Depends on your own elevation. For example, I know that from the top observation deck on my old ship (USS Belleau Wood), the horizon was twelve miles. To a six foot tall person standing in the middle of Kansas, the horizon is about 3-3.5 miles. Horizon to a 100 foot tall tower would be about 13.5 miles.
There are a couple of nice calculators online that provide various horizon figures. Try: http://pollux.nss.nima.mil/calc/horizon.html
JanneM sayeth:
Well, the authentication mechanism does seem unsecure - that is something the school needs to work on, or they're just setting themselves up for a lawsuit if it's used in an inappropriate way.
I tried to get this concept across to the junior college I just graduated from. They use a login system for access to lab computers and student e-mail with a very similar scheme. In our case, the user name is the first four letters of your last name followed by the last four numbers of your student id/SSN. Password is the first letter of first name, first letter of last name followed by the whole student id number.
As a member of the student government, I protested loud and long about the inherent insecurities in this system. Collecting full names and student id's is a piece of cake during registration week, and just about any other time since it's printed on every sheet of paper that the school generates. As an experiment, I covertly collected over 20 names and SID's in a matter of a couple of hours. I could have used that information to log into the computers as nearly two dozen different students.
My favorite point to make with administration was that I could take any one of those logins, download kiddy porn from a lab, and the student who I'd impersonated would have no way of proving that it wasn't them. Also, you'd have access to countless e-mail accounts and the privacy issues that unleashes.
To their credit, they did at least use an unguessable pin number to access your student records.
The end result of all my rantings? Nada. The reason for using such an insecure system? Ease of implementation. The IS manager just has to run a batch file at the beginning of each quarter and automatically create all the user accounts. Any other system would actually require work to set up unique usernames and passwords for each student.
Well, I have a Compaq Presario 1200-X111 laptop sitting here that won't turn on. I took it to the local "Compaq Authorized Repair Center" who charged me a hundred bucks to discover that the motherboard has "a problem." (I'm still not convinced it's not just the power switch, but how do you unsolder that little bugger from the board?)
I checked laptopparts and they want $695 for a new motherboard, but I can get the same part from Compaq's parts store for just $500. The big question though, is why would I spend that kind of money when I can almost replace the laptop for that?
So, there it sits in little pieces. Anyone know where to find the pinouts for the ribbon cables on the LCD? I could always wire in a standard monitor connection and have a cool second monitor to hang on my wall!
I grew up in Michigan, about three hours from Cedar Point. We would go a couple of times every summer - some of my best memories of my youth are from that place.
Everyone looks at me like I'm nuts when I say it, but my all time favorite ride there is still the Gemini. There's just something about riding a big creaky wooden coaster (Is it still the biggest wooden in the country?), but the Magnum XL rocked, too. Cedar Point has always been on top of it's game with new and innovative rides.
I'm living out in Washington State now, and haven't gotten back east in seven years. One stop on the itinerary when we get there will definitly be a trip to the Point for a little stroll down memory lane.
This new ride looks very similar to the Xcellerator at Knotts Berry Farm in California. It also uses the hydraulic launch and goes from 0-80 in something like 2.8 seconds. Cedar Fair (the owners of Cedar Point) also owns Knotts, along with a handful of other smaller parks, so my guess is that's where they got the basic plan for the new ride.
Man, I miss the Point. No one will build a good amusement park up here - the season is too short to justify the expense.
The Telegraph had an article back in February of last year (no longer available) that set the rate of autism in the UK at 1 in 175 children, or 58 out of every 10,000 (compared to the 10 in 10,000 rate reported in California.)
The evidence is becoming very persuasive that immunizations do bear a large portion of the blame. See the National Vaccine Information Center for some good articles on links to this and other complications.
For our part, after reading dozens of books and talking to as many people, we made the decision not to vaccinate our now six year old. (Commence the flamebait about how we're playing with fire, yadda yadda yadda...)
Dr. Mercola, a naturopathic doctor out of Chicago, also has many good articles about the possible causes of austism. WARNING:/.'ers may find Mercola's website hard to stomach, since he's going to tell you to exercise and to stop eating McD's fries and twinkies.;-)
>Gee, I wonder if they're gonna get rid of the MOD-28 TTYs, they were still in service when I left in '88.
Well, they were still in service when I left in '94. My comm shack had six of them. I put together a demonstration showing how we could replace them with two 8088's running Procomm while retaining one teletype for use as a printer and backup unit. My idea was shot down because it didn't come down from on high. (Innovation by the little drone bees was strictly forbidden.)
Even better than the 28's were the UYK-20 processors that we used as the heart of our communications system. Now that was a nice sturdy hunk of aluminum. Man I miss programming with punch tape and mag cassettes! (And that was in the early 90's!!)
