I think "microphobe" would be "person afraid of small". Maybe it's supposed to be "person afraid of [being] small". I think you need to listen to an old Steve Martin skit to understand what that fear might be.
No, "ditching" is not appropriate. They were designed to land in the water. In most cases, the capsule didn't sink. There is also a connotation of intentionally abandoning ship in "ditching".
You don't call it ditching when a float-plane lands on the water, do you?
Nor is "crash landed in the water" appropriate, unless the parachutes had failed to deploy.
zap is not bolts of lightning, gouts of flame!?
on
Hi-Tech Weed-Killer
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· Score: 1
When I read the part about identify the weeds "and zap them", I assumed they really meant it would zap them, either with flame, hot air, or an electric arc. How disappointing to learn that "zap" to some people means "spray with toxins".
In answer to your first question, yes, building this pulsejet stuff, or even telling someone how to build it, may become illegal in the USA. The Bush administration seems to still be determined to trash the freedoms of its citizens, in the name of "defending freedom".
In answer to your second question, I don't believe these pulsejet cruise missiles will ever become a threat to the public, at least not an extraordinary one. These pulsejets are not weapons, they are delivery systems. This guy is mostly just building the engine; the cruise missile for him is an afterthought, and he has no great expertise I think in UAV design. His designs don't go "boom", they merely arrive. (And there is some question about whether they would even do that, for long ranges or long durations.) Compare a pulsejet cruise missile with a $5000 car, crashed into the front of your house. (For a warhead, I could put a nuclear bomb in the backseat of the car as you have suggested as a warhead of choice for your weapon, or anthrax, or ricin. But gosh, those sure are rare and expensive things! Why not just fill 20 extra plastic jugs with gasoline or what-have-you and pack them inside? You will either be just as dead, or at the least extremely terrorized.) Why choose a home-built aircraft with a very noisy engine of questionable reliability, and a limited payload for your delivery system, when a reliable and unobtrusive car will do? Perhaps you are an engineer (you read slashdot); then certainly you too can think of something better than a custom-built aircraft powered by a custom-built engine? Remember, you're choosing a delivery system, not a warhead.
Do not rail at this pulsejet guy. You instead should be pissed off at whomever gave the terrorists technology, raw materials, and equipment for building biological, chemical, or nuclear warheads. That guilty party might turn out to be one part or another of the USA government, or perhaps the Chinese, or the French, or... Depends on the terrorist du jour, and the warhead they will choose. But no, it was not the pulsejet guy.
"Instead of sending future tech wealth abroad, we need to open our doors to more top foreign scientists. We're sending H-1B visa holders home with pink
slips and a basket of skills they learned from U.S. companies. We should be giving the brightest of them research fellowships working for the Department
Homeland Security."
Rather than my normal knee-jerk reaction opposing huge numbers of H1-B visas, I had different reactions to that quote from the article.
First is that many research jobs under the DHS will be closed to H1-B visa holders. They will require US citizenship, security clearances, yadayada. That is because they will be researching TERRORISM (run in circles, hide hide hide, put your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye).
Second, I predict (with no evidence at all, just wisdom) that if we match the very brightest H1-B visa holders with DHS research jobs, most of them will end up doing pointless, mind-numbing gubmint stuff, and will eventually trudge back to their native lands stultified by their "work". I predict that the DHS jobs that they would be offered will be an order of magnitude less "zoomy" and intellectually stimulating than what they would get in the average high-tech firm.
I would venture to guess that a very small % of US r&d goes towards DoD activities.
*cough* Strategic Defensive Initiative *cough*
(Perhaps you were still in diapers during the Reagan presidency, and missed that ejaculation of defense-related R&D money?)
GPS! For God's sake! When was the last time you got so lost that you needed friggin' GPS to pinpoint your location to the nearest ten feet.
Day before yesterday. And it wasn't because I got "so lost". I was dividing up some property. I drew the new lines and corners on a scale topo map for the surveyor. And then he handed me a roll of orange tape, and said "okay, go mark your new corner with this, and could you also hang some where that new line crosses the creek?" Yeah, that caught me by surprise!
