First time I've seen a story that doesn't appear on the main/. page but ends up surfacing in the Older Stuff side bar.
I do have to say that I am saddened to see this happen because although Al Jazeera may have been biased on the side of Iraq, it is good to have alternative news sources to get the other side's story from. And despite what many people may whole-heartedly claim, CNN, MSNBC, FOX, NBC, etc all do have a sense of American bias in them. That's besides the fact that half of their reporting is so horrible, it is actually hard to watch sometimes. I've found myself turning off the TV numerous times in response to my disgust for some of the stuff they hack out as "news". Although, I have found the embedded reporter's reports quite interesting, and you can always catch the various briefings, latest field updates, and general news easily enough. But, these agencies spend way to much time on sensationalism, heart-string-picking, etc.
I hope Al Jazeera can get their site back up soon.
Um, actually fresh air intake for the circulating air is not considered a "properly installed heating system". A heating/cooling system that involves taking air from the house and replacing it with air from outside is something quite exotic to tell you the truth (in a normal house anyhow, I think fresh air intakes might be more common on mobile home furnaces). The typical furnace installation simply involves a duct system to collect air from the various rooms of the house, a furnace (and cooling coil) to heat (and cool) the air, and a duct system to redistribute the air to the rooms of the house. That's it, nothing more. The fresh air intake that you may be thinking about is common on higher efficiency furnaces where fresh air is brought in from the outside to be used in the combustion process (thermodynamically, cooler air is better to burn). But fresh air intakes for the air actually circulated around the house are quite rare, at least in the north east, things may be different in other parts of the country.
And may I ask why you didn't sell it to a collector, museum, or otherwise for probably a heck of a lot more money than you paid for it? Assuming it was at some cheap sale, you might have picked it up for a couple hundred bucks or less? I would imagine you could sell that to some enthusiast who is more interested in having an artifact from that era than just looking at it and shooting it for several thousand at least. If I ran across something like that I would have never opened it until I could find its real value, especially in unopened mint condition.
"arbitrary and artificial belief system collides with the reality of human nature"
Ignoring the trolling for the time being...
I think you misunderstand what the poster further up meant, and what is meant by most religious people when they say they feel they have a problem with sexual topics. As for Christianity, I think you will be hard pressed to find a Christian who believes that "God thinks sex is so bad". In fact most people will likely tell you that from their experiences as a Christian, both in reading scripture and engaging in fellowship and discussion with others that God designed sex to be something to be enjoyed. God designed sex to be something to be shared between two people who value each other and want to share their feelings for each other with each other.
Where the problems lie is in the abuse of this enjoyment. Just as someone can have a good taste for well made foods and enjoy eating such foods, one can also be a glutton. They can enjoy eating fine foods and experience the good feelings involved with tasting and eating the food yet refrain from gorging on foods and practically lusting for more and more. But if they indulge themselves beyond a safe limit, this behaviour can descend to the point of practically worshipping the food and living your life with only the purpose of finding more ways of getting and eating that food. At this point there would be a problem.
The same applies to sex. Finding another person that you have such great feelings for that you want to share the enjoyment of sex that God has given humans with is great, and most likely encouraged. God does not want people to live their lives constantly in pain and agony or living every day denying who they are or what they feel, God just wants people to use the gifts/abilities/etc that have been given to people in a meaningful way. Taking the enjoyment of sex and running wild with it, sleeping with different people all the time every day/week/weekend is not using sex in a meaningful way. This is what some people have problems with and what most Christians may mean when they indicate they have problems with sexual issues. They don't want to look pr0n all the time, they just don't have someone who they have deep enough feelings for to share the enjoyment of sex with yet. Or if a couple is already married, they may be running into problems where they feel like they can't share the enjoyment of sex with each other right now, but they want to share the enjoyment of sex with each other. Or perhaps one side of a marriage may be experiencing medical problems while the other still feels deeply for them and wants to share the enjoyment of sex with them.
The issue is not as blind as you make it out to be, and basing your characterization of religion as "blindly accepting superstitious beliefs" on the way humans act as "human nature" is ridiculous. I think if you really believe your argument is valid you will want to read much more scripture relating to the topic you are arguing, otherwise you sound quite absurd.
That's where the power hungry politicians in the University world have it wrong. The students own the network, not the administrators. The students have paid for the network and are paying the administrators to operate the school. I really am quite confused as to who the heck some of these people think they are, implementing measures like this. It would be like hanging from a rope over a gorge and cutting the rope because it's violating copyright law. I have a feeling that once the whole student body catches wind of a P2P crackdown on campus that there will be massive protests and possibly riots. Like the incident at Michigan State University when the University decided to ban alcohol on campus. The whole freaking place went to hell, rioting on campus, cars on fire, etc. I think the reason that we are not hearing more opposition from the people who pay for the networks is probably the same reason that most of the computers that these people use leave port 139 open.
