When I worked for American Rocket Company in 1988-89, we used 80% Hydrogen Peroxide as fuel for our thrust vector control system. Sixteen injectors at the throat of the main engine nozzle under computer control squirted H2O2 into the plume and it deflected the plume, and therefore the thrust, by enough to steer a rocket.
This was really nasty stuff. IIRC, the only place we could get it was Germany, and we had to jump through all kinds of transportation safety hoops just to get it over here. 80% is a very high concentration, I don't know if Carmack needs this much or not. Peroxide you get at the drug store is 3% H2O2 and 97% H2O.
One of the test valves came back from our engine test site at Edwards and we rinsed it thoroughly with water. Still, when I handled it, traces of the peroxide burned my skin. Very nasty, very painful.
We also worked with other cool stuff like LOX (oxidizer), Silane (for ignition), and my favorite gas, Nitrous Oxide (another oxidizer, self-pressurizing and fun at parties!). I still have a hunk of polybutadiene rocket fuel on my desk as a souvenier; we used to cast that stuff into all kinds of fun shapes, including some you wouldn't be able to show your mother.
The referenced article is much more informative and revealing than the Reuters twinkie-bite of a story and brings up issues that deserve discussion.
Namely:
The proposed regulation would allow consumers to make at least one copy of most programs, with the main exception being those delivered via pay-per-view and video-on-demand services. Programs that cannot be copied could still be delayed as long as 90 minutes by viewers with personal video recorders...
Now wait a minute... either you can record a copy of a PPV program or you can't. Delaying and pausing using a PVR is done by recording, so does this proposed regulation imply that a PPV program can be recorded, but is then somehow erased or locked?
I have a couple of problems with this. First, I don't want the cable provider (or anyone) to have that much control over data on my media. And I think the average Joe Six-gig is going to feel the same way.
Which leads me to the second misgiving: someone will find a way around it. What if I hack my TiVo? What if I turn it off, or lose power, or otherwise interfere with the deleting or locking process? This will just give the cable companies (and Hollywood) the excuse to impose more and more restrictions on their content, or demand more and more access and control over the contents of my mass storage devices.
And why 90 minutes? Who decided that was fair? Why not 24 hours? Where was the consumer included in this decision? Oh... I forgot, this is not about the consumer, it's about 3) PROFIT!!!
pay them the two weeks or whatever but don't let them back on site
Well, that's good advice, but it's not enough, as the following two stories illustrate:
In 1989 I worked for a small startup company that was all Mac, and used an Appletalk network. Also on the network was a couple modems so that execs could dial in. Well, the company's flagship product failed catastrophically and the staff was eventually laid off in waves. When the Mac admin was laid off, he dialed in and found the admin account password had not been changed. So he composed a short Word document and sent 999 copies to every printer on the network, guaranteed to cause them to broadcast "out of paper" messages and give the document maximum exposure. The document was a quote from the catty blonde executive secretary:
I've been at the bottom and I've been at the top, and I don't care how much dick I have to suck, I'm staying at the top.
Of course, this valuable woman (indeed a hottie) still worked there. And when she found this document overflowing the outbins of every printer in the building, what did she do? She went around the office with a stack of them in her hand shrieking, "Did you do this?" at everyone...
That sysadmin became one of my closest friends.
At my current job, the Technical Publications interleaf network was brought down when the real admin deleted an account. At some point in the past she had brought in an "expert" from our software department -- a college student. A cocky, arrogant sonofabitch as I recall... I met him a few times and didn't take well to his air of superiority and disdain for others.
Anyway, the fix was simple, but annoying. When he was in there doing the job she asked for, he set up a chron job that would delete the password file if it discovered his account had been deleted. Well, it was, and so... no logins for an entire day.
This was years and years ago, before most management was aware of the seriousness of computer sabotage. I tried to explain to management the seriousness of the act, and the ethical bankruptcy that was required to do such a thing. They brushed me off, and the kid was eventually hired on a full time basis. So it didn't suprise me when the same thing happened on the software configuration management server after the guy quit a couple years later.
You say that as if TOS were something better? Gimme a break -- ST:TOS was cheesier than than a Kraft boxed dinner.
That's why it was great!
What ST:TNGdidn't have enough of, as compared to TOS, was breasts. Yes, you heard me, T and A. Sure, Marina Sirtis was easy to look at, but TOS had towering amazon blondes, hardbodied brunettes in fur bikinis, green-skinned dancing girls, and hordes of fem-bots, not to mention Terri Garr and Mariette Hartley in their primes.
