My roommate and I have a habit of buying relatively low-end, behind-the-curve computers, using 'em for a year or two, and then dumping 'em (either selling them or giving them away). We've been doing this for ten years or more.
As you might expect, we've seen more than our share of hardware trouble with cheap PC's. About 90% of the time the problem is a fan... usually the CPU fan, but quite often the PS fan as well.
Fortunately, fans are usually easy and cheap to replace (and I've performed more surgery on power supplies than any one person should have to do in a lifetime). The exception was one of the early e-machines... couldn't find a fan even vaguely resembling the dead one in the PS, and the PS itself had a non-standard mounting design.
The damned thing was so cheap that it had failed after being in service for less than five months. Hey, didn't that mean that it was still under warranty? Great, I thought, I'll just call e-machines and get them to send me a replacement PS...
Maybe they've changed their policies since, but e-machines refused. Their "warranty service" consists of you sending them the entire CPU, with all original parts in place, at your cost... then waiting for them to send you a replacement unit. Please allow six to eight weeks if you're lucky. Screw that. I jury-rigged a third-party PS, and resolved to never buy an e-machines product again.
Have you ever seen the magic trick where the guy surrounds his chair with dynamite and sets it off? Exact same problem there...
No, I haven't seen the trick, but I can picture it... must be great at parties!
Actually, it's not quite the same problem. We're talking about a sphere of explosives, not the circle that your magician is using... a three-dimensional problem, not two-dimensional. I'd expect that to be much more difficult.
Here's a link to the full text of the president's address to the UN. He mentions those tubes. Close enough?
And here's a link to a story from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who are anything but crackpots, explaining why those tubes are no kind of evidence at all.
Fission bombs are fairly easy to build. Getting the materials is the only real problem, since Wal Mart doesn't sell weapons-grade plutonium.
You can make 'em out of U-235, too, which is a little easier to come by.
It's still not all that easy to build one. Assuming that you manage to machine and assemble the fissionable mass without killing yourself, there's the little matter of making the conventional explosives that work as a trigger do their thing in the right way, at the right time. If you're building a bomb that uses explosives to crush a hollow sphere of fissionable material, for instance, you have to make sure that all the charges fire at exactly the right time, or it'll fizzle.
Keeping a lid on devices that use simple physical principles is a waste of time. If they're that simple, someone will figure it out on their own in due course.
Take H-bombs, for instance. Yes, it's true that details of their construction are secret... but it's pretty well known that you need a fission explosion to set one off. Fission bombs are impressive devices on their own... if you can build one, you really don't need to go much further for most purposes.
The construction details for fission bombs are well known... they're really very simple devices. That doesn't mean that they're easy to build, fortunately.
Agenda was replaced by Symphony and Symphony wasn't the simple freeform database/calendar app that Agenda had been.
True enough, because you're completely wrong about Symphony. Lotus Symphony, a DOS application, was released in 1985. It was a spreadsheet/business graphics/database program that was supposed to be the logical successor to 1-2-3, but suffered from a number of problems, not the least of which was a nasty user interface. Think of it as "1-2-3 plus a few utilities".
Agenda first shipped in 1988, and was a Windows-based PIM application. It had almost nothing in common with Symphony, or any other Lotus product.
The reference is to an article that speculates about a possible cause for autism, and speculates more vaguely about a hypothetical metabolite of gluten that's linked to that mechanism. As far as I can tell, the author presents no compelling evidence for his theory about autism's cause, and even less evidence for a link between this mechanism and gluten.
I consider gluten an unlikely culprit. It's hardly a new item in the environment... it's present in huge quantities in almost every wheat-based product, most notably bread, and always has been. You can't account for an upswing in autism by blaming gluten; we've been swimming in the stuff for centuries, and I doubt that California has suddenly experienced a massive increase in bread consumption.
I'll take these stories more seriously when I see convincing, controlled, peer-reviewed studies that show that they're for real.
This spammer has a good case on appeal. Sending spam is commerical activity designed to induce an interstate financial transaction. A State law that restricts this is probably a violation of the US Constitution.
Perhaps, but that wasn't GoatPigSheep's point. By his logic, you couldn't prosecute under the federal law, either, and that's what I was trying to clarify.
