Well, my SD card came with software to find back data that was 'lost'. In essence, I think it allows me to scan the 'raw' chips and look for 'recognizable blocks'. When I come to think of it, I guess there won't be that much difference. When you delete a file (on purpose, by accident or due to some malware), it's actually just the file-entry that gets overwritten, the actual contents scattered over the disk / chips remains as is. Unless you're filesystem incorporates some kind of 'secure erasing', you should have just as much luck finding back stuff on HDD & SDD IMHO.
Modifying router firmware to allow for all kinds of mal-ware has been featured on/. many times before... Destroying said hardware seems to be a first...
Funny how you complain about how bad others do your dirty work while you apparently save enough money because of it to watch your favorite shows on expensive hardware.
It doesn't take a genius to realize that heating by means of electricity is a waste-full method.
AFAIK, very few people use electricity for heating here... Sure there's the odd electric boiler sitting directly under the sink because of some 'afterthought' situation where a 'multi-purpose' building suddenly gets a kitchenette installed. But in the residential houses, most of the time you'll find a central heating system based on gas or oil IMHO. I'm surprised to hear there are that much appliances in use for heating water electrically.
Sure, and then you have a car-accident, spend 3 days in a coma, agonize the next 3 days about what to do next and eventually will need to choose whether to a) loose all the data b) let someone in on the secret and the 'activation' password. A week seems like a short amount of time in this case, then again, a month might be long enough to tip an 'investigative person' off.
From a 'problem needs solution' point of view I like your plan (*), but I would change the 'self-destruct & power-off' into a mighty 'self-encrypt & lay low' process, using a self-destroying key that you have stored somewhere so unlikely that no-one else would come up with the idea to use it for that purpose... The first sentence of any given book might be a good idea, all words reversed and 133t capitalized for added bonus =) When you resurrect after a long time of absence you then still can get back to the data, although it might be inconvenient to get it back into it's "active" state. Like someone mentioned, maybe they'll find a way to decrypt the thing in 20 years, but in all likelihood nobody will care enough to spend the money and effort on it by then (**). Frankly, I'd be A LOT more concerned about losing the data when I'm "unavailable" for a while, than about making really, REALLY sure that everything is 100% gone when I die.
*: if I'm dead, I'm dead and won't be able to care. My personal view on that topic aside, I have virtually nothing on my disks / accounts that would be 'life-destroying' if it fell into "the wrong hands", no (networked) computer is safe anyway. **: well, in my case I'd be very surprised if it wouldn't be like that; that said I most certainly don't want to look down on you or anyone else so please don't feel offended if you think otherwise.
Given the 'randomness' of these things, it might be that the results aren't very re-usable, hence it becomes almost required to keep paying some "sweatshop" to figure them out over and over again. It might not seem expensive at couple a cents per 'unit', but it surely will add up to much more than finding a clever way to brute-force your way through the tests using thousands of stolen zombie-computers.
Anyway, I find it a comforting feeling to know that all the spam I receive is helping out the poor in China; makes me all warm inside.
LOL, how much cans do you consume that you're unable to transport a weeks-worth of them in a car ? I think the average family takes at least a month to mass up a bin-bag full of the stuff. Heck, even a two-seater has *some* amount of storage. Simply put a plastic sheet on the passenger sheet and place the "can-bag" on top of that. Come to think of it, if you paint a smiley on the bag you might even try using the carpool-lanes =P
All joking aside, recycling EVERYTHING indeed can be cumbersome, but recycling the easy things (glass, alu & tin-cans, paper, etc...) isn't hard at all and it sure makes a dent in your overall "waste-budget". The only thing it requires is a small effort to actually do it, so stop finding excuses and do your bit.
(And FYI : yes, I plan on bringing any broken CFLs to the recycle station, and yes I'm pretty sure most of the people I know will too... (well, those aged below 60 in each case, which demographic group do you want to belong to ? =))
I simply set up my cheapo-VDSL-Wifi-Router to forward both incoming ports (one for TCP, other for UDP) to the IP address I got assigned by DHCP, start eMule, connect to an ed2k server, have it find some sources by doing a search and then connect to KAD (bootstrap from known clients)... It sometimes takes a couple of minutes to get 'up to speed', but once it's off, extra sources start rolling in... additionally, you can now also do searches directly on KAD (one at a time though, and although they're slower, they're much, much more "thorough"). Connecting to KAD without using the eD2k network first seems to rely on some cached list that gets outdated quickly (disclaimer : guessing here, have no clue on how it really works!!), so I tend to connect to some server first. Anyway, the point is : if your NAT gives you trouble using KAD, it's either config or your NAT that's acting up, KAD works fine !
