Thermonuclear devices are fusion weapons. To generate the incredible heat necessary to fuse your fuel (heavy hydrogen in the old days) requires the initial triggering of a conventional (fission) atomic device. Thus heat+nuclear, or thermonuclear.
I have used it to create from-scratch graphics for countless websites, including: this, this, this, and >this.
Sorry, but that last link looks like you just ripped off images from the web. The lightbulb and book are in completely different styles, for instance. One looks like it may have originally been created in Illustrator, the second is a cropped photo. If this is what you have to resort to when you use Gimp, I'll stick with my Adobe suite, thank you.
I realize you probably have a day job, but you know, even armchair advice like this could be extremely helpful to the Gimp team. I don't know who they have in charge of UI, but I'm sure your points would be appreciated. I hope their coders are lurking on/.
Content creation with photoshop is like painting with a brick.
Wish I had some mod points for this comment! While you're right about creating something from nothing, there are times (many times) when you need to extract something from an image. I've become pretty adept at using the selection tool in various ALT/CTRL/SHFT configurations to get just the right mask. And when you're feeling lazy, it's relatively easy to tweak the Magic Wand tool to grab what you need.
I suppose it's like the difference between "primitive" style cut-out or collage work and the more traditional paintbrush or pencil.
Don't forget, the real reason web designers without proper training tend to use Photoshop for their art or design work is because 90% of their work is pretty simple (buttons, banners, etc.) and all has to be exported to a rasterized format (JPEG, GIF, Bitmap, etc.)
Print people (newspapers, advertisers, etc.) have to deal with the real world. Raster images (as opposed to vector graphics produced by Freehand or Illustrator) can't be resized without interpolation. If you want to work in Photoshop, you'll have to deal with giant file sizes (600 dpi tends to require hundreds of megs per sheet). Also, while most printers can handle enormous data files (my HP 1500 can print full-page 4-color in about a minute a sheet) it's a lot easier to go from Illustrator to encapsulated PostScript than it is to convert from raster.
If your work is almost all at 72 dpi (and it will be if your primary building blocks for "design" are ripped off of other people's websites) it's just easier to stay in Photoshop.
I think one of the first major step to interstellar travel will be establishing a base on another planet
Well, it'd be a hell of a lot cheaper if we started with a more local "first step" like, say, the Moon. Mars is a lot sexier, sure, but the Moon is an order of magnitude closer (and thus, cheaper). I'm not suprised that the Japanese have the moon in their line of sight for their next space missions. It makes sense.
I'm afraid you haven't been looking too closely at the imaging and cloud density data that the websites above explain. There aren't "clouds" like on Earth -- chubby, fat little suckers that we have. On Venus, it's just a giant, very slow-moving morass of gas. The Sulpher-rich "clouds" are more like fog. The heavy pressure makes "walking" on the surface like deep-sea diving on the surface of the ocean floors. But you're never going to get much better visibility than a couple of yards, maybe a dozen or so if you're lucky.
If a "lander" had been equipped with airbags...then they would have melted upon deployment. The surface temperature of Venus is something like 800 degrees. And the atmosphere is highly reactive to metals. Yes, we have the technology to land on it nowadays, and it's certainly a lot closer than Mars, but terraforming and colonization talk just obfuscates what our primary purpose as a civilization should be: to build a large enough ship in orbit to explore the solar system up close and person.
This ship could have planetary re-entry capsules built into it, (much like the missions we're sending to Mars) or we could just build a better Earth-to-Orbit vehicle (which is long overdue). As long as you give it a strong enough power source you can build as ugly and un-aerodynamic a ship as you like. Need more O2? Need more food and water? Just hitch on a big-ass freight box behind the ship. It doesn't matter what the ship looks like (except from a maneuvering point of view -- center of gravity and all that).
But no, instead we waste our money sending fancy probes hundreds of millions of miles away and crossing our fingers. If these Mars missions have taught us anything, it's that scientists are very, very clever at fixing problems. Think of what they could do if they were able to do their observations on-site, instead of troubleshooting technical support problems with a 22 minute phone delay.
Don't make the mistake of staying local. Many of the people (most?) that are looking at employment websites are trying to find local companies that are hiring.
Just take a step back from your computer and think for a few seconds. Are you tied to a location (family, spouse, etc.?) If you have the ability to move, consider what kinds of cities (or towns) could use you best?
I was living in Boston, had went to school there, even got a fancy IT job when I graduated in '98. Really great times, but they stopped rolling by '02, and I found myself seriously struggling to make ends meet.
I worked freelance for about a year before all the work dried up, then I decided I'd be happier making less money if it was more steady. I looked in vain for work using online sites and classified ads before an opportunity presented itself to me. It's available to anyone, really.
For not terribly interesting reasons, my GF and I moved out to the middle of nowhere (Nebrasksa). I've never been to the midwest before. Never seen this much corn in all my life. I thought I'd drown in boredom. But you know what? It costs nothing to live here. You can get an apartment for a couple hundred bucks a month. Food is cheap and super-sized (hey, it's the heartland).
And I thought there'd be nothing for me here, jobs-wise. But my "big city" experience automagically placed my resume at the top of a lot of stacks of job applications. Most of the local talent has left the state, so there's a real need for skilled IT people. I got a job that's perfect, working for a nice, small office with a relaxed working environment, making more than enough to start saving again.
By Boston standards, I could just barely scrape by. I used to buy into the idea that "Places like San Francisco or New York are more expensive (housing, food, etc.) than Kansas City, Missouri because the jobs pay more." People, this is a myth.
Just ask around and you'll find that the salaries made in most of the Eastern Seaboard's cities is not substantially more than what you might find in the middle of Ohio (for example). But take cost of living into account, and the difference in lifestyle becomes readily apparent. You have to decide what's most important to you -- is it being surrounded by art and music and 3am pizza? Or is it being able to afford your rent, have some extra for cable TV and high-speed internet?
Make no doubt, if you've got 4 operas available to you any night of the week, if you've got the best pizza in the world at your doorstep, if you've got superstar artists living in lofts downtown -- You are paying for this. If you can't live without it, well, there's nothing I can say to convince you. I found that what was making me miserable (not being able to afford to live normal life comfortably) weighed more than what was making me happy (having a whole city at your fingertips).
