Interesting. I use KDE, which can either do a Mac style menu across the top or menus-in-apps. Here's an interesting point:
On my desktop, I use xinerama, either two or three monitors (I have gone as high as five in the past). I use menus-in-apps (aka Windows style). I load many many apps and have them spread out all over the place. I also tend to open new URLs in new windows.
On my laptop, I use a single 1024x768 monitor. I use menu-at-top (aka MacOS style). I load only a few apps, and have them all maximized (in general). I tend to use tabbed browsing significantly more.
In both I use Konsole (the KDE terminal app) in a uniform manner... lots of tabs, a primary shell, a root shell, and then several task shells. I use the second desktop in both as a place to kick windows that either are running "in the background" (conceptually, a la xmms) or interesting tangents that I ran across while working on a task (web pages found while googling for something else, half finished documents I was working on, etc).
I also used to be an emacs kinda guy, and now I use vi. I use Kate often as well (the file sidebar is very handy for making small changes to many files).
It's interesting, because the menubar difference is very natural, and I move back and forth with no difficulty. I can't recall the last time I hunted for the menu with a false start. For the single screen, MacOS style is the best, especially with a eraserhead mouse. For many screens, Windows style is better because I don't have to move across several monitors to hit a menu.
Bull. You say that, but you know you're going to see it, eventually.
I haven't seen Ep. II. And I am a hardcore SF geek, catching just about every SF and Fantasy movie as it is released. We did a expanded edition marathon of LotR before we went and saw Return on opening night. I stood in line for three days with a friend and bought 24 tickets for Phantom Menace. We were on the national NBC feed... he was singing "Luke be a Jedi tonight", I was next to him with the digeredoo (sp?).
But I haven't seen Episode II. And unless I hear good things about Episode III, I won't see that either (although if Ep. III gets rave reviews, I'll likely watch II and then see III in the theater).
Lucas lost me. When Rohan rode into battle to answer Gondor's call during RotK, I turned to my SO and said "Suck it Lucas, suck it long, suck it hard". That moment had thrill, which Lucas (at least in Phantom Menace) had utterly lost. Pretty much sums it up. I don't think any movie that Lucas has had full control over turned out well. He's a good producer, and has been a fairly capable director, especially when it comes to visuals. He really broke ground with the original trilogy, assembling an excellent team. As a writer, he sucks. And his ego won't let him see that.
I'm not adverse to seeing it... I just don't care enough to go. And I went to see Paycheck at the Metreon because it was SF... my standards are pretty low when it comes to giving a flick a chance.
the movie is destroying that by making it live action with older actors.
I'm not going to say that they aren't going with older actors, but I would doubt it. I've directed several stage shows and otherwise worked in theater for many years. When costume designers have concept sketches, the person inside the costume is ignorable since it's up to the casting director and director to choose an actor or actress. Often they have no face... that doesn't mean they are going to cast a faceless actor. The costume sketches are aimed at showing the costume, not making any sort of statement with regard to the actor who will wear that costume. The costume designer was probably told the hair color and sex (as hair color affects the color of the costume).
Since this is a totally side-issue to this thread, but a very very apt comment with regards to the story, I've answered it in a different reply to avoid muddying my other reply.
The comment "You can't, or rather you shouldn't take an anime and make a live action movie out of it" should be applied to taking some of the really good print works (Battle Angel Alita, anything by Masume Shiro) and making subpar, watered down anime of them. But then, the same thing was often said of a screen adaptation of LotR, and the gamble paid off. A really good series of movies was made. Remember, anime is a medium, not a genre. Crossing mediums is always an adaptive process which *can* add to the work (but all too often suffers from removal).
Yes, it's a "fucking cartoon" about a (spoiler removed) and two very clearly early teen children. The characters are going through their transition from childhood to adolescence; that's probably the major theme of their development, and the entire end of the series is about the entry into non-childhood dependance.
No, it is not a movie that attempts to play off on their youth nor make them sexy. The few times sex comes in it is mixed heavily with frustration, desperation and even violence. You know - typicial for a young teen. End of Eva is my favorite movie, a tone poem of visuals and thematic symbolism, a Rite of Spring for the screen. But the "American Otaku" all too often sexualizes and lusts after these characters.
