I don't think it's fair to claim that Watchmen's failure is what's causing studios not to pick up Heavy Metal. The first Heavy Metal movie came across as an experiment to see how much erotica would (a) get past the ratings board with an "R" and (b) be palatable to the American audience. The producers succeeded at their first goal; they published with an "R" rating what would get an "NC-17" if done with live actors. They failed at the second, which was convincing the wider American audience that porn was socially acceptable if animated instead of acted.
Honestly, I don't see how anyone can with a straight face say that the reason animated erotica isn't blockbuster-level successful in America is because ONE comic book based movie flopped at the box office. I doubt that (fantasy + rating) is the issue; I'm sure that a well-done Punisher movie could be quite successful with an "R" rating (assuming it could outlive the horror that John Travolta delivered in 2004). The producers of Heavy Metal simply wish that there were a mass audience for fantasy porn, and there just isn't.
I'm with Halcyon1234, I don't even watch horror flicks, but your sig's made me morbidly curious for ages.
If it helps, remember that you're in good company - even Hollywood frequently gives up on capturing the sound live and goes to studio recordings for voice and effects. Seriously, if you ever come back to this project Foley will be your best friend. If it's not too late, perhaps you could get your actors back into a recording studio?
Regardless, your project has my condolences, and I wish you the best of luck on your artistic efforts in the future.
The "mail man" decides which route the mail takes based on what you're willing to pay... you know, allowing people to pay premium rates for priority service, like some sites choosing to pay for better delivery than normal over your pipes.
I thought I was making that choice when I signed up for a 5Mbps fiber-optic uplink. My 15Mbps downlink is the equivalent to setting up a large mailbox (I anticipate receiving a large number of packets, after all); I'm OK with the arrangement that I'm renting it from the delivery service. Netflix does the same for their packets, paying a negotiated amount for the volume of packets they send and receive.
In this scenario my vision for Net Neutrality is that DHL, UPS, USPS, and FedEx don't get to charge each other for access to my address.
Regarding electron spins, there's a really good reason for the insane levels of cold - electron spin transitions require incredibly small energies. Some quick wiki-ing leads me to a value of 159.3*10^-24 joules to change spin at the magnetic field strengths cited in the summary. If I had to take a guess, the researchers are trying to keep the kinetic energy of the atoms being tested below that energy threshold so that the spin doesn't change randomly with Brownian motion.
The game you're talking about was licensed from a 3rd party, and Microsoft got a bad build of it. Maxis, the software's author, released the same game as one board of several available in a package called "Full Tilt! Pinball" in 1996.
I experienced it first through the "Full Tilt!" product, and was sorely disappointed by the version included in Windows. My biggest gripe was the plunger - in the Windows build the power of the ball release wasn't proportional to the distance the plunger appeared to be pulled back. Yes, that's a petty complaint, but little details like that stand out when you've played the finished product then get handed a copy of the beta release. There are other problems, too; I think Maxis made improvements to the physics engine after licensing it to Microsoft.
If you like the version you got free from Bill Gates, then do yourself a favor and find a copy of the full release. Three boards instead of just one, with fewer bugs. You'll be glad you did.
The only thing you can do to make this "unprofitable" is to require amazingly huge fines for any problems that arise. Of course, then you have to deal with the issue of getting a multinational multi-billion dollar company to actually pay the fine.
No problem, deny their drilling license if they don't have the proper equipment in their drilling plan. Revoke it if they are found to not be in compliance (perform random inspections). These problems have already been addressed in the North Sea, the US simply hasn't had the will to implement the same measures.
Many things, valve included, have difficulty turning when stuff blows up and cuts off power and/or communication to the controls.
There have been solutions to those problems for many years. The deep water blowout preventers required for North Sea operations have to automatically shut off unless a positive control signal is continuously applied. I work as an engineer in the oil field, and I'm amazed that the US hasn't already adopted many of the regulations already in place elsewhere. Equipment that will properly do the job already exists, we just need to make it unprofitable to not use it.
