Except that the flaw in your logic is that you assume that there is some initial cost, like the creation of a game or the tooling of a product, that needs to be made back.
Apple already has an e-commerce engine built using 1-click. One presumes these companies already have their music in digital format. Investment required? Take twenty thousand songs and run them through an Applescript that coverts them to AAC. Enter them into database to be sold (probably EDI from the publishers).
No-brainer, and it will make money hand over fist- even with "just" three percent of the market (which is a misnomer- this product will service the installed base, as well, not just 3% of the computer buying market per year).
Additionally, the structural integrity of ST era ships is far greater than that of modern spacecraft- even without the shields.
In the ST:OS episode where the Enterprise encounters a black hole and is flung into VERY low Earth orbit in the 1960's, Spock comments that if the Enterprise were to be hit by a nuclear weapon without its shields up, they might sustain serious damage (!). Not "get vaporized," nor "be destroyed."
Additionally, the Enterprise (and other ships) routinely absorb multiple photon torpedo hits when their shields are down. It would be naive to think that antimatter fueled weapons of the 24th century are less powerful than those of today- a photon torpedo has got to be the equivalent of a small nuclear bomb (hell, a Daisy Cutter is nearly the equivalent and it's just a big tub of conventional explosives!).
It's not unreasonable to think that structures that can (anecdotally) survive multiple nuclear explosions also have the integrity to withstand a simple ship-to-ship impact.
The American army rumbles up... stops a couple of miles away. They seem to be fiddling around with something... after a couple of minutes, they ATTACK!
-plink- A single 37mm shell lands on one of your tanks, bounces and rolls into a ditch.
You and your comrades laugh at the sheer impotency of the attack. You crawl out of your bunkers and tanks, and mock the enemy for such a feeble effort.
But they seem to be fiddling with something ELSE now...
Many GPS guided weapons have inertial guidance as a backup. If they lose guidance from the satellites, they remember where they where, and roughly what direction and how far they had to go to hit their target.
This article claims that GPS jamming reduces the accuracy of a 200 lb JDAM to +/- 100 feet; considering the destructive power of those weapons, the difference is academic against all but hardened targets.
The frequencies are fixed; they'll only change when the next generation of GPS satellites are launched, a prospect that hasn't even been planned yet. Anyhow, any sort of technological countermeasures deployed by Iraq against its much more powerful enemies are going to be a speed bump at best- they're hopelessly overmatched. Their best bet will be evasion, deceit, and propoganda- the only things that (barely) worked for them in Gulf War I.
Now Slashdot is only linking to images captured in the infrared spectrum? Great, now I'm going to have to spend the dough to update to the PowerBook with the face-burning screen, in addition to the penis-scorching base.
Not magical- integrated. Macs have a system level technology called ColorSync, that can calibrate and store color profiles for all your output devices.
Add that to the limited hardware space Mac users have to account for- only certain types of monitors, video cards, etc- and the hooks the application developers build into their DTP apps, and you have an elegant way to make sure your puke green logo is the proper shade of puke green throughout the production process.
For instance, I develop for the Web- so I have embedded a ColorSync profile that makes my monitor look like a Windows machine (about 20% darker than a typical Mac). By propagating that profile through all my apps that support ColorSync, I can make sure that even if I specify a very light color, it will be properly compensated for and appear darker on my screen.
Windows users can do the same thing- Photoshop recently shook up their entire profile handling on both platforms, much to the concern of digital artists everywhere- but, as is usually the case, the implementation is not quite as elegant, and the results not as predictable.
That said, there's no reason why Windows can "never" reach a similar level of function. Never is a long time...
(p.s. Safari inline spellchecking in HTML forms is a great way NOT to look like a doofus when posting at 3:05 AM!)
My "terribly slow" Dual 1 Ghz Macintosh is limited by its slowest part... me.
I keep the CPU meter running in the dock, and its twin towers of darkeness mock me..."what's the matter, buddy, can't even feed two glacial G4's? We're just sitting here, at 20% of capacity, while you try to decide which Actionscript to incorrectly code next..."
Even when I'm saving giant Photoshop files, checking 14 e-mail accounts and loading web pages into three different browsers (IE, Chimera, Safari), it still has one or two little dark blocks at the top of each meter. Probably just to piss me off.
