Heh, slide recovery was actually one of the plot points from the Pixar "Cars" movie.
I enjoy playing the racing sims (Race Drivin', Ferrari F350, GT4, Live 4 Speed, with the FF wheel and clutch and everything) more than the arcade racers (which, to me, are indistinguishable from sliding down a tube... though I do like the Burnout series for making crash-cars fun like back in our Hotwheels die-cast car days).
I learned a lot of interesting techniques, esp. from GT4. It made driving our car (a boring 2001 Mazda 626 sedan) fun again... I had been driving it like an econobox Toyota, and it would just lurch and never seem to shift when I wanted it to... then I realized that it was simply tuned for more, uh, aggressive handling. Unfortunately, driving it closer to its limit most of the time took its toll.... I eventually spun out while having to hit the brakes on an exit ramp in the rain and struck a rain gutter in the curb... knocking one of the front wheels of its axle and pretty much totaling it. But at least no other cars were involved but me.
Ended up getting a smaller compact... with ABS... I can still drive it hard, but not quite so close to its limit between controlled and uncontrolled handling:-P But yeah, I partly blame my video games... well, simulator experience... for giving me a false sense of confidence that I'd be able to handle the vehicle near its limit better:P
I've had a pretty spotless record for the rest of the 10+ years... more from following the things they teach you in driver's ed... keeping plenty of buffer distance between you and other cars, avoiding driving in blind spots or right next to other traffic, scanning far ahead, and particularly spotting aggressive or inattentive drivers and keeping a good distance from them. The point is to preemptively avoid the situations where you'd need to exercise 133+ driving skills to get out of danger.
They'll know when they cross the line... or rather, they'll find out...
I remember browsing Amazon for wheel rims at some point, and one of the suggestions for "other people who viewed this product also bought" was a fleshlight, picture and all. Needless to say, I stopped browsing wheel rims... didn't want to become associated with one of those people:-P
Honestly, I don't know anyone who uses Flash for things other than video... and Flash isn't particularly good at video so what's the point in fighting improvements?
I remember reading that too. I think you're right about the density... Jupiter's diameter should be about as large as gas giants get... any more material falling in would simply compress the core more and make it denser. If Jupiter were about 10 times more massive, however, it'd ignite and turn into a small star... so this planet might still be just below that threshold. But maybe since it's so large and diffuse, it might be spinning much faster to counteract all that gravity...
Hey genius, you dont put your best and brightest on a project that is a guaranteed revenue LOSS. Linux gaming is a lost cause, please stop asking for dev resources to be wasted on it. Once you can get a desktop userbase that exceeds Apple's, then you can start asking..
You haven't been working for Aperture Labs for very long, have you...
There is no reason why you cant pony up $120 for a gaming OS.
Sure there is, I'm poor (AKA married with children) and whenever it comes to a decision between a buying a gaming OS or hardware, the hardware always wins:P
I just sold my old gaming rig (Dual SMP Athlon XP-M + nVidia Geforce 6800GS), so if Valve pulls this off, I wouldn't need to buy a new Windows gaming machine to go alongside my Linux system (Dual core Athlon II + nVidia Geforce 8800GT), and would be happy to spend the money on new Steam games instead:-P
I kinda liked the human-generated Yahoo! index / hierarchy, it was a neat way to get started with the web, back when it wasn't all too big and time-sensitive to organize by hand.
I'd use yahoo mail more, if they even bothered trying to be competitive with gmail. But I don't really want to pay extra for the plus account just to get minimum necessities like forwarding and pop3 access on what is essentially now my spam account.
Follow the money? Babies cost a lot, but dead people don't? Except for all the legal and prison fees associated with death, of course, but that's money the lawyers can get behind.
As further evidence of stylistic adaptations, here's the only movie adaptation of the 8-bit video game genre that is any good: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhYJBVFOX58
Uhhh. What? So because everyone is speeding, you're accusing them of racial profiling... by default?
