(as it cools it contracts, when you melt it, it expands. think frozen water)
You are incorrect sir; water and it's frozen form ice are the exception to the rule in this case.
Water is at its densest at 4 degrees Celsius; below that, the dimagnetic structure of the molecules comes into play to form six-sided crystals that are actually less dense than the energetic but non-magnetically aligned water.
This is why ice floats in water, instead of sinking. It's also why ponds don't freeze solid in the winter, and why we have no clue how to put someone into suspended animations and safely revive them yet.
then maybe i should spread the word on how NewEgg fucked me on replacing my $600 digital camera and wouldn't return EVEN ONE of my e-mail contacts to them? (btw i originally heard about them through positive word of internet-mouth).
$80 set of cylindrical speakers. Siluro's techno thingies, if you're interested. Bought from new egg. Open the box, and one of the speakers fell apart, the LED is hanging loose by one wire, and the spider on one of the drivers is broken.
Had to pay to ship it back to NewEgg.
That's $15 shipping both ways.
And do they repair it and send it back?
No, they refund my $80.
So this christmas I spent $30 to learn that noone should ever buy from newegg ever. I am glad that it wasn't as costly to me as the lesson apparently was to you...
the only way that is possible is that the mass of the moon is in perfect balance with the distance it is from the earth and velocity that it is moving. if this was not perfect, it would have either floated away, or crashed into the earth years ago.
Actually, the equations for orbital mechanics do not depend on the mass of the object orbiting. Just like gravity exerts the same acceleration on an object regardless of its mass.
Now you can get a perturbation of an orbit, making it more elliptical, by changing its moment of inertia. However, the change would have to be very significant. Why? Because the moon-earth orbital system is stable for small perturbations.
You can see that this is so on any night. Go out and look at the moon. See anything different? Of course not; the moon always shows the same face to earth. It is tidally locked; the effect of tides has caused the moon's rotation to become exactly equal to its orbital period. The same tidal forces tend to pull orbits into circles, which is why most of the larger bodies in the solar system have roughly circular orbits. The closer the body is, the larger this effect (it's an inverse-power law)... that's why the moon's orbit around the earth is nearly precisely circular, and why mercury's orbit around the sun is nearly precisely circular, but Pluto and Jupiter's farthest moons have very elliptical orbits.
There are only a few factors that govern a body's orbit; mass of the object it is orbiting around, velocity, and distance. Given these three parameters, one can calculate its orbit very well. When the body in question is very massive, you have to run the calculation in reverse as well, meaning that the earth also orbits the moon. Actually, to be more precise, the earth and moon both orbit a point that is on a line between their centers of mass, the position of the point derived by their relative mass. In this case, that point is approximately 4000 mi away from Earth's center, putting it firmly within the crust. If you suddenly move mass from the moon to the earth, this point drops a bit more toward's the center of the Earth, with the effect that the moon will be a bit farther away from this center giving it a more elliptical orbit wrt Earth's center. But this new system is just as stable as the previous one.
Basically, the formula for calculating orbits is indifferent to small perturbations. Slightly larger perturbations will be eroded away by tidal forces. Very much larger perturbations can cause the type of behaviour you're talking about, but if we have the energy surplus to make that kind of effect on the moon, what the hell are we doing mining He3 for energy?
I like the guy running the machine gun. If you have surround sound on the DVD, you hear him behind you yelling stuff like "Oh yeah you like that? You want some more? Here's some for you!"
That and the "Why are we here?" conversation from the first episode...
Your premise is wrong because you presume that violence is the desired end result, when in reality, the desired end result is soldier safety combined with an end to hostilities.
Reminds me of Starship Troopers (the book, not the horribly inaccurate movie, horribly inaccurate even by Hollywood's loose standards)
Early in the book, Rico makes a point that he and his teammates are there to provide violence. His commanders decide something needs to be done, to apply violence in a certain way, and it is his job to do it.
Then he goes on about how modern war is not about killing your enemy; its about convincing him that you're right. Violence therefore is not a means to kill; in his kind of war, killing is the opposite of what you want. Your enemy has to be alive to be able to agree with you. He's philosophizing about this because he's on a mission on a planet of almost allies that humanity wants to be more firmly on their side. And therefore his mission is to avoid killing, but to decimate the infrastructure wherever possible.