Well, I don't have to repress as much memory as the rest of you. I waited for STV on video, and then when I eventually got a copy I watched the first half hour or so, and that was enough.
By the time that a greying middle-aged man armed only with a paunch and lame pseudo-religious jargon had single-handedly taken over the Enterprise, I had had enough. I rewound the tape, took it back to the video store, and said "This movie is defective, I'd like to return it."
And I wasn't lying.
Re:I wonder how much of this is quality . . .
on
Critics Pan Nemesis
·
· Score: 2
Well, then you won't like Queen of Angels, either, since it dives into Santaria by the end, but it's still one of his best novels, and you should read it as a lead in to Slant -- possibly more up your alley.
But the best way to tell whether or not you like an author is to read his/her shorts...
[in the morning] it's "more talk," [...] and almost no rock, except for when they want to take a dump
That's the way it's been on the "Mark and Brian Show" for years on KLOS here in LA. In fact, they even have the nerve to use the term "break" to describe the content of their show, as if the format of their program is music with some talk between songs.
In reality, they play one song, talk over the last 30 seconds of it, and then do their inane antics for another 20 minutes. Usually while one is cracking wise, the other is guffawing like a hick into his microphone. Then they'll play 10 minutes of commercials, and lead in to the next "break" with another song, and not necessarily the whole track.
And this format was so successful that nearly every other station in the market copied it for the AM hours, and the Mark and Brian Show is now syndicated in umpteen cities up and down the west coast and midwest.
And the really annoying thing is that these two buffoons steal all their content from the only morning show that's even sometimes funny, the Kevin and Bean program on competing KROQ.
Thank god for NPR. The LA radio market is the worst music that I've ever encountered. It's stupefying... If it weren't for KCRW, I'd never hear any music that wasn't brodacast courtesy of payola.
I'm glad somebody gets it. That's the number one most annoying thing I encounter, even when just reading the news on sites like Yahoo and the NYT.
Advertisements on three or more sides of the content are in constant motion in my peripheral vision and it makes it nearly impossible to concentrate on the actual content. Sometimes it require so much effort to ignore the distractions at the periphery of the page that I don't absorb any of the information in the article, even though my eyes are scanning the words. It is supremely frustrating to have to read an article two or three times just so the content can penetrate the noise of the advertizing. I could absorb and retain more if I were reading while stoned.
Even the printable versions of stories now have animated ads, especially on sites like NYT. That used to be my refuge from the noise and distraction, but even that sanctuary has been violated.
But I have to say I really like the idea of the "Ultramercial" on Salon. I voluntarily submit to a click thru series of advertisements and then I can go an concentrate on the content in a casual manner. If I have to be subjected to advertisements, then let's get it over with so I can get on to the rewarding part of the session... the reason why I came to your site in the first place.
It seems to me that the trend for larger and larget banner ads is a symptom of a failing advertising model. People are ignoring them more and more so you have to be more and more annoying. At some point, the audience is going to opt out of visiting your site altogether because the content has been pushed to the margins and the advertisements fill the screen.
Perhaps you should reconsider your evaluation of the accuracy of Google's targeted advertisements. Those who keep livestock, for whatever purpose, will also need to purchase silage for their stables.
In other words, goat fuxx0rs need goat feed, too.
Re:Might as well post a joke -
on
Science Askew
·
· Score: 1
the QDB Top 50 [bash.org] and Top 50-100 [bash.org] IRC quotes
Damn, some of those are funny as hell.
Allow me to solicit on your behalf the positive actions of point-enabled moderative peers who may similarly appreciate the sublimity of the referenced jocular citations.
The operators of the site have conveniently redirected requests for the review to "http://slashdot.org/slashdot-should-cache-article s-its-going-to-slashdot?s=&threadid=101554"
"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer." --Frank Zappa
I'm sorry, but I just can't imagine what a "Microsoft Lager" might be like. Of course, they'd probably just buy Anheuser-Busch and slap a MS logo on the "King of Beers," and declare it a Microsoft innovation.
I may be out-of-date, but I recall having to tolerate excessively long lead times on Tantalum capacitors because they're all being used to make cellular phones.
There certainly should be some sort of profit in recycling them, especially in the surface mount packages.