You've probably figured out from my long delay in responding that I don't have a good comeback for that. =)
Thanks for the replies! As I said before, my opinions on this aren't necessarily rational, and you do a good job presenting evidence of that. It's tragic that knowing that I'm wrong doesn't soothe the aches caused by years of Microsoft hate coloring my interpretation of their actions.
Meanwhile, you've earned a fan. Anyone who can doggedly persist at politely correcting someone who's clearly letting anger cloud his reason is worthy of my attention. Perhaps next time we get into a Slashdot back-and-forth I'll have a better position to argue from =)
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I seem to have rousted some trolls from under their bridges, and I appreciate the time you took to give a polite response.
I like a good argument, though, so I'm going to reply to you and keep this discussion going =)
That limit exists because the 8088 CPU can only address 1MB of RAM, and some memory must be reserved for other hardware devices.
The problem wasn't the limits of the 8088, it's that DOS was written assuming that those hardware limits would always be there. Specifically, instead of checking for memory availability and putting those reserved addresses at the end of addressable memory, DOS instead specified the range between 640kiB and 1MB as reserved. I believe that being forced to live with that poor design choice was the source of the fictitious "no-one will ever . .." quote.
Further, as newer systems became available, with higher limits, OSes were updated or created to take advantage of that - OS/2, Windows 95, Windows NT, etc, can all utilise the additional address space provided with the 286 and then 386.
Unfortunately, DOS was the order of the day for nearly 20 years; the operating systems you listed were all released in the early-to-mid 90's. Until then we were stuck with DOS and its 16-bit limits even on the 32-bit 386 & 486.
. . . a 32-bit x86 CPU can only address 4GB of RAM (without resorting to hacks like PAE that are a) typically unstable with consumer-level hardware drivers and b) require special programming to take advantage of).
As another poster pointed out, the instability of drivers under PAE is largely due to driver programmers making the "no one will ever . .." assumption again. I'd argue that Microsoft set the precedent, and the 3rd party developers followed it.
Even in *10* years it's unlikely 192GB of RAM in a desktop PC (or even "workstation") will be at all common. Further, in 5 years Windows 7 will have been replaced . ..
That sounds suspiciously like "no one will ever . .." to me. Moore's law disagrees with you on RAM availability; 10 years is enough time for 6 or 7 doublings of circuit density, I hope to have 1024 GiB of memory in my desktop by then. The histories of Windows 3, Windows 95, and Windows XP also contradict your "will have been replaced" assertion - Microsoft's strongest historic competitor has been its own obsolete software, including versions that are officially unsupported. I expect that Win7 will still be alive and twitching 10 years from now, having only recently left its official support period.
Regardless, the real issue is that the design of DOS left Microsoft poorly positioned for the transition from 16 to 32 bit hardware. It seems that instead of learning from the users' pain during that upgrade Microsoft continued to use coding practices that left their OS poorly positioned for the 32 to 64 bit upgrade.
There's a good argument to be made that Microsoft shouldn't have to support the installation on Windows on hardware it wasn't designed for; eg. XP shouldn't have been expected to run gracefully on 64 bit systems. The counter-argument to that is that Vista, which began development after 64-bit chips were available on the market, also failed to gracefully bridge the 64-bit divide.
Microsoft should know better. Its developers cannot have been ignorant of Moore's Law, and should have seen the 64-bit transition coming. Despite being staffed with some of the world's smartest programmers Microsoft seems mired in its own legacy of poor initial decisions. Fair or not, justified or not, the perception of those who have watched its history and used other systems without the same frustrations is that Microsoft products are not designed in a future-proof manner. No one will be surp
He didn't have to; he designed that principle into his systems so we all had to live with it for the last 35+ years. DOS was limited to 640kiB of RAM, resulting in users needing to move programs to "upper memory" (640kiB-1MiB) or "extended memory" (1MiB+) addresses by tricking the OS once larger memory cards became inexpensive. XP (32 bit) is limited to 3.1GiB, making it pointless to install even 4GiB of RAM in an XP box since nearly 1/4 of it will never be addressed. Microsoft continues to make the same mistake to this day; there's still a memory limit of ~192GiB in Win7 64 Bit. I expect that in about 5 years RAM will be cheap to buy in quantities larger than 192GiB and Microsoft will start looking silly again because we'll have to resort to DOS-era tricks to make it usable.
