I was playing with an extremely strong magnet, using it to make funky distortions in my comuputer monitor.
When I took the magnet away, a lot of discolorations in the screen remained. "No problem," I thought, "I'll just hit the degauss button."
Well degaussing only removed about half of the problem. The image still looks pretty bad and discolored.
Any suggestions how to fix it?
Artifacts of other civilizations: gamma-ray bursts
on
42 Worlds in 32 Days
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· Score: 1
What we need to look at is the *effects* of otherworldly life
One such effect might be gamma-ray bursts.
The most energetic events in the universe -- far more energetic than supernovae -- are gamma-ray bursts, and they're quite a mystery to astrophysicists trying to figure out how a natural process can give rise to them.
I think I've figured it out. They're not a natural phenomenon, they are advanced weapons, used to take out entire solar systems. (The shock wave probably destroys all life in neighboring solar systems as well.) Sadly, this weapon has been re-invented over and over again in different parts of the universe. We see gamma-ray bursts in all directions of the sky. From the distance in light-years, we know that some of them happened billions of years ago, and some of them happened less than a billion years ago.
Or maybe they're not weapons. Maybe they are accidents that occur when a civilization performs very high-energy physics experiments.
When any company sells a product it has to recover its costs and make a profit. If Apple were to release OS X for x86 PCs, one of the costs, quite literally, that it would have to recover is the resulting loss of hardware revenue. So I would have no problem with them charging $279 per license.
When Apple experimented with Mac clones, the fundamental mistake it made was charging too small a licensing fee. If the revenue from licensing Mac OS to a cloner had been the same as the profit on an Apple-made box, the company woudn't have cared if the cloners ate into their hardware market share, because it would have made no difference to the bottom line.
I'm forced to use Windows at work, and I use OS X at home. Funny, but when I'm using X, I never feel stifled by the lack of a "commodity computer marketplace." Instead, coming home to my Mac after a frustrating day of Micro$oft feels like losing the wingtips and putting on a comfortable pair of slippers.
Be was offering its OS for FREE to manufacturers. Having BeOS as well as Windows on the computers you sell clearly would have added value to your product, because everyone who spent time getting to know BeOS loved it. Clearly, the reason manufacturers didn't take Be up on their offer to preinstall the OS for free is pressure from Micro$oft.
For those who want a DVD-video recorder: WAIT for this new format, this will really enhance the VCR experiance: direct access and capacity...
How would this new DVD format be superior to using hard drives in TiVo-like devices? When the first "Blue Ray" drive hits the market (with its 27 GB per side capacity), I bet it will cost three times as much as a 130 GB hard drive, and have much slower read/write speeds.
With just a little work it would be possible to create vast numbers of offspring. How these offspring would be used is one of the major ethical questions.
To "use" a normal offspring would be unthinkable. Should this technology go into widespread use, we should hold high expectations of its users, and become just as indignant at the mere suggestion of "using" a child that is the product of this process. "How these offspring would be used" is a question that should never even be raised. They shouldn't be used, period, and to raise the question is to expose us to a very slippery slope.
There should be fewer people like *me*. I'm a suburban dweller, and the fact that there are so many people like me has led to terrible urban sprawl. If there were just a few people like me, it wouldn't be a problem.
Rather than saying crack babies et al shouldn't be born, better to say they shouldn't even be conceived. ("Shouldn't be born" implies a possible abortion.) I think you are with me on this, since you suggest Norplant for welfare recipients.
I know that older dual-decks manufactured by Go Video can defeat Macrovision, but newer ones can't.
Perhaps you would know: how would I be able to tell the difference? If I see a Go Video deck on eBay, is there a manufacturing date or model number that would let me know this is one of the capable decks?
It's a shame that we'll have the expense of rebuilding the 1960s NERVA capability. If that ball hadn't been dropped, we would have had powerful, efficient nuclear propulsion in the 1970s.
And it would be real nice if we could mine uranium from asteroids -- getting around the problem of having to launch the fuel for these spiffy nuclear propulsion systems up through our atmosphere.
The power system of the little Sojourner rover consisted of a solar panel on its roof, that charged some batteries.
The rover died after what, about 60 days?
You can get cheap rechargeable batteries at Radio Shack that are good for a lot more than 60 charge/discharge cycles. 500 cycles is more like it. So I don't understand why it died after only 60 days.
From the TechTV article: while all this may be technically possible, it doesn't mean NASA has the money to pay for it. The price tag for the initial Earth-based space elevator is estimated to be $40 billion.