Gainax is complacent; they release dating sims and strip games, but the originial work is about early teens... and the original work is what is being sexualized by way too many fans.
I can't speak to your examples, having not seen them, but I agree with your implied statement that american culture has problems with sexualizing youth. That's my point. American fans sexualize Rei, Auska and Shinji. (Japanese fans do as well... Eva 00 is more amusing and sad than scary, though).
Anno did a hell of a job creating depth in characters in what could have been another Pat Labor (not that I'm saying anything's bad about Pat Labor). Gainax pulled together on a shoestring budget and made a classic. I'm not slamming the work. I'm questioning the inappropriate response to the work.
And trust me, if you think this (from the concept art) looks better than this (original artwork) then it is you who needs a reality check.
Am I the only one in the conversation that is really sickened by the fact that there is an undercurrent here that the 14 year old original characters are sexy compared to the models for the costumes?
It really gets to me at cons where people go gaga over how they'd like to do Rei or other similarly extremely young, barely pubescent character. There's a word for this. Pedophilia.
(And it's artwork for the costumes, people... it's live action).
IUMA... the clip I remember (was one of the first three or so) was "A Halo Named Fred" and their song "Hat". This was at the corporate offices (read: hole in the wall) of Florida Internet, just *before* they opened. Later they got pretty big and were absorbed into the Verio. I think it was 1996 or so. If anybody remembers the date Flinet got started, that would be it.
It's still a great song, reminiscent of early Violent Femmes.
Of couse, I had been making MODs and tracking various stuff long before then, and even had some screechy 1 bit audio for my Apple ][+ that dated back a decade before "Hat". Hearing a case-rattling Peter Gunn or Star Trek theme (original, as that was all there was!) was cool. The best sound of that era (although it was in a game) had to be the Star Dance theme... nothing beats a high decible (you can't change the volume, and the entire case is a sounding board) scratchy 1-bit yet polyphonic rendition of the Dr. Who theme.
I've referred to it for many years as the "light cone" or "known space" (not as in Niven's Known Space). It's quite sobering that the universe, even that which we can mathematically predict (i.e., the result of the big bang) is so vast that there are areas that we will never interact with and, relativistially speaking, do not exist for us.
(And yes, I am quite aware that it's silly to say "never" when it comes to anything like this, but you most often work with the most proven theories. There *may* be an anti gravitational force, for instance, but I'm not leaping off the Eiffel tower anytime soon).
Pogs did fine for many many decades. Then they became much less popular when milk bottles started being made out of plastic.
You are referring, I would imagine, to the commercial variant where they made shiny colorful and/or holographic mock-bottlecaps.
Incidently, this is not new - marbles was originally played with smooth stones, and many many decades (centuries?) ago enterprising sales people created glass marbles, just the same way that the pog makers created colorful versions of the original game pieces.
And, AFAIK, until the Supreme Court says that copying, sharing, and distributing music files is legal, it remains nominally illegal in the U.S.
I'd like to point out here that it *is* legal to copy, share and distribute music, music files and CDs. I'd love an RIAA summons so I could tell 'em that my music is mine to do with as I like; they don't own music in the US, just some recordings thereof. Music itself is still free (as in Freedom).
Because many years ago his backgrounder got sick and he was forced to do his own backgrounds, unlike most Japanese manga artists. He loved the ability to control the artwork and stopped using stipples (the "rub on dots") and became renown for his intricate backgrounds and how well everything fit together.
His productivity also dropped *way* down and he puts out a fraction of the works of other artists. But he can get away with it because his work is so good it really stands out. Check out the various Appleseed graphic novels available in the US. (I'll describe them by memory, so I may be off, but the general trend is there...) Volume one is with a background artist. Notice the backgrounds are pretty standard and use quite a bit of drop in stippling. Volume two is when he first started doing his own backgrounds. Notice the way perspectives have started changing and the distinctive "gloopy" organtic look to architecture? Volume three shows his background work has become part of the focus. The backgrounds carry mood and are full of very very fine detail and sometimes subtle plotlines of their own. Plus works like GitS have MAD Magazine style characters walking on the frames cracking jokes and pointing out extra details (like the commentary track on a DVD).
