I actually work for a school district, and this past summer, several other building techs and I spent about three weeks packing up computers at the old high school, then opening them up, blowing the dust out, and installing new fiber NIC cards in them, then re-imaging them with one of about a dozen different images at the nearly-finished $50m new high school. There were about 770 computers to do this to, and they ranged from P100s (thin clients) to brand-new 1.2GHz machines. Then we got to cart each and every single computer and monitor through the building (most of which was still undergoing interior construction), and find an out-of-the-way spot to put them in (if the room wasn't finished).
I make $12.50 an hour in my third year, which isn't great for an experienced on-site tech. We're pretty lucky to have a tech-oriented district and some good network admins.
If the sun simply vanished, the planets wouldn't smash into each other. They's simply fly off on tangents from their orbits. Chances of impact events between the various planets and planetoids in the now-expanding system would be insignificant compared to the sudden lack of sunlight.
Sunspots? Not in the least. Sunspots this large? They're pretty uncommon, but I've seen naked-eye sunspots in foggy/thin cloud conditions before, too. They're much more common during the peak of the solar activity cycle, though (that's when I last saw naked-eye ones; conditions haven't been right where I live to see 'em recently).
And, actually, a more recent picture shows two enormous sunspots and a newer, largish group. The one that erupted while pointed at us is the middle lower one.
Yup. You saw the sunspots that are in the first image of the news post.
The eruption came from the one you see on the left side of the image (the one on right flared, too, but it wasn't pointed right at us).
Thing is, audiophiles routinely fail to distinguish their expensive cabling and other equipment from crap you buy at Wal-mart in blind tests. When audiophiles can identify the high-end equipment from the low-end stuff in a double-blind test, then there is creedence to their claim (and only the tested claim).
Yes, I agree that speakers make a world of difference--the crappy internal stereo speakers in the computers we get at work now are awful compared even to the stock speakers in my Saturn (which are surpisingly capable). But even with speakers, the quality difference starts dropping off sharply as prices go up. By the time you get to $20,000 speakers, they're not going to sound even twice as good as $5,000 speakers.
But, when audiophiles start claiming that power cables make a substantial difference in sound quality... Show me $500 power cable that's any different from cheap scrap copper wire shoved into a wall socket, or that $10,000 speaker wire provides any difference in signal transmission over the $15 50-foot wire I bought at Fred Meyer on Sunday, and I've got a bridge to sell you (and its acoustics are grand!).
When you consider that the nuts are being harvested and processed regardless of what happens to the shells, your point becomes moot. This plant simply burns the shells that would otherwise be dumped in a landfill. The energy balance sheet goes up, since the nuts are being used for energy production rather than decaying.
Check your facts. No current bunker-busting weapon in the US inventory is nuclear. They're all strongly-built casings around high explosives with a computer that counts major impact events (floors). Bush and Rummy want to start tests on using low-yield nuclear weapons in future bunker-busters.
I went just this April. I hadn't been to Disneyland for well over a decade, and I still enjoyed it. Admittedly, I liked California Adventure a bit better, but it's still great to get on Splash Mountain or the Matterhorn. I even spent about 4 hours riding stuff out in the rain one day--lines were great! Fastpass is really nifty, too. Get your ticket, go wander around, take a meal, do some short ride or game, come back and get in a line that lasts barely 15 minutes. We also spent a day at Six Flags Magic Mountain.
What a contrast. Disney was well-laid out, had lots of shade and benches, clean, well-maintained, and well-managed lines. Six Flags was dirty, had terrible line control, poor maintenance, and not nearly enough shade. Several major rides weren't operational, and some were going up and down throughout the day. We got lucky and caught the open-bottom ride at a slow point in the day, and I was able to ride it about 3 times in the space of an hour. By contrast, I was in line for Batman for well over an hour, and Superman was over two hours (for a ride that literally lasts about 30 seconds, you'd think it wouldn't take so long). There was trash everywhere, and lots of vandalism damage inside the Superman complex. I really wanted to go on the X roller coaster, but we had been hearing from other patrons that it was repeatedly getting shut down and had a 3+ hour line. They had some sort of FastPass-type thing, but it wasn't nearly as accessible as Disney's version. SFMM disappointed me so much that I have little desire to go back.
