Actually, in a controlled environment like these parks, you can do a lot better and easier. Since you control the environment, its cost effective to put more money into the infrastructure (hard to have stolen) and less into the actual braclets (easy to break)...
Here's my idea.. Have each kid transmitter just be a simple beacon, sending out a message cdma-style every couple of seconds. Power can be small. Use triangulation to find the kids. Give them a "I'm lost" button/switch, so they can page their parents. Of course, since the parents are paying for the service and are really the ones in need of comfort, they get a receiver, too. Like a pager that beeps when the kid switches the "lost" button. They can find the kid(s) position (multiple kids!!) with either a phone call, have the nearest landmark read out on the pager, or a directional finder.
At the exits, you can use this technology to make sure noone walks out with the tracker - limiting the park's risks even more.
My thoughts exactly about RE. These were just cheap shots and, while they made me jump, were more annoying than scary. If you listen to the foley, you laugh! People wearing noisy leather sneak up on people, and for no reason touch them. What's up with that!? And then there are other things.. like when milla goes to open a grate -- thee is a horrific noise when she thrusts her hand through the grate that scares you. What kind of scare is that? "The lead character opens a door!!!" Surely they could have thought of something better. And then, when she opens the grate, it's a lot quieter than when reached her hand through it. duh.
True story: We had a, uh, enthuiastiac vice president. He was helping lead a tour of VIPs, including some government representative (senate or congress) from Alaska. The group went through the machine shop in the basement and the VP told him that all the guys in drafting do is hit a button, and presto, the machines pop out the parts. Never mind all those people standing around who actually interpret the drawings, and break it down into programs for the machines.
Then, when our VP found out that the VIP was from Alaska, he said something like "as a matter of fact, most of the manufacturing of our satellite parts is done by Intuit indians," and that "they were very reliable and good with their hands". Mind you that we were located just outside of Washington, DC, quite away from Alaska. And had no ties to Alaska. Another VP quickly changed the subject.
Although I tried to find evidence on Aspen's site, it wasn't much use (I think they just win an award for terseness - particularily their history). There was some more info on Trimble's website. The AgGPS 132 is the receiver used - it uses satellite-based private subscription differential correction services and the public WAAS.
My initial guess was that the system computer-controlled the sprayers, so that when the GPS system detected that the aircraft was over the correct field and over a not-already-sprayed area, it would trigger the sprayers. To compensate for overlap, some individual sprayer jets may not fire so as to not re-apply over the same area.
But that thinking was all wrong. The Trimflight 3 brochure pdf describes the system very well - it's a precise guidance system aimed at cropdusters-- it includes measuring the field, determining a coverage pattern, guiding the pilot through that coverage pattern (with the help of a lightbar to indicate how far off-track they are), and then doing the recordkeeping to record what was sprayed where. It interfaces to a Crophawk flowmeter, but doesn't look like it controls the flow. This brochure also shows a helicopter doing application - the spray looks like a normal fixed-wing spray; I'm not sure why the downwash isn't blowing it all over!
I went to my sister's HS graduation, and the principal gave his speech... he used the word epitome, but pronounced it "epi-tome" instead of "e-pit-o-me". And that's one of those words I consider a classic high-school-english-paper word. Of course, this was about the time Ernest P. Worrell was pronoucing the word that way, and it took me a little bit to figure out that there were two words, but then again I wasn't the principal.
Thanks for the heads up on dachshund -- you just saved me some future embarassement! So far in my life I (luckily) haven't to spell either doxen or pronouce dachshund.
A friend of mine doesn't sound out the words AT ALL when he reads, and homophones cause him big trouble. When something is poorly written and the wrong word is used, he gets completely stumped.. he realizes that the sentence is messed up, but doesn't quite no wear. I read a little differently: when reading non-technical stuff, I usually sound out a lot of things (partially because I have a minor in poetry and love the sound of words). I don't sound out the more technical stuff (especially when it's "words" like SCSI or PCMCIA). Homophones stick out like a sore thumb to me, but they don't hinder my comprehension.
True story. What kind of reader are you? Did you notice the too homophones I used? Ok, there were three.
Re:I bought one for my sister
on
Dior iPod case
·
· Score: 2
A little off topic, and please don't consider this a flame, but here goes...
