Growing up my dad bought us a dog he named Kitty, a cat named Puppy, and a parrot named Jeff. He taught Jeff how to say Puppy and Kitty's names, which would cause Kitty to freak out and bark constantly. Dad found it hilarious. What are some things your parents did that convinced you they were crazy?

Merrick_T_Thundergun · 2012-05-25T04:57:51.913019+00:00

When I was little, I was at a park, and there was this lake in the middle. Of course full of Canadian Geese. I wasn't trying to play with them, or do anything to them, but where I wanted to play was to close and a group of them attacked us. My dad, like a Ninja, grabbed on the of the long necked attackers, and gave it a sharp twist, breaking the neck and killing the goose instantly. For the rest of that day in the park I walked with what felt like a force field around me as the geese would stay away in fear.

I think that was the first night we had goose for dinner. Years latter my dad and I got into goose hunting pretty serious, not sure if this event from my youth was part of it or not...

Aggrajag · 2012-05-25T03:04:23.717405+00:00

There is no they with anonymous. It just doesn't work that way.

numeroprimo · 1 day

The particular story was filmed and can be watched here. The crash was clearly from hitting cables on a crane. It is commonly claimed that the helicopter flew into a cloud of radiation which caused the pilot to blackout which lead to hitting the cables. No one survived so if radiation was a factor or not is really unknown, but I'm sure this is the story WhitePantherXP is referring to. I think the reason a radiation caused blackout is commonly used in this case is that the helicopter crew was military and supposedly very experienced.

Further, Really high doses can have nearly immediate affects, and considering this was directly above the Chernobyl reactor its safe to say the pilot could have easily gotten a really high dose. It may not have been a blackout, but it could have been seizures, vomiting, diarrhea, which can all occur within minutes of exposure.

phileconomicus · 2 days

You messed one of the impotant points.

Facebook and Google both have those. Facebook is the social media platform just like Google is the search platform. Facebook may screw up and lose a bunch of their younger userbase someday, but it will take a decade of mismanagement to really destroy their core customerbase. They're safe.

The users are not the core customer base, the advertisers are. And if as this article claims the value of advertising online drops really low, they are going to have a hard time increasing or maintaining revenue. This in turn will affect the relevancy of the site, and the stock price.

saMAN101 · 2 days

If the computer have it you want to focus on Civil 3D.

mburke1124 · 3 days

Does facebook have a driverless car?

Dananddog · 3 days

Yandex is Russian, and pretty popular in eastern Europe.

Dananddog · 4 days

Yandex is actually not half bad, some of the time...

To try and prove to myself that google really did work better, I forced myself to spend a week using a number of different sites. I spent a week on bing, a week and Yandex, ect... Yandex was the only one I made it the full week without giving up and using google.

BeeneMachine · 4 days

I'm sure thats the only reason you drive over to the Nethrlands....

xoxoyoyo · 4 days

simple statement that everything that exists is consciousness that is reacting to attractions and repulsions according to the framework in which it exists.

I don't think you would have a simple time using this framework to explain the natural world, I think it would be harder and require more/bigger fundamental assumptions than what we use now.

PerthroXIII · 4 days

More details please?

NN77 · 5 days

I'm guessing that he wasn't supposed to be in the picture, but saw the picture being taken and stood more or less still watching the process, thus being still enough to be in the photo.

unheardartists · 5 days

We don't have many foreigners who work in the mines around here, but the few that are here seam to be more New Zealanders than any other group, I have no idea why.

I like "Digital Terrain Model", we just call them 3d models, or models.

gonzales82 · 5 days

Hey I wanted to remind you, that you need to remind Edjca that he/she needs to remind Gycon not to play poker with logArythm557.

BabyStevie · 5 days

Why exactly did they beat you up?

scientologist2 · 5 days

I love Minneapolis, I'm glad we provided you a place to escape to.

Shadow_Jack · 6 days

Can't we complain about both?

unheardartists · 6 days

I would guess that its different in the states. On one hand its in every ones best interest to get the job done properly, on the other hand sharing of CAD files still has some taboo around it.

Many companies still use CAD as a way to make a pretty picture, they do not make a 3d model if you will. So when they share the CAD file all the line work is 2d and flat, and its simply labeled with information. So when I get it, I have the pleasure of adding that 3d dimension to it. Other times, they files have 3d, but its sporadic and random, where one area works good, and the next has holes to 0, and spikes to the sky. Maybe its a statement that the quality of the local engineering firms are not so good? But there cad work definitely is poor. Its happened on many occasions that I basically draft the plans from scratch so that we can make use of them.

I'm always told by the engineering firms that its a huge liability to share the CAD files and so they don't want to. They see the printed plan set, as enough for construction. Sure many times it is, but it adds unnecessary headaches and uncertainty to using machine control. Apart from liability, I think the firms are embarrassed to release the CAD files some times due to the things I described above.

