I don't know how this guy's flying club/park was set up, but at my local flying club, there is a fairly large "no man's land" between where the model aircraft fly and where the pilots are supposed to stand. Sometimes pilots and planes violate this separation (e.g. a pilot crossing the space to retrieve a damaged aircraft, or a plane being taxied through the space on it's way to or from the "runway"), but in general this no man's land is respected by everyone and accidents occur far away from anyone's head. Also, aircraft are never made to cross over the audience or pilot areas (I'm not part of the club so I don't know if this is an enforced rule, or just something everyone follows out of courtesy).
What this guy does in the TFV (The Featured Video) is totally stupid and reckless, and is just asking for trouble. Not only does he fly the thing over and near a parking lot (basically an audience area), but he flies it within a couple of feet of both himself (sitting down at a table at the end of the video) and another couple of individuals. As one youtube commenter posted, that thing is a flying chainsaw; you just don't fly it that close to anyone's head. This guy was a cocky, stupid individual, and sorry to say, he paid the ultimate price. Again, sorry to say, good thing it was him rather than somebody else. Far from being a freak accident, I bet you this was entirely predictable and also entirely avoidable with a few basic safely measures (and I'm not talking about wearing helmets). Maybe this will serve as a lesson to the others flying at that club, and they'll actually put into place a few basic safety rules to protect both themselves and the audience from this type of thing in the future.
A car could lose 25% of its wheel nuts and still remain a perfectly stable vehicle (provided that wheel nut loss was spread out evenly across all wheels). Reminds me of a joke:
A motorist had a flat tire in front of an insane asylum. He took the wheel off, but when he stood up he tipped over the hubcap containing the bolts, spilling them all down a sewer drain.
A patient, looking through the fence, suggested that the man take one bolt from the remaining three wheels to hold the fourth wheel in place until he could get to a service station.
The motorist thanked him profusely and said, “I don’t know why you are in that place.”
The patient said, “I’m in here for being crazy, not for being stupid.”
The inrush current when powering on a device (even for something as simple as a lightbulb) from an off state is indeed higher than its steady-state consumption. However, the transient lasts so briefly for most devices (that you would have in your house) that the additional power lost (due to the inrush) probably only amounts to a few seconds worth of actual steady-state operation. In other words, as long as the power failure is reasonably long (a few seconds at least), there will be a net reduction in your power use. For big factories with large electric motors and machinery that require time to spin up, the story is probably a little different... The bigger issue, which you alluded to, is all of your devices (that were in standby before the power failure) coming up to full power once power is restored. [Aside: I have a NAS and a server at home that fall under this category: most of the time they are in low power standby (unless I'm using them), but they'll power up to 100% following a power failure. For those devices, a power failure shorter than at least 1 hour means I might have to pay more for power than I would have otherwise.]
Plus, I'm also willing to bet that your power meter, even if it's a "smart" one, isn't capable of measuring instantaneous current fast enough to detect the full magnitude of the inrush current. It might not even detect it at all, meaning that quite contrary to the idea of the power company making money off you following a power failure, they might actually be losing it. On top of that, the inrush current that occurs after power is restored does put strain on the power distribution and generation equipment, so I'll bet the power company don't see the switching of power on and off as an opportunity to make money off of us.
I was thinking the same thing. I felt a little shafted, to be honest, during the 2003 blackout. In my area (Southern Ontario) power was restored quite early, before 11:00pm IIRC. I wish that it had lasted a bit longer so that I could appreciate the beautiful night sky a little longer. You don't often see the milky way within city limits... I almost wish they regularly scheduled these sorts of blackouts. It wouldn't hurt us to be reminded once in a while that the centre of the universe is somewhere above our heads, and not in the middle of the city where we live...
Even forgiving all of the dumb-ass scams Sony has pulled over the years that have alienated me as a customer, the one thing that keeps reminding me why I hate them so much is the forced updates that I have to endure almost every single time I turn on my PS3. I only use the thing a couple of times a month (for movies, usually), and it seems like almost every time I turn it on I need to apply some update, and if I refuse the machine refuses to let me do whatever it is I wanted to do. Why??? Because of this, almost every movie I want to watch on the thing becomes 15-30 minutes of dicking around with updates, rebooting, etc, followed by 90 or 120 minutes of movie. WTF. I've never seen any other product that was so antagonistic towards its user. It's a constant reminder that Sony doesn't give a shit about me and would gladly throw me under a bus if it meant they could make another dollar off me. I'm sure other companies think the same way, but at least most of them have the decency of not being so blindingly obvious about it. Up yours Sony, you can keep your PS4.
