It is all about escape velocity, and for equatorial orbits and trajectories, going with the rotation of the earth does help. A lot. To the point that many of the standard rockets, it'll boost your launchable mass by 20%. That is why the EU launches from French Guiana, Russia rents back its Baikonur Cosmodrome from Kazakhstan, and Boeing et al. have a mobile oil rig looking thing that'll take your rockets down to the equatorial Pacific to launch it (Sea Launch)
Um, yes there is. I have a unattached legal copy of Mac OSX sitting right next to me. It is called "Family Pack", we currently have 2 unused licenses in our home.
I've met and talked to Orrin Hatch many times, and his daughter-in-law is a good friend, but he needs to go down. He has this strange knack for making the wrong first decision every time. Sometimes someone points it out to him, and he back-pedals (stem-cell research); but by and large, he has consistently made this country a worse place to live in.
That said, Pete Ashdown isn't the man to do it. See, I've met him on several occasions, and while he is a techie and may get those questions right, he is not a people person. At all. Much like Orrin, he himself is first on the priority list. XMission is a wonderful ISP, and far and away the best available in Utah (I wish someone as good as them existed in Upstate New York), and I thank Pete for that. Stick to tech.
Btw, other comments are correct. Lots and lots of disciplines accomplish the same thing by never looking at the angle directly and instead carrying around the sin or cos of the angle which, crazily enough, is a ratio of two lengths. Who knew:) One that immediately jumps to mind are Optical Engineers.
They are getting better. They have put out many flawed games with beautiful production quality. They are learning their lessons and doing significantly better each time around. They still aren't an immediate buy for me though (I'm not swayed by good bits)
It is apparent from your comment that you aren't familiar with BGG.
BGG is a site targeted toward the growing movement in boardgaming. In large part, these games are imported from Germany, France, and Italy, and so is often called "German" games, "Euro" games, or even "Designer" games.
The rating system is based around how much you want to play the game again. New games do have a rating spike as the fan boys that preordered the game rate it, then over time, the ratings settle to the final position. Overall, the BGG community has managed to maintain its integrity fairly well in spite of the spikes of growth that occur around releases of more popular games.
Euro games are distinguished by tending to have short rule books, 2 hour play times, and a multitude of decsions to be made.
From that description, it should come as no surprise that Monopoly or Risk don't rate highly (few decisions, long play time respectively). A large community of people there don't like abstract games (they want a game with theme), which explains Chess. In fact, in general, Go is rated very highly (and rightfully so). The ratings are in tune with what the community likes, not age, or general popularity. Which is something you should understand since you participate in another niche community here:)
As far as Kill Doctor Lucky goes, you can have your opinion, but might I humbly suggest you try some of the games that are rated highly on BGG? You might have a bit of an epiphany on how good board games can be.
Often, when I am sitting in a movie talking loudly on my cell phone, I want to know how loud the movie is so I can put protective ear plugs in to save my hearing. Right now, I just start the movie with them in, but it makes it hard to hear my phone ring.:-)
Alan Moon's Gathering of Friends is going on right now too. It is a 10-day board gaming event. Personal invitation from Moon only. Check out
Terminal City Gamers
and
Plenary Games
for "live" reports from the event.
The arrangement thing happens with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and other silent movies. A company will get a copy of the movie, change the intertitles or tack on their own score and copyright that arrangement. Most Chaplin movies also have "lost scenes" tacked into the movie. Usually these are an extra coupl;e of frames in a given take. BTW, _very_ few silent movies had a set score, and most of the scores that did exist have been lost.
What we need is a system that when something is officially copyrighted (fees and all), a copy of the work is placed into say the library of congress (required not optional like now) so that when something does become public domain, we can actually get at the material. Mozart is public domain, but you would be hard pressed to find a copy of his sheet music that hasn't been arranged and recopyrighted. We have lost too many works of art to the ravages of time. Things will only get worse.
Off topic, but FYI... Prior the Clinton era, the Forest Service was largely independant of the presidential changes. The head of the Forest Service (I'm not talking about the Secretary of Agriculture) was a person who had fought his way up through the ranks and awarded the top post on merit. There was a large stink inside the USFS when Clinton decided to appoint his own head. Bush Jr. has continued the now tradition with his own appointee.
Humans and NP problems There are two things people look at when they find a new NP problem. First is reducing a currently known NP problem to the new problem. In this case, they reduced the 3 bucket problem. Second is the difficulty of approximation. Apparently Tetris also happens to be difficult to approximate. Humans happen to be _really_ good at approximation, while sucking at exact calculations. That is the whole reason we designed computers in the first place.
