Are wheelchairs in fact carbon neutral? Even disregarding carbon during manufacturing/delivery to the point where it is at your door, can you say positively that a user does not burn more calories using a wheelchair versus other alternatives of getting around? Can you say that calories not burned by someone wearing an efficient exoskeleton will never outweigh the energy savings of a wheelchair or alternatives?
To treat your questions seriously, yes a manual wheelchair is carbon neutral.
- Carbon from manufacturing/delivery is comparable to a artisan-made bicycle - approx same manufacturing process, and style and size of business. - Pushing a wheelchair burns about as many calories as walking. If you think about this it makes sense - you have smaller muscles called upon to do the work, but you're engaging less of your body in the effort, and you have the mechanical advantage of wheel.
"fit a pedal-powered generator". Where do those pedals fit? Basically down and in front. Take a look at some recumbent bicycle designs - preferably the more upright ones. Take a look at some wheelchair designs - standard legs out in front hospital-style, and some more active ones like tilite.com. Your pedal chain rings and crank-arms are going to have to fit somewhere very clever indeed to avoid them or the legs sticking out in front in a very awkward manner. Even standard hospital-style wheelchairs are a PITA to maneuver about due to the legs banging into everything, by adding the ability to pedal, you've just made that PITA far, far worse.
Leg strength - You're asking the compromised legs of someone who needs a wheelchair to produce power equivalent to an able-bodied person. That's not going to happen for a long, long time while atrophied muscles get stronger. You device needs to be enjoyable enough during that time, or human natures says, it will be abandoned.
Generating power - Most electric bicycles are just power assist for climbing hills. I don't think full-power generation is currently practical.
Power wheelchairs are hardly restricted to slow short-range trundling. They're 24-volt, and can reach speeds of at least 25km/h have ranges than can be extended by greater battery capacity, up to at least 30km. (Speed and range maximums may be higher - numbers are just from some individuals I know).
It's debatable that walking is better than a chair, but the able-bodied often blindly assume that walking must be so.
I'm partially paralysed due to a spinal cord injury, but can walk with a walker and a leg brace. When walking, I can go about 200 metres before my leg nerves/muscles are too weak to continue, and I need to take a break. That 200 metres will take me about 15 minutes - I've had double-leg-amputee Grannies speeding past me. During that time I can't carry anything unless it's very light and I can stuff it into a backpack.
Contrast this with my wheelchair, In which I can go faster than walking pace, can go for miles, and can carry heavier items in a backpack, and can carry items in my lap - either on their own, or in a tray. I can't clear the dining table while walking, but can with the chair. I can't go to the store with the walker.
Standing up - say to get stuff out of the cupboards - is a great, truly useful skill. Walking with compromised legs nerves, though, takes a another leap in level of ability before it beats a wheelchair.
My solutions do include using the right tool for the job - if you're getting tripped up by a few references to paths containing spaces then you're doing it wrong. If you'd need to do _lots_ of path manipulation and thus lots of escaping, then doing it in bash makes no sense. With mastery of the tools, the question of "which tool?" is "where is this easier to type?"
Sending with scp works easily, all you need are some quotes - the following will work fine: scp "A File Called Wanda" remote:/tmp
If you (or the people supplying you with shell scripts) are having problems with spaces in pathnames, use double-quotes around your path references. Or backslash-escape the spaces if you must. And use the -0 arguments where appropriate (like with find and xargs).
If this (or another type of difficult input) gets too tedious, substitute perl - its quoting operators can make awkward backslash-escaping disappear.
More awesomely, if you have found something in your history with ^R or up arrow or whatever, then you can press ^O to "execute this line and put the next line in the history onto the command line".
Thanks! I've wanted that probably about a thousand times.
1) get graduates straight out of universtiy. 2) condition them to believe working extremely long hours and weekends is "normal". 3) condition them to believe that if you're a real professional then your work is more important than socialising with your friends and spending time with your family. 4) pay them relatively low salaries, but promise big ones in the future. 5) give them free pop, sweeties and toys. 6) See how far you can push the suckers!
