KitKat1405241488

The biggest reason I don't sign up for any of these things is that most (even if they are legitimate) require you to convince a certain number of your friends to sign up. I know that I get kind of annoyed when my friends try to convince me to sign up for crap I don't want (usually with annoying spyware, as was mentioned previously), and I'd rather not do the exact same thing to others. I just see it as bad online etiquette, on par with sending chain email forwards, so I don't do it. My respect for my friends is usually stronger than my wanting a chance at some free product.

TFT stands for thin film transistor. These are commonly used in active matrix LCD screens. They are also being used in OLED display technology, which seems to be one of the more promising up-and-coming technologies. There is a ton of information on TFTs on the web because LCDs are poised to completely dominate the display market. The technology is improving by leaps and bounds, and it has the advantages of being relatively cheap and power efficient. Anyways, this is just off the top of my head. I can probably dig up some better researched information for you tomorrow, since the professor I work for specializes in displays and has a lot of technical papers and press releases and such lying around.

Mmm, lasers. Well, as much as I love lasers, I will refrain from discussing them since everyone else has done an excellent job of proving why it is impossible for a lightsaber to be made of a laser.On the other hand, if we consider building a lightsaber out of plasma, there are just as many problems. Basically, nuclear fusion reactors use this principle to operate. A plasma is confined in an area and heated up until the atoms start fusing together. The hardest part of this is confining the plasma. Once the plasma touches anything (i.e. the walls of the container it's in) it loses heat and the reaction stops. There are other factors involved, but I'll save that discussion for later. So the best way we have at the moment is to confine this plasma using magnetic fields. This has its own set of problems though. My nuclear professor compared it to trying to hold jello using elastic bands. There are certain schemes that have been set up to get around this, but all require giant elaborate equipment. It would be EXTREMELY difficult (I'd say impossible, but sometimes science surprises me) to find a way to confine a lightsaber-size shaft of plasma using only a little handle.

All these things just look like huge scams to me. As a woman, I've had my share of being hit on online, and the thought of voluntarily putting myself in that position.... *shudders*Don't trust it. Don't trust it at all.

I was watching Discovery Channel a month or so ago (yes, Discovery Channel is the source of half my knowledge ) and they were talking about going beyond HD tv. Apparently there is a film studio in Japan that has developed Super High Definition. Wait, even better, I'll link the video for you. Click here then click Japan Week -> Thursday -> "High Definition and Then Some" Anyways, as home entertainment systems get bigger and bigger, more resolution is demanded, and this entails more storage space. After a while, DVDs may not have the necessary storage capacity as we keep striving to improve our viewing experience. Blu-ray disks give opportunities for these new technologies to be viable, and leave room for more improvements. Our standards keep going up, and our perceptions of what is 'normal' for video and sound quality in movies and tv keeps changing. Maybe we don't need blu-ray disks to meet our current standards, but I guarantee we will in the future.

This is so fun! Most of the results that come up are actually me...club websites from my school, a local newspaper article from back home, etc. All the others are geneological sites, showing the birth and death date of one of my forebears with the same name. The only one that really surprised me was from a message board archive, a post that I made in 1999, that I'd totally forgotten about. I can't believe I used my real name there. That was back when I was young and naive....

<----- girlDon't worry, there are a bunch of us around. But don't be scared of the guys, most of them are really nice here :)Welcome to the forums!

Mmm, I love sharing recipes! Trying out making new things is always fun. Alright, here's a recipe I got from one of my friends in highschool. I don't know who should be credited for it, but certainly not me, so I'm putting it in quotes. This is an awesome snack recipe, and everytime I make it people love it. I doesn't even require any sort of skill, or using the oven

I had the 7 beta version, and I loved it. I like being able to sign in as Appear Offline because I have over 150 contacts on my list, and if I want to talk to one particular person I like to see if they're online first before going online. Otherwise, there are bound to be people that start talking to me, and during the schoolyear I don't always have time to talk to everyone, so that was a big selling point for me. As well, a lot of my friends have started using the msn spaces for blogs and pictures, so it's convenient to be able to see right away on my msn list when someone has updated their blog. One thing I was NOT happy about was a couple days ago when I was forced to upgrade to the official version from the beta. Having mini-sized display pictures in my contact list bothers me. The personal message box is an interesting idea, and saves some clutter in the message window when I'm chatting, but nevertheless I'm annoyed at being forced to upgrade.

