Anti-Microsoft conspiracy buffs will note that the built-in software in the Model 100 was written by Bill Gates, so maybe that explains the revisonist history.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the Basic in the Commodore Vic-20 and 64 and the Commodore Amiga (1000 and 500) written by Microsoft? (Here I'm referring to the Basic interpreter and not the GUI.)
"Okay, you have 10 hours to build a working television using what's found out in the junkyard. After you're done, it will have to last through an entire episode of Red Dwarf to win the contest." (The teams depart and come back with cartloads of old TVs, monitors, radios, vacuum tubes, etc.)
"It looks like the Bodgers are gonna have a go at an old green monochrome monitor while the Megalomaniacs came up with an old radar screen that was once used in the terminal at London's Heathrow airport..."
A while later, one team member is picking himself up off the ground, dazed and confused, with smoke coming from his now frazzled hair: "Well, they don't call it a flyback for nothing!"
After they're done assembling them: "That's a nice crisp picture of Rimmer on the Bodger's set, but he looks a wee bit on the sick side, kinda green... And the Megalomaniacs have... no horizontal or vertical output, just a blip on the center of their screen?" The team leader replies: "Oh, that's the Red Dwarf coming in for a landing..."
You get the picture. (Or you don't. Instead you see sparks and smoke coming out the back.)
Kryten, unpack Rachel and break out the puncture repair kit.
Combine Junkyard Wars with Survivor and have them build their housing, transportation, etc. out of "select" rubble, then fight over meager resources, similar to the plot of a Mad Max movie. The theme of the competition? When one team loses or their contraption fails, the entire team gets voted off and the remaining teams can battle for the engines, etc. that once belonged to the losers for their next project.
Some parts work better
than others. Some are duds and don't really work
at all.
IIRC, on one episode where they were building an off-road buggy, one team had to abandon an engine that was too far gone to be saved and ended up having to go back out to scrounge up another one. In a later episode, one team planned ahead by bringing back two engines in case one didn't work, thus saving a trip.
Don'tcha mean Tyramine? Or is Taurine present in meat & cheese too? Does Tyramine metabolize into Taurine or vice versa? I always hear about not eating red meat or cheese nor drinking red wine while taking monoamine oxidase inhibitors, because it messes with the metabolization of tyramines, and causes hypertensive effects including cardiac arrest. Would it be safe to drink Red Bull while on MAOIs such as Deprenyl or Moclobemide? If not, were the three in the article (or any others whose death was blamed on Red Bull) taking MAOIs?
People say absinthe tastes like black licorice. Any absinthe drinkers want to compare it to Jägermeister? Does it taste the same, or even similar? Anybody ever mixed Red Bull with Jägermeister?
Gasoline engines are ~20% efficient at converting fuel into energy. A modernized coal power plant can be 40% efficient, and all the smog can be localized to a point (the chimney), where scrubbers can remove the fly ash and sulfur dioxide and convert them into gypsum to be recycled into concrete. But you lose that efficiency by transmission line losses from the plant, then lose even further to charge batteries. A solution would be electric railways, but here in ass-backwards America, they are few and far in between 'cuz people gots ta have dere wheels.
The current brouhaha about global warming is centered only on the temperature of the atmosphere. There's more to what regulates the climate than just how much carbon dioxide is in the air.
Being the second stone from the sun is not all there is to Venus being so hot: Venus also has no moon. The moon is an extremely important factor in keeping the Earth's climate habitable. The moon doesn't cause tides in just the oceans, but it also causes a tide in the molten layer under the Earth's crust. This keeps the plates loose so that they can move around, and vast amounts of heat can escape from the center of the Earth around the boundaries of the plates in the form of volcanoes. This tidal action has allowed enough heat to escape so that the surface of the Earth has cooled enough in the past couple of billion years to allow the water vapor in its atmosphere to condense into oceans, which further moderates the temperature of the atmosphere via currents circulating around the cooler poles, the currents being assisted by tides caused by the moon. Carbon dioxide can be dissolved in the ocean, and reacts with calcium to form calcium carbonate, to precipitate out to make limestone. The addition of lifeforms which produce calcium carbonate (in the form of exoskeletons) further precipitates this process.
