Reading this article reminds me of the Improbability Drive in the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.
The last problem to be solved was to find a perfect source of randomness, which the galaxies best professors had been trying to solve for decades as whole departments had been built up on trying to solve this problem. Then one day, a brilliant student solves the problem by realizing a a cup of hot coffee provides this data. He is immediately awarded the highest Physics prize in the universe, and immediately lynched by his peers for being a smart-ass.
IWe've found rocks from Mars on this planet, so I dispute the "Completely" part of this.
I wonder how long it will be, before we find that rocks/grit from Earth have landed on Mars. This could happen from asteroid collisions or maybe from volcanic eruptions?
Mercedes S-Class sedans will even start shutting the sunroof and lifting reclined seats if a collision is deemed likely.
Isn't closing the sun-roof a dangerous think to do. If the impact jams the passenger and driver doors, then the sunroof might be the only way of escape.
I put it down for a minute, and when I came back, it had gone...
Re:Reminds me of wings
on
Fish with Limbs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There was an video segment on Discovery science about the evolution of insect wings. The basis of the research was based on stonefies and demonstrated how gills could have evolved into stubs which would not have given flight by themselves, but would have provided enough acceleration for the critter to escape from predators. The arms race between these two species would have forced ever faster acceleration to occur, until being fast enough to make flight possible.
You have to find the magic hammer first. Then go to the large rock beside the pond and hit it as hard as you can. It will glow and then disappear, leaving a pothole leading to the secret cave. Play the magic flute with the sequence FCBBA, and these items should appear.
some day, there'll be a huge scramble of people waiting for some locked gate or door to be opened in order to get a valuable item just within range. Remember what happened when some company came out with a handheld game that used barcodes to generate characters (Scannerz?). There were sudden shortages of commodity items.
My boss is the same. She'll come in running through the door whenever another one of her peers is outside, run halfway up the stairs, then slowly creep back downstairs while constantly watching the door to see if anyone else has followed her. As soon as she smells anything being cooked, she everyone's friend, rubbing her head and shoulders against everyone else in the room. Sometimes she gets so enthusiastic, she'll jump onto the kitchen table, and start crying until she's been fed. However, once she's had her favourite meal (hot chicken), she's happy as pie, and will sit down and curl up on the sofa. If the weather's really cold, she'll jump up onto the mantelpiece above the fire and fall asleep, not moving for the entire night. In Summer she likes to spend her night's wandering around the garden with nothing else on except a collar and a name-tag. On occasions she's known to sneak into my bedroom and curl up underneath my blanket.
Because management wanted to pay top dollars for good architects to design the system, but didn't want to pay top dollars for somebody to maintain/update the system. The architects realised they were going to be shafted anyway, so they didn't bother with documentation.
This was back in the late 1980's - in the era of VT100 terminals, and 8086 PC's. The entire office building was supposed to be protected by a UPS supply.
Man, I've been throught that.. in the early days of office LAN's, we had these very primitive network analyzer boxes which could pick up the MAC addresses of all machines on the network. However, these had to be named manually. And there was no permanent storage. So every time the box lost power, some poor sod had to type in the entire network database back in again.
At least they've brought down the price of floppy drives:
The Microtel SYSWM8001 PC, with an AMD [Advanced Micro Devices Inc.] Duron 1.6GHz chip and no floppy drive can be bought for $298 from Wal-Mart now," he said.
It's not just lawyers who are limbo-dancing. Today I received an envelope marked "Please Do Not Bend - X Rays Enclosed" on the front, and "Marketing Material Enclosed" in small letters on the back.
And this was from a health insurance company.
And to think that the headteacher in my elementary school (the sports coach) insisted that all boys should practise at least 20 'headers' each day (repetitively bouncing a 1/4 kilogram football travelling at 30km/hour off their skulls and upper vertebrae).
No wonder half the students never managed to make it to university.
I understand that local weather conditions (lighting, floods, snow ) and natives (farmers, construction crews, tractors, cranes) do far more to disrupt telephone services annually than a single strike to a main exchange (the damage is more distributed across the country).
All you can do is to have lots of spare parts and cables.
Re:"hazards and risks are poorly understood"
on
Buckyballs Kill Fish
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
The laws of physics do not behave differently on a HUGE carbon 60 molecule! The article fails to show what the buckyballs do to the fish or aquatic fleas. Does anyone have insight?
Brain damage is usually caused by oxygen starvation. Could the buckyballs be absorbing the oxygen from the bloodstream? Maybe there are chemical reactions in the body that create enough heat to which causes the molecule to oxidise. The ignition properties of nanotubes were discussed in a previous slashdot article.
See the problem here? These are religiously inspired buildings.
Very true. I did a Google search for various time lengths (five/ten/twenty year plan). Anything less than ten years was commercial/industrial, ten to thirty years was regional government, and anything over thirty years was religious/fanatical.
Slashdot Mirror
But if we use a fractal patterned tread, we'll need an infinite amount of road surface!
...obviously you'll need a square drill.
Reading this article reminds me of the Improbability Drive in the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.
