Why not just middle-click the link? Alternatively, you can use an extension like RadialContext to completely replace the right click menu with something easy to navigate and useful.
Because i've got a laptop with a two button pad:) I'll use the ctrl-click thing sometimes, but other times i don't want to bother with the keyboard. The RadialContext thing sounds weird, but i'll take a look at it.
Maybe that means you're keeping too many tabs open? Tabs are a useful organization feature, but they do not replace multiple windows..
Sure they do! I used to have six or eight IE windows open all the time, now i have 20 or 30 tabs open all the time:) Besides, it seems a bit silly to say "Everyone should use program X because it has feature Y!... Oh no! Stop using feature Y so much!"
LMAO, this is what that red 'X' on the side you 'accidentally' hit is for..failing that, you can edit the XUL file
I don't want a "feature" that is sometimes a nuiscance =P The XUL thing sounds like what i want, but what XUL file? Searching the Program Files directory shows several.XULs in Netscape\res\samples, but nothing in the Mozilla Firefox folder.
Go to about:config, the setting is browser.download.manager.showAlertOnComplete.. set it to false.
I figured a few of the answers might be in there. Wheee! 10 million undocumented options! Thanks for the pointer:)
I thought there was a setting for this, but I cannot seem to find it. Personally I love the single-window download approach.
I don't download things too often, but when i do it's frequently several things at once. I'm on a modem so even just downloading mp3s and such takes awhile. I like to be able to easily see how many files are downloading and how far each one has left to go while doing other stuff (so that when one of the files is about to finish i can go back to the tab with the files and start another one downloading,) and the task bar works well for that.
As far as I can tell, no. It would be nice if they'd stick around though.. I like icons.
That is both sad and silly. Why bother showing the icons in the bookmark folder if they don't save them?
Okay, i'm cheating/offtopic a little because i'm not switching from IE, i'm switching from Netscape. However the following things are still really annoying. For most of these i've tried to do a simple browse through the help index, glanced through the options, and done a quick google search with no positive results. (And no, i haven't installed any extras yet, if there are extensions that do some or all of these things i'd love to hear about it.)
Tab groups:
Netscape showed a tabgroup as a single item in the bookmarks that you clicked on to open the group of tabs. Firefox shows it as a folder, and you have to open the folder and select "open as tabs" at the bottom, which is annoying. Is there any way to get tab groups to behave more like they did in Netscape?
When you select "open as tabs" for a folder it closes all other open tabs instead of adding the new tabs onto the end.
Tabs:
When you right click on a link it lists "open in new window" before "open in new tab" how do i switch the order of those two?
How do i get rid of the "x" box on the right side of the tabs that closses the current tab? It's annoying and i keep pressing it by mistake.
How do i get rid of the "close other tabs" option when i right click on a tab? I sometimes hit it by mistake when trying to select "close tabs." (Okay, those last two were issues in Netscape as well, but i'd still like to know how to fix them.)
Downloads:
The message "Download Complete" that slides up from the bottom of the screen is _really_ annoying, how do i turn it off? _Nothing_ should be moving around the desktop on it's own!
The whole grouped together downloads thing is annoying, how do i get it to show one download box with percentage in the task bar for each file i am downlading?
Icons:
Sometimes there's an error and a page without an icon gets associated with the icon of another page. How do i clear out the icon from a bookmark?
Is it supposed to save the icons permenatly? All the icons in the bookmarks list are blank again every time i open Firefox. At first i thought this was because Windows almost always crashes before i close Firefox, but i tried loading a few pages and then closing and reopening Firefox and the problem still occured.
Are you too much of an imbecile to figure out what 4JKB4IA stands for?
No, are you too much of an imbecile to read english, stupid?
I know what it stands for, but seeing as how you're an AC that doesn't really mean anything. There's nothing stopping anyone from posting stuff they don't believe in for any number of reasons.
So again, as i said earlier, you're either a Republican trying to spread FUD by creating division between the Democrats, or you actually are a Democrat who honestly thinks that picking fights with other Democrats is the best way to get the vote out, which i think most people would agree is pretty stupid. Or you're just a Troll who doesn't care.
I'm not changing my mind one way or the other about the issues because of a lame ass ACs attempt to do whatever it was you were trying to do, but you're certainly lucky or unlucky (depending on your actual goals) in that regard because you probably could rile some people up enough in that matter to get them to vote against Kerry.
If you're never going to get to a fraction of c under Newtonian physics then you sure aren't going anywhere under Relativity either and the whole argumment is moot.
However there are theoretical drives that could accelerate at 1g for significant periods of time. The Bussard Ramscoop is the most obvious of these, since if we ever made one it could accelerate for an effectively infinite amount of time at 1g or even faster, however there are other ways we could probably do it.
But regardless, either you can accelerate at 1g for long periods of time, in which case Newtonian physics is a lot better for most kinds of star travel, or you can't, in which case the only way to travel such vast distances is to cheat in some manner. However Newtonian physics would also make it a lot easier to cheat, because there's nothing stopping you from skipping ftom point A to point B at faster than the speed of light, however under Realtivity that would cause all kinds of paradoxes.
