bsy_at_play - Slashdot User

Submission + - The vortex gun - coming soon to a protest near you? (dvice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04, 2012 @03:22AM

An anonymous reader writes: From the article: Vortex technology has been used in everything from rocket-powered fire extinguishers to Nerf guns, but neither of those things are capable of giving the beat-down to hapless protesters. By giving spinning vortices an electric charge, though, pepper spray can be sent over 150 feet at between 60 and 90 mph.

A vortex gun uses a pressure wave and a carefully designed barrel to fire donut-shaped rings of air that can hold themselves together over long distances. The military (starting with the German military during World War II) has been running experiments with using vortex canons to knock things over, but it's not a particularly efficient or effective way to go. What the gas rings can be used for is transporting other gasses (like pepper spray or tear gas or pesticide) long distances with a decent amount of accuracy, holding their cargo inside the calm center spinning vortex

Comment The American (Score 1) 201

by bsy_at_play on Monday June 20, 2011 @01:57PM (#36503222) Attached to: Review: <em>Green Lantern</em>

If Hollywood is getting to the lesser-known superhero comics, I'd like to see The American made into a movie. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_(comics) It's darker and has more room for serious stuff. As well as fun....

Comment Re:Won't work on 64-bit Windows (Score 1) 332

by bsy_at_play on Thursday February 24, 2011 @05:37PM (#35305728) Attached to: Google x86 Native Browser Client Maybe Not So Crazy After All

32-bit browsers running on 64-bit windows can launch another 64-bit executable.

Comment Re:Won't work on 64-bit Windows (Score 2) 332

by bsy_at_play on Thursday February 24, 2011 @04:58PM (#35305098) Attached to: Google x86 Native Browser Client Maybe Not So Crazy After All

see http://nativeclient.googlecode.com/svn/data/site/NaCl_SFI.pdf for the sandboxing schemes for x86-64 and arm.

Comment forgotten Differential Power and Fault Analysis? (Score 1) 173

by bsy_at_play on Thursday March 04, 2010 @06:14PM (#31363622) Attached to: Researchers Find Way To Zap RSA Algorithm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_analysis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_fault_analysis

Comment Re:Sort of Hawking Radiation (Score 1) 165

by bsy_at_play on Wednesday June 10, 2009 @01:36PM (#28282183) Attached to: First Acoustic Black Hole Created

heisenberg: uncertainty in energy times uncertainty in time has a lower bound. what is the energy of the phonons? given the small time that heisenberg allows the virtual phonon pairs to exist, how far can the phonons travel? without actually working out the numbers, my seat of the pants guess is that the number of virtual phonon pairs for which one member crosses the acoustic event horizon will be vanishingly small.

Google's Struggle To Reach Authors — of Every Book Ever Written 153

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 04, 2009 @03:49PM from the paper-of-record dept.

eldavojohn writes "There's no lack of news surrounding the settlement of Google's controversial move to digitize books — but how do you even start this endeavor? A New York Times story reveals the obstacles they face just to get the word out that they want to settle with publishers and authors everywhere. They turned to a world-wide ad campaign to start the $125 million settlement process and they're spending $7 million to $8 million in paper print ads and telephone hot-lines (handling 80+ languages) to reach as many people as possible. From the article: 'We looked at how many books were published in various areas and we knew from the plaintiffs and Google that 30 percent were published in the US, 30 percent in industrialized countries. The rest of the world is the rest.' That's quite the herculean task! Hopefully Google's efforts in digitizing books will breathe new life and revenue into authors and publishers the world over."

Comment one line of python (kinda slow) (Score 1) 311

by bsy_at_play on Sunday December 07, 2008 @07:53AM (#26019279) Attached to: Solving the Knight's Tour Puzzle In 60 Lines of Python

$ time python -c "import sys; sys.stdout.write((lambda size, sizesq, allp, openclose: ((lambda mkbrd, brd, mv, av, d, finished: ((lambda h: h(h, mkbrd(), 0, 0, 0)) (lambda h, b, r, c, v: [ lambda: ([ lambda:'', lambda: ((lambda nb, nv: d([lambda:h(h, nb, r-2, c-1, nv), lambda:h(h, nb, r-1, c-2, nv), lambda:h(h, nb, r-2, c+1, nv), lambda:h(h, nb, r-1, c+2, nv), lambda:h(h, nb, r+1, c-2, nv), lambda:h(h, nb, r+2, c-1, nv), lambda:h(h, nb, r+1, c+2, nv), lambda:h(h, nb, r+2, c+1, nv)]) ) (mv(b,r,c,v), v+1))] [av(b,r,c)]()), lambda: brd(b)][finished(v,r,c)]()) )) (lambda: [-1] * sizesq, lambda b: '\n'.join((''.join('%4d' % v for v in b[i:i+size])) for i in range(0,sizesq,size)) + '\n\n', lambda b, r, c, v: b[:r*size+c] + [v] + b[r*size+c+1:], lambda b, r, c: int(r >=0 and r = 0 and c 0)]())), lambda fl: ''.join(f() for f in fl)][allp], [lambda v,r,c: int(v==sizesq), lambda v,r,c: int(v==sizesq and r==0 and c==0)][openclose] ))) (int(sys.argv[1]), int(sys.argv[1])*int(sys.argv[1]), int(sys.argv[2]), int(sys.argv[3])))" 6 0 1
0 7 4 13 2 29
5 12 1 30 23 14
8 35 6 3 28 31
11 18 9 24 15 22
34 25 20 17 32 27
19 10 33 26 21 16

real 0m43.784s
user 0m36.254s
sys 0m0.052s
$

arguments: the 6 is the size of the board, 0 means to print the first found rather than all, and the 1 means to look for a closed path rather than an open path.

Slashdot Top Deals