Let's NOT assume 5%. Let's use some real figures. Like 2%.
Then let's assume that 1 full 20% of those use online banking.
Then, we'll be realistic and say that of those 10% are using Mac IE 5.2. (NO, people with Macs do NOT use IE - check usage stats anywhere you like!)
Let's say 10% of those people can be bothered contacting their bank.
That'd make those users funds equal to 48 million bucks.
Not worth getting out of bed for.
Being a web developer, I'm glad to see the back of the browser that was INTENTIONALLY CRIPPLED by MS. Their logic is "Well, if it's broken - what the hell do you expect?? YOU'RE ON A MAC!:P"
Hmmm - judicious use of quote marks makes your statement meaningless. Toss in a wink - and you might as well not hit the Submit button.
There's no such force at "Centrifugal" - it is correctly known as "Centripetal" force. It doesn't have anything to do with gravity. But it would allow the study of the corresponding Coriolis force with ease.
True, they're not interested in "deterrance [sic]" -- but they are definately interested in...
Man that cracks me up. You're arrogant enough to [sic] someone's poor spelling, then immediately commit the ultimate spelling mistake: "definitely" does not now, has never, and will NEVER contain the letter "a".
Sorry, ID is most definitely NOT a hypothesis. A Hypothesis can be falsified - whereas the CONCEPT or IDEA of ID can't be falsified, so it quite definitely does not get the dignity of being called a hypothesis.
It's a crackpot belief - nothing more.
Please don't get me started about the "I'm entitled to my belief" thing because it gets long...
The crux of the statement is that you have an entitlement. Unfortunately, every true entitlement also means a corresponding duty. The right to life for example, has a corresponding duty on everyone else not to kill you. If there is no duty, then there can be no entitlement. So, strictly speaking, you are NOT entitled to your opinion.
You are entitled to express your opinion - be it true or false - but you do not have an entitlement to believe in something which is not true.
The engine is "adaptation to the environment through natural selection." Humans no longer adapt the the environment, we adapt the environment to our liking. We heat, and cool our homes so we can livein climates where unaided humans can't survive for more than a few hours.
We don't allow predators to kill us, because we killed them all, or are in the process of doing so.
We defeat the germs and genes which have performed selection duty on us for millions of years.
We don't allow climate to affect us (at least the smart ones don't!) by engineering crops which withstand insects and droughts, and we irrigate so we can store crops for future use.
All these things have removed a significant part of natural selection.
This is not to say the human evolution has stopped. Far from it. However, DNA has just about run its course, as the torch bearer of Evolution: for human brains to grow any more, human females would be saddled with hips which would prevent efficient walking. True, we might all decide that "We like big butts and we can not lie", but this can't bring the size of the human brain much larger than it already is.
No. DNA's ultimate expression is when it creates a creature which can control its own evolution, and create technologies which surpass evolution by factors of many thousands of percent.
The future of human evolution will be the passing of the torch from biological processes to electronic (or quantum) processes.
This process is underway right now. With cyborgs (albeit very basic ones) quite common now. In the next few decades, the line separating humans and technology will blur substantially.
Eventually, we will discover that we no longer require the biological parts of ourselves, as our own inventions (or those of the AIs we create) will surpass, in every way, all our biological parts.
Once Evolution has dispensed with biology, it will be free to increase in a Geometric Progression, eventually turning humans into the masters of the universe.
You honestly believe preventing a plague would help this planet? Personally, I'm hoping a plague will wipe out at least 3 billion of us. (We could be our own plague, too.)
As to the reason to go into space, humans only need one: "Because it's there."
It does not matter how dangerous, difficult or expensive it is - it is human nature to expand, like the plague we are, we will expand into the rest of the Solar System, Galaxy, and eventually, the Universe. Or else humans will be rapidly consigned to the dustbin of history.
Human survival is only possible if we continue to expand - and the only place left to go is out.
Your stance assures that you will survive comfortably, but your descendants will die horribly, or simply fail to be born at all.
We use this in our ASP called "Diligent Boardbooks" (www.diligentbooks.com) and Magellan will convert.DOC,.XLS,.PPT and.PDF files into quite acceptable.HTML documents.
The software is not perfect - but it is probably the best thing currently available.
There are issues in the conversion process: such as text outside the printable area of the page, and transparent.GIF and.PNG files aren't seen as single images, they're broken into multiple 1 pixel high images (Which places a huge strain on an HTTPS connection due to the added latencies of multiple requests.) but overall, it works very well indeed.