But poor Venus is lonely. She hasn't been able to shed her excess body heat because there is no moon to cause a tide to crack the surface so the heat can be released slowly and continuously through volcanoes. The heat slowly builds up, then every million or so years, the entire planet's surface just heaves up and boils over. This process hasn't let out enough heat so that the surface is cool enough to allow water to form, and even if it did, there is no tide to drag the water around to moderate the climate.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't be concerned about global warming if we want to keep living in the manner to which we have become accustomed. If not, Canada and Siberia will warm up enough to grow crops, the subtropics will become deserts, and we'll all have to pull up our stakes and head north. Global economies will shift, there will be wars (remember: real estate is the motive for ALL wars), then we'll get used to it. Then once we're out of stuff to burn for energy, or otherwise change our ways and reduce emissions, it'll cool off, Canada and Siberia will freeze back over, and we'll all head south once again. But we are by no means doomed. Unless we lose the moon.
Incredible Secret Money Machines
on
Books on Demand
·
· Score: 1
The Book-on-Demand idea is one of the things Don has put forth as machines that are small and affordable enough for homeowners and small businesses to use to make money. (See www.tinaja.com.)Other ideas he has put forth for cottage industry use is Santa Claus machines: A machine that will take a CAD drawing and churn out all different kinds of items to sell. Common examples are sign cutters and embroidery machines, but I've seen people start small businesses using laser cutters and high-pressure water jet cutters.
I have a number of transformer ballast compact fluorescents, and I've never seen them flicker as much as a standard cool-white "regular" fluorescent. I think this is because of the persistance of the phosphors. I just wish someone would convert mercury vapor and both low and high pressure sodium lighting to electronic ballasts, I definitely can see the flicker in those. And noisy, too. Ever been inside a basketball gym lit with transformer ballasted lamps? The buzz can be deafening.
When on tour at a coal burning power plant, I asked what they did with the ash, and the plant foreman said that it is usually sold to concrete companies as an additive to the cement to make it more flexible. The flexible concrete is used for bridge supports, concrete beams, and (ironically) the huge concrete chimneys at the power plant, which can swing back and forth as much as three feet in hurricane force winds without any damage. Actually, coal ash has many uses, from road beds to sheet rock. See http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/c oal/874499.pdf (Copy then paste the link onto the address bar and then delete the space between c and o in coal that appeared due to a wraparound bug in/.'s post comment form.)
Save your money, waste it on something else
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 1
I see a lot of these rants have to do with the expense of owning and operating SUVs.
You have every right to buy as much safety and/or luxury as you can afford, and I would encourage you to do so.
One way to increase the safety of small economy cars is to build in NASCAR grade roll cages. So then the car weighs as much as an SUV because of the roll cage. What to do then? Make the roll cage out of space-age carbon fibers. So now you have a lightweight small car that is safe, and can even be made to go far on electricity, especially with lightweight lithium-ion batteries. But all that space age technology would make the car cost as much, or even more than a top of the line luxury SUV. Oh well, you have the money, you're a geek that loves high-tech stuff, so you splurge and get the electric car instead of the SUV. And you enjoy the savings on fuel, therefore you have more money to waste on something else, e.g. Bang & Oulfsen stereo, a 68" widescreen HDTV, and a new computer every six months. This means that the old Sony 25" Wega, the Panasonic stereo, and the 700 MHz P-III get passed on down, and eventually pitched onto the scrap heap. Along with the electric car you bought that has been totalled by the insurance company because of the splintered carbon fiber roll cage that can't be beat back into shape and filled with Bondo the way an SUV fender can.
That won't get rid of them; it will only make them an ideal toy for the rich. Which is what the enviro-wackos would like cars to become, forcing regular people onto buses.
That's what I've been saying all along, the left wing is using environmentalism to prop up a bigger agenda- class warfare, and what usually springs up as a result of class warfare? Socialism, Communism, and all the other political views that attempt to make everybody equal by micro-managing, telling you how to live your life, etc., which in reality is nothing more than a sham, a few corrupted elite controlling the masses.
