"All your base are belong to us" (often shortened to "All Your Base", AYBABTU or simply AYB) is an Engrish phrase that sparked an Internet phenomenon in 2001 and 2002, with spread of flash animation that ubiquitously depicted the slogan. The text is taken from the opening cut scene of the English version of the 1989 Japanese video game Zero Wing by Toaplan. Its brief but intense popularity derived in part from its poor translation into English and partly from its near-accidental adoption by a core group of Internet humorists. While the wildfire has died down, "All Your Base" is still a well-known reference among gamers and programmers.
I'm in the same camp. Yeah, I use GMail's POP3 access to download all my mail. But I still lost all the e-mail addresses, etc. to Hotmail's purge, and even if I had backed all the data up, it would only be available where I backed it up, not in a web-based mail client.
If it had happened just once, I wouldn't feel too bad about it. But I've been the recipient of several purges. They (MSN/Hotmail) have established themselves as untrustworthy with my data. Google, to date, has not.
I wouldn't trust my content to them. Every time MSN "upgrades" Hotmail, I lose everything. Luckily I migrated to GMail years ago, so don't lose anything important these days. That all went in the first "great purge." I logged onto my Hotmail account one day to find several years of archived messages had gone up in smoke, and (more importantly), lists of addresses. For some of my contacts, it was the sole repository for information on them.
AFAIK, most of Saturn's ring objects are made up of water ice. Actually, the most central spot (as in, we don't have to keep searching around for another source) of methane out there seems to be Titan. Downsystem propellant could be manufactured from the water ice in the rings, and bottles of liquid methane could be lobbed off of Titan. For that matter, given the low escape velocity of Titan, a mass driver could send the bottles on a pretty good flight path without any chemical-based oomph. A little guidance along the way could insert it into a burn-up orbit over Mars.
Others have speculated that Saturn would be a good refueling depot for extra-system travel. I'm not sure what the dV is to get from LEO to Saturn orbit on a "fast track," but being able to refuel there and re-boost might be a good method to get somewhere else (Proxima Centauri, for instance) in enough time for mission designers to start and end a project within the scope of their careers. Or at least have the opportunity to train the person that will witness the arrival.
It's been years since I read them, but didn't they grab methane ice chunks out of Saturn's rings? I don't think it's a matter of us not having the technology to do something like that, but more one of not having tried that using the technology we have. It would be slow, but a nuclear reactor powering an array of ion engines or something similar could navigate ice cubes downsystem fairly easy. Furthermore, if it's methane we're shipping, why not use some of it to power the thrusters to escape Saturn's orbit and head down? Once escape velocity is achieved, solar orbit deceleration could be handled by the ion engines.
Okay, but what is that, about three and a half days? That's far short of "seven to 14 days" mentioned in the blurb.
If you look at this description of a General Purpose Heat Source Module (dontcha love those military descriptive names?), you see that the major problem with an RTG is, as you alluded to, mass and not size.
GPHS modules stand approximately two inches tall and have a base that is almost square with sides less than four inches in length. Each GPHS module is designed to weigh no more than 1.44 kilograms and produces a nominal thermal power of 250 watts at beginning of mission.
Three pounds is a lot for something a few cubic inches in size. But, given a 7% nominal thermal-electric conversion efficiency (I based my math on some numbers for the Cassini mission), 250 W thermal should produce 16 W electric out of that three pound brick (by adding a little more mass for a thermopile). One of those bricks contains four Pu-238 pellets, and the diagram suggests that they're the same design on each side, so one could presume a half-sized, two-pellet GPHS would produce eight watts at maybe two pounds total. Eight watts isn't much, but it's going to do it for longer than the average term of service for a soldier.
Politics aside, it sure sounds like an attractive solution.
I'll grant you that those things are much lighter and more power rich than LIon batteries, but it's still huge compared to the target size of the whole package the military is looking for, and 180 W/h isn't enough to do the sort of thing they need, AFAIK. I still think RTGs are the answer.
I presume the green circles are "radio footprints." Of course, whomever made this either didn't realize that overlapping the radio footprints doesn't make the devices communicate (the footprint has to reach the next device over), or figured that people reading wouldn't know and were going for visual impact instead.
