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JB0

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Everything posted by JB0

  1. JB0
    It's what NASA's New Horizons team wants, but official names are subject to IAU approval. So unless the IAU hates fun, those are "real".
  2. JB0
    I throw it in every now and then. It's a sort of pretty-but-dumb that I find very enjoyable.
  3. JB0
    HE'S GOT A BOBOMB!
  4. JB0
    All I'm sayin' is if they reinstate Pluto as a planet instead of just the first and best of the Kuiper Belt, they better do the same for Planet Ceres. Man, that article makes all KINDS of factual errors. I mean, impulse drives are TOTALLY newtonian! They eject mass out one end to generate an acceleration, and use inertial damping fields to allow a large acceleration from a small force. This is more like Larry Niven's reactionless thruster, which does what it says. If they're going to get something as basic as THAT wrong, it casts doubt on everything they write! More seriously... 1. NASA carefully avoided making any claims about how or why it appeared to work. They very much did not claim it was "manipulating subatomic particles which constantly pop in and out of existence in empty space." They DID claim to also measure a thrust on what he assured them was a non-functional thruster, though. 2. And what the heck is a "standard photon rocket", anyways? Why aren't they comparing it to ion drives, which ACTUALLY EXIST and offer many of the same advantages as the alleged reactionless thruster? I am interested, and await more information, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and "violates conservation of momentum" is a hell of an extraordinary claim. I expect to see this eventually deflated, but... he's successfully conning experts who expect a con, so it's inherently interesting even if it gets debunked eventually.
  5. JB0
    Oh, also... The naming scheme is a little more complicated than that. http://www.ourpluto.org/pluto It involved a public, global vote/write-in campaign and a calculated effort to maintain a multicultural presence. Macross, as it happens, was "Favored by 30% of the voters from eastern Asia."
  6. JB0
    Awww, we got a canyon? I was really hoping for a mountain.
  7. JB0
    Why is KITT missing? I feel snubbed!
  8. JB0
    That clay model was pretty sweet, yeah. And I too would like a Sophia 3rd/Metal Attacker. Even if it didn't do hover mode.
  9. JB0
    That's awesome! I have a soft spot for the M-308 Gunner. Especially the big clamp that attaches the gun to the forearm. Game itself is wildly overlooked, too. Hurts to be an NES game hitting the same year as the Super Nintendo. Not even looking better than early Super Nintendo games can save you.
  10. JB0
    Ooooooooooooooooooooooooh, he WENT THERE. It's ON now!
  11. JB0
    Which was kinda my point. Ya know, I hesitated to link that, since Wired is not exactly in-depth journalism, but it seemed legit. Shows what I know. (I caught the part about requiring a firmware exploit and that they was a recall out to disable that exploit. I guess I just assumed this was a problem in the OEM stereo. )
  12. JB0
    I agree with you 100%. A little wear and grime just makes them feel so much more "real".
  13. JB0
    My understanding is neither Golion nor Dairugger XV were ever popular in Japan. Sad, but true.
  14. JB0
    Also results in the two being different, but obviously related, toys. Which is nice, as repaints get old after a while.
  15. JB0
    It could be a self-cleaning surface, such as titanium dioxide(which breaks many materials down with exposure to UV light). In which case, it'd maintain that just-painted look until it gets damaged. And if it's super-durable too... ... I think we actually have a good excuse for shiny, brightly-colored valks here.
  16. JB0
    Have I mentioned I sit down every year or two and rewatch the Super Mario movie? It's terrible, but I love it anyways.
  17. JB0
    Which is, honestly, probably a part of the problem. It strives for an attempt at realism, then does something I KNOW is crazy. Like I said, they were working with the best information they had available(I DO note the rings were made of what appeared to be exclusively water ice), and it really shouldn't bug me, but...
