If this isn't complete bullshit, it's probably a combination of real image projection with some mechanism for sending a different real image to each eye.
In order to see the image you must be looking at the projection lens, but the image will appear to be floating in midair in front of or behind the lens (can also be a mirror, as in those virtual-penny saucers someone mentioned).
Now if you somehow oscillated or rotated the lens so that each eye sees a different real image, you'd get full-stereo 3D. And it would be what they describe, a lifelike solid image floating in front of the projection equipment.
95% of you will be reading this on an x86 PCm which happens to trace back to a 4.7 MHz 8 bit ancestor found in the original IBM PC, the 8088.
While not object-code compatible the 8088 was designed for easy portability of 8080A code, which was *truly* 8-bit as opposed to 16-bit core over 8-bit bus with the 8088. This takes us back *past* the TRS-80 home computers, which used the Z-80, which was designed (in a different way) to be legacy compatible with the 8080A. The very first home computer kit, the Altair, used an 8080 IIRC.
And the 8080 was in turn a direct descendent of the 8008, and in turn the 4004, the first single-chip microprocessor ever designed. So the PC-compatible CPU core has a long and venerable history indeed.
I am going to patent a novel I dea I've had, "per unit" pricing: A method by which a retailer multiplies the "number of units delivered" by a "base price" to calculate a "total charge" to be paid for said delivery.
If that flies, next I'll patent discounts off MSRP, that'll be really slick.
Really, it's the only way. Nothing smells quite like a rendering plant and nothing gets it out. That smell is composed of volatile hydrocarbons which come out of the meat when it's cooked, and they get into anything porous -- even the surfaces of "solid" plastics. Insulation, wood, sheetrock, and even plastic that has been around that smell for any length of time will have that distinctive smell forever.
I got the impression from what I've read that it wasn't so much the British who hounded him to death as the American CIA who couldn't stomach the idea of a fag having access to their classified goodies.
Oh, and BTW I'm an American.
So you're angling for the DARPA challenge too?
on
Old Toy Modding?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Just a wild guess.
Re:Caps Lock? Who cares about Caps Lock?
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
My KVM switch uses Scroll Lock (hit twice within 1/2 second) to enable the other keys for switching machines. If we don't have some useless keys on the keyboard, devices like my KVM switch would have to hijack functions I actually use once in awhile, which would be annoying.
The Huey P. Long bridge over the Mississippi River just north of New Orleans is actually a railroad bridge. As an afterthought, the architects added vehicular lanes which are bolted on to the superstructure to either side of the actual train lane. Originally in the 1930's these vehicular lanes were single-lane with a generous clearance and sidewalk for pedestrians.
Since long before I was born they have been two ten-foot-wide lanes and pedestrians are not allowed on the bridge because of the danger. Neither are trucks allowed to pass one another because there isn't enough clearance.
The nominal height of this bridge is 130 feet above the river, give or take. It's not nearly as high as the A75 but we get our share of suicide jumpers both off it and the newer, swankier, and busier Greater New Orleans Mississippi River Bridge a few miles to the south (or, as it was renamed after a contest in the 80's, the "Crescent City [not drug] Connection").
You do not get the full thrill of the Huey Long unless you're on it when a TRAIN is also on it. And you really don't get the full thrill unless you are STOPPED IN TRAFFIC while a TRAIN is passing. You see, the H.P.Long is entirely riveted together. There isn't a weld to be found in the entire structure. This means it moves -- a lot. You normally can't tell in a moving vehicle, but people have been known to get seasick in stalled traffic. Especially when a train is passing.
I'm sure the A75 will be no picnic in bad weather, but being that high in bad weather you probably won't even be able to see the ground. What I wonder about is how much the thing will move around with only seven supports and all that wind-catching area.
Being stopped on traffic might be a lot more fun than just having your car slapped around by a gale.
The author of the parent comment knows just enough about gyrocopters to tell a lot of shit-stirring lies.
First and foremost, gyrocopters can't stall. At all. That's why they were invented. Juan de la Cierva was obsessed with the dangers of stalling in fixed-wing aircraft, which is why he devoted his life to promoting the autogyro. (Ironically enough, he actually died when the fixed-wing aircraft he was riding in stalled and crashed.)
Autogyros aren't used commercially because helicopters are better at VTOL, slow-speed and hover flight, and fixed-wing aircraft are more fuel efficient and faster for distance and heavy lifting.