Suing someone for sending spam to a state where it is illegal is complete hogwash. It would be as if one state made television commercials illegal and a person happened to pick up a frequency comming from another state.
You may think it's silly, but it's the law. All law is location-based... think about it! By your logic, you couldn't prosecute someone for transmitting child porn because he can't be sure of the location of the recipient (whether that should be prosecuted or not is another question, and one that I won't debate here; it's clear that it can be prosecuted, which is what counts).
If there's a risk of breaking the law, the onus is on the perpetrator to ensure that he's sending his stuff only to places that he's allowed to send it. The fact that it's hard to do that isn't the law's problem... maybe that'll give the spammers a little less incentive to spam in the first place.
Re:(here's why) Re:Been there done that
on
Jet Turbine Locomotives
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· Score: 2, Informative
JETS ARE F(*&^ING LOUD!.
And so are diesel locomotives. I had the misfortune to attend an outdoor wedding that happened to be near a trainyard, and the ceremony was completely drowned out by a nearby idling locomotive.
Besides, as numerous posts have pointed out, this isn't a jet engine... it's a gas turbine generator. Closely related, to be sure, but not the same. A jet engine's purpose in life is to throw a whole lot of fast-moving air out the back; a turbine generator is designed to spin that turbine efficiently, and there's no reason why it has to move more air than is necessary to accomplish that task. A land-bound locomotive can also carry a lot of sound shielding that would be impractical on an airplane.
Finally, aside from the volume of generated noise, the quality of the sound is quite different. During the 70's and 80's a turbine-powered train (cleverly called the Turbo Train) hauled passengers across Canada; I worked near Montreal's downtown train station, and watched (and heard) the train come and go many times. The noise level was no worse than a diesel, and actually kind of interesting... it was a high-pitched whine rather than a low-pitched rumble, and I found it much less annoying.
I suspect that what you saw was a bill doused in off-the-shelf rubbing alcohol, which is basically methanol diluted with water. Soak the bill and light it; the alcohol will burn off, and the water remaining behind will keep the bill cool enough to avoid charring.
A distantly related demo involves boiling water in a paper cup over a fierce fire... it's most dramatic in a roaring fireplace, but a bunsen burner ought to be good for a laugh, too. The water keeps the paper cup cool enough (100 C, of course) to avoid burning.
And it really did work in that Bond movie... no special effects there aside from using a trained pilot as a stunt double.
Don't know about the patent, but perhaps it covers some aspect of the newer design rather than the original belt.
See rotor. See rotor break. Fall, fall, fall.
on
The Coming Air Age
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· Score: 2, Funny
Not to mention if the rotor "departs the aircraft." A prop you can live without, but not a rotor.
True enough. A helicopter mechanic (who may have been pulling my chain) once told me about a critical connector that he called a "Jesus bolt". Why? Because if that bolt lets loose, you're going to see Jesus.
Playing devil's advocate, though... if you're going to talk about gross structural failures, you have to admit that there will be similar problems with other aircraft. If a wing falls off of your Cessna, you're going to be just as pissed, aren't you? What's the likelihood of a rotor going away compared to a wing going kaput?
With that said, I think I'd prefer to be in a dead-stick Cessna, just as you would... but that's with today's helicopters. A liberal application of technology could go a long way toward fixing those shortcomings.
Re:Easy prediction: It'll Never Happen.
on
The Coming Air Age
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· Score: 1
If a car loses control, you may hit something, or you may not. If a chopper loses control, isn't that going to turn out very badly in most cases?
Perhaps, but the comparison being made here is between helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, not cars. If the control systems go on a fixed-wing aircraft, you'll have about as enjoyable and lengthy a ride as you'd have on a helicopter with a similar problem.
If you're going to bring the relative safety of cars into the discussion, you'll have to admit that there's a lot more room to dodge a collision in three dimensions than in two... and there's a lot less stuff to hit at 20,000 feet!
The problem is not that the machines are too expensive to produce; it's that there's no incentive to produce them on any scale. You need a truckload of support hardware, the fuel (hydrogen peroxide) is nasty stuff, and I imagine you'd have government regulators of all flavors descend upon you like flies to shit as soon as you have a working product.
