Delta was already an hour late getting off the ground because they seem to be incapable of leaving either Fayetteville or Atlanta on time.
Actually Delta is one of the higher performing airlines in terms of on time performance, beating out JetBlue, Continental, AirTran, ASA, and United, among others.
It seems to me that this might be redundant effort on top of the great work done by Project Guttenberg. While I am all for independent approaches to issues such as this, me thinks that the resources of Google paired up with the experience and resources of PG would be a good thing. It would be very nice to see all these books as actual text files, instead of scanned images, but I'm not complaining!
Although I am afraid of the person that will replace Ashcroft, it is certainly a good thing for civil liberties and freedom that he is leaving. I think this brings to light the fact that Bush is only a part of the worry when it comes to the Bush administration, it is the goons behind him whispering in his ear that cause much of the worry.
We had to stop using our brand new 2.4Ghz phones at work because our wi-fi stuff wouldn't hold a signal when the phones were in use. Keep in mind this was 2 years ago, haven't tried anything since.
Yes, it seems to bridge a gap, but I'm a little afraid of the accident rate that the new pilots will have. This seems to go back to the barnstorming days, when pilot training was limited to getting up, turning, and getting down. There is no instrument training provision here, as there is with a full license, there doesn't seem to be any insrument navigation, it's probably all just "look out the window" kind of stuff, and 10 landings is a pitiful number.
I wonder if anyone will do it in the minimum number of hours. The minimum for a private license is 40, with 20 hours dual and 20 hours solo, but hardly anyone completes it in that amount of time. Also, does anyone think that as the years go by and they tack another provision or two onto this Sport License, it will just morph into a slightly weaker version of the Private License?
When I was working on a solar powered car in college there was one of those SAE cars next to our bay. I don't think they're all that plausible because they are little more than go carts. I think we should work toward some of the technologies they use, like superatomizing and mixing the fuel, and trying to get engines above their pathetic 30% efficiency, but 1500 mpg is a bit out of reach. Of course, I guess I should never say never.
We had a rack in our network room that had recently been moved so that new cable could be run behind it. No one had informed me that when it was put back into position it hadn't been attached to the floor, wall, ceiling, nothing, and the entire rack was BARELY balanced and standing.
One of the servers on the rack had a CD drive that was somewhat broken, it didn't open when you pushed the button. So, doing what I always did, I sat at the workstation a few feet away and logged in remotely. I gave the command for to eject the CD, and as it did, I watched a very full server rack teeter forward from the weight of the CD tray, and then crash to the floor.
I was very lucky my boss had taken his Zoloft that day.
Certainly true. I'm not at the sysadmin level, I'm still the end user support bitch at my company. So when I have to go solve a problem involving someone's personal settings, all I have to do is look around the desk or inside the top left drawer and I'll usually find all the information I need to login to their user account and email. Usually you can even find the logins to non-work stuff, like their personal email on hotmail, their online bank stuff, whatever you want.
I don't know if I was "incredibly brilliant", but I did the same gifted kid/geeky thing when I was young. I was not a social outcast, I had lots of friends and aquaintences, but I was years behind when it came to anything athletic. Karate or something similar might do wonders for the kid. If he wants to try something, suggest an activity that
Doesn't require sheer strength/speed/size
If he's a lightweight geek, find an activity in which being light and maneuverable would be a plus, like running, biking, backpacking
If he's not into the athletic thing, suggest something group oriented but still geeky, like acting at a community theater.
Better yet, get him into doing lighting/sound at a theater
If nothing else, immerse him in geek culture and groups. Chess clubs or computer clubs might seem like a step in the wrong direction, but they might just be a baby step in the right direction. Throwing the kid into activities that he's not familar with might scare the shit out of him, but he might be more willing to talk to folks at a geek club. He can then baby step himself up to regular kids at school, and who knows, maybe someday he'll talk to girls!!
