Interesting, now I need to take some paperclips with me next time I take the train...

What? No string? No mudflaps? Do I at least get to stick a paperclip up one of my water jets?

was the wtc7 fire somehow magically hotter than all the other skyscraper fires that never resulted in a collapse?
Do they perhaps use some kind of special fireproofing that protects steel from fire in skyscrapers? I mean they did claim that the planes blew this fireproofing off the twin towers thus exposing the steel. This didn't happen for wtc7.

Why didn't this building collapse?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH5-DpMObGc

or this one?

http://youtu.be/j4MjsVnasLA

You clearly don't understand structural engineering so I seriously doubt you would have a firm grasp of rocket science.
>> ^Skeeve:

According to the American Institute of Steel Construction, "Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F, and at 1800°F it is probably less than 10 percent." This is in addition to the expansion of the steel due to the heat (which is great enough to crack any concrete it is reinforcing). A 20' beam will expand 1.5 inches at 1000 degrees.
So, even if we assume the fire wasn't even as hot as your average house fire, you now have cracked and broken concrete and steel beams that are warping and bending. And, just like a pop can (or a paperclip, or any thing else really) once something has started to bend, bending it further just gets easier.
This isn't exactly rocket science.
>> ^Fade:
I believe when architects are designing concrete high-rises the requirement is for the structural steel to be able to support 3 to 5 times the maximum load that will ever be applied to it during its lifetime. Thus a 'theoretical' (since we have no way of knowing what temperature was actually in place) 50% weakening in the strength of the steel cannot result in a complete failure of all the support column at exactly the same time.
>> ^Skeeve:
A house fire can reach 1500 degrees in 3 1/2 minutes but an office fire can't reach the 1000 degrees necessary to bring steel to 50% of it's strength? Bullshit.
>> ^marinara:
I really doubt that a failure of a steel beam, which supports the floor (and nothing else), could take down an entire building.
Otherwise the facts in this video are generally correct, but misleading. (because office fires don't burn over 1000 degrees)

According to the American Institute of Steel Construction, "Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F, and at 1800°F it is probably less than 10 percent." This is in addition to the expansion of the steel due to the heat (which is great enough to crack any concrete it is reinforcing). A 20' beam will expand 1.5 inches at 1000 degrees.

So, even if we assume the fire wasn't even as hot as your average house fire, you now have cracked and broken concrete and steel beams that are warping and bending. And, just like a pop can (or a paperclip, or any thing else really) once something has started to bend, bending it further just gets easier.

This isn't exactly rocket science.
>> ^Fade:

I believe when architects are designing concrete high-rises the requirement is for the structural steel to be able to support 3 to 5 times the maximum load that will ever be applied to it during its lifetime. Thus a 'theoretical' (since we have no way of knowing what temperature was actually in place) 50% weakening in the strength of the steel cannot result in a complete failure of all the support column at exactly the same time.
>> ^Skeeve:
A house fire can reach 1500 degrees in 3 1/2 minutes but an office fire can't reach the 1000 degrees necessary to bring steel to 50% of it's strength? Bullshit.
>> ^marinara:
I really doubt that a failure of a steel beam, which supports the floor (and nothing else), could take down an entire building.
Otherwise the facts in this video are generally correct, but misleading. (because office fires don't burn over 1000 degrees)

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I agree with most of your points. I would like to make a small defense of the inability to change things in OS X. With mutability can come a lot of overhead and chaos. There is something to be said for an iron hand on the tiller of user interfaces - but only if you trust the group making decisions.

I am not a UX expert. Up until Lion I trusted the UX people at Apple to have a better idea about how humans can optimally interact with a computer. For the most part, I think they were right. Up until Lion - now I think I'm starting to be sold a crock. The decisions they have made don't seem to be based on making efficient interactions happen - but instead about some grand unified melding of Macs and iOS devices. It's bullshit.

The mandatory click to focus thing is really a taste thing. For me, personally it drives me batty. I don't want focus until I've clicked.

Bouncy in your face icons - agreed, annoying - but not as bad modal windows you have to dismiss.


