates logic. If, say, you need to lift a 50 lb box, then you need to apply 50.1 lbs of force to accelerate it upwards. You need a set of controller code in order to determine this commanded load of 50.1 lbs. In order to do that, you are going to be reading multiple sensor signals and developing your state commands. These sensors will include a set of pressure, temperature, and maybe even moisture sensors in contact with the human operator. The reason for this is that the commanded rates will be calculated based on the load being exerted against the suit by the human being. Based on the sensory inputs, a set of command states will be generated and fed to the actuator controller that I described above. As such, the system already has access to data regarding the load existing between the human operator and the suit. The safety issues you worry about, therefore, are relatively trivial to negate via the logic that computes the commanded states. Essentially, since the controller will be processing data regarding human-suit loads, it can involve some simple checks such as:
Of course, this is a very simplified model, but the point is that the safety check actually gets handled while setting the commanded loads. Thus, the actuators won't even be able to see a value that is too high for human safety. Redundancy can be added by implementing a series of simple filters to the commanded state input to the controller plant (something like a Schmidt Trigger). Safety, therefore, gets built directly into the suit contollers to prevent the suit from exerting an excess load on the human body via the suit.
You see, this sort of development is the precise work done by folks known as control systems engineers. They get paid, explicitly, to develop stable systems that cannot run away with unstable state variable modes. If they fail to do this, then not only will the human inside be turned to mush, but the hardware that the control logic is implemented on will exceed its own max loads and the system will fail spectacularly. So the entire purpose of this kind of engineer is to ensure this doesn't happen. Companies like Raytheon fork over millions of dollars a year to employees to do ju
Hey, I just bought an N900 a few days ago. I haven't bothered to get a phone contract for it yet because, well, that's not terribly imperative for me yet. However, I have done some research. I know T-mobile offers an unlimited data (and possibly unlimited text?) for ~ $25 per month. You can couple that plan with prepaid voice minutes (refills, topups, whatever) to keep your bill low if you really use such low amounts of voice data. Currently, I am using my N900 like a stylus driven laptop and I love the damn thing. I've sent e-mails with it. I've accessed my home network with it. Hell, I have Pidgin, Google Voice, and Skype running on it in such a manner that I can keep in contact with every person I know that uses the internet (the only reason I need voice, seemingly, is to talk to the folks that don't, like my Mom).
Anyways, the moral of the story is that, for someone like you that uses very few voice minutes and just wants a hackable pocket computer, the N900 really is a great platform. I've had mine two days and I can already tell it will be worth the investment.
Oh I didn't mean to imply a conspiracy, just plain old youthful idealism combined with incompetency and naivete. That's enough of a volatile cocktail to poison any issue really, be it political or otherwise.
I hope this performance improvement really shows in the release version of the program, and I hope it runs fairly lightweight on system resources. I've been using Firefox since my high school days and I really loved it up until a year ago or so. About the time Chrome came out, Firefox was eating up so many of my system resources (so what if I use six year old hardware, it's adequate!) that it was making it hard to get things done on my computer and have Firefox running simultaneously. I switched to Chrome for it's speed and small footprint but, honestly, internet with scripts enabled and crappy half-assed ad-blocking software is just too annoying. I'd love to return to Firefox soon. So here is crossing my fingers and hoping that the browser will run on an old Athlon 3200 processor with a single gig of pre-DDR2 memory.
Somewhere, at some time in the past, some underpaid, over-motivated intern had a brilliant idea to help save the world by fighting the evil oil companies first hand! He or she was more than excited just to get an internship at the white house, under the Obama administration no less! And then, this! He or she was given the opportunity to audit a world-changing report regarding one of the most publicized environmental disasters in history for typos and grammatical correctness. Being an over-achiever and one who is full of gumption, the intern took it upon him or herself to rearrange some paragraphs and really stick it to BP, knowing that they were doing the right thing to protect the world from eco-terrorists! Captain Planet would be proud, yesiree!
