since personal shredders are only $30, why does your company use the shredding service at all? It would probably be cheaper to outfit every employee (or at least every department) with their own shredder than pay for 2 months of that service
Because $30 personal shredders suck ass. They're cheaply made, their motors burn up if you put more than 5 sheets at a time through them with any regularity, and they jam very easily.
Spend a hundred for each one and you might get something worth using.
Spend $1500 for a serious industrial crosscut confetti model and let 30 employees share it and your company is probably far better off than with either of the above options, or the shredding service.
Bonus points if the company then sells the shredded paper *directly* to a pulp mill;)
I am NOT a looney! Why should I be attired with the epithet "looney" merely because I have a pet PowerBook running 55 different operating systems? I've 'eard tell Sir Gerald Nabardo had a pet Inspiron running Linux. You wouldn't call him a looney! Furthermore, Dawn Pailthorpe, the lady show-jumper, had a Clamshell iBook running NewtOS, after the late mathematician, Allan Bullock has two Porteges, both running *nix, and Marcel Proust had an Acorn! So if you're calling the author of A la recherche du temps perdu a looney, I shall have to ask you to step outside!
The original landing of a C-130 Hercules, a quad-turboprop transport plane weighing in excess of 85,000 pounds, on a carrier deck, on which that episode of JAG was (very) loosely based, occurred in October of 1963 and was achieved by Lt. James H. Flatley III. He later received the Distinguished Flying Cross for this amazing feat.
Perhaps the "antiterror drama" you're thinking of is "Threat Matrix" on ABC. It's actually a good show, and doesn't mangle jargon/geek terminology.
all these year's I've been calling myself a geek, when now I finally realize I'm a dork. That's both scary and depressing. We'll at least all the money I spent on Magic cards wasn't in vain.
For a self-proclaimed geek, or dork, or whatever you're trendily calling yourself today, your English skills -- specifically, your use of apostrophes -- leave something to be desired. Maybe you should have spent that Magic card money on a grammar book instead.
Mod me flamebait if you will, but if you're going to call yourself *anything* that has as its connotation "higher than average intelligence," you ought to make an attempt to demonstrate it in your self-expression. On-line, that means writing.
The fuel cell is quiet, emitting only 60 decibels at 100 feet.
60 dB at a distance of 100 feet is pretty darn loud. 60 dB is approximately the sound pressure of a loud conversation.
What you'll notice if you read that link more carefully is that the figures they give are for a 250 kW fuel cell. IOW, something big enough to serve as a substation on the power grid. So none of this (except the chemistry itself) is really applicable to something the size of a cell fone or PDA, because most of those specifications don't scale linearly with size.
Yeah. And as a magazine reporting on the Personal Computer industry, it's their journalistic responsibility to provide -- if you'll excuse the expression -- "fair and balanced" coverage of the personal computer industry.
My Macintosh is a "personal" computer in every sense of the word as it applied to PC Magazine when it was founded, and if the magazine is now "Wintel" Magazine, perhaps it's time for a name change.
If it isn't time for a name change, then I expect to see some kind of balanced editorial coverage. I don't mean factual content; I think it's perfectly reasonable for 90% of the magazine to be Windows-centric. But "PC" stands for "personal computer," not "Windows machine." Remember that.
Paypal et al should be pushing for more secure browsers on their site. I don't see how this could be a business conflict with MS.
You ever notice the little.NET Passport icon on the eBay sign-in page?
Didja happen to get that memo that eBay bought PayPal?
I'm gonna go right ahead and put two and two together and say that eBay -- and thus PayPal -- is partnering with M$ on this Passport thing, which means what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
If you accept that the converse is true -- what's bad for M$ is also bad for eBay -- then it certainly isn't in PayPal's best interest to promote non-IE browsers.
However, it IS is PayPal's best interest that IE gets fixed as fast as possible. And that just happens to be in the interests of M$, too, so whaddayaknow...this patch might actually get released in something resembling a timely manner.
Never mind that with something like Mozilla, it likely wouldn't have existed in the first place...
