The Architect is quite clearly Al Gore. Note the wooden demeanor, total lack of personality, and facial hair. Damn, the layers to this movie just keep peeling back like an onion!
To be honest, I haven't noticed that much difference between this and the level of processing ability of my old Voodoo3
You must not care about things like full screen AA, pixel shading, anisotropic filtering, and oh, I don't know, playing at any higher resolution than 640x480. But some of us do.
You're right, some people do place too much importance on the video card. But it's the easiest single upgrade that can give you a tangible increase in gaming performance. Dropping a bit more memory on the mainboard usually doesn't give you that tangible increase, unless you're running with too little memory to begin with. In which case you have bigger problems than just gaming performance.
You can find "laser" rangefinders in magazines such as US Cavalry. Typically these actually use an infrared beam rather than a true laser. And yes, it works by determing the time it takes for the reflection to be returned.
The advantages of having a robot do this type of work rather than a typical 3D animator are several. First, they can work anytime, at odd hours. Second, robots don't ask for a raise. Third, they don't take shortcuts unless they're programmed to. Can't say the same for any 3d modellers.
It seems like writing "there's a sphere of radius 3 centered here" would take less time than waiting for the robot to scan it.
It probably would. But is that sphere really radius 3? What if it was radius 2.65? How long would it take for the modeller to drive to the site, measure the sphere, remeasure to make sure it really _is_ a sphere and not an ellipsoid, then drive back and input the data?
Nor can you say "I saw a Shakespeare play today and a Tom Stoppard play yesterday, and X is better."
I gotta throw the flag on this one. You make good points, but this is not one of them. People in society today are so damn phobic of making judgments. I _can_ say that X is better. Just because nothing can exist in isolation does not mean that I can't decide how good it is. If enough informed people say that X is better, well then by any reasonable metric, X is better. There is nothing wrong with making informed decisions about the quality of a creation.
And howzcome these all look like shoeboxes? Why isn't anyone doing something in a format similar to by reciever / tape deck / VCR / DVD?
Recievers, tape decks, vcr's and dvd players are designed the way they are (short, wide and flat) so that you can stack the various components on top of one another. Since most people only have 1 computer, a stackable design is not a high priority. There are however, rackmount computers cases which are designed for this type of thing, and do bear a resemblance in shape to the aforementioned A/V boxes.
I bought something from one of these in Plano, Texas. (My mom just graduated from law school, and I bought her the scales of justice inside a crystal block.) Very, very cool to watch it done. From the way the guy running it explained it, it works by using two lasers. When the two lasers intersect, it gets hot enough to create a small fracture in the crystal at the exact point of intersection. From there it's pretty easy to see how it gets done, although the fractures do have to be done in a certain order, otherwise the previous fractures will difract the lasers.
You do know that the US has treaties with Japan to provide for their defense? That's why we have so many bases there. In turn, the Japanese are not allowed to rebuild their military. It was one of the major provisions of their surrender following World War II. The Japanese don't *need* to spend anything on military research. The US is footing the bill. That's the major reason Japan became an economic powerhouse during the Cold War. The same applies to Germany, although to a much lesser extent due to the Cold War and the US rearming Germany to prevent Soviet expansion. Germany and Japan are not the way they are now because they're peace loving hippies and anti-military. They were beaten into it. It's never as simple as black and white.
Getting into outer space isn't that hard. The problem lies in designing ships and rockets that can get into outer space and _come back_. If we just leave out that last part, the design process becomes much easier and the costs much lower. All this concern over coming back down is just so much balderdash. I bet if you polled all the astronauts and would-be astronauts, the great majority would prefer to just stay out there. Just strap a big can on top of the rocket with some acceleration couches and you're all set.