I'm surprised to find eMule that low, it's not like I do a lot with it, using it as a "try before you buy" tool, but I find it having one of the easiest to use interfaces (although they really should rip out that 'chat' thing). IMHO it also has a more-or-less honest queuing system (to hell with the 133t forks) and is super for finding old & exotic media ! (you'll find new stuff too off course, but too often these appear to be porn-in-disguise =(
Having done years of "travel", I can tell you that it's not half as fun as it sounds.
Yes, there's some good parts about it like making more money and seeing other places... but in retrospect, whenever someone asks me what's to see in eg. Milan (Italy) where I spent about half a year, all I can give them is a list of some really great restaurants, tips about taxi's and the airports and some too-expensive-for-non-business-needs hotels. Apart from that I've seen the outside of most interesting buildings in the city, but never had the time to visit them during opening hours as I was at work right then. Additionally, your social life comes to a grinding halt too as you usually arrive back home really late on Friday, try to make the most of Saturday to do chores and errants and get together with friends or family. On Sunday I usually tried to have a 'lazy day' (go to the library, cycle around, etc etc...), catch up with what I hadn't managed to do the day before and by the evening make sure to get at the airport again in time... Weekends quickly became too short & cramped, while weeks were slow and lonely.
Fun for a while, extremely boring (and even frustrating) in the long run...
Oh yeah, and I hope you like reading too, because you'll likely be doing a lot of it while waiting for planes, trains, people,...
On the other hand, ray-tracing would be much less of a hack. Things simply look great the way they are, not because you niftily put a semi-transparent super-texturized with shader magic polygon in that corner of the field of view whenever the light source is like that and the so-called mirror is on that position etc...
Sure it requires (a lot) more cpu-power, but development wise it should all be much more straight-forward. Build the scene and have it rendered.
Right now I'm under the impression that each time you want wow-factor, things are like : build scene, render scene, look for awkward stuff caused by incomplete technology, add tweaks to scene, render again... Repeat process until it all looks good from all corners. If not feasible within given time frame : either prevent user from walking out of the prepared spaces, drop idea altogether or leave it in half-baked and blame it on the drivers.
The hardest part to me seems to be getting a cable/ribbon and initial counterweight up that would be able to keep up the equilibrium plus some little extra. Once this has been established,/simply/ have smallish (but ever increasing) weights running up the tether until there is sufficient counter-weight to allow for hauling a stronger cable/ribbon up. Once that one is in place, repeat the process until after (quite) a while you have a system in place consisting of a bunch of cables with a large mass at the end. I guess you'd use the strongest cable only and keep the others in place as 'backup'.
A bit similar to getting a towing cable to a ship : first you shoot a thin & light cable fromg ship to ship, then use it to haul over a stronger rope, and one more and one more etc until in the end you can safely get the heavy towing cable across.
Getting the first part up seems to be the most difficult part, although I guess that if one of the initial robots fails before passing the half-way mark you're screwed too... then again, they'll probably simply need some kind of 'self-destruct' mechanism as to make sure any stuck robot can be "disconnected" and left to the powers of gravity...
Funny, I "grew up" on MSSQL (6.5 and up), and although I'll admit that 2005 and 2008 are starting to look more like a development platform rather than a RDBMS, my experience with Sybase (ASA) has been more or less identical to yours towards MSSQL.
I guess it all comes down to what you're used to. IMHO both are adequate at what they do, it's just that none of us likes to change / turn-away of what he knows best.
PS: a "few" years ago (around 2002 I think) we spent several months working with some (very smart) guys from Sybase and as far as I remember, most of the "porting" was linked to working around the limitations of Sybase (4k vs 8k pages, some stuff simply not being possible, no job-agent, no DTS,... and that was mssql7 which was still very close to it's Sybase roots), in the end management got anxious about the entire port getting to expensive and ditched the project, it was an interesting experience none the less. Haven't looked into ASA since, so probably my 'vision' is way backdated now. When I come to think of it, a major lack of GUI didn't help either, I sincerely hope that 'gap' has been closed now...