The whole digital special effects thing is just to avoid paying for real actors (but can you blame him? I mean, really -- imagine the payroll for a clone army of Hollywood extras).
I agree that Lucas is in it for the profit, but I think you picked the wrong reason for using all the CGI.
Peter Jackson didn't use CG (specifically, MASSIVE) because he was a cheap bastard. He used it because he didn't want to have the coordination, scheduling, and logistics issues that Mel Gibson can tell you all about from filming Braveheart with all live-action battle scenes.
And Braveheart only used ~3000 (might be off by a thousand either direction; been a while since I watched all the extras on the DVD) in even the biggest battles.
Helm's Deep, in Jackson's The Two Towers, was >10,000 orcs against ~1000 men (and those bloody elves who weren't supposed to be there anyway). Where do you even get 11,000 people with the discipline to behave exactly as you want them to?
You don't.
Lucas may well be a cheap bastard, but finding 50,000 people to put on Stormtrooper suits and be disciplined about it, making 50K suits in the first place, feeding 50K people for two or three days (and you thought Jesus's feeding of the 5000 with two loaves and five fish was a miracle!), and then locking up or destroying 50K Stormtrooper suits so they don't get stolen and auctioned off on eBay...well, that's a logistics problem NOBODY wants to deal with, cheap bastard or not. And that, my friends, is why Lucas used CG clone armies, and why huge battle scenes in sci-fi and fantasy films will likely continue to be CG in the future.
Side note: MASSIVE isn't perfect yet -- you can see some goofs if you pay close attention to the Helm's Deep scenes, like orcs running right through horses, and that sort of thing -- but it's pretty darn good, and it's getting better all the time. I can't wait to see the improvement from TTT to RotK.
You could just look over to your e-mail inbox and revel in the pile of offers for making said penis even bigger, or making it even more warm and tingly by viewing photos of naked celebs, or keeping it stiff by buying giant mountains of 100% natural herbal viagra-like products.
Of course, you'll need some way to purchase all those things, so you probably ought to take up that nice Nigerian gentleman on his offer to pay you 10% of the 50 million US dollars he wants to transfer into your bank account.
I am, however, what you might describe as an "aviation enthusiast."
Even considering the GE J85 is the engine from the F-5 Tiger fighter and you *might* be able to pick one up fairly cheap from a gov't surplus auction, it seems to me that $400K is a bit optimistic for this thing.
First, it's going to be carrying around a lot of extra pounds. (For an airplane; keep in mind this thing has to be road-worthy AND airworthy, and that requires a fair amount of structural bracing that a normal airplane wouldn't have.) Weight is the enemy of all airplane designers, and this nutjob is intentionally adding on an automotive drivetrain and chassis.
Second, I don't see anything jet-powered selling for under about US$1m or so brand-new. Something like a USED Cessna Citation CJ-1 or Learjet 31 will easily fetch US$2-3m on the market today, and I'd trust either of those a LOT more than I'd trust a product designed by someone with an apparent "get-venture-capital-fast" agenda and no demonstrable experience building working aircraft.
I love reading these stories about how everyone wants to make a national id card, Oracke wants to run the database, IBM wants to provide the hardware etc...
...and Dieboldwants tomake sure that your elected officials are really their elected officials (read: officials elected, quite literally, by Diebold), rather than the officials you voted for.
I'm not sure what scares me more: a national ID card, or the loss of my ability to vote against people who would support it.
Already some bars will "swipe" an ID rather than just look at the picture (also getting addresses, age and other data into their database).
Defeating that is simple enough - run a cow magnet over the strip on the back of your card. This works great as long as your state uses a magnetic strip rather than a barcode. Some states use both, but all the places that have scanned my ID have used the magnetic strip, not the barcode.
If your state uses a barcode, erase a couple bars in it with a sharp knife.
DISCLAIMER: IANAL, and modifying your driver's licence as mentioned above may be illegal in some jurisdictions. Follow the above ideas at your own risk.
1. Giant undersea release of methane or any other gas bubbles upward. 2. Unfortunate ship finds itself directly above said bubbles, weighs more than water/gas mixture and is suddenly no longer boyant. 3. Ship literally falls into the sea.