No, but it protects them from getting accused of racial profiling. If everyone is speeding, then they're pretty much free to use their own judgment in deciding who to pull over. I seem to recall a while ago the police were being accused of racial profiling and pulling over people for drug searches and whatever. This kind of acts as their "get out of jail free" card in that they can pull people over for speeding, then perform sobriety checks, look for drug paraphernalia, write them up for not wearing safety belts, etc.
Chances are, if you're pulled over for going less than 10mph over the speed limit, the speeding is just a pretext for checking you out for other reasons, but they can always fall back on the speeding charge as the probable cause for digging deeper. Somewhat clever government CYA, if you ask me;)
Heh, I lol'd. But I really don't mind speed cameras... at least here in Montgomery County, MD, they're *very* clearly marked (you have to really be not paying attention to miss them), they beat speed bumps, and the fines are reasonable (about $40 here for going >10mph). And if you're in a hurry, I'd rather have one of those show up in the mail a few days later than the alternative of getting pulled over, scrutinized by the fuzz, and become even more late for my appointment.
speeding is not a crime. is a manufactured crime designed to generate revenue. nothing more.
Not just revenue, but since everyone is always "speeding" (as most traffic seems to cruise at about 9mph over the limit, above which you can actually get points) , then the police can still pretty much pull over whomever they like (based on racial profiling or whatever). So it's a nice arrangement.
On the other hand, the speed limits are also probably set 10mph too slow, since they still have to apply to elderly drivers, and in poor weather conditions (though really people should drive slower if they can't see through the torrential downpour / dense fog). But I could see lawsuits coming if they raised speed limits to reasonable levels, but then some dork wipes out on a turn and sues the state because they were trying to "keep up" with the posted limits.
Ostensibly all that gawker traffic could just get in the way. But earlier on there were some science vessels offering to drop in and help measure the progress of the oil plume in the region, and they were turned away. Though now it looks like just last week, NOAA's started deploying a fleet of research vessels to start measuring http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/01/95170/noaa-research-ship-to-search-gulf.html
I'm certainly no fan of Rachel Maddow, but I think she hit it on the head with the idea that BP is underestimating the spill amount minimize fines by the EPA.
Quite true, in this culture of litigation, you never admit fault to anything, because doing so only increases the punitive damages a jury could award. Almost to the point where, if you cause a car accident, it's sometimes advantageous to back over the victim to make sure they're dead, since it's easier to defend a case and limit liability against the deceased than the merely horribly mangled / crippled for life. So in that respect, BP could be responding in a much more evil fashion than they are now (maybe if Cheney was still in power:P ). At least they haven't simply pinned all the blame on their dead workers yet.
So they have a lot of impetus to lowball everything and make things seem less serious, so when this hits the civil and criminal courts in a few months, they can justify their not-so-quick response and decisions over the past few months to try to recover the well.
I'd have expected less of them... But I guess they're doing pretty well so far with their coverage on bp.com and using dispersants to keep most of the spill at depth and keeping away science vessels so they're free to misunderestimate the true magnitude.
Wonder what their PR budget is compared to their recovery budget.
Yeah, I actually almost got recruited into the boomers, and have worked with lots of sonar technicians. Probably the closest analogy we have to space travel, where they just dive under water and disappear for months and travel through practically inaccessible places under the ice caps.
Might be a good size for a micro-colony, but I still wouldn't draw a comparison to camping out in microgravity in an enclosed space slightly larger than the Apollo for a year or so.
IANAA, but it doesn't seem like it would take too much effort to scout and then hijack an asteroid or ice comet and maneuver it back gradually on the ITN, and then park it in a stable orbit nearby. It'll take a few years to do it without using a lot of fuel, but that gives you time to drum up a market while it's in transit. Then you'll have a decent amount of water or raw material for shielding / etc. to use for other projects, the kind of bulk material which does take a fair amount of dough to transfer out of our gravity well.
But yeah, harvesting it for terrestrial use would be a bit silly since Earth probably has more abundant and accessible minerals, even rare ones.
Wistful thinking, I know... and I've probably been playing too much EVE / Vendetta Online, but I'm frankly a bit surprised that some kind of scheme like this isn't even on the long-term plan.
Right on... manned space exploration at the moment represents more of a really long, expensive camping trip than space exploration.