But my point is this. If you're in the U.S., most of it is the same all over. I know, New York City is different than Tupulo, Mississippi, but the general day-to-day life of Americans is a xeroxed morass of sameness with the exception of a few of the larger cities. But lemme tell you, living in an apartment in SoHo sucks when you find all your income is going to cover your head and you're stuck at home on a Saturday night because you just can't afford $10 drinks at the bar.
Look for cheap places to live, then look in their regional newspaper's classified ads for jobs. Divide the starting salaries you see with the same newspaper's classified ads for apartments. There are many places in this country that have high ratios, you just have to decide what's got the better cost/benefit ratio. I can tell you, unless you're a doctor, lawyer or financial wunderkid, a lot of places don't make financial sense for someone just trying to start out in the world.
People are buying homes out here in their early twenties. I couldn't have dreamed of doing that in Boston or New York, not for a long time, anyway. The average rent in most of your bigger cities could get you a pretty big house in other parts of the country.
I don't understand the big push for electronic voting. What exactly are we fixing? So it takes a couple more days to count all the votes... it's not like the political system grinds to a halt during those precious hours while votes are tallied. Strange that our country has for centuries done perfectly well with the traditional method, yet all of a sudden it's such an important issue that requires technological intervention.
All precious stones are not the same, not just because of the impurities a stone takes on during formation. The crystalline structure of a diamond is cubic, while rubies and saphires are trigonal. I think there are 7 total different crystalline configurations. Also, packed carbon tends to be a lot harder than packed corundum (the building block of rubies and saphire, which are almost identical). When someone tells you that diamonds are 10 and rubies/saphires are 9 on the Mohs hardness scale, it doesn't reflect that the scale isn't linear -- diamonds are 90 times harder than rubies/saphires, which are only about 5 times harder then the next group of minerals.
Furthermore, those who come up with a diamond mine not controled by DeBeers can still be crushed because there are many types of diamonds, and no mine find is going to generate all of them
Funny you should mention that... I just saw a show (Discovery? PBS? Can't recall precisely) that showed an Australian diamond firm that's the "new kid on the block" because of the tenacity of it's founder. The Aussie studied geology and knew there should be diamonds in this one region of northwest Australia, and after something like 5 years of walking around, panning in streams, then walking around some more, he finally hit the mother load.
Anyway, the reason this company isn't going away any time soon is because the diamonds that come from this source are almost all red and pink diamonds, the most rare diamond on the planet. The firm would have an exclusive sale every year that was invite-only, and the show was able to document one guy who tried to make a bid on their choice 10 pieces. These things were, no kidding, mere millimiters in size. The largest one was I think half a carat. He bid 4 mil, and didn't get it (they naturally don't reveal the amount of the winning bid).
I, for one, long for the day when we no longer prize such stupidly common elementals like Diamonds for more practical, rare gifts. Nothing says "I love you" like an Iridium baseball bat.
I also read somewhere that one of the new systems that is going to be tested is the use of the Ka Band for data transmission instead of what they normally use (X-Band), which I believe increases the amount of data that can be sent an order of magnitude or so. The X-Band tops out at 400 kbps, I believe.
the 'milestone' stated in the article, which was apparently overlooked by many of the posters here is the fact that, for the first time, a non-NASA spacecraft (in this case the ESA's Mars Express Orbiter) got into the act as a data relay for the rovers
It's also neat that some of these satellites are doing double-duty -- that is, they have certain bandwidth limitations that act as a bottleneck to all the data they could be sending from their normal scientific operation modes. The Mars Express orbiter had to juggle data from both its scientific instruments and all the recon for the rovers. In effect, distributing bandwidth like an ISP.
Yet while it is political, it is a good thing in that it's another step toward recognizing that for space exploration to be fully realized it needs to be global endeavor, not a national one.
Definately. I often wonder how much more advanced our space program would be (our=mankind's) if the Russians and Americans had been working cooperatively in the 60's instead of reinventing each other's work. I realize that the anatagonism of the cold war certainly helped get a lot of the movement underway, but I can't help but look at some of those older Russian probes and think, "Damn, what a clever bunch of guys they had."
Russia had been working on rockets long before the Germans were buzzing Britain; think of where we'd be now if we'd paired a guy like Goddard with guys like Glushko and Korolev. Sucks that Russian's pre-eminent rocket designers were later arrested and tortured under Stalin's terrors.
--- A small aside (Karma to burn...) why are we wasting our limited resources on sending probes to distant planets? It seems absurd to me, that you would send a probe halfway across the solar system, then wait (and pray) that all the instruments survived the trip, then wait for the results to come back as weak sputtering data. Think about it, folks -- How did they do in Star Trek? You assemble one big ship in space, then have it go out and get your research.
Everyone's talking about landing people on Mars, living on Mars... it's insane! The requirements to land on a planet are a lot more restrictive than travelling to a planet. Just concentrate on a ship with enough power (it would probably have to be nuclear, like our nuclear subs are today). Once you're power solution is found, you can build it as big and un-aerodynamic as you want! Need some extra O2, or food? No problem, just tack on another cargo hold.
I realize Ion propulsion isn't very efficient right now, but with enough power you wouldn't have to carry around all that stupid compressed air. Anyway, my point is that we could accomplish so much if we just got some people out there, but we don't have to have people living on other planets for this to happen. Just build a ship, people. You can figure out the other stuff as you go./rant.
The lag time between Earth and Mars is anywhere between 3 and 22 minutes when Earth and Mars are clostest and farthest away from each other in their orbits
And just to make matters worse, you've got to deal with some serious high-gain amplification to "dial them up". Beaming cable over a satellite's easy -- sending it millions of miles away means a lot more power (a scarce commodity on a satellite to begin with) or a much more sensitive antenna on the recieving end. I don't know what the current data transmission rates with the things we sent to Mars, but for reference, the Magellan probe back in the 90's had a transmission rate of 115 - 268.9 kilobits/sec.
It is really amazing to consider that we now have a "spy" satellite orbitting Mars relaying images of the surface back to us on Earth, and that it's sensors are good enough to show us photos of the landing of the rover on the surface. Just incredible. But this technology is still in its infancy -- we've still got decades before we land a man on the planet. This is an amazing page about the Soviet exploration of Venus that may also be of interest.