Uh, don't you mean:
1. Giant undersea release of methane or any other gas bubbles upward. 2. ??? 3. Profit!
It should not be difficult at all to build a guidance system that follows the laser and delivers a payload to the plane
What, because it's so much MORE difficult to procure a couple of SAMs (NOTE: EXISTING TECHNOLOGY) and a small, portable launcher (ALSO EXISTING TECHNOLOGY), and drive out in the middle of BFE and start shooting guided missiles at planes?
Please. If you're so worried someone might use the power "conduit" to guide a missile, you have a helluva lot more to worry about RIGHT NOW. Like deranged terrorists with lots of money and a couple Stingers left over from when we gave the Afghanis five bazillion of them to fight Soviet Russia (woohoo, got the joke in!).
Slashdot Mirror
Where can I get a job blasting helpless animals like that?
At the University of Michigan, duh...
-Captain Obvious
since personal shredders are only $30, why does your company use the shredding service at all? It would probably be cheaper to outfit every employee (or at least every department) with their own shredder than pay for 2 months of that service
;)
Because $30 personal shredders suck ass. They're cheaply made, their motors burn up if you put more than 5 sheets at a time through them with any regularity, and they jam very easily.
Spend a hundred for each one and you might get something worth using.
Spend $1500 for a serious industrial crosscut confetti model and let 30 employees share it and your company is probably far better off than with either of the above options, or the shredding service.
Bonus points if the company then sells the shredded paper *directly* to a pulp mill
p
I am NOT a looney! Why should I be attired with the epithet "looney" merely because I have a pet PowerBook running 55 different operating systems? I've 'eard tell Sir Gerald Nabardo had a pet Inspiron running Linux. You wouldn't call him a looney! Furthermore, Dawn Pailthorpe, the lady show-jumper, had a Clamshell iBook running NewtOS, after the late mathematician, Allan Bullock has two Porteges, both running *nix, and Marcel Proust had an Acorn! So if you're calling the author of A la recherche du temps perdu a looney, I shall have to ask you to step outside!
Didn't the DOD just get a grade of F for network security?
Nope. You're thinking of the Department of Homeland Security, proud owners of a $90 million contract with Microsoft.
Absolutely f*cking brilliant, I tell you. Absolutely f*cking brilliant. Your tax dollars at work.
ARRRRRRRRGH!
p
There's another 'antiterror' drama on too, one episode they landed a cargo plane on a carrier (which has been done, once).
That isn't an anti-terror drama. It's JAG.
The original landing of a C-130 Hercules, a quad-turboprop transport plane weighing in excess of 85,000 pounds, on a carrier deck, on which that episode of JAG was (very) loosely based, occurred in October of 1963 and was achieved by Lt. James H. Flatley III. He later received the Distinguished Flying Cross for this amazing feat.
Perhaps the "antiterror drama" you're thinking of is "Threat Matrix" on ABC. It's actually a good show, and doesn't mangle jargon/geek terminology.
p
Right now there is an illusion that it costs billions of dollars and huge corporations to do anything in space.
:-\
Bingo. Now it just costs billions of dollars, but you can do it with a team of 50 people and some creative outsourcing.
And one really really really rich geek.
Well, at least we got the "mega-corporation" bit out of the way.
p
And what, exactly, constitutes "meta-searching" Google?
p
all these year's I've been calling myself a geek, when now I finally realize I'm a dork. That's both scary and depressing. We'll at least all the money I spent on Magic cards wasn't in vain.
For a self-proclaimed geek, or dork, or whatever you're trendily calling yourself today, your English skills -- specifically, your use of apostrophes -- leave something to be desired. Maybe you should have spent that Magic card money on a grammar book instead.
Mod me flamebait if you will, but if you're going to call yourself *anything* that has as its connotation "higher than average intelligence," you ought to make an attempt to demonstrate it in your self-expression. On-line, that means writing.
p
"If peeing your pants is cool, then consider me Miles Davis."
