-- (Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant)
A few months ago a friend several states away wanted me to look at a web page. He couldn't remember the URL, but he remembered the search string. I typed it into Google, and got something completely different. So he went to his computer, typed in the same string... and got what he got the first time. Google "tunes" results according to cookies, your ISP, or your geographic location, as best as they can track. Which annoys the crap out of me, since over time I've become aware that it's *not* showing me pages it's showing to other people. Google also insists on returning results from the USA when I'm trying to search for stuff in Britain or Australia, even when I go the localized Google pages.
Between that and Google's insistent attempts to identify me to target ads, they're right on the edge of becoming another problem, not a solution.
Maybe one of the meta-engines like Dogpile is the answer.
> couldn't you just remove all your cookies at the end of each session?Google doesn't *just* use cookies, though those are probably the most useful to them. They also use your geographic area; if you're coming out of a .uk domain, you'll get different results than someone coming out of .au, for example. All the way down to IP addresses. My cable modem keeps the same IP for months at a time. Whenever it changes, I start getting weird replies from Google, no matter what I search for, all their "sponsored" links will point me to sites specializing in bestiality pr0n. Someone else on this local Comcast segment seems to do a lot of googling with very specialized search strings...
Remember, Google makes its money by selling *targeted* advertising. The closer they can target, the more they can charge.
Most of the more radical anti-spam proposals involve linking each email address with some specific IP or machine. Supposedly so spammers can be identified, to prevent anonymous hate mail, and sometimes they claim it's to enhance mail security or some kind of anti-stalking crap. But the reason Google always backs such proposals is that anything like that would make it trivially easy to cross your email address with your credit history and other personal information, to allow spammers and junk mailers to target you even *more* precisely.
Yesterday I jacked it up, pulled the passenger side front wheel off, unbolted the side of the engine and dropped it down, removed the air conditioner and alternator belts, and found I could easily spin the motor over with one hand on the lower pulley. Looks like it bent all the valves this time. First time it did that; second time I got lucky. Crapped out again. [sigh].
Her Geo is a '94, with the round-toothed belt. Mine is an '89 with the old flat-toothed belt. I've only had mine a year, but my old Capri had a flat belt, and it was probably 20 years old when I sold the car. I began to wonder if maybe the "improved" belts might not be such a great deal, so I decided to retrofit the early style belt. The pulleys are starting to look a bit worn now, though they were fine 18 months ago. The belt looks perfect, except for not being belt-shaped any more.
I air-hammered the bolt out of the end of the crank, then attempted to slide the lower sprocket off. It's supposed to be a slip fit. I wound up making a puller out of some 1/4 x 3 inch steel I had on hand. An hour later, alternately hammering and tightening, I got the freakin' sprocket off. Yeah, welcome to DaveWorld, where nothing can go wrong, go wrong, go wrong...
Ran out of daylight by then, so I packed it up and called it a day. Building engines is fine, but I really don't care much for the "auto mechanic" thing.
-- (Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant)
> I waste a *lot* of time stopping what i'm doing and changing > channels so i don't have to be assaulted by 5min of > commercials for every two songs I hear, besides the fact > that half the music I don't want to hear either.Nearly ten years ago, I realized I could listen to the radio for *more than one hour* without hearing any music - just endless repeated commercials and tag-team barking-head "deejays" reading material they got from some subscription service somewhere. Plus, the commercials were powermiked up so hard the speakers would rattle, and they used sirens, pager sounds, phone rings, and my personal favorite, air hammers with EVERY COMMERCIAL.
Every now and then in one of the vans at work, I'd turn the radio on and see if I could get anything. No, surfing the entire FM range, nothing but all commercials, all the time, until I have up.
> I'd consider a Navigator but Cadillac would have to pay me a > whole lot of money to even be seen *near* an Escalade.It's a freaking Chevy Suburban with a Cadillac badge. The Suburban, in turn, is a panel truck with windows.
I guess I have too much aluminum foil in my hat to be properly programmed by the thought control rays; if I had an Escalade, I'd probably drop the tailgate and heave some cinderblocks and yard mulch in there. The Cadillac badge doesn't make it not-a-truck, no matter how bling-bling the wheels are.
