HSR looks cool, but unless you get it to carry your car where you're going, thus eliminating the parking expense, the rental car expense, and the time required to park your car and rent the destination car
What are you blabbering on about? Where did the need for all those cars come from?
Just why would you need a car just to get to a train station, and what in the world would make you have to rent another car to get from a train station to anywhere? Unless, of course, your destination is completely outside civilization, or you're completely antisocial and can't bear traveling outside of your own private chassis (in which case you wouldn't want to board the train in the first place).
Where I am, I can just walk to a bus stop from my home, read a book for a bit, then get off at a large train station. I can then get on a train going to virtually any of even the most remote cities/towns/villages I want, or just board an international one and get off in a different country a few hours later.
And our public transit system is probably the crappiest in the area. The U.S. probably spends as much money on traffic lights every year as our entire national transportation budget. So just where is all that gross inefficiency coming from?
What you described is like getting into a car to drive to the convenience store around the corner and then getting on a Segway to navigate inside the store and then calling a taxi because your car's boot is not as convenient to get groceries out of.
Get a Canon PowerShot. For one thing, they're great little cameras (I started out with one), but that's besides the point. We're on Slashdot here, after all. The point is that you can make it a lot better with a firmware hack called CHDK. It is loaded into RAM from the memory card without touching your original firmware, and gives you full manual control over your camera. In addition to getting features normally only seen on DSLRs (such as bracketing, saving in RAW, and a live histogram), you can write and run Lua and uBASIC scripts on the camera, allowing you to program it to do whatever you want (such as motion detection to trigger photo or video capture, sophisticated timelapse scripts, intervalometers, USB remote triggering, etc.). You can take exposures far longer than the factory limit (mine went from a max of 15" to 64 seconds with CHDK), or far shorter in fact, allowing you to take both very low-light or very high-speed photographs that were simply impossible with the camera as it came out of the factory.
You can even play games on the thing. It's ridiculous.
If you can really say no to all that on a simple compact, you can buy me a DSLR and I'll give you your geek card back.
That is exactly why my favorite Science Fiction title is AquaNox. Post-apocalyptic / cyberpunk atmosphere aside, the story is so well thought-out as to be downright scary, in exactly the same sense as 1984 is scary.
What I'm seeing is a society whose collapse is within sight for the first time since its creation. If what you're saying was true, we would have figured out how to work together a long time ago.
Obviously, I was oversimplifying, but given the amount of probes we've already sent out there, it can't be that hard. There's nothing wrong with having scientific instruments and sensors on the probe too of course; the point is just that photography would be the #1 priority (and bandwidth user) for this probe. We'd need to design radiation-proof lens elements and one very special DSLR for this, too. But the idea is basically just this: we've already gone there... now let's go there and take all the amazing pictures possible.
Thanks a lot for the links, I will definitely have fun looking through them!:-)
But what about all the other planets? Most probes don't waste bandwidth on sending more than a few pictures back, and I doubt they would ever change trajectory (or match speed with a moon/planet) just for composition.
Out of all the dozens of ideas I've had that others realized and made millions, this is certainly the one I'm glad someone else also thought of.
Just this week I was thinking about ways to get a tiny probe into space whose only purpose would be photography. NASA (understandably) doesn't waste too much of their tiny bandwidth (and mission time) to transfer large photos; but what if that was the mission's only purpose? We could create a timelapse of all of Humanity making their rounds around the Sun. We could take a shot of Earth setting above the thin atmosphere of Mars. We could park it in geostationary orbit around Europa and make a timelapse of it circling around Jupiter, perhaps even witnessing the expansion and compression it experiences in doing so... the possibilities are endless.
If only I could convince Canon or Nikon to sponsor the century's publicity stunt.
Same here in Budapest, Hungary... ever since I've had a GSM phone.
It's funny to hear people complaining about not hearing their phones because the subway cars are loud...:-)
Let's face it, modern recordings suck and no processing will change that. That is not universally true. I find it is very much related to genre. Take Drum and Bass, for instance - in that genre, the sound engineer who determines what the final mix should sound like and deals with compression and EQing is almost always the same person (or group of people) who made the music itself, since they are all sound engineers (either professionally or as a hobby). As a result, these recordings always sound exactly like the artist(s) intended, regardless of whether it's released on vinyl (which is the most common), on CD (in which case the music is never converted to an analog format), or through the internet as mp3s. In fact, most of the mp3s I have of D'n'B music were recorded from vinyl and they all sound great.
