Comets, like other celestial objects, often have massive velocities, in the order of perhaps hundreds of kilometers per second. The problem is, a hundred kilometers in the gamut of the universe is quite trivial.
Heh, and how about that artificial intelligence claimed in its ads. Heck, this site even goes out of the way to say that in bold letters.
These guys should be sued for misleading advertising. Do a search for "robosweep" on Google (or just click here) Isn't it funny how all of the sites use the same exact wording? Who exactly runs this whole "As Seen on TV" thing anyways? Caveat Emptor!
If I could find one radio station that didn't have a playlist that I could figure out, entirely, after listening for three hours, I could die happy.
How about XM/SIRIUS? Most of the stations have much larger playlists than regular radio, and a lot fewer (if any) ads. And there are quite a few stations to choose from. I went with SIRIUS, and I am quite happy with it. You should give it a try. It is well worth the money if you listen to the radio more than a few hours a week.
The article mentioned the website American Antigravity as a source of information about this "electrogravitics" phenomenon. I clicked on the section about theHutchison Effect. It is said to be "...a very complex scalar-wave interaction between electromagnetic fields and matter." To me, it just proves that people without a solid background in science will believe almost anything they see.
Take, for example, the pictures in the document. This picture shows what looks like a butter knife embedded in some sort of metal. The metal looks pretty much like tin, lead, zinc, or some other metal with a low melting point. Maybe his scalar waves did this, or some idiot dropped a butter knife in a solder pot, let it cool, and cut it in half to reveal the knife. Who knows.
The best part comes from the videos at the bottom of the screen. Here, you see this little toy saucer take off and "magically" fly around the room. Video 3 shows the saucer resting on a wooden plank, with the camera close by aiming right at the little magic toy. Soon enough, it takes off and flutters about. Funny how all this energy in such a little space has no ill effects on the camera and its metal bits just inches away. The next 3 videos look remarkably alike, this time showing the craft at a distance. Notice how it lifts and flys, and something on the right hand side of the screen jingles around with similar movements. Again, there are metalic objects within very close distances (like the chains hanging nearby), but the "scalar waves of magic" (my quote) do not affect it. I bet that thing on the right is a fishing rod or a hollow tube with string in it used to manipulate the craft for the camera.
Alas, we will never know the truth, because unfortunatly, "...Hutchison's experiments have been exceeding difficult to replicate due to the extraordinarily complex arrangement of waveforms that is seemlingly required to generate the Hutchison effect."
Folks, take most of this stuff with a grain of salt. Sure, flyers fly (I've built one using a busted monitor as a power supply - it work, but according to my calculations, takes about 8000 Joules of energy for a 30 second flight, about the same energy as a family sedan going 7mph, which is quite inefficient), but they just work on well-known principals. Next time you see an "Ionic Breeze" air purifyer, put your hand next to it - you will feel the ion-induced wind blow against your hand. Same thing going on with the lifters, just with a bit more power and a different shape.
IIRC, this guy is from New Zealand. Does thier "big brother" really care what happens to him?
Next, look for Dubya to declare New Zealand part of the Axis of Evil, you know being a terrorist state and all where its citizens build cruise missiles in thier garage...
How would making state's ID cards physically similar sacrifice freedom? I never said to make a national ID card (which I am against), only to have ID cards use a common formatting. Read a little deeper next time, please.
Re:I have a question...
on
T-Shirt Cannon
·
· Score: 3, Funny
"The infidels were driven from our great country with the might of the Iraqi people and the T-shirt launchers."
I agree that a national ID card is bad; we've been over it many times before. However, I am all for a national standard for driver's licences. I work at a fairly busy convience store at Penn State University, and oftentimes I have the privledge (if you can call it that) of selling cigarettes to help college students kill themselves faster. Since the town also has quite a large secondary school system, it is absolutely necessary to card everyone who buys cigarettes as not to sell to minors.
Checking licences is quick, but is not as convienient as you may think. Since many students are out of state, I see at least 7 different states' licences (and thier many variations) at each shift. Every state has a different layout, orientation, and material (for instance, New Jersey licences seem to be nothing more than laminated paper, while PA licences are thick plastic cards). Worse yet, no state ever puts the date of birth in the same spot. While this may not seem like a problem at first, it is quite time consuming to constantly scan cards for DOB, picture, and expiration (as you cannot sell cigarettes to someone with an expired license).
