I work at Vandenberg, and they've got quite a fleet of alternative fuel vehicles. The little Ford Think things are getting used pretty heavily - I always see one or two in the parking lot. So apparently the cost of energy in California isn't enough to discourage the Air Force.
And Brummund - if you don't know about the USAF/golf connection, you haven't been around the Air Force much. We've got a large course on base. As for the high-performance driver, I can neither confirm nor deny. =]
"not moving over to the right after passing" seems to be a regionally dependent thing. Back East, people get upset when you drive in the 'passing lane', but I've grown up in California, and here, if you've got two lanes going in the same direction, you use them! Faster traffic moves to the left, slower traffic to the right. Not a difficult concept. When your exit is coming up, you move off to the right lane. In multi-lane highways, you try to leave the right lane for entering and exiting only, and for slow trucks and such.
That's not to say drivers aren't stupid. Not signaling drives me nuts. Forget world peace, visualize using your freaking turn signal, damn it!
And for some of us, it would be a much more drastic change in lifestyle. I work on a military base - without joining the military (again), there's no way I could live on base. For that matter, there's not nearly enough housing on base for everyone who works there. Sure, I'd love to live in a car-free city. It's just not going to happen here.
Just because you're sampling only a few seconds of an old hit doesn't make it right. The human brain has a tendency to remember and recognize even very small bits of songs... by sampling someone else's work, you're taking advantage of the listener's recognition of that sample. Seriously, either get permission, or come up with something original, for Christ's sake...
Obligatory plug: Check out the OpenTRAC project at opentrac.org. We always need more contributors.
I'm 25 as well (for another week at least), and I've been licensed for more than half of that. I would definitely recommend the hobby to geeks of all varieties.
WP5.1 rocks. Last good version they ever made. The graphical versions that followed were never stable, or even close to fast. Can't count how many division by zero errors I got in 6.0.
I still find myself wanting to do 'reveal codes' in Word 2000...
We used to have LCD projectors for big status displays in our network control center. Running 8 to 10 hours a day, they'd fail every three months or so. Without exception, the LCDs would crack or leak somehow, with huge colored bubbles covering the whole screen. I forget who made the projectors (Infocus, maybe?) but they sucked big time.
Exactly. Why the constant use of the word 'sharing' when 'illegally distributing' would be more accurate? I'd love to see someone create a system that actually allowed true borrowing of other people's music/movies. Something that makes sure only one person at a time can play it. See how popular that is with the college students...
That's nothing. In the shop where I used to work, one of the techs used the shop vac to clean out a laser printer that'd had a major toner leak. Unfortunately, the toner particles were a heck of a lot smaller than the filter in the vac, and they went straight on through. For years afterward, it looked like there'd been a fire in the place that'd left soot all over the ceiling.
Yeah, I know. They changed it because of the stupid tracking device that totally cut out a major portion of the plot. And they were supposed to be in a HMMWV. But then, some of the stuff King described happening in the hummer wouldn't really fit with the standard seat layout...
...the scene in Dreamcatcher where he takes a call on the Glock. Perhaps the next all-in-one media appliance? The original point-and-click interface...
I'm just trying to point out that the statement in the original post about a cell phone charging itself through the ringer/vibrator is absurd. Any such device would have to effectively dampen vibrations, so you'd just be reducing the output of the vibrator and wasting energy in conversion.
The current hardware's the same as APRS. You could reprogram a TinyTrack3 and it'd do OpenTrac as easily as APRS.
A big focus of the project is open hardware and software - something that's sorely lacking in APRS. Take the MIM, for example. It's a pretty clever little telemetry transmitter, but it sells for $79. Seems pretty excessive for a circuit board with a PIC and some support circuitry. No source code is provided, either. I'm working on something similar, but it'll be completely open source, provided under the BSD license. Source, CAD drawings, foil patterns, and all that stuff will be published for anyone to duplicate or modify.
Day-to-day operations give you the chance to test the system out under a real load, so you know it'll work in an emergency.