They keyboard was released in limited test markets. 4000 were made and sold (at $600 a pop!), but Mattel recalled them all for a full refund (and those who kept theirs actually had to sign a waiver).
http://www.intellivisionlives.com/bluesky/hardwa re /
That's the translation the series itself has, in print, in an episode.
Watch the final few minutes of the final episode. You see Maimimi's picture of Naota in a newspaper. Beneath that picture reads 'FOOLY COOLY'.
I built all my cities in the original Sim City like that. It was more expensive at first, but the lack of traffic and pollution more than made up for it later in the game. Later versions of SC eliminated that loophole. You had to have roads, period.
I've seen both versions (fansubbed, dubbed in theater, and the official sub on the R2 DVD, which I own).
The dub was actually quite well done. There are really only a couple places where it differs from the sub, and the only one that stands out in my mind is a single inserted word about a third of the way into the movie (where there's originally silence).
The music is unchanged, as far as I know.
All in all, I think it's a better dub than Mononoke was.
Note that the Ghibli Box Set is not a legitimate release. It is yet another bootleg DVD collection. Ghibli has not released any of their films in any sort of set, and several of the films in the bootleg set have not been released on DVD, period.
No, SciFi has not changed its mind. The "To Be Continued" is simply part of the episode. The producers wanted it aired as if nothing had changed.
The alien has never been seen before in Farscape--D'Argo doesn't even recognize the ship.
Okay, I'm reading a bit more, and turns out that the further it gets down the ribbon, the less energy it needs to move outwards--once it passes the midpoint, it will actually need to use its energy to slow down.
It could, potentially, be going nearly 11 kilometers a second at the end of the ribbon. For safety reasons, though, I suspect that the maximum speed of the elevator car would be kept way down so it won't damage or destroy the ribbon. I'd still guesstimate on the order of several days to a week for a one-way trip.
A long time, I'm sure. The anchor station would be at about 37,000 kilometers altitude. Even if we assume a blistering pace of 100kph (this ain't rocketry here--this thing will literally be crawling up the ribbon somehow), it'll take about 15 days to reach the station.
And with a 13-ton payload (at least for the initial design), that doesn't give any passengers much space to move around in.
A dual-stranded elevator would be better--you could have a payload going up and down at once. Some fancy engineering could probably get that functionality out of one ribbon, though.
I'd imagine that the crawlers they use to add layers to the initial ribbon could be used to simply add new layers and strip off old, worn layers. Hell, each elevator car could lay down some kind of resin to repair any holes or cracks every time it traverses the ribbon.
The premise is basically that a couple dozen teams from around the world (there were teams from Argentina, Germany, China, Chile...) get $3000 and 30 days to build a do-anything vehicle. Then they're all shipped to a decomissioned nuclear power plant where they compete in different games, including steep hill climbs, swamp racing, a 'roller coaster' with see-saw platforms and steeply banked turns, bowling, and something loosely based on soccer (football). Each episode has 3 teams competing against each other, and the two teams with the highest number of points at the end of the episode get to Sumo wrestle each other with the ground covered in tires, soapy water, barb wire, and caltrops.
The winner of the first season was a British beast of a machine with 8 wheels and two engines. They beat out a Quebec team with a good tracked design (they nearly got second place in the soccer game with a thrown track!), which seemed to have mechanical problems in the final Sumo match.
It's not as good as Junkyard Wars, but with what they learned in the first season, any second season should be better.
Actually, Nausicaa isn't out on DVD anywhere, including Japan.
I'm sure it's coming, though.
Ghibli's special when it comes to DVD releases: their Japanese releases usually include English subs, and sometimes even the dubs.
http://www.jigsco.com/title/ghibli.html
4700 yen is about $40, plus shipping on top of that.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't, actually. The Hubble weighs about 24,000lbs, and the shuttle can bring down about 43,500.
