Hmm.. the steel ball sounds familiar, and I mean that literally, I remember that banging sound clearly as if I could hear it right now. Telerama seems vaguely familiar, and the lightning. I don't recall the linotype, but I've seen one before, when I was a little kid and I took a tour of my hometown newspaper which still used them even as late as the 1970s. I still have a scar on my finger from the burn I got when I tried to swipe a hot lead slug... ha.
Anyway, when I went back to the Museum of Science and Industry, the saddest thing of all was the exhibit that was still there, the "Human Section." It's a human cadaver sliced into cross-sections about a half-inch thick, and mounted in formaldehyde between two sheets of plexiglass. I actually went to the museum to photograph it, since I'd described it to my friends and nobody believed me. But now it is deteriorating badly, some of the preservative liquid is evaporating and the top parts of the sections are drying out and mouldering, the plexiglass is scratched and cloudy from all those gawkers pressing against it, and it's decomposing from exposure to light. And to think a human being gave his body to science for this, and the museum couldn't even preserve it! It's a crime. Nowadays, I suppose you could just go online and look at high-rez black & white CAT scans, I've seen a website with a whole human body imaged in cros-sections a millimeter thick. But it is just not the same as looking at a real human body section. I mean, you can see the poor guy's nose hairs - on the INSIDE of his nose. That is something I could never forget (no matter how hard I tried).
I strenuously object to the hasty, ill-concieved rush to computerize education by turning everything into a video game. Pretty soon, everyone will think science only takes place inside a computer. Let me give an example.
One of my favorite childhood memories was going to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Up on the second floor, there was a permanent display of historic scientific apparatus, like a Wimshust Generator about 20 feet in diameter. I went back to visit it about 10 years ago, all those exhibits were gone, replaced with computer kiosks. Really BAD computer kiosks, uninspiring, ill-planned junk that had all the bells and whistles, but little educational content. I thought about the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on developing and deploying those horrid, amateurish kiosks, and how they replaced a whole museum wing that represented the technological development of America, and I can only consider it the greatest educational tragedy I ever saw. I remember being inspired, as a little child, seeing those monuments to science, but that will never happen again. And it's a damn shame.
I've written a few brief notes on this case in other threads on Slashdot, but I've never laid out the full story. And oh boy is it an amazing story. But I've been hesitant to lay out the details for fear of becoming the target of rabid anti-DMCA nutcases. I am still considering how to proceed with the matter, I'm sure I will eventually reveal all, but not today.
There is another side of the story. I have personally found the DMCA to be invaluable in protecting my interests against greedy, unscrupulous corporations. The little guy (like me) has so few tools to protect his rights, the DMCA allowed me to stop a corporation from misappropriating my works, without having to resort to expensive litigation. All I had to do was file a few letters, I even copied the text from sample DMCA letters in the archives at Berkman. It was easy, and a hell of a lot cheaper than hiring a lawyer. Result: total victory against the infringer.
By the time the SEC decides to act, the pump and dump is already over. These scams happen in the space of a few days. Blocking trading on a group of stocks that have already been pumped and dumped is futile. As the submission suggests, if they could act promptly by blockign trading immediately after a spams, that would effectively be a DoS attack on a stock trading, any spammer could initiate one. The SEC needs to go after the spammers, not the stocks.
You can't support that line of thinking because there is no version of iTunes without DRM to compare to..
Actually, that's the whole point. Without DRM, there was no iTunes Music Store. With DRM, the studios permitted downloads via the ITMS. The lack of DRM prevented ITMS from launching, it exists only because Jobs convinced the studios that DRM would minimally protect their product and then they committed to the new business model.
Now you're going even further off target. You're criticizing Apple's educational support for an OS design decision. Apple has issued incremental (and sometimes hidden) boot CD OS updates for new CPUs ever since I remember, certainly since MacOS 8 days. Many new machines issued with the old Classic Mac OS had "enablers" that were required for that hardware, Apple usually issued special boot CDs with newer OS builds just for those CPUs, they usually didn't roll out a CD will all available enablers until the next major point release. This continues today, the boot DVD for my PowerBook G4 won't boot my Quad G5, and neither of those disks will boot an Intel Mac.
