well, I'd just like to point out that a 'bundle' of sticks is a lot stronger than a twig, in terms of both load it can carry and the forces it can withstand before snapping. It's true they haven't demonstrated a way to build the cable, but they're working on it. right now the bigger problem is that carbon nanotubes are so incredibly short, and the cost of manufacture very high. liftport is planning on 'solving' those problems by mass producing mid grade CNTs for any number of uses. even if they don't make a working space elevator imagine an aircraft with a wall thickness measured in the NM with hull strenth that is literally bullet proof. These guys should really be after millitary aircraft designers, imagine a jet fighter that can't be taken out with anything less than a tactical nuke or a high power laser.
If designing an aircraft is too much, imagine designing a tank that that the speed and manuverability of a humvee, but was tougher to crack than an M1-abrams. CNT has Endless possibilities in the millitary, and the problems that need to be solved for the millitary would be some of the same ones needing to be solved in building the cable.
every game you've mentioned is a FPS. have you ever tried a RTS with a lot of complicated tech trees, and resource collection, with a big map with stuff happening in multiple locations all the same time? now imagine three of your allies dropped, and now there's just you vs 4 people, and they're attacking 2 of your bases in the first minute, and you likely now only have 2 bases to use to totally kick their asses with. I win those games about 50% of the time. because i can with just 2 players and defense come up with a combo and built it fast enough to take out 4 players, and their bases.
oh I have illidian (1500 random ladder wins) and jaina (1500 human ladder wins) on battle.net for Warcraft III TFT. When I had cable I often got up to 100 apm peaks *sniffles* I miss good quality internet.
alright i admit it i was confused when i wrote the comment i meant to say Andromeda, not alpha centauri, sigh, but if you take the wrong turn, off the intergalactic freeway, get half way to andromeda then realize your mistake turn about and head to alpha centauri my post will make a lot more sense;)
and someone else gave good equasions to calculate the proximity to the speed of light needed to make it to alpha centauri with a time dilation of 5 minutes, which i haven't run. fortunutealy slashdot lacks the 'crackbrain' mod so i'm safe.
you're also forgetting that by traveling at near light speed, time comes to a virtual standstill. so 'we'll be ariving in alpha centauri in about 5 minutes' takes relativistically a few million earth years. fun fun. of course that does take the edge off intergalactic travel, because the closer to the speed of light you're going, the less time the trip takes off your life time, so crygenics become entirely unnecisary to travel millions of light years in space.
of course, this also makes 'early collision detection' virtually impossible, since it would only take the fastest microprocessors a few hundred years to realize that long range sensors were detecting an object coming in for impact. the only viable option then is to have an 'impenetrable' charged particle field that due to the electric charge holding it in place makes it several millions of times stronger than steel. Just as a simple magnetic field can be used to contain a fusion reaction, a simple magnetically based charged particle shield can prevent an impact with the force of 1,000 hiroshimas from 'scratching' the hull.
the power requirements on that kind of shielding, and the propulsion needed to compensate for loss of inertia from impacts etc would still be amazing, though. and getting the whole system to still function under heavy time dilation would be quite an engineering feat, since your power source has to scale up it's power consumption exponentially to a pinical of requiring infinte power production to travel at light speeds (but of course that isn't possible, and the ship would only be able to travel at Near light speeds, where it would fuel economy would probably be measured in the 'gallons of hydrogen fusion per light year' format.
"yessir our new power thruster XL will take you to 99.999% the speed of light, but uses 1 million gallons per light year at those speeds." just a number i pulled out of complete imagination but, traveling an entire light year at 99.999% of the speed of light takes under a minute of 'local time', in 'relative' time. and of course, a full year and a minute in 'real time' so your reactor has to produce enough power in one minute to sustain the shields for an entire years worth 'real time' of impacts, etc. and every cycle the processor computes will mean the ship is a few hundred AUs from where it was when the clock cycle started.
very difficult problem. btw, the charched particle shields also protect from radiation, so that's not really a concern. if you can travel at near light speeds the shields needed to protect you from motes of dust are going to protect you from the blue shift of radiation.
I'd like to point out a couple things. although this article claims the 'average' netflix subscriber watches 5 movies a month, it then also claimes that netflix 'looses money' on people who rent more than five, but that isn't necisarilly true.
As a matter of fact, netflix's profits have been shown to be 'much higher' than expected recently, and the 'average' number of movies rented hasn't gone down.
so why are netflix profits up? 2 big things. #1 Advertising. Every netflix DVD comes with an ad printed on it now, most of these wind up being 'netflix' ads, but quite often ' new in theaters movie releases' will be on there. the other big thing is that with the acquizition of the wal-mart online movie rentals their volumes have gone up, and likely the rate they pay to the usps may have been renegotiated to a lower per item price.