So, yeah, before too much longer I was 1/4 km into the woods, in a place I'd never been before, two hours before sunset, in near-freezing weather. I got to within 10 feet of the point I'd marked on the aerial photo, and then starting looking around for the "best spot" for a property corner. The Magellan handheld worked great, even after I dropped it face down onto concrete and ice while crossing an icy ford.
As for getting lost, after I'd marked the new corner, I knew how to get back, but because I had the GPS, I next decided to just march out into many acres/hectares of forest that I'd never walked before, confident that I would be able to make a nice loop, and wouldn't have to waste viewing time backtracking to get home. Without the GPS, I wouldn't have tried that stunt, and would have missed a wonderful walk in the woods.
As for a voice recorder, that would have been useful, but most GPS handhelds don't have that. W/o a recorder, what you do instead is create a "waypoint" (ie. a landmark) in the GPS, and key in a very short description. This takes forever, and you have to take off your gloves, and fumble through the crude text entry with numb fingers. Would have been much nicer to just hold down a waypoint button and say what you want about the current location.
If you are so goddam far from civilisation that you need GPS to safe your sorry hide, where are
you gonna plug it in?
I took extra batteries. Turned out to be wise.
GPS handhelds are watt-pigs.
As for the Garmin Palm w/ GPS specifically, yes, it looks overpriced. Yes, it is a dumb design.
I think the GPS+bluetooth cookie would be a good idea. I think a GPS+firewire dongle would be fine (firewire rather than USB to get power supplied to the GPS dongle.) My claim is that whenever you buy a GPS receiver, if you are buying any sort of all-in-one solution as I did, you are making many compromises, and creating proprietary entanglements. For example, if I want to download a map into my Magellan handheld, I need to use the Magellan software, and that software only runs on Windows. Grrrr.
I see no problem with 'creating' forms of matter, accidentally or on purpose, particularly as it can be argued that, like penicillin, these forms aren't really being created but are being discovered. They might exist elsewhere in the universe, or might have existed.
Um, you really need to work on your argument.
First, penicillin isn't a new form of matter. It might be a new molecule, or one that mankind didn't know about before, but it doesn't rate the "new form of matter" moniker.
Second, just because something exists somewhere in the universe does not mean that it is thus safe or wise to have it here on earth. Black holes are fine, as long as they don't come near. Quasars are fine, as long as they aren't nearby and shining at us. Supernovas? Wonderful, but please keep them many light years away.
Maybe tetraneutron is something that is commonly made when cosmic rays hit our atmosphere, and maybe not. You should be at least a little startled by it, and that it was made _accidentally_.
Of course, a jillion years ago, before there was life, the atmosphere didn't have all this nasty oxygen. And thus, the ocean didn't have all this nasty oxygen. And thus, there is no reason that life needed to be snuggled right up next to a hydrothermal vent to get all sorts of wacky chemicals to tear down for energy. The ocean was probably a soup of them.
Now, maybe the chemicals mostly _came_ from vents, but do we need to look so closely to them for primordial habitats? Wasn't there some other theory that touted certain kinds of clay as a good substrate for interesting molecular reactions?
The US is actually very interested in fuel economy: Corporate Average Fuel Economy [doc.gov] is very much responsible for pushing manufacturers to increase fuel economy.
If this were true, then the average fuel economy of US "cars" would be increasing. It's not. Ergo, what you say is not true. CAFE does not push manufacturers to increase fuel economy. Instead, manufacturers push the US Congress to not alter the CAFE target values, and to not include SUVs when calculating the CAFE values.
Perhaps you recall a recent political discussion, in which US legislators (probably Republican members of the House) were saying that "soccer moms shouldn't have to drive anything smaller or more efficient than their Ford Behemoths, lest their precious darlings be crushed in a collision with a Chrysler Monstrosity". (That was paraphrased, of course, from the slightly more comments of the gulty parties.)
With talk of it being pushed over 40 mpg, it could be a real race for fuel economy very soon.
