I'm not old enough for a daisy-wheel (although my dad had one, and I remember it from when I was tiny)...but I've owned a lot of printers over the years, and I tend to be the go-to guy to set up and configure those of family and friends.
First off, the only reason to have an inkjet is for photo printing. But the consumables are rediculous, so only get one if you can get third party ink at reasonable prices. Also plan on printing something at least once or twice a month, or the heads will clog, necessitating wasting even more ink! I'll just print out a cute picture or webcomic to put up the fridge if I have nothing else. And I may not bother buying a new one in the future... but I have an old epson 6-color (CMYKcm) printer that's almost 10 years old and still works great (as long as you don't let the heads dry out)... which also takes super-cheap generic ink. Newer ones can have issues with DRM chips in the ink cartridges which can make it harder to get generics sometimes. YMMV. But it costs me less to print a full page photo on cheap glossy-photo or matte paper, then it would to order it online, so I've stuck with it.;)
But for any normal printing (i.e. NON-PHOTO), you're going to want to use laser printers exclusively. Their more durable, much much much faster (a 8x11 photo in hi quality on the ink jet takes something akin to 12 minutes to print)... on a laser, everything is blindingly fast.
You also definitely want to find a laser printer with cheap non-OEM toner that's readily available. I have two laser printers for day-to-day printing, a cheap ass low-end 600dpi brother (which is perfect for text buisness documents, word processing, printing the ocassional groupon or amazon return lable, etc) and generic replacement toner is dirt cheap. Even the drums are very reasonably priced. Use this for standard monochrome documents (comes out to under $0.01 a page (not including paper, and assuming %5 coverage, standard text documents, not solid black, etc))
I also have a nice office color laser (full duplex is a bonus in these larger higher-capacity office printers). There a lot of options here, look for a refurbished one online. (Also verify you can get generic toner) Mine was $300 and comes to about ~$0.06 a page.
Are you getting a theme here?;) Bottom line, whatever printer you get, make sure you can buy non-OEM consumables readily.
Has instructions on how to own your platform. It's not that hard. You first install KeyTool.efi to backup your original shipped keys, then you generate and install your own, and sign an authorization to delete it... then you can toggle between tpm setup mode and user mode at will, and add or remove whatever keys you want. Should take you maybe 20 minutes (and a few reboots) or so if you know your way around a command line.
Personally, when I got a new windows 8 laptop, this was the second thing I did. (The first one being to install the non-crapware oem version of windows 8 onto an external bootable usb3.0 drive so it's there if I ever really need it for something, but doesn't waste space on my primary drive for the ocassional dual boot)... ((PS: to do the latter you need to get your registration key from the last string of/sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM))
But isn't the advantage... that by lubricating faults what's happening is that built up tension is being released sooner, rather than later when it's built up even more?
Honestly, this ought to be seen as an advantage. More frequent smaller earthquakes are most likely very prefereable to infrequent but much larger earthquakes.
I still run my own mail server... Don't forget that under the stored communications act the government can get any emails stored by a third party for more than 6 months with no need for a warrant.
You're not the only one, brother. I'm still running on an old 23" CRT that does 2048x1536 @ 120hz...it also has kelvin color temperature controls (and sRGB and a few other) color profiles built in. The color detail for editing photographs is vastly better than you can get on LCD's.
Also, since it does 120hz, I also can use it for stereo3D (yes, this is a 12-14 yr. old monitor!) at 2048x1536... (which is BLOODY AWESOME for nvidia 3D-vision gaming, especially since I can turn the brightness -way- up to 100 and solve all the issues with shutter-glasses dimness you see with LCDs)
..unfortunately, I suspect it might finally be starting to die. When I first turn it on, the color brightness and darkens intermittently for a minute or two until it's fully warmed up (it didn't ever use to do that before)
The worst thing, is that when CRT's were on there way out 4-5 years ago, I looked up the price of a new one (I was thinking of getting another one for my girlfriends computer, but she insisted on a 'flat panel')...and they were still for sale, and marked down ridiculously... I could have gotten a spare for under $300 (-including shipping-!!!)...I figured "well, thats nice! CRT's are so cheap now, cause everone want's LCDs, silly people! Good to know!" Of course, now, that I likely need to get a new one soonish, they're no longer available anywhere at any price.
