I liked the idea of thermo-acoustics. You take a tapered cylindered, apply a resonance generator (hot liquid going through an intersecting pipe), and the oscillations would hopefully set up a standing-wave pattern that would drive air downwards.
AD. 793. This year came dreadful forewarnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter."
I'm wondering whether that was an meteorite impact or weather conditions?
Sometimes people do see something, but they just didn't understand the technology at the time. There was some preacher missionary on a Pacific island who reported hearing a buzzing noise and seeing a craft that looked a glass dome on legs hovering above the tree-line, being controlled by a pilot who seemed to be sitting at a chair pushing and pulling levers. They achieved some basic communication where the preacher bowed, and the craft's pilot reciprocated. I hate to say this, but it does sound a bit like a navy helicopter.
In one Scandinavian country, they want to introduce a congestion charge into downtown. Residents oppose this. So the MP's amend the legislation so that one road doesn't have toll booths. It just happens to be the road that leads to the suburb where they live.
Very true. Once went to Heathrow airport when the weather was extremely humid and all the trees and bushes were lush and green if not a bit overgrown like a safari park somewhere equatorial. Made the comment that I thought I was in such and such country. Look of shock and horrified faces all round.
In a rural lifestyle you may had long hours but you had good meals and short commutes.
Having to depend on an unpredictable transportation network that changes on a monthly basis according to the pedantic whims of anonymous bureaucrats is probably the most stressful thing next to living in an apartment block that isn't soundproof.
That's one way. The other ways are to drive into a truck Mr. Bean style, and drive out as soon as you are past the cameras . The other way would be to have a chain of three or more cars tailgating each other.
My last university did that - they had a service contract with Dell, then HP. This amounted to having a truck or van come over every month to replace broken PC's with new ones (basically the university IT department would cannibalize the working parts and swap them round so that only a handful of totally dud PC's were returned.
There are really only two choices of either a whitelist or a blacklist. The tricky part is that you must also include kernel objects, dynamic loaded libraries as well as executables.
For Linux, a whitelist could be updated as modules are installed.
Android actually restricts execution of user installed files to one or two directories.
Prior may not always have been published. Like the patent lawsuit over multiplayer games. One arcade manufacturer claimed to have a patent over arcade board games networked together using LAN or serial port technology. One university was able to demonstrate prior art by showing a game that ran on their campus network, even though the source code to that game had never been made publicly available.
Many corporations do this as well - their research departments will have archives and archives of technical reports, all dated and time-stamped for when the need arises. Though these days, they just file patents as a way of getting their documents timestamped in a legally binding way.
British Telecom has touchscreen systems way back in 1988. They were used for course training. Though the touch screen was actually just an add-on transparent glass pane that fitted inside the bezel of a CRT.
A patent has to explain how the system works in written language, down to the individual components. Like the X-ray machine in Total Recall. With todays' technology that would have to be described as a system that incorporates a large plasma screen + multiple X-ray devices + image fusion + rendering.
Star Trek teleporters (along with The Fly and Space Quest) would be described as a plurality of transporters, with a height high enough to accommodate one or two people each or an equivalent volume of objects, controlled by a display system operated by a humanoid. Such a system combines a memory system capable of transferring the entire energy and quantum state of those person or objects over a distance of over 1000,000 meters.
It would have to describe how that quantum state was stored, and how the energy was transferred.
I'm sure if they wanted to, somebody could file a patent in Klingon.
I've worked for a number of companies who used to design their own circuit boards. As memory chips tended to "fry" under testing conditions, everyone tried to grab as many as they could. So old PC's were cannabalized of useful bits before they went to the recycling center. When somebody left, the vultures would circle, gather round their desk picking and making off with cables, memory chips and manuals.
Even my last university would pre-salvage all damaged PC's being sent back to Dell. Whatever working parts in one machine would be swapped with the broken parts of another.
My bets are on "promession". Freeze a sealed tub full of old electronics using liquid nitrogen. Shake and pound the tub until the only parts remaining are dust, then seperate these using magnets (to attract metals) or a centrifuge (seperating metals from light plastic).
There are equations that relate to the frequencies of photons given off by the atoms as they collide. If you know how much matter you have injected into the system, how tightly confined the beams of atoms are, and how fast the ions are travelling, you can figure out the temperature at the time of collision.
Temperature is really just a measure of how much energy is stored in the electron orbitals.
Something feels hot simply because the electrons in your heat sensing receptor cells are gaining that much energy.
X11 started off as a way of unifying all the different windows systems of all the different UNIX workstation vendors (Digital, DEC, Sun, SGI, HP). At the time it was developed it was considered a triumph of engineering because you could have an application running on one workstation, and have everything else drawn on a different screen on another workstation in another part of the campus. All communication was done using TCP/IP and other network stacks.
