Does this mean- with the aid of the bios switcher - that by using a shitty mobo with support for 256kb (or larger) bios chips, I have a very heavy duty eprommer?
I don't know if they'll do plain old EPROMS and EEPROMS. Problem is that different devices require different timing to program. Some require multiple pulses of given length, etc if you want to adhere to manufacturer specs.
However, many flashroms on motherboards are 2Mbit and since you can essentially find flashroms and flashrom burners for free on the streets, maybe you might like to consider designing your electronic devices around these common flashroms instead of the older EPROMS, etc?
Free flashroms, free burner, typically larger capacity... what a bargain!
Will I be able to replace the linuxbio with the original again if everything buggers up?
If it fails to the point of not being able to boot any media, then you are screwed if you have no other means of flashing the old BIOS onto that rom. If you can't at least boot a bootable floppy that has the old ROM image and flasher, then that motherboard is essentially useless until you can get a useful bootstrapping happening out a flashrom that is inserted in that board.
However, you could restore the old BIOS onto the flashrom with a. an external ROM burning device (EPROM programmer style) or b. another motherboard, booted off it's own BIOS flashrom and then used to flash your other boards flashrom (with of course, a swapping of flashroms while the good motherboard is booted and still switched ON!).
With b you could go from 1 out of 2 good motherboards to either 2 out of 2 or even 0 out of 2. ; )
Don't short anything and get the flashroms around the right way and it might go well. It has worked for me in the past, but YMMV.
I think I'll wait for a more mature release before I go replacing my Award BIOS. As much as I love open source stuff, I don't want to deal with my BIOS being screwed up at the moment.
Incase anyone ever does find themselves in a pickle with a failed BIOS flashrom...
You can often use flashrom chips from other motherboards, sometimes even if they are a different type of flashrom.
I had one machine BIOS upgrade go really bad (no longer even got to display any POST info at all, not even frantic beeping), I pulled the bad flashrom out, booted another motherboard with a DOS floppy with the old ROM image and flash program, while it was ON I pulled out the good flashrom and inserted the bad (two completely different models of motherboard), flashed the bad rom back to the old image, swapped the flashroms back and presto, both machines working.
You have to be very careful not to short anything when extracting the flashroms while the PC is ON and whatever you do, don't insert them the wrong way around!
The Award flashers will typically detect the part type and voltage, warn you that it's not the correct image for the current motherboard (if the mobos are sufficiently different) and then proceed to flash if you give it the OK.
This should probably only be done as a desperate measure where you can afford to loose the motherboard that you temporarily flash with. Pick up some PC's off the street for spare flashroms and elligible flasher motherboards that you don't mind wrecking.
My OpenBSD file server is a Pentium 200MMX that someone just threw out. Works beautifully. In fact every PC I've picked up off the street has worked without any problems.
Please tell, what is this mythical "high end processing environment" that I keep hearing about?
I am not arguing with you. But the "high end processing environment" that I know Sun practically owns, is the financial sector. Stock Broking and Banking. Linux is coming up really fast on the desktop in the Stock Broking area though.
Reality shows that technical details mean NOTHING in the corporate world. People in these sorts of environments continue to use what they trust, what they've trusted for many years. Products that have barely ever softened this trust.
I have tried to deploy OpenBSD bridge firewalls and have been met with rejection by people with high technical prowess, because they fear that using OpenBSD for firewalls, moves the perceived accountability from, say Cisco, to themselves.
Forget what the EULA's might say, forget that they (Cisco) most likely wash their hands of even the highest negligence and forget how technically brilliant the free solution might be.
If it's not too hard I'd like to give it a shot. (the 5V trick)
Some 12V fans will just barely run at 5V, others not at all (usually these will shudder at start, but not actually get enough momentum to keep spinning). If you wire them between the 12V and 5V rails you'll be running the fan at 7 volts, which usually works for the troublesome fans.
I assume Skyfire's new temp controlled fan is designed to run at a wider voltage range though.
When I entered university (1990), most of the higher students were building computers for themselves and for friends. And guess the size? Those (mostly 8080-based) computers fit completely into keyboad!
