Posts by KaD

It's going to get hot...

Oh wow... Knowing how litigation happy the U.S. is these school administrators are going to burn for this one if it ever reaches trial. The prosecution may not even want to offer them a deal on this as it is one of those cases they can prove a point about and looks great on a resume.

Raise the shields!

The original Enterprise had navigational shields just for such things as hitting pieces of debris while traveling at high speeds. Also the navigational deflector in the front of the lower part of the ship was designed to move nasty things like matter out of the way before the ship passed through that space.

Kirk 1 : Scientist 0

Sounds familiar

Myself and some other guys were tasked with modernizing and upgrading a point-of-sales system for a company. No sooner than we had it all worked out than they let the lot of us go all at once. Of course no one else had been trained to maintain the systems and even the documentation was not done yet. I still hear from people I know who work there that they never figured out how/why things worked they way they do to this day.... Sounds like they had to spend a lot of money again to replace the one we made since they can't maintain it...

<smirk>

Encryption time

There we go. Just turned Vuze to use and allow only RC4-160 bit encrypted connections, and my speed is better to boot by about 25%. Welcome to the war Virgin, you are going to spend a lot of money to find out you can't read anything. Governments just hate it when they can't read your traffic. Soon enough all Internet apps will be using encryption and I think it is a good thing.

Now I Understand...

I knew P2P systems were good, now I know why they are great! I think we could use more of these "leaks". Help keep the governments honest.

Score: P2P 1 - U.S. Gov 0

Radiation Hazard?

These machines are backscatter x-ray unit. They work on a very different principal than "typical" x-ray systems that look at bones or scan your carry-on bags at airports. Backscatter devices rely on the principal that different materials "scatter" x-ray photons in a uniquely identifiable way depending on what atoms are in their makeup. The less protons an atom has, the more it scatters x-ray energy. A computer can read the scattered x-ray photons and show on a screen where there is a difference in the chemical makeup of the person being scanned. So that's how it shows that someone has a block of explosives or drugs taped to their thigh.

If you are worried about radiation, a person can receive up to 25 millirem (mrem) of ionizing radiation per year from a single source at maximum ( according to the U.S. Gov ). A backscatter X-ray delivers about 0.005 mrem of radiation. So if you were scanned about 200 times a year you would be exposed to what would be considered a negligible dose of 1 mrem. You could have cause for concern if you were scanned 100 times per week for a year.

FYI, 1 mrem of radiation is about the same as you get from living on the surface of our planet in about 2-3 days or flying in an aircraft for about 3 hours.

Human Right?

I agree the Internet is very useful, but I don't know about it being a right. Hey, does that mean if the record or movie industry had your Internet access terminated they could be sued for breaching your rights? Humm... I am liking this more and more.

When not to call IT

I was on the IT help desk for a company that sold farming and agriculture related items and products. They also had some gasoline stations for farmers to buy bulk fuel from and the like.

Anyway it is late in the evening when a manager from a gasoline location calls and starts screaming at me that the fuel pumps are on fire and burning gasoline is everywhere. He wanted me to tell him what buttons to press on the new point-of-sale system to stop the fire. I had to tell him five or six times in very a very stern tone to hang up the phone and dial 911 ( emergency services in North America ) immediately. I got in trouble for that because the guy later called the boss and said I was very rude to him on the phone when he needed help.... <sigh>

The same boss from the above call asked me to come in to his office a few weeks later. Needed me to install a sound card in his system so he could watch and listen to porn videos he would download from the net.

Some days it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.

I couldn't say it better myself...

The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

I almost hit a texting-tard

He was listing to his iPod while texting and walking down the street. Walked directly in front of my car when I was in the middle of my green light doing 50kmph. Only by liberal use of my brakes, swerving and application of my horn did the retard manage to survive without a scratch. Should have seen his eyes when he looked up and the only thing between me and him was my drivers side window. Maybe texting is just the next big way to sort the terminally stupid from the genepool.

Re: What about stopping?

I believe some of the previous probes have used atmospheric braking once they reached the target. They orbit in an elliptical path grazing the atmosphere each time and slowing down till they reach the desired speed and altitude which moves in to a nice circular orbit. Not much need for huge thrusters to slow down using that method.