All these strangely shaped and colored parts mix together quite well, and my children have had no trouble whatsoever in creating weird fan-fic style mashup vehicles and action sets.
I second that. I am writing this in the attic, where my tech stuff is surrounded by a hard to traverese landscape of brightly coloured bricks. Even the most specific ones get repurposed: the telephone as a showerd head, the life bouy as a toilet seat.
And the kids still love the standard bricks. Last time I went to Cologne, where they have a Lego shop where you can pay for loose bricks by the cup (similar to filing a bag in a candy store), I asked which special parts to fill the cup with. The answer was: big bricks, so we can build faster!
Sometimes people should just take the x hour ride as a chance to relax and catch up on your sleep/reading/video game time. Lord knows that the workaholic middle class could use it.
The last time I flew transatlantic I was quite happy with my €10 T-mobile Wi-Fi. Allowed me to check and correct the documents that my co-workers created (and that I brought along on the laptop), save PDF copies in Dropbox and mail links to the files to the client. It all went fast enough for me, and the big plus was that I could spend the next morning sleeping my jet lag off instead of trying to figure out the hotels WiFi (which, in my experience, are in the same QoS league as airline WiFi). Nothing to do with being a workaholic, only with being efficient.
Similiar systems have been in used at airports for years, to measure waiting times at security checks etc. The ones that measure road congestion can be bought off the shelf, or can be rented (when a construction company works on a stretch of highway for instance). This is really old technology, and I wonder how it ever got up to Slashdot's front page.
Well, you really do not need bluetooth to track cars. All cars have license plates that you can read with a camera and some software. This is widely used on the highways around my city, for over 5 years now. Sometimes I am really surprised how out of touch Slashdot's self-proclaimed nerds are with technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECS_(speed_camera)
Here in the Netherlands there is. It is unlawful to take anything from your body without your consent. Material taken without your consent cannot be used as a proof. A couple of years ago they tricked somebody into a friendly chat at the police station, including a cup of coffee on the house. Afterwards the cup was sent to the DNA lab for all the DNA traces he had left on them! End result: the guy was set free, because the proof was unlawful.
I think espionage charges for such a thing are more than a little ridiculous (and I doubt that is what they'll actually be charged for)
You may doubt it, but I do not. I took over nearly two year for a group of tourist plane spotters to be acquitted of espionage charges in 2001. At the initial process 8 of that group were convicted to three years in jail.
As a dutchman, I'm telling you that plenty of us would be happy to kick Wilders out of the country
In other words, you disagree with the majority of your voters? You sound like a particularly bitter political person one who blames the majority of your countrymen's as being fearful idiots who simply vote for someone for one obviously bad reason.
You know there are countries that have more than two political parties? Where you can 'win' an election (with the most votes) because you are the largest minority?
In the last Dutch election Wilders got 24 of the 150 seats in the Dutch parliament, making his party the third largest party in Dutch parliament (behind the VVD - 31 seats - and the PvdA - 30 seats). Hardly a majority isn't it?
North Korea of course:-)
And yeah, I want to see it just for the experience and because it's something so little amount of people have done. Would make awesome small talk subject too.
I also have heard it's really safe country to visit, actually. If you're being an idiot, they don't punish you.
This stamp collector from the Netherlands> (lame Babelfish translation, but Googles one is even worse) visited North Korea 24 times. His last visit however ended with weeks and weeks of interrogations, a forced confession to a crime he didn't commit and a judge that absolved him (but that might just as well sentenced him to decades of jail).
- Indian food by and large is not super-spicy to begin with. Home cooked food in India is usually mild and often a bit overcooked. Yes, certain cuisines such as Kolhapuri or Sahuji is known for being hotter. Even then, this is usually hype promoted by restaurants as a publicity stunt. While restaurants often label their dish "kolhapuri chicken" by adding 5 extra red chiles, authentic Kolhapuri food is not cooked this way
Ha! Tell that to us gringos! I just spent 3 weeks for work in Delhi, and loved the food. But almost everything was served with the quote 'Not spicy sir!' but still too spicy for my colleagues.
Relative to the exitinction of he dinosaur everything is recent. This is just a 'recent' as the import of potatoes in Germany and tomatoes in Italy, or about 200 years before the USA's declaration of independance. If you look at the rate at which cuisines change, that is not relatively recent at all.
