You miss the point; the tip would not be travelling relative to the Earth's rotation at its closest approach. It would appear approach the atmosphere almost vertically slowing to a stop then slowly recede again. Not like hitting a moving bullet, more like grabbing the hand-strap on the subway.
It could even dip a little into the upper atmosphere without a huge momentum loss due to friction since it wouldn't be moving at a high speed relative to the atmosphere. This would be an engineering trade off between replenishing its momentum versus the ease of getting up to it to attach. Each lift will deplete momentum, but each de-orbit will replenish. Solar arrays at the hub could generate electricity that electrify the tethers at key times to get orbital and momentum boosts periodically from the Earth's magnetic field. If we got serious about mining the Moon and Asteroids then the influx of de-orbiting material could provide plenty of excess lift power.
Why this obsession with a full blown "Space Elevator" when there is so much that can be done in the interim with tethers? Rotavators would require significantly less demanding materials and only require getting above atmosphere like SpaceShip One did recently. Then clamp on and ride the rest of the way to full orbital velocity (the tip would appear to hover briefly in sync with the Earth's rotation just above the atmosphere).
There are obviously gray areas between public and private speech, I'm sure the courts hear them all the time. By current legal standards blogs are certainly considered public speech, but that doesn't mean certain organizations couldn't be restricted from trolling in them, specifically Government organizations of various types. The School System has no business ferreting out what every student is up to or said in public outside of school -- HOWEVER the internet has given them a new powerful tool to do so.
I've little pity for those who might fall afoul of the Law based on information obtained in public sources on the net, but each Government organization should have a clear and publicly posted policy on how and why it is collecting personal information on the web. Failure to do so should preclude said agency from being able to use such information for other than informing police of clear ongoing criminal activity.
We likely don't know all the facts to this story, things can sound very clear cut depending on how you synopsize them, however I think blogs will eventually have to be considered as something between public and private. Various organizations will have to be banned from acting based on any information obtained from them -- perhaps even banned from actively searching them out without legal cause.
Odd how these threats to basic rights seem to come from the Left and the Right equally. Nobody in the extreme can ever stand dissenting opinion.
Having just gotten back from China I can tell you that ANYTHING you want on DVD is available for a BUCK. High Quality packaging and everything with FBI warnings and disclaimers in place. They use to just make VCDs that everyone had players for, then they went to DVD-5 and compressed the quality of some movies a bit. Now they rip full DVD-9 and market it as DVD-9 or HDVD. The "Broke Back Mountain" rip I saw (my wife made me watch it with her, BTW BORING!) had the "For Academy Viewing Only" disclaimer scroll across the screen about 3 times, but he quality was great. In Guangzhou lot of people have 50+ inch plasma Hi-Def TVs. I'm sure they will pirate Blu-Ray when it comes out. I saw lots of PSPs in use while I was there.
I was sorely tempted to snap up DVDs for bootlegging before coming back home but resisted.
I'm not sure I have much of a point other than piracy is here to stay in China. Copy-protection won't matter one wit because it is done by professionals with the equipment to do it right, and it is so firmly a part of the society I don't know anyway you could stop it if you really tried. I for one like the fact that if things become too draconian here stateside I always have a source that can hook me up in the East.
So to make an analogy, I should prefer buildings that are built that allow no inspections while being built or even after construction is completed, to buildings that are free to be inspected. Which would you trust to live in?
I can't help but wonder if this was mistake or an intentional attempt to boost HD-DVD sales by someone for stock reasons or something. The HD-DVD camp has been very shrill in decrying Blu-Ray the Beta of the new millennia, despite Blu-Ray's larger coalition of partners than its rival this time around and Blu-Ray's much larger storage (storage being a HUGE factor in Beta's demise). Beta did come out first, so the fit with HD-DVD is the more like Beta. HD-DVD is trying to claim a 2 month head start is insurmountable for Sony and Blu-Ray, but Beta had a least a year's head start on VHS.
I haven't seen any HD-DVD recorders yet. Do the HD-DVD notebooks have recorders or just players? Sony VIAO will come out with a read/write Blu-Ray in June I believe. If Blu-Ray is first with recorders that is the real race and death knell for HD-DVD.
Given the FUD form the HD-DVD camp I think they know that come June it is essentially all over for them. They will unload a few more players at or below cost. Brag about being first to market. then give up shortly after Christmas.
