Do Russian citizens temporarily visiting the country even get protection under the constitution? This could be problematic.
Absolutely!
Anybody within the jurisdiction of the USA is afforded the protection of the Constitution.
Heck, it even went so far as to extend these protections to court cases in the American Sector of Berlin in Germany before reunification.
In 1978, an East German waiter used a toy gun to hijack a Polish airliner heading for East Berlin and forced the pilot to land at an American Air Force base in West Berlin.
The United States Justice Department wants a quick trial and hires a tough judge (Herbert Sterrn), who, they think, will prosecute the case swiftly and be done with it. However, the judge is more than the authorities have bargained for -- he wants the defendants to be given a fair trial and all of the rights guaranteed to them under the Constitution.
A movie was even made over this. "Judgement in Berlin" starring Martin Sheen as the Judge and humble me as his court translator:)
at-b's post about the 'abmahnung' system in germany is correct.
I would bet dolllars to pesos that Adobe knows nothing about this.
Also, I would like to add, that unlike in the US, lawyer's fees in Germany are not a negotiated percentage of the loot^H^H^H^H award, but are fixed in fee schedule.
That is how they come up with the odd $2000 fee. I believe they could have legally charged closer to $3000.
Also, there probably is no talk about changing the name, this seems to be a 'abmahnung' for the advertisement on the university web page, thus the university gets the bill.
I once got one of these because I ran an ad for computers I was selling. I included "free deivery and setup". I was 'warned' that the delivery and setup was not free, but actually calculated in the price of the computers. So I was misleading customers about it being free. Had to pay about $1000 for that mistake. I know that system sucks.
When I am on the road, I enjoy listening to various talk shows on AM. These AM stations don't have a lot of range and they fade in and out all the time and sound horrible. Powerlines are a pain in the you-know-what also.
This is probably not what you are looking for. But this is the most common use of geothermal energy.
Presenting the Geothermal Heat pump!
Heat pumps work by moving heat, rather than by converting chemical energy to heat like in a furnace. Every heat pump has three major subsystems or parts: a geothermal heat pump to move heat between the building and the fluid in the earth connection, an earth connection for transferring heat between its fluid and the earth, and a distribution subsystem for delivering heating or cooling to the building. Each system may also have a desuperheater to supplement the building's water heater, or a full-demand water heater to meet all of the building's hot water needs.
In heating mode, heat is extracted from the fluid in the earth connection by the geothermal heat pump and distributed to the home or building -- typically through a system of air ducts. Cooler air from the building is returned to the geothermal heat pump, where it cools the fluid flowing to the earth connection. The fluid is then re-warmed as it flows through the earth connection.
In cooling mode, the process is reversed. The relatively cool fluid from the earth connection absorbs heat from the building and transfers it to the ground.
Geothermal heat pumps basically work like their air-to-air counterparts, only they save even more power, due to fact that the ground temperature usually is constant all year round.
The energy efficiency of heat pumps can be compared by looking at the rated COP or Coefficient of Performance of the unit. COP is the ratio of energy output to energy input thus a higher COP rating indicates a more efficient unit.The COP of an electric furnace is 1, since each watt of electricity put into it produces the equivalent of 1 watt of heat energy out. The COP of a typical unit is 3 or greater. Each watt the heat pump uses to run it's transferring mechanism enables it to draw 2 or more from the earth thus giving a total of 3 or more units out for every 1 unit put in. The heat pump supplies more than 2/3 of your energy requirement from free energy stored in the earth and reduces your heating cost by at least 66%
One of the common features of heat pumps are their ability to provide "free" hot water during summer operation. Btu output actually increases during hot water making cycles and the recovery rate is similar to that of a 40 gal. electric hot water heater. Hot water is also provided during winter operation at a saving of 65-70% less than the cost of heating the water with an electric hot water heater. A typical homeowner can expect this feature alone to save him 20 to 30% of his present electric bill.
During 1936 to 1938 Konrad Zuse developed and built the first binary digital computer in the world (Zl). A copy of this computer is on display in the Museum for Transport and Technology ("Museum fur Verkehr und Technik") (since 1989) in Berlin. It's construction was personally supervised by Zuse himself.