Our "Boardbooks" app is perhaps, the only product of its kind in the world: specifically designed for company directors, and board meetings, so that materials are available as soon as they are uploaded and approved - with note making capability, and the system keeps track of what pages you have viewed, and which have changed.
These SEOs are a giant crock of shit.
A client of ours hired iProspect at a fee of about USD70,000 and they were a complete joke. At the time of building the site, they sent a list of things to ensure we did correctly: this list contained not a single thing we weren't already going to do.
They didn't provide us with any meta data, page titles, title (alt) text or anything until the site had been up for 3 months, by which time google had crawled the site using the entries I had made. These ad hoc entries left the site at #2 on google using their preferred search terms. (#1 had an impossible number of links pointing to it, and could not be displaced.)
Over the next 2 months, dribs and drabs of data started rolling in from iProspect. It arrived as Word document, text files and Excel spreadsheets - but never in the same format, and never in any meaningful context - or in any particularly order... (The site had around 140 pages)
This in itself was a joke - they were completely unprofessional, totally amateurish, and the people we spoke to by video and audio conference really didn't have a clue what they were talking about. (Me and my team have spent a lot of time creating highly ranked sites on Google).
Finally, after 2 months (and $70,000 DON'T FORGET!) we had all the "correct" (LOL) data entered and Google was instructed to crawl the site again.
I then tested a range of search terms we had the previous results for, the ones the client specified, and after the $70,000 makeover, not a single result was higher than my Ad Hoc (and FREE!) entries.
We were absolutely disgusted. I tell ya, I'm in the wrong game. I could have charged $90,000 for the work they did, and it would (conservatively!) taken me less than a week to do the job it took iProspect 2 months to do - AND I DID A BETTER JOB!
I can't mention the URL here I think, but the site supports USA's longest running infomercial (yes, outsourced to New Zealand!) This site turns over better than 40 Million USD annually, and get's around 3-4000 sessions a day.
So, to anyone considering iProspect (in particular) or any other SEO company, my advice to you is simply to let your web developers have a crack first, because in many cases the results will be superior to anything these so-called "experts" can come up with.
Raimondo Fortezza has done a great job of creating downloadable PDFs of the ISS components. It's cost me about NZ$220 to print them all, and I am most of the way through assembling them all.
Of course, patients wouldn't sue if the doctors were competent - or even INTERESTED in their patients.
US doctors are in it for the MONEY - not the PATIENTS. Hell, my father was part of an on-going program (begun in 1974 IIRC) at Brown University to teach 4th and 5th year med students "Balint Medicine" which is basically about developing the doctor-patient relationship - because US doctors are so poor at it.
Remember - in the litigious culture of the USA frivolous lawsuits abound - and a malpractice suit effectively destroys a doctor's livelihood.
So, you're working in an industry where you deal with sick people, and those people die. So what? People die. And if you help ease the suffering of 99.9% of them, and 0.01% are accidentally hastened to their demise - so what?
This is probably gonna cost me Karma - but I don't care: It's about time for a reality check, and that reality check is that doctors are SELDOM to blame for someone dying.
People think surgery is "safe" - but the fact is that anaesthetics is an art more than a science, and people can die simply by being anaesthetised - and IT'S NO ONE'S FAULT!
One of the strange-but-true-facts is that in New York in the 70's, when doctors went on strike for a period, the deathrate actually DROPPED.
By and large, medical misadventure is more common than negligence, and accidents happen - which is a good reason to be hospitalised in the firt place!
Health care in the USA (and in other western cultures like New Zealand, where I am from) is of a very high quality - but the big problem is that the cost of administering medicine is obscene.
Did you know that triple-heart by-pass is one of the most common surgeries in the USA? At a cost of around $50,000 (at least) for each one. Now, I don't know about you, but I think a country can't afford to practice medicine like that.
Back to the lawsuit issue: my Dad was (erroneously and mistakenly) sued for mal-practice by a stupid woman whose husband died. Needless to say, the suit failed, but I remember my Dad being more worried about that than anything else in his career which spanned nearly 40 years of general practice and university teaching.
And think about this: do you really want to be cared for by a doctor who is being consumed by worry about a pending lawsuit? No - I didn't think so.
FYI, when we lived in Rhode Island, my Dad didn't even have a full practicing certificate because his NZ qualifications were Mb.CHb, Dip. Obst., FRNZCGP, and FRCS, but because he wasn't an "MD" he could only have a "teaching certificate" where they dealth with real and simulated patients.
Anyway, the malpractice insurance for his "limited" licence was more per week than the ANNUAL malpractice insurance he had in New Zealand.
This is the technology which is going to revolutionize mobile computing - and I have been waiting for it for quite some time!
