Why patents, and not copyrights? Are inventions any less worthy than music or text? OSC said that it was 'an expensive moral quibble' not to sign work for hire papers. He gets paid less because he does not sign his rights away. If some movie studio decides to make a movie out of one of his works, then it's a windfall for him - he's prolly smart enough to demand gross points instead of net points like Stan Lee.
But if nobody ever makes a movie out of an OSC book, that's money he lost. He is risking money he could otherwise have because he thinks someday his copyrights may be worth more than he ever made off his books. The publishers are willing to pay more if an author signs a work for hire statement because they know there is a chance to make money from a movie in the future. They are willing to pay more to buy the copyright than to merely license the work.
True, if the couch doesn't meet some requirements like controlability, and signals etc, the driver/creator of the thing, or his insurance company ( if he could even find one to insure his couch ) should be liable. But these tests don't require the destruction of the vehicle. Crash tests do.
Ask 10 poor people and I'll bet 9 would rather drive a deathtrap than nothing at all - I know I would. But if consumers don't demand safety in general as a feature of their vehicles, then that just means consumers ( the public ) doesn't care about safety. Yes safety costs money. Maybe they'll choose not to have that great sound system to know the company designed and tested the vehicle for occupant safety so they'll be able to walk away from a crash. Maybe not. Whatever the choice it should be the consumer's to make.
If a car is unsafe, the automaker opens themselves to lawsuits. It would behove the car makers to make sure their vehicles are safe.
A: Because they can't afford to live anywhere else.
Q: Why can't they afford to live someplace better?
A: Because richer people than them buy the better land, tougher well nourished people with better weapons are already living there.
Q: Why did they ever settle there?
A: They were born there. Generations ago men with spears drove them to the most dogforsaken areas of the Earth.
Q: Why?
A: Limited resources and space.
Q: Why are resources and space limited.
A: Because life including humans reproduces exponentially until all resources are consumed. When the rate of predation/starvation = the rate of reproduction, the numbers stablilize.
Q: Why don't people, who are smarter than other life forms limit their birth rates?
A: Go ahead limit your reproduction and leave the world to those eviler than thou, but I'll kill any number of people, and risk my own death to reproduce. Imagine that * 6 billion.
Q: Inevitable starvation, wars, and degradation of humanity sound distasteful to me. Where can we get more resources before the world gets tougher, and the meaning of 'fittest' changes from who can breed the fastest to who can survive the most tribulations? I just wanna screw and party.
A: Ingenious inventions can stretch existing resources, but more space can only be had by leaving Earth.
Q: Maybe we can build a space elevator
A: Maybe.
Q: Then when someone's life is in the dumps on Earth they don't have to accept a nasty fate like starvation or slavery or daily noogies. They can go settle in outer space.
A: They could.
Q: But it might be tough to live in space.
A: Of course it would.
Q: There might be things like starvation asphyxiation, irradiation, dehydration etc to contend with. Only the hardiest would survive.
A: Yes.
Q: Earth would be a better place. People on Earth would still screw, party and make babies. Some of them would not be able to find resources enough on Earth.
A: It depends on which chair they sit in.
Q: Chair?
A: 90% of life is sitting in the right chair. The right chair being the one which lets you accrue the most resources.
Q: And the best of us sit in the best chairs right? It must take talent to get a good seat. Let the riff raff go live on the moon or something. I get it.
A: Not really, the game of musical chairs is set up so that the incumbent sitter can almost always keep their seat from a standing person. Otherwise we'd spend all our time fighting to keep our seats. The more desperate the unseated get to sit down, the more unlikely people will be to move from the seats they are in. People will start to inherit seats from their parents. A bunch of rotting goulds sitters and those who wish they were them.
Q: So you don't need to be particularly fit or smart or hardworking to survive if you've got a good seat?
A: Right. And the dearer seats get, the harder it will get to move between seats. Everyone will stay put, or end up on the floor with no resources acrueing to them.
Q: Sounds like a rigid class society, like feudalism or something.
A: They can always live on the moon. Plenty of seats there..
Q: I'd take a chair on the moon over the floor I guess. Still it must be the least careful, or the blunderers that end up on the floor.
A: Or the unlucky. Sometimes careful is a virtue, sometimes it is a liability. Depends on your situation. You never really know if you were lucky anyway. Maybe losing the state lottery meant you didn't get shot by a robber the next day.