Disclaimer: If I was a 3D or video artist, a 10% increase in speed could free up an hour a day. Since I'm not, even a 100% increase in speed would just mean my computer would have half as much to do while it waited for my sorry ass.
I'd think it's more along the lines of a recognition that when Apple finally does something in a market segment, it's usually well designed and elegant.
There were tons of LCD all-in-ones- even that IBM machine, with the arm holding the screen- but the flat-panel iMac integrated the components in a way that surpassed them all in terms of utility and aesthetics (if you don't agree, you probably haven't seen/fiddled with one).
There's plenty of hard-drive MP3 players around- so why has "iPod" become almost synonymous with "portable music player?" It's because the ingenious scroll wheel and interface of Apple's machine- after about sixty seconds of messing with it, you're whipping through those menus like a pro and giggling with delight. I'm embarrassed to say it's a bit intoxicating (and I don't even own one; I play with them in stores). Every other MP3 player I've used is a confusing muddle of mode buttons and flashing LCD messages.
Conversely, one can see Microsoft's usual lack of consideration in Pocket PC's (and presumably their Tablets- I haven't seen one). It's basically "big Windows," with all the annoying interface doo-dads crammed onto a teeny screen. Does having four one-inch square windows with scroll bars on a handheld screen really serve the user?
In contrast, the Newton's interface was a dream- and that was the Neanderthal of handhelds! The expectation of an Apple tablet is that it will deliver the holy grail of tablet computing- easy usability with a pen only. Apple's reliance on its iSync technology to get all the information from its keyboard-enabled computers into your peripheral devices could be a major part of that plan.
As usual, the expectations of what Apple will deliver may not meet up with the reality. However, they have had enough successes in the past to continue to generate excitement.
That was actually a hilarious moment in the first Superman movie- Clark Kent was rushing to change into Superman for his first "public action" (saving Lois from a helicopter disaster) when he stopped and briefly glanced up and down at one of the half-booths common in NYC nowadays (and back in the 70's when the film was made).
It obviously didn't fit his requirements, as he went on to a revolving door which he spun at super speed to blur his transformation (which seems moot, after opening his shirt in the middle of a crowded street to reveal the Superman "S.")
Oh well, it's NYC, err, Metropolis-- no one would notice unless he was doing something abberant, like being nice or polite...
The characters, in the interest of drama, usually furrowed their brows, looked up at no one in particular, and assumed a deeper, "commanding" tone to their voice when addressing the computer.
Perhaps the computer uses a recognition algorithm based on all these factors to know when someon is talking to "it." My cat apparently has similar algorithms programmed in- I can speak in a conversational tone all day, even to a telephone, and the cat won't respond- but the moment I assume my "talking to kitty" voice, it snaps to attention.
Another interesting question about the ST computer- how did it route the person-to-person commnications before the individual spoke the receipient's name? You'd often here Picard's communicator pipe up: "Riker to Picard- you should come up to the bridge," or some such line.
One presumes that the communication did not go to everyone on the ship, only to be cut off when the word "Picard" was spoken. I always assumed the computer cached the outgoing communication until it was determined whom it was going to, and then retransmitted; the result should be a 1 second lag on the return to represent that, unless the computer subtly timeshifted the entire conversation to pad the lag into the spaces normally between words.
As recently as 50 years ago, most humans on this planet were mainly concerned with finding enough food on a daily basis to stay alive.
In today's society, it's only slightly unusual to report on an individual who apparently has enough free time to obsessivbely recreate a fictional spacecraft in exacting detail with intentionally poor tools.
The screwed up thing is, the majority of people in the world are STILL mainly concerned with finding enough food on a daily basis to stay alive.
I'm not trying to pull a guilt/ego/trippy trip on anyone; it's just odd to think that some of us are lucky enough to have to go out of our way to waste time.
I'm surprised anyone is outraged that the war is "really about oil."
Of course it's about oil. If the Middle East had no oil, we would pay no attention to them, and let them all kill each other in peace (see: Rwanda).
Governments are made up of people- i.e., they are greedy, selfish, and evasive about their motives, just like the real people you deal with every day.
