While small bubbles do make for high pressure, and appearently temperatures as hot as the surface of the sun. Last I checked that wasn't terribly hot, certainly very cold where fusion is concerned.
The fact of the matter is the "academics" who originally wrote an article and did the little experiment had an enourmous burden of proof. They knew this at the outset. To claim that at temperatures as hot as the sun, and tiny bubbles were enough to provide the enourmous pressures needed for fusion is the very definition of increadible. Frankly, they should have been VERY suspicious of their own results. Skepticism isn't something that should have even HAD to have come from outside their project.
At least they'll have the comfort of knowing that networks will probably not pick up the story, credibility being in such short supply. Except for Fox News, they appearently don't have the exacting standards The Weekly World News insists on.
No they have to do with the responsive user interface. You broadend the discussion to include hardware. In my case, the 48 hour frames are pretty much just a factor of the chip. Which of course would have a linear relationship with my render times.
And the results of a single application are important. In fact, to me that's all that's important as when it comes to games I favor Bandit Kings of Ancient China in all its EGA glory, Stars!, and curse the fact that Stars! Supernova will never be.
Microsoft didn't destroy OpenGL. It just languished while D3D grew. Will OpenGL v 2 be better? Maybe. Will trueSpace support it? One assumes so. Will it be better? Probably initially. But Microsoft will catch up again. Fortunately, when that time comes, I'll have the choice of which enviroment I wish to use.
I would argue I have more freedom. I can choose. Within a single application, I can use OpenGL or D3D as I see fit. An freedom you have forsaken for something akin to a religion. Your choice. And you pay for it in your own way. I pay in mine. You've even admitted as much. Now you seem to be saying the price I'm paying is too high. And I'm sure to you it seems that way. But you may rest assured I find your limited options an equally extravagent choice. But unlike you, I know that's *MY* perception, which I don't pretend is the objective truth.
In the end, freedom is the ability to choose. We are both equally free, as we both enjoy the same options. But based on our individual needs, and desires, we made individual choices. Not exactly surprising. While I might have rambled on about how the only thing you can't really buy more of is time. You've rambled on about how microsoft is destroying the world, despite the fact that I chose trueSpace, not microsoft. And as nice as the idea of a free software commune in a virtual marxist society might be, I've long since abandond such notions.
You dream of a world where there is one API to rule them all. I favor one where people choose what works best for them. And your argument, is no argument at all, it your opinion. To which you're entitled. But the fact remains, your choices have consequenses, and as such are not free of cost.
It is what it is. 3x faster isn't always 3x times more productive, or 3x whatever. While people are slow giving computers tasks, sometimes those tasks can be enourmously complex and take the computer a while to accomplish. Hybrid radiosity solutions and volumetric redering come to mind. In fact, my brain can figure out what it should look like in seconds, it might take me a week to tell the computer how to do it, and it might take day for the computer to actually accomplish the task I set before it. My record is 48 hrs to render a single frame. Do I do it profesionally? No, I can't texture or light a scene to save my life. But, for whatever reason, I enjoy it. However, I do not find it enjoyable to wait 2 days, for a frame. In this case, processing power directly, and linearly affects my "productivity". But that's one of a billion instances.
While there is a certain charm to the marxist simplicity you seem determined to frame the problem in, yet if it were accurate the market really would reflect this. It's not just doomed dot coms that had the gig ethernet. If a P90 with 16 MB ram, a 528 MB hd, and a 10 Mb card really did the same job as an array of xeon web servers, no one would ever use anything else.
The people have voted, they've decided not every problem looks like a nail. They've decided they need a wide variety of unix varients. They've decided they need some things that are free, and some things that require spot inspections from microsoft, and help desk contracts from sun. They decided against one kind of shoe, no matter how efficently produced, for all the people.
But it doesn't apply to games anymore than it applies to shoes, or any other good. Games are important, many billions of dollars important. They cut into TV ad revenues, they cut into school for some (I used to know a guy who had to take a quarter off school because of Quake I), they entertain, and sometimes train. If they truly were superfluous, they would be treated as such. They're not.
