The way I see it, if this thing costs fifty bucks then it is a way cool toy, but if it costs two hundred it's just not worth it.
By the way, I am the proud owner of an actual Super ELF SBC from 1977 with a 1802 CPU and two whole K of RAM. It's also an ultimate hacker toy, but it's so useful and I played with it so often that I finally had it framed so I can at least enjoy looking at it.
Delos was the name of the themepark but WestWorld and FutureWorld were the names of the movies as I recall. WestWorld was the one with Yul Brenner.
The idea was that the theme park was populated with animatronic actors that you could really shoot dead, or whatever. There was an enormous control room mediating the fantasy. The robots were so real it was hinted as strongly as you could back then that you could have sex with them and it was totally realistic.
Of course when the 'bots run amok they aren't cute any more...
FutureWorld was set after the debacle at WestWorld; Delos still had the WestWorld set and had added two others. (I forget what the third was.) Anyway it was derivative and not as engaging as the original, since you already knew the joke.
Even if it was made out of untreated wood, it'd still be safe in 10 years time
Pressure treated wood is generally guaranteed for 40 years even in ground-contact situations. I have a deck of pressure treated 2 x 6's which has been in ground contact for 13 years and has not deteriorated a bit.
The part of the US radio regulations which make these devices is Part 15, which specifically addresses low-powered unlicensed devices on a variety of bands. It spells out maximum power outputs and antenna lengths for these devices on AM, FM, the 49 MHz kiddie walkie-talkie band, and so on. Obviously Britain has no such analogous regulation, which is a shame because Part 15 devices seduced many a kid into exploring the magic of electronics.
That's like saying that a journalist is lacking in his ability to write if he's not fully competent in Latin.
No, it's like saying that even if a journalist is bold and persuasive and daring and insightful enough to investigate the news and uncover the truth, he is lacking in his ability to be a journalist if he has a poor command of the English language.
This is an unmanned tethered balloon. Unless I'm missing an obscure bit of aeronautical jargon here, this regulation doesn't apply. And for good reason I'd gather, since a tethered balloon can be reeled in, but a free balloon (like most weather balloons) goes where it wants once you release it.
...even if he focuses mainly on the negative. The ability of small focused internationally scattered groups to coalesce via the Internet is changing our society at many levels.
Sometimes this is a good thing. If I am curious about ultralight aircraft, or antique radios, or some other hobby with a limited number of enthusiasts I can quickly find a lot of information, join a group, and get involved.
But it also means that if my interests tend more toward alt.suicide.holiday or thinking the Jews have taken over the government, I could quickly find other people to reinforce those tendencies. Friedman concentrates on the most devastating aspect of this, and just because it's one end of a bell curve doesn't mean his point is wrong.
...is not the snazzy comment about google=god but the well-taken point that small groups of people who hate [pick target] will be able to much more effectively mobilize, recruit, and act in a world where everyone is connected and searches are universal.
Note the last paragraph about the effectiveness of Osama bin Laden's recruiting videos, and the possibility of targeting them precisely via broadband video. Brrrrrr.
But Pud never let a little thing like that deter him. It's a civil tort so it's only as illegal as the sender's willingness to sue you. I suspect FuckedCompany is counting on the companies involved to not want to stir up a shitstorm with him.
This has been well-established case law since the 19th century. You cannot publish the contents of mail you receive without permission, and this paragraph is explicitly denying permission.
The bit about "other than the intended recipient" is not giving the intended recipient permission to do whatever he wants; quite the opposite, it is notifying anyone he might hand the letter to or who might get a look at it inadvertently that they don't have permission to publish it, either.
The notice at the bottom is indeed intended for StorMaster, the intended recipient. This applies to all letters you receive from anybody, including e-mails; in the case of the letter you own the physical media (the paper) but you do NOT own the content and you do NOT have the right to publish it without the sender's permission.
