For those who are trying to get their nvidia graphics cards to work properly with FC2 here is an email address where you can let them know what is on their customers minds.
linux-bugs@nvidia.com
Lets keep it polite please, abuse never gets the desired results.
Hey stupid - are you too dumb to know there are 4 different simultaneous 24 hour days within a single rotation of earth?
This guy needs to re-think his rant. We divide The Earth into twenty four time zones not four so that by his own definition there are twenty four different simultaneous 24 hour days within a single rotation of earth, not four.
I never figured out why people have such a hard time understanding what he is trying to say here.
He is saying that there are some things we know and some we don't.
Some of the things that we don't know, we at least know exist. Therefore, even though we don't know the details yet, we can keep a general watch on that area/group/situation and gather data.
The dangerious ones are the ones that we are completely unaware of, have not thought of, and are not even looking for. They are the ones that will sneak up on us and cause the most damage.
It is not that hard! Whether or not they agree with or like Rumsfeld anyone who says that they don't understand is either stupid, or doesn't want to understand it, or has an agenda and thinks that you are too stupid to understand it.
"The three-part trip to orbit is aimed at getting around the fact that one helium-filled craft could never make the whole trip: Any balloon strong enough to weather the trip up to 100,000 feet could never be made light enough to go higher."
What they are basicly saying is that the master plan will be a three part journey to space.
Part one will be a large blimp to 100,000 feet. Part two will be a very large, more or less stationary, probably manned, floating platform somewhere between 100,000 and 149,000 feet. Part three will be a very light weight blimp that is larger then the first but smaller then the platform. The first stage blimp has propellers. The third stage blimp will have the ion engine.
"What if you flatten it out and give it a little bit of aerodynamic shape, and point it up a little bit so you have some of that thrust turned into lift?" Powell asked. "As you climb up, your drag is dropping, and now you're accelerating. The question comes, can you get aerodynamically clean enough, while still supporting the lift enough to slowly get faster and faster... to get all the way to orbit? Is there a drag-power combination to do that? We think there is. It looks like there's a wide margin."
Sounds like they have done the math.
..."Powell intends to conduct an ion engine test at an altitude of 100,000 feet by the end of this year."
When the whole system is built you will send freight up to the platform on the first blimp, offload it and head back down. Meanwhile the final stage blimp will be going back and forth between the platform and LEO. The article also says that they think that the trip to LEO would take BETWEEN three and nine days. (I assume that is dependent on where the final stage is in its cycle)
The Airforce has paid for the development up until now of the first stage and will be deciding whether or not to continue after the next round of tests. The Airforce is interested in the first stage as they would like a remote controlled craft that can sit around above hot spots for days at a time.
I think that this is a very interesting idea.
...And even if there's a misstep along the way, Powell believes his unconventional approach to spaceflight provides a far wider safety margin than the "tried-and-true" methods.
"Say you're on the shuttle, and you're screaming up to orbit, and something goes wrong. You have about a tenth of a second to discover the problem and fix the problem, or you lose the crew," he observed. "Here, something goes wrong -- complete power failure. Well, calm down. You're floating up here, you start drifting down, you have a meeting or two, you have some engineers walk down and work on the thing. 'OK, we can't fix it -- come on down.'... You've taken the danger out of space travel."
You know, I can't remember the last time I bought software, from a store or otherwise. It was probably RedHat7.3 (I was in the habit for a while of buying every second or third RedHat release just to support the company).
Between Freshmeat, FreshRPMS, and Sourceforge I have not had to pay for software for quite a while.
I wonder how much money I have saved? Hundreds? Thousands? Quite a bit I imagine. Somehow the idea of paying for software now seems kind of odd. Like, why in the world would I buy that when I can just go out on the internet and download everything I need? Heck, with Synaptic and FreshRPMS it has gotten downright brainless, just browse and click. (Kudos to the repo maintainers by the way, they are doing a great job and they are doing us a HUGE service.)
Of course I don't play many games, BZFlag and Neverball are about it for me. Have you tried Neverball yet. Great game!
I did really enjoy both Myst and Riven but I don't have a windows machine at home anymore to play them on. I might buy a Myst type game if it would run on Linux although the puzzles would have to be a little harder. I enjoy puzzles.
