Maybe a bit off-topic, but: I used to create a ramdisk in OS9, install a comfortably small OS on it, make that ramdisk the startup disk, and restart the machine.
Click, zoom, a booted machine in under ten seconds. Not very useful for normal operations, but I made a few $$$ betting the non-Mac-savvy ones in our group that the MacOS _could_ boot that fast (it wasn't my fault if they believed it was booting from the harddrive, and yet never asked about that).:D
Who gives a flying fXck what it looks like just so long as it works? I'm using a pre-release of 10.5 right now and find it good enough with the same scheme as 10.4 (I never even knew it was called 'Aqua', and that never made a shXts-bit of difference as to how it worked). My only complaint is that PhotoBooth refuses to start up because (it says) it doesn't like my video card (AGP Rage128 Pro that came with the machine).
>> Tinfoil suit wearing protesters don't automatically win because they are protected from one weapon.
No; but tinfoil-suit-protected MARKSMEN can even things up little bit. Mace & teargas are relatively short-range weapons, and the bad guys aren't going to use their bullets and THEN their microwaves because that would be just a little bit self-defeating, wouldn't it?
How does it go: apertures in shielding must be less than a 1/4 wavelength? So: 3mm/4 equals about 34 perforations per inch? Window screening is probably about half that number.
A couple? They look to be about the diameter of a quarter (http://www.unitednuclear.com/isotopes.htm), so I'm pretty sure that if you inhaled one _just_right_...:)
-- (from UN's website:)
A SPECIAL NOTICE ABOUT POLONIUM-210
With the recent news of Polonium-210 being used as a poison, a good deal of incorrect information has been passed around (primarily by the media) concerning the Polonium isotope and radioactive materials in general. It's important to get the facts correct. The general public is quite ignorant when it comes to knowledge about radioactive materials and radiation in general.
The amount of Plonium-210, as well as any of the isotopes we sell is an 'exempt quantity' amount. These quantities of radioactive material are not hazardous - this is why they are permitted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to be sold to the general public without any sort of license. Although we do sell these isotopes, distributors such as United Nuclear Scientific Supplies (and just about any isotope distributor) do not actually stock them. All isotopes are made to order at an NRC licensed reactor in Oak Ridge Tennessee. When the isotope is made, it is shipped directly to the customer from the reactor to insure the longest possible half-life.
The exempt quantity amount of Polonium-210, or any of the radioactive isotopes sold is so small that they are essentially invisible to the human eye. In the case of needle sources, the radioactive material is electroplated on the inside of the eye of a needle.
You would need about 15,000 of our Polonium-210 needle sources at a total cost of about $1 million - to have a toxic amount.
In comparison, Amercium-241 is a similar toxic Alpha radiation emitter. Instead of a half life of 138 days like Polonium-210 has, it has a half life of over 450 years. It is far more toxic - and there is 10 times more than the 'exempt quantity' amount in every smoke detector in your home.
If you really wanted to poison someone, you would of course have to come up with a way to remove the invisible amount of material from the exempt sources - which is just about physically impossible and combine them together. Of course you would also need that 15,000 exempt sources.
In addition, there are dozens of other far more toxic materials, such as Ricin and Abrin, both of which can easily be made, and are also undetectable as a poison and untraceable.
Although it obviously works, Polonium-210 is a poor choice for a poison.
Another point to keep in mind is that an order for 15,000 sources would look a tad suspicious, considering we sell about 1 or 2 sources every 3 months.
Make sure you are truly knowledgeable about a subject before you start repeating and spreading potentially incorrect information related to it.
(For those of you with a slightly warped sense of humor, we do sell a Polonium-210 coffee mug)
-- Any 'radioactive boyscouts' out there want to start scraping-out smoke detectors?
My 4gig unit is tough as a brick: hasn't failed me once (i.e. dataloss) and it has helped resurrect machines several times.
(somewhere, sometime, I'd read that that Firewire (400) is faster than USB2 (480) because there's less 'overhead' in the data packets. can anyone verify this?)
My town was one of the group in Connecticut that used the pen/paper/page-scanner route in this last election. _I_ had no problems with it and I don't remember seeing any negative reactions to it in the local paper.
In a town of 19,000+ people I'm sure the whole output just about half-filled one "10-ream paperbox", and is easily recountable...
Yeah well, granted, 'three-strikes'_is_appropriate for a great deal of situations; but, no matter what size you may be, "leave" means "leave", period. If it's on my property it most certainly does not mean "leave after I've caught you three times".
D'j'ever hear of "911"? If somebody's on MY property and doesn't leave the-first-time-asked then _I_ want a cop there to at least have an incident report filed on it.
...the old 'softstrip'(?) barcodes from BYTE Magazine? And wasn't there something in NIBBLE too? Did anyone else here ever use them, and what stories do you have about them?