You have to show you skills. Make a name for yourself. Contribute validly to some projects.
If you're skills ultimately are matter of 'gimp' playing-around? Than you're probably screwed and haven't learned anything real yet.
(Well, unless you want to specialize in photo-editing or graphic-design or some-such... in which case, community college might be your best bet) If you want to be hired as a coder, without the often-times nonsense of formal education, than you have to prove yourself. Contribute to a meaningful opensource project. Be noticed for contributing some code that actually does something (vs. confused bug reports). Real skill is rare enough, and a resume that shows an active participation and contribution to a notable project is probably a better thing that a formal accreditation (from many schools, at least).
Myself, I generally don't bother to pirate things much... but if anyone pulled that sort of nonsense, I'd be seriously tempted to start downloading crap left and right, and encourage all of my friends to do so as well.
Let's see them kick -everybody- off the internet, and see how that works, hmmm?
The real problem with electric cars is the limited lifetime of the battery. Modern lithium-ion batteries degrade, and are good for maybe 700 charge/discharge cycles. (The initial Hybrids extend this somewhat, IIRC, by avoiding charging above %70 or so (and beneath %30 or so) of design capacity), but the electrodes only have so much 'flux' of absorption/dissipation they can handle, before they begin degrading significantly in performance.
This is one of the real issues with electric cars that's going to bite people in their shiny-metal a**ses sooner than most of them expect. Especially the people who hardhack their hybrids to run fully electric. Replacing those batteries after 4 or 5 years of normal driving is going to be extremely expensive.
Heck, I have the replace the Li batteries in my phone every two years years or so because of this. I'm sure you've noticed it with laptops too... when it was brand new it'd run for four hours on battery, now you're lucky to get two and a half or three. These cars have a -lot- more battery.
Success in propagating a meme isn't necessarily related to it's truth-value, merely to it's value in engendering behavior in others. But the mechanisms of intelligence are involved even there. Appeals to emotion or other assorted well documented fallacies have been well described (by reason). The problem, perhaps, is in some philosophical jig where the word 'reason' (traditionally the most gloried phenomenon of human thought) somehow takes on multiple meanings....So what is reason?
Is it logic? The claims (referred to in) this article, would seem to negate a pure aristotelian glory of A implies not B and the like. Thus it would seem to cheapen the idea of those who bother to think logically. It leans towards suggesting that 'reason' is merely a sociological, nay, anthropological phenomenon. A matter of primates beating their chests, albeit with their brains instead of hairy arms.
And this is utter nonsense.
First of all, it denies the fact that fallacy is -necessary- in order to convince another thinking being of a false truth, and then turns around to imply that reason has no truth outside of a group phenomenon.
Obviously, pre-and-up-to-humans evolved language to share ideas. (It's audible telepathy, afterall!) And that was adaptive..why?
Because a meme, a social construct, a compellingly successful narrative could coordinate collective group behavior in an adaptive manner? Of course.
But however does any argument manage to do such a thing? By presenting a compelling explanation to other individuals that they fail to refute the truth of.
It all comes down to the personal analysis of truth of the part of the recipient of an argument, though. To be crass, we all have personal bullshit detectors.;) And some worse than others, of course.
But to decry the the fact that false but compelling arguments can be accepted too-readily negelects the very fact that they succeed BECAUSE THEY ARE COMPELLING. That they make a logical and self-consistent sense to the recipient. To the recipients own personal sentience, thought, and reason (however mistaken).
Many people may be ill-educated, worse; evilly-educated into a false set of hot-button moral certitudes (due to the social-darwinisticly-adaptive usefulness of such levers, perhaps, so as to facilitate obedience to certain top-down social hierarchy command structures)...
But it's still the reasoning of their own minds that reaches either accepts or rejects any such rhetorical exercise.
Reason is beautiful. Were it not for man's ability to reason, we'd still be living in caves, at best! Nowadays we use ion-beam lithography to carve out features thousands of times smaller than a single hair on our bodies. Nowadays we know the chemical composition of the outer atmostphere of stars billions of light years away. And how?
