From the episode "Devil in the Dark". Dog vomit is a pretty good description. I always thought they looked like a sausage pizza baked on a shag carpet that was draped over a guy crawling around on all fours. That is one of my favorite episodes. I gotta find that one on DVD sometime.:)
It used to be that all the robots did was push and flip each other. Robots like "Vlad the Impaler" and "Biohazard" ruled the arena. The robots that had piercing, grinding, or other weapons were never designed/build well enough to break the steel/lexan/titanium shell of the other robots to win. That is, until Son of Wyachi.
That robot had an average KO time of about a minute and a half. It destroyed the other robot in 90 seconds. I watched the semi-finals and the finals of the Heavyweight division and SoW dominated. There were some other robots that had efective spinning disc weapons too. The days of the flip and push battlebots are numbered. It's obvious that the judges and fans like to see physical damage and sparks. More importantly, how do you take out a bot like SoW? You can't get in close enough to push or flip it. Can't add thick heavy armor, because that would effect the weight class you are in. Only thing left is to take it out with a stronger, better weapon. SoW is just the beginning.
"When deep space exploration ramps up,
it will be corporations that name
everything. The IBM Stellar Sphere.
The Philip Morris Galaxy. Planet
Starbucks." - Jack
It's just the nature of capitalism. If something looks worth while, that it can make money, then it's only natural for a corporation to exploit it. There is nothing evil about it. We just have to put up with spam and banners. Everything has its price.
Yes I agree with you. After thinking about it some more I just had to find the name of the gun I was thinking of so I did some more research and found it. The gun was part of HARP (High Altitude Research Project). It achieved about 1/3 of escape velocity. I found a site talking about this and other large guns here and a page talking about Gerald Bull. I just remembered the part about the escape velocity wrong.
I can't remember the name of it, but many years ago the US military had a cannon that could fire shells out into outerspace. That meant it achieved escape velocity. I don't think it was more than a science experiment, though. As I recall the shells were fairly small so it would have been an ineffective weapon. Does anybody know the name of this cannon?
"He should have been thinking of the people who'd been waiting almost 20 years for that film, not the 10 year olds the promotional tie-ins were designed for."
Why? Sure, it would have been nice if he had. I wish he could have made it more of a well thought out series, but when you are spending hundreds of millions of dollars of the studio's money making a movie you had better make a profit if you expect to do it again. If he had made the series for grown-ups all he and the studio could really make the cut of the ticket sales. Even if it set a new world record and passed Titanic in sales, ticket sales alone would not even get close to the profits that the merchandising brings in.
Action Figures, Bed Sheets, Video Games, Pez Dispensers, and the list keeps going. One adult will buy a ticket and maybe the video or DVD when it comes out. $30. One child will have the ticket and video bought for him AND an army of action figures at several dollars a pop, the AT-AT's or Millenium Falcons that cost $50 or more, the posters, the bed sheets...we're easily talking 3 times the sales for the child when compaired to an adult.
Without that extra revenue, studios are reluctant to spend the money up front to make those grand special effects that we so love in our movies. So instead of a "B" movie with "A" special effects we would just have an "B" movie with cheezy effects, which will eventually end up on MST3K. That's not what we want either. It's a trade off. We want visually stunning movies, we have to bow to merchandising.
Which means the plot and script has to be simple enough for a kid to follow and enjoy if you want to sell them T-shirts and action figures. *shrug* What can you do?
"Merchandising! Merchandising! Where the REAL money from the movie is made." - Yogert, Spaceballs
I bought a Pentium Pro 200 with 32 MB of RAM back in '97. Upgraded the RAM to 64 and the video card to a 16 MB Nvidia and it's obvious to me that money spent on upgrading the RAM and Video card is where it's at, BUT you need the extra processing power if you want your computer to last a bit longer. If I would have settled for a 133, I would have had to ante up for a new machine years ago. Go to the Game section of your favorite store and take a look at the requirements for the games you like. One example is WWII Online. You need a MAJOR system to run that game. Something like 800 MHz, 512 MB RAM and 16 MB video card. And talking with people that have played it they tell me you should really double those figures if you want a good experience. I'm sure others will follow in it's footsteps.
Here is some good advice. When you go and buy a computer do two things:
Make a budget you can afford
Spend every penny of it and buy the best system you can.
When you do that, you assure the following:
You maximise the time between this purchase and the next. I stretched the life of my P Pro several years because I could do upgrades on the RAM and video card. What allowed me to do the upgrades was that my processor power did not fall behind the requirments of the programs I used. (until the last year or so)
You feel good about it. You bought the best system you could possibly afford at the time. Anything faster would be out of your budget and you could not have purchased it easily. You know you are making your money last longer.
Not sure how we got to this topic, but oh well... I have chosen Coke in the past in blind taste tests. The difference is that Pepsi tastes like carbonated sugar water and Coke tastes like carbonated sugar water with a bit of a body to it. The difference is small, but enought to make me prefer Coke.
Now, back to the topic at hand. I'm sure OV will have it's niche market for the people that like the small difference between it and MP3. But, there is little product differentiation between the two.....and no real force to cause people to switch or bring in a new market segment or demographic. But, that's ok. Just because it doesn't have a large following does not mean it is not any good. It seems like a good standard. As my one professor use to say "The wonderful thing about standards is there are so many to choose from."
The problem with today's movies lie in how the story is told. They just don't pay enough attention to it. What you end up with is people in strange situation saying strange things for strange reasons. You sit in the theater and think of how you could re-write the script as you are watching the movie. Kind of sucks the enjoyment out of it. If these movie studios would wise up a little, they could make a lot more money. Take a little bit more care with the scripts and stories and the movies they make would improve. In turn more people would like them and possibly see it again or tell friends to see it, increasing revenue. What I fear is that good script writers and story tellers are hard to come buy.
and the pursuit of happiness. You don't have a right to happiness, just the right to pursue it. Or at least that's what the Founders of the United States of America thought.
