I think this is a terrifically cool idea. My advice would be not to put any equation you don't understand, or you'll feel like a tool every time someone asks you to explain it. If you know any quantum mechanics, you could put Bohr's equation for the energy levels of a hydrogen atom. Coulomb's law springs to mind as well.
Well I for one would be willing to pay $10-20/month to read the NYT online. I already spend probably an hour a day reading it, and fifteen years ago I'd be paying for daily newspaper delivery at my age anyhow. Good journalism deserves my money.
Except that you can't carry Bacardi 151 onto a plane, as the document states:
Alcoholic beverages
Alcoholic beverages containing 24% or less alcohol are not restricted in checked baggage. Those containing more than 24%, but not more than 70% alcohol in retail packaging are limited to 5 L (1.3 gal.) per person and 5 L (1.3 gal.) per container in checked baggage. Those containing more than 70% alcohol (more than "140 proof") may not be carried onboard passenger-carrying aircraft [emphasis added]. Alcoholic beverages containing 70% or less alcohol are limited to travel size containers (3.4 oz/100ml) through the screening checkpoint.
No industrial lab would allow a flammable solvent near an electrically charged heating mantle.
Gotta tell you, it would be great if that were the case but it just isn't. I work in a QC lab at a drug company, and people are always doing things like distilling isopropyl alcohol in a regular fume hood. There are hot plates used in the same hood as all sorts of solvents. Many people don't wear gloves, ever, even when working with stuff like mixtures containing DMSO. Safety will never trump people's intrisic laziness.
Has anyone else noticed that the Babelfish site doesn't actually list Hebrew as a choice? This makes the whole thing a little fishy-sounding (pun intended) to me.
Make sure to set an open firmware password. Otherwise, root access for all is a simple Cmd-S on startup away, and then all your security is for naught.
Also, set the machine up at home. Once you're done, try everything you can to break into it: start from a CD, an external drive, single-user mode, the works. Only if it's rock-solid should you let it out into the world. Trust me, kids with Macs in labs can be very, very clever.
I had this exact same thing happen to me. I was fooling around, and decided to see what would happen if I did a 'net send * foo'. Of course, it worked. Too well. Apparently, the message popped up for each person, the first time they logged into their Win2K account afterwards. The next day, the principal hauls me into his office and reprimands me for
"harming" the network, and tells me that it took the three tech guys hours to "track down" what I had done, find out "what special program I had used" and "remove the message from the network."
I cheerfully explained to him that I refused to believe that what I had done was harmful, that I didn't use a special program, and that they knew for years that the NetBIOS messenger service was on, and that I would have been happy to show them how to turn it off if they wanted to know.
Apparently, some teacher was logged on when it happened and panicked, screaming that someone had "hacked the network!" This was, apparently, reason enough to decided that I had "caused harm," so what did I get? Two weeks' suspension from the network. Of course, since I had helpful friends, it meant nothing, but still...
Incidentally, the same week that this happened, someone brought in a laptop with a virus (I think SoBig, but could have been Blaster or something else) which managed to bring the whole network to its knees for two days. They knew whose laptop it was, but did he get punished at all? Of course not; that was an innocent mistake, despite the fact that it cost at least an order of magnitude more man-hours to fix.
Real Genius (Val Kilmer's second Hollywood movie) is the movie referred to by the top parent post (with the flying laser and the popcorn and whatnot). Top Secret, Kilmer's first, is the one where he parodies the Beach Boys and the NRA, along with WWII spy flicks. Both very good movies, much better than anything he's done recently.
We should support a bill giving the ESRB's ratings the weight of law, the same way that the MPAA's ratings hold true in the movie realm.
The MPAA's ratings are actually completely voluntary, and do not have the weight of any law whatsoever. However, any movie theater/video store that is found by the industry (they send people around, anonymously, to test) might have a hard time obtaining anything new. Therefore it's in the best interests of the stores and theaters to control who gets in/rents movies.
I don't know who else has noticed this, but nowhere in any advertisement is it referred to as the Apple Music Store. It's always, always, the iTunes Music Store. Why? So that Apple won't get sued. I'm willing to bet that ITMS is actually a subsidiary company, and that Apple's done a good job covering themselves on this one.
A friend of mine once worked in a chem lab where they, for some reason, needed to use non-denatured 95% ethanol. You know, Everclear. Well, it transpired that there every day the level in the bottle would be a little lower than it should have been. My friend had the bright idea of putting in a little phenolphthalein (main ingredient in Ex-Lax) into the bottle, as that apparently wouldn't disrupt whatever they were using it for. Presto, no more EtOH gone!
For a project I did last summer, I put a little easter egg into each php script, so that if I pass any page the variable author=show, it shows my name and contact info. It'll be interesting to see how long it lasts...
A bunch of people have been commenting on the professor who used to gargle LN2. The man's name was Jearl Walker, author of The Flying Circus of Physics, who published an excellent essay describing exactly how to do it. He also talks about dipping your hand in molten lead, as well as walking on fire. He is the one who mentioned that when you let the LN2 touch your teeth, they crack.
