OK, I've seen many things mentioned here, but so far nobody has touched on my personal favorite "lost art" - steam engines. Real, 12-inch-to-the-foot scale steam locomotives. They fascinate me nearly as much as a computer (and homebrewing, and growing food (by the way, homebrew tastes far better than Spudwiser, and a carrot, fresh from the planter on the windowsill is not only crunchy, but *sweet*)).
Once, only once, was I allowed to ride in the cab of a steam locomotive. It was an old Heisler logging engine, that had been resurrected by some farmers near Rockford, Illinois. Goddess, it must have taken weeks for that smile to go away:) Y'all can be fascinated with musclecars, metalsmithing and pinball machines, but for me there is nothing so interesting as watching movies of old steam trains rumbling by. A 4-8-8-4 can really get me breathing heavy:)
And, the fun part was that each one of those machines was hand-crafted by highly-skilled builders. Every railroad had slightly different designs, for their slightly-different terrain and loads. Some needed raw power, to haul stuff up steep grades; others needed sheer speed, for passenger liners; still others needed tight turning radius on narrow track laid atop the winter's ice in timber country. All were custom-designed, and custom-built (kinda like a really good piece of software... "elegant" is the word usually used, but that can hardly convey the appreciation these gems inspire).
Today's deisel-electrics are still somewhat customised... but not at all to the extent the old steamers were. The old steamers had soul - the new deisels have... well, I'm sure they have something, but for the life of me I can't think of it right now:)
Anybody know how a steam engine backs up? Or why they "chug" when under load? There are books and tapes that explain it all, and there are even places where you can build your own working miniatures. Wish I had a place big enough to do that *sigh* but it's not exactly an apartment-sized hobby.
Many moons ago, when I was still able to work, every morning at work I'd run through a game of Freecell, while the others were staggering blindly about groping for coffee. For me, Freecell was like doing mental gymnastics, a great way to warm up my mind and get it ready for the day's onslaught of subtle bugs that were my duty to track down and eliminate.
However, my PHB saw it as "just" playing games (despite my winning streak of nearly 20 games), and I was told to stop it. My productivity dropped, though it was still better than the rest of the group.
Nothing I could say would change his mind. His decree was final.:(
The company was bought out by a smaller competitor, in large part because it was not able to turn out a bug-free product on time and under budget. However, they *were* able to ensure that their best debugger was not "wasting" ten minutes a day playing games.
Re:profit.
on
Mighty Amazon
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Amazon could be profitable any time Jeff wanted it to be. The rules say that a company must show a profit at least once every "n" years, and when they show a profit, they end up paying taxes on it.
What Jeff did was to play that game, pouring any excess money back into making Amazon grow, until they finally had to show a profit. He's still doing that, and when people realize that Jeff knows the rules, and how to work around them, they'll better understand what he's doing.
I used to work with Jeff, years ago, at a place called Fitel, in New York City and London. Got to know him fairly well - he's actually a fairly accomplished hacker (in the old, good sense of the word) - as a child, overseas, he calibrated everybody's VCR digital counters, and had a BASIC program that converted between the different units, so that when the other ex-pats exchanged VCR tapes with indicators of where each show started, they'd be able to fast-forward to that spot on their VCR. Clever:)
So, please, folks. Realize that Jeff Bezos is one darned-clever dude, and react accordingly. He's not lost a bet that I know of in the nearly-twenty years that I've known him.
We do get lots of junk mail from the u.s. post office (they could easily filter that, but they don't), yet we complain about spam the most... why?
Hmm, could it be that, in amongst the real snailmail that I get, there might be, hmm, three? Four? pieces of junk mail per week. Those are easy to deal with - in fact, in Seattle, we have curbside recycling pickup.
Whereas, inamongst the spam I get daily (averages close to 90 pieces per day, and one day, when I was busy actually having a life, I didn't check my mail for almost 12 hours, at which point my ISP actually shut down my account's email, and warned me about getting too much mail!), there might be as many as... hmm... two real emails? On a good day?
