Here is a shorter, and in my opinion, more informative summary. They're heating up sodium chloride salt, then using that to produce steam from water, which drives turbines. That's nice, because molten salt is fairly nasty stuff to work with. Anything has its chemical activity rise exponentially with temperature (the Arrhenius equation) so as things get hotter, they get more chemically aggressive. Molten glass will dissolve bricks and mortar. Molten sodium and chlorine ions are even nastier -- a sodium ion is a very small object, only a little larger than hydrogen -- and can diffuse into metals, weakening them and creating leaks.
Have you heard of the concept of the Rule Of Law, which says that laws should apply uniformly to everyone, not just the rich? Have you read about the Magna Carta, or the code of Hammurabi, or the Solonic laws? Society is one long march from tribal feuding to widescale democracy -- the assertion, in the US Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, weak/stupid and strong/powerful alike. At almost every stage in history what you see is more and more weak people gaining more rights. There was a time when there was no voting: it was rule by the sword. Ancient Greece (among others) started voting, so that rather than just one strong person running the show, a number of less-strong people who were still all rich men voted on what they were going to do. Then landowners began to get to vote, then merchants, then slavery was abolished, then women got to vote... You don't see a trend here?
Civilization is a balance between selfishness and altruism. Altruistic groups, where people do things for other people with no reasonable expectation of reward, outcompete selfish individuals. Within a group, however, a selfish individual tends to outcompete other people for a short time, until reciprocity makes people start to shun that person. Selfishness is generally only effective in the short term, in other words.
Civilization has a track record of treating the poor badly, but over time, it also has consistently been granting them more and more rights, and treating them better and better. If one argues that we are more civilized now than we were 2000 years ago, and one observes that nearly everywhere the poor and weak are being treated better now than they were 2000 years ago, one can at the very least conclude that increasing civilization is correlated with the weak and poor being treated better.
For what it's worth, it probably didn't occur to the pilot that the turn was particularly steep. When you get your pilot certificate, or do your once-every-two-years flight review, one of the things you have to do is demonstrate steep turns, which means well over 45 degrees, in both directions, one after another. A 30 degree turn is pretty ho-hum.
While the g-force limit of a 737 might be unknown, it has been designed and tested to exceed by at least 150% the stress/strain requirements for a transport-category aircraft, which as I recall are +3.8/-1.5 G's.
It's sort of ironic that the reason the whole Hewlett Packard spying/pretexting fiasco happened was mostly because there was an adversarial relationship between the CEO and the Board Of Directors, and they were spying on each other trying to figure out who was leaking confidential information to the public in a big power struggle. As a result of being caught at it, they stopped doing this (by 'this' I mean only the adversarial setup) and appointed the CEO of HP as the new head of the Board of Directors. (This is based on my recollection of reading several articles about it: I might be wrong, although this generally agrees with my summation.)
I'm not precisely disagreeing with you: in fact, I completely agree that we haven't gotten much smarter, we've just gotten more knowledge.
With that said: there was a can-opener invented the very same day the modern-day food can was opened. It was a hammer and a cold chisel. Developing a *modern* can opener took a long time because it's a different, and hard, problem -- and even so, it's still evolving. From punch-type can-openers, to hand-operated lever-knife type openers that still can be found on swiss army knives, to hand-operated rotary cutter openers, to motorized rotary cutter openers, has been a long path. Another thing I'd point out is that technology has in no way been a linear-like process. It is exponential. Consider the set of can openers I just mentioned -- it took 50 years to get a reasonably portable, dedicated can opener. It took another 30, roughly, to get one that a person could quickly remove the entire top from the can. It took another 20 to get the rotary type, and very soon after that, the electric one was developed. Likewise, transportation by foot is 100,000 years old. Transportation by animal is maybe 8000 years old. Transportation by wagon is maybe 3500 years old. Transportation by bicycle is 200 years old, by car 120 years old, by airplane 100 years old, by spaceship 50 years old. You see the same thing with any technology you look at: exponential increase, because the number of people working on any problem is increasing, and they're working with and on previous discoveries. It models something like the acceleration of gravity. But it's definitely not linear.