And then Rico says (paraphrasing), "I've never been asked to kill all the left-handed red heads in a certain area, but if someone decided it needed to be done, me and my men could do it."
Maybe that's what this is about? After you've trained a soldier, after he has reached the point where physical exertion will never tire him again, after he has learned how to shoot as well as can be expected, operate the 200 or so different pieces of equipment he will run into as a soldier - operate them in the dark while sleeping nonetheless, and given him enough field training to ensure he can survive in a warzone...
Maybe the next stage is to teach that soldier how to direct all this ability. The soldier has learned how to be violent. Maybe accelerated massively multi-user virtual reality simulations can provide the training necessary to control that violence, to channel it exactly where needed in exactly the amounts needed.
Think about it; the key to learning any skill is practice and repetition. War games are all fine and good, but they take time to setup. They take time to play. They take time to get to and from. How long does it take for one war game? hours? days?
What if you could run the soldier through the war game in only the time it takes for him to do his job? What if you could continually run him through it again and again, putting him in different situations each time, grading him, providing feedback? How many tactical situations could you put him through in the same time as the previous war game?
It should be noted that photographs can survive an EMP but no digital media can.
I call bullshit.
Hard drives are largely unaffected by EMPs; the power levels required to ruin a CD would cook flesh, and it is possible to buy milspec flash cards that are EMP-hardened.
card counting is legal everywhere in the states. the casinos in nevada are allowed to not let you play if they suspect you're card counting, but it's not against the law. this has been tested in the courts.
And casinos elsewhere, such as Atlantic City, are not allowed to ban you for card counting without mechanical assistance. If they find you counting cards, they will start switching dealers every few minutes, dry up your supply of comp drinks, shuffle more often, whatever it takes to make you want to leave...
Re:Beavis..this is the coolest thing i have ever s
on
Your Own Mecha
·
· Score: 1
Indeed, I think you can argue well that the human form forces compromises that detract from combat effectiveness.
Allow me to provide the counter argument....
The idea of building a humanoid-shaped robot that you control to do your bidding is that we seem to be remarkably flexible in terms of our capabilities, and we already have a very finely-tuned control system for a human-shaped robot. If human-style flexibility and very good human control are requirements for your robotic application, then a humanoid mech is a good choice for you.
Remember when slashdot was about the wierd and wacky stuff on the internet? Like the lego porn page, or the telephone sex page (the one where telephones are having sex), the unix admin porn page, the site that you can telnet into and it does star wars (the movie) in ascii, and other things like this.
I can't help but notice that you provide 4 examples of "vintage slashdot"... three of which are porn related, and the fourth is star wars in ascii, which to a geek is so close to porn that they're indistinguishable...
What I'm hearing is that there should be a mirror site, showing classic slashdot type content, called slashpron
Actually, (AFAIK, IANAS, correct me if I'm wrong) the Hubble images are correct, but they're just using pretty colours to represent different kinds of radiation, not just the normal light.
Or to rephrase, the pretty pictures from the Hubble that are accused of beind doctored, would not be visible to humans if the colorization were not tampered with
While I was eyeing the recent flood of media players that hook up to the TV, I was also disappointed that just about every solution I find on the local shelves all require Windows 2000 or Windows XP.
FYI, what used to be called QCast tuner (before GameShark bought them out) used a Java app, and was out of the box compatible with a variety of host systems.
Cost is a little steep, though not overly so:
PS2: $179 Wireless Adapter: $59 QCast Tuner: $50
Total: $288
Or about $90 more expensive than Gateway's similar product... though when you compare codecs, its apples to oranges... Gateway only supports MPEG 1/2/4
The PS/2 supports that, DivX, and a few other codecs, not to mention a host of image and audio formats IIRC... also it is capable of supporting new codecs (it grabs the codec and saves it to the memory card)... though I've heard rumors that this is only the case with the QCast tuner, and that the new version does not do that...
So, depending on pricing, this Linksys might be a good option for Windows users. If you need Mac or Linux compatibility, though you might be able to hack it in it certainly won't be supported; The QCast Tuner may be the way to go...
