Like the droids in Starwars, in the escape pods with the plans to the Deathstar!
If only the gunner on the star destroyer had shot down the pod on general principles... Luke wouldn't have found R2D2, he wouldn't have met Obi-Wan and joined the Rebels, the Death Star would have destroyed Yavin and the Empire would have won. It's chaos theory, one tiny change and the whole of history is different!
Now, if you'll excuse me I have some chocolate coated spongy biscuits with a smashing orangey bit to attend to.
boring-ass rockets that you'd see in 1950's sci fi films
Hey! I resent that! 1950s sci-fi rockets had a chequered band around the middle! A CHEQUERED BAND! Is there a chequered bit around anywhere on the Shuttle? No. A nice two-tone design with the heat tiles, I'll give you that, but no cool-looking chequered bit. Dan Dare wouldn't go up in a Shuttle if you had him at gunpoint. Hell, if you get Dan Dare at gunpoint you're the villain anyway and you're going to get a kicking but that's beside the point. Any cool rocket needs a chequered bit, robot arms come a distant second.
2. With the money saved, build ships to go somewhere new. Or even somewhere we went FORTY YEARS AGO.
The Shuttle was a neat idea that didn't work out. There's no shame in admitting that. Russia ditched Buran because of the cost and continued to run a fine Earth-orbit operation for years based on Soyuz tech. Let's use American technology to take mankind further, rather than just duplicate what's already there.
Any one care to explain how a 15th century map details the coastline of Antartica (WITHOUT glaciers) when it wasn't mapped out until the 1960?!s
Yep. Sixth result down on that Google search you linked looks pretty thorough to me. Damn good map for the time, but Antarctica is just Terra Australis Incognita, with no real detail at all. And it's connected to South America, and overlaps most of Argentina... which rather buggers its claim to map Antarctica accurately, don't you think?
Saw an excellent BBC documentary last night called "The Power of nightmares" which shows how the right has manufactured 'imaginary enemies' and exagerated threats
Did you see last week's episode? They've been doing it for a long time. Apparently the neocon cabal had a go at this sort of thing in the seventies. First off, they decided that the CIA wasn't doing its job properly. So they had their own people go over the data as well. What did they come up with? A whole lot of Soviet superweapons that were so tremendously secret that there was no evidence for their existence at all! That was the frightening part - the neocons KNEW the Soviets had all kinds of secret weapons, so the fact that they could hide them so well, and put on this totally convincing act of being behind in the arms race, was a shock.
First lesson learned: bullshitting about nonexistent weapons can help your political goals.
Later, one of their political sympathisers came to be head of the CIA. At the time, the big story, popularised in some alarming book or other, was that the Soviets were behind every terrorist organisation worldwide. ALL of them. A report was demanded from the CIA, which had to prove that this was indeed true. The intelligence analysts were amazed. 'But it isn't true,' they replied. 'But look at all the evidence,' said the neocons. Most of this evidence turned out to actually be the CIA's own propaganda... but hey, you do as the boss says. Report produced, Soviets denounced as Evil Empire.
Second lesson learned: the intelligence services can always be bullied into producing a report that matches your propaganda needs.
Who's this 'they' I'm referring to, btw? Just a generic 'neocons' or 'the right'? No. The same few names throughout. Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle... all Bush's minders. The same damn cabal all the time. It's enough to make you start wondering if maybe there isn't something to all this conspiracy crap about Illuminati...
And yes, it's plain enough that the BBC doesn't toe the government line. They're never going to admit defeat over Hutton. Have you seen the recent storylines on Spooks?
Rotation is absolute, not relative. Get on a roundabout - it's spinning and you know it's spinning without reference to anything external, because you can feel the centrifugal and Coriolis forces.
The metric of spacetime around a nonrotating, spherically symmetric body is the Schwarzschild metric, which has no frame dragging. Around a rotating body it is the Kerr metric, which has all sorts of exciting effects in it. For instance, a rotating black hole has a region called the ergosphere, just outside the event horizon, where nothing can ever be stationary because space itself is being dragged around so rapidly. AFAICT, what has been detected here is the small difference between the Schwarzschild metric and the Kerr metric, where bodies orbiting the Earth are concerned.
Rotation can make a big difference in relativity. The distortion of spacetime is a result of the mass-energy of a body, but the shape of that distortion is affected by its rotation.