Unfortunately for your hypothesis, CCDs are very insensitive to the UV. For common chips used in mass-produced cameras, the polysilicon or aluminum "wires" that connect the pixels are in front of the photosensitive area, and the absorption depth of UV is very shallow, so the UV photons almost never get to the photosensitive area of the CCD. Also, for anything less than soft x-rays, a photon in a CCD produces either one or zero electrons, and for the visible region there is little correlation between photon energy and the probability of producing an electron, except deep in the blue, at the long wavelength cutoff of the quantum efficiency curve.
Silicon is basically transparent to light of wavelengths longer than about 1000nm, so only very near-IR will work. The LEDs and photodiodes that let you surf from your LaZBoy with a remote operate at about 800nm, and a CCD is sensitive enough at this wavelength to be affected by an 800nm laser -- but this is invisible so you aren't going to find laserpointers in this "color." (Experiment -- shine your remote at your handicam... see anything? Cool, eh?)
Anyway, many surveillance cameras are black and white, with no color filtering or separation, so really, any color laser is useful as long as the CCD is sensitive to it. The quantum efficiency of most CCDs peaks around 400-600nm, but it is still quite high at the most common laser diode wavelength of 650nm, so there isn't really a problem. At 300nm and lower, CCDs are virtually blind without expensive processing called "backside thinning," and you won't see backside-thinned devices on common surveillance cameras because they are very expensive.
Yes, color surveillance cameras are more and more common. For a color camera, a strong enough laser beam will still overwhelm a color CCD that uses a mosaic filter (as opposed to a three-chip camera with beamsplitters). This works because the princple that the author uses is that of "blooming." Basically, if your bright source creates too many photoelectrons, the excess flows over the walls of the pixels (which are really just potential barriers, not physical walls) into neighboring pixels. Make even a one-pixel source bright enough and you can flood a whole region of the array. Since the readout electronics can't tell which pixel any given electron originated in, it just looks like one big, bright extended source on the image.
This phenomenon is often encountered by anyone who works with focal plane arrays or uses data collected by them... ever seen an astronomical photograph with long bright lines emanating from either side of the brightest stars on the image? That's blooming, and it looks like bars instead of a smudge because astronomers pay extra for CCDs with "antiblooming" sinks to the substrate -- think of them as drains between pixel columns. But the chipmakers can't put drains between rows because that is the direction in which the pixels are shifted to be read out. In addressable pixel devices, like CMOS active pixel sensors, 2D antiblooming is easier, but it cuts down on the available area for collecting light, so it often isn't used on inexpensive CMOS APS chips found in surveillance applications.
Three-chip color cameras are only used for professional video production -- they're just not cost effective for surveillance or consumer applications when color mosaic CCDs are so much cheaper. There may be some high-end consumer cameras with three-CCD technology but they aren't common at all.
Of course, all bets are off for military applications -- only the military and their suppliers know for sure what's in their surveillance gear, and I suspect that they have already contended with the problem of laser-blinding CCDs used in night vision.
Ah, but insiders know that the entire time, there was a dark side that matter, one kept completely hidden from light out of shame, guilt, or just fear that its revelation would end their bliss. Whether or not any of matter's fears were valid, they became self-fulfilling. Indeed, when matter condensed and admitted to the deception, light flew off, freeing herself from the murky soup of what she suddenly realized was a stifling relationshhip.
Light continues to interact from time to time with matter, who frequently experiences severe depression into spacetime. But like all creative types, from the depth of these depressions come the most brilliant expressions, and these are the occasions whre light and matter relive moments of their earlier, inseperable days. For the universe is a lonely place for its two inhabitants, light and matter and even alienated, they must still interact.
But ultimately, matter's depression reaches mind-boggling depths, and this results in matter's most awesome and terrible works. For some of these, even light finds an undeniable attraction, for they perhaps reveal the dark secrets hidden in the black hole of matter's psyche. No one who has explored these depths has returned to report their true nature, and many expect that one day, far in the distant future, this will be the fate of both matter and light -- they will both be drawn into a bottomless, enduring depression for a very long eternity.
I will never be able to forget the time I moved to Ventura Co. CA and joined a gaming group made up predominantly of sailors from Pt. Mugu NAS. They had all served together on a carrier and played a lot of D&D for R&R. That much seemed reasonable...