The same is the case with newer metal releases. I found that, almost universally, albums released in the last couple of years have great quality and sound much cleaner than those released in the 90s or earlier (excepting artists like King Crimson, who probably were all sound engineers).
FTA:
Dr. Halloy and his colleagues worked with roaches because their societies are simple, egalitarian and democratic, with none of the social stratification seen in some other insect societies -- no queen bees, no worker ants. "Cockroaches are not like that," Dr. Halloy said. "They live all together." Indeed, it does not sound like our society at all.
Imagine the amount of shady marketing tactics made possible! How about inscribing the song Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin into the one-lane road that leads to your store? People going towards your store would encounter the song normally, but people going away from your store would hear a satanic message. The result would be that people going to your store would be in a sort of sad, but elevated mood, while people going away would be scared and freaked out.
From the oh-shit-i-misread dept.
To the untrained eye, the tiny, misshapen, fatty boobs on Giovanni Murtas's chest would not look very impressive. Mmmmm... Smells like bad pun in here.
What's with all the bad hungarian posts? If you are going to post something, you should at least make sure it's correct - especially if you're trying to flame someone/something.
A TGV train has reached a speed of 563 km/h, setting a record set in 1990. The train had larger-than-usual wheels and its engine produced roughly 25,000 horsepower. This has brought wheeled trains surprisingly close to the absolute record holder Japanese MAGLEV trains, with a record of 580 km/h.
started learning a few months ago and am almost fluent
Huh?:) You must be superman or something.
I've never heard the "pölö" used as an actual word, and I have no idea what they were trying to say. Some people say "pölö" as a slightly retarded phonetic pronounciation of the abbreviation pl. (short for "például" - "for example"), but that would make no sense in this context.
Slashdot Mirror
HSR looks cool, but unless you get it to carry your car where you're going, thus eliminating the parking expense, the rental car expense, and the time required to park your car and rent the destination car
What are you blabbering on about? Where did the need for all those cars come from?
Just why would you need a car just to get to a train station, and what in the world would make you have to rent another car to get from a train station to anywhere? Unless, of course, your destination is completely outside civilization, or you're completely antisocial and can't bear traveling outside of your own private chassis (in which case you wouldn't want to board the train in the first place).
Where I am, I can just walk to a bus stop from my home, read a book for a bit, then get off at a large train station. I can then get on a train going to virtually any of even the most remote cities/towns/villages I want, or just board an international one and get off in a different country a few hours later.
And our public transit system is probably the crappiest in the area. The U.S. probably spends as much money on traffic lights every year as our entire national transportation budget. So just where is all that gross inefficiency coming from?
What you described is like getting into a car to drive to the convenience store around the corner and then getting on a Segway to navigate inside the store and then calling a taxi because your car's boot is not as convenient to get groceries out of.
How about children being unruly in the classroom, forget the Ritalin, let's just mace the little buggers, that'll make them behave.
Sure, you were being hypothetical about the mace, but your example of the "normal way" of response is the scariest thing I've read all day.
I'm amazed that noone has suggested this yet.
Get a Canon PowerShot. For one thing, they're great little cameras (I started out with one), but that's besides the point. We're on Slashdot here, after all.
The point is that you can make it a lot better with a firmware hack called CHDK. It is loaded into RAM from the memory card without touching your original firmware, and gives you full manual control over your camera.
In addition to getting features normally only seen on DSLRs (such as bracketing, saving in RAW, and a live histogram), you can write and run Lua and uBASIC scripts on the camera, allowing you to program it to do whatever you want (such as motion detection to trigger photo or video capture, sophisticated timelapse scripts, intervalometers, USB remote triggering, etc.). You can take exposures far longer than the factory limit (mine went from a max of 15" to 64 seconds with CHDK), or far shorter in fact, allowing you to take both very low-light or very high-speed photographs that were simply impossible with the camera as it came out of the factory.