See, I once posted on Usenet, and some genius in the newsgroup decided, as a favor to the community, to collect all the posters' email addresses, and ***list them on a Web site!*** (after which, the genius closed her own email account, so nobody can email her to remove their address). Between that, and my dear mother (bless her on this of all days!) who seems to think that emailed "greeting cards" are indeed free (and thusly signing me up for still more spam lists, as now they know that the address is valid).
Anybody wonder why I want an email program that uses a whitelist, and removes anything not on the list at the server level, before I even have to see it?
it's unrealistic to suggest that whitelists can solve the spam problem, since there's no way to argue they'll be adopted widely enough to keep huge amounts of spam from reaching people.
If it came already set-up that way, by default, in Micro$oft's new OS, and AOheLl's new version, you'd catch a fairly large percent immediately, and with that userbase, there would be one hella incentive for other email programs to incorporate these features in their new releases, too.
Now, if you want anybody to be able to email you, might I suggest you use somethin akin to Hotmail or Yahoo.com? Those are, as evidenced by all the spam I get from either, throw-away email addresses, perfect for dealing with random people. These would also work with the various dating systems, where you want email from them, but not necessarily also a ton of spam to wade through daily.
I presonally rely on Mozilla filters, which rid me of about 97% of my spam, while allowing the email of random people who need to contact me to (usually) get through.
I rely on a Bayseian filter program (which seems unable to spot anything thus far), and Mailwasher, a Windows program that somehow holds together under Wine to run, most of the time, if you're lucky. They catch, with much human intervention, all of my spam... but it's the "human intervention" that's bugging me.
I'm a lesbian, an apartment-dweller and not a drug user. I have less than zero desire for Viagra, penis enlargement, septic tank cleaning, illegal peeing teens, hot anal fisting or Valium. Not only do I not want these, I don't even want to *see* them. A whitelist would grant me my wish - and the first time one of my "close friends" spams me because they got a virus would be the end of our friendship. I used up all my tolerance for spam some thirty thousand emails ago. I just want some peace and sanity.
My using a whitelist may not, by itself, end all spam, but it sure would end it *for me*. The rest of you are free to be deluded into thinking that you'll be able to fix it with laws, or filters, or whatever. I know my way will work. Even better, this may well give me incentive enough to learn --C well enough to add this feature to my Linux email program. Wheee, to be spam-free at last! What a joy that would be.
If the *only* way for email to arrive in my mailbox was if it came from (or at least purported to come from) somebody on my list, I'd never see spam again. No need to bounce it, just delete it from the mail server, sight (and site:) ) unseen. Eventually, if everybody started doing this, spammers would see zero revenue, and the tide of spam would disappear.
Anybody know of a Linux email app that does this all, deleting spam at the server but downloading wanted email? I'm all ears.
Been there, done that.
on
Hamvention
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Back when I used to live in Chicago (instead of Seattle), I used to go to these things. This was a great place to talk with other tech nerds - why, my first Linux CDRom came from a hamfest (Slackware, long time ago). Then one year I went to a talk, and had my 2M handie stolen. That kind of put an end to me wanting to go back, ever again.:(
Yes, these things can be fun, but they're also well-known, and well-loved, by all the thieves around. If you must go, lock the car, don't carry anything, use a fanny pack instead of a wallet or purse, and in general treat it like you were vacationing in a hostile country. Not my idea of a fun vacation, but a chaqu'un son gout.
Mojave, California, April 18, 2003: Scaled Composites today unveiled the existence of a commercial manned space program. This previously hidden, active research program has been in the works at its facility for two years. This program includes an airborne launcher (the White Knight), a space ship (SpaceShipOne), rocket propulsion, avionics, simulator and ground support elements. Master of Ceremonies, Cliff Robertson, introduced Burt Rutan who explained the history and the components of the program. Other dignitaries who attended the event were Dr. Maxim Faget (pioneer configuratioin designer of the early NASA space program from the Mercury through the Apollo programs), Erik Lindbergh (grandson of Charles Lindbergh and President of the Lindbergh Foundation), and Dennis Tito (Soyuz space tourist). Further information about the space program and high-resolution photographs are available at the Scaled Composites website: www.scaled.com.
if you were homeless, you could panhandle for about an hour a week
Been there, done that. Why do you think my eating habits changed? I had no money, and I ate whatever the shelters gave me. That food was very high in fat, so naturally I "blossomed". Now that I have a real place to live (after my disability finally started), losing that extra weight, sans the help of modern miracle pills like fenphen, is not easy.
