this translates to 4 tons of prehistoric plants per mile, or more than two tons per kilometer.
If we're going to start measuring car mileage in terms of prehistoric plant mass, shouldn't it be tonnes per kilometer? Or, tonnes per hundred kilometers...
Actually, I don't buy a lot of the numbers he used in the calculations. Oh well... it's not science but it's fun. Coming up next from the University of Utah: a study of how much energy is wasted around the world when people have sex that does not lead to babies.
The Pacific Bell lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, asks that the subpoenas be declared invalid, Meyer said.
They should have asked that the DMCA be declared invalid.
yo.
Re:I can see it already
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Debeers owns every diamond producing mine on earth.
Not true. There are lots of non-cartel diamond mines in Australia and Canada.
There were only eleven Slashdot stories between the challenge and the rebuttal from high up in Apple.
That's almost as fast as some of the SCO happenings recently. Man, there's several new things a day sometimes. Things sure happen fast these days.
Is Slashdot stories the new unit of Internet Time? Will there VPs yelling at PR to get a press release out before an attack story scrolls off the front page?
Consider a square wave. It's a discontinuous function that by Fourier's theorem can be represented as an infinite series of continuous functions -- and yet it's trivial to show that any sum of continuous functions must itself be continuous. So which is it -- continuous or discontinuous?
Discontinuous. The square wave is a good example of a function that can't be made by adding sinusoids. The Fourier series will add to a function with about 9% overshoot in infinitely thin, yet zero-energy spikes. An interactive demo of this "ringing" effect can be found here (set a to zero). More background is here.
Fourier's theorem actually states that almost any periodic function can be expressed as a sum of sinusoids.
I think this is a large power plant run by advanced aliens.
I've often thought the same thing explains the black holes in the middle of the galaxies. It's just a large furnace. All you have to do is give stars a nudge in the right direction, and eventually harness the X-rays and whatnot from the star being crushed as it falls in. There have, in the last few years, been more reports of regions in space where unusual things like this are happening: supernovae or black holes forming at vastly higher rates than normally seen.
Over millions of years, advanced societies will need increasing amounts of energy. Black holes and supernovae are the only ways to supply that energy. They fly around, and gather all the unneeded stars, and coast them towards a fiery and energy-emitting death.
Finishing off this thought, I figure the easiest way to push a star is to build a giant, Dyson-like sphere around it, and have a hole in one end where all the gases must escape.
The site also has other old-school, nerdy magazines. I enjoyed looking through the old Compute! articles.
There are some funny C64 vs. NES debates. Overall, there weren't that many Compute! articles, though. A friend of mine once got a game, and another time a disk sector editor published in Compute! magazine. That was huge for a sixteen year old! But, they weren't on the site (yet - they want your articles.)
Also, I wasn't aware there was a Datel Action Replay cartridge for the Commodore 64. They were doing it back then!
yo.
This is not a standalone unit - don't order this.
on
TiVo++ from India
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Most of the functionality of this device comes from the way it works as part of a network; the inexpensive client receives services from the central server. A WICE box won't work if it's by itself.
From the article (you did, read it, didn't you?)
"It consists of a Distribution Module (DM) box installed in every building or multi-dwelling unit (MDU), with a WICE box in every user's house. Each DM supports 16 users. A single wire brings you all the services."
If you did buy one of these, you'd have to run that wire all the way back to India.
You go and pour some fresh concrete or volcano mud, and some idiot goes and writes their initials in it, or steps there. It was the same then as it is now.
Who left the 56 footprints is not clear. But their discoverers suggest either late Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis -- two early human species found in Europe during the Paleolithic era, also known as the Stone Age.
When they find the guy that did it, they're going to be MAD!
mass-produce something they know they will sell instead of investigating something new
sell an inferior product to the public while setting their prices arbitrarily
care only about their own profits while screwing the artists and the consumers.
And of course in USA, the RIAA members
mass-produce something they know they will sell instead of investigating something new,
sell an inferior product to the public while setting their prices arbitrarily
care only about their own profits while screwing the artists and the consumers.
And yes, this may seem like a joke, but actually it's the way it is. I am a musician (hear some of my hard trance at www.mp3.com/_yo_) and the RIAA really does all these things.
Probably some company is right now working on the next generation keyboard.
