What apple did was essentially the next logical step forward. The Appstore is really the equivalent of their ITMS which was a success. Touch screens have been coming for sometime. It was ballsy of them to eliminate nearly all the buttons, but the individual components for the iPhone were already there.
Yes, all the component parts were there. They had been there for years. It's that none of the other people who had all the component parts for years were ballsy enough to come up with a touchscreen UI that actually worked. Same goes for tablets. MS has been trying for years to sell tablets, but it took Apple to actually make one that sold.
Very similar to USB. My first Fujitsu WIndows laptop had a USB port on it. I and the other techs I work with had to go online to figure out what it was. This was 1997 IIRC. It wasn't till Apple put out the iMac with USB that anybody paid attention to it. Face it, if it wasn't for Apple, Windows would probably still be operating on PS2 and parallel ports (not to mention 5 1/4" floppies).
If I could get one of these in a PDA-like form instead of phone-like, for under $300, I'd get one, if for no other reason than compatibility testing, development, and the XBox Live integration.
So, in other words, you want a Zune Touch. SOunds like an excellent reason to push the Zune brand. People like you want it.
I'm sorry, but that isn't a city. It's pretty much a large town. I would imagine where you live is also a classic case of urban sprawl. Lots of roads, parking lots, and cars along with problems that comes with them. The sort of thing that we're trying to get away from if you want to conserve energy and resources which is what this is trying to do.
The title is misleading. The LHC did not create a mini 'big bang' but created a miniature of the conditions that might have existed shortly AFTER the big bang. The 'big bang [wikipedia.org]' was the event that created all mass, space, and time in the entire universe in a single instant approximately 13.7 billion years ago. The LHC collision of lead ions did not create any mass, space, or time but did create a "hot dense soup of quarks and gluons known as a quark-gluon plasma" that might have existed after the 'big bang' event.
Yes, you are correct. The seven word title does not convey the actual details of the entire article, and is abeiviated to the point that somebody who is not already familiar with what is going on may find confusing. However, the actual meaning of the title was well understood by people who have been following the discussions on the LHC as these conditions have been long awaited. As for the people who were confused, they haven't read any of the previous articles on what the LHC is doing, so why should the writers be expect them to read this one?
Just figure out that launch and land from the ground thing, then we'll have the ultimate traffic beater!
If this is the guy I'm remembering, the landing part is the ultimate goal of his experiments. With the wing, the wearer can turn the downward speed into horizontal speed. Then use the horizontal speed to give more lift canceling out the remaining vertical speed with reduction of horizontal speed. Thus, if timing it correctly, the wearer could stall out right at ground level and basically just step down to the ground. Skydivers can currently do this but since the parachutes reduce the speeds involved, it's less dangerous although they can stall and fall far enough to hurt or kill themselves if done improperly. With the wing, it's not reducing speed, just changing the direction so it's much more dangerous if a mistake is made.
What expressive art tools are available that deemphasize precision work with your coordinated hand?
His other hand?
Once he gets that trained and is used to using it, won't it probably be better than trying to use his normal hand with lack of precision? That's what I did anyway when I injured my right hand; I just switched to my left.
1. Unobtainium. - I'll give you this one. They probably could have substituted tylium for a fusion material without any affect to the plot dealing with workers, their rights, or the resource scarcity.
2. Magic. - First, off, rational universes are boring. Fantasy is big for a reason and most drama deals with irrational emotions. Two, the events shown never really show magic as much as point towards either a universe that is deterministic, controlled, or chaotic. It seemed fairly deterministic to some degree but deterministic universes are boring because there is no chance of change. It certainly could be controlled, probably by the five cyclons. Substitute five crazy Banks style Minds who are manipulating events, and you have a good explaination of the story. Or the cylon/human interaction could just be considered a chaotic cannonical system as chaotic systems, while not deterministic, are predictable as they repeat within the bounds of their strange attractor. If you see the story as trying to break out of that system to break the cycle (replacing it with a new one), it even matches the themes of the story. Still, you saw magic because that's what you wanted to see. I saw a more complicated universe because that's what I wanted to see. Most likely the writers just thought those parts of the story sounded cool and put them in without thought as to fundamentally why.