Let the police do their job and RIAA push the police to do a harder job. The university administrators should stay the heck out of it unless there would be legal implications for the university. Afterall, the administrators are there to make the university a better place for the students, not for the RIAA.
Actually, yes, I'm an aerospace engineer, I know all about escape velocities and gravitational binding energy. If you truly understand the math and analysis involved you will realize that again, as I said before, that these are merely approximations in limiting conditions. If the universe exists alone then approximating effects in limiting conditions is not entirely valid (as we {humans} have applied them for the most part thus far). Simply check out the basic aerospace analysis of a parabolic orbit and the approximations should stick out like sore thumbs. If they don't, then you need to take (or take again) several basic calculus classes.
Yeh, but that is only how we look at things here on Earth, within enough of a margin of error, things at infinity, etc, do not matter to us for our purposes and applications. However, if you are looking at this in a purely classical physics matter and on the universal scale, then the momentum caused by the big bang, that is the movement of the universe now, can only continually be proppelled by further explosions. But the explosions have reactants and products, and pretty soon the reactants will run out (I would guess that the source of reactants is not infinite, just as any fuel that we know of is not infinite - whether it be for the Sun or for our cars). This means that further impulses will not occur to continually increase the momentum over infinite time. And, since gravity acts an infinitesmal force at even infinite distances, then in the end, gravity will always overcome the momentum, and the universe will have to crunch back in on itself.
And actually, if you look at it in this way, it sort of makes sense. The universe is just one big oscillating process, the origins of which we have no grasp of yet (through the sciences, the religions have explained this for a while now). But, we can imagine that if we just begin to look at the universe at some random point in time, it is either expanding or contracting. If expanding, a big bang has just occured, and the universe will continue to expand until the energies of expansion run out and the energies of contraction take over (ie Earth analogy: kinetic vs potential energies when throwing an object upwards). Then, when contraction energies take over, the universe will contract and collapse on itself, increasing temperatures, pressures, etc, and the result is another big bang that resets the universe to the original state that we observed it in: expansion. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
This would lead us onto another big question though: where the heck did all this start from? Has the universe just always existed and the absence of a surrounding (in thermo terms) resulted in a process/cycle that has thermo properties that are entirely conservered (constant on the whole). But then, why would the universe exist in the first place? Perhaps our universe is just the surrounding for thermo processes in other dimensions? Who knows. It would be fun to get in a time machine and travel 100, 1000, 10000, 100000, then 1000000 years into the future and see what we have come up with and if we can explain anything any better (although I'm sure we'll have come up with many more details in the mean time, but will we really understand the origins of time and the universe then?).
I think you may be misunderstanding the importance of the insulation. Yes, it is used to insulate the ET so that ice will not form on it, but your solution to 'screwing the insulation' via "make the payload module disposable" is completely inane. We do not want ice forming on the ET because the weight restrictions are quite exact already, and the boosters do not have the ability to lift up the extra weight of the ice (or rather, to the point that we want them to). If we did not insulate the ET, the extra weight of the ice would throw off trajectory calculations, burn points and times, and the overall flight path projections. Simply making the payload disposable will help one thing: it won't matter that much everytime the payload and shuttle crash back into the Earth because the weight calculations were skewed, but I don't think many people would be that happy otherwise.
And the insulation performs another key function in the lift off process. You know what the ET is filled up with? Liquid O2 and liquid H2. You know what the boiling point of liquid O2 and liquid H2 is? A helluva lot lower than the ambient temps in Florida. So, one thing we do to avoid having all of our propellant evaporate while we wait to launch our vehicle is we fill up the ET only right before lift off. We can't have the ET filled up and then sitting in Florida for a couple hours, because half our propellant is gonna be gone by time we get around to the actual launch. The other way we keep the propellant from evaporating is by insulating the ET.
The combination of ice formation and propellant evaporation by simply excluding the insulation because the payload is 'disposable' would ensure that these disposable payloads would never make it into space.
Yeh, but I'm sure Dell wouldn't pay me a 6-figure salary to do the calculations I just did. Their financial people should be able to handle the numbers and make those sorts of corrections. The only question then is whether or not they will or if Dell will simply find the way to report the largest loss figure (for whatever reason).
