Keep in mind that when the Challenger was originally built, it was supposed to be a test vehicle as a preliminary stage before the Columbia flew. Yes, it was retro-fit to become spaceworthy (and they said the Enterprise couldn't have that happen?) but it wasn't suppose to happen in the first place.
The Endeavor was built during the Reagan administration as a replacement shuttle...but keep in mind it was built largely out of the spare parts they were keeping as a backup they needed in order to do repairs on the rest of the shuttle fleet. That normally isn't too much of a problem unless you actually need those spares to do repairs. That that happens quite a bit where one shuttle is canabalized for another one that is getting preped for flight. NASA has even yanked parts off of the Enterprise in order to get a flight off the ground.
In short, you are all too close to the target when you suggest that there should have been a Shuttle Mark-2 program going as early as the late 1970's or early 1980's...particularly after the Challenger explosion.
From my opinion, there should be some bands that are left to the hams that just want to do code only, and a special "endorsement" that can be added to an Amature license that would allow you to access those frequencies. Basically nothing more than you can get for a driver's license by getting endorsements for hauling things like hazardous materials, being a taxi driver, school bus driver, etc. Or the huge number of endorsements you get for a pilot's license.
I guess the FCC wants to avoid that situation, even though the FAA has been doing stuff like that for years without any real problems in terms of enforcement or bureaucratic headaches of trying to keep everything straightened out.
As far as opening up ham radio to younger generations, I am not so sure if this is going to be the trick.
The fastest way to get listed with Google is to get your site name into the Open Directory Project (at least with a new low-volume site). Of course, there are issues with that, and it requires hand entry on the part of some volunteer, but at least it eventually does get listed.
Another thing to do is just push your site onto Google manually by putting into the direct scan list. It takes a little bit of digging to find it, but it is there. Do that for some other search engines as well.
As far as using other search engines... I used to use Lycos quite a bit, and as my primary search engine, but it is so incredibly stale now that I can't stand using it anymore. Yahoo I never liked at all...ever. I do use the Open Directory Project search... especially when I want to find similar sites of a topical nature. The search tools are pretty good on that site. The ODP is the directory source for Google, and is about 2-3 weeks ahead of Google Directories, although not quite as fast as Google with inferior net access.
I've commented earlier that the 1970's version was Mormon, and this new version is American. From what I see, it is heavily inspired by American culture, including presidential succession, civilian vs. military conflicts, environmental fears, and general attitudes toward personal liberties (both good and bad). Only very minor vestages remain from the original series, mainly the underlying plot line that can be summarized in about 50 words or less.
As far as SG-1 getting stale, I would have to agree more or less with you on many points. With Jack O'Neil as a Brigadier, the SG-1 team is more his personal staff and Lt. Col. Carter his XO. This is an interesting dynamic that makes it harder to write the dramatic Star Trek TOS-style episodes of going to a new planet every week, and instead the story arcs have to cover several episodes now...even across several seasons. Old enemies occasionally come up, and in this case they really are old enemies and not supposedly something "made up" to be like an old enemy. Apothos really needs to have another come back sometime soon (to describe a multi-season story arc), and the Replicators havn't been totally dealt with either.
Few TV series, much less a SciFi series, ever make it this far in terms of the number of episodes they have filmed. In many ways it is breaking new ground just because they now have to deal with the damage they have left behind in previous episodes.
Another good book that desribes the causes of civilization advances and retreats is "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond.
Mr. Diamond goes into several alternative explainations, but it does get slightly into energy production, and more importantly climate issues that have had a huge impact on the growth of civilizations.
I agree that the grandparent post was totally off the mark by quite a bit.
However, as a geek, I know that the Dark Ages were as much caused by the change in the fuel economy from wood to coal as the retreat of the Roman Empire.
I would love to see some hard documentary evidence on this point. From my knowledge of history, it was precisely the use of coal as a fuel source that triggered the Industrial Revolution. Almost immediately prior to the widespread use of coal in England, the primary fuel source was wood or hydro power (for running mills and stuff). There was a huge debate in England at the time because the forests were visibly disappearing from all over the British Isles, and doom and gloom were predicted (as supposedly did happen at Easter Island). After coal was used in large quantities, England went from a largly agrarian lifestyle and small villages (London had only about 30,000 people in the year 1400) to a major industrial power. The use of coal had a major impact on that occuring.
When coal was finally excavated in large quantities, there was a need for bulk shipments of the stuff overland to larger concentrations of people who needed it. From this came railroads, steel production, mechanical and civil engineering, and a modern industrial economy.
As far as the Great Depression being caused by a shift from coal to oil, that is incredibly simplistic, and there were many causes for what happened, including a lack of securities oversight (triggering the Wall Street Stock Market Crash of 1929), overproduction of food stocks, preditory pricing companies, and reconstruction issues from WWI where the bill to pay for that awful war finally came due and had to be paid. Conversion from coal to oil may be there as a slight cause, but nearly as significant with those fuel sources was the conversion from passenger rail travel to personal automobiles... which really didn't happen until the 1950's in the USA anyway.
What a fusion energy economy would actually provide is a cheap energy source that would cause a huge expansion of economic resources for just about everybody, even in the most poor parts of the world.
It could be argued that the wealth a person has is determined by the amount of raw power that they have available to do what they want to accomplish. This is actual power, as measured in kilowatt-hours, joules, or whatever. If you want to increase the wealth of a region, you need to provide energy resources that will allow the people in that area to be able to accomplish whatever task they set their mind to accomplish. In this regard control of power is also control of political power, as utility companies are quite aware of.
What project like this tabletop device, a Fusor, or even Cold Fusion offer to provide is the potential that you don't need utility companies to provide this energy for you. If you need the power to run an air-conditioner, you just prime your fusion reactor with a little hydrogen gas and some water (to extract some more hydrogen gas). And not much water at that either. And no need for rolling blackouts or even power surges on the power grid.
Geeks successfully decentralized computing power, so why not power generation itself? I for one look strong with anticipation and excitement for the future this may bring.
BTW, I think it will be 1st world nations that will be able to take advantage of a hydrogen economy first before most 3rd world nations. If you look at China, they are incredibly heavy users of coal right now, with manufacturing plants that are actually producing steam-powered locomotives as new products (and hudreds to thousands of deaths every year in the coal mines from accidents). If anything the Chinese experience is that they have had to go through the entire industrial revolution, but at a greatly accelerated pace compared to most western European countries and North America. Africa is in political turmoil that almost seems to resemble what Europe was like in the early part of the 2nd millenium, and simply won't get much of anywhere (except for a few minor countries who get it) until they resolve their political issues and stop the nearly constant state of warfare in Africa.
Well, they did a hyperspace jump to get there, and certainly a series of three or four small jumps would be trivial to get into position. This is like getting on the freeway and traveling 20 miles to get somewhere that is only 4 miles away, but doing that because it is faster than plowing through two dozen stop lights and stop signs (that are the wrong way onto major throughfares to get across easily). This happens in California quite often, particularly Los Angeles.
I think that the energy released from hydrogen and oxygen combining on Yavin 4 is trivial compared to the raw kinetic energy of a cloud of gas and debris coming from Yavin that is traveling at speeds far exceeding escape velocity... temporarily triggering nuclear fusion reactions in the compression wavefront in a manner very similar to a supernova explosion, including on the surface of Yavin 4. (Do you really *want* to be on the inside of a nuclear fusion reactor?)
The question that has to be asked is more how the Death Star could possibly have that much stored energy? A portal to an anti-matter universe?
I always considered the reason why the Death Star didn't simply wipe out Yavin itself was mainly energy requirements (blowing up a gas giant takes an order of magnitude more energy than blowing up a terrestrial "planet" instead), and the fact they didn't consider the Rebel fleet to be that much of a threat in the first place... also the reason they didn't do a quick seris of hyperjumps to simply get to the other side of the planet (giving military surprise and destroying the X-wings when they were still on the ground).
