I haven't perfected this yet, but I know it works.
On a windless night, suspend a blob of sterno in a tinfoil pan under a thin plastic bag from a dry-cleaners. (exact methodology is left as an exercise for the reader) I've found that a hair-dryer for initial inflation is a good idea.
You end up with a lightly glowing hot-air baloon -- and a few UFO sightings the next day!
electric R/C Helicopter for indoor flight
on
Smallest RC Cars?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Take a look at the Piccolo helicopter. A definite flyweight, but bigger than the cars! It is meant for indoor flight.
I've seen it with CDs, I've seen it with Cell Phones, I've seen it with DVDs.
Nobody buys them until everyone else has them. A set isn't usefull until there is programming. There isn't programming because there isn't anyone to watch it. Sets are so expensive because there isn't enough sales volume. There isn't enough Sales volume until lots of people want sets because there is lots of programming.
Metcalf's law states that any networking technology's usefulness is proportional to the square of the number of users.
It will come, don't worry. When it does it will be with a bang -- everything will happen at once when a critical mass is established. Programming will shoot up, prices will drop, and everyone and their dog will either own one or want one.
My parents are missionaries in Africa. I grew up there, and just spent the month of December there with my family.
I'm an engineer at a nuke plant. This morning the question came up "Do we have to have the fire marshall review all electrical design packages to ensure that we have not violated any fire policies? That would make about 15 reviews/approvals of any package.
Working for a non-profit/charitable/helping people type of organization can totally change the dynamics and expectations of people change when they a) gave something up to do what they are doing, and b) don't have the same commercial pressures on them.
I'd love to go back to Africa to work in some sort of development work, but I don't see much need there for Nuclear Engineers right now!
Engineers are not *automatically* good managers
on
Do You Like Your Job?
·
· Score: 1
In my job (nuke plant) the promotional procession has always been that the long serving engineers get promoted to Managers. In general, this leads to a bunch of micromanagers who want to solve everything, but don't have much for management skills and fail to see the overall picture.
I think this is changing somewhat -- they are trying to bring in management types, rather than automatically promote engineers. I'm not sure which is worse!
pic of the brute-force method from JYW discussion
on
Robot Mine Smasher
·
· Score: 1
Someone posted a neat article on the Junkyard-wars discussion forum.
If you can handle this excessively long URL, take a look at this topic:
http://www.junkyard-wars.com/forum/topic.asp?TOP IC _ID=1534&FORUM_ID=58&CAT_ID=8&Topic_Title=Mineswee pers+used+in+Afghanistan&Forum_Title=8%2E+QF+D%3A+ Minesweeper
It screws up if I put it in an href...
I say the Japanese way is to drive a small rod through the critical part of the mine. The British/American way is to destroy about six inches of groud and flail the mines to bits!
There are specific instructions that, if it is a digital image, the printed out photos must be from the same file.
Sounds straightforward to me. I can imagine that in a few years they will just want the digital version. My drivers licence has a digital pic on it. When I got a new one for a changed address, they reprinted it with my new address, but my stored scanned signature and photo.
Like most flammables, Hydrogen doesn't truly explode unless it is contained. It will burn rapidly, but it is the container that causes shrapnel.
Advantages of H2:
--being lighter than air, will rise upwards before it ignites,
--the combustion product of hydrogen is H2O, better known as water. None of the nasty smoke that kerosene, plastics and the like put out.
The reason you don't see it in cars is twofold. Fuel Cells are very expensive, and storage of a significant amount of H2 is difficult. It is either highly pressurized or stored in a heavy metallic matrix.
I suppose you can add to that that Hydrogen filling stations aren't on every street corner yet.
GSM is a digital communications standard that is not limited to frequencys. European GSM phones use the frequencies in the 800-900MHz range, while in the US, the GSM standard is part of the PCS standard which uses 1800-1900MHz.
So yes, it does use the same digital standards, but on different frequencies. You are still stuck with multi-band phones for international use, but if they can get rid of the analog requirements from the old US standards, phones will be simpler.
Re:The real reason 80,000 IIS Servers disappeared
on
Netcraft Survey Updated
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm surprised that they don't infer that a large number of those sites were alerted to the fact that they were running IIS when they were hit by code-red. They shut it down because they didn't need it, not because they replaced it!
Amazing how many of the code red servers were displaying the sample page.
"We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.
Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the
Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their
schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy
their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and healthcare? Too late.
Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier
bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan,
only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip
away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans;
they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs."
bin Laden is portraying himself as a defender of Islam. By doing so he is perverting Islam. The US must not make him a martyr for Islam.
I think the US should be very busy getting Islamic countries on side to prosecute bin Laden as a criminal, not a Muslim. I'd think that if he were tried in Pakistan (for example) under Pakistani law, but using US evidence, the US would be far ahead.
On the other hand, US foreign policy must change regarding the Israel/Palestine problem or else another bin Laden will spring up.
