Balloon launches are notoriously unreliable. You would think something this intrinsically simple would be pretty reliable, but a huge fraction of these types of launches go wrong. FAR less reliable than, say, a sounding rocket, which are typically 4-9's.
I don't, however, see how they could have released it when they did. It was clear that the thing would swing in an arc into the ground from where they released it. Particularly with someone dead downwind.
Ted Kennedy was a polarizing figure, called the Lion of the Senate, famous for having driven off a bridge (killing the female passenger),
a correction:
Ted Kennedy was a polarizing figure, a social parasite noted for continual drunkeness on the Senate floor, and his extreme leftist tendencies, called the Lion of the Senate, famous for having driven off a bridge leaving the passenger to die, in shallow water, in the back of the car, while he swam ashore and then got a good nights sleep, and spent the early part of the next day with his buddies and denying knowledge of the incident until confronted (killing the female passenger),
This is the anwser. And replace the Hasselblad with a $100 YashicaMat (the lens is *better* than the standard Zeiss 80/2.8 for the Hasselblad) and you are even better off. There's no reason to stop at 39MP, scan it to 100 if you want. That's what I do .
"Modern Religion"? Answered your own question there, sport.
Re:Can we cover the volcano with a slab of concret
on
Volcano Futures
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Hmm, it already melted through 100 miles or so of mostly solid rock, so we are going to stop it by putting a few feet or tens of feet skim coat of far weaker material with a lower melting point?
I have seen plenty of cows, having grown up on or near farms. Cows travel a very set pattern around the fields and are in constant motion. Note also that the metabolic output is the vast majority of the energy uses - just keeping the temperature up and the systems running is a huge fraction of the output. That's why it takes a huge amount of exercise to burn calories. So the differential in energy requirements between ambling around a field and chewing, and walking a treadmill at a moderate pace, and chewing, probably isn't all that big.
Its a stupid scheme for other reasons, of course. Instead of having the cows get some of their own food, you have to cut it and bring it to them somehow. Because of the metabolic issues, it takes far more feed to keep them going than they will ever output. You would probably do better sticking thermocouples in their sides and using it to charge a battery. Or tossing them in a furnace and burning them for fuel to run a generator. Or even better, burning their feed for fuel - the cow is an unnecessary and very inefficient middle-man. And of course their price on the market when you finally sell them for meat is much lower than regular cows because you are going to eventually run them ragged so they are too lean.
Don't like African Americans? I'll load up the "Negro avoider" app on my computer. And never have my commute disrupted again by the sight of people I don't like.
I think that falls into "stupidity is its own reward" category.
They closed the airports because the ash eats up jet engines, and can't easily be detected on radar. It's mostly silica and doesn't have a dielectric constant different enough from air to show up on most aircraft radar. So even if the cloud is thin enough on the ground to take off safely, you are relying on visual indications of the clouds thickening, and your visibility is poor so it's hard to see.
You guys all missed the kicker in the fine print! This little nugget (from TFA):
In addition to Star Trek(2009), those who have purchased the specially marked hard drives also receive an assortment of 20 Paramount Pictures movies pre-loaded on the FreeAgent Go 500GB ultra-portable drives that can be easily and securely unlocked through the online purchase of a license key. The films will be licensed for multiple devices to allow for portability and enjoyment of them on a desktop computer, laptop computer, or widescreen television, using the FreeAgent Theater+(TM) HD media player
So, you ain't getting JACK - aside from not having to download the entire movie. And a crappy hard drive for a premium price that you will format anyway.
Where do you think they got it? Toshiba got in trouble in the late 80s http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,965549,00.html for selling US 5-axis machines to the USSR to make submarine propellors. The helmet machining could be done at any one of a dozen machine shops within 25 miles of where I am currently sitting (in Sunnyvale, CA). 5-axis CNC machines were first developed and used about 100 yards from here in the late 50's/Early 60s.
I'm sorry. I can't swallow this shit. The PC industry owes its existence to Microsoft. While just about every other player in the industry was working on either big iron type systems (IBM, DEC) or absurdly unprofitable business models (Apple, BBC), Microsoft was paving the way with a simplified operating system that was cheap enough to develop that there were no huge R&D costs to recoup and that worked on commodity hardware cheap enough to become the modern day one-in-every-home PC.
Nobody else at the time would have done it, and it possibly would have happened eventually without MS, but give credit where credit is due. That they have become too big for their boots, turning into a bully does not take away from their past achievements. It's like criticizing Mohamed Ali's sporting record on account of his present poor level of physical fitness.