LOL! True story: In response to someone at her work asking "Where's so-and-so?" an Australian friend of my sister silenced the room by replying something along the lines of "outside having a faggot". This probably wouldn't have shocked everyone as much as it did if it hadn't been for the fact that the person being asked about was openly gay. The response was therefore immediately interpreted by everyone as "outside having sex with a partner" rather than "outside smoking". Man, I'm glad my lesson regarding "pants" was easier and less embarrassing to learn than that...
There's no guarantee that contacting your congressman will make any difference in all of this, but doing nothing diminishes your chances of affecting any kind of change to nil. Guaranteed that there is a significant part of your population that is going to be spending their evening comatose in front of the TV or watching Youtube, oblivious to or uncaring of this NSA scandal brewing around them. It's a foregone conclusion that they won't be calling their congressman. As someone aware of what is going on, who is not hopelessly entranced by "So you think you can dance" or some other such crap, and who has the power and capacity to maybe do something about it (you have a phone, don't you?), don't you think you have a duty to act on behalf of your country?
As a Canadian, I can't do much about this particular initiative, but I have on a small number of occasions participated in blocking certain bills that I felt strongly against (new Canadian copyright reform bills), and I did this simply by contacting my MP and various ministers. Did my individual acts, when considered on their own, make a difference? Hell no. But when considered together with similar acts by thousands of other Canadians, it had a very strong impact, and was enough to stop a couple of unfavourable bills in their tracks (at least for a while). If copyright reform can elicit that kind of effort from me, why doesn't the loss and corruption of one of your fundamental "rights" elicit the same kind of effort in you? What is it going to take?
I wonder what would happen to you if you went up to a British cop and told them they have nice "pants".
[NB: in Brittan if you want to say "pants" you need to say "trousers", because otherwise they think you're talking about "underwear". Man, I found that out the hard way...]
Maybe it's time that you start wearing track pants. They stretch, so might be able to accommodate up to an 8" "phone" in comfort. Who knows, you might be the first to start up a new fashion trend and show the world that there's a third use for track pants other than: a) exercising or b) showing everyone that you've "given up" and just don't care what you wear anymore.
While I'm at it, here are a couple of other ideas that people can use to comfortably carry a 6-7" phone around with and look trendy doing it (I really should be patenting these ideas so that I can make a lot of money, instead of blabbing about them on the Internet, but whatever): - create a holder that has an integrated shoulder strap so that you can carry the phone around like a "man purse" (or just "purse" if you're a woman) - Replace the strap with a gold chain, install a gold "wall clock" app then rotate the "man purse" holder 90deg towards the front so that it hangs like a necklace. Presto! Suddenly you look like a hip-hop artist. - Create a belt (for your pants) where instead of a buckle, there's a holder for your phone. Customize the look of your belt by installing different "skins". Just some ideas for skins off the top of my head: "The Texan Cattle Rancher" (with a longhorn steer on the front), "The Santa Claus" (simple gold rectangle), "The Hulk Hogan" (WWE Champion title belt). The possibilities are endless...
I was going to say that my comment was off-topic but that my favourite Twilignt Zone episode was "Button, Button", but I just checked the Wikipedia page for "Button, Button" and it turns out that Richard Matheson wrote that as well. Holy crap! I had no idea! I guess my comment isn't off-topic after all.
a 'virtual supercomputer' that leverages volunteers' surplus computing power
The first thing I thought when I read that was: "Fools. You're wasting your own energy to fund somebody else's patent portfolio (and wallet)." The idea that this might be a good idea or could forward some facet of science or could make the world a better place didn't even occur to me. I'm getting to be too cynical I think...
Yeah, I know. Over ten years ago while traveling Europe I was floored when I saw gas prices in London. I don't recall the exact cost, but I remember that after converting pounds to dollars and gallons to litres, it was something like 4x the cost of gas in Canada (although this was at a time when the Canadian dollar was low and gas was almost half the cost it is now). Regardless, I try to avoid complaining about gas prices whenever I converse with someone from Europe!
You guys (Americans) pay up to $80 per 15 gallons of gas? That's over $5/gallon. Even I don’t pay that much and I live in Canada. I was under the impression that Americans wouldn't tolerate anything over $4/gallon and if the cost did go above that, there would be anarchy in the streets. Perhaps I'm just mis-informed...
