Model rockets are a lot of fun, and there are larger kits now that use "D" and "E" engines from Estes, and are capable of using much more powerful engines from Aerotech. The bigger the kit, the less tiny manipulation. You can assemble the motor mount, he can trim and shape the fins, glue the fins, and give a fine coat of paint to the rocket. You assemble the parachute assembly. He helps steady the rocket body while you place the internal components.
IF you're really feeling fancy, get a ham radio license and find some transmitters that give altitude, acceleration, latitude and longitude, etc. Or find some other means of tracking and recovering the rocket.
I would also advise considering radio controlled cars and planes. Much less time building them and more time using them, which should be easier on the hands.
I don't need my graphics driver to necessarily be open-source. I need my graphics accelerator to function though, and it's been my experience that proper acceleration support has lagged. Simply bringing up a desktop in X is not the same as being able to navigate a 3d environment at-speed at the quality that the video card manufacturer touts. If they won't support 3d acceleration then I'm better off dusting off my old S3 Virge and buying a much more powerful microprocessor, letting the microprocessor do all of the work.
If these cards don't do 3d acceleration in my computing environment, what good are they?
And yes, I had this problem once before, with Matrox and the G450/G550 cards, back in the day. Aggravating as hell. Worse, if you were their corporate customer and asked for 3d accleration drivers they'd release them to you, but as a private consumer you had to justify the need. Apparently nothing that a noncommercial user did was considered justified. It was friggin' compiled! I wasn't even asking for source code!
Bureaucracies are similar all over, be they government or corporations. A CTO can be someone that takes credit for you doing your job, even if they have absolutely no idea what your job is, how you accomplish it, or how to replicate it in others.
Ah, but serving in a foreign military can cause one to lose one's citizenship, especially if that foreign military is in conflict with the United States.
I would argue that since Al Qaeda controlled territory at one point and has committed attacks against the country, a US Citizen's allegiance with Al Qaeda constitutes an action that would nullify one's citizenship, in the same fashion that serving in a foreign military would. Since a major goal of Al Qaeda is to set up a Caliphate and their own religious theocracy nation (in their own concept of what that means) then they're essentially declaring themselves to be a foreign power.
It is true that without a full chain of custody of the information one is basing a decision on, it is impossible to wholly know that the decision is correct.
It is also true that even if one has a full chain of custody on the information one is basing a decision on, it is possible to still make the wrong decision due to still not having all of the data.
Bush is not nearly as dumb as people think. It's funny when he spoke of "misunderestimating" him, as honestly I think that's true. This man, born in Kennebunkport Maine to a rich, as-close-to-aristocratic-as-possible family with generations of high ranking political "service" managed to not only convince a whole bunch that he's a Texan and "one of us", but managed to do so despite obviously political machinations to keep him out of real military service, get out of trouble for substance abuse including while driving, and other protections he received from on high. He attended Ivy-league schools, and while he didn't excel there, he certainly participated in the culture with his extracurricular activities like cheerleading. He managed to facade himself over and a whole lot of people bought it hook, line, and sinker.
I won't dispute that he became President with lots of help. Hell, his Rolodex of cabinet and government officials strongly correlated to previous power brokers under his father's and under Reagan's administrations. If anything they figured they'd run the country business-as-usual, ready to hop back into the private sector when Bush's Presidency ended. Then September 11 happened and the whole plan got shot to Hell. People like Cheney and Bremer and Ashcroft and Rumsfeld probably didn't want to be massively publicly scrutinized like they became, but suddenly there was newfound interest in non-politicos paying attention.
Obama didn't have these advantages. I'm not going to make a sob story out of his life, because there's no point. The point is, he got there a whole lot more based on his own than based on others propping him up, and he's willing to make the tough calls. His Vice President isn't doing the work for him. He's even hamstrung by a Senate that can't confirm a number of his appointees because of rules gridlock. He's still taking on the job himself. I respect that.
The work to get "Citizens United" overturned, and then continue from there.
