WHY!? What is this obsession with 2 wheeled devices that burn power to stay upright.
A 4 wheeled version does the same thing for free!
Or consider the genius of the wheelbarrow, a 2 wheeled device that uses a prop to stay upright when still. Brilliant!
This is technology taken to ridiculous extremes.
The segway is a misapplication of technology. Kamen's robotic wheelchair is genius because it adds functionality but is still just as useful as the standard electric wheelchair.
But the segway is just dumb, it's a toy for the rich and nothing more because it can't sit still without spending power constantly which causes all sorts of problems that a standard 4 wheel vehicle doesn't have.
Who in their right mind would base a robot soldier on a platform that has to expend energy to STAND STILL. It is one of the principal advantages of a robot that it can stand around idle without burning much power (unlike people).
So now you take away even that. Brilliant.
What's next, soft skin that covers fragile power conduits? How about a CPU that's exposed to the elements? Oh oh, I got it, a robot soldier that can only operate in environments with temperatures between 50 and 105 degrees farenheit.
Not all kidnappers are willing to kill or maim. There are very real differences in the repurcussions for kidnapping that does and does not result in bodily harm.
Let's mandate RFID injections so we can end the/. bickering over "personal freedom" and get back to laughing at SCO and MS bashing. At least until that's illegal too.
Can you please stop handing out Karma to that unfortunately large body of people who don't yet realize that books and movies are not the same media, and that you can't expect the same story to work equally well on both.
I don't know how it's possible that they haven't yet learned this basic fact, as it's been discussed to complete death by everyone and their grandmother for the past 10-20 years.
Tolkein was not a holy saint. His work is not the Bible. In some places his story telling is actually subpar. Peter Jackson has(for the most part) done a truly excellent job of culling the important elements into a theatrical release that the public can enjoy. His idea of releasing a very different version on DVD for the book fans is sheer genius. He recognizes that you can't please everyone with one version. Why can't you? It's not a hard concept to grasp really.
And if you really have issues with the job Jackson has done, suggest someone else who would have done better. Peter is the perfect choice IMO, as he doesn't have the ego that big producers do, an ego that would have turned LOTR in "Spielberg's LOTR".
Anti-American sentiment may be rising to such levels that for the leader of a foreign country it's tremendous publicity to be able to say that you were the one who stopped writing checks to the evil empire's coffers.
Is that by bottling up the sub industrial nations with environmental regulations, and thereby slowing their advance through the industrial stages, we may be making the problem worse in the long run.
The best way to get people to care about the environment is to get them beyond the point of having to worry about food, clothing and shelter. People worried about their next meal really could care less about pollution.
Kyoto and similar measures threaten to force sub-industrial nations to submit to burdensome restrictions that will make it harder for them to blossom into a wealthier economy.
Furthermore, it's grossly unfair to prolong the poverty of such nations by dictating how they can and can't develop so that we can sleep easier at night.
Remember, we didn't have any such restrictions when we went through this stage.
Many people are legitimately concerned about the negative impact on the reservoir. It will become a catastrophic mini ecosystem that might foul the water, making that reservoir temporarily useless.
I agree though that we have nothing fear for the sake of the weather and global environment.
So you're telling me that with 2 models, 3 laser pointers, a digital camcorder and some stock NASA footage I can make teasers for big budget hollywood movies?
That's gibberish. What is a low hanging fruit now was a pipe dream 100 years ago and unimagineable 200 years ago. The digital watch seems a trivial enough device, but many hundreds of years ago people spent extraordinary amounts of time and money to track what time it was. They might have considered the digital watch or maybe even a clockwork pocket watch of 150 years ago to be the final culmination of mankind's achievement.
We are constantly changing the definitions of what is easily attainable. If you back up and take a more historical perspective to scientific achievement you realize that everything is relative to the context of the time period being examined.
One wouldn't consider cloning a mammal to be a low-hanging fruit, but in 50 years they will likely be doing this as a standard lab in intro level biology classes.
But I'm sure there will still be people like you who consider it a low-hanging fruit.
B. He's demonstrated a propensity to take photos of things "behind the scenes" at Microsoft and publish them on the internet.
I don't expect they cared too much about this incident, but it identifies him as someone willing to snipe at his own place of employment on the internet. Being a temp, no reason to negotiate, just fire and forget. Why bother getting promises of good behavior from him that he'll likely reneg on next week when you can push the recycle button.