The last problem to be solved was to find a perfect source of randomness, which the galaxies best professors had been trying to solve for decades as whole departments had been built up on trying to solve this problem. Then one day, a brilliant student solves the problem by realizing a a cup of hot coffee provides this data. He is immediately awarded the highest Physics prize in the universe, and immediately lynched by his peers for being a smart-ass.
Just make sure it isn't bought up by a mad Chinese general. Otherwise we'll might end up having a Battle beneath the Earth.
IWe've found rocks from Mars on this planet, so I dispute the "Completely" part of this.
I wonder how long it will be, before we find that rocks/grit from Earth have landed on Mars. This could happen from asteroid collisions or maybe from volcanic eruptions?
Is that in British Imperial Inches or US Inches?
The article mentions:
Mercedes S-Class sedans will even start shutting the sunroof and lifting reclined seats if a collision is deemed likely.
Isn't closing the sun-roof a dangerous think to do. If the impact jams the passenger and driver doors, then the sunroof might be the only way of escape.
I put it down for a minute, and when I came back, it had gone...
There was an video segment on Discovery science about the evolution of insect wings. The basis of the research was based on stonefies and demonstrated how gills could have evolved into stubs which would not have given flight by themselves, but would have provided enough acceleration for the critter to escape from predators. The arms race between these two species would have forced ever faster acceleration to occur, until being fast enough to make flight possible.
Wasn't it just last year they were saying the PS3 would have 1000 processors in it.
Sony said it would have 1000 times the performance of the PS2, by using cell processors.
Anyway I thought Ensor from Blakes Seven invented the Tarial Cell computer.
You have to find the magic hammer first. Then go to the large rock beside the pond and hit it as hard as you can. It will glow and then disappear, leaving a pothole leading to the secret cave. Play the magic flute with the sequence FCBBA, and these items should appear.
That's how we get our pay cheques these days.
some day, there'll be a huge scramble of people waiting for some locked gate or door to be opened in order to get a valuable item just within range. Remember what happened when some company came out with a handheld game that used barcodes to generate characters (Scannerz?). There were sudden shortages of commodity items.
Does that count?
Yes, but they missed out on the story about newspaper editors being banned from reporting the results of school football matches if one team scores substantially higher than another team. In this case the score was 29-0 defeat.
My boss is the same. She'll come in running through the door whenever another one of her peers is outside, run halfway up the stairs, then slowly creep back downstairs while constantly watching the door to see if anyone else has followed her. As soon as she smells anything being cooked, she everyone's friend, rubbing her head and shoulders against everyone else in the room. Sometimes she gets so enthusiastic, she'll jump onto the kitchen table, and start crying until she's been fed. However, once she's had her favourite meal (hot chicken), she's happy as pie, and will sit down and curl up on the sofa. If the weather's really cold, she'll jump up onto the mantelpiece above the fire and fall asleep, not moving for the entire night. In Summer she likes to spend her night's wandering around the garden with nothing else on except a collar and a name-tag. On occasions she's known to sneak into my bedroom and curl up underneath my blanket.
It's a pity she's only a cat.
Because management wanted to pay top dollars for good architects to design the system, but didn't want to pay top dollars for somebody to maintain/update the system. The architects realised they were going to be shafted anyway, so they didn't bother with documentation.
This was back in the late 1980's - in the era of VT100 terminals, and 8086 PC's. The entire office building was supposed to be protected by a UPS supply.
Man, I've been throught that .. in the early days of office LAN's, we had these very primitive network analyzer boxes which could pick up the MAC addresses of all machines on the network. However, these had to be named manually. And there was no permanent storage. So every time the box lost power, some poor sod had to type in the entire network database back in again.
At least they've brought down the price of floppy drives:
The Microtel SYSWM8001 PC, with an AMD [Advanced Micro Devices Inc.] Duron 1.6GHz chip and no floppy drive can be bought for $298 from Wal-Mart now," he said.
It's not just lawyers who are limbo-dancing. Today I received an envelope marked "Please Do Not Bend - X Rays Enclosed" on the front, and "Marketing Material Enclosed" in small letters on the back. And this was from a health insurance company.
And to think that the headteacher in my elementary school (the sports coach) insisted that all boys should practise at least 20 'headers' each day (repetitively bouncing a 1/4 kilogram football travelling at 30km/hour off their skulls and upper vertebrae).
No wonder half the students never managed to make it to university.
I understand that local weather conditions (lighting, floods, snow ) and natives (farmers, construction crews, tractors, cranes) do far more to disrupt telephone services annually than a single strike to a main exchange (the damage is more distributed across the country).
All you can do is to have lots of spare parts and cables.
The laws of physics do not behave differently on a HUGE carbon 60 molecule! The article fails to show what the buckyballs do to the fish or aquatic fleas. Does anyone have insight?
Brain damage is usually caused by oxygen starvation. Could the buckyballs be absorbing the oxygen from the bloodstream? Maybe there are chemical reactions in the body that create enough heat to which causes the molecule to oxidise. The ignition properties of nanotubes were discussed in a previous slashdot article.
See the problem here? These are religiously inspired buildings.
Very true. I did a Google search for various time lengths (five/ten/twenty year plan). Anything less than ten years was commercial/industrial, ten to thirty years was regional government, and anything over thirty years was religious/fanatical.