Interesting side note: I was looking at the area around my hometown of San Antonio, TX (on the Central map) and noticed a spur of the route leading to LBJ's ranch near Blanco/Johnson City Texas. These tower routes were designed to facilitate cross-country communications for the public but they also had a wartime mission--keeping the President in commo during WW3.
Last year, there was an article here about some old AT&T bunkers and towers for sale. While it would be impracticle (if not impossible) to use all of these towers for 802.11 sites, their routes across the country would come in very handy. These maps would give you a good idea of what kind of line-of-sight you could get in various regions.
While I'm at it, here is an excellent site with more AT&T long-line info links:
My little sister sure was pissed when I dismantled her Speak-N-Spell back in 83 and tried to hook it up to our parent's hi-fi. This was my second unsuccessful experiment. Previously, I tried to construct a guitar and amplifier out of a wooden box with a hole in the side, some string, some 22-guage wire, and some empty cans of Tab (remember that nasty stuff?).
I'd guess that 90% of the dupes would be eliminated if Slash could scan prior stories for occurances of the URL(s) in the current story and report this to the editor before he/she posts. I mentioned this years ago, it got modded up, and nothing ever became of it.
A friend of our family tried these back in the 80s. She and a friend of hers in California bought them and used them for a while. As I recall, they were kind of lame and the novelty wore off after a while. They were expensive as hell but this woman would spend money on anything. This woman once spent her entire Texas -> California flight talking on the sky phone, to the tune of hundreds of dollars of phone charges!
Wouldn't vegetable oil retain heat longer than the plastic and metal that it was intended to protect? I could see this thing getting very hot on a sunny afternoon.
One of the most memorable renditions of music I've seen recently was a bum on the street. He appeared to be mildly intoxicated, but had an old catgut guitar. He asked for alms, we agreed but demanded a tune.
I then heard one of the most intense renditions of "Candle in the Wind" I've ever heard. It was unpolished, rough, and a few of the chords were simply wrong.
Hey, I'll tell you what...Pay me twenty bucks and get me drunk and I'll play for you guys all night! I'll even get the chords right! (well, most of them, anyway)
The M4 Sherman tank is especiallynot a weapon of mass destruction. The M4's crappy medium velocity 76mm gun was no match for the German Panther and Tiger tanks. See the comment that I just posted for more info.
If I ever build my child a tank, it will be something other than the M4 Sherman. That tank should have never been put in service. Prior to the Normandy invasion in 1944, GEN George S. Patton made the decision to concentrate production on the M4 Sherman instead of the M26 Pershing. The Pershing, according to Patton, was much too heavy. Patton, being a cavalry man, saw tanks as tools of the infantry. Tanks were to be used in conjunction with assaults by foot soldiers and were not intended to fight other tanks. Patton's choice of the lighter, faster Sherman turned out to be a huge mistake. The high-velocity guns of the German Tiger and Panther tanks penetrated the Shermans like a fork through a slice of bread. According to Belton Y. Cooper (whose book you should read...more on that in a bit), the Army began the Normandy campaign with 232 M4 tanks. In eleven months of service, 648 were completely destroyed and 700 were knocked out but later prepared. This comes out to roughly 580% losses in less than a year. These incredible losses resulted in the deaths of thousands of highly (and expensively) trained tank crew members.
As if the M4's crappy armor wasn't bad enough, the Army equipped it with rotary aircraft engines, which it apparently had in surplus. These engines constantly fouled spark plugs (of which they had around 18, if I am remembering Cooper's book correctly). The engines did not like to idle at low RPMs and this created constant problems when travelling in convoys. On top of that, the tanks would let out an extremely un-tactical backfire when they were started, which often drew German artillery fire upon their positions. The M4s also had very narrow tracks. Your son's model tank looks to be fairly accurate as far as the dimensions of the tracks. When these narrow tracks encountered freshly-plowed farmland, they got stuck and it took incredible effort to free them.
But wait, it gets even worse... The M4's main gun (75mm or 76mm, depending) was almost useless when up against German armor. When that gun hit the hardened armor (rolled, if my memory serves me) of the Tiger tanks, it merely bounced off, leaving a scratch or pockmark on the surface.
So, all you Slashdotters...if you're going to build your kid a tank, do them a favor and build them an M26!