As a pilot, I automatically think alpha, bravo, charlie, when trying to explain which letter I mean. My girlfriend is an ophthalmologist, and she uses a different phonetic alphabet, kind of impromptu, mostly using common names, and she claims it works much better with people who don't really understand what she's trying to do because they're more familiar with the words. April, Bill, Charlie, Doctor, something like that. Sometimes I get to hang out with one of her friends, who was a P-38 pilot in WWII, and he uses one of the old phonetics: able, baker, charlie, dog -- which, again, seems to be easier for people.
I was teaching kids, and providing a static target for them... but I was never good enough to come home without a lot of bruises, unfortunately. Wrong body shape for fencing: barrel chest, broad shoulders, short arms. Fencing is for elves, and I'm more of a dwarf. *sigh* But I'm great at pulling an 85 pound compound bow!
I'm told, by books, that this usage was common in the 1600's, as a cruel joke about pirate treatment of captured prisoners: "a jolly rogering." I don't know if it's true but I've read it in a couple of different places.
>The days of rock stars with million dollar salaries are over. The labels need to accept the fact that music is going to become increasingly diverse over the next several years, and that their old strategy of promoting a very small number number of superstar artists just isn't going to work any more.
I disagree. You're positing a world full of people who listen to music that they like. While a lot of us do that, there are also a very large number of people who listen to music that their friends like, and then come to like that music -- which is a wholly different thing. For that demographic, there will still be superstar artists. I think we'll see exactly what we've seen in the last five years, only moreso: briefly hyperpopular groups marketed to the me-too demographic and small independents for all the rest of us. The problem is: those hyperpopular acts will still make millions, and everyone wants to make millions, so there's still a driving force to push artists into the arms of record companies, who have the influence to launch ad campaigns to the me-too demographic.
What I think will happen is that as the market continues to get more broad, record companies aren't going to make as much, so they'll have less to spend on promoting bands, so they'll spend that on a few sure-thing bands for the me-too demographic, and we'll keep seeing the Britney-du-jour, while the small independent bands will continue to expand their influence, sucking up the money that used to go to the big record companies. What I think that'll mean is less Modest Mouse/Arcade Fire -- indie bands that after a dozen years finally make it big -- and significantly less variety on the mainstream radio because it'll be just a venue to push the very few sure-thing bands. I get really tired of switching through the top 5 radio stations in my area and hearing Kelly Clarkson playing on three of the five at the same time, when a year ago it was James Blunt playing on 4 of the five. They're all pushing the same crap. In contrast, one of the small college radio stations that I listen to, I can go for six hours of solid listening and have heard a total of two bands whose names I even recognize. I love that station and it's the one I listen to 90% of the time, but nobody getting airplay there is ever going to get rich.
To sum up: as long as artists still wish to get filthy rich, record companies will survive, because they can organize a media campaign that will attract people who use popularity as a judge of quality, and that's where the filthy rich money is.
*Part* of the reason I got started making mail was that I was tired of coming home from fencing practice with my right armpit fulla weird little bruises and blood-blisters. I built a fencing jacket -- one-arm and torso coverage -- out of mail finer than the tips of the foils we were using, and *boy* was that a nice change.
Bedspreads, actually comes to mind. I have several friends who have requested them. Eh, let's see if it ever starts working, first, and then I'll figure out what to do with it.
Is that 'scars' or 'scarfs'? I'm trying to build a robotic knitting machine -- well, okay, it makes chainmail, but that's basically testosterone knitting -- and the question keeps coming up, "yeah, well, what're you going to DO with an infinite supply of chainmail?" I keep answering "the fun is in finding out!" But a chainmail scarf would prevent scars, so then you'd be set.
