"Obviously you feel need the need to flex your ego here."
No, just to go on caffeine inspired rants at 3 AM:D.
"Yes, if there is a god (or perhaps just a metaconsciousness) then the primary commandment would seem to be "Live" since that which competes better is generally favored. But like the bacterium in the petri dish, consuming a limited set of resources in an unchecked manner leads to one swift fate, "Death"."
So that would mean that consuming all the resources of our world would be bad, wouldn't it? I never disagreed on that point, it's just that you're analogy to bacteria reminded me of Knives from Trigun. Remember, when you say "bacteria" most people (myself included) will instantly associate that with "disease". It would have been better to use a neutral term like "single celled organisms" or just "microorganisms". Perhaps a bit of a Freudian slip?
"As this relates to the exploration of space (which was the original topic) we are like bacteria in a dish seeking to jump to other dishes and further propagate our species."
Hm.. Your view is too narrow. AFAICT, the dividing line between organisms artificial. I find that I support something essentially like the gaia(spelling?) hypothesis: the smaller organisms, taken as a group, form an organism. In this view we are much more than a swarm of bacteria. We're not quite Borg, and not quite Zerg, we're just right in the middle.
"though your shooting from the hip doesn't win it any points when I think of the longer term planning and bigger view needed to continue the propagation and evolution of the species."
And I care how many "points" I receive from you because? Your points mean less to me than the points given out on "Who's Line is it Anyway?". Don't be so quick to criticize shooting from the hip, either. You'll need the foolhardy folks like myself to rush in to the dangers that space presents in order to get move out there successfully and make it safe for the "level headed planners" like yourself.
Oh, yes. Congratulations on noticing one example of the fractal nature of the universe. You'll find that there are a whole lot more out there. For instance, you can take your example to an even greater extreme and say that Earth's biosphere is like a gigantic microorganism (note the nicely neutral connotation to the term) that wants to divide. After all, it's not like we could colonize a world by ourselves without the help of all the other parts of the organism.
Admittedly, I shot my mouth off because I'm young, optimistic, and I could have legally been considered intoxicated (tired almost to the point of passing out with a bit of a caffeine buzz).
"copyfree" could also be misconstrued as "free from being copied" or some other nonsense. Copyleft may be a bad pun, but at least it's pretty clear that "left" is the opposite of "right"
"And so the experiment goes on. As a contribution to it, New Scientist has agreed to issue this article under a copyleft. That means you can copy it, redistribute it, reprint it in whole or in part, and generally play around with it as long as you, too, release your version under a copyleft and abide by the other terms and conditions in the licence."
I guess I'm nit-picking a bit, but there is a subtlety they missed in the article: you only have to release the modified code under copy left if you plan to release it. So if I were to, say, fix all of the problems with the 2.5 series Linux distros, I don't have to release the source code. If I release it, then it has to be copyleft, but the choice to release it is still mine.
I guess it would be pointless to modify an article and not redistribute it, but the phrasing above misrepresents copy-left.
BlackGriffen
I don't, that's what document translators are for! I'll admit it is annoying, but eh, I get along. The big difference is that the examples you cited are not due to bugs! OE should be able to handle any male I send it, not bug out if a line starts with the word "begin". Also, it is a lot easier to change email applications that operating systems (investments in hardware and/or software).
You're problem is that you want to shoot the messenger, rather than solve the problem, you coward.
From one physics undergrad to another: it's worse than you think. Some people actually believe that NASA is a bad waste of money! I don't know were the hippies got the idea that the budget of NASA could solve the world's hunger problems (esp. since NASA's budget is miniscule compared to the R&D budget for The Department of Health and Human Services). Let me tell ya, I was floored when my sister said they should stop wasting money on NASA. I was too caught off guard to respond.
I guess people see the figures "Each launch of the shuttle costs X cajillion dollars," and assume that most of the government's money is going that way. Maybe they believe that the shuttle is like an airport shuttle and runs hourly?
Maybe if China gets close to its goal of putting a man on the moon by 2020, it will light a fire under America's over-patriotic @$$. Or maybe the citizens will yawn with a resounding, "Been there, done that," and fade out of prominence in the world.
