Her mom is not stupid, but she does hit the wrong button on her mouse. To her, there's no difference -- they both click.
No, her mom is likely not stupid, but you have to wonder why she (and so many others) think this way...
For example, why don't these people constantly press the wrong pedal in their automobiles - hit the gas when they want to brake, hit the brakes when they want to accelerate? What is the difference? Two different pedals, one to the left, one to the right, both perform different functions in an automobile. Sounds similar to a mouse, right?
So - what is the difference? Is it a UI issue? Is it a feedback issue? I am thinking here that maybe the mouse buttons need to be different in a very tactile and/or size way. Maybe, make one "bumpy" and the other smooth. Or, make one "feel" differently when it is clicked. Maybe a solenoid feedback "bump" to the button when the action is correct or something?
Here is another idea, something that I think has not been explored at all, or very little, since it was first proposed by Douglas Engelbert back in the 1960's: Have a separate mouse for each hand, with only one button on each mouse. In a way, this is what Apple originally did with their single button mouse, except instead of having separate mouse controllers, the second button was relegated to the keyboard...
Other problems involved in the Orion design was the fact that the nuclear devices which were designed to power the craft had to be as small as possible, so they could fit the many needed to propel it. They developed a "launch" mechanism for these devices that shot them out the back of the craft, this launch mechanism was supposedly fed by something similar to what was found in cola vending machines (of the time?). Anyhow, due to the small size of these nuclear devices, they became instantly "classified" - because DARPA (probably ARPA at the time?) realized they were tiny tactical nukes (IIRC, some of these devices were to be around the size of a basketball - they were low in yield, but very compact) - and the research that went into the development of these devices also became classified...
I am not the coder of this demo - but I am very impressed by what I have seen.
Basically, this demo uses javascript and DHTML in some interesting ways, but the code behind the scenes is pretty "standard".
Essentially, they render the sides of the cube using a scanline renderer, which simply renders the sides as two separate triangles, built by drawing horizontal lines top to bottom (hence "scanline"), with the widths dependent on the slopes of the sides of the polygon (triangle). This is accomplished via a simple Bresenham algorithm. If you know how to draw a line between a pair of x/y coordinates using the Bresenham algorithm, you can create a scanline renderer. This particular renderer manipulates the images "n.jpg" where "n" is a number (of the scanline? or width?) - and horizontally displaced as well. Strange thing is, it seems as if for the 3D engine portion they use Math.cos and Math.sin - instead of a quicker (?) sin/cos lookup table. The spinny-twisty thing at the end is done in a similar fashion (except manipulating the pics "fn.jpg". DHTML layers are used extensively, along with PNGs with alpha layers and such.
Very impressive for javascript, but behind the scenes pretty standard code (though I would really like to know why no lookup tables)...
This is very impressive - sorta runs under Mozilla (had to load index2.html directly (for some reason the popup redirect in index.html didn't work) - and it was kinda jerky on my box (but my box isn't the latest, greatest, or anything like that) - but I am impressed nonetheless! I really loved the ending spinny-twisty thing! Great job!
It turns out its South African Rand... the abbreviation for which is ZAR. Use it.
Everyone knows that "ZAR" means "South African Rand"!!!
Seriously, when I saw the headline, I was thinking "rupees", too - so I had to go to the website and see "Ah, South Africa" - and so I knew it wasn't a rupee - but what it was I still didn't know, other than thinking "it must begin with an 'R' - meh". It wasn't until your post and others like it that I learned that SA's unit of currency was called a "Rand". Ok, I can deal with that...
However, I have to seriously wonder about the writer of the piece. The writer is obviously local for the story, reporting on international events. So, why didn't he instead write the line as:
...sold for R1 300 000 (about $200 000 US) at an auction...
If he had wanted to be a little more "worldly", he could have pegged it with the Euro, the British Pound, or the Yen, or something similar. Of the four, I would have personally picked the Euro - and I am an American (I just think the Euro is something *everyone* in major countries can convert, to an approximate number, in their head quickly to their own currency) - the writer could have just left it in Euros and been done with it...
I suppose, now, a lot more people know what a "Rand" is, though...
WORLD'S BEST QUARTER SHRINKER!!!!
on
19 million Amps
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· Score: 1
Or masturbation for that matter, or other comprimising positions. As a pornography conoisseur(sp), I can tell you there are mountains of non-penetrating porn.
The truth of the matter is that each person's definition of porn is likely completely different:
Person A defines porn as showing exposed breasts...
Person B agrees marginally with Person A, but it must include penetration as well...
Person C says mere nudity is pornographic...
Person D says: "None of that is porn - how can you be aroused by nakedness and penetration - NO! - Pornography is clearly watching a woman crush wine glasses with her high heels on!!!
Why are there so many uninformed, ignorant idiots among us?! Anybody can see that one person's porn is another person's "ho-hum-drum". There are people who get off on seeing pain being inflicted, no nudity involved at all. There are people who get off on seeing nice automobiles. I am sure there are people who literally cream their jeans from smelling a sizzling steak or something equally "ordinary".
