That's not... entirely... accurate. Specifically, the US government has placed purchase orders for airplanes from Boeing. This is somewhat different from the welfare that Airbus has received in the form of 'no pay back' grants with no expectation that they provide anything in return except 'jobs'.
There's some bad science in the post, especially the comment about the wave being 'still' that high. Most tsunamis are very small out in the ocean, most less then a few centimeters tall.
They don't get big until they approach the shore and the depth gets shallow.
The small waves, btw, travel around the speed of a jetliner, hence the lack of warning.
I ran Giant anti-spyware a few weeks ago on a system I had just used Ad-Aware and Spybot on, and it found more stuff. Real stuff too, not just cookies from doubleclick. The system was really deeply infested, and Giant got lots of stuff the others didn't.
Have you tried it? Or was your generalization based on assumption?
I have a modest proposal that should help increase the effectiveness of wind power.
The current primary obstacle is that there are many days when the weather is calm and there is less wind. My suggestion is, on those days simply CREATE the wind.
First, it is known that as heat rises, it generates a low pressure area that cool air must fill. This can be demonstrated by noticing how some dust and smoke is pulled into a campfire at the base.
Second, our nation is full of unwanted trash storage sites that consume vast acreage and are generally unpleasant to be near.
My suggestion: If we were to light the various garbage dumps on fire on those inconveniently calm days, the massive flames would generate an equally massive low pressure area. As the flames climbed hundreds of feet into the air, the temporary vacuum would be filled by surrounding air. The fires would grow in size quickly, and soon air from across the county would be moving inwards towards the fire to help oxidize this high temperature reaction.
As the air rushes to fill the spaces, the thousands of still windmills across the cities would begin to spin again, providing a continued source of pollution free wind power.
As an added bonus, each dump would eventually be consumed and could be used to build schools, hospitals, and baby milk factories.
It's a win win situation, both for a green future AND for getting rid of trash!
If you were a sixth century Scandinavian warrior out to kill a Grendel, and providence provided you with one of these clusters, what would you call it?
When they argue that the price of the repair mission is almost that of a replacement telescope, implicent in the assumption is "If we don't do this repair mission, then we can spend the money on a replacement".
The current state of the scope is that there is NO money for new telescopes other then the Webb telescope, but it's a radio scope and not an optical one (even though it's being sold as a Hubble replacement).
Either the money is spent on repairing the Hubble or.... it gets spent on paying interest on the national debt, stays in general fund, etc etc etc.
Pick your battles. Either the money goes to astronomy in the form of repair, or it goes where all the rest of the money goes.
It's unlikely you'd use lasers for wide scale signal distribution. A laser must be aimed, and to provide a signal to a thousand receivers you would need to fire a thousand beams, or have some intricate device that actively retargets thousands of times per second, squirting packets off to each receiver. Moving parts, complicated, no clear advantage.
Lasers for interplanetary communication is another thing. It's one sender to one receiver, and then you can go radio for inside planetary systems. Eg, you could set up a Mars Relay Station that takes low power local radio transmissions and beams the info back to Earth via laser, and vice versa. You get the advantage of cheap, small radio technology plus the range and bandwidth of laser.
It can be hooked to servos and automatically track objects, plus the CMUcam2 can control multiple servos, so you could have it be a sentry without having to do any wacky wiring or microprocessing.
It's just not economical. There are plenty of virus writers already out there, because it's just too easy and there are so many computers, it happens. If an antivirus company was discovered to have done this even ONCE, then their entire business would be destroyed instantly.
Something that I would find much more useful is a button that cycles through all the 'Closed Captioning' activation codes.
So many TVs in public have the volume low (which is good) but have closed captioning turned off (which is bad). There's no way to actually get coherent information from most programming this way. If you're in a loud bar or restaurant, having the volume up would be intrusive for those who choose not to watch TV. But if you activate the closed captioning, then anyone who chooses to watch will at least be able to understand what they're seeing instead of just watching the 'pretty pictures'.
I'm reminded of the slashdot poster who, on the day the sample return capsule crashed without deploying a parachute, turned on the TV with the sound off and the saw what appeared to be a flying saucer half buried in the desert with the words 'BREAKING NEWS' flashing across the bottom.
I would like to award you extra points for using 'quality' and 'FM' in the same sentence. Your contribution to humor has been duly noted.
FM is a tremendously degraded medium for audio. Saying you have a 'high-end dedicated tuner' is akin to bragging about how you filled your Geo Metro with super unleaded.
I look forward to reading the released documents. I believe a 'Sargeant Pepper' may be the foreign national in question, and I think it's high time he produce answers.
