So does it actually modify the browser interface itself, like up next to the navbar you've also got all these additional buttons? Or is it just a 'helper' app that floats around in it's own window, that just happens to be long and horizontal and can be positioned like an actual toolbar?
The software running on screen may have been SGI software, but the physical computer shown in the film is a Macintosh Quadra. (bear in mind that on film, almost anything on a computer screen is composited in afterwards). I distinctly remember because I had that model of machine at the time and identified it while watching the movie. "That's not UNIX, that's my Mac!"
I've not stuck my head into the modern Windows world for a while now, so I've got a question. I keep seeing this world "toolbar" bandied about in a way that is strange and foreign to me.
When I hear "toolbar" I think of one of the floating windoids that applications put tools and frequently used buttons on, like all that screen-hogging crap at the top of every MS application's default layout. I suppose the navigation bar and buttons, bookmarks, tabs, etc at the top of a browser also counts.
But how exactly does one "install" a toolbar into another application? And how does a "toolbar" do anything like install spyware, or other things that are not editing tools or at least some sort of button? I'm confused.
But this was the FIRST post - the others are the copycats. And it's not like it was modded "Redundant" or anything - it was modded "Troll", which is completely off.
I third that, and whoever modded the GP poster "off topic" (probably the same person) is a moron.
The topic is 3D user interfaces. The great grandparent was quoting a movie, Jurrasic Park, where a character sits down at a 3D user interface (not Off Topic, and not a Troll), proclaiming "it's a unix system... I know this!". Given the UI is one I've never seen on any Unix box, and that machine was in fact a Mac Quadra, I'd say that's even Funny.
Sometimes I wish I could metamoderate specific posts.
When a conversation I've been following, for example on a mailing list, starts getting too out of hand with mixed top-quotes, bottom-quotes, interspersed bottom quotes, etc, and I want to reply to a series of points in the conversation, I'll usually trim out the quotes just for my own ease, so I don't have to try to untangle the mess. I'll then sum up each earlier point before my response to it. It's easier to retype other people's points than to try to untangle their horrible mess of quotes, especially if they haven't been snipping the irrelevant parts.
But if I've been having a nice back-and-forth with someone who's got good nettiquite and is bottom posting properly, I see no problem with responding point-by-point with quotes. "Me, too" responses are still rather silly, but if I agree with one point in an argument that I'm responding to, I'll put [snip] after a fragment of the first sentance, and then respond "I agree here". Or if I only disagree with a few points, I'll say at the top that I agree for the most part, but there are a few points I want to address. Then I will quote and respond as appropriate.
Proper quoting actually supports clear conversation skills, not hinders thenm, but it's more than just where you put your quotes; snipping for relevancy is just as important.
"My God made the laws of Physics - and enforces them."
That's precisely what the person you're arguing against is saying: God didn't say "let there be fish" - God made it so that the nuclear energy contained in an object is equal to what the kinetic energy would be if it's mass was accelerated to the square of the speed of light (E=MC^2), and other such rules. That is a fairly simply system that gives rise to VERY complex results.
That's what moden physics is all about - discovering the simple rules that give rise to more complex ones, ultimately giving rise to rules that govern things like what a fish is. If you believe in God, that could be seen as searching to better understand God's universe, in a sense, his actual words.
It takes a much brighter designer to make a simple rule that will unfold into a beautiful, elegant and complex system. Wouldn't you think your God of infinite intelligence would have designed that, instead of just hacking together a bunch of discrete upper-order concepts like fish, plants, cows and people together like that?
Re:No Chinese myths of lost civilisations
on
Atlantis Found. Again.