Talk is just that, and nothing more.
Comparing fuel costs in the US to those in Europe is just short-sighted.
You'll have to explain that one for me. What do you mean by "short-sighted"? In what way? I don't see how a short-term or long-term viewpoint has anything to do with such a comparison. But before you get started with your "explanation", I will remind you that the ONLY thing that ever dramatically improved the fuel economy of US cars was the huge jump in gas prices in the 1970s.
It's not really an apples-to-apples comparison, as those taxes subsidize all kinds of other efforts and don't really reflect the true cost of driving on the consumer.
And your point would be? The tax I pay on a new pair of shoes does not reflect the true cost of walking, and subsidizes all kinds of other efforts. We do not need to adopt the Libertarian viewpoint (?) that each activity should be taxed at exactly the level needed to pay for that activity. Taxes can be a tool to influence policy, alter behavior, fund projects which have no obvious source of income, etc.
I'm reading lots of comments about "how is this different from just plotting pixels?" and such. If you were given a voxel dataset, and were given the job of showing the internal structure, in a nifty, sorta-transparent, sorta-3D way... you would likely fail.
It is not as simple as it seems. You want the nearer bones (or whatever structure) to show up more, but not completely obscure what is behind. And you want the stuff behind to look "behind". But how?
It is not the same problem as calculating normals of polygons to see which surfaces are facing the viewer, sorting things by depth, and finding out what is completely obscured by what else. Go back, and think again.
I'm guessing (without reading the paper), that the point of using dots is that the dots are not infinitely small, but rather have a small measureable size, and so the nearer dots are drawn larger, but that all dots are small enough that they don't tend to "hide" each other in the Z direction, but rather "pile up" a bit to make the piled up places darker. This sort of "implementation" is interesting I think solely because one might be able to implement it in a way that makes use of fairly standard operations implemented by vroomy graphics hardware. (Ie. it is not otherwise an obvious implementation of the desired operation, and I'll guess that the initial reaction of the people who built the graphics hardware/driver is "hey, you're abusing it!", followed almost immediately by "wow, cool!". It's as absurd and wonderful as if you drew a cloud of smoke between you and another object by drawing each particle in the cloud.)
Wow, if this woman isn't a complete example of "stupid whore," I don't know what is.
"Stupid" perhaps, "whore" I don't see where you get that. Apparently, you have diluted the meaning of "whore" through excessively liberal misuse. Let me distill the meaning again for you: "a woman who will have sex with you if you pay her money"
If you still wanted some sort of sexual overtones in your abusive description of Ms. Freeman, "stupid bimbo" would be less wrong, though still quite imperfect.
Or perhaps you should suggest that she thinks that inanimate sex partners are okay, but animal ones not, revealing her predilictions in the "dildo vs. gerbil" department. But really, "whore"? That's just so ad hominem, and rather out-of-left-field, based on the meager details provided by the article.
Ah, but, you see, in this case, profiling worked.
No doubt you think your dog got the retirement home info because of her antiquated name. You think of Violet as rather young, but in dog years, she may be ready for retirement!
(So, what sort of wonderful plans does one make to entice a retired dog. "Low Impact Fetch?")
2. Devices in range respond. Your stereo, fridge, computer, laptop, handheld, watch, all equipped with VNC servers, announce themselves.
3....You pick one to interact with, say the stereo.
(Security is not really a problem, all this can be end-to-end encrypted and authenticated).
Security is not a problem, if you don't mind either setting passwords on your "stereo, fridge, computer, laptop, handheld, watch", or letting your neighbors/"friends" help you control these devices.
You'd still like to see any substance that has any effect on a human, other than making them feel less hungry, be banned.
Eh? What part of "highly harmful and bogus War On Drugs" did you not understand? I doesn't bother me that you are surprised, but please don't be obtuse. A thousand pardons if I don't conform to your stereotype of what an American should think or say. I'm sure my government will be giving me a brain transplant soon enough, to correct this problem.
The argument is necesarially that these measures would have prevented past terrorist attacks, but tht it might help prevent future ones.