Traditional PDAs are about to make a real change, with both Input *AND* output projected.
You'll place your PDA on a table and project the screen against a wall, or stretched vertically, onto the table ahead of it, while it simultaneously projects the keyboard onto the table.
I also anticipate the keyboard projector will ultimately detect finger movements in a separate area, and act as a mouse also.
How freaking cool will this technology be? VERY - but the bottleneck is *STILL* going to be battery power - so - come on you Fuel-cell freaks: crack that problem!!
Rubbish, We can make one right now. Deploying it from orbit initially, and finishing it are the tricky parts. Oh, and how do you validate a 100,000 kilometre long carbon nanotube tape?
It will be realistic by the time it is affordable, which will be well before 2020. I predict a completed and operational elevator before 2025.
If brains were antimatter - they wouldn't have enough to blow their noses.
Look, it's this simple: Asteroids ROTATE, in wildly different ways and have a miniscule amount of local gravity.
How on earth is your loauncher supposed to touch down, let alone anchor itself? Then, if that can be achieved, how does it know which direction and when to chuck a load? Unless ALL units are completely sorted out, randonly chucking stuff off a rock is a waste of time - the combined effects will cancel eacg other out.
Look, this isn't rock(et) science - this is Laser Science.:P
The best and ONLY viable way to divert asteroids is to hit them with light pressure. Nuclear bombs and rock-chucking bots are the legacy thinking from military minds, and not logical thinking.
Here's how to divert a rock:
Launch a 500 Megawatt Nuclear reactor into orbit, and attach it to a giant "Laser Beam". Use a high power ION drive to get the system into a position where it leads the asteroid by a few thousand klicks. It then positions itself such that it can place 500 Megawatts of laser power onto the surface of the asteroid, pushing in one direction only.
It sits there for a few years pushing on the asteroid, while using the ION engine to hold it's position (Newton says action = reaction!). We send several missions to refuel the ION engines and tend the reactor.
You only need to adjust an asteroids speed by 2 cm/s to effectively make it miss the Earth - and we'd want even less than that, because we'd want to actually snatch the thing into a highly elliptical Earth Orbit. Say 2,000,000 x 450 Kilometres.
Then we'd not only save the Earth, but snag a trillion tons of raw materials which can gradually be mined and used by the burgeoning space manufacturing and orbital processing facilities which will bound to develop if that much "free" material is just sitting there asking to be used.
Alternatively, and arguably easier is to use Gigawatt class lasers (which perform multiple duties: launching payloads into LEO, illuminating search and rescue efforts at night, light battlefields, accelerate interstellar probesm send data into the cosmos, a Ballistic Missile defence syste, providing light in the Luna night, satelite killer, surgical strike weapon par-excellence, space junk de-orbiter and asteroid diverter!) based on Earth to deflect incoming NEOs.
Earth based is preferable because it's cheaper and has many other uses. Plus, you can build 50+ Gigawatt class lasers and combine the power which would deflect objects the sizes of Ceres.
1x Gigawatt is the power required to launch a 1 metre diameter, 1 ton payload into Low Earth Orbit. Check out http://www.lightcrafttechnologies.com/ This from Liek Mayabo the CEO.
Excellent to see old, crappy images reworked with hi-tech to reveal things the original science team were never capable of seeing!
What amazes me about the images is that there's enough light on the surface to actually see ANYTHING! I mean, isn't the surface pressure on the order of hundreds of atmospheres? To me, that implied some sort of soupy and only partly transparent atmosphere.
The radar map of the surface is remarkable in that there are no craters visible - evidence of extreme and recent volcanic activity I assume.
All together a very interesting planet - but one unlikely to see human footprints until we've throughly explored the Jupiter system I susppect. Just how on Venus would you design and use a pressure suit that can take the rather dangerous and corrosive Venusian Atmosphere, at ridiculous temeratures and pressures?
Getting a job from an interview is EASY. Getting the interview is the hard part.
Forget about dwelling on your interview skills - because you have obviously thought long and hard about how to approach the interview - and the advice simply is; "be honest - but not TOO honest!".
The tricky part is ensuring your application lies in the list of interviews.
Remember, an HR department might see 500+ (or even 5000+ applications!) for some positions and in some locations.
Now - picture yourself as the HR person receiving this applications. 500 cover letters with resumes attached - each one with 8 pages of information. That makes about 4500 pages to read.
Sorry - if your resume/CV is longer than a SINGLE SIDE OF A4 PAPER you most likely will NOT get an interview.
I don't care how many jobs you've had or how freaking successful you are - you need to condense ALL relevant information down to a single page!