I also have a 560x and the battery died very quickly after I got it. I haven't bothered looking into getting a replacement or what went wrong because it hardly gets used and mainly just sits plugged into the wall anymore.
Re:But how would they cover the debt....
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[H|Cr]acker Insurance
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Although I do agree with you that whenever someone's systems or networks go down they start throwing around random numbers indicating their losses, it would be pretty easy to calculate the loss to a relative accuracy. Just get all the numbers for the amount of business done during that period using the systems that are down and average to the time period that the systems were down. Say company XYZ does business through a phone system and a website. Say they make $730 dollars a year and that $365 of that come from the phone system and $365 of that comes from the website. Now, say the website goes down for a single normal business day (not some holiday or otherwise, just a random normal day) and that normally their website is up 24/7/365.
Loss = ($365/year)*(1 year/365 days) = $1/day on average
So, they lost $1 for that single day.
Now, for example, let's say that this is the company Dell. From Aug 2, 2001 to Aug 2, 2002 Dell took in revenues equalling $32.054 Billion. So, they bring in ($32.054)/(365) = $0.087819 Billion per day, or $87.819 Million in one day. Now, let's approximate that %50 of that is from various computer networks (kiosks at office stores, home users online, business users online, etc) and %50 is from their phone systems (I really have no idea as I could not find any actual percentages). That means that if Dell's networks all went down for a single day, they would lose $43.910 Million in sales.
The really hard part is estimating how network slow downs effect the business. But then again you could just see what the average expected sales for that day were and then what the actual sales for that day were and find the difference. If you have some data, statistics can handle the rest. But it sure does seem like some of these CEOs pull numbers out of their arses and throw them around to get sympathy or something.:\
Anyone else find it humorous that the Blizzard link in the article links to bnetd.org ? Thought this might just be more PR for Blizzard till I noticed the link:P
But I counted the circles in the Milk Hill formation, they all have 13 circles. I counted several times. From the angle the picture is taken, the circles at the very end of the arms on the farther side of the picture look a lot smaller than the ones that are closer, so you may have skipped them. But, they all have 13 circles. Besides I think if someone was going to go to all the effort to spend their entire night out there making this thing they would pay attention to the details, like fuked up symmetry, missing circles, etc.
Please note before you read this that I am not an environmental nut nor does this comment mean that I am a anti-global warming activist, I am merely a scientist (an engineer more specifically) making an observation.
If the average temperature of the world increased by 1.5 C over a period of time on the order of 10 years I would be freaking scared. The world is extremely fragile in many ways (although quite durable in many others). However, on the grand scale of things if our entire system were to drastically change its temperature like that over such a short period of time, the world would be in chaos (the environment, etc). Imagine if that instead of having a temperature everyday of 98.6 F (37 C) that you had a temperature of 101.3 F everyday (38.5 C)... You would not be a happy camper. Moreover, you would probably die after, at most, a couple months of that.
A 1.5 C change IS a big deal and I wanted to make sure that you don't go throwing around 'negligible' numbers that freakishly large anymore...
Actually, yes I have. I'm not trying to say that all other parks in the world suck, they don't. Heck, if I can get a ride on a roller coaster then I'll take it, I don't care where it is. Other parks have some pretty nice stuff too, even though Cedar Point seems to be striving for the highest/fastest records lately, a good balanced ride can still be just as fun in the long run. But still, Cedar Point is the best and if I had the choice of having an entire park to myself, I would probably choose Cedar Point over any other, as I would suspect most coaster enthusiasts would.
I think the real problem with determining the speed of gravity if indeed it does have a speed is the fact that we can not turn gravity on and off. Some of the first very very very rough measurements of the speed of light were made by a light source standing away from an oberserver and being turned off and on in a way that an algorithm they designed would use the information to tell them the approximate time it took for the light to get to the observer from the source. The problem with gravity is that we can not turn it off and on. Perhaps even like we can with a magnetic field. Just get a wire, run some current through it and use a switch to open/close the circuit. We could then measure the speed of a magnetic field (if it has one). The inability to turn gravity off and on is the key inhibitor to any substantial calculations on its part. And, I'm sure that when we can turn gravity off and on we really won't care that much anymore about trying to determine how fast it travels:) (although we probably will have already).
As a result of the recent successful hovering flights of the M400 Skycar, Moller International is once again accepting $5,000 deposits to secure delivery positions for our M400 Skycar. Your deposit is entirely refundable and will bear interest at an annual interest rate of 5%
Woa, 5%! That is better than you can get sticking your money in a Money Market account at the bank. Plus, the deposit is fully refundable! I gotta do this.
