A late-70's model Pontiac Catalina's bumper lines-up about halfway up a Ford Escort's (Wagon version) driver's-side door and will turn said door into a "laptop" in a "T-bone" collision. I know; I have the healed ribs and knee-bone to prove it.;-)
And yes, bumpers on HumVees are a little high; pulled up behind one at the local just-off-campus-drivethru a few weeks ago in my Honda Civic and noticed how the transmission was at eye level. I gotta say, I drove quite defensefully for quite a while after that (of course, I'm a leadfoot again now...)
BTW, in the Catalina -vs- Escort demolition derby, bet on the Catalina:
Escort
Driver's door inside car (had to be cut away)
Right-rear wheel snapped off (at impact with curb across the intersection)
I wondered the same thing. here's a link to simulations of common visual disorders; it looks like mild macular degenration as well as certain types of retinal detachment might be compensated-for with a technique like you suggest.
Oh, you can go DLP and get a tri-chip system for your living room but, as the guy says, "It'll cost ya!"
But yeah, I know what you mean about the picture looking "funny" -- I wonder if some people just have a higher level of visual acuity than the people who design these things (I know I don't make my living staring into bright lights, so maybe my retinas aren't as crispy...) I mean, I can't tell the difference between a $30 boom box and a $300 stereo, but I almost can't stand to watch a show on the Spike channel because their picture looks like it's been compressed and decompressed a couple of times.
Here's a link to one product (probably this manufacturer's most "affordable" 3-chip projector; the link at the Texas Instruments site pointing there ranked this one for "high-end home theaters" -- the "mid-range" systems below this category were mentioned at "price points as low as $20K-$30K", so I imagine this one is, er, a bit pricey...)
I got on Texas Instruments' DLP mailing list as soon as I heard about it (and I already have the wall picked out in my living room, though I don't think I'll ever ever be able to afford one of the really nice projectors unless I save Brooke Shields from drowning or something...) and have always been fascinated with the whole MEMS thing anyway.
BTW, here's a link to TI's DLP overview, for those who aren't interested in Googling for it.
With the question of insurance/liability having been brought up already, I can imagine such an underwriter requiring a space-tourist on a long voyage (to the moon, etc.) to HAVE to wear (at ALL times) some sort of "incapacitation device" that would render them, er, mostly harmless in the event they have an episode of "space rage" -- it may suffice to rely on their fellow passengers whacking 'em across the back of the head with a drink tray for "air rage" on domestic and international flights, as an emergency landing is at most a few hours away (plus the added complication of subduing a rowdy drunk in zero gravity (ok, ok, freefall) isn't a problem), but in space there's no place (or time) to pull over and invite the troublemaker to walk back home.
If this isn't a "feature" on the very earliest moon-tourism excursions, just wait until some jerk takes a dump on the drink cart and see how fast they invent a "remote-controlled Mickey patch"!!
Re:Rated PG-13 for brief language.
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Primer
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Maybe they were just getting back to basics?
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?!" H.M. Warner, 1927
Re:Garage tech and barriers to entry
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Primer
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· Score: 1
Ah, there still may be a bit of room at the bottom for the "little guys"; they'll just have to make up their own industries. Tucker didn't have much luck tilting at the automotive windmills because they had already grown too big (I was tempted to insert an "800-pound-gorilla" reference there, but I figured I'd already mixed-in enough metaphors...) Ditto with the web and biotech, as you pointed out, and probably almost everything else all the way down to mousetraps.
Space travel, however, still seems to hold some promise for the just-above-average guy -- launching humans is a niche market and always has been (and may be a niche market of some real note in the future, once there's a real selection of places to go), but launching stuff is getting to be pretty popular (hey, even the French are doing it!!) and there's still plenty of room for competetion...
Man, I bet food tastes good through that mouth.
And waddaya know, this isn't "trolling"...
Well you have a nice day, too. (and no, I'm not going to suggest you have a nice weekend.)
Thanks a lot. Y'know that really warm and friendly feeling that you get when someone flips you off in traffic because your car looks like the one that cut them off a few miles back?