>> ^srd:

>> ^dag:
Up until Lion I would completely disagree with you and say the UX of OS X is simply the best. Yes, I'm talking against Windows 7, Gnome, KDE et al. Now however, I'm starting to cast a wandering eye back towards Linux.
Windows 7 however, is a frigging awful experience any way you slice it. It's stupid little things like the alt-tab selecting whatever window is in the background when really you just want to cycle through the icons. Also, I can't believe they still haven't killed the dysfunctional bloatware ridden system tray. The retarded nanny-ware labyrinth that has to be navigated to connect to a wireless network makes my eyes bleed.
The way I'm feeling now is that all operating systems suck hard, but OS X sucks a little less, at least until Lion - which, again, is starting to suck much harder for all the reasons outlined in this video - and more.


Gnome, KDE, Windows et al have been scampering after the OSX UX for some years now, and I agreee have been doing it rather badly. And this is a trend I'm very skeptical of. However, if you like the workflow that OSX/Quarz imposes, I'm sure you can be happy with it. Where I take exception is having no choice except for what some people in a meeting in Cupertino decide is how I should do my work.
Things that really put me off:
- Menu bar at the top of the screen instead of attached to the individual application... Sure, thats traditional on apple computers and that made sense back in the days when the Mac didn't have real multitasking. But nowadays it's just terribly confusing and imposes longer mouse travel distances.
- Mandatory click-to-focus, which can be seen as a neccessary corrolary of the previous point. I've been using the focus-follows-mouse model (without raise-on-focus) for 15 years now and the difference is jarring. Imagine having to click away an overlay on each and every page you go to in your browser.
- Bouncy in-your-face animations and notification boxes that are reminiscent of Paperclip. Shut up already and get out of my face, I'm trying to work, not playing a game of whack-an-icon.
- Apple marketing OSX as 64 bit but delivering it in 32 bit mode and not telling you until you a) find out by accident and then b) spend 10 minutes gooling around until you find the command to switch it to 64bit default mode (no GUI level preference here for whatever reason).
I'd be a lot happier if I had a choice. Either by having real preferences that goes beyond what color scheme do I want and in what way do I want to stroke my touchpad to do what. Or open up the possibility for alternative window managers.
For all the "think different" attitude that Apple likes to spread, the OSX ecosystem seems to be hard at work to remove individual preferences. Apple turned into the opposite of what the 1984 commercial implied.
Dag, if you're looking at linux again, both KDE and Gnome (especially Gnome 3) are IMO horrible too. If you don't like them, give XFCE a go. I've been using it since '03 IIRC, when I grew tired of Blackbox. And you'd be in good company too

>> ^dag:

Up until Lion I would completely disagree with you and say the UX of OS X is simply the best. Yes, I'm talking against Windows 7, Gnome, KDE et al. Now however, I'm starting to cast a wandering eye back towards Linux.
Windows 7 however, is a frigging awful experience any way you slice it. It's stupid little things like the alt-tab selecting whatever window is in the background when really you just want to cycle through the icons. Also, I can't believe they still haven't killed the dysfunctional bloatware ridden system tray. The retarded nanny-ware labyrinth that has to be navigated to connect to a wireless network makes my eyes bleed.
The way I'm feeling now is that all operating systems suck hard, but OS X sucks a little less, at least until Lion - which, again, is starting to suck much harder for all the reasons outlined in this video - and more.



Gnome, KDE, Windows et al have been scampering after the OSX UX for some years now, and I agreee have been doing it rather badly. And this is a trend I'm very skeptical of. However, if you like the workflow that OSX/Quarz imposes, I'm sure you can be happy with it. Where I take exception is having no choice except for what some people in a meeting in Cupertino decide is how I should do my work.

Things that really put me off:

- Menu bar at the top of the screen instead of attached to the individual application... Sure, thats traditional on apple computers and that made sense back in the days when the Mac didn't have real multitasking. But nowadays it's just terribly confusing and imposes longer mouse travel distances.

- Mandatory click-to-focus, which can be seen as a neccessary corrolary of the previous point. I've been using the focus-follows-mouse model (without raise-on-focus) for 15 years now and the difference is jarring. Imagine having to click away an overlay on each and every page you go to in your browser.

