There is an interesting article (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeatur e/oct04/1004titan.html) in the current issue of IEEE spectrum. They discuss how a disaster was avoided by Boris Smeds who pushed for stringent tests of the communication between Cassini and Huygens. It turns out that the Italian manufacturers of the radio didn't take into account the significant doppler shift between both craft. As the firmware of the radio could not be remotely upgraded, Cassini's trajectory was altered (further away from Titan) to lower these doppler shifts.
"visually check the bolts before starting the rotation",
you would
"notice the Turn-Over Cart (TOC) to be in a common staging area, advancing the possibility that another project might have removed some bolts without communicating this to the NOAA team, and consequently realize the need to check whether the TIROS adapter plate, to which your TIROS NOAA N-PRIME spacecraft was mounted, was correctly bolted to the TOC adapter plate with the required 24 bolts before repositioning said spacecraft from a vertical to a horizontal position."
I was driving a BMW 528i between Brussels and Paris, with the cruise control on. BMW's cruise control (Tempomat) is extremely accurate; I've never seen more than 1km/h deviation once it has settled. So there is no need to look frequently at the odometer.
When I approached another car on the relatively empty road, it seemed as if that car was driving really slow, like standing still. That happens, so I continued. As I came near a second car, I finally realized that it was me who was driving awfully fast. 230km/h. A touch on the brakes, the cruise control turned off and the car decelerated rapidly.
It turned out that one of the keys in my bundle was stuck between the steering wheel housing and the stick used to set the cruise control, forcing it into acceleration mode. Like a slowly boiled frog, I didn't notice what had been happening.
Later models have the cruise control controls on the steering wheel itself, which would have avoided this. OTOH I don't like controls on the wheel at all: steering wheels are for steering, and controls that change position are not ergonomic.
Some months ago we had a major explosion disaster in Belgium involving a natural gas line. 23 people were killed, tens of others severely burned and still recovering.
First investigations revealed that the gas pipeline had been damaged by construction work for a service road to a new industrial building; the investigation and the legal proceedings regarding responsibility are continuing, and expected to last for another two years.
As a result of the accident people called for better plans of the infrastructure to avoid such disasters in the future.
Security by obscurity isn't going to work in this case.
While Google's employees may be a clever lot, most of them are just not financially astute enough or are too intrigued by their jobs to realize that they have decaying gold in their hands. Yes, they know they have gold, but no, they cannot imagine that it's a special kind of gold that decays.
As such they will clamp on to their options and shares, linger on and eventually see their value erode, like so many engineers have seen past the bubble. To add insult to injury they will have paid taxes on the options.
So here's a sound advice to anyone in a similar position: grab while the grabbing's good. If you linger, the grabbing times might pass you by.
Take a look how more than 2000 windmills destroyed the formerly pristine hills around Tarifa in Spain: http://www.tarifaspain.com/Windmills2.jpg. 50 km2 of spoiled vistas. As a bonus, they kill a lot of migrating birds who cross the Gibraltar strait between Europe and Africa twice a year: http://www.ncpa.org/prs/tst/20040501hsburnett.htm. All this for a relatively minute quantity of unreliable energy.
While more and more (> 10%) seem to be under repair each time I pass, at least the remaining mills seem to be operational most of the time there due to the unique wind conditions there. Most windmills I've seen in other places were simply standing still.
Windmills are mainly used as an pacifying excuse. But then, the populace is generally far too stupid to understand how utterly tiny the wind power potential really is.
Where the money during the goldrush was made selling shovels, I think that in this case, it's made by construction companies raking in subsidies. I predict those mills being abandoned in the next decade, when maintenance costs go through the roof.
You forgot that a train only brings you from a place where you aren't to a place where you don't want to be. In other words, 2/3 of the trajectory is missing. Maybe not in distance but certainly in time, as the time lost due to transportation mode switches is staggering.
E.g. the TGV between Brussels and Paris is awesome. The metro in Paris is well developed, and there is an extensive train network in Belgium. However, I need less time driving by car from my home to a typical destination in the Paris suburbs. I don't need to get up at a precise time to make sure I catch the reserved train, and bus, walk, train, switch, train, metro, walk, metro, walk, taxi.