Note for those who don't read the article. Their proof is _not_ for a basic tetris game. They assume a prebuilt structure that you are trying to fit pieces into. This structure is designed to allow the mapping from the 3-bucket problem to Tetris. They specifically mention the starting point of an empty board as an open problem.
They are dubious because the whole thing is a big joke. 90% of the articles/awards that are part of the IgNobels are people writing fake articles to mock the trappings of science. The long convoluted abstracts, graphs that mean nothing, big words in small places. Check out a copy of the Best Of the IgNobels some time. Believing the science stories of these awards is like believing the news stories of the Onion.
Of course the scary thing is when they are right anyway.
I can promise you that the emu scene on the XBox is not unparalleled. Take one look at the Dreamcast and you will see a thriving emulation scene. The list below is pulled from www.dcemulation.com
The homebrew scene is very active too. We have been making big strides in DMA lately, SDL has been ported. Take a look at the KOS project dcdev.allusion.net Disclaimer: I am a developer for KOS
48k Spectrum
DreamSpec
ZX-Ishspectrum Arcade Emu's
Unofficial MAME
DCPhoenix
DCSI
DreamPac
MameDC
MamedDC Atari
Stella DC
[D]cs2600
Atari 800/5200 Emu Commodore 64
DC64 ColecoVision
[D]Colem Hand Held
DCGNUboy
OsWanDC
NeoPoccottDC
Boob!Boy
DreamSMS Midway Z80 Laser Disk
LaserDC MSX
DreamMSX
fMSX DC Multi System Emu's
DarcDC Nintendo (NES)
NesterDC
FrNES
TuxNES-DC
Gleam Odyssey 2
Odd-DC PC Engine
Dream Engine Playstation
PCSX-DC Sega Genesis
Nginesis
DCGenerator Sega Master System
SMEG
SMS Plus Sega SG-1000/3000
Dream-O-Rama Sierra AGI
SarienDC Super Nintendo
DreamSNES
Sintendo
Ngine SNES 9x
Hogwash to you. I work for a company that does Lasik Surgery At night, your pupil expands to let more light in. There isn't a company out there that burns the cornea as far out as the normal pupil expands in the dark. That transition zone is what causes the haloing. True, people might not get haloing, but they are the exception not the rule. Those exceptions are due to not requiring much correction in the first place (the original guy who asked the question doesn't fit into that category) or whose pupils are unusually small.
There was mention in another comment about long term effects of lasik. We are just now getting data in on long term effects of RK, something that was developed before the fall of the Soviet Union. BTW, the long term effects of RK are pretty bad.
As another side note, don't listen to the people who say that the new bladeless procedure is a lot better. In over 50% of the cases, the persons epithelial layer is sloughing off shortly after surgery. Imagine a rug burn on your eye.
Jeff
Re:Only 7 ammendments left in the Bill of Rights
on
That Link Is Illegal
·
· Score: 1
The "designated free speech zone" also happened during the Olympic games here in SLC. The mayor, Rocky Anderson, designated certain areas of the city (off the beaten path) as the only place anyone was allowed to protest anything.
QWest would let it happen. My best friends mom is fighting this right now. Some guy named Aaron called up QWest and requested that his number get disconnected. Except he gave the wrong telephone number, and they disconnected hers.
To add insult to injury her husband is out of town right now and they won't let her reconnect the phone since when they got married x years ago, they only put his name on the account.
I know for a fact that Carnegie Mellon is a University working on this. The head of their robotics/haptic section came by the University of Utah about a year ago, and was showing video of this
All this whining about horrible acting and dialogue makes me wonder if anybody has seen the original trilogy lately. Bad acting, long exposition interspersed with one-line scenes is what star wars is about.
The only person who consistently had good lines, or even acted well was Han Solo. But he rewrote lots of his dialogue, and we all know that he is a good actor.
Luke Skywalker presented us with an oscar deserving performance with his infamous "No! No! Thats no true! Thats impossible"
Princess Leia: don't even get me started, half her lines in the first movie are clunkers.
And wow those were some amazing lightsaber battles in those movies. Swing swing swing die. Swing push swing talk loose hand. Swing jump talk swing jump talk swing lightning swing die.
But we have been watching these movies for 25 _years_ now. They are part of the childhood of most of us here. Give Ep I,II,III 25 years, and I am sure there will be a crop of 30 year olds singing the praises of the 6 movies.
