Foo: Even rabbits can count to four!! Bar: I've read it hrair times. Great book. If you haven't read it, go and do so.
I thought that was one of the best concepts in the book... that rabbits could only count to four, but it never caused them any trouble. The rabbit who was the runt of a large litter was called "Hrairoo", if I recall correctly. I'm surprised more folks haven't commented on this prior art... it has to be more well-known (in the real world, at least) than Gully Dwarves.
Re:Why it spins.
on
Solder in Space
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The astronaut was lucky the rosin ball didn't come right off and hit him in the eye.
I noticed, though, that the smoke from the heated ball of solder and rosin was clearly "rising" away from the astronaut. I'm guessing that they were using a fan or something similar to blow gases away. I'd be curious to know what happens when you melt this sort of solder without a breeze -- I'll have to google "zero gee flame" to see what the latest combustion experiments have yielded.
Also interesting... at 0:43 or so (in the Windows Media version), it looks like the guy holding the fan got distracted as the rosin bubble started spinning. The smoke starts moving in other directions, and a small chunk of... something... goes flying off to the upper right of the frame. Wonder what that was?
What the article doesn't say, is that busy signals are retried until someone answers.
That would work for some folks, I guess. But we do everything with our cell phones, and the computer's online from morning till night. This is on purpose, actually, because nobody who knows us would ever call that number to contact us. The only ones calling the land line are telemarketers or bill collectors, and we're happy enough giving them busy signals all day. Legitimate surveyors are simply collateral damage.
The end result: an unknown number of all-day dialup power users were left out of the study.
was this removed and retitled with a different headline? I also found it strange that no one had posted any comments on the original story
Not to worry! I've saved the original here. As for the original headline, I think it was just too fractured and unclear: "MS Funded Study Deciding Factor in 10yr Deal" makes it sound like the study was deciding something.
I also saved the original 11 comments, most of which were asking "where are all the comments?" I suspect a glitch in the system, but I'll leave that to the experts to explain.
Oddly enough, the pictures show up quickly on the Google cache, but the site itself is awfully slow. Guess their.asp server is having problems.
Can't even link to the pretty pictures, because they decided to make it a "multimedia experience". Flash on the "All About" page, and even the simple pictures on the front are chopped into tables so they could use animated.gifs for the screen.
Hopefully the tech in the unit is a bit more efficient than the marketing on the webpage.
Huh. I wonder why they toned it down? The article DOES mention the database-checking, so it's not just correction of an editorial mistake.
I don't know, but the AC's sure do hate Michael, don't they? Strange how few of them are willing to be identified as saying they know how to run things better than the Slashdot editors. Begs the question... if there are so many people who could do it better, why is Slashdot still around?
Or does Netcraft now say that *Slashdot is dead?:)
Somewhat off-topic, but at the moment, the Slashdot front page offers a slightly different version of this story summary (even after hitting Refresh). In fact, the story even disappeared from the front page for a moment, and I thought it was destined to be a ghost article.
Here's the info, for posterity, with differences in bold.
Your Rights Online: Statue of Liberty Checks Fingerprints Against FBI Watchlist
Posted by michael on Thu Aug 12, '04 11:13 AM from the oh-the-irony dept. gurps_npc writes "There is an interesting CNN article about the Statue of Liberty finally opening again (it was closed since 9/11 for security reasons). They have increased security to 'airport levels', and offer lockers for people to rent, partly to keep those incredibly dangerous objects like swiss army knives away from the fragile Statue of Liberty. But instead of keys, the lockers use fingerprint readers to open and close (approximately one reader for every 50 lockers). The privacy violation is of course that the lockers ALSO check your fingerprints against the FBI Terrorist Watch List. The article does not mention if any record of the finger print is kept by the FBI if it does not match. It also does not mention if the machine themselves keep a record of your fingerprint after you recover your stuff."
Note that the editorial comment about the TSA design requirement wasn't in the original, either.