I never really thought about it but there has to be a sizable group out there in the same situation. How about it. Any others find that the idea of purchasing software now seems kind of strange?
A girl that worked in a bar near where I used to live had the name Sei. (pronounced say)
I asked her one time and she told me that it is the number six in the Basque language. Her parents were Basque and since she was the sixth child born they had named her six.
I thought that it was a cool name at the time (she was a doll) but thinking back on it twelve years later she had a pretty poor self image.
She was always involved with the "wrong" guy and was not a happy person, living hand to mouth waiting tables in a bar with no real plans or hopes for the future. The sad thing is that she was pretty, quite smart, and very kind hearted. She could/should have gone far.
I can't say that her name was the cause but the idea that your parents don't care enough to give you a name but just call you number 6 couldn't have helped.
Odd... I had the exact opposite experience. RH9 was slow to boot and slow to use, while FC1 is faster all the way around. (Athlon 1500+.5GB ram, ide disk drive) It probably has something to do with my installation choices. Both times I moved everything I wanted to keep to an extra partition (thank you large disk drive) and let the install wipe the existing OS and install from scratch, but I seem to recall choosing "everything" with RH9 while picking and choosing just what I really use with FC1.
But my question is, if this has been tested by the Cassini test and others and the result has been proven, why are we bothering to do it again?
Thus sayeth the article:
" LATOR would measure this deflection with a billion (109) times the precision of Eddington's experiment and 30,000 times the precision of the current record-holder: a serendipitous measurement using signals from the Cassini spacecraft on its way to explore Saturn."
AND
"The 0.02 as accuracy of LATOR is good enough to reveal deviations from Einstein's relativity predicted by the aspiring Theories of Everything, which range from roughly 0.5 to 35 as. Agreement with LATOR's measurements would be a major boost for any of these theories. But if no deviation from Einstein is found even by LATOR, most of the current contenders--along with their 11 dimensions, pixellated space, and inconstant constants--will suffer a fatal blow and "pass on" to that great dusty library stack in the sky."
So in other words they think that taking the measurements with 30,000 times the precision of the current measurements is enough to show if the current flock of string theories is plausable.
-- You do not have the mind or education to envision Nature's Time Cube. [timecube.com]
Interesting site.
Is it yours?
One problem with the 4 day in one 24 hour rotation theory however is that it is only true if the earth has 4 time zones. Since the earth actually has 24 time zones there are in reality 24 days in each rotation.
Of course since humans are the ones that choose to segment the earth into 24 time zones and since that was done mostly for convenience you can pretty much say that there are any arbitrary number of days in a rotation. If we wanted to we could divide the earth up into more or fewer time zones, whatever is convenient. Want to have the time zones only a half hour apart, use 48. Ten minutes apart, use 144. 1 nanosecond, use ?
It is all arbitrary. We use 24 because one hour divisions are easy to keep track of and close enough to "sun time" that it doesn't matter for everyday use.
Since I know that clocks in New York are exactly 3 hours away from my clock I know without too much effort that if it is 14:23 at my house then it is 17:23 in Times Square.
If we were using divisions that were not even hours then it would be much harder to figure out the time.
I would have to estimate the distance, about 2855 miles according to Mapquest, know that the circumference of the earth is 24,902 mi at the equator(Thank you Google). Figure out that that is about 11.46% of the way around the world...(Since I don't live on the equator ignore that fact that As you go from 0 degrees latitude (the equator) to 90 degrees (north or south poles), the circumference of the circle defined by that latitude line will decrease in direct proportion to the cosine of the angle of latitude. Thus, the circumference of the circle is C = 2 pi r cos(x) - but it that is too hard to figure out this early in the morning)
Anyway, ignoring latitude, if we were using 10 minute time zones and it were 14:23 at my house it would be somewhere around either 16:53 or 17:03 in Times Square depending on how much I messed up the numbers by rounding.
In 5 years streaming media sent over the internet will be the "TV" of choice for anyone under 30.
Between people putting their own content out and those operating "pirate" feeds either in places that the the United States legal system can't touch or in encrypted anonymous trading networks, hollywood will never be able to put that genie back into the bottle.