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
China has the myth of Peng-lai, a sinking island supposed to be the home of the immortals, and home of the Xian-gu (mushrooms of immortality, cf. soma, ambrosia, tree of life).
http://www.pantheon.org/articles/p/peng-lai.html
This, not so coincidentally, out across the South (or East, according to this article) China Sea, in Oceania, where a lot of the seafloor is continental shelf, which was dry land and/or very shallow sea before the end of the Pleistocene. This is where many people place "Mu", "Lemuria", and other mythical sunken lands where ancient and/or powerful people lived. Not to mention Hawaiiki and it's variants, common to most Pacific Island cultures, and core of the Maori geneological story. So yeah, the Asian waters have their share of sunken homeland stories.
Tie that in with the genetic and cultural connections between the Polynesians and South Americans, and some suggestion of precolumbian trade between South American and Africa, maybe Plato's Egyptians' 'great seafaring people with cities of gold' were none other than our old Incan friends (whose creation story involves the survivors of a great flooded land in the west), and their 'sunken homeland to the west' was in fact west of South America, in Oceania... Plato's Atlantis may just be a very distorted and editorialized version of a much older story, perhaps crossed at some point with one of the many sunken Mediterranean civilizations.
I do not presently have a telephone. I have no interest in one. I use the internet for all of my non-personal, non-postal communications. (Not that I use postal communications much either). Everyone I know who I can't speak to in person, has internet access, so email or IM is a suitable way of contacting them.
Am *I*, in your opinion, participating in the levy of this "regressive tax"? I don't use the phone system. They still run a line to my house, though it's not active with a dial tone. Other people's tax dollars from their phone bills pay for that line to be there. I didn't ask for them to, I didn't ask for that line to be there, but it just is. VoIP is just another internet technology, and though it can connect to POTS phone systems, if there are people WITH POTS systems then they are paying for them.
If people stopped driving cars and thus stopped paying a gasoline tax, would you argue that they are putting a burden on those who do drive to pay for the upkeep of the roads? I might actually agree with such an assertion, but what is the problem with it? If enough people don't want the service provided (POTS phone lines, roads, what have you), to the point that there aren't enough taxes to pay for it's upkeep, then why not just kill the service when it reaches that point?
So let the burden of paying for POTS systems fall on those who still use them. It's only fair. We don't pay for the mass removal of horse manure from our streets anymore, either, because most people stopped driving horse-carts.
I think Kerry's concession should stand, but the Democrats (if the vote goes that way) should still get the election. That way, Kerry has effectively resigned and given the presidency to Edwards, who is far more appealing for a president anyway.
You know, that would make an interesting strategy to get a nationally less-popular candidate into office for a party: make him VP for the more popular (but less desirable, to the party) nominee for that party, and then have the more popular candidate resign when he wins, effectively sneaking your real preferred candidate into office.
Corporations are entities established in law only. In the absence of laws allowing their existence, the individuals who occupy what we now consider "ownership" positions in a "corporation" would be held personally responsible for their actions or actions carried out at their behest.
In order for a free market to work, you not only need to remove limiting laws (regulations, etc), but enabling laws as well (laws which allow corporations to exist). Regular old laws dealing with criminal activity will make sure that agents in the free market behave themselves.
Just a minor correction that I'm sure no one will even read or care to read: Halo is not set in the Marathon universe. In early drafts of the story is was, but it is clearly a very distinct world now, and Bungie has said as much.
1) Greatest band ever. Sadly, White Zombie didn't make the final cut. 2) responsible. 3)anonymity. 3)amongst Sorry to be such a pedant. One or two errors, I could overlook. Four became too egregious to ignore. After that, I kinda stopped counting...
Were you trying to be funny there, or it it just the irony?
EVERYTHING has it's own gravitational field. You do, I do, your computer does; the phosphors on my screen displaying this text as I type it each have their own gravitational field.
That being said, I'm pretty sure any body which naturally has a regular orbit around a planet is considered a moon, though you must get into a size limit somewhere otherwise every speck of dust in Saturn's rings could be considerd a separate "moon".
The conditions of sale laws you reference seem completely wrong to me. (Not that you are wrong, but that the law should not be like that). I personally feel that people's rights with regards to commerce (buying and selling things) is limited to the right to possess and exchange things of value, no other strings attached. If I buy Thing X, then that physical Thing X is mine to do whatever I want with (within other laws of course), and the previous owner has no connection to it.