Well that's what you just did.
Thanks, and I hope you have a nice day. Heck, go ahead and have a nice weekend.
I mean, I can give them "GoogleGear", "GoogleMe", "GoogleSex" and even "GoogleMeBackToOldVirginne", but if they win "Froogle" anything it'll open the door for them to go after the "Boogles" and "Canoogles" and even the "Lollapaloogles" of the world -- soon nothing that ends in "oogles" will be free, and the last time I checked monopolies were still a Bad Thing (tm).
A fun exercise I try to employ a lot is to take something and imagine the exact opposite of it (or to imagine it in reverse; not necessarily like playing the tape backwards, but thinking about whether the parts would make as much sense backwards as forwards) -- and I'm often surprised at just how much more useful the opposite of something seems than the original thing itself (of course, maybe I'm just suffering from an as-yet-unidentified problem...)
Anyway, it occurs to me that the real value in a robotic-library-book-manipulator would be not in the retrieval of books but in the return of books to the shelves! I live in (actually, just outside) a smallish college town where the local public library website shows "only" about 311,000 items checked-out during the current fiscal year (ongoing), but I know a significant amount of their resources (staff, paid and otherwise; -- they report 3,050 hours of "volunteer" service during the same period) are eaten by the labor involved in returning books to their "homes" on the shelves; something that could do that even semi-automatically might save large libraries millions (and might just outright save some of the smaller ones) every year.
Though I think it'd be cool to just be able to fly down the road and zip through an intersection (there's one particularly aggravating one on my daily commute that comes to mind...) each and every time without having to stop, all while traffic from the intersecting roadway gets the same treatment -- staggering cars inside the intersection in a sort of N/S--E/W--N/S--E/W dance (I'm visualizing something like the intersecting lines of a marching band -- and I've always wondered how the guy with the drum doesn't snag the guy with the trombone as they pass...) All in all, I think this kind of thing would be REALLY cool (on the order of The Jetsons or Blade Runner cool, even!), but I have to think of this as well: as long as car windows are transparent, this kind of thing will probably rate a solid 10 on the 10-point Pucker Factor scale, and I'm already wondering if auto upholstery of the future will be made durable enough to survive it.
That seems to be the attitude amongst upper-management types (PHB's, "management weenies", etc.) these days and now, apparently, we find it's not just a problem here in the U.S. but it's a global "problem" (which, if we blow this thing way, way out of proportion and up to near ridiculous extremes -- and isn't that always fun? -- may just make a good thing (tm) out of it; as long as I have a job that supports my family and I can do it from home -- meaning "my homeland", not necessarily my house -- who cares if my PHB is on another continent?!?! We export jobs to India, who exports jobs to Isreal, who exports jobs to Pakistan (I know, unlikely, but just play along...), who exports jobs to Germany, who exports jobs to...US -- we could indirectly end up working for ourselves again!) Of course, all this sounds suspiciously pyramidical...
Sad when a genius has his cheese slide off his cracker.
Genius' cheese lives on the edge of the cracker, some would even say that's where it thrives. In other words the more average someone's overall "grip" on reality the less likely he is, overall, to be of stunningly superior intelligence. That's not to say you have to be nutty to be a genius, but apparently it helps. 8-D
My daughters and I experimented with these last weekend. After a birthday party. Many of them only ended up exploring the neighbors' trees. They must have found the trees interesting; they're still there. (I guess that's better then them deciding to explore the power lines, though...)
He should visit my workplace; we most definitely don't replace everything completely every five years (every twenty-five, maybe... though the guy who was asking me for 5.25" floppy disks the other day might even argue that one.)
"You could set it for the pets you own, and other pets (and/or other critters) wouldn't be able to get in."
Uh, I think you meant "You could set it for the pets you own, and other pets (and/or other critters) wouldn't be able to get in unescorted."
Those of us with those big, friendly (but gullible) dogs would still come home to a "party" every day...