This game is so fun! I'm not very good, but I still love to play. I'm considering getting the game and a couple dance mats. Usually I just play at other people's houses though. Last week I accidentally turned the playstation off while it was saving, and it erased the memory card. That was pretty crappy. Good thing my friend is fairly easygoing and wasn't too angry....but now he has to unlock all of the songs again. I offered to help, but I don't know if he trusts me to let me near his playstation again, lol.

This new table is definitely prettier, and more artistic, but not very practical in my opinion. I've had to memorize a good chunk of the periodic table for some of my courses, and I know that if my table was in that form, it would confuse the heck out of me. I remember my elements according to their rows and columns, and there are also patterns and trends in the table that make sense to have it in the form that it is currently. Don't get me wrong, I like this new design, I just don't think it should be used in teaching classes where the students are expected to learn and utilize it on a regular basis.

You have to understand that most mobile phones get tossed in the garbage after a couple years and end up in landfills. At least with this phone you can plant the casing and grow a flower at the same time. I don't know what sort of effects the polymer will have on the soil when it biodegrades, but I would think that the company has done enough research to guarantee that it's not toxic. It would be cool if someone could get ahold of the MSDS or something for this polymer so we could get a better idea of what exactly it is and what it does. I'm curious to know what triggers the degradation of the plastic. It would suck to accidently leave your phone somewhere and then find out that your case has been disintegrated.As for recycling, only very certain kinds of plastic can be recycled. It usually takes a lot more energy to recycle them than to create them new. So you're balancing the evils of plastic buildup in landfill vs environmental degradation from energy usage.@ verman: I think the idea is that you just plant the casing. The guts of the phone that contains the metals has to be disposed of normally.

However, people are highly unpredictable. Emotions and such cause things like logic to be skewed or even overlooked altogether. We can't rule out the possiblity of a third world war because in many countries political power is based on force and not on reason.

I agree that graphics are way too much of a priority in current games. Since I'm an RPGer, the first thing that I look for in a game is storyline. This determines whether or not I buy the game at the outset. Of equal importance are versatility (is the game too linear, or allow for wandering around, sidequests, etc.) and challenge (does it try to spoon-feed me everything I should do, or make me think it out and solve problems myself) and battle system (is it awkward, complicated, too simple, etc). I often don't expect much from characters and dialogue, because games are notoriously terrible for this. Good graphics are nice, and I appreciate them, but they are not necessary for a game to be good. One of my favourite games of all-time, FFVI, has basic SNES graphics. I still play old commodore 64 games on my emulator, because they're fun and often a lot more thought went into creating the game elements than the game graphics. Sometimes, modern games try to incorporate way too many features and I get frustrated with trying to learn how to play them. Increased complexity does not always equal a better game. In fact, some of the classic games such as tetris and pacman reached that status in part because of their simplicity (keep in mind that simplicity does not imply unchallenging).

I didn't own a computer for all of my first year of university and half of my second. It's possible, but requires some ingenuity to work around. I had to use campus computer labs for typing up my projects and lab reports, which meant I had to be really organized to get things done during computer lab hours. Of course, this was before I had msn, or posted on internet forums, so the only websites I went to were for checking my email (every few days) or checking course websites. In terms of going completely without using any computers, I've done that before too. It's hardest right at the beginning, but once you get used to it, it's not that bad at all. I found that I spent more time outside, or doing things like playing piano or cooking interesting things, just generally doing the things I like to do, but forget that I like to do them when I'm spending time online.