I actually work for a school district, and this past summer, several other building techs and I spent about three weeks packing up computers at the old high school, then opening them up, blowing the dust out, and installing new fiber NIC cards in them, then re-imaging them with one of about a dozen different images at the nearly-finished $50m new high school. There were about 770 computers to do this to, and they ranged from P100s (thin clients) to brand-new 1.2GHz machines.
Then we got to cart each and every single computer and monitor through the building (most of which was still undergoing interior construction), and find an out-of-the-way spot to put them in (if the room wasn't finished).
I make $12.50 an hour in my third year, which isn't great for an experienced on-site tech. We're pretty lucky to have a tech-oriented district and some good network admins.
If the sun simply vanished, the planets wouldn't smash into each other. They's simply fly off on tangents from their orbits. Chances of impact events between the various planets and planetoids in the now-expanding system would be insignificant compared to the sudden lack of sunlight.
Sunspots? Not in the least. Sunspots this large? They're pretty uncommon, but I've seen naked-eye sunspots in foggy/thin cloud conditions before, too. They're much more common during the peak of the solar activity cycle, though (that's when I last saw naked-eye ones; conditions haven't been right where I live to see 'em recently).
And, actually, a more recent picture shows two enormous sunspots and a newer, largish group. The one that erupted while pointed at us is the middle lower one.
Yup. You saw the sunspots that are in the first image of the news post. The eruption came from the one you see on the left side of the image (the one on right flared, too, but it wasn't pointed right at us).
This flare happened today. She was likely referring to the much weaker one from last week.
Yes, I agree that speakers make a world of difference--the crappy internal stereo speakers in the computers we get at work now are awful compared even to the stock speakers in my Saturn (which are surpisingly capable). But even with speakers, the quality difference starts dropping off sharply as prices go up. By the time you get to $20,000 speakers, they're not going to sound even twice as good as $5,000 speakers.
But, when audiophiles start claiming that power cables make a substantial difference in sound quality... Show me $500 power cable that's any different from cheap scrap copper wire shoved into a wall socket, or that $10,000 speaker wire provides any difference in signal transmission over the $15 50-foot wire I bought at Fred Meyer on Sunday, and I've got a bridge to sell you (and its acoustics are grand!).
Up over 10%.
When you consider that the nuts are being harvested and processed regardless of what happens to the shells, your point becomes moot.
This plant simply burns the shells that would otherwise be dumped in a landfill. The energy balance sheet goes up, since the nuts are being used for energy production rather than decaying.
Check your facts. No current bunker-busting weapon in the US inventory is nuclear. They're all strongly-built casings around high explosives with a computer that counts major impact events (floors).
Bush and Rummy want to start tests on using low-yield nuclear weapons in future bunker-busters.
I went just this April. I hadn't been to Disneyland for well over a decade, and I still enjoyed it. Admittedly, I liked California Adventure a bit better, but it's still great to get on Splash Mountain or the Matterhorn.
I even spent about 4 hours riding stuff out in the rain one day--lines were great!
Fastpass is really nifty, too. Get your ticket, go wander around, take a meal, do some short ride or game, come back and get in a line that lasts barely 15 minutes.
We also spent a day at Six Flags Magic Mountain.
What a contrast. Disney was well-laid out, had lots of shade and benches, clean, well-maintained, and well-managed lines.
Six Flags was dirty, had terrible line control, poor maintenance, and not nearly enough shade. Several major rides weren't operational, and some were going up and down throughout the day. We got lucky and caught the open-bottom ride at a slow point in the day, and I was able to ride it about 3 times in the space of an hour. By contrast, I was in line for Batman for well over an hour, and Superman was over two hours (for a ride that literally lasts about 30 seconds, you'd think it wouldn't take so long). There was trash everywhere, and lots of vandalism damage inside the Superman complex. I really wanted to go on the X roller coaster, but we had been hearing from other patrons that it was repeatedly getting shut down and had a 3+ hour line.
They had some sort of FastPass-type thing, but it wasn't nearly as accessible as Disney's version.
