Usually photos of that era and later show something as ubiquitous as trees: Telephone poles with wires strung up everywhere, but they were noticeably absent in these pictures. But then again, this was pre-WWI Russia, where technology was basically unheard of. I was amazed at the pristineness of everything, no web of telephone and power lines, no automobiles, Model T or otherwise, no smog from stacks belching smoke from factories and other coal burning behemoths, there wasn't even a scrap of litter. But I did see some evidence of technology, at least they had electric lights in some buildings, and I did see the turbines- they look more like generators or large motors, in fact, they look very much like the motors that drive the turbines in the pumping stations in New Orleans, some of which are over 100 years old and still in use.
He missed doing 3-D photographs by thaaat much. It appears that he had his three cameras one atop another; if they would have been side by side instead, he would have made the world's first 3-D pictures that make use of the red/green glasses.
Done plenty o' that... You retired as a Specialist? Or did you typo and meant SFC?
"You can talk about us, but you can't talk without us!"
Re:DTS has done this theatrically for some time
on
Surround Lights
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· Score: 1
Now if the operator of the projectors down at the local 2^n plex theater (with stadium style seating) would just center the picture on the screen and %$#*&%! focus it, we might have something there.
Let's see here... You want other sources of radiation in the house? We all know about radium watch dials and carbon 14 in our bodies, but many ceramic glazing materials use uranium as a coloring (since the use of lead was banned). My nucsci prof brought out a nice bright orange Fiesta Ware(TM) ceramic plate like what's used in Mexican restaurants, and held it to an audible Geiger counter. What was a few intermittent ticks due to background radiation grew to a constant hiss as the plate was brought near. Another source of radiation is fluorescent lamp starters, as they contain a couple picocuries of Krypton 85 (half-life ~10.76 years).
Also, the mantles for Coleman gasoline lanterns use a smidgen of thorium for the incandescence, and there are numerous glow-in-the-dark products that use small tubes filled with radioactive tritium, such as compass dials and night sights for guns. If you have a shaker of potassium chloride ("lite" salt), 0.01% of that is potassium 40 isotope. And chances are, if Grandpa has a pacemaker, it probably has a power source that uses thermocouples to generate electricity from the decay heat of Plutonium 238 (half-life 87.7 years- might last a little longer than Grandpa).
How 'bout a skinnable house?
on
Mood Home
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· Score: 1
Maybe someone can come up with a paint that changes color with something like a small voltage applied, that way we can change the color as easily as in home architect and remodeling programs, thus bringing "wallpaper" to real wallpaper. Of course, someone would try to hack it, or worse, advertisers would turn the walls of your house into billboards.
I came across a most bizarre type of rotary engine called a quadrorhomb engine that uses expanding and contracting chambers in a rhombus configuration, there are four of them inside the rotor chamber hence the name quadrorhomb. More info at http://www.quadrorhomb.de. Maybe one of these could be attached to a pancake sized generator to make a flat engine/generator set the size of a textbook. Power it with hydrogen stored in a slab of zeolite or carbon nanotubes, and it could be used indoors (but maybe not on a long flight), and the world will beat a path to your door.
Also, is it just me, or does anyone else mentally substitute moron for wherever they see moral?
And every time I see "Jesus Christ is Lord" I see a fnord.
Volvo even has a working prototype of a multi-oil car that they would love to produce but don't figure there's any market for.
Not even militaries? In the U.S., all the old Vietnam era 2-1/2 ton Army trucks (Deuce-and-a-halfs) had multifuel engines, and they could burn just about any flammable liquid: gasoline, diesel, no. 2 heating oil, vegetable oil, alcohol, kerosene, JP-4 (jet fuel), flammable solvents, or any combination thereof; just so long as it could be squirted through injectors into the engine, it'll run.
As a side note, some ship engines will burn crude oil straight out of the ground.
filled with a mix of air / methane to a ratio of 320% methane.
320%? The OSHA defined upper explosive limit for methane in air (meaning a mixture that's too "rich" to ignite) is 95%. 100% pure methane will NOT explode or even burn. But as little as 5% methane in air will explode, and I'm presuming you meant 30% (or 20%, or maybe 32%) methane in air, which will explode quite nicely with the results you described. It is commonplace to calibrate methane detector meters used in mines with a standards lab traceable mixture of 2.5% methane in air, which is too "lean" to ignite, but is high enough to set off the alarm on the meter.