Are there ANY decent webmail sites left out there anymore that don't charge for basic services like automatic forwarding? I'm just not going to pay for a webmail account that I only use as a disposable intermediary between all the info-greedy sites out there and my real account...
What you're looking for is spamgourmet: "self-destructing disposable email addresses,
titanium strength spam blocking, very short learning curve". You set up a disposable (free) account with them, tell it how mny emails to allow, then give email address to untrustworthy individuals. They allow the number of emails to go through, then eat the rest. Can be reconfigured, or even created on the fly. Cool stuff!
I remember that even before the first levy was introduced, many retailers did some serious gouging with the price of their blank CDs. I'd expect the same behaviour with this increase.
As other people have pointed out, this is Canada, so the RIAA is not involved. Instead the levy is collected by an oganization called CPCC (Canadian Private Copying Collective) which is just a collections umbrella for SOCAN (who apparently feel that they know "what's right for music") and some similar organizations.
I emailed an acquaintance of mine who is a researcher in the plant
sciences department of a university in the canadian prairies. I asked
him to clarify some points that seem to me to be the source of a lot of
confusion here. Here is his response:
Canola is generally self fertile but a significant out-crossing with
other canola plants can and does occur. The pollen can move from one
plant to another over significant distances (a few hundred metres is
possible) and bees will carry pollen for several kms so there can be cross
pollination between plants some distance apart. The greater the distance,
the lower the probability of this happening so cross pollination between
canola fields a couple of hundred metres apart would be a rare event.
The Roundup resistance gene which is at the centre of this case could
get into a farmer's field in one two ways:
Seed of Roundup resistant canola could blow off a passing
truck and the seed could germinate and establish a resistant plant(s)
in a field of conventional canola. If this is how the resistance trait
is introduced into the field, most of the resistant plants would be very
close to the edge of the field bordering the road and the we would expect
a low percentage of the plants to be resistant.
Conventional canola plants growing in a field could be pollinated
with pollen from a Roundup resistant plant (wind borne or brought in by
a bee - honey bees like canola fields and these fields are an important
source of honey for bee keepers). If this happens, the seed produced by
flowers that were cross pollinated would carry the Roundup resistance
trait and if that seed were planted the next year some of the canola
plants would be resistant to Roundup. Typically, the level of resistant
plants would be in the area of 1-2% of the total plant population.
Mr Schmieser contends that he was the victim of number 1. The problem
with his theory is that, apparently, the resistant plants were uniformly
distributed throughout his fields and at much higher levels (60-90% of
all plants in the field were resistant). This could only happen if one
were to start with a low level of Roundup resistant plants in a field
and spray the field with Roundup to kill all the susceptible plants and
save the seed of these plants to seed next year's crop.
Ask Stock Market Analyst Prakesh Patel of W.R. Hambrecht & Co. about Redhat's
Financial Statements
What's reported net loss versus adjusted net loss?
What means "adjusted cost"?
How the hell does this accounting stuff work anyways?
Is it important that a lot of this revenue is due to acquisitions?
Is Redhat changing their business plans?
What about the dangers of reducing R & D expenditures?
What's the significance of this future growth in subscription revenue?
How can I get rich?
Actually, I wouldn't mind seeing that interview. I listened in to the
Redhat analyst's conference call
last night, but don't really have the background to understand much of
it.
When did the PalmOS go out of style? Since when is WinCE the leader
in handhelds?
In terms of popularity, Palm sells more than
anybody. In fact, Palm and Handspring together had 87 percent of
the market in June 2000.
Technically, the PalmOS is limited, but definitely good
enough. They're the ones that finally got the interface
"right". They've got the right form factor, ease-of-use,
battery life and necessary speed. They don't have a huge list of bells,
whistles and gongs, but the essentials are there - and physically
stripped down to exactly the size I want. It is exactly what you need as
a PDA. More features (cameras, GPS, colour, music, phone, wireless are
available as add-ons) are nice, but they aren't always essential, and
shouldn't come at a permanent increase in size.