> Actually, it's a Tahoe with a Cadillac badgeThe Tahoe is just a short Suburban. I imagine the nearly-imperceptible differences between them are of great importance to the Chevy people, but they all started out as GMC panel trucks, mostly used for ambulances, hearses, and flower delivery. Vans replaced them for those roles in the mid '60s, so they added windows and marketed them as heavy duty station wagons. Now vans have gone away, for the most part. Amazing...
> Maybe I can help a little. Chemically, propylene glycol
> ('environmentally safe antifreeze') is very similar to good
> old ethylene glycol
Some years ago when the propylene glycol antifreeze fad was high, I
bought a case of "Sierra" brand antifreeze. A few months later I opened
the shed to get a few jugs out after changing a radiator, and found a
nasty mess on the shelf and floor. Apparently Sierra was so
environmentally correct they used biodegradable plastic to store the
stuff in; every jug was empty, and the plastic was just shreds. I
bought some ordinary Prestone ethylene glycol and used that.
A few months ago I was buying more antifreeze and cast an eye out for propylene glycol. I found a bunch of "pre-mixed" antifreeze (I thought it was a joke at first...), but there was no propylene glycol of any brand in the display. I've since noticed none of the other parts stores or department stores carry any now. For my local area, propylene glycol no longer exists.
A pity, since it had a higher boiling point than ethylene glycol, which would have helped with a cooling problem I was having with the RX7 at the time.
> Anyone have ideas about how we could get access to such data? One crude > but direct way would be to go to a Hertz lot and say, "I'd like to buy > that Toyota over there; could I look at the service record?"Hertz would be a bad choice. Some years ago I rented a car from Hertz to drive from Denver to Little Rock. The jitney dropped me off in the lot by the car they had given me. I did a quick check on it, and it had one tire so low it was almost on the rim, the other three were visibly low, and there was no oil on the dipstick. I hiked back to the guard shack and told them about it, and they said, "Don't worry about, if there's a problem just call and we'll send a wrecker out with another car." Since there's a lot of not much in the midwest, and these were the days before cellular phones, I went through *hours* of paperwork to swap to another car... which turned out to have all four tires low, but with enough air to get to a gas station, and there was oil on the very bottom of the dipstick. I added oil, transmission fluid, coolant, and air, and the car did fine, no thanks to Hertz, I'm sure.
Service records? Surely you jest.
I would never voluntarily rent anything from those bozos again.
> Perhaps the truck craze is over... And I doubt if I will ever > buy another new car again anyway.Most people I know don't drive trucks because they want to be trendy. Most of them don't use them to haul anything, either. What I keep seeing are people who despise the current car offerings so much they simply opted out. Nobody wants a Fuckus, and if you're going to buy something Lincoln-sized, why not get something you don't have to crawl into, has a comfortable upright seating position, and good visibility?
Everything comes with every power convenience anyway.
> What magazines are you guys reading these days? I still miss > the old Super Ford. Are there any e-magazines? I prefer > something that is on topic - no chicks, no tobacco adds, no > juvenile content etc.I let all my subscriptions lapse some years ago. The content seemed to all become "how to bolt on chrome valve covers" or vendor press releases sloppily reworked into "feature articles." Plus the magazines got very thin, prices doubled or more, and Peterson/eMAP (which printed almost everything) fell in love with printing text over pictures, which resulted in a good percentage of any given article being blank to me, since I'm color blind.
> One magazine I do enjoy, but isn't Ford specific, is Grassroots Motorsports.Content in that one is *really* thin. For some reason, it always felt like that SCCA club magazine.
Of course, outside of DaveWorld, maybe most people don't care about making their own engine adapter plate, or welding up their own suspension and chassis bits, or plotting suspension geometry from scratch... slightly out-of-focus pictures of someone's car and lists of all the parts it has, as long as they're from vendors who advertise in that issue, yes, that's the ticket...
> Watch your asses. The "ticket by mail" has begun in the greater Austin area:The first photo-radar system was called ORBIS, and was first rolled out in Texas in the 1960s. It didn't last long; Texans retaliated by smearing feces on the lenses or simply shooting up the vans that the systems were installed in. Bulkky vacuum tube stuff back then.