You will (of course!) in your covering letter, say something along the lines of:
"My mercifully brief C.V. is attached, and I will present my full Resume at an interview, or on request."
Four years ago, I was looking for work, and had professional help to get my CV down to a single side of A4 paper - and since that time, I have got interviews for every single position I have applied for. I even got to play three employers off against each other to land my current position.:)
I did some research on this years ago when I noticed a kindergarten right next to a major power substation. I ended up having a guy with a gauss-meter take readings from the place - and they were through the roof in all except 10 square meters of the place!
Now - I'm not sure if electromagnetic fields are dangerous or not - and it's the sort of thing which could take 40 years to determine - like smoking! (I'm a smoker!)
But it seems elementary to me, that small, growing human brains shouldn't be subjected to 6 hours a day of high levels of radiation!
Further research shows that the highest levels of radiation in the home are often put out by cheap-ass clock-radios - and their fields extend 2 meters!
So, a vast majority of people are sleeping with their brians inside a large elctromagnetic field.
I'm only slightly paranoid, so I chucked out the clock radio, and replaced it with a straight timing device (output = effectively zero) and it turns on a stereo and a coffee maker in the a.m.:)
Someday I might be thankful for that decision - but maybe not too.
Don't think I'd ever buy a house close to power lines or a substation.
Descent 3 (Outrage, 1999) is available for about $9 and is still, to this day, one of the greatest online games of all time.
The community is small, the servers seldom see cheaters, and there's a LOT of support for online Nnewbies. My web site http://planetdescent.com/d3help provides a lot of help and is specifically targetted at online game-play.
You'll need a descent (decent!) joytsick and some time to get used to the 6DOF (6 degrees of freedom) mode of play, but it leaves ground-pounders (Quake, UT et al) for dead.
The online service at www.pxo.net is reliable, and despite the in-game chat/games list feature being useless, there are several windows based proggies for chatting and checking/joining servers.
Best $10 you'll ever spend.
Note: The Descent 3 Demo(s) do not work online - as they require servers running the same version - and none do.
BIG FAT WOW!
Sweet baby Jebus, if I mapped my electronic trail, you wouldn't even be able to see the map!!
I think the post should actually go something like this:
"I'm a scared person with too much time on my hands. I don't trust the US Government, so I made this lame map."
The only thing worth mentioning is that the US government has entirely too much INTEREST in what her citizens get up to.
Frankly, who gives a toss what electronic trails you leave behind? It's a TRAIL for goodness sake, and it tell ANYONE where you are NOW!
You think the police couldn't create a trail like this without any electronic information whatsoever?
Man, if you are paranoid about E-data on you, then you better move to Bumfuck, Africa, and live in a mud hut. And get a life!
OK, the fact is that Moore's Law doesn't exist at all. It's a theory, a bad one, but a self-fulfilling one - the market has been driven by what is "felt" to be Moore's Law. Despite the fact it doesn't exist, it is STILL a major driving force in hardware development.
No, the growth rate of Hard Drives in terms of capacity and speed is a normal hyperbolic graph (an exponential on top of an expontential) which is the same curve all technology is following.
The simple fact of the matter is that over time, the "abberations" that make advances seem more or less than hyperbolic will balance out, to produce a normal hyperbolic curve.
Look at the rate of CPU clock cycle increases: this year - it's just incredibly lame - and Chipzilla/AMD won't even add a single gigahertz to the final total from 2002. That's a LONG way behind what Moore's Law predicts.
We conveniently gloss over the massive increases in speed afforded by architecture changes, faster FSBs and faster RAM...
Check http://www.kurzweilai.net for the real oil on the rate of technological progress, and the coming Singularity.
While we can continue to rely upon a over-all Hyperbolic growth rate in speed/price/performance, there will always be hiccups along the way where existing technology provides for a smaller or faster growth rate.
When the paradigm changes (transitioning from moving parts to solid state storage - moving parts suck donkey nuts!) the rate of increase may surge massively, and then calm down to a more modest annual increase.
What we see in HDD performance is merely a blip in the graph, and while it seems significant now, the truth is that in 20 years, the curve will look pretty smooth, even given what appears to be massive variations away from the curve at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's NOT assume 5%. Let's use some real figures. Like 2%.
:P"
Then let's assume that 1 full 20% of those use online banking.
Then, we'll be realistic and say that of those 10% are using Mac IE 5.2. (NO, people with Macs do NOT use IE - check usage stats anywhere you like!)
Let's say 10% of those people can be bothered contacting their bank.
That'd make those users funds equal to 48 million bucks.