So no matter how you look at it, Relativity is a real pain for star travel.
Oh look, it's either a dishonest and immoral Republican spreading FUD, or an incredibly stupid Democrat. How's it going there?
So which is it? Cause you know, if you actually _are_ a Democrat, there's nothing like going around trying to insult the minor constituencies of your own party when your candidate is barely hanging on to a statistical tie. I'm too rational to take rash actions based off of an ACs comments, but you never know when you might tip someone else over the edge and convince them to go vote for Nader or some Libertarian instead of Kerry.
So, how many liberals in Florida did you make fun of in 2000?
On the other hand, if you're a Republican you're kind of blowing a hole in that whole "moral majority" thing.
So since Bin Laden is our Enemey, and Sadam was Bin Laden's Enemy, then Sadam was our friend? Seems like a poor way to treat a friend. Or does that mean that Sadam was our enemy and Bin Laden is our friend?
Believe it or not it _is_ possible to have three people or three groups of people who all hate each other.
Another example, i hate Bush, and i have a pretty poor opinion of Micheal Moore too. Does that make Micheal Moore and Bush friends?
Are you incredibly ignorant or just a troll? (And is there a differnece?)
Disclaimers like that are pretty standard in the news industry when reporting on related companies. They can't really refuse to talk about anything relating to themselves, but doing so leaves them open to charges of biased reporting. The best they can do is admit up front that there is a relation so at least any potential bias is in the open rather than subversive.
Given how many trolls complain about Slashdot's affiliation with OSTG you'd think that most people would appreciate this.
No, Relativity is much more of a problem for three reasons. One: under Relativity your mass incrases as you approach c, making it harder and harder to accelerate. There are theoretical designs that would let spaceships accelerate at 1g for long periods of time and they could go a lot faster if not for the increasing mass problem. Two: Even ignoring the problem with accelerating an ever increasing amount of mass, Relativity puts a hard cap of c on everything in the universe. So unless we find a way in which Relativity doesn't apply we can't cheat by hyperspace or wormsholes or anything like that. Three: Yes, Relativity does have the one good return in that it dictates that travel between starts will take decades or centuries, the crew will experience only a fraction of that time. However that's only a benefit because of the limits Relativity imposed in the first place, and in places an extreme psychological barrier on interstellar space travel that doesn't exit under Newtonian physics.
With Newtonian physics if you accelerated at just 1g for 5 years, your final velocity would be a little over 5 times the speed of light and you would have traveled about 13 light years. So a ten year trip would cover over 26 light years. That's still a long time but even with Relativity intersteller travel would probably take years or decades for the travellers, but with centuries or millenia passing on the "outside." With Newtonian physics it might take you decade or two for a round trip, but at least you can still expect some of your friends and family, probably your civilization, and most likely the human race to still be there when you get back.
Well, we seem to have come through the Second Impact realtively unscathed:)
However this report raises a lot of questions that it doesn't answer.
First of all, they seem to be talking about a single strike, but they first talk about "the crater" and then later "the holes" and "the craters." Are we talking about one crater or many? Did the person who wrote the article typo, or are the scientists being that unspecific?
Second of all, wasn't the Antarctic continent still near the south pole 780k years ago? That seems to mean that either the meteor hit at a very extreme angle, or it was _far_ out of the elliptic. In either case, it would be a very rare occurance.
On the other hand, magnetic reversals are _not_ a very rare occurance, they happen about once every 700,000 years. Why is he assuming that the very rare occurance caused the frequent and mostly regular occurance? It seems much more likely that it was just a coincidence. "There is no other explanation as to why this took place" yeah, and there is no other explanation for the other several _hundred_ nearly identical events either, because we haven't figured out why they happen yet! So is he proposing that Antarctica gets hit by a giant meteor about every 700k years like clockwork?
Finally exactly how "huge" are these craters, and what were the climatic conditions 780k years ago? If the climate was similar and Antarctica was near the south pole and covered with ice, wouldn't a "huge" strike have melted/dispersed quite a lot of the ice and caused ocean levels to rise?
More interesting is how everyone wants to prove that Einstein's theory is wrong. Seems to me like a bit of brain-envy.
Relativity is a real damper on that whole interstellar exploration/colonization thing. Yeah, finding a hole in relativity would probably make you famous, but you _might_ also be able to fit a lot of interesting things through that hole.
Besides, researchers really only have two choices. They can try to expand on already "proven" theories, or they can try to show that those theories are wrong, at least in some aspect.
So what you're saying is that the question is really, in Soviet Russia, is Competivie Gaming on TV ready for America? Except not in Soviet Russia, in America, ahh, screw it.
