Actually, the Dawn of the Dead remake didn't specify *why* the dead were walking the Earth, other than the ad tag lines. However, the original Dead series by George Romero strongly hinted that the zombies were caused by a virus that came from space.
Good point actually, although if this is the case, ANY material sent at the comet would trigger this sort of explosion. TNT explodes due to a high intensity shockwave hitting it. Now imagine a comet filled with TNT. Intelligent design indeed!
Hmm, which causes a greater explosion - hundreds of pounds of copper, or hundreds of tons of feathers?:)
if the chemical composition of the comet it is unknown, how "safe" it is to force it in an explosion with cooper...?
High school chemistry. Well, that and the fact that they're not detonating this 8 feet above your head.
if it is known to be "safe" for the comet to interact with cooper in that explosion, then the chemical composition of the comet it is already KNOWN and that makes NO reason for the experiment.
See above. Find me something that will combine with copper to have any sort of explosion anywhere close to as bad as the one resulting kinetic energy release.
Hint: there isn't anything.
On NEOs and orbital physics
on
NASA's Deep Impact
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
How acurately can they predict the comets path (whenever I here about near earth passes they are always given in wide ranges as to how near they actually came).
You hear about near-Earth passes, as you call them, because they're always the first time we've noticed said object getting close to the Earth. This comet (and many others, plus asteroids, etc) has a pretty well-known orbit around the Sun. We have plenty of observations and can accurately predict where it's going to be at any given point in time (barring things like orbital changes due to outgassing, disintegration, etc).
There's another object in the sky that we can do this with: the Moon. It's VERY close to Earth, yet we can be pretty safe in saying it ain't about to hit us. Lots of observations == confidence in a body's motion.
The "scary" ones you hear about are new objects we've never seen before, and all of sudden they look like they're coming "close". Once we get enough observations of them, we can calculate their orbits, and you pretty much never hear about them again.
DRM isn't evil per se.... I believe most people would rather have a legitimate copy of something rather than a pirate... If the cost is too great... people will quite happily justify piracy to themselves.
You just summed up this non-problem in a nutshell, and why myself and many others believe DRM to be evil, period. It serves no purpose other than to annoy legitimate customers. Because most will pay regardless, and those that won't, will pirate anyway - and DRM will always be cracked.
Funny in the range of multi-megabyte files, sure, but I did have an idea a few years back:
Atari 2600 games are generally 2-4K. I figured it would be fun to write a random (or hell, sequential) game generator based on those constraints. There are a lot of things that need to go just right in order to even display an image on the screen from the good old 2600, so the overwhelming majority of them won't even boot in oh, say, an emulator.
Tweak said emulator to flag the rejects, run for a LONG time (there's a lot more filtering you could do here if you looked into the 2600 internals), see what you get.
Then spend the rest of your life trying one after the other. Someone did the math for me, it's positively frightening.
Oh well... maybe with a lot better heuristics...:)
For better or worse, if we live in a consumerist society, as we do, we will be exposed to advertising. How else will they let us know what we want to buy?
Quite possibly, the most damning indictment of the human condition I've ever seen.
If opera ever wants to get any real market share, they are going to have to release their browser free and without ads.
I don't think they need to open source it. It'd be nice, but its realy too much to ask.
So they should give away their product for free, but open sourcing it would be too much? Sorry, but when a company's tossed their revenue down the drain, opening their source is the LAST thing they'll need to worry about:)
besides, how many mozilla or firefox users here compiled from source?
I think you greatly misunderstand the point of Open Source. I've never compiled GCC from source *myself*, but I guarantee you it wouldn't be 1/10th as good if it wasn't Open Sourced.
I bought a 2840 around this time last year, for just over $450 cdn. This at a time when 40gb ipods were > $700 cdn. Hell of a lot of money saved for something that's still smaller than my old Walkman (but my ipod-owning friends insist my player is waaaaay to heavy and large to carry around...). But, same capacity, better features overall, for $250 less? That's a lot of extra ramen in my diet.
It's a pretty damn nice unit too, as the parent mentioned. Ideal for use under Linux, and as a portable hard drive in general. I have to laugh when I want to borrow a song from a friend with an ipod and he/she tells me "um, you can't find specific FILES, they're just numbers". As I use my mp3 player as backup for my desktop's mp3 files, it's nice to know that I can just copy them back if I lose a hard drive.
One other cool feature is it supports the playlists that Winamp and XMMS use - so it's easy to make custom playlists for the thing. One issue with the built-in profiler that the parent may not be aware of - it can only handle about 1600 files. I imagine it's RAM-limited, so when it builds its tables they can only get so big. But who the heck browses by the old standard of artist/genre anyway?:) Playlists pretty much cover this for me.
