As anyone who has ever photographed a picture before can tell you, just a tiny difference in the exposure settings - aperture, shutter speed, flash level, film type - will produce a dramatically looking picture. I've seen the setup they used on the Matrix on "Making of the Matrix" on the DVD, and basically it looked like a whole bunch of Canon EOS-1N RSs strung together in an ascending circular fashion (for the Trinity scene). I'm curious how they ensured that all the colors and shadow/highlight detail matched perfectly with what they were filming so they could do a seamless transition from filmed footage to effect. Obviously, I guess they locked the exposure details, but what about film? Do they load the cameras with film stock and just shoot on that? Is computer correction involved?
Also, I never could figure out how they did they scene with the woman in red where they froze everyone in time until reading this. Can anyone elaborate more and how they varied the length of the exposure to produce that effect?
Anyone notice a strange correlation between the coming of a day that many consider to be apocalyptic and/or provoking major crisis and the freeing up of the ham airwaves which have proven absolutely vital to maintaining communication and order, and even saving lives in some cases, in other major natural disasters? Perhaps the government knows something we don't? The truth is out there my friends;)
This provision will no doubt signal the beginning of the end of morse code (IIRC the only reason there's any requirement at all is because we have an international treaty requiring it), in the hands of an expert, morse code is totally amazing to watch. I've seen crusty old hammers with keyers (boxes with switiches that emits streams of dots or dashes when depressed) that can do morse faster than they can talk. It's really incredible to not even be able to discern between dots and dashes when these people are having entire conversations in them. Skilled morse oding seems to be destined to become a lost art along with blacksmithing, writing machine code, etc.
This is probably true. Windows 2000 will be released in February, hate to tell you this, but to people who have been subjected to Microsoft's incompetent OSs for years, Win2K will seem like a gold standard to them. And that's a lot of people. Anyone who has pilfered a copy of the late Win2k betas (come on! own up! I did it) can tell you that this is a far cry from any Microsoft operating system I have used in the past. It's fast and, dare I say it, pretty stable for casual use (I've heard different stories under heavy loads). I think a lot of people will flock to Windows 2000 come 2000, and I might be one of them. Sure, I'll use Linux for all my servers and critical tasks, but as far as a GUI goes, it has anything Linux has to offer beat by a long ways. In short, Win2k will be such a major departure from anything the casual user has used before that I think the media and Wall Street might forget about Tux the Penguin for a little while.
Etoy.com existed when Etoys.com was just a glimmer in the eye of some enterprising lad. It's an extremely clear-cut case which Etoy.com had a really good chance of winning. It's ashame to see Etoys.com whore Etoy.com around for the entire Christmas season (just long enough to ensure their profits and prevent Etoy.com from selling anything) and then, what do you know, drop the lawsuit four days later. I hope Etoy.com doesn't cave; they stand a great chance of winning. Personally I'd love to see the big fat corporation recieve a nice kick in the domain name ass, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.
But it is! Why is RIAA partnering with college campuses to increase punishment for students with MP3s? Why are they paying well known artists to sign their name on anti-piracy propaganda? Why do they even bother shutting down MP3 sites? Why do we have SDMI? Why do we have WMA? Obviously, not because they are bored. RIAA knows that MP3 does and will contintue to represent a very real threat to the record companies' bottom lines. 'mp3' is one of the most searched for words on the internet. The argument could be made that they're more interested in preserving a distribution paradigm where one has to use a record company to be discovered, but they also know that the more MP3s people get, the fewer CDs this will buy. Sure, this may be a drop in the bucket now, but ten years down the road, when pretty much every popular single in recent memory is freely available online, it's easy to see them losing a lot of money. This is about piracy as much as it is control. Take a look at your list, by the way. You'll notice that of all the media pirated, software by far comes in first, with literally billions of dollars lost each year. Digital audio comes in second for sure. Piracy for the other two has been a complete non issue, which are analog formats with no good medium of distribution. The internet has enabled widespread piracy of digital audio and software simply because they were digtal, and it will do the same with digital video.