Humans aren't particularly adept physically and mentally to live in such confined quarters for months on end. Maybe someday, when we could build larger, sustainable biosphere-like micro-colonies that could stay in space indefinitely and engage the occupants' senses while it cruises around the solar system.
At least exercises like this Mars500 mission can provide us some more psychological insight in how to get along with each other right here on Earth. But for the near term, it would be cool to dump money in more robotic exploration, science, heck, even extraplanetary mining and fabrication.
Heh, yeah... every few months I poke my head up at these ebook reader / smartphone "developments" and ask... "is it better than my Palm T|X running Plucker?". The answer has been "no" for the past several years (even with the Palm Pre).
Seriously, can someone just bring back a nice lineup of Palm PDAs, and maybe just slap on a (slightly) more modern OS?
I just bought a cheap greyscale duplexing laser printer (Samsung ML-2851ND), so I know what you mean.
However, I was pretty happy when Palm PDAs went from greyscale to color apps... as far as conveying information goes, it does add a lot of practical uses.
Maybe to put it this way... if I could buy a big cheap greyscale LCD for my computer just to read news, I think I would still primarily use the smaller color screen.
Transparency is what the information age is for. It will be interesting to see how political bodies adjust... on one hand, the leaks are damaging, and truly innocuous or routine things can be spun and blown way out of proportion by opposition groups. On the other hand, they now have to behave to higher ethical standards (or at least the appearance of high ethical standards) because virtually anything could become public knowledge.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend of mine's description of Chatroulette:
"How many clicks to dick?"
Heh, slide recovery was actually one of the plot points from the Pixar "Cars" movie.
I enjoy playing the racing sims (Race Drivin', Ferrari F350, GT4, Live 4 Speed, with the FF wheel and clutch and everything) more than the arcade racers (which, to me, are indistinguishable from sliding down a tube... though I do like the Burnout series for making crash-cars fun like back in our Hotwheels die-cast car days).
I learned a lot of interesting techniques, esp. from GT4. It made driving our car (a boring 2001 Mazda 626 sedan) fun again... I had been driving it like an econobox Toyota, and it would just lurch and never seem to shift when I wanted it to... then I realized that it was simply tuned for more, uh, aggressive handling. Unfortunately, driving it closer to its limit most of the time took its toll.... I eventually spun out while having to hit the brakes on an exit ramp in the rain and struck a rain gutter in the curb... knocking one of the front wheels of its axle and pretty much totaling it. But at least no other cars were involved but me.
Ended up getting a smaller compact... with ABS... I can still drive it hard, but not quite so close to its limit between controlled and uncontrolled handling :-P But yeah, I partly blame my video games ... well, simulator experience... for giving me a false sense of confidence that I'd be able to handle the vehicle near its limit better :P
I've had a pretty spotless record for the rest of the 10+ years... more from following the things they teach you in driver's ed... keeping plenty of buffer distance between you and other cars, avoiding driving in blind spots or right next to other traffic, scanning far ahead, and particularly spotting aggressive or inattentive drivers and keeping a good distance from them. The point is to preemptively avoid the situations where you'd need to exercise 133+ driving skills to get out of danger.
They'll know when they cross the line... or rather, they'll find out...
I remember browsing Amazon for wheel rims at some point, and one of the suggestions for "other people who viewed this product also bought" was a fleshlight, picture and all. Needless to say, I stopped browsing wheel rims... didn't want to become associated with one of those people :-P
Honestly, I don't know anyone who uses Flash for things other than video... and Flash isn't particularly good at video so what's the point in fighting improvements?
Games?
I remember reading that too. I think you're right about the density... Jupiter's diameter should be about as large as gas giants get... any more material falling in would simply compress the core more and make it denser. If Jupiter were about 10 times more massive, however, it'd ignite and turn into a small star... so this planet might still be just below that threshold. But maybe since it's so large and diffuse, it might be spinning much faster to counteract all that gravity...
Hey genius, you dont put your best and brightest on a project that is a guaranteed revenue LOSS. Linux gaming is a lost cause, please stop asking for dev resources to be wasted on it. Once you can get a desktop userbase that exceeds Apple's, then you can start asking..
