They even arrested a little old lady for obstruction because she went around feeding expired parking meters so people wouldn't get tickets.
Which makes sense. I hate people who think they're doing the world a favor by feeding strangers' meters. It defeats the primary purpose of the meter, which is supposed to be there to ensure turnover- it makes sure that multiple people get a chance to park in the space, and that it isn't hogged by a single car all day. People think they're just for collecting "rent" for the space, but that's of secondary importance. Meter maids often mark your tires with chalk and log your plates anyway, so you can still get a ticket for meter feeding.
A list of 100 things to do before you die? On/.? Is one of the first ones to "finally RTFA"?
If you learned a language where you can speak with a tense for "passing on material taken without checking from someone else", why would you ever need to RTFA again?
It's clearly wiretapping because, duh, you're tapping into the wire to record the keystrokes.
The definition of wiretapping is more specific than "tapping a wire". For example a pen register (where they essentially log who you talk to) is not considered by the courts to be a wiretap, but it probably falls under the definition you are using.
But it's not federal wiretapping, or federal anything, because it doesn't cross state lines or involve a federal official. I don't know why the FBI is even involved.
You don't need to string the wire across a state line. It's like growing pot in California- see Supremacy Clause.
It used to be that you could run to the patent office with nothing more than a printout full of G, T, A, and C. The torrent of sequence patents reached such a frenzy a couple years ago that the patent office actually tightened the restrictions for sequence patents: now to patent one you have to provide a mechanism of action, i.e. how the sequence interacts with some drug or other treatment. It was covered on Slashdot.
Not that I think genes should be patentable at all, unless you designed them yourself. That's a much higher bar- people can insert any sequence they want into an organism but lack the knowledge of how to do it intelligently. If you can make a novel sequence change yourself that does something useful, you might deserve a patent. But wild-type sequences should not be patentable, and if a gene patented in this way turns out to have appeared in nature it should count as prior art.
If recreating an event down to its particular details doesn't give you any further insight into that event, perhaps you need some work on your critical thinking skills.
What further "insight" into the Kennedy assassination do you think you'll get from a FPS where you stack textbooks and get Kennedy in your sight?
Megan's Law is a reaction to a historically significant event. Would you play a video game where you rape and murder Megan Kanka?
Thats a great idea. Concentration Camp Tycoon, from the makers of rollercoaster tycoon and railroad tycoon. I can see it selling just about as well as lemonade tycoon...
No, silly. It's called Sim-Camp. Getting started is easy- just follow the steps below and you'll have your concentration camp up and running in no time.
Step 1 -- Build an Incinerator Every camp needs an incinerator to dispose of the bodies of its victims. To build an incinerator, click on the Incinerator tool, then click on an empty area of the map. (Note: If the smoke from your incinerator is not animating, the game is probably paused. Choose a game speed to start the smoke animating.)
Step 2 -- Add Zones Zones are areas that you designate for different kinds of buildings in your compound. The people who will be enslaved in your camp need to live in Residential Zones, work in Industrial Zones, and die in Disposal Zones. Place each zone type on the city map near the incinerator.
Step 3 -- Build Railways The residents will need some way to arrive in your camp from the rest of the Reich. Place some Railways along the sides of your zones. Now that the zones in your camp have transportation, you should see your death camp slowly come to life. Congratulations! You've created your first concentration camp -- you may now call yourself "Kamp Kommandant!"
From the department of Ctrl-V: 'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida by Thom Hartmann
There was something odd about the poll tapes.
A "poll tape" is the phrase used to describe a printout from an optical scan voting machine made the evening of an election, after the machine has read all the ballots and crunched the numbers on its internal computer. It shows the total results of the election in that location. The printout is signed by the polling officials present in that precinct/location, and then submitted to the county elections office as the official record of how the people in that particular precinct had voted. (Usually each location has only one single optical scanner/reader, and thus produces only one poll tape.)
Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org, the erstwhile investigator of electronic voting machines, along with people from Florida Fair Elections, showed up at Florida's Volusia County Elections Office on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 16, 2004, and asked to see, under a public records request, each of the poll tapes for the 100+ optical scanners in the precincts in that county. The elections workers - having been notified in advance of her request - handed her a set of printouts, oddly dated November 15 and lacking signatures.
Bev pointed out that the printouts given her were not the original poll tapes and had no signatures, and thus were not what she'd requested. Obligingly, they told her that the originals were held in another location, the Elections Office's Warehouse, and that since it was the end of the day they should meet Bev the following morning to show them to her.
Bev showed up bright and early the morning of Wednesday the 17th - well before the scheduled meeting - and discovered three of the elections officials in the Elections Warehouse standing over a table covered with what looked like poll tapes. When they saw Bev and her friends, Bev told me in a telephone interview less than an hour later, "They immediately shoved us out and slammed the door."
In a way, that was a blessing, because it led to the stinking evidence.
"On the porch was a garbage bag," Bev said, "and so I looked in it and, and lo and behold, there were public record tapes."
Thrown away. Discarded. Waiting to be hauled off.
"It was technically stinking, in fact," Bev added, "because what they had done was to have thrown some of their polling tapes, which are the official records of the election, into the garbage. These were the ones signed by the poll workers. These are something we had done an official public records request for."
When the elections officials inside realized that the people outside were going through the trash, they called the police and one came out to challenge Bev.
Kathleen Wynne, a www.blackboxvoting.org investigator, was there.
"We caught the whole thing on videotape," she said. "I don't think you'll ever see anything like this - Bev Harris having a tug of war with an election worker over a bag of garbage, and he held onto it and she pulled on it, and it split right open, spilling out those poll tapes. They were throwing away our democracy, and Bev wasn't going to let them do it."
As I was interviewing Bev just moments after the tussle, she had to get off the phone, because, "Two police cars just showed up."
She told me later in the day, in an on-air interview, that when the police arrived, "We all had a vigorous debate on the merits of my public records request."
The outcome of that debate was that they all went from the Elections Warehouse back to the Elections Office, to compare the original, November 2 dated and signed poll tapes with the November 15 printouts the Elections Office had submitted to the Secretary of State. A camera crew from www.votergate.tv met them there, as well.
And then things got even odder.
"We were sitting there comparing the real [signed, original] tapes with the [later printout] ones that were given us," Bev
Oh, and the same blocking could be done with a Windows web-proxy server.
True, but the Linux proxy is obviously uninfectable by anything that could infect the end-user systems being protected. This isn't as obvious with a Windows proxy- you need to know a little more about how the proxy works, how it does its filtering, what vulnerabilities it has, etc. The person making purchasing decisions may not be comfortable with his ability to judge the vulnerability of a Windows proxy. You also need to do a more thorough lockdown because of all the damn features crammed into Windows' every orifice. And keep in mind it can be infected from the inside as well.
In general the best networking strategies involve as diverse a set of operating systems as possible, so that no one agent can infect them all. I would go for a BSD proxy. Since it's always "dying", it offers bulletproof security.
You don't need Linux, unless you aren't smart enough to figure out how to work Windows.
clap clap clap... Post of the week!
Someone with automatic update wouldn't even need to know what SP2 is, but they would be up to date.
And that person would have more balls than I do for leaving that thing on automatic. Every SP2 install I have done so far has turned into a nerve-wracking experience.
Er, yes, this is one of the very first things mentioned in the article. you did read that article, right..?
This is the closest the article comes to it:
Chimeras (ki-MER-ahs) -- meaning mixtures of two or more individuals in a single body -- are not inherently unnatural. Most twins carry at least a few cells from the sibling with whom they shared a womb, and most mothers carry in their blood at least a few cells from each child they have born.
"At least a few cells from a sibling" is not quite the same thing. This is a case of two siblings fused into one individual. Neither sibling has a separate existence.
I seem to remember a story where another woman surprisingly failed a maternity test for her own son, and was found to be chimeral.
