The biggest problem with Disney's worldview -- and by association the worldview of the RIAA, MPAA, Vivendi, et al -- is that they assume no private person can create anything. All art comes from the generous people at Disney. There are no independent aritsts.
Correction, Disney knows full well that art comes from independent artists... they've made a fortune stealing ideas from idependant artists. See this slashdot article about Disney ripping off "Atlantis" from "Nadia" and this bit about Lion King ripping off Kimba. Let's not forget the other Disney "orginals": Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Pinnochio, Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Robin Hood, Aladdin, etc... Disney's whole business model is based off of "Rip, Mix, Burn". Hell, at least Apple pays for other people's technology (e.g. Xerox) before they take credit for it.
We use Meetingmaker on the Mac to schedule meetings via shared calenders... and Eudora for mail on OS 9, apple's "mail" for mail on OS X. Works just as good as Outlook without all of the virii and other security holes.
The theory goes that anti-hyrdogen should have all the same observable physical properties that hydrogen does.
I can't wait until they drop some of the anti-hydrogen atoms to whether they fall down or fall up.
Positron and antiprotons are charged and weigh almost nothing, so electromagnetic forces on them are waaay larger than gravity and you can't really tell if they fall up or down.
I know current wisdon is that antimatter will fall down... but wouldn't it be cool if the anti-matter fell up, essentially having a negative gravitational "charge"
the latency on ethernet is about 10 microseconds, not milliseconds... on the parallel port it's 1 microsecond... on firewire it's 125 microseconds... which means ethernet is better than firewire and parallel ports are better than ethernet (from a low latency view)
Answering my own question, I found this PDF on google about the performance of IEEE 1394 (Firewire). It says that Firewire can have latency as low as 125 microseconds, and bandwidth as high as 50MB/sec.
So why not network a cluster of G4s together with firewire?? Seems like it would perform much better than ethernet.
Ethernet has very high latensy at about ~10 milliseconds. Projects like PAPERS and the KLAT2 use the parallel port to connect compute nodes because of the much lower 1 ms latency.
Ok, no parallel port on Macs... but I wonder how do Firewire ports perform?
TissueSoft has just released Genome XP that will allow its customers to improve their genetic makeup by subscribing to ithis new service for a reasonable $666 a year. Genome XP features copy-protection to thwart unauthorised release of genetic material... any release of genetic material without purchase of an additional license will stop the user's heart until another license is purchased. In the advent of unintentional release of genetic material, users can have their heart restarted after a call to the TissueSoft license center (open weekdays 10am-3pm EST).
If you could sleep processes you could run some intensive job at a high priority when your not logged into your workstation and then sleep the processes when you log in. This way you could run some job that takes weeks or months but not bog down a workstation that you need for doing daily work on.
Yeah, you could "nice" down the process so that it doesn't slow things down while your logged in... but then system processes at higher priorities might slow down your number crunching when you're not logged in... It'd be best to be able to run it at high priority at night only.... ya know, use those unused cycles.
Mendocino is not isolated enough, I'm sure he still gets bathed in radiation from Fort Bragg and all of the cars driving by on the 1. He needs to go up the coast to Shelter Cove in Humbolt county. Shelter Cove is in the middle of nowhere on California's lost coast.
"Black Hawk Down" - Hollywood drags bloody corpse of truth across movie screens
The movie made a point in showing that the Somalis who fought the americans didn't do it because they were black or muslim or somali. They did it because it was a civil war.
They made a point of showing that the US agent who found out about the meeting was muslim. They showed Somalis celebrating the defeat of the americans... the also showed Somalis in the "friendly zone" joyously supporting the Americans when they returned. They showed Americans killing civilians and children in the confusion of the firefight... including a powerful scene where a grandfather walks in front of the convoy carrying the bloody corpse of his very young grandson... obviously killed by Americans.
The movie very accurately dipicted the large number of somalis who were killed and also very accurately portrayed that there were many civilians who just got caught in the middle. It did not villify the Somalis who fought the americans... It shows somalis fighters getting mowed down by american bullets and thier widows running out to them and dying too.... It shows the grief of a child who accidentally kills his father.
Granted, this is very subtle... but it is a subtle movie.. the characters only discuss the matter at hand and only make vague references to the politics..
It is possible to throw Galileo out of the Jovian system, but its not possible to get enough energy to throw Galileo out of the solar system so it would just be floating around in interplanetary space uncontrolled and would be a hazard of impacting the Earth after a few million years... and since it has plutonium on board this is an undesirable option.