You can get a personal Experimental class autogyro for under $20,000 (about the same as the less expensive fixed-wing EA class kits) and they're much safer than either fixed-wing craft or (especially) helicopters for novice flyers.
98 SE involved some pretty significant departures from 98 original. In fact, there was more difference between 98 and 98SE than between 98SE and ME, down where the gears are turning.
Take the guy's word for it. If you can find a 98 to 98SE upgrade (they were about ten bucks in the day) run that first, THEN try his service pack.
I released my novel for free mainly because it was too edgy to attract the attention of a normal publisher and I was tired of letting it rot on my hard drive. I used a tip jar and published my experience with that.
Upshot? A review on slashdot was my biggest promotional score, and total readership appears to be about 10,000 worldwide. Tip jar revenue ended up a bit over $1,000. And despite many mails and posts telling me it was a very good novel, I still can't attract a publisher.
It just isn't as easy as it looks.
Unfortunately there was no POD publisher available at the time that had low setup fees. I lost much time trying for conventional publication again and now that it's available on dead trees from lulu.com the wave of interest has passed and I haven't sold many copies.
However, because of all the interest I am working on a sequel (which I'd have never considered before) and when it's ready I will introduce it online and via Lulu at the same time. Hopefully that will let the impulse shoppers grab a copy while it's fresh in their minds. It will be interesting to see how that works out.
I have to cast my lot with the folks who are complaining about too many special-purpose blocks. Lego has to make molds for all of those, no wonder the damn things are so expensive.
When I was a kid, there were very few specialized blocks. Even the railroad kit didn't have any except for the lego motor modules (I have always had a soft heart for the 70's-era motor modules) and the railroad tracks. Even the railroad track ties were standard 8x2 thin blocks.
In those days the vast majority of legos were sold in generic kits. You could even get small boxes of 50 or 100 generic blocks, up through the large 400 and 600 and 1000 block kits. All generic. They'd come with a little booklet of suggestions but the possibilities were endless.
The 70's-era house kits had doors, windows, and roof blocks all of which tied in with standard blocks. You could build a wall of doors or use an architectural door in your Moon Rover. You could use your roof blocks to make an Aztec pyramid.
Now you buy a little kit for, say, a TIE fighter and it costs $20 and there's not much you can build with it except things that look a hell of a lot like TIE fighters. The big generic kits aren't even sold any more; if they were they'd probably cost $1,000 and nobody would buy them.
Lego should go back to making the generic kits, price them reasonably, and let the kids think of stuff to build themselves again.
There are two major effects going here. The first is the presence of the Moon and, to a lesser extent, the Sun. Tides drag on the Earth and slow its rotation. This is a relatively constant effect that is not going to change any time soon, for any reason, ever.
Tidal slowing is also magnitudes more important than anything you'd see from mountain building, earthquakes, or any other surface phenomenon. The earth is BIG. But tides take out a LOT of energy. Tides are the major reason the Earth's rotational period slows over geological time.
So right now, the Earth is not slowing; this must mean a shorter-acting phenomenon is supplying the rotational energy that the tides normally suck out. Again, there is only one thing big enough -- turbulence in the Earth's liquid core. Like the Earth itself the core is BIG so little changes in the fluid flow there can actually affect the Earth noticeably, and that flow is known to be chaotic -- because the magnetic field caused by that flow reverses periodically.
My money would be on a near-term magnetic field polarity reversal. Of course "near term" probably still means it will be ten thousand years before it's a problem. Sucks to be a man-made satellite, though, especially when flying over the South Atlantic, an area where the Earth's magnetic field is already starting to do strange things.
According to a mechanic I once knew, the tranny on a VW beetle will bolt directly up to the engine from a Porsche 928. He claimed to have done this once, and the vehicle made it 50 whole miles before all the oil came out the bottom (but it ran like a bat out of hell for those 50 miles, since a VW beetle weighs ~1500 lb compared to ~4500 lb for a Porsche 928). Oh, and it was a *bit* hard on the suspension, and they had to cut a hole in the rear hood for the engine to stick out...
It took a fair amount of detective work to figure out where Mars Pathfinder, which is a bit bigger than Beagle, was with respect to the Mars Global Surveyor photos because the orbiter itself couldn't be resolved. And I'm pretty sure Mars Express does not have a better imager than MGS.
Basically, if Beagle 2 doesn't wake up and start singing, we will probably never know why.