3. Space combat. - As we haven't actually fought outer space combats yet, we really don't know. Mostly likely, the range thing just had to be that way for the sake of story telling. The entire days of boredom, seconds of fear that space combat probably would be, just wouldn't make for a story that anybody really wanted to watch. No action. No build up of suspence. Then again, if you really wanted to sit down and do the math, it may turn out that outer space combat needs to take place up close with guns because the amount of fuel needed for missiles over long ranges against moving targets with point defense is simply uneconomical and probably ineffective. To be effective in space combat, you need to get up and close and use direct fire.
4. Living ships. - Seriously, this one I really disagree with you on. Warm meat bags make for wonderful ships in space simply because dumb machines also take radiation and other damage and can't repair themselves. Then it takes factories and workers to repair them. Living ships can repair themselves and are probably more economical than dumb machines. This goes especially true for a story about a race of living machines to begin with. Once you make a ship, that takes on fuel, processes it, self repairing, and controls itself, you essentially have a living creature. I bet we're going to find the same thing out with nanotechnology. Once we end up making a robust von Neumann nanobot, I bet it ends up being really close to a yeast, fungi or bacteria. Any von Neumann probes we end up making will probably be fairly close to a living creature.
Would you like to explain the 50,000 troops still in Iraq, then? Actually, the funniest explanation I've seen so far for this is that the troops are there to "prevent foreign interference" (if 50,000 troops isn't foreign interference, what is?)
Don't worry. They're coming home about 50 years after we get our troops out of Japan and Germany. Which if our withdrawal of troops from the Phillipines from the Spanish-American war says anything, that's in another 50 years or so.
The last thing China wants is to have the North Korean government collapse and create a refugee situation where hundreds of thousands of uneducated, dirt poor, and starving people come streaming across the border.
They've already got that. The last thing they want is for NK to collapse, be taken over by or reunify with SK, and lose their buffer state between them and US troops.
Could be God. Consider: what is more unlikely? That before time there was an infinitely dense concentration of something that burst, creating everything we observe? Or that before time, there was something else that said, "I'll make something today" and created everything we observe? I don't consider either one more or less plausible than the other.
The High Frontier, Redux - Covers the true scale of the distance between planets, and the energy requirements of going between them. He estimates that sending an Apollo-sized capsule to the nearest star would take as much energy as is produced on Earth in a year.
Energy is not really an issue. All the energy produced on Earth is less than a ten thousandth of what hits earth from the sun. Making it cheap might be an issue, but there is plenty of energy coming from the sun for any foreseeable project needs.
Energy affects acceleration - not distance traveled.
Not quite. You need a certain threshold of energy to escape any gravity well you are in or you'll just begin an orbit rather than getting where you want to go.
Why was the above post rated funny? The OP is right. In retrospective it turned out that the USSR never intended to attack the US and that the "domino" theory which lead to proxy wars and support for atrocial dictatorships was based on a misjudgment of Soviet foreign policies.
Not quite. While they were not considering first strike, they were still planning for the enevitable war with the West. However, due to their political theories, capitalists countries like the US and Britain could not co-exist because they would fight over natural resources. They then planned to step in after we had beat each other up. However, capitalist theory changed after WW2 and rather than colonial fighting over natural resources, it was about opening up markets because their was more money to be made selling stuff to other countries than stripping them of natural resources for the home country.
They were offered the olive branch back under Carter in an effort to let them back off the build up and get their economy into shape. They responded with the invasion of Afghanistan while the US was unable to respond even if we wanted to. Thus ushering in Reagan and his solution to instead ramp up the arms race till the USSR bankrupted itself.
And uh, what network was this cell phone connecting to? Because you know there's a series of cell towers and satellites that need to be in place for cell phones to work and I don't recall anyone having the foresight to erect such towers in 1928.
If she has the tech to travel back in time, then having the tech to set up an ad hoc cell or satellite network would be fairly trivial. For that matter, it might just be direct connect like a walkie talkie with her other time travelers and not need any sort of network.
Several teachers that I had relied on the class staying pretty constant, and gave each student a number in alphabetical order. To "Call roll", you would listen for the number before yours, and after that was said by the student in question, you would say yours. Any absences were immediately obvious, and it took no more than a minute to finish it.