From reasoning.
under: "Settings" -> "About phone" -> "Battery use".
Perhaps more akin to 'powertop' than 'top', but it shows what share of battery power is being consumed by what applications. It's incredibly easy to spot a resource hog and choose to uninstall or not run it!
In my experience, usually at least %60 of drain is from the display alone (well, %50-ish if you're running an instant messenger in the background).;)
Why the heck do people complain about the lack of something... that IS ALREADY BUILT IN?!?
Never turn on account sync in the first place. If you -do- have a gmail address, create a separate one just for your phone (since google makes it mandatory to have a gmail/google account to use android, for -some- reason I can't imagine...)
Disable all 'back up my data to google' options in the sub-sub menus.
Problem solved. Your phone won't have any account credentials worth worrying about, outside of through the browser (standard cross-site-scripting exploits, etc) or reasonable apps that ask for no permissions beyond internet (connectbot for ssh, etc)
Biodegradable cellulosic based car parts? I can't wait until I leave my new car out in the rain for two weeks, and fungus starts growing on my bumpers, the same as it grows on the fallen trees next to where I park.
Serious usability issue Regarding the new live code:
I often only have a chance to read slashdot on the weekends (such as during
periods of crunch-time at work, etc). And I'd made the habit of always
visiting it in the daily view mode to read where I'd left off due to being
otherwise busy: i.e.
Or, say, I missed the first week of december.. and now want to finally get
around to skimming back over what I'd missed... It used to be I could
immediately jump to the relevant pages of daily postings with ease. This
increasingly common trend on so many sites towards nothing more than a
linear "Many More" button, with no other option for directly jumping
forwards and backwards to some specific point in the past, is so
-indescribably- annoying. (Reddit did this 4-5 months or so ago, and I
spend far less time there as a result). It's a major loss of power-user
functionality to only be able to access the most recent stories (or n-1,
n-2, n-...) without being able to jump around arbitrarily in the timeline
of previous posts.
PLEASE FIX THIS, or provide similar functionality!!! I'm begging
you. Seriously.
Don't take away my previously-missed-slashdot-goodness.
Yours truly,
a long and devoted slashdot user, from the days when karma
was a number, and not merely excellent;)
PLEASE let them involve the ever-redacted-in-all-ways torture photos. Something to make people wake up to the (you would think.. so obvious!) war crimes of the current administrative branch.
I say 'current', for it hasn't changed between nominal figureheads.
Personally, I have a bluetooth A2DP (or whatever it is) adapter, that allows my smartphone to play music out to my car stereo. (Newer cars have a direct jack.. in my case, lacking one, I bought a device that listens to bluetooth and transmits FM stereo)..
Anyway, 'texting' is illegal in my personal jurisdiction. I've often wondered if someone will try to arrest or fine me for changing the song I'm playing, (as it's coming from my smartphone), compared to the EXACT SAME DISTRACTION I'd experience (if not more) if I were putting a new CD in my stereo.
Distraction is surely there. One must merely be careful.
I can verify that GPS works in airplane mode on the N1. I use google earth on flights to see my progress. (Earth pre-caches a low-res globe, enough to tell what part of what state you are in just fine)
My firewall/router/DVR computer is on 24/7 anyway, so I've always just run my own mail server. Any email to delivered directly into my home from the beginning.;)
A departure from standard 3rd-party developer programs that limit access, the Lightworks Open Source platform offers an unprecedented gateway into the NLE’s core engine, enabling a wide-range of creative developers to implement forward-thinking features and workflows.
*
*
*
...Lightworks Open Source offers a highly collaborative development environment based on powerful and feature-rich underlying technology,
It's entirely clear from the press release that they have no intention whatsoever of opensourcing the "feature rich underlying technology" of the "NLE 's core engine".
This is the same sort of thing that Xara tried to pull... using the open source community to add additional power and functionality that all ultimately still depended on a proprietary close-source rendering engine. That went well!
I look for technical software engineering lectures, etc, in a conference. Then again, I'm an engineer and not in management. Give me PHP over PHB any day!;)
But, seriously, a conference should tend to focus on the greater community... developers -and- management to some extent. The bigger the tent, the more to fill it.
