Actually, You've touched on why the navy still uses spotlights to communicate to this day. You know those movies where you have some seamen flipping the shades on a spotlight to send morse code to another ship? That's what I'm talking about. Unless you are along the line of sight which the light beam is travelling, it's virtually impossible to intercept the signal.
I have to say, it does sound somewhat cool (if slightly OTT) to have someone build a habitable hobbit hole. Yet when I looked at your floor plans, I gave up on it.
Your fantastic elliptical tubing is still leaves you with the problem of curved floors. There are 3 solutions to this. 1) fill the room with enough dirt/concrete/whatever so that you make a flat floor. But this severely reduces you headroom, which is already at a premium. 2) Cut open the tubes and only use the top half + some square walls. But here you loose all of the advantages of prefab that you mentioned. 3) live with curved floors. While you might be able to live comfortably, the only place with enough headroom will be in the middle of the room. As well, anyone who has ever had to pick out furniture for a curved wall can tell you what a pain it is; furnature for a curved floor would be a nightmare, it would all have to be custom and wouldn't be easily relocatable within the room.
One other thing, do you have an entrance/exit othe than the garage?
GigsVT, I checked your site out of curiosity. I hope you realize what you are doing, you should at least have a disclaimer or something up because otherwise you could be seriously liable.
I believe the issue is best illustrated by a story of my dad's: When he was at university a guy stole one of those "Radiation Hazard" signs from the physics department and attached it to his scooter. This was all fine until he got in a traffic accident ~1 month later. He was pretty severly injured, but when an ambulance arrived on the scene they refused to go near him until a hazmat team came in to confirm that there was no radiation. The guy lived to tell the tale, but had his injuries been more serious the hour that it took the hazmat team to arrive could have cost him his life.
I know most of your stuff is spoofs, but you should make sure it says that somewhere...
You have to emulate the signals becuase if you just had 1 radio, it wouldn't make much of a difference. The trick is to get your own transmitter and transmit those signals at much higher power, thus tricking the billboards into believing that there's hundreds of radios all listening to the same station...
Methinks that there could be good times had by people with a clue about radios.
Don't you think it would be amusing (for a while) to go out with your own transmitter and transmit false LO and IF signals, causing the billboards to think that there was suddenly an enourmous surge of traffic listening to country music? It shouldn't be too difficult to figure out the appropriate LO and IF frequencies to emulate someone listening to a local station, and it would be interesting to see how the advertising companies target markets according to their music tastes. For example, what do they think that people who listen to the opera will buy?
As well, I would be interested to see how the billboard company would respond to this (not to mention I would like to see all of their data infused with "anomalies"). I'm guessing they would try to sue your ass off by claiming that you were "stealing real customers" from them, but how well would that hold up in court?
Actually a friend of mine has a dog that is 1/4 wolf, and I can say that it is one of my favourite dogs in the world. It is not dangerous or really wild, and it is incredibly intelligent. It can pick up tricks or patterns much quicker than any of the other 3 dogs in the house. If I was going to get a dog, I would definitely want a part-wolf.
Well, that should make this a new record then, and by an enormous margin as they supposedly discovered "a silky, white web stretching 60 hectares across a field."*
It's a radio show that's covering this story, so why the hell would they want pictures? The website you are looking at is the web-presence of the radio show, and isn't supposed to be anything more.
As another poster mentioned, the reason they didn't give you the species of the spider is because it hasn't been determined yet.
And, IMHO, the CBC is a damn good news reporting agency.
Well, AFAIK, there aren't limits on the caffeine in beverages, but we do ban drinks like redbull (which happens to have a lot of caffeine in it) that can kill people. Things like redbull can usually be found on a black market-esque system.
This is why you just create a clever hack that sits in your house reporting your position falsely while you drive around. Shouldn't be too hard to do since they don't mention any encryption on the data stream or anything.
Right there you've hit the nail on the head. My reasons are very simple:
1) Learning curve: it's just too damn steep, and the documentation sucks. While the online support from the community is decent, it's not very helpful if you can't even get on the 'net or figure out how to work the IRC client.
