While it was obvious that WMDs were nothing but an excuse to go to war with Iraq (Wait, we DID find some, right?), we have little choice but to play ball with that insane psycho Kim Song Il: Seoul is within artillery range of N.K.
I think it would be neat to see a show centered around Starfleet Command / Federation Council. Just like the Klingons were obviously Russians, Command is obviously the Pentagon and the Council is obviously Congress. It'd be a perfect way to comment on current political and social issues. Something new and provacative to stir people up.
They're buying a thousand, and now another thousand computers and showing the teachers how to use them... but most people are fortunate to have enough electric power to run a light bulb at night? Somehow the logic behind that escapes me...
I mean, I'm all for computers for the poor, but first things first... clean water and electric power.
Chode: What the hell you been fixing these past few days?!?
Gus: The transdigital freon converter.
Chode: And what does that do?
Gus: It makes Ice Cubes.
Chode: Wuh... You mean to tell me, that with all the CRAP that's broken on this ship, you start with the fucking ICE MACHINE?
Gus: Now listen to ME, you fat purple dung pile... As the ship's engineer, I decide what gets fixed first. So if you don't like it, go screw yourself.
Chode: That does it! Come here... You've had this coming for along time [pulls out baseball bat] now I said get over here!
Gus: You wanna piece of me? [Middle finger becomes propane torch] Bring it ON!
Chode: [Smacks Gus with baseball bat]
Gus: Oh, this is fair... [Is beaten down by Chode]
[Sex android Six quietly enters bridge]
Chode: Oh, hello Six! [drops baseball bat]
Six: Captain, you know how fighting with Gus aggrivates your irritable bowel syndrome... Oooh, would ya like a handjob?
FWIW, download here. I love that short film... Especially Six >:P. The neat thing is they made a series of it on SciFi... Don't know when season 2's coming out though.
Go ahead... mod me OT. I still think it's hilarious:)
And SO, we see why it is a BAD idea to take your quarter-billion dollar genesis capture device, and try to catch it in midair with helicopters flying over hard dirt in formation rather than splash it into the OCEAN. Or try to capture it over the OCEAN. Either of those options would probably have left SOMETHING intact if it crashed rather than the most expensive artificial metor in a long time...
Sad commentary on the state of political knowledge
on
Did You VoteOrNot.org?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If you want to hear sad news, get ready. At that start of high school Government, everyone had to take the immigration exam as a test of what we already knew. You need to score 90 or above out of 100 to become an American citizen, right?
7 of the 30-some people in my class passed that criteria.
That was pathetic. Especially since the questions practically answered themselves:
N ) Which of the following is the residence of the President:
N+1) The White House is the official home of who?
Or were asked repeatedly:
8) How many states are there in the Union?
100) How many states are there in the Union?
One of the ones most people missed was probably:
X) How many years can a president hold office?
A) 2
B) 4
C) 2 terms of 4 years
D) 10
And you wonder why politicians can get away with the bullshit they do...
If you want 100 tons to orbit then dust off a Saturn V. It was capable of putting almost 150 tons into low earth orbit (And 25 tons to the moon). It cost a billion 1969-dollars per launch, which is probably more like 10 billion now. But ten billion is well within the range of many corporations today.
If they wanted, Microsoft could use their piles of cash to put a station larger than the ISS up there in ONE SHOT. *sigh*
The main launch point for American space missions is as far south as practical because that gives space vehicles the maximum boost from earth's rotation. At the equator, a spacecraft could pick up 1000mph for free (Well... not for FREE, it saps earth's rotational energy, but...). Given how chemical fuels can just barely get themselves into space, current rockets need all they can get.
I don't mind having only 1.5Mbps download speeds. Hell, I don't do much that needs more than that. However, I hate the guts of the bastards who castrated upstream speeds. I can pull down hundreds of megabytes of updates in minutes, but as a "consumer" I SURELY don't have ANY need to *upload* anything. No, why would I do that? I'm just another sheep using what the media wants to be a glorified TV system... NOT.
On the other hand, I do find it very interesting that I can connect on my private home LAN at 100 megabits per second. Now... It's $40 a month for 1.5 meg down, upload-castrated ADSL. Now, think about it: You can (if you're loaded) buy a 45meg sychronous T3 starting at $2000 a month source, and that's just the first thing Google returned. That's enough to give *60 people* uninterrupted service that gaurantees 750KBps if *everyone* is using the system at once, and 5.6MegaBYTEs per second if no one else is. Dividing the sizable monthly bill among 60 users results in about $35 a month for something that would most of the time give any USA broadband user penis envy.
