In a few years someone will come out with an ebook reader that looks like a typical hard cover novel. It will have a slightly curved, crisp black on white, 300 dpi, two page display that has the same contrast ratio as a printed page.
THEN ebooks will take off. When you can "curl up" with one, and no sooner.
FWIW, you might want to look at the DirecTivo- Tivos integrated with a DirecTV tuner. I have the Hughes HDVR2 (they changed the name just recently to SD-something) with dual tuners.
1. It records the original data stream off the satellite, so playback is as good as the original. There's no high, medium, low quality settings on this one. There's about 35 hours on this model, which I find is way more than enough.
2. With DirecTV, the monthly Tivo charge is reduced to $6. Personally, I make good living, so this really doesn't bother me. If it pays for new features now and then, fine. And the guide data is pretty good.
3. Tivo simply has the best software. I love 'puters, but I can't imagine wasting the time to set up some kludge using Windows or Linux or whatever. Nothing beats an integrated box for $199. Nice conflict resolution and the To Do list is more useful than you might initially think. Nice search functions, too.
I started writing Visual Basic programs that generate VHDL code about 8 years ago. If I could get my act together and tighten up (read: productize the GUI) the program that generates Viterbi decoders, I could probably sell the thing.
I don't usually nitpick erotic fantasies about sexy alien space vixens, but if they were tall, skinny and evolved in a lower gravity, I think you'd be the one having to worry about snapping them in half.
A lot of work has been done in recent years on both self driving cars (the smarts are in the car) and automated highways (the smarts are in the roadway). The technical problems are not really that steep.
Several *years* ago CalTrans here in California had a test were a single human driver drove a cars, and a small "platoon" of automated cars followed along behind in a freeway lane maintaining distace and direction of travel. It was way cool.:)
The real problems are (as is the usual case these days) legal ones.
If you're injured when your automated car crashes on the automated highway, who gets sued? Would you want to enter a market like that?
I'm reminded of a drug many years back that held promise to allow severe schizophrenics to lead normal lives. However there was some very very small chance the drug could cause cancer. No one would sell it here because of the potential for lawsuits. Lawyers. No one asked the schizophrenics.
I meant with the right animators. I wouldn't want it done unless Watterson was at least the head writer.
Is Miyazaki busy?;-)
I alwasy thought a series would be fun. Use traditional 2D hand drawn, but switch to toon CGI for Spaceman Spiff or Stupendous Man segments. That would be to make Calivin's fantasies look crisper and more realistic than the mundane world.:)
As long as it isn't too good. Scott Adams in his retrospective book (Seven Years Of Highly Defective People) said that he received complaints when he started using a computer to do lettering when he was having some issues with a hand injury. It was one of those fonts design to look like hand lettering. Personally, I don't think I would have noticed if he hadn't brought attention to it. As long as it's legible, the text blaoons are sort of invisible to me after so many years of reading comics of all kinds. I read the text without thinking that I am reading text.
I agreed with many of Watterson's controversial points of view involving comics and how they are sold and marketed
I really respected his decision not to license any Calvin & Hobbes products, although I did think perhaps a single item- a simple plush Hobbes doll identical to the "toy" Hobbes in the strip- would have been cool. There's also a part of me that feels a *little* fan service is a good thing.
And I still I think C&H could make a killer cartoon in the right hands.
the new medium can change the traditional "left-to-right in a rectangular frame" paradigm.
I find this to be quite true when I look at comics in the *.jp domain. Everything is right to left for some reason, and the characters speak in little picture symbols. Must be the Internatioanl Date Line.
I have a hard time with comics from the *.au domain, thought. They appear on my monitor upside down.
I know there's a lot of starry-eye feelings about the moon landings, but ultimately Apollo was "Beat the Russians" who were busy beating themselves into the ground anyway. It was a big build up, and then a big blowout into... nothing. NASA should be reduced to an agency with two missions:
1. Unmanned science and exploration. Some things, like Big Science, just don't have a clear monetary profit motive, but are valuable science, so stuff like Mars rovers and Europa landers are fine.
2. The promotion and highly targeted funding of commercial and private sector space efforts. One of the main impediments to these things are the up front investments being beyond the dreams of even the venture capitalists. There were some numbers run a while back that indicated a small solar panel farm in space could pay for itself in the first year of operation, but there was no one outside of a major government who could afford to actually put it there.