This is part of the trend toward automated mass transit. Suck all the joy/autonomy out of driving by constraining the ways you can legally drive, and after a while there will be no "freedom" in having your own car. You may as well get on the subway with a toy driving wheel and make vroom-vroom sounds.
Interesting argument, if a bit on the shiny side of the tinfoil hat.
I'll be happy when I can eventually get on the subway, sans toy driving wheel, and forget about the traffic, road rage, and riding with Bin Laden.
Meanwhile, we're driving toward our own destruction. Each time you (not you personally) drive to the 7-11 in your Hummer, you're using up the oil that a future generation could have used to cruise Route 66. Where's the "freedom" in that?
If you've got heat coming through the walls, just get some old-fashioned IR reflectors -- Aluminum Foil! Put it up to reflect heat away from your walls, and maybe an old fan to blow the heat off of it. Oh, and ripple it.
Actually, we used this technology on a west-facing window whose transparency was a bug, not a feature. It gave a great view of the neighbor's bathroom window, but was perfectly situated for the summer sun to beat down on the dining room table (and all its occupants).
A layer of aluminum foil -- secured in place with duct tape, of course -- took care of both problems.
Here's my question: I tried to make the new "coating" ripple-free. Was that a mistake? Since the comment has mods of Insightful, Interesting, and Funny, I don't know what to think.
Good on them - a lot of publicity for not much cash. Nice.
You're right about the publicity. I just went to downhillbattle.org and learned about their interesting (and rather illegal) stickering program. I'd be interested in buying a pack myself, but I would have to consider:
* How many laws would I break if I went to Wally World and added some "decoration" to the CDs?
* Who would like to throw my bail at the Kaufman County Jail?
What really got me was that they even didn't have a way to measure how much fuel was left and now they are looking for a good sensor to do so. Since they chose to do powered landing, fuel is essential to the survival of this craft and the passengers, and it seems like a reasonable precaution to keep track of how much of that is left.
As a programmer^W software engineer myself, I have to say that this design methodology looks verrrry familiar.
If I didn't know better, I'd think Carmack had a software design background...:)
Re:It looks nifty, but its not a sniper rifle
on
Ready, Aim, HACK!
·
· Score: 1
They've just got image poaching turned off. Go here. Scroll down (possibly to the pixellated hammer image) and hit refresh if needed. It looks surprisingly cool.
As far as the hammer... I'm sure it would work just fine as a close-range, permanent DoS tool.
I find that all I post about in the last 3-4 years is my UID.
Wow, Slashdotter #10. A wide-open username namespace and you picked... "ximenes"?
800,000 Slashdotters later, and that name would have *still* been available. Why not something simple, like "John" or "Me" or "This'll never take off"?
Re:I use the same password on all my systems
on
Fun With Passwords?
·
· Score: 1
The password I use on all the systems I access is ********
That reminds me of a bash.org conversation (that I can't seem to find):
foo> You know, when you type your password in IRC, it comes across as stars. Here's mine: ******** foo> Try it! bar> pass4win bar> what did you see foo> I saw ******** bar> You pass4win pile of stinking pass4win foo> You ******** pile of stinking ******** foo> Whenever you type "pass4win" I see ******** bar> but why do I see my password when you type it? foo> Because IRC knows it's your password and lets you see it. bar> kewl
Finally, an excuse to share a story from "back in the day".
I was a teenager delivering advertising circulars in Tulsa, and I stopped to chat (a frequent occurrence) with an old guy with cool gadgets in his garage. After a while, he showed me his favorite unsung invention... a tiny blade mounted on a circular track in a spherically-faced plastic housing.
He described for me how this device could be used to reshape the cornea -- make a shallow circular incision, and the eye would reshape itself. Voila, corrected vision without contacts or glasses!
But nobody was interested in his invention, he said.
Ten years later, radial keratotomy was all the rage... the only difference from the old man's method, really, was that the incisions were made radially instead of circularly.