Some early spacecraft are still functioning and broadcasting nuisance signals that make certain areas of the radio spectrum unusable, this combined with the possibility of spacecraft impacting Earth mean that all spacecraft must be properly disposed of before their fuel runs out and they are uncontrollable.
Next, you show your true ignorance with your statement that "middle class consumers" drive the market. Are you really that stupid? Everyone knows that it's businesses that drive the PC world for a myriad of reasons. Yes, every day there are more and more personal goodies for computers, and individuals are buying more of them, but that still does not compare to the amount of money generated by businesses. Every company that uses microsoft software is forced to have a license for every single workstation, unlike the home user who just borrows a friend's. When these businesses upgrade to XP, Microsoft is going to rake in a huge amount of profit. That is what drives their "innovation," not the whims of individual PC users.
Right on! Windows and MS Office are very well suited for doing your basic run of the mill office work. Windows boxes provide a cheap and standardized way to fill your office full of machines that you can easily find minimum wages workers to run and do routine office chores.
But an iMac with OS X is suited better for other "niche" markets. Sure theres the Artist/Musician market that everyone says is Mac land. But now with iPhoto and iMovie they are also well suited for the doting parent market which is full of people like me with pictures and home movies I want to get out to far flung relatives without spending hundreds of dollars for extra software that I'll have to fiddle with to get working the way I want anyway. For me the extra cost of the iMac is offset by the software that it comes with that will let me quickly cobble together photo albums, dvds, and CD-roms with movies on them to send out to the extended family thousands of miles away.
I also happen to be in another niche market. I'm one of those people that uses computers for hard core number crunching (ya know the sort of work that got computers called "computers" in the first place). The iMac has a G4 with its AltVec vectorization routines and that means I can now have a machine at home that will outperform the $10,000 HP workstation sitting on my desk at work. The iMac really is like a mini supercomputer and I start drooling when I start thinking how much time this little thing could save me. Granted Linux boxen and Linux clusters can reach comparable performance levels to G4 macs... but with a mac I don't have to do any work to set up the system or to keep it up. (I've run Linux and I like it, but the laziness in me prefers OS X) With OS X I have a full-on UNIX development environment right out of the box. Besides, I'm betting that the G5 will pull ahead of the Pentium-4 in terms of number crunching ability (measured in flops not megahertz), so I'm porting my software from the HP to the Mac hoping I'll get a G5 at work with the next replenishmnet cycle.
Finally, I have to give OS X credit for finally making me like GUIs. I always hated hunting through mazes of menus to change a setting where in UNIX I could just edit a config file or type a command line argument. So far my experience with OS X has been that I get the power of the command line very well integrated with the GUI. Heck, I can even drag and drop icons into the terminal window and get the full path to a file and that is sooo sweet.
To compensate for drag in the atmosphere you need a muzzle exit velocity aroun 10-11 km/s. You'll still need a rocket on board to circularize your orbit less you come back down into the atmospher on the same parabola that you left. You can use this rocket to help you escape though and leave the the
muzzle at a lower velocity. A 30 km launcher could accelerate cargo to 11 km/sec at 4000 gees, and could accelerate a rocket with people to 1.5 km/sec at 8 gees and save a lot of fuel for the rocket.
Of course, an even better solution is to build your mag lev accelerator into a loop like a particle accelerator... then you can accelerate at whatever rate you want:)
The Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) post-warm-up images were downlinked for analysis. The 15 images were planned in support of the UVIS Spica observation, and were examined for potential changes relative to the pre-warm-up images. Preliminary results show a change in the character of the anomaly with the halo gone but more spreading of the star image than before. ISS also performed a scattered light observation, in an effort to resolve an anomaly observed in C25 when an ISS observation received far more light than expected. This current observation included a series of scans across the sky to see how much scattered light ISS gets at different distances from the sun for a selection of different orientations, to see if reflection off another part of the spacecraft is causing the extra light seen by ISS.
I don't agree with the BBC's claim that this is a "major" problem... the narrow angle camera still works - the contaminent just effectively reduces the resolution of the NAC. But from what I understand, the NAC resolution is nominally very, very high and even with the contamination it still will produce amazing pictures.
As far as what the contaminent is... the best guess so far is that it is outgassing from some part of the spacecraft... probably the camera. Something got heated up, vaporized and then condensed on the lens (either the inside or the outside of the lens). When they see if the stuff cooks off and what temperature it cooks off at, they'll have a better idea where the contaminent came from.
Cassini has already had larger problems (the reaction wheel last December, and the probe relay problem) that have been overcome and Cassini is still on track to make all of its mission objectives and then some. This problem is minor by comparison and will probably be fixed.