Have you looked at the (admittedly pricier) baked ramen? Very low fat, and fairly (well, comparatively) lowcalorie too. Sure, it's harder to find, and not nearly as cheap, but it works for losing weight.
I used it several years ago, and dropped almost 20 pounds. I managed to keep the weight off for almost 2 years, then my intake went up and my activity went down, causing the ever-popular battle of the bulge to begin anew:(
Many moons ago, I bought an old kit car. It was already built, a "Kellison GT", supposed to look like something between a Ford GT-40 Mark 1 and Mark 2. The basic car was a '65 VW flootpan and transaxel, with a 1964 Porsche racing 356SC engine bolted on. 110 cubic inches, 120 horsepower.
It leaked like a seive, when you turned the wipers on, the left turn signal came on, it beat voltage regulators to death in less than 24 hours. The steering was beefed up - 3/4ths turn lock to lock. The suspension was stiffened - drive over a cigarette butt and you felt it. It could hit 120mph before redline, turned on a dime (and gave you 8% interest!), and ran on regular gas. I even, once, push-started it by myself, *up* a slight hill. It was *very* light:)
I really miss that car. It used to destroy pressure plates and clutches with great frequency, and the last one I put in was a Kennedy Racing 1800-pound pressure plate. Even with that, the clutch was starting to glaze, just before the pedal broke. The idiot who was driving it at the time just gear-jammed it all the way home, destroying it utterly.
I really miss that car. It had more spirit than any car I've ever had, before or since. I'm glad to see a story on/. that's about a rather different style of "hacking", even though it's not quite what most/.ers are expecting. Thanks for showing us that not only silicon can be cool:)
I googled for it. "Texas catheter" was the search term. (My sister is an RN, and she recently mentioned this thing by that name, so I went looking to see what she was talking about. That site had the best concise explaination of how it works. Not, personally, being into men (and not really serious about bondage), it was of no use to me, until I read that comment. Talk about serendipity!:) )
Nope, it's real. Read this to see about what effects of having too much of it can do, then read here for a typical ingredients list of soda pop. Make your own decision.
Or, if you're a guy (like probably 97% of the/. audience), try one of these. You'll still need a bucket of some sort, buy given that the soda fountain needed a drain, you can probably tap into that, using several feet of leftover hose.
Not to mention the bone loss from the phosphoric acid in soda, there to help it stay fizzy. Not only does it leach calcium when you drink it, the effects last quite a while, negating any calcium you may have consumed with the beverage.
Thanks, but no. I recall my great grandmothers, all frail and bent-over, from osteoporosis. While I know that I will die some day, I'd prefer not to be that frail and creaky when I go, thankyouverymuch. If I must have a beverage dispenser, might I choose one with both decaf and "green tea" chai, please? I'd even be willing to use almond milk, or even 2%, instead of whole milk.
One thing about spam that stands out, is that so much of it is of a very explicit sexual nature. It is sent indiscriminately to individuals who are unlikely to have any use for these products and services.
Goddess, you can say *that* again! I get, daily now, several ads for Viagra, Russian wives, penis enlargement, sexual stamina building, septic tank cleaning and home refinancing (I live in an apartment) and so on, often several copies of each ad daily.
My favorite is the ad that tells me how they have "helped 700,000 men just like" me. Sure, men named Jeannette, with long hair, wearing silk blouses, makeup, lipstick, perfume, and carrying IDs that tell the world they're female. Yup yup yup, I'll bet they have! Most of them live in the Castro district of San Fran:)
I bounce them all. It gets annoying, though, when I get some 30-50 emails daily, and *two* of them are legit. Grrrr.
So far, I've read about why mining the moon is unlikely to be cost-effective (well, maybe the He-3 might make it), and about the problems of getting the product back to Earth safely. But...
