You can make a fairly conventional looking car quite aerodynamic.
Thing is I'm not convinced it really makes a big difference if you don't travel much faster than 100kph - most of the present designs are aerodynamic enough - diminishing returns given the tradeoffs for an "aerodynamic" design[1].
After all for most cars the big problem with fuel consumption is stop/start driving (aka City driving), many can get really good mpg figures for pure highway driving.
One solution for stop/start is regenerative braking, the other solution is to have lighter cars (and passengers + luggage;) ).
Many motorcycles already get about 70-85mpg "real world". So I'm curious on what the Aptera "real world" mpgs will be. After all, how many mpg claims by manufacturers have matched "real world" figures?
BTW how do you handle a puncture with the Aptera?
[1] Most people want cars with a storage space that has easy access for shopping, luggage, golf bags, etc.
The Aptera may have lots of storage space but how easy is it to move stuff in and out? I can't find info on where the "boot" is.
A lot of the other "fancy designs" don't bother with such boring stuff and so the "boring" people don't buy them. There are a lot more "boring" people in the world than "interesting" people.
When I was a kid I bought this old book from one of those "old book sales" that was printed in 1977 called "How Things Don't Work"[1] and it was about bad and good designs. Quite a good book.
If I recall correctly they mentioned a toilet design just like the one shown in Popular Mechanics. So that's a design that must be more than 30 years old. I might go look for that book again, just to see how little designs have improved over 30 years.
The Japanese toilets are in a totally different league of their own - with puffs of air for drying, even sound effects.
My friend found this out the hard way when she was using one of those toilets. She had difficulty finding the "flush". She pressed one button/level and a puff of air came out, another and there was warm water for "cleansing", and so on, then she found a lever and there was a flushing noise, but no flushing water. She tried it again and same thing... Eventually after a while she found the real flush, and she asked someone what was that fake flush all about.
Turns out some Japanese people get embarassed at making certain sounds while doing the "toilet stuff" so they would flush to mask those embarassing sounds. This wastes water, so what some toilets have is a flush that just makes a sound and doesn't actually flush.
1) In some places, the email systems on average fail twice a week. BUT they don't go down for 20 hours. If an email service goes down unscheduled for 10 minutes every day it is not equivalent to the email service going down for 2.5 days once a year.
If your heartbeat is late by 20 milliseconds all year, you probably won't notice. If it's late by 7 seconds once a year, it might only be late once in your lifetime;).
2) Also for small/medium sized companies, a disaster big enough to bring down an email server managed by a semi-competent IT dept for 20 hours is often a disaster big enough to _independently_ bring down the rest of the company's operations for 20 hours. For example the company's office + factory burns down.
When that happens the email servers being "down" is not high on the Boss's list of concerns.
At other times, the IT dept should be able to get up and running in less than 8 hours.
If you're down when nearly everyone else is down who cares? But if you're down when the other departments in the company are running fine (except for you not doing your part), guess who gets the stares?
If your company is mainly a bunch of people roaming the world/country, then going gmail might be OK, but you should have a backup email service provider (definitely not Hotmail though - but Yahoo Mail seems OK).
Then they can't go around asking everyone for their keys - because most really wouldn't have them:).
The Truecrypt proponents don't get it. Hidden container or not, you have to voluntarily install Truecrypt, so that's sufficient cause for them to target and trouble you.
But even if they reoffend, robbers and violent people reoffend too (arguably at higher rates), they're not locked up forever.
You still give them another chance. Even if they keep doing it again.
I'd rather live in a society that's civilized enough to give people another chance, rather than lock them up forever, or execute them.
If rehabilitation doesn't work (maybe the rehab methods are broken? Fix them then) and they keep proving themselves dangerous then lock them up longer (you don't have to torture them - just lock them up), rather than put them on stupid lists.
3) So what if they don't change their sexual preferences?
The last I checked not every guy rapes girls they are attracted to, not every guy has consensual sex with another man's wife/girlfriend just because they are attracted to each other.
What are you going to do? Jail them for thought crime?
They're already jailing people for possessing child porn.
In some places adultery is illegal (I'm sure that includes parts of the USA), so maybe they should start jailing people for having movies of that AND get turned on by watching it.
