What is the long black contrail seen in the downfacing camera at 2:58? It's not the shuttle, because the camera is on the shuttle and the black contrail is miles away.
Also, what is the object seen at least 3 times as the camera rotates? It is most visible at 3:32 and resembles the object someone called a "lens flare" in the upfacing video. It is too solid to be a lens flare here.
I did see a large triangular piece coming down at 7:45. You can see it again underwater at 8:00.
I am also curious why there is so much debris falling off the booster on the way down. Considering the speed of ascent, you would expect the same debris on the way up as well.
I see the booster at 3:14, but I still wonder why we don't see a simultaneous jettison. At 3:00-01, when the FOV widens to see the whole shuttle, the right SRB's shadow is still on the wing. There is no shadow on the other side. Are the boosters dropped at different times?
Looks like CG to me. At 3:01, where is the other booster? At 3:03-3:05, a fuzzy object appears moving straight away from the shuttle. Where is the object in previous frames?
Realize something, the object does not appear at the edge of the frame. It appears in the middle of the frame.
What's the story? Slashdot and Ken's lawyer are reporting natural causes. The MSM is reporting a heart attack. Maybe the reason Wikipedia is writing controversial articles is because there's a controversy?
>Determining the full effects of Net neutrality can be difficult, however, in part because the concept is hard to define precisely.
Not really. There are only a handful of major backbones. It's like saying a railroad can charge different rates based on how desperate the customer looks to get to his destination. "Prioritizing" people is like putting them on different trains.
Whatever the current system is, charging users for bandwidth, is working fine.
There's something like 46 gallons of usable material in a 42 gallon barrel of oil. A few gallons are tar and chemicals, but the rest is fuel of some sort. Diesel, kerosene, etc. So I think you might have to double your figure. There's 38 gallons of fuel iirc.
>I was disappointed that the author didn't mention that this is effectively a job requirement in any field that explores new ideas.
Can these people dress themselves? Neoteny might be useful in scientific fields but the ultimate benefit is to the boss. Shower and clothe on-site, and pass on your useful inventions to the corpration. I guess it comes down to whether this is an effective use of our scientific talent.
So we have $37 billion going towards the idea that HIV causes AIDS? What a waste. It's no wonder I have an instinct against donating towards charities, the politics are overwhelming.
AIDS is a personal disease like diabetes and heart failure, it is not transmissible in the least.
>What do you mean by "middleware was just a buzzword"? That nobody really understood it?
Yep. Customers looking to build web apps had no idea what scripting or databases were. Expecting them to make a clear decision on "middleware" was like asking stadium fans to referee the world cup. Middleware was a great way of getting venture capital. Nobody on the customer side could tell the difference between Tomcat and PHP.
>None of the mainstream web services tools are based on them.
Really? I tend to think that the best platform for web development is Apache+PHP+MySql. This certainly wasn't the case in 2001 when both PHP and MySql were non-starters. Now look at your average $10/month web account which offers these services by default.
>why do you percieve any of the combinations you suggest as a "standardization of the web platform"?
Because when I was developing web applications for customers (2000-01), terms like "web scripting" and "database-backed web server" weren't defined. Customers didn't even know what PHP or MySQL were, or why they would need them.
We were pushing scripting languages and databases at a time when customers had no idea what they were. Incidentally this was the end of the dot-com era.
>We faced great chaos before CORBA... and, sadly, we're still facing that chaos now.
Yep. Anybody in web programming probably has wondered why it takes ~1hr to make a selectbox.
>But for some reason, it all sounds a little condescending to me
It is condescending. I think what he's saying is that engineers can't give speeches, teachers can't throw parties, and in the end, an uneducated breeder family will end up the boss of both of them.
Just another way of saying, "C students rule the world."
Retroreflectors are diffuse mirrors. They don't know where the source is. As the angle increases, more and more of the light hitting a retroreflector is returned at useless angles. Only a small fraction is returned to the source. Just a small point, because when the term retroreflector comes up, there's usually a certain breathless magic associated with it.
How I know this...pen, paper, and about 15 minutes drawing angles. Give it a whirl.
I used Linux a lot from 1995-2002 and I was never able to find an email client that made me happy (vs Eudora). Considering how simple the email protocol is, and how it got started on unix, I was always surprised that unix had no decent front-end for email, and a lot of subtle incompatibilities between the ones they had. The default mail command was arcane, sendmail took some work, PINE was for dialup users, various GUIs (XMH for example) primitive. The closest I got was Netscape, but it was buggy and slow.
Then Eudora wiped 4 years of email archives and I became a godless heretic.
>It's also true that unusually high levels of man-made pollutants will make your immune system weaker - not stronger - the more you're exposed
Well that's true, but one nice thing about the immune system is that it functions reliably until failure. Gulping down asbestos may weaken your immune system, but you won't get cancer until you breathe that one fiber that breaks the camel's back.