Ooh, found a nit just waiting to be picked. Despite what it says in your chart, the speed of light in a medium DOES equal the speed of light in a vacuum. Individual photons always travels at c. When measuring the speed of light in a medium, they are not measuring the actual speed at which the light particles are travelling, but simply the time it takes for the light to pass through the medium. So what's the difference? When travelling through a medium, the photons run into various atoms and kick them up into a higher, unstable energy level. The light is then re-emitted in a fairly random direction after a very short duration. This gives us the _apparent_ slowing of light. It also gives us refraction. But inbetween running into various atoms, light is always travelling at the speed of light.
You would be surprised just how innocent people can be
You seem to be confusing innocence with willful ignorance. If you want to own and use a computer, especially one connected to the internet, you have an implied obligation to make sure you know how to use and care for it properly. Just like when you own a car. When your ignorance begins to impact and harm other people, any claim of innocence gets tossed right out.
Well no, I wasn't a common soldier, but I didn't get very high in the office corps either due to an unfortunate training incident involving my foot, a boat propellor and the meeting of the two. I see where you're coming from though, and I think the problem lies in our differing definitions of "top brass". When I hear that, I think the top non-civilian leadership. For the civilian leadership, they definitely deserve a lot of the criticism you're throwing around. It's pretty easy to tell when a piece of equipment was pushed through by a civilian trying to score a contract for his home state and when it was pushed through by a Marine general with 38 years in service. I just don't think you should paint them both with the same stroke.
As for the second part...I agree completely. My father (a US Marine) did winter training in Norway as a 2nd Lt, and always told me the lessons he learned there about knowing the terrain and the environment stuck with him throughout his career. So kudos to you 'wegians for teaching the Marines a lesson and making them even better.
The defenceindustry comes up with something new and sexy, and off course the top brass goes along with it
Damn man, I thought I was cynical about the leadership during my time in service, but you take the cake. The *primary* concern of the majority of the people at the top is, and always has been, "Will this save our troops lives and/or kill more of the enemy?" Every other consideration comes after that, and if you think otherwise you're insulting the hell out of a lot of people who care deeply about the lives of the men under their command. Granted, there may be the occassional officer who thinks nothing of the lives under him, but these are a rarity.
American troops are constantly told that they are the best equipped, most highly trained military force on the planet. Making sure that it's true is a big chunk of military morale, and is official policy. Having that equipment be "sexy" also helps with morale. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems, certainly not as simple as developing sexy military equipment to impress one's mistress.
Give the brass *some* credit for not being total dipshits.
Well the Air and Space Museum in D.C. is a no-brainer. I've been there 23 times over my life and I never get tired of it. The Children's Museum in Chicago was pretty damn cool when I was 10, but I haven't been back in that area since then. Hit the top of the Sears Tower while you're there. Oh, Meteor Crater in Arizona. Must See. I found it even more impressive than the Grand Canyon because it was formed practically instantaneously. Yellowstone National Park, you could spend weeks there and still not see all the knock-you-on-your-ass stupendous things it has to offer.
The Tunguska blast of 1908 was a roughly 100m asteroid, hitting land.
Kinda a' nitpick, but the Tunguska object didn't hit land, it was an air-burst. That's the reason there isn't a huge crater there now. It flattened all the trees for hundreds of square miles, but in the very center of the blast, no crater. Stumped a bunch of scientists for a good long while. Air-burst detonations have a larger area of immediate effect (i.e. flattened by the blast wave), but their global effect is less than ones that actually impact. Either way you get lots of knocked over trees and some pretty sunsets.
I'm in the exact same situation. Our current record for Ad-aware items found on a customers computer is 3,796. Seriously. This was on a Sony Vaio in a family with 5 teenagers. Every file-sharing program and cute little computer "enhancement" program known to man had been installed on the computer. Bonzi Buddy, Hotbar, and Comet Cursor were among, but far from the worst of the offenders. On bootup there were over 50 popups and it wasn't even connected to the network yet! They also had 6 different popup blockers installed, none of which were doing a damn thing. We removed every single one of those items, installed Mozilla, taught them the meanings of the words spyware, adware, malware, and how not to click on every button constantly like a burn patient on a morphine drip, and we haven't heard from them since.
