I've read somewhere that the instellar medium may be to scarce for a Bussard ram-jet to work as thought. Apparently the scoop would have to be a few orders of magnitude larger than previous thought.
Though it might be possible using an on-board hydrogen to suplement the incoming H however.
That said a light sail, possibly augmented by high efficiency ion drive and of course a launch laser (lunar based or perhaps at a lagrange point) over a long enough timeframe sounds good.
We could even possibly use a lunar based magnetic catapult to send additional supllies and such after the craft and it could benifit from absorbing the momentum as it 'caught' the care packages.
Once upon a time The Norton Utilities were one of my favorites (this is going back to dos and win3.1x days) not anymore.
Last time (a couple years ago) I tried them out it was a total waste. It loaded several 'drivers' and huge background processes, and there wasn't even a sector/hex editor one could use to examine files in odd formats, .
Mcaffee has gone the same way as well. Thier "anti" virus program was as bad as some viruses, unpossible to turn off without a full uninstall (which means to use it again you needed to re-install and re-register) and caused all sorts of mischief with other programs, especially drm'd software (to malwares fight it out and the 'owner' looses).
The good news is the got rid of clif-racers in oblivion (almost certainly that flying thing, most players found them anoying).
As far as ugly, I'd have to agree, the npc's were definately that. However the really good thing about Morrowind was the modding potential. I downloaded some mods that fixed that right up. Some of the modders out there (look for red's heads astar's replaces) made some really amazingly good looking npc meshes and textures, many with very compareable complexity so they won't slow down the game on older computers.
Once you get used to the game (and grab a few mod's to make the npc's look good) it's a very good rpg for those that prefer not being railroaded down a set storyline (though there is one to follow if and when and how you choose).
Of course with that imported dvd player you are will also want a voltage converter so you can plug it into the wall and a format converter so you can watch a pal movie on an ntsc tv.
Gah, I just googled the one because I Knew Klaatu started with a K.
As far as goofing on Ash, well it's embarrising seeing as how many times I've seen Army of Darkness. I'm just one of those people that can't remember names.
The Originall use of that phrase was in "The Day the Earth Stood Still", as command words to the Robot Gort in case something happened to the alien visitor.
IIRC Sam Rami chose the words as a tribute to that movie.
Or even "Klaatu Verada Nikto". But don't worry, you got closer than Nash did. Oh yeah there mihgt be some deformed old lady at your door soon, something about eating your soul.:)
Yes, but while the mored educated about such matters won't panic, alot of common folk who DON'T know these things WILL.
Terror is the key word in Terrorism. The wholesale killing of thousands or even hundreds works, but just making a few thousand scream and run in terror of anything that even sounds like it might be neuclear still achieves thier goal of terror, and is likely to cause deaths as people pannic and all try to exit the city at 90 in thier cars and suv's in fear of insta-cancer and glowing in the dark.
It's not about scientific accuracy, but about perceptions of the masses.
Another possible contribution is that younger persons are less likely to seek birth controll if they do decide to do it, and thus pass on the genes for early peuberty. Of course this would tend to ballance out against the smaller size of the mother wich I assume would increase the likelyhood of birth problems (partially offset by modern medicine, but there are limits here too).
Though I've also heard reports suggesting that many of the plastics our food comes in may be leaking small amounts of estrogen like compounds that may be a contributing factor.
Hard to tell who's side your arguing here. Or are you saying would should stay put till we no longer have the resources to go get more?
We won't easily learn to effectively/efficiently garner the far vaster resources out there without trying to do exactly that. And frankly I expect the universe to wind down and milliways to shut for lack of bussiness before we get 'our house in order'.
Eigther false dichotomy aplies or we don't have the resources to waste time waiting for earth to get perfect before we learn to gather and use what's out there.
This is of course assuming we don't find ourselves in the dinosaurs position of wondering why it got dark all of sudden and what that loud noise was first.
We are NOT insects, we can as a race, or even as a comunity, pursue more than one usefull goal at a time. In fact recieve the greater benifit in just that way.
Things we learn about nuclear phyisics help against cancer. Things we learn about keeping a man alive in where space and weight are a premium help to feed disaster survivors. The list goes on.
