What says that there's not a life form that does not breath oxygen, is solid enough to walk on Jupiter and uses light to sustain it self.
If you throw out the "solid enough to walk on Jupiter" part, such an organism already exists that you may have heard of, sometimes called a "plant."
Nobody said that life needs oxygen to survive. You assumed that others were assuming it, which is an awfully big assumption to make, not having the ability to read minds and all.
The flat planet thing: nobody thought that the sun and the universe orbited a flat planet. Back when it was thought that the universe orbited Earth, people knew Earth was round. IIRC, people were theorizing that the Earth was round as far back as the Greeks. Even before Columbus "discovered" the new world, educated people thought the world was round but that the Atlantic ocean was too big to be sailed across.
Basically, they had no idea how much light was reaching the surface. The probe wouldn't have lived long enough for manual gain control (it would have to take a picture, send it to Earth, the Russians would have to process it, adjust the gain, send the gain adjust command to the probe, repeat until a usable image comes back), so they gave the probe's on-board camera automatic gain control.
Once they got the image from the probe, they converted the raw logarithmic data into a more usable format. Then it was adjusted to be viewable by a human.
Yeah. God forbid that, as technology progresses, the corporations have to keep up.
While I agree to an extent that something like this should be as backwards-compatible as possible, sometimes it's better to just throw out all the old legacy stuff and start anew. The NTSC TV signal is a horrible mess. And I'm sure that at least for a little while companies will be selling converters to allow people to watch the digital signal on their analog TV, even if it is at much lower quality and about half the resolution.
Besides, it's not just digital. It's HDTV, which means higher resolution (hopefully 1080i; 720p shouldn't even be allowed to be called HDTV, since even the most vanilla, plain Jane, consumer-grade digital camcorder records at 720i). I usually don't get excited by the latest techno-fads (still no Palm Pilot), but the prospect of being able to watch a movie at a decent resolution at my house is enough to pique my interest.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart alone is worth the price for basic cable (assuming the cable company isn't just a bunch of asshats who put Comedy Central (a self-admitted basic cable channel) only in their premium service).
While I agree that 90% of television is a wasteland of lowest-common-denominator, "here's what to think" programming, there are the occasional gems.
The last time I saw my parents (who've got satellite TV from Dish Network), I secretly put all the non-kiddie educational channels (all the Discovery channels, The Science Channel, PBS, etc.), as well as stuff like C-SPAN (or whatever the one is that's constantly broadcasting congressional sessions), on their Favorites list. I actually got depressed when, a few days later, they called me up and asked how to get "all these new fucking garbage channels" off their favorites list.
TV broadcasters are using the spectrum that belongs to the US taxpayers...
That's citizens. Let's say that again, just to help you remember it: citizens.
The fact that, whether by a corporation or my own damn government, I am only referred to as a consumer or a taxpayer (suggesting that, even in the case of the gov't, they only care about the money that I give to them) really bothers me.
Maybe if everyone demanded that at least the gov't called us citizens (or at least "the people"), it would change, and the gov't would have to start doing that whole "for the people, by the people" thing again. But the likelihood that enough people are going to actually stand up for their rights (including the right to be thought of as a person instead of just a part of the beurocrats' gravy train) is pretty slim. Too many Americans have been (purposely) distracted by when J-Lo and Ben will get married, whether it's Nike or Adidas that's the trend to pay them to advertise for this month (by purchasing clothing with their logos on them), and the like, to worry about anything other than our right to consume.
Nope. The had 20-bit addressing. 16 bits will only get you 64k of address space. 20 bits gets you a full megabyte (of which the upper 480k was taken up by the BIOS, leaving 640k for whatever else).
There is more to a processor's "bitness" than the size of its data bus. If there weren't, the Pentium 3 that I'm typing this on would be a 64-bit machine.
The other things to consider: the size of the general purpose registers, the size of the address space, and most importantly, the machine's word size. The 8088 and 8086 are the same in all these categories (16-bit general purpose registers, 20-bit address space, 16-bit word size).
The 8088 was basically just an 8086 with the data bus cut down to 8 bits to make the motherboards cheaper to manufacture. Doing this does not make in an 8-bit machine.
What about the things that aren't profitable, require long-term commitments, or are just plain too expensive to attract the private sector?
