if you've passed an act that removes more civil liberties than any other single act in the nation's history the thing you really need to do is follow it up by tightening the noose.
Thank God I'll be safe (cough) from terrorists though.
Now If I could only do something about those Black Marias. I know they'll be coming for me soon because I've downloaded anti-government texts over the internet.
They're called The Federalist Papers and Civil Disobedience.
VC on your front porch, all radioactively tagged, with a sign that says,"Please help yourself to some capital, but if you make any money put something back in."
Oh, and this is magical VC, so as soon as you take something out it's still got the same amount in the box. Nifty, huh?
So, there's no real harm in taking out. No one "loses" anything. But if you take out, make money, and don't put back in you become what is technically known as a "shit head."
And even the law has been known to formally uphold what it is generally refered to as the "social contract."
Now the only question is what are armed South Vietnamese dissidents are doing on the front porch in the first place.
There are actually many of us who still *prefer* to handle our purely text based tasks, such as email, from the command line.
I have nothing against GUI's, I'm running KDE right now, but to have to fire one up just to encrypt text when I'm already in text mode is not only annoying, it's doofey.
with a somewhat rough paint in order to reduce drag. This technique, however, works better with bicycles and road cars than with racing cars.
A somewhat rough surface only works to reduce drag in certain limited cases and at limited speeds. The reduced drag is accomplished by the rough surface actually serving to delay seperation of the airflow boundry layer from the surface it is flowing over. When seperation occurs turbulence, and hence drag, results.
At high speeds and over surfaces inately designed to maintain the boundry layer a smooth surface always has less turbulence, and thus less drag. In fact, in such surfaces a rough finish actually serves to force the airflow *off* the surface.
Which is why NASCAR stockers are waxed and polished, not roughed up.
"Breaker" Morant was scapegoated. He did as he was ordered. When what he did became a political embaressment he was executed for having done it, those having issued him the orders having denyied them.
That is a scapegoat.
The Thiokol engineers were "whistle blowers." They pissed of their employer. Their employer fired them.
A scapegoat is one who is unjustly sacrificed to prevent or ausage public embaressment. The firing of the Thiokol engineers actually *added* to the embaressment because the cat was already out of the bag.
They weren't sacrificed. They were executed.
KFG
Re:Yes, but is one of them Richard Feynman?
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Latest Columbia News
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· Score: 1
You can't do it. So called "carbon fiber" is a *composite* of carbon fibers and plastic. The plastic gives the form and the fibers add rigidity, taking advantage of the best attributes of both.
Such plastic plus fiber composites have been with us for ages. The WW1 Albatross fighter plane fuselage was made from composite materials, as was the PT boat, although must people don't recognize it as such.
That's right. *Plywood*, chip board and fiberboard are manufactured, actually high tech, plastic composite material using wood fibers instead of glass or graphite.
Your views on plastic as a throw away item is biased by the fact that plastics are the materials used to make disposable items. This has nothing to do with the plastic itself. What is one of the primary problems with this? Plastics don't degrade and build up in the land dumps. Metal does. Please note from the article that this plastic they have developed in *not* subject to degradation from uv light.
In any case, you can do exactly the same thing with a production plastic car to protect it from uv radiation as they do for GP cars.
Paint 'em.
There. Problem solved.
Trust me, I can make you a plastic car that will last for eons. Just like that Dixie cup you threw away last week.
Every car with a seperate frame and body suffers from this lack of rigidity.
It's not only perfectly possible to make a stressed skin plastic car, but the chassis of every Indy car and Grand Prix car is made entirely of stressed plastics. Because they are stronger, lighter and offer greater protection in a crash then steel,
The primary reason for using steel in the construction of production automobiles is manufacturing cost. Steel can be run down an assembely line in sheet form and *stamped* into complex structural shapes in fractions of a second.
Other materials have traditionally required skilled labor to form and more expesive machinery that takes longer to form a part than stamped steel.
Plus, your steel car rusts out in 10 years and they get to sell you a new one. Never underestimate the power of planned obsolesence. GM invented the overt philosophy.
Take a sheet of waxed paper. Grease it up with petroleum jelly. Now spray paint it. Do a good job, adding several coats.
You'll now find that you can simply peel the paint film from the paper backing. You will also now find that paint has no structural integrity whatsoever.
The primary function of painting metal is to prevent oxidation. Rust. It's secondary function is the purely cosmetic one of letting you change the color of the object. Note that the DeLoren, made of stainless steel, was not even available stock with paint on it.