2) Other people: They don't use linux and they don't want to. They also don't have the time for the learning curve.
3) Maintenance Time: Let's face it; running linux means you have to spend a certain (large) amount of time with your computer on a regular basis to ensure that everything stays updated, and to install anything new or cool.
Those are the 3 top reasons that are keeping me from linux, and i'm sure they apply to many other people. No, its not games because I don't play tooo many of them and I do have 2 regular-use boxes, one of which definately has to stay windows for the family.
You are right on most of your points, but you are dead wrong when you say "there is almost no petroleum-based utility electric in the U.S." The VAST majority of North America's power is produced from fossil fueled power plants. North America has been much slower than Europe to adopt nuclear power, mostly due to the green lobby. So instead we just keep pumping pollutants into the atmosphere. Makes a lot of sense to me...
I'd look up some numbers for you but i'm tired and going to bed.
Re:Step in the right direction, but...
on
Solar Power Play
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The key to bring photovoltaic cells into practical use is how you phase them in. Obviously, noone is going to fund a 756-acre power plant, but If you provide incentives for homeowners to build PV systems into their roofs, then the technology can slowly phase in.
This approach would work well in sunny climes like California, but the key is allowing the PV cells to plug directly into the grid. i.e: when the PV cells are producing more power than the home needs, they put power into the grid, when the home needs more power than the PV cells can provide, it sucks some off of the grid. The utility could then meter all of this and give people discounts on their electricity bill based on how much they contributed into the grid. With cheap PV cells this could become a reality, and there is an enourmous amount of area on rooftops in cities. Though the power provided by such a system would not really add up to much in the winter, it could make a BIG dent in power consumption in the winter.
"To counter the moves of other countries and to assert its sovereignty, Canada has taken a number of steps. First, it has invested large amounts of money in the people of the area. The Inuit people of the region are provided with full health insurance and welfare (as are all Canadians), and recently efforts have been made to maintain as much of the traditional culture and economy as possible. Recently, the Inuit were even granted their own territory, Nunavut, where they comprise the majority of the population and Inuktitut (the tongue of the Inuit) is an official language. Recently, youth unemployment and lack of housing (because of the high birth rate and rapidly rising population) have both become a cause for concern."
Puhleez! As the damn article said itself, us canucks provide free health care to everyone in our country, so that point is completely moot. And our recent efforts to "maintain as much of the traditional culture and economy as possible" are what we do everywhere in Canada. Our government invests huge amounts of money in protecting the traditions and heritages of our native peoples, not to mention those of everyone in Canada. And finally, the reason we created Nunavut is because now there is (barely) enough people to justify making a territory there! Granted most of these people are native, so I suppose it could be seen as a victory for first nations, but really it's just common sense.
Finally, the concerns about youth unemployment and lack of housing that you cite are almost universally applicable in Canada's indian reserves. So really all of these points are some idiot's poor attempt to BS his way into sounding legit. If had left out this paragraph, his article actually would have been decent because he does have a good grasp of the technical aspects. But the above shows an appalling lack of knowledge regarding the situation in Canada's north.
I've never been in an airplane that's been hit while it's on the tarmac, but a couple years ago the airplane I was riding in was was hit by lightning in-air. It was a jumbo jet of some sort, cant recall accurately, probably a 747 or something. There was just a REALLY loud bang, a bright flash, and all the cabin lights flickered for a bit. Then the pilot came on the PA and announced that we had been hit by lightning. He also said that the plane was built to take this and that diagnostics showed the plane was still in perfect working order and there was no reason to be afraid. All in all, it was a pretty cool experience.
We couldn't get energy from the magnetic field without either moving the wire through it or moving the magnietic field relative to the wire (or mesh, same dif). Neither are really feasable, but then, our magnetic field is supposed to be flipping now! so maybe we could build a once-off enormous electric generator for the duration of this flip?