I hope this was intended funny --or-- OMG you are ignorant. Cell phones work on planes without a transponder or re-transmitter on the plane. You just are discouraged from using the cell phone while it is in flight. I used my cell phone just last week from inside a plane on the ground. Now it might be at certain altitudes and great distances from city center a cell phone wouldn't connect, but when a hijacking is in progress nobody is going to think "Oh, I can't use my cell phone, it's against FAA rules." They will just flip open and try, and if close enough to a cell tower(s) it will work.
This is exactly what I'm talking about with wish fulfillment. You assume you know something about how something works then assume it is an inviolate law of the universe, which completely upholds and supports your position, but mostly because it is what you want to believe. Perhaps the cell phones had poor connections or experienced frequent drop outs, but work they did. No doubt you will fire back with some other half backed urban nonsense to prove me wrong. But I won't bother responding to what would be a pointless debate the likes of which I've had dozens of other times with conspiracy nuts who believe in things like: crop circle (alien origin), Face on Mars, Faked Moon landings, and Creationism.
OK, forget all the crap about flight angles and "how hard" it would be for an amateur to fly Flight 77 into the pentagon, and it must have been a missile instead. Where then did Flight 77 go? It crashed elsewhere and the government was able to cover it up? It was landed safely and all the people "disappeared"?
Jeez, people with cell phones on Flight 93 called loved ones to tell them that terrorists were in control of their plane. Was it a mix of government directed missiles and terrorists simultaneously causing all this havoc? Get real people. Believing the US government had a hand in this is just "wish fulfillment" and is why conspiracy people grasp at any seeming inconsistency they can imagine. That anyone other than the US government could perpetrate such acts invalidates one of the most cherished beliefs on the very far left: that the US is the only and ultimate evil in the world. I am not defending our government in all cases; just pointing out it does have legitimate concerns about external threats, threats we had become too complacent about before 9/11, even if now the pendulum has swung too far the other way.
You can only find a "link", not a "missing link." Once found it is no longer missing.
In much the same way as a hot water heater is unneeded since hot water is already hot. /attempted humor
A sad day -- I would have to say Solaris has always stuck with me from when I first read it over 30 years ago in my teens -- it was the first time I really thought about questions like what it means to be alive and human, what is thought, and what is free will. Neither film really did it justice, though at least the Soviet version didn't "Hollywoodize" it. I just didn't get the reason for the minutes and minutes of nothing but travel on Japanese tunnel roadway systems as the protagonist travels to the launch site in the Soviet version. A Russian friend told me it just looked very High Tech to Russians at the time.
What a circuitous way to say that the Cosmic Ray and Solar Activity exposure of Space is bad for you. Scientific American had an in depth article on this just a month or two ago. As it turns out we have no really good ideas about how to adequately shield the human body from radiation in space and the problem only gets worse once you leave what little protection the Earth's magnetic shield provides. And before you suggest Magnetic Shielding or Material Shielding or Electrostatic Shielding, they crunched the numbers on all these things and the results were depressing. You can shield with a high enough Magnetic Field, but the Teslas involved are so high as to be worse that the radiation your trying to shield from (Earth's shield is effective because of size). Physical shielding requires a Meter or more of water all around (impractical because of weight). Etc., ect... We've made NO progress on really effective anti radiation measures in space. There are only coping strategies, so if you want to go to Mars just be prepared to give up 10-15 years off your expected life time on average or at
best an early onset of senile dementia because you WILL loose quite a few neurons to radiation to realize your dreams of bounding around on Mars.
As a child I had been wildly enthusiastic about manned space flight or even becoming an astronaut myself some day. The fact that my 11th birthday coincided with the Apollo 11 Moon landing probably has something to do with this (I'll let you do the math to figure out my age). Anyway we've spent over 3 decades going basically nowhere and as it turns out space is a really hazardous place to stay for long periods of time. So while I'm still very much pro space exploration it is time to hand the baton to robots. Insisting that Man can do some things better is probably only true for the short term anyway. Better to embrace our robotic assisted lives by using the space program as a driving program to accelerate robotics instead of as a meat grinder for human flesh.
What NASA should REALLY focus on are sample return missions. That is where the real big bang for scientific buck will come.
