People have been attaching cameras to kites for quick-and-dirty aerial photographs for almost a hundred years.
Either this story has been in the queue for way too long, or you need to verify your sources.
Kite Aerial Photograhy began at least as early as the late 1880's with the work of Arthur Batut in Labruguiere, France - including this 1889 image of the city. He went so far as to use an altimeter to automatically adjust the focal length of the camera
~~~~~~
KAP seems like a great application for one of those X10 wireless cameras. Outdoors they have a range of maybe 200 feet and that could probably be enhanced with a directional antenna.
People say that [the/. eds don't check links], but I have yet to get a goatse.cx (or a mirror of same) link published.
The trick is to set up a site the uses a SLOW redirect - say five minutes. The eds go check the site and it looks fine - then close the windows or use their back button - never the wiser about the redirect. But when the article is submitted a good many users will click on the link and leave it open past the five minutes - certain to get a few gasps from the co-workers walking by when the goats.cx page comes up.
Alternatively, you could get a real story accepted that points to a page you control, then once it gets posted - change it to a goats.cx mirror or instant redirect.
I assume you are referring to USB 1.x. USB 2.0 is direct competitor to firewire.
But yeah, you can understand why they lock you into the low resolution, you'd never get full screen hi-resolution over a USB 1.x connection using MPEG 1 compression.
I think the whole thing is pretty overpriced for what you get though. I got the Video Blaster card with the same features (but with full screen video) at CompUSA last month and it was only $50. While I know that many Mac owners don't have the option of putting new cards in their boxes, a 300% markup seems kind of steep for an external unit that also has more limited capability.
Also, what is up with the 20MB software installation? You can play MPEG1 files with QuickTime, so all you need is a scheduling interface.
, build up a mound of dirt / strawbale / etc. that'll get covered in snow.
In addition or instead of that - you could build a cushion at the bottom. Some ideas for padding materials:
Cardboard boxes (they still use these for many movie stunts)
Garbage bags filled with the fallen leaves from the trees
Discarded carpetting - or even better carpet padding
discarded mattresses (but not box springs)
more hay bales
Note: if you find some carpet padding (or carpet with integrated padding) you can lay it at the bottom of the slope (or on the ramp proposed above) so that the rubber side is facing up. Make sure it stays relatively free of snow and it will work like a rubber brake shoe / friction brake on the bottom of the sled. That should work pretty well with smooth bottomed sleds, but probably not be as effective with sleds that have runners.
BTW: my favorite sled design while growing up was to take an inflated car innertube and insert it into a giant heavy duty garbage bag. Madea for a great boucy ride when you had a few moguls like our sledding slope had.
Every government agency has to deal with waste and fraud. The big question is whether it is any worse at NASA than any other agency and this article does not even begin to answer that question.
Actually, since you and I are footing the bill, I don't think the 'everyone else has the same problem' excuse is good enough. A better question is would expending additional resources on deterring, detecting and prosecuting fraud/waste have a net positive effect on the bottom line?
If there is currently $100M in fraud and spending $20M more on detecting and deterring fraud will deter/recover $50M of it, then that $20M should be spent. If the $20M will only deter/recover $10M, then obviously it would not be in the government's (or citizens') best interest to spend that $20M.
Of course I might be biased as I am a government auditor. Currently my organization averages about $100M in deterred/detected/recovered fraud/waste per year and we only cost the taxpayers a third of that.
Doesn't it seem likely that if "wooly rhinos" inhabited Europe that they must be the source of the stories about unicorns?
The artist rendering in the BBC article looks more like a Yak or giant Boar with long horns between its eyes, but if stoneage people either found these living in southern europe, or made similar discoveries of skeletons, the combination of their rarity and their unique physiology could easily lead to them becoming shrouded in myth and mystery.
Actually this is required by copyright law. The government is not allowed to 'compete' with the general populous. One way this is controlled is by not allowing the government to copyright works created by government employees on government time (see Title 17 United States Code section 105.
There are some copyrights that are owned by the government, but these have to be works that the government bought or commissioned through a contractor. Also, as noted in the first link, some Government created documents / websites contain images that are copyrighted and used by permission. Any third party wishing to use the image would of course have to seperately obtain permission from the copyright holder.
Think about a sphere - you can refer to any point on a sphere with 2 coordinates, like latitude and longitude, but it exists in 3 dimensions.
As a non-Math Geek, I just want to thank you for providing the single most accessible statement I have read on multidimensional space since reading Flatland.