Re:Your Tinfoil Hat Will Protect You.--paper hats.
on
Sensors Gone Wild
·
· Score: 1
actually, a bit of interesting history there... The first chaff was actually christmas tinsel wrapped around a bail of hay
But would you really want to inconvenience all of those high-powered rich snobs by making them wait in lines while you tear up their favourite road to make it better? They'll just get pissed about having to go around the construction and about the slowdown it causes. Then the next day they'll be back to complaining about all of the potholes.
Is it just me or does the whole concept of tracking people's eye movements in order to generate 3D images fundamentally wrong? My first reaction every time that I hear this is "isn't there lag in between when a user moves his eye and the computer adjusts?" I can understand eye tracking for some purposes, but not really for display.
My main concern in this though is that two people cannot see in 3D off of the same screen at the same time. Personally, I don't think that 3D imaging technology will move much beyond it's current "look i'm shiny, new, but not really practical" until we begin to see actual 3D constructions in space. Either that or transparent cubes that can have 3D images rendered inside them.
"Also, non/slow moving lasers will be the perfect target for counter-weapons to lock onto if they`re active for a few seconds at a time - usually you`d just get a flash as the weapon was fired - now you`ll have `I am here!` flashing lights (& heat)."
Well, not really. You see, it's incredibly hard to tell where a laser is coming from because it is such a focused beam. (unless it's in the middle of the desert and there's a really obvious laser-station shooting at you). Though there might be a little heat (likely not so much that they can't baffle it down to the heat signature of an internal combustion engine), there most certainly won't be big flashing lights saying "shoot me." All that there will be is a small hole developing in your tank's armour. Then, before you realize it, the laser will have penetrated to the magaizine: boom!
AFAIK, the only effective way to do that would be to put mirrors on your car, and it's not like that wouldn't be extremely unnoticable (but not neccesarily illegal). Point is though, laser range-finders are next to impossible to either detect (until it's too late) or jam.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, You've touched on why the navy still uses spotlights to communicate to this day. You know those movies where you have some seamen flipping the shades on a spotlight to send morse code to another ship? That's what I'm talking about. Unless you are along the line of sight which the light beam is travelling, it's virtually impossible to intercept the signal.
oops, now I see the foyer, disregard that last question please.
I have to say, it does sound somewhat cool (if slightly OTT) to have someone build a habitable hobbit hole. Yet when I looked at your floor plans, I gave up on it.
Your fantastic elliptical tubing is still leaves you with the problem of curved floors. There are 3 solutions to this. 1) fill the room with enough dirt/concrete/whatever so that you make a flat floor. But this severely reduces you headroom, which is already at a premium. 2) Cut open the tubes and only use the top half + some square walls. But here you loose all of the advantages of prefab that you mentioned. 3) live with curved floors. While you might be able to live comfortably, the only place with enough headroom will be in the middle of the room. As well, anyone who has ever had to pick out furniture for a curved wall can tell you what a pain it is; furnature for a curved floor would be a nightmare, it would all have to be custom and wouldn't be easily relocatable within the room.
One other thing, do you have an entrance/exit othe than the garage?
GigsVT, I checked your site out of curiosity. I hope you realize what you are doing, you should at least have a disclaimer or something up because otherwise you could be seriously liable.
I believe the issue is best illustrated by a story of my dad's: When he was at university a guy stole one of those "Radiation Hazard" signs from the physics department and attached it to his scooter. This was all fine until he got in a traffic accident ~1 month later. He was pretty severly injured, but when an ambulance arrived on the scene they refused to go near him until a hazmat team came in to confirm that there was no radiation. The guy lived to tell the tale, but had his injuries been more serious the hour that it took the hazmat team to arrive could have cost him his life.
I know most of your stuff is spoofs, but you should make sure it says that somewhere...
You have to emulate the signals becuase if you just had 1 radio, it wouldn't make much of a difference. The trick is to get your own transmitter and transmit those signals at much higher power, thus tricking the billboards into believing that there's hundreds of radios all listening to the same station...
Methinks that there could be good times had by people with a clue about radios.
