Long ago, when I thought I wanted to be an EE, I did a couple of summer internships at JPL. I worked on the Cassini flight computer. My coworkers, especially the lead ASIC designer, were blisteringly smart people. If Cassini fails, it won't be the computer design at least!
Back then, the project was called "CRAF/Cassini" where CRAF was "Comet Rendezvous/Asteroid Flyby." CRAF was supposed to be the sister ship to Cassini, but it was cut for budgetary reasons. Too bad... with all the design work done how much could it have cost to just build another ship?
See, we were building this neat computer that would be reused on the next generation of probes, instead of having custom computer hardware for each... but of course it didn't work out that way.
I was lucky enough to see Cassini (and Galileo) in the Vehicle Assembly Facility. There was an observation deck where you could watch the guys in the clean room building the spacecraft. It was very cool to look down and realize, "that is going to Saturn." Or wherever.
Cassini is the last of the old school probe designs... a gigantic and expensive. She'll give us a heck of a show.
... it's simple to engineer the problems with racism and the main cause of racism out of a socialist society to begin with; by eliminating the possibility of ENVY and GREED.
Which societies have been successful in this endeavor? If it is so simple, the list must be long.
Isn't a little bit of envy and greed good, anyway? Didn't some greedy corporate bastard put that computer on your desk?
Without envy and greed we'd be spineless losers, like that time when Kirk got split into good and evil parts by the transporter. That Good Kirk clown was useless.
Try to work with human nature, not redefine it. You'll get farther.
You can only tell someone to make backups so often before you are sleeping on the couch. Sometimes they have to learn the hard way.
Coincidentally, today I backed up my critical stuff onto 3 DVD-RW's and one IDE disk which is now stored in my secret underground lair. I am feeling pretty smug, bring on the lightning and house fires...
In short, that those who are in the majority can and will create laws which are designed not only to keep themselves in the majority but to oppress those that disagree with them.
Huzzah. And on a side note, this is why we have the Electoral College. After the last election many said "it's gotta go!" But if you read about the system and really think about it, you will see that it is truly elegant.
As a satellite TV customer, I say "screw the FCC."
For example...
Dish Network is being forced to make all local channels available to customers with 1 dish. In other words, all their customers will have to live with them juggling programming birds so that Podunk OK can get their local channels with maximum convenience.
It is not legal for Dish to sell me a network feed from a distant market if I can get that network off the air where I live.
Say I live somewhere with a CBS affiliate that does not broadcast in HD, but I want to see CSI in HD. Dish can't sell me CBS from NY or LA unless I get a waiver from the local CBS station saying it is OK. Which, in practice, they never give out.
I know the FCC is just one cog in the machine, but what I am trying to get at is less regulation, please! Let people sell me the signals I want. If local businesses need the protection of law to stay in business -- they shouldn't be in business.
we used to attach model rocket engines to R/C cars.
Ingredients:
1 Team Associated RC/10 buggy sans motor and tranny (so it free-wheels) 1 custom PVC rocket mount 1 50N model rocket engine. (like, F or G class in Estes terms. Huge.) 1 piece of cannon fuse 1 source of fire for fuse 1 large, flat, non-flammable place. (Miles Square park in Orange County CA, if you must know. They have a huge slab of tarmac that people use for RC cars, rockets, etc.)
When the engine went off it was like... uh, it was like a rocket. It sped off at tremendous speed, and it even went in a straight line.
We all about died laughing.
This remains one of the highlights of my misspent youth.
Jog dial and high-resolution color screens both came first from Sony...
And as a consumer that kind of scared me.
Jog dial and high-rez sound nice, but then you have to wait for your favorite software to release a version that supports Sony's hardware. Maybe they do, maybe they don't... but when Palm itself builds support for such stuff into the OS, you are guaranteed more support.
I do admit that Sony features HAVE been well-supported in the Palm world, but I actually prefer the "benevolent dictatorship" model that Microsoft has over Pocket PCs. Manufacturers of PPCs usually do not seem to release massively weirdo hardware on their own. I read that agreements to that effect are in their OS license terms.
There is the occasional oddball like the Toshiba e800, which has a 640x480 screen well in advance of official support for such in the OS. All I know is I am not buying one, I will wait for official support and it will be smoother sailing.
