Slashdot Mirror

Yeah, but do they have a HEMI in it?

Also note that the world speed record for a radio-controlled sailing vessel (which was also 2 meters long) is 157.65 km in 23 hours 42 min in the milder waters of the Mediterranean. At that world record speed in a small RC boat this challenge would have taken 32 days.

So 79 days in a boat not controlled by a human, and not limited to a 24 hour period, in the open waters of the Atlantic is not so shabby. The speed made good over that whole journey is 40% of that 24 hour record.

And given the design of the previous record holder he is only slightly switching the design around replacing a pair of rockets strapped on a car with a car strapped on a triplet of rockets.

http://familycow.proboards.com...

http://www.guinnessworldrecord... - a healthy breed of cow (not an optimised dairy cow, which have shorter lives) probably can usually be milked for 16 years, if kept healthy.

Reminded me of a bit of Trivia about Sherlock Holmes:

http://www.guinnessworldrecord...

Also apparently there are 272 films about Dracula. Blah Blah Blah! :)

Obviously, you are dumb. Caviar is the most desirable substance on Earth, and the best comes from Russia. You don't want to cut it off, do you?

I would say the best is from Iran (if most expensive == best). And he clearly is spoiling that supply route.

The USA held the record for the longest prison sentence for computer hacking for quite a while. Turkey recently stepped up, however, and showed us all what over-the-top really means.

She fell over 10,000 _meters, much more impressive than you may have realized.

                            http://www.guinnessworldrecord...

... According to its owners, Royal Caribbean, each of the Harmony's three four-storey high 16-cylinder Wartsila engines will, at full power, burn 1,377 US gallons of fuel an hour, or about 96,000 gallons a day of some of the most polluting diesel fuel in the world ...

To the tree-huggers,

Hear me out, please

The fuel that big ocean vessels use are sticky gooey stuffs, a blend of heavy fuel oil and 'leftover residual' from hydrocarbon cracking process

The fuel has to be pre-heated to 220 degree F - 260 degree F (or 104 degree C - 127 degree C) before it can be used

I used to work in the engine room of ocean vessels and the 'ambient temperature' in the engine room, even during the coldest winter months, remains at 60 degree C to 80 degree C, which is much hotter than the hottest temperature on earth (which was 56.7 degree C recorded back in 1913 - see http://www.guinnessworldrecord... )

This heavy fuel oil is only one grade above tar, yes, the black gooey tar that is mixed with crushed rocks to make roads and highways

By "Worlds Largest" the summary appears to mean "Worlds Most Powerful" http://www.guinnessworldrecord...

LOL... Really? I mean, yeah, we don't usually read the article around here - and I'm kind of guilty of that one myself. Heck, I might even be more guilty of that than most. I almost never read the article. I do, at least, skim the summary. Yeah, a helmet would have, almost certainly, helped this person in this particular crash. There's some claim that a helmet might have actually killed him in this crash but that's a REALLY unlikely outcome.

He flipped upside down and smashed into the ground, head-first. There's no severe brain damage mentioned. In fact, he went home the same day. He probably is concussed, swollen, tender to the touch, throbbing, and has a booming headache but he's almost certainly not brain damaged. We humans are pretty tough, actually. However unlikely, people have fallen from great heights and lived to tell the tale.

Did you really "TL;DR" the summary?

As for falling and living, you might want to see this... Here's the record holder:
http://www.guinnessworldrecord...

(She feel from over 33,000'/10,000 m.)

I've just used the mighty Google so I've not read these yet.
http://www.cracked.com/article...
http://www.mandatory.com/2012/...

Those are all folks who have fallen from absurd heights and, from the looks of it - just a quick skim of the Cracked article, they somehow managed to do so without losing a whole lot of brain function.

Two caveats - I didn't actually read the mandatory.com link. I didn't load the JavaScript up to see it. The second is that #1 at Cracked is the most awesome one of them all, of course. Dude bailed out of a plane, passed out from a lack of O2, and managed to only get banged up a little bit with a sprained ankle. The dude fell a couple of miles, or so it would appear. That's kind of neat.