Oh, fucking bullshit. Microsoft has done more to *put a stop* or *hinder* personal computing than anything they have contributed. They are single-handedly responsible for making personal computing hard-to-use, buggy, and time-wasting. I have lived through the entire era - from essentially no individual computers and card decks, to DOS, Mac, and then fucking Windows. Just taking my professional experience, and just one example - writing engineering reports. It started out that you wrote out your report in longhand, drew your own diagrams, and then handed it to a secretary with a Selectric and rub-on letters. It was labor-intensive, but you could get a given report written in a week, with excellent quality. Then we got DOS machines - you could do your own documents, and draw stuff in Autocad, and it came out much crummier, and it took forever. Then we got Lisa, and then later Macs 512s and even later SEs with Macdraw - easy to draw diagrams, proportional typing, and pretty quick. Then those got replaced with Windows - now it takes forever to do anything, the drawing programs take longer to do than they did in DOS, and, as a bonus - the FUCKING BUGS CORRUPT ALL YOUR WORK 5X A DAY. If you do finally get a document correct, you copy it to another machine or send it to document control. Oh, the second machine doesn't have the same fonts - FUCKED UP AGAIN. Oh, and the kicker - if you want a document from 1965, you find a Xerox copy and it's as good as the day it was done. If you want a Word document from last week - well, maybe it's OK, maybe it's unreadable, or maybe, worst of all, it's readable but doesn't render correctly. I still keep a Mac running OS 8.6 and Macdraw *just because it still works*. We did better work with less effort with a Lisa.
So, fuck Microsoft and the horse they rode in on. If they had never come along we would be far ahead of the game. If you think Windows and Microsoft actually advanced the state of the art or in any way provided ANYTHING positive, you have no idea what you are talking about.
The problem is that I saw the VW Golf (you call it Rabbit now) all over the place in San Francisco, LA and Vegas. That sounds great except I only saw them in two sizes: 1.8l and 2.5l engines. You look at that same car in Europe and they sell better at the 1.4-1.8l range. What's the point in going to a smaller car if the engine is still big? I can only imagine if the Fiesta was to be pushed it'd have a 1.6l engine anyway.
First - bigger engine does not mean a significant change in fuel milage, at least since universal fuel injection. How much fuel you use is essentially determined by how much HP you are using, and if you drive a V8 car gently (as if it had 4-cylinder power) you get the same mileage as the same car with a 4. With a larger engine you have the power *if you need it* but there's nothing forcing you to use it.
Secondly, you need that power if you are going to go out on a long trip. America is *huge* and has lots and lots of mountain ranges that would be famous if they were in Europe, but you have never heard of because they are nothing to note here. Drive from San Francisco to Chicago and you effectively cross mountain and elevation changes totaliing many crossings of the Alps or Pyrennes - every day. I guarantee you that you don't want to thrash it out in a 1400 CC Rabbit.
Slashdot Mirror
A grammar Naxi, you are. Toilet trained at 6 months, you were.
Only if it can be vectorized. Otherwise, MATLAB is *bog slow*. Compiling as a MEX function will restore the speed.
Balloon launches are notoriously unreliable. You would think something this intrinsically simple would be pretty reliable, but a huge fraction of these types of launches go wrong. FAR less reliable than, say, a sounding rocket, which are typically 4-9's.
I don't, however, see how they could have released it when they did. It was clear that the thing would swing in an arc into the ground from where they released it. Particularly with someone dead downwind.
a correction:
Ted Kennedy was a polarizing figure, a social parasite noted for continual drunkeness on the Senate floor, and his extreme leftist tendencies, called the Lion of the Senate, famous for having driven off a bridge leaving the passenger to die, in shallow water, in the back of the car, while he swam ashore and then got a good nights sleep, and spent the early part of the next day with his buddies and denying knowledge of the incident until confronted (killing the female passenger),
Fixed that for ya
This is the anwser. And replace the Hasselblad with a $100 YashicaMat (the lens is *better* than the standard Zeiss 80/2.8 for the Hasselblad) and you are even better off. There's no reason to stop at 39MP, scan it to 100 if you want. That's what I do .
"We're the religion of peace, and if you say otherwise, we are going to kill you"!
"Modern Religion"? Answered your own question there, sport.
Hmm, it already melted through 100 miles or so of mostly solid rock, so we are going to stop it by putting a few feet or tens of feet skim coat of far weaker material with a lower melting point?
I have seen plenty of cows, having grown up on or near farms. Cows travel a very set pattern around the fields and are in constant motion. Note also that the metabolic output is the vast majority of the energy uses - just keeping the temperature up and the systems running is a huge fraction of the output. That's why it takes a huge amount of exercise to burn calories. So the differential in energy requirements between ambling around a field and chewing, and walking a treadmill at a moderate pace, and chewing, probably isn't all that big.