Seems like a perfectly reasonable decision to me, and this guy had it coming.
The early episodes are beyond comparison, very top notch stuff.
However, as the season gets on, the writing seems to degrade noticeably and the plot gets a little wonky at the end when Church decides to do that thing he does (avoiding spoilage).
I'd advise them to slow down a bit, produce fewer episodes and take us back to the excellent writing of the first 5 episodes.
"Simons.... I want you to poison Griff's next meal"
Set up a huge panel with DECSS clearly printed on it and aim it at the Washington DC cameras.
Seriously though I wonder though if they intend to do anything about nudity and obscenity. You know that there are going to be people flashing themselves and holding up big banners with obscenities, particularly anti-Bush stuff (assuming, god forbid, that he's re-elected).
At some point we're going to have technology that allows material objects to replicate other material objects, with a fidelity similar to that of current digital media.
When that happens, the distinction between software and hardware will be dead and burried. You'll be able to "rip" your new car into its component atomic pattern, send it to your friend and then he can build one himself with his Betty Crocker Nano-Bake Oven(tm).
This is the kind of/. headline we've been hoping for!
Next we'll get the rocket packs, flying cars, the moon colony, the manned Mars mission, some more SCO comedy, the first Robot murder, 50 stories about the robot's trial, robot uprisings, the robot nation, the robot war, and uh... well that'll be about it for/.
Slashdot Mirror
WHY!? What is this obsession with 2 wheeled devices that burn power to stay upright.
A 4 wheeled version does the same thing for free!
Or consider the genius of the wheelbarrow, a 2 wheeled device that uses a prop to stay upright when still. Brilliant!
This is technology taken to ridiculous extremes.
The segway is a misapplication of technology. Kamen's robotic wheelchair is genius because it adds functionality but is still just as useful as the standard electric wheelchair.
But the segway is just dumb, it's a toy for the rich and nothing more because it can't sit still without spending power constantly which causes all sorts of problems that a standard 4 wheel vehicle doesn't have.
Who in their right mind would base a robot soldier on a platform that has to expend energy to STAND STILL. It is one of the principal advantages of a robot that it can stand around idle without burning much power (unlike people).
So now you take away even that. Brilliant.
What's next, soft skin that covers fragile power conduits? How about a CPU that's exposed to the elements? Oh oh, I got it, a robot soldier that can only operate in environments with temperatures between 50 and 105 degrees farenheit.
Not unless it's heavily motion compressed.
40 x 80 characters x 30 frames per second is 96,000 bytes per second.
And that's not including color information either, which is 4 bits per character, adding another 48K Bytes/sec.
Not all kidnappers are willing to kill or maim. There are very real differences in the repurcussions for kidnapping that does and does not result in bodily harm.
Let's mandate RFID injections so we can end the /. bickering over "personal freedom" and get back to laughing at SCO and MS bashing. At least until that's illegal too.
Can you please stop handing out Karma to that unfortunately large body of people who don't yet realize that books and movies are not the same media, and that you can't expect the same story to work equally well on both.
I don't know how it's possible that they haven't yet learned this basic fact, as it's been discussed to complete death by everyone and their grandmother for the past 10-20 years.
Tolkein was not a holy saint. His work is not the Bible. In some places his story telling is actually subpar. Peter Jackson has(for the most part) done a truly excellent job of culling the important elements into a theatrical release that the public can enjoy. His idea of releasing a very different version on DVD for the book fans is sheer genius. He recognizes that you can't please everyone with one version. Why can't you? It's not a hard concept to grasp really.
And if you really have issues with the job Jackson has done, suggest someone else who would have done better. Peter is the perfect choice IMO, as he doesn't have the ego that big producers do, an ego that would have turned LOTR in "Spielberg's LOTR".
Anti-American sentiment may be rising to such levels that for the leader of a foreign country it's tremendous publicity to be able to say that you were the one who stopped writing checks to the evil empire's coffers.
Do you sleep with a gun under your pillow?
419 masterminds trying to find your "hiding spot"?
This ain't a DiNiro movie. Noone's going to come looking for you for stringing along a spammer.
One Asteroid proof bunker, with 500,000 years provisions, cable TV and internet.
I don't run Linux on my wristwatch. Where's my check?
