Were you kind enough to return the boot, or is it now a decoration in your garage?:) Someone asked me once if I could remove one. I said "Sure, give me a cutting torch and 20 minutes, and it'll be off. You'll need a new tire though." Paying the fine was cheaper than getting a new tire. {sigh}, and I was looking forward to it.:)
Electrical tape is your friend too. Duct tape can be conductive. I found that out the hard way when I was a kid (miswired ignition system, 15Kv through a metallic non-electrical part covered in duct tape. Ouch.)
I have a great idea for a car (among many other things). I already recognize if I ever expect it to see the light of day, I will have to produce the first prototype. Then that prototype will be in competition for investor money right along with everyone else who has a great idea *AND* and prototype. If it makes it and we get investor money, we may (just may) have a marketable product. And only then will we find out if my great idea will actually be accepted by the market.
My sketches are only that. An idea sketched out. Until there's something tangible, it's a worthless piece of scrap paper. If it does become a real product, that scrap paper could someday be worth a fortune. Until you have the product that did sell, you've only lowered the value of a perfectly good piece of paper by writing on it.
I haven't been in the gaming area, but I've seen a lot of businesses like this.
Some guy has the next killer idea. "Oh, it'll make billions!". He needs me or someone I know for some aspect of it. "Well, we don't have any money yet, but we'll get investment money, and then our product will make us bigger than Microsoft! You'll be a partner in the company, so you'll get part of everything!" It's amazing how many people say they'll have something "bigger than Microsoft". I don't quite get why people use that as a benchmark for their company. How about using the benchmark of "we hope to break even in the first year, and make a profit in subsequent years."
That "killer idea" was something that him and his friends thought up. It's already been done, and it isn't feasible without some serious backing. I worked on some of the projects. I refused a lot of them. So far, none have done the most important thing in a business. Attract paying customers.
I worked for a very large adult website for years. The idea was very basic, but they got traffic, which kept growing. People asked me if they could do the same thing. Sure, you could do it bigger and better. You could have the most beautiful website in the world, but unless you get traffic in, you'll never make a penny. I don't say it to be mean. I say it to be practical. There was a site where they hired amazingly beautiful models. They had a great site, and great movies on it. They got 30 members in the first year. That was less than $7,000. It didn't even cover their expenses for hiring the girls, filming, editing and publishing the movies. They all did it with the hopes of making money. In the end, one guy was given the camera (Canon XL1). Some others got little things, like the computers they were using. There was no money for any of them to take home when they decided to close up shop.
Another place wanted to make the facebook killer. I was interviewed for helping on the technical side, since I've run large networks and the guy doing it had never tried. They've been working on it for two years now. Their intention was to launch with a pay membership system. I tried to tell them, they'll never keep the first membership (or even the first few thousand). Who wants to be on a social networking site where there's no one to socialize with. I asked about their customer base. "Oh, don't worry, we'll get them." Which roughly translates to "We don't have one, we just hope they'll come."
... and when I was a teenager, I was downloading porn from BBS's that also had door games. Before that, boys would "find" dirty magazines and pictures that their fathers had hidden away. As long as humans are humans, and we have our instinctual urges, we'll likely have porn of some sort somewhere. Ahh, Ms. November 1968...
It then depends on how "porn" is defined. There are obvious examples, but there are plenty of gray areas. Some people think women in bikinis is pornography. Is this pornography, or a clothing sales company? Should it be in.xxx or.com?
The biggest drawbacks I see to the.xxx domain are...
1) Name conflicts. If I have exampleporn.com, and you have exampleporn.us, and someone else has exampleporn.ru, we'll all be trying to get exampleporn.xxx. That would be a nightmare of arbitration.
2) Migration requirements. If people know exampleporn.com, they'll keep going there. If I shut it down and only run exampleporn.xxx, I'd have a dramatic drop in traffic. Some repeat traffic, even for popular sites, don't come back every day, or even every month. They may only go there once every year or so. If they can't find exampleporn.com next time they go, they'll assume the site went away.
3) Filtering. If places restrict access to.xxx, it's advantageous for adult sites *not* to have their domain under the.xxx domain. Tomorrow, your ISP may say "We operate a child friendly ISP, where we don't allow pornography." Yippie fuckin' skippie. In the wholesome "think about the children" world, that's great, until your wife leaves you, takes the kids, and you want to see some porn.:)
4) Protection of trademark. If Disney doesn't buy disney.xxx, someone's going to put a porn site on it. If they do buy disney.xxx, it can (and likely will) be perceived as their own intention to run a porn site on it.