A major reason I'm now in electronics is that every laser place I worked, the majority of the people doing the work had permanent eye damage. With the UV excimer system, the PhD who designed it had severe astigmatism from DIY lasik -- he'd flattened his cornea with a blast when a laser that was supposedly off let out one last pulse. I later was working with ultrafast freq-doubled copper ion lasers, and there, both the PhD's who spent time in the lab and the other tech had blind spots from green getting past safety glasses and burning holes in their retinas. I had one good exposure there, when I walked in a lab where there was a running laser in the open, because the 'laser on' warning light outside wasn't working, but it just left me foggy in one eye for a half day. (I had it checked, coz my girlfriend's in ophthalmology -- good choice on my part, huh?) It's endemic in the industry. I prefer working with invisible wavelengths because those mostly only damage the external tissues that can be repaired, but even better is working with low voltage electronics, because the worst thing that could happen is I could get lead poisoning from licking the circuit boards.
>I mean, I understand that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but do we really need to wait until the house burns to the ground before we'll agree that the bitch is on fire?
As someone brighter than I first said: when someone's income depends on not understanding your argument, it's incredibly difficult to convince that person that you're right. The USA is the leading consumer of energy in the world, and is, per capita, the leading producer of greenhouse pollutants. Is it really amazing that the people who are making enormous amounts of money in the business of producing energy and greenhouse gases don't ever seem to understand why global warming is a problem? They'll deny it exists until they can't do that anymore, and then they'll claim that it's not a problem until they can't do that, and then they'll claim that it's not THEIR problem until they can't do that, all the while hoping that they'll individually be retired and living on some nice beanchfront property in Arizona by the time that it's become impossible to continue denying there's a problem. It sucks, and they're bastards, but they stand to lose if the status quo changes, so it's easy to understand why they're doing what they're doing.
I was working with an enormous UV laser and at one point in the beampath, (for reasons I don't understand) it had a focal point. It did exactly what you're talking about: there was a little glowing ball of spark-filled plasma just sitting in the open air (since it was an invisible beam.) That was pretty cool, but definitely not where you wanted any part of yourself to be. To make it more fun, we pulsed the laser, especially when warming it up or checking for dark spots on the optics, so it'd be running at a nanosecond pulse per second, just 'pop'...'pop'... and you'd see this moment of bright glow where the focal point was. Another thing I learned from working in a room with an uncontained, invisible megawatt laser beam was that just about anything phosphoresces: paper, denim jeans, skin: it all glows a nice yellowish for just a moment after getting hit. (That's how we'd check the optics: we'd hold up a piece of paper, it'd go 'pop', and the glow and the burn pattern on the paper would show if one of the mirrors or lenses had a problem. Only, sometimes if you weren't careful, it wasn't just the paper that got hit. Leather gloves phosphoresce, too.)
My brother and mom have sibling dogs, and they do that sort of stuff all the time. Let's call them Jack and Jill. Jack has a chewtoy and Jill wants it so she runs over to the window, starts barking wildly, Jack runs over to see what she's barking at, and she doubles around and grabs the chewtoy. They hide things from one another. One will look to see if the other one's watching and then try to stash something, and the other will fake "not looking" and then as soon as the one takes off the other will turn and watch to see where it's being hidden. Dogs are *full* of duplicity. And it's not just domesticated ones. I was out riding my mountain bike through the middle of nowhere -- no roads or trails or anything, just a big chunk of desert -- and saw a coyote a little ways behind me. I rode on a bit further and looked back to see if I could still see it, and it was exactly the same distance from me that it had been previously, and was industriously sniffing a bush nearby, not looking at me at all, oh no, not in the least. I started riding again and would take quick looks back and it was following me, staring right at me, but every time I'd stop it'd stop and start looking off in the distance, at clouds, sniffing at nearby rocks, anything other than letting me know it was paying attention to me. (Finally I hit a deer trail and rode along it for a while, then did a 180 and re-established the predator/prey relationship. It had to tuck its tail in under its butt to keep me from riding up on it. Never saw it again.)
They're all competitive traits for social hunters: they serve to get things without reverting to open fighting, or in the case of the coyote, allay suspicion and allow more time to make a decision.