Alternatively, you could request that anyone that wants to use a 'built in' (ie installed in the multi-bay) floppy drive takes the AC power adaptor with them and plugs into a wall outlet.
I'm assuming of course that the Library is located inside and in a location that has continuous AC power. For the Lab you could buy extra chargers and have the AC power supplies always available at the work stations.
If this becomes the norm in the Lab it would also provide surplus batteries to be made available in the Library.
Any solution that involves the continuous partial discharging of the batteries will eventually result in dead batteries. Forget the so-called memory free battery claims for Li-Ion batteries, yes they were an improvement but I have never had a DELL notebook that hasn't lost at least 20% of its battery capacity within 6 months and 50% within a year.
Of course, attempts to make a database of existing guns will fail utterly.
What everyone fails to realize is that a registry already exists for gun serial numbers. Yes some criminals go to great lengths to file off the serial number, but they are still used to help solve crimes - and possessing a gun with a filed off serial number was itself made a crime in many juridictioins - the same could be done for altering the gun barrel.
Also, consider that fingerprints of criminals has been a forensic tool for over a century now, yet most criminals don't think to put on gloves or wear masks over their faces when they commit crimes. I think the ability of criminals to alter barrels is therefore a smokescreen since the criminals rarely fail to take other trivial steps to conceal their identities.
Unfortunately, the current serial number only database is only useable in those situations where a gun is discarded and not in cases like the current DC sniper. But because of serial numbers there is already a national registry and the NRA need not get its panties in a bunch about creating a new way to infringe on their second amendment rights. Ballistic fingerprints could easily be added to the existing serial number registry - at least for new guns and any gun that is legally resold.
I assume that law abiding gun owners aren't filing the serial numbers off their guns (which as I noted is itself crime in many places), and that if a gun is stolen any responsible gun owner (which the NRA claims is the vast majority of them) is going to immediately report the theft it to the police (since failure to report a crime is itself a crime).
Try some Google searches similar to this one that will locate websites that have archived their hit statistics including the referring page information. I'm sure if you go through enough of them you will find a bunch that were seriously slashdotted during the time period those statisitics cover. Plus when you find them you will be able to put them in context of how many hits they are getting from sites other than slashdot, and if they have the stats for other months/weeks so you will be able to really put them in context of what level of traffic they normally get.
Note: make sure you check Google's archive of the pages for those that aren't static.
It would seem to me that the super-absorbent gell that is used in diapers, tampons, and as a soil replacement/enhancer would do the same thing, perhaps better.
Actually I used to do a lot of hiking and we always kept a sanitary napkin or two in the first aid kit to apply to major wounds. Fortunately never had the opportunity to try them out. The form factor of a sanitary napkin is much easier to apply since unlike diapers and tampons they are flat. Also, since the big toxic shock scare of the 80's you can be pretty sure that they have been sterilized to a limited if not hospital autoclave standard.
As to the potato starch, we usually brought instant mashed potatoes with us for dinner anyway (great for thickening stews or for an instant add-water side dish that's much cheaper than freeze-dried meals from camping stores), now we can just bring that and leave the sanitary pads at home;^)
Yeah a laser pointer should do it as shown in this article.
But with any scheme that attempts to use light, you have to consider the safety of the audience topmost, including audience members that may suffer from photosensitive epilepsy.
I recommend you slice it up and sell off most of it. If you and/or your grandpappy were into knives, you might consider having part of it made into a collectible knife.
You could sell it to the knife company for the knife and a nice chunk of cash.
Can shoe size predict penile length? J. Shah and N. Christopher
Objective To establish if the 'myth' about whether the size of a man's penis can be estimated from his shoe size has any basis, infact.
Subjects and methods Two urologists measured the stretched penile length of 104 men in a prospective study and related this to their shoe size.
Results The median stretched penile length for the sampled population was 13cm and the median UK shoe size was 9 (European 43). There was no statistically significant correlation between shoe size and stretched penile length.
Conclusion The supposed association of penile length and shoe size has no scientific basis.
Now while millions of women (and some men - not that there's anything wrong with that) may find this research important, I think most men would prefer that the women research it independently rather than depend on the citizen's tax dollars.
That far predates SlashDot. I searched Google's archive and came up with this first use of IANAL from January 1990, making it more than 7.5 years older than SlashDot. We should remember that before SlashDot there was Usenet and IRC. Much of the culture that is SlashDot has its origins on those older systems.
