No different than hearing incessantly about the SALT Talks back in (gosh what was, the 70's? 80's?) where SALT = Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, so SALT talks was Strategic Arms Limitation Talks talks...
I forgot to mention, for those who don't know, the author of Hammer's Slammers is David Drake. It will make it easier to find if you visit the Baen Library.:-)
Yeah, except as the author explicitly pointed out in Hammer's Slammers, lasers have no place on the battle field. I believe he said something along the lines of "a machine gun with one bullet in it is just as effective once, but a laser with anything less than a full power pack is nothing more than a glorified pointing device."
Hammer's Slammers didn't use lasers, they used projected plasma weapons that fired at close to the speed of light and as straight as a laser.
It's still a kick ass series of books. Tank Lords is available for free from the Baen Free Library.
In Real Genius, they built a single-shot, self consuming laser that could be used (with a small rotating mirror and a phase conjugate tracking system) to eliminate a single target from space.
"To put it simply, in deference to you, Kent, it's like lasing a stick of dynamite" -- Chris Knight
"Kent has his name on his license plate. Yeah, my mom does the same thing to my underwear. Your mom puts license plates in your underwear? How do you sit?" -- Chris and Mitch Taylor
"No, seriously, if there is ever anything I can do for you, or more to the point, to you... please let me know. Can you hammer a six inch spike through a board with your penis? Uh, not right now... Well, a girl has to have her standards..." -- Chris and Susan Decker
"I was just contemplating the immortal words of Socrates who said 'I drank what?'" -- Chris
And did the original CompuServe actually sell anything?
Yes they did. I purchased a book on How to Use CompuServe and their color interface software (CompuServe Information Manager, maybe?) both online through Compuserve. That was at least 10 years ago.
I bought a little gadget that plugs in between the phone and the wall that is called an EZ Hangup (or something similar) and when you press the button it make a loud bonging noise twice and then plays a recorded message of something like "We do not wish to accept these types of calls, please take this as your notice to remove us from your calling list" and then repeats. Only something like $9 on ebay, IIRC.
DeBrands makes some of the finest chocolates I've ever tasted. They have a store in Indianapolis that sells their chocolates and fresh desserts. You haven't lived until you've tried one of their hot carmel beverages (like hot chocolate, only with carmel instead).
If they go out of business due to these money-hungry bastards, I swear by all that I hold holy, I will hunt down everyone that has anything to do with PanIP and make them sorry.
DVDs that are not writable, like those they put movies on, are 9.4 GB in size, because they contain two 4.7 GB layers per disc. As yet, no one has had much luck creating a writer that can burn on two different layers, so we're limited to single layer discs for writing DVDs at home.
Double sided DVD-R media are available, so it's still possible to fit an entire move onto one disc, as long as you don't mind flipping it half-way through.
Out of all the movies on DVD I've purchased, Stargate for some reason is formatted on a 4.7 GB per side disc and requires that it be flipped half-way through the movie... weird...
As a veteran of the U.S. Army, I can tell you there is a big difference between disobeying a direct order and disobeying an unlawful order.
If you are ordered to kill innocent civilians and you disobey because you believe it's an unlawful order, that is okay.
If you are ordered to get out of bed on time and go do your mandatory physical training along with everybody else and you say no because you don't think it's lawful for someone to tell you to get out of bed at 5:30 in the morning, that is not okay.
I spent 3 years in the Army, doing the job of my choice and let the Army pick my duty station as long as I didn't have to leave the country, and I was quite happy with my time in service.
I currently work with at least 3 other veterans (1 Navy, 1 Air Force and 1 Nation Guard) and all three of them agree that they would do the same if they had it to do all over again. All three of them got to see the world at government expense because they wanted to *and* learned additional valuable skills that helped them to get their current jobs.
The smart thing to do is sign up to take the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Apptitude Battery) tests and find out what your scores are. If you score at least a 95 GT score you can pretty much write your own ticket and get the job of your choice. I know, I spent 3 months working in a recruiting station in my home town.
I've purchased many, many items on ebay. I have also sold several items on ebay. I've had one bad experience with each side.