Not worth getting out of bed for.
Being a web developer, I'm glad to see the back of the browser that was INTENTIONALLY CRIPPLED by MS. Their logic is "Well, if it's broken - what the hell do you expect?? YOU'RE ON A MAC!
I suggest you move to a safer town, or country.
Hollow Point bullets for home defence? I'd have no problem convicting you of manslaughter.
Hmmm - judicious use of quote marks makes your statement meaningless. Toss in a wink - and you might as well not hit the Submit button. There's no such force at "Centrifugal" - it is correctly known as "Centripetal" force. It doesn't have anything to do with gravity. But it would allow the study of the corresponding Coriolis force with ease.
Man that cracks me up. You're arrogant enough to [sic] someone's poor spelling, then immediately commit the ultimate spelling mistake: "definitely" does not now, has never, and will NEVER contain the letter "a".
You moron.
We have a similar word in the English language: "losing". "Loosing" is an incorrect form of "Loosening": the act of making something less tight.
Sorry, ID is most definitely NOT a hypothesis. A Hypothesis can be falsified - whereas the CONCEPT or IDEA of ID can't be falsified, so it quite definitely does not get the dignity of being called a hypothesis. It's a crackpot belief - nothing more. Please don't get me started about the "I'm entitled to my belief" thing because it gets long... The crux of the statement is that you have an entitlement. Unfortunately, every true entitlement also means a corresponding duty. The right to life for example, has a corresponding duty on everyone else not to kill you. If there is no duty, then there can be no entitlement. So, strictly speaking, you are NOT entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to express your opinion - be it true or false - but you do not have an entitlement to believe in something which is not true.
Hello, I'm the milk man, I'm here to fix your dishwasher.
Gidday, I'm your cable guy, I'm here to fix your car.
Greetings, I'm a beautician, I'm here to mow your lawn.
In 1985 the New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange , at the Oxford Union Debate has already won the debate regarding nuclear weapons:
http://publicaddress.net/default,1578.sm#post
Everything that needed to be said about nukes was said then, and nothing further need be added today.
The debate was won, and all arguments for nuclear weapons rendered useless.
The engine is "adaptation to the environment through natural selection." Humans no longer adapt the the environment, we adapt the environment to our liking. We heat, and cool our homes so we can livein climates where unaided humans can't survive for more than a few hours.
;)
We don't allow predators to kill us, because we killed them all, or are in the process of doing so.
We defeat the germs and genes which have performed selection duty on us for millions of years.
We don't allow climate to affect us (at least the smart ones don't!) by engineering crops which withstand insects and droughts, and we irrigate so we can store crops for future use.
All these things have removed a significant part of natural selection.
This is not to say the human evolution has stopped. Far from it. However, DNA has just about run its course, as the torch bearer of Evolution: for human brains to grow any more, human females would be saddled with hips which would prevent efficient walking. True, we might all decide that "We like big butts and we can not lie", but this can't bring the size of the human brain much larger than it already is.
No. DNA's ultimate expression is when it creates a creature which can control its own evolution, and create technologies which surpass evolution by factors of many thousands of percent.
The future of human evolution will be the passing of the torch from biological processes to electronic (or quantum) processes.
This process is underway right now. With cyborgs (albeit very basic ones) quite common now. In the next few decades, the line separating humans and technology will blur substantially.
Eventually, we will discover that we no longer require the biological parts of ourselves, as our own inventions (or those of the AIs we create) will surpass, in every way, all our biological parts.
Once Evolution has dispensed with biology, it will be free to increase in a Geometric Progression, eventually turning humans into the masters of the universe.
If we're lucky that is.
You honestly believe preventing a plague would help this planet? Personally, I'm hoping a plague will wipe out at least 3 billion of us. (We could be our own plague, too.)
As to the reason to go into space, humans only need one: "Because it's there."
It does not matter how dangerous, difficult or expensive it is - it is human nature to expand, like the plague we are, we will expand into the rest of the Solar System, Galaxy, and eventually, the Universe. Or else humans will be rapidly consigned to the dustbin of history.
Human survival is only possible if we continue to expand - and the only place left to go is out.
Your stance assures that you will survive comfortably, but your descendants will die horribly, or simply fail to be born at all.
What you need is the app Magellan from BCL.
.DOC, .XLS, .PPT and .PDF files into quite acceptable .HTML documents.
.GIF and .PNG files aren't seen as single images, they're broken into multiple 1 pixel high images (Which places a huge strain on an HTTPS connection due to the added latencies of multiple requests.) but overall, it works very well indeed.
