Maybe it'll be time...
...that I coughed up to replace 10.4 on my Mini, which has been happily chugging along since 2006....
327 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Oct 2009
He's a tortured artist
Used to be in the Eagles
Now he whines
Like a wounded beagle
Poet of despair!
Pumped up with hot air!
He's serious, pretentious
And I just don't care
Don Henley must die!
Don't let him get back together
With Glenn Frey!
Don Henley must die!
Turn on the TV
And what did I see?
This bloated hairy thing
Winning a Grammy
Best Rock Vocalist?
Compared to what?
But your pseudo-serious
Crafty Satanic blot
Don Henley must die!
Put a sharp stick in his eye!
Don Henley must die!
Yea yea yea
Quit playin' that crap
You're out of the band
I'm only kidding
Can't you tell?
I love his sensitive music
Idiot poetry, swell
You and your kind
Are killing rock and roll
It's not because you are O—L—D
It's cause you ain't got no soul!
Don't be afraid of fun
Loosen up your ponytail!
Be wild, young, free and dumb
Get your head out of your tail
Don Henley must die!
Don't let him get back together
With Glenn Frey!
Don Henley must die!
Put him in the electric chair
Watch him fry!
Don Henley must die
Don Henley must die
No Eagles reunion
The same goes for you, Sting!
Look at Julianh's post, third from the top:
http://www.gpsinformation.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7506
While GPS in principle can do the trick, the civilian GPS units that will be used are limited to about the altitude PARIS will need... and that would be sketchy.
Besides, as has been noted, this is way more garden-shed and therefore much much cooler.
What the hell are you on about?
The earliest known engineer was Imhotep of Egypt, ca. 2700 BCE. After that, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman, Aztec, Mayan and Incan engineering works are well documented; and after the fall of Rome, Abū al-’Iz Ibn Ismā’īl ibn al-Razāz al-Jazarī, an Arab engineer, created a wide variety of devices, many still in use today — including a catchment device used in clocks, and a reciprocating water pump for irrigation purposes.
So, um, *England* the cradle of engineering? Are you on crack?
I recently saw Toy Story 3D with my son. I was actually impressed with the 3D precisely because it was inconspicuous aside from a few aforementioned "zap!" shots. But it was far more watchable than a 3D film attraction I saw at Disney World, where it was that over-the-top all the time.
So I disagree that 3D is a "novelty" approach. TS3D did it extremely well.
And the ticket price bump was nothing compared to the fact I lost my $350 prescription glasses in the theatre. That wouldn't happen at home!
...so we can get a nice long-term habitat there for tritium mining and such. Launching bulk cargo from the moon would be a piece of cake for a Gauss-gun launcher.
However, if you REALLY want to get into large-scale raping of the Solar System's wealth, you need to go to Mars. But how do you get the bulk cargo off? Easy. Same way as on the moon: a Gauss-gun located in the caldera of Olympus Mons, which is damn near in space anyhow. Just set up an automated track up the side of the volcano from the relatively benign lowlands, and Bob's your uncle. (Insofar as that expression can be used at all for large-scale operations on another planet, natch!)
She'll be a beauty... you say the structure's 57g so far, what's the electronic payload mass?
These craft can be amazingly light. This spring I built a 4' wingspan free-flight sailplane, whose finished mass was a mere 125g + 50g nose ballast. Her name was Lulu, and she flew like a champ. I use the past tense because I was hard on her, perhaps even slightly sadistic, in the name of aeronautical expertise. Next year's plans include R/C, perhaps an ekranoplan to 'fly' in the soccer fields across the street from my home.
Here's a pint: Cheers to Vulture 1-X!
...the wings appear to have engine pods, just out of the frame. I'm guessing the red propeller warning stripes are, um, in line with the props maybe?
And a catapult is an entirely reasonable method of launching a craft of this type. There are UAV examples going all the way back to the V-1... not to mention manned ones such as the first Wright Flyer. So what's your problem?
