I've bought my last two computers from Atlas Micro. They're just like Alienware and Falcon, only their systems are reasonably priced. A few months ago, I bought a system from them in the $1400s that cost in the $2200s at Alienware, Falcon, and Dell: Thoroughbred 2.4+, 512mb 400mhz ddr ram & mobo, radeon 9700, 80gb, dvd, cd. The last system that I bought from them is still solid - it's my parents' now.
In "Stranger in a Strange Land," in the early section where the protagonist is being held prisoner in the hospital, Heinlein describes a woman recovering in some special kind of bed, I believe designed to reduce stress on the bodies of recovering patients lying in bed for long periods of time. I've read somewhere that this was the direct origin of the concept of the waterbed. Two minutes of research later, I say this: check the link in this post. More Google searching for "heinlein waterbed" suggests that people were actually denied patents by the USPTO for waterbeds because Heinlein had put the idea in the public domain first.
But if the submission had come from John at XYZ.com, timothy would have posted it exactly the same, and all the readers would have read it exactly the same and posted followups exactly the same. If it walks like a duck... Just because these bits came from their creator rather than a 3rd party reviewer doesn't make them any less valuable, in my opinion. timothy and slashdot in general still comprise a third party that this content had to get through before reaching the public.
The Apple product has 83% of the storage space, 20.% of the volume, and transfers files 16500% faster (assuming 2.4 Mb/s USB spec and 50MB/s firewire, im unsure).
Just because Apple didn't choose to significantly increase its volume by adding a 802.11a antenna, just to add a *very* slow transmittal solution (compared to its firewire), means it's "lame?"
I don't have a religious bent for or against Apple; when intelligent people make these kinds of comments, it confuses me.
"Anyone else find this statement the tiniest bit ironic?"
If that's humor, ha. If not, you must not read slashdot much.
http://everything2.com/?node=fsck. Don't tell me you've never seen "fsck"
used in place of "fuck," just so censorware packages don't block a page. I
replace the A in "damn" in quite the same manner. My own school district's
proxies blocked off Slashdot, probably because one of the posts had the word
"sex" in it or something, so I'm never too careful.
I agree that "any idiot can go find dangerous chemicals," but that is not at all what this story is about. It's not like this boy stumbled upon NRC-restricted chemicals on the ground while smoking up with his friends one day. What he did do, at an age when most children are becoming high school freshmen, was conducting nuclear physics that most college engineering freshmen don't fully understand. This boy fooled people who worked for government nuclear watchdog organizations into giving him resource connections vital to building a reactor, and then researched until he learned how to process it into a potent form. Why do you find this event wholly unremarkable? Are you unimpressed that the boy was able to purify nuclear fuel until he put 40,000 people in danger? Were you valedictorian of Stuyvesant High School or something? What does a 15-year-old have to do to impress you, extend humankind's knowledge of tokamak design, achieve an MD, make first contact with an alien race? In case you need reminding of the average state of the American High School student, it's often enough of a miracle that kids want to learn anything.
Without further education, the boy can be a danger again. "But I didn't know that prion could kill people..." He's one of the only kids who tried so hard. This deserves recognition, more than being made cannon fodder in the navy... he deserves more of a chance than a lot of other kids I know who are going to college because their parents happen to be comfortably upper-middle class.
"In the fall of 1995, Ken and Kathy demanded that David enroll in Macomb Community College. He majored in metallurgy but skipped many of his classes and spent much of the day in bed or driving in circles around their block. Finally, Ken and Kathy gave him an ultimatum: Join the armed forces or move out of the house. They called the local recruiting office, which sent a representative to their house or called nearly every day until David finally gave in. After completing boot camp last year, he was stationed on the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise aircraft carrier.
"Alas, David's duties, as a lowly seaman, are of the deck-swabbing and potato-peeling variety. But long after his shipmates have gone to sleep, David stays up studying topics that interest him--currently steroids, melanin, genetic codes, antioxidants, prototype reactors, amino acids, and criminal law. And it is perhaps best that he does not work on the ship's eight reactors, for EPA scientists worry that his previous exposure to radioactivity may have greatly cut short his life."