But, there's some more stuff for you to read - seeing as you didn't even read the summary. :/

On 25 January 1979, Robert Williams (USA) was struck in the head and killed by the arm of a 1-ton production-line robot in a Ford Motor Company casting plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, USA, becoming the first fatal casualty of a robot. The robot was part of a parts-retrieval system that moved material from one part of the factory to another; when the robot began running slowly, Williams reportedly climbed into the storage rack to retrieve parts manually when he was struck in the head and killed instantly. Robots pose a significant work-place risk, despite safety measures introduced to limit injury. In 2005 in the UK alone there were 77 robot-related accidents.

Robert Williams was the first human to be killed by a robot
Kenji_Urada was a Japanese engineer who was one of the first persons reported to have been killed by a robot in 1981

LEGO has done pretty well with it's movies and games in recent years.

http://www.guinnessworldrecord...
http://www.hollywoodreporter.c...

They must have put a lot of thought and effort into this. I'm betting that they are working on all of those things.

It's also L E G O. They have a H U G E built in fan base.

I am not sure that this will win, but I am far from skeptical.

Here's one.

A race where there is ever only one car on the track at a time?

Here's one.

The highest temperature ever recorded on Earth was 56.7 degress, still more than 30 degrees less than even a relatively cool sauna.

You can't shoehorn 600 into a 777 no matter how hard you try.

Not to diminish your point (you were probablly talking about legality rather than feasability) but I expect you probablly could get over 600 passengers on a 777 if you were prepared to throw the safety rules out the window. el-al once put over a thousand people on a 747 http://www.guinnessworldrecord... . If we assume a similar ration of "maximum legal passenger capacity" to "maximum possible passenger capacity" then you should be able to stuff about 742 passengers on a 777.

Someone should tell the FAA to go fly a kite! What if someone should decide to do aerial photography from a kite and then sell the images? What? You don't think that could happen? http://xkcd.com/kite/ "I've checked FAA regulations, and it seems that as long as the kite is under five pounds I don't need to notify them before flights." Randall Munroe (xkcd) Of course there are kites and then there are 'KITES'... http://www.guinnessworldrecord... Richard P Synergy flew a kite to an altitude of approximately 4,422 m (14,509 ft) above the point of take-off on 12 August 2000 near Kincardine, Ontario, Canada. The massive kite, with an area of 25 m (270 ft), was designed and built by Synergy himself. At its maximum altitude the kite had 7.31 km (4.5 miles) of woven kevlar line connecting it to a winch on the ground. The record-breaking flight lasted 8 hr 35 min. The kite was a high tech delta, having 270 square feet of nylon kite skin, measuring 30 feet from wing tip to wing tip, and 18 feet tall, sporting hollow fiberglass spars 1.5 inches in diameter, flying on 270 pound woven Kvlar line 3/32 inch in diameter. It's a bird, it's a drone, nah it's a helicopter cat... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Never mind the FAA, PETA might have something to say about this one >;-)

Thankfully, we have the most open and technologically-savvy Administration in history. He uses e-mail like, OMG, daily (!!11!) and has, like, the most Twitter-followers of any US President too. Seriously, like, ever!..

Nothing to worry about... Our lives, rights, and freedoms are in good hands. Please, don't hate.

but onscreen keyboards are waaay faster. because the keys on phones like the Galaxy S Pro (originally sold on Sprint, called the Epic 4G) cannot really be typed as fast or as quickly as a touch screen. the keys are too small, require too much pressure to punch in, and all that.

https://www.google.com/search?q=epic+4g&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=HSLXU9zMJ6q48gHBhIC4AQ&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAg&biw=1536&bih=725

the only benefit to physical keyboard over touch screen would be more keys are available such as Alt, Ctrl, Del, Shift, and Tab, which more traditional PC apps benefit from like remote desktop or SSH clients, terminal service, and shit like that. I also like the keyboard to double as a gamepad if they ever decided to ship one again on a high-end model, because touch screen game controls suck (I mean for FPS, platformers, and RPGs; you gotta have a regular controller).

the world record for cellphone typing was done on a touch screen. I'd wager it's twice to three times as fast as a physical slide out keyboard.

http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2014/5/fastest-touch-screen-text-message-record-officially-broken-with-fleksy-keyboard-57380/

Damn! So if I get a Mercedes-Benz S-class, it will run just fine for 45-60 years? Maybe I -should- go with that for my next car, then.