Gah - these people, who are either greedy, morally corrupt (while espousing otherwise, of course), or both - sicken me to no end. I am sick of it! I do nothing (but the more I see this kind of stuff happenning, the more I think about doing something) to go against their own perversions (and love of money and believing mythological fairy tales as an adult most certainly do qualify as perverse, more than anything else, in my book) - why can't they leave me and mine alone the same? WHY NOT?!
Regarding herniated disks - I heard a while back on NPR a doctor has created a procedure to replace herniated and compressed disks. This doctor created an implant to replace the disk. Normal procedure for this kind of injury is spinal fusion, which causes more problems than it solves over time - because of strain, sometimes surrounding discs rupture or fail, and more spinal fusion needs to be done. Each fusion stiffens you up more, until you lurch around instead of walking normally. The surgery works pretty well, with many people leaving surgery with no further back pain, or very little compared to before. Most can resume normal activity fairly quickly. There is a catch, though: due to the fact that the spinal cord is in the way on the backside of the human body, they have to perform the surgery from the front thru the abdomen, which means they have to move aside your intestines, etc to get to the spine. Also, due to this, it is obviously limited to lower back injuries - however, since these are the most common of back injuries, it isn't that big of an issue...
Yes, merely uttering those four letters will get you out of jury duty - but knowing when to utter them, or if to utter them - should be the duty of every American.
See - if you believe that there are unjust laws, then it is your duty to enforce that belief, and to educate those around you about that belief, and what FIJA is. You have done that here, bravo. But it might have been better to do so "in the courtroom" (actually, in the jury deliberation room).
When I get called for jury duty, I always take part. The one time that I have went in (for juror selection), I answered everything as truthful as possible. This meant that since they never asked about FIJA, I said nothing about it. Had I been selected, and the case continued to trial, and there was a law that I didn't feel was just that was going to possibly incarcerate what I felt was a victim of an unjust law, I would then have the chance to "hang" the jury - or whatever was needed to keep the individual from being prosecuted -on my watch- under an unjust law.
Want to really shake things up? Hang the jury - but in the deliberation room, tell the other jurors in a logical and reasoned manner, that you are against the law being applied because you think it is unjust, and why you think it is unjust. Educate them on the reasons why the law is unjust, and question their own beliefs about the law. Then let them know about FIJA, and what it means and stands for. Let them know how their own government is duping them (although, I seriously wonder at this point, with everything that is going on that anyone with a set of eyeballs and a couple of brain cells to rub together - whether anyone really cares anymore - Rome is burning, and no one cares). Eventually it will reach the court, and the whole jury panel will be thrown out.
Ours is a corrupt land with corrupt leaders, corrupt government, corruption from top to bottom - with few good apples in between. We are losing our asses left and right to all of this corruption, and no one seems to care. It is depressing to witness, and nothing I nor anyone else seems to do seems to help a bit. We are all called crackpots, loonies, conspiracy theorists - even though it is all out in the open for anyone to see. We are yelled at by the outside world for us to "WAKE UP! DO SOMETHING!", yet we continue on, hands over our eyes and ears. Our skilled jobs are leaving, we are using more energy than all the rest, we pollute like a bad ass, we patent and copyright everything and sue everyone else.
Gah - I am just going to end it here, I just hope all the oblivious fuckers out there enjoy it when it finally burns to shit.
If you have ever owned an Amiga 1200 you would know why such a power supply "brick" is a bad idea (I don't remember if the 500 or 1000 had a brick PS - but such PSs are bad ideas all the way around). When I got my 1200, I thought the idea of a PS brick was nice - until I started using it. Finding a spot for the brick, cable not long enough, cables becoming dislodged, etc - PS bricks are nightmares.
What should be done is to make the PS have fans that draw air in the back and out the top, and make cases with matching holes, and not have vents (on the PS) on the inside of the PC case - so you isolate the PS airflow from the PC airflow. It may not solve the sound issue, but it would help keep the heat down (maybe they already have something like this?).
The closest I have been able to do to approximate this (without modding my case and PS) is to reverse the fan direction on the ATX power supply (if it isn't already reversed - the ATX spec calls for drawing air in thru the PS and "out" over the CPU), so that it is exhausting the warm air out of the case. Depending on the need, I may add a second exhaust fan, and maybe a front intake fan, to reduce heat buildup.
This does nothing for noise, though (not that it matters to me - over the weekend I modded my monitor to add a fan because heat buildup was causing display funkiness - while I was at it, I blew out all the dust inside after removing the shielding - I may need a new monitor - sigh)...
Am I reading "column binary" right in that the 10-12 positions in a column are treated as a binary representation of data (or code, as the case may be)? I have no experience with a 360, but I do love vintage computer technology and history. What tells the system that a particular column is binary? Or - does the system assume at first that everything is binary until the code is fully loaded and run, and then the code can treat other cards however it wishes (seems like the logical approach)?
Then some members started doing research. They discovered that if the community had a large dish, the community could purchase access to channels ala-cart for about 10% the cost of comcast (comcast does not even offer the ability to buy ala-cart, only one dish package does). We decided this is the option we want to go with.