Did you even read the article, listen to Rawlsky on the NPR interview, or read that guy's accounts of what happened? He's not being a whiny bastard, he just wanted to report what happened because it was rather odd. He reported it to the police because someone made threats on his life, if you think that's being a wuss then you have problems. I hope you get taken out whenever someone makes a threat on your life because you thought it would be wussy to report it to the police. And in case you didn't realize, Rawlsky is not stopping his spamming - ie he did NOT "He got the message." - he has no fvcking clue what the message even is. When someone is messing with so many people's lives this way (ie not everyone just uses their email to send out the latest pr0n pics to their buds *cough* - some actually use it to conduct real business and make business deals, like me) then there are no limits short of physically harming the guy. It seems like you have no idea what it's like losing contracts or sales because some emails were discarded with the hundreds of spams received every week. Filtering software only goes so far, in the end you have to wade through this shit by hand.
Probably a million people will sound the same on the phone, but if you listen to the phone call threats and Rawlsky's interview on NPR, they sound very similar. Although, I would think that Rawlsky wouldn't risk making threats at some guy just taking pictures, considering he gets death threats, etc. I find it funny too when NPR asks Rawlsky about blind relays and he responds with "no comment". If he wasn't using them he would condemn them as pollution and a problem in the email world, right? Because anyone can see the problem with leaving a blind relay completely open. Yet, he says "no comment" - pretty obvious he uses them (unless he has no idea what they are, which I find hard to believe). I don't feel sorry for this guy receiving death threats or being harassed every day. He does it to millions of people every day, and I doubt that when you want to be removed that he takes you off his list - what's his incentive? As far as I can tell, there are no "Do Not Email List" laws in the US, although some laws restricting the sending of some types of spam. The only miniscule incentive that exists is that it would give him some legitimacy as a marketer rather than some ass just sending bulk email - although, I think he has proably lost any chances at legitimacy already. I don't wish this guy any physical harm, but by all means, harass him to the end of time. (PS - You think he could afford a little more property rather than shoving his million dollar house right between two other houses with a couple feet on each side, sheesh!)
Woa, that's really weird. Disney owns ABC, makes (er copies) tons of movies every year, releases so many old movies every year from the "Disney vaults", owns and operates several multi-million (billion on some?) theme parks and recreation centers, etc, etc, etc... and yet EA can somehow get to their reaches by producing video games? Ming boggling. Yes, I did not read the article.
Why wait?
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War of Honor
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Personally, I'm baffled as to why anyone waits for a book they may want to come out in paperback. For something along the lines of a $25 hard cover book, the paperback version may be, at best, $15. You save a couple bucks but have to wait a long time until the initial hype and/or sales are done with before they start getting paperback versions out. I actually just go straight for the hard cover whenever I buy any book that is more than a hundred or so pages because it feels better when I'm reading it. There is some structure to the book, the pages don't get all messed up as easily, a good hard cover feels great to read by a fire or on some cold rainy day.
Does anyone else notice that Lindows is trying to get around the "free" idea of the GPL by citing the section that states:
"You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee."
And then proceding to charge you the entire retail cost for the product (that you would normally have to pay in order to get the full package with support and everything)? Everytime you end up at some FAQ or help portion of their site talking about the GPL, they always refer you to the page that sells the "Insider" version of Lindows for a $299 membership fee. Unless there is someplace buried further down in their site where you can download Lindows, I see them as ruining the idea of having the software freely available. I can't hardly imagine that it costs them $299 for the bandwidth you use to download Lindows, or the $129 at the regular retail subscription page.
Where is the page to order and download a $5 version in order to pay their bandwidth and server upkeep costs? I don't see it. Where is the page to order just the CDs for $10/$15? I don't see it.
Some people can stand voting with their wallet because they do not absolutely require the cell phone service. However, many others do. So, just change your service often - forcing the sales representatives to give you good introductory rates but without a long term service contract. If you can get one of them to give you cheap rates for half a year and then standard rates for another half a year on a one year contract, then take it and cancel the service afterwards. Repeat. Not only does this get you repeating good rates, but it contributes to the service cancelation numbers for the companies to possibly motivate them to provide better service.
Funny thing to note that most of these bastage companies are just ripping you off even more: Where I live, we need to make a lot of cell phone calls from a certain area just South of town, but we can never seem to get good service there. So after switching providers a couple times and figuring out that none of them will give us good reception down there, we start looking at coverage maps for the cell phone companies in our area. Guess what, they all look exactly the freaking same. Not only do they all use the same towers, but a lot of them even use the same equipment, they just portion their usage off with each other. So, the only thing you are usually paying for is how much less of an a$$ one company will be to you over another company.
