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The Best Burglar Alarm In History

Posted by samzenpus on Mon Dec 15, 2008 07:07 PM
from the suck-it-Edison dept.
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Sportsqs writes "When Nikola Tesla got creative with transformers and driver circuits at the turn of the 20th century he probably had no idea that others would have so much fun with his concepts over a hundred years later. One such guy is an Australian named Peter who runs a website called TeslaDownUnder, which showcases all his wacky Tesla ways, or rather electrickery, as Peter calls it." Very cool stuff, I wish I would have had something like this to protect my comic books from my little brother when I was a kid.
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Submission: The Best Burglar Alarm in History? by Sportsqs (1319325)
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  • Idle (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MrMista_B (891430) on Monday December 15 2008, @07:08PM (#26126877)

    Seriously, keep this shit in Idle, or get rid of Idle entirely.

    Please.

    • Re:Idle (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TD-Linux (1295697) on Monday December 15 2008, @07:12PM (#26126909)
      I personally found the article interesting and relevant (at least from the description, the links have all been slashdotted), though the image thumbails must go.

    • Re:Idle (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 15 2008, @07:13PM (#26126923)
      If you look at the (very sparse) editor comments whenever Slashdot's recent changes are mentioned, there's been a strong implication that they're doing these sorts of things to satisfy their bosses, not because they want to. Remember how idle was rolled-out with the slogan "Never go to idle.slashdot.org". I'd guess that the suits smelled money and told them to start moving things toward blatant me-too-ism in hopes of greater profitability.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Kagura (843695)
        Who runs Slashdot, exactly? I doubt I'm alone in thinking that it's just a tight-knit group of editors.

        • Re:Idle (Score:5, Informative)

          by carlzum (832868) on Monday December 15 2008, @09:52PM (#26128269)
          Slashdot is owned by SourceForge, Inc (formerly VA Linux), an Internet media company that owns several sites like Linux.com, Freshmeat, and Thinkgeek. It's a publicly traded company with a CEO [forbes.com], SEC filings [nasdaq.com], and NASDAQ ticker symbol [nasdaq.com]. SourceForge doesn't seem like a heartless corporation to me, they've done a lot of great things for the open source community and have generally stuck to their values, but as a public company they need to satisfy their investors (as seen in a recent management change [bizjournals.com]).

          • Re:Idle (Score:5, Informative)

            by Kagura (843695) on Monday December 15 2008, @09:58PM (#26128315)
            Wow, thanks for the good info. Here's a quote from the article that you already linked:

            SourceForge also said it "intends to take aggressive steps" to accelerate the growth of its core Internet properties: Slashdot, SourceForge.net and ThinkGeek.

            "These sites represent a truly unique set of Internet assets and there is more we can be doing to make them better and more engaging for our users," said Neumeister. "We are focused on aggressively pursuing our plans for each of these sites and making opportunistic investments that will enable us to reach our objectives faster."

            Thanks.

            • Holy shit, that is terrifying... D:

              • Re:Idle (Score:4, Funny)

                by liquidpele (663430) on Monday December 15 2008, @11:25PM (#26128941) Homepage Journal
                Oh, that's just CEO speak. Cryptonomican had a great example of it... something like "We will slave away tirelessly without sleep or food to build a fortune capable of purchasing world domination, while our employees and executives sleep in flee ridden cots outside to save money so as to provide maximum benefit for the shareholders". That paraphrase doesn't quite do it justice, but the point is that you have to make the shareholders think the business is growing and that there is opportunity there, no matter what.

            • "These sites represent a truly unique set of Internet assets and there is more we can be doing to make them better and more engaging for our users," said Neumeister. "We are focused on aggressively pursuing our plans for each of these sites and making opportunistic investments that will enable us to reach our objectives faster."

              Later in the interview, Neurmeister demonstrated his agression by biting a chunk out of his own arm. "Thats how dedicated we are" he said, before glassing a reporter, kicking out a w

        • Who runs Slashdot

          Master Blaster!

      • Re:Idle (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ElectricTurtle (1171201) on Monday December 15 2008, @08:57PM (#26127865)
        It was probably more an insightful knowledge that people were going to, do, and will continue to bitch about Idle. Never mind that they were told not to go there, not only do they go there anyway, they still have the chutzpah to complain about the place they were told not to go.