Many(most?) significant projects requiring any new devlopement of science and technology leaves side discorvies and observations that someone in some other field finds a novel use for.
They don't care. YOU are not thier customer. I'm not trying to be mean, just pointing out the correct targets of your boycot notices would be the devlopers and distributors that fall for the drm snake oil scams.
If anything NOT telling the distributors and developers why thier sales are sliping and they'll have to guess at why. Want to guess what reason the drm salesmen will suggest?
Also you might try and get the stock holders aware that these companies managment is spending thousands of dollars on snake oil that actually decreases sales and thier profits.
I have no clue how to do the latter, though if you hold any stock in any of these companies make shure they know that when you write your letters (dead tree letters work best, they can't be filtered out as easilly and show a deeper level of concern and commitment).
If a star was small enough for it's 'bio-zone' to have an outer limit near.15au then you run into other problems. Not the least of which is Roche's limit. Does no good if your biozone is so close tidal forces destroy anything large enough to be usefull.
Also many (most? been to long, all this stuff is a bit fuzzy in the memory) stars that small are red and white dwarfs at the end of thier life cycle, after doing the the whole swell up and swollow the inner few au in nuclear fire bit.
I see a lot of 'don't run windows xp as admin', but has anyone tried to anything usefull with such a setup?
I'm shure it's possible to some extent, but Everytime I re-install I swear I'm not going to use the admin acount or permisions for day to day use and everytime I wind getting tired of every damn idiot app or game or whatever refusing to install or run elsewise.
The problem is so many software vendors (especially the snake oil vendors selling 'copy protection') just assume the machine runs admin and code as if THEY own the machine, not the actual owner.
And XP itself compounds the problems with thier brain damaged design and UI in this area (or at least in my opinion).
". They can only find known virii. Maybe being 'protected' from tens of thousands of viruses comforts you, but I'm worried about the few no one knows about yet, and AV software provides no protection against those. "
Actually Anti-Virus programs have had an ever increasing ability to dectect unknown viruses for over a decade.
I remember an antivirus program from BEFORE win95 came out that did some simple checks for programs behaving like a virus.
Also your definitions are a bit confused. Viruses don't have to be worms or trojans, and not all worms or trojans are viruses.
As far as efficacy goes, yeah that varies a bit and is never perfect, but 95% safe is better than.5%.
OT, but what is a 'rear parcel shelf"? I hope you don't meant the flat space above and behind the rear seats. Think sudden deceleration and head trauma.
Actually X2 and X3 are pretty good games (well X3 needed patching to be playable, and needs a good system both on cpu and gpu). I'm currently addicted to X3.
If you don't know the the X series of games, they're the modern day equivelant to the old Elite games.
The X series is from Egosoft. The caveat here is they use Starforce for copy protection and Starforce doesn't have the best rep. For one thing it works as a series of hidden device drivers that load at boot.
I know, I know not what you meant, but see the above about adiction:)
OK I just re-read a bit of the relavant section of the FAQ (it's at ).
It apears a bit of both sorta.
The FTL traveler is traveling back in time for some frames of references, but not all frames. As in lots of things in relativity it all depends on your frame of reference.
I strongly suggest that faq to anyone looking for a clue on the subject, but a real education in relativity (with lots of attendand math) is probably needed for more than a clue.
I'll re-read them later today and see what they say, I am drawing on old (and thus not so clear) memories of them and they may have been updated and made clearer as well.
But the gist of what I remember is that the violation of causality was the result of traveling backwards in time per-se, but rather a matter of two(or more) timelines not being in the same sequence as each other.
And yeah, if you can violate the light cone any way you choose the time travel becomes much easier.
Anyway I'm gonna go google for those faq's and other info and see if I can get a clearer explanation.
Not exactly. Though exactly goes well past my feeble understanding of the math.
What you might have is a potential violation of cause and effect. Your not travelling backwards in time if you go faster than C(in a vacum), but you can have events happen before thier causes, or witness an event and prevent it.
This appears to happen no matter how you go from point a to point b, just so long as you arrive there before light could in a vacume.
There's a faq out there on relativity and ftl that explains (not shure I've explained it at all or just muddled it to be honest) it better. It used to be posted (and probably still is, been a couple of years) to a couple of the Star-Trek news groups.