First off, don't show it live! At least not the first year or so
Like you said, this sounds great for a trial run at how to do the coverage right. However in order for it to make the transition to live tv you'd also need to add some sort of ghost functinality to any game being used so you could have realtime "camera" operators inside the game. Preferably with a couple sets of hotkeys, one set to jump to each player in the game, and another set to act as bookmarks for previous locations. That way with a little bit of training two or three people could cover a lot of different positions.
This certainly wouldn't be the first time functionality was added to a game for TV purposes. I don't remember how they handle it in StarCraft, but Red Alert 2 had a ghost mode added just for Korean TV broadcasts.
The main difference is that Sony are more onwards with their consoles, Nintendo are just going backwards and claiming to be focusing on gameplay. Its easy to see who will win this "battle"
I'd like to see you justify either of those claims, that Sony is "more onwards" ("looking forward" perhaps?) or that Nintendo is going backwards.
Sony is certainly going forwards, they've got improved graphics, wireless, new media, and the ability to play music and movies in some format. However Nintendo is also going forwards, they've got improved graphics, wireless, new media, two screens, and touchscreen capability.
They're clearly pointed in related but slightly tangential directions, Sony towards the all-in-one entertainment device, and Nintendo towards a more dedicated gaming machine. It would be hard to argue that either one is more "onward" than the other, and certainly Nintendo is not moving backwards.
One could attempt to argue on the basis of graphics that Sony is more "onward." However even ignoring the "it's the gameplay" argument, better graphics do not necessarily indicate a better console. Not only can other factors be a limitation (the N64 had better graphics capabilites than the PSX, but was limited by the media format) but if he technology needed for the better graphics pushes either the price or the battery life outside the tollerance range of the consumers it will not be considered a step forward in the long run (see GameGear and NeoGeo.)
Maybe _you_ don't think their games rank at the top, but i can show you any number of other sources that think that Nintendo has always had a lot of the very best games out there. The general complaint has never been that they don't have some of the very best games out there, it's that they don't have enough games in general, especially in the "pretty good" to "almost but not quite the very best" range.
Not that owning multiple consoles is a bad thing (i go for the PS2 and GameCube myself) but one could make a reasonable argument for any of the big three that they have the very best games as long as you were looking at the right criteria.
With the success of the Mozilla project, I fail to see why anyone would bother running Netscape anymore....
I've been using Netscape, and with the discussion about Netscape vs. Mozilla/Firefox going on i decided that it was time to get out of the rut and try Firefox, just to give it a fair chance.
After about eight attempts to download Firefox i finally managed to get a working version (some earlier attempts failed when the modem disconected, but others seemed to succeed but got a "data error" when i tried to run the intaller.)
The first thing i noticed almost immediatly when running it is that Firefox has abysmal handling of tabgroups. The only way it seems to recognize tabgroups is as a folder of bookmarks. Therefore when it converted my Netscape bookmarks it turned all my tabgroups into folders that contain a set of bookmarks AND a subfolder with the same name that contains all the bookmarks again!
Instead of just selecting a tabgroup in the bookmark folder, i now have to go into the folder it created and select "open in tabs" from the bottom of the list. I might consider that a minor annoyance except that when i select "open in tabs" it gets rid of all the previous pages i had open!
This defeats most of the purpose in having tab groups!
If there's anyway to fix this "feature" it isn't covered in the help file, which pretty much just lists "tabbed browsing," saying you can open multiple tabs in the same window, and has nothing about tab groups.
I'm trying to give Firefox a fair chance, but i've gotten used to the ability to open as many bookmarks as is needed for a specific task with just one click and i'm feeling incredibly frustrated and limited right now.
You know, usually when i hear non-Americans making negative comments about American colleges and universities, it's them being in shock about how _little_ our taxes go into such institutions and how much the students have to pay for themselves.
I'm not sure which particular country you're from, but unfortunatly (from your perspective) the schools in your country probably have psychology departments of their own, and are probably doing experiments that you would consider to be just as useless, and you're probably paying more in taxes to support them than the people in America are.
Clearly you and your friends are not the definitive group of gamers. A lot of my friends at the game company i was working at at the time it came out thought it was great, as did i. I don't know which of us is closer to the normal spectrum of gamers, but not all gamers thought it was "stupid and pointless."
It's unprecedented in terms of the rate of change, that's the whole point of the Singularity. No single person lived through the agricultural revolution. Depending on how you want to count it probably lasted either centuries or millenia. And then you've got the huge gap between the agricultural and industrial revolutions. If you take the short end of the scale, an individual could have lived through the industrial revolution, but it would have taken most of their lives.
A century or so after the industrial revolution wound up (again, all depending on how you choose to count) we get to the computer revolution. The majority of it seems to be spread over a couple decades, and many of us may very well live to see at least the start of the next revolution. If the proponents of Singularity theory are correct we'll probably live to see the end of it as well, because it will last a few years or months.
