Am I the only one who actually listens to the President? During the 2004 State of the Union address, he clearly said "nuclear" rather than "nucular". He also said "terror," whereas he used to pronounce it more like "terra." So he has learned something while on the job. Alas, he hasn't learned about international relations or the environment.
I'm really in the middle on this one. I've built computers and fought with them. I've worked at a workstation sales office where we had to troubleshoot everything and work in Unix all day every day and in that job, I got the call when tech support couldn't figure out the problem. So... I have no doubt that I would be able to set up the system from scratch. The subscription fee is the main thing keeping me from buying a TiVo. (We don't have DirecTV or cable - just an antenna in the attic.)
That said, I've looked into MythTV - it certainly got my attention, and I'm trying, however slowly, to figure out the hardware I'll need to make it all work, and then I might just buy it all and put it together and hope it works. Time is a valuable commodity to me, too, so I don't want to spend forever troubleshooting Linux. I would rather spend forever researching my options while the prices fall;-)
USSRC has not been in particularly good shape financially for the last decade or more. Space Camp does tend to support the entire operation. (Museum admission is only about $14, including an IMAX movie.) The director finagled money to build the Saturn V mock-up, saying he had all kinds of corporate pledges that didn't really exist. Thus, when it was time to talk about building the gantry, the money never materialized.
The new centrifuge is pretty disappointing. I think it gets to 4 g's, but there is no program during the ride - you just get in the giant washing machine, spin dry, then get out. There is a waiting room in which the operator might give a briefing about the experience beforehand, and I presume the operator could make some presentation during, but neither occurred when I took a spin.
Also to boost the amusement park factor, in about 1993 they installed "Space Shot" which bothered me because it was taller than the Saturn I-B by a meter or two. They got in trouble with the state for advertising it as a thrill ride without mentioning the educational benefits. Basically, it's a really fast outdoor elevator. People strap in on all sides of a steel frame tower facing out with legs dangling from the seats, shoot up (again, about 4 g's) courtesy of air pressure stored in tanks, and come back down with -0.1g's. Bouncing on the column of air follows, running riders up and down a few more times.
Most of my undergraduate classmates were also counselors at USSRC since I went to the University of Alabama in Huntsville which is walking distance from USSRC (but I'm probably the only one who's ever walked it). I heard similar stories from them about various problems.
They scrapped the centrifuge, as you said, and replaced it with another one - smaller and more of an amusement park ride than the flight simulator they had before. What's more, the old centrifuge was built inside the connector ring for the first and second stages of the Saturn V.
They built the Saturn V replica in 1999 in time for the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The gantry has not been built.
I would appreciate seeing some fine management at the museum straighten out the mess there, but I still enjoy the opportunity to see their exhibits. What we really need is some serious space exploration to give them need to display new artifacts!
Rebecca Mercuri is the foremost expert on Electronic Voting. Her web site is chock-full of useful information, including many of her publications on the topic.
Mercuri has been interested in electronic voting since the 80's. She put up a web site when she noticed the 2000 Presidential election falling into confusion, and within 15 minutes had a call from the Associated Press - who had found her web site. She has testified before Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court about voting systems.
She devised the Mercuri Method of electronic voting, whereby the electronic voting machine prints a paper ballot for the voter to verify after casting the vote.
In describing a language a Turing Award recipient explains,
It was logically impossible for any source language program to cause the computer to run wild, either at compile time or at run time. A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array....[W]e asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interest of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to... In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law.
Hoare, C. Anthony R. "The Emperor's Old Clothes." Communications of the ACM, Vol. 24, No. 2, February 1981, pp. 75-83.
His award from the ACM was for his fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages.
You're not the only one:
Return-Path:
Received: from mapsyknits.com (adsl-199-245-138-8-cust-271-dsl.bac2.com [199.245.138.8])
by mail.hiwaay.net (8.12.9/8.12.9) with SMTP id h7HArlAt981759
for ; Sun, 17 Aug 2003 05:53:47 -0500 (CDT)
Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2003 05:53:47 -0500 (CDT)
Message-Id: <200308171053.h7HArlAt981759@mail.hiwaay.net>
Received: (qmail 1369 invoked by uid 0); 16 Aug 2003 22:40:42 -0000
From: Recall Team <noreply@mapsyknits.com>
Subject: Arnold for "Govenator!"
To: x
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: MULTIPART/alternative; BOUNDARY="0-1543114699-1061073639=:1323"
X-bounce-to: bounce-3EF31AF313-x@mapsyknits.com
[image's link][image]
You are receiving this offer as
a special promotion. As a leader in permission based marketing,
your privacy is extremely important to us. If you no longer wish to
receive these special offers,
please Click here to unsubscribe. We honor all removal requests immediately.