Well, that's one way to look at it. Another way (the way that I, as a nerd-recently-become-father, am inclined to think of it) is that if your kid disappears (against their will) in a department store or at the park you've got at least as good a chance of finding him/her as you would your LoJack-equipped SUV. Of course, you wouldn't want to advertise to the world that you've got a chip implanted in your kid's arm (like this fool), and it would have to be something that wasn't "always on" but rather could be remotely activated in the event of an emergency (again, sort of like LoJack...)
If that happens, won't you be wishing you had replied to that Nigerian prince's e-mails...
Re:Do you part to fight scams, scam a scammer
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419 Scammer Gets Scammed
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I have a similar tactic I use on telemarketers (and before you telemarketing/.-ers flame me out of karma, just think about your ratio of hangups/cussings -to- sells each day; NOBODY likes telemarketing except telemarketers -- and from what I gather even most of you would drop it like a bad habit if you felt like you had something else to fall back on...);
Without ever actually buying anything, I take up as much of their time as I can so they can aggravate the fewest people (overall) at the highest expense and with the least payback possible. How does this "help"? By starving them (eventually) out of existence; they know there is only a certain amount of "gold" in them-thar hills, and their chosen method of retrieving it has shifted over just the last few years from the equivalent of "panning" a small stream to "sluice-mining" the entire mountain down to a puddle -- if it takes just as long for them to retrieve all the gold in the mountain using one method as the other, even they will eventually choose to use the least expensive method (and that business model isn't going to involve paying a ka-hundred college students, retirees, and bored housewives even minimum wage to sit in rented office space and use rented telephone lines to bother you and me, it's going to much more closely resemble doing some actual market research and targeting their customers -- think rifle -vs- shotgun.)
Is it that comics and graphic novels have "risen into mainstream culture" or is it more that the traditional fans of comics and graphic novels are "coming into their own" as a powerful force in our society?
I, for one, hope it's the latter (I've always enjoyed what my dad used to call "them funny books", but I never considered myself a part of the "mainstream" of society...of course, we geeks have been gaining in popularity of late...); it might mean the difference between being "ahead of our time" and it finally being "our time"!
(also: I, for one, welcome our new graphic-novel-reading overlords. Sorry, I just couldn't resist!)
Slashdot Mirror
Would we be able to dope our own muscles so as to be able to pedal hard enough that our human-powered helicopter wouldn't need a "jock" pilot?
And yes, bumpers on HumVees are a little high; pulled up behind one at the local just-off-campus-drivethru a few weeks ago in my Honda Civic and noticed how the transmission was at eye level . I gotta say, I drove quite defensefully for quite a while after that (of course, I'm a leadfoot again now...)
BTW, in the Catalina -vs- Escort demolition derby, bet on the Catalina:
I'm not kidding.
I wondered the same thing. here's a link to simulations of common visual disorders; it looks like mild macular degenration as well as certain types of retinal detachment might be compensated-for with a technique like you suggest.
Oh, you can go DLP and get a tri-chip system for your living room but, as the guy says, "It'll cost ya!"
But yeah, I know what you mean about the picture looking "funny" -- I wonder if some people just have a higher level of visual acuity than the people who design these things (I know I don't make my living staring into bright lights, so maybe my retinas aren't as crispy...) I mean, I can't tell the difference between a $30 boom box and a $300 stereo, but I almost can't stand to watch a show on the Spike channel because their picture looks like it's been compressed and decompressed a couple of times.
Here's a link to one product (probably this manufacturer's most "affordable" 3-chip projector; the link at the Texas Instruments site pointing there ranked this one for "high-end home theaters" -- the "mid-range" systems below this category were mentioned at "price points as low as $20K-$30K", so I imagine this one is, er, a bit pricey...)
I got on Texas Instruments' DLP mailing list as soon as I heard about it (and I already have the wall picked out in my living room, though I don't think I'll ever ever be able to afford one of the really nice projectors unless I save Brooke Shields from drowning or something...) and have always been fascinated with the whole MEMS thing anyway.