The biggest problem I've seen is that the channel is just overloaded in many places. People using excessively long paths, too many high digipeaters too close together, and too-frequent transmissions.
OpenTrac doesn't fix that (there are methods already being discussed and tested for those problems), but it does let you do all sorts of nifty stuff with telemetry and such. And it's far easier to encode and decode than APRS, so it's better suited for small microcontrollers.
Many/.'ers are probably already familliar with APRS for position reporting over ham radio. APRS has some serious limitations, though, and there's an effort to develop a new, extensible, open protocol at opentrac.org. Things are just starting to take off, with prototype hardware in use and a couple of test programs written. Check it out and see what you can contribute.
My personal goal: A poor man's Land Warrior system for paintball scenario games. =]
Inhaling sharp-edged little particles has never been good for your health. Doesn't matter if they're manufactured or not. Take silicosis, for example.
We've got a huge diatomaceous earth plant in the next town over, and even though it's amorphous silica, I've heard you can still get some lung problems from breathing a lot of it for long enough.
Bury a fanless computer six feet down in the back yard. Run power and cat-5 into the garage. Add physical intrusion detection. By the time the police figure out where the cable leads, the thermite charges packed around the hard drives have done their work and there's nothing to find but a glass-encased lump of slag.
If anyone's interested, thermite is actually very easy to make. Igniting it from the computer would probably require a multi-stage ignition, though - say, electric match to black powder to magnesium strip to thermite. And you'd want to make sure the ignition signal didn't get accidentally flipped on reboot or core dump or anything. =]
Encryption's all well and good, but you've got to keep the keys somewhere. Just try recovering data from a hard drive when you can't identify which lump of metal IS the hard drive.
That's probably not too far from the truth... your body's pushed down against the deck with a force of 1G. When you lose gravity, your body acts like a spring and pushes you off. Meat doesn't make a very good spring, though, so you're probably not going to go too far.
Terminus (http://www.vvisions.com/games/details.cfm?ID=28) does a pretty good job of it. Yeah, it's not true Newtonian physics - ships have a maximum speed, and exceeding it causes hull damage and eventually destruction. But it does serve to limit the difference in velocity.
The Terminus solar system is REALLY BIG. The fact that your top speed is limited means that pretty much anything interesting is going to be clustered around the vortex gate network. But that doesn't mean you have to stay there. I've actually flown from the Moon to the Earth in real time, without using the gate network. Took something like 12 hours. I've pondered the feasibility of flying from Earth to Venus or Mars, but it's not entirely clear if even my huge flying fuel tank of a ship would have enough juice to run the life support for that long.
The other problem is navigation. The nav comp won't lock on to anything outside your local gate node. You're limited to looking out the window to pick your target. I once flew to Amalthea from a moon with a vortex gate and proved the concept - just had to align myself with visible landmarks. I think the solar system is dynamic in the game, though, so Venus is going to be a moving target.
I'd recommend Terminus to anyone who likes playing around with games outside of a set story line. Not as fun as the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games as far as pure action goes, but much more like Elite.
Fusion research isn't just for the big guys - you can build a Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor at home! Seriously, these things are capable of fusing hydrogen when built properly. I think they're only like 1% efficient at generating power, but it looks like there's still some room for experimentation. You could probably put one together for a few hundred bucks if you're good at scavenging. The biggest danger really isn't from neutron emission, it's from working with vacuum equipment. I wouldn't want to be near a glass bell jar when it implodes. Still, it'd be worth it just to have a cool, glowing fusion reactor in the garage.
Screw DRM. It can always be circumvented. If it were up to me, I'd go with steganographic watermarking. Make sure each theater gets a uniquely marked copy. When you've got 90 minutes or more of high-resolution video in which to hide maybe a dozen bits, it's going to be dang hard to find and eliminate. So when a movie does get leaked to Kazaa, you just read the watermark, figure out where it came from, and bill the leaking theater for lost revenues. You'd better believe the theater owners are going to keep a close eye on their projectionists.
