The Maryland Science Center had (may still even have) a bike that powered a generator which lit a few lightbulbs. There was a really simple closed circuit cam too. As you pedalled harder and faster, you lit the lights and the camera was able to discern more and more of your face.
The idea was to teach you about power and electricity. Pretty cool when you're only 5-10 years old.
This used to be an interesting page about the barcode scanner door entry system I built with Python and Linux. I posted this page because I'd like to share my project with others. I've answered emails giving people circuit diagrams, and I've had various online discussions about my design decisions. Now MC68040 and michael@slashdot.org decide that it's time for me to go down. They didn't ask me if they could link; they didn't ask if I'd like to put up a mirror somewhere else. At least michael-the-slashdot-editor knew that I'd be down in minutes if he made a link.
I'd love to put this page back up, and maybe in several days I'll remember to do so. If you're interested in interfacing Linux with serial devices or electric door strikes, drop me an email at drewp@bigasterisk.com.
This seems very similar to KD (VA)'s Hypersonic XLC which uses a compressed air system to launch at 80 MPH to go up 170 ft and over a crested hill and down through some more hills before finishing. It's about a 45 second ride and very exciting (especially at the launch section with the countdown light bar).
This is like the big-daddy version of the same coaster (although the 270 twirl on the way down seems like a very cool addition). I really enjoyed the airtime at 200 ft from 80 MPH to 20 MPH flipping over the summit. I imagine the view from twice as high at 1.5 times as fast will be that much cooler.
First, try looking for a reference newer than 1989. Secondly, try a reference that includes far more information in its modeling of the costs involved than the Wasserman report.
While Social Security costs may be decreased because of early death, early death due to smoking also accounts for a ton of lost income tax revenue and economic productivity. Also include familial costs for those dealing with smoking-related family members conditions and lost revenue from those debilitated (but not dead) by smoking and you start to see that when all factors are included, smokers pose a significant financial and emotional strain on the country.
The Wasserman report in JAMA was good for its time, but it was far too simplistic to account for everything we can now account for in defining the cost of smokers on the nation. Do what I did and go to ISI's Web of Science and peruse the 100 different article which cite the Wasserman report to see more recent information concerning this topic.
Besides, you *could* get 20$ back from the lawsuit. Then 100 CDs would be overcharged by 20 cents each! 4x more than your pessimistic view! What a country!
It took me 5 minutes to sign up my home and cell phone numbers for being on the do-not-call list in MA. A toll-free call and 5 minutes. Not a Self-Addressed-Stamped-Envelope or some crazy address that no one can remember or write down fast enough to get signed up on the list.
As long as the other states make it similarly easy to sign up, then you'll get the same participation.
. It does force an unreal feeling to the whole movie, makes you go, "OK, we're in comic book/fantasy land now".
Right...the leaping from building to building, spider robots, and 'faster than 5 speeding bullets' were fine...it was the human battery plot that made it seem like fantasy...
I'd imagine that if we were to give these plans to Lego, we'd have some really kickass home versions of all of the monuments. Or how about the 3D puzzle people? Or a craft store? There's consumeristic profit to be reaped from these laser scans...I wonder if the park system will see it.
Ok, but why should I believe Mr. Sullivan any more than I believe Michael Moore? Mr. Sullivan does nothing more than assert his own "facts" and gives no useable references to back up his views that Michael Moore had lied.
For example, the issue that the Columbine kids were *not* bowling that morning as tossed out by Sullivan in his article in opposition to Moore's view that they were:
The title is taken from the little-known fact that the two killers, Dylan and Eric, were supposed to be in bowling class at Columbine High School on the morning of the murders. At least five witnesses, including their teacher, told the police that they saw one or both boys that morning at the bowling alley for their first hour class. Some school and law enforcement officials later maintained that the two boys skipped that class that morning yet no other witness has come forward to say they saw Eric and Dylan anywhere else that morning.
One reason the film is called "Bowling For Columbine" is that, after the massacre, all the pundits and experts started blaming all the usual suspects that are wheeled out for blame whenever a school shooting occurs--evil rock music (in this case Marilyn Manson), violent video games, and bad parenting.
My point is that those scapegoats make about as much sense as blaming bowling. After all, Eric and Dylan were bowlers, they took bowling class at Columbine--was bowling responsible for their evil deeds? If they bowled that morning, did the bowling trigger their desire to commit mass murder? Or, if they skipped their bowling class that morning, did that bring on the massacre? Had they bowled, that may have altered their mood and prevented them from picking up their guns. As you can see, this is all nonsense, just as it is nonsense to blame Marilyn Manson.
