It is easy to design locks, even tumbler-mechanism mechanical locks, that are unpickable by the standard manipulation techniques.
It is even possible to build these 'unpickable' locks for a small multiple what a standard lock of the same mechanical quality would cost.
You can make it difficult enough that burning or drilling the core, or taking a fire-ax to the door, is much more feasible than any manipulation technique. When the locking mechanism is no longer the weakest link, then it no longer makes sense to spend more on an improved lock.
Everything else operated perfectly, so we still feel good about the general configuration
"Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"
So you have a Loss Of Vehicle accident, and yet you are not convening an accident investigation board with six months of hearings leading to recommendations that require you to ground all flights for the next decade. You'll never become the next NASA with that attitude.
"Childhood immunisation would provide adults with protection from the euphoria that is experienced by users".
"Meanwhile, experts at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, have developed a super-virus, harmless to humans, which produces proteins that can block or reduce the effects of cocaine."
"The Ministry of Love is developing a simple operation that reduces the drive towards dangerous sex acts by eliminating the risk of orgasm."
Now they are using something called wavefront technology, I guess they are able to ablate away your cornea in fractions of a wavelength of visible light (the laser is UV to prevent heating which would kill underlying cells).
I believe that before wavefront technology, they just looked at your prescription (focal length error in diopters, astigmatism) and take off the corresponding amount of lens across the entire aperture of your eye based on those few numbers.
With wavefront technology, they look at many points of the lens independently to decide how much to take off at each point.
The Google words for how this works are (hartmann shack wavefront).
Ray Charles (R.I.P.) went blind at the age of seven. This research only finds a result for people who went blind before the age of 2.
The guy merely had more talent in his little finger than most of today's most popular musicians have in their whole bank of voice sequencers and chorus machines. How boring.
For holography you want monochrome light, which means the light source will be lasers. Probably three diode lasers for R,G,B. Lasers are much more efficient than the incandescent bulbs used in projectors, which means that you will be able to put your PDA back in your pocket without second degree burns after using for a while.
The home page of one of the coauthors of the cited paper is here. It shows a hologram that takes a few seconds to generate on a 2 GHz PC. Pretty low quality, and presumably specialized hardware (which could probably be implemented as an FPGA) will be required to get it to video rates. But for static text type presentations, for the Powerpoint warriors who are the main market for projectors, speed is less important.
I am not as impressed as I was before. The dog is going to realize which one is out of place just by the smell of the toy which obviously doesn't fit w/the rest.
In the test they combined 9 known items and one unknown item in a room when the dog was away. Then, from another room, they asked the dog first to fetch a known item (which it did) then asked him for an item with an unfamiliar name. The dog then picked the new one (demonstrating 'negative identification' or some such term).
A few months later, they tried another fetch test, and the dog remembered the name for each of the new items introduced during the first test.
All cable companies in the US are now required to provide HDTV customers with a firewire-equipped cable box, on request. You can use this to make an HDTV PVR system from a Mac.
What about the case of Monsanto vs. Schmeiser where a Canadian canola farmer's crop was contaminated by Monsanto's Round-Up Ready crop and who was subsequently sued by Monsanto for violating their patents by growing seed with their designed genes without a license. The farmer lost, but is still appealing.
The word 'contamination' implies a small accidental admixture that degrades the quality of the crop. That is not exactly consistent with the 95-98% pure Roundup-Ready crop he was growing (and using Roundup on). There is a reason why the farmer lost his case.
According to that website, this will be visible in parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia. It is pretty light on detail, but according to this site parts of it will be visible from Australia and the eastern parts of North and South America.
If the full battery voltage, e.g. 9V, is applied to the bus, and each block has its own regulator (e.g. I found the 7805T for 16 cents at findchips.com, there's probably better cheaper) then voltage dropoff is not a significant problem, especially at the miniscule currents modern microcontrollers draw. Motors, of course, take more power, but still...