Having said all that, if RCA is trying to compete dollar for dollar with the ipod, they don't stand a chance. Not enough people care about the USB hard drive factor, sadly (and no, being able to store only non-playable mp3s on an ipod is just not enough).
Yeah, I'll second this. Only the very old, anything-liberal-is-bad types will say one good thing about Bush Jr. up here. We're all sitting waiting for someone to nuke half the US somedays, and praying there's no south wind blowing. That man is seriously destroying the US.
It's funny. In 2000, I really didn't see much wrong with him. I could understand why Americans voted for him. But today? I can't see him garnering more than maybe 5% of the vote, due to fringers and nutcases. The man is a lunatic, plain and simple. Example off the top of my head: he wants to ammend the Constitution, the single most important piece of judicial writing in the country, to prevent gay people from marrying? THIS is an issue that ranks up there with freedom of speech, women voting, emancipation of the slaves, etc?
I didn't honestly believe ANYONE in the US actually supported him anymore, regardless of polls. Then, last weekend, I drove down to Minnesota for a bit of shopping.
Every other car had a "Vote Bush and Cheney" sticker on it, plus a "support our troops" yellow ribbon thing.
I guess if Americans are really that simple-minded, to think that those two things go hand-in-hand and cannot be separate... I fear he's going to win another 4 years. I pity Americans. Enjoy living under a "terror alert" FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIVES.
And they were lying. See here. An NES controller, being a digital controller, gives you 4 signals for direction: UP, DOWN, LEFT, and RIGHT. That's it. A PC gameport has two pins for direction: X-AXIS, and Y-AXIS. Both take analog signals, and the strengths of these are what determines which direction you're going in.
Every console pad to gamepad/parallel pad conversion uses diodes for a reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the Dawn of the Dead remake didn't specify *why* the dead were walking the Earth, other than the ad tag lines. However, the original Dead series by George Romero strongly hinted that the zombies were caused by a virus that came from space.
:)
Guess which movie the remake was based on?
You know, I was told the very same thing around about 1985. Nearly 20 years later, a good senior programmer still earns sick amounts of money.
Then again, if you consider "programming" to mean "churn out KLOCs as fast as you can", then I suppose you may be correct.
Maybe he's Forest GIMP?
Sadly, #sco is keyed on efnet.
:)
Anyone wanna share?
Good point actually, although if this is the case, ANY material sent at the comet would trigger this sort of explosion. TNT explodes due to a high intensity shockwave hitting it. Now imagine a comet filled with TNT. Intelligent design indeed!
:)
Hmm, which causes a greater explosion - hundreds of pounds of copper, or hundreds of tons of feathers?
if the chemical composition of the comet it is unknown, how "safe" it is to force it in an explosion with cooper...?
High school chemistry. Well, that and the fact that they're not detonating this 8 feet above your head.
if it is known to be "safe" for the comet to interact with cooper in that explosion, then the chemical composition of the comet it is already KNOWN and that makes NO reason for the experiment.
See above. Find me something that will combine with copper to have any sort of explosion anywhere close to as bad as the one resulting kinetic energy release.
Hint: there isn't anything.
How acurately can they predict the comets path (whenever I here about near earth passes they are always given in wide ranges as to how near they actually came).
You hear about near-Earth passes, as you call them, because they're always the first time we've noticed said object getting close to the Earth. This comet (and many others, plus asteroids, etc) has a pretty well-known orbit around the Sun. We have plenty of observations and can accurately predict where it's going to be at any given point in time (barring things like orbital changes due to outgassing, disintegration, etc).
There's another object in the sky that we can do this with: the Moon. It's VERY close to Earth, yet we can be pretty safe in saying it ain't about to hit us. Lots of observations == confidence in a body's motion.
The "scary" ones you hear about are new objects we've never seen before, and all of sudden they look like they're coming "close". Once we get enough observations of them, we can calculate their orbits, and you pretty much never hear about them again.
DRM isn't evil per se. ... I believe most people would rather have a legitimate copy of something rather than a pirate ... If the cost is too great ... people will quite happily justify piracy to themselves.
You just summed up this non-problem in a nutshell, and why myself and many others believe DRM to be evil, period. It serves no purpose other than to annoy legitimate customers. Because most will pay regardless, and those that won't, will pirate anyway - and DRM will always be cracked.
more than root ...God?
Linus.
I just figured it was because almost all models are designed to be attached to keychains...
HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Thanks, I needed a good laugh.