Everything you say is true, but the exact same argument could be made for CDs seven or eight years ago. No one except the exceptionally rich could afford a five thousand dollar, single speed CD burner, and 600-700mb hard drives were the things dreams were made of. Not to mention the fact that we were all on that Concorde of internet connections, the venerable 9600 baud modem. Now look at the situation today, when (literally) my seven year old brother burns every Playstation game he rents and hasn't bought an audio CD ever in his life because he can copy or get on MP3 anything he wants over our 1.5+mpbs cable connection. For one thing, the size of hard drives seems to have already outpaced the maximum theoretical 17gb limit on DVD disks. Seagate et al have announced +50gb hard drives available in a matter of months. And it's only a matter of time before full-featured dual-layer DVD burners will fall under the thousand dollar mark, then under the five hundred, and to the point where every electronics boutique under the sun has them (just like their CD counterparts.) As for the bandwidth to share this all, both the government and private industry are virtually begging for more of it, and it's generally agreed that bandwidth will be so abundant in the near future so as to be a non-issue. The moral of the story is it has everything to do with piracy. It would take a complete idiot to see the asskicking that RIAA and the music industry in general are taking right now as a result of piracy and not foresee that happening in just a few more years for the entertainment industry too, and I submit to you that the major studios are not filled with idiotic people. If nothing else, think of why they instituited CSS in the first place - you argue that it's about control, which is partially right. But even more than that, they knew that DVD would become technologically piratable in a matter of years after it was released, and they sought to do the only thing they knew how to do: make it cryptographically impossible. With the crypto out of the picture, they've really been caught with their pants down, and they know it.
Katz has enumerated quite a few of the cyber-movers and shakers, but he seems to have forgotten that Time is a news-magazine. Thus, when they pick their man of the year, they are looking for someone who has shaped the news of this year, not who has made a lot of useful changes. His examples are the very antithesis of how the select the (wo)Man - the nameless, faceless programmers are changing our lives, doubtless, but they sure haven't been in the news. A famous example of this would be Adolf Hitler, who got the nod in `38 or `39, can't remember. I certainly wouldn't call his changes "useful," but he shaped news (in Time, at least) more than anyone that year. In 1980 they picked the Ayatollah. Same reasoning. People tend to liken the Time magazine MOTY selection to a Nobel prize - choosing people based on merit and goodwill. When people like David Ho (trying to cure AIDS) or Carter (promoting peace and goodwill towards man) are named, ostensibly this is true. However, that is not their selection criterion. With that in mind, I still have qualms as to the validity of their selection. E-commerce has really only been in the news for about a month now. Compare with Columbine. You know there had to be some tempation there to name Klebold and Harris; no two names were in the news more. I'm absolutely shocked that Jon "Hellmouth" Katz somehow forgot about Columbine when he wrote this piece. I guess he just didn't understand the award.
You couldn't ask for much more in terms of games. Megahertz for megahertz, the Celeron matches both the P2 and P3 in speed on non-SSE enabled games. It's extremely cheap (my Celeron was actually the cheapest component in my entire sytem except for the floppy drive) so you can overclock the hell out of em without worrying too much about electromigration. If you're looking for the most speed possible I would get a 400 which overclocks fine to 500. I haven't heard very many success stories about overclocking a 466, but hey, it could happen. So, as long as you don't plan on playing any SSE games (of which there aren't that many anyways), it's actually a waste of your money to buy a P3, and a P2 is essentially no more than a more expensive Celeron.
No, Daikatana did not ever get released. It probably will never get released, seeing as that egotistical prick Romero is heading up the efforts. It's already using outdated technology. The game will be lame.
