There's a law against cheating in online games??....oh goody....
This is why I hate statistics...
on
Shuttle Politics
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· Score: 2, Insightful
1:62.5 ratio? Hardly...
The maintenance and dynamics of each shuttle launch can NOT be summed up in a simple ratio. This is implying that there is some magic force behind the shuttle disasters... which there is not.
Spewing ratios and saying that this correlation will hold in the future is a horrible excuse. The way to solve the problem is not to just ground the fleet... their magic ratio would still remain. The proper course of action would be to raise funding (instead of the cuts that the government likes to put upon NASA) for their shuttle fleet so they can better find, diagnose, and fix the potential problems and design safety procedures in the event that the unthinkable DOES happen...
Why does this senator want to ground the fleet? Perhaps money?? hmm... well NASA WAS working on the Venture Star a while back... but they had to scrub it since they didn't have enough funding to continue the project to make a safer and more efficient reusable launch vehicle.
The astronauts know what they're getting into, the engineers know the risks, the entire organization knows how dangerous this is... so why are we going to groud the shuttles so they can't make further scientific experiments and tests that would help improve the safety of each launch?
If people had this mentality when the idea of launching people into space first became reality, man would never have left the ground...
I was lookin around on the CD's for FF7 on my computer a while back and playing all the cinematic sequences... I only found one ending on the CD for the game. Which leads to another question: If Aries could stay alive, wouldn't they make another ending to include her? (since they were all in the big... blimp... thing... whatever it's called.)
I've heard rumors that if you rename her Arieth, then she'll stay alive... but i've never tried that.
Go. The ancient Chinese strategy game. Many people here may have played, or do play Go (wei-chi, baduk, igo, etc...), and others have probably seen it in the movies Pi and A Beautiful Mind.
When introduced to Go originally, I thought it was just a simple game that really wasn't that popular (at least in the US it's not), simply because the rules are very simple. You try to surround territory on the board... if your stones get surrounded they get taken off as "prisioners" (at least the way I play it... japenese rules), and the person with most territory+prisioners wins. Sounds just like a finite game such as gomoku, connect-4, or a computer-mastered game like Chess... boy was I wrong. Although it's rules are simple, the strategy behind the game play is rich and emmense.
Go has an interesting history and philosophy behind it. Many concider it to be the oldest game still played in it's original form. Some say that it was once used as a way of fortune telling in China, believing that it's black and white stones represent the stars in the sky... the ying and yang. It is said that no two go games have ever been alike. Far more dynamic than chess, the possibility for play is said to be infinite. War strategy is practiced with Go... The Samauri were once required to study it, and even after battles they would sit down to play it. It affects great thinkers even today as a number system was inspired from Go (Sureal Numbers).
Computers are far from being strong at Go. A beginner at the game of Go can beat the strongest Go playing software the world has to offer. Unlike chess and it's small range of "good moves", Go offers a nearly unlimited possiblity for proper moves... compounding as you read deeper into the battles.
Not only did I learn a deal about asian history, but by playing and studying Go my mind became stronger as well. After a week of frequent playing, I began to recognise patterns and shapes within nature as shapes made with the Go stones... analyzing their strengths and weaknesses automatically. My ability to concentrate has increased, as well as my ability to read ahead in other games such as Chess. Although the affects Go has had on my mental abilities and rational thought are significant, it's affect on my life is truely infinite...
More information on Go: http://www.kiseido.com/ http://www.usgo.org/ http://playgo.to/interactive/
I too took part in naming characters after myself and friends (even Red XII was renamed after my friends dog). And yes... I did (as well as many people I know who truely appreciated this game) get choked up during the Aries death scene. The music was perfect for the emotional connection needed, and the cinematic sequence was (although not as detailed by today's standards) captivating.
What really confused me though... was the fact that you could still get Aries' ultimate limit break AFTER she died... anyone know a REAL way to keep her alive in the game (without help from the game shark)?
Although I have never played the final fantasy games prior, I have to say that FF7 definately changed my opinion of gaming in general.