This is an area of copyright law which may not be intuitive, but it is well established. Republishing e-mail you receive without the permission of the sender is illegal. In this case there is no doubt about the situation; permission is expressly denied in the letter itself.
Look for a post titled "books in pre-Change Internet form." There was a short thread of very positive posts and the parent is modded up and text is visible on the default view. Logs show that as of midnight this morning it had brought me about 500 more viewers too (thanks guys!).
I have done the experiment and written up the results here.
I must admit that I got a hell of a lot of help editing the thing for typos and some decent editorial advice from the effort. As well as just over $1,000 up to now.
I have yet to accomplish the "get rich" part, am still working on the "get a good agent" step. That is looking at least slightly more do-able than it would have been before I put the book online.
If they are allowed to proceed with this suit it means the end of business as it is practiced in the USA. It means, among other things, the end of the stock market.
Modern capitalism is based very strongly on the concept of limited liability which means precisely that investors are not responsible for liabilities incurred by the companies they invest in. The companies are, and the investors can lose their investment, but they are not criminally liable for the company's actions (unless they participate directly in those actions) and they are liable only for the amount of their investment.
It's like investing in a local street gang.
No, it's like investing in Exxon before the Exxon Valdez or in Union Carbide before Bhopal. You can lose your investment. To suggest that it go any further undermines every principle upon which our economy is founded.
This isn't the first tape recovered from the Columbia debris field; the much-televised final video from the cockpit was taken with a hand-held 8mm camcorder and fell 200,000 feet too.
The shuttle is designed for minimal shock (3g max on launch), so read/write head stability is not a problem. Once tape is written it is relatively invulnerable to electric fields (unlike most solid state media) and radiation (ditto). It also takes a hell of a lot of heat to erase tape; data are regularly recovered from hard drives that survive fires, even when the drive electronics are melted.
Finally, this recorder was an experimental device intended for fine-tuning the shuttle design; later orbiters weren't equipped with it. Exotic technologies weren't justified for a device that was not really envisioned as standard equipment. And in 1981, this kind of tape was state of the art.
Even deep-space probes of the era (such as Voyager) used tape to cache data locally because nothing similarly reliable with comparable storage capacity existed.
The Next Generation wasn't controversial, but it had some morally ambiguous moments, like when Picard left a planet to suffer from withdrawal symptoms because the Prime Directive said not to and he figured they would be better off in the end.
Enterprise had an episode with almost exactly this plot in season 1. They were contacted through heroic effort by a race that didn't have warp technology, who were dying out from a plague. Archer makes the decision, repellant to him but on the advice of his alien crew members, not to give them a cure even though they could because this race is standing in the way of another race with which they share their homeworld. It's obviously meant to be the "where the Prime Directive came from" episode.
Something like repeated heating/cooling cycles cause tiles to get loose and fall off. That would become a terrible danger to the station.
A tile loose in the ISS orbit will soon be a re-entering tile. There is noticeable hydrodynamic drag on the ISS itself, which is why they have to keep bumping its orbit. And those tiles are very light for their size.
one of the problems was that the foam insulation would outgas for years.
That tends to mess up experiments depending on vacuum. It was a research problem, not a safety problem.
But I don't know if the shuttles can be autopiloted during the last part of the approach.
They can be (generally must be) autopiloted practically until the runway is in sight. Ditching via autopilot is easy, since you tell the autopilot to get you in position for a safe landing in the middle of some open water; if the ship actually makes it down but there's no one on board it just goes into the ocean.
one thing that i must say is that programming for these premanunfactured bots is easy, but if you ever try to linux-fy, and tweak, or play with the goodies inside, goodluck.
Are you talking about the Parallax robots powered by BASIC Stamps? Those are standard PIC microcontrollers. If StampBASIC isn't good enough for you you should be able to directly replace the PIC with the StampBASIC microcode interpreter with a plain one and program it in machine language. I believe there is even a C compiler for the PIC.