Now, as far as GHG emissions go, surely it's better to be belching out the carbon in the lower troposphere than higher up. This is for the simple reason that low-altitude emissions have more opportunity to dissolve in precipitation, or to be consumed by plants. (I haven't seen too many trees at 15,000 feet......)
Also, hydrogen fueling does present at least the option of solar or wind water-cracking facilities which are not viable options for hydrocarbon fuels.
"Earth is a great place to pick up orbital velocity," said Tim Larson, the EPOXI project manager from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "This flyby will [get us] up close and personal with comet Hartley 2."
Oh, sure, really handy for you space-boffins and your probes! Send the Earth spiraling into the Sun just to visit a comet. The nerve!
30,000' from sea level. Yes, Afghanistan is high up. Yes, it's a bit less to lob a projectile. But (a) with US ECM tech and (b) given that it'll be unmanned in action, then shooting it down will be difficult; will reveal the AA missile launcher; and will only cost the Americans the cost of the airship, which is probably on a similar magnitude of expense as the AA missile would be to the Taliban (with a much smaller budget), so the shoot-down would be pointless except perhaps as a diversionary tactic.
The suggestions above to use an altimeter are good, but I have a simpler and probably lighter alternative.
Basically we need the pressure at 20,000m (at 16km it's 0.1 atm) to trigger the release. That implies a 10x expansion... for now I'll imagine the last 4km of pressure change will be consumed by the trigger's mechanical force, to keep things simple.
The problem with the syringe is the small piston area compared with the volume contained therein. Also, the glass syringe is delicate, expensive and fiddly. But if you had a large plunger, say 10cm diameter, the force it exerts will increase by the square of the diameter ratio, so you could get a much larger force to do the work.
Let's suppose you chose a tuna can. Now, obviously an opened tuna tin is lousy at containing pressure, but if the edges were machined smooth it could be a dandy container for a semi-inflated condom (PARIS never leaves home without one, natch). As the rubber expands it will press on the lid; on the lid, perhaps soldered or welded in place, is a single-edged razor blade. The pressure from the lid will push the blade into one or more monofilament fishing lines, which are tensioned and connected to release the plane and what-have-you.
The expansion force from this cylinder should be well above what any syringe can muster, its operation will be basically frictionless and I can't see it weighing as much as a glass syringe. The response of the lid to pressure can be controlled by springs and by the initial volume of air, thereby allowing a pressure response tailored to your needs (another thing PARIS is good at).
The only question to determine is the response to –60°C temperatures found at that elevation. Perhaps latex is not the best choice there, but a latex-free condom may work better. I guess you need to buy a lot of condoms and test them out!
An external oxidizer droptank would be huge, and the whole point is to get a spacecraft into space WITHOUT dropping large parts of airframe.
Jets kick rockets into the dust for lifting capacity because the oxidizer is ambient and does not require acceleration or carriage on the craft. This is an inherent limitation. You can carry a lot of jet engines and fuel for the volume and mass of an oxidizer tank.
The obvious reason for adding colours, as noted above, is to increase the gamut of colours available. But those changes need not be at the colour extremes; indeed, they can increase the gamut of NEUTRAL colours too.
This seems silly; you get a neutral grey by equal R,G,B signals right? Well, no actually. If you look at a video display that's not been calibrated the "white" will actually be bluish, around 9300K. It is possible to correct for the colour cast by dimming the blue, but that also dims the picture.
The solution is to add yellow light instead. Blue is an additive primary colour and yellow is a subtractive primary colour; chromatically, a reduction in one is equal to an increase in the other. Ok, the thery works but how do you decide how much yellow to add?
My guess is it's made up on the ratios of red+green versus blue. The brighter and more neutral-to-yellow tones will receive appropriate boosts, and then the screen can display wonderful paper-white and natural skin tones.
This shortcoming of RGB is analogous to the shortcomings of its theoretical subtractive sibling CMY colour. If you overprint solid cyan, magenta and yellow inks you don't get black, you get a nasty brown. So software removes some coverage from all three channels and replaces it with a fourth plate, black ink: and there you get CMYK, 4-colour process.
