Actually, you can put just about any object into orbit at any height you like. Heavier objects don't need to be higher up. There is a lower limit to orbital height, obviously- practically speaking this is 160 km above earth. Any lower and atmospheric drag will reduce your angular velocity and your satellite will fall to earth in flames.
The orbital period is a function of the height of the orbit - all objects (of any weight) will have the same period at the same height. (So the recurring cloud of debris in the film Gravity [which i worked on] is pretty much impossible, even if you cheat and allow an elliptical orbit. I mentioned this to the director after he told me how realistic he needed the film to be, but that my 'opinion' didn't get much traction at the time.)
If you make the orbit high enough (35,786 km) , the period will be the same as the length of a day, and you have a geosynchronous orbit. If you also put your bird over the equator, its geostationary.
It may be insensitive, and it's definitely offensive (as i believe it's supposed to be) but the fact is that in US prison populations, blacks outnumber latinos 2-1, and latinos outnumber whites by a further 2-1. The reasons for this are, to me, far more offensive than APK's comments, but are also way beyond the scope of what I wanted to point out. Sometimes the actual facts and figures agree with the numbers suggested by prejudice and stereotypes.
That doesn't really excuse APK's comments, but calling him racist based on this is a bit of a stretch, even if he was basing his imagery from nonfactual stereotypes. More likely it's something (unfortunately) ingrained in all of us by years of crime shows, and perhaps a Sublime song. And check out the website. It's a fascinating and awful look at incarceration in america. Its actually terrifying.
I don't need APK to resign from whatever he does, but maybe you both could take a spin through the site below and possibly channel some of that energy into something useful.
People are asking why the writers are "striking first" They arent. The WGA has been negotiating the deal with the producers since early March.
ALSO, It's not that the contracts are 'bad'. A decade ago, when most of the last deal was hashed out, there was no original streaming content. The studios were circling the wagons against streaming, and netflix was still doing DVDs. A big negotiating point in tat strike was in fact DVD residuals Streaming was not ignored, it;s just that no one really knew how big it would get and what the side effects of it's proliferation might be. Studios wanted to pay zero residuals on "new media" and naturally the writers werent thrilled with this. So, after protracted negotiations, they struck for 14 weeks and eventually got some concessions. Ironically, the lack of new entertainment on TV was a HUGE boon for Netflix, who got a massive surge of subscribers which wall street didn't really8 notice til the strike was long over. but i digress.
Now that streaming is huge, the writers are pretty glad they held out, but there are fresh issues- the new guys, Amazon, Netflix, etc. don't obey the traditional season paradigm. In the old days, when a writer was hired for ' a season' they got 30 (or whatever) shows out of the deal. Now, with their giant budgets and more elaborate shows, series like "walking Dead might have 16 (but often fewer) episodes per season. Because writers are often exclusive to the show, and they are paid 'per episode', many of them are making half as much. So its back to the table to negotiiate this and similar issues.
The AMPTP is the body that reps the studios, networks and independent producers. They negotiate not only with writers, but with the DGA, SAG-AFTRA, IATSE, the AFM, etc. Suffice to say that they are some hard nosed old bastards. They have a rep for not budging and often, a strike is the only way to make something happen.
By the way, when the writers went on strike in 2007, it was a huge dead weight on production in CA. On a film, lines in scripts get rewritten a little every day During the strike, many directors on already-running films did n ot want to cross picket lines by doing these small rewrites themselves. With writers on strije, there was no one to do it. So a lot of productions stalled, and some stopped altogether. This affects hundreds of thousands of industry workers all over the world.
I was in the middle of a divorce and had just come off a lucrative 18 month job, a little movie about spartans in red capes. My ex's evil lawyer convinced a judge to award payments based on my employed income. I was out of work for about 6 months due to the strike- with the extra monthly whammy to the ex, plus my lawyers (I fired the one who allowed the preceding to happen) I got murdered during the last strike. If this one happens, it wont be as bad, but I don't thing its going to come to a strike.
just my 2 cents.