A few months later, a report about the report reveals the tampering, the public becomes outraged, Obama has to answer for it all, and the intern is currently shitting his or her pants in fear of the Pandora's box that they unlocked, perhaps,even developing a nasty cocaine addiction in the process....
Either that or the politico douchebags in the white-house just fucked everyone over again out of sheer boredom.
Either way, it's times like this that make me proud I went to school to become an engineer, rather than getting muddled about in that dark world of hurt that is politics!
Might I suggest trying Duck Duck Go as a search engine? I've been using it for a few months now and I have been consistently pleased with the relevance of the results it returns as well as the various shortcuts for specific types of searchs (for instance, if I want to use Google to find something instead, I can type "!google [search term]" and I will be redirected to a google search). It definitely has some work to do on returning more results for obscure searches, but it seems to be doing well for a relatively new search engine.
Hey America (and the rest of the world), if you really want to pull your ass out of a recession fast, then projects like this are imperative. This spaceport isn't simply another, "Oh wow!" factor for the rich and famous. Straight from TFA:
TSC expects to employ up to 170 people when production is in full swing. It has begun posting job openings on its website for engineers and technicians.
See that? 170 engineering and technician positions (that's folks that assemble and build things, no college degree required) necessary to operate a production line for three spacecraft. Give this company some money, cross your fingers for success, and next thing you know we will have a whole new industry helping gear our species back out of the economic plunder created in the last few years. If we really want to haul our asses out of a recession, then the answer isn't to throw huge sums of money at every problem that comes along. The answer is to create new industries, new jobs in places where there were no jobs before! (See also, the robotics industry).
So for those of you that have been complaining about the recession, news like this should make you beam with joy. If the civilian space industry comes along, then there will be a whole new industry which can employ workers at all levels. That's why progress on fronts like deep-sea exploration, robotics development, and space exploration are important. This species has to progress or stagnate and die. The stars are merely one more frontier to progress into.
Stop being an attention whoring second rate electronics kit seller for third rate geeks and build your own damn hardware.
I don't know if you got ripped off by AdaFruit some time in the past or what, but this statement is pretty unfair. AdaFruit has some good prices on various electronic bits that can be a pain in the ass to find elsewhere. What's more, they've made a name for themselves as a trustworthy vendor, so when folks buy bits and pieces from AdaFruit, they know they will get quick, quality hardware, unlike some other online vendors that seem to have trouble tracking their orders and getting sales to their customers doors in a respectable timeframe.
As for the jab about third rate geeks, well that's just some foul elitism on your part. AdaFruit and LadyAda.net offer some straightforward, accessible, free electronics tutorials complete with source code and pictures. For folks who just want to dabble and hobby around in electronics, this is a great resource that doesn't require the rigorous study of electrical engineering in order to learn how to make a cool, flashy LED toy that they can show off to their friends. Furthermore, said guides are simple enough that they can be used in young classrooms (as in elementary to middle school) and can provide up and coming geeks inspiration for continuing in the technical fields. This is a priceless quality in some societies where academic and scientific competency are mocked and scorned.
So all in all, I have to say that AdaFruit, their customers, and their business partners are all entities that I support quite strongly. They offer valuable services and products to those that need them. If such products and services are, "below," an uber-geek like yourself (I have to assume you are one, to write such scornful and condescending words), well then don't use them. However, scorning any tech company for helping to lower the bar of entry into the engineering and technical fields is just putrid elitism at its worst. It only gets lonely at the top is when you intentionally block others from the path to the summit.
So keep your condescending misinformed crap to yourself. Some of us truly value the idea of living in a world where peers with common technical interests are not few and far between.
Several readers have sent word that NASA's EPOXI spacecraft....
EPOXI is the name of the mission (an extension of a previous mission), the spacecraft itself is actually called Deep Impact. Just trying to clear up the ambiguity.
