Sitting in the cubicle next to me as I type this is Walt, a coder who couldn't spell to save his life. He's not the best coder, but he's not a bad one either. But dealing with his spelling 'disability' is frustrating at times and funny at times. Reading his commented code is a trip! However, in general it doesn't cause problems - if he names his variables hedder, poynter, and lupe I don't care. The only times it ever causes problems are when he misspells items in a GUI; customers see that. So I know to double check anything he does that the customers see.
Occasionally you run into pockets of the opposite culture. At my alma mater, girls outnumber guys 2 to 1 (did I pick the right school or what?). I used to date this wonderful little CS girl there, and it turns out about half her friends were CS women. They would stick together, like women often do, and it seemed to me that the advantage actually went to the women at that program. The best sysad in the program was a guy, but the best encryption people were girls (good luck on your thesis defense, Kristin! Hugs, Theresa!). I guess that's just because girls are better at math. Or maybe at keeping secrets;). My old girlfriend said that she went into CS because "it was the only thing that was hard for me, and I wanted a challenge".
Interestingly enough, she also happens to be an Iraqi-American. The past couple of months have been strange. Right now she's working overseas and the people there are giving her crap for being a warmongering American. What are you supposed to do in that kind of situation?
Exactly. This is not a GM detector. I am a little surprised that the sensitivity of a thermodetector would be high enough, but LLNL does good work, so it figures. When I first read that it was a low temperature detector, I thought it was going to be one of those germanium detectors we used when I was an undergrad. The way that gamma ray spectrometers work is by telling how big the pulse is from each gamma ray detected, and sorting them into bins by size. The reason GM tubes can't do this is because every pulse is the same size.
"This will grow the market by... uh... wait... by... uh..." By stopping selling over the internet, thereby creating rampart controversy and slashdotting! Remember, any publicity is good publicity!
FYI, I used to play WH, WH40K etc back in the day. I would never buy their stuff now. These guys make M$ look like ascetics. Does NEone remember when they split Warhammer up into various "sides" (Dwarves, Skaven, etc.) so if you wanted to have a battle between, say, four different sides you had to spend ~$100? A far cry from when I bought WHFB for $30, and have been enjoying it ever since...
Thanks JohnFluxx. Let's try that again: click here click here
And BTW, this ~is~ the laser powered rocket n1ywb mentioned below. Myrabo pops up on the Discovery channel every couple of years. Unfortunately, his progress has been fairly slow. I read his book back when I was in Junior High. His big problem is using lasers. Both lasers and microwaves have their problems. I think it is a good idea, though, and I wish Dr. Myrabo luck. I recommend the book to NEone who is seriously interested in the problem of how to put things in orbit cheaply and safely.
Yes, there are many, many possible designs for internal combustion engines. Here is an interesting site which links to many different designs. My favorite among them is probably the ball piston design.
http://www.monito.com/wankel/alteralter.html
Leik Myrabo has been working on beam powered rockets etc. for years. "The Future of Flight" was published in 1985. He has done more work in this area than NEone else on the planet. He is currently working for RPI. Links:
http://www.rpi.edu/dept/mane/deptweb/faculty/membe r/myrabo.html
http://www.lightcrafttechnologies.com/technology.h tml
(I apologize if the urls dont come out properly. Slashdot formatting is still an arcane science to a newbie like myself. Dammit, Jim, I'm a physicist, not a webmaster!)
I like this idea - Slashdotters actually doing something other than crashing good sites. To really get this going however, someone with a little more Linux exposure than my-newbie-self ought to post a list of those companies that deserve a call. I believe somebody mentioned Adobe. Any other suggestions? Also emails work well, too - I can fire off a linuxspam to 40 companies faster than I can make a phone call. A little spontaneous organization (what, you don't read Prigogine?) and quite a few companies will get the clear message that a lot of people want Linux support on their products.
I suddenly had the ultradork image in my head of the Linux community forming Voltron.
As a Linux newbie who just installed RH 8.0 last month and is still working out the kinks, I appreciate the advice. I am using an old P166 that still runs Win95 on a partition. I am looking for something a little faster than my experience with Gnome/KDE. It's as slow as molasses currently. I was looking for a way to change some sort of configuration to make it faster, but I think I'll just try something else. One of the daughter posts refers to a 90MB RAM load running a "fast" newer version of Gnome, but I have only 64 MB RAM! (and am too cheap to upgrade the old beast) Now if only I could get my USB working with my Sony Microvault...