Hell, push for an amendment that says, "Persons, as defined in this Constitution and in all supporting documents and common law, shall refer only to natural persons." That would end corporate personhood, which is the real problem in my opinion, as corporations have their shareholders interest in mind, to the exclusion of all else. Don't let corporations play in politics.
Enlisting in a hostile foreign enemy is an automatic revocation of one's citizenship. Al Qaeda arguably is a de facto foreign power, a hostile foreign enemy.
Please give me specific examples of where he has failed to follow the rules as set out in the Constitution.
Has he taken your guns?
Has he quartered any troops in your house or on your land?
Has he taken any more powers "reserved for the states" than his predecessors? If yes, I want specifics, including how the courts have ruled on the matter(s).
Has he prohibited assembly, or speech? Has he endorsed a state-sponsored religion?
I am concerned that the President has ordered a capture or kill order that will most likely result in kill, rather than capture, on three US citizens.
I am also concerned that there are three US citizens that most likely are dangerous enough to warrant such an order.
I am much less concerned by who makes this decision at the moment. Right now, for the first time in my life, the sitting President of the United States, an elected official, is personally reviewing the data on terrorists and personally deciding whether or not to attempt to take these people out. He's not handing the job to an analyst or to an assistant-to-an-undersecretary or some other unknown, non-elected bureaucrat. He is personally taking the responsibility and accepting the ramifications of these decisions.
These individuals are members of an organization that has successfully attacked us in the past and that has pledged to attack us in the future. There is no practical way to bring them to legal justice, as they operate as a de facto government in territory that they control. In that sense they nearly are members of a nation-state and the rules of war can be found to apply to them as lieutenants in that de facto government's military structure.
I think that the situation is a terrible, horrible one. But, I also have less qualms about how this is being run than I do about the entire detention/torture system that was in place before it.
The intelligence of a group can be determined by finding the IQ of the least intelligent member of the group, and dividing that number by the total people in the group.
We've had people bring in non-spec equipment. We have about 30,000 machines across already too many different platforms, about twenty in total, with ten people to service them. If an asset is purchased that doesn't conform to one of those fourteen it doesn't get supported. Period.
If you buy it, you're going to be the only one supporting it. Your IS department is probably not staffed with all technicians qualified to add wholesale support for Linux-based OSes, and problems will occur, even on a Linux box.
This doesn't even get into Purchasing, which might not let you buy whatever you want. Here, they can only buy (last I checked) Latitude E5520s and Optiplex 790s, nothing else. Purchasing doesn't even let them have a choice- it's because of that issue of the sheer number of machines we have to support plus the diversity of them.
This doesn't even get into issues like MSproxy, which is one way of giving end users filtered internet access. It might not be configured to allow Linux boxes through properly. Obviously that's going to be a big problem if you order a lab of these, and I doubt that your network administrator will punch a hole in his firewall just for you.
If you don't talk to your IS department then you may as well not even bother buying them.
For those who care about the assets we're stuck supporting: Dell Latitude D505, D510, D520, D530, D610, E5500, E6500, E5510, E5520, 2100, 2120; Dell Optiplex GX270, GX280, GX520, 745, 755, 760, 780, 790; older custom-builts, Biostars M7VKQ, NGC-400, I945G-M7, Intel D945GCPE, and a smattering of Intel 845GLAD machines. Yes, it's too many. Yes, it's too great a range and there are too many old machines. But, that's what we're stuck with, and that's why we do not touch donated equipment, nonstandard equipment, or anything else of that nature.
But the act of possessing a certain amount of a substance or possessing a substance can itself being a criminal act. The consumption of a substance is also capable of being a criminal act. It's even possible to define, in advance, intent, such that things like, " possession with intent to distribute" can be crimes. They're not the same as distribution.
What's next? Check out Catcher and the Rye and the police question you? John Lennon was killed by a man with the book, so something must be wrong if you want to read it, right?
That only works if there are very few false-positives.
Every time CSI or some other crime drama is on, there will be tens of thousands of searches. You could attempt to filter those out, but then you have someone with intent simply searching while watching CSI.