I've had one small fan after another running in my room since the good ole days when computers were silent. Usually they were those el-cheapo air "purifiers" that used a foam filter and scented silica gel, but occasionally I've used fans salvaged from everything from refrigerators and microwave ovens to copy machines. I've even made my own fans by jamming toy airplane propellers onto record player motors. As I graduated from the VIC-20 to the C-64 to the Amiga 500, I always turned those nice, silent computers off at night and turned on some old salvaged fan to lull me to sleep. But that was in the days when I was too cheap to go to K-Mart and buy a real fan (i.e. a box fan or an oscillating fan, only because I blew every cent I made mowing yards and doing other teenage jobs on computers and software).
But now I have my big computer with the two cooling fans, hard disk that sounds like a table saw and CD-ROM that sounds like a DC-10 engine running at taxi speed. I turn all that off at night and turn on yet another salvaged air purifier fan.
Trying to find the mass of neutrinos is like trying to weigh a soda can on a truck scale. If the soda can was full of crap, and the scale was calibrated just right, it just might register. That's the difference between an electron and it's neutrino: A neutrino is just an empty can. An electron is a can filled with a charge. But the can still has mass, it is just very hard to weigh with truck scales.
New! From the makers of Nutri-Rat, the vitamins that makes rats grow B-I-G comes... (drum roll)
Nutri-Nose! Yes! Nutri-Nose makes noses grow B-I-G! Yes, You too can have a schnoz to make Pinocchio envious! You too can have a beak the size of Baron Munchausen's! Have the biggest snot locker on the block!
Obligatory disclaimer: "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. WARNING: Contains radioactive material."
I once found a CD along a road in New Orleans, someone must've tossed it out (skipping in the car player perhaps?) Anyway, the steamy, salty, pollution laden south Louisiana air caused it to delaminate and I could actually peel the aluminum layer off, leaving a completely clear disc. The fringes of everything look rainbow colored when looking through it, because the data is still there. Neat.
Try this! 1. Cylinder full of highly flammable, highly compressed acetylene
Compressing acetylene greater than 15 PSIG will cause it to decompose spontaneously into ethylene gas, releasing enough energy to explosively ignite it. The common acetylene you get from a welding supply house is compressed to 250 PSIG, but it is dissolved in acetone, much in the same way carbon dioxide is dissolved in water to make carbonated water. Dissolving acetylene in acetone stabilizes it to allow it to be stored at a much higher pressure, making it economically feasable for use in welding.
However, had your.22 been high enough power to rupture the tank it was in, the acetone spewing out at 250 PSIG would have surely created a much more spectacular fireball than the gasoline, since just the acetone itself is *much much* more flammable than gasoline.
Cattle and termites have in their guts bacteria which convert cellulose from plant matter into sugars, with methane as a byproduct. More methane escapes into the atmosphere from termites and cattle than is produced by all the gas wells in the world, but the trick is how the hell to collect it? Some farms already produce methane from collected cattle dung, but a challenge would be to collect it from termites. One way to put all those Formosa termites eating away New Orleans to good use would be to load them into a tank with wood chips and other vegetable matter, seal it, and start collecting methane, but they would quickly suffocate on their own farts, so fresh air would have to be added. Which would mix with the methane, add a spark and KABOOM! tank shrapnel, wood chips and termites scattered across the countryside. So the whole key to this mess, or any other methane-from-biomass scheme is to find a way of separating methane from air.
Don'tcha just wish that squeaky old laser printer print as fast as a high speed copier, you know, the ones that use a flash bulb and will plow through an entire ream of paper in two minutes? Put one of these babies on the deck and rig it to update its display between flashes, and it'll print a telephone book in two minutes. Not that you would need a telephone book anymore if you have a sheet of this stuff and the phone directory on a flash RAM card, but the point is it would revolutionize high speed printing. Especially when used with a color copier.
It's not the LCD that wears out, it's the backlight. Sadly, most laptop PCs, even the newest, are manufactured in such a way that trying to get inside to replace the backlight, which is usually a small cold-cathode fluorescent lamp similar to the ones in scanners, you almost have to destroy the housing to get to it. Even if you are successful at not cracking the screen and are able to find a replacement lamp, you may damage the connections and have dead stripes rather than dead pixels. Ask me how I know...
