thegreatbeyond

Whats the deal with Presidential Candidate John Kerry's military past? First I heard that he didnt follow orders and got some people killed.. or in a life threatening situation or something.. and then i heard that those are just "republican lies".

What is riboflavin?

What is albumen (as it relates to an ingredient in food)?

Satelite internet used to not be very reliable. How is it doing now in comparison to DSL and Cable internet? Are there still any problems with connection slow down when there is no satelite directly overhead? Meaning.. does the connection speed speed up and slow down as satelites more closer and farther away from your location?

When was color tv invented?

Who is the official inventor of pie?

Why doesn't duck quacks echo?

I'm sorry that it's taken me so long, but I had a lot of questions to answer, so I've been researching for a long time. I am proud that I'm able to provide this service, though.

No, I never proved that 1 + 1 = 2, and frankly, I wouldn't know how to approach it, but I've been assured that in higher level math classes, we are shown how this proof works.

I've been researching the question about packets for days, and have still not found a suitable answer, so I'm going to keep researching it and answer it later.

The problem with Kerry's military past is that it isn't well documented. On Kerry's side, he has the official documents posted concerning his purple hearts, bronze star, and silver star while in battle at Vietnam. Source: http://www.johnkerry.com/about/military_records.html On the other side, there are many veterans who contest that Kerry's awards all came from dishonorable conduct. Note that no one is contesting that he received the awareds, since he has official documentation for that, but that he didn't deserve the awards. Here are links to some of his criticisms:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/Re ... p?ID=12272
http://www.swiftvets.com/Index2.htm
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewSpecialRepor ... 0503a.html
http://www.aim.org/publications/guest_c ... mar18.html

Since it's all word-of-mouth testimony rather than documented by the military, I can't say for sure who's right. It does seem, though, that the evidence is stacked against Kerry.

Riboflavin (also known as vitamin B2) is essential for the metobolic system in our bodies, which convert fuel into energy. Source: http://www.vitamins-nutrition.org/vitam ... in-b2.html

Albumen is another name for egg-white. It has a high amount of riboflavin, as well as other protiens. Source: http://www.victoriapacking.com/egginfo.html

Yeah, satelite internet still has problems. Rain, clouds, and moving satelites often break the internet link or cause extreme slowdowns. The only real reason it's viable is because it is one of the only ways for very rural areas to get online. Here's a link to a Google answers thread about satellite internet: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=245196

The very first color TV system was invented in 1928 by John Logie Baird. It was a 30 line system (as opposed to our current 525 lines as defined by the NTSC standard (used in the Americas) or 625 lines as defined by the PAL standard (used everywhere else)) that displayed color by passing green light through the screen and deflecting red and blue light off the screen from the front. Source: http://inventors.about.com/library/inve ... lbaird.htm

The first pies were probably made by the ancient Greeks. Conquering Romans found the delicacy and wrote the first recorded recipe for a pie. Back then, though, the crust wasn't made to be eaten and was just a way for holding the filling in the pie. Source: http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/PieHistory.htm

Actually, the quack of a duck does echo. Usually, ducks don't stay near surfaces which reflect sound well, and the quack of a duck isn't very loud, so we almost never hear the echo. Source: http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/duckecho.htm

What's the longest domain name?

Domain names used to be limited to only 26 characters long, including the extension (meaning 22 characters plus a ".com"). Any domain name 26 characters long would have met the record, but recently, registrars (the companies who lease domain names) increased the limit to 67 characters (63 plus a three-letter extension). Right now, I've only found two domain names that qualify:
http://thepersonwithanewideaisacrank-un ... ktwain.com
http://thelongestdomainnameintheworldan ... ndmore.com

Without the "http://" in front, each of these is exactly 67 characters long, qualifying for the longest domain name. Since it's not really hard to make a new domain name that is 67 characters long, no one has tried to beat the record.

You completely left out SECAM(625 lines, like PAL, 25 fps, also like PAL.)(I believe they use it in France, although most places are PAL/NTSC), and PAL is most certainly not used 'everywhere else.' Japan comes to mind....

Oops. Here's a link to a page with the different lists of countries that use the three different standards (PAL, NTSC, and SECAM):
http://www.video-conversion.com/formats.htm

why are they called hamburgers? they aren't made of ham...
and what makes a sherbet different from iced cream?

