I mainly just don't like being tracked by our incompetent campus security. So try this: swipe every door you see no matter where you go. Overload their system. Or get techie, decode your card, and fab a new one with a functional code that doesn't ID you.
>>What we need are some elder care trained dogs or monkeys.
>Wow... That's sounds pretty bad too. What we need are compassionate loving families that stick together to take care of their own. I know it probably isn't ever going to happen, but when we abandon those who cared for us because it's inconvenient, what kind of justice do we deserve? With all due respect, you deserve to get flamed for that. Clearly you have never tried to care for an infirmed and/or dying parent while still looking out for you children and, oh, yeah, keeping your job. My wife and I have both had the doubtful honor of spending a ton of time over the last few years just to get 3rd-party care (hospice, VNA, etc) for our parents. Had any of them suffered from, say hemiparalysis or Alzheimer's, it would have been a lot worse. We aren't abandoning them, thank you very much.
I believe it is a federal offense to destroy US currency. This and other posters are wrong, or at least misinterpreting the Federal law they quote. There are several machines at the Boston Museum of Science (and probably elsewhere) which mash a coin flat and put a dinosaur or some such imprint on it. The museum has a plaque next to the machines quoting the portion of the law that makes this legal. IIRC, the critical feature is that you may not alter cash for the purpose of making it appear to be worth some other amount (e.g. pasting "20" on the corners of a 1-dollar bill). Why would the gov't or anyone else care if you destroy your own personal property(cash)?
Better having those guys there, rude and all, than having a real terrorist making his way into the plane and putting and end to your life. That's a standard example of FUD, as well as a standard example of a nonsequitur. There are some analyses which point out that, prior to any airport security, there were a number of hijackings to Cuba. Nobody was hurt. Then, as security got tighter and tighter, the number of hijackings went down but the death tolls went way up. The "Better X than Y" just doesn't fly here, any more than "Better the (anti-)Patriot Act than more OK City bombings" routine being foisted on us by the clowns in DC.
It sort of seems to me like saying "unmanned exploration is really successful, but look at how many people we killed with stupid manned exploration, that could have easily been done unmanned".
Well, that's exactly the message many of us would like to get out. Using astronauts is hot stuff for the evening news but otherwise is rarely of much value. Even the "rescue missions" for things like the Hubble probably don't break even. The development and maintenance cost of the shuttles, space suits, manned safety environment, etc., has gotta be more than sending up full replacement systems.
I can't understand that people are so against those ten-second adds : Seriously : Afterwards, you can read the article, free of costs Except that I have blocked a pile of cookies from sites like "adclick.net," "clickseeker.net" etc. One of these random cookies is the one Salon uses to track their visitors. Damned if I'm going to sort thru my cookieblock file to figure out which one it is.
While there are video-game pinball simulations, they really aren't the same as playing on a physical machine. The video-game-pinball becomes closer to a twitch-game, where if you twitch at the right moment you get a predictable result. In contrast, the physical pinball can have spin and other effects that influence the ball behavior and make the game much more interesting. Agreed they aren't the same, but if you're getting predictable results you're playing the weaker variety of sims (like, say, M$oft). The better products such as Empire's Pro Pinball series do a darn good randomization job.
Back in my day (not to long ago) the price to play a game was 25 cents. Today if you go into an arcade many games are $1.00 or more. I can't afford these prices. What do you expect children to do? (If you answered go to their parents for money you are right) People have been uttering this same whiny fallacy for years, both about vids and pins. Take a look back: what is your salary now compared to, say, 1980? What is the value of a given house? Car? Movie ticket? NFL ticket? (ok, so computers are cheaper:-) ). I submit it's a purely psychological barrier: the most valuable common coin is the quarter. Any price above that threatens to get into paper money, and that makes everyone freak.
This is old hat to us pinfans. There's only one manufacturer currently building pinballs, and it's harder and harder to find pins in arcades. Actually it's worse for pinfans, because poor maintenance can cripple a pinball machine, while vids can run forever so long as the joystick doesn't break. There is a very popular open-source simulator engine over at VPinMAME but, going by the chatter on rec.games.pinball this is not cutting into pinfans' real-world play time.
BZZT. 2.5 pounds of Plutonium per 75 watts of electricity. That's probably not that much heavier than the solar panels. The best part is that you'd need less battery with an RTG (just enough for large power draws) so you can save more weight there than your RTG costs you.