- Bouncy in-your-face animations and notification boxes that are reminiscent of Paperclip. Shut up already and get out of my face, I'm trying to work, not playing a game of whack-an-icon.

- Apple marketing OSX as 64 bit but delivering it in 32 bit mode and not telling you until you a) find out by accident and then b) spend 10 minutes gooling around until you find the command to switch it to 64bit default mode (no GUI level preference here for whatever reason).

I'd be a lot happier if I had a choice. Either by having real preferences that goes beyond what color scheme do I want and in what way do I want to stroke my touchpad to do what. Or open up the possibility for alternative window managers.

For all the "think different" attitude that Apple likes to spread, the OSX ecosystem seems to be hard at work to remove individual preferences. Apple turned into the opposite of what the 1984 commercial implied.

Dag, if you're looking at linux again, both KDE and Gnome (especially Gnome 3) are IMO horrible too. If you don't like them, give XFCE a go. I've been using it since '03 IIRC, when I grew tired of Blackbox. And you'd be in good company too

>> ^P1ggy:

Now they are in $20,000 of debt trying to sell melting ice cream online. Well, I guess the transferred the problem.


If you check out the website you will see that they are selling non-perishables from the store as art in plastic display boxes, at prices that are absurd for the non-artsy components.

This appears to have been spearheaded by the one-red-paperclip guy, and a few other hipster artists using very much the same notoriety = value trick that got him a house.

The video is clearly a significant part of their PR scheme to make back the money. I would be interested to see their accounting at the end of this little adventure.

ALL YOUR PAPERCLIP ARE BELONG TO US!!!

If you know anything about video technology or even own an iPhone you know this is totally fake.
For starters how do you get a video signal out of the headphone jack on the iPhone?
The rest is even more impossible (impossibler?).
How does he create a radio signal strong enough to override the data stream in a shielded digital cable without affecting anything else. That's like detonating a nuclear bomb to light your cigarette without blowing up the entire city or even lighting anyone elses cigarette, multiplied by how many parallel data wires the monitor uses. HDMI uses 4 shielded differential pairs.
The specs and resolution of the monitor(s) being hacked are unknown but it still manages to scale and rotate the image to fit perfectly and even splits it up and sends unique images to different monitors in the multi-monitor setup. With a paperclip-antenna.

Upvote for the video editing. He even got the reflections right and the multi-monitor shot has intentionally bad bezel compensation.

1. Use a thin screwdriver or paperclip to stop the fan from spinning.
2. Blow compressed air into the exhaust vent.
3. Use the screwdriver or paperclip to pull out any mutant dust bunnies that get stuck inside.
4. Done!

Of course, this only works if the fan is somewhat accessible from the outside.

Yup, that's what happens when you tell MacGyver he's not allowed any more paperclips.

>> ^kurtdh:
^
Private businesses are not required to accept pennies. Straight from the Department of the Treasury:
http://www.ustreas.gov/education/faq/currency/legal-tender.shtml
"There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise."


Correct, private businesses are not required by law to accept pennies. If I opened a company and said I'd only accept paperclips as payment, I'd have the right to do that. But, if I opened a company and negotiated a payment plan in paperclips with a client, then when the client wanted to pay I told him he now had to pay me in gold bullion, he wouldn't be obligated to do that because we already agreed that I'd trade him a good or service for paperclips not gold. See the difference?

In the case of the boys paying for their impounded car in pennies, the tow company has posted that it will accept a set amount in US Dollars (in this case, $88 US Dollars). Therefore the US Dollar currency is the agreed upon tender for the transaction, and pennies are part of that currency. Whatever combination of USD he uses to pay is irrelevant. If he gave them two twenties, three ones, six fives, forty quarters, sixty nickels and 200 pennies, and as long as it was in US Dollar currency, then they'd have to accept the money or give over his car without payment.

>> ^Payback:
Obviously Michael Jackson has been reincarnated as Clippy.


Now i'm going to have "Smooth Criminal" stuck in my head all night. Thanks a lot, jerk.

>> ^quantumushroom:
I'm more shocked by the sight of an apparently EMPTY train car IN JAPAN.


Well that seals it then. The clip is fake!

Your video, Paperclips respond to electromagnets under train floor, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.