Assuming Mars would swamp whatever light bands you would use, simply place a transmitter/receiver repeater sufficiently far enough from Mars so as to be able to resolve the light source as distinct. This could be done with a high polar orbit that always is 90 degrees Sun-ward, or perhaps better yet a pair of halo orbit repeaters to serve both the Sun-ward Side and dark side so all of Mars in in constant communication 24/7. If these orbits prove inadequate to be resolvable from Earth then put a repeater at one of the 5 Lagrange points of mars.
I would speculate there is another factor at work here that drives Studios to strive for huge opening numbers,
they get a larger percentage of the take, sometimes as much as 100% the first week or two. I think The X-Files movie was the first to introduce the 100% opening take strategy. I remember the theater owners being none too happy about it, some refusing to exhibit The X-Files. When you have to sit through 30 minutes of commercials at the Cinema you can thank the makers of The X-Files movie to some degree, as Theaters are really struggling to make up for the lost ticket revenue on premiers.
Personally I'm hoping for as many of these screw ups on the manufacturer's part as possible. I'm also hoping that HD-DVD comes to market soon enough before Blu-Ray that the outrage over incompatibility issues causes the Blu-Ray group to ratchet down their DRM stuff a bit. DRM is now a major obstacle to coming out with new consumer gear, and mark my words even the approved compatible products will break in industry unexpected ways. The buying public will not tolerate equipment that is as crash prone and glitchy as PCs are.
Ironically all these attempts to lock down HD-DVD and Blu-Ray to thwart piracy will probably accelerate piracy as people who have been buying EXPENSIVE HIGH END gear will feel little remorse in resorting to pirated material to display on their setups. The industry is fooling itself if it thinks it can keep real pirates from cracking their content by whatever method, when there will be such a huge demand from the installed based of early adopters.
It won't happen, but I would love to see legislation that forbids intentionally crippling products or creating some artificial market segmentation to insure some business model. Maybe when the HD-DVD Blu-Ray debacle really begins will we some come modification to the really bad legislation that is the DMCA. At least they are considering really spanking people the put Root-Kits in products. Maybe we need the CRMA (consumers rights millennium act) to balance some of this madness.
There have been a number of discoveries recently about how to generate neutrons from fusion albeit at a large energy loss.
What I'm wondering is whether this could be used to create a hybrid device that blast fissionable material with reaction initiating neutrons, rather than balance the fissionable material on the knife's edge of criticality. If so then fission reaction would stop immediately upon loss of initiating neutrons from the fusion source and you have a much safer nuclear reactor design. Could this also be used to burn our existing stockpiles of waste, and if not practical with these neutron sources, could future more efficient fusion reactors be used to extract additional energy from nuclear waste while consuming and disposing of it at the same time?
But as wikipedia shows this problem had been essentially resolved since
the early 90's, though I'm sure I been hearing that this problem is "Finally Solved" every year or two and has been since the early 70's.
Researchers will continue to refine their understanding of the process and claim to finally or fully understand the problem at last.
Some, mostly religious types, will claim scientists don't understand the process because there was some mystery at some point a few decades ago. It seems every few years we get similar pronouncements about the trajectory of a thrown baseball.
While Bee flight does little to disprove ID, ID proponents do frequently use examples like bee flight to bolster their ID arguments regardless of what the current scientific consensus is. Urban legends and wives tales do not die easily.
This is solvable problem with the right equipment as longs as you know what final FPS you want when you do the shoot. Also assuming someone makes affordable equipment that can do the pull-down/pull-up as needed. Even after the fact I suspect 60fps could be made to be 24fps or 30fps simulated with appropriate signal processing which combines frames rather than just dropping them to produce a sync. Whether the industry has such equipment yet I wouldn't know, only that I see no theoretical reason this shouldn't be doable, even trivial. Of course until 60fps production is common the issues are moot and the exotic equipment needed to get the "right look" will be unavailable at any price.
My point is that 60fps will open more options to filmmakers not less, though it may take some years and experimenting for filmmakers to get all the tools needed for the look they wish to produce.