If this is what you're going to use as criticism, I call bullshit. I've never heard of anything like application software that would run on 10.3 that won't run on 10.4, with the sole exception of Classic software that will not run on Intel. MacOS is not like Windows that breaks apps on every service pack.
You're missing some basic information here. Apple does have an Enterprise sales division and they are quite different from the consumer division, you get dedicated Apple representatives for your account. Onsite service contracts are available for server systems. Apple has always had self-servicing programs for enterprises, although the investment in spares can be a bit high.
Another factor is your allegations that uncertainty over future products hampers enterprise planning. The switch to Intel changed this picture considerably. Apple's future products track rather closely to Intel's.
Almost all of the MOAB bugs have already been patched, including OS fixes by Apple. Some of the application fixes were released within hours of the public announcement of the bug. Yet NONE of those fixes have been linked on the MOAB website.
The normal processes are working. What is NOT working is the MOAB process. If they used the normal procedure of notifying the developers privately, these bugs could have been fixed in days or even hours, before any public disclosure. But that wouldn't achieve what the MOAB hackers wanted. MOAB isn't about security, it's about publicity whoring.
You are referring to the Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment, of course. It could be said that the LLRE returns a single-pixel image of a manmade object on the lunar surface.
It's true, video cards supplied by Apple are not supported by the vendors, all support and driver updates have to come through Apple.
However, he still posted in the wrong place. He should have filed a bug report through regular Apple Developer channels. Anyone can file a bug report, you just have to sign up for a free Apple Developer Connection account.
You are mistaken. VueScan's multipass mode does not increase accuracy of the tonal resolution. It does not do brightness multisampling, it only does multisampling on the image resolution. Yes, I have VueScan Pro but I never use it, I just updated and noticed they added the profiling.
There are a multitude of reasons why Silverfast is superior to VueScan, the biggest one is that VueScan's GUI is absolute crap. My personal favorite feature of Silverfast is the ability to set white-point and black-point directly on an image preview using an eyedropper, in VueScan you have to do this by dragging points on a histogram, it's terribly difficult to use and often can't set the curve to what I need. Manual calibration of scanner input curves is PARTICULARLY vital when scanning negatives, as the film substrate has a dense anti-halation layer that adds density to all of the image area. This must be precompensated or else you just end up wasting a significant portion of your tonal resolution, you can't just take the standard ICC profile, you have to set the white point to the gray of the antihalation layer. Sure you have to optimize the curves after scanning, but unless you precompensate and use the full dynamic range, you just end up with a posterized file with lots of gaps in the histogram. Garbage in, garbage out.
Actually, modern flatbeds have DMax ratings that are competitive with drum scanners. I used to be a drum scanner operator and I think drum scans are way overkill for large B&W negs, they are better for high rez scans of small color transparencies.
One thing I should point out: I'm a big fan of Silverfast scanning software, and they just released a new version 6.5 which has a multiscan technique, it's sort of like HDR for scanning. It does multiple scans of each row at different exposure settings, combining them for a higher DMax and better sensitivity to levels. The big thing that digital scanning has needed for a long time is increased levels, so I scan most of my stuff at 16 bits instead of 8 bits. This Silverfast rev is the first affordable software that does anything significant to improve level sensitivity and bring it up to the potential of 16 bit.
I also note that Silverfast works with ICC color profiles, and can be calibrated with an ICC target. This is the weakness of software like VueScan. VueScan is totally unsuitable for quality scanning, although it is good for bulk scanning of paper documents (which is not a very demanding task). It would be preferable to scan archival files with a calibrated system. VueScan cannot be calibrated, and has very poor manual control over levels. This is especially problematic with B&W negatives, which have no 100% transparent areas, there is always a slight density of gray (the "anti-halation layer").
A friend of mine is a retired photography professor who does a lot of work on a 4x5 view camera. He's using an older Epson flatbed scanner. It has an illuminator on top, and a frame that can hold four 4x5 negatives for gang scanning. It comes with a whole set of frames to hold negatives of various sizes from 35mm to 8x10. His Epson model is discontinued, but it appears the equivalent would be something like the Epson Perfection V750-M.