As for setting up the network hardware, you could probably DIY for less than the first monthly payment. Get a screaming-fast Linux box to act as gateway to about 16 others, which in turn serve the end users (I think the link is for a T3 with 16 static IPs and 20 E-Mail boxes). So you get 16 web pages, 20 e-mail boxes, and the works. Heck... for another $5 a month, buy a web domain and set up your own e-mail server!
Ah, one can dream... Then again, (under NO duress from ISPs or big media companies), the government would probably tag you as an ISP and accordingly asshole rape you with red tape.
If no one is saying anything, there won't be anything to hear. Someone's gotta pipe up eventually: We started transmitting RF more than 110 years ago, and earth now outshines the *sun* in the Radio band.
Right now, I use a 22 year old Tandy M100 laptop for taking all manner of notes in school, as well as for programmable math. I haven't really considered a modern laptop because they're too large (M100 is same size as a sheet of paper) if you don't pay an indecent sum for a mini-mini, and because it's not ridiculously expensive to get batteries for (4 X AA == 20 hours operation).
Now, I would like to take the low power consumption of the M100 (1 watt in it's case) and it's full-size, GOOD keyboard and combine it with a more modern but still reflective LCD display. Rather than have a keyboard with 3-5 inches of space on top and bottom of it, build the laptop into the area covered by the KBD (12 by 5 inches or so). Now use a pair or 4- or 5- inch LCDs side-by-side as a display. Install a CF drive for mass storage and BAM, you got a winner.
On the software side, do something new with an operating system. Create a multi-tasking Kernel like that found in Contiki (GUI os for Commodore 64), along with a very basic windowing system. Keep 1) A word processor, 2) A simple spreadsheet, 3) A calendar, 4) A high-precision calculator, and 5) basic web browser/e-mail client in ROM on the system. Also, something that's good for "quick'n'dirty" programming, like the BASIC of the M100, and also similarly user-friendly.
Yes, quite a wishlist... probably never gonna happen. But I can dream, right?
You have a 10 gigabit per second connection to the central office. Your neighbor does too. So do most of your neighbors. Yet you all have a line that runs all the way to the CO before it can connect with anything else?
At this time, we've got network speeds at home (Gigabit ethernet) that can rival a small internet backbone over a distance of a few hundred meters. Now, suppose you and 16-ish neighbors were to buy a 24-port gigabit hub. You can all hook into that hub and have faster-than-lightning access to each other's data. You have something like 4 to 8 ports of the hub left open.
Now, similar groups do the same, and you link to 4-8 of their gigabit hubs. Now 60 to 80 people have burning-fast access to each other for gaming, data exchange, web pages, etc.
This trend continues, with an expanding web of people having uber-speed links to each other. Eventually, you truly have an internet without ISPs because EVERYONE is an ISP.
[Now I might be missing something here... Would you need a computer as a router between each 24-port switch? As in, can the switch route subnets through it's ports?]
There are several technological hurdles to this. First, everyone on your network would have to connect using IP6. This is because everyone on this new network has to talk to each other and that means each needs a public IP address. Unfortunately, the IP space under IP4 is getting VERY tight. Now, I just tried to find out what the "private" addresses for IP6 are, but holy shit... my brain imploded trying to read the RFC. Something about 5 addresses per interface (???)? Uh, yeah... Anyway, other problems would be how to deal with malicious hackers and viruses/worms/etc having gigabit speed access to millions of computers. But other than that, most of the requisite material is already available, no?
Think about the bandwidth required for a hologram. A typical hologram can resolve 5000 lines per millimeter. A 10 by 10 cm holographic plate therefore contains 250 billion "pixels", times (presumably) 32-bit color resolution per pixel means you could easily get a terabyte per frame. I think our only hope for storing this much data is a holographic hard drive or a quantum-type hard drive.
Bah... call me when I can upload my conciousness into a computer net. Or when they figure out what my conciousness *is*.
Chernobyl is a reactor that has, quite simply, a PISS-POOR design. The unforgivable crime was the failure to construct a containment dome, with which almost no radioactivity would have been released. The reactor was moderated by *graphite*, and so the fission reaction continued after coolant was lost. Core melts, graphite catches fire...
If the goddamn reactor had just used heavy water as a moderator, Chernobyl would never have happened!