;)
If you're gonna paraphrase Adam Sandler movies, at least get the form right
p
The fuel cell is quiet, emitting only 60 decibels at 100 feet.
60 dB at a distance of 100 feet is pretty darn loud. 60 dB is approximately the sound pressure of a loud conversation.
What you'll notice if you read that link more carefully is that the figures they give are for a 250 kW fuel cell. IOW, something big enough to serve as a substation on the power grid. So none of this (except the chemistry itself) is really applicable to something the size of a cell fone or PDA, because most of those specifications don't scale linearly with size.
p
fighter pilots use it succesfully and damn if they don't have more things in their mind than motorcyclists.
I'll betcha a hunnert bux a fighter pilot has never had Bambi run out in front of him whilst he was doing Mach 2 over the Iraqi desert...
But yeah, your point is a good one. I think this would be useful on bikes as well.
p
I think the Trib meant "$250,000 each."
And it just so happens that 18 * $250K = $4.5 million.
It seems a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a word. Such a little word....
p
Remember, this is PC Magazine
Yeah. And as a magazine reporting on the Personal Computer industry, it's their journalistic responsibility to provide -- if you'll excuse the expression -- "fair and balanced" coverage of the personal computer industry.
My Macintosh is a "personal" computer in every sense of the word as it applied to PC Magazine when it was founded, and if the magazine is now "Wintel" Magazine, perhaps it's time for a name change.
If it isn't time for a name change, then I expect to see some kind of balanced editorial coverage. I don't mean factual content; I think it's perfectly reasonable for 90% of the magazine to be Windows-centric. But "PC" stands for "personal computer," not "Windows machine." Remember that.
p
Paypal et al should be pushing for more secure browsers on their site. I don't see how this could be a business conflict with MS.
.NET Passport icon on the eBay sign-in page?
You ever notice the little
Didja happen to get that memo that eBay bought PayPal?
I'm gonna go right ahead and put two and two together and say that eBay -- and thus PayPal -- is partnering with M$ on this Passport thing, which means what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
If you accept that the converse is true -- what's bad for M$ is also bad for eBay -- then it certainly isn't in PayPal's best interest to promote non-IE browsers.
However, it IS is PayPal's best interest that IE gets fixed as fast as possible. And that just happens to be in the interests of M$, too, so whaddayaknow...this patch might actually get released in something resembling a timely manner.
Never mind that with something like Mozilla, it likely wouldn't have existed in the first place...
The whole digital special effects thing is just to avoid paying for real actors (but can you blame him? I mean, really -- imagine the payroll for a clone army of Hollywood extras).
I agree that Lucas is in it for the profit, but I think you picked the wrong reason for using all the CGI.
Peter Jackson didn't use CG (specifically, MASSIVE) because he was a cheap bastard. He used it because he didn't want to have the coordination, scheduling, and logistics issues that Mel Gibson can tell you all about from filming Braveheart with all live-action battle scenes.
And Braveheart only used ~3000 (might be off by a thousand either direction; been a while since I watched all the extras on the DVD) in even the biggest battles.
Helm's Deep, in Jackson's The Two Towers, was >10,000 orcs against ~1000 men (and those bloody elves who weren't supposed to be there anyway). Where do you even get 11,000 people with the discipline to behave exactly as you want them to?
You don't.
Lucas may well be a cheap bastard, but finding 50,000 people to put on Stormtrooper suits and be disciplined about it, making 50K suits in the first place, feeding 50K people for two or three days (and you thought Jesus's feeding of the 5000 with two loaves and five fish was a miracle!), and then locking up or destroying 50K Stormtrooper suits so they don't get stolen and auctioned off on eBay...well, that's a logistics problem NOBODY wants to deal with, cheap bastard or not. And that, my friends, is why Lucas used CG clone armies, and why huge battle scenes in sci-fi and fantasy films will likely continue to be CG in the future.
Side note: MASSIVE isn't perfect yet -- you can see some goofs if you pay close attention to the Helm's Deep scenes, like orcs running right through horses, and that sort of thing -- but it's pretty darn good, and it's getting better all the time. I can't wait to see the improvement from TTT to RotK.