Neuromancer is definitely _not_ the first book in the Cyberpunk Genre. While Gibson did coin the phrase, several books had been written before Neuromancer. A book that everyone would agree as being cyberpunk, and pre Neuromancer, is "True Names" by Vernor Vinge. It was published in 1981, three years before Neuromancer.
If you want to define cyberpunk by the themes in the books more than the physical act of flying around in computers with your mind, people like Alfred Bester, Roger Zelazny, and Philip K. Dick are definitely precursor-cyberpunk. Hell you could make a good case for Plato and Descartes.
If Vernor Vinge weren't such an _okay_ writer, and a pompous buffoon, I'd be more willing to give him the title.
As part of a project I was on, we needed to do a bunch of simulations of particles moving subject to physics. Unlike what you usually see in games, these needed to be real simulations (reproducable in the lab).
We ended up doing a bunch of OOP so that we could handle many different kinds of particles, and many different PDE solvers, each selected for the particular task. Because of polymorphism, we were able to write the engine once, and plug in what we needed fairly easily. In the end the code ended up being much cleaner, readable, and faster than the Fortran we started with. We have gone on and are using it for a completely different kind of simulation now with minor changes.
This was all in the Chemistry Department, but I certainly think it applies.
I would guess that most engineers use Fortran in part because of the book "Numerical Recipes in Fortran". Although there exist C and C++ versions of the book, they certainly don't take advantage of the languages, and for the most part are direct ports of the fortran. They are very disparaging of the languages in those books, and even spread FUD about C, C++ and the numerical stability of the compilers.
If these guy had any sense they would do what has worked so well in other sectors. Share the patents with each-other, then use them to keep everybody else out. The one that pops into my mind is the strangle hold two companies had on lasik surgery for a while. That is why they used to cost 10k+ a year. It has been done before, and is being done all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
It is all about escape velocity, and for equatorial orbits and trajectories, going with the rotation of the earth does help. A lot. To the point that many of the standard rockets, it'll boost your launchable mass by 20%. That is why the EU launches from French Guiana, Russia rents back its Baikonur Cosmodrome from Kazakhstan, and Boeing et al. have a mobile oil rig looking thing that'll take your rockets down to the equatorial Pacific to launch it (Sea Launch)
Um, yes there is. I have a unattached legal copy of Mac OSX sitting right next to me. It is called "Family Pack", we currently have 2 unused licenses in our home.
I've met and talked to Orrin Hatch many times, and his daughter-in-law is a good friend, but he needs to go down. He has this strange knack for making the wrong first decision every time. Sometimes someone points it out to him, and he back-pedals (stem-cell research); but by and large, he has consistently made this country a worse place to live in.
That said, Pete Ashdown isn't the man to do it. See, I've met him on several occasions, and while he is a techie and may get those questions right, he is not a people person. At all. Much like Orrin, he himself is first on the priority list. XMission is a wonderful ISP, and far and away the best available in Utah (I wish someone as good as them existed in Upstate New York), and I thank Pete for that. Stick to tech.
Btw, other comments are correct. Lots and lots of disciplines accomplish the same thing by never looking at the angle directly and instead carrying around the sin or cos of the angle which, crazily enough, is a ratio of two lengths. Who knew :) One that immediately jumps to mind are Optical Engineers.
Actually, it isn't linearly proportional to to angles. Otherwise 60 and 30 wouldn't be nice neat numbers.
His spread is the sine squared of the angle.
They are getting better. They have put out many flawed games with beautiful production quality. They are learning their lessons and doing significantly better each time around. They still aren't an immediate buy for me though (I'm not swayed by good bits)
It is apparent from your comment that you aren't familiar with BGG.
:)
BGG is a site targeted toward the growing movement in boardgaming. In large part, these games are imported from Germany, France, and Italy, and so is often called "German" games, "Euro" games, or even "Designer" games.
The rating system is based around how much you want to play the game again. New games do have a rating spike as the fan boys that preordered the game rate it, then over time, the ratings settle to the final position. Overall, the BGG community has managed to maintain its integrity fairly well in spite of the spikes of growth that occur around releases of more popular games.
Euro games are distinguished by tending to have short rule books, 2 hour play times, and a multitude of decsions to be made.
