4) Reach in with pliers and pull out plastic widget.
However, when the pliers are opened wide enough to grasp the widget, the pliers themselves will not fit in the bottle's neck.
You could use some long tweezers though. Or perhaps some very SMALL pliers. But like I said in one of my other responses to a response, it's far more exciting to use a paper napkin. "Exciting" is probably not the correct term for this, but keep in mind that by the time you get to removing the widget, you've chugged at least one guinness-- so pretty much anything seems exciting.
Sure, pliers would work, although it's far more interesting to use only materials that are available at your bar table... you can pull the widget out with a napkin.
This is simply the old "pull the cork out of the wine bottle trick" after you pop the cork down into the bottle.
There, now there's a little bit more useless knowledge that probably squeezed some useful information out of your memory in order to make room!
Last Saturday, I purchased a 6-pack of Guinness (in bottles) from the Kroger in Clarkston, GA. No, I do not live near there.
I paid approximatly $7.50.
My intent in purchasing the beer was, in addition to enjoying its smooth robust flavor, performing a demonstration to amazed friends on how to remove the magic "rocket widget" from an empty Guinness bottle (without breaking the bottle of course).
There, I said it. Now the entire world knows what beer I purchased, when, where, and why. What is the WORST thing that can possibly happen to me by making this public?
Antares makes some wonderful technology. I use their Kantos synth all the time (uses the same pitch controller than autotune does, but the output drives a synth).
Unfortunately, in the case of autotune, it's a case of good technology that is mostly used for evil. And by "evil" I mean "crappy boy/girl bands."
I have yet to find an A/V receiver remote that's comfortable. A hundred buttons crammed onto a large, flat, uncomfortable brick. And maybe a cover at the top or bottom that you flip open to reveal another 25 teeny tiny buttons!
And why is it that every remote that comes with a new appliance (with the exception of Tivo) is designed to be a "universal remote" capable of controlling all our other gear? Great idea on paper, but I've never seen it executed very well, except in high-end universal remotes with backlit screens and such.
A theory isn't something that's proven right or wrong, true or false.
That's a hypothesis. People often get the two confused. A theory can be demonstrated to be an accurate model of reality, or an inaccurate one. But that doesn't necessarily determine its usefulness.
Example: the "electron shell" theory of atoms. That basically says that electrons orbit in circular shells around atoms. We now know that this isn't remotely the case... however, even though electron shell theory does NOT represent the actual structure of atoms, it is still a very useful theory in chemistry! Why? Because it still is an accurate method of calculating the results of chemical reactions.
So there you have it... a theory is a model of reality, or an abstraction. If it accurately models the outcomes of events, it doesn't really matter if the underlying principles are true or false. If we had a pink bunny theory of quantum mechanics, you bet scientists would be using it if it accurately predicted the results of experiments (verifying hypotheses), regardless of whether there are actually pink bunnies driving all those tiny particle-waves around. I, for one, welcome our new quantum pink bunny overlords.
So the question is... is "dark matter" a hypothesis, or a theory? If it's an existence question, true/false, then it's a hypothesis.
By the way, another explanation for the same effect is "modified newtonian dynamics" which works out nicely on paper, and accurately models the behavior of the universe, but unfortunately it hasn't been tied to any existing theory yet.
There sits Spirit, silent and still on the frigid Martian surface.
Somewhere deep within its electronics, there's an error that was trapped. The message, which would be displayed if only there was a monitor onboard, simply reads:
Communication error; press any key to retry
Doh.
Lesson learned: be sure to handle your exceptions properly.
Have you tried to buy points, rotor and a condensor for a new car?
Sure, it's just a matter of walking down the street to the nearest tele-phone and asking the operator to patch you in to the local horseless carriage supply depot, right?
You buy this thing to make music, and perform music. You do NOT buy this thing to fool around with an OS. Why does it matter what the OS is, as long as the audio workstation does the things that an audio workstation is supposed to do?
Sure, you *could* run linux on it, but then you'd wind up sacrificing much of the functionality on your brand new $8000 hardware.
When all is said and done, if this package doesn't do what you want it to do, then DON'T BUY ONE.
This is not an invasion of privacy any more than using a credit card or debit card at a checkout or gas pump. In fact, it's probably less so, since there will most likely be a way to use prepaid accounts (not sure if that is available yet based on the web site but it seems logical).
Also, the RFID-enabled watch is not mandatory for purchases. Want anonymity? Pay cash.
