He was too fucking old to drive Goddamnit!
on
Spies Riding Shotgun
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I really love this part of the article:
The National Transportation Safety Board called for requiring standardized recorders in all light-duty vehicles after it was unable to ascertain what happened when an elderly driver plowed through a farmer's market in Santa Monica, Calif., last year, killing and injuring scores of people.
OK, let me be the first to call it since the NTSB is a bunch of politically correct pussies who don't want to piss off the fucking geezers in the AARP. The guy who caused this accident was too fucking old to drive, OK! He was 86 years old, according to this article he had "... a medical condition called a "second-degree heart block" that can cause the heart to stop beating for several seconds.", raising the question of why we are letting someone who has a bad heart that can stop beating during times of stress drive a motor vehicle. This guy's reflexes were gone, he couldn't adequately control the pedals because he had had hip replacement surgeries he might have had cognitive deficits as well as severe visual ones. He was just too fucking old to operate a motor vehicle, and guess what! There's millions more like him out there. Old folks are incredibly dangerous behind the wheel. We don't need black boxes in every car, we need annual vision, reaction and cognition testing for all drivers over 70 years old, and those who don't pass lose their licenses right then and there. While we're at it we can strip the licenses of anyone who has more than one DUI or who causes an accident where someone loses life or limb, this would go a long way towards making our roads a lot safer.
Does this suck if you're one of the old people in question? Well yes it does, but I find it interesting that the people who whine about restricting the driving privileges of the elderly have no problem with restricting the driving privileges of teenagers. Admittedly teenagers are bad drivers, but they're going to get better as they age, someone who's 16 years old will probably be a better and safer driver in 10 years when they're 26, the same cannot be said for a 70 year old. And while it might suck for elderly drivers to lose their licenses it kind of sucks for the rest of us when they lose control of a vehicle and kill 10 people and send 63 more to the hospital or in my case fail to yield right of way on a sunny day, plow into my motorcycle and cost me my left leg below the knee.
This is an electrostatic inertial confinment fusion device. They have been built as neutron sources. I've always thought that someone should do some more research on electrostatic fusion. I'd throw a few bucks their way to help build one if they had a way of taking donations.
There was a joke about that on the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. It was that the three astronauts rode to the ceremony commemorating the landing in a limousine and while Aldrin and Armstrong accepted the award the limousine drove around in circles in the parking lot with Michael Collins inside.
All in all I'd still take the opportunity to get that close to the moon. I'm amazed that Collins, who had been offered the chance to land on the moon in a later Apollo flight, turned it down.
Oh man. Posts like this make me regret that you can only give someone five mod points per post in/..
This is an awesome idea.
on
Internet Hunting
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
The military should figure out how to do this in Fallujah. Build an APC with a bunch of guns on it that could be remotely controlled via the internet. Then they could sell of time slots that would allow people to run around in Fallujah and kill insurgents.
they're getting more use out of the big scope at Palomar. Both Palomar and Lick, which until the 1980s housed the largest telescopes in the world (200 inch and 120 inch respectively) have been impacted by light pollution from encroaching urban areas and air pollution. But here's a way to use these scopes for something that can't be affected much by either. Cool!
Man, they sure do. I'm getting a chubby looking at this site. I might have to touch myself, I don't know what it is about really expensive pictures of vacuum tubes but for whatever reason I find looking at them really exciting.
I can't believe people take the attitude you're expressing here. Do you realize Mansanto has already developed and patented a technology that has been called "terminator"? The technology can be used across a wide species to introduce the characteristic of plants producing sterile seeds. They will bring that tech to market, once the idea of patenting plants takes root. I can't wait until that trait escapes into the wild.
It seems as if this would be self limiting. Plant is infected with gene to make sterile seeds, plant produces sterile seeds, plant does not propagate to next generation, gene is gone.
On the other hand the fact that Bremer and the CPA have bought Iraq into compliance with our IP laws is just one more sign that the Iraq war had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein or WMD and instead had to do with the US getting a larger foothold in the middle east.
I believe the Economist politically has a similar readership demographic to./ as well.