I'm pretty sure this is pertaining to the whole 1-Click fiasco, which, believe or not, was actually upheld by a judge as a legitimate patent. I shit you not. I guess Amazon could go ahead and patent the concept of ease-of-use while they're at it. That oughta net them a nice chunk of change. Personally, I agree with Stallman here. Software patents are a joke, and this is one of the more horrendous ones ever granted. It really bothers me that Amazon's profts will again swell this holiday season while other etailers suffer from the 50+% attrition rate from shopping cart item to final purchase. I don't think anyone on Slashdot needs to be reminded of the volatility of the tech sector, and, let's face it, many startup sites won't be around next Christmas. Amazon's ridiculous patent on storing cookies for one-click sure doesn't help the situation. To cop a little Microsoft terminology, they've created a market barrier to entry - Amazon's One Click is damn easy and really, really popular. I could easily see many consumers flocking there instead of another bookstore just becuase they don't want to be hassled with shipping and billing info. I would know because I've succumbed to the insidious "one-click" button many a time. I know own 20 or so ORA books, 10 of which I regretted One Clicking even before they arrived. And people wonder why their market cap is $6 billion:)
I'm curious if the VA Linux IPO had never happened would this apology have come? I guess ten billion dollars equates legitimacy to a crazed few:) -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
It's funny to see how little Wall Street still understands about the tech world. I give them credit - they did a great job on this stock by finding the word "Linux" in it, which, evidently, adds several billion in value right away. VA Linux does nothing impressive - they build computers and load Linux on them. Well WOW. A small company in Texas you may have heard of, named Dall or Dell or something, has been doing the exact same thing for over a year. So does Compaq. Other entities that build computers and load Linux on them... well, me for one, and a lot of other./'ers out there. I wouldn't exactly call VA Linux the greatest thing since sliced bread; yet they posted the biggest single point gain I have ever seen. This kind of gross overpricing is the epitome of what investors are talking about when they bemoan tech stocks. Don't get me wrong; I really like the people at VA. They bankrole the development of quite a few notable projects (E, for one), which is great. But I think Wall Street investors are complete idiots. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
I think Gateway needs to market a more scaled down machine. I, like many, run an older PC for firewall/gateway purposes. And like many older PCs, that PC is starting to fail. The hard drive worries me most, but I'm also seeing memory errors, fans are breaking, the graphics card is spotty. While I could easily fix every single one of these, tracking all the parts down is simply too time consuming to bother. I don't need 4.3gb of space, which is about the smallest HDD I can find, I need one. For reasons like this, I'd much rather just buy an entire new PC - I don't care about having the latest components, but support would be great, and getting to use Cobalt's GUI would be a treat. So, note to Gateway: market something in the $100-$200 "appliance" range. I'm sure you'd have lots of customers. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
That poses an interesting question - is there any way to hide from it? Most technologies have some sort of countermeasure - radar can be jammed, night vision is overly susceptible to bright flashes of light, which tend to cloud over the whole picture. But I don't think you can do much to escape from this system short of drenching yourself and slathering mud all over your body (another Predator reference). Even then, I'm not sure if it would work. I suppose you could exploit that coffee-cup flare that you saw, but on a much larger scale - get something hot enough where the flare would effectively shield you from pinpoint identification, etc. But even then they would just look up and, voila, you've illuminated yourself. I dunno - any thoughts? Could just use the EMP effect and fry everything within a couple miles.;) -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
A lot of people seem to be confusing night vision and thermal imaging. This system does not replace headlights, and isn't night vision. In other words, it does not magnify the intensity of light electronically and spit it out onto a CRT (although wouldn't it be nice to have no more streetlights or headlights ever! no light pollution, no more having to drive 200 mi. to watch the Leonids). All this is is a simple infra-red (heat sensing) mechanism. It can pick up things that would usually be out of the range of your headlights, provided there is some sort of temperature contrast. Typically, this would be a warm person walking by the side of the road at night, or a deer, or freshly wrecked cars, etc. I guess you could use it to see a really cold person on a hot day too;) Think "Predator" with his mask on, sans the hydraulic hair and cool breathing noises. Same thing, except from what I have seen they don't colorize the picture so it's all one monochromatic scene with varying tints signifying different heat levels. Living in Los Angeles, this is pretty worthless (Although Jason Priestley might argue), but I'm sure someone, somewhere will benefit from it. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