And once you get all of that together... you have a noisy, dangerous, difficult-to-handle flying machine that will carry one very skilled pilot for about 30 seconds.
There may be a market for a few units for sports events, exhibitions, and... oh, wait, we already have that covered, don't we?
Re:Easy prediction: It'll Never Happen.
on
The Coming Air Age
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· Score: 5, Informative
When the power goes in a helicopter you just drop, vertically.
Not quite true. When the power goes in a helicopter, there's a lot of angular momentum stored in the rotor, and aerodynamic effects allow you to spin the rotor even faster by angling the blades appropriately as you, er, plummet.
As you approach the ground (probably a lot faster than you'd like), you angle the blades to bite into the air, trading lift for angular momentum. If you do this correctly, you may be able to save your butt.
Yes, there's a lot of fraud on Ebay (and everywhere else, courtesy of Sturgeon's Law). I've seen another problem that hasn't been mentioned here so far... fraudulent accusations of fraud (metafraud??).
Ebay's protection mechanisms basically rely on word-of-mouth and unsubstantiated statements. Unfortunately this lends itself to abuse. I've been assisting my roommate with his Ebay auctions over the last few years, and twice he's been the subject of fraud accusations. Needless to say, he's scrupulously honest, and completely innocent.
One of the two incidents was apparently just a random act of maliciousness. The other was a case of mistaken identity. The plaintiff had been burned by someone whose Ebay profile vaguely resembled my roommate's... same town, approximately the same number of feedback points, similar merchandise for sale. He put two and two together, came up with pi, and promptly started a campaign of email abuse, harassment and complaint (he didn't even bid on my roommate's auctions... just insisted on poisoning the minds of those who did). He was strangely unapologetic when confronted.
T-Mobile imposes several limitations when you activate the Sidekick plan. In particular, they do something mysterious to your account that makes GPRS data non-functional if you use the SIM card in other data devices (like the Handspring Treo). I got this firsthand from a T-Mobile rep, and it's confirmed here.
I use several phones, including a GPRS-updated Treo 180, and switch among them to suit my needs, so this puts a damper on my enthusiasm... as do the limited voice minutes in the plan.
Saw this as an 8-year-old on the Montreal Metro, installed as promotion for Expo '67. The ad was on the long stretch of subway tunnel between the then-busiest station (Berri-de-Montigney) and the station that served the Expo fairgrounds (Ile Ste. Helene).
If memory serves me, it was about 10 seconds long and displayed an animated character running to keep up with the train. Don't recall the product it was selling. Based on what I saw, I imagine it was done with strobe lights synched in some simple way to the train.
As with most things related to Expo '67, the ad lingered for a few years, fell into disrepair, and eventually vanished.
The Treo is also GSM-only. And it is EITHER equipped for the U.S. GSM frequencies OR the rest-of-the-world GSM frequencies.
Um, no. The US version of the Treo runs at 800 & 1900 Mhz; the European version uses 800/1800. That means that the US version works in most GSM countries (limiting you to 800 Mhz services), while the Euro version works everywhere but in North America. I'd prefer a tri-band version, but it'll do.
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As you might expect, we've seen more than our share of hardware trouble with cheap PC's. About 90% of the time the problem is a fan... usually the CPU fan, but quite often the PS fan as well.
Fortunately, fans are usually easy and cheap to replace (and I've performed more surgery on power supplies than any one person should have to do in a lifetime). The exception was one of the early e-machines... couldn't find a fan even vaguely resembling the dead one in the PS, and the PS itself had a non-standard mounting design.
The damned thing was so cheap that it had failed after being in service for less than five months. Hey, didn't that mean that it was still under warranty? Great, I thought, I'll just call e-machines and get them to send me a replacement PS...
Maybe they've changed their policies since, but e-machines refused. Their "warranty service" consists of you sending them the entire CPU, with all original parts in place, at your cost... then waiting for them to send you a replacement unit. Please allow six to eight weeks if you're lucky. Screw that. I jury-rigged a third-party PS, and resolved to never buy an e-machines product again.
No, I haven't seen the trick, but I can picture it... must be great at parties!