From that description, it should come as no surprise that Monopoly or Risk don't rate highly (few decisions, long play time respectively). A large community of people there don't like abstract games (they want a game with theme), which explains Chess. In fact, in general, Go is rated very highly (and rightfully so). The ratings are in tune with what the community likes, not age, or general popularity. Which is something you should understand since you participate in another niche community here
As far as Kill Doctor Lucky goes, you can have your opinion, but might I humbly suggest you try some of the games that are rated highly on BGG? You might have a bit of an epiphany on how good board games can be.
The use for the sound meter is obvious.
:-)
Often, when I am sitting in a movie talking loudly on my cell phone, I want to know how loud the movie is so I can put protective ear plugs in to save my hearing. Right now, I just start the movie with them in, but it makes it hard to hear my phone ring.
Alan Moon's Gathering of Friends is going on right now too. It is a 10-day board gaming event. Personal invitation from Moon only. Check out Terminal City Gamers and Plenary Games for "live" reports from the event.
The arrangement thing happens with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and other silent movies. A company will get a copy of the movie, change the intertitles or tack on their own score and copyright that arrangement. Most Chaplin movies also have "lost scenes" tacked into the movie. Usually these are an extra coupl;e of frames in a given take. BTW, _very_ few silent movies had a set score, and most of the scores that did exist have been lost.
What we need is a system that when something is officially copyrighted (fees and all), a copy of the work is placed into say the library of congress (required not optional like now) so that when something does become public domain, we can actually get at the material. Mozart is public domain, but you would be hard pressed to find a copy of his sheet music that hasn't been arranged and recopyrighted. We have lost too many works of art to the ravages of time. Things will only get worse.
Off topic, but FYI...
Prior the Clinton era, the Forest Service was largely independant of the presidential changes. The head of the Forest Service (I'm not talking about the Secretary of Agriculture) was a person who had fought his way up through the ranks and awarded the top post on merit. There was a large stink inside the USFS when Clinton decided to appoint his own head. Bush Jr. has continued the now tradition with his own appointee.
Read the article, it is amazingly accessible.
Humans and NP problems
There are two things people look at when they find a new NP problem. First is reducing a currently known NP problem to the new problem. In this case, they reduced the 3 bucket problem. Second is the difficulty of approximation. Apparently Tetris also happens to be difficult to approximate. Humans happen to be _really_ good at approximation, while sucking at exact calculations. That is the whole reason we designed computers in the first place.
Note for those who don't read the article. Their proof is _not_ for a basic tetris game. They assume a prebuilt structure that you are trying to fit pieces into. This structure is designed to allow the mapping from the 3-bucket problem to Tetris. They specifically mention the starting point of an empty board as an open problem.
They are dubious because the whole thing is a big joke. 90% of the articles/awards that are part of the IgNobels are people writing fake articles to mock the trappings of science. The long convoluted abstracts, graphs that mean nothing, big words in small places. Check out a copy of the Best Of the IgNobels some time. Believing the science stories of these awards is like believing the news stories of the Onion.
Of course the scary thing is when they are right anyway.
I can promise you that the emu scene on the XBox is not unparalleled. Take one look at the Dreamcast and you will see a thriving emulation scene. The list below is pulled from www.dcemulation.com
The homebrew scene is very active too. We have been making big strides in DMA lately, SDL has been ported. Take a look at the KOS project
dcdev.allusion.net
Disclaimer: I am a developer for KOS
48k Spectrum
DreamSpec
ZX-Ishspectrum
Arcade Emu's
Unofficial MAME
DCPhoenix
DCSI
DreamPac
MameDC
MamedDC
Atari
Stella DC
[D]cs2600
Atari 800/5200 Emu
Commodore 64
DC64
ColecoVision
[D]Colem
Hand Held
DCGNUboy
OsWanDC
NeoPoccottDC
Boob!Boy
DreamSMS
Midway Z80 Laser Disk
LaserDC
MSX
DreamMSX
fMSX DC
Multi System Emu's
DarcDC
Nintendo (NES)
NesterDC
FrNES
TuxNES-DC
Gleam
Odyssey 2
Odd-DC
PC Engine
Dream Engine
Playstation
PCSX-DC
Sega Genesis
Nginesis
DCGenerator
Sega Master System
SMEG
SMS Plus
Sega SG-1000/3000
Dream-O-Rama
Sierra AGI
SarienDC
Super Nintendo
DreamSNES
Sintendo
Ngine SNES 9x
Hogwash to you.
I work for a company that does Lasik Surgery
At night, your pupil expands to let more light in.