I don't think this is all good, folks. I mean think about it - do you really want the people who drive Cadillacs to feel encouraged to come out driving at night? I've seen 4'2" Grannies park their SS Devilles into a tree in broad daylight, with no other cars on a straight piece of road. I don't exactly feel "safer" with this invention, for some reason. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
I and any other Angelinos should be proud to hear this one: "it is illegal to beat your wife with a strap wider than 2 inches without her consent" in Los Angeles. And people wonder why we have the nation's highest divorce rate:) -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
This chip only works on people who still have some undamaged tissue in their eye. You still have to scientifically be able to see - your rods and cones have to function - and all this chip does is restore some broken links in the pathway from eye to brain. Wonder's eyes are too far gone for this to be possible. This treatment has helped certain blind people to regain minimal sight, but it won't help Stevie Wonder. I still don't really know why the media ate this one up. Star power I guess. Anyways, it won't happen. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
Fluori*de* is put in the water, for the same reason they give it to you at the dentist's, to clean your teeth. Fluori*ne* is not, but if you still disagree you're welcome to spike your Evian with a little hydrofluoric acid next time you get a chance, and we'll see who's left standing... -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
Carbon is one of several elements that adheres to the octet rule, allowing it to form four bonds. I'm not sure if that necessarily makes it a good candidate to create life; after all, phosphorus can form five bonds, sulfur sometimes six, and iodine makes IF7 (seven) but no one makes any theories about them. By that logic, fluorine (a gas, BTW), the most electronegative element, would be a crucial building block in life, as it bonds to just about anything, but in reality you can thank your lucky stars there isn't anymore fluorine on Earth than what we have now. It kills basically whatever biological organism it comes in contact with. What's more probable is it became the building block of all Earth-based life because of its abundance. This is also why people lean towards silicon as another possiblity - add up all the silicon and all the carbon in the world and you've got a substantial chunk of all the molecules on Earth. It all has to do with abundance - iron makes of a third of the Earth, and it's crucial to many living organisms - ever wonder why your blood tastes like metal? That's the iron in hemoglobin. Likewise, magnesium composes about 15% of the earth, and is key to many biological processes such as photosynthesis. And then of course there's oxygen, the second most abundant element on Earth, which I've heard is used by a few organisms here and there;) -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
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Also, I never could figure out how they did they scene with the woman in red where they froze everyone in time until reading this. Can anyone elaborate more and how they varied the length of the exposure to produce that effect?
--
Anyone notice a strange correlation between the coming of a day that many consider to be apocalyptic and/or provoking major crisis and the freeing up of the ham airwaves which have proven absolutely vital to maintaining communication and order, and even saving lives in some cases, in other major natural disasters? Perhaps the government knows something we don't? The truth is out there my friends ;)
--
This provision will no doubt signal the beginning of the end of morse code (IIRC the only reason there's any requirement at all is because we have an international treaty requiring it), in the hands of an expert, morse code is totally amazing to watch. I've seen crusty old hammers with keyers (boxes with switiches that emits streams of dots or dashes when depressed) that can do morse faster than they can talk. It's really incredible to not even be able to discern between dots and dashes when these people are having entire conversations in them. Skilled morse oding seems to be destined to become a lost art along with blacksmithing, writing machine code, etc.
--
This is probably true. Windows 2000 will be released in February, hate to tell you this, but to people who have been subjected to Microsoft's incompetent OSs for years, Win2K will seem like a gold standard to them. And that's a lot of people. Anyone who has pilfered a copy of the late Win2k betas (come on! own up! I did it) can tell you that this is a far cry from any Microsoft operating system I have used in the past. It's fast and, dare I say it, pretty stable for casual use (I've heard different stories under heavy loads). I think a lot of people will flock to Windows 2000 come 2000, and I might be one of them. Sure, I'll use Linux for all my servers and critical tasks, but as far as a GUI goes, it has anything Linux has to offer beat by a long ways. In short, Win2k will be such a major departure from anything the casual user has used before that I think the media and Wall Street might forget about Tux the Penguin for a little while.
