The Milne Speaking Clock currently housed at the Science Museum in London uses optical glass discs for playback (source shines through the discs, sensor on the other side). It is still equipped with the same optical discs it was installed with during its 1964 refit (the Pat Simmons voice), although the device at the Science Museum has not been used as the line clock since 1964 (replaced by a much smaller device with a magnetic drum rather than optical discs). The original GPO Speaking Clock voice (Jane Cain) was commissioned in 1936. As of 3 April 2012 (I've been and photographed it), it's still running to a tolerance of thousandths of a second.
As far as I can make out from seeing the device first hand, the discs are made from a very highly polished quartz glass, coated with carbon(?). The entire device is encased in a sealed glass container, I would venture a guess that it is filled with an inert gas to prevent the carbon coating on the discs from oxidising. Whether this is part of the original design or if it's part of the museum preservation process, I couldn't tell you.
...that's been running as a bare HTPC for several years. OK, support still sucks for these boards in every sense of the word, shoehorning the drivers in has been a nightmare (on Windows and Linux) but fortunately I picked right first time and have only ever had to do that once.
It still runs Slackware 8.
If not for the stupid amount of money I spent on it (even back then nearly £200 for board and brick was a bit steep, but I needed compact and quiet), then I'd be binning it and investing in a pair of RasPis.
Aerosolised glass would lacerate the lung tissue of any who inhaled it. Commercial fail.
Fire departments worldwide already use misters in situations where there's lots of hot smoke in a confined space (perfect conditions for a backdraft) - the idea being to cool the hot smoke, not kill the flames. Once you remove the heat source, the fire extinguishes itself. Aside from that, the last thing you need to introduce to a fire is a forced injection of oxygen which is what you'd be doing if you used an airfan to force the mist. Nozzle configuration is the important thing here.
A hole saw to punch through an airplane skin? Overkill. Most aircraft skins can be penetrated using nothing more than a screwdriver - typically an airliner skin is 0.040" thick. Heck, you could punch through that with your fist.
In the UK we have this thing called the Trade Descriptions Act 1968, which among other things prohibits misdescription of goods. A DVD-video must by definition comply with the DVD-video standard (Part 3, Book B and DVD Video Recording Book) or it CANNOT be referred to as a DVD video.
Now, people do still have choice over whether or not to purchase a barcode for a particular title. If one does purchase a DVD video, then he has a statutory expectation that that is what he is getting. There is NOTHING in the standards to cover region locking, CSS encoding, or any other restrictive mechanism. ANY DVD that employs any of these mechanisms CANNOT claim to be a DVD-video.
Having made the choice to purchase a barcode with the DVD-Video logo, if one then finds out that one cannot play that DVD in a standard, open-region player (lots of Chinese players are not region locked hence will play ANY otherwise compliant disc), then IMO there would be a case under 1968 (c. 29).
My boggle with the region coding thing is the fact that unless specified on the box that a player is region-free*, there is no indication whatsoever on the hardware or the packaging (or the manual!) that the player is region locked and to what region. This is clearly a violation of 1968 (c.29)?
*Since DVD-video units hit mainstream in around 1997, I've been aware of the region coding and studiously avoided region locked players, unless there was a clear-cut and simple way of jailbreaking them. The only player I ever had to jailbreak was a Meridian 586 (bought near the end of 1997 and cost a bloody fortune).
in keeping with the process of natural justice, then yes, why not? It's part and parcel of the whole level playing field thing, full disclosure and all that. If disclosure is partial, then there is no justice.
If they (the State, in this case acting as Prosecutor) want to fuck you up the arse, there is NOTHING you can do to prevent it.
What you CAN do is not make their job easy. What you CAN do is make them spend money, because THAT is the limiting factor in their activities. What you CAN do is tell them to fuck off and that you will record what they say and obeying the maxim that for justice to be done it must be seen to be done, publish and be damned.
