"Make sure you wear Pb[lead] underwear, if you ever want to have kids."
Note the reference to lead shielding. He's thinking of some sort of ionizing radiation, obviously. X-rays, more than likely.
Tell you what. I'll let you stand infront of my 23db 13cm dish while I key the radio. Let me know if that gives you a warm fuzzy feeling inside. RF works great to cook flesh.
Christ Almighty, did I say radio waves are always harmless? No, I only said they aren't the same as ionizing radiation. I'm trying to combat the ignorance that leads to people taking at face value the phrases like "nuking my food" in reference to microwave ovens. I'd have thought that you, someone who obviously knows that radio waves aren't going to mutate people's children, would understand the importance of making that point. What if your neighbor decides to blame his brain tumor on the 6m antenna on your roof? Next thing you know we've got congress telling the FCC to cap amateur output at "10W in populated areas" or some such nonsense because in Joe Public's mind "radio waves" = "radioactive" = "instant deadly cancer".
China (Zhong Guo) mean the "Kindgom of the middle"
Like Mediterranean?
No, "mediterranean" means "in the middle of the land". It's meant to describe the Mediterranean Sea, which (apart from a small gap a Gibraltar) is surrounded on all sides by land; contrast with the Atlantic Ocean which (as far as people at the time knew) was essentially unbounded.
be serious.
He is being serious. It does translate to "kingdom of the middle", which in chinese essentially means "that around which all else revolves".
Make sure you wear Pb underwear, if you ever want to have kids.
You're thinking of gamma and X rays. We're talking about reg'lar old radio waves. Radio waves live on the other end of the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio waves are non-ionizing (i.e. they don't hurt your DNA). An EMP can be almost entirely dissipated by a well grounded metal shield. Physics. It's not just for kids!
Golly, if it's that serious maybe I should start stocking up on MREs...
Meals Refusing to Exit?
Meals Rejected by Ethiopians?
You know, I used to hear those (or variations on those*) back when I and several thousand friends were camping out in the Saudi Arabian desert. I understood the taste complaints (we got stuck with all the ham dishes so our saudi friends could have the not-ham), but the constipation issue drove me up the wall! The guy I worked with every day for weeks used to complain endlessly about MRE constipation, but he'd eat one and drink MAYBE a half canteen of water. I kept telling him, "those MREs are salty; you gotta drink more water". But would he listen? No, he'd eat his 3600 salt-laden calories a day and drink maybe a quart of water total for all three meals. I ate the same damn crap he did (ham slice...the horror...the horror), but I chugged down at LEAST a canteen full of water after every one, and not ONCE did any of my meals "refuse to exit".
Sorry. Ranting a bit. I got really tired of hearing about Specialist Barlow's constipation so the subject tends to set me off...:)
* Marines Refuse to Eat 'em, Meals Refused by Everyone, More Repulsive Eats...
P.T. Barnum is often quoted as saying, "There's a sucker born every minute." eBay is prime evidence of this.
As a friend of mine put it, eBay is the world's largest garage sale. The buyers are secretly hoping to find an original Picasso mis-listed in that pile of velvet Elvises and sad clowns with a starting bid of $1, and the sellers are listing every piece of colorful trash they find hoping they've stumbled across something rare/collectable that people will bid up into the stratosphere. Heck, I sold an untested Apple Color Laser Printer controller card "as-is" for $185. I've watched my girlfriend bid higher than the in-store price for clothes because she "didn't want to lose". It's insidious, that ebay...
You don't seriously think 10% of the population own a BMW, do you?:)
Hey, by the way he worded it it could be that he's saying "of the people who do NOT own BMWs, 90% of them don't care that the iPod doesn't...mumble...mumble"
I rather wonder, aside from the hobby aspect, how much longer Amature Radio will remain relevant. Seems disasters where AR would really shine and this sort of thing seems to replace them, as now pretty much anyone can afford a hand held phone, where once transmitters and receivers were the domain of those who actually cared enough to outfit and train themselves to be available for when there was need. Now you just whip out a cell phone and dial 911.
