My first reaction was, "Laser Chess?" But you may have been thinking of something else. But that reminds me of another game I used to love on the C64. It was kind of like chess, but when 2 pieces landed on the same spot, there was an arcade-style battle. Every piece had its own strengths and weaknesses. They were elementals and wizards and such. Can anyone give me a name and preferably a place to get a copy?
They could ask those weird questions like Leisure Suit Larry did to see if you are old enough. Thay was funny. IIRC, Spiro Agnew was a wrong choice for a question about a cough-causing germ.
I already know they can search for the answers on the internet. Maybe we could make 'em do an integral to log on! That would set an age+IQ requirement.
Of course, having been out of college long enough to forget all the math that I never use, I guess I could ask my son for help....
You make a very good point. Fortunately, I live very far upstream (different county) and well upwind.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of people and wildlife refuges (and the ocean, duh) that are downstream and suffer when these things leak. The smell is terrible, I'm sure (thank God I can't speak from experience), but is the lesser concern, environmentally.
I agree, there are a lot of reasons to want GPS to work better. I was thinking of GPS this morning and how it would be nice to give your kid a GPS watch or bookbag or something or a GPS unit in your car so that if they are ever lost/kidnapped/stolen, etc. I/police could locate them.
I understand that there would need to be some sort of receiver but it seems like this would be an issue of cost, not feasibility.
You would want these devices to be working 100% of the time, right? What if your kid has gotten stuck somewhere, is being held in someone's basement, is lost in the mall, or your car is parked in a deck/garage or is driving through tunnels.
And before the YRO posters get all riled up, the devices could be designed with some kind of passkey to protect privacy.
But if the US cut off the GPS, then they couldn't use it either, right?
There would also be a lot of uproar from businesses/individuals unless there were very good reasons for the war. Otherwise, the PR would be very damaging to the government, which they would try to avoid unless there was a 2nd-term president or something.
On reflection, I suppose that the US could turn off just a few of the satellites, disrupting service in a more or less contained region.
I have also heard of GPS jammers, but anyone could use those, so that would effectively negate the US's GPS advantage.
Yeah, but how many people do you work with that are not disciplined enough? Throw another developer or two into it and you would likely have a mess. You need a LOT of structure if you want to interface with the ArcObjects library. It does not play well with others.
And there customer service model is terrible. I am supposed to pay them money to report bugs to them, even if I don't want support! There is no free bug-reporting. They act like you're [or your problems] not important unless you are throwing even more money at them (they're licenses already cost a painfully large amount).
I ended up sending my bug in through some email I found on their website (I wonder if it made it to the developers or the trash bin). It is extremely painful to work around it and I imagine that it would be an easy fix, so I am very interested in seeing if the fix made it to v9. I wouldn't bet on it though.
I am a developer of apps/modules that run inside ArcMap (using VB.NET). I am very interested in getting some of our GIS to learn how to script in ArcObjects so that we can develop a bunch of 'mini-tools' in-house.
I know it just came out, but are there any good websites that will help teach non-programmers how to use Python in ArcMap/ArcObjects (besides esri.com)? Are there some free download sites? How about more advanced Python (for power users in other languages)?
When I searched for nigritude ultramarine,/. was only 21st. Maybe we need to make a lot more references to nigritude ultramarine in our messages (since it's been pointed out that the sigs don't make any difference). We probably just need to link to the/. article mentioned above asmuchaspossible, like I just did!
Yes, that is exactly the problem. Because it is so light relative to the rest of the atmosphere it drifts up quite rapidly. Unlike Hydrogen, which readily forms into heavier compounds, helium is inert and so it reaches the upper atmosphere where it is [slowly?] lost.
Actually, if helium could be harvested as a byproduct of this it would be great. Until now, helium has been a nonrenewable resource and there have been worries that we would run out one day. Better yet, if the helium could be made cheaply, maybe some of the technologies that rely on extremely cold temperatures would become ecomonically viable.
Thanks for pointing that out. I have heard of them, but do not know so much about them, so they don't occur to me so readily. Does it make any difference that we would be putting the carbon directly into the air rather than the ground? (I'm guessing that the answer is "no" because the carbon in the air gets into the ground through plants and the carbon in the ground gets into the air in various ways also.)
I just wanted to point out that once you burn the oil you will be releasing the CO2, same as any fossil fuel. However, there may be less other pollutants because of its purity and the supply is replenishable. That said, I am in support of this technology. Assuming there are no unknown environmental problems that crop up this will be great for politically and environmentally. My only concern is that if this catches on, it could encourage people to not worry about efficiency (any more than they already do). If it takes the wind out of the sails of energy conservation, etc., it may not be such a great thing after all.