Insert suitable hippy voice here: "But it's, like, nucular, and nucular is bad, man!"
Damn hippies and their "nucular"...
BlackGriffen
P.S. technically, DNA is "nucular," and atom bombs are "nuclear," is that why hippies oppose genetically modifying crops at all?;) (*tongue firmly planted in cheek*).
What a jag-off! Why don't you off yourself if you think that low of humans (you are one, after all). It would even help the population problem! Now that I'm done with the ad-hominems, my real response: so what? That is what we are! That is what life does. Life follows the simple maxim: maximize survivability. Why? Just ask those who are dead. Just consider the pattern:
problem: Herbivores tend to die if the plant they eat dies (they tend to need specialized stomachs to deal with plant toxins), carnivores die the the animal population drops (i.e. a disease sweeps through). Answer: eat everything (hence: we are omnivores).
problem: "biological warfare" dictates the bigger fish eats the smaller fish (hence the dinosaurs), but the larger and more complicated the organism the more improbable successful adaptations to rapid changes in the environment become, monocellular organisms can ultimately adapt most quickly (within an hour for the slow changes), but everything eats them otherwise. Solution: subject a large, complicated organism to the control of a group of monocellular organisms that regulate each-others' internal functions and can stimulate each other to grow/die as needed, such that the results of what these cells do to each-other translates to behavioral and physiological changes in the organism. Even the dinosaurs had brains (did you recognize the description?), but mammals were the first ones with a neo-cortex that could provide for effective learning (adaptation within the life-span of the organism, a.k.a. intelligence), and humans are just the bigger fish (human society is literally an organism: it grows and shrinks, it competes, it has a memory, etc.) Organisms have been changing their environments to suit their needs for billions of years (what the hell do you think anti-biotics are?), we're just a hell of a lot better at it since we're the "bigger fish".
At any rate, the implication of your post was to compare us to a disease. Ultimately, I say, so what? As compared to what? some ideal that you've baked up in that mind that evolution has provided you with? Please spare me the imaginary moral drivel! Humans have concocted so many moral systems that bend over backwards to try to explain why something is right or wrong. Bah! If there is a god, there is only one commandment that he seems to repeatedly give is creations: LIVE!
Am I the only one left who believes that progress is good in and of itself? Progress is the survival strategy that catapulted homo-sapians past the other hominids in to the position of prominence it holds today. It's also what later gave us the ability to do things that were beyond god-like in ancient times: splitting atoms, childhood survival rates above 80%, walking on the moon, seen back in time billions of years, manipulated the very essence of life itself, flew around the world, built towers that would make the Babylonians fall over in astonishment, and a slew of other things! Enough with this dicking around here on Earth and staring at the pretty pictures our robotic probes send back. The stars have been our birthright since Copernicus started shattering the celestial spheres! We won't make any real progress in space until we get real people up there to actually explore. 15 minutes of a geologist's time on Mars would be worth thousands of Pathfinder missions. People want a justification for the cost? Consider what the age of exploration did for Europe! Europe was still living off the fruits of that till WWII! Imagine what the vastness of space can yield to us given the time, patience (and lack thereof), and effort: minerals plentiful enough to build everyone on earth a steel frame house, whole planets to study the dynamics of how we can muck around with controlling weather/climate without fear of self-destruction, land that will one way or another be made arable, space for the world's excess population to move into, low g environments for manufacturing of both large structures and large crystals (think: one of the limiting factors in computer chip manufacturing is the size of the silicon crystals; a consequence of gravity), and no natives to worry about doing wrong! It must be done, but if we keep sitting around with our thumb up our butts, procrastinating, we may miss our chance (possible mishaps: energy becoming less abundant, another dark age, environmental catastrophe that may have been averted/avoided, meteor hits the Earth, etc.) Progress is our survival strategy people, and we can get ahead of the game if we just keep moving!
You think they have space in either of those countries? Hah! What you need is a high mountain that is close to the equator in a relatively stable zone. That pretty much eliminates everything but the Andes, doesn't it? Just food for though.
Great post! Maybe they could even get corporate sponsorships that way! "This mission of Survivor is Space was brought to you by Microsoft, because you'll never be on the outside looking in with Windows!"