Well, not to belabor an obvious point, but you wax plastic with. . . wax. Just as you do paint, wooden furniture, unpainted metal, every kind of flooring material you can think of (including plastics) and a host of other products and materials.
And for the same reasons. It adds a sacrificial layer that erodes instead of the base material. Prevents oxidation.Provides a smoother surface (racing cars are waxed for this reason, the aero drag of a waxed car is measurably lower than an unwaxed one), and as result, entirely coincidentally, gives a glossy sheen that some people find attractive.
People already wax plastic all the time. Hell, I wax my Lexan R/C car bodies. Makes 'em look great.
KFG
Yes, but is one of them Richard Feynman?
on
Latest Columbia News
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· Score: 5, Insightful
It's interesting to read Richard's story of the investigation of the first shuttle disaster, and his realization that the process was political, not scientific.
He had a great deal of trouble, as an official investigator, just being *allowed* to investigate, and of course to release his findings he had to engage in what amounted to guerilla tactics.
The end fate of the Morton-Thiokol engineers who "blew the whistle" must stand as some sort of object lesson in this case as well.
One would hope that steps are being taken to prenvent another go 'round of this shabby and shameful incident in American space history.
It refers to the mailorder "loophole." The so called mail order loophole doesn't apply merely to mailorder, it refers to any remote order, such as might be placed over the phone, or over the internet.
States at one point tried to levy sales tax on out of state mail order sales at the level of the seller. It went to the Supreme Court which ruled that a state cannot force compliance of its laws against someone who does not have a "presence" in the state.
This ruling applies just as much to the internet as anything else.
It isn't as simple as merely changing the law. It would require the institution of a *national* sales tax on "remote" sales, or a constitutional ammendment. A national sales tax on *anything* is still a hot button issue and it's the *states* that want the revenues from internet and mailorder sales.
By the way, it's always been clear to me that God plays dice with the universe, however, since he is the *house* he doesn't *gamble* with the universe. A distinction Mr. Einstein never seemed to grasp.
I just used ASCII as an obvious and intuitive example. It doesn't even have to be digital code, just any code of fixed length where some of the "bits" are effectively redundant place holders.
I'd only point out that all bit strings that stand for some sort of character are character code. All digital computer code is just code "made from bits." 255 zeros followed by a 1, 1 and SOH are all the same character using a different "font" as it were, just as the Morse character ".-" is actually the same as "a". Printed Morse is actually human readable with a little practice. So is ASCII in decimal ( with a LOT of practice) if it comes to that, but why bother? Even the English alphabet itself is just a graphical code, and just one of many possible ones.
Don't get hung up on the particular *form* a character code takes. It's still a character.
You're confusing a character set *optimized* for small "file size" with a compressed one. Again, they're two completely different beasties.
One can compress even an optimized character set though. For instance, if you have the string "eeeeeeeee" you could write it "e8." This is essentially what many image compressions do, since they often deal with large areas of the same data.
These people are essentially saying they have a patent on transmitting the digital phrase " paint the screen red."
Huffman compression is an algorithm for converting fixed length charecter code to variable length charecter code.
Since ASCII natively uses all bits of a fixed length for every charecter one can compress it by writing "1" instead of a bunch of zeros followed by a 1.
Morse is natively variable length. Not the same thing at all.
It doesn't even take much time and less brain than most sites.
It isn't even a question of using wysiwyg crap ( I use vim myself), it's a question of making good, clean, simple sites.
However, it is one thing to make a site that looks *good* in every browser, and quite another to make one that looks *best* in every browser.
But who said anything about looks? Not I.
You're falling into the age old trap of thinking of websites as being about looks. The DTP mindset that pervades web design.
They are about communication and navigation.
It is perfectly possible to make a website that looks good, functions well and makes navigation a snap in every graphical browser, that is, in fact, a perfect website, that is just plain a pain to use in a text browser.
find sarcasm itself interesting. There's nothing wrong with that. Nevermind that sarcasm, properly done, is the instrument of insight *and* funny, all at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
*read* the Federalist Papers lately.
Trust me, *this* government will think they're anti-government.
KFG
if you've passed an act that removes more civil liberties than any other single act in the nation's history the thing you really need to do is follow it up by tightening the noose.
Thank God I'll be safe (cough) from terrorists though.
Now If I could only do something about those Black Marias. I know they'll be coming for me soon because I've downloaded anti-government texts over the internet.
They're called The Federalist Papers and Civil Disobedience.
KFG
Or make them overheat when Yanks use them.
