Best treatment I ever saw on this is John Weldon's "To Be" animation. I saw it in the UK years ago and it took me ages to find out what it was called so I could look it up on-line. Varies between light-hearted entertainment and deeply disturbing nightmare fuel depending on how much you think about it.
There is a bi-annual 48 hour solo game development competition called Ludum Dare 48h that has just finished its 11th incarnation. All the entries have to supply source so it might be interesting for you to have a look though these. This time there were over 70 final entries but you do have to realise that there is a wide range of polish and completeness.
The competition itself is actually quite fun and provides a good forum for playing at game development as at doesn't take up much time and the end results are not expected to be perfectly polished, complete games.
By sheer chance I came across a link to a number of YouTube videos on the subject of evolution the other day and spent quite some time watching videos by the same author and several others that were considered related. One the the authors has a wonderful series called 'Why do people laugh at creationists?' and I watch it all through. It's basically a rebuttal of some of the strange things that creationists claim. I don't agree with all of it (the one on the Ice Shield thingy is a bit dubious) but it's a fun watch.
Even better, how about talking NEMA 0183 like most nautical instrumentation (like the GPS, autohelm, anemometer, wind direction indicator, compass, depth sounder, log, etc). It wouldn't half simplify the process if you could just buy instruments that are going to stand up to the marine environment. Getting a PIC to talk NEMA is going to be dead simple (it's just 4800 baud serial with some electrical specs) so creating any unique sensors or actuators is going to be easy and there are easy to get NEMA to PC interfaces.
And apparently a different concept to the books as well, there are quite a few good descriptions of Zaphod's anatomy scattered about. There's a bit of 'So long and thanks for all the fish' which indicates that his heads can collide, see each other easily (which is why he had the lights off so they couldn't) and he is quite capable of sticking one under a pillow while the other does crosswords. However the clincher is when Arthur first meets Zaphod and his two head are described as 'right-hand head' and 'left-hand head'.
I suspect it was to cut the effects budget, there's no reason that the film couldn't have done Zaphod like the BBC series but it would have meant that every shot with Zaphod it would have required CGI / effects processing to make it look good (a foam rubber head wouldn't cut it in this day).
Just to put my oar in when I was last at my dentist there was a note up that they were no longer able to offer teeth whitening treatment due to EU laws.
A quick search showed that as it was a cosmetic treatment the current laws restrict the concentration of hydrogen peroxide to 0.1%. Home kits apparently have about 3.6% and some treatments performed by dentists have up to 38%.
The law is being an ass, but this should come as a surprise.
It's like ripping a heat sink off a CPU and blaming the CPU for melting down. Maybe the CPU should run cooler, but the big problem was that the CPU was never designed to run without a heat sink.
Noting that Intel Pentium III chips are not damaged by the heatsink being removed in operation (the clock is stopped if the temperature gets too high) and Pentium 4 continues to work perfectly because the clock is automatically throttled to control temperature. See the test at Toms hardware.
I think that most systems would reject a TCP/IP packet from Mars. On a more serious note, I have this feeling that TCP/IP would really suck over that sort of distance (given the round trip time). It's a long time since I did the theory but I'm sure there enough problems using it over a satellite link, let alone an interplanetary link. You would need to tunnel it over a new protocol at the least.
Imagine it has a heavy spinning disc inside like a gyroscope but offset a bit or not quite round (the cam disc). This would cause the robot to vibrate a bit (kind of executing a small circle) in the 2D plane of the disc (probably why it's called jitter...). When it touches a solid object these small movements (they are probably quite fast) would just shove it away from the obstacle. I bet with an another disc in a different plane to push against to adjust it's orientation it would be quite maneuverable
Even if you believe in evolution you can still trace your family tree back to mitocondrial Eve (sorry the few online references I could find to here with a quick look were completely useless) so you could use the same excuse.
Quick summary:
Mitocondrial DNA (mtDNA) is passed unchanged (except for slow random mutations) down the female side of your family tree. (i.e. you have the same mtDNA as your mother and grandmother on your mother's side. If you are male you will not pass mtDNA onto your children). It is possible to track the mutations back through time and arrive at a female who was the first to have the mtDNA which all humans mtDNA has mutated from, so called Mitocondrial Eve. When she lived depends on the mutation rate, which is up for some debate.
Today Mr Random J. Hacker was banned from keeping
computer equipment for life after being found guilty of cruelty to electronics after leaving his PDA on the dashboard of his car. Mr Hacker said "I only popped into Radio Shack for five minutes and I thought that it would be fine, left in the car". A spokes-terminal for the SPCEE (Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Electronic Equipment) said "The interior of a car can heat up rapidly, literarily cooking electronic devices to death. You should always try to take any devices with you when you get out the car, but if you must leave then inside make sure that you wind the window down and leave them a bowl of water".