SFMM disappointed me so much that I have little desire to go back.
They keyboard was released in limited test markets. 4000 were made and sold (at $600 a pop!), but Mattel recalled them all for a full refund (and those who kept theirs actually had to sign a waiver).
a re /
http://www.intellivisionlives.com/bluesky/hardw
That's the translation the series itself has, in print, in an episode. Watch the final few minutes of the final episode. You see Maimimi's picture of Naota in a newspaper. Beneath that picture reads 'FOOLY COOLY'.
I built all my cities in the original Sim City like that. It was more expensive at first, but the lack of traffic and pollution more than made up for it later in the game.
Later versions of SC eliminated that loophole. You had to have roads, period.
I've seen both versions (fansubbed, dubbed in theater, and the official sub on the R2 DVD, which I own).
The dub was actually quite well done. There are really only a couple places where it differs from the sub, and the only one that stands out in my mind is a single inserted word about a third of the way into the movie (where there's originally silence).
The music is unchanged, as far as I know.
All in all, I think it's a better dub than Mononoke was.
Note that the Ghibli Box Set is not a legitimate release. It is yet another bootleg DVD collection. Ghibli has not released any of their films in any sort of set, and several of the films in the bootleg set have not been released on DVD, period.
No, SciFi has not changed its mind. The "To Be Continued" is simply part of the episode. The producers wanted it aired as if nothing had changed. The alien has never been seen before in Farscape--D'Argo doesn't even recognize the ship.
Okay, I'm reading a bit more, and turns out that the further it gets down the ribbon, the less energy it needs to move outwards--once it passes the midpoint, it will actually need to use its energy to slow down. It could, potentially, be going nearly 11 kilometers a second at the end of the ribbon. For safety reasons, though, I suspect that the maximum speed of the elevator car would be kept way down so it won't damage or destroy the ribbon. I'd still guesstimate on the order of several days to a week for a one-way trip.
A long time, I'm sure. The anchor station would be at about 37,000 kilometers altitude. Even if we assume a blistering pace of 100kph (this ain't rocketry here--this thing will literally be crawling up the ribbon somehow), it'll take about 15 days to reach the station.
And with a 13-ton payload (at least for the initial design), that doesn't give any passengers much space to move around in.
A dual-stranded elevator would be better--you could have a payload going up and down at once. Some fancy engineering could probably get that functionality out of one ribbon, though.
I'd imagine that the crawlers they use to add layers to the initial ribbon could be used to simply add new layers and strip off old, worn layers. Hell, each elevator car could lay down some kind of resin to repair any holes or cracks every time it traverses the ribbon.
Lucifer's Hammer was pretty good, but I think Footfall would make for a better movie. Think of the CGI baby elephants!
The show is called Full Metal Challenge.
The premise is basically that a couple dozen teams from around the world (there were teams from Argentina, Germany, China, Chile...) get $3000 and 30 days to build a do-anything vehicle. Then they're all shipped to a decomissioned nuclear power plant where they compete in different games, including steep hill climbs, swamp racing, a 'roller coaster' with see-saw platforms and steeply banked turns, bowling, and something loosely based on soccer (football).
Each episode has 3 teams competing against each other, and the two teams with the highest number of points at the end of the episode get to Sumo wrestle each other with the ground covered in tires, soapy water, barb wire, and caltrops.
The winner of the first season was a British beast of a machine with 8 wheels and two engines. They beat out a Quebec team with a good tracked design (they nearly got second place in the soccer game with a thrown track!), which seemed to have mechanical problems in the final Sumo match.
It's not as good as Junkyard Wars, but with what they learned in the first season, any second season should be better.
If you're truly desperate, go here. Ghibli's DVD release of Totoro in Japan includes English & Japanese subs and dubs.
Actually, Nausicaa isn't out on DVD anywhere, including Japan. I'm sure it's coming, though. Ghibli's special when it comes to DVD releases: their Japanese releases usually include English subs, and sometimes even the dubs. http://www.jigsco.com/title/ghibli.html 4700 yen is about $40, plus shipping on top of that.