You may not think much of them. But that is your individual subjective experience. While that is representative of some segment of the population, you cannot say it is a feature that is true for a large fraction, let alone a majority of the population. More over, I mostly encounter the choice when I putter around in trueSpace 5 since I have the choice of OpenGL or D3D enviroments. When I first got trueSpace 4, OpenGL was a better choice, now, in trueSpace 5, D3D seems more responsive. And contrary to what you find, I happen to prefer a responsive user interface. But in my defence there was a time when I considered lynx to be the best web browser, and emacs the best text editor and with bbdb the best contact management software anyone would need. Obviously I was an idiot. But, it certainly was responsive.
What's important is the only opinions that count are the one people are willing to spend resources on. Since you're not the only person spending resources, your's is not the only opinion of worth. In the end, the cost of everything is measured in dollars, or whatever the local currency might be. In fact, the only thing one cannot really buy is time. We've only got about a billion heart beats each, if you choose to spend some waiting, I choose to spend some making accurate 3d models that look butt ugly, and someone else chooses to spend some fraggin people he doesn't know in 1920x1600 photo real glory, to each their own. That's really what freedom is after all.
I use GCC despite it being a slower compiler. I use XFree86 despite it being a slower windowing system. I use Mozilla despite it being a slower browser. Freedom is more important than speed.
In this case, instead of paying with your pocket book, you pay with your pocket watch. While your "freedom" might be the only quality you care for, that hardly makes it the only one that matters, as you don't buy all the software. I, and many others, are as uncomfortable with your trade-offs as, you must be with ours.
While I never actually hated the voice overs, they added nothing to the film. Certainly, they did not add as much as the scene extensions and the true ending.
Deckard seeing Gaff's little calling card, the elevator doors close and, bam, credits. That's the perfect ending to the movie.
He found his humanity with a little help from technology and chooses an uncertain life, over quiet wait for the grave. As opposed to some fruity fly by, and silly voice over as epilogue, it's no contest.
I think Ridley's statements that the unicorn dream was intended to show that Deckard was really a replicant are a little suspect. (After all, the rest of the movie doesn't really support that view, the interaction with Gaff and Captain Bryant (I think), but there is certainly nothing wrong with using the dream to suggest it, and the unicorn, particularly in that part of the film can be interprited to have other symbolic significance.) But that said, while the dream isn't exactly what I would consider anything remotely like a dream as I have experienced them, I don't think it particularly detracts from the movie. I must say I can't recall a movie I've ever seen that did what I would call an accurate depiction of a dream.
I and the other Good Twins agree, the director's cut of Bladerunner is vastly superior, mostly due to the true ending. And it's a damn shame that the studio interfered, but I consider myself fortunate that as hobbled by studio fools as it was, Bladerunner gathered enough of a following, and ment enough to Scott that I eventually got to see it done right. Look at what the studio system did to Fincher with Alien 3. The movie as released is fairly unremarkable, but if you've ever had the good fortune, or perhaps misfortune, to see the work print for the movie, you'll see what you missed out on. Even incomplete and lacking a score, Fincher actually accomplished the impossible, with inadaquate resources no less, only to have executives, who appearently don't watch movies for recreation, ruin parts of it for no discernable reason.
I could point out your foolish assumption by saying that when Steven Speilberg is allowed to make a movie his way you end up with stuff like that piece of shit 1941. But really, what's the point?
My guess is that they gave it the later slot not because of any spicy language or hot toon action, but because of the slower ploting over some of the middle episodes. I would bet that they are of the impression that the youngsters coming up would find the lack of explosions and derth of exposition less interesting that whatever runs against it on nickelodeon or the wb, perhaps never to return.
That said, I don't think this series is actually slow. In fact I think it is the best of the gundam series. The animation is top notch throughout, the story is excellent in premis and very well excecuted. If there is a negative, it's the absolute inability of the original writers to provide half decent names for anything. Hardly a problem unique to this particular series.
If I might talk out of my ass for a moment....
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I STILL Want My HDTV
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I'd like to make a case for blaming Neilson ratings. They determine whether a tv is tuned to a particular channel, and not whether people are actually watching it right? Well that allows TV stations to over report their viewership. Since media conglomerates want to appear to have more people watching for longer times, in prime demographics, maybe useing that extra spectrum they were given for many standard channels rather than one HD channel would allow them to more efficiently inflate their viewership to increase their ad revenue, while provideding more time to schedule infomercial programming for us insomniacs.