You're right that these things tend to be subjective, but I have a NEC 1350 that can do 2500x2000 Progressive (8' wide screen). I have experimented with a variety of resolutions. I have never noticed a real difference between 1080I and 1080P on stuff converted from 24fps Film (which is almost everything) despite the second poster's comments about 3:2 pulldown. 720P is only slightly above DVD in visual quality (at least from film). This is odd, because I see a noticeable bump in spatial quality from 720 to 1080. This maybe due however to the fact that my computer based homebrew system does a really good job of upconverting DVD with a lot of signal processing tricks that create what could be termed artificial detail. When your display resolution is greater than your source resolution you actually get to see the details that are obscured by pixel and scan artifacts (assuming the extrapolation/image-processing is decent).
I take in IMAX whenever I'm up to Navy Pier in Chicago and I have never said, "oh this would be much better if it looked less fluid." Sony would be smart to get the IMAX catalog quickly available to really distinguish themselves from HD-DVD, and make sure they use the highest bit-rates possible for highest quality 1080P they can achieve. This is the type of move that wins over the videophile early adopters.
Filmmakers will adapt to be sure to high fps formats. Hell, you can always display lower frame rates when you want. Films like Gladiator used a slower frame rate than 24fps for the battle scenes to give it a choppy disorienting feel. I Robot did this in several scenes as well, but in this case it was just annoying.
If you hadn't noticed films are becoming more and more like rides and simulations all the time, though I'm not saying this is necessarily a good thing in that is usually for game tie-ins. But hell if they're gonna do it, it might as well look good.
Maybe you could be the first filmmaker to do a 60fps remake of 1968's "Bullitt" with Steve McQueen and redefine chase scenes.
There will be virtually no difference in viewing movies in 1080I versus 1080p because they were shot in 24fps originally. Motion will stutter regardless if 1080p or 1080I during fast pans (just like in the theater). Given the same codecs storage requirements should be identical as it is the source fps that should matter and not the output frame rate.
Now when you upconvert an interlace source (which film is not) to progressive you can get terrible artifacts, but this also depends on the quality of the upconvert hardware/software. Some HDTVs are un-watchable trying to view NTSC, others actually improve the image HUGELY, it all depends on the upconvert algorithms and horsepower assigned.
If you have ever seen 1080I shot live like some of the BRAVO performances you will see that that the image is stunning fluid and better quality than 24fps film. 1080p will be even better when there is a lot of rapid motion of the whole scene. 1080I looks great when filming plays on BRAVO because they avoid exactly this sort of camera motion. 24fps stutters when you scroll and interlace breaks up into a nasty comb effect. 1080P avoids both. And yes this is why gamers are obsessed with frame-rate. Games tend to be nothing but fast motion and pans. Even 120fps isn't overkill for rapid motion. Granted your eye can't see changes at 120fps, BUT -- and this is a big but -- when you have large field rapid motion your eyes will track the apparent motion. The edges will blur as your eye tries to smoothly track a moving image that is actually a series of stills at the frame rate. The only way it could look un-blurred is if your eyes actually tracked them in with a motion that was a series of skips at the frame rate (not even vaguely humanly possible).
For 24fps film 1080I is much better than 720p. 720p is probably a good choice for sports however for all the reasons listed above. OTA transmission doesn't have the bandwidth for 1080p however (at least not with mpeg2). 1080p if pretty close to nirvana for me, past here the gains are so insignificant as to be pointless. But you can always go higher on the frame rate. Shooting stuff in 60fps or higher would likely lead to new filming styles as current ones purposely avoid things that make 24fps look bad.
The film industry should film everything in 60fps whether film or video (and progressive scan only for video). 1080P will look glorious once there is actually material available. This may be the ace in the hole that put Blu-Ray over HD-DVD in a couple of years. But only if content providers wise up and start making 60fps content.
So we have a plan for an external drive, so I guess the plan for an HD version of XBOX 360 with and internal HD-DVD drive sometime in the future have been dropped. Since it is external I guess they actually will make this device just for the PR to suck some wind out of the sales for PS3 and Blu-Ray.
But if you can slap on an external HD-DVD you could probably slap on an external Blu-Ray. A year from now if Sony and Blu-Ray have won the format war with only Blu-Ray movies readily available, will Bill bite the bullet and also make an external Blu-Ray available? Would Sony let them? Could Sony prevent it legally?