I would have one battery block you could plug in anywhere in the setup, rather than have each block have its own battery. If you have 37 blocks hooked together, how do you know which one has the bad battery? On the downside it makes the connectors and wires bulkier by one power line, and requires n+1 blocks while before you had one. but it beats having to buy 37 batteries every year and take everything apart to replace them. Cheaper too because you can use smaller lighter, unopenable boxes.
(Assuming that you have a PIC or other smarts per block): You should have some way of plugging in a computer interface block and have the entire circuit topology displayed on your computer: each block can query all its neighbors to ask what they are and what state they are in, and what their neighbors are, etc.
Have user-programable blocks. Maybe a full PIC development C compiler etc. is required, or you can write your own little-language (or better yet, one that already exists) to lower the bar for beginning programmers. That way, when someone wants a block that shows red when the cat flap has had an exit more recently than an entrance, it can be programmed up, rather than requiring the development of a new cat-flap module.
[karmawhore]Everything should be open source, with a Linux development system, of course.[/karmawhore]
Servo motor blocks, motor blocks, etc. Maybe make a Mindstorms interface.
Does anyone have any publications from 1985 mentioning avatars in the 'Habitat' game? If so, then the OED would presumably be interested.
This web page, and others say: In 1985 at Lucasfilm, the inventor Chip Morningstar, working with his colleague Randall Farmer, created Habitat,... Chip needed a term to describe the digital personification of users in the Habitat worlds and he chose the word avatar, for its meaning from Hindu theology...
Sure, sooner or later hotmail will stop showing bmps in messages and issue a warning like "if you get a message, do not open it, but delete immediatly"
According to the comp.basilisk faq about Basilisks (images that cause system crashes in wetware): 10. Is it true that Microsoft uses basilisk booby-traps to protect Windows 2005 from disassembly and pirating? We could not possibly comment.
The baloon's size therefore is not related to the atmospheric pressure but rather the molar mass of the atmosphere. And as you said, gravity is weaker, so if anything I bet the baloon would be smaller than it has to be on earth.
Er...no. The total buoyancy of a balloon is equal to the difference in weight between the lifting gas that fills its envelope and the atmosphere that it displaces. In lower gravity the weight of a given mass of gas goes down, but so does the weight of a given mass of payload, so that's a wash. You can cancel out the gravity and use mass to get the neutral buoyancy equation M(payload+rigging+envelope+...) = k V P/T (m_atm - m_fill) where m_foo is the average molecular weight of foo. m_CO2 = 44 (Mars atmosphere), m_earthair=29, m_H2 = 2, and very roughly P_earth ~ 200*P_mars, T_earth ~ 1.3 T_mars
Therefore, a balloon on Mars has to be about a hundred times as voluminous as a balloon on Earth carrying the same mass of payload.
Ethics and public policty really can't handle this type of knowledge on who can get what disease after exposure to common environmental factors or habits.
If my genetic test shows that the cyanide in almonds can cause me lung damage, and somebody else's test shows that the aflatoxin in peanuts will cause her liver damage, then I'll eat peanuts and she'll eat almonds and everyone will have a healthy, nut-enhanced existence.
The argument for ignorance says that we should ban genetic testing, criminalize peanuts and almonds, and have everyone just eat tofu. If that happens, and I can't get genetic testing to see what is and is not healthy for me, I'll be forced to buy mixed nuts of dubious origin from the local nut-house and die coughing my lungs out in the gutters of Squirrel Alley.
This is not hyperbole. The health fascists are trying to ban peanuts in various public places (because some people have allergies) and have everyone go on a low-salt diet, even though most people (even most people with high blood pressure) don't have sodium-sensitive hypertension.
Superballs aint what they useta be
on
Superball!
·
· Score: 1
I have two Wham-O superballs, one labelled (c)1976, the other labelled (c) 2001 (which I bought a couple of months ago). The 1976 one is dark blue and hard. The 2001 one is black and much softer.