Buying - I ordered some of those 'breast enlargement pills' for my girlfriend. It's not something I wanted for her, but she was planning to buy some of the more expensive ones from a TV advertisement and I told her we could save money by using ebay. I ordered four bottles (to get the free shipping offered) and was told I would have them within 3 business days. Two weeks later, still no pills. I wrote several times and called and left phone messages. I eventually got an e-mail stating that they had been shipped to the wrong address and a new shipment was being sent out and that I would be receiving 6 bottles instead of the 4 I had paid for. One and a half weeks later they still hadn't arrived, and I left negative feedback for that seller. In less than 2 hours after posting the feedback, the seller used PayPal to refund my money. I then turned around and ordered the same pills from a different vendor, my girlfriend used them for a couple of weeks and said that they were making her fat and so she threw them out.:-(
Selling - I had an old Sega Genesis system and about 20 games for it that I never used any more. Posted it for sale, one guy kept bidding and rebidding and drove the price up high, won the auction and then never sent any money and never responded to e-mail. Within one week, his feedback dropped from around +10 to -5, so it was obvious that someone was abusing that account, no way of knowing if it was the true owner or not. I notified ebay and was allowed to re-run the auction a second time for no additional cost and ended up selling it to a legitimate buyer for about $20 less than what the first auction closed for.
Since I first started using ebay, I have purchased 3 computers (all the same), 3 digital cameras (all different), a digital camcorder, jewelry, perfume, children's toys, software, hardware, flashlights, those glow-chemical bracelets, lockpicks, magic tricks, universal remote controls, more stuff than I can even remember, and those are the only two incidents I've ever had.
I don't think using ebay is any more unsafe than most other forms of shopping, I'd worry more about buying/selling stuff through a newspaper classified ad, because you never know what's going to happen when you get to the other person's house, or worse yet, when they come to your home.
As a side note, my two greatest ebay deals involved Bob & Tom albums. I had a fairly complete set of their CD's, a total of 17 discs, one autographed, and one autographed poster. I sold the entire collection for $420 cash to someone living in the same town. A year later in the back of my closet I found a copy of Bob and Tom, A Day At the Race, a very limited edition cassette (only 500 copies made) that I listed and sold for $450... not bad considering I'd only paid $10 for it when it was new, which wasn't all that long ago...
Car battery lead contains arsenic and mercury, but it's in such small quantities (parts per billion) that it's practically negligable.
Car batteries contain two kinds of lead, a hard lead and a soft lead. The battery posts/terminals are hard lead, an almost pure form of lead with minimal trace elements. The grid inside the battery, where most of the lead is, is soft lead, which is alloyed with Calcium and Aluminum and minor amounts of Magnesium to make it flexible and more reactive.
Right before I left that job, someone stole a bottle of mercury from the QC lab (not on my shift) and dumped it into someone's boots. Luckily that person knocked their boot over before putting them on, or he would have been in for a very nasty surprise...
Maybe they should go arrest that guy in Florida who yesterday asked a judge to legally change his name to "God". The judge refused and they agreed on the name "I Am Who I Am". Since the killer in MD claims that he is God, maybe they should show up at I Am's house and ask him a few questions...
Before moving on to my current career, I worked for about 6 months at a secondary lead refinery, where we recycled car batteries back into lead.
The batteries were brought into what was called the breaker room, where they were smashed, the plastic case pieces would float to the top of the mix and removed for recycling, the liquid was drained off and sold, and then what was left was run through a drying kiln and then into a reverbatory furnace with molten lead coming out the other end.
The lead was then treated with a variety of processes to either soften or harden it. This was the part that was a pyromaniac's wet dream. Imagine a refinery floor with 4 kettles of 250-300,000 pounds of molten lead each, set into the floor so that the top of the kettle is just above waist high. Then imagine that the processing of these kettles full of molten lead uses powdered sulfur, red phosphorous, a calcium-aluminum-magnesium alloy and SODIUM. That's right, they paid union steel workers to stand there and throw paper lunch sacks full of powdered red phosphorous into a swirling kettle of molten lead. Oh yeah...
I was a Q.C. technician, so it was my job to sample the lead, test it's content and then write orders for the union guys to follow as to how much of each material to add.
Now, back to the sodium story... remember the breaker room where they smashed the batteries? That room was as big as a medium-sized airplane hanger, all metal construction with a cement floor. The floor was usually covered by up to an inch of a weak sulfuric acid solution that leaked from the battery crushing equipment. Less than a hundred yards away was a storage room containing 25 gallon drums of large chunks of metallic sodium. One day one of the guys called me over, pulled out a large knife and sliced off a chunk of sodium about the size of a baseball, and I then followed him to the entrance of the battery crusher room. He wiggled his eyebrows, which was about all the expression you can display behind a respirator, safety glasses and a face shield, and then threw that chunk of sodium into the middle of the room.
KABLOOIE!
Sodium reacts when it contacts water, because it disassociates a Hydrogen and an Oxygen atom from the water molecule leaving one free Hydrogen atom which then ignites from the heat generated by the reaction. Now, imagine if instead of water (H2O) you instead used a mixture of H2O and H2S04. More hydrogen! More oxygen! Bigger boom! Heck, you can throw just about any metal into Sulfuric Acid and start liberating small amounts of Hydrogen, so something like Sodium is just overkill.
