These "scientists have discovered the formula for" sorts of stories make (actual) scientists look like nutty boffins who make no real contribution to the world. (Actually, the word "boffin" is, in the Commonwealth, a pretty good marker for BS science stories.)
Newspaper science reporting is bad enough already. Do we really need this pure liquid crap flowing through Slashdot too?
(Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre has had rather a lot to say about these sorts of stories, and the whores who create them, over the years.)
Google gets to see the answers, but anyone searching for those answers doesn't get them, but is told to sign up and pay money for a "premium subscription".
Unless they, you know, just scroll down.
The munged answers and exhortations to sign up are at the top of the page, but if you just scroll down, you'll see the plaintext at the end.
This isn't immediately obvious, but it's hardly difficult.
Humans are, fundamentally, abysmally unsuited to survival in space. Plus, we insist on bringing astronauts BACK, which makes every manned mission FAR more complex and expensive.
Human spaceflight may be romantic and inspiring, and a human may be far more flexible and adaptable than any robot, but humans also have outrageous supply and environmental demands. It's simply impossible for manned missions to do more than a tiny fraction of what far cheaper automated probes can do.
And every time NASA shoots a Shuttle into low orbit to feed the ISS so that it can be dropped into the ocean on schedule, they do almost zero to advance human knowledge, and spend enough money to send a whole new robot-rover mission to Mars and then run it for three months.
People who insist that manned spaceflight is worth the price do not, I think, usually comprehend the magnitude of the difference between that price and the price of unmanned probes. They also seem to have a pretty poor grasp of what space science actually entails, and how little of it even theoretically can be done by people.
Exactly the situation you imagine was also imagined by the people who run the various Robot-Wars-esque competitions, before the "sport" even began. Electromagnetic weapons were forbidden by the first versions of the rules, along with all of the other obvious super-killers - firearms, flamethrowers and so on.
It does mean something, but it doesn't seem to mean much. Instead of the 3kHz-ish bandwidth of your normal voice phone link, this standard provides 150Hz to 6.8kHz audio bandwidth.
That, of course, is very well within the abilities of all kinds of crappy five-dollar microphones. This gadget is an integrated device with mic module, A/D converter and other jazz, but there doesn't seem to be anything else special about it.
There's nothing stopping software VOIP systems from providing DC-to-daylight audio bandwidth if you've got the link bandwidth to support it. I would be very surprised if you couldn't get a zero-dollar VOIP connection today that sounds better than this new "improved" standard, if you use even half-decent mics at either end.
I must admit there's a certain recursive appeal to the idea of someone being notable enough for a Wikipedia entry purely because of his vehement attempts to avoid being mentioned on Wikipedia.
As usual, the talk page has lots of entertaining dirt.
If they can actually make an OLPC with the specs of the most recent prototypes, it'd still be a good deal at $300.
It's a significantly more capable machine than an AlphaSmart Dana, and those sell for more than $400. There's a definite niche for rugged PC-companion machines with full-sized keyboards. The OLPC beats every previous entrant in that category by having a much better screen - everything else has a "mail slot" black and white screen with pretty miserable resolution.
The Dana is, I think, the best of the breed at the moment, since it has a 560 by 160 greyscale LCD screen and runs Palm OS. The dual-mode OLPC screen beats that by miles, and the OLPC also runs (or will run, or is alleged to run...) Linux.
> I had prospective employers, even those in the energy trading business, > actually deny me employment because I worked at Enron, as if I had something > to do with their downfall as an upper level tech person.
It occurs to me that the best response to such suspicions would be to point out that if you were one of the swindlers, you wouldn't need to look for another job.
Yep - the protagonist races in Known Space have no FTL until the humans get it towards the end of the first Man-Kzin War. FTL is what ends that war, since the humans can now flit about and deal with sublight battlefleets before they get to their destination.
When your concerns are based on one old newspaper article and the word of a person who opposes fluoridation and vaccination, and makes money by advocating various dietary quackery (refined sugar's a deadly poison, popular "healthy" foods are hideously contaminated, chelation's good for what ails you...), it behooves you to expend a bit more energy making sure your concerns are, in fact, justified.
For most of Sydney's suburbs, though, they've got amazing resolution. I mean, if you want to see Gladesville Shopping Centre in awesome detail - no problem!
I presume more inner-Sydney detail's coming soon. There's plenty of detail on our huge stupid Parliament House already.