8080 in 1990? Don't you mean 80486 or 1980?
In 1989, the 80486 was out. In 1991, I bought an 80486DX-33 with a whopping 200MB "Brand Technologies" IDE hard drive (a complete POS drive BTW).
The 8080 came out in 1974! 8086 in 1978 (16bit CPU+bus), 8088 (16bit, 8bit bus) in 1979, 286 in '82, 386 in '85, Pentium in '93...
Students were building 8080's in 1990 in your area? I don't doubt that some may have built 8080 machines as part of a Computer Engineering degree, but surely this was not the typical student built machine in 1990.
Tens of thousands of USD is blown up in the air and converted into a couple of movies
; )
In the late 80's I was working in electronic weapons. Homing anti aircraft missiles had their internal electronics placed carefully and then covered in resin, due to the fact that when these incredible machines launched, large'ish unprotected components (electrolytic caps for eg) would generally rip right off the PCB's or otherwise be damaged. Sending the missle anywhere but where it was supposed to go.
Even cables would be tied into bundles, bolted down and resin'ed into place.
Ship mounted missles, like the "standard anti aircraft", would strip the on deck "grip paint" back to bare aluminium after just one launch, from the rocket blast.
I can't get to the site, it's/.'ed for me. Did the DV even last one ride?
I found tombstones from a usenet google search (should have looked harder in the first place!), and managed to find a guy in my area who'll do it for me.
Awesome!
I plan on buying one of these small console size PC's, with a half decent CPU and gfx card with TV out (for the 3D accelerated emulated games) and perhaps a 10gig HDD. Putting Gentoo Linux on it and trying as much as I can to make it look as seamless a arcade machine emulator console as I can.
Should be fun to do and plenty of fun when it's actually working.
A couple of gamepads... ; )
Move over PS2 and X box! I'm completely over all the hyper polygon, driving and fighting games. Give me Twin Cobra, Slap Fight, Wonder Boy, Galaga, etc any day!
Can anyone recommend from experience a decent little machine to base this on?
I've played MAME on and off for probably 5 years but never really archived any of my favorite ROMS.
I was recently in the mood to download them again to play and archive for my own use, but it seems they're now really hard to find downloadable on the net.
Years ago, a friend of mine had a CD full of MAME ROMS that he purchased from some shonky shop.
Anyone know where I can get the ROMS on CD or DVD?
And yes, the stone fish is the world's most venomous.
Looking at Google, I'm seeing lots of conflicting stories about the good old stone fish. Most state that it is the most venomous, but "can often be deadly". I've definitely seen Aussie documentaries that are perhaps understating the dangers. This one states to immerse foot in hot water, which I have heard disables the venom.
This site suggests that death by heart failure can occur.
The deadly (female sydney) funnelweb is a fairly small spider though, and I'm pretty sure it's not very closely related to the tarantula
I saw something on TV recently that claimed that they were. This site suggests it, along with many others, are being incorrectly called tarantulas. Here's an interesting site, stating that they're not tarantulas.
The world's most venomous snake is the taipan (fierce snake), found in central australia
Yes, though the Aussie snake I fear most is the tiger, who is very agressive and will actually give chase, unlike almost any other snake in the World.
The world's most venomous spider is the female sydney funnelweb found around the south east cost and blue mountains.
I've heard the most venomous is the "daddy long legs" (sorry for the vague, non-technical, generic term), but they are harmless to us due to fangs too small to get through the first layer of dead skin.
The funnel web is a big bastard of the tarrantula family. Her fangs do not come together "pinching" style, so she raises her front legs and thorax (hub in the middle where everything connects) and brings this all down in a striking, venom dripping, fang sinking blow.
The world's most venonmous fish is the stone-fish, found in waters around australia.
Stepping on a stone fish gives you a whole new meaning of pain. The jelly this little fella injects typically into your foot needs to be cut out and rinsed with very hot water to give almost instant relief. But...
I thought the Worlds most venomous fish would have been the butterfly/lion fish? Also found in Oz. This gorgeous temptress can kill you. Not that the Stone fish couldn't, I'm sure she could cause heart failure from the pain. : )
The world's most venomous jellyfish is the box jellyfish, found in tropical australian waters.