Now I can stream Ratchet and Clank from my PS2 through my Happauage BTTV card, grab it with Mplayer, out of my PC 'cross the network to my wireless access point and on to my TV!! Its the missing link I've been waiting for!
With a wireless RF controller or two, this actually might be a good thing, as long as you don't want to play a different game very often:D
Name off the top of your head one portable battery powered device based on digital storage that is capable of recording a high-fidelity data stream.
DAT recorders, Creative Jukebox (several models)..
The Creative Nomads have horrible quality problems in their A/D stage, not to mention only supporting low-bitrate codecs... they don't count, failing to satisfy the criteria of high-fidelity...
What's the price on a portable DAT recorder? Froogle seems to think it's on the wrong side of $700... so while this device certainly meets the criteria mentioned above, it is also 3.5x as expensive as MD technology
Why doesn't Sony give up on this technology? Optical discs are the way to go, with flash cards being a good enough technology for the rest. This is like re-incarnating the Betamax.
Name off the top of your head one portable battery powered device based on digital storage that is capable of recording a high-fidelity data stream.
Yeah that's right. MiniDisc is the only thing out there. DJs, sound technicians, bootleggers, musicians... we all rely on MiniDiscs for high-fidelity field recording.
Re:Compatible with PC. What about Mac? Linux?
on
New Sony Minidisc Players
·
· Score: 4, Informative
"Hi-MD" uses the FAT file system, making it possible to use...
Furthermore, as portable, rewritable PC media, "Hi-MD" complies with USB format's Mass Storage Class
What do you think, Mac, Linux compatible?
Absolutely.
Guess what? EVERY USB Mass Storage Device uses FAT for storage. If you can connect a digital camera to it, you can attach this to it, because all digital cameras use FAT. That's how those USB readers can work, BTW... standardized storage format...
I do not understand why the MD format is still around and Sony releases a new player if there are mp3 players for the same price which can carry much more music for less weight...
Well, among other reasons, it's still the best portable recording format, in terms of portability, fidelity, and storage. As a digital DJ, I am VERY interested in seeing the new HD-MD disks.
I'm even considering writing my own multitracker in.NET using DirectSound, and putting the.NET Framework on every HD-MD disk... then whenever I'm near a computer I can do multitrack recording, just update the.NET Framework and run my program in place... it records direct to MD as it runs...
as far as I'm aware, nobody makes a laser printer that lets you emboss silver foil onto (and into) a piece of paper.
Just an FYI, most serious counterfeiting operations start by stealing a roll of currency paper. The paper arrives at the printing press with most of the anti-counterfeiting measures already enabled; here in america, only the holographic ink and the microprinting are done at the press.
And do you know how many times I've seen someone verify either of those features? Zero.
On the other hand, if you steal a roll of currency paper, you're going to have a real press setup to handle the volume. You want to get that money printed and in circulation, surplus paper burned and in the landfill, way before they catch up to you...
Anonymizer would give you up in half a heartbeat to anyone with a badge, and would start logging once asked. The only real anonymous Internet access, freedom.net, was a casualty of September 11th.
Proof please. I could counter by saying that I trust them not to do that.
Or for a more elegant counter-proof I could merely exclaim, "Nuh-uh!"
But then again my trust in anonymizer is implicit, and based on a working relationship of many years during which they have not betrayed my trust. And anonymizer knows that if they do this once, they will lose all their business; I trust in their greed.
If you're going to make claims to the contrary, I require proof. Take your tin-foil hat off and apply this little thing I call logic, or at least its close relative reason, to the situation.
1. Always anonymize. It's cheap, trustworthy, and it works. www.anonymizer.com is my anonymizer of choice, but choose your own.
2. Disable all HTML features in your mail reader. Of course, if you're truly anonymized, that won't matter anyways.
Seriously, its darned easy to not get caught online these days. I do it as a matter of course; I have a right to privacy in my online transactions, and anonymizer is an easy way to ensure that this privacy is never breached. But, when you're breaking the law, you should be damned sure its untraceable...
Slashdot Mirror
(as it cools it contracts, when you melt it, it expands. think frozen water)
You are incorrect sir; water and it's frozen form ice are the exception to the rule in this case.
Water is at its densest at 4 degrees Celsius; below that, the dimagnetic structure of the molecules comes into play to form six-sided crystals that are actually less dense than the energetic but non-magnetically aligned water.