-Chris
PS - I got most of this information from reading Belton Y. Cooper's incredible book, "Death Traps", which follows the 3rd Armored Divison ("Spearhead") from Normandy to the heart of Germany. I'm not sure if it is still available--it was out-of-print for a while...
During WWII you could buy units on trailers to pull around behind your car, pile the shit in,a nd get a few miles of driving out of the resultant outgassing.
That brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "piece of shit car", doesn't it?
Probably very little. If you've ever used the AOL client interface, you'll understand what I'm talking about. It is, perhaps, the lamest mail client around.
Another great alternative is Exim. Exim has an excellent security record, Postgres/MySQL/LDAP/DNSDB/CBD/etc/etc support and a relatively easy-to-understand configuration file format. It's also fast as all hell.
Amazing. Here in San Antonio, I bitch because its nearly impossible to find good german candy. And you're over there in Germany and you're bitching because you can't buy the crappy, proletariat-grade U.S. vending machine stuff.
I'm really getting sick of all this anti-military hogwash that is showing up on Slashdot lately. To quote P.J. O'Rourke:
"Any rich man does more for world peace than all the jerks pasting VISUALIZE WORLD PEACE bumper stickers on their cars. The worst leech of a merger and acquisitions lawyer making $500,000 year will, even if he cheats on his taxes, put $100,000 into the public coffers. That's $100,000 of education, charity, or U.S. Marines. And the Marine Corps does more for world peace than all the Ben & Jerry's ice cream ever made."
I don't think you read the article or looked at the website. The idea behind these products is that the $300 Mexican-made Fender Stratocaster that you buy for your kids can sound like a $3500 Epiphone with a little digital tweaking. The kids are still playing real instruments--this product lets you expose them to instruments that most are way beyond most parents' budgets.
Gosh, I hope you are talking about STTNG. As crazy as this sounds, I never watched that show but I will never forget "Stand By Me", which stands out as one of my favorite childhood movies.
When I was a kid, my father and I were *really* into model rocketry. We had, I think, at least two hundred Estes rockets--at least one of every model they made. Where we live, it's hard to find places free of tree cover so guess where we went to launch them? Fort Sam Houston! We went to an Army post to launch our rockets. We'd drive over to the parade grounds, set up our launch pad and launch all afternoon. Occaisonally, the MPs would stop by and watch us (more out of interest than concern) but nobody ever told us to go away.
These days, you can't even *get* on Fort Sam Houston without a military ID and I'm scared to think about what would happen if you launched a model rocket there.
doggone it, I munged my Subject: in an attempt to edit it and accidentally hit the submit. Your post was very much on-topic. Sorry for the confusion. I was intending to change my Subject: to "It felt different this time around..."
I know a lot of you on Slashdot aren't old enough to remember when Challanger exploded at takeoff, and don't remember the uphoria and excitement that we all used to have when the Space Shuttle was new, or the excitement that a honest to God civilian was getting to go into space. In this era of any rich playboy with $20mil can get into space with enough effort, its hard to imagine what that was like for us, especially those of us who were young at the time.
Interesting that you bring this up...I was thinking this afternoon about the difference between my reaction this morning and my reaction as an 11 year-old in 1986. When Challenger exploded, my class was eating lunch in the cafeteria. We were sitting there when Mrs. Owens was approached by another teacher. When they told her, she started bawling. We all sat there, very much confused, and watched our teachers cry. A minute or two later, our principal Mr. Rhode made the announcement over the PA and we were sent home a short time later. I can remember, even at that young age, the heartache I felt. The disbelief lasted for several days.
This morning, I was lying in bed, recovering from an early-morning road march with some folks from my Army ROTC batallion, when I saw the news on CNN.com. Strangely, I didn't panic. I didn't cry. I just sighed and called my parents. I think 11 September 2001 changed me in more ways than I previously realized. After seeing the WTC collapse and personally seeing the smoke from the smoldering Pentagon, relatively small tragedies like this just don't affect me in the same way. Kind of sad, really.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, as of now, neither of those URLs work. The "task force" removed the de-installer pending further testing.
Chris
The routes:
Eastern Section
Central Section
Western Section
Interesting side note: I was looking at the area around my hometown of San Antonio, TX (on the Central map) and noticed a spur of the route leading to LBJ's ranch near Blanco/Johnson City Texas. These tower routes were designed to facilitate cross-country communications for the public but they also had a wartime mission--keeping the President in commo during WW3.