Tell me about it! When I lived in Townsville, I couldn't swim in most parts because of crocs that like both fresh and salt water and bloody "kill ya in 60 seconds" box jellyfish. Wading in creeks above where crocs can climb was good but the thought of having my toes bitten off by mud crabs worried me (though I think they tend to avoid the free flowing areas).
The world's most venomous octopus is the blue ringed octopus, found all over the coast.
Mmmmm, he is a real bad one. Teterodotoxic (like puffer fish), his toxin shuts down the nervous system, people tend to stop breathing and loose consiousness and politely die. One scarey little bugger, especially since (I think) there is no anti venom for his toxin.
The world's most venomous shell-creature-type-thing (this one i'm not 100% sure about) is the conch shell, found in australian waters, especially around the reef.
I know the one you mean, the cone shaped nasty who shoots poison darts?
The world's most venomous brewed drink, fosters, is reputably found in pubs everywhere, although I've never seen any bastard drink it.
Victoria Bitter all the way my good mate. ; )
Anyway folks, come to Australia! Beautiful one day, necropolis the next.
Problem is that just about anything can make him physically capable. He could use a car, a butchers knife, an axe, or maybe he knows karate. Or he could just drown you with a glass of water.
There are lots of ways to elevate ones violent capabilities. But these hardly compare.
Walk into a mall on a Saturday, say around lunch time, into the fast food eatery. Look around and typically see hundreds of people. Even better, a packed cinema. Now, you're a sick fuck, bent on carnage and you have a whopping great big knife/axe under your jacket.
How many people are you going to gut or hack before some heros wrestle you to the ground?
Now go in there with an AK-47 with a 100 round drum and perhaps a spare or two dangling from your cammo belt. Walk close enough to the front without being blinded by the projector.... How many kills are you going to get? How many heros are going to run towards you to stop you?
Semi automatic assault rifles are usually quite easy to modify into full auto.
Replace cinema/food court with your choice of sprorts stadium, city train station during peak hour, major city lunch areas during mid day, large school, hospital, bus stops, K-Mart/Target during yearly stock take sales, etc etc.
Car's, knives, axes or fight training barely compare.
I've seen photos of a mall masacre. People where lying dead in the food they were eating, taken completely unaware. You could walk into a dinner and kill every occupant with a fully automatic weapon before they could be close to the door or swallow their bacon. Hell you could do it through the window without even going in to some.
Gun's in the hands of just anyone are bad news.
Hell, good kids, high on hormones who can no longer handle the relentless cruel humiliation of bullies at school can turn apparently evil and kill his tormentors.
These ones are kinda cool though. And they'll eat other insects that are in your home. I haven't been biten yet by a huntsman, though I have been biten by a redback (like a black widow). Luckily the redback was the gender that is least poisonous. When I was little (about 6), I woke up to find a funnel web crawling up my chest towards my face, which was pretty frightening. That was at my grandmothers who was living in the "bush" at the time.
I don't invite redbacks, funnel web or white tail spiders into my home though! They can kinda ruin you day, like the way OBL would probably like to.
: )
I recently held for the first time a python, which was a very enlightening experience. I could feel her breathing and even heard her take a deep "sigh" kind of breath. She felt incredible. I'd love to have a python if it weren't for the fact that I think they probably like to eat live food. I can't bring myself to kill some poor litte mice.
Oooooooh god. That's my plans for visiting Oz cancelled, then.
You just have to get used to the idea that they are very timid spiders and if the rare case occurs that one bites you, the worst you will get is something ranging from an itchy flea bite type of mark to a low level of local pain.
When it's raining outside, and I see a small'ish one, I often just grab him/her (bare hands) and bring it itside. Although I can only do this with the small ones (3-4cm across), as the big ones do instinctively freak me out a bit if they run across me (they are just so damn fast it is startling).
I read somewhere that.au has the top eight most venomous animals in the World. Though I think this could be a bit of an exageration (ranking wise).
I'd rather spend a night in with a hairy eight legged friend than with a member of our lying bastard government.
If he is physically capable, making the rest of us physically incapable of defending ourselves is the ultimate insanity.