Secondly, 'several ambulances'? People 'writhing on the floor, fainting and vomiting'? Here's what actually happened:
Indeed, I read TFA, and what a load of wasted words. The only reference to the actual event in the article is:
According to reports, two British Red Cross workers overseeing the event at the Kismot Indian restaurant in Edinburgh but became overwhelmed by the number of casualties and ambulances were called. Half of the 20 people who took part in the challenge dropped out after witnessing the first diners vomiting, collapsing, sweating and panting.
So, where does those reports (mind you, plural!) lead to? To the undisputedly unreliable Dail Liar^H^H^H^HMail !!!
The story on the local BBC site (unbiased as long as it is not about foreign wars) confirms CrazyBusErrors story, it is about two whackos doing stupid things. The whole 'can it kill you' meme was added by LiveScience to gain page views.
This kind of ignorance is dangerous and baffling. It's not as if he's arguing against anthropogenic global warming using science. Hell, maybe he believes in global warming and that it really is man-made. But he refuses to accept what will happen because the Bible says otherwise. What. The. Fuck.
Well, it remembers me of the very appropriate joke my daughter told yesterday evening:
One rainy night, a priest walked into a hotel and asked for a room. About an hour later there was a knock on his door. "Quick, Quick!", screamed the hotel manager. "There's a terrible flood happening. Get yourself out into the rescue boat before you drown!" But the priest remained calm. "The Lord is my Saviour, and He will save me."
Not long afterwards, the water had risen to the second floor. A second boat sailed past the priest's window and the captain looked inside. "Good God man, jump in here before you die!", the captain screamed. "The Lord is my Saviour, He will save me."
Soon enough, the flood raged higher and higher, until the priest was forced out onto the hotel roof. A nearby helicopter saw the man's plight and dangled a rope ladder down to him. "Hurry up!", yelled the pilot. "Grab onto the rope!". The priest smiled. "The Lord is my Saviour, He will save me."
The flood rises even higher, and the priest drowns. Then the priest enters heaven and meets God himself. "My Lord!", he wailed. "Why did you forsake me?" "Forsake you? I sent you two boats and a helicopter !!!!"
Maps themselves can be a problem. If you can find them at all, it is is best to keep them hidden near locals, because everyone with a map must be a foreign spy. That is already the case in Turkey, a US ally, so I bet that rule is in even greater effect in Iran.
And for the GPS: very nice to find your way back. But to find your way forth, you must have a map with GPS grid. Good luck on finding any of those outside the western world.
I walked with a GPS in Georgia (the one wedged between Russia and Turkey that is), and there it was great to confirm that you had followed the directions OK and landed on the right spot. But with no GPS grid enabled map to back up the directions, you never know if the GPS coordinates are right (in this case one was printed wrong in the guidebook - luckily I didn't end up in bordering Southern Ossetia or Chechnya...).
So, basically, anything that can be used as a weapon, too.
Anything of course except real weapons, which are protected by the second amendment. Somewhere in the near future you will be using your firearms for cooking, carpentry work etc.
No USian not on government or military business has any reason to be where they were.
Except maybe for the beautiful landscape and friendly people? Unlike most commenters here, I did hike in Iran. There are no maps there, or trails, you just have to go by spoken directions ("take a taxi to XYZ and then head south for two days"). Which means you can get horribly lost.
And info on the safety situation can be just as fuzzy, people in the cities (worldwide) have no idea what the situation in the mountain is, but will give you their personal fabricated opinion as a fact.
Personally I would be most worried about anti personel mines that are scattered throughout the border region. Against Iraqi troops, fugitives, and smugglers.
But Iraq is a big country, and can be hell on one spot and perfectly safe on another. As a matter of fact, just spoke someone last week who had just returned from a climbing trip in Afghanistan. Not being a couch potatoe does not equal to being a CIA agent
It'd be cool to even just be able to do an "album shuffle" mode where all the songs on an album are played in order before randomly selecting the next album.
Car radios often have the option ‘album shuffle’. Which means: shuffle all tracks on this album... I made the error to press that button more than once!!!.
Shuffle by album as you meant, random shuffling the album sequence instead of the track sequence makes a lot more sense to me, especially with 20-album MP3 CDrs in the player.
Slashdot Mirror
Also 45, but I remember being stinkin' jealous at my big brothers' Rocket Base and Moon Landing.