Nowadays, then the camera can me smaller than a matchbox and stick almost anywhere, they'd be a lot harder to find... except most systems still use the big shoebox cameras. Nobody pays any attention to those any more.
What I object to is, the owner of the property - the car - gets the ticket, not necessarily the person who was driving. That deeply offends my sense of justice.
Also, most photo-radar systems are leased to local PDs strictly for "revenue enhancement." The usual leasing terms are 50% of fines collected.
> So much for the Constitutional right to confront one's accuser and > to call witnesses in one's defense.Oh, but photo-tickets are a *civil* case, not a "criminal" case. The whole structure of the law is different there; you just got an E-ticket ride straight down the rabbit hole. Not that it matters in the least to *you*, since you'll be fined or imprisoned identically either way.
> > I've never understood the distaste for assassination. Which is worse - > > sending agents in to kill a handful of men who we know to be evil, or > > sending in an army to kill that handful of men plus one hundred thousand > > who had nothing to do with anything?There were some Congressmen calling for the assassination of Adolf Hitler in WWII. That lasted precisely as long as it took to explain to them that it would be a tit for tat game where they *personally* would be the targets. Half a dozen Nazis ruled Germany, but there was all of Congress, the Senate, the President and VP and the Cabinet, the Secretaries of this and Directors of that, forty-odd state governors... close to a thousand people who'd have to have 24/7 protection. Nowadays it would be a status symbol; in 1942, it was unthinkable. [1]
Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated anyway. After the Gestapo got done
with their retribution on the local population, there were Combined
Operations officers shitting their shorts at the thought that somewhere,
somehow, the Nazis might find out the assassins had been trained by the
Allies.
[1] Harry Truman, in one of his several biographies, mentioned that he
was "bothered" by people who wanted to talk to him or shake his hand
when he went to the bank or about his errands, or was walking to the
White House from Blair House, where he and his wife were staying while
the White House was being remodeled. The President of the United
States, walking all by himself down Pennsylvania Avenue, no Secret
Service, no Marines, not even a flock of staff members. It was a
different world then.
Before you get into an asskicking contest, you need to see if you can
protect your own ass. Except at the very top, we can't. Or rather,
it's not politically expedient.
> > My favorite part is the 30 seconds of minigun fire, followed by the shooter > > saying,"That's it. I'm done. I'm going home."I could see that. 30 seconds is 2500 rounds, and I haven't seen any of the cheap mil-surp stuff at $2 per round in a long time - it's $3 to $4 for cheap imported stuff.
Crack cocaine is a lot cheaper and lasts longer. Probably doesn't have the rush, though.
Up close and personal, a Minigun doesn't even sound like a firearm. It sounds like God's Own Outboard Motor on nitromethane.
"GE Brings Good Things To Life!"
> > [top metal bands of the 20th century] > > Sabbath won 1st place with Iron Man. > > Kiss - Detroit Rock City > > Iron Maiden - Run to the HillsOddly, disc #2 in the changer in the shop has all three of those...
I wouldn't rate any of them as "metal." You can plainly hear the words in every one, instead of the Marlboro-gargling-howling noise of "metal."
Hell, I know one guy who had bought a couple of metal albums from some group whose name I forget, had them for months before he found out they were "singing" in Portuguese...
>> As one who read it it is first set in India and secondly presents Sambo >> as an individual who preserves his own life and outwits the villains >> (Tigers) in the end. I have never seen how it could be viewed as >> offensive.Jeez, you don't need a *reason* to be offended...
I read a whole web site whose author raved about how Charlie Chan movies were "racial stereotyping" and "denigrating to Chinese." I kept looking for the punch line, but there wasn't one. The author apparently believed it.
Charlie Chan was a senior investigator for Honolulu PD, independently wealthy, and such a hot-shot that he got called in as a consultant all over the world. That's "denigrating" in politically-correct 21st Century Amerika...
Racing motorcycles sometimes use odd firing intervals to improve traction.
This goes back to the early 1970s, when sidevalve Harleys ruled the dirt tracks. Racers built new Honda fours and Kawasaki triples with two or three times the power of the Harleys, but they were never able to put the power down to the track effectively.