Do you believe any other patently stupid things as well? Do you believe that I can sell you the title to the Brooklyn Bridge? Have you ever picked up an issue of The Economist? Obviously not, if you had you never would have made the stupidly ignorant statement that you did above. Go look at the front and rear sections of The Economist where companies and institutions advertise for jobs. The people they're looking for are typically high powered finance and business types and not retarded MSCE wannabees such as yourself.
Why don't you go back to smearing shit on the walls and watching Fox News? They can distort and you can comply and leave the complex issues to your betters.
As people are upgrading, the phrase "no layer-change pause" will become the marketing mantra of the blue-laser crowd.
Hardware buffering of the MPEG3 stream to prevent layer change pauses is a lot cheaper than a new and incompatible technology, and most DVD players seem to have it already.
That what you get when some jr. programmers make the adjunct software in a company where it takes forever to purchase anything!
It can't take that long to purchase anything at Micro$oft. Daniel Feussner somehow managed to get nine million dollars worth of software purchased internally for his group which he then flogged on eBay. Of course Feussner later
died of ethylene glycol (antifreeze) poisoning so you have to wonder if the programmer who made this mistake will end up having the same thing happen to him.
As radical as it may seem, perhaps the journalists studied enough history in College to remember all the times when the general view of accepted science was horribly wrong. We're pretty sure now that the world is neither flat nor at the center of the universe.
You're giving journalists way too much credit. Most "journalists" are cowardly, lazy, stupid good for nothing hacks who don't have the balls to call bullshit on the claims being presented to them by various spokesmen for various causes. The primary rule of most American journalism, which I heard first from Don Pember, a professor in the school of communications at the University of Washington, is "if it bleeds, it leads". The people who major in communications at most major universities are morons, don't believe me, check out the quality and credibility of journalism in your average campus newspaper. BTW, "college" is not a proper noun and you "lose" your funding and credibility, not "loose" it. Are you a journalism major? Or perhaps education? Just curious.
There's one other group that you've forgotten about, although everyone of them that I've met would love to get out of the business, and that's prosthetists and the companies that make prosthetic limbs. Somewhere around 60 percent of all lower limb amputations are caused by diabetic complications, I'm a lower limb amputee (Donorcycle accident) and I've met a lot of diabetics who have lost their legs from diabetic complications and it's a damned hard thing, because even a minor injury to the foot or lower limb of a diabetic who is otherwise healthy can eventually cause limb loss.
and I'll say it again. SliMP3. This is a player controlled by either a PC running Doze, a Macintosh running OS/X or a Linux system. It has digital and audio outs and works with your existing PC/Mac/Linux based solution to find your music files and stream them over the network to the player. It also allows you to stream streaming media stations using MP3 (not WM or RAM unfortunately, so no BBC) from your computer to the player. I have one of these hooked up to my clock radio and it's fantastic. Plus, as a bonus, the volume control goes up to 11 for that extra bit of loudness you can't get with other streaming media solutions.
Firstly the numbers that Ballmer quotes are probably bullshit, TCO numbers are computed using a specialized form of mathematics where the operations exist in a mathematical field called "The Bullshit Plane" So you have the field of integers, the field of complex numbers and then the field of bullshit numbers where TCO numbers, presidential polling, WiFi access point range and Best Buy extended service contracts are computed.
But that aside the reason why I as an IT guy am not impressed by Windows is that it is difficult to administer remotely (when Microsoft shows me a version of Windows that I can admin over a 9600 BPS serial link with a CLI I'll be interested) and the fact that I don't want to be Microsoft's bitch. If I don't like IBM's Linux solution I can buy from HP or SGI. If I don't like Microsoft Windows I'm stuck with it.
Microsoft's history of price increases is also an issue. When Windows NT 3.51 came out I could purchase it for $95 dollars a license at Academic discount, NT 4.0 cost 135 dollars, Windows 2000 and XP are $165. Microsoft will counter that Windows XP is more functional than NT was and that that justifies the extra price, but my hardware is more functional than it was 8 years ago when NT 3.51 came out and it's cheaper, why hasn't Microsoft's operating system followed the same evolution? (that's a rhetorical question, but in case you're confused it's because they have a monopoly) In addition I take all of Microsoft's claims of increased functionality driving software price with a grain of salt as a lot of what those new releases deliver is bug fixes over the prior version.
