except for all the toxic manufacturing byproducts.
And the horrendous expense. and the maintenance costs, MTBF, etc. of solar plants, including keeping panels dust and dirt free.
Solar is great, until you look toward the details. It makes lots of sense in very specialized circumstances, but is not a panacea, is most certainly not a "clean" technology. it has problems, too.
I attended the venerable Massachusetts College of Art from 92 to 96. CG and video were my main areas of interst, and the main sources of my frustration. That, and arrogant faculty.
The "issue" (did any of them call it that) of whether CG is an artform was addressed pretty often at school. There was a core of students from a number of disciplines, all doing CG in some way and getting lots of flack for it. Illustrators getting bad marks for showing animations in reviews, SIM artists getting collectivist detritus tossed at their imaging and multimedia projects, etc. The official word, or as much as that convoluted bureaucracy would give, was that CG would never be a form of fine arts, but merely a "technical exercise" (direct quote, Jen Hall in 93) that related to whatever field you worked in. They had no imagination as to what is possible, nor the skill at storytelling to make it happen, unlike the students that were forging through technical and bureaucratic hell, and producing amazing pieces of art in the process.
I know this only relates halfway to "CG as art", but video was the same way. For me, animation and video are natural extensions of each other, and suffer the same attitude in the art world. Since they are both machine-mediated tasks, many people in the arts treat them with disdain, and have built up whole Luddite arguments against these most flexible tools.
Last, for now, is this, to the submitter and the rest of the artgeeks out there: does animation and CG help you express yourself? If it does, do it. do more of it. push pixels until your eyes hurt, and you will get good at what you do. That is the best, and only way, to really make electronic art viable, both as a living art and something regarded as such.
The studio and salon world is dead! long live art in the real world!
my site has some of my own work, links to others, email for any direct thoughts.
The OneWorlders can have my laptop, my voice, and my weapons only after they have my corpse.
Say NO to political globalization- it is tyranny with a smiling face, the EU summit and the Genoa preparations should be evidence enough.
Say NO to the politicians that steal your money to oppress you, and keep chipping away at your freedoms. Say NO to the Eurotrash that try to tell Americans that our fundamental rights are "negotiable".
Free speech, property rights, habeus corpus, bearing arms and trial by jury are not historical anomalies - they are the basis of human freedom.
RA Wilson must be rolling over in his... oh, wait, he's still alive... RA Wilson should be howling for compensation from these plagarists!
And, why does everything she touch in the movie break? She's as bad as Spike in Bebop, and always makes these little moans after things explode. Crazy girl with those collagen lips...
the Greeks and later the Romans, would use baskets of poisonous snakes against enemy ships and towns. talk about a nasty present, dozens of pissed and hungry vipers and cobras exploding on deck.
i'm sure that there are examples of "bio weapons" going all the way back into prehistory.
Turn-time of employees in fastfood and other entry-level positions is something that Katz needs to look into. Sure, it's mindless, repetitive work, but anyone with the least motivation will be in and out of a crap job like that inside a year.
And, again, you fret and bite your nails about these "evil corporations", when what enables them to do all of the things you rail against is the growth of the total Nanny State. Without the dubious laws that get grafted (both bribed and sutured in) onto our original, just laws, the corporate behaviour that gets bitched about would not even be possible.
Gah. I should just recycle my post from the last "oh, no, here comes the Corporate Republic!" scarefest.
NRO would provide image-processing and other sensor technology, and ops. They have some pretty sophisticated capabilities, both in Earth-sensing and data analysis, like their attempt to find the Polar Lander from MGS images.
NSA. Hmmm.... Comet smacking Earth, causing death and chaos... Couldn't possibly be a national security issue with huge implications for domestic and foreign upheaval, could it? 8/
i dont have my copy of Rain of Iron and Ice (John Lewis) with me, but that is similar to his figures. Most of the deaths are from tsunamis that are created by ocean-impacters, and are actually quite hard to trace, but definitely there. A lot of the deaths are in places like the Pacific islands, with little comm infrastructure even now, but plenty of stories that describe tsunamis washing over villages.
Also, events like the Chinese city that was destroyed in 1490, something like 10-20,000 people dying from "stones raining from the sky".
