I have read several articles talking about the perpetual fear of the supernatural that has always haunted the rulers of China. One author presented a theory that the Great Wall was actually constructed to confound a type of demon that the Emperors of China feared. Another stated that the Government in Beijing new the location of the first Emperors tomb but refused to let it be excavated because they feared his curse.
Even if the DRM/TC/whatever is built into the processor core, this is still true. DRM/Trusted Computing is a crock of shit that has been sold to clueless executives and legislators.
"I had previously said the guy couldn't do this, but it looks like he can for the most part, at least in the U.S. From U.S. 17:"
,
He can terminate, but only under certain restrictions, from subsection 3:
"Termination of the grant may be effected at any time during a period of five years beginning at the end of thirty-five years from the date of execution of the grant; or, if the grant covers the right of publication of the work, the period begins at the end of thirty-five years from the date of publication of the work under the grant or at the end of forty years from the date of execution of the grant, whichever term ends earlier."
He can terminate the license 35 years after the original grant, if he notifies the licensee in writing within 5 years.
MMORPGs require lots and lots of resources to develop. Since NASA has so much experience making successful multiplayer games I think you guys should jump right in and go for the gusto!
Seriously though, this type of game is not cheap to make or to keep up and running. The vast majority of them fail miserably and become giant money pits. Try smaller games first. Like a game where the player
1. manipulates a satellite with the shuttles remote arm and
2. a game where the player has to build a spacecraft to travel from low earth orbit to mars and deal with real issues of travel time and resource allocation(simplified of course).
3. a game set 200 years in the future where the player manages humanities presence in space to build up an infrastructure that is capable of launching a colonization effort to the Centauri stars. Along the way they have to deal with a degenerate system on Earth, Islamic Exodus and overly aggressive Mars colonist - ok so that part is a blatant rip off the Red, Blue Green Mars trilogy and it's Dune precursor timeline, but I still like it as a plot device.
The fact that matter forms bubbles around the voids intuitively make me think that some force is pushing matter away from the center of each void. Perhaps the center of each void is location where mini-inflation events have happened and what we see today is the reslut of these events pushing shells of matter up against each other so that they form filaments and bubbles. Just a though, IANAP though.
In next weeks episode Grace discovers that Trip is actually John, her long lost half brother by marriage twice removed. He lost his memory in a car accident and then Nick's evil Uncle had his faced changed by a plastic surgeon in Argentina. John is now convince that he is Trip and has forgotten that he is a world famous brain surgeon and impressionist painter. Meanwhile, Trip discovers that Grace had a baby out of wedlock when she was a teenager - 2 years ago. The baby is now a 17 year old orphan living in an orphanage in Argentina. Will Trip travel to Argentina to find the truth about Grace? Will he discover he is actually John, a world famous brain surgeon and impressionist painter? Will he be able to do brain surgery on himself to recover his lost memories? And what about Grace? Will she discover that the baby she thought had died at birth was taken by the monks to the Orphanage? Will she discover that Trip knows about her first pregnancy? And what about Nick, do Grace and John suspect the truth?
A theory that can't be disproved is not a scientific theory.
This whole debate has devolved into a dogmatic pissing match. With "scientific" evolutionist on one side and creationist on the other. There is no knowledge to be gained from this crap - its at the point where "our guy that said something that supported your argument withdraws his statement". In other words it becomes clear that the whole thing is about politics, not science, not religion, not truth.
Bioware has something that EA hasn't had since Bard's Tale - creativity. Things may go smoothly for a while, perhaps a good MMO and a few good single player games will emerge. But eventually things will go bad. EA is in the business of selling sequels and that can't last. They will eventually over extend themselves on high-cost sequel like Madden or Major League and have to suck out all of Bioware's resource out to meet the bills or they will take Bioware creations and run them into the ground (Knight of the old Mass Effect XXXIV).
"It's becoming harder and harder to get food, other than raw stuff, that isn't loaded up with crap we don't need in out diet."