Thus, they don't publicly announce that they're going to invade Iraq because a contrary dictator is threatening an important resource. They couch it in terms that make it seem more like a noble endeavour.
Would you ask a girl on a date by saying, "Let's go to a movie, since it's dark and maybe I can get my hand down your shirt in there?" That may be your motive, but you'd be a dumbass to say it.
Sounds like a good mission statement- I hope they have a plan to back up that goal.
How do they intend to keep on-line comics free? By subsidizing the cartoonists? By supplying them with enough free stuff that it's worth putting up their comics with them? By posting to Slashdot so they get a zillion banner views? It's unclear to me.
Comics artists gotta eat, too (and if you've been to a comics convention, you'd see that they gotta eat more than most- I'm talking about me here, too). In the end, there needs to be some correlation between putting content online and money appearing. Just aggregating content and hoping for the coolness to start generating dough sounds a lot like some dot-com business plans.
In the comics project I'm peripherally involved with, the idea is that the online component serves as a marketing tool for the printed magazine (yes, those are still around- for a while, at least). Additionally, the hope is to sell related products via the web site and recoup some money there- I think that's the main business model for The Joy of Tech.
If either of those fail, the online (free) stuff will go away. Thus, it's in the interest of people who like the stuff to buy a t-shirt once in a while, or even just donate some cash. Otherwise, the online comic will remain the province of the subsidized hobbyist who quits once they have a family to support.
I'm not slamming these guys for banding together to promote the art form as a whole- anything anyone does to bolster the sagging comic industry is OK by me. I'm just hoping this is not another "Great idea, we'll put on a show!" concept that will run out of steam once people start wondering where the reward is.
Yes, but while you're walking to Blockbuster, you can't do anything else, other than ogle the gals on the street or quietly plot world domination in your head.
While downloading a file, you can eat, sleep, or complain about it on Slashdot.
Head south, my friend. Highway 25 has a 10 mile stretch south of Hollister- I saw 147 indicated on an F3 there.
Highway 33 south of Coalinga has a 73 mile stretch that's more or less straight- 150 on a VFR, there.
Landshark owners will probably want to wait until 3:30 AM and hit Interstate 40 through Arizona. Plenty of long stretches there...and if they overshoot California they can decelerate in the Pacific:-)
As a professional who relies on my Macintosh to generate income, the supposed "price premium" of Apple hardware over a build-it-yourself amounts to a half day's billing.
Add the time to build eating into billable hours, and it would come out as an expensive proposition.
There are lots of reasons to build a machine yourself- better control over the parts, getting a custom config that you can't easily buy, and saving money. I wager that most people's reason to buy a Mac- it works, out of the box, to make us money- is not really compatible with those ideals.
I do agree with one sentiment addressed in the story, and that's avoiding the outlandish prices Apple charges for standard parts such as RAM and hard disks. Most savvy Mac users buy base configs and then load up the RAM and HD's via cheaper, third party suppliers.
The state of near-earth asteroid detection is pretty pitiful. We need years of warning if we're to divert an asteroid, not days.
Asteroid hunting should be part of the basic curriculum for astronomy programs, if it isn't already. Multiply a half dozen students by every university in the world and you've suddenly increased our detection capacity by several orders of magnitude.
Our fiction (especially science fiction) allows us to get our minds around "earth shattering" concepts before we have to really deal with them. I would launch a TV series about the discovery, treating it as fiction, of course.
You'll benefit from the "It's like Star Trek" effect- nowadays, any high-tech discovery is invariably compared to something on Star Trek, like the recent experiments in which a photon is "teleported."
Thanks to Star Trek and other science fiction, when we make contact with an alien race, the worldwide reaction won't be "Impossible!"-- rather, it will be "Finally!"
Re:disabled angle for funding... sad..
on
Funky Robotic Hand
·
· Score: 2
Oh, so this is the Slashdot article where we generalize about everyone in a particular country- thanks for letting me in on it.
I guess a European's reaction would be, "How could we use this to further delay action while genocide is occurring in our own back yard?"
The US military drives lots of research because they aren't motivated by profit. Some of the more interesting things in the world have come out of military funding- like this Internet thingy you're using to slam USAsians with.
