Comment Re:Taxes you say? (Score 1) 517
Bravo! Bravo! That would be an awesome stage act... call it the tinfoil monologues and do another bit about aliens. You would be brilliant.
Comment Re:Nickel and Hydrogen? (Score 1) 815
Meh, all you need to read:
"Although the reactors can be self-sustaining so that the input can be turned off, the scientists say that the reactors work better with a constant input. "
So, we have a machine that produces 8 units of energy out for every 1 unit in while consuming the nickel-hydrogen fuel, but it cannot feed back on itself? Me thinks there's a problem with their output units.
Pac-Man's Ghost Behavior Algorithms 194
An anonymous reader writes "This article has a very interesting description of the algorithms behind the ghosts in Pac-Man. I had no idea about most of this information, but that's probably because it's difficult to study the ghosts when I die every 30 seconds. Quoting: 'The ghosts are always in one of three possible modes: Chase, Scatter, or Frightened. The "normal" mode with the ghosts pursuing Pac-Man is Chase, and this is the one that they spend most of their time in. While in Chase mode, all of the ghosts use Pac-Man's position as a factor in selecting their target tile, though it is more significant to some ghosts than others. In Scatter mode, each ghost has a fixed target tile, each of which is located just outside a different corner of the maze. This causes the four ghosts to disperse to the corners whenever they are in this mode. Frightened mode is unique because the ghosts do not have a specific target tile while in this mode. Instead, they pseudorandomly decide which turns to make at every intersection.'"
Comment Re:Little difference? (Score 2, Insightful) 839
Ah see you've made my point. A trip to the new world (once they knew it was there) could be easily funded by a small group of investors. I see no small groups of investors with the technology and material to produce a colony ship to Mars. Do you?
In spirit, they are similar. The technical challenges to overcome are substantially greater. And once they are done with the technical problems, the financial costs are also relatively more significant.
Having said all of that, it is a matter of WILL alone that holds us back.
Comment Re:Little difference? (Score 1) 839
"Without constant shipments of oxygen, food, water, and many other supplies;"
There is plenty of water on mars.
becomes: "Without constant shipments of oxygen, food, and many other supplies;"
water + nuke powered electrolysis = oxygen + hydrogen
becomes: "Without constant shipments of food, and many other supplies;"
plenty of base elements to grow food; iron, calcium, potassium, in martian soil
becomes: "Without constant shipments of many other supplies;"
well yes they can't make everything. I agree that the europe->n. america was a much easier jump than earth -> mars... but it can be done. It is a question of WILL.
Comment Re:Agree - forget the ending (Score 1) 196
Have scanned the comments and didnt see this.... so
Submission + - google study of hdd failure
Submission + - BBC Debunks Itself
Pixelpump writes: "The BBC has proven itself to be a shill for the status quo with the release of it's documentary "9/11: The Conspiracy Files." The documentary builds strawman after strawman and then valiantly knocks them down, all the while leaving the real questions unanswered and unexplored.
http://www.factivism.com/content/view/77/33/"
Cold Fusion Scientist Exonerated 171
Icarus1919 writes "New Scientist reports that the scientist who discovered a possible cold fusion reaction by bombarding a solvent with neutrons and sonic waves has recently been exonerated of accusations of scientific misconduct following the verification of his results by another scientist."
Submission + - Couple who catch cop speeding could face charges.
a_nonamiss writes: "A Georgia couple, apparently tired of people speeding past their house, installed a camera and radar gun on their property. After it was installed, they caught a police office going 17MPH over the posted limit. They brought this to the attention of the local police department, and are now being forced to appear in front of a judge to answer to charges of stalking.
from the article:
from the article:
I have the utmost respect for most law enforcement. They have a difficult, dangerous and mostly thankless job to do, but shouldn't they be held accountable for casually breaking the very same laws they are supposed to be enforcing? Additionally, shouldn't we, as citizens, have the right to be able to bring this to someone's attention without having to face laughably bogus charges for our efforts?"The Sipples allegedly caught Kennesaw police officer Richard Perrone speeding up to 17 mph over the speed limit. Perrone alerted Bartow authorities, who in turn visited the Sipples' home to tell them Perrone intended to press charges against them for stalking.
Submission + - Hitachi develops sand sized RFID chips
Mazadillon writes: "Hitachi has developed an RFID chip 64 times smaller than current devices. The devices, which have enough memory to hold a 38 digit identification number, are a minute 0.05mm x 0.05mm in size. Possible uses include counterfeit protection for money and tickets."
Submission + - Full .NET application running on Linux
An anonymous reader writes: It seems there could be a place for Mono on the Linux GUI game. Many people thought Mono was going to be an easy way to port .NET Windows apps to Linux, but at the end it was just a new development platform. But it seems after release 1.2, Mono is reaching an acceptable maturity level.
Today I just checked Codice's Software blog, codicesoftware.blogspot.com, a small start-up company developing a new version control system. Their product, named Plastic, is fully written in .NET/Mono, and they finally made the GUI client run on Mono/Linux. It is probably one of the best looking SCM systems running on Linux. Is worth to have a look into it.
Have a look at the following post at their blog: http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2007/02/plastic -scm-running-on-sled-mono.html
Today I just checked Codice's Software blog, codicesoftware.blogspot.com, a small start-up company developing a new version control system. Their product, named Plastic, is fully written in
Have a look at the following post at their blog: http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2007/02/plasti
Submission + - Google developing AI
chonny69 writes: "Developers at search engine giant Google "are really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale," Google co-founder Larry Page said at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference Saturday. "It's not as far off as people think," he said.
Page also said that in the programming language of humans the brain's algorithms weren't all that complicated and could be approximated, eventually, with a lot of computational power."