Q: So the seatless go to Outer space and fight nature for a seat instead of each other. What happens when outer space stops being so hostile, once
Well if you're importing rare cars from Europe, then you're super rich from my point of view. I'm super rich to some guy in the third world making 3 cents a year working 25 hour days 9 days a week naked and scrawny from malnutrition carrying 300lb sacks of mud to make a billion cubit tall statue of Bender the Robot. Obviously the people who drive the cars on the road should bear the full cost of 'federalizing' them. However, it shouldn't cost that much to federalize a car. I am in favor of legislating a few things, like e-brakes, turn signals, headlights, horn, but as far as passenger safety it shoud be entirely up to the driver. If I bolt together some monstrosity, and put turn signals on it, I should be able to drive my couch down the road. I shouldn't have to make 20 couches and crash them into a wall. Of course driving a couch is unsafe. But I should have the right to do it anyway.
Mod parent down because he didn't get the joke. Mod me down because this is probably redundant. Mod a random person down because you can. Mod idiots up. CHAOS!!!!!! Moo haa haa
If sites used https, instead of http for all pages it would do wonders to increase the privacy of web surfers. Sites could even serve up 500 Internal Server Errors to Websence crawler bots, and to people from IP addresses known to be associated with censorware companies to try and keep off the block list. What percentage of web traffic occurrs from people at work? Being monitor proof could really increase traffic to a site.
A guy in the article explains that LEO spacefaring can be an exciting program. He coaches it in terms of 'changing the existing space station program into an exciting one'.
Although I do not agree that anything useful can or ever will be made of the existing ISS, the idea of havesting solar energy in orbit, and beaming it down for use on Earth really IS exciting. It holds the possibility of spacefaring paying for itself, and even churning a profit.
If you think about the other economically successful manifiestation of spacefaring, weather/spy/communications sattellites, it is obvious that they affect your life daily. If you watch TV, the show has been beamed to space and back.
Harvesting energy from outer space promises the same kind of world changing, standard-of-living enhancing potential as other 'future tech' like fusion power. The more orbiting solar panels you put up there, the more power there is for use down here, the more economic incentive to develop cheap access to space for maintainence and installation purposes - eventually opening space to less profitable persuits.
Throughout all of history people wanted to fly but thought it to be impossible - in the realm of pixies, and trolls, a fantasy. Then with the hot air baloon, and then more recently airplanes, people could fly. The realm of humans expanded upward.
The first people to orbit the earth expanded the realm upward further. Soon communications sattelites, and ICBMs came to pass.
But there was still something within reach that in all of history humans never dreamed was possible. To walk on another planet. With the Apollo program, a person had walked on the biggest planet in the sky - the moon. Humans were no longer limited to the ground under their feet, but could concievably, some even had, walked on the ground in the sky. There was that much more space to put your feet.
But the Apollo program was very expensive, and Mars was still too far away. It is only a little red dot in the sky, not, psychologically as big as the moon. Which dot even is Mars? That one? Or is it Venus? But the moon is Big, in your face, and obviously a real other planet not a star. People have walked on it. People can walk on other planets.
I was not born when the Apollo program was going on, but I don't think people walking on Mars or any other planet would cause as big a change in the average person's conception of what people can do.
We have sent numerous probes to Mars, Venus, and to photograph the outer planets. Of course it is possible to send a human to those places, at great expense, and danger, almost certainly a one way trip. People can walk on the moon, people can send their robots to any planet in the solar system. By extention people can walk anywhere on the solar system with ground, and conditions that won't melt a spacesuit.
But is it worth it? I COULD drive a better car, but do I want the payments? I COULD charge a vacation to somewhere exotic to my credit card and walk in another country. But I've been to Mexico. I don't need to go to Tahiti. I am comfortable in the knowledge that if I really wanted to go to Tahiti, I could go there as easily as I went to Mexico.
I think we're better off shutting down the space shuttle, and space station and concentrating more on unmanned probes/ telescopes and on developing spacefaring economically. Replace the space shuttle with a large unmanned robotic cargo truck, and a simple time-tested, small and efficent capsule style people mover. Then people can bolt together an economically useful unmanned orbiting solar power station instead of a scientifically useless orbiting hotel.
You wouldn't pay for this with taxes, but in your ( cheaper ) power bill, and in the lower prices of goods made in factories powered with space2earth beamed energy.
The average Joe could hope to be an astronaught. There would be real people paid to fix the orbiting power stations.
Ok, so you're pumping the electrical output of a medium sized hydroelectric plant through thick copper cables into freezing superconducting contacts. All is fine as your magnet draws millions of amps - for a while, until your copper wires start getting a little too hot. Soon you are using all your helium to cool them so that they don't heat up your superconducting contacts, but you are running out of helium! You want to shut off the power, but that can not be done with a switch because of the danger of arcing, the only way to disconnect the power is by letting the generators spin down. You call the power plant to tell them to spin down their genreators, but they laugh at you. The helium is gone. It is only a matter of time before the superconductors warm up. The magnet groans. You can not imagine why a superconducting magnet would make such a noise, but never the less, the magnet groans. All of a sudden the superconducting properties of the coils break down. You smell smoke.
