That said, I can't see cold fusion providing an aircraft fuel. If it works, you get hot water. What are you going to do with that? Power the plane with a steam rocket? Then suddenly your fuel, while certainly cheap, is heavy... Let it boil and expand and run a piston engine, maybe... how do gigantic prop-driven, cold-fusion powered flying boats grab you?;-)
The fission power business depends on massive subsidy, at least in.uk. As for fossil-fuel energy, that may have the clout to squash new technologies in.uk and.us, but I suspect that in.jp, where they're wholly dependent on imported power, any alternative would be welcomed.
Cold fusion was dropped because it could never be replicated, and perhaps because of Pons and Flesichmann's attitude. Science is not done by press conference, and you don't call an anomalous heat effect 'cold fusion' and cause a global hoo-hah without some damn good evidence.
I'm not sure quite what Disney's position is, but the last couple of Ghibli DVDs in the UK (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi and Hotaru no Haka) have been released by Optimum. They've done a very good job - certainly far better than the abysmal Buena Vista releases of Mononoke Hime, Majo no Takkyubin and Tenkuu no Shiro Laputa. I just hope they provide the UK releases of Nausicaa, Totoro and Howl...
Incidentally, for some reason gmail has decided to give me 12 invites - they will go to the first 12 logged in posters telling a funny joke involving ESR or RMS, bonus points for use of ASCII.
I think gmail must have just hit some kind of critical density; I finally got my invite last week, and since then I've been seeing them offered just about everywhere.
That's exponential growth for you, though... I've invited three people in myself already, and I imagine they've got invites of their own by now. I doubt Google will ever need to officially open gmail to the general public; in a couple of months the number of invites in circulation will probably exceed six billion:-)
Sorry to reply to myself, but... it occurs to me that the Lunar Transfer Vehicle is something that the US could build, and something that only the US could build. Twenty years of flying the Shuttle has given the US unique experience in building durable, reusable rocket motors - and that's what LTV needs, because it will never land on Earth but will refuel in orbit and fly another leg. Nobody else AFAIK has ever flown reusable engines.
Additionally, this project would be a spectacular demonstration of US technological and economic superiority - and let's be honest here, the US's prestige has been a little tarnished lately. Let's see what America's really capable of, shall we?
Whether or not manned spaceflight is worthwhile in itself is another argument (which I'm sure will be covered somewhere in this discussion). But spending vast sums of money just to duplicate what cheap and proven Russian equipment already does just fine thank you? That's a _massive_ waste.
The US is easily fifty years ahead of the rest of the world in both aerospace and nuclear technologies.
I'd contest that. European aircraft are pretty damn good, and as for nuclear power France and Japan certainly seem to know what they're doing.
The advantage the US has is experience in applying this technology to spacecraft. Europeans can build planes and missiles and so on, but building a manned orbiter is completely different - as we discovered with Hermes:-( Only the US is in any position to contemplate a nuclear rocket to Mars.
If you split the hydrogen out of water and then burn it, no, you won't get much energy.
You won't get any energy, at all, ever, by doing that. Fusion would definitely be nice, though. We'd run into the puppeteers' problem eventually, though: what do we use as a heat sink?:-)
The Shuttle's just... wrong. You're carrying massive amounts of dead weight every time it flies - how much is wasted carrying those wings to orbit?
My plan for the future is:
1: Scrap the Shuttles.
2: Cede LEO to the Russians. They're good at LEO: just look at their record with Soyuz, the Salyuts and Mir.
3: Build a Lunar Transfer Vehicle to move back and forth between Earth orbit and Moon orbit. Ferry crews to it on Soyuz, launch fuel on big dumb boosters (Titan, Proton, Ariane, take yer pick)
4: Construct moon base.
Why waste more of America's money building a Shuttle Plus that won't ever go anywhere? Don't reinvent the Russian wheel; instead, do something new...
Program - a sequence of instructions that a computer can interpret and execute;
The text file itself is only a script. The script + interpreter is a full program.
Surely by that definition, script + interpreter + kernel is a full program? You can't boot the interpreter direct, unless you're running a BBC Micro or something... It's GNU/Linux, not just GNU;-)
On TV, I watch programmes; at a football match, I might buy a programme. But on a computer, I run programs.
Similarly, my back would be in great pain were I to slip a disc, but in/etc/fstab I mount disks.
I'm happy enough to use the American spelling for computer jargon; that usage evolved in America, and so the older British spellings do not necessarily hold.