On simple observation, we can conclude that it is getting warmer, but not like the "global warming" activists wish you to believe.
Basically, a long time ago glaicers covered most of europe, asia, and north america. We know this by the geological evidence they left behind, as in fjords, lakes, and rubble that the glaciers carved out of the landscape. The glaicers are made from snow that falls in the winter and never totally melts in the summer. Leaving layers of snow that get packed on top of each other like layers in sedimentary rock. The logical conclusion is that the average temperature was a lot cooler, allowing the snow to build up over time to form the massive glaciers.
OK, so we know that it is warmer now, on average, than it was then. Why? Well, here is an interesting theory I heard a while ago.
The main part of the theory is a "vapor canopy". The "vapor canopy" is a high water vapor content in the atmosphere. The amout of water vapor in the atmosphere reached an equilibrium where there was enough to make clouds to reflect sunlight and prevent the temperatures from going higher and creating more water vapor. The earth was very hazy, hot, and humid. But then something happed. Something upset the equilibrium.
A comet or metorite impacts the earth throwing millions of tons of dust in the atmosphere. The dust blocks the the sunlight, which rapidly drops the average temperature globally. This causes the vapor canopy to collapse. The air is not warm enough to hold the massive amouts of water vapor. So the vapor condences, clouds form, and it rains. Just like a cold front, but on a massive scale. The earth cools even more. It gets cold enough that it starts snowing in the far north. The snow, clouds, and dust reflect enough of the sunlight to keep things cold so the snow does not all melt in the summer. Eventually, the dust settles, but only after huge amounts of snow and rain have fallen. Up north, snowfall after snowfall have packed the snow layers into ice layers to form glaciers.
OK, so it got cold. Why is it getting warmer? Things are getting warmer to once again obtain the point of equlibrium. The cool equlibrium temperature was achieved because of the dust. The dust blocked out the sunlight, which set the equilibrium temperature very cold. After the dust settles, the temperature is free to rise again. It rises slowly at first, because the snow and glaciers reflect a lot of sunlight and energy back into space. But things gradually begin to defrost. As more land appears out from under the snow, the more it can asorb the sunlight and the warmer it can get. The increase in temperatures cause more snow to melt, which uncovers more land. This process has kept going from then until now.
OK, so it is getting warmer. How warm will it get? Who knows. If the theory is accurate, the temperature will keep rising until it reaches a point of balance between the cooling effects of clouds and rain and the heating power of the sun.
Re:Cat Behaviour modification device...
on
Water Guns
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· Score: 1
I have to agree. Cats will do whatever they want, as long as they think they can get away with it. For a cat not do what it wants, they must know that there is no chance of a clean get away. They have a good memory for sound and touch, which is why they run when they hear the sound of a squirt gun...and a can opener.
One time while petting a cat that was lying down, I tried to rub it's tummy but the cat got after me with it's claws. I then produced a water baloon and rubbed it's tummy with the baloon. Needless to say, the cat attacked the baloon causing it to burst. Although I tried, I could only do it to a cat once. It seemed that once a cat learned what a waterbaloon felt like and what happend to it after he attacked, the cat would only touch the baloon, remember what happened, and then run.
As far as search engines go, I would much rather have a few results that point to good, informative sites rather than thousands of possibilities. I would think that a project like the ODP has the potential to be more useful in the long run than a webcrawler or a vast indexing of pages. That is if the focus stayed on the quality of the pages they linked to. Let us think for a minute. Information on a web page is either:
New and Original
A copy, mirror, or just links to something Original
How much of the web is truly new and original information? You got me. A lot of it, I would guess. However, if a search engine or directory structure would be able to pick the best and most informative sites and link to those they could accurately address the majority of its searches. How do you determine that something is the best site?
Could an algorithim do this? Perhaps, but so could a staff of people. A web crawler brings in new sites. Then someone on the staff looks at the sight and asks "Is this one of the best sources for original information on any topic?" If it is, they add it to the database and associate it with the proper nouns.
Let's say I try to search for a book titled "foo bar" by "john doe". In the search for "foo bar", I may not find anything if "foo bar" is a common phrase or common words. Same goes for the name. I would get loads of links to sites that mention people with that same name. Why not have the search engine ask for more information if the first search comes up too big. Instead of trying to find it directly, which you may have about the same odds as winning the lottery, ask the user to describe the thing that they are searching for. The user might enter something like "It's a book about widgets."
From there, the search engine might see the word "book" and pop up a link to Amazon.com or even do a search on Amazon.com and return those results. Have some built in intelligence that can match up a noun with the best sites about that noun in it's database. It could search for "widgets" and return those results. Or even apply the first search to the results of the "book" and/or "widgets" search. How do you design a search engine that can make the association between the noun and the best sites about that noun? (best being the key word in that sentence) Also, the engine would need to have an intuition about how much information is needed. Do I have enough information to give them a highly accurate link or do I need to ask them to describe it more? Do I need them to describe a description? From what perspective are they comming from? (perspective does determine relavance to a degree)
It's like that old saying "you have to have money to make money." In this case, you have to have information to get information. More specifically, you have to pass information about the information that you require. In other words, let the user provide the meta data instead of the database. The database would focus on the "noun-to-best-links" matches. The search engine asks the user questions and breaks the search request down into a set of noun searches which it can reference in its database. The best answers float to the top and if they are not what the user is looking for, odds are they can go to a site and find it there or get more meta data and try again.
T-shirts aside, it is becoming more and more obvious, though new discoveries and theories that comet/meteor impacts have had a much more influence on the development of life here on earth and than just the one that killed the dinosaurs. This is a real and dangerous threat to our world. Sure, the odds are high, but so are the stakes. It is time that we, as a world of people concerned for it's preservation, start to cooperate. It's time we begin to plan and lay the foundation for the the assurance of the survival of our species. There are some really good efforts out there now, but those are just the beginning.