Thankfully, the EU has just expanded to include half the former Soviet bloc - ten relatively poor countries. Federal law supersedes state laws, in Europe as it is in America, and about the most fundamental principle of the European Union is the single market.
Consequently it is actually illegal for the British government to restrict trade with other EU nations in this way. If your uber-cheap CDs happen to come from Poland or Lithuania or somewhere, then there's nothing they can do to you.
Personally, I'm a happy eurofederalist, buying all sorts of nice cheap imported stuff from the rest of the Union. Hooray for Brussels!
I've tracked a LOT of these ebay scams to Korea.
Dubya was right, North Korea is a threat.
It's not North Korea, it's South Korea. The place is full of ridiculously fat broadband connections, and the ISPs don't seem too bothered about what goes on on the networks. Since Koreans aren't any brighter than the rest of us, an awful lot of those broadband connections go to Windows machines which have been 0wnz0red since about 30 seconds after they were first switched on.
And that's before we even consider the mail servers installed in every school in the country, which are wide-open mail relays out of the box. Aaarrrggghhh!
South Korea would be paradise to be in - fat connection and nobody giving a filesystem check what you're doing with it - but the consequences for the rest of the world are becoming a nightmare.
I didn't realize spyware authors stole source code to programs and implanted spyware in it.
Well, it has been known to happen. There are a whole lot of P2P programs out there that just take Gnucleus, make some small changes to the interface, replace the GPL with a ridiculous EULA and add spyware.
you need rules to keep everyone from arguing with each other when you do need to figure out what happens to the kobold when it gets hit with the +5 axe of vorpal soothing.
About the bag of holding... and bearing in mind I only know D&D thanks to Bioware...
Anything placed in a bag of holding effectively weighs nothing. Zero newtons weight, zero kilograms inertial mass. So.
Take two bags of holding, two cannonballs, two buckets, two pulleys and a length of rope. Now, put the cannonballs in the buckets, and fasten the mouths of the bags over the rims of the buckets. Fasten the buckets to the rope, and run the rope over the two pulleys with one pulley above the other. Make sure that on the left hand side the bag is above the bucket, and on the right hand side the bag is below the bucket so that the cannonball drops out of the bucket and into the bag.
Now, let go of the rope. The weight of the cannonball in the left bucket pulls down on that side, and the cannonball on the right weighs nothing because it's in a BoH. So, the left side moves down, the right side up, and the pulleys turn.
Eventually the bucket on the right goes up and over the top and the cannonball drops out of the BoH and into the bucket. The reverse happens on the botton: the other ball drops out of the bucket and into the BoH. Result: the left hand side is still heavier than the right, and the pulleys turn.
The pulleys turn faster and faster, with no end in sight. Feel free to attach the mechanism of your choice to this limitless power source.
How smart is it in finding new music added, wouldn't it need to rescan all your music and compare it to what's on the player. Or does it store a database on your computer also? Or, do you just drag over your 20+gig of music and let it recopy every time? It's the stupid software that makes things easy.
I have an iHP-140; same principle, it's a USB hard disk that just recognises mp3s, oggs, wmas and wavs that you load onto it. It's... not hard, you know. Two simple commands to keep hard-disk collection and player collection synchronised:
Yes, it's that easy. Notice the 'u' flag; that means that if cp finds a file with the same name and the same or more recent date, it won't copy. So it'll only copy across any new stuff, not the whole multi-gigabyte mass of it.
If it looks a bit difficult, you might try a script?
Call it 'update', set the executable bit and stick it on your KDE menu if you like ease-of-use that much.
Now, I do need to keep the music organised; I like/audio/artist/album/00 - Trackname.ogg, but YMMV. All the random stuff I've downloaded rather than ripped from my own CDs are in/audio/General, which is admittedly a hellish pit. That said, I let iTunes loose on my collection once. NEVER AGAIN. Dear God, the mess it made thanks to the inconsistent tagging of all that pirated stuff. I'll organise my own music, thank you very much.
In case you hadn't noticed, people tend to eat much the same whether or not they use bicycles.
In fact, I suspect that given the rather paradoxical nature of the Western, and particularly the U.S, diet, people who ride bicycles will probably eat less on average.
Why? Because your typical great fat drive-400-metres-to-McDonalds cave troll probably wouldn't know a bicycle if you beat them around the head with one, and likely couldn't ride it far anyway without suffering a coronary.
