You can seed a large field from a single airplane in less than a day, at zero risk. Covering that field using a bomb-sniffing dog or a metal detector could take weeks, and carries a significant risk of blowing yourself up.
The nice thing about these flowers is they have a pretty good idea of what the market will be like. Price the seeds so that de-mining the world will cover the research and production costs, leaving about a 10% profit.
I think a field full of kudzu is worse than a field full of land mines. After all, you can continue to farm a field of land mines, if you're willing to risk getting blown up. If the field's full of kudzu, you can't farm it any more.
The typical computer screen may take up only 20% of your total visual field, but it takes up around 90% of your primary visual field: the area that your eyes and brain are most capable of focusing on. Your peripheral vision isn't much use for displaying information.
consider the situation where a bright geek gets an idea for a new and wonderful gadget. He picks up $50 in parts from Radio Shack and assembles them in a few hours into an item that people will gladly pay $200 for.
Where did that extra $150 come from? His labor (ala Marx)? No, his creativity.
In that situation, he isn't creating money, he's just encouraging people to move it around in his direction. Now, if he then did an IPO of his new company, that would be creating money.
Nope. In a Supreme Court decision a few years back, it was ruled that digital representations of minors could not be classified as child pornography, since no real minors were involved.
Say you have a creature called, "the Giant mammoth of Tarverac", and its strong, but if you kill it you can forage it for its tusks (very valuable), skin, good for shields or armor, and its meat for food. From which you turn around and sell it. However, the monster itself doesn't leave gold, unless it just happens to eat gold for food. Does this make sense?
Who do you sell the stuff to? If the stuff is consumed at a reasonable rate (food, arrows, spell reagents), you might be able to sell to the player market. For durable goods, like armor, the player market will saturate rapidly, and the only place to sell the stuff is to NPC shopkeepers -- who pay you in gold! The only thing your scheme does is slow the entrance of gold into the economy slightly, because of the need to go hiking off to the nearest shop.
The real world has a fixed amount of money (reserve banking not withstanding).
Dead wrong.
The real world has a fixed number of dollar bills and equivalents. The amount of money fluctuates rapidly.
Take a stock certificate. If one share of the stock sells for $25 right now, you would probably accept one share of that stock in payment for something that costs $20. The gap between the worth of the share and the price of the item will cover any broker's fees for selling, and the risk that the stock will go down before you can sell.
How about loans? If I loan you $100,000, with the agreement that, over the life of the loan, the total you'll pay back is $200,000, I could sell that loan to someone else for $200,000. After all, that loan is a promise they'll be paid $200,000 eventually, but until the loan is paid off, that's additional money in circulation that the government didn't print. A credit card is just a variation on a loan, but it also increases the effective amount of money in circulation.
How about playing with time delays in the banking system? Say I write you a check for $100, but I don't have the money in my account to cover it. If, by the time you get around to cashing it, I've been paid, nothing will go wrong, but until then, that's an additional $100 in circulation!
Personally I think it is bad that the player has the option to solve everything , so a few impossible or near impossible spots should be added as well, just to teach the player that they aren't supposed to go exploring every cranny of the map, but instead focus on their mission.
And when you do so, rest assured that someone, somewhere, will figure out how to do the impossible. After that, it will go from being a major accomplishment, to being the definition of "good".
Case in point: When Civilization II came out, the developers assured us that even they could only beat it at the hardest difficulty level (Deity) half the time. The current standard for a top player is that they can reliably not only beat the game at Deity, but do so with only one city. Back when I was following the community, about three years ago, the "ultimate challenge" was to launch a spaceship by the year 1 AD (only one city, remember!). I wouldn't be surprised if that was the standard of "top player" by now.
Best for a solid is diamond. Make a paste with diamond dust, let the heatsink and CPU case deform around the particles. Graphite might work also, I don't know if the adsorbed gasses and different structure make a difference.
Solid diamond is a very good thermal conductor, because of the way the carbon atoms are bonded together. Crushed diamond would make a good insulator, since almost no conduction will take place between particles. The ideal diamond heatsink would be a single-crystal sink grown directly onto the chip.