On another note, since this is turning into a discussion on IP vs no IP, I'd like to save some time and just point to another post I just made in this topic that covers pretty much anything else I'd say in response here:
I'm essentially arguing the opposite of your statement that "Information is tricky and needs more protection than physical products simply because it is so easy to copy". I think that trying to force artificial scarcity and thus value in information is going against the natural flow of it, that information, as they say, "wants to be free" and unprotected, and that promotion of the arts and sciences - which are what IP laws were set up to do in the first place - should be done via other means than artificially regulating the flow of information.
"One of the tennets of freedom is the right for people to be able to decide how what they create should be used."
Do gunmakers get to decide who you may or may not shoot? Do car manufacturers decide where you are allowed to drive? Do spoon builders decide what you can scoop? Can the cheesemakers tell you what crackers you are allowed to put it on?
If you want to treat information like a product (which I would argue against anyway), then most products' manufacturers don't have a say in what you can use their product for. Now granted, I can't make infinite free copies of my car and distribute them, by sheer physical (or technological) limits. But if I want to take my car, disassemble it, build it into some sort of... I dunno, fancy ridable player piano with upside-down pirate flags flying from it... and then give it to my friend, nobody can stop me. Not so with software: if I want to buy a game and modify it so it doesn't need a CD in the tray to play, and then distribute that, I can't. Why not?
If you want to treat data like commodities at least do so consistently.
I was actually arguing almost this exact same thing just last night, although I phrased it in a slightly different way. What I came down to is, essentially, art, as well as science, are inherantly not-for-profit ventures, in a model like that of "fine art" (painting, sculpture, etc). To attach a commodity-like value and artificial scarcity to a reproduction of any sort of information is just unnatural; it is effectively the PEOPLE who create that information that you should be paying for, as they are their time and effort is ultimate cost of creating it. (Materials cost, etc, aside).
That thought got me going a bit. Fine artists do art for the love of it, and just try to make a living from what they do. (Though of course, nobody would mind somehow getting rich off it either). Likewise, good scientists simply love science, and usually have to beg for funding to support their habit... er, research. People make intellectual pursuits because they want to: the only reason money becomes involved is because those people need it to live while they chase their intellectual dreams.
Cleaning toilets is something nobody wants to do, so they demand recompense for it. Same with hauling your garbage, flipping burgers, and any number of other thankless, boring jobs out there that will eventually be done by robots. Even things much more high-level like farming or business management - you can't exactly say "nobody wants to be a farmer" or "nobody wants to be a manager", but given the option of working a job like that or of being able to go on permanant paid vacation, most people would take the vacation.
Art and science, on the other hand, are different things. If we had robots and miracle replicators that took care of all our material needs, and nobody needed to work, money was obsolete and everybody was on permanant vacation, people would STILL do art and STILL do science strictly out of the love of what they do. These are not things that need monetary incentive to be done, because even if people did not need money, they would still be done anyway.
Thus I believe that in an ideal society, information would be left as it naturally tends to be - free, both as in speech and as in beer - and there would be a separate, strictly economic method of supporting artists just enough to allow people the leeway from paying work that they need to pursue the arts and sciences.
Information released into the public (you may still keep secrets of course) should not be constrained in any way. I don't think many people here will argue about that in principle; that information, as they say, "wants to be free". Rather, people will argue that that information has value and thus it's creators deserve compensation; or more specifically, that without economic support in their endevors no one will be able to pursue such intellectual things.
That I agree with, but I don't think the answer is in forcing artificial scarcity on information and making it behave like a physical product. Instead, to reap what in such an open system would be all of society's benefits, all of society should fund the initial endevors. Further profit could be made by GOOD artists and GOOD scientists from donations by people who appreciate their work, what you might call "honestly overpriced" reproductions (basically a cheap free gift with your donation), and commissions by wealthy benefactors who want an original piece (or original research) to their liking - just like in the fine arts. But people need the leeway to take a stab at it to begin with, and for that you need some sort of financial safety net.