Of course blowing up Yavin could cause some problems with the Death Star itself, but any competant commander (Tarkin certainly seemed competant in general) would have that happen at a reasonably safe distance... or jump into hyperspace well before the shock wave front even gets close.
P.S. I know this just fantasy... of course BS of one can be countered with more BS.
One of the reasons why colonies in the Americas, and the rest of the continents on the Earth, were able to get rid of European control was primarily issues related to distance and communications issues.
In space this is an issue as well, although for the first time in human history a major segment of frontier space will be made available with rapid communications (radio) over time to physically get there. How this will affect human colonization is going to be interesting and unique in human history.
Travel from the Earth to Mars by Hohmann transfer orbit is about 9 months long, and improved nuclear engines or other exotic technology can cut this down to about 3 months... about the same amount of time it took to travel between London and Boston back in the 1700's. Governance strategies are likely going to be similar in nature, although I hope countries realize the political implications before they start acting.
Travel between the Earth and L5, on the other hand and as demonstrated by the Apollo missions, is about 3 days. This means that potentially an evacuation could even bring people back to the Earth if some really ugly celestial event were to happen (although weither the Earth would be safe at the same time is subject to interpretation as well).
As far as the basic tech to make this happen, the ISS is far from the best solution, although the ISS shows precisely that it can happen, and at large scales. The #1 problem for building at the LaGrange Points is simply obtaining a reasonable quantity of basic construction supplies (girders, glass, oxygen, water, etc.) Almost all of that can be obtained from the Moon at prices far cheaper than can be done from the Earth, which is going to require colonization and mining efforts on the Moon to support any space colonies at the L Points larger than the ISS. Tugging a smaller asteroid into place can also give an initial supply of raw materials as well.
All of the raw science necessary to make this happen has already been discovered, and there are no show-stopper problems like there is for interstellar travel (like Einstein's Relatiivity equations). The rest is engineering and practical experience, which both Russia and the USA have in boatloads as well right now, with the Europeans, Japan, India, Brazil, and China not too far behind. All seven of these nations (the EU considered as one nation, if you will) will eventually get into space colonization in a major way, with even some other countries possibly getting into the act as well.
Did you ever read the proposal for ICANN at-large members? If not that is too bad in many ways.
The proposal called for 5 regions world-wide, and each board member had to be elected by direct ballot cast from each region by ordinary internet users. The process of qualifying wasn't that hard, but you had to prove that you were unique, with a hard snail-mail address. Ballot stuffing could happen, but it was quite difficult.
The result? It actually happened. ICANN, in their infinite wisdom killed the idea.... after the board members were actually elected and serving on the governing board (in closed meetings that the at-large members weren't invited to attend).
I wish that non-US government regulatory bodies had been complaining back then with the same kind of gusto as they seem to be doing right now, and it might have been that the at-large board members would be running the show right now, and not a bunch of stupid self-interested board members who don't care.
The country TLDs are still run by ICANN, but are non-controvercial because they are directly related to the ISO naming scheme for country codes. If you want to get a new country code, you submit the request through the ISO country code committee. This happened with the Soviet Union (.su) became Russia (.ru), and still happens as political circumstances change throughout the world.
ICANN does, however, allocate the IP addresses and organize the network topology, so this becomes a huge project in allocating Class A,B,& C networks (I know.../8,/16, &/24... but you know what I'm talking about if you are nitpicking at this fine points.) In theory ICANN could deallocate all of China from the internet by chaning routing tables to redirect IP addresses elsewhere. In practice, however, that would (probabally) never happen.
Where ICANN really screwed up, and where the U.S. Dept. of Commerce really messed up as well, was to kill the whole at-large board member plan.
I participated in the election of Karl Auerbach to the ICANN board, and I thought the whole process was incredible. **_IF_** ICANN had kept that policy for the at-large members and phased out the rest of the board, this would never have even been an issue, and the U.N. would not have even been tempted to get involved. Even though it was just for governance of the Internet, it was the first major election to a legislative body that I know about that litterally involved people from arround the world.
If these elections ever came back, I would vote for Karl in a heartbeat. As it was, Karl had to sue ICANN just to get financial records, and his position (in part because of Karl's meddling and getting into the face of Vinton Cerf) was eliminated by the rest of the board members. One of the nasty things that happened, and one of the mistakes of the at-large membership, was that the at-large board members were outnumbered by corporate members, who viewed the at-large board members as a threat (they were, as a matter of fact).
As it is, ICANN has lost all credibility in my opinion, and it appears as though the U.N. may be the only real option to get things cleaned up. They had their chance, and it is sad to think that America fostered this dictatorship (or more correctly, facist organization in the most litteral sense... governance by corporation) instead of having a real democratic movement and organization, even more so when it looked like it was really going to happen.
Keep in mind that the U.S. Constitution seems to be supporting the creative incentive idea, not the economic public good idea.
Very clearly and specifically, the only constitutional basis for copyright law is to "promote the useful arts and sciences". I know Eldridge vs. Ashcroft seemed to suggest SCOTUS didn't think that was a good way to challenge copyright law, but if you read the dissenting opinions in that case you might think otherwise. Certainly at some time in the not too distant future SCOTUS will revisit the issue and may likely reverse themselves on copyright issues. The majority opinion was largely based on the idea that Congress can do pretty much what it wants to do, and usefulness or even constitutionality of copyright laws is largely up to the U.S. Congress.
If you could provide a clear example on how artists (speaking broadly, including photographers, scultors, painters, authors, computer programmers, musicians, actors, etc.) have really gained anything with this current system, I would love to hear what you are suggesting.
Certainly a few people at the top of each of their professions have made millions or billions of dollars (i.e. Bill Gates) from strong copyright, but I would argue that the rank and file artist who is trying to be creative and pay the mortgage on their house is generally losing their shirt based on the current system.
Authors have it quite rough, but there are now several alternatives to placing the written word whereever they want to. Earning money from writing is a bit tougher, but it can be done.
Musicians are generally the worst off with the current system. Record lables tend to take just about everything that is made off of a record, and most musicians would be lucky to get a few cents from every CD sold. Quite litterally, if they instead bought their own computer with a CD-R burner and made their own CDs, most new musicians would be money ahead after the first dozen CD sales. I've seen regional bands that do exactly that sort of self-publishing because they don't trust the major labels. Those bands are also much more approachable on a fan level.
As a computer programmer, I certainly hope most of my software doesn't survive the life + 75 current copyright regime. Heck, software I wrote 10 years ago I'm not getting a single penny off of anyway, and neither is the company that I wrote it for. I fail to see the financial incentive for either myself or any company that will employ me to even preserve that copyright rule, and if it went to 14 years it would still be worth while for me to write computer software. It would also mean I could hack an Atari 2600 emulator together and have some fun with some old games that the publishers addresses aren't even known.
I don't know where you get the idea you can't sell the driver to the end user. The GPL always allows you to sell any GPL'd software for whatever you can get for it. The difference is that you can't restrict others from also selling it, and it must have source code to tweak it as well.
That is the GPL, and the difference between the GPL and CC-by-NC (or non-commercial use only licenses in general). Most people who don't understand the GPL usually don't get that point. BSD-style licenses are basically attribution only licenses... you can use it as long as you give credit somewhere that it came from whoever wrote it in the first place.
The problem with MySQL AB is that they insist that their drivers, by being GPL'd, also make anything linking to them forced to be GPL'd as well unless you purchase the commercial license.
I think they are full of it, although the GPL is not exactly clear if that is the case either. The legal question comes from the idea of if something running in another process, can you access data from that process running a GPL'd program if your application is propritary? Can you sell that propritary program and keep it propritary? I suggest the answer is yes, but MySQL AB wants you to think the answer is no. That is the argument.
BTW, earlier version of MySQL solved this problem by having the drivers written as LGPL libraries. There is also little that can be done to stop a "clean room" environment that rewrites the current drivers and merely uses the communications protocols to talk to the MySQL server. So in effect, all MySQL is trying to say is that you must also rewrite the drivers if you want a propritary product. If the cost savings is worth it, any decent programmer ought to be able to accomplish that task if you want to stay on the safe side of legal as well. I'm just not volunteering.