The first fully functional program-controlled electromechanical digital computer in the world (the Z3) was completed by Zuse in 1941, but was destroyed in 1944 during the war. Because of its historical importance, a copy was made in 1960 and put on display in the German Museum ("Deutsches Museum") in Munich.
Next came the more sophisticated Z4, which was the only Zuse Z-machine to survive the war. The Z4 was almost complete when, due to continued air raids, it was moved from Berlin to Gottingen where it was installed in the laboratory of the Aerodynamische Versuchanstalt (DVL/Experimental Aerodynamics Institute). It was only there for a few weeks before Gottingen was in danger of being captured and the machine was once again moved to a small village "Hinterstein" in the Allgau/Bavaria. Finally it was taken to Switzerland where it was installed in the ETH (Federal Polytechnical Institute/"Eidgenossisch Technische Hochschule") in Zurich in 1950. It was used in the Institute of Applied Mathematics at the ETH until 1955.
Ofoto delivers high-quality photographic prints from your digital and film photos. We use the latest printing technology available from Eastman Kodak.
We print your photos on KODAK PROFESSIONAL Digital III Color Paper, a resin-coated, silver-halide color paper designed for digital printers that use LED, CRT, or laser printing devices. (For details, download Kodak's Digital III Color Paper Datasheet.) A light source inside our digital printers exposes this paper pixel by pixel, by. This process mimics traditional photography, in which light from the subject exposes photographic film inside of a camera.
I took advantage of an offer from ofoto.com (affiliated with amazon) to receive 25 free prints.
I submitted various 640 x 480 pics taken with an old Sanyo camera.
The results were quite good.
For a 4" print, minimum resolution should be 640 x 480, higher would be better. Also the lossines of the jpg file (I send some with various levels of compression) plays a role. You can easily see artifacts on highly compressed or economy mode pictures. My 640x480 pics were about 65k in size and the quality of the pics were excellent. They print the pictures on kodak paper, so it is i.e. a photograph and will last just like one (no ink fade etc.)
I think they charge about $0.40 a print, plus S&H (2.50).
You can also preview your pictures in various frames, and order them too.
I miss some of the early graphic adventures. Here is a description which I shamelessly copied from http://www.swobi.at/asylum/asylum.html
In the year 1980 the software company Med Systems released a game called "Rat's Revenge" for the TRS-80.
This game was written entirely in BASIC. The player was a rat and had to find a piece of cheese in a maze before starving.
It was one of the first commercial games which used a 3D-graphics of a maze (a long, long time before DOOM! ). Although the
maze graphics was drawn "only" with characters, it was really kind of cool in those days. The instructions in the game even
explained the more difficult views of the maze for beginners.
In the same year they brought out the two predecessors of Asylum: "Deathmaze 5000" (by Frank Corr, Jr.) and "Labyrinth" (by Frank Corr and William Denman).
Both games used almost the same graphics as "Rats Revenge"
but they had actually items and puzzles (?).
While the only goal of "Deathmaze 5000" was to survive and to get out of the maze, in "Labyrinth" there also
was the quest to kill the Minotaur.
In 1981 the first Asylum game (curiosly enough called "Asylum";-)) was released for the TRS-80. This Frank Corr / William
Denman production had again the 3D-graphics, but there now were lots of items, puzzles and persons to interact with.
The follow-up "Asylum II" (A William Denman production) came out 1982 also for the TRS-80.
In 1985 Asylum II was released as "Asylum" for the Atari 800 and the C64. The mazes and the puzzles were almost
identically, but these versions used a scrolling bitmap 3D-graphics for the maze and bitmap graphics for the inmates.
These programs were again written by William F. Denman, Jr. and the art was by Michael O. Haire.
The probe downlink (at 16bps) was tracked by the 70 Meter Goldstone Deep Space Network dish, while transmitting with total of 8 watts RF power at distance of 83 million miles (133 million Kilometers).
This just shows, that if you don't have a lot going for you (8 watts), size does matter.
Great, I can't wait for someone to announce that he got Win95 to run on Win4Lin running on Solaris in a VMWare session on Win95 running in Plex86 under FreeBSD.
Did you say the distribution system in the dorm is for cable TV?