It surprises me how much the immune system acts like a sci-fi shield, designed to run pretty much all the time, with the same multi-faceted defense (viruses, cancer, chemicals, maybe bacteria), and the same 100%-till-failure protective effects. I have experienced all of this. So my only question is, how much energy does it take to keep the shield running. That is, do people with a lower immunity live longer, eat less, or have more waking hours.
The idea that wild rats have a higher immunity is certainly believable; this is the same idea behind vaccines. Which group, lab or wild rats, is better off?
I had a Panasonic PC-Sr. Partner in the 1980's. Same concept, a "luggable laptop." If you wanted to switch from the office to the living room, or take it to Grandma's house, it was a lot more friendly than hauling a rig, monitor, and cables. Overall it was an excellent computer, max ram, two disk drives, CGA adapter, monitor, printer, and keyboard in one box. Hell, I almost forgot about the printer, it was just a thermal, but there if you needed it. This luggable packed a punch.
Modern day, maybe the "luggable" concept will have an impact in the lanparty market, but most people, it seems, want an actual laptop, wireless, good batteries, ultimate convenience. Although at 20 lbs. maybe it will do better than that; my Sr. Partner was 35 lbs.
Genesis vs. SNES wasn't really a dogfight. What made these consoles so successful is that they peaked at different times. If the average console cycle is 5 years, then the Genesis and SNES were fully out-of-phase, Genesis peaking in 1991-92 just as the SNES was being released. Had Sega pushed hard for a next-gen console in 1995 instead of half-assing it with a bunch of RISC processors, the Nintendo/Sega leapfrogging could have continued to this day.
What was the selling point for upgrading from the 16 bit consoles? CD-rom and 3D graphics. Nintendo64 had 3D, Playstation had both, and so did Saturn...but somehow, nobody cared.
It's not surprising that an early middleware app like Corba failed because it was being developed at a time when the concept of middleware was just a buzzword. The article mentions the "fracturing" of the middleware market and the over-reliance on "screen scraping" technologies like HTTP+CGI. In other words, it wasn't until the standardization of the web platform (Apache+PHP+MySql or IIS+ASP+SqlServer) that people even knew what middleware was supposed to look like, and this standardization didn't happen, actually, until after the dot-com boom was over.
Amp-hours for batteries is a 20 hour rating. Thus, a 2500mAh battery outputs 2.5Ah / 20 = 0.125 Amps. Times 1.2 V = 0.15 Watts.
That's discharge over 20 hours. Recharging in an hour would take.15W * 20 = 3W. Recharging in a minute would take 180 W. Four batteries in a minute would be 720 W. The maximum power of a 15A circuit seems to be 15A*120V = 1800 W.
So I agree with the guy who said it would run like a microwave.
Fusion research is well underway...the ITER project (mulit-national, but built in France) will be the first prototype fusion reactor, and after that (20-30 years), usable fusion reactors will come on-line. The Z-Machine is mostly used for weapons and materials research: High impulse, no sustained power.
Figure on fusion being the energy resource of 2050-2100 and beyond. It's mostly a computer (magnetic confinement) and materials (high heat) problem.
My understanding is that residential (home based) fuel cells are already cost-competitive and allow you to sell power back to the grid. The main impediments are startup costs and the lack of awareness. Not too different from solar cells (1980's) that heated water at minimal cost. From this angle, talking about hydro-powered cars is a bit of a canard.
I was surprised by the Mythbusters TV show today when they revved-up an older-model sedan by pumping tanked hydrogen into the top of the engine. Residual gas in the fuel line was already depleted by the previous experiment. After starting the car a couple times, they had a backflash and stopped, not surprising as they were pumping the uncontrolled hydrogen by hand.
Does hydrogen involve new cars or just new storage?
Considering that Dell is a respected name, I was wondering how they could make money selling good PC's. A bit of research revealed that the weak links in a Dell purchase are:
* Cheap/overpriced video card * Cheap/overpriced hard drive * Integrated (i.e. cheap) motherboard
Thus, if you want a Dell with nVidia GeForce 7900, you're going to pay $500 instead of the $400 cost. Same for the hard drive...upgrades to Raptors are more expensive than the price differential. It's all very clever, but it amounts to extorting $2-400 per pc on the video/hd subsystem plus whatever they make by having integrated mobos.
Slashdot Mirror
What is the long black contrail seen in the downfacing camera at 2:58? It's not the shuttle, because the camera is on the shuttle and the black contrail is miles away.
Also, what is the object seen at least 3 times as the camera rotates? It is most visible at 3:32 and resembles the object someone called a "lens flare" in the upfacing video. It is too solid to be a lens flare here.
>(the SRB's are only on for just over 2 minutes)
Well if the SRB's hit Mach 25 going up in 2 minutes, it should be fairly easy to calculate the speed from the time it takes to fall back down.