So - if I understand you correctly, you are saying that your complex essentially wants to be a "downlink" station from the satellites, right? In other words, you have a large dish (10-12 foot) K or C-Band (or something else newer, probably), pointed at some general bird in the sky with the channels you want from a higher tier provider (ie, the people who provide the access to DishTV), you pay them and get it cheap, then wire everyone to the dish with repeaters, amps, etc - and give each one a "custom" "cable" box, right?
If that is what I think you are doing, that is pretty sweet - talk about screwing the "man" and telling him where to stick it!
Considering you have a complex of people who seem to be willing to roll their own solutions, do you think you could just take the jump to an IPTV solution? That is, pay for a T1 or T3 to the complex, get some internet service on it, fiber or cat5e to each unit in the complex, and then have some kind of custom machine or LiveCD Linux set-top box configuration to download the admittedly small video offerrings (some legal.torrents, various vlogs, other online video clips, etc) on the 'net?
Ultimately, that is where it going, so you should think about that possibility as well...
All in all, kudos to you and your (hopefully) merry group - I hope it works out for you, and you get what *you* want (hmm - alternatively - have you thought about mixing the two - get the sat feed, turn each channel into.torrents, then give each unit a box to view the.torrents, and other 'net video offerrings - combine it with cheap T1 service from Speakeasy or similar - so sweet)...
I don't know how the heck they are writing their reports that makes the columns a major pain to rearrange, but whatever!
If you have never had to directly write a report that prints to a line printer, consider yourself lucky.
Imagine having to take care of everything that goes into a report design - horizontal positioning of the columns on the page, proper centering of report titles, page numbers and date information (right and left justified, respectively - oh, and on the same line as the centered title), proper calculation in the columns, sometimes variable number of columns, or multipart reports. Then there is the form feed and vertical tabulation checks and routines. Who can forget about pre-printed forms, making sure every line is located in its proper position, printing tests on greenbar, then holding the form and greenbar up to a light (typically the florescent ceiling light above your cubicle mocking you) to make sure it is all aligned pretty...
Then - in the middle of the night - getting a call from your boss or client screaming at you that the check remittance "report" (which actually writes the check amounts on pre-printed "check forms") has screwed up because you assumed (most likely because the spec the client signed off on said so) that the amount field would never contain more than six figures - and now a whole box of checks (thousands of them, and they aren't cheap) has been wasted - and damnit! - we need it fixed now because payments go out tommorow.
Sometimes I miss those days of working with greenbar on a line printer, loading a box of paper onto the tractor feeds, cleaning the chaff and chads out, reloading a new ribbon, listening to the whine of the printer as it form feeds and then starts a new job with the buzz of a thousand hornets...
Then I remember writing the reports...NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!1!!!1!!!!one
Personally, I think we (as in mankind) are closer than many people believe to creating a true form of machine intelligence, if not true conscious and sentient artificial intelligence. The former is likely to come about first, and the latter, if it came about, would likely be quickly regarded as not being "artificial" anymore. In fact, we humans would probably quickly accept and adapt to it. One only has to look at how quickly we anthromorphosize just about everything that even looks like it could be "intelligent" to know this.
Why am I so certain that we are close? We have at our hands numerous pieces of technology and knowledge, some fairly mature, others fairly new, which, taken together, can be seen to represent a possible whole greater than the sum of the individual pieces. The key pieces (and there are many other important pieces, but not as key, such as recent advances in growing neural nets using real neurons, and growing neurons on a silicon substrate, among others) are:
Network theory and Neural network modeling has yielded, over the years, a ton of insight into how brains work (as well as a lot of data in how they likely don't work). Such modeling has taught us a lot in this area, but has yielded little to nothing on what we call consciousness or intelligence. These systems are forced to be small (relative to our brain - or even the brains of lesser creatures) due to the fact that currently the only practical method to simulate such systems is via software - simulating an analog, non-discrete, networked, and distributed system on a digital, discrete, serial computer. These small systems have yielded some very useful and practical technology (improved OCR and better credit fraud checking software, for instance), but none has created a true intelligence. The majority of the limits are imposed by the fact that you have to simulate a large networked system, where each node consumes many bytes of memory, along with many more bytes to describe the interconnects, and still more bytes for the software to simulate all of that - that ultimately you are left with a very hairy problem that a serial computer takes time to churn through. While a network with trillions of nodes could in theory be simulated in software, given enough hardware, it currently isn't something that can be done practically. Given these constraints, researchers have had to be content with studying smaller networks, hoping to interconnect them in some way to make a larger, more powerful whole. These efforts have yielded some results, but as a whole these "hand-tuned and taught" networks are not likely to be the building blocks we hope them to be. Ultimately, it will take a very large neural network to be built to make an intelligent system.
Some researchers have speculated that a simulation may limit these systems precisely because they are not "non-discrete", and that it is the ability for a brain to take in multiple inputs all at once and process them all at the same time to yield outputs which is responsible for what we call "intelligent behavior". Whether this is true or not, we don't know, simply because we haven't been able to build large scale non-discrete processing neural networks. On the other side of the coin, it has been speculated by researchers that the brain simulates serial computation from the inherent pattern matching ability of the neural network which makes up the brain. This is a very interesting possibility, one that argues, in a sense, that a neural network can become and simulate a UTM for serial computation (mathematics and logic). This isn't surprising - if we can simulate a neural network using a UTM, why can'
Ignore the above - I was notified on another post of my error - punch cards were 80 columns by 12 rows - and after a bit of reading, the way data is actually stored on a card is completely different from a bit pattern - each "column" actually stores a character of sorts - although I am not sure whether you can store a full byte value within a position or not...
