From a purely evolutionary standpoint, any time members of a species--especially those with no genetic defects--kill themselves signals a serious problem for the population as a whole. Usually the suicides are a symptom of underlying societal problems that are negatively affecting the rest of the population as well. This is why it is in the interest of the society to address the root causes of the suicides, although they do not always succeed in this.
If it were just genetically abnormal people removing bad genes from the gene pool, it would not be a problem. But when otherwise normal people kill themselves, it signals weakness in the society as a whole and makes the rest of its members uncomfortable.
Actually, there is NO REASON that the "Windows Experience Index" should be or needs to be a hardware benchmark. As the name implies, it is ranking ONLY the performance of Windows itself--and having a crippled version of windows does indeed reduce its performance, as demonstrated in the benchmark. The marketing bullshit is that they sell the crippled version in the first place, not that the benchmark accurately reflects it.
So get yourself a real benchmark program and quit whining. And yes, XP is better for gaming on regular systems because of lower overhead and more compatibility, but believe me, win7 makes all the difference when you run an SSD.
Why don't they go with something like the Windows Experience Index? The scale is from 1 to 10, except you can't buy anything lower than 3 and nothing can be rated higher than 7.9 until we feel like changing it.
Yes, I suppose it does. What is decidedly *not* scary, though, is orbiting solar satellites that beam the power down in low-intensity microwave or IR laser radiation. Energy is even more abundant in space than asteroids! Let's start with the easy stuff.
If you want some shiny excitement from an institution separated from the political process, look at SpaceX. They just happen to be developing a man-rated heavy-lift rocket and apollo-style capsule to be ready within the next five years. Check the updates page to see this month's successful test of the capsule landing parachute's, and the June test of the Falcon 9 LEO rocket that was 100% successful on its very first launch. I work for NASA but one of these days I swear I'm going to bail to SpaceX because they are actually doing stuff that is relevant and efficient. That's not to say NASA isn't doing stuff--there are still several science probes launched every year, each one state-of-the-art and one-of-a-kind--but if you really want to GO somewhere then SpaceX is the place to be.
NASA needs to go big. I know these new probes can be done on a shoestring budget, say $200 million or so. But please go build us a new heavy lift rocket and shoot some guys into space. Most of us haven't seen a man land on the moon in our lifetime, so can we just try that again?
Sure we can, easy peasy. Just give us another $100 billion and we'll get right on it. We got a list with plenty of new engineers, scientists, technicians, research equipment, higher education, American manufacturing and ethical management. Oh, you say our infrastructure is crumbling, we're trapped in a never-ending war, and nobody wants to raise taxes enough to pay off the debts from our overspending, pork-barrel, corporate-welfare, entitlement-driven government? Well, never mind, then.
Well, if you don't mind it getting back in a decade or so, it doesn't have to be a huge amount of energy. Stick a radiothermal/solar device and an ion thruster on it, point it in the right direction, and wait a while.
For atmospheric entry, if you could smelt the iron in space and forge it into lance-shaped ingots, you could hurl them in a ballistic re-entry trajectory, make a few more craters in Siberia or the Sahara, and recover a large amount of the material with very little effort. There has been talk of exporting raw materials into space using a giant rail gun, so the same should work in reverse, since a solid block of metal can undergo 1000's of g's easily.
Little home-made transmitters are a mixed bag unless you have the equipment to tune them up properly. I tried a little TV transmitter myself once with very little success, but I did get an 20-foot FM transmission working. Now I have my amateur license and I've bought a couple radios rather than building them--the antennas and communication are what I'm really interested in.
If you're interested in learning more about why your transmitters did or didn't work I highly recommend getting into the amateur radio community. There is so much to learn from hams everywhere, even just by surfing the web.
Though to be fair, how many shows have you watched where the first episode adequately described whether you liked the rest of it or not? Maybe a 45-minute episode would be able to explain enough about the characters for the audience to tell, or the vote might end up being random and the resulting series not at all interesting.
But how about this: a choose-your-own-adventure style show, where there are three 20-minute segments each week, each being a "possible future" for the show, then everybody votes online to decide which one actually happened. Then step and repeat. Though you could only air once every two weeks because you wouldn't know what you were filming 'til the vote came in.