Separation is at 2:58, and water impact is at 7:28. From an altitude of 29 miles, that's an average speed of 387 mph.
I'd still like to know where the other booster is in this video. Aren't they jettisoned at the same time?
I did see a large triangular piece coming down at 7:45. You can see it again underwater at 8:00.
I am also curious why there is so much debris falling off the booster on the way down. Considering the speed of ascent, you would expect the same debris on the way up as well.
I see the booster at 3:14, but I still wonder why we don't see a simultaneous jettison. At 3:00-01, when the FOV widens to see the whole shuttle, the right SRB's shadow is still on the wing. There is no shadow on the other side. Are the boosters dropped at different times?
Looks like CG to me. At 3:01, where is the other booster? At 3:03-3:05, a fuzzy object appears moving straight away from the shuttle. Where is the object in previous frames?
Realize something, the object does not appear at the edge of the frame. It appears in the middle of the frame.
Just like any number of WTC crash videos.
> who died of natural causes last week
What's the story? Slashdot and Ken's lawyer are reporting natural causes. The MSM is reporting a heart attack. Maybe the reason Wikipedia is writing controversial articles is because there's a controversy?
>Determining the full effects of Net neutrality can be difficult, however, in part because the concept is hard to define precisely.
Not really. There are only a handful of major backbones. It's like saying a railroad can charge different rates based on how desperate the customer looks to get to his destination. "Prioritizing" people is like putting them on different trains.
Whatever the current system is, charging users for bandwidth, is working fine.
>His recently traded a KISS Snowglobe in exchange for one afternoon with Alice Cooper.
So Alice Cooper collects snowglobes?
> the town of Kipling, Sask...has offered MacDonald a farmhouse in exchange for the role in the movie.
OK so what does a paperclip have to do with it? The guy got a farmhouse because he is a filmmaker. He's trading on publicity.
Such a stupid story.
There's something like 46 gallons of usable material in a 42 gallon barrel of oil. A few gallons are tar and chemicals, but the rest is fuel of some sort. Diesel, kerosene, etc. So I think you might have to double your figure. There's 38 gallons of fuel iirc.
>I was disappointed that the author didn't mention that this is effectively a job requirement in any field that explores new ideas.
Can these people dress themselves? Neoteny might be useful in scientific fields but the ultimate benefit is to the boss. Shower and clothe on-site, and pass on your useful inventions to the corpration. I guess it comes down to whether this is an effective use of our scientific talent.
So we have $37 billion going towards the idea that HIV causes AIDS? What a waste. It's no wonder I have an instinct against donating towards charities, the politics are overwhelming.
AIDS is a personal disease like diabetes and heart failure, it is not transmissible in the least.
>What do you mean by "middleware was just a buzzword"? That nobody really understood it?
Yep. Customers looking to build web apps had no idea what scripting or databases were. Expecting them to make a clear decision on "middleware" was like asking stadium fans to referee the world cup. Middleware was a great way of getting venture capital. Nobody on the customer side could tell the difference between Tomcat and PHP.
>None of the mainstream web services tools are based on them.
Really? I tend to think that the best platform for web development is Apache+PHP+MySql. This certainly wasn't the case in 2001 when both PHP and MySql were non-starters. Now look at your average $10/month web account which offers these services by default.
>why do you percieve any of the combinations you suggest as a "standardization of the web platform"?
Because when I was developing web applications for customers (2000-01), terms like "web scripting" and "database-backed web server" weren't defined. Customers didn't even know what PHP or MySQL were, or why they would need them.
We were pushing scripting languages and databases at a time when customers had no idea what they were. Incidentally this was the end of the dot-com era.
>We faced great chaos before CORBA... and, sadly, we're still facing that chaos now.
Yep. Anybody in web programming probably has wondered why it takes ~1hr to make a selectbox.
>But for some reason, it all sounds a little condescending to me
It is condescending. I think what he's saying is that engineers can't give speeches, teachers can't throw parties, and in the end, an uneducated breeder family will end up the boss of both of them.
Just another way of saying, "C students rule the world."
Retroreflectors are diffuse mirrors. They don't know where the source is. As the angle increases, more and more of the light hitting a retroreflector is returned at useless angles. Only a small fraction is returned to the source. Just a small point, because when the term retroreflector comes up, there's usually a certain breathless magic associated with it.
How I know this...pen, paper, and about 15 minutes drawing angles. Give it a whirl.
I used Linux a lot from 1995-2002 and I was never able to find an email client that made me happy (vs Eudora). Considering how simple the email protocol is, and how it got started on unix, I was always surprised that unix had no decent front-end for email, and a lot of subtle incompatibilities between the ones they had. The default mail command was arcane, sendmail took some work, PINE was for dialup users, various GUIs (XMH for example) primitive. The closest I got was Netscape, but it was buggy and slow.