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Yeah why not.. I mean they've always been magnates for positive PR in the past ;)
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Etoy.com existed when Etoys.com was just a glimmer in the eye of some enterprising lad. It's an extremely clear-cut case which Etoy.com had a really good chance of winning. It's ashame to see Etoys.com whore Etoy.com around for the entire Christmas season (just long enough to ensure their profits and prevent Etoy.com from selling anything) and then, what do you know, drop the lawsuit four days later. I hope Etoy.com doesn't cave; they stand a great chance of winning. Personally I'd love to see the big fat corporation recieve a nice kick in the domain name ass, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.
--
But it is! Why is RIAA partnering with college campuses to increase punishment for students with MP3s? Why are they paying well known artists to sign their name on anti-piracy propaganda? Why do they even bother shutting down MP3 sites? Why do we have SDMI? Why do we have WMA? Obviously, not because they are bored. RIAA knows that MP3 does and will contintue to represent a very real threat to the record companies' bottom lines. 'mp3' is one of the most searched for words on the internet. The argument could be made that they're more interested in preserving a distribution paradigm where one has to use a record company to be discovered, but they also know that the more MP3s people get, the fewer CDs this will buy. Sure, this may be a drop in the bucket now, but ten years down the road, when pretty much every popular single in recent memory is freely available online, it's easy to see them losing a lot of money. This is about piracy as much as it is control.
Take a look at your list, by the way. You'll notice that of all the media pirated, software by far comes in first, with literally billions of dollars lost each year. Digital audio comes in second for sure. Piracy for the other two has been a complete non issue, which are analog formats with no good medium of distribution. The internet has enabled widespread piracy of digital audio and software simply because they were digtal, and it will do the same with digital video.
--
Everything you say is true, but the exact same argument could be made for CDs seven or eight years ago. No one except the exceptionally rich could afford a five thousand dollar, single speed CD burner, and 600-700mb hard drives were the things dreams were made of. Not to mention the fact that we were all on that Concorde of internet connections, the venerable 9600 baud modem. Now look at the situation today, when (literally) my seven year old brother burns every Playstation game he rents and hasn't bought an audio CD ever in his life because he can copy or get on MP3 anything he wants over our 1.5+mpbs cable connection.
For one thing, the size of hard drives seems to have already outpaced the maximum theoretical 17gb limit on DVD disks. Seagate et al have announced +50gb hard drives available in a matter of months. And it's only a matter of time before full-featured dual-layer DVD burners will fall under the thousand dollar mark, then under the five hundred, and to the point where every electronics boutique under the sun has them (just like their CD counterparts.) As for the bandwidth to share this all, both the government and private industry are virtually begging for more of it, and it's generally agreed that bandwidth will be so abundant in the near future so as to be a non-issue.
The moral of the story is it has everything to do with piracy. It would take a complete idiot to see the asskicking that RIAA and the music industry in general are taking right now as a result of piracy and not foresee that happening in just a few more years for the entertainment industry too, and I submit to you that the major studios are not filled with idiotic people. If nothing else, think of why they instituited CSS in the first place - you argue that it's about control, which is partially right. But even more than that, they knew that DVD would become technologically piratable in a matter of years after it was released, and they sought to do the only thing they knew how to do: make it cryptographically impossible. With the crypto out of the picture, they've really been caught with their pants down, and they know it.
--
Katz has enumerated quite a few of the cyber-movers and shakers, but he seems to have forgotten that Time is a news-magazine. Thus, when they pick their man of the year, they are looking for someone who has shaped the news of this year, not who has made a lot of useful changes. His examples are the very antithesis of how the select the (wo)Man - the nameless, faceless programmers are changing our lives, doubtless, but they sure haven't been in the news.
A famous example of this would be Adolf Hitler, who got the nod in `38 or `39, can't remember. I certainly wouldn't call his changes "useful," but he shaped news (in Time, at least) more than anyone that year. In 1980 they picked the Ayatollah. Same reasoning.
People tend to liken the Time magazine MOTY selection to a Nobel prize - choosing people based on merit and goodwill. When people like David Ho (trying to cure AIDS) or Carter (promoting peace and goodwill towards man) are named, ostensibly this is true. However, that is not their selection criterion.
