
Oops, and...
...Mea culpa, Mea minima culpa.
33 publicly visible posts • joined 12 May 2007
Silly question: Why do people have no insurance?
But anyways, its Basic Physics™. Anything in the focal point of a large lens will fry, given enough sunlight. The mount of the ball is meant to keep things away from the focal trail. Its the opposite with a Campbell-Stokes recorder where the hours of sunshine are recorded as burn marks in a strip of special paper:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Campbell-Stokes_recorder.jpg
My city council (Haarlem, The Netherlands) replaced Windows with Linux on all of their PC's a few years ago and they never looked back. They are saving themselves a boatload of money every year too. Training of users? Yes, of course. But they now have more control over their machines and network and less maintenance.
They had a carefully worked out plan and didn't rush things. It paid off for them.
I agree with PZ Myers' stance on this issue:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/09/michael_reisss_big_mistake.php#more
Creationism does not belong in science class, but you have to explain what science is and does and why creationism has no basis in science.
Anything that blatantly goes against solid evidence is crap and should be exposed and dismissed as such.
An urban legend (unverified, '50s, '60s) from Amsterdam goes as follows:
Over the year the chemistry faculty lab of the University of Amsterdam used to collect the sodium left-overs from practice in a big jar with petroleum. At the end of a fourth semester two students were (as usual) dispatched with the jar and two long tweezers to the moat running along the lab building. Their job was to dump the sodium scraps into the water one at the time, and let nature reclaim the element.
At first this was fun of course, watching the sodium perform all kinds of different stunts on the water, depending on scrap size. But after some time the students started to realise that they were going to be there for the best part of the day, dumping sodium at the rate they were instructed to maintain. By that time the thrill was gone and they decided to turn over the jar and dump its contents into the moat in one go.
Allegedly a blast resulted that took out a few parked cars and a lot of chemistry lab windows. The story doesn't recount the students' fate......
I got this story from my brother-in-law, who studied chemistry at that faculty in the '60s, though it happened before his time.
"course and heading are two completely different things"
Good point (and no worries, I'm not a pilot ;-). He might still have been in his corridor though, but
> John Freas
"if said driver unexpectedly yanks the machine into a turn toward the other traffic, the convergence angles change and if the other target is suddenly predicted to enter the safe bubble that the TCAS intends to preserve, it will set off the alarm."
Very plausable, I vote for this explanation of events.
It would seem the two incidents just may not have been related. Making two turns (after which the plane should be on course again, and still in its corridor, if the pilot knew where he was) would not get you closer to the plane in front, assuming same direction and speed. The sudden climb is more likely the result of the aircraft proximity warning system advising the pilot to climb, because another plane was detected on a head-on collision course. The other plane would have had the same warning, but be advised to descend. We'll hear what really happened eventually, and two pilots will probably be flying chickens in Africa or something.....
> "the OS was ok, but nothing remarkable and not exactly solid."
I beg to differ. I managed a lab with 20-odd A3000's, running from an A3000 Unix server. After an initial three+ years of incremental upgrades (ethernet to utp, system upgrades and tweaks, single-user to multi-user FS) it ended up running for four more years, withstanding the daily battering in school without any significant maintenance, exept for the odd hard drive replacement. The last Amiga OS I used (v3.x something) was very solid. Power outages and uncountable rogue power resets by students never touched it, never required me to act upon. It was also very well-integrated with the last Amiga Unix. When the lab was dismanteled (to be replaced by Macs), it was in perfect working order.
As for remakable: That was why we installed it in the first place. It allowed us to teach graphics/animation/video. And we (legally) ran Mac OS on these machines too for DTP classes.
But now we have OSX and we're not looking back. However, sometimes I still daydream of the only things that did leave this world with the Amiga: the concepts of Draggable Multiple Screens and Multiple Simultaneous Resolutions. Still ahead of this time......
....of this kind of legislation is to stifle free speech. Attacking kiddy porn is just a straw man, set up to achieve that goal. Anyone protesting the use of the law beyond it's original alledged purpose can and will be accused of condoning or proliferating kiddy porn; nobody wants to be in such a position.
I hope the Fins, their constitution and its guardians are robust enough to see them through this......
News reports indicate that the lady made extensive eye contact with the gorilla, while also smiling. This may have been understood by the gorilla as threatning, thus leading to the attack.
I guess a lot of signs will go up in zoo's, warning the public for making eye contact with and smiling at apes.