An organic system is inherently unstable - this is why the global network is so resilient against targetted attacks (such as wide-scale DNS poisoning, root name server outage...). The system will route around the dark spot. Whether or not it's "what the man wants" is irrelevant. If "The Man" wants the Internet to go dark permanently, all "The Man" has to do is cause a global, total and simultaneous blackout of every node, domain and name server, webserver - anything with a CPU and internet connection.
oh yeah. Local vegetation (dandelion, hogweed, wild garlic, that sort of thing) when I'm out in the sticks, or if I'm cooking at home it's usually roasted peppers, potatoes and onions, braising the rabbit with woodpigeon breast and pheasant (or partridge, depending on what else I manage to bag).
...that a human life can be so easily monetised. OK, these guys know what they're getting into, that there's a very real risk of something failing spectacularly, and of them dying. That's what they get paid for. However, that should not be reflected in the equipment they're being asked to use. Built by the lowest bidder? I'd want something with a track record of *not* failing; there's a reason why greymarket goods are so cheap. They *do* fail.
That's right, they have more rabbits than ever. Bigger, faster, and stronger ones. Myxy only kills the weaker ones. The dingoes are even more out of their depth than ever.
If I could get down there with my air rifle, I'd be like a pig in mud. And very well fed.
I concur: when Schering-Plough's patent on loratadine expired, the price of the drug went through the floor and suddenly it was available over the counter - but not at $15 per pill.
Sure made my life easier, in recent years I've been travelling around a lot and scheduling to be around my GP surgery one day then again three days later to pick up the prescription is a nightmare. Now I just walk into the first pharmacy I see and pick up a month's supply for change out of a fiver.
Patents on pharmaceuticals is just a license to inflate the price to the point of ridiculous and beyond. It must stop. People die because they *can't afford the drug that will likely save them*.
I read a theory in a Trek novel (one of the early crossover ones I think - Strangers From The Sky?), which explained the arrowhead symbol as a function of mass, energy and velocity. Basically it went something like: as you approach the speed of light, the amount of energy required to push a mass approaches infinity. If you can change the mass to something less than zero, then the amount of energy required to accelerate past C becomes less than infinite, hence attainable.
Despite the reference to the Higg's Boson as the "God Particle" in popular science journals and mainstream media, just how important is this discovery as far as weak interactions, gravity, etc., are concerned? Is this discovery going to change the face of quantum chromodynamics as we know it?
pisses me off that The Cloud costs £6/hour to use, and BT OpenZone requires that you have a BT home account (unless you use the public terminal in such equipped booths). Nottingham is practically unbroken in coverage for both of them from Netherfield across to Wollaton, Arnold down to Silverdale. We do have a classic red box (or two or ten) as well, at least one of these has been retrofitted with a wifi module.
it would be a lot easier to engineer a space installation which spins; failing that (likely given the potential cost running into tens of billions, which no nation or even group of nations can afford right now), an attached structure on the ISS which spins independently of the superstructure, in which the occupants can enjoy some portion of earth normal gravity, albeit simulated. I'd connect something to the other end of the Columbus module... or wait until the Node connector is installed (apparently around 2014).
Absent gravity, spider webs are surprisingly symmetrical (a href="http://www.space.com/6142-spider-success-weightless-webs-spun-space.html">Linky). Mummichogs have been used to study motion sickness in space - they're apparently very adaptable to changing gravitational environments. As a matter of physics, flight relies on three things: lift, drag and thrust. In space, you don't need lift and drag (since these two factors depend on gravity), you're left with thrust. As birds don't have vector thrusting, I'd think they'd just flap around in fairly straight lines until they collide with walls.
As for the ant question, I refer you to the recent broadcast by Kent Brockman:
"The spacecraft has apparently been taken over - "conqured" if you will - by a master race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."
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The records on the Voyagers and Pioneers didn't just contain audio, you know.
They contained video as well.
RCA tried (and failed) to commercialise this technology in 1981 as the CED Videodisc System.
re: your last point.
The Milne Speaking Clock currently housed at the Science Museum in London uses optical glass discs for playback (source shines through the discs, sensor on the other side). It is still equipped with the same optical discs it was installed with during its 1964 refit (the Pat Simmons voice), although the device at the Science Museum has not been used as the line clock since 1964 (replaced by a much smaller device with a magnetic drum rather than optical discs). The original GPO Speaking Clock voice (Jane Cain) was commissioned in 1936. As of 3 April 2012 (I've been and photographed it), it's still running to a tolerance of thousandths of a second.