Finally I don't like to expose myself to the ticking terrorist target timebomb formed by the tightly packed masses in the Paris metro at rush hour.
Granted, if you live close to a train station, and have a direct connection to your work location, it's another matter. But these conditions only apply to 10% of the working population.
I never understood why, in a great country overflowing with capable and honest people, these two candidates were selected. Your theory provides a possible explanation.
I wore a chip with a gold top on a white ceramic substrate, connected with visible gold traces to gold pins - which I bent around the ceramic and soldered to a gold chain - around my neck.
I don't remember what kind of chip it was, but it looked really classy, with the gold trims and all. And believe it or not, but every girl I met was fascinated. Chips were fairly new and talked up in the media back then.
Just to say that fashion is very important to girls - as if you didn't knew that already - and being a geek doesn't automatically get you disqualified.
When I was a child I saw a television series about the holocaust.
Terrified, I asked my father: "Dad, how come these people didn't leave Germany when they still could ?" He answered: "A lot did, but most wanted to stay near their family and didn't think it would become that bad."
It's not only the US. Almost anywhere you can be sued on false grounds. You will have to defend yourself and pay lawyers to do so. While the case is running its - slow - course, you have to divert energy to it and you are hindered in your attaining your goals.
A lawsuit has become a tool to slow down an opponent, causing him to miss deadlines. Even if the suit is eventually lost, the suitor actually wins.
Judges and lawyers will not accelerate things. Lawyers are paid by the hour. Judges, like bureaucrats, slow down things to keep their efforts to the absolute minimum. Remember that they are appointed for life without any performance bonus. Why would they try to accelerate ? To bring in more work for themselves ?
If your suitor is bigger than you (or the state, and the state is making up new laws while you are defending yourself) you'll lose big time. I'm speaking of experience.
No, I've assembled it myself with a MSI K8N Neo Platinum mainboard. Maybe your eMachine uses the same board.
I have upgraded the bios to V1.4 to correct for erratum 109 (a program froze XP randomly), AFTER installing SP2. Maybe I should try the NoExecute flag again.
I've got an Athlon64. Most programs included in Windows XP (like calc.exe and so) crashed. Third party apps were fine.
I changed the boot.ini file to include NoExecute=AlwaysOff instead of OptIn.
Alas this disables the protection against executing code on the stack, something I was looking forward to as it was advertised as an advantage of the Athlon64.
I had nearly exactly the same experience when I was 4. The only difference was that I plugged in the two probes of my 'Electro' game (because the battery was down). Same effect: a blackened socket, tripped breaker and a very worried father.
I have listened to HRTF encoded samples with quality headphones, but up to now I have never been fully convinced. E.g. I can believe that a sound is circling around my head, if I know what to expect. But out of the blue it is completely impossible to determine if a motionless, unknown source is positioned in front of or behind me. That problem never arises with loudspeaker surround systems.
I have come to the conclusion that a very important clue is missing when using headphones and a static HRTF. In real life our head makes both large movements on purpose and unintended small jittery movements, and the sound changes as a result. Our brain processes these changes subconsciously to provide us with spatial info.
Attach some accelerometers (or alternatively, a means to obtain an absolute rotational position) to the headphone, update the model dynamically and you will have addressed my complaint.
Maybe this isn't 100% related, and some people think that traffic cameras are good (I'm not one of them), but here in Belgium you can obtain the pictures made by a traffic camera if you get fined by simply asking for them.
The problem is that, if you do that, the authorities state that you are not cooperating. They automatically deny a settlement, and you have to go before a police judge. Unless you supply overwhelming evidence - you are considered guilty by default, and you have to prove you're not - you will receive a much steeper fine and a criminal record.
So you have the right to get the records, but you are paying dearly if you exercize it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm waiting for the extended edition box set in WMVHD 1080p.
Please don't mod me Funny: I mean it.
You Create Concrete Croissants ?
Somehow I doubt people will enjoy them.
There is an interesting article (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeatur e/oct04/1004titan.html) in the current issue of IEEE spectrum. They discuss how a disaster was avoided by Boris Smeds who pushed for stringent tests of the communication between Cassini and Huygens. It turns out that the Italian manufacturers of the radio didn't take into account the significant doppler shift between both craft. As the firmware of the radio could not be remotely upgraded, Cassini's trajectory was altered (further away from Titan) to lower these doppler shifts.