But if there were accurate reporting, ie people leaveing to get a pop when a commercial came on, sleeping through the news, in short if it tracked how much time people really spent watching TV, they might find trends which I'll preceed to predict with no basis in fact and only wild speculation as my guide. I would bet people with HD TV's recieving HD programing would spend more time watching TV than average, watch longer, and prefer HD programs to standard programs. Since they have the money to spend on purchases like HD TV's and are willing to spend it, it puts them in a better demographic. But most importantly, I'll try to justify this assertion with hand waving and magic powder, that they'd be more likely to watch commercials, as HD commercials would feature more eye candy and probably be more entertaining. And I'm not just talking about Victoria's Secret.
If the viewing habbits were accurately compiled, and my prognostication came to pass there might be a very real, very powerful market pressure where to get the really lucrative advertisers you have to have a HD signal.
For a ceramic, Alumina is pretty tough, but that's like saying for a 5th grader Todd Peterman is pretty tough. It takes very little to propigate cracks through ceramics. There some stuff that can be done, but ceramics aren't metal. And alumina has always been transparent.
Now this MIGHT be news if they some how got their alumina powders on a nano scale where the alumina crystal grains are smaller than the wavelengths of light, then you'll actually get a relatively tough, and see through material. Not be cause something magical happens on that scale, but because the crack length will be huge, and actually require the formation of a large surface which would take a lot of energy despite the low toughness of the alumina. That would be news. BIG news. At least to me. But that's not what they said.
They said they made a 10cm alumina tile. Big whoop.
They might be able to enhance it by making it like corning wear, but that summery of a press release was clearly too light to provide that kind of detail. Which might have been interesting, although not news.
I would bet that it being transparent means they either used a spectacularly fine powder, or it is basically fully dense as there doesn't appear to be many internal surfaces to scatter light (ie it's not opaque).
Further more, I would bet that the flaw(s) introduced by the bullet would not be what caused it to fail, I would bet that pre-existing flaws near the bullets point of impact would be vastly expanded. Worse yet, the alumina tile might even bounce the bullet off instead of just stop it.
Maybe the news is the simplicity and low cost? Too bad that didn't make it into the news then.
Either way it sounds like it's nothing but a press release for a non-large company that's really happy that they might picked up as a contractor for the Department of Defence.
Yawn. Already, we've given it more consideration that it deserves.
While I play a lawyer on slashdot, my legal advice can result in serious personal injury, or even death. And unless you're cuban, it may even get you deported.
Standard disclaimers aside, you agree to it by your purchase of their product AFAIK.
But more importantly they have enough cash to sue you until you live under an overpass and have your wages from selling cans garnished to pay your attorneys legal fees.
IIRC back when I owned nintendo games before I got scammed by sega, I noticed in the fine print that Nintendo claims you are not allowed to make backups of their software. I would imagin that this would persist, and they will of course argue in court that fair use backups aren't necessary due to the reliability of their cartriges.
I think it's a good fight to pick, but I wouldn't want my ass on the line. Maybe someone should quickly code up a free mp3 player, and visualization program for this thing. And viola, fair use.
If you're into that sort of thing, which is most definately cool. You should look at some of the stuff with spider silk. There's a company that genetically engineer goats to express the stuff spider silk is made of in their milk. (one would assume the golden orb spider) Then they get fetta cheese and spider silk on a reasonable scale. (I don't know if fetta cheese comes from goats, but I do like the way it just rolls off the tongue, so if you're a cheese expert feel free to interject).
I would also like to think that our military personel have something a little more substantial that alumina, perhaps silicon carbide, or better yet a ceremet of silicon carbide and nickle (but maybe that'd be too heavy). Either way in a kevlar vest, their opaque and not windows. I think Titanium Boride has been used for bullet proof vests too.
Maybe it's me, but it seems like the time might be right for lawyers to entertain us with a class action lawsuit. If China's ISP and telecomunications companies are state owned enterprises it seems like you might be able to do something silly like sue China under one of the anti-spam laws some states have. I think the one in washington provides something like $500 per offence.
I'd love to see that full page ad, or even better commercial on late night tv. Have you recieved spam? You may have been harmed, and be owed a thousand dollars or more! We can help, but you need to help us. You can't spell sue without u!
The best would be a bulk e-mailing titled that Make Money Fast and promised thousands of dollars without ever doing anything! And best of all, nothing to pay, ever!
and the engineers all over the world...
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Transparent Aluminium
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· Score: 5, Informative
let out a giant yawn.