He will make himself physically capable BECAUSE "the rest of you" are.
In the US you have so many killings every year, higher numbers directly attributed to gun ownership. In Australia we have so few. So does that mean that (percentage wise) there are more nutcases in the US than Australia?
No, I don't think so. We have our fair share of nut cases, but they usually get taken down easily and quickly after the initial attack with a bludgeoning or stabbing type weapon.
We have had masacres in the past (many many years between them). Hoddle Street, Port Arthur, Strathfield. But these were done by people with MASSIVE physical abilities (read, high powered assault rifles). Since our buy back scheme, we have had much less incidents.
BTW, regarding Port Arthur, the perpetrator aquired the most effective means to his end, after breaking into someones house and guess what he found? Colt AR-15 (I think, it was M-16 like from memory) in some guys house, perhaps as protection, this man and his family were KILLED with his OWN WEAPON. Now, sure, you can say that he should have had it better locked up right? Well the problem is, that TRUSTING people to do what is correct and safe is a mistake, because people being people, do stupid things. It only takes one well meaning drongo to arm a malicious drongo.
If I go into a mall, with intent to kill as many people as I can, but all I have is a knife, how successful do you think I will be? Now if I have a Colt AR-15 or AK-47 with plenty of ammo, what do you think my success rate will be?
I wish you could see it from our point of view. All you guys can think is, "if I give up my guns, I will be helpless against EVERYONE ELSE who do have guns". For us, the people with guns are law enforcement agencies and a minority of criminals who usually use their weapons against each other in gang land disputes.
There are sometimes home invasions, murders and what not, but these are infrequent and firearms in Australia are often used in more of a threatening manner because the criminals know that the victim is not going to pull out a 357 Magnum and blow his nuts off.
If everyone in Australia had guns, there would be many more deaths. Guns make it too easy to kill. Domestic violence beatings would be upgraded to killings in heated moments, and people down in the lowest times of their lives could be killing others or themselves all too easily when they ordinarily might have just had a punch up and a night in the clink to cool off or a failed attempt at suicide (wimped out with the wrist cutting and hanging, eating a bullet on the other hand is so quick, simple and final).
No, they're not. Guns are the problem. If you don't have a gun, you can't shoot me with it. This lame argument has been used for years by the jackals in the NRA, and it is just as false now as when those murderers invented it.
So very true. A dangerous person is a lot more dangerous with a gun than without. It takes mental and physical capability to do any level of damage to the safety of others. If the person is mentally capable of mass murder, making him physically capable is the ultimate insanity.
the average building wouldn't keep you safe from the radiation from the fallout from a nuclear weapon, let alone the massive amounts of radiation which would pour onto the earth without the magnetosphere. Even without the direct effects of the radiation on life-forms (massive deaths, sterility, mutations etc), it would be pretty tough to survive once the solar wind had stripped the atmosphere away from this rock we sit on.
Wow, what a fun loving, happy go lucky guy you are!
You think that we can pull a scam on businesses similiar to Y2K?
The Y2K bug was not a scam. However it was exploited and hyped by scammers.
I was working for a company in 1996 whose business critical systems running on big VAXen were demostratable to fail on the development machines when the clock was wound forward. They were working on the bugs for years.
And there WERE some Y2K failures. Few enough though, for people to beleive it was a hoax, but this is because most systems were fixed! If nothing were done, many things would have failed with varying degrees.
If nothing had been done, it would not have been hype at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean- with the aid of the bios switcher - that by using a shitty mobo with support for 256kb (or larger) bios chips, I have a very heavy duty eprommer?
I don't know if they'll do plain old EPROMS and EEPROMS. Problem is that different devices require different timing to program. Some require multiple pulses of given length, etc if you want to adhere to manufacturer specs.
However, many flashroms on motherboards are 2Mbit and since you can essentially find flashroms and flashrom burners for free on the streets, maybe you might like to consider designing your electronic devices around these common flashroms instead of the older EPROMS, etc?
Free flashroms, free burner, typically larger capacity... what a bargain!
Will I be able to replace the linuxbio with the original again if everything buggers up?
