1. One of the ways that I would hope we could see less of the 'simple' (yes a relative term) wedgebots is through a greater amount of competition. Hopefully if this genre takes off, we will see a lot more competitors.
Think 'Ninja Warrior'. They give it enough time, and intially allow 100 people to participate in the first round. This gives them a good pool of talent out of which we get to see the real competitors at the other end. (Unfortunately for NW, some of the returning talent makes a simple mistake and we don't get to see them for another season. But that is a NW problem, not Battlebots) It would seem that Battlebots needs to be around long enough to get big enough for more people to participate. Even if it doesn't eliminate the wedgebots, it may at least provide us with a wider range of contestants in the early stages.
As for the 'hydraulic' arms. Thanks for the clarification, though I was mostly just referring the tactic of implementing a 'flipper arm' as a weapon when a lot of the general population seems to expect something a bit more or different.
2. Yup, hopefully as the audience grows, the money will too. That's why I'm glad this is ESPN taking over instead of SPIKE....
6. Agreed. It was mostly my random thoughts. I'll probably be happy with just the basic ultralight, light, medium, and heavy categories.
The experimental class would definately be something that goes way beyond the normal expectations of a battlebot tournament. I'd estimate it would have to be something like a 'season finale' or yearly tournament with some gargantuan prize attached. I could quickly see that class becoming the 'corporate' class. However, access to a good junkyard could make a very interesting competition.
You are absolutely correct that such an event could be too dangerous for the typical coverage. Of course, I also make my living working with autonomous UAVs... could be such a cool way to 'showcase' your company's latest and greatest. (please?):)
Either that, or they could put a product on the shelves that earned them more than the Linux PCs.
Lets say I can fit 20 Product Bs into the footprint of 1 Product A. If Product A nets me $10 and product B nets me $2 per unit, I'm going to sell Product A online, and Product B in the physical store.
Since I'm happily employed and unlikely to end up as an advisor for the show, I'll throw in a few words of advice for ESPN.
1. Do something about the wedge/flipper bots. There are plenty of methods to deal with them that don't involve a simple ban on the design type. But trust me when I say that BattleBots was being done in by what appeared to be a never ending supply of squat cheese wedges.
Why spend time engineering a novel robot when you could stick a motor and a hydraulic arm into a wedge and have a good chance at winning?
2. Give them a real amount of time to fight. Comedy Central tried to cram the whole tournament into something that was far to short. Let the damned things fight.
2.1: Let the damned things fight. The course doesn't need to be 'extreme' and deadly. Sure, put in a few obstacles but don't turn the course into a third opponent. Nothing like watching a good battle only to see one opponent DQ'd after some goofy piece of scenery flips over for no reason.
Imagine watching a UFC match. The opponents have separated after an amazing show on the mat. They are circling one another, knowing that if they show the other any opening that it will be taken advantage of. This is a fight to go down in history books gentlemen. I haven't seen one like this since... Opps, there goes the trap door. Bob Tartarsky wins.
3. It doesn't need to be the WWF/WWE to be entertaining. No need for over the top announcers that act like 8 yr olds on meth. Keep the commentary on topic and interesting, not loud and idiotic.
4. This one follows number 3. We can get our bikini babes on the internet, you are not SPIKE tv.
5. Give a reasonable stipend to the robots that compete. These things are expensive, but are expected to enter into a fight where their entire investment could be flushed away. The designer of the robot shouldn't have to be a wiz at getting sponsorship. Don't ban sponsorship, but give the anti-social geeks a chance.
6. Consider price caps in addition to weight restrictions. I'd be interested in seeing the $10k robots fight the $10k robots.
The fact that you can sit here and talk about what people will do in an emergency as if it were some sort of certainty tells me that you've never really been in any situation more tense than a game of texas hold'em.
You don't have any insight into my personal life, and this is just a message board so I can not expect you to understand since I haven't discussed my personal life in my posts. Otherwise your statement would be god damned insulting.
That aside...
I didn't want to discuss hypotheticals, I shouldn't have tried to post based on hypotheticals. I simply wanted to point out that a pilot who is behind a reinforced door, would then have the time to at least try to think rationally about the situation. Pilots of commercial airliners ARE the type who are trained to remain calm, or at least try to remain calm under very stressful conditions. There will always be a hypothetical situation that can be constructed that are exceptions, but a pilot behind a door which they have enough justification to trust will withstand an attack until they have time to land will be in a much better position to think rationally than a pilot who has no such luxury.