That's exactly what Bush Sr. was told by NASA in the early 90's when he told them to draw up a plan to get us to Mars. Price tag? About $300 billion. Their mistake, and yours, lies in assuming we need "a big spaceship to carry us there". That's just ridiculous. You don't send a bunch of people over at once. You send them in groups of 5 or 6. Build 12 small ships and put them on a continuous unmanned loop around the inner solar system. There'll always be a ship close by ready to take some more colonists out to Mars. Doing it that way, we could colonize Mars for less than $10 billion. From a genetic standpoint, you only need about 250 colonists to have long term viability.
Kinda OT, but since you mentioned skewed nationalistic agenda, did you ever learn the _reason_ the Soviets were so interested in Venus? It turns out that some of the top scientists had convinced the government that if we ever had a nuclear war, Earth would end up like Venus. The 14 Venera landers were military research on survival in that type of environment. I'm not so sure about this, but one of my instructors insists that it was the data from Venus that finally convinced some of the old hard-liners that glasnost was necessary. Not one of them could tolerate the thought of Mother Russia ending up like the pictures that Venera sent back.
Anything to helps to get the human race off of this death trap of a planet is a Good Thing(tm). In the long run I don't really care if they're Chinese, Indian, American, or even French. If everything goes tits up here on Earth (and when you talk about long-term that becomes a statistical certainty) we damn well better not have all our eggs in this supremely fragile basket. Just MHO.
In a related story, organizers of the event displayed disgust with the "conservative" news medias "clearly biased reporting." Bob Roughhead gave this statement:
While it is clear to us that we did fall short of our goal of 1,000,000 gamers coming together and celebrating their geekness in a public display, our counts put us closer to several hundred thousand gamers. That the conservative news media would stoop to such tactics to degrade this event sickens me.
In an interview on Larry King, the Reverend Al Sharpton took the side of the geeks, pointing out in a rambling incoherent 12 minute statement that the Man also tried to keep him down.
Police called to the scene for traffic control were adamant with their totals, saying that there were no more than 2000 geeks present at most. Tear gas and beanbags gun were put to use, however, when a college sorority on a scavenger hunt strayed too close to the pack. There were no survivors.
It takes about 30 minutes just to use the toilet up there, because of the lack of gravity-induced friction (traction) forces. Sex is all about friction. You'd need to strap one party down, and the other one would need hand- and foot-holds just to maintain contact.
Ahh, but the difference is that the toilet is not grabbing you back (at least I hope it doesn't). You don't really need gravity induced friction if you're grabbing onto each other, legs and arms wrapped around each other, etc. The real answer is that we won't know what's practical until someone goes up there and really tries it. And I completely fail to see how ethics comes into it.
Just because an achievement was dependant upon earlier advances does not lessen its greatness any. Indeed, it would be better to say that Man landing on the Moon represented the pinnacle of human achievement to that point, the result of thousands of years of single achievements put into focus by a unique moment. The only thing I can think of that will trump that is when we create our first extrasolar colony and ensure the long term survival of the human race, regardless of what happens on Earth.
Ahh, I was thinking of changing my sig to this exact same thing! Weird Al is a genius among men, not just French people. And lucky me, my fiancee bought us tickets to see him in concert this sunday at CalPoly. Woo! Just thought I'd share that with you.
Let's see....IPv6 should give us enough IP addresses so every brick can have their own address. Hope the building doesnt stop you from moving from one area to the other if you set your subnet wrong.
I'm currently in the final stages of doing something like this myself. We're gonna have ~128 people at the LAN. Here's some tips:
Go and talk with the manager at your local software shop. Chances are they'll be happy to place a flyer on the counter, and they may even be willing to help sponsor. Give yourself at least 3 months planning time. You're gonna need it. Set a minimum age and stick to it. We decided on 16, no exceptions. Make it clear that cheaters will be evicted with no refunds. HAVE SOME PRIZES - very important. Best Case, MVP, winner of tournaments. Sponsors can really help with this one. For networking we ended up getting several cheap 24 port Dlink switches with gigabit uplink, then had an 8 port gigabit switch that they all headed into. Get some volunteers to help with setup and takedown. Offer them a free spot, but make sure you can trust them to stay afterwards. Keep the rules understated. Make having fun the priority but let everyone know on a basic level that the rules are there and will be enforced. Anarchy is not a good thing with respect to a good LAN party.