In the mean time I don't have cable and don't miss it. I refuse to pay $50 -$60 a month for crap!
Every time I am somewhere like a hotel room where I can watch cable I end up flipping through 60 channels and not finding anything I want to watch. Who wants to watch a bunch of stupid sheep's pretend lives when you can go and have a life of your own?
My kids watch video's and DVD's that we either own or have rented and they are happy. They watch about 30 minutes of video a night, none of it broadcast. They watch way less then any of their friends. As a result they have time for ballet, gymnastics, swim team, trick jumprope classes, T-ball, scouts, church groups, sleep overs, visits to the liberary, computers, train spotting, ice skating, riding bikes, bowling, and doing their homework, reading stories to dad.
A better analogy would be "Your car is working , but you haven't changed the oil in six months."
"What do you mean change the oil?" "It came with oil when I bought it."
"Besides it only uses Ford oil and Ford wants me to by a monthly oil subscription... like I am going to bend over for that one."
Since I am known among my wifes circle as "the computer guy" I get asked to look at peoples peecee's all the time. Many, if not most came with a free trial edition McAfee that the owner never bothered to renew when it expired. I agree with the previous poster that said corporate greed is a contributing factor.
For that matter... what is so different about each virus that we need new "virus updates" all the time? I am not trying to troll but is there anyone out there that can tell me? It seems to me that the antivirus companys have a vested interest in patching but not fixing the problem. There must be a better way to block viruses and worms, at least the Microsoft Outlook Virus(tm) variety. It seems to me that a better solution would be to write a program that puts a sand box around Outlook.
My wife has one site that she uses for business that will not work with Mozilla. I have found however, that it works ok with Konqueror. So my Gnome desktop at home has a nice big icon on the bottom panel that launches Konqueror for her.
You may be too young. When I was a child we had fall out shelters and civil defense drills to prepare for all out war. The Soviet Union was literaly out to destroy the United States and they had the muscle to do it, or at least to try. We _were_ at war. The Soviet plan was to rule all of Europe and eventually the world. Disrupting their economy and their attempts to update their technology by stealing ours probably helped along their fall. At the end they were weak, but if they had survived and been flush with cash and the latest technology they would probably own Europe right now and be looking at us.
Lame --- To many buzz words, have someone who is not a marketing nit-wit rewrite it.
I found myself saying "Yada, yada, yada" in my head through about two thirds of the article. (sure sign that they were just stringing buzz words together)
The main jist seems to be that there are different stages of on-line business.
1) The ability to look up static data. (traditional web page, one way comunication)
2) The ability to do something. (On line ordering, move your money around in your bank account. There has to be some kind of back end tied in now -- database, application logic, etc.)
3) The ability for business' to do something (EDI anyone? They seem to mean that data is being sent from back end to back end but the transfer is initated by a person.)
4) Automate the things business' are doing. (In our case we use perl scripts and cron to do this, they mention XML, grid computing, Yada, yada, yada.)
So I guess at my company we already have "e-business on demand" (The "on demand" part is when my boss stalks in and tells me he has an ACH file sitting in dir X on server Y that he wants encrypted and sent to companies ABC and DEF and then archived before 15:00 every day WITHOUT FAIL. And I, being the lazy bastard that I am, write a script and go back to reading Slashdot.)
And while we're at it, let's discuss the consequences as well. A one-in-a-million chance is small, but if it destroys the entire earth, it's probably too risky to offset almost any benefit.
Oh come on!
You can't really be that much of a fool.
One small generator, encased in a very strong shelded box that was designed to withstand accidental re-entry from orbit, with its small amount of radio active material chemically bonded into a ceramic that is specificly designed to not become a fine power if it is blown up destoying the entire earth?!?!?!?!
Not to mention the Tempur-Pedic Mattress, certified space technology!!!
I can vouch that the Tempur-Pedic mattress was worth the cost of the Apollo program all by itself. My wife really wanted one so I reluctantly agreed. It is the most comfortable mattress in existance.
Perhaps if everyone starts skipping over the commericals television will change.