Alfred Dunhill designs some cool stuff, including this carbon fiber pen and a decent line of watches, but I refuse to buy anything from a guy who sells deadly addictive drugs as fashion accesories. Yeah, I know he probably got started with that line when it was cool, but he's still raking in the blood money. I'm not sure what the proportion of smoking is among the geek community (I suspect its lower than average), but since we're the ones that tend to go for his high-tech materials, I wonder if he has totally alienated other geeks, too.
A friend of mine helped out a guy who was getting screwed for child support payments. Basically, his ex-wife was living off of the child support payments (and I think remarried) and not giving a dime to her at-college kids. So, he paid the kids directly, too. To get his payments re-evaluated, he needed to serve his ex-wife with papers. He wasn't allowed to do it himself... he needed a third party to do it. He hired a firm to do it, and they did... but she kept lying under oath that she never received the papers and the judge kept letting her delay. Why the judge didn't witness the supoena right there in court, I don't know. Anyway, after many attempts, the ex-husband was running out of money. My friend agreed to do the delivery. They knew where she went to church, dressed up in thier sunday best, and followed her. Aparently the rule they had to follow was that the documents had to touch her person -- leaving at her doorstep wasn't good enough. And this lady was smart (dumb?) enough to literally run away everytime she thought she was going to be subpoened. But, she didn't know my friend, and when they handed her the package in the middle of the church (a huge cathederal, and just after the service), her shriek echoed through the building. She tossed it up in the air and ran out. As paritioners filed out, they had to step around the package on the floor- with her full name in big red letters. Plenty of witnesses, hopefully. A videocamera would have been more effective, but this was back in the day when they were bigger. It's amazing what denial some people can get into thinking they can avoid subpoenas...
Actually, Gatling guns are legal in Virginia. When most people think of machine guns, they think of fully automatic guns, where the force from the first bullet firing is used to eject the casing, load the next bullet, and fire it. A gattling gun is different - a manual crank is used to load the next bullet, and usually this means that another barrel is rotated into position.
The difference is that in the fully automatic gun, all you do is hold down the trigger; in the gattling gun, you must continually turn the crank. The theory is that the user of the gattling gun is in more control - kindof like the repetitive trigger pulling necessary in legal semi-automatic guns.
Gattling guns are used in modern guns to generate increadibly high-volume of fire. Remember the BFG in Predator? The use of multiple barrels allows a little more time for the barrels to cool off between sucessive shots. I would also suspect that they could be built to be less susceptable to jamming because, since it's an external force driving the gun, one dud bullet won't stop the chain of events.
p.s. INAGE (gun expert). Alternate theory: gatling guns that are replicas of the original may be exempt under "antique" laws
Just for comparison, the US's largest conventional bomb is the BLU-82B (aka Commando Vault in Vietnam and Daisy Cutter in Afghanistan). It weighs 7.5 tons, with 6.3 tons of explosive (84% bomb!). It's pushed out the back of a C130 cargo plane and is optimized for destruction and ground level without digging a crater (original purpose was to clear foliage to make helicopter landing pads). It costs $27,318 and 225 were produced (mostly in the 70's).
If you want to build your own, you can get the explosive here
So, for comparison (aprox.) exposive/weight ratio of W54 davey crockett=880, of BLU-82B daisy cuttter=0.84
Actually, it still takes quite some time. From the FAQ:
kernel--- compilercache time default-- no-------------- 5m28.860s default-- yes, but empty 6m56.490s default-- yes, filled------ 2m51.900s modified yes, filled------ 3m58.730s
(ugly formatting to avoid lameness filter)
It looks pretty safe, especially if you've been burned by a badly written Makefile. The FAQ explains the difference between compilercache and makefiles pretty well.
As a bonus, compilercache ignores changes made to the comments (since it uses the preprocessed source (with the comments stripped) to calculate an MD5 checksum), so you can fix/add comments without worrying about an extra long compile.
I probably won't use it, though -- my projects tend to require only one file to be recompiled per build.
This article focuses on Pearce and the problems with the movie. He's amazingly outspoken and critical of the movie and the whole process that created it -- something I think the studios would be all over him for, especially so close to the opening. But I guess, happily, it's not like the old days where studios owned stars.
Also interesting (to me, at least!): Director Simon Wells is the great-grandson of H.G. Wells.