Code speaks louder than words. I don't care if he said it or not, he wrote it. And his employees continue to re-write it with every Windows release.
How many of those particles should we find, as a percentage, of any given biological mass? 1%?.0001%? Does that account for the quantities of He found accompanying natural petroleum deposits?
Probably not. There's no need for the oil source to be the same as the Helium source. The most likely source of all the helium in a petroleum deposit is the radioactive material in the rocks in and below the deposit's formation. For example, the amount of Americium found in your smoke detector creates 30,000 alpha particles per second, a kilogram of Uranium ore produces 25,000,000 per second (scroll down a bit to see the activity rates table in the linked reference). Since alpha particles are equivalent to ionized Helium nuclei, ore and mineral deposits that generate alpha particles are basically Helium sources. The Helium migrates upwards until it's trapped by the same formation that prevents the upwards migration of underground hydrocarbons.
Hang on, don't the pilots of Apache helicopters and the like have a HUD over one eye? I've heard stories of how they develop a weird ability to move and focus each eye independently, like a human chameleon.
Yes, the pilot has an HUD over the eye, but it solves the focus problem by cheating - it only works when the pilot is looking at things that are far away. Most things that are outside the cockpit are far away, though, so that works out OK for them; just don't expect that solution to work for your contact-lens-mounted HUD system. reference
[nitpick="on"]Also, someone's been pulling your leg about pilots developing lizard eye. The Apache heads-up system is head-tracking, not eye-tracking. The skill pilots learn is to look around while holding their head still - useful, for sure, but not superhuman. Go ahead and submit that one to Mythbusters, though; I'd love to see them do an episode on it.[/nipick]
Absolutely - I would love to have 50 competing companies digging up my yard, and "accidentally" cutting each other's cables in the process...brilliant!
You and the GP are both right, we should nether have private monopolies on telecom nor 50 companies trying to run wires through every easement. Monopolies are too frequently abused, and having multiple connections to each home is wasteful - duplication of effort + the inevitable human error/sabotage possibilities are both obvious wastes there.
What we should do instead is to have a single fiber run to each house and maintained as a public utility. The ISPs and cable companies could then lease time on the lines and sell their services to the various homes, competing on a cost/value basis rather than an "I have a wire there and you don't" basis. This is already being done in some communities, and is an elegant solution to the twin problems of needing market competition and efficient use of resources.
You're thinking about the problem all wrong - you don't need to recreate the environment that the sensor expects, you need to deliver the response that it wants. Most blood oxygen and pulse sensors are merely combinations of LEDs and photosensors which look for the amount of light reflected back and track its variation.
All you need to fool one of these is a gummy frog with an embedded LED that will provide the necessary feedback. Add a rubber cement cast of the subject's fingerprint and you're golden. The implementation is left as an exercise for the reader;^)
Considering that I'm not planning on doing this myself, I just obsessed way too much on finding an answer for you. For starters, the Colorado time broadcast is a pretty good choice:
The time codes are sent from WWVB using one of the simplest systems possible, and at a very low data rate of one bit per second. The 60,000 Hz signal is always transmitted, but every second it is significantly reduced in power for a period of 0.2, 0.5, or 0.8 seconds: 0.2 seconds of reduced power means a binary zero, 0.5 seconds of reduced power is a binary one, 0.8 seconds of reduced power is a separator. The time code is sent in BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) and indicates minutes, hours, day of the year and year, along with information about daylight savings time and leap years. The time is transmitted using 53 bits and 7 separators, and therefore takes 60 seconds to transmit. A clock or watch can contain an extremely small and relatively simple antenna and receiver to decode the information in the signal and set the clock's time accurately. All that you have to do is set the time zone, and the atomic clock will display the correct time.
