Seeing those stars orbit an invisible point in space is neat... But want I want to see is one of those stars "vanish" when its orbit takes it to a point where the BH is between it and us. Granted, that it dissappeared would not, in and of itself, prove that the black hole is a black hole... it would only mean that the object absorbed all the radiation.
What would prove things is the strange data that would be arive as the light from the star would pass near the event horizon on its way here... we would see some screwy stuff.
They COULD become a superpower... if the average IT worker over there didn't have their head up their backside.
I work for a company that has a support and R&D office over there. The work we get from those offices is consistantly late and pretty much total crap.... Turnover rate is measured by the minute so even if you do get one worth a damn, he's gone in a week.
Companies are starting to pull out of there because it costing far more money to clean their mistakes than any cost those offices save.
Do some more research. What makes fusion/fission warheads more powerfull than fission alone is not the uncontrollable fusion reaction. Fission needs neutrons.... lots of them. Fusion reactions pack a massive neutron flux. The fusionable material in those bombs is there to "turbocharge" the neutron flux, which causes MORE of the fissonable material to react.
The fusion reaction is a catalyst, not the main source of the increased power. It increases the efficiancy of the fission reaction.
Is that this damn thing is too old. As is, the Chixilub crater, at 65MY, is severely degraded, and many of the continents were close to their present locations. At the end of the Permian Era, they were all lumped into one land mass.
Even an impact crater as large as 100 miles would be so worn over that even with sensitive geologic data, it would be hard to detect. Finding evidence of shocked quartz points to some sort of impact in that area... narrowing down the date and size is the tough part.
Could this be the smoking gun? Hard to say. My guess is that numerous phenomenon combined to cause this extinction. Massive vulcanism in what is now Siberia would have causes all sorts of problems ecologically. Then you have theories on methane seeps... which could explain why ocean life suffered the worst fate... And maybe this rock was the coup de gras of the Permian Era.... the final nail on the coffin for an already stressed ecosystem.
Though, these extinction events lead life on Earth to its current path. Poor evolutionary pathes were cut off, and only hearty, adaptable species survived.
250 isn't a hard number to hit. The Winston Cup cars were running close to 230 at Talladega and Daytona before they slapped restrictor plates on them. The Champ Cars were touching 250 at Indy before they instituted pop-off valves on the turbos.
On a large, banked oval, any car with enough horsepower to overcome drag will hit that speed. A modified Corvette pushed past 250, and the McLaren F1 was GEARING LIMITED at around 240 or so.
The reason why the Big Dig was so impressive was that, unlike the Chunnel, they had to build this thing under and through a major city. Every logistical problem the Chunnel had, the Big Dig had... along with having to worry about buildings, subways, power lines, sewer lines... you name it.
The Chunnel was just a big tube dug through some mud off the coast of England. The size and complexity of the Central Artery Project dwarfed that of the Chunnel. That thing isn't even in the same league.
The Vipers didn't use toroidal loops of energy.. they were bullets. As for them glowing... maybe they have partial tracer rounds so you can see where they are going... coated with some self-contained cobustable material.
As for them sticking away from the craft. Packaging and safety. Longer barrels mean better accuracy and the ability for higher muzzel velocities. Plus, its probably easier for maintainence to have the muzzle gas vented away from the ship... When you shoot a gun, do you hold it away from your body, or do you hold the gun between your legs and squeeze the trigger? Plus it looks cooler to have big guns.
The glow you saw coming out of the Vipers was exhaust... perhaps the engines use high energy plasma as a source of thrust. Simple physics, through out mass one end and the thing is thrust in the opposite direction. The gas-like material being vented on the manuvering thrusters was indeed, gas, being used as fuel. Same as the hydrazine thrusters on the space shuttle.
