Voiceover says (paraphrased) Declared a contingency over central america. If you find debris, inform law enforcment and do not touch as it may be hazardous
one of the screens showing what looks like a debris trail
Perhaps you should familiarise yourself with Cassini-Huygens
If it takes 6 years to get there, you want to be able to do as much as possible, rather then do the equivilant of 'You know, we should have brought that metric set of spanners' when you get there.
Cheap, low cost is OK for scouting and test missions, where the turnaround time is short. Say the Moon, Mars, Venus and testing engine designs
Saturn is a bloody long way away. Cassini is the orbiter, and Huygens is going to go way beyond 'Pretty Picutres' - it's going to enter Titan's atmosphere, land in the ocean and perform spectral analysis on anything it can find.
Low Cost is a waste of time here - you want it to work first time, keep working and not break, otherwise it'll be 10 years before we build another one and get back there.
I see no reason at all to 'Scoot around taking pictures' - Been ThereDone That. Let's try something new and risky for a change.
Not free - $40/month to play here - It was Legends Only content
>Jagged Pine
Same, except eventually they released it to the general public a few months later, to calm down the Tunare-worshipers who were pissed off over the Faction system in Plane of Growth
Not to mention the whole quality and effort that they put into Stoneburnt and Warrens, quite possibly the most boring and underutilised zones in the game.
Paneel was supposed to ship with the game, it ran late - Erudite Necromancers used to have a Hut, rather then a city.
But never let it to be said players of Everquest get the shit belted out of them, and then thank Sony when the beating stops, rather then being angry at the behavior in the first place.
If that's really what it looks like, what are they going to be playing on the screen ?
Recordings of previous games ? For chrisstake, that would beat out Arnold Rimmer's Risk Story for boredom.
Current Games ? Gee, well I guess I'd have to choose a seat where I can see the main screen while playing. Give a little bit of an edge. Who needs cheats when your opponents screen is being projected at 20 x 14 foot resolution above their head.
I walked over it about '98 when it was $125 / person. Was definatly worthwhile - It's a 3 hour walk up and back, including about 20 minutes hanging around at the very top of the Arch. Not a spot for people with fear of wide open spaces.
Basically You go up in a sealed all-over coverall with radio headset and Glasses have to be attached via a restraining strap. You are to a cleverly designed guide wire that runs the whole way along, leave from the underside, walk up the top of the Arch on the South East side, across the top, and back down the South West arch
You should go now, because PM John Howard now has it guarded 24 hours a day 7 days a week due to 'terrorist threats' made against it.
(Personally, I think the NSW Police force are worried someone's going to steal it, and have taken a leaf from the Ankh Morpork law Enforcement Handbook)
On Distributing the CD-ROM
on
War of Honor
·
· Score: 2
There's been a few attempts to put the CD online. The main problem with it hasn't been Legal, instead it's been this
The files have also bounced around a few Usenet groups, but the preferedd method of storage is still CD-ROM because it's easier to upload them via Palm Format, or quickly browse something via HTML without having to dig through a whole bunch of different directories.
Find a show on TV today showing a better role model for the 'nerds' of the generation, even without getting into the whole gay/bisexual nerds can be important also subplot.
Take the quiet kid at school, bit of an outsider, not liked by anyone except an old male friend. In her spare time, she browses the town's computers systems, and has 'Accidentally' broken into pretty much every computer in the town [1]
Then a superhero turns up, saves her life and gives her some direction and a new sense of priorities. She begins spreading further and wider, meets up with another nerd crossing old tech and new tech, picks up on that and forges a valuable weapon in the defense of the world (althout she did accidentally releases a self-multiplying daemon onto the internet, a bit like Robert Morris, Jr did [2]). She even ends up teaching some classes in Highschool to people her own age[3].
She gets offered a job at the worlds largest software manufacturer [4], and pretty much every university in the world [5] but turns it down to fight evil instead. When the highschool is threatened, the athletic and the popular kids turn to her as one of the few people who can help [6].
Arriving in College, still the outsider, she still wanders around before finally discovering that there are other people like her, and when they get together there is practically nothing they cannot do [7] including giving her the power to attack a God [8], take over as the leader of the team that defends Earth from Hell for six months [9], and when her lover is killed she decides to destroy the entire world to save everyone from the pain of living[10]
If that's not a path to base your entire life on, I don't know what is. Also, she's the only person to ever have a iMac laptop upgraded with the telepathic optional kit, making it actually useful.