You expect the arcing to be the familiar blue-violet glow, but instead, you see bright yellow arcing because of the residual helium, and some reds and greens from the vaporizing metals in the ceramic superconducting wire.
The heat of the electrical arc spreads the failure to the surrounding superconducting wire. It starts slowly, but the electrical fire seems to be spreading at an exponential rate. Through the thick pyrex view plate once so clear but now covered in places with an opaque layer of condensed metal smoke, and in others so foggy that all you can see is flashing yellow electrical arcs tinted in places with other colors, you see the immenent destruction of the whole lab. The heat will build pressure in the coil chamber the helium and vaporized metal plasma will weaken the three inch thick pyrex view plate, causing it to shatter. You run for it.
Outside you watch the side of the building for smoke, nothing, no sign of the disaster within. People rush out of the exits and gather next to the person - you - who was considerate enough to pull the fire alarm.
BANG!! The brick wall bursts, smoke, broken bricks, and glass, and a brief yellow flash. The glowing gas bubbles upward, ball shaped for an instant before disappearing.
You watch the smoke billow out of the building. The roof has not collapsed. You creep around a wide circle to see into the building you just destroyed. There is a loud buzz. You see a mean blue-violet-green stationary arc from the end of your 12 inch thick melting copper cable to the ground cable. Red hot copper has eaten it's way through the floor, and started a fire in the basement. Hopefully it doesn't fall on the huge tanks of fuel oil they use for heating.
BANG! They blow up. The fire pressurized the kerosene-like fuel in the tanks, causing them to explode. The normally benign hydrocarbon is atomized, hot volitile and well mixed with air. The entire building shatters spraying splintered, burning wood, and crumbled brick bits of wall for hundereds of feet in every direction. The billowing orange, no red, no black mushroom cloud rises into the sky, a beacon for the fire department to find. All eyes are on you. It was your lab that blew up. You melt backwards towards the parking lot and take off squealing your tires on the way to the newstand to look for another job..
But imagine how FLOATY a frog could be at 25 tesla!
They ought to give up on MRI's and just concentrate on implementing the EXTREME SPORT of magnetic field weightless floating. If a frog can do it, so can I! It would be such a *gnarly* diamagnetic buzz!
So the world was stuck at 20 Tesla for superconducting magnets for years and years till now when they can reach 25 Tesla.
Does this mean that there are 100 Tesla NON-superconducting magnets in someone's basement? One would think that superconducting magnets would be stronger than regular ones, but maybe not. Maybe someone's got an ultramagnet hooked directly to a nuclear power plant with 3 foot diameter copper cable windings that puts out even stronger fields...
I totally agree. There MIGHT be some deadly germ anywhere, but probably not unless you are in a particularly dirty area where there is lots of food for bacteria. I eat wild plants like strawberrys without washing them, I'd eat a sandwich that fell on the lawn, or on a rock outside unless there was sand around. ( I hate eating sand... )
As for the 5 second rule, who cares, once it falls on the surface, it's contaminated. But EVERYTHING in life is contaminated with something. Do I think I'll get sick from it? Depends on the surface...
I've eaten cold pizza from a box on my counter 36 or more hours since buying it. The same beer that makes one forget to refrigerate their pizza tends to kill anything that may have grown on it in the meantime if drunk at the same time the leftovers are consumed. I'm fairly confident that floor microbes are suceptible to beer sterilization as well.
Dog slobber is harmless too, unless you just caught them eating out of the cat box and can smell it on their breath. Potato chips are fine after the dog sniffed them but turned up his nose. Dog tongues are useful wound cleansers and scab abraiders too. Skin you knee? It'll heal twice as fast and with less scarring if you let your dog lick off the scab every day or every other day.
Brie that has been sitting in the window sill for days and is growing white fur is an unknown. I ate some of that assuming the white fur was just more of the 'crust' and did get mildly sick, though it may have been from other causes.
I've heard that green bread is OK to eat. Have accidentally eaten moldy bread. It tasted so gross I almost puked on the spot. No ill affects afterward though.
Olives, black and green, as well as pickles are good to eat when sitting out for days in a bowl if there is liquid in the bowl. Olives, are good even if there is no liquid as they shrivel and dry to chewy raisin like things. Dried pickles sound too gross to try.
Cheetos. I never eat cheeze puffs until they are good and stale. MMMMMM chewy like real cheeze instead of all crunchy and gross..
Miniaturize this down to NanoScale, and you'd have a the Maxwell House Demon 3000 hot coffee energy extractor. Like Mr. Fusion, it straps nicely to a Delorian, and tucks neatly behind the can opener in the kitchen.
If the ball bearing did not go all the way through the asteroid sample, but became lodged in it, then all the energy of the ball bearing was transferred into the asteroid. Sounds like firing a ball bearing at the sample at the right angle, were it far enough away, and headed for Earth, would be an effective way of giving it some lateral momentum and changing it's orbit to miss Earth.