Benefit of the doubt and all, I suppose you could blue sky the idea of someone typing the 419 scam in and forwarding the email to people in 1992 or so. Of course, I am not even sure if at that time the @ symbol for the name/domain separation was in place or not (that part of email and the internet is waaay before I got on the internet) - maybe that was earlier.
It still amazes me that it is only been 10+ years since PC compatibles really exploded on the scene (I actually started using the internet with a 2400 baud modem and an Amiga 2000), with 486 boxes in various shapes and styles. Prior to that (and the emergence of Best Buy - boo, hiss), to get a PC compatible computer you bought it at small stores (ComputerLand-type stores or mom'n'pop shops) or thru a Computer Shopper ad (or from the ever immortal I-Never-Age CDW chickie - does anyone remember those ads?).
Standard Hollerith punch cards were 80 columns by 25 rows - so, if each of your "bytes" were 25 bits long (actually, lets just call them words with a bit-length of 25). I think (not sure) they were 25 bits long to represent 3 real bytes with a parity bit for checksums (?)...
Sometimes I swear that we computer geeks know the history of our own machines less than the common US citizen knows about the US Constitution (the document, not the ship - though I would speculate fewer know anything about the ship).
Yes, I know who Charles Babbage is, I know about his machines, I know that he designed the Analytical Engine (and named many of the pieces of the AE after mill parts - ie, the Mill=CPU, the Store=memory, etc) to use punch cards after seeing one of Jaquard's looms in actions (and subsequently a tapestry portrait of Babbage was made on said looms). I don't remember the format of the cards which were to be used by the Analytical Engine, but I do know that the only relationship that they bore to the Jaquard design was that they had holes in them. IIRC, the Jaquard punch cards had a fairly small number of holes in them. Undoubtedly, Babbages cards would have had to have more holes to represent the numbers/instructions his machine could handle. Unfortunately, he never built the machine, thus there never existed anything called "Babbage Cards".
In the late 1800's, another individual came to light, trying to solve the problem of the 1890 US Census. The last census had taken so long to tabulate that it was feared that by the time the current census was finished and tabulated, the next census cycle would be well underway and the data would be useless. Herman Hollerith came along and changed that. He created what would become the standard punch card, for his tabulation machine. He took his inspiration from a completely different source, though: he was riding a train and saw the conduction punch his ticket, and he thought about how such a card could record all the characteristics of a person on it for the census, and how using the technology of the day, those cards could be processed and tabulated much quicker than the hand processes previously devised. His machines were tested alongside other methods of tabulation and counting available at the time, and the US government chose his system, which turned out to be very successful. His tabulation machine business grew, he became fairly wealthy, and his machines saw use in many businesses the world over (especially in the freight train business).
Eventually, Hollerith's company became what we know today as IBM. His cards lived on with few modifications, to become the punch cards as we know them (or barely know them - not much use for them today). These cards had a standard size - 80 columns by 25 rows...
Now you know why there is such a thing as an IBM 80 x 25 display - one screen could accurately represent a full card (whether this was the true purpose or not of this size is something I have never found out to my satisfaction - some history books say yes, others just hold it as a curiosity or holdover)...
Now - with that said, I must say that from the link to the site you give, that looks like an impressive weaving mill, and fairly old. It is hard to tell what the age of it is, but it could be using a form of Jaquard's loom cards, or a later form of Hollerith card, or some hybrid, or something else. In the weaving mill industry, there wasn't anything like a "standard card" - I would speculate, though, that if the machine was using something like 80x25 hole cards and were built after 1890, then they were likely Hollerith cards (albeit likely more beefy or made of metal to handle the abuse)...
I remember getting one of these letters in my inbox when I was about twelve or thirteen(1992?).
Now - if you had said you had gotten such a scam via regular post, I might believe it - but I doubt in 1992 or thereabouts you got it via email (which you may or may not have had - maybe you had access to a university account, you don't say - all I know is that in 1992 consumer access to the internet was all but non-existant).
Spam, of which the 419 scam is a part of, showed up in great amounts first on internet newsgroups - ie, the Canter/Siegel Green Card Lottery spam, which went out in 1994. I know - I was there - I was an indirect.com customer (the first "consumer" ISP in Phoenix, Arizona - now long since gone, having been gobbled up by Goodnet, then they in turn by Earthlink), and I got the spam myself. At the time I didn't think anything of it, and I didn't appreciate what had happenned. But, then again, I had only been on the internet since the fall of 1993, having gotten tired of the BBS scene.
You may want to re-think your dates and timeline...
