Some copies of the C64 version of the Infocom game had an opening picture featuring the green eyeless alien and a thumb. It was displayed while the game loaded and wasn't part of the original game. It was added to an illegally distributed copy.
Does anyone here remember this picture? Anyone has a copy that can be run on an emulator? I drew this picture and I'd love to see it again...
why? sms's can be sent easily to other networks in properly built cellular network systems
The OP was talking about social networks, not cellular networks. Perhaps this fact would be more obvious if if he had spelled "cliques" correctly (not "clicks").
The thing is, people like you [...] are a big part of the reason health care in the U.S. is both expensive and substandard. Most of the time, if you feel sick, you do -not- need to see a doctor.
True, MOST of the time. But a good family doctor is often the one who diagnoses serious illnesses early, leading to much better chances of recovery. Early diagnosis is much cheaper, too. So these visits are not quite useless.
It has to be a really good doctor, though, to pick up the small clues and not become burned out by the mass of trivial complaints. How many of them are really good? It's the specialists who get the "glory".
They could have gone the simpler and more direct route of just building a power plant that used the difference in tempersture between the cold bottom water and the top water to pump up that water and generate electricity.
Simpler? More direct? Let's compare them:
Alternative 1: Want airconditioning? Just use the cold water to do the cooling.
Alternative 2: Use the temperature gradient in the lake to produce electricity and use this electricity to run the air conditioning.
Ahem.
Such plants have been proven to work with ocean water
Proven to work, yes. But not economically. It's very difficult to produce electricity from relatively small temperature gradients and the efficiency is very low. Much higher gradients are available as waste heat from industrial sources and even they are barely practical for producing electricity.
Science fiction authors seem to like this idea, though. Power generation from ocean thermal gradients is featured is many SF works. Don't confuse this with practical and available technology.
These launchers do fail occasionally, just like any other launcher in the business. In fact, this specific type of launcher has failed on the previous attempt to launch a solar sail by the same group!
They will just launch another investigation into how this procedure was come up with to glue these tiles on.
Somehow I find it hard to accept any "insights" from someone who can't tell the difference between the gluing of heat-resistant tiles to the orbiter and the application of cryogenic foam insulation to the external tank.
They just want to appear as a real competitor to give their online casino sponsor their money's worth in attention. I bet they'll find some excuse not to fly.
It will take a new generation accustomed to living its life through handheld electronics and without the level of comfort with heavy paper books that we have.
Our old generation got used to cellular phones pretty quickly, didn't they?
When the price, size, user interface, availability and other factors are right you'd be surprised as how quickly we "old folks" get used to things that seemed like science fiction just a few years earlier.
The only problem with e-books is that nobody got it right, yet.
EEG signals aren't exactly a direct neural interface. It's more like listening outside a room with thousands of people talking. You can't tell what they are talking about but the tone of the drone can tell you something about the general mood in the room.
You don't need to be a genius, just a person with a healthy sense of curiosity.
They are totally useless for exploring the brain's functions
Perhaps you won't be doing cutting edge neurology research with this kind of EEG interface to your computer but it's far from useless. Basic analysis of the spectrum of the signal is not so hard. The dominant frequencies correlate to states of consciousness such as relaxation or concentration.
It's fun. It's fascinating to watch your own brain in action. It can even be potentially useful as a biofeedback tool.
The reason for using frequency modulation is not just for bypassing the highpass filter on sound cards.
You wouldn't connect anything attached to mains power to your head with low impedance electrodes, would you? Do you trust the USB port of your motherboard with your life?
You need isolation. This is usually achieved with an optocoupler. An optocoupler is not so good at passing analog signals but passing a simple on/off FM signal through it is trivial. Isolating a serial digital signal is equally easy but then you need to find some way to power the ADC and microprocessor on the other side of the coupler with an isolated power supply. The voltage-to-frequency converter takes very little power so it can be easily powered by a battery. The microprocessor and digital interfaces of the ADC can also add noise to the sensitive EEG inputs.
And why are you so afraid of analog circuitry? I find if hilarious that you consider an 8-pin voltage to frequency converter with a few resistors and capacitors more complicated than an analog to digital converter, high order anti-aliasing filters, microprocessors, crystals, serial interfaces and burning ROMs. There is no demodulation circuit since it's done in software. I consider trading a few MIPS from CPU for a simpler circuit a good trade.