The article misrepresents the 'real' situation, netflix's business model (and thus investor expected profit margins) are based on 5 movies a month, on the 3 at a time plan. people who rent more than 5 movies Eat into the netflix profit margin. they haven't 'cost' netflix money until they exceed 10 movies a month. (I'm fairly sure their 'business model' involves a 2:1 return on investment etc)
Because netflix has a lot of 'heavy movie users' they've also got many tiers of service available, however this may eat into their profit margins since the people who watch 5 movies a month can now downgrade to 2 movies at a time, and still always have a movie available to them.
frankly with my queue i could easily be on the 'nine at a time' plan (which costs as much as having three seperate 3 at a time plans) and still be turning the movies around as fast as the usps can deliver them... which with a very small manipulation by netflix would wind up being around 30 discs a month. as a matter of fact if my finances were in better order i would be on the '9' at a time plan. afterall they have 55,000 movie selections and at least 5,000 are of great interest to me.
anyways, it seems that a lot of the people who are netflix subscribers are using netflix basically as easy weekend enetertainment of a movie, and they don't actually have every single weekend 'free' to watch the movie they thought they'd want to, so apparently they're going to be doing a lot of business, since the 'casual' renter species far outnumbers the 'movie geek' species, on an order of about 100:1 so even if they loose money on that '1' as long as that person is convincing the 100 normals that netflix is the best thing to happen to movies since the corner video store, well... they can bear the burden of having a few geeks renting a lot of movies.
and now they have software to precisely decide just how much they can afford to have these 'geeks' reccomending them. but it could definitely bite them in the ass, if they kill off the most vocal 'word of mouth advertising' that they get, because of trying to eck out a little more profit. if on the other hand they use this software to allot 'how much word of mouth advertising' they're willing to bear the expense of, then they're on the right track.
but yeah I've noticed that i get much better service at the 'begining' of the month, before i've 'cost' netflix profit or money, than towards the 'end' of the month where likely they're trying to control expenses, by simply just 'loosing' the discs i've mailed back to them for a while.
and considering I'm about 250 miles out from their mailing center, and mailman doesn't come to my place til 4pm, so I can't return movies until the 'next' day, and the discs take an average of 2-days each way... that kinda 'limits' the number of discs i can get, even with 'same day' turn around on the netflix end, to about 15 a month on the 3 at a time plan. I've only been a subscriber for 2 months and have only seen 27 movies, and for almost one full month i was on the 5 at a time plan... so clearly they're managing to limit me to 10 a month on the 3 at a time, and 16-17 a month on the 5 at a time plan. becaus
well, the Earth is moving several times faster than the space shuttle, so even if 'walking' is insufficient to cause time dilation, our simple traversal through an expanding universe is causing time dilation, but only relative to a hypothetical object that is 'not moving' away from the 'center' of the universe as fast as our galaxy.
see the thing is time dilation is relative, if you're on a ship moving half the speed of light for an hour based on a time peace you're wearing, to you it seems like an hour has passed, just fine, but relative to say the earth a lot more time has actually passed.
Er am i the only one to notice that...
on
No Time Travel, Sorry
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· Score: 3, Informative
time dilation can be reproducably created, and in fact occurs on a daily basis, to a slight extent every time someone flies an airplane, or is launched into orbit aboard a space vehicle. technically just 'walking' will create a small bit of 'time dilation' it might be impossibly small to try and detect, or course.
Nasa has done a lot of research on this. if you accelerate a physical object to the 'speed of light' it's 'relative' time stops in comparison to that of the universe, while time continues to flow for the rest of the universe, until that object is decelerated to normal velocity.
So if 'time' can't be traveled through, then what exactly is 'time dilation?' Also, black holes are only useful for traveling 'forward' in time, the 'intense gravity' within a black hole 'simulates' traveling forward at the speed of light, the closer you are the greater the gravity, and thus the greater the time dilation. no one has formulated or demonstrated the possibly to go 'to the past' although if 'gravity' and 'light speed travel' can decelerate ones own flow of time so the future can be reached, then 'anti-gravity' or some form of 'reverse momentum' might perhaps allow one to experience a pocket of time where as one progresses through it the entire universe grows 'younger' the problem with this is gravity and acceleration seem to both follow temeperature and have a common starting point or 'absolute zero' below which it is impossible to go.
appologies to all the great science fiction, but traveling back in time just isn't possible.* (unless of course one travels forward through time throught the end of the universe as we know it, until a new universe is created from the ashes of the old one, assuming that that Does in fact happen, and given the nature of atomic mass to develop in a consistant patter, one travels to the 'future' of a new 'third world inhabited by the evolutionary decendants of apes' before they manage to create time travel, and knowing exactly how the universe unfolds (because of a massive quantum computer and impressive algrythm that can determine the exact course of events Before they happen, again, based on the data it recieved while you were traveling 'forward' in time...) and thus influence the development of a primative world that the locals call 'earth' because everything formed along the same 'predestined' pattern based on the arrangment of molecules in the universe when it collapsed... only you went and went Forward in time, causing the end of the universe to happen differently than when it ended last time, so now you're ona world inhabited by 27 foot tall sentient lizards who think mamals are a tasty snack.
oops. well, you shouldn't have tried to avoid the big crunch to see how the universe would unfold the next time around;)
the internet is made up of several hundred or thousands of private networks patched together. Google, etc are paying One company, a company that has a Very fast set of fiber backbones in the So. Cal area, and charges Very low rates, they have a 'deal' with verizon etc that 'my traffic can pass over your network, so your traffic can pass over mine' no money is going to verizon from this. verizon has to get all it's money from companies paying Verizon $$$ because the company that all thes So. Cal companies is offering an absurdly low rate (2 cents a GB or less if your volume is in the TB range) companies like verizon who operate globally can't compete with one little company that only has to run fiber into verizons So Cal offices. etc...