Graphite is a good heat conductor along the plane of the material, but a good insulator between sheets. Because of this directional bias, it doesn't make a good heatsink material.
Surprisingly, soot (amorphous carbon) makes a wonderful thermal paste. It doesn't conduct heat very well, but its very high compressibility more than makes up for it.
As human eye only has sensors for three wave lengths, three numbers should be enough to represent full spectrum of light, as much as we can perceive it. We just have two problems: 1) the currently used RGB model doesn't model the correct wave lengths - it's close but not perfect. 2) Every human eye has a little bit different construction. No human eye is perfect - so selecting three perfect wave lengths is impossible.
Not quite true. The human eye is sensitive to three regions of the spectrum, centered around red, green, and blue. The overlap between the regions is what allows color mixing (such as the RGB model) to work.
After saying that, I feel that RGB is still better color model than HSV, Lab, CMYK or all the other models available because RGB is closest match to human eye behavior. All we need is much more precision than 8 bit per color. 8 bit is barely enough to store final image, but if any computations are required (like alpha blending with another image) then more precision is needed.
There's one model that's better than RGB for representing color: the CIE model. RGB has good coverage of shades of white, and of the saturated colors from red to green. It's lacking in the blue-greens, and can't handle a large section of the purples. The CIE model can handle every color the human eye can see. However, since it isn't based on a combination of three colors, it's much harder to work with hardware-wise.
Re:Altitude of HST & ISS
on
Saving Hubble
·
· Score: 1
OK, would there be any issues with lowering the HST to join the ISS?
Yes. The big one is orbit maintenance: the ISS needs periodic boosts (several a year) from the Shuttle or Progress supply rockets to stay at the correct altitude. At 600km, Hubble doesn't need more than one boost after every repair mission.
The other worry is stationkeeping: Hubble and the ISS may start out near each other, but one of them (probably the ISS) will have higher atmospheric drag than the other, so they will tend to drift. The ISS will need to use fuel to stay near Hubble without colliding.
Yeah, but all it would take is one meltdown and we suddenly have a disaster a few orders of magnitude larger than 9/11.
Wrong. We've seen a meltdown here in the US: Three Mile Island. Total area contaminated: the reactor containment building. Total costs: $975 million over fourteen years for cleanup. Total deaths: 0.
The big problem with JPEG2000, as I see it, is a lack of a free, open-source implementation that is compatible with closed-source, proprietary software. I was recently looking into implementing JPEG and JPEG2000 support for my company's main product. Since this is a relatively minor feature for our product, we didn't want to pay the licensing fees for a commercial implementation. The libJPEG codec for JPEG compression has a very nice license, only requiring the addition of two lines to the software documentation. The only open-source JPEG2000 implementation (JasPer) requires adding over a page of disclaimers, copyright notifications, and license terms.
Considering that there have been zero civilian deaths from nuclear power use in the US, and that thousands die every years from diseases brought about by coal-burning, I have to wonder what type of design they want. Perhaps a nuclear power plant that produces power but doesn't actually have a reactor?
There isn't much helium-3 involved -- no more than a few thousand tons. People move that much mass around every day, and you don't see catastrophic tides occurring every time a freighter goes by, do you?
People generally don't have a good idea of just how damn heavy planets are. To make a measurable difference in the Moon's behavior, it would be necessary to move over 1,000,000,000,000,000 tons of material -- over a million tons for every man, woman, and child on Earth!
Maybe if you had 2 protons and -1 neutrons, you could call that Helium-1. But how exactly do you get an anti-neutron?
You can get an anti-neutron the same place you get any other antiparticle, but it wouldn't give you Helium-1. It would be Helium-3, because an anti-neutron still counts as a nucleon.
Slashdot Mirror
Do they yet have a functional RTF import? That's the thing I've found missing from entirely too many Linux office suites and word processors.
You can seed a large field from a single airplane in less than a day, at zero risk. Covering that field using a bomb-sniffing dog or a metal detector could take weeks, and carries a significant risk of blowing yourself up.
The nice thing about these flowers is they have a pretty good idea of what the market will be like. Price the seeds so that de-mining the world will cover the research and production costs, leaving about a 10% profit.