Actually, if destroying things for research is your opiate of choice, the Underwriter's Laboratory is the place for you. They zap, burn, smash, and thrash everything that gets the UL stamp on the bottom. From torture testing blenders to smashing TV screens, all is done to ensure consumer safety, and stand behind the manufacturer in case of lawsuit (Consumer: Your extension cord shorted out and burned my house down! Manufacturer: What did you have plugged into it? Consumer: A toaster, a microwave oven, and a George Foreman grill. Manufacturer: Sounds like you exceeded the UL recommended safe wattage load. Judge: The manufacturer is not liable for your damages. Case dismissed. (Gavel slam)). Similar institutions in other countries include Canadian Safety Administration (CSA) and Council European (CE).
Remember the good ole days when computer magazines for the Commodore 64 used to have type-in games and other programs? IIRC, someone once proposed a type of bar & dot code that would be printed along the edges of the magazine and could be read in via a scanner thingy not unlike the Cue Cat (only larger due to mid 80's technology). And since the early 90's there have been various programs that allow you to print a dense dot pattern similar to UPS tracking labels, using an ordinary ink-jet or laser printer, and could be read in using a standard hand scanner. It was proposed that magazines could be distributed with programs without the need for a separate disk (of course, this was back in the days before multi-megabyte games and applications).
As said in Principia Discordia, mankind will solve its problems only when it stops taking things so seriously.
Once upon a time, in the mid 80's, some of my buddies were on the way to the local rifle range with a trunk full of rifles, shotguns, and a couple 45's on the front seat. They stopped by the high school, which was in session, to visit with their old shop teacher from the year previous. While they were there, the assistant principal stuck his head in the car and noticed the guns, and started asking questions. After learning that they were there just for a minute and were on their way to the range, he said something to the effect of "Oh, okay, but be careful", and continued on his way. If this were to happen today, the school would be evacuated onto the football field, the local swat team would be dispatched, and my buddies would be collected and whisked away under tighter security than the President. Their houses would be gone over with a fine tooth comb, as well as their personal background, and if they didn't match up with a predefined conception of "normal" (or seemed a little too "sterile" for that matter), a case would be made and their sole purpose in life would become nothing more than a way for security guards and a warden to earn a living.
Things have gone from zero tolerance to practically negative tolerance. One kid got kicked out of school for drawing a soldier with a knife. I fear for my 14 year old nephew who loves to draw Anime' and all things war related (and is GOOD at it), yet strongly exhibits symptoms of ADHD (and constantly gets bullied for it). He gets detention for lashing out at his tormentors, and gets kicked out of detention and then suspended, for drawing Anime' instead of doing his punish work. Which is fine with him, he didn't want to be in the detention hall with those who got him there there in the first place, anyway.
Sprawling on the fringes of the city, in geometric order, an insulated border, in between the bright lights and the far unlit unknown.
Growing up, it all seemed so one-sided, opinions all provided, the future predecided, detached and subdivided in the mass production zone.
Nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone.
Subdivisions, in the high school halls, in the shopping malls, conform or be cast out.
I have Cox @home cable internet service, 2-4 Mbps downstream, 128 kbps upstream. I understand that the cable office pumps out the signal at around 2 GHz at several kilowatts (aided by pole mounted amplifiers) to all cable modems at once, and the cable modems pluck down only the info addressed to it. But the upstream signal is less than half that at around 900 MHz, because so many cable modems are returning signals to the cable office at the same time at wall-wart strength (read: feeble) power output. Is this the way it works or is the limiting factor more complicated?
This reminds me of VCRs: The mechanical parts of VCRs break due to mechanical wear (and more recently, flimsy injection-molded plastic construction), and it costs more for Grandma to have it repaired than it does to buy a new one with better features, e.g. 4 heads, picture-in-picture, etc.; but guess what: They also snuck in Macrovision. They could do that with VCRs, because of the "sooner-or-later-it's-gonna-break" factor. But CD players are more durable, I have a 15 year old single-disc JVC CD player from a component system that still plays as good as new, why would I want to replace it (except with a Pioneer 6-disc changer, which I bought 10 years ago)?