So basically what verizon etc is saying is that 'every time data crosses onto another network, and additional fee will be applied to it' this 'additional fee' will be decided by the host network, and is based on the model that cellular roaming works off of... Basically it's saying that 'verizon' has a right to charge google a ton of money so they can run fiber to topeka KS that they don't even hook up to people's houses because then they'd use bandwith and cost verizon money.
i'm not for this rediculous 'fee structure' they want to put in place, yet the current set of agreements are a mistake, and were forced by 'fair access' laws... so now they want more laws that allow them to effictively un write the fair access laws... stupid, real stupid. if these retarded fee structurs ever went through though a hacker with a sizable botnet could literally cause 10 Trillion USD in 'fair access fees' originitating from verizion owned ips without trouble though. they're just asking to be put out of business.
well, there are these things called 'postage meters' you put a sealed envelope on a scale/printer combo, and press a button and you pay the postage for the EXACT weight. 39 cents is for a full OUNCE of non-presorted mail. meters are available to anyone, there are websites that sell the devices... and you can 'refil' their postage over the internet. (they can only print a metered amount if they have an account with sufficient funds to deduct from to print the postage mark) you can send the mail un-presorted, just like any other piece of mail, savings can be signifigant.
now, if they're mailing you a little post card presorting it, and in their pre sort facility they fill the mailbags up by 25 lbs sacks they pay by the pound of mail, at what comes out to a Very Discounted rate.
for post card sized mailings it could well turn out to cost 3.9 cents, or less.
I don't think you have to worry about photoshop plugins. there has been this thing called 'photoshop' that they've been selling for 'windows' pcs and well, any plugin worth buying has has an 'windows' (x86) port. which measn they've got more than enough source code to 'port' it over to mac os x86 edition by just changing a setting in the compiler.
i realize plugins one 'bought' five years ago won't 'work' because of course you need to 'buy' the new version that supports the new hardware. the x86 switch will be a lot less painful than the switch from 68k, since 'new' software that does what most people use macs for now should be available.
there Are nuclear powered batteries, that provide 10+ years of continuous power for devices such as pacemakers. The amount of radioactive materials are so slight, that the simple battery casing provides an effective shield meaning that no more radiation thanone would recieve from normal background rads will escape it. however, such batteries are a far cry from providing enough power for a laptop.
as far as generating electricity from radioactive materials goes there are two methodologies involved a. the tendandcy of silicon to 'produce' electrcial charge when exposed to the right ffrequencies of radiation. and b. the use of radioactive waste to produce 'heat' to make steam to power an electrical turbine. the former is the type of technology used in 'new' pacemakers etc, the latter is some cold war era technology, primarilly researched by the russians. nuclear decay batteries have been powering satelites etc for decades, however based on the 'facts' for the linked story it seems absurd at best. 12 miles from food processing? does he not realize that virtually every egg and piece of poultry in the Us is irradiated to 'sterilize' it? does he not realize UV lights are installed at the entry points to any US based food manufacturor, to allow for 'bacterial sterilization' to prevent contamination? yes, Uv light is 'radiation' too;) and it's been known to cause skin cancer too, never mind that millions of people flock to locations where they can bask in the stuff like 'beaches' etc.
having lived in the midwest all my life i can say that the majority of the topsoil is in fact still here. but yeah, wind erosion dose cause a signifigant problem for agraculture. keep in mind if you'd read my entire comment you'd have noticed my mentioning of algea, which i prefer to soy based... on the arguments that it can be produced vastly cheaper, with the right technological investments.
Egypt hasn't been 'green' since iraq was a garden of tropical wonder. all this 'erosion' you speak of occured long before modern agroculture, and infact modern 'agroculture' has reclaimed vast tracts of 'unusable land' through fertilization and crop rotations.
but yeah, i have seen land that has been 'turned to sand' through irresponsible crop managment, mostly from agressive soil destroying crops such as ginsing, or tobbacco. other crops like peanuts, which can also be used for diesel fuel production restore a natural balance to the soil. so even with land based biofuels it's possible to help 'repair' the soil balance.
biofuels are viable, right now today, $2 a gallon is plenty for existing soybean farmers etc to 'profit'. with the right investment in technology we could make 'cheaper' biofuels, through the theoretically 'cheaper' to produce algea. i mean it has 50x the energy yield of soybean plants, which we've found to be profitable at $2 a gallon for refined biodiesel... even if that 50x yeild only netted a 5x reduced production cost, well 40 cents a gallon? when was the last time Petrolium was that cheap?
scary stuff for the oil industry, of course until someone tries to produce as much algea, for the minimal cost possible and calculates the actual cost of doing so it's just 'theory'
Bill gates could with 1% of his personal fortune establish an algea to biodiesel operation capable of producing 50% of the volume that the US consumes every year, in the best case scenario. $500 million would go a long way to building a biofuel industry capable of crushing the oil/coal/gas cartel, just imagine what a few bn would do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power solar cells are about 15% efficient, algea is about 50% efficient, and soybeans are about 1% efficient. vehicles running off straight algea or algea oil would be running at more than triple the efficiency of solar electric vehicles. which means you could have three times as many of them on the road, for the available surface area that could be dedicated to production of solar energy.
add in the savings of not having to 'manufacture' the solar cells, and the energy becomes quite cheap. possibly cheaper than fission power, possibly cheaper than fusion.
well the answer you seek lies in the concept of an infinite number of zeros, with a trailing '1' how can an infinite number of zeros have a trailing 1? because that's how reality works, reality isn't a neat tidy mathematical equasion. reality can go one beyond infinity no matter if that means you can't compute it then.
I guess I'm just not one of those math geek types who think the entire answer to the whole universe can be wrapped up in one tidy perfect equasion.
I guess to your simple mind that two obviously different number should have the same value simply because a mathematical proof can be used, and certified to say it is so. I prefer not to acknowledge that as being the case, because i define the univers as not being describle in something as simplistic as mathematical representation. which is a subset of reality, a greatly simplified subset of reality.