I can see it now. A form of television where you pay a monthly fee to watch and get commerical free tv. Wonderful, high quality programing, both educational and entertaining. Our minds will be expanded, our horizons broadened. Our children will be enlightened. The level of "culture" in our society will rise to new highs. There will be a great renewal in the arts.
Dare we say another Renaissance?
No longer will the programing be dictated by Madison Avenue. No longer will we be forced to wade through the sewage spewing out into our living rooms. Garbage aimed at the lowest comon denominator because there have to be a certain number of the right kind of people watching who will buy product-X.
Mindless. Boring. Crap.
I can see it now, a reliable, high quality signal that never fails. That carries content on demand. A beautiful picture, high definition, perfect concert quality sound.
Perhaps instead of being broadcast the signal will even come into your house on some kind of cable... oh, wait...
Do any of you actually read the articles before you open your mouths?
The idea was originally formulated to use CPU memory cycles by team member Cynthia Dwork in 1992.
But they soon realised it was better to use memory latency - the time it takes for the computer's processor to get information from its memory chip - than CPU power. That way, it does not matter how old or new a computer is because the system does not rely on processor chip speeds, which can improve at rapid rates. A cryptographic puzzle that is simple enough not to bog down the processor too much, but that requires information to be accessed from memory, levels the difference between older and newer computers.
They took Radio AAHS' experience with children's radio and bent it to their evil will!!
I couldn't agree with you more. For an eye opener try listening closely to to lyrics of the songs they play on friday night. It's NOT stuff I want my seven year old listening to.
At one time Disney may have been about making good, fun, wholesome movies but these days they are just about greed.
They don't even make very good movies anymore. They all pretty much have the same lame plot.
1) Young "person" disobeys parents/teacher/tribe/king because adults are stupid. 2) He or she has big adventure. 3) At the place where they should start suffering the consequences, someone bails them out. 4) They return home as a hero. 5) They were right, adults really are stupid because it all turned out ok in the end. (Notice that no mention is ever made, or even thanks offered, that those "stupid adults" may have risked everything including life, limb, and eternal suffering to accomplish number three.)
He wrote quite a series of "books for young people" (Tunnel in the Sky, Podkayne of Mars, Farmer in the Sky). All have the classic "brash young dreamer rebelling against his olde pharte parents" theme. Worth reading because they are just plain fun.
Tunnel in the Sky...I had forgotten about that one. I must have read it about 6 times while I was it 7th and 8th grade.
Heinlein's juvenile books are great reading for young teens but he got just plain weird at the end. Although I read them all, I was pretty much disapointed in everything after "Stranger in a Strange Land." It was like he ran out of ideas for new stories and just started tossing in more and more sex.
While a little bit of PG or even R rated sex can make a character and a story interesting more then a page of it is just boring.
Put in some sex if it will make your main character agonize over something later in the book, or lose/gain his one chance to {whatever} before the final conflict, or cause a chain of events that will somehow effect the outcome of the story, or even to show the moral makeup of a character. But don't just throw it in because you have a bunch of people sitting around somewhere with nothing better to do and you have to add two hundred more pages to make it a novel.
Slashdot Mirror
Ads? What ads?
I don't see any ads.
Mozilla dosn't seem to show me any ads. (hahahahaha)
Hummm... I guess I will have to launch IE once in a while just to see what I am missing. NOT!
For those who are trying to get their nvidia graphics cards to work properly with FC2 here is an email address where you can let them know what is on their customers minds.
linux-bugs@nvidia.com
Lets keep it polite please, abuse never gets the desired results.
This guy needs to re-think his rant. We divide The Earth into twenty four time zones not four so that by his own definition there are twenty four different simultaneous 24 hour days within a single rotation of earth, not four.
I never figured out why people have such a hard time understanding what he is trying to say here.
He is saying that there are some things we know and some we don't.
Some of the things that we don't know, we at least know exist. Therefore, even though we don't know the details yet, we can keep a general watch on that area/group/situation and gather data.
The dangerious ones are the ones that we are completely unaware of, have not thought of, and are not even looking for. They are the ones that will sneak up on us and cause the most damage.
