that improves safety in zero visibility conditions and a general improvement in situational awareness, reducing the risk of friendly fire casualties.
Something like this is needed, since bright orange reflective paint always doesn't work, orders from ground control are sometimes ignored, "extreme weather conditions" like a sunny desert day have an effect, and "extreme differences in language" between english and whatever A10 pilots from the USA speak (Ebonics?) take their toll. A heads up display that says "DON'T FIRE - IT'S A BRITISH TANK YOU ARSEHOLE" may be useful.
No one from the USA even bothered to turn up to the inquest. Somewhere out there is probably a couple of A10s with little union jacks painted on the side.
Since the X-Files has come on the air belief in these psuedo science ideas has increased dramatetically.
It's just more visable. Almost everyone here will scoff at the idea of "magnetic water" curing things, since that is a recent scam. Many will not scoff at the idea of "ley lines", something that has "always been here" since 1923 (when the term was coined to describe ancient roads), and other scams that have appeared since. For some reason, a cult attitude to "natural" products has developed - ie. if it is natural it must be good for you. Living in a country where natural critters kill the occasional tourist I've managed to avoid that mindset.
I suspect that the people that use tarot cards or fall for the latest snake-oil cure (or tell you about their past lives - no one was ever middle class in a former life, they were either slave-girl to the emperor or the empress) would be doing it with or without the X files.
The great thing about the X files is that if anyone talks about almost any kind of psudo-spiritual-scientific bullshit you can stop them by saying - "Yeah, I saw that on the X-files too".
"Invincible ignorance" is certainly a problem. Well educated people are not trusted as messengers. Elmo is.
A lot of this is discussed in Carl Sagan's 'A Demon Haunted World' which I highly recommend reading.
The Greg Egan short story "Silver Fire" is another good comment on an ignorant modern society.
It will eat up loads of your time, overall costing your company more than it would to just pay more for each system.
It isn't something that can get an instant answer.
It depends on your technical competance, whether you are on salary or wages, and what the monetary consequences of your lost time are to the company. Also, the consequences of lost production when a PC dies should be considered. If you can drop everything for an hour to fix a dead PC and get back to your real job later, then the machines will probably spend a lot less time out of action than if you had a service contract. If a single component dies you can replace it in a very short time - or you could wait for an entire replacement box (without your in-house software on it) to turn up.
If you roll your own, any system that crashes will be pinned on YOU, and you alone. I know that's not a situation that I'd like to be in. Would you?
That's life. If an engineer builds a bridge that is outstanding in every way they will get a little brass plaque with their name on it. If it falls down they go to jail. Avoiding blame is a game best left to those in politics, the rest of us have to get things done.
If it was me in my former position doing it, it would be cheaper for me to do the sixty boxes, then go back to my real job, doing occasional support every now and again. The guy that actually was doing that task (building and maintaining about 150 PCs) was probably doing it for about half of what it would cost for me to do it.
What's your salary/the salary of the people that will have to build 60 boxes? How long will it take?
A very good point - it will all depend on volume. I have a relative that is a medical specialist, so his time is worth an enormous amount per hour. It was cost effective for him to drive for a couple of hours, get the hardware and software for five PCs for his practice, assemble them, and install all the software. Instead he could have shelled out an extra 30% for boxes that he would still have to install software on - plus video capture cards and other gear to talk to his medical equipment.
If he had wanted a dozen PCs it would be worth it to get someone else to do it. I don't know about the USA situation, but here the price of the whole is often a huge amount more than the price of the parts, and post sales support is almost a mythical beast. Also, the wage cost of someone here that can competantly put together the PCs is around $6US per hour. A postgraduate student in almost any technical field would have assembled PCs in enough weird and wonderful configurations that they could put together an office PC with ease. It isn't as if it is a difficult task (I'm sure most people that are reading this have built at least one PC from parts).
You can imagine a call to Windows tech support from someone using Windows that has had the Start button removed.
A lot of people hide their start buttons, and you have to move the mouse off the bottom/RHS/LHS of the screen (depending on their preference), or have a huge bar taking up 1/3 of the right side of the screen (and manually resize every window that pops up so that it is visable!), or set single click to run applications. Plus there's multiple ways to browse files, and there's no garentee that you'll find even one of those on start menu. Some days the only thing you can do is go Start->Run->cmd.