If it fails to the point of not being able to boot any media, then you are screwed if you have no other means of flashing the old BIOS onto that rom. If you can't at least boot a bootable floppy that has the old ROM image and flasher, then that motherboard is essentially useless until you can get a useful bootstrapping happening out a flashrom that is inserted in that board.
However, you could restore the old BIOS onto the flashrom with a. an external ROM burning device (EPROM programmer style) or b. another motherboard, booted off it's own BIOS flashrom and then used to flash your other boards flashrom (with of course, a swapping of flashroms while the good motherboard is booted and still switched ON!).
With b you could go from 1 out of 2 good motherboards to either 2 out of 2 or even 0 out of 2. ; )
Don't short anything and get the flashroms around the right way and it might go well. It has worked for me in the past, but YMMV.
I think I'll wait for a more mature release before I go replacing my Award BIOS. As much as I love open source stuff, I don't want to deal with my BIOS being screwed up at the moment.
Incase anyone ever does find themselves in a pickle with a failed BIOS flashrom...
You can often use flashrom chips from other motherboards, sometimes even if they are a different type of flashrom.
I had one machine BIOS upgrade go really bad (no longer even got to display any POST info at all, not even frantic beeping), I pulled the bad flashrom out, booted another motherboard with a DOS floppy with the old ROM image and flash program, while it was ON I pulled out the good flashrom and inserted the bad (two completely different models of motherboard), flashed the bad rom back to the old image, swapped the flashroms back and presto, both machines working.
You have to be very careful not to short anything when extracting the flashroms while the PC is ON and whatever you do, don't insert them the wrong way around!
The Award flashers will typically detect the part type and voltage, warn you that it's not the correct image for the current motherboard (if the mobos are sufficiently different) and then proceed to flash if you give it the OK.
This should probably only be done as a desperate measure where you can afford to loose the motherboard that you temporarily flash with. Pick up some PC's off the street for spare flashroms and elligible flasher motherboards that you don't mind wrecking.
My OpenBSD file server is a Pentium 200MMX that someone just threw out. Works beautifully. In fact every PC I've picked up off the street has worked without any problems.
It'll be a wonderful day when we'll finally be able to rid ourselves from those damned Award/AMI/Phoenix bug-riddled extremely legacy code.
Yeah. But would you agree that Award is a tonne better than AMI and Phoenix?
I love being able to insert ROM images as modules into my Award BIOS (Etherboot, LAN booting without EPROM).
Please tell, what is this mythical "high end processing environment" that I keep hearing about?
I am not arguing with you. But the "high end processing environment" that I know Sun practically owns, is the financial sector. Stock Broking and Banking. Linux is coming up really fast on the desktop in the Stock Broking area though.
Reality shows that technical details mean NOTHING in the corporate world. People in these sorts of environments continue to use what they trust, what they've trusted for many years. Products that have barely ever softened this trust.
I have tried to deploy OpenBSD bridge firewalls and have been met with rejection by people with high technical prowess, because they fear that using OpenBSD for firewalls, moves the perceived accountability from, say Cisco, to themselves.
Forget what the EULA's might say, forget that they (Cisco) most likely wash their hands of even the highest negligence and forget how technically brilliant the free solution might be.
This situation of course, disgusts me.
If it's not too hard I'd like to give it a shot. (the 5V trick)
Some 12V fans will just barely run at 5V, others not at all (usually these will shudder at start, but not actually get enough momentum to keep spinning). If you wire them between the 12V and 5V rails you'll be running the fan at 7 volts, which usually works for the troublesome fans.
I assume Skyfire's new temp controlled fan is designed to run at a wider voltage range though.
When I entered university (1990), most of the higher students were building computers for themselves and for friends. And guess the size? Those (mostly 8080-based) computers fit completely into keyboad!
8080 in 1990? Don't you mean 80486 or 1980?
In 1989, the 80486 was out. In 1991, I bought an 80486DX-33 with a whopping 200MB "Brand Technologies" IDE hard drive (a complete POS drive BTW).
The 8080 came out in 1974! 8086 in 1978 (16bit CPU+bus), 8088 (16bit, 8bit bus) in 1979, 286 in '82, 386 in '85, Pentium in '93...