Strangely enough, most of the Europeans who came to America did so ~before~ they developed that social safety net you speak of. Try facts, you'll like them! Don't get me wrong, I love our economic system, even though I'm not a billionaire (yet;), but it could be improved. See also under "Medical System". I'm getting sick and tired of the high and mighty attitude of a lot of my fellow Americans towards other parts of the world, esp. with regards to Europeans (Liberty Fries NEone?). You are making us look bad to the rest of the world, and frankly, it's Un-American! America is great because we follow American ideals, and telling someone else that they are doomed to mediocrity because they live in the Communist State of Ireland doesn't sound very American to me. How about being the kind of American we can be proud of, instead of insulting the neighbors, k?
Instead of offering free music with a car, try offering it along with the delivery mechanism, such as high-speed internet access or satellite radio. The service provider uses a portion of the price to pay the artists (or record companies), the customer gets the convenience of quick delivery of the desired material (instead of bland ClearChannel), and the service provider has a killer app to distiguish themselves from the competition until it becomes a standard service. This already works for sat radio, and is moving into the internet arena. Eventually, as internet access goes wireless, these two worlds will merge. I'm not sure why it is taking so long in the internet space, probably because copying isn't an issue with sat radio (the reason why it isn't is not because people don't copy things off the radio, but because if you can tell your radio to play any song you want, who needs a copy?).
It should be noted that Tsiolkovsky was talking about geosynchronous orbits around 1900, and radio engineer George O. Smith wrote about communication satellites in "QRM Interplanetary" in 1942. However, Smith's communication satellites/stations were generally placed at Trojan points in order to give line-of-sight between planets around the sun (hence the name of the novel/story collection "Venus Equilateral"). Of course, no one made a movie of one of Smith's books, so everyone forgets him...
Well, by RTFA'ing, I see that his authenticity has been questioned, but so far it appears to be legit. It is strange how "questioning" something, in English, is implied to mean "disbelieve". As in questioning authority, etc.
I ran across this blog from a resident of Baghdad. Apparently, music websites aren't scragged by Iraqi security. It's not media coverage, but it gives a certain perspective you won't find in the media.
http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/
I worry that I might be perhaps causing trouble for the guy, but I figure if he put it on the web he wants people to see it.
Years ago, I was engaged to a beautiful, intelligent woman. I had inquired into her tastes in rings before popping the question, and she was very anti-diamonds/gold (this was during Apartheid). I had a jeweller friend make her a unique, intricate, beautiful ring out of silver and amethyst (her favorites). She was very happy with the ring when I showed it to her, and wore it proudly. Time passed... She developed a new group of friends, and to her new girlfriends, her ring was "not good enough". They felt that the ring was a sign of me being too cheap to spend a significant amount of money on her. She asked me for a diamond ring to replace the cheap POS I had gotten for her a year before. This really hurt me, not because of the money, but because she felt that the sign of my love wasn't good enough. I ended up not getting her the new ring. Our relationship had changed, and so had she. Asking for the new ring was a symptom, not a cause, of a bad relationship. She started out loving the ring (and me) and ended up hating it (and me). I eventually left her.
I hear that she took a blowtorch to the ring after I left her.
With textbook prices in the $80-100+ range these days, thats actually an excellent idea. What is needed now are some free, up-to-date textbooks which can be downloaded online. I know that a lot of work goes into writing a textbook, and authors want to get paid, but on the other hand, a free downloadable textbook could quickly become the standard text in Maine. It's hard for a textbook writer to get noticed (most textbooks bought in the US are "hits" - the umpteenth revision of US Standard Foo by J. Successful Author), so textbook writers, here's your chance! Slashdotters, if you have any friends who are trying to get their textbook published, see if they are willing to have the kids use it for free! Let's have the Mainers get their $300 worth out of those Apples.
And name me one of the above countries in which the majority of the population is ~for~ the war? What happened to "Democracy"? (Kuwait and Qatar are not democracies, so I guess that shouldn't be a requirement for them)
I used to work in nuclear fusion research. They've been saying it is twenty years away for almost 50 years now. The joke in the industry is, "Fusion power is the energy of the future, and always will be!".
(actually, I am fairly positive on fusion power, but I think that spending the vast majority of research funds on a few large experiments is counterproductive)
The main reason ethanol is not a primary fuel in the US (outside the midwest, where it is politically expedient to subsidize) it that the free market cost of ethanol is about $2/gallon of gas energy equivalent. Note that gas is selling for $1.79/gal in my town today. We're getting close folks. Ethanol provides 23% superior power at stoichiometric combustion, which is why it is used by racers. The downside is that it's low energy density means larger gas tanks (or shorter range).
Damn, beaten to post.
NEways, Buchi Analytical http://www.buchi-analytical.com also makes concentrators, but they are not as cheap, so tecaeromex looks like a better bet.
