Only the heaviest class of body armor will stop a rifle bullet, and even then, they have a ceramic or metal plate over your chest and that's the only place it will protect you from a rifle bullet. All other body armor is designed to only stop handgun rounds, with the heavier stuff stopping magnum slugs and the lighter stuff stopping 9mm and.22.
Even with a vest, the blunt trauma can give you huge welts and bruises, and even crack ribs. I have seen a (car-cam) video of a vest-wearing cop taking two to the chest, and after that he was on the ground writhing in pain and quite unable to do anything but call for help on the radio.
Yep, I tried XP but it was slower and less stable. I also had to do several registry hacks to turn off the stupid, patronizing help bubbles that keep popping up. I went back to 2k and haven't regretted it, even though at work XP is the 'official' OS. Actually, many XP-using co-workers don't seem too perturbed when they see I am still on 2k. It says something when our entire IT dept. is running 2k on their personal boxes, too.;)
Indeed. If you read George RR Martin's "Song of Fire and Ice" series, summer lasts about what, 10 earth years? And of course, so does the winter, which makes it hard to beleive that anything survives a winter... but it is fun to explore the possibilities.
Consumer electronics that are unintentional radiators (FCCspeak for 'transmitters') are Part 15 devices. Actually, you can have intentional radiators under Part 15 was well, but the rules (power levels etc) are higher. Part 15 is usually where cordless phones and garage door openers operate.
You are allowd to build up to, I think, 5 homemade Part 15 intentional radiators without getting them certified by the FCC. The maximum power levels are pretty low though, 100mW IIRC. A 100mW signal will go a few hundred feet at best.
My understanding of Part 15 is limited to FM voice communications. I have no idea if images (TV) are also allowed under Part 15.
"I don't know why this hasn't received more coverage"
Maybe because that link is five huge pages spouting a bunch of conspiracy-theory pseudo-science... finally coming to the conclusion that the moon is, in fact, a disguised "Death Star"?
Yeah, I don't know why it hasn't received more coverage... in The National Enquirer!
Ever seen the inside of a HP/Compaq DL320-G2? It has three banks of stacked pairs of 40mm fans. Those suckers are loud enough to damage your hearing if you power more than one of them up in the same server rack. It's incredible how much noise high-speed 40mm fans can make with the exhaust of one blowing into the intake of another.
Once Windows boots and the system driver loads, the fans slow down to a temperature-controlled speed. I pity the fool running Novell on these things though, because there *is* no driver and the fans roar constantly.... I guess if you're insane enough to run Novell, the constant barrage of decibels in the pain range is not going to bother you either.
BTW, did I mention how smart it was to have a driver in the OS control the fan speed? If your OS crashes and the CPU goes into an infinite loop, the driver will not be alive to increase the fan speed, so you fry your CPU and maybe the mobo to boot. Great design, guys!
Be that as it may, I don't think you can stop them from being invented in the first place, any more than you can keep humans from making babies. The problem is what to do with the weapons (and babies) after they are created, and that's probably where we should concentrate our efforts.
Besides, I think nuclear weapons were a good invention. By upping the ante, neither the US nor the USSR wanted to go down the road of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction). Probably saved countless lives in the conventional wars that we didn't fight because nobody wanted to invite a nuclear strike.
Interesting. I have always just used HTTP, and it has never redirected me to HTTPS. But it's good to know that option is there, thanks for the tip romcabrera and damiangerous!
Yep. You don't even need to buy software: Jabberd 1.x has a patch and Jabberd 2 has a Bandersnatch add-on; either of which will allow conversations to be logged to disk. Even if the clients are using SSL.
"However, your email is not likely to be captured by their system, and remains private."
While Yahoo does support optional SSL, and I have no experience with Hotmail, I have never seen an SSL 'padlock' icon on Gmail. So the messages you read and send on Gmail appear to be transmitted in plaintext, and would thus be easy for the sysadmin to read.
I'm on the page about the Transmeta story, but I keep seeing all these posts about shredders and personal information -- which appear to come from a different story, as the replies make no sense in the Transmeta context. Is/. broken?
"jed? That shit is disgusting." "Sounds like you need to learn how to map keys"
Map keys. To edit a text file. Riiiiight. Well, I didn't have to map any keys and yet the backspace in jed works just fine, thankyouverymuch. I guess I'll stick with disgusting, it appears to be much less stressful.