If everything was standardized, things would be much less time consuming. I know people become mighty frustrated when they have to hurry off to get drunk with their friends but need thier smokes right now. What would be so hard about having a standard layout? States could still embellish and add thier own features for security or other reasons, but to anyone who works with IDs all day, this would surely make life easier. The whole vertical layout for people under 21 is also a good idea, as it is really easy to tell if someone is of age by the orientation of the license, but it seems as this may be too easy to fake. Any ideas?
GP32 offers total gaming experience, with its mixture of globally appealing humor, addicive game-play and a myriad of game modes and options.
Of course, when I buy a portable videogame system, the first thing I consider is its globally appealing humor. Next, I consider if my friends think it is cool when I play it on my smorking break.
Heh... I 'proved' this to myself a few years back in middle school. Since all primes come in the form 6k±1 (except 2, which is a special case), you can consider all primes to be either a 6k+1 or 6k-1. I ran Mathematica for a few days using a sieve taking advantage of this to come up 2 graphs of the distance between two consecutive primes of the same type. Both were consistent with the same logarithmic function, showing that both tend to grow at very nearly the same rate. Unless something catastrophic happens somewhere above the values I tested to (like all 6k+1 disappear), it only seems logical twin primes are endless.
Of course, as you notice, this is NOT a mathematical proof, but something I did to try to convince myself that there are in fact endless twin primes. Also, what seems right in my head most likely makes no sense to others. If you don't agree, tell me why my reasoning is flawed so I don't make the same mistake again.
You seem to be very lucky. Where I go to school (Penn State, if you need to know), We pay about the same $140, but it doesn't get us much. We are limited to 1GB/week of transfers out of our domain. If you surpass that (which can easily be done if the latest Mandrake ISO is not yet on the university servers), you are penalised. Your bandwidth is capped at 2.5KB/s for the remainder of the week. Three such penalites and it lasts all semester. If you manage a fifth, it is suspended altogether. And of course, you get no refund.
I guess it just depends on how much money your school wants and how sadistic the sysadmins are.
Something tells me that outside of university dorms, internet access is going to be overpriced for a long long time.
Something tells me you don't pay for school yourself. Internet access is almost always included in the price of the housing contract or tuition. Most of the time it is labled as something obscure, such as "Information Technology Fee." Regardless, you are still shelling out a hell of a lot of money to surf the internet at school, even if you go to a cheap one.
I believe by "real" 3D game you mean one that uses polygons to represent a three dimensional world. If that is the case, then Battlezone should be the first game to fit in this category. It was released in 1980, quite some time before descent.
If you mean texturemapped polys, thats a hard one. I know Virtua Racing from Sega featured them in '92, a full two years before Descent. Hell, now that I am thinking about it, Indy 500 from Papyrus software came out in '89 for PC, at the same time Hard Drivin' was in the arcades. I'm sure there has been more before that, but I cannot recall.
Perhaps you mean the Fingerworks keyboard. I have had the opportunity to play around with one for quite some time, and I am quite impressed. The gesture-based shortcuts are quickly learned (i.e., rotating your wrist like opening a jar will open the currently selected item). They are a little out of my price range ($330 for the top-o-the-line full ergonomic Touchstream ST), but the iGesture Pad is reasonable at $179. There aren't many places to try these things out at, but trust me, when you can ditch your mouse (since gestures take its place) and still have absolute control over inputs, it is quite worth the price. Another bonus - you can choose from QUERTY, DVORAK, Programmer's QUERTY, Programmer's DVORAK, and QUERAK, and you can change the layout at any time via software. Check it out here.
I find it quite funny that the aliens use 8-bit ASCII just like we do. You would think that they would just write the message out or something.
What would have made this hoax better would be to devise a non-commonly used system (perhaps 5-bits for A-Z and a few punctuations or something, and then use huffman encoding to reduce the size of the message) and have some "computer expert" (who is of course, involved in the hoax) come out and say he decoded the message and show how it was done. Then I just might believe it.
(Note- I do completely believe in extraterrestrial lifeforms, but I don't think they stop by too often, if at all).
Funny, I just bought a can of these cookies today, before reading the story. Damn my luck, it should go to something more usefull, like winning the powerball or something. Oh well. I now have another antenna to go with my Pringles antenna. Maybe a comparison is in the works!
strange, last year's show was incredible, at least for me. I laid down in an empty field in central PA (about 10 minutes from Penn State - there are plenty of fields around here!) to watch the show. Early on, it was slow going, but there were many spectacular fireballs which seemed to come in a spectacular variety of colors. The pace picked up throughout the evening, and I recorded a total of 1,332 sightings in the hour between 4 and 5 AM local time.
Me, being the geek that I am, wrote a program for my TI-89 (with nothing but one of those red LED keychains) to keep track of button presses. This made it much easier to count than trying to keep track in my head.
