So we could switch to nuclear for electric, some plug-in hybrids, coal for liquid fuels and be good to go for hundreds of years. Not even counting our Natural gas reserves.
I was on a Vodaphone data plan while living in Germay.
The man said we had the "all of Europe" plan.
Apparently the UK is not part of Europe. They were kind enough to cut us off at about $5,000 after four days.
We played the "dumb American" excuse card and manages something more reasonable, thankfully.
I told this to a colleage and he had a similar problem in Dubai, but he ended up paying it.
International roaming can quickly become crazy expensive.
In general I advocate a "bounce you to the next level" system with some minor penalty if you go over your minutes. On data, they really need a much better way of letting you know what is going on. The Vodaphone system had a software meter to count usage, but it was useless if you used the device with multiple laptops.
They have two awesome sister technical museums near Frankfurt/Stuttgart. Sinsheim has planes (both supersonic passenger planes) and the Buran is at the Speyer along with more space stuff. Both have a good amount of military stuff and tons of autos. Trains. Model trains. Chainsaws. Sewing machines. Steam Engines. Automatic organs. Motorcycles. A lot of the planes are set up so you can crawl around in them, and you can get very close to a lot of the cars.
Also, they are simple museums, not a lot of glitz or reading. Here is a car, model, year. Here are some more.
However, the best part may be the rides. Germans have a different sense of liability. They have crazy rides that are not supervised, very much buyer beware. Six story steel tube slides. Self loading roller coasters and go-carts. The best was a boat jump thing that winches you up a include, then drops you down a rail into a pool. Awesome fun.
I knew some guys in college that did a wire + brick trick into a transformer station. Left an impact on them, as they freaked out because of the reward announced for them. But a bunch of kids had an excuse to miss their final exam the next morning...
I saw a transformer blow from lightning right in front of me once. Amazing show!
Every kid should have a pole-electrician come and tell war stories. The guy in the bucket that had to watch his buddy fry to death, knowing if he touched him he would die. The guy that had to run from a transformer full of hot oil that exploded and killed his buddy right next to him. Electricity is scary.
So this doesn't allow _you_ to backup your Blu ray discs.
Yet.
I remember excitedly reading about this great "mp3" compression algorithm back in the early 90s that would help squeeze down the audio contents of a 700 MB (!!) audio CD into more manageable chunks of a few MB each. But back when a HD was still 10s of MBs and expensive, this seemed worthless.
Thanks. I was thinking about using clickers this Fall, but now I probably won't.
I don't take attendance, but I do hand back papers to individual students (they can't pick up their buddies papers). It is just as good as attendance.
As for technology, I tried using a tablet last year. The resolution was so bad the notes looked worse than usual. Plus students stopped taking notes and coming to class as a side effect. I went back to chalk talks...
2) You missed my point most spectacularly. Until a real bullet hits that vest, there is no proof that it can deflect bullets.
You missed my point as well. Given the choice between wear the vest you have or don't wear the vest, I would wear the vest. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. I don't need proof before I wear it if it is what I have right now and I assume it at least helps to some extent. Maybe it is a placebo to help calm the public, but that also helps in a way...
As for entrapment, it is still legal AFAIK. Why shouldn't DHS put together a ihateamerica.com honeypot to collect intel on evil-doers?
As for 9/11 truthers, how can W both simultaneously the most derided president in recent memory for limited intellectual ability, yet at the same time the mastermind of some sinister plot to force us into a war on terror? Do we quickly forget about the first WTC bombing, the embassy and barracks bombings, and the Cole? Is the WTC attack that far-fetched, given the history of terrorists over the last two decades?
It is a balancing act, you balance security with cost (time, money, privacy, convenience).
Someone makes that call at DHS. So now I have to take my shoes off for inspection after the crazy shoe bomber.
Is it unreasonable to have some sort of secondary screening if you set off some set of flags? So you are detained a few minutes. That makes sense.
If the screening does not work, point to a story where a real terrorist made it on the plane with weapons or contraband. Not a test case, a real missed diagnosis case.
And I believe the reason they do extra screening on last minute ticket purchases or changes is they need some time to trickle your name through their information algorithms to see if something hits. Seems reasonable to me, and it is not much of an imposition on you. If you don't like it, you can always drive or walk:-)
There are some plots that have been foiled, but I am not sure checking my shoes at the airport helped.
If you live in a war zone, I would keep my bulletproof vest on. Just because you did not get shot at today does not mean you are safe for tomorrow.