NASA doesn't really have the capability to do an asteroid deflection. There is only one organization, probably in the world, that could handle it: the US military.
Sure, NASA would be used for some consultation, but any deflections would be an AirForce/Boeing/Lockmart/NRO/NSA endeavour. The military is used to working under severe time and situational constraints, NASA is not. It might cost tens of billions of dollars, but the military will be able to accomplish it, whereas NASA would do something like forget to convert imperial to metric.
When the time comes (and it will), NASA will be a consultation and tech resource, nothing more. The rockets will be commercial Deltas or Titans, the nukes will come from the Air Force, and the failsafe methodologies will be purely DoD.
He has something far more important than cash: a contract. Specifically (well, semi-specific), he has a contract with NPO Energia, one of Russia's largest aerospace corps, for a flight into orbit, a stay in a station, and a return flight. The contract was originally for a flight to Mir, but when Energia and Rosaviacosmos deorbitted her, the contract fell back to ISS.
On top of a legal contract with Energia, he also has 6 or 7 months of training in Star City, already completed. He knows how to use a Soyuz, climb into and use an Orlan spacesuit, and operate the basic systems in the Russian modules of ISS.
NASA is simply allergic to the idea that anyone but a gold-plated, square-jawed, government-employed Astronaut (tm) can fly in space, because "Space is hard!" They are in for one bad PR thrashing over this, it is time, has been time, for citizen tourists in space. And citizen explorers. The hue and cry over Tito's flight shows exactly how scared the NASA bureaucrats are of anyone but their annointed few going into orbit.
actually, MIT is mostly about engineering, not science.
And, well, lightspeed (300,000km/sec) is not the fastest speed possible, at least in lab conditions.
junkscience.com is a "skeptic" site that pokes holes in both science fads and bad policy based on those fads. The site is currently up, so it is probably a problem with you connection.
KNMI might be a "real" institute, with "real" scientists, but they are also people, prone to errors, even grand, gross ones. To assume that formal training somehow makes them infallible is as hubristic as the assumption that humanity has any real control over global ecosystems.
but we can make educated guesses that are reliable enough to base policy on.</i>
i wholeheartedly disagree. The science of climate modelling is far from accurate, and is not mature enough to base policy on, especially policy that is guaranteed/designed to destroy the industrial nation's economys, which would also make the 3rd World nations much much poorer.
I had the same idea about a year ago, but personally I dont have the funds nor associates who think its a good idea, nor do I relish the idea of having to fight Boston's repressive tendencies. I'd open it in a tight place like Flann's, call it something corny like "The Root Sheller," and wait for Cambridgiophiles to deign to visit it. (Maybe it's not such a great idea.)
Flanns? As in "Flann O'Briens Pub"?!? Gaah... I used to watch my friends drag their sorry asses back from that dive every couple of nites after classes.
The best 'geek bar' I have ever been in: the former Liberty Cafe in Central Square. They had "the Bomb" - six shots of espresso straight up, and Net access back in like 96 or 97. Then the guys that ran it were kicked out to make way for the gentrification of CentSqu, and the infusion of Starbucks, "luxury" apartments" and the Gap.
anyway, rant off...
One essential for a geek bar - a stage with video projection, ethernet and a decent sound system, for doing spoken word and other performance.
Not all Americans - just New Yorkers, DC's cretins, and those wackos in Cali. The rest of us seem pretty darn normal, and dont lord stuff over other people. 8)
Ahh, and a Diderot quote: "Man will not be free until the last king has been strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
It's weird seeing posts from someone who banged my exgirlfriend...
Optical SETI, IMHO, has a much better chance of success, simply because laser "beacons" are much easier to construct, and make detectable, across space than are easily dissipated radio waves.
The laser will spread out, but the pulsed nature of the beam (eek, a pulsed beam) allows for greater power, and the beam still won't spread as much as a radio transmission. A laser's light is all moving in one direction, and starts not only focused, but collimated. Example of spread: a pencil-thick (say.5cm) laser fried from earth is a couple of tens of meters, IIRC, when it reaches the moon. It's still a lot less spread than cube-of-radius (or whatever, i'm tired) for an omnidirectional radio broadcast, especially when taking into account the strength of signal received.
