Slashdot Mirror
Insanely Great Quickies
It's quickie time! Let's get into the action with some blood and guts. cthulhubob told us about Overkill. In light of all the irritating infringement news, An anonymous coward pointed us at http://www.groucho.com. I don't know why, but
Jesper Skov thinks that having turbojets on model airplanes is a fantastic idea. Hey Doc, are you reading? Gabriel Golden submitted The Boomtrain Manifesto.
leviathan shared the l33t surfer.
According to our anonymous source, "Wired News is reporting that Danni Ashe has become the Most Downloaded Woman on the Internet. In your face, Cindy Margolis!"
Bluedove (with a little help from Wes) showed us how to pirate music and video without a computer.
alienmole gave us the origin of @.
Mantis! is a Sega Saturn obsessive. Check out his site.
Garth, while busy turning it up to eleven, told us about the upcoming re-release of Spinal Tap. On a personal note, just wanted to tell my friend Raja to get well, and that we're all thinking about him.
Actually... There was a LARGE controversy about this here in Canada, and stores were warned that there might be a huge tax, though they were never told what it was, even though they were told to start collecting for it before they had decided what it was going to be. So, not surprisingly, just before this kicked in, there was a HUGE run on blank CDs in the country. There was such a protest, though, that they ended up taxing 'regular' CD-Rs only $0.25 or so and put the big tax on "audio" CD-Rs, about $1.75. What is the difference between a regular CD-R and and Audio CD-R, you ask? Well, Audio CD-Rs are marked with some identifier that allows them to be played on certain new audio equipment (namely, some Sony equipment, I believe). This same equipment will NOT play regular CD-Rs. That sure sounds like a 'feature' that the consumer asked for. In any case, this falls under a digital home recording act, so now it is perfectly legal to copy CDs and give them to your friends. It could have been MUCH worse.
Their messages can be moderated up to 11!
--
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
That has been done, at least mounting cameras with transmitters to watch from the ground, I don't know of anyone ever flying that way though. Would imagine the field of view would be limited and unless you could also have some kind of instrumentation show up to compensate, I would be very doubtful that this could work.
It does take some getting used to, but flying a plane from a fixed position is pretty easy. If you've ever tried a R/C car, you know what it is like at first. You get quickly disoriented and turn the wrong way unless the car is heading directly away.
After a bit, your brain learns to compensate for the orentation of the vehicle and you automatically make the proper control inputs. The same thing happens with a R/C plane, only in 3 degrees instead of 2. I found that getting the PC simulator helped me the most. After a few hours of crashing the plane everytime I turned, I got quite proficient at recognizing the position and attitude of the aircraft and was soon flying inverted with no problem.
When I finally got out to the field with my trainer R/C, I had little trouble adjusting to it. R/C flying is great.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
In the RFI (Radio Frequency Interference) test: So, this test is of most impotency for us all
Really? Dude! I mean, I knew RFI was bad and stuff, but I never knew it would get like that! Ouch, I'd better go recalibrate my ham transceiver.
--
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
Spinal Tap is giving out a bunch of songs free in mp3 on their new site, Tapster
#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}
F(#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}%cF(%s))
The thing about the tax (and likely why it remains unknown) is that by paying the tax, that legitimizes my using it for piracy; I've already paid the RIAA. Why should I pay the tax to compensate for copying, and then be told that I can't copy! If I pay for something, I want it, and I have right to it.
This sort of tax is bad PR. Unfortunately, I guess it is cheaper to use the money collected in this way to pay for some glitzy ad campaign to offset that PR.
Someplace else it said the engine supplies 75N at what looks like maximum power. Now:
g=10 m/s^2.
1N=1kg * 1m/s^2 (F=ma)
So, let's assume lawn chair + human + fuel + control system + misc = 150kg.
That's 1500N so you need at least 20 of those bad boys.
I was thinking that 4 on the back of a bicycle might provide a nice assist up hill, but it would probably be loud, and I'd hate to be riding this if it blew up.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
For one, like you say, they are very expensive. They obviously fly much faster than traditional prop R/C and require a much larger flying field. Most fields in the area here around Chicago either have grass strips or short asphalt.
Another problem would be the noise. It is hard enough these days to get away with 2-stroke gas prop engines. Many of the fields around here are now sitting close to residential areas and restrictions on flying hours have been imposed because of noise (you did see the park-district R/C field out the back _before_ you bought your $400,000 town house, right?).
And aside from all that, they are harder than hell to fly. I've obviously never personally flown one, but I have the Dave Brown simulator that let's you fly R/C planes, helicopters and jets on the PC. Flying a jet is _damn_ hard. (no, actually _landing_ is the tricky bit.)
In addition to turbojets, there have been ducted-fan propelled 'jet' models around for a while too. These still have a prop for propulsion and are quite a bit slower than turbojets, but are much less expensive and heavy (doesn't need to fly as fast to generate enough lift to overcome weight) and can been seen at larger AMA events.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
www.danni.com is running "Apache/1.3.12 (Unix)",
www.cindymargolis.com is running "Microsoft-IIS/4.0".
Just found it funny to notice...
The article on osOpinion (analog "piracy") was interesting but slightly uninformed.
Wonder why analog tapes cost so much? The RIAA imposes a TAX on every one. This piracy issue has arisen before with analog cassetes and vcrs; in both cases, the RIAA was scared out of its collective minds (or what little minds it has). Eventually, the manufacturers of blank tapes were forced to pay to the RIAA a small fee for each blank tape to cover the cost of piracy. Nowadays, not that many people know about this.
--
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
I fly R/C planes, and there are almost always at least one or two jets flying at the field in los Angeles I fly at.
n asoar.htm
I'm finishing up a radio controlled rocketplane right now myself, based on the X-20 spaceplane. A friend of mine has an R/C turbojet, and he was thinking of helping me with my drop tests by taking my rocket plane up on his jet and dropping it from there for the glide tests so it would be going fast enough.
If you want pics of the plane I'm modeling mine after, check out this link:
http://www.friends-partners.org/~mwade/craft/dy
I saw gas turbines mentioned and figured I'd post a url to the Gas Turbine Builder Association. It's amazing what these guys have done. Check it out. http://www.gtba.cnuce.cnr.it/
Haven't you read RFC 1437?
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
The cheapest one they had was 12500 DKR, which translates to $1507.50 US Dollars.
So, how many of these would you have to strap to a lawn chair to get it to fly with a person in it?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
A couple of years ago I spent a good day trying to track down the name for the symbol in response to a question posed on the radio (I wonder if this team was inspired by the same question) well, anyway I never found an answer and the radio show never addressed the question again.
Now I can let them know that the answer has been found.
One correction to the article though. Amphora is a unit of liquid volume, not weight (as is also indicated in the article since it is a fraction of a barrel). Amphora's were a conical ceramic jug that were used as far back as Roman times, and have been found intact on sunken Roman ships at the bottom of the Mediterranean filled with wine, olive oil, and fish-sauce (my guess is the fish sauce was actually Ceasar dressing B^) ). Since the use of them goes back so far, I wouldn't be surprised if the symbol also goes back further than the 1500's.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Turbojets for model airplanes have been around for quite a while, at least five years, I think. Their popularity has been held down by their price and the difficulty of finding a place to fly it. They need a long runway (for a model). There is also the insurance catch-22. IIRC, it is almost impossible to find a club field that would let you fly uninsured, and the AMA won't insure a jet without a ton of paperwork. It has been years since I have flown R/C, though, so things may have changed.