As for compiling to StampBASIC p-code there isn't much point; you'd still have a very limited instruction store and you'd still be limited to the functions supported by the p-code interpreter, which are quite primitive.
The 2600 reset did not actually reset the CPU, it was just an input that the cart could read and act upon. I know this well since I've written a couple of 2600 demos, and I've used it.
The Atari 2600 used the 6507, a 24-pin packaging of the 6502. It was not a particularly low-power chip but it was considered very fast for its technology, executing many instructions in 2 clock cycles.
The 1802 was, in fact, used in quite a few space probes, including the Pioneer series, because of its reliability (it was miserably slow by contrast to the 6502 but also much simpler).
After the review of my novel on Friday, it got over 20,000 hits per hour for the next four hours, and over 200,000 hits by the end of the day. Good thing I didn't try using my Bellsouth Personal Webspace to host it;-)
We need to explore possible failure modes in order to create a mode that's as failure-free as possible.
Outside of little things like writing this silly novel, my whole life devolves into me trying to get this message through to people who just don't want to hear it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I noticed that too.
By the way, I am the proud owner of an actual Super ELF SBC from 1977 with a 1802 CPU and two whole K of RAM. It's also an ultimate hacker toy, but it's so useful and I played with it so often that I finally had it framed so I can at least enjoy looking at it.
The idea was that the theme park was populated with animatronic actors that you could really shoot dead, or whatever. There was an enormous control room mediating the fantasy. The robots were so real it was hinted as strongly as you could back then that you could have sex with them and it was totally realistic.
Of course when the 'bots run amok they aren't cute any more...
FutureWorld was set after the debacle at WestWorld; Delos still had the WestWorld set and had added two others. (I forget what the third was.) Anyway it was derivative and not as engaging as the original, since you already knew the joke.
Pressure treated wood is generally guaranteed for 40 years even in ground-contact situations. I have a deck of pressure treated 2 x 6's which has been in ground contact for 13 years and has not deteriorated a bit.
The part of the US radio regulations which make these devices is Part 15, which specifically addresses low-powered unlicensed devices on a variety of bands. It spells out maximum power outputs and antenna lengths for these devices on AM, FM, the 49 MHz kiddie walkie-talkie band, and so on. Obviously Britain has no such analogous regulation, which is a shame because Part 15 devices seduced many a kid into exploring the magic of electronics.
No, it's like saying that even if a journalist is bold and persuasive and daring and insightful enough to investigate the news and uncover the truth, he is lacking in his ability to be a journalist if he has a poor command of the English language.
This is an unmanned tethered balloon. Unless I'm missing an obscure bit of aeronautical jargon here, this regulation doesn't apply. And for good reason I'd gather, since a tethered balloon can be reeled in, but a free balloon (like most weather balloons) goes where it wants once you release it.
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: message_die() in db/db.php on line 88
Sometimes this is a good thing. If I am curious about ultralight aircraft, or antique radios, or some other hobby with a limited number of enthusiasts I can quickly find a lot of information, join a group, and get involved.
But it also means that if my interests tend more toward alt.suicide.holiday or thinking the Jews have taken over the government, I could quickly find other people to reinforce those tendencies. Friedman concentrates on the most devastating aspect of this, and just because it's one end of a bell curve doesn't mean his point is wrong.
Note the last paragraph about the effectiveness of Osama bin Laden's recruiting videos, and the possibility of targeting them precisely via broadband video. Brrrrrr.
But Pud never let a little thing like that deter him. It's a civil tort so it's only as illegal as the sender's willingness to sue you. I suspect FuckedCompany is counting on the companies involved to not want to stir up a shitstorm with him.
The bit about "other than the intended recipient" is not giving the intended recipient permission to do whatever he wants; quite the opposite, it is notifying anyone he might hand the letter to or who might get a look at it inadvertently that they don't have permission to publish it, either.
This is an area of copyright law which may not be intuitive, but it is well established. Republishing e-mail you receive without the permission of the sender is illegal. In this case there is no doubt about the situation; permission is expressly denied in the letter itself.
