> And magnets, if you're a Juggalo.
Even if you're not. Quantum theory of magnetism is pretty hairy stuff. Virtual photons, anyone?
1921 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2013
Because politicians have diplomatic immunity, right?
I guess he's getting desperate. I wonder how long it'll be before he cuts a deal with the US; it's obvious he'll do and say absolutely anything to avoid going to Sweden to stand trial for those rapes.
Meh, who am I kidding? He's of course already tried to cut a deal with the US, and been turned down.
Megapixels were a selling point early in digital camera history, one'd think that people would have learned by now that once you have more than 5-6 megapixel it's the LENS which is the limiting factor.
8 megapixels is already way more than any user of a cell phone camera will ever need, because the poor quality of the lens means that most of it is "dead" resolution anyway (so if you really DO print that 20 megapixel image at billboard size, it still wont look sharper than the 5 megapixel shot).
> Just because it is a bit bigger and has an atmosphere of sorts, why should it be any easier than the moon to start a colony on?
1) Mars got an atmosphere, meaning there's radiation protection. On Luna any permanent residents will need to stay underground.
2) Mars got an atmosphere, meaning temperature is more moderated, and wings and balloons can be used for lifting craft.
3) Gravity is higher, meaning less problem with atrophying muscles and bones.
4) Mars has has more raw materials. Mars is a planet like Earth, formed by direct conglomeration of star disk material, while Luna formed from the lightest parts of Earth's crust following a huge impact - this is why Luna is so low on heavier materials like iron.
5) Mars is not as well explored as Luna, and is also bigger and more geologically active, so there's more interesting science on Mars.
In fact, the ONLY thing Luna's got which Mars doesn't, is geographic proximity to Earth. It's easier to reach. There's no point in going there, a moon base doesn't help with things like building spaceships, but it's easier to get to than Mars. So if the point is to take the easy option and build a second ISS, then Luna is a good choice. If the point is space exploration and the furthering of mankind: Mars or Titan.
The radiation isn't that big a problem. The radiation on Mars is manageable, and unless you get really unlucky and there's a huge solar flare the radiation during the trip wont kill you either. You'll get a slightly raised cancer risk, but nothing as bad as, say, smoking.
Time because technology progresses in pace with people's motivation for getting off this ball. 3D printing, for instance, has solved a lot of the problems of getting spares when gear fails on Mars, while the Peak Everything scenarios pretty conclusively show that the Earth is not going to be a nice place to be in two hundred years or so.
Money because space colonies will take a very long time to become profitable. Yeah, there's fantasies about helium 3 and gold and diamonds and whatnot, but the cost of transport is so high that there's no substance it'd be cost effective to transport back to Earth. It might be cost-effective to transport humans out, tho, as the emigrants will sell/leave nearly all they have behind..
I expect I'll live long enough to see the first Mars colonies. With a spot of luck I'll even be in one.
I bet that even at three foot and sharp-toothedly shredding fish, it was adorable.
Speaking of awwww, I googled for a reconstruction of this mega-platypus. I didn't find one, but instead I found this:
Frankly I don't see much use for PC gaming if the advantage of the superior control of keyboard & mouse is removed. Better hardware, sure, but the games aren't written for PC, they're written for the consoles (that's why no game has pushed the PC hardware in the last five years), so the better hardware just translates to high framerates at very high res - but the steambox is made to use TV for display.
That WOULD be impressive, but I think we're really talking about differences in scheduling brought on by fuzzy logic and tiny shifts in timing, differences which seem counterintuitive to the operators (e.g. prioritized tasks occasionally being put on the backburner for no obvious reason).
> Both possibilities are equally terrifying.
Not at all. If we're alone, we've got a whole galaxy to spread into - a mere technological problem. If we're not, there's competitors, and the principle of mediocrity suggests some of them are better competitors than we are.
Fermi's paradox can be rephrased as that it's surprising we've still not been extinguished by alien invasion.
Because AFAIK not a single Earth-like planet has been found orbiting in the habitable zone of a Sol-like (yellow, main-sequence, G-class) star.
Estimates of how many life-supporting planets there are, based solely on tidally-locked super-earths orbiting around red dwarfs is really pushing the whole concept.