[eyeball counting image]
The August 2003 Scientific American has a relevant article by Mark Warschauer, "Demystifying the Digital Divide" talking about the complexities of bringing computers to communities, particularly in third-world countries, but the same problems apply in various parts of the U.S. You (obviously) can't just put computers there and expect people to use them.
The article lists several more sources for information:
Warschauer, Mark. Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide. Boston: MIT Press. 2003.
My brother works at a large department store (chain) pushing carts for about $8/hr, and if he works Sunday, he makes $1/hr extra - only 1 extra, and that's what the employer did to keep people happy about working on Sunday.
Most of the managers I've ever heard of bend over backward scheduling people so that they never work overtime, or if they do, it's for just a very short time.
I must admit some curiosity about the problem. I bought an Orinoco access point and put it under the stairs, centrally located, and I get top-notch reception throughout the house and solid connectivity over the entire.18 acre (.013 hectares) lot. My house was built in 1995 and doesn't have much metal in the construction - certainly not in the gypsum board walls.
Re:Insulation Vs. The Flying Armoured Tank
on
Columbia Coverage
·
· Score: 1
The vehicle was flying about mach 2 at 80 seconds, and there have been instances where ice and foam damaged the tiles. See my journal for some references.
This was my submission, seconds later than this story post:
The U.S. Space Shuttle Columbia, flying STS 107 apparently dissentegrated over north Texas during re-entry according to CNN, CBS, and NBC TV reports. Columbia launched on January 16 for that orbiter's 28th journey. Communication was lost at 8:00 Central Time (14:00 GMT), 16 minutes prior to the scheduled landing, at an altitude of 200,000 feet (61km) and velocity of 12,000 miles per hour (19,000 km/h). NASA advises people to report and avoid debris in the area because it may inlude toxic propellants.
Re:Callipygian in pop culture
on
A Word a Day
·
· Score: 1
Sorry. I had the wrong URL in the clipboard. I was trying to link to the lyrics.
Callipygian in pop culture
on
A Word a Day
·
· Score: 1
Several years ago Sir Mix-A-Lot came out with a song called "Baby Got Back," hailing the beauty of large tooshes. In the video, there was an oversized magazine cover featuring a woman on the front, much like Cosmopolitan, but it showed her backside and the title of the mag was "Callipygian!"
Quick rundown: Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Netherlands tied for 1st place. Slovenia (14) and Costa Rica (15) also beat the United States (17). China (138) and North Korea (139) finish up the list.
In 1997 I sold some memory for about $250 via USENET, and the buyer wanted it shipped C.O.D. I went to the local office of the United States Postal Service to send it off, and explained to the clerk that I only wanted to accept cash for the payment. There were two blanks on the C.O.D. form to enter the amount for cash and for check, and in the check section, he wrote "NO CHECK" for me. The package went on its way, got delivered, and the postal clerk on the other end followed regulations by accepting a check. The check was rubber. The Bexar Co. Texas district attorney's office whose job it is to hunt down bad checks was no help - they just took the bad check and sat on it. The post office was no help - even though it was their clerk who made up regulations on his own.
Moral: If you must ship C.O.D., set the amount for payment by check to the maximum - $10,000. That way, if it's a bad check, the clerk will remember it (to be a witness to the passing of a bad check), and the crime will be substantially worse if you do get a bad check, making it easier to pursue.
This summer I drove (in a car) 1100 miles through several states in the U.S. and almost every motorcyclist I saw on the interstate (especially in Indiana and Wisconsin) was wearing blue jeans, a cotton shirt, and no helmet. The most head protection I saw was a cotton scarf. It seems I saw a couple of helmeted motorcyclists in Alabama.
I doubt if the invention of another safety device for motorcyclists will do much good for those who already have a flagrant disregard for their own protection.
The Foreverbright site (linked from "holiday" in the intro) has a "Where to Buy" link offering a lengthy list of retailers. I haven't checked the shelves yet, but it seems you should look at those little hardware stores and drugstores rather than random department stores if you want to buy them in person.
A CD hanging from the rear view mirror (instead of or in addition to a cardboard pine tree air freshener or dice) seemed all the rage while I was in Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico in the summer of 2001. Of course, I saw the decorations on more cumbis than cars:-). (A cumbi in Taxco is a VW van with the side door and seats removed, benches installed, shoe polish proclaiming the destinations on the windshield, and a $0.30 fare to ride wherever it happens to go.)