I even think the whole GPL'd driver business that MySQL is demanding is BS as well. I was in a similar situation as the grandparent post, trying to come up with a reasonable database backend to a product I was developing.
I tried to convince the money people that it was better to simply support MySQL and try to stay on the safe side of legal, and besides, try to gain some good karma by helping out the folks at MySQL AB, even if I felt their driver copyright was on shaky ground.
Frankly, I think the MySQL commercial license is incredibly reasonable considering what you get, and a MySQL database can have infinite (well... within reason and bandwidth, but not arbitrary limits) connections and is a reasonably tough, reliable system. Certainly on par with the MS-SQL Server.
As for switching from MySQL to Oracle? That is incredibly stupid unless Oracle provided a bunch of prostitutes for the company sales party, or something else along those lines. Or some mega Oracle fan in upper management. It looks like somebody was trying to find something to justify why Oracle should be used at the very least and thought they found it.
One of the problems facing many of the "rising generations" today is that they have seldom, if ever, used a good analog computer. Or even know what one is if they even see one.
These can be as simple as a slide rule or a logrithmic scale on a wheel, to something as complex as the Nordin Bomb Scope (used by U.S. bombers in WWII), or even the targeting computers on the Ohio Class battleships of the U.S. Navy. BTW, they were not electronic computers, but they were quite accurate, and last used in combat operations in Lebanon during the Reagan administration.
The nice thing about analog computers is that they can handle input data that is of a continuous nature and be able to perform calculations on that information (or feedback, if it were). They can also handle both discrete and continuous information inputs, and integrate them both together.
Drawbacks to analog computers is that they are seldom general purpose machines. Babagage's computer might be an exception, but even that could be called a digital computer, just not electronic. Analog computers require incredible skill on the part of machinists as well as mechanical engineers (something particularly the USA is lacking these days). They require custom curved pieces and unusual shapes that make devices like this to be a dying art.
Another more minor problem with analog computers is that they are only as accurate as the precision of all of their parts. This goes for pocket watches (pure mechanical watches are analog computers in this sense), slide rules, or even automotive odometers. Because they tend to be one-off devices, especially the more specialized analog computers, higher precision often isn't available, which is exactly why digital general purpose finite state machines (what is commonly refered to as a computer) have become as pervasive as they have in current industrial society.
Still, there is nothing like a good astrolabe to tell you your current lattitude... just in case the GPS reciever breaks down, or worse the GPS constellation breaks down.
How this applies is that I think of the human brain as precisely an analog computer, but one that surprisingly has been equiped for general purpose work with useful input and output mechanisms. Add in a bit of quantum computing that is not just a separate module but integrated into the overall design, and perhaps you get a simplistic view of what the human brain is really about.
The reason why the subtitles are not any better simply has to do with the sub-picture spec. All sub-pictures (the sub-titles in DVD movies) are very simple bitmaped images that are partially compressed with a run-length encoding algorithm, and only have four colors of depth. Those colors are indexable to a full RBG color pallet, but you have to set those colors up in the first place. And not all of the colors are available in all circumstances (different colors apply when the selector is "highlighted" over that part of the sub-picutre.
This system was originally done because much of the original DVD work was done in Japan, and they wanted to have an easy way to display Japanese characters... especially as Unicode was not as widely used then as it is today. It also gives a little more flexability in positioning the elements, as opposed to Line-21 closed captioning done with broadcast television.
As to why video publishing companies don't take advantage of more captioning options, I think it is more a curse of companies not really caring about their fan base except for what minimum work they have to accomplish to get their money. The technological capabilities are already there to have up to 32 different sub-pictures simultaneously in the same video piece. I don't know anybody, however, that really takes advantage of that capability. Multiple languages are almost as easy, and really don't take up that much room on the DVD compared to the video bandwidth.
As far as being able to customize a DVD disc, somehow I don't think that is going to happen. It would be cool to be able to add on extras as a fan, but most studios prefer to have the extra "power" to control their product.
OK, yes, the announcement is something new and it is relevant for/. to report this kind of story, but as far as the DVD industry is concerned, they blew their chance and this is essentially old news.
Every DVD player comes equiped with its own CPU, and even its own assembly code that is a part of the DVD-Video specification. This is already a part of the DVD-Video spec from even the very beginning. The problem is that Hollywood (together with the other members of the DVD Consortium... now DVD Forum) deliberately crippled the CPU so that it could in reality do very little. I've described this CPU has having 26 registers, no RAM at all, and 1 TB ROM address space, with incredible video capabilities but lousy rendering capabilities (sub-pictures).
Frankly, I think the DVD Forum blew their chance at having a cheap consumer entertainment computer back when the original design was put together back in the mid 1980s. If the CPU would have even had just a little bit more computing power, including a small (even 64 K) amount of RAM and text rendering capabilities (nothing new or even expensive to implement back when the design was being put together) they would have had not only a movie playing machine, but a computing platform that would have been more widely distruted than the X-Box or Playstation.
Even before the DVD-Video 1.0 spec came out (it was at a beta 0.98 when I mentioned this) I was suggesting to the design committee for DVD-Video to incorporate Java into the specification. Even then (about 10 years ago) I felt that some sort of programming environment would have been both easy to implement and offer to make DVD-Video something well beyond a simple movie playback box. Obviously my idea fell on deaf ears. Too bad I didn't patent the idea (perhaps I should have).
The DVD Forum will probabaly screw this one up as well, but at least they are going down the right general direction. IMHO there is no reason to make it specific to the Blu-ray format except as a splash to make the new generation of players seem to have more capabilities. Existing DVD discs certainly could be using this same capability, and there is plenty of space on a DVD for some binary (even raw source code) programming instructions, with a full two hour movie.
No, our sun's name is "The Sun". In Latin langages (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, etc.) it is "Sol". Science Fiction writers use the latin term simply to give some extra flavor, but it is just an adoption of the latin term in English. Helios is the greek version (aka Helium, Heliopause, Perihelion) of the same word, if you want to get even more exotic.
Personally, I like simple Anglo-Saxon when talking in English, even if the words are "vulgar" due to ancient repression of aboriginal Englishmen still reflected in the language. Crap instead of Manure, for instance. Anglo-Saxon words are usually easier to spell as well.
Yes, you are being picky. This is one that most languages (especially English in this case) simply don't have a reasonable general term for, mainly because until very recently there hasn't been a need for such a term.
The use of the term "solar system" is, however, a very widely recognized term that most people in the general public are familiar with, and when it is suggested that another "solar system" was found around another star besides the Sun, most people hearing that phrase instantly understand exactly what is being said. Isn't that the purpose of language anyway? Did anybody reading the article get confused and misinterpret what was said?
Sol is the Latin version of the word...hence adopted by Science Fiction writers to give a more exotic flavor to something most people here on Earth find ordinary...nothing more or less. And by being Latin, it is the root word for many terms relating to the Sun, as is the word Helios (the Greek version of the same word).
To propose perhaps a more generic term, perhaps "star system" would be appropriate, and could be applied generically to the planets and other stuff around the Sun. Or perhaps a word like "furdiquorid" (something made up), but then again, would anybody recognize that word as meaning anything? Star system would at least be recognized by scientists and many SciFi fans (perhaps hardcore SF fans as well). By context it may also be recognized by literate people in general, although it would be considered an unusual term.
Another word that needs to be standardized for a more generic version is perihelion (with related terms perigee, perijove, periares, etc.), although with this word at least you understand from the word roots what object you are orbiting.
There is much I could do to counter this post, although you do bring up a number of valid points.
I totally agree with you on the archival status of B&W photography. There is a hidden lie right now on the archival quality of digital media, particularly in regards to Compact Discs. If you have "pressed" CDs (made in a manufacturing plant and not CD-Rs on you home computer), made of metalic gold (this is another assumption not often discussed), it is indeed possible for a CD-ROM to last more than 100 years. Unfortuntely such archival quality CDs are seldom made and from my experience the lifetime of a CD is anywhere from 2 to 10 years. Cheap CD-Rs from Wal-Mart are going to be closer to the 2 year mark or worse. And every generation copy of digital data also seems to lose some data... especially when you are talking year between generations instead of hours or minutes.