Just hook up a DVD Player or VCR to it and broadcast the video.
I know it's not as sexy, but it's cheap.
On the other hand, get yourself a couple of TiVos (runs linux) and hook them up, hack the system so you can control it over the serial or use an infrared repeater of some kind, perhaps even web controlled using the ethernet hack.
For more information, look at Tivo-Underground at www.tivocommunity.com
I don't think so, at least I can't recall anything tandy compatible, but the Z-80 was extremely popular in the east, because they manufactured it themselves, it was called the U880.
Sometimes I was invited as a guest to an east german computer club, and they done some wicked stuff with the hardware that was available to them. I was very impressed to see real time video digitilization on a sinclair zx-81. (remember, the computer that normally couldn't even show the screen when it was running a programm)
One of the companies I worked for in 1990 after the wall fell, was building dual processor 8086 workstations for WYSIWYG high quality typesetting.
Now, that the news is full of elections, I have a little east german computer election story to tell.:)
A friend of mine was in charge of programming and running the computer system used in the last east german elections. The way elections worked was, you got a preprinted ballot with a slate of candidates from the party (yes, there was only one party), and you got to drop it in the box. If you didn't like a candidate, you could cross out his name with a single line, but if you did, you would wind up on a list you wouldn't want to be on (State Security). So it isnt surprising that election results look something like this:
Berlin 99.5%
Dresden 99.2%
Leipzig 99.7%
Halle 99.1%
And so on...
Well, in any case, the east German TV covering the elections wanted to be a little more like the west, and planned to show computer generated bar charts of the election results. My buddy programmed it for them, and during a test run the folks in charge decided they didn't like it, because all bars in the chart were about the same height. (Duh)
So they decided to reprogramm the system to zoom in at 98% so one could see the difference better. But that didn't fly either, because now, a district with 91.1% would look very bad next to a district having 91.5%, and the head of the party in that district would complain that he looks bad on TV.
Needless to say, they scrapped the whole idea and just scrolled the districts and their percenteges like the credits at the end of a movie.
btw. The software used for the elections was ReDaBas (Relational Data Base), known to us westerners as dBase.
I am not too familiar with russian computers, but I have a lot more experience with East German computers, which the russians imported and used a lot.
One of the last computers they build, was the Robotron ESER 1834, it was an IBM XT compatible. It used a 16 bit K1810WM86 microprocessor (16 bit) and the operating system was DCP 3.2 (Disk Control Programm, i.e. MS-DOS 3.2)It came in 256K or 640K RAM variants, 2x360/720Kb floppies and harddrive. In 1990 they came out with an EC1835, basically an IBM AT.
Earlier computers ran SCP (a CP/M clone), I also have the manual for a P8000 unix system III.
Interesting thing about the P8000, it was a hybrid 8 bit CP/M, 16 bit Unix machine.
A history of computers build by Robotron can be found at http://robotron.informatik.hu-berlin.de/studienarb eit/files/hardware/hardware.html
Using SuSe 6.2 and an AMD-K6-2 550 MHz, I also received Signal 11s at random during compilations.
If I started the compiler again, it would compile the code where it aborted, just to sig 11 at another location.
I then lowered the CPU clock from 550 MHz to 533 Mhz, and I have never seen it happen again.
Re:"Insightful"? not "funny"?
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
You post looks a lot like what I posted on another forum the other day.
There is no problem with the electorate college per say, but how the individual states implement it.
The problem I see is, that folks just assume that because things are done a certain way, this must be the right way of doing things.
Let's look at the source code of the electorate college:
Each State shall appoint, in such a manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress:.....
Now in plain english this means, that the states may choose their electors in any way they want to. It does not even say that there have to be elections! In theory, if the state legislature (or the state constitution) prescribes that the electors are determined by pulling ping-pong balls out of a bingo machine, so be it.
That is why every state has a certain number of electors allocated to them.
Imagine if it were a popular vote, and the states are the ones to administer the election, what would stop the states from creating more voters by lowering the voting age, allowing women to vote, allowing slaves to vote? I know, women are allowed to vote now, and there are no more slaves, but one must see this in a historical context. Nowadays a state might allow migrant farm workers or foreigners to vote just to have more say so in who will be the next president.