PS the ex and I get along fine these days, and the kid who was born during the strike is now 10! Yikes!
In cold weather I register the end of my nose as a fingerprint. It works! And the feds will never figure it out, they can try all my fingers and still not get in.
If you want to keep finger functionality, use your imagination- the back of a knuckle or the side of a thumb are just as unique as a fingerprint, and work just as well.
Unlocking ones phone with one's nose will occasionally be met with wisecracks- trying to operate a phone with a nose will probably get you beaten up or arrested. So be careful:)
What if all of us, and our friends, childrem, coworkers, etc. included some kind of inflammatory keywords in the subject or the body of every email we sent? This would have the immediate effect of 'lighting up the switchboard" at the NSA. While a few of us might get a call from the NSA, the vast majority of us could relax, knowing that whatever harmless activity we might actually be emailing about would be overlooked as the NSA investigates 20 billion emails that advocate "per to the hedonists" (it's an anagram- I'm not crazy!)
You would want to be sure that you weren't the only one doing this though. We could probably get some russian spammers to help out... Now that's a headline I'd like to see- SPAMMERS SAVE THE INTERNET!
This might actually work. It would sure be fun try it to see what happens. Who's in?
But a contact lens is stuck to your eye when you look down, doesn't the lens remain in the same spot relative to your eyeball? Or do you just have to keep the close-up stuff in the lower part of your vision frame?
I also can't imagine being a bright young engineer and saying "ya know where I want to work and innovate with all my creative energy and talent? IBM, that's where it's at!"
It takes a long time for a big company to die and many can reinvent themselves. Look at the origins of Nokia and Nintendo - neither was exactly a tech company when they started. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google are big enough to survive ten year of terrible decisions by management (Microsoft already has!) without much pain. The companies that tend to die are ones where some disruptive technology changes their market completely and they don't adapt. SGI was a good example: some of their engineers proposed building a cheaper graphics accelerator for the mass market and they decided not to build them because they'd cannibalise the graphics workstation market. Those engineers left and formed nVidia, and now a graphics workstation is just a commodity PC with a high-end nVidia card in it. SGI had the opportunity to lead a shift in the market and decided not to take it. Those are hard to predict, because they typically rely on advances in manufacturing that suddenly make something economically viable that wasn't previously. Often these things are gradual (in the nVidia/SGI case, the reduction in fabrication costs until it became feasible to make a mass-market GPU) and aren't obvious until a watershed has passed.
I dunno, Kodak died pretty quick. And film-reliant companies Rank/Cintel, who sold film transfer machines for $1m + were suddenly seeing their products dumped in back alleys. But I think we pretty much agree, Samsung is pretty diversified, they probably could weather a stretch of hard times. The same thing happened to Silicon Graphics- million dollar Onyx boxes selling on eBay for $25 (free shipping!) When some disruptive tech comes along, (say an analog to the HDD/SSD that costs a tenth as much and runs twice as fast [on twice the power]) if Seagate didn't invent it, then they are done. Look at what happened to Rim when the iPhone came out. When MySpace deflated, it was like a bubble popping (NO idea why they still exist) Real Networks- once huge, though never viable, now reduced to failed patent trolls. Enron went from 20K employees and massive global holdings to a husk almost overnight. Anyway, the point is, these things sometimes happen with spectacular speed, to the companies you least expect to die.
IBM has managed to reinvent itself, Microsoft is trying, I think. I wouldn't be surprised to see Facebook providing business services and integration along the lines of what IBM does, in the same way that Amazon now markets its internal infrastructure to the world. After all, a company can't live on Likes alone!
Say what you like about Apple, but their shit works. RealPlayer was always crap, and the i remember feeling sorry for any company that used RealNetworks software on their site. That company must have had some seriously high pressure salespeople because then, quicktime blew it away. Even windows media player sucked giant huevos. While quicktime player was JKL-ng glorious porn all over the baby internet, windows media files had a tough time with jumping backwards or playing in reverse.