Oh to that I absolutely agree. I'd just like to see reinforced cabin doors so that we could concentrate our security focus.
Right now security is trying hard to find everything to prevent everything, but with a few changes which are being resisted because it adds cost to the airlines, we could remove some of the things which security needs to be concerned about.
Even though the passengers ideally would rush any would-be terrorist, there are key points at which the plane is particularly vulnerable. At least a strong cabin door would keep someone from rushing the cabin and conking the pilot with a fire extinguisher during a landing. I trust pilots, but even the most diligent could be distracted by a 200 lb man flailing about in the cockpit while the rest of the passengers tried to pull him back out.
Be that as it may, individual states in the US do not have the right to break away. EU member states have that right. Therefore, the EU isn't a country (yet). Rather, it is a very close confederation of countries.
You know, for the first 75 years or so there were states in the USA who thought exactly that.
Maybe not. On the other hand "I'm going to kill one passenger every minute until you open this door" would probably work. Also, "I'm going to set off my bomb if you don't open this door in 30 seconds" is pretty much guaranteed to work.
No, it won't work.
Killing one passenger every minute wouldn't work, since anyone that would do that pretty much has voided any of my expectations that they would'nt continue to do so or worse once they have the cockpit.
If the terrorist has a bomb, but his goal is to get into the pilot's compartment, as a pilot I sure as hell wouldn't prefer the option where the terrorist HAS a bomb AND the cockpit.
If the owner posted the sign that said take me for a joyride, and the person did take it for a joyride (lets assume that he did return it and not just take it to a scrapyard).
How could you call that theft?
When people put stuff outside their house and a big sign saying "Free" next to it, would the police investigate that 'theft'?
Can you prove that he was saying "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear"? No.
You are kidding right?
His post wasn't that complex, and it was fairly clear, I'll quote it here, word for word. "Don't do evil shit and you won't have to worry."
Now lets line it up side by side.
Don't do evil shit______________and_______you won't have to worry. If you have nothing to hide_____then______you have nothing to fear.
That is exactly what he implied. Calling his post out as a repeat of the 'nothing to hide' mantra was 100% appropriate. It's not even comparing apples and oranges, it's comparingEmpire and Red Delicious.
Now I agree that we should keep discussions limited to the case at hand. However, that is exactly why arguements that suggest guilt simply for holding an opposing viewpoint are not acceptable.
Oh, so you don't really view the copyright violation as an injustice to begin with.
Not in the context of the quote that you posted. You are flipping around the context of the quote from one which stated that depriving people of their human rights anywhere was a threat to human rights everywhere. I'm sorry, but I don't view the plight of the movie industry as something even close to the level of a fight for essential human rights.
As far as you are concerned, there is no problem if nobody pays for the content they enjoy...
Excuse me, but I said no such thing. Don't try to define my concerns. If you read my post, you would see that you are attempting to put words into my mouth that are almost the opposite of what I wrote.
I pointed out that the original purpose of copyright was to give protection to the creators of information, but also to ensure that such information became part of the public domain after a limited amount of time. It was very important that they granted the creator a temporary monopoly, and it was equally important that that monopoly expire after a period of time.
If you take that to imply that I don't want people to receive compensation for their works then you are being deliberately ignorant.
Sorry, I must've missed the new Constitutional amendment, spelling out the quotas, exceeding which makes one inelligible to participate in public discourse. Could you post a link, please?
Don't be a smart ass.
And don't dodge the issue that the changes to the structure of copyright law have been changed to such a level that the original purpose and concept of the law is nearly unconstitutional in itself.
Perhaps you could point me to the constitutional amendment that removed the word limited from this passage: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
I would challenge you to find any film that failed to make a profit that didn't also use 'Hollywood Accounting'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting "In accountancy, Hollywood accounting is the practice of distributing the profit earned by a large project to corporate entities which, though technically distinct from the one responsible for the project itself, are typically owned by the same people. This has the net result of reducing the project's reported profit by a substantial margin, sometimes even eliminating it altogether. This may be for income tax reasons, but more often it is to reduce the amount which the corporation must pay in royalties or other profit-sharing agreements."
