As for picking the lock, I really hope the lock is far more sophisticated than the brief description in the article suggests. From what they describe it could quite possibly pop open if you simply flooded every fiber with light.
If you simply complicate the back end a little bit, that approach fails. Put an LED light source on each output, with each LED's output modulated in a particular fashion, with the processing hardware behind the lock looking for the right modulation on the right fibers. Add multi-frequency LEDs or combinations of LEDs, and the cracking problem gets much harder -- if the sensor on a particular fiber is looking for a 100 Hz modulation in the red spectrum, no modulation in the yellow spectrum, and a 5 kHz modulation in the green spectrum, with other fibers having different beat frequencies, then flooding every fiber with light from a single source won't come close to tricking the lock.
I thought you were going to say it was the basis for the current US Government's homeland policies.
Stay in your home. Do not attempt to run. The nice men from the Heimatsicherheitsdienst will be along shortly to take you away where you can't reveal any more secrets about government policymaking.
What's amazing about the piano, is that electric current is used to warm the strings in order to get them into tune. The guitar tunes itself mechanically, but the piano is tuned electrically (not electronically, although there are electronics to determine the pitch of the strings).
The problem I see with the 'electric piano' is that the tuning mechanism is dumping heat into the body of the piano as waste heat from the heating of the strings. With half a kilowatt of energy being dissipated in the body, that's going to change the acoustics of the body of the piano, changing the way the whole piano sounds.
anybody remember these guys? http://www.go-l.com/monitors/index.htm last i recall, they had fraud rumors flying left and right, but then they showed up to some convention or other with an actual setup and made everyone eat their words. i still think a lot of their desktop descriptions sound like complete hogwash, but whatever. that grand canyon display still looks pretty badass.
Or, for a wider range of multi-monitor styles, you could check out 9X Media. Their expandable multimonitor units run up to 32 displays; their 3-over-3 six-monitor configuration would be almost ideal for a flight simulator, particularly an air-combat sim -- the front three and front-up three views visible all at once would improve your SA in a dogfight situation immensely.
Of course, with a setup like that, you're limited in your choice of video cards; only the Colorgraphics Xentera video card is available in an eight-head model, and that's only available for PCI, and only supports eight displays in analog mode (4 DVI outputs); if you were willing to sack the up/front/right and up/front/left views, though, you could get 9X Media's 1-over-3 monitor configuration and the Xentera GT-4 quad-head card, which supports 4 DVI displays and is available for AGP. Of course, the video card is pricey, but when you're ponying up $7,400 for the four-monitor display unit, what's a $600 video card? Besides, $8,000 for a multiple-monitor gaming configuration that none of your games support is the ne plus ultra of excessive technology -- the mark of the true uber-geek.
It might be interesting to embed these into the top of a sidewalk, then watch the sidewalk start glowing whenever someone walks on it, or whenever there are other vibrations in the area. Not necessarily useful, but interesting.
If you can make the unit sufficiently small, so that you can fit tens of them per inch, embedding a layer of them into a sidewalk or other pedestrian surface would have people leaving glowing footprints, which could be used as a theming enhancement in amusement parks, dance floors, or just for sheer weirdness value in homes or other locations.
Then you either didn't read down far enough, or didn't read closely enough. "Lord of the Rings:The Two Towers" is under 'Scripts' at the bottom of the page.
I drink coffee first for the taste, then the caffein, not the other way around.
And you're looking for instant coffee? All instant coffee tastes like shit, relatively speaking. Buy a percolator, or if that's not your thing, a small espresso machine. If you're dead set on instant, I find the more expensive it is, the better it tastes.
It requires advance preparation, but an alternative to espresso machines, percolators, or small drip units is The Toddy. It's sort of a drip-filter cone on massive steroids, using a cold-brew process to extract the flavor from the coffee without getting the acids and oils along with it. The process of making it is simple -- you put a pound of coffee into the brewing container, add nine cups of water, and let it sit for twelve hours, then drain into the decanter, then you stick the decanter into your refrigerator. To make coffee, you add one part toddy to three parts boiling water -- so making a cup of coffee is as quick as heating water in your microwave or on the stove. Almost all the convenience of instant, with better taste than hot-brewed coffee.
Shortly after I bought mine, I performed an experiment by buying blue-stripe coffee (aka the cheapest generic I could find) at the supermarket, and brewing it in the toddy maker. What I wound up with, while it was clearly cheap coffee (thin, unremarkable flavor), wasn't bitter or oily-tasting. On the other end of the spectrum, when I brewed Celebes Kalossi in the toddy maker, what I got was a rich, full-bodied coffee that was a pleasure to drink.