Exactly. The highest-mileage car on record is a Volvo, but I think the second-highest is a Mercedes. Mercedes even has a standard award for a million miles. That's what those badges on the grills mean.

I code, so I have a nice computer. I live on it. I use it constantly. I want a nice, reliable one. It's expensive.

However, the vast majority of folks I know want cheap crap.

Guess who they call to help them fix their cheap crap?

Guess who has learned to say "No. Get a decent computer, then call me back."

Just in case your actually being serious (and if you are, please seek help).

I going to guess that it may have something to do with the fact that it's already sold 27 million copies on the PS3 and Xbox 360 and broke six world videogame sales records in its launch week alone--making it the best-selling videogame of 2013 by a WIDE margin.

I think a boomerang was thrown further.

While this article from 2007 begs to differ, the folks at Guinness are on your side, it seems.

So my question is: what roughly is the maximum theoretical distance an unpowered flying object can be thrown by a top athlete? Assuming no wind, level ground and the usual stuff for a record.

That seems more appropriate to ask of xkcd's "What if" section.

In this case, 'The Human Battery' has already subjected himself to a trial and walked off with a Guinness World Record. The protocol isn't clear, but it apparently involved running a current through this dude while he held a cup of 15ml of water, heating it from 25 C to 97 C in 97 seconds. And while Guinness may not be scientifically rigorous - even may have an interest in allowing records to be set - they aren't exactly slouches at skepticism.

I would like to second the motion for a Randi Foundation trial of this character.

Depends on how big a blender you have. The brochure says the Cray 2 was 45 inches tall, 53 inches in diameter, and weighed 5500 pounds. [Aaaaaaand ... cue the "Yo Momma" jokes.] According to Guinness, the world's largest blender was "4.79 m (16 ft 4 in) tall, 2.43 (8 ft) wide, 3.04 m (10 ft) deep and ... [was used] to make a 1, 324 litre (291 gal / 350 US gal) smoothie." Assuming the smoothie ingredients weighed the same as water, the blender was able to handle just shy of 3000 pounds. That's well shy of the Cray 2's weight, but the Guinness article doesn't make it clear if that was the blender's maximum weight limit.

And before you try to "Whoosh" me ... it's not a Whoosh if you enjoy figuring out the answer to the rhetorical question.

At the very best he is creating harmonics which mathematically 'imply' such a fundamental.

Actually, that would be more impressive. You would have to sing two (or more) discrete pitches, without much in the way of harmonics for either one.

If an ear/nose/throat doctor says he has vocal cords twice as long as normal, and muscles that work differently, I'm more inclined to believe that he can produce a note that low, more than I would believe what you suggest.

In fact, what exactly do you think the Guinness Book of World people are measuring?

http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records-1/lowest-vocal-note-by-a-male/

The lowest vocal note produced by a male is G -7 (0.189 Hz) and was achieved by Tim Storms (USA) at Citywalk Studios in Branson, Missouri, USA, on 30 March 2012.

Timothy is the bass singer for the vocal group 'Pierce Arrow'. The attempt was witnessed by two college music professors and an acoustician. The frequency output of Timothy's voice was measured using Bruel & Kjaer equipment (low frequency microphone, precision sound analyser and laptop for post analysis).

I can read it for you, but I can't understand it for you.

Burj Khalifa is a skyscraper, not a tower. There is a difference.

As defined by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat: a tower is a structure where less than 50% of the total height is useable floor space.

In addition, the poor reception to Microsoft's focus on motion gaming

You define "poor reception" as making the world's fastest selling consumer electronics device?

sales of the PS3 are surpassing the 360 this year

PS3 is surpassing Xbox in sales? Not according to NPD, which says Xbox 360 has been outselling other consoles for 5 months now.

like they did earlier this year in Abu Gosh, Israel: http://community.guinnessworldrecords.com/_The-largest-serving-of-hummus/blog/1713298/7691.html They used a satellite dish to hold it all for the world record attempt.