I do disagree with you on some of the other points. Chemical photography is not always at "full-resolution", and I can give you several examples of this. I used to have a cheap 110 camera that I assembled from a kit, and the resolution of those images is comparable to cheap ( $50) digital cameras. Similar were so-called "spy cameras" that were somewhat popular in the 1960's and 1970's. The widespread availability of 35mm film more or less standardized resolution, but even then different film stocks had better resolution (due to silver grains and manufacturing processes) depending on who was doing the job. Like the classic Fuji vs. Kodak arguements of long ago. Even then, most professionals didn't (still don't) use 35mm except for more casual fun or situations where you needed a smaller camera (photojournalism, etc.). Having an 8x10 negative for high quality art prints even now is not uncommon, and something that Ansel Adams was particularly noted for.
And since I'm bringing up Ansel Adams, even after he took the shot, he would spend as much as an 8-10 hour day just to do a single "print"... all of that in a darkroom. That goes to show how much photography can truly be an art in the sense of how to balance colors and adjust brightness levels.
Having digital gear work in extremely wet or cold weather is more of a problem with the quality of the electronics inside. Mil-spec components can work just fine in sub-zero weather (it doesn't matter much the temperature scale at those levels), but far too often even with expensive digital cameras are made with ordinary consumer electronic components. For high-end photography this may change, but it is something that professional photographers are going to have to insist upon, and something they are not familiar with. As far as wet weather is concerned, it is no different than with chemical photography, as you have to have more rugged equipment that has good seals to keep the moisture out. Water trapped between lenses (or behind) will spoil photos made with any media. Admitedly some quality chemical cameras have no electronic parts (they are purely mechanical in nature), but in practice even that isn't always true.
As for digital prints being dye-based... this is more the printing system that is used. There is nothing stoping a digital print being done with silver halides on archival paper for a final print. This is just the raw mechanics on how it gets fixed onto a tangible medium. Unstable "chemical" photos have also been commonly made, which only last from 5 to 15 years. Notably the poloroid prints or other "instant" photography, and much of what was done for photojournalism (where archival needs aren't as high). Carbon black (the common dye used for the "black" part of much of printing, including desktop computer printers) generally is quite stable as far as an archival quality dye is concerned. So digital B&W photos would probably have fairly good archival qualities if printed on archival quality paper. Other inks, however, have much shorter lifetimes, particularly a good blue or yellow.
It is way too bad that the parent posting here was AC instead of somebody who posted with his name. I wish it would be modded up more.
I have experience with both chemical (traditional) photography and digitial photography and imaging. In the latter I've spent quite a bit on display systems on a professional engineering basis and am quite familiar with the issues on that end as well.
Digital photography can be as good as traditional photography, but there is a long road ahead when you find companies that suggest color depth and range are "good enough". This is usually the result of some manager who knows little if anything about the underlying technology but instead doesn't want to throw more money at improving technologies when the end customer, in their opinion, won't notice a difference. Often they are correct in terms of immediate need, but that also effectively kills any future push to improve once the line has been drawn.
To Kodak's credit, when they developed the PCD image format, they included by far the best dynamic range specification than any other digital encoding format. Unfortunately for them (and the rest of us), they kept it propritary, under lock and key with annoying patents and licensing issues incompatable with the GPL (and other nasty problems) so it is seldom if ever used.
The problem with digital imaging is that when you get to extreme ends of the color space (near black or near white, deep red, etc.) is where you most often notice color differences. Particularly near black your eye can percieve a tremendous difference in shades, as your eyes are logrithmic in nature in terms of sensitivity. This is true even with gamma corrected images, but the gamma does help out quite a bit.
Another huge issue that occurs with color (as opposed to monochrome or greyscale images) is that the RGB colorspace (or related CMY) is almost written in stone as the only possible color space, ignoring that people can see more than just three colors. I won't belabor this point, but most people are simply blind on what could be seen with digital photography simply because digital camera and display equipment forces you into seeing through the RGB blinders. It is so common and pervasive that few want to go beyond and try for more color richness. Traditional photography, while still using color filters on its negatives, offers more dynamic range even on colors than what you would see on a computer monitor.
I would also have to agree with the parent poster that people going into photography for the first time (young kids just starting out) are going to get the ultimate garbage digital photographs.
On the other hand, from my experience with digital photography and unlike chemical photography, you can get those kids to take hundreds if not thousands of photographs, and dump the garbage ones that don't have any value. This is a two-edge sword as well because good photographers will try to follow some artistic guidelines in terms of framing the shot, composition of the scene, etc., while somebody taking random shots of everything they look at is going to produce much more garbage shots that should be immediately discarded.
Still, I've handed my kids a digital camera to take on class field trips, and I have been able to get a few very good photos from their experience. And it is neat to get a visual view of life as a 7 year old... something that I have taken for granted at times.
A sad fact of human history is that over several generations there tends to occur a "collapse" in technology. In other words, we forget how things were done in the past and for a few generations we have to go back to basics in order to "rediscover" how our ancestors really did everything that was accomplished around us.
Historical examples include Easter Island, the Roman Empire, Egypt, Incas, Central Africa, and several periods of time in China.
The rougher aspects of what occur during a technology collapse is what happens to the colonists that are left to hang out and dry when this occurs. A good historical example is how the Viking colonists in Greenland had a very successful colony, with a dozen towns and even a Catholic diocese (to give an idea of the number of people living there). A climate shift occured together with political changes in Europe that made it significantly difficult to continue to support the colonies in Greenland, and as a result the colony there dwindled and eventually died out.
I would sure hate to be living on something like L-5 when a political revolution occurs in America or Europe... at least if basic life support or other resources still needed to be "imported" in order to keep the place going. A more concrete example is how MIR was launched by the USSR, but a couple of cosmonauts were trapped on board when a political change occured and they landed essentially in a whole new country that wasn't there before they left. What would have happened if the new Russia didn't care about the fate of those cosmonauts?
By living on a "planet", you can survive a technology collapse and have the raw materials needed to rebuild your civilization to regain the technology know-how in order to advance even further. I put planet in quotes because it may be possible for a partial collapse in technology where on an asteroid you have only the tools to do basic repairs until you can reaquire the infrastructure to expand again. I just don't see how on an O'Neill colony that would be possible.
Larger teraformed planets (or even a planet like the Earth) can support an almost total collapse of technology back to a hunter/gatherer level of civilization, while smaller minor planets could only support a lower level of collapse. The question is how far can you go if knowledge is locked up/patented/copyrighted/forbidden/classified and as a result forgotten by future generations?
This is not to suggest that O'Neill colonies or living on asteroids is wrong to do, but planetary teraforming is going to be necessary if only to act as an emergency reserve "just in case" and as an investment into the future. That and there is no reason why both can't occur simultaneously except for purely political/religious reasons.
The magnetic field of Mars is more like what it will be like on the Earth when the pole reversal occurs: There are several north and south poles scattered all over the surface of Mars, including some near the equator. A "North Pole" and "South Pole" may only be a hundred miles apart in some cases.
The overall effect of this is that the general magnetic field for the planet as a whole is weak, and instead of having ionized material streaming into just two poles on Mars, solar storms will stream into dozens or hundreds of magnetic poles all across the entire planet.
The terms of Aurora Borealis and Australis would still be correct terms in the sense that there still are north and south "poles" to stream material toward, but it would be scattered over almost the entire planet. Unless you happen to have a "compass" on you when a solar storm hit Mars, you wouldn't really be be able to tell the difference.
I do feel like the original researcher who has pushed this "press release" out did a disservice by only mentioning the Aurora Borealis, probably because he has lived his entire life in the Northern hemisphere and is really only familiar with that term, even if he is an astrophysicist and should know both auroral terms. Coming up with a new term is just silly.