Students were building 8080's in 1990 in your area? I don't doubt that some may have built 8080 machines as part of a Computer Engineering degree, but surely this was not the typical student built machine in 1990.
Did you know that if you chew on a piece of aluminum foil for couple of minutes, you'll get high?
You're just trying to hurt my teeth!
BTW, there is no way I am going to waste any of my aluminium foil hat for "chewing".
Tens of thousands of USD is blown up in the air and converted into a couple of movies
/.'ed for me. Did the DV even last one ride?
; )
In the late 80's I was working in electronic weapons. Homing anti aircraft missiles had their internal electronics placed carefully and then covered in resin, due to the fact that when these incredible machines launched, large'ish unprotected components (electrolytic caps for eg) would generally rip right off the PCB's or otherwise be damaged. Sending the missle anywhere but where it was supposed to go.
Even cables would be tied into bundles, bolted down and resin'ed into place.
Ship mounted missles, like the "standard anti aircraft", would strip the on deck "grip paint" back to bare aluminium after just one launch, from the rocket blast.
I can't get to the site, it's
Thanks for the link.
I found tombstones from a usenet google search (should have looked harder in the first place!), and managed to find a guy in my area who'll do it for me.
Awesome!
I plan on buying one of these small console size PC's, with a half decent CPU and gfx card with TV out (for the 3D accelerated emulated games) and perhaps a 10gig HDD. Putting Gentoo Linux on it and trying as much as I can to make it look as seamless a arcade machine emulator console as I can.
Should be fun to do and plenty of fun when it's actually working.
A couple of gamepads... ; )
Move over PS2 and X box! I'm completely over all the hyper polygon, driving and fighting games. Give me Twin Cobra, Slap Fight, Wonder Boy, Galaga, etc any day!
Can anyone recommend from experience a decent little machine to base this on?
I've played MAME on and off for probably 5 years but never really archived any of my favorite ROMS.
I was recently in the mood to download them again to play and archive for my own use, but it seems they're now really hard to find downloadable on the net.
Years ago, a friend of mine had a CD full of MAME ROMS that he purchased from some shonky shop.
Anyone know where I can get the ROMS on CD or DVD?
And yes, the stone fish is the world's most venomous.
Looking at Google, I'm seeing lots of conflicting stories about the good old stone fish. Most state that it is the most venomous, but "can often be deadly". I've definitely seen Aussie documentaries that are perhaps understating the dangers. This one states to immerse foot in hot water, which I have heard disables the venom.
This site suggests that death by heart failure can occur.
The deadly (female sydney) funnelweb is a fairly small spider though, and I'm pretty sure it's not very closely related to the tarantula
I saw something on TV recently that claimed that they were. This site suggests it, along with many others, are being incorrectly called tarantulas. Here's an interesting site, stating that they're not tarantulas.
A hard earned thirst needs a big cold beer!
Man, where do you live?
.au and I would not dare leave a ground floor window open while I sleep.
I live in Sydney
Ah. That would be 'her' swallowing your arm. Stroke the cuuute python!
; )
You sound like a true patriot Josh! CARN AUSSIE!!
I doubt it...
The world's most venomous snake is the taipan (fierce snake), found in central australia
Yes, though the Aussie snake I fear most is the tiger, who is very agressive and will actually give chase, unlike almost any other snake in the World.
The world's most venomous spider is the female sydney funnelweb found around the south east cost and blue mountains.
I've heard the most venomous is the "daddy long legs" (sorry for the vague, non-technical, generic term), but they are harmless to us due to fangs too small to get through the first layer of dead skin.
The funnel web is a big bastard of the tarrantula family. Her fangs do not come together "pinching" style, so she raises her front legs and thorax (hub in the middle where everything connects) and brings this all down in a striking, venom dripping, fang sinking blow.
The world's most venonmous fish is the stone-fish, found in waters around australia.
Stepping on a stone fish gives you a whole new meaning of pain. The jelly this little fella injects typically into your foot needs to be cut out and rinsed with very hot water to give almost instant relief. But...
