I agree that the marketing aspect with Star Wars and other themed sets needs to go. I disagree with the idea of going back to nothing but plastic blocks.
I spent hours working with the 'Technics'(sp?) sets they used to sell. These differed from the regular legos in that they came with a bunch of various sized gears, universal joints, steering knuckles, etc. The normal solid bricks have holes through which shafts may be run. I spent many many hours learning about gears, mechanical advantage, backlash, torque (I often wished for some metal versions of the plastic gears and shafts for high-load areas) and many other concepts.
I'd love to see all this plus a few specialized parts so that I could build a kit with which I could build any number of remote control vehicles. (I've never played with the mindstorms stuff, I dont' know if they have this kind of stuff).
I used to have this problem with Legos too, then I started picking them up when I'm done playing with them. I find the kids have quit running off with them now too.
Hey, thanks for the great info. I've just printed out all your replies to send to my brother, who lives in a 1960 RV. He doesn't routinely live totally off the grid as he uses an electrical connection, but he maintains the capability to do so when he desires. I think he will enjoy reading your posts.
Is been a long time since I read the AUP, but I have asked they tech support guys if its ok if I port forward my VNC server to my internal machines and they said 'sure, but we only provide tech support for single machines directly connected to the cable modem'.
They do block port 25, which is fine with me, I just run my mail server on 2525 (it accepts connections only from the IP of my machine at work and relays directly out to the Cox mail servers, because those servers won't allow me to send mail through them from outside their network).
I expect their AUP has the same server and NAT restrictions everybody else does, and they use it to smack down people using excessive bandwidth (which is also just fine with me, I don't want those people on my network segment either).
I always wonder what its like for leaders of other major countries who have been in power for decades and have to deal with some noob as the head of the US government every 4 or 8 years. It must be frustratingly difficult to build up any of the personal relationships that are so important in politics.
And if you go to them with the attitude of an a$$ like that they'll be happy to shut you off and never have to deal with you again.
If you have issues with your provider, it helps a lot to go to the office in person looking like a very nice reasonable person and explain your position politely and be reasonable about negotiating. Praise their customer service personel if they are good at what they do. They will usually be happy to work something out.
Threatening to sue or demanding 100% utilization of your throughput is a good way to make them not want to work with you.
Cox where I live kicks ass. I'm a tech-head with a terminal-DIY attitude, so normally I never call tech support for anything because it takes longer to explain to them what the problem is and find a solution than it would to fix it myself. No so with these guys, of the half dozen or so times I've called with problems every time they are fast, knowledgable and actually sound like they know the product they are supporting (rather than reading me a trouble-tree over the phone).
In a year and a half its never gone out, and it always tests out right at 3Mbps.
YMMV, and maybe they'll suck in the future, but this is one company I'm quite happy to pay for service.
Incidentally, household bleach is not used. If you soak a US bill in bleach for very long it will almost completely disintegrate (but the ink will still be firmly stuck to the bits).
If the machine fails to copy, the counterfitter will simply find a different way to do the copy. If the copy machine alters the image in a subtle but trackable way, counterfitters get caught.
What's the basis you have for saying that poor people are dumb
I think the causal link is backwards there. It not so much that being poor makes someone dumb, its that dumb people don't get high paying jobs and don't manage their money effectively, and frequently, at least in my experiance, don't really aspire to anything greater.
I (obviously) don't know much about CPU design, but it seems that we have about three major storage levels, processor cache, main memory and hard disk.
If you could cram 100 gig of fast memory onto your CPU chip, would you need main memory or harddrives?
Obviously the chips would have to be designed differently to take advantage of such a design, but it seems like not having to deal with multiple levels of slower and slower storage would be a really good thing for processors.
I used to fly occasionally in an unpressuried private plane at a max altitude of 19,000 feet. It was interesting for us passengers to turn off our oxygen for long periods and attempt to play various games. If you just sit still and don't do anything you're ok, but as soon as you try to sustain any kind of mental or physical effort it quickly becomes obvious that you are having issues. Lots of fun:)
In addition to the CO2 partial pressure issue, I've read that below around 3psi its starts getting difficult to generate enough of a pressure difference to draw air into the lungs quickly enough.
Re:We know other life exists
on
Lonely Planets
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· Score: 1
Evidently the readers misunderstand the question.
I'll try to make it more clear.
Is it sensable to think of the universe as a place larger, possibly infinitely so, than what we can see?
Or, since to the best of our knowledge it is not possible to have any kind of interaction with or knowledge of things outside of our 13.6 billion or so horizon, should the concept of the universe explicitly exclude the existance of those things?
