Following the disastrous failure of the Genesis probe landing today, NASA scientists have given careful thought and consideration to the next-generation Genesis probe's re-entry system. The system's failure to deploy a parachute/parafoil descent mechanism today has been completely removed from the design. The new design solution is simple and elegant and is awaiting approval from Caltech and JPL scientists. The new solution? A circus net. Yes, the very same net that catches high-flying trapeze artists at the circus has been given the preliminary green light by NASA. Using kevlar and carbon-fiber reinforced strands rather than the traditional elastomer blend, the netting will be an order of magnitude stronger than it's circus cousin, yet can absorb the impact of a common egg traveling 4000mph without breaking the egg. Scientists only have to work out what to do with the egg once the initial bounce occurs; suggestions include medieval moats surrounding the net with trained swordfish for retrieval or very large bags of feathers.
It was still pretty fuckin stupid. In the off chance that the chopper missed, splat. If the parachute didn't deploy, splat. Now, had they aimed it for a lake or the sea, you miss, splash. You can still pick it up with a chopper.
In the immortal words of John Madden, "ya gotta wonder what they were thinking on that one.".
Makes perfect sense, but also makes you wonder just how difficult it would have been to install an "Oh Shit" remote trigger, just in case. I mean, a 200+ million dollar project might need a little manual intervention.
The stunt team could have hit a big red button, causing the probe's parachute to deploy, then swoop down for the capture. The whole mission seemed kinda wacky in the first place, with the helicopter and all. I wonder who sat down and decided it'd be a good idea.
Also you have to wonder HOW the damn thing hit land to begin with. Isn't 70% of the Earth's surface covered with water? You have a 3 in 10 chance of hitting land if this is true.
No, we've had fake transparency/translucency, where the desktop background gets polled and blended via a dirty software hack. Eterm used this. You could see the background through Eterm, but not any windows beneath your Eterm window. What Xorg is bringing to the table is real, true transparency and alpha blended/masked object. Welcome home new features.
Even hard drives are dirt cheap anymore. Ironically enough, you'll pay more for an 80g ata133 drive than you will a 160g ata133 drive. Saw some at Fry's, new in box, for $69 this week.
Not making some great profit? Are you really that blind? The $10-$15 dollar per barrel premium that's added to each and every oil shipment is a speculative tax, i.e. not the result of a real crisis but in anticipation of one. It's caused by jittery execs taking advantage of a situation like this to fatten profits. There's no shortage. There won't be a shortage. But we're paying through the nose for it like there is. Some industry insiders were quoted recently as saying the speculative tax bubble should burst soon, but who knows. As long as we need gas, they can stab us for it.
Regardless, we pay the lowest price for fuel in the world (well, except for Iraq, which pays pennies per gallon) so we still have nothing to cry about in the global scheme of things. Ask any european or Brit that pays upwards of $7.50 per gallon how good we have it. Yet they are geographically closer to the ME than we are. Why do we get such an enormous discount? Do we have lower fuel taxes? To a certain extent yes, but what other reasons could cause us to get enormous fuel discounts? Something to ponder.
Don't be so naive. The United States only takes action when our interests are at stake, rarely at the urging of other nations that are in trouble. Bosnia was one of the few times we had nothing at stake besides our reputation.
I'm not proud of the way our government behaves, or the attitude it takes, but you have to face the truth. The truth is that if the Middle East didn't have oil, nobody, including the UN, would give a rat's ass about their internal affairs. As long as there's a need for fossil fuel, the countries containing mass quantities of it are important.
Don't forget that the current administration's direct involvement in Iraq also stems from really bad intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction, which of course were never found. Saddam's whole thing about not letting the UN search was just a stunt to keep his neighbors guessing. If his neighbors thought he had WMD's, they wouldn't poke him with a sharp stick. That's the way politics work in that region. Why do you think India and Pakistan are in such a hurry with their nuclear programs? Iran is also on the boat. If you carry the bigger stick, other countries won't monkey with you. But now that his stick was found to be false, look at the parties the neighbors are having with our men and women in the military, and with the Iraqi people. Roadside bombs! AK47 ambushes! RPG surprises for helicopter crews! Now you see what crapflood Saddam held back for so long. The day our military pulls out is the day hell really breaks loose there, and that's why we've been so slow to transition.