You absolutely can't miss the U.S. Space and Rocket Center - it's the Earth's largest space museum, featuring a real Saturn V moon rocket lying on the ground and a mock-up standing on end, a slew of other rockets (Redstone, Atlas, Jupiter C, Hermes, V-2, a Shuttle mock-up, real engines all over the place, and more), space station presentation, Skylab mock-ups, full lunar lander and rover exhibits, and more, plus a helicopter and some missiles. They have a moon rock on display. (You can touch the one at the Smithsonian.) There's an IMAX Dome theater showing something spacey, a climbing wall, Mars rides, a centrifuge, and a really fast outdoor elevator to nowhere they call "Space Shot."
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one who actually listens to the President? During the 2004 State of the Union address, he clearly said "nuclear" rather than "nucular". He also said "terror," whereas he used to pronounce it more like "terra." So he has learned something while on the job. Alas, he hasn't learned about international relations or the environment.
I'm really in the middle on this one. I've built computers and fought with them. I've worked at a workstation sales office where we had to troubleshoot everything and work in Unix all day every day and in that job, I got the call when tech support couldn't figure out the problem. So... I have no doubt that I would be able to set up the system from scratch. The subscription fee is the main thing keeping me from buying a TiVo. (We don't have DirecTV or cable - just an antenna in the attic.)
;-)
That said, I've looked into MythTV - it certainly got my attention, and I'm trying, however slowly, to figure out the hardware I'll need to make it all work, and then I might just buy it all and put it together and hope it works. Time is a valuable commodity to me, too, so I don't want to spend forever troubleshooting Linux. I would rather spend forever researching my options while the prices fall
USSRC has not been in particularly good shape financially for the last decade or more. Space Camp does tend to support the entire operation. (Museum admission is only about $14, including an IMAX movie.) The director finagled money to build the Saturn V mock-up, saying he had all kinds of corporate pledges that didn't really exist. Thus, when it was time to talk about building the gantry, the money never materialized.
The new centrifuge is pretty disappointing. I think it gets to 4 g's, but there is no program during the ride - you just get in the giant washing machine, spin dry, then get out. There is a waiting room in which the operator might give a briefing about the experience beforehand, and I presume the operator could make some presentation during, but neither occurred when I took a spin.
Also to boost the amusement park factor, in about 1993 they installed "Space Shot" which bothered me because it was taller than the Saturn I-B by a meter or two. They got in trouble with the state for advertising it as a thrill ride without mentioning the educational benefits. Basically, it's a really fast outdoor elevator. People strap in on all sides of a steel frame tower facing out with legs dangling from the seats, shoot up (again, about 4 g's) courtesy of air pressure stored in tanks, and come back down with -0.1g's. Bouncing on the column of air follows, running riders up and down a few more times.
Most of my undergraduate classmates were also counselors at USSRC since I went to the University of Alabama in Huntsville which is walking distance from USSRC (but I'm probably the only one who's ever walked it). I heard similar stories from them about various problems. They scrapped the centrifuge, as you said, and replaced it with another one - smaller and more of an amusement park ride than the flight simulator they had before. What's more, the old centrifuge was built inside the connector ring for the first and second stages of the Saturn V. They built the Saturn V replica in 1999 in time for the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The gantry has not been built. I would appreciate seeing some fine management at the museum straighten out the mess there, but I still enjoy the opportunity to see their exhibits. What we really need is some serious space exploration to give them need to display new artifacts!
Mercuri has been interested in electronic voting since the 80's. She put up a web site when she noticed the 2000 Presidential election falling into confusion, and within 15 minutes had a call from the Associated Press - who had found her web site. She has testified before Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court about voting systems.
She devised the Mercuri Method of electronic voting, whereby the electronic voting machine prints a paper ballot for the voter to verify after casting the vote.
Hoare, C. Anthony R. "The Emperor's Old Clothes." Communications of the ACM, Vol. 24, No. 2, February 1981, pp. 75-83.
His award from the ACM was for his fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages.
Sir Tony Hoare has worked for Microsoft since 1999.
Received: from mapsyknits.com (adsl-199-245-138-8-cust-271-dsl.bac2.com [199.245.138.8])
by mail.hiwaay.net (8.12.9/8.12.9) with SMTP id h7HArlAt981759
for ; Sun, 17 Aug 2003 05:53:47 -0500 (CDT)
Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2003 05:53:47 -0500 (CDT)
Message-Id: <200308171053.h7HArlAt981759@mail.hiwaay.net>
Received: (qmail 1369 invoked by uid 0); 16 Aug 2003 22:40:42 -0000
From: Recall Team <noreply@mapsyknits.com>
Subject: Arnold for "Govenator!"
