The official line of the US government may be that nothing is happening up there, but let me tell you, they're surveying the crap out of the Arctic Ocean right now, making sure the US's Exclusive Economic Zone is defined and that they have proper control of oil and gas up there...
But if you want to use your educational discount on software, you have to go to the online store. The discount works on hardware in the store, but for some reason they can't apply it to software.
There's an Apple store 15 minutes from my home, but I've put off getting Tiger because I want instant gratification (and the $69 edu discount price!)
This year at Otakon (yes, I am a nerd) I saw a performance by a classically trained pianist who calls himself Piano Squall. He performed several songs from both old and new Final Fantasy, along with some other video game music. It was quite enjoyable, especially since I'm a FF nut (and a classically trained pianist).
He has mp3s of his recordings available for download here. Worth checking out if you enjoy FF music.
Or get a group of friends together and share the cards among yourselves-- they usually give out four of the cards at a time.
This also helps when they have those promotions like "Spend $150 in a month, get a free turkey"... even if you spend only $50 a month, do that with three other people, and boom, free turkey dinner!
been there, done that, minus the graphics...
on
P2P Roaming Chat
·
· Score: 1
Um, ever heard of LambdaMOO and all the other MOOs and MUDs? Text-based social VR has been around for years and years. This just tacks on a graphical interface, which is cool, but much more limiting.
Lem rocks. I read The Futurological Congress and was completely baffled, but highly amused (similar to Philip K Dick, but Lem never explains which reality was real at the end of the novel). And then I read Solaris while living alone in Wisconsin on the shore of Lake Michigan... Let's just say I was really creeped out and leave it at that. BTW, I'd really like to see the movie eventually... I wonder if the English version is any good?
It's too bad Lem's works haven't reached a wide audience here in the English-speaking world (nearly everyone I've talked to about it has never heard of him, which probably isn't saying much, but...) His works are awfully nifty and ahead of their time.
Me too! I love LeGuin.. I remember reading some of her children's books as a little girl, and being completely enchanted by the worlds she created.
Then I took a Science Fiction genre study in college, where I read The Left Hand of Darkness and fell in love with LeGuin all over again. I took it home and made my dad read it.:)
My only problem with The Left Hand of Darkness is that the gender issues didn't quite come out the way LeGuin hoped they would... (hopefully this isn't much of a spoiler) instead of being dual-gendered and confusing, it came out as homoerotic... and I don't think that was what she was going for. Damn the english language with its crappy pronouns!
Vonnegut is one of the authors who most influenced my adolesence... I read Cat's Cradle in my early teens, and dreamed about lower-energy molecular states for a while. I also house-sat once for a man who had an extensive library of Vonnegut, so I caught up with a lot of his other books then. It made for an enjoyable two weeks.:) It's too bad they're all printed in that expensive premium-paperback format... I'm all for authors making lots of money from their work, but let's face it, I'm just a broke college student.
One of the best things about Sci-fi is that it takes reality, tweaks it a little bit, and imaginatively runs with the tweaking, creating a whole new world. I think Vonnegut does this as well, if not better, than many SF authors... his tweaks are tiny, and they make his created realities just a little different from ours, creating extraordinarily believable characters in fascinating situations.
I like Guy Gavriel Kay very much... his Fionavar Tapestry trilogy is very well done. It's one of the few trilogies that I caught as it was being written so I had to wait impatiently for the next book to come out.:)
Another must-read author (if you ask me, that is) is Storm Constantine. I didn't care much for her book Sea Dragon Heir, but her Wraeththu trilogy is wonderful. If I could have only three books in my life, it would be these three. Eventually I'll have to order some more of her stuff... I can never seem to find it in bookstores.
If anyone's interested in some literary analysis of the SF/Fantasy genres, check out the Genre Evolution Project at the University of Michigan. It's still a work in progress (papers are being published as we speak), but interesting nonetheless.
The reason why sails are not used in commercial watercraft is the fact that handling sails requires much more men than handling a huge diesel engine does.
Hmmm... interesting. For some reason I always thought that the reason commercial ships didn't have sails was because commercial ships have hulls that are more suited to cargo placement than speed/seakeeping, requiring much more power to plow the brick of a ship through the water than sails could ever give.
Take, for instance, a tanker, where the block coefficient (the ratio of the displaced volume of the ship's hull to a rectangular block having the dimensions of the ship's length, breadth and draft) approaches 1. That's honestly a brick, and unless you want it to travel at a disgustingly slow speed, you really need more than sails.