Do you really think that any corporations care about the atmospheric makeup of Pluto, collecting samples from Mars, landing on asteroids, etc.? Of course they don't, there's virtually no possibility of direct monetary profit, and any indirect monetary profit would likely be too far off for most companies.
That's why we have NASA and the ESA. Sending probes is important. The experience gained from long-term human habitation of space is important (we're going to have to do it sooner or later; please, let's skip the "but manned spaceflights are worthless" arguments this time). But there isn't any money to be made doing it, so don't expect the corporations to make many advances there.
In all likelyhood, at least for the next few decades, corporate interest in space is going to end at Earth orbits closer than the moon, for a few Space Jets, satellites, and things like that. What corporation is going to want to send a probe to Europa to see if there's a liquid ocean under all that ice?
I'm not against the private sector getting involved in space. In fact, I think it's great and necessary. I already thought John Carmack was a cool guy, and the fact that he's bankrolling his own aerospace company makes him even cooler. But we still need to do the purely scientific stuff, and for the forseeable future that means NASA, the ESA, and whatever's left of the soviet space program.
>>If we pull all of our troops out of Europe, who will keep the Germans out of France?
>Frace's highway tolls will.
Yes, but what will happen when the French military goes on strike to protest having to spend more than 35 hours a week fighting off the Germans? Hmm?;)
200ft long? Where did you get that? Having actually seen one of the "wind farms" in question, I'm pretty sure the blades aren't 200 feet long. I really hope you don't think they look like the stereotypical wind-mill, because they don't.
And that area is tremendously windy. Trying to drive down the road (into the wind) in a 4 cylinder Saturn LS, I was only going 50mph despite having the gas pedal all the way to the floor. My friend was quite accurate when describing that part of CA as "windy as fuck."
I would imagine that the plane of Earth's orbit would be largely irrelevant, because the Earth's axis is not perpendicular to its orbital plane. In other words, the Earth is "tilted."
Unless the Arecibo radio telescope was so carefully planed that it was built juuust the right distance from the equator so as to be aligned with the galactic plane, it's either going to point "down" or "up", and either way that's largely away from the galactic disc.
Except that the Earth is tilted. Therefor, the Arecibo radio telescope doesn't point straight into the galactic disc.
And it only looks flat when you view it from afar. Just look out at the night sky, and see how many stars are "North" of you, and how many are "South" of you. There are stars in the Southern hemisphere that can't be seen from the Northern hemisphere, and vice versa. Because of this, one could assume that since Arecibo has such a limited view of the sky, we could very well miss a star from which the telltale signals of an alien civilization would emerge.
Worse, they don't even get the Arecibo telescope for a continuous 24 hours. Rather, they get it for 8 hours a day, making it even more limited.
Basically, a patent is for something that you invented, such as a better mousetrap, or a new compression algorithm.
A copyright is for something that you created, like a painting or a screenplay.
If you have trouble, an easy way to remember it is that you get a copyright if you write a new book, and a patent if you invent a new book printing process.
I've glanced over some software patents. The ones that I looked at weren't very specific. They basically said, "This patent is for this, a non-obvious way for doing X."
This particular patent sounds even more vague, along the lines of, "This patent is for selling things over the internet," probably with little or no mention of how the system would actually work. Basically, I think that for anything technology-related the USPTO is like, "Oh, wait... technical, computer nerd stuff... ok, yeah, here you go."
Except that asteriods probably aren't big enough to have an internal source of heat, in other words their insides are as solid and cold as their outsides. Therefor, no diamonds from lava flowing to the surface (because there wouldn't be any lava, nor any heat).
This would leave large impacts as the only possible source of heat. There probably aren't very many impacts big enough to create the necessary heat and pressure without completely destroying the asteroid, making asteroid diamond deposits that are large enough to be worth the time and expense to harvest them very rare.
Besides, doesn't it take heat and pressure over and extended period of time to create a diamond? Meaning that one asteroid hitting another would be over too quickly for diamonds to form?
I don't see why they couldn't just keep the Arianne-4 in production untill all the problems with the Arianne-5 had been ironed out. Seems to me they were trying to fix something that wasn't broken.
JPEGS aren't going anywhere. They beat PNG (as far as file sizes are concerned) hands down for pictures, game screenshots, etc., basically anything that doesn't have large contiguous areas of the same color. The PNG people even acknowledge this.
