I wonder if with a little poking around it wouldn't be possible to send commands directly to the PIC16C71 processor on the thing. The PIC seems to control all the motor and sensor functions and translate them into things PBASIC can easily use. If you could send commands directly to it you'd probably end up with a much more powerful, "hackable" language... Or, I could be talking out my ass:)
Staaaar Trekkin' across the universe...
On the starship Enterprise, under Captain Kiiirk
Staaaar Trekkin' across the universe...
Always moving forward, 'cause we can't find reverse...
The reason he's doing this is probably because his new merchandising juggernaut, Episode II, won't live up to all the expectations and hopes churned up by the fan rumor mill. Just like Episode I. He wants to keep our expectations down to reasonable levels. The question is.. why won't it live up to our expectations?
Think about it. Lucas had a great idea; take a classic fantasy plot, and stick it in a high-technology world. Once he saw the green rolling in, though, any thought of "art" went out the window, and became "How can I change this to make more money?" The result? Compare the Empire Strikes Back to Return of the Jedi and Episode I.
ESB is not cute. Look at some of the scenes in that movie. We have the Imperial AT-AT walkers. We have the asteroid scene. We have the escape-from-the-big-space-slug scene. The introduction of the Super Star-Destroyer, holograms, Vader becoming even MORE evil, brilliant light-saber battles.. I could go on and on, but I already have.
Then we have Return of the Jedi. Yes, there were some very cool scenes, but... Endor was originally supposed to be populated by Wookies like Chewbacca. Lucas, being a man of some intelligence, realized that something cute and fluffy would sell better, so he cut 'em in half and called them Ewoks. The result? A sequence of bizarre, Jar-Jaresque scenes of teddy bears overrunning trained Imperial troops in full body armor. Ok.
If I had a point in this rant, it's that Lucas has completely lost sight of the Star Wars "concept". Midichlorians, Jar-Jar's cartoonish escapes from tight jams... This is a live-action cartoon. I want the REAL Star Wars back.
As I understand it, the main reason Napster is considered different is the fact that MP3s are (for all intents and purposes) lossless, CD-quality recordings of digital music. If you tape a CD, then the tape is invariably lower quality, acoustically, than the original. Say you give that tape to a friend. If your friend makes a copy of that tape to give someone else, the tape HE tape is gonna sound worse than the one you made. So on and so forth until the quality is so bad it's not worth making copies. Now, with today's hi-fi recording technology, that problem isn't as bad as it used to be, but it's definitely still a limiting factor on how many "degrees" from the original source a song can travel. IIRC, that's the only reason tapes and tape recorders weren't banned right at the start, and why the RIAA doesn't chase down 'tape pirates'.
An MP3 can be copied an infinite number of times with zero quality loss. This means that if a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend made this MP3, the copy that YOU got, passed through all those people, sounds EXACTLY the same as the original. The RIAA's reasoning (if you can call it that) is that no one is going to go out and buy CDs if they can get perfect copies for free. Tapes, however, are "ok" because the copies made are lower quality than the original, and will get worse with every person they go through.
Re:It's still a democracy.....use it!
on
Lawsuits Suck
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· Score: 1
I could be wrong but... isn't that what the EFF is for? Or should the EFF participate as a member of this new association?
Many of the technologies and concepts that we take for granted today hold their origins in science fiction. Look at the communications satellite; not invented by Arthur C. Clarke as some would like you to believe, but he certainly envisioned the concept. It's not difficult to believe that a game, or story, could envision a future (or present) hauntingly similar to our own. I'm writing a book myself with precisely that goal in mind.
There are millions of books around, and millions upon millions of authors and designers and visionaries that all have their own ideas on how the future will be. Is it really any surprise that a few of them seem to be pretty close?
I've used Macs extensively (especially older ones) and I've seen the bomb accompany all kinds of crazy stuff, from the "Cannot open '' because." to the bomb just sitting in a box with no message. Granted, documented/helpful error messages weren't exactly in vogue at the time, but geez!
Obviously the Martians were a race of giant creatures with immense strength and incredibly keen eyesight. Their primary sport was "Hit the Blue Dot", an odd pasttime which consisted of chucking rocks towards the earth. Any that managed to nail it, of course, got all the girls. Unfortunately, most of them were bad aims, as the Martian race obviously died out millions of years ago.