The taxpayers, of course, would get a cut of any profits from the commercial ventures, just as any investor would. A check in the mail thanks to orbital utilities would do more to inspire the average man on the street to appreciate space than men on Mars. I really think we as a society have progressed beyond the gee-whiz stage of space into a "What can we do with it?" stage. And it's a fair question.
We really should have followed the vision of Von Braun and his contemporaries and gone in solid, incremental, logical steps. We'd have had a rotating ring station by now, and currently have a presence in space of more than 100 people at any given moment. The manned mission to Mars would have happened in the late 1990's because we'd have an assembly platform for the craft in Earth orbit. I submit the payoff to civilization would be orders of magnitude higher.
And Martin Landau really might have been on the moon in 1999.;-)
Generally true for stars and other deep space objects, but you can observe Mars from the middle of a brightly lit mall parking lot.
Heck, I once located a crescent Venus in the middle of the afternoon when it was at its peak in brightness. It was odd seeing a crescent (through a telescope, of course) floating in blue sky that wasn't the moon.
Mars has greater seasonal variations, but it does have predictable seasons. This is due to its orbital eccentricity rather than any stability in its axis of rotation. In fact, Mars' eccentricity is second only to that of Pluto.
What you are probably thiniing of was a research paper in the 1990s that claimed Mars' axial tilt varies chaotically between 10 and 50 degrees. However, these variations happened over millions of years. The cuttent tilt is twenty-ummmmmm.... something degrees.
"It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it."
It's expensive and dangerous and there quite simply is no political will to go to Mars, and politics, sadly, rules the minds of man.
Personally, I love space stuff, but even I would like to see some more logical things done around Earth (orbital industries, commercial ventures, etc.) before we wind up with another Apollo-loike boondoggle.
I think it's more a fascination amongst the public, and the astronomers are feeding it. Mars is interesting because it's another place on which we could potentially walk around. You couldn't exactly go traipsing around in a polo shirt and Levis shorts, but you know what I mean. Carl Sagan put it best when he said, after the Viking landings, Mars would now always be "a place" as opposed to some abstract idea.
And they have sent probes to Venus. There's even some ground based images from a Russain lander, but they don't show very much. The surface has been fairly well mapped by radar bearing probes from the US.
href="http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/ast121/lectures/ surface_venus.html">The surface of venus.
The Martian sky looks reddish from the ground because of the dust content. From space (or Earth) we are seeing the upper atmosphere which is just gasses (CO2 mainly), and gasses scatter the blue light (look up "Rayleigh scattering").
Actually, there are some on the fringe (but not quite into "the face on Mars" fringe) insists that the Martian sky *is* blue from the ground. They claim that NASA's color correction of the incoming images, dating all the way back to the Viking landers, is off. The URL escapes me at the moment, I'm afraid.
Slashdot Mirror
Stone tablets last thousands of years, and it's off the shelf technology.
Let it out slowly.
Now chant.
"It's OK to spend part of my day away from computers and the Internet."
Repeat as necessary.
Wiggle your toes and clench your buttocks if that helps. Actually, that's good advice for any time of day.
Ideally, there'd be a good sized rechargable, and the reader would sit in a charger stand when not in use.
THEN ebooks will take off. When you can "curl up" with one, and no sooner.
Did I miss a memo? When was cruise missile production moved to Mexico????
Does everything have to have sinister underpinnings to geekdom? Occam's Razor used to be a such favorite in the old days.
1. It records the original data stream off the satellite, so playback is as good as the original. There's no high, medium, low quality settings on this one. There's about 35 hours on this model, which I find is way more than enough.
2. With DirecTV, the monthly Tivo charge is reduced to $6. Personally, I make good living, so this really doesn't bother me. If it pays for new features now and then, fine. And the guide data is pretty good.
3. Tivo simply has the best software. I love 'puters, but I can't imagine wasting the time to set up some kludge using Windows or Linux or whatever. Nothing beats an integrated box for $199. Nice conflict resolution and the To Do list is more useful than you might initially think. Nice search functions, too.
But if the late James Morasco was the tile maker he went to his grave with his secret and is now presumably on the planet Jupiter getting a tan.
So the crushing, pulping pressures of metallic hydrogen gives one a nice tan, eh?
The Tax Code of the United States. ;-)
I started writing Visual Basic programs that generate VHDL code about 8 years ago. If I could get my act together and tighten up (read: productize the GUI) the program that generates Viterbi decoders, I could probably sell the thing.