Slashdot Mirror
The Architect is quite clearly Al Gore. Note the wooden demeanor, total lack of personality, and facial hair. Damn, the layers to this movie just keep peeling back like an onion!
To be honest, I haven't noticed that much difference between this and the level of processing ability of my old Voodoo3
You must not care about things like full screen AA, pixel shading, anisotropic filtering, and oh, I don't know, playing at any higher resolution than 640x480. But some of us do.
You're right, some people do place too much importance on the video card. But it's the easiest single upgrade that can give you a tangible increase in gaming performance. Dropping a bit more memory on the mainboard usually doesn't give you that tangible increase, unless you're running with too little memory to begin with. In which case you have bigger problems than just gaming performance.
You can find "laser" rangefinders in magazines such as US Cavalry. Typically these actually use an infrared beam rather than a true laser. And yes, it works by determing the time it takes for the reflection to be returned.
The advantages of having a robot do this type of work rather than a typical 3D animator are several. First, they can work anytime, at odd hours. Second, robots don't ask for a raise. Third, they don't take shortcuts unless they're programmed to. Can't say the same for any 3d modellers.
It seems like writing "there's a sphere of radius 3 centered here" would take less time than waiting for the robot to scan it.
It probably would. But is that sphere really radius 3? What if it was radius 2.65? How long would it take for the modeller to drive to the site, measure the sphere, remeasure to make sure it really _is_ a sphere and not an ellipsoid, then drive back and input the data?
Nor can you say "I saw a Shakespeare play today and a Tom Stoppard play yesterday, and X is better."
I gotta throw the flag on this one. You make good points, but this is not one of them. People in society today are so damn phobic of making judgments. I _can_ say that X is better. Just because nothing can exist in isolation does not mean that I can't decide how good it is. If enough informed people say that X is better, well then by any reasonable metric, X is better. There is nothing wrong with making informed decisions about the quality of a creation.
And howzcome these all look like shoeboxes? Why isn't anyone doing something in a format similar to by reciever / tape deck / VCR / DVD?
Recievers, tape decks, vcr's and dvd players are designed the way they are (short, wide and flat) so that you can stack the various components on top of one another. Since most people only have 1 computer, a stackable design is not a high priority. There are however, rackmount computers cases which are designed for this type of thing, and do bear a resemblance in shape to the aforementioned A/V boxes.
I bought something from one of these in Plano, Texas. (My mom just graduated from law school, and I bought her the scales of justice inside a crystal block.) Very, very cool to watch it done. From the way the guy running it explained it, it works by using two lasers. When the two lasers intersect, it gets hot enough to create a small fracture in the crystal at the exact point of intersection. From there it's pretty easy to see how it gets done, although the fractures do have to be done in a certain order, otherwise the previous fractures will difract the lasers.
You do know that the US has treaties with Japan to provide for their defense? That's why we have so many bases there. In turn, the Japanese are not allowed to rebuild their military. It was one of the major provisions of their surrender following World War II. The Japanese don't *need* to spend anything on military research. The US is footing the bill. That's the major reason Japan became an economic powerhouse during the Cold War. The same applies to Germany, although to a much lesser extent due to the Cold War and the US rearming Germany to prevent Soviet expansion. Germany and Japan are not the way they are now because they're peace loving hippies and anti-military. They were beaten into it. It's never as simple as black and white.
Getting into outer space isn't that hard. The problem lies in designing ships and rockets that can get into outer space and _come back_. If we just leave out that last part, the design process becomes much easier and the costs much lower. All this concern over coming back down is just so much balderdash. I bet if you polled all the astronauts and would-be astronauts, the great majority would prefer to just stay out there. Just strap a big can on top of the rocket with some acceleration couches and you're all set.