It is about balancing risk and cost. If we wanted no terrorists to take over planes, we could all strip nekkid and handcuff us while on board. Someone has to make a call about how far to go to get some sort of effective deterrent. I personally would go with personal interviews like the Israelis do. A trained psych person can pick up cues just by talking with people. Of course, a trained evil-doer can probably not give off those cues...
I thought I heard cash for flights and one-way are possible indicators of potential issues. I did not dream that one up, you get harassed if you do that these days. just like if you change airlines last minute you get the special search.
I would assume they have some sort of formula to figure this stuff out. Meet n criteria to set off flags or alarms. Of course, correlation does not imply causation, but it can be a starting point or filter.
In fault diagnosis, you have type 1 and type 2 failure. False alarms and missed events. False alarms are annoying, but they are not as deadly as missed events...
So it does not work perfectly, I believe your math. What should we do? Stick our heads in the sand and ignore the threat? Rationalize that you are more likely to die in a car accident, so take no action?
I think people that pay cash for a one-way airline ticket need extra scrutiny.
I think people that move money around internationally through sketchy banks need some examination.
I think people with terrorist ties need some looking at.
If the DHS is set up to fail, they appear to have not had any failures in the last few years. May not be perfect, but maybe it is working?
Opened it in about 30 tabs and a few loaded...
Most amazing disk data recovery ever
It was one of the most iconic and heart-stopping movie images of 2003: the Columbia Space Shuttle ignited, burning and crashing to earth in fragments.
Now, amazingly, data from a hard drive recovered from the fragments has been used to complete a physics experiment - CXV-2 - that took place on the doomed Shuttle mission.
Columbia's fragments were painstakingly and exhaustively collected. Amongst them was a 400MB Seagate hard drive which was in the sort of shape you think it would be in after being in an explosive fire and then hurled to earth from several miles up with a ferocious impact.
The Johnson Space Centre workers analysing the shuttle crash sent it off the CVX-2 (Critical Viscosity of Xenon) experiment engineers, who sent it on to Kroll Ontrack in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to see if the data, any data, could be recovered. For researcher Robert Berg and his team it was the only hope, a terribly slim hope, of salvaging significant data from the experiment looking at Xenon gas flows in microgravity.
The Kroll people managed to recover 90 percent or so of the 400MB of data from the drive with its cracked and burned casing. Now, a few years on, Berg and his team have analysed the data and reported the experiment and its results in the April edition of the Physical Review E journal. These showed that, rather liked whipped cream which changes from a fluid to a near-solid after being whipped or stirred vigorously, the gas Xenon change its viscosity from gas to liquid when similarly treated in very low gravity. The phenomenon of a sudden change in viscosity is called shear thinning.
It was a highly complex experiment needing prologed and detailed analysis of the data on the hard drive to discover the shear thinning effect. But it, like the drive, was eventually found. So ends a twenty-year research project and in doing so helps bring to a finish the dreadful story of the Columbia Space Shuttle mission.
Just at a NSF conference and the keynote speaker tried to pull up a ppbx, not a ppt. It did not work.
I know there are converters for free. I know breaking compatibility helps drive sales. But sometimes, things don't open like you want and most people don't know (or care) why.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, we may, even using it as primary transportation fuel.
We have 250 years at current rates, including about 50% of our electric generation.
http://www.clean-energy.us/facts/coal.htm
Our coal usage for electric is almost exactly that of our transportation needs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USEnFlow02-quads.gif
So we could switch to nuclear for electric, some plug-in hybrids, coal for liquid fuels and be good to go for hundreds of years. Not even counting our Natural gas reserves.
We have hundreds of years of coal.
You can make methanol cheaply from coal. Probably cheaper than gas.
No farmland needed.
You can make H2 from water and electricity, but the conversion efficiency is bad.
You can make H2 from high temp (nuke or solar) cycles for better efficiency.
You need to compress/cool H2 to store it liquid form and that loses efficiency.
You can grow biomass and convert it to liquid hydrocarbons.
There are some methods for converting CO2 to hydrocarbons, but they are usually inefficient.
We are stuck with coal and oil for a few centuries, methinks...
What we need is a google proxy to surf through that would automatically strip malware.
What could go wrong?
Seriously, this Flash / Adobe stuff is crazy. Just browsing a mainstream site with bad adverts can compromise your box these days.
My Treo 700 lasted me days when stuck in Europe without a charger (radio off).
I was fine with the thickness of the Treo, given it could last days on a single charge. I have bee screwed in the afternoon a few times with my Droid.
Maybe a micro DS? Add another LCD when you open it up?
Why do we even have cards / DVDs for games anymore? I thought everything was going download.
I love my droid, but it needs a bigger battery. And 2.2 went a bit wonky on me. But I love it still.
