Andrew Camacho

Paloooz. You said, "Scientists and rockets will not make our lives any better whatsoever."

You are on the internet right? I would take a guess and say the reason for that is because you enjoy being on the internet, hence it makes your life better. You know who is responsible for the internet? Not jackasses like you, but scientists. So you have already contradicted yourself.

I'm in my 20's, maybe by the time I'm 60+, if I want to fly to Spain to visit my family, my commercial aircraft might possibly go into to orbit and travel at such rapid speeds that the time to go from the USA to Spain is drastically reduced. I feel like that would make my life better. And you know where the foundation for commercial space travel is coming from? From companies like this one. The people here who have died in this accident were working to make ideas such as the one I just talked about a reality.

So stop trying to defend yourself. You know you are wrong. You are just digging yourself a whole. And I would recommend just trying to be an all around better person from now on.

apc

Paloooz. While life might be meaningless to you, no doubt because you are probably an asshole with no friends and have never accomplished anything in your life, it is not that way for everyone else.

These people were living on the scientific frontier trying to expand the realm of our existence, i.e helping to develop society. Again, this is probably something you have never done nor will ever do, so I really don't expect you to understand.

Everyone dies, no one is arguing with you about that. But it is a shame that these people died in such a tragic way and while in the process of helping us to develop as a civilization. We should sit here and wish our best to their families and friends, not make jokes at their expense.

apc

I disagree Fatima. For instance, yesterday I bought Civilization 4 with a gift certificate I had from Best Buy. The only version they had was a 3 disc CD set. So I got it.

I get home, and like I have done with other games, I went to make copies of it so I could just keep the images on my Hard Drive. This way I don't have to worry about carrying these CD's with me when I'm going from home to college etc.

But there was some copy protection on the disks preventing me from doing so! I bought the game, and I want to keep copies on my computer so I don't always physically have to have the discs on me when I want to play. What is wrong with that? NOTHING.

By the way, had I gone on a torrent site and just PIRATED the game, I wouldn't have to deal with any of this. It would have been hassle free.

So yes, DRM, copy protection, w/e you wan't to call it just hurts the honest consumer. Pretty messed up situation if you ask me.

apc

Just out of curiosity, does anyone know at what efficiency solar polar becomes cost competitive with oil (at todays prices). I think today we are getting around 20%+ efficiency, but I could be wrong.

Reference would be cool. Thanks

You mean like a missile?

Actually oil represents about 3% of the UAE revenue. Their oil reserves are also expected to be dry in about 20 years. They know this, which is why you have seen them going around spending all of their oil money on other investments in the past few years. They have been trying to diversify. This tower is meant to get attention (which I guess it rightfully deserves) so people just think of Dubai in a good way which might bring more business and tourism to the state. Whether the energy savings in the long run are greater than the extra construction costs which would save them money, I have no idea. But good luck to them anyways.

apc

Wait I'm confused. Someone explain to me why a card that you can only read is good for retailers? I mean can't I still print photos off of my home printer at home, regardless of whether or not it is read only?
I don't get it.

apc

Yea sure. Until some recently created Chinese satellite space debris turns the blimp into swiss cheese.

I think the idea is cool and all. When I was a little boy stuff like
this got me all excited.

But honestly in my opinion, a government
really has no place doing something like this. The government should
just scrap this and lower taxes instead. Or keep taxes the same and
make an attempt to lower the deficit, seeing as we pay around 300
billion dollars a year solely towards the interest of the
debt.

Eventually the private sector will have a reason to go to the
moon (given, might not be in the next 100 years), and it will be
done. I just don't see why the government should be doing this. Keep
the government small.

apc
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Hmm, this is similar to something one of my professors worked on. I'm taking this modeling of systems class here at Pratt School of Engineering at Duke and on our first day of class our teacher showed us some of her projects.

One was this software that you would plug all of these random variables into such as whether a knife, gun, poison, etc was used, whether the body was moved after the crime, whether the weapon was brought to the scene etc. It was a list of around 30 different variables that detectives could easily determine.

Anyways, they ended up determining what these variables were for a bunch of actual murder cases in the past and put them into a matrix. From this they found certain patterns.

Then they put the system up to the test. They would give it murder cases that were already solved (such that they knew who the killer was and all of his characteristics) and would put all of the background variables of the murder into the system. It would then spit out stuff like male, age 27-30, married, tall, white, etc...For all of the cases that were thrown at it, the algorithms had high success rates with good confidence intervals. I thought it was impressive at least.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/10559/33412/01582571.pdf?arnumber=1582571

There is a link to one of the papers that she published.

apc