So yes, the idea that we will have two or more revolutions within the time span of a single human lifespan is unprecedented. The scale of the changes may very well be different as well. The Singulairty is supposed to be a bigger change than everything prior put together. However the computer revolution doesn't seem to have caused as great a change in behavior to me as the revolutions before it and the ones theorized after it. Admitedly that may be because i grew up during a big part of it so am biased, because we're not finished with it yet and there are greater things yet to come, or it's just a weak-ass revolution that's not worth of the name:)
You seem to be forgetting about that whole scaling thing. You could probably put a small gassoline engine inside a laptop that would power it for a month, but the same amount of fuel would still only last a car about five minutes (if you were lucky.)
Small laptop, small power requirement, small fuel source. Big car, bif power requirement, big fuel source. Comparing the fuel source of one to the power requirements of the other is ludicrous.
If you're going to make a joke about it, you need to be over the top. You may or may not have failed to get it, but after writing a post that sounds exactly like you were taken in most people are going to think exactly that.
If you want to prevent confusion, the proper response is something along these lines:
"This "paper" is clearly unprofesional:
Every good writer knows that small numbers should be written out unless they are actually being used in a numeric formula. I can not believe that the author forgot such an important rule while writing a serious paper. Clearly all references to 0wned should read Zerowned."
Yeah, it's not great, but you get the point i hope.
On the other hand, a mild version of Focus might not be so bad. Especially if it were people other than me who it was being done to. (Starting to feel like Pham Nuwen...)
I agree, and in fact the only thing i didn't like about "A Deepness in the Sky" was that Vinge almost exclusively treated Focusing as inherently evil. I seem to remeber that at the end there was some decision (or at least a large group that supported the idea of) let's destroy all Focus technology, because no good can come of this.
It is possible that this was just an opinion of the characters rather than the author, but the noted lack of disent and discusion tends to make me thing that Vinge had similar thoughts. From a science fiction author this view is both suprising and depressing. It's like decided that some new technology, lasers, gunpowder, nuclear reactions, etc, should be abandoned because the easiest way to use it is to hurt people. This ignores both the fact that "undoing" a technological breakthrough is difficult or impossible in any kind of modern era, and that just about any technology can be used for "evil" purposes.
There were only two problems with Focusing as presented in the novel, it was being used on people against their will, and the effects were almost permenant.
The first problem has an easy solution, don't allow anyone to force someone else to become Focused. The actual implementation of this is more difficult, but no more so than trying to eliminate the technology completly. The second problem is most likely just a matter of further research into the subject. In the novel they wanted to stop all research as soon as they found a way to reverse the initial effects. What they should have been doing was continuing research to make the reversal easier and more effective, or finding a way to make the initial Focusing less damaging and short term.
If a pill was developed that would let you become Focused for eight hours at a time with no bad after-effects, i would argue against companies being able to force employees to take the pill, but i would be happy to take it myself. People already modify their brain chemistry in numerous ways for much more trvial reasons (caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, and every other recreational drug in existance.) Wouldn't it be great to be able to make yourself artificially enthusiastic about your job? Even with jobs i like there are days where i wish i could be doing something else instead or have trouble focusing on work.
I think that if the Z button were UNDER the R button, it would work perfectly
Even that might cause problems. The PS2 used the same sollution but has problems of their own.
Maybe i'm just incompetent, but _i_ have difficulty using the R2 and L2 buttons on the PS2 controller with my middle finger. They work fine with index fingers, but for games where i need to press both the 1 and 2 buttons on the same side at once, or switch back and forth quickly between them, i'm totally screwed.
Trying to hold the controller with index fingers on the 1 buttons and middle fingers on the 2 buttons just feels unnatural and starts to hurt after a little bit.
I can't figure out why no console maker has designed a controller for what seems like a _natural_ hand position, with the "shoulder" buttons on the _back_ of the controller, kind of like a trigger. I could easily handle four shoulder buttons that way, i could probably even handle eight, though i have no idea what you'd use them all for.
There will always appear to be too much at stake. That's the trap. Do you think Kerry will undo the Patriot Act? Do you think he will pull us out of Iraq?
I think Kerry is more likely to undo the Patriot Act than Bush. He's also more likely to pull us out of Iraq earlier than Bush, although i'm not sure if that's a good idea. We made a mess over there, and we bear the responsibility of cleaning it up, even though i have no real idea of how to go about it. It might be that anything active we try will just make the situation worse, and the best we can do is pull out and let things reach equilibrium on it's own, but that would be a rather sad state of affairs.
But that aside, the past is the past, and as much as we might like to change it we can't. However we can learn from it. What's more important than how much of Bush's crap Kerry would undo is how Kerry would act differently from Bush in the future. I believe Kerry is _much_ less likely to support further additions to the Patriot Act, i believe Kerry is _much_ less likely to invade Iran or some other middle-eastern country on specious grounds.
I'm not going to vote for Kerry because i think he'll fix the things in the past, i'm going to vote for him because i think he'll do more good, or at the very least less damage, in the future.
I'm not trying to trash kerry either. If I had to vote for one or the other, it would be Kerry over Bush. But I don't have to, so I'm not going to.