The sad thing was, I was supposed to bring a hot chick with me to watch, but she must have figured out I was a Slashdot reader and she bailed on me. So, of course, I was all alone (as usual).
Hey now, Penn State is not that bad. The only problem, as you pointed out, is that it is in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Other than that, the city of State College is becoming a rather fast-expanding town. Having partially lived in the city all my life (divorce visitation situation), it has seen a fairly drastic change in the last 10 or so years. The new interstate project (I-99) will allow access to the town without having to guess which cornfield to turn at.
And don't get me started with Jersey. Working at McLanahan's (the local grocery/drug/convenience store. I'm the strange fellow with the long hair and pi shirts) I see Jersey folk all the time, buying cigarettes of course (the are from Jersey 'cuz I card them). Jersey folk have a propensity of hanging out in front of convience stores smoking and shooting the breeze. Most of the time there is one fat guy who never talks, and a skinny long-haired type who has the mouth of a sailor. They sure would be great characters in movies...
And at least State College has the funds to purchase modern equiptment for the fuzz to communicate their intentions of raiding Dunkin Donuts...
I guess we will end up eating it somehow, but probably we consume a quite miniscule portion of it, probably less than what is in our water supply now anyway.
Silver, the best conductor, would be great at improving throughput. It is also one of the modern-day snake oils in the form of "colloidal silver" which was popular during that Y2K thing as it was believed to prevent you from getting sick. Stan Jones, the libertarian senate candidate from Montana, made his own concoction and drank it. It ends up, if you consume enough, your skin will turn a pale blueish-grey and you will look like you are dead. That's what you get for beleiving Y2K hype...
Also, at Wegman's today, I saw some "7 Layer Opera Cake," topped with 23-carat gold leaf. The lady in charge of all the delicious treats asured me that the gold is in fact edible, and adds a distinct taste to the cake. Intrigued, I bought the $4USD delicacy (which was a whole 100 cubic cm in volume). It was really good, but I'm sure the gold was entirly unnecessary (I could detect no difference in the taste in the bites with the gold leaf). I should have tested the resistance of my skin with my multimeter both before and a while after eating the cake. What would really be funny is if it did in fact make a difference. Maybe I'll try again sometime.
You might want to try the cake (very yummy, even for 4 bucks), but keep away from the colloidal silver stuff.
Hmm... I've been watching the Blinkenlights stream for about 10 minutes now, and in that time I have seen 3 ads for the new Mini Cooper. Not that I mind, but it seems it is no longer possible to do anything without staring at ads. What next, half-page ads on slashdot?
Slashdot Mirror
I'll remind you, those things are super slow!
Comets, like other celestial objects, often have massive velocities, in the order of perhaps hundreds of kilometers per second. The problem is, a hundred kilometers in the gamut of the universe is quite trivial.
Heh, and how about that artificial intelligence claimed in its ads. Heck, this site even goes out of the way to say that in bold letters.
These guys should be sued for misleading advertising. Do a search for "robosweep" on Google (or just click here) Isn't it funny how all of the sites use the same exact wording? Who exactly runs this whole "As Seen on TV" thing anyways? Caveat Emptor!
If I could find one radio station that didn't have a playlist that I could figure out, entirely, after listening for three hours, I could die happy.
How about XM/SIRIUS? Most of the stations have much larger playlists than regular radio, and a lot fewer (if any) ads. And there are quite a few stations to choose from. I went with SIRIUS, and I am quite happy with it. You should give it a try. It is well worth the money if you listen to the radio more than a few hours a week.
The article mentioned the website American Antigravity as a source of information about this "electrogravitics" phenomenon. I clicked on the section about theHutchison Effect. It is said to be "...a very complex scalar-wave interaction between electromagnetic fields and matter." To me, it just proves that people without a solid background in science will believe almost anything they see.
Take, for example, the pictures in the document. This picture shows what looks like a butter knife embedded in some sort of metal. The metal looks pretty much like tin, lead, zinc, or some other metal with a low melting point. Maybe his scalar waves did this, or some idiot dropped a butter knife in a solder pot, let it cool, and cut it in half to reveal the knife. Who knows.
The best part comes from the videos at the bottom of the screen. Here, you see this little toy saucer take off and "magically" fly around the room. Video 3 shows the saucer resting on a wooden plank, with the camera close by aiming right at the little magic toy. Soon enough, it takes off and flutters about. Funny how all this energy in such a little space has no ill effects on the camera and its metal bits just inches away. The next 3 videos look remarkably alike, this time showing the craft at a distance. Notice how it lifts and flys, and something on the right hand side of the screen jingles around with similar movements. Again, there are metalic objects within very close distances (like the chains hanging nearby), but the "scalar waves of magic" (my quote) do not affect it. I bet that thing on the right is a fishing rod or a hollow tube with string in it used to manipulate the craft for the camera.
