rob86

The people at NASA are pretty smart and careful, but they do and have made mistakes on more than one occasion. I imagine it's not too easy to do all of this space stuff and calculate every possible variable. It's incredible how they manage to do the stuff they do at all in my opinion. Chances of it blowing apart the moon are slim, take a look at pictures of the moon and look at all of the craters. That moon's one tough rock. I think this experiment is very important because they plan to find out once and for all if water was ever on the moon. A lot of people will be disappointed if there wasn't! It seems like space is a lot more boring than people dreamed, first nothing happened when they broke into space (no heaven, no weird stuff), all searches for intelligent E.T. life have proven fruitless, even simple life hasn't been found yet. Now they're having a hard time just finding proof that life COULD have existed. And there we were, thinking that the great unknown was full of intergalactic warfare, super intelligent beings.. It's kind of disappointing, really It's strange how there is so much life on earth, yet we have found none so far outside our planet.. you think even at the least some animal that started on earth, might have evolved to fly out into space.. lol. It sounds weird, but lots of terrestrial species have evolved in weird habitats. Maybe some group of space-dinosaurs flew out into space and migrated to another planet more comfortable for them.. or maybe I'll keep dreaming.

NASA is planning to ram our Moon with two large rockets to analyze the debris caused by the explosion tomorrow morning. It's in hopes to determine whether or not there was water on the moon and also to study more into how well humans could survive there for longer periods of time. They plan to return to the moon in 2020 with the eventual goal of a manned mission to Mars and this "Destruction Derby" is part of that plan. This is a big event for people interested in space, and NASA is definitely excited about it. You'll most likely be able to view these groundbreaking (no pun intended ) events on the internet or NASA TV which is free for people who have a satellite and a FTA receiver. Tune in to either EchoStar 10/11 at 110 or Echostar 7 at 119 to watch the action live or just record it like I plan to. As for international viewers , I assume it will be broadcast live on NASA.gov and most likely will be available at any time in the future.Enjoy the show guys, and cross your fingers NASA doesn't blow the moon out of the sky. That would certainly ruin their day, wouldn't it?By the way, more information is available on many blogs and news sites, but I don't want to quote anyone's well written blog so check it out yourself on google.

Check out some kind of program that lets you view the stars and space, like Stellarium, which is free, or maybe that other one I haven't tried that lets you fly through the solar system, they have pretty accurate models of the stars/moon we see I think, I never actually tried viewing an eclipse on it, but it might show you how stuff in space works. A lot of people don't understand how the stuff outside our planet works and are scared to ask because it seems like common knowledge.. but it's really not. People know the earth spins, but not how it spins but if you find some software or animated graphics that show you this, it will be very clear and you can see the "science" behind the rotation of the things in space. There's really no need to go to mythology for an explanation.

What is also interesting is that humanity's inventions and discoveries are becoming more and more powerful. It's one thing to make a soap bomb, or molotov cocktail, it's another thing to make a nuclear 'dirty' bomb -- but what could the future have in store for us? With all the advancements of science, studies into cloning, parallel universes, time travel, space travel,artificial intelligence.. .. it wouldn't be long before some people figure out how to use these things for evil. I guess you could just watch sci-fi movies to find out what could happen! What about those mini-black holes scientists have been creating with particle colliders. There has been much controversy over their safety and whether or not they'll suck the planet in and that is under highly secure conditions with hundreds of scientists studying it. Sure, it seems unlikely that a evil dictator could build something that massive right now and not be noticed, but like computers, it's possible these devices could get much smaller and cheaper. It could be used as an "end of the world" device used at the loss of a war and create a black hole to suck in the entire planet! It would be even worse than nuclear bombs being unleashed. Does anybody know about that experiment scientist were doing that involved teleporting particles across a room? I wonder if there have been any more developments in that area, or if it was just a hoax. It sounded really interesting, to think that any teleportation is really possible.. I think I'm getting off the subject of PGP, but it's my post, I can do what I want! I think you just need a license to have PGP available for download, which the website you got it from most likely has. Here's a list of countries and their crypto laws. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