BlackGriffen
(that ad even sounds probable! but the implication of not being able to leave windows *shudders*)
God d@mn mu fu'in been counters! Space flight eventually has to be manned or there isn't even a reason to be doing all this! Especially when you consider that many of the benefits of space aren't even feasible without men up there to do the work (mining at first, colonies, agriculture, and eventually zero to low g manufacturing [did you know that crystal structures grow more cleanly in zero g? consider what would happen if Intel or IBM could get a plant in orbit (long long way off)!]).
I'm sure as hell glad there wasn't a short sighted bean counter like you looking over the shoulders of Leif Ericson or Enrico Fermi.
But getting hump back whales on europa could save the earth from big cigars with blue balls! In all seriousness, though, what space exploration really needs is a cheap space port. Ideally, it should be near the equator, high in altitude (less air resistance at high altitudes = less fuel wasted), and thermally insulated (prevent things from icing up). The Andes sound like the ideal natural location, but I don't see it happening any time soon.
Perhaps NASA will perfect a mag-lev, however, and cut costs some that way...
I'd bet that most of the people compaining about this guy's exclusion of OE users would probably be the same ones to justify a video game company not developing for anything but Windows. Typical. The analogy may not be exact, but the principle of the action is the same.
There's a difference, though. All they have to do use use a different email app. If they're being forced to use Outlook, then they should complain to Microsoft for the bug, and not the guy for taking advantage of it.
Perhaps, but there's a difference between needing them and having them. I don't have the numbers, unfortunately, but you should simply compare the wattage rating for the two chips. As a preliminary for that, consider that a full fledged (though not full clocked) g4 is actually used in a laptop. If someone stuck a P4 in one, we'd have another three mile island!;P
From what I understand, Apple is working on a language called Objective C++. Basically, Objective C is C with some object oriented extensions, right? Well, Objective C++ will be, if I understand correctly, C++ with dynamic typing that will make it compatible with Objective C. Once they have that...
The 2.2GHz pentiums are not more expensive than the older models, when the older models were introduced. The problem is that DVD prices are not dropping. I'd bet that inflation is the only thing bringing the price of DVDs down. As long as demand is increasing, there's no incentive for the producer to drop the price. When demand levels off, or the next big thing comes along, then the price will drop. Until then, I'd wager that DVD prices will either be stable or on the rise to compensate for inflation.
1 - no lame players...
2 - much less cheaters....
3 - decent and reliable online stats and rankings
What gaming server are you using, cause I've got to get a piece of that! There will always be lame players and cheaters. Even the Diablo II realms aren't immune with everyone and his uncle trying to figure out how to dupe items. Once you get cheaters and lame players, stats don't mean much.
BlackGriffen
Not Quite OpenNap, but...
on
Pay to Play
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Do you remember the online gaming service Kali? I think they're still around, though I can't load kali.net right now. They had a one time fee of $20, and after that you could play pretty much any game capable of IPX network gaming over it. They were marginalized by gaming companies offering free online gaming built in to the game, but if the companies start trying to charge a monthly fee for their service, Kali could make a really big comeback. They may need to change their business model so that you have to pay a couple of bucks to upgrade each new major revision of Kali, but they could probably easily compete with proprietary 1-game networks.
Even if that doesn't succeed, someone will probably make something like Opennap or gnutella for gamers. Once a free service like that comes along, that the companies don't have to pay money to maintain, I don't see why they wouldn't embrace it. Hell, the companies may even surprise us and do it themselves.
I think that UWB devices don't interfere with each other because you would need two waves to hit at the same time and in the same place, right on the receiver, to actually notice the interference. Otherwise, the interference would be there, you just couldn't detect it from where you where. Because of the short duration (they sound almost like fourier approximations of dirac delta spikes), this coincidence is extremely unlikely. Even with thousands of devices on a single block, they probably wouldn't interfere with each-other any more often/severely than current noise.
The reason they wouldn't interfere with standard receivers, I think, is that the duration of the spike is so short that the signal will barely have time to propagate down the antenna (light travels about 1 foot every nanosecond, electricity travels slower, so the signal may barely reach the end of a 1 foot antenna). Even if a signal was passed on by the antenna, the receiver probably doesn't run at high enough frequency to notice (to notice a nanosecond pulse requires that the receiver can resolve that small of a time scale, i.e. it can operate around the GHz range).