> the speed of sound is ~3x normal air
Oh, interesting point, hadn't thought of that. Is the sound barrier a problem for harddisks? A quick back-of-the-hand calculation suggests rotation speed in a 7200 rpm HD should be in the region 20-25 m/s, a far cry from the speed of sound (343 m/s), but I may be mistaken.
> legacy formats
DVD and CD = legacy formats? Plus, Sony will have had to intentionally disable the support, which they do because they want to lock in users to Sony's online shops. It amazes me that people like you seem to think being locked in and deprived of options is _progress_.
> Who listens to music through their TV anyway.
Who doesn't have a surround sound system?
> Sony seem to be handing them the market
They're basically playing tennis with the market, fumbling it between them. Microsoft goes Evil Empire at E3 and drives users over to Sony, then Sony remembers that, oh yeah, I'm a litigious passive-aggresive bastard, and drive them back.
I hope the Steambox turns out to be all it's been cracked up to be, and I hope it utterly destroys PS3 and XBone. Because if it doesn't, we continue the slide into locked userspaces which are not so much a "walled garden" as a prison.
Oh, I know, the Russian Wikileaks site. It's thoroughly infiltrated, to the point that one of associate has been caught sending information about human rights activists to Belarus' psychopathic dictator Lukashenka.
People have this belief that prisoners only make license plates or break rocks. Not so:
Much of the US manufacturing jobs have disappeared behind bars, not to China.
Reddit occasionally cracks down on the worst subreddits, and one of the most prominent CP peddlers at Reddit got exposed. But since Reddit is very haphazard in its approach to CP and violent porn, it always comes creeping back.
That said, the ugliest smut stays in their own designated cesspools, and don't really disturb the rest of the site much. Personally I find the countless shills and paid propagandists more annoying, as they're everywhere.
...so law enforcement, secret services, laywers, ISP:s, copyright organizations, employers, prospective employers -- in short everyone + dog EXCEPT private citizens -- can track and monitor us on the net, instead of the excessive privacy we have today when we may say things which might upset our governments, RIAA or Paris Hilton without anyone knowing it was us who said it.
And the irony of it is that this "excessive" privacy is already mostly an illusion, at least in Europe, where in most countries ISP:s are required to keep records of what you do on the, for law enforcement to peruse at their convenience.
> A TRUE Libertarian distrusts government, period. They're essentially anarchists.
No, not really. Libertarianism is simply egoism elevated to political principle, the credo of libertarianism is "fuck you I got mine". Yes they hate the state, but not out of principle like leftist anarchists do, but because the state is funded through tax money, they're anti-tax, because taxation, dontyouknow, is theft.
All their positions follow from that: they're opposed to war not because people die but because wars cost tax money; they're opposed to environmental protection not because they don't believe nature is being damaged, but because environmental protection cost tax- and corporate money; they're in favor of legal drugs and guns because it doesn't cost tax money (plus companies can make money off them); they're opposed to immigration because that costs tax money; they're opposed to aid to disaster victims because that costs tax money... and so on and so on.
There isn't a single position of libertarians which isn't motivated by Fuck You I Got Mine.
As long as they, personally, don't have to pay taxes, they're perfectly OK with the state being an oppressive dictatorship to everyone else.
> Libertarians want to lead their own lives as free of government interference as possible
No no no, libertarians just want theirs. They don't give a shit about anyone else, and in Russia and China, if you're rich and connected (and all libertarians imagine that they would be if it wasn't for the nanny state getting in their way) you're above the law, and can do whatever you want. Free of government interference.
That the plebs get thrown into prison - well, that just serves them right for being statists.
> Really, these are all of interest only for the nostalgic value to those who played them back then.
Running them in the emulator makes you realize that memories are cheating and they are all horrid crud.
They were good for their time, but times have changed. A lot. After some bad experiences replaying old games like Lords of Midnight, I now avoid replaying my old favorites because I know I'll just be disappointed.
They have nostalgic and cultural value and were in their time great games, but they're not good games if judged by their own merit against todays games.
(But since they at least were good once, they're still firmly ahead of ancient gnostic manuscripts!)