Funny enough, the best CAD files come from our small mom and pop engineering firms, and the Big National firms are the worst. The national firms, a. just don't care as much, an individual project doesn't mean as much to them, and b. they have way more bureaucratic processes to get the files, and you don't always get the ones you want. The local firms, will share them back and forth, and even take suggestions, and modifications that can help in construction, the big firms generally will not without change orders and getting payed by the client.

A note on regional terminology. Locally DTM is not an acrimony used, so I'm curious what it stands for. (I can guess the meaning, but want the words). Second, for some reason, and its not rational, I hate when people call excavators, diggers. I know they dig, and it makes perfectly reasonable seance, but it just bugs me for some reason. Its not used locally and people would look at you funny if you pointed at an excavator and called it a digger.

Since you in New Zealand you might no the answer to a question that I have often wondered. Is there lots of mining in New Zealand? I work in and around mines a lot, and it seams that there is a disproportional number of New Zealanders when looking at all the foreign people working in the mines in the US.

mrskribbs · 6 days

Top comment made me lose my milk...

He's turned his lungs into bagpipes.

unheardartists · 6 days

Basically the same thing I was about to type out twice.

unheardartists · 6 days

I don't think the power lines actually interfere with the Satellites as much as the radios. I don't know for sure. They system I use (Topcon) will go into a "float" mode when the precision isn't good enough. When the system is in float it wont report elevations, and can have some wonky northing and eastings. Anyway, going under power-lines, will almost always trip the system into float. A surveying/engineering company we team up with often, uses trimble, and they have the same troubles under power-lines. Maybe its that the lines are over some certain voltage, but never the less. The few times we have had the machine control in under powerlines, it turns into the old fashioned way of doing things. The surveyors will travers in with total stations and I'll pull out my eye level...

As a topcon user I have had Glonass since 2003, its trimble that didn't have it before and got it 2 to 3 years ago.

On one hand I love the machine control, on the other it can suck. First and foremost the quality of the engineering firm is of the utmost importance. Many firms still will not share there CAD files, so we have to digitize the plans if we want to use any of our gps equipment, or machine control. At that point the accuracy is questionable, if we are lucky there will be point lists in the plans that we can manually enter. Usually at this point we aren't going to invest much into using the gps. The good firms, will have the files for us, nice clean data lines, and the model is as easy as converting the file type. But we get maybe 1 or 2 of these for every 10 that are the other way. When that ratio changes we will get more machine control. We already have it on a fair number of dozers and graders, but it only gets utilized on about 10% to 20% of our jobs primarily for this reason.

I'm in MN, so of course things vary from region to region. Here the DOT is among the worst when it comes to sharing CAD files for machine control. So even though it would be amazing on road jobs, we often don't get to use it. The owner of our company is particularly gun shy, after we built about 5 miles of road 3 tenths to high. The transitions where made smoothly and fine, but the state still made us remove the material from the road. So, if we can't get competent CAD files, we don't build the model our self from point lists and plan sheets. In the 9 years we have had and use machine control any and all savings we have had where more than wiped out by that one bad project.

unheardartists · 6 days

I work for a contractor, and one of my jobs is working with the 3d models ether provided or made by me from the site plans. A few things to note. the GPS receivers do as you say run around 15k each, however for the automatics to be wired into a machine runs around $100k. Many newer machines come prewired, we have a D5 that is brand new, and will be getting a receiver for it, the wiring, computers, radios, computers (screens) ect, will run us in total around $30k. Any older dozer that we have if we wanted to convert it to automatics, it would cost around $100k. Wired is a poor choice of words, since its not wiring as much as special hydraulic control that cost the money.

Being the person who receives the CAD files from our customers (or rather their engineers), its amazing what a wide range of totally dozer ready, to worthless CAD files we get.

unheardartists · 7 days

Well, let me know if you come up with a fully automated dozer, I want one.

Also for what its worth, of all the dozer work that is out there being done, only a small amount of it is machine controlled. Its not really necessary for many things. And it adds new problems to the process. For example, working under or close to power lines, make for some really interesting bumps and ditches, even though your model is say perfectly flat.

unheardartists · 7 days

"Machine Control" just means the dozer has gps on it a computer showing the operator the 3d model of whats being built. Most, but not all machine controlled dozers have the ability to have the computer run the controls, but its only useful when you are tolerancing, so 90% of the dozing is done by man, maybe 10% by the computer, but the operator still steers.

bullbear420 · 8 days

I have no idea, maybe 8 million would be better?

Three-Year Club	Summer Santa 2011
Secret Santa 2010	Verified Email

Vithar

TROPHY CASE

Vithar

TROPHY CASE

you'll need to login or register to do that

create a new account

login