Actually, no - reread the article. He does mention that you can read the levels by simply putting the device around the romex, as the hot and neutral return would cancel each other out. So, you have to put the coils on the individual wires. Every breaker box *already* has the wires broken out to each breaker, but in the original 100 amp box he had, where there was scant room for anything, he tried a "dry run" with mounting the coils and could only get 8 mounted before he ran out of room. So, he simply got a bigger panel, and moved the 100 amp service coming from the original breaker box (so now it is basically only serving as a box to hold the meter) to the new breaker box, which has tons more room to allow him to monitor all the circuits. This, however, did require him to move all the circuits over and rewire the new box. He should have, while he was at it, tried to get a bigger service than 100 amps - that is a small service for today's needs. It looks like his house is 1940-1950's vintage, hence the smaller amperage box - today's houses, IIRC, tend to have 150-200 amp or greater service - simply because of all the extra appliances today's houses are likely to have.
...but I'd rather have their faulty system of checks and balances than the outright corruption and byzantine system of governance that still controls much of the world today...
You think the government of the United States doesn't have outright corruption and byzantine system? What planet are you on?
No, military tanks aren't rolling down the street yet (although police tanks are), and people aren't disappearing (but enough many innocent people have had their homes raided for nothing) - I guess you don't care, though...
Slashdot Mirror
No, her mom is likely not stupid, but you have to wonder why she (and so many others) think this way...
For example, why don't these people constantly press the wrong pedal in their automobiles - hit the gas when they want to brake, hit the brakes when they want to accelerate? What is the difference? Two different pedals, one to the left, one to the right, both perform different functions in an automobile. Sounds similar to a mouse, right?
So - what is the difference? Is it a UI issue? Is it a feedback issue? I am thinking here that maybe the mouse buttons need to be different in a very tactile and/or size way. Maybe, make one "bumpy" and the other smooth. Or, make one "feel" differently when it is clicked. Maybe a solenoid feedback "bump" to the button when the action is correct or something?
Here is another idea, something that I think has not been explored at all, or very little, since it was first proposed by Douglas Engelbert back in the 1960's: Have a separate mouse for each hand, with only one button on each mouse. In a way, this is what Apple originally did with their single button mouse, except instead of having separate mouse controllers, the second button was relegated to the keyboard...
Other problems involved in the Orion design was the fact that the nuclear devices which were designed to power the craft had to be as small as possible, so they could fit the many needed to propel it. They developed a "launch" mechanism for these devices that shot them out the back of the craft, this launch mechanism was supposedly fed by something similar to what was found in cola vending machines (of the time?). Anyhow, due to the small size of these nuclear devices, they became instantly "classified" - because DARPA (probably ARPA at the time?) realized they were tiny tactical nukes (IIRC, some of these devices were to be around the size of a basketball - they were low in yield, but very compact) - and the research that went into the development of these devices also became classified...
Basically, this demo uses javascript and DHTML in some interesting ways, but the code behind the scenes is pretty "standard".
Essentially, they render the sides of the cube using a scanline renderer, which simply renders the sides as two separate triangles, built by drawing horizontal lines top to bottom (hence "scanline"), with the widths dependent on the slopes of the sides of the polygon (triangle). This is accomplished via a simple Bresenham algorithm. If you know how to draw a line between a pair of x/y coordinates using the Bresenham algorithm, you can create a scanline renderer. This particular renderer manipulates the images "n.jpg" where "n" is a number (of the scanline? or width?) - and horizontally displaced as well. Strange thing is, it seems as if for the 3D engine portion they use Math.cos and Math.sin - instead of a quicker (?) sin/cos lookup table. The spinny-twisty thing at the end is done in a similar fashion (except manipulating the pics "fn.jpg". DHTML layers are used extensively, along with PNGs with alpha layers and such.
Very impressive for javascript, but behind the scenes pretty standard code (though I would really like to know why no lookup tables)...
This is very impressive - sorta runs under Mozilla (had to load index2.html directly (for some reason the popup redirect in index.html didn't work) - and it was kinda jerky on my box (but my box isn't the latest, greatest, or anything like that) - but I am impressed nonetheless! I really loved the ending spinny-twisty thing! Great job!
Everyone knows that "ZAR" means "South African Rand"!!!
Seriously, when I saw the headline, I was thinking "rupees", too - so I had to go to the website and see "Ah, South Africa" - and so I knew it wasn't a rupee - but what it was I still didn't know, other than thinking "it must begin with an 'R' - meh". It wasn't until your post and others like it that I learned that SA's unit of currency was called a "Rand". Ok, I can deal with that...
However, I have to seriously wonder about the writer of the piece. The writer is obviously local for the story, reporting on international events. So, why didn't he instead write the line as:
If he had wanted to be a little more "worldly", he could have pegged it with the Euro, the British Pound, or the Yen, or something similar. Of the four, I would have personally picked the Euro - and I am an American (I just think the Euro is something *everyone* in major countries can convert, to an approximate number, in their head quickly to their own currency) - the writer could have just left it in Euros and been done with it...
I suppose, now, a lot more people know what a "Rand" is, though...
subject says it all, 'nuff said...