We use this in our ASP called "Diligent Boardbooks" (www.diligentbooks.com) and Magellan will convert
The software is not perfect - but it is probably the best thing currently available.
There are issues in the conversion process: such as text outside the printable area of the page, and transparent
Our "Boardbooks" app is perhaps, the only product of its kind in the world: specifically designed for company directors, and board meetings, so that materials are available as soon as they are uploaded and approved - with note making capability, and the system keeps track of what pages you have viewed, and which have changed.
All this with nothing except a web browser.
Well worth investigating
These SEOs are a giant crock of shit. A client of ours hired iProspect at a fee of about USD70,000 and they were a complete joke. At the time of building the site, they sent a list of things to ensure we did correctly: this list contained not a single thing we weren't already going to do. They didn't provide us with any meta data, page titles, title (alt) text or anything until the site had been up for 3 months, by which time google had crawled the site using the entries I had made. These ad hoc entries left the site at #2 on google using their preferred search terms. (#1 had an impossible number of links pointing to it, and could not be displaced.) Over the next 2 months, dribs and drabs of data started rolling in from iProspect. It arrived as Word document, text files and Excel spreadsheets - but never in the same format, and never in any meaningful context - or in any particularly order. .. (The site had around 140 pages)
This in itself was a joke - they were completely unprofessional, totally amateurish, and the people we spoke to by video and audio conference really didn't have a clue what they were talking about. (Me and my team have spent a lot of time creating highly ranked sites on Google).
Finally, after 2 months (and $70,000 DON'T FORGET!) we had all the "correct" (LOL) data entered and Google was instructed to crawl the site again.
I then tested a range of search terms we had the previous results for, the ones the client specified, and after the $70,000 makeover, not a single result was higher than my Ad Hoc (and FREE!) entries.
We were absolutely disgusted. I tell ya, I'm in the wrong game. I could have charged $90,000 for the work they did, and it would (conservatively!) taken me less than a week to do the job it took iProspect 2 months to do - AND I DID A BETTER JOB!
I can't mention the URL here I think, but the site supports USA's longest running infomercial (yes, outsourced to New Zealand!) This site turns over better than 40 Million USD annually, and get's around 3-4000 sessions a day.
So, to anyone considering iProspect (in particular) or any other SEO company, my advice to you is simply to let your web developers have a crack first, because in many cases the results will be superior to anything these so-called "experts" can come up with.
The guy's a turkey for comparing a 17" CRT to a 17" LCD. This guy doesn't know a 17" LCD is the rough equivalent of a 19" CRT?? WTF?
http://www.marscenter.it/eng/modellismoiss.htm
5 2
Raimondo Fortezza has done a great job of creating downloadable PDFs of the ISS components. It's cost me about NZ$220 to print them all, and I am most of the way through assembling them all.
http://www.mistaril.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3
for photos of the parts.
The work is time consuming but rewarding. The parts are very detailed and not for children - but for model makers and enthusiasts.
I have done about 300 hours so far on it - and have maybe another 150 to go before it's complete (in its current state.)
We are still waiting for PIRS docking module and US Airlock components.
US doctors are in it for the MONEY - not the PATIENTS. Hell, my father was part of an on-going program (begun in 1974 IIRC) at Brown University to teach 4th and 5th year med students "Balint Medicine" which is basically about developing the doctor-patient relationship - because US doctors are so poor at it.
Remember - in the litigious culture of the USA frivolous lawsuits abound - and a malpractice suit effectively destroys a doctor's livelihood.
So, you're working in an industry where you deal with sick people, and those people die. So what? People die. And if you help ease the suffering of 99.9% of them, and 0.01% are accidentally hastened to their demise - so what?
This is probably gonna cost me Karma - but I don't care: It's about time for a reality check, and that reality check is that doctors are SELDOM to blame for someone dying.
People think surgery is "safe" - but the fact is that anaesthetics is an art more than a science, and people can die simply by being anaesthetised - and IT'S NO ONE'S FAULT!
One of the strange-but-true-facts is that in New York in the 70's, when doctors went on strike for a period, the deathrate actually DROPPED.
By and large, medical misadventure is more common than negligence, and accidents happen - which is a good reason to be hospitalised in the firt place!
Health care in the USA (and in other western cultures like New Zealand, where I am from) is of a very high quality - but the big problem is that the cost of administering medicine is obscene.
Did you know that triple-heart by-pass is one of the most common surgeries in the USA? At a cost of around $50,000 (at least) for each one. Now, I don't know about you, but I think a country can't afford to practice medicine like that.