Cassini was launched in 1997, and arrives at Saturn in 2004... seven years later. Then its primary mission ends 4 years after that... and it is hoped Cassini can fly a 4 year extended mission after that... So this spacecraft will fly 15 years in deep space without any possibility of any repairs more sophisticated than commanding a motor back and forth to jiggle something loose or turning on a part to heat it up. Things are bound to break... hopefully, these things will be small and not cause the spacecraft to blow up when it turns on its engines the next time.... we all want to see the pictures of the pterodactyls flying on Titan, don't we?
Process patents claim a "process which uses a computer."
This sounds like a way to patent basic mathematical algorithms without disclosing how they work. What is calculus was developed in modern times? Sounds like the process of taking a simple derivative or integral would be patentable... heck sounds like "zero" would be patentable...
Only physical "inventions" should be patentable... patenting algorithms is akin to patenting a plot device in a novel.
I thought the point of patents was to prevent inventions from being secret and give the inventor protection if the inventor discloses his/her idea to the public. Doesn't that mean you should have to include the source code of software in a patent?
This patent is just a bunch of baseless claims.. hey I'll patent my secret fusion device and not tell anyone how it works... cuz it's secret....
With software patents this easy, some company should just sit around and brainstorm ideas for possible software and then patent the idea for the software without ever developing it... Just patent as many ideas as you can out of science fiction books...
The MOLA data has a vertical accuracy of about 5m and a horizontal spatial accuracy of 100m.
As the MGS satellite orbits Mars it fires a laser every 330m to measure the height of the ground below. This means that in the direction of the orbit the resolution is 330m but in between the orbits the gaps can vary between a few meters to a few kilometers. My data processing software uses a linear interpolation algorithm to fill the gaps. Datasets created at higher resolutions require more interpolation because the gaps between the orbits are larger.
There's more information about the interpolation on the link above.
Ok, so instead of just worrying about catching flu, colds, STDs... now I have to worry about catching a gene therapy virus that changes my eyes blue... or worse
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest problem with Disney's worldview -- and by association the worldview of the RIAA, MPAA, Vivendi, et al -- is that they assume no private person can create anything. All art comes from the generous people at Disney. There are no independent aritsts.
Correction, Disney knows full well that art comes from independent artists... they've made a fortune stealing ideas from idependant artists. See this slashdot article about Disney ripping off "Atlantis" from "Nadia" and this bit about Lion King ripping off Kimba. Let's not forget the other Disney "orginals": Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Pinnochio, Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Robin Hood, Aladdin, etc... Disney's whole business model is based off of "Rip, Mix, Burn". Hell, at least Apple pays for other people's technology (e.g. Xerox) before they take credit for it.
The best websites are usable in Lynx at 300 baud. No graphics, certainly no Java... keep text terse and to the point... abrviate where possible.
We use Meetingmaker on the Mac to schedule meetings via shared calenders... and Eudora for mail on OS 9, apple's "mail" for mail on OS X. Works just as good as Outlook without all of the virii and other security holes.
So are these to be called Darwin awards?
The theory goes that anti-hyrdogen should have all the same observable physical properties that hydrogen does.
I can't wait until they drop some of the anti-hydrogen atoms to whether they fall down or fall up.
Positron and antiprotons are charged and weigh almost nothing, so electromagnetic forces on them are waaay larger than gravity and you can't really tell if they fall up or down.
I know current wisdon is that antimatter will fall down... but wouldn't it be cool if the anti-matter fell up, essentially having a negative gravitational "charge"
You're right... drat those units...
the latency on ethernet is about 10 microseconds, not milliseconds... on the parallel port it's 1 microsecond... on firewire it's 125 microseconds... which means ethernet is better than firewire and parallel ports are better than ethernet (from a low latency view)
Answering my own question, I found this PDF on google about the performance of IEEE 1394 (Firewire). It says that Firewire can have latency as low as 125 microseconds, and bandwidth as high as 50MB/sec.
So why not network a cluster of G4s together with firewire?? Seems like it would perform much better than ethernet.
Ethernet has very high latensy at about ~10 milliseconds. Projects like PAPERS and the KLAT2 use the parallel port to connect compute nodes because of the much lower 1 ms latency.
Ok, no parallel port on Macs... but I wonder how do Firewire ports perform?
TissueSoft has just released Genome XP that will allow its customers to improve their genetic makeup by subscribing to ithis new service for a reasonable $666 a year. Genome XP features copy-protection to thwart unauthorised release of genetic material... any release of genetic material without purchase of an additional license will stop the user's heart until another license is purchased. In the advent of unintentional release of genetic material, users can have their heart restarted after a call to the TissueSoft license center (open weekdays 10am-3pm EST).