As far as integrating that into this specific project, you may want to add a processor dedicated to just decoding the time signal - one bit per second, read over a full minute, is more attention than the primary processor probably wants to give to the radio. Once the time is read off of the radio, though, it's pretty simple to dump it into the clock. The clock chip's data sheet gives details on the serial protocol used to send data to the chip, and on pg. 8 it tells what registers to address for setting time and date.
I'd say it's possible, and would probably be easy for someone who knows what they're doing =)
If you do end up making an add-on circuit for this project, just make sure you publish it; Ladyada might even be willing to host it.
You've got it the wrong way around - once D-Link contrives a Linux solution for Netflix streaming, then we'll be able to stream Netflix to any Linux platform we like.
Yes, it's not possible now, but the Netflix streaming overlords might be more persuaded by a potential corporate partner than they are by the unwashed masses. I wish D-Link the best of luck in this effort!
in North America, most people avoid diesel and gas stations often don't have it. (emphasis added)
Where does this come from??? While I admit that there are stations that don't carry diesel, almost every station near an Interstate highway in the U.S. carries it. They have to: they're competing for truckers' business, and rigs uniformly run diesel.
So what if there are a few stations that decide to save on construction costs by purchasing one less underground tank and cheaper pumps? It's not like I don't know where to find diesel fuel if I need it. And I can't imagine a situation where I'd be driving long distance and not have a diesel station conveniently located along my route.
I apologize to MikeBabcock, I don't mean to dump on you personally about this. I just see it trotted out like it were a barrier to entry similar to lack of charging stations for all-electric cars or filling stations for all-Hydrogen vehicles, and I'm mystified by it.
The HSA earns interest. . . The monies remaining in the HSA after retirement can be transfered as retirement $$ to you, much like and IRA.
Where are you working that your pre-tax medical account rolls over year-to-year!?!? The last three jobs I've had (Academia, U.S. Military, Oil field) the equvalent program was called a "flexible spending account" (FSA), and money not used at year end was LOST. If the money didn't disappear when I didn't use it I'd be all over that action, even if I couldn't roll it over to my 401K at retirement.
Seriously, how do I get in on that? Can you set it up as a private account with a bank or brokerage?
The real tragedy about this is that there is already a vast library of Physics computational tools, but few new students are using it because it's all written in Fortran. Computing has moved forward (python vs. Fortran), but the libraries don't move forward with it.
I once heard a story about a CS professor who every year assigned the translation of a Fortran library function into C to his students. I cry thinking about it, since C is rapidly being left behind as well.
You make a great point about the use of water creating a circular reference (honestly, that was brilliant!), but don't discount the meter reference. Believe it or not, that standard was chosen because it made it easy to reproduce. Further (if I recall correctly), since the meter and the second are both related to the light emission properties of cesium, a competent physicist should be able to inexpensively reproduce either or both with things he already has around the lab. A sample of cesium, a handful of electronics no more complex than a microwave transmitter, an interferometer for the meter, and a mass spectrometer* for the second would do the job. Simple to understand, reproducible with techniques already in common practice (interferometry and mass spectroscopy), inexpensive to build - really, it's a much better standard than it seems at first reading.
*For the standards cognoscenti in the audience, I know that modern second standards don't use mass spectrometers. It would do the job, though, and most physicists have access to one in a pinch.
DDT does thin eggshells resulting in a much lower rate of successful hatching, for example.
Does it now? Here's a second opinion on that:
In the few studies claiming to implicate DDT as the cause of thinning, the birds were fed diets that were either low in calcium, included other known egg shell-thinning substances, or that contained levels of DDT far in excess of levels that would be found in the environment - and even then, the massive doses produced much less thinning than what had been found in egg shells in the wild. Reference: Steven Milloy of Junk Science writing for Fox News
If you're offended by the Fox News reference, check out his bibliography.