The world we live in disgusts me. I'm heading off to Cornell Engineering this August. I think that in view of his raw audacity and intelligence, his parents shouldn't be forcing him into the Navy. After the "DOE, EPA, FBI, and NRC" got done disposing of David's hazardous waste, they should have thought for a second. If this is the only teenager they've found making a nuclear reactor in his back yard, perhaps they should have given him a full scholarship to any scientific University he wanted. The boy can't spell worth a dsmn, but he has the curiosity, drive, and intelligence to succeed at CalTech, MIT, or whatever, and be the next Newton. I hope that after the Armed Forces finishes grinding his soul to a pulp, and perhaps his body as well, in case of war, he attends a fine institution where he can meet other misunderstood geniuses like him, lives a hundred years, and "make[s] a scratch in life," just like he wants to, because he can. The fact that this person is not involved in nuclear research is a symptom of the disease that infects this country, right alongside our horrible international testing scores.
If you can focus all of the solar light that hits an earth-acre space, into a much smaller space (say, a 3' square) on the ground, yes, it's gonna be hot and perhaps dangerously hot. But not weapons-grade dangerously hot.
That's absurd. Have you ever played with a fresnel lens? I've used one square foot of focused sunlight to burn holes in non-metals (including my hand:(!
For the unscientific, read the link below to see how a 3' circle of sunlight, concentrated to a square centimeter, can melt Aluminum. For the lovers of conversion factors, read on:
I'm going to trust an astrophysics grad student for a conversion factor on this one (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bclee/lens.html). He says the sun puts out 1340 Watts/m^2 at the Earth's surface, before atmospheric absorption. Mississippi State says there are 43,560 square feet in one acre. My trusty ti-83 says that 1 acre * 43560 ft^2 / acre * (12 in)^2 / (1 ft)^2 * (2.54 cm)^2 / (1 in)^2 * (1 m)^2 / (100 cm)^2 * 1340 W / m^2 = 5.4 megawatts from one acre of sunlight.
My light bulbs put out 100 Watts over somewhere around 4*pi*(3 in)^2 (yeah yeah that's a great approximation:), making 113 in^2. About 1 Watt / in^2. As opposed to 5.4 megawatts spread over a 3 foot square, as you said, which yields (5400 kilowatts) / (36 in)^2 = 4.2 kilowatts of power per square inch. Ouch!
This is all fraught with inaccuracy, and the atmosphere does soak up quite a bit of radiation, but I sure hope i'm not off by a factor of 4,200. Did I miscalculate something?
There are several joke posts about non-4-year college programs getting.edu names. Sadly, to some of us, this isn't a joke. I am a high school webmaster. I've tried several times to get an xyz.edu name. I am always rebuffed by the registrar; they say I must be a 4-year college to apply. Yet, non-colleges like stuy.edu and bxscience.edu have their names, and even less-reputable things like data centers have a.edu. My question is, do you have to know somebody at internic/verisign to get a.edu name? Because I sure have been trying, and it sure hasn't been working.
Did anyone read the Wired article?
"Most of the problems appear to be related to Microsoft's Windows NT, while Russian-made software seems to be more reliable."
I can't hold down shift-1 enough to express how long I laughed at this simple statement, at the head of a Wired article no less. I mean... man!
Your company "evaluated these systems," and you spell "Iridium" wrong once, twice, thrice... tetrice... what company was that again?:) But no, really, I shouldn't talk; I spell horriblee. As long as you can convert kg to N, I feel safe...
"...object 2000 SG344 has a 500-to-1 chance of hitting earth in the year 2030, a much higher probability of impact than any object before it."
Gee, and I thought we were 100% sure the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs hit the earth. Guess I'd better take another stat class...
P.S. Anybody replying trying to lecture me about the nature of statistics will have their house promptly burned to the ground.