Alumina being transparent or strong is hardly new. Although the bullet proof glass thing is pretty funny. Alumina is not tough, it may be strong, and even greatly stronger than steel should we be talking about specific strength, but it is not tough at all. And I don't know about you, but the last thing I was between me and a bullet is a sheet of something that will shatter with countless sharp edges to cut me to ribbons.
I'm sure there are a great many chemical concerns that would be thrilled to tell you all about their alumina powders should you care to ask. But trust me, until we can do with alumina what clams can do with chalk the most interesting thing one is likely to do with alumina is make a crucible.
At least they won't have any problem demonstrating irreparable harm.
The trick is demonstrating microsoft is responsible for it. When you have 36 billion is cash on hand people just see deep pockets so why not play court room lotto.
But...
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
It's from memory so bear with me if I'm not 100% accurate. Seems to me the second amendment states you have a right to join the national guard. One weekend a month, two weeks a year.
I'm all for RESPONSABLE people owning guns, and being a REASONABLE person, I've no problem with the government determining who the reasonable, responsable people are.
Episode II looks like it will have one redeming quality. Laughs, lots and lots of unintentional laughs. The impression I got from the trailers was that it was going to where no star *wars* movie had gone before. Lucas may as well call it Return of the Alien From L.A. Now if only there was a Kathy Ireland cameo, it might just be perfect.
If we're going to talk about them as a "concept" then the first table of contents, index, bibliography, dictionary, etc ad nausium, trump BT's "concept". It's the encoding that automates the looking up of the object of interest that makes hyperlinks useful and even interesting at all.
That's exactly how I found both They Might Be Giants and Bare Naked Ladies. Sure it might not have been mp3's and might have been cassette tapes. But without those illicit copies I never would have found either of those bands, and in the case of TMBG I own every on of the albums they've put to CD. I wouldn't have gone to shows. I simply wouldn't know any better. Well when BNL got famous I probably would have found them. But still...
The truth is the oscar voters probably didn't see a lot of the movies, they saw excerpts on video tapes the studios sent to them.
It's all about what one is looking for. The awards show that most reflects what I consider to be good movies, is, perhaps sadly, the MTV movie awards. The oscars is a mutual masterbation party where the predominently uninteresting people give strokes to other uninteresting people in return for strokes of their own, and a few interesting people get stokes to either legitimize the whole affair, or by accident. I like to see the deserving rewarded for their skill. But I am so consistantly disapointed by the Acadamy choices, it's hard to be even interested, let alone excited.
Regardless of pithy comments AC's have to offer, this is neither accurate nor new. "State of the Art" comes to mind. Is the cg in Tron not art? Laser light shows? The butt ugly architecture of the 70's? The beautiful Konsai(sp?) Airport? Modern graceful bridges?
Ever since man found fire, and began to share his knowledge, there has been a boundry between what is known and true, and what his intuition told him. To me, that is the domain of art. Where the knowledge can be described with paper and pencil and some formal model its technology. But when it leaves that domain, and you're counting on someone's skilled hand, be it behind a welding torch, or a keyboard, that is art.
IIRC my teaching correctly, it was the Nazi's inability to recognize that they needed to remove the Boron from their graphite that frustrated their efforts and forced them to move on to heavy water.
Many years ago when I first heard TMBG there were some EE's that were trying to make a case for Birdhouse In Your Soul being a science song, the "Blue Canary Nightlight" being a metaphore for an electron. Which of course it isn't. But hey, who would've known that New York was once New Amsterdam without the best damn band that I almost never hear on the radio. Not I.
They Might Be Giant Scientists
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Science Songs as MP3
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· Score: 3, Interesting
They also sing a song about Pavlove (Dinner Bell), one about mammals, (convienently enough Mammal), and one about Alexander Grahm Bell, then a smattering of other more obscure historical figures. None of which were mentioned on the linked sight, incidently.
Appearently he his. Once more Watto, the stupid flying thing, has taken to wearing a beret in an attempt to be yet more queer. To say nothing of what some people are calling the "Forbidden Love" trailer that some saw before Fellowship of The Ring. It looks like it will go past bad. The question is will it stop at bad, but funny, or head straight for The Alien From L.A. bad. At least Nsych is back in it, without them I'd wonder if George Lucas would be able to ever completely defile his creation.