5) Customer stupidity. Most people don't understand that some names don't end in.com. I had a.us domain a long time ago, under the old structure [name].[category].[state].us. If I told someone to go there, they'd try to put.com at the end of it. This still applies today. I have a subdomain for a special app. special.example.com . People almost always read it back as www.special.example.com, regardless of the fact that I tell them to type exactly what I say to them.
6) Implication to registrars. If a registrar handles the.xxx domain, they're not only handling names for run of the mill porn stuff, but they may also be handling names for illegal activites (very.young.kiddieporn.xxx, nasty.bestiality.xxx, etc). That could tarnish their image.
I know it's been argued that by creating.xxx, implies ICANN is open to allowing pornography on the Internet. That's stupid. I know a long time ago there was a filter on domain name creation. You couldn't include the letters f, u, c, k, in that sequence. Sometimes a name that could be too naughty would not be allowed either. Those filters are obviously gone now.
With all that said, I'm not against.xxx being created. Those are just potential problems of it. I think it *should* be created, and allow a smooth migration towards it. If it is created, I don't it won't be the exclusive realm for dirty sites.
And the really big question, are you sure they really were "stolen" and not just kept.
I think you have an extremely valid question here.
For most people, they'll rent a movie, watch it once, and return it.
For gamers, they'll rent a game, play it, like it, and possibly keep wanting to play it for a while. Rather buying it, they can just say "I never got it", and it's now considered lost in transit.
I've received quite a few disks from Netflix that were scratched beyond use. No big deal. Report the scratch so they'll toss it when they receive it. I haven't received any broken disks. CD's and DVD's are actually fairly hard to break. Take one and flex it til it breaks. Watch your eyes though.:) If I remember from the article correctly, they only have 3 distro centers, so it's perfectly possible that some employees at the local sorting station break them on purpose. I knew someone who worked as a sorter at a USPS distro center. He said they mistreated mail fairly regularly. If the label wasn't printed with a zip+4 zipcode, it would get tossed into a separate bin and processed last on the shift. If they were handwritten, and the address wasn't totally clear, even if it was just one possibly confusing letter, it got tossed into the bin to process later. That was regardless if the confusing letter would cause confusion (is that "main st", "maln st", or "ma1n st", and that zip only had a "main st").
That's not to say all USPS workers disregard priority of mail to suit their own personal agenda, it's just that some employees don't perform their tasks to the best interest of the customers. You get that anywhere.
I knew someone who worked for UPS (the commercial shipping company, not USPS). At their center, they handled domestic returns for a consumer electronics company (Linksys, if I remember correctly). Those boxes were tossed around because they received so many and they were annoying. Some people were careful to load the delivery trucks in the order they would be delivered in. Some people just loaded the delivery trucks as quickly as possible to make their work easier.
I know with FedEx, I once was receiving a small package. I saw the driver go by and I needed the package, so I went to the local distro center when they should have been arriving. I asked the person at the counter asked about my package, as it was marked as being on the truck for delivery. Rather than putting my small package on their small package shelf, it was just thrown in the truck, and ended up behind a large box on the floor. It took them 20 minutes to find it on the truck, since it wasn't where it should have been. It helped that I was patient, and described the size of the package so they knew it was small, so it must have ended up somewhere in the truck. He hadn't stopped at my place, because he didn't see it in the truck, so he assumed I had already collected it from the distro center before he left.
I've had a lot of stuff shipped. Most of it makes it through fine. I got a large box with 3 servers in it once, where it was obvious that a forklift had run through the side of it. A couple boxes with monitors shipped at the same time got to their destinations absolutely destroyed. Since they were on different sides of the country, I have to assume it happened at the local center. At least they weren't expensive. I sold them on eBay, and just absorbed the expense.
With all the home repairs I've done over the last few years, "shoddy/lazy" work isn't the exception, it's the norm. I'd be delighted to find well thought out and designed work than the crap that they've been building for the last couple decades.
3/4" pipe coming into the bathroom would be one of those examples. You *may* have 3/4" pipe coming in there, but you'll have 1/2" pipe coming in between the meter and the house. I've installed quite a few whole house water filtration systems (effective ones, not the crap that door to door guys try to sell), and found 1/2" pipe. WTF. Well, I'm not a plumber, so I'm not replumbing their whole house, but I have to convert the 1/2" to 1" for the filter and then back down to attach for the house. It doesn't hurt their pressure at all (like much would be worse at that point), but they tell me about existing problems where you can't do things like start the laundry *and* flush a toilet. And that's on city water, not on a well.