Also, no personal data is stored on the watch, according to the manufacturer. All it does is link back to a Speedpass account number.
Perhaps the invasion of privacy comes from the fact that RFID tags are inherently evil?
You know, the infamous Cambridge Study that made its way around the net a few months back, which shows that the human brain still easily reads words even if the letters are mixed up, just as long as the first and last letters are correct.
Now this is being exploited by spammers to circumvent filters. Example of one I received today in my "suspect email" folder:
#1 Spupelment aavilable! - Works!
*New* Enahncement Oil - Get hard in 60 seocnds! Amzaing! Like no ohter oil you've seen.
And naturally it's followed by a block of a couple hundred random dictionary words. I wonder if how well the bayesian filters are working for this (hash-buster aside)? I had to resort to activating a whitelist on my ISP's spam filter.
Didn't the hardware vendors already make Doom3-ready hardware? You see, the funny thing is, I upgraded my computer in November of 2002 specifically to play Doom3.
P4 2.4GHz, Radeon 9700 Pro, 512MB memory. I was ready!!
time passes....
No my computer is getting old. It never even got to run Doom3 (except for the leaked alpha). And guess what? I'll be upgrading again this spring, specifically to play Doom3.
The study looked at a defined population of species, and then extrapolated the results. This isn't unusual and is one of the reasons for the tolerance in the headline figures.
Or do you think they'd study everything on planet earth ?
Wouldn't the extrapolation only be valid if the 1000 or so species were picked purely randomly from the pool of 14 million?
I have a 1.8 chip running at 2.4, and the Zalman 7000AlCu.
I get 34C idle and 45C under full load. I don't think a 3.2 chip should be running 20C hotter than that, so check the airflow in your case. A heatsink/fan doesn't do any good if it's just blowing hot air over the cpu.
Make sure any fans in the back of the case are blowing air out, and make sure you have at least one fan in the front that sucks air in, and that there's nothing inside the case blocking airflow over your Zalman.
All in all, out of the 43,200 minutes in a month w/ 30 days, we're talking about a 1.6% rate of unavailabilty.
I think "availability" should only be defined in terms of when you want to use your computer. If it's a home computer, that may be 3 hours a day.
The 43,200 minutes includes the time you're at work, sleeping, eating, etc.
So, 3 hours a day on average for the month means 5400 minutes. Doing the math, this comes to about 13% of that time required to fix problems.
Imagine if you had to spend that amount of time per month fixing your own car that you use for daily transportation! (well, some people do, but you gotta know what you're getting into when you buy a 1982 Oldsmobile)
I used to do this kind of thing all the time, for friends and family. I've tried to get away from it (I'm even doing less tinkering with my own box) since going into programming, but people still call me up for computer problems even though I haven't done really intense troubleshooting since, oh, Win98.
Anyway, when your car breaks, it's YOUR car. Even the mechanic recognizes that it's YOUR car that has the problem, and he can fix it if you don't know how. No issues there, right?
Well computers, it seems, are different. They are so complicated and mysterious to the average joe, that any glitch must be the fault of Some Computer Person Somewhere. You see, when this friend of yours had a problem with his computer, it became YOUR problem as soon as you started working on it.
And when you're 3 hours into whatever fix you're trying to accomplish, they have the nerve to ask "What's taking so long?" Grrrrr.
A friend of mine asked me last week if I could "stop by and install Windows 2000" on her computer. She has Windows 98 right now. Right, I'll just stop by, on my way to somewhere, and spend an entire day with an OS upgrade. In return, I will probably get a free dinner. That's not worth it, IMO. As far as I'm concerned, she needs to stay with Win98 until she gets a whole new computer.
I grew up with an Atari 400. But we didn't have one of them newfangled "disk" drives. We had a few cartridges, sure, including Basic and a few games, but the really GOOD games were stored on regular audio cassettes.
The hard part was figuring out where exactly the game started... the tape label would have the tape counter location for each game, assuming the ink wasn't smeared, and you'd have to fast forward to that point and listen for the beeps to start.
