A good glider has a 20:1 glide ratio, and a well designed paper glider could achieve this, theoretically you could do better. Given a release altitude of 23 miles which gives 460 miles as an upper bound. Thats before you count jet streams which are at about 5-8 miles up and really pour on the speed at up to 400kph (250mph). Known to cut flight times by as much as 40% around the globe, they are not to be underestimated. It may take 20 hours for a glider to reach the ground, with several hours in a jet stream it could cross thousands of kilometres. It only takes one significant updraft weather system to life the glider back up to altitude too.
However given the rarefied air at altitude I imagine a glider would descend rapidly until in thicker air below 30,000 feet. I also doubt such gliders wouldn't just travel in variously sized large circles rather than cover huge distances in one direction. That assumes they all fly properly and don't stall/tumble their way down or dive too fast.
The jet streams travel west to east, with no exceptions, which should be a big clue as to which finders claims are true, and tend not to cross the equator a great deal. Unless there is something highly unusual and slightly disturbing going on in the upper atmosphere, you'd expect gliders to show up east of the launch site along the jet stream path crossing europe.
So given all this, I call bullshit. The paper planes could be found a few hundred miles away at most. Anything else supposedly confirmed is probably an inside job, they've shipped a few to far parts of the world for people to accidentally find - how cunning! IANAM (I'm not a meteorologist) for the record, I once researched how far a RC plane could fly if you could take it up with a helium balloon.
Whats the point in the mention of saving paper? Gadgets like the iPad has the environmental impact of a lot of paper, many times it's weight in paper. Such a large ammount that I doubt the iPad would make real benefit to the environment before it becomes toxic unrecyclable e-waste in a year or two.
Although energy intensive, paper is also a endlessly renewable resource, and close to 100% recyclable. Perhaps not in practice, but it could be.
I've always found computers, coding and gaming to be a social experience, and indeed any online community is exactly that, a social group. I pretty much got into computers when I found other kids at school who were into them also. Any partiuclar hobby or career may have it's clique, and such social groups tend to recruit new members as they grow.
This may explain gender imbalance, once the social group becomes predominantly one sex or even one demographic, it makes it harder for the other to enter.
So the solution is... well I don't know, but knowing the above, that gives some idea on how to make change? Get high profile women involved, who can encourage others?
One of the reasons I rely on proper paper maps when in the wilderness is because they have significantly less errors and include a lot of information the digital databases don't.
I've also been concerned for many years the way many maps in GPS units, and online map tools don't give you any information about the type of road (paved, unpaved, 4WD only etc) which proper topographic maps do. You can't even tell how steep the road is due to the lack of proper topographic information.
This is very poor on the part of the companies making these products. There is no excuse for stupidity but there is also no excuse for not anticipating the stupidity of people who might be mislead by bad information from your product and kill themselves with it. Seriously, how could the possible condition of the road and the type of vehicle it being used with be completely forgotten when developing these products?
Quite simply too many GPS devices have map data that is just not as good as a real map, and seems to lack any consideration of safety when providing instructions to users.
Combine this neglegence with standard widespread and potentially fatal stupidity and it's a perfect storm.
If you are stupid enough put your life in the hands of a single fallible device, you're going to have other problems surviving in the wilderness. Even on a light day walk in a well maintained trail you are one fall or a weather change away form a survival situation, it doesn't take much imagination to work that out, nor prior experience.
I would suggest the real problem here is that GPS is powerfully enabling to inexperienced people who otherwise would not have undertaken the journey without such directional assitance - perhaps even not been able to find the start of the trail in the first place. The feeling of confidence when you can navigate is dangerous, except it's not in your own orienteering ability, it's in a handheld device that's one drop away from failure.
There is no substitute to having a freakin clue what do what when the batteries run out.
Does the researcher take into account the metric asston of dead torrents with zero seeders? What about torrents that are being downloaded and actually seeded to some degree, are they still highly faked?
Fake stuff gets deleted from peoples systems once they realise it's BS, it doesn't get left seeding, therefore it just could not possibly have thousands of seeders as some torrents apparently do.
While the MPAA and others undoubtedly spam the portals with enormous quantities fake torrents, but they very quickly go dead, and it's a lost cause. The genuine article gets picked up on and heavily seeded.