Re:Doesn't have much on the good old Libretto
on
Tiqit Handheld PC
·
· Score: 2
Libretto: 8.3" x 5.2" x 1.4" (60 cubic inches); 37.4 oz
eightythree: 5.4" x 4.4" x 1.1" (26 cubic inches); 20 oz
Granted, the Libretto is a wonderful machine with often better specs (example: 7.1" 800x480 instead of 4" 640x480 screen, better keyboard), but it's 2.3x the size and 1.8x the weight of the eightythree -- they cater to different markets.
And don't forget that Konqueror has a similar feature: type "gg:" before the search terms to do a google search. Also helpful,"dict:". It's all under "enhanced browsing", under "Settings/configure konqueror"
Actually, the whole point behind DRM is to restrict usage, of which copying is one type of usage that is usually prohibited. It's clear that you know this, but that first sentence is the too-simplified version that most people believe (and some unscrupulous DRM proponents will be satisfied with having people believe this because they know many people won't go for the much more restrictive leases DRM allows)
Actually, that's a good idea -- they may have recogonized that the manuals alone may be a primary selling point:
From the FAQ:
Where can I get hold of the hardware system manuals ? There are 6 system manuals describing the Emotion Engine, Vector Units and Graphics Synthesizer which are provided with the Linux kit on the "DISC 1" DVD ROM in PDF format (both English and Japanese language). These manuals are Copyright of Sony Computer Entertainment. Once you have bought the kit, you can use the manuals and the information contained in them for your own development of software. However, you may not re-produce or copy the manuals or re-distribute them without prior permission from Sony Computer Entertainment. For the avoidance of doubt, that means that the PDFs may not be posted on public web sites and may not be copied for friends.
We recognize that many people visiting this site would like to read these PDFs right now - even before they get the kit. We're investigating some possible solutions to this, but for the time being, please be patient and we'll get the kits out as soon as we can.
I was curious which box he was pinging, and did a whois database search... It's at MIT alright, but what was more amazing was that it owns all 18.x.x.x IPs -- quite a large block!!
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (NET-MIT-TEMP)
1 Amherst Street
Cambridge, MA 02139-1986
US
Slashdot Mirror
LLNL has been researching micropower impulse radar to 'image' the vocal chords, mainly for speech recogonition. The main site seems down, but you can get to it with google cache. Also check out ucdavis
Actually, in a controlled environment like these parks, you can do a lot better and easier. Since you control the environment, its cost effective to put more money into the infrastructure (hard to have stolen) and less into the actual braclets (easy to break)...
Here's my idea.. Have each kid transmitter just be a simple beacon, sending out a message cdma-style every couple of seconds. Power can be small. Use triangulation to find the kids. Give them a "I'm lost" button/switch, so they can page their parents. Of course, since the parents are paying for the service and are really the ones in need of comfort, they get a receiver, too. Like a pager that beeps when the kid switches the "lost" button. They can find the kid(s) position (multiple kids!!) with either a phone call, have the nearest landmark read out on the pager, or a directional finder.
At the exits, you can use this technology to make sure noone walks out with the tracker - limiting the park's risks even more.
My thoughts exactly about RE. These were just cheap shots and, while they made me jump, were more annoying than scary. If you listen to the foley, you laugh! People wearing noisy leather sneak up on people, and for no reason touch them. What's up with that!? And then there are other things.. like when milla goes to open a grate -- thee is a horrific noise when she thrusts her hand through the grate that scares you. What kind of scare is that? "The lead character opens a door!!!" Surely they could have thought of something better. And then, when she opens the grate, it's a lot quieter than when reached her hand through it. duh.
Whoops. Thanks, my gaffe. My brain was thinking one thing; my fingers another.
True story: We had a, uh, enthuiastiac vice president. He was helping lead a tour of VIPs, including some government representative (senate or congress) from Alaska. The group went through the machine shop in the basement and the VP told him that all the guys in drafting do is hit a button, and presto, the machines pop out the parts. Never mind all those people standing around who actually interpret the drawings, and break it down into programs for the machines.
Then, when our VP found out that the VIP was from Alaska, he said something like "as a matter of fact, most of the manufacturing of our satellite parts is done by Intuit indians," and that "they were very reliable and good with their hands". Mind you that we were located just outside of Washington, DC, quite away from Alaska. And had no ties to Alaska. Another VP quickly changed the subject.
Luckily, I left before that company...
Although I tried to find evidence on Aspen's site, it wasn't much use (I think they just win an award for terseness - particularily their history). There was some more info on Trimble's website. The AgGPS 132 is the receiver used - it uses satellite-based private subscription differential correction services and the public WAAS.