Oops, my bad. Perhaps I shall amend my previous statement to say "non-European", since the same principles apply. That's what I get for posting while sleepy. Anyways, this is what I was thinking of before:

Whoa, m^e, this is awesome!!! I used to have some of my own little systems for doing simple math, but a lot of them relied on using my fingers, which sometimes was difficult cause I could only go up to 9. But these Vedic Mathematic systems are fabulous, and I'd never heard of them before. It's actually surprising how people forget how much we owe to Arabic culture for things that are now considered 'common knowledge'. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, when most of Europe lapsed into disarray, with many of the libraries and institutions of learning razed by invaders, the Arabs had a thriving intellectual community and preserved things such as Greek classics which would have otherwise been lost. When Europe recovered, and resumed trade with her neighbours again, all this knowledge was passed on and assimilated into European culture. (Pardon my sweeping generalizations here. I'm too tired to research this to double check, so I'm just going by what I can remember.)

This isn't totally related to bombs, but whatever.Like all kinds of radiation, neutron radiation has a lot of benefits that people don't realize. The biggest one that I can think of off the top of my head is neutron radiography of turbine blades. Basically, when you manufacture a giant turbine blade for something like a jet engine, you really want to make sure it'll work cause jet engines failing in mid-air are not really acceptable. Sometimes there can be flaws or imperfections in the metal that aren't detectable by conventional methods, but cause big problems, like the blade ripping apart and getting stuck in the engine causing catastrophic failure. The way that you can find them is by shooting neutrons through the blade, basically like doing an x-ray, but with neutrons (cause x-rays don't go through metal). Any blades that have even small cracks or defects get scrapped. So next time you're flying, and your plane doesn't crash, think of the helpful neutron radiation that made your flight a little bit safer

Well, there is a dual reason that my nickname is KitKat. I had to choose a nickname 3 years ago for a university event, and this was a problem for me, since I've never had a nickname in my life. This was before I had my own computer (yes, I survived one and a half years of university without my own computer if you can believe that) so I didn't even have an online alias. So, the first reason for the name KitKat is pretty straightforward. I like cats. I think they're the best pets ever, and my ideal day at home is to be curled up beside the fire with a cat on my lap and a good book. The second reason is a little more strange. If you ever look at your receipt when you buy a regular KitKat, some stores list it as 'KitKat 4 finger' to differentiate from the different kinds of KitKats. Owing to a run-in with some farm machinery when I was 2 years old, I'm missing my pinky finger on my left hand, therefore only having 4 fingers on that hand. So KitKat seems to suit me well, and is the nickname I use for everything now.

A few of my profs are doing research into nanotechnology. The problem right now is that in order to get these 'nanobots' to do anything beyond acting as simple sensors or detectors, there needs to be some way to program them. Right now, from the technology we have, programming requires transistors, or similar devices. However, we're barely able to scale our transistors down to the nano scale at the moment, and the smaller we go, the more problems we run into. So, chances are that if any feasible nanobots are developed within the near future, they will be single purpose machines, designed for only one purpose and unable to be 'hacked'. The road to nanotechnology is going to be a slow one. There's definitely a lot of research into that area, but the difficulties are huge (for instance, quantum effects become more and more predominant in smaller and smaller structures, causing them to behave in ways that we don't expect; also normal background radiation that is always present can start to interfere with the workings of these devices). So, I'd say we don't have to worry too much yet about rogue nanobots escaping and taking over the world

When I first saw this game, I was quite skeptical at the Disney/FF mix. It just seemed wrong to have Cloud in the same game as Goofy. However, this game has grown on me a lot. I just thought that everything about it was really well done. One of the strongest points of this game is that appeals to people who aren't necessarily gamers. I convinced two of my friends (both who had never played an RPG in their lives) to give this game a try, and they absolutely loved it. All the aspects of the game are very well explained (except for building gummi ships, which was somewhat confusing) and the difficulty increases at a moderate pace, enough for the player to become comfortable with the game, but so difficult that they become discouraged. There is also enough variety that it doesn't get repetetive or boring (going out and thwacking monsters with a keyblade is also great for relieving stress ) I would recommend this game for any person just starting out. In fact, my one friend liked it so much that she went out and bought herself a PS2, and now she's playing through Chrono Cross, FF7 and FFX.