Its a stupid scheme for other reasons, of course. Instead of having the cows get some of their own food, you have to cut it and bring it to them somehow. Because of the metabolic issues, it takes far more feed to keep them going than they will ever output. You would probably do better sticking thermocouples in their sides and using it to charge a battery. Or tossing them in a furnace and burning them for fuel to run a generator. Or even better, burning their feed for fuel - the cow is an unnecessary and very inefficient middle-man. And of course their price on the market when you finally sell them for meat is much lower than regular cows because you are going to eventually run them ragged so they are too lean.
Brett
They would probably be walking around anyway.
I think that falls into "stupidity is its own reward" category.
Brett
some tesxt to avoid lameness filter... But the parent is SPOT ON!
Anything but dating a slashdotter.
They closed the airports because the ash eats up jet engines, and can't easily be detected on radar. It's mostly silica and doesn't have a dielectric constant different enough from air to show up on most aircraft radar. So even if the cloud is thin enough on the ground to take off safely, you are relying on visual indications of the clouds thickening, and your visibility is poor so it's hard to see.
Damn straight! It's all that damned individualism that is ruining the world.
It's at least "Ryan Seacrest"
You guys all missed the kicker in the fine print! This little nugget (from TFA):
So, you ain't getting JACK - aside from not having to download the entire movie. And a crappy hard drive for a premium price that you will format anyway.
Restraint of Trade?
Yes, they do know something the startups don't - how difficult it actually is.
Brett
It still takes energy to split the molecule, and it has to come from somewhere, even if viruses to the dirty work.
Where do you think they got it? Toshiba got in trouble in the late 80s http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,965549,00.html for selling US 5-axis machines to the USSR to make submarine propellors. The helmet machining could be done at any one of a dozen machine shops within 25 miles of where I am currently sitting (in Sunnyvale, CA). 5-axis CNC machines were first developed and used about 100 yards from here in the late 50's/Early 60s.
As always, Robot Chicken cuts to the chase
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O_rXZ381vo
Oh, fucking bullshit. Microsoft has done more to *put a stop* or *hinder* personal computing than anything they have contributed. They are single-handedly responsible for making personal computing hard-to-use, buggy, and time-wasting. I have lived through the entire era - from essentially no individual computers and card decks, to DOS, Mac, and then fucking Windows. Just taking my professional experience, and just one example - writing engineering reports. It started out that you wrote out your report in longhand, drew your own diagrams, and then handed it to a secretary with a Selectric and rub-on letters. It was labor-intensive, but you could get a given report written in a week, with excellent quality. Then we got DOS machines - you could do your own documents, and draw stuff in Autocad, and it came out much crummier, and it took forever. Then we got Lisa, and then later Macs 512s and even later SEs with Macdraw - easy to draw diagrams, proportional typing, and pretty quick. Then those got replaced with Windows - now it takes forever to do anything, the drawing programs take longer to do than they did in DOS, and, as a bonus - the FUCKING BUGS CORRUPT ALL YOUR WORK 5X A DAY. If you do finally get a document correct, you copy it to another machine or send it to document control. Oh, the second machine doesn't have the same fonts - FUCKED UP AGAIN. Oh, and the kicker - if you want a document from 1965, you find a Xerox copy and it's as good as the day it was done. If you want a Word document from last week - well, maybe it's OK, maybe it's unreadable, or maybe, worst of all, it's readable but doesn't render correctly. I still keep a Mac running OS 8.6 and Macdraw *just because it still works*. We did better work with less effort with a Lisa.
So, fuck Microsoft and the horse they rode in on. If they had never come along we would be far ahead of the game. If you think Windows and Microsoft actually advanced the state of the art or in any way provided ANYTHING positive, you have no idea what you are talking about.
First - bigger engine does not mean a significant change in fuel milage, at least since universal fuel injection. How much fuel you use is essentially determined by how much HP you are using, and if you drive a V8 car gently (as if it had 4-cylinder power) you get the same mileage as the same car with a 4. With a larger engine you have the power *if you need it* but there's nothing forcing you to use it.
Secondly, you need that power if you are going to go out on a long trip. America is *huge* and has lots and lots of mountain ranges that would be famous if they were in Europe, but you have never heard of because they are nothing to note here. Drive from San Francisco to Chicago and you effectively cross mountain and elevation changes totaliing many crossings of the Alps or Pyrennes - every day. I guarantee you that you don't want to thrash it out in a 1400 CC Rabbit.
Brett
Oh, fucking WONDERFUL - thank you so very very much! 35ish years to get that out of my head, and now it's back.