Seeing that there are still people who've kept their cart latched to the Realnetworks donkey makes me sad.
"One of the biggest challenges is figuring out how to stitch images together across screens, both electronically and through software."
I'm not discounting the intelligence of the designers at Google, but splitting video of any resolution across multiple monitors is not something that needs to be figured out. Christy, Green Hippo, Derivative and dozens of others have been offering solutions to this for years, if not decades. The finest pitch LED screens are about 5mm, these days (I'm talking about the big screens behind [yer favorite rock star], not desktops) and the gaps between the panels are essentially invisible. And solutions abound for color/contrast/brightness/gamma normalization.
There is certainly work to be done with consumer/professional displays meant for the desktop, but if you've got the money to bolt together a couple of monitors and you expect the join to be invisible, you've probably got the money to buy a bigger monitor.
Unless, of course, you're going to shape it like a windshield and stick it on the inside of your car. I don't recall seeing that at any trade shows yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple will replace an iPhone battery for $29. Sure, I can do it myself, for a little less, but for $29 while I wait at the Apple store, I'll take it
So you think because people buy them, they're good?
No, he thinks that because people USE them, they're good.
This prospectus looks like it was written by high school students:
"It is an impressive and already proofen
concept for passive investors and for those who want to enjoy a weekly passive income"
Anyone who put any money into this is an idiot and deserves what they got. You can bet that money is being spent on weed and video games right now.
I predict thy will finally get busted when someone recognizes the "PROOFEN' IT BABY" bumpersticker on mom's station wagon.
I wonder why no one complained about (or remembered) this thing:
https://newatlas.com/mayak-sat...
According to the website, it was designed to orbit for just a month.
csw
And people would have complained that the solar powered raspberry pi was a useless piece of space junk.
you can't win, with haters. :)
csw
Actually, you can put just about any object into orbit at any height you like. Heavier objects don't need to be higher up. There is a lower limit to orbital height, obviously- practically speaking this is 160 km above earth. Any lower and atmospheric drag will reduce your angular velocity and your satellite will fall to earth in flames.
The orbital period is a function of the height of the orbit - all objects (of any weight) will have the same period at the same height. (So the recurring cloud of debris in the film Gravity [which i worked on] is pretty much impossible, even if you cheat and allow an elliptical orbit. I mentioned this to the director after he told me how realistic he needed the film to be, but that my 'opinion' didn't get much traction at the time.)
If you make the orbit high enough (35,786 km) , the period will be the same as the length of a day, and you have a geosynchronous orbit. If you also put your bird over the equator, its geostationary.
just sayin.
csw
Just be grateful I haven't fired up my megawatt bank of ruby lasers and metamaterial focusing array to shine a coke logo on the moon.
It will happen!
forget about combat.... ...these will be fantastic for robbing banks!
hypothetically speaking, of course!
Plus, our idiot president's predecessor is a Hawaiian. Saying "fuck you obama" in this manner is just about something one could expect from 45.
It may be insensitive, and it's definitely offensive (as i believe it's supposed to be) but the fact is that in US prison populations, blacks outnumber latinos 2-1, and latinos outnumber whites by a further 2-1. The reasons for this are, to me, far more offensive than APK's comments, but are also way beyond the scope of what I wanted to point out. Sometimes the actual facts and figures agree with the numbers suggested by prejudice and stereotypes.
That doesn't really excuse APK's comments, but calling him racist based on this is a bit of a stretch, even if he was basing his imagery from nonfactual stereotypes. More likely it's something (unfortunately) ingrained in all of us by years of crime shows, and perhaps a Sublime song. And check out the website. It's a fascinating and awful look at incarceration in america. Its actually terrifying.
I don't need APK to resign from whatever he does, but maybe you both could take a spin through the site below and possibly channel some of that energy into something useful.
Or maybe just better insults.
http://static.prisonpolicy.org...
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/r...
underrated comment!
Adding to guises post...