There's a whole other world of computers out there beyond the home, cubicle, or studio: back behind the offices, out in the factories. Black and white monitors are used all the time in heavy industry, specifically in the industrial process control arena. Many industrial computing systems use touch screens that use 800x600 monochrome LCDs, but these displays can output various shades of blue and brown by varying the intensity of single pixels. (And they run Linux, too! See www.controleng.com , they have a wealth of links to the industrial computing sector.)
As a couple other posters pointed out, most U.S. produced topographic maps are red light readable, the "red" ink actually being kinda brownish, but I have seen some topo maps made outside the US that had red markings that weren't red light readable. The simple solution to this is to cut a small notch in one of the red lenses that allows a feeble sliver of white light to illuminate the map to make the red lines stand out. Then, when done, cover the notch with a small square of 100 M.P.H. tape (the green duct tape the Army uses for everything from patching rain gear to taping helicopters back together.)
Slashdot Mirror
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the Basic in the Commodore Vic-20 and 64 and the Commodore Amiga (1000 and 500) written by Microsoft? (Here I'm referring to the Basic interpreter and not the GUI.)
"It looks like the Bodgers are gonna have a go at an old green monochrome monitor while the Megalomaniacs came up with an old radar screen that was once used in the terminal at London's Heathrow airport..."
A while later, one team member is picking himself up off the ground, dazed and confused, with smoke coming from his now frazzled hair: "Well, they don't call it a flyback for nothing!"
After they're done assembling them: "That's a nice crisp picture of Rimmer on the Bodger's set, but he looks a wee bit on the sick side, kinda green... And the Megalomaniacs have... no horizontal or vertical output, just a blip on the center of their screen?" The team leader replies: "Oh, that's the Red Dwarf coming in for a landing..."
You get the picture. (Or you don't. Instead you see sparks and smoke coming out the back.)
Kryten, unpack Rachel and break out the puncture repair kit.
Combine Junkyard Wars with Survivor and have them build their housing, transportation, etc. out of "select" rubble, then fight over meager resources, similar to the plot of a Mad Max movie. The theme of the competition? When one team loses or their contraption fails, the entire team gets voted off and the remaining teams can battle for the engines, etc. that once belonged to the losers for their next project.
IIRC, on one episode where they were building an off-road buggy, one team had to abandon an engine that was too far gone to be saved and ended up having to go back out to scrounge up another one. In a later episode, one team planned ahead by bringing back two engines in case one didn't work, thus saving a trip.
Don'tcha mean Tyramine? Or is Taurine present in meat & cheese too? Does Tyramine metabolize into Taurine or vice versa? I always hear about not eating red meat or cheese nor drinking red wine while taking monoamine oxidase inhibitors, because it messes with the metabolization of tyramines, and causes hypertensive effects including cardiac arrest. Would it be safe to drink Red Bull while on MAOIs such as Deprenyl or Moclobemide? If not, were the three in the article (or any others whose death was blamed on Red Bull) taking MAOIs?
People say absinthe tastes like black licorice. Any absinthe drinkers want to compare it to Jägermeister? Does it taste the same, or even similar? Anybody ever mixed Red Bull with Jägermeister?
Gasoline engines are ~20% efficient at converting fuel into energy. A modernized coal power plant can be 40% efficient, and all the smog can be localized to a point (the chimney), where scrubbers can remove the fly ash and sulfur dioxide and convert them into gypsum to be recycled into concrete. But you lose that efficiency by transmission line losses from the plant, then lose even further to charge batteries. A solution would be electric railways, but here in ass-backwards America, they are few and far in between 'cuz people gots ta have dere wheels.
Being the second stone from the sun is not all there is to Venus being so hot: Venus also has no moon. The moon is an extremely important factor in keeping the Earth's climate habitable. The moon doesn't cause tides in just the oceans, but it also causes a tide in the molten layer under the Earth's crust. This keeps the plates loose so that they can move around, and vast amounts of heat can escape from the center of the Earth around the boundaries of the plates in the form of volcanoes. This tidal action has allowed enough heat to escape so that the surface of the Earth has cooled enough in the past couple of billion years to allow the water vapor in its atmosphere to condense into oceans, which further moderates the temperature of the atmosphere via currents circulating around the cooler poles, the currents being assisted by tides caused by the moon. Carbon dioxide can be dissolved in the ocean, and reacts with calcium to form calcium carbonate, to precipitate out to make limestone. The addition of lifeforms which produce calcium carbonate (in the form of exoskeletons) further precipitates this process.