You give me 100 grand to build a home
I hire an electrical company (owned by me) $10k I hire an excavation service (also owned by me) $10k I hire a carpenter (I don't yet own a carpentry company) $10k Roofing company (owned by me) $5k Material + equipment cost $50k General labor $15k
Look! I just spent all $100k. No profit!
Except that I made a profit through the electrician and excavation, but thanks to the clever accounting, I don't report that as profit. In fact, I may have lost money on this deal since I had to hire a lawn service to cut the lawn after (also owned by me)
Sorry that I promised you 10% of the profit, but building homes (making movies) is expensive.
He's saying that if you don't do anything to grab the attention of FBI agents (or as he calls it, "evil shit"), then you don't have to worry about those said FBI agents.
I think applying a quote from Dr. King to this situation is a stretch of epic proportions in the scope of the injustice.
Perhaps the true injustice is that companies with access to billions of dollars have tailored our laws to suit their own interests. These laws run counter to the original concepts of copyright that were developed outside of corporate interference.
The original purpose behind copyright was to allow these creations to fall into the public domain while providing incentives to the creator, not be used as some black-currency for corporations.
I bought my house in an auction that allowed sniping. At 11pm I submitted a bid for a property of around $200k. The other party had no chance to resubmit a bid at that time since the auction was closing 15 minutes after that.
The property itself was appraised at $240k.
I knew that the other party would want to revise their bid if they thought they would lose it. They were trying to benefit from the seller needing to sell fast, but didn't expect someone to jump in at the last minute.
So why is that bad for the seller? Since the auction allowed for my bid sniping, the other party never had a chance to put in a counter-offer. I was prepared to go up to $215k, and, judging by their reaction, they probably would have done the same.
The sniping cost the seller nearly $15k because there was no period to re-evaluate the bids.
(Not that I feel bad, I needed the property fast too since my previous home was washed away in a flood. I was just pointing out that the seller lost out on some $ because sniping was allowed)
I was a bit sloppy with my post, thank you for clarifying the process.
The point I was trying to make was that a star just doesn't go supernova from a normal star with no 'warning' Of course, the last phase just before it reaches the Chandrasekhar limit is very short, and the subsequent collapse IS effectively instantaneous.
But it shows that the star does go through a 'series' of collapses. It was those collapses that I was clumsily referring to as giving off indicators.
For example, if the star did go nova '7999' years ago, then we would see that it was already burning carbon which would be a pretty good indicator that we were set for a light show.
The real question I have is why the astronomers seem to think that the supernova event is so near, yet outside of the normal timeline by which they should be able to determine that it is so near. If it was burning Helium, you could expect it to last one to one million years. But if it was already on Carbon, then you could be fairly certain that it would only be a few thousand at most.
This is just guessing on my part, but I wonder if they are only detecting that it is burning Helium, but that the combination of the second star in the system is 'feeding' the WR star, causing its 'life' to accelerate.
I find it interesting that you were modded 'troll'. Especially considering that most of the people in this thread are concerned about censorship. It is sad that on slashdot you get modded 'troll' for exposing what was an ad-hominem attack.
While we may not have all of the information regarding a star exploding into a supernova, I'd expect that there is at least some sort of indication that the star is nearing the end of its life. In a stars lifetime, the collapse and supernova event may be nearly 'instant', but 10,000 years is nothing when compared to the overall lifetime of a star.
Given our short lifetimes when compared to that of the universe, we are a bit like the highspeed cameras that are used to capture explosions. In our frame of reference, a popping balloon is a near instantaneous event, but to the camera it is a long, drawn out affair.
I would imagine that a supernova is similar. Instantaneous from the 'point-of-view' of a star, but aeons to a human.
If it weren't for those, the screen could be an inch bigger.
The screen won't magically become bigger if you remove the speakers. It would require selecting a larger LCD, and that means it would cost more. At the very least, it would cost more to add a larger screen than you would save by removing the speakers. You would then have to issue headphones with each OLPC, and probably have to replace them as they are lost/damaged/stolen.
We provide people who are poor, with enough money or money equivalents, to obtain sufficient sustenance. We don't, however, provide them with 5-course chef-prepared meals every night.
True, quite true.
However, there is a slight difference between the prescriptions that fight Parkinson's Disease and Foie Gras.
My income comes from things that have been heavily researched. The raw materials for what I engineer are quite cheap compared to what I charge for the finished product. ($2-3k in materials and then sold for $40-100k) So I know what it means to have to charge a premium for the research that goes into the product.
