The RIAA's royalty database uses a fantastically advanced quantum storage technique. The whole thing fits in a cryogenic cell the size of a medicine pill bottle.
Unfortunately, the uncertainly principle kicks in when you take a close look . . .
If Clippy had been allowed to hang around in Windows he would at least been kept off the streets.
In related news, the alternate Clippy, the advice dog, lost his job as a neuticles model and was sold to a company that tests military grade blood-clotting bandages. He's shot in the abdomen three days a week so trainees can learn how to apply the dressings. And all because you didn't want a friendly little animated help-mate watching after you.
The Orz were masterpieces of mindf**k. Happy chirping little guys who were actually the manifestations of some hideous Lovecraftian thing from *below*.
After your race has risen from the primordial slime, competed with other critters, evolved to sapience, built cities, and achieved spaceflight and reached the center of the galaxy, you can submit proof of age and $45 to receive a key to open up a new level . . .
SimGalaxy Interspecies Brothel
Just remember . . . one race's intimate lubricant could be another's caustic death sauce.
A maglev would be nice, but the kind of big money projects that intrigue me are semi-public works projects to make the country more disaster proof and help it adapt to global warming.
Like:
Water pipelines and catch basins to help the West deal with mountain snowpack that is starting to melt too early. Part of the deal: Subsidize cisterns for new homes.
A survivable, redundant national energy grid.
Equip cities with a hardened emergency energy and communication infrastructure to keep traffic signals, police stations, hospitals, and the like going during a crisis.
Don't go abusing your body assuming you'll be able to get a new heart any time soon.
Of course, as late as the mid 1950s reputable engineers scoffed at the ideas of flights to the moon. This could come together faster than you can imagine.
In A Gift from Earth, a colony world uses organ harvesting to punish criminals and dissidents, and rewards loyalty to the regime with spare parts.
In the course of the novel, a slower-than-light starship arrives with a how-to guide for a brand-new technology: Custom-grown organs. The protagonist sees grown-from-seed organs developing in a tank, and assumes that they are from children! Actually, they spell the end of the local tyranny.
That was in 1968, just a year or two after the first "Gil the Arm" story.
You could have a whole industry of finger-pointers and fact checkers looking into the effectiveness of offset claims.
The example of green server farms doesn't strike me as ludicrous or faddish. It's really easy to measure things like power consumption.
Siting would in part determine where the power is coming from. You could also do cool things like setting up in a northern state that gets lots of snow, and use ice ponds to assist the air conditioning.
It's conceivable that big farms could invest in local alternative energy plants as a way of stabilizing long-term costs and priority during shortages.
You could back up wind power with an investment in "methane farming" at a local landfill. Methane could be stored and "burned" in a fuel cell stack when the grid or wind farm can't supply cheap and/or "green" juice.
It's a popular concept in some circles: Use affordable high-tech devices to let folks in the developing world have a better life.
An example are cell phones. They've brought connectivity to folks in even isolated villages who could not dream of getting a land line.
Or the "life straw," a simple, cheap, but high-tech gadget that filters the filth and germs from streams. It's literally a straw.
Or a simple solar-charged LED light. Hang it outside your hut in the day, bring it in at night so the kids can study or mom can make extra money doing piecework.
A sturdy, self-contained solar electrical generator could act as an adjunct for a decentralized high-tech low-budget infrastructure. You'd use it to charge cell phones, XO Laptops (and their adult equivalent), and so on.
It's hinted at in the story, but the reason the probe is taking its sweet time to actually achieve an orbit is Mercury's high orbital velocity.
It's pretty easy to get into an elliptical orbit which stretches from Earth's orbit around the Sun to Mercury's orbit around the sun. But getting into a circular orbit means matching Mercury's velocity, and doing so in a way that lets a "burn" be made to actually enter into an orbit around the planet. As I recall, you need a total velocity change of 40 kps to get into orbit around Mercury. That more than twice the change required to get into an orbit around Mars.