But they're not a part of the system that programmers have much control over, and when programmers write stuff that tries to take some control, the users go *insane* -- see "allow or deny", for instance.
So, hackers using Web2.0 bricked Los Alamos by spearphishing, to get all the inappropriate buzzwords out of the way... but is social engineering really cracking the system? If you convince someone to give you the keys to the car and then you steal the car, that's nothing wrong with the car. In this case, it's possible that a better design might make it impossible for someone to give the keys to the wrong people, but nobody else has a flawless solution for that, either.
Yeah, I did something similar, only on a modern machine, coz I'm not very bright. I was trying to get the modem configured on my first debian machine. It worked on the windows partition, after all, but I just couldn't find where it was located... so I typed something like: for x in/dev; do echo $x; echo "ATDT5000" >>/dev/$x; done
I figured I could *hear* the modem when it got to the right dev.
The modem was at/dev/ttyS1. Unfortunately, there were some other things it found before that, most notably/dev/hda1,/dev/hda2,/dev/hdb1... boy did it take me a long time to fix that.
>but have you ever considered only linking to articles that have, I don't know, actual facts? Instead of rumor and innuendo to drive Apple bashing for Page Hits.
Yeah, that's great. While we're at it, let's not teach evolution until it's proven beyond a doubt. Ditto gravity: why are we talking about it when we haven't even detected gravitons?
The thing is: sometimes you have to make decisions on what to do and how to react, based on the best available information at the time, and *sometimes* that information isn't in the form of actual facts. Hence much of our current debate on global warming, or the United States and its entry into the Iraq War a couple years back.
If you wait for actual facts, by the time you have your actual facts, the train's left the station. If you read about something and think the coverage is reasonably reliable, you can actually start supporting or opposing something when there's still a chance of making a difference.
Saul Griffith built one for his masters' thesis, "towards personal fabricators" at MIT. It's available on the net in pdf format, but in a quick search I haven't found it -- I have a copy on my home computer, though, if you want. It's built out of LEGO bricks with an aluminum nozzle (and a LEGO worm gear) that's heated using a PID controller and a resistive heater, to melt and extrude the chocolate. I'm building a significantly larger version, again out of LEGO bricks. I don't know if I'll manage 0,5mm accuracy, which is what he claims, but I should be able to do almost a cubic foot of material.
I believe there are at least four classes of non-copyrighted material: 1. Material that was but the copyright has expired, eg Hamlet. 2. Material that is not subject to copyright, like Federal Government publications ("Copyright protection... is not available for any work of the United States Government...") eg the Federal Aviation Regulations. 3. Collated mathematical tables or other large groups of derivable data, if not used in the same format as the book from which they came. 4. Materials that lack sufficient complexity for copyright -- I can't write the letter 'A' on a piece of paper and then claim I've copyrighted it and go after other people for use of it.
Within each of these groups, there are at least tens of thousands, if not millions, of instances. I bet there are petabytes of non-copyrighted material out there.
>I have yet to understand why ClearChannel can get away with almost a complete monopoly of the radio business.
Because most people change their tastes to match those of the group in which they find themselves, and radios coopt that behavior by playing the same crap over and over. People assume that other people must like it, and pretty soon, they, too, like it. It's the basis of social behavior: if you see other people eating a certain plant, you know it's safe so you eat it too. Media takes advantage of this by presenting themselves as the voice of the people, and people assume that what the media says is what most people think. People who don't behave this way are, in a word, anti-social. I don't think there's anything wrong with that (speaking as one of those people) but it's not the way most people work.
The crash I had, I was sitting still at the back of a traffic jam and a semi ran into me doing about 65 mph/100kph, and my car rolled about five times. The side-to-side yanking of the seatbelt is what broke all my ribs, but luckily most of my internal organs were fine or just bruised. I've read about the aortic tear thing, and it sounds reasonable. I've also read debate about whether that's actually what happens... but dead's dead. (btw, 35mph -> 55kph, more or less, rather than 70.)