Personally, I hope that SMG does quit so they can have the Scooby Gang series : Willow, Xander, Giles and Dawn. Other people won't agree with me, but there's more stories to work with if they have to remake the Slayer out of her clone with Faith's Assistance, then by continuing with Buffy
(In case you were keeping count: [1] Welcome to the Hellmouth [2] I Robot, You Jane [3] Passion [4] What's My Line [5] Choices [6] Graduation Day [7] Hush [8] Tough Love [9] Barganing [10] Grave)
"The universe is only 6000 years old, and as one of the supporting pieces of evidence, here's some measurements from something that's 15 billion years old."
He's about as deserving of the Doctor title as Doctor Nick Riviera
Push Button 22 - it turns on a overlay of the galaxy. Compare that with the data presented, and you'll see that what you thought was a simulation of the whole galaxy is actually our very-very-near neighbours.
Space is Big.
We appear to be towards the middle in this sample, because we are the point of origin for all the observations. We are slightly off centre, because it's easier to map objects away from the core itself, which is incredibly noisy.
For us to actually map all the stars in our galaxy, we'd need a lot more observation points above, below and throughout the disk, and that's something that's not going to happen soon.
It's getting launched at pretty much the same time Everquest 2 is ramping up and Star Wars Galaxies is running. So, it looks like the latest attempt to save the EverQuest Brandname is to try to hook Mac OS users just as the game is being replaced.
So far to keep their game alive they have
- Removed information as to how many people are playing after noticing a 20% drop - Started promoting EQ as a way of drunk women meeting famous people with a really amusing movie file that has basically vanished from the net - Offering $40/month luxury servers that have what they used to promise the standard servers - Providing a range of services that they swore they would never ever do (The Rename service netted then $69,200 last month alone) - Trying to stir up interest in their game with some of the poorest tie-in merchandise in history - emailing out free accounts - giving free doses of their game away on magazine covers
(For people who don't play EQ, a lot of people are commenting on how once crowded zones are now going empty, and more and more people are leaving or Ebaying their characters rather then keep playing. When asked about Everquest 2, a common reaction is a shudder and 'Nope, never again')
(As an aside, they plan on releasing all four seasons of B7 in one large DVD set at the end of the year - hopefully they'll do the same for what episodes of Dr Who they have left, rather then their current policy of theme-DVD's which seem messy)
"He's going to try to put down some place safe. A safe landing is the key to everything right now," says the Sydney Morning Herald
The print version of the story goes on to describe a safe landing was a large open area, dotted with a few trees to avoid dragging him around.
The catch ? He was planning on flying over the Nullarbor plain in Western Australia. Nullarbor is not Australain Aboriginal - it means "No Trees" in Latin for obvious reasons.
So they are going to skip that, stay south and will probably hit South Australia in a couple of hours, continuing to clock up the miles.
All they did (showing some of that wonderful Blizzard Creativity) was take the main character from Diablo, and put it in the middle of Warcraft. The trouble is, the heros are so essential to the game, and so hideously overpowered the rest of the characters are reduced to sideshows.
Warcraft III is designed to be a quick and dirty game where the fights are over in 30 minutes or less. Gone is any hope of a epic back-and-forth fight, it's a lets get the game finished as quick as possible.
The first person to lose their hero has lost the game in 90% of the cases, because their hero is out of the game for 2 minutes, while the other hero is running around levelling up and getting more items.
In order to get the game over as quick as possible, the game is exaggerated - if you lose, you come into the next fight at a disadvantage. If you win, you are more likely to win the next time, because the game is adjusting the hero's strengths. Add to that the Upkeep rules and the game is saying "You will play me this way or not at all - I will not let you deviate from the designers vision"
Strategy games should not do this - It's like playing a game of chess where when you capture the oponents pieces you get to put them on your side. Fun ? Maybe once or twice for the low-attention span crowd, but it's not strategy.
Personally, I'd look to a company that doesn't have a history of screwing over the open source community, or trying to steal your personal details from your system registry - say Creative Assembly, who will be releasing the latest Total War game in the near future - Medieval Total War which is more a computerised table top wargame then anything else.
Al Qaeda has formed their own Accountancy Firm!
on
Cyber-Attacks?
·
· Score: 1
Arthur Anderson is a front company for Al Qaeda ? You could say that they sure aided in a major attack on the Internet Infrastructure in the last few days, aided by some inside knowledge.