But poor Venus is lonely. She hasn't been able to shed her excess body heat because there is no moon to cause a tide to crack the surface so the heat can be released slowly and continuously through volcanoes. The heat slowly builds up, then every million or so years, the entire planet's surface just heaves up and boils over. This process hasn't let out enough heat so that the surface is cool enough to allow water to form, and even if it did, there is no tide to drag the water around to moderate the climate.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't be concerned about global warming if we want to keep living in the manner to which we have become accustomed. If not, Canada and Siberia will warm up enough to grow crops, the subtropics will become deserts, and we'll all have to pull up our stakes and head north. Global economies will shift, there will be wars (remember: real estate is the motive for ALL wars), then we'll get used to it. Then once we're out of stuff to burn for energy, or otherwise change our ways and reduce emissions, it'll cool off, Canada and Siberia will freeze back over, and we'll all head south once again. But we are by no means doomed. Unless we lose the moon.
The Book-on-Demand idea is one of the things Don has put forth as machines that are small and affordable enough for homeowners and small businesses to use to make money. (See www.tinaja.com.)Other ideas he has put forth for cottage industry use is Santa Claus machines: A machine that will take a CAD drawing and churn out all different kinds of items to sell. Common examples are sign cutters and embroidery machines, but I've seen people start small businesses using laser cutters and high-pressure water jet cutters.
I have a number of transformer ballast compact fluorescents, and I've never seen them flicker as much as a standard cool-white "regular" fluorescent. I think this is because of the persistance of the phosphors. I just wish someone would convert mercury vapor and both low and high pressure sodium lighting to electronic ballasts, I definitely can see the flicker in those. And noisy, too. Ever been inside a basketball gym lit with transformer ballasted lamps? The buzz can be deafening.
When on tour at a coal burning power plant, I asked what they did with the ash, and the plant foreman said that it is usually sold to concrete companies as an additive to the cement to make it more flexible. The flexible concrete is used for bridge supports, concrete beams, and (ironically) the huge concrete chimneys at the power plant, which can swing back and forth as much as three feet in hurricane force winds without any damage. Actually, coal ash has many uses, from road beds to sheet rock. See http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/c oal/874499.pdf (Copy then paste the link onto the address bar and then delete the space between c and o in coal that appeared due to a wraparound bug in /.'s post comment form.)
You have every right to buy as much safety and/or luxury as you can afford, and I would encourage you to do so.
One way to increase the safety of small economy cars is to build in NASCAR grade roll cages. So then the car weighs as much as an SUV because of the roll cage. What to do then? Make the roll cage out of space-age carbon fibers. So now you have a lightweight small car that is safe, and can even be made to go far on electricity, especially with lightweight lithium-ion batteries. But all that space age technology would make the car cost as much, or even more than a top of the line luxury SUV. Oh well, you have the money, you're a geek that loves high-tech stuff, so you splurge and get the electric car instead of the SUV. And you enjoy the savings on fuel, therefore you have more money to waste on something else, e.g. Bang & Oulfsen stereo, a 68" widescreen HDTV, and a new computer every six months. This means that the old Sony 25" Wega, the Panasonic stereo, and the 700 MHz P-III get passed on down, and eventually pitched onto the scrap heap. Along with the electric car you bought that has been totalled by the insurance company because of the splintered carbon fiber roll cage that can't be beat back into shape and filled with Bondo the way an SUV fender can.
That's what I've been saying all along, the left wing is using environmentalism to prop up a bigger agenda- class warfare, and what usually springs up as a result of class warfare? Socialism, Communism, and all the other political views that attempt to make everybody equal by micro-managing, telling you how to live your life, etc., which in reality is nothing more than a sham, a few corrupted elite controlling the masses.
But now I have my big computer with the two cooling fans, hard disk that sounds like a table saw and CD-ROM that sounds like a DC-10 engine running at taxi speed. I turn all that off at night and turn on yet another salvaged air purifier fan.