For things that DO have large, contiguous areas of the same color (like website graphics, or the mostly black "picture of Earth from Mars" photo), PNG is usually better (file size-wise), especially if those graphics can be reduced to 8-bit indexed color.
All of The Mummy films looked bad as a whole. Yes, they had some fantastic looking shots, but most of the shots just looked awful. Even worse, the effects in The Mummy Returns actually looked worse than in the original.
The Scorpion King was no exception. The only good thing about that film was the Asian woman;)
Jabba the Hut in RotJ: horribly fake. Fake skin, inarticulate facial movement, and stupid little sidekick/friend/minion/whatever. Henson puppets almost always look fake to me.
Jabba the Hut in the new edition of Star Wars: horribly fake, but for different reasons. Like the typical Lucas "effects shot" composition: static head-on two shot, with actor off to one side (Han, on the right, in this case), and too much room for the effect (Jabba in this case) on the other side of the frame. Throw in unmatching lighting and you've got a bad effects shot.
I do agree with you, though, that too many untalented people wield it with little discretion. George Lucas is one of them. Ever notice how the CG in Steven Spielberg films looks an order of magnitude better than in a George Lucas film, despite the same company and many of the same people working on the two films (though not at the same time)?
In all those movies you mentioned, I thought the characters looked patently fake.
What I think is happening is the placebo effect: you know that Gollum is CG, so for no other reason he looks fake to you. Likewise, you know that the stiff, badly articulated puppets in the movies you mentioned are physical puppets, so subconsiously they look more "real" to you.
I, on the other hand, thought Gollum himself looked fantastic. The only real problems I noticed were compositing mistakes and situations where the lighting doesn't match up. Half the time I forgot he was a CG character and just paid attention to the story.
Slashdot Mirror
What says that there's not a life form that does not breath oxygen, is solid enough to walk on Jupiter and uses light to sustain it self.
If you throw out the "solid enough to walk on Jupiter" part, such an organism already exists that you may have heard of, sometimes called a "plant."
Nobody said that life needs oxygen to survive. You assumed that others were assuming it, which is an awfully big assumption to make, not having the ability to read minds and all.
The flat planet thing: nobody thought that the sun and the universe orbited a flat planet. Back when it was thought that the universe orbited Earth, people knew Earth was round. IIRC, people were theorizing that the Earth was round as far back as the Greeks. Even before Columbus "discovered" the new world, educated people thought the world was round but that the Atlantic ocean was too big to be sailed across.
Basically, they had no idea how much light was reaching the surface. The probe wouldn't have lived long enough for manual gain control (it would have to take a picture, send it to Earth, the Russians would have to process it, adjust the gain, send the gain adjust command to the probe, repeat until a usable image comes back), so they gave the probe's on-board camera automatic gain control.
Once they got the image from the probe, they converted the raw logarithmic data into a more usable format. Then it was adjusted to be viewable by a human.
Yeah. God forbid that, as technology progresses, the corporations have to keep up.
While I agree to an extent that something like this should be as backwards-compatible as possible, sometimes it's better to just throw out all the old legacy stuff and start anew. The NTSC TV signal is a horrible mess. And I'm sure that at least for a little while companies will be selling converters to allow people to watch the digital signal on their analog TV, even if it is at much lower quality and about half the resolution.
Besides, it's not just digital. It's HDTV, which means higher resolution (hopefully 1080i; 720p shouldn't even be allowed to be called HDTV, since even the most vanilla, plain Jane, consumer-grade digital camcorder records at 720i). I usually don't get excited by the latest techno-fads (still no Palm Pilot), but the prospect of being able to watch a movie at a decent resolution at my house is enough to pique my interest.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart alone is worth the price for basic cable (assuming the cable company isn't just a bunch of asshats who put Comedy Central (a self-admitted basic cable channel) only in their premium service).
While I agree that 90% of television is a wasteland of lowest-common-denominator, "here's what to think" programming, there are the occasional gems.
The last time I saw my parents (who've got satellite TV from Dish Network), I secretly put all the non-kiddie educational channels (all the Discovery channels, The Science Channel, PBS, etc.), as well as stuff like C-SPAN (or whatever the one is that's constantly broadcasting congressional sessions), on their Favorites list. I actually got depressed when, a few days later, they called me up and asked how to get "all these new fucking garbage channels" off their favorites list.