Nope, that's not what I'm saying at all. It seems to me that you are so focused on "thinking for yourself" that you completely lost ability to think about anyone else and/or the effects of your actions.
If you want to 'think for yourself', fine by me, in fact I applaud it; but for crying out loud : learn to put things into context. Being unreachable while flying is that much of an inconvenience ?? What's next ? Driving through red lights because, hey, you're not going to loose any of your oh-so-precious time on this 'law' imposed on you, are you ? "No sir! I'm not a sheep, I'll cross the road when *I* decide to !"
The "I was following orders"-alarm is so not relevant here. I'm not saying to never question anything, sure you can disagree with whatever you want but as far as fighting the system goes, one should weigh the consequences of ones actions. Obeying often doesn't harm anyone and potentially improves the quality of life for all of us, that's not being a sheep, that's being part of society. If ever in a situation where you come to realize that what you're being told/asked/forced to do something that would qualify as 'bad' in the more general context of the word, then yes please object and revolt. But when being asked to turn off an electronic device during take-off or landing you should indeed simply obey and make the world an easier place for all of us. If you cant cope with that and prefer to be selfish prick, feel free but please not in my time, nor in my neighborhood.
Trying to revolt to.. well "anything" simply because you believe you have the right to do so, doesn't make you a 'wolf', in fact, it makes you an idiot. The kind that makes so much noise that it doesn't take long before they get ignored completely. Maybe you'll be right on something one day, but trust me, by then people really won't be bothered anymore.
It does not nullify the threat, it simply makes it less obvious. These guys see thousands of computers going through there x-ray machine every day, and regardless of the make or model, they all look more or less alike. And then suddenly one comes by that not only misses some 'key components' both visually (ports) as though the x-ray machine (HDD). Heck, the thing doesn't even have a VGA output (yes, it has that mini-DVI thing), but the issue here is not "what are the tech specs of the Mac Book Air ?", the issue is "Why does this so-called computer look so different ?"
What most people here seem to miss is that these guys are not looking for computers, they are looking (amongst other things) for "stuff disguised as computers".
Man I am disappointed in the moderation going on here, common sense obviously has left the building =(
PS: As for the parallel port, maybe I should have said "serial" port and yes, my Latitude D830 has one and no, I haven't found a use for it (yet).
In fact, that's quite a silly remark to make. Troll whatever you want, I am NOT saying to not question things, I'm saying to err on the safe side. Realizing I'm only an amateur on the field, I don't know for sure what the influence of cellular phones on avionics is. Sure, I can imagine there is some, although at the same time I have a hard time believing that it would be enough to cause them to go haywire. That said, over 100 phones all broadcasting at max strength inside an aluminum tube does not seem like a good idea at all.
Since I find myself at a point where I would not KNOW (I use 'know', not 'guess') if the 'rule' is stupid or not, I prefer to stick to it, especially if my life potentially depends on it. Given the fact that the guy was reading (and phoning about) pharmaceutical sales documents, I'm somehow not convinced either that he had the know-how required but rather was trying to rake his bonus in. Anyway, even when I would know that a rule is stupid, I would still have the decency to oblige if only to keep some order. People getting my voice-mail instead of me for the next 80 minutes somehow did not strike me as life-threatening, nor as a trip to the slaughterhouse...
Funny, so you're telling us that you've never had a situation where something baffles you and you call in the help of some colleagues ? In my world, more people tend to know/spot/realize/understand/... more things, and even though none of them might know what a Mac Book Air is, they weren't trying to figure out whether it was one in the first place. They were trying to figure out if the thing was a threat (bomb, jamming device, idunnoknowwhat) and for THAT they all got some training and for that reason alone it was a good idea to have more people around trying to spot any caveats in the 'potential terrorist' his story / mock-up / explanations /... They still might have failed coming to the right conclusion, but they did try to improve the odds of finding out what this thing really was, in my humble opinion that is "doing their job" and makes me think more of them than those guys that rather simply seem to "be" there waiting for their shift to end.
And, as you've obviously not read the article, here's a quote that displays that having more people around actually 'solved the mystery'
"...Nygard was made to wait until a younger agent came over to the gathering to inform his comrades of their error,...