Of course, now it collects dust, since my computer is next to my component system and I play MP3s through it. Not that I'm gonna get rid of the CD players anytime soon, I still buy CDs of songs I like (besides that, many people do NOT know how to do quality rips, the topic of a different rant). I just want to know these new copy-protected CDs will play on 10 and 15 year old players, just like current Macrovision tapes will still play on those ancient 20 year old top-loading indestructable easily repaired VCRs.
Buggy Beta of Microsoft Think(TM) installed. Your brain is fragmented, and you are in dire need of sleep, not even a gallon of coffee will save you from segmentation faults while writing the Hello World program.
So you are reaching for your.45 to put your computer out of its misery, but Wait! You have an idea: You install Borton Brain Utilities on your brain.
Choose one:
Borton Speedbrain: Defragments your brain in 10 minutes, works much faster than MS Sleep(TM), which takes 8 hours.
Borton Brain Doctor: Recovers lost brain cell clusters and broken synapse chains and repairs them.
Borton Frontal Lobe Optimizery: Optimizes your thought patterns and plugs that notorius memory leak, so you won't need spinal taps as often.
Borton Brain Washer: Scrubs out unneeded registry entries and removes unneeded DLLs from the medulla oblongata directory.
Analogy: One OS (Linux) distributed by many companies = one processor motherboard (x86 architecture) distributed by many manufacturers.
Slackware : Redhat:: Asus : Soyo
In other words, same difference. It all comes down to a matter of personal preference. Arguments can be made between distros just like mobo mfgrs.
Windows will run on all mobos, but a mobo can run any OS adapted to the architecture. The mobo is not tied to Windows (save those with built in Winmodems, etc.) Whoops, I shouldn't have said that, Microsoft might bribe mobo companies to embed its kernel into the chipset so that only Windows will work on that motherboard. (The only company to ever tie the motherboard to the OS was Amiga with its Kickstart ROM, right? If you bought an upgraded OS, it came with a new Kickstart ROM, thus giving rise to companies that manufactured dual Kickstart boards.)
fstream io_fil("zerowing.rom",ios_base::are belong to us);
Download the latest kernel, then the latest version of XFree86, the latest version of Gnome, KDE, Apache, etc., then assemble it yourself for a no-name Linux. We do it with computers all the time by buying the parts separately to get our own tailored computer, why not the OS too? Then you know exactly what you got and won't have the needless bloat like full Red Hat or Mandrake distros. Not that they don't have their uses, I installed Mandrake 7.2 on my machine so I can learn Linux, play around with it, and try out all the apps to see what they do, but then I discovered www.linuxfromscratch.org.
I thought the first 4 was the bank code and the last 4 was the checksum, thus giving only 8 numbers to work with. (Maybe each bank has a range of numbers, e.g. 4000-5000 for one bank, 6000-7000 for another, thus giving 12 numbers?) When getting ATM receipts, for personal tracking purposes (did I charge with this card, or that card?) they show only the checksum number (the rest are XXX'ed out), since it is theoretically impossible to reconstruct an 8 digit number from a 4 digit checksum, right?
They somehow manage with prepaid phone cards and cellular phones, why wouldn't it work with other transactions? How 'bout a one-use prepaid Internet card? Pay cash for a $20 one-shot card at a grocery store, post office, or even an ATM style vending machine; it would be just the same as purchasing cashier's checks, traveler's checks, or money orders (which often recycle numbers on them), and if your product or service is not received, you can call to get a stop payment placed on the transaction.
This would also be a good way to STOP recurring payments, e.g. membership sites that won't stop deducting unless you call them, and they often keep deducting even after deactivating your password. My CC number was stolen and used on a membership site (most probably pr0n) and I had to call the bank and have the card number deactivated because I had no foggy idea who was doing the monthly charge. The bank eventually traced the charges and did a chargeback so luckily I got refunded, and I hope it put the hurt on the site operator. If this is the case, site operators who use recurring payments should embrace the one-shot credit card to keep from having to pay out chargebacks.
