I have for some time wanted to write a story including a "car" powered by a V-8 engine which is organic above the crankshaft. I have done my little engineering studies of nutrient bath and circulatory systems, exhaust issues (I mean this thing shits all over the road) and such... I have so far envisioned genetically tuned muscles, grown in a vat (or what-have-you), but the synthetic muscles are interesting. The problem is that I don't have a story there, just a neato idea. Not even characters. That doesn't stop many SF writers, unfortunately.
Normally, I agree with anybody who says that a drug problem is the fault of the drug user and nobody else. After all, nobody forced the user to start using drugs, right?
In the post above, the poster actually *was* forced to start using drugs, and now has a drug problem.
Save your moral clarity for a problem you understand.
Lapintosh might have worked for the PB 100. The concept is a little old now.
I don't care much for "MacBook" myself, although I hope the early posters are right, and it builds some "Scottish Laptop" vibe. That will go over well with some of their core constituents. Sigh. For that matter so would, say, "Gemini", which also refers to the Core Duo (Sigh!). Or they could have gone a bit retro with the twin theme: ][Book = "twinbook", or Book][ = "Book Two". They could even pre-empt the Timbuktu ref with their own ads.
Apple must have cringed when they heard Intel was calling the chip "Duo" anything, with the PB 5xx series lurking back there.
Many Governments in Europe support Iran's allegedly peaceful nuclear program. It makes sense that they are warming to nuclear power. Of course, if they're not more fore-handed, they may do more than merely warm.
I will say, when you think of Open Source, you think of a certain ideology and this is in contrast to the ideology that the founders of the news site hold in many aspects. Although, in the narrow view of technology, the ideologies are consistent. Outside of technology, many/.'s will disagree with the points of view expressed on OSM or Pajamas or whatever it will be called.
Panurge: This is the second post wherein I've seen you pissing on the space program. I'm curious--is there an aspect of space science which you support? Last time, I called you an idiot, and you quite rightly called me on it. So I'm *just* asking. What would you find worth the money (and other impact) to accomplish regarding to space & science?
And for the gravity solution (in getting to Mars), you string the cargo and crew module together, and set them spinning--string in the middle, cargo on one end at one gee, crew on the other end at one gee. That is also Zubrin.
If you don't know who BOB ZUBRIN is, you know where to Gooooooooooo.
So should you embed a file within a JPEG image, for example, the casual observer would only see the image and perhaps only notice something odd due to the image's file size.
So what? I can bloat a file with no visible benefit? Been doing that for years.
Clippy: "It looks like you're trying to cram 24kb of text into a 3.2Mb.doc file. I can help!"
Okay, mod me how you will, but I couldn't help noting that Mr. Oh fuck, here comes the "teh free market!" rhetoric is apparently broadcasting from the moon. Sorry, moonbat. It had to be said. And your post was hurtin' anyway.
For those who are "not normally assertive", I recommend this highly successful three-step program. Shut up. Grow a pair. Then speak up. It worked for me! Hell, I'm the president of this club. NOTE: AC will be studiously ignored on this thread:-)
Or a terrible flaming, lidless eye...and a text-to-speech capture of the user's name, whispered quietly, menacingly...in Bill Gates' nasal, sing-song voice...cut to scene of him sitting on desk, staring into monitor with...YOUR FACE ON THE SCREEN!
That might get some people to switch.
Re:We're not going to leave the planet just yet...
on
NASA's Shuttle Plans
·
· Score: 1
[top of my head...] Apollo used O2/Kerosene for first stage (and lots of it), then O2/H2 for everything else, except the tetrazine/hydrazine for the thrusters of idiotic Tom Hanks fame (which never made it to the atmosphere). No reason we couldn't use straight O2/H2 all the way except finnickiness about explosions. But the last time a manned project blew itself up, it was related to a SRB anyway. (yes, which burned a hole in the liquid tank, ok, which is where the real trouble started--er, finished). Hardly proof against disaster. Say what you want about kerosene, but its exhaust is more like water than the methyl-ethyl-bad-shit originally wanked about. To a first approx., anyway.
And by the time you get to where it matters in (on?) Jupiter, who can tell a liquid from a solid?
Okay, thanks for the reminder about duty cycle, etc... But still, assuming we're transmitting far more transitions/time, then is there a miniscule inductive heating effect? Granted, we're not roasting anything here, but if you vary the current (& the field) more rapidly, more frequently... what? No? nevermind...