Maybe they'll jail you one day and put you on a sex offender list because you were undressing a woman with your eyes, against her will.
Or jail and list your son because he had this silly app on his phone that fakes "undressing a woman" given a photo.
"and later being offered and receiving oral sex from a 15-year-old girl" = "aggravated child molestation" = mandatory 10 year jail sentence.
Imagine if your friend got jailed for 10 years because you voluntarily initiated sex with him. Talk about mentally scarred for life, and so who was doing the scarring - your friend? No. The State.
Then there are cases of high school kids sending naked pictures of themselves to others... Kids do that sort of stuff. They're silly, but they never expect that the State might jail them in order to "protect them".
Who needs protection like that? The State ends up being one more threat to your children's safety - if not a bigger threat.
What most people don't understand about software is that with software: 1) the blueprint compiles and runs = it "kinda works" 2) It costs about as much (if not more!) to make the blueprint as it does to make the prototype and the real thing. 3) The Build Phase of Software Engineering involves the programmer typing "make all" and going for a cup of coffee or home, and costs 24 cents. In contrast the Build Phase of Civil Engineering involves heavy machinery and lots of workers with hard hats, and costs $$$$$$$.
Given 1) and 2) there's a very high pressure for Management to sell the blueprint drafts as version 1.0.
Software: make each blueprint = USD1 million, and it "kinda works" for the customer. make final = USD1 million, and it "kinda works a bit better" for the customer.
Big Building: make each blueprint = USD1 million ( customer rarely buys them). make final blueprints = USD1 million Architect Firm charges USD10 million for all the design stuff including making as many blueprints as it takes, and everyone signs off on the final blueprints Make actual building = USD100 million, "works 99.99%" for the customer.
And that's why software engineering can't be like civil engineering.
Say you like creating programs and not maintaining them (e.g. doing boring minor "enhancements"), so you want to create a program, and then outsource the support to India (for example), so that you can go on with creating other programs.
How do you do that in LISP?
I don't like Java, but seems all these "outsource" programmers love it. So it makes some sense to write the program in English, and get the programmers to "compile it" to Java, C# or some other buzzword compliant language of the day.
> So Google's "going green" is at the cost of making everyone else less "green".
That's not true if the chips just tolerate higher temps better (instead of generating less heat - which is a different thing).
Giving chips that can't take higher temps to Joe Average is not going to increase energy consumption - since: 1) Joe Average is going to have air conditioning/heating set for the humans 2) Joe Average's house/room does not have a high server density and has poor insulation, so most of the airconditioning energy is used to pump out heat that leaks in from outside, rather that heat from the few computers on in Joe's house/room.
Conventional Wisdom Company is going to have their server air conditioning set to "way cold", either out of habit or they really have stuff that really needs low temps (there used to be stuff that caught fire rather easily:) ).
So no difference to them.
That said the CPUs can take about 60-70C, so it's not a big deal even if ambient is 40C (104F), as long as the airflow is enough to take the heat away.
So I wonder what temperatures the chips are running at in Google's data centers - some articles claim they have ambient at 80F (26C), what are the temps at motherboard and CPU? If the density is high enough, those temps might be high...
I'm in a tropical country and the computers in my home are definitely exposed to an ambient of > 80F. Heck 86F-92F (30C-33C) wouldn't be far from typical. And they work fine.
I think countries in the Middle East region are hotter - doubt all PC owners there have airconditioning.
I'm actually more worried about the hard drives failing due to high temps.
I read the article and it says the grunting doesn't really sound like moles, and they react differently - while they surface for both, they move away from the moles but they do not move away from the "grunting".
Question: do earthquakes harm worms significantly? I'm thinking not likely.
Or is it just for the "grunting" the worms can't tell where the "mole" is.
"I've read that Qantas outsourced the maintenance of their planes to a Malaysian subsidiary of Malaysian Airlines, so chances are both planes were serviced by the same group of people"
Just make voter coercion a _serious_ offense (someone tries to coerce you, they go to jail for a very long time).
So what if votes are sold? What if I think it's better for someone to bribe me with their money to vote some way, than the politicians bribing me with my own money to vote some way.