But he works in finland for a finnish tech site. Secondly, janos is the Czechoslovakian variant of 'john' and is used in many places in europe, not just hungary.
so you don't know any more 'for certain' that he's hungarian (or has a mother father etc from hungary) than the original poster who asserted he was finnish (based on the fact he works for a finnish publication)
you want mathematical theorems - those are known to be true.
0.9999... = 1
Thus x = 0.9999...
10x = 9.9999...
10x - x = 9.9999... - 0.9999...
9x = 9
x = 1.
now it may be splitting hairs here but this is a perfectly valid mathematical proof here, but 0.999999999999999999999.... is always going to be the smallest possible difference from 1 in reality. even though in math it can be proven to be in fact to be the same value. if you're going to assign an arbitrary value to 0.99999.... the closest arbitrary value is always going to be 1, so it's kinda splitting hairs to say that the clossest possible number that isn't exactly 1 but is infinitely close to 1.. is exactly the same as 1... still math proves that they are equal.
bill gates _didn't_ have a successful product. microsoft would have been another belly up flop, had fate not intervened. IBM saw all this 'computer hobbyist' stuff going on, and said 'let's make desktop PCs.' IBM went to the developer of a popular OS (i believe it may have been teh guy who wrote CP/M) he Refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement, IMB was hot to sign a license agreement they just wanted strict confidentiality. When he refuused, IBM was in a boat load of hot water, and someone there knew of this 'bill gates' fellow, because of his attempts to promote his faltering company microsoft...
Microsoft not only signed an NDA they agreed to ship an OS they hadn't written yet, and using the advance fee that ibm paid them they bought up QDOS, which was a 'reverse engineered' hack of CP/M they then used that code to develop MS-DOS 1.0 in time for the 'deadline' to deliver it to ibm.
Microsoft really had no future and no hope of surviving and bill gates vehmently blamed piracy for that, even though hobbyists loathed his pitiful 3-man in a a garage designs.. but still saw potential in the premise of a simple human readable programming language that could be executed directly from the source.
Can piracy really put companies out of business? for the most part, only when they're already plagued with mis-managment or other problems. bill gates also sees open source software as a 'threat' to the industry. realistically though open source is more of a 'threat' than piracy ever will be. in normal healthy people piracy makes them 'feel bad' or 'guilty' and they usually are rationalizing heavily, 'oh i'm just previewing it if it's good i'll buy it' blah blah. but open source users feel Good about promoting open source, especially with all the patent brouhaha that's over come the software industry and made anyone without a diverse patent library find themselves in a 'pay to play' situation.
will open source software kill off software development companies? no, but between the patent laws as they are and open source communities there is little breathing room for the 'little guy' in this market.
the best thing is that they don't even have to 'blacklist' them they can just redirect them to a special 'search' page that informs the users that after so and a so a date google may not be available from their isp.
without even having to do a black out i'm sure they could get quite a few people to call in angrily, and several to switch to avoid the possibility of not having access. Google could play the game of hardball with these isps who want 'metered' usage of types of services.
or a white hat could just write a firefox extention to 'click through And Close' ads run by mal-ware companies. why not just bankrupt these guys i think that would be more effective.
mal-ware sites would quickly stop using adwords if enough people were running an extention that was designed to cost them money.
The right never did anything like throwing at CLinton accusations of rape, murder, drug abuse
Short term memory? I'll give you three phrases to jog you memory.
"jennifer flowers" "vince foster" "mena airport"
oh yeah, the right wing got plenty of coverage time in to 'accuse' clinton of rape, murder, and if not drug abuse, then drug Smuggling! not to mention good old 'cattlegate' etc etc etc...
Who hasn't experienced that thing where you jerk alert and suddenly realize some part of your brain you're not even aware of has been driving for the last 45 minutes - on the freeway, at 75 mph - while the rest of your head has been somewhere else?
I'm curious too, that happens to me on any drive longer than an hour where I haven't administered the proper portion of caffeine prior to getting behind the wheel/ durring driving. for any drive longer than 3 hrs i need to continually consume caffeine to remain alert. the scarriest thing is that i do this on windy roads. so i KNOW i wasn't asleep... i just was like my head was parked to sector 0.
not to mention jimmy, the neighboorhood newspaper delivery boy, who's getting paid peanuts to deliver these things.. and even if he gets caught using these card number fraudulently is highly unlikely to be tried as an adult, given the circumstances.
I downloaded VLC just yesterday to try it out, and frankly the image quality SUCKS. even the stock windows media player that coame with windows 98 etc does a better job at deartifacting.
sure VLC has a bunch of settings, that don't work unless you turn them on in the title menu... so what do people wwho made dvds with out title menues do? what if i made a captioned 'home video' with no menu? stuck using default Crappy settings in VLC. because changing settings during playback causes the subtitles/captions to 'dissapear'not to mention i need to know which mode to put it into based on the type of artifacting i'm seeing on the screen...
vlc might be good for you, but frankly i think i'll stick to a player that can actually handle things like improving the image quality Automatically.
under integration you forgot to include gmail, i know you said etc.... still, email and calendar functions are critical for desktop users. perhaps google, knowing what a decent sized orginization needs in terms of tools to allow the office to work together more fluidly will be able to better integrate those functions into a 'desktop' linux than some people who've never had to manage that kind of workload.
well i'm pretty sure that i'm not curtting the calories too low, because i'm not on a specific 'atkins' etc diet, but rather restricting carbs, and increasing fiber. and i still get many carbs from fruits (have you seen the carb content of some fruits? 'net carbs are lower, but still...) so keeping fruits in the diet especially as snacks helps maintain a low level of consistant carbs. i'm also trying to eat whole grain products when possible, as the body digests them slower, creating a more even distrobution of carbs.