I know there will be dozens of other posts about the NYT's registration policy. I however registered long ago and had to overcome an early problem with the NYT's system -- its password field used to accept 20 characters and I used 16, only to find out the registration got truncated to 15 characters. Using 16 characters would not get you in. Well that was 2 or 3 years ago, they have probably ironed out those old problems. BUT now my email no longer registers as a valid registration after having visited the site several times a year mostly from following Slashdot.org article posting links (which usually just painlessly whisked me to the articles without a login).
So they take a system users already hate and make it worse evidently by forcing you to reregister every other year or so even if you have visited the site frequently. I could understand if some cookie had been purged from my system forcing me to give my Email, but it says my Email is not on record and so have to go through the whole registration again. I know I'm using the right Email because the login screen tries to fill in the password (for the Email the NYT doesn't recognize!) This never happens to me on Ebay or Amazon, but it seems to happen frequently on non-retail sites.
Is this just sloppiness on their part or is this some (however inane) logic to purging older registrations from the system?
Other than a pipe for spamming what purpose do these registrations serve?
Slashdot Mirror
It could even dip a little into the upper atmosphere without a huge momentum loss due to friction since it wouldn't be moving at a high speed relative to the atmosphere. This would be an engineering trade off between replenishing its momentum versus the ease of getting up to it to attach. Each lift will deplete momentum, but each de-orbit will replenish. Solar arrays at the hub could generate electricity that electrify the tethers at key times to get orbital and momentum boosts periodically from the Earth's magnetic field. If we got serious about mining the Moon and Asteroids then the influx of de-orbiting material could provide plenty of excess lift power.
Why this obsession with a full blown "Space Elevator" when there is so much that can be done in the interim with tethers? Rotavators would require significantly less demanding materials and only require getting above atmosphere like SpaceShip One did recently. Then clamp on and ride the rest of the way to full orbital velocity (the tip would appear to hover briefly in sync with the Earth's rotation just above the atmosphere).
There are obviously gray areas between public and private speech, I'm sure the courts hear them all the time. By current legal standards blogs are certainly considered public speech, but that doesn't mean certain organizations couldn't be restricted from trolling in them, specifically Government organizations of various types. The School System has no business ferreting out what every student is up to or said in public outside of school -- HOWEVER the internet has given them a new powerful tool to do so.
I've little pity for those who might fall afoul of the Law based on information obtained in public sources on the net, but each Government organization should have a clear and publicly posted policy on how and why it is collecting personal information on the web. Failure to do so should preclude said agency from being able to use such information for other than informing police of clear ongoing criminal activity.
We likely don't know all the facts to this story, things can sound very clear cut depending on how you synopsize them, however I think blogs will eventually have to be considered as something between public and private. Various organizations will have to be banned from acting based on any information obtained from them -- perhaps even banned from actively searching them out without legal cause.
Odd how these threats to basic rights seem to come from the Left and the Right equally. Nobody in the extreme can ever stand dissenting opinion.
Having just gotten back from China I can tell you that ANYTHING you want on DVD is available for a BUCK. High Quality packaging and everything with FBI warnings and disclaimers in place. They use to just make VCDs that everyone had players for, then they went to DVD-5 and compressed the quality of some movies a bit. Now they rip full DVD-9 and market it as DVD-9 or HDVD. The "Broke Back Mountain" rip I saw (my wife made me watch it with her, BTW BORING!) had the "For Academy Viewing Only" disclaimer scroll across the screen about 3 times, but he quality was great. In Guangzhou lot of people have 50+ inch plasma Hi-Def TVs. I'm sure they will pirate Blu-Ray when it comes out. I saw lots of PSPs in use while I was there.
I was sorely tempted to snap up DVDs for bootlegging before coming back home but resisted.
I'm not sure I have much of a point other than piracy is here to stay in China. Copy-protection won't matter one wit because it is done by professionals with the equipment to do it right, and it is so firmly a part of the society I don't know anyway you could stop it if you really tried. I for one like the fact that if things become too draconian here stateside I always have a source that can hook me up in the East.
So to make an analogy, I should prefer buildings that are built that allow no inspections while being built or even after construction is completed, to buildings that are free to be inspected. Which would you trust to live in?