Slashdot Mirror
I work at Vandenberg, and they've got quite a fleet of alternative fuel vehicles. The little Ford Think things are getting used pretty heavily - I always see one or two in the parking lot. So apparently the cost of energy in California isn't enough to discourage the Air Force.
And Brummund - if you don't know about the USAF/golf connection, you haven't been around the Air Force much. We've got a large course on base. As for the high-performance driver, I can neither confirm nor deny. =]
"not moving over to the right after passing" seems to be a regionally dependent thing. Back East, people get upset when you drive in the 'passing lane', but I've grown up in California, and here, if you've got two lanes going in the same direction, you use them! Faster traffic moves to the left, slower traffic to the right. Not a difficult concept. When your exit is coming up, you move off to the right lane. In multi-lane highways, you try to leave the right lane for entering and exiting only, and for slow trucks and such.
That's not to say drivers aren't stupid. Not signaling drives me nuts. Forget world peace, visualize using your freaking turn signal, damn it!
And for some of us, it would be a much more drastic change in lifestyle. I work on a military base - without joining the military (again), there's no way I could live on base. For that matter, there's not nearly enough housing on base for everyone who works there. Sure, I'd love to live in a car-free city. It's just not going to happen here.
Just because you're sampling only a few seconds of an old hit doesn't make it right. The human brain has a tendency to remember and recognize even very small bits of songs... by sampling someone else's work, you're taking advantage of the listener's recognition of that sample. Seriously, either get permission, or come up with something original, for Christ's sake...
Obligatory plug: Check out the OpenTRAC project at opentrac.org. We always need more contributors.
I'm 25 as well (for another week at least), and I've been licensed for more than half of that. I would definitely recommend the hobby to geeks of all varieties.
N1VG
I vote for that butt-ugly Beehive parliment building as the first target. What the heck were they thinking?
So now I can lose all of my electronic files along with the physical ones in the piles of junk on my desk...
WP5.1 rocks. Last good version they ever made. The graphical versions that followed were never stable, or even close to fast. Can't count how many division by zero errors I got in 6.0.
I still find myself wanting to do 'reveal codes' in Word 2000...
We used to have LCD projectors for big status displays in our network control center. Running 8 to 10 hours a day, they'd fail every three months or so. Without exception, the LCDs would crack or leak somehow, with huge colored bubbles covering the whole screen. I forget who made the projectors (Infocus, maybe?) but they sucked big time.
Exactly. Why the constant use of the word 'sharing' when 'illegally distributing' would be more accurate? I'd love to see someone create a system that actually allowed true borrowing of other people's music/movies. Something that makes sure only one person at a time can play it. See how popular that is with the college students...
That's nothing. In the shop where I used to work, one of the techs used the shop vac to clean out a laser printer that'd had a major toner leak. Unfortunately, the toner particles were a heck of a lot smaller than the filter in the vac, and they went straight on through. For years afterward, it looked like there'd been a fire in the place that'd left soot all over the ceiling.
Yeah, I know. They changed it because of the stupid tracking device that totally cut out a major portion of the plot. And they were supposed to be in a HMMWV. But then, some of the stuff King described happening in the hummer wouldn't really fit with the standard seat layout...
...the scene in Dreamcatcher where he takes a call on the Glock. Perhaps the next all-in-one media appliance? The original point-and-click interface...
(OK book, lousy movie.)
I'm just trying to point out that the statement in the original post about a cell phone charging itself through the ringer/vibrator is absurd. Any such device would have to effectively dampen vibrations, so you'd just be reducing the output of the vibrator and wasting energy in conversion.
Perpetual motion vibrators!
A big focus of the project is open hardware and software - something that's sorely lacking in APRS. Take the MIM, for example. It's a pretty clever little telemetry transmitter, but it sells for $79. Seems pretty excessive for a circuit board with a PIC and some support circuitry. No source code is provided, either. I'm working on something similar, but it'll be completely open source, provided under the BSD license. Source, CAD drawings, foil patterns, and all that stuff will be published for anyone to duplicate or modify.
