Was in a science fiction short, "Bringing down the Iron" or something like that from Analog a few years ago as a way of getting asteroid materials back to the earth's surface
1) Get a Large Nickle/Ferrous Asteroid 2) Make a *really* big hollow sphere out of the mined products. Better make it nice and accurate to avoid stress issues 3) Make it vacuumtite 4) Get it LEO with reaction jets and begin re-entry 5) Slowly let air into the sphere to provide a small amount of degree of the rate of descent vs the outside atmosphere density
Sure, it's made of iron, but a big sphere enclosing a vacuum is a lot lighter as a whole, so it will float.
Yup, in the novel the bugs had big nasty spaceships, along with missiles, individual personel beam weapons, an organised social and diplomatic structure and were generally very technologically advanced.
The movie is a piece of rubbish that's sole benefit is that a big chunk of cash got sent Ginny Heinlein's way.
I don't think you realise just how different the book is compared to that mess that got hurled at the screen by Verhoven.
Campbell said that they were in Asimov's writing, yet Asimov said that Campbell was the first one to actually write them down, and he always credited Campbell for them.
ht tp://www.aloak.ca/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?url=http://w ww.bigsextoystore.com/ultrareal05/dj5400-05.html URL Redirect to bigsextoystore, and no mod points available...
One of the essential things for any materials-based culture is the ability to harness and control a simple energy source. Here on Earth, that's fire. For other environments, be it Gas Giant life or Underwater life, for it to advance past a certain point it needs these energy sources in great number.
This is not to say there is a X-Life out there that uses some tech that never needed this bootstrap, but if it's that radically different to Earth, how do you look for it ?
NSW - Labour Government Australia - Liberal Government (Remember, in Australia these are the opposite of what they mean in the US)
This is not to say that the NSW government was stupid introducing the legislation in the first place, but at least they'll listen to the committee's response, unlike Mr Head-in-the-sand-Howard
The NSW Government has this nice habit at the moment of rejecting Federal programs - Feds' say no Injecting rooms, NSW opens one. Fed's outlaw stem cell research, and Bob Carr says he will pass laws voiding the federal law
At the moment in Australia, all the states are Labour, and only the Federal government is Liberal. This is something like every state government in the US being Republican, and only the Federal government being Democrat
It seems to be the ideal situation for Australian voters is to make sure that you keep the federal and state governments fighting each other so they are too busy to pass legislation, and that way they interfere with you as little as possible
It was serialized in the Jan 2002 - Apr 2002 issues of Analog
Not a bad story, but I found it to be a bit too much "Humans Bad, Neanderthals Good" to really accept it. Basically, neanderthals have no Crime, Rape, Theft, Pollution, Overpopulation, and they have far more advanced in many physical sciences.
The sole good thing he had to say about Humans was we landed on the moon,and then he figured out a way to make us look bad over that.
Hopefully the future books become a little less one-sided
At the end of the third film, when she's hiding Luke and Leia, she changes her name to from Padme Armidala to Mon Mothma.
Leader of the Opposition becomes Leader of the Resistance. And there's enough similarity in appearance between the two of them to pull it off.
There you go, she's in the films, no need for CGI-Inserts, retroactive continuity or re-releasing yet another special edition to try to beat ET's all time box office record.
No wonder Lucas didn't think of it
Cassini, and it's headlines, inside story history
on
Cassini Can See Cleary Now
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Page 1 : PLUTONIUM POWERED PROBE COULD KILL BILLIONS IF EXPLODED ON TAKEOFF Page 7 : It didn't.
Page 1 : EARTH COULD BE HIT BY PLUTONIUM PROBE FLYBY AND KILL EVERYONE Page 9 : Missed us.
Page 1 : BILLION DOLLAR PLUTONIUM PROBE BLINDED Page 11 : We fixed it.
Events have passed you by then www.whirlpool.net.au
According to reports from The Age, SMH and Australian IT, NetStats will be phased out on July 1 and 'soft limits' will be placed on the OptusNet Cable service. An Optus spokesperson revealed that the plans for Optus Choices subscribers will be as follows:
Boba Fett : lets just say that kid made Jar Jar look good.
