Mine is 1/8 Watt, green, looks just like a common laser pointer on the outside. In my opinion, Wicked Lasers is a reputable company.
I can pop balloons if they are dark colored. I can melt electrical tape. I can light a match if I color it with a Sharpie first.
If I shine it on the back of my hand, I don't feel anything. If I take a pen and make a black dot on my hand, then it hurts pretty bad.
I have to be within a couple of feet of the balloon to pop it. You have to hold your hand very steady to do this. I have to be within inches of the match. I cannot ignite liquids. I wanted to start my charcoal with it, but I have been unable. Another problem is the reflected light is so freaking bright that you cannot see anything for a minute or so if you look at the target while you are doing your tricks.(It came with safety sunglasses, but then you can't see anything else at night when you are wearing them.)
Cooling is a big design problem. I don't think that the laser diodes were originally designed to run continuously.
The reason that you can see the beam of a green laser and not a red one is because Rayleigh Scattering is frequency dependant. A violet beam should scatter even more than a green one. So the beam should be more visible unless the decreased sensitivity of the human eye to the violet color cancels this out.
Since this violet laser is more powerful than my green one, you should be able to do more things with it, such as light a cigarette. You could probably pop balloons at a greater distance, too. Your common laser pointers are less than 5 mW. This violet one is close to 200 mW.
The FAA will probably require that it have flashing lights at night and be covered in red and white checkerboard. It should also have a radar transponder. Assuming that it is solar powered, the night time lighting requirement might require such heavy batteries that the project becomes unfeasable.
From what I have been able to determine, we don't really predict tsunamis. We detect an earthquake under the ocean and wait for the tsunami to hit. If the earthquake is less than 6.5, we ignore it.
The tsunami is detected by buoys that measure the tide. If the tide goes way up at the wrong time, it must be a tsunami. If the buoy is close to the epicenter, we can then warn people that are farther away. The buoys only work when they are in shallow water. It has been reported on the news that the buoys are very expensive and this is why the nations that were hit by this disaster did not invest in tsunami prediction. It seems to me that a shore based tide detector would be very cheap if it was connected by land line.
A massive displacement of the seafloor or an undersea landslide is required to create a tsunami. There doesn't seem to be any theory for predicting this other than going with the intensity measurement of the earthquake. There doesn't seem to be any large effort to place instruments on the ocean floor to detect this movement. (It would probably cost too much)
What about the high energy wave that travels vast distances through the ocean? Shouldn't there be some way to detect this wave?
I thought that I could read this story to find out something about "Operation Fastlink" and the supposed thousands arrested.
I can find nothing ontopic in page after page of comments!
The comments are nothing but people's silly opinions about copyright law. It starts with the self-righteous claiming that people who violate copyright laws are no different than armed robbers. Instead of being modded down as trolls, these posts are modded up and then they are replied to ad nausium.
Where are the moderators? This topic is nothing but useless garbage now. There is nothing in here about "Operation Fastlink."
In the future, people who feel compelled to share their opinion with an uncaring puplic, should start a "Give your opinion about copyright law" thread. I don't care what your opinions are. I came here looking for information. Slashdot is not supposed to be a flamefest.
I read some career advice, 25 years ago, that said that women should pursue a career in computer programming because most of them already had the typing skills that are required. (This was when a keyboard at home was very rare.)
I remember that statement to this day because it is one of the dumbest things that I have ever read.
There needs to be some sort of free access to the communications infrastructure because it is not practical for each person to string a wire to his ISP.
In the old days, AT&T would only allow you to connect AT&T equipment to the phone line in your home. They claimed that anything else would degrade everyone's telephone service. Then a court told them that they couldn't make rules like that. Then people were free to use modems. Then they connected computers together with the modems. This led to the internet.
My point being that none of this would have happened if the courts hadn't forced AT&T to open up their system.
It wasn't clear from the news article what the effect will be on my DSL service. It sounds like the phone company will still share the copper wires with DSL companies, but they will be free to jack up the price as much as they want. And since the phone company is also an ISP, they have an incentive to jack up the price so high that it drives the independant providers out of the market.