As well, Delaware has 0% sales tax for consumers. Although this doesn't have a direct effect, it means that the state is highly corporatized. Wilmington, in a liberal sense, has grown to be about one-third of the size of the state. DuPont is headquartered here, and we have big presences from AstraZeneca, Hercules, ICI, CSC, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I've bought my last two computers from Atlas Micro. They're just like Alienware and Falcon, only their systems are reasonably priced. A few months ago, I bought a system from them in the $1400s that cost in the $2200s at Alienware, Falcon, and Dell: Thoroughbred 2.4+, 512mb 400mhz ddr ram & mobo, radeon 9700, 80gb, dvd, cd. The last system that I bought from them is still solid - it's my parents' now.
In "Stranger in a Strange Land," in the early section where the protagonist is being held prisoner in the hospital, Heinlein describes a woman recovering in some special kind of bed, I believe designed to reduce stress on the bodies of recovering patients lying in bed for long periods of time. I've read somewhere that this was the direct origin of the concept of the waterbed. Two minutes of research later, I say this: check the link in this post. More Google searching for "heinlein waterbed" suggests that people were actually denied patents by the USPTO for waterbeds because Heinlein had put the idea in the public domain first.
But if the submission had come from John at XYZ.com, timothy would have posted it exactly the same, and all the readers would have read it exactly the same and posted followups exactly the same. If it walks like a duck... Just because these bits came from their creator rather than a 3rd party reviewer doesn't make them any less valuable, in my opinion. timothy and slashdot in general still comprise a third party that this content had to get through before reaching the public.
The Apple product has 83% of the storage space, 20.% of the volume, and transfers files 16500% faster (assuming 2.4 Mb/s USB spec and 50MB/s firewire, im unsure).
Just because Apple didn't choose to significantly increase its volume by adding a 802.11a antenna, just to add a *very* slow transmittal solution (compared to its firewire), means it's "lame?"
I don't have a religious bent for or against Apple; when intelligent people make these kinds of comments, it confuses me.
You bastards! We can do one continent a week, I know it...
"Anyone else find this statement the tiniest bit ironic?" If that's humor, ha. If not, you must not read slashdot much. http://everything2.com/?node=fsck. Don't tell me you've never seen "fsck" used in place of "fuck," just so censorware packages don't block a page. I replace the A in "damn" in quite the same manner. My own school district's proxies blocked off Slashdot, probably because one of the posts had the word "sex" in it or something, so I'm never too careful.
I agree that "any idiot can go find dangerous chemicals," but that is not at all what this story is about. It's not like this boy stumbled upon NRC-restricted chemicals on the ground while smoking up with his friends one day. What he did do, at an age when most children are becoming high school freshmen, was conducting nuclear physics that most college engineering freshmen don't fully understand. This boy fooled people who worked for government nuclear watchdog organizations into giving him resource connections vital to building a reactor, and then researched until he learned how to process it into a potent form. Why do you find this event wholly unremarkable? Are you unimpressed that the boy was able to purify nuclear fuel until he put 40,000 people in danger? Were you valedictorian of Stuyvesant High School or something? What does a 15-year-old have to do to impress you, extend humankind's knowledge of tokamak design, achieve an MD, make first contact with an alien race? In case you need reminding of the average state of the American High School student, it's often enough of a miracle that kids want to learn anything.
Without further education, the boy can be a danger again. "But I didn't know that prion could kill people..." He's one of the only kids who tried so hard. This deserves recognition, more than being made cannon fodder in the navy... he deserves more of a chance than a lot of other kids I know who are going to college because their parents happen to be comfortably upper-middle class.
"Alas, David's duties, as a lowly seaman, are of the deck-swabbing and potato-peeling variety. But long after his shipmates have gone to sleep, David stays up studying topics that interest him--currently steroids, melanin, genetic codes, antioxidants, prototype reactors, amino acids, and criminal law. And it is perhaps best that he does not work on the ship's eight reactors, for EPA scientists worry that his previous exposure to radioactivity may have greatly cut short his life."