        I really just don't get the hostility. I may have a high ID, but that's just because I only registered to go to the 10th anniversary party, I've lurked since 1998, and dudes, this is what Slashdot was created for. For chrissake, if anybody can find some of that early footage of Taco talking about why and how he created slashdot, you'll be enlightened to find that it was supposed to be kind of obscure and somewhat nonsensical. That's why it's called slashdot! It was supposed to sound weird when you had to verbalize the URL! Now in the intervening decade we have all these guys with sticks up their asses trying to pretend like /. is serious business . Granted /. isn't an immature playground like Digg or others, but it's just not 100% serious business like a trade journal or something. Christ.

        • >> you'll be enlightened to find that it was supposed to be kind of obscure and somewhat nonsensical.

          Maybe that's true from a historical POV, but I believe (sorry, no stats available) that most people were at the end just driven by the classic "News for nerds, stuff that matters". So "idle" is misplaced.

        • Re:Idle (Score:5, Insightful)

          by virgil_disgr4ce (909068) on Monday December 15 2008, @11:11PM (#26128873) Homepage
          THANK YOU. I cannot stand this irritating get-off-my-lawnism that seems to think that the only "news for nerds" is gnome-kde flamewars. I mean jesus, people even bitched about the "interesting bash commands/scripts/etc" stories. Come on, if you really hate slashdot that much, start your own site solely for stories about how websites that aren't viewable on lynx are an abomination of nature or whatever it is you people consider "real" news for nerds. Idiots.

          Disclaimer: I am aware that I am metacomplaining! :p

      • Re:Idle (Score:5, Funny)

        by Max Littlemore (1001285) on Monday December 15 2008, @10:15PM (#26128453)

        I don't completely hate Idle, I go to Idle on a slow news day, but I don't think it belongs on the front page. I'd like to see a slashdot poll (I have just submitted this):

        What would you most like to see done to people who think Idle should appear on the front page?

        • Have their fingernails pulled out one by one without pain relief
        • Have them fitted with a custom 1.3kW microwave helmet
        • Covered in honey and placed on a fire ant nest
        • Have their income wiped out by no one visiting ./ anymore because digg is better
        • meh
        • A week locked in the basement with CowboyNeal.

    • To parrot/paraphrase what others have already written, lighten up and enjoy the refreshing mix of tech, freshness, and humor.

      • Re:Idle (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 15 2008, @07:28PM (#26127051)

        Darken down, you anally loose and cheerful ray of sunshine!

          • You both educated me and allowed me to fit you in one of those categories, all in one go. Nice!

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        So, rather than just ignoring this story on the main page, you decided that it would be better to click into it, then post a comment about how much you hate these stories.

        Seriously, what the hell is wrong with people these days? Almost no effort to skip over the story, yet you choose to whine like a stepped on dog.

        You're the problem with the internet, frankly. Too many people out there think other peoples' websites should be changed to suit them. As though Slashdot is made just for you, and its owners aren'

        • Re:Idle (Score:5, Interesting)

          by JWSmythe (446288) * <jwsmythe@@@jwsmythe...com> on Monday December 15 2008, @08:58PM (#26127867) Homepage Journal

              I'm really not sure which is worse, that they post these things, or that they're so old. Really, I saw this years ago.

              Feedback is good for any site. It shows the direction which the users would like the site to go in. It's important for good growth of any site (or any company). Try something, see if the users like it. If they do, keep it and/or expand it. If they don't like it, file it away somewhere so the same mistakes aren't made again.

              But, posting what the site owner/editor/publisher wants is true. I run a news site also. It's a different format with a different target audience, but it's mine. I (owner/publisher) ran a story about men and their cats. My senior editor got a bit miffed. I'll paraphrase. "We're in the middle of two wars, the economy collapsing, and what could be the most detrimental US election ever, and you're running stories about f***ing cats?!?!"

              There was good reason that I did. Because the NYTimes ran it first. Because the regular news is absolutely depressing. Once in a great while you have to give a little bright news. Broadcast TV doesn't want to do the fluff piece on a doughnut shop making the county's largest doughnut, but when all they've run for the last week is car crashes, shootings, and world news on terrorist bombings and the body count in wars we're involved in, sometimes you have to give a little bright spot in the news, even if it is still out of line.