So, say you wanted to play "Dog Daze", in which you and your opponent control your little doggies and try to pee on the most fire hydrants (I tell you, they just don't make quality games like this anymore!). Fast forward to tape position 49 or something. I don't remember the exact process, but I think if you turned the unit on with no cartridge installed you get some sort of command prompt. Or maybe you boot up with the BASIC cartridge. Anyway, by typing something along the lines of "load" and hitting enter, and then very quickly pressing "play" on the Atari tape recorder, you might get the game to start loading, provided you fast-forwarded to the correct location. After 5 minutes of listening to what sounds like a phone ringing and watching a plain blue screen, the game eventually displays its opening graphics! Of course, 1 in 4 times, the load would fail and you'd have to rewind and try again.
Eventually my parents got a sleek new Apple//c (FAR superior to the//e, I must say) with dual floppy disk drives. Beyond Castle Wolfenstein spoiled me for good.
Listen to the sounds of the landing gear in Aliens, as the ship gets stuck trying to leave the reactor platform.
That sound has been used several other tv shows and movies. Naturally, I can't name any of them off the top of my head.
Same goes for other sounds in that movie... doors opening, etc, they all seem to be pretty standard sci-fi sounds now. Except the pulse rifles. Thankfully nobody has used those sounds because those are so identifiable with Aliens, and they were the best sound effects in the movie.
I think a lot of sound designers get away with using "canned" sounds. There's that "pooshwap!" sound that was used at the end of Doom2, when John Romero's severed head is firing out demons through that hole in the wall that you're supposed to shoot rockets through.
That sound has been used in several action flicks (perhaps Mission Impossible 2, can't remember) for explosions, though it doesn't sound anything like an explosion to me! I've also heard that exact same sound on a couple TV commercials and an episode of the X-files.
It takes a lot of work to make original sounds though. My favorite are still the velociraptors from Jurassic Park... Gary Rydstrom mixed a dolphin shriek with a walrus grunt to create the velociraptor attack cry. I think if anybody else tries to use those sounds in a different movie, everybody will instantly think "velociraptor"!
Slashdot Mirror
4) Reach in with pliers and pull out plastic widget.
However, when the pliers are opened wide enough to grasp the widget, the pliers themselves will not fit in the bottle's neck.
You could use some long tweezers though. Or perhaps some very SMALL pliers.
But like I said in one of my other responses to a response, it's far more exciting to use a paper napkin. "Exciting" is probably not the correct term for this, but keep in mind that by the time you get to removing the widget, you've chugged at least one guinness-- so pretty much anything seems exciting.
Now deviating off-topic...
Sure, pliers would work, although it's far more interesting to use only materials that are available at your bar table... you can pull the widget out with a napkin.
This is simply the old "pull the cork out of the wine bottle trick" after you pop the cork down into the bottle.
There, now there's a little bit more useless knowledge that probably squeezed some useful information out of your memory in order to make room!
Last Saturday, I purchased a 6-pack of Guinness (in bottles) from the Kroger in Clarkston, GA. No, I do not live near there.
I paid approximatly $7.50.
My intent in purchasing the beer was, in addition to enjoying its smooth robust flavor, performing a demonstration to amazed friends on how to remove the magic "rocket widget" from an empty Guinness bottle (without breaking the bottle of course).
There, I said it. Now the entire world knows what beer I purchased, when, where, and why.
What is the WORST thing that can possibly happen to me by making this public?
Antares makes some wonderful technology. I use their Kantos synth all the time (uses the same pitch controller than autotune does, but the output drives a synth).
Unfortunately, in the case of autotune, it's a case of good technology that is mostly used for evil. And by "evil" I mean "crappy boy/girl bands."
I have yet to find an A/V receiver remote that's comfortable. A hundred buttons crammed onto a large, flat, uncomfortable brick. And maybe a cover at the top or bottom that you flip open to reveal another 25 teeny tiny buttons!
And why is it that every remote that comes with a new appliance (with the exception of Tivo) is designed to be a "universal remote" capable of controlling all our other gear? Great idea on paper, but I've never seen it executed very well, except in high-end universal remotes with backlit screens and such.
No, the blonde love interest's cousin is Louis... but then again that's the first time her name was mentioned on the show.
As for seeing binary code in an email causing you to become homocidal, seems like that basic idea was lifted right out of Snow Crash.
But I mainly want to see Lex Luthor turn evil.
Smallville is about all they have going for them. I think it's the best show that nobody is watching.
A theory isn't something that's proven right or wrong, true or false.
That's a hypothesis. People often get the two confused. A theory can be demonstrated to be an accurate model of reality, or an inaccurate one. But that doesn't necessarily determine its usefulness.