And this is probably even easier to foil than normal roll call. You simply use a substitution attack ie have somebody else say your number (or "Here" for normal roll call). The teacher is usually busy looking at their paper and doesn't see the person speaking and doesn't recognize that it is not the intended speaker. Students aren't likely to snitch and risk the enimity of the students who do this. Increase the speed that this is done by reducing it to just saying numbers, and it gets even easier to spoof. Another attack that can be used is to simply edit the attendance roll either at the teacher's desk, as it is being carried to the office, or when at the office. Usually, at some point, access is given to students sympathetic to the missing students who can put a check mark down for them or erase their name off the truancy list.
Really, just read some of the accounts of POW and concentration camps from WW2 and how they faked attendance. If people can fool the nazis in concentration camp setting, they can spoof the teacher in high school.
I stopped using it because I was sick of all the garish pages people would put together and the automated music playing.
Amen, brother! They let people program their own webpages with html and look what it got us, a garish nightmare of unreadable crap. What we really need is some site that prevented people from doing whatever they wanted with their own site. Hem it in like some sort of garden. Then block them from doing what they want with it like it was walled off. It's the only way that these things will be useable. If we are to make these sort of things actually readable and useable, then they need to be tightly controlled or they'll end up a chaotic mess.
And in engineering it's almost 100% Windows. Why? Software.
Really? When I was in it was mostly mainframes although they were accessed by either PCs or Macs if not on a terminal. Even then, the Macs were mostly empty because nobody knew how to use them. This was good for me because I knew how to log into the mainframe from the Mac and thus never had to wait for an open workstation like all the other engineering students. Of course, that was 15 years ago.
Still, if things have changed that much, which I don't doubt, in the last 15 years, then they could easily change again in the next 15. I think that is what is going on here, somebody is suggesting that it is. Things went from mainframes to desktop computers. House phones are all but disappearing due to mobile phones. The landscape is changing and the desktop PC may be losing ground to something else.
Surely there should be a box to abstain from voting (spoil your ballot), and this neutral should be checked by default.
Typically, this is signified by turning in a blank ballot, which would be the default state of a ballot given to a voter. In voting systems where a winner must attain a certain percentage of the votes or face a revote, this can actually affect the outcome.
You tell me what you want to do on the moon and I'll tell you how to do it faster and cheaper here on Earth.
Build large space stations and a moon base for exploration of space and the rest of the solar system.
The point of materials such as water and gold on the moon is not that we'll ship them back down the gravity well, but that if we are looking at large scale space exploration or habitation, it will be much cheaper to ship the industry to the moon and do it there than build everything on Earth and ship it up the gravity well. This is true even if we only use robots to do it. We can ship water to the moon, but once the amount of water needed is less than the amount of machinery needed to extract water from the moon, there is little reason to ship water.
So no matter how far back you look, you're NEVER going to see the beginnings of the universe, because the light from everything that happened around the time of the big bang radiated out past us and is already gone.
Actually, we see the beginnings of the big bang all around us. It's the cosmic microwave background radiation. Don't think of the radiation of the big bang as an explosion that would pass us up. Think instead of it as a cloud that filled the entire universe. As the universe expanded, the cloud still fills the universe, but is much 'thinner' so to speak due to an expanding universe and associated redshifting. By taking the detected CMBR and working backwards, we can determine roughly the conditions of the big bang at the time it no longer was opaque.
Slashdot Mirror
The second law of thermodynamics disagrees with you.
Yes, all the component parts were there. They had been there for years. It's that none of the other people who had all the component parts for years were ballsy enough to come up with a touchscreen UI that actually worked. Same goes for tablets. MS has been trying for years to sell tablets, but it took Apple to actually make one that sold.
Very similar to USB. My first Fujitsu WIndows laptop had a USB port on it. I and the other techs I work with had to go online to figure out what it was. This was 1997 IIRC. It wasn't till Apple put out the iMac with USB that anybody paid attention to it. Face it, if it wasn't for Apple, Windows would probably still be operating on PS2 and parallel ports (not to mention 5 1/4" floppies).
So, in other words, you want a Zune Touch. SOunds like an excellent reason to push the Zune brand. People like you want it.
I'm sorry, but that isn't a city. It's pretty much a large town. I would imagine where you live is also a classic case of urban sprawl. Lots of roads, parking lots, and cars along with problems that comes with them. The sort of thing that we're trying to get away from if you want to conserve energy and resources which is what this is trying to do.
Well, in this case, it gets them in the news and attempts to sway the court of public opinion.
