Volcanoes form when magma forces its way up through a crack in the crust.
You want to send a probe down. See the problem?
Scientist,"Ok, now we'll just head on up to the vent over there and toss the probe in.."
*Rumblings from volcano*
Scientist, "I can't help feeling that I've missed something crucial in my calculations... oh well."
*scientist continues to the edge of the vent, tosses probe in*
Scientist (excitedly),"Right! Now all we do is wait for some data! (Taps laptop) Hmm, there must be a sensor problem, the probe seems to be going upwards.... What's that rumbling noise?"
You're thinking of the square root of 2 songs per second , which is about 1.41 songs per second.
Or maybe you were thinking of floppy disc sizes (1.44MB) and it struck a chord somewhere, causing you to post in error to SlashDot, attracting the inevitable flamage and the comeuppance you deserve, because as we all know, nobody expects The Spanish Inquisition!
Stupid neurons. Always so associative. And it's 6am here, give me a break:-)
I picked it up from somewhere, but a google search for soyuz 5 will get you a link or three.
Fair enough, those things often broke, but they were still rather robust if you treated them badly. I consider a partial re-entry with the heat shield on the wrong end a pretty good case of "operation outside design parameters".
Put your copyrighted file on a website with a click-through EULA:
"Users downloading these songs must agree to pay the copyright owner *1 BILLION* dollars for each song downloaded. (Insert usual boilerplate here) To accept the terms of this agreement , press the "I Agree" button".
Make sure you advertise with google your website and it's file for download. Used a sponsored link if you feel like it.
The following steps:
1) They click through, get file, send cease and desist. 2) Me : "oh, you downloaded my file? Glad you liked it!excuse me, where's my BILLION dollars?" 3) RIAA get their crack legal team out to defend themselves.
End result is either:
1) RIAA proves that click through EULA's are not valid. We can ignore Microsoft and their EULA's all we want after that, with the added happy bonus of using an Evil Corps lawyers against another Evil corp.
or (my personal favorite)
3) Microsoft weighs in on my side with their legal team and I get my billion dollars. Ok, I'll donate a few million to the Gates foundation, and the EFF;-) Again the happy bonus of using an Evil Corps lawyers against another Evil corp.
Maybe we could turn it into a sport - corporation-baiting, here we come!
I dunno , I think that extra zero kind of gives it away, unless you're one of those anal dinner accountants that split everything to the tenth of a cent when carving up the cheque:-)
A few years ago, I finished a job (after 5 years) with about 80,000 in the bank. I used go round prestige car lots in my scruffiest gear and see how long it took for someone to serve me. Then casually ask If I could take their latest and shiniest for a spin.
Normally the answer was no, until I asked for a phone, rang my bank and got it to read my balance out on the speakerphone.
I used to get to drive every car on the lot after that. (and drive em HARD too:-) Then I'd just say "eh!", shrug , and leave. It was great.
Just doing my bit to put the snobs in their place.
(No, in the end I put all the cash on a house instead)
cotton gin : used to help collect cotton , which is used to make cloth, which is then draped suggestively over nekkid models.
internal combustion engine: used primarily along with the wheel to propel props (eg. sports cars) which are then covered suggestively in nekkid models.
See? No matter how you look at it, it all comes back to porn:-)
Or maybe it's just the amazing way the human mind can turn a perfectly useful object into porn.
Yes..... it's just likely that it will be briefly UN-inhabitable if a moderate-sized rock hits. And there's the problem of defining "briefly". Briefly - is it 1 hour when there's some problem with earthly life support? is it 1 Day? 1 Week? It's no good for us here on the ground if things go bad enough to kill everything on earth for 20 minutes and then have conditions revert back to "normal enough to live on". Except for the two people on the ISS there'd be nobody left. At least they could hold out for a month or two and drop back down on a soyuz.
I'd prefer 50 people on the moon, but don't forget the chicks:-)
Most of the new ones will give you several days of stand-by life. Except if you're in the middle of no-frikken-where, or alternatively it seems, in my office.