Presuming you're an american, i hope that means that you're planning on voting for a third party. I tend to disagree with people who vote for third parties because they think the two main parties are both the same, but at least you'd be doing _something_ productive.
Not voting because you think it won't make a difference is just a self-fullfilling prophecy, and not voting because you "object to the system" doesn't actually send the message you want, unless the message is to think that you're lazy or don't care about your future.
The only way to change the system is to vote for a new system or to try and overthrow the government. The voting way is a lot more likely to get you results, and a lot less likely to end with you in jail or dead:)
I've got a Sony Vaio laptop with an AMD Athlon. It works fine for most games, although it freezes frequently and crashes once in awhile too, but i have no idea if that's Sony's fault, AMD's fault, or Microsoft's fault.
However, i've been trying to get Master of Magic and Master of Orion running on here for awhile. Both the Windows XP emulation mode and VDMSound report that there isn't enough expanded memory to run the program, no matter how much virtual expanded memory i set up in the preferences for either program. DosBox works, but is painfully slow for both programs. VDMSound is supposed to be faster than DosBox, but i couldn't get the memory error to go away.
After poking around on a lot of forums someone finally mentioned that some (all?) AMD motherboards have problems allocating EMS and there was probably no way to get VDMSound or the native emulation working.
Disclaimer: I am not a hardware person, and i don't know if the information is accurate or which chipsets/motherboards have the problem, but it certainly matches the difficulies i've been having. If you plan on running any DOS games in emulation, you should probably look into the issue more. (It's kind of a moot point for me since i can't aford a new computer until i find a job.)
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Thank you for the ones you helped with :)
Why not just middle-click the link? Alternatively, you can use an extension like RadialContext to completely replace the right click menu with something easy to navigate and useful.
Because i've got a laptop with a two button pad :) I'll use the ctrl-click thing sometimes, but other times i don't want to bother with the keyboard. The RadialContext thing sounds weird, but i'll take a look at it.
Maybe that means you're keeping too many tabs open? Tabs are a useful organization feature, but they do not replace multiple windows..
Sure they do! I used to have six or eight IE windows open all the time, now i have 20 or 30 tabs open all the time :) Besides, it seems a bit silly to say "Everyone should use program X because it has feature Y! ... Oh no! Stop using feature Y so much!"
LMAO, this is what that red 'X' on the side you 'accidentally' hit is for..failing that, you can edit the XUL file
I don't want a "feature" that is sometimes a nuiscance =P The XUL thing sounds like what i want, but what XUL file? Searching the Program Files directory shows several .XULs in Netscape\res\samples, but nothing in the Mozilla Firefox folder.
Go to about:config, the setting is browser.download.manager.showAlertOnComplete.. set it to false.
I figured a few of the answers might be in there. Wheee! 10 million undocumented options! Thanks for the pointer :)
I thought there was a setting for this, but I cannot seem to find it. Personally I love the single-window download approach.
I don't download things too often, but when i do it's frequently several things at once. I'm on a modem so even just downloading mp3s and such takes awhile. I like to be able to easily see how many files are downloading and how far each one has left to go while doing other stuff (so that when one of the files is about to finish i can go back to the tab with the files and start another one downloading,) and the task bar works well for that.
As far as I can tell, no. It would be nice if they'd stick around though.. I like icons.
That is both sad and silly. Why bother showing the icons in the bookmark folder if they don't save them?
Tab groups:
Netscape showed a tabgroup as a single item in the bookmarks that you clicked on to open the group of tabs. Firefox shows it as a folder, and you have to open the folder and select "open as tabs" at the bottom, which is annoying. Is there any way to get tab groups to behave more like they did in Netscape?
When you select "open as tabs" for a folder it closes all other open tabs instead of adding the new tabs onto the end.
Tabs:
When you right click on a link it lists "open in new window" before "open in new tab" how do i switch the order of those two?
How do i get rid of the "x" box on the right side of the tabs that closses the current tab? It's annoying and i keep pressing it by mistake.
How do i get rid of the "close other tabs" option when i right click on a tab? I sometimes hit it by mistake when trying to select "close tabs." (Okay, those last two were issues in Netscape as well, but i'd still like to know how to fix them.)
Downloads:
The message "Download Complete" that slides up from the bottom of the screen is _really_ annoying, how do i turn it off? _Nothing_ should be moving around the desktop on it's own!
The whole grouped together downloads thing is annoying, how do i get it to show one download box with percentage in the task bar for each file i am downlading?
Icons:
Sometimes there's an error and a page without an icon gets associated with the icon of another page. How do i clear out the icon from a bookmark?
Is it supposed to save the icons permenatly? All the icons in the bookmarks list are blank again every time i open Firefox. At first i thought this was because Windows almost always crashes before i close Firefox, but i tried loading a few pages and then closing and reopening Firefox and the problem still occured.
No, are you too much of an imbecile to read english, stupid?
I know what it stands for, but seeing as how you're an AC that doesn't really mean anything. There's nothing stopping anyone from posting stuff they don't believe in for any number of reasons.
