Yep, my parent's house had some good old balanced pair (not twisted) phone lines that were probably installed before the house even had electricity. The main phone box consisted of two copper buss bars with bolts you could tighten onto wires. It handled dialup just fine for many years.

If you do a search for "Texas police tank" you'll see that some police department does have a small armored vehicle. I suppose it might technically qualify as a tank but it has road tires and no gun on top. From what I've heard, they didn't use it much and eventually stopped driving it due to fuel costs. I don't have a source on that, is was some random guy on the Internet ;)

And it turns out that it's much cheaper to buy bullets by the ton. I certainly hope our tax money doesn't go into buying bullets at Walmart prices.

Utility knife for opening boxes and stuff.

A cheapo multimeter. You're working with electronics, having one of these is a requirement even though many people in IT try to get by without them.

Perhaps a soldering iron and solder sucker. Hopefully you'll never need them but weird shit happens.

A set of precision screwdrivers is sometimes needed for taking stuff apart, and can be pushed into extra duty as pin extractors or whatever else.

A dedicated Ethernet tester can be pretty handy too. And get a crimper for these if you don't have one already.

BTW, "geek" isn't an insult anymore...

I think even my TI-83's rand() function beats free will.

I had the same printer. We only got rid of it once all of the plastic paper guides had broken off the front, around 10 years after we bought it. I've never seen an inkjet live up to its reliability, and the price of the ink was amazing.

They did print the uprights with Titanium EBM, but the article neglected to mention it.

It looks like they have a few specs on their website: http://www.formulagroupt.be/pages/car

It doesn't mention their cooling system, but often these motors are oil or water cooled and have a radiator.

It's because Formula Student courses are extremely tight and curvy. A shorter wheelbase gives you a smaller rotational inertia, which means you can enter and exit corners faster. This comes at the expense of high speed stability, and indeed most FSAE/FSC cars get quite unstable above 90mph.

On top of that, a shorter car is a lighter car, and every gram counts on a race car.

2. Consider just trying the trees together with symlinks (Use "find" to recurse, then ln -s"). Unless you have many tens of thousands of small files, this will work remarkably well, especially if the disk that holds the symlinks is fast and has a sensible filesystem; you could even make it a ramdisk.

This seems like the most reasonable solution to me. I think people are getting caught up treating this like a high availability fileserver when it's really just a data acquisition project. Configure the disks to automatically mount, and then use a really simple condition to figure out which mounted disks have data on them (for example, the existence of a directory, or even just the size of the disk). Use a shell script to test this condition and then make symlinks for all of the data files.

I don't know exactly what kind of equipment OP is working with, but some DAQ systems let you choose what size of files to divide the output into. Try choosing the largest reasonable file size to reduce the number of symlinks.

If you really think duplicate file names are unlikely then simply don't worry about them. I would at least have the script make some sort of log so you can figure out WTF happened if you find yourself missing some data. Don't worry about security -- this is a scientific project to it's safe to assume that the root password and IP address are written in sharpie on the server anyway, probably within eyesight of a window that faces a busy street. Don't listen to the people suggesting wireless telemetry instead of sneakernet, you have at least an order of magnitude more data than would make sense for such a system.

Microwave transmitters aren't exactly super efficient either.

Haha, that reminds me of my old school district. They blocked just about everything interesting on the Internet, *except* for Slashdot. I always assumed that the guy who controlled the blacklist was also a slashdotter. One year they experimented with giving the secretaries the power to remotely monitor computers and add sites to the district wide blocklist. I got caught browsing Slashdot and immediately unplugged the computer so that my session would disappear from the monitoring software. . . By the time I was logged back in, whoever was in charge had unblocked Slashdot :D

X11 used to do the exact same thing, it would normally show a black screen for several seconds when you stared it but it was actually showing whatever was sitting in the display buffer. I could turn off my computer for up to several seconds and still make out my background image when X restarted. That was an ancient computer too, with a power switch that actually cut all power.

They can go use it whenever they want, and such parks are large enough that thousands of people can partake in all sorts of sports or other activities at the same time, from barbecuing, to playing catch, to even playing golf, without interfering with one another.

In typical American parks you can expect to be harassed by the police for such things as being there at the wrong time of day, walking your dog in the wrong area, parking during the wrong hours, or straight up arrested for bringing a beer to your barbecue. Not to mention the random extended closures, or the super weird people who make up their own park rules and go to crazy lengths to try to enforce them.

I'm not saying that I don't enjoy our parks because I do, but they are not a perfect replacement for having your own space.

While it is possible to patch small amounts of damage to carbon fiber, it's more complicated than fixing fiberglass and if you do it wrong, you'll have an extremely dangerous car on your hands. You really wouldn't want to trust your average crappy auto body repair place to do that safely and effectively, you would need someone with a degree in materials science. However, composites and aerospace companies are working on this all the time. In the future we will probably see more robust techniques for these sorts of repairs.