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well, I'd just like to point out that a 'bundle' of sticks is a lot stronger than a twig, in terms of both load it can carry and the forces it can withstand before snapping. It's true they haven't demonstrated a way to build the cable, but they're working on it. right now the bigger problem is that carbon nanotubes are so incredibly short, and the cost of manufacture very high. liftport is planning on 'solving' those problems by mass producing mid grade CNTs for any number of uses. even if they don't make a working space elevator imagine an aircraft with a wall thickness measured in the NM with hull strenth that is literally bullet proof. These guys should really be after millitary aircraft designers, imagine a jet fighter that can't be taken out with anything less than a tactical nuke or a high power laser.
If designing an aircraft is too much, imagine designing a tank that that the speed and manuverability of a humvee, but was tougher to crack than an M1-abrams. CNT has Endless possibilities in the millitary, and the problems that need to be solved for the millitary would be some of the same ones needing to be solved in building the cable.
Multitasking, my ass
every game you've mentioned is a FPS. have you ever tried a RTS with a lot of complicated tech trees, and resource collection, with a big map with stuff happening in multiple locations all the same time? now imagine three of your allies dropped, and now there's just you vs 4 people, and they're attacking 2 of your bases in the first minute, and you likely now only have 2 bases to use to totally kick their asses with. I win those games about 50% of the time. because i can with just 2 players and defense come up with a combo and built it fast enough to take out 4 players, and their bases.
oh I have illidian (1500 random ladder wins) and jaina (1500 human ladder wins) on battle.net for Warcraft III TFT. When I had cable I often got up to 100 apm peaks *sniffles* I miss good quality internet.
alright i admit it i was confused when i wrote the comment i meant to say Andromeda, not alpha centauri, sigh, but if you take the wrong turn, off the intergalactic freeway, get half way to andromeda then realize your mistake turn about and head to alpha centauri my post will make a lot more sense ;)
and someone else gave good equasions to calculate the proximity to the speed of light needed to make it to alpha centauri with a time dilation of 5 minutes, which i haven't run. fortunutealy slashdot lacks the 'crackbrain' mod so i'm safe.
you're also forgetting that by traveling at near light speed, time comes to a virtual standstill. so 'we'll be ariving in alpha centauri in about 5 minutes' takes relativistically a few million earth years. fun fun. of course that does take the edge off intergalactic travel, because the closer to the speed of light you're going, the less time the trip takes off your life time, so crygenics become entirely unnecisary to travel millions of light years in space.
of course, this also makes 'early collision detection' virtually impossible, since it would only take the fastest microprocessors a few hundred years to realize that long range sensors were detecting an object coming in for impact. the only viable option then is to have an 'impenetrable' charged particle field that due to the electric charge holding it in place makes it several millions of times stronger than steel. Just as a simple magnetic field can be used to contain a fusion reaction, a simple magnetically based charged particle shield can prevent an impact with the force of 1,000 hiroshimas from 'scratching' the hull.
the power requirements on that kind of shielding, and the propulsion needed to compensate for loss of inertia from impacts etc would still be amazing, though. and getting the whole system to still function under heavy time dilation would be quite an engineering feat, since your power source has to scale up it's power consumption exponentially to a pinical of requiring infinte power production to travel at light speeds (but of course that isn't possible, and the ship would only be able to travel at Near light speeds, where it would fuel economy would probably be measured in the 'gallons of hydrogen fusion per light year' format.
"yessir our new power thruster XL will take you to 99.999% the speed of light, but uses 1 million gallons per light year at those speeds." just a number i pulled out of complete imagination but, traveling an entire light year at 99.999% of the speed of light takes under a minute of 'local time', in 'relative' time. and of course, a full year and a minute in 'real time' so your reactor has to produce enough power in one minute to sustain the shields for an entire years worth 'real time' of impacts, etc. and every cycle the processor computes will mean the ship is a few hundred AUs from where it was when the clock cycle started.
very difficult problem. btw, the charched particle shields also protect from radiation, so that's not really a concern. if you can travel at near light speeds the shields needed to protect you from motes of dust are going to protect you from the blue shift of radiation.
I'd like to point out a couple things. although this article claims the 'average' netflix subscriber watches 5 movies a month, it then also claimes that netflix 'looses money' on people who rent more than five, but that isn't necisarilly true.
As a matter of fact, netflix's profits have been shown to be 'much higher' than expected recently, and the 'average' number of movies rented hasn't gone down.
so why are netflix profits up? 2 big things. #1 Advertising. Every netflix DVD comes with an ad printed on it now, most of these wind up being 'netflix' ads, but quite often ' new in theaters movie releases' will be on there. the other big thing is that with the acquizition of the wal-mart online movie rentals their volumes have gone up, and likely the rate they pay to the usps may have been renegotiated to a lower per item price.