Day-to-day operations give you the chance to test the system out under a real load, so you know it'll work in an emergency.
The biggest problem I've seen is that the channel is just overloaded in many places. People using excessively long paths, too many high digipeaters too close together, and too-frequent transmissions.
OpenTrac doesn't fix that (there are methods already being discussed and tested for those problems), but it does let you do all sorts of nifty stuff with telemetry and such. And it's far easier to encode and decode than APRS, so it's better suited for small microcontrollers.
My personal goal: A poor man's Land Warrior system for paintball scenario games. =]
Inhaling sharp-edged little particles has never been good for your health. Doesn't matter if they're manufactured or not. Take silicosis, for example.
We've got a huge diatomaceous earth plant in the next town over, and even though it's amorphous silica, I've heard you can still get some lung problems from breathing a lot of it for long enough.
Didn't know they had thermite, but I've got a beautiful chunk of metallic pitchblende (Uranium Oxide) from them.
Hey, I needed something to test my new geiger counter design, and nothing else around the house could get it up to 30,000 counts/min...
Bury a fanless computer six feet down in the back yard. Run power and cat-5 into the garage. Add physical intrusion detection. By the time the police figure out where the cable leads, the thermite charges packed around the hard drives have done their work and there's nothing to find but a glass-encased lump of slag.
If anyone's interested, thermite is actually very easy to make. Igniting it from the computer would probably require a multi-stage ignition, though - say, electric match to black powder to magnesium strip to thermite. And you'd want to make sure the ignition signal didn't get accidentally flipped on reboot or core dump or anything. =]
Encryption's all well and good, but you've got to keep the keys somewhere. Just try recovering data from a hard drive when you can't identify which lump of metal IS the hard drive.
That's probably not too far from the truth... your body's pushed down against the deck with a force of 1G. When you lose gravity, your body acts like a spring and pushes you off. Meat doesn't make a very good spring, though, so you're probably not going to go too far.
Terminus (http://www.vvisions.com/games/details.cfm?ID=28) does a pretty good job of it. Yeah, it's not true Newtonian physics - ships have a maximum speed, and exceeding it causes hull damage and eventually destruction. But it does serve to limit the difference in velocity.
The Terminus solar system is REALLY BIG. The fact that your top speed is limited means that pretty much anything interesting is going to be clustered around the vortex gate network. But that doesn't mean you have to stay there. I've actually flown from the Moon to the Earth in real time, without using the gate network. Took something like 12 hours. I've pondered the feasibility of flying from Earth to Venus or Mars, but it's not entirely clear if even my huge flying fuel tank of a ship would have enough juice to run the life support for that long.
The other problem is navigation. The nav comp won't lock on to anything outside your local gate node. You're limited to looking out the window to pick your target. I once flew to Amalthea from a moon with a vortex gate and proved the concept - just had to align myself with visible landmarks. I think the solar system is dynamic in the game, though, so Venus is going to be a moving target.
I'd recommend Terminus to anyone who likes playing around with games outside of a set story line. Not as fun as the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games as far as pure action goes, but much more like Elite.
Fusion research isn't just for the big guys - you can build a Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor at home! Seriously, these things are capable of fusing hydrogen when built properly. I think they're only like 1% efficient at generating power, but it looks like there's still some room for experimentation. You could probably put one together for a few hundred bucks if you're good at scavenging. The biggest danger really isn't from neutron emission, it's from working with vacuum equipment. I wouldn't want to be near a glass bell jar when it implodes. Still, it'd be worth it just to have a cool, glowing fusion reactor in the garage.
Screw DRM. It can always be circumvented. If it were up to me, I'd go with steganographic watermarking. Make sure each theater gets a uniquely marked copy. When you've got 90 minutes or more of high-resolution video in which to hide maybe a dozen bits, it's going to be dang hard to find and eliminate. So when a movie does get leaked to Kazaa, you just read the watermark, figure out where it came from, and bill the leaking theater for lost revenues. You'd better believe the theater owners are going to keep a close eye on their projectionists.