Interesting... In a way, the MPAA is going out of their way to prevent anyone that doesn't run Windows from viewing their movies.
"In a suprise press release, Microsoft has announced its previously hidden alliance with the MPAA for the past year. Microsoft has provided funding for the MPAA's legal fees. However, the details on how Microsoft benefits from the deal are not known at this time..."
One of the major reasons that ET will prove so elusive is the fact that we're not only looking at narrow slices of space, on narrow frequencies... but we're also looking for a signal that may encompass a very narrow slice of time for a civilization.
Putting aside the argument that intelligent life is not the "goal" of evolution (which is also a very good thing to remember), let's assume that an intelligent civilization DOES evolve out there. How long are they going to use radio for communication?
I don't claim to know tons about the area of the EM spectrum we're currently searching, but don't you think there will be better ways to communicate?
Analogy: Two tribes in two valleys separated by hills communicate via smoke signals. This is, to them, not only the best, but one of the only ways to communicate. Yet, all around them, even passing through them, are our radio waves, from our civilization, carrying speech and music, microwaves carrying our voices... Is it really so hard to adapt this analogy to our situation?
For all we know, there could be civilizations all around us, communicating; we just don't have the technology to detect the transmissions.
1. How do the black holes form? (i.e. Where do babies come from?
Black holes are formed when a star that is at least 10x as massive as our sun (I believe) undergoes a supernova explosion, thereby throwing off its outer layers of star matter. The remaining core of the star is sufficiently massive that, without the fusion reactions to sustain it, it collapses in on itself, getting denser and denser and denser until a teaspoon of the matter weighs more than the entire planet earth. This compacts even more, until it becomes an absolute singularity with finite (but very very high) mass, and near infinite density.
2. Once a black hole is formed, it sucks all nearby matter in. Will it keep growing indefinitely or will it somehow stop at some point?
I don't think that anyone really knows the exact physics that occur inside a black hole. There are bil-yuns and bil-yuns of theories, but as I understand it, no matter how much mass a black hole sucks in, that amount is so small compared to its existing mass that it makes virtually no difference.
However, according to Steven Hawking, black holes DO dissipate eventually. I'm sure the idea is more complicated than this, but in a nutshell: virtual particle pairs are constantly appearing and instantly annihilating each other all through the universe. The reasons behind this are tangly, involving quantum physics and string theory and other mind-warping stuff. When these particles appear directly on the event horizon (point of no return), one gets sucked into the black hole, and the other sails merrily into space before they can annihilate. This causes the hole's total energy to decrease by some infinitesimal amount, but it happens CONSTANTLY. So, in theory, a black hole will eventually evaporate due to this "Hawking radiation".
3. What exactly is meant by the size of the black hole?
This one's easy.. I think. "Size" when talking about black holes refers to the thing's mass, which is based from the mass of the star that spawned it.
4. When something is being sucked into a black hole it starts accelerating due to the gravitational pull of the black hole. At some point the speed of the sucking object (did I just invent this term?;-) will approach the speed of light, at which point the time is supposed to slow down. This effectively means that at some point the speed of the object will start to decrease, and, eventually, it will stop moving. Therefore, the object will, in fact, never reach the black hole. Did I just pull this out of my ass or is it at least partially true? Actually, from what I've read in the past (as in a couple years ago, might've changed by now) you're right on the money with this one. Keep in mind, though, that from the point of view of the "sucking object", as you called it, you just get stretched out into a long, unpleasant line and disappear into the hole. *poof-gone* As an outside observer, though, time will appear to go slower and slower and slower... eventually almost appearing to stop. I wonder how many aeons you'd have to watch before something disappeared into the singularity... This part has always confused me a bit, too.
Well, I hope that helped a little bit. Keep in mind I could be dead wrong on all four of these, but at least I tried. If someone else can give a better, or at least more accurate, response, please do, 'cause now I wanna know!
"Hey cool, a black hole! Oh, damn, it sank through the floor, where it will center in the core of the earth and digest the planet over 1000 years like a Sarlacc."
Certifications, labs like this, and Official Stamps of Approval mean perhaps more than they ought (corporate decision making being what it is) but that's hard to get around.