As far as I can make out from seeing the device first hand, the discs are made from a very highly polished quartz glass, coated with carbon(?). The entire device is encased in a sealed glass container, I would venture a guess that it is filled with an inert gas to prevent the carbon coating on the discs from oxidising. Whether this is part of the original design or if it's part of the museum preservation process, I couldn't tell you.
Makes me wonder just how many "Dark Ages" we've actually been through?
I have a CDR I burned in 1996, on HP media. Still perfectly readable. Dye layer is sandwiched between two layers of plastic.
I have a CDR I burned last month on a PNY disc... yep, it's peeled. Dye layer was protected by a layer of ink.
It's all down to the physical media. If anyone has a stock of HP CDR media, circa 1995-2000, that they're not planning on using, please let me know.
I beg to differ, although my example might not be seen as mainstream - or even safe enough for general use:
Radioisotope thermoelectric generators.
The Voyager spacecraft have been using the same batteries since the 1970's.
...that's been running as a bare HTPC for several years. OK, support still sucks for these boards in every sense of the word, shoehorning the drivers in has been a nightmare (on Windows and Linux) but fortunately I picked right first time and have only ever had to do that once.
It still runs Slackware 8.
If not for the stupid amount of money I spent on it (even back then nearly £200 for board and brick was a bit steep, but I needed compact and quiet), then I'd be binning it and investing in a pair of RasPis.
Except...
Kim Jong Il was Korean, if I recall correctly? Notwithstanding the issue of his place and date of birth...
problems:
Aerosolised glass would lacerate the lung tissue of any who inhaled it. Commercial fail.
Fire departments worldwide already use misters in situations where there's lots of hot smoke in a confined space (perfect conditions for a backdraft) - the idea being to cool the hot smoke, not kill the flames. Once you remove the heat source, the fire extinguishes itself. Aside from that, the last thing you need to introduce to a fire is a forced injection of oxygen which is what you'd be doing if you used an airfan to force the mist. Nozzle configuration is the important thing here.
A hole saw to punch through an airplane skin? Overkill. Most aircraft skins can be penetrated using nothing more than a screwdriver - typically an airliner skin is 0.040" thick. Heck, you could punch through that with your fist.
In the UK we have this thing called the Trade Descriptions Act 1968, which among other things prohibits misdescription of goods. A DVD-video must by definition comply with the DVD-video standard (Part 3, Book B and DVD Video Recording Book) or it CANNOT be referred to as a DVD video.
Now, people do still have choice over whether or not to purchase a barcode for a particular title. If one does purchase a DVD video, then he has a statutory expectation that that is what he is getting. There is NOTHING in the standards to cover region locking, CSS encoding, or any other restrictive mechanism. ANY DVD that employs any of these mechanisms CANNOT claim to be a DVD-video.
Having made the choice to purchase a barcode with the DVD-Video logo, if one then finds out that one cannot play that DVD in a standard, open-region player (lots of Chinese players are not region locked hence will play ANY otherwise compliant disc), then IMO there would be a case under 1968 (c. 29).
My boggle with the region coding thing is the fact that unless specified on the box that a player is region-free*, there is no indication whatsoever on the hardware or the packaging (or the manual!) that the player is region locked and to what region. This is clearly a violation of 1968 (c.29)?
*Since DVD-video units hit mainstream in around 1997, I've been aware of the region coding and studiously avoided region locked players, unless there was a clear-cut and simple way of jailbreaking them. The only player I ever had to jailbreak was a Meridian 586 (bought near the end of 1997 and cost a bloody fortune).
in keeping with the process of natural justice, then yes, why not? It's part and parcel of the whole level playing field thing, full disclosure and all that. If disclosure is partial, then there is no justice.
If they (the State, in this case acting as Prosecutor) want to fuck you up the arse, there is NOTHING you can do to prevent it.
What you CAN do is not make their job easy. What you CAN do is make them spend money, because THAT is the limiting factor in their activities. What you CAN do is tell them to fuck off and that you will record what they say and obeying the maxim that for justice to be done it must be seen to be done, publish and be damned.