What I want to see, is the effect of a large thermonuclear bomb on an asteroid sample...
I wonder how far someone could get with telebegging:
I am calling on behalf of the non-profit John Doe foundation. As someone who tries to be charitable and make the world a better place, we think you might be interested in making a small donation to the John Doe foundation. Your contribution would be tax deductable and you can be sure that over 99% of the money collected actually goes toward the John Doe foundation's cause. That makes the John Doe foundation a leader in efficient use of funds to make the world a better place.
Um, ok, I suppose I can donate $20.00, just one more thing, what kinds of things does the John Doe foundation do?
In this world, many people are faced with poverty and no means of support other than the charity of good people like yourself. The John Doe foundation believes that not only the necessities of life are due, but the little things like Italian sportscars, and mansions, even spending cash, can enrich the lives of these otherwise indigent people. Because there is only so much charity to be had, and money only goes so far, the John Doe foundation was created to concentrate it's fundraising powers on funding the enrichment of just one person, John Doe. Over the last year we have been able to buy John Doe, a palacial estate in southern California overlooking the ocean, a fleet of fast sexy cars, a yacht, a small dude ranch in Colorado, a private Jet, and almost a hundered million dollars in spending cash by concentrating the donations of millions of generous donors like yourself towards the enrichment of this poor unfortunate.
The John Doe foundation may not help as many people as some other larger charities, but can any of them match the quality of assistance that we provide? We urge you to open your wallet and your heart to John Doe. Give till it hurts.
$20.00 is all I can afford, I missed paying my cable bill this month. May I ask your name?
Some sick son-of-a-bitch is gonna do this, cleverly having his wget program set up free email accounts and use them to confirm the registrations, they'll sign everyone up slowly over like 2 years, until the telemarketers pertition the government that there was cheating and the cheats can't be reliably seperated from the real signups. The terrorist, or disgruntled ex-spammer will have successfully brought back telemarketing to the US. Moo haa haa.
Cell phones work on the gigahertz frequencies. ( Yeah like your microwave oven but cell phones don't have enough juice to cook your ear. ) Working on the GHz frequency lets cell phones get by with a really short antenna. Ham is at most MHz and AM is KHz. The antennas required would be way too long to use in cell phones.
I got an olde CB for free and tried it out. There was nobody on most of the channels. The one or two channels that would sometimes have some chatter had some guy with a southern accent jabbering about something retarded.
What is it with the southern accents and audio communication? When that Yahoo voice chat first came out I went and listened. Everyone sounded like a trucker from Alabama.
I don't know why people didn't just use the regular phone. The phone always seems to work even when the power is out, and when the phone goes out, the power always seems to be on.
Some dudes discovered this with a dental X-Ray machine in like 2000 or something, and then in 2001, Lawrence Livermore tried to replicate it with a 'much larger xray machine' and said that they got nothing. This was before 9/11 when mini nukes were Taboo. But now that the gubmint wants mini nukes for bunker busting, Lawrence Livermore is researching this again, and think's it's promising.
My conspiracy theory is that Lawrence Livermore or Area 51 or some such government run hush hush spot may have a weapon based on this on the drawing board, or even in development. When the dudes published the idea in 2000, Lawrence livermore published fake negative results to keep the other countries of the world from working on the idea, and then secretly have been working on it ever since. Now that mini-nukes are back in style since 9/11, they can even say they're working on it in public and don't have to hide their research.
There need to be cheap widely available LCD goggles that have comparable resolution to a computer monitor or at least a TV screen. Any other form of 3D, sucks because it would give you a headache. The other kewl thing about such goggles, is that they could be equipped with some sort of detector for head movement ( I don't know how, but aircraft seem to know which way they are pointing so it is possible ) This would, for the first time, let you look to the side or up or down the way you do in life, by looking that way, not by pressing a button. That would really increase 'immersion'.
I would use a pair of such goggles as my main computer screen if I had them, and they didn't give me a headache. Can LCD pixels be made small enough to look good when viewed at such close range as goggles though? Think of the added privacy of not having people be able to look over your shoulder while you type...
Gameplay has gotten worse since the end of the SNES era. The SNES had the power to run just about any 'Jumping around game' side scroller that you could think up, and the controller style that was introduced with the NES and perfected with the Sony Playstation's advanced version ( the one with the additional 2 analog joysticks and the shaker feedback ) was perfectly suited to those games.
Atari was fun, but the controllers sucked. The analog joystick didn't let you control Pitfall Harry exactly, and exact on/off timing is what you need control of in a side scroller. With the Atari's limited power/memory, impresice analog control made the repetitive and simple screens hard/variable enough to be fun for a long time. The NES with the memory and power to display many different screens of side scrolling action meshed perfectly with the easy to use and ergonomic NES controller. The SNES with more power added more buttons, still on/off only, no analog which was fine for 2D games.