There is a new computer-telescope system that is capable of using sensitive light detectors and detection algorithims that have proven effective at finding and tracking asteroids. I can't remember what the system is called but I know they have one installed and are planning a few more. This is good, it's a good first step. Perhaps a next step is a network of these around the globe that can constantly scan the sky in all directions. That sounds feasable even in the short term. Then we can ask "What is next?"
Ok, we have our network of "eyes" and can see the potential doomsday rocks coming. What's the next step? One option would be to come up with a plan to deal with the threating asteroids or comets on a size and reaction-time basis. (send a team of oil-rig workers?? launch nukes?? use solar sails?? build large ground based repulsor beams?? build starships with photons torpedos??) Another option is to plan a survival strategy. (dig caves?? colonize the moon and/or Mars?? build large-scale space stations??) Yet another option could be working on a next generation of detection capability to increast the amount of warning time. (invent large powerful scannars?? "scanning...indications negative at this time." use intelligent meandering robot probes??)
Anyway... we can pick an option or combination of options and set a large scale, long term plan into motion....a human preservation and defence initiative. Who knows how much time we have? We should not procrastinate on this issue. The stakes are too high.
it's similar to the problem that a lot of sports and driving/flight simulators are having nowadays. They have become so realistic that they often become devoid any actual fun
That's a bit harsh. Those games can be very fun, but it takes more work to get to a point where they become fun. The ultra realism of these games make it hard for people who are not that interested in that type of game to get to the point where they can have fun. You can't just pick up a simulation and expect to be able to master it. You have to learn the technical aspects and most importantly you have to put lots of time into practice.
Let's take Grand Turismo. My one friend is horrible at passing the licence tests. He loves racing other cars, but when it comes to racing against yourself he finds it frustrating. He can't pass the tests so therefore he can't use the better cars and can't race on the other tracks. If he dosen't master the tests, he's not going to have any fun playing the game. Someone else on the other hand loves to race against themselves. Their the perfectionists that have fun trying to become perfect or near perfect to pass the tests. He can pass the tests because he will keep at it until he does and then can race the better cars and tracks. The game will be fun for him.
The flight simulators and racing simulators are just what they claim to be. Simulations. They are not aimed for the broad gamer market, but for the nich market of people that want to master a certain machine in a various set of situations that will challenge them to play the game perfectly. These are the people that buy a game and beat the game. Then they play it again, and again, and again. They play the same game over and over just to master the game. To play it perfectly. Think about it. Every game is like that. In RPG's you want to master and develop your perfect charachter, with FPS you want to master each weapon and level, with RTS you want to create the perfect battle plan and execute it perfectly. It goes on, and on.
Let me get this straight. They want to engineer a form of life that will remove CO2 and other green house gasses from the air. Haven't these people ever heard of Trees?!?! They're great! They inhale CO2 and exhale O2. It dosen't get any better than that, folks. You can climb on them, (great for parents who can't afford a swing set or jungle gym for the kids), hang a swing from them, and build crude dwelling structures in the middle of them up off of the ground. Kids love Trees. But wait, there's more! Some even make pretty flowers in the spring followed by brightly colored fleshy fruit that you can eat! They're delicious and they come in a huge variety of flavors and styles to choose from. That's not all! Trees provide cool shade in the summer and help block the cold wind in the winter. Trees also come with their patented anti-theft device called Roots®. With Roots®, tree-nappers don't stand a chance at taking the tree alive. I know what you must be thinking, "If Trees come with all of this functionality, what is the maintenance like?" That's the best part, because with Trees there is no maintenance required! That's right folks, no maintenance. Thousands of models to choose from. Order now!
Trees come standard with:
carbon dioxide to oxygen converter, wood grain body molding, swing mounts(mounting kit not included), sun shades, and Roots®.
Optional packages:
- Fruit package (local climate may vary, see dealer for inventory)
- Pine package (not available with fruit package)
A hundred years ago if you were an artist of some sort and produced a work, you made money by selling or performing that work to/for someone directly. If you were good, you could charge enough money to keep yourself fed, in clothes, and hopefully out of debt until you could sell some more. They used the only business model they had available, which was the trade industry. You did your craft locally. The buyers came to you or you had to go to them. This was true of painters, sculptors, musicians, carpenters, blacksmiths, whoever. This how it was done. They didn't have a choice.
Advances in transportation and communications changed things so that a craftsman could consider a much larger area as 'local'. Eventually, it became hard for one person of average skill to promote themselves alone and compete. Enter in Labels, agencies, and unions as 'middle-men' to help the craftsmen perform their trade over the ever growing size of their 'local' area. These 'middle-men' did the same thing that the crafstmen use to do, sell directly to the customer, but they did it over a larger area and kept most of the profit to cover costs. So now the craftsmen could go about just as they had before and make next to nothing, or they could take a chance and join with the 'middle-men'. If they wanted even a chance to make a lot of money, they had to go with the 'middle-men'. They didn't have a choice.
Of course, there is balance in the world. When something happens to add to one side of the equation, something subtracts from the other. The technology and trade fields are like that. One advancement, the car, eventually killed the blacksmith trade. There was just no more need for them anymore. The old craftsmen in that trade had to change to survive. They didn't have a choice.
Now through the internet the world is 'local' to everyone. Thanks to the likes of FedEx and UPS, anyone can send their craft anywhere. Craftsman can sell their work directly to anyone without a middleman. The 'middle-man' is now just as un-needed as the blacksmith was after the car. Ordinarially, the uneeded 'middle-men' would just fade away like the blacksmith. However, these 'middle-men' have become very, very rich off the backs of the craftsmen and for the first time in history have the ability to fight and sustain themselves past their usefulness. They know what's at stake. It's survival. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain so they fight to control their main threat. The technological advances that have changed the world and outdated them. They are trying to deal themselves back into the card game through DMCA's and government regulations so they can hold on to copyrights and IP that they obtained from the craftsmen. They want to survive and that's what they have to do. Did they really have a choice?