An organic system is inherently unstable - this is why the global network is so resilient against targetted attacks (such as wide-scale DNS poisoning, root name server outage...). The system will route around the dark spot. Whether or not it's "what the man wants" is irrelevant. If "The Man" wants the Internet to go dark permanently, all "The Man" has to do is cause a global, total and simultaneous blackout of every node, domain and name server, webserver - anything with a CPU and internet connection.
No biggy.
oh yeah. Local vegetation (dandelion, hogweed, wild garlic, that sort of thing) when I'm out in the sticks, or if I'm cooking at home it's usually roasted peppers, potatoes and onions, braising the rabbit with woodpigeon breast and pheasant (or partridge, depending on what else I manage to bag).
FYI: it wasn't a Mercury capsule, it was Apollo 1. Apart from that, yes it was.
...that a human life can be so easily monetised. OK, these guys know what they're getting into, that there's a very real risk of something failing spectacularly, and of them dying. That's what they get paid for. However, that should not be reflected in the equipment they're being asked to use. Built by the lowest bidder? I'd want something with a track record of *not* failing; there's a reason why greymarket goods are so cheap. They *do* fail.
oh, the myxomatosis thing? How did that turn out?
That's right, they have more rabbits than ever. Bigger, faster, and stronger ones. Myxy only kills the weaker ones. The dingoes are even more out of their depth than ever.
If I could get down there with my air rifle, I'd be like a pig in mud. And very well fed.
I concur: when Schering-Plough's patent on loratadine expired, the price of the drug went through the floor and suddenly it was available over the counter - but not at $15 per pill.
Sure made my life easier, in recent years I've been travelling around a lot and scheduling to be around my GP surgery one day then again three days later to pick up the prescription is a nightmare. Now I just walk into the first pharmacy I see and pick up a month's supply for change out of a fiver.
Patents on pharmaceuticals is just a license to inflate the price to the point of ridiculous and beyond. It must stop. People die because they *can't afford the drug that will likely save them*.
I wish I was stoned/drunk enough to know what the hell you were talking about...!
what, like warp drive?
I read a theory in a Trek novel (one of the early crossover ones I think - Strangers From The Sky?), which explained the arrowhead symbol as a function of mass, energy and velocity. Basically it went something like: as you approach the speed of light, the amount of energy required to push a mass approaches infinity. If you can change the mass to something less than zero, then the amount of energy required to accelerate past C becomes less than infinite, hence attainable.
Despite the reference to the Higg's Boson as the "God Particle" in popular science journals and mainstream media, just how important is this discovery as far as weak interactions, gravity, etc., are concerned? Is this discovery going to change the face of quantum chromodynamics as we know it?
pisses me off that The Cloud costs £6/hour to use, and BT OpenZone requires that you have a BT home account (unless you use the public terminal in such equipped booths). Nottingham is practically unbroken in coverage for both of them from Netherfield across to Wollaton, Arnold down to Silverdale. We do have a classic red box (or two or ten) as well, at least one of these has been retrofitted with a wifi module.
The Cloud wifi network has been operating from UK payphones for several years.
what's wrong with shorter, cascading keys using different algorithms?
it would be a lot easier to engineer a space installation which spins; failing that (likely given the potential cost running into tens of billions, which no nation or even group of nations can afford right now), an attached structure on the ISS which spins independently of the superstructure, in which the occupants can enjoy some portion of earth normal gravity, albeit simulated. I'd connect something to the other end of the Columbus module... or wait until the Node connector is installed (apparently around 2014).
Absent gravity, spider webs are surprisingly symmetrical (a href="http://www.space.com/6142-spider-success-weightless-webs-spun-space.html">Linky).
Mummichogs have been used to study motion sickness in space - they're apparently very adaptable to changing gravitational environments.
As a matter of physics, flight relies on three things: lift, drag and thrust. In space, you don't need lift and drag (since these two factors depend on gravity), you're left with thrust. As birds don't have vector thrusting, I'd think they'd just flap around in fairly straight lines until they collide with walls.
As for the ant question, I refer you to the recent broadcast by Kent Brockman:
"The spacecraft has apparently been taken over - "conqured" if you will - by a master race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."