That's why you get the raw stuff and prepare it yourself. Lack of exercise and convenience food will kill you. Almost all cases of T2D are curable by a lifestyle change.
Some of the DX10 screen shots actually look worse than the DX9 screens. In the Call of Juarez screens the water looks slightly more realistic in the distance, but up close the reflections on the water's surface are more realistic with DX9. The distance terrain texturing in DX10 appears to be a little better at very long distances, but worse the closer you get to the viewport. A lot of the distant terrain in the CoJ DX10 screens just looks hazy and out of focus. Particle render is better under DX10. I guess I was just expecting to much.
"Neither Islam nor Christianity have changed substantially in the last 500-1000 years. Neither the Bible nor the Quran have gone through a new edition."
Perhaps this is true in the alternate universe you call home, but the reality is that Christianity has changed more in the last 500 years than it had in the preceding 1000 years. New editions of the Bible started to be published 400 years ago and new editions appear each year. Many protestant sects are radically different than Catholicism.
That would get a small, old house in a very rural area, say 50+ miles from any major population center or anything else of potential interest. 3 to 5 times that much would get a nice house(1200sf to 3000sf) in most suburban areas in the South and Midwest. About 10 times that $420,000 to get a 2000sf house in Florida, Arizona, Nevada. The price goes up from there for New York City or California. The appraised value of property in California urban areas is about $1,100 per square foot (the last I heard, I would expect it to decline substantially from that over the next 5 years).
Ms. Frankenstein. All you need is a breadboard, some LEDs, a battery and some silly putty. The vast majority of people on this planet are completely confused by and terrified of technology; even the ones in the developed world that are totally dependent on it. They are intimidate by Scientist and Engineers and more than a little distrustful of us. A jack-ass stunt like this doesn't help the situation.
"Just remember this when you geeks try to pull some moral high ground shit later. You're the same shitty people as everyone else. You just have more self-righteousness to spread around like rancid butter."
OH PLEASE!
This company's 'moral higher ground' was spreading FUD and suing anyone one they thought would yield. Indeed, that was their only revenue stream. Take your preaching to some place where they don't know the recent history of SCO.
If a system was operating in an environment where a failure was more like is it desirable to increase the frequency of the access to a given memory location. It seems reasonable that this would be the case. I am looking at an application that could be exposed to a higher level of cosmic rays than would be the normal for ground based workstations.
First of all spend, $100-200 on a dobsonian. Don't spend more than that until you have some time observing to see if it's really a hobby you want to pursue.
Here is my setup:
Canon 350D XT, Celestron 6" Newtonian on a Celestron Advanced GT mount. Outdated 1.3Ghz laptop
I started with a 6" Meade, but the electronics on the mount wouldn't drive the equatorial axis in the correct direction. I returned the telescope and mount to the vendor and got the slightly more expensive Celestron. I have been pretty happy with it so far.
The mount has to work well enough to follow objects in the sky, when looking at objects in a telescope of this size you realize just how fast the sky moves overhead. A star will show up as a streak on a 15 second exposure unless the telescope is driven around the equatorial axis by a motor. Even with a motorized mount, you will still have to recenter the target periodically and you will get what is called field rotation. The field rotation is compensated for later with software when you stack multiple exposures to make an image.
Focusing is a big problem with a camera on a telescope. You can't see enough light through the camera view port to focus sharply on celestial objects - unfortunately the little lcd screens on the camera don't help much; this is where the laptop comes into play. You can shoot an image with the camera connected to the laptop via usb, download the image to see if it's in focus, adjust and repeat until you get good focus.
There are other options for focusing, such as optical splitters and lcd screens that can be attached to the telescope, but I haven't tried these.
Since the 350D XT can be remotely controlled from the laptop you can adjust shutter speed, 'film speed', etc. without touching the camera and bumping the telescope off target or screwing up your focus. Cabling between the camera and laptop can be a bit of a problem, especially in the dark. The usb cable needs to be atleast 10 feet long depending on how you position your telescope and laptop.