Alas, we will never know the truth, because unfortunatly, "...Hutchison's experiments have been exceeding difficult to replicate due to the extraordinarily complex arrangement of waveforms that is seemlingly required to generate the Hutchison effect."
Folks, take most of this stuff with a grain of salt. Sure, flyers fly (I've built one using a busted monitor as a power supply - it work, but according to my calculations, takes about 8000 Joules of energy for a 30 second flight, about the same energy as a family sedan going 7mph, which is quite inefficient), but they just work on well-known principals. Next time you see an "Ionic Breeze" air purifyer, put your hand next to it - you will feel the ion-induced wind blow against your hand. Same thing going on with the lifters, just with a bit more power and a different shape.
This guy might know.
LAN party conversation:
"There is a string hanging out of the pants of your hot chick computer case."
"No! Don't pull that!"
"Wha? Oh.... That wasn't a string..."
IIRC, this guy is from New Zealand. Does thier "big brother" really care what happens to him?
Next, look for Dubya to declare New Zealand part of the Axis of Evil, you know being a terrorist state and all where its citizens build cruise missiles in thier garage...
How would making state's ID cards physically similar sacrifice freedom? I never said to make a national ID card (which I am against), only to have ID cards use a common formatting. Read a little deeper next time, please.
"The infidels were driven from our great country with the might of the Iraqi people and the T-shirt launchers."
-Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
Checking licences is quick, but is not as convienient as you may think. Since many students are out of state, I see at least 7 different states' licences (and thier many variations) at each shift. Every state has a different layout, orientation, and material (for instance, New Jersey licences seem to be nothing more than laminated paper, while PA licences are thick plastic cards). Worse yet, no state ever puts the date of birth in the same spot. While this may not seem like a problem at first, it is quite time consuming to constantly scan cards for DOB, picture, and expiration (as you cannot sell cigarettes to someone with an expired license).
If everything was standardized, things would be much less time consuming. I know people become mighty frustrated when they have to hurry off to get drunk with their friends but need thier smokes right now. What would be so hard about having a standard layout? States could still embellish and add thier own features for security or other reasons, but to anyone who works with IDs all day, this would surely make life easier. The whole vertical layout for people under 21 is also a good idea, as it is really easy to tell if someone is of age by the orientation of the license, but it seems as this may be too easy to fake. Any ideas?
Heh... I 'proved' this to myself a few years back in middle school.
Since all primes come in the form 6k±1 (except 2, which is a special case), you can consider all primes to be either a 6k+1 or 6k-1. I ran Mathematica for a few days using a sieve taking advantage of this to come up 2 graphs of the distance between two consecutive primes of the same type. Both were consistent with the same logarithmic function, showing that both tend to grow at very nearly the same rate. Unless something catastrophic happens somewhere above the values I tested to (like all 6k+1 disappear), it only seems logical twin primes are endless.
Of course, as you notice, this is NOT a mathematical proof, but something I did to try to convince myself that there are in fact endless twin primes. Also, what seems right in my head most likely makes no sense to others. If you don't agree, tell me why my reasoning is flawed so I don't make the same mistake again.
You seem to be very lucky. Where I go to school (Penn State, if you need to know), We pay about the same $140, but it doesn't get us much. We are limited to 1GB/week of transfers out of our domain. If you surpass that (which can easily be done if the latest Mandrake ISO is not yet on the university servers), you are penalised. Your bandwidth is capped at 2.5KB/s for the remainder of the week. Three such penalites and it lasts all semester. If you manage a fifth, it is suspended altogether. And of course, you get no refund.
I guess it just depends on how much money your school wants and how sadistic the sysadmins are.
If you mean texturemapped polys, thats a hard one. I know Virtua Racing from Sega featured them in '92, a full two years before Descent. Hell, now that I am thinking about it, Indy 500 from Papyrus software came out in '89 for PC, at the same time Hard Drivin' was in the arcades. I'm sure there has been more before that, but I cannot recall.