Don't you think it would be amusing (for a while) to go out with your own transmitter and transmit false LO and IF signals, causing the billboards to think that there was suddenly an enourmous surge of traffic listening to country music? It shouldn't be too difficult to figure out the appropriate LO and IF frequencies to emulate someone listening to a local station, and it would be interesting to see how the advertising companies target markets according to their music tastes. For example, what do they think that people who listen to the opera will buy?
As well, I would be interested to see how the billboard company would respond to this (not to mention I would like to see all of their data infused with "anomalies"). I'm guessing they would try to sue your ass off by claiming that you were "stealing real customers" from them, but how well would that hold up in court?
Actually a friend of mine has a dog that is 1/4 wolf, and I can say that it is one of my favourite dogs in the world. It is not dangerous or really wild, and it is incredibly intelligent. It can pick up tricks or patterns much quicker than any of the other 3 dogs in the house. If I was going to get a dog, I would definitely want a part-wolf.
Well, that should make this a new record then, and by an enormous margin as they supposedly discovered "a silky, white web stretching 60 hectares across a field."*
*emphasis added
It's a radio show that's covering this story, so why the hell would they want pictures? The website you are looking at is the web-presence of the radio show, and isn't supposed to be anything more.
As another poster mentioned, the reason they didn't give you the species of the spider is because it hasn't been determined yet.
And, IMHO, the CBC is a damn good news reporting agency.
Well, AFAIK, there aren't limits on the caffeine in beverages, but we do ban drinks like redbull (which happens to have a lot of caffeine in it) that can kill people. Things like redbull can usually be found on a black market-esque system.
no actually it won't...
around -70 deg. C CO2 sublimes from "dry ice" into a gas...
for some reason it works differently in a pressure cylinder
This is why you just create a clever hack that sits in your house reporting your position falsely while you drive around. Shouldn't be too hard to do since they don't mention any encryption on the data stream or anything.
Right there you've hit the nail on the head. My reasons are very simple:
1) Learning curve: it's just too damn steep, and the documentation sucks. While the online support from the community is decent, it's not very helpful if you can't even get on the 'net or figure out how to work the IRC client.
2) Other people: They don't use linux and they don't want to. They also don't have the time for the learning curve.
3) Maintenance Time: Let's face it; running linux means you have to spend a certain (large) amount of time with your computer on a regular basis to ensure that everything stays updated, and to install anything new or cool.
Those are the 3 top reasons that are keeping me from linux, and i'm sure they apply to many other people. No, its not games because I don't play tooo many of them and I do have 2 regular-use boxes, one of which definately has to stay windows for the family.
"this is just another example of how the human brain is hot-wired to see faces in everything - even a colon"
If you take this out of context, as I did when I first read that, it sounds really wrong. Be on the lookout for goatse.cx replies...
You are right on most of your points, but you are dead wrong when you say "there is almost no petroleum-based utility electric in the U.S." The VAST majority of North America's power is produced from fossil fueled power plants. North America has been much slower than Europe to adopt nuclear power, mostly due to the green lobby. So instead we just keep pumping pollutants into the atmosphere. Makes a lot of sense to me...
I'd look up some numbers for you but i'm tired and going to bed.
The key to bring photovoltaic cells into practical use is how you phase them in. Obviously, noone is going to fund a 756-acre power plant, but If you provide incentives for homeowners to build PV systems into their roofs, then the technology can slowly phase in.
This approach would work well in sunny climes like California, but the key is allowing the PV cells to plug directly into the grid. i.e: when the PV cells are producing more power than the home needs, they put power into the grid, when the home needs more power than the PV cells can provide, it sucks some off of the grid. The utility could then meter all of this and give people discounts on their electricity bill based on how much they contributed into the grid. With cheap PV cells this could become a reality, and there is an enourmous amount of area on rooftops in cities. Though the power provided by such a system would not really add up to much in the winter, it could make a BIG dent in power consumption in the winter.
"(If this guy was any good, we'll find out that this British suspect was just a patsy)"
No actually, if this guy is any good we won't find out that this Brit is just a facade...