Just remind him that if he can't talk to people, he's not going to get laid:-)
I think we can all agree that yes, software, or rather the result of erroneous software, can kill. However I think the more relevant question is should someone be held responsible if in case it does?
If software screws up an automated train switch and two trains collide, or if software used to regulate power transmission goes haywire and causes a blackout that results in a dozen deaths, is the software writer responsible? I say probably not. Obviously sheer negligence and less than satisfactory work would be grounds to punish someone, but that is still subjective. While the blame could be pointed at the coder that wrote the software, he would have as much reason to point to the company that designs power transmission systems and say "Their system should have physical backups to prevent blackouts", and he would be right. They should have physical backups.
Now let's say that someone writes a virus or some exploit that brings down someone else's code and causes a blackout. Should that virus writer be punished? The large majority would say yes. We just saw a story where a guy is getting charged with terrorism for "hacking" a few DirectTV boxes, and the consensus here on/. was that he deserved punishment. But the case would probably also be made that the original coder should have written code that was less vulnerable to exploitation. For something so important, the code should be guaranteed stable and reliable, right?
I'm sure that in the case of a few people or a small company writing code, people would demand that they be held liable for writing exploitable code. Seems a bit hypocritical since most people would never blame MS for writing exploitable code.
I worked in a move theater for a few years, including the time when the first of the "new" Star Wars came out. Lucas had a bastardly set of rules for all theaters that were carrying the film.
Projectionists were only allowed to load the film into the projector, they were not allowed to actually glimpse the movie as it was being played.
The little windows in the theater doors had to be covered with black construction paper.
Lucas had employees sit in the theaters and do head counts. The head count had to match with the ticket sales.
No employees were allowed to watch the movies without purchasing a ticket, and then they couldn't even use an employee discount.
The penalty for breaking the rules? The theater lost the right to show the film. Since it was the hottest movie of the year, of course no theater argued any of the rules that the jerk laid down. Talk about squeezing out every last dime...
His penalty?...Jail for 10 years should do the trick.
ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE? It makes me want to crawl out of my skin when I hear jackasses say things like this. Today everyone's solution to problems is "We need longer jail sentences. More jail time now!". You are advocating 10 YEARS for writing a script? Everyone knows that white collar criminals are scared just by being taken to court, let alone jail time.
If this guy went to jail for even two months I'd bet you all the money I have that he would never do something like this again. After being in jail for two months, his job would probably be gone, he'd have to suffer the embarassment of telling his friends, his family, his wife's family, his children, etc, that he has to go spend some time in jail because of a stupid thing he did.
10 YEARS!! You've got to be kidding me. I'd like to ask anyone that has ever thought that putting someone in prison for 10 years to think about what they were doing ten years ago. Think of what you were doing ten years ago, and what's happened since then. The people you've met, the girlfriends you've had, places you've been. Now replace that with the inside of a concrete room. Every day. For 10 years.
You are in idiot and an asshole for suggesting 10 years for a scripting prank. I guarantee you any jail time he gets will cause him to lose his job, he will lose his right to vote, he will lose a fortune on legal costs, and countless other things. If anyone here on slashdot had to suffer through all that, we would all be crying "Why? Why?", and it would be enough to straighten our fellow slashdotter out.
Before screaming for 10 years of someone's life to be stolen from them, think about what the hell you're saying. I'm sure the simple fact that he has been caught and is involved with the police and the courts will make this guy never do anything like this again. Don't make it obvious what a jackass you are by putting him in jail for a decade while ignoring real criminals like, say, the president.
Even if you ignore the fuel needed to pump the helium in and out of the storage, they will need the power to propel the "gravy"-plane forward
They don't plan on pumping the helium in and out. It looks like they plan on leaving the helium static in the tanks, and pumping air in and out of other tanks, making the plane weigh more and less. However, it's not really the weight of the plane that matters, it's the density. The goal is to get the average density of all the materials onboard i.e. the people, instruments, seats, structure, tanks, etc to be less than the density of the air around it. This is where I think they will have problems.