The article misrepresents the 'real' situation, netflix's business model (and thus investor expected profit margins) are based on 5 movies a month, on the 3 at a time plan. people who rent more than 5 movies Eat into the netflix profit margin. they haven't 'cost' netflix money until they exceed 10 movies a month. (I'm fairly sure their 'business model' involves a 2:1 return on investment etc)
Because netflix has a lot of 'heavy movie users' they've also got many tiers of service available, however this may eat into their profit margins since the people who watch 5 movies a month can now downgrade to 2 movies at a time, and still always have a movie available to them.
frankly with my queue i could easily be on the 'nine at a time' plan (which costs as much as having three seperate 3 at a time plans) and still be turning the movies around as fast as the usps can deliver them... which with a very small manipulation by netflix would wind up being around 30 discs a month. as a matter of fact if my finances were in better order i would be on the '9' at a time plan. afterall they have 55,000 movie selections and at least 5,000 are of great interest to me.
anyways, it seems that a lot of the people who are netflix subscribers are using netflix basically as easy weekend enetertainment of a movie, and they don't actually have every single weekend 'free' to watch the movie they thought they'd want to, so apparently they're going to be doing a lot of business, since the 'casual' renter species far outnumbers the 'movie geek' species, on an order of about 100:1 so even if they loose money on that '1' as long as that person is convincing the 100 normals that netflix is the best thing to happen to movies since the corner video store, well... they can bear the burden of having a few geeks renting a lot of movies.
and now they have software to precisely decide just how much they can afford to have these 'geeks' reccomending them. but it could definitely bite them in the ass, if they kill off the most vocal 'word of mouth advertising' that they get, because of trying to eck out a little more profit. if on the other hand they use this software to allot 'how much word of mouth advertising' they're willing to bear the expense of, then they're on the right track.
but yeah I've noticed that i get much better service at the 'begining' of the month, before i've 'cost' netflix profit or money, than towards the 'end' of the month where likely they're trying to control expenses, by simply just 'loosing' the discs i've mailed back to them for a while.
and considering I'm about 250 miles out from their mailing center, and mailman doesn't come to my place til 4pm, so I can't return movies until the 'next' day, and the discs take an average of 2-days each way... that kinda 'limits' the number of discs i can get, even with 'same day' turn around on the netflix end, to about 15 a month on the 3 at a time plan. I've only been a subscriber for 2 months and have only seen 27 movies, and for almost one full month i was on the 5 at a time plan... so clearly they're managing to limit me to 10 a month on the 3 at a time, and 16-17 a month on the 5 at a time plan. becaus
well, the Earth is moving several times faster than the space shuttle, so even if 'walking' is insufficient to cause time dilation, our simple traversal through an expanding universe is causing time dilation, but only relative to a hypothetical object that is 'not moving' away from the 'center' of the universe as fast as our galaxy.
see the thing is time dilation is relative, if you're on a ship moving half the speed of light for an hour based on a time peace you're wearing, to you it seems like an hour has passed, just fine, but relative to say the earth a lot more time has actually passed.
time dilation can be reproducably created, and in fact occurs on a daily basis, to a slight extent every time someone flies an airplane, or is launched into orbit aboard a space vehicle. technically just 'walking' will create a small bit of 'time dilation' it might be impossibly small to try and detect, or course.
;)
Nasa has done a lot of research on this. if you accelerate a physical object to the 'speed of light' it's 'relative' time stops in comparison to that of the universe, while time continues to flow for the rest of the universe, until that object is decelerated to normal velocity.
So if 'time' can't be traveled through, then what exactly is 'time dilation?' Also, black holes are only useful for traveling 'forward' in time, the 'intense gravity' within a black hole 'simulates' traveling forward at the speed of light, the closer you are the greater the gravity, and thus the greater the time dilation. no one has formulated or demonstrated the possibly to go 'to the past' although if 'gravity' and 'light speed travel' can decelerate ones own flow of time so the future can be reached, then 'anti-gravity' or some form of 'reverse momentum' might perhaps allow one to experience a pocket of time where as one progresses through it the entire universe grows 'younger' the problem with this is gravity and acceleration seem to both follow temeperature and have a common starting point or 'absolute zero' below which it is impossible to go.
appologies to all the great science fiction, but traveling back in time just isn't possible.* (unless of course one travels forward through time throught the end of the universe as we know it, until a new universe is created from the ashes of the old one, assuming that that Does in fact happen, and given the nature of atomic mass to develop in a consistant patter, one travels to the 'future' of a new 'third world inhabited by the evolutionary decendants of apes' before they manage to create time travel, and knowing exactly how the universe unfolds (because of a massive quantum computer and impressive algrythm that can determine the exact course of events Before they happen, again, based on the data it recieved while you were traveling 'forward' in time...) and thus influence the development of a primative world that the locals call 'earth' because everything formed along the same 'predestined' pattern based on the arrangment of molecules in the universe when it collapsed... only you went and went Forward in time, causing the end of the universe to happen differently than when it ended last time, so now you're ona world inhabited by 27 foot tall sentient lizards who think mamals are a tasty snack.
oops. well, you shouldn't have tried to avoid the big crunch to see how the universe would unfold the next time around
the internet is made up of several hundred or thousands of private networks patched together. Google, etc are paying One company, a company that has a Very fast set of fiber backbones in the So. Cal area, and charges Very low rates, they have a 'deal' with verizon etc that 'my traffic can pass over your network, so your traffic can pass over mine' no money is going to verizon from this. verizon has to get all it's money from companies paying Verizon $$$ because the company that all thes So. Cal companies is offering an absurdly low rate (2 cents a GB or less if your volume is in the TB range) companies like verizon who operate globally can't compete with one little company that only has to run fiber into verizons So Cal offices. etc...