Joseph Michaels used to haunt sci.space.polic, too. Long, long rants about making F1 (Saturn V) engines out of these shape-changing robots that would then transform into other devices on orbit, blah blah blah. For hundreds of kilobytes.
IIRC, he has also been on one of those Discovery/TLC documentaries, going on about the Amazing Fractal Robots that will revolutionzie everything.
He seems good at publicizing himself, if nothing else.
eh. i still use my Newton MP2100 (final model, baby) every day. The handwriting on the later units (2100, 2000, even the 130) is really good. And, it uses normal English characters instead of that Grafiti crap.
Being able to scribble on paper, and then have it translated to text? That is even kewler. It'll leave you with a permanent deadtree record along with the data, ready for processing and distribution.
Antigrav/ElectroGravity
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 1
Y'all read it here first. IT is an antigrav device, using Podhoretz's (sp) work in Russia on spinning GHz freq disks of superconducting cermets.
I think the discussion around a personal transport that flies/hovers is accurate, but the motive power is going to be something far far different from turbofans or rotors.
Dig it. The world is about to get even stranger.
8)
I hate my Newt's keyboard. It's very sticky in it's action, and makes touch-typing pretty hard. I've got a hardware hacking friend who is going to make me a rollup Newt keyboard at some point.
Yes, IMHO, this many new TLDs are needed..com got "mined out" in about 3 or 3.5 years. These new namespaces could, conceivably, get mined (if no additions) out in 10 years, if no extras are added.
.web should, of course, be at the top of the list for additions! 8)
Slashdot Mirror
except for all the toxic manufacturing byproducts.
And the horrendous expense. and the maintenance costs, MTBF, etc. of solar plants, including keeping panels dust and dirt free.
Solar is great, until you look toward the details. It makes lots of sense in very specialized circumstances, but is not a panacea, is most certainly not a "clean" technology. it has problems, too.
the fount of negativity, josh
I attended the venerable Massachusetts College of Art from 92 to 96. CG and video were my main areas of interst, and the main sources of my frustration. That, and arrogant faculty.
The "issue" (did any of them call it that) of whether CG is an artform was addressed pretty often at school. There was a core of students from a number of disciplines, all doing CG in some way and getting lots of flack for it. Illustrators getting bad marks for showing animations in reviews, SIM artists getting collectivist detritus tossed at their imaging and multimedia projects, etc. The official word, or as much as that convoluted bureaucracy would give, was that CG would never be a form of fine arts, but merely a "technical exercise" (direct quote, Jen Hall in 93) that related to whatever field you worked in. They had no imagination as to what is possible, nor the skill at storytelling to make it happen, unlike the students that were forging through technical and bureaucratic hell, and producing amazing pieces of art in the process.
I know this only relates halfway to "CG as art", but video was the same way. For me, animation and video are natural extensions of each other, and suffer the same attitude in the art world. Since they are both machine-mediated tasks, many people in the arts treat them with disdain, and have built up whole Luddite arguments against these most flexible tools.
Last, for now, is this, to the submitter and the rest of the artgeeks out there: does animation and CG help you express yourself? If it does, do it. do more of it. push pixels until your eyes hurt, and you will get good at what you do. That is the best, and only way, to really make electronic art viable, both as a living art and something regarded as such.
The studio and salon world is dead! long live art in the real world!
my site has some of my own work, links to others, email for any direct thoughts.
The OneWorlders can have my laptop, my voice, and my weapons only after they have my corpse.
Say NO to political globalization- it is tyranny with a smiling face, the EU summit and the Genoa preparations should be evidence enough.
Say NO to the politicians that steal your money to oppress you, and keep chipping away at your freedoms. Say NO to the Eurotrash that try to tell Americans that our fundamental rights are "negotiable".
Free speech, property rights, habeus corpus, bearing arms and trial by jury are not historical anomalies - they are the basis of human freedom.
i know what else I would call H Kissinger:
war criminal.
can't wait to see the fallout over what he did to keep Pinochet in power.
Down with empire!
Hail Eris! Hail Discordia!
RA Wilson must be rolling over in his... oh, wait, he's still alive... RA Wilson should be howling for compensation from these plagarists!