What's with teaching state history, when teaching the present and future values of a loan is so much much more important towards quenching the blind ambition of college-bound students.
Sorry, Mods, but ignorance is not insightful. More like inciteful.
There are plenty of good reasons to learn history; the most obvious reason being that it helps you understand why we are where we are. But your question assumes people are actually learning history, and I must make a serious objection.
Since the time teachers have is a limiting factor, we try and give the fundementals -- casting a wide net and hoping this spurns students to go and (shocking!) learn on their own. Unfortunately, the resources allocated to education pale in comparison to the money spent on, say, cosmetics. Or professional sports. Or any of a number of other useless things that reinforce we can't be our best unless we spend, Spend, Spend! Welcome to the U.S.
It's not like students don't have enough time to learn history, science and economics. But more often then not, the kinds of subjects you mentioned are seldom requirements, though some schools offer pretty decent physical-education programs and economics classes as electives. In general, this increase corresponds to higher income demographics, which may help to explain why the rich tend to be slimmer.:)
I believe the appropriate reponse might contain the comment, "Karma is a bitch." When Jane Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe were popular in the 50's, women were faced with unrealistic expectations -- and have had cope with lower self-esteem and in some cases increased health risks (implants). Nowadays crap like Sex in the City and Coupling tell guys they will simply not be memorable lovers if they're aren't donkies. Never mind technique. Never mind that most normal women do have an upper bound on "comfortable" size that likely isn't that much larger then the guy in question. No, if you're going to satisfy your woman, you've got to split her in half.
Ask yourself how many guys would want to date a woman based on her breast size? That's probably a similar number to how many women would go for a larger guy. Now, think about that first number, and subtract how many guys could still have a happy relationship with a woman regardless of her chest?
In other words, Yes, women care, a few more than others, but not so many that it's causing you to lose potential dates. There are probably other factors that rank far higher (spending all your time on/., for instance).
Going back to your New World analogy, you forgot that before America was colonised by Europeans that it was explored by them beforehand.
Not to mention, the land they were going to had air they could breathe, water they could drink and food they could eat. In order to sustain life on Mars, you'd need to have some extremely advanced (and expensive) equipment just to survive for a week, let alone a lifetime.
Instead, we invested nearly everything into the Shuttle, which IMO has been a major diversion, as well as a money pit.
I don't think people realize just how many parts there are to a "Man on Mars" equation, and how difficult each part is. Getting to Mars, having enough food and water to sustain the trip, hitting a target that far away, then coming back is hard enough. But if you actually plan on landing someone on the surface, you've got yourself a HUGE problem.
Look, Mars isn't the moon. A couple of small boosters isn't going to cut it when you're trying to escape from planetary gravity. The shuttle may have diverted a lot of money from the "Let's Just Get Out There" fund, but if we're ever going to land a person on Mars, we'd better have a damned good planet-to-orbit-to-planet system developed. And that means a shuttle of some kind.
I personally don't see a Mars landing happening within the next three decades. No way. There are too many logistical problems to solve. While we've pretty much got the hang of hitting the Mars target from Earth (I don't think any of our Mars-shots have missed) we have a long way to go before we can reliably get a lander to the surface (we're getting better at this part). Then you have to factor in the large amounts of fuel you need to carry to Mars if you ever want to come back to Earth. The amount of things you have to have in place for this to happen is staggering. Just off the top of my head:
Earth-> Earth Orbit vehicle [Yes, but needs improvement]
Space station (ideally you would store your months and months of required supplies in Earth orbit) [Not really]
Earth Orbit-> Mars Orbit vehicle [Not really]
Mars orbital station (good for telemetry, as well as emergency way-station procedures in case crew get stranded) [No]
Mars Orbit-> Surface -> Mars Orbit (Remember all that fuel you're going to need to escape the Martian gravity) [No]
If, in the next couple of decades, we can send a rover to Mars and get it back here I'd be impressed. But I don't see a lot of talk about how to overcome the issue of landing a rover to the surface that still has enough fuel to get back into orbit again. Think about how hard the current Mars rovers hit the surface -- now add a few thousand pounds of rocket fuel to the mix. We need a much, much more sophisticated shuttle designed if we plan on having humans land and then come back (fragile, air-breathing bastards that we are).
Well, for some reason my impression of Ford will always resemble the mad, bumbling version on the BBC TV series. I know the BBC series gets a lot of flak for handling the storyline so terribly, but the casting of Ford, Arthur, the Book and Marvin were as good as I thought they'd ever get.
Now, the casting of Arthur and Marvin in this I accepted quickly (can't remember who's doing the Book, if anyone), but the choice of a black Ford works for me for a couple of reasons.
First, the only real requirements for Ford are that he be reasonably inconspicuous and a bit crazed. There are a lot of people that could fill those shoes. Plus, England is just generally more colorblind then we are (our histories are surely to blame) and provided it makes sense (for instance, a black Ford living in Wales is probably less likely than a black Ford living in Manchester) there's no reason why he couldn't, or wouldn't be black.
I know the one thing that's going to suffer from this translation is that, since this is the first real American production of the book, the English-ness will be massacred a-la Harry Potter. Having Mos Def as Ford allows his character to remain fundementally unchanged (still a crazy guy), plus give American audiences something they'll instantly recognize ("Look! A young black male in the supporting lead role! He must be the comic sidekick, like that Chris Tucker guy").
Plus, you know companies like Disney love to play up their multiculturalism.
The email accounts that this idea harvests can certainly be used for spam mischief, but I have already seen a variation on this theme that is used for much more practical (and financially rewarding) purposes. For obvious reasons I'm not at liberty to give too many details, but realize that there are a lot of services that use captchas that aren't offering free email accounts. Think bigger. For instance, say, Ticketmaster.
A lot of sites are using Turing tests these days because an OCR software solution would require a decent budget and some real programmers to crack. Sure, it can be done, but if the prize is a few email solicitations, that's not a big pot of gold to tempt most people with the resources to do this. But when the payout is bigger (say, a dozen front-row seats to a concert, or 3rd base seats at the World Series) you will see much more sophisticated systems arising that can make you shitloads of cash without anyone ever being the wiser. Of course, there's different ethics at work. What would you be more annoyed at: getting a hundred junk emails a day, or missing out on those 50-yard seats at the Super Bowl?