I really believe building codes are a suggestion, and only used when a repair contractor wants to make more money. "Nope, we have to do it this way. I know it'll cost double, but it's code."
Nah, they just pruned the ugly virgins. The hot ones became "special" priestesses. You know, the ones that served to the leaders "needs". There's a name for those now. What is that? Oh ya. Whores.:)
Just because you don't follow the local slang doesn't mean it doesn't exist.:) Growing up in the south, I've avoided the "y'all", and most of the southern drawl, but I've heard it enough that it's easy to slip into. At very least, I understand every word people say. If you've ever watched "King of the Hill", I actually understand what "Boomhauer" says. Well, what he's saying. The random noises between his words is actually how some people speak.
From what I've seen, "pop" is a northern thing, kind of across states that border Canada. I can't say I've heard people who originated in other areas use it. I had a quick look a the wikipedia page on it, and they list "tonic", which I can't say I've heard anyone use.
It should be perfectly doable. Where I am, from the desktop to the Internet there's a wireless bridge, then a NAT, and then I'm on. I haven't had any problems playing games online. Most new installs from what I've seen give a router that gives the LAN a NAT address anyways.
How are they doing it? Can you hear the entire 10.0.0.0/8 network, or are they simply providing a single NAT address for internal use (i.e., on your final point to point link).
I'm actually surprised that more residential providers haven't put the majority of their customers on NAT's, and providing public IP's as the exception, not the rule.
I'm annoyed when some SEO "expert" wants a dozen/24's to stick on a handful of boxes because "the search engines will know I'm link spamming", but it's even more annoying to know millions of IP's are wasted because the providers don't want to conserve address space.
You're just getting into semantics and finer tastes.:)
By definition, it's suppose to be 2/3 highball glass of ice, 3 parts coke, 1 part white rum. It will be slightly lighter than normal coke.
If I'm mixing it at home, my mix is usually a pint glass, 3 ice cubes, 2/3 rum, top with coke. It should be a very light tan in color. That gives me a nice drink that I can work on for about an hour so I have time to socialize with guests.
A typical bar mix is a short tumbler, 3/4 ice, one shot rum, fill with coke. It will be darker than the proper mix.
I've become very fond of Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum and Dr. Pepper. I know that most bars only have Coke/Pepsi, Sprite/7up, and water on their gun, depending on how loud the establishment is and my mood, I may specify Captain Morgan and Dr Pepper. If the bartender is limited to reading lips because it's so loud, I'll order "rum and coke", and will usually receive Bacardi and Coke/Pepsi. If it's not loud and they're not busy, I'll be very specific about my drink list. "shot of Jack, and a double captain and coke in a short glass". I have a very high alcohol tolerance, so if I have any expectation of feeling anything, I drink. If I drink at the same rate as those that are with me (with a few exceptions), I won't even feel it and they'll be sloppy drunk.
Actually, he's mostly correct. The dialect they speak is Español mexicano. I've known Cubans (immigrants or 1st generation American) who have a very hard time understanding Mexican Spanish, and vice versa.
Americans don't speak British English, they speak American English. Australians speak Australian English. Within each of those are other dialects. For a lot of people, if they grew up in an area that had a distinct dialect with few others having other dialects, they can sometimes have a hard time understanding some (or much) of what someone else says in another dialect of the same language.
I grew up in an area where several dialects of English were spoken due to migration, and I watched a good bit of BBC on PBS since that was one of the few stations we could receive on our broadcast TV. Depending on where I am, my accent will drift from a very plain "midwestern" accent, to a "deep southern" accent, or one of the "northeastern" accents.
I knew someone who grew up in the Southeast US, and she had a very distinct "deep southern" accent. I spoke with her on the phone while she was in the Northeast, and I thought I had a wrong number, because her southern accent was completely gone, and she had the appropriate accent for where she was now living.
With current (within the last 100 years) trends for people to move between areas frequently may result in a more standardized "English" language, but that will probably take a long time. I know if you want a "Coca Cola" in different areas, you still have to change what you're asking for between "Coke", "Soda", and "Pop". I tried to order a "rum and coke" in Europe. The waiter gave me a dumb look, because he had no clue what I was asking for. One of the people I was with already knew the variation for the locale, and said "He'd like a Bacardi and cola".
Ya, I as actually assuming steady cruise for the ship, but still, you're absolutely right.