I'm not a tremendous fan of anime or manga (not for the sake of them just being from Japan, at any rate), but Shirow does do good work. It's a shame that very few of the animated works based on his stories carry the humor and depth his written works do.
People selling CD on street corners could be, and in my experience are, people selling their own work without a contract with the RIAA.
I'd be interested to see the result when they hit a RenFaire (small merchants who are or personally know the performer), SF Con (lots of Filk tapes and CDs that look bootleg) or one of the flea market guys who sells small/local band stuff (usually bad heavy metal or young punk).
--
Evan "OTOH, EverAnime and Son May can fry in hell, AFAIAC"
I've noted that raw ingredients tend to be better (tomatos, berries) and processed anything (other than the odd farmer's sausage) tend to be pretty lousy. Non-organtic food is free to add all sorts of stuff to stabalize and make it taste just so (plus the fact that some organtic outfits play with the formula and/or have poor standards assurance).
I do tomatos, onions and almonds from the farmers market, and peanut butter, ketchup and mayo from the grocery store. Publix (a southern grocery store) has good maters, so grocery store *can* have good ones.
Of course, I despise and laugh at the term organtic. Last time I walked into a Safeway their entire produce section was full of just as many carbon based molecules as the farmer's market. Kinda like Davis' big billboard as you enter town: "Green and Nuclear Free". My SO and I commonent that that's a rather negative and monochomatic phrase. Although it would solve CA's energy problem if tapped right...
I have never seen this. Most composite and colorised photos I've seen match the raw telescope images pretty accurately with the exception of color and contrast. Features (like stars and such) are identical. Nebula are... well.. nebulous, so they up the contrast so you can see them. Stars and galaxies are pretty find on their own and stand out nicely.
If you use KDE, fire up KStars - you can do raw database transactions and pull DSS images by right clicking anywhere. Nifty. Then click on a nebula and compare the original to the HST image. It's pretty obvious they are clarifying and not adding anything to the original.
Accumulation of dust or pitting due to dust damage? I have yet to see that anywhere but here. I'm not saying that it's not true, but AFAIK, the source is one/. poster. I couldn't find a reference on NASA's site.
Even if it is true, a solar panel wiping system would be complex, and NASA is big on the KISS principle. Better three months of working than a potential year's lifespan and a probe that dosen't work. Plus, what's the lifespan of the other parts? They are incredibly conservative, as they can't kick it with the toe of their shoe if something doesn't unfold right or it gets caught on something. They are taking nine days to even drive off the platform (in case it pitches down facefirst they still get nine days worth of data).
Heh. That just reminded me of a big one I did. I've been reading these and chuckling and thinking "I never did anything that bad". Must be selective memory:
I inherited a system that had not had a backup in quite awhile, and so the first thing I did was make a backup. Go to the directory under the source I needed to work on, which was in srcdir, and then typed some:
tar cvf * srcdir
I note that gnutar now won't allow you to do that, so I'm guessing it's smarter now. But I'd never seen a directory get smoothly wiped out and converted into a file with the same name like that. I now use the f flag only for untarring (zxvf), and do "tar c -dir- |gzip >tarfile.tgz" to archive.
And now I'm friends with the guy who has the CA license plate "TAR ZXF". I've got "RHPS", which is geeky in an entirely different way.
I wasn't talking about US Silver Certificates (which are normal greenbacks with a "Silver Certificate" notice on them) but rather companies that print various scrip that are reputedly backed by silver. (Although, yeah, Silver Certs are kinda nifty).
Different beasts entirely. Hit the Liberty dollar link.
There's no reason why you can't start your own currency today.
There are several groups that have done that. Many in the US base on silver or gold, as US currency is no longer based on it. There was a different European note (well before the EU) that somebody was trying to get people to use, and there have been a handful of companies that have tried to get international bills working. Plus innumerable wackos like Emperor Norton that have just declared their notes legal tender.
In addition, you could almost count such corporate backed notes such as American Express Traveller's Checks.