The Fireplace Scene : Urgh. I mean, just. Urgh. When the fireplace appeared the audience started laughing.
The Assembly line sequence : Caused massive Galaxy Quest Flashbacks. "This makes no sense!"
R2-D2 : He can fly ? Since when ?
Actors (Australia Only) : Jack Thompson shouldn't be in a Star Wars film. Nor should anyone from Playschool
C3-PO in final battle : C3PO should not be doing that and making jokes. Did *ANYONE* see anything wrong with this ?
Never, Ever get Christopher Lee to say "The Dark Lord". That film is at the end of the year, not this one. You might as well have Yoda shoot webbing out of his arms.. Oh.. yeah...
Trailers : In Australia we didn't get the Matrix 2 Trailer. We got : Stuart Little 2, Snow Dogs and The Crocodile Hunter Movie. I'm not f'n kiding. The goddam Crocodile Hunter. Can't we shoot him or something ? He's sending the wrong impression of our country, when he's actually a guy who got fired off a third-rate childrens wildlife show back in '91
Oh, and they screwed up Parsec again. Well done. If two star systems one parsec apart, they are closer then Alpha Centauri is to Earth. You have to do an awful lot of fanwanking to explain why Tatooine is in range while the Arena planet isn't.
For many years, Telstra allowed Email and News spamming from within their address space, because they would only take action on abuse originating from their own machines.
You could set up a news spew on one of their ISDN links, or misconfigure Exchange and leave it accepting external connections, and Telstra would shrug and say "Not our problem"
Telstra has been listed by ORBS and MAPS in the a few times in the past, so I'm not the least bit suprised at a little bit of pre-emptive defense.
Richard Hoagland issues this picture as proof that NASA is testing it's Standard Issue Big Gun in Antartica where no-one is going to notice, and the black marks are where it's been fired.
Either that, or there's weird pillars in Antartica that NO-ONE HAS EVER NOTICED BECAUSE IT'S ALL BEING COVERED UP BY THE 19.5 DEGREE SOCIETY.
Like Blizzard and Diablo, pretty much the entire original design team of the game has already left, and this version will be designed and balanced by the people that did such an excellent job on the last two expansions.
Background : The newest expansion was released in December last year. The two big selling points, the special Trade Zone, and the new user interface *still* haven't been added to the game after 5 months, yet they have already announced the next expansion due this December, along with EQ2, EQ for Playstation and the special $40/month "Legends" servers.
The entire live development team was layed off, leaving zones from the expansion before that one still screwed up - the "Plane of Mischief" and "Sleepers Tomb" which have been written off by Verant and won't have any further resources devoted to them, despite long and detailed archives of what is wrong with then
Apart from the Interface and the Bazaar zone, highendguilds are finding that the content in this game is designed for you to spend 2 months equipping 80+ members of your guild with special weapons so you can attack one mob to get one item, which you then use to spend 2 months getting 10 more components to get a key so you can enter the *NEXT* zone, where the cycle will begin again.
Meanwhile, the people who wrote EQ1 have formed their own company and are busy hiring all the talent from Verant, who never signed non-compete clauses.
So Verant is left with under-talented artists who (due to contracts sorted out at the peak of their success) are on $80,000 - $120,000/year to produce third rate high-poly models that bog down the highest end system any time you get more then 5 of them on the screen.
Meanwhile, their design team is designing encounters that need *70 to 90* people to work in precise co-ordination for 30 minutes, and then act suprised when people start complaining.
To top all this off, they announced that any existing customer from EQ1 who wants to join EQ2 will have to start all over from scratch, and the end result of this is a widespread "Well, when EQ2 comes out, I guess I can finally quit and get this damn monkey off my back"
The sad thing is, they'll probably still sell about 200,000 copies.
This is just a variation on the commonly used honeypot scripts that first turned up in news.admin.net-abuse about a decade ago.