At first glance, I thought that the entire game would revolve around cloud taggin along with avelanche and blowing up the reactors.... eventually taking down the evil shinra. This made it seem like any other boring game that i've played without a real plot. But... the dynamics that ensued in the story line as i played along captivated me for the 40+ hours it took me to finish the game (and the multiple times I've played it all the way through as well) held me through the battles to find and against Sepiroth, Jenova, and all the other bosses throughout the game untill the final encounter... and I only wanted more...
Although some people dislike it, others love it, FF7 opened my eyes into a whole new line of story telling and interactive gaming. From it's subtle love story, dynamic plot twists, countless side games, hidden pasts of every character... I could pick it up right now and be fully entertained and satisfied from the first cinematic sequence to the very end and back again.
So, I hope you can appreciate that it doesn't matter at all if the Earth's surface intercepts 100 billion pebble-sized rocks per month, as these objects are completely irrelevant to the discussion. If you want statistics on the number of meteor falls per year that have any effect at all on humans (much less a significant, detrimental effect), a good first step is looking at how many of the bloody things we actually notice. That number is about 50 per year.
Do you know how many times the Earth's surface has come close to a catastrophic collision with a metor? All the times that a large asteroid has skimmed through our atmosphere, passed between us and the moon, even hitting our own moon. With the right angle, they could easily take out an entire suburb full of people or entire cities/states/countries.
Are you trying to say that investing money into global security is a bad idea?
Well we only see 50 a year... so we shouldn't worry about it, right?
There's plenty more that we miss each year too... I hope you appreciate that 50 per year doesn't matter. If you closed your eyes and plugged your ears... sure, you wouldn't think that ANY metors fell on Earth at all... but ignorance isn't an excuse.
While the form factor on these boards are great, one gives up a lot in the way of ability to upgrade, since many parts are now soldered onto the motherboard.
Uhh... no.... they are IN the motherboard, not just soldered to it.
Meteor falls are quite rare, actually. There are typically about 50 recorded per year [demon.co.uk] for the entire planet.
::sigh:: Wow you're horribly mistaken.
Metors fall into the earths atmosphere ALL THE TIME. Many of them are so small that they burn up instantly (once in a while you'll se some metors burning up out of a declared "metor shower" actually...). Most of them don't make it to the surface, but plenty, PLENTY do.
Take any one of two poles we have on this planet. Go to one (make sure there hasnt been a snow fall for a while), and look around for all the black specks that show up against the white snow. Scientists do this often to collect metors for study - Especially after metor showers.
Little math for ya:
Lets say that you find an average density of metors as 1-metor : 5 km^2 (that's being very generous) a month after a big snow fall...
The radius of the earth is 6370km.
Surface area = 4Pi*r^2
SA ~= 509645864 km^2
SA / 5 = # of metors
That's over 100 billion metors that would hit the surface of the earth every month!
Metor landing aren't that rare. More than likely you've picked up a metor and never knew it. I've heard stories of people being hit on the head or other parts of their body by a small stone while they were out in the middle of a field or parking lot. Even more about a stone hitting their car from nowhere while there are no other cars infront of them....
Sure, only 50 recorded per year, but how many unknown causes for property damage do you think insurance companies get per year (minus insurance fraud)?
Most people won't recognise a metor unless it totally destroys their VW Bug... doesn't mean that they never hit us...
The practical applications, according to the press release, is ability 'to download a full-length DVD movie in less than five seconds'
In other news, the MPAA has filed a lawsuit against Caltech for "aiding the piracy of copyrighted movies". The RIAA is expected to file a similar lawsuit as many wonder why they haven't already milked Caltech for all the money it's got.
I have a hard time believing that this is safe for electronic devices that store memory in ram chips (like PDA's). Wouldnt this effect the entire circuit? How do they isolate it to the proper section of the device?... how the hell do they know which is the proper section?
It's simple chemistry. The main components in the combustion process within a car engine is the hydrogen from the hydro-carbon, and the oxygen in the air. Give it a spark, and you get some nice energy output.
The timing of the car depends on the octane level of the gas. If you have a higher octane level, the gas burns slower, but hotter.
If you replace the carbon/hydrogen bonded molecules with pure hydrogen, you won't have to have so much energy to overcome breaking the C-H bonds (burn faster), and you'll get a much much much much higher energy output. Get the ratio of 2hydrogen atoms for every oxygen, and you get the perfect combustion setup with pure water as your "exhaust" (and you wont have CO2 being expelled either... just pure water).