They did actually build a device that was called and sold as a "TR-107 TRICORDER Mark 1".
G.R. managed to get it set up so anyone inventing Star-Treck tech could use the names they had on the show or some such such.
Try a google for it or the Canadian company Vital Technologies Corporation.
It's simple, MOST people make the same mistake you did. It's been going on for years.
It may have started when the first movies (IIRC Charles Ogle played the monster in the first (silent) version of the movie) came out.
Most people refer to the original Star Wars movie as "Star Wars" and not "Star Wars: A New Hope", which is the full title.
That would be his parents. Frankenstien WAS the (mad)scientist. His 'creation' was named Adam and is sometimes called "Frankenstiens monster".
Just taking my turn with picking nits. No harmfull/mean intent here.
I don't think that's quite it. Thier goal is to increase the bottom line any way they can get away with.
What these schemes really do is allow them better controll distribution and move things more towards pay-per-use by forcing you to buy more copies if the first one gets scratched or damaged or lost.
The slight effect it has on piracy is just a bonus. They say it's all about piracy because by raising up that spector they sell these schemes to the public who otherwise wouldn't buy something 'anti-backup' or 'sell at different prices to different markets and prevent buying mailorder from cheapland'.
While people do pirate many things, the ones that really do impact thier bottom line are the pro's who churn out thousands of copies complete with lables and such that just might pass for the real thing. The average Joe lending his buddy cdr(w) or dvd -/+r(W) is much less of an impact and may even be free advertising. The pro's generally have gear that's more than capable of doing bit-perfect copies and aren't in least concerned or even slowed by these schemes.
It never was much about 'piracy' and more about forcing the customer to pay as much as possible, repeatedly if they can.
Mycroft
Re:This should be used in other games...
on
Kong Lives!
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Oh you can do that too, you just have to do it on Nightmare mode.
Slashdot Mirror
I've read somewhere that the instellar medium may be to scarce for a Bussard ram-jet to work as thought. Apparently the scoop would have to be a few orders of magnitude larger than previous thought.
Though it might be possible using an on-board hydrogen to suplement the incoming H however.
That said a light sail, possibly augmented by high efficiency ion drive and of course a launch laser (lunar based or perhaps at a lagrange point) over a long enough timeframe sounds good.
We could even possibly use a lunar based magnetic catapult to send additional supllies and such after the craft and it could benifit from absorbing the momentum as it 'caught' the care packages.
Mycroft
Once upon a time The Norton Utilities were one of my favorites (this is going back to dos and win3.1x days) not anymore.
Last time (a couple years ago) I tried them out it was a total waste. It loaded several 'drivers' and huge background processes, and there wasn't even a sector/hex editor one could use to examine files in odd formats, .
Mcaffee has gone the same way as well. Thier "anti" virus program was as bad as some viruses, unpossible to turn off without a full uninstall (which means to use it again you needed to re-install and re-register) and caused all sorts of mischief with other programs, especially drm'd software (to malwares fight it out and the 'owner' looses).
Mycroft
The good news is the got rid of clif-racers in oblivion (almost certainly that flying thing, most players found them anoying).
As far as ugly, I'd have to agree, the npc's were definately that. However the really good thing about Morrowind was the modding potential. I downloaded some mods that fixed that right up. Some of the modders out there (look for red's heads astar's replaces) made some really amazingly good looking npc meshes and textures, many with very compareable complexity so they won't slow down the game on older computers.
Once you get used to the game (and grab a few mod's to make the npc's look good) it's a very good rpg for those that prefer not being railroaded down a set storyline (though there is one to follow if and when and how you choose).
Mycroft
Of course with that imported dvd player you are will also want a voltage converter so you can plug it into the wall and a format converter so you can watch a pal movie on an ntsc tv.
Mycroft
Gah, I just googled the one because I Knew Klaatu started with a K.
As far as goofing on Ash, well it's embarrising seeing as how many times I've seen Army of Darkness. I'm just one of those people that can't remember names.
The Originall use of that phrase was in "The Day the Earth Stood Still", as command words to the Robot Gort in case something happened to the alien visitor.
IIRC Sam Rami chose the words as a tribute to that movie.