Or load a browser everytime you hit the reboot key sequence, but reboot everytime you use the "h" key.
But hey, at least they've still got warm beer.
KFG
VC on your front porch, all radioactively tagged, with a sign that says,"Please help yourself to some capital, but if you make any money put something back in."
Oh, and this is magical VC, so as soon as you take something out it's still got the same amount in the box. Nifty, huh?
So, there's no real harm in taking out. No one "loses" anything. But if you take out, make money, and don't put back in you become what is technically known as a "shit head."
And even the law has been known to formally uphold what it is generally refered to as the "social contract."
Now the only question is what are armed South Vietnamese dissidents are doing on the front porch in the first place.
KFG
There are actually many of us who still *prefer* to handle our purely text based tasks, such as email, from the command line.
I have nothing against GUI's, I'm running KDE right now, but to have to fire one up just to encrypt text when I'm already in text mode is not only annoying, it's doofey.
KFG
In fact, I spent most of last night making a Windows partition just so I could play Tux Racer.
KFG
with a somewhat rough paint in order to reduce drag. This technique, however, works better with bicycles and road cars than with racing cars.
A somewhat rough surface only works to reduce drag in certain limited cases and at limited speeds. The reduced drag is accomplished by the rough surface actually serving to delay seperation of the airflow boundry layer from the surface it is flowing over. When seperation occurs turbulence, and hence drag, results.
At high speeds and over surfaces inately designed to maintain the boundry layer a smooth surface always has less turbulence, and thus less drag. In fact, in such surfaces a rough finish actually serves to force the airflow *off* the surface.
Which is why NASCAR stockers are waxed and polished, not roughed up.
KFG
"Breaker" Morant was scapegoated. He did as he was ordered. When what he did became a political embaressment he was executed for having done it, those having issued him the orders having denyied them.
That is a scapegoat.
The Thiokol engineers were "whistle blowers." They pissed of their employer. Their employer fired them.
A scapegoat is one who is unjustly sacrificed to prevent or ausage public embaressment. The firing of the Thiokol engineers actually *added* to the embaressment because the cat was already out of the bag.
They weren't sacrificed. They were executed.
KFG
And it was Feynman who made that fact public.
The Thiokol engineers were fired.
KFG
does your '39 have? And how many did GM sell last year?
The fact that you have preserved your Pontiac has nothing to do with GM adopting an overt philosophy to encourage people to repurchase.
There are always a few people as wise as yourself in these matters, but they are always in the minority, which is all GM needs to make a killing.
KFG
Go ahead. I double dare you.
You can't do it. So called "carbon fiber" is a *composite* of carbon fibers and plastic. The plastic gives the form and the fibers add rigidity, taking advantage of the best attributes of both.
Such plastic plus fiber composites have been with us for ages. The WW1 Albatross fighter plane fuselage was made from composite materials, as was the PT boat, although must people don't recognize it as such.
That's right. *Plywood*, chip board and fiberboard are manufactured, actually high tech, plastic composite material using wood fibers instead of glass or graphite.
Your views on plastic as a throw away item is biased by the fact that plastics are the materials used to make disposable items. This has nothing to do with the plastic itself. What is one of the primary problems with this? Plastics don't degrade and build up in the land dumps. Metal does. Please note from the article that this plastic they have developed in *not* subject to degradation from uv light.
In any case, you can do exactly the same thing with a production plastic car to protect it from uv radiation as they do for GP cars.
Paint 'em.
There. Problem solved.
Trust me, I can make you a plastic car that will last for eons. Just like that Dixie cup you threw away last week.
KFG
Every car with a seperate frame and body suffers from this lack of rigidity.
It's not only perfectly possible to make a stressed skin plastic car, but the chassis of every Indy car and Grand Prix car is made entirely of stressed plastics. Because they are stronger, lighter and offer greater protection in a crash then steel,
The primary reason for using steel in the construction of production automobiles is manufacturing cost. Steel can be run down an assembely line in sheet form and *stamped* into complex structural shapes in fractions of a second.
Other materials have traditionally required skilled labor to form and more expesive machinery that takes longer to form a part than stamped steel.
Plus, your steel car rusts out in 10 years and they get to sell you a new one. Never underestimate the power of planned obsolesence. GM invented the overt philosophy.
KFG
Take a sheet of waxed paper. Grease it up with petroleum jelly. Now spray paint it. Do a good job, adding several coats.
You'll now find that you can simply peel the paint film from the paper backing. You will also now find that paint has no structural integrity whatsoever.