The reason we don't have pure hydrogen/oxygen burning internal combustion cars is because it would be TOO powerful... the fuel misture injected per stroke would be too delicate to control within a safe error range, so sticking to something much safer (our present gas) allows us to not worry about the fuel mixtures as much.
Let's ruin the future these college students COULD have had because some 70 year old, overpaid ass hole sittin at a desk wants to set an example. Let's destroy all the money, effort, and time these students have put into their academic carreer in preparation for their future. Lets distroy the years of education they have gone though sequentially just so someone with a rather long stick up their ass can think he's making a difference....
all because they wanted to listen to some music...
I almost didn't go to college because of ass holes like that who like to USE people as sacrificial sheep...
People like him should be dragged out into the street and shot. They are playing with people's lives like it's nothing - like they're disposable entities in society - to make themselves look good and try to boost their polls a couple points.
CPU makers normally downgrade their CPU's for the purpose of stability... if they ship out a new processor that they grade as "3.5ghz!", sure, it can run at 3.5, but you can usually go up some mhz until you start to notice system instability.
Yes, some chips aren't stable right from the factory, but for all intensive purposes, chipmakers would rather loose 100mhz or more to avoid risking the lable of "instable".
yea... ya ever wonder why P4's seem to run cooler?
Take a look at the rediculously large heatsink they bolt into the case (yes... through the motherboard and into the case itself because it is so heavy) and then think "Hmm... what if this were on an AMD..."
Slashdot Mirror
...good...
There's a law against cheating in online games?? ....oh goody....
1:62.5 ratio? Hardly...
The maintenance and dynamics of each shuttle launch can NOT be summed up in a simple ratio. This is implying that there is some magic force behind the shuttle disasters... which there is not.
Spewing ratios and saying that this correlation will hold in the future is a horrible excuse. The way to solve the problem is not to just ground the fleet... their magic ratio would still remain. The proper course of action would be to raise funding (instead of the cuts that the government likes to put upon NASA) for their shuttle fleet so they can better find, diagnose, and fix the potential problems and design safety procedures in the event that the unthinkable DOES happen...
Why does this senator want to ground the fleet? Perhaps money?? hmm... well NASA WAS working on the Venture Star a while back... but they had to scrub it since they didn't have enough funding to continue the project to make a safer and more efficient reusable launch vehicle.
The astronauts know what they're getting into, the engineers know the risks, the entire organization knows how dangerous this is... so why are we going to groud the shuttles so they can't make further scientific experiments and tests that would help improve the safety of each launch?
If people had this mentality when the idea of launching people into space first became reality, man would never have left the ground...
And, AMD is playing along too, so where are we going to turn?
...hmmmm...
Cyrix!!!
I was lookin around on the CD's for FF7 on my computer a while back and playing all the cinematic sequences... I only found one ending on the CD for the game. Which leads to another question: If Aries could stay alive, wouldn't they make another ending to include her? (since they were all in the big... blimp... thing... whatever it's called.)
I've heard rumors that if you rename her Arieth, then she'll stay alive... but i've never tried that.
Go. The ancient Chinese strategy game. Many people here may have played, or do play Go (wei-chi, baduk, igo, etc...), and others have probably seen it in the movies Pi and A Beautiful Mind.
/
When introduced to Go originally, I thought it was just a simple game that really wasn't that popular (at least in the US it's not), simply because the rules are very simple. You try to surround territory on the board... if your stones get surrounded they get taken off as "prisioners" (at least the way I play it... japenese rules), and the person with most territory+prisioners wins. Sounds just like a finite game such as gomoku, connect-4, or a computer-mastered game like Chess... boy was I wrong. Although it's rules are simple, the strategy behind the game play is rich and emmense.
Go has an interesting history and philosophy behind it. Many concider it to be the oldest game still played in it's original form. Some say that it was once used as a way of fortune telling in China, believing that it's black and white stones represent the stars in the sky... the ying and yang. It is said that no two go games have ever been alike. Far more dynamic than chess, the possibility for play is said to be infinite. War strategy is practiced with Go... The Samauri were once required to study it, and even after battles they would sit down to play it. It affects great thinkers even today as a number system was inspired from Go (Sureal Numbers).