Yes, I am essentially talking about some sort of government welfare (more commonly known to the intellectual crowd as "grants") to support the promotion of arts and sciences. Not a lot, mind you - nobody should be able to say "Hey, I could make a killing on free govt being an artist!" But it should be just enough to live a frugal life off of, or enough that you can take some time off your day job to pursue an interest in the arts and s
Except most people with a sound system powerfull enough to do that likely have a large disc changer in their trunk, broadcasting over short range to their car radio. You could always just broadcast over a slightly larger range and interfere with that signal.
(As an aside, I've actually had radio stations I was listening to fade partially out and started hearing whatever someone driving past me was playing because of this).
I think if stuff like this starts happening on a larger scale, we might start seeing more use of intelligent frequency-hopping radio devices, more like wifi networking that fixed-frequency broadcasting. Maybe get some of this damned FCC regulated frequencies crap fixed in the process.
Has anybody considered using balloons not only for launch assists, but also for reentry? As the craft begins reentry, inflate a very large balloon attached to it. This not only gives you an early parachute effect (which, granted, you'd probably want to minimize to keep from burning your balloon with the air friction), but as you enter the atmosphere proper, the boyancy of the balloon would slow your descent. I imagine if you calibrated the whole system right you might be able to just lower the craft gently back to the ground instead of dropping like a brick from space.
On a completely different topic, what about these new electric-powered charged-air thrusters NASA has been toying with? (A take on the old hobbyist 'lifter' technology). It seems that if you could somehow harness the heat from friction on reentry as a power source, you could power some of these drives to use as breaking thrusters.
Slashdot Mirror
So does it actually modify the browser interface itself, like up next to the navbar you've also got all these additional buttons? Or is it just a 'helper' app that floats around in it's own window, that just happens to be long and horizontal and can be positioned like an actual toolbar?
The software running on screen may have been SGI software, but the physical computer shown in the film is a Macintosh Quadra. (bear in mind that on film, almost anything on a computer screen is composited in afterwards). I distinctly remember because I had that model of machine at the time and identified it while watching the movie. "That's not UNIX, that's my Mac!"
I've not stuck my head into the modern Windows world for a while now, so I've got a question. I keep seeing this world "toolbar" bandied about in a way that is strange and foreign to me.
When I hear "toolbar" I think of one of the floating windoids that applications put tools and frequently used buttons on, like all that screen-hogging crap at the top of every MS application's default layout. I suppose the navigation bar and buttons, bookmarks, tabs, etc at the top of a browser also counts.
But how exactly does one "install" a toolbar into another application? And how does a "toolbar" do anything like install spyware, or other things that are not editing tools or at least some sort of button? I'm confused.
But this was the FIRST post - the others are the copycats. And it's not like it was modded "Redundant" or anything - it was modded "Troll", which is completely off.
I third that, and whoever modded the GP poster "off topic" (probably the same person) is a moron.
The topic is 3D user interfaces. The great grandparent was quoting a movie, Jurrasic Park, where a character sits down at a 3D user interface (not Off Topic, and not a Troll), proclaiming "it's a unix system... I know this!". Given the UI is one I've never seen on any Unix box, and that machine was in fact a Mac Quadra, I'd say that's even Funny.
Sometimes I wish I could metamoderate specific posts.
*Limit one per customer.
When a conversation I've been following, for example on a mailing list, starts getting too out of hand with mixed top-quotes, bottom-quotes, interspersed bottom quotes, etc, and I want to reply to a series of points in the conversation, I'll usually trim out the quotes just for my own ease, so I don't have to try to untangle the mess. I'll then sum up each earlier point before my response to it. It's easier to retype other people's points than to try to untangle their horrible mess of quotes, especially if they haven't been snipping the irrelevant parts.