There's an attack noone ever expected! Terrorists trade in their weapons and become Accountants! No more AK-47, instead it's Form A-74K!
* Maybe they'll be stable enough to mount a nice in close power station without having to worry about Mercury's gravity well
* Maybe observing their orbits could point to some more information on the GU theory
* Maybe they could lead to some more theory on planetary formation with formation of planets close to stellar bodies
* Maybe the knowledge gained from this can lead to new designs on high-altitude fast turnaround observation of objects coming at us from the sun (Like, the last two near-miss asteroids)
* Maybe they are completly unremarkable chunks of stone, worth two or three papers and then forgotten about.
It's a ground based observation at objects too close to the sun for most observations, done on the cheap with minimal new hardware designs. I'd be very suprised if the total budget for this was much over 3 or 4 million total
The things you want NASA to do ? Guess what - they are already doing them. It's just they like doing a wide variety of different things, because you never know when you'll find something interesting in an unexplored area of science.
NASA has always used US military aircraft, from fighter planes to the SR-71. It's easier to borrow something that'll get you up to 40,000 - 70,000 feet and then return it then sit down and design a one-off design
The Dryden flight centre has been using F-18's since 1987, first as a high angle of attack research aircraft, then as a chase plane, then the F-18SRA (System Research Aircraft - don't go calling em F/A-18's)
Remember, they have an existing maintainance infrastructure, easily available spare parts and a very well-known aerodynamic model to start with, so why not mess with em a bit in the name of research ?
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/MM_NTV_Web.h tml
Voiceover says (paraphrased) Declared a contingency over central america. If you find debris, inform law enforcment and do not touch as it may be hazardous
one of the screens showing what looks like a debris trail
Use the Dial up 55kb, not the 225 kb please
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/19/10429112 70928.html
Gravity waves have been used in many stories as a FTL communication system, now that's all out of date.
Venus is a big swampy planet, eh guys ?
I care about this cause it's "orbit" as seen from Earth is Really,Really, Reallyneat.
Although I admit that everytime I look at the JPL Orbit Diagrams, I feel the urge to load up the original version of Elite
Perhaps you should familiarise yourself with Cassini-Huygens
If it takes 6 years to get there, you want to be able to do as much as possible, rather then do the equivilant of 'You know, we should have brought that metric set of spanners' when you get there.
Cheap, low cost is OK for scouting and test missions, where the turnaround time is short. Say the Moon, Mars, Venus and testing engine designs
Saturn is a bloody long way away. Cassini is the orbiter, and Huygens is going to go way beyond 'Pretty Picutres' - it's going to enter Titan's atmosphere, land in the ocean and perform spectral analysis on anything it can find.
Low Cost is a waste of time here - you want it to work first time, keep working and not break, otherwise it'll be 10 years before we build another one and get back there.
I see no reason at all to 'Scoot around taking pictures' - Been There Done That. Let's try something new and risky for a change.
>Marauder's Mire
Not free - $40/month to play here - It was Legends Only content
>Jagged Pine
Same, except eventually they released it to the general public a few months later, to calm down the Tunare-worshipers who were pissed off over the Faction system in Plane of Growth
Not to mention the whole quality and effort that they put into Stoneburnt and Warrens, quite possibly the most boring and underutilised zones in the game.
Paneel was supposed to ship with the game, it ran late - Erudite Necromancers used to have a Hut, rather then a city.
But never let it to be said players of Everquest get the shit belted out of them, and then thank Sony when the beating stops, rather then being angry at the behavior in the first place.
If that's really what it looks like, what are they going to be playing on the screen ?
Recordings of previous games ? For chrisstake, that would beat out Arnold Rimmer's Risk Story for boredom.
Current Games ? Gee, well I guess I'd have to choose a seat where I can see the main screen while playing. Give a little bit of an edge. Who needs cheats when your opponents screen is being projected at 20 x 14 foot resolution above their head.
I walked over it about '98 when it was $125 / person. Was definatly worthwhile - It's a 3 hour walk up and back, including about 20 minutes hanging around at the very top of the Arch. Not a spot for people with fear of wide open spaces.
Basically You go up in a sealed all-over coverall with radio headset and Glasses have to be attached via a restraining strap. You are to a cleverly designed guide wire that runs the whole way along, leave from the underside, walk up the top of the Arch on the South East side, across the top, and back down the South West arch
You should go now, because PM John Howard now has it guarded 24 hours a day 7 days a week due to 'terrorist threats' made against it.