The reason you don't hear too much about this sort of thing is because the people involved appreciate the huge amounts of money at stake, so they keep their mouths shut. Yeah, it's too bad you can't put your system on/. and show off to da man, on the other hand, you get to drive a nice sports car and live in a duplex in Manhattan. It's a trade-off.
Why am I even mentioning any of this? Because I missed the boat (heck, wasn't even invited onboard!), so I'm not making any dime off it. Which makes me a little bitter.:)
Know and understand this: any system you can think of that has holes in it that can be exploited for financial gain are most likely already being exploited by insiders who know a lot more about these sytems than we do. As a general rule, if you have a clever idea to make a million bucks, it might not have been done already. But if it's up on Slashdot, you have most definately missed the boat.
Go to Suprnova.org and check out what's new, or use Nova Search to look for something specific.
The advantages of Bittorent: swarmed downloads (if a lot of people are downloading something, the speeds increase); auto-verify downloaded pieces against a hash (no more fakes or poisoned files).
The disadvantages: easy as piss for other clients to get your IP (if you're worried about that sort of thing).
Slashdot's new co-location site is now at Andover.Net's own (pinky finger to the mouth) $1 million dedicated data center at the Exodus network facility in Waltham, Mass [...] All boxes are networked together through a Cisco 6509 with 2 MSFCs and a Cisco 3500 so we can rearrange our internal network topology just by reconfiguring the switch. Internet connectivity to/from the outside world all flows through an Arrowpoint CS-800 switch which acts as both a firewall load balancer for the front end Web servers.
The Hardware: 5 load balanced Web servers dedicated to pages; 3 load balanced Web servers dedicated to images; 1 SQL server; 1 NFS Server. All the boxes are VA Linux Systems FullOns running Debian (except for the SQL box). Each box (except for the SQL box) has LVD SCSI with 10,000 RPM drives. And they all have 2 Intel EtherExpress 100 LAN adapters.
The company I used to work for was co-located at the Exodus network facility, and I've been in it a couple of times. It is, in a word, awesome. The security is tighter than Ft. Knox. They usually don't let you past the front "desk" unless you've got a good reason. (By "desk" I mean a tightly secured room with heavy glass, steel doors, a million cameras on you). They make you wear trackable badges when you enter the building. You're instructed to not look at Altavista's boxen (which were also located at Exodus, at least when I saw it). Of course everyone looks anyway. The drool factor on these systems cannot be measured in simple liters. The battery backup system alone is massive, and there's something like 3 redundancies for each system. All the boxes are inside steel cages, most of the cooler systems use optical data transfer... There's enough heavy-iron Cisco in the building to grill yourself up a pancake the size of Texas. (Oh, that's crisco).
In other words, not IIS with a cracked copy of MS SQL running off XP Pro on an AMD Thunderbird.
I guess you haven't seen this yet, then, have you?
Yes, I realize it's not very practical for sports or photojournalism, but this is only going to get better and cheaper. Everyone who's bought a decent digital camera will tell you the same thing: for 90% of my work, digital does the same thing as film, only it's a shitload cheaper, a shitload easier, and offers some fantastic additional benefits. Think of media storage for instance -- storing slides or negs is a bitch, whether you're a pro dealing with cataloging thousands of images for business, or you're an amateur with a dozen shoe-boxes of holiday and travel shots. Digital makes this so easy it hurts.
Now, you can certainly argue the merits of film technology not requiring as much continued investment, but the fact is, the pro-sumer line of cameras that are out now rival film in all characteristics save one: tonal range. The room for new technological growth is still there, but at this point the 35mm evolution to digital is complete.
People that argue about resolution are missing the bigger picture: if I want to do anything with an image, whether digital or analog, the first thing I'm going to do is get it into my computer. That's easier when the format I'm shooting in is already digital. Also, if I'm scanning a slide, even on a *nice* scanner, you're not going to see any improvement over the 5 meg files I get out of my digital body. What you *will* see is lots of dust, which means a few hours Photoshopping. Most of the time, a sub $20k scanner's extra pixels are just interpolation, anyway. There's plenty of software that can do that with low-res images already.
In terms of maturity -- have you seen the long-exposure capabilities of Canon's digital line? Holy-freakin-shit! Even an EOS D60, which is now outdated, can produce 4-minute exposures with no noise. Nothing. Turn the night into day.
Then there's the added benefits for learning photographers. If you want to get good, you shoot your ass off. For the first couple of years, you toss out 35/36 shots. As you get better, you'll slowly lower that, but the fact is, developing that much film is expensive. And as a learning tool, if I'm going to figure out that a blown shot at f/8 would have been perfect at f/11, I need to know right after I've taken the shot. Not a week later when I finally get my film back. And that's only useful when I've recorded the exposure for every shot. Have you ever tried this? After a single roll you'll never want to do it again.
With digital, you get instant feedback as to what you're technically doing right or wrong. Hell, nice pro-sumer digitals offer color histograms of your shots. I can confidently say that with the right teacher, a digital camera will allow an amateur to develop the technical skills of a pro in under a year (now, the artistic skills may never come, but that's another issue entirely).
When you get into bigger boxes (8x10's and the like) you're talking about thousands of dollars of investment for good glass and equipment (and good luck with your processing costs -- you can always buy an enlarger!). Medium format equipment can run you several times more if you want the "35mm experience" like the fancy Mamiya 645's. Frankly, I don't see any advantage to traditional film unless you: 1) Already know what you're doing, and 2) Are currently making a living off of it. And even then I'd recommend it, unless you 3) Have already spent a huge chunk on medium or large-format, and are too unsophisticated to figure out how to "work the eBay".
That was pretty nice, leading us down a primrose path and then throwing that 4th babe in there. Wasn't expecting that fine piece of crumpet. You bastard.
Slashdot Mirror
Thermonuclear devices are fusion weapons. To generate the incredible heat necessary to fuse your fuel (heavy hydrogen in the old days) requires the initial triggering of a conventional (fission) atomic device. Thus heat+nuclear, or thermonuclear.