From an 80 inch (~2 meter) drop onto concrete, the 1976 one rebounds 68 inches, the 2001 one only 59 inches. This gives coefficients of restitution of 85% and 74%, respectively.
People today don't have the balls they used to. My guess is that product liability lawsuits have turned everything soft.
wouldn't it be possible to mount the derailleur ABOVE the gears
The derailleur has to shift the chain to the right position before it reaches the cluster so that it feeds onto the correct sprocket. Since the chain is going up and behind the cluster at that time, the derailleur has to be on the bottom. On the front chainrings, the derailleur is on top and wouldn't work on the bottom.
About people who try to leave an 8-second gap in front of their cars in the middle of congestion:
Bravo! If only more people were like you, the world would be a nicer place to live.
No, if more people were like him then congested traffic would move a lot more slowly, and people would waste a lot more time stuck in traffic, instead of enjoying it with their families and doing other worthwhile things.
Slashdot Mirror
It is even possible to build these 'unpickable' locks for a small multiple what a standard lock of the same mechanical quality would cost.
You can make it difficult enough that burning or drilling the core, or taking a fire-ax to the door, is much more feasible than any manipulation technique. When the locking mechanism is no longer the weakest link, then it no longer makes sense to spend more on an improved lock.
But jeez, a bic pen and 5 seconds...
Aspirin taken daily with bottle of bourbon reduces awareness of heart attacks
Later today, after you report to the education center at 10:59 AM and leave a minute later at 1:00 pm, just as you always do, you will understand.
So you have a Loss Of Vehicle accident, and yet you are not convening an accident investigation board with six months of hearings leading to recommendations that require you to ground all flights for the next decade. You'll never become the next NASA with that attitude.
"Childhood immunisation would provide adults with protection from the euphoria that is experienced by users".
"Meanwhile, experts at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, have developed a super-virus, harmless to humans, which produces proteins that can block or reduce the effects of cocaine."
"The Ministry of Love is developing a simple operation that reduces the drive towards dangerous sex acts by eliminating the risk of orgasm."
One of those sentences is not in the article.
Now they are using something called wavefront technology, I guess they are able to ablate away your cornea in fractions of a wavelength of visible light (the laser is UV to prevent heating which would kill underlying cells).
I believe that before wavefront technology, they just looked at your prescription (focal length error in diopters, astigmatism) and take off the corresponding amount of lens across the entire aperture of your eye based on those few numbers.
With wavefront technology, they look at many points of the lens independently to decide how much to take off at each point.
The Google words for how this works are (hartmann shack wavefront).
Ray Charles (R.I.P.) went blind at the age of seven. This research only finds a result for people who went blind before the age of 2.
The guy merely had more talent in his little finger than most of today's most popular musicians have in their whole bank of voice sequencers and chorus machines. How boring.
For holography you want monochrome light, which means the light source will be lasers. Probably three diode lasers for R,G,B. Lasers are much more efficient than the incandescent bulbs used in projectors, which means that you will be able to put your PDA back in your pocket without second degree burns after using for a while.
The home page of one of the coauthors of the cited paper is here. It shows a hologram that takes a few seconds to generate on a 2 GHz PC. Pretty low quality, and presumably specialized hardware (which could probably be implemented as an FPGA) will be required to get it to video rates. But for static text type presentations, for the Powerpoint warriors who are the main market for projectors, speed is less important.
A few months later, they tried another fetch test, and the dog remembered the name for each of the new items introduced during the first test.
That's a smart dog.
All cable companies in the US are now required to provide HDTV customers with a firewire-equipped cable box, on request. You can use this to make an HDTV PVR system from a Mac.
00000000 was the name of Secretary of Defense McNamara's dog.
According to that website, this will be visible in parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia. It is pretty light on detail, but according to this site parts of it will be visible from Australia and the eastern parts of North and South America.