And that was soon followed by any number of friggin'-laser-assisted procedures that all built on an idea I first heard about in the early '80s from a crazy old guy in a garage in Tulsa. I wonder if he's still around... I got the impression he wouldn't be bitter that his crazy idea turned into something big after all.
Clap Clap Clap... Mod parent up, please. Aside from the occasional spelling error, I could not have said it better myself.
Occasional spelling error? By the time I got done reading it, I wondered if the poster had finished third grade English... much less high school civics.
I've found that opinions that aren't really given much thought tend to come out the same way -- without much thought. And in this case, I can't tell where one rambling thought ends and another begins.
If I could, I'd mod the comment "-1, Incomplete" -- please resubmit when sober.
Er, it's control-H (^M) not control-D (^D) that erases. Control-D is eof. Get outa your GUI!
Just a typo, I know, but control-M (13) is carriage return. That might still be valid, though... assuming a word processor that doesn't assume control-K (10, line feed) with control-M, you could return to the beginning of the line and overtype.
When I was a high school student in Tulsa in the 1980's, a monorail system around town was being kicked around. I thought it was pretty cool, although it didn't actually *go* anywhere in particular. It went by my school, and that was good enough.
I don't know what it is about monorail that gets the imagination so fired up... as the site notes, the engineering required for something as simple as switching tracks is daunting. But what's the runaway #1 selection in an online poll of Tulsa students? 80% say... Monorail, baby! (Note, this is before Slashdotters hit the poll and skew the results...)
And my conscience is telling me that as the resident of a Bush-leaning states, I don't want four more years of Bush on my conscience
Check out David Cobb's site more closely, and you'll find that the Green Party absolutely understands your concerns. The "Ralph Who?" quip refers to the decision by the Green Party to part ways with Ralph Nader and his short-sighted, self-focused 2004 campaign.
Cobb is focused on two things: Grow the Green Party, and Get Rid Of Bush. Here's a statement on his site that addresses your concerns:
1. In "swing states," where few percentage points separate Bush and Kerry, we encourage activists to mobilize voters behind Kerry. (A frequently updated list of swing states is posted at www.swing04.com.)
2. In "safe states" (and Washington, D.C.), so overwhelmingly pro-Bush or pro-Kerry that we can be confident of who will win in November, we encourage activists to mobilize voters behind Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb. 3. In all states, we encourage activists to engage in election-year vigilance to ensure that all votes count, especially those of racial minorities -- and to advocate for instant runoff voting and other reforms so that voters in future elections can support the candidate they most believe in without risk of electing the candidate they most oppose.
The Green Party is growing up -- we're no longer a single-issue party, and we've told the vanity candidate to take a hike. Check us out again... I think you'll like what you see.
Either way, you could sell the windows box to subsidize the replacement plan and save a buttload of money.
If only it were that simple. When my company was still owned by its founder, there was an annual sale of old equipment to employees. It was so popular, they had to institute a lottery system to determine who got first dibs. Lots of fun.
When we got bought by $PUBLICALLY_TRADED_CORPORATION, the equipment sale was the first thing to go, closely followed by the annual company picnic. Seems it's easier to just throw it away (or hire someone to get rid of it) than to make it available to your employees.
Lockheed, of course, has the additional problem of being a defense contractor. You can't even make a photocopy without running blank pages after, to eliminate ghost images from the toner roller. No way are they going to put their spare PCs in the company garage sale.
Funny you should mention the bacteria. I got tired of my frozen dinners getting stolen at a previous employer, so I took one and left it on the dashboard in the Texas summer heat for a couple of days. Then, I put it back in the freezer.
However, to give the thief a chance to rethink his/her ways, I told my co-workers of my plan. Apparently, word got back to the thief, because nobody took the bait. In fact, as far as I can recall, nobody ever reported their lunch missing again.