I thought the Worlds most venomous fish would have been the butterfly/lion fish? Also found in Oz. This gorgeous temptress can kill you. Not that the Stone fish couldn't, I'm sure she could cause heart failure from the pain. : )
The world's most venomous jellyfish is the box jellyfish, found in tropical australian waters.
Tell me about it! When I lived in Townsville, I couldn't swim in most parts because of crocs that like both fresh and salt water and bloody "kill ya in 60 seconds" box jellyfish. Wading in creeks above where crocs can climb was good but the thought of having my toes bitten off by mud crabs worried me (though I think they tend to avoid the free flowing areas).
The world's most venomous octopus is the blue ringed octopus, found all over the coast.
Mmmmm, he is a real bad one. Teterodotoxic (like puffer fish), his toxin shuts down the nervous system, people tend to stop breathing and loose consiousness and politely die. One scarey little bugger, especially since (I think) there is no anti venom for his toxin.
The world's most venomous shell-creature-type-thing (this one i'm not 100% sure about) is the conch shell, found in australian waters, especially around the reef.
I know the one you mean, the cone shaped nasty who shoots poison darts?
The world's most venomous brewed drink, fosters, is reputably found in pubs everywhere, although I've never seen any bastard drink it.
Victoria Bitter all the way my good mate. ; )
Anyway folks, come to Australia! Beautiful one day, necropolis the next.
Problem is that just about anything can make him physically capable. He could use a car, a butchers knife, an axe, or maybe he knows karate. Or he could just drown you with a glass of water.
There are lots of ways to elevate ones violent capabilities. But these hardly compare.
Walk into a mall on a Saturday, say around lunch time, into the fast food eatery. Look around and typically see hundreds of people. Even better, a packed cinema. Now, you're a sick fuck, bent on carnage and you have a whopping great big knife/axe under your jacket.
How many people are you going to gut or hack before some heros wrestle you to the ground?
Now go in there with an AK-47 with a 100 round drum and perhaps a spare or two dangling from your cammo belt. Walk close enough to the front without being blinded by the projector.... How many kills are you going to get? How many heros are going to run towards you to stop you?
Semi automatic assault rifles are usually quite easy to modify into full auto.
Replace cinema/food court with your choice of sprorts stadium, city train station during peak hour, major city lunch areas during mid day, large school, hospital, bus stops, K-Mart/Target during yearly stock take sales, etc etc.
Car's, knives, axes or fight training barely compare.
I've seen photos of a mall masacre. People where lying dead in the food they were eating, taken completely unaware. You could walk into a dinner and kill every occupant with a fully automatic weapon before they could be close to the door or swallow their bacon. Hell you could do it through the window without even going in to some.
Gun's in the hands of just anyone are bad news.
Hell, good kids, high on hormones who can no longer handle the relentless cruel humiliation of bullies at school can turn apparently evil and kill his tormentors.
You don't seem to have much faith in your fellow citizens
Do me a favour, tonight, open your doors and windows before you go to bed...
What's that? Not a penguins chance in hell? Didn't think so.
I don't trust ANYONE other than my closest family members. Even best friends have stabbed me in the back in their weakest times.
If we geeks had had the foresight not to fix things to well the economy would still be buzzing.
You work for Microsoft don't you.
These ones are kinda cool though. And they'll eat other insects that are in your home. I haven't been biten yet by a huntsman, though I have been biten by a redback (like a black widow). Luckily the redback was the gender that is least poisonous. When I was little (about 6), I woke up to find a funnel web crawling up my chest towards my face, which was pretty frightening. That was at my grandmothers who was living in the "bush" at the time.
I don't invite redbacks, funnel web or white tail spiders into my home though! They can kinda ruin you day, like the way OBL would probably like to.
: )
I recently held for the first time a python, which was a very enlightening experience. I could feel her breathing and even heard her take a deep "sigh" kind of breath. She felt incredible. I'd love to have a python if it weren't for the fact that I think they probably like to eat live food. I can't bring myself to kill some poor litte mice.
Oooooooh god. That's my plans for visiting Oz cancelled, then.
.au has the top eight most venomous animals in the World. Though I think this could be a bit of an exageration (ranking wise).