  18. JB0
    I DID probably come off ruder than I intended, really. But there won't be ice accumulation in a vacuum, because there's nothing to be icing the wings up. Anything that could has long since precipitated out onto something else or been blown away by the solar wind. Large asteroids don't retain an atmosphere. Not even Ceres. Ice accumulation in Saturn's rings would most likely be from running into the ice, at which point ice on the wings is probably not a primary concern.* But Pluto has an atmosphere, and the mass needed to keep any spontaneous release of water/nitrogen/methane/carbon monoxide vapors around long enough to start accumulating on planes. So weapons fire impacting the ground would rapidly make atmospheric conditions favorable for icing. The same is probably true of, say, Europa or Tethys. *Tangentally, it really bugs me how very wrong SDF Macross's portrayal of Saturn's ring system is. But to be fair, Pioneer 11 only flew by in 1979, with the V'gers right behind it in '80 and '81. Knowledge of the ring structure was understandably scant among non-astronomers in 1982, and I can't really fault them for not knowing the rings were so incredibly thin. I SHOULD just give them points for knowing they're largely made of water ice and move on with my life, instead of worrying about the ring system being thinner than the ships hiding within it.
  19. JB0
    I'm sorry, but FROM WHAT? In space, the VF is the hottest thing in it's immediate vicinity. And the "atmospheric pressure" is so low that any ice that DOES manage to start forming on a VF (we'll say there was a recent fold accident and you flew through a cloud) will sublimate almost instantly. Not melt. Sublimate. It will transition directly from solid to gas. That said, VFs are designed to be all-environment fighters, and capable of transition between atmospheric and space operation with no advance preparation required. And presumably they operate on a variety of extraterrestrial bodies as well. Icing could be a HUGE concern on, say, Pluto. A stray missile vaporizes a water ice mountain, and the humidity goes up enough for anyone in the vicinity to start experiencing icing problems.
  20. JB0
    ALL communications technology has been disruptive to manners. Right now we're just in a phase where manners haven't caught up to the state of the art. This too shall pass. Definitely an issue in society as it exists now. But on the upside, the known interface techniques can't exactly extract thoughts from your OEM computer and put them into a foreign system. Which is not to say that hacking prosthetics would not be real, and dangerous. Makes recent car-hacking demonstrations look positively benign. And, well... most companies have proven they have no idea how to deal with computer security, including a few at the root of the traditional computing market(Hi, Apple!). Get out into less traditional markets like artificial limbs, and you start seeing people who have no understanding of why you even NEED security designing computer interfaces. To take a currently real example, you have cars where the Bluetooth receiver in the radio is connected to the main system bus with no filtration or authentication, and an attacker can futz with the AC, stomp on the brakes, disable the brakes, kill the ignition, flash the headlights, jerk the steering wheel away... because they simply had no concept of the IDEA of someone attacking their car computer. Network security was not something they ever had to think about before, and they didn't think about it this time either. Similarly, the high profile pay card theft from Target exploited a vulnerability in the AIR CONDITIONER. The AC company has not typically had to be concerned with security, and didn't design to be robustly defended. The guys making the purchase decisions don't know much about security, and decided to install vulnerable AC control software on the same servers processing sensitive payment information. Well, that depends on the system design, doesn't it? Look at how reliable a car today is compared to one from the dawn of the automotive age(when someone hasn't remotely hijacked it). Now spin that kind of progress forward a few millenia and see what the future looks like. Computer systems are in many regards far less reliable than they used to be, but they also do so much MORE than they used to. We're starting to hit the point where most people's use cases are satisfied, and they can once again focus on stability and performance improvements instead of adding more. The OS on a zentradi ship is a fixed target. It can be burned into a solid-state read-only memory format at the factory. If something goes wrong, power-cycle the computer and it comes back up as good as new in a matter of seconds... just like a single-tasking 4-MHz machine from 1982 would have.
  21. JB0
    And an excellent use for any toys you can find no better way to display. Beats hiding 'em in the closet, for sure.
  22. JB0
    This is also a common practice in liquid-fueled rocket engines. Run the fuel/oxidizer lines around the combustion chamber, use the arrangement to both keep the cryogenic lines from icing up(regardless if the fuel is cryogenic, liquid oxygen is still the best oxidizer that doesn't hate civilization*) and cool the combustion chamber at the same time. *Fluorine is an even better oxidizer, and chlorine trifluoride is EVEN BETTER STILL. Also highly toxic, highly volatile, and can cause such traditionally fireproof substances as metal, concrete, brick, and ash to spontaneously erupt into flames/explode violently on contact. So we wisely use pure oxygen instead, since it is so meek and docile by contrast.
  23. JB0
    Will the jet transform this time?
  24. JB0
    On a related note, I pronounce it maaaaaaaaaac-ROSS.
  25. JB0
    That's a name I've not heard in many years.
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