It's pretty impressive that NASA figured out a way to do this with a gravity assist. A proposed European probe would have used an ion rocket to make the velocity change.
Some comics work just fine on a screen. They might be made for the screen, or be print comics that happen to have the layout and lines and style that remain readable on a screen.
I read PBF online, but will probably buy multiple copies of the book to use as gifts.
Some comix I don't think cut it on screen. Some of Chris Ware's head-thumpers like the "Acme Novelty Company" really belong on a printed page.
The one with no face and a chainsaw who chases me down the hall of my elementary school after I run out of Mrs. Green's classroom wearing only Wonder Woman Underoos and bunny slippers.
It will have a simple title, like Vein, and be about a heroic surgeon who unearths the sinister truth behind a revolutionary new artificial blood vessel replacement technology, and after a long build up in which seemingly fully recovered trauma patients turn into super-powered . . .
. . . well, I'd write more, but there's a screenwriters strike on, and I don't want to come across as a scab.
Actually, he's split himself into two people, each of which will be able to devote his full creative and directorial energies to one of the Hobbit films.
I joined the EFF as soon as memberships were offered. (One of the key events that spurred the founding of the organization was the Secret Service raid on my publisher, Steve Jackson Games.) My original membership card is #127.
Through the years I've let the membership lapse now and then. For a while, the EFF's fights included marginal things like pushing ISDN connections. Hard to get excited about.
But now . . . they have a real fight. I just rejoined at the $100.00 level.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm hoping Gary's version of the afterlife includes orc-stomping and eldritch wizardry and chances to try out exotic pole arms.
RTFA. The crap up front is just a cover. This is in fact a sinister tutoring center.
The RIAA's royalty database uses a fantastically advanced quantum storage technique. The whole thing fits in a cryogenic cell the size of a medicine pill bottle.
Unfortunately, the uncertainly principle kicks in when you take a close look . . .
If Clippy had been allowed to hang around in Windows he would at least been kept off the streets.
In related news, the alternate Clippy, the advice dog, lost his job as a neuticles model and was sold to a company that tests military grade blood-clotting bandages. He's shot in the abdomen three days a week so trainees can learn how to apply the dressings. And all because you didn't want a friendly little animated help-mate watching after you.
You bastards.
The Orz were masterpieces of mindf**k. Happy chirping little guys who were actually the manifestations of some hideous Lovecraftian thing from *below*.
After your race has risen from the primordial slime, competed with other critters, evolved to sapience, built cities, and achieved spaceflight and reached the center of the galaxy, you can submit proof of age and $45 to receive a key to open up a new level . . .
SimGalaxy Interspecies Brothel
Just remember . . . one race's intimate lubricant could be another's caustic death sauce.
A maglev would be nice, but the kind of big money projects that intrigue me are semi-public works projects to make the country more disaster proof and help it adapt to global warming.
Like:
Water pipelines and catch basins to help the West deal with mountain snowpack that is starting to melt too early. Part of the deal: Subsidize cisterns for new homes.
A survivable, redundant national energy grid.
Equip cities with a hardened emergency energy and communication infrastructure to keep traffic signals, police stations, hospitals, and the like going during a crisis.
It will help with their plan to wire all of our houses with HiDef telescreens.
(Crap, I've got to stop giving them ideas.)
If that strategy works, you're talking about bankrupting Taco Bell and the death of the Republican party.
This creepy thing is most likely a freakishly deformed puppy, but I'm sure it will be good for some tabloid news stories.
Don't go abusing your body assuming you'll be able to get a new heart any time soon.
Of course, as late as the mid 1950s reputable engineers scoffed at the ideas of flights to the moon. This could come together faster than you can imagine.
In A Gift from Earth, a colony world uses organ harvesting to punish criminals and dissidents, and rewards loyalty to the regime with spare parts.