I'm not entirely sure but I think you may be thinking of the ball barrow. (Just in case there are people who have never seen one of these it is a heavy duty plastic wheel barrow with the wheel replaced with a large plastic ball. The basic objective is that it won't sink into muddy ground as much and is much harder to tip over left to right.)
AFAIR, the guy who invented it (and it was a damn good idea IMO) managed to get patents on it is most countries but in the USA it was ruled that replacing the wheel with a ball was obvious and it was refused. Hence the inventer got screwed as everybody could copy it.
This is all from wetware so I could be competely wrong (it may also be a UL). Also, my memory is telling me that the inventer was Dyson (the same guy who invented the bag-less vacuum cleaner)
I've just had a though, if you don't have room for a TV on your desk just get one of the nifty TV capture cards so you can the contents of the screen displayed on your desktop...
Erm, nevermind, pretend I didn't say that.
Erm...
Not that I can come up with a good example of this not working off the top of my head, but wouldn't this make the problem of finding large primes trivially easy ?
AFAIR hugh amounts of time (computer and human) has been spent looking for large primes for crypto work, perhaps somebody should tell these people that all they have to do is...
Compute the first few thousand primes using the sieve of what-his-name (a few seconds work, even with only brute force)
Find the product with infinite precision and add 1 (Okay this may take a minute or two)
Or you use up 2 gallons of fluorinert (@ $500/gallon) doing it (See previous article). Totally silly, but it did manage to knock most other overclocked systems into a cocked hat!
Let's see... Toaster + Computer interface + Bluetooth + Speaker + Mad programmer = a Talky Toaster ! Now all we need is for somebody to come up with plans for a scutter!
I managed to blow up a three terminal regulator by wiring it up backwards (It was an old one and I misread the number). Shot a lump of the plastic case across the room and hit me. I was glad that I was about 8 feet away when it happened.
Tantalum caps also meant to blow up quite nicely. Apparently, (told to me by somebody I trust to have actually done this) if you really screw up they can explode throwing molten globs of burning tantalum everywhere.
As I was driving home, still laughing about the way that Mattel seems to have screwed itself, I had a really ironic thought...
'As Mattel are now the copyright holders shouldn't somebody change the copyright notices in the code to reflect this ?'
I'm not sure what the GNU GPL says should happen when a copyright holder signs all their rights to another body, but surely it couldn't insist that something that is completely incorrect concerning the legal issues of a program be duplicated. I suspect that nobody every actually thought that their might be such a thing as a hostile copyright holder of a GPL'ed program.
It would be really, _really_ funny if instead of killing the program off it ended up being redistributed with Mattel's name on it!
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There is plenty of that sort of footage around already. There's no bang, but being this side of the screen is as close as I'd want to get.
Best treatment I ever saw on this is John Weldon's "To Be" animation. I saw it in the UK years ago and it took me ages to find out what it was called so I could look it up on-line. Varies between light-hearted entertainment and deeply disturbing nightmare fuel depending on how much you think about it.
There is a bi-annual 48 hour solo game development competition called Ludum Dare 48h that has just finished its 11th incarnation. All the entries have to supply source so it might be interesting for you to have a look though these. This time there were over 70 final entries but you do have to realise that there is a wide range of polish and completeness.
The competition itself is actually quite fun and provides a good forum for playing at game development as at doesn't take up much time and the end results are not expected to be perfectly polished, complete games.
Yes! We could eventually, once an for all, decide which is better, vi or emacs.
By sheer chance I came across a link to a number of YouTube videos on the subject of evolution the other day and spent quite some time watching videos by the same author and several others that were considered related. One the the authors has a wonderful series called 'Why do people laugh at creationists?' and I watch it all through. It's basically a rebuttal of some of the strange things that creationists claim. I don't agree with all of it (the one on the Ice Shield thingy is a bit dubious) but it's a fun watch.
The first in the series is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS5vid4GkEY then just follow the response to links.
One of the best other videos is the proof that 'Evolution IS a Blind Watchmaker' at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcAq9bmCeR0
Even better, how about talking NEMA 0183 like most nautical instrumentation (like the GPS, autohelm, anemometer, wind direction indicator, compass, depth sounder, log, etc). It wouldn't half simplify the process if you could just buy instruments that are going to stand up to the marine environment. Getting a PIC to talk NEMA is going to be dead simple (it's just 4800 baud serial with some electrical specs) so creating any unique sensors or actuators is going to be easy and there are easy to get NEMA to PC interfaces.
I mean, why reinvent the wheel?
And apparently a different concept to the books as well, there are quite a few good descriptions of Zaphod's anatomy scattered about. There's a bit of 'So long and thanks for all the fish' which indicates that his heads can collide, see each other easily (which is why he had the lights off so they couldn't) and he is quite capable of sticking one under a pillow while the other does crosswords. However the clincher is when Arthur first meets Zaphod and his two head are described as 'right-hand head' and 'left-hand head'.