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Keep in mind that when the Challenger was originally built, it was supposed to be a test vehicle as a preliminary stage before the Columbia flew. Yes, it was retro-fit to become spaceworthy (and they said the Enterprise couldn't have that happen?) but it wasn't suppose to happen in the first place.
The Endeavor was built during the Reagan administration as a replacement shuttle...but keep in mind it was built largely out of the spare parts they were keeping as a backup they needed in order to do repairs on the rest of the shuttle fleet. That normally isn't too much of a problem unless you actually need those spares to do repairs. That that happens quite a bit where one shuttle is canabalized for another one that is getting preped for flight. NASA has even yanked parts off of the Enterprise in order to get a flight off the ground.
In short, you are all too close to the target when you suggest that there should have been a Shuttle Mark-2 program going as early as the late 1970's or early 1980's...particularly after the Challenger explosion.
From my opinion, there should be some bands that are left to the hams that just want to do code only, and a special "endorsement" that can be added to an Amature license that would allow you to access those frequencies. Basically nothing more than you can get for a driver's license by getting endorsements for hauling things like hazardous materials, being a taxi driver, school bus driver, etc. Or the huge number of endorsements you get for a pilot's license.
I guess the FCC wants to avoid that situation, even though the FAA has been doing stuff like that for years without any real problems in terms of enforcement or bureaucratic headaches of trying to keep everything straightened out.
As far as opening up ham radio to younger generations, I am not so sure if this is going to be the trick.
The fastest way to get listed with Google is to get your site name into the Open Directory Project (at least with a new low-volume site). Of course, there are issues with that, and it requires hand entry on the part of some volunteer, but at least it eventually does get listed.
Another thing to do is just push your site onto Google manually by putting into the direct scan list. It takes a little bit of digging to find it, but it is there. Do that for some other search engines as well.
As far as using other search engines... I used to use Lycos quite a bit, and as my primary search engine, but it is so incredibly stale now that I can't stand using it anymore. Yahoo I never liked at all...ever. I do use the Open Directory Project search... especially when I want to find similar sites of a topical nature. The search tools are pretty good on that site. The ODP is the directory source for Google, and is about 2-3 weeks ahead of Google Directories, although not quite as fast as Google with inferior net access.
I've commented earlier that the 1970's version was Mormon, and this new version is American. From what I see, it is heavily inspired by American culture, including presidential succession, civilian vs. military conflicts, environmental fears, and general attitudes toward personal liberties (both good and bad). Only very minor vestages remain from the original series, mainly the underlying plot line that can be summarized in about 50 words or less.
As far as SG-1 getting stale, I would have to agree more or less with you on many points. With Jack O'Neil as a Brigadier, the SG-1 team is more his personal staff and Lt. Col. Carter his XO. This is an interesting dynamic that makes it harder to write the dramatic Star Trek TOS-style episodes of going to a new planet every week, and instead the story arcs have to cover several episodes now...even across several seasons. Old enemies occasionally come up, and in this case they really are old enemies and not supposedly something "made up" to be like an old enemy. Apothos really needs to have another come back sometime soon (to describe a multi-season story arc), and the Replicators havn't been totally dealt with either.
Few TV series, much less a SciFi series, ever make it this far in terms of the number of episodes they have filmed. In many ways it is breaking new ground just because they now have to deal with the damage they have left behind in previous episodes.
Another good book that desribes the causes of civilization advances and retreats is "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond.
Mr. Diamond goes into several alternative explainations, but it does get slightly into energy production, and more importantly climate issues that have had a huge impact on the growth of civilizations.
I agree that the grandparent post was totally off the mark by quite a bit.
I would love to see some hard documentary evidence on this point. From my knowledge of history, it was precisely the use of coal as a fuel source that triggered the Industrial Revolution. Almost immediately prior to the widespread use of coal in England, the primary fuel source was wood or hydro power (for running mills and stuff). There was a huge debate in England at the time because the forests were visibly disappearing from all over the British Isles, and doom and gloom were predicted (as supposedly did happen at Easter Island). After coal was used in large quantities, England went from a largly agrarian lifestyle and small villages (London had only about 30,000 people in the year 1400) to a major industrial power. The use of coal had a major impact on that occuring.
When coal was finally excavated in large quantities, there was a need for bulk shipments of the stuff overland to larger concentrations of people who needed it. From this came railroads, steel production, mechanical and civil engineering, and a modern industrial economy.
As far as the Great Depression being caused by a shift from coal to oil, that is incredibly simplistic, and there were many causes for what happened, including a lack of securities oversight (triggering the Wall Street Stock Market Crash of 1929), overproduction of food stocks, preditory pricing companies, and reconstruction issues from WWI where the bill to pay for that awful war finally came due and had to be paid. Conversion from coal to oil may be there as a slight cause, but nearly as significant with those fuel sources was the conversion from passenger rail travel to personal automobiles... which really didn't happen until the 1950's in the USA anyway.
What a fusion energy economy would actually provide is a cheap energy source that would cause a huge expansion of economic resources for just about everybody, even in the most poor parts of the world.
It could be argued that the wealth a person has is determined by the amount of raw power that they have available to do what they want to accomplish. This is actual power, as measured in kilowatt-hours, joules, or whatever. If you want to increase the wealth of a region, you need to provide energy resources that will allow the people in that area to be able to accomplish whatever task they set their mind to accomplish. In this regard control of power is also control of political power, as utility companies are quite aware of.
What project like this tabletop device, a Fusor, or even Cold Fusion offer to provide is the potential that you don't need utility companies to provide this energy for you. If you need the power to run an air-conditioner, you just prime your fusion reactor with a little hydrogen gas and some water (to extract some more hydrogen gas). And not much water at that either. And no need for rolling blackouts or even power surges on the power grid.
Geeks successfully decentralized computing power, so why not power generation itself? I for one look strong with anticipation and excitement for the future this may bring.
BTW, I think it will be 1st world nations that will be able to take advantage of a hydrogen economy first before most 3rd world nations. If you look at China, they are incredibly heavy users of coal right now, with manufacturing plants that are actually producing steam-powered locomotives as new products (and hudreds to thousands of deaths every year in the coal mines from accidents). If anything the Chinese experience is that they have had to go through the entire industrial revolution, but at a greatly accelerated pace compared to most western European countries and North America. Africa is in political turmoil that almost seems to resemble what Europe was like in the early part of the 2nd millenium, and simply won't get much of anywhere (except for a few minor countries who get it) until they resolve their political issues and stop the nearly constant state of warfare in Africa.
Well, they did a hyperspace jump to get there, and certainly a series of three or four small jumps would be trivial to get into position. This is like getting on the freeway and traveling 20 miles to get somewhere that is only 4 miles away, but doing that because it is faster than plowing through two dozen stop lights and stop signs (that are the wrong way onto major throughfares to get across easily). This happens in California quite often, particularly Los Angeles.
I think that the energy released from hydrogen and oxygen combining on Yavin 4 is trivial compared to the raw kinetic energy of a cloud of gas and debris coming from Yavin that is traveling at speeds far exceeding escape velocity... temporarily triggering nuclear fusion reactions in the compression wavefront in a manner very similar to a supernova explosion, including on the surface of Yavin 4. (Do you really *want* to be on the inside of a nuclear fusion reactor?)
The question that has to be asked is more how the Death Star could possibly have that much stored energy? A portal to an anti-matter universe?
I always considered the reason why the Death Star didn't simply wipe out Yavin itself was mainly energy requirements (blowing up a gas giant takes an order of magnitude more energy than blowing up a terrestrial "planet" instead), and the fact they didn't consider the Rebel fleet to be that much of a threat in the first place... also the reason they didn't do a quick seris of hyperjumps to simply get to the other side of the planet (giving military surprise and destroying the X-wings when they were still on the ground).
Of course blowing up Yavin could cause some problems with the Death Star itself, but any competant commander (Tarkin certainly seemed competant in general) would have that happen at a reasonably safe distance... or jump into hyperspace well before the shock wave front even gets close.