Being military, they'll probably use RTGs to charge capacitors. I suspect a fairly small RTG would generate enough juice to charge ultra-capacitors for use on the high-energy stuff like movement. AKAImBatman would know more, if he's reading...
I seem to remember Al Gore getting jacked up for making a campaign-related call from his office at the White House. It was all over the news for weeks. His answer, after you trimmed off all the rhetoric, was, "Oops. Sorry." It seemed like they were going to hang him or something. Nowadays no one would even bother reporting that.
When I switched from Linux to OSX last year, I immediately installed Firefox because that's what I'd been using before. A first look at Safari found several things "missing" that I felt I needed. There's a lot to dislike about the Mac implementation of Firefox 2.0, but it was at least something I knew.
Then I was at a conference, and the guy sitting next to me was using a MacBook Pro. We started comparing notes, with him extolling the virtues of Safari. After getting a few misconceptions cleared up, I started to look deeper into it. A trip to the Mac store to talk to one of the "Geniuses" led me to http://www.pimpmysafari.com/. I'm working on getting all the pieces installed that I want, but it looks like I can make Safari into the browser I want it to be.
Links? Slacker! In my day, we read the HTML document raw. We had to interpret the tags ourselves. No DNS, either. We kept lists of IP addresses written on shirtsleeves. And they weren't our shirtsleeves, either. We had to steal them from our neighbors...
I almost hate to respond to this, but I'm going to anyway...
Vista Home Premium upgrade @ $150
Upgrade from what? When you buy a Mini, you're getting a new computer, and a full OS license. Buying an upgrade OS package implies that you have a qualified OS to upgrade from. So, add $200. Also, are those prices local to you? Otherwise, add S&H. Don't forget to add running around time (what's that worth?), build time, dealing with incompatibilities and DOA components. Now what's your' price at? Over $1500? For that you could buy a 20" iMac, and now you have to add the price of a 20" flat panel display to your list.
Every time there's one of these articles, there's a post like yours. Every time, someone shoots it down with a post similar to mine. It was just my turn, I guess.
I wonder if they untangle in a predictable fashion. If they did, then maybe we could send a bundle of entangled photons to a remote location, then purposely alter their states, henceforth altering the states of their entangled bretheren. If it happens predictably, then we would have superluminal data communication, right?
I was on vacation last week. I got back to a stack of phone messages, one from the HR department at Nike. Yeah, on my work phone. Dunno if that puts them in the category of "bottom feeders" or if the recruiting efforts aren't limited to that category.
I'll like this thing a heck of a lot better if the screen swivels around so it can be a tablet (or the keyboard detatches) and I can use a pen/stylus for input. The screen is just the right size for the PADD I keep asking for.
Does that include the handwriting recognition? I admit that I'm sorely behind the times on what SOTA looks like in this area, but when I had a Palm device (Handspring Visor, if that tells you anything), I found I quickly became very comfortable with the pen-based input. I don't care for the current trend toward micro keyboards, and have been looking for a new Palm-based device that fit what I felt I needed. I'm also considering the Nokia N800, though haven't seen anything related to handwriting recognition on that (though I haven't really looked too deep, either).
In the first 24 hours after roasting, the oils leech out of the beans (note they have a matte look when they're first roasted, and a glossy look after about a day). You shouldn't grind and brew coffee that's been roasted in the past 24 hours. After that, it's probably best to use it in a week.
My wife and I own a cafe, which she manages while I hold down a job that keeps a roof over our head. We use Illy coffee, imported from Italy. The pack dates on the bulk canisters are often six months old, but the beans are pressure packed in nitrogen, so they taste as fresh as newly-roasted beans from local coffee companies. I believe the same can be said about the 250g (~9 oz.) cans of their coffee.