"as you approach it, it will start to slow down, and eventually stop"
It may seem counterintuitive, but sailboats here on Earth can actually sail against the wind. Not directly -- most sailboats can point about 45 degrees into the wind (i.e., if the wind is blowing from north to south, a sailboat can travel northeast or northwest as well as anything more southerly than that). When sailing against the wind, the sails (which are allowed to curve) become airfoils and "pull" the boat upwind in exactly the same way that airplane wings pull a plane up despite gravity.
That said, I don't think a photonfoil approach will work for solar sails since I don't think photons will develop a pressure differential like molecules do. You could should be able to tilt the sails to get a vectoring effect, though, and you could use this to slingshot around a few handy planets and get additional velocity to reach your destination even though it is "upwind".
I can't stand vi. In particular, the fact that different vi's (Redhat, HP-UX, Slackware) do totally different things when you push the same keys. Problem is, I *have* to use vi. When installing an OS, booting off a rescue floppy, or visiting a machine I don't have privileges on, vi is my *only* choice. There simply isn't anything else in many situations.
I'm all for different text editors (I use jed on Slackware because it's the closest thing to MS-DOS's user-friendly EDIT program), but until jed comes with every flavor of *NIX or *BSD I'm ever likely to come across, vi will be causing me to hate my life for years to come. Especially on HP-UX where the backspace and delete keys are completely nonfunctional. Hello, welcome to the year 2005, where half the buttons on my freaking keyboard do not work! I guess real UNIX admins never make mistakes?
Oh and BTW, I hate Emacs too. So now everyone can flame me equally.:)
"Gonna have to karmawhore some" -- Score:0, Offtopic
Uh, I don't think that helped.
Temp control and suicide rates
on
Cubicle Privacy
·
· Score: 1
Regarding temp control and suicide rates:
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
Major heat waves started to coincide, with almost magical precision, with major failures of... Breathe-o-Smart [building temperature control] systems. To begin with this merely caused simmering resentment and only a few deaths from asphyxiation.
The real horror erupted on the day that three events happened simultaneously. The first event was that Breathe-o-Smart Inc. issued a statement to the effect that best results were achieved by using their systems in temperate climates.
The second event was the breakdown of a Breathe-o-Smart system on a particularly hot and humid day with the resulting evacuation of many hundreds of office staff into the street where they met the third event, which was a rampaging mob of long-distance telephone operators who had got so twisted with having to say, all day and every day, "Thank you for using BS&S" to every single idiot who picked up a phone that they had finally taken to the streets with trash cans, megaphones and rifles.
In the ensuing days of carnage every single window in the city, rocket-proof or not, was smashed, usually to accompanying cries of "Get off the line, asshole! I don't care what number you want, what extension you're calling from. Go and stick a firework up your bottom! Yeeehaah! Hoo Hoo Hoo! Velooooom! Squawk!" and a variety of other animal noises that they didn't get a chance to practise in the normal line of their work.
As a result of this, all telephone operators were granted a constitutional right to say "Use BS&S and die!" at least once an hour when answering the phone and all office buildings were required to have windows that opened, even if only a little bit.
Another, unexpected result was a dramatic lowering of the suicide rate. All sorts of stressed and rising executives who had been forced, during the dark days of the Breathe-o-Smart tyranny, to jump in front of trains or stab themselves, could now just clamber out on to their own window ledges and leap off at their leisure. What frequently happened, though, was that in the moment or two they had to look around and gather their thoughts they would suddenly discover that all they had really needed was a breath of air and a fresh perspective on things, and maybe also a farm on which they could keep a few sheep.
"No, that mindless generic cartoon with a yellow bear you see on TV is not Winnie the Pooh"
I agree, the original books are way better. Although the first Pooh movie was decent... it's the more recent material that is nothing but mindless drivel. But since we are talking about Disney, there was no need for me to be redundant.
Acutally, Congress passed a bill recently that allows retired police to carry concealed weapons outside of their home state, even if the state they are visiting does not otherwise allow the concealed carry of weapons. This could conceivably be called a federal concealed carry permit, but it's not for citizens so it doesn't really pass muster.
Now, I bet the Secret Service guys have federal concealed carry permits. I don't think they unstrap and unload and protect the President with brass knuckles, just because they enter Illinois or NYC or some other place that does not allow its subjects to carry concealed.
Slashdot Mirror
What a pain! In that case I think I'll stick to 32-bit CPUs unless I'm doing something that really, really needs 64-bit. Which I'm not.
"I'm running a 64-bit version of Firefox on Linux. There is no Flash plugin available for this platform"
I thought the whole point of AMD's x86_64 platform was that it was totally backwards compatible with 32-bit code. Is this not the case?
"even if the vest can stop everything"
.22.
