Re:Someone tell me how you get more real than real
on
Giant Sub-Woofer
·
· Score: 1
Well, at concerts there is a legal limitation on how loud the band is allowed to play. And you're certainly not allowed to more or less put your head into a subwoofer destined to be heard by 10.000 people.
I personally expect that you have to have bad hearing for a start to appreciate the sound - otherwise your brain may get scared and jump out of your skull in self defense. Hell, even old-aged Mozart - death as a post - wouldn't have had problems hearing that thing, i guess.
Anyway, i curious: How do they protect against accidents? A sound system that powerfull *must* be protected against unwanted sounds like clicks and whines...
Any major ISP can (and does) log more info about users that Google ever will be able to.
From Mails, News, http, login-times, to telephone-numbers from wher you dial in, transfer statistics, bank account number and so on... it's all there. Many times combined in a single user-interface for accounting reasons.
Or electric chainsaws. No more stops at the local gas station while you saw yourself through urban history. Just pick up power-packs and/or recharge quickly while passing a power outlet. No more waiting for Doom 3D. Just make your own:-)
Or what about protable particle accelerators like they used in Ghostbusters? Just remember: Never cross the rays unless fighting against something really big:-))
The author has a point when he says that end-user solutions don't stop the spam traversing the network and consuming bandwidth and resources. However, if significant numbers of internet users employed effective end-user anti-spam tools then it would eventually hit the spammers economic return.
Many of the "big" spammers are known by name. Why not starting to charge them a monthly fee like $5/End-User for using the "extended mail services" aka sending commercial mail to the end-user? They'd start only spamming the dumb-ass idiots that buy products from their spam.
BTW, any recent info on Gary Winnick (IMHO graphics) and David Fox (IMHO script), who worked on Maniac Mansion with Ron Gilbert?
So all we now need is some million bucks (or less; how much do top-adventure-makers earn?) to lock Ron and Tim and the rest of the team into the same room for a week of brainstorming. The results could be open-sourced to implement them.
As there is already a very good open-source adventure interpreter called ScummVm, it shouldn't be too hard to get going:-)
...from LucasArts? The Sam&Max team is only a small part, isn't it?
What about all the people that worked on Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Indy, etc...?
Bringing that people together again (outside LucasArts, naturally) should get us some nice adventures and would essentially put that manager-idiots from LucasArts out of a job:-)
It's incredible. I mean, there is no way, I repeat, no way, these guys can be expected to be taken seriously. Without serious (M)$ backing them, how can they go on?
The more SCO goes on with this load of crap, the less i believe that Microsoft is responsible for all this. I mean, yes, Microsoft is selling Vaporware too, but at least they know how to really make money out of it and they handle better in court. And, oh yes, they do have a product they can base their business on...
In a surprise turn of events, SCO says that they need more time...
Yeah right, and they lived happily ever after, or what?
They also have said that these first two lawsuits will be against companies that hold SCO Unix licenses.
Wouldn't that companies have already enough problems having to work with crappy SCO "Unix"? Why making things even worse by sueing them?
Dear SCO: What do you expect? That companies make the same mistake twice by buying another one of your licenses; this time for a product you can't even prove you own?
I must have taken the wrong drugs or something to have this prolonged nightmare. Can somebody please wake me up?
Well part of it is not allowing other countries to get "freebies" to run their own programs. Also a lot of NASA stuff can be used for all kinds of military stuff.
On the other side: sharing information on how to do a specific scientific mission to mars couldn't be bad for Nasa. Every probe Europe (or someone else) send there helps Nasa on its own quest for a manned mission.
How bad for Nasa would it really be if Europe would send 10 copies of the Mars Rovers there and puts all information in a publically available archive? I mean, you'd buyed 2 Rovers and got another 10 for free. You'd then have enough sites readily explored for making your sample return mission hit a real jackpot without too much gambling:-)
Unfortunately no can do... all that stuff is ITAR sensitive.
I'll probably never understand the US security policies. While the US doesn't allow technology used in scientific programs to be exported, the government itself exports weapons of mass destruction to countries they don't trust. After all, most of the WPM's in Iraq where labeled "Made in US"...
Anyway, more dangerous navigation technology has been long around commercially and no-one objects. I'm taking about the highly sophisticated auto-pilots, now even available for small smaller aircrafts. With only a little bit of tweaking, you might be able to turn your commercial learjet into a big cruise missile. It might not be exact enough to hit a specific sky-scraper (although it might), but if you target Manhattan low enough you sure hit something important...