At the risk of delving too deeply into an off-the-cuff remark, Crassus's "fire brigades" were simply henchmen whom he hired to wait around while the fires other henchmen set burned, allowing Crassus himself to buy up the surrounding properties at digustingly low prices. Then, once the deal had been struck, Crassus's firemen went in. Not quite "fire brigades".
And they weren't just "accused" of doing this...it's clear that it happened on numberous occasions, and everyone knew about it.
Yes there is, and speaking as a techie, I wish we had some at my school. I forget what it is called, but you may want to get in touch with the techies at the Signature Theater in Arlington, 'cause I've seen their system myself, and it looks pretty nice. I don't have an e-mail address for them, but the main phone number is (703) 820-9771. They are extremely nice and helpful. I wangled a visit to the tech booth after a show one night and chatted with them for about half an hour. They say that the software is nice, but occasionally crashes in the middle of the show. If you ask nice, they might have recommendations for you.
Re:Another potential problem...
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
Fair enough. I guess that the only way to prove it is to go help the guy build one, and then run it!
Re:Another potential problem...
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Time Travel
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The only reason I can see that the sun's frame of reference should be taken as "truer" is that the sun is more massive, and therefore more things can seen as realtive to it. I suppose an analogy might be that we measure the positions of places relative to the poles and the meridian, not to the anthill in front of my house: the anthill is less significant. Similarly, with respect to the universe, the sun is more significant than the earth.
Another potential problem...
on
Time Travel
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It might also be an issue that even if he transports something "back in time", that it will remain at the same point in space. Now, the earth is moving around the sun, and the whole solar system is moving around the galaxy, and the galaxy is moving through intergalactic space, so if you send something back in time it is unlikely that you will ever see it, since it will be the same place, and you will have moved. Am I missing anything here?
Something like this exists online right now. The one I know about is about movies and TV shows, but I suspect it could be modified to do bug reporting. You might want to take a look at that, and see if you can get the code by asking nicely.
Re:Well, just look at the technical documentation!
on
Modem Accelerators?
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Hey man...If you're going *that* fast, I don't think anyone's gonna quibble about a couple hundred miles per second...but you're probably right. I'm too lazy to perform all the calculations...maybe I should just change my sig.
Re:Well, just look at the technical documentation!
on
Modem Accelerators?
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· Score: 1
I stand corrected. Thank you for enlightening me, and thank you especially for not making me feel like an idiot in the process (something too many/.ers do, myself included). I suppose I could have just looked that up on google or something...oh well. I always did sort of wonder why they called them modems...figured it was just luser-speak.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is a terrifically cool idea. My advice would be not to put any equation you don't understand, or you'll feel like a tool every time someone asks you to explain it. If you know any quantum mechanics, you could put Bohr's equation for the energy levels of a hydrogen atom. Coulomb's law springs to mind as well.
Good luck!
Well I for one would be willing to pay $10-20/month to read the NYT online. I already spend probably an hour a day reading it, and fifteen years ago I'd be paying for daily newspaper delivery at my age anyhow. Good journalism deserves my money.
Except that you can't carry Bacardi 151 onto a plane, as the document states:
No industrial lab would allow a flammable solvent near an electrically charged heating mantle.
Gotta tell you, it would be great if that were the case but it just isn't. I work in a QC lab at a drug company, and people are always doing things like distilling isopropyl alcohol in a regular fume hood. There are hot plates used in the same hood as all sorts of solvents. Many people don't wear gloves, ever, even when working with stuff like mixtures containing DMSO. Safety will never trump people's intrisic laziness.
Has anyone else noticed that the Babelfish site doesn't actually list Hebrew as a choice? This makes the whole thing a little fishy-sounding (pun intended) to me.
I'm pretty sure any Italian could tell you that tiramisu is not Japanese.
Make sure to set an open firmware password. Otherwise, root access for all is a simple Cmd-S on startup away, and then all your security is for naught.
Also, set the machine up at home. Once you're done, try everything you can to break into it: start from a CD, an external drive, single-user mode, the works. Only if it's rock-solid should you let it out into the world. Trust me, kids with Macs in labs can be very, very clever.
I had this exact same thing happen to me. I was fooling around, and decided to see what would happen if I did a 'net send * foo'. Of course, it worked. Too well. Apparently, the message popped up for each person, the first time they logged into their Win2K account afterwards. The next day, the principal hauls me into his office and reprimands me for "harming" the network, and tells me that it took the three tech guys hours to "track down" what I had done, find out "what special program I had used" and "remove the message from the network."
I cheerfully explained to him that I refused to believe that what I had done was harmful, that I didn't use a special program, and that they knew for years that the NetBIOS messenger service was on, and that I would have been happy to show them how to turn it off if they wanted to know.