The trouble is, most modern day harvesting software won't go more then 2 or 3 layers deep on a domain specifically to avoid these bots.
And even if they do get the fake email addresses, the spammers don't care that 95% of their email addresses are fake, because they just onsell them as "20 million email addresses, checked and verified", and the end load falls on whoever's mail server is attacked, while the spammer just walks away looking for a new machine to abuse
* A bunch of writers that other people like that I haven't been exposed to yet
Time to head down to the speciality SF bookshop tommorow and check them out (Galaxy, in Sydney Aus)
The biggest problem of Fantasy / Science Fiction at the moment is that people find one writer / style and refuse to read outside it. At it's worst these leads to Bookracks of Star Wars, Star Trek and other licensed works, while new authors cannot get into the 30-foot space that's reserved for "authors that perform"
Don't complain that you don't know the authors, just think of them as favorite authors you don't know about yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Was in a science fiction short, "Bringing down the Iron" or something like that from Analog a few years ago as a way of getting asteroid materials back to the earth's surface
1) Get a Large Nickle/Ferrous Asteroid
2) Make a *really* big hollow sphere out of the mined products. Better make it nice and accurate to avoid stress issues
3) Make it vacuumtite
4) Get it LEO with reaction jets and begin re-entry
5) Slowly let air into the sphere to provide a small amount of degree of the rate of descent vs the outside atmosphere density
Sure, it's made of iron, but a big sphere enclosing a vacuum is a lot lighter as a whole, so it will float.
Hubble is never pointed within 45 degrees of the Sun due to possible damage that's pretty damn hard to fix.
Yeah, cause there's absolutly no innocent people in the Middle East, is there, they are all terrorists, every single one of them.
(Sigh)
Yup, in the novel the bugs had big nasty spaceships, along with missiles, individual personel beam weapons, an organised social and diplomatic structure and were generally very technologically advanced.
The movie is a piece of rubbish that's sole benefit is that a big chunk of cash got sent Ginny Heinlein's way.
I don't think you realise just how different the book is compared to that mess that got hurled at the screen by Verhoven.
Or was it John W Campbell ?
Campbell said that they were in Asimov's writing, yet Asimov said that Campbell was the first one to actually write them down, and he always credited Campbell for them.
They always forget the editors.
ht tp://www.aloak.ca/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?url=http://w ww.bigsextoystore.com/ultrareal05/dj5400-05.html
URL Redirect to bigsextoystore, and no mod points available...
I understand this release has two trailers and that's it (Bare-bones release, or rental)
Doesn't even the DEI initials hidden as an easter egg.
One of the essential things for any materials-based culture is the ability to harness and control a simple energy source. Here on Earth, that's fire. For other environments, be it Gas Giant life or Underwater life, for it to advance past a certain point it needs these energy sources in great number.
This is not to say there is a X-Life out there that uses some tech that never needed this bootstrap, but if it's that radically different to Earth, how do you look for it ?
NSW - Labour Government
Australia - Liberal Government
(Remember, in Australia these are the opposite of what they mean in the US)
This is not to say that the NSW government was stupid introducing the legislation in the first place, but at least they'll listen to the committee's response, unlike Mr Head-in-the-sand-Howard
The NSW Government has this nice habit at the moment of rejecting Federal programs - Feds' say no Injecting rooms, NSW opens one. Fed's outlaw stem cell research, and Bob Carr says he will pass laws voiding the federal law
At the moment in Australia, all the states are Labour, and only the Federal government is Liberal. This is something like every state government in the US being Republican, and only the Federal government being Democrat
It seems to be the ideal situation for Australian voters is to make sure that you keep the federal and state governments fighting each other so they are too busy to pass legislation, and that way they interfere with you as little as possible
It was serialized in the Jan 2002 - Apr 2002 issues of Analog
Not a bad story, but I found it to be a bit too much "Humans Bad, Neanderthals Good" to really accept it. Basically, neanderthals have no Crime, Rape, Theft, Pollution, Overpopulation, and they have far more advanced in many physical sciences.