You can even play games on the thing. It's ridiculous.
If you can really say no to all that on a simple compact, you can buy me a DSLR and I'll give you your geek card back.
That is exactly why my favorite Science Fiction title is AquaNox. Post-apocalyptic / cyberpunk atmosphere aside, the story is so well thought-out as to be downright scary, in exactly the same sense as 1984 is scary.
Evidence? Like what?
What I'm seeing is a society whose collapse is within sight for the first time since its creation. If what you're saying was true, we would have figured out how to work together a long time ago.
Obviously, I was oversimplifying, but given the amount of probes we've already sent out there, it can't be that hard. There's nothing wrong with having scientific instruments and sensors on the probe too of course; the point is just that photography would be the #1 priority (and bandwidth user) for this probe. We'd need to design radiation-proof lens elements and one very special DSLR for this, too. But the idea is basically just this: we've already gone there... now let's go there and take all the amazing pictures possible.
Thanks a lot for the links, I will definitely have fun looking through them! :-)
But what about all the other planets? Most probes don't waste bandwidth on sending more than a few pictures back, and I doubt they would ever change trajectory (or match speed with a moon/planet) just for composition.
Out of all the dozens of ideas I've had that others realized and made millions, this is certainly the one I'm glad someone else also thought of.
Just this week I was thinking about ways to get a tiny probe into space whose only purpose would be photography. NASA (understandably) doesn't waste too much of their tiny bandwidth (and mission time) to transfer large photos; but what if that was the mission's only purpose?
We could create a timelapse of all of Humanity making their rounds around the Sun. We could take a shot of Earth setting above the thin atmosphere of Mars.
We could park it in geostationary orbit around Europa and make a timelapse of it circling around Jupiter, perhaps even witnessing the expansion and compression it experiences in doing so... the possibilities are endless.
If only I could convince Canon or Nikon to sponsor the century's publicity stunt.
The Tacit, a wrist mounted sonar device with haptic feedback, is like strapping a bat to your wrist to help you see.
Uh... yeah. That's exactly what it's like.
Same here in Budapest, Hungary... ever since I've had a GSM phone. It's funny to hear people complaining about not hearing their phones because the subway cars are loud... :-)
The same is the case with newer metal releases. I found that, almost universally, albums released in the last couple of years have great quality and sound much cleaner than those released in the 90s or earlier (excepting artists like King Crimson, who probably were all sound engineers).
Imagine the amount of shady marketing tactics made possible! How about inscribing the song Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin into the one-lane road that leads to your store? People going towards your store would encounter the song normally, but people going away from your store would hear a satanic message. The result would be that people going to your store would be in a sort of sad, but elevated mood, while people going away would be scared and freaked out.
Sure, they'll delete your personal information - but the company they've already sold it to won't.
[citation needed]
I imagine a -135% efficiency power cell would be more accurately called a lamp.
I'm sorry, but "lófasz a seggedbe" (literally: horse dick into your ass) is quite a bit offensive...
What's with all the bad hungarian posts? If you are going to post something, you should at least make sure it's correct - especially if you're trying to flame someone/something.
Here: Lófasz a seggedbe.
Am I the only one who finds it funny that Duke Nukem Forever is abbreviated to 'DNF', which in racing terms means 'Did Not Finish'?
Actually, it's "disznó". And I'm not even being a smartass - there's a reason the Hungarian alphabet has 44 letters...
Aluminum Oxide? What's that?
Maybe you meant Aluminium Oxide?
A TGV train has reached a speed of 563 km/h, setting a record set in 1990. The train had larger-than-usual wheels and its engine produced roughly 25,000 horsepower. This has brought wheeled trains surprisingly close to the absolute record holder Japanese MAGLEV trains, with a record of 580 km/h.
Oops, accidentally modded you Offtopic - I hope replying to a post still removes moderation...
started learning a few months ago and am almost fluent
:) You must be superman or something.
I've never heard the "pölö" used as an actual word, and I have no idea what they were trying to say. Some people say "pölö" as a slightly retarded phonetic pronounciation of the abbreviation pl. (short for "például" - "for example"), but that would make no sense in this context.
Huh?