I was reading about the popular (well I guess it's popular, I had never heard of it before) encryption software called Pretty Good Privacy, also known as PGP. I was surprised to read about the legal concerns around this software and the controversy around it. Apparently, it's banned from being "exported" outside of USA and Canada because as we all know, anyone outside of North America is a terrorist. I'm just kidding guys, but really the US Government doesn't want people in other countries to use this powerful software because it could be used against them. Terrorists and other generally bad guys could exchange undecipherable messages. The creator of this software apparently fought a lot of legal battles for our rights to privacy. He got into legal trouble by attempting to share his software with the international community. While it's "illegal" to export this software, I'm assuming people outside of N.A. can download it these days.The software seems to be so controversial, that it's illegal to use it in some countries. Encrypting your private e-mails could be punishable by law. You may not have the need to encrypt your emails or anything, but I found the story of this humble software kind of interesting. In case this post bored the heck out of you, I have a general question to ask as an amendment to this post -Do you think it's right to create something if it has the potential to be misused for crime/terrorism/immoral things? For example, do you think it's acceptable to create a website with detailed instructions on how to make bombs? Do you think it's right for a genius man in a high tech laboratory to create an biological "virus" (I can't think of a nicer word for it) that could spread fast and cure all cancer, if a some-what smart bio-terrorist , incapable of doing it all himself, but capable of understanding things, could simply modify it and create a fast spreading plague that could wipe out a country or be used by dictators like the late S. Hussein for genocide? Do you think scientists should stop researching things like nuclear power, black holes etc. less they be used for evil ? Imagine the benefits of scientific research into these new areas, but imagine also that this knowledge in the wrong hands could wipe out humanity? Hmmm.. interesting questions.

GMail needs to downgrade. Ever since their updating (whenever that was) I lost the ability to "Select All Emails in Inbox" in Gmail Basic mode for slow connections. I can't understand why that feature would be missing, but I can't find it anywhere. I remember on regular Gmail you just select the whole page and it asks you if you want to do it. My Inbox just grows to huge sizes because I can't log in to the "regular" gmail to mass-archive or delete. I have to click every box by hand or I'm feeling really lazy I use a firefox extension to check all form boxes. If anyone knows of a better way, feel free to tell me..

It's possible that you could create a proxy on your home computer, give it a non standard/typical port # and a password leave the computer running and online, and at school use your computer (and it's I.P. Address) as a proxy. You might be able to bypass the blocking and show off.. For extra security use a firewall to block any connections on that port not from your school. (get the schools ip address). If it doesn't support a password, this would still be relatively safe I think. You don't want people using IP to do illegal things, you know. People often do port scans on entire ranges of IP Addresses to find open ports that could be of use to them, someone infected with a virus (trojan horse type) or unprotected web servers (Yes, thatincludes your Psionicks website!) and if you use standard proxy ports like the ones you see on proxy sites, people will want to use your computer as a proxy for lots of bad stuff!I don't know if it'd get around the blocking, not sure how they block stuff, but it might work. There are other ways besides proxy servers also to connect to your computer and use it. It's kind of neat controlling your computer from somewhere else..