Slashdot Mirror
Foo: Even rabbits can count to four!!
Bar: I've read it hrair times. Great book. If you haven't read it, go and do so.
I thought that was one of the best concepts in the book... that rabbits could only count to four, but it never caused them any trouble. The rabbit who was the runt of a large litter was called "Hrairoo", if I recall correctly. I'm surprised more folks haven't commented on this prior art... it has to be more well-known (in the real world, at least) than Gully Dwarves.
The astronaut was lucky the rosin ball didn't come right off and hit him in the eye.
I noticed, though, that the smoke from the heated ball of solder and rosin was clearly "rising" away from the astronaut. I'm guessing that they were using a fan or something similar to blow gases away. I'd be curious to know what happens when you melt this sort of solder without a breeze -- I'll have to google "zero gee flame" to see what the latest combustion experiments have yielded.
Also interesting... at 0:43 or so (in the Windows Media version), it looks like the guy holding the fan got distracted as the rosin bubble started spinning. The smoke starts moving in other directions, and a small chunk of... something... goes flying off to the upper right of the frame. Wonder what that was?
What the article doesn't say, is that busy signals are retried until someone answers.
That would work for some folks, I guess. But we do everything with our cell phones, and the computer's online from morning till night. This is on purpose, actually, because nobody who knows us would ever call that number to contact us. The only ones calling the land line are telemarketers or bill collectors, and we're happy enough giving them busy signals all day. Legitimate surveyors are simply collateral damage.
The end result: an unknown number of all-day dialup power users were left out of the study.
was this removed and retitled with a different headline? I also found it strange that no one had posted any comments on the original story
Not to worry! I've saved the original here. As for the original headline, I think it was just too fractured and unclear: "MS Funded Study Deciding Factor in 10yr Deal" makes it sound like the study was deciding something.
I also saved the original 11 comments, most of which were asking "where are all the comments?" I suspect a glitch in the system, but I'll leave that to the experts to explain.
Non, je ne veux pas coucher avec toi ce soir.
.sig discussions... but curiosity killed the cat...)
Very cool! How about this riff of the original verse:
Voulez-vous manger du cochon, ce soir?
The kids get a kick out of how romantically you can invite your date to a pork dinner.
(I considered posting as AC because there's nothing lamer than
Oddly enough, the pictures show up quickly on the Google cache, but the site itself is awfully slow. Guess their .asp server is having problems.
.gifs for the screen.
Can't even link to the pretty pictures, because they decided to make it a "multimedia experience". Flash on the "All About" page, and even the simple pictures on the front are chopped into tables so they could use animated
Hopefully the tech in the unit is a bit more efficient than the marketing on the webpage.
Huh. I wonder why they toned it down? The article DOES mention the database-checking, so it's not just correction of an editorial mistake.
:)
I don't know, but the AC's sure do hate Michael, don't they? Strange how few of them are willing to be identified as saying they know how to run things better than the Slashdot editors. Begs the question... if there are so many people who could do it better, why is Slashdot still around?
Or does Netcraft now say that *Slashdot is dead?
Somewhat off-topic, but at the moment, the Slashdot front page offers a slightly different version of this story summary (even after hitting Refresh). In fact, the story even disappeared from the front page for a moment, and I thought it was destined to be a ghost article.
Here's the info, for posterity, with differences in bold.
Your Rights Online: Statue of Liberty Checks Fingerprints Against FBI Watchlist
Posted by michael on Thu Aug 12, '04 11:13 AM
from the oh-the-irony dept.
gurps_npc writes "There is an interesting CNN article about the Statue of Liberty finally opening again (it was closed since 9/11 for security reasons). They have increased security to 'airport levels', and offer lockers for people to rent, partly to keep those incredibly dangerous objects like swiss army knives away from the fragile Statue of Liberty. But instead of keys, the lockers use fingerprint readers to open and close (approximately one reader for every 50 lockers). The privacy violation is of course that the lockers ALSO check your fingerprints against the FBI Terrorist Watch List. The article does not mention if any record of the finger print is kept by the FBI if it does not match. It also does not mention if the machine themselves keep a record of your fingerprint after you recover your stuff."