Put a liquid crystal display coating over the windshield that can selectively darken specific parts of it. Have a sensor outside the car facing forward that notes any super bright light sources like the sun or headlights at night. It also tracks where the face of the driver is and, if it determines a glare situation is occurring, does the geometry to find out exactly what part of the windshield is between their head and the light source and applies a tint at that one place. The person could still see that the light source was present, but it wouldn't blind them.
Try driving west in the evening as the sun is setting, and something like this starts to look pretty good.
The 'explosive bolts' mention don't actually explode. The correct name is 'frangible bolt'. A small charge goes off inside it and breaks down the structure so it seperates cleanly. 'Explosive bolt' suggests that it goes off like a firecracker, but shooting shrapnel around inside a million pounds of cryogenic fuel and delicate machinery would be unwise.
Also, in response to the post that asked why there were so many problems w/ spaceflight, there's one thing the responders failed to mention: assembly line quality.
If you build 30 soyuz capsules over a 30 year period, each one is still very much like a craftsman assembled item. If, on the other hand, you build 100 devices of similar complexity in a year, then you can have real assembly lines with better inherent quality. The defects/flight and cost would drop dramatically if there were more spacecraft being built. Check the quality of the pre-Ford cars against the Model T, and the difference is immediately apparent.
Slashdot Mirror
If by 'emotional response' you mean 'consumers don't want to go completely bankrupt by purchasing a TV', then yes.
The MUCH lower cost of tube based TVs is probably a bigger driver of the current market.
That's not... entirely... accurate. Specifically, the US government has placed purchase orders for airplanes from Boeing. This is somewhat different from the welfare that Airbus has received in the form of 'no pay back' grants with no expectation that they provide anything in return except 'jobs'.
You're absolutely right, I should have said 'specifically'. The rest of the post was totally fine, and I apologize for the inference.
There's some bad science in the post, especially the comment about the wave being 'still' that high. Most tsunamis are very small out in the ocean, most less then a few centimeters tall.
They don't get big until they approach the shore and the depth gets shallow.
The small waves, btw, travel around the speed of a jetliner, hence the lack of warning.
Because a .COM is more likely to be a company, and companies have lawyers.
.NET, on the other hand, is more likely to be too cheap to hire lawyers, because we're more likely to be unrepentant network laying unix hippies.
A
I ran Giant anti-spyware a few weeks ago on a system I had just used Ad-Aware and Spybot on, and it found more stuff. Real stuff too, not just cookies from doubleclick. The system was really deeply infested, and Giant got lots of stuff the others didn't.
Have you tried it? Or was your generalization based on assumption?
The first big product using this technology will be a high end video card with some embedded LEDs for great justice.
It will be targetted at case modders, but will appeal to everyone because it looks so damn sexy.
I have a modest proposal that should help increase the effectiveness of wind power.
The current primary obstacle is that there are many days when the weather is calm and there is less wind. My suggestion is, on those days simply CREATE the wind.
First, it is known that as heat rises, it generates a low pressure area that cool air must fill. This can be demonstrated by noticing how some dust and smoke is pulled into a campfire at the base.
Second, our nation is full of unwanted trash storage sites that consume vast acreage and are generally unpleasant to be near.
My suggestion: If we were to light the various garbage dumps on fire on those inconveniently calm days, the massive flames would generate an equally massive low pressure area. As the flames climbed hundreds of feet into the air, the temporary vacuum would be filled by surrounding air. The fires would grow in size quickly, and soon air from across the county would be moving inwards towards the fire to help oxidize this high temperature reaction.
As the air rushes to fill the spaces, the thousands of still windmills across the cities would begin to spin again, providing a continued source of pollution free wind power.
As an added bonus, each dump would eventually be consumed and could be used to build schools, hospitals, and baby milk factories.
It's a win win situation, both for a green future AND for getting rid of trash!
If you were a sixth century Scandinavian warrior out to kill a Grendel, and providence provided you with one of these clusters, what would you call it?
>Now I've got the theme song to Excite Bike stuck in my head.
> Do do do dodo doo. Do do do dodo doo. doopydoopydoopy do do dodo, dodo do do dodo.
Great, now the RIAA is gonna totally come down on your ass for illegally reproducing the song.
When they argue that the price of the repair mission is almost that of a replacement telescope, implicent in the assumption is "If we don't do this repair mission, then we can spend the money on a replacement".
The current state of the scope is that there is NO money for new telescopes other then the Webb telescope, but it's a radio scope and not an optical one (even though it's being sold as a Hubble replacement).