I personally think the website thing is a bad idea (physical voting and hand counts are best), but if the website allows people to change their vote until a certain deadline that does cut the impact of vote selling.
So they can sell their vote multiple times and change it to what they want, and the buyers know that.
If the buyers can kidnap thousands of voters, I think the country has a bigger problem than web voting, and if that problem isn't fixed it doesn't really matter what voting system is used...
Slashdot Mirror
You can make a fairly conventional looking car quite aerodynamic.
;) ).
Thing is I'm not convinced it really makes a big difference if you don't travel much faster than 100kph - most of the present designs are aerodynamic enough - diminishing returns given the tradeoffs for an "aerodynamic" design[1].
After all for most cars the big problem with fuel consumption is stop/start driving (aka City driving), many can get really good mpg figures for pure highway driving.
One solution for stop/start is regenerative braking, the other solution is to have lighter cars (and passengers + luggage
Many motorcycles already get about 70-85mpg "real world". So I'm curious on what the Aptera "real world" mpgs will be. After all, how many mpg claims by manufacturers have matched "real world" figures?
BTW how do you handle a puncture with the Aptera?
[1] Most people want cars with a storage space that has easy access for shopping, luggage, golf bags, etc.
The Aptera may have lots of storage space but how easy is it to move stuff in and out? I can't find info on where the "boot" is.
A lot of the other "fancy designs" don't bother with such boring stuff and so the "boring" people don't buy them. There are a lot more "boring" people in the world than "interesting" people.
Almost 10 years?
When I was a kid I bought this old book from one of those "old book sales" that was printed in 1977 called "How Things Don't Work"[1] and it was about bad and good designs. Quite a good book.
If I recall correctly they mentioned a toilet design just like the one shown in Popular Mechanics. So that's a design that must be more than 30 years old. I might go look for that book again, just to see how little designs have improved over 30 years.
The Japanese toilets are in a totally different league of their own - with puffs of air for drying, even sound effects.
My friend found this out the hard way when she was using one of those toilets. She had difficulty finding the "flush". She pressed one button/level and a puff of air came out, another and there was warm water for "cleansing", and so on, then she found a lever and there was a flushing noise, but no flushing water. She tried it again and same thing... Eventually after a while she found the real flush, and she asked someone what was that fake flush all about.
Turns out some Japanese people get embarassed at making certain sounds while doing the "toilet stuff" so they would flush to mask those embarassing sounds. This wastes water, so what some toilets have is a flush that just makes a sound and doesn't actually flush.
[1] Here's a review of that book: http://www.diemer.ca/Docs/Diemer-HowThingsDontWork-Review.htm
There certainly are badly run IT depts out there.
;).
1) In some places, the email systems on average fail twice a week. BUT they don't go down for 20 hours. If an email service goes down unscheduled for 10 minutes every day it is not equivalent to the email service going down for 2.5 days once a year.
If your heartbeat is late by 20 milliseconds all year, you probably won't notice. If it's late by 7 seconds once a year, it might only be late once in your lifetime
2) Also for small/medium sized companies, a disaster big enough to bring down an email server managed by a semi-competent IT dept for 20 hours is often a disaster big enough to _independently_ bring down the rest of the company's operations for 20 hours. For example the company's office + factory burns down.
When that happens the email servers being "down" is not high on the Boss's list of concerns.
At other times, the IT dept should be able to get up and running in less than 8 hours.
If you're down when nearly everyone else is down who cares?
But if you're down when the other departments in the company are running fine (except for you not doing your part), guess who gets the stares?
If your company is mainly a bunch of people roaming the world/country, then going gmail might be OK, but you should have a backup email service provider (definitely not Hotmail though - but Yahoo Mail seems OK).
In some places that person also gives advice on tech stuff to the boss. Like "Hey Boss, you shouldn't bet the entire company's email on gmail". :)
"I bet more money is spent trying to improve rail safety than road safety though"
:)
Rightfully so, because it's better for the species.
How many genes can get selected for "fitness" by crossing a busy road or driving a car, compared to choosing to sit in a train or plane?