All this makes me wonder how the signal is detected at all, even if the receiver knows when to look. I also have to wonder because of the pulses have nanosecond widths, the position of the device has a significant effect on wether it's timing is synced with the signal (i.e. since light travels about a foot in a nanosecond, a shift in the position will lead to a shift in the timing). Perhaps the device listens starts listening 2 nanoseconds early to 2 nanoseconds late, and broadcasts often enough so that it can adjust the timing?
Voltage: this is a "potential difference", essentially, when charge moves due to voltage, it picks up energy such that energy = charge * voltage
Current: this is charge in motion. Current measures the amount of charge moving through a surface per unit time.
so you take some amount of charge, q, multiplied by some potential difference, V, and you get how much energy the charge picked up. If you know the current, I, for some time t, q = I*t. So the change in energy = I*V*t. Power is just the change in energy divided by how long that change took. Thus P = I*V.
As for V = IR, there isn't really a way to derive the relationship: Ohm's law is empirical (means that we simply observe that the current through something other than vacuum is proportional to the voltage applied to it, and the constant of proportionality is R).
Understand, I have brushed a ton of stuff under the rug, including a lot of calculus for time varying quantities, the fact that V/I (which should just be R) is sometimes dependent on the current and always dependent on the temperature. A really good reference on E&M is Electricity and Magnetism (or something like that) by Purcell.
Not so fast. I don't know about suppressed technologies (I could imagine a car that splits water to store energy and later burn it back in to water), but I do know that the account given was bunk. Read my post just above yours. I am familiar with the issues involved sufficiently to say, without referring to any laws of thermodynamics, that the "inventor"'s account was innacurate, and even offered a plausible explanation for the account on Rueters.
Also, note well that sound science (i.e. Newton, Galileo, et al) has never been proven flat out wrong. Even relativity and quantum mechanics were just slight modifications to the theory from the point of view of day to day human experience. For most problems, the difference they make in the calculations is about 1 part in a million. So even if the laws of thermodynamics are proven wrong one day, I doubt that they will be proven so grossly wrong that some yokel with poor funding will be able to build a free energy machine.
that if the damage stems from genetic causes, the stem cells will still have to be repaired before a new organ is cultured. The interesting thing is that the body doesn't reject stem cells from other people; at least in the brain.
BlackGriffen
I doubt that anyone here needs a point-by-point debunking, but just to show how fuking stupid the journalist was:
"A multimeter reading of the batteries' voltage before the device started up showed a total of 48.9 volts. When it was switched off, a second reading showed 51.2 volts, indicating that, somehow, they had been reimbursed."
Not true. The article describes the place as "cold". Car batteries run on a process that requires ions to drift through a solution. I haven't done any calculations, but my gut tells me that the hotter the battery, the greater the open circuit voltage should be since the chemical processes producing the electricity will go faster. All they've proved is that the batteries warmed up during the test (assuming their voltage was measured with everything disconnected to ensure there was no fraud in the measurement taking), quite plausible since that's what batteries do when you use them.
"which remained lit during a short power cut."
Attach a fly wheel to a generator and motor. Cut power to motor, fly wheel continues to drives generator for a while.
"``The draw on the batteries was estimated at more than 4.5 kilowatts. With any existing technology the batteries would have been drained flat in one and a half minutes,'' the inventor said."
Ok, 4.5 kW, at about 50 V, you're talking about roughly 90 Amps of current! Considering that the power dissipated by the battery's internal resistance is I*I*R, you're talking about 91kW being dissipated by each battery if the internal resistance was 1 Ohm (1 ohm internal resistance is reasonable, isn't it?). Those fuking batteries should have exploded.
All I have left to say is, "Reuters, you're about 2 months early for April fools day."
BlackGriffen
Slashdot Mirror
"Obviously you feel need the need to flex your ego here."
:D.
No, just to go on caffeine inspired rants at 3 AM
"Yes, if there is a god (or perhaps just a metaconsciousness) then the primary commandment would seem to be "Live" since that which competes better is generally favored. But like the bacterium in the petri dish, consuming a limited set of resources in an unchecked manner leads to one swift fate, "Death"."