I remember running across references to this research before; apparently, the research staff, as part of a press conference, decided to stand on the slope when they dumped the ping-pong balls to give the photographers some dramatic photographs. After all, they were just ping-pong balls, right? Too light to do anything, right? Well, if you look at the image sequence one,two, and three, you'll see that the researchers discovered that while one ping-pong ball has a trivial impact, half a million of them is another thing entirely, knocking people off their feet.
The logical next step would be a program that would listen to, and enjoy, the music that other computers write and sing.
Rather than that, write a program that would disparage the music as 'repetetive', 'trite', 'imitative', 'lacking originality', 'formulaic', and other denigrations, and you could eliminate music critics...
KDE and some other window managers organize applications by their function. This probably won't save you time when you know exactly what program you're looking for, but it can be helpful if you are looking for say, a midi player, but you don't know what its called. It also saves the confusion of having your whole screen fill up with application names at once.
Well, given that Windows won't do it for you, there's nothing keeping you from reorganizing your Start Menu as a series of cascading menus by creating submenus by functional category, then moving the entries into the appropriate menus. When my Start Menu pushed over into a second column, I did just that, consolidating applications by function to keep the main menu well within a single column. Makes things a lot easier to drill down to.
In the rare case where it does not, hollywood generally pays for the rights ANYWAY to avoid a lawsuit and bad publicity. Avoiding Bad PR is more important for a multi-billion dollar industry which is all about popularity than paying a few bucks for book rights.
Except in cases where the original material is clearly in the public domain, which allows the production company to do whatever they want to with the material. However, this also creates a problem for other people, in that the production company will now have a copyright on a movie presentation, and can use that copyright to threaten legal action against any other company that wants to use the same public-domain source and produce a movie version. We have already seen this in practice in the case of a company which has made a significant pile of money producing animated versions of fairy tales...
Many hospital IT shops are an afterthought especially the ones in long established buildings. The worst I've ever had to work was located in the basement of the hospital, right next to the morgue. There was a constant smell of chemicals used to 'dress' the bodies, in addition to the humid musty smell of any basement. To top it off there was a strong magnetic field from a generator room next to us that caused severe ghosting on all the monitors.
Yes, well, I regard finding out, at the hospital I work IT at, what the radiation-spill protocol was -- from the inside -- within my first week there to be one of the uglier surprises I've had...
In retrospect, the actual incident was trivial -- we had a leak from a pipe in the overhead soaking ceiling tiles and the rug; what made it a radiation spill was that the Drug Testing Lab was on the floor above the room with the leak, it was their drain that was leaking, and the lab is allowed to lose some number of millicuries of radioactive material down the drains per month. But we didn't know that at the time, and got to go through the whole parade -- responders in bunny suits, paper laid out on the floor to protect from additional contamination, radiation scans of the hands and shoes before we were allowed to leave the area, a thyroid scan the next day (radioactive iodine)...
15C on air? You must live at the North Pole, since no amount of air cooling will lower the temperature of the CPU below the room temperature.
Amazing. It is possible to grow up without ever being exposed to the concept of wind chill factor. Admittedly, getting it to work inside a computer case is going to create a significant amount of noise, but if that's a tradeoff you're willing to accept...
Please! Software will be held as firmware (as software already in cars is). Software updates (if any) would be flashed by the garage). I'm sure that software in the car of the future will be as immune from viruses as the software currently in cars.
The software currently in cars is only 'secure' (and the wide availability of 'power' engine-control ROMs shows how easy it is to subvert with physical access) as long as the memory can only be modified if you have physical access to the car. As soon as you allow the software to accept data from outside, you open the door to subversion.
At the very least, government couldn't generate revenue without forcibly extracting it from the people who actually do generate revenue (the market).
Too late; the government already does. Have you looked at what happens if you 'choose' not to pay your income tax? The threat of being taken away against your will and locked up, again against your will, would be felony assault if it weren't a government making it; that sounds like 'forcible extraction' to me...
As I see it, once I've purchased something I've bought it and it's mine.
That's why the right that a creator has in their reproducible creation is called copyright -- the right to control how the creation is copied. When a magazine 'buys' a picture from a photographer, they aren't buying the photograph; they're buying a license to use the image in a particular way, with the limits to that use defined in the contract between the magazine and the publisher. The photographer can narrow down what part of their rights in the image are being extended to the magazine as much as they choose. Or the magazine can insist on buying all rights in perpetuity, where the photographer assigns the copyright to the magazine, which becomes the new copyright holder.