As far as Amazon.com and their one-click thing, I avoid it at all costs. I choose not to save the CC number, and immediately erase any cookies Amazon might put on the computer afterwards, only making a hard copy printout with the confirmation number and other information to keep in a safe place until I received the order. Besides that, having to re-enter personal info and CC numbers offers a "cooling-off" period (do I really want to place the order?) and stops the impulse buying that one-click was really designed for.
Re:Battery life anyone?
on
Paper Phones
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· Score: 1
I'm imagining that they will have a similar lifespan as the foil batteries found in Polaroid film cartridges.
Re:This ought to really catch on with Americans
on
Fiddler on the RUF
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· Score: 1
Whole cities will be designed for this! And they will practically sell themselves! This will be the most important invention since toilet paper!
Slashdot Mirror
Usually photos of that era and later show something as ubiquitous as trees: Telephone poles with wires strung up everywhere, but they were noticeably absent in these pictures. But then again, this was pre-WWI Russia, where technology was basically unheard of. I was amazed at the pristineness of everything, no web of telephone and power lines, no automobiles, Model T or otherwise, no smog from stacks belching smoke from factories and other coal burning behemoths, there wasn't even a scrap of litter. But I did see some evidence of technology, at least they had electric lights in some buildings, and I did see the turbines- they look more like generators or large motors, in fact, they look very much like the motors that drive the turbines in the pumping stations in New Orleans, some of which are over 100 years old and still in use.
He missed doing 3-D photographs by thaaat much. It appears that he had his three cameras one atop another; if they would have been side by side instead, he would have made the world's first 3-D pictures that make use of the red/green glasses.
"You can talk about us, but you can't talk without us!"
Now if the operator of the projectors down at the local 2^n plex theater (with stadium style seating) would just center the picture on the screen and %$#*&%! focus it, we might have something there.
Let's see here... You want other sources of radiation in the house? We all know about radium watch dials and carbon 14 in our bodies, but many ceramic glazing materials use uranium as a coloring (since the use of lead was banned). My nucsci prof brought out a nice bright orange Fiesta Ware(TM) ceramic plate like what's used in Mexican restaurants, and held it to an audible Geiger counter. What was a few intermittent ticks due to background radiation grew to a constant hiss as the plate was brought near. Another source of radiation is fluorescent lamp starters, as they contain a couple picocuries of Krypton 85 (half-life ~10.76 years). Also, the mantles for Coleman gasoline lanterns use a smidgen of thorium for the incandescence, and there are numerous glow-in-the-dark products that use small tubes filled with radioactive tritium, such as compass dials and night sights for guns. If you have a shaker of potassium chloride ("lite" salt), 0.01% of that is potassium 40 isotope. And chances are, if Grandpa has a pacemaker, it probably has a power source that uses thermocouples to generate electricity from the decay heat of Plutonium 238 (half-life 87.7 years- might last a little longer than Grandpa).
Maybe someone can come up with a paint that changes color with something like a small voltage applied, that way we can change the color as easily as in home architect and remodeling programs, thus bringing "wallpaper" to real wallpaper. Of course, someone would try to hack it, or worse, advertisers would turn the walls of your house into billboards.
I came across a most bizarre type of rotary engine called a quadrorhomb engine that uses expanding and contracting chambers in a rhombus configuration, there are four of them inside the rotor chamber hence the name quadrorhomb. More info at http://www.quadrorhomb.de. Maybe one of these could be attached to a pancake sized generator to make a flat engine/generator set the size of a textbook. Power it with hydrogen stored in a slab of zeolite or carbon nanotubes, and it could be used indoors (but maybe not on a long flight), and the world will beat a path to your door.
Also, is it just me, or does anyone else mentally substitute moron for wherever they see moral? And every time I see "Jesus Christ is Lord" I see a fnord.
Not even militaries? In the U.S., all the old Vietnam era 2-1/2 ton Army trucks (Deuce-and-a-halfs) had multifuel engines, and they could burn just about any flammable liquid: gasoline, diesel, no. 2 heating oil, vegetable oil, alcohol, kerosene, JP-4 (jet fuel), flammable solvents, or any combination thereof; just so long as it could be squirted through injectors into the engine, it'll run.