Ooh, I had that game for my Processor Technology SOL-20, it was the first game software I ever purchased, that must have been around 1975. The SOL-20 version had a really clever hack, someone figured out that the S-100 bus emitted radio noise that could be picked up on a nearby AM radio, so he wrote little loops into the code so it would make phaser sounds through your radio. Unfortunately during other game play the CPU emitted a cacophony of irritating noise, so overall, it got rather tedious to listen to all that crap just for a few phaser noises.
Sure, I endorse the spammer paying attorney's fees, that's the whole point, to make the losing defendant pay for the lawsuit. But how can the State Attorneys submit a bill to anyone when they are salaried employees of the State? The "lawyers fees," in actuality, are State fees, since they should rightfully be awarded to the State Treasury, since taxpayers bankrolled the lawsuit. Why should the attorneys get anything beyond their salaries? If the attorneys get money from their salary AND fees from the defendant, that seems like double dipping.
What is the deal with State Attorney's fees? This action was brought by officials of the State Attorney General's office, their salaries are paid by taxpayers. As employees of the State, the prosecution lawyers have already been paid for their work. Sure the State has a right to recover their expenses in this lawsuit, but this seems like an awfully high dollar figure, and seems like double-dipping at the taxpayers' expense. Do the prosecutors get a bonus for winning?
I hadn't heard of that one, but I checked it out and PE is literally a drop in the bucket, compared to Gates massive holdings in conventional energy from gas, coal, and nuclear. The PE investment is $84 million, nobody quite knows the full extent of his other energy deals but I read estimates of over $750 million just in this year alone.
Funny you should mention that. He's doing just the opposite. Gates just bought 10% of PNM Resources, a gas and electric utility in Arizona. They don't do renewable energy.
Gates also owns major portions of Home Depot, Canadian National Railway Co, Republic Services (a garbage hauling company), several TV networks, Four Seasons Hotels, Berkshire Hathaway, and several Big Pharmaceutical companies. This is not the profile of an enlightened investor. These are the investments any Robber Baron would make to diversify his holdings.
Keep your eye on Cascade Investments LLC, that's Gates' personal holding company. He's still building his personal fortune, leveraging his monopoly into more areas.
Like many kids in the 1960s, the coolest thing we could get our hands on was Estes model rocket engines. I particularly loved to make "boost gliders" which were devilishly difficult to build right. They were complex because they had a large rotatable wing. During the boost phase the wing was retracted parallel to the main tube, but after the rocket burned out, the propellant module ejected and the wing would rotate out to a configuration like an aircraft. The idea was that the rocket would shoot upright to maximum altitude, then the wing would deploy and it would fly in a flat spiral, then land close to the launch site. If you did it wrong, it would go up and then fly off in a straight line off to the horizon, never to be seen again. The best rocket I ever made was a scale model of the BOMARC, one of the first cruise missiles in the US arsenal. I spent weeks making sure every detail was perfect, it looked beautiful, even the paint job was polished to mirror-like perfection (very difficult for a 12 year old kid like me to achieve). The aerodynamics looked good, although scale model kits were notorious for poor flight qualities since sacrifices were made for the sake of accurate design. But I managed to static test the rocket until it worked right, this was done by attaching a long piece of string to the rocket's center of gravity, then whirling it around at the end of 20 feet of string, watching its flight dynamics until you puked from dizziness. A little trim balancing here, a little added weight there, and everything was perfect. In fact, so perfect I didn't want to launch it. I hung the rocket from my bedroom ceiling, where I fondly gazed at it every night as I lay in bed. Eventually I decided I had to see it fly. But to minimize the risk, the first flight would be a small rocket engine, I didn't want to shoot it up 2000 feet and maybe never see it again, a small 200ft flight would be sufficient. Whenever I set up my launch pad, all the neighborhood kids would suddenly show up to watch the launch. 3..2..1.. blastoff! It popped up, the engine ejected, and the BOMARC flew in a perfect spiral about one block in diameter. All the kids started chasing after it, back and forth, as it lazily spiraled around up out of their reach, I laughed and laughed. I stood right by the launch pad as the rocket started coming down, it looked like it would land almost at my feet.. and it DID! And then one of the kids chasing it STOMPED right on top of it, smashing my beautiful rocket to bits! Dammit! I think I gave up building rockets after that, my heart wasn't in it anymore.