BTW, here's a link to TI's DLP overview, for those who aren't interested in Googling for it.
Nope, that particular corner was turned back when the phrase "Slashdotted" was coined.
With the question of insurance/liability having been brought up already, I can imagine such an underwriter requiring a space-tourist on a long voyage (to the moon, etc.) to HAVE to wear (at ALL times) some sort of "incapacitation device" that would render them, er, mostly harmless in the event they have an episode of "space rage" -- it may suffice to rely on their fellow passengers whacking 'em across the back of the head with a drink tray for "air rage" on domestic and international flights, as an emergency landing is at most a few hours away (plus the added complication of subduing a rowdy drunk in zero gravity (ok, ok, freefall) isn't a problem), but in space there's no place (or time) to pull over and invite the troublemaker to walk back home.
If this isn't a "feature" on the very earliest moon-tourism excursions, just wait until some jerk takes a dump on the drink cart and see how fast they invent a "remote-controlled Mickey patch"!!
Maybe they were just getting back to basics?
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?!" H.M. Warner, 1927
Ah, there still may be a bit of room at the bottom for the "little guys"; they'll just have to make up their own industries. Tucker didn't have much luck tilting at the automotive windmills because they had already grown too big (I was tempted to insert an "800-pound-gorilla" reference there, but I figured I'd already mixed-in enough metaphors...) Ditto with the web and biotech, as you pointed out, and probably almost everything else all the way down to mousetraps.
Space travel, however, still seems to hold some promise for the just-above-average guy -- launching humans is a niche market and always has been (and may be a niche market of some real note in the future, once there's a real selection of places to go ), but launching stuff is getting to be pretty popular (hey, even the French are doing it!!) and there's still plenty of room for competetion...
Man, I bet food tastes good through that mouth. And waddaya know, this isn't "trolling"... Well you have a nice day, too. (and no, I'm not going to suggest you have a nice weekend.)
Thanks a lot. Y'know that really warm and friendly feeling that you get when someone flips you off in traffic because your car looks like the one that cut them off a few miles back? Well that's what you just did. Thanks, and I hope you have a nice day. Heck, go ahead and have a nice weekend.
Actually, evolution's lack of "creativity" isn't the reason (but the real reason does involve "creativity"...)
Nope, you're not a lone dope.
I mean, I can give them "GoogleGear", "GoogleMe", "GoogleSex" and even "GoogleMeBackToOldVirginne", but if they win "Froogle" anything it'll open the door for them to go after the "Boogles" and "Canoogles" and even the "Lollapaloogles" of the world -- soon nothing that ends in "oogles" will be free, and the last time I checked monopolies were still a Bad Thing (tm).
A fun exercise I try to employ a lot is to take something and imagine the exact opposite of it (or to imagine it in reverse; not necessarily like playing the tape backwards, but thinking about whether the parts would make as much sense backwards as forwards) -- and I'm often surprised at just how much more useful the opposite of something seems than the original thing itself (of course, maybe I'm just suffering from an as-yet-unidentified problem...)
Anyway, it occurs to me that the real value in a robotic-library-book-manipulator would be not in the retrieval of books but in the return of books to the shelves! I live in (actually, just outside) a smallish college town where the local public library website shows "only" about 311,000 items checked-out during the current fiscal year (ongoing), but I know a significant amount of their resources (staff, paid and otherwise; -- they report 3,050 hours of "volunteer" service during the same period) are eaten by the labor involved in returning books to their "homes" on the shelves; something that could do that even semi-automatically might save large libraries millions (and might just outright save some of the smaller ones) every year.
Though I think it'd be cool to just be able to fly down the road and zip through an intersection (there's one particularly aggravating one on my daily commute that comes to mind...) each and every time without having to stop, all while traffic from the intersecting roadway gets the same treatment -- staggering cars inside the intersection in a sort of N/S--E/W--N/S--E/W dance (I'm visualizing something like the intersecting lines of a marching band -- and I've always wondered how the guy with the drum doesn't snag the guy with the trombone as they pass...) All in all, I think this kind of thing would be REALLY cool (on the order of The Jetsons or Blade Runner cool, even!), but I have to think of this as well:
as long as car windows are transparent, this kind of thing will probably rate a solid 10 on the 10-point Pucker Factor scale, and I'm already wondering if auto upholstery of the future will be made durable enough to survive it.