For the motorized mount to follow the sky correctly, it must be aligned with polar north. My mount has an auto-alignment capability. I never have gotten it to work well enough for astrophotography, so I just align the mount manually by sighting it on the north star.
When you take a picture with a DSLR, the mirror that redirects light to the view port has to be moved out of position before the shutter is opened. This is barely noticeable when you are doing regular photography, but for astrophotography the movement of the mirror will cause the telescope to bounce for a few seconds and completely ruin an image. So you will need a shutter release cable to flip the mirror up, let the telescope stabilize and then open the shutter. You will also need a T-Ring to attach the camera to the telescope.
Then you have to be able to supply power to all this stuff. With my power pack this all weighs about 80lbs.
This is very much an entry level astrophotography setup. It is suitable for shooting SOME deep sky objects, but you will need to be very familiar with the camera, telescope and mount and you will have to be persistent. It might be possible to get a comparable setup for $1700, but $2100 is probably more realistic. I haven't even gotten into the issue of post-processing the images, which is a whole 'nother realm of costs. I am still a beginner so there is a lot more that I don't know yet.
I am not trying to discourage you from the hobby, but I am trying to give you enough of a data dump so you have some ideal of the complexities and expense involved; I have left lots of little detail off that you will have to pick up along the way. Just take it slow and be sure its something you really want to do before you put $1000 into it. The learning curve is steep and it's an expensive undertaking.
The good news is that it's possible for amateurs to make incredibly good images, but I agree with the other
Self-referencing logic is problematic. It's always possible to create algorithms that loop forever and it impossible to tell in the general case if an algorithm will loop forever. It's also possible to construct true statements from a logic system that are impossible for the logic system to prove.
Intuitively, I would expect that any computer that achieved self-awareness, would instantly go to work on the most interesting problems it could think of - i.e. it's own nature. It would probably lock-up shortly after starting to think about it's own possible logic states.
I know a place where I can see out to +8M with the naked eye when atmospheric conditions are right, which is fairly often in the winter at this location. It's incredible. You can actually see that many of the dark clouds toward the center of the milky way are in front of the background stars. There is absolutely no need for a street light filter.
The location is in the continental US, over a hundred miles from a town with 100,000 people in it and over two hundred miles from a city with more than 500,000. The nearest town has a population of 1,000 and is about 10 miles away, but because of the geography of the location none of the light leaks into the viewing area.
I think for people who have lived in cities all their lives it's hard to understand why the ancients and men like Galileo, Copernicus and Brae were so obsessed with the nighttime sky. When you see it from a location were it's truly dark and you can see dozens of clusters and nebula in front of the milky way, you understand.
Slashdot Mirror
I have read several articles talking about the perpetual fear of the supernatural that has always haunted the rulers of China. One author presented a theory that the Great Wall was actually constructed to confound a type of demon that the Emperors of China feared. Another stated that the Government in Beijing new the location of the first Emperors tomb but refused to let it be excavated because they feared his curse.
Even if the DRM/TC/whatever is built into the processor core, this is still true. DRM/Trusted Computing is a crock of shit that has been sold to clueless executives and legislators.
He can revoke the grant of license, but only after 35 years. This is spelled out by U.S. copyright law, not the GPL. http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap2.html#203
,
He can terminate, but only under certain restrictions, from subsection 3: "Termination of the grant may be effected at any time during a period of five years beginning at the end of thirty-five years from the date of execution of the grant; or, if the grant covers the right of publication of the work, the period begins at the end of thirty-five years from the date of publication of the work under the grant or at the end of forty years from the date of execution of the grant, whichever term ends earlier."
He can terminate the license 35 years after the original grant, if he notifies the licensee in writing within 5 years.