This is a time for Justice, not retaliation. Justice includes both bin Laden and Palestinians.
I haven't noticed that crime rates are way down in the US because so many people have guns.
Unintentional gun injuries are pretty high though.
I can handle certain government regulations. Airport security is one of them. The physical weapons these guys had were insignificant. Their real weapon was their willingness to kill.
I've been warned twice over the years about carrying my normal knife on the plane. I think it will be packed in baggage from now on.
Never underestimate a trained person with a knife and a keen willingness to use it. A steak knife will do.
I think success for these hijackers was their willingness to kill people. Pilots, anyone who resisted -- gone. It was not the threat of a knife that forced a pilot to fly where he didn't want to go -- it was the use of a knife.
While the US usually tries diplomatic means before force, I think all diplomacy with Afganastan is now off. Bin Laden, no government can protect you now.
Dang, I tried to program our TRS-80 at the time to solve the cube, but didn't have the mathematical knowlege to model it properly!
I consistantly solved it in 1:15, but sometime got under a minute.
I spent far too much time on it, which could be attested to by parents and teachers. I don't think I can solve it now. I get the first two layers and the corners, then end up popping out a couple pieces to finish it up.
Mine is a true original Rubik's cube. Still works smoothly with the aid of a little vaseline. That also aids popping out the pieces for those last few "moves"!
You would think that a company that can build hardware and software to solve a mechanical rubik's cube would also be able to create a website that could resist the slashdot onslaught.
Rob Rosenberg has been a standard source for me for years when it comes to virus myths. Heaven knows there are lots of people who need to be pointed there.
Vmyths.com has been informative since before the days of the first email^h^h^h^h outlook virus.
Although I suppose viruses are of much less significance amoung thoses here for some reason. I did manage to destroy my windows installation with a Funlove virus recently (thanks Gnutella.....), my Linux partition worked flawlessly until I tried swapping the drive to another computer to try to recover some junk and seem to have physically damaged my 60 gig drive. Ouch! It is under warantee, and I've learned a few more lessons on the importance of keeping good backups.
NB Tel's terms of service are pretty clear that running personal servers is perfectly acceptable. I wouldn't want to run a commercial web site though.
When they installed web caching they screwed up a bunch of us running dynamic DNS services. They were helpfull in allowing us the tools to find our real external IPs to continue to do so.
We don't even have a bandwidth cap anymore!
I haven't been following the support newsgroup recently, but they do tend to be fairly on the ball about these things. My web server is still running, so they haven't cut off port 80 yet.
Michael
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't perfected this yet, but I know it works.
On a windless night, suspend a blob of sterno in a tinfoil pan under a thin plastic bag from a dry-cleaners. (exact methodology is left as an exercise for the reader) I've found that a hair-dryer for initial inflation is a good idea.
You end up with a lightly glowing hot-air baloon -- and a few UFO sightings the next day!
Take a look at the Piccolo helicopter. A definite flyweight, but bigger than the cars! It is meant for indoor flight.
Nobody buys them until everyone else has them. A set isn't usefull until there is programming. There isn't programming because there isn't anyone to watch it. Sets are so expensive because there isn't enough sales volume. There isn't enough Sales volume until lots of people want sets because there is lots of programming.
Metcalf's law states that any networking technology's usefulness is proportional to the square of the number of users.
It will come, don't worry. When it does it will be with a bang -- everything will happen at once when a critical mass is established. Programming will shoot up, prices will drop, and everyone and their dog will either own one or want one.
I'm an engineer at a nuke plant. This morning the question came up "Do we have to have the fire marshall review all electrical design packages to ensure that we have not violated any fire policies? That would make about 15 reviews/approvals of any package.
Working for a non-profit/charitable/helping people type of organization can totally change the dynamics and expectations of people change when they a) gave something up to do what they are doing, and b) don't have the same commercial pressures on them.
I'd love to go back to Africa to work in some sort of development work, but I don't see much need there for Nuclear Engineers right now!
In my job (nuke plant) the promotional procession has always been that the long serving engineers get promoted to Managers. In general, this leads to a bunch of micromanagers who want to solve everything, but don't have much for management skills and fail to see the overall picture.
I think this is changing somewhat -- they are trying to bring in management types, rather than automatically promote engineers. I'm not sure which is worse!
If you can handle this excessively long URL, take a look at this topic:
http://www.junkyard-wars.com/forum/topic.asp?TOP IC _ID=1534&FORUM_ID=58&CAT_ID=8&Topic_Title=Mineswee pers+used+in+Afghanistan&Forum_Title=8%2E+QF+D%3A+ Minesweeper
It screws up if I put it in an href...
I say the Japanese way is to drive a small rod through the critical part of the mine. The British/American way is to destroy about six inches of groud and flail the mines to bits!
I won't question that for a minute.
On the other hand, so does slashdot....
I think it was best said "They have a face better suited for radio".
I just got a new Canadian Passport.