IANA...whatever...but at what point do the little antennae heat up? Clippy: "Looks like you're trying to remove a flaming WiFi card..." Combine this with a cantenna, and roast pigeons as they fly by.
Re:We're not going to leave the planet just yet...
on
NASA's Shuttle Plans
·
· Score: 1
Nobody's talking about SRBs. I'm taking issue with Mr. "You're never going to leave the planet without leaving it choking in your toxic vapors" who thinks that liquid fuels don't exist. And while he may have apont about infrastructure pollution (the trucks that carry the parts, etc...), I'll wager that MORE pollution is generated by, say, the apparently massive latex dong industry than by any nation's pace program.
As for making hydrogen solid, that's easy. Put it on Jupiter:-)
Easy--DON'T.
Please don't take this personally--but I've been stewing about this for two decades. Um, anyway--since you asked... I never cared about the damned ISS, not even when it was spectacular and named Space Station Freedom. The fact is, it's not good for much of anything. About the best utility it could be to any other aspect of a space program is as a kind of lifeboat (somewhere a mission can fail to that doesn't involve re-entry), but even tat won't work. If your mission is failing, how are you going to get from your current orbit to that of the Station? Sure, maybe it will work a small percent of the time, but not enough to justify building and manning the thing! All the ISS is doing is advertising. Big Deal. We're getting much better science, much better PR, and much better astronaut survival rates from the unmanned Mars missions. When we do get around to Mars missions, they won't be benefitted in any way by a space station. But look at what the station is doing to NASA: They're actually going to axe funding for the Voyagers! This is crap! It's a pittance the Voyagers require, but right when they are crossing OUT OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM, generating a wealth of previously un-dreamed-of information, their funding has to be sacrificed to NASA's idiotic shuttle+station scheme.
We *have* reliable orbit technology. Had it since the sixties. We *have* reliable earth observation technology. Every damned agency of the Federal Gov't seems to have its own satellite.
Feh. "We need the shuttle to get back and forth to the station. We need the station in case something happens to the shuttle."
Research is just about the last refuge of justification for the station. But we know what happens in orbit (and presumably, beyond orbit, where the ISS will *NEVER GO*). Bodies degenerate. Ever-more refined programs of exercise and vitamin supplements are approaching a limit. We do not have the answer to degeneration, but when we have some plausible candidates, then we can put a man or three up in some kind of Soyuz -esque thing. But hey--thanks for responding to the post:-)
Re:We're not going to leave the planet just yet...
on
NASA's Shuttle Plans
·
· Score: 1
...The amount of shit that has to be poured into the atmosphere to get any really significant payload into orbit
Let's see... Hydrogen and Oxygen, hydrogen and Oxygen... If only we could combine those two and have it be stable. And non-polluting. Ah, well. Back to the perhapsotrons.
Idiot.
Birthday Recipes,Birthday Cake Recipes,Birthday Recipe Ideas From TheBirthday.Com
"Muhallabia ~ an Arabian dessert
Ingredients:
1/2 cup rice, picked, washed and soaked in 1/2 cup milk
5-1/2 cups milk
1/2 cup sugar
a handful of almonds, blanched*and sliced
a few drops rose water
a few pistachios. chopped
1 astronaut. dead
Directions:
Blend the rice and milk. Make it into an absolutely smooth paste. Pry the astronaut's head off with a teaspoon.
Bring the rest of the milk to boil in the large pan. Pour the ground rice and sugar into it. Drop the astronaut in. Stir continuously, on a low fire till the whole mixture thickens. Simmer for 5 minutes. Add the almonds, and rose water. Stir in gently. Pour into the glasses or bowls. Cool and chill.
Sprinkle over the chopped pistachios. Top with the little helmet. And the exotic, Arabian dessert is ready to eat.
* To blanch the almonds put them into a bowl and pour hot water over. After a few minutes the skins will slip off easily. Then slice and chop the way you like with no sweating."
...I'm surprised I haven't seen this elsewhere in the comments for the earlier stories--but does anyone else think the upcoming landing (fingers crossed!) will be the last one no matter how well it goes? Lots of people talking about if it goes poorly, but I will wager that even after a happy ending, in the attempt to chase down myriad problems to the new standard of acceptable risk, NASA will keep running up against the conceptual flaws in the Orbiter+Tank+Boosters design.
I'm not bagging on NASA--this stuff is dangerous no matter what, and they've done a yeoman's job keeping this rig upright, so to speak. But there have been some very bad priorities pushing development over there (external & internal).
Sorry, I'm tired and rambling, but I feel we may have seen the last Shuttle Launch.