The people that it happen to wish it was too. In NC we have a LOT of hog farms. Heavy rain, floods, hurricanes can either break the containment of the ponds or just cause them to overflow. I'm just glad that I live upstream.
Maybe you could describe the physics of a curveball for us. In order to not criticize yourself, you will need to be technically correct, but in order for me to not criticize you, it will need to be understandable to an average baseball fan.
(I'm only trying to be 10% antagonistic. Part of me wants to give you a chance to strengthen your original argument. Another part wants to know more about the Magnux effect without googling or going to wikipedia.)
It's not really friction that keeps you from sliding through.
If you want to get really deep into it, the force that causes the friction and keeps you from bursting through floors, chairs, ice is the electromagnetic. It is the strength of the chemical and molecular bonds that is keeping you on top. You can picture friction by imaging that when you magnify a surface by a large amount, you will see that the surface is irregular (try picturing sandpaper). It is all of these irregularities of the 2 surfaces that are sliding against each other that cause friction (it also explains why static friction can be a larger magnitude than kinetic - the surfaces are kind of stuck together). Some surfaces are much smoother, so they create less friction. There are undoubtedly some other effects going on in metals, etc. as well - things like electric currents and magnetic fields.
Actually, it's not quite parabolic, but close. If there was no air, it would be parabolic, but the air resistance creates complications to such a degree that you can't* even exactly solve for the path of the ball. You need to compute it numerically.
* - I culd be wrong. But if you can solve for it, it's not easy. It doesn't yield such a nice shape either.
His word choice was a little poor in that sentence. I'm sure he knows what he's talking about, and didn't mean to imply that it could possible be speeding up.
The baseball gets most of its energy from the impulse caused by the bat striking it (it may keep some from the initial pitch). After that, the baseball is being slowed down by air resistance and its speed will be decreased by gravity as it climbs, but after it reaches its maximum height, gravity will start to speed it up again. However, since he was talking about line drives, I don't think that either of these make a very important difference to its speed.
He would have been better off with only the first half. All he did was confuse the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
That one with the bouncing lasers?
My first reaction was, "Laser Chess?" But you may have been thinking of something else. But that reminds me of another game I used to love on the C64. It was kind of like chess, but when 2 pieces landed on the same spot, there was an arcade-style battle. Every piece had its own strengths and weaknesses. They were elementals and wizards and such. Can anyone give me a name and preferably a place to get a copy?
They could ask those weird questions like Leisure Suit Larry did to see if you are old enough. Thay was funny. IIRC, Spiro Agnew was a wrong choice for a question about a cough-causing germ.
I already know they can search for the answers on the internet. Maybe we could make 'em do an integral to log on! That would set an age+IQ requirement.
Of course, having been out of college long enough to forget all the math that I never use, I guess I could ask my son for help....
You make a very good point. Fortunately, I live very far upstream (different county) and well upwind.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of people and wildlife refuges (and the ocean, duh) that are downstream and suffer when these things leak. The smell is terrible, I'm sure (thank God I can't speak from experience), but is the lesser concern, environmentally.
I agree, there are a lot of reasons to want GPS to work better. I was thinking of GPS this morning and how it would be nice to give your kid a GPS watch or bookbag or something or a GPS unit in your car so that if they are ever lost/kidnapped/stolen, etc. I/police could locate them.
I understand that there would need to be some sort of receiver but it seems like this would be an issue of cost, not feasibility.
You would want these devices to be working 100% of the time, right? What if your kid has gotten stuck somewhere, is being held in someone's basement, is lost in the mall, or your car is parked in a deck/garage or is driving through tunnels.
And before the YRO posters get all riled up, the devices could be designed with some kind of passkey to protect privacy.
But if the US cut off the GPS, then they couldn't use it either, right?
There would also be a lot of uproar from businesses/individuals unless there were very good reasons for the war. Otherwise, the PR would be very damaging to the government, which they would try to avoid unless there was a 2nd-term president or something.
On reflection, I suppose that the US could turn off just a few of the satellites, disrupting service in a more or less contained region.
I have also heard of GPS jammers, but anyone could use those, so that would effectively negate the US's GPS advantage.
Yeah, but how many people do you work with that are not disciplined enough? Throw another developer or two into it and you would likely have a mess. You need a LOT of structure if you want to interface with the ArcObjects library. It does not play well with others.
And there customer service model is terrible. I am supposed to pay them money to report bugs to them, even if I don't want support! There is no free bug-reporting. They act like you're [or your problems] not important unless you are throwing even more money at them (they're licenses already cost a painfully large amount).