Is it just me or is it not lighting fireworks without the gunpowder smell and the soot all over your hands?
It also ideally needs to be a bitterly cold, clear night, there should be a really massive bonfire, and little kids should be writing their names in the air with sparklers.
And the Catherine wheel must get stuck against the fence-post and splutter lamely to a halt.
For what i know abaout japanese, they don't use spaces between 'words'. A single kanji represents the whole word and their outline is always more or less square.
That would probably be Chinese. Written Japanese seems to be a mix-and-match job involving two native phonetic alpabets (one all spiky and angular, and one with a lot of letters that look like pretzels), one imported phonetic alphabet, and lots of Chinese pictograms for good measure...
One of the hints for the Babel Fish puzzle, around the fifteenth one down, simply said:
At this point, brave men have been known to break down and cry.
Dear God, though, the Babel Fish puzzle. The bloody Babel Fish puzzle... But that was fair enough because it was immensely funny, or at least immensely funny in hindsight. Opening the case that contained the atomic vector plotter, that was annoying, because you didn't have long and the interface was a bugger to figure out even if you had persuaded the Vogon captain to continue his poetry...
I actually got the second verse on my first go - I'd discovered the 'enjoy' verb in the pub, enjoyed the music and the beer, and then out of a spirit of sheer masochism I enjoyed the Vogon poetry;-) Then the next time around I enjoyed everything... the mud was particularly enjoyable, as was Mr Prosser, and indeed the house both before and after demolition.
However, I do agree that open source model does not encourage games that are graphic intensive that involves a lot of artwork.
But hey, we do have six hundred and forty-seven variants of Angband, two hundred and thirty-eight variants of NetHack, and nine thousand three hundred and twelve Tetrises.
Apparently, they tried showing it two different orders (Totoro/Fireflies and Fireflies/Totoro), and found that people absolutely HATED Fireflies when seen after Totoro.
Understandable. There are a couple of motifs that appear in both films, making Setsuko parallel Mei. The little crab stance, for instance, where Mei is watching over her seeds, is paralleled by Setsuko following a crab across the beach. Later, IIRC, Seita tells Setsuko that their mother is buried under a camphor tree - which is where Mei found the totoros living. It's hard enough to watch Setsuko die when you're watching a harsh, realistic war film, but when you keep involuntarily seeing her as Mei then it's just unbearable; there's no catbus coming for her this time.
The actual title is Hauru no Ugoku Shiro - a direct translation of the English Howl's Moving Castle, allowing for some understandable Japanese difficulty in pronouncing the name of a Welsh wizard. The original story is distinctly British, in a rather discworldish sort of way, but I can definitely see why Miyazaki went for it; I can't wait to see his Calcifer.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if they can buy and pilot an aircraft.
That said, I can't see cold fusion providing an aircraft fuel. If it works, you get hot water. What are you going to do with that? Power the plane with a steam rocket? Then suddenly your fuel, while certainly cheap, is heavy... Let it boil and expand and run a piston engine, maybe... how do gigantic prop-driven, cold-fusion powered flying boats grab you? ;-)
/me buys stocks in airline companies. Or do you think a dramatic drop in their operating costs will be a problem for them?
Christmas Island gets spelled out in full. Every time. That TLD has been tainted, and is beyond recovery ;-)
Yeah. Physically impossible. It would be cool if you could just, oh, 'tunnel' through the barrier or something, but that would be absurd...
Cold fusion was dropped because it could never be replicated, and perhaps because of Pons and Flesichmann's attitude. Science is not done by press conference, and you don't call an anomalous heat effect 'cold fusion' and cause a global hoo-hah without some damn good evidence.
I'm not sure quite what Disney's position is, but the last couple of Ghibli DVDs in the UK (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi and Hotaru no Haka) have been released by Optimum. They've done a very good job - certainly far better than the abysmal Buena Vista releases of Mononoke Hime, Majo no Takkyubin and Tenkuu no Shiro Laputa. I just hope they provide the UK releases of Nausicaa, Totoro and Howl...
I think gmail must have just hit some kind of critical density; I finally got my invite last week, and since then I've been seeing them offered just about everywhere.
That's exponential growth for you, though... I've invited three people in myself already, and I imagine they've got invites of their own by now. I doubt Google will ever need to officially open gmail to the general public; in a couple of months the number of invites in circulation will probably exceed six billion :-)
Additionally, this project would be a spectacular demonstration of US technological and economic superiority - and let's be honest here, the US's prestige has been a little tarnished lately. Let's see what America's really capable of, shall we?