Don't get me wrong, I'm cool with argument that we should protect the base of the food chain. I just get touchy when people assume things are absolute fact when they are based on shaky research. If it's true (as stated in the quote) that the thinning egg shell results were the result of inadequate calcium in the diet of the test birds, then an adequate control group (same diet/conditions minus DDT) would have been enough for the research to refute itself. It just wouldn't have been as fun to publish as comparing their test birds' egg thickness to a table of "average shell thickness in healthy birds".
Honestly, it makes me wonder if the environmentalists aren't just engaging in projection when complaining about bad science and rigged/paid-for studies on the part of big industry.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it's fair to claim that Watchmen's failure is what's causing studios not to pick up Heavy Metal. The first Heavy Metal movie came across as an experiment to see how much erotica would (a) get past the ratings board with an "R" and (b) be palatable to the American audience. The producers succeeded at their first goal; they published with an "R" rating what would get an "NC-17" if done with live actors. They failed at the second, which was convincing the wider American audience that porn was socially acceptable if animated instead of acted.
Honestly, I don't see how anyone can with a straight face say that the reason animated erotica isn't blockbuster-level successful in America is because ONE comic book based movie flopped at the box office. I doubt that (fantasy + rating) is the issue; I'm sure that a well-done Punisher movie could be quite successful with an "R" rating (assuming it could outlive the horror that John Travolta delivered in 2004). The producers of Heavy Metal simply wish that there were a mass audience for fantasy porn, and there just isn't.
I'm with Halcyon1234, I don't even watch horror flicks, but your sig's made me morbidly curious for ages.
If it helps, remember that you're in good company - even Hollywood frequently gives up on capturing the sound live and goes to studio recordings for voice and effects. Seriously, if you ever come back to this project Foley will be your best friend. If it's not too late, perhaps you could get your actors back into a recording studio?
Regardless, your project has my condolences, and I wish you the best of luck on your artistic efforts in the future.
The "mail man" decides which route the mail takes based on what you're willing to pay... you know, allowing people to pay premium rates for priority service, like some sites choosing to pay for better delivery than normal over your pipes.
I thought I was making that choice when I signed up for a 5Mbps fiber-optic uplink. My 15Mbps downlink is the equivalent to setting up a large mailbox (I anticipate receiving a large number of packets, after all); I'm OK with the arrangement that I'm renting it from the delivery service. Netflix does the same for their packets, paying a negotiated amount for the volume of packets they send and receive.
In this scenario my vision for Net Neutrality is that DHL, UPS, USPS, and FedEx don't get to charge each other for access to my address.
Wow. I really like that analogy, stick with it =)
Regarding electron spins, there's a really good reason for the insane levels of cold - electron spin transitions require incredibly small energies. Some quick wiki-ing leads me to a value of 159.3*10^-24 joules to change spin at the magnetic field strengths cited in the summary. If I had to take a guess, the researchers are trying to keep the kinetic energy of the atoms being tested below that energy threshold so that the spin doesn't change randomly with Brownian motion.
The game you're talking about was licensed from a 3rd party, and Microsoft got a bad build of it. Maxis, the software's author, released the same game as one board of several available in a package called "Full Tilt! Pinball" in 1996.
I experienced it first through the "Full Tilt!" product, and was sorely disappointed by the version included in Windows. My biggest gripe was the plunger - in the Windows build the power of the ball release wasn't proportional to the distance the plunger appeared to be pulled back. Yes, that's a petty complaint, but little details like that stand out when you've played the finished product then get handed a copy of the beta release. There are other problems, too; I think Maxis made improvements to the physics engine after licensing it to Microsoft.
If you like the version you got free from Bill Gates, then do yourself a favor and find a copy of the full release. Three boards instead of just one, with fewer bugs. You'll be glad you did.
The only thing you can do to make this "unprofitable" is to require amazingly huge fines for any problems that arise. Of course, then you have to deal with the issue of getting a multinational multi-billion dollar company to actually pay the fine.
No problem, deny their drilling license if they don't have the proper equipment in their drilling plan. Revoke it if they are found to not be in compliance (perform random inspections). These problems have already been addressed in the North Sea, the US simply hasn't had the will to implement the same measures.
