But I take offense to the idea that just because BSG discovered that handheld style camera movements makes for a more dramatic show makes it worthy of being presented as "reinventing" science fiction.
They copied the whole handheld style of camera movement from Firefly, anyway. (Same effects company. There's even a Firefly class spaceship in one scene in the mini-series.)
Uh... "the significantly older version of Han" was filmed with the original movie, and a stand-in (a fat guy wearing some sort of fur outfit, looked kinda like Cyrano Jones from The Trouble With Tribbles) for Jabba, that George originally planned to replace with a stop motion Hut.
When that plan didn't work out (didn't have the time/budget/tech to do it convincingly) they added the Greedo scene to pass on the same information about Han's difficulties with the local smugglar king, which is why the conversation with Jabba is essentially the same as the conversation with Greedo.
The VoIP people will have a billing address for you, but that could have no relationship with the location you're calling from.
One thing that VoIP services let you do is live in New York and have a "local" number in L.A. You can call your friends there, and they can call you, and to the phone system, it looks like you're in L.A. If you call 911 you will get an L.A. 911 operator.
Since the only way to get $5000 bullets would be to artificially inflate the price through taxes etc. you will just create a thriving bullet smuggling industry, with all the death and violence associated with it, just like drugs.
Maybe it only works for random data (however they choose to define that.) You compress 1000 random bytes, you get 10 non-random ones. (by their definition) Try to compress those and you end up back at 1000 random bytes.
You've got a compresser that can only compress noise. Not actual information. (Could be useful...might make it possible to keep up with everthing written on/.)
So if I don't like John Doe I start sending him messages encrypted using an illegal encryption technique, and then phone in an anonymous tip to the local FBI saying he's a terrorist, and if they check out his computer they'll find a bunch of encrypted files proving it.
The mere fact that he has these encrypted messages sitting in his "deleted messages" folder, and won't tell the authorities how to decrypt them makes him a criminal.
X-33 was designed to fail from the beginning. NASA is full of people feeding at the Shuttle trough, they don't want anything upsetting it. Of the three X-33 proposals that they considered they picked the one which everyone outside of NASA considered to be the riskiest, most likely to fail. So now NASA can point at the X-33 and say "See, that SSTO stuff is nonsense."
Apple had C&Ded AppleInsider, and MacJunkie before I caught the picture, but MacJunkie still has their "Why we think this is a fake" article up, which contains a description, and lists a whole bunch of reasons why it can't be a "real" computer.
Guess what? Steve ended his keynote with his Lt Columbo "One more thing..." impression, and rolled out the G4 cube. It sure looks like the machine MacJunkie was poo-pooing as a fake.
They tend to have a very low thrust. They can have high delta-v. You just have to run them longer. You can get much more delta-v out of a pound of reaction matter run through an ion drive than out of a pound of fuel burned in a chemical rocket.
You also need a good power source to run the thing off of, such as a nice little nuclear reactor.
It may be theoretically possible to make it so that some of these probes were on some sort of free return trajectory, but I doubt it. Especially for a totally unpowered probe. Managing that sort of thing requires constant fine adjustments in the probe's trajectory. Even if you did manage to get it back here you would still have to catch the thing as it came wizzing back past the Earth at a few miles per second. The shuttle couldn't do it, nor anything else NASA has ever built.
Trying to build a probe capable of doing that sort of thing plus the stuff needed to catch it if it did manage to come back would multiply the cost of the program by a few orders of magnitude. Cheaper just to forget about it and launch another one.
Since this hasn't been solved yet I would be greatly surprised if how you translate a cyphertext character to its plaintext equivalent is a simple X --> Y transformation.
There may be things such as character position dependancies so the two "V" characters translate into different characters in the plaintext version.
Just about any book that they make you read in high school sucks. It sucks because they are making you read it. I was fortunate enough to have read The Crysalids before grade 9 English, so I rather enjoyed it. The teacher tried hard to undo that enjoyment, but he didn't quite succeed.
(I keep meaning to give Dickens another try. Maybe he isn't as boring a writer as I remember from school.)
I can understand them wanting to use encryption to protect the content of a DVD. As several people have pointed out numerous times in all the discussions of DeCSS, it doesn't prevent anyone from actually copying the disk. It does make it harder for people to modify the disks.
When Lucas finally gets around to releasing Star Wars on DVD how long will it be before some enterprising person starts selling a 'fixed' version of it. How many of us would prefer to buy a version of the disk in which Gredo doesn't shoot first, and you can't see that Obiwan's lightsaber is just a plastic rod throughout half his fight with Darth? We can get rid of that totally redundant "see what we can do with CGI" scene between Han and Jaba that just repeats the conversation he had with Gredo. We can get all this on a disk with no loss of image or sound quality.