Twenty cities, is that it? More than twenty countries are at risk - no - currently suffering due to circumstances that humans actually have control over. Crime, poverty, war, etc. Our very planet is at risk of being struck by a large meteorite and wiping out a city or the entire world. I don't really think we have any effect on climate change but there are so many arguments for and against that it's hard to decide what's B.S. and what's fact. I do know one thing and a lot of people have a lot to gain financially and otherwise from the climate change hype. If I were a businessman making extra profit due to people being scared of climate change, heck, I'd be a devout climate change protestor too! "Hey ma'am, did you know in 20 years, your country willl be under water and dried up (yes I meant to say that, in reality many people would be so paranoid they'd miss that contradiction) , unless you shop at my green environmentally friendly store!" Many climatologists and people who are studying this current hype get paid to research this stuff, and what happens if they say climate change is nothing to worry about, there is suddenly a lot less of a use for all the climatologists, until the next era of impending climate doom (it happened more than once). This might come as a shock to some people, but people do some shady things for money. There are a lot of intelligent climatologists, and other climate-related experts that think, or know that climate change caused by humans is a hoax. I can't guarantee whether they are right or wrong, but I think they're just as credible and educated on the subject if not more so than 90% of the people who actively protest global warming. Don't get me wrong here, I don't think we should pollute and litter our hearts out, there are plenty of good reasons to be enviro-friendly, I've seen pictures of big cities and I can't believe people actually live in smog so thick you can't see through it. There's no gain for anyone in not being environmentally friendly, but I don't like the idea of being manipulated to believe we're causing some catastrophe. One thing any person should do, is get their facts from people who know something, that means not Al Gore - not me - not some blogger with statistics he found from a site which obtained them from a guy who got them from some random persons website - and not the people running around with "stop climate change!" signs. I may not know much about Climate Change, but I do know one thing - people are strange. People get caught up in things they don't understand and spend so much time thinking they know what's going on, that they believe they know despite not really knowing a thing.

I just felt like saying that I find those highlighted keywords advertisements on webpages very annoying. I see them quite a bit now. The ones where key words in paragraphs are highlighted with double underline and in blue, and when your mouse goes over them a popup comes up. I don't know how much money it makes the webpage owners, but they really make a webpage look bad, it doesn't matter if it's a simple black and white webpage or a fancy one with graphics everywhere, those advertisements look bad on anything. If they're customizable, nobody seems to put any effort into making them look okay. Always the double underline.. If you happen to move your mouse over them, the popup doesn't go away for a few seconds too. Try seeing that with images disabled on a browser which is how I always browse, it's a bunch of transparent boxes and illegible text on text. Yuck. I don't think I'd ever purposely click on one anyway. This is how well that advertising works. On one webpage I'm looking at right now, the word "webpage" is highlighted. I put my mouse over it, it shows me an advertisement for original recipe pine tar. As if that isn't weird enough, when I hover over the word "Linux" and a popup for discount viagra pops up. Sure lowers the "professional appearance" grade of a webpage in my opinion.

Here's my reply. Hey! Just wanted to say hello, hope my reply was sufficient to answer your question. Just kidding, I don't even know what Drupal is so I don't think I'll be much help. The login looks like a pre-set thing to me, it might not be very customizable unless you do it by hand. Or maybe there are themes for drupal? This is a long shot, but maybe you could search for the html or php (whatever it is) file that contains the words "Create new account" and right above that, would be the html for your password box. You could edit that a bit, or at least find it and then ask for the next step on how to widen it and move the image. As for the right hand column, well, I think that'd be a little bit harder to edit, but you could try searching for words like "RECENT COMMENTS" and maybe there'd be some table html attributes that you could change.. of course I'd make a copy/backup of the file you're editing in case something goes wrong. Or maybe there are much easier ways to edit that stuff, I really don't know. As for the module things, well I know even less of that lol.

No I was using cron on my computer but I figured out what was wrong. I had to put in export DISPLAY=:0.

Anyone out there know much about using cron tab? I'm having some difficulties with it, I can't get my bash scripts to do anything and I don't know if it's because it won't echo to a terminal, or if there's something wrong with my cron text, or both.I think it wont echo to a terminal, so how do I do that? I basically just wanted to make a test bash script that says "hello world" in a terminal every minute.

3.11 How do I encode Xvid or DivX video with ffmpeg?Both Xvid and DivX (version 4+) are implementations of the ISO MPEG-4 standard (note that there are many other coding formats that use this same standard). Thus, use '-vcodec mpeg4' to encode in these formats. The default fourcc stored in an MPEG-4-coded file will be 'FMP4'. If you want a different fourcc, use the '-vtag' option. E.g., '-vtag xvid' will force the fourcc 'xvid' to be stored as the video fourcc rather than the default.