P.S. I know this just fantasy... of course BS of one can be countered with more BS.
One of the reasons why colonies in the Americas, and the rest of the continents on the Earth, were able to get rid of European control was primarily issues related to distance and communications issues.
In space this is an issue as well, although for the first time in human history a major segment of frontier space will be made available with rapid communications (radio) over time to physically get there. How this will affect human colonization is going to be interesting and unique in human history.
Travel from the Earth to Mars by Hohmann transfer orbit is about 9 months long, and improved nuclear engines or other exotic technology can cut this down to about 3 months... about the same amount of time it took to travel between London and Boston back in the 1700's. Governance strategies are likely going to be similar in nature, although I hope countries realize the political implications before they start acting.
Travel between the Earth and L5, on the other hand and as demonstrated by the Apollo missions, is about 3 days. This means that potentially an evacuation could even bring people back to the Earth if some really ugly celestial event were to happen (although weither the Earth would be safe at the same time is subject to interpretation as well).
As far as the basic tech to make this happen, the ISS is far from the best solution, although the ISS shows precisely that it can happen, and at large scales. The #1 problem for building at the LaGrange Points is simply obtaining a reasonable quantity of basic construction supplies (girders, glass, oxygen, water, etc.) Almost all of that can be obtained from the Moon at prices far cheaper than can be done from the Earth, which is going to require colonization and mining efforts on the Moon to support any space colonies at the L Points larger than the ISS. Tugging a smaller asteroid into place can also give an initial supply of raw materials as well.
All of the raw science necessary to make this happen has already been discovered, and there are no show-stopper problems like there is for interstellar travel (like Einstein's Relatiivity equations). The rest is engineering and practical experience, which both Russia and the USA have in boatloads as well right now, with the Europeans, Japan, India, Brazil, and China not too far behind. All seven of these nations (the EU considered as one nation, if you will) will eventually get into space colonization in a major way, with even some other countries possibly getting into the act as well.
Did you ever read the proposal for ICANN at-large members? If not that is too bad in many ways.
The proposal called for 5 regions world-wide, and each board member had to be elected by direct ballot cast from each region by ordinary internet users. The process of qualifying wasn't that hard, but you had to prove that you were unique, with a hard snail-mail address. Ballot stuffing could happen, but it was quite difficult.
The result? It actually happened. ICANN, in their infinite wisdom killed the idea.... after the board members were actually elected and serving on the governing board (in closed meetings that the at-large members weren't invited to attend).
I wish that non-US government regulatory bodies had been complaining back then with the same kind of gusto as they seem to be doing right now, and it might have been that the at-large board members would be running the show right now, and not a bunch of stupid self-interested board members who don't care.
The country TLDs are still run by ICANN, but are non-controvercial because they are directly related to the ISO naming scheme for country codes. If you want to get a new country code, you submit the request through the ISO country code committee. This happened with the Soviet Union (.su) became Russia (.ru), and still happens as political circumstances change throughout the world.
/8, /16, & /24... but you know what I'm talking about if you are nitpicking at this fine points.) In theory ICANN could deallocate all of China from the internet by chaning routing tables to redirect IP addresses elsewhere. In practice, however, that would (probabally) never happen.
ICANN does, however, allocate the IP addresses and organize the network topology, so this becomes a huge project in allocating Class A,B,& C networks (I know...
Where ICANN really screwed up, and where the U.S. Dept. of Commerce really messed up as well, was to kill the whole at-large board member plan.
I participated in the election of Karl Auerbach to the ICANN board, and I thought the whole process was incredible. **_IF_** ICANN had kept that policy for the at-large members and phased out the rest of the board, this would never have even been an issue, and the U.N. would not have even been tempted to get involved. Even though it was just for governance of the Internet, it was the first major election to a legislative body that I know about that litterally involved people from arround the world.
If these elections ever came back, I would vote for Karl in a heartbeat. As it was, Karl had to sue ICANN just to get financial records, and his position (in part because of Karl's meddling and getting into the face of Vinton Cerf) was eliminated by the rest of the board members. One of the nasty things that happened, and one of the mistakes of the at-large membership, was that the at-large board members were outnumbered by corporate members, who viewed the at-large board members as a threat (they were, as a matter of fact).
As it is, ICANN has lost all credibility in my opinion, and it appears as though the U.N. may be the only real option to get things cleaned up. They had their chance, and it is sad to think that America fostered this dictatorship (or more correctly, facist organization in the most litteral sense... governance by corporation) instead of having a real democratic movement and organization, even more so when it looked like it was really going to happen.
Keep in mind that the U.S. Constitution seems to be supporting the creative incentive idea, not the economic public good idea.
Very clearly and specifically, the only constitutional basis for copyright law is to "promote the useful arts and sciences". I know Eldridge vs. Ashcroft seemed to suggest SCOTUS didn't think that was a good way to challenge copyright law, but if you read the dissenting opinions in that case you might think otherwise. Certainly at some time in the not too distant future SCOTUS will revisit the issue and may likely reverse themselves on copyright issues. The majority opinion was largely based on the idea that Congress can do pretty much what it wants to do, and usefulness or even constitutionality of copyright laws is largely up to the U.S. Congress.
If you could provide a clear example on how artists (speaking broadly, including photographers, scultors, painters, authors, computer programmers, musicians, actors, etc.) have really gained anything with this current system, I would love to hear what you are suggesting.
Certainly a few people at the top of each of their professions have made millions or billions of dollars (i.e. Bill Gates) from strong copyright, but I would argue that the rank and file artist who is trying to be creative and pay the mortgage on their house is generally losing their shirt based on the current system.
Authors have it quite rough, but there are now several alternatives to placing the written word whereever they want to. Earning money from writing is a bit tougher, but it can be done.
Musicians are generally the worst off with the current system. Record lables tend to take just about everything that is made off of a record, and most musicians would be lucky to get a few cents from every CD sold. Quite litterally, if they instead bought their own computer with a CD-R burner and made their own CDs, most new musicians would be money ahead after the first dozen CD sales. I've seen regional bands that do exactly that sort of self-publishing because they don't trust the major labels. Those bands are also much more approachable on a fan level.
As a computer programmer, I certainly hope most of my software doesn't survive the life + 75 current copyright regime. Heck, software I wrote 10 years ago I'm not getting a single penny off of anyway, and neither is the company that I wrote it for. I fail to see the financial incentive for either myself or any company that will employ me to even preserve that copyright rule, and if it went to 14 years it would still be worth while for me to write computer software. It would also mean I could hack an Atari 2600 emulator together and have some fun with some old games that the publishers addresses aren't even known.
I don't know where you get the idea you can't sell the driver to the end user. The GPL always allows you to sell any GPL'd software for whatever you can get for it. The difference is that you can't restrict others from also selling it, and it must have source code to tweak it as well.
That is the GPL, and the difference between the GPL and CC-by-NC (or non-commercial use only licenses in general). Most people who don't understand the GPL usually don't get that point. BSD-style licenses are basically attribution only licenses... you can use it as long as you give credit somewhere that it came from whoever wrote it in the first place.
The problem with MySQL AB is that they insist that their drivers, by being GPL'd, also make anything linking to them forced to be GPL'd as well unless you purchase the commercial license.
I think they are full of it, although the GPL is not exactly clear if that is the case either. The legal question comes from the idea of if something running in another process, can you access data from that process running a GPL'd program if your application is propritary? Can you sell that propritary program and keep it propritary? I suggest the answer is yes, but MySQL AB wants you to think the answer is no. That is the argument.
BTW, earlier version of MySQL solved this problem by having the drivers written as LGPL libraries. There is also little that can be done to stop a "clean room" environment that rewrites the current drivers and merely uses the communications protocols to talk to the MySQL server. So in effect, all MySQL is trying to say is that you must also rewrite the drivers if you want a propritary product. If the cost savings is worth it, any decent programmer ought to be able to accomplish that task if you want to stay on the safe side of legal as well. I'm just not volunteering.