If you're going to natural explosions, I think supernovas have your cute little volcanoes beat.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=84763&cid=7395 872
There's a bigger one, the Fauld, WWII.
p ly &threshold=5&commentsort=0&tid=134&mode=thread&pid =7395872
I posted about it here.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=84763&op=Re
Back in WW2, the RAF had a huge ammo depot called the Fauld.
g e2_lge.j pg
l dc rater.htm
e r. htm
On November 27, 1944, there was an accident and it blew up.
This is the supposedly the largest non-nuclear explosion in recorded history.
3670 tons of bombs went up in an explosion that was seismically recordable in Casablanca
The crater was half a mile across.
78 people killed.
A photo:
http://www.historicairphotos.com/g_uk/ima
Some informative links with other photos:
http://www.carolyn.topmum.net/tutbury/fauld/fau
http://freespace.virgin.net/kehla.barnes/disast
Is that by bottling up the sub industrial nations with environmental regulations, and thereby slowing their advance through the industrial stages, we may be making the problem worse in the long run.
The best way to get people to care about the environment is to get them beyond the point of having to worry about food, clothing and shelter. People worried about their next meal really could care less about pollution.
Kyoto and similar measures threaten to force sub-industrial nations to submit to burdensome restrictions that will make it harder for them to blossom into a wealthier economy.
Furthermore, it's grossly unfair to prolong the poverty of such nations by dictating how they can and can't develop so that we can sleep easier at night.
Remember, we didn't have any such restrictions when we went through this stage.
Many people are legitimately concerned about the negative impact on the reservoir. It will become a catastrophic mini ecosystem that might foul the water, making that reservoir temporarily useless.
I agree though that we have nothing fear for the sake of the weather and global environment.
So you're telling me that with 2 models, 3 laser pointers, a digital camcorder and some stock NASA footage I can make teasers for big budget hollywood movies?
I'll get started right away.
God that sucked.
Low hanging fruits are gone?
That's gibberish. What is a low hanging fruit now was a pipe dream 100 years ago and unimagineable 200 years ago. The digital watch seems a trivial enough device, but many hundreds of years ago people spent extraordinary amounts of time and money to track what time it was. They might have considered the digital watch or maybe even a clockwork pocket watch of 150 years ago to be the final culmination of mankind's achievement.
We are constantly changing the definitions of what is easily attainable. If you back up and take a more historical perspective to scientific achievement you realize that everything is relative to the context of the time period being examined.
One wouldn't consider cloning a mammal to be a low-hanging fruit, but in 50 years they will likely be doing this as a standard lab in intro level biology classes.
But I'm sure there will still be people like you who consider it a low-hanging fruit.
FreeBSD is dying.
A. He's just a temp
B. He's demonstrated a propensity to take photos of things "behind the scenes" at Microsoft and publish them on the internet.
I don't expect they cared too much about this incident, but it identifies him as someone willing to snipe at his own place of employment on the internet. Being a temp, no reason to negotiate, just fire and forget. Why bother getting promises of good behavior from him that he'll likely reneg on next week when you can push the recycle button.
Seems like a perfectly reasonable decision to me, and this guy had it coming.
The early episodes are beyond comparison, very top notch stuff.
However, as the season gets on, the writing seems to degrade noticeably and the plot gets a little wonky at the end when Church decides to do that thing he does (avoiding spoilage).
I'd advise them to slow down a bit, produce fewer episodes and take us back to the excellent writing of the first 5 episodes.
"Simons.... I want you to poison Griff's next meal"
This figure incorporates the added inefficiency of the process that converted plants -> oil. That was probably a very lossy process.
Set up a huge panel with DECSS clearly printed on it and aim it at the Washington DC cameras.
Seriously though I wonder though if they intend to do anything about nudity and obscenity. You know that there are going to be people flashing themselves and holding up big banners with obscenities, particularly anti-Bush stuff (assuming, god forbid, that he's re-elected).
At some point we're going to have technology that allows material objects to replicate other material objects, with a fidelity similar to that of current digital media.
When that happens, the distinction between software and hardware will be dead and burried. You'll be able to "rip" your new car into its component atomic pattern, send it to your friend and then he can build one himself with his Betty Crocker Nano-Bake Oven(tm).
IP's going to be an even bigger business.
This is the kind of /. headline we've been hoping for!
/.
Next we'll get the rocket packs, flying cars, the moon colony, the manned Mars mission, some more SCO comedy, the first Robot murder, 50 stories about the robot's trial, robot uprisings, the robot nation, the robot war, and uh... well that'll be about it for
See you all in the Matrix!