The sole good thing he had to say about Humans was we landed on the moon,and then he figured out a way to make us look bad over that.
Hopefully the future books become a little less one-sided
At the end of the third film, when she's hiding Luke and Leia, she changes her name to from Padme Armidala to Mon Mothma.
Leader of the Opposition becomes Leader of the Resistance. And there's enough similarity in appearance between the two of them to pull it off.
There you go, she's in the films, no need for CGI-Inserts, retroactive continuity or re-releasing yet another special edition to try to beat ET's all time box office record.
No wonder Lucas didn't think of it
Page 1 : PLUTONIUM POWERED PROBE COULD KILL BILLIONS IF EXPLODED ON TAKEOFF
Page 7 : It didn't.
Page 1 : EARTH COULD BE HIT BY PLUTONIUM PROBE FLYBY AND KILL EVERYONE
Page 9 : Missed us.
Page 1 : BILLION DOLLAR PLUTONIUM PROBE BLINDED
Page 11 : We fixed it.
Events have passed you by then www.whirlpool.net.au
According to reports from The Age, SMH and Australian IT, NetStats will be phased out on July 1 and 'soft limits' will be placed on the OptusNet Cable service.
An Optus spokesperson revealed that the plans for Optus Choices subscribers will be as follows:
550MB - $54.95
3GB - $69.95
5GB - $134.95
10GB - $265.95
Australia, the continent of the 3gb 'Broadband' Internet
After you watch Jango fire around 10,000 rounds at a single proto-A-Wing and still not kill it, you know why Stormtroopers are such rotten shots
Yup, Damn cold on that Desert Planet.
Strange, with all those outfits, Senator Armidala doesn't have any bras.
List of Cringes :
Boba Fett : lets just say that kid made Jar Jar look good.
The Fireplace Scene : Urgh. I mean, just. Urgh. When the fireplace appeared the audience started laughing.
The Assembly line sequence : Caused massive Galaxy Quest Flashbacks. "This makes no sense!"
R2-D2 : He can fly ? Since when ?
Actors (Australia Only) : Jack Thompson shouldn't be in a Star Wars film. Nor should anyone from Playschool
C3-PO in final battle : C3PO should not be doing that and making jokes. Did *ANYONE* see anything wrong with this ?
Never, Ever get Christopher Lee to say "The Dark Lord". That film is at the end of the year, not this one. You might as well have Yoda shoot webbing out of his arms.. Oh.. yeah...
Trailers : In Australia we didn't get the Matrix 2 Trailer. We got : Stuart Little 2, Snow Dogs and The Crocodile Hunter Movie. I'm not f'n kiding. The goddam Crocodile Hunter. Can't we shoot him or something ? He's sending the wrong impression of our country, when he's actually a guy who got fired off a third-rate childrens wildlife show back in '91
Oh, and they screwed up Parsec again. Well done. If two star systems one parsec apart, they are closer then Alpha Centauri is to Earth. You have to do an awful lot of fanwanking to explain why Tatooine is in range while the Arena planet isn't.
For many years, Telstra allowed Email and News spamming from within their address space, because they would only take action on abuse originating from their own machines.
You could set up a news spew on one of their ISDN links, or misconfigure Exchange and leave it accepting external connections, and Telstra would shrug and say "Not our problem"
Telstra has been listed by ORBS and MAPS in the a few times in the past, so I'm not the least bit suprised at a little bit of pre-emptive defense.
That would be here
Preferred the Double-Gauss Sunders, myself, but they took that out of the current build.
Very simple teaser website at this link
That would be a Ribbentrop cocktail
Richard Hoagland issues this picture as proof that NASA is testing it's Standard Issue Big Gun in Antartica where no-one is going to notice, and the black marks are where it's been fired.
Either that, or there's weird pillars in Antartica that NO-ONE HAS EVER NOTICED BECAUSE IT'S ALL BEING COVERED UP BY THE 19.5 DEGREE SOCIETY.
Neat picture though. Thanks.