The question probably stems from a tendancy to try to view the universe from a perspective unbounded by lightspeed limits, where events that occur at a distance are observed immediately. Obviously this is not possible for a normal observer. But it causes one to consider questions like this.
Do we have any reason to think that the observable universe is all of the universe (not just that its the only part that can matter to us)?
My similar idea was to use a nice quite alarm clock set for about 1 minute before one or more of those indestructable 120db monsters with no 'off' button is set to go off. After sleeping through it once and having to sprint from the room with hands over ears, the adrenalin rush upon waking to disable the loud clocks should be sufficent to keep you up.
Re:We know other life exists
on
Lonely Planets
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· Score: 1
What evidence to you have that a completely different type of life is more likely than another instence of our kind.
Just an assumption based on the observation that there are more places unlike Earth than like, and the speculation that life evolving in places unlike Earth will not be 'life as we know it'. Which is all based on the (reasonable, imo) assumption that other kinds of life are possible.
Re:We know other life exists
on
Lonely Planets
·
· Score: 1
Question.
From here, we can't possibly see about 13.6 billion light years. So all our figures indicate only stuff within that distance. It seems plausable to me that the universe itself could actually be completely unlimited in volume, or it could be a total of, say 50 billion light years across. There could be an alien race about 20 billion light years farther on who is so technologicly advanced that they've moved a bunch of galaxy superclusters into an enormous arrow with a caption that says 'We Are Here', and we'd never know about it, right (at least, not until 20 billion years from now when the light from there finally gets here)? (until sombody figures out how to do FTL travel or whatever)
Re:We know other life exists
on
Lonely Planets
·
· Score: 1
That 'as we know it' phrase is so important.
If we ever find life somewhere else, it most probably will not be 'as we know it'.
Vernor Vinge touched on this in _Deepness in the Sky_ wherein he has invented an alien race on a planet that goes through severe freeze-thaw cycles hundreds of years long. Purely fiction of course, but it illustrates the point that just because macroscopic Earth life cannot survive what we would consider extremely variable conditions doesn't mean that life cannot evolve to survive such conditions.
Life as we know it operates at a particular energy level. There is no reason some form of life could exist at much lower energe levels in suitable frozen enviroments. Upon meeting them its possible we might never recognize them as living organisms.
I think our knowledge of what constitutes suitable conditions for life is so poor at this stage that the only way for us to expand our knowledge is to go find some more examples.
True, but two elevators (one Earthly, one Lunar) with a few of those orbital transfer tethers to move stuff between orbits would be plausable. Such a system eliminates any need from payload capsules to have anything more than some basic attitude and maneuvering jets.
Heck, you might be able to use tethers right down to the lunar surface since you wouldn't be going through any atmosphere.
One of the problems I've heard about with nanotubes is that even when they get long enough to start doing something with, they are darn slippery, so you can't just make a rope out of them like you can with other substances.
There is alot of research in this field though, if the problems can be solved they will be, and it will be interesting to see how they do it.
Now that most of us have stopped laughing about it, I expect to see the first space elevator in about 50 years:) I'll probably be too old to use it, but that life.
Seriously, install a little nuclear powered CO2 scrubber/regenerator in the abdomen somewhere and dump the carbon into the small intestine or somewhere (or reprocess into glucose or something useful). Imagine how much easier it would be if we didnt' have to send along all that oxygen and food.
Make it really sophisticated and you could eliminate much of the ingestion/excretion part of the cycle and drasticly reduce or eliminate lung capacity. If you could figure out how to bump up the capabilities of the radiation repair machanisms and toughen up the skin a bit you could get a way with minimal environmental suits, maybe some lycra suits with cooling plumbing and heat radiators and some light armor to help cope with radiation and micrometeorites.
Sure, eating and breathing are pretty cool, but I'm sure there are plenty of people that would trade them for some deep sea or deep space missions.
Yes, I know there are many, many interactions related to eating and breathing that we don't know about and any kind of conversion like the above would involve absurd amounts of medical testing and discover and screw-ups. Sure would be cool though.
I'll bet there are hundreds if not thousands of young, intelligent volunteers who could easily be trained up and ready to go by the time a ship and launch windows were ready to go.
Sure, you aren't going to be sending PhD's, but just like fighter pilots, you keep the best at home to train and direct, and set the second best to do the work (and the dying).
Of course you have to provide a reasonable chance for survival, I don't think you'd get many volunteers for a strict suicide mission, but even if it was a 'go there and we'll keep sending supplies until we figure out how to bring you home' mission, you could probably find people. I can think of worse places to live.
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Mmmmm, nice.
I know where my toys budget for this month is going. Too bad they don't have an economy variety pack or something for getting a junk box started.