Lucas isn't going to want that to happen, and a lot of other film makers aren't going to want people doing other less noble things with their films. And they have a point. People shouldn't be allowed to change a film maker's work around to match their own preferences. But doing through encryption is futile. It may slow people down, but it won't stop them.
We don't have problems with people selling pirated copies of books, or with them taking some author's work and rewriting a few paragraphs here and there to better suit their own preferences, and then reselling the revised versions even though the technology exists, and has existed to do it for as long as people have been printing books. That was the whole point for the creation of copyright law in the first place, and those laws work pretty well. Why should they be applied differently to various electronic media?
There is nothing new in fiction. Everything is just a reworking of something which someone else has already done. Heinlein freely admitted that he based his flat cats on a creature from an earlier story written by someone else. (I don't have my library handy or I would look it up.)
...but SETI is not about processing data as quickly as possible...
Absolutely, positively false.
If that were the case, then SETI@home would simply do all the computations on their own machines, and not ask for help from thousands of systems distributed all over the world.
There is a big difference between "fast enough" and "as fast as possible." Using just their own machines isn't fast enough. What they are doing now is. Last time I checked the SETI@Home project was already processing the data as quickly as it is coming off the telescope. Faster client software doesn't gain them anything. It just helps people running the client app inflate their egos by boosting their block counts.
The CSS encoding does nothing to stop the guys who want to make a million copies. They will just go right ahead and make their copies of the encoded data. If they wanted to make multi-region copies, there are lots of ways for them to get ecryption keys. Too many people have access to keys at too many companies for them to be truly secure.
The only thing that the CSS encryption really stops is John Doe making a single copy of the DVD for his friend Richard Roe.
I guess you haven't worked much with multiple displays. Once you've done it for a while you never want to go back to using just one. You keep the main thing you are working on in the center screen, and less important stuff on the sides. Instead of having to switch windows all the time, you just have to glance off to the side to see the other stuff.
The price on this thing is a little steep though. You could get 3 Apple Cinema Displays for about 1/2 the price they want to charge for this thing, and have a total desktop area of 4800 * 1024
You need low populations to be able to get away with stuff like that because it is so hard on the land. Unless you plan to pass through these countries shooting every other person it is too late for that sort of thing to be sustainable. (And on average the amount of topsoil on North American and European farms is increasing.)
Most North American sewage gets cleaned up considerably before the water gets dumped back into the rivers. The outflow from a sewage treatment plant is usually cleaner than the river or lake it is going into. And we keep our garbage in nice compact landfills where we will be able to go back and mine out all that valuable stuff we are throwing away now.
People in third world nations tend to generate more sewage per person. (even a lot of the undernourised ones) That's one of the side effects of a high fiber diet.
Slashdot Mirror
They copied the whole handheld style of camera movement from Firefly, anyway. (Same effects company. There's even a Firefly class spaceship in one scene in the mini-series.)
In the episode The Prom they're watching a tape of a demon attack:
There was at least one Columbo episode that did it.
Not impossible. Just more difficult. You don't need to use green screens to make mattes. They just make the process easier.
Uh... "the significantly older version of Han" was filmed with the original movie, and a stand-in (a fat guy wearing some sort of fur outfit, looked kinda like Cyrano Jones from The Trouble With Tribbles) for Jabba, that George originally planned to replace with a stop motion Hut.
When that plan didn't work out (didn't have the time/budget/tech to do it convincingly) they added the Greedo scene to pass on the same information about Han's difficulties with the local smugglar king, which is why the conversation with Jabba is essentially the same as the conversation with Greedo.
The VoIP people will have a billing address for you, but that could have no relationship with the location you're calling from.
One thing that VoIP services let you do is live in New York and have a "local" number in L.A. You can call your friends there, and they can call you, and to the phone system, it looks like you're in L.A. If you call 911 you will get an L.A. 911 operator.
At least when you call from your cell phone, you'll get 911 for the right city. With VoIP they don't even really know what city you're in.
At the moment it's a not-available album. The only Oldfield the have is 10 tracks from Elements: The Best of Mike Oldfield
Since the only way to get $5000 bullets would be to artificially inflate the price through taxes etc. you will just create a thriving bullet smuggling industry, with all the death and violence associated with it, just like drugs.
Maybe it only works for random data (however they choose to define that.) You compress 1000 random bytes, you get 10 non-random ones. (by their definition) Try to compress those and you end up back at 1000 random bytes.
/.)
You've got a compresser that can only compress noise. Not actual information. (Could be useful...might make it possible to keep up with everthing written on
So if I don't like John Doe I start sending him messages encrypted using an illegal encryption technique, and then phone in an anonymous tip to the local FBI saying he's a terrorist, and if they check out his computer they'll find a bunch of encrypted files proving it.
The mere fact that he has these encrypted messages sitting in his "deleted messages" folder, and won't tell the authorities how to decrypt them makes him a criminal.
And my favourite non-functioning machine: The Brother's in Arms' cannon that fired its barrel down the range.