Seriously though, this type of game is not cheap to make or to keep up and running. The vast majority of them fail miserably and become giant money pits. Try smaller games first. Like a game where the player 1. manipulates a satellite with the shuttles remote arm and
2. a game where the player has to build a spacecraft to travel from low earth orbit to mars and deal with real issues of travel time and resource allocation(simplified of course).
3. a game set 200 years in the future where the player manages humanities presence in space to build up an infrastructure that is capable of launching a colonization effort to the Centauri stars. Along the way they have to deal with a degenerate system on Earth, Islamic Exodus and overly aggressive Mars colonist - ok so that part is a blatant rip off the Red, Blue Green Mars trilogy and it's Dune precursor timeline, but I still like it as a plot device.
I guess he mean recent in a cosmological sense...
The fact that matter forms bubbles around the voids intuitively make me think that some force is pushing matter away from the center of each void. Perhaps the center of each void is location where mini-inflation events have happened and what we see today is the reslut of these events pushing shells of matter up against each other so that they form filaments and bubbles. Just a though, IANAP though.
Tune in next week folks!
This whole debate has devolved into a dogmatic pissing match. With "scientific" evolutionist on one side and creationist on the other. There is no knowledge to be gained from this crap - its at the point where "our guy that said something that supported your argument withdraws his statement". In other words it becomes clear that the whole thing is about politics, not science, not religion, not truth.
I hope his games are more original than his catch-phrase.
Bioware has something that EA hasn't had since Bard's Tale - creativity. Things may go smoothly for a while, perhaps a good MMO and a few good single player games will emerge. But eventually things will go bad. EA is in the business of selling sequels and that can't last. They will eventually over extend themselves on high-cost sequel like Madden or Major League and have to suck out all of Bioware's resource out to meet the bills or they will take Bioware creations and run them into the ground (Knight of the old Mass Effect XXXIV).
That's why you get the raw stuff and prepare it yourself. Lack of exercise and convenience food will kill you. Almost all cases of T2D are curable by a lifestyle change.
Some of the DX10 screen shots actually look worse than the DX9 screens. In the Call of Juarez screens the water looks slightly more realistic in the distance, but up close the reflections on the water's surface are more realistic with DX9. The distance terrain texturing in DX10 appears to be a little better at very long distances, but worse the closer you get to the viewport. A lot of the distant terrain in the CoJ DX10 screens just looks hazy and out of focus. Particle render is better under DX10. I guess I was just expecting to much.
Perhaps this is true in the alternate universe you call home, but the reality is that Christianity has changed more in the last 500 years than it had in the preceding 1000 years. New editions of the Bible started to be published 400 years ago and new editions appear each year. Many protestant sects are radically different than Catholicism.
That would get a small, old house in a very rural area, say 50+ miles from any major population center or anything else of potential interest. 3 to 5 times that much would get a nice house(1200sf to 3000sf) in most suburban areas in the South and Midwest. About 10 times that $420,000 to get a 2000sf house in Florida, Arizona, Nevada. The price goes up from there for New York City or California. The appraised value of property in California urban areas is about $1,100 per square foot (the last I heard, I would expect it to decline substantially from that over the next 5 years).
Thanks! We are trying.
Ms. Frankenstein. All you need is a breadboard, some LEDs, a battery and some silly putty. The vast majority of people on this planet are completely confused by and terrified of technology; even the ones in the developed world that are totally dependent on it. They are intimidate by Scientist and Engineers and more than a little distrustful of us. A jack-ass stunt like this doesn't help the situation.
Luckily for this guy, he has a +5 shield that protects him from the affect http://www.flickr.com/photos/pumpkin/23610518/in/set-538104/.
OH PLEASE!
This company's 'moral higher ground' was spreading FUD and suing anyone one they thought would yield. Indeed, that was their only revenue stream. Take your preaching to some place where they don't know the recent history of SCO.
If a system was operating in an environment where a failure was more like is it desirable to increase the frequency of the access to a given memory location. It seems reasonable that this would be the case. I am looking at an application that could be exposed to a higher level of cosmic rays than would be the normal for ground based workstations.