On the GPS thing, it's pretty funny that you mentioned it. I've been writing my own GPS software here and taking into account errors GPS readings. In a static location (like, sitting on my porch with the receiver having a clear view of the sky) I plotted my location over a period on Google Earth. The dilution of precision is a bitch. I started plotting the "squiggles" (everywhere it said I was), along with the mean and median of the readings as points. The reported coordinates went all over the place, including a few extreme points over a mile away. I thought I could get accuracy down to inches with some method, but the best it's done has been about 1 meter. I was hoping to get the resolution "perfect" down to the point where the receiver is sitting to make a better for geocaching. Then it dawned on me. Even if I made my precision correct down to an inch, that still can't take into account the error when the person who created the cache location.
I was hoping to do a little weather balloon exercise, sending a smart gilder up to 100k feet on a weather balloon, and having it fly home (i.e., landing on a runway for RC flyers). The best I could hope for without setting up my own ILS beacons would be getting it somewhere really close to home. Walking a few meters to recover it isn't as bad as driving for miles to recover it.:) Without good altimeter readings (like, echoing off the ground below it), it could flare and stall too high or too low pretty easily.
Well, from both of our observations, and from what I have seen from other people, we all survive fine.
The Northeast US gets really nasty storms (i.e., nor'easters). I was only 4 during the blizzard of 1978, but I do remember seeing ice floating in the road and our yard, and houses that had been swept out to sea. I asked my mom about it recently, and she said we were without power or gas for 14 days. Our basement (where the gas heater was) was flooded for a while, so until that got cleared up, we were warmed by whatever they could burn in the fireplace.
Around mid-summer 2002 (I believe), I remember widespread power outages in the Southeast US due to a hurricane. I was moving from Florida to California, and every hotel (that had power) along I-10 was booked up because the utility companies took all the rooms for their crews. That's also when I found that it's possible but less than comfortable for two people to sleep in the cab of a U-Haul truck. We didn't find a hotel with an available room until we hit Texas.
In digging around, there have been instances of outages in major cities, including a week long blackout for major parts of New York City in 2006.
You should try to live in some of the harsh weather states, like Florida.
When I was a kid, we'd experience up to 12 hours of power outages about once a month. If it was night time, the most chaos was to look to see if the neighbors lights were on.
During (and after) hurricanes, it's a given that you will probably expect a prolonged power outage. People get along fine without the need of electricity. You'll find both LEOs and civilians directing traffic at busy intersections. You'll even find people helping out with anything they can. I've helped move large trees out of the road and off of houses with little more than a pickup truck, chains, a few helpful people, and a little effort.
None of your examples have to be cybercrime related. They can easily be done by someone internally. It's more likely that kind of stuff would happen accidentally by the non-malicious staff working it. Look at the power plant incidents that have happened in the past.
As far as that goes, you could have a major impact on the power grid with some improvised explosives (or several other methods) and knowing where the high tension lines run. If the tower looks like this, it isn't going to work quite as well as expected.
Well, it would depend on what you're doing the calculations for, and how you're doing them.
Say it used diesel fired engines, and you were instructed to calculate the fuel consumption per engine revolution, and then apply that to a trip. I don't know the specifics on an aircraft carrier, so I'll just make up some numbers.
At full speed, the ship travels at 12 nautical miles per hour (knots). The engines spin at 300rpm. It burns 1275 gallons of fuel per hour.
That's 18,000 engine revolutions per hour, or 0.0708334 gallons per revolution.
1,000 miles at 12 knots = 84.3333334 hours.
If you are to travel 1,000 nautical miles, 18,000 * 83.3333334 = 1,500,000.0012 revolutino. At 0.0707334 gallons per revolution, that would be 106,100.100085 gallons.
But knowing that it burns 1,275 gallons per hour at 12 knots, and you will be traveling for 83.3333334 hours, you will require 106,250.000085 gallons. Using the measure of gallons per revolution to try to come up with a very precise number to work with, you've actually fallen short by 150 gallons for the trip. I can imagine a slight embarrassment by having your aircraft carrier run out of fuel just 7 minutes from its destination.
Using 7 decimal points of precision, when it's multiplied so many times, it can easily cause errors.
I'd be pretty sure they aren't counting gallons per revolution, I only used that as an example of where errors could happen. If you're considering the full length of the ship, 0.1 inches is more than enough to believe you have a good number.:) I believe due to expansion of the metals, the total length of the ship may change more than that depending on if it's a hot or cold day.:)
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Actually, there are plenty of places this works, including the courts.
"You have 30 days to respond. Failure to respond will mean you accept the terms of this letter."
Somehow, I usually don't get the letter until day 40. Hmm.
Once I got one that said "... 72 hours to respond ..." It was postmarked Friday. It didn't get delivered until Tuesday.