Actually, what would make far more sense... would be to somehow capture the trapped mass, and then eject it violently to change course so as to be able to gently-enough encounter and capture the next piece of mass, and so on. Use the junk as reaction mass to change your velocity...
To gain altitude, fire the current junk at an downward angle which also completely cancels out it's orbital momentum, it will then fall directly to earth, and your 'scow' will gain altitude (well, a change in orbital momentum as well due to angle you need to fire it at to cancel out it's own, but you get the idea). To descend, fire it straight up a speed exceeding terminal velocity so as to escape the earth's orbit altogether (here you would have more freedom to also adjust your orbital momentum as you saw fit, by firing it at different angles... also, you could effectively -only- change your orbital momentum by firing it an extreme angle essentially perpendicular to the earth's surface, such that it would still achieve terminal velocity).
All the thing needs is an energy source! (Well, and some serious computation) The reaction mass is already up there!:)
This then becomes an engineering problem of how to capture and relaunch the individual pieces of junk. First off, I'd imagine you would need a sufficiently low differential in velocity to the target during the intercept/capture phase. (Of course, once again, free reaction mass abounds, as long as you can 'throw' your last captured piece with sufficient energy). Which leads to the second engineering challenge; how to very energetically expel the mass you've just captured in any direction. Well, the direction part isn't hard, gyroscopes and all... but how a machine would grapple and then violently launch an arbitrarily sized and shaped object would be the challenge.
For ferromagnetic debris, I suppose electromagenetic coupling might allow capture, and then perhaps a robotic arm could appropriately position it's center of mass over a 'simple' extremely-high-speed piston?
But, I can't think of any reason this couldn't necessarily work!
...perhaps the relative delta-v needed to move from one piece to another (compared to the force one could realistically apply to launching a given intercepted mass) would make it difficult or unviable with current technologies... any thoughts?
(PS: This is still an engineering problem relating to the force you could realistically impart when relauching debris... for even a single atom would be more than sufficient mass if you could launch it at 99.99999999% the speed of light.:) )
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not old enough for a daisy-wheel (although my dad had one, and I remember it from when I was tiny) ...but I've owned a lot of printers over the years, and I tend to be the go-to guy to set up and configure those of family and friends.
;)
;) Bottom line, whatever printer you get, make sure you can buy non-OEM consumables readily.
First off, the only reason to have an inkjet is for photo printing. But the consumables are rediculous, so only get one if you can get third party ink at reasonable prices. Also plan on printing something at least once or twice a month, or the heads will clog, necessitating wasting even more ink! I'll just print out a cute picture or webcomic to put up the fridge if I have nothing else. And I may not bother buying a new one in the future... but I have an old epson 6-color (CMYKcm) printer that's almost 10 years old and still works great (as long as you don't let the heads dry out)... which also takes super-cheap generic ink. Newer ones can have issues with DRM chips in the ink cartridges which can make it harder to get generics sometimes. YMMV. But it costs me less to print a full page photo on cheap glossy-photo or matte paper, then it would to order it online, so I've stuck with it.
But for any normal printing (i.e. NON-PHOTO), you're going to want to use laser printers exclusively. Their more durable, much much much faster (a 8x11 photo in hi quality on the ink jet takes something akin to 12 minutes to print)... on a laser, everything is blindingly fast.
You also definitely want to find a laser printer with cheap non-OEM toner that's readily available. I have two laser printers for day-to-day printing, a cheap ass low-end 600dpi brother (which is perfect for text buisness documents, word processing, printing the ocassional groupon or amazon return lable, etc) and generic replacement toner is dirt cheap. Even the drums are very reasonably priced. Use this for standard monochrome documents (comes out to under $0.01 a page (not including paper, and assuming %5 coverage, standard text documents, not solid black, etc))
I also have a nice office color laser (full duplex is a bonus in these larger higher-capacity office printers). There a lot of options here, look for a refurbished one online. (Also verify you can get generic toner) Mine was $300 and comes to about ~$0.06 a page.