SOMETHING in the system decided to put a stop to this
init will get the shits if a restarts a process too often in a certain period of time and will kill it off.
(init being the "master" program that the linux kernel loads as boot... it loads everything else. It's normally the first process if you type 'ps ax' at a prompt)
Still cruise control(s) have a few failsafe's in them.
One is that the circuit that controls the actuator is routed through a switch on your brake (and clutch) pedal. This is a separate circuit to the one that already tells your cruise control that you've got your foot on the brake.
Cruise controls will also cut out if they change speed above or below their set speed. Mine's about 20kph... yours may vary.
Finally, cruise control is still dependant upon the ignition switch, as is your ECU. (Except for a small wire for memory backup)
Ringmaster: "Ladies and Gentlemen , let's hear it for the AMAZING COLAMAN! Known throughout the world for his feats of COGNITIVE ABILITY, tonight he will attempt to FACTORISE the number 581102!! That's right FIVE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY ONE THOUSAND, ONE HUNDRED AND TWO, using only his AMAZING COGNITIVE POWERS!!!"
ColaMan : "Ladies and Gentlemen, I will prove that this number is indeed not prime by dividing 581102 by EVERY SINGLE NUMBER GREATER THAN ONE using ONLY my INCREDIBLE COGNITIVE POWERS!!! I WILL NOT REST UNTIL I CAN PROVE, WITHOUT A DOUBT THAT 581102 IS NOT PRIME!!!"
(ColaMan cracks knuckles, limbers up)
ColaMan : "LADIES and GENTLEMEN, I shall now commence my AMAZING FEAT by dividing 581102 by the number 2! Again, I repeat that I am using nothing but my AMAZING COGNITIVE POWERS!!!"
Ringmaster : "Ladies and Gentlemen , can we I have some quiet please, while ColaMan performs this amazing feat."
ColaMan : "Lets see, oh 581102 ends in two, so it's divisible by two!!!!! 581102 IS NOT PRIME!!"
Audience (impressed) : "oooooh!"
ColaMan: "Thank you very much, I'll be here all week! Tell your friends!!"
It's very hard for an ECU to make an engine self destruct on RPM.
As long as there's still a butterfly valve, connected to a cable, connected to an accelerator pedal, driven by *your* foot, you're fine. Mind you those new Audi's are "throttle by wire", but they're *very* redundant.
Selecting 1st gear (via your automatic transmission ECU) whilst at 100kph will generally leave a nice compression skid and a stain on the drivers seat - and a bit of damage if you're unlucky. Picking 2 gears at once in electronically controlled autos is also a nice way to burn your transmission out.
They build them strong - snipped from an entry for soyuz 5:
"Volynov remained behind for what was undoubtedly the most unbelievable re-entry ever survived. The PAO service module of the Soyuz failed to separate after retrofire. While this had occurred on various Vostok and Voskhod flights, and on one Mercury flight, it was a much more serious problem for Volynov, where the module was much larger than a small retropack. Furthermore, once it started reaching the tendrils of the atmosphere, the combined spacecraft sought the most aerodynamically stable position - nose forward, with the heavy descent module with its light metal entry hatch at the front, the less dense service module with its flared base to the back. Volynov at once appraised the situation and considered all possibilities and realised that there was nothing he could really do.
The spacecraft was re-entering air-lock forward and with every minute the G forces increased. Volynov did his duty with all of his strength but this became increasingly difficult since he was hanging in the straps of his seat with the G forces assailing him in the opposite direction from what planned. Soon a strong smell penetrated the cabin - the rubber gaskets of the hermetic seal of the hatch were burning. The hatch had a light covering of heat protective resins, but at the last moment these could not hold out and the vaporised into fumes that immediately spread throughout the cabin. Volynov could remain conscious for only a few seconds after this.