So that would mean that consuming all the resources of our world would be bad, wouldn't it? I never disagreed on that point, it's just that you're analogy to bacteria reminded me of Knives from Trigun. Remember, when you say "bacteria" most people (myself included) will instantly associate that with "disease". It would have been better to use a neutral term like "single celled organisms" or just "microorganisms". Perhaps a bit of a Freudian slip?
"As this relates to the exploration of space (which was the original topic) we are like bacteria in a dish seeking to jump to other dishes and further propagate our species."
Hm.. Your view is too narrow. AFAICT, the dividing line between organisms artificial. I find that I support something essentially like the gaia(spelling?) hypothesis: the smaller organisms, taken as a group, form an organism. In this view we are much more than a swarm of bacteria. We're not quite Borg, and not quite Zerg, we're just right in the middle.
"though your shooting from the hip doesn't win it any points when I think of the longer term planning and bigger view needed to continue the propagation and evolution of the species."
And I care how many "points" I receive from you because? Your points mean less to me than the points given out on "Who's Line is it Anyway?". Don't be so quick to criticize shooting from the hip, either. You'll need the foolhardy folks like myself to rush in to the dangers that space presents in order to get move out there successfully and make it safe for the "level headed planners" like yourself.
Oh, yes. Congratulations on noticing one example of the fractal nature of the universe. You'll find that there are a whole lot more out there. For instance, you can take your example to an even greater extreme and say that Earth's biosphere is like a gigantic microorganism (note the nicely neutral connotation to the term) that wants to divide. After all, it's not like we could colonize a world by ourselves without the help of all the other parts of the organism.
Admittedly, I shot my mouth off because I'm young, optimistic, and I could have legally been considered intoxicated (tired almost to the point of passing out with a bit of a caffeine buzz).
BlackGriffen
"copyfree" could also be misconstrued as "free from being copied" or some other nonsense. Copyleft may be a bad pun, but at least it's pretty clear that "left" is the opposite of "right"
BlackGriffen
"And so the experiment goes on. As a contribution to it, New Scientist has agreed to issue this article under a copyleft. That means you can copy it, redistribute it, reprint it in whole or in part, and generally play around with it as long as you, too, release your version under a copyleft and abide by the other terms and conditions in the licence."
I guess I'm nit-picking a bit, but there is a subtlety they missed in the article: you only have to release the modified code under copy left if you plan to release it. So if I were to, say, fix all of the problems with the 2.5 series Linux distros, I don't have to release the source code. If I release it, then it has to be copyleft, but the choice to release it is still mine.
I guess it would be pointless to modify an article and not redistribute it, but the phrasing above misrepresents copy-left.
BlackGriffen
I don't, that's what document translators are for! I'll admit it is annoying, but eh, I get along. The big difference is that the examples you cited are not due to bugs! OE should be able to handle any male I send it, not bug out if a line starts with the word "begin". Also, it is a lot easier to change email applications that operating systems (investments in hardware and/or software).
You're problem is that you want to shoot the messenger, rather than solve the problem, you coward.
BlackGriffen
From one physics undergrad to another: it's worse than you think. Some people actually believe that NASA is a bad waste of money! I don't know were the hippies got the idea that the budget of NASA could solve the world's hunger problems (esp. since NASA's budget is miniscule compared to the R&D budget for The Department of Health and Human Services). Let me tell ya, I was floored when my sister said they should stop wasting money on NASA. I was too caught off guard to respond.
I guess people see the figures "Each launch of the shuttle costs X cajillion dollars," and assume that most of the government's money is going that way. Maybe they believe that the shuttle is like an airport shuttle and runs hourly?
Maybe if China gets close to its goal of putting a man on the moon by 2020, it will light a fire under America's over-patriotic @$$. Or maybe the citizens will yawn with a resounding, "Been there, done that," and fade out of prominence in the world.
BlackGriffen
On a caffeine buzz.
Insert suitable hippy voice here: "But it's, like, nucular, and nucular is bad, man!"
;) (*tongue firmly planted in cheek*).