I have used it to create from-scratch graphics for countless websites, including: this, this, this, and >this.
Sorry, but that last link looks like you just ripped off images from the web. The lightbulb and book are in completely different styles, for instance. One looks like it may have originally been created in Illustrator, the second is a cropped photo. If this is what you have to resort to when you use Gimp, I'll stick with my Adobe suite, thank you.
I realize you probably have a day job, but you know, even armchair advice like this could be extremely helpful to the Gimp team. I don't know who they have in charge of UI, but I'm sure your points would be appreciated. I hope their coders are lurking on /.
Content creation with photoshop is like painting with a brick.
Wish I had some mod points for this comment! While you're right about creating something from nothing, there are times (many times) when you need to extract something from an image. I've become pretty adept at using the selection tool in various ALT/CTRL/SHFT configurations to get just the right mask. And when you're feeling lazy, it's relatively easy to tweak the Magic Wand tool to grab what you need.
I suppose it's like the difference between "primitive" style cut-out or collage work and the more traditional paintbrush or pencil.
Don't forget, the real reason web designers without proper training tend to use Photoshop for their art or design work is because 90% of their work is pretty simple (buttons, banners, etc.) and all has to be exported to a rasterized format (JPEG, GIF, Bitmap, etc.)
Print people (newspapers, advertisers, etc.) have to deal with the real world. Raster images (as opposed to vector graphics produced by Freehand or Illustrator) can't be resized without interpolation. If you want to work in Photoshop, you'll have to deal with giant file sizes (600 dpi tends to require hundreds of megs per sheet). Also, while most printers can handle enormous data files (my HP 1500 can print full-page 4-color in about a minute a sheet) it's a lot easier to go from Illustrator to encapsulated PostScript than it is to convert from raster.
If your work is almost all at 72 dpi (and it will be if your primary building blocks for "design" are ripped off of other people's websites) it's just easier to stay in Photoshop.
I think one of the first major step to interstellar travel will be establishing a base on another planet
Well, it'd be a hell of a lot cheaper if we started with a more local "first step" like, say, the Moon. Mars is a lot sexier, sure, but the Moon is an order of magnitude closer (and thus, cheaper). I'm not suprised that the Japanese have the moon in their line of sight for their next space missions. It makes sense.
below the H2SO4 clouds so you can see the ground
...then they would have melted upon deployment. The surface temperature of Venus is something like 800 degrees. And the atmosphere is highly reactive to metals. Yes, we have the technology to land on it nowadays, and it's certainly a lot closer than Mars, but terraforming and colonization talk just obfuscates what our primary purpose as a civilization should be: to build a large enough ship in orbit to explore the solar system up close and person.
I'm afraid you haven't been looking too closely at the imaging and cloud density data that the websites above explain. There aren't "clouds" like on Earth -- chubby, fat little suckers that we have. On Venus, it's just a giant, very slow-moving morass of gas. The Sulpher-rich "clouds" are more like fog. The heavy pressure makes "walking" on the surface like deep-sea diving on the surface of the ocean floors. But you're never going to get much better visibility than a couple of yards, maybe a dozen or so if you're lucky.
If a "lander" had been equipped with airbags
This ship could have planetary re-entry capsules built into it, (much like the missions we're sending to Mars) or we could just build a better Earth-to-Orbit vehicle (which is long overdue). As long as you give it a strong enough power source you can build as ugly and un-aerodynamic a ship as you like. Need more O2? Need more food and water? Just hitch on a big-ass freight box behind the ship. It doesn't matter what the ship looks like (except from a maneuvering point of view -- center of gravity and all that).
But no, instead we waste our money sending fancy probes hundreds of millions of miles away and crossing our fingers. If these Mars missions have taught us anything, it's that scientists are very, very clever at fixing problems. Think of what they could do if they were able to do their observations on-site, instead of troubleshooting technical support problems with a 22 minute phone delay.
Don't make the mistake of staying local. Many of the people (most?) that are looking at employment websites are trying to find local companies that are hiring.
Just take a step back from your computer and think for a few seconds. Are you tied to a location (family, spouse, etc.?) If you have the ability to move, consider what kinds of cities (or towns) could use you best?
I was living in Boston, had went to school there, even got a fancy IT job when I graduated in '98. Really great times, but they stopped rolling by '02, and I found myself seriously struggling to make ends meet.
I worked freelance for about a year before all the work dried up, then I decided I'd be happier making less money if it was more steady. I looked in vain for work using online sites and classified ads before an opportunity presented itself to me. It's available to anyone, really.
For not terribly interesting reasons, my GF and I moved out to the middle of nowhere (Nebrasksa). I've never been to the midwest before. Never seen this much corn in all my life. I thought I'd drown in boredom. But you know what? It costs nothing to live here. You can get an apartment for a couple hundred bucks a month. Food is cheap and super-sized (hey, it's the heartland).
And I thought there'd be nothing for me here, jobs-wise. But my "big city" experience automagically placed my resume at the top of a lot of stacks of job applications. Most of the local talent has left the state, so there's a real need for skilled IT people. I got a job that's perfect, working for a nice, small office with a relaxed working environment, making more than enough to start saving again.
By Boston standards, I could just barely scrape by. I used to buy into the idea that "Places like San Francisco or New York are more expensive (housing, food, etc.) than Kansas City, Missouri because the jobs pay more." People, this is a myth.
Just ask around and you'll find that the salaries made in most of the Eastern Seaboard's cities is not substantially more than what you might find in the middle of Ohio (for example). But take cost of living into account, and the difference in lifestyle becomes readily apparent. You have to decide what's most important to you -- is it being surrounded by art and music and 3am pizza? Or is it being able to afford your rent, have some extra for cable TV and high-speed internet?
Make no doubt, if you've got 4 operas available to you any night of the week, if you've got the best pizza in the world at your doorstep, if you've got superstar artists living in lofts downtown -- You are paying for this. If you can't live without it, well, there's nothing I can say to convince you. I found that what was making me miserable (not being able to afford to live normal life comfortably) weighed more than what was making me happy (having a whole city at your fingertips).