If you were a prisoner of an oppressive state, it is often the only form of resistance you have.
Yes, you are correct. The seven word title does not convey the actual details of the entire article, and is abeiviated to the point that somebody who is not already familiar with what is going on may find confusing. However, the actual meaning of the title was well understood by people who have been following the discussions on the LHC as these conditions have been long awaited. As for the people who were confused, they haven't read any of the previous articles on what the LHC is doing, so why should the writers be expect them to read this one?
If this is the guy I'm remembering, the landing part is the ultimate goal of his experiments. With the wing, the wearer can turn the downward speed into horizontal speed. Then use the horizontal speed to give more lift canceling out the remaining vertical speed with reduction of horizontal speed. Thus, if timing it correctly, the wearer could stall out right at ground level and basically just step down to the ground. Skydivers can currently do this but since the parachutes reduce the speeds involved, it's less dangerous although they can stall and fall far enough to hurt or kill themselves if done improperly. With the wing, it's not reducing speed, just changing the direction so it's much more dangerous if a mistake is made.
His other hand?
Once he gets that trained and is used to using it, won't it probably be better than trying to use his normal hand with lack of precision? That's what I did anyway when I injured my right hand; I just switched to my left.
1. Unobtainium. - I'll give you this one. They probably could have substituted tylium for a fusion material without any affect to the plot dealing with workers, their rights, or the resource scarcity.
2. Magic. - First, off, rational universes are boring. Fantasy is big for a reason and most drama deals with irrational emotions. Two, the events shown never really show magic as much as point towards either a universe that is deterministic, controlled, or chaotic. It seemed fairly deterministic to some degree but deterministic universes are boring because there is no chance of change. It certainly could be controlled, probably by the five cyclons. Substitute five crazy Banks style Minds who are manipulating events, and you have a good explaination of the story. Or the cylon/human interaction could just be considered a chaotic cannonical system as chaotic systems, while not deterministic, are predictable as they repeat within the bounds of their strange attractor. If you see the story as trying to break out of that system to break the cycle (replacing it with a new one), it even matches the themes of the story. Still, you saw magic because that's what you wanted to see. I saw a more complicated universe because that's what I wanted to see. Most likely the writers just thought those parts of the story sounded cool and put them in without thought as to fundamentally why.
3. Space combat. - As we haven't actually fought outer space combats yet, we really don't know. Mostly likely, the range thing just had to be that way for the sake of story telling. The entire days of boredom, seconds of fear that space combat probably would be, just wouldn't make for a story that anybody really wanted to watch. No action. No build up of suspence. Then again, if you really wanted to sit down and do the math, it may turn out that outer space combat needs to take place up close with guns because the amount of fuel needed for missiles over long ranges against moving targets with point defense is simply uneconomical and probably ineffective. To be effective in space combat, you need to get up and close and use direct fire.
4. Living ships. - Seriously, this one I really disagree with you on. Warm meat bags make for wonderful ships in space simply because dumb machines also take radiation and other damage and can't repair themselves. Then it takes factories and workers to repair them. Living ships can repair themselves and are probably more economical than dumb machines. This goes especially true for a story about a race of living machines to begin with. Once you make a ship, that takes on fuel, processes it, self repairing, and controls itself, you essentially have a living creature. I bet we're going to find the same thing out with nanotechnology. Once we end up making a robust von Neumann nanobot, I bet it ends up being really close to a yeast, fungi or bacteria. Any von Neumann probes we end up making will probably be fairly close to a living creature.
Don't worry. They're coming home about 50 years after we get our troops out of Japan and Germany. Which if our withdrawal of troops from the Phillipines from the Spanish-American war says anything, that's in another 50 years or so.
They've already got that. The last thing they want is for NK to collapse, be taken over by or reunify with SK, and lose their buffer state between them and US troops.
No reason they couldn't be the same thing.
Point taken. Energy required is as xkcd implies, but you can get energy from slingshot effect, thus reducing the fuel needed.
Energy is not really an issue. All the energy produced on Earth is less than a ten thousandth of what hits earth from the sun. Making it cheap might be an issue, but there is plenty of energy coming from the sun for any foreseeable project needs.