Scratch that sentence- the failed maternity test was part of the same story about the tetragametic kidney patient. Lucky for her, actually; it meant she could accept kidneys from any of her siblings.
This already happens, in a form of twin birth where a pair of fraternal twins fuse into a single embryo. This can result in an "embedded twin", where one twin is partially absorbed into the body of the other. You get individuals with second faces on their shoulders, etc. But there is the happier case where the twins get mixed up at a very early stage in blastular development and develop normally from then on. This produces a chimeral individual whose cells are of two different genotypes.
This is extremely rare; a case was discovered in 2002 when a woman needed a kidney transplant. Tissue typing revealed her to be a tetragametic individual, having developed from four gametes instead of two. Half her cells were genotypically different from the other half. During development, this woman and her twin fused into one embryo, and appeared to the world after birth to be one person. There are probably more people like this out there. I seem to remember a story where another woman surprisingly failed a maternity test for her own son, and was found to be chimeral.
See here (or its Google cache to avoid slashdotting) for details.
The campaign should combat the messages of pornography by putting signs on buses saying sex with children is not OK, said Layden.
Wow, incredible. Imagine a bus going by with a big sign on it saying "SEX WITH CHILDREN IS NOT OK".
But really, how is this any more absurd than those urinal cakes that have "SAY NO TO DRUGS" on them?
I once heard a comedian ask if a junkie has ever been standing at a urinal, seen the "SAY NO TO DRUGS" printed on the urinal cake, and had an epiphany right there while pissing.
Maybe they could try "SEX WITH CHILDREN IS NOT OK" on the urinal cakes first, to see if it works, before ramping up to buses.
I'd like a stack of urinal cakes that say "OFFSHORING TECH JOBS IS NOT OK". I'd hit all the mens rooms in my company's corporate headquarters. Because you'll certainly never see a bus go by that says "OFFSHORING TECH JOBS IS NOT OK". You'll see "SEX WITH BUSES IS NOT OK" first.
I'm in my thirties, but there are enough moralizing idiots in the world to keep me feeling like a jaded teenager for the rest of my life.
when my dad was in highschool he and his brother snuck into the chem lab and ended up dumping a jar of Hg all over the floor.
Frank Zappa's father worked as a meteorologist at a military arsenal and used to come home with mercury for the kids. His autobiography talks about it: "One of the things I used to like to do was pour the mercury on the floor and hit it with a hammer, so it squirted all over the place. I lived in mercury."
My father never brought home so much as a blob. I might have been a rock star by now. Gee, thanks Dad.
Anonymous Coward writes in: "I have been looking for some good porn sites to help my addiction. Most of the sites I've found, however, either have skanky chicks or want a lot of money and open too many popups. I was wondering if anyone knew of a good source of porn on the Internet. And as always, compatibility with GNU/FOSS solutions is preferred."
It's an impressive demonstration. Everytime I see it I still get spooked by the noise and spark it makes.
So it's still there? That's impressive. He put it together 14 years ago. I thought it might have busted by now.
His big problem was the switch. If you just use an ordinary switch, the capacitor bank discharges all its energy at the switch contact and ends up just destroying the switch and not crushing the can. He set up a system of two or three power transistors, where you push a button to flip the gate of the first transistor, and that one flips the gate of the next which flips the gate of the main HV power transistor that closes the circuit. He was still paranoid of getting a shock across the ten-foot lead wires so he surrounded the actual switch with lots of plastic and you pushed it down with a rubber tube. He should have used IR.
I'm going to make the king out of a linear accelerator. For the pawns I'll use my run-of-the-mill 5 keV cyclotrons.
A friend of mine in the physics program at Rutgers built the can crusher demo they have. It discharges a huge HV paper-oil capacitor through a coil of copper tubing about six or seven turns long, wrapped around a plexiglass tube. You put the can in the tube, close the switch, and POW the can is instantly crushed into a hot crumpled aluminum stick the width of your thumb because the field sets up a countercurrent in the can which repels the main coils. Even my girlfriend was impressed. We used to discharge the capacitor bank across thin wire-wrap wire, which vaporizes pretty well. He's working at some military contractor nowadays, working on ultrapowerful lasers. Which probably suits him better than the fiber optic sissy lasers he was working on before the telecom crash.