Later in the article, it said data was recorded from the descent. Is that descent back to earth or what? Was it controlled or did it just crash land?
The descending flight plan was intentional; the speed needed to ignite the motor is quite high, and a gravity assist helped to attain it. The scramjet fired during the last portion of a parabolic flight.
Plus, I bet they didn't want to risk the vehicle flying off in an unintended direction if it worked too well; with the chosen flight path it was stopped directly after the experiment concluded:-)
And he can't use iPods to match up beats, alter the pitch of music or spin records back and forth for a scratching effect -- all things that professional club DJs consider essential.
The performance aspect- hinted to in the quote above- is a big part of what makes club DJ's so popular. If you've never seen one at work, it can get quite physical- they literally throw those records around the platter in an attempt to generate sounds and synchronize beats. A good DJ can elicit cheers and applause from an otherwise oblivious crowd.
The DJs with the MP3 players are acting more like radio DJs- they're programming the night with a list of songs, not cutting up raw material into a performance. There's a place for both, obviously, but one will not replace the other- similar to the way theater and movies continue to coexist.
The Rueters credit is undoubtedly for the photo, which you are viewing, of the historical artifact, which is the original photo.
It's confusing, but not malicious.
Some Tech not Yet Discovered...
on
P2P Roaming Chat
·
· Score: 2
...in BrendanLand: Clickable thumbnails that get larger, so you can actually see the screenshots
The problem with this is that there is no compelling action that will drive people to go through the hassle of setting up their worlds. If he wanted to really tie in the Napster aspect, he should have included filesharing in the form of "stashes," or something similar.
However, it would still suck. There's a reason why all that cheesy "virtual malls" and "click on the storefront to enter the store" crap never took off- because simulating an annoying real world experience (trudging through a mall, or wandering through a desert) does not make for a compelling online experience.
Want community? Write a front end for connecting people's Civ worlds... or Sims worlds... those are compelling experiences, and I think someone's already on that:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Except that the flaw in your logic is that you assume that there is some initial cost, like the creation of a game or the tooling of a product, that needs to be made back.
Apple already has an e-commerce engine built using 1-click. One presumes these companies already have their music in digital format. Investment required? Take twenty thousand songs and run them through an Applescript that coverts them to AAC. Enter them into database to be sold (probably EDI from the publishers).
No-brainer, and it will make money hand over fist- even with "just" three percent of the market (which is a misnomer- this product will service the installed base, as well, not just 3% of the computer buying market per year).
Additionally, the structural integrity of ST era ships is far greater than that of modern spacecraft- even without the shields.
In the ST:OS episode where the Enterprise encounters a black hole and is flung into VERY low Earth orbit in the 1960's, Spock comments that if the Enterprise were to be hit by a nuclear weapon without its shields up, they might sustain serious damage (!). Not "get vaporized," nor "be destroyed."
Additionally, the Enterprise (and other ships) routinely absorb multiple photon torpedo hits when their shields are down. It would be naive to think that antimatter fueled weapons of the 24th century are less powerful than those of today- a photon torpedo has got to be the equivalent of a small nuclear bomb (hell, a Daisy Cutter is nearly the equivalent and it's just a big tub of conventional explosives!).
It's not unreasonable to think that structures that can (anecdotally) survive multiple nuclear explosions also have the integrity to withstand a simple ship-to-ship impact.
Imagine being on the receiving end.
The American army rumbles up... stops a couple of miles away. They seem to be fiddling around with something... after a couple of minutes, they ATTACK!
-plink- A single 37mm shell lands on one of your tanks, bounces and rolls into a ditch.
You and your comrades laugh at the sheer impotency of the attack. You crawl out of your bunkers and tanks, and mock the enemy for such a feeble effort.
But they seem to be fiddling with something ELSE now...
Many GPS guided weapons have inertial guidance as a backup. If they lose guidance from the satellites, they remember where they where, and roughly what direction and how far they had to go to hit their target.
This article claims that GPS jamming reduces the accuracy of a 200 lb JDAM to +/- 100 feet; considering the destructive power of those weapons, the difference is academic against all but hardened targets.