...these are ancient designs which can be implemented using decades-old technology. The only interesting thing is that now NASA has killed enough people to shift the bureaucracy off its ass. We don't need the Battlestar Galactica hardware to do Apollo missions.
...God forbid your target audience (remember them? the people whom you would like to convert to Open Source, but AREN'T USING IT YET) should be able to read TFA. Ironic is your belief that only through studiously avoiding the software used by 95% (?) of the world can we hope to reach 95% of the world.
...for SIGGRAPH, could you please summarize the moderated arguments into two presentations, one using MS Powerpoint, and the other using an Open Source presentation app? Thanks.
...by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them...
Great. Get this thing to anticipate when I need a sandwich, program it to script my Japanese Female Robot, teach it to use Inkscape 0.42 to support us, and let me get on playing GTA:pr0n.
Slashdot Mirror
I have for some time wanted to write a story including a "car" powered by a V-8 engine which is organic above the crankshaft. I have done my little engineering studies of nutrient bath and circulatory systems, exhaust issues (I mean this thing shits all over the road) and such... I have so far envisioned genetically tuned muscles, grown in a vat (or what-have-you), but the synthetic muscles are interesting.
The problem is that I don't have a story there, just a neato idea. Not even characters. That doesn't stop many SF writers, unfortunately.
Normally, I agree with anybody who says that a drug problem is the fault of the drug user and nobody else. After all, nobody forced the user to start using drugs, right?
In the post above, the poster actually *was* forced to start using drugs, and now has a drug problem.
Save your moral clarity for a problem you understand.
Lapintosh might have worked for the PB 100. The concept is a little old now.
I don't care much for "MacBook" myself, although I hope the early posters are right, and it builds some "Scottish Laptop" vibe. That will go over well with some of their core constituents. Sigh. For that matter so would, say, "Gemini", which also refers to the Core Duo (Sigh!). Or they could have gone a bit retro with the twin theme:
][Book = "twinbook", or Book][ = "Book Two".
They could even pre-empt the Timbuktu ref with their own ads.
Apple must have cringed when they heard Intel was calling the chip "Duo" anything, with the PB 5xx series lurking back there.
Many Governments in Europe support Iran's allegedly peaceful nuclear program. It makes sense that they are warming to nuclear power. Of course, if they're not more fore-handed, they may do more than merely warm.
I guess that we may call you a liberal, then?
Panurge: This is the second post wherein I've seen you pissing on the space program. I'm curious--is there an aspect of space science which you support? Last time, I called you an idiot, and you quite rightly called me on it. So I'm *just* asking. What would you find worth the money (and other impact) to accomplish regarding to space & science?
And for the gravity solution (in getting to Mars), you string the cargo and crew module together, and set them spinning--string in the middle, cargo on one end at one gee, crew on the other end at one gee. That is also Zubrin. If you don't know who BOB ZUBRIN is, you know where to Gooooooooooo.
So what? I can bloat a file with no visible benefit? Been doing that for years.
Clippy: "It looks like you're trying to cram 24kb of text into a 3.2Mb
Actually, I think CNN's cash is tied up in Carol Costello's plastic surgery. Ba-dum.
Okay, mod me how you will, but I couldn't help noting that Mr. Oh fuck, here comes the "teh free market!" rhetoric is apparently broadcasting from the moon. Sorry, moonbat. It had to be said. And your post was hurtin' anyway.
Actually, Anonymous-Coward-who-amazingly-demands-moderation, morons don't usually fsck. You're just under thirty and bitter.
For those who are "not normally assertive", I recommend this highly successful three-step program. :-)
Shut up.
Grow a pair.
Then speak up.
It worked for me! Hell, I'm the president of this club. NOTE: AC will be studiously ignored on this thread
Or a terrible flaming, lidless eye...and a text-to-speech capture of the user's name, whispered quietly, menacingly...in Bill Gates' nasal, sing-song voice...cut to scene of him sitting on desk, staring into monitor with...YOUR FACE ON THE SCREEN!
That might get some people to switch.
[top of my head...] Apollo used O2/Kerosene for first stage (and lots of it), then O2/H2 for everything else, except the tetrazine/hydrazine for the thrusters of idiotic Tom Hanks fame (which never made it to the atmosphere). No reason we couldn't use straight O2/H2 all the way except finnickiness about explosions.
But the last time a manned project blew itself up, it was related to a SRB anyway. (yes, which burned a hole in the liquid tank, ok, which is where the real trouble started--er, finished). Hardly proof against disaster.