Oh and just as a footnote, personally I respect the Iraqi people and all people generally. However, what I wrote isn't based on my own personal beliefs, it's based on the actions and attitudes of the current administration here in the US. If they really cared about human rights they would have done something about Tibet decades ago.
I've read (and watched) 1984 many times over and am versed in the concepts of an 'Orwellian' future. You can see it creeping in here and there...the media that reports only the bad things other countries do, media language tailored to make bad things sound good, etc. Overall I think people, when given time to think about the concepts involved with privacy violations, will reject them. The Patriot Act is a fine example of this.
German driver's licenses are notoriously hard to get, and are considered a rite of passage by many.
The school is expensive, and has a high failure rate, something like 40%. Generally your parents will pay for you to attend the school during summertime after your 18th birthday. Most Germans don't drive before they're 18 years old (unless they're on a tractor).
If you are driving drunk, and are pulled over by the Polizei (think 'pull-at-side'), you will lose your license FOR LIFE. You will never drive a car again. Thankfully the structure of most German towns relieve most of the residents from driving to and from the bars.
Germans are often considered hard-asses for their policies, but driving a vehicle capable of killing each time you get in and turn the key is serious business. I wouldn't mind if their policies were enacted here. I'm sure I would be alot happier with the reduction of idiots in SUV's not signaling all over the place or road raging on the news.
No, the original reason for the 55mph speed limit was the oil crisis in the 70's. Before that time, everyone had gigantic v8's in their passenger cars that were gladly swilling fuel and giving you 10mpg if you were lucky. Fuel prices were so low that nobody cared. Also, cars were about as aerodynamic as bricks back then. Again, with cheap fuel, who cares.
This all swung back around during the oil crisis years. The national speed limit was reduced (saving fuel by drivers moving their brick-shaped cars slower), speedometers were changed to limit top speeds to 85mph, etc. The speedometer change was more psychological than anything; cars could still move faster than 85mph, but to the driver, if you were going 55 or 60mph, you were pretty close to topping out your speedo.
These days we have (for the most part) fairly fuel efficient cars. The days of the popular, big bore v8 aren't over, but the majority of manufacturers are opting for 3 liter v6's and stingy 4 cylinder engines. The public is responding by buying cars that have decent power but don't rape them at the gas pump. Diesel is even beginning to re-emerge as a Good Idea in the US due to advances in technology like direct injection that results in a cleaner burn of diesel fuel and quieter operation of the diesel engine.
Gas mileage does decrease over 65mph, but it's hard to quantify because two cars with the exact same engine may vary widely in their aerodynamic drag coefficient. You can't blindly say going over 65mph kills efficiency in every car...for that matter going over 45 or 55 hurts efficiency as well.
One of these days, some clear-headed policymakers will take a look at the root causes of terror. Terrorists aren't a bunch of bored, toothless losers sitting around waiting for someone to attack. They're people that see great injustice in their country as a *direct result* of the actions of another country. The US exploits countries like Iraq for cheap oil because their government is easy to disrupt and puppet dictators are relatively easy to install. See Saddam Hussein as the best example of a CIA-installed dictator. Why was Saddam so bad? Because he had to be. There are too many chaotic factions that will do anything to get their hands on the power he held. Just take a look at the current quagmire to get an idea of the dam of insurgence he successfully held back for decades. Most people that are bombing and killing in Iraq right now are *not* Iraqis.
Don't you think the Iraqi people, by and large, want peace and stability like everyone else? Nobody cares who's at the top of the food chain as long as they can do business and lead a happy life. Saddam was loved by most for the simple fact that he kept the country on an even keel and allowed the public a modicum of success and a window to the future. I'm not praising Saddam or justifying his methods, but he did keep Iraq in one piece long enough for people to feel their families have a future.