From Sullivan's "source" Dan Lyons of Forbes magazine:
TITLE: Moore titled the movie Bowling for Columbine because, he suggests, the two kids who shot up Columbine High in Littleton, Colo., went to a 6 a.m. bowling class on the day of the attack. ACTUALLY: Cool story, but police say it's not true. They say the shooters skipped their bowling class that day.
I'm sorry, but while I don't have links to the actual witness statements and police reports, I'd say that Michael Moore's explanation is better than Mr. Sullivan's "proof" from Dan Lyons' two sentence statements.
In fact, the FAQ page goes on to debunk quite a few of the "facts" stated by Dan Lyons (what's Forbes magazine doing trying to debunk a documentary anyways? why don't they stick to money articles?):
Q. Is that bank that hands out guns for real? A. Yes. North Country Bank (with branches throughout Northern Michigan) offers you a wide choice of guns when you open up a certificate of deposit account. In effect, they are giving you all of the interest the account will earn in advance in the form of a gun. The bank is also an authorized federal arms dealer so they can do the quick background check right there at the bank. I put $1,000 in a long-term account, they did the background check, and, within an hour, walked out with my new Weatherby--just as you see it in the film. (I did have a choice of getting a pair of golf clubs or a grandfather clock, but they didn't have either of those hanging on the wall like they did those three rifles). I learned about the bank's gun offer from an ad in the local paper that showed a gun across the top with the heading, " More Bang for Your Buck" from North Country Bank. I still have the account and the gun to this day (though I plan to legally "auction" off the gun for charity, and creatively have it destroyed--more on that later!)
and...
Q. How did you convince Lockheed to let you in their missile factory in Littleton? A. Well, first of all, the Lockheed PR people would disagree with your use of the term, "missile." They now call their Titan and Atlas missiles on which nuclear warheads were once (and still are but in less numbers) attached, "rockets." That's because the Lockheed rockets now take satellites into outer space. Some of them are weather satellites, some are telecommunications satellites, and some are top secret Pentagon projects (like the ones that are launched as spy satellites and others which are used to direct the launching of the nuclear missiles should the USA ever decide to use them).
Lockheed Martin is the largest defense contractor in the United States. They gave us the MX missile and are now heavily involved in developing the nutty Star Wars missile defense shield. They have five facilities in and around the Littleton and Denver area and they are the #1 private employer in the school district that contains Columbine High School.
How did I get their permission to film there? I threatened them with bombing, of course.
and...
If you believe Mr. Sullivan's suppositions that all of the US money to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan went to "aid" not to the government, then you should check out this link on Moore's site. It is, unlike Sullivan's article, well-linked and referenced to the State Dept reports and other sources which explain how the money was sent to Afghanistan in order to support the Taliban (not the people).
When it comes to fact-checking a documentary on how our culture is skewed in some places, I'll trust Michael Moore, not Andrew Sullivan and Dan Lyons.
I have a cell phone number that must have *just* been reassigned, because I am still getting a ton of calls from numbers that I have no idea who they are. I called a few of them back at the beginning to bitch at the people who were calling "my" number...but most caller IDs were the operator level number of some companies that must have been in contact with the person who previously had my phone...and those operators were WHOLLY unsympathetic.
So, how do I get this to stop? I have a call screening function, but it uses a minute of my airtime to pick up the phone and tell them it's not the old person's number anymore. If I turn it over to my voicemail, I have to wait and see if it was someone important (at a number i didn't recognize) and if they left me a message.
Half of the things that need to be figured out for manned interplanetary missions need to be figured out in the weightlessness of space. The biosphere gives some great implications as to what might be needed for self-sufficiency and psychology of isolation, but most of what's gained can not be directly transferred to life in space because of the extremely different environment of weightlessness and compactness necessary.
Re:Defense of Brin's morality
on
Google vs. Evil
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps YOU missed the part about "raise your price until some people leave". Then you don't have to worry about a 2-year waiting list, because only those who want to pay top dollar for top dollar service will still keep coming. THEN, you put up the website and camera to build back up the clientele pool to a 2-year waiting list.
There are quite a few different cheap versions of battery-powered regular Christmas lights. I've decorated all sorts of things with these and the worse you need to do is hide the battery pack (size of 2 or 4 AA batteries). They last hours at a time. While LED's would be better for time, the ubiquitousness of the regular lights probably means you can get a string of lights for under $20.