That seems to be the attitude amongst upper-management types (PHB's, "management weenies", etc.) these days and now, apparently, we find it's not just a problem here in the U.S. but it's a global "problem" (which, if we blow this thing way, way out of proportion and up to near ridiculous extremes -- and isn't that always fun? -- may just make a good thing (tm) out of it; as long as I have a job that supports my family and I can do it from home -- meaning "my homeland", not necessarily my house -- who cares if my PHB is on another continent?!?! We export jobs to India, who exports jobs to Isreal, who exports jobs to Pakistan (I know, unlikely, but just play along...), who exports jobs to Germany, who exports jobs to...US -- we could indirectly end up working for ourselves again!) ...
Of course, all this sounds suspiciously pyramidical
Sad when a genius has his cheese slide off his cracker.
Genius' cheese lives on the edge of the cracker, some would even say that's where it thrives. In other words the more average someone's overall "grip" on reality the less likely he is, overall, to be of stunningly superior intelligence. That's not to say you have to be nutty to be a genius, but apparently it helps. 8-D
My daughters and I experimented with these last weekend. After a birthday party. Many of them only ended up exploring the neighbors' trees. They must have found the trees interesting; they're still there. (I guess that's better then them deciding to explore the power lines, though...)
He should visit my workplace; we most definitely don't replace everything completely every five years (every twenty-five, maybe... though the guy who was asking me for 5.25" floppy disks the other day might even argue that one.)
Well, that's one way to look at it. Another way (the way that I, as a nerd-recently-become-father, am inclined to think of it) is that if your kid disappears (against their will) in a department store or at the park you've got at least as good a chance of finding him/her as you would your LoJack-equipped SUV. Of course, you wouldn't want to advertise to the world that you've got a chip implanted in your kid's arm (like this fool), and it would have to be something that wasn't "always on" but rather could be remotely activated in the event of an emergency (again, sort of like LoJack...)
If that happens, won't you be wishing you had replied to that Nigerian prince's e-mails...
I have a similar tactic I use on telemarketers /.-ers flame me out of karma, just think about your ratio of hangups/cussings -to- sells each day; NOBODY likes telemarketing except telemarketers -- and from what I gather even most of you would drop it like a bad habit if you felt like you had something else to fall back on...);
(and before you telemarketing
Without ever actually buying anything, I take up as much of their time as I can so they can aggravate the fewest people (overall) at the highest expense and with the least payback possible. How does this "help"? By starving them (eventually) out of existence; they know there is only a certain amount of "gold" in them-thar hills, and their chosen method of retrieving it has shifted over just the last few years from the equivalent of "panning" a small stream to "sluice-mining" the entire mountain down to a puddle -- if it takes just as long for them to retrieve all the gold in the mountain using one method as the other, even they will eventually choose to use the least expensive method (and that business model isn't going to involve paying a ka-hundred college students, retirees, and bored housewives even minimum wage to sit in rented office space and use rented telephone lines to bother you and me, it's going to much more closely resemble doing some actual market research and targeting their customers -- think rifle -vs- shotgun.)
From episode 9F09 (just into that glorious 4th season), Homer's Triple Bypass :
"Mmm... ham."
Is it that comics and graphic novels have "risen into mainstream culture" or is it more that the traditional fans of comics and graphic novels are "coming into their own" as a powerful force in our society?
I, for one, hope it's the latter (I've always enjoyed what my dad used to call "them funny books", but I never considered myself a part of the "mainstream" of society...of course, we geeks have been gaining in popularity of late...); it might mean the difference between being "ahead of our time" and it finally being "our time"!
(also: I, for one, welcome our new graphic-novel-reading overlords. Sorry, I just couldn't resist!)