Even if Microsoft can deliver solutions for the same price as Linux a lot of companies are going to look at Microsoft's recent history and say "Do we really want to be their bitches?" and when the answer is "no", go with that Linux solution.
will be able to use the money that they save by deploying Linux to purchase more CCTV cameras, or maybe on a PR campaign to convince everyone that Blind Man Blunkett's ID cards are a good idea!
Here in America of course adoption of Linux will allow the US government to spend more money on covering the breasts of statues, so as not to offend John Ashcroft, and they'll be able to give more money to Halliburton. Wheeeee!
If you have a direct wire between two points you have three points of failure, the wire, the transmitter or the receiver. These are relatively predictable. It seems that with a packetized communications bus you also have the specter of a failure mode involving service dropping below a certain threshold. It would be cool if you could design an automotive control bus that would allow for signalling and control and then just be able to plug things into it. Want a nav system? Plug it in? Want to pipe your cell phone over the audio system? Plug it in (or connect via Bluetooth), need a tire pressure sensor? Plug it in. Hook the brakes up to it, steering, accelerator and everything else without having to worry about designing specific linkages or control systems.
But I have a piece of cool tech in my car that you
can't get in Europe or Japan. It's a Ruger KP90DC, eight shots of.45 lovin, and as soon as they're released I'm putting a set of Crimson Trace lasergrips on it. So if I see some moron driving down the road and playing Doom III or watching reruns of Friends on his center console monitor I can bust a couple of caps into him and improve road safety.
There was a really good article in Air and Space about 15 or 16 years ago on Project Pluto. Man I would have loved to work on this thing, no candy-assed environmental impact statements, just fire that sucker up and go! And what about the "can-do" mentality of the USAF in the 1950's? When told that the reactor would spew radioactive crap all over the place as a consequence of its disintegrating during flight was the Air Force deterred? Hell no! They recognized that this wasn't a bug, it was a feature! The USAF planned to have the rocket fly around the USSR after it dropped its bombs spewing radioactive exhaust and flattening the landscape with Mach 4+ shockwaves until it fell out of the sky. Talk about making lemonade when life hands you lemons!
Of course the big problem with this was flight testing. They couldn't guarantee that the damned thing wouldn't just take off on its own during a flight test and head towards Las Vegas or Los Angeles, one of the engineers they interviewed for the article said that this would be like a "flying Chernobyl". Testing at sea was considered but by this time ICBM technology had progressed and the nascent environmental sensibilities of the time made people queasy about dumping 15 or 20 nuclear reactors into the ocean as part of a flight test program. Still, what a project! Damn! Men were men back then!
Ever been tempted to track the random people who attempt to hack/spam you, and beat them senseless?
Yes, and I've thought of doing more than that. I wonder how the cracking community would respond if one of their members, such as the Russian guy mentioned in this article, were slowly tortured on a video that was then distributed over the net. I think if you were to take one of these guys and cut his fingers off with a pair of bolt cutters, and then burn his eyes out with a torch, and then deafen him by playing 100 decibel music into his ears as well as cutting his balls off and scarring his body by writing "We 0wnz0r you" on his body with a paintbrush dipped in acid that perhaps these crackers might think about finding honest work.
There is not a single cyberpunk or SF writer who
on
Flying By Brain
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· Score: 2, Funny
could have come up with anything better than the first line of the article. As good as, yes, but better? No.
Somewhere in Florida, 25,000 disembodied rat neurons are thinking about flying an F-22.
Followed by much German laughter, drinking of beer and an invasion of France through the low countries.
Re:I used to be down on solar power until hurrican
on
Solar Shingles
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· Score: 2, Informative
Solar cells typically take more energy to manufacture than they produce over the lifetime of the cell so from an efficiency standpoint they are a waste of energy.