I can't help but wonder if this was mistake or an intentional attempt to boost HD-DVD sales by someone for stock reasons or something. The HD-DVD camp has been very shrill in decrying Blu-Ray the Beta of the new millennia, despite Blu-Ray's larger coalition of partners than its rival this time around and Blu-Ray's much larger storage (storage being a HUGE factor in Beta's demise). Beta did come out first, so the fit with HD-DVD is the more like Beta. HD-DVD is trying to claim a 2 month head start is insurmountable for Sony and Blu-Ray, but Beta had a least a year's head start on VHS.
I haven't seen any HD-DVD recorders yet. Do the HD-DVD notebooks have recorders or just players? Sony VIAO will come out with a read/write Blu-Ray in June I believe. If Blu-Ray is first with recorders that is the real race and death knell for HD-DVD.
Given the FUD form the HD-DVD camp I think they know that come June it is essentially all over for them. They will unload a few more players at or below cost. Brag about being first to market. then give up shortly after Christmas.
I hope this was intended funny --or-- OMG you are ignorant. Cell phones work on planes without a transponder or re-transmitter on the plane. You just are discouraged from using the cell phone while it is in flight. I used my cell phone just last week from inside a plane on the ground. Now it might be at certain altitudes and great distances from city center a cell phone wouldn't connect, but when a hijacking is in progress nobody is going to think "Oh, I can't use my cell phone, it's against FAA rules." They will just flip open and try, and if close enough to a cell tower(s) it will work.
This is exactly what I'm talking about with wish fulfillment. You assume you know something about how something works then assume it is an inviolate law of the universe, which completely upholds and supports your position, but mostly because it is what you want to believe. Perhaps the cell phones had poor connections or experienced frequent drop outs, but work they did. No doubt you will fire back with some other half backed urban nonsense to prove me wrong. But I won't bother responding to what would be a pointless debate the likes of which I've had dozens of other times with conspiracy nuts who believe in things like: crop circle (alien origin), Face on Mars, Faked Moon landings, and Creationism.
OK, forget all the crap about flight angles and "how hard" it would be for an amateur to fly Flight 77 into the pentagon, and it must have been a missile instead. Where then did Flight 77 go? It crashed elsewhere and the government was able to cover it up? It was landed safely and all the people "disappeared"?
Jeez, people with cell phones on Flight 93 called loved ones to tell them that terrorists were in control of their plane. Was it a mix of government directed missiles and terrorists simultaneously causing all this havoc? Get real people. Believing the US government had a hand in this is just "wish fulfillment" and is why conspiracy people grasp at any seeming inconsistency they can imagine. That anyone other than the US government could perpetrate such acts invalidates one of the most cherished beliefs on the very far left: that the US is the only and ultimate evil in the world. I am not defending our government in all cases; just pointing out it does have legitimate concerns about external threats, threats we had become too complacent about before 9/11, even if now the pendulum has swung too far the other way.
You can only find a "link", not a "missing link." Once found it is no longer missing.
/attempted humor
In much the same way as a hot water heater is unneeded since hot water is already hot.
A sad day -- I would have to say Solaris has always stuck with me from when I first read it over 30 years ago in my teens -- it was the first time I really thought about questions like what it means to be alive and human, what is thought, and what is free will. Neither film really did it justice, though at least the Soviet version didn't "Hollywoodize" it. I just didn't get the reason for the minutes and minutes of nothing but travel on Japanese tunnel roadway systems as the protagonist travels to the launch site in the Soviet version. A Russian friend told me it just looked very High Tech to Russians at the time.
What a circuitous way to say that the Cosmic Ray and Solar Activity exposure of Space is bad for you. Scientific American had an in depth article on this just a month or two ago. As it turns out we have no really good ideas about how to adequately shield the human body from radiation in space and the problem only gets worse once you leave what little protection the Earth's magnetic shield provides. And before you suggest Magnetic Shielding or Material Shielding or Electrostatic Shielding, they crunched the numbers on all these things and the results were depressing. You can shield with a high enough Magnetic Field, but the Teslas involved are so high as to be worse that the radiation your trying to shield from (Earth's shield is effective because of size). Physical shielding requires a Meter or more of water all around (impractical because of weight). Etc., ect... We've made NO progress on really effective anti radiation measures in space. There are only coping strategies, so if you want to go to Mars just be prepared to give up 10-15 years off your expected life time on average or at best an early onset of senile dementia because you WILL loose quite a few neurons to radiation to realize your dreams of bounding around on Mars.