Trying to find the mass of neutrinos is like trying to weigh a soda can on a truck scale. If the soda can was full of crap, and the scale was calibrated just right, it just might register. That's the difference between an electron and it's neutrino: A neutrino is just an empty can. An electron is a can filled with a charge. But the can still has mass, it is just very hard to weigh with truck scales.
Nutri-Nose! Yes! Nutri-Nose makes noses grow B-I-G! Yes, You too can have a schnoz to make Pinocchio envious! You too can have a beak the size of Baron Munchausen's! Have the biggest snot locker on the block!
Obligatory disclaimer: "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. WARNING: Contains radioactive material."
I once found a CD along a road in New Orleans, someone must've tossed it out (skipping in the car player perhaps?) Anyway, the steamy, salty, pollution laden south Louisiana air caused it to delaminate and I could actually peel the aluminum layer off, leaving a completely clear disc. The fringes of everything look rainbow colored when looking through it, because the data is still there. Neat.
Well, we all know what to do here-- Time to fry!!
FREEDOM DEFINED IS FREEDOM DENIED
Compressing acetylene greater than 15 PSIG will cause it to decompose spontaneously into ethylene gas, releasing enough energy to explosively ignite it. The common acetylene you get from a welding supply house is compressed to 250 PSIG, but it is dissolved in acetone, much in the same way carbon dioxide is dissolved in water to make carbonated water. Dissolving acetylene in acetone stabilizes it to allow it to be stored at a much higher pressure, making it economically feasable for use in welding.
However, had your .22 been high enough power to rupture the tank it was in, the acetone spewing out at 250 PSIG would have surely created a much more spectacular fireball than the gasoline, since just the acetone itself is *much much* more flammable than gasoline.
Cattle and termites have in their guts bacteria which convert cellulose from plant matter into sugars, with methane as a byproduct. More methane escapes into the atmosphere from termites and cattle than is produced by all the gas wells in the world, but the trick is how the hell to collect it? Some farms already produce methane from collected cattle dung, but a challenge would be to collect it from termites. One way to put all those Formosa termites eating away New Orleans to good use would be to load them into a tank with wood chips and other vegetable matter, seal it, and start collecting methane, but they would quickly suffocate on their own farts, so fresh air would have to be added. Which would mix with the methane, add a spark and KABOOM! tank shrapnel, wood chips and termites scattered across the countryside. So the whole key to this mess, or any other methane-from-biomass scheme is to find a way of separating methane from air.
EVERY TIME I HEAR THE WORD "PROGRESS" MY FUR BRISTLES
Don'tcha just wish that squeaky old laser printer print as fast as a high speed copier, you know, the ones that use a flash bulb and will plow through an entire ream of paper in two minutes? Put one of these babies on the deck and rig it to update its display between flashes, and it'll print a telephone book in two minutes. Not that you would need a telephone book anymore if you have a sheet of this stuff and the phone directory on a flash RAM card, but the point is it would revolutionize high speed printing. Especially when used with a color copier.
It's not the LCD that wears out, it's the backlight. Sadly, most laptop PCs, even the newest, are manufactured in such a way that trying to get inside to replace the backlight, which is usually a small cold-cathode fluorescent lamp similar to the ones in scanners, you almost have to destroy the housing to get to it. Even if you are successful at not cracking the screen and are able to find a replacement lamp, you may damage the connections and have dead stripes rather than dead pixels. Ask me how I know...
There's a whole other world of computers out there beyond the home, cubicle, or studio: back behind the offices, out in the factories. Black and white monitors are used all the time in heavy industry, specifically in the industrial process control arena. Many industrial computing systems use touch screens that use 800x600 monochrome LCDs, but these displays can output various shades of blue and brown by varying the intensity of single pixels. (And they run Linux, too! See www.controleng.com , they have a wealth of links to the industrial computing sector.)
As a couple other posters pointed out, most U.S. produced topographic maps are red light readable, the "red" ink actually being kinda brownish, but I have seen some topo maps made outside the US that had red markings that weren't red light readable. The simple solution to this is to cut a small notch in one of the red lenses that allows a feeble sliver of white light to illuminate the map to make the red lines stand out. Then, when done, cover the notch with a small square of 100 M.P.H. tape (the green duct tape the Army uses for everything from patching rain gear to taping helicopters back together.)