The upside to all this is that I have a professional barista in my employ that makes my coffee every morning.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_bel ong_to_us
"All your base are belong to us" (often shortened to "All Your Base", AYBABTU or simply AYB) is an Engrish phrase that sparked an Internet phenomenon in 2001 and 2002, with spread of flash animation that ubiquitously depicted the slogan. The text is taken from the opening cut scene of the English version of the 1989 Japanese video game Zero Wing by Toaplan. Its brief but intense popularity derived in part from its poor translation into English and partly from its near-accidental adoption by a core group of Internet humorists. While the wildfire has died down, "All Your Base" is still a well-known reference among gamers and programmers.Chance of someone imagining a Beowulf cluster of these: 100.0%
iSatan ?? Oh, Apple's gone too far this time...
I'm in the same camp. Yeah, I use GMail's POP3 access to download all my mail. But I still lost all the e-mail addresses, etc. to Hotmail's purge, and even if I had backed all the data up, it would only be available where I backed it up, not in a web-based mail client.
If it had happened just once, I wouldn't feel too bad about it. But I've been the recipient of several purges. They (MSN/Hotmail) have established themselves as untrustworthy with my data. Google, to date, has not.
I am in ur iPhone, diggin thru ur data!
I wouldn't trust my content to them. Every time MSN "upgrades" Hotmail, I lose everything. Luckily I migrated to GMail years ago, so don't lose anything important these days. That all went in the first "great purge." I logged onto my Hotmail account one day to find several years of archived messages had gone up in smoke, and (more importantly), lists of addresses. For some of my contacts, it was the sole repository for information on them.
They don't have to go all the way from here to the moon, just hop from one place to another successfully.
AFAIK, most of Saturn's ring objects are made up of water ice. Actually, the most central spot (as in, we don't have to keep searching around for another source) of methane out there seems to be Titan. Downsystem propellant could be manufactured from the water ice in the rings, and bottles of liquid methane could be lobbed off of Titan. For that matter, given the low escape velocity of Titan, a mass driver could send the bottles on a pretty good flight path without any chemical-based oomph. A little guidance along the way could insert it into a burn-up orbit over Mars.
Others have speculated that Saturn would be a good refueling depot for extra-system travel. I'm not sure what the dV is to get from LEO to Saturn orbit on a "fast track," but being able to refuel there and re-boost might be a good method to get somewhere else (Proxima Centauri, for instance) in enough time for mission designers to start and end a project within the scope of their careers. Or at least have the opportunity to train the person that will witness the arrival.
It's been years since I read them, but didn't they grab methane ice chunks out of Saturn's rings? I don't think it's a matter of us not having the technology to do something like that, but more one of not having tried that using the technology we have. It would be slow, but a nuclear reactor powering an array of ion engines or something similar could navigate ice cubes downsystem fairly easy. Furthermore, if it's methane we're shipping, why not use some of it to power the thrusters to escape Saturn's orbit and head down? Once escape velocity is achieved, solar orbit deceleration could be handled by the ion engines.
Nope, haven't RTFA, but Kim Stanley Robinson laid out what at least one NASA guy has said was more or less a roadmap to terraforming Mars.
The soldiers would be carrying around scalding hot devices as their power sources.
Okay, you win. But thanks for the link to the SRG page. Very interesting. Now I'm going to go read up on "linear alternators."
I find that the unit could operate on 1.07 watts
Okay, but what is that, about three and a half days? That's far short of "seven to 14 days" mentioned in the blurb.
If you look at this description of a General Purpose Heat Source Module (dontcha love those military descriptive names?), you see that the major problem with an RTG is, as you alluded to, mass and not size.
Three pounds is a lot for something a few cubic inches in size. But, given a 7% nominal thermal-electric conversion efficiency (I based my math on some numbers for the Cassini mission), 250 W thermal should produce 16 W electric out of that three pound brick (by adding a little more mass for a thermopile). One of those bricks contains four Pu-238 pellets, and the diagram suggests that they're the same design on each side, so one could presume a half-sized, two-pellet GPHS would produce eight watts at maybe two pounds total. Eight watts isn't much, but it's going to do it for longer than the average term of service for a soldier.
Politics aside, it sure sounds like an attractive solution.
I'll grant you that those things are much lighter and more power rich than LIon batteries, but it's still huge compared to the target size of the whole package the military is looking for, and 180 W/h isn't enough to do the sort of thing they need, AFAIK. I still think RTGs are the answer.