You would be surprised just how innocent people can be
You seem to be confusing innocence with willful ignorance. If you want to own and use a computer, especially one connected to the internet, you have an implied obligation to make sure you know how to use and care for it properly. Just like when you own a car. When your ignorance begins to impact and harm other people, any claim of innocence gets tossed right out.
Well no, I wasn't a common soldier, but I didn't get very high in the office corps either due to an unfortunate training incident involving my foot, a boat propellor and the meeting of the two. I see where you're coming from though, and I think the problem lies in our differing definitions of "top brass". When I hear that, I think the top non-civilian leadership. For the civilian leadership, they definitely deserve a lot of the criticism you're throwing around. It's pretty easy to tell when a piece of equipment was pushed through by a civilian trying to score a contract for his home state and when it was pushed through by a Marine general with 38 years in service. I just don't think you should paint them both with the same stroke.
As for the second part...I agree completely. My father (a US Marine) did winter training in Norway as a 2nd Lt, and always told me the lessons he learned there about knowing the terrain and the environment stuck with him throughout his career. So kudos to you 'wegians for teaching the Marines a lesson and making them even better.
Damn man, I thought I was cynical about the leadership during my time in service, but you take the cake. The *primary* concern of the majority of the people at the top is, and always has been, "Will this save our troops lives and/or kill more of the enemy?" Every other consideration comes after that, and if you think otherwise you're insulting the hell out of a lot of people who care deeply about the lives of the men under their command. Granted, there may be the occassional officer who thinks nothing of the lives under him, but these are a rarity.
American troops are constantly told that they are the best equipped, most highly trained military force on the planet. Making sure that it's true is a big chunk of military morale, and is official policy. Having that equipment be "sexy" also helps with morale. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems, certainly not as simple as developing sexy military equipment to impress one's mistress.
Give the brass *some* credit for not being total dipshits.
Well the Air and Space Museum in D.C. is a no-brainer. I've been there 23 times over my life and I never get tired of it. The Children's Museum in Chicago was pretty damn cool when I was 10, but I haven't been back in that area since then. Hit the top of the Sears Tower while you're there. Oh, Meteor Crater in Arizona. Must See. I found it even more impressive than the Grand Canyon because it was formed practically instantaneously. Yellowstone National Park, you could spend weeks there and still not see all the knock-you-on-your-ass stupendous things it has to offer.
The Tunguska blast of 1908 was a roughly 100m asteroid, hitting land.
Kinda a' nitpick, but the Tunguska object didn't hit land, it was an air-burst. That's the reason there isn't a huge crater there now. It flattened all the trees for hundreds of square miles, but in the very center of the blast, no crater. Stumped a bunch of scientists for a good long while. Air-burst detonations have a larger area of immediate effect (i.e. flattened by the blast wave), but their global effect is less than ones that actually impact. Either way you get lots of knocked over trees and some pretty sunsets.
I'm in the exact same situation. Our current record for Ad-aware items found on a customers computer is 3,796. Seriously. This was on a Sony Vaio in a family with 5 teenagers. Every file-sharing program and cute little computer "enhancement" program known to man had been installed on the computer. Bonzi Buddy, Hotbar, and Comet Cursor were among, but far from the worst of the offenders. On bootup there were over 50 popups and it wasn't even connected to the network yet! They also had 6 different popup blockers installed, none of which were doing a damn thing. We removed every single one of those items, installed Mozilla, taught them the meanings of the words spyware, adware, malware, and how not to click on every button constantly like a burn patient on a morphine drip, and we haven't heard from them since.