The frequencies are fixed; they'll only change when the next generation of GPS satellites are launched, a prospect that hasn't even been planned yet. Anyhow, any sort of technological countermeasures deployed by Iraq against its much more powerful enemies are going to be a speed bump at best- they're hopelessly overmatched. Their best bet will be evasion, deceit, and propoganda- the only things that (barely) worked for them in Gulf War I.
>Tons of hotographs
Now Slashdot is only linking to images captured in the infrared spectrum? Great, now I'm going to have to spend the dough to update to the PowerBook with the face-burning screen, in addition to the penis-scorching base.
Not magical- integrated. Macs have a system level technology called ColorSync, that can calibrate and store color profiles for all your output devices.
Add that to the limited hardware space Mac users have to account for- only certain types of monitors, video cards, etc- and the hooks the application developers build into their DTP apps, and you have an elegant way to make sure your puke green logo is the proper shade of puke green throughout the production process.
For instance, I develop for the Web- so I have embedded a ColorSync profile that makes my monitor look like a Windows machine (about 20% darker than a typical Mac). By propagating that profile through all my apps that support ColorSync, I can make sure that even if I specify a very light color, it will be properly compensated for and appear darker on my screen.
Windows users can do the same thing- Photoshop recently shook up their entire profile handling on both platforms, much to the concern of digital artists everywhere- but, as is usually the case, the implementation is not quite as elegant, and the results not as predictable.
That said, there's no reason why Windows can "never" reach a similar level of function. Never is a long time...
(p.s. Safari inline spellchecking in HTML forms is a great way NOT to look like a doofus when posting at 3:05 AM!)
My "terribly slow" Dual 1 Ghz Macintosh is limited by its slowest part... me.
I keep the CPU meter running in the dock, and its twin towers of darkeness mock me..."what's the matter, buddy, can't even feed two glacial G4's? We're just sitting here, at 20% of capacity, while you try to decide which Actionscript to incorrectly code next..."
Even when I'm saving giant Photoshop files, checking 14 e-mail accounts and loading web pages into three different browsers (IE, Chimera, Safari), it still has one or two little dark blocks at the top of each meter. Probably just to piss me off.
Disclaimer: If I was a 3D or video artist, a 10% increase in speed could free up an hour a day. Since I'm not, even a 100% increase in speed would just mean my computer would have half as much to do while it waited for my sorry ass.
I'd think it's more along the lines of a recognition that when Apple finally does something in a market segment, it's usually well designed and elegant.
There were tons of LCD all-in-ones- even that IBM machine, with the arm holding the screen- but the flat-panel iMac integrated the components in a way that surpassed them all in terms of utility and aesthetics (if you don't agree, you probably haven't seen/fiddled with one).
There's plenty of hard-drive MP3 players around- so why has "iPod" become almost synonymous with "portable music player?" It's because the ingenious scroll wheel and interface of Apple's machine- after about sixty seconds of messing with it, you're whipping through those menus like a pro and giggling with delight. I'm embarrassed to say it's a bit intoxicating (and I don't even own one; I play with them in stores). Every other MP3 player I've used is a confusing muddle of mode buttons and flashing LCD messages.
Conversely, one can see Microsoft's usual lack of consideration in Pocket PC's (and presumably their Tablets- I haven't seen one). It's basically "big Windows," with all the annoying interface doo-dads crammed onto a teeny screen. Does having four one-inch square windows with scroll bars on a handheld screen really serve the user?
In contrast, the Newton's interface was a dream- and that was the Neanderthal of handhelds! The expectation of an Apple tablet is that it will deliver the holy grail of tablet computing- easy usability with a pen only. Apple's reliance on its iSync technology to get all the information from its keyboard-enabled computers into your peripheral devices could be a major part of that plan.
As usual, the expectations of what Apple will deliver may not meet up with the reality. However, they have had enough successes in the past to continue to generate excitement.
That was actually a hilarious moment in the first Superman movie- Clark Kent was rushing to change into Superman for his first "public action" (saving Lois from a helicopter disaster) when he stopped and briefly glanced up and down at one of the half-booths common in NYC nowadays (and back in the 70's when the film was made).
It obviously didn't fit his requirements, as he went on to a revolving door which he spun at super speed to blur his transformation (which seems moot, after opening his shirt in the middle of a crowded street to reveal the Superman "S.")
