Slashdot Mirror
Using Commodity Hardware in Laboratories?
PhysicsTom asks: "I am a Senior Physics student who's final year project is based upon using common, easily available technology to replace parts of the aparatus used in various departmental labs. Currently, my main area of interest is trying to integrate certain computer peripherals (such as scanners and digital cameras) into experiments at an earlier stage, so that images gained from the experiments (such as difraction patterns, etc) can be analysed in a program such as MathCAD straight off, rather than the much less efficient methods we're using at the moment. The problem is that I am having trouble finding out about the way in which scanners and digital cameras work, and how this would affect their accuracy with respect to what I am aiming to do." Basically, how do the various hardware aspects of such devices affect their ability to accurately measure or scan the subject of the experiment?
"The information I am looking for includes things like: the resolution of their grey-scales, what degree of accuracy the motor steps at, how uniformly distributed the CCDs are in the arrays, and other issues that might affect accuracy. Just so that I can know how close to the 'real' picture what I get out of the scanner/camera is. If anyone can tell me all these boring facts for any suchequipment (preferably solutions currently available in the UK) then I would be very appreciative."
...are belong to us.
Godverdomme.
I reading The Slashdot Privacy Watch. And they say this oh no!
An Open Letter to VA Linux Concerning Privacy on Slashdot
To whom it may concern,
It has come to our attention that Slashdot is building a detailed database of every visitor and user of Slashdot. This database includes, among other personal details, an address history which permanently records every IP address assosciated with every Slashdot user and comment for all time. We are concerned that this database is a signifigant Intellectual Property asset that may be abused in the event of a sale of Slashdot by VA Linux to a third party.
In addition, we feel that keeping a permanent and indelible record of every IP address used to post every Anonymous comment on Slashdot erases whatever hopes of anonymity that endangered or threatened users may have had. To name two examples, Chinese dissidents and corporate insiders can have no expectation of anonymously revealing civil rights violations and corporate abuse.
It is our hope that given these concerns, VA Linux or Slashdot may choose to provide an opt-out option to users, whereby users could choose not to be tracked and profiled if they so request. Some discussion has been made of a Slashdot subscription service; perhaps one revenue stream for Slashdot would be to sell Privacy Rights. For a low yearly fee, a user could purchase the right not to be tracked, profiled, and logged by IP address.
Whatever steps are taken, it is our hope that Slashdot will address the current privacy concerns in public to allay our fears and to promote open discussion.
Thanks again for creating one of the most popular sites on the Internet, and all the best.
-The Slashdot Privacy Watch Team.
If you are in a laboratory you are being WATCHED!
Laboratories Dump
Broken Hearts are for Assholes. - Frank Zappa
Of course, there's the "state-sanctioned" version of how Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda got his most peculiar nickname ("'CmdrTaco' is a reference to a Dave Barry article where he lists places not to take a date. Among them is any place called 'The Commander Taco' or something like that.") and then there's the real reason for said nickname.
In order to explain it, we'll need to hop into the time machine and step back a few years to when Mr. Malda was still but a wee pup in college. So I'd like to take you back to the early 90's.
Rob was fresh out of Catholic high school, with dozens of years of Catholic guilt impressed upon and built up inside him. He'd snored his way through high school, tinkering around with nothing more than computers. Fact of the matter is that most girls don't like geeks and he was too repressed to figure out a way to approach those of the fairer sex. For that matter, he was even afraid to touch himself. Based on what little sex ed had been taught in school, he knew better than to engage in premarital copulation or let his seed touch the ground, lest he burn in hell or suffer the fate of Onan. It wasn't the bullying and the scornful glances that were the worst torture of high school, it was waking up in the middle of the night, his genitals throbbing, gritting his teeth, and clenching his perineum to abate the oncoming rush of verboten relief (after his mom found his stained underwear once, he had learned better).
But college represented the ultimate to a scrawny kid who wasn't quite sure how to play well with others. It was the chance to meet completely new people and to completely reinvent himself, a rebirth of sorts. And what kind of rebirth would it be? The kind that meant he would (finally) get chicks. Catholic guilt be damned! He'd heard that throbbing in his loins loud and clear and it was finally time to do something about it. But how? The answer was clear: in addition to the obvious major in computer science, he'd pick up a minor in art. Women would look at him and see not only the provider instincts that comp sci implied, but a sensitive heart and a mind with a flair for aesthetics as well, a heart with art in it. What lady could possibly resist such a formidable combination?
Unfortunately, all of them. A little scribble on paper saying you know art is no replacement for the ability to clearly communicate that you love it as he was finding out. Things at college were no different than in high school. The girls were still hung up on the football players, leaving him struggling to make a saving throw vs. pathetic geekdom. He discovered the concept of alcohol, figuring that cracking a sixer and his inhibitions meant that he'd be cracking their legs, but again, he turned into nothing but an incoherent mess.
A year went by and no luck, aside from ridding himself of some Catholic guilt: the liberal nature of campus and the wonders of the nascent world wide web meant that with a little (very little) peer interaction skirting around the subject and lonely hours in the dead of night on weekends when his roommates were out presumably dipping their wicks meant that he'd finally been able to overcome his irrational fear of masturbation. And boy, did he ever.
