Oh Mother!
I always thought Branny's mother must have been called Mary.... So is he Abel, or Cain?
57 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Dec 2007
In the fair and ancient city of York, StreetView came up against a one-way system that has flummoxed the best of us. Small wonder, then, that the trail goes cold halfway down some streets, or in one case does a funny kind of U-turn after turning onto a side street (Blake St. off Museum St. if you care).
I wouldn't be surprised if that camera rig had trouble with some of the old stone arches as well.
Funny though, two streets in York which have been pedestrianized forever have excellent coverage: Stonegate and the Shambles. So how the heck did they get those pix? The spymobile (quick while there's nobody about!) or some kind of handcart?
Looking at the StreetView of some of my old stomping grounds in York and London, it's pretty obvious that thoroughness was not on the agenda. Whole sections of streets are missing, as if the spymobilers decided they couldn't be arsed, and it was nearly opening time anyway.
Mines the one with 20 Woodbines in the pocket.
If you read the fine print on the TV licence, it says quite clearly that you can't use it for anything else but watching permitted TV channels. But wait, there's more. It also says you are not allowed to tell anyone else if you inadvertently hear or see anything else on it.
Well that's what it said in 1980. I bet it says the same thing today. Living in darkest Berks. I used to hear Radio Lubljana on my little portable TV. Oops I wasn't supposed to tell anyone....
There's more to this than you'd think. Having worked in the call rating industry, I've learned that any little municipality with a cell phone tower in its boundaries can pass taxes on calls that pass through that tower.
What really happens is that "Collection companies", no doubt having egged on the locals with the prospect of ready cash, trawl the call records of the various call carriers for taxable calls. They present the service providers with tax bills and pass on the proceeds to the municipalities, taking a hefty cut for themselves. The providers have to either (a) pay up and eat the cost or (b) employ more companies (who may be related to the collectors) to scan all the local yokel regulations across the USA for tax rates, and then work out how to charge the taxes on to the customer.
All this from people driving through Podunk by way of Boonsville, calling in for their voice mail along the way.
Thus
My lap rest is a flat (no rim) cookie sheet. Got it for 3 bucks at Ollie's. 14 inches by 9 is a good size, but the next size up works too. Previous versions included an interesting flat sheet by Oneida, 6 bucks at Target, with one edge bent up into a handle. If you don't want it to slip and slide, or scratch tabletops, apply self-adhesive foam or felt sheet from the craft store: 99 cents.
Then have a good laugh at the bozos who pay $29.99.
"Dan Wildt said the laser could easily have kept blazing for longer, but this would have destroyed or melted the ground test equipment."
Classic problem with lasers. The energy of the light beam is a small percentage of the energy dissipated at the source. The very design of a laser ensures this: any light not on the lasing path is discarded.
Oh and by the way, as E.J. Thribb might put it:
A megawatt
Is not a lot
Your average artillery shell definitely produces megawatts
when it goes off. And is actually more efficient than a typical
laser!
Back in my day it seemed like the time spent wearing minis was directly related to the thickness of the thighs. You could have made a thousand Steinways from the legs on view between the Tyne and the Tees. And that was just the men (boom boom). More delicate figures favoured maxis.
Ignore this. King is just trying to keep some constituents happy and not look "soft on pervs". This kind of thing happens a lot, since the individual representative is not beholden to his national party the way MP's are enslaved by the Parliamentary party. The bill will go into committee and never be seen again (unless it pops up as a clause in some Omnibus Keep The Bluenoses Happy bill later).
Melamine by itself has a toxic dose of about the same value as table salt. So does a related compound called cyanuric acid. Together they make insoluble crystals that form stones in organs like the kidneys. That's what's sickening babies now, not any toxicity. Cyanuric acid is used in animal feed and is considered harmless for that use. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melamine_cyanurate
Forget about the "American Education System". There isn't one. This is the first mistake Brits make when dealing with US education. The Feds do nothing but throw money at people, whatever the press says about "Federal Education Policy". At the state level control of education is highly variable. Some states, South Carolina for one, I think, control centrally. Effectively the entire state is one "school district". Here in New York a school district can be as small as a town of a few tens of thousands of people, with its own policies AND (very important) ability to levy taxes. Sure the state govt. drops "mandates" on us and distributes "school aid" (basically a tax on small towns to feed big cities) but the bottom line is that no Prez or Veep can impose anything from Washington, and likewise even a Congress full of Creationists couldn't mandate its teaching.
The Redmondites must be cackling with glee. I can't think of anything more likely to put people off LInux than by packaging it with anything from Lotus, especially anything related to the hated Notes. This is classic suit-think: it doesn't matter if the product is crap, it just matters that we can sell it. Come to think of it, that's been IBM-think since forever.
Assault is when you threaten to harm another person. Battery is when you actually do it. It's very old law and nothing to do with free speech on the Internet. Just because people frequently get away with saying "I'm going to come over there and kick your head in" it doesn't mean that it's legal to do so. All the threatened person has to do is complain to the police.
Face it, temporary huts are just that. Let them go the way of all such things. Shift all the technology to one of the museums equipped to handle it. Let the old house go back to being an old house. I'm tired of hearing that this brick or that paving stone deserves preservation just because something happened to happen in its general vicinity.
It's only a small step from "persuasion" to where the happy slappers in govt. offices are telling people what they can and can't name their kids, right down to keeping lists of allowed names. American ex-pats find that they can't indulge in the customs of passing on parental names, or even grand-parental names, if their kids are born in the wrong country in Europe. As usual the Frogs are big offenders in this dept. Compared to the idiocy inflicted by bureaucracies in situations like this, a few bloody silly names are a small price to pay.