But my point is this. If you're in the U.S., most of it is the same all over. I know, New York City is different than Tupulo, Mississippi, but the general day-to-day life of Americans is a xeroxed morass of sameness with the exception of a few of the larger cities. But lemme tell you, living in an apartment in SoHo sucks when you find all your income is going to cover your head and you're stuck at home on a Saturday night because you just can't afford $10 drinks at the bar.
Look for cheap places to live, then look in their regional newspaper's classified ads for jobs. Divide the starting salaries you see with the same newspaper's classified ads for apartments. There are many places in this country that have high ratios, you just have to decide what's got the better cost/benefit ratio. I can tell you, unless you're a doctor, lawyer or financial wunderkid, a lot of places don't make financial sense for someone just trying to start out in the world.
People are buying homes out here in their early twenties. I couldn't have dreamed of doing that in Boston or New York, not for a long time, anyway. The average rent in most of your bigger cities could get you a pretty big house in other parts of the country.
I don't understand the big push for electronic voting. What exactly are we fixing? So it takes a couple more days to count all the votes... it's not like the political system grinds to a halt during those precious hours while votes are tallied. Strange that our country has for centuries done perfectly well with the traditional method, yet all of a sudden it's such an important issue that requires technological intervention.
All precious stones are not the same, not just because of the impurities a stone takes on during formation. The crystalline structure of a diamond is cubic, while rubies and saphires are trigonal. I think there are 7 total different crystalline configurations. Also, packed carbon tends to be a lot harder than packed corundum (the building block of rubies and saphire, which are almost identical). When someone tells you that diamonds are 10 and rubies/saphires are 9 on the Mohs hardness scale, it doesn't reflect that the scale isn't linear -- diamonds are 90 times harder than rubies/saphires, which are only about 5 times harder then the next group of minerals.
Furthermore, those who come up with a diamond mine not controled by DeBeers can still be crushed because there are many types of diamonds, and no mine find is going to generate all of them
Funny you should mention that... I just saw a show (Discovery? PBS? Can't recall precisely) that showed an Australian diamond firm that's the "new kid on the block" because of the tenacity of it's founder. The Aussie studied geology and knew there should be diamonds in this one region of northwest Australia, and after something like 5 years of walking around, panning in streams, then walking around some more, he finally hit the mother load.
Anyway, the reason this company isn't going away any time soon is because the diamonds that come from this source are almost all red and pink diamonds, the most rare diamond on the planet. The firm would have an exclusive sale every year that was invite-only, and the show was able to document one guy who tried to make a bid on their choice 10 pieces. These things were, no kidding, mere millimiters in size. The largest one was I think half a carat. He bid 4 mil, and didn't get it (they naturally don't reveal the amount of the winning bid).
I, for one, long for the day when we no longer prize such stupidly common elementals like Diamonds for more practical, rare gifts. Nothing says "I love you" like an Iridium baseball bat.
I also read somewhere that one of the new systems that is going to be tested is the use of the Ka Band for data transmission instead of what they normally use (X-Band), which I believe increases the amount of data that can be sent an order of magnitude or so. The X-Band tops out at 400 kbps, I believe.
the 'milestone' stated in the article, which was apparently overlooked by many of the posters here is the fact that, for the first time, a non-NASA spacecraft (in this case the ESA's Mars Express Orbiter) got into the act as a data relay for the rovers
/rant.
It's also neat that some of these satellites are doing double-duty -- that is, they have certain bandwidth limitations that act as a bottleneck to all the data they could be sending from their normal scientific operation modes. The Mars Express orbiter had to juggle data from both its scientific instruments and all the recon for the rovers. In effect, distributing bandwidth like an ISP.
Yet while it is political, it is a good thing in that it's another step toward recognizing that for space exploration to be fully realized it needs to be global endeavor, not a national one.
Definately. I often wonder how much more advanced our space program would be (our=mankind's) if the Russians and Americans had been working cooperatively in the 60's instead of reinventing each other's work. I realize that the anatagonism of the cold war certainly helped get a lot of the movement underway, but I can't help but look at some of those older Russian probes and think, "Damn, what a clever bunch of guys they had."
Russia had been working on rockets long before the Germans were buzzing Britain; think of where we'd be now if we'd paired a guy like Goddard with guys like Glushko and Korolev. Sucks that Russian's pre-eminent rocket designers were later arrested and tortured under Stalin's terrors.
---
A small aside (Karma to burn...) why are we wasting our limited resources on sending probes to distant planets? It seems absurd to me, that you would send a probe halfway across the solar system, then wait (and pray) that all the instruments survived the trip, then wait for the results to come back as weak sputtering data. Think about it, folks -- How did they do in Star Trek? You assemble one big ship in space , then have it go out and get your research.
Everyone's talking about landing people on Mars, living on Mars... it's insane! The requirements to land on a planet are a lot more restrictive than travelling to a planet. Just concentrate on a ship with enough power (it would probably have to be nuclear, like our nuclear subs are today). Once you're power solution is found, you can build it as big and un-aerodynamic as you want! Need some extra O2, or food? No problem, just tack on another cargo hold.
I realize Ion propulsion isn't very efficient right now, but with enough power you wouldn't have to carry around all that stupid compressed air. Anyway, my point is that we could accomplish so much if we just got some people out there, but we don't have to have people living on other planets for this to happen. Just build a ship, people. You can figure out the other stuff as you go.
From their website...
The data rates from the Mars Surveyor to Earth are 1105, 2856, and 9240 bps and realtime rates are 29260 and 63580 bps.
The lag time between Earth and Mars is anywhere between 3 and 22 minutes when Earth and Mars are clostest and farthest away from each other in their orbits
And just to make matters worse, you've got to deal with some serious high-gain amplification to "dial them up". Beaming cable over a satellite's easy -- sending it millions of miles away means a lot more power (a scarce commodity on a satellite to begin with) or a much more sensitive antenna on the recieving end. I don't know what the current data transmission rates with the things we sent to Mars, but for reference, the Magellan probe back in the 90's had a transmission rate of 115 - 268.9 kilobits/sec.