Anyone familar with aviation or the atmosphere knows that the atmosphere gets much less dense as you go up. Here in Columbus, altitude 1,000 feet, the density of air is 1.2 kg/m^3 At 10,000 feet the density is 0.88 kg/m^3 and at 30,000 feet it is 0.41 kg/m^3. This plane would have to have an average density less than those values to reach those altitudes, and keep in mind that simply having the cabin pressurized for humans will make the entire cabin a bubble of "heavy" air.
The energy to pressurize air will come from a wind powered turbine which will be deployed when the plane is descending, but I don't know how much power they expect to get from this. Any power produced by this turbine would affect the plane in the form of drag, which decreases speed and range. This would have to be a very flexible air storage system, since the requirements would change every day depending on high and low pressure systems, temperature, and the weight of whoever is on board.
They may also have stability and control issues. I assume that this would have to be a large plane, even with today's light weight materials. Just look at how big blimps have to be to carry their minimal cargo. A plane like this with huge wingspan and extreme buoyancy would be affected by every gust of wind and bit of turbulence that affected it, and although it could be very stable, control inputs would have to combat huge wind loads, and control effectiveness would be marginal, to say the least.
From my armchair view of this project, it seems possible on a small scale, but not to the point of carrying "massive loads" of people and cargo as the website claims.
The memory playback is a nice (but scary) idea, but I don't think it could ever be implemented correctly. If the plan is to play memories until a patient accepts what happened, a new memory program/video/experience would have to be generated for every patient.
A shooting victim would need a different experience than a burning building survivor, who would need a different experience than the train wreck survivor that comes in the next day. Since the situations would have to be fairly specific for each individual case, this would be nearly impossible to implement.
Also, if each different video/experience is produced, why not play it on a television? Even a big screen, if you want. I know the goal of the VR is to immerse the subject in the virtual world, but I don't know that it would be that much more effective than good old fashioned photos, videos, and psychiatry.
I thought one of the main concessions that the RIAA "allows" is that people can make copies of CD's that they have legally bought, both for backup purposes and to have a copy in the car, home, office, etc.
Is this different? Does the MPAA have a different view on copying than the RIAA, and if so under which corporate empire's rule do we live? We are obviously not under the rule of the people anymore.
I googled a girlfriend a year ago and found out she's a British pornstar.
I was relieved to see that it was just the same name, not the same person. Now when I look back however, I think of all the things that could have been.....:-)
I think things like this are taking us down the wrong path. I know that Microsoft must think "Hey, his name sounds like ours", but that's got nothing to do with what his domain name actually was.
His website didn't say anything defammatory against MS, he didn't make any claims that he was sponsored by, related to, etc. MS, and he's not trying to sell anything that takes away from MS's precious monopoly. Most importantly, there is no way that anyone looking for microsoft.com would accidentally type in mikerowesoft.com, nor would they ever get his web site from a search for "microsoft".
They originally offered him $10 for his domain. That is a slap in the face and must have given a few assholes at MS a good chuckle.
But what we should really worry about is how subjective these cases can be. If I open an animal hospital in southern Florida, can I call it Gator Aid? The sports drink manufacturer should really not give a damn about my hospital, but they most likely would. My last name sounds like Bose, the stereo makers. If I start a company or market a product or service, does that mean I can't use my name since it sounds like theirs? What are the rules on this stuff?
According to Intel, this time next year we will be enjoying 55" LCD and plasma screens for under $1,000.
I can't find the link right now, but I read an article saying that Intel had come up with a new semiconductor that would make these displays possible. The best part was that they should be on the shelves in the next 12 months (take that with plenty o' salt).
Yeah, there's some sort of formula from statistics, which I will now try to pull out of the cobwebs.
It's something like the expected chance of something happening times the cost (or benefit) of it if it does happen. So if you lose $100,000 a day if your network is down, and Windows servers have a 2% chance of being down for a day, it is costing you another $2,000.