I was on a Vodaphone data plan while living in Germay.
The man said we had the "all of Europe" plan.
Apparently the UK is not part of Europe. They were kind enough to cut us off at about $5,000 after four days.
We played the "dumb American" excuse card and manages something more reasonable, thankfully.
I told this to a colleage and he had a similar problem in Dubai, but he ended up paying it.
International roaming can quickly become crazy expensive.
In general I advocate a "bounce you to the next level" system with some minor penalty if you go over your minutes. On data, they really need a much better way of letting you know what is going on. The Vodaphone system had a software meter to count usage, but it was useless if you used the device with multiple laptops.
Octave is a Matlab clone that now works pretty well. Go make a toolbox or two for octave.
There is a Buran in Germany at the Speyer Technik museum.
http://blog.flightstory.net/681/russian-space-shuttle-buran-transported-to-german-museum/
http://sinsheim.technik-museum.de/node/1327
http://sinsheim.technik-museum.de/en
They have two awesome sister technical museums near Frankfurt/Stuttgart. Sinsheim has planes (both supersonic passenger planes) and the Buran is at the Speyer along with more space stuff. Both have a good amount of military stuff and tons of autos. Trains. Model trains. Chainsaws. Sewing machines. Steam Engines. Automatic organs. Motorcycles. A lot of the planes are set up so you can crawl around in them, and you can get very close to a lot of the cars.
Also, they are simple museums, not a lot of glitz or reading. Here is a car, model, year. Here are some more.
However, the best part may be the rides. Germans have a different sense of liability. They have crazy rides that are not supervised, very much buyer beware. Six story steel tube slides. Self loading roller coasters and go-carts. The best was a boat jump thing that winches you up a include, then drops you down a rail into a pool. Awesome fun.
I knew some guys in college that did a wire + brick trick into a transformer station. Left an impact on them, as they freaked out because of the reward announced for them. But a bunch of kids had an excuse to miss their final exam the next morning...
I saw a transformer blow from lightning right in front of me once. Amazing show!
Every kid should have a pole-electrician come and tell war stories. The guy in the bucket that had to watch his buddy fry to death, knowing if he touched him he would die. The guy that had to run from a transformer full of hot oil that exploded and killed his buddy right next to him. Electricity is scary.
There are plenty of places online selling Doctorates.
One classic claims to convert your "life experiences" into credit for a doctorate, no classes needed.
Heck, you can even become a pope online: http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/popecard.html
So this doesn't allow _you_ to backup your Blu ray discs.
Yet.
I remember excitedly reading about this great "mp3" compression algorithm back in the early 90s that would help squeeze down the audio contents of a 700 MB (!!) audio CD into more manageable chunks of a few MB each. But back when a HD was still 10s of MBs and expensive, this seemed worthless.
The more things change...
Worse than goatse? Example, please...
Thanks. I was thinking about using clickers this Fall, but now I probably won't.
I don't take attendance, but I do hand back papers to individual students (they can't pick up their buddies papers). It is just as good as attendance.
As for technology, I tried using a tablet last year. The resolution was so bad the notes looked worse than usual. Plus students stopped taking notes and coming to class as a side effect. I went back to chalk talks...
What, you can't read two novels a week?
The point is, some people (me) won't install whatever idiotic plugin of the day.
We are stuck with flash and quicktime, they are ubiquitous. That is as far as I go.
I have better things to do than install stuff I don't need from a monopolistic vendor.
Off topic, there are a lot of MS Astroturfers and fanbois defending every misstep. ???
That site doesn't even load! It just wants me to load some software plugin I have never head of. Useless.
Interesting idea. Could a N Korea invasion by the Chinese precipitate a strike on S. Korea some way? They have been allies for decades...
I would have guessed some sort of Taiwan move, but I think the China-Taiwan issue is calming down recently.
2) You missed my point most spectacularly. Until a real bullet hits that vest, there is no proof that it can deflect bullets.
You missed my point as well. Given the choice between wear the vest you have or don't wear the vest, I would wear the vest. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. I don't need proof before I wear it if it is what I have right now and I assume it at least helps to some extent. Maybe it is a placebo to help calm the public, but that also helps in a way...
As for entrapment, it is still legal AFAIK. Why shouldn't DHS put together a ihateamerica.com honeypot to collect intel on evil-doers?