Until they explained that if, after you kill your foe, you eat his/her/its brain then you gain all of his/her/its hit points, experience points, spells, special abilities, exceptional stats, and whatnot.
Ooooh.... Kay.
Then I played a game in their campaign, which had basically degenerated into a series of raids on the seats of various pantheons to eat as many god brains as possible. Of course, all the regulars in the group were 100th level F/T/C/MUs with thousands of hitpoints and every special ability and spell and psionic talent in the books. The only thing that saved my character from being brain sucked by these PC mindflaying ghouls was that they made me roll up my character at first level with zero experience points.
I tell ya, it sure was a great education in munchkinism.
From the Shadow Robot Co. page: We are exploring the possibility of making the fingers and thumb detachable. If this is of interest to you, please indicate the fact.
Hey, why stop there? Why not provide specialized appendages that can plug into the hand in place of the fingers, like pliers, screwdrivers, scissors, milkshake blenders... French ticklers...
'Course, it does open the possibility of misplacing your digits. Imagine leaving your pliers at home and arriving at work with a buzzing silver bullet for a thumb.
Slashdot Mirror
When I worked for American Rocket Company in 1988-89, we used 80% Hydrogen Peroxide as fuel for our thrust vector control system. Sixteen injectors at the throat of the main engine nozzle under computer control squirted H2O2 into the plume and it deflected the plume, and therefore the thrust, by enough to steer a rocket.
This was really nasty stuff. IIRC, the only place we could get it was Germany, and we had to jump through all kinds of transportation safety hoops just to get it over here. 80% is a very high concentration, I don't know if Carmack needs this much or not. Peroxide you get at the drug store is 3% H2O2 and 97% H2O.
One of the test valves came back from our engine test site at Edwards and we rinsed it thoroughly with water. Still, when I handled it, traces of the peroxide burned my skin. Very nasty, very painful.
We also worked with other cool stuff like LOX (oxidizer), Silane (for ignition), and my favorite gas, Nitrous Oxide (another oxidizer, self-pressurizing and fun at parties!). I still have a hunk of polybutadiene rocket fuel on my desk as a souvenier; we used to cast that stuff into all kinds of fun shapes, including some you wouldn't be able to show your mother.
I think you misspelled "Canadian" in that sentence...
Damn, that is a secure OS!
Namely:
Now wait a minute... either you can record a copy of a PPV program or you can't. Delaying and pausing using a PVR is done by recording, so does this proposed regulation imply that a PPV program can be recorded, but is then somehow erased or locked?I have a couple of problems with this. First, I don't want the cable provider (or anyone) to have that much control over data on my media. And I think the average Joe Six-gig is going to feel the same way.
Which leads me to the second misgiving: someone will find a way around it. What if I hack my TiVo? What if I turn it off, or lose power, or otherwise interfere with the deleting or locking process? This will just give the cable companies (and Hollywood) the excuse to impose more and more restrictions on their content, or demand more and more access and control over the contents of my mass storage devices.
And why 90 minutes? Who decided that was fair? Why not 24 hours? Where was the consumer included in this decision? Oh... I forgot, this is not about the consumer, it's about 3) PROFIT!!!
Nosir, it doesn't look settled yet...
Uh, exactly how much pain can you live with? My fiancee firmly predicts that Oprah will run for President within a decade.
And the really scary part is that, put up against any of the major party candidates of the past 30 years, I'd vote for her!
In 1989 I worked for a small startup company that was all Mac, and used an Appletalk network. Also on the network was a couple modems so that execs could dial in. Well, the company's flagship product failed catastrophically and the staff was eventually laid off in waves. When the Mac admin was laid off, he dialed in and found the admin account password had not been changed. So he composed a short Word document and sent 999 copies to every printer on the network, guaranteed to cause them to broadcast "out of paper" messages and give the document maximum exposure. The document was a quote from the catty blonde executive secretary:
Of course, this valuable woman (indeed a hottie) still worked there. And when she found this document overflowing the outbins of every printer in the building, what did she do? She went around the office with a stack of them in her hand shrieking, "Did you do this?" at everyone...That sysadmin became one of my closest friends.
At my current job, the Technical Publications interleaf network was brought down when the real admin deleted an account. At some point in the past she had brought in an "expert" from our software department -- a college student. A cocky, arrogant sonofabitch as I recall... I met him a few times and didn't take well to his air of superiority and disdain for others.