Sony injected an energy into the Palm handheld market that I don't think can be matched by the other manufacturers.
True enough, though I cursed them roundly for not officially supporting Macs.
but the bitch will level faster than me and I won't be able to group with her, and the next thing I know she is in an online marriage with some d00d from Germany.
In fact, one of the things a prosecuting lawyer (even in an obvious self defense shoot) will try to get you on is whether your ammunition was specifically designed to kill someone. Some of the best self defense ammunition such as "Hydra-shoks" and "Black Talon" will make the jury think that you meant to kill someone...
A good point.
A friend of mine has always carried what the local police carry. That way, were he ever on the stand, he would claim that he chose to use what the police used as he believed it was the best (safest, whatever) choice.
Of course, if you end up in a civil trial, reason goes out the window and God help you.
Obligatory Simpsons reference:
MOE:... luckily, I was able to shoot him in the spine, or it could have gotten real ugly.
I don't know the details of the GBH thing, but consider this:
A Supreme Court ruling ensures that the police do not have the obligation to protect you. (Sorry but I do not recall the name or date of the ruling.)
In other words, a police department attempted to assert its right to ignore your cries for help, and this is now a right of all police depts in the country. Getting mugged? A cop can just walk by. Tough luck, citizen.
Is this part of a giant conspiracy by The Man? Probably not. More likely The Man is interested in being shielded from liability in case it happens to not get somewhere in time to help. Because if the cops WERE liable for things they didn't prevent, they would get sued out of existence and we'd all be trading ammo and gasoline in some kind of post-holocaust urban hell.
I may be attributing too much to Fox News, but as a general liability shield the "right to distort content" sounds pretty darn handy to any media company. When you put out content 24 hours a day you are going to make mistakes.
I don't know about you but to me CGI doesn't look real. The movements, textures, and impacts are always too perfect.
And therefore, not perfect. The mind boggles! If I were an android, smoke would be coming out of my realistic fleshy ears. Also, my name would be Norman.
I used to run a small business. I remember one bizarre conversation that I had with my accountant at our first tax time...
ME: So we don't have to pay a tax on that then? ACCOUNTANT: Right. ME: So what's this big fee, payable to the government, that you have calculated? ACCOUNTANT: That's not a tax. That's a levy.
Oh, it's not a tax, it's a LEVY! I feel so much better... Let me sign the check.
People like you just lead us further into the upwardly spiralling cycle of hatred and violence, seemingly unable to see the obvious, predictable and inevitable outcome of continually upping the ante against the potential threat of a hyper-caricatured and vilified view of 'the enemy'.
Hey, I didn't propose a SOLUTION, so don't get all "cycle of hatred" on me. I just stated a FACT, which is that there are a lot of guys who hate us for *who we are.* For *how we live.* Is that propaganda? Or is it just defining the problem?
Even Bin Laden said, in his letter to us, that the first thing he calls us to is Islam. He wants to change us, he is very open about that, and he speaks for a lot of the "bad guys," as I call them, even if it gives the moral relativism crowd hives.
If you have an easy way to make them stop hating us besides caving in to demands, please post it here and FedEx it to the UN and the White House while you are at it.
(Insert standard "not all Muslims are asshats" disclaimer here. Thanks.)
Honestly, real life isn't some cliched American TV show or movie where all the characters neatly fall into these little "good" and "evil" boxes.
Not everyone fits neatly into such boxes. But some sure do, like the asshats that cut off that guy's head the other day. Claiming otherwise puts one in a different box, labeled "fool."
Slashdot Mirror
Always wanted a PS2, can afford it too. Couldn't ever justify it. (see above :).
Twisted Metal: Black, Time Crisis 2 & 3
That's all it took for me.
Frankly, you don't really need to see the face of your enemy in a space battle. They are a blinking set of lights a few kilometers away.
I wish. In Trek, the ships pretty much fly up each others' noses before they shoot.
Long ago, when I thought I wanted to be an EE, I did a couple of summer internships at JPL. I worked on the Cassini flight computer. My coworkers, especially the lead ASIC designer, were blisteringly smart people. If Cassini fails, it won't be the computer design at least!