Toward that end, I have one piece of advice for any 9th or 10th graders reading this: practice and study for the PSAT. Your high school may not place much emphasis on it, especially if you live in a rural area; they may not even tell you when it will be offered. MAKE SURE YOU TAKE IT IN 11TH GRADE. A sufficiently high score (and if you're in a low-achieving state, that score won't be all that high) will make you a National Merit Semifinalist, which is enough to get you a full ride at quite a lot of universities and at least half tuition at many others. It will also open up other scholarship opportunities. And apply for every scholarship you hear of; $1000 here and there adds up.
This is a huge piece of great advice for HS students! I took the PSAT my sophomore year of HS and did better than anyone else in my school (juniors included). My adviser told me that, with my score, I could get a full-ride to any school I wanted. When PSAT time rolled around for my junior year I came down with appendicitis and missed the test. Later on, when I started looking for scholarships, I was rejected out of hand for 95% of them because sophomore scores can't net you the National Merit Semifinalist title (only junior scores can). That single stroke of shitty luck cost me a lot of $$$. Take the parent's advice to heart young ones.
Maybe high schools should start advertising the merits of vocational and tech schools a little bit more. I remember my high school councilor advocating four year college to a lot of students that, quite frankly, just weren't going to do well in four year college (disinterested in abstract concepts, prefer working on something tangible, rather than developing math problems or theses, far too lazy to put more than an hour-a-day on homework, etc.). We have this obsession in the States with four year degrees, acting like employees without one are incompetent and useless. We have students that don't want to attend college attending college because they are told there's no other way to succeed in the world. And, simultaneously, it seems like fewer and fewer college kids I know are actually prepared for the world that they are put into. Few know how to maintain a car. Most don't understand the first thing about taxes. The concept of fiscal responsibility is lost on many of them. Hell, most kids I know didn't even know how to cook before heading off to college.
So maybe this increase in college applications is indicative of the trend that, when a society obsesses over a college degree in all walks of life, then that is one thing that most coming-of-age adults value.
Based on the reading of the summary (I don't care enough about Hulu to RTFA), it sounds like this is just another case of someone taking something good....and making it worse. This brings back memories of pre-ad Pandora, pre-ad Disney channel, Halo before the days of weapon loadouts, and cars before the days of electronic locks that fault for no apparent damn reason and leave you with one door incapable of opening.... *sigh*
So in the picture attached to the article, one of the guys is wearing a nearly transparent white suit. I am not sure which researcher though that making one of the prototypes be transparent was a good idea (probably one fantasizing about female astronauts), but I have ten bucks that says the guy modeling that particular outfit just wanted to get a near-nude picture of himself on the internet for shits and giggles.
Is his other hand functional? It would be cheaper to work on being ambidextrous, and that may pay off in the future sometime as well. But if he's not worried about price, then finding a techy solution is definitely the way to go.
That only makes any sense if the contents of the CD are really worth $12 in value. In other words, if you download the songs from the CD, then what you really have is a CD's worth of songs and your $50. Unless you are capable of turning around and selling those songs for $12, then they aren't really worth the supposed market value. If all you end up with is $50 and some songs, then you have just that, $50 and some songs. You don't have $62 worth of value unless you can liquidate those songs into $12 or find some other means of bartering them.
So the long and short of it is, unless you are actually redistributing copyrighted content for money (in other words, commercial purposes), you aren't really any richer (in an economic sense) than you were before. Thus, copyright laws should only be enforced against people redistributing for commercial value. Otherwise people are being fined and prosecuted for gaining something of "value" that really didn't bring any economic value to them.