Windows is not best installed and configured by novices either.
Dual boot could be a problem depending on how it's done
My favourite is a boot floppy for linux. Floppy in for linux, floppy out for all else (then let the NT bootloader go from there if necessary). Almost foolproof - so long as you keeps spare floppies.
As I see it the entire point of an independant testing body is to be independant. You can't make a conflict of interest go away by creating some paperwork. The guy is in the situation where DEKA gives him his orders - they should at least pay him for the privelage. If he does something that upsets his new manager at DEKA enough he will be sacked, and will not get any income until the end of his sabbatical when his job opens up again (unless he is very lucky or the system is such that he can get paid for doing nothing). The honest way to do things would be for him to simply work for them, and that to go on record - instead of him being able to stand up in court and say "I've never been paid by that company".
I worked for a private testing authority fo a while, and at least a couple of times a month someone would ask me to "fix" results. If I'd done it once and word had got out the company would have been screwed - no-one is going to pay for worthless test certificates. Integrety is important in positions such as his. Checks and balances are also very important. At his salary there is unlikely to be anyone with any technical skill whatsoever keeping an eye on him.
This way someone can't come back down the line and say "DEKA paid you to say that"
Instead they can simply say "DEKA told you to say that." He works for DEKA. Who pays him doesn't matter, since he is being paid to work for DEKA.
It's a very good situation for DEKA, but not good for the taxpayers, and is likely to "taint" the career of the person involved. Maybe I've just been reading too much in the papers recently about people in government on trial after being bought by property developers, and I used to live near the house the health department built (the owner didn't live in it, she was in jail).
so they have their inside man making sure everything will work okay.Or am I stretching it too far?
A little, he's not the governments man for a while, so why are they paying him?
He is not working in the governmant interest, but in the interest of DEKA. Their aims will not always coincide, and may conflict, hence the term "conflict of interest".
Ronald Medford, the staff member who made these suggestions, has taken a government-approved sabbatical to work for Kamen's firm, DEKA Research & Development Corp., which created Segway. Medford is the "in-house critic and adviser, having nothing to do with sales and marketing, but only telling us what to do to make products safe," said Gary Bridge, Segway's senior vice president of marketing.
To avoid conflict of interest, Bridge said, the government continues to pay Medford's salary ($138,200 a year) and Medford has promised to recuse himself from any product decisions involving DEKA and Segway when he returns to the CPSC later this year.
So he worked on the approval process, is now working exclusively on the product he approved, and the government (not the company he is working for) is paying his salary. Does anyone else have problems with this? In a lot of places something like this would be looked at carefully to see whether there were job offers during the approval process or other signs of bribery (with the government being stupid enough to pay the bribe). He's not being paid to do his job, he's being paid to be a DEKA employee (his orders longer come from the government)- so DEKA should pay for him.
Without the ability to click handsfree, this thing is utterly worthless.
The article said that you can use key combinations to do it. At last - a use for the unused "windows" keys on the other keyboard (or "print screen" and "scroll lock" on this old one).
For example - the movie "Forrest Gump". Millions paid to see it, and collectively paid far more than the production costs, but the writers were told that it made a loss (and shown specially cooked books to prove it). I suspect that tax is paid on very few movies - does anyone have any figures on "Episode 1"? I suspect the tax records will show, against the evidence of reality, that it didn't make much money at all.
Maybe it will - they HDTV kit they shipped to Australia supports the wrong standard for Australia, so it may be worth looking into if you have a HDTV, 240 volts AC and a pile of PAL format X-box games. So may employees, so much money - you would think that they could get someone to look up which standard is used in the country that they are shipping the boxes to!
Also, a lot of Japanese made TV's support a multitude of TV formats, including both NTSC and PAL. So if the manual says that your TV supports PAL-B/G (as well as the local format) it would work. I suspect that PAL capable TVs would be more expensive in NTSC countries, since NTSC requires less hardware. Feeding 240V into the X-box may be a pain, if you don't already have a transformer that will do this you will end up spending more than you would save. If the region coding of the games is true then that would suck mightily - I suspect that the only region problem would be PAL games vs NTSC games.