Note that the editorial comment about the TSA design requirement wasn't in the original, either.
This is part of the trend toward automated mass transit. Suck all the joy/autonomy out of driving by constraining the ways you can legally drive, and after a while there will be no "freedom" in having your own car. You may as well get on the subway with a toy driving wheel and make vroom-vroom sounds.
Interesting argument, if a bit on the shiny side of the tinfoil hat.
I'll be happy when I can eventually get on the subway, sans toy driving wheel, and forget about the traffic, road rage, and riding with Bin Laden.
Meanwhile, we're driving toward our own destruction. Each time you (not you personally) drive to the 7-11 in your Hummer, you're using up the oil that a future generation could have used to cruise Route 66. Where's the "freedom" in that?
If you've got heat coming through the walls, just get some old-fashioned IR reflectors -- Aluminum Foil! Put it up to reflect heat away from your walls, and maybe an old fan to blow the heat off of it. Oh, and ripple it.
Actually, we used this technology on a west-facing window whose transparency was a bug, not a feature. It gave a great view of the neighbor's bathroom window, but was perfectly situated for the summer sun to beat down on the dining room table (and all its occupants).
A layer of aluminum foil -- secured in place with duct tape, of course -- took care of both problems.
Here's my question: I tried to make the new "coating" ripple-free. Was that a mistake? Since the comment has mods of Insightful, Interesting, and Funny, I don't know what to think.
Good on them - a lot of publicity for not much cash. Nice.
You're right about the publicity. I just went to downhillbattle.org and learned about their interesting (and rather illegal) stickering program. I'd be interested in buying a pack myself, but I would have to consider:
* How many laws would I break if I went to Wally World and added some "decoration" to the CDs?
* Who would like to throw my bail at the Kaufman County Jail?
* Barring that, there's always the Poor Farm
* Can I really trust an outfit that thinks that a side-scrolling website design is a Good Thing?
As a programmer^W software engineer myself, I have to say that this design methodology looks verrrry familiar.
* Write code.
* Compile.
* Fix syntax errors.
* Compile.
* Declare variables.
* Compile.
* Celebrate successful compile!
* Run.
* Change variable declarations to prevent runtime overflow error.
* Compile.
* Fix typo in * Compile.
* Run.
* Celebrate run to completion!
* Check results. Database is now empty.
* Panic.
* Call DBA to request database restore.
* Find comment: * Purchase another case of Jolt.
If I didn't know better, I'd think Carmack had a software design background...
They've just got image poaching turned off. Go here. Scroll down (possibly to the pixellated hammer image) and hit refresh if needed. It looks surprisingly cool.
As far as the hammer... I'm sure it would work just fine as a close-range, permanent DoS tool.
I find that all I post about in the last 3-4 years is my UID.
Wow, Slashdotter #10. A wide-open username namespace and you picked... "ximenes"?
800,000 Slashdotters later, and that name would have *still* been available. Why not something simple, like "John" or "Me" or "This'll never take off"?
There are tens of people with a 2 digit UID.
Tens? More like dozens! Scores , even!
The password I use on all the systems I access is ********
That reminds me of a bash.org conversation (that I can't seem to find):
foo> You know, when you type your password in IRC, it comes across as stars. Here's mine: ********
foo> Try it!
bar> pass4win
bar> what did you see
foo> I saw ********
bar> You pass4win pile of stinking pass4win
foo> You ******** pile of stinking ********
foo> Whenever you type "pass4win" I see ********
bar> but why do I see my password when you type it?
foo> Because IRC knows it's your password and lets you see it.
bar> kewl
Finally, an excuse to share a story from "back in the day".