Now, not even 4-colour process is perfect, although it's quite good. There is Pantone Hexachrome, which adds red and green process inks. Some high-quality giclée plotters use CMYK plus pastel C,M,Y inks for best quality in pale tones. And printers can use spot-colour 'bump plates' for super-bright reds, or special finished like varnish, metallic or flourescent inks.
As you point out, the area of Antarctic ice has been increasing recently. That is actually perfectly consistent with melting, in a slightly nonintuitive way. As the ice loses its grip on the continental rocks, the flow rate of glaciers increases. This results in a thinner sheet with greater area but less volume.
This is also the type of change that is very bad news for people in low-lying areas: melting icecaps in the Arctic are floating and, by Archmedes' Principle, will not alter ocean levels when they melt. However, dropping a glacier from a valley into the water *will* displace water and, if this is happening around the entire Antarctic circumference, this could have a significant effect on world ocean levels.
...and I thought I'd seen the worst yesterday, when I saw some dude driving while using BOTH hands to drive his QWERTY mobile phone.... and leaving no hands, as well as no attention, for the task of controlling his vehicle.
Now these idiots can have 100% of their field of view obstructed by their fecking iPhones. Thanks to a screen, which, as pointed out above, will be 100% unuseable because it's out of focus*. Oh well, at least the glassestards will be easy to spot, thanks to the notch they have sawn into their noses.
* Unless the moron in question has superhuman ocular accommodation, in which case they'll just have a blinding migraine.
I was visiting Salt Lake City at the beginning of 2007. The Tribune had an article highlighting the most and least profitable Utah businesses. The worst of the worst? SCO, natch.
Never underestimate the human capacity for stupidity. SCO's insistence at beating this thoroughly dead equine is a marvelous example of human stupidity at its nadir.
The “spacing of the letters”, i.e. the overall tracking of the typeface, has a fairly minor effect on the readability of said face. Using a proper typographically-sensitive application like a page layout package, you can adjust the tracking over a wide range and until the glyphs are actually colliding or becoming so separated that they don't read as a unified whole, the difference in readability is very slight. Besides, you get a greater variation in overall tracking when you use full-justified text vs. left-justified/rag-right alignment than you would switching between two similar faces such as Arial vs. Helvetica. Long story short*, the effect of character spacing on readability is small compared to the design of the typefaces themselves.
And that's where, as others have pointed out, Arial earns a monumental fail. Its glyphs are really bush-league compared to the craftsmanship of Helvetica. Its ubiquity is a rematch of VHS-vs.-Beta; the crappier one won despite a four-decade lead by the better typeface. Who wants to put MS on trial for crimes against typography?
Now, in terms of saving ink, approaches like EcoFont are a silly idea. With the resolution of modern inkjet and laser printers, simply having a printer driver that substitutes a 90% screen on type will reduce ink usage for any typeface without a loss of readability (except in really tiny type). My 11-year-old HP LaserJet 6MP has been able to do this from the get-go... and I can also get ten reams printed from a single cartridge most of the time. Try THAT on an inkjet: you'll have about nine blank reams at the end, or you'll have paid five times as much in consumables.
So, if your goal is economy, buy a laser printer. Use the eco-printing mode when the purpose is documentation rather than perfect appearance. And don't print unless you have to.
* I know, too late now.
Serif fonts are an excellent choice for long passages of text, provided they are rendered in sufficient resolution to render the details properly. The "curly shit" provides greater definition and significantly improves readability. There's a reason why the first commercial sans-serif font was called Grotesque.
That said, Times New Roman is as bad a knockoff of real Times Roman as Arial is of Helvetica. Use quality typefaces, you'll get better results.
And on the off chance that you actually decide to seek some education (unlikely I know), then read the first half of Eric Gill's brilliant "Essay on Typography". He explains the logic and history of typeface design from the point of view of a master.