> His four tests used 3 different charging times. The first two trials he did an overnight charge. The third test was the official charge time.
You misunderstand how LiI batteries work.
As you say, I did a run with the battery after it'd been sitting uncharged in my camera bag for N weeks, then I gave it an overnight charge before testing again, then I charged it again right after that run - which presumably accounted for its not-so-good third-run result.
I gave the battery a decent chance to recover from its 10 cycles before doing the final, "Activatored", test, which is (again presumably) why it did reasonably well - in fact, just as well as you'd expect if the sticker were just, um, a sticker.
The important point here is that overnight charging of a LiI battery should be no better than shorter "full" charging, because LiI chargers pump lots of current into the battery in constant current mode over a relatively short time, then tail off in constant voltage mode, then sit and do nothing - no trickle charge. It's plausible that a LiI charger will report a full charge before the constant voltage mode is quite complete, but that mode will _not_ take more than an hour or two. Any further benefit is solely due to giving the battery time to rest and cool down.
Most computer fans have the decency to make a racket for a while before their bearings are so damaged that the fan stops, or doesn't spin fast enough to keep its component cool. I actually use the USB/1394 box I reviewed here, and its fan started crapping out after not a whole lot of months of service. A squirt of oil silenced it, and it's been fine for quite a while now.
Once you've ignored one noisy fan bearing and lost hardware and/or system reliability as a result, you become pretty good at picking the noise, even in a room full of computers:-).
> As a matter of fact, LEDs are quite a neat lighting solution;
> they're cheap, awfully efficient and have a long working life.
Well, kinda, but if you actually want to light your house with the things, you're going to be disappointed. Coloured LEDs have efficiency rather better than that of incandescent bulbs, but fluorescents still beat them. White LEDs are only up there with the better halogens in lumens-per-watt terms. Their colour rendering is actually very good (certainly when compared with high efficiency triphosphor fluorescents), but there's not yet any practical way to get useful light levels from them over more than a small area.
For reading lamps, accent lights and flashlights, regular 5mm LEDs and the high power "super-LEDs" (Luxeon Stars and their clones) work well. If you want to replace a lamp with a rating of tens of watts in incandescent terms, LEDs ain't there yet.
...is that the Smart city cars (as opposed to the impossible-to-hate roadster) are just not good cars for the money.
There's unquestionably room in the market, especially in highly urbanised countries where fuel is expensive, for tiny funky city cars like these. I'd buy one. But the Smarts, despite being a Mercedes co-production (which would lead you to think it'd be nice but have lousy quality control...), are just lousy to drive and too expensive, according to all reports. The reviews (Review 1, Review 2) have been so lousy that I ruled out even ever test driving one; if the things cost $AU5000 then that'd be another matter, but they're really quite expensive here, and the US pricing would seem to be similarly inflated, compared with the lower pricing of regular cars in the States.
Here in Sydney, Australia, I see a Smart tooling around every now and then, but every single one I've seen has been a corporate promotional vehicle, not a private car. There's no reason at all for a private citizen to buy one of these expensive, annoying little things, when perfectly good four-seat Japanese subcompacts are available for the same money. Korean ones cost rather less.
I'd never previously bothered to check who was responsible for those almost invariably completely irrelevant ad-linked words on some sites - [random example]this article, for instance[/random example].
I can see how Vibrant's marketing people could spin this to potential clients, though. The relevance of their machine-generated ad-links is incredible. I mean, how could you possibly tell the difference between one of my link-infestedreviews and a page where the word "developers" in a sentence about game programming is linked to this page? Later on, "PC" links, just as spookily perfectly, to the Dell.co.uk Back To School Sale.
Well, actually, that link's broken right now. But I'm sure that's just because of excessive server load from all the people clicking on it.
The Hostway link's there again, from "control panel", as in "graphics card driver control panel", on the next page. In that same paragraph the laser-like specificity of the term "computer system" triggered another perfect-bullseye Vibrant Media link, to some remote network admin software.
If site operators can get themselves some useful income by defacing their pages with these mouseover-box-triggering, reading-interrupting irrelevancies, then more power to 'em. Lord knows I've cluttered my own site with pop-ups and banners galore (which I encourage my readers to block). But Vibrant must have some bad-ass sales people if they can convince anyone to pay any significant amount of money for this kind of advertising.
