Rotation is a non-issue, because you can just look at an object from the opposite side and achieve the same effect.
The "Eastern" and "Western" naming convention was chosen arbitrarilly, like the Eastern and Western hemispheres of the Earth. How hard can that be to grasp?
(BTW: If you were a true geek, my use of the word "unfashionable" would have tipped you off that I was just quoting Douglas Adams. The Comic Book Store Guy would be rudely unimpressed with you right now.)
By the way, this theory also increases the likelyhood that, in a massive, interplanetary saga, every goddamned character that matters seems to be a close relative of every other one. Not only the Anakin-Luke-Leah connection, but also how Anakin built the droids, the bounty hunter that got Han was the son of the guy who was cloned to make the storm-troopers, I'm sure it will be revealed in the third movie that Yoda was Mace's uncle (or something equally far-fetched and stupid), and don't even get me started on the Antilles family.
Now is as good a time as any for my Grand Unified Theory of Star Wars Physics.
It all boils down to this: The "Galaxy Far, Far Away" is small and dense. Since it was "a long time ago", this seems likely, because we live in an expanding universe.
Evidence: Light speed is a big freakin' deal. Han's ship can just barely pull it off for short bursts, and he routinely outruns top-of-the-line Imperial Cruisers by doing so. Most of the time, the Falcon, like most other ships, coasts along at sub-light speed.
All these people travelling below light speed are going from one star system to another in a matter of hours or days on a fairly regular basis. This means that most of the stars are only a few light-hours apart, and crossing the galaxy from a place as remote as Luke's homeworld all the way to the capital planet near Galactic Central Point is a mere matter of days. Let's be generous and say that the whole galaxy is about a light-year wide.
Now consider that the thickness of our own galaxy, even way out here on the fringes of the unfashionable Eastern Spiral Arm, is about three thousand light years, you get a sense of how tiny their galaxy really was.
In a galaxy where the stars are that close together, it stands to reason that "deep space" is not really that deep. There's still some gasses in high orbits over planets. (Whatever gasses they are, they are not very refractive, because it still looks like deep space... and they are not very dense, because some of the ships, like the B-Wing and the Slave 1, get by without being very aerodynamic.)
This is why you hear R2 beeping, Tie Fighters exploding, weapons firing, etc.
So those of you who are physically incapable of saying to themselves "it's just a movie" can finally sit back, relax, and enjoy the film. Space flight in the Star Wars setting is not the same as space flight in the here and now.
Dayton is simply looking at this from an economist's perspective. I don't think it warrents the flying-off-the-handle tax-and-spend finger pointing that I see happening here.
You are correct in saying that not all Democrats are big-government, tax-hungry liberals. There's Tim Penny, for example, who is a Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute. (Sure, he worked for Ventura and ran for Governor for The Party Formerly Known As Reform, but he had a long career as a congressman with a (D) after his name before that.)
That said, Mark Dayton is that sort of Democrat, and always has been, so pardon us for not being shocked that he's floating trial baloons for Yet Another New Tax.
Reading some of these posts, it seems a lot of people believe that politicians want to "get rich" by raising taxes.
Not at all. We believe they want to "get powerful" by raising taxes. I've seen no evidence to the contrary.
If "Slider451" is who I think it is, I've disagreed with him dozens of times on dozens of issues, but in this case, as a fellow Minnesotan, I agree with every word of that last post.
P.S. In these tough times, not paying for a few things at all would be even better than taxes or deficit spending. We could start with the prescription drug give-aways that Dayton campaigned for and the Republicans have completely capitulated on.
Good point there. Those looking for long-term value might want to buy an $800 eMac, and plug the video-out port into the $1299 Studio display. Set the eMac sideways behind the display so you don't block the DVD bay. For $2099, you are giving up a small amount of CPU speed, and it's not as s3xy as the iMac, but some geeks would probably be happier going that route.
On the other hand, if you are looking to drop a fat wad of cash for a 20" screen attached to a unique-looking computer that's less than half the power of the current G5 towers, you are probably not the type to sweat over maximizing bang-for-the-buck to begin with.
Even adding a bigger internal drive is a pain. Issues like getting Just The Right Thickness of heatsink grease come up, and you totally void your warranty.
If you are an iMac owner and want more space, go with an external Firewire drive. If you are shopping and think 80MB won't be enough for you, consider other models. (I just dropped a 120 GB into a new eMac. A lot of disassembly, and one or two delicate connections to watch out for... but not impossible.)