Whoever modded that +3Informative didn't do any research. I did. Actually, per NASA: A conservative projection of an achievable thin-film solar cell blanket usable for space would be a 5% efficient thin-film cell fabricated on a 25 micron thick Kapton substrate. This yields a photovoltaic blanket specific power of 1.7 kW/kg. An optimistic projection might be a 15% thin-film cell on a 7 micron thick Kapton substrate, leading to a photovoltaic blanket specific power of 15 kW/kg. These numbers compare favorably to current state of the art spacecraft solar blankets. Compare that to your alleged 70W/kg. Go BZZZT yourself.
Question for the real radio guys out there: Is the size of the dish on a radio telescope analogous to the size of the mirror on a more typical visible-light telescope? Well, I'm primarily optics, not radio, but, yeah, the principles are the same. The larger the dish, the more power (or light, or whatever) you collect. The limitations come about because you want the dish figure to be "smooth," which means roughness as well as the actual curvature to be accurate to a fraction of a wavelength. Since light is on the order of 0.5 to 1 nanometer, and radio waves run out to many meters (depending on band), it's clear that you can build a far larger dish with under, say, 0.01 wave of sag for a radio wave than for visible light. In addition, a mirror can't have holes or imperfections greater than a fraction of a wave. For light,that means a continuous sheet of glass or metal. For radio waves, you can darn near build the "mirror" out of girders and struts, so long as the gaps remain less than maybe one-tenth a wavelength.
It's inappropriate and incompetent to insinuate that all left-wingers (which BTW is not synonymous with "liberals") subscribe to that sort of anti-nuclear paranoia.
As to the technology itself: IIRC the Rovers have some tiny radio-generators to provide heat during the Martian night. But to supply a generator large enough to obviate the need for solar cells most likely would blow the weight budget (soft landing, remember?). Just my guess.
Why didn't you buy the extended warranty? The extended warranty costs $250, lasts for *three* years from the original purchase date, and covers all repairs. With all due respect, I prefer NOT to buy things that are going to fall apart. If an extended warranty is that much of a necessity it should be built into the base price of the machine. I've never had the slightest problem w/ any Mac, but I can guarantee that if I buy any computer/appliance/tool that goes bad that quickly, I dump it and buy some competitor's product next time.
why is it that the internet just begs to coin words and phrases that are simultaneously annoying and stupid.
"blog". The very mention of that word makes me cringe. It sounds as though someone tried to create the internet equivalent of the Smurfs use of the word "smurf". "I'm going to blog in my blog."
OK, so from now on we'll all talk about "Smurfing the Internet"?
I work at a unversity which has very few tenured profs, mostly it is frowned upon. The "Assistant" could be due to his educational level. Here we get titles based on degree. Instructor=batchelors, Assistant Prof=Masters, Full prof=PhD. He's too busy being famous/running supercluster to take time out for a silly, worthless PhD:)
I take it you're not from the USA? Few if any colleges in the states even *allow* a prof. to remain employed if he doesn't get tenure within 6 or 7 years. Similarly, almost no schools even hire someone who doesn't have a PhD.
I'll add a vote for that site. Nice layout, fair treatment of fans and performers alike. Not clear the business model will survive, but heck - right now I'm listening to a nice Beethoven piano/cello duo from that site.
> You're not going to actually try to convince us you're running OS X on that machine, are you? OS X can only be run on USB-equipped Macs.
That's incorrect. OSX may not support things like SCSI ports or the old appletalk printer port, but plenty of people have OSX running on beige G3 macs.
> OS. Say I've got a load of dreamweaver files open as well as some folders open, they're grouped neatly into 2 items on the bar that I can expand to see a list of all the html files or folders that I have open.
Yeah, I would like to have the Dock do that, i.e. if an app is open, when you right-click that app in the Dock, part of the Contextual Menu is a list of currently open documents for that app. Expose sort of does this, but not as neatly. As for folders, they would show up in the Dock'sFinder contextual menu.
BTW, WappPro and TaskMenuBar did essentially this under OS8/9.
> The best feature about the dock, is the ability to drag a file to an application that sits in the dock.
I've been doing this since system 7: all you have to do is put an open folder on your desktop and fill it with aliases of your favorite apps. Plus you can make this "windowdock" any shape you want and place it anywhere you want.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
So this filament is superstrong and can cut thru stuff? Guess all we need is a way to attach a mooring point and we can build that Ringworld thing.
I mainly just don't like being tracked by our incompetent campus security.
So try this: swipe every door you see no matter where you go. Overload their system.
Or get techie, decode your card, and fab a new one with a functional code that doesn't ID you.
>>What we need are some elder care trained dogs or monkeys.
>Wow... That's sounds pretty bad too. What we need are compassionate loving families that stick together to take care of their own. I know it probably isn't ever going to happen, but when we abandon those who cared for us because it's inconvenient, what kind of justice do we deserve?