Slashdot Mirror
Here is a shorter, and in my opinion, more informative summary. They're heating up sodium chloride salt, then using that to produce steam from water, which drives turbines. That's nice, because molten salt is fairly nasty stuff to work with.
Anything has its chemical activity rise exponentially with temperature (the Arrhenius equation) so as things get hotter, they get more chemically aggressive. Molten glass will dissolve bricks and mortar. Molten sodium and chlorine ions are even nastier -- a sodium ion is a very small object, only a little larger than hydrogen -- and can diffuse into metals, weakening them and creating leaks.
Have you heard of the concept of the Rule Of Law, which says that laws should apply uniformly to everyone, not just the rich?
Have you read about the Magna Carta, or the code of Hammurabi, or the Solonic laws?
Society is one long march from tribal feuding to widescale democracy -- the assertion, in the US Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, weak/stupid and strong/powerful alike.
At almost every stage in history what you see is more and more weak people gaining more rights. There was a time when there was no voting: it was rule by the sword. Ancient Greece (among others) started voting, so that rather than just one strong person running the show, a number of less-strong people who were still all rich men voted on what they were going to do. Then landowners began to get to vote, then merchants, then slavery was abolished, then women got to vote... You don't see a trend here?
Civilization is a balance between selfishness and altruism. Altruistic groups, where people do things for other people with no reasonable expectation of reward, outcompete selfish individuals. Within a group, however, a selfish individual tends to outcompete other people for a short time, until reciprocity makes people start to shun that person. Selfishness is generally only effective in the short term, in other words.
Civilization has a track record of treating the poor badly, but over time, it also has consistently been granting them more and more rights, and treating them better and better. If one argues that we are more civilized now than we were 2000 years ago, and one observes that nearly everywhere the poor and weak are being treated better now than they were 2000 years ago, one can at the very least conclude that increasing civilization is correlated with the weak and poor being treated better.
For what it's worth, it probably didn't occur to the pilot that the turn was particularly steep. When you get your pilot certificate, or do your once-every-two-years flight review, one of the things you have to do is demonstrate steep turns, which means well over 45 degrees, in both directions, one after another. A 30 degree turn is pretty ho-hum.
While the g-force limit of a 737 might be unknown, it has been designed and tested to exceed by at least 150% the stress/strain requirements for a transport-category aircraft, which as I recall are +3.8/-1.5 G's.
It's sort of ironic that the reason the whole Hewlett Packard spying/pretexting fiasco happened was mostly because there was an adversarial relationship between the CEO and the Board Of Directors, and they were spying on each other trying to figure out who was leaking confidential information to the public in a big power struggle. As a result of being caught at it, they stopped doing this (by 'this' I mean only the adversarial setup) and appointed the CEO of HP as the new head of the Board of Directors.
(This is based on my recollection of reading several articles about it: I might be wrong, although this generally agrees with my summation.)
I'm not precisely disagreeing with you: in fact, I completely agree that we haven't gotten much smarter, we've just gotten more knowledge.
With that said: there was a can-opener invented the very same day the modern-day food can was opened. It was a hammer and a cold chisel. Developing a *modern* can opener took a long time because it's a different, and hard, problem -- and even so, it's still evolving. From punch-type can-openers, to hand-operated lever-knife type openers that still can be found on swiss army knives, to hand-operated rotary cutter openers, to motorized rotary cutter openers, has been a long path.
Another thing I'd point out is that technology has in no way been a linear-like process. It is exponential. Consider the set of can openers I just mentioned -- it took 50 years to get a reasonably portable, dedicated can opener. It took another 30, roughly, to get one that a person could quickly remove the entire top from the can. It took another 20 to get the rotary type, and very soon after that, the electric one was developed.
Likewise, transportation by foot is 100,000 years old. Transportation by animal is maybe 8000 years old. Transportation by wagon is maybe 3500 years old. Transportation by bicycle is 200 years old, by car 120 years old, by airplane 100 years old, by spaceship 50 years old. You see the same thing with any technology you look at: exponential increase, because the number of people working on any problem is increasing, and they're working with and on previous discoveries. It models something like the acceleration of gravity. But it's definitely not linear.