There are also other potential advantages for this scheme. For example, if you want to record nighttime EEG activity you can transmit the FM signal from your bed to the PC through an off-the-shelf short range stereo audio transmitter. The two channels are indeed a limitation but this is only a simple circuit that beginners can build with a mimimal chance of frying their brains in the process.
BTW, I wrote the Python frequency demodulation code for this project.
One point that space elevator advocates always seem to conveniently forget is that carbon nanotube composites will benefit competing technologies, as well.
For example, they would make it much easier to achieve the tankage mass ratios required for a single stage to orbit reusable launch vehicle. Such vehicles are believed to be marginally possible today but CNT composites could easily make them competitive with elevators.
Jordin Kare of LLNL has a nice presentation comparing the costs of space elevators to other potential technologies. The bottom line is that the elevator is not necessarily cheaper and has much larger up-front costs before the first payload goes up.
Using space elevators as a justification for investments in CNT composite technology is propaganda.
You can only hear pure sinusoidal tones up to about 20 kHz but it has been shown that in complex wideband sounds such as percussion the effect of frequencies over 30kHz is still noticable.
Deducting from sinewaves to arbitrary waveforms is not valid unless you are talking about linear systems. The ear is not linear.
Most people don't have equipment that can faithfully render even the quality of a standard CD but the frequency range of these new formats is not totally useless.
The PaX patch effectively implements this feature on older x86 processors that don't have hardware NX support. It takes advantage of the fact that data and code have separate page table caches.
It comes with a pretty high performance overhead, though. A page fault will occur for any miss of the TLB cache while normally they are just loaded from the page table in main memory.
Henry is bright I agree, but he sometimes gets away with some howlers because the other posters are either a) equally lacking in knowledge or b) other posters are unwilling to publically 'call him out'. (I'm not in the b) category myself when his howler is in an area where I'm not in the a) group.)
Other posters unwilling to publically 'call him out'? Far from it. Everyone is dying to get an "I corrected Henry" virtual T-shirt!
Hey, Henry grudingly admitted that I'm eligible for one...
There are no posts of sci.space.* by Burt Rutan in recent years (or anyone else of scaled composites ). He is pretty tight-lipped, especially when compared to Carmack.
You will find, however, many informative posts by the one and only Henry Spencer, author of The Ten Commandments for C Programmers and possibly the most knowledgeable person in the world about the history of the U.S. space program.
There exists a shape which can move supersonically without generating a shockwave. On the outside it is a smooth cylinder. Internally it is equipped with a carefully shaped intake coupled to an expansion nozzle that compresses the air as it passes through and expands it back to its original pressure without generating a discontinuity in pressue (i.e. a shockwave).
A sniper bullet was developed (in the 60s, IIRC) that uses this shape. The idea was to give the sniper a second chance if the first bullet misses. The supersonic shock of the passing bullet is generally what alerts the target. The muzzle noise is distant and can be silenced quite effectively.
The only problem with this shape is that it is symmetrical and therefore cannot produce any net lift. This would seem to make it impossible to build an airplane using this concept. In fact, it only means that a shock-free unpowered hypersonic glider is impossible. A powered airplane could theoretically use the engine's energy to offset the required asymmetry and have thrust, lift, supersonic motion and no shockwave all without violating the laws of aerodynamics. Actually designing such an aircraft is still a monumental task and there is no guarantee that a practical solution can be found - but in principle it should be possible.
Note that the methods described in the article are supposed to soften the shockwave as it propagates away from a conventionally-shaped aircraft while this is about odd shapes for canceling it at the source.
Microsoft does not use a lookup table. It interleaves the long filename into the directory as a series of "invalid" directory entries that are ignored by older DOS versions. There is no "actual" short filename in the Microsoft implementation either: the long filename directory entry points directly to the first cluster without lookup via the short filename. So this patent does not qualify as prior art.
Patents are not about ideas but about reduction to practice.
Slashdot Mirror
That quote is definitely from the roadrunner.
Some copies of the C64 version of the Infocom game had an opening picture featuring the green eyeless alien and a thumb. It was displayed while the game loaded and wasn't part of the original game. It was added to an illegally distributed copy.
Does anyone here remember this picture? Anyone has a copy that can be run on an emulator? I drew this picture and I'd love to see it again...
why? sms's can be sent easily to other networks in properly built cellular network systems
The OP was talking about social networks, not cellular networks. Perhaps this fact would be more obvious if if he had spelled "cliques" correctly (not "clicks").