Forgive my antagonistic, sarcastic post, but that's crap.
_________________________________________
fear the wrath of the naval architect...
Mr. Serious and Yahoo! should hook up. He can be their new spokesperson.
He'll have a job (since I haven't heard of him in any films recently, I can't imagine he's working much) and Yahoo! won't have to deal with the lawsuit anymore. Problem solved.
According to someone I know who absolutely refuses to post (silly lurkers), webplay by sourceforge is a much more streamlined streaming mp3 werver than the apache one. He says "an entire vhost per playlist is too much overhead".
Don't ask me about it, though-- I'm no computer engineer.;)
Several companies, including auto-makers, are currently looking into non-combusting fuel cell systems (as is the US Navy). Fuel cells, imho, are much more practical than hydrogen combustion systems. They don't combust, so they produce no gaseous emissions. Fuel cells exist that run on hydrogen (these are perfectly non-polluting), but there are also ones that can run on de-sulfured diesel fuel and gasoline, as well as natural gas. The non-hydrogen ones use fuel reformers to utilize the hydrogen in the fossil fuels. These are usually used in large-scale applications like power plants, but they are being scaled down.
Non-hydrogen fuel cells provide the emissions benefit of hydrogen combustion systems without the problems in making new 'hydrogen stations'. Of course, you're getting energy from fossil fuels, and they do produce some waste (along with some other disadvantages, too), but they don't combust in a giant ball of flame, like people worry hydrogen systems will.
Planting a mangrove farm sounds like a neat idea. The problem is, mangroves tend to trap sediment that's being transported in the longshore current. This can cause erosion problems later on down the line, since the amount of sediment in the current stays roughly constant, so the current picks up material from other places, causing the shoreline to retreat.
Seawater Farms seems to have picked a good location for their project-- I don't think there's a lot of current activity in the Red Sea. But this project would cause big problems elsewhere-- for instance, California or Florida, where they are already having problems with shoreline erosion.
Slashdot Mirror
The official line of the US government may be that nothing is happening up there, but let me tell you, they're surveying the crap out of the Arctic Ocean right now, making sure the US's Exclusive Economic Zone is defined and that they have proper control of oil and gas up there...
But if you want to use your educational discount on software, you have to go to the online store. The discount works on hardware in the store, but for some reason they can't apply it to software.
There's an Apple store 15 minutes from my home, but I've put off getting Tiger because I want instant gratification (and the $69 edu discount price!)
Wouldn't it be the editors' place to gently correct this? They do read the blurbs before they post the stories, right?
This year at Otakon (yes, I am a nerd) I saw a performance by a classically trained pianist who calls himself Piano Squall. He performed several songs from both old and new Final Fantasy, along with some other video game music. It was quite enjoyable, especially since I'm a FF nut (and a classically trained pianist).
He has mp3s of his recordings available for download here. Worth checking out if you enjoy FF music.
As a girl gamer who loves FFVII, I'm happy they're developing Vincent's character more. He had a great backstory.
And plus, he's hot.
Ctrl, Alt...
I see two buttons right there.
Or get a group of friends together and share the cards among yourselves-- they usually give out four of the cards at a time.
This also helps when they have those promotions like "Spend $150 in a month, get a free turkey"... even if you spend only $50 a month, do that with three other people, and boom, free turkey dinner!
Um, ever heard of LambdaMOO and all the other MOOs and MUDs? Text-based social VR has been around for years and years. This just tacks on a graphical interface, which is cool, but much more limiting.
Piers Anthony will stand the test of time
...among 13-year-olds!
Lem rocks. I read The Futurological Congress and was completely baffled, but highly amused (similar to Philip K Dick, but Lem never explains which reality was real at the end of the novel). And then I read Solaris while living alone in Wisconsin on the shore of Lake Michigan... Let's just say I was really creeped out and leave it at that. BTW, I'd really like to see the movie eventually... I wonder if the English version is any good?
It's too bad Lem's works haven't reached a wide audience here in the English-speaking world (nearly everyone I've talked to about it has never heard of him, which probably isn't saying much, but...) His works are awfully nifty and ahead of their time.
Okay, here comes a 'Me too':
:)
Me too! I love LeGuin.. I remember reading some of her children's books as a little girl, and being completely enchanted by the worlds she created.
Then I took a Science Fiction genre study in college, where I read The Left Hand of Darkness and fell in love with LeGuin all over again. I took it home and made my dad read it.