The electorate college gives every state aproximately the same voting power, a little more for the less populous states. Therefore no state can abuse the system to give itself more power.
Also, if we went to direct voting, the states would lose even more of their sovereignty. They already lost a lot with the 17th ammendment allowing Senators to be elected directly.
Slashdot Mirror
What would a true government programm be if it didn't involve standing in a line?
Check out this Java Powered Secret Decoder Ring...
Go ahead...Pull my Finger!
Absolutely!
Anybody within the jurisdiction of the USA is afforded the protection of the Constitution.
Heck, it even went so far as to extend these protections to court cases in the American Sector of Berlin in Germany before reunification.
In 1978, an East German waiter used a toy gun to hijack a Polish airliner heading for East Berlin and forced the pilot to land at an American Air Force base in West Berlin.
The United States Justice Department wants a quick trial and hires a tough judge (Herbert Sterrn), who, they think, will prosecute the case swiftly and be done with it. However, the judge is more than the authorities have bargained for -- he wants the defendants to be given a fair trial and all of the rights guaranteed to them under the Constitution.
A movie was even made over this. "Judgement in Berlin" starring Martin Sheen as the Judge and humble me as his court translator :)
http://www.rcfp.org/taping
Also has links to the relevant state codes concerning this.
I would bet dolllars to pesos that Adobe knows nothing about this.
Also, I would like to add, that unlike in the US, lawyer's fees in Germany are not a negotiated percentage of the loot^H^H^H^H award, but are fixed in fee schedule.
That is how they come up with the odd $2000 fee. I believe they could have legally charged closer to $3000.
Also, there probably is no talk about changing the name, this seems to be a 'abmahnung' for the advertisement on the university web page, thus the university gets the bill.
I once got one of these because I ran an ad for computers I was selling. I included "free deivery and setup". I was 'warned' that the delivery and setup was not free, but actually calculated in the price of the computers. So I was misleading customers about it being free. Had to pay about $1000 for that mistake. I know that system sucks.
If I donate my time and skill in developing software for a non-profit, is it possible to deduct that from my taxes (income)?
When I am on the road, I enjoy listening to various talk shows on AM. These AM stations don't have a lot of range and they fade in and out all the time and sound horrible. Powerlines are a pain in the you-know-what also.
I would pay for decent coverage of talk radio.
Is this the same reason why dylithium crystals are not suited for holographic memory chips?
Presenting the Geothermal Heat pump!
Heat pumps work by moving heat, rather than by converting chemical energy to heat like in a furnace. Every heat pump has three major subsystems or parts: a geothermal heat pump to move heat between the building and the fluid in the earth connection, an earth connection for transferring heat between its fluid and the earth, and a distribution subsystem for delivering heating or cooling to the building. Each system may also have a desuperheater to supplement the building's water heater, or a full-demand water heater to meet all of the building's hot water needs.
In heating mode, heat is extracted from the fluid in the earth connection by the geothermal heat pump and distributed to the home or building -- typically through a system of air ducts. Cooler air from the building is returned to the geothermal heat pump, where it cools the fluid flowing to the earth connection. The fluid is then re-warmed as it flows through the earth connection.
In cooling mode, the process is reversed. The relatively cool fluid from the earth connection absorbs heat from the building and transfers it to the ground.
Geothermal heat pumps basically work like their air-to-air counterparts, only they save even more power, due to fact that the ground temperature usually is constant all year round.
The energy efficiency of heat pumps can be compared by looking at the rated COP or Coefficient of Performance of the unit. COP is the ratio of energy output to energy input thus a higher COP rating indicates a more efficient unit.The COP of an electric furnace is 1, since each watt of electricity put into it produces the equivalent of 1 watt of heat energy out. The COP of a typical unit is 3 or greater. Each watt the heat pump uses to run it's transferring mechanism enables it to draw 2 or more from the earth thus giving a total of 3 or more units out for every 1 unit put in. The heat pump supplies more than 2/3 of your energy requirement from free energy stored in the earth and reduces your heating cost by at least 66%
One of the common features of heat pumps are their ability to provide "free" hot water during summer operation. Btu output actually increases during hot water making cycles and the recovery rate is similar to that of a 40 gal. electric hot water heater. Hot water is also provided during winter operation at a saving of 65-70% less than the cost of heating the water with an electric hot water heater. A typical homeowner can expect this feature alone to save him 20 to 30% of his present electric bill.