I second that. I am writing this in the attic, where my tech stuff is surrounded by a hard to traverese landscape of brightly coloured bricks. Even the most specific ones get repurposed: the telephone as a showerd head, the life bouy as a toilet seat.
And the kids still love the standard bricks. Last time I went to Cologne, where they have a Lego shop where you can pay for loose bricks by the cup (similar to filing a bag in a candy store), I asked which special parts to fill the cup with. The answer was: big bricks, so we can build faster!
Sometimes people should just take the x hour ride as a chance to relax and catch up on your sleep/reading/video game time. Lord knows that the workaholic middle class could use it.
The last time I flew transatlantic I was quite happy with my €10 T-mobile Wi-Fi. Allowed me to check and correct the documents that my co-workers created (and that I brought along on the laptop), save PDF copies in Dropbox and mail links to the files to the client. It all went fast enough for me, and the big plus was that I could spend the next morning sleeping my jet lag off instead of trying to figure out the hotels WiFi (which, in my experience, are in the same QoS league as airline WiFi).
Nothing to do with being a workaholic, only with being efficient.
Similiar systems have been in used at airports for years, to measure waiting times at security checks etc. The ones that measure road congestion can be bought off the shelf, or can be rented (when a construction company works on a stretch of highway for instance). This is really old technology, and I wonder how it ever got up to Slashdot's front page.
Well, you really do not need bluetooth to track cars. All cars have license plates that you can read with a camera and some software. This is widely used on the highways around my city, for over 5 years now. Sometimes I am really surprised how out of touch Slashdot's self-proclaimed nerds are with technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECS_(speed_camera)
We don't have jurys here. Judges with a false sense of probability can get corrected by a higher court. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_de_Berk
Here in the Netherlands there is. It is unlawful to take anything from your body without your consent. Material taken without your consent cannot be used as a proof. A couple of years ago they tricked somebody into a friendly chat at the police station, including a cup of coffee on the house. Afterwards the cup was sent to the DNA lab for all the DNA traces he had left on them! End result: the guy was set free, because the proof was unlawful.
And then there's this story of a Dutch guy that bought a totaled Ferrari, spent five years to rebuild it, and then had it crashed again when he rented it out! http://www.rtvutrecht.nl/nieuws/369456/ferraririt-lage-weide-eindigt-in-crash
Realistically, though, the whole thing should be comparable to phone taps and one should either oppose both or deem both to be acceptable.
Of course you know that the Netherlands are far too fond of phone tapping?
"Yes, I am paranoid. But am I paranoid enough?"
You may doubt it, but I do not. I took over nearly two year for a group of tourist plane spotters to be acquitted of espionage charges in 2001. At the initial process 8 of that group were convicted to three years in jail.
As a dutchman, I'm telling you that plenty of us would be happy to kick Wilders out of the country
In other words, you disagree with the majority of your voters? You sound like a particularly bitter political person one who blames the majority of your countrymen's as being fearful idiots who simply vote for someone for one obviously bad reason.
You know there are countries that have more than two political parties? Where you can 'win' an election (with the most votes) because you are the largest minority?
In the last Dutch election Wilders got 24 of the 150 seats in the Dutch parliament, making his party the third largest party in Dutch parliament (behind the VVD - 31 seats - and the PvdA - 30 seats). Hardly a majority isn't it?
and you would be surprised just how low value something needs to be for the chance to be taken.
Like your fathers ashes.
North Korea of course :-)
And yeah, I want to see it just for the experience and because it's something so little amount of people have done. Would make awesome small talk subject too.
I also have heard it's really safe country to visit, actually. If you're being an idiot, they don't punish you.
This stamp collector from the Netherlands> (lame Babelfish translation, but Googles one is even worse) visited North Korea 24 times. His last visit however ended with weeks and weeks of interrogations, a forced confession to a crime he didn't commit and a judge that absolved him (but that might just as well sentenced him to decades of jail).
And if the EU does turn hostile to the US in some sort of bizarro-world, the US possesses capabilities to shoot them down.
It is not the EU turning hostile to the US, it is the US turning hostile the the EU. And that some sort of bizarro world is already here.
Don't you remember that in 2002 a federal law passed congress legislating invading the seat of government of my country - a founding NATO partner?