(Personally, I think the NSW Police force are worried someone's going to steal it, and have taken a leaf from the Ankh Morpork law Enforcement Handbook)
There's been a few attempts to put the CD online. The main problem with it hasn't been Legal,
instead it's been this
The files have also bounced around a few Usenet groups, but the preferedd method of storage is still CD-ROM because it's easier to upload them via Palm Format, or quickly browse something via HTML without having to dig through a whole bunch of different directories.
I came across his writing in Analog, as usual. Higher Learning is the first one that made me remember his name.
He didn't have any books in the current batch of books in the Baen Free Library, but there are a few Borderlands of Science columns at Baen.com
I must admit I did like their
photoshopped Passport they provided.
But - they got his place of birth wrong ? I thought he was from Iowa, he only worked in outer space ?
Find a show on TV today showing a better role model for the 'nerds' of the generation, even without getting into the whole gay/bisexual nerds can be important also subplot.
Take the quiet kid at school, bit of an outsider, not liked by anyone except an old male friend. In her spare time, she browses the town's computers systems, and has 'Accidentally' broken into pretty much every computer in the town [1]
Then a superhero turns up, saves her life and gives her some direction and a new sense of priorities. She begins spreading further and wider, meets up with another nerd crossing old tech and new tech, picks up on that and forges a valuable weapon in the defense of the world (althout she did accidentally releases a self-multiplying daemon onto the internet, a bit like Robert Morris, Jr did [2]). She even ends up teaching some classes in Highschool to people her own age[3].
She gets offered a job at the worlds largest software manufacturer [4], and pretty much every university in the world [5] but turns it down to fight evil instead. When the highschool is threatened, the athletic and the popular kids turn to her as one of the few people who can help [6].
Arriving in College, still the outsider, she still wanders around before finally discovering that there are other people like her, and when they get together there is practically nothing they cannot do [7] including giving her the power to attack a God [8], take over as the leader of the team that defends Earth from Hell for six months [9], and when her lover is killed she decides to destroy the entire world to save everyone from the pain of living[10]
If that's not a path to base your entire life on, I don't know what is. Also, she's the only person to ever have a iMac laptop upgraded with the telepathic optional kit, making it actually useful.
Personally, I hope that SMG does quit so they can have the Scooby Gang series : Willow, Xander, Giles and Dawn. Other people won't agree with me, but there's more stories to work with if they have to remake the Slayer out of her clone with Faith's Assistance, then by continuing with Buffy
(In case you were keeping count:
[1] Welcome to the Hellmouth
[2] I Robot, You Jane
[3] Passion
[4] What's My Line
[5] Choices
[6] Graduation Day
[7] Hush
[8] Tough Love
[9] Barganing
[10] Grave)
That's good, because otherwise you'd have to go begging for change for 25,000,000 people
"The universe is only 6000 years old, and as one of the supporting pieces of evidence, here's some measurements from something that's 15 billion years old."
He's about as deserving of the Doctor title as Doctor Nick Riviera
Odd thing : Searching for numbers on Google
19099 : 12,300 matches
19100 : 531,000 matches
19101 : 537,000 matches
19102 : 518,000 matches
19103 : 71,900 matches
There's a massive number of systems out there still showing April 24th, 19102 at the top of the page. That's 2 1/2 years after the bug.
Yeah, it was all a hoax and never affected any machine.
Little bit less of a press release, little bit more information including a better explanation of the flight profile at
http://www.mech.uq.edu.au/hyper/hyshot/
Push Button 22 - it turns on a overlay of the galaxy. Compare that with the data presented, and you'll see that what you thought was a simulation of the whole galaxy is actually our very-very-near neighbours.
Space is Big.
We appear to be towards the middle in this sample, because we are the point of origin for all the observations. We are slightly off centre, because it's easier to map objects away from the core itself, which is incredibly noisy.
For us to actually map all the stars in our galaxy, we'd need a lot more observation points above, below and throughout the disk, and that's something that's not going to happen soon.
It's a good map to get started with, though
It's getting launched at pretty much the same time Everquest 2 is ramping up and Star Wars Galaxies is running. So, it looks like the latest attempt to save the EverQuest Brandname is to try to hook Mac OS users just as the game is being replaced.