Back then, the project was called "CRAF/Cassini" where CRAF was "Comet Rendezvous/Asteroid Flyby." CRAF was supposed to be the sister ship to Cassini, but it was cut for budgetary reasons. Too bad... with all the design work done how much could it have cost to just build another ship?
See, we were building this neat computer that would be reused on the next generation of probes, instead of having custom computer hardware for each... but of course it didn't work out that way.
I was lucky enough to see Cassini (and Galileo) in the Vehicle Assembly Facility. There was an observation deck where you could watch the guys in the clean room building the spacecraft. It was very cool to look down and realize, "that is going to Saturn." Or wherever.
Cassini is the last of the old school probe designs... a gigantic and expensive. She'll give us a heck of a show.
To accelerate 1kg by 1m/s...
That was awesome.
Science people "get it."
Everyone else I have talked to... they tend to get brain-bleed when metric comes up.
I go by "Cletus Van Damme."
Which societies have been successful in this endeavor? If it is so simple, the list must be long.
Isn't a little bit of envy and greed good, anyway? Didn't some greedy corporate bastard put that computer on your desk?
Without envy and greed we'd be spineless losers, like that time when Kirk got split into good and evil parts by the transporter. That Good Kirk clown was useless.
Try to work with human nature, not redefine it. You'll get farther.
There's a lot of creepy shit out there but once you start censoring, where do you stop?
Guess we're gonna find out.
If you want one of those plain jane phones it will cost you more than a phone with all the features I just mentioned above.
Horsefeathers. We just added a line to our t-mo account and the free phone they offered us was a plain jane Samsung 225. No color, no nothing.
If you want a particular phone that isn't part of the carrier's offers, sure, you'll pay more.
... sometimes, a little less.
You can only tell someone to make backups so often before you are sleeping on the couch. Sometimes they have to learn the hard way.
Coincidentally, today I backed up my critical stuff onto 3 DVD-RW's and one IDE disk which is now stored in my secret underground lair. I am feeling pretty smug, bring on the lightning and house fires...
Lightning is VERY cool. I saw it on TV once.
- California Boy
In short, that those who are in the majority can and will create laws which are designed not only to keep themselves in the majority but to oppress those that disagree with them.
Huzzah. And on a side note, this is why we have the Electoral College. After the last election many said "it's gotta go!" But if you read about the system and really think about it, you will see that it is truly elegant.
As a satellite TV customer, I say "screw the FCC."
For example...
Dish Network is being forced to make all local channels available to customers with 1 dish. In other words, all their customers will have to live with them juggling programming birds so that Podunk OK can get their local channels with maximum convenience.
It is not legal for Dish to sell me a network feed from a distant market if I can get that network off the air where I live.
Say I live somewhere with a CBS affiliate that does not broadcast in HD, but I want to see CSI in HD. Dish can't sell me CBS from NY or LA unless I get a waiver from the local CBS station saying it is OK. Which, in practice, they never give out.
I know the FCC is just one cog in the machine, but what I am trying to get at is less regulation, please! Let people sell me the signals I want. If local businesses need the protection of law to stay in business -- they shouldn't be in business.
we used to attach model rocket engines to R/C cars.
Ingredients:
1 Team Associated RC/10 buggy sans motor and tranny (so it free-wheels)
1 custom PVC rocket mount
1 50N model rocket engine. (like, F or G class in Estes terms. Huge.)
1 piece of cannon fuse
1 source of fire for fuse
1 large, flat, non-flammable place. (Miles Square park in Orange County CA, if you must know. They have a huge slab of tarmac that people use for RC cars, rockets, etc.)
When the engine went off it was like... uh, it was like a rocket. It sped off at tremendous speed, and it even went in a straight line.
We all about died laughing.
This remains one of the highlights of my misspent youth.
I have started to use fractional clicks. You chumps are triple-clicking, but I get the same work done with 1/3 click!
Jog dial and high-resolution color screens both came first from Sony...
And as a consumer that kind of scared me.
Jog dial and high-rez sound nice, but then you have to wait for your favorite software to release a version that supports Sony's hardware. Maybe they do, maybe they don't... but when Palm itself builds support for such stuff into the OS, you are guaranteed more support.