Mycroft
I read somewhere that over 80% of the dust in a typical household is shed skin cells, if so this would tend to explain the smell.
Mycroft
Or even "Klaatu Verada Nikto". But don't worry, you got closer than Nash did. :)
Oh yeah there mihgt be some deformed old lady at your door soon, something about eating your soul.
Mycroft
Yes, but while the mored educated about such matters won't panic, alot of common folk who DON'T know these things WILL.
Terror is the key word in Terrorism. The wholesale killing of thousands or even hundreds works, but just making a few thousand scream and run in terror of anything that even sounds like it might be neuclear still achieves thier goal of terror, and is likely to cause deaths as people pannic and all try to exit the city at 90 in thier cars and suv's in fear of insta-cancer and glowing in the dark.
It's not about scientific accuracy, but about perceptions of the masses.
Mycroft.
Another possible contribution is that younger persons are less likely to seek birth controll if they do decide to do it, and thus pass on the genes for early peuberty. Of course this would tend to ballance out against the smaller size of the mother wich I assume would increase the likelyhood of birth problems (partially offset by modern medicine, but there are limits here too).
Though I've also heard reports suggesting that many of the plastics our food comes in may be leaking small amounts of estrogen like compounds that may be a contributing factor.
Mycroft
Hard to tell who's side your arguing here. Or are you saying would should stay put till we no longer have the resources to go get more?
We won't easily learn to effectively/efficiently garner the far vaster resources out there without trying to do exactly that. And frankly I expect the universe to wind down and milliways to shut for lack of bussiness before we get 'our house in order'.
Eigther false dichotomy aplies or we don't have the resources to waste time waiting for earth to get perfect before we learn to gather and use what's out there.
This is of course assuming we don't find ourselves in the dinosaurs position of wondering why it got dark all of sudden and what that loud noise was first.
We are NOT insects, we can as a race, or even as a comunity, pursue more than one usefull goal at a time. In fact recieve the greater benifit in just that way.
Things we learn about nuclear phyisics help against cancer. Things we learn about keeping a man alive in where space and weight are a premium help to feed disaster survivors. The list goes on.
Many(most?) significant projects requiring any new devlopement of science and technology leaves side discorvies and observations that someone in some other field finds a novel use for.
Mycroft
They don't care. YOU are not thier customer. I'm not trying to be mean, just pointing out the correct targets of your boycot notices would be the devlopers and distributors that fall for the drm snake oil scams.
If anything NOT telling the distributors and developers why thier sales are sliping and they'll have to guess at why. Want to guess what reason the drm salesmen will suggest?
Also you might try and get the stock holders aware that these companies managment is spending thousands of dollars on snake oil that actually decreases sales and thier profits.
I have no clue how to do the latter, though if you hold any stock in any of these companies make shure they know that when you write your letters (dead tree letters work best, they can't be filtered out as easilly and show a deeper level of concern and commitment).
Mycroft
If a star was small enough for it's 'bio-zone' to have an outer limit near .15au then you run into other problems. Not the least of which is Roche's limit. Does no good if your biozone is so close tidal forces destroy anything large enough to be usefull.
Also many (most? been to long, all this stuff is a bit fuzzy in the memory) stars that small are red and white dwarfs at the end of thier life cycle, after doing the the whole swell up and swollow the inner few au in nuclear fire bit.
Mycroft
I see a lot of 'don't run windows xp as admin', but has anyone tried to anything usefull with such a setup?
I'm shure it's possible to some extent, but Everytime I re-install I swear I'm not going to use the admin acount or permisions for day to day use and everytime I wind getting tired of every damn idiot app or game or whatever refusing to install or run elsewise.
The problem is so many software vendors (especially the snake oil vendors selling 'copy protection') just assume the machine runs admin and code as if THEY own the machine, not the actual owner.
And XP itself compounds the problems with thier brain damaged design and UI in this area (or at least in my opinion).
Mycroft
". They can only find known virii. Maybe being 'protected' from tens of thousands of viruses comforts you, but I'm worried about the few no one knows about yet, and AV software provides no protection against those. "
.5%.
Actually Anti-Virus programs have had an ever increasing ability to dectect unknown viruses for over a decade.
I remember an antivirus program from BEFORE win95 came out that did some simple checks for programs behaving like a virus.