I remember _finally_ finding an HP barcode wand at a show and hooking it up to my Apple][+. I wrote-up a reader and had a lot of fun doing it and used it to load their programs (ASCII BASIC) - I was surprised at how efficient it was (for the times). It beat the daylights out of cassette storage (couldn't afford a disk drive at that time) and it led me to writing an output application so I could barcode all my work to the printer for storage. Most of those pages are still legible after all these years.
Technically it's "stereographic" since the eyes are really viewing two flat images - you can't move your head to see 'around' the object. "Stereoscopic" is the way your eyes function when viewing real three-dimensional objects.
I trust a lot of people less than I might trust Diebold. Probably hate more people than I hate Diebold too. And Diebold isn't even mentioned in the article.
The guy hasn't officially attested to anything yet and until he does there's no case; he just gets his "15 minutes". He _says_ people told him they voted for him but none of them have come-out in public yet. The guy owns a bar - maybe his drunk customers only _believed_ they voted for him. His wife came home and asked him if he voted for himself - didn't SHE vote for him? Not a close family, huh?
If it can be proven he didn't vote for himself (properly: that there wasn't a vote cast for his name), and he says he did, then the manufacturer or the polling personnel might have a case against him. However if it can't be proven then it's no case.
Both books, Dune and Troopers are books that I read at least once a year.
Go, thou: read Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War" (1974) and hope they never attempt to make a movie of it. It's another book you'll want to keep rereading.
Look for "the Author's preferred edition" (the latest paperback edition) - the story is in three parts and Haldeman rewrote the second part for this edition because, through time (no pun intended), he was never really satisfied with its flow. IMO, both versions have their good points but I can understand why he did what he did.
Also, words here could also be FRAUD and LIE - as in: what proof does he have that he voted for himself and isn't in this just for his "15 minutes of fame by saying he DID vote for himself".
_I_ want to get on the news too - maybe I'LL go tell the newsers that MY vote doesn't seem to show in the newspaper tallies either.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe a bit off-topic, but: I used to create a ramdisk in OS9, install a comfortably small OS on it, make that ramdisk the startup disk, and restart the machine.
:D
Click, zoom, a booted machine in under ten seconds. Not very useful for normal operations, but I made a few $$$ betting the non-Mac-savvy ones in our group that the MacOS _could_ boot that fast (it wasn't my fault if they believed it was booting from the harddrive, and yet never asked about that).
Who gives a flying fXck what it looks like just so long as it works? I'm using a pre-release of 10.5 right now and find it good enough with the same scheme as 10.4 (I never even knew it was called 'Aqua', and that never made a shXts-bit of difference as to how it worked). My only complaint is that PhotoBooth refuses to start up because (it says) it doesn't like my video card (AGP Rage128 Pro that came with the machine).
These things are getting harder to find as time goes on...
. swf
2 .swf
3 .swf
http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/j/r/jrk132/tech
http://www.ucc.asn.au/~japester/humour/foamy/tech
http://foamytoons.mirrors.corruptedtruth.com/tech
>> Tinfoil suit wearing protesters don't automatically win because they are protected from one weapon.
No; but tinfoil-suit-protected MARKSMEN can even things up little bit. Mace & teargas are relatively short-range weapons, and the bad guys aren't going to use their bullets and THEN their microwaves because that would be just a little bit self-defeating, wouldn't it?
How does it go: apertures in shielding must be less than a 1/4 wavelength? So: 3mm/4 equals about 34 perforations per inch? Window screening is probably about half that number.
I tried Anonet; couldn't get it talking properly with OSX (10.4.7 & Tunnelblick). Any help to GET it going would be greatly appreciated.
A couple? They look to be about the diameter of a quarter (http://www.unitednuclear.com/isotopes.htm), so I'm pretty sure that if you inhaled one _just_right_... :)
--
(from UN's website:)
A SPECIAL NOTICE ABOUT POLONIUM-210
With the recent news of Polonium-210 being used as a poison, a good deal of incorrect information has been passed around (primarily by the media) concerning the Polonium isotope and radioactive materials in general. It's important to get the facts correct. The general public is quite ignorant when it comes to knowledge about radioactive materials and radiation in general.
The amount of Plonium-210, as well as any of the isotopes we sell is an 'exempt quantity' amount. These quantities of radioactive material are not hazardous - this is why they are permitted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to be sold to the general public without any sort of license.
Although we do sell these isotopes, distributors such as United Nuclear Scientific Supplies (and just about any isotope distributor) do not actually stock them.
All isotopes are made to order at an NRC licensed reactor in Oak Ridge Tennessee. When the isotope is made, it is shipped directly to the customer from the reactor to insure the longest possible half-life.
The exempt quantity amount of Polonium-210, or any of the radioactive isotopes sold is so small that they are essentially invisible to the human eye.
In the case of needle sources, the radioactive material is electroplated on the inside of the eye of a needle.
You would need about 15,000 of our Polonium-210 needle sources at a total cost of about $1 million - to have a toxic amount.
In comparison, Amercium-241 is a similar toxic Alpha radiation emitter.