As a pilot, I automatically think alpha, bravo, charlie, when trying to explain which letter I mean. My girlfriend is an ophthalmologist, and she uses a different phonetic alphabet, kind of impromptu, mostly using common names, and she claims it works much better with people who don't really understand what she's trying to do because they're more familiar with the words. April, Bill, Charlie, Doctor, something like that. Sometimes I get to hang out with one of her friends, who was a P-38 pilot in WWII, and he uses one of the old phonetics: able, baker, charlie, dog -- which, again, seems to be easier for people.
I was teaching kids, and providing a static target for them... but I was never good enough to come home without a lot of bruises, unfortunately. Wrong body shape for fencing: barrel chest, broad shoulders, short arms. Fencing is for elves, and I'm more of a dwarf. *sigh*
But I'm great at pulling an 85 pound compound bow!
I'm told, by books, that this usage was common in the 1600's, as a cruel joke about pirate treatment of captured prisoners: "a jolly rogering." I don't know if it's true but I've read it in a couple of different places.
>The days of rock stars with million dollar salaries are over. The labels need to accept the fact that music is going to become increasingly diverse over the next several years, and that their old strategy of promoting a very small number number of superstar artists just isn't going to work any more.
I disagree.
You're positing a world full of people who listen to music that they like. While a lot of us do that, there are also a very large number of people who listen to music that their friends like, and then come to like that music -- which is a wholly different thing. For that demographic, there will still be superstar artists. I think we'll see exactly what we've seen in the last five years, only moreso: briefly hyperpopular groups marketed to the me-too demographic and small independents for all the rest of us.
The problem is: those hyperpopular acts will still make millions, and everyone wants to make millions, so there's still a driving force to push artists into the arms of record companies, who have the influence to launch ad campaigns to the me-too demographic.
What I think will happen is that as the market continues to get more broad, record companies aren't going to make as much, so they'll have less to spend on promoting bands, so they'll spend that on a few sure-thing bands for the me-too demographic, and we'll keep seeing the Britney-du-jour, while the small independent bands will continue to expand their influence, sucking up the money that used to go to the big record companies. What I think that'll mean is less Modest Mouse/Arcade Fire -- indie bands that after a dozen years finally make it big -- and significantly less variety on the mainstream radio because it'll be just a venue to push the very few sure-thing bands. I get really tired of switching through the top 5 radio stations in my area and hearing Kelly Clarkson playing on three of the five at the same time, when a year ago it was James Blunt playing on 4 of the five. They're all pushing the same crap. In contrast, one of the small college radio stations that I listen to, I can go for six hours of solid listening and have heard a total of two bands whose names I even recognize. I love that station and it's the one I listen to 90% of the time, but nobody getting airplay there is ever going to get rich.
To sum up: as long as artists still wish to get filthy rich, record companies will survive, because they can organize a media campaign that will attract people who use popularity as a judge of quality, and that's where the filthy rich money is.
*Part* of the reason I got started making mail was that I was tired of coming home from fencing practice with my right armpit fulla weird little bruises and blood-blisters. I built a fencing jacket -- one-arm and torso coverage -- out of mail finer than the tips of the foils we were using, and *boy* was that a nice change.
Bedspreads, actually comes to mind. I have several friends who have requested them. Eh, let's see if it ever starts working, first, and then I'll figure out what to do with it.
Is that 'scars' or 'scarfs'? I'm trying to build a robotic knitting machine -- well, okay, it makes chainmail, but that's basically testosterone knitting -- and the question keeps coming up, "yeah, well, what're you going to DO with an infinite supply of chainmail?" I keep answering "the fun is in finding out!" But a chainmail scarf would prevent scars, so then you'd be set.