One of these days, probably 20 to 30 years from now, we'll move towards a hydrogen economy, and all of this drama will seem like a bad footnote in the history books. Without funding, terrorists can't complete complicated objectives like training and synchronizing a large scale attack. Cut off their money and they wither and die. Without the need for oil (of which the US is the world's biggest consumer) the Middle East will no longer be relevant.
The Spiderman trailer was another example of this. It originally debuted on the web with Spidey netting helicopter between the Twin Towers..if memory serves..or he was just swinging between them. Either way, it was altered and re-released.
People get the blood for oil concept from the simple fact that hey, we charge money for 'rescuing' your ass. In the US government's estimation, every dollar we spend 'liberating' Iraq can be paid back with their precious oil reserves. Same thing happened with Desert Shield/Desert Storm. As part of reparations of war, we got cheap or free oil for a period of time. You may remember $1./gal gas just after Desert Storm. Since the current operation isn't considered complete, oil prices are still high. After all, Haliburton and friends are paying big dividends to US and other workers to get the oil flowing our way. Each and every employee there is getting a shitload of hazard pay for driving around in a war-torn chaotic country.
You've got to get to a newspaper sometime. Television isn't a good source of information because the average viewer has a short attention span and everything meaningful must be compressed to 3 second soundbites.
So what if you get hacked, you've seen the goatse man plenty of times by now. Skript kiddies are so lacking in creativity you'd be staring at that or tubgirl for a few seconds until you rebooted.
Right, this is the whole concept of digital zoom, because in order for digital zoom to look right, you downsample an image of higher resolution than your output source. A 72dpi image on screen at 100% magnification will look worse when printed at 300dpi. Working with a 300dpi image on screen forces you to zoom out to see the whole image, and when you print, it matches. Hence your 5mp camera >> 1mp grid analogy is valid.
The question still remains: just how many megapixels can a human eye see? Now what about an eagle eye? An albatross eye?
Actually you can handle all this with sophisticated software. You'd fractalize the image then use transform algorithms to zoom in and out. Not sure how you'd implement the interface for it (thought sensors or whatever, maybe squinting triggers it) but it'd be nice to have.
Personally I'd go for a subdermal temple button in the right side of my head, in that soft spot just next to the eye. Have it automatically kill the zoom feature when your eye is closed as well. You probably don't want to see hi-res images of your blood veins in your eyelid when you blink on a sunny day.
Re:Some of the changes (possible spoilers)
on
Star Wars on DVD
·
· Score: 1
Then it's the best version available, particularly for purists that don't like having their memories tinkered with.
Personally I hate the funky emperor and would like the revised one added, but c'est la vie, the rest of the movie is perfect.
Re:Some of the changes (possible spoilers)
on
Star Wars on DVD
·
· Score: 1
Try 2 years before the release. I bought the trilogy on DVD in 5.1 dolby surround, widescreen, from a local asian market. Evidently they released it in Singapore or Hong Kong legally but not here (US). Even the cover art looks right.
Because the 5 or 6 year old pc that was wonderful at running Windows 98 won't cut it trying to run XP, no matter how much ram you throw at it. If you want to stick with Windows, you MUST upgrade at some point. If you want to keep using 98, and it works for you (hope you don't need usb much), then it's fine. But most people want to use what's new or what's supposed to be 'better', at least software-wise.
TG never fronted shit, they've been pay-per-view since day one (exluding CVS). I used to buy subscriptions for them..which happened to last until their latest revision, and I'd have to re-up to get the latest version. I gave up on it eventually and decided dual boot with Wintendo was just as easy.