Slashdot Mirror
While small bubbles do make for high pressure, and appearently temperatures as hot as the surface of the sun. Last I checked that wasn't terribly hot, certainly very cold where fusion is concerned.
The fact of the matter is the "academics" who originally wrote an article and did the little experiment had an enourmous burden of proof. They knew this at the outset. To claim that at temperatures as hot as the sun, and tiny bubbles were enough to provide the enourmous pressures needed for fusion is the very definition of increadible. Frankly, they should have been VERY suspicious of their own results. Skepticism isn't something that should have even HAD to have come from outside their project.
At least they'll have the comfort of knowing that networks will probably not pick up the story, credibility being in such short supply. Except for Fox News, they appearently don't have the exacting standards The Weekly World News insists on.
No they have to do with the responsive user interface. You broadend the discussion to include hardware. In my case, the 48 hour frames are pretty much just a factor of the chip. Which of course would have a linear relationship with my render times.
And the results of a single application are important. In fact, to me that's all that's important as when it comes to games I favor Bandit Kings of Ancient China in all its EGA glory, Stars!, and curse the fact that Stars! Supernova will never be.
Microsoft didn't destroy OpenGL. It just languished while D3D grew. Will OpenGL v 2 be better? Maybe. Will trueSpace support it? One assumes so. Will it be better? Probably initially. But Microsoft will catch up again. Fortunately, when that time comes, I'll have the choice of which enviroment I wish to use.
I would argue I have more freedom. I can choose. Within a single application, I can use OpenGL or D3D as I see fit. An freedom you have forsaken for something akin to a religion. Your choice. And you pay for it in your own way. I pay in mine. You've even admitted as much. Now you seem to be saying the price I'm paying is too high. And I'm sure to you it seems that way. But you may rest assured I find your limited options an equally extravagent choice. But unlike you, I know that's *MY* perception, which I don't pretend is the objective truth.
In the end, freedom is the ability to choose. We are both equally free, as we both enjoy the same options. But based on our individual needs, and desires, we made individual choices. Not exactly surprising. While I might have rambled on about how the only thing you can't really buy more of is time. You've rambled on about how microsoft is destroying the world, despite the fact that I chose trueSpace, not microsoft. And as nice as the idea of a free software commune in a virtual marxist society might be, I've long since abandond such notions.
You dream of a world where there is one API to rule them all. I favor one where people choose what works best for them. And your argument, is no argument at all, it your opinion. To which you're entitled. But the fact remains, your choices have consequenses, and as such are not free of cost.
It is what it is. 3x faster isn't always 3x times more productive, or 3x whatever. While people are slow giving computers tasks, sometimes those tasks can be enourmously complex and take the computer a while to accomplish. Hybrid radiosity solutions and volumetric redering come to mind. In fact, my brain can figure out what it should look like in seconds, it might take me a week to tell the computer how to do it, and it might take day for the computer to actually accomplish the task I set before it. My record is 48 hrs to render a single frame. Do I do it profesionally? No, I can't texture or light a scene to save my life. But, for whatever reason, I enjoy it. However, I do not find it enjoyable to wait 2 days, for a frame. In this case, processing power directly, and linearly affects my "productivity". But that's one of a billion instances.
While there is a certain charm to the marxist simplicity you seem determined to frame the problem in, yet if it were accurate the market really would reflect this. It's not just doomed dot coms that had the gig ethernet. If a P90 with 16 MB ram, a 528 MB hd, and a 10 Mb card really did the same job as an array of xeon web servers, no one would ever use anything else.
The people have voted, they've decided not every problem looks like a nail. They've decided they need a wide variety of unix varients. They've decided they need some things that are free, and some things that require spot inspections from microsoft, and help desk contracts from sun. They decided against one kind of shoe, no matter how efficently produced, for all the people.
But it doesn't apply to games anymore than it applies to shoes, or any other good. Games are important, many billions of dollars important. They cut into TV ad revenues, they cut into school for some (I used to know a guy who had to take a quarter off school because of Quake I), they entertain, and sometimes train. If they truly were superfluous, they would be treated as such. They're not.