Luckily we were wearing those big ear-muff style hearing protectors, or we would have been deafened. The explosion was unbelievable and nearly knocked us over from 20+ feet away, and we weren't even in the same room where it happened.
The most amazing part of the story is that no one even noticed. There were so many loud noises and other distractions that a deafeningly loud bang was no reason for people to even look up.
If it hadn't been for the fact that the company was an environmental disgrace (the president and several managers were indicted a year or so after I left for dumping water with lead dust in it into the local sewer system) and a safety nightmare (I've never seen a place with so many 'first aid incidents' before, and I hope to never again), it was a great job for $21,000 a year... of course that was 1998, so $21,000 seemed like a lot of money at the time...
Do you remember a really old TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) program called Sidekick?
Their license agreement allowed you to install the program on as many PCs as you wanted, as long as it was only used on one PC at a time. This allowed you to put it on your home PC, your work PC, your laptop PC, etc., and you only had to pay once.
That's one way to allow "some" piracy to occur. Not the only way by any means, but it's one way.
Are they going to share the prize?
on
RC5-64 Success
·
· Score: 1
Let's see, 321,000+ participants dividing a check of $10,000, that breaks down to $0.03 per participant... pretty sad when the postage to send your check is more than the check is for.... reminds of the time a creditor sent me a dun for $0.12, it cost them more in postage (including the pre-paid return mailer) then it gained them...
All the CEOs and VPs with their MBAs are going to see these new systems and immediately replace the existing technology and start firing SysAdmins... then (I'm going to guess here) 41 days later they'll all be sitting in their offices asking out loud "what's wrong with the e-mail?" or "why can't I log in?"
Then they'll call up the old SysAdmins and offer to hire them back at hopefully double the salary.
You never really know how much you need something until it's gone.
Slashdot Mirror
No different than hearing incessantly about the SALT Talks back in (gosh what was, the 70's? 80's?) where SALT = Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, so SALT talks was Strategic Arms Limitation Talks talks...
Check with police supply houses. I've seen red backlit keyboards for sale for that very purpose. Around $100 IIRC.
I forgot to mention, for those who don't know, the author of Hammer's Slammers is David Drake. It will make it easier to find if you visit the Baen Library. :-)
Yeah, except as the author explicitly pointed out in Hammer's Slammers, lasers have no place on the battle field. I believe he said something along the lines of "a machine gun with one bullet in it is just as effective once, but a laser with anything less than a full power pack is nothing more than a glorified pointing device."
Hammer's Slammers didn't use lasers, they used projected plasma weapons that fired at close to the speed of light and as straight as a laser.
It's still a kick ass series of books. Tank Lords is available for free from the Baen Free Library.
Actually, no.
In Real Genius, they built a single-shot, self consuming laser that could be used (with a small rotating mirror and a phase conjugate tracking system) to eliminate a single target from space.
"To put it simply, in deference to you, Kent, it's like lasing a stick of dynamite" -- Chris Knight
"Kent has his name on his license plate.
Yeah, my mom does the same thing to my underwear.
Your mom puts license plates in your underwear? How do you sit?" -- Chris and Mitch Taylor
"No, seriously, if there is ever anything I can do for you, or more to the point, to you... please let me know.
Can you hammer a six inch spike through a board with your penis?
Uh, not right now...
Well, a girl has to have her standards..." -- Chris and Susan Decker
"I was just contemplating the immortal words of Socrates who said 'I drank what?'" -- Chris
And did the original CompuServe actually sell anything?
Yes they did. I purchased a book on How to Use CompuServe and their color interface software (CompuServe Information Manager, maybe?) both online through Compuserve. That was at least 10 years ago.
I bought a little gadget that plugs in between the phone and the wall that is called an EZ Hangup (or something similar) and when you press the button it make a loud bonging noise twice and then plays a recorded message of something like "We do not wish to accept these types of calls, please take this as your notice to remove us from your calling list" and then repeats. Only something like $9 on ebay, IIRC.
Has anyone checked to see if the password is 12345? 12345? That's the combination on my luggage!
DeBrands makes some of the finest chocolates I've ever tasted. They have a store in Indianapolis that sells their chocolates and fresh desserts. You haven't lived until you've tried one of their hot carmel beverages (like hot chocolate, only with carmel instead).
If they go out of business due to these money-hungry bastards, I swear by all that I hold holy, I will hunt down everyone that has anything to do with PanIP and make them sorry.