No, it's just more intrusive crap that they're piling on law-abiding citizens. It is unlikely to do anything but aid in the post-mortem analysis of what the terrorist ate for dinner the night before the attack, etc. You still might not even know who the terrorist really was, just that the same ID card was at that particular Pizza Hut.
ID cards can be forged. ID cards can be stolen.
ID cards can be just blithely gotten and used appropriately by people who are more violent than you assumed they were.
The most obvious things to do, screen ALL bags, have bomb-sniffing dogs sniff all your stuff, and have gun-toting federal agents on ALL flights, has not yet been accomplished. I can understand the difficulty in obtaining more dogs quickly.
The inability to get more federal agents on flights is inexcusable. We could transfer to this job the numerous DEA agents who are currently engaged in our highly harmful and bogus War On Drugs, and put them on the planes. (Bam, fixed two problems at once!)
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder why he didn't pick AAC or Ogg Vorbis. What a doof. :-)
I think "microphobe" would be "person afraid of small". Maybe it's supposed to be "person afraid of [being] small". I think you need to listen to an old Steve Martin skit to understand what that fear might be.
"Time for Tubby Bye-bye"!
You don't call it ditching when a float-plane lands on the water, do you?
Nor is "crash landed in the water" appropriate, unless the parachutes had failed to deploy.
When I read the part about identify the weeds "and zap them", I assumed they really meant it would zap them, either with flame, hot air, or an electric arc. How disappointing to learn that "zap" to some people means "spray with toxins".
In answer to your second question, I don't believe these pulsejet cruise missiles will ever become a threat to the public, at least not an extraordinary one. These pulsejets are not weapons, they are delivery systems. This guy is mostly just building the engine; the cruise missile for him is an afterthought, and he has no great expertise I think in UAV design. His designs don't go "boom", they merely arrive. (And there is some question about whether they would even do that, for long ranges or long durations.) Compare a pulsejet cruise missile with a $5000 car, crashed into the front of your house. (For a warhead, I could put a nuclear bomb in the backseat of the car as you have suggested as a warhead of choice for your weapon, or anthrax, or ricin. But gosh, those sure are rare and expensive things! Why not just fill 20 extra plastic jugs with gasoline or what-have-you and pack them inside? You will either be just as dead, or at the least extremely terrorized.) Why choose a home-built aircraft with a very noisy engine of questionable reliability, and a limited payload for your delivery system, when a reliable and unobtrusive car will do? Perhaps you are an engineer (you read slashdot); then certainly you too can think of something better than a custom-built aircraft powered by a custom-built engine? Remember, you're choosing a delivery system, not a warhead.
Do not rail at this pulsejet guy. You instead should be pissed off at whomever gave the terrorists technology, raw materials, and equipment for building biological, chemical, or nuclear warheads. That guilty party might turn out to be one part or another of the USA government, or perhaps the Chinese, or the French, or ... Depends on the terrorist du jour, and the warhead they will choose. But no, it was not the pulsejet guy.
Whatever idea you're blathering about, it's clearly not the one described in the article(s). RTFA!
"I never asked for the anal probe." Bonus points if you know the origin of the quote... :-)
That insane, gleeful cackling that you hear?
It's coming from Redmond, Washington.
Rather than my normal knee-jerk reaction opposing huge numbers of H1-B visas, I had different reactions to that quote from the article.
First is that many research jobs under the DHS will be closed to H1-B visa holders. They will require US citizenship, security clearances, yadayada. That is because they will be researching TERRORISM (run in circles, hide hide hide, put your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye).
Second, I predict (with no evidence at all, just wisdom) that if we match the very brightest H1-B visa holders with DHS research jobs, most of them will end up doing pointless, mind-numbing gubmint stuff, and will eventually trudge back to their native lands stultified by their "work". I predict that the DHS jobs that they would be offered will be an order of magnitude less "zoomy" and intellectually stimulating than what they would get in the average high-tech firm.
I thought Sony called this 'iLink', and that it was Firewire without the wires that supply power.