When I got out in 94, we had several 286's. That was impressive. The rest were 8088's.
I've taken two courses online in the past couple of years. Both
were pretty miserable.
The general way an online course works is through the extensive use of message boards
which allow the students to interact with each other. Real time chat and whiteboard
software are also used. Supporters claim that the experience equals that of a
real classroom, but my first hand experience is that it does not.
Several days ago, I was discussing online classes with a former instructor of mine.
His wife teaches some online courses and she contends that her online students are
getting perhaps 60% of the education they could receive in a physical classroom - and this
is from an instructor who in my experience truly cares about her students.
The first course I took was Intro to Philosophy. The instructor would post a weekly
lecture and assign all the typical reading required in a Phil 100 class. Then you had
lists of questions to answer and post to the board where everyone else was supposed to
respond to your answers, and you responded to theirs. Then you responded to their
responses, etc, etc, etc. One day I got tied up and couldn't log on for almost 36
hours - there were nearly two hundred new messages waiting. I ended up dropping the
course after the second week because the sheer amount of material combined with math and
chemistry courses was overwhelming.
This summer, I took and completed a humanities course entitled _Survey of World
Literature_. The class received absolutely no input from the instructor other than
the weekly lecture. The only time the instructor made her presence known
was to answer direct questions posted in a special ask the instructor board
(usually of the I forgot to do an assignment can I please turn it in late
whine.) Wildly inaccurate and misguided posts from students went unchallenged by the
faculty member in charge. I suspect that the instructor may not have even read the
individual postings, but I can't prove it.
Online courses may be very good for people of a particular personality - one who is very
self driven, who isn't really into the face-to-face interaction of a classroom setting.
In general however, I just don't feel like the technology has reached a point where
the education delivered is of the same caliber.
The capacity for human ignorance never fails to amuse me.
Kids, this is what happens when you have a society that lets people become so
self-centered that the thought of actually being a responsible productive resident is
considered a joke. And here I thought only the US was so encumbered.
Apparently we're contagious.
I don't know what the legal system is like in South Korea, but if it's anything like here,
the dude's family will probably bring a lawsuit against the gaming room, the game
manufacturer, the government, and anyone else they can bilk money out of because they
raised a kid with no self control who grew into a man with no self control. After
all, it's already happened here.
This whole thing reminds me of the classic experiment by Olds and Milner in which they
wired tiny electrodes into the limbic system of rats. The rats could give themselves
a jolt of electricity by pressing a little lever. The stimulation of the limbic
system was so pleasurable that some rats would press the bar thousands of times an hour
for up to 20 hours at a time until they collapsed from exhaustion. When the rats
recovered, they'd go right back to pressing the bar. I have a feeling that if we
could do that for people, we'd find that some (like this mental midget in South Korea)
would push the bar until their heads exploded.
Really people, take a break from/., turn off the computer, and get some sun, will ya?;-)
It's just not worth dying on the crapper in some internet cafe.
>I've never been much for PDAs, mostly because I don't need one
I never really had a burning desire for a PDA either until one day when I saw this huge pile of articles sitting on my desk that I had printed out to read later. I spent several months watching ebay and finally picked out a Casiopeia BE-300 that came in under my set price ($120 US.)
Now I print out almost nothing and instead save copies over to my snyc folder and take them with me. It makes me feel better that my recycle bin isn't as full, I'm not stuck behind my computer for an extra three or four hours everyday, and with the backlit screen I can even read comfortably in bed after my wife has turned out the light.
I do use the appointment book to an extent, but not exclusively. My primary tools are the browser and Mobibook.
I will admit that for my specific purpose, the PDA is adequate but not ideal. The screen on most PDA's is a little on the small side, but certainly useable. I picked the Casio because I found the screen quality to be the easiest on my eyes (your mileage my vary.) Lately however, I've had my eye on the various Tablet PC's on the market. The wider screen appeals to me, and since 95% of my use is at home, or in a car (not while driving!) the extra size and weight is not an issue for me. If I could find a stripped down model that was wifi enabled and acted more of less as a slave to my desktop PC, with a small amount of storage for traveling out of range, I'd be in heaven.
Crocuta
I've been using Opera for around a year now, and the banner ads in the free version never bothered me one bit (and I even clicked on them sometimes when something caught my eye.) I finally paid for it a couple of months ago - not to get rid of the ads, but because I find it to be a nice little chunk of software and I wanted to support the developers. If I could find the right switch, I'd happily turn the banners back on in my paid for version.