The courts have previously ruled that the cable companies don't have to share their coax network with anyone. The judges in the current case seem to be fine with a nation where your only choice for broadband access is one phone company or one cable company. The cable companies have no competion for cable television, so they raise the price a little every year. If they lose most of their competion for broadband internet access, I can see them raising that price on a regular basis, also.
The phone company will raise their price at the same time, in an attempt to always be one dollar cheaper.
The statement: "Copying of the media is very difficult" must be a marketing exaggeration for "Consumer hardware that writes to this media is not yet available."
After all, it can't be difficult to read, because that would defeat the whole purpose of using it.
It will probably be pretty easy to copy data from it to your hard drive.
I work on pharmacy systems and other hospital computer systems. They are all Windows based. If you were an executive that needed to develop a new, large GUI-based project, what OS would you use? You can easily assemble a large group of Windows programmers. All of your field personnel are trained in Windows support, not linux. There's really no choice here.
I think that it is disengenuous of Microsoft to drive all other competitors from the marketplace and then cover their ass with a little disclaimer about how you shouldn't use their product if it is for something important.
If you want to launch a data file (want to call the program associated with its extension), you call a function called ShellExecute() with the operation verb set to "open"
The Microsoft documentation says that this, "Opens the file specified by the lpFile parameter. The file can be an executable file, a document file, or a folder."
So the ShellExecute call is going to execute an.EXE file and there is no flag that you can set to stop it.
The curious thing about this virus is that it is sent in a.ZIP file, so once you double clicked, you would then be inside WinZip (or some other archive program) and then have to double click it again to launch it. XP has native.ZIP support, so I assume that you would get some explorer type window that you would have to double click a second time.
I became curious when my virus scanner said that the.ZIP archive was safe, so I extracted the compressed file to disk.
The only indication that it is a virus is the tiny little elipsis to the right of the file name in Windows explorer. As someone else mentioned, most people's computers (seems to be everyone's except mine) won't even display the.SCR or.EXE ending!
The reason I opened the.ZIP archive was to see if the virus was zipped a second time. An archive inside an archive will usually defeat a virus scanner.
I never opened the virus, but I can see how someone would if it was in the form of a bounced email and they had reason to believe that one of their emails had bounced.
Hire completely new writers and give them years, if need be, to come up with a really fresh take.
Most people don't know that the producers have intentionally excluded all experienced science fiction writers from the series. The producers are quite proud of it too. This pretty much guarantees that most episodes will be drivel.
Producers do some pretty stupid things in Hollywood, but this is inexcusable. I've heard that script writers from M.A.S.H. don't put this experience on their resumes because they would be assumed to be too old to write scripts that appeal to the target audience. So the only people who are still working are the young and inexperienced. It really bothers me that the 50's and 60's had excellent writing in shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits and STOS. All that we have now is crap.
I've tried to come up with a logical reason to exclude science fiction writers from writing for a science fiction series, and all that I've come up with is a crazy theory that they think that it will enhance its appeal to non-science-fiction fans.
The real result is a stack of scripts that don't appeal to anyone.
The U.S. Congress doesn't care how much spam we get. The FBI doesn't care if some dumbass loses $500 on fake Viagra. But if one crooked record executive sees his sales drop by 1%, Congress will write huge stacks of legislation to protect those profits.
That's because those same record executives give them huge stacks of money. We don't, so we don't count.
The politicians will never lean on Microsoft to secure their product for the same reason.
The best that we can hope for is a few ineffective laws that makes it look like they care.
Listening to the electronic media, the FBI seems to be grandstanding on this one in collusion with the news media who like to do "gee whiz" stories about technology.
The FBI are really patting themselves on the back without ever pointing out that this guy did not write the MSBLASTER worm.
The press loves to quote big numbers, like 500,000 computers infected. I doubt that more than a handful of computers were infected by this stupid kid. I've never heard of anyone getting infected by penis32.
I don't think that it took Sherlock Holmes to identify the perpetrator when the idiot begs to be arrested by modifying the virus to connect to a web site that he had registered.
I wish I had a dollar for every person that has asked me if I heard that they caught the guy who wrote the MSBLASTER virus. I told them all that they have been mislead and that he didn't write the virus. I don't think that anyone believed me.
One of the news commentators stated last night that the power companies buy insurance for failures like this and therefore have no financial incentive to upgrade their equipment.