Look, I can understand the distrust of anything and everything surrounding a corporate marketing push, but we should probably actually look before we call bull(bear)shit. Let's give credit where credit is due:

That's not the only video... in fact It was on national television:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXmmOmR7M9w

Here's the writeup of the event at Guinness World Records:
http://community.guinnessworldrecords.com/_Clackers-in-a-TV-ad-What/blog/2271291/7691.html?b=

and "fingernail-sized" is variable:
http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records/human_body/body_parts/longest_fingernails_-_female.aspx

(just kidding)

Really? While I understand the nature of conflict of interest, on the spectrum of things that are open to interpretation, this one seems closer to "fact" than "opinion". You walk into an airport with a laptop, you walk out without one, boom... you're one of the 12,000.

Sometimes facts are facts regardless of who's spouting them. If I told you the next new Moon was August 1, would you "take that with a monstrous rock of salt" because I was in the outdoor evening lighting business?

I believe the conflict of interest was spelled out pretty clearly in TFA: "Dell used the report to support its launch of Dell ProSupport Mobility Services"

Your analogy is pretty bad, you're talking about a binary event that we not only know to the day, but to the second. The study was done by sampling, and oh btw, if you read the study it does not say "about 12,000", it says "up to 12,000". A proper analogy there would be: Human beings grow to up to 8ft 11in in height. I'm sure you can see how a company presenting that as typical needs to be taken with a monstrous rock of salt.

If you wish to try something that hasn't been done before or have already attempted a potential record then we'll need to pass your suggestion on to our research department first. They'll decide if it's something that we're interested in establishing as a new record category. If we are, they'll draw up the necessary guidelines and send them to you. If not, we can always suggest other records that you may wish to attempt.

- http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/member/faqs.aspx

Mozilla hasn't published the exact guidelines they were given, but there are some hints in their FAQ

What does Mozilla have to provide Guinness to validate the record?
We will provide the following:
Signed statements of authentication from our judges showing that we've followed the rules and confirming our numbers.

And to address other posters who were mentioning the whole HTTP thing, it's in the rules, too:

What is Mozilla doing to make sure the record attempt is valid? Mozilla will only count downloads that are fully and completely transmitted, not partial or complete updates. We will also discard duplicate downloads with the help of a cookie system. We will be logging our downloads using Apache and these logs will be made available for audit to Guinness World Records(TM), as well as two judges - Corey Shields and Paul Vixie.

This guy http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records/amazin g_feats/unusual_skills/strangest_diet.aspx could eat all of the above.

Still, if you require the person to keep the food down then C & D don't count.

The article title had me excited for a second - as a (ex-)member of the University of Waterloo's Midnight Sun Solar Race Car Team that broke the world record for the longest distance traveled on a solar car, I thought they were trying to erase us from the record books. I guess the distance record will be safe for next little while longer. :)

I wish you guys the best in your journey ahead! UNSW, for those that don't know, has one of the most advanced photovoltaic research labs in the world and probably still holds all the records for getting the highest efficiency out of Si-cells.

Oh, I'm quite calm, just a little confused.

Your repeated use of straw men says something about your reaction to my position.

That's your reason? Hey, witchcraft also predates the US government! And so does any religion.

The Mormons do not.

But does it make marriage any less valid if the government refuses to have anything to do with it? Separation of church and state and all that? Why are you against the law only recognizing a "civil union" between any two individuals, which may or may not be marriage?

"Separation of Church and State" does not appear in the constitution.

I do not agree with "civil unions" being given equivalency with marriage, because marriage has a specific definition.

Or maybe your new analogy is drug laws? In that case, what are you trying to change -- get cocaine redefined as something other than a narcotic? In which case, why would you be opposed to doing the same thing for a gay marriage law?

This is one of those straw men that I referred to earlier. For the most part, I think that drug prohibition is good.(although I think marijuana is debatable) I brought it up as an example of how laws can be crafted based on nonsense.

Would you feel the same way if it was, say, the institution of slavery? As a country, we've been over this before.

This is a nonsensical example.

I'll bet, if you could, you'd establish marriage, heterosexual only, across the country.

If I could, I'd establish marriage as a heterosexual monogamous institution in the state that I live.

Not if they are locked up.

Murders and rapes don't happen in prison?

Why are you in favor of protecting the life of a bundle of cells, or a doll without a brain (literally!), but not an innocent adult who's been wrongfully convicted of a crime?

In cases where there are any doubts about the actual guilt of the person, the death penalty shouldn't be imposed.