My initial guess was that the system computer-controlled the sprayers, so that when the GPS system detected that the aircraft was over the correct field and over a not-already-sprayed area, it would trigger the sprayers. To compensate for overlap, some individual sprayer jets may not fire so as to not re-apply over the same area.
But that thinking was all wrong. The Trimflight 3 brochure pdf describes the system very well - it's a precise guidance system aimed at cropdusters-- it includes measuring the field, determining a coverage pattern, guiding the pilot through that coverage pattern (with the help of a lightbar to indicate how far off-track they are), and then doing the recordkeeping to record what was sprayed where. It interfaces to a Crophawk flowmeter, but doesn't look like it controls the flow. This brochure also shows a helicopter doing application - the spray looks like a normal fixed-wing spray; I'm not sure why the downwash isn't blowing it all over!
I went to my sister's HS graduation, and the principal gave his speech... he used the word epitome, but pronounced it "epi-tome" instead of "e-pit-o-me". And that's one of those words I consider a classic high-school-english-paper word. Of course, this was about the time Ernest P. Worrell was pronoucing the word that way, and it took me a little bit to figure out that there were two words, but then again I wasn't the principal.
Thanks for the heads up on dachshund -- you just saved me some future embarassement! So far in my life I (luckily) haven't to spell either doxen or pronouce dachshund.
A friend of mine doesn't sound out the words AT ALL when he reads, and homophones cause him big trouble. When something is poorly written and the wrong word is used, he gets completely stumped .. he realizes that the sentence is messed up, but doesn't quite no wear. I read a little differently: when reading non-technical stuff, I usually sound out a lot of things (partially because I have a minor in poetry and love the sound of words). I don't sound out the more technical stuff (especially when it's "words" like SCSI or PCMCIA). Homophones stick out like a sore thumb to me, but they don't hinder my comprehension.
True story. What kind of reader are you? Did you notice the too homophones I used? Ok, there were three.
A little off topic, and please don't consider this a flame, but here goes...
Alfred Dunhill designs some cool stuff, including this carbon fiber pen and a decent line of watches, but I refuse to buy anything from a guy who sells deadly addictive drugs as fashion accesories. Yeah, I know he probably got started with that line when it was cool, but he's still raking in the blood money. I'm not sure what the proportion of smoking is among the geek community (I suspect its lower than average), but since we're the ones that tend to go for his high-tech materials, I wonder if he has totally alienated other geeks, too.
$12 if done by the govmn't (but I suspect that this is for simpler cases)
Otherwise, $50 to a couple hundred dollars depending on the difficulty of the case (at $50/hr surveillance!).
A friend of mine helped out a guy who was getting screwed for child support payments. Basically, his ex-wife was living off of the child support payments (and I think remarried) and not giving a dime to her at-college kids. So, he paid the kids directly, too. To get his payments re-evaluated, he needed to serve his ex-wife with papers. He wasn't allowed to do it himself... he needed a third party to do it. He hired a firm to do it, and they did... but she kept lying under oath that she never received the papers and the judge kept letting her delay. Why the judge didn't witness the supoena right there in court, I don't know. Anyway, after many attempts, the ex-husband was running out of money. My friend agreed to do the delivery. They knew where she went to church, dressed up in thier sunday best, and followed her. Aparently the rule they had to follow was that the documents had to touch her person -- leaving at her doorstep wasn't good enough. And this lady was smart (dumb?) enough to literally run away everytime she thought she was going to be subpoened. But, she didn't know my friend, and when they handed her the package in the middle of the church (a huge cathederal, and just after the service), her shriek echoed through the building. She tossed it up in the air and ran out. As paritioners filed out, they had to step around the package on the floor- with her full name in big red letters. Plenty of witnesses, hopefully. A videocamera would have been more effective, but this was back in the day when they were bigger. It's amazing what denial some people can get into thinking they can avoid subpoenas...
Actually, you don't need two... a single tach wih dual needles would look much cooler!
Or get the whole pdf (652kB) from usenix -- it's easier to add that to my library than the html. Thanks for a great link!
Actually, Gatling guns are legal in Virginia. When most people think of machine guns, they think of fully automatic guns, where the force from the first bullet firing is used to eject the casing, load the next bullet, and fire it. A gattling gun is different - a manual crank is used to load the next bullet, and usually this means that another barrel is rotated into position.