I really fail to see why some people come unglued over Opera's banner ad. It's this little unobtrusive thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on your own elevation. For example,
l
I know that from the top observation deck on my
old ship (USS Belleau Wood), the horizon was
twelve miles. To a six foot tall person standing
in the middle of Kansas, the horizon is about
3-3.5 miles. Horizon to a 100 foot tall tower
would be about 13.5 miles.
There are a couple of nice calculators online that
provide various horizon figures. Try:
http://pollux.nss.nima.mil/calc/horizon.htm
Crocuta
JanneM sayeth: Well, the authentication mechanism does seem unsecure - that is something the school needs to work on, or they're just setting themselves up for a lawsuit if it's used in an inappropriate way.
I tried to get this concept across to the junior college I just graduated from. They use a login system for access to lab computers and student e-mail with a very similar scheme. In our case, the user name is the first four letters of your last name followed by the last four numbers of your student id/SSN. Password is the first letter of first name, first letter of last name followed by the whole student id number.
As a member of the student government, I protested loud and long about the inherent insecurities in this system. Collecting full names and student id's is a piece of cake during registration week, and just about any other time since it's printed on every sheet of paper that the school generates. As an experiment, I covertly collected over 20 names and SID's in a matter of a couple of hours. I could have used that information to log into the computers as nearly two dozen different students.
My favorite point to make with administration was that I could take any one of those logins, download kiddy porn from a lab, and the student who I'd impersonated would have no way of proving that it wasn't them. Also, you'd have access to countless e-mail accounts and the privacy issues that unleashes.
To their credit, they did at least use an unguessable pin number to access your student records.
The end result of all my rantings? Nada. The reason for using such an insecure system? Ease of implementation. The IS manager just has to run a batch file at the beginning of each quarter and automatically create all the user accounts. Any other system would actually require work to set up unique usernames and passwords for each student.
Well, I have a Compaq Presario 1200-X111 laptop sitting here that won't turn on. I took it to the local "Compaq Authorized Repair Center" who charged me a hundred bucks to discover that the motherboard has "a problem." (I'm still not convinced it's not just the power switch, but how do you unsolder that little bugger from the board?)
I checked laptopparts and they want $695 for a new motherboard, but I can get the same part from Compaq's parts store for just $500. The big question though, is why would I spend that kind of money when I can almost replace the laptop for that?
So, there it sits in little pieces. Anyone know where to find the pinouts for the ribbon cables on the LCD? I could always wire in a standard monitor connection and have a cool second monitor to hang on my wall!
Crocuta
I grew up in Michigan, about three hours from Cedar Point. We would go a couple of times every summer - some of my best memories of my youth are from that place.
Everyone looks at me like I'm nuts when I say it, but my all time favorite ride there is still the Gemini. There's just something about riding a big creaky wooden coaster (Is it still the biggest wooden in the country?), but the Magnum XL rocked, too. Cedar Point has always been on top of it's game with new and innovative rides.
I'm living out in Washington State now, and haven't gotten back east in seven years. One stop on the itinerary when we get there will definitly be a trip to the Point for a little stroll down memory lane.
This new ride looks very similar to the Xcellerator at Knotts Berry Farm in California. It also uses the hydraulic launch and goes from 0-80 in something like 2.8 seconds. Cedar Fair (the owners of Cedar Point) also owns Knotts, along with a handful of other smaller parks, so my guess is that's where they got the basic plan for the new ride.
Man, I miss the Point. No one will build a good amusement park up here - the season is too short to justify the expense.
Crocuta
The Telegraph had an article back in February of last year (no longer available) that set the rate of autism in the UK at 1 in 175 children, or 58 out of every 10,000 (compared to the 10 in 10,000 rate reported in California.)
/.'ers may find Mercola's website hard to stomach, since he's going to tell you to exercise and to stop eating McD's fries and twinkies. ;-)
The evidence is becoming very persuasive that immunizations do bear a large portion of the blame. See the National Vaccine Information Center for some good articles on links to this and other complications.
For our part, after reading dozens of books and talking to as many people, we made the decision not to vaccinate our now six year old. (Commence the flamebait about how we're playing with fire, yadda yadda yadda...)
Dr. Mercola, a naturopathic doctor out of Chicago, also has many good articles about the possible causes of austism. WARNING:
Crocuta
>Gee, I wonder if they're gonna get rid of the MOD-28 TTYs, they were still in service when I left in '88.
Well, they were still in service when I left in '94. My comm shack had six of them. I put together a demonstration showing how we could replace them with two 8088's running Procomm while retaining one teletype for use as a printer and backup unit. My idea was shot down because it didn't come down from on high. (Innovation by the little drone bees was strictly forbidden.)
Even better than the 28's were the UYK-20 processors that we used as the heart of our communications system. Now that was a nice sturdy hunk of aluminum. Man I miss programming with punch tape and mag cassettes! (And that was in the early 90's!!)