This would imply that no improvement in infrastructure will occur without an act of congress. Given the current political climate, this will probably require the transfer of public funds into the hands of rich corporations instead of merely mandating that they make the improvements out of their own pockets.
Despite the Presidents latest "I told you so," I don't believe that his energy bill has anything in it about improving the electrical transmission system.
but once shut down, they take a great deal of time (several days) to restart.
This only happens when a nuclear reactor is almost ready to be refueled. It gets overwhelmed by delayed xenon precursors. (Xenon absorbs neutrons and shuts down the fission reaction) You have to wait hours or perhaps days for the precursors to decay.
This doesn't happen while you still have a lot of U-235 in the core. Starting up and shutting down the power plant (going fast and then stopping) was a favorite way for our nuclear navy to screw with a non-nuclear Soviet ship that was tailing them during the cold war. It was more difficult to start and shut down a conventional engine room.
I don't think terrorists are organised enough yet to pull something like this off.
It doesn't sound very difficult to me: You just cause one generator to trip off line. The increased load on the generator next to it will cause it to overload and trip off offline. Then another one trips off, etc.
All that you would have to do is drive over to a generator and throw a weasel or something else conductive across the output lines of the generator.
Wasn't the cascade failure a few years ago on the West Coast caused by a squirrel?
I have a battery-powered air pump that I bought at a fishing tackle store in the Midwest. It will run all night on two D cells. It would probably be sufficient to keep your fish alive.
Finding fishing tackle in Manhattan during a power outage might be a little difficult, though.
That is way that I understand that Hawking radiation works. I have always had a problem with this though. There is this other conjecture about a method of instantaneous communications. It involves capturing, separating and storing virtual pairs. The idea being that you can separate the particles by a vast distance, but once you destroy one particle, its mate also vanishes.
So why is it true that with Hawking radiation, you can destroy one member of the pair and the other survives?
When the reflectivity (albedo) drops, that means the dry ice melted. The Thermal Emisison Spectrometer can show that temperature is above 0C, but that doesn't mean that water is present.
The picture looks like sand dunes to me. That's not some foot-wide mud puddle; Those things are huge.
Who cares if -r is slightly more tolerated than +r?
The real question is, why is it so bloody difficult to copy a DVD?
I can put a cd in drive F: and have a perfectly usable copy created in drive G: in a few minutes. (Unless the disk contains SafeDisk 2 or GeekScrewer 9) Just try doing that with a DVD!
First of all, the source DVD has twice the capacity of your blank DVD. And there is some sector that you can't even write to. So you end up decrypting, shrinking it down, etc. I've had a DVD writer for a month and have never used it to copy a DVD because I determined that my computer is just not fast enough to do all this in a reasonable amount of time.
I just want to put the source DVD in one drive and have the copy come out in the other. Is that so much to ask?
I remember building something called a "squirrel cage" motor in electrical lab. Alternating current in the stator would induce current in the rotor, which generated a magnetic field around the rotor that was then pushed by the field generated by the stator.
We used a soda pop can for the rotor.
I was thinking that if you could spin a pop can, maybe you could push water uphill.
You might have to put salt in the water to increase its conductivity. It might shock the crap out of you if you stuck your hand in it, too.
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Mine is 1/8 Watt, green, looks just like a common laser pointer on the outside. In my opinion, Wicked Lasers is a reputable company.
I can pop balloons if they are dark colored. I can melt electrical tape. I can light a match if I color it with a Sharpie first.
If I shine it on the back of my hand, I don't feel anything. If I take a pen and make a black dot on my hand, then it hurts pretty bad.
I have to be within a couple of feet of the balloon to pop it. You have to hold your hand very steady to do this. I have to be within inches of the match. I cannot ignite liquids. I wanted to start my charcoal with it, but I have been unable. Another problem is the reflected light is so freaking bright that you cannot see anything for a minute or so if you look at the target while you are doing your tricks.(It came with safety sunglasses, but then you can't see anything else at night when you are wearing them.)
Cooling is a big design problem. I don't think that the laser diodes were originally designed to run continuously.
The reason that you can see the beam of a green laser and not a red one is because Rayleigh Scattering is frequency dependant. A violet beam should scatter even more than a green one. So the beam should be more visible unless the decreased sensitivity of the human eye to the violet color cancels this out.