Many restaurants and caterers do not give away their leftovers because of the liability if someone were to eat something that had been around for the day and gone bad or in any other way gotten ill from the food.
My brother organized with a local soup kitchen to receive leftovers from a catering business he worked for, and when management found out, they stopped it. Especially with catering, you don't know who or what touched the food once it's put out.
Good idea...and I think it's still manageable in some situations, but a lot of the food industry shies from doing this for this reason.
She could always raise her price to the point that she's still putting people on a waiting list and then make a website with the profits. The extra people drawn in (especially if she put up monitoring cameras so people could see their kids while they're at work...password it and things to keep out the freaks and pedophiles) and then that will draw in more people to her service (to replace those that left because of the rate increase). Then, she could bump it up just a bit more to hedge off a few others and now she's got a steady state of enough plus a few on waiting and the highest market price for that group...
It's called supply/demand economics.
Or she can collect whatever she's getting now and leave it at that. It's only a daycare.
The point is that just because one tech-obsessed innovator thinks that a system like this must be ubiquitous and transparent does not mean that a system like this would not work any other way. Imagine if instead of your cellphone or underwear asking everyone around you for a lift to the Bronx, you did it by speaking with everyone, old-fashioned. You will get some responses of "I'm not heading that way". You will also get some responses of "No, leave me alone". You might even get "go F yourself, ya mook". There's no reason that they system can't do the same thing.
Turn your pants off, the guy looking for a ride won't get a response and will move on. In the meantime, you're also not an open node waiting to get pinged or spammed or make new aquaintances all the time from someone else's skivvies...which was what you were railing against in the first place.
You still have the network available to you this way when you are interested. It's like using your ethernet cable's plugability to be the ultimate firewall. All up to you.
Slashdot Mirror
The Maryland Science Center had (may still even have) a bike that powered a generator which lit a few lightbulbs. There was a really simple closed circuit cam too. As you pedalled harder and faster, you lit the lights and the camera was able to discern more and more of your face.
The idea was to teach you about power and electricity. Pretty cool when you're only 5-10 years old.
This used to be an interesting page about the barcode scanner door entry system I built with Python and Linux. I posted this page because I'd like to share my project with others. I've answered emails giving people circuit diagrams, and I've had various online discussions about my design decisions.
Now MC68040 and michael@slashdot.org decide that it's time for me to go down. They didn't ask me if they could link; they didn't ask if I'd like to put up a mirror somewhere else. At least michael-the-slashdot-editor knew that I'd be down in minutes if he made a link.
I'd love to put this page back up, and maybe in several days I'll remember to do so. If you're interested in interfacing Linux with serial devices or electric door strikes, drop me an email at drewp@bigasterisk.com.
Bitter?
This seems very similar to KD (VA)'s Hypersonic XLC which uses a compressed air system to launch at 80 MPH to go up 170 ft and over a crested hill and down through some more hills before finishing. It's about a 45 second ride and very exciting (especially at the launch section with the countdown light bar).
This is like the big-daddy version of the same coaster (although the 270 twirl on the way down seems like a very cool addition). I really enjoyed the airtime at 200 ft from 80 MPH to 20 MPH flipping over the summit. I imagine the view from twice as high at 1.5 times as fast will be that much cooler.
First, try looking for a reference newer than 1989. Secondly, try a reference that includes far more information in its modeling of the costs involved than the Wasserman report.
While Social Security costs may be decreased because of early death, early death due to smoking also accounts for a ton of lost income tax revenue and economic productivity. Also include familial costs for those dealing with smoking-related family members conditions and lost revenue from those debilitated (but not dead) by smoking and you start to see that when all factors are included, smokers pose a significant financial and emotional strain on the country.
The Wasserman report in JAMA was good for its time, but it was far too simplistic to account for everything we can now account for in defining the cost of smokers on the nation. Do what I did and go to ISI's Web of Science and peruse the 100 different article which cite the Wasserman report to see more recent information concerning this topic.
5$ back for 100 CDs is 5 cents per CD...
Besides, you *could* get 20$ back from the lawsuit. Then 100 CDs would be overcharged by 20 cents each! 4x more than your pessimistic view! What a country!
Harvey Mudd College's webserver just bit the slashdot bullet on this one.
It took me 5 minutes to sign up my home and cell phone numbers for being on the do-not-call list in MA. A toll-free call and 5 minutes. Not a Self-Addressed-Stamped-Envelope or some crazy address that no one can remember or write down fast enough to get signed up on the list.