Well, it has electronics and a battery (= power source), hence it could just as well be something to jam the avionics and bring the plane down. If you've never seen a MacBook Air before, it might indeed look like a bad mock-up of a portable computer. Sure there's a screen, and a keyboard, but the ATTENTIVE guard actually was bright enough to notice that there is no hard-disk !? nor a DVD drive !? nor a parallel port !? Sure it's annoying for the guy that he missed his flight, but I always wonder why people need to complain over and over about some 'side-effects' that are there for their own safety. It's like that guy sitting in front of me in the plane once that refused to kill his phone when taking off. Had to ask him 3 times before he finally did, probably because he understood that my next move would be calling the steward (ess)s. I also very much doubt that a cell phone will bring down the plane, but if some -supposedly more in the know than me- official deemed it necessary to forbid cell-phones on a plane, then why is it so hard for some people to oblige to that ?
5. Use closed containers for both a (wide) base and the moving parts. Let the customer fill these with water once he has unpacked and placed the lamp. (**) => Should save a lot on transportation mass, if no water available use sand.
** : Safety warning : fill base first, THEN fill moving part. (and for the 'help-I-live-in-a-suing-happy-country' among us it should come with a giant yellow sticker saying : "WARNING: when using hot water, the water may be hot !")
Given the efficiency of PV cells, I think there should be simpler (read: thermodynamical) ways of getting that concrete cube up...
I'm thinking of some kind of ratchet system where the sun heats something with a large coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE). Once it reaches it's maximum position and 'clicks into the next position, part of the heat is moved to another part and this part gets to cool while the other part now heats up until... etc... rinse & repeat. Given sufficient gearing etc this should be well more capable at lifting a weight than using (costly) PV cells IMHO... maybe you'll need a small PV cell to power the controllers =P
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Well, my SD card came with software to find back data that was 'lost'. In essence, I think it allows me to scan the 'raw' chips and look for 'recognizable blocks'. When I come to think of it, I guess there won't be that much difference. When you delete a file (on purpose, by accident or due to some malware), it's actually just the file-entry that gets overwritten, the actual contents scattered over the disk / chips remains as is. Unless you're filesystem incorporates some kind of 'secure erasing', you should have just as much luck finding back stuff on HDD & SDD IMHO.
Didn't Arther C Clarke write a book about that ?
(out for some wiki-searching...)
et voila : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deep_Range
I highly enjoyed reading that one, I'm surprised to learn it's that old.
agreed, but that's not what the headline implies.
/. many times before ... ...
Modifying router firmware to allow for all kinds of mal-ware has been featured on
Destroying said hardware seems to be a first
(off course I did not read the article...)
Why would a trojan want to lock itself inside a LAN in the first place...
"Hey look, I infested this machine, let's make sure I can get not to another one !"
Funny how you complain about how bad others do your dirty work while you apparently save enough money because of it to watch your favorite shows on expensive hardware.
It doesn't take a genius to realize that heating by means of electricity is a waste-full method.
AFAIK, very few people use electricity for heating here... Sure there's the odd electric boiler sitting directly under the sink because of some 'afterthought' situation where a 'multi-purpose' building suddenly gets a kitchenette installed. But in the residential houses, most of the time you'll find a central heating system based on gas or oil IMHO. I'm surprised to hear there are that much appliances in use for heating water electrically.
Sure, and then you have a car-accident, spend 3 days in a coma, agonize the next 3 days about what to do next and eventually will need to choose whether to a) loose all the data b) let someone in on the secret and the 'activation' password.
A week seems like a short amount of time in this case, then again, a month might be long enough to tip an 'investigative person' off.
From a 'problem needs solution' point of view I like your plan (*), but I would change the 'self-destruct & power-off' into a mighty 'self-encrypt & lay low' process, using a self-destroying key that you have stored somewhere so unlikely that no-one else would come up with the idea to use it for that purpose... The first sentence of any given book might be a good idea, all words reversed and 133t capitalized for added bonus =)
When you resurrect after a long time of absence you then still can get back to the data, although it might be inconvenient to get it back into it's "active" state. Like someone mentioned, maybe they'll find a way to decrypt the thing in 20 years, but in all likelihood nobody will care enough to spend the money and effort on it by then (**).
Frankly, I'd be A LOT more concerned about losing the data when I'm "unavailable" for a while, than about making really, REALLY sure that everything is 100% gone when I die.