So let's say I was using the ffmpeg or mencoder apps to encode a video. On one of their webpages (can't remember which one) a FAQ said that if you want to encode in XVid or DivX you should just use the generic Mpeg4 codecs. I wonder why? Maybe their generic Mpeg4 is really XVid with a more generic name since it's an open source codec. I don't know, I'm just wondering what to use with these apps. There is a libxvid codec, but it doesn't seem to work for me while mpeg 4 does, and the webpage tells me to use mpeg4 anyway.

I know what DivX and XVid are basically, since I use them to encode videos, but what has me confused is that I read DivX and XVid are both MPEG4 and when I use ffmpeg or mencoder to convert, I'm apparently supposed to use mpeg4 and just give it a "DivX" or "Xvid" tag when I want to encode in DivX or XVid. I thought there was something special about DivX/XVid to make it so popular, but is it just generic mpeg4 encoding with a fancy (fourcc) name?

For some reason, I feel like trying out that Psiball thing our resident psychic phenomena expert () was posting about. I've done a bit of reading on the subject and it interested me. I think I'll do a little journal of my attempts here. To start off with I'm trying to be as confident and open minded as I can and believe in these little psi balls, because I think if these things are truly do-able, I'd have to be in a right state of mind to achieve success, but I can't help but feel very skeptical and doubting the whole thing. I mean, it does sound kind of weird, to focus your psi and channel it through your body into your hands. Since I have a feeling nobody will be reading this but Nameless, (Hey Nameless!) if you have any tips or encouragement, feel free to share.. If these Psiballs are real, I want to experience it!I don't think I'm in the the right frame of mind to attempt something like this Psiballs at this moment, but we'll see... I really don't know much about "Psi" so I wonder if Psiballs are beyond my skill level.. I don't feel energy flowing through my body

Sorry I guess I didn't understand what you were asking. I read your questions again and I still don't. How much space videos take up on a DVD depends on the combined length of the videos and the quality or bitrate they will be encoded with. I'm not sure if ConvertX lets you pick a quality. It has an option to change the so-called quality, but it doesn't seem to change the estimated overall size at the bottom. I assume it converts into a highest quality vob file then. Whether or not 4.7gb of mkv files would be 4.7gb of vob format depends on the mkv bitrate and the vob bitrate. You can make them as large or as small as you want depending on how little video quality matters to you. I don't know much about converting TO .vob format. You can also cut down on a little bit of size by encoding the audio at a low bit rate. You can encode something, then test it out to see if it's watchable. You could convert to divx and have lots of control over the parameters. Dr DivX is a good one for encoding a video into divx format I _THINK_ Dr Divx works in Linux under wine. You have to make sure your dvd player can play these things though or else they'll be useless to you. I've been looking for a good command line encoder myself to convert some .trp files to xvid or divx, haven't found one yet.. Probably didn't help you but oh well.. good luck getting replies. It's been kind of quiet around here. Nobody even removed my accidental double post yet - free extra credits, I guess!

I don't want to disagree with all these advanced users, doesn't Ubuntu come with a built in firewall-ish thing called iptables? It's not a fancy GUI, but as far as I know, it does the job, doesn't it? Firestarter seems to be the front end for it.

