Just in case you're not just posting a smart-ass comment, I'm referring to Organic certified foods.
I was posting a smart-ass comment, sorry for that. I just can't get over some foods getting certified as organic while others are inorganic? non-organic? anti-organic? organically-challenged?
I think that maybe they should have come up with a better term than "organic certified foods".
But this is not making fun of your point or of your usage of the term "organic". I was just poking fun at the terms that have been used to describe these types of foods.
Canola is the very definition of hearty crop. It is a 3 foot high plant with yellow flowers and once it is established in an area it is almost impossible to get rid of.
Heh, this reminds me of when I was working as a research assistant at a state department of agriculture station. We were clearing a field to plant bok choy, to test it as a possible crop to be grown in my state. The field had been growing belgian endive the previous few seasons. To get rid of the endive left over from the year before they just plowed it under, leaving bits and pieces of the plants.
Well, this was dumb because endive is a weed - it's a member of the composite family of plants, a large group that includes dandelions and chicory. If you cut a plant up, especially the root, it will grow into two or more full plants. We spent the entire growing season watching for endive plants to spring up and then we had to get down on our hands and knees and dig out the entire plant, root and all, with gardening shovels. If we accidently broke the plant and left a piece of root behind then another full plant would quickly grow in place of the one we removed. What a mess!
I really don't see why the US needs to force their sexual discomfort on the rest of the world.
If this was about forcing "sexual discomfort" on the rest of the world then the US would be banning and bringing charges upon the sex spammers.
What this is really about is the right of people to ignore what they don't want to see, while others still have the right to watch it. By adding keywords what they are doing is classifying the e-mails. That way one person can filter it into their "junk" folder while another person can filter it into their "yes, please!" folder. The tag is all about informed choices, not about limiting them.
Espresso does not have more caffeine compared to drip coffee in general. ... Anyway, back to my point. Espresso generally has 80 mg per serving (2 oz = doppio) than drip coffee which has 160 mg (could vary from 120-240) per 16 oz. serving.
According to your numbers:
espresso: 80 mg / 2 oz = 40 mg/oz drip: 160 mg / 16 oz = 10 mg/oz
These numbers agree with the numbers at the site you listed, as well as some other sources I have on hand.
So espresso has about 4 times the caffeine of drip coffee on a per-ounce basis. Yes, the serving size of espresso is usually a lot less than drip coffee but the fact remains that espresso does have a higher concentration of caffeine.
a malicious web site could use the disk: protocol to remotely mount the disk image.
Hmm, I just tried this and I can't get OmniWeb 4.5 to mount a disk on my own system using this. Do you mean that using the disk: protocol could get your computer to remotely mount a disk on someone else's server and then use the browser to execute a script on that remotely mounted disk?
this exploit also works in Camino as far as I can tell (although I didn't have it set to automount images) using recenet nightly build.
It semi-works in OmniWeb 4.5. The download happens, the help tries to open the script, but the downloaded file is not automounted so the script is not there. So OmniWeb is safe simply because it doesn't automount dmg files.
Holland is a great country that would be the envy of all Americans if they ever took their heads out of the sand.
- A Canadian
Hmm, you do realise that Canadians are Americans, right?
you can conclude that as a Canadian, when I said "American" I meant those who come from USA.
A lot of conflict can be avoided if only people tried harder to look at statements from the author's point-of-view and not just their own. A lot more conflict would be avoided if people would stop generalizing and insinuating that every "American" has his head in the sand. Most "Americans" are just fine with the rest of the world and they do agree that there are plenty of other great countries in the world. Yes, we "Americans" are proud of our own country but that doesn't mean that we think the rest of the world is crap.
How about crossing south over the border to "America" and taking a closer look at us. Most of us are actually pretty nice people. Perhaps if more people visited "America" they'd realize that just because there is the occasional ignorant person it doesn't mean that the majority of our population is that way. I mean EVERY nation has its fanatics and idiots, you can't judge a nation of around 300 million people based on a few louder-than-average idiots, can you?
I became anti-capital punishment simply because an average life sentance without parole is 14 years of hopelessness ending in death or suicide, with a total cost of around $600,000. The average death-penalty recipient lives 16 years, most of that time with the hope of beating the system on appeal, at a total cost of $1.8 million.
