As Peter Bradford, a former member of the NRC stated to the New York Times: "The abiding lesson that Three Mile Island taught Wall Street was that a group of NRC-licensed reactor operators, as good as any others, could turn a $2 billion dollar asset into a $1 billion dollar cleanup job in about 90 minutes." Even with massive government subsidies to the nuclear industry, no new plants have been ordered since 1978 as virtually every other power generation option is cheaper and has less risk to investors.
Home Solar Power Equipment Reposession Agency - for when a customer defaults on their payments. Though it'll probably be a bit hard to unwire an AC inverter from a main circuit breaker with a screaming shotgun-wielding homeowner next to you. There'll be a reality TV show about this in 2020.
Linden Labs, Wired Magazine, and a bunch of self-congratulatory bloggers and assorted dorks out of San Francisco give a crap about this train wreck of a "virtual community?" Every "article" I read about this thing seems like just a thinly disgused ad.
I've also read Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children - and while I thought the premise of the two books was extremely interesting, I think Bear falls into the trap that other "hard" sci-fi writers fall into, which is that the characters end up just being mouthpieces for "cool ideas" that the author wanted to put into a novel. Bear is better at disguising this than some authors (Baxter, though he's gotten better), but I felt that for some reason Bear chose to make the two main adult protagonists of the novels (aside from when they launch into speculative rants on Bear's ideas) particularly unlikeable. By the end of the first novel, I found myself not particularly caring what happened to them.
I'm not sure how well Bear is going to do if he decides to go into the "thriller" genre, as Darwin's Radio absolutely PLODS along - you'll sometimes get the feeling that some huge plot twist is coming, but then it's foreshadowed to death for 100 pages and when something actually happens it's not even that interesting.
To add insult to injury, passengers will have to listen to smooth jazz renditions of "Unchained", "Right Now", and "Why Can't This Be Love" while being bombarded with lethal radiation.
Oh, that said Allen. Nevermind.
I believe that more research needs to be done to determine whether human activities are having any effect on the global climate. As history tells us, it is usually the best course of action in the face of uncertainty to do nothing. For example, during the Cold War there was a great deal of uncertainty about what he intentions of the Soviet Union in East Germany were, and due to this fact we made sure to not "rock the boat" b,y sending any troops or weapons of any kind to West Germany. It was of course our steadfast dedication to non-involvement and careful scientific study, examination and research over many decadesof the massive arms buildup behind the Iron Curtain that eventually allowed us to witness the collapse of the Soviet Union and Germany's reunification.
Is made entirely of clear plastic Lexan. The modern toilet is an example of perfect human engineering, I want to see the entire process from start to finish!
For anyone interested in doing some experimenting, an NPN transistor connected to a power-supply through a large resistor, with its emitter and base connected to ground makes a great johnston noise source. Take the ouptput from the collector, amplify with an op amp and low-pass filter it, and feed it to an A/D converter and you've got a good starting point for experimentation.
Though as a previous poster mentioned the delta wings do look pretty cool, but if this is the correct wing configuration for the creature it seems like would definately be an advantage for hunting. Some birds (modern descendents of dinosaurs) can hit 100 miles per hour or more in an attack dive, and having delta wings would allow this dinosaur to achieve high dive speeds while still maintaing some control. Maybe it's possible that given this creature's low weight (1/10th of a pound) that it devloped this wing configuration through evolution because it spent its life completely airborne, and so a wing configuration based on high-speed attack was more important than being able to fly at low speeds for say, takeoff and landing.
Though Bob Moog was obviously a genius of electronic instrument design, he is often credited with being the first to develop the voltage-controlled oscillator and voltage controlled filter. Actually the credit should go to Dr. Freidrich Adolf Trautwein and his Trautonium, a vacuum tube behemoth constructed in Germany in 1930. The VCOs were thyratron tubes (similar to solid state SCRs) that were used as relaxation oscillators, which were tuned by applying a negative voltage to their control grids. There are schematics available for similar tube synth circuits available at Metasonix, which also has tube synth modules for sale.
Back in the early 90s I remember the Computer Museum in Boston having a bunch of stuff like this for sale in their gift shop. I still have a 3 ring binder that was constructed out of discarded PCBs(chips removed).
Unfortunately Boston's Computer Museum closed in 1999, but apparently the computing artifacts it contained are now at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. If it's anything as nice as Boston's old Computer Museum, it's definately worth a trip for anyone in that area. I thought the room-filling exhibit of just a piece of ENIAC was worth the price of admission alone.
"But given Q1's reported glitch-related 'spasms' at the expo, it may be a while before androids are escorting tour groups or looking after children"
For some reason I'm picturing a female Japanese robot in a pink blazer with shoulderpads, spinning and flailing around on the floor like Pris after Deckard caps her in Blade Runner.