Over the past 27 years, about $150 Billion has been spent on the Space Shuttle program. What do we have to show for it? Certainly not reliable, low-cost access to space.
Hundreds of round trips per year could be made up and down the 'space elevator.' By contrast, it's a really good year if we get eight shuttle flights.
Such civilizations do not last a long time, and blow themselves up
The most energetic events in the universe -- far more energetic than supernovae -- are gamma-ray bursts, and they're quite a mystery to astrophysicists trying to figure out how a natural process can give rise to them.
I think I've figured it out. They're not a natural phenomenon, they are advanced weapons, used to take out entire solar systems. (The shock wave probably destroys all life in neighboring solar systems as well.) Sadly, this weapon has been re-invented over and over again in different parts of the universe. We see gamma-ray bursts in all directions of the sky. From the distance in light-years, we know that some of them happened billions of years ago, and some of them happened less than a billion years ago.
Or maybe they're not weapons. Maybe they are accidents that occur when a civilization performs very high-energy physics experiments.
If a planet is exactly tidelocked, there would be a small habitable strip of land near the terminator (the boundary between the freezing night side and the roasting sunward side). It used to be thought that Mercury was exactly tidelocked, and I remember an interesting piece of science fiction about the inhabitants of Mercury's terminator.
The length of time an effort has been going in is irrelevant. The "war on crime" has been going on a lot longer than the "war on drugs." It has gone on as long as there has been civilization -- in effect, perpetually. Should we therefore admit defeat and disband all police forces?
Compile two versions of your code, one using double precision, the other using all single precision.
Compare the accuracy of the final results, and decide if the performance penalty of using double precision is worth the extra accuracy.
Don't get me wrong, I know double precision is essential for some problems. But I also know engineers who code everything double precision by default, even though 95% of the time single precision results would be every bit as good.
I said Linux' lower price means there would be a lot of demand for it, if Linux had as many Joe-Sixpack-friendly apps as Windows, and if the OS itself was as friendly to Joe Sixpack.
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Please visit the Hydrino Study Group for an in-depth, scientific discussion of the BlackLight Power process.
I was playing with an extremely strong magnet, using it to make funky distortions in my comuputer monitor.
When I took the magnet away, a lot of discolorations in the screen remained. "No problem," I thought, "I'll just hit the degauss button."
Well degaussing only removed about half of the problem. The image still looks pretty bad and discolored.
Any suggestions how to fix it?
What we need to look at is the *effects* of otherworldly life
One such effect might be gamma-ray bursts.
The most energetic events in the universe -- far more energetic than supernovae -- are gamma-ray bursts, and they're quite a mystery to astrophysicists trying to figure out how a natural process can give rise to them.
I think I've figured it out. They're not a natural phenomenon, they are advanced weapons, used to take out entire solar systems. (The shock wave probably destroys all life in neighboring solar systems as well.) Sadly, this weapon has been re-invented over and over again in different parts of the universe. We see gamma-ray bursts in all directions of the sky. From the distance in light-years, we know that some of them happened billions of years ago, and some of them happened less than a billion years ago.
Or maybe they're not weapons. Maybe they are accidents that occur when a civilization performs very high-energy physics experiments.
The batteries under development at BlackLight Power, Inc. have an energy density that's a whopping 606 times greater than lithium-ion batteries.
What do the 'p' and 'i' stand for in 480p and 1080i? Interlaced? Pixels?
When any company sells a product it has to recover its costs and make a profit. If Apple were to release OS X for x86 PCs, one of the costs, quite literally, that it would have to recover is the resulting loss of hardware revenue. So I would have no problem with them charging $279 per license.
When Apple experimented with Mac clones, the fundamental mistake it made was charging too small a licensing fee. If the revenue from licensing Mac OS to a cloner had been the same as the profit on an Apple-made box, the company woudn't have cared if the cloners ate into their hardware market share, because it would have made no difference to the bottom line.
I'm forced to use Windows at work, and I use OS X at home. Funny, but when I'm using X, I never feel stifled by the lack of a "commodity computer marketplace." Instead, coming home to my Mac after a frustrating day of Micro$oft feels like losing the wingtips and putting on a comfortable pair of slippers.
Did you even read the excellent article by Scot Hacker?
Be was offering its OS for FREE to manufacturers. Having BeOS as well as Windows on the computers you sell clearly would have added value to your product, because everyone who spent time getting to know BeOS loved it. Clearly, the reason manufacturers didn't take Be up on their offer to preinstall the OS for free is pressure from Micro$oft.
Good luck with the lawsuit, Be!