Nukes in space would work... not as well as atmospheric nukes though. You still have a ton of heat being generated, the EMP, plus a wavefront of extremely high energy and high velocity radioactive and nonradioactive matter that made up the warhead and missle. Even if its plasma, it still has mass. Kinetic energy is no joke. I can punch a hole straight through 20 feet of concrete with a marshmallow, provided you let me accelerate the marshmallow to a high enough speed. If you take mass and accelerate it to extremely high speeds, which a nuke would certainly do, that "easile defeatable" plasma would pack one hell of a whallop. You lose any damage caused by the atmospheric shock wave, which is what causes most of the house-flattening of nukes. This is actually explained since the Galactica got nuked yet wasn't turned into bit-sized bits.
I don't see how you got off on this field and frame thing... that is Star Trek kind of techno babble.. and BG actually did a great job of maintaining some resemblence of true physics.
Space isn't a vacuum... there is a small amount of gas, mostly hydrogen, floating around even in the most desolate regions.. Its small, something on the order of one molecule per liter or something like that.
So there is a TEENY TINY bit of pressure in space, that will come into play at high speeds. I would think that under extremely high speeds, even sub-light speeds, the drag created would actually be surprisingly large.
I have VZW and many associates have AT&T, some Sprint, some T-Mobile...
Here in northern Mass... Verizon has the best coverage, by far, and the best service. I have a plan that is perfect, and while it costs more...
you get what you pay for, right?
I have a Moto T720... and recently, the thing wouldn't want to charge anymore and started to act sluggish. I brought the thing in to the VW service desk... guy took a quick look at it and told me that he'll just give me a new phone. No charge (I don't get insurance on it).. Not too long ago, they replaced the screen and keypad on my old StarTac free of charge as well.
Best coverage of any provider, good, reliable service... okay in my book.
Lets be realistic here... how are you going to make a 10 some-odd foot tall 800lbs green muscle man look realistic? Hm? Explain to me? See, other CGI sprites, like the CGI Neo, or the dinosaurs in JP, they have a foundation in reality, painstakingly rendered to perform like the actual object. The human eye is more comfortable with something like that.
Now, I don't know about you, but I don't know any 12 foot tall, 800lbs green dudes to model the Hulk after. Rather than have the cheesy effects of the TV show hulk.. all slow mo BS and wierd camera angles..
I think its a good arguement for the MOND theory. At the distance they are at, it sounds like the probe may be past the boundry where the acceleration acting on it is enough to kick in the MOND's F=ma adjustment.
For those who do not know, the Modification of Newtonian Dynamics is a counter theory to dark matter. It suggests that there is no dark matter, and that there needs to be an adjustment when an object is under extremely weak accelerations. Much like there is an adjustment when objects are at extremely high relative speeds. In layman's terms, at very small accelerations (like less than 1x10^-9 m/s^2), the force acting on an object is greater than that of the product of the mass and the acceleration.
As MOND predicts, this object is slowing down quicker than expected. Rather than dark matter slowing down, the force our SS is acting upon it is slightly higher.
Pretty interesting stuff actually. Amazingly enough, it fits the observed data quite nicely. And it eliminates all the snafus of some mysterious "dark" matter that no one can see or detect.
Using alcohol over water may give you some thermodynamic advantages. But there is one drawback... water doesn't burn. How confident are you that the system would NEVER leak.
All it would take is a small leak somewhere.... Heh.. if its in a well lit room, all you may see is your case starting to brown and melt.
I've seen both Spiderman and AotC. I thought Spiderman was a really cool flick. Decent story, good acting, neat sfx. I will be waiting for the next one to come out. I thought the plot was more sugary sweet than AotC. Cheesy love story with cheesy lines. Cliche lead in for the next vilian. I was done well, but it was as much fluff as AtoC.
EpII: I actually prefered it over Spiderman. I mean, it seems to be the "cool" thing right now to blast the new Star Wars movies. People complain that it lacks the feeling of the first three... yadda yadda... Jesus himself could have come down from the heavens, wrote the script and directed the movie and people would have said it sucked and doesn't compare. No matter how good, or bad, these prequels are, they are being compared to a legend. They are being put up against three movies that had a 20 or so year headstart in building up an aura.
Stop spending do much time listing reasons why you don't like the movie and just sit back and enjoy it... I know I did.