The primary function of painting metal is to prevent oxidation. Rust. It's secondary function is the purely cosmetic one of letting you change the color of the object. Note that the DeLoren, made of stainless steel, was not even available stock with paint on it.
KFG
Might I point out that paint is a film?
KFG
Well, not to belabor an obvious point, but you wax plastic with. . . wax. Just as you do paint, wooden furniture, unpainted metal, every kind of flooring material you can think of (including plastics) and a host of other products and materials.
And for the same reasons. It adds a sacrificial layer that erodes instead of the base material. Prevents oxidation.Provides a smoother surface (racing cars are waxed for this reason, the aero drag of a waxed car is measurably lower than an unwaxed one), and as result, entirely coincidentally, gives a glossy sheen that some people find attractive.
People already wax plastic all the time. Hell, I wax my Lexan R/C car bodies. Makes 'em look great.
KFG
It's interesting to read Richard's story of the investigation of the first shuttle disaster, and his realization that the process was political, not scientific.
He had a great deal of trouble, as an official investigator, just being *allowed* to investigate, and of course to release his findings he had to engage in what amounted to guerilla tactics.
The end fate of the Morton-Thiokol engineers who "blew the whistle" must stand as some sort of object lesson in this case as well.
One would hope that steps are being taken to prenvent another go 'round of this shabby and shameful incident in American space history.
KFG
Yes.
KFG
It refers to the mailorder "loophole." The so called mail order loophole doesn't apply merely to mailorder, it refers to any remote order, such as might be placed over the phone, or over the internet.
States at one point tried to levy sales tax on out of state mail order sales at the level of the seller. It went to the Supreme Court which ruled that a state cannot force compliance of its laws against someone who does not have a "presence" in the state.
This ruling applies just as much to the internet as anything else.
It isn't as simple as merely changing the law. It would require the institution of a *national* sales tax on "remote" sales, or a constitutional ammendment. A national sales tax on *anything* is still a hot button issue and it's the *states* that want the revenues from internet and mailorder sales.
KFG
I clearly misspoke.
By the way, it's always been clear to me that God plays dice with the universe, however, since he is the *house* he doesn't *gamble* with the universe. A distinction Mr. Einstein never seemed to grasp.
KFG
I just used ASCII as an obvious and intuitive example. It doesn't even have to be digital code, just any code of fixed length where some of the "bits" are effectively redundant place holders.
I'd only point out that all bit strings that stand for some sort of character are character code. All digital computer code is just code "made from bits." 255 zeros followed by a 1, 1 and SOH are all the same character using a different "font" as it were, just as the Morse character ".-" is actually the same as "a". Printed Morse is actually human readable with a little practice. So is ASCII in decimal ( with a LOT of practice) if it comes to that, but why bother? Even the English alphabet itself is just a graphical code, and just one of many possible ones.
Don't get hung up on the particular *form* a character code takes. It's still a character.
KFG
You're confusing a character set *optimized* for small "file size" with a compressed one. Again, they're two completely different beasties.
One can compress even an optimized character set though. For instance, if you have the string "eeeeeeeee" you could write it "e8." This is essentially what many image compressions do, since they often deal with large areas of the same data.
These people are essentially saying they have a patent on transmitting the digital phrase " paint the screen red."
KFG
Only spoken over the *phone?*
Hey, maybe I should patent that.
Sheer PTO doofyness.
KFG
Huffman compression is an algorithm for converting fixed length charecter code to variable length charecter code.
Since ASCII natively uses all bits of a fixed length for every charecter one can compress it by writing "1" instead of a bunch of zeros followed by a 1.
Morse is natively variable length. Not the same thing at all.
KFG
Of course you can, and so can I, or anybody.
It doesn't even take much time and less brain than most sites.
It isn't even a question of using wysiwyg crap ( I use vim myself), it's a question of making good, clean, simple sites.
However, it is one thing to make a site that looks *good* in every browser, and quite another to make one that looks *best* in every browser.
But who said anything about looks? Not I.
You're falling into the age old trap of thinking of websites as being about looks. The DTP mindset that pervades web design.
They are about communication and navigation.
It is perfectly possible to make a website that looks good, functions well and makes navigation a snap in every graphical browser, that is, in fact, a perfect website, that is just plain a pain to use in a text browser.
Now try *hearing* your way through a site.
KFG
find sarcasm itself interesting. There's nothing wrong with that. Nevermind that sarcasm, properly done, is the instrument of insight *and* funny, all at the same time.
Think of it as multitasking.
KFG