Another thing you should know if you take physics at Rutgers is that the physics auditorium is probably exposing you to mercury vapor. Legend has it that they did a "mercury hammer" demo one time with liquid nitrogen, where you pour the mercury in and freeze it, then pull it out and pound nails with it. Someone got the bright idea of passing the hammer around the room, and during its trip through the audience it started to drip. Only some of it made it back to the front of the room.
AOL is extremely unfriendly towards their employees developing P2P stuff. Remember Gnutella was first developed by Nullsoft, an AOL subsidiary? Remember that AOL tried to kill it but the genie was already out of the bottle? Remember WASTE was first developed by Nullsoft too? Remember it was only up for about a day before AOL shut that down as well?
No problem. We'll just pay a soccer mom to visit AOL headquarters and dance around on the table demanding P2P and warez, and we got it.
It's not going downhill towards the Sun that costs too much. It's going uphill from Earth that makes it impraticable.
Orbital speed near the earth's surface is sqrt(gr)=7745 m/s. The escape velocity is sqrt(2) times that, or 11 km/s.
Orbital velocity around the sun is about 30 km/s. Neglecting the radius of the sun itself, you'd have to burn enough rocket fuel to reach 30 km/s relative to the earth to get rid of your angular momentum relative to the sun. Getting it off the earth would be the easy part.
Getting it out of the solar system (past Pluto) would be easier than getting it to the sun. Escape velocity at Earth's orbit is sqrt(2)*30 or 42 km/s, only 42-30=12 km/s of a difference from the waste's speed on the ground, which is still greater than the 11 km/s required to escape Earth.
Sorry, that's a case of an author offering a separate commercial license.
It is a shame that corporatists like you have lost sight of the meaning of free market capitalism (in which competition, of all types, is sacred). It is causing the fall of the American empire. You sicken me.
Yes, I've bought licenses from GPL authors. That's not the case I was talking about though.
The worst case is when a library with multiple authors does not implement a difficult piece of functionality but merely establishes a standard way of doing things, and a GPL license is slapped onto it. Effectively this creates a closed implementation standard.
But this problem applies to commercial software, not just GPL
Which was sort of my point, since I was arguing that these problems apply not only to commercial software, but also the GPL- in contrast to what most people think about the GPL. Not only do people equate the GPL with the public domain, not recognizing it as a proprietary license, if you read this thread you'll see that many people are under the impression that the GPL is the only free license there is.
- you're not free to use a random company's library either, unless they're willing to sell it to you under some conditions.
Yep. People mistake it for the public domain, but the GPL is just like a commercial license from a random company. Except a company might sell you a license. The GPL does not negotiate or compromise- it wants you to open source the entire application if you link to a GPL library, and that's it.
Unless you can get hold of the author, and he also releases it under a separate commercial license. This is one case where the GPL actually works out. I've negotiated purchases of commercial licenses from authors of GPL software before. In that case the GPL doesn't get in the way. Unfortunately in many cases there is no one around with the right to negotiate a separate commercial license, since hundreds of people have tweaked a line of code here or there.
Are you seriously suggesting you should have the right to use other people's work, and then sell it in a form that prevents other people using your work freely? Or have I misunderstood your point?
Yes- a form that prevents other people using my work freely. When people say stuff like what you just said, they're typically thinking of a case like where someone builds a super duper XML tool based on a few lines of code added on top of a GPL-ed XML library. Usually I'm writing some other type of tool- a financial or scientific application- and I just want to do something like load and save preferences from a config file, maybe in a way that's compatible with some GNU application.
It's not unreasonable for me to link to a library and not be forced to open source my entire application. Most free software licenses allow this, because they are not in fact proprietary licenses like the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
They even arrested a little old lady for obstruction because she went around feeding expired parking meters so people wouldn't get tickets.