This is a nightmare scenario for anyone who is familiar with how data systems fail. I once had a credit agency pick up a very old P.O. box I hadn't used for years and suddenly decide it was my current address, so all my mail from them went into a black hole; this bad address propagated through the credit world for nearly a year, during which I had to call regularly and request copies of bills and get the address changed back.
In the system described here, once bad data gets into your microwave oven there's virtually no way to chase down all the instances of it that will be floating around the universe. Didn't Sandra Bullock star in a movie about this once?
They also disallowed auctions of all WTC memorabilia (even that ashtray you really bought there in 1982) shortly after 9/11, and auctions of anything even claiming to be Shuttle Columbia debris before most of it hit the ground.
Space junk does not "float," it zips along at seven miles per second. Any piece of space junk big enough to see would have completely destroyed at least one module of the ISS. Even if the space junk was in "almost" the same orbit as ISS (say, detached from the ISS itself previously) it would be going fast enough to do a hell of a lot of damage.
I don't have any idea what could have caused this, but it wasn't something randomly floating around that just bumped the station. What disturbs me more than the accident itself is that professionals who should know better are floating this idea that it might be like a shopping cart hitting your car. It makes no sense at all.
10^14 neurons in the brain, brain is 3 dimensional
Actually most of those neurons are in the cerebral cortex, which is a flat sheet. It's the white matter (mostly nerve fibres providing interareal connections) which make it three-dimensional. Total area if you laid the cortex flat would be about two square feet. It is also a bit thicker than the retina. In any case, the point about having more pixels than the eye can resolve is lost if you are displaying a really big graphic and you lean close to focus in on small areas. I can really see the use of these for laying out a big software project in a graphical development environment...
I was given to understand that the major obstacle to copying Xbox games is that they are all distributed on dual-layer DVD's which couldn't be duplicated. I suspect Microsoft will be considerably more upset than even the MPAA over this.
Breaks my heart, I tell ya, it just breaks my heart.
I am (finally) in the process of formatting MOPI for Book-On-Demand publication as promised in the "Dead Tree" essay. I'll be updating the site when this happens. It may take a couple of more months, since I had a major personal disaster recently, but it's happening.
I have also plotted and started writing a sequel, inspired to some degree by many of the comments about the original novel.
I did not guess when I put MOPI online that the experiment would come to anything like the success it has seen. I put at least part of the blame on the publishing industry. In the 70's there were dozens of publishers, all of whom had at least one person dedicated to reading the slush pile; now there are only a few mega-publishers who would all rather publish the sure thing 12th installment in some safe series than strike out in a new and potentially unprofitable direction.
It has not become as hard to find an agent (that is, a good agent with the right connections who can actually get stuff read) as it once was to find a publisher. And we wonder why all the stuff on bookstore shelves looks the same. Sheesh.
Ten thousand or so people have read my online novel, but only ONE publisher out of all of the SF publishers listed in Writer's Guide bothered to answer a query -- Baen if I recall -- and they didn't bother to answer the proposal package. Of course it has a Dr. Adder type of problem, but the plain fact is K.W. Jeter was able to get Dr. Adder published in the early 80's. Prime Intellect in 2003? Or even back in 1994? Fuggedaboudit.
So if it's such a bad, noncommercial book, why have people sent me more than a thousand dollars in TIPS? I'd say the publishing industry is broken.
Publishers publish thousand-page trilogies because they're more predictable, so writers write them and readers read them because they're comfortable but muchmoreso because they're there. The problem with those exciting dangerous ideas is that we focus on the exciting part while businessmen focused on the bottom line focus on the dangerous part. And as long as that drives the industry, then yes break-in authors such as myself will see professional writing as a way to die broke.
It was really quite obvious. Pons and Fleischmann claimed to get a certain amount of energy from their apparattus. Well, fusion doesn't just create heat; it also creates neutrons. Shitloads of neutrons. Think "neutron bomb."
And their apparattus was not shielded.
The fact that they were still alive proved that they had not succeeded in doing what they thought they had done.
Slashdot Mirror
In order to see the image you must be looking at the projection lens, but the image will appear to be floating in midair in front of or behind the lens (can also be a mirror, as in those virtual-penny saucers someone mentioned).
Now if you somehow oscillated or rotated the lens so that each eye sees a different real image, you'd get full-stereo 3D. And it would be what they describe, a lifelike solid image floating in front of the projection equipment.