The thing is, people like you [...] are a big part of the reason health care in the U.S. is both expensive and substandard. Most of the time, if you feel sick, you do -not- need to see a doctor.
True, MOST of the time. But a good family doctor is often the one who diagnoses serious illnesses early, leading to much better chances of recovery. Early diagnosis is much cheaper, too. So these visits are not quite useless.
It has to be a really good doctor, though, to pick up the small clues and not become burned out by the mass of trivial complaints. How many of them are really good? It's the specialists who get the "glory".
They could have gone the simpler and more direct route of just building a power plant that used the difference in tempersture between the cold bottom water and the top water to pump up that water and generate electricity.
Simpler? More direct? Let's compare them:
Alternative 1: Want airconditioning? Just use the cold water to do the cooling.
Alternative 2: Use the temperature gradient in the lake to produce electricity and use this electricity to run the air conditioning.
Ahem.
Such plants have been proven to work with ocean water
Proven to work, yes. But not economically. It's very difficult to produce electricity from relatively small temperature gradients and the efficiency is very low. Much higher gradients are available as waste heat from industrial sources and even they are barely practical for producing electricity.
Science fiction authors seem to like this idea, though. Power generation from ocean thermal gradients is featured is many SF works. Don't confuse this with practical and available technology.
These launchers do fail occasionally, just like any other launcher in the business. In fact, this specific type of launcher has failed on the previous attempt to launch a solar sail by the same group!
...it did fail us on July 20 when the 3rd stage motors failed to provide the necessary velocity change and the rocket computer shut overrode the command to separate the spacecraft from the booster...
Yes, it will most likely be visible. You can see satellites every evening. The sail is bigger than the solar panels of most satellites.
They will just launch another investigation into how this procedure was come up with to glue these tiles on.
Somehow I find it hard to accept any "insights" from someone who can't tell the difference between the gluing of heat-resistant tiles to the orbiter and the application of cryogenic foam insulation to the external tank.
Great idea. The kids will probably think it's a cool name that has something to do with Quidditch and Harry Potter.
They just want to appear as a real competitor to give their online casino sponsor their money's worth in attention. I bet they'll find some excuse not to fly.
It will take a new generation accustomed to living its life through handheld electronics and without the level of comfort with heavy paper books that we have.
Our old generation got used to cellular phones pretty quickly, didn't they?
When the price, size, user interface, availability and other factors are right you'd be surprised as how quickly we "old folks" get used to things that seemed like science fiction just a few years earlier.
The only problem with e-books is that nobody got it right, yet.
EEG signals aren't exactly a direct neural interface. It's more like listening outside a room with thousands of people talking. You can't tell what they are talking about but the tone of the drone can tell you something about the general mood in the room.
You don't need to be a genius, just a person with a healthy sense of curiosity.
They are totally useless for exploring the brain's functions
Perhaps you won't be doing cutting edge neurology research with this kind of EEG interface to your computer but it's far from useless. Basic analysis of the spectrum of the signal is not so hard. The dominant frequencies correlate to states of consciousness such as relaxation or concentration.
It's fun. It's fascinating to watch your own brain in action. It can even be potentially useful as a biofeedback tool.
The reason for using frequency modulation is not just for bypassing the highpass filter on sound cards.
You wouldn't connect anything attached to mains power to your head with low impedance electrodes, would you? Do you trust the USB port of your motherboard with your life?
You need isolation. This is usually achieved with an optocoupler. An optocoupler is not so good at passing analog signals but passing a simple on/off FM signal through it is trivial. Isolating a serial digital signal is equally easy but then you need to find some way to power the ADC and microprocessor on the other side of the coupler with an isolated power supply. The voltage-to-frequency converter takes very little power so it can be easily powered by a battery. The microprocessor and digital interfaces of the ADC can also add noise to the sensitive EEG inputs.
And why are you so afraid of analog circuitry? I find if hilarious that you consider an 8-pin voltage to frequency converter with a few resistors and capacitors more complicated than an analog to digital converter, high order anti-aliasing filters, microprocessors, crystals, serial interfaces and burning ROMs. There is no demodulation circuit since it's done in software. I consider trading a few MIPS from CPU for a simpler circuit a good trade.