              I run what I want, when I want. I want real factual news run all day every day. I also want to keep our readers, so the fluff pieces are almost required. Silly things like the car with the tesla coil on it are good to bring in new readers too. Someone will ask someone else "Did you see the car with lightning around it on Slashdot?" Bringing in readers with fluff is fine. Keeping them around with real news is more important.

              Some days it's harder to find real news than on other days. That's why you'll see repeated news on TV and in the newspaper. They have time and space to fill (respectively). We have a luxury on the Internet, where we just have to remain active. We don't have to fill X number of pages to keep our advertisers happy, we only have to bring in X number of viewers. On my site, that's trivial. I don't answer to advertisers, so if I bring in exactly 0 viewers for a year, then I simply won't make any money. If I bring in 1 million users a day, well, I'll be much happier on my yacht, checking my readership numbers once a day. :)

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jcr (53032)

        Geez, doesn't suck the way /. put a gun to your head and made you click on the story?

        Oh, wait.

        -jcr

  • Must be a slow news day, this is old (Score:5, Insightful)

    by John Sokol (109591) on Monday December 15 2008, @07:10PM (#26126891) Homepage Journal

    I already seen this site like a year or two ago.
    How can this make slashdot now.

    Tesla's very cool, but there is little new here.

    And how come we are not talking about the shoe that almost hit George Bush instead.

    • Re:Must be a slow news day, this is old (Score:4, Funny)

      by all5n (1239664) on Monday December 15 2008, @07:33PM (#26127119)

      Or at a bare minimum we should be talking about the guaranteed Obama/Blagojevich connection.

      What did he know, and when did he know it?

    • but there is little new here.

      Especially since it isn't any good for the stated purpose. From his site [tesladownunder.com]:

      Actual rotation speed is about 10 seconds per revolution which is easy for thieves to avoid I guess.

    • "And how come we are not talking about the shoe that almost hit George Bush instead."

      Uh, because that is a topic for another thread and not relevant to this one?

  • One thing I don't get about this story... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eln (21727) on Monday December 15 2008, @07:11PM (#26126901) Homepage

    One thing about this story confuses me: Why is samzenpus allowed to post stories outside of Idle?

  • Slashdotted (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Yo-Yo-boy-wonder (1180359) on Monday December 15 2008, @07:13PM (#26126929)
    How crappy does your server have to be to get slashdotted by a handful of users?

  • The website seems DownUnder. (Score:5, Funny)

    by MRe_nl (306212) on Monday December 15 2008, @07:18PM (#26126965)

    Slashdotted, or rather electrickery?

  • Alarm? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SIR_Taco (467460) <phil.woodlandNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday December 15 2008, @07:21PM (#26126997) Homepage

    I don't see how this is a burglar alarm.
    Anti-theft device sure, alarm no.

    • Re:Alarm? (Score:5, Funny)

      by mewshi_nya (1394329) on Monday December 15 2008, @07:32PM (#26127101)

      Burglar touches it, fries, starts screaming. There's your alarm.

        • "You can't scream when you are already dead"

          That's just what Jimmy kept saying...

          • I don't know about Australia, but in some countries, death traps for burglars are classified as illegal, and if you manage to kill a burglar with one you could be found guilty of at least manslaughter, maybe murder.

  • Slashdit is idle. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LoRdTAW (99712) on Monday December 15 2008, @07:21PM (#26127001)

    Yea its cool but first its only a time lapse photo. Those sparks aren't arcing at 360 degrees. Every cool Tesla coil photo is time lapsed. Otherwise your just stuck with a single and sometimes dim arc.

    What then hell is going on here? Like others have said is idle being merged with "regular" Slashdot? I turned off idle because of lame and non news items like this. Christ its like Slashdot cant be bothered to look for actual news for nerds or stuff that matters.

    And whats with all the flame bait articles? Its like they enjoy whipping us into a frenzy and then sit back and watch the fire works. Slashdot is rapidly deteriorating into a faux news site that's more (lame) entertainment then actual news.

    • Re:Slashdit is idle. (Score:4, Informative)

      by girlintraining (1395911) on Monday December 15 2008, @07:27PM (#26127047)

      Slashdot is rapidly deteriorating into a faux news site that's more (lame) entertainment then actual news.