The most popular (but still dubious) non-government blessed note in the US seems to be the Liberty Dollar. Considering I've had the cops called on me on three wonderful occasions when using US $2 bills (and in one case one cop didn't know if it was valid or not), and had many times when the manager yelled at me because I was trying to pass counterfeit money, I am pretty sure that these would not be very useful. (Yes, I used to carry $2 and dollar coins for normal use. I like odd currency. I once overheard a waitress pissed because I left her a dollar, when it was four Susan Bs. The cops were once at a Dennys and twice at a Burger King... the same one, with some of the same employees working at the time. I'm guessing that they were confused about how the first call went and thought I had been arrested and was trying the same "scam").
There are sometimes glaring design optimizations that could have been made, but somehow just were not thought about for whatever reason.
Ask 'em. Most people at NASA are happy to talk about their work. It's not generally classified, and there's no NDA. When the really obvious or cool stuff is prefaced with "Why didn't you..." the response is almost always "We thought about that, but we didn't have the -foo- budget". Where foo is time, money, materials, weight or space. Often there are lots of cool ideas and the end result is much more simple and less featureful... but the remaining features are rock solid and tested 20 times to Sunday.
Some features are also dropped because a team (sometimes in an outside company) couldn't deliver their package on deadline and fully tested. Each payload tends to have a couple dozen little projects each provided by some university. Sometimes when one project is trimmed, for structural or other reasons, a perfectly good project is also cut.
So there's lots of thought into these probes. An amazing amount. Pretty much anything that you think is stupid has been done for a reason, and the ultimate reason is "we didn't want the whole probe to fail, so we simplified it". It's a very expensive shot, and if the solar panels don't deploy because the mechanism was over-engineered and got brittle in space (cold + radiation), the whole project is dead.
Depending on where you live, NASA and JPL has a pretty good lecture circuit going, and they have speakers that really know their stuff... even the astronauts. They are incredibly conservative engineers, and it seems to me that they should be - even with very conservative engineering, keeping everything as simple and as tested as possible, they run into problems. On a shakedown cruise of a new battleship, they can dock back again if there's a problem... or just fix it at sea. NASA is using up massively complex systems that have to work the first time they are tested. And then the design is thrown away because tech (materials, computer and science knowledge) has advanced by the next time they shoot. Plus they are an open organization that works with hundreds of companies and universities and has to QA everything.
If it sounds like I'm awestruck by them, it's for a simple reason. Everytime I have ever talked to somebody from NASA or JPL about the details of space I have always been totally impressed by their operation.
You're calling the people who built, launched and sent a semi-autonomous probe through space and landed it on another planet stupid?
What is your definition of smart, then?
Oh, and I'll give kudos to the scientists... they clearly deserve it. But I can't rehire them. I'd like to know what politicians funded this so I can make sure they get hired again (or at least cast my vote). Anybody know?
Wonderful anecdote. Unfortunatly, that's what scientific studies are structured to prevent - indivdual anecdotes. That's what I'm asking about. At one point, everybody thought that spontaneous generation was valid because everybody had anecdotes. At one point everybody thought Microsoft wrote stable and secure code because of anecdotes. At one point people thought (still do) that video games and D&D cause kids to go insane and kill people becuase everybody had anecdotes.
People in general seem to only have a dim idea of what science is, and I see lots of kneejerk reactions regarding very important issues and "science by legislation". You can't vote science, nor "win" by debate or emotional plea.
I'm not saying they don't cause problems, video games, D&D, Microsoft or second hand smoke, but I do see a dearth of unbiased, scientific studies.
Speaking of the oft cited "truth" that videogames are bad for you, has there ever been a scientific study that has shown second hand smoke does anything other than distress people with asthma? The WHO did several studies that said it was safe.
--
Evan "I hate being around smokers for asthetic reasons"
Oh, and to reply to myself as an example of how Qt does not go after any reimplementation, they officially bless projects like PyQt, which is a reimplementation of the Qt API in Python. Not quite the same as what you asked, but other than the unfinished Harmony project, it's the best example I can come up with.
Slashdot Mirror
On my desktop, I use xinerama, either two or three monitors (I have gone as high as five in the past). I use menus-in-apps (aka Windows style). I load many many apps and have them spread out all over the place. I also tend to open new URLs in new windows.
