To clear things up a bit, rockets do not work by pushing against something. If rockets did push against something, how would they work in the vaccum of space where there is nothing to push against.
Rockets move through the conservation of momentum, another form of Newton's action-reaction law. Think of a scenario where you are standing on a skateboard with a bowling ball. Now, picture yourself tossing the bowling ball a couple of feet in front of you. As you can imagine, you and the skateboard will move backwards a few feet to compensate for the bowling ball moving forward. How much you move back depends on mass x velocity of you and bowling ball.
This is how rockets work. They give some of their mass (fuel) velocity going in one direction while the rest of the mass moves in the opposite. It is better to think of the action-reaction as a recoil system rather than something being pushed back. If anything is being "pushed" in the rocket, it is the rocket's own fuel mass.
Remember how the major videocard manufacturers got burned when Creative Labs and Diamond Multimedia (now S3) when 3dfx decided to go into board making and cutted off their chipset supply from other board makers. I doubt the major board makers will pick up their chips any time soon should 3dfx decide to go back to strictly making chips.
Only way 3dfx can get back into the picture is by going back to their roots. I don't mean back to selling chipsets but rather building a new kickass chipset that outperforms everyone elses, like the way the original Voodoo shook up the market.
Yep, this country is not a Democracy. Democracy is strictly defined as the rule of the majority. Contrary to popular belief, this is actually bad because majority rule leads to minority oppression. Our founding fathers were well aware of this so they designed a system where the majority will rule but not at the expense of the minority. That's why we have a senate system where every state gets 2 representatives regardless of the state population size. It is to make sure that the large states do not oppress the smaller states. That's why senators can filabuster. It gives one senator power over the entire senate.
Your vote doesn't determine the Presidency. Only the electoral college does. The electoral college, more often than not, goes with the popular vote of the state. Otherwise, they risk being elected out of office for "not representing their people." Personally, I don't see a reason why we are still using an electoral college. I can only say why it was used in the first place:
1. As Jesse Ventura said on Larry King Live yesterday, it was necessary back in the days when communication was done through horses and counting ballots for millions was just too much of a burden. Like you said with electronic polling, it's really unnecessary. Going through the electoral college to pick a president is like going through a horse's ass.
2. There was a time when illiteracy rate was high. Politicians decided that presidential decision should be left to the "pros" and not to the uneducated and uninformed. Today, with our great public education system, illiteracy is still high but we have T.V. I think every American can get enough information about the candidates before choosing their President.
3. It's another form of checks and balances. The President will have to work with the Senate and the House of Reps. If he/she pisses all of them off (on a continuous basis), the Senate and House can get rid of him/her. However, I think if the people like the President, then the hell with what the Senate and House think.
Most Americans already feel alienated from Washington. The electoral college is just another layer between the people and politicians that we should get rid off. Of course, try convincing your Senator or House Representative to strip themselves of this power in determining the President. It's almost like asking them to pass a bill to take a pay dock.
I wouldn't be surprised if they do. My account got spammed within the first few weeks and I've never used it prior to that. They also have poor spam filter (at least back when I last checked) which is the main reason why I stopped using them. Right now, I'm using netaddress.com. They have decent spam filter but their servers aren't the best in terms of performance and reliability.
I created an account at mail.com using my first and last name before the @ and it got spammed fairly immediately. So I figure spammers probably also use first and last name combos to spam.
A simple filter rule that has helped me remove most of my spam is to delete any emails that does not contain my email address in the "to" field. What most people don't realize about most spam list buyers is that they don't get the actual email addresses but rather they get a list alias to email to. Spam list sellers don't want their buyers to get the actual list of emails because they won't be able to charge on a per use basis. It's the same technique used by direct mail marketing. It's the same reason why that simple filter rule works most of the time.
I got a bunch of questions for you communications/engineers/physicists out there:
What's the cause of this latency?
Is it the physics? Is it caused by the distance the signal has to travel or the medium that the signal waves have to propogate through? Is it possible to get around this by using a different EM spectrum?
Or is it some internal routing issue that will improve with better hardware?
Aside from having shorter development cycles, scripting languages are also great for prototyping a website or portions of it. It's like writing a first draft. Considering how much your superiors change their minds without realizing the havoc it wreaks on your code, scripting languages are great to conceptualize and layout a site. When the design stabilizes, you can move to one of the compiled languages. It might sound like redundant work but too often is the case where you have to scrap your code to fit the needs of the bosses. And it's better to scrap a scripting language than it is to a compiled language.
Terms of most (if not all) IPOs includes not being able to sell your shares prior to a designated period of time. VCs and Investment Bankers will just have to extend this period of time to 3 or 4 years. That way, most executives of start-ups will be forced to stay with the company and not screw over anyone over during the 3-4 years.
but the brain does most of the "seeing"
on
End To Blindness?
·
· Score: 1
Don't forget that much of what we see is through our brains. Our eyes simply capture "bitmaps" of the world and our brains make sense of what we see i.e., columns of neurons in our brains parses these bitmaps into lines, contours, shapes, depth, etc. The problem with people who have been blind for a period of time is that these neuronal columns do not get stimulation. Neurons that do not get stimulated shrink and die off. The eyes may be able to send pictures to the brain but the brain won't be able to make sense of it.
The brain is known to be able to mallable and it has been known shift functions from damage areas to other areas. However, current literature suggests that recovery will be minimal given the complexity of the visual system.
These type of restoration will probably only help those who have recently become blind.