BTW, Did I mention that fossil-fuel plants regurgitate TONS of uranium and thorium ash into the atmosphere?
"But what does the effort involved to duplicate something matter?"
Because as the amount of effort to duplicate something decreases, it's scarcity and therefore value decrease. The reason MS can sell Windows for thousands of dollars is because they impose artificial scarcity by hiding the source, which drives up cost.
If the book were released as as HTML/PDF/rtf/whatever, it too would be effortlessly duplicatable and therefore have almost no monetary cost beyond what we choose to pay for it, just as linux has no monetary cost unless you choose to pay your favorite distro vendor.
It's called "Render a stereo view and cross your eyes."
To be honest, I find it quite amazing. And (especially in digital photos, for some reason) the effect seems to be more pronounced than in real life. Maybe it's just me.
[shameless_plug] The stereo view is also the default of my little 3-D program on Sourceforge, Tronimation. [/shameless_plug] I wonder how that would look in this new monitor... >:)
Come again? If the key is on a portion of the DVD the R/W head can't get to, how on earth is it read in the first place? Or is it just a firmware restriction?
I've got a Tandy M100, along with an Sanyo MBC-4000. I don't care what kind of emulator you try to offer me for the M100: It doesn't have the same keyboard with a wired switch for every key. It doesn't have the same screen. I can't take it with me. And I severely doubt that my emulator will be running on the original hardware after more than twenty years of use.
The MBC-4000 (If anyone has ANY disks for this thing, please E-Mail me!) is another unique thing. I've never met anything with a similar keyboard.
My point is, you can't duplicate the feeling and the (for lack of a better word) aura of the original hardware... So what if I can get an Altair 8800 emulator? That doesn't mean I have a piece of computer history. I don't have a computer that's proven it's durability for more than 30 years.
As a side note, I am an active M100 user... Most reliable goddamn computer I've ever had. Never crashes, never BSODs. Just does what I program it to.
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While it was obvious that WMDs were nothing but an excuse to go to war with Iraq (Wait, we DID find some, right?), we have little choice but to play ball with that insane psycho Kim Song Il: Seoul is within artillery range of N.K.
They're as subtle as a tactical nuke.
"People were beginning to think the game was rigged."
I think it would be neat to see a show centered around Starfleet Command / Federation Council. Just like the Klingons were obviously Russians, Command is obviously the Pentagon and the Council is obviously Congress. It'd be a perfect way to comment on current political and social issues. Something new and provacative to stir people up.
They're buying a thousand, and now another thousand computers and showing the teachers how to use them... but most people are fortunate to have enough electric power to run a light bulb at night? Somehow the logic behind that escapes me...
I mean, I'm all for computers for the poor, but first things first... clean water and electric power.
Dude... You messed up the TTR quote :)
:)
Chode: What the hell you been fixing these past few days?!?
Gus: The transdigital freon converter.
Chode: And what does that do?
Gus: It makes Ice Cubes.
Chode: Wuh... You mean to tell me, that with all the CRAP that's broken on this ship, you start with the fucking ICE MACHINE?
Gus: Now listen to ME, you fat purple dung pile... As the ship's engineer, I decide what gets fixed first. So if you don't like it, go screw yourself.
Chode: That does it! Come here... You've had this coming for along time [pulls out baseball bat] now I said get over here!
Gus: You wanna piece of me? [Middle finger becomes propane torch] Bring it ON!
Chode: [Smacks Gus with baseball bat]
Gus: Oh, this is fair... [Is beaten down by Chode]
[Sex android Six quietly enters bridge]
Chode: Oh, hello Six! [drops baseball bat]
Six: Captain, you know how fighting with Gus aggrivates your irritable bowel syndrome... Oooh, would ya like a handjob?
FWIW, download here. I love that short film... Especially Six >:P. The neat thing is they made a series of it on SciFi... Don't know when season 2's coming out though.
Go ahead... mod me OT. I still think it's hilarious
Here is the nasty me speaking:
And SO, we see why it is a BAD idea to take your quarter-billion dollar genesis capture device, and try to catch it in midair with helicopters flying over hard dirt in formation rather than splash it into the OCEAN. Or try to capture it over the OCEAN. Either of those options would probably have left SOMETHING intact if it crashed rather than the most expensive artificial metor in a long time...
If you want to hear sad news, get ready. At that start of high school Government, everyone had to take the immigration exam as a test of what we already knew. You need to score 90 or above out of 100 to become an American citizen, right?
7 of the 30-some people in my class passed that criteria.