Let's hope no other misfortunes turn up.
No, you would NOT simply
"visually check the bolts before starting the rotation",
you would
"notice the Turn-Over Cart (TOC) to be in a common staging area, advancing the possibility that another project might have removed some bolts without communicating this to the NOAA team, and consequently realize the need to check whether the TIROS adapter plate, to which your TIROS NOAA N-PRIME spacecraft was mounted, was correctly bolted to the TOC adapter plate with the required 24 bolts before repositioning said spacecraft from a vertical to a horizontal position."
That's why it IS rocket science.
I was driving a BMW 528i between Brussels and Paris, with the cruise control on. BMW's cruise control (Tempomat) is extremely accurate; I've never seen more than 1km/h deviation once it has settled. So there is no need to look frequently at the odometer.
When I approached another car on the relatively empty road, it seemed as if that car was driving really slow, like standing still. That happens, so I continued. As I came near a second car, I finally realized that it was me who was driving awfully fast. 230km/h. A touch on the brakes, the cruise control turned off and the car decelerated rapidly.
It turned out that one of the keys in my bundle was stuck between the steering wheel housing and the stick used to set the cruise control, forcing it into acceleration mode. Like a slowly boiled frog, I didn't notice what had been happening.
Later models have the cruise control controls on the steering wheel itself, which would have avoided this. OTOH I don't like controls on the wheel at all: steering wheels are for steering, and controls that change position are not ergonomic.
Some months ago we had a major explosion disaster in Belgium involving a natural gas line. 23 people were killed, tens of others severely burned and still recovering.
s /actueel/rtlnieuws/2004/07_juli/30/buitenland/slid eshow_belgische_fabriek.xml
Slideshow here, picture 8 has the fireball:
http://www.rtl.nl/(/actueel/rtlnieuws/)/component
First investigations revealed that the gas pipeline had been damaged by construction work for a service road to a new industrial building; the investigation and the legal proceedings regarding responsibility are continuing, and expected to last for another two years.
As a result of the accident people called for better plans of the infrastructure to avoid such disasters in the future.
Security by obscurity isn't going to work in this case.
AFAWK, no terrorists were involved.
Yesterday I received a bag of bad luck by breaking a million mirrors in my DLP projector.
Is this a new Slashdot record ?
While Google's employees may be a clever lot, most of them are just not financially astute enough or are too intrigued by their jobs to realize that they have decaying gold in their hands. Yes, they know they have gold, but no, they cannot imagine that it's a special kind of gold that decays.
As such they will clamp on to their options and shares, linger on and eventually see their value erode, like so many engineers have seen past the bubble. To add insult to injury they will have paid taxes on the options.
So here's a sound advice to anyone in a similar position: grab while the grabbing's good. If you linger, the grabbing times might pass you by.
For the sake of you, I hope you won't.
. All this for a relatively minute quantity of unreliable energy.
Take a look how more than 2000 windmills destroyed the formerly pristine hills around Tarifa in Spain: http://www.tarifaspain.com/Windmills2.jpg. 50 km2 of spoiled vistas. As a bonus, they kill a lot of migrating birds who cross the Gibraltar strait between Europe and Africa twice a year: http://www.ncpa.org/prs/tst/20040501hsburnett.htm
While more and more (> 10%) seem to be under repair each time I pass, at least the remaining mills seem to be operational most of the time there due to the unique wind conditions there. Most windmills I've seen in other places were simply standing still.
Windmills are mainly used as an pacifying excuse. But then, the populace is generally far too stupid to understand how utterly tiny the wind power potential really is.
Where the money during the goldrush was made selling shovels, I think that in this case, it's made by construction companies raking in subsidies. I predict those mills being abandoned in the next decade, when maintenance costs go through the roof.
E.g. the TGV between Brussels and Paris is awesome. The metro in Paris is well developed, and there is an extensive train network in Belgium. However, I need less time driving by car from my home to a typical destination in the Paris suburbs. I don't need to get up at a precise time to make sure I catch the reserved train, and bus, walk, train, switch, train, metro, walk, metro, walk, taxi.