He remained alive when a miracle occurred - a miracle for which he could thank the designers who had included a strong titanium frame which helped the airlock hold out against the onslaught of the superheated plasma. The PAO service module finally separated from the SA re-entry vehicle. The capsule turned around to an aerodynamically stable position at hypersonic speed and the heat shield finally took the brunt of the heating as designed. The spacecraft continued on a 9 G ballistic trajectory. The damage to the capsule resulted in a failure of the soft-landing rockets. The landing was harder than usual and Volynov broke his teeth. The capsule was recovered 2 km SW of Kustani, far short of its aim point, on January 18, 1969 at 07:58 GMT. It would be seven years until Volynov flew again, on Soyuz 21. "
The pilots can certainly tell though. I was on a singapore air flight last year - as we were beginning taxiing, the pilot hits the brakes and says, "Whoever's using that mobile phone, turn it off - NOW. Crew, search the cabin." This was (I kid you not) less than 45 seconds after the Captain had specifically said that phones were not to be used. WTF? Did someone think "Oh, my phone's not allowed to be used? Better ring the office to tell them!"
So yes, they can tell if there's a operating cellphone on board. Maybe they have a little red light marked "Cellphone in Use" on their panel. Certainly seems to piss them off though.
Amen on the hard drive - we have an 85MB connor drive at work that is 12 years old. It's still booted / used 8-10 hours a day to run a DOS PLC control system for our lab and shut off overnight.
Yes, I've made a backup, over IPX via our mars-nwe netware emulator on our file server that connects it to the 'modern' world. It's backed up to a drive that's *one thousand* times larger. Ah, the never-ending march of technology.
Then Iraqi air defense turned out with little more than AAA.
They had the equipment, they just didn't use it for some reason that only they know.
There was some consternation about where all of Iraq's jets and missiles were at the start of the "Drive to Baghdad", because there wasn't any. Yet the Iraquis were out generally harassing the no fly zone on and off with their jets a few days before. Sure , they woulda got shot out of the sky pretty quick, but they coulda had a go. Maybe they're saving them for the next conflict.
This is kinda like the reason I don't moderate -In my profile - "I'd like to moderate, except IE goes beserk if there's more than 20 comments to moderate"
Moderation boxes glitch and redraw all over the window when scrolling, or IE doesn't finish loading the page at all.
Anyone else seen that? Maybe I should submit it to slashdot. "SLASHDOT CRASHES IE!!"... yeah, that'll do.
Just try getting a copy of "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes". An online "video store" would need a small amount of very cheap disk space to store even tripe such as the above. Done right, you'd find VOD to have an incredible selection
It won't be on VOD. The small amount of very cheap disk space will go to another, more popular movie which will be VOD'd much more often and therefore will make more money. Beancounters will find and solve the usage/viewage/price ratio for each movie in their catalog, and you can be sure that the marginal movies will be dropped for more profitable ones. Good news for the mainstream I guess.
It's fine if they know you're on a p2p network, just as long as they can't figure out that the encrypted tcp streams you've been getting from five other people don't magically reassemble into a britney song. I don't know how - no doubt smarter people than I are working on it.
"Those encrypted streams officer? Why , they're just so that my colleagues and I can converse securely and privately about our new RIAA replacement."
Slashdot Mirror
Volcanoes form when magma forces its way up through a crack in the crust.
You want to send a probe down.
See the problem?
Scientist,"Ok, now we'll just head on up to the vent over there and toss the probe in.."
*Rumblings from volcano*
Scientist, "I can't help feeling that I've missed something crucial in my calculations... oh well."
*scientist continues to the edge of the vent, tosses probe in*
Scientist (excitedly),"Right! Now all we do is wait for some data! (Taps laptop) Hmm, there must be a sensor problem, the probe seems to be going upwards.... What's that rumbling noise?"
*volcano proceeds to erupt*
Scientist,"Ahh! it burns! it burns!!"
No, that'd be four songs per second.
:-)
You're thinking of the square root of 2 songs per second , which is about 1.41 songs per second.