Which makes sense. I hate people who think they're doing the world a favor by feeding strangers' meters. It defeats the primary purpose of the meter, which is supposed to be there to ensure turnover- it makes sure that multiple people get a chance to park in the space, and that it isn't hogged by a single car all day. People think they're just for collecting "rent" for the space, but that's of secondary importance.
Meter maids often mark your tires with chalk and log your plates anyway, so you can still get a ticket for meter feeding.
All that can be true when you tell the truth too. For instance, imagine your wife asking "Are you cheating on me?"
That's why you should never marry a bitch. My wife never asks me stupid shit like that and I don't need to use my brain at all around her.
A list of 100 things to do before you die? On /.? Is one of the first ones to "finally RTFA"?
If you learned a language where you can speak with a tense for "passing on material taken without checking from someone else", why would you ever need to RTFA again?
The Republicans have no idea what can be done with embryonic stem cells that cannot be accomplished with adult stem cells. Neither does anyone else.
You're being sarcastic, right? They're thumbnails. Fair use.
It's clearly wiretapping because, duh, you're tapping into the wire to record the keystrokes.
The definition of wiretapping is more specific than "tapping a wire". For example a pen register (where they essentially log who you talk to) is not considered by the courts to be a wiretap, but it probably falls under the definition you are using.
But it's not federal wiretapping, or federal anything, because it doesn't cross state lines or involve a federal official. I don't know why the FBI is even involved.
You don't need to string the wire across a state line. It's like growing pot in California- see Supremacy Clause.
It used to be that you could run to the patent office with nothing more than a printout full of G, T, A, and C. The torrent of sequence patents reached such a frenzy a couple years ago that the patent office actually tightened the restrictions for sequence patents: now to patent one you have to provide a mechanism of action, i.e. how the sequence interacts with some drug or other treatment. It was covered on Slashdot.
Not that I think genes should be patentable at all, unless you designed them yourself. That's a much higher bar- people can insert any sequence they want into an organism but lack the knowledge of how to do it intelligently. If you can make a novel sequence change yourself that does something useful, you might deserve a patent. But wild-type sequences should not be patentable, and if a gene patented in this way turns out to have appeared in nature it should count as prior art.
If recreating an event down to its particular details doesn't give you any further insight into that event, perhaps you need some work on your critical thinking skills.
What further "insight" into the Kennedy assassination do you think you'll get from a FPS where you stack textbooks and get Kennedy in your sight?
Megan's Law is a reaction to a historically significant event. Would you play a video game where you rape and murder Megan Kanka?
And this game doesn't help explain what happened?
No.
Thats a great idea. Concentration Camp Tycoon, from the makers of rollercoaster tycoon and railroad tycoon. I can see it selling just about as well as lemonade tycoon...
No, silly. It's called Sim-Camp. Getting started is easy- just follow the steps below and you'll have your concentration camp up and running in no time.
Step 1 -- Build an Incinerator
Every camp needs an incinerator to dispose of the bodies of its victims. To build an incinerator, click on the Incinerator tool, then click on an empty area of the map. (Note: If the smoke from your incinerator is not animating, the game is probably paused. Choose a game speed to start the smoke animating.)
Step 2 -- Add Zones
Zones are areas that you designate for different kinds of buildings in your compound. The people who will be enslaved in your camp need to live in Residential Zones, work in Industrial Zones, and die in Disposal Zones. Place each zone type on the city map near the incinerator.
Step 3 -- Build Railways
The residents will need some way to arrive in your camp from the rest of the Reich. Place some Railways along the sides of your zones. Now that the zones in your camp have transportation, you should see your death camp slowly come to life. Congratulations! You've created your first concentration camp -- you may now call yourself "Kamp Kommandant!"
From the department of Ctrl-V:
'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida
by Thom Hartmann
There was something odd about the poll tapes.