"To counter the moves of other countries and to assert its sovereignty, Canada has taken a number of steps. First, it has invested large amounts of money in the people of the area. The Inuit people of the region are provided with full health insurance and welfare (as are all Canadians), and recently efforts have been made to maintain as much of the traditional culture and economy as possible. Recently, the Inuit were even granted their own territory, Nunavut, where they comprise the majority of the population and Inuktitut (the tongue of the Inuit) is an official language. Recently, youth unemployment and lack of housing (because of the high birth rate and rapidly rising population) have both become a cause for concern."
Puhleez! As the damn article said itself, us canucks provide free health care to everyone in our country, so that point is completely moot. And our recent efforts to "maintain as much of the traditional culture and economy as possible" are what we do everywhere in Canada. Our government invests huge amounts of money in protecting the traditions and heritages of our native peoples, not to mention those of everyone in Canada. And finally, the reason we created Nunavut is because now there is (barely) enough people to justify making a territory there! Granted most of these people are native, so I suppose it could be seen as a victory for first nations, but really it's just common sense.
Finally, the concerns about youth unemployment and lack of housing that you cite are almost universally applicable in Canada's indian reserves. So really all of these points are some idiot's poor attempt to BS his way into sounding legit. If had left out this paragraph, his article actually would have been decent because he does have a good grasp of the technical aspects. But the above shows an appalling lack of knowledge regarding the situation in Canada's north.
I've never been in an airplane that's been hit while it's on the tarmac, but a couple years ago the airplane I was riding in was was hit by lightning in-air. It was a jumbo jet of some sort, cant recall accurately, probably a 747 or something. There was just a REALLY loud bang, a bright flash, and all the cabin lights flickered for a bit. Then the pilot came on the PA and announced that we had been hit by lightning. He also said that the plane was built to take this and that diagnostics showed the plane was still in perfect working order and there was no reason to be afraid. All in all, it was a pretty cool experience.
We couldn't get energy from the magnetic field without either moving the wire through it or moving the magnietic field relative to the wire (or mesh, same dif). Neither are really feasable, but then, our magnetic field is supposed to be flipping now! so maybe we could build a once-off enormous electric generator for the duration of this flip?
actually, a bit of interesting history there...
The first chaff was actually christmas tinsel wrapped around a bail of hay
Ahhh...
But would you really want to inconvenience all of those high-powered rich snobs by making them wait in lines while you tear up their favourite road to make it better? They'll just get pissed about having to go around the construction and about the slowdown it causes. Then the next day they'll be back to complaining about all of the potholes.
Is it just me or does the whole concept of tracking people's eye movements in order to generate 3D images fundamentally wrong? My first reaction every time that I hear this is "isn't there lag in between when a user moves his eye and the computer adjusts?" I can understand eye tracking for some purposes, but not really for display.
My main concern in this though is that two people cannot see in 3D off of the same screen at the same time. Personally, I don't think that 3D imaging technology will move much beyond it's current "look i'm shiny, new, but not really practical" until we begin to see actual 3D constructions in space. Either that or transparent cubes that can have 3D images rendered inside them.
"Also, non/slow moving lasers will be the perfect target for counter-weapons to lock onto if they`re active for a few seconds at a time - usually you`d just get a flash as the weapon was fired - now you`ll have `I am here!` flashing lights (& heat)."
Well, not really. You see, it's incredibly hard to tell where a laser is coming from because it is such a focused beam. (unless it's in the middle of the desert and there's a really obvious laser-station shooting at you). Though there might be a little heat (likely not so much that they can't baffle it down to the heat signature of an internal combustion engine), there most certainly won't be big flashing lights saying "shoot me." All that there will be is a small hole developing in your tank's armour. Then, before you realize it, the laser will have penetrated to the magaizine: boom!
exactly how do you plan to jam a laser?
AFAIK, the only effective way to do that would be to put mirrors on your car, and it's not like that wouldn't be extremely unnoticable (but not neccesarily illegal). Point is though, laser range-finders are next to impossible to either detect (until it's too late) or jam.