Anyway, aren't the batteries under the trunk liner? So, in order to swap your battery during a shopping/camping/golf trip, wouldn't you need to empty your trunk first, then wrench out your back pulling out the used batteries (probably leaving a grease mark on your pants in the process), then wrench it again putting in the new ones? Sounds like fun...
Humans do not logically deal with unexpected events. Note all the old geezers driving into buildings or people pulling into oncoming traffic to avoid rear ending the car in front of them instead of pulling onto the shoulder. Humans in general are terrible at logical reactions to unexpected conditions.
I did put "to a greater or lesser degree", but sure, you got me there. However, I'm not sure why you'd think it's so easy to determine if a pedestrian has been hit in all possible cases. Sure, there's the easy case of you running straight into them, but what about the case where a kid runs out and hits the side of the car? I guess there must be wide-angle cameras aiming out the side of the car (for lane changes), but how are they going to judge collisions vs near misses? Are there microphones to detect the sound of a collision? Maybe pressure or vibration sensors? Does the car stop if there's both the sound and visual of a collision? What if there's the sound of a collision but no corresponding visual, does it still stop? If there's a collision but it's minor and the pedestrian walks off, does the car just stay there blocking traffic or does it resume driving, possibly leaving the scene of an accident? If these are truly driverless cars, someone can’t just get out and ask "are you OK?".
Maybe these cars will be restricted to certain motorways where pedestrians are prohibited in which case a lot of corner-cases just go away, but I’m not (yet) convinced that they could handle a hectic city any better than your average geezer could (well, maybe that’s unfair, a driverless car probably won’t ever drive into a building or rear-end someone because it can’t judge stopping distance, but I digress). Maybe I'm not giving the technology enough credit and I'm being critical for nothing, but I don't think that I am. In my experience, it's extremely hard to plan for all corner case conditions, especially for really complex systems. A car navigating a city street might sound simple, but I'm sure it's anything but.
What happens if someone pops out between two parked cars just as a driverless car goes by and gets hit? Is it going to hear the noise or feel the bump and know to stop (and maybe automatically call police)? Will it continue driving, possibly dragging the victim for several km because it can't see anything in any of its sensors? If someone else on the side of the road starts waving their arms and yelling “stop”, or if another car behind them is honking and flashing their lights, will it be programmed to pull over and stop?
Dealing with all of the regular, mundane aspects of driving must be a hard enough task for those developing these cars, but dealing with the thousands of rare corner-cases that must be safely handled must be almost impossible. Human judgment might be terribly flawed in certain cases, but at least we can deal logically (to a greater or lesser degree) with unexpected events without having to be specifically programmed to.
Hopefully they got title insurance when they bought the house, which in Ontario covers this type of thing (it covers things like errors in surveys or public records, amongst other things that would affect the ability to sell or finance the property). If they didn't: sucks to be them, but I have no pity. It only costs a few hundred dollars to get title insurance when you buy a house, which you can just lump in with your mortgage if you don't want to pay outright. If they don't get an exemption for the 5k, or if it turns out that they are living on some ancient Indian burial ground, then their stinginess when buying the house is probably going to cost them a lot more than the title insurance would have...
Yeah, I suppose it's more or less like a slide rule. Kind of like how a Rolex is essentially the same as a sundial (plus or minus several hundred precisely machined moving parts, assembled with amazing workmanship).
I've always wanted a Curta mechanical calculator conceived before WWII by an Austrian (but only mass-produced afterwards, I believe). It does more or less the same thing as the monstrosity that you linked to above (including multiplication and division), all in a hand-sized package. Now that's a mechanical marvel. I'd love to have one...
That's a little insensitive, don't you think? This is an article about the *Indian* military, so wouldn't a more accurate abbreviation be OMS (Oh My Shiva) or possibly OMV (Oh My Vishnu)? Just sayin'...
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know how this guy's flying club/park was set up, but at my local flying club, there is a fairly large "no man's land" between where the model aircraft fly and where the pilots are supposed to stand. Sometimes pilots and planes violate this separation (e.g. a pilot crossing the space to retrieve a damaged aircraft, or a plane being taxied through the space on it's way to or from the "runway"), but in general this no man's land is respected by everyone and accidents occur far away from anyone's head. Also, aircraft are never made to cross over the audience or pilot areas (I'm not part of the club so I don't know if this is an enforced rule, or just something everyone follows out of courtesy).