Since I lived on my own I was automatically considered an independent student for determining Financial Aid (though I think the rules may have changed since then).
Taking the time off lets you build up your own identiity as an individual. So many people never figure out who they are until they get out of of College and realize that the degree they completed is not appropriate for who they discover they are after spending a year in the real world after graduation. It's very easy to fall into the trap of just becoming whatever your peers in College want you to be. The time off let's you find out who you want yourself to be
If you wait until after College, you will not really be able to enjoy your time off since you will have a mountain of loans accumulating interest, you will be forgoing much more salary by not working, and you won't be able to ride along on your parent's health insurance.
If you go to Europe after HS you can drink legally, if you go to College you can't. You are much safer drinking legally in Europe where they have a great public transportation system (and you can live for almost nothing in say Prague) than you are drinking illegally in car-centric USA where you have a pretty high chance of drinking too much and driving into a tree on the way home.
And if you are a guy, then you will have a much better sex life in Europe as an 18 yr old American than you would as a pimple-faced freshman at College competing with upperclassmen guys for the limited number of girls your age. If you are a girl, the logic may work somewhat in reverse.
One contrary view would be if you are thinkning about the military or peace corps, if that is how you plan to spend your "year off" then get your degree first. It is necessary for the peace corps, and for the military will pay off your loans while letting you serve as an officer instead of a grunt.
Yes, my thoughts exactly. In last week's Enterprise episode, when T'Pol's great-grandmum sells a sample of Velcro to a patent attorney, the buyer refers to it as a product that will revolutionize the world. Since prior to this I would not have considered Velcro to have "revolutionized the world" the comment must have been referring to this research. Once all human babies are started on this regimen, we will achieve the understanding of physics necessary to one day build a warp drive.
PLease mod up parent, it sounds like the best solution for a non-techie.
I figured an out of the box solution existed since most OCR software does this automatically when you scan page of mixed text and images, it will block out the page into sections to be OCR'd and images to be jpg compressed. I know Adobe Acrobat's scanning version is pretty good at this and let's you pre-define the default compression for the images.
Re:Abby FineReader...
on
Accurate OCR?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've tested and compared OmniPage Pro to Abby FineReader
I'm pretty sure that Abby FineReader has language modules, so you can scan works in many languages
I'll say, in fact it supports the following: Armenian (Eastern), Armenian (Grabar), Armenian (Western), Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Dutch (Belgian), Estonian, Finnish, French, German, German (new spelling), Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian (Bokmal), Norwegian (Nynorsk), Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Tatar, Turkish, and Ukrainian. Only European languages, but still impressive.
Slashdot Mirror
People have been attaching cameras to kites for quick-and-dirty aerial photographs for almost a hundred years.
Either this story has been in the queue for way too long, or you need to verify your sources.
Kite Aerial Photograhy began at least as early as the late 1880's with the work of Arthur Batut in Labruguiere, France - including this 1889 image of the city. He went so far as to use an altimeter to automatically adjust the focal length of the camera
~~~~~~
KAP seems like a great application for one of those X10 wireless cameras. Outdoors they have a range of maybe 200 feet and that could probably be enhanced with a directional antenna.
People say that [the /. eds don't check links], but I have yet to get a goatse.cx (or a mirror of same) link published.
The trick is to set up a site the uses a SLOW redirect - say five minutes. The eds go check the site and it looks fine - then close the windows or use their back button - never the wiser about the redirect. But when the article is submitted a good many users will click on the link and leave it open past the five minutes - certain to get a few gasps from the co-workers walking by when the goats.cx page comes up.
Alternatively, you could get a real story accepted that points to a page you control, then once it gets posted - change it to a goats.cx mirror or instant redirect.
I assume you are referring to USB 1.x. USB 2.0 is direct competitor to firewire.
But yeah, you can understand why they lock you into the low resolution, you'd never get full screen hi-resolution over a USB 1.x connection using MPEG 1 compression.
I think the whole thing is pretty overpriced for what you get though. I got the Video Blaster card with the same features (but with full screen video) at CompUSA last month and it was only $50. While I know that many Mac owners don't have the option of putting new cards in their boxes, a 300% markup seems kind of steep for an external unit that also has more limited capability.
Also, what is up with the 20MB software installation? You can play MPEG1 files with QuickTime, so all you need is a scheduling interface.