*cough* Strategic Defensive Initiative *cough* (Perhaps you were still in diapers during the Reagan presidency, and missed that ejaculation of defense-related R&D money?)
Presumably that sort of extravagance is already included as part of the $4.33e+09/year budget.
Day before yesterday. And it wasn't because I got "so lost". I was dividing up some property. I drew the new lines and corners on a scale topo map for the surveyor. And then he handed me a roll of orange tape, and said "okay, go mark your new corner with this, and could you also hang some where that new line crosses the creek?" Yeah, that caught me by surprise!
So, yeah, before too much longer I was 1/4 km into the woods, in a place I'd never been before, two hours before sunset, in near-freezing weather. I got to within 10 feet of the point I'd marked on the aerial photo, and then starting looking around for the "best spot" for a property corner. The Magellan handheld worked great, even after I dropped it face down onto concrete and ice while crossing an icy ford.
As for getting lost, after I'd marked the new corner, I knew how to get back, but because I had the GPS, I next decided to just march out into many acres/hectares of forest that I'd never walked before, confident that I would be able to make a nice loop, and wouldn't have to waste viewing time backtracking to get home. Without the GPS, I wouldn't have tried that stunt, and would have missed a wonderful walk in the woods.
As for a voice recorder, that would have been useful, but most GPS handhelds don't have that. W/o a recorder, what you do instead is create a "waypoint" (ie. a landmark) in the GPS, and key in a very short description. This takes forever, and you have to take off your gloves, and fumble through the crude text entry with numb fingers. Would have been much nicer to just hold down a waypoint button and say what you want about the current location.
If you are so goddam far from civilisation that you need GPS to safe your sorry hide, where are you gonna plug it in?
I took extra batteries. Turned out to be wise. GPS handhelds are watt-pigs.
As for the Garmin Palm w/ GPS specifically, yes, it looks overpriced. Yes, it is a dumb design.
I think the GPS+bluetooth cookie would be a good idea. I think a GPS+firewire dongle would be fine (firewire rather than USB to get power supplied to the GPS dongle.) My claim is that whenever you buy a GPS receiver, if you are buying any sort of all-in-one solution as I did, you are making many compromises, and creating proprietary entanglements. For example, if I want to download a map into my Magellan handheld, I need to use the Magellan software, and that software only runs on Windows. Grrrr.
Matlab is "The Revenge of FORTRAN".
(I don't know Mathematica; perhaps it is also.)
Um, you really need to work on your argument.
First, penicillin isn't a new form of matter. It might be a new molecule, or one that mankind didn't know about before, but it doesn't rate the "new form of matter" moniker.
Second, just because something exists somewhere in the universe does not mean that it is thus safe or wise to have it here on earth. Black holes are fine, as long as they don't come near. Quasars are fine, as long as they aren't nearby and shining at us. Supernovas? Wonderful, but please keep them many light years away.
Maybe tetraneutron is something that is commonly made when cosmic rays hit our atmosphere, and maybe not. You should be at least a little startled by it, and that it was made _accidentally_.
Now, maybe the chemicals mostly _came_ from vents, but do we need to look so closely to them for primordial habitats? Wasn't there some other theory that touted certain kinds of clay as a good substrate for interesting molecular reactions?
If this were true, then the average fuel economy of US "cars" would be increasing. It's not. Ergo, what you say is not true. CAFE does not push manufacturers to increase fuel economy. Instead, manufacturers push the US Congress to not alter the CAFE target values, and to not include SUVs when calculating the CAFE values.
Perhaps you recall a recent political discussion, in which US legislators (probably Republican members of the House) were saying that "soccer moms shouldn't have to drive anything smaller or more efficient than their Ford Behemoths, lest their precious darlings be crushed in a collision with a Chrysler Monstrosity". (That was paraphrased, of course, from the slightly more comments of the gulty parties.)
With talk of it being pushed over 40 mpg, it could be a real race for fuel economy very soon.
Talk is just that, and nothing more.
Comparing fuel costs in the US to those in Europe is just short-sighted.