A "poll tape" is the phrase used to describe a printout from an optical scan voting machine made the evening of an election, after the machine has read all the ballots and crunched the numbers on its internal computer. It shows the total results of the election in that location. The printout is signed by the polling officials present in that precinct/location, and then submitted to the county elections office as the official record of how the people in that particular precinct had voted. (Usually each location has only one single optical scanner/reader, and thus produces only one poll tape.)
Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org, the erstwhile investigator of electronic voting machines, along with people from Florida Fair Elections, showed up at Florida's Volusia County Elections Office on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 16, 2004, and asked to see, under a public records request, each of the poll tapes for the 100+ optical scanners in the precincts in that county. The elections workers - having been notified in advance of her request - handed her a set of printouts, oddly dated November 15 and lacking signatures.
Bev pointed out that the printouts given her were not the original poll tapes and had no signatures, and thus were not what she'd requested. Obligingly, they told her that the originals were held in another location, the Elections Office's Warehouse, and that since it was the end of the day they should meet Bev the following morning to show them to her.
Bev showed up bright and early the morning of Wednesday the 17th - well before the scheduled meeting - and discovered three of the elections officials in the Elections Warehouse standing over a table covered with what looked like poll tapes. When they saw Bev and her friends, Bev told me in a telephone interview less than an hour later, "They immediately shoved us out and slammed the door."
In a way, that was a blessing, because it led to the stinking evidence.
"On the porch was a garbage bag," Bev said, "and so I looked in it and, and lo and behold, there were public record tapes."
Thrown away. Discarded. Waiting to be hauled off.
"It was technically stinking, in fact," Bev added, "because what they had done was to have thrown some of their polling tapes, which are the official records of the election, into the garbage. These were the ones signed by the poll workers. These are something we had done an official public records request for."
When the elections officials inside realized that the people outside were going through the trash, they called the police and one came out to challenge Bev.
Kathleen Wynne, a www.blackboxvoting.org investigator, was there.
"We caught the whole thing on videotape," she said. "I don't think you'll ever see anything like this - Bev Harris having a tug of war with an election worker over a bag of garbage, and he held onto it and she pulled on it, and it split right open, spilling out those poll tapes. They were throwing away our democracy, and Bev wasn't going to let them do it."
As I was interviewing Bev just moments after the tussle, she had to get off the phone, because, "Two police cars just showed up."
She told me later in the day, in an on-air interview, that when the police arrived, "We all had a vigorous debate on the merits of my public records request."
The outcome of that debate was that they all went from the Elections Warehouse back to the Elections Office, to compare the original, November 2 dated and signed poll tapes with the November 15 printouts the Elections Office had submitted to the Secretary of State. A camera crew from www.votergate.tv met them there, as well.
And then things got even odder.
"We were sitting there comparing the real [signed, original] tapes with the [later printout] ones that were given us," Bev
Oh, and the same blocking could be done with a Windows web-proxy server.
True, but the Linux proxy is obviously uninfectable by anything that could infect the end-user systems being protected. This isn't as obvious with a Windows proxy- you need to know a little more about how the proxy works, how it does its filtering, what vulnerabilities it has, etc. The person making purchasing decisions may not be comfortable with his ability to judge the vulnerability of a Windows proxy. You also need to do a more thorough lockdown because of all the damn features crammed into Windows' every orifice. And keep in mind it can be infected from the inside as well.
In general the best networking strategies involve as diverse a set of operating systems as possible, so that no one agent can infect them all. I would go for a BSD proxy. Since it's always "dying", it offers bulletproof security.
You don't need Linux, unless you aren't smart enough to figure out how to work Windows.
clap clap clap... Post of the week!
Someone with automatic update wouldn't even need to know what SP2 is, but they would be up to date.
And that person would have more balls than I do for leaving that thing on automatic. Every SP2 install I have done so far has turned into a nerve-wracking experience.
This is the closest the article comes to it:"At least a few cells from a sibling" is not quite the same thing. This is a case of two siblings fused into one individual. Neither sibling has a separate existence.
I seem to remember a story where another woman surprisingly failed a maternity test for her own son, and was found to be chimeral.