I'd recommend converting the whole thing into XML with fields for:
- Major genre
- minor genre
- the question
- a hint
- some numerically scaled level of difficulty
- multiple choice options A, B, C, & D, and
- the correct answer
that should allow anyone who want to build an interface a lot of leeway as to how they want to structure the quiz.A long time ago, there used to be an IRC based game that was a run like Jeopardy. Don't know if the games were archived though.
In addition or instead of that - you could build a cushion at the bottom. Some ideas for padding materials:
- Cardboard boxes (they still use these for many movie stunts)
- Garbage bags filled with the fallen leaves from the trees
- Discarded carpetting - or even better carpet padding
- discarded mattresses (but not box springs)
- more hay bales
Note: if you find some carpet padding (or carpet with integrated padding) you can lay it at the bottom of the slope (or on the ramp proposed above) so that the rubber side is facing up. Make sure it stays relatively free of snow and it will work like a rubber brake shoe / friction brake on the bottom of the sled. That should work pretty well with smooth bottomed sleds, but probably not be as effective with sleds that have runners.BTW: my favorite sled design while growing up was to take an inflated car innertube and insert it into a giant heavy duty garbage bag. Madea for a great boucy ride when you had a few moguls like our sledding slope had.
Liquid Crystal Diode Display
thank you!.
the LCD is pretty pointless
Except because of the id3 tags you can also use it to display contact information, password hints, haiku, whatever.
It might be fairly little added benefit for an mp3, but is does give it other uses like the referenced stopwatch function.
Every government agency has to deal with waste and fraud. The big question is whether it is any worse at NASA than any other agency and this article does not even begin to answer that question.
Actually, since you and I are footing the bill, I don't think the 'everyone else has the same problem' excuse is good enough. A better question is would expending additional resources on deterring, detecting and prosecuting fraud/waste have a net positive effect on the bottom line?
If there is currently $100M in fraud and spending $20M more on detecting and deterring fraud will deter/recover $50M of it, then that $20M should be spent. If the $20M will only deter/recover $10M, then obviously it would not be in the government's (or citizens') best interest to spend that $20M.
Of course I might be biased as I am a government auditor. Currently my organization averages about $100M in deterred/detected/recovered fraud/waste per year and we only cost the taxpayers a third of that.
Doesn't it seem likely that if "wooly rhinos" inhabited Europe that they must be the source of the stories about unicorns?
The artist rendering in the BBC article looks more like a Yak or giant Boar with long horns between its eyes, but if stoneage people either found these living in southern europe, or made similar discoveries of skeletons, the combination of their rarity and their unique physiology could easily lead to them becoming shrouded in myth and mystery.
Actually this is required by copyright law. The government is not allowed to 'compete' with the general populous. One way this is controlled is by not allowing the government to copyright works created by government employees on government time (see Title 17 United States Code section 105.
There are some copyrights that are owned by the government, but these have to be works that the government bought or commissioned through a contractor. Also, as noted in the first link, some Government created documents / websites contain images that are copyrighted and used by permission. Any third party wishing to use the image would of course have to seperately obtain permission from the copyright holder.
I think Double Star was written in the 1950s.
1956 to be precise.
Think about a sphere - you can refer to any point on a sphere with 2 coordinates, like latitude and longitude, but it exists in 3 dimensions.
As a non-Math Geek, I just want to thank you for providing the single most accessible statement I have read on multidimensional space since reading Flatland.
BestBuy is selling a Porsche designed widescreen ultra thin laptop the looks almost exactly like a Tibook. Sadly, it runs Windows
Finally, I'll be able to crash a Porsche and be able to walk away.
Any hope of getting an OS free version?
I'm assuming of course that the Library is located inside and in a location that has continuous AC power. For the Lab you could buy extra chargers and have the AC power supplies always available at the work stations.
If this becomes the norm in the Lab it would also provide surplus batteries to be made available in the Library.
Any solution that involves the continuous partial discharging of the batteries will eventually result in dead batteries. Forget the so-called memory free battery claims for Li-Ion batteries, yes they were an improvement but I have never had a DELL notebook that hasn't lost at least 20% of its battery capacity within 6 months and 50% within a year.
--
DC SlashDot MeetUp at Dr. Dremos 10/24/02
Of course, attempts to make a database of existing guns will fail utterly.
What everyone fails to realize is that a registry already exists for gun serial numbers. Yes some criminals go to great lengths to file off the serial number, but they are still used to help solve crimes - and possessing a gun with a filed off serial number was itself made a crime in many juridictioins - the same could be done for altering the gun barrel.