A true DVD contains a lot of weird looking files. I'm not sure what you call that format. Vob? DVD's are never in .avi or .divx format though a lot of modern dvd players can play those formats along with mp3s and jpeg. If you do it this way, you'll miss out on stuff like DVD Menus and your disk won't be compatible with standard dvd players that don't support other stuff. On the other hand, you can fit more stuff on, provided the dvd player you use can play that type of file.I've used Convert X to DVD and what it does is takes the video and make it into a true dvd, with a customizable menu. It's a pretty good program. I guess what you're asking is if a compressed video will expand to fit (or almost fit) the DVD. Yes, it will but it will retain the lower quality of compressed file. I'm no familiar with mkv but if you have a 700mb .avi and convert it to dvd, it will use the entire dvd.I think the important thing is length (in time), not file size. Depending on the length of your videos, you can add multiple videos and they'll still be playable like a normal DVD, with a menu. As for two full movies in divx format, no, never.You can however, transfer the compressed video to DVD as data, as you would jpeg pictures, mp3s (not audio cds!) or other types of data. Some dvd players support playing videos like this, some don't, and some do but do a horrible job of it. Your disk won't function like a DVD either, with no menus and no bookmarks or whatever. When I say some players do a horrible rush job of implementing the feature, I mean that some won't let you select an aspect ratio and you're stuck with a funny shaped video. Sorry if I misunderstood the question, I'm in a rush to post this and will come back later to elaborate and possibly make more sense..

I think it's really a toss up between whether it's better to have check points or the ability to save at any time. Like everyone else, I have experienced the frustration of playing something difficult with no option to save halfway through it. I get angry at the developers for not giving me the option. The thing is, I understand and agree completely with the arguments that having the ability to save makes a game less fun. When I play games with checkpoints, it's more exciting and rewarding. There's no doubt about that. There are so many games where dying means something, whether it's an RPG or Strategy or FPS. In tactical strategy games, when you make a tactical error a half your army gets killed, you should have to live with that loss, but I find myself restoring a recent save point and not making that fatal error. Or in R6: RavenShield campaign if I accidently sent a team to their death, I should accept that my error got my finest team blown up by a grenade, but I usually just load a saved game. In the few RPG's I've played, I save so often that I don't even fear death because there are no repercussions. I guess you could say that gamers like myself should be able to control our urges to save and restore all the time, but it's really hard not to be tempted by the ease of saving :PSo I guess in conclusion, I think that developers should limit the amount of times a gamer can save. Ignore our complaining and frustration. I think a lot more fun in the game is worth a little bit of frustration once in a while. It's always the games with limited saving I enjoy more even if they do make me angry at times. Either that or gamers should have more self control and learn to use excessive saving only when absolutely necessarily.

Ubuntu is apparently the most popular linux distribution out there, but despite that, many people still use and are dedicated to other ones. I'm just wondering what the appeal is? Ubuntu is the only "big" one I've used (not counting Puppy linux since it's not really in the same league) so I don't know much about others. I like Ubuntu, but I want to be aware of some of the more popular options.The huge amount of distros out there is overwhelming, to be honest. I mean to someone just putting their toes into the Linux-verse, I'm trying to understand concepts like, Ubuntu, like a thousand other distros, is based on Debian. There are a thousand other distros based on ubuntu, which is based on Debian. Yet people use Debian, despite the fact that there are a bazillion "improved upon" versions of it.I've done some comparing of Ubuntu reviews ot other distros, and Ubuntu always gets pretty good reviews for everything, hardware support, updates, packages, support yet many people seem to label it as a "Newbie" linux, and recommend more difficult distros, which have worse reviews in almost every area. Are they just avoiding Ubuntu because they're elitist and think if an OS is easy to use, it must suck, or are there actually good reasons for using other OS's? So, can anyone tell me why people use different distros? I gather some are used for servers, but surely people must use some for just normal desktop purposes as well..Also, when a distro is labeled as being for "experts", how "expert" is expert anyway?

You could hide the related posts by clicking the minimize icon on the top right of the box. This means you'll lose the functionality of seeing related posts, but considering most related posts are very old, and the admin haven't changed it, it might be good to just turn that feature off on your username and make the page look a bit cleaner. I hate having all that useless (it IS useless when the posts are from 5 years ago) information on the screen. For a more extreme method, you could use R.I.P. the firefox extension to remove it permanently.