Um, wrong. To get to the moon, you have to get out of the Earth's gravity well. To get out of the solar system, you need to get out of the sun's gravity well which is quite larger than getting out of Earth's to get to the moon. If wikipedia is to be believed, you need enough energy to move something 30 km/sec more to escape the solar system than just to escape earth. With E=1/2mv^2 and a 5000 kg apollo module equivilant, it would require 2.25*10^6 Newtons more energy to escape the solar system than Earth to the moon. Otherwise, whatever you send out will just end up orbiting the sun instead of getting where you are going.
Not quite. You need a certain threshold of energy to escape any gravity well you are in or you'll just begin an orbit rather than getting where you want to go.
Not quite. While they were not considering first strike, they were still planning for the enevitable war with the West. However, due to their political theories, capitalists countries like the US and Britain could not co-exist because they would fight over natural resources. They then planned to step in after we had beat each other up. However, capitalist theory changed after WW2 and rather than colonial fighting over natural resources, it was about opening up markets because their was more money to be made selling stuff to other countries than stripping them of natural resources for the home country.
They were offered the olive branch back under Carter in an effort to let them back off the build up and get their economy into shape. They responded with the invasion of Afghanistan while the US was unable to respond even if we wanted to. Thus ushering in Reagan and his solution to instead ramp up the arms race till the USSR bankrupted itself.
If she has the tech to travel back in time, then having the tech to set up an ad hoc cell or satellite network would be fairly trivial. For that matter, it might just be direct connect like a walkie talkie with her other time travelers and not need any sort of network.
And this is probably even easier to foil than normal roll call. You simply use a substitution attack ie have somebody else say your number (or "Here" for normal roll call). The teacher is usually busy looking at their paper and doesn't see the person speaking and doesn't recognize that it is not the intended speaker. Students aren't likely to snitch and risk the enimity of the students who do this. Increase the speed that this is done by reducing it to just saying numbers, and it gets even easier to spoof. Another attack that can be used is to simply edit the attendance roll either at the teacher's desk, as it is being carried to the office, or when at the office. Usually, at some point, access is given to students sympathetic to the missing students who can put a check mark down for them or erase their name off the truancy list.
Really, just read some of the accounts of POW and concentration camps from WW2 and how they faked attendance. If people can fool the nazis in concentration camp setting, they can spoof the teacher in high school.
Amen, brother! They let people program their own webpages with html and look what it got us, a garish nightmare of unreadable crap. What we really need is some site that prevented people from doing whatever they wanted with their own site. Hem it in like some sort of garden. Then block them from doing what they want with it like it was walled off. It's the only way that these things will be useable. If we are to make these sort of things actually readable and useable, then they need to be tightly controlled or they'll end up a chaotic mess.
Unless you had that patented before you posted, it's just considered prior art now and free for anybody to use.
Really? When I was in it was mostly mainframes although they were accessed by either PCs or Macs if not on a terminal. Even then, the Macs were mostly empty because nobody knew how to use them. This was good for me because I knew how to log into the mainframe from the Mac and thus never had to wait for an open workstation like all the other engineering students. Of course, that was 15 years ago.
Still, if things have changed that much, which I don't doubt, in the last 15 years, then they could easily change again in the next 15. I think that is what is going on here, somebody is suggesting that it is. Things went from mainframes to desktop computers. House phones are all but disappearing due to mobile phones. The landscape is changing and the desktop PC may be losing ground to something else.
Typically, this is signified by turning in a blank ballot, which would be the default state of a ballot given to a voter. In voting systems where a winner must attain a certain percentage of the votes or face a revote, this can actually affect the outcome.
Build large space stations and a moon base for exploration of space and the rest of the solar system.
The point of materials such as water and gold on the moon is not that we'll ship them back down the gravity well, but that if we are looking at large scale space exploration or habitation, it will be much cheaper to ship the industry to the moon and do it there than build everything on Earth and ship it up the gravity well. This is true even if we only use robots to do it. We can ship water to the moon, but once the amount of water needed is less than the amount of machinery needed to extract water from the moon, there is little reason to ship water.
Actually, we see the beginnings of the big bang all around us. It's the cosmic microwave background radiation. Don't think of the radiation of the big bang as an explosion that would pass us up. Think instead of it as a cloud that filled the entire universe. As the universe expanded, the cloud still fills the universe, but is much 'thinner' so to speak due to an expanding universe and associated redshifting. By taking the detected CMBR and working backwards, we can determine roughly the conditions of the big bang at the time it no longer was opaque.