Whether a creator can be considered to have granted copyright using a medium which did not exist at the time the copyright was licensed, and what forms of publication are considered to fall under a single contract are nebulous under the current copyright laws. That is what this case is about. And the court's ruling -- that reproduction of the magazine in toto in electronic form is legally a reprinting of the magazine, not a new publication -- is the issue that is likely going to have to go all the way to the Supreme Court before a definitive ruling is obtained. If the ruling is overturned, though, it opens the door for declaring bound annual reprints of magazines to be a separate 'publication', which will change the way that publishers write contracts with piece-workers (non-staff photographers, writers, et al.).
There is a lot of evidence in literature that our eyes have evolved to see the color blue over time. A lot of biblical and Grecian writings describe the sea to be the color of wine (purplish)
Actually, the relevant phrase is "wine-dark sea", and refers not to the color of the water, but the observation that, because the Mediterranean falls off into deep water rapidly, the water is comparable in clarity to that of the open ocean, which, because the light hitting the water is not diffused by phytoplankton and sediment, is much darker than the phytoplankton-colored greenish inshore water. Not purplish water, but water that was as dark as wine that had not been 'properly' diluted with water.
The number of critical plaudits for this one is almost unbelievable, in such a usually divided field.
Which, of course, doesn't mean that you aren't going to get the occasional brain-dead reviewer. Now, I already knew that the movie reviewer for my local paper was a twit, but reading his review of RotK made me realize that not only was he a twit, he was a subliterate twit, and have decided to ignore his future columns as being wastes of ink. Go read the article; it's amazing how clueless some people can be.
Well, what I meant was that some weapons might make space fighters rather useless.
And that's entirely possible. However, as we've seen in the miniseries, the type of combat that they're recreating is roughly analogous to modern naval combat, where you have basically two threats to your capital ships -- long-range cruise missiles fired from other naval vessels, and medium-range missiles fired from aircraft. Fighters remain viable as a weapon in order to either shoot down the incoming missile carriers prior to launching their missiles, or force them to fire at extreme range, which gives the targets hard- and soft-kill systems more time to knock them down. In a missile-throwing engagement like this, your goal is to throw enough targets at the defender to roll back their defenses until missiles start to leak through; defensive fighters keep the launching craft far enough out to keep that from being effective.
And if you think about it, this is the next generation up from the TV series, where what you had was essentially WWII naval combat -- the two sides launched aircraft against each other's capital ships, but if you could get in close enough, the capital ships could bombard each other directly (the solenite missiles on the Pegasus). So what they have managed to do with this is create the impression that the Galactica of the TV series exists as the ancestor of the Galactica of the miniseries by showing some of the evolution of military capability and tactics, without having to rely on wordy exposition -- a much more subtle and effective technique.
I couldn't find a nine-button mouse with scroll wheel, but I did find a ten-button trackball with scroll wheel... but the most outrageous mouse I've ever seen was a three-button mouse that also had a ten-key numeric pad and an array of programmable buttons -- something like thirty or forty buttons all told.
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Of course, with a setup like that, you're limited in your choice of video cards; only the Colorgraphics Xentera video card is available in an eight-head model, and that's only available for PCI, and only supports eight displays in analog mode (4 DVI outputs); if you were willing to sack the up/front/right and up/front/left views, though, you could get 9X Media's 1-over-3 monitor configuration and the Xentera GT-4 quad-head card, which supports 4 DVI displays and is available for AGP. Of course, the video card is pricey, but when you're ponying up $7,400 for the four-monitor display unit, what's a $600 video card? Besides, $8,000 for a multiple-monitor gaming configuration that none of your games support is the ne plus ultra of excessive technology -- the mark of the true uber-geek.
Shortly after I bought mine, I performed an experiment by buying blue-stripe coffee (aka the cheapest generic I could find) at the supermarket, and brewing it in the toddy maker. What I wound up with, while it was clearly cheap coffee (thin, unremarkable flavor), wasn't bitter or oily-tasting. On the other end of the spectrum, when I brewed Celebes Kalossi in the toddy maker, what I got was a rich, full-bodied coffee that was a pleasure to drink.
I remember running across references to this research before; apparently, the research staff, as part of a press conference, decided to stand on the slope when they dumped the ping-pong balls to give the photographers some dramatic photographs. After all, they were just ping-pong balls, right? Too light to do anything, right? Well, if you look at the image sequence one,two, and three, you'll see that the researchers discovered that while one ping-pong ball has a trivial impact, half a million of them is another thing entirely, knocking people off their feet.