Oh wait, you were serious... *quakes in fear*
Funny in the range of multi-megabyte files, sure, but I did have an idea a few years back:
:)
Atari 2600 games are generally 2-4K. I figured it would be fun to write a random (or hell, sequential) game generator based on those constraints. There are a lot of things that need to go just right in order to even display an image on the screen from the good old 2600, so the overwhelming majority of them won't even boot in oh, say, an emulator.
Tweak said emulator to flag the rejects, run for a LONG time (there's a lot more filtering you could do here if you looked into the 2600 internals), see what you get.
Then spend the rest of your life trying one after the other. Someone did the math for me, it's positively frightening.
Oh well... maybe with a lot better heuristics...
For better or worse, if we live in a consumerist society, as we do, we will be exposed to advertising. How else will they let us know what we want to buy?
Quite possibly, the most damning indictment of the human condition I've ever seen.
If opera ever wants to get any real market share, they are going to have to release their browser free and without ads.
:)
I don't think they need to open source it. It'd be nice, but its realy too much to ask.
So they should give away their product for free, but open sourcing it would be too much? Sorry, but when a company's tossed their revenue down the drain, opening their source is the LAST thing they'll need to worry about
besides, how many mozilla or firefox users here compiled from source?
I think you greatly misunderstand the point of Open Source. I've never compiled GCC from source *myself*, but I guarantee you it wouldn't be 1/10th as good if it wasn't Open Sourced.
And remember, kids:
The plural of "anecdote" is still not "data".
Personally, I found it deliciously ironic that the swing state in this election was Ohio...
And there's a reason we can't have both work at the same time?
I bought a 2840 around this time last year, for just over $450 cdn. This at a time when 40gb ipods were > $700 cdn. Hell of a lot of money saved for something that's still smaller than my old Walkman (but my ipod-owning friends insist my player is waaaaay to heavy and large to carry around...). But, same capacity, better features overall, for $250 less? That's a lot of extra ramen in my diet.
:) Playlists pretty much cover this for me.
It's a pretty damn nice unit too, as the parent mentioned. Ideal for use under Linux, and as a portable hard drive in general. I have to laugh when I want to borrow a song from a friend with an ipod and he/she tells me "um, you can't find specific FILES, they're just numbers". As I use my mp3 player as backup for my desktop's mp3 files, it's nice to know that I can just copy them back if I lose a hard drive.
One other cool feature is it supports the playlists that Winamp and XMMS use - so it's easy to make custom playlists for the thing. One issue with the built-in profiler that the parent may not be aware of - it can only handle about 1600 files. I imagine it's RAM-limited, so when it builds its tables they can only get so big. But who the heck browses by the old standard of artist/genre anyway?
Having said all that, if RCA is trying to compete dollar for dollar with the ipod, they don't stand a chance. Not enough people care about the USB hard drive factor, sadly (and no, being able to store only non-playable mp3s on an ipod is just not enough).
The plural of anecdote is still not data.
Well yeah, that, and it will kill your pet elephant.
That's why I consider sour gas a benefit, not a detriment!
(note: if you don't work in the P&G industry, you might miss the joke. Also the deadly seriousness of H2S)
You DO know we also had a NASA-built shuttle named Enterprise, right? :)
What a rediculous suggestion.
Oh well, I've got karma to loose.
Yeah, I'll second this. Only the very old, anything-liberal-is-bad types will say one good thing about Bush Jr. up here. We're all sitting waiting for someone to nuke half the US somedays, and praying there's no south wind blowing. That man is seriously destroying the US.
It's funny. In 2000, I really didn't see much wrong with him. I could understand why Americans voted for him. But today? I can't see him garnering more than maybe 5% of the vote, due to fringers and nutcases. The man is a lunatic, plain and simple. Example off the top of my head: he wants to ammend the Constitution, the single most important piece of judicial writing in the country, to prevent gay people from marrying? THIS is an issue that ranks up there with freedom of speech, women voting, emancipation of the slaves, etc?
I didn't honestly believe ANYONE in the US actually supported him anymore, regardless of polls. Then, last weekend, I drove down to Minnesota for a bit of shopping.
Every other car had a "Vote Bush and Cheney" sticker on it, plus a "support our troops" yellow ribbon thing.
I guess if Americans are really that simple-minded, to think that those two things go hand-in-hand and cannot be separate... I fear he's going to win another 4 years. I pity Americans. Enjoy living under a "terror alert" FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIVES.
And they were lying. See here. An NES controller, being a digital controller, gives you 4 signals for direction: UP, DOWN, LEFT, and RIGHT. That's it. A PC gameport has two pins for direction: X-AXIS, and Y-AXIS. Both take analog signals, and the strengths of these are what determines which direction you're going in.
Every console pad to gamepad/parallel pad conversion uses diodes for a reason.