Either the money is spent on repairing the Hubble or.... it gets spent on paying interest on the national debt, stays in general fund, etc etc etc.
Pick your battles. Either the money goes to astronomy in the form of repair, or it goes where all the rest of the money goes.
...and this time the lamb had a little Mary.
Richard,
You can't just get back at me by trying to get the show cancelled. Like I said at the office yesterday, I'm flattered, but you're really not my type.
Coming online and talking smack about the show I love just isn't the right way to handle this.
Can't we be friends again?
Love,
CB
It's unlikely you'd use lasers for wide scale signal distribution. A laser must be aimed, and to provide a signal to a thousand receivers you would need to fire a thousand beams, or have some intricate device that actively retargets thousands of times per second, squirting packets off to each receiver. Moving parts, complicated, no clear advantage.
Lasers for interplanetary communication is another thing. It's one sender to one receiver, and then you can go radio for inside planetary systems. Eg, you could set up a Mars Relay Station that takes low power local radio transmissions and beams the info back to Earth via laser, and vice versa. You get the advantage of cheap, small radio technology plus the range and bandwidth of laser.
Check out the CMUCAM: CMUcam vision sensors.
It can be hooked to servos and automatically track objects, plus the CMUcam2 can control multiple servos, so you could have it be a sentry without having to do any wacky wiring or microprocessing.
I expected the story to read "But when Flash Gordon approaches, will the moon people fight back with their electro-guns? Watch next week to find out!"
You mistyped 'age-old DUMB question'.
It's just not economical. There are plenty of virus writers already out there, because it's just too easy and there are so many computers, it happens. If an antivirus company was discovered to have done this even ONCE, then their entire business would be destroyed instantly.
Are you getting enough oxygen?
> Fry's has to pay (...) to have enough staff to answer my questions, etc.
Actually, with Fry's, the customer pays for that. In spades.
Have you ever asked a Fry's employee for help?
Something that I would find much more useful is a button that cycles through all the 'Closed Captioning' activation codes.
So many TVs in public have the volume low (which is good) but have closed captioning turned off (which is bad). There's no way to actually get coherent information from most programming this way. If you're in a loud bar or restaurant, having the volume up would be intrusive for those who choose not to watch TV. But if you activate the closed captioning, then anyone who chooses to watch will at least be able to understand what they're seeing instead of just watching the 'pretty pictures'.
I'm reminded of the slashdot poster who, on the day the sample return capsule crashed without deploying a parachute, turned on the TV with the sound off and the saw what appeared to be a flying saucer half buried in the desert with the words 'BREAKING NEWS' flashing across the bottom.
Of interest... roughly the same price as it sold for new (adjusted for inflation).
I would like to award you extra points for using 'quality' and 'FM' in the same sentence. Your contribution to humor has been duly noted.
FM is a tremendously degraded medium for audio. Saying you have a 'high-end dedicated tuner' is akin to bragging about how you filled your Geo Metro with super unleaded.
I look forward to reading the released documents. I believe a 'Sargeant Pepper' may be the foreign national in question, and I think it's high time he produce answers.
Actually, that's not entirely accurate. Please see this archive of the earliest RadioShark page, with the price listed:
r if fintechnology.com/products/radioshark/
http://web.archive.org/web/20040110095549/www.g
Here's an idea I had a couple years ago:
Put a liquid crystal display coating over the windshield that can selectively darken specific parts of it. Have a sensor outside the car facing forward that notes any super bright light sources like the sun or headlights at night. It also tracks where the face of the driver is and, if it determines a glare situation is occurring, does the geometry to find out exactly what part of the windshield is between their head and the light source and applies a tint at that one place. The person could still see that the light source was present, but it wouldn't blind them.
Try driving west in the evening as the sun is setting, and something like this starts to look pretty good.
The 'explosive bolts' mention don't actually explode. The correct name is 'frangible bolt'. A small charge goes off inside it and breaks down the structure so it seperates cleanly. 'Explosive bolt' suggests that it goes off like a firecracker, but shooting shrapnel around inside a million pounds of cryogenic fuel and delicate machinery would be unwise.
Also, in response to the post that asked why there were so many problems w/ spaceflight, there's one thing the responders failed to mention: assembly line quality.
If you build 30 soyuz capsules over a 30 year period, each one is still very much like a craftsman assembled item. If, on the other hand, you build 100 devices of similar complexity in a year, then you can have real assembly lines with better inherent quality. The defects/flight and cost would drop dramatically if there were more spacecraft being built. Check the quality of the pre-Ford cars against the Model T, and the difference is immediately apparent.