On my laptop, I use a single 1024x768 monitor. I use menu-at-top (aka MacOS style). I load only a few apps, and have them all maximized (in general). I tend to use tabbed browsing significantly more.
In both I use Konsole (the KDE terminal app) in a uniform manner... lots of tabs, a primary shell, a root shell, and then several task shells. I use the second desktop in both as a place to kick windows that either are running "in the background" (conceptually, a la xmms) or interesting tangents that I ran across while working on a task (web pages found while googling for something else, half finished documents I was working on, etc).
I also used to be an emacs kinda guy, and now I use vi. I use Kate often as well (the file sidebar is very handy for making small changes to many files).
It's interesting, because the menubar difference is very natural, and I move back and forth with no difficulty. I can't recall the last time I hunted for the menu with a false start. For the single screen, MacOS style is the best, especially with a eraserhead mouse. For many screens, Windows style is better because I don't have to move across several monitors to hit a menu.
--
Evan
I haven't seen Ep. II. And I am a hardcore SF geek, catching just about every SF and Fantasy movie as it is released. We did a expanded edition marathon of LotR before we went and saw Return on opening night. I stood in line for three days with a friend and bought 24 tickets for Phantom Menace. We were on the national NBC feed... he was singing "Luke be a Jedi tonight", I was next to him with the digeredoo (sp?).
But I haven't seen Episode II. And unless I hear good things about Episode III, I won't see that either (although if Ep. III gets rave reviews, I'll likely watch II and then see III in the theater).
Lucas lost me. When Rohan rode into battle to answer Gondor's call during RotK, I turned to my SO and said "Suck it Lucas, suck it long, suck it hard". That moment had thrill, which Lucas (at least in Phantom Menace) had utterly lost. Pretty much sums it up. I don't think any movie that Lucas has had full control over turned out well. He's a good producer, and has been a fairly capable director, especially when it comes to visuals. He really broke ground with the original trilogy, assembling an excellent team. As a writer, he sucks. And his ego won't let him see that.
I'm not adverse to seeing it... I just don't care enough to go. And I went to see Paycheck at the Metreon because it was SF... my standards are pretty low when it comes to giving a flick a chance.
--
Evan
You're new to the internet, aren't you?
--
Evan
I'm not going to say that they aren't going with older actors, but I would doubt it. I've directed several stage shows and otherwise worked in theater for many years. When costume designers have concept sketches, the person inside the costume is ignorable since it's up to the casting director and director to choose an actor or actress. Often they have no face... that doesn't mean they are going to cast a faceless actor. The costume sketches are aimed at showing the costume, not making any sort of statement with regard to the actor who will wear that costume. The costume designer was probably told the hair color and sex (as hair color affects the color of the costume).
--
Evan
The comment "You can't, or rather you shouldn't take an anime and make a live action movie out of it" should be applied to taking some of the really good print works (Battle Angel Alita, anything by Masume Shiro) and making subpar, watered down anime of them. But then, the same thing was often said of a screen adaptation of LotR, and the gamble paid off. A really good series of movies was made. Remember, anime is a medium, not a genre. Crossing mediums is always an adaptive process which *can* add to the work (but all too often suffers from removal).
--
Evan
No, it is not a movie that attempts to play off on their youth nor make them sexy. The few times sex comes in it is mixed heavily with frustration, desperation and even violence. You know - typicial for a young teen. End of Eva is my favorite movie, a tone poem of visuals and thematic symbolism, a Rite of Spring for the screen. But the "American Otaku" all too often sexualizes and lusts after these characters.
Gainax is complacent; they release dating sims and strip games, but the originial work is about early teens... and the original work is what is being sexualized by way too many fans.
I can't speak to your examples, having not seen them, but I agree with your implied statement that american culture has problems with sexualizing youth. That's my point. American fans sexualize Rei, Auska and Shinji. (Japanese fans do as well... Eva 00 is more amusing and sad than scary, though).
Anno did a hell of a job creating depth in characters in what could have been another Pat Labor (not that I'm saying anything's bad about Pat Labor). Gainax pulled together on a shoestring budget and made a classic. I'm not slamming the work. I'm questioning the inappropriate response to the work.