Hmmm, it's kind of funny to see you group the original Stargate series into the fantasy-with-no-technobabble category. I just finished watching all 10 seasons of SG-1 for the first time and I was pleasantly surprised by how much science they did put into most of that series (at least, the first 7 seasons). Throughout nearly every episode we have Samantha Carter doing her best to explain the physics being used in terms that can be understood by military grunts like Jack O'neil (and, consequently, the audience). They talked often about the power requirements to drive such technologies as FTL drives and stargates. They integrated astrophysics into many of the single-episode story arcs (time-dilation due to black holes, adding mass to a gas giant to cause it to combust into a star, etc. etc.). Sure, there were a few things they glossed over with things like Asgard and Ancient technology (like how the teleporters worked), but for the most part they tried to explain things using everything from quantum mechanics, to multiverse theory, and even relativity in the original SG-1. The Ascension thing was a bit magical (though, with the implementation of the Ori priors they started talking about ascension simply being related to portions of the human brain being more actively used), but most of the science in that particular science fiction series stood out as refreshingly derived from current theoretical physics models in my opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
Practice makes perfect.
Well, maybe not in your time frame of reference.... =P
First, as for homosexuality, it is wrong...
First, as for that statement, it is wrong, so fuck you.
Yes, I think that we would be better as a nation under the OT law...
So you don't think we should be allowed to eat pork or shellfish? Oh, you're just a crazy moralist dick that wants to impose his own set of arbitrary values on the rest of the society in which he lives. I get it.
On that note, double fuck you. Asshole.
So, that's nice that the government wants to crack down on sites like Facebook, but I think there are data mining things going on that most folk (even some on slashdot) are unaware of. For instance, awhile back I decided to switch my car insurance policy from company A to company B. When I contacted company B and had them quote me a rate, they said there was an at-fault accident on my record that shouldn't have been there. I asked them where they got that information because my DMV record was clean. They explained that they got their info. from a third party company that gets that kind of information from DMV. They told me I could contact the company to have the accident removed from my record, as there seemed to be no problem with the insurance company disputing the alleged incident (in other words, I am not paying for the accident). Well, I did some Googling and internet browsing and found the company. They list themselves as a data aggregation company (one that I had never heard of) that will sell information to any party interested (information like my personal driving record). There was a whole process you could go through to "opt-out" of their aggregation service, effectively limiting them from collecting information on you. I started the process which involved a few forms asking for personal information. Not wanting to give this company much more information, I just decided to call them instead.
I talked to a customer service rep. and they helped me get though the opt-out process without giving up much more in the way of personal info. The rep. quipped, however, that my efforts were pretty futile because there were countless other companies providing the same services. So I asked for those company names and, sure enough, eventually found their web presence with similar business-descriptions and opt-out policies. All of this data aggregation was happening unbeknown to myself and probably most folk that are not in the car insurance industry. Many of them had outdated records (they only mine DMV so often), and showed various false information about my driving record in their records. This was the info. that would be used to analyze my driving habits for insurance rates. All in all, it was breathtaking how flawed and vast this info. gathering network was.
So, long story short, the privacy thing goes a lot deeper than Facebook. Frankly, I have a Facebook profile and I couldn't give a damn about my privacy settings on there (I never want to work for someone that takes things I say on a site like Facebook seriously). What I do give a damn about is companies that turn a profit off of data-mining me without my permission (I NEVER requested any of these company's services, why the hell do they have the right to gather a profile on me?)
Anyways, I would much prefer to see legislation regarding issues like mine rather than crap directed at Facebook or Google. Either way, it was a few months back that I went through all of this and I forget the name of the first company I contacted. I think I still have it written on a post-it note at home. I'll try to find it and dig it up to post in a response to this message later.
This might be a bit of a flame-bating stretch but I'll take a shot at it. The JWST will be able to see as far back to a few moments (on a cosmic scale) just after the big bang. The amount of evidence (and pretty pictures) gathered regarding the origin of the universe stemming from a single, brilliant explosion will increase (and NASA will publicize it, they have a great PR program). Each bit of evidence ingested by young minds that are being raised in creationist households (or just generally uneducated households) will contribute to that young mind wanting to learn more about our origin and the wonders of the universe. It probably will even go on to inspire a few more kids to study science, math, and other such fields. This will produce a few more college graduates, a few more rational beings, and a few less emotion driven doofuses. It might even go on to squelch some of the more outspoken religious nutjobs once and for all.