This is why ice floats in water, instead of sinking. It's also why ponds don't freeze solid in the winter, and why we have no clue how to put someone into suspended animations and safely revive them yet.
then maybe i should spread the word on how NewEgg fucked me on replacing my $600 digital camera and wouldn't return EVEN ONE of my e-mail contacts to them? (btw i originally heard about them through positive word of internet-mouth).
$80 set of cylindrical speakers. Siluro's techno thingies, if you're interested. Bought from new egg. Open the box, and one of the speakers fell apart, the LED is hanging loose by one wire, and the spider on one of the drivers is broken.
Had to pay to ship it back to NewEgg.
That's $15 shipping both ways.
And do they repair it and send it back?
No, they refund my $80.
So this christmas I spent $30 to learn that noone should ever buy from newegg ever. I am glad that it wasn't as costly to me as the lesson apparently was to you...
But $1 would be too costly, IMHO...
the only way that is possible is that the mass of the moon is in perfect balance with the distance it is from the earth and velocity that it is moving. if this was not perfect, it would have either floated away, or crashed into the earth years ago.
Actually, the equations for orbital mechanics do not depend on the mass of the object orbiting. Just like gravity exerts the same acceleration on an object regardless of its mass.
Now you can get a perturbation of an orbit, making it more elliptical, by changing its moment of inertia. However, the change would have to be very significant. Why? Because the moon-earth orbital system is stable for small perturbations.
You can see that this is so on any night. Go out and look at the moon. See anything different? Of course not; the moon always shows the same face to earth. It is tidally locked; the effect of tides has caused the moon's rotation to become exactly equal to its orbital period. The same tidal forces tend to pull orbits into circles, which is why most of the larger bodies in the solar system have roughly circular orbits. The closer the body is, the larger this effect (it's an inverse-power law)... that's why the moon's orbit around the earth is nearly precisely circular, and why mercury's orbit around the sun is nearly precisely circular, but Pluto and Jupiter's farthest moons have very elliptical orbits.
There are only a few factors that govern a body's orbit; mass of the object it is orbiting around, velocity, and distance. Given these three parameters, one can calculate its orbit very well. When the body in question is very massive, you have to run the calculation in reverse as well, meaning that the earth also orbits the moon. Actually, to be more precise, the earth and moon both orbit a point that is on a line between their centers of mass, the position of the point derived by their relative mass. In this case, that point is approximately 4000 mi away from Earth's center, putting it firmly within the crust. If you suddenly move mass from the moon to the earth, this point drops a bit more toward's the center of the Earth, with the effect that the moon will be a bit farther away from this center giving it a more elliptical orbit wrt Earth's center. But this new system is just as stable as the previous one.
Basically, the formula for calculating orbits is indifferent to small perturbations. Slightly larger perturbations will be eroded away by tidal forces. Very much larger perturbations can cause the type of behaviour you're talking about, but if we have the energy surplus to make that kind of effect on the moon, what the hell are we doing mining He3 for energy?
I like the guy running the machine gun. If you have surround sound on the DVD, you hear him behind you yelling stuff like "Oh yeah you like that? You want some more? Here's some for you!"
That and the "Why are we here?" conversation from the first episode...
Red vs. Blue is machinima, that is, animation made with the help of consumer 3D software; in this case, Halo for the XBox.
So they took a bunch of guys, hooked them up in Halo, wrote a script, got some cameraguys, and recorded a DVD. It's VERY VERY funny stuff.
Why do Red and Blue have to be up against one another? Can't they just get along?
Actually, a lot of the jokes are based exactly on that topic...
Your premise is wrong because you presume that violence is the desired end result, when in reality, the desired end result is soldier safety combined with an end to hostilities.
Reminds me of Starship Troopers (the book, not the horribly inaccurate movie, horribly inaccurate even by Hollywood's loose standards)
Early in the book, Rico makes a point that he and his teammates are there to provide violence. His commanders decide something needs to be done, to apply violence in a certain way, and it is his job to do it.
Then he goes on about how modern war is not about killing your enemy; its about convincing him that you're right. Violence therefore is not a means to kill; in his kind of war, killing is the opposite of what you want. Your enemy has to be alive to be able to agree with you. He's philosophizing about this because he's on a mission on a planet of almost allies that humanity wants to be more firmly on their side. And therefore his mission is to avoid killing, but to decimate the infrastructure wherever possible.