I guess I'd assumed that it's self-evident that sentient life is more important to preserve than a bunch of unintelligent cells.

Does that mean that you would be in favor of euthanizing people with traumatic brain injuries or severe dementia? These people are usually only alive in the biological sense.

This "lump of cells" business is another straw man. We're not talking about that. For 6 weeks or so after conception, that's what you have but beyond that you have a little person.

Frankly, it's an insult to the children -- they have more in common with adult chimps than with first or second trimester fetuses.

James Elgin Gill was born before the end of the second trimester. Although quite small, he was a complete human being.

You have more in common with him than with Bubbles the chimp.

LK

Eli ? wasn't he called fred

from

http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/content_pages/ record.asp?recordid=43573

Oldest Driver
There are two male drivers who were issued with new driving licenses at the age of 104: Fred Hale Sr (USA, b. December 1, 1890) was issued with a driving license in February 1995 at age 104, and drove until it expired on his 108th birthday in 1998. Fred currently holds the Guinness World Record as the oldest living man.

According to LucasFilm the original originals were destroyed in the making of the "Special Editions".

And according to Robert Rankin, who told me this in a pub so accuracy cannot be guaranteed, that's not true. His mate Jason Joiner, in the course of amassing his record breaking Star Wars collection, bought several filing cabinets full of paperwork/documentation from the original shoots. In one of the drawers were... tins of film. That's right folks, the claim is that Jason Joiner has the originals, or at least enough of them to make Lucas use a 2nd generation print as the source for the "Special Editions".

http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/content_pages/ record.asp?recordid=53702

This was over 6 years ago! I know It's not humanoid, well at least maybe not from the waist down, I can't tell.. but it got a world record, and better than a badly poored bottle of beer. (in any case it looked more like this robot just fell over while holding a bottle and happened to be next to a glass!)

I recall seeing this on the telly some years ago: http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/content_pages/ record.asp?recordid=43594 The technique was to drive very fast up to the space, whack the handbrake on, and the car would rotate 180 degrees and skid miraculously into the tiny gap. I, for one, would pay good money for that process to be automated.

http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records4/Check er/CheckRecord.asp?Q=9&PID=&Answer=Yes

The Guiness Book of World Records doesn't allow longest time spent gaming records.

The gaming fun and festivities began with a round of Counter-Strike Source, went through various strategy games, and was interspaced with bouts of Unreal Tournament 2004 and various single-player games along the way. The machine was in motion for 32 hours straight.

Was this done by one person or a group? From the article you would think that the guy sat there playing games for 32 hours straight.
If it was just one person, this marathon gaming feat should be immediately entered into The Guinness Book of World Records.
There are currently no entries for marathon LAN gaming.

Wow, I guess I'm actually a little young to have heard that one ( thanks, it's been a long time since I was too young for *anything* ). I wonder if it was done before that.

In any event, it appears you should call the Gunniess World Records folks and have them issue a correction. I'm not sure but Ford's compensation package might actually have been less than Jobs', even after adjusting for inflation, what with the value of the jet and stock...

Took 13 people to roll this dude over :) http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/content_pages/ record.asp?recordid=48383

Don't forget the homo sapiens have reached weights exceeding the 600 kgs in the article.

It says right here the world record on flat ground is 167.043 MPH (268.831 km/h). That is more than double your statistic of 80 MPH and not even going down hill.

The world record is certainly not just 80.5mph:

http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/content_pages/ record.asp?recordid=52629

I don't know what speeds exactly rockets travel at, but at Mach 2 (earth relativistic since there's not air in space, but about 1200-1400MPH give or take depending on altitude)

Even a relative slow moving spacecraft travels far, far faster than the speed of sound. The average interstellar spacecraft generally cruises at somewhere around the neighborhood of 50,000 mph - roughly Mach 66. Some have been known to hit much higher speeds, but usually that's a result of a nearby planet's gravitational pull.

According to the Guiness Book of World Records, the fastest recorded spacecraft were the NASA-German Helios probes, which hit 158,000 mph during their slingshot pass around the sun.

You make it sound like Bill Gates is Hitler or something. Queue Gates = Hitler jokes. The Gates Foundation has donated an enormous amount of money to many different types of organizations that helps millions.

Not as gross as http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/content_pages/ record.asp?recordid=52680