It is really amazing to consider that we now have a "spy" satellite orbitting Mars relaying images of the surface back to us on Earth, and that it's sensors are good enough to show us photos of the landing of the rover on the surface. Just incredible. But this technology is still in its infancy -- we've still got decades before we land a man on the planet. This is an amazing page about the Soviet exploration of Venus that may also be of interest.
What's with teaching state history, when teaching the present and future values of a loan is so much much more important towards quenching the blind ambition of college-bound students.
:)
Sorry, Mods, but ignorance is not insightful. More like inciteful.
There are plenty of good reasons to learn history; the most obvious reason being that it helps you understand why we are where we are. But your question assumes people are actually learning history, and I must make a serious objection.
Since the time teachers have is a limiting factor, we try and give the fundementals -- casting a wide net and hoping this spurns students to go and (shocking!) learn on their own. Unfortunately, the resources allocated to education pale in comparison to the money spent on, say, cosmetics. Or professional sports. Or any of a number of other useless things that reinforce we can't be our best unless we spend, Spend, Spend! Welcome to the U.S.
It's not like students don't have enough time to learn history, science and economics. But more often then not, the kinds of subjects you mentioned are seldom requirements, though some schools offer pretty decent physical-education programs and economics classes as electives. In general, this increase corresponds to higher income demographics, which may help to explain why the rich tend to be slimmer.
These aren't the torrents you're looking for. Move along. Move along.
I believe the appropriate reponse might contain the comment, "Karma is a bitch." When Jane Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe were popular in the 50's, women were faced with unrealistic expectations -- and have had cope with lower self-esteem and in some cases increased health risks (implants). Nowadays crap like Sex in the City and Coupling tell guys they will simply not be memorable lovers if they're aren't donkies. Never mind technique. Never mind that most normal women do have an upper bound on "comfortable" size that likely isn't that much larger then the guy in question. No, if you're going to satisfy your woman, you've got to split her in half.
/., for instance).
Ask yourself how many guys would want to date a woman based on her breast size? That's probably a similar number to how many women would go for a larger guy. Now, think about that first number, and subtract how many guys could still have a happy relationship with a woman regardless of her chest?
In other words, Yes, women care, a few more than others, but not so many that it's causing you to lose potential dates. There are probably other factors that rank far higher (spending all your time on
Going back to your New World analogy, you forgot that before America was colonised by Europeans that it was explored by them beforehand.
Not to mention, the land they were going to had air they could breathe, water they could drink and food they could eat. In order to sustain life on Mars, you'd need to have some extremely advanced (and expensive) equipment just to survive for a week, let alone a lifetime.
I don't think people realize just how many parts there are to a "Man on Mars" equation, and how difficult each part is. Getting to Mars, having enough food and water to sustain the trip, hitting a target that far away, then coming back is hard enough. But if you actually plan on landing someone on the surface, you've got yourself a HUGE problem.
Look, Mars isn't the moon. A couple of small boosters isn't going to cut it when you're trying to escape from planetary gravity. The shuttle may have diverted a lot of money from the "Let's Just Get Out There" fund, but if we're ever going to land a person on Mars, we'd better have a damned good planet-to-orbit-to-planet system developed. And that means a shuttle of some kind.
I personally don't see a Mars landing happening within the next three decades. No way. There are too many logistical problems to solve. While we've pretty much got the hang of hitting the Mars target from Earth (I don't think any of our Mars-shots have missed) we have a long way to go before we can reliably get a lander to the surface (we're getting better at this part). Then you have to factor in the large amounts of fuel you need to carry to Mars if you ever want to come back to Earth. The amount of things you have to have in place for this to happen is staggering. Just off the top of my head:
- Earth-> Earth Orbit vehicle [Yes, but needs improvement]
- Space station (ideally you would store your months and months of required supplies in Earth orbit) [Not really]
- Earth Orbit-> Mars Orbit vehicle [Not really]
- Mars orbital station (good for telemetry, as well as emergency way-station procedures in case crew get stranded) [No]
- Mars Orbit-> Surface -> Mars Orbit (Remember all that fuel you're going to need to escape the Martian gravity) [No]
If, in the next couple of decades, we can send a rover to Mars and get it back here I'd be impressed. But I don't see a lot of talk about how to overcome the issue of landing a rover to the surface that still has enough fuel to get back into orbit again. Think about how hard the current Mars rovers hit the surface -- now add a few thousand pounds of rocket fuel to the mix. We need a much, much more sophisticated shuttle designed if we plan on having humans land and then come back (fragile, air-breathing bastards that we are).Well, for some reason my impression of Ford will always resemble the mad, bumbling version on the BBC TV series. I know the BBC series gets a lot of flak for handling the storyline so terribly, but the casting of Ford, Arthur, the Book and Marvin were as good as I thought they'd ever get.
Now, the casting of Arthur and Marvin in this I accepted quickly (can't remember who's doing the Book, if anyone), but the choice of a black Ford works for me for a couple of reasons.
First, the only real requirements for Ford are that he be reasonably inconspicuous and a bit crazed. There are a lot of people that could fill those shoes. Plus, England is just generally more colorblind then we are (our histories are surely to blame) and provided it makes sense (for instance, a black Ford living in Wales is probably less likely than a black Ford living in Manchester) there's no reason why he couldn't, or wouldn't be black.
I know the one thing that's going to suffer from this translation is that, since this is the first real American production of the book, the English-ness will be massacred a-la Harry Potter. Having Mos Def as Ford allows his character to remain fundementally unchanged (still a crazy guy), plus give American audiences something they'll instantly recognize ("Look! A young black male in the supporting lead role! He must be the comic sidekick, like that Chris Tucker guy").
Plus, you know companies like Disney love to play up their multiculturalism.
The email accounts that this idea harvests can certainly be used for spam mischief, but I have already seen a variation on this theme that is used for much more practical (and financially rewarding) purposes. For obvious reasons I'm not at liberty to give too many details, but realize that there are a lot of services that use captchas that aren't offering free email accounts. Think bigger. For instance, say, Ticketmaster.
/. and show off to da man, on the other hand, you get to drive a nice sports car and live in a duplex in Manhattan. It's a trade-off.