I was a teenager delivering advertising circulars in Tulsa, and I stopped to chat (a frequent occurrence) with an old guy with cool gadgets in his garage. After a while, he showed me his favorite unsung invention... a tiny blade mounted on a circular track in a spherically-faced plastic housing.
He described for me how this device could be used to reshape the cornea -- make a shallow circular incision, and the eye would reshape itself. Voila, corrected vision without contacts or glasses!
But nobody was interested in his invention, he said.
Ten years later, radial keratotomy was all the rage... the only difference from the old man's method, really, was that the incisions were made radially instead of circularly.
And that was soon followed by any number of friggin'-laser-assisted procedures that all built on an idea I first heard about in the early '80s from a crazy old guy in a garage in Tulsa. I wonder if he's still around... I got the impression he wouldn't be bitter that his crazy idea turned into something big after all.
Clap Clap Clap... Mod parent up, please. Aside from the occasional spelling error, I could not have said it better myself.
Occasional spelling error? By the time I got done reading it, I wondered if the poster had finished third grade English... much less high school civics.
I've found that opinions that aren't really given much thought tend to come out the same way -- without much thought. And in this case, I can't tell where one rambling thought ends and another begins.
If I could, I'd mod the comment "-1, Incomplete" -- please resubmit when sober.
And I make lasers...
Friggin' lasers, you insensitive clod!
'Scuse me while I kiss the sky!
Who would have figured that Hendrix was into astronomy?
Silly rabbit, everybody knows he's saying "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy." Right?
Er, it's control-H (^M) not control-D (^D) that erases. Control-D is eof. Get outa your GUI!
Just a typo, I know, but control-M (13) is carriage return. That might still be valid, though... assuming a word processor that doesn't assume control-K (10, line feed) with control-M, you could return to the beginning of the line and overtype.
^Ks this post a waste of karma, or what?^M
When I was a high school student in Tulsa in the 1980's, a monorail system around town was being kicked around. I thought it was pretty cool, although it didn't actually *go* anywhere in particular. It went by my school, and that was good enough.
I don't know what it is about monorail that gets the imagination so fired up... as the site notes, the engineering required for something as simple as switching tracks is daunting. But what's the runaway #1 selection in an online poll of Tulsa students? 80% say... Monorail, baby! (Note, this is before Slashdotters hit the poll and skew the results...)
Check out David Cobb's site more closely, and you'll find that the Green Party absolutely understands your concerns. The "Ralph Who?" quip refers to the decision by the Green Party to part ways with Ralph Nader and his short-sighted, self-focused 2004 campaign.
Cobb is focused on two things: Grow the Green Party, and Get Rid Of Bush. Here's a statement on his site that addresses your concerns:
The Green Party is growing up -- we're no longer a single-issue party, and we've told the vanity candidate to take a hike. Check us out again... I think you'll like what you see.
Either way, you could sell the windows box to subsidize the replacement plan and save a buttload of money.
If only it were that simple. When my company was still owned by its founder, there was an annual sale of old equipment to employees. It was so popular, they had to institute a lottery system to determine who got first dibs. Lots of fun.
When we got bought by $PUBLICALLY_TRADED_CORPORATION, the equipment sale was the first thing to go, closely followed by the annual company picnic. Seems it's easier to just throw it away (or hire someone to get rid of it) than to make it available to your employees.
Lockheed, of course, has the additional problem of being a defense contractor. You can't even make a photocopy without running blank pages after, to eliminate ghost images from the toner roller. No way are they going to put their spare PCs in the company garage sale.
Funny you should mention the bacteria. I got tired of my frozen dinners getting stolen at a previous employer, so I took one and left it on the dashboard in the Texas summer heat for a couple of days. Then, I put it back in the freezer.
However, to give the thief a chance to rethink his/her ways, I told my co-workers of my plan. Apparently, word got back to the thief, because nobody took the bait. In fact, as far as I can recall, nobody ever reported their lunch missing again.