Someone fill in some more if needed or correct me if I'm wrong.
I started with the Canon Rebel 2000 and I really liked it. I think the controls are intuitive and its got more focusing points than the higher level cameras like the Elan.
I saved money at first by going with Tamron lenses and I was also satisfied with that. And of course whether they're canon or Tamron, the lenses can be auto or manual focus.
Being an amateur photgrapher is also a great way to get girls to undress for you:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Delta was already an hour late getting off the ground because they seem to be incapable of leaving either Fayetteville or Atlanta on time.
Actually Delta is one of the higher performing airlines in terms of on time performance, beating out JetBlue, Continental, AirTran, ASA, and United, among others.
Wow, as a Linux geek and an airline employee, I find that doubly offensive :-)
Just the news I need to hear in order to start my line of supersmart offspring that will form the ultimate Revenge of the Nerds. Mwuhahahahahahahha
Oh wait, according to my calculations the probability of me getting laid is 3x10^-8
It seems to me that this might be redundant effort on top of the great work done by Project Guttenberg. While I am all for independent approaches to issues such as this, me thinks that the resources of Google paired up with the experience and resources of PG would be a good thing. It would be very nice to see all these books as actual text files, instead of scanned images, but I'm not complaining!
They went to the trouble and time of doing this project, and the best subject they could find was some rather boring urband area?
Seeing as how they're nerds, I went to the site fully expecting to see some telephoto shot of a girls' dorm room. sigh.......
Although I am afraid of the person that will replace Ashcroft, it is certainly a good thing for civil liberties and freedom that he is leaving. I think this brings to light the fact that Bush is only a part of the worry when it comes to the Bush administration, it is the goons behind him whispering in his ear that cause much of the worry.
We had to stop using our brand new 2.4Ghz phones at work because our wi-fi stuff wouldn't hold a signal when the phones were in use. Keep in mind this was 2 years ago, haven't tried anything since.
Yes, it seems to bridge a gap, but I'm a little afraid of the accident rate that the new pilots will have. This seems to go back to the barnstorming days, when pilot training was limited to getting up, turning, and getting down. There is no instrument training provision here, as there is with a full license, there doesn't seem to be any insrument navigation, it's probably all just "look out the window" kind of stuff, and 10 landings is a pitiful number.
I wonder if anyone will do it in the minimum number of hours. The minimum for a private license is 40, with 20 hours dual and 20 hours solo, but hardly anyone completes it in that amount of time. Also, does anyone think that as the years go by and they tack another provision or two onto this Sport License, it will just morph into a slightly weaker version of the Private License?
When I was working on a solar powered car in college there was one of those SAE cars next to our bay. I don't think they're all that plausible because they are little more than go carts. I think we should work toward some of the technologies they use, like superatomizing and mixing the fuel, and trying to get engines above their pathetic 30% efficiency, but 1500 mpg is a bit out of reach. Of course, I guess I should never say never.
We had a rack in our network room that had recently been moved so that new cable could be run behind it. No one had informed me that when it was put back into position it hadn't been attached to the floor, wall, ceiling, nothing, and the entire rack was BARELY balanced and standing.
One of the servers on the rack had a CD drive that was somewhat broken, it didn't open when you pushed the button. So, doing what I always did, I sat at the workstation a few feet away and logged in remotely. I gave the command for to eject the CD, and as it did, I watched a very full server rack teeter forward from the weight of the CD tray, and then crash to the floor.
I was very lucky my boss had taken his Zoloft that day.
Paypal is certainly a shady company. To find out why, go to www.paypalsucks.org
Certainly true. I'm not at the sysadmin level, I'm still the end user support bitch at my company. So when I have to go solve a problem involving someone's personal settings, all I have to do is look around the desk or inside the top left drawer and I'll usually find all the information I need to login to their user account and email. Usually you can even find the logins to non-work stuff, like their personal email on hotmail, their online bank stuff, whatever you want.