Slashdot Mirror
Sitting in the cubicle next to me as I type this is Walt, a coder who couldn't spell to save his life. He's not the best coder, but he's not a bad one either. But dealing with his spelling 'disability' is frustrating at times and funny at times. Reading his commented code is a trip! However, in general it doesn't cause problems - if he names his variables hedder, poynter, and lupe I don't care. The only times it ever causes problems are when he misspells items in a GUI; customers see that. So I know to double check anything he does that the customers see.
Occasionally you run into pockets of the opposite culture. At my alma mater, girls outnumber guys 2 to 1 (did I pick the right school or what?). I used to date this wonderful little CS girl there, and it turns out about half her friends were CS women. They would stick together, like women often do, and it seemed to me that the advantage actually went to the women at that program. The best sysad in the program was a guy, but the best encryption people were girls (good luck on your thesis defense, Kristin! Hugs, Theresa!). I guess that's just because girls are better at math. Or maybe at keeping secrets ;). My old girlfriend said that she went into CS because "it was the only thing that was hard for me, and I wanted a challenge".
Interestingly enough, she also happens to be an Iraqi-American. The past couple of months have been strange. Right now she's working overseas and the people there are giving her crap for being a warmongering American. What are you supposed to do in that kind of situation?
And Jaz, if you see this, email, k? I miss you.
Exactly. This is not a GM detector. I am a little surprised that the sensitivity of a thermodetector would be high enough, but LLNL does good work, so it figures. When I first read that it was a low temperature detector, I thought it was going to be one of those germanium detectors we used when I was an undergrad. The way that gamma ray spectrometers work is by telling how big the pulse is from each gamma ray detected, and sorting them into bins by size. The reason GM tubes can't do this is because every pulse is the same size.
"This will grow the market by... uh... wait... by... uh..."
By stopping selling over the internet, thereby creating rampart controversy and slashdotting! Remember, any publicity is good publicity!
FYI, I used to play WH, WH40K etc back in the day. I would never buy their stuff now. These guys make M$ look like ascetics. Does NEone remember when they split Warhammer up into various "sides" (Dwarves, Skaven, etc.) so if you wanted to have a battle between, say, four different sides you had to spend ~$100? A far cry from when I bought WHFB for $30, and have been enjoying it ever since...
Thanks JohnFluxx. Let's try that again:
click here
click here
And BTW, this ~is~ the laser powered rocket n1ywb mentioned below. Myrabo pops up on the Discovery channel every couple of years. Unfortunately, his progress has been fairly slow. I read his book back when I was in Junior High. His big problem is using lasers. Both lasers and microwaves have their problems. I think it is a good idea, though, and I wish Dr. Myrabo luck. I recommend the book to NEone who is seriously interested in the problem of how to put things in orbit cheaply and safely.
Yes, there are many, many possible designs for internal combustion engines. Here is an interesting site which links to many different designs. My favorite among them is probably the ball piston design. http://www.monito.com/wankel/alteralter.html
Leik Myrabo has been working on beam powered rockets etc. for years. "The Future of Flight" was published in 1985. He has done more work in this area than NEone else on the planet. He is currently working for RPI. Links: http://www.rpi.edu/dept/mane/deptweb/faculty/membe r/myrabo.html
http://www.lightcrafttechnologies.com/technology.h tml
(I apologize if the urls dont come out properly. Slashdot formatting is still an arcane science to a newbie like myself. Dammit, Jim, I'm a physicist, not a webmaster!)
I like this idea - Slashdotters actually doing something other than crashing good sites. To really get this going however, someone with a little more Linux exposure than my-newbie-self ought to post a list of those companies that deserve a call. I believe somebody mentioned Adobe. Any other suggestions? Also emails work well, too - I can fire off a linuxspam to 40 companies faster than I can make a phone call. A little spontaneous organization (what, you don't read Prigogine?) and quite a few companies will get the clear message that a lot of people want Linux support on their products. I suddenly had the ultradork image in my head of the Linux community forming Voltron.
How many people thought they saw "Libertarians join the fight against Patriot Act"?
Like that would be news?
As a Linux newbie who just installed RH 8.0 last month and is still working out the kinks, I appreciate the advice. I am using an old P166 that still runs Win95 on a partition. I am looking for something a little faster than my experience with Gnome/KDE. It's as slow as molasses currently. I was looking for a way to change some sort of configuration to make it faster, but I think I'll just try something else. One of the daughter posts refers to a 90MB RAM load running a "fast" newer version of Gnome, but I have only 64 MB RAM! (and am too cheap to upgrade the old beast) Now if only I could get my USB working with my Sony Microvault...