Were you kind enough to return the boot, or is it now a decoration in your garage? :) Someone asked me once if I could remove one. I said "Sure, give me a cutting torch and 20 minutes, and it'll be off. You'll need a new tire though." Paying the fine was cheaper than getting a new tire. {sigh}, and I was looking forward to it. :)
Electrical tape is your friend too. Duct tape can be conductive. I found that out the hard way when I was a kid (miswired ignition system, 15Kv through a metallic non-electrical part covered in duct tape. Ouch.)
Well, you should have a 3" pipe in the bathroom too, but that's not for drinking from. :)
I have a great idea for a car (among many other things). I already recognize if I ever expect it to see the light of day, I will have to produce the first prototype. Then that prototype will be in competition for investor money right along with everyone else who has a great idea *AND* and prototype. If it makes it and we get investor money, we may (just may) have a marketable product. And only then will we find out if my great idea will actually be accepted by the market.
My sketches are only that. An idea sketched out. Until there's something tangible, it's a worthless piece of scrap paper. If it does become a real product, that scrap paper could someday be worth a fortune. Until you have the product that did sell, you've only lowered the value of a perfectly good piece of paper by writing on it.
I haven't been in the gaming area, but I've seen a lot of businesses like this.
Some guy has the next killer idea. "Oh, it'll make billions!". He needs me or someone I know for some aspect of it. "Well, we don't have any money yet, but we'll get investment money, and then our product will make us bigger than Microsoft! You'll be a partner in the company, so you'll get part of everything!" It's amazing how many people say they'll have something "bigger than Microsoft". I don't quite get why people use that as a benchmark for their company. How about using the benchmark of "we hope to break even in the first year, and make a profit in subsequent years."
That "killer idea" was something that him and his friends thought up. It's already been done, and it isn't feasible without some serious backing. I worked on some of the projects. I refused a lot of them. So far, none have done the most important thing in a business. Attract paying customers.
I worked for a very large adult website for years. The idea was very basic, but they got traffic, which kept growing. People asked me if they could do the same thing. Sure, you could do it bigger and better. You could have the most beautiful website in the world, but unless you get traffic in, you'll never make a penny. I don't say it to be mean. I say it to be practical. There was a site where they hired amazingly beautiful models. They had a great site, and great movies on it. They got 30 members in the first year. That was less than $7,000. It didn't even cover their expenses for hiring the girls, filming, editing and publishing the movies. They all did it with the hopes of making money. In the end, one guy was given the camera (Canon XL1). Some others got little things, like the computers they were using. There was no money for any of them to take home when they decided to close up shop.
Another place wanted to make the facebook killer. I was interviewed for helping on the technical side, since I've run large networks and the guy doing it had never tried. They've been working on it for two years now. Their intention was to launch with a pay membership system. I tried to tell them, they'll never keep the first membership (or even the first few thousand). Who wants to be on a social networking site where there's no one to socialize with. I asked about their customer base. "Oh, don't worry, we'll get them." Which roughly translates to "We don't have one, we just hope they'll come."
It then depends on how "porn" is defined. There are obvious examples, but there are plenty of gray areas. Some people think women in bikinis is pornography. Is this pornography, or a clothing sales company? Should it be in .xxx or .com?
The biggest drawbacks I see to the .xxx domain are...
1) Name conflicts. If I have exampleporn.com, and you have exampleporn.us, and someone else has exampleporn.ru, we'll all be trying to get exampleporn.xxx. That would be a nightmare of arbitration.
2) Migration requirements. If people know exampleporn.com, they'll keep going there. If I shut it down and only run exampleporn.xxx, I'd have a dramatic drop in traffic. Some repeat traffic, even for popular sites, don't come back every day, or even every month. They may only go there once every year or so. If they can't find exampleporn.com next time they go, they'll assume the site went away.
3) Filtering. If places restrict access to .xxx, it's advantageous for adult sites *not* to have their domain under the .xxx domain. Tomorrow, your ISP may say "We operate a child friendly ISP, where we don't allow pornography." Yippie fuckin' skippie. In the wholesome "think about the children" world, that's great, until your wife leaves you, takes the kids, and you want to see some porn. :)
4) Protection of trademark. If Disney doesn't buy disney.xxx, someone's going to put a porn site on it. If they do buy disney.xxx, it can (and likely will) be perceived as their own intention to run a porn site on it.