Wonder why it's still legal to possess airplanes and cars (car-bombs) in the US...
Sorry to disagree with you, but SCO might never beat 3D Realms and their "Duke Nukem whenever". They even managed to get the Wired's first "Vaporware Lifetime Achievement Award", see here.
At least, SCO hasn't reached the stage where they simply set their release dates to "When it's done":-)
regardless of religion, lets say for a moment that you were an all powerful diety, would you seriously create an entire universe to support but ONE intelligent life form?
To quote from a movie: "That would be an awfull waste of space"
Of course that would be mostly mars rocks but the idea has been there over a long time. If you could make sure the sponsors don't interfere with the mission (except the names of the rocks and a big logo on the spacecraft) and if the Nasa would accept the money it could work.
First step could be to paint sponsor logos on the rockets and make movies of the take-offs. Image a red Titan-Centaur rocket in Coca Cola design sending a sample return mission to the red planet. Making a whole advertising campaign out of it would'nt be that hard.
Just imagine, the Mars/Cola rocket standing there, shining red with the white logo, on the pad. You here the countdown "4.. 3.. 2.. 1" then the engine starts and the rocket lifts of from the pad, you here "Ride of the Valkyries" as background music. As the rocket speeds into the sky, a subtitle shows "Join on Exploring the red planet."
Maybe you could ask your chiefs to release more technical details, especially on the drive system and the autonomous waypoint navigation.
I'm currently working here on the design of a driving robot to fool around in the back-yard (complete with slow telemetry, signal-delay and automatic driving; no spectrometers and rock-grinders though, they ARE somewhat of my budget range). I'm researching on how to run through a planetary mission when command-uplink capability is limited or completly lost (only data downlink available). Just like the mission plans call for Voyager.
BTW: The thing is called ESE (the Earth Surface Explorer) and should be able to fly its first mission to the as yet mostly unexplored third planet in search for higher life forms by the end of next year. Currently planned primary target is the "vegetable garden" formation in the "backyard" region:-)
I'd say that the ISS will be fundamental in both manned and unmanned missions to mars in the future.
First of all, it is important that a sample return mission from mars does not go to earth directly but gets the first analysis done in orbit (an that would mean ISS), to minimize the risk of contaminating earth's biosphere with extraterrestrial life-forms.
And it will also be likely that a manned mission's mars rocket would be assembled in orbit because a rocket like that should be fairly large, because the astronauts have to live in it for at least 2 years, so the living space (and the storage space as well) has to be fairly large. In my opinion, the living space should at least approach that of the old MIR space station to protect from the greatest psychological problems...
Hard to say. Except for earth, we don't have any examples yet, which means there could be only very rude educated guesswork.
But i'd say the chances are pretty good, since it's known (or at least highly possible) that primitive live like one-cell-organism could survive in space for a long time through hybernating. And it is known that planetary material could be ejected into space (like from meteor impacts or violent vulcanic explosions like in Krakatau - see here and here and land on another planet like mars.
Although the chances of survival for one-cell-organisms in a single incident are fairly small, there must have been thousands - if not millions - of these catastrophic events in earths past. One of the biggest was presumably the asteroid that created a thermonuclear winter about 65 million years ago. This one is known to have ejected material out of earths orbit.
So, all things considered, chances are that some bacteria could have survived an ejection from earth, the travel through interplanetary space, reentry into mars' atmosphere and adaption to mars' climate.
For the chances of complex life-forms: Well, it pretty much depends on many factors: The past climate of mars, if the first life-forms were native or not - and if not - how sucessfull presumed introduced life-forms from other planets adapted to the given and changing climate on mars.
As for fish, i'm don't really know, i'll rather bet on plant-life and rather primitive water-based or sand-based animal life-forms.
Probably yes. But it will take much longer than on mars.
AFAIK, Mars lost much of it's atmosphere (and i assume its water as well because of the lowering atmospheric pressure) to the solar wind, because it has no magnetic field (or at least no global one), so the solar wind could rip the uppermost part of the atmosphere away.
Of course, this process takes millions ans billions of years, but mars has been around a long time...
They'd have to modify all development tools and backup software as well.