Example: the "electron shell" theory of atoms. That basically says that electrons orbit in circular shells around atoms. We now know that this isn't remotely the case... however, even though electron shell theory does NOT represent the actual structure of atoms, it is still a very useful theory in chemistry! Why? Because it still is an accurate method of calculating the results of chemical reactions.
So there you have it... a theory is a model of reality, or an abstraction. If it accurately models the outcomes of events, it doesn't really matter if the underlying principles are true or false. If we had a pink bunny theory of quantum mechanics, you bet scientists would be using it if it accurately predicted the results of experiments (verifying hypotheses), regardless of whether there are actually pink bunnies driving all those tiny particle-waves around. I, for one, welcome our new quantum pink bunny overlords.
So the question is... is "dark matter" a hypothesis, or a theory? If it's an existence question, true/false, then it's a hypothesis.
By the way, another explanation for the same effect is "modified newtonian dynamics" which works out nicely on paper, and accurately models the behavior of the universe, but unfortunately it hasn't been tied to any existing theory yet.
"Junkyard Wars Extreme"
Somewhere deep within its electronics, there's an error that was trapped. The message, which would be displayed if only there was a monitor onboard,
simply reads:
Doh.
Lesson learned: be sure to handle your exceptions properly.
Have you tried to buy points, rotor and a condensor for a new car?
Sure, it's just a matter of walking down the street to the nearest tele-phone and asking the operator to patch you in to the local horseless carriage supply depot, right?
You buy this thing to make music, and perform music.
You do NOT buy this thing to fool around with an OS. Why does it matter what the OS is, as long as the audio workstation does the things that an audio workstation is supposed to do?
Sure, you *could* run linux on it, but then you'd wind up sacrificing much of the functionality on your brand new $8000 hardware.
When all is said and done, if this package doesn't do what you want it to do, then DON'T BUY ONE.
This is not an invasion of privacy any more than using a credit card or debit card at a checkout or gas pump. In fact, it's probably less so, since there will most likely be a way to use prepaid accounts (not sure if that is available yet based on the web site but it seems logical).
Also, the RFID-enabled watch is not mandatory for purchases. Want anonymity? Pay cash.
Also, no personal data is stored on the watch, according to the manufacturer. All it does is link back to a Speedpass account number.
Perhaps the invasion of privacy comes from the fact that RFID tags are inherently evil?
You know, the infamous Cambridge Study that made its way around the net a few months back, which shows that the human brain still easily reads words even if the letters are mixed up, just as long as the first and last letters are correct.
Now this is being exploited by spammers to circumvent filters. Example of one I received today in my "suspect email" folder:
#1 Spupelment aavilable! - Works!
*New* Enahncement Oil - Get hard in 60 seocnds! Amzaing!
Like no ohter oil you've seen.
And naturally it's followed by a block of a couple hundred random dictionary words.
I wonder if how well the bayesian filters are working for this (hash-buster aside)?
I had to resort to activating a whitelist on my ISP's spam filter.
Didn't the hardware vendors already make Doom3-ready hardware?
You see, the funny thing is, I upgraded my computer in November of 2002 specifically to play Doom3.
P4 2.4GHz, Radeon 9700 Pro, 512MB memory. I was ready!!
time passes....
No my computer is getting old. It never even got to run Doom3 (except for the leaked alpha). And guess what? I'll be upgrading again this spring, specifically to play Doom3.
Curse you id software. Curse you.
The study looked at a defined population of species, and then extrapolated the results. This isn't unusual and is one of the reasons for the tolerance in the headline figures.
Or do you think they'd study everything on planet earth ?
Wouldn't the extrapolation only be valid if the 1000 or so species were picked purely randomly from the pool of 14 million?
65C seems very high.
I have a 1.8 chip running at 2.4, and the Zalman 7000AlCu.
I get 34C idle and 45C under full load. I don't think a 3.2 chip should be running 20C hotter than that, so check the airflow in your case. A heatsink/fan doesn't do any good if it's just blowing hot air over the cpu.
Make sure any fans in the back of the case are blowing air out, and make sure you have at least one fan in the front that sucks air in, and that there's nothing inside the case blocking airflow over your Zalman.
NASA is indeed hiding something. Check out the original photo, before NASA photoshopped it.
http://j.bruce.home.mindspring.com/realmars.jpg
credit goes to "madmikee" on corvetteforum.com for this
This has got to be the first page I've ever seen on Microsoft.com that looks the same in Mozilla as it does in IE.