And then Rico says (paraphrasing), "I've never been asked to kill all the left-handed red heads in a certain area, but if someone decided it needed to be done, me and my men could do it."
Maybe that's what this is about? After you've trained a soldier, after he has reached the point where physical exertion will never tire him again, after he has learned how to shoot as well as can be expected, operate the 200 or so different pieces of equipment he will run into as a soldier - operate them in the dark while sleeping nonetheless, and given him enough field training to ensure he can survive in a warzone...
Maybe the next stage is to teach that soldier how to direct all this ability. The soldier has learned how to be violent. Maybe accelerated massively multi-user virtual reality simulations can provide the training necessary to control that violence, to channel it exactly where needed in exactly the amounts needed.
Think about it; the key to learning any skill is practice and repetition. War games are all fine and good, but they take time to setup. They take time to play. They take time to get to and from. How long does it take for one war game? hours? days?
What if you could run the soldier through the war game in only the time it takes for him to do his job? What if you could continually run him through it again and again, putting him in different situations each time, grading him, providing feedback? How many tactical situations could you put him through in the same time as the previous war game?
I'm guessing that you're not talking US$ ??
We can get 19" (mostly) flat-screens for $100 here...
It should be noted that photographs can survive an EMP but no digital media can.
I call bullshit.
Hard drives are largely unaffected by EMPs; the power levels required to ruin a CD would cook flesh, and it is possible to buy milspec flash cards that are EMP-hardened.
Hobby stores (and hobby store owners) are your friend.
card counting is legal everywhere in the states. the casinos in nevada are allowed to not let you play if they suspect you're card counting, but it's not against the law. this has been tested in the courts.
And casinos elsewhere, such as Atlantic City, are not allowed to ban you for card counting without mechanical assistance. If they find you counting cards, they will start switching dealers every few minutes, dry up your supply of comp drinks, shuffle more often, whatever it takes to make you want to leave...
Indeed, I think you can argue well that the human form forces compromises that detract from combat effectiveness.
Allow me to provide the counter argument....
The idea of building a humanoid-shaped robot that you control to do your bidding is that we seem to be remarkably flexible in terms of our capabilities, and we already have a very finely-tuned control system for a human-shaped robot. If human-style flexibility and very good human control are requirements for your robotic application, then a humanoid mech is a good choice for you.
Remember when slashdot was about the wierd and wacky stuff on the internet? Like the lego porn page, or the telephone sex page (the one where telephones are having sex), the unix admin porn page, the site that you can telnet into and it does star wars (the movie) in ascii, and other things like this.
I can't help but notice that you provide 4 examples of "vintage slashdot"... three of which are porn related, and the fourth is star wars in ascii, which to a geek is so close to porn that they're indistinguishable...
What I'm hearing is that there should be a mirror site, showing classic slashdot type content, called slashpron
Actually, (AFAIK, IANAS, correct me if I'm wrong) the Hubble images are correct, but they're just using pretty colours to represent different kinds of radiation, not just the normal light.
Or to rephrase, the pretty pictures from the Hubble that are accused of beind doctored, would not be visible to humans if the colorization were not tampered with
And don't mind a second or two of lag between controller input and response.
Well if you've got hardware encoding in the card you should only see a frame (maybe another one for packet-stitching on the receive end) of lag...
While I was eyeing the recent flood of media players that hook up to the TV, I was also disappointed that just about every solution I find on the local shelves all require Windows 2000 or Windows XP.
FYI, what used to be called QCast tuner (before GameShark bought them out) used a Java app, and was out of the box compatible with a variety of host systems.
Cost is a little steep, though not overly so:
PS2: $179
Wireless Adapter: $59
QCast Tuner: $50
Total: $288
Or about $90 more expensive than Gateway's similar product... though when you compare codecs, its apples to oranges... Gateway only supports MPEG 1/2/4
The PS/2 supports that, DivX, and a few other codecs, not to mention a host of image and audio formats IIRC... also it is capable of supporting new codecs (it grabs the codec and saves it to the memory card)... though I've heard rumors that this is only the case with the QCast tuner, and that the new version does not do that...