Since this violet laser is more powerful than my green one, you should be able to do more things with it, such as light a cigarette. You could probably pop balloons at a greater distance, too. Your common laser pointers are less than 5 mW. This violet one is close to 200 mW.
The FAA will probably require that it have flashing lights at night and be covered in red and white checkerboard. It should also have a radar transponder. Assuming that it is solar powered, the night time lighting requirement might require such heavy batteries that the project becomes unfeasable.
I would like to filter out all of the local newspapers and local television stations that only parrot the wire feed.
The tsunami is detected by buoys that measure the tide. If the tide goes way up at the wrong time, it must be a tsunami. If the buoy is close to the epicenter, we can then warn people that are farther away. The buoys only work when they are in shallow water. It has been reported on the news that the buoys are very expensive and this is why the nations that were hit by this disaster did not invest in tsunami prediction. It seems to me that a shore based tide detector would be very cheap if it was connected by land line.
A massive displacement of the seafloor or an undersea landslide is required to create a tsunami. There doesn't seem to be any theory for predicting this other than going with the intensity measurement of the earthquake. There doesn't seem to be any large effort to place instruments on the ocean floor to detect this movement. (It would probably cost too much)
What about the high energy wave that travels vast distances through the ocean? Shouldn't there be some way to detect this wave?
I can find nothing ontopic in page after page of comments!
The comments are nothing but people's silly opinions about copyright law. It starts with the self-righteous claiming that people who violate copyright laws are no different than armed robbers. Instead of being modded down as trolls, these posts are modded up and then they are replied to ad nausium.
Where are the moderators? This topic is nothing but useless garbage now. There is nothing in here about "Operation Fastlink."
In the future, people who feel compelled to share their opinion with an uncaring puplic, should start a "Give your opinion about copyright law" thread. I don't care what your opinions are. I came here looking for information. Slashdot is not supposed to be a flamefest.
I remember that statement to this day because it is one of the dumbest things that I have ever read.
Others have pointed out that the speed was not a record.
My question is: Shouldn't there be a person on board for it to be considered travel?
In the old days, AT&T would only allow you to connect AT&T equipment to the phone line in your home. They claimed that anything else would degrade everyone's telephone service. Then a court told them that they couldn't make rules like that. Then people were free to use modems. Then they connected computers together with the modems. This led to the internet.
My point being that none of this would have happened if the courts hadn't forced AT&T to open up their system.
It wasn't clear from the news article what the effect will be on my DSL service. It sounds like the phone company will still share the copper wires with DSL companies, but they will be free to jack up the price as much as they want. And since the phone company is also an ISP, they have an incentive to jack up the price so high that it drives the independant providers out of the market.
The courts have previously ruled that the cable companies don't have to share their coax network with anyone. The judges in the current case seem to be fine with a nation where your only choice for broadband access is one phone company or one cable company. The cable companies have no competion for cable television, so they raise the price a little every year. If they lose most of their competion for broadband internet access, I can see them raising that price on a regular basis, also.
The phone company will raise their price at the same time, in an attempt to always be one dollar cheaper.
After all, it can't be difficult to read, because that would defeat the whole purpose of using it.
It will probably be pretty easy to copy data from it to your hard drive.
I think that it is disengenuous of Microsoft to drive all other competitors from the marketplace and then cover their ass with a little disclaimer about how you shouldn't use their product if it is for something important.
The Microsoft documentation says that this, "Opens the file specified by the lpFile parameter. The file can be an executable file, a document file, or a folder."
So the ShellExecute call is going to execute an .EXE file and there is no flag that you can set to stop it.
The curious thing about this virus is that it is sent in a .ZIP file, so once you double clicked, you would then be inside WinZip (or some other archive program) and then have to double click it again to launch it. XP has native .ZIP support, so I assume that you would get some explorer type window that you would have to double click a second time.
I became curious when my virus scanner said that the .ZIP archive was safe, so I extracted the compressed file to disk.
The only indication that it is a virus is the tiny little elipsis to the right of the file name in Windows explorer. As someone else mentioned, most people's computers (seems to be everyone's except mine) won't even display the .SCR or .EXE ending!
The reason I opened the .ZIP archive was to see if the virus was zipped a second time. An archive inside an archive will usually defeat a virus scanner.