Damn hippies and their "nucular"...
BlackGriffen
P.S. technically, DNA is "nucular," and atom bombs are "nuclear," is that why hippies oppose genetically modifying crops at all?
What a jag-off! Why don't you off yourself if you think that low of humans (you are one, after all). It would even help the population problem! Now that I'm done with the ad-hominems, my real response: so what? That is what we are! That is what life does. Life follows the simple maxim: maximize survivability. Why? Just ask those who are dead. Just consider the pattern:
problem: Herbivores tend to die if the plant they eat dies (they tend to need specialized stomachs to deal with plant toxins), carnivores die the the animal population drops (i.e. a disease sweeps through). Answer: eat everything (hence: we are omnivores).
problem: "biological warfare" dictates the bigger fish eats the smaller fish (hence the dinosaurs), but the larger and more complicated the organism the more improbable successful adaptations to rapid changes in the environment become, monocellular organisms can ultimately adapt most quickly (within an hour for the slow changes), but everything eats them otherwise. Solution: subject a large, complicated organism to the control of a group of monocellular organisms that regulate each-others' internal functions and can stimulate each other to grow/die as needed, such that the results of what these cells do to each-other translates to behavioral and physiological changes in the organism. Even the dinosaurs had brains (did you recognize the description?), but mammals were the first ones with a neo-cortex that could provide for effective learning (adaptation within the life-span of the organism, a.k.a. intelligence), and humans are just the bigger fish (human society is literally an organism: it grows and shrinks, it competes, it has a memory, etc.) Organisms have been changing their environments to suit their needs for billions of years (what the hell do you think anti-biotics are?), we're just a hell of a lot better at it since we're the "bigger fish".
At any rate, the implication of your post was to compare us to a disease. Ultimately, I say, so what? As compared to what? some ideal that you've baked up in that mind that evolution has provided you with? Please spare me the imaginary moral drivel! Humans have concocted so many moral systems that bend over backwards to try to explain why something is right or wrong. Bah! If there is a god, there is only one commandment that he seems to repeatedly give is creations: LIVE!
BlackGriffen
Am I the only one left who believes that progress is good in and of itself? Progress is the survival strategy that catapulted homo-sapians past the other hominids in to the position of prominence it holds today. It's also what later gave us the ability to do things that were beyond god-like in ancient times: splitting atoms, childhood survival rates above 80%, walking on the moon, seen back in time billions of years, manipulated the very essence of life itself, flew around the world, built towers that would make the Babylonians fall over in astonishment, and a slew of other things! Enough with this dicking around here on Earth and staring at the pretty pictures our robotic probes send back. The stars have been our birthright since Copernicus started shattering the celestial spheres! We won't make any real progress in space until we get real people up there to actually explore. 15 minutes of a geologist's time on Mars would be worth thousands of Pathfinder missions. People want a justification for the cost? Consider what the age of exploration did for Europe! Europe was still living off the fruits of that till WWII! Imagine what the vastness of space can yield to us given the time, patience (and lack thereof), and effort: minerals plentiful enough to build everyone on earth a steel frame house, whole planets to study the dynamics of how we can muck around with controlling weather/climate without fear of self-destruction, land that will one way or another be made arable, space for the world's excess population to move into, low g environments for manufacturing of both large structures and large crystals (think: one of the limiting factors in computer chip manufacturing is the size of the silicon crystals; a consequence of gravity), and no natives to worry about doing wrong! It must be done, but if we keep sitting around with our thumb up our butts, procrastinating, we may miss our chance (possible mishaps: energy becoming less abundant, another dark age, environmental catastrophe that may have been averted/avoided, meteor hits the Earth, etc.) Progress is our survival strategy people, and we can get ahead of the game if we just keep moving!
BlackGriffen
You think they have space in either of those countries? Hah! What you need is a high mountain that is close to the equator in a relatively stable zone. That pretty much eliminates everything but the Andes, doesn't it? Just food for though.
BlackGriffen
Great post! Maybe they could even get corporate sponsorships that way! "This mission of Survivor is Space was brought to you by Microsoft, because you'll never be on the outside looking in with Windows!"