I find it interesting that there you don't "die" the first time in both of your dreams. It's like it represents anxiety of something bad you fear will happen. Instead of an instant and unexpected "death" like being hit by a bus, it's always prolonged, and that's the most torturing part of anything, the anticipation of something bad or long drawn out anxiety over something. It's like falling out of a building, hitting the ground isn't scary or painful (it's over instantly), but the falling and anticipating the ground is. I think the dreams mean you're feeling anxious about something, maybe life in general. Not necessarily death, but something bad. Bad could also mean the absence of something good. Something good could mean happiness. People often worry that they will never find happiness. I'm wondering why your mom is in your dreams. I would think, in a nightmare, you might be alone because sometimes people feel alone. I guess it must mean that your mom means a lot to you and is the "rock" in your life, always there. Maybe it's not about yourself dying, it's the fear of losing someone you love. I'm no dream expert though... or was that obvious? I bet it was :lol:As for the earthquakes and tsunami's and stuff, I don't know if the method of impending doom is significant, you just might live in an area where that stuff's on your mind. I guess someone might say there's significance in the fact that it's a natural disaster, but I don't think so. I used to have recurring nightmares of being chased through the forest by people trying to kill me, because I pretty much grew up in a forest! That was pretty scary, I never had dreams of earthquakes and stuff in my life.On a humorous note, I used to have this horrifying dream many times when I was younger. It was about zombies popping up out of the ground around my home and trying to drag me under. It wasn't until a few years ago when I finally realized what was causing these nightmares. I remembered my parents let me stay up late to watch a Michael Jackson Thriller concert with them one night when I was really young and it had zombie dancers and stuff. It gave me nightmares for a decade. Ha..Ha?, Yeah....kind of weird!

I don't know how I learned to type fast, I guess just from a lot of experience typing. I don't remember when or how I switched from looking at the keyboard to being able to type without looking, it just happened gradually. I've never really tried any typing software or typing lessons for any amount of time so I can't say if they work or not. For most things, you don't need to type fast. My fingers sometimes go faster than my brain and I type something stupid without thinking. if I typed slower, I'd have to think my things through!I think it's just like anything though, you have to practice and you get faster and don't have to concentrate as much. If you've ever played a video game, you'll know that the more you play it, the faster you do things without thinking. In racing games people always crash into things the first day but after a while they can race virtual cars like a pro. Typing is like that, but more boring so it seems like learning is work instead of a byproduct of using a computer. I don't know how long it would take, but you don't have to go from 32 to 100 in a week. You can get faster gradually and improve all the time. Finishing what you want to type faster is reward enough for your fingers to constantly push themselves to go faster I think even if you don't actively push yourself to go faster. That's not to say a little extra conscious effort once in a while can't hurt.. it probably will be good. If you often look at the keys, it might be a good idea to try not looking at the keyboard as much as you can.That's probably the most important thing. Your speed increases when you don't have to think about where your fingers are going and that only starts when you make an effort to not "cheat".

I used to have this problem with Trap. In fact I think one of my first posts on here was complaining that I had to log in repeatedly. For some reason, I haven't been bothered by that for a long time. Maybe I just got used to it? There are a couple things you could try, one of which is use the LastPass extension with Firefox. It works very good, and logs in automatically, so even if Trap makes you log in, you won't have to type anything, just wait an extra few seconds. As for losing your post, there is another firefox extension for that called Lazureus, and I use it all the time on Xisto. I sometimes take a while to write stuff on here, since I get distracted and do other things, and Trap times me out and doesn't let me reply. I have to go back into the post and then reply again to get it to work. With Lazureus, it lets me right click on the box and just paste in what I had last. These are both FF extensions, so if you're not using Firefox, I don't have any other suggestions. :PI'll admit, somethings funny about Trap's log in system though. There are some forums that never log me out once in a year which is how I think it should be for convenience. If someone breaks into my home, the last thing I'll worry about is whether they hop on my already logged in Xisto account