As for importing a TV from Australia, it would be cheaper to get one from a country where there actually make the things.
but comparing free software to free market capitalism is a long stretch
My point was that comparing open source software to communism is such a long stretch that it was originally only seriously suggested by:
1/ Those that consider communism is evil, therefore bundling it in with communism makes it evil. Or
2/ those that consider communism is good, therefore bundling it in with communism makes it good.
Sharing of intelectual property is only a political act to those that see everything as a political act - or those that have had to listen to poeple like that for years. I don't see it as having much to do as either of those two isms - it is a seperate thing of itself.
The first time I remember seeing gnu software described as being communist was in a column by Bob Metcalfe (of ethernet fame) which was his portion of a flame war, but in print and not email.
Speaking of flamewars, if you want to take this offtopic stuff furthur, my shiny new email address that I would be mad to post on slashdot if it was the only one I had is bosto@worldoptions.com.au.
Re:Cloudy Days? =No Power?
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Whay happens when there's a cloudy day on earth
It won't be a problem - just bump up the intensity of the beam and boil those pesky clouds away.
Telsa gave up on broadcast power a century ago due to the inefficiency, and while microwaves can be more closely focused the loss would still be enormous - particularly with some water in the air. Huge dishes may be an answer, but an expensive one.
Anyway - some of that energy will leak into the atmosphere and will result in heating of it.
Some energy will get lost that way if there is any moisture in the air.
How about jets trying to avoid the wandering microwave beam paths
It would depend upon the intensity, the skin of most aircraft would act as a faraday sheild (the pilot may still get fried). Birds and people in the wrong spot would not come equipt with faraday sheilds.
No more than the idea of swapping stuff is capitalism. There is a lot more to both - and without both sharing and swapping we would not be civilised.
Shared intellectual property between indivuals may offend the sensibilities of some business, but they need it to survive in their current form (otherwise they would be unable to get trained staff). Linux has spread and developed the way USENET was supposed to spread scientific knowledge .
Two problems - getting 1% and getting it home
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· Score: 2
First - covering a big portion of the surface, which is going to be in the dark half of the time.
Second - getting the energy to where it will be used. This isn't particularly silly, since the energy could be used to manufacture something on the lunar surface (eg. satellites) which doesn't need to go all of the way home. Manufacturing processes like vapour deposition would work well there on an enormous scale - but at current scales it is a lot easier to use vacuum pumps.
But your criteria also fits other religious organizations
No - it is very recent, half the mysticism comes from A.E. Van Voght short stories and other documented sources. There appears to have been nothing special about Ron Hubberd, no miracles or even documented evidence that he gave a penny to a begger, so he differs from every prophet or saint ever written about. We can ask people alive today about how the con turned from fake psychology to fake religeon.
On that basis I think I can safely say that there is less reality to it than the average X-Files episode. I like my science fiction in print or on the screen, not from people hassling me on street corners.
I will continue to be sceptical of anything that calls itself a religeon that spontaneously appears and seems to only benefit it's leaders. I was sceptical of the "Magnificat Meal" group that split off from the Catholic church near where I live, and it turned out to be a scam benifiting only it's leaders (it imploded last year). On a related note - the Japanese movie "A Taxing Woman Returns" is a very entertaining look at a cult set up to launder money
How is what they do different than what Christianity and Islam do?
Because it's so fake that it is obvious, it's entire history is documented, they cheat, they steal, and they tell people to refuse medical and psychiatric help which leads to premature deaths. Posing as rescue workers at the world trade centre must be worth a jail term for a few of them.
So it's possible the MD's just didn't like the competition...
Scientologists are rabidly opposed to Psychologists, Psychiatrists, and anyone that treats cancer - according to them, having cancer makes you evil, but treatable by paying $ for meditation training.
reconstituted Dianetics as a "religion"
I suspect that was done for tax reasons.
Apparently Hubbard was also an associate of another big conman - Alistair Crowley, hence the badly scripted mystical stuff.