Disc guns that actually shoot straight are a tricky engineering challenge, but the "Shot-Blade" pretty much solves it; I reviewed it a while ago. The Shot-Blade has a lot more spring power than it needs to shoot its little lightweight projectiles; I could see it being reworked into a CD launcher of some kind.
Slashdot Mirror
These "scientists have discovered the formula for" sorts of stories make (actual) scientists look like nutty boffins who make no real contribution to the world. (Actually, the word "boffin" is, in the Commonwealth, a pretty good marker for BS science stories.)
Newspaper science reporting is bad enough already. Do we really need this pure liquid crap flowing through Slashdot too?
(Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre has had rather a lot to say about these sorts of stories, and the whores who create them, over the years.)
Google gets to see the answers, but anyone searching for those answers doesn't get them, but is told to sign up and pay money for a "premium subscription".
Unless they, you know, just scroll down.
The munged answers and exhortations to sign up are at the top of the page, but if you just scroll down, you'll see the plaintext at the end.
This isn't immediately obvious, but it's hardly difficult.
Humans are, fundamentally, abysmally unsuited to survival in space. Plus, we insist on bringing astronauts BACK, which makes every manned mission FAR more complex and expensive.
Human spaceflight may be romantic and inspiring, and a human may be far more flexible and adaptable than any robot, but humans also have outrageous supply and environmental demands. It's simply impossible for manned missions to do more than a tiny fraction of what far cheaper automated probes can do.
And every time NASA shoots a Shuttle into low orbit to feed the ISS so that it can be dropped into the ocean on schedule, they do almost zero to advance human knowledge, and spend enough money to send a whole new robot-rover mission to Mars and then run it for three months.
People who insist that manned spaceflight is worth the price do not, I think, usually comprehend the magnitude of the difference between that price and the price of unmanned probes. They also seem to have a pretty poor grasp of what space science actually entails, and how little of it even theoretically can be done by people.
Exactly the situation you imagine was also imagined by the people who run the various Robot-Wars-esque competitions, before the "sport" even began. Electromagnetic weapons were forbidden by the first versions of the rules, along with all of the other obvious super-killers - firearms, flamethrowers and so on.
That, of course, is very well within the abilities of all kinds of crappy five-dollar microphones. This gadget is an integrated device with mic module, A/D converter and other jazz, but there doesn't seem to be anything else special about it.
There's nothing stopping software VOIP systems from providing DC-to-daylight audio bandwidth if you've got the link bandwidth to support it. I would be very surprised if you couldn't get a zero-dollar VOIP connection today that sounds better than this new "improved" standard, if you use even half-decent mics at either end.
142 out of 12,000, some of which aren't really a problem, and that's numbers generated by a critic?
And a very... dedicated critic, too.
I must admit there's a certain recursive appeal to the idea of someone being notable enough for a Wikipedia entry purely because of his vehement attempts to avoid being mentioned on Wikipedia.
As usual, the talk page has lots of entertaining dirt.
(Uncyclopedia has the real low-down, of course.)
If they can actually make an OLPC with the specs of the most recent prototypes, it'd still be a good deal at $300.
It's a significantly more capable machine than an AlphaSmart Dana, and those sell for more than $400. There's a definite niche for rugged PC-companion machines with full-sized keyboards. The OLPC beats every previous entrant in that category by having a much better screen - everything else has a "mail slot" black and white screen with pretty miserable resolution.
The Dana is, I think, the best of the breed at the moment, since it has a 560 by 160 greyscale LCD screen and runs Palm OS. The dual-mode OLPC screen beats that by miles, and the OLPC also runs (or will run, or is alleged to run...) Linux.
> I had prospective employers, even those in the energy trading business,
> actually deny me employment because I worked at Enron, as if I had something
> to do with their downfall as an upper level tech person.
It occurs to me that the best response to such suspicions would be to point out that if you were one of the swindlers, you wouldn't need to look for another job.
Yep - the protagonist races in Known Space have no FTL until the humans get it towards the end of the first Man-Kzin War. FTL is what ends that war, since the humans can now flit about and deal with sublight battlefleets before they get to their destination.
Either
(a) he's running a truly awesome amount of auction management and/or sniping software for a whole bunch of auctions, or
(b) he's running eBay.
I suggest you start with the World Health Organisation.
This and this are the important ones.