*: if I'm dead, I'm dead and won't be able to care. My personal view on that topic aside, I have virtually nothing on my disks / accounts that would be 'life-destroying' if it fell into "the wrong hands", no (networked) computer is safe anyway.
**: well, in my case I'd be very surprised if it wouldn't be like that; that said I most certainly don't want to look down on you or anyone else so please don't feel offended if you think otherwise.
Given the 'randomness' of these things, it might be that the results aren't very re-usable, hence it becomes almost required to keep paying some "sweatshop" to figure them out over and over again. It might not seem expensive at couple a cents per 'unit', but it surely will add up to much more than finding a clever way to brute-force your way through the tests using thousands of stolen zombie-computers.
Anyway, I find it a comforting feeling to know that all the spam I receive is helping out the poor in China; makes me all warm inside.
LOL, how much cans do you consume that you're unable to transport a weeks-worth of them in a car ? I think the average family takes at least a month to mass up a bin-bag full of the stuff. Heck, even a two-seater has *some* amount of storage. Simply put a plastic sheet on the passenger sheet and place the "can-bag" on top of that. Come to think of it, if you paint a smiley on the bag you might even try using the carpool-lanes =P
All joking aside, recycling EVERYTHING indeed can be cumbersome, but recycling the easy things (glass, alu & tin-cans, paper, etc...) isn't hard at all and it sure makes a dent in your overall "waste-budget".
The only thing it requires is a small effort to actually do it, so stop finding excuses and do your bit.
(And FYI : yes, I plan on bringing any broken CFLs to the recycle station, and yes I'm pretty sure most of the people I know will too... (well, those aged below 60 in each case, which demographic group do you want to belong to ? =))
although the article doesn't mention it, I wouldn't be too surprised if it was an African swallow.
weird.
I simply set up my cheapo-VDSL-Wifi-Router to forward both incoming ports (one for TCP, other for UDP) to the IP address I got assigned by DHCP, start eMule, connect to an ed2k server, have it find some sources by doing a search and then connect to KAD (bootstrap from known clients)... It sometimes takes a couple of minutes to get 'up to speed', but once it's off, extra sources start rolling in... additionally, you can now also do searches directly on KAD (one at a time though, and although they're slower, they're much, much more "thorough"). Connecting to KAD without using the eD2k network first seems to rely on some cached list that gets outdated quickly (disclaimer : guessing here, have no clue on how it really works!!), so I tend to connect to some server first.
Anyway, the point is : if your NAT gives you trouble using KAD, it's either config or your NAT that's acting up, KAD works fine !
I'm surprised to find eMule that low, it's not like I do a lot with it, using it as a "try before you buy" tool, but I find it having one of the easiest to use interfaces (although they really should rip out that 'chat' thing). IMHO it also has a more-or-less honest queuing system (to hell with the 133t forks) and is super for finding old & exotic media ! (you'll find new stuff too off course, but too often these appear to be porn-in-disguise =(
Apparently a swallow snagged it away and took off towards England...
Having done years of "travel", I can tell you that it's not half as fun as it sounds.
...
Yes, there's some good parts about it like making more money and seeing other places... but in retrospect, whenever someone asks me what's to see in eg. Milan (Italy) where I spent about half a year, all I can give them is a list of some really great restaurants, tips about taxi's and the airports and some too-expensive-for-non-business-needs hotels. Apart from that I've seen the outside of most interesting buildings in the city, but never had the time to visit them during opening hours as I was at work right then.
Additionally, your social life comes to a grinding halt too as you usually arrive back home really late on Friday, try to make the most of Saturday to do chores and errants and get together with friends or family. On Sunday I usually tried to have a 'lazy day' (go to the library, cycle around, etc etc...), catch up with what I hadn't managed to do the day before and by the evening make sure to get at the airport again in time... Weekends quickly became too short & cramped, while weeks were slow and lonely.
Fun for a while, extremely boring (and even frustrating) in the long run...
Oh yeah, and I hope you like reading too, because you'll likely be doing a lot of it while waiting for planes, trains, people,
On the other hand, ray-tracing would be much less of a hack. Things simply look great the way they are, not because you niftily put a semi-transparent super-texturized with shader magic polygon in that corner of the field of view whenever the light source is like that and the so-called mirror is on that position etc...