This is like the corporate/university computers that re-image themselves every night against the central server, deleting anything that changed on the hard disk. That would be an awesome feature for a dumb web-surfing box for the idio---parents. Would be a little bit of a pain for everyone else, but we can avoid getting infected, right?
Sure it does! Just make time run backward and we can see all the little radio-photons running toward the transmitter! Or better yet, try and detect the subtle field distortions caused by antennas absorbing radio frequency energy.
Why don't they just stick to beginnings then? They could just have 10 different introductory episodes, each with a different cast and location, and not actually have any story at all.
Do you really, really just want to listen to such music? Because you know, you can already. You can go listen to local bands and ask for their demo tapes, and stay away from all the artists that belong to some label working with RIAA.
You are correct. And I believe it is the only substance known to do this, no? Of course, the politicians would care more about the explosions than the laws of physics.
But this is a democracy, and in a democracy power is always held by the majority! Sure, maybe the majority is only 20% of the population, but they're still the majority of...er...important people?;)
True, but then the concern becomes whether commercial mining activity will ramp up before the local price or sheer scarcity of helium makes speculative exploration impractical. If the price stays artificially low, the commercial incentive won't be there until it's too late, and we'll be up a gravity well without a rocket, so to speak. Somebody on this planet really ought to have a stockpile of helium for when that time comes. That's the whole point of a strategic helium reserve--so that we have it when we really need it, not for f***ing party balloons.
Apparently, they forgot that without a large supply of helium operating their favorite cash cow, the manned space flight program, would become a lot harder. There are also many scientific applications that are virtually impossible without helium, with its boiling point at 4.1 Kelvin. Hydrogen, at 14 Kelvin, is not a perfect replacement, and has a tendency to explode. They really ought to be inflating the price, so we learn to conserve helium now while we still have plenty left.
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From a purely evolutionary standpoint, any time members of a species--especially those with no genetic defects--kill themselves signals a serious problem for the population as a whole. Usually the suicides are a symptom of underlying societal problems that are negatively affecting the rest of the population as well. This is why it is in the interest of the society to address the root causes of the suicides, although they do not always succeed in this.
If it were just genetically abnormal people removing bad genes from the gene pool, it would not be a problem. But when otherwise normal people kill themselves, it signals weakness in the society as a whole and makes the rest of its members uncomfortable.
Actually, there is NO REASON that the "Windows Experience Index" should be or needs to be a hardware benchmark. As the name implies, it is ranking ONLY the performance of Windows itself--and having a crippled version of windows does indeed reduce its performance, as demonstrated in the benchmark. The marketing bullshit is that they sell the crippled version in the first place, not that the benchmark accurately reflects it.
So get yourself a real benchmark program and quit whining. And yes, XP is better for gaming on regular systems because of lower overhead and more compatibility, but believe me, win7 makes all the difference when you run an SSD.
Why don't they go with something like the Windows Experience Index? The scale is from 1 to 10, except you can't buy anything lower than 3 and nothing can be rated higher than 7.9 until we feel like changing it.
That just sounds really scary to me.
Yes, I suppose it does. What is decidedly *not* scary, though, is orbiting solar satellites that beam the power down in low-intensity microwave or IR laser radiation. Energy is even more abundant in space than asteroids! Let's start with the easy stuff.
If you want some shiny excitement from an institution separated from the political process, look at SpaceX. They just happen to be developing a man-rated heavy-lift rocket and apollo-style capsule to be ready within the next five years. Check the updates page to see this month's successful test of the capsule landing parachute's, and the June test of the Falcon 9 LEO rocket that was 100% successful on its very first launch. I work for NASA but one of these days I swear I'm going to bail to SpaceX because they are actually doing stuff that is relevant and efficient. That's not to say NASA isn't doing stuff--there are still several science probes launched every year, each one state-of-the-art and one-of-a-kind--but if you really want to GO somewhere then SpaceX is the place to be.
NASA needs to go big. I know these new probes can be done on a shoestring budget, say $200 million or so. But please go build us a new heavy lift rocket and shoot some guys into space. Most of us haven't seen a man land on the moon in our lifetime, so can we just try that again?
Sure we can, easy peasy. Just give us another $100 billion and we'll get right on it. We got a list with plenty of new engineers, scientists, technicians, research equipment, higher education, American manufacturing and ethical management. Oh, you say our infrastructure is crumbling, we're trapped in a never-ending war, and nobody wants to raise taxes enough to pay off the debts from our overspending, pork-barrel, corporate-welfare, entitlement-driven government? Well, never mind, then.