Has nobody read Heinlien's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"? Why not set up a launcher there and threaten, or at least imply a threat, to lob "rocks" down on our heads? Given the government in China, I find it unlikely that they haven't thought about that.
How would the people of Earth react? How could we prevent getting flattened by twenty-ton steel-cased rocks being launched by an electromagnetic cannon right down the gravity well? Yee-ouch!
"practicing geology without a license"?!? Does that mean that the local rock & mineral club, of which I'm a member, could be violating laws when we go out and study the local terrain, searching for specimens?
I'm glad I don't live in California. I'd hate to learn that my checking the webicorders could be illegal.
It could be that farms are big, empty places, and the amount of ozone per cubic mile of atmosphere, coupled with the lack of high hydrocarbons per cubic mile of atmosphere, make it a non-issue. As farms tend not to be near major concentrations of pollutants, this small amount of ozone would be OK, and quite probably, less harmful to the environment than the pesticides. Plus, as an added bonus, the ozone won't leave a residue that may cumulatively be nasty for us to ingest.
I'm not sure what happened to the *original* CBBS hardware, but several years ago, Randy Suess sold me one of the old hard drives, a 10-meg one, that had been used in *a* CBBS. He also sold off a bunch of S-100 boards, and an old chassis, so I suspect the original CBBS hgardware was sold off, over the years, as parts no longer needed.
Randy's running Chinet nowadays, and last I heard, Ward had CBBS. You could always ask Randy, if you're curious.
CBBS was how IO first got on the 'net, back before there really was a 'net. I stayed with them, as Randy moved CBBA to a UNIX machine, and got hooked up for USENET news and email, and when he formed a small "net" with the authors of the conferrencing software, "Picospan", in Ann Arbor. Karl Denninger and Bill Vajk were also UNIX bitheads who were tied in there (Hi Bill!)
There was a real sense of community back then. Most people knew each other, and hung out together, even having picnics and other get-togethers. The net has grown a lot since Ward came up with XMODEM, and oft-times I miss the friendly (and not-so-friendly) rivalries of the early days. I now live in Seattle, and though I use a small local ISP, I don't know a single person who uses it. It's grown so impersonal:(
I really hope that the early days can be documented, and hope that they can capture a sense of how alive it felt back then, how people would go out of their way to be helpful to total strangers (and believe me, we had quite a few who were totally strange, myself among them).
How about trying this idea out: Every email account gets ten free emails per day, and after that, they are charged. Or, in a similar vein, give each email account a (low) free bandwidth count (number of kilobytes), and after that, charge them.
I think either of these would work, but only if *every* *single* *ISP* *in* *the* *world* did this. If even ten percent didn't, we'd see a mass migration of spammers to thos sites. Then again, if that happened, it'd be very simple to block those sites:)
Just thinking back to movies of X-Rays being used to show pictures of your foot, to see how it fit inside a new shoe. Sure, at the time it was a great selling gadget, but I wonder how much damage it did to the people who used it, and those who worked in the store with it. I'm thinking also of modern x-ray technicians, who wear special lead-lined vests, and limit the exposure as much as possible.
It'd sure looch the large one if, after taking pictures of your hand, you suddenly developed bone cancer and died within a year.:(
If you were only writing a journal for you and you alone, you would not have it on the internet. You want positive responses to your thoughts, otherwise you would keep them private.
Not true. I blog, because I like being able to open up and clarify my thoughts. I have comments disabled - frankly, I don't give a large rat's patootie who reads my blog, if anybody at all besides me does. It's a journal, fer cryin' out loud. You don't write in a journal with the expectation that millions of people are going to read it and suddenly like you. You write in a journal to clarify what's going on in your life, to help you see where you've been, where you're headed, and maybe even spot trends that you may have missed, ways of doing things that always produce bad results. With that knowledge, you might even be able to change.
Sure, you needn't treat blogs the same way I do. You can do with them as *you* see fit - but I, though I be in a very small minority, do not fit your ideas as to why people blog.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I've seen many things mentioned here, but so far nobody has touched on my personal favorite "lost art" - steam engines. Real, 12-inch-to-the-foot scale steam locomotives. They fascinate me nearly as much as a computer (and homebrewing, and growing food (by the way, homebrew tastes far better than Spudwiser, and a carrot, fresh from the planter on the windowsill is not only crunchy, but *sweet*)).