All in all, out of the 43,200 minutes in a month w/ 30 days, we're talking about a 1.6% rate of unavailabilty.
I think "availability" should only be defined in terms of when you want to use your computer. If it's a home computer, that may be 3 hours a day.
The 43,200 minutes includes the time you're at work, sleeping, eating, etc.
So, 3 hours a day on average for the month means 5400 minutes. Doing the math, this comes to about 13% of that time required to fix problems.
Imagine if you had to spend that amount of time per month fixing your own car that you use for daily transportation!
(well, some people do, but you gotta know what you're getting into when you buy a 1982 Oldsmobile)
I used to do this kind of thing all the time, for friends and family. I've tried to get away from it (I'm even doing less tinkering with my own box) since going into programming, but people still call me up for computer problems even though I haven't done really intense troubleshooting since, oh, Win98.
Anyway, when your car breaks, it's YOUR car. Even the mechanic recognizes that it's YOUR car that has the problem, and he can fix it if you don't know how. No issues there, right?
Well computers, it seems, are different. They are so complicated and mysterious to the average joe, that any glitch must be the fault of Some Computer Person Somewhere. You see, when this friend of yours had a problem with his computer, it became YOUR problem as soon as you started working on it.
And when you're 3 hours into whatever fix you're trying to accomplish, they have the nerve to ask "What's taking so long?" Grrrrr.
A friend of mine asked me last week if I could "stop by and install Windows 2000" on her computer. She has Windows 98 right now. Right, I'll just stop by, on my way to somewhere, and spend an entire day with an OS upgrade. In return, I will probably get a free dinner. That's not worth it, IMO. As far as I'm concerned, she needs to stay with Win98 until she gets a whole new computer.
Until now, I did not know it was possible to get an eye cramp. :-o
I grew up with an Atari 400. But we didn't have one of them newfangled "disk" drives. We had a few cartridges, sure, including Basic and a few games, but the really GOOD games were stored on regular audio cassettes.
//c (FAR superior to the //e, I must say) with dual floppy disk drives. Beyond Castle Wolfenstein spoiled me for good.
The hard part was figuring out where exactly the game started... the tape label would have the tape counter location for each game, assuming the ink wasn't smeared, and you'd have to fast forward to that point and listen for the beeps to start.
So, say you wanted to play "Dog Daze", in which you and your opponent control your little doggies and try to pee on the most fire hydrants (I tell you, they just don't make quality games like this anymore!). Fast forward to tape position 49 or something. I don't remember the exact process, but I think if you turned the unit on with no cartridge installed you get some sort of command prompt. Or maybe you boot up with the BASIC cartridge.
Anyway, by typing something along the lines of "load" and hitting enter, and then very quickly pressing "play" on the Atari tape recorder, you might get the game to start loading, provided you fast-forwarded to the correct location.
After 5 minutes of listening to what sounds like a phone ringing and watching a plain blue screen, the game eventually displays its opening graphics! Of course, 1 in 4 times, the load would fail and you'd have to rewind and try again.
Eventually my parents got a sleek new Apple
Listen to the sounds of the landing gear in Aliens, as the ship gets stuck trying to leave the reactor platform.
That sound has been used several other tv shows and movies. Naturally, I can't name any of them off the top of my head.
Same goes for other sounds in that movie... doors opening, etc, they all seem to be pretty standard sci-fi sounds now. Except the pulse rifles. Thankfully nobody has used those sounds because those are so identifiable with Aliens, and they were the best sound effects in the movie.
I think a lot of sound designers get away with using "canned" sounds. There's that "pooshwap!" sound that was used at the end of Doom2, when John Romero's severed head is firing out demons through that hole in the wall that you're supposed to shoot rockets through.
That sound has been used in several action flicks (perhaps Mission Impossible 2, can't remember) for explosions, though it doesn't sound anything like an explosion to me!
I've also heard that exact same sound on a couple TV commercials and an episode of the X-files.
It takes a lot of work to make original sounds though. My favorite are still the velociraptors from Jurassic Park... Gary Rydstrom mixed a dolphin shriek with a walrus grunt to create the velociraptor attack cry. I think if anybody else tries to use those sounds in a different movie, everybody will instantly think "velociraptor"!
Just add a bunch of creatively placed linefeeds, you can easily get back up to the 6X number (based on lines of code).