5) Customer stupidity. Most people don't understand that some names don't end in .com. I had a .us domain a long time ago, under the old structure [name].[category].[state].us. If I told someone to go there, they'd try to put .com at the end of it. This still applies today. I have a subdomain for a special app. special.example.com . People almost always read it back as www.special.example.com, regardless of the fact that I tell them to type exactly what I say to them.
6) Implication to registrars. If a registrar handles the .xxx domain, they're not only handling names for run of the mill porn stuff, but they may also be handling names for illegal activites (very.young.kiddieporn.xxx, nasty.bestiality.xxx, etc). That could tarnish their image.
I know it's been argued that by creating .xxx, implies ICANN is open to allowing pornography on the Internet. That's stupid. I know a long time ago there was a filter on domain name creation. You couldn't include the letters f, u, c, k, in that sequence. Sometimes a name that could be too naughty would not be allowed either. Those filters are obviously gone now.
With all that said, I'm not against .xxx being created. Those are just potential problems of it. I think it *should* be created, and allow a smooth migration towards it. If it is created, I don't it won't be the exclusive realm for dirty sites.
I think you have an extremely valid question here.
For most people, they'll rent a movie, watch it once, and return it.
For gamers, they'll rent a game, play it, like it, and possibly keep wanting to play it for a while. Rather buying it, they can just say "I never got it", and it's now considered lost in transit.
I've received quite a few disks from Netflix that were scratched beyond use. No big deal. Report the scratch so they'll toss it when they receive it. I haven't received any broken disks. CD's and DVD's are actually fairly hard to break. Take one and flex it til it breaks. Watch your eyes though. :) If I remember from the article correctly, they only have 3 distro centers, so it's perfectly possible that some employees at the local sorting station break them on purpose. I knew someone who worked as a sorter at a USPS distro center. He said they mistreated mail fairly regularly. If the label wasn't printed with a zip+4 zipcode, it would get tossed into a separate bin and processed last on the shift. If they were handwritten, and the address wasn't totally clear, even if it was just one possibly confusing letter, it got tossed into the bin to process later. That was regardless if the confusing letter would cause confusion (is that "main st", "maln st", or "ma1n st", and that zip only had a "main st").
That's not to say all USPS workers disregard priority of mail to suit their own personal agenda, it's just that some employees don't perform their tasks to the best interest of the customers. You get that anywhere.
I knew someone who worked for UPS (the commercial shipping company, not USPS). At their center, they handled domestic returns for a consumer electronics company (Linksys, if I remember correctly). Those boxes were tossed around because they received so many and they were annoying. Some people were careful to load the delivery trucks in the order they would be delivered in. Some people just loaded the delivery trucks as quickly as possible to make their work easier.
I know with FedEx, I once was receiving a small package. I saw the driver go by and I needed the package, so I went to the local distro center when they should have been arriving. I asked the person at the counter asked about my package, as it was marked as being on the truck for delivery. Rather than putting my small package on their small package shelf, it was just thrown in the truck, and ended up behind a large box on the floor. It took them 20 minutes to find it on the truck, since it wasn't where it should have been. It helped that I was patient, and described the size of the package so they knew it was small, so it must have ended up somewhere in the truck. He hadn't stopped at my place, because he didn't see it in the truck, so he assumed I had already collected it from the distro center before he left.
I've had a lot of stuff shipped. Most of it makes it through fine. I got a large box with 3 servers in it once, where it was obvious that a forklift had run through the side of it. A couple boxes with monitors shipped at the same time got to their destinations absolutely destroyed. Since they were on different sides of the country, I have to assume it happened at the local center. At least they weren't expensive. I sold them on eBay, and just absorbed the expense.
With all the home repairs I've done over the last few years, "shoddy/lazy" work isn't the exception, it's the norm. I'd be delighted to find well thought out and designed work than the crap that they've been building for the last couple decades.
3/4" pipe coming into the bathroom would be one of those examples. You *may* have 3/4" pipe coming in there, but you'll have 1/2" pipe coming in between the meter and the house. I've installed quite a few whole house water filtration systems (effective ones, not the crap that door to door guys try to sell), and found 1/2" pipe. WTF. Well, I'm not a plumber, so I'm not replumbing their whole house, but I have to convert the 1/2" to 1" for the filter and then back down to attach for the house. It doesn't hurt their pressure at all (like much would be worse at that point), but they tell me about existing problems where you can't do things like start the laundry *and* flush a toilet. And that's on city water, not on a well.
I really believe building codes are a suggestion, and only used when a repair contractor wants to make more money. "Nope, we have to do it this way. I know it'll cost double, but it's code."