:) Y'all can be fascinated with musclecars, metalsmithing and pinball machines, but for me there is nothing so interesting as watching movies of old steam trains rumbling by. A 4-8-8-4 can really get me breathing heavy :)
... but not at all to the extent the old steamers were. The old steamers had soul - the new deisels have ... well, I'm sure they have something, but for the life of me I can't think of it right now :)
Once, only once, was I allowed to ride in the cab of a steam locomotive. It was an old Heisler logging engine, that had been resurrected by some farmers near Rockford, Illinois. Goddess, it must have taken weeks for that smile to go away
And, the fun part was that each one of those machines was hand-crafted by highly-skilled builders. Every railroad had slightly different designs, for their slightly-different terrain and loads. Some needed raw power, to haul stuff up steep grades; others needed sheer speed, for passenger liners; still others needed tight turning radius on narrow track laid atop the winter's ice in timber country. All were custom-designed, and custom-built (kinda like a really good piece of software... "elegant" is the word usually used, but that can hardly convey the appreciation these gems inspire).
Today's deisel-electrics are still somewhat customised
Anybody know how a steam engine backs up? Or why they "chug" when under load? There are books and tapes that explain it all, and there are even places where you can build your own working miniatures. Wish I had a place big enough to do that *sigh* but it's not exactly an apartment-sized hobby.
Many moons ago, when I was still able to work, every morning at work I'd run through a game of Freecell, while the others were staggering blindly about groping for coffee. For me, Freecell was like doing mental gymnastics, a great way to warm up my mind and get it ready for the day's onslaught of subtle bugs that were my duty to track down and eliminate.
:(
However, my PHB saw it as "just" playing games (despite my winning streak of nearly 20 games), and I was told to stop it. My productivity dropped, though it was still better than the rest of the group.
Nothing I could say would change his mind. His decree was final.
The company was bought out by a smaller competitor, in large part because it was not able to turn out a bug-free product on time and under budget. However, they *were* able to ensure that their best debugger was not "wasting" ten minutes a day playing games.
Amazon could be profitable any time Jeff wanted it to be. The rules say that a company must show a profit at least once every "n" years, and when they show a profit, they end up paying taxes on it.
:)
What Jeff did was to play that game, pouring any excess money back into making Amazon grow, until they finally had to show a profit. He's still doing that, and when people realize that Jeff knows the rules, and how to work around them, they'll better understand what he's doing.
I used to work with Jeff, years ago, at a place called Fitel, in New York City and London. Got to know him fairly well - he's actually a fairly accomplished hacker (in the old, good sense of the word) - as a child, overseas, he calibrated everybody's VCR digital counters, and had a BASIC program that converted between the different units, so that when the other ex-pats exchanged VCR tapes with indicators of where each show started, they'd be able to fast-forward to that spot on their VCR. Clever
So, please, folks. Realize that Jeff Bezos is one darned-clever dude, and react accordingly. He's not lost a bet that I know of in the nearly-twenty years that I've known him.
We do get lots of junk mail from the u.s. post office (they could easily filter that, but they don't), yet we complain about spam the most... why?
... hmm ... two real emails? On a good day?
Hmm, could it be that, in amongst the real snailmail that I get, there might be, hmm, three? Four? pieces of junk mail per week. Those are easy to deal with - in fact, in Seattle, we have curbside recycling pickup.
Whereas, inamongst the spam I get daily (averages close to 90 pieces per day, and one day, when I was busy actually having a life, I didn't check my mail for almost 12 hours, at which point my ISP actually shut down my account's email, and warned me about getting too much mail!), there might be as many as
See, I once posted on Usenet, and some genius in the newsgroup decided, as a favor to the community, to collect all the posters' email addresses, and ***list them on a Web site!*** (after which, the genius closed her own email account, so nobody can email her to remove their address). Between that, and my dear mother (bless her on this of all days!) who seems to think that emailed "greeting cards" are indeed free (and thusly signing me up for still more spam lists, as now they know that the address is valid).