Those young, unrecognized-talent players seldom prosper when they leave the Jazz. I would put it to you that Malone and Stockton (and Sloan's coaching) made a lot of those guys look better than they really were, just like O'Neal made Penny Hardaway look better than he was and is now making Kobe Bryant look better than he is.
Another example: Look at Radislov Nesterovic. Playing next to Kevin Garnett: Solid journeyman European center:: Playing on a new team, even with Tim Duncan: Total bust.
Abdul-Jabbar once said that having Magic Johnson for his point guard added nearly 10 years to his career as a productive center in the NBA.
Other than Hornacek, the Jazz never really had much in the way of good supporting players. They had a bunch of guys who were on the bubble of being good enough for the NBA who seemed to be better players thanks to Sloan, Malone, and Stockton. Once the value of those players went up in the eyes of other teams, they left the Jazz (who knew better than spend a lot signing them) to get bigger contracts. The one exception being Ostertag, who everybody realized was a stiff and didn't make a lot of offers for.
Anyway, the Jazz and the Sonics are both putting up respectable numbers with "rebuilding year" teams. The Clippers, on the other hand, still suck, and probably always will. As a Wolves fan, I just gotta say "thank you, Clippers" for giving up on Olowokandi just as he's starting to become a good player. He and Odom will both see the playoffs with their new teams long before the squad they left behind will.
How (and why) the hell are they supposed to create a virus from "non-organic matter"? You want them to fuse atoms to make their carbon? Or are you suggesting that they make a completely inorganic virus, i.e. one that contains no carbon-based molecules whatsoever?... Maybe you're just mis-using the phrase "organic material."Carbon is an element. Not all carbon compounds are organic. You are the one mis-using the phrase "organic material."
As for my comment that I'm only impressed if they started with non-organic matter, I mean exactly that. "Synthesized" DNA which comes from organic matter as the base materials is not nearly as impressive of a feat as creating a living organism from raw elements.
And no, it would not help us understand how viruses work necessarilly, but it would help us understand a little something called the origins of life on Earth. A field of study not without merit, unless you are from the "it's turtles all the way down" set.
Funny you should say that, I was just thinking I would have found it more useful if it was just tightly-tiled pictures without any context of where the links were coming from. Kind of like the massive bank of monitors that Veidt used in "The Watchmen" to keep track of current trends in human culture.
In the current layout, you still have to skim through it, and only get a handful of images... so you might as well just go to Google News or Drudge Report or something for your news links.
Do you want to know how hard it would be to terraform Mars? Here's how you can best simulate it: Move to Antarctica for a few years. Deep into Antarctica. Don't melt any snow: drink only the water you brought with you. Build a relay into all your radio equipment that delays the signal anywhere between a couple minutes and a half hour, depending on the time of the year.
Oh yea, and don't breathe any of the outside air. Build a geodesic dome which you can never leave. Grow hydroponic plants at low temperatures and with minimal sunlight to provide for all of your food and oxygen. Oh, and you can't get any fuel either, except that which is shipped to you at the approximate cost of a rocket from Earth to Mars... I would guess heating oil would go for about two million dollars a gallon or so. You might eventually use something like nuclear power, but it will cost trillions just to get the materials to you, and you will need to build the reactor yourself, as well as maintain it and dispose of the waste.
Sound like a fun way to live to you? No? Then you just might not be cut out for life on Mars either.
Okay, I use both and prefer the Mac, but I gotta call BS when I see it, and you just repeated a very common myth.
Any PC user that I know that has spent any amount of time on the Mac (more than just moving the mouse around at the local best buy) really has nothing bad to say about it and usually likes it.
The details of Mac OS's has always been part of the required training for Microsoft certifications, because an NT admin in a mega-corp frequently needs to support the small network of Macs that the advertising department or some such area. While most of them just learn barely enough to get their precious MCSE pieces of paper, many others delve into the Mac OS a lot further than the typical "I only use Macs" school teacher ever will.
Not every Windows user who disses Macs does so out of complete ignorance. More often than not, they dislike Macs for one of two reasons:
1. They are more comfortable with the familiarity of Windows, having spent months learning the finer details of COM libraries, the system registry, and.NET 2. They play computer games, and will always choose the platform that has more state-of-the-art games available
That said, I have an X-Box for games, and a UNIX background that's at least as strong as my Windows knowledge. OS X 10.3 rocks my world.
In the US more than 95% of the privately held land is owned by only 3% of the population.
Of course, you had to use the "privately held" qualifier, becuase the majority of the land in the US is owned by the public and managed by the government. Massive expanses of land throughout the west have been Federal land reserves since the TR administration, and the states all hold a lot of land themselves.