WinCE is attempting to be an all-singing, all-dancing embedded
OS. The reality is that it's being handily beaten by Palm in the
handheld market, by WindRiver (and other embedded OSes)
in the realtime and embedded markets.
Handspring is finally producing the phone
that I've wanted ever since I tried to juggle my old Casio BOSS and a
cellular brick-phone. Now if only it was available in Canada. (Oh, and
by the way Nokia, I don't want to enter appointments into a phone, using
a clumsy keypad and itty-bitty screen).
There are still way more apps for PalmOS than any of its competitors,
and developers get the benefits of an open environment. WinCE is a real
late-comer and doesn't offer enough improvements to be the front-runner.
The non-disclaimer: I own a Palm Vx, chosen specifically because of
it's form factor, user-interface and applications. I write embedded
telecommunications software (on realtime OSes) for a living. That's my
basis for these opinions.
Can everybody please post examples for how their short message was ballooned into wordy spam? I just got a new mouse with a scroll wheel and I'd like to try it out.
Here's a quick summary of who came up with what, and where things are going on. Morality, ethics, "Our world is crumbling around us", etc. are left to the professionals (and gifted amateurs) elsewhere in this discussion.
The spider silk gene is intellectual property of the University of Wyoming and is licensed by Nexia Biotechnologies. The spider silk genome information was patented through the work of Dr. Randy Lewis.
Nexia Biotechnologies is a company from St. Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec (on the western edge of Montreal). St. Anne is home to MacDonald College, the agricultural school of McGill University. Nexia's Corporate offices and R&D facilities are located in St. Anne. Nexia's CEO Jeffrey D. Turner is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Animal Science at McGill University.
Nexia's knowledge is not really in the spiders, but in the goats. Their press releases give an overview of what they're into. Specifically, they've got what they call BELE (Breed Early, Lacate Early) goats which can be used as a sort of biological factory. The spider silk becomes their first biologically manufactured product.
Nexia's breeding farm is the decomissioned base in Plattsburgh, New York. Their research farm is in Canada.
Nexia completed an IPO in December and apparantly has agreements with the US and Canadian military for the use of BioSteel.
You earn that sort of treatment, you don't get it automatically.
I am 100% in agreement with that statement. You do have to earn the right to be treated "like some sort of paragon of computing". You shouldn't have to earn the right to be treated like a human being. I work hard to be respected for my ability - I work to improve my skills, read to improve my knowledge. (I am however totally smart-assed and sarcastic). I expect to be judged on my ability and results, not on how old I am.
I have worked with 17 year olds that were worth more to a company than the 35 year-old who was his boss. I've also worked with 17 year olds I wouldn't trust to wipe their own ass. Merit comes from a great deal more than age.
I hope that your company has something about it that makes it worth it for recruits to go through some 'tear-em-down-then-build-them-up' corporate bootcamp. Myself, I've taken enough shit over the years to realize that somethings are worth it, and others you just walk away from. Gee, that sure is a broad open job market out there, ain't it?
Don't like being the office teaboy? Don't like being sneered at and ribbed by your colleagues because of your youth? Well, you won't get a job in my company then.
Could you please email me the name of your company so that I may submit my resume? I am young, fresh out of university and am seeking experience and guidance. I realize that with my B.Sc. in computer science I have a great many opportunities open to me, in open-minded, progressive companies desperate for my skills, however, I would really like to "have a man made of me".
Please allow me to check my mind at the door, and assume a demure, unappreciated presence in your offices. I assume that self-flagellation, and a suitable dominatrix will be provided for remedial self-esteem adjustment.
This comes down to the culture of an organization. I've worked at places where my opinion was discounted because I was young, and I've also worked at places where anyone over fifty was mistrusted. Some organization value experience over ability, others seem to believe that experience with old technology isn't relevant (perhaps missing associated ability).
Myself, I'm a big believer in meritocracy and rewarding individual ability and results (regardless of age, sex, ethnicity and sexual or editor preference). Get yourself into an organization that rewards competence and ability. (Unless you're incompetent).