I've got a better answer to that. How about people on Death Row should be put to death? Honestly, wtf is the point of putting someone on Death Row and then leaving them there to rot for 10, 20, even 30 years? Kill them already!
Give Death Row criminals a certain amount of time to make their appeals, say 2 years. After that time they die, as quickly and inexpensively as possible. Yes, maybe we'll kill an innocent person but at some point we just have to bite the bullet and take that chance.
More harm is done to society by having an inefficient and costly judicial and penitentiary system than would be done by the rare person getting wrongly put to death. Think of it this way, maybe with the money we will save by having a more efficient penitentiary system we can spend more on prevention and education to actually keep people from turning criminal in the first place!
Market share and install base are definitely linked. If Apple's only selling 3% of computers, their install base is going to trend to 3% over time, holding all other things equal.
You are not counting the rate at which the computers are removed from the market. This is anecdotal evidence but I find that Macintosh computers tend to be removed from the market at a rate 1/2 that as Windows computers. I have seen studies in the past that bear this out but I can't seem to locate one on the internet right now. I'll look around some more and see if I can locate one or two.
So you get this situation:
market is 1000 computers Mac is 3% of yearly sales Windows computers remove from market at a rate of 30% per year Mac computers remove from market at a rate of 15% per year
There may be some small rounding errors in there, but those are minimal. I can't get the table to display correctly but the numbers go: (year) (removed: {Mac Win}) (added: {Mac Win}) (total: {Mac Win}) (% Mac installed base)
As you can see, the installed base of the Macs actually grows past the 3% market share. This is because less percent of Macs are being removed from the market than are being added.
I just recreated the application on my home machine using AppleScript and the entire application took up 60k. I'm betting that the rest of the trojan was just filler in order to make it look more official.
damn, i need to get used to typing <br> instead of enter.....
Just use "Plain Old Text" instead of the other text options in the pop-up menu at the bottom of the comment entry area.
You can still do some html formatting with "Plain Old Text", the major difference between it and "HTML Formatted" is that white space mostly matters with the "Plain Old Text" setting. So hitting enter at the end of a line will cause a line ending when the comment is displayed.
But iTMS won't let those nasty pirates do their evil thing. No Sirreeeebob.
It's not about stopping the pirates, it's about liability. Apple has to put up some sort of barrier, however easy to circumvent, so that when someone does pirate the music Apple can say that they have protections in place. That way the pirate has to circumvent the protection and Apple can say that they don't support piracy.
I bought my 40 gig iPod yesterday because I ran out of room on the 10 gig and frankly iTunes doesn't make dealing with deselecting large amounts of music to be copied to the iPod easy.
Actually iTunes makes it pretty easy:
Run iTunes
File->New Smart Playlist Uncheck Match Check Limit to in the text box to the right type 10 in the pop-up menu to the right choose GB hit return
Now set your iPod to automatically update only from that new playlist and you are in business. You can make the process even better by setting a few matching options when you set up the playlist. For example, if you have your songs rated then only match the top rated ones.
However, I do agree with the rest of your comments. If Apple is forced into raising song prices it will be at the cost of a lot of sales. I've bought a good deal of songs (278 at last count) at 99 cents per song and $9.99 per album. I will completely stop buying songs if the prices go up at all. I know that I'm not unique in this so multiply my purchases by a couple of thousand and you start seeing major losses.
take the number of songs you have, multiply each spot on a CD by that number -n where n is the position in the list you are starting at zero, next multiply that by n! and finally multiply that by 7
that is how many times any one song can be burned to CD...most certainly NOT unlimited....but it is a hell of a lot, even if you only had 10 songs.
It resets every time you make a new playlist so it is unlimited. All you have to do is make a playlist, copy all the songs into it, burn, make a different playlist, copy all the songs from the first playlist into the new one, burn, etc.
Again, it's not intended to stop people from burning disks, just to slow down and annoy anyone who wants to copy a CD a few hundred times. That way those people won't use iTunes to copy things a hundred times and Apple can't be blamed for any misuse of the free tools it provides.
Re:The flagship...
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
But the ultimate insult was when "Call of Cthulhu" when to a d20 system. Yes, you can still play with the old rules...which were better...than using the d20 system, but still. They should have just well enough alone. "Call of Cthulhu" was and still is my favorte PnP role playing game. Bar none.