Sure it requires (a lot) more cpu-power, but development wise it should all be much more straight-forward. Build the scene and have it rendered.
Right now I'm under the impression that each time you want wow-factor, things are like : build scene, render scene, look for awkward stuff caused by incomplete technology, add tweaks to scene, render again... Repeat process until it all looks good from all corners. If not feasible within given time frame : either prevent user from walking out of the prepared spaces, drop idea altogether or leave it in half-baked and blame it on the drivers.
Wouldn't this be a "gradual effort" ?
/simply/ have smallish (but ever increasing) weights running up the tether until there is sufficient counter-weight to allow for hauling a stronger cable/ribbon up. Once that one is in place, repeat the process until after (quite) a while you have a system in place consisting of a bunch of cables with a large mass at the end. I guess you'd use the strongest cable only and keep the others in place as 'backup'.
The hardest part to me seems to be getting a cable/ribbon and initial counterweight up that would be able to keep up the equilibrium plus some little extra. Once this has been established,
A bit similar to getting a towing cable to a ship : first you shoot a thin & light cable fromg ship to ship, then use it to haul over a stronger rope, and one more and one more etc until in the end you can safely get the heavy towing cable across.
Getting the first part up seems to be the most difficult part, although I guess that if one of the initial robots fails before passing the half-way mark you're screwed too... then again, they'll probably simply need some kind of 'self-destruct' mechanism as to make sure any stuck robot can be "disconnected" and left to the powers of gravity...
Funny, I "grew up" on MSSQL (6.5 and up), and although I'll admit that 2005 and 2008 are starting to look more like a development platform rather than a RDBMS, my experience with Sybase (ASA) has been more or less identical to yours towards MSSQL.
... and that was mssql7 which was still very close to it's Sybase roots), in the end management got anxious about the entire port getting to expensive and ditched the project, it was an interesting experience none the less. Haven't looked into ASA since, so probably my 'vision' is way backdated now. When I come to think of it, a major lack of GUI didn't help either, I sincerely hope that 'gap' has been closed now...
I guess it all comes down to what you're used to. IMHO both are adequate at what they do, it's just that none of us likes to change / turn-away of what he knows best.
PS: a "few" years ago (around 2002 I think) we spent several months working with some (very smart) guys from Sybase and as far as I remember, most of the "porting" was linked to working around the limitations of Sybase (4k vs 8k pages, some stuff simply not being possible, no job-agent, no DTS,
Nope, that's not what I'm saying at all. It seems to me that you are so focused on "thinking for yourself" that you completely lost ability to think about anyone else and/or the effects of your actions.
.. well "anything" simply because you believe you have the right to do so, doesn't make you a 'wolf', in fact, it makes you an idiot. The kind that makes so much noise that it doesn't take long before they get ignored completely. Maybe you'll be right on something one day, but trust me, by then people really won't be bothered anymore.
If you want to 'think for yourself', fine by me, in fact I applaud it; but for crying out loud : learn to put things into context. Being unreachable while flying is that much of an inconvenience ?? What's next ? Driving through red lights because, hey, you're not going to loose any of your oh-so-precious time on this 'law' imposed on you, are you ? "No sir! I'm not a sheep, I'll cross the road when *I* decide to !"
The "I was following orders"-alarm is so not relevant here. I'm not saying to never question anything, sure you can disagree with whatever you want but as far as fighting the system goes, one should weigh the consequences of ones actions. Obeying often doesn't harm anyone and potentially improves the quality of life for all of us, that's not being a sheep, that's being part of society. If ever in a situation where you come to realize that what you're being told/asked/forced to do something that would qualify as 'bad' in the more general context of the word, then yes please object and revolt. But when being asked to turn off an electronic device during take-off or landing you should indeed simply obey and make the world an easier place for all of us. If you cant cope with that and prefer to be selfish prick, feel free but please not in my time, nor in my neighborhood.
Trying to revolt to
It does not nullify the threat, it simply makes it less obvious. These guys see thousands of computers going through there x-ray machine every day, and regardless of the make or model, they all look more or less alike. And then suddenly one comes by that not only misses some 'key components' both visually (ports) as though the x-ray machine (HDD). Heck, the thing doesn't even have a VGA output (yes, it has that mini-DVI thing), but the issue here is not "what are the tech specs of the Mac Book Air ?", the issue is "Why does this so-called computer look so different ?"