No way. A couple of things here make no sense. First off, I am making more money now working in the software development industry than pretty much anything else I could do. There are few careers I can work at right now that would even come close to what I am doing now. Sure, I can only get so far working as an engineer, but as someone mentioned, is pulling down a salary that is greater than 90% of the country SO BAD? I think not.
And as far as the over 30 thing... hogwash, many of the developers at my company are over 30, most are, in fact. There is no age bias as far as I can see it. A 40 year old dude who is up to speed on the current coding languages will not be considered "past him prime". Hogwash. This may have been true before the bubble burst, but now HR departments are focusing on actual ability, and not just hiring any 22 year old slob who claims he is a java god.
As far as foriegn workers... I haven't seen it here, and I work in a area that has a large influx of programmers from India.
The software industry is here to stay. It pays a hell of a lot more than most any other profession, and few, if any, will pay so much for sitting on your ass and tapping away on a keyboard.
The PS2 will come out on top. The reasons are quite simple and straightforward really.
1)For one thing, Sony had a massive install base. While the initial launch of titles was weak, a PS2 still could play PSOne games... People wouldn't worry about their PS2 gathering dust while they wait for more native titles (like the N64).
2) Name recognition. The Playstation was the king of consoles. Every platform gamer pretty much had one. Most all the developers already had partnerships with Sony for the PSOne, partnerships that made a ton of cash for both sides. Even Nintendo has an advantage over Microsoft. And another thing rarely mentioned... Sony's reputation in the market is not of some predatory evil juggernaut out to kill all competition. I don't remember all the contempt and distrust thrown at the PS2 when it was announced. The main knock against Sony is that their stuff costs too much, but the products are still really good. How much anti-Sony feelings are kicking around? Compare that to the "MS is EVIL!" crowd. This makes more of an impact that most people think.
3) They got to market before Microsoft. Self-explanitory. This actually surprised me. The X-Box is basically a bunch of existing, outsourced PC hardware thrown together. The only thing Microsoft did was design a cheesy case and stank controller (I actually like the DualShock2), and stuff it with a M$ OS. The PS2 seems like it required far more time in R&D. Yet, for some reason, M$ didn't get what is essentially a stripped down PC out to the consumer closer to the PS2. My guess is that they would have released a console with NO GAMES.
Overall, I don't see the X-Box putting a real dent into the PS2's sales. Sure, the X-Box is a superior hardware platform... but they have no games. Sony has been doing the console thing for a long time, they didn't just jump into the industry because they wanted to make a quick buck like MS has.
I seem to remember an article in Discover about how things age. Basically, they suspect that there is a protien locked in the end of a gene, and as the cell replicates and "ages" blocks of this protien drop off. When the protein is completely gone after many generations (say when a person hits middle age) all sorts of regenerative bits start shutting down... skin cells stop producing colligen(sp), bones and cartilage no longer replenish, neurons start dying at an accelerated rate.. stuff like that.
So the newborn clone has already ages 30 or so years genetically speaking, by the time she takes her first breath. A girl could develop breat cancer the instant she hits puberty, some poor dude could get alzhiemer's when he is in his 30's (early onset arthritis too)...Rough stuff actually.
I would think that unless they figure out this process, this TYPE of cloning should only be done on young sources. So someone could take a sample shortly after birth and use it later in life. Well, you could also get into a kind of moral snafu when you have parents losing a child very young to some sort of accident and then having them cloned so they get another crack at it...
But I am not even getting into the ethical side of this maelstrom.
Very shortsighted response. Gene research does more than just cure obscure diseases. Cancer is a genetic disease, and while some cancers are, as you say, self inflicted, many are predisposed. Gene research and therapy may cure or prevent a vast number of cancers.
There are genetic links to heart disease, diabetes, cancers, infections ( bacterial and viral). Most any condition that does not involve some sort of contaminating poison could be elminated with gene research. With the rise of bacteria resistant to antibiotics, gene research could solve that problem.
