No, it's actually safe if done correctly. If you put just a drop on your tongue, the N2 on the bottom will evaporate, forming a cushion of air for the droplet to float on. Also it looks cool when you exhale.
What bugs me is this common assumption that interstellar and intergalactic spaceflight necessarily implies faster-than-light spaceflight. It may be a long, boring trip, but the technology already exists to get somewhere eventually, and within a century we may be able to go very close to the speed of light (with Bussard Ramjets or something similar).
The problem I see with this is that unless you know exactly where the bombs are being kept, you need to shoot a pretty wide beam, and that means it'd probably ruin nuclear power plants as well as bombs. And I think many people would agree that we should be using more nuclear power, not less.
Well, of course you don't want to duplicate the space shuttle. You'd have to be stupid to want to do that. It's big, clumsy, and ludicrously expensive. What these people are trying to do (in the long run; right now it's all suborbital) is to build something better than the shuttle.
It'll be interesting to see what XCor does in response to this.
Probably nothing. XCOR and Scaled are not in competition. Scaled is doing this for the X-Prize, and XCOR is doing it for tourism. Scaled has stated that it does not intend to sell rides on its vehicle....
He did say once. Gnop, Operation Desert Storm, Minotaur, Pathways into Darkness, and Marathon were all Mac-only. That's their first five games! Marathon 2 was their first cross-platform game, and it wasn't released for Windows until long after the Mac version.
Emulation isn't a gray area at all, IMO, if you only emulate games you legitimately own. For example, in the case of the Playstation, if you run an emulator on your PC and use actual game discs, you are not hurting Sony at all. Consoles are typically sold at a loss, and this loss is recouped through game sales. So if you emulate, they're actually making more money.
Of course, the companies probably don't see it quite this way. First of all there's a loss of control involved. If you only emulate legitimately, they're not harmed, but of course this isn't the reality of the situation. The other issue is that they don't want people to play their old games. They want people to go out and buy new games. Consoles tend to break eventually, but with emulation there'll always be hardware to run the old games, and if you've already got plenty of old games you're less likely to go out and buy whatever's being released now.
If that were true, you might have a point, but Google takes about 0.2 seconds to return results. Even if MSN can manage 0.01, you'd never notice the difference. But you would notice all the huge, long-loading images they're bound to have on the front page.
Here's a possibility you missed: retractible touchscreens. A button on the watch could cause four 1x1 screens to extend in all directions, giving you a plus-shaped pad.
You could fit four buttons on each section and they'd be large enough to easily press with your fingers. For a phone, you'd need 12 buttons, which would be 3 panels. That'd leave enough room for a 2x1 display, which seems pretty decent. In the mp3-player mode, you'd need maybe 8 buttons, giving you a 1x3 playlist. A PDA could give you 4 buttons, a 1x1 scribble area, and a 3x1 screen. You really could do everything like that.
Slashdot Mirror
So, what's your point?
Incidentally, a viola is a stringed instrument which has nothing to do with the exclamation "voila!"
Oh no! At this rate you will soon run out of exclamation points!
No, it's actually safe if done correctly. If you put just a drop on your tongue, the N2 on the bottom will evaporate, forming a cushion of air for the droplet to float on. Also it looks cool when you exhale.
Never done it myself though.
Does that have anything to do with Dance Dance Revolution?
What bugs me is this common assumption that interstellar and intergalactic spaceflight necessarily implies faster-than-light spaceflight. It may be a long, boring trip, but the technology already exists to get somewhere eventually, and within a century we may be able to go very close to the speed of light (with Bussard Ramjets or something similar).
Well, an "a" looks an awful lot like an "e" that's been rotated 180 degrees, so in a sense it is a rearrangement.
The problem I see with this is that unless you know exactly where the bombs are being kept, you need to shoot a pretty wide beam, and that means it'd probably ruin nuclear power plants as well as bombs. And I think many people would agree that we should be using more nuclear power, not less.
Well, of course you don't want to duplicate the space shuttle. You'd have to be stupid to want to do that. It's big, clumsy, and ludicrously expensive. What these people are trying to do (in the long run; right now it's all suborbital) is to build something better than the shuttle.
But sometimes people have kids who are smarter than they are.
Also, something can only create something at or less than it's reality.
Gee, you'd think Descartes would've thought of the obvious counterexample: people having kids.
It'll be interesting to see what XCor does in response to this.
Probably nothing. XCOR and Scaled are not in competition. Scaled is doing this for the X-Prize, and XCOR is doing it for tourism. Scaled has stated that it does not intend to sell rides on its vehicle....
When will they find the regular aging gene? We need a cure for that too.
None of the monsters in Marathon threw bones. You're thinking of Pathways into Darkness (which was really slow, yes).
He did say once. Gnop, Operation Desert Storm, Minotaur, Pathways into Darkness, and Marathon were all Mac-only. That's their first five games! Marathon 2 was their first cross-platform game, and it wasn't released for Windows until long after the Mac version.
Ugh, I can't stand gasoline from concentrate. The taste is horrible. Tropicana all the way!
Rather, a universal Turing machine has infinite memory, but there are many varieties of Turing machine which do not.
How about Tileable Blur [gimp.org]?
I made a Photoshop action script that does that. It works very nicely.
That "IWarp" looks a lot like Photoshop's "displace" filter.
Dunno about those other ones you mentioned.
Emulation isn't a gray area at all, IMO, if you only emulate games you legitimately own. For example, in the case of the Playstation, if you run an emulator on your PC and use actual game discs, you are not hurting Sony at all. Consoles are typically sold at a loss, and this loss is recouped through game sales. So if you emulate, they're actually making more money.
Of course, the companies probably don't see it quite this way. First of all there's a loss of control involved. If you only emulate legitimately, they're not harmed, but of course this isn't the reality of the situation. The other issue is that they don't want people to play their old games. They want people to go out and buy new games. Consoles tend to break eventually, but with emulation there'll always be hardware to run the old games, and if you've already got plenty of old games you're less likely to go out and buy whatever's being released now.
If that were true, you might have a point, but Google takes about 0.2 seconds to return results. Even if MSN can manage 0.01, you'd never notice the difference. But you would notice all the huge, long-loading images they're bound to have on the front page.
Actually, 1 / (1 - v^2/c^2)^0.5 = gamma
"I wonder if I could trade the kid for a ratchet."
You mean quadratic, not cubic.
Maybe they could build the whole thing on the ground, as a long, long coil of nanotube rope, then unwind it from GEO.
Here's a possibility you missed: retractible touchscreens. A button on the watch could cause four 1x1 screens to extend in all directions, giving you a plus-shaped pad.
You could fit four buttons on each section and they'd be large enough to easily press with your fingers. For a phone, you'd need 12 buttons, which would be 3 panels. That'd leave enough room for a 2x1 display, which seems pretty decent. In the mp3-player mode, you'd need maybe 8 buttons, giving you a 1x3 playlist. A PDA could give you 4 buttons, a 1x1 scribble area, and a 3x1 screen. You really could do everything like that.