The problem with cell phones is they're only wireless for the short distance from the handheld phone to the cell site and require extensive infrastructure from there on out. If you want a cell tower where telecom infrastructure is unavailable (either due to being in the boonies or perhaps the local infrastructure is unserviceable as it was on 9-11), you need to set up a long-range link to the outside. This link can take days to get ready. Also, the emergency cell equipment isn't exactly plentiful, so you have to add in the time it takes to get a COW or COLT out to where you need it.
Amateur radio, on the other had, requires a couple guys showing up with HF rigs and a car battery. In an disaster you can't really depend upon local infrastructure. Ham radio and satellite are really the only guaranteed ways to communicate in the immediate aftermath if the situation is bad enough to take out landline communications.
This could be an incredibly useful technology. Anyone who had someone in New York/DC during 9/11 knows how difficult it was to get a hold of anyone that day. Aside from the fact that cell towers went down with the WTCs, Verizons CO (central office) was right next to Tower 1 and 2, knocking out quite a few landlines. Switching capabilities were compromised, leaving most of us with "All circuits are busy." In the future, deploy a few dozen of these and the cell phone capacity could ramp up rather quickly in an extreme event.
Unfortunately, none of these would have really helped on 9-11. The fact that huge swathes of Verizon's infrastructure were taken out by the towers collapsing meant that it wasn't just a lack of cell tower capacity. They would've needed dozens of microwave links to even BEGIN to handle the loss. COLTs and COWs are handy for "lesser" disasters (floods, ice storms, etc) where a permanent cell towers are either out of commission or overloaded but most of the basic telecom infrastructure is still functional.
Are people really running around trailing all of the code from all of the gigs they've had and just randomly incorporating it into other things?
That just seems rather disconcerting to me.
It's insane isn't it? That's like a carpenter bringing the hammer he used on the previous job with him to use on my house! The nerve!
Patent the patent system then issue a cease and desist to the USPTO.
Yeah, and I'm going to patent the butthole so everyone has to pay me to take a crap or (in the case of most/. posters) open their mouth to say anything.
Cripes, can we let this inane, dumb-ass joke die already? It wasn't particularly funny the first time, and it doesn't get any funnier with repetition.
Because Nanogator prevented a gaffer from buying a pair of glasses.
Heh. And because of me three stuntmen and the best boy were forced to give back all the money they made a year ago working on the movie. My brother is planning on getting from me this afternoon, which we figure should be just enough to put the focus puller into bankruptcy.
I drove my 1967 Dodge Dart (273ci V8, automatic transmission) from Los Angeles to San Francisco (400 miles) in 3 hours 45min (avg 110mph) using I little over 14 gallons of gas (about 28MPG). This was right after rebuilding and tuning the engine, putting on new tires, and I got lucky in that I almost never had to touch the brakes the whole trip. I never got over 16MPG in normal use. Clearly, Your Mileage May Vary. Under the right conditions you can get astounding economy out of a 35 year old chrome-grilled yellow monstrosity, and under the wrong conditions you can get abyssmal performance from a Chevy Sprint or Toyota Prius. It's important to remember that anecdotal evidence is not evidence, it's just a single data point.
No not really.I think I know where you're going with this, but the IP address does not pinpoint the exact physical location, the MAC address does.
MAC address is the identity of the device plugged into the circuit. You can move that device to any circuit anywhere. Each circuit will have one or more IP addresses available to it. An IP address that's in use maps to a specific circuit on a specific subnet. The subnet is served by a particular router. That router is stationary.
Put another way, think DHCP for a minute.
DHCP is just a way of assigning unique IP addresses to each individual device. DHCP servers have a specific set of IP addresses in a pool they assign from. Another DHCP server can't use any of those same IP addresses. You can move and entire subnet of IP addresses, but you can't move a random sampling of half of them while leaving the other half as-is.
IP address that was yours yesterday might be down the street today.
That's because we're on the same DHCP server. If I move to an area served by a different DHCP server, I can't get the same IP address.
We all know there is technically much more to it than that, but, in a layman's eye, if the IP address can move around, why can't he take it with him?