To: x
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: MULTIPART/alternative; BOUNDARY="0-1543114699-1061073639=:1323"
X-bounce-to: bounce-3EF31AF313-x@mapsyknits.com
--0-1543114699-1061073639=:1323
Content-Type: TEXT/plain; CHARSET=US-ASCII
--0-1543114699-1061073639=:1323
[image's link] [image] You are receiving this offer as a special promotion. As a leader in permission based marketing,Content-Type: TEXT/html; CHARSET=iso-8859-1
your privacy is extremely important to us. If you no longer wish to receive these special offers,
please Click here to unsubscribe. We honor all removal requests immediately.
[eyeball counting image]
The article lists several more sources for information:
My brother works at a large department store (chain) pushing carts for about $8/hr, and if he works Sunday, he makes $1/hr extra - only 1 extra, and that's what the employer did to keep people happy about working on Sunday.
Most of the managers I've ever heard of bend over backward scheduling people so that they never work overtime, or if they do, it's for just a very short time.
I must admit some curiosity about the problem. I bought an Orinoco access point and put it under the stairs, centrally located, and I get top-notch reception throughout the house and solid connectivity over the entire .18 acre (.013 hectares) lot. My house was built in 1995 and doesn't have much metal in the construction - certainly not in the gypsum board walls.
With a decidedly Apple bent - here.
NASA's afternoon press conference today produced the Air Force photo and a helpful series of slides mapping the sensor failures over time.
The vehicle was flying about mach 2 at 80 seconds, and there have been instances where ice and foam damaged the tiles. See my journal for some references.
The U.S. Space Shuttle Columbia, flying STS 107 apparently dissentegrated over north Texas during re-entry according to CNN, CBS, and NBC TV reports. Columbia launched on January 16 for that orbiter's 28th journey. Communication was lost at 8:00 Central Time (14:00 GMT), 16 minutes prior to the scheduled landing, at an altitude of 200,000 feet (61km) and velocity of 12,000 miles per hour (19,000 km/h). NASA advises people to report and avoid debris in the area because it may inlude toxic propellants.
Sorry. I had the wrong URL in the clipboard. I was trying to link to the lyrics.
Several years ago Sir Mix-A-Lot came out with a song called "Baby Got Back," hailing the beauty of large tooshes. In the video, there was an oversized magazine cover featuring a woman on the front, much like Cosmopolitan, but it showed her backside and the title of the mag was "Callipygian!"
Quick rundown: Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Netherlands tied for 1st place. Slovenia (14) and Costa Rica (15) also beat the United States (17). China (138) and North Korea (139) finish up the list.
You're right. Sputnik was billed as Earth's first artificial moon - and nobody complained that it was only as big as a basketball.
Moral: If you must ship C.O.D., set the amount for payment by check to the maximum - $10,000. That way, if it's a bad check, the clerk will remember it (to be a witness to the passing of a bad check), and the crime will be substantially worse if you do get a bad check, making it easier to pursue.
Andy Grove, Intel Chairman
Gordon Moore, Intel Chairman Emeritus
Gordon Moore on his law, in which he boldly predicts it will hold another score years.
I doubt if the invention of another safety device for motorcyclists will do much good for those who already have a flagrant disregard for their own protection.
The Foreverbright site (linked from "holiday" in the intro) has a "Where to Buy" link offering a lengthy list of retailers. I haven't checked the shelves yet, but it seems you should look at those little hardware stores and drugstores rather than random department stores if you want to buy them in person.
A CD hanging from the rear view mirror (instead of or in addition to a cardboard pine tree air freshener or dice) seemed all the rage while I was in Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico in the summer of 2001. Of course, I saw the decorations on more cumbis than cars :-). (A cumbi in Taxco is a VW van with the side door and seats removed, benches installed, shoe polish proclaiming the destinations on the windshield, and a $0.30 fare to ride wherever it happens to go.)
You absolutely can't miss the U.S. Space and Rocket Center - it's the Earth's largest space museum, featuring a real Saturn V moon rocket lying on the ground and a mock-up standing on end, a slew of other rockets (Redstone, Atlas, Jupiter C, Hermes, V-2, a Shuttle mock-up, real engines all over the place, and more), space station presentation, Skylab mock-ups, full lunar lander and rover exhibits, and more, plus a helicopter and some missiles. They have a moon rock on display. (You can touch the one at the Smithsonian.) There's an IMAX Dome theater showing something spacey, a climbing wall, Mars rides, a centrifuge, and a really fast outdoor elevator to nowhere they call "Space Shot."
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) documents all kinds of air pollution (literally) in AP-42. Section 13.2.1 addresses paved roads, and section 13.2.2 addresses unpaved roads.