TV broadcasters are using the spectrum that belongs to the US taxpayers...
That's citizens. Let's say that again, just to help you remember it: citizens.
The fact that, whether by a corporation or my own damn government, I am only referred to as a consumer or a taxpayer (suggesting that, even in the case of the gov't, they only care about the money that I give to them) really bothers me.
Maybe if everyone demanded that at least the gov't called us citizens (or at least "the people"), it would change, and the gov't would have to start doing that whole "for the people, by the people" thing again. But the likelihood that enough people are going to actually stand up for their rights (including the right to be thought of as a person instead of just a part of the beurocrats' gravy train) is pretty slim. Too many Americans have been (purposely) distracted by when J-Lo and Ben will get married, whether it's Nike or Adidas that's the trend to pay them to advertise for this month (by purchasing clothing with their logos on them), and the like, to worry about anything other than our right to consume.
"Consume. Marry and reproduce." Indeed.
Nope. The had 20-bit addressing. 16 bits will only get you 64k of address space. 20 bits gets you a full megabyte (of which the upper 480k was taken up by the BIOS, leaving 640k for whatever else).
There is more to a processor's "bitness" than the size of its data bus. If there weren't, the Pentium 3 that I'm typing this on would be a 64-bit machine.
The other things to consider: the size of the general purpose registers, the size of the address space, and most importantly, the machine's word size. The 8088 and 8086 are the same in all these categories (16-bit general purpose registers, 20-bit address space, 16-bit word size).
The 8088 was basically just an 8086 with the data bus cut down to 8 bits to make the motherboards cheaper to manufacture. Doing this does not make in an 8-bit machine.
What about the things that aren't profitable, require long-term commitments, or are just plain too expensive to attract the private sector?
Do you really think that any corporations care about the atmospheric makeup of Pluto, collecting samples from Mars, landing on asteroids, etc.? Of course they don't, there's virtually no possibility of direct monetary profit, and any indirect monetary profit would likely be too far off for most companies.
That's why we have NASA and the ESA. Sending probes is important. The experience gained from long-term human habitation of space is important (we're going to have to do it sooner or later; please, let's skip the "but manned spaceflights are worthless" arguments this time). But there isn't any money to be made doing it, so don't expect the corporations to make many advances there.
In all likelyhood, at least for the next few decades, corporate interest in space is going to end at Earth orbits closer than the moon, for a few Space Jets, satellites, and things like that. What corporation is going to want to send a probe to Europa to see if there's a liquid ocean under all that ice?
I'm not against the private sector getting involved in space. In fact, I think it's great and necessary. I already thought John Carmack was a cool guy, and the fact that he's bankrolling his own aerospace company makes him even cooler. But we still need to do the purely scientific stuff, and for the forseeable future that means NASA, the ESA, and whatever's left of the soviet space program.
>>If we pull all of our troops out of Europe, who will keep the Germans out of France?
;)
>Frace's highway tolls will.
Yes, but what will happen when the French military goes on strike to protest having to spend more than 35 hours a week fighting off the Germans? Hmm?
200ft long? Where did you get that? Having actually seen one of the "wind farms" in question, I'm pretty sure the blades aren't 200 feet long. I really hope you don't think they look like the stereotypical wind-mill, because they don't.
And that area is tremendously windy. Trying to drive down the road (into the wind) in a 4 cylinder Saturn LS, I was only going 50mph despite having the gas pedal all the way to the floor. My friend was quite accurate when describing that part of CA as "windy as fuck."
Yeah, you're right. I accidentally put an extra n in there, so I must be the biggest fucktard ever.
Anybody who reads pretty much any of the space/science news websites (like SpaceFlight Now) has at least heard of the problems with the Ariane-5.
I would imagine that the plane of Earth's orbit would be largely irrelevant, because the Earth's axis is not perpendicular to its orbital plane. In other words, the Earth is "tilted."
Unless the Arecibo radio telescope was so carefully planed that it was built juuust the right distance from the equator so as to be aligned with the galactic plane, it's either going to point "down" or "up", and either way that's largely away from the galactic disc.
Except that the Earth is tilted. Therefor, the Arecibo radio telescope doesn't point straight into the galactic disc.