Like I said, it's just like a phone number was in the old days (and still frequently is today). If you move next door you can keep your phone number. If you move across town, you can't.
Anyway, we're talking about a company with fixed IP addresses that it wants to keep. DHCP is irrelevant.
IP addresses aren't like that, though. They were never designed to be soft routed.
Before some wit corrects me on this, I'd like to amend the above statement: IP addresses were never intended to be routed arbitrarily and individually. Routing happens, of course, but by a more rational distributed, hierarchical tree type arrangement that doesn't require each and every router to keep 16 gigs of lookup table handy.
You're actually off by one level of abstraction; your local telco has jack numbers for each address they serve. Your phone number is associated with the jack number in the CO. Case in point is that when we moved about 1.5 years ago, we were able to take our phone number with us, since we were still served by the same CO.
You can keep your same IP address if you move to an area served by the same sub-block of addresses by the same ISP. DSL connectivity is highly analogous to phone service in this regard. If you can keep you phone number, you can keep your IP address. If you move to an area served by a different CO, you probably have to change IP addresses. Cable, wireless, etc. will map differently, of course, but the concept is similar.
Actually, IP addresses are like what phone numbers used to be. Back in Ye Olden Days, you phone number essentially described the physical location of the wire pair that delivered your dialtone. A phone number of 471-1234 meant your pair was out of Central Office 47, sub area 1, pair 1234. You could change your last 4 digits, but not your 3 digit prefix, as the prefix designated the physical building where the 10,000 pairs serving your area lived. This is still the case for landlines in many areas (my boss had his shop in 471, but moved a half mile south and Verizon made him change to 477). Portability is possible with wireless phones because (by definition) they aren't tied to any particular physical location. Since a certain degree of soft routing already has to happen to get the call to the cell nearest you, it's not much of a leap to allow routing to other providers.
IP addresses aren't like that, though. They were never designed to be soft routed. That's what DNS is for. They IP address, in the end, is a number pinpointing the exact location of a physical circuit. There is no system below the IP address level to perform the necessary redirection. You can forward traffic from the old IP address to the new, but you can't take the old IP address with you.
This reminds me of the most recent National Public Radio April Fools' Joke: they claimed, very convincingly, that the USPS is working on portable zip codes. People think there's a prestige about 90210, for example. It's almost a brand, by itself. So when they move away, they want to take that with them. The gag was done so cleanly that there were quite a few people fooled.
The funny thing about that is that a bunch of folks actually managed to get the 90210 ZIP code expanded along its northern boundary. You see, a bunch of rich jerks moved up into the hills between Beverly Hills (nice) and the San Fernando Valley (not nice) and were annoyed that they had to have the Valley ZIP code. Now, despite being on the Valley side of the hills, they are in 90210.
George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of the its frequency squared.
Aren't "frequency" and "number of times they appeared" measurements of the same thing? If a word happens frequently, it'll happen more often, right?
Lockheed Martin is probably the most prolific military constractor there is. You actually intend to try and imply that they are strictly a satellite manufacturer? On Slashdot? Then I apologize in advance for replying to a troll.
We're not talking about Lockheed-Martin as a whole, just the one plant. Moore said in Bowling for Columbine that the Lockheed Martin plant in Littleton, CO made ICBMs. This is not true.
* The self-discharge rate increases with temperature. NiMHs left in a hot car in summer will drain faster than those in a cool house. Single-use lithium style batteries can hold their charge for 5-7 years.
I wonder if they can improve on this substanitially or if it is a chemistry limit.
From what I've heard, it's mostly the chemistry. Just like you can't make a hydrogen tank that the hydrogen can't leak out of. You can minimize the leakage by making better seals and such, but when you get right down to it, hydrogen always gets out somewhere 'cause it's so darn small. You can improve batteries by fractional amounts through careful manufacturing, but in the end the chemistry of it is such that a certain base amount of current will always leak through and discharge.