What most people here seem to miss is that these guys are not looking for computers, they are looking (amongst other things) for "stuff disguised as computers".
Man I am disappointed in the moderation going on here, common sense obviously has left the building =(
PS: As for the parallel port, maybe I should have said "serial" port and yes, my Latitude D830 has one and no, I haven't found a use for it (yet).
In fact, that's quite a silly remark to make.
Troll whatever you want, I am NOT saying to not question things, I'm saying to err on the safe side.
Realizing I'm only an amateur on the field, I don't know for sure what the influence of cellular phones on avionics is. Sure, I can imagine there is some, although at the same time I have a hard time believing that it would be enough to cause them to go haywire. That said, over 100 phones all broadcasting at max strength inside an aluminum tube does not seem like a good idea at all.
Since I find myself at a point where I would not KNOW (I use 'know', not 'guess') if the 'rule' is stupid or not, I prefer to stick to it, especially if my life potentially depends on it. Given the fact that the guy was reading (and phoning about) pharmaceutical sales documents, I'm somehow not convinced either that he had the know-how required but rather was trying to rake his bonus in.
Anyway, even when I would know that a rule is stupid, I would still have the decency to oblige if only to keep some order. People getting my voice-mail instead of me for the next 80 minutes somehow did not strike me as life-threatening, nor as a trip to the slaughterhouse...
Funny, ... They still might have failed coming to the right conclusion, but they did try to improve the odds of finding out what this thing really was, in my humble opinion that is "doing their job" and makes me think more of them than those guys that rather simply seem to "be" there waiting for their shift to end.
so you're telling us that you've never had a situation where something baffles you and you call in the help of some colleagues ? In my world, more people tend to know/spot/realize/understand/... more things, and even though none of them might know what a Mac Book Air is, they weren't trying to figure out whether it was one in the first place. They were trying to figure out if the thing was a threat (bomb, jamming device, idunnoknowwhat) and for THAT they all got some training and for that reason alone it was a good idea to have more people around trying to spot any caveats in the 'potential terrorist' his story / mock-up / explanations /
And, as you've obviously not read the article, here's a quote that displays that having more people around actually 'solved the mystery'
"...Nygard was made to wait until a younger agent came over to the gathering to inform his comrades of their error,...
But brings up the TOC quite a bit, especially in cold climates as you'll need to foresee socks for all pc's then...
Well, it has electronics and a battery (= power source), hence it could just as well be something to jam the avionics and bring the plane down.
If you've never seen a MacBook Air before, it might indeed look like a bad mock-up of a portable computer. Sure there's a screen, and a keyboard, but the ATTENTIVE guard actually was bright enough to notice that there is no hard-disk !? nor a DVD drive !? nor a parallel port !?
Sure it's annoying for the guy that he missed his flight, but I always wonder why people need to complain over and over about some 'side-effects' that are there for their own safety. It's like that guy sitting in front of me in the plane once that refused to kill his phone when taking off. Had to ask him 3 times before he finally did, probably because he understood that my next move would be calling the steward (ess)s. I also very much doubt that a cell phone will bring down the plane, but if some -supposedly more in the know than me- official deemed it necessary to forbid cell-phones on a plane, then why is it so hard for some people to oblige to that ?
... "Lets just say he lost control a few miles down the road"
My new hero !!
5. Use closed containers for both a (wide) base and the moving parts. Let the customer fill these with water once he has unpacked and placed the lamp. (**)
=> Should save a lot on transportation mass, if no water available use sand.
** : Safety warning : fill base first, THEN fill moving part.
(and for the 'help-I-live-in-a-suing-happy-country' among us it should come with a giant yellow sticker saying : "WARNING: when using hot water, the water may be hot !")
Given the efficiency of PV cells, I think there should be simpler (read: thermodynamical) ways of getting that concrete cube up...
I'm thinking of some kind of ratchet system where the sun heats something with a large coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE). Once it reaches it's maximum position and 'clicks into the next position, part of the heat is moved to another part and this part gets to cool while the other part now heats up until... etc... rinse & repeat.
Given sufficient gearing etc this should be well more capable at lifting a weight than using (costly) PV cells IMHO... maybe you'll need a small PV cell to power the controllers =P
(feel free to prove me wrong =)