The truth of the matter is that each person's definition of porn is likely completely different:
Why are there so many uninformed, ignorant idiots among us?! Anybody can see that one person's porn is another person's "ho-hum-drum". There are people who get off on seeing pain being inflicted, no nudity involved at all. There are people who get off on seeing nice automobiles. I am sure there are people who literally cream their jeans from smelling a sizzling steak or something equally "ordinary".
Gah - these people, who are either greedy, morally corrupt (while espousing otherwise, of course), or both - sicken me to no end. I am sick of it! I do nothing (but the more I see this kind of stuff happenning, the more I think about doing something) to go against their own perversions (and love of money and believing mythological fairy tales as an adult most certainly do qualify as perverse, more than anything else, in my book) - why can't they leave me and mine alone the same? WHY NOT?!
Regarding herniated disks - I heard a while back on NPR a doctor has created a procedure to replace herniated and compressed disks. This doctor created an implant to replace the disk. Normal procedure for this kind of injury is spinal fusion, which causes more problems than it solves over time - because of strain, sometimes surrounding discs rupture or fail, and more spinal fusion needs to be done. Each fusion stiffens you up more, until you lurch around instead of walking normally. The surgery works pretty well, with many people leaving surgery with no further back pain, or very little compared to before. Most can resume normal activity fairly quickly. There is a catch, though: due to the fact that the spinal cord is in the way on the backside of the human body, they have to perform the surgery from the front thru the abdomen, which means they have to move aside your intestines, etc to get to the spine. Also, due to this, it is obviously limited to lower back injuries - however, since these are the most common of back injuries, it isn't that big of an issue...
See - if you believe that there are unjust laws, then it is your duty to enforce that belief, and to educate those around you about that belief, and what FIJA is. You have done that here, bravo. But it might have been better to do so "in the courtroom" (actually, in the jury deliberation room).
When I get called for jury duty, I always take part. The one time that I have went in (for juror selection), I answered everything as truthful as possible. This meant that since they never asked about FIJA, I said nothing about it. Had I been selected, and the case continued to trial, and there was a law that I didn't feel was just that was going to possibly incarcerate what I felt was a victim of an unjust law, I would then have the chance to "hang" the jury - or whatever was needed to keep the individual from being prosecuted -on my watch- under an unjust law.
Want to really shake things up? Hang the jury - but in the deliberation room, tell the other jurors in a logical and reasoned manner, that you are against the law being applied because you think it is unjust, and why you think it is unjust. Educate them on the reasons why the law is unjust, and question their own beliefs about the law. Then let them know about FIJA, and what it means and stands for. Let them know how their own government is duping them (although, I seriously wonder at this point, with everything that is going on that anyone with a set of eyeballs and a couple of brain cells to rub together - whether anyone really cares anymore - Rome is burning, and no one cares). Eventually it will reach the court, and the whole jury panel will be thrown out.
Ours is a corrupt land with corrupt leaders, corrupt government, corruption from top to bottom - with few good apples in between. We are losing our asses left and right to all of this corruption, and no one seems to care. It is depressing to witness, and nothing I nor anyone else seems to do seems to help a bit. We are all called crackpots, loonies, conspiracy theorists - even though it is all out in the open for anyone to see. We are yelled at by the outside world for us to "WAKE UP! DO SOMETHING!", yet we continue on, hands over our eyes and ears. Our skilled jobs are leaving, we are using more energy than all the rest, we pollute like a bad ass, we patent and copyright everything and sue everyone else.
Gah - I am just going to end it here, I just hope all the oblivious fuckers out there enjoy it when it finally burns to shit.
What should be done is to make the PS have fans that draw air in the back and out the top, and make cases with matching holes, and not have vents (on the PS) on the inside of the PC case - so you isolate the PS airflow from the PC airflow. It may not solve the sound issue, but it would help keep the heat down (maybe they already have something like this?).
The closest I have been able to do to approximate this (without modding my case and PS) is to reverse the fan direction on the ATX power supply (if it isn't already reversed - the ATX spec calls for drawing air in thru the PS and "out" over the CPU), so that it is exhausting the warm air out of the case. Depending on the need, I may add a second exhaust fan, and maybe a front intake fan, to reduce heat buildup.
This does nothing for noise, though (not that it matters to me - over the weekend I modded my monitor to add a fan because heat buildup was causing display funkiness - while I was at it, I blew out all the dust inside after removing the shielding - I may need a new monitor - sigh)...
Am I reading "column binary" right in that the 10-12 positions in a column are treated as a binary representation of data (or code, as the case may be)? I have no experience with a 360, but I do love vintage computer technology and history. What tells the system that a particular column is binary? Or - does the system assume at first that everything is binary until the code is fully loaded and run, and then the code can treat other cards however it wishes (seems like the logical approach)?
How long will it take for Foster-Miller to implement the software from whatever team wins this thing into their Talon system...?
Well - to a certain extent (all the way up to being found guilty and sentenced, that is), it worked for Bernie Ebbers, didn't it...?
So - if I understand you correctly, you are saying that your complex essentially wants to be a "downlink" station from the satellites, right? In other words, you have a large dish (10-12 foot) K or C-Band (or something else newer, probably), pointed at some general bird in the sky with the channels you want from a higher tier provider (ie, the people who provide the access to DishTV), you pay them and get it cheap, then wire everyone to the dish with repeaters, amps, etc - and give each one a "custom" "cable" box, right?