Fast forward some years and those minds are now voting on important issues, like hunger, the poor, disease, etc. When they vote, since they are a bit more educated, they will vote a little less passionately and more reasonably. Those minds will now vote for funding to go to projects like the JWST, rather than killing "them damn Muslims!" over a religious pissing match. When they look for jobs, they will find jobs in the sciences. Jobs that may continue to help the fight against disease, or hunger, etc. And little by little the big social problems that you list will get chipped away at with successive generations of students (and even grown adults being exposed to evidence for the Big Bang for the first time) growing more intelligent.
Projects like the JWST and other scientific undertakings combat the problems you list indirectly through attrition. Public education regarding, and access to, scientific knowledge helps battle social problems through a war of attrition. The reality is that the problems you listed are symptomatic of society's attitude, not it's technology. We can produce enough food to feed everyone. We have enough smart people to educate everyone. We choose, as a society, not to do such things because we do not value them as much as other distractions presently. Every project like the JWST helps to shift those social values a little further away from emotional and sensual satiation towards scientific progress and the development of the human species.
In other words, your list of problems cannot be solved by technology (or, more appropriately, they already have been). They must be solved by social attitude. Projects like the JWST help shift that social attitude in the right direction over time.
' However in this case, I'd imagine the logic is more like 'hey you're pulling really hard on the arm right now, and there is a lot of resistance, meaning the guy needs more help, so pull harder!'
That's not really how control programs tend to work in applications like these. Generally speaking (and I do mean very generally) in some sort of advanced control system you have a set of commanded states that you want to achieve (force, acceleration, velocity, whatever). This command set gets fed into what is known as a plant which is a complicated set of matrices that models the dynamics the system being controlled (so maybe this would exist for each joint motor, or something like that). The plant calculates, based on a set of inputs, a probable outcome of states (it won't be exactly the same as the commanded because of system loss and unmodeled dynamics and such). These output states are then fed through some other sort of control block (maybe a simple gain, maybe a state-estimator, it depends on the application) and circulated back to the input of the plant. They are combined with the commanded states via a negative combination (you take the difference between the two states, commanded and output from the last cycle) and used again to produce another set of state outputs. This cycle continues many times a second allowing the system to "damp" perturbations and disturbances in the state variables, thus achieving a highly accurate approximation of the commanded state in a short amount of time.
The feedback, therefore, is primarily used to ensure the commanded state is achieved correctly.
The danger you are speaking of generally gets handled through the commanded rates logic. If, say, you need to lift a 50 lb box, then you need to apply 50.1 lbs of force to accelerate it upwards. You need a set of controller code in order to determine this commanded load of 50.1 lbs. In order to do that, you are going to be reading multiple sensor signals and developing your state commands. These sensors will include a set of pressure, temperature, and maybe even moisture sensors in contact with the human operator. The reason for this is that the commanded rates will be calculated based on the load being exerted against the suit by the human being. Based on the sensory inputs, a set of command states will be generated and fed to the actuator controller that I described above. As such, the system already has access to data regarding the load existing between the human operator and the suit. The safety issues you worry about, therefore, are relatively trivial to negate via the logic that computes the commanded states. Essentially, since the controller will be processing data regarding human-suit loads, it can involve some simple checks such as:
"if ( $human-suit_load >= ($Survivable_Human_Load - $Some_Safety_Factor) ){$human-suit_load = $Maximum_Allowable_Load}"
Of course, this is a very simplified model, but the point is that the safety check actually gets handled while setting the commanded loads. Thus, the actuators won't even be able to see a value that is too high for human safety. Redundancy can be added by implementing a series of simple filters to the commanded state input to the controller plant (something like a Schmidt Trigger). Safety, therefore, gets built directly into the suit contollers to prevent the suit from exerting an excess load on the human body via the suit.