It is not that hard! Whether or not they agree with or like Rumsfeld anyone who says that they don't understand is either stupid, or doesn't want to understand it, or has an agenda and thinks that you are too stupid to understand it.
I didn't see it say 100 in the article ... how did you get that?
What they are basicly saying is that the master plan will be a three part journey to space.
Part one will be a large blimp to 100,000 feet. Part two will be a very large, more or less stationary, probably manned, floating platform somewhere between 100,000 and 149,000 feet. Part three will be a very light weight blimp that is larger then the first but smaller then the platform. The first stage blimp has propellers. The third stage blimp will have the ion engine.
Sounds like they have done the math.
When the whole system is built you will send freight up to the platform on the first blimp, offload it and head back down. Meanwhile the final stage blimp will be going back and forth between the platform and LEO. The article also says that they think that the trip to LEO would take BETWEEN three and nine days. (I assume that is dependent on where the final stage is in its cycle)
The Airforce has paid for the development up until now of the first stage and will be deciding whether or not to continue after the next round of tests. The Airforce is interested in the first stage as they would like a remote controlled craft that can sit around above hot spots for days at a time.
I think that this is a very interesting idea.
Did anyone else see the Cialia link at the top of the page? (insert micro soft joke here) hehehe
Humm...
You know, I can't remember the last time I bought software, from a store or otherwise. It was probably RedHat7.3 (I was in the habit for a while of buying every second or third RedHat release just to support the company).
Between Freshmeat, FreshRPMS, and Sourceforge I have not had to pay for software for quite a while.
I wonder how much money I have saved? Hundreds? Thousands? Quite a bit I imagine. Somehow the idea of paying for software now seems kind of odd. Like, why in the world would I buy that when I can just go out on the internet and download everything I need? Heck, with Synaptic and FreshRPMS it has gotten downright brainless, just browse and click. (Kudos to the repo maintainers by the way, they are doing a great job and they are doing us a HUGE service.)
Of course I don't play many games, BZFlag and Neverball are about it for me. Have you tried Neverball yet. Great game!
I did really enjoy both Myst and Riven but I don't have a windows machine at home anymore to play them on. I might buy a Myst type game if it would run on Linux although the puzzles would have to be a little harder. I enjoy puzzles.
I never really thought about it but there has to be a sizable group out there in the same situation. How about it. Any others find that the idea of purchasing software now seems kind of strange?
A girl that worked in a bar near where I used to live had the name Sei. (pronounced say)
I asked her one time and she told me that it is the number six in the Basque language. Her parents were Basque and since she was the sixth child born they had named her six.
I thought that it was a cool name at the time (she was a doll) but thinking back on it twelve years later she had a pretty poor self image.
She was always involved with the "wrong" guy and was not a happy person, living hand to mouth waiting tables in a bar with no real plans or hopes for the future. The sad thing is that she was pretty, quite smart, and very kind hearted. She could/should have gone far.
I can't say that her name was the cause but the idea that your parents don't care enough to give you a name but just call you number 6 couldn't have helped.
Odd... I had the exact opposite experience. RH9 was slow to boot and slow to use, while FC1 is faster all the way around. (Athlon 1500+ .5GB ram, ide disk drive) It probably has something to do with my installation choices. Both times I moved everything I wanted to keep to an extra partition (thank you large disk drive) and let the install wipe the existing OS and install from scratch, but I seem to recall choosing "everything" with RH9 while picking and choosing just what I really use with FC1.
Thus sayeth the article:
" LATOR would measure this deflection with a billion (109) times the precision of Eddington's experiment and 30,000 times the precision of the current record-holder: a serendipitous measurement using signals from the Cassini spacecraft on its way to explore Saturn."
AND
"The 0.02 as accuracy of LATOR is good enough to reveal deviations from Einstein's relativity predicted by the aspiring Theories of Everything, which range from roughly 0.5 to 35 as. Agreement with LATOR's measurements would be a major boost for any of these theories. But if no deviation from Einstein is found even by LATOR, most of the current contenders--along with their 11 dimensions, pixellated space, and inconstant constants--will suffer a fatal blow and "pass on" to that great dusty library stack in the sky."
So in other words they think that taking the measurements with 30,000 times the precision of the current measurements is enough to show if the current flock of string theories is plausable.