To call it Frankenstien experiments is quite ignorant. Was Saulk's work frankenstien? Pasture?
Slashdot Mirror
Netflix plans to change their envelopes if necessary... Nothing to see here.. move along.
Why not? God of War was a huge hit... why not try to copy?
Seeing those stars orbit an invisible point in space is neat... But want I want to see is one of those stars "vanish" when its orbit takes it to a point where the BH is between it and us. Granted, that it dissappeared would not, in and of itself, prove that the black hole is a black hole... it would only mean that the object absorbed all the radiation. What would prove things is the strange data that would be arive as the light from the star would pass near the event horizon on its way here... we would see some screwy stuff.
They COULD become a superpower... if the average IT worker over there didn't have their head up their backside. I work for a company that has a support and R&D office over there. The work we get from those offices is consistantly late and pretty much total crap.... Turnover rate is measured by the minute so even if you do get one worth a damn, he's gone in a week. Companies are starting to pull out of there because it costing far more money to clean their mistakes than any cost those offices save.
Do some more research. What makes fusion/fission warheads more powerfull than fission alone is not the uncontrollable fusion reaction. Fission needs neutrons.... lots of them. Fusion reactions pack a massive neutron flux. The fusionable material in those bombs is there to "turbocharge" the neutron flux, which causes MORE of the fissonable material to react.
The fusion reaction is a catalyst, not the main source of the increased power. It increases the efficiancy of the fission reaction.
Is that this damn thing is too old. As is, the Chixilub crater, at 65MY, is severely degraded, and many of the continents were close to their present locations. At the end of the Permian Era, they were all lumped into one land mass.
Even an impact crater as large as 100 miles would be so worn over that even with sensitive geologic data, it would be hard to detect. Finding evidence of shocked quartz points to some sort of impact in that area... narrowing down the date and size is the tough part.
Could this be the smoking gun? Hard to say. My guess is that numerous phenomenon combined to cause this extinction. Massive vulcanism in what is now Siberia would have causes all sorts of problems ecologically. Then you have theories on methane seeps... which could explain why ocean life suffered the worst fate... And maybe this rock was the coup de gras of the Permian Era.... the final nail on the coffin for an already stressed ecosystem.
Though, these extinction events lead life on Earth to its current path. Poor evolutionary pathes were cut off, and only hearty, adaptable species survived.
250 isn't a hard number to hit. The Winston Cup cars were running close to 230 at Talladega and Daytona before they slapped restrictor plates on them. The Champ Cars were touching 250 at Indy before they instituted pop-off valves on the turbos.
On a large, banked oval, any car with enough horsepower to overcome drag will hit that speed. A modified Corvette pushed past 250, and the McLaren F1 was GEARING LIMITED at around 240 or so.
Well, heating up the oxygen tank isn't the problem...
Its heating up that hydrogen tank....
The reason why the Big Dig was so impressive was that, unlike the Chunnel, they had to build this thing under and through a major city. Every logistical problem the Chunnel had, the Big Dig had... along with having to worry about buildings, subways, power lines, sewer lines... you name it. The Chunnel was just a big tube dug through some mud off the coast of England. The size and complexity of the Central Artery Project dwarfed that of the Chunnel. That thing isn't even in the same league.