But if I've been having a nice back-and-forth with someone who's got good nettiquite and is bottom posting properly, I see no problem with responding point-by-point with quotes. "Me, too" responses are still rather silly, but if I agree with one point in an argument that I'm responding to, I'll put [snip] after a fragment of the first sentance, and then respond "I agree here". Or if I only disagree with a few points, I'll say at the top that I agree for the most part, but there are a few points I want to address. Then I will quote and respond as appropriate.
Proper quoting actually supports clear conversation skills, not hinders thenm, but it's more than just where you put your quotes; snipping for relevancy is just as important.
"My God made the laws of Physics - and enforces them."
That's precisely what the person you're arguing against is saying: God didn't say "let there be fish" - God made it so that the nuclear energy contained in an object is equal to what the kinetic energy would be if it's mass was accelerated to the square of the speed of light (E=MC^2), and other such rules. That is a fairly simply system that gives rise to VERY complex results.
That's what moden physics is all about - discovering the simple rules that give rise to more complex ones, ultimately giving rise to rules that govern things like what a fish is. If you believe in God, that could be seen as searching to better understand God's universe, in a sense, his actual words.
It takes a much brighter designer to make a simple rule that will unfold into a beautiful, elegant and complex system. Wouldn't you think your God of infinite intelligence would have designed that, instead of just hacking together a bunch of discrete upper-order concepts like fish, plants, cows and people together like that?
China has the myth of Peng-lai, a sinking island supposed to be the home of the immortals, and home of the Xian-gu (mushrooms of immortality, cf. soma, ambrosia, tree of life).
l
http://www.pantheon.org/articles/p/peng-lai.htm
This, not so coincidentally, out across the South (or East, according to this article) China Sea, in Oceania, where a lot of the seafloor is continental shelf, which was dry land and/or very shallow sea before the end of the Pleistocene. This is where many people place "Mu", "Lemuria", and other mythical sunken lands where ancient and/or powerful people lived. Not to mention Hawaiiki and it's variants, common to most Pacific Island cultures, and core of the Maori geneological story. So yeah, the Asian waters have their share of sunken homeland stories.
Tie that in with the genetic and cultural connections between the Polynesians and South Americans, and some suggestion of precolumbian trade between South American and Africa, maybe Plato's Egyptians' 'great seafaring people with cities of gold' were none other than our old Incan friends (whose creation story involves the survivors of a great flooded land in the west), and their 'sunken homeland to the west' was in fact west of South America, in Oceania... Plato's Atlantis may just be a very distorted and editorialized version of a much older story, perhaps crossed at some point with one of the many sunken Mediterranean civilizations.
I do not presently have a telephone. I have no interest in one. I use the internet for all of my non-personal, non-postal communications. (Not that I use postal communications much either). Everyone I know who I can't speak to in person, has internet access, so email or IM is a suitable way of contacting them.
Am *I*, in your opinion, participating in the levy of this "regressive tax"? I don't use the phone system. They still run a line to my house, though it's not active with a dial tone. Other people's tax dollars from their phone bills pay for that line to be there. I didn't ask for them to, I didn't ask for that line to be there, but it just is. VoIP is just another internet technology, and though it can connect to POTS phone systems, if there are people WITH POTS systems then they are paying for them.
If people stopped driving cars and thus stopped paying a gasoline tax, would you argue that they are putting a burden on those who do drive to pay for the upkeep of the roads? I might actually agree with such an assertion, but what is the problem with it? If enough people don't want the service provided (POTS phone lines, roads, what have you), to the point that there aren't enough taxes to pay for it's upkeep, then why not just kill the service when it reaches that point?
So let the burden of paying for POTS systems fall on those who still use them. It's only fair. We don't pay for the mass removal of horse manure from our streets anymore, either, because most people stopped driving horse-carts.