I mean, it would be simple to do something like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl open($orig, "mymp3.mp3"); open($copy, ">", "piratecopy.mp3"); $copy =; close $orig; close $copy;
And whatabout even the most simplistic backup tools?
tar xv
would normally read a directory from streamer tape. How can they even MAKE tar distiungish between illegal copied mp3's and ones that you lost during a harddisk failure?
Anyway, IMHO the greatest threat to RIAA (and similar organisations) is probably not the file-sharing per-se but the ability of artists getting noticed (and therefore money) without having contracts with the Fuhrers in MusicCity Headquarters.
Remember: the greatest threat to any monopoly is that your worst enemy finds good and cheap distribution and advertising channels! Even well-known artists start releasing some of their songs for free. To quote SCO: "Giving away something for free is against the law because it hinders us to make profit!"
(Maybe they should sell products that are worth our money instead of pestering us with technology that won't make it anyway)
SCO decides to sue a End-User and that user is you, what would you do?
Open a public funding, win in court ('cause i'm using NetBSD, not Linux, at the moment). With the rest of the fund i'll buy enough shares of SCO the get the control.
Might be quite interesting to watch what happens if i'd give the shares to Stallman as a present:-))
There's nothing wrong with 30-year-old rust-bucket space technology as long as it does its work cheap and reliable.
The old (ancient?) Soyuz launcher is a nice example: Nearly 1700 launches up until now, most of them sucessfull. It is in fact so cost effective, that Arianespace is planing to use Soyuz at Guiana Space Center from 2006 on (as well continuing to use them in Baikonur).
Do 5 seperately controlled halogen lamps that could be controlled via network *and* local keypads and automatic timers count as a hacking project?
Well, at least the software is a bit hacky, because i only had 20 Bytes (!) of RAM in the controller (8 of them for serial input/output and another 10 for the timers and menu-controls), i had to use "Year" and "Month" from the internal clock as temporary variables for local keypad input.
Works great, although there's some kind of race condition when you're typing at the moment a month ends:-)
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Well, at concerts there is a legal limitation on how loud the band is allowed to play. And you're certainly not allowed to more or less put your head into a subwoofer destined to be heard by 10.000 people.
I personally expect that you have to have bad hearing for a start to appreciate the sound - otherwise your brain may get scared and jump out of your skull in self defense. Hell, even old-aged Mozart - death as a post - wouldn't have had problems hearing that thing, i guess.
Anyway, i curious: How do they protect against accidents? A sound system that powerfull *must* be protected against unwanted sounds like clicks and whines...
Any major ISP can (and does) log more info about users that Google ever will be able to.
From Mails, News, http, login-times, to telephone-numbers from wher you dial in, transfer statistics, bank account number and so on... it's all there. Many times combined in a single user-interface for accounting reasons.
So what?
Think big - think railguns.
:-)
:-))
Or electric chainsaws. No more stops at the local gas station while you saw yourself through urban history. Just pick up power-packs and/or recharge quickly while passing a power outlet. No more waiting for Doom 3D. Just make your own
Or what about protable particle accelerators like they used in Ghostbusters? Just remember: Never cross the rays unless fighting against something really big
If you want a nice, compile-it-yourself single-user OS that has not even a single feature you didn't put in there yourself try BlinkOS
The author has a point when he says that end-user solutions don't stop the spam traversing the network and consuming bandwidth and resources. However, if significant numbers of internet users employed effective end-user anti-spam tools then it would eventually hit the spammers economic return.
Many of the "big" spammers are known by name. Why not starting to charge them a monthly fee like $5/End-User for using the "extended mail services" aka sending commercial mail to the end-user? They'd start only spamming the dumb-ass idiots that buy products from their spam.
Nice, thanx!
:-)
BTW, any recent info on Gary Winnick (IMHO graphics) and David Fox (IMHO script), who worked on Maniac Mansion with Ron Gilbert?
So all we now need is some million bucks (or less; how much do top-adventure-makers earn?) to lock Ron and Tim and the rest of the team into the same room for a week of brainstorming. The results could be open-sourced to implement them.
As there is already a very good open-source adventure interpreter called ScummVm, it shouldn't be too hard to get going
Wanna start funding, anyone?
...from LucasArts? The Sam&Max team is only a small part, isn't it?
:-)
What about all the people that worked on Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Indy, etc...?
Bringing that people together again (outside LucasArts, naturally) should get us some nice adventures and would essentially put that manager-idiots from LucasArts out of a job
You could adapt well-known game-shows to that trend.