Same thing with Star Wars. The original d6 Star Wars system from West End Games was beautiful in its simplicity. The d20 system that replaced it when TSR took over the license is poor in comparison. Go to just about any gaming convention and you will see that the amount of Star Wars games being played with West End rules far outnumbers the amount of games being played with the d20 rules.
I do think that the d20 AD&D rules are better than the original AD&D rules and far better than the 2nd Edition AD&D rules. However, this does not hold true for all game systems. Sometimes a game system just works and shouldn't be replaced, no matter how new and interesting the replacing system is.
Thanks for a response that is informative. I am not trying to troll, just looking for an answer and you provided me one.
Eh, you are not trolling even though some moderators might tag you as one for your question. That's the nature of an open moderation situation like we have here on Slashdot. Sometimes you get tagged down, sometimes you get tagged up. It happens, but it usually evens out. Nothing to worry about, after all it's not like you get cash taken away for a low karma or get paid for a high karma!:-)
Hell, you asked a question that I'm sure was on the minds of a lot of people. Asking it was definitely the right thing to do and that's all that matters...
I'm a 23 year old male, and I want a pink iPod mini more than anything.
Heh, I really like the blue one but I have a 20 gig 3rd gen iPod and I'm too spoiled on the extra drive space (I use it to store all sorts of documents for shuttling between computers).
One thing I have noticed is that you can see the mini iPods from a really, really long ways away. I thought the white headphones and white iPod were unusually noticeable until I saw someone with a pink mini iPod the other day and they were way the hell off in the distance. Not only are the mini iPods small and beautiful, but they are also really attention-getting!
> laying back 320kbps MP3s on your iPod WILL use up the battery almost twice as fast
Depends very heavily on how the caching is done, how much of the load is actually the hard drive, and a number of other factors.
One could more accurately say that playing back 320 kbps MP3s will not use your battery any more than twice as fast, nor probably any less than ten percent faster.
The two biggest drains on the battery in the iPod are spinning the hard drive and lighting up the display. The light only comes on when you turn it on yourself or if you operate a control and you have it set to automatically turn on for a period of time.
The iPod has a RAM buffer which can hold about 20 minutes of music for a 128 kbps MP3. MP3's use an approximately proportionate amount of RAM to their bitrate so 256 kbps MP3 files would last about 10 minutes in the RAM buffer, doubling the amount of HD access per unit of time. Double the access is approximately double the power usage per unit of time.
If you don't skip through playing songs (which causes the HD to spin and re-load the buffer with the new songs) and you don't light up the display much then you'll get around 8 hours out of a third generation iPod. If you use larger (read: higher bitrate) audio files then you'll significantly lower the time the battery will last. Doubling the file size will nearly halve the maximum time the battery will last. Increasing from 128 kbps to 320 kbps will cut battery life to approximately 40% or to about 3 hours, assuming a linear increase in file size.
I'm not trying to be a smart ass, but I know little about chemistry and I would like some clarification by someone who might know.
It seems to me like people are jumping to conclusions here. Isn't it possible that some other source, source C, was where these meteorites originated and then later collided with both earth and Mars?
Yes, it certainly is possible. However it is unlikely. The sort of analysis that goes into determining the source of origin of a rock is fairly accurate. There are a number of factors which are taken into account which, when combined, form a fairly unique "fingerprint" as to the origin of a piece of rock.
First of all, there is the relative amounts of elements. Mars has a different elemental mix than the Earth due to its distance from the Sun, its mass, the loss of atmosphere and water, among many other factors. Then there is the different proportions of isotopes of each element. Earth, partially due to the shielding afforded by its atmosphere and its magnetic field, has a different mix of isotopes of each element. Remember that each element often has 2 or 3 common isotopes, this significantly contributes to the complexity of the fingerprint.
Then there are differences in rock formation between Mars and the Earth. Rocks formed on Mars have gone through a different history of sedimentation, melting, crystallization, weathering, etc. than those formed on Earth. This results in not only different minerals being formed but also the patterns of how these minerals mix and the relative proportions that one mineral may be found in a mixture with others.
I'm probably missing a few other factors but you get the idea. Remember that the process of identifying rocks is not only used to tell if a rock is from Mars or the Earth but it is also accurate enough to possibly be used to tell if a rock is from near Moscow or from near Los Angeles. Scientists can get a fairly good idea of where on the Earth a diamond or a piece of uranium originated simply by using some of these techniques. Analysis of the isotope ratios alone is a strong indicator.