I agree that the marketing aspect with Star Wars and other themed sets needs to go. I disagree with the idea of going back to nothing but plastic blocks.
I spent hours working with the 'Technics'(sp?) sets they used to sell. These differed from the regular legos in that they came with a bunch of various sized gears, universal joints, steering knuckles, etc. The normal solid bricks have holes through which shafts may be run. I spent many many hours learning about gears, mechanical advantage, backlash, torque (I often wished for some metal versions of the plastic gears and shafts for high-load areas) and many other concepts.
I'd love to see all this plus a few specialized parts so that I could build a kit with which I could build any number of remote control vehicles. (I've never played with the mindstorms stuff, I dont' know if they have this kind of stuff).
I used to have this problem with Legos too, then I started picking them up when I'm done playing with them. I find the kids have quit running off with them now too.
Hey, thanks for the great info. I've just printed out all your replies to send to my brother, who lives in a 1960 RV. He doesn't routinely live totally off the grid as he uses an electrical connection, but he maintains the capability to do so when he desires. I think he will enjoy reading your posts.
Is been a long time since I read the AUP, but I have asked they tech support guys if its ok if I port forward my VNC server to my internal machines and they said 'sure, but we only provide tech support for single machines directly connected to the cable modem'.
They do block port 25, which is fine with me, I just run my mail server on 2525 (it accepts connections only from the IP of my machine at work and relays directly out to the Cox mail servers, because those servers won't allow me to send mail through them from outside their network).
I expect their AUP has the same server and NAT restrictions everybody else does, and they use it to smack down people using excessive bandwidth (which is also just fine with me, I don't want those people on my network segment either).
I always wonder what its like for leaders of other major countries who have been in power for decades and have to deal with some noob as the head of the US government every 4 or 8 years. It must be frustratingly difficult to build up any of the personal relationships that are so important in politics.
And if you go to them with the attitude of an a$$ like that they'll be happy to shut you off and never have to deal with you again.
If you have issues with your provider, it helps a lot to go to the office in person looking like a very nice reasonable person and explain your position politely and be reasonable about negotiating. Praise their customer service personel if they are good at what they do. They will usually be happy to work something out.
Threatening to sue or demanding 100% utilization of your throughput is a good way to make them not want to work with you.
All Cox are not the same.
Cox where I live kicks ass. I'm a tech-head with a terminal-DIY attitude, so normally I never call tech support for anything because it takes longer to explain to them what the problem is and find a solution than it would to fix it myself. No so with these guys, of the half dozen or so times I've called with problems every time they are fast, knowledgable and actually sound like they know the product they are supporting (rather than reading me a trouble-tree over the phone).
In a year and a half its never gone out, and it always tests out right at 3Mbps.
YMMV, and maybe they'll suck in the future, but this is one company I'm quite happy to pay for service.
Incidentally, household bleach is not used. If you soak a US bill in bleach for very long it will almost completely disintegrate (but the ink will still be firmly stuck to the bits).
Thats better than failing anyway.
If the machine fails to copy, the counterfitter will simply find a different way to do the copy. If the copy machine alters the image in a subtle but trackable way, counterfitters get caught.
Its probably *much* easier than face recognition, since to be useful as a counterfit it has to be a pretty good representation.
I'm curious how accurate it is. If I scan a bill and make artistic changes to it, how significant do the changes have to be before I can print it?
What's the basis you have for saying that poor people are dumb
I think the causal link is backwards there. It not so much that being poor makes someone dumb, its that dumb people don't get high paying jobs and don't manage their money effectively, and frequently, at least in my experiance, don't really aspire to anything greater.
I (obviously) don't know much about CPU design, but it seems that we have about three major storage levels, processor cache, main memory and hard disk.
If you could cram 100 gig of fast memory onto your CPU chip, would you need main memory or harddrives?
Obviously the chips would have to be designed differently to take advantage of such a design, but it seems like not having to deal with multiple levels of slower and slower storage would be a really good thing for processors.
There is gravity, they are just in free-fall at terminal velocity.
I used to fly occasionally in an unpressuried private plane at a max altitude of 19,000 feet. It was interesting for us passengers to turn off our oxygen for long periods and attempt to play various games. If you just sit still and don't do anything you're ok, but as soon as you try to sustain any kind of mental or physical effort it quickly becomes obvious that you are having issues. Lots of fun :)
In addition to the CO2 partial pressure issue, I've read that below around 3psi its starts getting difficult to generate enough of a pressure difference to draw air into the lungs quickly enough.
Evidently the readers misunderstand the question.
I'll try to make it more clear.