Say what you want about kerosene, but its exhaust is more like water than the methyl-ethyl-bad-shit originally wanked about. To a first approx., anyway.
And by the time you get to where it matters in (on?) Jupiter, who can tell a liquid from a solid?
Okay, thanks for the reminder about duty cycle, etc... But still, assuming we're transmitting far more transitions/time, then is there a miniscule inductive heating effect? Granted, we're not roasting anything here, but if you vary the current (& the field) more rapidly, more frequently... what? No? nevermind...
IANA...whatever...but at what point do the little antennae heat up?
Clippy: "Looks like you're trying to remove a flaming WiFi card..."
Combine this with a cantenna, and roast pigeons as they fly by.
Nobody's talking about SRBs. I'm taking issue with Mr. "You're never going to leave the planet without leaving it choking in your toxic vapors" who thinks that liquid fuels don't exist. And while he may have apont about infrastructure pollution (the trucks that carry the parts, etc...), I'll wager that MORE pollution is generated by, say, the apparently massive latex dong industry than by any nation's pace program.
:-)
As for making hydrogen solid, that's easy. Put it on Jupiter
Easy--DON'T. :-)
Please don't take this personally--but I've been stewing about this for two decades. Um, anyway--since you asked...
I never cared about the damned ISS, not even when it was spectacular and named Space Station Freedom. The fact is, it's not good for much of anything. About the best utility it could be to any other aspect of a space program is as a kind of lifeboat (somewhere a mission can fail to that doesn't involve re-entry), but even tat won't work. If your mission is failing, how are you going to get from your current orbit to that of the Station? Sure, maybe it will work a small percent of the time, but not enough to justify building and manning the thing!
All the ISS is doing is advertising. Big Deal. We're getting much better science, much better PR, and much better astronaut survival rates from the unmanned Mars missions. When we do get around to Mars missions, they won't be benefitted in any way by a space station. But look at what the station is doing to NASA: They're actually going to axe funding for the Voyagers! This is crap! It's a pittance the Voyagers require, but right when they are crossing OUT OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM, generating a wealth of previously un-dreamed-of information, their funding has to be sacrificed to NASA's idiotic shuttle+station scheme.
We *have* reliable orbit technology. Had it since the sixties. We *have* reliable earth observation technology. Every damned agency of the Federal Gov't seems to have its own satellite.
Feh. "We need the shuttle to get back and forth to the station. We need the station in case something happens to the shuttle."
Research is just about the last refuge of justification for the station. But we know what happens in orbit (and presumably, beyond orbit, where the ISS will *NEVER GO*). Bodies degenerate. Ever-more refined programs of exercise and vitamin supplements are approaching a limit. We do not have the answer to degeneration, but when we have some plausible candidates, then we can put a man or three up in some kind of Soyuz -esque thing.
But hey--thanks for responding to the post
Let's see... Hydrogen and Oxygen, hydrogen and Oxygen... If only we could combine those two and have it be stable. And non-polluting. Ah, well. Back to the perhapsotrons.
Idiot.
...I'm surprised I haven't seen this elsewhere in the comments for the earlier stories--but does anyone else think the upcoming landing (fingers crossed!) will be the last one no matter how well it goes? Lots of people talking about if it goes poorly, but I will wager that even after a happy ending, in the attempt to chase down myriad problems to the new standard of acceptable risk, NASA will keep running up against the conceptual flaws in the Orbiter+Tank+Boosters design.
I'm not bagging on NASA--this stuff is dangerous no matter what, and they've done a yeoman's job keeping this rig upright, so to speak. But there have been some very bad priorities pushing development over there (external & internal).
Sorry, I'm tired and rambling, but I feel we may have seen the last Shuttle Launch.
...these are ancient designs which can be implemented using decades-old technology. The only interesting thing is that now NASA has killed enough people to shift the bureaucracy off its ass. We don't need the Battlestar Galactica hardware to do Apollo missions.
...God forbid your target audience (remember them? the people whom you would like to convert to Open Source, but AREN'T USING IT YET) should be able to read TFA. Ironic is your belief that only through studiously avoiding the software used by 95% (?) of the world can we hope to reach 95% of the world.
...for SIGGRAPH, could you please summarize the moderated arguments into two presentations, one using MS Powerpoint, and the other using an Open Source presentation app? Thanks.
Great. Get this thing to anticipate when I need a sandwich, program it to script my Japanese Female Robot, teach it to use Inkscape 0.42 to support us, and let me get on playing GTA:pr0n.