Every keytop is a small display, maybe LCD or LED or some other technology. On powerup, each key is set to the normal key. The driver monitors which application is active. If it's one of the ones it knows, it replaces all the function key keytops with the actual function (F1 becomes "Help". While you hold down CTRL, each key's function appears underneath the key ("paste" appears under V)
In games, the function completely replaces the letter (you don't need to see the letter that the key used to be.) All you need is a little text file for each game or program; it would come with most of the ones you need. It'd be easy to add your own.
The Exertainment System is the first truly interactive system that combines aerobic exercise and video entertainment. It consists of a Lifecycle 3500 aerobic trainer, one of the world's most popular computerized exercise bikes, and a Super NES, the world's most popular 16-bit video game system.
While riding on your Lifecycle 3500, you can use the system to monitor your biking activities (rpm, distance, calories, etc.) or set up a long-term fitness program in the "Program Manager". You can also choose to participate in the game "Mountain Bike Rally". Choose from several riders, several terrains, and several different bikes to have a truly interactive experience.
It didn't sell very well, but mostly because it wasn't marketed properly. You still see the systems in a some fitness clubs (if you do, enter your name as "ronaye" to see an easter egg picture of my girlfriend at the time.)
The new system in the article is multiplayer, which should make it a little more fun. It didn't seem to have any feedback to make the pedalling harder, however. That is essential to making the exercise interactive.
I think systems like this will take off, once they're done right. I mean, plain exercise bikes are already a substitute for real biking, and those are accepted now. "Virtual" exercising systems are just trying to be a step closer to reality.
These work with any existing 3d engine... games do not have to be rewritten to use the 3d features.
The 3d engine (OpenGL, DirectX etc.) knows where each object is in 3D. Usually the video card's rendering engine draws one image per frame. The 3d glasses' engine would draw two - one for each eye, slightly to each side of the viewpoint.
Some games fake a lot of things, however, and stuff might be drawn in the wrong place. One thing that comes to mind would be 2D sprites drawn at the front of the viewplane, when they're actually supposed to be way in the distance. A game programmed this way would look wrong in the glasses.
Another fun thing to do is to put the stuff in a bowl and hit it in with a hammer. The hammer will bounce off. If the bowl is shallow, the oobleck will even crack into pieces.
Why was this modded up? Can't Slashdot have a thing that detects if the moderators actually read the article?
The games come on many cards because the whole game doesn't fit on one card. Several cards are swiped in sequence; all of the data making up the whole game is saved in the reader's onboard flash memory. The swiping process has to be transparent to the game.
From Nintendo's site:
The e-Reader hardware has a one megabit flash ROM to store up to one video game for continued play
Up to one game. OK, so you can store either zero or one game... perfect!
Personally, I see this opening up a big market for amateur game developers. Microprinting is probably not cheap, but it's cheaper than making cartridges.
Also, you could easily see how certain MAME games could be squeezed onto cards.
Descartes never talked about the relative weights of brain and mind, but you can read in an implicit 50-50 assumption in most Dualist literature. My idea is more like 99-1, or even 99.999999% automatic machinery and.00000001% self-awareness, creativity, consciousness, spirit or what have you.
Which only leaves room for 0.00000099% math skills.
I don't know about you, but when my batteries run out and I can't replace them, I heat them up.
Yep!
Works all the time. If, late at night, the batteries in your remote control run out, don't run to the store! Simply pop them in the toaster (don't be an idiot -- not *in* the toaster, use a grill or something on top of the slot) and warm them up. How long? Precicely one toaster cycle.
This recharge is guaranteed to get you through the night.
Yes, I'm an electrical engineer. No, I don't know exactly why this works.
We know that cell phones (and other radio broadcasting equipment) emit radiation that is harmful to living beings at high power. The current theory is that this radiation at lower powers are not harmful.
But let's look at this. There are many dangers that radiation causes, but the one that concerns most people is cancer. What is the mechanism for radiation causing cancer? An ionizing radiation particle strikes the DNA inside the nucleus of a cell, causing a mutation that causes the cell to go into a state of uncontrolled cell reproduction. It just takes one initial cell to mutate to make a tumor.
Of course for this to happen, the radiation has to strike the DNA in exactly the right place. Your cells contain a lot of error-checking, so it is extremely unlikely for a single photon to make this happen. That is why scientists say you need a high dose of cell phone radiation to get cancer.
But cancer has always been a probability game. You can get cancer from swallowing a single molecule of benzene, if it finds its way into the nucleus of a cell and attaches itself to the right place in your DNA. In the same way, a single cell phone call can give you cancer -- it's just not that likely.