But I can also tell you that if my $70k product could save lives, you could have it for $2k.
Ironically, it is something similar to DRM that is required in these sorts of cases. I hate the concept of DRM, but if we could get these medicines to Africa and make sure that it wouldn't be resold in the US I'd be all for it. Unfortunately, the medicines that we research here in the states are easily resold back to us for fractions of what they should sell for to earn back the research dollars.
But to call it 'Filet Mignon' healthcare is setting up a false argument.
You don't notch the metal parts of the firearm, you notch the stock (typically wood) with a 3-4mm cut. One Notch per kill. I wouldn't do it for dove hunting or anything like that, but typically for larger game like whitetail deer you would put a notch in your stock when you take one down.
It's been a while since I did this, and it was hard to find someone who had 1/2 a brain to cooperate with you on a public server, but...
Spawn as an engineer, take the jeep and get it at the back of your base, toss in a few explosives and have someone else drive it. Detonate it at the proper time.:D It was great for nailing tanks.
(You had to have someone else drive for the best effect since your explosives would vanish on the death of the engineer, but it also gave you a good view of the best time to detonate)
You should give Natural Selection www.unknownworlds.com/ns/ a try. When I played it was based on the HL engine and gave you two options, marines or aliens for a team.
One person on the marines was the 'commander' and had a top down C&C style view. He could give orders, set waypoints, hand out weapons, and progress through an upgrade tree. The rest of the marines were just plain old FPS style, but relied on the commander to keep them supplied as they fought.
The aliens on the other hand, had no leader, but information was shared between them (If one alien saw an enemy, the rest of the players could 'sense' that enemy, and you would receive notification that an area was under attack, etc. Just no central leadership mode)
It was a game that I greatly enjoyed. I remember it when it was fairly beta, had a few chats with Charlie Cleveland (he likely won't remember, but I did appreciate his discussions about building up Unknown Worlds). I sincerely hope that it grows since it got a lot of things 'right'.
Slashdot Mirror
1. One of the ways that I would hope we could see less of the 'simple' (yes a relative term) wedgebots is through a greater amount of competition. Hopefully if this genre takes off, we will see a lot more competitors.
...
:)
Think 'Ninja Warrior'. They give it enough time, and intially allow 100 people to participate in the first round. This gives them a good pool of talent out of which we get to see the real competitors at the other end. (Unfortunately for NW, some of the returning talent makes a simple mistake and we don't get to see them for another season. But that is a NW problem, not Battlebots) It would seem that Battlebots needs to be around long enough to get big enough for more people to participate. Even if it doesn't eliminate the wedgebots, it may at least provide us with a wider range of contestants in the early stages.
As for the 'hydraulic' arms. Thanks for the clarification, though I was mostly just referring the tactic of implementing a 'flipper arm' as a weapon when a lot of the general population seems to expect something a bit more or different.
2. Yup, hopefully as the audience grows, the money will too. That's why I'm glad this is ESPN taking over instead of SPIKE.
6. Agreed. It was mostly my random thoughts. I'll probably be happy with just the basic ultralight, light, medium, and heavy categories.
The experimental class would definately be something that goes way beyond the normal expectations of a battlebot tournament. I'd estimate it would have to be something like a 'season finale' or yearly tournament with some gargantuan prize attached. I could quickly see that class becoming the 'corporate' class. However, access to a good junkyard could make a very interesting competition.
You are absolutely correct that such an event could be too dangerous for the typical coverage. Of course, I also make my living working with autonomous UAVs... could be such a cool way to 'showcase' your company's latest and greatest. (please?)
Either that, or they could put a product on the shelves that earned them more than the Linux PCs.
Lets say I can fit 20 Product Bs into the footprint of 1 Product A. If Product A nets me $10 and product B nets me $2 per unit, I'm going to sell Product A online, and Product B in the physical store.
Since I'm happily employed and unlikely to end up as an advisor for the show, I'll throw in a few words of advice for ESPN.
1. Do something about the wedge/flipper bots. There are plenty of methods to deal with them that don't involve a simple ban on the design type. But trust me when I say that BattleBots was being done in by what appeared to be a never ending supply of squat cheese wedges.
Why spend time engineering a novel robot when you could stick a motor and a hydraulic arm into a wedge and have a good chance at winning?