Oh yeah.. I do recall building one cool rocket, once I was an adult. I found out that ultra high performance engines had come on the market, I think this was the late 1970s. No more wimpy Estes D engines, these were E, F and G engines. I heard there was a 2 stage rocket kit that would break the sound barrier, so I ordered one. IIRC, it was a G engine with a D on top of it. No sense in buying more than one set of engines, this kit would go up thousands of feet and come down miles away, I'd never see it again. The fins were made of composite balsa plywood, regular plywood would just break apart when it hit the sound barrier. The fins had to be epoxied carefully to the body tube with perfect fillets, construction details were crucial, the kit instructions said that the slightest flaw would cause the rocket to break up and smash INTO the sound barrier, rather than through it. It also recommended not painting the rocket as the least imbalance (i.e. more paint on one side than the other) would have an adverse effect. So I built the rocket, and my friends got together so we could launch it. We had to find a big field because you were supposed to stand at a specific distance away (~250 ft IIRC) so you'd be in the right spot to hear the faint sonic boom. We brought a long tape measure to mark off the distance precisely. I only had 20 feet of wire to run to the electronic igniter, so we drew straws on who would launch, the poor sap who pressed the button woul
The Nike+ sensor module has a little switch on the underside, you can switch it off if you don't want to broadcast the sensor data.
I personally only use my sensor on my running shoes, which I only wear while running. Good running shoes are too expensive to wear just walking around town, they wear out too quickly. So if anyone wants to track me while I run 5 one mile laps, in the exact same course, 4 times a week, hey, help yourself to my sensor data.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm.. the steel ball sounds familiar, and I mean that literally, I remember that banging sound clearly as if I could hear it right now. Telerama seems vaguely familiar, and the lightning. I don't recall the linotype, but I've seen one before, when I was a little kid and I took a tour of my hometown newspaper which still used them even as late as the 1970s. I still have a scar on my finger from the burn I got when I tried to swipe a hot lead slug... ha.
Anyway, when I went back to the Museum of Science and Industry, the saddest thing of all was the exhibit that was still there, the "Human Section." It's a human cadaver sliced into cross-sections about a half-inch thick, and mounted in formaldehyde between two sheets of plexiglass. I actually went to the museum to photograph it, since I'd described it to my friends and nobody believed me. But now it is deteriorating badly, some of the preservative liquid is evaporating and the top parts of the sections are drying out and mouldering, the plexiglass is scratched and cloudy from all those gawkers pressing against it, and it's decomposing from exposure to light. And to think a human being gave his body to science for this, and the museum couldn't even preserve it! It's a crime.
Nowadays, I suppose you could just go online and look at high-rez black & white CAT scans, I've seen a website with a whole human body imaged in cros-sections a millimeter thick. But it is just not the same as looking at a real human body section. I mean, you can see the poor guy's nose hairs - on the INSIDE of his nose. That is something I could never forget (no matter how hard I tried).
I strenuously object to the hasty, ill-concieved rush to computerize education by turning everything into a video game. Pretty soon, everyone will think science only takes place inside a computer. Let me give an example.
One of my favorite childhood memories was going to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Up on the second floor, there was a permanent display of historic scientific apparatus, like a Wimshust Generator about 20 feet in diameter. I went back to visit it about 10 years ago, all those exhibits were gone, replaced with computer kiosks. Really BAD computer kiosks, uninspiring, ill-planned junk that had all the bells and whistles, but little educational content. I thought about the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on developing and deploying those horrid, amateurish kiosks, and how they replaced a whole museum wing that represented the technological development of America, and I can only consider it the greatest educational tragedy I ever saw. I remember being inspired, as a little child, seeing those monuments to science, but that will never happen again. And it's a damn shame.