Anybody wonder why I want an email program that uses a whitelist, and removes anything not on the list at the server level, before I even have to see it?
it's unrealistic to suggest that whitelists can solve the spam problem, since there's no way to argue they'll be adopted widely enough to keep huge amounts of spam from reaching people.
If it came already set-up that way, by default, in Micro$oft's new OS, and AOheLl's new version, you'd catch a fairly large percent immediately, and with that userbase, there would be one hella incentive for other email programs to incorporate these features in their new releases, too.
Now, if you want anybody to be able to email you, might I suggest you use somethin akin to Hotmail or Yahoo.com? Those are, as evidenced by all the spam I get from either, throw-away email addresses, perfect for dealing with random people. These would also work with the various dating systems, where you want email from them, but not necessarily also a ton of spam to wade through daily.
I presonally rely on Mozilla filters, which rid me of about 97% of my spam, while allowing the email of random people who need to contact me to (usually) get through.
I rely on a Bayseian filter program (which seems unable to spot anything thus far), and Mailwasher, a Windows program that somehow holds together under Wine to run, most of the time, if you're lucky. They catch, with much human intervention, all of my spam... but it's the "human intervention" that's bugging me.
I'm a lesbian, an apartment-dweller and not a drug user. I have less than zero desire for Viagra, penis enlargement, septic tank cleaning, illegal peeing teens, hot anal fisting or Valium. Not only do I not want these, I don't even want to *see* them. A whitelist would grant me my wish - and the first time one of my "close friends" spams me because they got a virus would be the end of our friendship. I used up all my tolerance for spam some thirty thousand emails ago. I just want some peace and sanity.
My using a whitelist may not, by itself, end all spam, but it sure would end it *for me*. The rest of you are free to be deluded into thinking that you'll be able to fix it with laws, or filters, or whatever. I know my way will work. Even better, this may well give me incentive enough to learn --C well enough to add this feature to my Linux email program. Wheee, to be spam-free at last! What a joy that would be.
White list.
:) ) unseen. Eventually, if everybody started doing this, spammers would see zero revenue, and the tide of spam would disappear.
If the *only* way for email to arrive in my mailbox was if it came from (or at least purported to come from) somebody on my list, I'd never see spam again. No need to bounce it, just delete it from the mail server, sight (and site
Anybody know of a Linux email app that does this all, deleting spam at the server but downloading wanted email? I'm all ears.
Back when I used to live in Chicago (instead of Seattle), I used to go to these things. This was a great place to talk with other tech nerds - why, my first Linux CDRom came from a hamfest (Slackware, long time ago). Then one year I went to a talk, and had my 2M handie stolen. That kind of put an end to me wanting to go back, ever again. :(
Yes, these things can be fun, but they're also well-known, and well-loved, by all the thieves around. If you must go, lock the car, don't carry anything, use a fanny pack instead of a wallet or purse, and in general treat it like you were vacationing in a hostile country. Not my idea of a fun vacation, but a chaqu'un son gout.
Mojave, California, April 18, 2003:
Scaled Composites today unveiled the existence of a commercial manned space program. This previously hidden, active research program has been in the works at its facility for two years. This program includes an airborne launcher (the White Knight), a space ship (SpaceShipOne), rocket propulsion, avionics, simulator and ground support elements.
Master of Ceremonies, Cliff Robertson, introduced Burt Rutan who explained the history and the components of the program. Other dignitaries who attended the event were Dr. Maxim Faget (pioneer configuratioin designer of the early NASA space program from the Mercury through the Apollo programs), Erik Lindbergh (grandson of Charles Lindbergh and President of the Lindbergh Foundation), and Dennis Tito (Soyuz space tourist).
Further information about the space program and high-resolution photographs are available at the Scaled Composites website: www.scaled.com.
if you were homeless, you could panhandle for about an hour a week
Been there, done that. Why do you think my eating habits changed? I had no money, and I ate whatever the shelters gave me. That food was very high in fat, so naturally I "blossomed". Now that I have a real place to live (after my disability finally started), losing that extra weight, sans the help of modern miracle pills like fenphen, is not easy.