The playstation and N64 were the first popular game systems that had the juice to render truly 3D games. The N64 added a single awkwardly placed analog joystick to it's default controller. The playstation stayed with on/off buttons. But the playstation had a CD Rom drive so only it had the storage capacity to hold many different screens of 3D action. You could buy an optional vibrating controller with 2 much more ergonomically placed analog sticks in addition to the standard on/off buttons. These optional analog controllers were supported by many later Playstation games.
But gameplay was really stuck at that point. People usually have only 10 fingers and some of those need to be used to hold the controller itself. Also, certain fingers are biomechanically coupled to some extent to others, so the range of coordinated movement is limited. The SNES controller really took full advantage of all the fingers of a human hand. The playstation controller added another pair of L/R buttons, for a total of four, but that is about the limit. Players choose whether to use the analog sticks or the on/off buttons because they do not have the fingers to take advantage of both.
In real life, you have 10 fingers, 10 toes, 2 legs 2 arms, a movable head, a twistable spine, aimable eyeballs etc. In game-land, you have 10 fingers, 4 of which are holding the controller at best, more like six unusable ones. The thumb does double duty controlling and pressing buttons and the index finger presses buttons. You really have only 4 fingers that are used to control the game.
Your eyeballs face straight ahead and view the world through a window ( your TV screen/Monitor ) Turning your head or moving means using a finger that could otherwise be used to control some other action.
Playability is what makes games fun. Super Mario Brothers 2 and 3 are still fun to play for hours even though they are passe. This is because they are playable. Even a really low tech game like chess is fun, because it is playable. Chess isn't immersive, it doesn't simulate a real military conflict, but it is still fun. Now that 3D graphics are possible
It could read the new double sided floppy disks. )
Black and white MacPaint, Dark Castle, and having to swap the floppy disk that held the program you were running with the floppy with the operating system back and forth to do certain things.
We are spoiled nowadays with these new fangled Hard Drive things. Back then I thought the 3 1/2 inch floppy disks WERE hard disks! They certainly are harder than the 5 1/2 inch ones! I remember when we got that extra 3 1/2 inch drive. No more floppy disk swapping. You could boot off the main drive with your operating system floppy and run programs and store files using the other 800K floppy drive. That was the shiznit!
Since Ice reflects solar energy back into Outer Space better than liquid water, melting the polar ice caps should result in more warming of that area, though being at an oblique angle to the sun's light means not much light actually strikes the north and south poles, so it might not matter much.
That's why ice floats. If you have a glass of water that is filled to the brim with ice cubes floating in it and sticking out above the top of the glass, and the ice melts, then the water level will remain unchanged. This is because the ice displaces the same weight of water wether or not it is melted.
Since the ice at the north pole is floating, it's melting won't affect sea level, but what about the glaciers covering Greenland, or Antarctica? That water will flow off land, and into the ocean, raising sea level.
The server was cracked in the week between when the exloit was posted on bugtraq and the time a patch was available. http://www.gnu.org has it under gnus flashes
(For the ptrace bug, an root-shell exploit available on 17 March 2003, and
a working fix was not available on linux-kernel until the following week.
Evidence found on the machine indicates that were cracked during that
week.)
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But if nobody ever makes a movie out of an OSC book, that's money he lost. He is risking money he could otherwise have because he thinks someday his copyrights may be worth more than he ever made off his books. The publishers are willing to pay more if an author signs a work for hire statement because they know there is a chance to make money from a movie in the future. They are willing to pay more to buy the copyright than to merely license the work.
Ask 10 poor people and I'll bet 9 would rather drive a deathtrap than nothing at all - I know I would. But if consumers don't demand safety in general as a feature of their vehicles, then that just means consumers ( the public ) doesn't care about safety. Yes safety costs money. Maybe they'll choose not to have that great sound system to know the company designed and tested the vehicle for occupant safety so they'll be able to walk away from a crash. Maybe not. Whatever the choice it should be the consumer's to make.
If a car is unsafe, the automaker opens themselves to lawsuits. It would behove the car makers to make sure their vehicles are safe.
Well if you're importing rare cars from Europe, then you're super rich from my point of view. I'm super rich to some guy in the third world making 3 cents a year working 25 hour days 9 days a week naked and scrawny from malnutrition carrying 300lb sacks of mud to make a billion cubit tall statue of Bender the Robot.
Obviously the people who drive the cars on the road should bear the full cost of 'federalizing' them. However, it shouldn't cost that much to federalize a car. I am in favor of legislating a few things, like e-brakes, turn signals, headlights, horn, but as far as passenger safety it shoud be entirely up to the driver. If I bolt together some monstrosity, and put turn signals on it, I should be able to drive my couch down the road. I shouldn't have to make 20 couches and crash them into a wall. Of course driving a couch is unsafe. But I should have the right to do it anyway.