That caused some brief interest at the time, then got mostly forgotten. Then the road racers ratcheted the power up past 150hp, and traction was a problem again, even with six inch wide slicks. 90 degree V twins were beating inline fours with more power on the twistier tracks. As power continued to climb, every corner became a holeshot, and the traction difference became even more noticeable.
It was known that tires generate their maximum traction at a small degree of slip, which was thoroughly understood from ABS brake development. The theory was that the more widely spaced firing intervals of the two cylinder engines cycled back and forth across this maximum traction point, while the more-powerful fours simply blew the tire into smoke. The theory has been developed quite a bit more since then, figuring the springiness of the tire carcass, etc.
Anyway, this has led to the engine people experimenting with odd firing spacing, trying to get more power to the ground, particularly where electronic traction control is prohibited. Since tires are under constant development, the perfect power pulse arrangement is a moving target.
For a street bike, not bound by racing rules, it's simpler to just program traction control into the engine management system.
In the motorcycle world, firing interval bench racing occupies the same niche as conrod length for automotive engines...
One thing drove me nuts, though. All the way through the series, they'd point their guns at whoever they were talking to, from alien baddies to their superior officers.
For all I know that's acceptable nowadays, but I grew up with "never point a gun at something you don't intend to shoot."
As a general comment, nowadays I'm seeing a lot of movie rifles carried muzzle-down (sometimes to the point of vertical) when police or military are preparing to engage opponents. I'd bet this is some kind of "tactical" thing. Yes, what goes up does come down, and an accidental discharge into the air *might* hurt someone. An AD onto concrete or a paved road has a much higher chance of a problem. Assuming you don't shoot yourself or a squadmate in the foot, a ricochet zinging off through the squad, or in the case of police, civilians, is going to cause a lot more trouble than taking out a light fixture or a dent on someone's car from a falling bullet.
Then again, I never saw the point of holding a gun over my head and turning it sideways to shoot it, either. Could be I'm just out of touch with modern gun handling techniques.
> > Indiana slide rule that I carried in High School, my Pickett & Eckel > > Inc. Chicago Illinois slide rule that my Dad bought me my last yearI always wanted to make a little wooden box with a glass front and a brass hammer. Put my old slide rule inside, and a sign that says, "IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS".
-- (Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant)
> > communication. Marconi was ignorant and stubborn. He used > > trial-and-error experimentation to improve his equipment and > > demonstrate that radio was not limited to line-of-sight, and it > > could even propagate beyond the horizon! Scientific understanding > > came well after practical application...That happens often enough. "Why" can be much more difficult than "how". The Romans discovered concrete around 400BC, but it was 2300 years later before anyone had any idea why it turned hard when it got wet.
The old radios with the coherers were some weird stuff, though.
Rimmed revolver brass is thin since it's fully supported by the cylinder and frame of the gun; the thickened rim prevents expansion at the gap.
Pressure for the .38 is about the same as for a .410 shotshell.
Shotshells in general are probably way stronger than they need to be since they have to cycle through autoloaders, and there's still considerable pressure when they're extracted. I've seen .45 and .380 brass with blowouts on the sides where they were loaded hot; when the unsupported sides cleared the breech, they split.
I'd guess you could probably load .357 in plastic without failure.
Commercial ammo still stays with brass, aluminum, and steel. No idea if it's marketing or some real reason, but I'd expect plastic cases to be useable for lower-pressure, large bore cartridges.
Might be difficult to crimp a plastic case, but you could mold an annular ring inside the mouth, and rely on stretch for the case to slide up to the cannelure.
> > The damage to the city was pretty extensive, but in a city of mostly wooden > > shacks it is difficult to accurately determine how much of that was blast > > damage and how much was fire damage. I hope this never needs to be done again.On the contrary, it's very easy to pick out the primary blast damage from the aerial photos. The main problem was that neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki had any effective fire control or emergency services as we'd identify them today. Neither had been subjected to more than nuisance bombing, so they'd never bothered.
Most of the city was wood or paper; the flash lit the place up like a torch. But simple flight of bombers with conventional incinidiaries would have done almost exactly the same thing.