Only the heaviest class of body armor will stop a rifle bullet, and even then, they have a ceramic or metal plate over your chest and that's the only place it will protect you from a rifle bullet. All other body armor is designed to only stop handgun rounds, with the heavier stuff stopping magnum slugs and the lighter stuff stopping 9mm and
Even with a vest, the blunt trauma can give you huge welts and bruises, and even crack ribs. I have seen a (car-cam) video of a vest-wearing cop taking two to the chest, and after that he was on the ground writhing in pain and quite unable to do anything but call for help on the radio.
"I have never known the CPU to get dragged down by network traffic"
Unusual at 100Mbps, but when you scale up to gigabit and higher, the overhead starts to add up. See http://sd.wareonearth.com/~phil/jumbo.html.
That link works for me, thanks!
Yep, I tried XP but it was slower and less stable. I also had to do several registry hacks to turn off the stupid, patronizing help bubbles that keep popping up. I went back to 2k and haven't regretted it, even though at work XP is the 'official' OS. Actually, many XP-using co-workers don't seem too perturbed when they see I am still on 2k. It says something when our entire IT dept. is running 2k on their personal boxes, too. ;)
Indeed. If you read George RR Martin's "Song of Fire and Ice" series, summer lasts about what, 10 earth years? And of course, so does the winter, which makes it hard to beleive that anything survives a winter... but it is fun to explore the possibilities.
C'mon, it's not like this is rocket science, Mr. Named After a... erm, Rocket.
Consumer electronics that are unintentional radiators (FCCspeak for 'transmitters') are Part 15 devices. Actually, you can have intentional radiators under Part 15 was well, but the rules (power levels etc) are higher. Part 15 is usually where cordless phones and garage door openers operate.
You are allowd to build up to, I think, 5 homemade Part 15 intentional radiators without getting them certified by the FCC. The maximum power levels are pretty low though, 100mW IIRC. A 100mW signal will go a few hundred feet at best.
My understanding of Part 15 is limited to FM voice communications. I have no idea if images (TV) are also allowed under Part 15.
"I don't know why this hasn't received more coverage"
Maybe because that link is five huge pages spouting a bunch of conspiracy-theory pseudo-science... finally coming to the conclusion that the moon is, in fact, a disguised "Death Star"?
Yeah, I don't know why it hasn't received more coverage... in The National Enquirer!
Ever seen the inside of a HP/Compaq DL320-G2? It has three banks of stacked pairs of 40mm fans. Those suckers are loud enough to damage your hearing if you power more than one of them up in the same server rack. It's incredible how much noise high-speed 40mm fans can make with the exhaust of one blowing into the intake of another.
Once Windows boots and the system driver loads, the fans slow down to a temperature-controlled speed. I pity the fool running Novell on these things though, because there *is* no driver and the fans roar constantly.... I guess if you're insane enough to run Novell, the constant barrage of decibels in the pain range is not going to bother you either.
BTW, did I mention how smart it was to have a driver in the OS control the fan speed? If your OS crashes and the CPU goes into an infinite loop, the driver will not be alive to increase the fan speed, so you fry your CPU and maybe the mobo to boot. Great design, guys!
"You can never un-invent weapons"
Be that as it may, I don't think you can stop them from being invented in the first place, any more than you can keep humans from making babies. The problem is what to do with the weapons (and babies) after they are created, and that's probably where we should concentrate our efforts.
Besides, I think nuclear weapons were a good invention. By upping the ante, neither the US nor the USSR wanted to go down the road of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction). Probably saved countless lives in the conventional wars that we didn't fight because nobody wanted to invite a nuclear strike.
Interesting. I have always just used HTTP, and it has never redirected me to HTTPS. But it's good to know that option is there, thanks for the tip romcabrera and damiangerous!
Yep. You don't even need to buy software: Jabberd 1.x has a patch and Jabberd 2 has a Bandersnatch add-on; either of which will allow conversations to be logged to disk. Even if the clients are using SSL.
"However, your email is not likely to be captured by their system, and remains private."
While Yahoo does support optional SSL, and I have no experience with Hotmail, I have never seen an SSL 'padlock' icon on Gmail. So the messages you read and send on Gmail appear to be transmitted in plaintext, and would thus be easy for the sysadmin to read.
I'm on the page about the Transmeta story, but I keep seeing all these posts about shredders and personal information -- which appear to come from a different story, as the replies make no sense in the Transmeta context. Is /. broken?
"jed? That shit is disgusting."