Or maybe you were thinking of floppy disc sizes (1.44MB) and it struck a chord somewhere, causing you to post in error to SlashDot, attracting the inevitable flamage and the comeuppance you deserve, because as we all know, nobody expects The Spanish Inquisition!
Stupid neurons. Always so associative. And it's 6am here, give me a break
I picked it up from somewhere, but a google search for soyuz 5 will get you a link or three.
Fair enough, those things often broke, but they were still rather robust if you treated them badly. I consider a partial re-entry with the heat shield on the wrong end a pretty good case of "operation outside design parameters".
Ha! Excellent Idea!
:
:
;-) Again the happy bonus of using an Evil Corps lawyers against another Evil corp.
Put your copyrighted file on a website with a click-through EULA
"Users downloading these songs must agree to pay the copyright owner *1 BILLION* dollars for each song downloaded. (Insert usual boilerplate here) To accept the terms of this agreement , press the "I Agree" button".
Make sure you advertise with google your website and it's file for download. Used a sponsored link if you feel like it.
The following steps
1) They click through, get file, send cease and desist.
2) Me : "oh, you downloaded my file? Glad you liked it!excuse me, where's my BILLION dollars?"
3) RIAA get their crack legal team out to defend themselves.
End result is either:
1) RIAA proves that click through EULA's are not valid. We can ignore Microsoft and their EULA's all we want after that, with the added happy bonus of using an Evil Corps lawyers against another Evil corp.
or (my personal favorite)
3) Microsoft weighs in on my side with their legal team and I get my billion dollars. Ok, I'll donate a few million to the Gates foundation, and the EFF
Maybe we could turn it into a sport - corporation-baiting, here we come!
I dunno , I think that extra zero kind of gives it away, unless you're one of those anal dinner accountants that split everything to the tenth of a cent when carving up the cheque :-)
But that's half the fun!
:-) Then I'd just say "eh!", shrug , and leave. It was great.
A few years ago, I finished a job (after 5 years) with about 80,000 in the bank. I used go round prestige car lots in my scruffiest gear and see how long it took for someone to serve me. Then casually ask If I could take their latest and shiniest for a spin.
Normally the answer was no, until I asked for a phone, rang my bank and got it to read my balance out on the speakerphone.
I used to get to drive every car on the lot after that. (and drive em HARD too
Just doing my bit to put the snobs in their place.
(No, in the end I put all the cash on a house instead)
Allow me:
:-)
cotton gin : used to help collect cotton , which is used to make cloth, which is then draped suggestively over nekkid models.
internal combustion engine: used primarily along with the wheel to propel props (eg. sports cars) which are then covered suggestively in nekkid models.
See? No matter how you look at it, it all comes back to porn
Or maybe it's just the amazing way the human mind can turn a perfectly useful object into porn.
Yes..... it's just likely that it will be briefly UN-inhabitable if a moderate-sized rock hits.
:-)
And there's the problem of defining "briefly".
Briefly - is it 1 hour when there's some problem with earthly life support? is it 1 Day? 1 Week?
It's no good for us here on the ground if things go bad enough to kill everything on earth for 20 minutes and then have conditions revert back to "normal enough to live on". Except for the two people on the ISS there'd be nobody left. At least they could hold out for a month or two and drop back down on a soyuz.
I'd prefer 50 people on the moon, but don't forget the chicks
Most of the new ones will give you several days of stand-by life.
Except if you're in the middle of no-frikken-where, or alternatively it seems, in my office.
Phone (transmitting keep-alives): hello? Helloo? HELLLOOO!
Tower : Speak up, dammit!
*Phone crackles with corona discharge* H-E-L-L-O!
Tower : yeah, thats fine, keep it up.
User (20 minutes later): WTF? Flat again?
SOMETHING in the system decided to put a stop to this
init will get the shits if a restarts a process too often in a certain period of time and will kill it off.