4 independent cores on a single chip could be a godsend for professional audio engineers. I'm currently using an AMD-based digital audio workstation, and even with a high-end Athalon 64 playing back 48 audio tracks along with VST soft synths and plug-in reverbs and compressors can easily bring the system grinding to a halt if I don't keep my eye on the CPU usage meter. The latest version of Cubase supports clustering over Ethernet, but this is a PITA to set up properly and the last thing one wants in a music studio is a bunch of extra computers that have to be silenced with fanless cooling hardware or hooked up from another room.
There are some pieces of PCI and Firewire audio equipment that are dedicated to running audio plug-ins to take the load off the CPU, but they are a terrible value for the money. The least powerful of them cost about as much as a top of the line video card, nearly all of them only run proprietary plug-ins, and most of them are based on processors that are relatively ancient (the bottom-end Creamware Scope PCI card, costing over $500, has 3 SHARC processors that came out over 6 years ago).
To get to my point, with 4 independent cores, I could dedicate say 1 core to playing back pre-recorded audio, 1 to running virtual instruments, 1 to running plug-in effects, and still have a 4th to send MIDI data, or run a video-editing program linked to the sequencer, or whatever. I'm looking forward to this.
The Cylons and humans are having babies already and it's only the end of Season 1? Don't the writers know that bringing babies into a script pretty much universally means the death of a series?
Oh yeah. Where's Muffy the Daggit?
How do employers determine which of the 50 people with my name that live in my general area and show up in the first few pages of Google results is _me_? Or do they grab the first name on the list that has been convicted of armed robbery and assume?
I want the Star Wars public service message collection on DVD!
C3PO - "R2D2! You're on fire! Why, R2D2 you've found a cigarette. Smoking is terrible for your lungs, and very bad for your heart. I don't think it makes you look grownup at all!"
Not holographic, but I think something like the Heliodisplay
http://www.io2technology.com/dojo/178/v.jsp is a lot more impressive, considering it can display images in free space "Help me Obi-Wan" style, without any screen whatsoever. Now if only something could be done about its $19,000 price tag...
Slashdot Mirror
Ghost Chimp, M.D.
Forget either of them, I demand Nicki Clyne nudies!!
he's got that ambition baby, look in his eyes this week he's moppin' floors next week it's the fries
if by "sound card" you allow extrapolation to the more general term "audio interface" there are plenty - M-Audio, http://www.m-audio.com/ Echo Audio http://www.echoaudio.com/ Mark of the Unicorn, http://www.motu.com/ Digidesign, http://www.digidesign.com/ RME, http://www.rme-audio.com/ Apogee, http://www.apogeedigital.com/ Edirol, http://www.edirol.com/ etc.
As Peter Bradford, a former member of the NRC stated to the New York Times: "The abiding lesson that Three Mile Island taught Wall Street was that a group of NRC-licensed reactor operators, as good as any others, could turn a $2 billion dollar asset into a $1 billion dollar cleanup job in about 90 minutes." Even with massive government subsidies to the nuclear industry, no new plants have been ordered since 1978 as virtually every other power generation option is cheaper and has less risk to investors.
Home Solar Power Equipment Reposession Agency - for when a customer defaults on their payments. Though it'll probably be a bit hard to unwire an AC inverter from a main circuit breaker with a screaming shotgun-wielding homeowner next to you. There'll be a reality TV show about this in 2020.
Linden Labs, Wired Magazine, and a bunch of self-congratulatory bloggers and assorted dorks out of San Francisco give a crap about this train wreck of a "virtual community?" Every "article" I read about this thing seems like just a thinly disgused ad.
I've also read Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children - and while I thought the premise of the two books was extremely interesting, I think Bear falls into the trap that other "hard" sci-fi writers fall into, which is that the characters end up just being mouthpieces for "cool ideas" that the author wanted to put into a novel. Bear is better at disguising this than some authors (Baxter, though he's gotten better), but I felt that for some reason Bear chose to make the two main adult protagonists of the novels (aside from when they launch into speculative rants on Bear's ideas) particularly unlikeable. By the end of the first novel, I found myself not particularly caring what happened to them. I'm not sure how well Bear is going to do if he decides to go into the "thriller" genre, as Darwin's Radio absolutely PLODS along - you'll sometimes get the feeling that some huge plot twist is coming, but then it's foreshadowed to death for 100 pages and when something actually happens it's not even that interesting.
To add insult to injury, passengers will have to listen to smooth jazz renditions of "Unchained", "Right Now", and "Why Can't This Be Love" while being bombarded with lethal radiation. Oh, that said Allen. Nevermind.
I believe that more research needs to be done to determine whether human activities are having any effect on the global climate. As history tells us, it is usually the best course of action in the face of uncertainty to do nothing. For example, during the Cold War there was a great deal of uncertainty about what he intentions of the Soviet Union in East Germany were, and due to this fact we made sure to not "rock the boat" b,y sending any troops or weapons of any kind to West Germany. It was of course our steadfast dedication to non-involvement and careful scientific study, examination and research over many decadesof the massive arms buildup behind the Iron Curtain that eventually allowed us to witness the collapse of the Soviet Union and Germany's reunification.