Are you getting a theme here?
http://blog.hansenpartnership.com/
/sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM))
(Scroll down, it's the third blog post down)
Has instructions on how to own your platform. It's not that hard. You first install KeyTool.efi to backup your original shipped keys, then you generate and install your own, and sign an authorization to delete it... then you can toggle between tpm setup mode and user mode at will, and add or remove whatever keys you want. Should take you maybe 20 minutes (and a few reboots) or so if you know your way around a command line.
Personally, when I got a new windows 8 laptop, this was the second thing I did. (The first one being to install the non-crapware oem version of windows 8 onto an external bootable usb3.0 drive so it's there if I ever really need it for something, but doesn't waste space on my primary drive for the ocassional dual boot)... ((PS: to do the latter you need to get your registration key from the last string of
But isn't the advantage... that by lubricating faults what's happening is that built up tension is being released sooner, rather than later when it's built up even more?
Honestly, this ought to be seen as an advantage. More frequent smaller earthquakes are most likely very prefereable to infrequent but much larger earthquakes.
I still run my own mail server... Don't forget that under the stored communications act the government can get any emails stored by a third party for more than 6 months with no need for a warrant.
You're not the only one, brother. I'm still running on an old 23" CRT that does 2048x1536 @ 120hz ...it also has kelvin color temperature controls (and sRGB and a few other) color profiles built in. The color detail for editing photographs is vastly better than you can get on LCD's.
..unfortunately, I suspect it might finally be starting to die. When I first turn it on, the color brightness and darkens intermittently for a minute or two until it's fully warmed up (it didn't ever use to do that before)
...and they were still for sale, and marked down ridiculously... I could have gotten a spare for under $300 (-including shipping-!!!) ...I figured "well, thats nice! CRT's are so cheap now, cause everone want's LCDs, silly people! Good to know!" Of course, now, that I likely need to get a new one soonish, they're no longer available anywhere at any price.
Also, since it does 120hz, I also can use it for stereo3D (yes, this is a 12-14 yr. old monitor!) at 2048x1536... (which is BLOODY AWESOME for nvidia 3D-vision gaming, especially since I can turn the brightness -way- up to 100 and solve all the issues with shutter-glasses dimness you see with LCDs)
The worst thing, is that when CRT's were on there way out 4-5 years ago, I looked up the price of a new one (I was thinking of getting another one for my girlfriends computer, but she insisted on a 'flat panel')
*cries*
You have to show you skills. Make a name for yourself. Contribute validly to some projects.
If you're skills ultimately are matter of 'gimp' playing-around? Than you're probably screwed and haven't learned anything real yet.
(Well, unless you want to specialize in photo-editing or graphic-design or some-such... in which case, community college might be your best bet) If you want to be hired as a coder, without the often-times nonsense of formal education, than you have to prove yourself. Contribute to a meaningful opensource project. Be noticed for contributing some code that actually does something (vs. confused bug reports). Real skill is rare enough, and a resume that shows an active participation and contribution to a notable project is probably a better thing that a formal accreditation (from many schools, at least).
MOD PARENT UP! Seriously.
(I was first... lol)
Myself, I generally don't bother to pirate things much... but if anyone pulled that sort of nonsense, I'd be seriously tempted to start downloading crap left and right, and encourage all of my friends to do so as well.
Let's see them kick -everybody- off the internet, and see how that works, hmmm?
The real problem with electric cars is the limited lifetime of the battery. Modern lithium-ion batteries degrade, and are good for maybe 700 charge/discharge cycles. (The initial Hybrids extend this somewhat, IIRC, by avoiding charging above %70 or so (and beneath %30 or so) of design capacity), but the electrodes only have so much 'flux' of absorption/dissipation they can handle, before they begin degrading significantly in performance.
This is one of the real issues with electric cars that's going to bite people in their shiny-metal a**ses sooner than most of them expect. Especially the people who hardhack their hybrids to run fully electric. Replacing those batteries after 4 or 5 years of normal driving is going to be extremely expensive.
Heck, I have the replace the Li batteries in my phone every two years years or so because of this. I'm sure you've noticed it with laptops too... when it was brand new it'd run for four hours on battery, now you're lucky to get two and a half or three. These cars have a -lot- more battery.