People are asking why the writers are "striking first" They arent. The WGA has been negotiating the deal with the producers since early March.
ALSO, It's not that the contracts are 'bad'. A decade ago, when most of the last deal was hashed out, there was no original streaming content. The studios were circling the wagons against streaming, and netflix was still doing DVDs. A big negotiating point in tat strike was in fact DVD residuals Streaming was not ignored, it;s just that no one really knew how big it would get and what the side effects of it's proliferation might be. Studios wanted to pay zero residuals on "new media" and naturally the writers werent thrilled with this. So, after protracted negotiations, they struck for 14 weeks and eventually got some concessions. Ironically, the lack of new entertainment on TV was a HUGE boon for Netflix, who got a massive surge of subscribers which wall street didn't really8 notice til the strike was long over. but i digress.
Now that streaming is huge, the writers are pretty glad they held out, but there are fresh issues- the new guys, Amazon, Netflix, etc. don't obey the traditional season paradigm. In the old days, when a writer was hired for ' a season' they got 30 (or whatever) shows out of the deal. Now, with their giant budgets and more elaborate shows, series like "walking Dead might have 16 (but often fewer) episodes per season. Because writers are often exclusive to the show, and they are paid 'per episode', many of them are making half as much. So its back to the table to negotiiate this and similar issues.
The AMPTP is the body that reps the studios, networks and independent producers. They negotiate not only with writers, but with the DGA, SAG-AFTRA, IATSE, the AFM, etc. Suffice to say that they are some hard nosed old bastards. They have a rep for not budging and often, a strike is the only way to make something happen.
By the way, when the writers went on strike in 2007, it was a huge dead weight on production in CA. On a film, lines in scripts get rewritten a little every day During the strike, many directors on already-running films did n ot want to cross picket lines by doing these small rewrites themselves. With writers on strije, there was no one to do it. So a lot of productions stalled, and some stopped altogether. This affects hundreds of thousands of industry workers all over the world.
I was in the middle of a divorce and had just come off a lucrative 18 month job, a little movie about spartans in red capes. My ex's evil lawyer convinced a judge to award payments based on my employed income. I was out of work for about 6 months due to the strike- with the extra monthly whammy to the ex, plus my lawyers (I fired the one who allowed the preceding to happen) I got murdered during the last strike. If this one happens, it wont be as bad, but I don't thing its going to come to a strike.
just my 2 cents.
PS the ex and I get along fine these days, and the kid who was born during the strike is now 10! Yikes!
I agree, it makes no sense! Maybe they save FUEL by driving more miles, and that fuel was the EQUIVALENT of driving 747000 km?
Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe KellyAnn Conway could explain it to us.
cw
F, FB, FBI, I see where this is going...
In cold weather I register the end of my nose as a fingerprint. It works! And the feds will never figure it out, they can try all my fingers and still not get in.
If you want to keep finger functionality, use your imagination- the back of a knuckle or the side of a thumb are just as unique as a fingerprint, and work just as well.
Unlocking ones phone with one's nose will occasionally be met with wisecracks- trying to operate a phone with a nose will probably get you beaten up or arrested. So be careful :)
cw
What if all of us, and our friends, childrem, coworkers, etc. included some kind of inflammatory keywords in the subject or the body of every email we sent? This would have the immediate effect of 'lighting up the switchboard" at the NSA. While a few of us might get a call from the NSA, the vast majority of us could relax, knowing that whatever harmless activity we might actually be emailing about would be overlooked as the NSA investigates 20 billion emails that advocate "per to the hedonists" (it's an anagram- I'm not crazy!)
You would want to be sure that you weren't the only one doing this though. We could probably get some russian spammers to help out... Now that's a headline I'd like to see- SPAMMERS SAVE THE INTERNET!
This might actually work. It would sure be fun try it to see what happens. Who's in?
But a contact lens is stuck to your eye when you look down, doesn't the lens remain in the same spot relative to your eyeball? Or do you just have to keep the close-up stuff in the lower part of your vision frame?