Very, very true. I wonder how long it will be before a company like CompTIA begins to offer "standard" Linux software technician certifications? Are we going to start seeing John Doe, CLE?
Or is this already going on and I'm a day late, dollar short as usual?
50,000 years is an insane amount of time to orbit a time capsule. They claim to have taken into account everything there is to account for, but I think they may have missed one of the most fundamental processes of life on this planet: evolution.
50,000 years is roughly 5 times the sum of all recorded (known?) human history thus far. In that time, technology has increased exponentially and, recently, at greater than exponential rates. Won't we hit a plateau some time in the next, oh, 2,000 years or so? Sooner or later, physical, mechanical technology will slump in favor of other forms. Perhaps biological.. or psychological.
If this thing really lasts 50,000 years, who's to say that humanity will be able to interpret it when it falls? Our entire structure of thinking may be altered by then. Perhaps symbolic thinking will be too "primitive" for the descendants of the human race to waste their time on. It might sound to them like dolphins sound to us.
There is another possibility...
Arthur C. Clarke had an interesting concept in the 2001 series; a race of incredibly advanced beings found a way to write their minds into the granular structure of spacetime itself. They became god-like beings of pure energy, with no more need for a planet than we have for an appendix.
When this thing falls, it may fall to an world barren of humanity. Not because we blew ourselves up, or got hit by a comet, or any number of the zillions of ways we could be wiped out as a species, but merely because we don't need the world anymore.
Evolution, artificial or otherwise, will be the single largest factor in whether or not Keo can deliver our messages to future generations.
Not only that, but Prowse spoke all of Vader's lines and was dubbed over later by JEJ. IIRC Prowse was rather pissed about that... because he didn't know about it until he saw the completed movie.
I think I speak for many when I say...
on
The Regulon
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· Score: 1
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if with a little poking around it wouldn't be possible to send commands directly to the PIC16C71 processor on the thing. The PIC seems to control all the motor and sensor functions and translate them into things PBASIC can easily use. If you could send commands directly to it you'd probably end up with a much more powerful, "hackable" language... Or, I could be talking out my ass :)
Staaaar Trekkin' across the universe...
On the starship Enterprise, under Captain Kiiirk
Staaaar Trekkin' across the universe...
Always moving forward, 'cause we can't find reverse...
The reason he's doing this is probably because his new merchandising juggernaut, Episode II, won't live up to all the expectations and hopes churned up by the fan rumor mill. Just like Episode I. He wants to keep our expectations down to reasonable levels. The question is.. why won't it live up to our expectations?
Think about it. Lucas had a great idea; take a classic fantasy plot, and stick it in a high-technology world. Once he saw the green rolling in, though, any thought of "art" went out the window, and became "How can I change this to make more money?" The result? Compare the Empire Strikes Back to Return of the Jedi and Episode I.
ESB is not cute. Look at some of the scenes in that movie. We have the Imperial AT-AT walkers. We have the asteroid scene. We have the escape-from-the-big-space-slug scene. The introduction of the Super Star-Destroyer, holograms, Vader becoming even MORE evil, brilliant light-saber battles.. I could go on and on, but I already have.
Then we have Return of the Jedi. Yes, there were some very cool scenes, but... Endor was originally supposed to be populated by Wookies like Chewbacca. Lucas, being a man of some intelligence, realized that something cute and fluffy would sell better, so he cut 'em in half and called them Ewoks. The result? A sequence of bizarre, Jar-Jaresque scenes of teddy bears overrunning trained Imperial troops in full body armor. Ok.
If I had a point in this rant, it's that Lucas has completely lost sight of the Star Wars "concept". Midichlorians, Jar-Jar's cartoonish escapes from tight jams... This is a live-action cartoon. I want the REAL Star Wars back.
taco?
How do you get the "rights" to report on something?
Simple.. just hit the US Patent office and apply for a patent on reporting the Olympics.
"Nyahhh *crunch*crunch*crunch* you've got mail, doc!"
I am going to have nightmares about this, I just know it...