I have a Maha mh-c777plus universal charger.I've had good results with it charging NiMH batteries. It has a few flaws-- it pushes too much current for NiCd batteries in "Ni type" battery mode, the 24v power connector sparks when plugging it in, and the piezo "squeaker" it uses is as loud as a smoke alarm-- but nothing that couldn't be worked around*. It's designed with battery packs in mind rather than individual cells, so you need to pick up a couple batteryholders to get enough cells together to satisfy the charger's minimum voltage requirement (3v, as I recall). If you're looking for just a straight AAA/AA cell charger/conditioner, Maha has other models.
* charge NiCd's in Li-ion mode, add a power switch to unit so you don't have to plug the 24v in "hot", and fill the hole on that damn piezo "siren" inside with epoxy-- it's still audible, but only if you're in the same room.
My Fluffy 3000 would have been ordered off or manhandled off without a qualm. It's a machine. It won't scratch my furniture either, because I won't allow it too.
I think that's the major issue with robot "friends". I think part of what makes friends "valuable" is the fact that we've invested time and effort into adjusting ourselves to fit their peculiarities. A "replacement" friend will be just as peculiar, but in other ways, requiring more adjustments. A robot, like you say, doesn't require us to adjust to it at all. We can just "fix" the inconvenient behavior. At that point, it's as much a friend as my tailored suit. Fits nice, but I can always get another just like it.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Though for it to really work you'll need to dangle a ground wire off it and keep it connected to a good, solid ground.
I quote the OP:
"Make sure you wear Pb[lead] underwear, if you ever want to have kids."
Note the reference to lead shielding. He's thinking of some sort of ionizing radiation, obviously. X-rays, more than likely.
Tell you what. I'll let you stand infront of my 23db 13cm dish while I key the radio. Let me know if that gives you a warm fuzzy feeling inside. RF works great to cook flesh.
Christ Almighty, did I say radio waves are always harmless? No, I only said they aren't the same as ionizing radiation. I'm trying to combat the ignorance that leads to people taking at face value the phrases like "nuking my food" in reference to microwave ovens. I'd have thought that you, someone who obviously knows that radio waves aren't going to mutate people's children, would understand the importance of making that point. What if your neighbor decides to blame his brain tumor on the 6m antenna on your roof? Next thing you know we've got congress telling the FCC to cap amateur output at "10W in populated areas" or some such nonsense because in Joe Public's mind "radio waves" = "radioactive" = "instant deadly cancer".
Like Mediterranean?
No, "mediterranean" means "in the middle of the land". It's meant to describe the Mediterranean Sea, which (apart from a small gap a Gibraltar) is surrounded on all sides by land; contrast with the Atlantic Ocean which (as far as people at the time knew) was essentially unbounded.
be serious.
He is being serious. It does translate to "kingdom of the middle", which in chinese essentially means "that around which all else revolves".
You're thinking of gamma and X rays. We're talking about reg'lar old radio waves. Radio waves live on the other end of the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio waves are non-ionizing (i.e. they don't hurt your DNA). An EMP can be almost entirely dissipated by a well grounded metal shield. Physics. It's not just for kids!
Meals Refusing to Exit?
Meals Rejected by Ethiopians?
You know, I used to hear those (or variations on those*) back when I and several thousand friends were camping out in the Saudi Arabian desert. I understood the taste complaints (we got stuck with all the ham dishes so our saudi friends could have the not-ham), but the constipation issue drove me up the wall! The guy I worked with every day for weeks used to complain endlessly about MRE constipation, but he'd eat one and drink MAYBE a half canteen of water. I kept telling him, "those MREs are salty; you gotta drink more water". But would he listen? No, he'd eat his 3600 salt-laden calories a day and drink maybe a quart of water total for all three meals. I ate the same damn crap he did (ham slice...the horror...the horror), but I chugged down at LEAST a canteen full of water after every one, and not ONCE did any of my meals "refuse to exit".
Sorry. Ranting a bit. I got really tired of hearing about Specialist Barlow's constipation so the subject tends to set me off... :)
* Marines Refuse to Eat 'em, Meals Refused by Everyone, More Repulsive Eats...
Ah, the CAT bus. Never has there been a more wrtched hive of scum and villainy...