The propaganda attack against the nukes was probably the most effective thing Beria's people ever accomplished; probably more important than his management of the Soviet nuclear effort. When you strip aside the propaganda, the picture changes. The true reason even military people were chary of the nukes was because they were cheap. Yes, the Manhattan Engineer District cost a significant fraction of the entire US war effort, but after Trinity, it was all downhill - the extraction and fabrication facilities and basic research were all paid for, just keep turning the crank and out dropped shiny new fission devices, easily dropped by single aircraft. No more "aluminum overcast" of expensive aircraft were needed any more, nor their crews and the entire support structure that kept them flying. And the more nukes we made, the cheaper they got as we amortized our costs; one hell of a bargain if you think about it.
The neutron bombs were cool too, but against a highly industrialized opponent, you don't even have to fry anyone any more. Just do an air burst and let the magnetic pulse wipe out their entire communications infrastructure and their smart weapons. Not nearly as much military stuff is shielded as you would think.
- Terry Pratchett
> > Perhaps this would be true IF the bleeping manufacturers would provide a > > venue for registering feedback?!They don't want *your* feedback. They pay serious money to marketing analysts to tell them what you think.
These are the same people whose surveys said people loved the styling of the Pontiac Aztek.
> > Of course Americans don't need speed limits because they are so > > intelligent that they can individually decide for themselves what is a > > safe speed to drive at.That, and we're all illiterate anyway, so we can't read the road signs. So we just drive as fast as we want all the time, occasionally being stopped for a chat by the nice men in the black uniforms...
> > This intelligence is self evident. When they are free to choose what > > sort of vehicle to buy to drive in the city they prefer a 4WD off road > > vehicle weighing more than two tons.Drive in any largeish American city, and you'd run down to the car lot looking for something big enough that you need a step hanging under the cab just to get in.
Streets in many urban areas look like Berlin in 1945. Signal lights and signage are random, often poorly placed, and sometimes simply incorrect. Driver training is practically nonexistent, and written tests now concentrate almost entirely on memorizing the penalties for DWI and drugs. (I let my motorcycle endorsement lapse once, and had to re-test. I failed the exam, which consisted *entirely* of alcohol and drug related questions, with no "rules of the road" questions of any kind!) Vehicles are either heavily insured, in which case the drivers would welcome a wreck just to get a new car, or uninsured, in which case the drivers are looking for a nice car to hit so they can file a personal injury lawsuit. People regularly park by slamming their bumpers into the cars ahead and behind of them, and most of them think nothing about putting a nice dent in your car with their door. When in motion, they're either drunk, stoned, talking on their cellular phone, watching their on-dash DVD player, playing with the radio, drinking or eating, changing diapers, digging through stuff on the floor, or some combination of the above.
But, hey, it's home...
>> Thrust: 200lbs > 2. thrust is a force - should it be quoted in Newtons (or lbf)?lbf is absolutely clear in context.
At least pounds-force is a meaningful unit. I had the old kgs/cgs metric system in school, with kg/m and the like.
The new ISO metric has Newtons, Phils, Bobs, Stanleys, Alberts, and other mysterious units which, frankly, are silly.
YF is a *humorous* movie, but not a *funny* movie; not in the Mel Brooks tradition, anyway. It had its amusing elements, but it was a better sequel to the original than most of the real sequels.
The movie used the laboratory set from the original movie, which was done by Nikola Tesla. Unfortunately, they didn't use *all* of the original set, and they only powered up a few pieces of equipment. Maybe the insulation had deteriorated over 3/4 of a century. Still nifty to see the stuff, though.
Verdict: holds up well, worth seeing.
"Where wolf? *There* wolf!"
> > They must be outsourcing their support to some third party...Just remember... usually, the only time your customer has a personal contact with a company if if he calls support. Particularly if they bought a shrinkwrap product. He doesn't see the fancy new building, well-groomed sales force, or the trophy secretaries. The 'face' of your company is some pissant with "Asshole" cranked up to "11."
Support costs money. Support sucks. But poor support will lose you customers faster than anything else, and it'll lose them forever. I still boycott companies due to poor support contacts in the past. (and obnoxious advertising, but that's a different rant) I have a little list, I do, I do...
Some of my favorites: Adaptec, SCO, and whatever the name of that company that sells DesignCAD is.