So again, as i said earlier, you're either a Republican trying to spread FUD by creating division between the Democrats, or you actually are a Democrat who honestly thinks that picking fights with other Democrats is the best way to get the vote out, which i think most people would agree is pretty stupid. Or you're just a Troll who doesn't care.
I'm not changing my mind one way or the other about the issues because of a lame ass ACs attempt to do whatever it was you were trying to do, but you're certainly lucky or unlucky (depending on your actual goals) in that regard because you probably could rile some people up enough in that matter to get them to vote against Kerry.
However there are theoretical drives that could accelerate at 1g for significant periods of time. The Bussard Ramscoop is the most obvious of these, since if we ever made one it could accelerate for an effectively infinite amount of time at 1g or even faster, however there are other ways we could probably do it.
But regardless, either you can accelerate at 1g for long periods of time, in which case Newtonian physics is a lot better for most kinds of star travel, or you can't, in which case the only way to travel such vast distances is to cheat in some manner. However Newtonian physics would also make it a lot easier to cheat, because there's nothing stopping you from skipping ftom point A to point B at faster than the speed of light, however under Realtivity that would cause all kinds of paradoxes.
So no matter how you look at it, Relativity is a real pain for star travel.
So which is it? Cause you know, if you actually _are_ a Democrat, there's nothing like going around trying to insult the minor constituencies of your own party when your candidate is barely hanging on to a statistical tie. I'm too rational to take rash actions based off of an ACs comments, but you never know when you might tip someone else over the edge and convince them to go vote for Nader or some Libertarian instead of Kerry.
So, how many liberals in Florida did you make fun of in 2000?
On the other hand, if you're a Republican you're kind of blowing a hole in that whole "moral majority" thing.
So again, are you slime, or an idiot?
So since Bin Laden is our Enemey, and Sadam was Bin Laden's Enemy, then Sadam was our friend? Seems like a poor way to treat a friend. Or does that mean that Sadam was our enemy and Bin Laden is our friend?
Believe it or not it _is_ possible to have three people or three groups of people who all hate each other.
Another example, i hate Bush, and i have a pretty poor opinion of Micheal Moore too. Does that make Micheal Moore and Bush friends?
Disclaimers like that are pretty standard in the news industry when reporting on related companies. They can't really refuse to talk about anything relating to themselves, but doing so leaves them open to charges of biased reporting. The best they can do is admit up front that there is a relation so at least any potential bias is in the open rather than subversive.
Given how many trolls complain about Slashdot's affiliation with OSTG you'd think that most people would appreciate this.
With Newtonian physics if you accelerated at just 1g for 5 years, your final velocity would be a little over 5 times the speed of light and you would have traveled about 13 light years. So a ten year trip would cover over 26 light years. That's still a long time but even with Relativity intersteller travel would probably take years or decades for the travellers, but with centuries or millenia passing on the "outside." With Newtonian physics it might take you decade or two for a round trip, but at least you can still expect some of your friends and family, probably your civilization, and most likely the human race to still be there when you get back.
However this report raises a lot of questions that it doesn't answer.
First of all, they seem to be talking about a single strike, but they first talk about "the crater" and then later "the holes" and "the craters." Are we talking about one crater or many? Did the person who wrote the article typo, or are the scientists being that unspecific?
Second of all, wasn't the Antarctic continent still near the south pole 780k years ago? That seems to mean that either the meteor hit at a very extreme angle, or it was _far_ out of the elliptic. In either case, it would be a very rare occurance.
On the other hand, magnetic reversals are _not_ a very rare occurance, they happen about once every 700,000 years. Why is he assuming that the very rare occurance caused the frequent and mostly regular occurance? It seems much more likely that it was just a coincidence. "There is no other explanation as to why this took place" yeah, and there is no other explanation for the other several _hundred_ nearly identical events either, because we haven't figured out why they happen yet! So is he proposing that Antarctica gets hit by a giant meteor about every 700k years like clockwork?
Finally exactly how "huge" are these craters, and what were the climatic conditions 780k years ago? If the climate was similar and Antarctica was near the south pole and covered with ice, wouldn't a "huge" strike have melted/dispersed quite a lot of the ice and caused ocean levels to rise?
Relativity is a real damper on that whole interstellar exploration/colonization thing. Yeah, finding a hole in relativity would probably make you famous, but you _might_ also be able to fit a lot of interesting things through that hole.
Besides, researchers really only have two choices. They can try to expand on already "proven" theories, or they can try to show that those theories are wrong, at least in some aspect.
First off, don't show it live! At least not the first year or so
Like you said, this sounds great for a trial run at how to do the coverage right. However in order for it to make the transition to live tv you'd also need to add some sort of ghost functinality to any game being used so you could have realtime "camera" operators inside the game. Preferably with a couple sets of hotkeys, one set to jump to each player in the game, and another set to act as bookmarks for previous locations. That way with a little bit of training two or three people could cover a lot of different positions.