I think Kerry's concession should stand, but the Democrats (if the vote goes that way) should still get the election. That way, Kerry has effectively resigned and given the presidency to Edwards, who is far more appealing for a president anyway.
You know, that would make an interesting strategy to get a nationally less-popular candidate into office for a party: make him VP for the more popular (but less desirable, to the party) nominee for that party, and then have the more popular candidate resign when he wins, effectively sneaking your real preferred candidate into office.
Oh dear God, they've found the Question.
Goodbye, Universe.
Corporations are entities established in law only. In the absence of laws allowing their existence, the individuals who occupy what we now consider "ownership" positions in a "corporation" would be held personally responsible for their actions or actions carried out at their behest.
In order for a free market to work, you not only need to remove limiting laws (regulations, etc), but enabling laws as well (laws which allow corporations to exist). Regular old laws dealing with criminal activity will make sure that agents in the free market behave themselves.
Just a minor correction that I'm sure no one will even read or care to read: Halo is not set in the Marathon universe. In early drafts of the story is was, but it is clearly a very distinct world now, and Bungie has said as much.
Were you trying to be funny there, or it it just the irony?
We need a +1 Unintentionally Funny for things like the juxtaposition of that message and sig :-)
What difference does being a vegan have to do with whether or not you would handle SPAM (the food)? It's not like it's meat or anything...
SPAM is Pretend, Artificial Meat
EVERYTHING has it's own gravitational field. You do, I do, your computer does; the phosphors on my screen displaying this text as I type it each have their own gravitational field.
That being said, I'm pretty sure any body which naturally has a regular orbit around a planet is considered a moon, though you must get into a size limit somewhere otherwise every speck of dust in Saturn's rings could be considerd a separate "moon".
"Who knows, are the girls easier on the moon?"
No idea, but there's certain to be fewer heavy chicks around!
The conditions of sale laws you reference seem completely wrong to me. (Not that you are wrong, but that the law should not be like that). I personally feel that people's rights with regards to commerce (buying and selling things) is limited to the right to possess and exchange things of value, no other strings attached. If I buy Thing X, then that physical Thing X is mine to do whatever I want with (within other laws of course), and the previous owner has no connection to it.
On another note, since this is turning into a discussion on IP vs no IP, I'd like to save some time and just point to another post I just made in this topic that covers pretty much anything else I'd say in response here:
The Arts and Sciences are Inherantly Not-for-Profit
I'm essentially arguing the opposite of your statement that "Information is tricky and needs more protection than physical products simply because it is so easy to copy". I think that trying to force artificial scarcity and thus value in information is going against the natural flow of it, that information, as they say, "wants to be free" and unprotected, and that promotion of the arts and sciences - which are what IP laws were set up to do in the first place - should be done via other means than artificially regulating the flow of information.
"One of the tennets of freedom is the right for people to be able to decide how what they create should be used."
Do gunmakers get to decide who you may or may not shoot? Do car manufacturers decide where you are allowed to drive? Do spoon builders decide what you can scoop? Can the cheesemakers tell you what crackers you are allowed to put it on?
If you want to treat information like a product (which I would argue against anyway), then most products' manufacturers don't have a say in what you can use their product for. Now granted, I can't make infinite free copies of my car and distribute them, by sheer physical (or technological) limits. But if I want to take my car, disassemble it, build it into some sort of... I dunno, fancy ridable player piano with upside-down pirate flags flying from it... and then give it to my friend, nobody can stop me. Not so with software: if I want to buy a game and modify it so it doesn't need a CD in the tray to play, and then distribute that, I can't. Why not?
If you want to treat data like commodities at least do so consistently.
I was actually arguing almost this exact same thing just last night, although I phrased it in a slightly different way. What I came down to is, essentially, art, as well as science, are inherantly not-for-profit ventures, in a model like that of "fine art" (painting, sculpture, etc). To attach a commodity-like value and artificial scarcity to a reproduction of any sort of information is just unnatural; it is effectively the PEOPLE who create that information that you should be paying for, as they are their time and effort is ultimate cost of creating it. (Materials cost, etc, aside).