I'm currently in the middle of playing through .hack//INFECTION and it's pretty fun. In fact, I'm now convinced that it's a very good thing I don't play any actual MMORPG's or else I would never leave my computer and fail out of school So far, I'm really enjoying it. The only things that annoy me about it are how the speech balloons of the characters get in the way during battles, so that I can't see properly to be able to effectively fight the monsters. And the girls talk SO MUCH! I seriously hope I'm not all cutesy like that when I talk online because it's absolutely ridiculous.I'm going to try to find the other three, as soon as I finish this one. The fact that there's a DVD that comes with the game is a really cool bonus, IMO. It adds a lot more depth to the story, and gives you a better understanding of what you're trying to achieve in the game.

Not really. Programming isn't my area of expertise. However, I did see on Discovery Channel one time this little petri dish of brain cells (I think they were monkey brain cells, I'm not sure) that was hooked up to a flight simulator and could 'fly' a plane by giving positive and negative stimuli. But I digress. Perhaps I was too quick to dismiss Amnzero's theory. My apologies, Amnzero. Alright, so assuming we have a robot that is capable of 'learning' in some sense, there will also exist a way of 'punishing' such a robot in a way that will modify its behaviour. One thing that no one has tackled yet in this thread is to define what we mean when we discuss robots. Obviously, there is a huge difference between my computer, my calculator, my toaster and my guitar amp. All use electrical current to accomplish some sort of task which it was designed to do. I would probably consider all of these to be robots, but my definition of robot would be, 'An electrical or mechanical device which accomplishes a task." So for me, I would say that only certain types of robots, like computers, have the potential to someday possess the characteristics of humans.

Hey Amnzero, I thought your post was quite interesting. Hope you don't mind if I debate some of your points =) Ordinarily in this section of the forum, I'd agree with you, but this topic is a little different. What we're discussing here is the definition of life, and the definition of what it is to be human. Definitions are tricky things because they are by nature invented by humans, and tend to change and shift over time. They are also closely connected to each person's worldview and hence we cannot avoid bringing religious beliefs into the discussion, otherwise the discussion would be incomplete. This is a philosophical issue which has no real answers, no matter how long we debate it because it is impossible to 'prove' it one way or the other. But by hearing from a number of different points of view, we can learn, evaluate, and broaden our understanding. If I were to build a machine and program it to attack people, and this machine went out and did just that, should I then punish the machine for doing what I programmed it to do? Machines do not 'learn' the way humans do, at least not yet anyway, and punishing a machine would have no effect on it. If I change the programming however, that will change the machine's behaviour. Here you get into the tricky issue of right and wrong, and what is considered a crime. You also mention the issue of feeling, which is another whole debate in itself. Take some time to think through your logic, and I'm sure you can find where it starts to go astray.

Whoever mentioned Skype as a good program, I second the nomination. I can make long distance calls across the country and overseas, without having to pay any outrageous long distance bills. Plus, the quality is excellent. Sometimes feedback is a problem, but this can be solved by using headphones instead of running the audio through your speakers.Another free program that I like is Finale Notepad, if you're into composing music. It does require that you sign up on their website, and once in a while they may send promotional emails, but I've found these to be few and far between. I sometimes download sheet music from websites, and this program is convenient for playing a song through for me to determine if I want to print it out and learn to play it. Also, on the few occasions that I do compose music, it's much faster than writing it out by hand.