As I understand it, the main reason Napster is considered different is the fact that MP3s are (for all intents and purposes) lossless, CD-quality recordings of digital music. If you tape a CD, then the tape is invariably lower quality, acoustically, than the original. Say you give that tape to a friend. If your friend makes a copy of that tape to give someone else, the tape HE tape is gonna sound worse than the one you made. So on and so forth until the quality is so bad it's not worth making copies. Now, with today's hi-fi recording technology, that problem isn't as bad as it used to be, but it's definitely still a limiting factor on how many "degrees" from the original source a song can travel. IIRC, that's the only reason tapes and tape recorders weren't banned right at the start, and why the RIAA doesn't chase down 'tape pirates'.
An MP3 can be copied an infinite number of times with zero quality loss. This means that if a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend made this MP3, the copy that YOU got, passed through all those people, sounds EXACTLY the same as the original. The RIAA's reasoning (if you can call it that) is that no one is going to go out and buy CDs if they can get perfect copies for free. Tapes, however, are "ok" because the copies made are lower quality than the original, and will get worse with every person they go through.
I could be wrong but... isn't that what the EFF is for? Or should the EFF participate as a member of this new association?
Many of the technologies and concepts that we take for granted today hold their origins in science fiction. Look at the communications satellite; not invented by Arthur C. Clarke as some would like you to believe, but he certainly envisioned the concept. It's not difficult to believe that a game, or story, could envision a future (or present) hauntingly similar to our own. I'm writing a book myself with precisely that goal in mind.
There are millions of books around, and millions upon millions of authors and designers and visionaries that all have their own ideas on how the future will be. Is it really any surprise that a few of them seem to be pretty close?
I've used Macs extensively (especially older ones) and I've seen the bomb accompany all kinds of crazy stuff, from the "Cannot open '' because ." to the bomb just sitting in a box with no message. Granted, documented/helpful error messages weren't exactly in vogue at the time, but geez!
Obviously the Martians were a race of giant creatures with immense strength and incredibly keen eyesight. Their primary sport was "Hit the Blue Dot", an odd pasttime which consisted of chucking rocks towards the earth. Any that managed to nail it, of course, got all the girls. Unfortunately, most of them were bad aims, as the Martian race obviously died out millions of years ago.
Most notably a 2 foot by 3 foot titanium fuel tank may make it through the atmosphere. Wanna bet we see it on e-bay if it does fall to earth?
Why just the tank? They should put the entire Iridium network up for auction on e-bay! I bet they'd sell it, AND get a decent amount of money...
Or they'll think it's a pulsar.. or a Cepheid variable.. You'd have to do more with the light than that.
The real question is, do we WANT everyone knowing we're here? Maybe we should just remain silent. Or, perhaps, just broadcast Bach.
Interesting... In a way, the MPAA is going out of their way to prevent anyone that doesn't run Windows from viewing their movies.
"In a suprise press release, Microsoft has announced its previously hidden alliance with the MPAA for the past year. Microsoft has provided funding for the MPAA's legal fees. However, the details on how Microsoft benefits from the deal are not known at this time..."
One of the major reasons that ET will prove so elusive is the fact that we're not only looking at narrow slices of space, on narrow frequencies... but we're also looking for a signal that may encompass a very narrow slice of time for a civilization.
Putting aside the argument that intelligent life is not the "goal" of evolution (which is also a very good thing to remember), let's assume that an intelligent civilization DOES evolve out there. How long are they going to use radio for communication?
I don't claim to know tons about the area of the EM spectrum we're currently searching, but don't you think there will be better ways to communicate?
Analogy: Two tribes in two valleys separated by hills communicate via smoke signals. This is, to them, not only the best, but one of the only ways to communicate. Yet, all around them, even passing through them, are our radio waves, from our civilization, carrying speech and music, microwaves carrying our voices... Is it really so hard to adapt this analogy to our situation?
For all we know, there could be civilizations all around us, communicating; we just don't have the technology to detect the transmissions.
I'm no astrophysicist, but...
;-) will approach the speed of light, at which point the time is supposed to slow down. This effectively means that at some point the speed of the object will start to decrease, and, eventually, it will stop moving. Therefore, the object will, in fact, never reach the black hole. Did I just pull this out of my ass or is it at least partially true?
1. How do the black holes form? (i.e. Where do babies come from?
Black holes are formed when a star that is at least 10x as massive as our sun (I believe) undergoes a supernova explosion, thereby throwing off its outer layers of star matter. The remaining core of the star is sufficiently massive that, without the fusion reactions to sustain it, it collapses in on itself, getting denser and denser and denser until a teaspoon of the matter weighs more than the entire planet earth. This compacts even more, until it becomes an absolute singularity with finite (but very very high) mass, and near infinite density.