A major reason I'm now in electronics is that every laser place I worked, the majority of the people doing the work had permanent eye damage. With the UV excimer system, the PhD who designed it had severe astigmatism from DIY lasik -- he'd flattened his cornea with a blast when a laser that was supposedly off let out one last pulse. I later was working with ultrafast freq-doubled copper ion lasers, and there, both the PhD's who spent time in the lab and the other tech had blind spots from green getting past safety glasses and burning holes in their retinas. I had one good exposure there, when I walked in a lab where there was a running laser in the open, because the 'laser on' warning light outside wasn't working, but it just left me foggy in one eye for a half day. (I had it checked, coz my girlfriend's in ophthalmology -- good choice on my part, huh?) It's endemic in the industry. I prefer working with invisible wavelengths because those mostly only damage the external tissues that can be repaired, but even better is working with low voltage electronics, because the worst thing that could happen is I could get lead poisoning from licking the circuit boards.
>I mean, I understand that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but do we really need to wait until the house burns to the ground before we'll agree that the bitch is on fire?
As someone brighter than I first said: when someone's income depends on not understanding your argument, it's incredibly difficult to convince that person that you're right. The USA is the leading consumer of energy in the world, and is, per capita, the leading producer of greenhouse pollutants. Is it really amazing that the people who are making enormous amounts of money in the business of producing energy and greenhouse gases don't ever seem to understand why global warming is a problem? They'll deny it exists until they can't do that anymore, and then they'll claim that it's not a problem until they can't do that, and then they'll claim that it's not THEIR problem until they can't do that, all the while hoping that they'll individually be retired and living on some nice beanchfront property in Arizona by the time that it's become impossible to continue denying there's a problem. It sucks, and they're bastards, but they stand to lose if the status quo changes, so it's easy to understand why they're doing what they're doing.
I was working with an enormous UV laser and at one point in the beampath, (for reasons I don't understand) it had a focal point. It did exactly what you're talking about: there was a little glowing ball of spark-filled plasma just sitting in the open air (since it was an invisible beam.) That was pretty cool, but definitely not where you wanted any part of yourself to be. To make it more fun, we pulsed the laser, especially when warming it up or checking for dark spots on the optics, so it'd be running at a nanosecond pulse per second, just 'pop'...'pop'... and you'd see this moment of bright glow where the focal point was. Another thing I learned from working in a room with an uncontained, invisible megawatt laser beam was that just about anything phosphoresces: paper, denim jeans, skin: it all glows a nice yellowish for just a moment after getting hit. (That's how we'd check the optics: we'd hold up a piece of paper, it'd go 'pop', and the glow and the burn pattern on the paper would show if one of the mirrors or lenses had a problem. Only, sometimes if you weren't careful, it wasn't just the paper that got hit. Leather gloves phosphoresce, too.)
My brother and mom have sibling dogs, and they do that sort of stuff all the time. Let's call them Jack and Jill. Jack has a chewtoy and Jill wants it so she runs over to the window, starts barking wildly, Jack runs over to see what she's barking at, and she doubles around and grabs the chewtoy. They hide things from one another. One will look to see if the other one's watching and then try to stash something, and the other will fake "not looking" and then as soon as the one takes off the other will turn and watch to see where it's being hidden. Dogs are *full* of duplicity.
And it's not just domesticated ones. I was out riding my mountain bike through the middle of nowhere -- no roads or trails or anything, just a big chunk of desert -- and saw a coyote a little ways behind me. I rode on a bit further and looked back to see if I could still see it, and it was exactly the same distance from me that it had been previously, and was industriously sniffing a bush nearby, not looking at me at all, oh no, not in the least. I started riding again and would take quick looks back and it was following me, staring right at me, but every time I'd stop it'd stop and start looking off in the distance, at clouds, sniffing at nearby rocks, anything other than letting me know it was paying attention to me. (Finally I hit a deer trail and rode along it for a while, then did a 180 and re-established the predator/prey relationship. It had to tuck its tail in under its butt to keep me from riding up on it. Never saw it again.)
They're all competitive traits for social hunters: they serve to get things without reverting to open fighting, or in the case of the coyote, allay suspicion and allow more time to make a decision.