Back to the lawsuit issue: my Dad was (erroneously and mistakenly) sued for mal-practice by a stupid woman whose husband died. Needless to say, the suit failed, but I remember my Dad being more worried about that than anything else in his career which spanned nearly 40 years of general practice and university teaching.
And think about this: do you really want to be cared for by a doctor who is being consumed by worry about a pending lawsuit? No - I didn't think so.
FYI, when we lived in Rhode Island, my Dad didn't even have a full practicing certificate because his NZ qualifications were Mb.CHb, Dip. Obst., FRNZCGP, and FRCS, but because he wasn't an "MD" he could only have a "teaching certificate" where they dealth with real and simulated patients.
Anyway, the malpractice insurance for his "limited" licence was more per week than the ANNUAL malpractice insurance he had in New Zealand.
Just something to think about.
Traditional PDAs are about to make a real change, with both Input *AND* output projected.
You'll place your PDA on a table and project the screen against a wall, or stretched vertically, onto the table ahead of it, while it simultaneously projects the keyboard onto the table.
I also anticipate the keyboard projector will ultimately detect finger movements in a separate area, and act as a mouse also.
How freaking cool will this technology be? VERY - but the bottleneck is *STILL* going to be battery power - so - come on you Fuel-cell freaks: crack that problem!!
Rubbish, We can make one right now. Deploying it from orbit initially, and finishing it are the tricky parts. Oh, and how do you validate a 100,000 kilometre long carbon nanotube tape? It will be realistic by the time it is affordable, which will be well before 2020. I predict a completed and operational elevator before 2025.
Look, it's this simple: Asteroids ROTATE, in wildly different ways and have a miniscule amount of local gravity.
How on earth is your loauncher supposed to touch down, let alone anchor itself? Then, if that can be achieved, how does it know which direction and when to chuck a load? Unless ALL units are completely sorted out, randonly chucking stuff off a rock is a waste of time - the combined effects will cancel eacg other out.
Look, this isn't rock(et) science - this is Laser Science. :P
The best and ONLY viable way to divert asteroids is to hit them with light pressure. Nuclear bombs and rock-chucking bots are the legacy thinking from military minds, and not logical thinking.
Here's how to divert a rock:
Launch a 500 Megawatt Nuclear reactor into orbit, and attach it to a giant "Laser Beam". Use a high power ION drive to get the system into a position where it leads the asteroid by a few thousand klicks. It then positions itself such that it can place 500 Megawatts of laser power onto the surface of the asteroid, pushing in one direction only.
It sits there for a few years pushing on the asteroid, while using the ION engine to hold it's position (Newton says action = reaction!). We send several missions to refuel the ION engines and tend the reactor.
You only need to adjust an asteroids speed by 2 cm/s to effectively make it miss the Earth - and we'd want even less than that, because we'd want to actually snatch the thing into a highly elliptical Earth Orbit. Say 2,000,000 x 450 Kilometres.
Then we'd not only save the Earth, but snag a trillion tons of raw materials which can gradually be mined and used by the burgeoning space manufacturing and orbital processing facilities which will bound to develop if that much "free" material is just sitting there asking to be used.
Alternatively, and arguably easier is to use Gigawatt class lasers (which perform multiple duties: launching payloads into LEO, illuminating search and rescue efforts at night, light battlefields, accelerate interstellar probesm send data into the cosmos, a Ballistic Missile defence syste, providing light in the Luna night, satelite killer, surgical strike weapon par-excellence, space junk de-orbiter and asteroid diverter!) based on Earth to deflect incoming NEOs.
Earth based is preferable because it's cheaper and has many other uses. Plus, you can build 50+ Gigawatt class lasers and combine the power which would deflect objects the sizes of Ceres.
1x Gigawatt is the power required to launch a 1 metre diameter, 1 ton payload into Low Earth Orbit. Check out http://www.lightcrafttechnologies.com/ This from Liek Mayabo the CEO.
Excellent to see old, crappy images reworked with hi-tech to reveal things the original science team were never capable of seeing! What amazes me about the images is that there's enough light on the surface to actually see ANYTHING! I mean, isn't the surface pressure on the order of hundreds of atmospheres? To me, that implied some sort of soupy and only partly transparent atmosphere. The radar map of the surface is remarkable in that there are no craters visible - evidence of extreme and recent volcanic activity I assume. All together a very interesting planet - but one unlikely to see human footprints until we've throughly explored the Jupiter system I susppect. Just how on Venus would you design and use a pressure suit that can take the rather dangerous and corrosive Venusian Atmosphere, at ridiculous temeratures and pressures?