The problem with VTOL is that it takes about 4 times as much power as a fixed wing plane. Compare the engines in light 'copters with those in light planes. So you have 75% excess power, with all the extra weight involved, for most of your flight. The longer the range, the worse it gets! And all for the sake of landing and taking off in restricted space. VTOL craft are notorious fuel guzzlers because of this.
The military have their reasons for wasting power and fuel. Civvies have to keep their eyes on the bottom line.
I find the claims of the airship heavy lift brigade underwhelming. The typical payload of most heavy lifters, whether floating, rotary or fixed-wing, is about the same as one (1) ordinary road-going lorry. Even the Hindenburg and its kin only had about a 55-ton payload capacity, which must have really inconvenienced all those rich cruising types. "What do you mean, I can't take Frou Frou's kennel?"
The umpire's word is law. Arguing gets you a red card.
All the other sports that allow replays, radar, sonar, odar etc. suffer from ever more focus on fine detail that detracts from the game. Was he 1 cm out, or 1 cm in? Who cares? If it wasn't clear to the spectators that the guy scored, or went out of bounds, why does it matter? TV people like to over-analyze everything, but the sports admins should just let them yap and get on with providing a good spectacle.
A bas la technologie!!
Unrestricted top-level domains will force big companies to rush for their own domains, having already been forced to grab .com, .biz, .net and .god knows what else versions of their domains so that no-one can impersonate them. You can see .ibm, .gm, .chrysler, .bt, .consignia, .ici, .nokia and all coming on fast. If they don't....they might wind up having to go cap in hand to somebody in China to redeem their names.
Election officials over here have a special category, TSTV, reserved for those voters who display the kind of intelligence that will make them vulnerable to the kinds of "tricks" described in the article. It stands, you will be amazed to learn, for "Too Stupid to Vote". These are the voters who, fresh from map-assisted laying of hands on fundaments, have trouble poking holes in bits of paper, or pulling down levers, or whatever task is required of them to register their preference.
Of course our elections require slightly more than choosing between Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, as in the typical UK vote. For better or worse, a typical general election requires choices for President, House of Representatives, Senator (two elections out of three), State legislature members (usually both Houses) plus county and city officials. Some states elect judges, District Attorneys, State Comptrollers, the list goes on. And that's without including Ballot Initiatives (where allowed) etc. etc. etc. All in the name of providing power to the people, when some of the people can be fooled all of the time.
The UK manages democracy by limiting what you can vote for. Factions in the USA try to manage it by limiting who can vote, They've done it for reasons of racism, sexism, other-isms, or just plain holding on to power. The Feds can't do much about it. They have power from the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution, but the transgressions have to be really blatant for them to step in. Forget HAVA: it's just another "here's a barrel of money if you do what we say" law.
As always the last line of defense is the intelligence of the individual. And if that's not there, well maybe that voter really should stay home.
One 40mm grenade = about half a cup of payload. Granted if you toss fuel rather than explosive you're upping the energy (no weight wasted on oxidizer) but you have to disperse it in air to get the bang.
Grenades are about creating havoc with shrapnel. These things seem to be about creating a lot of noise and pressure. Granted it'll ruin anybody's day, but no bunkers will be busted.
We should be happy that marketeers are such dullards. They never understand how easy it is to program our machines to outfox them. If they start cueing off IP packets, then machines will start sending HTTP packets to all manner of random addresses. It wouldn't take much to undermine their business model. If some percentage of Phorm's database is worthless, then their friends in advertising will drop them like a rock. Start polluting!
Feb 29 is day 60 of a leap year. In any other year Mar 1 is day 60. Therefore "leapers" simply have their birthday on day 60. March 1 babies are welcome to
join in.
However.....
Everybody with a birthday after day 60 must celebrate their birthday one day earlier (in the calendric sense) in a leap year.
Which means that the poor bastards born on day 366 (Dec. 31) in a leap year really really don't get birthdays but once every four years (longer, if a century year intervenes)!!
Clear now?
The French rag that originally posted the video alleged he said "Casse-toi alors, tu pauvre con", literally "break yourself then, you poor c*nt". "Casse-toi" is commonly used to mean "Get lost". Listening to the video, I did not hear "con". I only heard "tu pauvre", meaning "you poor [man]". So it seems the froggies have newspapers that are as "truthful" as newspapers everywhere else. And they do it without the Dirty Digger!
I thought the job of a Congressman was to represent his constituents. Of course the good citizens may not want to get value for all the money they send to DC, but somehow I doubt it.
If Lessig wants money out of politics, the best way is to keep politics out of money. Believe me, the money people don't like feeding the bears any more than anybody
else. However, it's the only way to keep said critters out of your pantry.
Sorry, beg to disagree. I tonne is about 4.2 Gigajoules, or 4200 megajoules. 1 megatonne is about 4.2 Terajoules. For comparison, ordinary everyday bullets have energies in the kilojoule range.
This rail gun is basically an electric artillery piece. It's actually less efficient than a conventional cannon, but on the other hand you can accumulate energy over a long period and let it go in a fraction of a second. A cannon, being a heat engine, wastes at least 60% of the input energy. If you generate your electricity from a heat engine, you lose more due to conversion.
The real attraction of rail guns is for very long accelerators for shooting to orbit, or at least to sub-orbital speed so you don't need as much rocket. But those won't fit on ships.