If you could sleep processes you could run some intensive job at a high priority when your not logged into your workstation and then sleep the processes when you log in. This way you could run some job that takes weeks or months but not bog down a workstation that you need for doing daily work on.
Yeah, you could "nice" down the process so that it doesn't slow things down while your logged in... but then system processes at higher priorities might slow down your number crunching when you're not logged in... It'd be best to be able to run it at high priority at night only.... ya know, use those unused cycles.
Mendocino is not isolated enough, I'm sure he still gets bathed in radiation from Fort Bragg and all of the cars driving by on the 1. He needs to go up the coast to Shelter Cove in Humbolt county. Shelter Cove is in the middle of nowhere on California's lost coast.
"Black Hawk Down" - Hollywood drags bloody corpse of truth across movie screens
The movie made a point in showing that the Somalis who fought the americans didn't do it because they were black or muslim or somali. They did it because it was a civil war.
They made a point of showing that the US agent who found out about the meeting was muslim. They showed Somalis celebrating the defeat of the americans... the also showed Somalis in the "friendly zone" joyously supporting the Americans when they returned. They showed Americans killing civilians and children in the confusion of the firefight... including a powerful scene where a grandfather walks in front of the convoy carrying the bloody corpse of his very young grandson... obviously killed by Americans.
The movie very accurately dipicted the large number of somalis who were killed and also very accurately portrayed that there were many civilians who just got caught in the middle. It did not villify the Somalis who fought the americans... It shows somalis fighters getting mowed down by american bullets and thier widows running out to them and dying too.... It shows the grief of a child who accidentally kills his father.
Granted, this is very subtle... but it is a subtle movie.. the characters only discuss the matter at hand and only make vague references to the politics..
It is possible to throw Galileo out of the Jovian system, but its not possible to get enough energy to throw Galileo out of the solar system so it would just be floating around in interplanetary space uncontrolled and would be a hazard of impacting the Earth after a few million years... and since it has plutonium on board this is an undesirable option.
Some early spacecraft are still functioning and broadcasting nuisance signals that make certain areas of the radio spectrum unusable, this combined with the possibility of spacecraft impacting Earth mean that all spacecraft must be properly disposed of before their fuel runs out and they are uncontrollable.
Next, you show your true ignorance with your statement that "middle class consumers" drive the market. Are you really that stupid? Everyone knows that it's businesses that drive the PC world for a myriad of reasons. Yes, every day there are more and more personal goodies for computers, and individuals are buying more of them, but that still does not compare to the amount of money generated by businesses. Every company that uses microsoft software is forced to have a license for every single workstation, unlike the home user who just borrows a friend's. When these businesses upgrade to XP, Microsoft is going to rake in a huge amount of profit. That is what drives their "innovation," not the whims of individual PC users.
Right on! Windows and MS Office are very well suited for doing your basic run of the mill office work. Windows boxes provide a cheap and standardized way to fill your office full of machines that you can easily find minimum wages workers to run and do routine office chores.
But an iMac with OS X is suited better for other "niche" markets. Sure theres the Artist/Musician market that everyone says is Mac land. But now with iPhoto and iMovie they are also well suited for the doting parent market which is full of people like me with pictures and home movies I want to get out to far flung relatives without spending hundreds of dollars for extra software that I'll have to fiddle with to get working the way I want anyway. For me the extra cost of the iMac is offset by the software that it comes with that will let me quickly cobble together photo albums, dvds, and CD-roms with movies on them to send out to the extended family thousands of miles away.
I also happen to be in another niche market. I'm one of those people that uses computers for hard core number crunching (ya know the sort of work that got computers called "computers" in the first place). The iMac has a G4 with its AltVec vectorization routines and that means I can now have a machine at home that will outperform the $10,000 HP workstation sitting on my desk at work. The iMac really is like a mini supercomputer and I start drooling when I start thinking how much time this little thing could save me. Granted Linux boxen and Linux clusters can reach comparable performance levels to G4 macs... but with a mac I don't have to do any work to set up the system or to keep it up. (I've run Linux and I like it, but the laziness in me prefers OS X) With OS X I have a full-on UNIX development environment right out of the box. Besides, I'm betting that the G5 will pull ahead of the Pentium-4 in terms of number crunching ability (measured in flops not megahertz), so I'm porting my software from the HP to the Mac hoping I'll get a G5 at work with the next replenishmnet cycle.
Finally, I have to give OS X credit for finally making me like GUIs. I always hated hunting through mazes of menus to change a setting where in UNIX I could just edit a config file or type a command line argument. So far my experience with OS X has been that I get the power of the command line very well integrated with the GUI. Heck, I can even drag and drop icons into the terminal window and get the full path to a file and that is sooo sweet.