I think a field full of kudzu is worse than a field full of land mines. After all, you can continue to farm a field of land mines, if you're willing to risk getting blown up. If the field's full of kudzu, you can't farm it any more.
The typical computer screen may take up only 20% of your total visual field, but it takes up around 90% of your primary visual field: the area that your eyes and brain are most capable of focusing on. Your peripheral vision isn't much use for displaying information.
consider the situation where a bright geek gets an idea for a new and wonderful gadget. He picks up $50 in parts from Radio Shack and assembles them in a few hours into an item that people will gladly pay $200 for.
Where did that extra $150 come from? His labor (ala Marx)? No, his creativity.
In that situation, he isn't creating money, he's just encouraging people to move it around in his direction. Now, if he then did an IPO of his new company, that would be creating money.
Nope. In a Supreme Court decision a few years back, it was ruled that digital representations of minors could not be classified as child pornography, since no real minors were involved.
Theoretically, at least, we're a federal republic.
In practice, it's more of a rotational kakistodemocracy.
Say you have a creature called, "the Giant mammoth of Tarverac", and its strong, but if you kill it you can forage it for its tusks (very valuable), skin, good for shields or armor, and its meat for food. From which you turn around and sell it. However, the monster itself doesn't leave gold, unless it just happens to eat gold for food. Does this make sense?
Who do you sell the stuff to? If the stuff is consumed at a reasonable rate (food, arrows, spell reagents), you might be able to sell to the player market. For durable goods, like armor, the player market will saturate rapidly, and the only place to sell the stuff is to NPC shopkeepers -- who pay you in gold! The only thing your scheme does is slow the entrance of gold into the economy slightly, because of the need to go hiking off to the nearest shop.
The real world has a fixed amount of money (reserve banking not withstanding).
Dead wrong.
The real world has a fixed number of dollar bills and equivalents. The amount of money fluctuates rapidly.
Take a stock certificate. If one share of the stock sells for $25 right now, you would probably accept one share of that stock in payment for something that costs $20. The gap between the worth of the share and the price of the item will cover any broker's fees for selling, and the risk that the stock will go down before you can sell.
How about loans? If I loan you $100,000, with the agreement that, over the life of the loan, the total you'll pay back is $200,000, I could sell that loan to someone else for $200,000. After all, that loan is a promise they'll be paid $200,000 eventually, but until the loan is paid off, that's additional money in circulation that the government didn't print. A credit card is just a variation on a loan, but it also increases the effective amount of money in circulation.
How about playing with time delays in the banking system? Say I write you a check for $100, but I don't have the money in my account to cover it. If, by the time you get around to cashing it, I've been paid, nothing will go wrong, but until then, that's an additional $100 in circulation!
Personally I think it is bad that the player has the option to solve everything , so a few impossible or near impossible spots should be added as well, just to teach the player that they aren't supposed to go exploring every cranny of the map, but instead focus on their mission.
And when you do so, rest assured that someone, somewhere, will figure out how to do the impossible. After that, it will go from being a major accomplishment, to being the definition of "good".
Case in point: When Civilization II came out, the developers assured us that even they could only beat it at the hardest difficulty level (Deity) half the time. The current standard for a top player is that they can reliably not only beat the game at Deity, but do so with only one city. Back when I was following the community, about three years ago, the "ultimate challenge" was to launch a spaceship by the year 1 AD (only one city, remember!). I wouldn't be surprised if that was the standard of "top player" by now.
Best for a solid is diamond. Make a paste with diamond dust, let the heatsink and CPU case deform around the particles. Graphite might work also, I don't know if the adsorbed gasses and different structure make a difference.
Solid diamond is a very good thermal conductor, because of the way the carbon atoms are bonded together. Crushed diamond would make a good insulator, since almost no conduction will take place between particles. The ideal diamond heatsink would be a single-crystal sink grown directly onto the chip.
Graphite is a good heat conductor along the plane of the material, but a good insulator between sheets. Because of this directional bias, it doesn't make a good heatsink material.
Surprisingly, soot (amorphous carbon) makes a wonderful thermal paste. It doesn't conduct heat very well, but its very high compressibility more than makes up for it.
is there any other type of lawyer?