Nah, they just pruned the ugly virgins. The hot ones became "special" priestesses. You know, the ones that served to the leaders "needs". There's a name for those now. What is that? Oh ya. Whores. :)
That's no twinkie. That's an ICBM that can linger in space for weeks before hitting its target.
Ya, it doesn't quite have the same ring as "That's no moon. It's a space station.", but hey, it's a freakin' flying twinkie.
Just because you don't follow the local slang doesn't mean it doesn't exist. :) Growing up in the south, I've avoided the "y'all", and most of the southern drawl, but I've heard it enough that it's easy to slip into. At very least, I understand every word people say. If you've ever watched "King of the Hill", I actually understand what "Boomhauer" says. Well, what he's saying. The random noises between his words is actually how some people speak.
From what I've seen, "pop" is a northern thing, kind of across states that border Canada. I can't say I've heard people who originated in other areas use it. I had a quick look a the wikipedia page on it, and they list "tonic", which I can't say I've heard anyone use.
It should be perfectly doable. Where I am, from the desktop to the Internet there's a wireless bridge, then a NAT, and then I'm on. I haven't had any problems playing games online. Most new installs from what I've seen give a router that gives the LAN a NAT address anyways.
How are they doing it? Can you hear the entire 10.0.0.0/8 network, or are they simply providing a single NAT address for internal use (i.e., on your final point to point link).
I'm actually surprised that more residential providers haven't put the majority of their customers on NAT's, and providing public IP's as the exception, not the rule.
I'm annoyed when some SEO "expert" wants a dozen /24's to stick on a handful of boxes because "the search engines will know I'm link spamming", but it's even more annoying to know millions of IP's are wasted because the providers don't want to conserve address space.
You're just getting into semantics and finer tastes. :)
By definition, it's suppose to be 2/3 highball glass of ice, 3 parts coke, 1 part white rum. It will be slightly lighter than normal coke.
If I'm mixing it at home, my mix is usually a pint glass, 3 ice cubes, 2/3 rum, top with coke. It should be a very light tan in color. That gives me a nice drink that I can work on for about an hour so I have time to socialize with guests.
A typical bar mix is a short tumbler, 3/4 ice, one shot rum, fill with coke. It will be darker than the proper mix.
I've become very fond of Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum and Dr. Pepper. I know that most bars only have Coke/Pepsi, Sprite/7up, and water on their gun, depending on how loud the establishment is and my mood, I may specify Captain Morgan and Dr Pepper. If the bartender is limited to reading lips because it's so loud, I'll order "rum and coke", and will usually receive Bacardi and Coke/Pepsi. If it's not loud and they're not busy, I'll be very specific about my drink list. "shot of Jack, and a double captain and coke in a short glass". I have a very high alcohol tolerance, so if I have any expectation of feeling anything, I drink. If I drink at the same rate as those that are with me (with a few exceptions), I won't even feel it and they'll be sloppy drunk.
Actually, he's mostly correct. The dialect they speak is Español mexicano. I've known Cubans (immigrants or 1st generation American) who have a very hard time understanding Mexican Spanish, and vice versa.
Americans don't speak British English, they speak American English. Australians speak Australian English. Within each of those are other dialects. For a lot of people, if they grew up in an area that had a distinct dialect with few others having other dialects, they can sometimes have a hard time understanding some (or much) of what someone else says in another dialect of the same language.
I grew up in an area where several dialects of English were spoken due to migration, and I watched a good bit of BBC on PBS since that was one of the few stations we could receive on our broadcast TV. Depending on where I am, my accent will drift from a very plain "midwestern" accent, to a "deep southern" accent, or one of the "northeastern" accents.
I knew someone who grew up in the Southeast US, and she had a very distinct "deep southern" accent. I spoke with her on the phone while she was in the Northeast, and I thought I had a wrong number, because her southern accent was completely gone, and she had the appropriate accent for where she was now living.
With current (within the last 100 years) trends for people to move between areas frequently may result in a more standardized "English" language, but that will probably take a long time. I know if you want a "Coca Cola" in different areas, you still have to change what you're asking for between "Coke", "Soda", and "Pop". I tried to order a "rum and coke" in Europe. The waiter gave me a dumb look, because he had no clue what I was asking for. One of the people I was with already knew the variation for the locale, and said "He'd like a Bacardi and cola".
Ya, I as actually assuming steady cruise for the ship, but still, you're absolutely right.