As long as the other states make it similarly easy to sign up, then you'll get the same participation.
. It does force an unreal feeling to the whole movie, makes you go, "OK, we're in comic book/fantasy land now".
Right...the leaping from building to building, spider robots, and 'faster than 5 speeding bullets' were fine...it was the human battery plot that made it seem like fantasy...
Does an Apple ][e in a *black* case count as a collectible computer classic?
They're from an educational series made back in the 80's.
I'd imagine that if we were to give these plans to Lego, we'd have some really kickass home versions of all of the monuments. Or how about the 3D puzzle people? Or a craft store? There's consumeristic profit to be reaped from these laser scans...I wonder if the park system will see it.
Ok, but why should I believe Mr. Sullivan any more than I believe Michael Moore? Mr. Sullivan does nothing more than assert his own "facts" and gives no useable references to back up his views that Michael Moore had lied.
For example, the issue that the Columbine kids were *not* bowling that morning as tossed out by Sullivan in his article in opposition to Moore's view that they were:
From the "Bowling for Columbine" FAQ page:
The title is taken from the little-known fact that the two killers, Dylan and Eric, were supposed to be in bowling class at Columbine High School on the morning of the murders. At least five witnesses, including their teacher, told the police that they saw one or both boys that morning at the bowling alley for their first hour class. Some school and law enforcement officials later maintained that the two boys skipped that class that morning yet no other witness has come forward to say they saw Eric and Dylan anywhere else that morning.
One reason the film is called "Bowling For Columbine" is that, after the massacre, all the pundits and experts started blaming all the usual suspects that are wheeled out for blame whenever a school shooting occurs--evil rock music (in this case Marilyn Manson), violent video games, and bad parenting.
My point is that those scapegoats make about as much sense as blaming bowling. After all, Eric and Dylan were bowlers, they took bowling class at Columbine--was bowling responsible for their evil deeds? If they bowled that morning, did the bowling trigger their desire to commit mass murder? Or, if they skipped their bowling class that morning, did that bring on the massacre? Had they bowled, that may have altered their mood and prevented them from picking up their guns. As you can see, this is all nonsense, just as it is nonsense to blame Marilyn Manson.
From Sullivan's "source" Dan Lyons of Forbes magazine:
TITLE: Moore titled the movie Bowling for Columbine because, he suggests, the two kids who shot up Columbine High in Littleton, Colo., went to a 6 a.m. bowling class on the day of the attack.
ACTUALLY: Cool story, but police say it's not true. They say the shooters skipped their bowling class that day.
I'm sorry, but while I don't have links to the actual witness statements and police reports, I'd say that Michael Moore's explanation is better than Mr. Sullivan's "proof" from Dan Lyons' two sentence statements.
In fact, the FAQ page goes on to debunk quite a few of the "facts" stated by Dan Lyons (what's Forbes magazine doing trying to debunk a documentary anyways? why don't they stick to money articles?):
Q. Is that bank that hands out guns for real?
A. Yes. North Country Bank (with branches throughout Northern Michigan) offers you a wide choice of guns when you open up a certificate of deposit account. In effect, they are giving you all of the interest the account will earn in advance in the form of a gun. The bank is also an authorized federal arms dealer so they can do the quick background check right there at the bank. I put $1,000 in a long-term account, they did the background check, and, within an hour, walked out with my new Weatherby--just as you see it in the film. (I did have a choice of getting a pair of golf clubs or a grandfather clock, but they didn't have either of those hanging on the wall like they did those three rifles). I learned about the bank's gun offer from an ad in the local paper that showed a gun across the top with the heading, " More Bang for Your Buck" from North Country Bank. I still have the account and the gun to this day (though I plan to legally "auction" off the gun for charity, and creatively have it destroyed--more on that later!)
and...
Q. How did you convince Lockheed to let you in their missile factory in Littleton?
A. Well, first of all, the Lockheed PR people would disagree with your use of the term, "missile." They now call their Titan and Atlas missiles on which nuclear warheads were once (and still are but in less numbers) attached, "rockets." That's because the Lockheed rockets now take satellites into outer space. Some of them are weather satellites, some are telecommunications satellites, and some are top secret Pentagon projects (like the ones that are launched as spy satellites and others which are used to direct the launching of the nuclear missiles should the USA ever decide to use them).
Lockheed Martin is the largest defense contractor in the United States. They gave us the MX missile and are now heavily involved in developing the nutty Star Wars missile defense shield. They have five facilities in and around the Littleton and Denver area and they are the #1 private employer in the school district that contains Columbine High School.