This certainly wouldn't be the first time functionality was added to a game for TV purposes. I don't remember how they handle it in StarCraft, but Red Alert 2 had a ghost mode added just for Korean TV broadcasts.
I'd like to see you justify either of those claims, that Sony is "more onwards" ("looking forward" perhaps?) or that Nintendo is going backwards.
Sony is certainly going forwards, they've got improved graphics, wireless, new media, and the ability to play music and movies in some format. However Nintendo is also going forwards, they've got improved graphics, wireless, new media, two screens, and touchscreen capability.
They're clearly pointed in related but slightly tangential directions, Sony towards the all-in-one entertainment device, and Nintendo towards a more dedicated gaming machine. It would be hard to argue that either one is more "onward" than the other, and certainly Nintendo is not moving backwards.
One could attempt to argue on the basis of graphics that Sony is more "onward." However even ignoring the "it's the gameplay" argument, better graphics do not necessarily indicate a better console. Not only can other factors be a limitation (the N64 had better graphics capabilites than the PSX, but was limited by the media format) but if he technology needed for the better graphics pushes either the price or the battery life outside the tollerance range of the consumers it will not be considered a step forward in the long run (see GameGear and NeoGeo.)
Um, they don't?
Maybe _you_ don't think their games rank at the top, but i can show you any number of other sources that think that Nintendo has always had a lot of the very best games out there. The general complaint has never been that they don't have some of the very best games out there, it's that they don't have enough games in general, especially in the "pretty good" to "almost but not quite the very best" range.
Not that owning multiple consoles is a bad thing (i go for the PS2 and GameCube myself) but one could make a reasonable argument for any of the big three that they have the very best games as long as you were looking at the right criteria.
I've been using Netscape, and with the discussion about Netscape vs. Mozilla/Firefox going on i decided that it was time to get out of the rut and try Firefox, just to give it a fair chance.
After about eight attempts to download Firefox i finally managed to get a working version (some earlier attempts failed when the modem disconected, but others seemed to succeed but got a "data error" when i tried to run the intaller.)
The first thing i noticed almost immediatly when running it is that Firefox has abysmal handling of tabgroups. The only way it seems to recognize tabgroups is as a folder of bookmarks. Therefore when it converted my Netscape bookmarks it turned all my tabgroups into folders that contain a set of bookmarks AND a subfolder with the same name that contains all the bookmarks again!
Instead of just selecting a tabgroup in the bookmark folder, i now have to go into the folder it created and select "open in tabs" from the bottom of the list. I might consider that a minor annoyance except that when i select "open in tabs" it gets rid of all the previous pages i had open!
This defeats most of the purpose in having tab groups!
If there's anyway to fix this "feature" it isn't covered in the help file, which pretty much just lists "tabbed browsing," saying you can open multiple tabs in the same window, and has nothing about tab groups.
I'm trying to give Firefox a fair chance, but i've gotten used to the ability to open as many bookmarks as is needed for a specific task with just one click and i'm feeling incredibly frustrated and limited right now.
I'm not sure which particular country you're from, but unfortunatly (from your perspective) the schools in your country probably have psychology departments of their own, and are probably doing experiments that you would consider to be just as useless, and you're probably paying more in taxes to support them than the people in America are.
Either you're making a joke that's too subtle for me to get, or you just weren't paying enough attention, because he clearly didn't mix up the voices.
Clearly you and your friends are not the definitive group of gamers. A lot of my friends at the game company i was working at at the time it came out thought it was great, as did i. I don't know which of us is closer to the normal spectrum of gamers, but not all gamers thought it was "stupid and pointless."
And in the case of cell-phones, you should probably also consider tin foil boxers :)
A century or so after the industrial revolution wound up (again, all depending on how you choose to count) we get to the computer revolution. The majority of it seems to be spread over a couple decades, and many of us may very well live to see at least the start of the next revolution. If the proponents of Singularity theory are correct we'll probably live to see the end of it as well, because it will last a few years or months.
So yes, the idea that we will have two or more revolutions within the time span of a single human lifespan is unprecedented. The scale of the changes may very well be different as well. The Singulairty is supposed to be a bigger change than everything prior put together. However the computer revolution doesn't seem to have caused as great a change in behavior to me as the revolutions before it and the ones theorized after it. Admitedly that may be because i grew up during a big part of it so am biased, because we're not finished with it yet and there are greater things yet to come, or it's just a weak-ass revolution that's not worth of the name :)
Small laptop, small power requirement, small fuel source. Big car, bif power requirement, big fuel source. Comparing the fuel source of one to the power requirements of the other is ludicrous.
If you want to prevent confusion, the proper response is something along these lines:
"This "paper" is clearly unprofesional:
Every good writer knows that small numbers should be written out unless they are actually being used in a numeric formula. I can not believe that the author forgot such an important rule while writing a serious paper. Clearly all references to 0wned should read Zerowned."
Yeah, it's not great, but you get the point i hope.