Well, given that Windows won't do it for you, there's nothing keeping you from reorganizing your Start Menu as a series of cascading menus by creating submenus by functional category, then moving the entries into the appropriate menus. When my Start Menu pushed over into a second column, I did just that, consolidating applications by function to keep the main menu well within a single column. Makes things a lot easier to drill down to.
Yes, well, I regard finding out, at the hospital I work IT at, what the radiation-spill protocol was -- from the inside -- within my first week there to be one of the uglier surprises I've had...
In retrospect, the actual incident was trivial -- we had a leak from a pipe in the overhead soaking ceiling tiles and the rug; what made it a radiation spill was that the Drug Testing Lab was on the floor above the room with the leak, it was their drain that was leaking, and the lab is allowed to lose some number of millicuries of radioactive material down the drains per month. But we didn't know that at the time, and got to go through the whole parade -- responders in bunny suits, paper laid out on the floor to protect from additional contamination, radiation scans of the hands and shoes before we were allowed to leave the area, a thyroid scan the next day (radioactive iodine)...
That's why the right that a creator has in their reproducible creation is called copyright -- the right to control how the creation is copied. When a magazine 'buys' a picture from a photographer, they aren't buying the photograph; they're buying a license to use the image in a particular way, with the limits to that use defined in the contract between the magazine and the publisher. The photographer can narrow down what part of their rights in the image are being extended to the magazine as much as they choose. Or the magazine can insist on buying all rights in perpetuity, where the photographer assigns the copyright to the magazine, which becomes the new copyright holder.
Whether a creator can be considered to have granted copyright using a medium which did not exist at the time the copyright was licensed, and what forms of publication are considered to fall under a single contract are nebulous under the current copyright laws. That is what this case is about. And the court's ruling -- that reproduction of the magazine in toto in electronic form is legally a reprinting of the magazine, not a new publication -- is the issue that is likely going to have to go all the way to the Supreme Court before a definitive ruling is obtained. If the ruling is overturned, though, it opens the door for declaring bound annual reprints of magazines to be a separate 'publication', which will change the way that publishers write contracts with piece-workers (non-staff photographers, writers, et al.).
Actually, the relevant phrase is "wine-dark sea", and refers not to the color of the water, but the observation that, because the Mediterranean falls off into deep water rapidly, the water is comparable in clarity to that of the open ocean, which, because the light hitting the water is not diffused by phytoplankton and sediment, is much darker than the phytoplankton-colored greenish inshore water. Not purplish water, but water that was as dark as wine that had not been 'properly' diluted with water.
Actually, it's Never Twice the Same Color. A little less of proper English, but the initialism works cleaner.
Which, of course, doesn't mean that you aren't going to get the occasional brain-dead reviewer. Now, I already knew that the movie reviewer for my local paper was a twit, but reading his review of RotK made me realize that not only was he a twit, he was a subliterate twit, and have decided to ignore his future columns as being wastes of ink. Go read the article; it's amazing how clueless some people can be.
The Tomahawk's warhead does make for (if you will pardon the clicheed phrase) the 'mother of all DOS attacks', though...
And that's entirely possible. However, as we've seen in the miniseries, the type of combat that they're recreating is roughly analogous to modern naval combat, where you have basically two threats to your capital ships -- long-range cruise missiles fired from other naval vessels, and medium-range missiles fired from aircraft. Fighters remain viable as a weapon in order to either shoot down the incoming missile carriers prior to launching their missiles, or force them to fire at extreme range, which gives the targets hard- and soft-kill systems more time to knock them down. In a missile-throwing engagement like this, your goal is to throw enough targets at the defender to roll back their defenses until missiles start to leak through; defensive fighters keep the launching craft far enough out to keep that from being effective.
And if you think about it, this is the next generation up from the TV series, where what you had was essentially WWII naval combat -- the two sides launched aircraft against each other's capital ships, but if you could get in close enough, the capital ships could bombard each other directly (the solenite missiles on the Pegasus). So what they have managed to do with this is create the impression that the Galactica of the TV series exists as the ancestor of the Galactica of the miniseries by showing some of the evolution of military capability and tactics, without having to rely on wordy exposition -- a much more subtle and effective technique.
I couldn't find a nine-button mouse with scroll wheel, but I did find a ten-button trackball with scroll wheel... but the most outrageous mouse I've ever seen was a three-button mouse that also had a ten-key numeric pad and an array of programmable buttons -- something like thirty or forty buttons all told.