Such facts about the socialist ownership of resources in the US dispells the myth that America is a nation of chaotic free-market capitalism run wild, so I can see how a reactionary would want to factor them out before calculating percentages.
Steering back on to the topic of a virus created "from scratch". If it truely was a case of creating a virus (one of the simplest life-froms) from non-organic matter, that would be big news. Unfortunately, the article is very vague about what their starting materials were. If their "synthetic genome" was built using organic material, it would represent a much less signifigant feat.
because like the case of Shawn Kemp, there are plenty of guys who could score 6 points and 3 rebounds a game.
That's the big myth behind the "overpaid washed up athletes" claim. There are not plenty of guys who could score 6 points and three rebounds against NBA players. The European leagues are full of very good former college stars who couldn't do it.
Out of almost 300 Million Americans, only a couple hundred are good enough to be benchwarmers in the NBA. Fewer than ever these days, because there are so many good players from the rest of the world now entering the league. You could easilly take the worst team in the NBA (the Clippers at the moment, I suspect) and mop up the floor with any college team in the US, or have a winning record against the pros in the Italian League. They may seem to suck in contrast to the Tim Duncans and Kevin Garnetts, but don't let that fool you into thinking they are anything less than elite athletes.
I had a friend (who owns an iPod) who's birthday was yesterday. She's been getting into the iTMS ever since the Windows version of iTunes came out a couple weeks ago.
Right before going over to her house for a small party, I fired up iTunes on my iBook and bought a $20 certificate for her. When I got there, I just said "check your e-mail for your gift." She loved it. I'm sure I will use it again one of these days, as it saves shopping time while seeming less impersonal than cash.
Millions have been sold. Can you cite one known case?
You really have to abuse the hell out of them just to make them have trouble reading the drive. If it was meant to be treated like a delicate little flower, would Apple be running those obnoxious commercials of people jumping around like idiots while listening to them?
Seriously, if you think they are as fragile as all that, I suspect you don't own one, and are just going by wild speculation. I do own one, so I don't need to guess. It's far more rugged than any portable music player I've ever owned.
If it can be jarred badly enough so that it can't read, is a head crash really out of the question?
Did even one of those myriad people who bounce around enough while jogging to skip the read head ever report damage to the hard drive? No? Then yes, it's out of the question. Apple probably tested the damned thing in a paint-can shaker or something, because I have yet to hear of a single reported incident of this ever happening to anybody. This is not a 1980's-era IBM HD. It's an order of magnitude more rugged.
I didn't say there was anything wrong with southern accents. I just speculated that Carter's use of "nuc-u-lar" when he should know better might be a southern accent thing. Same goes for Bush, because anybody who knows somebody who moved to Texas for a few years knows how infectious the lingo can be down there.
I like accents. I'm particularilly fond of the sound of my own local inflections (Minnesotan), and make no effort to hide it when I'm around people from other places.
I run with an iPod all the time. It does not skip, nor do I ph34r damage. If you bump it REALLY HARD during one of the few moments when the drive is spinning, it usually responds by shutting off, but the minor jostling from a jogger's stride doesn't cause that to happen.
As the article points out, these batteries will lose their ability to store a charge in a few years (all rechargable batteries do so), and buying a replacement battery (as one does for one's camcorder or discman every few years) isn't an option.
Instead one has to throw away the ipod and buy a new one...
Holy crap, I thought this was Slashdot! You're afraid that you might someday need to open an old out-of-warranty MP3 player to replace a battery!? What the hell kind of hacker are you, anyway?
Slashdot's stated purpose is "news for nerds." Go read CNN.com or Drudge Report or something if that doesn't apply to you.
Slashdot Mirror
The "Eastern" and "Western" naming convention was chosen arbitrarilly, like the Eastern and Western hemispheres of the Earth. How hard can that be to grasp?
(BTW: If you were a true geek, my use of the word "unfashionable" would have tipped you off that I was just quoting Douglas Adams. The Comic Book Store Guy would be rudely unimpressed with you right now.)
By the way, this theory also increases the likelyhood that, in a massive, interplanetary saga, every goddamned character that matters seems to be a close relative of every other one. Not only the Anakin-Luke-Leah connection, but also how Anakin built the droids, the bounty hunter that got Han was the son of the guy who was cloned to make the storm-troopers, I'm sure it will be revealed in the third movie that Yoda was Mace's uncle (or something equally far-fetched and stupid), and don't even get me started on the Antilles family.