Which was great when all your software was doing the rendering. Then they start bringing in hardware acceleration starting with pixel-blitting and hardware mouse cursors. Going up and down through the network stack just to read a block of pixels was just too much, so they had to implement direct graphics screen formats which bypassed the network stack. Next thing was people was far fancier widgets than plain bitmapped text on flat square widgets as X-windows just managed the basic bounding box of every widget, window and screen, along with bitmapped text fonts and mouse icons, read input from input devices like mice and keyboards, and a software drawing callback system to refresh items which were erased when windows are moved around.
Then users wanted rounded corners on windows, shadow, transparency and effects, and accurate fonts. So they brought in X-windows/Motif, TrueType Fonts (FreeType). Then 3D acceleration came along, this was more of a bolt-on to X-windows. You created special GL widgets which allowed you to send down graphics commands. Then they wanted 3D effects on the window system itself. That meant bypassing the X-windows 2D render path to do pixblitting, and just render everything as texture-mapped triangles and point clouds using OpenGL. So the window manager itself becomes an OpenGL application. 2D drawing is just done over OpenGL functionality.
With current graphics hardware, it's easier just to have each window as an OpenGL renderbuffer and just texture draw all of them to the framebuffer.
All they need to do is add hydrophobic coatings so they could go underwater and the synthetic materials used to replicate geckos, and these things could climb walls. Add a needle to inject lethal drugs and you have the ultimate assassin's weapon.
The last apartment complex I rent in, had lockers beside the letter boxes. The post person would place the parcel inside one of these lockers, and drop the key into your letterbox. When you came to open the locker, the key itself would get locked in the locker lock, so it could be retrieved by the post person
For a home owner, the modern day equivalent would be to have an outhouse with a one-way lock. The postman could lock the door, but only the homeowner could unlock it.
Britain did that with their original domain name system. Email would have been uk.ac.somewhere.faculty.department.researchlab@student, and a web page would have something similar.
Aren't DNS hostname just the same thing as he is proposing. You send out a request for the name, and any one of many machines may send back the reply? All they would have to do is add support for encrypted hostnames. Encrypt the name using a public/private key and send it to the secure port of the domain name server.
But everyone is still recommended to get up every hour and walk around for 10 minutes to allow the circulation and exercise to get rid of all the toxins that have built up.
Slashdot Mirror
Chinook helicopter?
http://air-boyne.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ch-47-chinook-1024x768.jpeg
Now comes in micro-indoor version:
http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/yhst-94582326164583_2231_135403177
I liked the idea of thermo-acoustics. You take a tapered cylindered, apply a resonance generator (hot liquid going through an intersecting pipe), and the oscillations would hopefully set up a standing-wave pattern that would drive air downwards.
I've wondered about that - the exact words were:
AD. 793. This year came dreadful forewarnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter."
I'm wondering whether that was an meteorite impact or weather conditions?
Sometimes people do see something, but they just didn't understand the technology at the time. There was some preacher missionary on a Pacific island who reported hearing a buzzing noise and seeing a craft that looked a glass dome on legs hovering above the tree-line, being controlled by a pilot who seemed to be sitting at a chair pushing and pulling levers. They achieved some basic communication where the preacher bowed, and the craft's pilot reciprocated. I hate to say this, but it does sound a bit like a navy helicopter.
what is the point of glass and flashing lights in space other than to be broken by tiny particles
Don't you just hate it when you are doing 0.99c along an interstellar freeway and some photon is tailgating you?
They are just the same.
Councillor Swick: http://www.leopardmag.co.uk/swick/swick_0404.html
In one Scandinavian country, they want to introduce a congestion charge into downtown. Residents oppose this. So the MP's amend the legislation so that one road doesn't have toll booths. It just happens to be the road that leads to the suburb where they live.
They prefer to build new roads rather than maintain old ones.
Every UK motorway has the hazard of fog, black ice, smoke from burning fields, snow and ice.
Not all drivers know to slow down in these conditions.
Very true. Once went to Heathrow airport when the weather was extremely humid and all the trees and bushes were lush and green if not a bit overgrown like a safari park somewhere equatorial. Made the comment that I thought I was in such and such country. Look of shock and horrified faces all round.
In a rural lifestyle you may had long hours but you had good meals and short commutes.
Having to depend on an
unpredictable transportation network that changes on a monthly basis according to the pedantic whims of anonymous bureaucrats is probably the most stressful thing next to living in an apartment block that isn't soundproof.
That's one way. The other ways are to drive into a truck Mr. Bean style, and drive out as soon as you are past the cameras . The other way would be to have a chain of three or more cars tailgating each other.
My last university did that - they had a service contract with Dell, then HP. This amounted to having a truck or van come over every month to replace broken PC's with new ones (basically the university IT department would cannibalize the working parts and swap them round so that only a handful of totally dud PC's were returned.
There are really only two choices of either a whitelist or a blacklist. The tricky part is that you must also include kernel objects, dynamic loaded libraries as well as executables.
For Linux, a whitelist could be updated as modules are installed.
Android actually restricts execution of user installed files to one or two directories.
Prior may not always have been published. Like the patent lawsuit over multiplayer games. One arcade manufacturer claimed to have a patent over arcade board games networked together using LAN or serial port technology. One university was able to demonstrate prior art by showing a game that ran on their campus network, even though the source code to that game had never been made publicly available.