That's funny, on my other tabbed paged right now I'm reading about the formalities of moving to Canada
If nothing else, immerse him in geek culture and groups. Chess clubs or computer clubs might seem like a step in the wrong direction, but they might just be a baby step in the right direction. Throwing the kid into activities that he's not familar with might scare the shit out of him, but he might be more willing to talk to folks at a geek club. He can then baby step himself up to regular kids at school, and who knows, maybe someday he'll talk to girls!!
Just remind him that if he can't talk to people, he's not going to get laid
I think we can all agree that yes, software, or rather the result of erroneous software, can kill. However I think the more relevant question is should someone be held responsible if in case it does?
/. was that he deserved punishment. But the case would probably also be made that the original coder should have written code that was less vulnerable to exploitation. For something so important, the code should be guaranteed stable and reliable, right?
If software screws up an automated train switch and two trains collide, or if software used to regulate power transmission goes haywire and causes a blackout that results in a dozen deaths, is the software writer responsible? I say probably not. Obviously sheer negligence and less than satisfactory work would be grounds to punish someone, but that is still subjective. While the blame could be pointed at the coder that wrote the software, he would have as much reason to point to the company that designs power transmission systems and say "Their system should have physical backups to prevent blackouts", and he would be right. They should have physical backups.
Now let's say that someone writes a virus or some exploit that brings down someone else's code and causes a blackout. Should that virus writer be punished? The large majority would say yes. We just saw a story where a guy is getting charged with terrorism for "hacking" a few DirectTV boxes, and the consensus here on
I'm sure that in the case of a few people or a small company writing code, people would demand that they be held liable for writing exploitable code. Seems a bit hypocritical since most people would never blame MS for writing exploitable code.
My $0.02
The penalty for breaking the rules? The theater lost the right to show the film. Since it was the hottest movie of the year, of course no theater argued any of the rules that the jerk laid down. Talk about squeezing out every last dime...
His penalty?
ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE? It makes me want to crawl out of my skin when I hear jackasses say things like this. Today everyone's solution to problems is "We need longer jail sentences. More jail time now!". You are advocating 10 YEARS for writing a script? Everyone knows that white collar criminals are scared just by being taken to court, let alone jail time.
If this guy went to jail for even two months I'd bet you all the money I have that he would never do something like this again. After being in jail for two months, his job would probably be gone, he'd have to suffer the embarassment of telling his friends, his family, his wife's family, his children, etc, that he has to go spend some time in jail because of a stupid thing he did.
10 YEARS!! You've got to be kidding me. I'd like to ask anyone that has ever thought that putting someone in prison for 10 years to think about what they were doing ten years ago. Think of what you were doing ten years ago, and what's happened since then. The people you've met, the girlfriends you've had, places you've been. Now replace that with the inside of a concrete room. Every day. For 10 years.
You are in idiot and an asshole for suggesting 10 years for a scripting prank. I guarantee you any jail time he gets will cause him to lose his job, he will lose his right to vote, he will lose a fortune on legal costs, and countless other things. If anyone here on slashdot had to suffer through all that, we would all be crying "Why? Why?", and it would be enough to straighten our fellow slashdotter out.
Before screaming for 10 years of someone's life to be stolen from them, think about what the hell you're saying. I'm sure the simple fact that he has been caught and is involved with the police and the courts will make this guy never do anything like this again. Don't make it obvious what a jackass you are by putting him in jail for a decade while ignoring real criminals like, say, the president.
Even if you ignore the fuel needed to pump the helium in and out of the storage, they will need the power to propel the "gravy"-plane forward
They don't plan on pumping the helium in and out. It looks like they plan on leaving the helium static in the tanks, and pumping air in and out of other tanks, making the plane weigh more and less. However, it's not really the weight of the plane that matters, it's the density. The goal is to get the average density of all the materials onboard i.e. the people, instruments, seats, structure, tanks, etc to be less than the density of the air around it. This is where I think they will have problems.