You may not think much of them. But that is your individual subjective experience. While that is representative of some segment of the population, you cannot say it is a feature that is true for a large fraction, let alone a majority of the population. More over, I mostly encounter the choice when I putter around in trueSpace 5 since I have the choice of OpenGL or D3D enviroments. When I first got trueSpace 4, OpenGL was a better choice, now, in trueSpace 5, D3D seems more responsive. And contrary to what you find, I happen to prefer a responsive user interface. But in my defence there was a time when I considered lynx to be the best web browser, and emacs the best text editor and with bbdb the best contact management software anyone would need. Obviously I was an idiot. But, it certainly was responsive.
What's important is the only opinions that count are the one people are willing to spend resources on. Since you're not the only person spending resources, your's is not the only opinion of worth. In the end, the cost of everything is measured in dollars, or whatever the local currency might be. In fact, the only thing one cannot really buy is time. We've only got about a billion heart beats each, if you choose to spend some waiting, I choose to spend some making accurate 3d models that look butt ugly, and someone else chooses to spend some fraggin people he doesn't know in 1920x1600 photo real glory, to each their own. That's really what freedom is after all.
I use GCC despite it being a slower compiler. I use XFree86 despite it being a slower windowing system. I use Mozilla despite it being a slower browser. Freedom is more important than speed.
In this case, instead of paying with your pocket book, you pay with your pocket watch. While your "freedom" might be the only quality you care for, that hardly makes it the only one that matters, as you don't buy all the software. I, and many others, are as uncomfortable with your trade-offs as, you must be with ours.
While I never actually hated the voice overs, they added nothing to the film. Certainly, they did not add as much as the scene extensions and the true ending.
Deckard seeing Gaff's little calling card, the elevator doors close and, bam, credits. That's the perfect ending to the movie.
He found his humanity with a little help from technology and chooses an uncertain life, over quiet wait for the grave. As opposed to some fruity fly by, and silly voice over as epilogue, it's no contest.
I think Ridley's statements that the unicorn dream was intended to show that Deckard was really a replicant are a little suspect. (After all, the rest of the movie doesn't really support that view, the interaction with Gaff and Captain Bryant (I think), but there is certainly nothing wrong with using the dream to suggest it, and the unicorn, particularly in that part of the film can be interprited to have other symbolic significance.) But that said, while the dream isn't exactly what I would consider anything remotely like a dream as I have experienced them, I don't think it particularly detracts from the movie. I must say I can't recall a movie I've ever seen that did what I would call an accurate depiction of a dream.
I and the other Good Twins agree, the director's cut of Bladerunner is vastly superior, mostly due to the true ending. And it's a damn shame that the studio interfered, but I consider myself fortunate that as hobbled by studio fools as it was, Bladerunner gathered enough of a following, and ment enough to Scott that I eventually got to see it done right. Look at what the studio system did to Fincher with Alien 3. The movie as released is fairly unremarkable, but if you've ever had the good fortune, or perhaps misfortune, to see the work print for the movie, you'll see what you missed out on. Even incomplete and lacking a score, Fincher actually accomplished the impossible, with inadaquate resources no less, only to have executives, who appearently don't watch movies for recreation, ruin parts of it for no discernable reason.
I could point out your foolish assumption by saying that when Steven Speilberg is allowed to make a movie his way you end up with stuff like that piece of shit 1941. But really, what's the point?
My guess is that they gave it the later slot not because of any spicy language or hot toon action, but because of the slower ploting over some of the middle episodes. I would bet that they are of the impression that the youngsters coming up would find the lack of explosions and derth of exposition less interesting that whatever runs against it on nickelodeon or the wb, perhaps never to return.
That said, I don't think this series is actually slow. In fact I think it is the best of the gundam series. The animation is top notch throughout, the story is excellent in premis and very well excecuted. If there is a negative, it's the absolute inability of the original writers to provide half decent names for anything. Hardly a problem unique to this particular series.
I'd like to make a case for blaming Neilson ratings. They determine whether a tv is tuned to a particular channel, and not whether people are actually watching it right? Well that allows TV stations to over report their viewership. Since media conglomerates want to appear to have more people watching for longer times, in prime demographics, maybe useing that extra spectrum they were given for many standard channels rather than one HD channel would allow them to more efficiently inflate their viewership to increase their ad revenue, while provideding more time to schedule infomercial programming for us insomniacs.