As a child I had been wildly enthusiastic about manned space flight or even becoming an astronaut myself some day. The fact that my 11th birthday coincided with the Apollo 11 Moon landing probably has something to do with this (I'll let you do the math to figure out my age). Anyway we've spent over 3 decades going basically nowhere and as it turns out space is a really hazardous place to stay for long periods of time. So while I'm still very much pro space exploration it is time to hand the baton to robots. Insisting that Man can do some things better is probably only true for the short term anyway. Better to embrace our robotic assisted lives by using the space program as a driving program to accelerate robotics instead of as a meat grinder for human flesh.
What NASA should REALLY focus on are sample return missions. That is where the real big bang for scientific buck will come.
Assuming Mars would swamp whatever light bands you would use, simply place a transmitter/receiver repeater sufficiently far enough from Mars so as to be able to resolve the light source as distinct. This could be done with a high polar orbit that always is 90 degrees Sun-ward, or perhaps better yet a pair of halo orbit repeaters to serve both the Sun-ward Side and dark side so all of Mars in in constant communication 24/7. If these orbits prove inadequate to be resolvable from Earth then put a repeater at one of the 5 Lagrange points of mars.
I thought TRANSPUTER is what FEMPUTER became after trying to live in a MANPUTER's world.
I would speculate there is another factor at work here that drives Studios to strive for huge opening numbers, they get a larger percentage of the take, sometimes as much as 100% the first week or two. I think The X-Files movie was the first to introduce the 100% opening take strategy. I remember the theater owners being none too happy about it, some refusing to exhibit The X-Files. When you have to sit through 30 minutes of commercials at the Cinema you can thank the makers of The X-Files movie to some degree, as Theaters are really struggling to make up for the lost ticket revenue on premiers.
Personally I'm hoping for as many of these screw ups on the manufacturer's part as possible. I'm also hoping that HD-DVD comes to market soon enough before Blu-Ray that the outrage over incompatibility issues causes the Blu-Ray group to ratchet down their DRM stuff a bit. DRM is now a major obstacle to coming out with new consumer gear, and mark my words even the approved compatible products will break in industry unexpected ways. The buying public will not tolerate equipment that is as crash prone and glitchy as PCs are.
Ironically all these attempts to lock down HD-DVD and Blu-Ray to thwart piracy will probably accelerate piracy as people who have been buying EXPENSIVE HIGH END gear will feel little remorse in resorting to pirated material to display on their setups. The industry is fooling itself if it thinks it can keep real pirates from cracking their content by whatever method, when there will be such a huge demand from the installed based of early adopters.
It won't happen, but I would love to see legislation that forbids intentionally crippling products or creating some artificial market segmentation to insure some business model. Maybe when the HD-DVD Blu-Ray debacle really begins will we some come modification to the really bad legislation that is the DMCA. At least they are considering really spanking people the put Root-Kits in products. Maybe we need the CRMA (consumers rights millennium act) to balance some of this madness.
What I'm wondering is whether this could be used to create a hybrid device that blast fissionable material with reaction initiating neutrons, rather than balance the fissionable material on the knife's edge of criticality. If so then fission reaction would stop immediately upon loss of initiating neutrons from the fusion source and you have a much safer nuclear reactor design. Could this also be used to burn our existing stockpiles of waste, and if not practical with these neutron sources, could future more efficient fusion reactors be used to extract additional energy from nuclear waste while consuming and disposing of it at the same time?
It wasn't mentioned, but does the cycling of propellants due to aborted launch attempts add significant additional strain to the foam?
Were there any launch aborts before the final Columbia mission?
I would have stayed with a Pentium derived name
Pentium Dual -> PentDiem (as in Carpe Diem, Seize the Day )
Pentium Quad -> PentQuadium
Pentium 8-way -> PentOctium
Who knows, maybe there's a Pent-Up demand
I wouldn't call this timely news as there was a flurry or reports about determining the physics of bee flight in late November 2005 Deciphering the Mystery of Bee Flight
Secrets of bee flight revealed">
Longstanding Puzzle of Honeybee Flight Solved at Last
But as wikipedia shows this problem had been essentially resolved since the early 90's, though I'm sure I been hearing that this problem is "Finally Solved" every year or two and has been since the early 70's.
Researchers will continue to refine their understanding of the process and claim to finally or fully understand the problem at last.