Have you looked at the (admittedly pricier) baked ramen? Very low fat, and fairly (well, comparatively) lowcalorie too. Sure, it's harder to find, and not nearly as cheap, but it works for losing weight.
:(
I used it several years ago, and dropped almost 20 pounds. I managed to keep the weight off for almost 2 years, then my intake went up and my activity went down, causing the ever-popular battle of the bulge to begin anew
Many moons ago, I bought an old kit car. It was already built, a "Kellison GT", supposed to look like something between a Ford GT-40 Mark 1 and Mark 2. The basic car was a '65 VW flootpan and transaxel, with a 1964 Porsche racing 356SC engine bolted on. 110 cubic inches, 120 horsepower.
:)
/. that's about a rather different style of "hacking", even though it's not quite what most /.ers are expecting. Thanks for showing us that not only silicon can be cool :)
It leaked like a seive, when you turned the wipers on, the left turn signal came on, it beat voltage regulators to death in less than 24 hours. The steering was beefed up - 3/4ths turn lock to lock. The suspension was stiffened - drive over a cigarette butt and you felt it. It could hit 120mph before redline, turned on a dime (and gave you 8% interest!), and ran on regular gas. I even, once, push-started it by myself, *up* a slight hill. It was *very* light
I really miss that car. It used to destroy pressure plates and clutches with great frequency, and the last one I put in was a Kennedy Racing 1800-pound pressure plate. Even with that, the clutch was starting to glaze, just before the pedal broke. The idiot who was driving it at the time just gear-jammed it all the way home, destroying it utterly.
I really miss that car. It had more spirit than any car I've ever had, before or since. I'm glad to see a story on
I googled for it. "Texas catheter" was the search term. (My sister is an RN, and she recently mentioned this thing by that name, so I went looking to see what she was talking about. That site had the best concise explaination of how it works. Not, personally, being into men (and not really serious about bondage), it was of no use to me, until I read that comment. Talk about serendipity! :) )
Nope, it's real. Read this to see about what effects of having too much of it can do, then read here for a typical ingredients list of soda pop. Make your own decision.
Or, if you're a guy (like probably 97% of the /. audience), try one of these. You'll still need a bucket of some sort, buy given that the soda fountain needed a drain, you can probably tap into that, using several feet of leftover hose.
Not to mention the bone loss from the phosphoric acid in soda, there to help it stay fizzy. Not only does it leach calcium when you drink it, the effects last quite a while, negating any calcium you may have consumed with the beverage.
Thanks, but no. I recall my great grandmothers, all frail and bent-over, from osteoporosis. While I know that I will die some day, I'd prefer not to be that frail and creaky when I go, thankyouverymuch. If I must have a beverage dispenser, might I choose one with both decaf and "green tea" chai, please? I'd even be willing to use almond milk, or even 2%, instead of whole milk.
One thing about spam that stands out, is that so much of it is of a very explicit sexual nature. It is sent indiscriminately to individuals who are unlikely to have any use for these products and services.
:)
Goddess, you can say *that* again! I get, daily now, several ads for Viagra, Russian wives, penis enlargement, sexual stamina building, septic tank cleaning and home refinancing (I live in an apartment) and so on, often several copies of each ad daily.
My favorite is the ad that tells me how they have "helped 700,000 men just like" me. Sure, men named Jeannette, with long hair, wearing silk blouses, makeup, lipstick, perfume, and carrying IDs that tell the world they're female. Yup yup yup, I'll bet they have! Most of them live in the Castro district of San Fran
I bounce them all. It gets annoying, though, when I get some 30-50 emails daily, and *two* of them are legit. Grrrr.
Want to remove every single log line to improve speed? With the "normal" approach you'll have to write a script to remove them or do it manually.
.h file, re-compile and you're golden. That removes all the #ifdef debug code you put in when you were writing it.
Or you change one #define in one
Do they teach programmers anything useful these days? Sheesh.