If it's open in source, it's still not open in runtime, just like any proprietary software. If anything the ability to mess with the source may encourage a developer not to think to put configuration flexibility once the program is in the wild. There's quote a cost in retaining developers to work on fixing patching problems in-house, it's time consuming, then it has to be tested and rolled out with a risk of it all going tits-up with no one else to blame. Which is a bad thing in the vindictive and image conscious corporate world. Then you have the headache of having your own custom code that needs support in house for ever and ever and ever and it will require equally constant financial justification to the powers that be.
Frustratingly, some asshat upstairs is going to suggest outsourcing back to a proprietary solution and get a raise for doing it.
Facebook is a reverse-wikileaks. It's a way to leak personal information from the general public back to secretive corporate and governmental organisations. It's worked rather TOO well, they now have a detailed map of your every social interaction, private thought, what you read, watch and listen to on the web, and have a record of it going all the way back (have you tried to see how far youc an go back in your facebook history? All the way back to when you joined!).
An entire record of your digital life, once you put all this out there, there's no getting it back. While it's probably not very available to governments now (merely advertisers can trawl this stuff to figure out how to sell you more shit) it's out there and it could fall into the hands of those who would do us harm, should laws change. You can bet in another awfully convenient 9/11 style terror attack the government rushes for more legislation to get access to this stuff real fast.
Most normal people drive used cars. The problem is the category of people who buy new cars who get catered to. The rest of us buy cars which were once what someone else wanted. Given the average age of vehicles on the road in a developed nation is something between 7-14 years, really, we do not get the reliable economical fun machines we need (you can have those, but they are so sought after they are not cheap). The manufacturers are just not anticipating what the national fleet needs to be in 5-10 years. We will have to put up with cars that have every trending hipster gizmo we don't need.
My car has a mini disc player in it's sound system, because that what was hot in 1999 when someone bought it new.
That means in 5-10 years time, pretty much every car will have a bloody iPod dock, despite that iPods won't exist anymore except as e-waste.
Reccently I had an epiphany while driving an old volkswagen kombi van I borrowed for a weekend - it made me a safer driver, because it was everything a modern car was not, noisy, unstable, harsh, and no power-assisted anything. I did something unusual... I held on to the steering wheel with both hands, and - get this - I anticipated the road ahead because I needed to change gears myself - and even more crazy, I didn't follow slow drivers 10 feet behind. I know! right!?
So what do I want in a car now? I want a car to not be a flying couch and a sensory deprivation tank. No wonder people are driving like idiots and no wonder when kids get in a car these days they go nuts -- In the van the neices and nephews were entertained by the ride itself.
Give me, steering that feels like it's connected to something, and doesn't take one finger to turn and the other hand to talk on the cellphone with.
Brakes and that have more feel, accelerator more progressive and not so light and easy to be over zealous with.
MPG-aware cruise control... please.
For kicks, I want a proximity warning sensor - no, not for me, for the tailgaters. Something that flashes a light or illuminated sign at the guy behind "Watch your following distance / your asking for an accident." in scrolling text.
I encountered something I couldn't explain... I found religion was even more useless at explaining it. Science at least gives you a methodology to get started. It had rather the opposite effect, because I saw something odd with my own eyes I knew it could be explained.
The only things that can't be explained are the impossible. Fortunatley the impossible never happens.
Smartphones have a magnetic compass that could be your magnetic field detector and data logger right there!
Android phones have the ability to use Tasker - a great app that lets you program phone to some extent - SMS alert perhaps when the compass moves. Multitasking means you could run multiple data loggers to cover all the various ways a smartphone can sense it's environment.
Here is my list of equipment you need to procure or construct yourself if not available.
- Small solenoids/servos with power pack and wireless remote control( think "bump" "tap tap" somewhere or slamming door)
- Coils and small DC power supplies.
- Infrasound generators.
- Infrared thermal lamps.
- Compact source of static charged air with proximity sensor trigger (stand up hairs on back of neck)
- Powerful permanent magnets hidden in objects, hidden electromagnetic coil (think moving/falling vase).
- Sources of cold air.
- Rigged sensor equipment.
Usage:
1) Use these gadgets to make the occupants REALLY think the place is haunted.