While not object-code compatible the 8088 was designed for easy portability of 8080A code, which was *truly* 8-bit as opposed to 16-bit core over 8-bit bus with the 8088. This takes us back *past* the TRS-80 home computers, which used the Z-80, which was designed (in a different way) to be legacy compatible with the 8080A. The very first home computer kit, the Altair, used an 8080 IIRC.
And the 8080 was in turn a direct descendent of the 8008, and in turn the 4004, the first single-chip microprocessor ever designed. So the PC-compatible CPU core has a long and venerable history indeed.
If that flies, next I'll patent discounts off MSRP, that'll be really slick.
Really, it's the only way. Nothing smells quite like a rendering plant and nothing gets it out. That smell is composed of volatile hydrocarbons which come out of the meat when it's cooked, and they get into anything porous -- even the surfaces of "solid" plastics. Insulation, wood, sheetrock, and even plastic that has been around that smell for any length of time will have that distinctive smell forever.
Oh, and BTW I'm an American.
Just a wild guess.
My KVM switch uses Scroll Lock (hit twice within 1/2 second) to enable the other keys for switching machines. If we don't have some useless keys on the keyboard, devices like my KVM switch would have to hijack functions I actually use once in awhile, which would be annoying.
Since long before I was born they have been two ten-foot-wide lanes and pedestrians are not allowed on the bridge because of the danger. Neither are trucks allowed to pass one another because there isn't enough clearance.
The nominal height of this bridge is 130 feet above the river, give or take. It's not nearly as high as the A75 but we get our share of suicide jumpers both off it and the newer, swankier, and busier Greater New Orleans Mississippi River Bridge a few miles to the south (or, as it was renamed after a contest in the 80's, the "Crescent City [not drug] Connection").
You do not get the full thrill of the Huey Long unless you're on it when a TRAIN is also on it. And you really don't get the full thrill unless you are STOPPED IN TRAFFIC while a TRAIN is passing. You see, the H.P.Long is entirely riveted together. There isn't a weld to be found in the entire structure. This means it moves -- a lot. You normally can't tell in a moving vehicle, but people have been known to get seasick in stalled traffic. Especially when a train is passing.
I'm sure the A75 will be no picnic in bad weather, but being that high in bad weather you probably won't even be able to see the ground. What I wonder about is how much the thing will move around with only seven supports and all that wind-catching area.
Being stopped on traffic might be a lot more fun than just having your car slapped around by a gale.
First and foremost, gyrocopters can't stall. At all. That's why they were invented. Juan de la Cierva was obsessed with the dangers of stalling in fixed-wing aircraft, which is why he devoted his life to promoting the autogyro. (Ironically enough, he actually died when the fixed-wing aircraft he was riding in stalled and crashed.)
Autogyros aren't used commercially because helicopters are better at VTOL, slow-speed and hover flight, and fixed-wing aircraft are more fuel efficient and faster for distance and heavy lifting.
You can get a personal Experimental class autogyro for under $20,000 (about the same as the less expensive fixed-wing EA class kits) and they're much safer than either fixed-wing craft or (especially) helicopters for novice flyers.
Take the guy's word for it. If you can find a 98 to 98SE upgrade (they were about ten bucks in the day) run that first, THEN try his service pack.
Upshot? A review on slashdot was my biggest promotional score, and total readership appears to be about 10,000 worldwide. Tip jar revenue ended up a bit over $1,000. And despite many mails and posts telling me it was a very good novel, I still can't attract a publisher.
It just isn't as easy as it looks.
Unfortunately there was no POD publisher available at the time that had low setup fees. I lost much time trying for conventional publication again and now that it's available on dead trees from lulu.com the wave of interest has passed and I haven't sold many copies.
However, because of all the interest I am working on a sequel (which I'd have never considered before) and when it's ready I will introduce it online and via Lulu at the same time. Hopefully that will let the impulse shoppers grab a copy while it's fresh in their minds. It will be interesting to see how that works out.
When I was a kid, there were very few specialized blocks. Even the railroad kit didn't have any except for the lego motor modules (I have always had a soft heart for the 70's-era motor modules) and the railroad tracks. Even the railroad track ties were standard 8x2 thin blocks.
In those days the vast majority of legos were sold in generic kits. You could even get small boxes of 50 or 100 generic blocks, up through the large 400 and 600 and 1000 block kits. All generic. They'd come with a little booklet of suggestions but the possibilities were endless.