Perhaps you mean the Fingerworks keyboard. I have had the opportunity to play around with one for quite some time, and I am quite impressed. The gesture-based shortcuts are quickly learned (i.e., rotating your wrist like opening a jar will open the currently selected item). They are a little out of my price range ($330 for the top-o-the-line full ergonomic Touchstream ST), but the iGesture Pad is reasonable at $179. There aren't many places to try these things out at, but trust me, when you can ditch your mouse (since gestures take its place) and still have absolute control over inputs, it is quite worth the price. Another bonus - you can choose from QUERTY, DVORAK, Programmer's QUERTY, Programmer's DVORAK, and QUERAK, and you can change the layout at any time via software. Check it out here.
I find it quite funny that the aliens use 8-bit ASCII just like we do. You would think that they would just write the message out or something.
What would have made this hoax better would be to devise a non-commonly used system (perhaps 5-bits for A-Z and a few punctuations or something, and then use huffman encoding to reduce the size of the message) and have some "computer expert" (who is of course, involved in the hoax) come out and say he decoded the message and show how it was done. Then I just might believe it.
(Note- I do completely believe in extraterrestrial lifeforms, but I don't think they stop by too often, if at all).
Funny, I just bought a can of these cookies today, before reading the story. Damn my luck, it should go to something more usefull, like winning the powerball or something. Oh well. I now have another antenna to go with my Pringles antenna. Maybe a comparison is in the works!
...or a tin foil Jimmy Hat.
strange, last year's show was incredible, at least for me. I laid down in an empty field in central PA (about 10 minutes from Penn State - there are plenty of fields around here!) to watch the show. Early on, it was slow going, but there were many spectacular fireballs which seemed to come in a spectacular variety of colors. The pace picked up throughout the evening, and I recorded a total of 1,332 sightings in the hour between 4 and 5 AM local time.
Me, being the geek that I am, wrote a program for my TI-89 (with nothing but one of those red LED keychains) to keep track of button presses. This made it much easier to count than trying to keep track in my head.
The sad thing was, I was supposed to bring a hot chick with me to watch, but she must have figured out I was a Slashdot reader and she bailed on me. So, of course, I was all alone (as usual).
Hey now, Penn State is not that bad. The only problem, as you pointed out, is that it is in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Other than that, the city of State College is becoming a rather fast-expanding town. Having partially lived in the city all my life (divorce visitation situation), it has seen a fairly drastic change in the last 10 or so years. The new interstate project (I-99) will allow access to the town without having to guess which cornfield to turn at.
And don't get me started with Jersey. Working at McLanahan's (the local grocery/drug/convenience store. I'm the strange fellow with the long hair and pi shirts) I see Jersey folk all the time, buying cigarettes of course (the are from Jersey 'cuz I card them). Jersey folk have a propensity of hanging out in front of convience stores smoking and shooting the breeze. Most of the time there is one fat guy who never talks, and a skinny long-haired type who has the mouth of a sailor. They sure would be great characters in movies...
And at least State College has the funds to purchase modern equiptment for the fuzz to communicate their intentions of raiding Dunkin Donuts...
Cabbage eats arsenic --> Insect eats cabbage --> small, furry rodent eats insect --> Mice droppings contaminate livestock feed --> Cows or other commonly-eaten animal eats feed --> Humans eat livestock.
I guess we will end up eating it somehow, but probably we consume a quite miniscule portion of it, probably less than what is in our water supply now anyway.
You have to remeber not all ATMs have the same button layout.
How about gold or silver?
Silver, the best conductor, would be great at improving throughput. It is also one of the modern-day snake oils in the form of "colloidal silver" which was popular during that Y2K thing as it was believed to prevent you from getting sick. Stan Jones, the libertarian senate candidate from Montana, made his own concoction and drank it. It ends up, if you consume enough, your skin will turn a pale blueish-grey and you will look like you are dead. That's what you get for beleiving Y2K hype...
Also, at Wegman's today, I saw some "7 Layer Opera Cake," topped with 23-carat gold leaf. The lady in charge of all the delicious treats asured me that the gold is in fact edible, and adds a distinct taste to the cake. Intrigued, I bought the $4USD delicacy (which was a whole 100 cubic cm in volume). It was really good, but I'm sure the gold was entirly unnecessary (I could detect no difference in the taste in the bites with the gold leaf). I should have tested the resistance of my skin with my multimeter both before and a while after eating the cake. What would really be funny is if it did in fact make a difference. Maybe I'll try again sometime.
You might want to try the cake (very yummy, even for 4 bucks), but keep away from the colloidal silver stuff.
Hmm... I've been watching the Blinkenlights stream for about 10 minutes now, and in that time I have seen 3 ads for the new Mini Cooper. Not that I mind, but it seems it is no longer possible to do anything without staring at ads. What next, half-page ads on slashdot?
er, wait... We already have those.