But they're not a part of the system that programmers have much control over, and when programmers write stuff that tries to take some control, the users go *insane* -- see "allow or deny", for instance.
So, hackers using Web2.0 bricked Los Alamos by spearphishing, to get all the inappropriate buzzwords out of the way... but is social engineering really cracking the system? If you convince someone to give you the keys to the car and then you steal the car, that's nothing wrong with the car. In this case, it's possible that a better design might make it impossible for someone to give the keys to the wrong people, but nobody else has a flawless solution for that, either.
Yeah, I did something similar, only on a modern machine, coz I'm not very bright. I was trying to get the modem configured on my first debian machine. It worked on the windows partition, after all, but I just couldn't find where it was located... so I typed something like: /dev; do echo $x; echo "ATDT5000" >> /dev/$x; done
/dev/ttyS1. Unfortunately, there were some other things it found before that, most notably /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, /dev/hdb1... boy did it take me a long time to fix that.
for x in
I figured I could *hear* the modem when it got to the right dev.
The modem was at
>but have you ever considered only linking to articles that have, I don't know, actual facts? Instead of rumor and innuendo to drive Apple bashing for Page Hits.
Yeah, that's great. While we're at it, let's not teach evolution until it's proven beyond a doubt. Ditto gravity: why are we talking about it when we haven't even detected gravitons?
The thing is: sometimes you have to make decisions on what to do and how to react, based on the best available information at the time, and *sometimes* that information isn't in the form of actual facts. Hence much of our current debate on global warming, or the United States and its entry into the Iraq War a couple years back.
If you wait for actual facts, by the time you have your actual facts, the train's left the station. If you read about something and think the coverage is reasonably reliable, you can actually start supporting or opposing something when there's still a chance of making a difference.
Saul Griffith built one for his masters' thesis, "towards personal fabricators" at MIT. It's available on the net in pdf format, but in a quick search I haven't found it -- I have a copy on my home computer, though, if you want. It's built out of LEGO bricks with an aluminum nozzle (and a LEGO worm gear) that's heated using a PID controller and a resistive heater, to melt and extrude the chocolate.
I'm building a significantly larger version, again out of LEGO bricks. I don't know if I'll manage 0,5mm accuracy, which is what he claims, but I should be able to do almost a cubic foot of material.
I believe there are at least four classes of non-copyrighted material: ... is not available for any work of the United States Government...") eg the Federal Aviation Regulations.
1. Material that was but the copyright has expired, eg Hamlet.
2. Material that is not subject to copyright, like Federal Government publications ("Copyright protection
3. Collated mathematical tables or other large groups of derivable data, if not used in the same format as the book from which they came.
4. Materials that lack sufficient complexity for copyright -- I can't write the letter 'A' on a piece of paper and then claim I've copyrighted it and go after other people for use of it.
Within each of these groups, there are at least tens of thousands, if not millions, of instances. I bet there are petabytes of non-copyrighted material out there.
So who owns the copyright to Hamlet? or Alice In Wonderland? or a book full of trigonometry tables?
>I have yet to understand why ClearChannel can get away with almost a complete monopoly of the radio business.
Because most people change their tastes to match those of the group in which they find themselves, and radios coopt that behavior by playing the same crap over and over. People assume that other people must like it, and pretty soon, they, too, like it. It's the basis of social behavior: if you see other people eating a certain plant, you know it's safe so you eat it too. Media takes advantage of this by presenting themselves as the voice of the people, and people assume that what the media says is what most people think.
People who don't behave this way are, in a word, anti-social. I don't think there's anything wrong with that (speaking as one of those people) but it's not the way most people work.
The crash I had, I was sitting still at the back of a traffic jam and a semi ran into me doing about 65 mph/100kph, and my car rolled about five times. The side-to-side yanking of the seatbelt is what broke all my ribs, but luckily most of my internal organs were fine or just bruised. I've read about the aortic tear thing, and it sounds reasonable. I've also read debate about whether that's actually what happens... but dead's dead.
(btw, 35mph -> 55kph, more or less, rather than 70.)