How did I get their permission to film there? I threatened them with bombing, of course.
and...
If you believe Mr. Sullivan's suppositions that all of the US money to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan went to "aid" not to the government, then you should check out this link on Moore's site. It is, unlike Sullivan's article, well-linked and referenced to the State Dept reports and other sources which explain how the money was sent to Afghanistan in order to support the Taliban (not the people).
When it comes to fact-checking a documentary on how our culture is skewed in some places, I'll trust Michael Moore, not Andrew Sullivan and Dan Lyons.
I have a cell phone number that must have *just* been reassigned, because I am still getting a ton of calls from numbers that I have no idea who they are. I called a few of them back at the beginning to bitch at the people who were calling "my" number...but most caller IDs were the operator level number of some companies that must have been in contact with the person who previously had my phone...and those operators were WHOLLY unsympathetic.
So, how do I get this to stop? I have a call screening function, but it uses a minute of my airtime to pick up the phone and tell them it's not the old person's number anymore. If I turn it over to my voicemail, I have to wait and see if it was someone important (at a number i didn't recognize) and if they left me a message.
Any ideas?
Half of the things that need to be figured out for manned interplanetary missions need to be figured out in the weightlessness of space. The biosphere gives some great implications as to what might be needed for self-sufficiency and psychology of isolation, but most of what's gained can not be directly transferred to life in space because of the extremely different environment of weightlessness and compactness necessary.
Do you want me to draw you a picture?
Only if it's a nudie...
Perhaps YOU missed the part about "raise your price until some people leave". Then you don't have to worry about a 2-year waiting list, because only those who want to pay top dollar for top dollar service will still keep coming. THEN, you put up the website and camera to build back up the clientele pool to a 2-year waiting list.
There are quite a few different cheap versions of battery-powered regular Christmas lights. I've decorated all sorts of things with these and the worse you need to do is hide the battery pack (size of 2 or 4 AA batteries). They last hours at a time. While LED's would be better for time, the ubiquitousness of the regular lights probably means you can get a string of lights for under $20.
Many restaurants and caterers do not give away their leftovers because of the liability if someone were to eat something that had been around for the day and gone bad or in any other way gotten ill from the food.
My brother organized with a local soup kitchen to receive leftovers from a catering business he worked for, and when management found out, they stopped it. Especially with catering, you don't know who or what touched the food once it's put out.
Good idea...and I think it's still manageable in some situations, but a lot of the food industry shies from doing this for this reason.
...and then you get shot from the side and your enemy takes your camo and gun.
Here...Ya lazy bastard
I mean really. This isn't very askslashdot....it's more like AskGoogle -> "led holiday lights".
Duh.
She could always raise her price to the point that she's still putting people on a waiting list and then make a website with the profits. The extra people drawn in (especially if she put up monitoring cameras so people could see their kids while they're at work...password it and things to keep out the freaks and pedophiles) and then that will draw in more people to her service (to replace those that left because of the rate increase). Then, she could bump it up just a bit more to hedge off a few others and now she's got a steady state of enough plus a few on waiting and the highest market price for that group...
It's called supply/demand economics.
Or she can collect whatever she's getting now and leave it at that. It's only a daycare.
Here are a few uses:
--Suit of Armor, Shield, Sword, and Helmet
--Scare Grackles from your bird feeder for cardinals
--Robot wheels
--Microwaveable dish
The point is that just because one tech-obsessed innovator thinks that a system like this must be ubiquitous and transparent does not mean that a system like this would not work any other way. Imagine if instead of your cellphone or underwear asking everyone around you for a lift to the Bronx, you did it by speaking with everyone, old-fashioned. You will get some responses of "I'm not heading that way". You will also get some responses of "No, leave me alone". You might even get "go F yourself, ya mook". There's no reason that they system can't do the same thing.
Turn your pants off, the guy looking for a ride won't get a response and will move on. In the meantime, you're also not an open node waiting to get pinged or spammed or make new aquaintances all the time from someone else's skivvies...which was what you were railing against in the first place.
You still have the network available to you this way when you are interested. It's like using your ethernet cable's plugability to be the ultimate firewall. All up to you.
Nobody said you had to leave your pants turned on.
Could you imagine a beowulf cluster of these things?...
Oh, wait...yeah, I guess you did.
Since this one is slashdotted, I went searching and found another test that was thrown at the Tablet PCs:
Tablet PC Horshack Test