Is it sensable to think of the universe as a place larger, possibly infinitely so, than what we can see?
Or, since to the best of our knowledge it is not possible to have any kind of interaction with or knowledge of things outside of our 13.6 billion or so horizon, should the concept of the universe explicitly exclude the existance of those things?
The question probably stems from a tendancy to try to view the universe from a perspective unbounded by lightspeed limits, where events that occur at a distance are observed immediately. Obviously this is not possible for a normal observer. But it causes one to consider questions like this.
Do we have any reason to think that the observable universe is all of the universe (not just that its the only part that can matter to us)?
My similar idea was to use a nice quite alarm clock set for about 1 minute before one or more of those indestructable 120db monsters with no 'off' button is set to go off. After sleeping through it once and having to sprint from the room with hands over ears, the adrenalin rush upon waking to disable the loud clocks should be sufficent to keep you up.
What evidence to you have that a completely different type of life is more likely than another instence of our kind.
Just an assumption based on the observation that there are more places unlike Earth than like, and the speculation that life evolving in places unlike Earth will not be 'life as we know it'. Which is all based on the (reasonable, imo) assumption that other kinds of life are possible.
Question.
From here, we can't possibly see about 13.6 billion light years. So all our figures indicate only stuff within that distance. It seems plausable to me that the universe itself could actually be completely unlimited in volume, or it could be a total of, say 50 billion light years across. There could be an alien race about 20 billion light years farther on who is so technologicly advanced that they've moved a bunch of galaxy superclusters into an enormous arrow with a caption that says 'We Are Here', and we'd never know about it, right (at least, not until 20 billion years from now when the light from there finally gets here)? (until sombody figures out how to do FTL travel or whatever)
That 'as we know it' phrase is so important.
If we ever find life somewhere else, it most probably will not be 'as we know it'.
Vernor Vinge touched on this in _Deepness in the Sky_ wherein he has invented an alien race on a planet that goes through severe freeze-thaw cycles hundreds of years long. Purely fiction of course, but it illustrates the point that just because macroscopic Earth life cannot survive what we would consider extremely variable conditions doesn't mean that life cannot evolve to survive such conditions.
Life as we know it operates at a particular energy level. There is no reason some form of life could exist at much lower energe levels in suitable frozen enviroments. Upon meeting them its possible we might never recognize them as living organisms.
I think our knowledge of what constitutes suitable conditions for life is so poor at this stage that the only way for us to expand our knowledge is to go find some more examples.
True, but two elevators (one Earthly, one Lunar) with a few of those orbital transfer tethers to move stuff between orbits would be plausable. Such a system eliminates any need from payload capsules to have anything more than some basic attitude and maneuvering jets.
Heck, you might be able to use tethers right down to the lunar surface since you wouldn't be going through any atmosphere.
One of the problems I've heard about with nanotubes is that even when they get long enough to start doing something with, they are darn slippery, so you can't just make a rope out of them like you can with other substances.
:) I'll probably be too old to use it, but that life.
There is alot of research in this field though, if the problems can be solved they will be, and it will be interesting to see how they do it.
Now that most of us have stopped laughing about it, I expect to see the first space elevator in about 50 years
I'm waiting to see nuclear powered people.
Seriously, install a little nuclear powered CO2 scrubber/regenerator in the abdomen somewhere and dump the carbon into the small intestine or somewhere (or reprocess into glucose or something useful). Imagine how much easier it would be if we didnt' have to send along all that oxygen and food.
Make it really sophisticated and you could eliminate much of the ingestion/excretion part of the cycle and drasticly reduce or eliminate lung capacity. If you could figure out how to bump up the capabilities of the radiation repair machanisms and toughen up the skin a bit you could get a way with minimal environmental suits, maybe some lycra suits with cooling plumbing and heat radiators and some light armor to help cope with radiation and micrometeorites.
Sure, eating and breathing are pretty cool, but I'm sure there are plenty of people that would trade them for some deep sea or deep space missions.
Yes, I know there are many, many interactions related to eating and breathing that we don't know about and any kind of conversion like the above would involve absurd amounts of medical testing and discover and screw-ups. Sure would be cool though.
I'll bet there are hundreds if not thousands of young, intelligent volunteers who could easily be trained up and ready to go by the time a ship and launch windows were ready to go.
Sure, you aren't going to be sending PhD's, but just like fighter pilots, you keep the best at home to train and direct, and set the second best to do the work (and the dying).
Of course you have to provide a reasonable chance for survival, I don't think you'd get many volunteers for a strict suicide mission, but even if it was a 'go there and we'll keep sending supplies until we figure out how to bring you home' mission, you could probably find people. I can think of worse places to live.