Look for a post titled "books in pre-Change Internet form." There was a short thread of very positive posts and the parent is modded up and text is visible on the default view. Logs show that as of midnight this morning it had brought me about 500 more viewers too (thanks guys!).
I must admit that I got a hell of a lot of help editing the thing for typos and some decent editorial advice from the effort. As well as just over $1,000 up to now.
I have yet to accomplish the "get rich" part, am still working on the "get a good agent" step. That is looking at least slightly more do-able than it would have been before I put the book online.
Modern capitalism is based very strongly on the concept of limited liability which means precisely that investors are not responsible for liabilities incurred by the companies they invest in. The companies are, and the investors can lose their investment, but they are not criminally liable for the company's actions (unless they participate directly in those actions) and they are liable only for the amount of their investment.
It's like investing in a local street gang.
No, it's like investing in Exxon before the Exxon Valdez or in Union Carbide before Bhopal. You can lose your investment. To suggest that it go any further undermines every principle upon which our economy is founded.
The shuttle is designed for minimal shock (3g max on launch), so read/write head stability is not a problem. Once tape is written it is relatively invulnerable to electric fields (unlike most solid state media) and radiation (ditto). It also takes a hell of a lot of heat to erase tape; data are regularly recovered from hard drives that survive fires, even when the drive electronics are melted.
Finally, this recorder was an experimental device intended for fine-tuning the shuttle design; later orbiters weren't equipped with it. Exotic technologies weren't justified for a device that was not really envisioned as standard equipment. And in 1981, this kind of tape was state of the art.
Even deep-space probes of the era (such as Voyager) used tape to cache data locally because nothing similarly reliable with comparable storage capacity existed.
Enterprise had an episode with almost exactly this plot in season 1. They were contacted through heroic effort by a race that didn't have warp technology, who were dying out from a plague. Archer makes the decision, repellant to him but on the advice of his alien crew members, not to give them a cure even though they could because this race is standing in the way of another race with which they share their homeworld. It's obviously meant to be the "where the Prime Directive came from" episode.
A tile loose in the ISS orbit will soon be a re-entering tile. There is noticeable hydrodynamic drag on the ISS itself, which is why they have to keep bumping its orbit. And those tiles are very light for their size.
one of the problems was that the foam insulation would outgas for years.
That tends to mess up experiments depending on vacuum. It was a research problem, not a safety problem.
But I don't know if the shuttles can be autopiloted during the last part of the approach.
They can be (generally must be) autopiloted practically until the runway is in sight. Ditching via autopilot is easy, since you tell the autopilot to get you in position for a safe landing in the middle of some open water; if the ship actually makes it down but there's no one on board it just goes into the ocean.
Are you talking about the Parallax robots powered by BASIC Stamps? Those are standard PIC microcontrollers. If StampBASIC isn't good enough for you you should be able to directly replace the PIC with the StampBASIC microcode interpreter with a plain one and program it in machine language. I believe there is even a C compiler for the PIC.
As for compiling to StampBASIC p-code there isn't much point; you'd still have a very limited instruction store and you'd still be limited to the functions supported by the p-code interpreter, which are quite primitive.
The 2600 reset did not actually reset the CPU, it was just an input that the cart could read and act upon. I know this well since I've written a couple of 2600 demos, and I've used it.
The 1802 was, in fact, used in quite a few space probes, including the Pioneer series, because of its reliability (it was miserably slow by contrast to the 6502 but also much simpler).
After the review of my novel on Friday, it got over 20,000 hits per hour for the next four hours, and over 200,000 hits by the end of the day. Good thing I didn't try using my Bellsouth Personal Webspace to host it ;-)
Outside of little things like writing this silly novel, my whole life devolves into me trying to get this message through to people who just don't want to hear it.
Hmmm. Maybe that's because it's ridiculous. Far be it from me to suggest that you were supposed to figure that out...