Computers are far from being strong at Go. A beginner at the game of Go can beat the strongest Go playing software the world has to offer. Unlike chess and it's small range of "good moves", Go offers a nearly unlimited possiblity for proper moves... compounding as you read deeper into the battles.
Not only did I learn a deal about asian history, but by playing and studying Go my mind became stronger as well. After a week of frequent playing, I began to recognise patterns and shapes within nature as shapes made with the Go stones... analyzing their strengths and weaknesses automatically. My ability to concentrate has increased, as well as my ability to read ahead in other games such as Chess. Although the affects Go has had on my mental abilities and rational thought are significant, it's affect on my life is truely infinite...
More information on Go:
http://www.kiseido.com/
http://www.usgo.org
http://playgo.to/interactive/
I too took part in naming characters after myself and friends (even Red XII was renamed after my friends dog). And yes... I did (as well as many people I know who truely appreciated this game) get choked up during the Aries death scene. The music was perfect for the emotional connection needed, and the cinematic sequence was (although not as detailed by today's standards) captivating.
What really confused me though... was the fact that you could still get Aries' ultimate limit break AFTER she died... anyone know a REAL way to keep her alive in the game (without help from the game shark)?
Although I have never played the final fantasy games prior, I have to say that FF7 definately changed my opinion of gaming in general.
At first glance, I thought that the entire game would revolve around cloud taggin along with avelanche and blowing up the reactors.... eventually taking down the evil shinra. This made it seem like any other boring game that i've played without a real plot. But... the dynamics that ensued in the story line as i played along captivated me for the 40+ hours it took me to finish the game (and the multiple times I've played it all the way through as well) held me through the battles to find and against Sepiroth, Jenova, and all the other bosses throughout the game untill the final encounter... and I only wanted more...
Although some people dislike it, others love it, FF7 opened my eyes into a whole new line of story telling and interactive gaming. From it's subtle love story, dynamic plot twists, countless side games, hidden pasts of every character... I could pick it up right now and be fully entertained and satisfied from the first cinematic sequence to the very end and back again.
If that crashes it... would "" fix windows?
Uhh... I'm waiting for the "April Fools"??
This light slowing device might find applications in the telecommunications industry.
I thought the idea here was to go faster?
So, I hope you can appreciate that it doesn't matter at all if the Earth's surface intercepts 100 billion pebble-sized rocks per month, as these objects are completely irrelevant to the discussion. If you want statistics on the number of meteor falls per year that have any effect at all on humans (much less a significant, detrimental effect), a good first step is looking at how many of the bloody things we actually notice. That number is about 50 per year.
Do you know how many times the Earth's surface has come close to a catastrophic collision with a metor? All the times that a large asteroid has skimmed through our atmosphere, passed between us and the moon, even hitting our own moon. With the right angle, they could easily take out an entire suburb full of people or entire cities/states/countries.
Are you trying to say that investing money into global security is a bad idea?
Well we only see 50 a year... so we shouldn't worry about it, right?
There's plenty more that we miss each year too... I hope you appreciate that 50 per year doesn't matter. If you closed your eyes and plugged your ears... sure, you wouldn't think that ANY metors fell on Earth at all... but ignorance isn't an excuse.
While the form factor on these boards are great, one gives up a lot in the way of ability to upgrade, since many parts are now soldered onto the motherboard.
Uhh... no.... they are IN the motherboard, not just soldered to it.
Meteor falls are quite rare, actually. There are typically about 50 recorded per year [demon.co.uk] for the entire planet.
::sigh:: Wow you're horribly mistaken.
Metors fall into the earths atmosphere ALL THE TIME. Many of them are so small that they burn up instantly (once in a while you'll se some metors burning up out of a declared "metor shower" actually...). Most of them don't make it to the surface, but plenty, PLENTY do.
Take any one of two poles we have on this planet. Go to one (make sure there hasnt been a snow fall for a while), and look around for all the black specks that show up against the white snow. Scientists do this often to collect metors for study - Especially after metor showers.