Everyone makes this mistake at first. You're thinking of an infinite expanse of empty space, and at some point there's a colossal explosion, from which there is now a Universe expanding outwards.
Wrong.
If that was the case, then the Universe of matter would form an expanding spherical shell with the detonation point at the centre. What would we observe? Answer: galaxies all aligned in one plane as we look tangentially along the sphere, complete void in the outward direction, and maybe a very faint glow from the other side when we look in the inward direction.
That's not what we see, though. The Universe is, as far as we can tell, homogeneous and isotropic - the same in every region and in every direction.
The way to view the Big Bang is not as an explosion in space, but an explosion of space.
Here's one illustration: take an infinitely long, one dimensional Universe. Place a marker - say, a star - at every lightyear along the whole infinite length of this Universe. Now let the Universe expand according to the following rule: each star at point n shifts to point 2n. Now suddenly there are exactly the same number of stars in the Universe, but they're two lightyears apart instead of just one. And somewhere back in time, they were half a lightyear apart; extrapolating all the way back, they were rammed right up against each other. But the Universe was always infinite in extent.
Our Universe is probably something like that. It's always been infinite in extent, with material evenly distributed throughout the whole infinity; it's just that the material is getting more spread out, just like the stars in the 1D universe.
So, some 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the background radiation was emitted. Certainly, the radiation that was emitted here is thirteen billion lightyears away by now, but what we see is the radiation that was emitted from what is now thirteen billion lightyears away, and which has only just got here.
But I must object to "embarrassingly smaller budget than NASA's." NASA had to do their first manned suborbital flight with 1950s hardware borrowed from the artillery boys, and without 40 years of prior experience to draw on.
The X Prize contestants are, in Newton's words, standing on the shoulders of giants.
And those giants stood on the shoulders of the Devil. Redstone, which sent the first Mercury astronauts on suborbital flights, was a direct descendant of the V2, fondly remembered by Londoners.
The BBC coverage on News 24 was pretty decent. They had a guy on site, regular updates as SS1 got higher over time, and a continual live image running on a separate channel. They cut to the Tory conference and the latest good news from Iraq from time to time, and rather carelessly missed the separation while discussing Manchester United... but overall they gave it some pretty good treatment. ITV and Sky didn't cover it anywhere near as much from what I saw, but I don't get any other news channels.
Slashdot Mirror
How about outsourcing to the S.P.Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation? The Russians would surely jump at the chance.
If only the gunner on the star destroyer had shot down the pod on general principles... Luke wouldn't have found R2D2, he wouldn't have met Obi-Wan and joined the Rebels, the Death Star would have destroyed Yavin and the Empire would have won. It's chaos theory, one tiny change and the whole of history is different!
Now, if you'll excuse me I have some chocolate coated spongy biscuits with a smashing orangey bit to attend to.
Hey! I resent that! 1950s sci-fi rockets had a chequered band around the middle! A CHEQUERED BAND! Is there a chequered bit around anywhere on the Shuttle? No. A nice two-tone design with the heat tiles, I'll give you that, but no cool-looking chequered bit. Dan Dare wouldn't go up in a Shuttle if you had him at gunpoint. Hell, if you get Dan Dare at gunpoint you're the villain anyway and you're going to get a kicking but that's beside the point. Any cool rocket needs a chequered bit, robot arms come a distant second.
1. Retire the Shuttle and use Soyuz, which works just fine.
2. With the money saved, build ships to go somewhere new. Or even somewhere we went FORTY YEARS AGO.
The Shuttle was a neat idea that didn't work out. There's no shame in admitting that. Russia ditched Buran because of the cost and continued to run a fine Earth-orbit operation for years based on Soyuz tech. Let's use American technology to take mankind further, rather than just duplicate what's already there.
Damn... I thought we sorted this business out in the eighties. I suppose there'll have to be a rematch now.
Yep. Sixth result down on that Google search you linked looks pretty thorough to me. Damn good map for the time, but Antarctica is just Terra Australis Incognita, with no real detail at all. And it's connected to South America, and overlaps most of Argentina... which rather buggers its claim to map Antarctica accurately, don't you think?