I ended up sending my bug in through some email I found on their website (I wonder if it made it to the developers or the trash bin). It is extremely painful to work around it and I imagine that it would be an easy fix, so I am very interested in seeing if the fix made it to v9. I wouldn't bet on it though.
I am a developer of apps/modules that run inside ArcMap (using VB.NET). I am very interested in getting some of our GIS to learn how to script in ArcObjects so that we can develop a bunch of 'mini-tools' in-house.
I know it just came out, but are there any good websites that will help teach non-programmers how to use Python in ArcMap/ArcObjects (besides esri.com)? Are there some free download sites? How about more advanced Python (for power users in other languages)?
I thought we were talking about fixing computers.
And I would have thought that when you searched for the Microsoft outlaw group you would have been sent here.
When I searched for nigritude ultramarine, /. was only 21st. Maybe we need to make a lot more references to nigritude ultramarine in our messages (since it's been pointed out that the sigs don't make any difference). We probably just need to link to the /. article mentioned above as much as possible, like I just did!
Yes, that is exactly the problem. Because it is so light relative to the rest of the atmosphere it drifts up quite rapidly. Unlike Hydrogen, which readily forms into heavier compounds, helium is inert and so it reaches the upper atmosphere where it is [slowly?] lost.
Well, that explains how they handle elections.
Actually, if helium could be harvested as a byproduct of this it would be great. Until now, helium has been a nonrenewable resource and there have been worries that we would run out one day. Better yet, if the helium could be made cheaply, maybe some of the technologies that rely on extremely cold temperatures would become ecomonically viable.
So the moon is made out of Hydrogen and Helium now?
Yes, I will sue anyone using the birds and the bees. (If I can't get any*, no one can!)
* Yup, I'm married.
To be honest, I read that you didn't have them, but I just couldn't resist.
I don't even have the old Star Warts let alone the new one.
I'm sure that there's some kind of cream you can get from your doctor for that.
Thanks for pointing that out. I have heard of them, but do not know so much about them, so they don't occur to me so readily. Does it make any difference that we would be putting the carbon directly into the air rather than the ground? (I'm guessing that the answer is "no" because the carbon in the air gets into the ground through plants and the carbon in the ground gets into the air in various ways also.)
I just wanted to point out that once you burn the oil you will be releasing the CO2, same as any fossil fuel. However, there may be less other pollutants because of its purity and the supply is replenishable. That said, I am in support of this technology. Assuming there are no unknown environmental problems that crop up this will be great for politically and environmentally. My only concern is that if this catches on, it could encourage people to not worry about efficiency (any more than they already do). If it takes the wind out of the sails of energy conservation, etc., it may not be such a great thing after all.
The people that it happen to wish it was too. In NC we have a LOT of hog farms. Heavy rain, floods, hurricanes can either break the containment of the ponds or just cause them to overflow. I'm just glad that I live upstream.
Maybe you could describe the physics of a curveball for us. In order to not criticize yourself, you will need to be technically correct, but in order for me to not criticize you, it will need to be understandable to an average baseball fan.
(I'm only trying to be 10% antagonistic. Part of me wants to give you a chance to strengthen your original argument. Another part wants to know more about the Magnux effect without googling or going to wikipedia.)
It's not really friction that keeps you from sliding through.
If you want to get really deep into it, the force that causes the friction and keeps you from bursting through floors, chairs, ice is the electromagnetic. It is the strength of the chemical and molecular bonds that is keeping you on top. You can picture friction by imaging that when you magnify a surface by a large amount, you will see that the surface is irregular (try picturing sandpaper). It is all of these irregularities of the 2 surfaces that are sliding against each other that cause friction (it also explains why static friction can be a larger magnitude than kinetic - the surfaces are kind of stuck together). Some surfaces are much smoother, so they create less friction. There are undoubtedly some other effects going on in metals, etc. as well - things like electric currents and magnetic fields.
Actually, it's not quite parabolic, but close. If there was no air, it would be parabolic, but the air resistance creates complications to such a degree that you can't* even exactly solve for the path of the ball. You need to compute it numerically.
* - I culd be wrong. But if you can solve for it, it's not easy. It doesn't yield such a nice shape either.
His word choice was a little poor in that sentence. I'm sure he knows what he's talking about, and didn't mean to imply that it could possible be speeding up.
The baseball gets most of its energy from the impulse caused by the bat striking it (it may keep some from the initial pitch). After that, the baseball is being slowed down by air resistance and its speed will be decreased by gravity as it climbs, but after it reaches its maximum height, gravity will start to speed it up again. However, since he was talking about line drives, I don't think that either of these make a very important difference to its speed.
He would have been better off with only the first half. All he did was confuse the issue.