Last year, there was an article here about some old AT&T bunkers and towers for sale. While it would be impracticle (if not impossible) to use all of these towers for 802.11 sites, their routes across the country would come in very handy. These maps would give you a good idea of what kind of line-of-sight you could get in various regions.
While I'm at it, here is an excellent site with more AT&T long-line info links:
Towers in Utah w/ good links
Actually, you don't even need to buy Audio Hijack. Good old netcat(1) (find it with Fink) can do the trick.
Chris
My little sister sure was pissed when I dismantled her Speak-N-Spell back in 83 and tried to hook it up to our parent's hi-fi. This was my second unsuccessful experiment. Previously, I tried to construct a guitar and amplifier out of a wooden box with a hole in the side, some string, some 22-guage wire, and some empty cans of Tab (remember that nasty stuff?).
I'm waiting for the Motorola V600. It's due out later this year.
Big screen (65K colors), Bluetooth, J2ME, polyphonic rings, GPRS, and best of all, A NORMAL, USABLE KEYBOARD LAYOUT!
I'd guess that 90% of the dupes would be eliminated if Slash could scan prior stories for occurances of the URL(s) in the current story and report this to the editor before he/she posts. I mentioned this years ago, it got modded up, and nothing ever became of it.
A friend of our family tried these back in the 80s. She and a friend of hers in California bought them and used them for a while. As I recall, they were kind of lame and the novelty wore off after a while. They were expensive as hell but this woman would spend money on anything. This woman once spent her entire Texas -> California flight talking on the sky phone, to the tune of hundreds of dollars of phone charges!
Wouldn't vegetable oil retain heat longer than the plastic and metal that it was intended to protect? I could see this thing getting very hot on a sunny afternoon.
One of the most memorable renditions of music I've seen recently was a bum on the street. He appeared to be mildly intoxicated, but had an old catgut guitar. He asked for alms, we agreed but demanded a tune.
I then heard one of the most intense renditions of "Candle in the Wind" I've ever heard. It was unpolished, rough, and a few of the chords were simply wrong.
Hey, I'll tell you what...Pay me twenty bucks and get me drunk and I'll play for you guys all night! I'll even get the chords right! (well, most of them, anyway)
The M4 Sherman tank is especially not a weapon of mass destruction. The M4's crappy medium velocity 76mm gun was no match for the German Panther and Tiger tanks. See the comment that I just posted for more info.
Chris
If I ever build my child a tank, it will be something other than the M4 Sherman. That tank should have never been put in service. Prior to the Normandy invasion in 1944, GEN George S. Patton made the decision to concentrate production on the M4 Sherman instead of the M26 Pershing. The Pershing, according to Patton, was much too heavy. Patton, being a cavalry man, saw tanks as tools of the infantry. Tanks were to be used in conjunction with assaults by foot soldiers and were not intended to fight other tanks. Patton's choice of the lighter, faster Sherman turned out to be a huge mistake. The high-velocity guns of the German Tiger and Panther tanks penetrated the Shermans like a fork through a slice of bread. According to Belton Y. Cooper (whose book you should read...more on that in a bit), the Army began the Normandy campaign with 232 M4 tanks. In eleven months of service, 648 were completely destroyed and 700 were knocked out but later prepared. This comes out to roughly 580% losses in less than a year. These incredible losses resulted in the deaths of thousands of highly (and expensively) trained tank crew members.
As if the M4's crappy armor wasn't bad enough, the Army equipped it with rotary aircraft engines, which it apparently had in surplus. These engines constantly fouled spark plugs (of which they had around 18, if I am remembering Cooper's book correctly). The engines did not like to idle at low RPMs and this created constant problems when travelling in convoys. On top of that, the tanks would let out an extremely un-tactical backfire when they were started, which often drew German artillery fire upon their positions. The M4s also had very narrow tracks. Your son's model tank looks to be fairly accurate as far as the dimensions of the tracks. When these narrow tracks encountered freshly-plowed farmland, they got stuck and it took incredible effort to free them.
But wait, it gets even worse... The M4's main gun (75mm or 76mm, depending) was almost useless when up against German armor. When that gun hit the hardened armor (rolled, if my memory serves me) of the Tiger tanks, it merely bounced off, leaving a scratch or pockmark on the surface.
So, all you Slashdotters...if you're going to build your kid a tank, do them a favor and build them an M26!