If that is what I think you are doing, that is pretty sweet - talk about screwing the "man" and telling him where to stick it!
Considering you have a complex of people who seem to be willing to roll their own solutions, do you think you could just take the jump to an IPTV solution? That is, pay for a T1 or T3 to the complex, get some internet service on it, fiber or cat5e to each unit in the complex, and then have some kind of custom machine or LiveCD Linux set-top box configuration to download the admittedly small video offerrings (some legal .torrents, various vlogs, other online video clips, etc) on the 'net?
Ultimately, that is where it going, so you should think about that possibility as well...
All in all, kudos to you and your (hopefully) merry group - I hope it works out for you, and you get what *you* want (hmm - alternatively - have you thought about mixing the two - get the sat feed, turn each channel into .torrents, then give each unit a box to view the .torrents, and other 'net video offerrings - combine it with cheap T1 service from Speakeasy or similar - so sweet)...
I don't know how the heck they are writing their reports that makes the columns a major pain to rearrange, but whatever!
If you have never had to directly write a report that prints to a line printer, consider yourself lucky.
Imagine having to take care of everything that goes into a report design - horizontal positioning of the columns on the page, proper centering of report titles, page numbers and date information (right and left justified, respectively - oh, and on the same line as the centered title), proper calculation in the columns, sometimes variable number of columns, or multipart reports. Then there is the form feed and vertical tabulation checks and routines. Who can forget about pre-printed forms, making sure every line is located in its proper position, printing tests on greenbar, then holding the form and greenbar up to a light (typically the florescent ceiling light above your cubicle mocking you) to make sure it is all aligned pretty...
Then - in the middle of the night - getting a call from your boss or client screaming at you that the check remittance "report" (which actually writes the check amounts on pre-printed "check forms") has screwed up because you assumed (most likely because the spec the client signed off on said so) that the amount field would never contain more than six figures - and now a whole box of checks (thousands of them, and they aren't cheap) has been wasted - and damnit! - we need it fixed now because payments go out tommorow.
Sometimes I miss those days of working with greenbar on a line printer, loading a box of paper onto the tractor feeds, cleaning the chaff and chads out, reloading a new ribbon, listening to the whine of the printer as it form feeds and then starts a new job with the buzz of a thousand hornets...
Then I remember writing the reports...NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!1!!!1!!!!one
Why am I so certain that we are close? We have at our hands numerous pieces of technology and knowledge, some fairly mature, others fairly new, which, taken together, can be seen to represent a possible whole greater than the sum of the individual pieces. The key pieces (and there are many other important pieces, but not as key, such as recent advances in growing neural nets using real neurons, and growing neurons on a silicon substrate, among others) are:
Network theory and Neural network modeling has yielded, over the years, a ton of insight into how brains work (as well as a lot of data in how they likely don't work). Such modeling has taught us a lot in this area, but has yielded little to nothing on what we call consciousness or intelligence. These systems are forced to be small (relative to our brain - or even the brains of lesser creatures) due to the fact that currently the only practical method to simulate such systems is via software - simulating an analog, non-discrete, networked, and distributed system on a digital, discrete, serial computer. These small systems have yielded some very useful and practical technology (improved OCR and better credit fraud checking software, for instance), but none has created a true intelligence. The majority of the limits are imposed by the fact that you have to simulate a large networked system, where each node consumes many bytes of memory, along with many more bytes to describe the interconnects, and still more bytes for the software to simulate all of that - that ultimately you are left with a very hairy problem that a serial computer takes time to churn through. While a network with trillions of nodes could in theory be simulated in software, given enough hardware, it currently isn't something that can be done practically. Given these constraints, researchers have had to be content with studying smaller networks, hoping to interconnect them in some way to make a larger, more powerful whole. These efforts have yielded some results, but as a whole these "hand-tuned and taught" networks are not likely to be the building blocks we hope them to be. Ultimately, it will take a very large neural network to be built to make an intelligent system.
Some researchers have speculated that a simulation may limit these systems precisely because they are not "non-discrete", and that it is the ability for a brain to take in multiple inputs all at once and process them all at the same time to yield outputs which is responsible for what we call "intelligent behavior". Whether this is true or not, we don't know, simply because we haven't been able to build large scale non-discrete processing neural networks. On the other side of the coin, it has been speculated by researchers that the brain simulates serial computation from the inherent pattern matching ability of the neural network which makes up the brain. This is a very interesting possibility, one that argues, in a sense, that a neural network can become and simulate a UTM for serial computation (mathematics and logic). This isn't surprising - if we can simulate a neural network using a UTM, why can'
Ignore the above - I was notified on another post of my error - punch cards were 80 columns by 12 rows - and after a bit of reading, the way data is actually stored on a card is completely different from a bit pattern - each "column" actually stores a character of sorts - although I am not sure whether you can store a full byte value within a position or not...
I will go away and grovel now...