"Sounds like you need to learn how to map keys"
Map keys. To edit a text file. Riiiiight. Well, I didn't have to map any keys and yet the backspace in jed works just fine, thankyouverymuch. I guess I'll stick with disgusting, it appears to be much less stressful.
Doh, you're absolutely correct.
"as you approach it, it will start to slow down, and eventually stop"
It may seem counterintuitive, but sailboats here on Earth can actually sail against the wind. Not directly -- most sailboats can point about 45 degrees into the wind (i.e., if the wind is blowing from north to south, a sailboat can travel northeast or northwest as well as anything more southerly than that). When sailing against the wind, the sails (which are allowed to curve) become airfoils and "pull" the boat upwind in exactly the same way that airplane wings pull a plane up despite gravity.
That said, I don't think a photonfoil approach will work for solar sails since I don't think photons will develop a pressure differential like molecules do. You could should be able to tilt the sails to get a vectoring effect, though, and you could use this to slingshot around a few handy planets and get additional velocity to reach your destination even though it is "upwind".
"Don't like vi? Use a different editor"
:)
I can't stand vi. In particular, the fact that different vi's (Redhat, HP-UX, Slackware) do totally different things when you push the same keys. Problem is, I *have* to use vi. When installing an OS, booting off a rescue floppy, or visiting a machine I don't have privileges on, vi is my *only* choice. There simply isn't anything else in many situations.
I'm all for different text editors (I use jed on Slackware because it's the closest thing to MS-DOS's user-friendly EDIT program), but until jed comes with every flavor of *NIX or *BSD I'm ever likely to come across, vi will be causing me to hate my life for years to come. Especially on HP-UX where the backspace and delete keys are completely nonfunctional. Hello, welcome to the year 2005, where half the buttons on my freaking keyboard do not work! I guess real UNIX admins never make mistakes?
Oh and BTW, I hate Emacs too. So now everyone can flame me equally.
"Gonna have to karmawhore some" -- Score:0, Offtopic
Uh, I don't think that helped.
Regarding temp control and suicide rates:
... Breathe-o-Smart [building temperature control] systems. To begin with this merely caused simmering resentment and only a few deaths from asphyxiation.
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
Major heat waves started to coincide, with almost magical precision, with major failures of
The real horror erupted on the day that three events happened simultaneously. The first event was that Breathe-o-Smart Inc. issued a statement to the effect that best results were achieved by using their systems in temperate climates.
The second event was the breakdown of a Breathe-o-Smart system on a particularly hot and humid day with the resulting evacuation of many hundreds of office staff into the street where they met the third event, which was a rampaging mob of long-distance telephone operators who had got so twisted with having to say, all day and every day, "Thank you for using BS&S" to every single idiot who picked up a phone that they had finally taken to the streets with trash cans, megaphones and rifles.
In the ensuing days of carnage every single window in the city, rocket-proof or not, was smashed, usually to accompanying cries of "Get off the line, asshole! I don't care what number you want, what extension you're calling from. Go and stick a firework up your bottom! Yeeehaah! Hoo Hoo Hoo! Velooooom! Squawk!" and a variety of other animal noises that they didn't get a chance to practise in the normal line of their work.
As a result of this, all telephone operators were granted a constitutional right to say "Use BS&S and die!" at least once an hour when answering the phone and all office buildings were required to have windows that opened, even if only a little bit.
Another, unexpected result was a dramatic lowering of the suicide rate. All sorts of stressed and rising executives who had been forced, during the dark days of the Breathe-o-Smart tyranny, to jump in front of trains or stab themselves, could now just clamber out on to their own window ledges and leap off at their leisure. What frequently happened, though, was that in the moment or two they had to look around and gather their thoughts they would suddenly discover that all they had really needed was a breath of air and a fresh perspective on things, and maybe also a farm on which they could keep a few sheep.
Cool website. I didn't rate quite what I expected but it's very interesting!
"No, that mindless generic cartoon with a yellow bear you see on TV is not Winnie the Pooh"
I agree, the original books are way better. Although the first Pooh movie was decent... it's the more recent material that is nothing but mindless drivel. But since we are talking about Disney, there was no need for me to be redundant.
There are no "federal concealed carry permits"
Acutally, Congress passed a bill recently that allows retired police to carry concealed weapons outside of their home state, even if the state they are visiting does not otherwise allow the concealed carry of weapons. This could conceivably be called a federal concealed carry permit, but it's not for citizens so it doesn't really pass muster.
Now, I bet the Secret Service guys have federal concealed carry permits. I don't think they unstrap and unload and protect the President with brass knuckles, just because they enter Illinois or NYC or some other place that does not allow its subjects to carry concealed.