Apparently, some teacher was logged on when it happened and panicked, screaming that someone had "hacked the network!" This was, apparently, reason enough to decided that I had "caused harm," so what did I get? Two weeks' suspension from the network. Of course, since I had helpful friends, it meant nothing, but still...
Incidentally, the same week that this happened, someone brought in a laptop with a virus (I think SoBig, but could have been Blaster or something else) which managed to bring the whole network to its knees for two days. They knew whose laptop it was, but did he get punished at all? Of course not; that was an innocent mistake, despite the fact that it cost at least an order of magnitude more man-hours to fix.
Real Genius (Val Kilmer's second Hollywood movie) is the movie referred to by the top parent post (with the flying laser and the popcorn and whatnot). Top Secret, Kilmer's first, is the one where he parodies the Beach Boys and the NRA, along with WWII spy flicks. Both very good movies, much better than anything he's done recently.
Top Secret is the movie you're thinking of. Very funny.
We should support a bill giving the ESRB's ratings the weight of law, the same way that the MPAA's ratings hold true in the movie realm.
The MPAA's ratings are actually completely voluntary, and do not have the weight of any law whatsoever. However, any movie theater/video store that is found by the industry (they send people around, anonymously, to test) might have a hard time obtaining anything new. Therefore it's in the best interests of the stores and theaters to control who gets in/rents movies.
I don't know who else has noticed this, but nowhere in any advertisement is it referred to as the Apple Music Store. It's always, always, the iTunes Music Store. Why? So that Apple won't get sued. I'm willing to bet that ITMS is actually a subsidiary company, and that Apple's done a good job covering themselves on this one.
A friend of mine once worked in a chem lab where they, for some reason, needed to use non-denatured 95% ethanol. You know, Everclear. Well, it transpired that there every day the level in the bottle would be a little lower than it should have been. My friend had the bright idea of putting in a little phenolphthalein (main ingredient in Ex-Lax) into the bottle, as that apparently wouldn't disrupt whatever they were using it for. Presto, no more EtOH gone!
For a project I did last summer, I put a little easter egg into each php script, so that if I pass any page the variable author=show, it shows my name and contact info. It'll be interesting to see how long it lasts...
A bunch of people have been commenting on the professor who used to gargle LN2. The man's name was Jearl Walker, author of The Flying Circus of Physics, who published an excellent essay describing exactly how to do it. He also talks about dipping your hand in molten lead, as well as walking on fire. He is the one who mentioned that when you let the LN2 touch your teeth, they crack.
Interestingly, your sig seems quite appropriate for this discussion...
Nooo..."lucifer" means "bringer of light." Satan is a christian term.
At the risk of delving too deeply into an off-the-cuff remark, Crassus's "fire brigades" were simply henchmen whom he hired to wait around while the fires other henchmen set burned, allowing Crassus himself to buy up the surrounding properties at digustingly low prices. Then, once the deal had been struck, Crassus's firemen went in. Not quite "fire brigades".
And they weren't just "accused" of doing this...it's clear that it happened on numberous occasions, and everyone knew about it.
Yes there is, and speaking as a techie, I wish we had some at my school. I forget what it is called, but you may want to get in touch with the techies at the Signature Theater in Arlington, 'cause I've seen their system myself, and it looks pretty nice. I don't have an e-mail address for them, but the main phone number is (703) 820-9771. They are extremely nice and helpful. I wangled a visit to the tech booth after a show one night and chatted with them for about half an hour. They say that the software is nice, but occasionally crashes in the middle of the show. If you ask nice, they might have recommendations for you.
Fair enough. I guess that the only way to prove it is to go help the guy build one, and then run it!
The only reason I can see that the sun's frame of reference should be taken as "truer" is that the sun is more massive, and therefore more things can seen as realtive to it. I suppose an analogy might be that we measure the positions of places relative to the poles and the meridian, not to the anthill in front of my house: the anthill is less significant. Similarly, with respect to the universe, the sun is more significant than the earth.
It might also be an issue that even if he transports something "back in time", that it will remain at the same point in space. Now, the earth is moving around the sun, and the whole solar system is moving around the galaxy, and the galaxy is moving through intergalactic space, so if you send something back in time it is unlikely that you will ever see it, since it will be the same place, and you will have moved. Am I missing anything here?
Still, sounds like an interesting guy.
Something like this exists online right now. The one I know about is about movies and TV shows, but I suspect it could be modified to do bug reporting. You might want to take a look at that, and see if you can get the code by asking nicely.
Hey man...If you're going *that* fast, I don't think anyone's gonna quibble about a couple hundred miles per second...but you're probably right. I'm too lazy to perform all the calculations...maybe I should just change my sig.
I stand corrected. Thank you for enlightening me, and thank you especially for not making me feel like an idiot in the process (something too many /.ers do, myself included). I suppose I could have just looked that up on google or something...oh well. I always did sort of wonder why they called them modems...figured it was just luser-speak.
Thanks again.