Oh well, it's NYC, err, Metropolis-- no one would notice unless he was doing something abberant, like being nice or polite...
The characters, in the interest of drama, usually furrowed their brows, looked up at no one in particular, and assumed a deeper, "commanding" tone to their voice when addressing the computer.
Perhaps the computer uses a recognition algorithm based on all these factors to know when someon is talking to "it." My cat apparently has similar algorithms programmed in- I can speak in a conversational tone all day, even to a telephone, and the cat won't respond- but the moment I assume my "talking to kitty" voice, it snaps to attention.
Another interesting question about the ST computer- how did it route the person-to-person commnications before the individual spoke the receipient's name? You'd often here Picard's communicator pipe up: "Riker to Picard- you should come up to the bridge," or some such line.
One presumes that the communication did not go to everyone on the ship, only to be cut off when the word "Picard" was spoken. I always assumed the computer cached the outgoing communication until it was determined whom it was going to, and then retransmitted; the result should be a 1 second lag on the return to represent that, unless the computer subtly timeshifted the entire conversation to pad the lag into the spaces normally between words.
As recently as 50 years ago, most humans on this planet were mainly concerned with finding enough food on a daily basis to stay alive.
In today's society, it's only slightly unusual to report on an individual who apparently has enough free time to obsessivbely recreate a fictional spacecraft in exacting detail with intentionally poor tools.
The screwed up thing is, the majority of people in the world are STILL mainly concerned with finding enough food on a daily basis to stay alive.
I'm not trying to pull a guilt/ego/trippy trip on anyone; it's just odd to think that some of us are lucky enough to have to go out of our way to waste time.
I'm surprised anyone is outraged that the war is "really about oil."
Of course it's about oil. If the Middle East had no oil, we would pay no attention to them, and let them all kill each other in peace (see: Rwanda).
Governments are made up of people- i.e., they are greedy, selfish, and evasive about their motives, just like the real people you deal with every day.
Thus, they don't publicly announce that they're going to invade Iraq because a contrary dictator is threatening an important resource. They couch it in terms that make it seem more like a noble endeavour.
Would you ask a girl on a date by saying, "Let's go to a movie, since it's dark and maybe I can get my hand down your shirt in there?" That may be your motive, but you'd be a dumbass to say it.
Sounds like a good mission statement- I hope they have a plan to back up that goal.
How do they intend to keep on-line comics free? By subsidizing the cartoonists? By supplying them with enough free stuff that it's worth putting up their comics with them? By posting to Slashdot so they get a zillion banner views? It's unclear to me.
Comics artists gotta eat, too (and if you've been to a comics convention, you'd see that they gotta eat more than most- I'm talking about me here, too). In the end, there needs to be some correlation between putting content online and money appearing. Just aggregating content and hoping for the coolness to start generating dough sounds a lot like some dot-com business plans.
In the comics project I'm peripherally involved with, the idea is that the online component serves as a marketing tool for the printed magazine (yes, those are still around- for a while, at least). Additionally, the hope is to sell related products via the web site and recoup some money there- I think that's the main business model for The Joy of Tech.
If either of those fail, the online (free) stuff will go away. Thus, it's in the interest of people who like the stuff to buy a t-shirt once in a while, or even just donate some cash. Otherwise, the online comic will remain the province of the subsidized hobbyist who quits once they have a family to support.
I'm not slamming these guys for banding together to promote the art form as a whole- anything anyone does to bolster the sagging comic industry is OK by me. I'm just hoping this is not another "Great idea, we'll put on a show!" concept that will run out of steam once people start wondering where the reward is.
Yes, but while you're walking to Blockbuster, you can't do anything else, other than ogle the gals on the street or quietly plot world domination in your head.
While downloading a file, you can eat, sleep, or complain about it on Slashdot.
Head south, my friend. Highway 25 has a 10 mile stretch south of Hollister- I saw 147 indicated on an F3 there.
:-)
Highway 33 south of Coalinga has a 73 mile stretch that's more or less straight- 150 on a VFR, there.
Landshark owners will probably want to wait until 3:30 AM and hit Interstate 40 through Arizona. Plenty of long stretches there...and if they overshoot California they can decelerate in the Pacific
As a professional who relies on my Macintosh to generate income, the supposed "price premium" of Apple hardware over a build-it-yourself amounts to a half day's billing.