You see, this sort of development is the precise work done by folks known as control systems engineers. They get paid, explicitly, to develop stable systems that cannot run away with unstable state variable modes. If they fail to do this, then not only will the human inside be turned to mush, but the hardware that the control logic is implemented on will exceed its own max loads and the system will fail spectacularly. So the entire purpose of this kind of engineer is to ensure this doesn't happen. Companies like Raytheon fork over millions of dollars a year to employees to do ju
Hey, I just bought an N900 a few days ago. I haven't bothered to get a phone contract for it yet because, well, that's not terribly imperative for me yet. However, I have done some research. I know T-mobile offers an unlimited data (and possibly unlimited text?) for ~ $25 per month. You can couple that plan with prepaid voice minutes (refills, topups, whatever) to keep your bill low if you really use such low amounts of voice data. Currently, I am using my N900 like a stylus driven laptop and I love the damn thing. I've sent e-mails with it. I've accessed my home network with it. Hell, I have Pidgin, Google Voice, and Skype running on it in such a manner that I can keep in contact with every person I know that uses the internet (the only reason I need voice, seemingly, is to talk to the folks that don't, like my Mom).
Anyways, the moral of the story is that, for someone like you that uses very few voice minutes and just wants a hackable pocket computer, the N900 really is a great platform. I've had mine two days and I can already tell it will be worth the investment.
Oh I didn't mean to imply a conspiracy, just plain old youthful idealism combined with incompetency and naivete. That's enough of a volatile cocktail to poison any issue really, be it political or otherwise.
I hope this performance improvement really shows in the release version of the program, and I hope it runs fairly lightweight on system resources. I've been using Firefox since my high school days and I really loved it up until a year ago or so. About the time Chrome came out, Firefox was eating up so many of my system resources (so what if I use six year old hardware, it's adequate!) that it was making it hard to get things done on my computer and have Firefox running simultaneously. I switched to Chrome for it's speed and small footprint but, honestly, internet with scripts enabled and crappy half-assed ad-blocking software is just too annoying. I'd love to return to Firefox soon. So here is crossing my fingers and hoping that the browser will run on an old Athlon 3200 processor with a single gig of pre-DDR2 memory.
Somewhere, at some time in the past, some underpaid, over-motivated intern had a brilliant idea to help save the world by fighting the evil oil companies first hand! He or she was more than excited just to get an internship at the white house, under the Obama administration no less! And then, this! He or she was given the opportunity to audit a world-changing report regarding one of the most publicized environmental disasters in history for typos and grammatical correctness. Being an over-achiever and one who is full of gumption, the intern took it upon him or herself to rearrange some paragraphs and really stick it to BP, knowing that they were doing the right thing to protect the world from eco-terrorists! Captain Planet would be proud, yesiree!
A few months later, a report about the report reveals the tampering, the public becomes outraged, Obama has to answer for it all, and the intern is currently shitting his or her pants in fear of the Pandora's box that they unlocked, perhaps,even developing a nasty cocaine addiction in the process....
Either that or the politico douchebags in the white-house just fucked everyone over again out of sheer boredom.
Either way, it's times like this that make me proud I went to school to become an engineer, rather than getting muddled about in that dark world of hurt that is politics!
Yeah, that crossed my mind about two minutes after I posted.
"What's that? You're selling Iguana on a stick? Give me a second to get another Nuka-Cola out of the fridge first."
;)
Alternative allusion:
"You eat one Iguana on a Stick.
+25 hit points.
Temporary +1 to Science skill"
Might I suggest trying Duck Duck Go as a search engine? I've been using it for a few months now and I have been consistently pleased with the relevance of the results it returns as well as the various shortcuts for specific types of searchs (for instance, if I want to use Google to find something instead, I can type "!google [search term]" and I will be redirected to a google search). It definitely has some work to do on returning more results for obscure searches, but it seems to be doing well for a relatively new search engine.