Lower power radiation does not mean lower power photons coming from the antenna. It means less photons per second leaving the antenna. They are the same photons - the energy of a photon depends only on its frequency (E=hv, energy = Planck's constant times the frequency.) If a lot of photons of a certain frequency can give you cancer, so can just one.
I am an electrical engineer, but sometimes I think that a hundred years from now, people will look back on what we're doing in these times the same way we look at the coal-burning pollution at the start of the industrial revolution. We're crazy!!
We are bathing ourselves in RF! Not only do we wrap all of our houses in wiring that transmit 60Hz radiation, we broadcast in every known frequency that we can - AM, FM, television, cell phones. (AM is especially bad - so much of the power is wasted in the carrier.) Companies fight over unused parts of the spectrum - they can't wait to send cancer-causing photons into our bodies!!
Using electrons and photons to transmit information (at relatively low levels) is one thing. A century from now they will look back and be surprised that we used electricity - in all its lossy, inefficient, cancer-causing glory - to transmit energy from one place to another. That's just a bad idea. (A lot of people are looking at hydrogen, extracted from water through electrolysis, as a clean way to transport energy)
Of course, as has been mentioned, modern living exposes us to all kinds of health risks. Personally, I will keep driving my benzene-spewing car and using my radiation-emmitting cell phone until the next thing comes along.
You could buy a backbone.
However, the surefire way to make sure that nobody messes with you is to buy your own country.
Argentina's debt is $132 billion, and is close to defaulting. If you can pick up the monthly tab of $913 million, the country could be yours.
Think of it! Nobody can make laws about what your company does... nobody to stop you from uncompetitive actions. I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't already bought Argentina, actually. The anti-trust laws are AMERICAN anti-trust laws.
Countries don't come on the market that often, so if you see one you like at a good price you should snap it up.
yo.
My brother just started as a shop foreman for this show, here in Vancouver, so I hope the show stays on. Coincidentally enough I went to see him at the shop earlier today... I probably shouldn't mention the new prop I saw them building, but it was cool. I haven't really seen a lot of the show, but it was interesting to see all the props. This was the shop, not the set. I saw a giant stack of spears in one corner. (Apparently there are a lot of spear scenes in the show.)
I also talked to the electrical engineer and the "systems technician" who build all the electronics for the show; they were both young guys. They had a pretty nice setup there. I saw a lot of LEDs, joysticks, and control panels with buttons and switches. Because I've done on similar things, I asked what they used when they needed to switch more powerful AC lights. The engineer told me they had tried using triacs, but they couldn't get them to work right, and just used relays (same experience as me!). He also told me they use DC, usually 12V, as much as possible.
Anyways, my brother and I agreed that it's really hard to find it on TV these days. He has all the episode tapes but I don't even know when (or if) it's on anymore.
I agree with what he's doing (BT's patent is ridiculous), but the article was wrong here:
Had Bemer or IBM, his employer at the time, patented the escape concept, he or they could own a sizable chunk of the world's technology right now.
If he had indeed patented this in 1960, the patent would have expired by now. Even if it took a few years for him to get the patent, the 17 years would be long over.
Unless he purposely dragged on the application process for years to make the patent last longer, like The Patent King.
Now, there is a 20 year limit from the year of filing.
Slashdot Mirror
If we're going to start measuring car mileage in terms of prehistoric plant mass, shouldn't it be tonnes per kilometer? Or, tonnes per hundred kilometers...
Actually, I don't buy a lot of the numbers he used in the calculations. Oh well... it's not science but it's fun. Coming up next from the University of Utah: a study of how much energy is wasted around the world when people have sex that does not lead to babies.
yo.
They should have asked that the DMCA be declared invalid.
yo.
yo.
That's almost as fast as some of the SCO happenings recently. Man, there's several new things a day sometimes. Things sure happen fast these days.
Is Slashdot stories the new unit of Internet Time? Will there VPs yelling at PR to get a press release out before an attack story scrolls off the front page?
yo.
Discontinuous. The square wave is a good example of a function that can't be made by adding sinusoids. The Fourier series will add to a function with about 9% overshoot in infinitely thin, yet zero-energy spikes. An interactive demo of this "ringing" effect can be found here (set a to zero). More background is here.
Fourier's theorem actually states that almost any periodic function can be expressed as a sum of sinusoids.
yo.
I've often thought the same thing explains the black holes in the middle of the galaxies. It's just a large furnace. All you have to do is give stars a nudge in the right direction, and eventually harness the X-rays and whatnot from the star being crushed as it falls in. There have, in the last few years, been more reports of regions in space where unusual things like this are happening: supernovae or black holes forming at vastly higher rates than normally seen.