I hope they continue to delve into the olefactory sences as well.
Ahh but they already have! The infamous mad scientist Professor Hubert Farnsworth has already invented smelloscope, a great leap forward for the field of astronomy. Just don't use it to smell Uranus, er, Urectum...
Can someone explain why and how you can speed up/shorten travelling time by using planets as slingshots?
A slingshot maneuver serves two purposes. First of all, the slingshot allows you to change the direction of the velocity vector. This is important since most of the velocity you get from being in Earth orbit is perpendicular to a path directly to the Sun.
Look at it this way, imagine you have a ball on a string. You swing the ball around your head and let go. Does the ball travel directly away from you? If you film it and slow down the film you will see that it actually moves sideways, perpendicular to the string. If you want to hit something you need to let go just about 90 degrees before the string is pointed at the object. And if you want to hit something above you there is no way to do so from an orbit perpendicular to the ground. You might have to bounce the ball off another object to get it to go where you want it to.
The slingshot also does provide a velocity boost. Here is an excellent explanation of this usage. It boils down to the fact that all of the planets in the solar system are not stationary. By taking up a temporary orbit and changing direction of your velocity to be in the direction of the planet you end up adding the planets velocity to your current velocity.
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Hmm, thellabyte mellabyte trellabyte quellabyte...
You may have something there! I say we all just jump ship and adopt this new naming system. It sounds pretty cool...
I was posting a smart-ass comment, sorry for that. I just can't get over some foods getting certified as organic while others are inorganic? non-organic? anti-organic? organically-challenged?
I think that maybe they should have come up with a better term than "organic certified foods".
But this is not making fun of your point or of your usage of the term "organic". I was just poking fun at the terms that have been used to describe these types of foods.
Heh, this reminds me of when I was working as a research assistant at a state department of agriculture station. We were clearing a field to plant bok choy, to test it as a possible crop to be grown in my state. The field had been growing belgian endive the previous few seasons. To get rid of the endive left over from the year before they just plowed it under, leaving bits and pieces of the plants.
Well, this was dumb because endive is a weed - it's a member of the composite family of plants, a large group that includes dandelions and chicory. If you cut a plant up, especially the root, it will grow into two or more full plants. We spent the entire growing season watching for endive plants to spring up and then we had to get down on our hands and knees and dig out the entire plant, root and all, with gardening shovels. If we accidently broke the plant and left a piece of root behind then another full plant would quickly grow in place of the one we removed. What a mess!
I would imagine that the crops are still organic, being that they grow and are composed mostly of carbon molecules and water...
I'm sure that this crop is a lot tastier and nutritious than the INorganic rocks and dirt that are just lying around!
A byte is usually 8 bits but it has also been defined as 6, 7, 9 or even odder combinations. It all depends on the system architecture.
You can read a bit more about it here
If this was about forcing "sexual discomfort" on the rest of the world then the US would be banning and bringing charges upon the sex spammers.
What this is really about is the right of people to ignore what they don't want to see, while others still have the right to watch it. By adding keywords what they are doing is classifying the e-mails. That way one person can filter it into their "junk" folder while another person can filter it into their "yes, please!" folder. The tag is all about informed choices, not about limiting them.
According to your numbers:
espresso: 80 mg / 2 oz = 40 mg/oz
drip: 160 mg / 16 oz = 10 mg/oz
These numbers agree with the numbers at the site you listed, as well as some other sources I have on hand.
So espresso has about 4 times the caffeine of drip coffee on a per-ounce basis. Yes, the serving size of espresso is usually a lot less than drip coffee but the fact remains that espresso does have a higher concentration of caffeine.
Yep, that mounted the remote disk. Very interesting...
Hmm, I just tried this and I can't get OmniWeb 4.5 to mount a disk on my own system using this. Do you mean that using the disk: protocol could get your computer to remotely mount a disk on someone else's server and then use the browser to execute a script on that remotely mounted disk?
It semi-works in OmniWeb 4.5. The download happens, the help tries to open the script, but the downloaded file is not automounted so the script is not there. So OmniWeb is safe simply because it doesn't automount dmg files.
you can conclude that as a Canadian, when I said "American" I meant those who come from USA.
A lot of conflict can be avoided if only people tried harder to look at statements from the author's point-of-view and not just their own.