So far, I've read about why mining the moon is unlikely to be cost-effective (well, maybe the He-3 might make it), and about the problems of getting the product back to Earth safely. But ...
Has nobody read Heinlien's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"? Why not set up a launcher there and threaten, or at least imply a threat, to lob "rocks" down on our heads? Given the government in China, I find it unlikely that they haven't thought about that.
How would the people of Earth react? How could we prevent getting flattened by twenty-ton steel-cased rocks being launched by an electromagnetic cannon right down the gravity well? Yee-ouch!
"practicing geology without a license"?!? Does that mean that the local rock & mineral club, of which I'm a member, could be violating laws when we go out and study the local terrain, searching for specimens?
I'm glad I don't live in California. I'd hate to learn that my checking the webicorders could be illegal.
It could be that farms are big, empty places, and the amount of ozone per cubic mile of atmosphere, coupled with the lack of high hydrocarbons per cubic mile of atmosphere, make it a non-issue. As farms tend not to be near major concentrations of pollutants, this small amount of ozone would be OK, and quite probably, less harmful to the environment than the pesticides. Plus, as an added bonus, the ozone won't leave a residue that may cumulatively be nasty for us to ingest.
I'm not sure what happened to the *original* CBBS hardware, but several years ago, Randy Suess sold me one of the old hard drives, a 10-meg one, that had been used in *a* CBBS. He also sold off a bunch of S-100 boards, and an old chassis, so I suspect the original CBBS hgardware was sold off, over the years, as parts no longer needed.
Randy's running Chinet nowadays, and last I heard, Ward had CBBS. You could always ask Randy, if you're curious.
CBBS was how IO first got on the 'net, back before there really was a 'net. I stayed with them, as Randy moved CBBA to a UNIX machine, and got hooked up for USENET news and email, and when he formed a small "net" with the authors of the conferrencing software, "Picospan", in Ann Arbor. Karl Denninger and Bill Vajk were also UNIX bitheads who were tied in there (Hi Bill!)
:(
There was a real sense of community back then. Most people knew each other, and hung out together, even having picnics and other get-togethers. The net has grown a lot since Ward came up with XMODEM, and oft-times I miss the friendly (and not-so-friendly) rivalries of the early days. I now live in Seattle, and though I use a small local ISP, I don't know a single person who uses it. It's grown so impersonal
I really hope that the early days can be documented, and hope that they can capture a sense of how alive it felt back then, how people would go out of their way to be helpful to total strangers (and believe me, we had quite a few who were totally strange, myself among them).
How about trying this idea out: Every email account gets ten free emails per day, and after that, they are charged. Or, in a similar vein, give each email account a (low) free bandwidth count (number of kilobytes), and after that, charge them.
:)
I think either of these would work, but only if *every* *single* *ISP* *in* *the* *world* did this. If even ten percent didn't, we'd see a mass migration of spammers to thos sites. Then again, if that happened, it'd be very simple to block those sites
Just thinking back to movies of X-Rays being used to show pictures of your foot, to see how it fit inside a new shoe. Sure, at the time it was a great selling gadget, but I wonder how much damage it did to the people who used it, and those who worked in the store with it. I'm thinking also of modern x-ray technicians, who wear special lead-lined vests, and limit the exposure as much as possible.
:(
It'd sure looch the large one if, after taking pictures of your hand, you suddenly developed bone cancer and died within a year.
If you were only writing a journal for you and you alone, you would not have it on the internet. You want positive responses to your thoughts, otherwise you would keep them private.
Not true. I blog, because I like being able to open up and clarify my thoughts. I have comments disabled - frankly, I don't give a large rat's patootie who reads my blog, if anybody at all besides me does. It's a journal, fer cryin' out loud. You don't write in a journal with the expectation that millions of people are going to read it and suddenly like you. You write in a journal to clarify what's going on in your life, to help you see where you've been, where you're headed, and maybe even spot trends that you may have missed, ways of doing things that always produce bad results. With that knowledge, you might even be able to change.
Sure, you needn't treat blogs the same way I do. You can do with them as *you* see fit - but I, though I be in a very small minority, do not fit your ideas as to why people blog.