Over millions of years, advanced societies will need increasing amounts of energy. Black holes and supernovae are the only ways to supply that energy. They fly around, and gather all the unneeded stars, and coast them towards a fiery and energy-emitting death.
Finishing off this thought, I figure the easiest way to push a star is to build a giant, Dyson-like sphere around it, and have a hole in one end where all the gases must escape.
yo.
There are some funny C64 vs. NES debates. Overall, there weren't that many Compute! articles, though. A friend of mine once got a game, and another time a disk sector editor published in Compute! magazine. That was huge for a sixteen year old! But, they weren't on the site (yet - they want your articles.)
Also, I wasn't aware there was a Datel Action Replay cartridge for the Commodore 64. They were doing it back then!
yo.
From the article (you did, read it, didn't you?)
If you did buy one of these, you'd have to run that wire all the way back to India.yo.
yo.
It's not just the level of skill involved. Let's have a look.
What exactly is the difference? As was mentioned elsewhere, Reverend Lovejoy said it best:
Once something has been approved by the Government, it's no longer immoral.
yo.
- mass-produce something they know they will sell instead of investigating something new
- sell an inferior product to the public while setting their prices arbitrarily
- care only about their own profits while screwing the artists and the consumers.
And of course in USA, the RIAA members- mass-produce something they know they will sell instead of investigating something new,
- sell an inferior product to the public while setting their prices arbitrarily
- care only about their own profits while screwing the artists and the consumers.
And yes, this may seem like a joke, but actually it's the way it is. I am a musician (hear some of my hard trance at www.mp3.com/_yo_) and the RIAA really does all these things.yo.
- keep all of the money and give none to the artist
- have an efficient distribution system, but one that does not promote enough new talent
- make it so that the musicians have to make most of their money by concerts and commercial sponsorships.
This is clearly not fair. In the United States, artists are protected by the member companies of the RIAA, whoyo.
Every keytop is a small display, maybe LCD or LED or some other technology. On powerup, each key is set to the normal key. The driver monitors which application is active. If it's one of the ones it knows, it replaces all the function key keytops with the actual function (F1 becomes "Help". While you hold down CTRL, each key's function appears underneath the key ("paste" appears under V)
In games, the function completely replaces the letter (you don't need to see the letter that the key used to be.) All you need is a little text file for each game or program; it would come with most of the ones you need. It'd be easy to add your own.
In three years they will be $29.95 at Wal*Mart.
yo.
It didn't sell very well, but mostly because it wasn't marketed properly. You still see the systems in a some fitness clubs (if you do, enter your name as "ronaye" to see an easter egg picture of my girlfriend at the time.)
The new system in the article is multiplayer, which should make it a little more fun. It didn't seem to have any feedback to make the pedalling harder, however. That is essential to making the exercise interactive.
I think systems like this will take off, once they're done right. I mean, plain exercise bikes are already a substitute for real biking, and those are accepted now. "Virtual" exercising systems are just trying to be a step closer to reality.
yo.
The 3d engine (OpenGL, DirectX etc.) knows where each object is in 3D. Usually the video card's rendering engine draws one image per frame. The 3d glasses' engine would draw two - one for each eye, slightly to each side of the viewpoint.
Some games fake a lot of things, however, and stuff might be drawn in the wrong place. One thing that comes to mind would be 2D sprites drawn at the front of the viewplane, when they're actually supposed to be way in the distance. A game programmed this way would look wrong in the glasses.
I am a video game developer.
yo.
Incomplete management team - check.
No business plan - check.
I am going to put into this company all the money I've made from investing in the Freedom Ship project.
yo.
yo.
yo.
The games come on many cards because the whole game doesn't fit on one card. Several cards are swiped in sequence; all of the data making up the whole game is saved in the reader's onboard flash memory. The swiping process has to be transparent to the game.
From Nintendo's site:
Up to one game. OK, so you can store either zero or one game... perfect!Personally, I see this opening up a big market for amateur game developers. Microprinting is probably not cheap, but it's cheaper than making cartridges.
Also, you could easily see how certain MAME games could be squeezed onto cards.
yo.
Which only leaves room for 0.00000099% math skills.
yo.
No, this article is looking more and more fake.
I don't know about you, but when my batteries run out and I can't replace them, I heat them up.
Yep!