TSC expects to employ up to 170 people when production is in full swing. It has begun posting job openings on its website for engineers and technicians.
See that? 170 engineering and technician positions (that's folks that assemble and build things, no college degree required) necessary to operate a production line for three spacecraft. Give this company some money, cross your fingers for success, and next thing you know we will have a whole new industry helping gear our species back out of the economic plunder created in the last few years. If we really want to haul our asses out of a recession, then the answer isn't to throw huge sums of money at every problem that comes along. The answer is to create new industries, new jobs in places where there were no jobs before! (See also, the robotics industry).
So for those of you that have been complaining about the recession, news like this should make you beam with joy. If the civilian space industry comes along, then there will be a whole new industry which can employ workers at all levels. That's why progress on fronts like deep-sea exploration, robotics development, and space exploration are important. This species has to progress or stagnate and die. The stars are merely one more frontier to progress into.
Stop being an attention whoring second rate electronics kit seller for third rate geeks and build your own damn hardware.
I don't know if you got ripped off by AdaFruit some time in the past or what, but this statement is pretty unfair. AdaFruit has some good prices on various electronic bits that can be a pain in the ass to find elsewhere. What's more, they've made a name for themselves as a trustworthy vendor, so when folks buy bits and pieces from AdaFruit, they know they will get quick, quality hardware, unlike some other online vendors that seem to have trouble tracking their orders and getting sales to their customers doors in a respectable timeframe.
As for the jab about third rate geeks, well that's just some foul elitism on your part. AdaFruit and LadyAda.net offer some straightforward, accessible, free electronics tutorials complete with source code and pictures. For folks who just want to dabble and hobby around in electronics, this is a great resource that doesn't require the rigorous study of electrical engineering in order to learn how to make a cool, flashy LED toy that they can show off to their friends. Furthermore, said guides are simple enough that they can be used in young classrooms (as in elementary to middle school) and can provide up and coming geeks inspiration for continuing in the technical fields. This is a priceless quality in some societies where academic and scientific competency are mocked and scorned.
So all in all, I have to say that AdaFruit, their customers, and their business partners are all entities that I support quite strongly. They offer valuable services and products to those that need them. If such products and services are, "below," an uber-geek like yourself (I have to assume you are one, to write such scornful and condescending words), well then don't use them. However, scorning any tech company for helping to lower the bar of entry into the engineering and technical fields is just putrid elitism at its worst. It only gets lonely at the top is when you intentionally block others from the path to the summit.
So keep your condescending misinformed crap to yourself. Some of us truly value the idea of living in a world where peers with common technical interests are not few and far between.
Also, if you ask me, the comet looks like a Lancer Frigate.
Several readers have sent word that NASA's EPOXI spacecraft ....
EPOXI is the name of the mission (an extension of a previous mission), the spacecraft itself is actually called Deep Impact. Just trying to clear up the ambiguity.
Toward that end, I have one piece of advice for any 9th or 10th graders reading this: practice and study for the PSAT. Your high school may not place much emphasis on it, especially if you live in a rural area; they may not even tell you when it will be offered. MAKE SURE YOU TAKE IT IN 11TH GRADE. A sufficiently high score (and if you're in a low-achieving state, that score won't be all that high) will make you a National Merit Semifinalist, which is enough to get you a full ride at quite a lot of universities and at least half tuition at many others. It will also open up other scholarship opportunities. And apply for every scholarship you hear of; $1000 here and there adds up.
This is a huge piece of great advice for HS students! I took the PSAT my sophomore year of HS and did better than anyone else in my school (juniors included). My adviser told me that, with my score, I could get a full-ride to any school I wanted. When PSAT time rolled around for my junior year I came down with appendicitis and missed the test. Later on, when I started looking for scholarships, I was rejected out of hand for 95% of them because sophomore scores can't net you the National Merit Semifinalist title (only junior scores can). That single stroke of shitty luck cost me a lot of $$$. Take the parent's advice to heart young ones.