Mod parent down because he didn't get the joke. Mod me down because this is probably redundant. Mod a random person down because you can. Mod idiots up. CHAOS!!!!!! Moo haa haa
If sites used https, instead of http for all pages it would do wonders to increase the privacy of web surfers. Sites could even serve up 500 Internal Server Errors to Websence crawler bots, and to people from IP addresses known to be associated with censorware companies to try and keep off the block list. What percentage of web traffic occurrs from people at work? Being monitor proof could really increase traffic to a site.
Although I do not agree that anything useful can or ever will be made of the existing ISS, the idea of havesting solar energy in orbit, and beaming it down for use on Earth really IS exciting. It holds the possibility of spacefaring paying for itself, and even churning a profit.
If you think about the other economically successful manifiestation of spacefaring, weather/spy/communications sattellites, it is obvious that they affect your life daily. If you watch TV, the show has been beamed to space and back.
Harvesting energy from outer space promises the same kind of world changing, standard-of-living enhancing potential as other 'future tech' like fusion power. The more orbiting solar panels you put up there, the more power there is for use down here, the more economic incentive to develop cheap access to space for maintainence and installation purposes - eventually opening space to less profitable persuits.
Throughout all of history people wanted to fly but thought it to be impossible - in the realm of pixies, and trolls, a fantasy. Then with the hot air baloon, and then more recently airplanes, people could fly. The realm of humans expanded upward.
The first people to orbit the earth expanded the realm upward further. Soon communications sattelites, and ICBMs came to pass.
But there was still something within reach that in all of history humans never dreamed was possible. To walk on another planet. With the Apollo program, a person had walked on the biggest planet in the sky - the moon. Humans were no longer limited to the ground under their feet, but could concievably, some even had, walked on the ground in the sky. There was that much more space to put your feet.
But the Apollo program was very expensive, and Mars was still too far away. It is only a little red dot in the sky, not, psychologically as big as the moon. Which dot even is Mars? That one? Or is it Venus? But the moon is Big, in your face, and obviously a real other planet not a star. People have walked on it. People can walk on other planets.
I was not born when the Apollo program was going on, but I don't think people walking on Mars or any other planet would cause as big a change in the average person's conception of what people can do.
We have sent numerous probes to Mars, Venus, and to photograph the outer planets. Of course it is possible to send a human to those places, at great expense, and danger, almost certainly a one way trip. People can walk on the moon, people can send their robots to any planet in the solar system. By extention people can walk anywhere on the solar system with ground, and conditions that won't melt a spacesuit.
But is it worth it? I COULD drive a better car, but do I want the payments? I COULD charge a vacation to somewhere exotic to my credit card and walk in another country. But I've been to Mexico. I don't need to go to Tahiti. I am comfortable in the knowledge that if I really wanted to go to Tahiti, I could go there as easily as I went to Mexico.
I think we're better off shutting down the space shuttle, and space station and concentrating more on unmanned probes/ telescopes and on developing spacefaring economically. Replace the space shuttle with a large unmanned robotic cargo truck, and a simple time-tested, small and efficent capsule style people mover. Then people can bolt together an economically useful unmanned orbiting solar power station instead of a scientifically useless orbiting hotel.
You wouldn't pay for this with taxes, but in your ( cheaper ) power bill, and in the lower prices of goods made in factories powered with space2earth beamed energy.
The average Joe could hope to be an astronaught. There would be real people paid to fix the orbiting power stations.
You expect the arcing to be the familiar blue-violet glow, but instead, you see bright yellow arcing because of the residual helium, and some reds and greens from the vaporizing metals in the ceramic superconducting wire.
The heat of the electrical arc spreads the failure to the surrounding superconducting wire. It starts slowly, but the electrical fire seems to be spreading at an exponential rate. Through the thick pyrex view plate once so clear but now covered in places with an opaque layer of condensed metal smoke, and in others so foggy that all you can see is flashing yellow electrical arcs tinted in places with other colors, you see the immenent destruction of the whole lab. The heat will build pressure in the coil chamber the helium and vaporized metal plasma will weaken the three inch thick pyrex view plate, causing it to shatter. You run for it.
Outside you watch the side of the building for smoke, nothing, no sign of the disaster within. People rush out of the exits and gather next to the person - you - who was considerate enough to pull the fire alarm.
BANG!! The brick wall bursts, smoke, broken bricks, and glass, and a brief yellow flash. The glowing gas bubbles upward, ball shaped for an instant before disappearing.