BlackGriffen
(that ad even sounds probable! but the implication of not being able to leave windows *shudders*)
God d@mn mu fu'in been counters! Space flight eventually has to be manned or there isn't even a reason to be doing all this! Especially when you consider that many of the benefits of space aren't even feasible without men up there to do the work (mining at first, colonies, agriculture, and eventually zero to low g manufacturing [did you know that crystal structures grow more cleanly in zero g? consider what would happen if Intel or IBM could get a plant in orbit (long long way off)!]).
I'm sure as hell glad there wasn't a short sighted bean counter like you looking over the shoulders of Leif Ericson or Enrico Fermi.
BlackGriffen
But getting hump back whales on europa could save the earth from big cigars with blue balls! In all seriousness, though, what space exploration really needs is a cheap space port. Ideally, it should be near the equator, high in altitude (less air resistance at high altitudes = less fuel wasted), and thermally insulated (prevent things from icing up). The Andes sound like the ideal natural location, but I don't see it happening any time soon.
Perhaps NASA will perfect a mag-lev, however, and cut costs some that way...
BlackGriffen
I'd bet that most of the people compaining about this guy's exclusion of OE users would probably be the same ones to justify a video game company not developing for anything but Windows. Typical. The analogy may not be exact, but the principle of the action is the same.
There's a difference, though. All they have to do use use a different email app. If they're being forced to use Outlook, then they should complain to Microsoft for the bug, and not the guy for taking advantage of it.
BlackGriffen
Perhaps, but there's a difference between needing them and having them. I don't have the numbers, unfortunately, but you should simply compare the wattage rating for the two chips. As a preliminary for that, consider that a full fledged (though not full clocked) g4 is actually used in a laptop. If someone stuck a P4 in one, we'd have another three mile island! ;P
BlackGriffen
But then if you're hacking the hardware together anyway, you have complete access to the ROMs, and could thus hack them to fool the software.
BlackGriffen
From what I understand, Apple is working on a language called Objective C++. Basically, Objective C is C with some object oriented extensions, right? Well, Objective C++ will be, if I understand correctly, C++ with dynamic typing that will make it compatible with Objective C. Once they have that...
BlackGriffen
The 2.2GHz pentiums are not more expensive than the older models, when the older models were introduced. The problem is that DVD prices are not dropping. I'd bet that inflation is the only thing bringing the price of DVDs down. As long as demand is increasing, there's no incentive for the producer to drop the price. When demand levels off, or the next big thing comes along, then the price will drop. Until then, I'd wager that DVD prices will either be stable or on the rise to compensate for inflation.
BlackGriffen
1 - no lame players... 2 - much less cheaters.... 3 - decent and reliable online stats and rankings What gaming server are you using, cause I've got to get a piece of that! There will always be lame players and cheaters. Even the Diablo II realms aren't immune with everyone and his uncle trying to figure out how to dupe items. Once you get cheaters and lame players, stats don't mean much. BlackGriffen
Do you remember the online gaming service Kali? I think they're still around, though I can't load kali.net right now. They had a one time fee of $20, and after that you could play pretty much any game capable of IPX network gaming over it. They were marginalized by gaming companies offering free online gaming built in to the game, but if the companies start trying to charge a monthly fee for their service, Kali could make a really big comeback. They may need to change their business model so that you have to pay a couple of bucks to upgrade each new major revision of Kali, but they could probably easily compete with proprietary 1-game networks.
Even if that doesn't succeed, someone will probably make something like Opennap or gnutella for gamers. Once a free service like that comes along, that the companies don't have to pay money to maintain, I don't see why they wouldn't embrace it. Hell, the companies may even surprise us and do it themselves.
BlackGriffen
I think that UWB devices don't interfere with each other because you would need two waves to hit at the same time and in the same place, right on the receiver, to actually notice the interference. Otherwise, the interference would be there, you just couldn't detect it from where you where. Because of the short duration (they sound almost like fourier approximations of dirac delta spikes), this coincidence is extremely unlikely. Even with thousands of devices on a single block, they probably wouldn't interfere with each-other any more often/severely than current noise.