Acutally, I prefer Spider Robinson's analogy that this DOS attack was like "a 12-year-old nincompoop gluing shut all the doors of the mall". Very appropriate as most of the sites are nothing more than commerce. I don't much care if I can't get into a store.
chsh won't work? Sysadmin won't edit/etc/shells? Don't have permissions on/etc/passwd?Why not explore the wonderful world of csh programming on Solaris? Start with the following one easy step!
Add the following to the end of your $HOME/.cshrc:
if ( -x/usr/local/bin/ksh ) exec/usr/local/bin/ksh
if ( -x/usr/local/bin/bash ) exec/usr/local/bin/bash
Disclaimer: I hope this doesn't become a shell war thread...:-?
Damn your eyes for that suggestion! You make outrageous inflamatory statements like "csh is OK" and expect to be left off the hook? I call on all followers of the One True Shell (whichever one it is for you) to declare war!
Slashdot Mirror
Are wheelchairs in fact carbon neutral? Even disregarding carbon during manufacturing/delivery to the point where it is at your door, can you say positively that a user does not burn more calories using a wheelchair versus other alternatives of getting around? Can you say that calories not burned by someone wearing an efficient exoskeleton will never outweigh the energy savings of a wheelchair or alternatives?
To treat your questions seriously, yes a manual wheelchair is carbon neutral.
- Carbon from manufacturing/delivery is comparable to a artisan-made bicycle - approx same manufacturing process, and style and size of business.
- Pushing a wheelchair burns about as many calories as walking. If you think about this it makes sense - you have smaller muscles called upon to do the work, but you're engaging less of your body in the effort, and you have the mechanical advantage of wheel.
Some data's available here, which puts wheelchair in the middle of light exertion walking.
http://caloriecount.about.com/activities-walking-ac17
Finally, using a wheelchairs all about sitting on your ass all day - how couldn't it burn less calories! :-)
You asked, so here's why this won't work:
"fit a pedal-powered generator". Where do those pedals fit? Basically down and in front. Take a look at some recumbent bicycle designs - preferably the more upright ones. Take a look at some wheelchair designs - standard legs out in front hospital-style, and some more active ones like tilite.com. Your pedal chain rings and crank-arms are going to have to fit somewhere very clever indeed to avoid them or the legs sticking out in front in a very awkward manner. Even standard hospital-style wheelchairs are a PITA to maneuver about due to the legs banging into everything, by adding the ability to pedal, you've just made that PITA far, far worse.
Leg strength - You're asking the compromised legs of someone who needs a wheelchair to produce power equivalent to an able-bodied person. That's not going to happen for a long, long time while atrophied muscles get stronger. You device needs to be enjoyable enough during that time, or human natures says, it will be abandoned.
Generating power - Most electric bicycles are just power assist for climbing hills. I don't think full-power generation is currently practical.
Power wheelchairs are hardly restricted to slow short-range trundling. They're 24-volt, and can reach speeds of at least 25km/h have ranges than can be extended by greater battery capacity, up to at least 30km. (Speed and range maximums may be higher - numbers are just from some individuals I know).
It's debatable that walking is better than a chair, but the able-bodied often blindly assume that walking must be so.
I'm partially paralysed due to a spinal cord injury, but can walk with a walker and a leg brace. When walking, I can go about 200 metres before my leg nerves/muscles are too weak to continue, and I need to take a break. That 200 metres will take me about 15 minutes - I've had double-leg-amputee Grannies speeding past me. During that time I can't carry anything unless it's very light and I can stuff it into a backpack.
Contrast this with my wheelchair, In which I can go faster than walking pace, can go for miles, and can carry heavier items in a backpack, and can carry items in my lap - either on their own, or in a tray. I can't clear the dining table while walking, but can with the chair. I can't go to the store with the walker.
Standing up - say to get stuff out of the cupboards - is a great, truly useful skill. Walking with compromised legs nerves, though, takes a another leap in level of ability before it beats a wheelchair.