I presume the green circles are "radio footprints." Of course, whomever made this either didn't realize that overlapping the radio footprints doesn't make the devices communicate (the footprint has to reach the next device over), or figured that people reading wouldn't know and were going for visual impact instead.
Being military, they'll probably use RTGs to charge capacitors. I suspect a fairly small RTG would generate enough juice to charge ultra-capacitors for use on the high-energy stuff like movement. AKAImBatman would know more, if he's reading...
I seem to remember Al Gore getting jacked up for making a campaign-related call from his office at the White House. It was all over the news for weeks. His answer, after you trimmed off all the rhetoric, was, "Oops. Sorry." It seemed like they were going to hang him or something. Nowadays no one would even bother reporting that.
When I switched from Linux to OSX last year, I immediately installed Firefox because that's what I'd been using before. A first look at Safari found several things "missing" that I felt I needed. There's a lot to dislike about the Mac implementation of Firefox 2.0, but it was at least something I knew.
Then I was at a conference, and the guy sitting next to me was using a MacBook Pro. We started comparing notes, with him extolling the virtues of Safari. After getting a few misconceptions cleared up, I started to look deeper into it. A trip to the Mac store to talk to one of the "Geniuses" led me to http://www.pimpmysafari.com/. I'm working on getting all the pieces installed that I want, but it looks like I can make Safari into the browser I want it to be.
Links? Slacker! In my day, we read the HTML document raw. We had to interpret the tags ourselves. No DNS, either. We kept lists of IP addresses written on shirtsleeves. And they weren't our shirtsleeves, either. We had to steal them from our neighbors...
I almost hate to respond to this, but I'm going to anyway...
Vista Home Premium upgrade @ $150
Upgrade from what? When you buy a Mini, you're getting a new computer, and a full OS license. Buying an upgrade OS package implies that you have a qualified OS to upgrade from. So, add $200. Also, are those prices local to you? Otherwise, add S&H. Don't forget to add running around time (what's that worth?), build time, dealing with incompatibilities and DOA components. Now what's your' price at? Over $1500? For that you could buy a 20" iMac, and now you have to add the price of a 20" flat panel display to your list.
Every time there's one of these articles, there's a post like yours. Every time, someone shoots it down with a post similar to mine. It was just my turn, I guess.
Talk about a cosmic hole-in-one. Wouldn't it be amazing if they found Beagle II at the bottom of that thing?
I wonder if they untangle in a predictable fashion. If they did, then maybe we could send a bundle of entangled photons to a remote location, then purposely alter their states, henceforth altering the states of their entangled bretheren. If it happens predictably, then we would have superluminal data communication, right?
I was on vacation last week. I got back to a stack of phone messages, one from the HR department at Nike. Yeah, on my work phone. Dunno if that puts them in the category of "bottom feeders" or if the recruiting efforts aren't limited to that category.
I'll like this thing a heck of a lot better if the screen swivels around so it can be a tablet (or the keyboard detatches) and I can use a pen/stylus for input. The screen is just the right size for the PADD I keep asking for.
Does that include the handwriting recognition? I admit that I'm sorely behind the times on what SOTA looks like in this area, but when I had a Palm device (Handspring Visor, if that tells you anything), I found I quickly became very comfortable with the pen-based input. I don't care for the current trend toward micro keyboards, and have been looking for a new Palm-based device that fit what I felt I needed. I'm also considering the Nokia N800, though haven't seen anything related to handwriting recognition on that (though I haven't really looked too deep, either).
What's a guy to do?
In the first 24 hours after roasting, the oils leech out of the beans (note they have a matte look when they're first roasted, and a glossy look after about a day). You shouldn't grind and brew coffee that's been roasted in the past 24 hours. After that, it's probably best to use it in a week.
My wife and I own a cafe, which she manages while I hold down a job that keeps a roof over our head. We use Illy coffee, imported from Italy. The pack dates on the bulk canisters are often six months old, but the beans are pressure packed in nitrogen, so they taste as fresh as newly-roasted beans from local coffee companies. I believe the same can be said about the 250g (~9 oz.) cans of their coffee.
The upside to all this is that I have a professional barista in my employ that makes my coffee every morning.