Honourable, if somewhat out of date, mention: This.
And, of course, this and this and this and this and this.
Hmm. Maybe not so much.
For most of Sydney's suburbs, though, they've got amazing resolution. I mean, if you want to see Gladesville Shopping Centre in awesome detail - no problem!
I presume more inner-Sydney detail's coming soon. There's plenty of detail on our huge stupid Parliament House already.
Cool, huh?
You misunderstand how LiI batteries work. As you say, I did a run with the battery after it'd been sitting uncharged in my camera bag for N weeks, then I gave it an overnight charge before testing again, then I charged it again right after that run - which presumably accounted for its not-so-good third-run result.
I gave the battery a decent chance to recover from its 10 cycles before doing the final, "Activatored", test, which is (again presumably) why it did reasonably well - in fact, just as well as you'd expect if the sticker were just, um, a sticker.
The important point here is that overnight charging of a LiI battery should be no better than shorter "full" charging, because LiI chargers pump lots of current into the battery in constant current mode over a relatively short time, then tail off in constant voltage mode, then sit and do nothing - no trickle charge. It's plausible that a LiI charger will report a full charge before the constant voltage mode is quite complete, but that mode will _not_ take more than an hour or two. Any further benefit is solely due to giving the battery time to rest and cool down.
Indeed.
Once you've ignored one noisy fan bearing and lost hardware and/or system reliability as a result, you become pretty good at picking the noise, even in a room full of computers :-).
Well, kinda, but if you actually want to light your house with the things, you're going to be disappointed. Coloured LEDs have efficiency rather better than that of incandescent bulbs, but fluorescents still beat them. White LEDs are only up there with the better halogens in lumens-per-watt terms. Their colour rendering is actually very good (certainly when compared with high efficiency triphosphor fluorescents), but there's not yet any practical way to get useful light levels from them over more than a small area.
For reading lamps, accent lights and flashlights, regular 5mm LEDs and the high power "super-LEDs" (Luxeon Stars and their clones) work well. If you want to replace a lamp with a rating of tens of watts in incandescent terms, LEDs ain't there yet.
There's unquestionably room in the market, especially in highly urbanised countries where fuel is expensive, for tiny funky city cars like these. I'd buy one. But the Smarts, despite being a Mercedes co-production (which would lead you to think it'd be nice but have lousy quality control...), are just lousy to drive and too expensive, according to all reports. The reviews (Review 1, Review 2) have been so lousy that I ruled out even ever test driving one; if the things cost $AU5000 then that'd be another matter, but they're really quite expensive here, and the US pricing would seem to be similarly inflated, compared with the lower pricing of regular cars in the States.
Here in Sydney, Australia, I see a Smart tooling around every now and then, but every single one I've seen has been a corporate promotional vehicle, not a private car. There's no reason at all for a private citizen to buy one of these expensive, annoying little things, when perfectly good four-seat Japanese subcompacts are available for the same money. Korean ones cost rather less.
I can see how Vibrant's marketing people could spin this to potential clients, though. The relevance of their machine-generated ad-links is incredible. I mean, how could you possibly tell the difference between one of my link-infested reviews and a page where the word "developers" in a sentence about game programming is linked to this page? Later on, "PC" links, just as spookily perfectly, to the Dell.co.uk Back To School Sale.
Well, actually, that link's broken right now. But I'm sure that's just because of excessive server load from all the people clicking on it.
The Hostway link's there again, from "control panel", as in "graphics card driver control panel", on the next page. In that same paragraph the laser-like specificity of the term "computer system" triggered another perfect-bullseye Vibrant Media link, to some remote network admin software.
If site operators can get themselves some useful income by defacing their pages with these mouseover-box-triggering, reading-interrupting irrelevancies, then more power to 'em. Lord knows I've cluttered my own site with pop-ups and banners galore (which I encourage my readers to block). But Vibrant must have some bad-ass sales people if they can convince anyone to pay any significant amount of money for this kind of advertising.
GameSpot concurs.
Disc guns that actually shoot straight are a tricky engineering challenge, but the "Shot-Blade" pretty much solves it; I reviewed it a while ago. The Shot-Blade has a lot more spring power than it needs to shoot its little lightweight projectiles; I could see it being reworked into a CD launcher of some kind.
Yes :-).
Did anybody else look at that logo and immediately think of a Red Dwarf episode?