Little math for ya:
Lets say that you find an average density of metors as 1-metor : 5 km^2 (that's being very generous) a month after a big snow fall...
The radius of the earth is 6370km.
Surface area = 4Pi*r^2
SA ~= 509645864 km^2
SA / 5 = # of metors
That's over 100 billion metors that would hit the surface of the earth every month!
Metor landing aren't that rare. More than likely you've picked up a metor and never knew it. I've heard stories of people being hit on the head or other parts of their body by a small stone while they were out in the middle of a field or parking lot. Even more about a stone hitting their car from nowhere while there are no other cars infront of them....
Sure, only 50 recorded per year, but how many unknown causes for property damage do you think insurance companies get per year (minus insurance fraud)?
Most people won't recognise a metor unless it totally destroys their VW Bug... doesn't mean that they never hit us...
...Pi.
See! Our pollution is not only affecting our own ecosystem, but even the temperature on the Sun!!
Damn CFCs and CO2 killing our sun!!!
Is this going to be like adding 7of9 to voyager?
Wait... they already have big boobs... now what... Oh I know!!
I got the twist: T'Pol explores "emotions" and becomes a nudist, running around the ship naked and stoping in provocative positions.
Ratings go through the roof as millions around the globe begin to embrace Star Trek rather than mocking it and its fans.
The practical applications, according to the press release, is ability 'to download a full-length DVD movie in less than five seconds'
In other news, the MPAA has filed a lawsuit against Caltech for "aiding the piracy of copyrighted movies". The RIAA is expected to file a similar lawsuit as many wonder why they haven't already milked Caltech for all the money it's got.
I have a hard time believing that this is safe for electronic devices that store memory in ram chips (like PDA's). Wouldnt this effect the entire circuit? How do they isolate it to the proper section of the device? ... how the hell do they know which is the proper section?
It's simple chemistry. The main components in the combustion process within a car engine is the hydrogen from the hydro-carbon, and the oxygen in the air. Give it a spark, and you get some nice energy output.
The timing of the car depends on the octane level of the gas. If you have a higher octane level, the gas burns slower, but hotter.
If you replace the carbon/hydrogen bonded molecules with pure hydrogen, you won't have to have so much energy to overcome breaking the C-H bonds (burn faster), and you'll get a much much much much higher energy output. Get the ratio of 2hydrogen atoms for every oxygen, and you get the perfect combustion setup with pure water as your "exhaust" (and you wont have CO2 being expelled either... just pure water).
The reason we don't have pure hydrogen/oxygen burning internal combustion cars is because it would be TOO powerful... the fuel misture injected per stroke would be too delicate to control within a safe error range, so sticking to something much safer (our present gas) allows us to not worry about the fuel mixtures as much.
Let's ruin the future these college students COULD have had because some 70 year old, overpaid ass hole sittin at a desk wants to set an example. Let's destroy all the money, effort, and time these students have put into their academic carreer in preparation for their future. Lets distroy the years of education they have gone though sequentially just so someone with a rather long stick up their ass can think he's making a difference....
all because they wanted to listen to some music...
I almost didn't go to college because of ass holes like that who like to USE people as sacrificial sheep...
People like him should be dragged out into the street and shot. They are playing with people's lives like it's nothing - like they're disposable entities in society - to make themselves look good and try to boost their polls a couple points.
Fuck them.... fuck politics...
CPU makers normally downgrade their CPU's for the purpose of stability... if they ship out a new processor that they grade as "3.5ghz!", sure, it can run at 3.5, but you can usually go up some mhz until you start to notice system instability.
Yes, some chips aren't stable right from the factory, but for all intensive purposes, chipmakers would rather loose 100mhz or more to avoid risking the lable of "instable".
yea... ya ever wonder why P4's seem to run cooler?
Take a look at the rediculously large heatsink they bolt into the case (yes... through the motherboard and into the case itself because it is so heavy) and then think "Hmm... what if this were on an AMD..."
"Your doughnut shaped universe theory is intreaguing to me, homer, I may just have to steal it..."
Homer and Hawking in Moe's bar...
The genius is revealed.
much faster than the ATI Radeon 9000
Wow... it beats the shitty version of the directx 9 compatible cards produced by ATI... that says a lot...