Who's going to win? Who knows? Right now the 'middle-men' have lots of money and power. Sure craftsmen can bypass them to a small extent and sell directly, but because of their limited resources they would be no better off than the crastment of the late 19th century. With a hundred years of advancement they managed to come full-circle. It is logical to assume that if any craftsman will take a chance for big money and join with the 'middle-men' of their craft. At least there is a chance for them to make some real money and also it is the only real business model they are familiar with. So, they sell themselves out. Do they really have a choice?
How can anybody assume that the political environment will not change? A lot of the posts I have read here are assuming that the current state of the world is how it always will be. How can one assume that? There is too much history that says otherwise. (Please read about the Greek and Roman Empires if you don't know what I'm talking about)
The world has been a fairly stable place for the last 50 years and it would seem that it is being taken for granted. I don't buy that at all. There is far too much unrest in the Middle East. Especially Isreal. A situation could flare up and next thing you know the US is at war. The military has to be ready if we are to survive.
The US military is the best in the world. (see: Persian Gulf War) But before the US, there were the Brittish, The Spanish, The Roman, The Greeks, and others. They all had the best of their time for one reason or another, but they all fell because the times had changed and they didn't change with them. If the US wants to stay on top, it has to constantly prepare, anticipate, and change.
Here's a great non-military example. The steel industry. The US was on top for a long time. Then technologies became available that made its huge bulky steel mills slow, expensive, and inflexable. They didn't change with the times and now they are defunct. Another good one is the ice industry.
In the not too distant past, Ice wagons use to deliver blocks of ice to people's houses for use in their iceboxes. This ice came from up north, cut out of frozen ponds and shipped all over. Even as far as Asia, even though only a small percentage of the ice survived the trip it was still able to turn a profit. But technology came in the form of industrial cooling systems. Now you could build a large ice making plant right there in the city. The ice cutters up north went bankrupt. Again, technology brought smaller and smaller refrigeration systems until you ultimately had a refrigerator. The ice making plants went bankrupt. In this example, each predecessor failed to realize what the change meant to it's current strategy and failed to change with it. Therefore, they passed on.
The US is trying to see what future technologies could do in this sort of battle simulation so they can anticipate the changes and stay on top. Plus, they can quickly identify how to use new technologies as they arise. "...remember when Blue lost to Red in simulation A1234? This new technology over here may change that if we use it that way over there..."
War games are not a waste of time or money. War is not a waste of time or money, if it is not taken lightly or waged for the wrong reasons. As Mr. X says in JFK, "Politics is power, nothing more." A countries ability to influence the world is directly related to its ability to make war. If the US allows its war ability to wane, so shall its political influence and then the US will soon find stronger nations are dictating terms to it.
Don't worry about it. People like you and I played with our toys and played hard. It is because of people like us that the mint toys are worth what they are. Mirage was my favorite and I played with him all the time. Only thing left of him now is his one foot (half of his rear spoiler). I turned Smokescreen into a convertable. It was not my fault they made the windows and roof so easy to break off. One push off the second floor window onto the concrete patio and that was all she wrote. They should have play-tested those things better.
Of course, all that changed when Mom started making me buy my own toys.
I remember that day like it was yesterday. I was 9. I was home sick from school that day with a cold. I had a high fever so Mom kept me home and made some chicken noodle soup which I had just finished right before I was watching the launch live on TV.
I was really caught up in the "teacher in space" idea for two reasons. First, I thought that some day I would have a chance at going into space even though I would not be an astronaut. (I wanted to take over third base from Mike Schmidt at the time) Lastly, and more real, was that my father had applied for it.
He is a science teacher in a junior high and he REALLY wanted to go. It had been his childhood dream, of sorts, to travel into space and back. He never really had a chance, though. The PR people was sure to pick a woman so it was just a question of ethnicity. I even remember my Dad saying something to that effect at the time.
Still, shortly after the "major malfunction" I couldn't help but think that it could have been Dad. I remember Mom and I just flipping from channel to channel and seeing what each news person had to say. My Dad even taped most of the news shows when he got home.
NASA has done a wonderful job. Considering what it had to do, send men out into space on rockets and get them back alive, and the complications of technology and monetary limitations I am surprised that we did not lose more people and missions. Sure, the Mars failures could have been avoided, but when you ride a motorcycle it's not a question of IF you will fall off, but WHEN you will fall off.
NASA has a record which give the illusion that this sort of stuff is routine and there are not many risks involved. Well, there are plenty of risks. Risks that need to be taken. Challenges that need to be met. We must continue to explore. We must continue to discover. We are pretty much done with exploration and discovery here on the surface of the Earth, save the deep ocean and the few remaining wildernesses. Our wanderlust has no direction to go except to the stars. If we can take these risks now, then we will be paving the way for our future. There are things out there that we need to see, and places have to go. Not for the present, but for the future. Imagine if we had never taken to the sea or dared to fly.
I use both messenger services and I am not unpleased with either of them. Still...
For the life of me, I cannot figure out why people prefer AIM over ICQ. ICQ can do everything that AIM can do and there are no ads on ICQ. (of course, you can remove the ads on AIM) If you want a real-time chat in ICQ you just open up a talk session. Someone sends you a message, and you get a notification in the sys tray, not a huge window. The beautiful thing is you can just let it sit there in the queue with ICQ. You'll get to it when you get to it. With AIM, this large window pops up right in your face. "You WILL chat with me!" Subtlety is a lost art.
The truth is that AOL spends all it's time pushing AIM and none on ICQ. That's tragic. AOL bought a great product/service in ICQ. It's just too bad that they are not giving it a real chance.
First, does your TV have and Optical In jack? If it does, use it.... If not, I'd use S-Video straight from the DVD to the TV. Much better picture and less interferance than a coaxial cable.
Secondly, I'm going to assume that your DVD player has Dolby Digital 5.1 out jacks. Make sure you get a 5.1 Dolby digital decoder, or if you are going the way of an all-in-one system make sure the reciever has Dolby Digital 5.1 support. That's the REAL surround sound. I had a system that 'faked it', but when I got the money and got a real system it became obvious that there is no comparison between the two. Well worth the money.