If they figure out you "misused" it, they'll just make people hate you instead of hating the broken system.
And they might claim you did millions of dollars of damage and so put you in jail for a long time.
And add yet another stupid law (and expensive system?) supposedly to protect the public from people like you.
Kind of surprising actually.
I believe the convention has it that for a particular task, expert brains have less activity than novice brains.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0003270
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1576979
Apparently it is easier to make the world warmer with our present tech level, than it is to make it cooler.
:).
Therefore we can cope with cooler better than warmer
Given our present tech level it's probably easier to cope with X degrees too cold than X degrees too warm.
Yeah. Go fetch the key without my help.
As I've been saying, what we need is better plausible deniability.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/148440
Then they can't go around asking everyone for their keys - because most really wouldn't have them :).
The Truecrypt proponents don't get it. Hidden container or not, you have to voluntarily install Truecrypt, so that's sufficient cause for them to target and trouble you.
"The problem with sex offenders is that no matter what kind of rehab/psych treatments the offender gets, they do not change their sexual preferences"
1) Not all sex offenders are what you are thinking of (others have pointed it out)
2) So but do they reoffend? This is a nerd site, let's have some evidence.
Not a reliable source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_offender#Recidivism_rates
But even if they reoffend, robbers and violent people reoffend too (arguably at higher rates), they're not locked up forever.
You still give them another chance. Even if they keep doing it again.
I'd rather live in a society that's civilized enough to give people another chance, rather than lock them up forever, or execute them.
If rehabilitation doesn't work (maybe the rehab methods are broken? Fix them then) and they keep proving themselves dangerous then lock them up longer (you don't have to torture them - just lock them up), rather than put them on stupid lists.
3) So what if they don't change their sexual preferences?
The last I checked not every guy rapes girls they are attracted to, not every guy has consensual sex with another man's wife/girlfriend just because they are attracted to each other.
What are you going to do? Jail them for thought crime?
They're already jailing people for possessing child porn.
In some places adultery is illegal (I'm sure that includes parts of the USA), so maybe they should start jailing people for having movies of that AND get turned on by watching it.
Maybe they'll jail you one day and put you on a sex offender list because you were undressing a woman with your eyes, against her will.
Or jail and list your son because he had this silly app on his phone that fakes "undressing a woman" given a photo.
Yep sex offenders could be high school kids _consensually_ having sex with each other.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_v._State_of_Georgia
"and later being offered and receiving oral sex from a 15-year-old girl" = "aggravated child molestation" = mandatory 10 year jail sentence.
Imagine if your friend got jailed for 10 years because you voluntarily initiated sex with him. Talk about mentally scarred for life, and so who was doing the scarring - your friend? No. The State.
Then there are cases of high school kids sending naked pictures of themselves to others... Kids do that sort of stuff. They're silly, but they never expect that the State might jail them in order to "protect them".
Who needs protection like that? The State ends up being one more threat to your children's safety - if not a bigger threat.
Software Engineering versions explained for the Civil Engineering folk:
1.0 = plastic model/first draft
2.0 = blueprint
3.0 = prototype
3.1 = real thing
What most people don't understand about software is that with software:
1) the blueprint compiles and runs = it "kinda works"
2) It costs about as much (if not more!) to make the blueprint as it does to make the prototype and the real thing.
3) The Build Phase of Software Engineering involves the programmer typing "make all" and going for a cup of coffee or home, and costs 24 cents. In contrast the Build Phase of Civil Engineering involves heavy machinery and lots of workers with hard hats, and costs $$$$$$$.
Given 1) and 2) there's a very high pressure for Management to sell the blueprint drafts as version 1.0.
Software:
make each blueprint = USD1 million, and it "kinda works" for the customer.
make final = USD1 million, and it "kinda works a bit better" for the customer.
Big Building:
make each blueprint = USD1 million ( customer rarely buys them).
make final blueprints = USD1 million
Architect Firm charges USD10 million for all the design stuff including making as many blueprints as it takes, and everyone signs off on the final blueprints
Make actual building = USD100 million, "works 99.99%" for the customer.
And that's why software engineering can't be like civil engineering.