2) ???
3) Charge for each return visit until making desired profit.
As for the mouse, that's still not beaten by touch. Touch input doesn't scale. A mouse can select a single pixel or fly right accross the screen, have several buttons and scroll wheels are indespensible.
It concerns me there's going to be a generation of kids coming that are not going to be able to keyboard, handwrite because they will be touchscreen, game controller and voice interface users.
There's a reoccuring theme here: management. There are many variables, but the one constant is a failure of management to provide social structured culture that leads to the right condtuct discipline for good teamwork. I've worked with all the people described in this article and it's comments. In some work places I've witness it all go very wrong. In one work place it was never a problem. One firm I worked for had a pretty heavy handed policy on employee behaviour. It was lead by a bunch of high confrontational and perhaps slightly beligerant cult-leader like managers who stood up to the jerks, shut up the heretics got everyone else focused as a team. They lead by example with rock-star awesomeness, and motiviational speaker style hype. It was frakkin terrible. I hate to say it I prefer the hands-off corporate culture where personality traits are allowed to emerge to be a problem, because the side effects of curing the systemic dysfunction are worse than the disease.
. Safety. Our walled garden is totally secure. All your interactions are done through iApps.
Huh? How can that be? Apple cannot possibly review and rigorously test every line of code to be vulnerability and malicious behaviour free. Considering it's rather trivial to hide malicious code in place sight, or introduce a deliberate coding mistake. They could only ever catch very obvious malicious behaviour and only if that emerges while in testing considering the logisitical impossiblity of Apple to thoroughly test the hundreds of thousands of App submissions, therefore it's safe to assume they've only done the most obvious and basic testing. They are also extremely tight lipped about their testing process.
That is of course, if the walled garden is about our safety at all.
Read books... nobody can monitor what you read, nor look up a history of what you may have read that some service provider has kept a record. Books can be gotten for free, borrowed, and bought for untraceable cash. Possession of the books may be incriminating but that is easy to deal with.
This kind of highlights why governments and corporates are increasingly running roughshod over our privacy online, trying to push through legislation that's something out of 1984, because it's incredibly tantalizing to be able to track parts of our lives that we're previously very private on such a massive scale.
The internet is wonderful for the deluge of information you can have on demand. Only problem is it flows both ways.
Slashdot Mirror
A good glider has a 20:1 glide ratio, and a well designed paper glider could achieve this, theoretically you could do better. Given a release altitude of 23 miles which gives 460 miles as an upper bound. Thats before you count jet streams which are at about 5-8 miles up and really pour on the speed at up to 400kph (250mph). Known to cut flight times by as much as 40% around the globe, they are not to be underestimated. It may take 20 hours for a glider to reach the ground, with several hours in a jet stream it could cross thousands of kilometres. It only takes one significant updraft weather system to life the glider back up to altitude too.
However given the rarefied air at altitude I imagine a glider would descend rapidly until in thicker air below 30,000 feet. I also doubt such gliders wouldn't just travel in variously sized large circles rather than cover huge distances in one direction. That assumes they all fly properly and don't stall/tumble their way down or dive too fast.
The jet streams travel west to east, with no exceptions, which should be a big clue as to which finders claims are true, and tend not to cross the equator a great deal. Unless there is something highly unusual and slightly disturbing going on in the upper atmosphere, you'd expect gliders to show up east of the launch site along the jet stream path crossing europe.
So given all this, I call bullshit. The paper planes could be found a few hundred miles away at most. Anything else supposedly confirmed is probably an inside job, they've shipped a few to far parts of the world for people to accidentally find - how cunning! IANAM (I'm not a meteorologist) for the record, I once researched how far a RC plane could fly if you could take it up with a helium balloon.
Whats the point in the mention of saving paper? Gadgets like the iPad has the environmental impact of a lot of paper, many times it's weight in paper. Such a large ammount that I doubt the iPad would make real benefit to the environment before it becomes toxic unrecyclable e-waste in a year or two.
Although energy intensive, paper is also a endlessly renewable resource, and close to 100% recyclable. Perhaps not in practice, but it could be.
I've always found computers, coding and gaming to be a social experience, and indeed any online community is exactly that, a social group. I pretty much got into computers when I found other kids at school who were into them also. Any partiuclar hobby or career may have it's clique, and such social groups tend to recruit new members as they grow.