That was pathetic. Especially since the questions practically answered themselves:
N ) Which of the following is the residence of the President:
N+1) The White House is the official home of who?
Or were asked repeatedly:
8) How many states are there in the Union?
100) How many states are there in the Union?
One of the ones most people missed was probably:
X) How many years can a president hold office?
A) 2
B) 4
C) 2 terms of 4 years
D) 10
And you wonder why politicians can get away with the bullshit they do...
If you want 100 tons to orbit then dust off a Saturn V. It was capable of putting almost 150 tons into low earth orbit (And 25 tons to the moon). It cost a billion 1969-dollars per launch, which is probably more like 10 billion now. But ten billion is well within the range of many corporations today.
If they wanted, Microsoft could use their piles of cash to put a station larger than the ISS up there in ONE SHOT. *sigh*
The main launch point for American space missions is as far south as practical because that gives space vehicles the maximum boost from earth's rotation. At the equator, a spacecraft could pick up 1000mph for free (Well... not for FREE, it saps earth's rotational energy, but...). Given how chemical fuels can just barely get themselves into space, current rockets need all they can get.
I don't mind having only 1.5Mbps download speeds. Hell, I don't do much that needs more than that. However, I hate the guts of the bastards who castrated upstream speeds. I can pull down hundreds of megabytes of updates in minutes, but as a "consumer" I SURELY don't have ANY need to *upload* anything. No, why would I do that? I'm just another sheep using what the media wants to be a glorified TV system... NOT.
On the other hand, I do find it very interesting that I can connect on my private home LAN at 100 megabits per second. Now... It's $40 a month for 1.5 meg down, upload-castrated ADSL. Now, think about it: You can (if you're loaded) buy a 45meg sychronous T3 starting at $2000 a month source, and that's just the first thing Google returned. That's enough to give *60 people* uninterrupted service that gaurantees 750KBps if *everyone* is using the system at once, and 5.6MegaBYTEs per second if no one else is. Dividing the sizable monthly bill among 60 users results in about $35 a month for something that would most of the time give any USA broadband user penis envy.
As for setting up the network hardware, you could probably DIY for less than the first monthly payment. Get a screaming-fast Linux box to act as gateway to about 16 others, which in turn serve the end users (I think the link is for a T3 with 16 static IPs and 20 E-Mail boxes). So you get 16 web pages, 20 e-mail boxes, and the works. Heck... for another $5 a month, buy a web domain and set up your own e-mail server!
Ah, one can dream... Then again, (under NO duress from ISPs or big media companies), the government would probably tag you as an ISP and accordingly asshole rape you with red tape.
If no one is saying anything, there won't be anything to hear. Someone's gotta pipe up eventually: We started transmitting RF more than 110 years ago, and earth now outshines the *sun* in the Radio band.
Right now, I use a 22 year old Tandy M100 laptop for taking all manner of notes in school, as well as for programmable math. I haven't really considered a modern laptop because they're too large (M100 is same size as a sheet of paper) if you don't pay an indecent sum for a mini-mini, and because it's not ridiculously expensive to get batteries for (4 X AA == 20 hours operation).
Now, I would like to take the low power consumption of the M100 (1 watt in it's case) and it's full-size, GOOD keyboard and combine it with a more modern but still reflective LCD display. Rather than have a keyboard with 3-5 inches of space on top and bottom of it, build the laptop into the area covered by the KBD (12 by 5 inches or so). Now use a pair or 4- or 5- inch LCDs side-by-side as a display. Install a CF drive for mass storage and BAM, you got a winner.
On the software side, do something new with an operating system. Create a multi-tasking Kernel like that found in Contiki (GUI os for Commodore 64), along with a very basic windowing system. Keep 1) A word processor, 2) A simple spreadsheet, 3) A calendar, 4) A high-precision calculator, and 5) basic web browser/e-mail client in ROM on the system. Also, something that's good for "quick'n'dirty" programming, like the BASIC of the M100, and also similarly user-friendly.
Yes, quite a wishlist... probably never gonna happen. But I can dream, right?
You have a 10 gigabit per second connection to the central office. Your neighbor does too. So do most of your neighbors. Yet you all have a line that runs all the way to the CO before it can connect with anything else?
At this time, we've got network speeds at home (Gigabit ethernet) that can rival a small internet backbone over a distance of a few hundred meters. Now, suppose you and 16-ish neighbors were to buy a 24-port gigabit hub. You can all hook into that hub and have faster-than-lightning access to each other's data. You have something like 4 to 8 ports of the hub left open.