I never opened the virus, but I can see how someone would if it was in the form of a bounced email and they had reason to believe that one of their emails had bounced.
Most people don't know that the producers have intentionally excluded all experienced science fiction writers from the series. The producers are quite proud of it too. This pretty much guarantees that most episodes will be drivel.
Producers do some pretty stupid things in Hollywood, but this is inexcusable. I've heard that script writers from M.A.S.H. don't put this experience on their resumes because they would be assumed to be too old to write scripts that appeal to the target audience. So the only people who are still working are the young and inexperienced. It really bothers me that the 50's and 60's had excellent writing in shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits and STOS. All that we have now is crap.
I've tried to come up with a logical reason to exclude science fiction writers from writing for a science fiction series, and all that I've come up with is a crazy theory that they think that it will enhance its appeal to non-science-fiction fans.
The real result is a stack of scripts that don't appeal to anyone.
That's because those same record executives give them huge stacks of money. We don't, so we don't count.
The politicians will never lean on Microsoft to secure their product for the same reason.
The best that we can hope for is a few ineffective laws that makes it look like they care.
The FBI are really patting themselves on the back without ever pointing out that this guy did not write the MSBLASTER worm.
The press loves to quote big numbers, like 500,000 computers infected. I doubt that more than a handful of computers were infected by this stupid kid. I've never heard of anyone getting infected by penis32.
I don't think that it took Sherlock Holmes to identify the perpetrator when the idiot begs to be arrested by modifying the virus to connect to a web site that he had registered.
I wish I had a dollar for every person that has asked me if I heard that they caught the guy who wrote the MSBLASTER virus. I told them all that they have been mislead and that he didn't write the virus. I don't think that anyone believed me.
This would imply that no improvement in infrastructure will occur without an act of congress. Given the current political climate, this will probably require the transfer of public funds into the hands of rich corporations instead of merely mandating that they make the improvements out of their own pockets.
Despite the Presidents latest "I told you so," I don't believe that his energy bill has anything in it about improving the electrical transmission system.
This only happens when a nuclear reactor is almost ready to be refueled. It gets overwhelmed by delayed xenon precursors. (Xenon absorbs neutrons and shuts down the fission reaction) You have to wait hours or perhaps days for the precursors to decay.
This doesn't happen while you still have a lot of U-235 in the core. Starting up and shutting down the power plant (going fast and then stopping) was a favorite way for our nuclear navy to screw with a non-nuclear Soviet ship that was tailing them during the cold war. It was more difficult to start and shut down a conventional engine room.
It doesn't sound very difficult to me: You just cause one generator to trip off line. The increased load on the generator next to it will cause it to overload and trip off offline. Then another one trips off, etc.
All that you would have to do is drive over to a generator and throw a weasel or something else conductive across the output lines of the generator.
Wasn't the cascade failure a few years ago on the West Coast caused by a squirrel?
Coincidence? I think not.
Finding fishing tackle in Manhattan during a power outage might be a little difficult, though.
So why is it true that with Hawking radiation, you can destroy one member of the pair and the other survives?
The picture looks like sand dunes to me. That's not some foot-wide mud puddle; Those things are huge.
I don't see any evidence of mud or liquid water.
The real question is, why is it so bloody difficult to copy a DVD?
I can put a cd in drive F: and have a perfectly usable copy created in drive G: in a few minutes. (Unless the disk contains SafeDisk 2 or GeekScrewer 9) Just try doing that with a DVD!
First of all, the source DVD has twice the capacity of your blank DVD. And there is some sector that you can't even write to. So you end up decrypting, shrinking it down, etc. I've had a DVD writer for a month and have never used it to copy a DVD because I determined that my computer is just not fast enough to do all this in a reasonable amount of time.
I just want to put the source DVD in one drive and have the copy come out in the other. Is that so much to ask?
One of my coworkers has been silently infected twice.
We used a soda pop can for the rotor.
I was thinking that if you could spin a pop can, maybe you could push water uphill.
You might have to put salt in the water to increase its conductivity. It might shock the crap out of you if you stuck your hand in it, too.
Maybe I'll finally be able to afford those zircon-encrusted tweezers that are so useful for picking dental floss.