When I got out in 94, we had several 286's. That was impressive. The rest were 8088's.
...and it has been!
/. doesn't cache pages has apparently come up so many times that it even earned itself its very own FAQ entry.
In fact, the question of why
I've taken two courses online in the past couple of years. Both were pretty miserable.
The general way an online course works is through the extensive use of message boards which allow the students to interact with each other. Real time chat and whiteboard software are also used. Supporters claim that the experience equals that of a real classroom, but my first hand experience is that it does not. Several days ago, I was discussing online classes with a former instructor of mine. His wife teaches some online courses and she contends that her online students are getting perhaps 60% of the education they could receive in a physical classroom - and this is from an instructor who in my experience truly cares about her students.
The first course I took was Intro to Philosophy. The instructor would post a weekly lecture and assign all the typical reading required in a Phil 100 class. Then you had lists of questions to answer and post to the board where everyone else was supposed to respond to your answers, and you responded to theirs. Then you responded to their responses, etc, etc, etc. One day I got tied up and couldn't log on for almost 36 hours - there were nearly two hundred new messages waiting. I ended up dropping the course after the second week because the sheer amount of material combined with math and chemistry courses was overwhelming.
This summer, I took and completed a humanities course entitled _Survey of World Literature_. The class received absolutely no input from the instructor other than the weekly lecture. The only time the instructor made her presence known was to answer direct questions posted in a special ask the instructor board (usually of the I forgot to do an assignment can I please turn it in late whine.) Wildly inaccurate and misguided posts from students went unchallenged by the faculty member in charge. I suspect that the instructor may not have even read the individual postings, but I can't prove it.
Online courses may be very good for people of a particular personality - one who is very self driven, who isn't really into the face-to-face interaction of a classroom setting. In general however, I just don't feel like the technology has reached a point where the education delivered is of the same caliber.
Crocuta
The capacity for human ignorance never fails to amuse me.
/., turn off the computer, and get some sun, will ya? ;-)
It's just not worth dying on the crapper in some internet cafe.
Kids, this is what happens when you have a society that lets people become so self-centered that the thought of actually being a responsible productive resident is considered a joke. And here I thought only the US was so encumbered. Apparently we're contagious.
I don't know what the legal system is like in South Korea, but if it's anything like here, the dude's family will probably bring a lawsuit against the gaming room, the game manufacturer, the government, and anyone else they can bilk money out of because they raised a kid with no self control who grew into a man with no self control. After all, it's already happened here.
This whole thing reminds me of the classic experiment by Olds and Milner in which they wired tiny electrodes into the limbic system of rats. The rats could give themselves a jolt of electricity by pressing a little lever. The stimulation of the limbic system was so pleasurable that some rats would press the bar thousands of times an hour for up to 20 hours at a time until they collapsed from exhaustion. When the rats recovered, they'd go right back to pressing the bar. I have a feeling that if we could do that for people, we'd find that some (like this mental midget in South Korea) would push the bar until their heads exploded.
Really people, take a break from
Crocuta
>I've never been much for PDAs, mostly because I don't need one I never really had a burning desire for a PDA either until one day when I saw this huge pile of articles sitting on my desk that I had printed out to read later. I spent several months watching ebay and finally picked out a Casiopeia BE-300 that came in under my set price ($120 US.) Now I print out almost nothing and instead save copies over to my snyc folder and take them with me. It makes me feel better that my recycle bin isn't as full, I'm not stuck behind my computer for an extra three or four hours everyday, and with the backlit screen I can even read comfortably in bed after my wife has turned out the light. I do use the appointment book to an extent, but not exclusively. My primary tools are the browser and Mobibook. I will admit that for my specific purpose, the PDA is adequate but not ideal. The screen on most PDA's is a little on the small side, but certainly useable. I picked the Casio because I found the screen quality to be the easiest on my eyes (your mileage my vary.) Lately however, I've had my eye on the various Tablet PC's on the market. The wider screen appeals to me, and since 95% of my use is at home, or in a car (not while driving!) the extra size and weight is not an issue for me. If I could find a stripped down model that was wifi enabled and acted more of less as a slave to my desktop PC, with a small amount of storage for traveling out of range, I'd be in heaven. Crocuta
I've been using Opera for around a year now, and the banner ads in the free version never bothered me one bit (and I even clicked on them sometimes when something caught my eye.) I finally paid for it a couple of months ago - not to get rid of the ads, but because I find it to be a nice little chunk of software and I wanted to support the developers. If I could find the right switch, I'd happily turn the banners back on in my paid for version.
I really fail to see why some people come unglued over Opera's banner ad. It's this little unobtrusive thing.
Crocuta