harywilke

the early history of flight is full of interesting people. Otto Lilienthal[1], "the Glider King", built his own mountain complete with a workshop in the top, to practice on. Octave Chanute[2], the grandfather of flight, was a mentor to the wright brothers and many other earlier aviators. He set up the International Conference on Aerial Navigation[3] at the World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago one of the first ever international conferences on flight. i think this bit from a page on the Cicero Flying Field[4] does a nice job of displaying the mentoring attitude of Chanute.

" Chanute had faith that the scientific method hitched to engineering discipline might well allow humans to fly through the air. He wrote a series of 27 articles under the title Progress in Flying Machines, which recapped the history of aviation, and which were published in The Railroad and Engineering Journal, beginning with the October 1891 issue. Chanute stated that he had a three-fold purpose in writing those articles:

“1. To satisfy himself whether, with our present mechanical knowledge and appliances, more particularly the light motors recently developed, men might reasonably hope eventually to fly through the air.” Chanute wrote that he “now thinks that this question can be answered in the affirmative”

“2. To save the waste of effort on the part of experimenters, involved in trying again devices which have already failed.” - and to point out the reasons for such failures

“3. To furnish an account of those recent achievements which render it less chimerical than it was a few years ago to experiment with a flying machine...” - and to suggest how a promising design might be distinguished from a poor design "

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octave_Chanute 3. https://archive.org/details/cu31924004359596 4. http://www.lincolnbeachey.com/cicart.html

edit: left off cicero flying field attribute

Any port you use daily where you have a 50% chance of plugging it in upside-down is a pain in the ass and broken by design.

right click on the title of a finder window.

there are also the people who are innocent, but plead guilty because it is the less worse option. [1] 1. http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

undivided attention? being in the courtroom doesn't make you any less distracted or harried. the lawyers are handling multiple cases at the same time. the judge is probably doing crosswords up on the bench. some of the jurors are probably thinking about where to eat for lunch, others decided the case soon as they saw the defendant walk in the courtroom wearing jailhouse orange. and That's just for the 10% of cases that actually make it to trial.

i love the fact that the first century BCE Tironian et still shows up in irish gaelic signs today. [1] the shady characters blog has a great write up on Cicero and his scribe Tiro [2]

[1] http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-... [2] http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-...

i'm surprised how many people do not use accountants to prepare their taxes. i tried turbotax or one of it's ilk my first year out of college. it showed me owing 7k. after freaking out i got in contact w/ my brothers accountant. i ended up getting a refund of 700. it's not my job to know the ins and outs of the tax code or to keep up on what has changed since last years filings. hire an expert.

thank you for that. I've seen the MIT guide bouncing around the internet since forever, but never fully digested. the narrators comments are helpful to understand just what he is doing and what the locks are made like. i recommend any of the 'Gutted' versions.

It's like looking through Winston Smith's commits.

i wonder about his statement that not a thing in the sky would survive at hit. from the video of it punching through the reinforced concrete walls, it seem that there is very little damage to the wall besides the obvious hole. sort of like the shaolin monk throwing a needle through glass. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW_97D0hLBc but i'd guess this is more a question of what kind of target they are shooting at. they present incoming missiles (small and mobile) and something over 100 miles away (big and stationary?).

they do. they bones control the cage mesh. before to maintain volume of your character mesh, you would bind latices to the bones to control your character mesh. but that wasn't a very elegant solution as latices are box shaped and your mesh is arbitrarily shaped. also latices have a bunch of interior points that need to be dealt with. so people used multiple latices, one for each limb, one for head, etc. then you had to make sure the latices overlapped nicely and played nice with each other. this new method uses an over sized low res version of your mesh. much simpler. it also accounts for things that are a pain when binding your mesh like finger joints. where your middle finger bone might affect some of your pointer finger mesh.

the video from the paper explains it pretty well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egf4m6zVHUI

so let's ditch the human.