Can anyone point me toward some information on the hit to CPU and I/O throughput for scrubbing?
Here is my setup:
Canon 350D XT, Celestron 6" Newtonian on a Celestron Advanced GT mount. Outdated 1.3Ghz laptop
I started with a 6" Meade, but the electronics on the mount wouldn't drive the equatorial axis in the correct direction. I returned the telescope and mount to the vendor and got the slightly more expensive Celestron. I have been pretty happy with it so far.
The mount has to work well enough to follow objects in the sky, when looking at objects in a telescope of this size you realize just how fast the sky moves overhead. A star will show up as a streak on a 15 second exposure unless the telescope is driven around the equatorial axis by a motor. Even with a motorized mount, you will still have to recenter the target periodically and you will get what is called field rotation. The field rotation is compensated for later with software when you stack multiple exposures to make an image.
Focusing is a big problem with a camera on a telescope. You can't see enough light through the camera view port to focus sharply on celestial objects - unfortunately the little lcd screens on the camera don't help much; this is where the laptop comes into play. You can shoot an image with the camera connected to the laptop via usb, download the image to see if it's in focus, adjust and repeat until you get good focus.
There are other options for focusing, such as optical splitters and lcd screens that can be attached to the telescope, but I haven't tried these.
Since the 350D XT can be remotely controlled from the laptop you can adjust shutter speed, 'film speed', etc. without touching the camera and bumping the telescope off target or screwing up your focus. Cabling between the camera and laptop can be a bit of a problem, especially in the dark. The usb cable needs to be atleast 10 feet long depending on how you position your telescope and laptop.
For the motorized mount to follow the sky correctly, it must be aligned with polar north. My mount has an auto-alignment capability. I never have gotten it to work well enough for astrophotography, so I just align the mount manually by sighting it on the north star.
When you take a picture with a DSLR, the mirror that redirects light to the view port has to be moved out of position before the shutter is opened. This is barely noticeable when you are doing regular photography, but for astrophotography the movement of the mirror will cause the telescope to bounce for a few seconds and completely ruin an image. So you will need a shutter release cable to flip the mirror up, let the telescope stabilize and then open the shutter. You will also need a T-Ring to attach the camera to the telescope.
Then you have to be able to supply power to all this stuff. With my power pack this all weighs about 80lbs.
This is very much an entry level astrophotography setup. It is suitable for shooting SOME deep sky objects, but you will need to be very familiar with the camera, telescope and mount and you will have to be persistent. It might be possible to get a comparable setup for $1700, but $2100 is probably more realistic. I haven't even gotten into the issue of post-processing the images, which is a whole 'nother realm of costs. I am still a beginner so there is a lot more that I don't know yet.
I am not trying to discourage you from the hobby, but I am trying to give you enough of a data dump so you have some ideal of the complexities and expense involved; I have left lots of little detail off that you will have to pick up along the way. Just take it slow and be sure its something you really want to do before you put $1000 into it. The learning curve is steep and it's an expensive undertaking.
The good news is that it's possible for amateurs to make incredibly good images, but I agree with the other
Intuitively, I would expect that any computer that achieved self-awareness, would instantly go to work on the most interesting problems it could think of - i.e. it's own nature. It would probably lock-up shortly after starting to think about it's own possible logic states.
I have always wonder which part of the brain stores the ability to ride a bike.
The location is in the continental US, over a hundred miles from a town with 100,000 people in it and over two hundred miles from a city with more than 500,000. The nearest town has a population of 1,000 and is about 10 miles away, but because of the geography of the location none of the light leaks into the viewing area.
I think for people who have lived in cities all their lives it's hard to understand why the ancients and men like Galileo, Copernicus and Brae were so obsessed with the nighttime sky. When you see it from a location were it's truly dark and you can see dozens of clusters and nebula in front of the milky way, you understand.