As a side note, some ship engines will burn crude oil straight out of the ground.
The whole time I watched this movie I couldn't help but think of the old Glenn Frey song "Smuggler's Blues":
It's a losing proposition, But one you can't refuse. It's the politics of contraband, It's the smuggler's blues, Smuggler's blues.
How 'bout dividing a circle into 6,400 units and calling it a mill? Where Th' F... did the U.S. Army come up with that one for positioning artillery?
320%? The OSHA defined upper explosive limit for methane in air (meaning a mixture that's too "rich" to ignite) is 95%. 100% pure methane will NOT explode or even burn. But as little as 5% methane in air will explode, and I'm presuming you meant 30% (or 20%, or maybe 32%) methane in air, which will explode quite nicely with the results you described. It is commonplace to calibrate methane detector meters used in mines with a standards lab traceable mixture of 2.5% methane in air, which is too "lean" to ignite, but is high enough to set off the alarm on the meter.
Actually, if destroying things for research is your opiate of choice, the Underwriter's Laboratory is the place for you. They zap, burn, smash, and thrash everything that gets the UL stamp on the bottom. From torture testing blenders to smashing TV screens, all is done to ensure consumer safety, and stand behind the manufacturer in case of lawsuit (Consumer: Your extension cord shorted out and burned my house down! Manufacturer: What did you have plugged into it? Consumer: A toaster, a microwave oven, and a George Foreman grill. Manufacturer: Sounds like you exceeded the UL recommended safe wattage load. Judge: The manufacturer is not liable for your damages. Case dismissed. (Gavel slam)). Similar institutions in other countries include Canadian Safety Administration (CSA) and Council European (CE).
Remember the good ole days when computer magazines for the Commodore 64 used to have type-in games and other programs? IIRC, someone once proposed a type of bar & dot code that would be printed along the edges of the magazine and could be read in via a scanner thingy not unlike the Cue Cat (only larger due to mid 80's technology). And since the early 90's there have been various programs that allow you to print a dense dot pattern similar to UPS tracking labels, using an ordinary ink-jet or laser printer, and could be read in using a standard hand scanner. It was proposed that magazines could be distributed with programs without the need for a separate disk (of course, this was back in the days before multi-megabyte games and applications).
Think of the Amiga OS running the Linux kernel as a GUI to replace XFree86.
Once upon a time, in the mid 80's, some of my buddies were on the way to the local rifle range with a trunk full of rifles, shotguns, and a couple 45's on the front seat. They stopped by the high school, which was in session, to visit with their old shop teacher from the year previous. While they were there, the assistant principal stuck his head in the car and noticed the guns, and started asking questions. After learning that they were there just for a minute and were on their way to the range, he said something to the effect of "Oh, okay, but be careful", and continued on his way. If this were to happen today, the school would be evacuated onto the football field, the local swat team would be dispatched, and my buddies would be collected and whisked away under tighter security than the President. Their houses would be gone over with a fine tooth comb, as well as their personal background, and if they didn't match up with a predefined conception of "normal" (or seemed a little too "sterile" for that matter), a case would be made and their sole purpose in life would become nothing more than a way for security guards and a warden to earn a living.
Things have gone from zero tolerance to practically negative tolerance. One kid got kicked out of school for drawing a soldier with a knife. I fear for my 14 year old nephew who loves to draw Anime' and all things war related (and is GOOD at it), yet strongly exhibits symptoms of ADHD (and constantly gets bullied for it). He gets detention for lashing out at his tormentors, and gets kicked out of detention and then suspended, for drawing Anime' instead of doing his punish work. Which is fine with him, he didn't want to be in the detention hall with those who got him there there in the first place, anyway.
Sprawling on the fringes of the city, in geometric order, an insulated border, in between the bright lights and the far unlit unknown.
Growing up, it all seemed so one-sided, opinions all provided, the future predecided, detached and subdivided in the mass production zone.
Nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone.
Subdivisions, in the high school halls, in the shopping malls, conform or be cast out.