And I don't know about debunking the binary explosives. There were two UK plots that look relevant that apparently were disrupted, but it looks like searches at the airport had nothing to do with it.
http://www.dhs.gov/xabout/stories006.shtm
http://www.dhs.gov/xabout/stories013.shtm
As for 9/11 truthers, how can W both simultaneously the most derided president in recent memory for limited intellectual ability, yet at the same time the mastermind of some sinister plot to force us into a war on terror? Do we quickly forget about the first WTC bombing, the embassy and barracks bombings, and the Cole? Is the WTC attack that far-fetched, given the history of terrorists over the last two decades?
It is a balancing act, you balance security with cost (time, money, privacy, convenience).
Someone makes that call at DHS. So now I have to take my shoes off for inspection after the crazy shoe bomber.
Is it unreasonable to have some sort of secondary screening if you set off some set of flags? So you are detained a few minutes. That makes sense.
If the screening does not work, point to a story where a real terrorist made it on the plane with weapons or contraband. Not a test case, a real missed diagnosis case.
And I believe the reason they do extra screening on last minute ticket purchases or changes is they need some time to trickle your name through their information algorithms to see if something hits. Seems reasonable to me, and it is not much of an imposition on you. If you don't like it, you can always drive or walk
http://www.dhs.gov/xabout/gc_1188408340457.shtm
There are some plots that have been foiled, but I am not sure checking my shoes at the airport helped.
If you live in a war zone, I would keep my bulletproof vest on. Just because you did not get shot at today does not mean you are safe for tomorrow.
It is about balancing risk and cost. If we wanted no terrorists to take over planes, we could all strip nekkid and handcuff us while on board. Someone has to make a call about how far to go to get some sort of effective deterrent. I personally would go with personal interviews like the Israelis do. A trained psych person can pick up cues just by talking with people. Of course, a trained evil-doer can probably not give off those cues...
I thought I heard cash for flights and one-way are possible indicators of potential issues. I did not dream that one up, you get harassed if you do that these days. just like if you change airlines last minute you get the special search.
I would assume they have some sort of formula to figure this stuff out. Meet n criteria to set off flags or alarms. Of course, correlation does not imply causation, but it can be a starting point or filter.
In fault diagnosis, you have type 1 and type 2 failure. False alarms and missed events. False alarms are annoying, but they are not as deadly as missed events...
So it does not work perfectly, I believe your math. What should we do? Stick our heads in the sand and ignore the threat? Rationalize that you are more likely to die in a car accident, so take no action?
I think people that pay cash for a one-way airline ticket need extra scrutiny.
I think people that move money around internationally through sketchy banks need some examination.
I think people with terrorist ties need some looking at.
If the DHS is set up to fail, they appear to have not had any failures in the last few years. May not be perfect, but maybe it is working?
It was one of the most iconic and heart-stopping movie images of 2003: the Columbia Space Shuttle ignited, burning and crashing to earth in fragments.
Now, amazingly, data from a hard drive recovered from the fragments has been used to complete a physics experiment - CXV-2 - that took place on the doomed Shuttle mission.
Columbia's fragments were painstakingly and exhaustively collected. Amongst them was a 400MB Seagate hard drive which was in the sort of shape you think it would be in after being in an explosive fire and then hurled to earth from several miles up with a ferocious impact.
The Johnson Space Centre workers analysing the shuttle crash sent it off the CVX-2 (Critical Viscosity of Xenon) experiment engineers, who sent it on to Kroll Ontrack in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to see if the data, any data, could be recovered. For researcher Robert Berg and his team it was the only hope, a terribly slim hope, of salvaging significant data from the experiment looking at Xenon gas flows in microgravity.
The Kroll people managed to recover 90 percent or so of the 400MB of data from the drive with its cracked and burned casing. Now, a few years on, Berg and his team have analysed the data and reported the experiment and its results in the April edition of the Physical Review E journal. These showed that, rather liked whipped cream which changes from a fluid to a near-solid after being whipped or stirred vigorously, the gas Xenon change its viscosity from gas to liquid when similarly treated in very low gravity. The phenomenon of a sudden change in viscosity is called shear thinning.
It was a highly complex experiment needing prologed and detailed analysis of the data on the hard drive to discover the shear thinning effect. But it, like the drive, was eventually found. So ends a twenty-year research project and in doing so helps bring to a finish the dreadful story of the Columbia Space Shuttle mission.
Just at a NSF conference and the keynote speaker tried to pull up a ppbx, not a ppt. It did not work.
I know there are converters for free. I know breaking compatibility helps drive sales. But sometimes, things don't open like you want and most people don't know (or care) why.
They have a converter for docx to doc, maybe oo can get it to work with wine so open office can automagically open everything? Or maybe it already has docx support?
http://www.oooninja.com/2008/02/office-compatibility-pack-review.html