With all due respect, you deserve to get flamed for that. Clearly you have never tried to care for an infirmed and/or dying parent while still looking out for you children and, oh, yeah, keeping your job. My wife and I have both had the doubtful honor of spending a ton of time over the last few years just to get 3rd-party care (hospice, VNA, etc) for our parents. Had any of them suffered from, say hemiparalysis or Alzheimer's, it would have been a lot worse.
We aren't abandoning them, thank you very much.
What about the NG-5? Surely something like this would be an ideal high end application of such a product?
:-)
Well, the Japanese info briefs don't have any reference to their product being "three laws safe." Could be a problem
I believe it is a federal offense to destroy US currency.
This and other posters are wrong, or at least misinterpreting the Federal law they quote. There are several machines at the Boston Museum of Science (and probably elsewhere) which mash a coin flat and put a dinosaur or some such imprint on it. The museum has a plaque next to the machines quoting the portion of the law that makes this legal. IIRC, the critical feature is that you may not alter cash for the purpose of making it appear to be worth some other amount (e.g. pasting "20" on the corners of a 1-dollar bill). Why would the gov't or anyone else care if you destroy your own personal property(cash)?
Better having those guys there, rude and all, than having a real terrorist making his way into the plane and putting and end to your life.
That's a standard example of FUD, as well as a standard example of a nonsequitur. There are some analyses which point out that, prior to any airport security, there were a number of hijackings to Cuba. Nobody was hurt. Then, as security got tighter and tighter, the number of hijackings went down but the death tolls went way up.
The "Better X than Y" just doesn't fly here, any more than "Better the (anti-)Patriot Act than more OK City bombings" routine being foisted on us by the clowns in DC.
It sort of seems to me like saying "unmanned exploration is really successful, but look at how many people we killed with stupid manned exploration, that could have easily been done unmanned".
Well, that's exactly the message many of us would like to get out. Using astronauts is hot stuff for the evening news but otherwise is rarely of much value. Even the "rescue missions" for things like the Hubble probably don't break even. The development and maintenance cost of the shuttles, space suits, manned safety environment, etc., has gotta be more than sending up full replacement systems.
Hmmm... and here I thought an amateur was someone who used her own home video camera in her bedroom instead of a corporate filming studio. :-)
I can't understand that people are so against those ten-second adds : Seriously : Afterwards, you can read the article, free of costs
Except that I have blocked a pile of cookies from sites like "adclick.net," "clickseeker.net" etc. One of these random cookies is the one Salon uses to track their visitors. Damned if I'm going to sort thru my cookieblock file to figure out which one it is.
While there are video-game pinball simulations, they really aren't the same as playing on a physical machine. The video-game-pinball becomes closer to a twitch-game, where if you twitch at the right moment you get a predictable result. In contrast, the physical pinball can have spin and other effects that influence the ball behavior and make the game much more interesting.
Agreed they aren't the same, but if you're getting predictable results you're playing the weaker variety of sims (like, say, M$oft). The better products such as Empire's Pro Pinball series do a darn good randomization job.
Back in my day (not to long ago) the price to play a game was 25 cents. Today if you go into an arcade many games are $1.00 or more. I can't afford these prices. What do you expect children to do? (If you answered go to their parents for money you are right) :-) ).
People have been uttering this same whiny fallacy for years, both about vids and pins. Take a look back: what is your salary now compared to, say, 1980? What is the value of a given house? Car? Movie ticket? NFL ticket? (ok, so computers are cheaper
I submit it's a purely psychological barrier: the most valuable common coin is the quarter. Any price above that threatens to get into paper money, and that makes everyone freak.
This is old hat to us pinfans. There's only one manufacturer currently building pinballs, and it's harder and harder to find pins in arcades. Actually it's worse for pinfans, because poor maintenance can cripple a pinball machine, while vids can run forever so long as the joystick doesn't break.
There is a very popular open-source simulator engine over at VPinMAME but, going by the chatter on rec.games.pinball this is not cutting into pinfans' real-world play time.
BZZT. 2.5 pounds of Plutonium per 75 watts of electricity. That's probably not that much heavier than the solar panels. The best part is that you'd need less battery with an RTG (just enough for large power draws) so you can save more weight there than your RTG costs you.
Whoever modded that +3Informative didn't do any research. I did.
Actually, per NASA: A conservative projection of an achievable thin-film solar cell blanket usable for space would be a 5% efficient thin-film cell fabricated on a 25 micron thick Kapton substrate. This yields a photovoltaic blanket specific power of 1.7 kW/kg. An optimistic projection might be a 15% thin-film cell on a 7 micron thick Kapton substrate, leading to a photovoltaic blanket specific power of 15 kW/kg. These numbers compare favorably to current state of the art spacecraft solar blankets.