2. Once a black hole is formed, it sucks all nearby matter in. Will it keep growing indefinitely or will it somehow stop at some point?
I don't think that anyone really knows the exact physics that occur inside a black hole. There are bil-yuns and bil-yuns of theories, but as I understand it, no matter how much mass a black hole sucks in, that amount is so small compared to its existing mass that it makes virtually no difference.
However, according to Steven Hawking, black holes DO dissipate eventually. I'm sure the idea is more complicated than this, but in a nutshell: virtual particle pairs are constantly appearing and instantly annihilating each other all through the universe. The reasons behind this are tangly, involving quantum physics and string theory and other mind-warping stuff. When these particles appear directly on the event horizon (point of no return), one gets sucked into the black hole, and the other sails merrily into space before they can annihilate. This causes the hole's total energy to decrease by some infinitesimal amount, but it happens CONSTANTLY. So, in theory, a black hole will eventually evaporate due to this "Hawking radiation".
3. What exactly is meant by the size of the black hole?
This one's easy.. I think. "Size" when talking about black holes refers to the thing's mass, which is based from the mass of the star that spawned it.
4. When something is being sucked into a black hole it starts accelerating due to the gravitational pull of the black hole. At some point the speed of the sucking object (did I just invent this term?
Actually, from what I've read in the past (as in a couple years ago, might've changed by now) you're right on the money with this one. Keep in mind, though, that from the point of view of the "sucking object", as you called it, you just get stretched out into a long, unpleasant line and disappear into the hole. *poof-gone* As an outside observer, though, time will appear to go slower and slower and slower... eventually almost appearing to stop. I wonder how many aeons you'd have to watch before something disappeared into the singularity... This part has always confused me a bit, too.
Well, I hope that helped a little bit. Keep in mind I could be dead wrong on all four of these, but at least I tried. If someone else can give a better, or at least more accurate, response, please do, 'cause now I wanna know!
Creating black holes? Oh, good...
"Hey cool, a black hole! Oh, damn, it sank through the floor, where it will center in the core of the earth and digest the planet over 1000 years like a Sarlacc."
Certifications, labs like this, and Official Stamps of Approval mean perhaps more than they ought (corporate decision making being what it is) but that's hard to get around.
Very, very true. I wonder how long it will be before a company like CompTIA begins to offer "standard" Linux software technician certifications? Are we going to start seeing John Doe, CLE?
Or is this already going on and I'm a day late, dollar short as usual?
50,000 years. Hrm.
50,000 years is an insane amount of time to orbit a time capsule. They claim to have taken into account everything there is to account for, but I think they may have missed one of the most fundamental processes of life on this planet: evolution.
50,000 years is roughly 5 times the sum of all recorded (known?) human history thus far. In that time, technology has increased exponentially and, recently, at greater than exponential rates. Won't we hit a plateau some time in the next, oh, 2,000 years or so? Sooner or later, physical, mechanical technology will slump in favor of other forms. Perhaps biological.. or psychological.
If this thing really lasts 50,000 years, who's to say that humanity will be able to interpret it when it falls? Our entire structure of thinking may be altered by then. Perhaps symbolic thinking will be too "primitive" for the descendants of the human race to waste their time on. It might sound to them like dolphins sound to us.
There is another possibility...
Arthur C. Clarke had an interesting concept in the 2001 series; a race of incredibly advanced beings found a way to write their minds into the granular structure of spacetime itself. They became god-like beings of pure energy, with no more need for a planet than we have for an appendix.
When this thing falls, it may fall to an world barren of humanity. Not because we blew ourselves up, or got hit by a comet, or any number of the zillions of ways we could be wiped out as a species, but merely because we don't need the world anymore.
Evolution, artificial or otherwise, will be the single largest factor in whether or not Keo can deliver our messages to future generations.
Not only that, but Prowse spoke all of Vader's lines and was dubbed over later by JEJ. IIRC Prowse was rather pissed about that... because he didn't know about it until he saw the completed movie.
What?
And the church apologized to him in 1996, I believe. Which has always cracked me up; better late than never?