Works all the time. If, late at night, the batteries in your remote control run out, don't run to the store! Simply pop them in the toaster (don't be an idiot -- not *in* the toaster, use a grill or something on top of the slot) and warm them up. How long? Precicely one toaster cycle.
This recharge is guaranteed to get you through the night.
Yes, I'm an electrical engineer. No, I don't know exactly why this works.
yo.
We know that cell phones (and other radio broadcasting equipment) emit radiation that is harmful to living beings at high power. The current theory is that this radiation at lower powers are not harmful.
But let's look at this. There are many dangers that radiation causes, but the one that concerns most people is cancer. What is the mechanism for radiation causing cancer? An ionizing radiation particle strikes the DNA inside the nucleus of a cell, causing a mutation that causes the cell to go into a state of uncontrolled cell reproduction. It just takes one initial cell to mutate to make a tumor.
Of course for this to happen, the radiation has to strike the DNA in exactly the right place. Your cells contain a lot of error-checking, so it is extremely unlikely for a single photon to make this happen. That is why scientists say you need a high dose of cell phone radiation to get cancer. But cancer has always been a probability game. You can get cancer from swallowing a single molecule of benzene, if it finds its way into the nucleus of a cell and attaches itself to the right place in your DNA. In the same way, a single cell phone call can give you cancer -- it's just not that likely.
Lower power radiation does not mean lower power photons coming from the antenna. It means less photons per second leaving the antenna. They are the same photons - the energy of a photon depends only on its frequency (E=hv, energy = Planck's constant times the frequency.) If a lot of photons of a certain frequency can give you cancer, so can just one.
I am an electrical engineer, but sometimes I think that a hundred years from now, people will look back on what we're doing in these times the same way we look at the coal-burning pollution at the start of the industrial revolution. We're crazy!!
We are bathing ourselves in RF! Not only do we wrap all of our houses in wiring that transmit 60Hz radiation, we broadcast in every known frequency that we can - AM, FM, television, cell phones. (AM is especially bad - so much of the power is wasted in the carrier.) Companies fight over unused parts of the spectrum - they can't wait to send cancer-causing photons into our bodies!!
Using electrons and photons to transmit information (at relatively low levels) is one thing. A century from now they will look back and be surprised that we used electricity - in all its lossy, inefficient, cancer-causing glory - to transmit energy from one place to another. That's just a bad idea. (A lot of people are looking at hydrogen, extracted from water through electrolysis, as a clean way to transport energy)
Of course, as has been mentioned, modern living exposes us to all kinds of health risks. Personally, I will keep driving my benzene-spewing car and using my radiation-emmitting cell phone until the next thing comes along.
yo.
You could buy a backbone. However, the surefire way to make sure that nobody messes with you is to buy your own country. Argentina's debt is $132 billion, and is close to defaulting. If you can pick up the monthly tab of $913 million, the country could be yours. Think of it! Nobody can make laws about what your company does... nobody to stop you from uncompetitive actions. I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't already bought Argentina, actually. The anti-trust laws are AMERICAN anti-trust laws. Countries don't come on the market that often, so if you see one you like at a good price you should snap it up. yo.
My brother just started as a shop foreman for this show, here in Vancouver, so I hope the show stays on. Coincidentally enough I went to see him at the shop earlier today... I probably shouldn't mention the new prop I saw them building, but it was cool. I haven't really seen a lot of the show, but it was interesting to see all the props. This was the shop, not the set. I saw a giant stack of spears in one corner. (Apparently there are a lot of spear scenes in the show.)
I also talked to the electrical engineer and the "systems technician" who build all the electronics for the show; they were both young guys. They had a pretty nice setup there. I saw a lot of LEDs, joysticks, and control panels with buttons and switches. Because I've done on similar things, I asked what they used when they needed to switch more powerful AC lights. The engineer told me they had tried using triacs, but they couldn't get them to work right, and just used relays (same experience as me!). He also told me they use DC, usually 12V, as much as possible.
Anyways, my brother and I agreed that it's really hard to find it on TV these days. He has all the episode tapes but I don't even know when (or if) it's on anymore.
yo
Had Bemer or IBM, his employer at the time, patented the escape concept, he or they could own a sizable chunk of the world's technology right now.
If he had indeed patented this in 1960, the patent would have expired by now. Even if it took a few years for him to get the patent, the 17 years would be long over.
Unless he purposely dragged on the application process for years to make the patent last longer, like The Patent King.
Now, there is a 20 year limit from the year of filing.
IANAL, BIWOWALF3Y.
yo.