The difference is that in the fully automatic gun, all you do is hold down the trigger; in the gattling gun, you must continually turn the crank. The theory is that the user of the gattling gun is in more control - kindof like the repetitive trigger pulling necessary in legal semi-automatic guns.
Gattling guns are used in modern guns to generate increadibly high-volume of fire. Remember the BFG in Predator? The use of multiple barrels allows a little more time for the barrels to cool off between sucessive shots. I would also suspect that they could be built to be less susceptable to jamming because, since it's an external force driving the gun, one dud bullet won't stop the chain of events.
p.s. INAGE (gun expert). Alternate theory: gatling guns that are replicas of the original may be exempt under "antique" laws
Great info, thanks!
Just for comparison, the US's largest conventional bomb is the BLU-82B (aka Commando Vault in Vietnam and Daisy Cutter in Afghanistan). It weighs 7.5 tons, with 6.3 tons of explosive (84% bomb!). It's pushed out the back of a C130 cargo plane and is optimized for destruction and ground level without digging a crater (original purpose was to clear foliage to make helicopter landing pads). It costs $27,318 and 225 were produced (mostly in the 70's).
If you want to build your own, you can get the explosive here
So, for comparison (aprox.) exposive/weight ratio of W54 davey crockett=880, of BLU-82B daisy cuttter=0.84
Actually, it still takes quite some time. From the FAQ:
kernel--- compilercache time
default-- no-------------- 5m28.860s
default-- yes, but empty 6m56.490s
default-- yes, filled------ 2m51.900s
modified yes, filled------ 3m58.730s
(ugly formatting to avoid lameness filter)
It looks pretty safe, especially if you've been burned by a badly written Makefile. The FAQ explains the difference between compilercache and makefiles pretty well.
As a bonus, compilercache ignores changes made to the comments (since it uses the preprocessed source (with the comments stripped) to calculate an MD5 checksum), so you can fix/add comments without worrying about an extra long compile.
I probably won't use it, though -- my projects tend to require only one file to be recompiled per build.
This article focuses on Pearce and the problems with the movie. He's amazingly outspoken and critical of the movie and the whole process that created it -- something I think the studios would be all over him for, especially so close to the opening. But I guess, happily, it's not like the old days where studios owned stars.
Also interesting (to me, at least!): Director Simon Wells is the great-grandson of H.G. Wells.
Libretto:
8.3" x 5.2" x 1.4" (60 cubic inches); 37.4 oz
eightythree:
5.4" x 4.4" x 1.1" (26 cubic inches); 20 oz
Granted, the Libretto is a wonderful machine with often better specs (example: 7.1" 800x480 instead of 4" 640x480 screen, better keyboard), but it's 2.3x the size and 1.8x the weight of the eightythree -- they cater to different markets.
And I don't possibly see how C|Net could have known about the Monorail 7000 computer that came out at the end of 1997 (at $999 vs. the mac at $7,499)
And don't forget that Konqueror has a similar feature: type "gg:" before the search terms to do a google search. Also helpful,"dict:". It's all under "enhanced browsing", under "Settings/configure konqueror"
The whole point behind DRM is to restrict copying
Actually, the whole point behind DRM is to restrict usage, of which copying is one type of usage that is usually prohibited. It's clear that you know this, but that first sentence is the too-simplified version that most people believe (and some unscrupulous DRM proponents will be satisfied with having people believe this because they know many people won't go for the much more restrictive leases DRM allows)
From the FAQ:
Ok, I did the math. At 9,972 undergraduates, graduates, and professors, that works out to
- one desktop computer
- one notebook computer
- one library computer
- 12 toilets
- 1,667 coke machines
per each person
I was curious which box he was pinging, and did a whois database search... It's at MIT alright, but what was more amazing was that it owns all 18.x.x.x IPs -- quite a large block!!
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (NET-MIT-TEMP)
1 Amherst Street
Cambridge, MA 02139-1986
US
Netname: MIT
Netblock: 18.0.0.0 - 18.255.255.255
Check out the furbeowulf cluster -- similar except it uses fibre instead of cat5.
Just a nit-pick, but Intel compilers actually cost: $500 for linux C/C++ compiler ($125 academic)
Intel does provide a number of free open source products, including an Intanium assembler, library routines, vision routines, and a network performance analyzer.