Saying that he took to it like a fish to water was an understatement: he masturbated as if he honestly believed that if he did it enough, he'd win a prize. Unfortunately discovering Usenet, he learned all manner of deviant masturbatory practices, of course convincing himself that it was all OK and that this was just practice for when he finally met Ms. Right, etc., etc. You can justify some things to yourself, but there shouldn't be any way to rationally justify getting your penis lodged in a beaker. Stupid stupid! What was he thinking? But the guy on alt.sex.masturbation had said that the sensation of a penis displacing a beaker full of warm olive oil was the most "realistic" feeling ever, so who was he to doubt? It was a heart pounding few minutes waiting to return to his normal, pitifully small flaccid state, hoping that his roommate wouldn't return to find him in such a grotesque state. His roommate was, of course, aware that Rob was wacking it like it was going out of style, but while that was mildly normal, there was something horribly wrong about having your member painfully lodged in a glass beaker. But things there all worked out and the beaker replaced his normal jitrag "hidden" underneath his bed. He even jokingly contemplated submitting the beaker half-full of swirled olive oil and rank seed as an art project, but thankfully thought better of it.
This was all foreplay to what would give him his nickname forever. Perusing alt.sex.masturbation after he'd mauled himself one afternoon while his roommate was still out, he came upon a life-changing post: the most realistic sex sensation, ever, guaranteed. Dozens of replies to the post over the next few days verifying that this was indeed the best thing since sliced bread assuaged his fears that this would turn into another Beaker Incident. So for the first time ever, Rob set out to the hardware store. Having picked up a small length of modestly gauged PVC piping, it was off to the supermarket to procure some liver.
When he burst back into his room, rosy-cheeked and visibly excited, his roommate and a few of his friends began to cruelly inquire about why he had some piping and liver. Malda, somewhere between stutter and a mumble, blurted out some half-assed explaination about "Maxwell's Demon" and "passive heating". They laughed and headed on out to "throw some brews back and nail some broads". Malda waited the longest five minutes of his life until he was convinced that they were gone, then snuck down to the microwave to heat up the liver for the longest 45 seconds of his life. Sprinting with the foul organ in tow back to his room, he stuffed the liver into the PVC pipe and then stuffed his foul organ inside of it. So amazing was the sensation that it provided that he copulated with the homebrewed artificial vagina multiple four more times that evening, finally passing out with the semen-laced liver-stuffed pipe leaking all manner of horrible fluids leaking onto his sheets. With a start, he woke in the middle of the night, scrambling furiously to hide the pipe, dispose of the pearly mistake-covered liver, and then wash his sheets. His roommate and his friends stumbled in while he was washing the sheets, and they cruelly inquired if he'd shat the bed or what. He responded that he'd had a bit too much to drink and had puked on it. They gave each other knowing glances, shoved him aside and went back to their respective rooms.
So Malda's love affair with a pipe and some liver continued unabated, and things were going well: in one of his art classes, he'd even managed to tell a (not even remotely attractive) girl that he was a comp sci major and an art minor, and was patting himself on the back for a job well done. He returned to his room high on life and ready for a few rounds with the liverpipe, and so thought nothing of it when his roommate invited him over to dinner at his friend's place. He accepted, thrusted to fruition in his unholy contraption, cleaned up after himself and then took a shower and a nap before getting up to head to dinner over at his roommate's friend's house.
He showed up at six prompt, and they began by cracking open a few Coronas and watching some TV. It was Mexican night, they informed him. Nachos and tacos: what would he like? Tacos, he responded.
At the dinner table (OK, huddled around the TV), Malda was talking with excitement in his voice about how he'd unearthed some of his old disks with shareware classics like Duke Nuke 'Em, Jumpman, Tapper and Commander Keen on them and had been playing them all afternoon. One of the guys snickered and he asked if they weren't into old games.
"*snicker* Hey, uh. Guys. Do these tacos taste a little funky to you?"
"*snicker* Yeah, a little bit."
Rob looked around, not quite getting the gist of it and responded "These taste fine. Why?"
As his roommate burst out laughing, one of the guys said "Yeah. I sort of... ran out of meat and I had to make your tacos with this piece of meat I found in the garbage near your roommate's room. But don't worry. It was all wrapped up and so it wasn't dirty... COMMANDER TACO!!"
It was then, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, that he realized that he'd been fed a piece of liver that he'd been intimate with only hours before. He ran out of the apartment crying and failed his classes for the rest of the semester, getting enough counseling and living in enough denial afterwords that he managed to graduate in 4 1/2 years like a real trooper.
So why would he choose such an embarassing nickname for a website he decided to run shortly thereafter, you ask? Who knows? Brainfart, Freudian slip, self-deprecation, therapy, anybody's guess, really. On the bright side, it's one less question that those pesky reporters will have to ask him about the meaning behind his name, right?
Small Funny Game (requires java)
http://www.flysms.com/worm/
enjoy.