First you have to design cargo that can stand acceleration of 4000 g.
Water to replenish space stations could easily withstand 4000 gees... as could other raw building materials... say a solid block of steel.
I always thought it was:
:)
Mac Faithful
Linux Geek
Microsoft Certified
Also, Microsoft is the Company, Linux is the Movement, and Apple is the Mothership
Delphi was the best Oracle after all....
It also sounds like Delphinus, the dolphin constellation...
To compensate for drag in the atmosphere you need a muzzle exit velocity aroun 10-11 km/s. You'll still need a rocket on board to circularize your orbit less you come back down into the atmospher on the same parabola that you left. You can use this rocket to help you escape though and leave the the
:)
muzzle at a lower velocity. A 30 km launcher could accelerate cargo to 11 km/sec at 4000 gees, and could accelerate a rocket with people to 1.5 km/sec at 8 gees and save a lot of fuel for the rocket.
Of course, an even better solution is to build your mag lev accelerator into a loop like a particle accelerator... then you can accelerate at whatever rate you want
From the 10/25/01 - 10/31/01 weekly status report:
The Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) post-warm-up images were downlinked for analysis. The 15 images were planned in support of the UVIS Spica observation, and were examined for potential changes relative to the pre-warm-up images. Preliminary results show a change in the character of the anomaly with the halo gone but more spreading of the star image than before. ISS also performed a scattered light observation, in an effort to resolve an anomaly observed in C25 when an ISS observation received far more light than expected. This current observation included a series of scans across the sky to see how much scattered light ISS gets at different distances from the sun for a selection of different orientations, to see if reflection off another part of the spacecraft is causing the extra light seen by ISS.
I don't agree with the BBC's claim that this is a "major" problem... the narrow angle camera still works - the contaminent just effectively reduces the resolution of the NAC. But from what I understand, the NAC resolution is nominally very, very high and even with the contamination it still will produce amazing pictures.
As far as what the contaminent is... the best guess so far is that it is outgassing from some part of the spacecraft... probably the camera. Something got heated up, vaporized and then condensed on the lens (either the inside or the outside of the lens). When they see if the stuff cooks off and what temperature it cooks off at, they'll have a better idea where the contaminent came from.
Cassini has already had larger problems (the reaction wheel last December, and the probe relay problem) that have been overcome and Cassini is still on track to make all of its mission objectives and then some. This problem is minor by comparison and will probably be fixed.
Cassini was launched in 1997, and arrives at Saturn in 2004... seven years later. Then its primary mission ends 4 years after that... and it is hoped Cassini can fly a 4 year extended mission after that... So this spacecraft will fly 15 years in deep space without any possibility of any repairs more sophisticated than commanding a motor back and forth to jiggle something loose or turning on a part to heat it up. Things are bound to break... hopefully, these things will be small and not cause the spacecraft to blow up when it turns on its engines the next time.... we all want to see the pictures of the pterodactyls flying on Titan, don't we?
Process patents claim a "process which uses a computer."
This sounds like a way to patent basic mathematical algorithms without disclosing how they work. What is calculus was developed in modern times? Sounds like the process of taking a simple derivative or integral would be patentable... heck sounds like "zero" would be patentable...
Only physical "inventions" should be patentable... patenting algorithms is akin to patenting a plot device in a novel.
One patent to rule them all
One patent to find them,
One patent to bring them all
And in the darkness bind them
I thought the point of patents was to prevent inventions from being secret and give the inventor protection if the inventor discloses his/her idea to the public. Doesn't that mean you should have to include the source code of software in a patent?
This patent is just a bunch of baseless claims.. hey I'll patent my secret fusion device and not tell anyone how it works... cuz it's secret....
With software patents this easy, some company should just sit around and brainstorm ideas for possible software and then patent the idea for the software without ever developing it... Just patent as many ideas as you can out of science fiction books...
About the resolution... from Adrian Lark's site:
The MOLA data has a vertical accuracy of about 5m and a horizontal spatial accuracy of 100m.
As the MGS satellite orbits Mars it fires a laser every 330m to measure the height of the ground below. This means that in the direction of the orbit the resolution is 330m but in between the orbits the gaps can vary between a few meters to a few kilometers. My data processing software uses a linear interpolation algorithm to fill the gaps. Datasets created at higher resolutions require more interpolation because the gaps between the orbits are larger.
There's more information about the interpolation on the link above.
Ok, so instead of just worrying about catching flu, colds, STDs... now I have to worry about catching a gene therapy virus that changes my eyes blue... or worse