Many corporations do this as well - their research departments will have archives and archives of technical reports, all dated and time-stamped for when the need arises. Though these days, they just file patents as a way of getting their documents timestamped in a legally binding way.
British Telecom has touchscreen systems way back in 1988. They were used for course training. Though the touch screen was actually just an add-on transparent glass pane that fitted inside the bezel of a CRT.
A patent has to explain how the system works in written language, down to the individual components. Like the X-ray machine in Total Recall. With todays' technology that would have to be described as a system that incorporates a large plasma screen + multiple X-ray devices + image fusion + rendering.
Star Trek teleporters (along with The Fly and Space Quest) would be described as a plurality of transporters, with a height high enough to accommodate one or two people each or an equivalent volume of objects, controlled by a display system operated by a humanoid. Such a system combines a memory system capable of transferring the entire energy and quantum state of those person or objects over a distance of over 1000,000 meters.
It would have to describe how that quantum state was stored, and how the energy was transferred.
I'm sure if they wanted to, somebody could file a patent in Klingon.
IBM simulates entire cat, mouse and rat brain
I've worked for a number of companies who used to design their own circuit boards. As memory chips tended to "fry" under testing conditions, everyone tried to grab as many as they could. So old PC's were cannabalized of useful bits before they went to the recycling center. When somebody left, the vultures would circle, gather round their desk picking and making off with cables, memory chips and manuals.
Even my last university would pre-salvage all damaged PC's being sent back to Dell. Whatever working parts in one machine would be swapped with the broken parts of another.
My bets are on "promession". Freeze a sealed tub full of old electronics using liquid nitrogen. Shake and pound the tub until the only parts remaining are dust, then seperate these using magnets (to attract metals) or a centrifuge (seperating metals from light plastic).
There are equations that relate to the frequencies of photons given off by the atoms as they collide. If you know how much matter you have injected into the system, how tightly confined the beams of atoms are, and how fast the ions are travelling, you can figure out the temperature at the time of collision.
Temperature is really just a measure of how much energy is stored in the electron orbitals.
Something feels hot simply because the electrons in your heat sensing receptor cells are gaining that much energy.
X11 started off as a way of unifying all the different windows systems of all the different UNIX workstation vendors (Digital, DEC, Sun, SGI, HP). At the time it was developed it was considered a triumph of engineering because you could have an application running on one workstation, and have everything else drawn on a different screen on another workstation in another part of the campus. All communication was done using TCP/IP and other network stacks.
Which was great when all your software was doing the rendering. Then they start bringing in hardware acceleration starting with pixel-blitting and hardware mouse cursors. Going up and down through the network stack just to read a block of pixels was just too much, so they had to implement direct graphics screen formats which bypassed the network stack. Next thing was people was far fancier widgets than plain bitmapped text on flat square widgets as X-windows just managed the basic bounding box of every widget, window and screen, along with bitmapped text fonts and mouse icons, read input from input devices like mice and keyboards, and a software drawing callback system to refresh items which were erased when windows are moved around.
Then users wanted rounded corners on windows, shadow, transparency and effects, and accurate fonts. So they brought in X-windows/Motif, TrueType Fonts (FreeType). Then 3D acceleration came along, this was more of a bolt-on to X-windows. You created special GL widgets which allowed you to send down graphics commands. Then they wanted 3D effects on the window system itself. That meant bypassing the X-windows 2D render path to do pixblitting, and just render everything as texture-mapped triangles and point clouds using OpenGL. So the window manager itself becomes an OpenGL application. 2D drawing is just done over OpenGL functionality.
With current graphics hardware, it's easier just to have each window as an OpenGL renderbuffer and just texture draw all of them to the framebuffer.
They call them "pigs" in the , which require the use of pig launchers and receivers. You also get flexi-pigs and cleaning pigs.
For cable installation, they use "cable blowing machines" which use high pressure air to push cables through ducts.
All they need to do is add hydrophobic coatings so they could go underwater and the synthetic materials used to replicate geckos, and these things could climb walls. Add a needle to inject lethal drugs and you have the ultimate assassin's weapon.
The last apartment complex I rent in, had lockers beside the letter boxes. The post person would place the parcel inside one of these lockers, and drop the key into your letterbox. When you came to open the locker, the key itself would get locked in the locker lock, so it could be retrieved by the post person
For a home owner, the modern day equivalent would be to have an outhouse with a one-way lock. The postman could lock the door, but only the homeowner could unlock it.
Britain did that with their original domain name system. Email would have been uk.ac.somewhere.faculty.department.researchlab@student, and a web page would have something similar.
Aren't DNS hostname just the same thing as he is proposing. You send out a request for the name, and any one of many machines may send back the reply?
All they would have to do is add support for encrypted hostnames. Encrypt the name using a public/private key and send it to the secure port of the domain name server.
But everyone is still recommended to get up every hour and walk around for 10 minutes to allow the circulation and exercise to get rid of all the toxins that have built up.