What this guy does in the TFV (The Featured Video) is totally stupid and reckless, and is just asking for trouble. Not only does he fly the thing over and near a parking lot (basically an audience area), but he flies it within a couple of feet of both himself (sitting down at a table at the end of the video) and another couple of individuals. As one youtube commenter posted, that thing is a flying chainsaw; you just don't fly it that close to anyone's head. This guy was a cocky, stupid individual, and sorry to say, he paid the ultimate price. Again, sorry to say, good thing it was him rather than somebody else. Far from being a freak accident, I bet you this was entirely predictable and also entirely avoidable with a few basic safely measures (and I'm not talking about wearing helmets). Maybe this will serve as a lesson to the others flying at that club, and they'll actually put into place a few basic safety rules to protect both themselves and the audience from this type of thing in the future.
A car could lose 25% of its wheel nuts and still remain a perfectly stable vehicle (provided that wheel nut loss was spread out evenly across all wheels). Reminds me of a joke:
A motorist had a flat tire in front of an insane asylum. He took the wheel off, but when he stood up he tipped over the hubcap containing the bolts, spilling them all down a sewer drain.
A patient, looking through the fence, suggested that the man take one bolt from
the remaining three wheels to hold the fourth wheel in place until he could get to a service station.
The motorist thanked him profusely and said, “I don’t know why you are in that place.”
The patient said, “I’m in here for being crazy, not for being stupid.”
As is Radio-Fish Identification? Now that's just cool.
PS: Before you tear me to pieces (ha, ha, ha, I kill me...), sharks are indeed considered fish, or so the internets tells me.
The inrush current when powering on a device (even for something as simple as a lightbulb) from an off state is indeed higher than its steady-state consumption. However, the transient lasts so briefly for most devices (that you would have in your house) that the additional power lost (due to the inrush) probably only amounts to a few seconds worth of actual steady-state operation. In other words, as long as the power failure is reasonably long (a few seconds at least), there will be a net reduction in your power use. For big factories with large electric motors and machinery that require time to spin up, the story is probably a little different... The bigger issue, which you alluded to, is all of your devices (that were in standby before the power failure) coming up to full power once power is restored. [Aside: I have a NAS and a server at home that fall under this category: most of the time they are in low power standby (unless I'm using them), but they'll power up to 100% following a power failure. For those devices, a power failure shorter than at least 1 hour means I might have to pay more for power than I would have otherwise.]
Plus, I'm also willing to bet that your power meter, even if it's a "smart" one, isn't capable of measuring instantaneous current fast enough to detect the full magnitude of the inrush current. It might not even detect it at all, meaning that quite contrary to the idea of the power company making money off you following a power failure, they might actually be losing it. On top of that, the inrush current that occurs after power is restored does put strain on the power distribution and generation equipment, so I'll bet the power company don't see the switching of power on and off as an opportunity to make money off of us.
I was thinking the same thing. I felt a little shafted, to be honest, during the 2003 blackout. In my area (Southern Ontario) power was restored quite early, before 11:00pm IIRC. I wish that it had lasted a bit longer so that I could appreciate the beautiful night sky a little longer. You don't often see the milky way within city limits... I almost wish they regularly scheduled these sorts of blackouts. It wouldn't hurt us to be reminded once in a while that the centre of the universe is somewhere above our heads, and not in the middle of the city where we live...
Thanks for the tip. I think I'll try enabling that, in the hope of making it less annoying to use. I still won't buy a PS4, though...
Even forgiving all of the dumb-ass scams Sony has pulled over the years that have alienated me as a customer, the one thing that keeps reminding me why I hate them so much is the forced updates that I have to endure almost every single time I turn on my PS3. I only use the thing a couple of times a month (for movies, usually), and it seems like almost every time I turn it on I need to apply some update, and if I refuse the machine refuses to let me do whatever it is I wanted to do. Why??? Because of this, almost every movie I want to watch on the thing becomes 15-30 minutes of dicking around with updates, rebooting, etc, followed by 90 or 120 minutes of movie. WTF. I've never seen any other product that was so antagonistic towards its user. It's a constant reminder that Sony doesn't give a shit about me and would gladly throw me under a bus if it meant they could make another dollar off me. I'm sure other companies think the same way, but at least most of them have the decency of not being so blindingly obvious about it. Up yours Sony, you can keep your PS4.