There's a series of decent (but marketing-focused) articles explaining low-latency messaging around exchanges, and high-frequency trading at Solace Systems, makers of low-latency messaging appliances:
http://www.solacesystems.com/tag/low-latency
From that feed, here's a Reuters story about HFT that's more than just fear and frothing at the mouth:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKN173583920091202?pageNumber=1
- Richard
My solutions do include using the right tool for the job - if you're getting tripped up by a few references to paths containing spaces then you're doing it wrong. If you'd need to do _lots_ of path manipulation and thus lots of escaping, then doing it in bash makes no sense. With mastery of the tools, the question of "which tool?" is "where is this easier to type?"
Sending with scp works easily, all you need are some quotes - the following will work fine:
scp "A File Called Wanda" remote:/tmp
The problem's not with the tool...
If you (or the people supplying you with shell scripts) are having problems with spaces in pathnames, use double-quotes around your path references. Or backslash-escape the spaces if you must. And use the -0 arguments where appropriate (like with find and xargs).
If this (or another type of difficult input) gets too tedious, substitute perl - its quoting operators can make awkward backslash-escaping disappear.
- Richard
More awesomely, if you have found something in your history with ^R or up arrow or whatever, then you can press ^O to "execute this line and put the next line in the history onto the command line".
Thanks! I've wanted that probably about a thousand times.
You forgot:
7) ???
8) Profit!
HTH
Here's retelling of some of Feynman's anecdotes about safecraking at Los Alamos.
Feynman's book is a very good read, and yes, he did complain about their security problems.
Thanks! We can't have a great goat reference like that without a goatse.cx link. But I disagree - that looks like really, really heavy going indeed!
What you're looking for is spamgourmet: "self-destructing disposable email addresses, titanium strength spam blocking, very short learning curve". You set up a disposable (free) account with them, tell it how mny emails to allow, then give email address to untrustworthy individuals. They allow the number of emails to go through, then eat the rest. Can be reconfigured, or even created on the fly. Cool stuff!
In the interests of providing a little more context, here's the slashdot history of the recordable media levy:
I remember that even before the first levy was introduced, many retailers did some serious gouging with the price of their blank CDs. I'd expect the same behaviour with this increase.
As other people have pointed out, this is Canada, so the RIAA is not involved. Instead the levy is collected by an oganization called CPCC (Canadian Private Copying Collective) which is just a collections umbrella for SOCAN (who apparently feel that they know "what's right for music") and some similar organizations.
I emailed an acquaintance of mine who is a researcher in the plant sciences department of a university in the canadian prairies. I asked him to clarify some points that seem to me to be the source of a lot of confusion here. Here is his response:
Whoops! That's REALLY annoying. I guess that's why they have the preview button.
I can see it already:
Ask Stock Market Analyst Prakesh Patel of W.R. Hambrecht & Co. about Redhat's Financial Statements
Actually, I wouldn't mind seeing that interview. I listened in to the Redhat analyst's conference call last night, but don't really have the background to understand much of it.
When did the PalmOS go out of style? Since when is WinCE the leader in handhelds?
In terms of popularity, Palm sells more than anybody. In fact, Palm and Handspring together had 87 percent of the market in June 2000.
Technically, the PalmOS is limited, but definitely good enough. They're the ones that finally got the interface "right". They've got the right form factor, ease-of-use, battery life and necessary speed. They don't have a huge list of bells, whistles and gongs, but the essentials are there - and physically stripped down to exactly the size I want. It is exactly what you need as a PDA. More features (cameras, GPS, colour, music, phone, wireless are available as add-ons) are nice, but they aren't always essential, and shouldn't come at a permanent increase in size.
WinCE is attempting to be an all-singing, all-dancing embedded OS. The reality is that it's being handily beaten by Palm in the handheld market, by WindRiver (and other embedded OSes) in the realtime and embedded markets.
Handspring is finally producing the phone that I've wanted ever since I tried to juggle my old Casio BOSS and a cellular brick-phone. Now if only it was available in Canada. (Oh, and by the way Nokia, I don't want to enter appointments into a phone, using a clumsy keypad and itty-bitty screen).
There are still way more apps for PalmOS than any of its competitors, and developers get the benefits of an open environment. WinCE is a real late-comer and doesn't offer enough improvements to be the front-runner.