And, why does everything she touch in the movie break? She's as bad as Spike in Bebop, and always makes these little moans after things explode. Crazy girl with those collagen lips...
the Greeks and later the Romans, would use baskets of poisonous snakes against enemy ships and towns. talk about a nasty present, dozens of pissed and hungry vipers and cobras exploding on deck.
i'm sure that there are examples of "bio weapons" going all the way back into prehistory.
Turn-time of employees in fastfood and other entry-level positions is something that Katz needs to look into. Sure, it's mindless, repetitive work, but anyone with the least motivation will be in and out of a crap job like that inside a year.
And, again, you fret and bite your nails about these "evil corporations", when what enables them to do all of the things you rail against is the growth of the total Nanny State. Without the dubious laws that get grafted (both bribed and sutured in) onto our original, just laws, the corporate behaviour that gets bitched about would not even be possible.
Gah. I should just recycle my post from the last "oh, no, here comes the Corporate Republic!" scarefest.
NRO would provide image-processing and other sensor technology, and ops. They have some pretty sophisticated capabilities, both in Earth-sensing and data analysis, like their attempt to find the Polar Lander from MGS images.
NSA. Hmmm.... Comet smacking Earth, causing death and chaos... Couldn't possibly be a national security issue with huge implications for domestic and foreign upheaval, could it? 8/
i dont have my copy of Rain of Iron and Ice (John Lewis) with me, but that is similar to his figures. Most of the deaths are from tsunamis that are created by ocean-impacters, and are actually quite hard to trace, but definitely there. A lot of the deaths are in places like the Pacific islands, with little comm infrastructure even now, but plenty of stories that describe tsunamis washing over villages.
l
Also, events like the Chinese city that was destroyed in 1490, something like 10-20,000 people dying from "stones raining from the sky".
http://www.sns.ias.edu/~piet/press/worldend.htm
has some great civilization-wrecking disasters.
NASA doesn't really have the capability to do an asteroid deflection. There is only one organization, probably in the world, that could handle it: the US military.
Sure, NASA would be used for some consultation, but any deflections would be an AirForce/Boeing/Lockmart/NRO/NSA endeavour. The military is used to working under severe time and situational constraints, NASA is not. It might cost tens of billions of dollars, but the military will be able to accomplish it, whereas NASA would do something like forget to convert imperial to metric.
When the time comes (and it will), NASA will be a consultation and tech resource, nothing more. The rockets will be commercial Deltas or Titans, the nukes will come from the Air Force, and the failsafe methodologies will be purely DoD.
Kent Cullers is the blind astronomer at the SETI Institute. Here is a page about "Contact" that describes his caricatured roll:
http://www.seti-inst.edu/phoenix/contact.html
This is an amazing thread.
He has something far more important than cash: a contract. Specifically (well, semi-specific), he has a contract with NPO Energia, one of Russia's largest aerospace corps, for a flight into orbit, a stay in a station, and a return flight. The contract was originally for a flight to Mir, but when Energia and Rosaviacosmos deorbitted her, the contract fell back to ISS.
On top of a legal contract with Energia, he also has 6 or 7 months of training in Star City, already completed. He knows how to use a Soyuz, climb into and use an Orlan spacesuit, and operate the basic systems in the Russian modules of ISS.
NASA is simply allergic to the idea that anyone but a gold-plated, square-jawed, government-employed Astronaut (tm) can fly in space, because "Space is hard!" They are in for one bad PR thrashing over this, it is time, has been time, for citizen tourists in space. And citizen explorers. The hue and cry over Tito's flight shows exactly how scared the NASA bureaucrats are of anyone but their annointed few going into orbit.
Space is a place, not a program.
Yeah, try doing a digital painting with that.
"Hey, J05H, why are you twitching?"
"I'm trying to smudge this part of the picture."
Just doesn't work, gimme a good Wacom any day!
actually, MIT is mostly about engineering, not science.
And, well, lightspeed (300,000km/sec) is not the fastest speed possible, at least in lab conditions.
junkscience.com is a "skeptic" site that pokes holes in both science fads and bad policy based on those fads. The site is currently up, so it is probably a problem with you connection.