There are specific instructions that, if it is a digital image, the printed out photos must be from the same file.
Sounds straightforward to me. I can imagine that in a few years they will just want the digital version. My drivers licence has a digital pic on it. When I got a new one for a changed address, they reprinted it with my new address, but my stored scanned signature and photo.
Looks like they are building five of them and plan to fly one this year. http://www.stormbirds.com/project/
Like most flammables, Hydrogen doesn't truly explode unless it is contained. It will burn rapidly, but it is the container that causes shrapnel.
Advantages of H2:
--being lighter than air, will rise upwards before it ignites,
--the combustion product of hydrogen is H2O, better known as water. None of the nasty smoke that kerosene, plastics and the like put out.
The reason you don't see it in cars is twofold. Fuel Cells are very expensive, and storage of a significant amount of H2 is difficult. It is either highly pressurized or stored in a heavy metallic matrix.
I suppose you can add to that that Hydrogen filling stations aren't on every street corner yet.
Michael
GSM is a digital communications standard that is not limited to frequencys. European GSM phones use the frequencies in the 800-900MHz range, while in the US, the GSM standard is part of the PCS standard which uses 1800-1900MHz.
So yes, it does use the same digital standards, but on different frequencies. You are still stuck with multi-band phones for international use, but if they can get rid of the analog requirements from the old US standards, phones will be simpler.
I'm surprised that they don't infer that a large number of those sites were alerted to the fact that they were running IIS when they were hit by code-red. They shut it down because they didn't need it, not because they replaced it!
Amazing how many of the code red servers were displaying the sample page.
another quote (not my writing):
"We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.
Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the
Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their
schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy
their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and healthcare? Too late.
Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier
bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan,
only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip
away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans;
they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs."
bin Laden is portraying himself as a defender of Islam. By doing so he is perverting Islam. The US must not make him a martyr for Islam.
I think the US should be very busy getting Islamic countries on side to prosecute bin Laden as a criminal, not a Muslim. I'd think that if he were tried in Pakistan (for example) under Pakistani law, but using US evidence, the US would be far ahead.
On the other hand, US foreign policy must change regarding the Israel/Palestine problem or else another bin Laden will spring up.
This is a time for Justice, not retaliation. Justice includes both bin Laden and Palestinians.
Michael
Methinks Gordon Sinclair missed a little one there.
I also think that he conveniently ignored all the offers of help that weren't really needed due to the vast resources of the US.
I haven't noticed that crime rates are way down in the US because so many people have guns.
Unintentional gun injuries are pretty high though.
I can handle certain government regulations. Airport security is one of them. The physical weapons these guys had were insignificant. Their real weapon was their willingness to kill.
I've been warned twice over the years about carrying my normal knife on the plane. I think it will be packed in baggage from now on.
Never underestimate a trained person with a knife and a keen willingness to use it. A steak knife will do.
I think success for these hijackers was their willingness to kill people. Pilots, anyone who resisted -- gone. It was not the threat of a knife that forced a pilot to fly where he didn't want to go -- it was the use of a knife.
While the US usually tries diplomatic means before force, I think all diplomacy with Afganastan is now off. Bin Laden, no government can protect you now.
Dang, I tried to program our TRS-80 at the time to solve the cube, but didn't have the mathematical knowlege to model it properly!
I consistantly solved it in 1:15, but sometime got under a minute.
I spent far too much time on it, which could be attested to by parents and teachers. I don't think I can solve it now. I get the first two layers and the corners, then end up popping out a couple pieces to finish it up.
Mine is a true original Rubik's cube. Still works smoothly with the aid of a little vaseline. That also aids popping out the pieces for those last few "moves"!
Michael
You would think that a company that can build hardware and software to solve a mechanical rubik's cube would also be able to create a website that could resist the slashdot onslaught.
Michael
There are probably 10s of thousands of experiences of slashdotters sending their computers through airport X-ray machines.
Why are we not seeing a flood of people posting that they've had BIOS wiped/ drive crashes due to this?
Answer: The X-ray levels used are very low and may cause damage to 1 in a 100,000 units.
Sorry, if that were the case earth's population would be devastated every time there was a rain storm.
Vmyths.com has been informative since before the days of the first email^h^h^h^h outlook virus.
Although I suppose viruses are of much less significance amoung thoses here for some reason. I did manage to destroy my windows installation with a Funlove virus recently (thanks Gnutella.....), my Linux partition worked flawlessly until I tried swapping the drive to another computer to try to recover some junk and seem to have physically damaged my 60 gig drive. Ouch! It is under warantee, and I've learned a few more lessons on the importance of keeping good backups.
When they installed web caching they screwed up a bunch of us running dynamic DNS services. They were helpfull in allowing us the tools to find our real external IPs to continue to do so.
We don't even have a bandwidth cap anymore!
I haven't been following the support newsgroup recently, but they do tend to be fairly on the ball about these things. My web server is still running, so they haven't cut off port 80 yet. Michael