Many things, valve included, have difficulty turning when stuff blows up and cuts off power and/or communication to the controls.
There have been solutions to those problems for many years. The deep water blowout preventers required for North Sea operations have to automatically shut off unless a positive control signal is continuously applied. I work as an engineer in the oil field, and I'm amazed that the US hasn't already adopted many of the regulations already in place elsewhere. Equipment that will properly do the job already exists, we just need to make it unprofitable to not use it.
You've probably figured out from my long delay in responding that I don't have a good comeback for that. =)
Thanks for the replies! As I said before, my opinions on this aren't necessarily rational, and you do a good job presenting evidence of that. It's tragic that knowing that I'm wrong doesn't soothe the aches caused by years of Microsoft hate coloring my interpretation of their actions.
Meanwhile, you've earned a fan. Anyone who can doggedly persist at politely correcting someone who's clearly letting anger cloud his reason is worthy of my attention. Perhaps next time we get into a Slashdot back-and-forth I'll have a better position to argue from =)
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I seem to have rousted some trolls from under their bridges, and I appreciate the time you took to give a polite response.
I like a good argument, though, so I'm going to reply to you and keep this discussion going =)
That limit exists because the 8088 CPU can only address 1MB of RAM, and some memory must be reserved for other hardware devices.
The problem wasn't the limits of the 8088, it's that DOS was written assuming that those hardware limits would always be there. Specifically, instead of checking for memory availability and putting those reserved addresses at the end of addressable memory, DOS instead specified the range between 640kiB and 1MB as reserved. I believe that being forced to live with that poor design choice was the source of the fictitious "no-one will ever . . ." quote.
Further, as newer systems became available, with higher limits, OSes were updated or created to take advantage of that - OS/2, Windows 95, Windows NT, etc, can all utilise the additional address space provided with the 286 and then 386.
Unfortunately, DOS was the order of the day for nearly 20 years; the operating systems you listed were all released in the early-to-mid 90's. Until then we were stuck with DOS and its 16-bit limits even on the 32-bit 386 & 486.
. . . a 32-bit x86 CPU can only address 4GB of RAM (without resorting to hacks like PAE that are a) typically unstable with consumer-level hardware drivers and b) require special programming to take advantage of).
As another poster pointed out, the instability of drivers under PAE is largely due to driver programmers making the "no one will ever . . ." assumption again. I'd argue that Microsoft set the precedent, and the 3rd party developers followed it.
Even in *10* years it's unlikely 192GB of RAM in a desktop PC (or even "workstation") will be at all common. Further, in 5 years Windows 7 will have been replaced . . .
That sounds suspiciously like "no one will ever . . ." to me. Moore's law disagrees with you on RAM availability; 10 years is enough time for 6 or 7 doublings of circuit density, I hope to have 1024 GiB of memory in my desktop by then. The histories of Windows 3, Windows 95, and Windows XP also contradict your "will have been replaced" assertion - Microsoft's strongest historic competitor has been its own obsolete software, including versions that are officially unsupported. I expect that Win7 will still be alive and twitching 10 years from now, having only recently left its official support period.
Regardless, the real issue is that the design of DOS left Microsoft poorly positioned for the transition from 16 to 32 bit hardware. It seems that instead of learning from the users' pain during that upgrade Microsoft continued to use coding practices that left their OS poorly positioned for the 32 to 64 bit upgrade.
There's a good argument to be made that Microsoft shouldn't have to support the installation on Windows on hardware it wasn't designed for; eg. XP shouldn't have been expected to run gracefully on 64 bit systems. The counter-argument to that is that Vista, which began development after 64-bit chips were available on the market, also failed to gracefully bridge the 64-bit divide.