Interesting site.
Is it yours?
One problem with the 4 day in one 24 hour rotation theory however is that it is only true if the earth has 4 time zones. Since the earth actually has 24 time zones there are in reality 24 days in each rotation.
Of course since humans are the ones that choose to segment the earth into 24 time zones and since that was done mostly for convenience you can pretty much say that there are any arbitrary number of days in a rotation. If we wanted to we could divide the earth up into more or fewer time zones, whatever is convenient. Want to have the time zones only a half hour apart, use 48. Ten minutes apart, use 144. 1 nanosecond, use ?
It is all arbitrary. We use 24 because one hour divisions are easy to keep track of and close enough to "sun time" that it doesn't matter for everyday use.
Since I know that clocks in New York are exactly 3 hours away from my clock I know without too much effort that if it is 14:23 at my house then it is 17:23 in Times Square.
If we were using divisions that were not even hours then it would be much harder to figure out the time.
I would have to estimate the distance, about 2855 miles according to Mapquest, know that the circumference of the earth is 24,902 mi at the equator(Thank you Google). Figure out that that is about 11.46% of the way around the world...(Since I don't live on the equator ignore that fact that As you go from 0 degrees latitude (the equator) to 90 degrees (north or south poles), the circumference of the circle defined by that latitude line will decrease in direct proportion to the cosine of the angle of latitude. Thus, the circumference of the circle is C = 2 pi r cos(x) - but it that is too hard to figure out this early in the morning)
Anyway, ignoring latitude, if we were using 10 minute time zones and it were 14:23 at my house it would be somewhere around either 16:53 or 17:03 in Times Square depending on how much I messed up the numbers by rounding.
I, for one, am glad that we use 24 time zones.
In 5 years streaming media sent over the internet will be the "TV" of choice for anyone under 30.
Between people putting their own content out and those operating "pirate" feeds either in places that the the United States legal system can't touch or in encrypted anonymous trading networks, hollywood will never be able to put that genie back into the bottle.
In the mean time I don't have cable and don't miss it. I refuse to pay $50 -$60 a month for crap!
Every time I am somewhere like a hotel room where I can watch cable I end up flipping through 60 channels and not finding anything I want to watch. Who wants to watch a bunch of stupid sheep's pretend lives when you can go and have a life of your own?
My kids watch video's and DVD's that we either own or have rented and they are happy. They watch about 30 minutes of video a night, none of it broadcast. They watch way less then any of their friends. As a result they have time for ballet, gymnastics, swim team, trick jumprope classes, T-ball, scouts, church groups, sleep overs, visits to the liberary, computers, train spotting, ice skating, riding bikes, bowling, and doing their homework, reading stories to dad.
A better analogy would be "Your car is working , but you haven't changed the oil in six months."
"What do you mean change the oil?" "It came with oil when I bought it."
"Besides it only uses Ford oil and Ford wants me to by a monthly oil subscription... like I am going to bend over for that one."
Since I am known among my wifes circle as "the computer guy" I get asked to look at peoples peecee's all the time. Many, if not most came with a free trial edition McAfee that the owner never bothered to renew when it expired. I agree with the previous poster that said corporate greed is a contributing factor.
For that matter... what is so different about each virus that we need new "virus updates" all the time? I am not trying to troll but is there anyone out there that can tell me? It seems to me that the antivirus companys have a vested interest in patching but not fixing the problem. There must be a better way to block viruses and worms, at least the Microsoft Outlook Virus(tm) variety. It seems to me that a better solution would be to write a program that puts a sand box around Outlook.
My wife has one site that she uses for business that will not work with Mozilla. I have found however, that it works ok with Konqueror. So my Gnome desktop at home has a nice big icon on the bottom panel that launches Konqueror for her.
You may be too young. When I was a child we had fall out shelters and civil defense drills to prepare for all out war. The Soviet Union was literaly out to destroy the United States and they had the muscle to do it, or at least to try. We _were_ at war. The Soviet plan was to rule all of Europe and eventually the world. Disrupting their economy and their attempts to update their technology by stealing ours probably helped along their fall. At the end they were weak, but if they had survived and been flush with cash and the latest technology they would probably own Europe right now and be looking at us.