In the course of the novel, a slower-than-light starship arrives with a how-to guide for a brand-new technology: Custom-grown organs. The protagonist sees grown-from-seed organs developing in a tank, and assumes that they are from children! Actually, they spell the end of the local tyranny.
That was in 1968, just a year or two after the first "Gil the Arm" story.
. . . the giant glowing thing in the sky.
The announced final price for the XO Laptop is $188.
If the same inflation figure is used, the $75 will rise to $141.
Which is still pretty amazing.
You could have a whole industry of finger-pointers and fact checkers looking into the effectiveness of offset claims.
The example of green server farms doesn't strike me as ludicrous or faddish. It's really easy to measure things like power consumption.
Siting would in part determine where the power is coming from. You could also do cool things like setting up in a northern state that gets lots of snow, and use ice ponds to assist the air conditioning.
It's conceivable that big farms could invest in local alternative energy plants as a way of stabilizing long-term costs and priority during shortages.
You could back up wind power with an investment in "methane farming" at a local landfill. Methane could be stored and "burned" in a fuel cell stack when the grid or wind farm can't supply cheap and/or "green" juice.
It's a popular concept in some circles: Use affordable high-tech devices to let folks in the developing world have a better life.
An example are cell phones. They've brought connectivity to folks in even isolated villages who could not dream of getting a land line.
Or the "life straw," a simple, cheap, but high-tech gadget that filters the filth and germs from streams. It's literally a straw.
Or a simple solar-charged LED light. Hang it outside your hut in the day, bring it in at night so the kids can study or mom can make extra money doing piecework.
A sturdy, self-contained solar electrical generator could act as an adjunct for a decentralized high-tech low-budget infrastructure. You'd use it to charge cell phones, XO Laptops (and their adult equivalent), and so on.
It's hinted at in the story, but the reason the probe is taking its sweet time to actually achieve an orbit is Mercury's high orbital velocity.
It's pretty easy to get into an elliptical orbit which stretches from Earth's orbit around the Sun to Mercury's orbit around the sun. But getting into a circular orbit means matching Mercury's velocity, and doing so in a way that lets a "burn" be made to actually enter into an orbit around the planet. As I recall, you need a total velocity change of 40 kps to get into orbit around Mercury. That more than twice the change required to get into an orbit around Mars.
It's pretty impressive that NASA figured out a way to do this with a gravity assist. A proposed European probe would have used an ion rocket to make the velocity change.
Some comics work just fine on a screen. They might be made for the screen, or be print comics that happen to have the layout and lines and style that remain readable on a screen.
I read PBF online, but will probably buy multiple copies of the book to use as gifts.
Some comix I don't think cut it on screen. Some of Chris Ware's head-thumpers like the "Acme Novelty Company" really belong on a printed page.
Read the F'ing EULA my friend.
And if you don't stop fast-forwarding through those Axe commercials we're going to deactivate your reproductive module.
The one with no face and a chainsaw who chases me down the hall of my elementary school after I run out of Mrs. Green's classroom wearing only Wonder Woman Underoos and bunny slippers.
. . . "wanking" hours?
Thanks, I'll be here all week, try the hummous infused polenta medallions.
. . . FlameCoyote
It will have a simple title, like Vein , and be about a heroic surgeon who unearths the sinister truth behind a revolutionary new artificial blood vessel replacement technology, and after a long build up in which seemingly fully recovered trauma patients turn into super-powered . . .
. . . well, I'd write more, but there's a screenwriters strike on, and I don't want to come across as a scab.
Actually, he's split himself into two people, each of which will be able to devote his full creative and directorial energies to one of the Hobbit films.
I joined the EFF as soon as memberships were offered. (One of the key events that spurred the founding of the organization was the Secret Service raid on my publisher, Steve Jackson Games.) My original membership card is #127.
Through the years I've let the membership lapse now and then. For a while, the EFF's fights included marginal things like pushing ISDN connections. Hard to get excited about.
But now . . . they have a real fight. I just rejoined at the $100.00 level.