I've written a few brief notes on this case in other threads on Slashdot, but I've never laid out the full story. And oh boy is it an amazing story. But I've been hesitant to lay out the details for fear of becoming the target of rabid anti-DMCA nutcases. I am still considering how to proceed with the matter, I'm sure I will eventually reveal all, but not today.
There is another side of the story. I have personally found the DMCA to be invaluable in protecting my interests against greedy, unscrupulous corporations. The little guy (like me) has so few tools to protect his rights, the DMCA allowed me to stop a corporation from misappropriating my works, without having to resort to expensive litigation. All I had to do was file a few letters, I even copied the text from sample DMCA letters in the archives at Berkman. It was easy, and a hell of a lot cheaper than hiring a lawyer. Result: total victory against the infringer.
By the time the SEC decides to act, the pump and dump is already over. These scams happen in the space of a few days. Blocking trading on a group of stocks that have already been pumped and dumped is futile. As the submission suggests, if they could act promptly by blockign trading immediately after a spams, that would effectively be a DoS attack on a stock trading, any spammer could initiate one. The SEC needs to go after the spammers, not the stocks.
Actually, that's the whole point. Without DRM, there was no iTunes Music Store. With DRM, the studios permitted downloads via the ITMS. The lack of DRM prevented ITMS from launching, it exists only because Jobs convinced the studios that DRM would minimally protect their product and then they committed to the new business model.
Now you're going even further off target. You're criticizing Apple's educational support for an OS design decision. Apple has issued incremental (and sometimes hidden) boot CD OS updates for new CPUs ever since I remember, certainly since MacOS 8 days. Many new machines issued with the old Classic Mac OS had "enablers" that were required for that hardware, Apple usually issued special boot CDs with newer OS builds just for those CPUs, they usually didn't roll out a CD will all available enablers until the next major point release. This continues today, the boot DVD for my PowerBook G4 won't boot my Quad G5, and neither of those disks will boot an Intel Mac.
If this is what you're going to use as criticism, I call bullshit. I've never heard of anything like application software that would run on 10.3 that won't run on 10.4, with the sole exception of Classic software that will not run on Intel. MacOS is not like Windows that breaks apps on every service pack.
It's hardly fair to judge Apple's enterprise efforts by the Australian educational market.
You're missing some basic information here.
Apple does have an Enterprise sales division and they are quite different from the consumer division, you get dedicated Apple representatives for your account. Onsite service contracts are available for server systems. Apple has always had self-servicing programs for enterprises, although the investment in spares can be a bit high.
Another factor is your allegations that uncertainty over future products hampers enterprise planning. The switch to Intel changed this picture considerably. Apple's future products track rather closely to Intel's.
Almost all of the MOAB bugs have already been patched, including OS fixes by Apple. Some of the application fixes were released within hours of the public announcement of the bug. Yet NONE of those fixes have been linked on the MOAB website.
The normal processes are working. What is NOT working is the MOAB process. If they used the normal procedure of notifying the developers privately, these bugs could have been fixed in days or even hours, before any public disclosure. But that wouldn't achieve what the MOAB hackers wanted. MOAB isn't about security, it's about publicity whoring.
You are referring to the Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment, of course. It could be said that the LLRE returns a single-pixel image of a manmade object on the lunar surface.
You can't short penny stocks. No brokerage offers this, they'd be insane to.
It's true, video cards supplied by Apple are not supported by the vendors, all support and driver updates have to come through Apple.
However, he still posted in the wrong place. He should have filed a bug report through regular Apple Developer channels. Anyone can file a bug report, you just have to sign up for a free Apple Developer Connection account.
You are mistaken. VueScan's multipass mode does not increase accuracy of the tonal resolution. It does not do brightness multisampling, it only does multisampling on the image resolution. Yes, I have VueScan Pro but I never use it, I just updated and noticed they added the profiling.