Maybe high schools should start advertising the merits of vocational and tech schools a little bit more. I remember my high school councilor advocating four year college to a lot of students that, quite frankly, just weren't going to do well in four year college (disinterested in abstract concepts, prefer working on something tangible, rather than developing math problems or theses, far too lazy to put more than an hour-a-day on homework, etc.). We have this obsession in the States with four year degrees, acting like employees without one are incompetent and useless. We have students that don't want to attend college attending college because they are told there's no other way to succeed in the world. And, simultaneously, it seems like fewer and fewer college kids I know are actually prepared for the world that they are put into. Few know how to maintain a car. Most don't understand the first thing about taxes. The concept of fiscal responsibility is lost on many of them. Hell, most kids I know didn't even know how to cook before heading off to college.
So maybe this increase in college applications is indicative of the trend that, when a society obsesses over a college degree in all walks of life, then that is one thing that most coming-of-age adults value.
Based on the reading of the summary (I don't care enough about Hulu to RTFA), it sounds like this is just another case of someone taking something good....and making it worse. This brings back memories of pre-ad Pandora, pre-ad Disney channel, Halo before the days of weapon loadouts, and cars before the days of electronic locks that fault for no apparent damn reason and leave you with one door incapable of opening.... *sigh*
So in the picture attached to the article, one of the guys is wearing a nearly transparent white suit. I am not sure which researcher though that making one of the prototypes be transparent was a good idea (probably one fantasizing about female astronauts), but I have ten bucks that says the guy modeling that particular outfit just wanted to get a near-nude picture of himself on the internet for shits and giggles.
Combine alcohol, a roofie, and the desire to impress a geek chick to get her to show you her Star Wars figurine collection.
Is his other hand functional? It would be cheaper to work on being ambidextrous, and that may pay off in the future sometime as well. But if he's not worried about price, then finding a techy solution is definitely the way to go.
That only makes any sense if the contents of the CD are really worth $12 in value. In other words, if you download the songs from the CD, then what you really have is a CD's worth of songs and your $50. Unless you are capable of turning around and selling those songs for $12, then they aren't really worth the supposed market value. If all you end up with is $50 and some songs, then you have just that, $50 and some songs. You don't have $62 worth of value unless you can liquidate those songs into $12 or find some other means of bartering them.
So the long and short of it is, unless you are actually redistributing copyrighted content for money (in other words, commercial purposes), you aren't really any richer (in an economic sense) than you were before. Thus, copyright laws should only be enforced against people redistributing for commercial value. Otherwise people are being fined and prosecuted for gaining something of "value" that really didn't bring any economic value to them.
Hmmm, it's kind of funny to see you group the original Stargate series into the fantasy-with-no-technobabble category. I just finished watching all 10 seasons of SG-1 for the first time and I was pleasantly surprised by how much science they did put into most of that series (at least, the first 7 seasons). Throughout nearly every episode we have Samantha Carter doing her best to explain the physics being used in terms that can be understood by military grunts like Jack O'neil (and, consequently, the audience). They talked often about the power requirements to drive such technologies as FTL drives and stargates. They integrated astrophysics into many of the single-episode story arcs (time-dilation due to black holes, adding mass to a gas giant to cause it to combust into a star, etc. etc.). Sure, there were a few things they glossed over with things like Asgard and Ancient technology (like how the teleporters worked), but for the most part they tried to explain things using everything from quantum mechanics, to multiverse theory, and even relativity in the original SG-1. The Ascension thing was a bit magical (though, with the implementation of the Ori priors they started talking about ascension simply being related to portions of the human brain being more actively used), but most of the science in that particular science fiction series stood out as refreshingly derived from current theoretical physics models in my opinion.