But if there were accurate reporting, ie people leaveing to get a pop when a commercial came on, sleeping through the news, in short if it tracked how much time people really spent watching TV, they might find trends which I'll preceed to predict with no basis in fact and only wild speculation as my guide. I would bet people with HD TV's recieving HD programing would spend more time watching TV than average, watch longer, and prefer HD programs to standard programs. Since they have the money to spend on purchases like HD TV's and are willing to spend it, it puts them in a better demographic. But most importantly, I'll try to justify this assertion with hand waving and magic powder, that they'd be more likely to watch commercials, as HD commercials would feature more eye candy and probably be more entertaining. And I'm not just talking about Victoria's Secret.
If the viewing habbits were accurately compiled, and my prognostication came to pass there might be a very real, very powerful market pressure where to get the really lucrative advertisers you have to have a HD signal.
But again, just how I think it might really be.
For a ceramic, Alumina is pretty tough, but that's like saying for a 5th grader Todd Peterman is pretty tough. It takes very little to propigate cracks through ceramics. There some stuff that can be done, but ceramics aren't metal. And alumina has always been transparent.
Now this MIGHT be news if they some how got their alumina powders on a nano scale where the alumina crystal grains are smaller than the wavelengths of light, then you'll actually get a relatively tough, and see through material. Not be cause something magical happens on that scale, but because the crack length will be huge, and actually require the formation of a large surface which would take a lot of energy despite the low toughness of the alumina. That would be news. BIG news. At least to me. But that's not what they said.
They said they made a 10cm alumina tile. Big whoop.
They might be able to enhance it by making it like corning wear, but that summery of a press release was clearly too light to provide that kind of detail. Which might have been interesting, although not news.
I would bet that it being transparent means they either used a spectacularly fine powder, or it is basically fully dense as there doesn't appear to be many internal surfaces to scatter light (ie it's not opaque).
Further more, I would bet that the flaw(s) introduced by the bullet would not be what caused it to fail, I would bet that pre-existing flaws near the bullets point of impact would be vastly expanded. Worse yet, the alumina tile might even bounce the bullet off instead of just stop it.
Maybe the news is the simplicity and low cost? Too bad that didn't make it into the news then.
Either way it sounds like it's nothing but a press release for a non-large company that's really happy that they might picked up as a contractor for the Department of Defence.
Yawn. Already, we've given it more consideration that it deserves.
While I play a lawyer on slashdot, my legal advice can result in serious personal injury, or even death. And unless you're cuban, it may even get you deported.
Standard disclaimers aside, you agree to it by your purchase of their product AFAIK.
But more importantly they have enough cash to sue you until you live under an overpass and have your wages from selling cans garnished to pay your attorneys legal fees.
IIRC back when I owned nintendo games before I got scammed by sega, I noticed in the fine print that Nintendo claims you are not allowed to make backups of their software. I would imagin that this would persist, and they will of course argue in court that fair use backups aren't necessary due to the reliability of their cartriges.
I think it's a good fight to pick, but I wouldn't want my ass on the line. Maybe someone should quickly code up a free mp3 player, and visualization program for this thing. And viola, fair use.
If you're into that sort of thing, which is most definately cool. You should look at some of the stuff with spider silk. There's a company that genetically engineer goats to express the stuff spider silk is made of in their milk. (one would assume the golden orb spider) Then they get fetta cheese and spider silk on a reasonable scale. (I don't know if fetta cheese comes from goats, but I do like the way it just rolls off the tongue, so if you're a cheese expert feel free to interject).
I would also like to think that our military personel have something a little more substantial that alumina, perhaps silicon carbide, or better yet a ceremet of silicon carbide and nickle (but maybe that'd be too heavy). Either way in a kevlar vest, their opaque and not windows. I think Titanium Boride has been used for bullet proof vests too.
A'ight, yo.
Maybe it's me, but it seems like the time might be right for lawyers to entertain us with a class action lawsuit. If China's ISP and telecomunications companies are state owned enterprises it seems like you might be able to do something silly like sue China under one of the anti-spam laws some states have. I think the one in washington provides something like $500 per offence.
I'd love to see that full page ad, or even better commercial on late night tv. Have you recieved spam? You may have been harmed, and be owed a thousand dollars or more! We can help, but you need to help us. You can't spell sue without u!
The best would be a bulk e-mailing titled that Make Money Fast and promised thousands of dollars without ever doing anything! And best of all, nothing to pay, ever!
let out a giant yawn.