There are a multitude of reasons why Silverfast is superior to VueScan, the biggest one is that VueScan's GUI is absolute crap. My personal favorite feature of Silverfast is the ability to set white-point and black-point directly on an image preview using an eyedropper, in VueScan you have to do this by dragging points on a histogram, it's terribly difficult to use and often can't set the curve to what I need. Manual calibration of scanner input curves is PARTICULARLY vital when scanning negatives, as the film substrate has a dense anti-halation layer that adds density to all of the image area. This must be precompensated or else you just end up wasting a significant portion of your tonal resolution, you can't just take the standard ICC profile, you have to set the white point to the gray of the antihalation layer. Sure you have to optimize the curves after scanning, but unless you precompensate and use the full dynamic range, you just end up with a posterized file with lots of gaps in the histogram. Garbage in, garbage out.
Actually, modern flatbeds have DMax ratings that are competitive with drum scanners. I used to be a drum scanner operator and I think drum scans are way overkill for large B&W negs, they are better for high rez scans of small color transparencies.
One thing I should point out: I'm a big fan of Silverfast scanning software, and they just released a new version 6.5 which has a multiscan technique, it's sort of like HDR for scanning. It does multiple scans of each row at different exposure settings, combining them for a higher DMax and better sensitivity to levels. The big thing that digital scanning has needed for a long time is increased levels, so I scan most of my stuff at 16 bits instead of 8 bits. This Silverfast rev is the first affordable software that does anything significant to improve level sensitivity and bring it up to the potential of 16 bit.
I also note that Silverfast works with ICC color profiles, and can be calibrated with an ICC target. This is the weakness of software like VueScan. VueScan is totally unsuitable for quality scanning, although it is good for bulk scanning of paper documents (which is not a very demanding task). It would be preferable to scan archival files with a calibrated system. VueScan cannot be calibrated, and has very poor manual control over levels. This is especially problematic with B&W negatives, which have no 100% transparent areas, there is always a slight density of gray (the "anti-halation layer").
A friend of mine is a retired photography professor who does a lot of work on a 4x5 view camera. He's using an older Epson flatbed scanner. It has an illuminator on top, and a frame that can hold four 4x5 negatives for gang scanning. It comes with a whole set of frames to hold negatives of various sizes from 35mm to 8x10. His Epson model is discontinued, but it appears the equivalent would be something like the Epson Perfection V750-M.
Ooh, I had that game for my Processor Technology SOL-20, it was the first game software I ever purchased, that must have been around 1975. The SOL-20 version had a really clever hack, someone figured out that the S-100 bus emitted radio noise that could be picked up on a nearby AM radio, so he wrote little loops into the code so it would make phaser sounds through your radio. Unfortunately during other game play the CPU emitted a cacophony of irritating noise, so overall, it got rather tedious to listen to all that crap just for a few phaser noises.
Sure, I endorse the spammer paying attorney's fees, that's the whole point, to make the losing defendant pay for the lawsuit. But how can the State Attorneys submit a bill to anyone when they are salaried employees of the State? The "lawyers fees," in actuality, are State fees, since they should rightfully be awarded to the State Treasury, since taxpayers bankrolled the lawsuit. Why should the attorneys get anything beyond their salaries? If the attorneys get money from their salary AND fees from the defendant, that seems like double dipping.
What is the deal with State Attorney's fees? This action was brought by officials of the State Attorney General's office, their salaries are paid by taxpayers. As employees of the State, the prosecution lawyers have already been paid for their work. Sure the State has a right to recover their expenses in this lawsuit, but this seems like an awfully high dollar figure, and seems like double-dipping at the taxpayers' expense. Do the prosecutors get a bonus for winning?
Look online again, Apple released a utility specifically designed to fix bricked shuffles.
Mr. Troll:
Ethanol is a liquid. $84Million of ethanol is a literal drop in the bucket of Gates' massive holdings of oil and LNG (liquified natural gas).
I hadn't heard of that one, but I checked it out and PE is literally a drop in the bucket, compared to Gates massive holdings in conventional energy from gas, coal, and nuclear. The PE investment is $84 million, nobody quite knows the full extent of his other energy deals but I read estimates of over $750 million just in this year alone.
Funny you should mention that. He's doing just the opposite. Gates just bought 10% of PNM Resources, a gas and electric utility in Arizona. They don't do renewable energy.