Slashdot Mirror
First time I've seen a story that doesn't appear on the main
I do have to say that I am saddened to see this happen because although Al Jazeera may have been biased on the side of Iraq, it is good to have alternative news sources to get the other side's story from. And despite what many people may whole-heartedly claim, CNN, MSNBC, FOX, NBC, etc all do have a sense of American bias in them. That's besides the fact that half of their reporting is so horrible, it is actually hard to watch sometimes. I've found myself turning off the TV numerous times in response to my disgust for some of the stuff they hack out as "news". Although, I have found the embedded reporter's reports quite interesting, and you can always catch the various briefings, latest field updates, and general news easily enough. But, these agencies spend way to much time on sensationalism, heart-string-picking, etc.
I hope Al Jazeera can get their site back up soon.
Um, actually fresh air intake for the circulating air is not considered a "properly installed heating system". A heating/cooling system that involves taking air from the house and replacing it with air from outside is something quite exotic to tell you the truth (in a normal house anyhow, I think fresh air intakes might be more common on mobile home furnaces). The typical furnace installation simply involves a duct system to collect air from the various rooms of the house, a furnace (and cooling coil) to heat (and cool) the air, and a duct system to redistribute the air to the rooms of the house. That's it, nothing more. The fresh air intake that you may be thinking about is common on higher efficiency furnaces where fresh air is brought in from the outside to be used in the combustion process (thermodynamically, cooler air is better to burn). But fresh air intakes for the air actually circulated around the house are quite rare, at least in the north east, things may be different in other parts of the country.
And may I ask why you didn't sell it to a collector, museum, or otherwise for probably a heck of a lot more money than you paid for it? Assuming it was at some cheap sale, you might have picked it up for a couple hundred bucks or less? I would imagine you could sell that to some enthusiast who is more interested in having an artifact from that era than just looking at it and shooting it for several thousand at least. If I ran across something like that I would have never opened it until I could find its real value, especially in unopened mint condition.
"arbitrary and artificial belief system collides with the reality of human nature"
Ignoring the trolling for the time being...
I think you misunderstand what the poster further up meant, and what is meant by most religious people when they say they feel they have a problem with sexual topics. As for Christianity, I think you will be hard pressed to find a Christian who believes that "God thinks sex is so bad". In fact most people will likely tell you that from their experiences as a Christian, both in reading scripture and engaging in fellowship and discussion with others that God designed sex to be something to be enjoyed. God designed sex to be something to be shared between two people who value each other and want to share their feelings for each other with each other.
Where the problems lie is in the abuse of this enjoyment. Just as someone can have a good taste for well made foods and enjoy eating such foods, one can also be a glutton. They can enjoy eating fine foods and experience the good feelings involved with tasting and eating the food yet refrain from gorging on foods and practically lusting for more and more. But if they indulge themselves beyond a safe limit, this behaviour can descend to the point of practically worshipping the food and living your life with only the purpose of finding more ways of getting and eating that food. At this point there would be a problem.
The same applies to sex. Finding another person that you have such great feelings for that you want to share the enjoyment of sex that God has given humans with is great, and most likely encouraged. God does not want people to live their lives constantly in pain and agony or living every day denying who they are or what they feel, God just wants people to use the gifts/abilities/etc that have been given to people in a meaningful way. Taking the enjoyment of sex and running wild with it, sleeping with different people all the time every day/week/weekend is not using sex in a meaningful way. This is what some people have problems with and what most Christians may mean when they indicate they have problems with sexual issues. They don't want to look pr0n all the time, they just don't have someone who they have deep enough feelings for to share the enjoyment of sex with yet. Or if a couple is already married, they may be running into problems where they feel like they can't share the enjoyment of sex with each other right now, but they want to share the enjoyment of sex with each other. Or perhaps one side of a marriage may be experiencing medical problems while the other still feels deeply for them and wants to share the enjoyment of sex with them.
The issue is not as blind as you make it out to be, and basing your characterization of religion as "blindly accepting superstitious beliefs" on the way humans act as "human nature" is ridiculous. I think if you really believe your argument is valid you will want to read much more scripture relating to the topic you are arguing, otherwise you sound quite absurd.
That's where the power hungry politicians in the University world have it wrong. The students own the network, not the administrators. The students have paid for the network and are paying the administrators to operate the school. I really am quite confused as to who the heck some of these people think they are, implementing measures like this. It would be like hanging from a rope over a gorge and cutting the rope because it's violating copyright law. I have a feeling that once the whole student body catches wind of a P2P crackdown on campus that there will be massive protests and possibly riots. Like the incident at Michigan State University when the University decided to ban alcohol on campus. The whole freaking place went to hell, rioting on campus, cars on fire, etc. I think the reason that we are not hearing more opposition from the people who pay for the networks is probably the same reason that most of the computers that these people use leave port 139 open.