As a friend of mine put it, eBay is the world's largest garage sale. The buyers are secretly hoping to find an original Picasso mis-listed in that pile of velvet Elvises and sad clowns with a starting bid of $1, and the sellers are listing every piece of colorful trash they find hoping they've stumbled across something rare/collectable that people will bid up into the stratosphere. Heck, I sold an untested Apple Color Laser Printer controller card "as-is" for $185. I've watched my girlfriend bid higher than the in-store price for clothes because she "didn't want to lose". It's insidious, that ebay...
Hey, by the way he worded it it could be that he's saying "of the people who do NOT own BMWs, 90% of them don't care that the iPod doesn't...mumble...mumble"
The problem with cell phones is they're only wireless for the short distance from the handheld phone to the cell site and require extensive infrastructure from there on out. If you want a cell tower where telecom infrastructure is unavailable (either due to being in the boonies or perhaps the local infrastructure is unserviceable as it was on 9-11), you need to set up a long-range link to the outside. This link can take days to get ready. Also, the emergency cell equipment isn't exactly plentiful, so you have to add in the time it takes to get a COW or COLT out to where you need it.
Amateur radio, on the other had, requires a couple guys showing up with HF rigs and a car battery. In an disaster you can't really depend upon local infrastructure. Ham radio and satellite are really the only guaranteed ways to communicate in the immediate aftermath if the situation is bad enough to take out landline communications.
Unfortunately, none of these would have really helped on 9-11. The fact that huge swathes of Verizon's infrastructure were taken out by the towers collapsing meant that it wasn't just a lack of cell tower capacity. They would've needed dozens of microwave links to even BEGIN to handle the loss. COLTs and COWs are handy for "lesser" disasters (floods, ice storms, etc) where a permanent cell towers are either out of commission or overloaded but most of the basic telecom infrastructure is still functional.
It's insane isn't it? That's like a carpenter bringing the hammer he used on the previous job with him to use on my house! The nerve!
Yeah, and I'm going to patent the butthole so everyone has to pay me to take a crap or (in the case of most /. posters) open their mouth to say anything.
Cripes, can we let this inane, dumb-ass joke die already? It wasn't particularly funny the first time, and it doesn't get any funnier with repetition.
Because Nanogator prevented a gaffer from buying a pair of glasses.
Heh. And because of me three stuntmen and the best boy were forced to give back all the money they made a year ago working on the movie. My brother is planning on getting from me this afternoon, which we figure should be just enough to put the focus puller into bankruptcy.
I drove my 1967 Dodge Dart (273ci V8, automatic transmission) from Los Angeles to San Francisco (400 miles) in 3 hours 45min (avg 110mph) using I little over 14 gallons of gas (about 28MPG). This was right after rebuilding and tuning the engine, putting on new tires, and I got lucky in that I almost never had to touch the brakes the whole trip. I never got over 16MPG in normal use. Clearly, Your Mileage May Vary. Under the right conditions you can get astounding economy out of a 35 year old chrome-grilled yellow monstrosity, and under the wrong conditions you can get abyssmal performance from a Chevy Sprint or Toyota Prius. It's important to remember that anecdotal evidence is not evidence, it's just a single data point.
MAC address is the identity of the device plugged into the circuit. You can move that device to any circuit anywhere. Each circuit will have one or more IP addresses available to it. An IP address that's in use maps to a specific circuit on a specific subnet. The subnet is served by a particular router. That router is stationary.
Put another way, think DHCP for a minute.
DHCP is just a way of assigning unique IP addresses to each individual device. DHCP servers have a specific set of IP addresses in a pool they assign from. Another DHCP server can't use any of those same IP addresses. You can move and entire subnet of IP addresses, but you can't move a random sampling of half of them while leaving the other half as-is.
IP address that was yours yesterday might be down the street today.
That's because we're on the same DHCP server. If I move to an area served by a different DHCP server, I can't get the same IP address.
We all know there is technically much more to it than that, but, in a layman's eye, if the IP address can move around, why can't he take it with him?