Yes, there's the sort of lawyer found on the golf course.
As human eye only has sensors for three wave lengths, three numbers should be enough to represent full spectrum of light, as much as we can perceive it. We just have two problems: 1) the currently used RGB model doesn't model the correct wave lengths - it's close but not perfect. 2) Every human eye has a little bit different construction. No human eye is perfect - so selecting three perfect wave lengths is impossible.
Not quite true. The human eye is sensitive to three regions of the spectrum, centered around red, green, and blue. The overlap between the regions is what allows color mixing (such as the RGB model) to work.
After saying that, I feel that RGB is still better color model than HSV, Lab, CMYK or all the other models available because RGB is closest match to human eye behavior. All we need is much more precision than 8 bit per color. 8 bit is barely enough to store final image, but if any computations are required (like alpha blending with another image) then more precision is needed.
There's one model that's better than RGB for representing color: the CIE model. RGB has good coverage of shades of white, and of the saturated colors from red to green. It's lacking in the blue-greens, and can't handle a large section of the purples. The CIE model can handle every color the human eye can see. However, since it isn't based on a combination of three colors, it's much harder to work with hardware-wise.
OK, would there be any issues with lowering the HST to join the ISS?
Yes. The big one is orbit maintenance: the ISS needs periodic boosts (several a year) from the Shuttle or Progress supply rockets to stay at the correct altitude. At 600km, Hubble doesn't need more than one boost after every repair mission.
The other worry is stationkeeping: Hubble and the ISS may start out near each other, but one of them (probably the ISS) will have higher atmospheric drag than the other, so they will tend to drift. The ISS will need to use fuel to stay near Hubble without colliding.
okay so it's "over a million tons for every man, woman, and child on Earth!" But what's that in terms we can all understand?
How many VW's is that, or library on Congresses?
Approximately a million VW Bugs. Per person.
Yeah, but all it would take is one meltdown and we suddenly have a disaster a few orders of magnitude larger than 9/11.
Wrong. We've seen a meltdown here in the US: Three Mile Island. Total area contaminated: the reactor containment building. Total costs: $975 million over fourteen years for cleanup. Total deaths: 0.
Hardly catastrophic.
I mean "heavy". People in general don't have a clue what the difference between "weight" and "mass" is, so I use the one they're used to.
If it was illegal, then every politician and lobbyist in the US would be serving time.
The big problem with JPEG2000, as I see it, is a lack of a free, open-source implementation that is compatible with closed-source, proprietary software. I was recently looking into implementing JPEG and JPEG2000 support for my company's main product. Since this is a relatively minor feature for our product, we didn't want to pay the licensing fees for a commercial implementation. The libJPEG codec for JPEG compression has a very nice license, only requiring the addition of two lines to the software documentation. The only open-source JPEG2000 implementation (JasPer) requires adding over a page of disclaimers, copyright notifications, and license terms.
Considering that there have been zero civilian deaths from nuclear power use in the US, and that thousands die every years from diseases brought about by coal-burning, I have to wonder what type of design they want. Perhaps a nuclear power plant that produces power but doesn't actually have a reactor?
Yes.
And no, I'm not being funny here.
This has been discussed for years and how close are we to a working, ie more energy out than we put in, prototype are we??
A prototype for He3 fusion? I don't think we've yet reached the stage of "working, ie energy comes out" prototype.
There isn't much helium-3 involved -- no more than a few thousand tons. People move that much mass around every day, and you don't see catastrophic tides occurring every time a freighter goes by, do you?
People generally don't have a good idea of just how damn heavy planets are. To make a measurable difference in the Moon's behavior, it would be necessary to move over 1,000,000,000,000,000 tons of material -- over a million tons for every man, woman, and child on Earth!
Maybe if you had 2 protons and -1 neutrons, you could call that Helium-1. But how exactly do you get an anti-neutron?
You can get an anti-neutron the same place you get any other antiparticle, but it wouldn't give you Helium-1. It would be Helium-3, because an anti-neutron still counts as a nucleon.
Helium-1 or Helium-2 would be Hydrogen, right?
Helium-1 would be hydrogen, but helium-2 is helium with two protons and two electrons -- and a half-life too short to measure.