The reason they wouldn't interfere with standard receivers, I think, is that the duration of the spike is so short that the signal will barely have time to propagate down the antenna (light travels about 1 foot every nanosecond, electricity travels slower, so the signal may barely reach the end of a 1 foot antenna). Even if a signal was passed on by the antenna, the receiver probably doesn't run at high enough frequency to notice (to notice a nanosecond pulse requires that the receiver can resolve that small of a time scale, i.e. it can operate around the GHz range).
All this makes me wonder how the signal is detected at all, even if the receiver knows when to look. I also have to wonder because of the pulses have nanosecond widths, the position of the device has a significant effect on wether it's timing is synced with the signal (i.e. since light travels about a foot in a nanosecond, a shift in the position will lead to a shift in the timing). Perhaps the device listens starts listening 2 nanoseconds early to 2 nanoseconds late, and broadcasts often enough so that it can adjust the timing?
Just some thoughts from a physics undergrad.
Your instructor, I mean.
Voltage: this is a "potential difference", essentially, when charge moves due to voltage, it picks up energy such that energy = charge * voltage
Current: this is charge in motion. Current measures the amount of charge moving through a surface per unit time.
so you take some amount of charge, q, multiplied by some potential difference, V, and you get how much energy the charge picked up. If you know the current, I, for some time t, q = I*t. So the change in energy = I*V*t. Power is just the change in energy divided by how long that change took. Thus P = I*V.
As for V = IR, there isn't really a way to derive the relationship: Ohm's law is empirical (means that we simply observe that the current through something other than vacuum is proportional to the voltage applied to it, and the constant of proportionality is R).
Understand, I have brushed a ton of stuff under the rug, including a lot of calculus for time varying quantities, the fact that V/I (which should just be R) is sometimes dependent on the current and always dependent on the temperature. A really good reference on E&M is Electricity and Magnetism (or something like that) by Purcell.
BlackGriffen
Not so fast. I don't know about suppressed technologies (I could imagine a car that splits water to store energy and later burn it back in to water), but I do know that the account given was bunk. Read my post just above yours. I am familiar with the issues involved sufficiently to say, without referring to any laws of thermodynamics, that the "inventor"'s account was innacurate, and even offered a plausible explanation for the account on Rueters.
Also, note well that sound science (i.e. Newton, Galileo, et al) has never been proven flat out wrong. Even relativity and quantum mechanics were just slight modifications to the theory from the point of view of day to day human experience. For most problems, the difference they make in the calculations is about 1 part in a million. So even if the laws of thermodynamics are proven wrong one day, I doubt that they will be proven so grossly wrong that some yokel with poor funding will be able to build a free energy machine.
BlackGriffen
that if the damage stems from genetic causes, the stem cells will still have to be repaired before a new organ is cultured. The interesting thing is that the body doesn't reject stem cells from other people; at least in the brain. BlackGriffen
I doubt that anyone here needs a point-by-point debunking, but just to show how fuking stupid the journalist was: "A multimeter reading of the batteries' voltage before the device started up showed a total of 48.9 volts. When it was switched off, a second reading showed 51.2 volts, indicating that, somehow, they had been reimbursed." Not true. The article describes the place as "cold". Car batteries run on a process that requires ions to drift through a solution. I haven't done any calculations, but my gut tells me that the hotter the battery, the greater the open circuit voltage should be since the chemical processes producing the electricity will go faster. All they've proved is that the batteries warmed up during the test (assuming their voltage was measured with everything disconnected to ensure there was no fraud in the measurement taking), quite plausible since that's what batteries do when you use them. "which remained lit during a short power cut." Attach a fly wheel to a generator and motor. Cut power to motor, fly wheel continues to drives generator for a while. "``The draw on the batteries was estimated at more than 4.5 kilowatts. With any existing technology the batteries would have been drained flat in one and a half minutes,'' the inventor said." Ok, 4.5 kW, at about 50 V, you're talking about roughly 90 Amps of current! Considering that the power dissipated by the battery's internal resistance is I*I*R, you're talking about 91kW being dissipated by each battery if the internal resistance was 1 Ohm (1 ohm internal resistance is reasonable, isn't it?). Those fuking batteries should have exploded. All I have left to say is, "Reuters, you're about 2 months early for April fools day." BlackGriffen