Now, similar groups do the same, and you link to 4-8 of their gigabit hubs. Now 60 to 80 people have burning-fast access to each other for gaming, data exchange, web pages, etc.
This trend continues, with an expanding web of people having uber-speed links to each other. Eventually, you truly have an internet without ISPs because EVERYONE is an ISP.
[Now I might be missing something here... Would you need a computer as a router between each 24-port switch? As in, can the switch route subnets through it's ports?]
There are several technological hurdles to this. First, everyone on your network would have to connect using IP6. This is because everyone on this new network has to talk to each other and that means each needs a public IP address. Unfortunately, the IP space under IP4 is getting VERY tight. Now, I just tried to find out what the "private" addresses for IP6 are, but holy shit... my brain imploded trying to read the RFC. Something about 5 addresses per interface (???)? Uh, yeah... Anyway, other problems would be how to deal with malicious hackers and viruses/worms/etc having gigabit speed access to millions of computers. But other than that, most of the requisite material is already available, no?
Think about the bandwidth required for a hologram. A typical hologram can resolve 5000 lines per millimeter. A 10 by 10 cm holographic plate therefore contains 250 billion "pixels", times (presumably) 32-bit color resolution per pixel means you could easily get a terabyte per frame. I think our only hope for storing this much data is a holographic hard drive or a quantum-type hard drive.
Bah... call me when I can upload my conciousness into a computer net. Or when they figure out what my conciousness *is*.
Chernobyl is a reactor that has, quite simply, a PISS-POOR design. The unforgivable crime was the failure to construct a containment dome, with which almost no radioactivity would have been released. The reactor was moderated by *graphite*, and so the fission reaction continued after coolant was lost. Core melts, graphite catches fire...
If the goddamn reactor had just used heavy water as a moderator, Chernobyl would never have happened!
BTW, Did I mention that fossil-fuel plants regurgitate TONS of uranium and thorium ash into the atmosphere?
"But what does the effort involved to duplicate something matter?"
Because as the amount of effort to duplicate something decreases, it's scarcity and therefore value decrease. The reason MS can sell Windows for thousands of dollars is because they impose artificial scarcity by hiding the source, which drives up cost.
If the book were released as as HTML/PDF/rtf/whatever, it too would be effortlessly duplicatable and therefore have almost no monetary cost beyond what we choose to pay for it, just as linux has no monetary cost unless you choose to pay your favorite distro vendor.
Because a book is a real-world item that is not effortlessly duplicated by every general purpose computer in existance.
"just unplug the removable hard drive, and play it back at the insurance office."
:)
Somehow, I doubt that any recording mechanism with moving parts would survive 80+ G's and still work
It's called "Render a stereo view and cross your eyes."
To be honest, I find it quite amazing. And (especially in digital photos, for some reason) the effect seems to be more pronounced than in real life. Maybe it's just me.
[shameless_plug] The stereo view is also the default of my little 3-D program on Sourceforge, Tronimation.
[/shameless_plug] I wonder how that would look in this new monitor... >:)
I nominate this litigious asshole to be a Lawyer in Space... With no space suit.
Come again? If the key is on a portion of the DVD the R/W head can't get to, how on earth is it read in the first place? Or is it just a firmware restriction?
I've got a Tandy M100, along with an Sanyo MBC-4000. I don't care what kind of emulator you try to offer me for the M100: It doesn't have the same keyboard with a wired switch for every key. It doesn't have the same screen. I can't take it with me. And I severely doubt that my emulator will be running on the original hardware after more than twenty years of use.
The MBC-4000 (If anyone has ANY disks for this thing, please E-Mail me!) is another unique thing. I've never met anything with a similar keyboard.
My point is, you can't duplicate the feeling and the (for lack of a better word) aura of the original hardware... So what if I can get an Altair 8800 emulator? That doesn't mean I have a piece of computer history. I don't have a computer that's proven it's durability for more than 30 years.
As a side note, I am an active M100 user... Most reliable goddamn computer I've ever had. Never crashes, never BSODs. Just does what I program it to.
Yeah, but if it were Linux, the sysadmin would SSH in and "killall solitare". >:P
"First, I would re-design IP to take variable-length addresses, so IPv4, IPv6 and everything else to come are all compatible and interchangable."
That's been considered before, and was rejected because handling variable length addresses would place an enormous strain on routers and DNS servers.