Forget about dwelling on your interview skills - because you have obviously thought long and hard about how to approach the interview - and the advice simply is; "be honest - but not TOO honest!".
The tricky part is ensuring your application lies in the list of interviews.
Remember, an HR department might see 500+ (or even 5000+ applications!) for some positions and in some locations.
Now - picture yourself as the HR person receiving this applications. 500 cover letters with resumes attached - each one with 8 pages of information. That makes about 4500 pages to read.
Sorry - if your resume/CV is longer than a SINGLE SIDE OF A4 PAPER you most likely will NOT get an interview.
I don't care how many jobs you've had or how freaking successful you are - you need to condense ALL relevant information down to a single page!
You will (of course!) in your covering letter, say something along the lines of:
Four years ago, I was looking for work, and had professional help to get my CV down to a single side of A4 paper - and since that time, I have got interviews for every single position I have applied for. I even got to play three employers off against each other to land my current position. :)
Hope this helps.
I did some research on this years ago when I noticed a kindergarten right next to a major power substation. I ended up having a guy with a gauss-meter take readings from the place - and they were through the roof in all except 10 square meters of the place! Now - I'm not sure if electromagnetic fields are dangerous or not - and it's the sort of thing which could take 40 years to determine - like smoking! (I'm a smoker!) But it seems elementary to me, that small, growing human brains shouldn't be subjected to 6 hours a day of high levels of radiation! Further research shows that the highest levels of radiation in the home are often put out by cheap-ass clock-radios - and their fields extend 2 meters! So, a vast majority of people are sleeping with their brians inside a large elctromagnetic field. I'm only slightly paranoid, so I chucked out the clock radio, and replaced it with a straight timing device (output = effectively zero) and it turns on a stereo and a coffee maker in the a.m. :)
Someday I might be thankful for that decision - but maybe not too.
Don't think I'd ever buy a house close to power lines or a substation.
Descent 3 (Outrage, 1999) is available for about $9 and is still, to this day, one of the greatest online games of all time.
The community is small, the servers seldom see cheaters, and there's a LOT of support for online Nnewbies. My web site http://planetdescent.com/d3help provides a lot of help and is specifically targetted at online game-play.
You'll need a descent (decent!) joytsick and some time to get used to the 6DOF (6 degrees of freedom) mode of play, but it leaves ground-pounders (Quake, UT et al) for dead.
The online service at www.pxo.net is reliable, and despite the in-game chat/games list feature being useless, there are several windows based proggies for chatting and checking/joining servers.
Best $10 you'll ever spend.
Note: The Descent 3 Demo(s) do not work online - as they require servers running the same version - and none do.
Sweet Baby Jebus!
:)
Just when you think the Convicts can't get any dumber, they go and do this! ACK.
Yet another reason to stay in New Zealand!
BIG FAT WOW! Sweet baby Jebus, if I mapped my electronic trail, you wouldn't even be able to see the map!! I think the post should actually go something like this: "I'm a scared person with too much time on my hands. I don't trust the US Government, so I made this lame map." The only thing worth mentioning is that the US government has entirely too much INTEREST in what her citizens get up to. Frankly, who gives a toss what electronic trails you leave behind? It's a TRAIL for goodness sake, and it tell ANYONE where you are NOW! You think the police couldn't create a trail like this without any electronic information whatsoever? Man, if you are paranoid about E-data on you, then you better move to Bumfuck, Africa, and live in a mud hut. And get a life!
No, the growth rate of Hard Drives in terms of capacity and speed is a normal hyperbolic graph (an exponential on top of an expontential) which is the same curve all technology is following.
The simple fact of the matter is that over time, the "abberations" that make advances seem more or less than hyperbolic will balance out, to produce a normal hyperbolic curve.
Look at the rate of CPU clock cycle increases: this year - it's just incredibly lame - and Chipzilla/AMD won't even add a single gigahertz to the final total from 2002. That's a LONG way behind what Moore's Law predicts.
We conveniently gloss over the massive increases in speed afforded by architecture changes, faster FSBs and faster RAM...
Check http://www.kurzweilai.net for the real oil on the rate of technological progress, and the coming Singularity.
While we can continue to rely upon a over-all Hyperbolic growth rate in speed/price/performance, there will always be hiccups along the way where existing technology provides for a smaller or faster growth rate.
When the paradigm changes (transitioning from moving parts to solid state storage - moving parts suck donkey nuts!) the rate of increase may surge massively, and then calm down to a more modest annual increase.
What we see in HDD performance is merely a blip in the graph, and while it seems significant now, the truth is that in 20 years, the curve will look pretty smooth, even given what appears to be massive variations away from the curve at the moment.