You haven't been working for Aperture Labs for very long, have you...
There is no reason why you cant pony up $120 for a gaming OS.
Sure there is, I'm poor (AKA married with children) and whenever it comes to a decision between a buying a gaming OS or hardware, the hardware always wins :P
I have one of these on my desk:
http://www.mini-box.com/M350-universal-mini-itx-enclosure
You'd need to throw in an external optical drive, but then you could get whatever you wanted.
Hopefully they're delaying Portal 2 so they can dedicate their best and brightest to port Steam and all their Source games over to Linux by the end of this summer:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve_steam_announcement&num=1
I just sold my old gaming rig (Dual SMP Athlon XP-M + nVidia Geforce 6800GS), so if Valve pulls this off, I wouldn't need to buy a new Windows gaming machine to go alongside my Linux system (Dual core Athlon II + nVidia Geforce 8800GT), and would be happy to spend the money on new Steam games instead :-P
Yes, wistful thinking, I know :P
I kinda liked the human-generated Yahoo! index / hierarchy, it was a neat way to get started with the web, back when it wasn't all too big and time-sensitive to organize by hand.
I'd use yahoo mail more, if they even bothered trying to be competitive with gmail. But I don't really want to pay extra for the plus account just to get minimum necessities like forwarding and pop3 access on what is essentially now my spam account.
Follow the money? Babies cost a lot, but dead people don't? Except for all the legal and prison fees associated with death, of course, but that's money the lawyers can get behind.
IANAL ;-P
As further evidence of stylistic adaptations, here's the only movie adaptation of the 8-bit video game genre that is any good:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhYJBVFOX58
It's still relatively recently that video games became an "adult" pastime.
I remember "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" being pretty badass... when I was 10.
Actually, I think "Crank" was pretty awesome, which was vaguely Grand Theft Auto -like.
I think the major similarity between those two examples was that they were mostly stylistically based on the video games.
Uhhh. What? So because everyone is speeding, you're accusing them of racial profiling ... by default?
No, but it protects them from getting accused of racial profiling. If everyone is speeding, then they're pretty much free to use their own judgment in deciding who to pull over. I seem to recall a while ago the police were being accused of racial profiling and pulling over people for drug searches and whatever. This kind of acts as their "get out of jail free" card in that they can pull people over for speeding, then perform sobriety checks, look for drug paraphernalia, write them up for not wearing safety belts, etc.
Chances are, if you're pulled over for going less than 10mph over the speed limit, the speeding is just a pretext for checking you out for other reasons, but they can always fall back on the speeding charge as the probable cause for digging deeper. Somewhat clever government CYA, if you ask me ;)
Heh, I lol'd. But I really don't mind speed cameras... at least here in Montgomery County, MD, they're *very* clearly marked (you have to really be not paying attention to miss them), they beat speed bumps, and the fines are reasonable (about $40 here for going >10mph). And if you're in a hurry, I'd rather have one of those show up in the mail a few days later than the alternative of getting pulled over, scrutinized by the fuzz, and become even more late for my appointment.
speeding is not a crime. is a manufactured crime designed to generate revenue. nothing more.
Not just revenue, but since everyone is always "speeding" (as most traffic seems to cruise at about 9mph over the limit, above which you can actually get points) , then the police can still pretty much pull over whomever they like (based on racial profiling or whatever). So it's a nice arrangement.
On the other hand, the speed limits are also probably set 10mph too slow, since they still have to apply to elderly drivers, and in poor weather conditions (though really people should drive slower if they can't see through the torrential downpour / dense fog). But I could see lawsuits coming if they raised speed limits to reasonable levels, but then some dork wipes out on a turn and sues the state because they were trying to "keep up" with the posted limits.
So yeah, speed limits suck. Cope with it :P
Science vessels? According to Newsweek, it's photographers and people looking to document the damage that BP is turning away. Now that's some unadulterated bullshit "damage control."