Jeopardy would be a nice example:
Gamer:"I take Sueing Jokes for 500"
Moderator:"'We sue tomorrow'"
Gamer: "What is SCO?"
It's incredible. I mean, there is no way, I repeat, no way, these guys can be expected to be taken seriously. Without serious (M)$ backing them, how can they go on?
The more SCO goes on with this load of crap, the less i believe that Microsoft is responsible for all this. I mean, yes, Microsoft is selling Vaporware too, but at least they know how to really make money out of it and they handle better in court. And, oh yes, they do have a product they can base their business on...
In a surprise turn of events, SCO says that they need more time...
Yeah right, and they lived happily ever after, or what?
They also have said that these first two lawsuits will be against companies that hold SCO Unix licenses.
Wouldn't that companies have already enough problems having to work with crappy SCO "Unix"? Why making things even worse by sueing them?
Dear SCO: What do you expect? That companies make the same mistake twice by buying another one of your licenses; this time for a product you can't even prove you own?
I must have taken the wrong drugs or something to have this prolonged nightmare. Can somebody please wake me up?
Well part of it is not allowing other countries to get "freebies" to run their own programs. Also a lot of NASA stuff can be used for all kinds of military stuff.
:-)
On the other side: sharing information on how to do a specific scientific mission to mars couldn't be bad for Nasa. Every probe Europe (or someone else) send there helps Nasa on its own quest for a manned mission.
How bad for Nasa would it really be if Europe would send 10 copies of the Mars Rovers there and puts all information in a publically available archive? I mean, you'd buyed 2 Rovers and got another 10 for free. You'd then have enough sites readily explored for making your sample return mission hit a real jackpot without too much gambling
Unfortunately no can do... all that stuff is ITAR sensitive.
I'll probably never understand the US security policies. While the US doesn't allow technology used in scientific programs to be exported, the government itself exports weapons of mass destruction to countries they don't trust. After all, most of the WPM's in Iraq where labeled "Made in US"...
Anyway, more dangerous navigation technology has been long around commercially and no-one objects. I'm taking about the highly sophisticated auto-pilots, now even available for small smaller aircrafts. With only a little bit of tweaking, you might be able to turn your commercial learjet into a big cruise missile. It might not be exact enough to hit a specific sky-scraper (although it might), but if you target Manhattan low enough you sure hit something important...
Wonder why it's still legal to possess airplanes and cars (car-bombs) in the US...
Sorry to disagree with you, but SCO might never beat 3D Realms and their "Duke Nukem whenever". They even managed to get the Wired's first "Vaporware Lifetime Achievement Award", see here.
:-)
At least, SCO hasn't reached the stage where they simply set their release dates to "When it's done"
regardless of religion, lets say for a moment that you were an all powerful diety, would you seriously create an entire universe to support but ONE intelligent life form? To quote from a movie: "That would be an awfull waste of space"
Of course that would be mostly mars rocks but the idea has been there over a long time. If you could make sure the sponsors don't interfere with the mission (except the names of the rocks and a big logo on the spacecraft) and if the Nasa would accept the money it could work.
.. 3 .. 2 .. 1" then the engine starts and the rocket lifts of from the pad, you here "Ride of the Valkyries" as background music. As the rocket speeds into the sky, a subtitle shows "Join on Exploring the red planet."
First step could be to paint sponsor logos on the rockets and make movies of the take-offs. Image a red Titan-Centaur rocket in Coca Cola design sending a sample return mission to the red planet. Making a whole advertising campaign out of it would'nt be that hard.
Just imagine, the Mars/Cola rocket standing there, shining red with the white logo, on the pad. You here the countdown "4
Maybe you could ask your chiefs to release more technical details, especially on the drive system and the autonomous waypoint navigation.
:-)
I'm currently working here on the design of a driving robot to fool around in the back-yard (complete with slow telemetry, signal-delay and automatic driving; no spectrometers and rock-grinders though, they ARE somewhat of my budget range). I'm researching on how to run through a planetary mission when command-uplink capability is limited or completly lost (only data downlink available). Just like the mission plans call for Voyager.
BTW: The thing is called ESE (the Earth Surface Explorer) and should be able to fly its first mission to the as yet mostly unexplored third planet in search for higher life forms by the end of next year. Currently planned primary target is the "vegetable garden" formation in the "backyard" region
I'd say that the ISS will be fundamental in both manned and unmanned missions to mars in the future.