BZZZZZZZTTTTT! BULLSHIT ALERT! BULLSHIT ALERT! I've seen this claim made more than once on Slashdot. Unfortunately I've never seen one single shred of evidence to back it up. Do you have any sources for this? I can find at least one paper on Google that says that this is bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
The National Transportation Safety Board called for requiring standardized recorders in all light-duty vehicles after it was unable to ascertain what happened when an elderly driver plowed through a farmer's market in Santa Monica, Calif., last year, killing and injuring scores of people.
OK, let me be the first to call it since the NTSB is a bunch of politically correct pussies who don't want to piss off the fucking geezers in the AARP. The guy who caused this accident was too fucking old to drive, OK! He was 86 years old, according to this article he had "... a medical condition called a "second-degree heart block" that can cause the heart to stop beating for several seconds.", raising the question of why we are letting someone who has a bad heart that can stop beating during times of stress drive a motor vehicle. This guy's reflexes were gone, he couldn't adequately control the pedals because he had had hip replacement surgeries he might have had cognitive deficits as well as severe visual ones. He was just too fucking old to operate a motor vehicle, and guess what! There's millions more like him out there. Old folks are incredibly dangerous behind the wheel. We don't need black boxes in every car, we need annual vision, reaction and cognition testing for all drivers over 70 years old, and those who don't pass lose their licenses right then and there. While we're at it we can strip the licenses of anyone who has more than one DUI or who causes an accident where someone loses life or limb, this would go a long way towards making our roads a lot safer.
Does this suck if you're one of the old people in question? Well yes it does, but I find it interesting that the people who whine about restricting the driving privileges of the elderly have no problem with restricting the driving privileges of teenagers. Admittedly teenagers are bad drivers, but they're going to get better as they age, someone who's 16 years old will probably be a better and safer driver in 10 years when they're 26, the same cannot be said for a 70 year old. And while it might suck for elderly drivers to lose their licenses it kind of sucks for the rest of us when they lose control of a vehicle and kill 10 people and send 63 more to the hospital or in my case fail to yield right of way on a sunny day, plow into my motorcycle and cost me my left leg below the knee.
All in all I'd still take the opportunity to get that close to the moon. I'm amazed that Collins, who had been offered the chance to land on the moon in a later Apollo flight, turned it down.
It seems as if this would be self limiting. Plant is infected with gene to make sterile seeds, plant produces sterile seeds, plant does not propagate to next generation, gene is gone.
On the other hand the fact that Bremer and the CPA have bought Iraq into compliance with our IP laws is just one more sign that the Iraq war had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein or WMD and instead had to do with the US getting a larger foothold in the middle east.
Do you believe any other patently stupid things as well? Do you believe that I can sell you the title to the Brooklyn Bridge? Have you ever picked up an issue of The Economist? Obviously not, if you had you never would have made the stupidly ignorant statement that you did above. Go look at the front and rear sections of The Economist where companies and institutions advertise for jobs. The people they're looking for are typically high powered finance and business types and not retarded MSCE wannabees such as yourself.
Why don't you go back to smearing shit on the walls and watching Fox News? They can distort and you can comply and leave the complex issues to your betters.
Hardware buffering of the MPEG3 stream to prevent layer change pauses is a lot cheaper than a new and incompatible technology, and most DVD players seem to have it already.
It can't take that long to purchase anything at Micro$oft. Daniel Feussner somehow managed to get nine million dollars worth of software purchased internally for his group which he then flogged on eBay. Of course Feussner later died of ethylene glycol (antifreeze) poisoning so you have to wonder if the programmer who made this mistake will end up having the same thing happen to him.
You're giving journalists way too much credit. Most "journalists" are cowardly, lazy, stupid good for nothing hacks who don't have the balls to call bullshit on the claims being presented to them by various spokesmen for various causes. The primary rule of most American journalism, which I heard first from Don Pember, a professor in the school of communications at the University of Washington, is "if it bleeds, it leads". The people who major in communications at most major universities are morons, don't believe me, check out the quality and credibility of journalism in your average campus newspaper. BTW, "college" is not a proper noun and you "lose" your funding and credibility, not "loose" it. Are you a journalism major? Or perhaps education? Just curious.