Slashdot Mirror
ASSOCIATED PRESS: AP NEWSWIRE 3PM GMT
Following the disastrous failure of the Genesis probe landing today, NASA scientists have given careful thought and consideration to the next-generation Genesis probe's re-entry system. The system's failure to deploy a parachute/parafoil descent mechanism today has been completely removed from the design. The new design solution is simple and elegant and is awaiting approval from Caltech and JPL scientists. The new solution? A circus net. Yes, the very same net that catches high-flying trapeze artists at the circus has been given the preliminary green light by NASA. Using kevlar and carbon-fiber reinforced strands rather than the traditional elastomer blend, the netting will be an order of magnitude stronger than it's circus cousin, yet can absorb the impact of a common egg traveling 4000mph without breaking the egg. Scientists only have to work out what to do with the egg once the initial bounce occurs; suggestions include medieval moats surrounding the net with trained swordfish for retrieval or very large bags of feathers.
It was still pretty fuckin stupid. In the off chance that the chopper missed, splat. If the parachute didn't deploy, splat. Now, had they aimed it for a lake or the sea, you miss, splash. You can still pick it up with a chopper.
In the immortal words of John Madden, "ya gotta wonder what they were thinking on that one.".
Makes perfect sense, but also makes you wonder just how difficult it would have been to install an "Oh Shit" remote trigger, just in case. I mean, a 200+ million dollar project might need a little manual intervention.
The stunt team could have hit a big red button, causing the probe's parachute to deploy, then swoop down for the capture. The whole mission seemed kinda wacky in the first place, with the helicopter and all. I wonder who sat down and decided it'd be a good idea.
Also you have to wonder HOW the damn thing hit land to begin with. Isn't 70% of the Earth's surface covered with water? You have a 3 in 10 chance of hitting land if this is true.
It's still not true, because you still don't see other windows stacked beneath it.
No, we've had fake transparency/translucency, where the desktop background gets polled and blended via a dirty software hack. Eterm used this. You could see the background through Eterm, but not any windows beneath your Eterm window. What Xorg is bringing to the table is real, true transparency and alpha blended/masked object. Welcome home new features.
Even hard drives are dirt cheap anymore. Ironically enough, you'll pay more for an 80g ata133 drive than you will a 160g ata133 drive. Saw some at Fry's, new in box, for $69 this week.
Not making some great profit? Are you really that blind? The $10-$15 dollar per barrel premium that's added to each and every oil shipment is a speculative tax, i.e. not the result of a real crisis but in anticipation of one. It's caused by jittery execs taking advantage of a situation like this to fatten profits. There's no shortage. There won't be a shortage. But we're paying through the nose for it like there is. Some industry insiders were quoted recently as saying the speculative tax bubble should burst soon, but who knows. As long as we need gas, they can stab us for it.
Regardless, we pay the lowest price for fuel in the world (well, except for Iraq, which pays pennies per gallon) so we still have nothing to cry about in the global scheme of things. Ask any european or Brit that pays upwards of $7.50 per gallon how good we have it. Yet they are geographically closer to the ME than we are. Why do we get such an enormous discount? Do we have lower fuel taxes? To a certain extent yes, but what other reasons could cause us to get enormous fuel discounts? Something to ponder.
Don't be so naive. The United States only takes action when our interests are at stake, rarely at the urging of other nations that are in trouble. Bosnia was one of the few times we had nothing at stake besides our reputation.
I'm not proud of the way our government behaves, or the attitude it takes, but you have to face the truth. The truth is that if the Middle East didn't have oil, nobody, including the UN, would give a rat's ass about their internal affairs. As long as there's a need for fossil fuel, the countries containing mass quantities of it are important.
Don't forget that the current administration's direct involvement in Iraq also stems from really bad intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction, which of course were never found. Saddam's whole thing about not letting the UN search was just a stunt to keep his neighbors guessing. If his neighbors thought he had WMD's, they wouldn't poke him with a sharp stick. That's the way politics work in that region. Why do you think India and Pakistan are in such a hurry with their nuclear programs? Iran is also on the boat. If you carry the bigger stick, other countries won't monkey with you. But now that his stick was found to be false, look at the parties the neighbors are having with our men and women in the military, and with the Iraqi people. Roadside bombs! AK47 ambushes! RPG surprises for helicopter crews! Now you see what crapflood Saddam held back for so long. The day our military pulls out is the day hell really breaks loose there, and that's why we've been so slow to transition.