COMMENT ON THIS DOCUMENT:
Lame --- To many buzz words, have someone who is not a marketing nit-wit rewrite it.
I found myself saying "Yada, yada, yada" in my head through about two thirds of the article. (sure sign that they were just stringing buzz words together)
The main jist seems to be that there are different stages of on-line business.
1) The ability to look up static data. (traditional web page, one way comunication)
2) The ability to do something. (On line ordering, move your money around in your bank account. There has to be some kind of back end tied in now -- database, application logic, etc.)
3) The ability for business' to do something (EDI anyone? They seem to mean that data is being sent from back end to back end but the transfer is initated by a person.)
4) Automate the things business' are doing. (In our case we use perl scripts and cron to do this, they mention XML, grid computing, Yada, yada, yada.)
So I guess at my company we already have "e-business on demand" (The "on demand" part is when my boss stalks in and tells me he has an ACH file sitting in dir X on server Y that he wants encrypted and sent to companies ABC and DEF and then archived before 15:00 every day WITHOUT FAIL. And I, being the lazy bastard that I am, write a script and go back to reading Slashdot.)
Oh come on!
You can't really be that much of a fool.
One small generator, encased in a very strong shelded box that was designed to withstand accidental re-entry from orbit, with its small amount of radio active material chemically bonded into a ceramic that is specificly designed to not become a fine power if it is blown up destoying the entire earth?!?!?!?!
Ya right!
I can vouch that the Tempur-Pedic mattress was worth the cost of the Apollo program all by itself. My wife really wanted one so I reluctantly agreed. It is the most comfortable mattress in existance.
Perhaps if everyone starts skipping over the commericals television will change.
... oh, wait...
I can see it now. A form of television where you pay a monthly fee to watch and get commerical free tv. Wonderful, high quality programing, both educational and entertaining. Our minds will be expanded, our horizons broadened. Our children will be enlightened. The level of "culture" in our society will rise to new highs. There will be a great renewal in the arts.
Dare we say another Renaissance?
No longer will the programing be dictated by Madison Avenue. No longer will we be forced to wade through the sewage spewing out into our living rooms. Garbage aimed at the lowest comon denominator because there have to be a certain number of the right kind of people watching who will buy product-X.
Mindless.
Boring.
Crap.
I can see it now, a reliable, high quality signal that never fails. That carries content on demand. A beautiful picture, high definition, perfect concert quality sound.
Perhaps instead of being broadcast the signal will even come into your house on some kind of cable
Don't you mean McDonald's Haunted Mansion?
I couldn't agree with you more. For an eye opener try listening closely to to lyrics of the songs they play on friday night. It's NOT stuff I want my seven year old listening to.
Don't buy anything from Disney.
I don't.
Ever!
At one time Disney may have been about making good, fun, wholesome movies but these days they are just about greed.
They don't even make very good movies anymore. They all pretty much have the same lame plot.
1) Young "person" disobeys parents/teacher/tribe/king because adults are stupid.
2) He or she has big adventure.
3) At the place where they should start suffering the consequences, someone bails them out.
4) They return home as a hero.
5) They were right, adults really are stupid because it all turned out ok in the end. (Notice that no mention is ever made, or even thanks offered, that those "stupid adults" may have risked everything including life, limb, and eternal suffering to accomplish number three.)
Tunnel in the Sky...I had forgotten about that one. I must have read it about 6 times while I was it 7th and 8th grade.
Heinlein's juvenile books are great reading for young teens but he got just plain weird at the end. Although I read them all, I was pretty much disapointed in everything after "Stranger in a Strange Land." It was like he ran out of ideas for new stories and just started tossing in more and more sex.
While a little bit of PG or even R rated sex can make a character and a story interesting more then a page of it is just boring.
Put in some sex if it will make your main character agonize over something later in the book, or lose/gain his one chance to {whatever} before the final conflict, or cause a chain of events that will somehow effect the outcome of the story, or even to show the moral makeup of a character. But don't just throw it in because you have a bunch of people sitting around somewhere with nothing better to do and you have to add two hundred more pages to make it a novel.