Anyway, the fix was simple, but annoying. When he was in there doing the job she asked for, he set up a chron job that would delete the password file if it discovered his account had been deleted. Well, it was, and so... no logins for an entire day.
This was years and years ago, before most management was aware of the seriousness of computer sabotage. I tried to explain to management the seriousness of the act, and the ethical bankruptcy that was required to do such a thing. They brushed me off, and the kid was eventually hired on a full time basis. So it didn't suprise me when the same thing happened on the software configuration management server after the guy quit a couple years later.
That's why it was great!
What ST:TNGdidn't have enough of, as compared to TOS, was breasts. Yes, you heard me, T and A. Sure, Marina Sirtis was easy to look at, but TOS had towering amazon blondes, hardbodied brunettes in fur bikinis, green-skinned dancing girls, and hordes of fem-bots, not to mention Terri Garr and Mariette Hartley in their primes.
By the time that a greying middle-aged man armed only with a paunch and lame pseudo-religious jargon had single-handedly taken over the Enterprise, I had had enough. I rewound the tape, took it back to the video store, and said "This movie is defective, I'd like to return it."
And I wasn't lying.
But the best way to tell whether or not you like an author is to read his/her shorts...
(And I'm not talking about Hanes.)
That's the way it's been on the "Mark and Brian Show" for years on KLOS here in LA. In fact, they even have the nerve to use the term "break" to describe the content of their show, as if the format of their program is music with some talk between songs.
In reality, they play one song, talk over the last 30 seconds of it, and then do their inane antics for another 20 minutes. Usually while one is cracking wise, the other is guffawing like a hick into his microphone. Then they'll play 10 minutes of commercials, and lead in to the next "break" with another song, and not necessarily the whole track.
And this format was so successful that nearly every other station in the market copied it for the AM hours, and the Mark and Brian Show is now syndicated in umpteen cities up and down the west coast and midwest.
And the really annoying thing is that these two buffoons steal all their content from the only morning show that's even sometimes funny, the Kevin and Bean program on competing KROQ.
Thank god for NPR. The LA radio market is the worst music that I've ever encountered. It's stupefying... If it weren't for KCRW, I'd never hear any music that wasn't brodacast courtesy of payola.
(Damn, I'm just full of rants today.)
Advertisements on three or more sides of the content are in constant motion in my peripheral vision and it makes it nearly impossible to concentrate on the actual content. Sometimes it require so much effort to ignore the distractions at the periphery of the page that I don't absorb any of the information in the article, even though my eyes are scanning the words. It is supremely frustrating to have to read an article two or three times just so the content can penetrate the noise of the advertizing. I could absorb and retain more if I were reading while stoned.
Even the printable versions of stories now have animated ads, especially on sites like NYT. That used to be my refuge from the noise and distraction, but even that sanctuary has been violated.
But I have to say I really like the idea of the "Ultramercial" on Salon. I voluntarily submit to a click thru series of advertisements and then I can go an concentrate on the content in a casual manner. If I have to be subjected to advertisements, then let's get it over with so I can get on to the rewarding part of the session... the reason why I came to your site in the first place.
It seems to me that the trend for larger and larget banner ads is a symptom of a failing advertising model. People are ignoring them more and more so you have to be more and more annoying. At some point, the audience is going to opt out of visiting your site altogether because the content has been pushed to the margins and the advertisements fill the screen.
In other words, goat fuxx0rs need goat feed, too.
Damn, some of those are funny as hell.
Allow me to solicit on your behalf the positive actions of point-enabled moderative peers who may similarly appreciate the sublimity of the referenced jocular citations.
"You know what they say, 'Another day, another sausage.'" --Frank Zappa
Yeah, well then thank God they don't have an airline.
The operators of the site have conveniently redirected requests for the review to "http://slashdot.org/slashdot-should-cache-article s-its-going-to-slashdot?s=&threadid=101554"
Brilliant!
I'm sorry, but I just can't imagine what a "Microsoft Lager" might be like. Of course, they'd probably just buy Anheuser-Busch and slap a MS logo on the "King of Beers," and declare it a Microsoft innovation.
Or in your tooth.
There certainly should be some sort of profit in recycling them, especially in the surface mount packages.