(init being the "master" program that the linux kernel loads as boot... it loads everything else. It's normally the first process if you type 'ps ax' at a prompt)
Good point!
Still cruise control(s) have a few failsafe's in them.
One is that the circuit that controls the actuator is routed through a switch on your brake (and clutch) pedal. This is a separate circuit to the one that already tells your cruise control that you've got your foot on the brake.
Cruise controls will also cut out if they change speed above or below their set speed. Mine's about 20kph... yours may vary.
Finally, cruise control is still dependant upon the ignition switch, as is your ECU. (Except for a small wire for memory backup)
Pity I do not live in either of these countries otherwise surely I would be wetting myself in terror right now ;-)
Seriously, you could get your computer to auto-generate one-time keys for each session and then just say, "Sorry, don't know the keys!"
Ringmaster: "Ladies and Gentlemen , let's hear it for the AMAZING COLAMAN! Known throughout the world for his feats of COGNITIVE ABILITY, tonight he will attempt to FACTORISE the number 581102!! That's right FIVE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY ONE THOUSAND, ONE HUNDRED AND TWO, using only his AMAZING COGNITIVE POWERS!!!"
ColaMan : "Ladies and Gentlemen, I will prove that this number is indeed not prime by dividing 581102 by EVERY SINGLE NUMBER GREATER THAN ONE using ONLY my INCREDIBLE COGNITIVE POWERS!!! I WILL NOT REST UNTIL I CAN PROVE, WITHOUT A DOUBT THAT 581102 IS NOT PRIME!!!"
(ColaMan cracks knuckles, limbers up)
ColaMan : "LADIES and GENTLEMEN, I shall now commence my AMAZING FEAT by dividing 581102 by the number 2! Again, I repeat that I am using nothing but my AMAZING COGNITIVE POWERS!!!"
Ringmaster : "Ladies and Gentlemen , can we I have some quiet please, while ColaMan performs this amazing feat."
ColaMan : "Lets see, oh 581102 ends in two, so it's divisible by two!!!!! 581102 IS NOT PRIME!!"
Audience (impressed) : "oooooh!"
ColaMan: "Thank you very much, I'll be here all week! Tell your friends!!"
Audience : *rapturous applause*
It's very hard for an ECU to make an engine self destruct on RPM.
As long as there's still a butterfly valve, connected to a cable, connected to an accelerator pedal, driven by *your* foot, you're fine. Mind you those new Audi's are "throttle by wire", but they're *very* redundant.
Selecting 1st gear (via your automatic transmission ECU) whilst at 100kph will generally leave a nice compression skid and a stain on the drivers seat - and a bit of damage if you're unlucky. Picking 2 gears at once in electronically controlled autos is also a nice way to burn your transmission out.
They build them strong - snipped from an entry for soyuz 5 :
"Volynov remained behind for what was undoubtedly the most unbelievable re-entry ever survived. The PAO service module of the Soyuz failed to separate after retrofire. While this had occurred on various Vostok and Voskhod flights, and on one Mercury flight, it was a much more serious problem for Volynov, where the module was much larger than a small retropack. Furthermore, once it started reaching the tendrils of the atmosphere, the combined spacecraft sought the most aerodynamically stable position - nose forward, with the heavy descent module with its light metal entry hatch at the front, the less dense service module with its flared base to the back. Volynov at once appraised the situation and considered all possibilities and realised that there was nothing he could really do.
The spacecraft was re-entering air-lock forward and with every minute the G forces increased. Volynov did his duty with all of his strength but this became increasingly difficult since he was hanging in the straps of his seat with the G forces assailing him in the opposite direction from what planned. Soon a strong smell penetrated the cabin - the rubber gaskets of the hermetic seal of the hatch were burning. The hatch had a light covering of heat protective resins, but at the last moment these could not hold out and the vaporised into fumes that immediately spread throughout the cabin. Volynov could remain conscious for only a few seconds after this.