There are also other potential advantages for this scheme. For example, if you want to record nighttime EEG activity you can transmit the FM signal from your bed to the PC through an off-the-shelf short range stereo audio transmitter. The two channels are indeed a limitation but this is only a simple circuit that beginners can build with a mimimal chance of frying their brains in the process.
BTW, I wrote the Python frequency demodulation code for this project.
One point that space elevator advocates always seem to conveniently forget is that carbon nanotube composites will benefit competing technologies, as well.
For example, they would make it much easier to achieve the tankage mass ratios required for a single stage to orbit reusable launch vehicle. Such vehicles are believed to be marginally possible today but CNT composites could easily make them competitive with elevators.
Jordin Kare of LLNL has a nice presentation comparing the costs of space elevators to other potential technologies. The bottom line is that the elevator is not necessarily cheaper and has much larger up-front costs before the first payload goes up.
Using space elevators as a justification for investments in CNT composite technology is propaganda.
Of course, without all of NASA's developments and the tons of spent by the government in the past, would this private venture even be possible?
Of course, but everything space-related and government-funded that was really needed for this flight was learned over 40 years ago.
Marsiform Jupiter? Joviform Saturn?
You can only hear pure sinusoidal tones up to about 20 kHz but it has been shown that in complex wideband sounds such as percussion the effect of frequencies over 30kHz is still noticable.
Deducting from sinewaves to arbitrary waveforms is not valid unless you are talking about linear systems. The ear is not linear.
Most people don't have equipment that can faithfully render even the quality of a standard CD but the frequency range of these new formats is not totally useless.
The PaX patch effectively implements this feature on older x86 processors that don't have hardware NX support. It takes advantage of the fact that data and code have separate page table caches.
It comes with a pretty high performance overhead, though. A page fault will occur for any miss of the TLB cache while normally they are just loaded from the page table in main memory.
Vogons aren't funny because they are grotesque green aliens, they are funny because they are the local council town planning department in space
This phenomenon is perfectly familiar to people all around the world. Any Britishisms in HHG are not essential to its funnyness.
Henry is bright I agree, but he sometimes gets away with some howlers because the other posters are either a) equally lacking in knowledge or b) other posters are unwilling to publically 'call him out'. (I'm not in the b) category myself when his howler is in an area where I'm not in the a) group.)
Other posters unwilling to publically 'call him out'? Far from it. Everyone is dying to get an "I corrected Henry" virtual T-shirt!
Hey, Henry grudingly admitted that I'm eligible for one...
CoLinux (the "Israel" link in the article) is for running Linux under Windows - not the other way around.
There are no posts of sci.space.* by Burt Rutan in recent years (or anyone else of scaled composites ). He is pretty tight-lipped, especially when compared to Carmack.
You will find, however, many informative posts by the one and only Henry Spencer, author of The Ten Commandments for C Programmers and possibly the most knowledgeable person in the world about the history of the U.S. space program.
U.S. Patent 5,934,607 - Shock suppression supersonic aircraft
There exists a shape which can move supersonically without generating a shockwave. On the outside it is a smooth cylinder. Internally it is equipped with a carefully shaped intake coupled to an expansion nozzle that compresses the air as it passes through and expands it back to its original pressure without generating a discontinuity in pressue (i.e. a shockwave).
A sniper bullet was developed (in the 60s, IIRC) that uses this shape. The idea was to give the sniper a second chance if the first bullet misses. The supersonic shock of the passing bullet is generally what alerts the target. The muzzle noise is distant and can be silenced quite effectively.
The only problem with this shape is that it is symmetrical and therefore cannot produce any net lift. This would seem to make it impossible to build an airplane using this concept. In fact, it only means that a shock-free unpowered hypersonic glider is impossible. A powered airplane could theoretically use the engine's energy to offset the required asymmetry and have thrust, lift, supersonic motion and no shockwave all without violating the laws of aerodynamics. Actually designing such an aircraft is still a monumental task and there is no guarantee that a practical solution can be found - but in principle it should be possible.
Note that the methods described in the article are supposed to soften the shockwave as it propagates away from a conventionally-shaped aircraft while this is about odd shapes for canceling it at the source.
See this discussion for more details.
Microsoft does not use a lookup table. It interleaves the long filename into the directory as a series of "invalid" directory entries that are ignored by older DOS versions. There is no "actual" short filename in the Microsoft implementation either: the long filename directory entry points directly to the first cluster without lookup via the short filename. So this patent does not qualify as prior art.
Patents are not about ideas but about reduction to practice.