Also your definitions are a bit confused. Viruses don't have to be worms or trojans, and not all worms or trojans are viruses.
As far as efficacy goes, yeah that varies a bit and is never perfect, but 95% safe is better than
Mycroft
USEFULL?!?! I take it you've not been paying attention to congress lately.
Mycroft
OT, but what is a 'rear parcel shelf"?
I hope you don't meant the flat space above and behind the rear seats.
Think sudden deceleration and head trauma.
Mycroft
Actually X2 and X3 are pretty good games (well X3 needed patching to be playable, and needs a good system both on cpu and gpu). I'm currently addicted to X3. :)
If you don't know the the X series of games, they're the modern day equivelant to the old Elite games.
The X series is from Egosoft. The caveat here is they use Starforce for copy protection and Starforce doesn't have the best rep. For one thing it works as a series of hidden device drivers that load at boot.
I know, I know not what you meant, but see the above about adiction
Mycroft
OK I just re-read a bit of the relavant section of the FAQ (it's at ).
It apears a bit of both sorta.
The FTL traveler is traveling back in time for some frames of references, but not all frames. As in lots of things in relativity it all depends on your frame of reference.
I strongly suggest that faq to anyone looking for a clue on the subject, but a real education in relativity (with lots of attendand math) is probably needed for more than a clue.
Mycroft
I'll re-read them later today and see what they say, I am drawing on old (and thus not so clear) memories of them and they may have been updated and made clearer as well.
But the gist of what I remember is that the violation of causality was the result of traveling backwards in time per-se, but rather a matter of two(or more) timelines not being in the same sequence as each other.
And yeah, if you can violate the light cone any way you choose the time travel becomes much easier.
Anyway I'm gonna go google for those faq's and other info and see if I can get a clearer explanation.
Mycroft
Not exactly. Though exactly goes well past my feeble understanding of the math.
What you might have is a potential violation of cause and effect.
Your not travelling backwards in time if you go faster than C(in a vacum), but you can have events happen before thier causes, or witness an event and prevent it.
This appears to happen no matter how you go from point a to point b, just so long as you arrive there before light could in a vacume.
There's a faq out there on relativity and ftl that explains (not shure I've explained it at all or just muddled it to be honest) it better. It used to be posted (and probably still is, been a couple of years) to a couple of the Star-Trek news groups.
Mycroft
They did actually build a device that was called and sold as a "TR-107 TRICORDER Mark 1".
G.R. managed to get it set up so anyone inventing Star-Treck tech could use the names they had on the show or some such such.
Try a google for it or the Canadian company Vital Technologies Corporation.
Mycroft
It's simple, MOST people make the same mistake you did. It's been going on for years.
It may have started when the first movies (IIRC Charles Ogle played the monster in the first (silent) version of the movie) came out.
Most people refer to the original Star Wars movie as "Star Wars" and not "Star Wars: A New Hope", which is the full title.
Mycroft
"...or that dude who created Frankenstein..."
That would be his parents.
Frankenstien WAS the (mad)scientist. His 'creation' was named Adam and is sometimes called "Frankenstiens monster".
Just taking my turn with picking nits. No harmfull/mean intent here.
Mycroft
I don't think that's quite it. Thier goal is to increase the bottom line any way they can get away with.
What these schemes really do is allow them better controll distribution and move things more towards pay-per-use by forcing you to buy more copies if the first one gets scratched or damaged or lost.
The slight effect it has on piracy is just a bonus.
They say it's all about piracy because by raising up that spector they sell these schemes to the public who otherwise wouldn't buy something 'anti-backup' or 'sell at different prices to different markets and prevent buying mailorder from cheapland'.
While people do pirate many things, the ones that really do impact thier bottom line are the pro's who churn out thousands of copies complete with lables and such that just might pass for the real thing. The average Joe lending his buddy cdr(w) or dvd -/+r(W) is much less of an impact and may even be free advertising. The pro's generally have gear that's more than capable of doing bit-perfect copies and aren't in least concerned or even slowed by these schemes.
It never was much about 'piracy' and more about forcing the customer to pay as much as possible, repeatedly if they can.
Mycroft
Oh you can do that too, you just have to do it on Nightmare mode.
Mycroft