Add the time to build eating into billable hours, and it would come out as an expensive proposition.
There are lots of reasons to build a machine yourself- better control over the parts, getting a custom config that you can't easily buy, and saving money. I wager that most people's reason to buy a Mac- it works, out of the box, to make us money- is not really compatible with those ideals.
I do agree with one sentiment addressed in the story, and that's avoiding the outlandish prices Apple charges for standard parts such as RAM and hard disks. Most savvy Mac users buy base configs and then load up the RAM and HD's via cheaper, third party suppliers.
Berzerk!
[kill the humanoid! stop the intruder!]
Evil Otto would look strange in 3D. Nominally "round," he came out to be more like a 12 sided stepped rectangle in those gloriously pixelated days.
Extend that into the 3rd dimension and you'd have a nightmarishly complex, grinning polyhedron bouncing after you...
The state of near-earth asteroid detection is pretty pitiful. We need years of warning if we're to divert an asteroid, not days.
Asteroid hunting should be part of the basic curriculum for astronomy programs, if it isn't already. Multiply a half dozen students by every university in the world and you've suddenly increased our detection capacity by several orders of magnitude.
Our fiction (especially science fiction) allows us to get our minds around "earth shattering" concepts before we have to really deal with them. I would launch a TV series about the discovery, treating it as fiction, of course.
You'll benefit from the "It's like Star Trek" effect- nowadays, any high-tech discovery is invariably compared to something on Star Trek, like the recent experiments in which a photon is "teleported."
Thanks to Star Trek and other science fiction, when we make contact with an alien race, the worldwide reaction won't be "Impossible!"-- rather, it will be "Finally!"
Oh, so this is the Slashdot article where we generalize about everyone in a particular country- thanks for letting me in on it.
I guess a European's reaction would be, "How could we use this to further delay action while genocide is occurring in our own back yard?"
The US military drives lots of research because they aren't motivated by profit. Some of the more interesting things in the world have come out of military funding- like this Internet thingy you're using to slam USAsians with.
I guess this is an offtopic, trolly flamebait.
Later in the article, it said data was recorded from the descent. Is that descent back to earth or what? Was it controlled or did it just crash land?
The descending flight plan was intentional; the speed needed to ignite the motor is quite high, and a gravity assist helped to attain it. The scramjet fired during the last portion of a parabolic flight.
Plus, I bet they didn't want to risk the vehicle flying off in an unintended direction if it worked too well; with the chosen flight path it was stopped directly after the experiment concluded
First the Metal Storm, now this!
Soon Australians will be able to fly up to anyone, anywhere in the world, within minutes, and then cut them to ribbons.
I wish I was Australian.
And he can't use iPods to match up beats, alter the pitch of music or spin records back and forth for a scratching effect -- all things that professional club DJs consider essential.
The performance aspect- hinted to in the quote above- is a big part of what makes club DJ's so popular. If you've never seen one at work, it can get quite physical- they literally throw those records around the platter in an attempt to generate sounds and synchronize beats. A good DJ can elicit cheers and applause from an otherwise oblivious crowd.
The DJs with the MP3 players are acting more like radio DJs- they're programming the night with a list of songs, not cutting up raw material into a performance. There's a place for both, obviously, but one will not replace the other- similar to the way theater and movies continue to coexist.
The Rueters credit is undoubtedly for the photo, which you are viewing, of the historical artifact, which is the original photo.
It's confusing, but not malicious.
...in BrendanLand: Clickable thumbnails that get larger, so you can actually see the screenshots
:-)
The problem with this is that there is no compelling action that will drive people to go through the hassle of setting up their worlds. If he wanted to really tie in the Napster aspect, he should have included filesharing in the form of "stashes," or something similar.
However, it would still suck. There's a reason why all that cheesy "virtual malls" and "click on the storefront to enter the store" crap never took off- because simulating an annoying real world experience (trudging through a mall, or wandering through a desert) does not make for a compelling online experience.
Want community? Write a front end for connecting people's Civ worlds... or Sims worlds... those are compelling experiences, and I think someone's already on that