With that in mind, I still have qualms as to the validity of their selection. E-commerce has really only been in the news for about a month now. Compare with Columbine. You know there had to be some tempation there to name Klebold and Harris; no two names were in the news more. I'm absolutely shocked that Jon "Hellmouth" Katz somehow forgot about Columbine when he wrote this piece. I guess he just didn't understand the award.
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You took it out of context. I said the P3 would be a waste of money if you don't play SSE games. This is true.
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You couldn't ask for much more in terms of games. Megahertz for megahertz, the Celeron matches both the P2 and P3 in speed on non-SSE enabled games. It's extremely cheap (my Celeron was actually the cheapest component in my entire sytem except for the floppy drive) so you can overclock the hell out of em without worrying too much about electromigration. If you're looking for the most speed possible I would get a 400 which overclocks fine to 500. I haven't heard very many success stories about overclocking a 466, but hey, it could happen. So, as long as you don't plan on playing any SSE games (of which there aren't that many anyways), it's actually a waste of your money to buy a P3, and a P2 is essentially no more than a more expensive Celeron.
--
Well.. nevermind. Looks like they might have actually completed the game. Two years behind schedule.
--
No, Daikatana did not ever get released. It probably will never get released, seeing as that egotistical prick Romero is heading up the efforts. It's already using outdated technology. The game will be lame.
--
I'm pretty sure this is pertaining to the whole 1-Click fiasco, which, believe or not, was actually upheld by a judge as a legitimate patent. I shit you not. I guess Amazon could go ahead and patent the concept of ease-of-use while they're at it. That oughta net them a nice chunk of change. :)
Personally, I agree with Stallman here. Software patents are a joke, and this is one of the more horrendous ones ever granted. It really bothers me that Amazon's profts will again swell this holiday season while other etailers suffer from the 50+% attrition rate from shopping cart item to final purchase. I don't think anyone on Slashdot needs to be reminded of the volatility of the tech sector, and, let's face it, many startup sites won't be around next Christmas. Amazon's ridiculous patent on storing cookies for one-click sure doesn't help the situation. To cop a little Microsoft terminology, they've created a market barrier to entry - Amazon's One Click is damn easy and really, really popular. I could easily see many consumers flocking there instead of another bookstore just becuase they don't want to be hassled with shipping and billing info.
I would know because I've succumbed to the insidious "one-click" button many a time. I know own 20 or so ORA books, 10 of which I regretted One Clicking even before they arrived. And people wonder why their market cap is $6 billion
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Stallman Schmallman. ESR is our leader now. He has $41 million dollars. Isn't that the litmus test for leadership? ;)
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I'm curious if the VA Linux IPO had never happened would this apology have come? I guess ten billion dollars equates legitimacy to a crazed few :)
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
It's funny to see how little Wall Street still understands about the tech world. I give them credit - they did a great job on this stock by finding the word "Linux" in it, which, evidently, adds several billion in value right away. VA Linux does nothing impressive - they build computers and load Linux on them. Well WOW. A small company in Texas you may have heard of, named Dall or Dell or something, has been doing the exact same thing for over a year. So does Compaq. Other entities that build computers and load Linux on them ... well, me for one, and a lot of other ./'ers out there. I wouldn't exactly call VA Linux the greatest thing since sliced bread; yet they posted the biggest single point gain I have ever seen. This kind of gross overpricing is the epitome of what investors are talking about when they bemoan tech stocks.