Now, If you are going the component rout, get a nice rack so you can rack mount your decoder, pre-amp, and amp. Building it that way is more expensive but much more flexable. You could even mount a linux box in there and play mp3's through your system if you wanted. All that's left are the front and rear speakers, center speaker, and sub woofer. You can pick those out using the rest of your budget. You might over shoot your budget....but hey, it's not like you won't be using it. Just make sure the speakers can handle the output of your amp. It would suck if you blew them out on the first day.
OR...
You can just cheap-out and go to the local audio-video store and buy the 'home theater in a box' that's on sale for $600 that has everything you need and will do all that you want it to do. You can even buy four of those $60 speaker stands with the cash you have left over.
Personally, I don't know which name brands are the best and how much they should cost. I cheaped-out and bought a Sony Home Theatre System at Bryn Mawr. It sounds great. I have my DVD, VCR, Computer, and Cable TV hooked up to the reciever. DVD's sound awsome. The mp3's off my computer sound good too. Nothing like endless music of all your favorites.:)
You're correct about us needing the ISS. The future of manned exploration of other planets becomes more feasable with space stations.
For example, the Space Stations would be used like airports. A shuttle would take people from the Earth to the ISS. Then from there they switch to a smaller spacecraft, designed soley for travel in space, from the ISS to another orbital Space Station going around Mars, the Moon, or anywhere. Then from there, they switch to another craft designed to land on the surface and take off again.
Space Stations can store up supplies using robot ships, like with Mir. When everything is ready, send the people. The Space Stations can also be built in Earth orbit and slowly sent to the Moon and/or Mars. Who cares if it takes a year.
Space Stations are also modularized so you can tack on what you need where you need it. Kind of like expensive Legos. New modules can be constructed in Earth orbit and slowly sent out to existing stations to add or relpace functionality of the older modules.
Space Stations should be the groundwork for a mission to Mars just like the Gemini missions were the groundwork for the Moon landings. We work out the bugs by setting up a station in Earth orbit (ISS) and one in Moon orbit. Test out every thing we need to accomplish on a Mars trip. Once we demonstrate that we can do those things we set our sights on Mars. Then while we wait for the planets to align for the shortest possible trip for a man, we can work on setting up a station in Mars orbit. Send modules and supplies in robot ships and link them together there ahead of the people.
On a side note, working out this technology for Mars will make having a constant presence on the Moon that much easier. The next step being the colonization of the Moon.
Not so fast. We can create fusion, but we can't control it. It occurs at temperatures and pressures too high for standard mechanical/physical containment. That's why you hear so much crap about 'cold fusion', the attempt to bring the temperature and pressure down to a managable level. Right now it is a pipe dream. We cannot even conatin it let alone convert the energy it produces to electricity. That's why it's only used in bombs at this point.
I was scared too, but I passed. I only read half of the book of test questions too. When I was taking the test I thought I was doing horrible, but as it turned out using common sence was enough to get me by. You don't have to have all of that stuff memorized, just have a general idea of what sounds right and what dosen't. I think you should go take the test. You will be surprised. Good Luck.
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From the episode "Devil in the Dark". Dog vomit is a pretty good description. I always thought they looked like a sausage pizza baked on a shag carpet that was draped over a guy crawling around on all fours. That is one of my favorite episodes. I gotta find that one on DVD sometime. :)
That robot had an average KO time of about a minute and a half. It destroyed the other robot in 90 seconds. I watched the semi-finals and the finals of the Heavyweight division and SoW dominated. There were some other robots that had efective spinning disc weapons too. The days of the flip and push battlebots are numbered. It's obvious that the judges and fans like to see physical damage and sparks. More importantly, how do you take out a bot like SoW? You can't get in close enough to push or flip it. Can't add thick heavy armor, because that would effect the weight class you are in. Only thing left is to take it out with a stronger, better weapon. SoW is just the beginning.
It's just the nature of capitalism. If something looks worth while, that it can make money, then it's only natural for a corporation to exploit it. There is nothing evil about it. We just have to put up with spam and banners. Everything has its price.
Yes I agree with you. After thinking about it some more I just had to find the name of the gun I was thinking of so I did some more research and found it. The gun was part of HARP (High Altitude Research Project). It achieved about 1/3 of escape velocity. I found a site talking about this and other large guns here and a page talking about Gerald Bull. I just remembered the part about the escape velocity wrong.
I can't remember the name of it, but many years ago the US military had a cannon that could fire shells out into outerspace. That meant it achieved escape velocity. I don't think it was more than a science experiment, though. As I recall the shells were fairly small so it would have been an ineffective weapon. Does anybody know the name of this cannon?
Why? Sure, it would have been nice if he had. I wish he could have made it more of a well thought out series, but when you are spending hundreds of millions of dollars of the studio's money making a movie you had better make a profit if you expect to do it again. If he had made the series for grown-ups all he and the studio could really make the cut of the ticket sales. Even if it set a new world record and passed Titanic in sales, ticket sales alone would not even get close to the profits that the merchandising brings in.
Action Figures, Bed Sheets, Video Games, Pez Dispensers, and the list keeps going. One adult will buy a ticket and maybe the video or DVD when it comes out. $30. One child will have the ticket and video bought for him AND an army of action figures at several dollars a pop, the AT-AT's or Millenium Falcons that cost $50 or more, the posters, the bed sheets...we're easily talking 3 times the sales for the child when compaired to an adult.
Without that extra revenue, studios are reluctant to spend the money up front to make those grand special effects that we so love in our movies. So instead of a "B" movie with "A" special effects we would just have an "B" movie with cheezy effects, which will eventually end up on MST3K. That's not what we want either. It's a trade off. We want visually stunning movies, we have to bow to merchandising. Which means the plot and script has to be simple enough for a kid to follow and enjoy if you want to sell them T-shirts and action figures. *shrug* What can you do?