2. Give them a real amount of time to fight. Comedy Central tried to cram the whole tournament into something that was far to short. Let the damned things fight.
2.1: Let the damned things fight. The course doesn't need to be 'extreme' and deadly. Sure, put in a few obstacles but don't turn the course into a third opponent. Nothing like watching a good battle only to see one opponent DQ'd after some goofy piece of scenery flips over for no reason.
Imagine watching a UFC match. The opponents have separated after an amazing show on the mat. They are circling one another, knowing that if they show the other any opening that it will be taken advantage of. This is a fight to go down in history books gentlemen. I haven't seen one like this since... Opps, there goes the trap door. Bob Tartarsky wins.
3. It doesn't need to be the WWF/WWE to be entertaining. No need for over the top announcers that act like 8 yr olds on meth. Keep the commentary on topic and interesting, not loud and idiotic.
4. This one follows number 3. We can get our bikini babes on the internet, you are not SPIKE tv.
5. Give a reasonable stipend to the robots that compete. These things are expensive, but are expected to enter into a fight where their entire investment could be flushed away. The designer of the robot shouldn't have to be a wiz at getting sponsorship. Don't ban sponsorship, but give the anti-social geeks a chance.
6. Consider price caps in addition to weight restrictions. I'd be interested in seeing the $10k robots fight the $10k robots.
The fact that you can sit here and talk about what people will do in an emergency as if it were some sort of certainty tells me that you've never really been in any situation more tense than a game of texas hold'em.
You don't have any insight into my personal life, and this is just a message board so I can not expect you to understand since I haven't discussed my personal life in my posts. Otherwise your statement would be god damned insulting.
That aside...
I didn't want to discuss hypotheticals, I shouldn't have tried to post based on hypotheticals. I simply wanted to point out that a pilot who is behind a reinforced door, would then have the time to at least try to think rationally about the situation. Pilots of commercial airliners ARE the type who are trained to remain calm, or at least try to remain calm under very stressful conditions. There will always be a hypothetical situation that can be constructed that are exceptions, but a pilot behind a door which they have enough justification to trust will withstand an attack until they have time to land will be in a much better position to think rationally than a pilot who has no such luxury.
Oh to that I absolutely agree. I'd just like to see reinforced cabin doors so that we could concentrate our security focus.
Right now security is trying hard to find everything to prevent everything, but with a few changes which are being resisted because it adds cost to the airlines, we could remove some of the things which security needs to be concerned about.
Even though the passengers ideally would rush any would-be terrorist, there are key points at which the plane is particularly vulnerable. At least a strong cabin door would keep someone from rushing the cabin and conking the pilot with a fire extinguisher during a landing. I trust pilots, but even the most diligent could be distracted by a 200 lb man flailing about in the cockpit while the rest of the passengers tried to pull him back out.
Be that as it may, individual states in the US do not have the right to break away. EU member states have that right. Therefore, the EU isn't a country (yet). Rather, it is a very close confederation of countries.
You know, for the first 75 years or so there were states in the USA who thought exactly that.
Maybe not. On the other hand "I'm going to kill one passenger every minute until you open this door" would probably work. Also, "I'm going to set off my bomb if you don't open this door in 30 seconds" is pretty much guaranteed to work.
No, it won't work.
Killing one passenger every minute wouldn't work, since anyone that would do that pretty much has voided any of my expectations that they would'nt continue to do so or worse once they have the cockpit.
If the terrorist has a bomb, but his goal is to get into the pilot's compartment, as a pilot I sure as hell wouldn't prefer the option where the terrorist HAS a bomb AND the cockpit.
If the owner posted the sign that said take me for a joyride, and the person did take it for a joyride (lets assume that he did return it and not just take it to a scrapyard).
How could you call that theft?
When people put stuff outside their house and a big sign saying "Free" next to it, would the police investigate that 'theft'?
You are kidding right?
His post wasn't that complex, and it was fairly clear, I'll quote it here, word for word.
"Don't do evil shit and you won't have to worry."
Now lets line it up side by side. That is exactly what he implied. Calling his post out as a repeat of the 'nothing to hide' mantra was 100% appropriate. It's not even comparing apples and oranges, it's comparingEmpire and Red Delicious.
Now I agree that we should keep discussions limited to the case at hand. However, that is exactly why arguements that suggest guilt simply for holding an opposing viewpoint are not acceptable.