They are experts at sniffing crotches, after all. It's only a matter of time before they can also sniff out bowel and prostate cancers too.
LOL! True story: In response to someone at her work asking "Where's so-and-so?" an Australian friend of my sister silenced the room by replying something along the lines of "outside having a faggot". This probably wouldn't have shocked everyone as much as it did if it hadn't been for the fact that the person being asked about was openly gay. The response was therefore immediately interpreted by everyone as "outside having sex with a partner" rather than "outside smoking". Man, I'm glad my lesson regarding "pants" was easier and less embarrassing to learn than that...
There's no guarantee that contacting your congressman will make any difference in all of this, but doing nothing diminishes your chances of affecting any kind of change to nil. Guaranteed that there is a significant part of your population that is going to be spending their evening comatose in front of the TV or watching Youtube, oblivious to or uncaring of this NSA scandal brewing around them. It's a foregone conclusion that they won't be calling their congressman. As someone aware of what is going on, who is not hopelessly entranced by "So you think you can dance" or some other such crap, and who has the power and capacity to maybe do something about it (you have a phone, don't you?), don't you think you have a duty to act on behalf of your country?
As a Canadian, I can't do much about this particular initiative, but I have on a small number of occasions participated in blocking certain bills that I felt strongly against (new Canadian copyright reform bills), and I did this simply by contacting my MP and various ministers. Did my individual acts, when considered on their own, make a difference? Hell no. But when considered together with similar acts by thousands of other Canadians, it had a very strong impact, and was enough to stop a couple of unfavourable bills in their tracks (at least for a while). If copyright reform can elicit that kind of effort from me, why doesn't the loss and corruption of one of your fundamental "rights" elicit the same kind of effort in you? What is it going to take?
I wonder what would happen to you if you went up to a British cop and told them they have nice "pants".
[NB: in Brittan if you want to say "pants" you need to say "trousers", because otherwise they think you're talking about "underwear". Man, I found that out the hard way...]
Maybe it's time that you start wearing track pants. They stretch, so might be able to accommodate up to an 8" "phone" in comfort. Who knows, you might be the first to start up a new fashion trend and show the world that there's a third use for track pants other than: a) exercising or b) showing everyone that you've "given up" and just don't care what you wear anymore.
While I'm at it, here are a couple of other ideas that people can use to comfortably carry a 6-7" phone around with and look trendy doing it (I really should be patenting these ideas so that I can make a lot of money, instead of blabbing about them on the Internet, but whatever):
- create a holder that has an integrated shoulder strap so that you can carry the phone around like a "man purse" (or just "purse" if you're a woman)
- Replace the strap with a gold chain, install a gold "wall clock" app then rotate the "man purse" holder 90deg towards the front so that it hangs like a necklace. Presto! Suddenly you look like a hip-hop artist.
- Create a belt (for your pants) where instead of a buckle, there's a holder for your phone. Customize the look of your belt by installing different "skins". Just some ideas for skins off the top of my head: "The Texan Cattle Rancher" (with a longhorn steer on the front), "The Santa Claus" (simple gold rectangle), "The Hulk Hogan" (WWE Champion title belt). The possibilities are endless...
I sure hope they use cedar. Cedar battery smoked salmon could be quite good...
I was going to say that my comment was off-topic but that my favourite Twilignt Zone episode was "Button, Button", but I just checked the Wikipedia page for "Button, Button" and it turns out that Richard Matheson wrote that as well. Holy crap! I had no idea! I guess my comment isn't off-topic after all.
a 'virtual supercomputer' that leverages volunteers' surplus computing power
The first thing I thought when I read that was: "Fools. You're wasting your own energy to fund somebody else's patent portfolio (and wallet)." The idea that this might be a good idea or could forward some facet of science or could make the world a better place didn't even occur to me. I'm getting to be too cynical I think...
Yeah, I know. Over ten years ago while traveling Europe I was floored when I saw gas prices in London. I don't recall the exact cost, but I remember that after converting pounds to dollars and gallons to litres, it was something like 4x the cost of gas in Canada (although this was at a time when the Canadian dollar was low and gas was almost half the cost it is now). Regardless, I try to avoid complaining about gas prices whenever I converse with someone from Europe!