Oh and just as a footnote, personally I respect the Iraqi people and all people generally. However, what I wrote isn't based on my own personal beliefs, it's based on the actions and attitudes of the current administration here in the US. If they really cared about human rights they would have done something about Tibet decades ago.
I've read (and watched) 1984 many times over and am versed in the concepts of an 'Orwellian' future. You can see it creeping in here and there...the media that reports only the bad things other countries do, media language tailored to make bad things sound good, etc. Overall I think people, when given time to think about the concepts involved with privacy violations, will reject them. The Patriot Act is a fine example of this.
Three words:
Meds. Take them.
I agree with your ideas but not your delivery.
German driver's licenses are notoriously hard to get, and are considered a rite of passage by many.
The school is expensive, and has a high failure rate, something like 40%. Generally your parents will pay for you to attend the school during summertime after your 18th birthday. Most Germans don't drive before they're 18 years old (unless they're on a tractor).
If you are driving drunk, and are pulled over by the Polizei (think 'pull-at-side'), you will lose your license FOR LIFE. You will never drive a car again. Thankfully the structure of most German towns relieve most of the residents from driving to and from the bars.
Germans are often considered hard-asses for their policies, but driving a vehicle capable of killing each time you get in and turn the key is serious business. I wouldn't mind if their policies were enacted here. I'm sure I would be alot happier with the reduction of idiots in SUV's not signaling all over the place or road raging on the news.
No, the original reason for the 55mph speed limit was the oil crisis in the 70's. Before that time, everyone had gigantic v8's in their passenger cars that were gladly swilling fuel and giving you 10mpg if you were lucky. Fuel prices were so low that nobody cared. Also, cars were about as aerodynamic as bricks back then. Again, with cheap fuel, who cares.
This all swung back around during the oil crisis years. The national speed limit was reduced (saving fuel by drivers moving their brick-shaped cars slower), speedometers were changed to limit top speeds to 85mph, etc. The speedometer change was more psychological than anything; cars could still move faster than 85mph, but to the driver, if you were going 55 or 60mph, you were pretty close to topping out your speedo.
These days we have (for the most part) fairly fuel efficient cars. The days of the popular, big bore v8 aren't over, but the majority of manufacturers are opting for 3 liter v6's and stingy 4 cylinder engines. The public is responding by buying cars that have decent power but don't rape them at the gas pump. Diesel is even beginning to re-emerge as a Good Idea in the US due to advances in technology like direct injection that results in a cleaner burn of diesel fuel and quieter operation of the diesel engine.
Gas mileage does decrease over 65mph, but it's hard to quantify because two cars with the exact same engine may vary widely in their aerodynamic drag coefficient. You can't blindly say going over 65mph kills efficiency in every car...for that matter going over 45 or 55 hurts efficiency as well.
One of these days, some clear-headed policymakers will take a look at the root causes of terror. Terrorists aren't a bunch of bored, toothless losers sitting around waiting for someone to attack. They're people that see great injustice in their country as a *direct result* of the actions of another country. The US exploits countries like Iraq for cheap oil because their government is easy to disrupt and puppet dictators are relatively easy to install. See Saddam Hussein as the best example of a CIA-installed dictator. Why was Saddam so bad? Because he had to be. There are too many chaotic factions that will do anything to get their hands on the power he held. Just take a look at the current quagmire to get an idea of the dam of insurgence he successfully held back for decades. Most people that are bombing and killing in Iraq right now are *not* Iraqis.