Also, consider that fingerprints of criminals has been a forensic tool for over a century now, yet most criminals don't think to put on gloves or wear masks over their faces when they commit crimes. I think the ability of criminals to alter barrels is therefore a smokescreen since the criminals rarely fail to take other trivial steps to conceal their identities.
Unfortunately, the current serial number only database is only useable in those situations where a gun is discarded and not in cases like the current DC sniper. But because of serial numbers there is already a national registry and the NRA need not get its panties in a bunch about creating a new way to infringe on their second amendment rights. Ballistic fingerprints could easily be added to the existing serial number registry - at least for new guns and any gun that is legally resold.
I assume that law abiding gun owners aren't filing the serial numbers off their guns (which as I noted is itself crime in many places), and that if a gun is stolen any responsible gun owner (which the NRA claims is the vast majority of them) is going to immediately report the theft it to the police (since failure to report a crime is itself a crime).
Try some Google searches similar to this one that will locate websites that have archived their hit statistics including the referring page information. I'm sure if you go through enough of them you will find a bunch that were seriously slashdotted during the time period those statisitics cover. Plus when you find them you will be able to put them in context of how many hits they are getting from sites other than slashdot, and if they have the stats for other months/weeks so you will be able to really put them in context of what level of traffic they normally get.
Note: make sure you check Google's archive of the pages for those that aren't static.
It would seem to me that the super-absorbent gell that is used in diapers, tampons, and as a soil replacement/enhancer would do the same thing, perhaps better.
;^)
Actually I used to do a lot of hiking and we always kept a sanitary napkin or two in the first aid kit to apply to major wounds. Fortunately never had the opportunity to try them out. The form factor of a sanitary napkin is much easier to apply since unlike diapers and tampons they are flat. Also, since the big toxic shock scare of the 80's you can be pretty sure that they have been sterilized to a limited if not hospital autoclave standard.
As to the potato starch, we usually brought instant mashed potatoes with us for dinner anyway (great for thickening stews or for an instant add-water side dish that's much cheaper than freeze-dried meals from camping stores), now we can just bring that and leave the sanitary pads at home
Yeah a laser pointer should do it as shown in this article.
But with any scheme that attempts to use light, you have to consider the safety of the audience topmost, including audience members that may suffer from photosensitive epilepsy.
I recommend you slice it up and sell off most of it. If you and/or your grandpappy were into knives, you might consider having part of it made into a collectible knife.
You could sell it to the knife company for the knife and a nice chunk of cash.
I recall there was a slashdot story on Damascus steel that referred to some of these knives maybe a year ago.
Of course, if its not your typical iron meterorite, then it maybe is even more valuable, so maybe an assay is the best way to start.
Excellent list, I would only add:
* IANAL, but...
That far predates SlashDot. I searched Google's archive and came up with this first use of IANAL from January 1990, making it more than 7.5 years older than SlashDot. We should remember that before SlashDot there was Usenet and IRC. Much of the culture that is SlashDot has its origins on those older systems.
Also check out Choices for the High School Graduate: A Survival Guide for the Information Age which addresses this very question by following the experiences of HS grads who made various choices with their lives and what they learned from their experiences.
to our good friends, the Vulcans
Yes, my thoughts exactly. In last week's Enterprise episode, when T'Pol's great-grandmum sells a sample of Velcro to a patent attorney, the buyer refers to it as a product that will revolutionize the world. Since prior to this I would not have considered Velcro to have "revolutionized the world" the comment must have been referring to this research. Once all human babies are started on this regimen, we will achieve the understanding of physics necessary to one day build a warp drive.
PLease mod up parent, it sounds like the best solution for a non-techie.
I figured an out of the box solution existed since most OCR software does this automatically when you scan page of mixed text and images, it will block out the page into sections to be OCR'd and images to be jpg compressed. I know Adobe Acrobat's scanning version is pretty good at this and let's you pre-define the default compression for the images.
I've tested and compared OmniPage Pro to Abby FineReader
You can also download a fully functional demo version that will run 15 times. So it couldn't hurt to give it a try.
I'm pretty sure that Abby FineReader has language modules, so you can scan works in many languages
I'll say, in fact it supports the following: Armenian (Eastern), Armenian (Grabar), Armenian (Western), Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Dutch (Belgian), Estonian, Finnish, French, German, German (new spelling), Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian (Bokmal), Norwegian (Nynorsk), Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Tatar, Turkish, and Ukrainian. Only European languages, but still impressive.