"Merchandising! Merchandising! Where the REAL money from the movie is made." - Yogert, Spaceballs
Here is some good advice. When you go and buy a computer do two things:
- Make a budget you can afford
- Spend every penny of it and buy the best system you can.
When you do that, you assure the following:Now, back to the topic at hand. I'm sure OV will have it's niche market for the people that like the small difference between it and MP3. But, there is little product differentiation between the two.....and no real force to cause people to switch or bring in a new market segment or demographic. But, that's ok. Just because it doesn't have a large following does not mean it is not any good. It seems like a good standard. As my one professor use to say "The wonderful thing about standards is there are so many to choose from."
The problem with today's movies lie in how the story is told. They just don't pay enough attention to it. What you end up with is people in strange situation saying strange things for strange reasons. You sit in the theater and think of how you could re-write the script as you are watching the movie. Kind of sucks the enjoyment out of it. If these movie studios would wise up a little, they could make a lot more money. Take a little bit more care with the scripts and stories and the movies they make would improve. In turn more people would like them and possibly see it again or tell friends to see it, increasing revenue. What I fear is that good script writers and story tellers are hard to come buy.
and the pursuit of happiness. You don't have a right to happiness, just the right to pursue it. Or at least that's what the Founders of the United States of America thought.
Basically, a long time ago glaicers covered most of europe, asia, and north america. We know this by the geological evidence they left behind, as in fjords, lakes, and rubble that the glaciers carved out of the landscape. The glaicers are made from snow that falls in the winter and never totally melts in the summer. Leaving layers of snow that get packed on top of each other like layers in sedimentary rock. The logical conclusion is that the average temperature was a lot cooler, allowing the snow to build up over time to form the massive glaciers.
OK, so we know that it is warmer now, on average, than it was then. Why? Well, here is an interesting theory I heard a while ago.
The main part of the theory is a "vapor canopy". The "vapor canopy" is a high water vapor content in the atmosphere. The amout of water vapor in the atmosphere reached an equilibrium where there was enough to make clouds to reflect sunlight and prevent the temperatures from going higher and creating more water vapor. The earth was very hazy, hot, and humid. But then something happed. Something upset the equilibrium.
A comet or metorite impacts the earth throwing millions of tons of dust in the atmosphere. The dust blocks the the sunlight, which rapidly drops the average temperature globally. This causes the vapor canopy to collapse. The air is not warm enough to hold the massive amouts of water vapor. So the vapor condences, clouds form, and it rains. Just like a cold front, but on a massive scale. The earth cools even more. It gets cold enough that it starts snowing in the far north. The snow, clouds, and dust reflect enough of the sunlight to keep things cold so the snow does not all melt in the summer. Eventually, the dust settles, but only after huge amounts of snow and rain have fallen. Up north, snowfall after snowfall have packed the snow layers into ice layers to form glaciers.
OK, so it got cold. Why is it getting warmer? Things are getting warmer to once again obtain the point of equlibrium. The cool equlibrium temperature was achieved because of the dust. The dust blocked out the sunlight, which set the equilibrium temperature very cold. After the dust settles, the temperature is free to rise again. It rises slowly at first, because the snow and glaciers reflect a lot of sunlight and energy back into space. But things gradually begin to defrost. As more land appears out from under the snow, the more it can asorb the sunlight and the warmer it can get. The increase in temperatures cause more snow to melt, which uncovers more land. This process has kept going from then until now.
OK, so it is getting warmer. How warm will it get? Who knows. If the theory is accurate, the temperature will keep rising until it reaches a point of balance between the cooling effects of clouds and rain and the heating power of the sun.
One time while petting a cat that was lying down, I tried to rub it's tummy but the cat got after me with it's claws. I then produced a water baloon and rubbed it's tummy with the baloon. Needless to say, the cat attacked the baloon causing it to burst. Although I tried, I could only do it to a cat once. It seemed that once a cat learned what a waterbaloon felt like and what happend to it after he attacked, the cat would only touch the baloon, remember what happened, and then run.
- New and Original
- A copy, mirror, or just links to something Original
How much of the web is truly new and original information? You got me. A lot of it, I would guess. However, if a search engine or directory structure would be able to pick the best and most informative sites and link to those they could accurately address the majority of its searches. How do you determine that something is the best site?Could an algorithim do this? Perhaps, but so could a staff of people. A web crawler brings in new sites. Then someone on the staff looks at the sight and asks "Is this one of the best sources for original information on any topic?" If it is, they add it to the database and associate it with the proper nouns.
Let's say I try to search for a book titled "foo bar" by "john doe". In the search for "foo bar", I may not find anything if "foo bar" is a common phrase or common words. Same goes for the name. I would get loads of links to sites that mention people with that same name. Why not have the search engine ask for more information if the first search comes up too big. Instead of trying to find it directly, which you may have about the same odds as winning the lottery, ask the user to describe the thing that they are searching for. The user might enter something like "It's a book about widgets."
From there, the search engine might see the word "book" and pop up a link to Amazon.com or even do a search on Amazon.com and return those results. Have some built in intelligence that can match up a noun with the best sites about that noun in it's database. It could search for "widgets" and return those results. Or even apply the first search to the results of the "book" and/or "widgets" search. How do you design a search engine that can make the association between the noun and the best sites about that noun? (best being the key word in that sentence) Also, the engine would need to have an intuition about how much information is needed. Do I have enough information to give them a highly accurate link or do I need to ask them to describe it more? Do I need them to describe a description? From what perspective are they comming from? (perspective does determine relavance to a degree)
It's like that old saying "you have to have money to make money." In this case, you have to have information to get information. More specifically, you have to pass information about the information that you require. In other words, let the user provide the meta data instead of the database. The database would focus on the "noun-to-best-links" matches. The search engine asks the user questions and breaks the search request down into a set of noun searches which it can reference in its database. The best answers float to the top and if they are not what the user is looking for, odds are they can go to a site and find it there or get more meta data and try again.