The 70's-era house kits had doors, windows, and roof blocks all of which tied in with standard blocks. You could build a wall of doors or use an architectural door in your Moon Rover. You could use your roof blocks to make an Aztec pyramid.
Now you buy a little kit for, say, a TIE fighter and it costs $20 and there's not much you can build with it except things that look a hell of a lot like TIE fighters. The big generic kits aren't even sold any more; if they were they'd probably cost $1,000 and nobody would buy them.
Lego should go back to making the generic kits, price them reasonably, and let the kids think of stuff to build themselves again.
Tidal slowing is also magnitudes more important than anything you'd see from mountain building, earthquakes, or any other surface phenomenon. The earth is BIG. But tides take out a LOT of energy. Tides are the major reason the Earth's rotational period slows over geological time.
So right now, the Earth is not slowing; this must mean a shorter-acting phenomenon is supplying the rotational energy that the tides normally suck out. Again, there is only one thing big enough -- turbulence in the Earth's liquid core. Like the Earth itself the core is BIG so little changes in the fluid flow there can actually affect the Earth noticeably, and that flow is known to be chaotic -- because the magnetic field caused by that flow reverses periodically.
My money would be on a near-term magnetic field polarity reversal. Of course "near term" probably still means it will be ten thousand years before it's a problem. Sucks to be a man-made satellite, though, especially when flying over the South Atlantic, an area where the Earth's magnetic field is already starting to do strange things.
According to a mechanic I once knew, the tranny on a VW beetle will bolt directly up to the engine from a Porsche 928. He claimed to have done this once, and the vehicle made it 50 whole miles before all the oil came out the bottom (but it ran like a bat out of hell for those 50 miles, since a VW beetle weighs ~1500 lb compared to ~4500 lb for a Porsche 928). Oh, and it was a *bit* hard on the suspension, and they had to cut a hole in the rear hood for the engine to stick out...
Basically, if Beagle 2 doesn't wake up and start singing, we will probably never know why.
In the system described here, once bad data gets into your microwave oven there's virtually no way to chase down all the instances of it that will be floating around the universe. Didn't Sandra Bullock star in a movie about this once?
They also disallowed auctions of all WTC memorabilia (even that ashtray you really bought there in 1982) shortly after 9/11, and auctions of anything even claiming to be Shuttle Columbia debris before most of it hit the ground.
I don't have any idea what could have caused this, but it wasn't something randomly floating around that just bumped the station. What disturbs me more than the accident itself is that professionals who should know better are floating this idea that it might be like a shopping cart hitting your car. It makes no sense at all.
Actually most of those neurons are in the cerebral cortex, which is a flat sheet. It's the white matter (mostly nerve fibres providing interareal connections) which make it three-dimensional. Total area if you laid the cortex flat would be about two square feet. It is also a bit thicker than the retina. In any case, the point about having more pixels than the eye can resolve is lost if you are displaying a really big graphic and you lean close to focus in on small areas. I can really see the use of these for laying out a big software project in a graphical development environment...
Breaks my heart, I tell ya, it just breaks my heart.
It's amazing that the atmosphere probe, which entered at 47 km/sec, managed a controlled deceleration and survived.
Oops. It will not be going off-line when printed copies become available.
I have also plotted and started writing a sequel, inspired to some degree by many of the comments about the original novel.
I did not guess when I put MOPI online that the experiment would come to anything like the success it has seen. I put at least part of the blame on the publishing industry. In the 70's there were dozens of publishers, all of whom had at least one person dedicated to reading the slush pile; now there are only a few mega-publishers who would all rather publish the sure thing 12th installment in some safe series than strike out in a new and potentially unprofitable direction.
It has not become as hard to find an agent (that is, a good agent with the right connections who can actually get stuff read) as it once was to find a publisher. And we wonder why all the stuff on bookstore shelves looks the same. Sheesh.
So if it's such a bad, noncommercial book, why have people sent me more than a thousand dollars in TIPS? I'd say the publishing industry is broken.
Publishers publish thousand-page trilogies because they're more predictable, so writers write them and readers read them because they're comfortable but muchmoreso because they're there. The problem with those exciting dangerous ideas is that we focus on the exciting part while businessmen focused on the bottom line focus on the dangerous part. And as long as that drives the industry, then yes break-in authors such as myself will see professional writing as a way to die broke.
And their apparattus was not shielded.
The fact that they were still alive proved that they had not succeeded in doing what they thought they had done.