Gates also owns major portions of Home Depot, Canadian National Railway Co, Republic Services (a garbage hauling company), several TV networks, Four Seasons Hotels, Berkshire Hathaway, and several Big Pharmaceutical companies. This is not the profile of an enlightened investor. These are the investments any Robber Baron would make to diversify his holdings.
Keep your eye on Cascade Investments LLC, that's Gates' personal holding company. He's still building his personal fortune, leveraging his monopoly into more areas.
Like many kids in the 1960s, the coolest thing we could get our hands on was Estes model rocket engines. I particularly loved to make "boost gliders" which were devilishly difficult to build right. They were complex because they had a large rotatable wing. During the boost phase the wing was retracted parallel to the main tube, but after the rocket burned out, the propellant module ejected and the wing would rotate out to a configuration like an aircraft. The idea was that the rocket would shoot upright to maximum altitude, then the wing would deploy and it would fly in a flat spiral, then land close to the launch site. If you did it wrong, it would go up and then fly off in a straight line off to the horizon, never to be seen again.
The best rocket I ever made was a scale model of the BOMARC, one of the first cruise missiles in the US arsenal. I spent weeks making sure every detail was perfect, it looked beautiful, even the paint job was polished to mirror-like perfection (very difficult for a 12 year old kid like me to achieve). The aerodynamics looked good, although scale model kits were notorious for poor flight qualities since sacrifices were made for the sake of accurate design. But I managed to static test the rocket until it worked right, this was done by attaching a long piece of string to the rocket's center of gravity, then whirling it around at the end of 20 feet of string, watching its flight dynamics until you puked from dizziness. A little trim balancing here, a little added weight there, and everything was perfect.
In fact, so perfect I didn't want to launch it. I hung the rocket from my bedroom ceiling, where I fondly gazed at it every night as I lay in bed. Eventually I decided I had to see it fly. But to minimize the risk, the first flight would be a small rocket engine, I didn't want to shoot it up 2000 feet and maybe never see it again, a small 200ft flight would be sufficient. Whenever I set up my launch pad, all the neighborhood kids would suddenly show up to watch the launch. 3..2..1.. blastoff! It popped up, the engine ejected, and the BOMARC flew in a perfect spiral about one block in diameter. All the kids started chasing after it, back and forth, as it lazily spiraled around up out of their reach, I laughed and laughed. I stood right by the launch pad as the rocket started coming down, it looked like it would land almost at my feet.. and it DID! And then one of the kids chasing it STOMPED right on top of it, smashing my beautiful rocket to bits! Dammit!
I think I gave up building rockets after that, my heart wasn't in it anymore.
Oh yeah.. I do recall building one cool rocket, once I was an adult. I found out that ultra high performance engines had come on the market, I think this was the late 1970s. No more wimpy Estes D engines, these were E, F and G engines. I heard there was a 2 stage rocket kit that would break the sound barrier, so I ordered one. IIRC, it was a G engine with a D on top of it. No sense in buying more than one set of engines, this kit would go up thousands of feet and come down miles away, I'd never see it again. The fins were made of composite balsa plywood, regular plywood would just break apart when it hit the sound barrier. The fins had to be epoxied carefully to the body tube with perfect fillets, construction details were crucial, the kit instructions said that the slightest flaw would cause the rocket to break up and smash INTO the sound barrier, rather than through it. It also recommended not painting the rocket as the least imbalance (i.e. more paint on one side than the other) would have an adverse effect.
So I built the rocket, and my friends got together so we could launch it. We had to find a big field because you were supposed to stand at a specific distance away (~250 ft IIRC) so you'd be in the right spot to hear the faint sonic boom. We brought a long tape measure to mark off the distance precisely. I only had 20 feet of wire to run to the electronic igniter, so we drew straws on who would launch, the poor sap who pressed the button woul
The Nike+ sensor module has a little switch on the underside, you can switch it off if you don't want to broadcast the sensor data.
I personally only use my sensor on my running shoes, which I only wear while running. Good running shoes are too expensive to wear just walking around town, they wear out too quickly. So if anyone wants to track me while I run 5 one mile laps, in the exact same course, 4 times a week, hey, help yourself to my sensor data.