Scratch that sentence- the failed maternity test was part of the same story about the tetragametic kidney patient. Lucky for her, actually; it meant she could accept kidneys from any of her siblings.
This already happens, in a form of twin birth where a pair of fraternal twins fuse into a single embryo. This can result in an "embedded twin", where one twin is partially absorbed into the body of the other. You get individuals with second faces on their shoulders, etc. But there is the happier case where the twins get mixed up at a very early stage in blastular development and develop normally from then on. This produces a chimeral individual whose cells are of two different genotypes.
This is extremely rare; a case was discovered in 2002 when a woman needed a kidney transplant. Tissue typing revealed her to be a tetragametic individual, having developed from four gametes instead of two. Half her cells were genotypically different from the other half. During development, this woman and her twin fused into one embryo, and appeared to the world after birth to be one person. There are probably more people like this out there. I seem to remember a story where another woman surprisingly failed a maternity test for her own son, and was found to be chimeral.
See here (or its Google cache to avoid slashdotting) for details.
The campaign should combat the messages of pornography by putting signs on buses saying sex with children is not OK, said Layden.
Wow, incredible. Imagine a bus going by with a big sign on it saying "SEX WITH CHILDREN IS NOT OK".
But really, how is this any more absurd than those urinal cakes that have "SAY NO TO DRUGS" on them?
I once heard a comedian ask if a junkie has ever been standing at a urinal, seen the "SAY NO TO DRUGS" printed on the urinal cake, and had an epiphany right there while pissing.
Maybe they could try "SEX WITH CHILDREN IS NOT OK" on the urinal cakes first, to see if it works, before ramping up to buses.
I'd like a stack of urinal cakes that say "OFFSHORING TECH JOBS IS NOT OK". I'd hit all the mens rooms in my company's corporate headquarters. Because you'll certainly never see a bus go by that says "OFFSHORING TECH JOBS IS NOT OK". You'll see "SEX WITH BUSES IS NOT OK" first.
I'm in my thirties, but there are enough moralizing idiots in the world to keep me feeling like a jaded teenager for the rest of my life.
when my dad was in highschool he and his brother snuck into the chem lab and ended up dumping a jar of Hg all over the floor.
Frank Zappa's father worked as a meteorologist at a military arsenal and used to come home with mercury for the kids. His autobiography talks about it: "One of the things I used to like to do was pour the mercury on the floor and hit it with a hammer, so it squirted all over the place. I lived in mercury."
My father never brought home so much as a blob. I might have been a rock star by now. Gee, thanks Dad.
Anonymous Coward writes in: "I have been looking for some good porn sites to help my addiction. Most of the sites I've found, however, either have skanky chicks or want a lot of money and open too many popups. I was wondering if anyone knew of a good source of porn on the Internet. And as always, compatibility with GNU/FOSS solutions is preferred."
It's an impressive demonstration. Everytime I see it I still get spooked by the noise and spark it makes.
So it's still there? That's impressive. He put it together 14 years ago. I thought it might have busted by now.
His big problem was the switch. If you just use an ordinary switch, the capacitor bank discharges all its energy at the switch contact and ends up just destroying the switch and not crushing the can. He set up a system of two or three power transistors, where you push a button to flip the gate of the first transistor, and that one flips the gate of the next which flips the gate of the main HV power transistor that closes the circuit. He was still paranoid of getting a shock across the ten-foot lead wires so he surrounded the actual switch with lots of plastic and you pushed it down with a rubber tube. He should have used IR.
I'm going to make the king out of a linear accelerator. For the pawns I'll use my run-of-the-mill 5 keV cyclotrons.
A friend of mine in the physics program at Rutgers built the can crusher demo they have. It discharges a huge HV paper-oil capacitor through a coil of copper tubing about six or seven turns long, wrapped around a plexiglass tube. You put the can in the tube, close the switch, and POW the can is instantly crushed into a hot crumpled aluminum stick the width of your thumb because the field sets up a countercurrent in the can which repels the main coils. Even my girlfriend was impressed. We used to discharge the capacitor bank across thin wire-wrap wire, which vaporizes pretty well. He's working at some military contractor nowadays, working on ultrapowerful lasers. Which probably suits him better than the fiber optic sissy lasers he was working on before the telecom crash.