I also can't imagine being a bright young engineer and saying "ya know where I want to work and innovate with all my creative energy and talent? IBM, that's where it's at!"
You don't live in Poughkeepsie.
So the iPod, iPhone and iPad were "nothing special", hardware-wise? I beg to differ.
It takes a long time for a big company to die and many can reinvent themselves. Look at the origins of Nokia and Nintendo - neither was exactly a tech company when they started. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google are big enough to survive ten year of terrible decisions by management (Microsoft already has!) without much pain. The companies that tend to die are ones where some disruptive technology changes their market completely and they don't adapt. SGI was a good example: some of their engineers proposed building a cheaper graphics accelerator for the mass market and they decided not to build them because they'd cannibalise the graphics workstation market. Those engineers left and formed nVidia, and now a graphics workstation is just a commodity PC with a high-end nVidia card in it. SGI had the opportunity to lead a shift in the market and decided not to take it. Those are hard to predict, because they typically rely on advances in manufacturing that suddenly make something economically viable that wasn't previously. Often these things are gradual (in the nVidia/SGI case, the reduction in fabrication costs until it became feasible to make a mass-market GPU) and aren't obvious until a watershed has passed.
I dunno, Kodak died pretty quick. And film-reliant companies Rank/Cintel, who sold film transfer machines for $1m + were suddenly seeing their products dumped in back alleys. But I think we pretty much agree, Samsung is pretty diversified, they probably could weather a stretch of hard times. The same thing happened to Silicon Graphics- million dollar Onyx boxes selling on eBay for $25 (free shipping!) When some disruptive tech comes along, (say an analog to the HDD/SSD that costs a tenth as much and runs twice as fast [on twice the power]) if Seagate didn't invent it, then they are done. Look at what happened to Rim when the iPhone came out. When MySpace deflated, it was like a bubble popping (NO idea why they still exist) Real Networks- once huge, though never viable, now reduced to failed patent trolls. Enron went from 20K employees and massive global holdings to a husk almost overnight. Anyway, the point is, these things sometimes happen with spectacular speed, to the companies you least expect to die.
IBM has managed to reinvent itself, Microsoft is trying, I think. I wouldn't be surprised to see Facebook providing business services and integration along the lines of what IBM does, in the same way that Amazon now markets its internal infrastructure to the world. After all, a company can't live on Likes alone!
(that was awful, i know)
This woman had her return leg cancelled for (almost) this reason!
http://kdvr.com/2014/10/30/spi...
spirit. yech.
cw
Don't you love the smell of freshly mown astroturf?
cw
Say what you like about Apple, but their shit works. RealPlayer was always crap, and the i remember feeling sorry for any company that used RealNetworks software on their site. That company must have had some seriously high pressure salespeople because then, quicktime blew it away. Even windows media player sucked giant huevos. While quicktime player was JKL-ng glorious porn all over the baby internet, windows media files had a tough time with jumping backwards or playing in reverse.
Seeing that there are still people who've kept their cart latched to the Realnetworks donkey makes me sad.
Get a new cable, that will probably fix it. And it's magenta, not pink.
"One of the biggest challenges is figuring out how to stitch images together across screens, both electronically and through software."
I'm not discounting the intelligence of the designers at Google, but splitting video of any resolution across multiple monitors is not something that needs to be figured out. Christy, Green Hippo, Derivative and dozens of others have been offering solutions to this for years, if not decades. The finest pitch LED screens are about 5mm, these days (I'm talking about the big screens behind [yer favorite rock star], not desktops) and the gaps between the panels are essentially invisible. And solutions abound for color/contrast/brightness/gamma normalization.
There is certainly work to be done with consumer/professional displays meant for the desktop, but if you've got the money to bolt together a couple of monitors and you expect the join to be invisible, you've probably got the money to buy a bigger monitor.
Unless, of course, you're going to shape it like a windshield and stick it on the inside of your car. I don't recall seeing that at any trade shows yet.