Actually, it's not quite the same problem. We're talking about a sphere of explosives, not the circle that your magician is using... a three-dimensional problem, not two-dimensional. I'd expect that to be much more difficult.
Here's a link to the full text of the president's address to the UN. He mentions those tubes. Close enough?
And here's a link to a story from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who are anything but crackpots, explaining why those tubes are no kind of evidence at all.
You can make 'em out of U-235, too, which is a little easier to come by. It's still not all that easy to build one. Assuming that you manage to machine and assemble the fissionable mass without killing yourself, there's the little matter of making the conventional explosives that work as a trigger do their thing in the right way, at the right time. If you're building a bomb that uses explosives to crush a hollow sphere of fissionable material, for instance, you have to make sure that all the charges fire at exactly the right time, or it'll fizzle.
Take H-bombs, for instance. Yes, it's true that details of their construction are secret... but it's pretty well known that you need a fission explosion to set one off. Fission bombs are impressive devices on their own... if you can build one, you really don't need to go much further for most purposes.
The construction details for fission bombs are well known... they're really very simple devices. That doesn't mean that they're easy to build, fortunately.
With a 1 MeV accelerator? You'd have better luck with a couple of "D" cells.
Disclaimer: no, I have not done the math.
Do I look like a search engine?? Go find those links yourself... how do you think I found them?
Looks like they've managed to duplicate one of the first cyclotrons. Question is, what are they going to do with it?
Absolutely right... looks like I'm guilty of misremembering, myself.
True enough, because you're completely wrong about Symphony. Lotus Symphony, a DOS application, was released in 1985. It was a spreadsheet/business graphics/database program that was supposed to be the logical successor to 1-2-3, but suffered from a number of problems, not the least of which was a nasty user interface. Think of it as "1-2-3 plus a few utilities".
Agenda first shipped in 1988, and was a Windows-based PIM application. It had almost nothing in common with Symphony, or any other Lotus product.
I consider gluten an unlikely culprit. It's hardly a new item in the environment... it's present in huge quantities in almost every wheat-based product, most notably bread, and always has been. You can't account for an upswing in autism by blaming gluten; we've been swimming in the stuff for centuries, and I doubt that California has suddenly experienced a massive increase in bread consumption.
I'll take these stories more seriously when I see convincing, controlled, peer-reviewed studies that show that they're for real.
Perhaps, but that wasn't GoatPigSheep's point. By his logic, you couldn't prosecute under the federal law, either, and that's what I was trying to clarify.
You may think it's silly, but it's the law. All law is location-based... think about it! By your logic, you couldn't prosecute someone for transmitting child porn because he can't be sure of the location of the recipient (whether that should be prosecuted or not is another question, and one that I won't debate here; it's clear that it can be prosecuted, which is what counts).
If there's a risk of breaking the law, the onus is on the perpetrator to ensure that he's sending his stuff only to places that he's allowed to send it. The fact that it's hard to do that isn't the law's problem... maybe that'll give the spammers a little less incentive to spam in the first place.
And so are diesel locomotives. I had the misfortune to attend an outdoor wedding that happened to be near a trainyard, and the ceremony was completely drowned out by a nearby idling locomotive.
Besides, as numerous posts have pointed out, this isn't a jet engine... it's a gas turbine generator. Closely related, to be sure, but not the same. A jet engine's purpose in life is to throw a whole lot of fast-moving air out the back; a turbine generator is designed to spin that turbine efficiently, and there's no reason why it has to move more air than is necessary to accomplish that task. A land-bound locomotive can also carry a lot of sound shielding that would be impractical on an airplane.
Finally, aside from the volume of generated noise, the quality of the sound is quite different. During the 70's and 80's a turbine-powered train (cleverly called the Turbo Train) hauled passengers across Canada; I worked near Montreal's downtown train station, and watched (and heard) the train come and go many times. The noise level was no worse than a diesel, and actually kind of interesting... it was a high-pitched whine rather than a low-pitched rumble, and I found it much less annoying.
How about this? It's amazing what you can do with just a few carefully placed permanent magnets... look, ma, no electricity!