Don't bother with the latter half of the book — he gets carried away, and actually states that you cannot consider yourself a typographer until you have not only designed your own type by cutting metal movable-type characters, but you also have to actually grind your own pigments. So, yah, while Gill unquestionably understands type, he's also a bit of a nut case. :-)
of non-criminal activity resulting in criminal or quasi-criminal sanctions. Take domestic violence: basically all a woman* has to do is say she's afraid of her husband, and in many jurisdictions he's as good as convicted. Except he won't have the benefit of a trial, or any other legal protections that bona fide criminals get.
* If a man, on the other hand, is abused by his wife, then HE will take the fall. It happened to me, and to countless other legions of innocent men. That's because "everyone knows that never ever happens", and no amount of research or statistics seems likely to change that. Situations like this and other examples of blatant sexism may have something to do with the reason male suicide rates vary from 2x to over an order of magnitude greater than female suicide rates.
As the victim of an attempted homicide in the hands of my ex-wife in front of our three-year-old daughter, which was followed up by ten years (and counting) of the crime being ignored by the police and courts because it was perpetrated by a female, which of course "everyone knows never happens", I applaud your principled stand.
She wasn't traumatized, she was annoyed. Believe me, I understand the difference.
"Maybe the only way is to have a friend who you trust to act as a teenage of the opposite sex and get them to chat with the child in question. They will then find out they cannot trust anyone on the Internet and it's better to join the local sports club instead. :)"
...or, they could have your friend busted for being a paedo.
There are some major flaws in that argument. OSX 10.0 was the first BSD-based Mac OS ever, and for a lot of users it wasn't there yet. XP, in contrast, was the most popular Windows NT family member, where the line arguably reached its peak (although personally I preferred Windows 2000 in many ways).
I never used OS X much before 10.3, and I have used Macs since 1984 and Linux since 1999. I also have a bit of experience with OpenBSD, AIX and Solaris, so Unix hasn't scared me off in a long time.
The base of OS X is strong and mature. The higher-level and higher-tech stuff on top are less so, and so they are a source of trouble. But this is much worse in Windows, which grew for so long without a formal architecture that it's profoundly messed up on a lot of levels. I honestly don't think there is one person that really understands Windows. This of course is pure speculation, but I don't think it's an unfounded statement.
Now, as far as Apple "leaving users behind", on my Mac Mini at home I am still running 10.4, and there is in fact a great deal of software that runs perfectly well. Not 100%, but pretty good for a system installed in 2006 and used every day.
Happy St. Pat's. Cheers!
The singularity is effectively a point, but that's not the important criterion. The event horizon is; that is the point at which the escape velocity reaches the speed of light. A massive black hole has a large event horizon while a tiny one has a very small one, but every event horizon has a definite and finite size.
As the radius of the event horizon drops, the gradient of the gravitational field gets steeper. That in fact is what drives Hawking radiation and the enormous energy output of a microscopic black hole. It's also why a supermassive black hole will last for trillions of years while a microscopic one vanishes in a tiny puff of logic and a flash of gamma radiation.
Apple didn't drop floppies because "Mac users couldn't use them"; they dropped them because floppies have tiny capacity and they are spectacularly fail-prone.
In fact, they are so bad that, at the pre-press shop I worked at in 1994, we set up a dial-up First Class BBS so (a) a client whose floppy had cratered wouldn't have to drive (or courier) a replacement disk across town and (b) they wouldn't need to send one in the first place for small jobs. The BBS was not a small expense for us (we needed another phone line, and it used up a machine on our network) but floppies were such a PITA that it was worthwhile to us, purely in terms of reduced aggravation on our end.
And I'm not even mentioning the time (in 2001, at another pre-press joint) I tried to set up Linux on an Apple Network Server 700 machine, a large part of which *had* to be done using floppies, because my boss was convinced that Linux (as opposed to AIX, which was already on there!) would magically make it run fast. I spent two months of graveyard shifts fighting with it futilely... that was a Very Long Period Of Floppy Disk Hell. I never succeeded --- and, frankly, I doubt you would either. Even if you are a non-Mac-kind-of-'tard.