Microsoft should know better. Its developers cannot have been ignorant of Moore's Law, and should have seen the 64-bit transition coming. Despite being staffed with some of the world's smartest programmers Microsoft seems mired in its own legacy of poor initial decisions. Fair or not, justified or not, the perception of those who have watched its history and used other systems without the same frustrations is that Microsoft products are not designed in a future-proof manner. No one will be surp
To be fair, Gates never said that line.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Misattributed
He didn't have to; he designed that principle into his systems so we all had to live with it for the last 35+ years. DOS was limited to 640kiB of RAM, resulting in users needing to move programs to "upper memory" (640kiB-1MiB) or "extended memory" (1MiB+) addresses by tricking the OS once larger memory cards became inexpensive. XP (32 bit) is limited to 3.1GiB, making it pointless to install even 4GiB of RAM in an XP box since nearly 1/4 of it will never be addressed. Microsoft continues to make the same mistake to this day; there's still a memory limit of ~192GiB in Win7 64 Bit. I expect that in about 5 years RAM will be cheap to buy in quantities larger than 192GiB and Microsoft will start looking silly again because we'll have to resort to DOS-era tricks to make it usable.
Code speaks louder than words. I don't care if he said it or not, he wrote it. And his employees continue to re-write it with every Windows release.
How many of those particles should we find, as a percentage, of any given biological mass? 1%? .0001%? Does that account for the quantities of He found accompanying natural petroleum deposits?
Probably not. There's no need for the oil source to be the same as the Helium source. The most likely source of all the helium in a petroleum deposit is the radioactive material in the rocks in and below the deposit's formation. For example, the amount of Americium found in your smoke detector creates 30,000 alpha particles per second, a kilogram of Uranium ore produces 25,000,000 per second (scroll down a bit to see the activity rates table in the linked reference). Since alpha particles are equivalent to ionized Helium nuclei, ore and mineral deposits that generate alpha particles are basically Helium sources. The Helium migrates upwards until it's trapped by the same formation that prevents the upwards migration of underground hydrocarbons.
Hang on, don't the pilots of Apache helicopters and the like have a HUD over one eye? I've heard stories of how they develop a weird ability to move and focus each eye independently, like a human chameleon.
Yes, the pilot has an HUD over the eye, but it solves the focus problem by cheating - it only works when the pilot is looking at things that are far away. Most things that are outside the cockpit are far away, though, so that works out OK for them; just don't expect that solution to work for your contact-lens-mounted HUD system. reference
[nitpick="on"]Also, someone's been pulling your leg about pilots developing lizard eye. The Apache heads-up system is head-tracking, not eye-tracking. The skill pilots learn is to look around while holding their head still - useful, for sure, but not superhuman. Go ahead and submit that one to Mythbusters, though; I'd love to see them do an episode on it.[/nipick]
Absolutely - I would love to have 50 competing companies digging up my yard, and "accidentally" cutting each other's cables in the process...brilliant!
You and the GP are both right, we should nether have private monopolies on telecom nor 50 companies trying to run wires through every easement. Monopolies are too frequently abused, and having multiple connections to each home is wasteful - duplication of effort + the inevitable human error/sabotage possibilities are both obvious wastes there.
What we should do instead is to have a single fiber run to each house and maintained as a public utility. The ISPs and cable companies could then lease time on the lines and sell their services to the various homes, competing on a cost/value basis rather than an "I have a wire there and you don't" basis. This is already being done in some communities, and is an elegant solution to the twin problems of needing market competition and efficient use of resources.
By weight or volume?
It's by volume, in units of standard cubic feet [1] of produced gas per barrel [2] of oil produced (i.e. after the gas has escaped).
[1] "standard" meaning "at standard temperature and pressure"
[2] 1 barrel = 42 US gallons
You're thinking about the problem all wrong - you don't need to recreate the environment that the sensor expects, you need to deliver the response that it wants. Most blood oxygen and pulse sensors are merely combinations of LEDs and photosensors which look for the amount of light reflected back and track its variation.
All you need to fool one of these is a gummy frog with an embedded LED that will provide the necessary feedback. Add a rubber cement cast of the subject's fingerprint and you're golden. The implementation is left as an exercise for the reader ;^)
Considering that I'm not planning on doing this myself, I just obsessed way too much on finding an answer for you. For starters, the Colorado time broadcast is a pretty good choice:
(from the Galleon corporate website)
As far as integrating that into this specific project, you may want to add a processor dedicated to just decoding the time signal - one bit per second, read over a full minute, is more attention than the primary processor probably wants to give to the radio. Once the time is read off of the radio, though, it's pretty simple to dump it into the clock. The clock chip's data sheet gives details on the serial protocol used to send data to the chip, and on pg. 8 it tells what registers to address for setting time and date.