There is no good way without intensive investigation to determine if there even is a danger. Such investigation is only proving warranted in cases where terrorism is a real threat.
True, but their consistent domineering market share in OS and productivity suite markets does speak to their general success. Even their arguable failures like Microsoft Bob and Windows Vista have given them things that could be integrated in to other products or could be revised as whole products.
Regardless of one's feelings on Microsoft, that company has consistently and continually tried to make their user interfaces as attractive and easy to use as is possible. They've gone through the effort to develop fonts, to determine how to add pseudo-3d effects, how to space things and how to define icons and sizes. Whatever your beef with Redmond, the UI is the one thing that I will wholeheartedly disagree with you about in almost all circumstances.
If they dropped the ball here, then that's absolutely amazing. Literally amazing. They've built a company and made some of the richest people in the world on how pretty and easy to use their software products are, at the expense of what those interfaces run on for lower level code. If they're losing touch with UI now, that doesn't bode well for them for the long term. They certainly won't disappear, but their non-OS products would lose market share and once people stop being locked in to their non-OS products, they have little reason to stay with the OS itself if other vendors have multiOS versions of competing products.
Correct. Unless there's a very strong correlation that one behavior overwhelmingly leads to another that is a crime, then using one's research to attempt to predict a crime will lead to nothing more than the police showing up to essentially ask you if you're going to commit a crime. Even if you were, you simply say, "I'm sorry officer, but I have no legal obligation to speak with you on this or any other matter."
Seeing as how they can't really compel you to spend too much time with them until they arrest you, and if they do arrest you they must then provide you with legal counsel, this would not work in any way for a lot of potential criminals, as one's lawyer would also basically tell you to say nothing at all.
Until there's at least a crime-in-progress, you haven't done anything. Conspiracy to commit is difficult when there's no crime either, especially if there isn't even any materiel for a crime. Even then, one could research a crime, gather supplies for a crime, and be almost to the point of committing a crime, but then at the last moment, decide not to commit the crime. Still no crime has been committed.
Science fiction conventions and other Fandom events cost a lot to put on as well. In Fandom, seed money is used to pay for deposits on convention space, and to pay for marketing to get prepaid preregistrations. Even at a lower rate than day-of memberships, preregs can make or break a convention. It's possible to completely pay for everything with preregistrations and just use the day-of money as the seed money for the next convention, if they're nonprofit. For a commercial product, with seed money, one can do everything from attracting large investment dollars to producing marketing literature to encourage preorders, which in turn help to pay for everything.
Re:James Watson had 20-some unrealized defects
on
Sequencing the Unborn
·
· Score: 1
Our knowledge of genetic density is still primitive. Definitely too shaky for insurance filtring[sic].
Don't be too sure about that latter part. Once insurance companies feel that they have a method to screen for a demographic subgroup that doesn't violate civil rights they'll be happy to define it and use it, especially if investigation of that group yields viable statistics. That doesn't mean that every member of that group, especially a genetically-defined group, will manifest the traits associated with that group, but when you're talking about probabilities and risk you're not talking about individuals, you're talking about a data set.
I have no at-fault auto accidents. Despite this, because of my gender and relative youth, my insurance costs more than it does for my parents, when the number of incidents is identical, namely zero. Even if you look at not-at-fault accidents, we're the same at two. We have the same coverage levels and have the same number of vehicles insured, and the same number of drivers. When I got married, which did not change my driving habits or my fiancé's/wife's driving habits, our rates both went down, even though were were effectively the same age, living in the same place, making the same commutes, with the same cars.
I have no doubt that insurance companies would do whatever they could to define subgoups.
Slashdot Mirror
There's Always:
Sex Trek
Sex Trek: The Search for Cock
Sex Trek: The Next Penetration
Sex Trek: Deep Sixty-Nine
Sex Trek: Voyeurism
Model rockets are a lot of fun, and there are larger kits now that use "D" and "E" engines from Estes, and are capable of using much more powerful engines from Aerotech. The bigger the kit, the less tiny manipulation. You can assemble the motor mount, he can trim and shape the fins, glue the fins, and give a fine coat of paint to the rocket. You assemble the parachute assembly. He helps steady the rocket body while you place the internal components.