Palpal wouldn't accept my Bankcard or Visa, since my cards were not issued by a bank based in the USA. Automatic teller machines in most parts of the globe will accept them (including the UK, Argentina and Chile) but not paypal. I still don't know whether I'll pay a subscription, but at least now with the credit card option I can if I want to.
you can actually crumble titanium ore with your hands.
Yes, it's called sand. One important source of titanium is the Rutile and Ilmenite in beach sand.
The only thing that makes it twice as strong as steel is making an alloy out of it with some other metal
It is as strong as most steels, but a great deal lighter. As with most metals, it has far better mechanical propeties if it is mixed with something than if it is pure. You have a mixture, a "solid solution", and the other material dissolved in it adds to the strength by making it more difficult to push the crystal structure out of shape - since there are other atoms of a different size in the way. If you have enough of another metal, you can get a lot of small particles of a different composition forming, and these can also make it more difficult to damage the material.
The thing I never found out is: what other metals do you mix it with to make the alloy?
It depends on what you want to use it for. If you want to make cutting tools, then titanium and nitrogen alone are good (ie. the gold coloured coating on a lot of high speed cutting tools). If you want a structural material then Aluminium, Vanadium and Chromium are good things to add. For turbine blades or processing hot and nasty chemicals look up "Nimonic 80" on the net - much better stuff has been developed over the last 30 years, but there is a lot of info about the old established stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
No one from the USA even bothered to turn up to the inquest. Somewhere out there is probably a couple of A10s with little union jacks painted on the side.
I suspect that the people that use tarot cards or fall for the latest snake-oil cure (or tell you about their past lives - no one was ever middle class in a former life, they were either slave-girl to the emperor or the empress) would be doing it with or without the X files.
The great thing about the X files is that if anyone talks about almost any kind of psudo-spiritual-scientific bullshit you can stop them by saying - "Yeah, I saw that on the X-files too".
"Invincible ignorance" is certainly a problem. Well educated people are not trusted as messengers. Elmo is.
The Greg Egan short story "Silver Fire" is another good comment on an ignorant modern society.It depends on your technical competance, whether you are on salary or wages, and what the monetary consequences of your lost time are to the company. Also, the consequences of lost production when a PC dies should be considered. If you can drop everything for an hour to fix a dead PC and get back to your real job later, then the machines will probably spend a lot less time out of action than if you had a service contract. If a single component dies you can replace it in a very short time - or you could wait for an entire replacement box (without your in-house software on it) to turn up.
That's life. If an engineer builds a bridge that is outstanding in every way they will get a little brass plaque with their name on it. If it falls down they go to jail. Avoiding blame is a game best left to those in politics, the rest of us have to get things done.If it was me in my former position doing it, it would be cheaper for me to do the sixty boxes, then go back to my real job, doing occasional support every now and again. The guy that actually was doing that task (building and maintaining about 150 PCs) was probably doing it for about half of what it would cost for me to do it.
If he had wanted a dozen PCs it would be worth it to get someone else to do it. I don't know about the USA situation, but here the price of the whole is often a huge amount more than the price of the parts, and post sales support is almost a mythical beast. Also, the wage cost of someone here that can competantly put together the PCs is around $6US per hour. A postgraduate student in almost any technical field would have assembled PCs in enough weird and wonderful configurations that they could put together an office PC with ease. It isn't as if it is a difficult task (I'm sure most people that are reading this have built at least one PC from parts).
Windows is not best installed and configured by novices either.
My favourite is a boot floppy for linux. Floppy in for linux, floppy out for all else (then let the NT bootloader go from there if necessary). Almost foolproof - so long as you keeps spare floppies.I worked for a private testing authority fo a while, and at least a couple of times a month someone would ask me to "fix" results. If I'd done it once and word had got out the company would have been screwed - no-one is going to pay for worthless test certificates. Integrety is important in positions such as his. Checks and balances are also very important. At his salary there is unlikely to be anyone with any technical skill whatsoever keeping an eye on him.
Instead they can simply say "DEKA told you to say that." He works for DEKA. Who pays him doesn't matter, since he is being paid to work for DEKA.It's a very good situation for DEKA, but not good for the taxpayers, and is likely to "taint" the career of the person involved. Maybe I've just been reading too much in the papers recently about people in government on trial after being bought by property developers, and I used to live near the house the health department built (the owner didn't live in it, she was in jail).