Hamburgers are called that because the published recipe originated in the German city of Hamburg. Source: http://www.worldhistory.com/wiki/h/hamburger.htm

There are 4 different classifications to a milk-based frozen dessert, and they all depend on the amount of milk fat. Here's the list:
Sorbet - 0%
Sherbet - between 1% and 2%
Ice milk - between 3% and 9%
Ice cream - more than 10%
Source: http://www.riverdeep.net/current/2002/0 ... ream.jhtml

I'm still working on that packet question.

Well, I finally think I'm ready to answer the packet question, as well as provide some information about it for people who don't understand what it means.

When two computers "talk" to each other over the internet, they need to share a common method of communicating, otherwise, the two computers wouldn't be able to understand each other. For the internet, this common method is the IP protocol. There are two ways to communicate using IP: fast, but without a garuntee of delivery, and slower, but a garunteed delivery. These two are referred to as UDP and TCP. You'll often see them noted as UDP/IP and TCP/IP. In both schemes, data is organized into "packets", which are small chunks of data.

The question about packets refers to the "three-way handshake" required for all TCP connections. For TCP to garuntee delivery over an unreliable network, it needs a special kind of reply called ACK, which is short for acknowledge. If I get an ACK reply for the data I just sent, I know it arrived at it's destination. If I don't get an ACK reply for the data I send within a certain amount of time, I resend it.

The three-way handshake (between client A and server B) is as follows:
A sends B a SYN packet (to start and synchronize the connection)
B sends A a ACK packet (to acknowledge the SYN packet)
A sends B a ACK packet (to acknowledge the ACK packet and open the connection)

The question is, what happens if a third computer, C, sends the final ACK packet to B instead of A? This assumes all the information inside the ACK packet is the same, so it looks like it came from B. The answer is that B will think the connection is open and will eventually receive the correct ACK packet from A and disregard it as a resend. Until A sends the final ACK packet, though, it won't think the connection is open. If this situation happens on a turbulent enough network (like the internet) it's possible that B will send data to A when A isn't expecting it, so some data may be lost.

Source: ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc1180.txt

Chewi's Idea: What's the highest screen resolution ever used/possible?

AVS's Idea: Is invisible paint possible? Explain the possibilities of refracting light. Can you explain Star Trek's cloaking device technology?

What determines the graphics in a game, the system or the cd/Cartridge? If its the CD/Catridge how is it possible

Typically, video cards support much higher resolutions than any monitor can display, so I went to the websites of video card manufacturers to find the highest resolutions supported. Both ATI and NVidia reported the same thing: the highest resolution supported by top of the line video cards is 2048 × 1536. Sources: http://mirror.ati.com/products/radeonx800/specs.html and http://nvidia.com/page/pg_20040406661996.html

So far, I have seen two different methods of "invisibility". The first, and perhaps the easiest to accomplish, is simply absorbing light rather than reflecting it. This is the invisibility technology used by militaries to hide planes. As you may have guessed, this technique doesn't work well in a sparse environment, since it's almost as easy to see a black figure as it is a normal figure. That's why it's usually only used as camoflage in dense environments or dark environments, like jungles or the night sky. In this mehod, "invisible" paint certainly could exist, since it would be some sort of paint that absorbed light. http://www.soteria.com/brown/docs/misc/invpaint.htm

The second method is far more complex. It involves a camera and a projector. So far, only simple demonstrations exist where a reflective screen hides a camera which is linked to a projector pointed at the screen. This creates the illusion that the screen isn't really there. The same principle works if a person is wearing a special jacket which reflects light instead of a screen, since you would "see" the scene behind the person. In this method, it would extremely difficult to use just a paint to achieve the effect. Source (with movies!): http://projects.star.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/pr ... xv/oc.html

You need to be more specific with the possibilities of refracting light. Light refraction is a simple idea: light, when it enters a new medium, changes speed and direction. There are millions of ideas that take advantage of this, like the lenses in my glasses and the lenses in a microscope.

Since the cloaking device in StarTrek is a fictional item in a fictional universe, I have no hope of scientifically describing how it works. You'll have to live with the official description, from StarTrek.com: http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/l ... 70048.html

Sorry, but this graphics question has me confused. If I'm reading it correctly, are you asking whether the graphics in a game are loaded from the CD/cartridge directly, or from local system memory? If so, the answer varies depending on what system, and what program, you're talking about. Usually, to achieve maximum speed, a program transfers to local memory all the graphics it will be using, since transferring from local memory is faster than transferring directly from CD/cartridge. This principle applies on all computers, as well as most gaming consoles. Some developers, though, read graphics straight from a CD/cartridge to save programming effort. This is usually not a problem in cartridge based programs, since memory in the cartridge is almost as fast as local memory, but for CD based programs, it can render the program unusable due to long load times.