Some, mostly religious types, will claim scientists don't understand the process because there was some mystery at some point a few decades ago. It seems every few years we get similar pronouncements about the trajectory of a thrown baseball.
While Bee flight does little to disprove ID, ID proponents do frequently use examples like bee flight to bolster their ID arguments regardless of what the current scientific consensus is. Urban legends and wives tales do not die easily.
My last journal entry was actually on the topic of ID Christians in Scientists' Clothing
My point is that 60fps will open more options to filmmakers not less, though it may take some years and experimenting for filmmakers to get all the tools needed for the look they wish to produce.
I take in IMAX whenever I'm up to Navy Pier in Chicago and I have never said, "oh this would be much better if it looked less fluid." Sony would be smart to get the IMAX catalog quickly available to really distinguish themselves from HD-DVD, and make sure they use the highest bit-rates possible for highest quality 1080P they can achieve. This is the type of move that wins over the videophile early adopters.
Filmmakers will adapt to be sure to high fps formats. Hell, you can always display lower frame rates when you want. Films like Gladiator used a slower frame rate than 24fps for the battle scenes to give it a choppy disorienting feel. I Robot did this in several scenes as well, but in this case it was just annoying.
If you hadn't noticed films are becoming more and more like rides and simulations all the time, though I'm not saying this is necessarily a good thing in that is usually for game tie-ins. But hell if they're gonna do it, it might as well look good.
Maybe you could be the first filmmaker to do a 60fps remake of 1968's "Bullitt" with Steve McQueen and redefine chase scenes.
Now when you upconvert an interlace source (which film is not) to progressive you can get terrible artifacts, but this also depends on the quality of the upconvert hardware/software. Some HDTVs are un-watchable trying to view NTSC, others actually improve the image HUGELY, it all depends on the upconvert algorithms and horsepower assigned.
If you have ever seen 1080I shot live like some of the BRAVO performances you will see that that the image is stunning fluid and better quality than 24fps film. 1080p will be even better when there is a lot of rapid motion of the whole scene. 1080I looks great when filming plays on BRAVO because they avoid exactly this sort of camera motion. 24fps stutters when you scroll and interlace breaks up into a nasty comb effect. 1080P avoids both. And yes this is why gamers are obsessed with frame-rate. Games tend to be nothing but fast motion and pans. Even 120fps isn't overkill for rapid motion. Granted your eye can't see changes at 120fps, BUT -- and this is a big but -- when you have large field rapid motion your eyes will track the apparent motion. The edges will blur as your eye tries to smoothly track a moving image that is actually a series of stills at the frame rate. The only way it could look un-blurred is if your eyes actually tracked them in with a motion that was a series of skips at the frame rate (not even vaguely humanly possible).
For 24fps film 1080I is much better than 720p. 720p is probably a good choice for sports however for all the reasons listed above. OTA transmission doesn't have the bandwidth for 1080p however (at least not with mpeg2). 1080p if pretty close to nirvana for me, past here the gains are so insignificant as to be pointless. But you can always go higher on the frame rate. Shooting stuff in 60fps or higher would likely lead to new filming styles as current ones purposely avoid things that make 24fps look bad.
The film industry should film everything in 60fps whether film or video (and progressive scan only for video). 1080P will look glorious once there is actually material available. This may be the ace in the hole that put Blu-Ray over HD-DVD in a couple of years. But only if content providers wise up and start making 60fps content.
But if you can slap on an external HD-DVD you could probably slap on an external Blu-Ray. A year from now if Sony and Blu-Ray have won the format war with only Blu-Ray movies readily available, will Bill bite the bullet and also make an external Blu-Ray available? Would Sony let them? Could Sony prevent it legally?
So they take a system users already hate and make it worse evidently by forcing you to reregister every other year or so even if you have visited the site frequently. I could understand if some cookie had been purged from my system forcing me to give my Email, but it says my Email is not on record and so have to go through the whole registration again. I know I'm using the right Email because the login screen tries to fill in the password (for the Email the NYT doesn't recognize!) This never happens to me on Ebay or Amazon, but it seems to happen frequently on non-retail sites.
Is this just sloppiness on their part or is this some (however inane) logic to purging older registrations from the system?
Other than a pipe for spamming what purpose do these registrations serve?