You watch the smoke billow out of the building. The roof has not collapsed. You creep around a wide circle to see into the building you just destroyed. There is a loud buzz. You see a mean blue-violet-green stationary arc from the end of your 12 inch thick melting copper cable to the ground cable. Red hot copper has eaten it's way through the floor, and started a fire in the basement. Hopefully it doesn't fall on the huge tanks of fuel oil they use for heating.
BANG! They blow up. The fire pressurized the kerosene-like fuel in the tanks, causing them to explode. The normally benign hydrocarbon is atomized, hot volitile and well mixed with air. The entire building shatters spraying splintered, burning wood, and crumbled brick bits of wall for hundereds of feet in every direction. The billowing orange, no red, no black mushroom cloud rises into the sky, a beacon for the fire department to find. All eyes are on you. It was your lab that blew up. You melt backwards towards the parking lot and take off squealing your tires on the way to the newstand to look for another job..
They ought to give up on MRI's and just concentrate on implementing the EXTREME SPORT of magnetic field weightless floating. If a frog can do it, so can I! It would be such a *gnarly* diamagnetic buzz!
DUDE!
Does this mean that there are 100 Tesla NON-superconducting magnets in someone's basement? One would think that superconducting magnets would be stronger than regular ones, but maybe not. Maybe someone's got an ultramagnet hooked directly to a nuclear power plant with 3 foot diameter copper cable windings that puts out even stronger fields...
As for the 5 second rule, who cares, once it falls on the surface, it's contaminated. But EVERYTHING in life is contaminated with something. Do I think I'll get sick from it? Depends on the surface...
I've eaten cold pizza from a box on my counter 36 or more hours since buying it. The same beer that makes one forget to refrigerate their pizza tends to kill anything that may have grown on it in the meantime if drunk at the same time the leftovers are consumed. I'm fairly confident that floor microbes are suceptible to beer sterilization as well.
Dog slobber is harmless too, unless you just caught them eating out of the cat box and can smell it on their breath. Potato chips are fine after the dog sniffed them but turned up his nose. Dog tongues are useful wound cleansers and scab abraiders too. Skin you knee? It'll heal twice as fast and with less scarring if you let your dog lick off the scab every day or every other day.
Brie that has been sitting in the window sill for days and is growing white fur is an unknown. I ate some of that assuming the white fur was just more of the 'crust' and did get mildly sick, though it may have been from other causes.
I've heard that green bread is OK to eat. Have accidentally eaten moldy bread. It tasted so gross I almost puked on the spot. No ill affects afterward though.
Olives, black and green, as well as pickles are good to eat when sitting out for days in a bowl if there is liquid in the bowl. Olives, are good even if there is no liquid as they shrivel and dry to chewy raisin like things. Dried pickles sound too gross to try.
Cheetos. I never eat cheeze puffs until they are good and stale. MMMMMM chewy like real cheeze instead of all crunchy and gross..
Miniaturize this down to NanoScale, and you'd have a the Maxwell House Demon 3000 hot coffee energy extractor. Like Mr. Fusion, it straps nicely to a Delorian, and tucks neatly behind the can opener in the kitchen.
What I want to see, is the effect of a large thermonuclear bomb on an asteroid sample...
I wonder how far someone could get with telebegging:
I am calling on behalf of the non-profit John Doe foundation. As someone who tries to be charitable and make the world a better place, we think you might be interested in making a small donation to the John Doe foundation. Your contribution would be tax deductable and you can be sure that over 99% of the money collected actually goes toward the John Doe foundation's cause. That makes the John Doe foundation a leader in efficient use of funds to make the world a better place.
Um, ok, I suppose I can donate $20.00, just one more thing, what kinds of things does the John Doe foundation do?
In this world, many people are faced with poverty and no means of support other than the charity of good people like yourself. The John Doe foundation believes that not only the necessities of life are due, but the little things like Italian sportscars, and mansions, even spending cash, can enrich the lives of these otherwise indigent people. Because there is only so much charity to be had, and money only goes so far, the John Doe foundation was created to concentrate it's fundraising powers on funding the enrichment of just one person, John Doe. Over the last year we have been able to buy John Doe, a palacial estate in southern California overlooking the ocean, a fleet of fast sexy cars, a yacht, a small dude ranch in Colorado, a private Jet, and almost a hundered million dollars in spending cash by concentrating the donations of millions of generous donors like yourself towards the enrichment of this poor unfortunate.
The John Doe foundation may not help as many people as some other larger charities, but can any of them match the quality of assistance that we provide? We urge you to open your wallet and your heart to John Doe. Give till it hurts.
$20.00 is all I can afford, I missed paying my cable bill this month. May I ask your name?
Certainly ma'am, I'm John Doe.