I even think the whole GPL'd driver business that MySQL is demanding is BS as well. I was in a similar situation as the grandparent post, trying to come up with a reasonable database backend to a product I was developing.
I tried to convince the money people that it was better to simply support MySQL and try to stay on the safe side of legal, and besides, try to gain some good karma by helping out the folks at MySQL AB, even if I felt their driver copyright was on shaky ground.
Frankly, I think the MySQL commercial license is incredibly reasonable considering what you get, and a MySQL database can have infinite (well... within reason and bandwidth, but not arbitrary limits) connections and is a reasonably tough, reliable system. Certainly on par with the MS-SQL Server.
As for switching from MySQL to Oracle? That is incredibly stupid unless Oracle provided a bunch of prostitutes for the company sales party, or something else along those lines. Or some mega Oracle fan in upper management. It looks like somebody was trying to find something to justify why Oracle should be used at the very least and thought they found it.
One of the problems facing many of the "rising generations" today is that they have seldom, if ever, used a good analog computer. Or even know what one is if they even see one.
These can be as simple as a slide rule or a logrithmic scale on a wheel, to something as complex as the Nordin Bomb Scope (used by U.S. bombers in WWII), or even the targeting computers on the Ohio Class battleships of the U.S. Navy. BTW, they were not electronic computers, but they were quite accurate, and last used in combat operations in Lebanon during the Reagan administration.
The nice thing about analog computers is that they can handle input data that is of a continuous nature and be able to perform calculations on that information (or feedback, if it were). They can also handle both discrete and continuous information inputs, and integrate them both together.
Drawbacks to analog computers is that they are seldom general purpose machines. Babagage's computer might be an exception, but even that could be called a digital computer, just not electronic. Analog computers require incredible skill on the part of machinists as well as mechanical engineers (something particularly the USA is lacking these days). They require custom curved pieces and unusual shapes that make devices like this to be a dying art.
Another more minor problem with analog computers is that they are only as accurate as the precision of all of their parts. This goes for pocket watches (pure mechanical watches are analog computers in this sense), slide rules, or even automotive odometers. Because they tend to be one-off devices, especially the more specialized analog computers, higher precision often isn't available, which is exactly why digital general purpose finite state machines (what is commonly refered to as a computer) have become as pervasive as they have in current industrial society.
Still, there is nothing like a good astrolabe to tell you your current lattitude... just in case the GPS reciever breaks down, or worse the GPS constellation breaks down.
How this applies is that I think of the human brain as precisely an analog computer, but one that surprisingly has been equiped for general purpose work with useful input and output mechanisms. Add in a bit of quantum computing that is not just a separate module but integrated into the overall design, and perhaps you get a simplistic view of what the human brain is really about.
The reason why the subtitles are not any better simply has to do with the sub-picture spec. All sub-pictures (the sub-titles in DVD movies) are very simple bitmaped images that are partially compressed with a run-length encoding algorithm, and only have four colors of depth. Those colors are indexable to a full RBG color pallet, but you have to set those colors up in the first place. And not all of the colors are available in all circumstances (different colors apply when the selector is "highlighted" over that part of the sub-picutre.
This system was originally done because much of the original DVD work was done in Japan, and they wanted to have an easy way to display Japanese characters... especially as Unicode was not as widely used then as it is today. It also gives a little more flexability in positioning the elements, as opposed to Line-21 closed captioning done with broadcast television.
As to why video publishing companies don't take advantage of more captioning options, I think it is more a curse of companies not really caring about their fan base except for what minimum work they have to accomplish to get their money. The technological capabilities are already there to have up to 32 different sub-pictures simultaneously in the same video piece. I don't know anybody, however, that really takes advantage of that capability. Multiple languages are almost as easy, and really don't take up that much room on the DVD compared to the video bandwidth.
As far as being able to customize a DVD disc, somehow I don't think that is going to happen. It would be cool to be able to add on extras as a fan, but most studios prefer to have the extra "power" to control their product.
OK, yes, the announcement is something new and it is relevant for /. to report this kind of story, but as far as the DVD industry is concerned, they blew their chance and this is essentially old news.
Every DVD player comes equiped with its own CPU, and even its own assembly code that is a part of the DVD-Video specification. This is already a part of the DVD-Video spec from even the very beginning. The problem is that Hollywood (together with the other members of the DVD Consortium... now DVD Forum) deliberately crippled the CPU so that it could in reality do very little. I've described this CPU has having 26 registers, no RAM at all, and 1 TB ROM address space, with incredible video capabilities but lousy rendering capabilities (sub-pictures).
Frankly, I think the DVD Forum blew their chance at having a cheap consumer entertainment computer back when the original design was put together back in the mid 1980s. If the CPU would have even had just a little bit more computing power, including a small (even 64 K) amount of RAM and text rendering capabilities (nothing new or even expensive to implement back when the design was being put together) they would have had not only a movie playing machine, but a computing platform that would have been more widely distruted than the X-Box or Playstation.
Even before the DVD-Video 1.0 spec came out (it was at a beta 0.98 when I mentioned this) I was suggesting to the design committee for DVD-Video to incorporate Java into the specification. Even then (about 10 years ago) I felt that some sort of programming environment would have been both easy to implement and offer to make DVD-Video something well beyond a simple movie playback box. Obviously my idea fell on deaf ears. Too bad I didn't patent the idea (perhaps I should have).
The DVD Forum will probabaly screw this one up as well, but at least they are going down the right general direction. IMHO there is no reason to make it specific to the Blu-ray format except as a splash to make the new generation of players seem to have more capabilities. Existing DVD discs certainly could be using this same capability, and there is plenty of space on a DVD for some binary (even raw source code) programming instructions, with a full two hour movie.
No, our sun's name is "The Sun". In Latin langages (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, etc.) it is "Sol". Science Fiction writers use the latin term simply to give some extra flavor, but it is just an adoption of the latin term in English. Helios is the greek version (aka Helium, Heliopause, Perihelion) of the same word, if you want to get even more exotic.
Personally, I like simple Anglo-Saxon when talking in English, even if the words are "vulgar" due to ancient repression of aboriginal Englishmen still reflected in the language. Crap instead of Manure, for instance. Anglo-Saxon words are usually easier to spell as well.
Yes, you are being picky. This is one that most languages (especially English in this case) simply don't have a reasonable general term for, mainly because until very recently there hasn't been a need for such a term.
The use of the term "solar system" is, however, a very widely recognized term that most people in the general public are familiar with, and when it is suggested that another "solar system" was found around another star besides the Sun, most people hearing that phrase instantly understand exactly what is being said. Isn't that the purpose of language anyway? Did anybody reading the article get confused and misinterpret what was said?
Sol is the Latin version of the word...hence adopted by Science Fiction writers to give a more exotic flavor to something most people here on Earth find ordinary...nothing more or less. And by being Latin, it is the root word for many terms relating to the Sun, as is the word Helios (the Greek version of the same word).
To propose perhaps a more generic term, perhaps "star system" would be appropriate, and could be applied generically to the planets and other stuff around the Sun. Or perhaps a word like "furdiquorid" (something made up), but then again, would anybody recognize that word as meaning anything? Star system would at least be recognized by scientists and many SciFi fans (perhaps hardcore SF fans as well). By context it may also be recognized by literate people in general, although it would be considered an unusual term.
Another word that needs to be standardized for a more generic version is perihelion (with related terms perigee, perijove, periares, etc.), although with this word at least you understand from the word roots what object you are orbiting.
There is much I could do to counter this post, although you do bring up a number of valid points.
I totally agree with you on the archival status of B&W photography. There is a hidden lie right now on the archival quality of digital media, particularly in regards to Compact Discs. If you have "pressed" CDs (made in a manufacturing plant and not CD-Rs on you home computer), made of metalic gold (this is another assumption not often discussed), it is indeed possible for a CD-ROM to last more than 100 years. Unfortuntely such archival quality CDs are seldom made and from my experience the lifetime of a CD is anywhere from 2 to 10 years. Cheap CD-Rs from Wal-Mart are going to be closer to the 2 year mark or worse. And every generation copy of digital data also seems to lose some data... especially when you are talking year between generations instead of hours or minutes.