Finally I don't like to expose myself to the ticking terrorist target timebomb formed by the tightly packed masses in the Paris metro at rush hour.
Granted, if you live close to a train station, and have a direct connection to your work location, it's another matter. But these conditions only apply to 10% of the working population.
correction: ... in Reverse Polish Notation ...
Actually, in Polish notation, that should be "You Poland forgot."
Thanks for the link. It's a beautiful site, worth the time for a first visit to a .is domain.
I hope it isn't too late already to get that damn dam construction stopped.
I never understood why, in a great country overflowing with capable and honest people, these two candidates were selected. Your theory provides a possible explanation.
I don't remember what kind of chip it was, but it looked really classy, with the gold trims and all. And believe it or not, but every girl I met was fascinated. Chips were fairly new and talked up in the media back then.
Just to say that fashion is very important to girls - as if you didn't knew that already - and being a geek doesn't automatically get you disqualified.
When I was a child I saw a television series about the holocaust.
Terrified, I asked my father: "Dad, how come these people didn't leave Germany when they still could ?" He answered: "A lot did, but most wanted to stay near their family and didn't think it would become that bad."
It's not only the US. Almost anywhere you can be sued on false grounds. You will have to defend yourself and pay lawyers to do so. While the case is running its - slow - course, you have to divert energy to it and you are hindered in your attaining your goals.
A lawsuit has become a tool to slow down an opponent, causing him to miss deadlines. Even if the suit is eventually lost, the suitor actually wins.
Judges and lawyers will not accelerate things. Lawyers are paid by the hour. Judges, like bureaucrats, slow down things to keep their efforts to the absolute minimum. Remember that they are appointed for life without any performance bonus. Why would they try to accelerate ? To bring in more work for themselves ?
If your suitor is bigger than you (or the state, and the state is making up new laws while you are defending yourself) you'll lose big time. I'm speaking of experience.
No, I've assembled it myself with a MSI K8N Neo Platinum mainboard. Maybe your eMachine uses the same board.
I have upgraded the bios to V1.4 to correct for erratum 109 (a program froze XP randomly), AFTER installing SP2. Maybe I should try the NoExecute flag again.
I've got an Athlon64. Most programs included in Windows XP (like calc.exe and so) crashed. Third party apps were fine.
I changed the boot.ini file to include NoExecute=AlwaysOff instead of OptIn.
Alas this disables the protection against executing code on the stack, something I was looking forward to as it was advertised as an advantage of the Athlon64.
The system is fine (for) now.
BeyondTV is great. Simple, clean and pretty user interface in 3 formats (windowed/full screen/web).
The next release (3.5) promises to be even better with multiple tuner support and a client/server architecture.
I had nearly exactly the same experience when I was 4. The only difference was that I plugged in the two probes of my 'Electro' game (because the battery was down). Same effect: a blackened socket, tripped breaker and a very worried father.
I have listened to HRTF encoded samples with quality headphones, but up to now I have never been fully convinced. E.g. I can believe that a sound is circling around my head, if I know what to expect. But out of the blue it is completely impossible to determine if a motionless, unknown source is positioned in front of or behind me. That problem never arises with loudspeaker surround systems.
I have come to the conclusion that a very important clue is missing when using headphones and a static HRTF. In real life our head makes both large movements on purpose and unintended small jittery movements, and the sound changes as a result. Our brain processes these changes subconsciously to provide us with spatial info.
Attach some accelerometers (or alternatively, a means to obtain an absolute rotational position) to the headphone, update the model dynamically and you will have addressed my complaint.
Maybe this isn't 100% related, and some people think that traffic cameras are good (I'm not one of them), but here in Belgium you can obtain the pictures made by a traffic camera if you get fined by simply asking for them.
The problem is that, if you do that, the authorities state that you are not cooperating. They automatically deny a settlement, and you have to go before a police judge. Unless you supply overwhelming evidence - you are considered guilty by default, and you have to prove you're not - you will receive a much steeper fine and a criminal record.
So you have the right to get the records, but you are paying dearly if you exercize it.
All rights in theory, none in practice.
$49 bid, $137 ask