"Lastly, if there were no major issues there, and the package was sufficiently expensive,"
Do you happen to work for the US Department of Defense?
Where I used to work, expensive = minus points, free = plus points.
Say you like creating programs and not maintaining them (e.g. doing boring minor "enhancements"), so you want to create a program, and then outsource the support to India (for example), so that you can go on with creating other programs.
How do you do that in LISP?
I don't like Java, but seems all these "outsource" programmers love it. So it makes some sense to write the program in English, and get the programmers to "compile it" to Java, C# or some other buzzword compliant language of the day.
Well it depends on how fast they want those chips to clock.
Intel could say, 5 degrees warmer? No problem, here are your 2GHz high temp chips.
And somehow they're the same price as the 3GHz chips that only support normal temps. Or a bit more expensive since they're "custom".
Not sure how much CPU google needs vs I/O throughput. If they don't need as much CPU per box then this might actually be viable.
> So Google's "going green" is at the cost of making everyone else less "green".
:) ).
That's not true if the chips just tolerate higher temps better (instead of generating less heat - which is a different thing).
Giving chips that can't take higher temps to Joe Average is not going to increase energy consumption - since:
1) Joe Average is going to have air conditioning/heating set for the humans
2) Joe Average's house/room does not have a high server density and has poor insulation, so most of the airconditioning energy is used to pump out heat that leaks in from outside, rather that heat from the few computers on in Joe's house/room.
Conventional Wisdom Company is going to have their server air conditioning set to "way cold", either out of habit or they really have stuff that really needs low temps (there used to be stuff that caught fire rather easily
So no difference to them.
That said the CPUs can take about 60-70C, so it's not a big deal even if ambient is 40C (104F), as long as the airflow is enough to take the heat away.
So I wonder what temperatures the chips are running at in Google's data centers - some articles claim they have ambient at 80F (26C), what are the temps at motherboard and CPU? If the density is high enough, those temps might be high...
I'm in a tropical country and the computers in my home are definitely exposed to an ambient of > 80F. Heck 86F-92F (30C-33C) wouldn't be far from typical. And they work fine.
I think countries in the Middle East region are hotter - doubt all PC owners there have airconditioning.
I'm actually more worried about the hard drives failing due to high temps.
Cheaper way to experience zero G:
:).
Jump and fall...
Wheeee
Careful about the landing bit.
Yeah, so I'm wondering where the 400k/month is really coming from.
;).
Is it from stupid people buying the stuff advertised in spam, or is it from stupid people paying spammers to "advertise" for them?
Or maybe the placebo effect is working rather well for some people, so they become regular customers
I read the article and it says the grunting doesn't really sound like moles, and they react differently - while they surface for both, they move away from the moles but they do not move away from the "grunting".
Question: do earthquakes harm worms significantly? I'm thinking not likely.
Or is it just for the "grunting" the worms can't tell where the "mole" is.
I meant the MAS pilots (who might not be Malaysians at all).
"I've read that Qantas outsourced the maintenance of their planes to a Malaysian subsidiary of Malaysian Airlines, so chances are both planes were serviced by the same group of people"
Not necessarily:
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24152399-5017323,00.html
http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/8/15/nation/20080815171659&sec=nation
As for the 777, the Malaysian pilots were lucky or did a better job of handling the incident - no injuries:
http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2005/AAIR/aair200503722.aspx
Because wrestling with the issues is harder than watching "wrestling" on TV and cheering on your favourite party^H^H^H^H^Hwrestling team ;).
Hi, I'm sorry I'm kidnapped right now, please leave a message and I hope I can get back to you later.
Just make voter coercion a _serious_ offense (someone tries to coerce you, they go to jail for a very long time).
So what if votes are sold? What if I think it's better for someone to bribe me with their money to vote some way, than the politicians bribing me with my own money to vote some way.
I personally think the website thing is a bad idea (physical voting and hand counts are best), but if the website allows people to change their vote until a certain deadline that does cut the impact of vote selling.
So they can sell their vote multiple times and change it to what they want, and the buyers know that.
If the buyers can kidnap thousands of voters, I think the country has a bigger problem than web voting, and if that problem isn't fixed it doesn't really matter what voting system is used...