The first fully functional program-controlled electromechanical digital computer in the world (the Z3) was completed by Zuse in 1941, but was destroyed in 1944 during the war. Because of its historical importance, a copy was made in 1960 and put on display in the German Museum ("Deutsches Museum") in Munich.
Next came the more sophisticated Z4, which was the only Zuse Z-machine to survive the war. The Z4 was almost complete when, due to continued air raids, it was moved from Berlin to Gottingen where it was installed in the laboratory of the Aerodynamische Versuchanstalt (DVL/Experimental Aerodynamics Institute). It was only there for a few weeks before Gottingen was in danger of being captured and the machine was once again moved to a small village "Hinterstein" in the Allgau/Bavaria. Finally it was taken to Switzerland where it was installed in the ETH (Federal Polytechnical Institute/"Eidgenossisch Technische Hochschule") in Zurich in 1950. It was used in the Institute of Applied Mathematics at the ETH until 1955.
This from the ofoto faq:
Ofoto delivers high-quality photographic prints from your digital and film photos. We use the latest printing technology available from Eastman Kodak.
We print your photos on KODAK PROFESSIONAL Digital III Color Paper, a resin-coated, silver-halide color paper designed for digital printers that use LED, CRT, or laser printing devices. (For details, download Kodak's Digital III Color Paper Datasheet .) A light source inside our digital printers exposes this paper pixel by pixel, by. This process mimics traditional photography, in which light from the subject exposes photographic film inside of a camera.
--- snip ---
Take it for what it's worth
I submitted various 640 x 480 pics taken with an old Sanyo camera.
The results were quite good.
For a 4" print, minimum resolution should be 640 x 480, higher would be better. Also the lossines of the jpg file (I send some with various levels of compression) plays a role. You can easily see artifacts on highly compressed or economy mode pictures. My 640x480 pics were about 65k in size and the quality of the pics were excellent. They print the pictures on kodak paper, so it is i.e. a photograph and will last just like one (no ink fade etc.)
I think they charge about $0.40 a print, plus S&H (2.50).
You can also preview your pictures in various frames, and order them too.
In the year 1980 the software company Med Systems released a game called "Rat's Revenge" for the TRS-80. This game was written entirely in BASIC. The player was a rat and had to find a piece of cheese in a maze before starving. It was one of the first commercial games which used a 3D-graphics of a maze (a long, long time before DOOM! ). Although the maze graphics was drawn "only" with characters, it was really kind of cool in those days. The instructions in the game even explained the more difficult views of the maze for beginners.
In the same year they brought out the two predecessors of Asylum:
"Deathmaze 5000" (by Frank Corr, Jr.) and
"Labyrinth" (by Frank Corr and William Denman).
Both games used almost the same graphics as "Rats Revenge" but they had actually items and puzzles (?).
While the only goal of "Deathmaze 5000" was to survive and to get out of the maze, in "Labyrinth" there also was the quest to kill the Minotaur.
In 1981 the first Asylum game (curiosly enough called "Asylum" ;-)) was released for the TRS-80. This Frank Corr / William
Denman production had again the 3D-graphics, but there now were lots of items, puzzles and persons to interact with.
The follow-up "Asylum II" (A William Denman production) came out 1982 also for the TRS-80.
In 1985 Asylum II was released as "Asylum" for the Atari 800 and the C64. The mazes and the puzzles were almost identically, but these versions used a scrolling bitmap 3D-graphics for the maze and bitmap graphics for the inmates. These programs were again written by William F. Denman, Jr. and the art was by Michael O. Haire.
I played that on a Video Genie II (A TRS-80 clone) from cassette tape.
After every event, you had to manually start the tape recorder again.
This just shows, that if you don't have a lot going for you (8 watts), size does matter.
5 times thinner than a CD...
Can be wrapped around a soda can...
5 1/4" floppies could do this years ago!
If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck...