      No, management has simply determined a need to draw more readers to the site and so they've started creating one-off episodes that aren't part of the regular plotline to draw them in. Or as us BSG regulars call this phenomenon "Season 3". Don't worry, when the submitter's strike is over, things will improve. They already tried the webisode thing (aka Geeks in Space), and then quietly buried it.

      Don't panic - everything is going according to plan.

    • Slashdot is rapidly deteriorating into a faux news site that's more (lame) entertainment then actual news.

      "oniondot", perhaps?

    • Re:Slashdit is idle. (Score:4, Informative)

      by enos (627034) on Monday December 15 2008, @08:54PM (#26127833)

      Time lapse is a video where the frames are shot much slower than they're played back. Speeding up the world, essentially.

      This is a regular long exposure. Single frame. Looking at the EXIF data on the original JPEG, the summary's image was a 31 second exposure. Hence why the driver is a bit blurry (he twitched a bit).

      • Ahh thanks for the correction. For some reason I had time lapse in my head. I used to do a bit of coiling and had a Kodak digital camera that was capable of taking longish exposures. They were blurry though.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by recharged95 (782975)
      What happens if you stick a heavy metal plate in the path?...hmmm...

  • Tesla was a Slashdotter (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wdhowellsr (530924) on Monday December 15 2008, @07:33PM (#26127123)
    While my day job is as a Computer Progammer Analyst, my love is researching everything else in my lab (with funding preferably). Tesla was a Slashdotter in that he did his thing without buying into the conventional wisdom of the time. He unfortunately trusted Thomas Edison, a man who was neither a scientist nor an original thinker and one who makes Bill Gates look like Mother Theresa. Why do you think the movie studios moved to Hollywood, CA?

    I am currently working on several products that will replace current measuring instruments that use nuclear technology. Thanks to what may appear to be worthless patents filed by Tesla regarding resonance in solid bodies, I am having success beyond what I could have imagined.

    It's unfortunate that someone with so much to offer is now regarded as a marginal creator of useless technology.

    The next time someone promises $10,000 to increase the effiency of your DC Dynamos, kick him in the ....

    • So Tesla is to the Woz what Edison is to "the fast talking one". I never thought of it like that before.

    • It's unfortunate that someone with so much to offer is now regarded as a marginal creator of useless technology.

      I don't know that I would say that, they did name the measurement of magnetic flux after him. Having a basic unit of electromagnetism named after me is more honor than I expect to have granted to me in this life.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by DerekLyons (302214)

      Tesla was a Slashdotter in that he did his thing without buying into the conventional wisdom of the time.

      Oh, Slashdotters have their conventional wisdom and groupthink too... Just because it doesn't match the mainstream doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

      It's unfortunate that someone with so much to offer is now regarded as a marginal creator of useless technology.

      Mostly due to the tireless efforts of generation of cranks who've spent their time wallowing in the more marginal of his creations an

  • MagnaVolt? (Score:3, Informative)

    by uniquename72 (1169497) on Monday December 15 2008, @08:28PM (#26127571)
    Links are slashdotted -- is it anything like this [youtube.com]?

  • Tesla coils are a Soviet defence!

  • Force field (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AeiwiMaster (20560) on Tuesday December 16 2008, @12:07AM (#26129213)

    At first, I thought he had managed
    to make a force field around the car using a tesla coil.

    But then I saw that he was just rotating a pole connected to a tesla coil around the car, what a disappointment.

    It might actually be possible to make a force field with a Tesla coil if you can find the correct field harmonics.
    See http://amasci.com/freenrg/audwall.html [amasci.com]

    You might also have to know something about
    quaternionic electromagnetism to pull it of.
    http://www.scribd.com/doc/4445/quaternionic-electrodynamics [scribd.com]

    Also if you think that slashdot stories have been
    to low quality lately then maybe you should try http://crowdnews.eu/ [crowdnews.eu]

    • I have always wanted to turn a Tesla coil loose on the street, unfortunately I can't find any Xmyth specials.

    • And someone with a pacemaker would bump up against your car accidentally while his shoes were wet, and possibly die. You get sued, all your possessions/savings are forfeit, and then you are (rightly) sent to prison.

      That's if the "parking enforcement" person (you know, that guy who is just there to do his job making sure people don't park like self-absorbed asshats) gets a shock doesn't get you arrested first. Assuming something he touched was conductive, I guess. And he wasn't wearing gloves. And he mad

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