You guys (Americans) pay up to $80 per 15 gallons of gas? That's over $5/gallon. Even I don’t pay that much and I live in Canada. I was under the impression that Americans wouldn't tolerate anything over $4/gallon and if the cost did go above that, there would be anarchy in the streets. Perhaps I'm just mis-informed...
Anyway, aren't the batteries under the trunk liner? So, in order to swap your battery during a shopping/camping/golf trip, wouldn't you need to empty your trunk first, then wrench out your back pulling out the used batteries (probably leaving a grease mark on your pants in the process), then wrench it again putting in the new ones? Sounds like fun...
Humans do not logically deal with unexpected events. Note all the old geezers driving into buildings or people pulling into oncoming traffic to avoid rear ending the car in front of them instead of pulling onto the shoulder. Humans in general are terrible at logical reactions to unexpected conditions.
I did put "to a greater or lesser degree", but sure, you got me there. However, I'm not sure why you'd think it's so easy to determine if a pedestrian has been hit in all possible cases. Sure, there's the easy case of you running straight into them, but what about the case where a kid runs out and hits the side of the car? I guess there must be wide-angle cameras aiming out the side of the car (for lane changes), but how are they going to judge collisions vs near misses? Are there microphones to detect the sound of a collision? Maybe pressure or vibration sensors? Does the car stop if there's both the sound and visual of a collision? What if there's the sound of a collision but no corresponding visual, does it still stop? If there's a collision but it's minor and the pedestrian walks off, does the car just stay there blocking traffic or does it resume driving, possibly leaving the scene of an accident? If these are truly driverless cars, someone can’t just get out and ask "are you OK?".
Maybe these cars will be restricted to certain motorways where pedestrians are prohibited in which case a lot of corner-cases just go away, but I’m not (yet) convinced that they could handle a hectic city any better than your average geezer could (well, maybe that’s unfair, a driverless car probably won’t ever drive into a building or rear-end someone because it can’t judge stopping distance, but I digress). Maybe I'm not giving the technology enough credit and I'm being critical for nothing, but I don't think that I am. In my experience, it's extremely hard to plan for all corner case conditions, especially for really complex systems. A car navigating a city street might sound simple, but I'm sure it's anything but.
What happens if someone pops out between two parked cars just as a driverless car goes by and gets hit? Is it going to hear the noise or feel the bump and know to stop (and maybe automatically call police)? Will it continue driving, possibly dragging the victim for several km because it can't see anything in any of its sensors? If someone else on the side of the road starts waving their arms and yelling “stop”, or if another car behind them is honking and flashing their lights, will it be programmed to pull over and stop?
Dealing with all of the regular, mundane aspects of driving must be a hard enough task for those developing these cars, but dealing with the thousands of rare corner-cases that must be safely handled must be almost impossible. Human judgment might be terribly flawed in certain cases, but at least we can deal logically (to a greater or lesser degree) with unexpected events without having to be specifically programmed to.
Hopefully they got title insurance when they bought the house, which in Ontario covers this type of thing (it covers things like errors in surveys or public records, amongst other things that would affect the ability to sell or finance the property). If they didn't: sucks to be them, but I have no pity. It only costs a few hundred dollars to get title insurance when you buy a house, which you can just lump in with your mortgage if you don't want to pay outright. If they don't get an exemption for the 5k, or if it turns out that they are living on some ancient Indian burial ground, then their stinginess when buying the house is probably going to cost them a lot more than the title insurance would have...
et-lay em-thay y-tray o-tay op-stay ee-may.
Take that, NSA bitches..., uh, I mean ake-tay at-they, SA-Nay??? ah, fuck it...
Is this actually true, or is it that you need to be a licensed gunsmith to *sell* a gun (but making one for yourself is totally legal)?
Honest question; I don't know anything about American gun laws...
Yeah, I suppose it's more or less like a slide rule. Kind of like how a Rolex is essentially the same as a sundial (plus or minus several hundred precisely machined moving parts, assembled with amazing workmanship).
I've always wanted a Curta mechanical calculator conceived before WWII by an Austrian (but only mass-produced afterwards, I believe). It does more or less the same thing as the monstrosity that you linked to above (including multiplication and division), all in a hand-sized package. Now that's a mechanical marvel. I'd love to have one...
Killer Robots OMG National Security
That's a little insensitive, don't you think? This is an article about the *Indian* military, so wouldn't a more accurate abbreviation be OMS (Oh My Shiva) or possibly OMV (Oh My Vishnu)? Just sayin'...