I would LOVE 9GB disks
DVDs that are not writable, like those they put movies on, are 9.4 GB in size, because they contain two 4.7 GB layers per disc. As yet, no one has had much luck creating a writer that can burn on two different layers, so we're limited to single layer discs for writing DVDs at home.
Double sided DVD-R media are available, so it's still possible to fit an entire move onto one disc, as long as you don't mind flipping it half-way through.
Out of all the movies on DVD I've purchased, Stargate for some reason is formatted on a 4.7 GB per side disc and requires that it be flipped half-way through the movie... weird...
Read the article, it has NO computer assistance of any kind.
Which is why it's probably limited to 300 mph speeds and 20,000 feet altitudes...
As a veteran of the U.S. Army, I can tell you there is a big difference between disobeying a direct order and disobeying an unlawful order.
If you are ordered to kill innocent civilians and you disobey because you believe it's an unlawful order, that is okay.
If you are ordered to get out of bed on time and go do your mandatory physical training along with everybody else and you say no because you don't think it's lawful for someone to tell you to get out of bed at 5:30 in the morning, that is not okay.
I spent 3 years in the Army, doing the job of my choice and let the Army pick my duty station as long as I didn't have to leave the country, and I was quite happy with my time in service.
I currently work with at least 3 other veterans (1 Navy, 1 Air Force and 1 Nation Guard) and all three of them agree that they would do the same if they had it to do all over again. All three of them got to see the world at government expense because they wanted to *and* learned additional valuable skills that helped them to get their current jobs.
The smart thing to do is sign up to take the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Apptitude Battery) tests and find out what your scores are. If you score at least a 95 GT score you can pretty much write your own ticket and get the job of your choice. I know, I spent 3 months working in a recruiting station in my home town.
So, by my choosing to not spend $8 on a movie ticket, and instead spending $17-20 5 months later, they're losing money?
Wow, that's even better than my answer! You must be a poet, too... ;-)
(Hey, that rhymes!)
Hey, you're a poet, and weren't aware of the fact!
I've purchased many, many items on ebay. I have also sold several items on ebay. I've had one bad experience with each side.
:-(
Buying - I ordered some of those 'breast enlargement pills' for my girlfriend. It's not something I wanted for her, but she was planning to buy some of the more expensive ones from a TV advertisement and I told her we could save money by using ebay. I ordered four bottles (to get the free shipping offered) and was told I would have them within 3 business days. Two weeks later, still no pills. I wrote several times and called and left phone messages. I eventually got an e-mail stating that they had been shipped to the wrong address and a new shipment was being sent out and that I would be receiving 6 bottles instead of the 4 I had paid for. One and a half weeks later they still hadn't arrived, and I left negative feedback for that seller. In less than 2 hours after posting the feedback, the seller used PayPal to refund my money. I then turned around and ordered the same pills from a different vendor, my girlfriend used them for a couple of weeks and said that they were making her fat and so she threw them out.
Selling - I had an old Sega Genesis system and about 20 games for it that I never used any more. Posted it for sale, one guy kept bidding and rebidding and drove the price up high, won the auction and then never sent any money and never responded to e-mail. Within one week, his feedback dropped from around +10 to -5, so it was obvious that someone was abusing that account, no way of knowing if it was the true owner or not. I notified ebay and was allowed to re-run the auction a second time for no additional cost and ended up selling it to a legitimate buyer for about $20 less than what the first auction closed for.
Since I first started using ebay, I have purchased 3 computers (all the same), 3 digital cameras (all different), a digital camcorder, jewelry, perfume, children's toys, software, hardware, flashlights, those glow-chemical bracelets, lockpicks, magic tricks, universal remote controls, more stuff than I can even remember, and those are the only two incidents I've ever had.
I don't think using ebay is any more unsafe than most other forms of shopping, I'd worry more about buying/selling stuff through a newspaper classified ad, because you never know what's going to happen when you get to the other person's house, or worse yet, when they come to your home.
As a side note, my two greatest ebay deals involved Bob & Tom albums. I had a fairly complete set of their CD's, a total of 17 discs, one autographed, and one autographed poster. I sold the entire collection for $420 cash to someone living in the same town. A year later in the back of my closet I found a copy of Bob and Tom, A Day At the Race, a very limited edition cassette (only 500 copies made) that I listed and sold for $450... not bad considering I'd only paid $10 for it when it was new, which wasn't all that long ago...