There is a new computer-telescope system that is capable of using sensitive light detectors and detection algorithims that have proven effective at finding and tracking asteroids. I can't remember what the system is called but I know they have one installed and are planning a few more. This is good, it's a good first step. Perhaps a next step is a network of these around the globe that can constantly scan the sky in all directions. That sounds feasable even in the short term. Then we can ask "What is next?"
Ok, we have our network of "eyes" and can see the potential doomsday rocks coming. What's the next step? One option would be to come up with a plan to deal with the threating asteroids or comets on a size and reaction-time basis. (send a team of oil-rig workers?? launch nukes?? use solar sails?? build large ground based repulsor beams?? build starships with photons torpedos??) Another option is to plan a survival strategy. (dig caves?? colonize the moon and/or Mars?? build large-scale space stations??) Yet another option could be working on a next generation of detection capability to increast the amount of warning time. (invent large powerful scannars?? "scanning...indications negative at this time." use intelligent meandering robot probes??)
Anyway... we can pick an option or combination of options and set a large scale, long term plan into motion....a human preservation and defence initiative. Who knows how much time we have? We should not procrastinate on this issue. The stakes are too high.
That's a bit harsh. Those games can be very fun, but it takes more work to get to a point where they become fun. The ultra realism of these games make it hard for people who are not that interested in that type of game to get to the point where they can have fun. You can't just pick up a simulation and expect to be able to master it. You have to learn the technical aspects and most importantly you have to put lots of time into practice.
Let's take Grand Turismo. My one friend is horrible at passing the licence tests. He loves racing other cars, but when it comes to racing against yourself he finds it frustrating. He can't pass the tests so therefore he can't use the better cars and can't race on the other tracks. If he dosen't master the tests, he's not going to have any fun playing the game. Someone else on the other hand loves to race against themselves. Their the perfectionists that have fun trying to become perfect or near perfect to pass the tests. He can pass the tests because he will keep at it until he does and then can race the better cars and tracks. The game will be fun for him.
The flight simulators and racing simulators are just what they claim to be. Simulations. They are not aimed for the broad gamer market, but for the nich market of people that want to master a certain machine in a various set of situations that will challenge them to play the game perfectly. These are the people that buy a game and beat the game. Then they play it again, and again, and again. They play the same game over and over just to master the game. To play it perfectly. Think about it. Every game is like that. In RPG's you want to master and develop your perfect charachter, with FPS you want to master each weapon and level, with RTS you want to create the perfect battle plan and execute it perfectly. It goes on, and on.
Trees come standard with:
carbon dioxide to oxygen converter, wood grain body molding, swing mounts(mounting kit not included), sun shades, and Roots®.
Optional packages:
- Fruit package (local climate may vary, see dealer for inventory)
- Pine package (not available with fruit package)
Advances in transportation and communications changed things so that a craftsman could consider a much larger area as 'local'. Eventually, it became hard for one person of average skill to promote themselves alone and compete. Enter in Labels, agencies, and unions as 'middle-men' to help the craftsmen perform their trade over the ever growing size of their 'local' area. These 'middle-men' did the same thing that the crafstmen use to do, sell directly to the customer, but they did it over a larger area and kept most of the profit to cover costs. So now the craftsmen could go about just as they had before and make next to nothing, or they could take a chance and join with the 'middle-men'. If they wanted even a chance to make a lot of money, they had to go with the 'middle-men'. They didn't have a choice.
Of course, there is balance in the world. When something happens to add to one side of the equation, something subtracts from the other. The technology and trade fields are like that. One advancement, the car, eventually killed the blacksmith trade. There was just no more need for them anymore. The old craftsmen in that trade had to change to survive. They didn't have a choice.
Now through the internet the world is 'local' to everyone. Thanks to the likes of FedEx and UPS, anyone can send their craft anywhere. Craftsman can sell their work directly to anyone without a middleman. The 'middle-man' is now just as un-needed as the blacksmith was after the car. Ordinarially, the uneeded 'middle-men' would just fade away like the blacksmith. However, these 'middle-men' have become very, very rich off the backs of the craftsmen and for the first time in history have the ability to fight and sustain themselves past their usefulness. They know what's at stake. It's survival. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain so they fight to control their main threat. The technological advances that have changed the world and outdated them. They are trying to deal themselves back into the card game through DMCA's and government regulations so they can hold on to copyrights and IP that they obtained from the craftsmen. They want to survive and that's what they have to do. Did they really have a choice?
Who's going to win? Who knows? Right now the 'middle-men' have lots of money and power. Sure craftsmen can bypass them to a small extent and sell directly, but because of their limited resources they would be no better off than the crastment of the late 19th century. With a hundred years of advancement they managed to come full-circle. It is logical to assume that if any craftsman will take a chance for big money and join with the 'middle-men' of their craft. At least there is a chance for them to make some real money and also it is the only real business model they are familiar with. So, they sell themselves out. Do they really have a choice?
The world has been a fairly stable place for the last 50 years and it would seem that it is being taken for granted. I don't buy that at all. There is far too much unrest in the Middle East. Especially Isreal. A situation could flare up and next thing you know the US is at war. The military has to be ready if we are to survive.
The US military is the best in the world. (see: Persian Gulf War) But before the US, there were the Brittish, The Spanish, The Roman, The Greeks, and others. They all had the best of their time for one reason or another, but they all fell because the times had changed and they didn't change with them. If the US wants to stay on top, it has to constantly prepare, anticipate, and change.
Here's a great non-military example. The steel industry. The US was on top for a long time. Then technologies became available that made its huge bulky steel mills slow, expensive, and inflexable. They didn't change with the times and now they are defunct. Another good one is the ice industry.
In the not too distant past, Ice wagons use to deliver blocks of ice to people's houses for use in their iceboxes. This ice came from up north, cut out of frozen ponds and shipped all over. Even as far as Asia, even though only a small percentage of the ice survived the trip it was still able to turn a profit. But technology came in the form of industrial cooling systems. Now you could build a large ice making plant right there in the city. The ice cutters up north went bankrupt. Again, technology brought smaller and smaller refrigeration systems until you ultimately had a refrigerator. The ice making plants went bankrupt. In this example, each predecessor failed to realize what the change meant to it's current strategy and failed to change with it. Therefore, they passed on.