Ostensibly all that gawker traffic could just get in the way. But earlier on there were some science vessels offering to drop in and help measure the progress of the oil plume in the region, and they were turned away. Though now it looks like just last week, NOAA's started deploying a fleet of research vessels to start measuring
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/01/95170/noaa-research-ship-to-search-gulf.html
Anyway, just another lame episode of politicians vs. scientists vs. politicized environmentalists where the scientists are kind of caught in the middle again.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/deepwaterhorizon/7011584.html
I'm certainly no fan of Rachel Maddow, but I think she hit it on the head with the idea that BP is underestimating the spill amount minimize fines by the EPA.
Quite true, in this culture of litigation, you never admit fault to anything, because doing so only increases the punitive damages a jury could award. Almost to the point where, if you cause a car accident, it's sometimes advantageous to back over the victim to make sure they're dead, since it's easier to defend a case and limit liability against the deceased than the merely horribly mangled / crippled for life. So in that respect, BP could be responding in a much more evil fashion than they are now (maybe if Cheney was still in power :P ). At least they haven't simply pinned all the blame on their dead workers yet.
So they have a lot of impetus to lowball everything and make things seem less serious, so when this hits the civil and criminal courts in a few months, they can justify their not-so-quick response and decisions over the past few months to try to recover the well.
I'd have expected less of them... But I guess they're doing pretty well so far with their coverage on bp.com and using dispersants to keep most of the spill at depth and keeping away science vessels so they're free to misunderestimate the true magnitude.
Wonder what their PR budget is compared to their recovery budget.
Yeah, I actually almost got recruited into the boomers, and have worked with lots of sonar technicians. Probably the closest analogy we have to space travel, where they just dive under water and disappear for months and travel through practically inaccessible places under the ice caps.
Might be a good size for a micro-colony, but I still wouldn't draw a comparison to camping out in microgravity in an enclosed space slightly larger than the Apollo for a year or so.
IANAA, but it doesn't seem like it would take too much effort to scout and then hijack an asteroid or ice comet and maneuver it back gradually on the ITN, and then park it in a stable orbit nearby. It'll take a few years to do it without using a lot of fuel, but that gives you time to drum up a market while it's in transit. Then you'll have a decent amount of water or raw material for shielding / etc. to use for other projects, the kind of bulk material which does take a fair amount of dough to transfer out of our gravity well.
But yeah, harvesting it for terrestrial use would be a bit silly since Earth probably has more abundant and accessible minerals, even rare ones.
Wistful thinking, I know... and I've probably been playing too much EVE / Vendetta Online, but I'm frankly a bit surprised that some kind of scheme like this isn't even on the long-term plan.
Right on... manned space exploration at the moment represents more of a really long, expensive camping trip than space exploration.
Humans aren't particularly adept physically and mentally to live in such confined quarters for months on end. Maybe someday, when we could build larger, sustainable biosphere-like micro-colonies that could stay in space indefinitely and engage the occupants' senses while it cruises around the solar system.
At least exercises like this Mars500 mission can provide us some more psychological insight in how to get along with each other right here on Earth. But for the near term, it would be cool to dump money in more robotic exploration, science, heck, even extraplanetary mining and fabrication.
Yes! Bring on the ob. Simpsons references!
Heh, yeah... every few months I poke my head up at these ebook reader / smartphone "developments" and ask... "is it better than my Palm T|X running Plucker?". The answer has been "no" for the past several years (even with the Palm Pre).
Seriously, can someone just bring back a nice lineup of Palm PDAs, and maybe just slap on a (slightly) more modern OS?
I just bought a cheap greyscale duplexing laser printer (Samsung ML-2851ND), so I know what you mean.
However, I was pretty happy when Palm PDAs went from greyscale to color apps... as far as conveying information goes, it does add a lot of practical uses.
Maybe to put it this way... if I could buy a big cheap greyscale LCD for my computer just to read news, I think I would still primarily use the smaller color screen.
Transparency is what the information age is for. It will be interesting to see how political bodies adjust... on one hand, the leaks are damaging, and truly innocuous or routine things can be spun and blown way out of proportion by opposition groups. On the other hand, they now have to behave to higher ethical standards (or at least the appearance of high ethical standards) because virtually anything could become public knowledge.