Is made entirely of clear plastic Lexan. The modern toilet is an example of perfect human engineering, I want to see the entire process from start to finish!
42 degrees, 11 minutes, 8 seconds north by 71 degrees 18 minutes 31 seconds west should put you in the general area. Happy hunting!
Truly written like someone who has never actually experienced war or conflict. Well done, armchair commando!
P.S. Extra points for using veganism in a straw man argument.
For anyone interested in doing some experimenting, an NPN transistor connected to a power-supply through a large resistor, with its emitter and base connected to ground makes a great johnston noise source. Take the ouptput from the collector, amplify with an op amp and low-pass filter it, and feed it to an A/D converter and you've got a good starting point for experimentation.
Though as a previous poster mentioned the delta wings do look pretty cool, but if this is the correct wing configuration for the creature it seems like would definately be an advantage for hunting. Some birds (modern descendents of dinosaurs) can hit 100 miles per hour or more in an attack dive, and having delta wings would allow this dinosaur to achieve high dive speeds while still maintaing some control. Maybe it's possible that given this creature's low weight (1/10th of a pound) that it devloped this wing configuration through evolution because it spent its life completely airborne, and so a wing configuration based on high-speed attack was more important than being able to fly at low speeds for say, takeoff and landing.
given that it had been imaged by Voyager 2 but had eluded telescopses since then. I believe "Perdita" means "Lost" in Latin...
Though Bob Moog was obviously a genius of electronic instrument design, he is often credited with being the first to develop the voltage-controlled oscillator and voltage controlled filter. Actually the credit should go to Dr. Freidrich Adolf Trautwein and his Trautonium, a vacuum tube behemoth constructed in Germany in 1930. The VCOs were thyratron tubes (similar to solid state SCRs) that were used as relaxation oscillators, which were tuned by applying a negative voltage to their control grids. There are schematics available for similar tube synth circuits available at Metasonix, which also has tube synth modules for sale.
Back in the early 90s I remember the Computer Museum in Boston having a bunch of stuff like this for sale in their gift shop. I still have a 3 ring binder that was constructed out of discarded PCBs(chips removed).
Unfortunately Boston's Computer Museum closed in 1999, but apparently the computing artifacts it contained are now at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. If it's anything as nice as Boston's old Computer Museum, it's definately worth a trip for anyone in that area. I thought the room-filling exhibit of just a piece of ENIAC was worth the price of admission alone.
"But given Q1's reported glitch-related 'spasms' at the expo, it may be a while before androids are escorting tour groups or looking after children"
For some reason I'm picturing a female Japanese robot in a pink blazer with shoulderpads, spinning and flailing around on the floor like Pris after Deckard caps her in Blade Runner.
4 independent cores on a single chip could be a godsend for professional audio engineers. I'm currently using an AMD-based digital audio workstation, and even with a high-end Athalon 64 playing back 48 audio tracks along with VST soft synths and plug-in reverbs and compressors can easily bring the system grinding to a halt if I don't keep my eye on the CPU usage meter. The latest version of Cubase supports clustering over Ethernet, but this is a PITA to set up properly and the last thing one wants in a music studio is a bunch of extra computers that have to be silenced with fanless cooling hardware or hooked up from another room.
There are some pieces of PCI and Firewire audio equipment that are dedicated to running audio plug-ins to take the load off the CPU, but they are a terrible value for the money. The least powerful of them cost about as much as a top of the line video card, nearly all of them only run proprietary plug-ins, and most of them are based on processors that are relatively ancient (the bottom-end Creamware Scope PCI card, costing over $500, has 3 SHARC processors that came out over 6 years ago).
To get to my point, with 4 independent cores, I could dedicate say 1 core to playing back pre-recorded audio, 1 to running virtual instruments, 1 to running plug-in effects, and still have a 4th to send MIDI data, or run a video-editing program linked to the sequencer, or whatever. I'm looking forward to this.
The Cylons and humans are having babies already and it's only the end of Season 1? Don't the writers know that bringing babies into a script pretty much universally means the death of a series? Oh yeah. Where's Muffy the Daggit?
How do employers determine which of the 50 people with my name that live in my general area and show up in the first few pages of Google results is _me_? Or do they grab the first name on the list that has been convicted of armed robbery and assume?
I want the Star Wars public service message collection on DVD!
C3PO - "R2D2! You're on fire! Why, R2D2 you've found a cigarette. Smoking is terrible for your lungs, and very bad for your heart. I don't think it makes you look grownup at all!"
Not holographic, but I think something like the Heliodisplay http://www.io2technology.com/dojo/178/v.jsp is a lot more impressive, considering it can display images in free space "Help me Obi-Wan" style, without any screen whatsoever. Now if only something could be done about its $19,000 price tag...