Success in propagating a meme isn't necessarily related to it's truth-value, merely to it's value in engendering behavior in others. But the mechanisms of intelligence are involved even there. Appeals to emotion or other assorted well documented fallacies have been well described (by reason). The problem, perhaps, is in some philosophical jig where the word 'reason' (traditionally the most gloried phenomenon of human thought) somehow takes on multiple meanings. ...So what is reason?
Is it logic? The claims (referred to in) this article, would seem to negate a pure aristotelian glory of A implies not B and the like. Thus it would seem to cheapen the idea of those who bother to think logically. It leans towards suggesting that 'reason' is merely a sociological, nay, anthropological phenomenon. A matter of primates beating their chests, albeit with their brains instead of hairy arms.
And this is utter nonsense.
First of all, it denies the fact that fallacy is -necessary- in order to convince another thinking being of a false truth, and then turns around to imply that reason has no truth outside of a group phenomenon.
Obviously, pre-and-up-to-humans evolved language to share ideas. (It's audible telepathy, afterall!) And that was adaptive ..why?
Because a meme, a social construct, a compellingly successful narrative could coordinate collective group behavior in an adaptive manner? Of course.
But however does any argument manage to do such a thing? By presenting a compelling explanation to other individuals that they fail to refute the truth of.
It all comes down to the personal analysis of truth of the part of the recipient of an argument, though. To be crass, we all have personal bullshit detectors. ;) And some worse than others, of course.
But to decry the the fact that false but compelling arguments can be accepted too-readily negelects the very fact that they succeed BECAUSE THEY ARE COMPELLING. That they make a logical and self-consistent sense to the recipient. To the recipients own personal sentience, thought, and reason (however mistaken).
Many people may be ill-educated, worse; evilly-educated into a false set of hot-button moral certitudes (due to the social-darwinisticly-adaptive usefulness of such levers, perhaps, so as to facilitate obedience to certain top-down social hierarchy command structures)...
But it's still the reasoning of their own minds that reaches either accepts or rejects any such rhetorical exercise.
Reason is beautiful. Were it not for man's ability to reason, we'd still be living in caves, at best! Nowadays we use ion-beam lithography to carve out features thousands of times smaller than a single hair on our bodies. Nowadays we know the chemical composition of the outer atmostphere of stars billions of light years away. And how?
From reasoning.
under: "Settings" -> "About phone" -> "Battery use". Perhaps more akin to 'powertop' than 'top', but it shows what share of battery power is being consumed by what applications. It's incredibly easy to spot a resource hog and choose to uninstall or not run it!
;)
In my experience, usually at least %60 of drain is from the display alone (well, %50-ish if you're running an instant messenger in the background).
Why the heck do people complain about the lack of something... that IS ALREADY BUILT IN?!?
Never turn on account sync in the first place. If you -do- have a gmail address, create a separate one just for your phone (since google makes it mandatory to have a gmail/google account to use android, for -some- reason I can't imagine...)
Disable all 'back up my data to google' options in the sub-sub menus.
Problem solved. Your phone won't have any account credentials worth worrying about, outside of through the browser (standard cross-site-scripting exploits, etc) or reasonable apps that ask for no permissions beyond internet (connectbot for ssh, etc)
Biodegradable cellulosic based car parts? I can't wait until I leave my new car out in the rain for two weeks, and fungus starts growing on my bumpers, the same as it grows on the fallen trees next to where I park.
Yikes, you're right! Taking close to %50 on a 3.2Ghz 6-way AMD!
Serious usability issue Regarding the new live code:
;)
I often only have a chance to read slashdot on the weekends (such as during periods of crunch-time at work, etc). And I'd made the habit of always visiting it in the daily view mode to read where I'd left off due to being otherwise busy: i.e.
http://slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=20110125
(To view the stories of jan 25 2011, for example)
Or, say, I missed the first week of december.. and now want to finally get around to skimming back over what I'd missed... It used to be I could immediately jump to the relevant pages of daily postings with ease. This increasingly common trend on so many sites towards nothing more than a linear "Many More" button, with no other option for directly jumping forwards and backwards to some specific point in the past, is so -indescribably- annoying. (Reddit did this 4-5 months or so ago, and I spend far less time there as a result). It's a major loss of power-user functionality to only be able to access the most recent stories (or n-1, n-2, n-...) without being able to jump around arbitrarily in the timeline of previous posts.