Like Blizzard and Diablo, pretty much the entire original design team of the game has already left, and this version will be designed and balanced by the people that did such an excellent job on the last two expansions.
/year to produce third rate high-poly models that bog down the highest end system any time you get more then 5 of them on the screen.
Background : The newest expansion was released in December last year. The two big selling points, the special Trade Zone, and the new user interface *still* haven't been added to the game after 5 months, yet they have already announced the next expansion due this December, along with EQ2, EQ for Playstation and the special $40/month "Legends" servers.
The entire live development team was layed off, leaving zones from the expansion before that one still screwed up - the "Plane of Mischief" and "Sleepers Tomb" which have been written off by Verant and won't have any further resources devoted to them, despite long and detailed archives of what is wrong with then
Apart from the Interface and the Bazaar zone, high end guilds are finding that the content in this game is designed for you to spend 2 months equipping 80+ members of your guild with special weapons so you can attack one mob to get one item, which you then use to spend 2 months getting 10 more components to get a key so you can enter the *NEXT* zone, where the cycle will begin again.
Meanwhile, the people who wrote EQ1 have formed their own company and are busy hiring all the talent from Verant, who never signed non-compete clauses.
So Verant is left with under-talented artists who (due to contracts sorted out at the peak of their success) are on $80,000 - $120,000
Meanwhile, their design team is designing encounters that need *70 to 90* people to work in precise co-ordination for 30 minutes, and then act suprised when people start complaining.
To top all this off, they announced that any existing customer from EQ1 who wants to join EQ2 will have to start all over from scratch, and the end result of this is a widespread "Well, when EQ2 comes out, I guess I can finally quit and get this damn monkey off my back"
The sad thing is, they'll probably still sell about 200,000 copies.
Haven't seen them posted with all the Flaming going on, so I called up a summary then from their spreadsheet (this is the all adults row from the detailed spreasheet at http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/seind02/append/c7/at07- 10.xls)
True or False
------------
A = The center of the Earth is very hot - 80% Correct
B = All radioactivity is man-made - 76% Correct
C = The oxygen we breathe comes from plants - 87% Correct
D = It is the father's gene which decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl - 65% Correct
E = Lasers work by focusing sound waves - 45% Correct
F = Electrons are smaller than atoms - 48% Correct
G = Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria - 51% Correct
H = The universe began with a huge explosion - 33% Correct
I = The continents on which we live have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move in the future - 79% Correct
J = Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals - 53% Correct
K = Cigarette smoking causes lung cancer - 94% Correct
L = The earliest humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs - 48% Correct
M = Radioactive milk can be made safe by boiling it - 65% Correct
Short Answer
-------------
N = Which travels faster: light or sound? 76% Correct
O = Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth? - 75% Correct
P = How long does it take for the Earth to go around the Sun: one day, one month, or one year? - 54% Correct
Q = Please tell me in your own words, what is DNA? - 45% Correct
R = Please tell me in your own words, what is a molecule? - 22% Correct
This is just a variation on the commonly used honeypot scripts that first turned up in news.admin.net-abuse about a decade ago.
The trouble is, most modern day harvesting software won't go more then 2 or 3 layers deep on a domain specifically to avoid these bots.
And even if they do get the fake email addresses, the spammers don't care that 95% of their email addresses are fake, because they just onsell them as "20 million email addresses, checked and verified", and the end load falls on whoever's mail server is attacked, while the spammer just walks away looking for a new machine to abuse
* New website didn't know about
* A bunch of writers that other people like that I haven't been exposed to yet
Time to head down to the speciality SF bookshop tommorow and check them out (Galaxy, in Sydney Aus)
The biggest problem of Fantasy / Science Fiction at the moment is that people find one writer / style and refuse to read outside it. At it's worst these leads to Bookracks of Star Wars, Star Trek and other licensed works, while new authors cannot get into the 30-foot space that's reserved for "authors that perform"
Don't complain that you don't know the authors, just think of them as favorite authors you don't know about yet.