Anyone familar with aviation or the atmosphere knows that the atmosphere gets much less dense as you go up. Here in Columbus, altitude 1,000 feet, the density of air is 1.2 kg/m^3 At 10,000 feet the density is 0.88 kg/m^3 and at 30,000 feet it is 0.41 kg/m^3. This plane would have to have an average density less than those values to reach those altitudes, and keep in mind that simply having the cabin pressurized for humans will make the entire cabin a bubble of "heavy" air.
The energy to pressurize air will come from a wind powered turbine which will be deployed when the plane is descending, but I don't know how much power they expect to get from this. Any power produced by this turbine would affect the plane in the form of drag, which decreases speed and range. This would have to be a very flexible air storage system, since the requirements would change every day depending on high and low pressure systems, temperature, and the weight of whoever is on board.
They may also have stability and control issues. I assume that this would have to be a large plane, even with today's light weight materials. Just look at how big blimps have to be to carry their minimal cargo. A plane like this with huge wingspan and extreme buoyancy would be affected by every gust of wind and bit of turbulence that affected it, and although it could be very stable, control inputs would have to combat huge wind loads, and control effectiveness would be marginal, to say the least.
From my armchair view of this project, it seems possible on a small scale, but not to the point of carrying "massive loads" of people and cargo as the website claims.
My $0.02
The memory playback is a nice (but scary) idea, but I don't think it could ever be implemented correctly. If the plan is to play memories until a patient accepts what happened, a new memory program/video/experience would have to be generated for every patient.
A shooting victim would need a different experience than a burning building survivor, who would need a different experience than the train wreck survivor that comes in the next day. Since the situations would have to be fairly specific for each individual case, this would be nearly impossible to implement.
Also, if each different video/experience is produced, why not play it on a television? Even a big screen, if you want. I know the goal of the VR is to immerse the subject in the virtual world, but I don't know that it would be that much more effective than good old fashioned photos, videos, and psychiatry.
I thought one of the main concessions that the RIAA "allows" is that people can make copies of CD's that they have legally bought, both for backup purposes and to have a copy in the car, home, office, etc.
Is this different? Does the MPAA have a different view on copying than the RIAA, and if so under which corporate empire's rule do we live? We are obviously not under the rule of the people anymore.
I was relieved to see that it was just the same name, not the same person. Now when :-)
I look back however, I think of all the things that could have been.....
His website didn't say anything defammatory against MS, he didn't make any claims that he was sponsored by, related to, etc. MS, and he's not trying to sell anything that takes away from MS's precious monopoly. Most importantly, there is no way that anyone looking for microsoft.com would accidentally type in mikerowesoft.com, nor would they ever get his web site from a search for "microsoft".
They originally offered him $10 for his domain. That is a slap in the face and must have given a few assholes at MS a good chuckle.
But what we should really worry about is how subjective these cases can be. If I open an animal hospital in southern Florida, can I call it Gator Aid? The sports drink manufacturer should really not give a damn about my hospital, but they most likely would. My last name sounds like Bose, the stereo makers. If I start a company or market a product or service, does that mean I can't use my name since it sounds like theirs? What are the rules on this stuff?
According to Intel, this time next year we will be enjoying 55" LCD and plasma screens for under $1,000.
I can't find the link right now, but I read an article saying that Intel had come up with a new semiconductor that would make these displays possible. The best part was that they should be on the shelves in the next 12 months (take that with plenty o' salt).
Did anyone else hear about this or know anymore?
It's something like the expected chance of something happening times the cost (or benefit) of it if it does happen. So if you lose $100,000 a day if your network is down, and Windows servers have a 2% chance of being down for a day, it is costing you another $2,000.
Someone fill in some more if needed or correct me if I'm wrong.
I saved money at first by going with Tamron lenses and I was also satisfied with that. And of course whether they're canon or Tamron, the lenses can be auto or manual focus.
Being an amateur photgrapher is also a great way to get girls to undress for you :-)