So far to keep their game alive they have
- Removed information as to how many people are playing after noticing a 20% drop
- Started promoting EQ as a way of drunk women meeting famous people with a really amusing movie file that has basically vanished from the net
- Offering $40/month luxury servers that have what they used to promise the standard servers
- Providing a range of services that they swore they would never ever do (The Rename service netted then $69,200 last month alone)
- Trying to stir up interest in their game with some of the poorest tie-in merchandise in history
- emailing out free accounts
- giving free doses of their game away on magazine covers
(For people who don't play EQ, a lot of people are commenting on how once crowded zones are now going empty, and more and more people are leaving or Ebaying their characters rather then keep playing. When asked about Everquest 2, a common reaction is a shudder and 'Nope, never again')
BBC should also concentrate on returning Paul Darrow to the screen at the same time so they can screen a "Shakey Set Saturday" double feature.
(As an aside, they plan on releasing all four seasons of B7 in one large DVD set at the end of the year - hopefully they'll do the same for what episodes of Dr Who they have left, rather then their current policy of theme-DVD's which seem messy)
"He's going to try to put down some place safe. A safe landing is the key to everything right now," says the Sydney Morning Herald
The print version of the story goes on to describe a safe landing was a large open area, dotted with a few trees to avoid dragging him around.
The catch ? He was planning on flying over the Nullarbor plain in Western Australia. Nullarbor is not Australain Aboriginal - it means "No Trees" in Latin for obvious reasons.
So they are going to skip that, stay south and will probably hit South Australia in a couple of hours, continuing to clock up the miles.
All they did (showing some of that wonderful Blizzard Creativity) was take the main character from Diablo, and put it in the middle of Warcraft. The trouble is, the heros are so essential to the game, and so hideously overpowered the rest of the characters are reduced to sideshows.
Warcraft III is designed to be a quick and dirty game where the fights are over in 30 minutes or less. Gone is any hope of a epic back-and-forth fight, it's a lets get the game finished as quick as possible.
The first person to lose their hero has lost the game in 90% of the cases, because their hero is out of the game for 2 minutes, while the other hero is running around levelling up and getting more items.
In order to get the game over as quick as possible, the game is exaggerated - if you lose, you come into the next fight at a disadvantage. If you win, you are more likely to win the next time, because the game is adjusting the hero's strengths. Add to that the Upkeep rules and the game is saying "You will play me this way or not at all - I will not let you deviate from the designers vision"
Strategy games should not do this - It's like playing a game of chess where when you capture the oponents pieces you get to put them on your side. Fun ? Maybe once or twice for the low-attention span crowd, but it's not strategy.
Personally, I'd look to a company that doesn't have a history of screwing over the open source community, or trying to steal your personal details from your system registry - say Creative Assembly, who will be releasing the latest Total War game in the near future - Medieval Total War which is more a computerised table top wargame then anything else.
Arthur Anderson is a front company for Al Qaeda ? You could say that they sure aided in a major attack on the Internet Infrastructure in the last few days, aided by some inside knowledge.
There's an attack noone ever expected! Terrorists trade in their weapons and become Accountants! No more AK-47, instead it's Form A-74K!
As for the advertising... how much has the Coke logo changed in the last 50 years? Brand recognition is powerful, long lasting stuff
2001.
Pan Am
Bell.
Why do this now ?
Because they are there.
* Maybe they'll be stable enough to mount a nice in close power station without having to worry about Mercury's gravity well
* Maybe observing their orbits could point to some more information on the GU theory
* Maybe they could lead to some more theory on planetary formation with formation of planets close to stellar bodies
* Maybe the knowledge gained from this can lead to new designs on high-altitude fast turnaround observation of objects coming at us from the sun (Like, the last two near-miss asteroids)
* Maybe they are completly unremarkable chunks of stone, worth two or three papers and then forgotten about.
It's a ground based observation at objects too close to the sun for most observations, done on the cheap with minimal new hardware designs. I'd be very suprised if the total budget for this was much over 3 or 4 million total
The things you want NASA to do ? Guess what - they are already doing them. It's just they like doing a wide variety of different things, because you never know when you'll find something interesting in an unexplored area of science.
NASA has always used US military aircraft, from fighter planes to the SR-71. It's easier to borrow something that'll get you up to 40,000 - 70,000 feet and then return it then sit down and design a one-off design
The Dryden flight centre has been using F-18's since 1987, first as a high angle of attack research aircraft, then as a chase plane, then the F-18SRA (System Research Aircraft - don't go calling em F/A-18's)
Remember, they have an existing maintainance infrastructure, easily available spare parts and a very well-known aerodynamic model to start with, so why not mess with em a bit in the name of research ?