Whether or not manned spaceflight is worthwhile in itself is another argument (which I'm sure will be covered somewhere in this discussion). But spending vast sums of money just to duplicate what cheap and proven Russian equipment already does just fine thank you? That's a _massive_ waste.
I'd contest that. European aircraft are pretty damn good, and as for nuclear power France and Japan certainly seem to know what they're doing.
The advantage the US has is experience in applying this technology to spacecraft. Europeans can build planes and missiles and so on, but building a manned orbiter is completely different - as we discovered with Hermes :-( Only the US is in any position to contemplate a nuclear rocket to Mars.
You won't get any energy, at all, ever, by doing that. Fusion would definitely be nice, though. We'd run into the puppeteers' problem eventually, though: what do we use as a heat sink? :-)
My plan for the future is:
1: Scrap the Shuttles.
2: Cede LEO to the Russians. They're good at LEO: just look at their record with Soyuz, the Salyuts and Mir.
3: Build a Lunar Transfer Vehicle to move back and forth between Earth orbit and Moon orbit. Ferry crews to it on Soyuz, launch fuel on big dumb boosters (Titan, Proton, Ariane, take yer pick)
4: Construct moon base.
Why waste more of America's money building a Shuttle Plus that won't ever go anywhere? Don't reinvent the Russian wheel; instead, do something new...
The text file itself is only a script. The script + interpreter is a full program.
Surely by that definition, script + interpreter + kernel is a full program? You can't boot the interpreter direct, unless you're running a BBC Micro or something... It's GNU/Linux, not just GNU ;-)
Similarly, my back would be in great pain were I to slip a disc, but in /etc/fstab I mount disks.
I'm happy enough to use the American spelling for computer jargon; that usage evolved in America, and so the older British spellings do not necessarily hold.
It also ideally needs to be a bitterly cold, clear night, there should be a really massive bonfire, and little kids should be writing their names in the air with sparklers.
And the Catherine wheel must get stuck against the fence-post and splutter lamely to a halt.
Isn't that more a consequence of the fact that most people write with their right hand?
No way, man! Those things are, like, full of cholesterol!
That would probably be Chinese. Written Japanese seems to be a mix-and-match job involving two native phonetic alpabets (one all spiky and angular, and one with a lot of letters that look like pretzels), one imported phonetic alphabet, and lots of Chinese pictograms for good measure...
Maybe there's a more reasonable explanation for this... Yep. Some idiot wrote 'hertz per second' when they meant 'hertz'.
I'll see your Japanese samurai and raise you Persian Immortals.
At this point, brave men have been known to break down and cry.
Dear God, though, the Babel Fish puzzle. The bloody Babel Fish puzzle... But that was fair enough because it was immensely funny, or at least immensely funny in hindsight. Opening the case that contained the atomic vector plotter, that was annoying, because you didn't have long and the interface was a bugger to figure out even if you had persuaded the Vogon captain to continue his poetry...
I actually got the second verse on my first go - I'd discovered the 'enjoy' verb in the pub, enjoyed the music and the beer, and then out of a spirit of sheer masochism I enjoyed the Vogon poetry ;-) Then the next time around I enjoyed everything... the mud was particularly enjoyable, as was Mr Prosser, and indeed the house both before and after demolition.
I don't know if this statement is true.
It's entirely false.
-- 3DRealms
But hey, we do have six hundred and forty-seven variants of Angband, two hundred and thirty-eight variants of NetHack, and nine thousand three hundred and twelve Tetrises.
And did anyone ever catch that wumpus?
Understandable. There are a couple of motifs that appear in both films, making Setsuko parallel Mei. The little crab stance, for instance, where Mei is watching over her seeds, is paralleled by Setsuko following a crab across the beach. Later, IIRC, Seita tells Setsuko that their mother is buried under a camphor tree - which is where Mei found the totoros living. It's hard enough to watch Setsuko die when you're watching a harsh, realistic war film, but when you keep involuntarily seeing her as Mei then it's just unbearable; there's no catbus coming for her this time.
The actual title is Hauru no Ugoku Shiro - a direct translation of the English Howl's Moving Castle, allowing for some understandable Japanese difficulty in pronouncing the name of a Welsh wizard. The original story is distinctly British, in a rather discworldish sort of way, but I can definitely see why Miyazaki went for it; I can't wait to see his Calcifer.