I suspect that what you saw was a bill doused in off-the-shelf rubbing alcohol, which is basically methanol diluted with water. Soak the bill and light it; the alcohol will burn off, and the water remaining behind will keep the bill cool enough to avoid charring. A distantly related demo involves boiling water in a paper cup over a fierce fire... it's most dramatic in a roaring fireplace, but a bunsen burner ought to be good for a laugh, too. The water keeps the paper cup cool enough (100 C, of course) to avoid burning.
And it really did work in that Bond movie... no special effects there aside from using a trained pilot as a stunt double.
Don't know about the patent, but perhaps it covers some aspect of the newer design rather than the original belt.
True enough. A helicopter mechanic (who may have been pulling my chain) once told me about a critical connector that he called a "Jesus bolt". Why? Because if that bolt lets loose, you're going to see Jesus.
Playing devil's advocate, though... if you're going to talk about gross structural failures, you have to admit that there will be similar problems with other aircraft. If a wing falls off of your Cessna, you're going to be just as pissed, aren't you? What's the likelihood of a rotor going away compared to a wing going kaput?
With that said, I think I'd prefer to be in a dead-stick Cessna, just as you would... but that's with today's helicopters. A liberal application of technology could go a long way toward fixing those shortcomings.
Perhaps, but the comparison being made here is between helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, not cars. If the control systems go on a fixed-wing aircraft, you'll have about as enjoyable and lengthy a ride as you'd have on a helicopter with a similar problem.
If you're going to bring the relative safety of cars into the discussion, you'll have to admit that there's a lot more room to dodge a collision in three dimensions than in two... and there's a lot less stuff to hit at 20,000 feet!
And once you get all of that together... you have a noisy, dangerous, difficult-to-handle flying machine that will carry one very skilled pilot for about 30 seconds.
There may be a market for a few units for sports events, exhibitions, and... oh, wait, we already have that covered, don't we?
Not quite true. When the power goes in a helicopter, there's a lot of angular momentum stored in the rotor, and aerodynamic effects allow you to spin the rotor even faster by angling the blades appropriately as you, er, plummet.
As you approach the ground (probably a lot faster than you'd like), you angle the blades to bite into the air, trading lift for angular momentum. If you do this correctly, you may be able to save your butt.
Ebay's protection mechanisms basically rely on word-of-mouth and unsubstantiated statements. Unfortunately this lends itself to abuse. I've been assisting my roommate with his Ebay auctions over the last few years, and twice he's been the subject of fraud accusations. Needless to say, he's scrupulously honest, and completely innocent.
One of the two incidents was apparently just a random act of maliciousness. The other was a case of mistaken identity. The plaintiff had been burned by someone whose Ebay profile vaguely resembled my roommate's... same town, approximately the same number of feedback points, similar merchandise for sale. He put two and two together, came up with pi, and promptly started a campaign of email abuse, harassment and complaint (he didn't even bid on my roommate's auctions... just insisted on poisoning the minds of those who did). He was strangely unapologetic when confronted.
T-Mobile imposes several limitations when you activate the Sidekick plan. In particular, they do something mysterious to your account that makes GPRS data non-functional if you use the SIM card in other data devices (like the Handspring Treo). I got this firsthand from a T-Mobile rep, and it's confirmed here. I use several phones, including a GPRS-updated Treo 180, and switch among them to suit my needs, so this puts a damper on my enthusiasm... as do the limited voice minutes in the plan.
Saw this as an 8-year-old on the Montreal Metro, installed as promotion for Expo '67. The ad was on the long stretch of subway tunnel between the then-busiest station (Berri-de-Montigney) and the station that served the Expo fairgrounds (Ile Ste. Helene).
If memory serves me, it was about 10 seconds long and displayed an animated character running to keep up with the train. Don't recall the product it was selling. Based on what I saw, I imagine it was done with strobe lights synched in some simple way to the train.
As with most things related to Expo '67, the ad lingered for a few years, fell into disrepair, and eventually vanished.
Um, no. The US version of the Treo runs at 800 & 1900 Mhz; the European version uses 800/1800. That means that the US version works in most GSM countries (limiting you to 800 Mhz services), while the Euro version works everywhere but in North America. I'd prefer a tri-band version, but it'll do.