IF you're really feeling fancy, get a ham radio license and find some transmitters that give altitude, acceleration, latitude and longitude, etc. Or find some other means of tracking and recovering the rocket.
I would also advise considering radio controlled cars and planes. Much less time building them and more time using them, which should be easier on the hands.
I don't need my graphics driver to necessarily be open-source. I need my graphics accelerator to function though, and it's been my experience that proper acceleration support has lagged. Simply bringing up a desktop in X is not the same as being able to navigate a 3d environment at-speed at the quality that the video card manufacturer touts. If they won't support 3d acceleration then I'm better off dusting off my old S3 Virge and buying a much more powerful microprocessor, letting the microprocessor do all of the work.
If these cards don't do 3d acceleration in my computing environment, what good are they?
And yes, I had this problem once before, with Matrox and the G450/G550 cards, back in the day. Aggravating as hell. Worse, if you were their corporate customer and asked for 3d accleration drivers they'd release them to you, but as a private consumer you had to justify the need. Apparently nothing that a noncommercial user did was considered justified. It was friggin' compiled! I wasn't even asking for source code!
Pretty much.
Bureaucracies are similar all over, be they government or corporations. A CTO can be someone that takes credit for you doing your job, even if they have absolutely no idea what your job is, how you accomplish it, or how to replicate it in others.
Pretty much what I was thinking... When you get angry and design mechanical things, you start thinking of mean mechanical things.
Ah, but serving in a foreign military can cause one to lose one's citizenship, especially if that foreign military is in conflict with the United States.
I would argue that since Al Qaeda controlled territory at one point and has committed attacks against the country, a US Citizen's allegiance with Al Qaeda constitutes an action that would nullify one's citizenship, in the same fashion that serving in a foreign military would. Since a major goal of Al Qaeda is to set up a Caliphate and their own religious theocracy nation (in their own concept of what that means) then they're essentially declaring themselves to be a foreign power.
Nice Straw Man...
Citizens United is the most recent high-profile change that needs to be undone. There are many other changes that are needed as well.
It is true that without a full chain of custody of the information one is basing a decision on, it is impossible to wholly know that the decision is correct.
It is also true that even if one has a full chain of custody on the information one is basing a decision on, it is possible to still make the wrong decision due to still not having all of the data.
Bush is not nearly as dumb as people think. It's funny when he spoke of "misunderestimating" him, as honestly I think that's true. This man, born in Kennebunkport Maine to a rich, as-close-to-aristocratic-as-possible family with generations of high ranking political "service" managed to not only convince a whole bunch that he's a Texan and "one of us", but managed to do so despite obviously political machinations to keep him out of real military service, get out of trouble for substance abuse including while driving, and other protections he received from on high. He attended Ivy-league schools, and while he didn't excel there, he certainly participated in the culture with his extracurricular activities like cheerleading. He managed to facade himself over and a whole lot of people bought it hook, line, and sinker.
I won't dispute that he became President with lots of help. Hell, his Rolodex of cabinet and government officials strongly correlated to previous power brokers under his father's and under Reagan's administrations. If anything they figured they'd run the country business-as-usual, ready to hop back into the private sector when Bush's Presidency ended. Then September 11 happened and the whole plan got shot to Hell. People like Cheney and Bremer and Ashcroft and Rumsfeld probably didn't want to be massively publicly scrutinized like they became, but suddenly there was newfound interest in non-politicos paying attention.
Obama didn't have these advantages. I'm not going to make a sob story out of his life, because there's no point. The point is, he got there a whole lot more based on his own than based on others propping him up, and he's willing to make the tough calls. His Vice President isn't doing the work for him. He's even hamstrung by a Senate that can't confirm a number of his appointees because of rules gridlock. He's still taking on the job himself. I respect that.