That's exactly what Bush Sr. was told by NASA in the early 90's when he told them to draw up a plan to get us to Mars. Price tag? About $300 billion. Their mistake, and yours, lies in assuming we need "a big spaceship to carry us there". That's just ridiculous. You don't send a bunch of people over at once. You send them in groups of 5 or 6. Build 12 small ships and put them on a continuous unmanned loop around the inner solar system. There'll always be a ship close by ready to take some more colonists out to Mars. Doing it that way, we could colonize Mars for less than $10 billion. From a genetic standpoint, you only need about 250 colonists to have long term viability.
Kinda OT, but since you mentioned skewed nationalistic agenda, did you ever learn the _reason_ the Soviets were so interested in Venus? It turns out that some of the top scientists had convinced the government that if we ever had a nuclear war, Earth would end up like Venus. The 14 Venera landers were military research on survival in that type of environment. I'm not so sure about this, but one of my instructors insists that it was the data from Venus that finally convinced some of the old hard-liners that glasnost was necessary. Not one of them could tolerate the thought of Mother Russia ending up like the pictures that Venera sent back.
Anything to helps to get the human race off of this death trap of a planet is a Good Thing(tm). In the long run I don't really care if they're Chinese, Indian, American, or even French. If everything goes tits up here on Earth (and when you talk about long-term that becomes a statistical certainty) we damn well better not have all our eggs in this supremely fragile basket. Just MHO.
In a related story, organizers of the event displayed disgust with the "conservative" news medias "clearly biased reporting." Bob Roughhead gave this statement:
In an interview on Larry King, the Reverend Al Sharpton took the side of the geeks, pointing out in a rambling incoherent 12 minute statement that the Man also tried to keep him down.
Police called to the scene for traffic control were adamant with their totals, saying that there were no more than 2000 geeks present at most. Tear gas and beanbags gun were put to use, however, when a college sorority on a scavenger hunt strayed too close to the pack. There were no survivors.
It takes about 30 minutes just to use the toilet up there, because of the lack of gravity-induced friction (traction) forces. Sex is all about friction. You'd need to strap one party down, and the other one would need hand- and foot-holds just to maintain contact.
Ahh, but the difference is that the toilet is not grabbing you back (at least I hope it doesn't). You don't really need gravity induced friction if you're grabbing onto each other, legs and arms wrapped around each other, etc. The real answer is that we won't know what's practical until someone goes up there and really tries it. And I completely fail to see how ethics comes into it.
Neap tides is the term I believe you're looking for.
Just because an achievement was dependant upon earlier advances does not lessen its greatness any. Indeed, it would be better to say that Man landing on the Moon represented the pinnacle of human achievement to that point, the result of thousands of years of single achievements put into focus by a unique moment. The only thing I can think of that will trump that is when we create our first extrasolar colony and ensure the long term survival of the human race, regardless of what happens on Earth.
Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog!
Ahh, I was thinking of changing my sig to this exact same thing! Weird Al is a genius among men, not just French people. And lucky me, my fiancee bought us tickets to see him in concert this sunday at CalPoly. Woo! Just thought I'd share that with you.
Let's see....IPv6 should give us enough IP addresses so every brick can have their own address. Hope the building doesnt stop you from moving from one area to the other if you set your subnet wrong.
I'm currently in the final stages of doing something like this myself. We're gonna have ~128 people at the LAN. Here's some tips:
Go and talk with the manager at your local software shop. Chances are they'll be happy to place a flyer on the counter, and they may even be willing to help sponsor.
Give yourself at least 3 months planning time. You're gonna need it.
Set a minimum age and stick to it. We decided on 16, no exceptions.
Make it clear that cheaters will be evicted with no refunds.
HAVE SOME PRIZES - very important. Best Case, MVP, winner of tournaments. Sponsors can really help with this one.
For networking we ended up getting several cheap 24 port Dlink switches with gigabit uplink, then had an 8 port gigabit switch that they all headed into.
Get some volunteers to help with setup and takedown. Offer them a free spot, but make sure you can trust them to stay afterwards.
Keep the rules understated. Make having fun the priority but let everyone know on a basic level that the rules are there and will be enforced. Anarchy is not a good thing with respect to a good LAN party.
Have FUN! I plan on doing so.