Oh, so you don't really view the copyright violation as an injustice to begin with.
Not in the context of the quote that you posted. You are flipping around the context of the quote from one which stated that depriving people of their human rights anywhere was a threat to human rights everywhere. I'm sorry, but I don't view the plight of the movie industry as something even close to the level of a fight for essential human rights.
As far as you are concerned, there is no problem if nobody pays for the content they enjoy...
Excuse me, but I said no such thing. Don't try to define my concerns. If you read my post, you would see that you are attempting to put words into my mouth that are almost the opposite of what I wrote.
I pointed out that the original purpose of copyright was to give protection to the creators of information, but also to ensure that such information became part of the public domain after a limited amount of time. It was very important that they granted the creator a temporary monopoly, and it was equally important that that monopoly expire after a period of time.
If you take that to imply that I don't want people to receive compensation for their works then you are being deliberately ignorant.
Sorry, I must've missed the new Constitutional amendment, spelling out the quotas, exceeding which makes one inelligible to participate in public discourse. Could you post a link, please?
Don't be a smart ass.
And don't dodge the issue that the changes to the structure of copyright law have been changed to such a level that the original purpose and concept of the law is nearly unconstitutional in itself.
Perhaps you could point me to the constitutional amendment that removed the word limited from this passage: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
I would challenge you to find any film that failed to make a profit that didn't also use 'Hollywood Accounting'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
"In accountancy, Hollywood accounting is the practice of distributing the profit earned by a large project to corporate entities which, though technically distinct from the one responsible for the project itself, are typically owned by the same people. This has the net result of reducing the project's reported profit by a substantial margin, sometimes even eliminating it altogether. This may be for income tax reasons, but more often it is to reduce the amount which the corporation must pay in royalties or other profit-sharing agreements."
You give me 100 grand to build a home
I hire an electrical company (owned by me) $10k
I hire an excavation service (also owned by me) $10k
I hire a carpenter (I don't yet own a carpentry company) $10k
Roofing company (owned by me) $5k
Material + equipment cost $50k
General labor $15k
Look! I just spent all $100k. No profit!
Except that I made a profit through the electrician and excavation, but thanks to the clever accounting, I don't report that as profit. In fact, I may have lost money on this deal since I had to hire a lawn service to cut the lawn after (also owned by me)
Sorry that I promised you 10% of the profit, but building homes (making movies) is expensive.
He's saying that if you don't do anything to grab the attention of FBI agents (or as he calls it, "evil shit"), then you don't have to worry about those said FBI agents.
Prove it.
I think applying a quote from Dr. King to this situation is a stretch of epic proportions in the scope of the injustice.
Perhaps the true injustice is that companies with access to billions of dollars have tailored our laws to suit their own interests. These laws run counter to the original concepts of copyright that were developed outside of corporate interference.
The original purpose behind copyright was to allow these creations to fall into the public domain while providing incentives to the creator, not be used as some black-currency for corporations.
Sniping is bad from a seller's perspective.
I bought my house in an auction that allowed sniping. At 11pm I submitted a bid for a property of around $200k. The other party had no chance to resubmit a bid at that time since the auction was closing 15 minutes after that.
The property itself was appraised at $240k.
I knew that the other party would want to revise their bid if they thought they would lose it. They were trying to benefit from the seller needing to sell fast, but didn't expect someone to jump in at the last minute.
So why is that bad for the seller? Since the auction allowed for my bid sniping, the other party never had a chance to put in a counter-offer. I was prepared to go up to $215k, and, judging by their reaction, they probably would have done the same.
The sniping cost the seller nearly $15k because there was no period to re-evaluate the bids.
(Not that I feel bad, I needed the property fast too since my previous home was washed away in a flood. I was just pointing out that the seller lost out on some $ because sniping was allowed)
I was a bit sloppy with my post, thank you for clarifying the process.
The point I was trying to make was that a star just doesn't go supernova from a normal star with no 'warning' Of course, the last phase just before it reaches the Chandrasekhar limit is very short, and the subsequent collapse IS effectively instantaneous.
But it shows that the star does go through a 'series' of collapses. It was those collapses that I was clumsily referring to as giving off indicators.
For example, if the star did go nova '7999' years ago, then we would see that it was already burning carbon which would be a pretty good indicator that we were set for a light show.