:)
A lot of sites are using Turing tests these days because an OCR software solution would require a decent budget and some real programmers to crack. Sure, it can be done, but if the prize is a few email solicitations, that's not a big pot of gold to tempt most people with the resources to do this. But when the payout is bigger (say, a dozen front-row seats to a concert, or 3rd base seats at the World Series) you will see much more sophisticated systems arising that can make you shitloads of cash without anyone ever being the wiser. Of course, there's different ethics at work. What would you be more annoyed at: getting a hundred junk emails a day, or missing out on those 50-yard seats at the Super Bowl?
The reason you don't hear too much about this sort of thing is because the people involved appreciate the huge amounts of money at stake, so they keep their mouths shut. Yeah, it's too bad you can't put your system on
Why am I even mentioning any of this? Because I missed the boat (heck, wasn't even invited onboard!), so I'm not making any dime off it. Which makes me a little bitter.
Know and understand this: any system you can think of that has holes in it that can be exploited for financial gain are most likely already being exploited by insiders who know a lot more about these sytems than we do. As a general rule, if you have a clever idea to make a million bucks, it might not have been done already. But if it's up on Slashdot, you have most definately missed the boat.
Very simple.
Download the experimental Bittorrent client.
Go to Suprnova.org and check out what's new, or use Nova Search to look for something specific.
The advantages of Bittorent: swarmed downloads (if a lot of people are downloading something, the speeds increase); auto-verify downloaded pieces against a hash (no more fakes or poisoned files).
The disadvantages: easy as piss for other clients to get your IP (if you're worried about that sort of thing).
From the /. FAQ:
Slashdot's new co-location site is now at Andover.Net's own (pinky finger to the mouth) $1 million dedicated data center at the Exodus network facility in Waltham, Mass [...] All boxes are networked together through a Cisco 6509 with 2 MSFCs and a Cisco 3500 so we can rearrange our internal network topology just by reconfiguring the switch. Internet connectivity to/from the outside world all flows through an Arrowpoint CS-800 switch which acts as both a firewall load balancer for the front end Web servers.
The Hardware: 5 load balanced Web servers dedicated to pages; 3 load balanced Web servers dedicated to images; 1 SQL server; 1 NFS Server.
All the boxes are VA Linux Systems FullOns running Debian (except for the SQL box). Each box (except for the SQL box) has LVD SCSI with 10,000 RPM drives. And they all have 2 Intel EtherExpress 100 LAN adapters.
The company I used to work for was co-located at the Exodus network facility, and I've been in it a couple of times. It is, in a word, awesome. The security is tighter than Ft. Knox. They usually don't let you past the front "desk" unless you've got a good reason. (By "desk" I mean a tightly secured room with heavy glass, steel doors, a million cameras on you). They make you wear trackable badges when you enter the building. You're instructed to not look at Altavista's boxen (which were also located at Exodus, at least when I saw it). Of course everyone looks anyway. The drool factor on these systems cannot be measured in simple liters. The battery backup system alone is massive, and there's something like 3 redundancies for each system. All the boxes are inside steel cages, most of the cooler systems use optical data transfer... There's enough heavy-iron Cisco in the building to grill yourself up a pancake the size of Texas. (Oh, that's crisco).
In other words, not IIS with a cracked copy of MS SQL running off XP Pro on an AMD Thunderbird.
I guess you haven't seen this yet, then, have you?
Yes, I realize it's not very practical for sports or photojournalism, but this is only going to get better and cheaper. Everyone who's bought a decent digital camera will tell you the same thing: for 90% of my work, digital does the same thing as film, only it's a shitload cheaper, a shitload easier, and offers some fantastic additional benefits. Think of media storage for instance -- storing slides or negs is a bitch, whether you're a pro dealing with cataloging thousands of images for business, or you're an amateur with a dozen shoe-boxes of holiday and travel shots. Digital makes this so easy it hurts.
Now, you can certainly argue the merits of film technology not requiring as much continued investment, but the fact is, the pro-sumer line of cameras that are out now rival film in all characteristics save one: tonal range. The room for new technological growth is still there, but at this point the 35mm evolution to digital is complete.
People that argue about resolution are missing the bigger picture: if I want to do anything with an image, whether digital or analog, the first thing I'm going to do is get it into my computer. That's easier when the format I'm shooting in is already digital. Also, if I'm scanning a slide, even on a *nice* scanner, you're not going to see any improvement over the 5 meg files I get out of my digital body. What you *will* see is lots of dust, which means a few hours Photoshopping. Most of the time, a sub $20k scanner's extra pixels are just interpolation, anyway. There's plenty of software that can do that with low-res images already.
In terms of maturity -- have you seen the long-exposure capabilities of Canon's digital line? Holy-freakin-shit! Even an EOS D60, which is now outdated, can produce 4-minute exposures with no noise. Nothing. Turn the night into day.
Then there's the added benefits for learning photographers. If you want to get good, you shoot your ass off. For the first couple of years, you toss out 35/36 shots. As you get better, you'll slowly lower that, but the fact is, developing that much film is expensive. And as a learning tool, if I'm going to figure out that a blown shot at f/8 would have been perfect at f/11, I need to know right after I've taken the shot. Not a week later when I finally get my film back. And that's only useful when I've recorded the exposure for every shot. Have you ever tried this? After a single roll you'll never want to do it again.
With digital, you get instant feedback as to what you're technically doing right or wrong. Hell, nice pro-sumer digitals offer color histograms of your shots. I can confidently say that with the right teacher, a digital camera will allow an amateur to develop the technical skills of a pro in under a year (now, the artistic skills may never come, but that's another issue entirely).
When you get into bigger boxes (8x10's and the like) you're talking about thousands of dollars of investment for good glass and equipment (and good luck with your processing costs -- you can always buy an enlarger!). Medium format equipment can run you several times more if you want the "35mm experience" like the fancy Mamiya 645's. Frankly, I don't see any advantage to traditional film unless you: 1) Already know what you're doing, and 2) Are currently making a living off of it. And even then I'd recommend it, unless you 3) Have already spent a huge chunk on medium or large-format, and are too unsophisticated to figure out how to "work the eBay".
That was pretty nice, leading us down a primrose path and then throwing that 4th babe in there. Wasn't expecting that fine piece of crumpet. You bastard.