On the GPS thing, it's pretty funny that you mentioned it. I've been writing my own GPS software here and taking into account errors GPS readings. In a static location (like, sitting on my porch with the receiver having a clear view of the sky) I plotted my location over a period on Google Earth. The dilution of precision is a bitch. I started plotting the "squiggles" (everywhere it said I was), along with the mean and median of the readings as points. The reported coordinates went all over the place, including a few extreme points over a mile away. I thought I could get accuracy down to inches with some method, but the best it's done has been about 1 meter. I was hoping to get the resolution "perfect" down to the point where the receiver is sitting to make a better for geocaching. Then it dawned on me. Even if I made my precision correct down to an inch, that still can't take into account the error when the person who created the cache location.
I was hoping to do a little weather balloon exercise, sending a smart gilder up to 100k feet on a weather balloon, and having it fly home (i.e., landing on a runway for RC flyers). The best I could hope for without setting up my own ILS beacons would be getting it somewhere really close to home. Walking a few meters to recover it isn't as bad as driving for miles to recover it. :) Without good altimeter readings (like, echoing off the ground below it), it could flare and stall too high or too low pretty easily.
Well, from both of our observations, and from what I have seen from other people, we all survive fine.
The Northeast US gets really nasty storms (i.e., nor'easters). I was only 4 during the blizzard of 1978, but I do remember seeing ice floating in the road and our yard, and houses that had been swept out to sea. I asked my mom about it recently, and she said we were without power or gas for 14 days. Our basement (where the gas heater was) was flooded for a while, so until that got cleared up, we were warmed by whatever they could burn in the fireplace.
Around mid-summer 2002 (I believe), I remember widespread power outages in the Southeast US due to a hurricane. I was moving from Florida to California, and every hotel (that had power) along I-10 was booked up because the utility companies took all the rooms for their crews. That's also when I found that it's possible but less than comfortable for two people to sleep in the cab of a U-Haul truck. We didn't find a hotel with an available room until we hit Texas.
In digging around, there have been instances of outages in major cities, including a week long blackout for major parts of New York City in 2006.
You should try to live in some of the harsh weather states, like Florida.
When I was a kid, we'd experience up to 12 hours of power outages about once a month. If it was night time, the most chaos was to look to see if the neighbors lights were on.
During (and after) hurricanes, it's a given that you will probably expect a prolonged power outage. People get along fine without the need of electricity. You'll find both LEOs and civilians directing traffic at busy intersections. You'll even find people helping out with anything they can. I've helped move large trees out of the road and off of houses with little more than a pickup truck, chains, a few helpful people, and a little effort.
None of your examples have to be cybercrime related. They can easily be done by someone internally. It's more likely that kind of stuff would happen accidentally by the non-malicious staff working it. Look at the power plant incidents that have happened in the past.
As far as that goes, you could have a major impact on the power grid with some improvised explosives (or several other methods) and knowing where the high tension lines run. If the tower looks like this, it isn't going to work quite as well as expected.
I think the major parts of that are,
1) It wasn't high tech. This is primarily a tech site.
2) It didn't work, unless you count some smoke and getting the attention of the police.
3) It barely involved tech, unless you consider M80's and a child's clock to be high tech. If so, you don't belong here.
I could build a better bomb in my garage, but I have no reason to, and I don't really like jail. :)
Well, it would depend on what you're doing the calculations for, and how you're doing them.
Say it used diesel fired engines, and you were instructed to calculate the fuel consumption per engine revolution, and then apply that to a trip. I don't know the specifics on an aircraft carrier, so I'll just make up some numbers.
At full speed, the ship travels at 12 nautical miles per hour (knots). The engines spin at 300rpm. It burns 1275 gallons of fuel per hour.
That's 18,000 engine revolutions per hour, or 0.0708334 gallons per revolution.
1,000 miles at 12 knots = 84.3333334 hours.
If you are to travel 1,000 nautical miles, 18,000 * 83.3333334 = 1,500,000.0012 revolutino. At 0.0707334 gallons per revolution, that would be 106,100.100085 gallons.
But knowing that it burns 1,275 gallons per hour at 12 knots, and you will be traveling for 83.3333334 hours, you will require 106,250.000085 gallons. Using the measure of gallons per revolution to try to come up with a very precise number to work with, you've actually fallen short by 150 gallons for the trip. I can imagine a slight embarrassment by having your aircraft carrier run out of fuel just 7 minutes from its destination.
Using 7 decimal points of precision, when it's multiplied so many times, it can easily cause errors.
I'd be pretty sure they aren't counting gallons per revolution, I only used that as an example of where errors could happen. If you're considering the full length of the ship, 0.1 inches is more than enough to believe you have a good number. :) I believe due to expansion of the metals, the total length of the ship may change more than that depending on if it's a hot or cold day. :)