Did you see last week's episode? They've been doing it for a long time. Apparently the neocon cabal had a go at this sort of thing in the seventies. First off, they decided that the CIA wasn't doing its job properly. So they had their own people go over the data as well. What did they come up with? A whole lot of Soviet superweapons that were so tremendously secret that there was no evidence for their existence at all! That was the frightening part - the neocons KNEW the Soviets had all kinds of secret weapons, so the fact that they could hide them so well, and put on this totally convincing act of being behind in the arms race, was a shock.
First lesson learned: bullshitting about nonexistent weapons can help your political goals.
Later, one of their political sympathisers came to be head of the CIA. At the time, the big story, popularised in some alarming book or other, was that the Soviets were behind every terrorist organisation worldwide. ALL of them. A report was demanded from the CIA, which had to prove that this was indeed true. The intelligence analysts were amazed. 'But it isn't true,' they replied. 'But look at all the evidence,' said the neocons. Most of this evidence turned out to actually be the CIA's own propaganda... but hey, you do as the boss says. Report produced, Soviets denounced as Evil Empire.
Second lesson learned: the intelligence services can always be bullied into producing a report that matches your propaganda needs.
Who's this 'they' I'm referring to, btw? Just a generic 'neocons' or 'the right'? No. The same few names throughout. Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle... all Bush's minders. The same damn cabal all the time. It's enough to make you start wondering if maybe there isn't something to all this conspiracy crap about Illuminati...
And yes, it's plain enough that the BBC doesn't toe the government line. They're never going to admit defeat over Hutton. Have you seen the recent storylines on Spooks?
Advice to future PMs: don't fuck with the BBC...
The metric of spacetime around a nonrotating, spherically symmetric body is the Schwarzschild metric, which has no frame dragging. Around a rotating body it is the Kerr metric, which has all sorts of exciting effects in it. For instance, a rotating black hole has a region called the ergosphere, just outside the event horizon, where nothing can ever be stationary because space itself is being dragged around so rapidly. AFAICT, what has been detected here is the small difference between the Schwarzschild metric and the Kerr metric, where bodies orbiting the Earth are concerned.
Rotation can make a big difference in relativity. The distortion of spacetime is a result of the mass-energy of a body, but the shape of that distortion is affected by its rotation.
Consequently it is actually illegal for the British government to restrict trade with other EU nations in this way. If your uber-cheap CDs happen to come from Poland or Lithuania or somewhere, then there's nothing they can do to you.
Personally, I'm a happy eurofederalist, buying all sorts of nice cheap imported stuff from the rest of the Union. Hooray for Brussels!
It's not North Korea, it's South Korea. The place is full of ridiculously fat broadband connections, and the ISPs don't seem too bothered about what goes on on the networks. Since Koreans aren't any brighter than the rest of us, an awful lot of those broadband connections go to Windows machines which have been 0wnz0red since about 30 seconds after they were first switched on.
And that's before we even consider the mail servers installed in every school in the country, which are wide-open mail relays out of the box. Aaarrrggghhh!
South Korea would be paradise to be in - fat connection and nobody giving a filesystem check what you're doing with it - but the consequences for the rest of the world are becoming a nightmare.
Well, it has been known to happen. There are a whole lot of P2P programs out there that just take Gnucleus, make some small changes to the interface, replace the GPL with a ridiculous EULA and add spyware.
No, but later reports indicate that he's been visited by a giant spooky rabbit, and has been researching the theoretical basis of time travel.
His arm comes off, but he's OK about it.
Anything placed in a bag of holding effectively weighs nothing. Zero newtons weight, zero kilograms inertial mass. So.
Take two bags of holding, two cannonballs, two buckets, two pulleys and a length of rope. Now, put the cannonballs in the buckets, and fasten the mouths of the bags over the rims of the buckets. Fasten the buckets to the rope, and run the rope over the two pulleys with one pulley above the other. Make sure that on the left hand side the bag is above the bucket, and on the right hand side the bag is below the bucket so that the cannonball drops out of the bucket and into the bag.
Now, let go of the rope. The weight of the cannonball in the left bucket pulls down on that side, and the cannonball on the right weighs nothing because it's in a BoH. So, the left side moves down, the right side up, and the pulleys turn.
Eventually the bucket on the right goes up and over the top and the cannonball drops out of the BoH and into the bucket. The reverse happens on the botton: the other ball drops out of the bucket and into the BoH. Result: the left hand side is still heavier than the right, and the pulleys turn.