Strangely enough, most of the Europeans who came to America did so ~before~ they developed that social safety net you speak of. Try facts, you'll like them! Don't get me wrong, I love our economic system, even though I'm not a billionaire (yet;), but it could be improved. See also under "Medical System". I'm getting sick and tired of the high and mighty attitude of a lot of my fellow Americans towards other parts of the world, esp. with regards to Europeans (Liberty Fries NEone?). You are making us look bad to the rest of the world, and frankly, it's Un-American! America is great because we follow American ideals, and telling someone else that they are doomed to mediocrity because they live in the Communist State of Ireland doesn't sound very American to me. How about being the kind of American we can be proud of, instead of insulting the neighbors, k?
Instead of offering free music with a car, try offering it along with the delivery mechanism, such as high-speed internet access or satellite radio. The service provider uses a portion of the price to pay the artists (or record companies), the customer gets the convenience of quick delivery of the desired material (instead of bland ClearChannel), and the service provider has a killer app to distiguish themselves from the competition until it becomes a standard service. This already works for sat radio, and is moving into the internet arena. Eventually, as internet access goes wireless, these two worlds will merge. I'm not sure why it is taking so long in the internet space, probably because copying isn't an issue with sat radio (the reason why it isn't is not because people don't copy things off the radio, but because if you can tell your radio to play any song you want, who needs a copy?).
It should be noted that Tsiolkovsky was talking about geosynchronous orbits around 1900, and radio engineer George O. Smith wrote about communication satellites in "QRM Interplanetary" in 1942. However, Smith's communication satellites/stations were generally placed at Trojan points in order to give line-of-sight between planets around the sun (hence the name of the novel/story collection "Venus Equilateral"). Of course, no one made a movie of one of Smith's books, so everyone forgets him...
Well, by RTFA'ing, I see that his authenticity has been questioned, but so far it appears to be legit.
It is strange how "questioning" something, in English, is implied to mean "disbelieve". As in questioning authority, etc.
Um, note the Version 2.0 on the blog. Version 1.0 goes back much further.
I ran across this blog from a resident of Baghdad. Apparently, music websites aren't scragged by Iraqi security. It's not media coverage, but it gives a certain perspective you won't find in the media.
http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/
I worry that I might be perhaps causing trouble for the guy, but I figure if he put it on the web he wants people to see it.
Years ago, I was engaged to a beautiful, intelligent woman. I had inquired into her tastes in rings before popping the question, and she was very anti-diamonds/gold (this was during Apartheid). I had a jeweller friend make her a unique, intricate, beautiful ring out of silver and amethyst (her favorites). She was very happy with the ring when I showed it to her, and wore it proudly.
Time passed...
She developed a new group of friends, and to her new girlfriends, her ring was "not good enough". They felt that the ring was a sign of me being too cheap to spend a significant amount of money on her. She asked me for a diamond ring to replace the cheap POS I had gotten for her a year before. This really hurt me, not because of the money, but because she felt that the sign of my love wasn't good enough.
I ended up not getting her the new ring. Our relationship had changed, and so had she. Asking for the new ring was a symptom, not a cause, of a bad relationship. She started out loving the ring (and me) and ended up hating it (and me). I eventually left her.
I hear that she took a blowtorch to the ring after I left her.
Can you hear me now? ;)
With textbook prices in the $80-100+ range these days, thats actually an excellent idea. What is needed now are some free, up-to-date textbooks which can be downloaded online. I know that a lot of work goes into writing a textbook, and authors want to get paid, but on the other hand, a free downloadable textbook could quickly become the standard text in Maine. It's hard for a textbook writer to get noticed (most textbooks bought in the US are "hits" - the umpteenth revision of US Standard Foo by J. Successful Author), so textbook writers, here's your chance! Slashdotters, if you have any friends who are trying to get their textbook published, see if they are willing to have the kids use it for free! Let's have the Mainers get their $300 worth out of those Apples.
And name me one of the above countries in which the majority of the population is ~for~ the war? What happened to "Democracy"? (Kuwait and Qatar are not democracies, so I guess that shouldn't be a requirement for them)
I used to work in nuclear fusion research. They've been saying it is twenty years away for almost 50 years now. The joke in the industry is, "Fusion power is the energy of the future, and always will be!". (actually, I am fairly positive on fusion power, but I think that spending the vast majority of research funds on a few large experiments is counterproductive)
Nicky Tesla didn't patent his inventions? What alternate history are you from? http://www.tfcbooks.com/patents/patents.htm
The main reason ethanol is not a primary fuel in the US (outside the midwest, where it is politically expedient to subsidize) it that the free market cost of ethanol is about $2/gallon of gas energy equivalent. Note that gas is selling for $1.79/gal in my town today. We're getting close folks. Ethanol provides 23% superior power at stoichiometric combustion, which is why it is used by racers. The downside is that it's low energy density means larger gas tanks (or shorter range).
Damn, beaten to post. NEways, Buchi Analytical http://www.buchi-analytical.com also makes concentrators, but they are not as cheap, so tecaeromex looks like a better bet.