It still amazes me that it is only been 10+ years since PC compatibles really exploded on the scene (I actually started using the internet with a 2400 baud modem and an Amiga 2000), with 486 boxes in various shapes and styles. Prior to that (and the emergence of Best Buy - boo, hiss), to get a PC compatible computer you bought it at small stores (ComputerLand-type stores or mom'n'pop shops) or thru a Computer Shopper ad (or from the ever immortal I-Never-Age CDW chickie - does anyone remember those ads?).
Man - those times were fun - I feel old...
Standard Hollerith punch cards were 80 columns by 25 rows - so, if each of your "bytes" were 25 bits long (actually, lets just call them words with a bit-length of 25). I think (not sure) they were 25 bits long to represent 3 real bytes with a parity bit for checksums (?)...
Yes, I know who Charles Babbage is, I know about his machines, I know that he designed the Analytical Engine (and named many of the pieces of the AE after mill parts - ie, the Mill=CPU, the Store=memory, etc) to use punch cards after seeing one of Jaquard's looms in actions (and subsequently a tapestry portrait of Babbage was made on said looms). I don't remember the format of the cards which were to be used by the Analytical Engine, but I do know that the only relationship that they bore to the Jaquard design was that they had holes in them. IIRC, the Jaquard punch cards had a fairly small number of holes in them. Undoubtedly, Babbages cards would have had to have more holes to represent the numbers/instructions his machine could handle. Unfortunately, he never built the machine, thus there never existed anything called "Babbage Cards".
In the late 1800's, another individual came to light, trying to solve the problem of the 1890 US Census. The last census had taken so long to tabulate that it was feared that by the time the current census was finished and tabulated, the next census cycle would be well underway and the data would be useless. Herman Hollerith came along and changed that. He created what would become the standard punch card, for his tabulation machine. He took his inspiration from a completely different source, though: he was riding a train and saw the conduction punch his ticket, and he thought about how such a card could record all the characteristics of a person on it for the census, and how using the technology of the day, those cards could be processed and tabulated much quicker than the hand processes previously devised. His machines were tested alongside other methods of tabulation and counting available at the time, and the US government chose his system, which turned out to be very successful. His tabulation machine business grew, he became fairly wealthy, and his machines saw use in many businesses the world over (especially in the freight train business).
Eventually, Hollerith's company became what we know today as IBM. His cards lived on with few modifications, to become the punch cards as we know them (or barely know them - not much use for them today). These cards had a standard size - 80 columns by 25 rows...
Now you know why there is such a thing as an IBM 80 x 25 display - one screen could accurately represent a full card (whether this was the true purpose or not of this size is something I have never found out to my satisfaction - some history books say yes, others just hold it as a curiosity or holdover)...
Now - with that said, I must say that from the link to the site you give, that looks like an impressive weaving mill, and fairly old. It is hard to tell what the age of it is, but it could be using a form of Jaquard's loom cards, or a later form of Hollerith card, or some hybrid, or something else. In the weaving mill industry, there wasn't anything like a "standard card" - I would speculate, though, that if the machine was using something like 80x25 hole cards and were built after 1890, then they were likely Hollerith cards (albeit likely more beefy or made of metal to handle the abuse)...
Now - if you had said you had gotten such a scam via regular post, I might believe it - but I doubt in 1992 or thereabouts you got it via email (which you may or may not have had - maybe you had access to a university account, you don't say - all I know is that in 1992 consumer access to the internet was all but non-existant).
Spam, of which the 419 scam is a part of, showed up in great amounts first on internet newsgroups - ie, the Canter/Siegel Green Card Lottery spam, which went out in 1994. I know - I was there - I was an indirect.com customer (the first "consumer" ISP in Phoenix, Arizona - now long since gone, having been gobbled up by Goodnet, then they in turn by Earthlink), and I got the spam myself. At the time I didn't think anything of it, and I didn't appreciate what had happenned. But, then again, I had only been on the internet since the fall of 1993, having gotten tired of the BBS scene.
You may want to re-think your dates and timeline...
Actually, no - reread the article. He does mention that you can read the levels by simply putting the device around the romex, as the hot and neutral return would cancel each other out. So, you have to put the coils on the individual wires. Every breaker box *already* has the wires broken out to each breaker, but in the original 100 amp box he had, where there was scant room for anything, he tried a "dry run" with mounting the coils and could only get 8 mounted before he ran out of room. So, he simply got a bigger panel, and moved the 100 amp service coming from the original breaker box (so now it is basically only serving as a box to hold the meter) to the new breaker box, which has tons more room to allow him to monitor all the circuits. This, however, did require him to move all the circuits over and rewire the new box. He should have, while he was at it, tried to get a bigger service than 100 amps - that is a small service for today's needs. It looks like his house is 1940-1950's vintage, hence the smaller amperage box - today's houses, IIRC, tend to have 150-200 amp or greater service - simply because of all the extra appliances today's houses are likely to have.
I for one would rather speak out about it now before it was too late...
You think the government of the United States doesn't have outright corruption and byzantine system? What planet are you on?
No, military tanks aren't rolling down the street yet (although police tanks are), and people aren't disappearing (but enough many innocent people have had their homes raided for nothing) - I guess you don't care, though...