Like I said, it's just like a phone number was in the old days (and still frequently is today). If you move next door you can keep your phone number. If you move across town, you can't.
Anyway, we're talking about a company with fixed IP addresses that it wants to keep. DHCP is irrelevant.
Before some wit corrects me on this, I'd like to amend the above statement: IP addresses were never intended to be routed arbitrarily and individually. Routing happens, of course, but by a more rational distributed, hierarchical tree type arrangement that doesn't require each and every router to keep 16 gigs of lookup table handy.
You're actually off by one level of abstraction; your local telco has jack numbers for each address they serve. Your phone number is associated with the jack number in the CO. Case in point is that when we moved about 1.5 years ago, we were able to take our phone number with us, since we were still served by the same CO.
You can keep your same IP address if you move to an area served by the same sub-block of addresses by the same ISP. DSL connectivity is highly analogous to phone service in this regard. If you can keep you phone number, you can keep your IP address. If you move to an area served by a different CO, you probably have to change IP addresses. Cable, wireless, etc. will map differently, of course, but the concept is similar.
Actually, IP addresses are like what phone numbers used to be. Back in Ye Olden Days, you phone number essentially described the physical location of the wire pair that delivered your dialtone. A phone number of 471-1234 meant your pair was out of Central Office 47, sub area 1, pair 1234. You could change your last 4 digits, but not your 3 digit prefix, as the prefix designated the physical building where the 10,000 pairs serving your area lived. This is still the case for landlines in many areas (my boss had his shop in 471, but moved a half mile south and Verizon made him change to 477). Portability is possible with wireless phones because (by definition) they aren't tied to any particular physical location. Since a certain degree of soft routing already has to happen to get the call to the cell nearest you, it's not much of a leap to allow routing to other providers.
IP addresses aren't like that, though. They were never designed to be soft routed. That's what DNS is for. They IP address, in the end, is a number pinpointing the exact location of a physical circuit. There is no system below the IP address level to perform the necessary redirection. You can forward traffic from the old IP address to the new, but you can't take the old IP address with you.
The funny thing about that is that a bunch of folks actually managed to get the 90210 ZIP code expanded along its northern boundary. You see, a bunch of rich jerks moved up into the hills between Beverly Hills (nice) and the San Fernando Valley (not nice) and were annoyed that they had to have the Valley ZIP code. Now, despite being on the Valley side of the hills, they are in 90210.
George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of the its frequency squared.
Aren't "frequency" and "number of times they appeared" measurements of the same thing? If a word happens frequently, it'll happen more often, right?
We're not talking about Lockheed-Martin as a whole, just the one plant. Moore said in Bowling for Columbine that the Lockheed Martin plant in Littleton, CO made ICBMs. This is not true.
I wonder if they can improve on this substanitially or if it is a chemistry limit.
From what I've heard, it's mostly the chemistry. Just like you can't make a hydrogen tank that the hydrogen can't leak out of. You can minimize the leakage by making better seals and such, but when you get right down to it, hydrogen always gets out somewhere 'cause it's so darn small. You can improve batteries by fractional amounts through careful manufacturing, but in the end the chemistry of it is such that a certain base amount of current will always leak through and discharge.
* charge NiCd's in Li-ion mode, add a power switch to unit so you don't have to plug the 24v in "hot", and fill the hole on that damn piezo "siren" inside with epoxy-- it's still audible, but only if you're in the same room.
You wear a cloak? You are weird.
My Fluffy 3000 would have been ordered off or manhandled off without a qualm. It's a machine. It won't scratch my furniture either, because I won't allow it too.
I think that's the major issue with robot "friends". I think part of what makes friends "valuable" is the fact that we've invested time and effort into adjusting ourselves to fit their peculiarities. A "replacement" friend will be just as peculiar, but in other ways, requiring more adjustments. A robot, like you say, doesn't require us to adjust to it at all. We can just "fix" the inconvenient behavior. At that point, it's as much a friend as my tailored suit. Fits nice, but I can always get another just like it.
I think that was his point. He built a cheezy little robot that only picked up balls and even that miniscule range of capability cost $400.