-Chris
PS - I got most of this information from reading Belton Y. Cooper's incredible book, "Death Traps", which follows the 3rd Armored Divison ("Spearhead") from Normandy to the heart of Germany. I'm not sure if it is still available--it was out-of-print for a while...
Oh please, as if anybody on here ever gets any....
During WWII you could buy units on trailers to pull around behind your car, pile the shit in,a nd get a few miles of driving out of the resultant outgassing.
That brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "piece of shit car", doesn't it?
Probably very little. If you've ever used the AOL client interface, you'll understand what I'm talking about. It is, perhaps, the lamest mail client around.
Another great alternative is Exim. Exim has an excellent security record, Postgres/MySQL/LDAP/DNSDB/CBD/etc/etc support and a relatively easy-to-understand configuration file format. It's also fast as all hell.
There are no Reeses Pieces
Amazing. Here in San Antonio, I bitch because its nearly impossible to find good german candy. And you're over there in Germany and you're bitching because you can't buy the crappy, proletariat-grade U.S. vending machine stuff.
Would you like to set up a trade?
I'm really getting sick of all this anti-military hogwash that is showing up on Slashdot lately. To quote P.J. O'Rourke:
"Any rich man does more for world peace than all the jerks pasting VISUALIZE WORLD PEACE bumper stickers on their cars. The worst leech of a merger and acquisitions lawyer making $500,000 year will, even if he cheats on his taxes, put $100,000 into the public coffers. That's $100,000 of education, charity, or U.S. Marines. And the Marine Corps does more for world peace than all the Ben & Jerry's ice cream ever made."
I don't think you read the article or looked at the website. The idea behind these products is that the $300 Mexican-made Fender Stratocaster that you buy for your kids can sound like a $3500 Epiphone with a little digital tweaking. The kids are still playing real instruments--this product lets you expose them to instruments that most are way beyond most parents' budgets.
Chris
Gosh, I hope you are talking about STTNG. As crazy as this sounds, I never watched that show but I will never forget "Stand By Me", which stands out as one of my favorite childhood movies.
When I was a kid, my father and I were *really* into model rocketry. We had, I think, at least two hundred Estes rockets--at least one of every model they made. Where we live, it's hard to find places free of tree cover so guess where we went to launch them? Fort Sam Houston! We went to an Army post to launch our rockets. We'd drive over to the parade grounds, set up our launch pad and launch all afternoon. Occaisonally, the MPs would stop by and watch us (more out of interest than concern) but nobody ever told us to go away.
These days, you can't even *get* on Fort Sam Houston without a military ID and I'm scared to think about what would happen if you launched a model rocket there.
You are slashdotted. What does the picture show?
doggone it, I munged my Subject: in an attempt to edit it and accidentally hit the submit. Your post was very much on-topic. Sorry for the confusion. I was intending to change my Subject: to "It felt different this time around..."
I know a lot of you on Slashdot aren't old enough to remember when Challanger exploded at takeoff, and don't remember the uphoria and excitement that we all used to have when the Space Shuttle was new, or the excitement that a honest to God civilian was getting to go into space. In this era of any rich playboy with $20mil can get into space with enough effort, its hard to imagine what that was like for us, especially those of us who were young at the time.
Interesting that you bring this up...I was thinking this afternoon about the difference between my reaction this morning and my reaction as an 11 year-old in 1986. When Challenger exploded, my class was eating lunch in the cafeteria. We were sitting there when Mrs. Owens was approached by another teacher. When they told her, she started bawling. We all sat there, very much confused, and watched our teachers cry. A minute or two later, our principal Mr. Rhode made the announcement over the PA and we were sent home a short time later. I can remember, even at that young age, the heartache I felt. The disbelief lasted for several days.
This morning, I was lying in bed, recovering from an early-morning road march with some folks from my Army ROTC batallion, when I saw the news on CNN.com. Strangely, I didn't panic. I didn't cry. I just sighed and called my parents. I think 11 September 2001 changed me in more ways than I previously realized. After seeing the WTC collapse and personally seeing the smoke from the smoldering Pentagon, relatively small tragedies like this just don't affect me in the same way. Kind of sad, really.
Anybody else have the same reaction?
We send men and women out every day in 42 year-old aircraft but I don't see anyone getting in a tizzy about that.
The fact is, space flight, like traditional aviation, is risky. We have to accept the risk if we are to continue this program.