He is not working in the governmant interest, but in the interest of DEKA. Their aims will not always coincide, and may conflict, hence the term "conflict of interest".
For example - the movie "Forrest Gump". Millions paid to see it, and collectively paid far more than the production costs, but the writers were told that it made a loss (and shown specially cooked books to prove it). I suspect that tax is paid on very few movies - does anyone have any figures on "Episode 1"? I suspect the tax records will show, against the evidence of reality, that it didn't make much money at all.
There used to be "tinyX" and I suspect there was a small X add on for the linux router project.
Also - X has been ported to PDAs.
You don't really need the drivers for every video card X supports on your hard drive, that's just the way the binary distributions come.
Also, a lot of Japanese made TV's support a multitude of TV formats, including both NTSC and PAL. So if the manual says that your TV supports PAL-B/G (as well as the local format) it would work. I suspect that PAL capable TVs would be more expensive in NTSC countries, since NTSC requires less hardware. Feeding 240V into the X-box may be a pain, if you don't already have a transformer that will do this you will end up spending more than you would save. If the region coding of the games is true then that would suck mightily - I suspect that the only region problem would be PAL games vs NTSC games.
As for importing a TV from Australia, it would be cheaper to get one from a country where there actually make the things.
1/ Those that consider communism is evil, therefore bundling it in with communism makes it evil. Or
2/ those that consider communism is good, therefore bundling it in with communism makes it good.
Sharing of intelectual property is only a political act to those that see everything as a political act - or those that have had to listen to poeple like that for years. I don't see it as having much to do as either of those two isms - it is a seperate thing of itself.
The first time I remember seeing gnu software described as being communist was in a column by Bob Metcalfe (of ethernet fame) which was his portion of a flame war, but in print and not email.
Speaking of flamewars, if you want to take this offtopic stuff furthur, my shiny new email address that I would be mad to post on slashdot if it was the only one I had is bosto@worldoptions.com.au.
Telsa gave up on broadcast power a century ago due to the inefficiency, and while microwaves can be more closely focused the loss would still be enormous - particularly with some water in the air. Huge dishes may be an answer, but an expensive one.
Some energy will get lost that way if there is any moisture in the air. It would depend upon the intensity, the skin of most aircraft would act as a faraday sheild (the pilot may still get fried). Birds and people in the wrong spot would not come equipt with faraday sheilds.Shared intellectual property between indivuals may offend the sensibilities of some business, but they need it to survive in their current form (otherwise they would be unable to get trained staff). Linux has spread and developed the way USENET was supposed to spread scientific knowledge .
Second - getting the energy to where it will be used. This isn't particularly silly, since the energy could be used to manufacture something on the lunar surface (eg. satellites) which doesn't need to go all of the way home. Manufacturing processes like vapour deposition would work well there on an enormous scale - but at current scales it is a lot easier to use vacuum pumps.
This sort of stuff is peddled by those that say there is only one way to do things and that's my way - all else is evil/communism/insert_name_here.
The idea of sharing knowledge dates back to the start of recorded history (which is shared knowledge).
On that basis I think I can safely say that there is less reality to it than the average X-Files episode. I like my science fiction in print or on the screen, not from people hassling me on street corners.
I will continue to be sceptical of anything that calls itself a religeon that spontaneously appears and seems to only benefit it's leaders. I was sceptical of the "Magnificat Meal" group that split off from the Catholic church near where I live, and it turned out to be a scam benifiting only it's leaders (it imploded last year). On a related note - the Japanese movie "A Taxing Woman Returns" is a very entertaining look at a cult set up to launder money
Anyway, Xenu.net has more, as do the newspapers.
Apparently Hubbard was also an associate of another big conman - Alistair Crowley, hence the badly scripted mystical stuff.
Or maybe not - must have room to swing cat.
Palpal wouldn't accept my Bankcard or Visa, since my cards were not issued by a bank based in the USA. Automatic teller machines in most parts of the globe will accept them (including the UK, Argentina and Chile) but not paypal. I still don't know whether I'll pay a subscription, but at least now with the credit card option I can if I want to.