For those who want a DVD-video recorder: WAIT for this new format, this will really enhance the VCR experiance: direct access and capacity ...
How would this new DVD format be superior to using hard drives in TiVo-like devices? When the first "Blue Ray" drive hits the market (with its 27 GB per side capacity), I bet it will cost three times as much as a 130 GB hard drive, and have much slower read/write speeds.
Build an advanced unmanned aircraft for under $10K? I think that's a little optomistic.
With just a little work it would be possible to create vast numbers of offspring. How these offspring would be used is one of the major ethical questions.
To "use" a normal offspring would be unthinkable. Should this technology go into widespread use, we should hold high expectations of its users, and become just as indignant at the mere suggestion of "using" a child that is the product of this process. "How these offspring would be used" is a question that should never even be raised. They shouldn't be used, period, and to raise the question is to expose us to a very slippery slope.
No, if all technology were eliminated from the planet tomorrow, the stand-up thing to do would be to work toward re-establishing it.
There should be fewer people like *me*. I'm a suburban dweller, and the fact that there are so many people like me has led to terrible urban sprawl. If there were just a few people like me, it wouldn't be a problem.
Rather than saying crack babies et al shouldn't be born, better to say they shouldn't even be conceived. ("Shouldn't be born" implies a possible abortion.) I think you are with me on this, since you suggest Norplant for welfare recipients.
is it even possible for a proprietary OS to be successful in today's market?
Isn't Windows a proprietary OS?
Seriously. Don't mod this down.
I know that older dual-decks manufactured by Go Video can defeat Macrovision, but newer ones can't.
Perhaps you would know: how would I be able to tell the difference? If I see a Go Video deck on eBay, is there a manufacturing date or model number that would let me know this is one of the capable decks?
It's a shame that we'll have the expense of rebuilding the 1960s NERVA capability. If that ball hadn't been dropped, we would have had powerful, efficient nuclear propulsion in the 1970s.
And it would be real nice if we could mine uranium from asteroids -- getting around the problem of having to launch the fuel for these spiffy nuclear propulsion systems up through our atmosphere.
The power system of the little Sojourner rover consisted of a solar panel on its roof, that charged some batteries.
The rover died after what, about 60 days?
You can get cheap rechargeable batteries at Radio Shack that are good for a lot more than 60 charge/discharge cycles. 500 cycles is more like it. So I don't understand why it died after only 60 days.
From the TechTV article: while all this may be technically possible, it doesn't mean NASA has the money to pay for it. The price tag for the initial Earth-based space elevator is estimated to be $40 billion.
Over the past 27 years, about $150 Billion has been spent on the Space Shuttle program. What do we have to show for it? Certainly not reliable, low-cost access to space.
Hundreds of round trips per year could be made up and down the 'space elevator.' By contrast, it's a really good year if we get eight shuttle flights.
Such civilizations do not last a long time, and blow themselves up
The most energetic events in the universe -- far more energetic than supernovae -- are gamma-ray bursts, and they're quite a mystery to astrophysicists trying to figure out how a natural process can give rise to them.
I think I've figured it out. They're not a natural phenomenon, they are advanced weapons, used to take out entire solar systems. (The shock wave probably destroys all life in neighboring solar systems as well.) Sadly, this weapon has been re-invented over and over again in different parts of the universe. We see gamma-ray bursts in all directions of the sky. From the distance in light-years, we know that some of them happened billions of years ago, and some of them happened less than a billion years ago.
Or maybe they're not weapons. Maybe they are accidents that occur when a civilization performs very high-energy physics experiments.
If a planet is exactly tidelocked, there would be a small habitable strip of land near the terminator (the boundary between the freezing night side and the roasting sunward side). It used to be thought that Mercury was exactly tidelocked, and I remember an interesting piece of science fiction about the inhabitants of Mercury's terminator.
The length of time an effort has been going in is irrelevant. The "war on crime" has been going on a lot longer than the "war on drugs." It has gone on as long as there has been civilization -- in effect, perpetually. Should we therefore admit defeat and disband all police forces?
It's often worthwhile to do this test:
Compile two versions of your code, one using double precision, the other using all single precision.
Compare the accuracy of the final results, and decide if the performance penalty of using double precision is worth the extra accuracy.
Don't get me wrong, I know double precision is essential for some problems. But I also know engineers who code everything double precision by default, even though 95% of the time single precision results would be every bit as good.
You didn't read my post.
I said Linux' lower price means there would be a lot of demand for it, if Linux had as many Joe-Sixpack-friendly apps as Windows, and if the OS itself was as friendly to Joe Sixpack.