So basically what verizon etc is saying is that 'every time data crosses onto another network, and additional fee will be applied to it' this 'additional fee' will be decided by the host network, and is based on the model that cellular roaming works off of... Basically it's saying that 'verizon' has a right to charge google a ton of money so they can run fiber to topeka KS that they don't even hook up to people's houses because then they'd use bandwith and cost verizon money.
i'm not for this rediculous 'fee structure' they want to put in place, yet the current set of agreements are a mistake, and were forced by 'fair access' laws... so now they want more laws that allow them to effictively un write the fair access laws... stupid, real stupid. if these retarded fee structurs ever went through though a hacker with a sizable botnet could literally cause 10 Trillion USD in 'fair access fees' originitating from verizion owned ips without trouble though. they're just asking to be put out of business.
well, there are these things called 'postage meters' you put a sealed envelope on a scale/printer combo, and press a button and you pay the postage for the EXACT weight. 39 cents is for a full OUNCE of non-presorted mail. meters are available to anyone, there are websites that sell the devices... and you can 'refil' their postage over the internet. (they can only print a metered amount if they have an account with sufficient funds to deduct from to print the postage mark) you can send the mail un-presorted, just like any other piece of mail, savings can be signifigant.
now, if they're mailing you a little post card presorting it, and in their pre sort facility they fill the mailbags up by 25 lbs sacks they pay by the pound of mail, at what comes out to a Very Discounted rate.
for post card sized mailings it could well turn out to cost 3.9 cents, or less.
I don't think you have to worry about photoshop plugins. there has been this thing called 'photoshop' that they've been selling for 'windows' pcs and well, any plugin worth buying has has an 'windows' (x86) port. which measn they've got more than enough source code to 'port' it over to mac os x86 edition by just changing a setting in the compiler.
i realize plugins one 'bought' five years ago won't 'work' because of course you need to 'buy' the new version that supports the new hardware. the x86 switch will be a lot less painful than the switch from 68k, since 'new' software that does what most people use macs for now should be available.
there Are nuclear powered batteries, that provide 10+ years of continuous power for devices such as pacemakers. The amount of radioactive materials are so slight, that the simple battery casing provides an effective shield meaning that no more radiation thanone would recieve from normal background rads will escape it. however, such batteries are a far cry from providing enough power for a laptop.
;) and it's been known to cause skin cancer too, never mind that millions of people flock to locations where they can bask in the stuff like 'beaches' etc.
as far as generating electricity from radioactive materials goes there are two methodologies involved a. the tendandcy of silicon to 'produce' electrcial charge when exposed to the right ffrequencies of radiation. and b. the use of radioactive waste to produce 'heat' to make steam to power an electrical turbine. the former is the type of technology used in 'new' pacemakers etc, the latter is some cold war era technology, primarilly researched by the russians. nuclear decay batteries have been powering satelites etc for decades, however based on the 'facts' for the linked story it seems absurd at best. 12 miles from food processing? does he not realize that virtually every egg and piece of poultry in the Us is irradiated to 'sterilize' it? does he not realize UV lights are installed at the entry points to any US based food manufacturor, to allow for 'bacterial sterilization' to prevent contamination? yes, Uv light is 'radiation' too
having lived in the midwest all my life i can say that the majority of the topsoil is in fact still here. but yeah, wind erosion dose cause a signifigant problem for agraculture. keep in mind if you'd read my entire comment you'd have noticed my mentioning of algea, which i prefer to soy based... on the arguments that it can be produced vastly cheaper, with the right technological investments.
Egypt hasn't been 'green' since iraq was a garden of tropical wonder. all this 'erosion' you speak of occured long before modern agroculture, and infact modern 'agroculture' has reclaimed vast tracts of 'unusable land' through fertilization and crop rotations.
but yeah, i have seen land that has been 'turned to sand' through irresponsible crop managment, mostly from agressive soil destroying crops such as ginsing, or tobbacco. other crops like peanuts, which can also be used for diesel fuel production restore a natural balance to the soil. so even with land based biofuels it's possible to help 'repair' the soil balance.
biofuels are viable, right now today, $2 a gallon is plenty for existing soybean farmers etc to 'profit'. with the right investment in technology we could make 'cheaper' biofuels, through the theoretically 'cheaper' to produce algea. i mean it has 50x the energy yield of soybean plants, which we've found to be profitable at $2 a gallon for refined biodiesel... even if that 50x yeild only netted a 5x reduced production cost, well 40 cents a gallon? when was the last time Petrolium was that cheap?
scary stuff for the oil industry, of course until someone tries to produce as much algea, for the minimal cost possible and calculates the actual cost of doing so it's just 'theory'
Bill gates could with 1% of his personal fortune establish an algea to biodiesel operation capable of producing 50% of the volume that the US consumes every year, in the best case scenario. $500 million would go a long way to building a biofuel industry capable of crushing the oil/coal/gas cartel, just imagine what a few bn would do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power solar cells are about 15% efficient, algea is about 50% efficient, and soybeans are about 1% efficient. vehicles running off straight algea or algea oil would be running at more than triple the efficiency of solar electric vehicles. which means you could have three times as many of them on the road, for the available surface area that could be dedicated to production of solar energy.
add in the savings of not having to 'manufacture' the solar cells, and the energy becomes quite cheap. possibly cheaper than fission power, possibly cheaper than fusion.
well the answer you seek lies in the concept of an infinite number of zeros, with a trailing '1' how can an infinite number of zeros have a trailing 1? because that's how reality works, reality isn't a neat tidy mathematical equasion. reality can go one beyond infinity no matter if that means you can't compute it then.
I guess I'm just not one of those math geek types who think the entire answer to the whole universe can be wrapped up in one tidy perfect equasion.
I guess to your simple mind that two obviously different number should have the same value simply because a mathematical proof can be used, and certified to say it is so. I prefer not to acknowledge that as being the case, because i define the univers as not being describle in something as simplistic as mathematical representation. which is a subset of reality, a greatly simplified subset of reality.