You could just look over to your e-mail inbox and revel in the pile of offers for making said penis even bigger, or making it even more warm and tingly by viewing photos of naked celebs, or keeping it stiff by buying giant mountains of 100% natural herbal viagra-like products.
Of course, you'll need some way to purchase all those things, so you probably ought to take up that nice Nigerian gentleman on his offer to pay you 10% of the 50 million US dollars he wants to transfer into your bank account.
p
I think I remember someone mentioning that story back in preschool...
Oh yeah.
It's called "don't count your chickens before they hatch."
p
Fortunately, your decimal arithmetic skills are absolutely useless, because 2.003 * 1000 = 2003. Just like the OP said.
I'd waste a mod point but a) I don't have any and b) there isn't a "-1: Mathematically Incompetent" moderation.
p
IANAAE (though I've read a few books on it).
I am, however, what you might describe as an "aviation enthusiast."
Even considering the GE J85 is the engine from the F-5 Tiger fighter and you *might* be able to pick one up fairly cheap from a gov't surplus auction, it seems to me that $400K is a bit optimistic for this thing.
First, it's going to be carrying around a lot of extra pounds. (For an airplane; keep in mind this thing has to be road-worthy AND airworthy, and that requires a fair amount of structural bracing that a normal airplane wouldn't have.) Weight is the enemy of all airplane designers, and this nutjob is intentionally adding on an automotive drivetrain and chassis.
Second, I don't see anything jet-powered selling for under about US$1m or so brand-new. Something like a USED Cessna Citation CJ-1 or Learjet 31 will easily fetch US$2-3m on the market today, and I'd trust either of those a LOT more than I'd trust a product designed by someone with an apparent "get-venture-capital-fast" agenda and no demonstrable experience building working aircraft.
p
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
What's a cubit?
p
I loike trah-fic loights.
I loike trah-fic loights.
I loike trah-fic loights.
No mat-ah where they've bean...
I loike trah-fic loights.
I loike trah-fic loights.
I loike trah-fic loights.
But only when they're green...
continued...
p
I love reading these stories about how everyone wants to make a national id card, Oracke wants to run the database, IBM wants to provide the hardware etc...
...and Diebold wants to make sure that your elected officials are really their elected officials (read: officials elected, quite literally, by Diebold), rather than the officials you voted for.
I'm not sure what scares me more: a national ID card, or the loss of my ability to vote against people who would support it.
p
Already some bars will "swipe" an ID rather than just look at the picture (also getting addresses, age and other data into their database).
Defeating that is simple enough - run a cow magnet over the strip on the back of your card. This works great as long as your state uses a magnetic strip rather than a barcode. Some states use both, but all the places that have scanned my ID have used the magnetic strip, not the barcode.
If your state uses a barcode, erase a couple bars in it with a sharp knife.
DISCLAIMER: IANAL, and modifying your driver's licence as mentioned above may be illegal in some jurisdictions. Follow the above ideas at your own risk.
p
1. Giant undersea release of methane or any other gas bubbles upward.
2. Unfortunate ship finds itself directly above said bubbles, weighs more than water/gas mixture and is suddenly no longer boyant.
3. Ship literally falls into the sea.
Uh, don't you mean:
1. Giant undersea release of methane or any other gas bubbles upward.
2. ???
3. Profit!
Just a thought.
p
It should not be difficult at all to build a guidance system that follows the laser and delivers a payload to the plane
What, because it's so much MORE difficult to procure a couple of SAMs (NOTE: EXISTING TECHNOLOGY) and a small, portable launcher (ALSO EXISTING TECHNOLOGY), and drive out in the middle of BFE and start shooting guided missiles at planes?
Please. If you're so worried someone might use the power "conduit" to guide a missile, you have a helluva lot more to worry about RIGHT NOW. Like deranged terrorists with lots of money and a couple Stingers left over from when we gave the Afghanis five bazillion of them to fight Soviet Russia (woohoo, got the joke in!).
p