I'd say it's possible, and would probably be easy for someone who knows what they're doing =)
If you do end up making an add-on circuit for this project, just make sure you publish it; Ladyada might even be willing to host it.
You've got it the wrong way around - once D-Link contrives a Linux solution for Netflix streaming, then we'll be able to stream Netflix to any Linux platform we like.
Yes, it's not possible now, but the Netflix streaming overlords might be more persuaded by a potential corporate partner than they are by the unwashed masses. I wish D-Link the best of luck in this effort!
Could someone explain how "Telex machines" date the submitter? Wikipedia isn't much help on this.
Thanks!
Where does this come from??? While I admit that there are stations that don't carry diesel, almost every station near an Interstate highway in the U.S. carries it. They have to: they're competing for truckers' business, and rigs uniformly run diesel.
So what if there are a few stations that decide to save on construction costs by purchasing one less underground tank and cheaper pumps? It's not like I don't know where to find diesel fuel if I need it. And I can't imagine a situation where I'd be driving long distance and not have a diesel station conveniently located along my route.
I apologize to MikeBabcock, I don't mean to dump on you personally about this. I just see it trotted out like it were a barrier to entry similar to lack of charging stations for all-electric cars or filling stations for all-Hydrogen vehicles, and I'm mystified by it.
Rule 37:
There is no overkill.
There is only 'Open fire'
and 'Time to reload'.
Thanks, I'll look into that. I'm not sure if an HDHP is the right choice for me, but if it's a requirement for the HSA it might be more attractive.
Where are you working that your pre-tax medical account rolls over year-to-year!?!? The last three jobs I've had (Academia, U.S. Military, Oil field) the equvalent program was called a "flexible spending account" (FSA), and money not used at year end was LOST. If the money didn't disappear when I didn't use it I'd be all over that action, even if I couldn't roll it over to my 401K at retirement.
Seriously, how do I get in on that? Can you set it up as a private account with a bank or brokerage?
The real tragedy about this is that there is already a vast library of Physics computational tools, but few new students are using it because it's all written in Fortran. Computing has moved forward (python vs. Fortran), but the libraries don't move forward with it.
I once heard a story about a CS professor who every year assigned the translation of a Fortran library function into C to his students. I cry thinking about it, since C is rapidly being left behind as well.
You make a great point about the use of water creating a circular reference (honestly, that was brilliant!), but don't discount the meter reference. Believe it or not, that standard was chosen because it made it easy to reproduce. Further (if I recall correctly), since the meter and the second are both related to the light emission properties of cesium, a competent physicist should be able to inexpensively reproduce either or both with things he already has around the lab. A sample of cesium, a handful of electronics no more complex than a microwave transmitter, an interferometer for the meter, and a mass spectrometer* for the second would do the job. Simple to understand, reproducible with techniques already in common practice (interferometry and mass spectroscopy), inexpensive to build - really, it's a much better standard than it seems at first reading.
*For the standards cognoscenti in the audience, I know that modern second standards don't use mass spectrometers. It would do the job, though, and most physicists have access to one in a pinch.
Don't get me wrong, I'm cool with argument that we should protect the base of the food chain. I just get touchy when people assume things are absolute fact when they are based on shaky research. If it's true (as stated in the quote) that the thinning egg shell results were the result of inadequate calcium in the diet of the test birds, then an adequate control group (same diet/conditions minus DDT) would have been enough for the research to refute itself. It just wouldn't have been as fun to publish as comparing their test birds' egg thickness to a table of "average shell thickness in healthy birds".
Honestly, it makes me wonder if the environmentalists aren't just engaging in projection when complaining about bad science and rigged/paid-for studies on the part of big industry.