Shpaget

You don't want a random generator, you want the pictures to be generated according to an algorithm. You need to decide on the resolution and color depth. For the number of possible combinations, the resolution is not a significant factor, but it skyrockets with the increase in color depth. A modest VGA resolution of 640x480 rendered at very modest 8-bit color depth of 256 different colors will give you a whooping 6x10^1404 combinations. If you dare to increase the color depth to "true color" 24 bit, you're already in the ballpark of 1x10^10^7. HDMI specifications allow for up to 48 bits, or 1x10^10^15. That's all nice and theoretically doable, but before you decide on that, I'll ask you one question. How do you plan on browsing/searching the pictures? It's easy with text, pictures are quite different.

If you're willing to go down that road, then this wins over V2. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/9a52_smerch.jpg edit And even that pales in comparison with this http://r.ddmcdn.com/s_f/o_1/DSC/uploads/2014/05/135344427249613408612001197_8AZ_Rockets.jpg

You (or him) should seriously not be asking for medical advice on internet. Why not have a neurologist suggest something?

Starwhip, you sure are serious about cookies. How much do you have in the wrinklers? As for you guys, complaining about me wasting your day, go and have a cookie.

Is anybody clicking cookies? It's an addictive little game where you click a cookie to produce more cookies, which you then use to buy different cookie production upgrades. http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/ I'm currently producing a little more than half a billion cookies per second.

"Always" is such a long time to be making such general claims.

Hej ljud.

Wouldn't the asteroid material you'd be firing hit the surface of the Moon and negate the pulling? You'd need to angle your thrust sideways, wasting a good chunk of it.

Also, not all programming is done for modern computers with tens of GBs of RAM. Pick up an Arduino or a PIC and you'll be counting those bytes soon enough.

Count me in. Although, it's not that unusual for the Moon to be this close. It happens once a month.

It's completely overcast here, so lucky you. It's the context of the creation of the word and intended meaning with all the doomsday associations it originally comes with that bother me. As for, sure, it does for those that don't know the meaning of the words, just like "supermoon" creates the same questions for those that don't know what that means, the difference being that "Perigee-syzygy" is self-explanatory, if you know what the individual words mean.

Yeah, I know, and that makes it even more absurd... Why is NASA using a phrase some crackpot astrologer came up with while spewing countless other nonsense? http://www.astropro.com/features/articles/supermoon/

This "supermoon" naming is really absurd. An average citizen at which these pompous news articles are aimed at would not even notice the difference in apparent size of the moon. Somebody who spends more nights in the open, staring at the stars than in bed sleeping would probably have hard time seeing the difference. This is the difference in apparent size: Prepare for the apocalypse!

You could ask the same question about paper books. You can be just as uncertain that paper pages are empty until the book is opened at that page. In this case, the author admits using black magic, while Gutenberg and his pals always tried to hide the truth.

Yeah, I don't know where I got the numbera from.

Lower case English alphabet, comma, full stop and 0-9 digits.

That's an understatement. Like I said in my previous post, entire Universe would not be enough (by thousands of orders of magnitude), even if just a single atom was used as a storage for every string of 3200 letters. If you want, you can calculate how much storage it would take to store the raw text file. There are 29 (26 letters, comma, full stop, space) symbols that are to be ordered in a 3200 long string. 29^3200 = 4,7167 * 10^4679 Multiply by 3200 to get the number of letters. 1,509 * 10^4683 If each letter in ASCII takes one byte then that is the number of bytes required. Or 1,3721 * 10^4671 terabytes. So, even if every atom in the observable universe could store a terabyte of data, you'd need 1,372 * 10^4591 Universes.

Whoa! At first, my thought was "Not possible. The number of combinations is so large that even if it only contained strings of up to 60 letters long, it would take more than the entire universe to contain it." But holy crap, 3200. The explanation how it's done... well, of course it would have to be done that way, it's thousands of orders of magnitude larger than the Universe, yet the source code is probably tiny. Astonishing. Unfortunately, Michael seems to have broken the page.

Mirrors, even the parabolic ones, are cheaper than PVs of the same surface area. Parabolic trough design requires Sun tracking only on one axis, which can be done very cheaply, while maintaining structural integrity.

That is the sleekest looking train station ever! Look at that floor and tracks in it! It looks like an acrylic display for model trains, not an actual freight train carrying tons of space rocket parts. I'm in love.

The guy I work with is an avid non reader and over the last couple of years I've worked with him, he failed to react to some very blatant references to various novels me and my other colleagues made. So I got him the first book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhikers Trilogy, and he actually liked it.

There is a good reason for this to happen, speaking from the Gov point of view. Now they can tax it. If company A mines an asteroid for resources and hauls those to LEO, it can't really sell them to company B, since they are not legally owners of those resources and if no sale is happening there is no tax. If, however, the resources are acknowledged as owned by company A, then they can legally sell them to B and the trade tax can be easily processed without any complicated paperwork. Without this, company A would need to find some creative ways to take the money from company B in return for the access to the resources. Without a legal framework to operate in, the term money laundering comes to mind. That being said OST is a joke, anyway.

If it's too cloudy for parabolic reflectors, it's just as cloudy for photovoltaics. Concentrated solar thermal is a great thing, not with sterling but a proper steam turbine. There are some environmental issues with it though. Everything that enters into the solar rays near the tower, gets vaporized.

Empty space is not nothing. It's space/spacetime. Nothing is what was (wasn't???) there before the Big Bang.

You won't find a fireworks mode on Rebel XSi (which is the 450D in the rest of the world). You can, however, set a long exposure (15-30 s), low ISO, stop down the lens and just go wild. Sometimes you'll just get lucky. If you want to get the lightning every time, get yourself a Canon point and shoot thingy and install CHDK. For DSLRs there is the Magic Lantern, but I'm not sure if they've managed to get it to work on 450D.