Instead of a half life of 138 days like Polonium-210 has, it has a half life of over 450 years. It is far more toxic - and there is 10 times more than the 'exempt quantity' amount in every smoke detector in your home.
If you really wanted to poison someone, you would of course have to come up with a way to remove the invisible amount of material from the exempt sources - which is just about physically impossible and combine them together. Of course you would also need that 15,000 exempt sources.
In addition, there are dozens of other far more toxic materials, such as Ricin and Abrin, both of which can easily be made, and are also undetectable as a poison and untraceable.
Although it obviously works, Polonium-210 is a poor choice for a poison.
Another point to keep in mind is that an order for 15,000 sources would look a tad suspicious, considering we sell about 1 or 2 sources every 3 months.
Make sure you are truly knowledgeable about a subject before you start repeating and spreading potentially incorrect information related to it.
(For those of you with a slightly warped sense of humor, we do sell a Polonium-210 coffee mug)
--
Any 'radioactive boyscouts' out there want to start scraping-out smoke detectors?
For Mac users (whose machines can boot from firewire devices) I can recommend the http://www.kanguru.com/fireflash.html.
My 4gig unit is tough as a brick: hasn't failed me once (i.e. dataloss) and it has helped resurrect machines several times.
(somewhere, sometime, I'd read that that Firewire (400) is faster than USB2 (480) because there's less 'overhead' in the data packets. can anyone verify this?)
My town was one of the group in Connecticut that used the pen/paper/page-scanner route in this last election. _I_ had no problems with it and I don't remember seeing any negative reactions to it in the local paper.
In a town of 19,000+ people I'm sure the whole output just about half-filled one "10-ream paperbox", and is easily recountable...
Yeah well, granted, 'three-strikes'_is_appropriate for a great deal of situations; but, no matter what size you may be, "leave" means "leave", period. If it's on my property it most certainly does not mean "leave after I've caught you three times".
D'j'ever hear of "911"? If somebody's on MY property and doesn't leave the-first-time-asked then _I_ want a cop there to at least have an incident report filed on it.
...the old 'softstrip'(?) barcodes from BYTE Magazine? And wasn't there something in NIBBLE too? Did anyone else here ever use them, and what stories do you have about them?
I remember _finally_ finding an HP barcode wand at a show and hooking it up to my Apple][+. I wrote-up a reader and had a lot of fun doing it and used it to load their programs (ASCII BASIC) - I was surprised at how efficient it was (for the times). It beat the daylights out of cassette storage (couldn't afford a disk drive at that time) and it led me to writing an output application so I could barcode all my work to the printer for storage. Most of those pages are still legible after all these years.
Good times.
Maybe something similar to this: http://www.ptgrey.com/products/spherical.asp
...he didn't do it by taking apart a bunch of smoke detectors.
Technically it's "stereographic" since the eyes are really viewing two flat images - you can't move your head to see 'around' the object. "Stereoscopic" is the way your eyes function when viewing real three-dimensional objects.
>> By not allowing OS X to run on anything except their own hardware.
Oh! You mean like the way that microsoft forces people to buy third-party x86-boxes to run THEIR software?
(/sarc)
Reading this whole article, I'm surprised that NOBODY'S yet mentioned Sydney's Comet (1983)! c'MON people!
Oooh! Mod this one: "Score 10, right-on-the-mark)"!
I buy Apple because I want to own the machine and the software; not own the machine and have the software company own me.
WTF? How is Apple "forcing" people?
Yah - I have both covers. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War - I was quite surprised at how many of my favorite books have entries in wikipedia!
here's the cover: http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/h/joe-w-haldeman /forever-war.htm
http://www.artybees.co.nz/bizarre-book-pages/whatw eretheyon-spaceship-moon.htm
I trust a lot of people less than I might trust Diebold. Probably hate more people than I hate Diebold too. And Diebold isn't even mentioned in the article.
The guy hasn't officially attested to anything yet and until he does there's no case; he just gets his "15 minutes". He _says_ people told him they voted for him but none of them have come-out in public yet. The guy owns a bar - maybe his drunk customers only _believed_ they voted for him. His wife came home and asked him if he voted for himself - didn't SHE vote for him? Not a close family, huh?
If it can be proven he didn't vote for himself (properly: that there wasn't a vote cast for his name), and he says he did, then the manufacturer or the polling personnel might have a case against him. However if it can't be proven then it's no case.
Go, thou: read Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War" (1974) and hope they never attempt to make a movie of it. It's another book you'll want to keep rereading.
Look for "the Author's preferred edition" (the latest paperback edition) - the story is in three parts and Haldeman rewrote the second part for this edition because, through time (no pun intended), he was never really satisfied with its flow. IMO, both versions have their good points but I can understand why he did what he did.
_I_ want to get on the news too - maybe I'LL go tell the newsers that MY vote doesn't seem to show in the newspaper tallies either.
Futurama: "The Honking", season 2, episode 18, of course!