He remained alive when a miracle occurred - a miracle for which he could thank the designers who had included a strong titanium frame which helped the airlock hold out against the onslaught of the superheated plasma. The PAO service module finally separated from the SA re-entry vehicle. The capsule turned around to an aerodynamically stable position at hypersonic speed and the heat shield finally took the brunt of the heating as designed. The spacecraft continued on a 9 G ballistic trajectory. The damage to the capsule resulted in a failure of the soft-landing rockets. The landing was harder than usual and Volynov broke his teeth. The capsule was recovered 2 km SW of Kustani, far short of its aim point, on January 18, 1969 at 07:58 GMT. It would be seven years until Volynov flew again, on Soyuz 21. "
The pilots can certainly tell though. I was on a singapore air flight last year - as we were beginning taxiing, the pilot hits the brakes and says, "Whoever's using that mobile phone, turn it off - NOW. Crew, search the cabin." This was (I kid you not) less than 45 seconds after the Captain had specifically said that phones were not to be used. WTF? Did someone think "Oh, my phone's not allowed to be used? Better ring the office to tell them!"
So yes, they can tell if there's a operating cellphone on board. Maybe they have a little red light marked "Cellphone in Use" on their panel. Certainly seems to piss them off though.
Amen on the hard drive - we have an 85MB connor drive at work that is 12 years old. It's still booted / used 8-10 hours a day to run a DOS PLC control system for our lab and shut off overnight.
Yes, I've made a backup, over IPX via our mars-nwe netware emulator on our file server that connects it to the 'modern' world. It's backed up to a drive that's *one thousand* times larger. Ah, the never-ending march of technology.
Then Iraqi air defense turned out with little more than AAA.
They had the equipment, they just didn't use it for some reason that only they know.
There was some consternation about where all of Iraq's jets and missiles were at the start of the "Drive to Baghdad", because there wasn't any. Yet the Iraquis were out generally harassing the no fly zone on and off with their jets a few days before. Sure , they woulda got shot out of the sky pretty quick, but they coulda had a go. Maybe they're saving them for the next conflict.
"you'll need a computer with Basic and at least 24K of RAM."
:-(
Ok, Let's see here....
24K of RAM - Check, I have 256MB... should be enough (for anyone!).
BASIC, hmmm..... (clicks XP start menu) er, ah crap.
Come back, Extended Color BASIC, all is forgiven! I miss my old COCO 2 sometimes
This is kinda like the reason I don't moderate -In my profile - "I'd like to moderate, except IE goes beserk if there's more than 20 comments to moderate"
... yeah, that'll do.
Moderation boxes glitch and redraw all over the window when scrolling, or IE doesn't finish loading the page at all.
Anyone else seen that? Maybe I should submit it to slashdot. "SLASHDOT CRASHES IE!!"
Bastard Operator From Hell.
See The Register for more info.
Maybe his laptop has an Athlon processor sans heatsink.
It involves an added D->A and then A->D conversion which will undoubtably reduce quality
No, you have a (lossy D) -> (D) -> (lossy D)
There's no (A), but there's still losses in the chain.
Ok , purists will say the (D) in the middle is still lossy, but it's a lot better than the other two.
Just try getting a copy of "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes". An online "video store" would need a small amount of very cheap disk space to store even tripe such as the above. Done right, you'd find VOD to have an incredible selection
It won't be on VOD. The small amount of very cheap disk space will go to another, more popular movie which will be VOD'd much more often and therefore will make more money. Beancounters will find and solve the usage/viewage/price ratio for each movie in their catalog, and you can be sure that the marginal movies will be dropped for more profitable ones. Good news for the mainstream I guess.
It's fine if they know you're on a p2p network, just as long as they can't figure out that the encrypted tcp streams you've been getting from five other people don't magically reassemble into a britney song. I don't know how - no doubt smarter people than I are working on it.
"Those encrypted streams officer? Why , they're just so that my colleagues and I can converse securely and privately about our new RIAA replacement."