Silicon is basically transparent to light of wavelengths longer than about 1000nm, so only very near-IR will work. The LEDs and photodiodes that let you surf from your LaZBoy with a remote operate at about 800nm, and a CCD is sensitive enough at this wavelength to be affected by an 800nm laser -- but this is invisible so you aren't going to find laserpointers in this "color." (Experiment -- shine your remote at your handicam... see anything? Cool, eh?)
Anyway, many surveillance cameras are black and white, with no color filtering or separation, so really, any color laser is useful as long as the CCD is sensitive to it. The quantum efficiency of most CCDs peaks around 400-600nm, but it is still quite high at the most common laser diode wavelength of 650nm, so there isn't really a problem. At 300nm and lower, CCDs are virtually blind without expensive processing called "backside thinning," and you won't see backside-thinned devices on common surveillance cameras because they are very expensive.
Yes, color surveillance cameras are more and more common. For a color camera, a strong enough laser beam will still overwhelm a color CCD that uses a mosaic filter (as opposed to a three-chip camera with beamsplitters). This works because the princple that the author uses is that of "blooming." Basically, if your bright source creates too many photoelectrons, the excess flows over the walls of the pixels (which are really just potential barriers, not physical walls) into neighboring pixels. Make even a one-pixel source bright enough and you can flood a whole region of the array. Since the readout electronics can't tell which pixel any given electron originated in, it just looks like one big, bright extended source on the image.
This phenomenon is often encountered by anyone who works with focal plane arrays or uses data collected by them... ever seen an astronomical photograph with long bright lines emanating from either side of the brightest stars on the image? That's blooming, and it looks like bars instead of a smudge because astronomers pay extra for CCDs with "antiblooming" sinks to the substrate -- think of them as drains between pixel columns. But the chipmakers can't put drains between rows because that is the direction in which the pixels are shifted to be read out. In addressable pixel devices, like CMOS active pixel sensors, 2D antiblooming is easier, but it cuts down on the available area for collecting light, so it often isn't used on inexpensive CMOS APS chips found in surveillance applications.
Three-chip color cameras are only used for professional video production -- they're just not cost effective for surveillance or consumer applications when color mosaic CCDs are so much cheaper. There may be some high-end consumer cameras with three-CCD technology but they aren't common at all.
Of course, all bets are off for military applications -- only the military and their suppliers know for sure what's in their surveillance gear, and I suspect that they have already contended with the problem of laser-blinding CCDs used in night vision.
While I don't necessarily disagree with your evaluation of their collective intelligence, you haven't quite justified your use of profanity.
Light continues to interact from time to time with matter, who frequently experiences severe depression into spacetime. But like all creative types, from the depth of these depressions come the most brilliant expressions, and these are the occasions whre light and matter relive moments of their earlier, inseperable days. For the universe is a lonely place for its two inhabitants, light and matter and even alienated, they must still interact.
But ultimately, matter's depression reaches mind-boggling depths, and this results in matter's most awesome and terrible works. For some of these, even light finds an undeniable attraction, for they perhaps reveal the dark secrets hidden in the black hole of matter's psyche. No one who has explored these depths has returned to report their true nature, and many expect that one day, far in the distant future, this will be the fate of both matter and light -- they will both be drawn into a bottomless, enduring depression for a very long eternity.
I will never be able to forget the time I moved to Ventura Co. CA and joined a gaming group made up predominantly of sailors from Pt. Mugu NAS. They had all served together on a carrier and played a lot of D&D for R&R. That much seemed reasonable...
Until they explained that if, after you kill your foe, you eat his/her/its brain then you gain all of his/her/its hit points, experience points, spells, special abilities, exceptional stats, and whatnot.
Ooooh.... Kay.
Then I played a game in their campaign, which had basically degenerated into a series of raids on the seats of various pantheons to eat as many god brains as possible. Of course, all the regulars in the group were 100th level F/T/C/MUs with thousands of hitpoints and every special ability and spell and psionic talent in the books. The only thing that saved my character from being brain sucked by these PC mindflaying ghouls was that they made me roll up my character at first level with zero experience points.
I tell ya, it sure was a great education in munchkinism.
Hey, why stop there? Why not provide specialized appendages that can plug into the hand in place of the fingers, like pliers, screwdrivers, scissors, milkshake blenders... French ticklers...
'Course, it does open the possibility of misplacing your digits. Imagine leaving your pliers at home and arriving at work with a buzzing silver bullet for a thumb.
I hate it when that happens.
Amplitude and frequency may vary.