With a higher unemployement rate than the US had at the peak of the Great Depression, I'd question your version of "a lot".

i remember being on a jury in a case that involved child abduction, the police did not record the interviews they conducted with the child after it had been rescued. i talked to the prosecutor afterwards about it and they said it's to easy over analyze every word said and twist it to appear as something else. to easy for a defence to say they were leading the witness and therefore the recording should be thrown out. remember there was video of the Rodney King beating. the defendants slowed it down and pointed out on each frame actions that King supposedly did that were threatening to the officers beating him.

recording everything is not a panacea. not having everything recorded a sign of nefarious actions.

"But US copyright primarily extends from US laws, which are hard to break if you're in a foreign jurisdiction."

well. sometimes the US has strange notions of 'foreign jurisdiction'. for example if a US citizen were to order a drink at a bar overseas and that drink happens to contain rum from cuba. you've just violated US law. that will be $250,000 and 10 years in prison. [1]

see this bit from treasury.gov:

"Transactions Involving Cuban-Origin Goods in Third Countries

The question is often asked whether United States citizens or permanent resident aliens of the United States may legally purchase Cuban origin goods, including tobacco and alcohol products, in a third country for personal use outside the United States. The answer is no. The Regulations prohibit persons subject to the jurisdiction of the United States from purchasing, transporting, importing, or otherwise dealing in or engaging in any transactions with respect to any merchandise outside the United States if such merchandise (1) is of Cuban origin; or (2) is or has been located in or transported from or through Cuba; or (3) is made or derived in whole or in part of any article which is the growth, produce or manufacture of Cuba. Thus, in the case of cigars, the prohibition extends to cigars manufactured in Cuba and sold in a third country and to cigars manufactured in a third country from tobacco grown in Cuba."

[1] http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Documents/...

I grew up in NW Indiana. We are were in the same Chicago's timezone which makes sense, but 20 miles to the south or east of us was on what we affectionately called "Farmer Fuck Up Time". they didn't change for DST. it sucked. hard. I remember calling ahead to ask what time it was when traveling to away games in high school.

Actually Indiana can be used as a test case of how to mess around w/ DST or not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana

DVD's and pretty much all optical media are terrible for backup. they degrade just siting on the shelf. and one scratch and 'poof' goes your data. I'm surprised as a medium that they have lasted this long. [1]"Manufacturers claim that CD-R and DVD-R discs have a shelf life of 5 to 10 years before recording," note that is "before recording" [1] http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub121/sec4.html

Reminds me of this excellent short story on the kill Hitler time travel theme told through wiki edits.

http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/08/wikihistory

John K's blog [1] is full of great insight on drawing and cartoons. Especially the early posts. This is the John K who gave us Ren and Stimpy 1. http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com

He wasn't on the Macintosh team.

The Bulls teams of the 90's used the full court press to destroy teams in the third quarter. I agree that it would cause too much wear and tear to run it all the time.

As a US citizen the answer is always 'yes' even if you lived on the moon.

With current reelection rates over 80% in congress for the last fifty years [1], one wonders if they have any need to represent their districts at all. http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/reelect.php

Reminds me of The Wire episode "The Pager" (Season 1, Episode 5) where the dealers were using a code to send numbers to pagers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQBlq45c1T4 (clip shows the reveal of how the code works)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24448063 bbc reporting on it now. "BBC Worldwide is expected to confirm the find at a press conference in London later this week."

This is gobsmackingly awful. Their 'relax we won't let people use this to hijack accounts on other services solution is to check incoming email for a new header. a new header that yahoo invented.[1] good luck getting every web based sign up site with email password reset to update their email service.

1. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/yahoo-email/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_fastener not rivets. just pretty generic fasteners.

The 5th and the 14th amendment cover all people, not just citizens. Here is an informative read on how and why and the history of the question of non-citizen rights. http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar... Found this after a discussion of the rights of Boston Marathon suspects as non-citizens. Pretty much they have every right of a non-citizen, except the right to vote.

I wonder how long till apple makes something similar to google's mapmaker. watch map edits in real time for a while and you'll see the power of local people for fixing a lot of map issues. http://www.google.com/mapmaker/pulse

Odd summation. The Etymology and definition section of the same wikipedia article leans towards the non-practicing entity notion of a patent troll.

Just being a jerk with a patent dosen't make you a patent troll.