But that aside the reason why I as an IT guy am not impressed by Windows is that it is difficult to administer remotely (when Microsoft shows me a version of Windows that I can admin over a 9600 BPS serial link with a CLI I'll be interested) and the fact that I don't want to be Microsoft's bitch. If I don't like IBM's Linux solution I can buy from HP or SGI. If I don't like Microsoft Windows I'm stuck with it.
Microsoft's history of price increases is also an issue. When Windows NT 3.51 came out I could purchase it for $95 dollars a license at Academic discount, NT 4.0 cost 135 dollars, Windows 2000 and XP are $165. Microsoft will counter that Windows XP is more functional than NT was and that that justifies the extra price, but my hardware is more functional than it was 8 years ago when NT 3.51 came out and it's cheaper, why hasn't Microsoft's operating system followed the same evolution? (that's a rhetorical question, but in case you're confused it's because they have a monopoly) In addition I take all of Microsoft's claims of increased functionality driving software price with a grain of salt as a lot of what those new releases deliver is bug fixes over the prior version.
Even if Microsoft can deliver solutions for the same price as Linux a lot of companies are going to look at Microsoft's recent history and say "Do we really want to be their bitches?" and when the answer is "no", go with that Linux solution.
Here in America of course adoption of Linux will allow the US government to spend more money on covering the breasts of statues, so as not to offend John Ashcroft, and they'll be able to give more money to Halliburton. Wheeeee!
If you have a direct wire between two points you have three points of failure, the wire, the transmitter or the receiver. These are relatively predictable. It seems that with a packetized communications bus you also have the specter of a failure mode involving service dropping below a certain threshold. It would be cool if you could design an automotive control bus that would allow for signalling and control and then just be able to plug things into it. Want a nav system? Plug it in? Want to pipe your cell phone over the audio system? Plug it in (or connect via Bluetooth), need a tire pressure sensor? Plug it in. Hook the brakes up to it, steering, accelerator and everything else without having to worry about designing specific linkages or control systems.
Do not taunt "Super fun happy propulsion device"!
But I have a piece of cool tech in my car that you can't get in Europe or Japan. It's a Ruger KP90DC, eight shots of .45 lovin, and as soon as they're released I'm putting a set of Crimson Trace lasergrips on it. So if I see some moron driving down the road and playing Doom III or watching reruns of Friends on his center console monitor I can bust a couple of caps into him and improve road safety.
Of course the big problem with this was flight testing. They couldn't guarantee that the damned thing wouldn't just take off on its own during a flight test and head towards Las Vegas or Los Angeles, one of the engineers they interviewed for the article said that this would be like a "flying Chernobyl". Testing at sea was considered but by this time ICBM technology had progressed and the nascent environmental sensibilities of the time made people queasy about dumping 15 or 20 nuclear reactors into the ocean as part of a flight test program. Still, what a project! Damn! Men were men back then!
Yes, and I've thought of doing more than that. I wonder how the cracking community would respond if one of their members, such as the Russian guy mentioned in this article, were slowly tortured on a video that was then distributed over the net. I think if you were to take one of these guys and cut his fingers off with a pair of bolt cutters, and then burn his eyes out with a torch, and then deafen him by playing 100 decibel music into his ears as well as cutting his balls off and scarring his body by writing "We 0wnz0r you" on his body with a paintbrush dipped in acid that perhaps these crackers might think about finding honest work.
Somewhere in Florida, 25,000 disembodied rat neurons are thinking about flying an F-22.
It's just such a great hook.
Warum heisst Canada, "Canada"?
Weil da sind keiner da!
Followed by much German laughter, drinking of beer and an invasion of France through the low countries.
BZZZZZZZTTTTT! BULLSHIT ALERT! BULLSHIT ALERT! I've seen this claim made more than once on Slashdot. Unfortunately I've never seen one single shred of evidence to back it up. Do you have any sources for this? I can find at least one paper on Google that says that this is bullshit.