And it only looks flat when you view it from afar. Just look out at the night sky, and see how many stars are "North" of you, and how many are "South" of you. There are stars in the Southern hemisphere that can't be seen from the Northern hemisphere, and vice versa. Because of this, one could assume that since Arecibo has such a limited view of the sky, we could very well miss a star from which the telltale signals of an alien civilization would emerge.
Worse, they don't even get the Arecibo telescope for a continuous 24 hours. Rather, they get it for 8 hours a day, making it even more limited.
God dammit you guys! For the last time, I am not under alien control!
*ZAP*
I love to sing-ah, 'bout the moon-ah
And the June-ah and the spring-ah
I love to sing-ah
"Goddammit, you guys! For the last time, there is no probe up my ass, and I am not under alien control!"
:)
Any guesses?
A patent and a copyright aren't the same thing.
Basically, a patent is for something that you invented, such as a better mousetrap, or a new compression algorithm.
A copyright is for something that you created, like a painting or a screenplay.
If you have trouble, an easy way to remember it is that you get a copyright if you write a new book, and a patent if you invent a new book printing process.
The only problem with US judges is that they're so easy to buy ;)
Be the first kid on your street to collect them all!
I've glanced over some software patents. The ones that I looked at weren't very specific. They basically said, "This patent is for this, a non-obvious way for doing X."
This particular patent sounds even more vague, along the lines of, "This patent is for selling things over the internet," probably with little or no mention of how the system would actually work. Basically, I think that for anything technology-related the USPTO is like, "Oh, wait... technical, computer nerd stuff... ok, yeah, here you go."
Except that asteriods probably aren't big enough to have an internal source of heat, in other words their insides are as solid and cold as their outsides. Therefor, no diamonds from lava flowing to the surface (because there wouldn't be any lava, nor any heat).
This would leave large impacts as the only possible source of heat. There probably aren't very many impacts big enough to create the necessary heat and pressure without completely destroying the asteroid, making asteroid diamond deposits that are large enough to be worth the time and expense to harvest them very rare.
Besides, doesn't it take heat and pressure over and extended period of time to create a diamond? Meaning that one asteroid hitting another would be over too quickly for diamonds to form?
Or am I completely 100% off-base on this?
From what I've read the Ariane-4 had a very good track record. The Ariane-5, OTOH, well, *BOOM* ;)
I don't see why they couldn't just keep the Arianne-4 in production untill all the problems with the Arianne-5 had been ironed out. Seems to me they were trying to fix something that wasn't broken.
JPEGS aren't going anywhere. They beat PNG (as far as file sizes are concerned) hands down for pictures, game screenshots, etc., basically anything that doesn't have large contiguous areas of the same color. The PNG people even acknowledge this.
For things that DO have large, contiguous areas of the same color (like website graphics, or the mostly black "picture of Earth from Mars" photo), PNG is usually better (file size-wise), especially if those graphics can be reduced to 8-bit indexed color.
All of The Mummy films looked bad as a whole. Yes, they had some fantastic looking shots, but most of the shots just looked awful. Even worse, the effects in The Mummy Returns actually looked worse than in the original.
;)
The Scorpion King was no exception. The only good thing about that film was the Asian woman
Jabba the Hut in RotJ: horribly fake. Fake skin, inarticulate facial movement, and stupid little sidekick/friend/minion/whatever. Henson puppets almost always look fake to me.
Jabba the Hut in the new edition of Star Wars: horribly fake, but for different reasons. Like the typical Lucas "effects shot" composition: static head-on two shot, with actor off to one side (Han, on the right, in this case), and too much room for the effect (Jabba in this case) on the other side of the frame. Throw in unmatching lighting and you've got a bad effects shot.
I do agree with you, though, that too many untalented people wield it with little discretion. George Lucas is one of them. Ever notice how the CG in Steven Spielberg films looks an order of magnitude better than in a George Lucas film, despite the same company and many of the same people working on the two films (though not at the same time)?
In all those movies you mentioned, I thought the characters looked patently fake.
What I think is happening is the placebo effect: you know that Gollum is CG, so for no other reason he looks fake to you. Likewise, you know that the stiff, badly articulated puppets in the movies you mentioned are physical puppets, so subconsiously they look more "real" to you.
I, on the other hand, thought Gollum himself looked fantastic. The only real problems I noticed were compositing mistakes and situations where the lighting doesn't match up. Half the time I forgot he was a CG character and just paid attention to the story.