Slashdot Mirror
To clear things up a bit, rockets do not work by pushing against something. If rockets did push against something, how would they work in the vaccum of space where there is nothing to push against.
Rockets move through the conservation of momentum, another form of Newton's action-reaction law. Think of a scenario where you are standing on a skateboard with a bowling ball. Now, picture yourself tossing the bowling ball a couple of feet in front of you. As you can imagine, you and the skateboard will move backwards a few feet to compensate for the bowling ball moving forward. How much you move back depends on mass x velocity of you and bowling ball.
This is how rockets work. They give some of their mass (fuel) velocity going in one direction while the rest of the mass moves in the opposite. It is better to think of the action-reaction as a recoil system rather than something being pushed back. If anything is being "pushed" in the rocket, it is the rocket's own fuel mass.
Remember how the major videocard manufacturers got burned when Creative Labs and Diamond Multimedia (now S3) when 3dfx decided to go into board making and cutted off their chipset supply from other board makers. I doubt the major board makers will pick up their chips any time soon should 3dfx decide to go back to strictly making chips.
Only way 3dfx can get back into the picture is by going back to their roots. I don't mean back to selling chipsets but rather building a new kickass chipset that outperforms everyone elses, like the way the original Voodoo shook up the market.
Yep, this country is not a Democracy. Democracy is strictly defined as the rule of the majority. Contrary to popular belief, this is actually bad because majority rule leads to minority oppression. Our founding fathers were well aware of this so they designed a system where the majority will rule but not at the expense of the minority. That's why we have a senate system where every state gets 2 representatives regardless of the state population size. It is to make sure that the large states do not oppress the smaller states. That's why senators can filabuster. It gives one senator power over the entire senate.
Your vote doesn't determine the Presidency. Only the electoral college does. The electoral college, more often than not, goes with the popular vote of the state. Otherwise, they risk being elected out of office for "not representing their people." Personally, I don't see a reason why we are still using an electoral college. I can only say why it was used in the first place:
1. As Jesse Ventura said on Larry King Live yesterday, it was necessary back in the days when communication was done through horses and counting ballots for millions was just too much of a burden. Like you said with electronic polling, it's really unnecessary. Going through the electoral college to pick a president is like going through a horse's ass.
2. There was a time when illiteracy rate was high. Politicians decided that presidential decision should be left to the "pros" and not to the uneducated and uninformed. Today, with our great public education system, illiteracy is still high but we have T.V. I think every American can get enough information about the candidates before choosing their President.
3. It's another form of checks and balances. The President will have to work with the Senate and the House of Reps. If he/she pisses all of them off (on a continuous basis), the Senate and House can get rid of him/her. However, I think if the people like the President, then the hell with what the Senate and House think.
Most Americans already feel alienated from Washington. The electoral college is just another layer between the people and politicians that we should get rid off. Of course, try convincing your Senator or House Representative to strip themselves of this power in determining the President. It's almost like asking them to pass a bill to take a pay dock.
I wouldn't be surprised if they do. My account got spammed within the first few weeks and I've never used it prior to that. They also have poor spam filter (at least back when I last checked) which is the main reason why I stopped using them. Right now, I'm using netaddress.com. They have decent spam filter but their servers aren't the best in terms of performance and reliability.
I created an account at mail.com using my first and last name before the @ and it got spammed fairly immediately. So I figure spammers probably also use first and last name combos to spam.
A simple filter rule that has helped me remove most of my spam is to delete any emails that does not contain my email address in the "to" field. What most people don't realize about most spam list buyers is that they don't get the actual email addresses but rather they get a list alias to email to. Spam list sellers don't want their buyers to get the actual list of emails because they won't be able to charge on a per use basis. It's the same technique used by direct mail marketing. It's the same reason why that simple filter rule works most of the time.
I got a bunch of questions for you communications/engineers/physicists out there:
What's the cause of this latency?
Is it the physics? Is it caused by the distance the signal has to travel or the medium that the signal waves have to propogate through? Is it possible to get around this by using a different EM spectrum?
Or is it some internal routing issue that will improve with better hardware?
Aside from having shorter development cycles, scripting languages are also great for prototyping a website or portions of it. It's like writing a first draft. Considering how much your superiors change their minds without realizing the havoc it wreaks on your code, scripting languages are great to conceptualize and layout a site. When the design stabilizes, you can move to one of the compiled languages. It might sound like redundant work but too often is the case where you have to scrap your code to fit the needs of the bosses. And it's better to scrap a scripting language than it is to a compiled language.
Terms of most (if not all) IPOs includes not being able to sell your shares prior to a designated period of time. VCs and Investment Bankers will just have to extend this period of time to 3 or 4 years. That way, most executives of start-ups will be forced to stay with the company and not screw over anyone over during the 3-4 years.
Don't forget that much of what we see is through our brains. Our eyes simply capture "bitmaps" of the world and our brains make sense of what we see i.e., columns of neurons in our brains parses these bitmaps into lines, contours, shapes, depth, etc. The problem with people who have been blind for a period of time is that these neuronal columns do not get stimulation. Neurons that do not get stimulated shrink and die off. The eyes may be able to send pictures to the brain but the brain won't be able to make sense of it.
The brain is known to be able to mallable and it has been known shift functions from damage areas to other areas. However, current literature suggests that recovery will be minimal given the complexity of the visual system.
These type of restoration will probably only help those who have recently become blind.
Well it's an good post but with that "News for Gooks..." bit, it should be scored as "5, Flamebait"