You'll have to explain that one for me. What do you mean by "short-sighted"? In what way? I don't see how a short-term or long-term viewpoint has anything to do with such a comparison. But before you get started with your "explanation", I will remind you that the ONLY thing that ever dramatically improved the fuel economy of US cars was the huge jump in gas prices in the 1970s.
It's not really an apples-to-apples comparison, as those taxes subsidize all kinds of other efforts and don't really reflect the true cost of driving on the consumer.
And your point would be? The tax I pay on a new pair of shoes does not reflect the true cost of walking, and subsidizes all kinds of other efforts. We do not need to adopt the Libertarian viewpoint (?) that each activity should be taxed at exactly the level needed to pay for that activity. Taxes can be a tool to influence policy, alter behavior, fund projects which have no obvious source of income, etc.
It is not as simple as it seems. You want the nearer bones (or whatever structure) to show up more, but not completely obscure what is behind. And you want the stuff behind to look "behind". But how?
It is not the same problem as calculating normals of polygons to see which surfaces are facing the viewer, sorting things by depth, and finding out what is completely obscured by what else. Go back, and think again.
I'm guessing (without reading the paper), that the point of using dots is that the dots are not infinitely small, but rather have a small measureable size, and so the nearer dots are drawn larger, but that all dots are small enough that they don't tend to "hide" each other in the Z direction, but rather "pile up" a bit to make the piled up places darker. This sort of "implementation" is interesting I think solely because one might be able to implement it in a way that makes use of fairly standard operations implemented by vroomy graphics hardware. (Ie. it is not otherwise an obvious implementation of the desired operation, and I'll guess that the initial reaction of the people who built the graphics hardware/driver is "hey, you're abusing it!", followed almost immediately by "wow, cool!". It's as absurd and wonderful as if you drew a cloud of smoke between you and another object by drawing each particle in the cloud.)
"Stupid" perhaps, "whore" I don't see where you get that. Apparently, you have diluted the meaning of "whore" through excessively liberal misuse. Let me distill the meaning again for you: "a woman who will have sex with you if you pay her money"
If you still wanted some sort of sexual overtones in your abusive description of Ms. Freeman, "stupid bimbo" would be less wrong, though still quite imperfect.
Or perhaps you should suggest that she thinks that inanimate sex partners are okay, but animal ones not, revealing her predilictions in the "dildo vs. gerbil" department. But really, "whore"? That's just so ad hominem, and rather out-of-left-field, based on the meager details provided by the article.
(So, what sort of wonderful plans does one make to entice a retired dog. "Low Impact Fetch?")
sing the carolling favourite, "Walking in a Nuclear Wasteland"
Or maybe you prefer "Chestnuts glowing by an open fire..."?
3.
(Security is not really a problem, all this can be end-to-end encrypted and authenticated).
Security is not a problem, if you don't mind either setting passwords on your "stereo, fridge, computer, laptop, handheld, watch", or letting your neighbors/"friends" help you control these devices.
Eh? What part of "highly harmful and bogus War On Drugs" did you not understand? I doesn't bother me that you are surprised, but please don't be obtuse. A thousand pardons if I don't conform to your stereotype of what an American should think or say. I'm sure my government will be giving me a brain transplant soon enough, to correct this problem.
No, it's just more intrusive crap that they're piling on law-abiding citizens. It is unlikely to do anything but aid in the post-mortem analysis of what the terrorist ate for dinner the night before the attack, etc. You still might not even know who the terrorist really was, just that the same ID card was at that particular Pizza Hut.
ID cards can be forged. ID cards can be stolen. ID cards can be just blithely gotten and used appropriately by people who are more violent than you assumed they were.
The most obvious things to do, screen ALL bags, have bomb-sniffing dogs sniff all your stuff, and have gun-toting federal agents on ALL flights, has not yet been accomplished. I can understand the difficulty in obtaining more dogs quickly.
The inability to get more federal agents on flights is inexcusable. We could transfer to this job the numerous DEA agents who are currently engaged in our highly harmful and bogus War On Drugs, and put them on the planes. (Bam, fixed two problems at once!)