Why don't we try negotiating with the asteroid? It might work better than in the middle east. (or at least get Hilary Clinton off the planet). ;) ;)
Well, if you don't mind it getting back in a decade or so, it doesn't have to be a huge amount of energy. Stick a radiothermal/solar device and an ion thruster on it, point it in the right direction, and wait a while.
For atmospheric entry, if you could smelt the iron in space and forge it into lance-shaped ingots, you could hurl them in a ballistic re-entry trajectory, make a few more craters in Siberia or the Sahara, and recover a large amount of the material with very little effort. There has been talk of exporting raw materials into space using a giant rail gun, so the same should work in reverse, since a solid block of metal can undergo 1000's of g's easily.
Filmed on a soundstage? No wonder they look so inauthentic. You'd think they could have at least gotten an actual movie studio.
Little home-made transmitters are a mixed bag unless you have the equipment to tune them up properly. I tried a little TV transmitter myself once with very little success, but I did get an 20-foot FM transmission working. Now I have my amateur license and I've bought a couple radios rather than building them--the antennas and communication are what I'm really interested in.
If you're interested in learning more about why your transmitters did or didn't work I highly recommend getting into the amateur radio community. There is so much to learn from hams everywhere, even just by surfing the web.
Good thought, but it's a lot more likely to come back if it actually hits the earth, this century. ;)
They won't acknowledge their own, but if yours violates an FCC-like rule then you can be sure they will acknowledge its existence...
Though to be fair, how many shows have you watched where the first episode adequately described whether you liked the rest of it or not? Maybe a 45-minute episode would be able to explain enough about the characters for the audience to tell, or the vote might end up being random and the resulting series not at all interesting.
But how about this: a choose-your-own-adventure style show, where there are three 20-minute segments each week, each being a "possible future" for the show, then everybody votes online to decide which one actually happened. Then step and repeat. Though you could only air once every two weeks because you wouldn't know what you were filming 'til the vote came in.
This is like the corporate/university computers that re-image themselves every night against the central server, deleting anything that changed on the hard disk. That would be an awesome feature for a dumb web-surfing box for the idio---parents. Would be a little bit of a pain for everyone else, but we can avoid getting infected, right?
Sure it does! Just make time run backward and we can see all the little radio-photons running toward the transmitter! Or better yet, try and detect the subtle field distortions caused by antennas absorbing radio frequency energy.
Why don't they just stick to beginnings then? They could just have 10 different introductory episodes, each with a different cast and location, and not actually have any story at all.
Do you really, really just want to listen to such music? Because you know, you can already. You can go listen to local bands and ask for their demo tapes, and stay away from all the artists that belong to some label working with RIAA.
Except, you can't. Venues have to pay "preemptive royalties" (mafia protection) so they don't get sued for local artists playing cover songs. They can collect royalties for songs they don't even own. And they have no intention of making sure even their own artists are fairly paid, either.
You are correct. And I believe it is the only substance known to do this, no? Of course, the politicians would care more about the explosions than the laws of physics.
That's right, I'm sorry, I forgot that Wall Street had figured out a way to create wealth out of thin air. Oh, wait...
LOL point taken...all I can is this!
But this is a democracy, and in a democracy power is always held by the majority! Sure, maybe the majority is only 20% of the population, but they're still the majority of ...er ...important people? ;)
True, but then the concern becomes whether commercial mining activity will ramp up before the local price or sheer scarcity of helium makes speculative exploration impractical. If the price stays artificially low, the commercial incentive won't be there until it's too late, and we'll be up a gravity well without a rocket, so to speak. Somebody on this planet really ought to have a stockpile of helium for when that time comes. That's the whole point of a strategic helium reserve--so that we have it when we really need it, not for f***ing party balloons.
Apparently, they forgot that without a large supply of helium operating their favorite cash cow, the manned space flight program, would become a lot harder. There are also many scientific applications that are virtually impossible without helium, with its boiling point at 4.1 Kelvin. Hydrogen, at 14 Kelvin, is not a perfect replacement, and has a tendency to explode. They really ought to be inflating the price, so we learn to conserve helium now while we still have plenty left.
Eeeeexactly...
True, but donors have a longer memory than voters, and that money can go places other than just the campaign, if you get what I mean ;)