But he works in finland for a finnish tech site. Secondly, janos is the Czechoslovakian variant of 'john' and is used in many places in europe, not just hungary.
so you don't know any more 'for certain' that he's hungarian (or has a mother father etc from hungary) than the original poster who asserted he was finnish (based on the fact he works for a finnish publication)
you want mathematical theorems - those are known to be true.
0.9999... = 1
Thus x = 0.9999...
10x = 9.9999...
10x - x = 9.9999... - 0.9999...
9x = 9
x = 1.
now it may be splitting hairs here but this is a perfectly valid mathematical proof here, but 0.999999999999999999999.... is always going to be the smallest possible difference from 1 in reality. even though in math it can be proven to be in fact to be the same value. if you're going to assign an arbitrary value to 0.99999.... the closest arbitrary value is always going to be 1, so it's kinda splitting hairs to say that the clossest possible number that isn't exactly 1 but is infinitely close to 1.. is exactly the same as 1... still math proves that they are equal.
bill gates _didn't_ have a successful product. microsoft would have been another belly up flop, had fate not intervened. IBM saw all this 'computer hobbyist' stuff going on, and said 'let's make desktop PCs.' IBM went to the developer of a popular OS (i believe it may have been teh guy who wrote CP/M) he Refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement, IMB was hot to sign a license agreement they just wanted strict confidentiality. When he refuused, IBM was in a boat load of hot water, and someone there knew of this 'bill gates' fellow, because of his attempts to promote his faltering company microsoft...
Microsoft not only signed an NDA they agreed to ship an OS they hadn't written yet, and using the advance fee that ibm paid them they bought up QDOS, which was a 'reverse engineered' hack of CP/M they then used that code to develop MS-DOS 1.0 in time for the 'deadline' to deliver it to ibm.
Microsoft really had no future and no hope of surviving and bill gates vehmently blamed piracy for that, even though hobbyists loathed his pitiful 3-man in a a garage designs.. but still saw potential in the premise of a simple human readable programming language that could be executed directly from the source.
Can piracy really put companies out of business? for the most part, only when they're already plagued with mis-managment or other problems. bill gates also sees open source software as a 'threat' to the industry. realistically though open source is more of a 'threat' than piracy ever will be. in normal healthy people piracy makes them 'feel bad' or 'guilty' and they usually are rationalizing heavily, 'oh i'm just previewing it if it's good i'll buy it' blah blah. but open source users feel Good about promoting open source, especially with all the patent brouhaha that's over come the software industry and made anyone without a diverse patent library find themselves in a 'pay to play' situation.
will open source software kill off software development companies? no, but between the patent laws as they are and open source communities there is little breathing room for the 'little guy' in this market.
the best thing is that they don't even have to 'blacklist' them they can just redirect them to a special 'search' page that informs the users that after so and a so a date google may not be available from their isp.
without even having to do a black out i'm sure they could get quite a few people to call in angrily, and several to switch to avoid the possibility of not having access. Google could play the game of hardball with these isps who want 'metered' usage of types of services.
or a white hat could just write a firefox extention to 'click through And Close' ads run by mal-ware companies. why not just bankrupt these guys i think that would be more effective.
mal-ware sites would quickly stop using adwords if enough people were running an extention that was designed to cost them money.
The right never did anything like throwing at CLinton accusations of rape, murder, drug abuse
Short term memory? I'll give you three phrases to jog you memory.
"jennifer flowers"
"vince foster"
"mena airport"
oh yeah, the right wing got plenty of coverage time in to 'accuse' clinton of rape, murder, and if not drug abuse, then drug Smuggling! not to mention good old 'cattlegate' etc etc etc...
Who hasn't experienced that thing where you jerk alert and suddenly realize some part of your brain you're not even aware of has been driving for the last 45 minutes - on the freeway, at 75 mph - while the rest of your head has been somewhere else?
I'm curious too, that happens to me on any drive longer than an hour where I haven't administered the proper portion of caffeine prior to getting behind the wheel/ durring driving. for any drive longer than 3 hrs i need to continually consume caffeine to remain alert. the scarriest thing is that i do this on windy roads. so i KNOW i wasn't asleep... i just was like my head was parked to sector 0.
not to mention jimmy, the neighboorhood newspaper delivery boy, who's getting paid peanuts to deliver these things.. and even if he gets caught using these card number fraudulently is highly unlikely to be tried as an adult, given the circumstances.
I downloaded VLC just yesterday to try it out, and frankly the image quality SUCKS. even the stock windows media player that coame with windows 98 etc does a better job at deartifacting.
sure VLC has a bunch of settings, that don't work unless you turn them on in the title menu... so what do people wwho made dvds with out title menues do? what if i made a captioned 'home video' with no menu? stuck using default Crappy settings in VLC. because changing settings during playback causes the subtitles/captions to 'dissapear'not to mention i need to know which mode to put it into based on the type of artifacting i'm seeing on the screen...
vlc might be good for you, but frankly i think i'll stick to a player that can actually handle things like improving the image quality Automatically.
under integration you forgot to include gmail, i know you said etc.... still, email and calendar functions are critical for desktop users. perhaps google, knowing what a decent sized orginization needs in terms of tools to allow the office to work together more fluidly will be able to better integrate those functions into a 'desktop' linux than some people who've never had to manage that kind of workload.
well i'm pretty sure that i'm not curtting the calories too low, because i'm not on a specific 'atkins' etc diet, but rather restricting carbs, and increasing fiber. and i still get many carbs from fruits (have you seen the carb content of some fruits? 'net carbs are lower, but still...) so keeping fruits in the diet especially as snacks helps maintain a low level of consistant carbs. i'm also trying to eat whole grain products when possible, as the body digests them slower, creating a more even distrobution of carbs.