Let the police do their job and RIAA push the police to do a harder job. The university administrators should stay the heck out of it unless there would be legal implications for the university. Afterall, the administrators are there to make the university a better place for the students, not for the RIAA.
Actually, yes, I'm an aerospace engineer, I know all about escape velocities and gravitational binding energy. If you truly understand the math and analysis involved you will realize that again, as I said before, that these are merely approximations in limiting conditions. If the universe exists alone then approximating effects in limiting conditions is not entirely valid (as we {humans} have applied them for the most part thus far). Simply check out the basic aerospace analysis of a parabolic orbit and the approximations should stick out like sore thumbs. If they don't, then you need to take (or take again) several basic calculus classes.
Yeh, but that is only how we look at things here on Earth, within enough of a margin of error, things at infinity, etc, do not matter to us for our purposes and applications. However, if you are looking at this in a purely classical physics matter and on the universal scale, then the momentum caused by the big bang, that is the movement of the universe now, can only continually be proppelled by further explosions. But the explosions have reactants and products, and pretty soon the reactants will run out (I would guess that the source of reactants is not infinite, just as any fuel that we know of is not infinite - whether it be for the Sun or for our cars). This means that further impulses will not occur to continually increase the momentum over infinite time. And, since gravity acts an infinitesmal force at even infinite distances, then in the end, gravity will always overcome the momentum, and the universe will have to crunch back in on itself.
And actually, if you look at it in this way, it sort of makes sense. The universe is just one big oscillating process, the origins of which we have no grasp of yet (through the sciences, the religions have explained this for a while now). But, we can imagine that if we just begin to look at the universe at some random point in time, it is either expanding or contracting. If expanding, a big bang has just occured, and the universe will continue to expand until the energies of expansion run out and the energies of contraction take over (ie Earth analogy: kinetic vs potential energies when throwing an object upwards). Then, when contraction energies take over, the universe will contract and collapse on itself, increasing temperatures, pressures, etc, and the result is another big bang that resets the universe to the original state that we observed it in: expansion. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
This would lead us onto another big question though: where the heck did all this start from? Has the universe just always existed and the absence of a surrounding (in thermo terms) resulted in a process/cycle that has thermo properties that are entirely conservered (constant on the whole). But then, why would the universe exist in the first place? Perhaps our universe is just the surrounding for thermo processes in other dimensions? Who knows. It would be fun to get in a time machine and travel 100, 1000, 10000, 100000, then 1000000 years into the future and see what we have come up with and if we can explain anything any better (although I'm sure we'll have come up with many more details in the mean time, but will we really understand the origins of time and the universe then?).
I think you may be misunderstanding the importance of the insulation. Yes, it is used to insulate the ET so that ice will not form on it, but your solution to 'screwing the insulation' via "make the payload module disposable" is completely inane. We do not want ice forming on the ET because the weight restrictions are quite exact already, and the boosters do not have the ability to lift up the extra weight of the ice (or rather, to the point that we want them to). If we did not insulate the ET, the extra weight of the ice would throw off trajectory calculations, burn points and times, and the overall flight path projections. Simply making the payload disposable will help one thing: it won't matter that much everytime the payload and shuttle crash back into the Earth because the weight calculations were skewed, but I don't think many people would be that happy otherwise.
And the insulation performs another key function in the lift off process. You know what the ET is filled up with? Liquid O2 and liquid H2. You know what the boiling point of liquid O2 and liquid H2 is? A helluva lot lower than the ambient temps in Florida. So, one thing we do to avoid having all of our propellant evaporate while we wait to launch our vehicle is we fill up the ET only right before lift off. We can't have the ET filled up and then sitting in Florida for a couple hours, because half our propellant is gonna be gone by time we get around to the actual launch. The other way we keep the propellant from evaporating is by insulating the ET.
The combination of ice formation and propellant evaporation by simply excluding the insulation because the payload is 'disposable' would ensure that these disposable payloads would never make it into space.
Yeh, but I'm sure Dell wouldn't pay me a 6-figure salary to do the calculations I just did. Their financial people should be able to handle the numbers and make those sorts of corrections. The only question then is whether or not they will or if Dell will simply find the way to report the largest loss figure (for whatever reason).