I suspect it was to cut the effects budget, there's no reason that the film couldn't have done Zaphod like the BBC series but it would have meant that every shot with Zaphod it would have required CGI / effects processing to make it look good (a foam rubber head wouldn't cut it in this day).
In the UK we've just had a good demonstration of why flying cars are a bad idea. Apparently he ran out of fuel ...
Just to put my oar in when I was last at my dentist there was a note up that they were no longer able to offer teeth whitening treatment due to EU laws.
A quick search showed that as it was a cosmetic treatment the current laws restrict the concentration of hydrogen peroxide to 0.1%. Home kits apparently have about 3.6% and some treatments performed by dentists have up to 38%.
The law is being an ass, but this should come as a surprise.
Make them do 1st level phone support for an AOL for a few hundred hours, that will teach them ...
Noting that Intel Pentium III chips are not damaged by the heatsink being removed in operation (the clock is stopped if the temperature gets too high) and Pentium 4 continues to work perfectly because the clock is automatically throttled to control temperature. See the test at Toms hardware.
I think that most systems would reject a TCP/IP packet from Mars. On a more serious note, I have this feeling that TCP/IP would really suck over that sort of distance (given the round trip time). It's a long time since I did the theory but I'm sure there enough problems using it over a satellite link, let alone an interplanetary link. You would need to tunnel it over a new protocol at the least.
Imagine it has a heavy spinning disc inside like a gyroscope but offset a bit or not quite round (the cam disc). This would cause the robot to vibrate a bit (kind of executing a small circle) in the 2D plane of the disc (probably why it's called jitter...). When it touches a solid object these small movements (they are probably quite fast) would just shove it away from the obstacle. I bet with an another disc in a different plane to push against to adjust it's orientation it would be quite maneuverable
Quick summary:
Mitocondrial DNA (mtDNA) is passed unchanged (except for slow random mutations) down the female side of your family tree. (i.e. you have the same mtDNA as your mother and grandmother on your mother's side. If you are male you will not pass mtDNA onto your children). It is possible to track the mutations back through time and arrive at a female who was the first to have the mtDNA which all humans mtDNA has mutated from, so called Mitocondrial Eve. When she lived depends on the mutation rate, which is up for some debate.
Today Mr Random J. Hacker was banned from keeping computer equipment for life after being found guilty of cruelty to electronics after leaving his PDA on the dashboard of his car. Mr Hacker said "I only popped into Radio Shack for five minutes and I thought that it would be fine, left in the car". A spokes-terminal for the SPCEE (Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Electronic Equipment) said "The interior of a car can heat up rapidly, literarily cooking electronic devices to death. You should always try to take any devices with you when you get out the car, but if you must leave then inside make sure that you wind the window down and leave them a bowl of water".
AFAIR, the guy who invented it (and it was a damn good idea IMO) managed to get patents on it is most countries but in the USA it was ruled that replacing the wheel with a ball was obvious and it was refused. Hence the inventer got screwed as everybody could copy it.
This is all from wetware so I could be competely wrong (it may also be a UL). Also, my memory is telling me that the inventer was Dyson (the same guy who invented the bag-less vacuum cleaner)
How about chopping off their legal department ?
I've just had a though, if you don't have room for a TV on your desk just get one of the nifty TV capture cards so you can the contents of the screen displayed on your desktop ...
Erm, nevermind, pretend I didn't say that.
Not that I can come up with a good example of this not working off the top of my head, but wouldn't this make the problem of finding large primes trivially easy ?
AFAIR hugh amounts of time (computer and human) has been spent looking for large primes for crypto work, perhaps somebody should tell these people that all they have to do is
- Compute the first few thousand primes using the sieve of what-his-name (a few seconds work, even with only brute force)
- Find the product with infinite precision and add 1 (Okay this may take a minute or two)
It would save so many computer cycles...Or you use up 2 gallons of fluorinert (@ $500/gallon) doing it (See previous article).
Totally silly, but it did manage to knock most other overclocked systems into a cocked hat!
Let's see ...
Toaster + Computer interface + Bluetooth + Speaker + Mad programmer = a Talky Toaster !
Now all we need is for somebody to come up with plans for a scutter!
Tantalum caps also meant to blow up quite nicely. Apparently, (told to me by somebody I trust to have actually done this) if you really screw up they can explode throwing molten globs of burning tantalum everywhere.
'As Mattel are now the copyright holders shouldn't somebody change the copyright notices in the code to reflect this ?'
I'm not sure what the GNU GPL says should happen when a copyright holder signs all their rights to another body, but surely it couldn't insist that something that is completely incorrect concerning the legal issues of a program be duplicated. I suspect that nobody every actually thought that their might be such a thing as a hostile copyright holder of a GPL'ed program.
It would be really, _really_ funny if instead of killing the program off it ended up being redistributed with Mattel's name on it!