I'd try doggy style. But that's me.
Several *years* ago CalTrans here in California had a test were a single human driver drove a cars, and a small "platoon" of automated cars followed along behind in a freeway lane maintaining distace and direction of travel. It was way cool. :)
The real problems are (as is the usual case these days) legal ones.
If you're injured when your automated car crashes on the automated highway, who gets sued? Would you want to enter a market like that?
I'm reminded of a drug many years back that held promise to allow severe schizophrenics to lead normal lives. However there was some very very small chance the drug could cause cancer. No one would sell it here because of the potential for lawsuits. Lawyers. No one asked the schizophrenics.
Is Miyazaki busy? ;-)
I alwasy thought a series would be fun. Use traditional 2D hand drawn, but switch to toon CGI for Spaceman Spiff or Stupendous Man segments. That would be to make Calivin's fantasies look crisper and more realistic than the mundane world. :)
As long as it isn't too good. Scott Adams in his retrospective book (Seven Years Of Highly Defective People) said that he received complaints when he started using a computer to do lettering when he was having some issues with a hand injury. It was one of those fonts design to look like hand lettering. Personally, I don't think I would have noticed if he hadn't brought attention to it. As long as it's legible, the text blaoons are sort of invisible to me after so many years of reading comics of all kinds. I read the text without thinking that I am reading text.
I really respected his decision not to license any Calvin & Hobbes products, although I did think perhaps a single item- a simple plush Hobbes doll identical to the "toy" Hobbes in the strip- would have been cool. There's also a part of me that feels a *little* fan service is a good thing.
And I still I think C&H could make a killer cartoon in the right hands.
I find this to be quite true when I look at comics in the *.jp domain. Everything is right to left for some reason, and the characters speak in little picture symbols. Must be the Internatioanl Date Line.
I have a hard time with comics from the *.au domain, thought. They appear on my monitor upside down.
Which, of course, was my implied humor as opposed to your blatant spelling out it it.
Or does he know his audience?
1. Unmanned science and exploration. Some things, like Big Science, just don't have a clear monetary profit motive, but are valuable science, so stuff like Mars rovers and Europa landers are fine.
2. The promotion and highly targeted funding of commercial and private sector space efforts. One of the main impediments to these things are the up front investments being beyond the dreams of even the venture capitalists. There were some numbers run a while back that indicated a small solar panel farm in space could pay for itself in the first year of operation, but there was no one outside of a major government who could afford to actually put it there.
The taxpayers, of course, would get a cut of any profits from the commercial ventures, just as any investor would. A check in the mail thanks to orbital utilities would do more to inspire the average man on the street to appreciate space than men on Mars. I really think we as a society have progressed beyond the gee-whiz stage of space into a "What can we do with it?" stage. And it's a fair question.
We really should have followed the vision of Von Braun and his contemporaries and gone in solid, incremental, logical steps. We'd have had a rotating ring station by now, and currently have a presence in space of more than 100 people at any given moment. The manned mission to Mars would have happened in the late 1990's because we'd have an assembly platform for the craft in Earth orbit. I submit the payoff to civilization would be orders of magnitude higher.
And Martin Landau really might have been on the moon in 1999. ;-)
Here's a better one one without whitespace.
Click on the Venera links.
Heck, I once located a crescent Venus in the middle of the afternoon when it was at its peak in brightness. It was odd seeing a crescent (through a telescope, of course) floating in blue sky that wasn't the moon.
What you are probably thiniing of was a research paper in the 1990s that claimed Mars' axial tilt varies chaotically between 10 and 50 degrees. However, these variations happened over millions of years. The cuttent tilt is twenty-ummmmmm.... something degrees.
It's expensive and dangerous and there quite simply is no political will to go to Mars, and politics, sadly, rules the minds of man.
Personally, I love space stuff, but even I would like to see some more logical things done around Earth (orbital industries, commercial ventures, etc.) before we wind up with another Apollo-loike boondoggle.
And they have sent probes to Venus. There's even some ground based images from a Russain lander, but they don't show very much. The surface has been fairly well mapped by radar bearing probes from the US.
href="http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/ast121/lectures/ surface_venus.html">The surface of venus.
Actually, there are some on the fringe (but not quite into "the face on Mars" fringe) insists that the Martian sky *is* blue from the ground. They claim that NASA's color correction of the incoming images, dating all the way back to the Viking landers, is off. The URL escapes me at the moment, I'm afraid.