The Vipers didn't use toroidal loops of energy.. they were bullets. As for them glowing... maybe they have partial tracer rounds so you can see where they are going... coated with some self-contained cobustable material. As for them sticking away from the craft. Packaging and safety. Longer barrels mean better accuracy and the ability for higher muzzel velocities. Plus, its probably easier for maintainence to have the muzzle gas vented away from the ship... When you shoot a gun, do you hold it away from your body, or do you hold the gun between your legs and squeeze the trigger? Plus it looks cooler to have big guns. The glow you saw coming out of the Vipers was exhaust... perhaps the engines use high energy plasma as a source of thrust. Simple physics, through out mass one end and the thing is thrust in the opposite direction. The gas-like material being vented on the manuvering thrusters was indeed, gas, being used as fuel. Same as the hydrazine thrusters on the space shuttle. Nukes in space would work... not as well as atmospheric nukes though. You still have a ton of heat being generated, the EMP, plus a wavefront of extremely high energy and high velocity radioactive and nonradioactive matter that made up the warhead and missle. Even if its plasma, it still has mass. Kinetic energy is no joke. I can punch a hole straight through 20 feet of concrete with a marshmallow, provided you let me accelerate the marshmallow to a high enough speed. If you take mass and accelerate it to extremely high speeds, which a nuke would certainly do, that "easile defeatable" plasma would pack one hell of a whallop. You lose any damage caused by the atmospheric shock wave, which is what causes most of the house-flattening of nukes. This is actually explained since the Galactica got nuked yet wasn't turned into bit-sized bits. I don't see how you got off on this field and frame thing... that is Star Trek kind of techno babble.. and BG actually did a great job of maintaining some resemblence of true physics.
No... SCO shall announce Int. Prop. on any code that contains the string "#include"
Space isn't a vacuum... there is a small amount of gas, mostly hydrogen, floating around even in the most desolate regions.. Its small, something on the order of one molecule per liter or something like that. So there is a TEENY TINY bit of pressure in space, that will come into play at high speeds. I would think that under extremely high speeds, even sub-light speeds, the drag created would actually be surprisingly large.
I have VZW and many associates have AT&T, some Sprint, some T-Mobile... Here in northern Mass... Verizon has the best coverage, by far, and the best service. I have a plan that is perfect, and while it costs more... you get what you pay for, right? I have a Moto T720... and recently, the thing wouldn't want to charge anymore and started to act sluggish. I brought the thing in to the VW service desk... guy took a quick look at it and told me that he'll just give me a new phone. No charge (I don't get insurance on it).. Not too long ago, they replaced the screen and keypad on my old StarTac free of charge as well. Best coverage of any provider, good, reliable service... okay in my book.
Lets be realistic here... how are you going to make a 10 some-odd foot tall 800lbs green muscle man look realistic? Hm? Explain to me? See, other CGI sprites, like the CGI Neo, or the dinosaurs in JP, they have a foundation in reality, painstakingly rendered to perform like the actual object. The human eye is more comfortable with something like that.
Now, I don't know about you, but I don't know any 12 foot tall, 800lbs green dudes to model the Hulk after. Rather than have the cheesy effects of the TV show hulk.. all slow mo BS and wierd camera angles..
I think its a good arguement for the MOND theory. At the distance they are at, it sounds like the probe may be past the boundry where the acceleration acting on it is enough to kick in the MOND's F=ma adjustment. For those who do not know, the Modification of Newtonian Dynamics is a counter theory to dark matter. It suggests that there is no dark matter, and that there needs to be an adjustment when an object is under extremely weak accelerations. Much like there is an adjustment when objects are at extremely high relative speeds. In layman's terms, at very small accelerations (like less than 1x10^-9 m/s^2), the force acting on an object is greater than that of the product of the mass and the acceleration. As MOND predicts, this object is slowing down quicker than expected. Rather than dark matter slowing down, the force our SS is acting upon it is slightly higher. Pretty interesting stuff actually. Amazingly enough, it fits the observed data quite nicely. And it eliminates all the snafus of some mysterious "dark" matter that no one can see or detect.
All it would take is a small leak somewhere.... Heh.. if its in a well lit room, all you may see is your case starting to brown and melt.
EpII: I actually prefered it over Spiderman. I mean, it seems to be the "cool" thing right now to blast the new Star Wars movies. People complain that it lacks the feeling of the first three... yadda yadda... Jesus himself could have come down from the heavens, wrote the script and directed the movie and people would have said it sucked and doesn't compare. No matter how good, or bad, these prequels are, they are being compared to a legend. They are being put up against three movies that had a 20 or so year headstart in building up an aura.
Stop spending do much time listing reasons why you don't like the movie and just sit back and enjoy it... I know I did.