I do admit that Sony features HAVE been well-supported in the Palm world, but I actually prefer the "benevolent dictatorship" model that Microsoft has over Pocket PCs. Manufacturers of PPCs usually do not seem to release massively weirdo hardware on their own. I read that agreements to that effect are in their OS license terms.
There is the occasional oddball like the Toshiba e800, which has a 640x480 screen well in advance of official support for such in the OS. All I know is I am not buying one, I will wait for official support and it will be smoother sailing.
Sony injected an energy into the Palm handheld market that I don't think can be matched by the other manufacturers.
True enough, though I cursed them roundly for not officially supporting Macs.
a quick google for "divorce rate myth" gives:
o rc erate.htm
http://www.familybiblefellowship.org/family/div
which uses census data to show that it is about 21% per year. (1997)
yes, the url is scary! religion, run!
find an SO that has similar interestes
but the bitch will level faster than me and I won't be able to group with her, and the next thing I know she is in an online marriage with some d00d from Germany.
In fact, one of the things a prosecuting lawyer (even in an obvious self defense shoot) will try to get you on is whether your ammunition was specifically designed to kill someone. Some of the best self defense ammunition such as "Hydra-shoks" and "Black Talon" will make the jury think that you meant to kill someone...
... luckily, I was able to shoot him in the spine, or it could have gotten real ugly.
A good point.
A friend of mine has always carried what the local police carry. That way, were he ever on the stand, he would claim that he chose to use what the police used as he believed it was the best (safest, whatever) choice.
Of course, if you end up in a civil trial, reason goes out the window and God help you.
Obligatory Simpsons reference:
MOE:
FYI, HD DLP RPTV ASAP.
I don't know the details of the GBH thing, but consider this:
A Supreme Court ruling ensures that the police do not have the obligation to protect you. (Sorry but I do not recall the name or date of the ruling.)
In other words, a police department attempted to assert its right to ignore your cries for help, and this is now a right of all police depts in the country. Getting mugged? A cop can just walk by. Tough luck, citizen.
Is this part of a giant conspiracy by The Man? Probably not. More likely The Man is interested in being shielded from liability in case it happens to not get somewhere in time to help. Because if the cops WERE liable for things they didn't prevent, they would get sued out of existence and we'd all be trading ammo and gasoline in some kind of post-holocaust urban hell.
I may be attributing too much to Fox News, but as a general liability shield the "right to distort content" sounds pretty darn handy to any media company. When you put out content 24 hours a day you are going to make mistakes.
I don't know about you but to me CGI doesn't look real. The movements, textures, and impacts are always too perfect.
And therefore, not perfect. The mind boggles! If I were an android, smoke would be coming out of my realistic fleshy ears. Also, my name would be Norman.
I think we should all start saving our poo now.
I used to run a small business. I remember one bizarre conversation that I had with my accountant at our first tax time...
ME: So we don't have to pay a tax on that then?
ACCOUNTANT: Right.
ME: So what's this big fee, payable to the government, that you have calculated?
ACCOUNTANT: That's not a tax. That's a levy.
Oh, it's not a tax, it's a LEVY! I feel so much better... Let me sign the check.
[Your blood pressure just went up.]
People like you just lead us further into the upwardly spiralling cycle of hatred and violence, seemingly unable to see the obvious, predictable and inevitable outcome of continually upping the ante against the potential threat of a hyper-caricatured and vilified view of 'the enemy'.
Hey, I didn't propose a SOLUTION, so don't get all "cycle of hatred" on me. I just stated a FACT, which is that there are a lot of guys who hate us for *who we are.* For *how we live.* Is that propaganda? Or is it just defining the problem?
Even Bin Laden said, in his letter to us, that the first thing he calls us to is Islam. He wants to change us, he is very open about that, and he speaks for a lot of the "bad guys," as I call them, even if it gives the moral relativism crowd hives.
If you have an easy way to make them stop hating us besides caving in to demands, please post it here and FedEx it to the UN and the White House while you are at it.
(Insert standard "not all Muslims are asshats" disclaimer here. Thanks.)
Honestly, real life isn't some cliched American TV show or movie where all the characters neatly fall into these little "good" and "evil" boxes.
Not everyone fits neatly into such boxes. But some sure do, like the asshats that cut off that guy's head the other day. Claiming otherwise puts one in a different box, labeled "fool."