The non-disclaimer: I own a Palm Vx, chosen specifically because of it's form factor, user-interface and applications. I write embedded telecommunications software (on realtime OSes) for a living. That's my basis for these opinions.
Can everybody please post examples for how their short message was ballooned into wordy spam? I just got a new mouse with a scroll wheel and I'd like to try it out.
Oh, you've done that already. Thanks.
Here's a quick summary of who came up with what, and where things are going on. Morality, ethics, "Our world is crumbling around us", etc. are left to the professionals (and gifted amateurs) elsewhere in this discussion.
The spider silk gene is intellectual property of the University of Wyoming and is licensed by Nexia Biotechnologies. The spider silk genome information was patented through the work of Dr. Randy Lewis.
Nexia Biotechnologies is a company from St. Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec (on the western edge of Montreal). St. Anne is home to MacDonald College, the agricultural school of McGill University. Nexia's Corporate offices and R&D facilities are located in St. Anne. Nexia's CEO Jeffrey D. Turner is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Animal Science at McGill University.
Nexia's knowledge is not really in the spiders, but in the goats. Their press releases give an overview of what they're into. Specifically, they've got what they call BELE (Breed Early, Lacate Early) goats which can be used as a sort of biological factory. The spider silk becomes their first biologically manufactured product.
Nexia's breeding farm is the decomissioned base in Plattsburgh, New York. Their research farm is in Canada.
Nexia completed an IPO in December and apparantly has agreements with the US and Canadian military for the use of BioSteel.
I am 100% in agreement with that statement. You do have to earn the right to be treated "like some sort of paragon of computing". You shouldn't have to earn the right to be treated like a human being. I work hard to be respected for my ability - I work to improve my skills, read to improve my knowledge. (I am however totally smart-assed and sarcastic). I expect to be judged on my ability and results, not on how old I am.
I have worked with 17 year olds that were worth more to a company than the 35 year-old who was his boss. I've also worked with 17 year olds I wouldn't trust to wipe their own ass. Merit comes from a great deal more than age.
I hope that your company has something about it that makes it worth it for recruits to go through some 'tear-em-down-then-build-them-up' corporate bootcamp. Myself, I've taken enough shit over the years to realize that somethings are worth it, and others you just walk away from. Gee, that sure is a broad open job market out there, ain't it?
Could you please email me the name of your company so that I may submit my resume? I am young, fresh out of university and am seeking experience and guidance. I realize that with my B.Sc. in computer science I have a great many opportunities open to me, in open-minded, progressive companies desperate for my skills, however, I would really like to "have a man made of me".
Please allow me to check my mind at the door, and assume a demure, unappreciated presence in your offices. I assume that self-flagellation, and a suitable dominatrix will be provided for remedial self-esteem adjustment.
This comes down to the culture of an organization. I've worked at places where my opinion was discounted because I was young, and I've also worked at places where anyone over fifty was mistrusted. Some organization value experience over ability, others seem to believe that experience with old technology isn't relevant (perhaps missing associated ability).
Myself, I'm a big believer in meritocracy and rewarding individual ability and results (regardless of age, sex, ethnicity and sexual or editor preference). Get yourself into an organization that rewards competence and ability. (Unless you're incompetent).
I forgot to add a link to the full Globe and Mail story.
Acutally, I prefer Spider Robinson's analogy that this DOS attack was like "a 12-year-old nincompoop gluing shut all the doors of the mall". Very appropriate as most of the sites are nothing more than commerce. I don't much care if I can't get into a store.
chsh won't work? Sysadmin won't edit /etc/shells? Don't have permissions on /etc/passwd?Why not explore the wonderful world of csh programming on Solaris? Start with the following one easy step!
if ( -x /usr/local/bin/ksh ) exec /usr/local/bin/ksh /usr/local/bin/bash ) exec /usr/local/bin/bash
if ( -x
Damn your eyes for that suggestion! You make outrageous inflamatory statements like "csh is OK" and expect to be left off the hook? I call on all followers of the One True Shell (whichever one it is for you) to declare war!