PLEASE FIX THIS, or provide similar functionality!!! I'm begging you. Seriously.
Don't take away my previously-missed-slashdot-goodness.
Yours truly, a long and devoted slashdot user, from the days when karma was a number, and not merely excellent
You're confused somewhere.
PLEASE let them involve the ever-redacted-in-all-ways torture photos. Something to make people wake up to the (you would think.. so obvious!) war crimes of the current administrative branch. I say 'current', for it hasn't changed between nominal figureheads.
Personally, I have a bluetooth A2DP (or whatever it is) adapter, that allows my smartphone to play music out to my car stereo. (Newer cars have a direct jack.. in my case, lacking one, I bought a device that listens to bluetooth and transmits FM stereo).. Anyway, 'texting' is illegal in my personal jurisdiction. I've often wondered if someone will try to arrest or fine me for changing the song I'm playing, (as it's coming from my smartphone), compared to the EXACT SAME DISTRACTION I'd experience (if not more) if I were putting a new CD in my stereo. Distraction is surely there. One must merely be careful.
I can verify that GPS works in airplane mode on the N1. I use google earth on flights to see my progress. (Earth pre-caches a low-res globe, enough to tell what part of what state you are in just fine)
Sony Betamax recommends VHS if you're a fan of porn.
My firewall/router/DVR computer is on 24/7 anyway, so I've always just run my own mail server. Any email to delivered directly into my home from the beginning. ;)
It's entirely clear from the press release that they have no intention whatsoever of opensourcing the "feature rich underlying technology" of the "NLE 's core engine".
This is the same sort of thing that Xara tried to pull... using the open source community to add additional power and functionality that all ultimately still depended on a proprietary close-source rendering engine. That went well!
I look for technical software engineering lectures, etc, in a conference. Then again, I'm an engineer and not in management. Give me PHP over PHB any day! ;)
But, seriously, a conference should tend to focus on the greater community... developers -and- management to some extent. The bigger the tent, the more to fill it.
Actually, what would make far more sense... would be to somehow capture the trapped mass, and then eject it violently to change course so as to be able to gently-enough encounter and capture the next piece of mass, and so on. Use the junk as reaction mass to change your velocity...
:)
...perhaps the relative delta-v needed to move from one piece to another (compared to the force one could realistically apply to launching a given intercepted mass) would make it difficult or unviable with current technologies... any thoughts?
:) )
To gain altitude, fire the current junk at an downward angle which also completely cancels out it's orbital momentum, it will then fall directly to earth, and your 'scow' will gain altitude (well, a change in orbital momentum as well due to angle you need to fire it at to cancel out it's own, but you get the idea). To descend, fire it straight up a speed exceeding terminal velocity so as to escape the earth's orbit altogether (here you would have more freedom to also adjust your orbital momentum as you saw fit, by firing it at different angles... also, you could effectively -only- change your orbital momentum by firing it an extreme angle essentially perpendicular to the earth's surface, such that it would still achieve terminal velocity).
All the thing needs is an energy source! (Well, and some serious computation) The reaction mass is already up there!
This then becomes an engineering problem of how to capture and relaunch the individual pieces of junk. First off, I'd imagine you would need a sufficiently low differential in velocity to the target during the intercept/capture phase. (Of course, once again, free reaction mass abounds, as long as you can 'throw' your last captured piece with sufficient energy). Which leads to the second engineering challenge; how to very energetically expel the mass you've just captured in any direction. Well, the direction part isn't hard, gyroscopes and all... but how a machine would grapple and then violently launch an arbitrarily sized and shaped object would be the challenge.
For ferromagnetic debris, I suppose electromagenetic coupling might allow capture, and then perhaps a robotic arm could appropriately position it's center of mass over a 'simple' extremely-high-speed piston?
But, I can't think of any reason this couldn't necessarily work!
(PS: This is still an engineering problem relating to the force you could realistically impart when relauching debris... for even a single atom would be more than sufficient mass if you could launch it at 99.99999999% the speed of light.