The world we live in disgusts me. I'm heading off to Cornell Engineering this August. I think that in view of his raw audacity and intelligence, his parents shouldn't be forcing him into the Navy. After the "DOE, EPA, FBI, and NRC" got done disposing of David's hazardous waste, they should have thought for a second. If this is the only teenager they've found making a nuclear reactor in his back yard, perhaps they should have given him a full scholarship to any scientific University he wanted. The boy can't spell worth a dsmn, but he has the curiosity, drive, and intelligence to succeed at CalTech, MIT, or whatever, and be the next Newton. I hope that after the Armed Forces finishes grinding his soul to a pulp, and perhaps his body as well, in case of war, he attends a fine institution where he can meet other misunderstood geniuses like him, lives a hundred years, and "make[s] a scratch in life," just like he wants to, because he can. The fact that this person is not involved in nuclear research is a symptom of the disease that infects this country, right alongside our horrible international testing scores.
That's absurd. Have you ever played with a fresnel lens? I've used one square foot of focused sunlight to burn holes in non-metals (including my hand :(!
For the unscientific, read the link below to see how a 3' circle of sunlight, concentrated to a square centimeter, can melt Aluminum. For the lovers of conversion factors, read on:
I'm going to trust an astrophysics grad student for a conversion factor on this one (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bclee/lens.html). He says the sun puts out 1340 Watts/m^2 at the Earth's surface, before atmospheric absorption. Mississippi State says there are 43,560 square feet in one acre. My trusty ti-83 says that 1 acre * 43560 ft^2 / acre * (12 in)^2 / (1 ft)^2 * (2.54 cm)^2 / (1 in)^2 * (1 m)^2 / (100 cm)^2 * 1340 W / m^2 = 5.4 megawatts from one acre of sunlight.
My light bulbs put out 100 Watts over somewhere around 4*pi*(3 in)^2 (yeah yeah that's a great approximation :), making 113 in^2. About 1 Watt / in^2. As opposed to 5.4 megawatts spread over a 3 foot square, as you said, which yields (5400 kilowatts) / (36 in)^2 = 4.2 kilowatts of power per square inch. Ouch!
This is all fraught with inaccuracy, and the atmosphere does soak up quite a bit of radiation, but I sure hope i'm not off by a factor of 4,200. Did I miscalculate something?
There are several joke posts about non-4-year college programs getting .edu names. Sadly, to some of us, this isn't a joke. I am a high school webmaster. I've tried several times to get an xyz.edu name. I am always rebuffed by the registrar; they say I must be a 4-year college to apply. Yet, non-colleges like stuy.edu and bxscience.edu have their names, and even less-reputable things like data centers have a .edu. My question is, do you have to know somebody at internic/verisign to get a .edu name? Because I sure have been trying, and it sure hasn't been working.
Did anyone read the Wired article? "Most of the problems appear to be related to Microsoft's Windows NT, while Russian-made software seems to be more reliable." I can't hold down shift-1 enough to express how long I laughed at this simple statement, at the head of a Wired article no less. I mean ... man!
Your company "evaluated these systems," and you spell "Iridium" wrong once, twice, thrice ... tetrice ... what company was that again? :) But no, really, I shouldn't talk; I spell horriblee. As long as you can convert kg to N, I feel safe...
"...object 2000 SG344 has a 500-to-1 chance of hitting earth in the year 2030, a much higher probability of impact than any object before it."
Gee, and I thought we were 100% sure the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs hit the earth. Guess I'd better take another stat class...
P.S. Anybody replying trying to lecture me about the nature of statistics will have their house promptly burned to the ground.
As well, Delaware has 0% sales tax for consumers. Although this doesn't have a direct effect, it means that the state is highly corporatized. Wilmington, in a liberal sense, has grown to be about one-third of the size of the state. DuPont is headquartered here, and we have big presences from AstraZeneca, Hercules, ICI, CSC, etc.