If the full battery voltage, e.g. 9V, is applied to the bus, and each block has its own regulator (e.g. I found the 7805T for 16 cents at findchips.com, there's probably better cheaper) then voltage dropoff is not a significant problem, especially at the miniscule currents modern microcontrollers draw. Motors, of course, take more power, but still...
I would have one battery block you could plug in anywhere in the setup, rather than have each block have its own battery. If you have 37 blocks hooked together, how do you know which one has the bad battery? On the downside it makes the connectors and wires bulkier by one power line, and requires n+1 blocks while before you had one. but it beats having to buy 37 batteries every year and take everything apart to replace them. Cheaper too because you can use smaller lighter, unopenable boxes.
(Assuming that you have a PIC or other smarts per block): You should have some way of plugging in a computer interface block and have the entire circuit topology displayed on your computer: each block can query all its neighbors to ask what they are and what state they are in, and what their neighbors are, etc.
Have user-programable blocks. Maybe a full PIC development C compiler etc. is required, or you can write your own little-language (or better yet, one that already exists) to lower the bar for beginning programmers. That way, when someone wants a block that shows red when the cat flap has had an exit more recently than an entrance, it can be programmed up, rather than requiring the development of a new cat-flap module.
[karmawhore]Everything should be open source, with a Linux development system, of course.[/karmawhore]
Servo motor blocks, motor blocks, etc. Maybe make a Mindstorms interface.
Does anyone have any publications from 1985 mentioning avatars in the 'Habitat' game? If so, then the OED would presumably be interested.
This web page, and others say:
In 1985 at Lucasfilm, the inventor Chip Morningstar, working with his colleague Randall Farmer, created Habitat,... Chip needed a term to describe the digital personification of users in the Habitat worlds and he chose the word avatar, for its meaning from Hindu theology...
The title is misleading. It is merely an autopsy of the electronics the skimmer installed, and not of the skimmer himself.
According to the comp.basilisk faq about Basilisks (images that cause system crashes in wetware):
10. Is it true that Microsoft uses basilisk booby-traps to protect Windows 2005 from disassembly and pirating?
We could not possibly comment.
M(payload+rigging+envelope+...) = k V P/T (m_atm - m_fill)
where m_foo is the average molecular weight of foo. m_CO2 = 44 (Mars atmosphere), m_earthair=29, m_H2 = 2, and very roughly P_earth ~ 200*P_mars, T_earth ~ 1.3 T_mars
Therefore, a balloon on Mars has to be about a hundred times as voluminous as a balloon on Earth carrying the same mass of payload.
The Spirit is willing, but the flash is weak.
(Posted by Jane Slee and John Stracke in separate usenet postings.)
The argument for ignorance says that we should ban genetic testing, criminalize peanuts and almonds, and have everyone just eat tofu. If that happens, and I can't get genetic testing to see what is and is not healthy for me, I'll be forced to buy mixed nuts of dubious origin from the local nut-house and die coughing my lungs out in the gutters of Squirrel Alley.
This is not hyperbole. The health fascists are trying to ban peanuts in various public places (because some people have allergies) and have everyone go on a low-salt diet, even though most people (even most people with high blood pressure) don't have sodium-sensitive hypertension.
From an 80 inch (~2 meter) drop onto concrete, the 1976 one rebounds 68 inches, the 2001 one only 59 inches. This gives coefficients of restitution of 85% and 74%, respectively.
People today don't have the balls they used to. My guess is that product liability lawsuits have turned everything soft.
The derailleur has to shift the chain to the right position before it reaches the cluster so that it feeds onto the correct sprocket. Since the chain is going up and behind the cluster at that time, the derailleur has to be on the bottom. On the front chainrings, the derailleur is on top and wouldn't work on the bottom.
http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/94q4/nicegift.ht ml ...
So to make it up to Helen, I said I'd buy her a gift.
"Any thing at all, my love," I said, overcome with remorse.
"Oh, I don't know," replied Helen,"You really shouldn't do this you know. But, if you are, just get me something really expensive, that I don't need."
The following day I booked her in for chemotherapy.