The work to get "Citizens United" overturned, and then continue from there.
Hell, push for an amendment that says, "Persons, as defined in this Constitution and in all supporting documents and common law, shall refer only to natural persons." That would end corporate personhood, which is the real problem in my opinion, as corporations have their shareholders interest in mind, to the exclusion of all else. Don't let corporations play in politics.
They don't all get into a room together and remain stuck there until a decision is made, which becomes the lowest-common-denominator decision...
Enlisting in a hostile foreign enemy is an automatic revocation of one's citizenship. Al Qaeda arguably is a de facto foreign power, a hostile foreign enemy.
Okay, I'll bite.
Please give me specific examples of where he has failed to follow the rules as set out in the Constitution.
Has he taken your guns?
Has he quartered any troops in your house or on your land?
Has he taken any more powers "reserved for the states" than his predecessors? If yes, I want specifics, including how the courts have ruled on the matter(s).
Has he prohibited assembly, or speech? Has he endorsed a state-sponsored religion?
Inquiring minds want to know.
I am concerned that the President has ordered a capture or kill order that will most likely result in kill, rather than capture, on three US citizens.
I am also concerned that there are three US citizens that most likely are dangerous enough to warrant such an order.
I am much less concerned by who makes this decision at the moment. Right now, for the first time in my life, the sitting President of the United States, an elected official, is personally reviewing the data on terrorists and personally deciding whether or not to attempt to take these people out. He's not handing the job to an analyst or to an assistant-to-an-undersecretary or some other unknown, non-elected bureaucrat. He is personally taking the responsibility and accepting the ramifications of these decisions.
These individuals are members of an organization that has successfully attacked us in the past and that has pledged to attack us in the future. There is no practical way to bring them to legal justice, as they operate as a de facto government in territory that they control. In that sense they nearly are members of a nation-state and the rules of war can be found to apply to them as lieutenants in that de facto government's military structure.
I think that the situation is a terrible, horrible one. But, I also have less qualms about how this is being run than I do about the entire detention/torture system that was in place before it.
...that joint-bureaucracy works...
The intelligence of a group can be determined by finding the IQ of the least intelligent member of the group, and dividing that number by the total people in the group.
How about calling your IS department first?
We've had people bring in non-spec equipment. We have about 30,000 machines across already too many different platforms, about twenty in total, with ten people to service them. If an asset is purchased that doesn't conform to one of those fourteen it doesn't get supported. Period.
If you buy it, you're going to be the only one supporting it. Your IS department is probably not staffed with all technicians qualified to add wholesale support for Linux-based OSes, and problems will occur, even on a Linux box.
This doesn't even get into Purchasing, which might not let you buy whatever you want. Here, they can only buy (last I checked) Latitude E5520s and Optiplex 790s, nothing else. Purchasing doesn't even let them have a choice- it's because of that issue of the sheer number of machines we have to support plus the diversity of them.
This doesn't even get into issues like MSproxy, which is one way of giving end users filtered internet access. It might not be configured to allow Linux boxes through properly. Obviously that's going to be a big problem if you order a lab of these, and I doubt that your network administrator will punch a hole in his firewall just for you.
If you don't talk to your IS department then you may as well not even bother buying them.
For those who care about the assets we're stuck supporting: Dell Latitude D505, D510, D520, D530, D610, E5500, E6500, E5510, E5520, 2100, 2120; Dell Optiplex GX270, GX280, GX520, 745, 755, 760, 780, 790; older custom-builts, Biostars M7VKQ, NGC-400, I945G-M7, Intel D945GCPE, and a smattering of Intel 845GLAD machines. Yes, it's too many. Yes, it's too great a range and there are too many old machines. But, that's what we're stuck with, and that's why we do not touch donated equipment, nonstandard equipment, or anything else of that nature.
But the act of possessing a certain amount of a substance or possessing a substance can itself being a criminal act. The consumption of a substance is also capable of being a criminal act. It's even possible to define, in advance, intent, such that things like, " possession with intent to distribute" can be crimes. They're not the same as distribution.