Don't you think the Iraqi people, by and large, want peace and stability like everyone else? Nobody cares who's at the top of the food chain as long as they can do business and lead a happy life. Saddam was loved by most for the simple fact that he kept the country on an even keel and allowed the public a modicum of success and a window to the future. I'm not praising Saddam or justifying his methods, but he did keep Iraq in one piece long enough for people to feel their families have a future.
One of these days, probably 20 to 30 years from now, we'll move towards a hydrogen economy, and all of this drama will seem like a bad footnote in the history books. Without funding, terrorists can't complete complicated objectives like training and synchronizing a large scale attack. Cut off their money and they wither and die. Without the need for oil (of which the US is the world's biggest consumer) the Middle East will no longer be relevant.
The Spiderman trailer was another example of this. It originally debuted on the web with Spidey netting helicopter between the Twin Towers..if memory serves..or he was just swinging between them. Either way, it was altered and re-released.
People get the blood for oil concept from the simple fact that hey, we charge money for 'rescuing' your ass. In the US government's estimation, every dollar we spend 'liberating' Iraq can be paid back with their precious oil reserves. Same thing happened with Desert Shield/Desert Storm. As part of reparations of war, we got cheap or free oil for a period of time. You may remember $1./gal gas just after Desert Storm. Since the current operation isn't considered complete, oil prices are still high. After all, Haliburton and friends are paying big dividends to US and other workers to get the oil flowing our way. Each and every employee there is getting a shitload of hazard pay for driving around in a war-torn chaotic country.
You've got to get to a newspaper sometime. Television isn't a good source of information because the average viewer has a short attention span and everything meaningful must be compressed to 3 second soundbites.
Makes sense to me. Since what it does is let the user do what the admin can, superuser do = sudo.
But pronounced the other way is more appropriate in this context. Sue = Dough.
So what if you get hacked, you've seen the goatse man plenty of times by now. Skript kiddies are so lacking in creativity you'd be staring at that or tubgirl for a few seconds until you rebooted.
Right, this is the whole concept of digital zoom, because in order for digital zoom to look right, you downsample an image of higher resolution than your output source. A 72dpi image on screen at 100% magnification will look worse when printed at 300dpi. Working with a 300dpi image on screen forces you to zoom out to see the whole image, and when you print, it matches. Hence your 5mp camera >> 1mp grid analogy is valid.
The question still remains: just how many megapixels can a human eye see? Now what about an eagle eye? An albatross eye?
Actually you can handle all this with sophisticated software. You'd fractalize the image then use transform algorithms to zoom in and out. Not sure how you'd implement the interface for it (thought sensors or whatever, maybe squinting triggers it) but it'd be nice to have.
Personally I'd go for a subdermal temple button in the right side of my head, in that soft spot just next to the eye. Have it automatically kill the zoom feature when your eye is closed as well. You probably don't want to see hi-res images of your blood veins in your eyelid when you blink on a sunny day.
Then it's the best version available, particularly for purists that don't like having their memories tinkered with.
Personally I hate the funky emperor and would like the revised one added, but c'est la vie, the rest of the movie is perfect.
Try 2 years before the release. I bought the trilogy on DVD in 5.1 dolby surround, widescreen, from a local asian market. Evidently they released it in Singapore or Hong Kong legally but not here (US). Even the cover art looks right.
Mucusfilm. Bah.
Because the 5 or 6 year old pc that was wonderful at running Windows 98 won't cut it trying to run XP, no matter how much ram you throw at it. If you want to stick with Windows, you MUST upgrade at some point. If you want to keep using 98, and it works for you (hope you don't need usb much), then it's fine. But most people want to use what's new or what's supposed to be 'better', at least software-wise.
TG never fronted shit, they've been pay-per-view since day one (exluding CVS). I used to buy subscriptions for them..which happened to last until their latest revision, and I'd have to re-up to get the latest version. I gave up on it eventually and decided dual boot with Wintendo was just as easy.
I think it was "leaSHed and branded". Leased and branded only applies to Manpower outsourced people.
Ohhh. So this device isn't as cool as I thought it was. Or maybe cooler than I expected.