The US is trying to see what future technologies could do in this sort of battle simulation so they can anticipate the changes and stay on top. Plus, they can quickly identify how to use new technologies as they arise. "...remember when Blue lost to Red in simulation A1234? This new technology over here may change that if we use it that way over there..."
War games are not a waste of time or money. War is not a waste of time or money, if it is not taken lightly or waged for the wrong reasons. As Mr. X says in JFK, "Politics is power, nothing more." A countries ability to influence the world is directly related to its ability to make war. If the US allows its war ability to wane, so shall its political influence and then the US will soon find stronger nations are dictating terms to it.
Of course, all that changed when Mom started making me buy my own toys.
I was really caught up in the "teacher in space" idea for two reasons. First, I thought that some day I would have a chance at going into space even though I would not be an astronaut. (I wanted to take over third base from Mike Schmidt at the time) Lastly, and more real, was that my father had applied for it.
He is a science teacher in a junior high and he REALLY wanted to go. It had been his childhood dream, of sorts, to travel into space and back. He never really had a chance, though. The PR people was sure to pick a woman so it was just a question of ethnicity. I even remember my Dad saying something to that effect at the time.
Still, shortly after the "major malfunction" I couldn't help but think that it could have been Dad. I remember Mom and I just flipping from channel to channel and seeing what each news person had to say. My Dad even taped most of the news shows when he got home.
NASA has done a wonderful job. Considering what it had to do, send men out into space on rockets and get them back alive, and the complications of technology and monetary limitations I am surprised that we did not lose more people and missions. Sure, the Mars failures could have been avoided, but when you ride a motorcycle it's not a question of IF you will fall off, but WHEN you will fall off.
NASA has a record which give the illusion that this sort of stuff is routine and there are not many risks involved. Well, there are plenty of risks. Risks that need to be taken. Challenges that need to be met. We must continue to explore. We must continue to discover. We are pretty much done with exploration and discovery here on the surface of the Earth, save the deep ocean and the few remaining wildernesses. Our wanderlust has no direction to go except to the stars. If we can take these risks now, then we will be paving the way for our future. There are things out there that we need to see, and places have to go. Not for the present, but for the future. Imagine if we had never taken to the sea or dared to fly.
Let us dare to travel to the stars.
For the life of me, I cannot figure out why people prefer AIM over ICQ. ICQ can do everything that AIM can do and there are no ads on ICQ. (of course, you can remove the ads on AIM) If you want a real-time chat in ICQ you just open up a talk session. Someone sends you a message, and you get a notification in the sys tray, not a huge window. The beautiful thing is you can just let it sit there in the queue with ICQ. You'll get to it when you get to it. With AIM, this large window pops up right in your face. "You WILL chat with me!" Subtlety is a lost art.
The truth is that AOL spends all it's time pushing AIM and none on ICQ. That's tragic. AOL bought a great product/service in ICQ. It's just too bad that they are not giving it a real chance.
First, does your TV have and Optical In jack? If it does, use it.... If not, I'd use S-Video straight from the DVD to the TV. Much better picture and less interferance than a coaxial cable. :)
Secondly, I'm going to assume that your DVD player has Dolby Digital 5.1 out jacks. Make sure you get a 5.1 Dolby digital decoder, or if you are going the way of an all-in-one system make sure the reciever has Dolby Digital 5.1 support. That's the REAL surround sound. I had a system that 'faked it', but when I got the money and got a real system it became obvious that there is no comparison between the two. Well worth the money.
Now, If you are going the component rout, get a nice rack so you can rack mount your decoder, pre-amp, and amp. Building it that way is more expensive but much more flexable. You could even mount a linux box in there and play mp3's through your system if you wanted. All that's left are the front and rear speakers, center speaker, and sub woofer. You can pick those out using the rest of your budget. You might over shoot your budget....but hey, it's not like you won't be using it. Just make sure the speakers can handle the output of your amp. It would suck if you blew them out on the first day.
OR...
You can just cheap-out and go to the local audio-video store and buy the 'home theater in a box' that's on sale for $600 that has everything you need and will do all that you want it to do. You can even buy four of those $60 speaker stands with the cash you have left over.
Personally, I don't know which name brands are the best and how much they should cost. I cheaped-out and bought a Sony Home Theatre System at Bryn Mawr. It sounds great. I have my DVD, VCR, Computer, and Cable TV hooked up to the reciever. DVD's sound awsome. The mp3's off my computer sound good too. Nothing like endless music of all your favorites.
For example, the Space Stations would be used like airports. A shuttle would take people from the Earth to the ISS. Then from there they switch to a smaller spacecraft, designed soley for travel in space, from the ISS to another orbital Space Station going around Mars, the Moon, or anywhere. Then from there, they switch to another craft designed to land on the surface and take off again.
Space Stations can store up supplies using robot ships, like with Mir. When everything is ready, send the people. The Space Stations can also be built in Earth orbit and slowly sent to the Moon and/or Mars. Who cares if it takes a year.
Space Stations are also modularized so you can tack on what you need where you need it. Kind of like expensive Legos. New modules can be constructed in Earth orbit and slowly sent out to existing stations to add or relpace functionality of the older modules.
Space Stations should be the groundwork for a mission to Mars just like the Gemini missions were the groundwork for the Moon landings. We work out the bugs by setting up a station in Earth orbit (ISS) and one in Moon orbit. Test out every thing we need to accomplish on a Mars trip. Once we demonstrate that we can do those things we set our sights on Mars. Then while we wait for the planets to align for the shortest possible trip for a man, we can work on setting up a station in Mars orbit. Send modules and supplies in robot ships and link them together there ahead of the people.
On a side note, working out this technology for Mars will make having a constant presence on the Moon that much easier. The next step being the colonization of the Moon.
KB3FHD and I'm clear.