- Indian food by and large is not super-spicy to begin with. Home cooked food in India is usually mild and often a bit overcooked. Yes, certain cuisines such as Kolhapuri or Sahuji is known for being hotter. Even then, this is usually hype promoted by restaurants as a publicity stunt. While restaurants often label their dish "kolhapuri chicken" by adding 5 extra red chiles, authentic Kolhapuri food is not cooked this way
Ha! Tell that to us gringos! I just spent 3 weeks for work in Delhi, and loved the food. But almost everything was served with the quote 'Not spicy sir!' but still too spicy for my colleagues.
Relative to the exitinction of he dinosaur everything is recent. This is just a 'recent' as the import of potatoes in Germany and tomatoes in Italy, or about 200 years before the USA's declaration of independance. If you look at the rate at which cuisines change, that is not relatively recent at all.
Indeed, I read TFA, and what a load of wasted words. The only reference to the actual event in the article is:
So, where does those reports (mind you, plural!) lead to? To the undisputedly unreliable Dail Liar^H^H^H^HMail !!!
The story on the local BBC site (unbiased as long as it is not about foreign wars) confirms CrazyBusErrors story, it is about two whackos doing stupid things. The whole 'can it kill you' meme was added by LiveScience to gain page views.
Well, it remembers me of the very appropriate joke my daughter told yesterday evening:
One rainy night, a priest walked into a hotel and asked for a room. About an hour later there was a knock on his door. "Quick, Quick!", screamed the hotel manager. "There's a terrible flood happening. Get yourself out into the rescue boat before you drown!" But the priest remained calm. "The Lord is my Saviour, and He will save me."
Not long afterwards, the water had risen to the second floor. A second boat sailed past the priest's window and the captain looked inside. "Good God man, jump in here before you die!", the captain screamed. "The Lord is my Saviour, He will save me."
Soon enough, the flood raged higher and higher, until the priest was forced out onto the hotel roof. A nearby helicopter saw the man's plight and dangled a rope ladder down to him. "Hurry up!", yelled the pilot. "Grab onto the rope!". The priest smiled. "The Lord is my Saviour, He will save me."
The flood rises even higher, and the priest drowns. Then the priest enters heaven and meets God himself. "My Lord!", he wailed. "Why did you forsake me?" "Forsake you? I sent you two boats and a helicopter !!!!"
Dutch is fine by me, but the average /.er might want to check the (short) facts here: http://www.om.nl/actueel/nieuws-_en/@154346/wanted_botnet/
Maps themselves can be a problem. If you can find them at all, it is is best to keep them hidden near locals, because everyone with a map must be a foreign spy. That is already the case in Turkey, a US ally, so I bet that rule is in even greater effect in Iran.
And for the GPS: very nice to find your way back. But to find your way forth, you must have a map with GPS grid. Good luck on finding any of those outside the western world.
I walked with a GPS in Georgia (the one wedged between Russia and Turkey that is), and there it was great to confirm that you had followed the directions OK and landed on the right spot. But with no GPS grid enabled map to back up the directions, you never know if the GPS coordinates are right (in this case one was printed wrong in the guidebook - luckily I didn't end up in bordering Southern Ossetia or Chechnya...).
Anything of course except real weapons, which are protected by the second amendment. Somewhere in the near future you will be using your firearms for cooking, carpentry work etc.
Except maybe for the beautiful landscape and friendly people? Unlike most commenters here, I did hike in Iran. There are no maps there, or trails, you just have to go by spoken directions ("take a taxi to XYZ and then head south for two days"). Which means you can get horribly lost.
And info on the safety situation can be just as fuzzy, people in the cities (worldwide) have no idea what the situation in the mountain is, but will give you their personal fabricated opinion as a fact.
Personally I would be most worried about anti personel mines that are scattered throughout the border region. Against Iraqi troops, fugitives, and smugglers.
But Iraq is a big country, and can be hell on one spot and perfectly safe on another. As a matter of fact, just spoke someone last week who had just returned from a climbing trip in Afghanistan. Not being a couch potatoe does not equal to being a CIA agent
Does this make an newsworthy item? A blog entry that, as only source, states "a recent report from the Pew Research Center" ?
I guess I know now why nobody at Slashdot cares to RTFA.
Car radios often have the option ‘album shuffle’. Which means: shuffle all tracks on this album... I made the error to press that button more than once!!!.
Shuffle by album as you meant, random shuffling the album sequence instead of the track sequence makes a lot more sense to me, especially with 20-album MP3 CDrs in the player.