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Evan
Am I the only one in the conversation that is really sickened by the fact that there is an undercurrent here that the 14 year old original characters are sexy compared to the models for the costumes?
It really gets to me at cons where people go gaga over how they'd like to do Rei or other similarly extremely young, barely pubescent character. There's a word for this. Pedophilia.
(And it's artwork for the costumes, people... it's live action).
--
Evan
It's still a great song, reminiscent of early Violent Femmes.
Of couse, I had been making MODs and tracking various stuff long before then, and even had some screechy 1 bit audio for my Apple ][+ that dated back a decade before "Hat". Hearing a case-rattling Peter Gunn or Star Trek theme (original, as that was all there was!) was cool. The best sound of that era (although it was in a game) had to be the Star Dance theme... nothing beats a high decible (you can't change the volume, and the entire case is a sounding board) scratchy 1-bit yet polyphonic rendition of the Dr. Who theme.
--
Evan
(And yes, I am quite aware that it's silly to say "never" when it comes to anything like this, but you most often work with the most proven theories. There *may* be an anti gravitational force, for instance, but I'm not leaping off the Eiffel tower anytime soon).
--
Evan
You are referring, I would imagine, to the commercial variant where they made shiny colorful and/or holographic mock-bottlecaps.
Incidently, this is not new - marbles was originally played with smooth stones, and many many decades (centuries?) ago enterprising sales people created glass marbles, just the same way that the pog makers created colorful versions of the original game pieces.
--
Evan
--
Evan
I'd like to point out here that it *is* legal to copy, share and distribute music, music files and CDs. I'd love an RIAA summons so I could tell 'em that my music is mine to do with as I like; they don't own music in the US, just some recordings thereof. Music itself is still free (as in Freedom).
--
Evan
His productivity also dropped *way* down and he puts out a fraction of the works of other artists. But he can get away with it because his work is so good it really stands out. Check out the various Appleseed graphic novels available in the US. (I'll describe them by memory, so I may be off, but the general trend is there...) Volume one is with a background artist. Notice the backgrounds are pretty standard and use quite a bit of drop in stippling. Volume two is when he first started doing his own backgrounds. Notice the way perspectives have started changing and the distinctive "gloopy" organtic look to architecture? Volume three shows his background work has become part of the focus. The backgrounds carry mood and are full of very very fine detail and sometimes subtle plotlines of their own. Plus works like GitS have MAD Magazine style characters walking on the frames cracking jokes and pointing out extra details (like the commentary track on a DVD).
I'm not a tremendous fan of anime or manga (not for the sake of them just being from Japan, at any rate), but Shirow does do good work. It's a shame that very few of the animated works based on his stories carry the humor and depth his written works do.
--
Evan
I'd be interested to see the result when they hit a RenFaire (small merchants who are or personally know the performer), SF Con (lots of Filk tapes and CDs that look bootleg) or one of the flea market guys who sells small/local band stuff (usually bad heavy metal or young punk).
--
Evan "OTOH, EverAnime and Son May can fry in hell, AFAIAC"
I do tomatos, onions and almonds from the farmers market, and peanut butter, ketchup and mayo from the grocery store. Publix (a southern grocery store) has good maters, so grocery store *can* have good ones.
Of course, I despise and laugh at the term organtic. Last time I walked into a Safeway their entire produce section was full of just as many carbon based molecules as the farmer's market. Kinda like Davis' big billboard as you enter town: "Green and Nuclear Free". My SO and I commonent that that's a rather negative and monochomatic phrase. Although it would solve CA's energy problem if tapped right...
--
Evan
If you use KDE, fire up KStars - you can do raw database transactions and pull DSS images by right clicking anywhere. Nifty. Then click on a nebula and compare the original to the HST image. It's pretty obvious they are clarifying and not adding anything to the original.
--
Evan
Even if it is true, a solar panel wiping system would be complex, and NASA is big on the KISS principle. Better three months of working than a potential year's lifespan and a probe that dosen't work. Plus, what's the lifespan of the other parts? They are incredibly conservative, as they can't kick it with the toe of their shoe if something doesn't unfold right or it gets caught on something. They are taking nine days to even drive off the platform (in case it pitches down facefirst they still get nine days worth of data).