Some sick son-of-a-bitch is gonna do this, cleverly having his wget program set up free email accounts and use them to confirm the registrations, they'll sign everyone up slowly over like 2 years, until the telemarketers pertition the government that there was cheating and the cheats can't be reliably seperated from the real signups. The terrorist, or disgruntled ex-spammer will have successfully brought back telemarketing to the US. Moo haa haa.
Cell phones work on the gigahertz frequencies. ( Yeah like your microwave oven but cell phones don't have enough juice to cook your ear. ) Working on the GHz frequency lets cell phones get by with a really short antenna. Ham is at most MHz and AM is KHz. The antennas required would be way too long to use in cell phones.
What is it with the southern accents and audio communication? When that Yahoo voice chat first came out I went and listened. Everyone sounded like a trucker from Alabama.
I don't know why people didn't just use the regular phone. The phone always seems to work even when the power is out, and when the phone goes out, the power always seems to be on.
It's like every time someone asks SCO how many lines of code in Linux are 'offending', the number goes up by an order of magnitude
My conspiracy theory is that Lawrence Livermore or Area 51 or some such government run hush hush spot may have a weapon based on this on the drawing board, or even in development. When the dudes published the idea in 2000, Lawrence livermore published fake negative results to keep the other countries of the world from working on the idea, and then secretly have been working on it ever since. Now that mini-nukes are back in style since 9/11, they can even say they're working on it in public and don't have to hide their research.
I would use a pair of such goggles as my main computer screen if I had them, and they didn't give me a headache. Can LCD pixels be made small enough to look good when viewed at such close range as goggles though? Think of the added privacy of not having people be able to look over your shoulder while you type...
Gameplay has gotten worse since the end of the SNES era. The SNES had the power to run just about any 'Jumping around game' side scroller that you could think up, and the controller style that was introduced with the NES and perfected with the Sony Playstation's advanced version ( the one with the additional 2 analog joysticks and the shaker feedback ) was perfectly suited to those games.
Atari was fun, but the controllers sucked. The analog joystick didn't let you control Pitfall Harry exactly, and exact on/off timing is what you need control of in a side scroller. With the Atari's limited power/memory, impresice analog control made the repetitive and simple screens hard/variable enough to be fun for a long time. The NES with the memory and power to display many different screens of side scrolling action meshed perfectly with the easy to use and ergonomic NES controller. The SNES with more power added more buttons, still on/off only, no analog which was fine for 2D games.
The playstation and N64 were the first popular game systems that had the juice to render truly 3D games. The N64 added a single awkwardly placed analog joystick to it's default controller. The playstation stayed with on/off buttons. But the playstation had a CD Rom drive so only it had the storage capacity to hold many different screens of 3D action. You could buy an optional vibrating controller with 2 much more ergonomically placed analog sticks in addition to the standard on/off buttons. These optional analog controllers were supported by many later Playstation games.
But gameplay was really stuck at that point. People usually have only 10 fingers and some of those need to be used to hold the controller itself. Also, certain fingers are biomechanically coupled to some extent to others, so the range of coordinated movement is limited. The SNES controller really took full advantage of all the fingers of a human hand. The playstation controller added another pair of L/R buttons, for a total of four, but that is about the limit. Players choose whether to use the analog sticks or the on/off buttons because they do not have the fingers to take advantage of both.
In real life, you have 10 fingers, 10 toes, 2 legs 2 arms, a movable head, a twistable spine, aimable eyeballs etc. In game-land, you have 10 fingers, 4 of which are holding the controller at best, more like six unusable ones. The thumb does double duty controlling and pressing buttons and the index finger presses buttons. You really have only 4 fingers that are used to control the game. Your eyeballs face straight ahead and view the world through a window ( your TV screen/Monitor ) Turning your head or moving means using a finger that could otherwise be used to control some other action.
Playability is what makes games fun. Super Mario Brothers 2 and 3 are still fun to play for hours even though they are passe. This is because they are playable. Even a really low tech game like chess is fun, because it is playable. Chess isn't immersive, it doesn't simulate a real military conflict, but it is still fun. Now that 3D graphics are possible
We are spoiled nowadays with these new fangled Hard Drive things. Back then I thought the 3 1/2 inch floppy disks WERE hard disks! They certainly are harder than the 5 1/2 inch ones! I remember when we got that extra 3 1/2 inch drive. No more floppy disk swapping. You could boot off the main drive with your operating system floppy and run programs and store files using the other 800K floppy drive. That was the shiznit!
Since Ice reflects solar energy back into Outer Space better than liquid water, melting the polar ice caps should result in more warming of that area, though being at an oblique angle to the sun's light means not much light actually strikes the north and south poles, so it might not matter much.
Since the ice at the north pole is floating, it's melting won't affect sea level, but what about the glaciers covering Greenland, or Antarctica? That water will flow off land, and into the ocean, raising sea level.
http://www.gnu.org has it under gnus flashes