It all boils down to this: The "Galaxy Far, Far Away" is small and dense. Since it was "a long time ago", this seems likely, because we live in an expanding universe.
Evidence: Light speed is a big freakin' deal. Han's ship can just barely pull it off for short bursts, and he routinely outruns top-of-the-line Imperial Cruisers by doing so. Most of the time, the Falcon, like most other ships, coasts along at sub-light speed.
All these people travelling below light speed are going from one star system to another in a matter of hours or days on a fairly regular basis. This means that most of the stars are only a few light-hours apart, and crossing the galaxy from a place as remote as Luke's homeworld all the way to the capital planet near Galactic Central Point is a mere matter of days. Let's be generous and say that the whole galaxy is about a light-year wide.
Now consider that the thickness of our own galaxy, even way out here on the fringes of the unfashionable Eastern Spiral Arm, is about three thousand light years, you get a sense of how tiny their galaxy really was.
In a galaxy where the stars are that close together, it stands to reason that "deep space" is not really that deep. There's still some gasses in high orbits over planets. (Whatever gasses they are, they are not very refractive, because it still looks like deep space... and they are not very dense, because some of the ships, like the B-Wing and the Slave 1, get by without being very aerodynamic.)
This is why you hear R2 beeping, Tie Fighters exploding, weapons firing, etc.
So those of you who are physically incapable of saying to themselves "it's just a movie" can finally sit back, relax, and enjoy the film. Space flight in the Star Wars setting is not the same as space flight in the here and now.
You are correct in saying that not all Democrats are big-government, tax-hungry liberals. There's Tim Penny, for example, who is a Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute. (Sure, he worked for Ventura and ran for Governor for The Party Formerly Known As Reform, but he had a long career as a congressman with a (D) after his name before that.)
That said, Mark Dayton is that sort of Democrat, and always has been, so pardon us for not being shocked that he's floating trial baloons for Yet Another New Tax.
Reading some of these posts, it seems a lot of people believe that politicians want to "get rich" by raising taxes.
Not at all. We believe they want to "get powerful" by raising taxes. I've seen no evidence to the contrary.
P.S. In these tough times, not paying for a few things at all would be even better than taxes or deficit spending. We could start with the prescription drug give-aways that Dayton campaigned for and the Republicans have completely capitulated on.
40 to 120. It was the low-end eMac. Try to keep up.
Guilty as charged!
On the other hand, if you are looking to drop a fat wad of cash for a 20" screen attached to a unique-looking computer that's less than half the power of the current G5 towers, you are probably not the type to sweat over maximizing bang-for-the-buck to begin with.
If you are an iMac owner and want more space, go with an external Firewire drive. If you are shopping and think 80MB won't be enough for you, consider other models. (I just dropped a 120 GB into a new eMac. A lot of disassembly, and one or two delicate connections to watch out for... but not impossible.)
Still less space than a 20" LCD + desktop PC too, unless you cram the PC tower under your desk to fill up with dust bunnies.
Another example: Look at Radislov Nesterovic. Playing next to Kevin Garnett: Solid journeyman European center:: Playing on a new team, even with Tim Duncan: Total bust.
Abdul-Jabbar once said that having Magic Johnson for his point guard added nearly 10 years to his career as a productive center in the NBA.
Other than Hornacek, the Jazz never really had much in the way of good supporting players. They had a bunch of guys who were on the bubble of being good enough for the NBA who seemed to be better players thanks to Sloan, Malone, and Stockton. Once the value of those players went up in the eyes of other teams, they left the Jazz (who knew better than spend a lot signing them) to get bigger contracts. The one exception being Ostertag, who everybody realized was a stiff and didn't make a lot of offers for.
Anyway, the Jazz and the Sonics are both putting up respectable numbers with "rebuilding year" teams. The Clippers, on the other hand, still suck, and probably always will. As a Wolves fan, I just gotta say "thank you, Clippers" for giving up on Olowokandi just as he's starting to become a good player. He and Odom will both see the playoffs with their new teams long before the squad they left behind will.
As for my comment that I'm only impressed if they started with non-organic matter, I mean exactly that. "Synthesized" DNA which comes from organic matter as the base materials is not nearly as impressive of a feat as creating a living organism from raw elements.
And no, it would not help us understand how viruses work necessarilly, but it would help us understand a little something called the origins of life on Earth. A field of study not without merit, unless you are from the "it's turtles all the way down" set.
In the current layout, you still have to skim through it, and only get a handful of images... so you might as well just go to Google News or Drudge Report or something for your news links.