There isn't a company out there that burns the cornea as far out as the normal pupil expands in the dark. That transition zone is what causes the haloing. True, people might not get haloing, but they are the exception not the rule. Those exceptions are due to not requiring much correction in the first place (the original guy who asked the question doesn't fit into that category) or whose pupils are unusually small.
There was mention in another comment about long term effects of lasik. We are just now getting data in on long term effects of RK, something that was developed before the fall of the Soviet Union. BTW, the long term effects of RK are pretty bad.
As another side note, don't listen to the people who say that the new bladeless procedure is a lot better. In over 50% of the cases, the persons epithelial layer is sloughing off shortly after surgery. Imagine a rug burn on your eye.
Jeff
The "designated free speech zone" also happened during the Olympic games here in SLC. The mayor, Rocky Anderson, designated certain areas of the city (off the beaten path) as the only place anyone was allowed to protest anything.
QWest would let it happen.
My best friends mom is fighting this right now.
Some guy named Aaron called up QWest and requested that his number get disconnected. Except he gave the wrong telephone number, and they disconnected hers.
To add insult to injury her husband is out of town right now and they won't let her reconnect the phone since when they got married x years ago, they only put his name on the account.
I know for a fact that Carnegie Mellon is a University working on this. The head of their robotics/haptic section came by the University of Utah about a year ago, and was showing video of this
Or the Anthrax bombings of China by Japan
All this whining about horrible acting and dialogue makes me wonder if anybody has seen the original trilogy lately. Bad acting, long exposition interspersed with one-line scenes is what star wars is about.
The only person who consistently had good lines, or even acted well was Han Solo. But he rewrote lots of his dialogue, and we all know that he is a good actor.
Luke Skywalker presented us with an oscar deserving performance with his infamous "No! No! Thats no true! Thats impossible"
Princess Leia: don't even get me started, half her lines in the first movie are clunkers.
And wow those were some amazing lightsaber battles in those movies.
Swing swing swing die.
Swing push swing talk loose hand.
Swing jump talk swing jump talk swing lightning swing die.
But we have been watching these movies for 25 _years_ now. They are part of the childhood of most of us here. Give Ep I,II,III 25 years, and I am sure there will be a crop of 30 year olds singing the praises of the 6 movies.
Bladerunner is based on the book
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"
by Philip K. Dick
published 1968
Read "True Names" and come back to me and tell me if the book is just a "theme" or really a precursor to Gibson.
Gaa, I can't believe I forgot about
Simulacrum 3
by David somethingorother
it was published early '60s
and
Shockwave Runner
by John Brunner (sp?)
I don't remember when it was published, but Vinge mentions it as an inspiration for his story
Neuromancer is definitely _not_ the first book in the Cyberpunk Genre. While Gibson did coin the phrase, several books had been written before Neuromancer. A book that everyone would agree as being cyberpunk, and pre Neuromancer, is "True Names" by Vernor Vinge. It was published in 1981, three years before Neuromancer.
If you want to define cyberpunk by the themes in the books more than the physical act of flying around in computers with your mind, people like Alfred Bester, Roger Zelazny, and Philip K. Dick are definitely precursor-cyberpunk. Hell you could make a good case for Plato and Descartes.
If Vernor Vinge weren't such an _okay_ writer, and a pompous buffoon, I'd be more willing to give him the title.
As part of a project I was on, we needed to do a bunch of simulations of particles moving subject to physics. Unlike what you usually see in games, these needed to be real simulations (reproducable in the lab).
We ended up doing a bunch of OOP so that we could handle many different kinds of particles, and many different PDE solvers, each selected for the particular task. Because of polymorphism, we were able to write the engine once, and plug in what we needed fairly easily. In the end the code ended up being much cleaner, readable, and faster than the Fortran we started with. We have gone on and are using it for a completely different kind of simulation now with minor changes.
This was all in the Chemistry Department, but I certainly think it applies.
I would guess that most engineers use Fortran in part because of the book "Numerical Recipes in Fortran". Although there exist C and C++ versions of the book, they certainly don't take advantage of the languages, and for the most part are direct ports of the fortran. They are very disparaging of the languages in those books, and even spread FUD about C, C++ and the numerical stability of the compilers.
If these guy had any sense they would do what has worked so well in other sectors. Share the patents with each-other, then use them to keep everybody else out. The one that pops into my mind is the strangle hold two companies had on lasik surgery for a while. That is why they used to cost 10k+ a year. It has been done before, and is being done all the time.