Don't get me wrong; I really like the people at VA. They bankrole the development of quite a few notable projects (E, for one), which is great. But I think Wall Street investors are complete idiots.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
I think Gateway needs to market a more scaled down machine. I, like many, run an older PC for firewall/gateway purposes. And like many older PCs, that PC is starting to fail. The hard drive worries me most, but I'm also seeing memory errors, fans are breaking, the graphics card is spotty. While I could easily fix every single one of these, tracking all the parts down is simply too time consuming to bother. I don't need 4.3gb of space, which is about the smallest HDD I can find, I need one. For reasons like this, I'd much rather just buy an entire new PC - I don't care about having the latest components, but support would be great, and getting to use Cobalt's GUI would be a treat. So, note to Gateway: market something in the $100-$200 "appliance" range. I'm sure you'd have lots of customers.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
That poses an interesting question - is there any way to hide from it? Most technologies have some sort of countermeasure - radar can be jammed, night vision is overly susceptible to bright flashes of light, which tend to cloud over the whole picture. But I don't think you can do much to escape from this system short of drenching yourself and slathering mud all over your body (another Predator reference). Even then, I'm not sure if it would work. I suppose you could exploit that coffee-cup flare that you saw, but on a much larger scale - get something hot enough where the flare would effectively shield you from pinpoint identification, etc. But even then they would just look up and, voila, you've illuminated yourself. I dunno - any thoughts? Could just use the EMP effect and fry everything within a couple miles. ;)
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
A lot of people seem to be confusing night vision and thermal imaging. This system does not replace headlights, and isn't night vision. In other words, it does not magnify the intensity of light electronically and spit it out onto a CRT (although wouldn't it be nice to have no more streetlights or headlights ever! no light pollution, no more having to drive 200 mi. to watch the Leonids). All this is is a simple infra-red (heat sensing) mechanism. It can pick up things that would usually be out of the range of your headlights, provided there is some sort of temperature contrast. Typically, this would be a warm person walking by the side of the road at night, or a deer, or freshly wrecked cars, etc. I guess you could use it to see a really cold person on a hot day too ;) Think "Predator" with his mask on, sans the hydraulic hair and cool breathing noises. Same thing, except from what I have seen they don't colorize the picture so it's all one monochromatic scene with varying tints signifying different heat levels. Living in Los Angeles, this is pretty worthless (Although Jason Priestley might argue), but I'm sure someone, somewhere will benefit from it.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
I don't think this is all good, folks. I mean think about it - do you really want the people who drive Cadillacs to feel encouraged to come out driving at night? I've seen 4'2" Grannies park their SS Devilles into a tree in broad daylight, with no other cars on a straight piece of road. I don't exactly feel "safer" with this invention, for some reason.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
I and any other Angelinos should be proud to hear this one: :)
"it is illegal to beat your wife with a strap wider than 2 inches without her consent" in Los Angeles.
And people wonder why we have the nation's highest divorce rate
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
This chip only works on people who still have some undamaged tissue in their eye. You still have to scientifically be able to see - your rods and cones have to function - and all this chip does is restore some broken links in the pathway from eye to brain. Wonder's eyes are too far gone for this to be possible. This treatment has helped certain blind people to regain minimal sight, but it won't help Stevie Wonder. I still don't really know why the media ate this one up. Star power I guess. Anyways, it won't happen.
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"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
Fluori*de* is put in the water, for the same reason they give it to you at the dentist's, to clean your teeth. Fluori*ne* is not, but if you still disagree you're welcome to spike your Evian with a little hydrofluoric acid next time you get a chance, and we'll see who's left standing...
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"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
Carbon is one of several elements that adheres to the octet rule, allowing it to form four bonds. I'm not sure if that necessarily makes it a good candidate to create life; after all, phosphorus can form five bonds, sulfur sometimes six, and iodine makes IF7 (seven) but no one makes any theories about them. By that logic, fluorine (a gas, BTW), the most electronegative element, would be a crucial building block in life, as it bonds to just about anything, but in reality you can thank your lucky stars there isn't anymore fluorine on Earth than what we have now. It kills basically whatever biological organism it comes in contact with. ;)
What's more probable is it became the building block of all Earth-based life because of its abundance. This is also why people lean towards silicon as another possiblity - add up all the silicon and all the carbon in the world and you've got a substantial chunk of all the molecules on Earth. It all has to do with abundance - iron makes of a third of the Earth, and it's crucial to many living organisms - ever wonder why your blood tastes like metal? That's the iron in hemoglobin. Likewise, magnesium composes about 15% of the earth, and is key to many biological processes such as photosynthesis. And then of course there's oxygen, the second most abundant element on Earth, which I've heard is used by a few organisms here and there
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"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."