Alumina being transparent or strong is hardly new. Although the bullet proof glass thing is pretty funny. Alumina is not tough, it may be strong, and even greatly stronger than steel should we be talking about specific strength, but it is not tough at all. And I don't know about you, but the last thing I was between me and a bullet is a sheet of something that will shatter with countless sharp edges to cut me to ribbons.
I'm sure there are a great many chemical concerns that would be thrilled to tell you all about their alumina powders should you care to ask. But trust me, until we can do with alumina what clams can do with chalk the most interesting thing one is likely to do with alumina is make a crucible.
At least they won't have any problem demonstrating irreparable harm.
The trick is demonstrating microsoft is responsible for it. When you have 36 billion is cash on hand people just see deep pockets so why not play court room lotto.
But...
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
It's from memory so bear with me if I'm not 100% accurate. Seems to me the second amendment states you have a right to join the national guard. One weekend a month, two weeks a year.
I'm all for RESPONSABLE people owning guns, and being a REASONABLE person, I've no problem with the government determining who the reasonable, responsable people are.
Episode II looks like it will have one redeming quality. Laughs, lots and lots of unintentional laughs. The impression I got from the trailers was that it was going to where no star *wars* movie had gone before. Lucas may as well call it Return of the Alien From L.A. Now if only there was a Kathy Ireland cameo, it might just be perfect.
If we're going to talk about them as a "concept" then the first table of contents, index, bibliography, dictionary, etc ad nausium, trump BT's "concept". It's the encoding that automates the looking up of the object of interest that makes hyperlinks useful and even interesting at all.
That's exactly how I found both They Might Be Giants and Bare Naked Ladies. Sure it might not have been mp3's and might have been cassette tapes. But without those illicit copies I never would have found either of those bands, and in the case of TMBG I own every on of the albums they've put to CD. I wouldn't have gone to shows. I simply wouldn't know any better. Well when BNL got famous I probably would have found them. But still...
It seems like someone is planing another adventure in venture capital. Improbable + investment = angry_shareholders + carribian_vacation.
The truth is the oscar voters probably didn't see a lot of the movies, they saw excerpts on video tapes the studios sent to them.
It's all about what one is looking for. The awards show that most reflects what I consider to be good movies, is, perhaps sadly, the MTV movie awards. The oscars is a mutual masterbation party where the predominently uninteresting people give strokes to other uninteresting people in return for strokes of their own, and a few interesting people get stokes to either legitimize the whole affair, or by accident. I like to see the deserving rewarded for their skill. But I am so consistantly disapointed by the Acadamy choices, it's hard to be even interested, let alone excited.
Regardless of pithy comments AC's have to offer, this is neither accurate nor new. "State of the Art" comes to mind. Is the cg in Tron not art? Laser light shows? The butt ugly architecture of the 70's? The beautiful Konsai(sp?) Airport? Modern graceful bridges?
Ever since man found fire, and began to share his knowledge, there has been a boundry between what is known and true, and what his intuition told him. To me, that is the domain of art. Where the knowledge can be described with paper and pencil and some formal model its technology. But when it leaves that domain, and you're counting on someone's skilled hand, be it behind a welding torch, or a keyboard, that is art.
IIRC my teaching correctly, it was the Nazi's inability to recognize that they needed to remove the Boron from their graphite that frustrated their efforts and forced them to move on to heavy water.
No pure graphite, no neutrons, no bomb.
now for some real Karma whoring.
Many years ago when I first heard TMBG there were some EE's that were trying to make a case for Birdhouse In Your Soul being a science song, the "Blue Canary Nightlight" being a metaphore for an electron. Which of course it isn't. But hey, who would've known that New York was once New Amsterdam without the best damn band that I almost never hear on the radio. Not I.
They also sing a song about Pavlove (Dinner Bell), one about mammals, (convienently enough Mammal), and one about Alexander Grahm Bell, then a smattering of other more obscure historical figures. None of which were mentioned on the linked sight, incidently.
Appearently he his. Once more Watto, the stupid flying thing, has taken to wearing a beret in an attempt to be yet more queer. To say nothing of what some people are calling the "Forbidden Love" trailer that some saw before Fellowship of The Ring. It looks like it will go past bad. The question is will it stop at bad, but funny, or head straight for The Alien From L.A. bad. At least Nsych is back in it, without them I'd wonder if George Lucas would be able to ever completely defile his creation.