I do disagree with you on some of the other points. Chemical photography is not always at "full-resolution", and I can give you several examples of this. I used to have a cheap 110 camera that I assembled from a kit, and the resolution of those images is comparable to cheap ( $50) digital cameras. Similar were so-called "spy cameras" that were somewhat popular in the 1960's and 1970's. The widespread availability of 35mm film more or less standardized resolution, but even then different film stocks had better resolution (due to silver grains and manufacturing processes) depending on who was doing the job. Like the classic Fuji vs. Kodak arguements of long ago. Even then, most professionals didn't (still don't) use 35mm except for more casual fun or situations where you needed a smaller camera (photojournalism, etc.). Having an 8x10 negative for high quality art prints even now is not uncommon, and something that Ansel Adams was particularly noted for.
And since I'm bringing up Ansel Adams, even after he took the shot, he would spend as much as an 8-10 hour day just to do a single "print"... all of that in a darkroom. That goes to show how much photography can truly be an art in the sense of how to balance colors and adjust brightness levels.
Having digital gear work in extremely wet or cold weather is more of a problem with the quality of the electronics inside. Mil-spec components can work just fine in sub-zero weather (it doesn't matter much the temperature scale at those levels), but far too often even with expensive digital cameras are made with ordinary consumer electronic components. For high-end photography this may change, but it is something that professional photographers are going to have to insist upon, and something they are not familiar with. As far as wet weather is concerned, it is no different than with chemical photography, as you have to have more rugged equipment that has good seals to keep the moisture out. Water trapped between lenses (or behind) will spoil photos made with any media. Admitedly some quality chemical cameras have no electronic parts (they are purely mechanical in nature), but in practice even that isn't always true.
As for digital prints being dye-based... this is more the printing system that is used. There is nothing stoping a digital print being done with silver halides on archival paper for a final print. This is just the raw mechanics on how it gets fixed onto a tangible medium. Unstable "chemical" photos have also been commonly made, which only last from 5 to 15 years. Notably the poloroid prints or other "instant" photography, and much of what was done for photojournalism (where archival needs aren't as high). Carbon black (the common dye used for the "black" part of much of printing, including desktop computer printers) generally is quite stable as far as an archival quality dye is concerned. So digital B&W photos would probably have fairly good archival qualities if printed on archival quality paper. Other inks, however, have much shorter lifetimes, particularly a good blue or yellow.
As far as Digital photography needing a high end
It is way too bad that the parent posting here was AC instead of somebody who posted with his name. I wish it would be modded up more.
I have experience with both chemical (traditional) photography and digitial photography and imaging. In the latter I've spent quite a bit on display systems on a professional engineering basis and am quite familiar with the issues on that end as well.
Digital photography can be as good as traditional photography, but there is a long road ahead when you find companies that suggest color depth and range are "good enough". This is usually the result of some manager who knows little if anything about the underlying technology but instead doesn't want to throw more money at improving technologies when the end customer, in their opinion, won't notice a difference. Often they are correct in terms of immediate need, but that also effectively kills any future push to improve once the line has been drawn.
To Kodak's credit, when they developed the PCD image format, they included by far the best dynamic range specification than any other digital encoding format. Unfortunately for them (and the rest of us), they kept it propritary, under lock and key with annoying patents and licensing issues incompatable with the GPL (and other nasty problems) so it is seldom if ever used.
The problem with digital imaging is that when you get to extreme ends of the color space (near black or near white, deep red, etc.) is where you most often notice color differences. Particularly near black your eye can percieve a tremendous difference in shades, as your eyes are logrithmic in nature in terms of sensitivity. This is true even with gamma corrected images, but the gamma does help out quite a bit.
Another huge issue that occurs with color (as opposed to monochrome or greyscale images) is that the RGB colorspace (or related CMY) is almost written in stone as the only possible color space, ignoring that people can see more than just three colors. I won't belabor this point, but most people are simply blind on what could be seen with digital photography simply because digital camera and display equipment forces you into seeing through the RGB blinders. It is so common and pervasive that few want to go beyond and try for more color richness. Traditional photography, while still using color filters on its negatives, offers more dynamic range even on colors than what you would see on a computer monitor.
I would also have to agree with the parent poster that people going into photography for the first time (young kids just starting out) are going to get the ultimate garbage digital photographs.
On the other hand, from my experience with digital photography and unlike chemical photography, you can get those kids to take hundreds if not thousands of photographs, and dump the garbage ones that don't have any value. This is a two-edge sword as well because good photographers will try to follow some artistic guidelines in terms of framing the shot, composition of the scene, etc., while somebody taking random shots of everything they look at is going to produce much more garbage shots that should be immediately discarded.
Still, I've handed my kids a digital camera to take on class field trips, and I have been able to get a few very good photos from their experience. And it is neat to get a visual view of life as a 7 year old... something that I have taken for granted at times.
A sad fact of human history is that over several generations there tends to occur a "collapse" in technology. In other words, we forget how things were done in the past and for a few generations we have to go back to basics in order to "rediscover" how our ancestors really did everything that was accomplished around us.
Historical examples include Easter Island, the Roman Empire, Egypt, Incas, Central Africa, and several periods of time in China.
The rougher aspects of what occur during a technology collapse is what happens to the colonists that are left to hang out and dry when this occurs. A good historical example is how the Viking colonists in Greenland had a very successful colony, with a dozen towns and even a Catholic diocese (to give an idea of the number of people living there). A climate shift occured together with political changes in Europe that made it significantly difficult to continue to support the colonies in Greenland, and as a result the colony there dwindled and eventually died out.
I would sure hate to be living on something like L-5 when a political revolution occurs in America or Europe... at least if basic life support or other resources still needed to be "imported" in order to keep the place going. A more concrete example is how MIR was launched by the USSR, but a couple of cosmonauts were trapped on board when a political change occured and they landed essentially in a whole new country that wasn't there before they left. What would have happened if the new Russia didn't care about the fate of those cosmonauts?
By living on a "planet", you can survive a technology collapse and have the raw materials needed to rebuild your civilization to regain the technology know-how in order to advance even further. I put planet in quotes because it may be possible for a partial collapse in technology where on an asteroid you have only the tools to do basic repairs until you can reaquire the infrastructure to expand again. I just don't see how on an O'Neill colony that would be possible.
Larger teraformed planets (or even a planet like the Earth) can support an almost total collapse of technology back to a hunter/gatherer level of civilization, while smaller minor planets could only support a lower level of collapse. The question is how far can you go if knowledge is locked up/patented/copyrighted/forbidden/classified and as a result forgotten by future generations?
This is not to suggest that O'Neill colonies or living on asteroids is wrong to do, but planetary teraforming is going to be necessary if only to act as an emergency reserve "just in case" and as an investment into the future. That and there is no reason why both can't occur simultaneously except for purely political/religious reasons.
To start with, I'm posting a related space.com URL (note the date this article was posted... /. behind the times):
_ aurora.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050608_mars
The magnetic field of Mars is more like what it will be like on the Earth when the pole reversal occurs: There are several north and south poles scattered all over the surface of Mars, including some near the equator. A "North Pole" and "South Pole" may only be a hundred miles apart in some cases.
The overall effect of this is that the general magnetic field for the planet as a whole is weak, and instead of having ionized material streaming into just two poles on Mars, solar storms will stream into dozens or hundreds of magnetic poles all across the entire planet.
The terms of Aurora Borealis and Australis would still be correct terms in the sense that there still are north and south "poles" to stream material toward, but it would be scattered over almost the entire planet. Unless you happen to have a "compass" on you when a solar storm hit Mars, you wouldn't really be be able to tell the difference.
I do feel like the original researcher who has pushed this "press release" out did a disservice by only mentioning the Aurora Borealis, probably because he has lived his entire life in the Northern hemisphere and is really only familiar with that term, even if he is an astrophysicist and should know both auroral terms. Coming up with a new term is just silly.