Oh yea, and don't breathe any of the outside air. Build a geodesic dome which you can never leave. Grow hydroponic plants at low temperatures and with minimal sunlight to provide for all of your food and oxygen. Oh, and you can't get any fuel either, except that which is shipped to you at the approximate cost of a rocket from Earth to Mars... I would guess heating oil would go for about two million dollars a gallon or so. You might eventually use something like nuclear power, but it will cost trillions just to get the materials to you, and you will need to build the reactor yourself, as well as maintain it and dispose of the waste.
Sound like a fun way to live to you? No? Then you just might not be cut out for life on Mars either.
Any PC user that I know that has spent any amount of time on the Mac (more than just moving the mouse around at the local best buy) really has nothing bad to say about it and usually likes it.
The details of Mac OS's has always been part of the required training for Microsoft certifications, because an NT admin in a mega-corp frequently needs to support the small network of Macs that the advertising department or some such area. While most of them just learn barely enough to get their precious MCSE pieces of paper, many others delve into the Mac OS a lot further than the typical "I only use Macs" school teacher ever will.
Not every Windows user who disses Macs does so out of complete ignorance. More often than not, they dislike Macs for one of two reasons:
1. They are more comfortable with the familiarity of Windows, having spent months learning the finer details of COM libraries, the system registry, and .NET
2. They play computer games, and will always choose the platform that has more state-of-the-art games available
That said, I have an X-Box for games, and a UNIX background that's at least as strong as my Windows knowledge. OS X 10.3 rocks my world.
Of course, you had to use the "privately held" qualifier, becuase the majority of the land in the US is owned by the public and managed by the government. Massive expanses of land throughout the west have been Federal land reserves since the TR administration, and the states all hold a lot of land themselves.
Such facts about the socialist ownership of resources in the US dispells the myth that America is a nation of chaotic free-market capitalism run wild, so I can see how a reactionary would want to factor them out before calculating percentages.
Steering back on to the topic of a virus created "from scratch". If it truely was a case of creating a virus (one of the simplest life-froms) from non-organic matter, that would be big news. Unfortunately, the article is very vague about what their starting materials were. If their "synthetic genome" was built using organic material, it would represent a much less signifigant feat.
That's the big myth behind the "overpaid washed up athletes" claim. There are not plenty of guys who could score 6 points and three rebounds against NBA players. The European leagues are full of very good former college stars who couldn't do it.
Out of almost 300 Million Americans, only a couple hundred are good enough to be benchwarmers in the NBA. Fewer than ever these days, because there are so many good players from the rest of the world now entering the league. You could easilly take the worst team in the NBA (the Clippers at the moment, I suspect) and mop up the floor with any college team in the US, or have a winning record against the pros in the Italian League. They may seem to suck in contrast to the Tim Duncans and Kevin Garnetts, but don't let that fool you into thinking they are anything less than elite athletes.
Right before going over to her house for a small party, I fired up iTunes on my iBook and bought a $20 certificate for her. When I got there, I just said "check your e-mail for your gift." She loved it. I'm sure I will use it again one of these days, as it saves shopping time while seeming less impersonal than cash.
In which nobody has reported permanent damage to an iPod hard drive. Thanks for making my point for me.
You really have to abuse the hell out of them just to make them have trouble reading the drive. If it was meant to be treated like a delicate little flower, would Apple be running those obnoxious commercials of people jumping around like idiots while listening to them?
Seriously, if you think they are as fragile as all that, I suspect you don't own one, and are just going by wild speculation. I do own one, so I don't need to guess. It's far more rugged than any portable music player I've ever owned.
Did even one of those myriad people who bounce around enough while jogging to skip the read head ever report damage to the hard drive? No? Then yes, it's out of the question. Apple probably tested the damned thing in a paint-can shaker or something, because I have yet to hear of a single reported incident of this ever happening to anybody. This is not a 1980's-era IBM HD. It's an order of magnitude more rugged.
I like accents. I'm particularilly fond of the sound of my own local inflections (Minnesotan), and make no effort to hide it when I'm around people from other places.
Pure FUD, nothing more.
Instead one has to throw away the ipod and buy a new one...
Holy crap, I thought this was Slashdot! You're afraid that you might someday need to open an old out-of-warranty MP3 player to replace a battery!? What the hell kind of hacker are you, anyway?
Slashdot's stated purpose is "news for nerds." Go read CNN.com or Drudge Report or something if that doesn't apply to you.
Also, if you want longer battery life, Belkin offers a cheap add-on pack that extends it considerably.