My only problem with The Left Hand of Darkness is that the gender issues didn't quite come out the way LeGuin hoped they would... (hopefully this isn't much of a spoiler) instead of being dual-gendered and confusing, it came out as homoerotic... and I don't think that was what she was going for. Damn the english language with its crappy pronouns!
Vonnegut is one of the authors who most influenced my adolesence... I read Cat's Cradle in my early teens, and dreamed about lower-energy molecular states for a while. I also house-sat once for a man who had an extensive library of Vonnegut, so I caught up with a lot of his other books then. It made for an enjoyable two weeks. :) It's too bad they're all printed in that expensive premium-paperback format... I'm all for authors making lots of money from their work, but let's face it, I'm just a broke college student.
One of the best things about Sci-fi is that it takes reality, tweaks it a little bit, and imaginatively runs with the tweaking, creating a whole new world. I think Vonnegut does this as well, if not better, than many SF authors... his tweaks are tiny, and they make his created realities just a little different from ours, creating extraordinarily believable characters in fascinating situations.
I like Guy Gavriel Kay very much... his Fionavar Tapestry trilogy is very well done. It's one of the few trilogies that I caught as it was being written so I had to wait impatiently for the next book to come out. :)
Another must-read author (if you ask me, that is) is Storm Constantine. I didn't care much for her book Sea Dragon Heir, but her Wraeththu trilogy is wonderful. If I could have only three books in my life, it would be these three. Eventually I'll have to order some more of her stuff... I can never seem to find it in bookstores.
If anyone's interested in some literary analysis of the SF/Fantasy genres, check out the Genre Evolution Project at the University of Michigan. It's still a work in progress (papers are being published as we speak), but interesting nonetheless.
The reason why sails are not used in commercial watercraft is the fact that handling sails requires much more men than handling a huge diesel engine does.
Hmmm... interesting. For some reason I always thought that the reason commercial ships didn't have sails was because commercial ships have hulls that are more suited to cargo placement than speed/seakeeping, requiring much more power to plow the brick of a ship through the water than sails could ever give.
Take, for instance, a tanker, where the block coefficient (the ratio of the displaced volume of the ship's hull to a rectangular block having the dimensions of the ship's length, breadth and draft) approaches 1. That's honestly a brick, and unless you want it to travel at a disgustingly slow speed, you really need more than sails.
Forgive my antagonistic, sarcastic post, but that's crap.
_________________________________________
fear the wrath of the naval architect...
Mr. Serious and Yahoo! should hook up. He can be their new spokesperson.
He'll have a job (since I haven't heard of him in any films recently, I can't imagine he's working much) and Yahoo! won't have to deal with the lawsuit anymore. Problem solved.
_______________________
According to someone I know who absolutely refuses to post (silly lurkers), webplay by sourceforge is a much more streamlined streaming mp3 werver than the apache one. He says "an entire vhost per playlist is too much overhead".
;)
Don't ask me about it, though-- I'm no computer engineer.
Several companies, including auto-makers, are currently looking into non-combusting fuel cell systems (as is the US Navy). Fuel cells, imho, are much more practical than hydrogen combustion systems. They don't combust, so they produce no gaseous emissions. Fuel cells exist that run on hydrogen (these are perfectly non-polluting), but there are also ones that can run on de-sulfured diesel fuel and gasoline, as well as natural gas. The non-hydrogen ones use fuel reformers to utilize the hydrogen in the fossil fuels. These are usually used in large-scale applications like power plants, but they are being scaled down.
Non-hydrogen fuel cells provide the emissions benefit of hydrogen combustion systems without the problems in making new 'hydrogen stations'. Of course, you're getting energy from fossil fuels, and they do produce some waste (along with some other disadvantages, too), but they don't combust in a giant ball of flame, like people worry hydrogen systems will.
For more info, try http://www.ballard.com and http://www.internationalfuelcells.com/.
Planting a mangrove farm sounds like a neat idea. The problem is, mangroves tend to trap sediment that's being transported in the longshore current. This can cause erosion problems later on down the line, since the amount of sediment in the current stays roughly constant, so the current picks up material from other places, causing the shoreline to retreat.
Seawater Farms seems to have picked a good location for their project-- I don't think there's a lot of current activity in the Red Sea. But this project would cause big problems elsewhere-- for instance, California or Florida, where they are already having problems with shoreline erosion.
For more info and links about coastal erosion, try http://www.haznet.org/text/erosion.html.
Forgive a newbie poster, who forgot to check the links within the document...
sigh.
For some interesting stats and commentary on how most Gnutella users simply leach off of 1% of all users contribute 50% of the files, check out
n dex.html
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_10/adar/i