KNMI might be a "real" institute, with "real" scientists, but they are also people, prone to errors, even grand, gross ones. To assume that formal training somehow makes them infallible is as hubristic as the assumption that humanity has any real control over global ecosystems.
but we can make educated guesses that are reliable enough to base policy on .</i>
i wholeheartedly disagree. The science of climate modelling is far from accurate, and is not mature enough to base policy on, especially policy that is guaranteed/designed to destroy the industrial nation's economys, which would also make the 3rd World nations much much poorer.
I had the same idea about a year ago, but personally I dont have the funds nor associates who think its a good idea, nor do I relish the idea of having to fight Boston's repressive tendencies. I'd open it in a tight place like Flann's, call it something corny like "The Root Sheller," and wait for Cambridgiophiles to deign to visit it. (Maybe it's not such a great idea.)
Flanns? As in "Flann O'Briens Pub"?!? Gaah... I used to watch my friends drag their sorry asses back from that dive every couple of nites after classes.
The best 'geek bar' I have ever been in: the former Liberty Cafe in Central Square. They had "the Bomb" - six shots of espresso straight up, and Net access back in like 96 or 97. Then the guys that ran it were kicked out to make way for the gentrification of CentSqu, and the infusion of Starbucks, "luxury" apartments" and the Gap.
anyway, rant off...
One essential for a geek bar - a stage with video projection, ethernet and a decent sound system, for doing spoken word and other performance.
Not all Americans - just New Yorkers, DC's cretins, and those wackos in Cali. The rest of us seem pretty darn normal, and dont lord stuff over other people. 8)
Ahh, and a Diderot quote: "Man will not be free until the last king has been strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
It's only been up on /. for TEN MINUTES and the demos on the site are already hosed? sheesh. Don't you peeps ever sleep? 8)
Nautilus is going to be really sweet when I get around to installing 'Nux on my Be machine.
It's weird seeing posts from someone who banged my exgirlfriend...
.5cm) laser fried from earth is a couple of tens of meters, IIRC, when it reaches the moon. It's still a lot less spread than cube-of-radius (or whatever, i'm tired) for an omnidirectional radio broadcast, especially when taking into account the strength of signal received.
Optical SETI, IMHO, has a much better chance of success, simply because laser "beacons" are much easier to construct, and make detectable, across space than are easily dissipated radio waves.
The laser will spread out, but the pulsed nature of the beam (eek, a pulsed beam) allows for greater power, and the beam still won't spread as much as a radio transmission. A laser's light is all moving in one direction, and starts not only focused, but collimated. Example of spread: a pencil-thick (say
Joseph Michaels used to haunt sci.space.polic, too. Long, long rants about making F1 (Saturn V) engines out of these shape-changing robots that would then transform into other devices on orbit, blah blah blah. For hundreds of kilobytes.
IIRC, he has also been on one of those Discovery/TLC documentaries, going on about the Amazing Fractal Robots that will revolutionzie everything.
He seems good at publicizing himself, if nothing else.
It's not a laptop computer, it's a portable, folding desk for the Internet age. I want one.
eh. i still use my Newton MP2100 (final model, baby) every day. The handwriting on the later units (2100, 2000, even the 130) is really good. And, it uses normal English characters instead of that Grafiti crap.
Being able to scribble on paper, and then have it translated to text? That is even kewler. It'll leave you with a permanent deadtree record along with the data, ready for processing and distribution.
Y'all read it here first.
IT is an antigrav device, using Podhoretz's (sp) work in Russia on spinning GHz freq disks of superconducting cermets.
I think the discussion around a personal transport that flies/hovers is accurate, but the motive power is going to be something far far different from turbofans or rotors.
Dig it. The world is about to get even stranger.
8)
I hate my Newt's keyboard. It's very sticky in it's action, and makes touch-typing pretty hard. I've got a hardware hacking friend who is going to make me a rollup Newt keyboard at some point.
I'm still pissed at Steve Jobs, too.
///J05H///
Yes, IMHO, this many new TLDs are needed. .com got "mined out" in about 3 or 3.5 years. These new namespaces could, conceivably, get mined (if no additions) out in 10 years, if no extras are added.
.web should, of course, be at the top of the list for additions! 8)