I agree, and in fact the only thing i didn't like about "A Deepness in the Sky" was that Vinge almost exclusively treated Focusing as inherently evil. I seem to remeber that at the end there was some decision (or at least a large group that supported the idea of) let's destroy all Focus technology, because no good can come of this.
It is possible that this was just an opinion of the characters rather than the author, but the noted lack of disent and discusion tends to make me thing that Vinge had similar thoughts. From a science fiction author this view is both suprising and depressing. It's like decided that some new technology, lasers, gunpowder, nuclear reactions, etc, should be abandoned because the easiest way to use it is to hurt people. This ignores both the fact that "undoing" a technological breakthrough is difficult or impossible in any kind of modern era, and that just about any technology can be used for "evil" purposes.
There were only two problems with Focusing as presented in the novel, it was being used on people against their will, and the effects were almost permenant.
The first problem has an easy solution, don't allow anyone to force someone else to become Focused. The actual implementation of this is more difficult, but no more so than trying to eliminate the technology completly. The second problem is most likely just a matter of further research into the subject. In the novel they wanted to stop all research as soon as they found a way to reverse the initial effects. What they should have been doing was continuing research to make the reversal easier and more effective, or finding a way to make the initial Focusing less damaging and short term.
If a pill was developed that would let you become Focused for eight hours at a time with no bad after-effects, i would argue against companies being able to force employees to take the pill, but i would be happy to take it myself. People already modify their brain chemistry in numerous ways for much more trvial reasons (caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, and every other recreational drug in existance.) Wouldn't it be great to be able to make yourself artificially enthusiastic about your job? Even with jobs i like there are days where i wish i could be doing something else instead or have trouble focusing on work.
Even that might cause problems. The PS2 used the same sollution but has problems of their own.
Maybe i'm just incompetent, but _i_ have difficulty using the R2 and L2 buttons on the PS2 controller with my middle finger. They work fine with index fingers, but for games where i need to press both the 1 and 2 buttons on the same side at once, or switch back and forth quickly between them, i'm totally screwed.
Trying to hold the controller with index fingers on the 1 buttons and middle fingers on the 2 buttons just feels unnatural and starts to hurt after a little bit.
I can't figure out why no console maker has designed a controller for what seems like a _natural_ hand position, with the "shoulder" buttons on the _back_ of the controller, kind of like a trigger. I could easily handle four shoulder buttons that way, i could probably even handle eight, though i have no idea what you'd use them all for.
I think Kerry is more likely to undo the Patriot Act than Bush. He's also more likely to pull us out of Iraq earlier than Bush, although i'm not sure if that's a good idea. We made a mess over there, and we bear the responsibility of cleaning it up, even though i have no real idea of how to go about it. It might be that anything active we try will just make the situation worse, and the best we can do is pull out and let things reach equilibrium on it's own, but that would be a rather sad state of affairs.
But that aside, the past is the past, and as much as we might like to change it we can't. However we can learn from it. What's more important than how much of Bush's crap Kerry would undo is how Kerry would act differently from Bush in the future. I believe Kerry is _much_ less likely to support further additions to the Patriot Act, i believe Kerry is _much_ less likely to invade Iran or some other middle-eastern country on specious grounds.
I'm not going to vote for Kerry because i think he'll fix the things in the past, i'm going to vote for him because i think he'll do more good, or at the very least less damage, in the future.
I'm not trying to trash kerry either. If I had to vote for one or the other, it would be Kerry over Bush. But I don't have to, so I'm not going to.
Presuming you're an american, i hope that means that you're planning on voting for a third party. I tend to disagree with people who vote for third parties because they think the two main parties are both the same, but at least you'd be doing _something_ productive.
Not voting because you think it won't make a difference is just a self-fullfilling prophecy, and not voting because you "object to the system" doesn't actually send the message you want, unless the message is to think that you're lazy or don't care about your future.
The only way to change the system is to vote for a new system or to try and overthrow the government. The voting way is a lot more likely to get you results, and a lot less likely to end with you in jail or dead :)
I've got a Sony Vaio laptop with an AMD Athlon. It works fine for most games, although it freezes frequently and crashes once in awhile too, but i have no idea if that's Sony's fault, AMD's fault, or Microsoft's fault.
However, i've been trying to get Master of Magic and Master of Orion running on here for awhile. Both the Windows XP emulation mode and VDMSound report that there isn't enough expanded memory to run the program, no matter how much virtual expanded memory i set up in the preferences for either program. DosBox works, but is painfully slow for both programs. VDMSound is supposed to be faster than DosBox, but i couldn't get the memory error to go away.
After poking around on a lot of forums someone finally mentioned that some (all?) AMD motherboards have problems allocating EMS and there was probably no way to get VDMSound or the native emulation working.
Disclaimer: I am not a hardware person, and i don't know if the information is accurate or which chipsets/motherboards have the problem, but it certainly matches the difficulies i've been having. If you plan on running any DOS games in emulation, you should probably look into the issue more. (It's kind of a moot point for me since i can't aford a new computer until i find a job.)