No way. A couple of things here make no sense. First off, I am making more money now working in the software development industry than pretty much anything else I could do. There are few careers I can work at right now that would even come close to what I am doing now. Sure, I can only get so far working as an engineer, but as someone mentioned, is pulling down a salary that is greater than 90% of the country SO BAD? I think not. And as far as the over 30 thing... hogwash, many of the developers at my company are over 30, most are, in fact. There is no age bias as far as I can see it. A 40 year old dude who is up to speed on the current coding languages will not be considered "past him prime". Hogwash. This may have been true before the bubble burst, but now HR departments are focusing on actual ability, and not just hiring any 22 year old slob who claims he is a java god. As far as foriegn workers... I haven't seen it here, and I work in a area that has a large influx of programmers from India. The software industry is here to stay. It pays a hell of a lot more than most any other profession, and few, if any, will pay so much for sitting on your ass and tapping away on a keyboard.
The PS2 will come out on top. The reasons are quite simple and straightforward really. 1)For one thing, Sony had a massive install base. While the initial launch of titles was weak, a PS2 still could play PSOne games... People wouldn't worry about their PS2 gathering dust while they wait for more native titles (like the N64). 2) Name recognition. The Playstation was the king of consoles. Every platform gamer pretty much had one. Most all the developers already had partnerships with Sony for the PSOne, partnerships that made a ton of cash for both sides. Even Nintendo has an advantage over Microsoft. And another thing rarely mentioned... Sony's reputation in the market is not of some predatory evil juggernaut out to kill all competition. I don't remember all the contempt and distrust thrown at the PS2 when it was announced. The main knock against Sony is that their stuff costs too much, but the products are still really good. How much anti-Sony feelings are kicking around? Compare that to the "MS is EVIL!" crowd. This makes more of an impact that most people think. 3) They got to market before Microsoft. Self-explanitory. This actually surprised me. The X-Box is basically a bunch of existing, outsourced PC hardware thrown together. The only thing Microsoft did was design a cheesy case and stank controller (I actually like the DualShock2), and stuff it with a M$ OS. The PS2 seems like it required far more time in R&D. Yet, for some reason, M$ didn't get what is essentially a stripped down PC out to the consumer closer to the PS2. My guess is that they would have released a console with NO GAMES. Overall, I don't see the X-Box putting a real dent into the PS2's sales. Sure, the X-Box is a superior hardware platform... but they have no games. Sony has been doing the console thing for a long time, they didn't just jump into the industry because they wanted to make a quick buck like MS has.
I seem to remember an article in Discover about how things age. Basically, they suspect that there is a protien locked in the end of a gene, and as the cell replicates and "ages" blocks of this protien drop off. When the protein is completely gone after many generations (say when a person hits middle age) all sorts of regenerative bits start shutting down... skin cells stop producing colligen(sp), bones and cartilage no longer replenish, neurons start dying at an accelerated rate.. stuff like that. So the newborn clone has already ages 30 or so years genetically speaking, by the time she takes her first breath. A girl could develop breat cancer the instant she hits puberty, some poor dude could get alzhiemer's when he is in his 30's (early onset arthritis too) ...Rough stuff actually.
I would think that unless they figure out this process, this TYPE of cloning should only be done on young sources. So someone could take a sample shortly after birth and use it later in life. Well, you could also get into a kind of moral snafu when you have parents losing a child very young to some sort of accident and then having them cloned so they get another crack at it...
But I am not even getting into the ethical side of this maelstrom.
Very shortsighted response. Gene research does more than just cure obscure diseases. Cancer is a genetic disease, and while some cancers are, as you say, self inflicted, many are predisposed. Gene research and therapy may cure or prevent a vast number of cancers.
There are genetic links to heart disease, diabetes, cancers, infections ( bacterial and viral). Most any condition that does not involve some sort of contaminating poison could be elminated with gene research. With the rise of bacteria resistant to antibiotics, gene research could solve that problem.
To call it Frankenstien experiments is quite ignorant. Was Saulk's work frankenstien? Pasture?
Corporate power-play or not, it should go on.