The real question I have is why the astronomers seem to think that the supernova event is so near, yet outside of the normal timeline by which they should be able to determine that it is so near. If it was burning Helium, you could expect it to last one to one million years. But if it was already on Carbon, then you could be fairly certain that it would only be a few thousand at most.
This is just guessing on my part, but I wonder if they are only detecting that it is burning Helium, but that the combination of the second star in the system is 'feeding' the WR star, causing its 'life' to accelerate.
I find it interesting that you were modded 'troll'. Especially considering that most of the people in this thread are concerned about censorship. It is sad that on slashdot you get modded 'troll' for exposing what was an ad-hominem attack.
I realize that video games haven't been around all that long but..
You are reminiscing about when you were 'younger' and referencing FFIX?!
While we may not have all of the information regarding a star exploding into a supernova, I'd expect that there is at least some sort of indication that the star is nearing the end of its life. In a stars lifetime, the collapse and supernova event may be nearly 'instant', but 10,000 years is nothing when compared to the overall lifetime of a star.
Given our short lifetimes when compared to that of the universe, we are a bit like the highspeed cameras that are used to capture explosions. In our frame of reference, a popping balloon is a near instantaneous event, but to the camera it is a long, drawn out affair.
I would imagine that a supernova is similar. Instantaneous from the 'point-of-view' of a star, but aeons to a human.
If it weren't for those, the screen could be an inch bigger.
/. geek.
The screen won't magically become bigger if you remove the speakers. It would require selecting a larger LCD, and that means it would cost more. At the very least, it would cost more to add a larger screen than you would save by removing the speakers. You would then have to issue headphones with each OLPC, and probably have to replace them as they are lost/damaged/stolen.
The target audience isn't the average
Kind of like declaring that you are the smartest person North of Barrow, or the best public University in Wyoming.
We provide people who are poor, with enough money or money equivalents, to obtain sufficient sustenance. We don't, however, provide them with 5-course chef-prepared meals every night.
True, quite true.
However, there is a slight difference between the prescriptions that fight Parkinson's Disease and Foie Gras.
My income comes from things that have been heavily researched. The raw materials for what I engineer are quite cheap compared to what I charge for the finished product. ($2-3k in materials and then sold for $40-100k) So I know what it means to have to charge a premium for the research that goes into the product.
But I can also tell you that if my $70k product could save lives, you could have it for $2k.
Ironically, it is something similar to DRM that is required in these sorts of cases. I hate the concept of DRM, but if we could get these medicines to Africa and make sure that it wouldn't be resold in the US I'd be all for it. Unfortunately, the medicines that we research here in the states are easily resold back to us for fractions of what they should sell for to earn back the research dollars.
But to call it 'Filet Mignon' healthcare is setting up a false argument.
"they believe American troops are able to track down Taliban members using their cellphones."
I'm sure those companies who have physical, and known locations will get on that ASAP.
You don't notch the metal parts of the firearm, you notch the stock (typically wood) with a 3-4mm cut. One Notch per kill. I wouldn't do it for dove hunting or anything like that, but typically for larger game like whitetail deer you would put a notch in your stock when you take one down.
It's been a while since I did this, and it was hard to find someone who had 1/2 a brain to cooperate with you on a public server, but...
:D It was great for nailing tanks.
Spawn as an engineer, take the jeep and get it at the back of your base, toss in a few explosives and have someone else drive it. Detonate it at the proper time.
(You had to have someone else drive for the best effect since your explosives would vanish on the death of the engineer, but it also gave you a good view of the best time to detonate)
You should give Natural Selection www.unknownworlds.com/ns/ a try. When I played it was based on the HL engine and gave you two options, marines or aliens for a team.
One person on the marines was the 'commander' and had a top down C&C style view. He could give orders, set waypoints, hand out weapons, and progress through an upgrade tree. The rest of the marines were just plain old FPS style, but relied on the commander to keep them supplied as they fought.
The aliens on the other hand, had no leader, but information was shared between them (If one alien saw an enemy, the rest of the players could 'sense' that enemy, and you would receive notification that an area was under attack, etc. Just no central leadership mode)
It was a game that I greatly enjoyed. I remember it when it was fairly beta, had a few chats with Charlie Cleveland (he likely won't remember, but I did appreciate his discussions about building up Unknown Worlds). I sincerely hope that it grows since it got a lot of things 'right'.