Now THAT is a screenshot I would like to see :)
Just hook up a DVD Player or VCR to it and broadcast the video.
I know it's not as sexy, but it's cheap.
On the other hand, get yourself a couple of TiVos (runs linux) and hook them up, hack the system so you can control it over the serial or use an infrared repeater of some kind, perhaps even web controlled using the ethernet hack.
For more information, look at Tivo-Underground at www.tivocommunity.com
Sometimes I was invited as a guest to an east german computer club, and they done some wicked stuff with the hardware that was available to them. I was very impressed to see real time video digitilization on a sinclair zx-81. (remember, the computer that normally couldn't even show the screen when it was running a programm)
One of the companies I worked for in 1990 after the wall fell, was building dual processor 8086 workstations for WYSIWYG high quality typesetting.
Now, that the news is full of elections, I have a little east german computer election story to tell. :)
A friend of mine was in charge of programming and running the computer system used in the last east german elections. The way elections worked was, you got a preprinted ballot with a slate of candidates from the party (yes, there was only one party), and you got to drop it in the box. If you didn't like a candidate, you could cross out his name with a single line, but if you did, you would wind up on a list you wouldn't want to be on (State Security). So it isnt surprising that election results look something like this:
Berlin 99.5%
Dresden 99.2%
Leipzig 99.7%
Halle 99.1%
And so on... Well, in any case, the east German TV covering the elections wanted to be a little more like the west, and planned to show computer generated bar charts of the election results. My buddy programmed it for them, and during a test run the folks in charge decided they didn't like it, because all bars in the chart were about the same height. (Duh)
So they decided to reprogramm the system to zoom in at 98% so one could see the difference better. But that didn't fly either, because now, a district with 91.1% would look very bad next to a district having 91.5%, and the head of the party in that district would complain that he looks bad on TV.
Needless to say, they scrapped the whole idea and just scrolled the districts and their percenteges like the credits at the end of a movie.
btw. The software used for the elections was ReDaBas (Relational Data Base), known to us westerners as dBase.
One of the last computers they build, was the Robotron ESER 1834, it was an IBM XT compatible. It used a 16 bit K1810WM86 microprocessor (16 bit) and the operating system was DCP 3.2 (Disk Control Programm, i.e. MS-DOS 3.2)It came in 256K or 640K RAM variants, 2x360/720Kb floppies and harddrive. In 1990 they came out with an EC1835, basically an IBM AT.
Earlier computers ran SCP (a CP/M clone), I also have the manual for a P8000 unix system III. Interesting thing about the P8000, it was a hybrid 8 bit CP/M, 16 bit Unix machine.
A history of computers build by Robotron can be found at http://robotron.informatik.hu-berlin.de/studienarb eit/files/hardware/hardware.html
Because the pet dog get gets 2 wieners and he doesn't like buns :)
If it doesn't make my X-11 Netscape Fonts look any better, then I don't need it.
If I started the compiler again, it would compile the code where it aborted, just to sig 11 at another location.
I then lowered the CPU clock from 550 MHz to 533 Mhz, and I have never seen it happen again.
There is no problem with the electorate college per say, but how the individual states implement it.
The problem I see is, that folks just assume that because things are done a certain way, this must be the right way of doing things.
Let's look at the source code of the electorate college:
Each State shall appoint, in such a manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress:.....
Now in plain english this means, that the states may choose their electors in any way they want to. It does not even say that there have to be elections! In theory, if the state legislature (or the state constitution) prescribes that the electors are determined by pulling ping-pong balls out of a bingo machine, so be it.
That is why every state has a certain number of electors allocated to them.
Imagine if it were a popular vote, and the states are the ones to administer the election, what would stop the states from creating more voters by lowering the voting age, allowing women to vote, allowing slaves to vote? I know, women are allowed to vote now, and there are no more slaves, but one must see this in a historical context. Nowadays a state might allow migrant farm workers or foreigners to vote just to have more say so in who will be the next president.
The electorate college gives every state aproximately the same voting power, a little more for the less populous states. Therefore no state can abuse the system to give itself more power.
Also, if we went to direct voting, the states would lose even more of their sovereignty. They already lost a lot with the 17th ammendment allowing Senators to be elected directly.