I also have a 560x and the battery died very quickly after I got it. I haven't bothered looking into getting a replacement or what went wrong because it hardly gets used and mainly just sits plugged into the wall anymore.
Although I do agree with you that whenever someone's systems or networks go down they start throwing around random numbers indicating their losses, it would be pretty easy to calculate the loss to a relative accuracy. Just get all the numbers for the amount of business done during that period using the systems that are down and average to the time period that the systems were down. Say company XYZ does business through a phone system and a website. Say they make $730 dollars a year and that $365 of that come from the phone system and $365 of that comes from the website. Now, say the website goes down for a single normal business day (not some holiday or otherwise, just a random normal day) and that normally their website is up 24/7/365.
Loss = ($365/year)*(1 year/365 days) = $1/day on average So, they lost $1 for that single day.
Now, for example, let's say that this is the company Dell. From Aug 2, 2001 to Aug 2, 2002 Dell took in revenues equalling $32.054 Billion. So, they bring in ($32.054)/(365) = $0.087819 Billion per day, or $87.819 Million in one day. Now, let's approximate that %50 of that is from various computer networks (kiosks at office stores, home users online, business users online, etc) and %50 is from their phone systems (I really have no idea as I could not find any actual percentages). That means that if Dell's networks all went down for a single day, they would lose $43.910 Million in sales.
The really hard part is estimating how network slow downs effect the business. But then again you could just see what the average expected sales for that day were and then what the actual sales for that day were and find the difference. If you have some data, statistics can handle the rest. But it sure does seem like some of these CEOs pull numbers out of their arses and throw them around to get sympathy or something.
Anyone else find it humorous that the Blizzard link in the article links to bnetd.org ? Thought this might just be more PR for Blizzard till I noticed the link
But I counted the circles in the Milk Hill formation, they all have 13 circles. I counted several times. From the angle the picture is taken, the circles at the very end of the arms on the farther side of the picture look a lot smaller than the ones that are closer, so you may have skipped them. But, they all have 13 circles. Besides I think if someone was going to go to all the effort to spend their entire night out there making this thing they would pay attention to the details, like fuked up symmetry, missing circles, etc.
Please note before you read this that I am not an environmental nut nor does this comment mean that I am a anti-global warming activist, I am merely a scientist (an engineer more specifically) making an observation.
If the average temperature of the world increased by 1.5 C over a period of time on the order of 10 years I would be freaking scared. The world is extremely fragile in many ways (although quite durable in many others). However, on the grand scale of things if our entire system were to drastically change its temperature like that over such a short period of time, the world would be in chaos (the environment, etc). Imagine if that instead of having a temperature everyday of 98.6 F (37 C) that you had a temperature of 101.3 F everyday (38.5 C)... You would not be a happy camper. Moreover, you would probably die after, at most, a couple months of that.
A 1.5 C change IS a big deal and I wanted to make sure that you don't go throwing around 'negligible' numbers that freakishly large anymore...
Actually, yes I have. I'm not trying to say that all other parks in the world suck, they don't. Heck, if I can get a ride on a roller coaster then I'll take it, I don't care where it is. Other parks have some pretty nice stuff too, even though Cedar Point seems to be striving for the highest/fastest records lately, a good balanced ride can still be just as fun in the long run. But still, Cedar Point is the best and if I had the choice of having an entire park to myself, I would probably choose Cedar Point over any other, as I would suspect most coaster enthusiasts would.
I think the real problem with determining the speed of gravity if indeed it does have a speed is the fact that we can not turn gravity on and off. Some of the first very very very rough measurements of the speed of light were made by a light source standing away from an oberserver and being turned off and on in a way that an algorithm they designed would use the information to tell them the approximate time it took for the light to get to the observer from the source. The problem with gravity is that we can not turn it off and on. Perhaps even like we can with a magnetic field. Just get a wire, run some current through it and use a switch to open/close the circuit. We could then measure the speed of a magnetic field (if it has one). The inability to turn gravity off and on is the key inhibitor to any substantial calculations on its part. And, I'm sure that when we can turn gravity off and on we really won't care that much anymore about trying to determine how fast it travels
Truly an awesome coaster park, one of the best, if not the best, coaster park in the country.
Correction: the best coaster park in the world.
Under the Purchase Skycar link, they say this:
As a result of the recent successful hovering flights of the M400 Skycar, Moller International is once again accepting $5,000 deposits to secure delivery positions for our M400 Skycar. Your deposit is entirely refundable and will bear interest at an annual interest rate of 5%
Woa, 5%! That is better than you can get sticking your money in a Money Market account at the bank. Plus, the deposit is fully refundable! I gotta do this.