Compare that to your alleged 70W/kg. Go BZZZT yourself.
Question for the real radio guys out there:
Is the size of the dish on a radio telescope analogous to the size of the mirror on a more typical visible-light telescope?
Well, I'm primarily optics, not radio, but, yeah, the principles are the same. The larger the dish, the more power (or light, or whatever) you collect. The limitations come about because you want the dish figure to be "smooth," which means roughness as well as the actual curvature to be accurate to a fraction of a wavelength. Since light is on the order of 0.5 to 1 nanometer, and radio waves run out to many meters (depending on band), it's clear that you can build a far larger dish with under, say, 0.01 wave of sag for a radio wave than for visible light.
In addition, a mirror can't have holes or imperfections greater than a fraction of a wave. For light,that means a continuous sheet of glass or metal. For radio waves, you can darn near build the "mirror" out of girders and struts, so long as the gaps remain less than maybe one-tenth a wavelength.
It's inappropriate and incompetent to insinuate that all left-wingers (which BTW is not synonymous with "liberals") subscribe to that sort of anti-nuclear paranoia.
As to the technology itself: IIRC the Rovers have some tiny radio-generators to provide heat during the Martian night. But to supply a generator large enough to obviate the need for solar cells most likely would blow the weight budget (soft landing, remember?). Just my guess.
The two Rovers are on opposite sides of Mars? How long will it take them to reach a common arena, at which point...
"Battlebots: Martian Showdown"
Why didn't you buy the extended warranty? The extended warranty costs $250, lasts for *three* years from the original purchase date, and covers all repairs.
With all due respect, I prefer NOT to buy things that are going to fall apart. If an extended warranty is that much of a necessity it should be built into the base price of the machine.
I've never had the slightest problem w/ any Mac, but I can guarantee that if I buy any computer/appliance/tool that goes bad that quickly, I dump it and buy some competitor's product next time.
why is it that the internet just begs to coin words and phrases that are simultaneously annoying and stupid.
"blog". The very mention of that word makes me cringe. It sounds as though someone tried to create the internet equivalent of the Smurfs use of the word "smurf". "I'm going to blog in my blog."
OK, so from now on we'll all talk about "Smurfing the Internet"?
I work at a unversity which has very few tenured profs, mostly it is frowned upon. :)
The "Assistant" could be due to his educational level. Here we get titles based on degree. Instructor=batchelors, Assistant Prof=Masters, Full prof=PhD. He's too busy being famous/running supercluster to take time out for a silly, worthless PhD
I take it you're not from the USA? Few if any colleges in the states even *allow* a prof. to remain employed if he doesn't get tenure within 6 or 7 years. Similarly, almost no schools even hire someone who doesn't have a PhD.
>Fraternity of Artists of Digitally Downloaded Electronic Recordings
>aka FADDER.
If instead it were the Best Loved And Crowned King (of) Artists of Digitally Downloaded Elec. Rec.,
we'd have a great tv show.
> Don't forget Magnatune.
I'll add a vote for that site. Nice layout, fair treatment of fans and performers alike. Not clear the business model will survive, but heck - right now I'm listening to a nice Beethoven piano/cello duo from that site.
> You're not going to actually try to convince us you're running OS X on that machine, are you? OS X can only be run on USB-equipped Macs.
That's incorrect. OSX may not support things like SCSI ports or the old appletalk printer port, but plenty of people have OSX running on beige G3 macs.
>Plus, there may be resources on Mars that could be used as fuel, given the proper technology to harness/convert/whatever those resources.
So.... the skill mix we need to send to Mars has to include a couple alchemists?
BTW, I'm shocked nobody has yet pointed out that if there is indigenous life on Mars, it will say "I for one welcome our new Terran Overlords."
> OS. Say I've got a load of dreamweaver files open as well as some folders open, they're grouped neatly into 2 items on the bar that I can expand to see a list of all the html files or folders that I have open.
Yeah, I would like to have the Dock do that, i.e. if an app is open, when you right-click that app in the Dock, part of the Contextual Menu is a list of currently open documents for that app.
Expose sort of does this, but not as neatly. As for folders, they would show up in the Dock'sFinder contextual menu.
BTW, WappPro and TaskMenuBar did essentially this under OS8/9.
> The best feature about the dock, is the ability to drag a file to an application that sits in the dock.
:-)
I've been doing this since system 7: all you have to do is put an open folder on your desktop and fill it with aliases of your favorite apps. Plus you can make this "windowdock" any shape you want and place it anywhere you want.