Another thing you should know if you take physics at Rutgers is that the physics auditorium is probably exposing you to mercury vapor. Legend has it that they did a "mercury hammer" demo one time with liquid nitrogen, where you pour the mercury in and freeze it, then pull it out and pound nails with it. Someone got the bright idea of passing the hammer around the room, and during its trip through the audience it started to drip. Only some of it made it back to the front of the room.
AOL is extremely unfriendly towards their employees developing P2P stuff. Remember Gnutella was first developed by Nullsoft, an AOL subsidiary? Remember that AOL tried to kill it but the genie was already out of the bottle? Remember WASTE was first developed by Nullsoft too? Remember it was only up for about a day before AOL shut that down as well?
No problem. We'll just pay a soccer mom to visit AOL headquarters and dance around on the table demanding P2P and warez, and we got it.
It's not going downhill towards the Sun that costs too much. It's going uphill from Earth that makes it impraticable.
Orbital speed near the earth's surface is sqrt(gr)=7745 m/s. The escape velocity is sqrt(2) times that, or 11 km/s.
Orbital velocity around the sun is about 30 km/s. Neglecting the radius of the sun itself, you'd have to burn enough rocket fuel to reach 30 km/s relative to the earth to get rid of your angular momentum relative to the sun. Getting it off the earth would be the easy part.
Getting it out of the solar system (past Pluto) would be easier than getting it to the sun. Escape velocity at Earth's orbit is sqrt(2)*30 or 42 km/s, only 42-30=12 km/s of a difference from the waste's speed on the ground, which is still greater than the 11 km/s required to escape Earth.
False. See question 2.
Sorry, that's a case of an author offering a separate commercial license.
It is a shame that corporatists like you have lost sight of the meaning of free market capitalism (in which competition, of all types, is sacred). It is causing the fall of the American empire. You sicken me.
"Corporatists like me?" LOL
Yes, I've bought licenses from GPL authors. That's not the case I was talking about though.
The worst case is when a library with multiple authors does not implement a difficult piece of functionality but merely establishes a standard way of doing things, and a GPL license is slapped onto it. Effectively this creates a closed implementation standard.
But this problem applies to commercial software, not just GPL
Which was sort of my point, since I was arguing that these problems apply not only to commercial software, but also the GPL- in contrast to what most people think about the GPL. Not only do people equate the GPL with the public domain, not recognizing it as a proprietary license, if you read this thread you'll see that many people are under the impression that the GPL is the only free license there is.
- you're not free to use a random company's library either, unless they're willing to sell it to you under some conditions.
Yep. People mistake it for the public domain, but the GPL is just like a commercial license from a random company. Except a company might sell you a license. The GPL does not negotiate or compromise- it wants you to open source the entire application if you link to a GPL library, and that's it.
Unless you can get hold of the author, and he also releases it under a separate commercial license. This is one case where the GPL actually works out. I've negotiated purchases of commercial licenses from authors of GPL software before. In that case the GPL doesn't get in the way. Unfortunately in many cases there is no one around with the right to negotiate a separate commercial license, since hundreds of people have tweaked a line of code here or there.
Are you seriously suggesting you should have the right to use other people's work, and then sell it in a form that prevents other people using your work freely? Or have I misunderstood your point?
Yes- a form that prevents other people using my work freely. When people say stuff like what you just said, they're typically thinking of a case like where someone builds a super duper XML tool based on a few lines of code added on top of a GPL-ed XML library. Usually I'm writing some other type of tool- a financial or scientific application- and I just want to do something like load and save preferences from a config file, maybe in a way that's compatible with some GNU application.
It's not unreasonable for me to link to a library and not be forced to open source my entire application. Most free software licenses allow this, because they are not in fact proprietary licenses like the GPL.