A lot more conflict would be avoided if people would stop generalizing and insinuating that every "American" has his head in the sand. Most "Americans" are just fine with the rest of the world and they do agree that there are plenty of other great countries in the world. Yes, we "Americans" are proud of our own country but that doesn't mean that we think the rest of the world is crap.
How about crossing south over the border to "America" and taking a closer look at us. Most of us are actually pretty nice people. Perhaps if more people visited "America" they'd realize that just because there is the occasional ignorant person it doesn't mean that the majority of our population is that way. I mean EVERY nation has its fanatics and idiots, you can't judge a nation of around 300 million people based on a few louder-than-average idiots, can you?
I've got a better answer to that. How about people on Death Row should be put to death? Honestly, wtf is the point of putting someone on Death Row and then leaving them there to rot for 10, 20, even 30 years? Kill them already!
Give Death Row criminals a certain amount of time to make their appeals, say 2 years. After that time they die, as quickly and inexpensively as possible. Yes, maybe we'll kill an innocent person but at some point we just have to bite the bullet and take that chance.
More harm is done to society by having an inefficient and costly judicial and penitentiary system than would be done by the rare person getting wrongly put to death. Think of it this way, maybe with the money we will save by having a more efficient penitentiary system we can spend more on prevention and education to actually keep people from turning criminal in the first place!
You are not counting the rate at which the computers are removed from the market. This is anecdotal evidence but I find that Macintosh computers tend to be removed from the market at a rate 1/2 that as Windows computers. I have seen studies in the past that bear this out but I can't seem to locate one on the internet right now. I'll look around some more and see if I can locate one or two.
So you get this situation:
market is 1000 computers
Mac is 3% of yearly sales
Windows computers remove from market at a rate of 30% per year
Mac computers remove from market at a rate of 15% per yearThere may be some small rounding errors in there, but those are minimal. I can't get the table to display correctly but the numbers go:
(year) (removed: {Mac Win}) (added: {Mac Win}) (total: {Mac Win}) (% Mac installed base)
As you can see, the installed base of the Macs actually grows past the 3% market share. This is because less percent of Macs are being removed from the market than are being added.
I just recreated the application on my home machine using AppleScript and the entire application took up 60k. I'm betting that the rest of the trojan was just filler in order to make it look more official.
Just use "Plain Old Text" instead of the other text options in the pop-up menu at the bottom of the comment entry area.
You can still do some html formatting with "Plain Old Text", the major difference between it and "HTML Formatted" is that white space mostly matters with the "Plain Old Text" setting. So hitting enter at the end of a line will cause a line ending when the comment is displayed.
It's not about stopping the pirates, it's about liability. Apple has to put up some sort of barrier, however easy to circumvent, so that when someone does pirate the music Apple can say that they have protections in place. That way the pirate has to circumvent the protection and Apple can say that they don't support piracy.
Actually iTunes makes it pretty easy:
Now set your iPod to automatically update only from that new playlist and you are in business. You can make the process even better by setting a few matching options when you set up the playlist. For example, if you have your songs rated then only match the top rated ones.
However, I do agree with the rest of your comments. If Apple is forced into raising song prices it will be at the cost of a lot of sales. I've bought a good deal of songs (278 at last count) at 99 cents per song and $9.99 per album. I will completely stop buying songs if the prices go up at all. I know that I'm not unique in this so multiply my purchases by a couple of thousand and you start seeing major losses.
It resets every time you make a new playlist so it is unlimited. All you have to do is make a playlist, copy all the songs into it, burn, make a different playlist, copy all the songs from the first playlist into the new one, burn, etc.
Again, it's not intended to stop people from burning disks, just to slow down and annoy anyone who wants to copy a CD a few hundred times. That way those people won't use iTunes to copy things a hundred times and Apple can't be blamed for any misuse of the free tools it provides.
Same thing with Star Wars. The original d6 Star Wars system from West End Games was beautiful in its simplicity. The d20 system that replaced it when TSR took over the license is poor in comparison. Go to just about any gaming convention and you will see that the amount of Star Wars games being played with West End rules far outnumbers the amount of games being played with the d20 rules.
I do think that the d20 AD&D rules are better than the original AD&D rules and far better than the 2nd Edition AD&D rules. However, this does not hold true for all game systems. Sometimes a game system just works and shouldn't be replaced, no matter how new and interesting the replacing system is.