X-33 was designed to fail from the beginning. NASA is full of people feeding at the Shuttle trough, they don't want anything upsetting it. Of the three X-33 proposals that they considered they picked the one which everyone outside of NASA considered to be the riskiest, most likely to fail. So now NASA can point at the X-33 and say "See, that SSTO stuff is nonsense."
Apple had C&Ded AppleInsider, and MacJunkie before I caught the picture, but MacJunkie still has their "Why we think this is a fake" article up, which contains a description, and lists a whole bunch of reasons why it can't be a "real" computer.
Guess what? Steve ended his keynote with his Lt Columbo "One more thing..." impression, and rolled out the G4 cube. It sure looks like the machine MacJunkie was poo-pooing as a fake.
You also need a good power source to run the thing off of, such as a nice little nuclear reactor.
Practically, no.
It may be theoretically possible to make it so that some of these probes were on some sort of free return trajectory, but I doubt it. Especially for a totally unpowered probe. Managing that sort of thing requires constant fine adjustments in the probe's trajectory. Even if you did manage to get it back here you would still have to catch the thing as it came wizzing back past the Earth at a few miles per second. The shuttle couldn't do it, nor anything else NASA has ever built.
Trying to build a probe capable of doing that sort of thing plus the stuff needed to catch it if it did manage to come back would multiply the cost of the program by a few orders of magnitude. Cheaper just to forget about it and launch another one.
Since this hasn't been solved yet I would be greatly surprised if how you translate a cyphertext character to its plaintext equivalent is a simple X --> Y transformation.
There may be things such as character position dependancies so the two "V" characters translate into different characters in the plaintext version.
Or maybe it's a number.
Just about any book that they make you read in high school sucks. It sucks because they are making you read it. I was fortunate enough to have read The Crysalids before grade 9 English, so I rather enjoyed it. The teacher tried hard to undo that enjoyment, but he didn't quite succeed.
(I keep meaning to give Dickens another try. Maybe he isn't as boring a writer as I remember from school.)
When Lucas finally gets around to releasing Star Wars on DVD how long will it be before some enterprising person starts selling a 'fixed' version of it. How many of us would prefer to buy a version of the disk in which Gredo doesn't shoot first, and you can't see that Obiwan's lightsaber is just a plastic rod throughout half his fight with Darth? We can get rid of that totally redundant "see what we can do with CGI" scene between Han and Jaba that just repeats the conversation he had with Gredo. We can get all this on a disk with no loss of image or sound quality.
Lucas isn't going to want that to happen, and a lot of other film makers aren't going to want people doing other less noble things with their films. And they have a point. People shouldn't be allowed to change a film maker's work around to match their own preferences. But doing through encryption is futile. It may slow people down, but it won't stop them.
We don't have problems with people selling pirated copies of books, or with them taking some author's work and rewriting a few paragraphs here and there to better suit their own preferences, and then reselling the revised versions even though the technology exists, and has existed to do it for as long as people have been printing books. That was the whole point for the creation of copyright law in the first place, and those laws work pretty well. Why should they be applied differently to various electronic media?
I would expect that the "coating" isn't on the outside of the disk. It's in the middle of the sandwich, next to the data layer.
There is nothing new in fiction. Everything is just a reworking of something which someone else has already done. Heinlein freely admitted that he based his flat cats on a creature from an earlier story written by someone else. (I don't have my library handy or I would look it up.)
There is a big difference between "fast enough" and "as fast as possible." Using just their own machines isn't fast enough. What they are doing now is. Last time I checked the SETI@Home project was already processing the data as quickly as it is coming off the telescope. Faster client software doesn't gain them anything. It just helps people running the client app inflate their egos by boosting their block counts.
The CSS encoding does nothing to stop the guys who want to make a million copies. They will just go right ahead and make their copies of the encoded data. If they wanted to make multi-region copies, there are lots of ways for them to get ecryption keys. Too many people have access to keys at too many companies for them to be truly secure.
The only thing that the CSS encryption really stops is John Doe making a single copy of the DVD for his friend Richard Roe.
I guess you haven't worked much with multiple displays. Once you've done it for a while you never want to go back to using just one. You keep the main thing you are working on in the center screen, and less important stuff on the sides. Instead of having to switch windows all the time, you just have to glance off to the side to see the other stuff.
The price on this thing is a little steep though. You could get 3 Apple Cinema Displays for about 1/2 the price they want to charge for this thing, and have a total desktop area of 4800 * 1024
Most North American sewage gets cleaned up considerably before the water gets dumped back into the rivers. The outflow from a sewage treatment plant is usually cleaner than the river or lake it is going into. And we keep our garbage in nice compact landfills where we will be able to go back and mine out all that valuable stuff we are throwing away now.
People in third world nations tend to generate more sewage per person. (even a lot of the undernourised ones) That's one of the side effects of a high fiber diet.