First of all, it is important that a sample return mission from mars does not go to earth directly but gets the first analysis done in orbit (an that would mean ISS), to minimize the risk of contaminating earth's biosphere with extraterrestrial life-forms.
And it will also be likely that a manned mission's mars rocket would be assembled in orbit because a rocket like that should be fairly large, because the astronauts have to live in it for at least 2 years, so the living space (and the storage space as well) has to be fairly large. In my opinion, the living space should at least approach that of the old MIR space station to protect from the greatest psychological problems...
Hard to say. Except for earth, we don't have any examples yet, which means there could be only very rude educated guesswork.
But i'd say the chances are pretty good, since it's known (or at least highly possible) that primitive live like one-cell-organism could survive in space for a long time through hybernating. And it is known that planetary material could be ejected into space (like from meteor impacts or violent vulcanic explosions like in Krakatau - see here and here and land on another planet like mars.
Although the chances of survival for one-cell-organisms in a single incident are fairly small, there must have been thousands - if not millions - of these catastrophic events in earths past. One of the biggest was presumably the asteroid that created a thermonuclear winter about 65 million years ago. This one is known to have ejected material out of earths orbit.
So, all things considered, chances are that some bacteria could have survived an ejection from earth, the travel through interplanetary space, reentry into mars' atmosphere and adaption to mars' climate.
For the chances of complex life-forms: Well, it pretty much depends on many factors: The past climate of mars, if the first life-forms were native or not - and if not - how sucessfull presumed introduced life-forms from other planets adapted to the given and changing climate on mars.
As for fish, i'm don't really know, i'll rather bet on plant-life and rather primitive water-based or sand-based animal life-forms.
Probably yes. But it will take much longer than on mars.
AFAIK, Mars lost much of it's atmosphere (and i assume its water as well because of the lowering atmospheric pressure) to the solar wind, because it has no magnetic field (or at least no global one), so the solar wind could rip the uppermost part of the atmosphere away.
Of course, this process takes millions ans billions of years, but mars has been around a long time...
Well, it's a space probe in a solar orbit, so you could say it's a satellite of the sun...
Anyway, AFAIK they didn't contact it per se, they only listened for and recieved its telemetry.
They'd have to modify all development tools and backup software as well.
;
I mean, it would be simple to do something like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl
open($orig, "mymp3.mp3");
open($copy, ">", "piratecopy.mp3");
$copy =
close $orig;
close $copy;
And whatabout even the most simplistic backup tools?
tar xv
would normally read a directory from streamer tape. How can they even MAKE tar distiungish between illegal copied mp3's and ones that you lost during a harddisk failure?
Anyway, IMHO the greatest threat to RIAA (and similar organisations) is probably not the file-sharing per-se but the ability of artists getting noticed (and therefore money) without having contracts with the Fuhrers in MusicCity Headquarters.
Remember: the greatest threat to any monopoly is that your worst enemy finds good and cheap distribution and advertising channels! Even well-known artists start releasing some of their songs for free. To quote SCO: "Giving away something for free is against the law because it hinders us to make profit!"
(Maybe they should sell products that are worth our money instead of pestering us with technology that won't make it anyway)
SCO decides to sue a End-User and that user is you, what would you do?
:-))
Open a public funding, win in court ('cause i'm using NetBSD, not Linux, at the moment). With the rest of the fund i'll buy enough shares of SCO the get the control.
Might be quite interesting to watch what happens if i'd give the shares to Stallman as a present
There's nothing wrong with 30-year-old rust-bucket space technology as long as it does its work cheap and reliable.
The old (ancient?) Soyuz launcher is a nice example: Nearly 1700 launches up until now, most of them sucessfull. It is in fact so cost effective, that Arianespace is planing to use Soyuz at Guiana Space Center from 2006 on (as well continuing to use them in Baikonur).
Thats cool!
:-)
It just gave me an idea on how to solve my forgetting-to-water-my-plants problem cheaper than planned
Do 5 seperately controlled halogen lamps that could be controlled via network *and* local keypads and automatic timers count as a hacking project?
:-)
Well, at least the software is a bit hacky, because i only had 20 Bytes (!) of RAM in the controller (8 of them for serial input/output and another 10 for the timers and menu-controls), i had to use "Year" and "Month" from the internal clock as temporary variables for local keypad input.
Works great, although there's some kind of race condition when you're typing at the moment a month ends