-Rush, "Subdivisions", 1981
I have Cox @home cable internet service, 2-4 Mbps downstream, 128 kbps upstream. I understand that the cable office pumps out the signal at around 2 GHz at several kilowatts (aided by pole mounted amplifiers) to all cable modems at once, and the cable modems pluck down only the info addressed to it. But the upstream signal is less than half that at around 900 MHz, because so many cable modems are returning signals to the cable office at the same time at wall-wart strength (read: feeble) power output. Is this the way it works or is the limiting factor more complicated?
Of course, now it collects dust, since my computer is next to my component system and I play MP3s through it. Not that I'm gonna get rid of the CD players anytime soon, I still buy CDs of songs I like (besides that, many people do NOT know how to do quality rips, the topic of a different rant). I just want to know these new copy-protected CDs will play on 10 and 15 year old players, just like current Macrovision tapes will still play on those ancient 20 year old top-loading indestructable easily repaired VCRs.
So you are reaching for your .45 to put your computer out of its misery, but Wait! You have an idea: You install Borton Brain Utilities on your brain.
Choose one:
Borton Speedbrain: Defragments your brain in 10 minutes, works much faster than MS Sleep(TM), which takes 8 hours.
Borton Brain Doctor: Recovers lost brain cell clusters and broken synapse chains and repairs them.
Borton Frontal Lobe Optimizery: Optimizes your thought patterns and plugs that notorius memory leak, so you won't need spinal taps as often.
Borton Brain Washer: Scrubs out unneeded registry entries and removes unneeded DLLs from the medulla oblongata directory.
Slackware : Redhat :: Asus : Soyo
In other words, same difference. It all comes down to a matter of personal preference. Arguments can be made between distros just like mobo mfgrs.
Windows will run on all mobos, but a mobo can run any OS adapted to the architecture. The mobo is not tied to Windows (save those with built in Winmodems, etc.) Whoops, I shouldn't have said that, Microsoft might bribe mobo companies to embed its kernel into the chipset so that only Windows will work on that motherboard. (The only company to ever tie the motherboard to the OS was Amiga with its Kickstart ROM, right? If you bought an upgraded OS, it came with a new Kickstart ROM, thus giving rise to companies that manufactured dual Kickstart boards.)
fstream io_fil("zerowing.rom",ios_base::are belong to us);
Download the latest kernel, then the latest version of XFree86, the latest version of Gnome, KDE, Apache, etc., then assemble it yourself for a no-name Linux. We do it with computers all the time by buying the parts separately to get our own tailored computer, why not the OS too? Then you know exactly what you got and won't have the needless bloat like full Red Hat or Mandrake distros. Not that they don't have their uses, I installed Mandrake 7.2 on my machine so I can learn Linux, play around with it, and try out all the apps to see what they do, but then I discovered www.linuxfromscratch.org.
I thought the first 4 was the bank code and the last 4 was the checksum, thus giving only 8 numbers to work with. (Maybe each bank has a range of numbers, e.g. 4000-5000 for one bank, 6000-7000 for another, thus giving 12 numbers?) When getting ATM receipts, for personal tracking purposes (did I charge with this card, or that card?) they show only the checksum number (the rest are XXX'ed out), since it is theoretically impossible to reconstruct an 8 digit number from a 4 digit checksum, right?
This would also be a good way to STOP recurring payments, e.g. membership sites that won't stop deducting unless you call them, and they often keep deducting even after deactivating your password. My CC number was stolen and used on a membership site (most probably pr0n) and I had to call the bank and have the card number deactivated because I had no foggy idea who was doing the monthly charge. The bank eventually traced the charges and did a chargeback so luckily I got refunded, and I hope it put the hurt on the site operator. If this is the case, site operators who use recurring payments should embrace the one-shot credit card to keep from having to pay out chargebacks.
As far as Amazon.com and their one-click thing, I avoid it at all costs. I choose not to save the CC number, and immediately erase any cookies Amazon might put on the computer afterwards, only making a hard copy printout with the confirmation number and other information to keep in a safe place until I received the order. Besides that, having to re-enter personal info and CC numbers offers a "cooling-off" period (do I really want to place the order?) and stops the impulse buying that one-click was really designed for.
I'm imagining that they will have a similar lifespan as the foil batteries found in Polaroid film cartridges.
Whole cities will be designed for this! And they will practically sell themselves! This will be the most important invention since toilet paper!