Then Eudora wiped 4 years of email archives and I became a godless heretic.
>It's also true that unusually high levels of man-made pollutants will make your immune system weaker - not stronger - the more you're exposed
Well that's true, but one nice thing about the immune system is that it functions reliably until failure. Gulping down asbestos may weaken your immune system, but you won't get cancer until you breathe that one fiber that breaks the camel's back.
It surprises me how much the immune system acts like a sci-fi shield, designed to run pretty much all the time, with the same multi-faceted defense (viruses, cancer, chemicals, maybe bacteria), and the same 100%-till-failure protective effects. I have experienced all of this. So my only question is, how much energy does it take to keep the shield running. That is, do people with a lower immunity live longer, eat less, or have more waking hours.
The idea that wild rats have a higher immunity is certainly believable; this is the same idea behind vaccines. Which group, lab or wild rats, is better off?
I had a Panasonic PC-Sr. Partner in the 1980's. Same concept, a "luggable laptop." If you wanted to switch from the office to the living room, or take it to Grandma's house, it was a lot more friendly than hauling a rig, monitor, and cables. Overall it was an excellent computer, max ram, two disk drives, CGA adapter, monitor, printer, and keyboard in one box. Hell, I almost forgot about the printer, it was just a thermal, but there if you needed it. This luggable packed a punch.
r partner.php
Modern day, maybe the "luggable" concept will have an impact in the lanparty market, but most people, it seems, want an actual laptop, wireless, good batteries, ultimate convenience. Although at 20 lbs. maybe it will do better than that; my Sr. Partner was 35 lbs.
http://386page.com/systems/Panasonic/sr-partner/s
Genesis vs. SNES wasn't really a dogfight. What made these consoles so successful is that they peaked at different times. If the average console cycle is 5 years, then the Genesis and SNES were fully out-of-phase, Genesis peaking in 1991-92 just as the SNES was being released. Had Sega pushed hard for a next-gen console in 1995 instead of half-assing it with a bunch of RISC processors, the Nintendo/Sega leapfrogging could have continued to this day.
What was the selling point for upgrading from the 16 bit consoles? CD-rom and 3D graphics. Nintendo64 had 3D, Playstation had both, and so did Saturn...but somehow, nobody cared.
It's not surprising that an early middleware app like Corba failed because it was being developed at a time when the concept of middleware was just a buzzword. The article mentions the "fracturing" of the middleware market and the over-reliance on "screen scraping" technologies like HTTP+CGI. In other words, it wasn't until the standardization of the web platform (Apache+PHP+MySql or IIS+ASP+SqlServer) that people even knew what middleware was supposed to look like, and this standardization didn't happen, actually, until after the dot-com boom was over.
Amp-hours for batteries is a 20 hour rating. Thus, a 2500mAh battery outputs 2.5Ah / 20 = 0.125 Amps. Times 1.2 V = 0.15 Watts.
.15W * 20 = 3W. Recharging in a minute would take 180 W. Four batteries in a minute would be 720 W. The maximum power of a 15A circuit seems to be 15A*120V = 1800 W.
That's discharge over 20 hours. Recharging in an hour would take
So I agree with the guy who said it would run like a microwave.
Fusion research is well underway...the ITER project (mulit-national, but built in France) will be the first prototype fusion reactor, and after that (20-30 years), usable fusion reactors will come on-line. The Z-Machine is mostly used for weapons and materials research: High impulse, no sustained power.
Figure on fusion being the energy resource of 2050-2100 and beyond. It's mostly a computer (magnetic confinement) and materials (high heat) problem.
My understanding is that residential (home based) fuel cells are already cost-competitive and allow you to sell power back to the grid. The main impediments are startup costs and the lack of awareness. Not too different from solar cells (1980's) that heated water at minimal cost. From this angle, talking about hydro-powered cars is a bit of a canard.
I was surprised by the Mythbusters TV show today when they revved-up an older-model sedan by pumping tanked hydrogen into the top of the engine. Residual gas in the fuel line was already depleted by the previous experiment. After starting the car a couple times, they had a backflash and stopped, not surprising as they were pumping the uncontrolled hydrogen by hand.
Does hydrogen involve new cars or just new storage?
Considering that Dell is a respected name, I was wondering how they could make money selling good PC's. A bit of research revealed that the weak links in a Dell purchase are:
* Cheap/overpriced video card
* Cheap/overpriced hard drive
* Integrated (i.e. cheap) motherboard
Thus, if you want a Dell with nVidia GeForce 7900, you're going to pay $500 instead of the $400 cost. Same for the hard drive...upgrades to Raptors are more expensive than the price differential. It's all very clever, but it amounts to extorting $2-400 per pc on the video/hd subsystem plus whatever they make by having integrated mobos.