Did you even read the article, listen to Rawlsky on the NPR interview, or read that guy's accounts of what happened? He's not being a whiny bastard, he just wanted to report what happened because it was rather odd. He reported it to the police because someone made threats on his life, if you think that's being a wuss then you have problems. I hope you get taken out whenever someone makes a threat on your life because you thought it would be wussy to report it to the police. And in case you didn't realize, Rawlsky is not stopping his spamming - ie he did NOT "He got the message." - he has no fvcking clue what the message even is. When someone is messing with so many people's lives this way (ie not everyone just uses their email to send out the latest pr0n pics to their buds *cough* - some actually use it to conduct real business and make business deals, like me) then there are no limits short of physically harming the guy. It seems like you have no idea what it's like losing contracts or sales because some emails were discarded with the hundreds of spams received every week. Filtering software only goes so far, in the end you have to wade through this shit by hand.
Probably a million people will sound the same on the phone, but if you listen to the phone call threats and Rawlsky's interview on NPR, they sound very similar. Although, I would think that Rawlsky wouldn't risk making threats at some guy just taking pictures, considering he gets death threats, etc. I find it funny too when NPR asks Rawlsky about blind relays and he responds with "no comment". If he wasn't using them he would condemn them as pollution and a problem in the email world, right? Because anyone can see the problem with leaving a blind relay completely open. Yet, he says "no comment" - pretty obvious he uses them (unless he has no idea what they are, which I find hard to believe). I don't feel sorry for this guy receiving death threats or being harassed every day. He does it to millions of people every day, and I doubt that when you want to be removed that he takes you off his list - what's his incentive? As far as I can tell, there are no "Do Not Email List" laws in the US, although some laws restricting the sending of some types of spam. The only miniscule incentive that exists is that it would give him some legitimacy as a marketer rather than some ass just sending bulk email - although, I think he has proably lost any chances at legitimacy already. I don't wish this guy any physical harm, but by all means, harass him to the end of time. (PS - You think he could afford a little more property rather than shoving his million dollar house right between two other houses with a couple feet on each side, sheesh!)
Woa, that's really weird. Disney owns ABC, makes (er copies) tons of movies every year, releases so many old movies every year from the "Disney vaults", owns and operates several multi-million (billion on some?) theme parks and recreation centers, etc, etc, etc
Personally, I'm baffled as to why anyone waits for a book they may want to come out in paperback. For something along the lines of a $25 hard cover book, the paperback version may be, at best, $15. You save a couple bucks but have to wait a long time until the initial hype and/or sales are done with before they start getting paperback versions out. I actually just go straight for the hard cover whenever I buy any book that is more than a hundred or so pages because it feels better when I'm reading it. There is some structure to the book, the pages don't get all messed up as easily, a good hard cover feels great to read by a fire or on some cold rainy day.
Reminded me of Foxtrot:
Link
Does anyone else notice that Lindows is trying to get around the "free" idea of the GPL by citing the section that states:
"You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee."
And then proceding to charge you the entire retail cost for the product (that you would normally have to pay in order to get the full package with support and everything)? Everytime you end up at some FAQ or help portion of their site talking about the GPL, they always refer you to the page that sells the "Insider" version of Lindows for a $299 membership fee. Unless there is someplace buried further down in their site where you can download Lindows, I see them as ruining the idea of having the software freely available. I can't hardly imagine that it costs them $299 for the bandwidth you use to download Lindows, or the $129 at the regular retail subscription page.
Where is the page to order and download a $5 version in order to pay their bandwidth and server upkeep costs? I don't see it. Where is the page to order just the CDs for $10/$15? I don't see it.
Some people can stand voting with their wallet because they do not absolutely require the cell phone service. However, many others do. So, just change your service often - forcing the sales representatives to give you good introductory rates but without a long term service contract. If you can get one of them to give you cheap rates for half a year and then standard rates for another half a year on a one year contract, then take it and cancel the service afterwards. Repeat. Not only does this get you repeating good rates, but it contributes to the service cancelation numbers for the companies to possibly motivate them to provide better service.
Funny thing to note that most of these bastage companies are just ripping you off even more: Where I live, we need to make a lot of cell phone calls from a certain area just South of town, but we can never seem to get good service there. So after switching providers a couple times and figuring out that none of them will give us good reception down there, we start looking at coverage maps for the cell phone companies in our area. Guess what, they all look exactly the freaking same. Not only do they all use the same towers, but a lot of them even use the same equipment, they just portion their usage off with each other. So, the only thing you are usually paying for is how much less of an a$$ one company will be to you over another company.