Yeah, but it's funny as hell...
That only works if there are very few false-positives.
Every time CSI or some other crime drama is on, there will be tens of thousands of searches. You could attempt to filter those out, but then you have someone with intent simply searching while watching CSI.
There is no good way without intensive investigation to determine if there even is a danger. Such investigation is only proving warranted in cases where terrorism is a real threat.
True, but their consistent domineering market share in OS and productivity suite markets does speak to their general success. Even their arguable failures like Microsoft Bob and Windows Vista have given them things that could be integrated in to other products or could be revised as whole products.
Regardless of one's feelings on Microsoft, that company has consistently and continually tried to make their user interfaces as attractive and easy to use as is possible. They've gone through the effort to develop fonts, to determine how to add pseudo-3d effects, how to space things and how to define icons and sizes. Whatever your beef with Redmond, the UI is the one thing that I will wholeheartedly disagree with you about in almost all circumstances.
If they dropped the ball here, then that's absolutely amazing. Literally amazing. They've built a company and made some of the richest people in the world on how pretty and easy to use their software products are, at the expense of what those interfaces run on for lower level code. If they're losing touch with UI now, that doesn't bode well for them for the long term. They certainly won't disappear, but their non-OS products would lose market share and once people stop being locked in to their non-OS products, they have little reason to stay with the OS itself if other vendors have multiOS versions of competing products.
Correct. Unless there's a very strong correlation that one behavior overwhelmingly leads to another that is a crime, then using one's research to attempt to predict a crime will lead to nothing more than the police showing up to essentially ask you if you're going to commit a crime. Even if you were, you simply say, "I'm sorry officer, but I have no legal obligation to speak with you on this or any other matter."
Seeing as how they can't really compel you to spend too much time with them until they arrest you, and if they do arrest you they must then provide you with legal counsel, this would not work in any way for a lot of potential criminals, as one's lawyer would also basically tell you to say nothing at all.
Until there's at least a crime-in-progress, you haven't done anything. Conspiracy to commit is difficult when there's no crime either, especially if there isn't even any materiel for a crime. Even then, one could research a crime, gather supplies for a crime, and be almost to the point of committing a crime, but then at the last moment, decide not to commit the crime. Still no crime has been committed.
Seed money.
Science fiction conventions and other Fandom events cost a lot to put on as well. In Fandom, seed money is used to pay for deposits on convention space, and to pay for marketing to get prepaid preregistrations. Even at a lower rate than day-of memberships, preregs can make or break a convention. It's possible to completely pay for everything with preregistrations and just use the day-of money as the seed money for the next convention, if they're nonprofit. For a commercial product, with seed money, one can do everything from attracting large investment dollars to producing marketing literature to encourage preorders, which in turn help to pay for everything.
Don't be too sure about that latter part. Once insurance companies feel that they have a method to screen for a demographic subgroup that doesn't violate civil rights they'll be happy to define it and use it, especially if investigation of that group yields viable statistics. That doesn't mean that every member of that group, especially a genetically-defined group, will manifest the traits associated with that group, but when you're talking about probabilities and risk you're not talking about individuals, you're talking about a data set.
I have no at-fault auto accidents. Despite this, because of my gender and relative youth, my insurance costs more than it does for my parents, when the number of incidents is identical, namely zero. Even if you look at not-at-fault accidents, we're the same at two. We have the same coverage levels and have the same number of vehicles insured, and the same number of drivers. When I got married, which did not change my driving habits or my fiancé's/wife's driving habits, our rates both went down, even though were were effectively the same age, living in the same place, making the same commutes, with the same cars.
I have no doubt that insurance companies would do whatever they could to define subgoups.
Because Data was influenced by the emotion chip, and we couldn't have made fifteen years worth of "women driver" jokes...
Were you expecting the saucer crashdown from Star Trek: Generations?
C'mon! I mean, Marina Sirtis wasn't even driving...