Eh, you are not trolling even though some moderators might tag you as one for your question. That's the nature of an open moderation situation like we have here on Slashdot. Sometimes you get tagged down, sometimes you get tagged up. It happens, but it usually evens out. Nothing to worry about, after all it's not like you get cash taken away for a low karma or get paid for a high karma!
Hell, you asked a question that I'm sure was on the minds of a lot of people. Asking it was definitely the right thing to do and that's all that matters...
Heh, I really like the blue one but I have a 20 gig 3rd gen iPod and I'm too spoiled on the extra drive space (I use it to store all sorts of documents for shuttling between computers).
One thing I have noticed is that you can see the mini iPods from a really, really long ways away. I thought the white headphones and white iPod were unusually noticeable until I saw someone with a pink mini iPod the other day and they were way the hell off in the distance. Not only are the mini iPods small and beautiful, but they are also really attention-getting!
The two biggest drains on the battery in the iPod are spinning the hard drive and lighting up the display. The light only comes on when you turn it on yourself or if you operate a control and you have it set to automatically turn on for a period of time.
The iPod has a RAM buffer which can hold about 20 minutes of music for a 128 kbps MP3. MP3's use an approximately proportionate amount of RAM to their bitrate so 256 kbps MP3 files would last about 10 minutes in the RAM buffer, doubling the amount of HD access per unit of time. Double the access is approximately double the power usage per unit of time.
If you don't skip through playing songs (which causes the HD to spin and re-load the buffer with the new songs) and you don't light up the display much then you'll get around 8 hours out of a third generation iPod. If you use larger (read: higher bitrate) audio files then you'll significantly lower the time the battery will last. Doubling the file size will nearly halve the maximum time the battery will last. Increasing from 128 kbps to 320 kbps will cut battery life to approximately 40% or to about 3 hours, assuming a linear increase in file size.
Yes, it certainly is possible. However it is unlikely. The sort of analysis that goes into determining the source of origin of a rock is fairly accurate. There are a number of factors which are taken into account which, when combined, form a fairly unique "fingerprint" as to the origin of a piece of rock.
First of all, there is the relative amounts of elements. Mars has a different elemental mix than the Earth due to its distance from the Sun, its mass, the loss of atmosphere and water, among many other factors. Then there is the different proportions of isotopes of each element. Earth, partially due to the shielding afforded by its atmosphere and its magnetic field, has a different mix of isotopes of each element. Remember that each element often has 2 or 3 common isotopes, this significantly contributes to the complexity of the fingerprint.
Then there are differences in rock formation between Mars and the Earth. Rocks formed on Mars have gone through a different history of sedimentation, melting, crystallization, weathering, etc. than those formed on Earth. This results in not only different minerals being formed but also the patterns of how these minerals mix and the relative proportions that one mineral may be found in a mixture with others.
I'm probably missing a few other factors but you get the idea. Remember that the process of identifying rocks is not only used to tell if a rock is from Mars or the Earth but it is also accurate enough to possibly be used to tell if a rock is from near Moscow or from near Los Angeles. Scientists can get a fairly good idea of where on the Earth a diamond or a piece of uranium originated simply by using some of these techniques. Analysis of the isotope ratios alone is a strong indicator.
Ahh but they already have! The infamous mad scientist Professor Hubert Farnsworth has already invented smelloscope, a great leap forward for the field of astronomy. Just don't use it to smell Uranus, er, Urectum...
A slingshot maneuver serves two purposes. First of all, the slingshot allows you to change the direction of the velocity vector. This is important since most of the velocity you get from being in Earth orbit is perpendicular to a path directly to the Sun.
Look at it this way, imagine you have a ball on a string. You swing the ball around your head and let go. Does the ball travel directly away from you? If you film it and slow down the film you will see that it actually moves sideways, perpendicular to the string. If you want to hit something you need to let go just about 90 degrees before the string is pointed at the object. And if you want to hit something above you there is no way to do so from an orbit perpendicular to the ground. You might have to bounce the ball off another object to get it to go where you want it to.
The slingshot also does provide a velocity boost. Here is an excellent explanation of this usage. It boils down to the fact that all of the planets in the solar system are not stationary. By taking up a temporary orbit and changing direction of your velocity to be in the direction of the planet you end up adding the planets velocity to your current velocity.