Car battery lead contains arsenic and mercury, but it's in such small quantities (parts per billion) that it's practically negligable. Car batteries contain two kinds of lead, a hard lead and a soft lead. The battery posts/terminals are hard lead, an almost pure form of lead with minimal trace elements. The grid inside the battery, where most of the lead is, is soft lead, which is alloyed with Calcium and Aluminum and minor amounts of Magnesium to make it flexible and more reactive. Right before I left that job, someone stole a bottle of mercury from the QC lab (not on my shift) and dumped it into someone's boots. Luckily that person knocked their boot over before putting them on, or he would have been in for a very nasty surprise...
Sadly, that's the best argument I've heard to invade Iraq so far... :-(
Maybe they should go arrest that guy in Florida who yesterday asked a judge to legally change his name to "God". The judge refused and they agreed on the name "I Am Who I Am". Since the killer in MD claims that he is God, maybe they should show up at I Am's house and ask him a few questions...
Before moving on to my current career, I worked for about 6 months at a secondary lead refinery, where we recycled car batteries back into lead.
The batteries were brought into what was called the breaker room, where they were smashed, the plastic case pieces would float to the top of the mix and removed for recycling, the liquid was drained off and sold, and then what was left was run through a drying kiln and then into a reverbatory furnace with molten lead coming out the other end.
The lead was then treated with a variety of processes to either soften or harden it. This was the part that was a pyromaniac's wet dream. Imagine a refinery floor with 4 kettles of 250-300,000 pounds of molten lead each, set into the floor so that the top of the kettle is just above waist high. Then imagine that the processing of these kettles full of molten lead uses powdered sulfur, red phosphorous, a calcium-aluminum-magnesium alloy and SODIUM. That's right, they paid union steel workers to stand there and throw paper lunch sacks full of powdered red phosphorous into a swirling kettle of molten lead. Oh yeah...
I was a Q.C. technician, so it was my job to sample the lead, test it's content and then write orders for the union guys to follow as to how much of each material to add.
Now, back to the sodium story... remember the breaker room where they smashed the batteries? That room was as big as a medium-sized airplane hanger, all metal construction with a cement floor. The floor was usually covered by up to an inch of a weak sulfuric acid solution that leaked from the battery crushing equipment. Less than a hundred yards away was a storage room containing 25 gallon drums of large chunks of metallic sodium. One day one of the guys called me over, pulled out a large knife and sliced off a chunk of sodium about the size of a baseball, and I then followed him to the entrance of the battery crusher room. He wiggled his eyebrows, which was about all the expression you can display behind a respirator, safety glasses and a face shield, and then threw that chunk of sodium into the middle of the room.
KABLOOIE!
Sodium reacts when it contacts water, because it disassociates a Hydrogen and an Oxygen atom from the water molecule leaving one free Hydrogen atom which then ignites from the heat generated by the reaction. Now, imagine if instead of water (H2O) you instead used a mixture of H2O and H2S04. More hydrogen! More oxygen! Bigger boom! Heck, you can throw just about any metal into Sulfuric Acid and start liberating small amounts of Hydrogen, so something like Sodium is just overkill.
Luckily we were wearing those big ear-muff style hearing protectors, or we would have been deafened. The explosion was unbelievable and nearly knocked us over from 20+ feet away, and we weren't even in the same room where it happened.
The most amazing part of the story is that no one even noticed. There were so many loud noises and other distractions that a deafeningly loud bang was no reason for people to even look up.
If it hadn't been for the fact that the company was an environmental disgrace (the president and several managers were indicted a year or so after I left for dumping water with lead dust in it into the local sewer system) and a safety nightmare (I've never seen a place with so many 'first aid incidents' before, and I hope to never again), it was a great job for $21,000 a year... of course that was 1998, so $21,000 seemed like a lot of money at the time...
Do you remember a really old TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) program called Sidekick?
Their license agreement allowed you to install the program on as many PCs as you wanted, as long as it was only used on one PC at a time. This allowed you to put it on your home PC, your work PC, your laptop PC, etc., and you only had to pay once.
That's one way to allow "some" piracy to occur. Not the only way by any means, but it's one way.
Let's see, 321,000+ participants dividing a check of $10,000, that breaks down to $0.03 per participant... pretty sad when the postage to send your check is more than the check is for.... reminds of the time a creditor sent me a dun for $0.12, it cost them more in postage (including the pre-paid return mailer) then it gained them...
(it's actually less of a problem sucking as opposed to blowing)
Sounds like someone is still not married...
Time, hell.... this person has waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much money...
All the CEOs and VPs with their MBAs are going to see these new systems and immediately replace the existing technology and start firing SysAdmins... then (I'm going to guess here) 41 days later they'll all be sitting in their offices asking out loud "what's wrong with the e-mail?" or "why can't I log in?"
Then they'll call up the old SysAdmins and offer to hire them back at hopefully double the salary.
You never really know how much you need something until it's gone.