That thought got me going a bit. Fine artists do art for the love of it, and just try to make a living from what they do. (Though of course, nobody would mind somehow getting rich off it either). Likewise, good scientists simply love science, and usually have to beg for funding to support their habit... er, research. People make intellectual pursuits because they want to: the only reason money becomes involved is because those people need it to live while they chase their intellectual dreams.
Cleaning toilets is something nobody wants to do, so they demand recompense for it. Same with hauling your garbage, flipping burgers, and any number of other thankless, boring jobs out there that will eventually be done by robots. Even things much more high-level like farming or business management - you can't exactly say "nobody wants to be a farmer" or "nobody wants to be a manager", but given the option of working a job like that or of being able to go on permanant paid vacation, most people would take the vacation.
Art and science, on the other hand, are different things. If we had robots and miracle replicators that took care of all our material needs, and nobody needed to work, money was obsolete and everybody was on permanant vacation, people would STILL do art and STILL do science strictly out of the love of what they do. These are not things that need monetary incentive to be done, because even if people did not need money, they would still be done anyway.
Thus I believe that in an ideal society, information would be left as it naturally tends to be - free, both as in speech and as in beer - and there would be a separate, strictly economic method of supporting artists just enough to allow people the leeway from paying work that they need to pursue the arts and sciences.
Information released into the public (you may still keep secrets of course) should not be constrained in any way. I don't think many people here will argue about that in principle; that information, as they say, "wants to be free". Rather, people will argue that that information has value and thus it's creators deserve compensation; or more specifically, that without economic support in their endevors no one will be able to pursue such intellectual things.
That I agree with, but I don't think the answer is in forcing artificial scarcity on information and making it behave like a physical product. Instead, to reap what in such an open system would be all of society's benefits, all of society should fund the initial endevors. Further profit could be made by GOOD artists and GOOD scientists from donations by people who appreciate their work, what you might call "honestly overpriced" reproductions (basically a cheap free gift with your donation), and commissions by wealthy benefactors who want an original piece (or original research) to their liking - just like in the fine arts. But people need the leeway to take a stab at it to begin with, and for that you need some sort of financial safety net.
Yes, I am essentially talking about some sort of government welfare (more commonly known to the intellectual crowd as "grants") to support the promotion of arts and sciences. Not a lot, mind you - nobody should be able to say "Hey, I could make a killing on free govt being an artist!" But it should be just enough to live a frugal life off of, or enough that you can take some time off your day job to pursue an interest in the arts and s
The tagline is an OR, not an AND. If it's news for nerds OR stuff that matters, it gets in. Doesn't have to be both.
Except most people with a sound system powerfull enough to do that likely have a large disc changer in their trunk, broadcasting over short range to their car radio. You could always just broadcast over a slightly larger range and interfere with that signal.
(As an aside, I've actually had radio stations I was listening to fade partially out and started hearing whatever someone driving past me was playing because of this).
I think if stuff like this starts happening on a larger scale, we might start seeing more use of intelligent frequency-hopping radio devices, more like wifi networking that fixed-frequency broadcasting. Maybe get some of this damned FCC regulated frequencies crap fixed in the process.
Has anybody considered using balloons not only for launch assists, but also for reentry? As the craft begins reentry, inflate a very large balloon attached to it. This not only gives you an early parachute effect (which, granted, you'd probably want to minimize to keep from burning your balloon with the air friction), but as you enter the atmosphere proper, the boyancy of the balloon would slow your descent. I imagine if you calibrated the whole system right you might be able to just lower the craft gently back to the ground instead of dropping like a brick from space.
On a completely different topic, what about these new electric-powered charged-air thrusters NASA has been toying with? (A take on the old hobbyist 'lifter' technology). It seems that if you could somehow harness the heat from friction on reentry as a power source, you could power some of these drives to use as breaking thrusters.