--
Evan
I inherited a system that had not had a backup in quite awhile, and so the first thing I did was make a backup. Go to the directory under the source I needed to work on, which was in srcdir, and then typed some:
tar cvf * srcdir
I note that gnutar now won't allow you to do that, so I'm guessing it's smarter now. But I'd never seen a directory get smoothly wiped out and converted into a file with the same name like that. I now use the f flag only for untarring (zxvf), and do "tar c -dir- |gzip >tarfile.tgz" to archive.
And now I'm friends with the guy who has the CA license plate "TAR ZXF". I've got "RHPS", which is geeky in an entirely different way.
--
Evan
Different beasts entirely. Hit the Liberty dollar link.
--
Evab
There are several groups that have done that. Many in the US base on silver or gold, as US currency is no longer based on it. There was a different European note (well before the EU) that somebody was trying to get people to use, and there have been a handful of companies that have tried to get international bills working. Plus innumerable wackos like Emperor Norton that have just declared their notes legal tender. In addition, you could almost count such corporate backed notes such as American Express Traveller's Checks.
The most popular (but still dubious) non-government blessed note in the US seems to be the Liberty Dollar. Considering I've had the cops called on me on three wonderful occasions when using US $2 bills (and in one case one cop didn't know if it was valid or not), and had many times when the manager yelled at me because I was trying to pass counterfeit money, I am pretty sure that these would not be very useful. (Yes, I used to carry $2 and dollar coins for normal use. I like odd currency. I once overheard a waitress pissed because I left her a dollar, when it was four Susan Bs. The cops were once at a Dennys and twice at a Burger King... the same one, with some of the same employees working at the time. I'm guessing that they were confused about how the first call went and thought I had been arrested and was trying the same "scam").
I wonder if you can photocopy them, though?
--
Evan
Ask 'em. Most people at NASA are happy to talk about their work. It's not generally classified, and there's no NDA. When the really obvious or cool stuff is prefaced with "Why didn't you..." the response is almost always "We thought about that, but we didn't have the -foo- budget". Where foo is time, money, materials, weight or space. Often there are lots of cool ideas and the end result is much more simple and less featureful... but the remaining features are rock solid and tested 20 times to Sunday.
Some features are also dropped because a team (sometimes in an outside company) couldn't deliver their package on deadline and fully tested. Each payload tends to have a couple dozen little projects each provided by some university. Sometimes when one project is trimmed, for structural or other reasons, a perfectly good project is also cut.
So there's lots of thought into these probes. An amazing amount. Pretty much anything that you think is stupid has been done for a reason, and the ultimate reason is "we didn't want the whole probe to fail, so we simplified it". It's a very expensive shot, and if the solar panels don't deploy because the mechanism was over-engineered and got brittle in space (cold + radiation), the whole project is dead.
Depending on where you live, NASA and JPL has a pretty good lecture circuit going, and they have speakers that really know their stuff... even the astronauts. They are incredibly conservative engineers, and it seems to me that they should be - even with very conservative engineering, keeping everything as simple and as tested as possible, they run into problems. On a shakedown cruise of a new battleship, they can dock back again if there's a problem... or just fix it at sea. NASA is using up massively complex systems that have to work the first time they are tested. And then the design is thrown away because tech (materials, computer and science knowledge) has advanced by the next time they shoot. Plus they are an open organization that works with hundreds of companies and universities and has to QA everything.
If it sounds like I'm awestruck by them, it's for a simple reason. Everytime I have ever talked to somebody from NASA or JPL about the details of space I have always been totally impressed by their operation.
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Evan
What is your definition of smart, then?
Oh, and I'll give kudos to the scientists... they clearly deserve it. But I can't rehire them. I'd like to know what politicians funded this so I can make sure they get hired again (or at least cast my vote). Anybody know?
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Evan
People in general seem to only have a dim idea of what science is, and I see lots of kneejerk reactions regarding very important issues and "science by legislation". You can't vote science, nor "win" by debate or emotional plea.
I'm not saying they don't cause problems, video games, D&D, Microsoft or second hand smoke, but I do see a dearth of unbiased, scientific studies.
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Evan
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Evan "I hate being around smokers for asthetic reasons"
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Evan