The pulleys turn faster and faster, with no end in sight. Feel free to attach the mechanism of your choice to this limitless power source.
Wizards of the Sword Coast?
Spot on. Now, if you'll excuse me, I believe I have something of interest in my coat pocket...
It's an immense achievement. Jar-Jar was so bad that it made the Ewoks look like fucking Shaft.
I have an iHP-140; same principle, it's a USB hard disk that just recognises mp3s, oggs, wmas and wavs that you load onto it. It's... not hard, you know. Two simple commands to keep hard-disk collection and player collection synchronised:
[me@computer]$ cp -ru /mnt/iriver/audio /home/media/audio
/home/media/music /mnt/iriver/audio
[me@computer]$ cp -ru
Yes, it's that easy. Notice the 'u' flag; that means that if cp finds a file with the same name and the same or more recent date, it won't copy. So it'll only copy across any new stuff, not the whole multi-gigabyte mass of it.
If it looks a bit difficult, you might try a script?
#!/bin/bash /mnt/iriver
/mnt/iriver/audio /home/media/audio
/home/media/music /mnt/iriver/audio
umount /mnt/iriver
mount
cp -ru
cp -ru
Call it 'update', set the executable bit and stick it on your KDE menu if you like ease-of-use that much.
Now, I do need to keep the music organised; I like /audio/artist/album/00 - Trackname.ogg, but YMMV. All the random stuff I've downloaded rather than ripped from my own CDs are in /audio/General, which is admittedly a hellish pit. That said, I let iTunes loose on my collection once. NEVER AGAIN. Dear God, the mess it made thanks to the inconsistent tagging of all that pirated stuff. I'll organise my own music, thank you very much.
As do Gemini 8 and Mir.
Unfortunately, Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11, STS-51L and STS-107 agree with the previous poster. Space is a bloody dangerous place to be.
In fact, I suspect that given the rather paradoxical nature of the Western, and particularly the U.S, diet, people who ride bicycles will probably eat less on average.
Why? Because your typical great fat drive-400-metres-to-McDonalds cave troll probably wouldn't know a bicycle if you beat them around the head with one, and likely couldn't ride it far anyway without suffering a coronary.
Wrong.
If that was the case, then the Universe of matter would form an expanding spherical shell with the detonation point at the centre. What would we observe? Answer: galaxies all aligned in one plane as we look tangentially along the sphere, complete void in the outward direction, and maybe a very faint glow from the other side when we look in the inward direction.
That's not what we see, though. The Universe is, as far as we can tell, homogeneous and isotropic - the same in every region and in every direction.
The way to view the Big Bang is not as an explosion in space, but an explosion of space.
Here's one illustration: take an infinitely long, one dimensional Universe. Place a marker - say, a star - at every lightyear along the whole infinite length of this Universe. Now let the Universe expand according to the following rule: each star at point n shifts to point 2n. Now suddenly there are exactly the same number of stars in the Universe, but they're two lightyears apart instead of just one. And somewhere back in time, they were half a lightyear apart; extrapolating all the way back, they were rammed right up against each other. But the Universe was always infinite in extent.
Our Universe is probably something like that. It's always been infinite in extent, with material evenly distributed throughout the whole infinity; it's just that the material is getting more spread out, just like the stars in the 1D universe.
So, some 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the background radiation was emitted. Certainly, the radiation that was emitted here is thirteen billion lightyears away by now, but what we see is the radiation that was emitted from what is now thirteen billion lightyears away, and which has only just got here.
Hey, Australian game censorship bureau! Look! Play some of these!
Then after their heads explode, Aussies can play all the violent and/or filthy games they like.
The X Prize contestants are, in Newton's words, standing on the shoulders of giants.
And those giants stood on the shoulders of the Devil. Redstone, which sent the first Mercury astronauts on suborbital flights, was a direct descendant of the V2, fondly remembered by Londoners.
The BBC coverage on News 24 was pretty decent. They had a guy on site, regular updates as SS1 got higher over time, and a continual live image running on a separate channel. They cut to the Tory conference and the latest good news from Iraq from time to time, and rather carelessly missed the separation while discussing Manchester United... but overall they gave it some pretty good treatment. ITV and Sky didn't cover it anywhere near as much from what I saw, but I don't get any other news channels.
Clearly, this is to be avoided when selecting a president. Best to stick with the current... oh, wait...