You just have to get used to the idea that they are very timid spiders and if the rare case occurs that one bites you, the worst you will get is something ranging from an itchy flea bite type of mark to a low level of local pain.
When it's raining outside, and I see a small'ish one, I often just grab him/her (bare hands) and bring it itside. Although I can only do this with the small ones (3-4cm across), as the big ones do instinctively freak me out a bit if they run across me (they are just so damn fast it is startling).
I read somewhere that
I'd rather spend a night in with a hairy eight legged friend than with a member of our lying bastard government.
If he is physically capable, making the rest of us physically incapable of defending ourselves is the ultimate insanity.
He will make himself physically capable BECAUSE "the rest of you" are.
In the US you have so many killings every year, higher numbers directly attributed to gun ownership. In Australia we have so few. So does that mean that (percentage wise) there are more nutcases in the US than Australia?
No, I don't think so. We have our fair share of nut cases, but they usually get taken down easily and quickly after the initial attack with a bludgeoning or stabbing type weapon.
We have had masacres in the past (many many years between them). Hoddle Street, Port Arthur, Strathfield. But these were done by people with MASSIVE physical abilities (read, high powered assault rifles). Since our buy back scheme, we have had much less incidents.
BTW, regarding Port Arthur, the perpetrator aquired the most effective means to his end, after breaking into someones house and guess what he found? Colt AR-15 (I think, it was M-16 like from memory) in some guys house, perhaps as protection, this man and his family were KILLED with his OWN WEAPON. Now, sure, you can say that he should have had it better locked up right? Well the problem is, that TRUSTING people to do what is correct and safe is a mistake, because people being people, do stupid things. It only takes one well meaning drongo to arm a malicious drongo.
If I go into a mall, with intent to kill as many people as I can, but all I have is a knife, how successful do you think I will be? Now if I have a Colt AR-15 or AK-47 with plenty of ammo, what do you think my success rate will be?
I wish you could see it from our point of view. All you guys can think is, "if I give up my guns, I will be helpless against EVERYONE ELSE who do have guns". For us, the people with guns are law enforcement agencies and a minority of criminals who usually use their weapons against each other in gang land disputes.
There are sometimes home invasions, murders and what not, but these are infrequent and firearms in Australia are often used in more of a threatening manner because the criminals know that the victim is not going to pull out a 357 Magnum and blow his nuts off.
If everyone in Australia had guns, there would be many more deaths. Guns make it too easy to kill. Domestic violence beatings would be upgraded to killings in heated moments, and people down in the lowest times of their lives could be killing others or themselves all too easily when they ordinarily might have just had a punch up and a night in the clink to cool off or a failed attempt at suicide (wimped out with the wrist cutting and hanging, eating a bullet on the other hand is so quick, simple and final).
No, they're not. Guns are the problem. If you don't have a gun, you can't shoot me with it. This lame argument has been used for years by the jackals in the NRA, and it is just as false now as when those murderers invented it.
So very true. A dangerous person is a lot more dangerous with a gun than without. It takes mental and physical capability to do any level of damage to the safety of others. If the person is mentally capable of mass murder, making him physically capable is the ultimate insanity.
"consultants"
That's the new word for "salesman" isn't it?
the average building wouldn't keep you safe from the radiation from the fallout from a nuclear weapon, let alone the massive amounts of radiation which would pour onto the earth without the magnetosphere. Even without the direct effects of the radiation on life-forms (massive deaths, sterility, mutations etc), it would be pretty tough to survive once the solar wind had stripped the atmosphere away from this rock we sit on.
Wow, what a fun loving, happy go lucky guy you are!
Do you work for NASA's PR dept? ; )
You think that we can pull a scam on businesses similiar to Y2K?
The Y2K bug was not a scam. However it was exploited and hyped by scammers.
I was working for a company in 1996 whose business critical systems running on big VAXen were demostratable to fail on the development machines when the clock was wound forward. They were working on the bugs for years.
And there WERE some Y2K failures. Few enough though, for people to beleive it was a hoax, but this is because most systems were fixed! If nothing were done, many things would have failed with varying degrees.
If nothing had been done, it would not have been hype at all.