So, depending on pricing, this Linksys might be a good option for Windows users. If you need Mac or Linux compatibility, though you might be able to hack it in it certainly won't be supported; The QCast Tuner may be the way to go...
Now I can stream Ratchet and Clank from my PS2 through my Happauage BTTV card, grab it with Mplayer, out of my PC 'cross the network to my wireless access point and on to my TV!! Its the missing link I've been waiting for!
:D
With a wireless RF controller or two, this actually might be a good thing, as long as you don't want to play a different game very often
The article and a quick google could not reveal any pricing information.
Anyone have any idea what kind of pricing we're talking about here?
Name off the top of your head one portable battery powered device based on digital storage that is capable of recording a high-fidelity data stream.
DAT recorders, Creative Jukebox (several models)..
The Creative Nomads have horrible quality problems in their A/D stage, not to mention only supporting low-bitrate codecs... they don't count, failing to satisfy the criteria of high-fidelity...
What's the price on a portable DAT recorder? Froogle seems to think it's on the wrong side of $700... so while this device certainly meets the criteria mentioned above, it is also 3.5x as expensive as MD technology
Why doesn't Sony give up on this technology? Optical discs are the way to go, with flash cards being a good enough technology for the rest. This is like re-incarnating the Betamax.
Name off the top of your head one portable battery powered device based on digital storage that is capable of recording a high-fidelity data stream.
Yeah that's right. MiniDisc is the only thing out there. DJs, sound technicians, bootleggers, musicians... we all rely on MiniDiscs for high-fidelity field recording.
"Hi-MD" uses the FAT file system, making it possible to use...
Furthermore, as portable, rewritable PC media, "Hi-MD" complies with USB format's Mass Storage Class
What do you think, Mac, Linux compatible?
Absolutely.
Guess what? EVERY USB Mass Storage Device uses FAT for storage. If you can connect a digital camera to it, you can attach this to it, because all digital cameras use FAT. That's how those USB readers can work, BTW... standardized storage format...
I do not understand why the MD format is still around and Sony releases a new player if there are mp3 players for the same price which can carry much more music for less weight...
.NET using DirectSound, and putting the .NET Framework on every HD-MD disk... then whenever I'm near a computer I can do multitrack recording, just update the .NET Framework and run my program in place... it records direct to MD as it runs...
Well, among other reasons, it's still the best portable recording format, in terms of portability, fidelity, and storage. As a digital DJ, I am VERY interested in seeing the new HD-MD disks.
I'm even considering writing my own multitracker in
as far as I'm aware, nobody makes a laser printer that lets you emboss silver foil onto (and into) a piece of paper.
Just an FYI, most serious counterfeiting operations start by stealing a roll of currency paper. The paper arrives at the printing press with most of the anti-counterfeiting measures already enabled; here in america, only the holographic ink and the microprinting are done at the press.
And do you know how many times I've seen someone verify either of those features? Zero.
On the other hand, if you steal a roll of currency paper, you're going to have a real press setup to handle the volume. You want to get that money printed and in circulation, surplus paper burned and in the landfill, way before they catch up to you...
Anonymizer would give you up in half a heartbeat to anyone with a badge, and would start logging once asked. The only real anonymous Internet access, freedom.net, was a casualty of September 11th.
Proof please. I could counter by saying that I trust them not to do that.
Or for a more elegant counter-proof I could merely exclaim, "Nuh-uh!"
But then again my trust in anonymizer is implicit, and based on a working relationship of many years during which they have not betrayed my trust. And anonymizer knows that if they do this once, they will lose all their business; I trust in their greed.
If you're going to make claims to the contrary, I require proof. Take your tin-foil hat off and apply this little thing I call logic, or at least its close relative reason, to the situation.
1. Always anonymize. It's cheap, trustworthy, and it works. www.anonymizer.com is my anonymizer of choice, but choose your own.
2. Disable all HTML features in your mail reader. Of course, if you're truly anonymized, that won't matter anyways.
Seriously, its darned easy to not get caught online these days. I do it as a matter of course; I have a right to privacy in my online transactions, and anonymizer is an easy way to ensure that this privacy is never breached. But, when you're breaking the law, you should be damned sure its untraceable...