This may explain gender imbalance, once the social group becomes predominantly one sex or even one demographic, it makes it harder for the other to enter.
So the solution is... well I don't know, but knowing the above, that gives some idea on how to make change? Get high profile women involved, who can encourage others?
One of the reasons I rely on proper paper maps when in the wilderness is because they have significantly less errors and include a lot of information the digital databases don't. I've also been concerned for many years the way many maps in GPS units, and online map tools don't give you any information about the type of road (paved, unpaved, 4WD only etc) which proper topographic maps do. You can't even tell how steep the road is due to the lack of proper topographic information.
This is very poor on the part of the companies making these products. There is no excuse for stupidity but there is also no excuse for not anticipating the stupidity of people who might be mislead by bad information from your product and kill themselves with it. Seriously, how could the possible condition of the road and the type of vehicle it being used with be completely forgotten when developing these products? Quite simply too many GPS devices have map data that is just not as good as a real map, and seems to lack any consideration of safety when providing instructions to users. Combine this neglegence with standard widespread and potentially fatal stupidity and it's a perfect storm.
If you are stupid enough put your life in the hands of a single fallible device, you're going to have other problems surviving in the wilderness. Even on a light day walk in a well maintained trail you are one fall or a weather change away form a survival situation, it doesn't take much imagination to work that out, nor prior experience.
I would suggest the real problem here is that GPS is powerfully enabling to inexperienced people who otherwise would not have undertaken the journey without such directional assitance - perhaps even not been able to find the start of the trail in the first place. The feeling of confidence when you can navigate is dangerous, except it's not in your own orienteering ability, it's in a handheld device that's one drop away from failure.
There is no substitute to having a freakin clue what do what when the batteries run out.
Infact this is positively patent invalidating.
Does the researcher take into account the metric asston of dead torrents with zero seeders? What about torrents that are being downloaded and actually seeded to some degree, are they still highly faked?
Fake stuff gets deleted from peoples systems once they realise it's BS, it doesn't get left seeding, therefore it just could not possibly have thousands of seeders as some torrents apparently do.
While the MPAA and others undoubtedly spam the portals with enormous quantities fake torrents, but they very quickly go dead, and it's a lost cause. The genuine article gets picked up on and heavily seeded.
Same ratio as /. comments. Posts like "In Soviet Russia .." and "IANAL but ..." are now automated by scripts.
Where do I sign up for this "meatspace"of which you speak? Would most of my friends be in it?
If it's open in source, it's still not open in runtime, just like any proprietary software. If anything the ability to mess with the source may encourage a developer not to think to put configuration flexibility once the program is in the wild. There's quote a cost in retaining developers to work on fixing patching problems in-house, it's time consuming, then it has to be tested and rolled out with a risk of it all going tits-up with no one else to blame. Which is a bad thing in the vindictive and image conscious corporate world. Then you have the headache of having your own custom code that needs support in house for ever and ever and ever and it will require equally constant financial justification to the powers that be.
Frustratingly, some asshat upstairs is going to suggest outsourcing back to a proprietary solution and get a raise for doing it.
"hypocritical" ? I see what you did there, the opposite of hypercritical. A journalist/writer who is incapable of even the mildest criticism?
Facebook is a reverse-wikileaks. It's a way to leak personal information from the general public back to secretive corporate and governmental organisations. It's worked rather TOO well, they now have a detailed map of your every social interaction, private thought, what you read, watch and listen to on the web, and have a record of it going all the way back (have you tried to see how far youc an go back in your facebook history? All the way back to when you joined!).
An entire record of your digital life, once you put all this out there, there's no getting it back. While it's probably not very available to governments now (merely advertisers can trawl this stuff to figure out how to sell you more shit) it's out there and it could fall into the hands of those who would do us harm, should laws change. You can bet in another awfully convenient 9/11 style terror attack the government rushes for more legislation to get access to this stuff real fast.
... disemboweling a singular sysadmin?
Most normal people drive used cars. The problem is the category of people who buy new cars who get catered to. The rest of us buy cars which were once what someone else wanted. Given the average age of vehicles on the road in a developed nation is something between 7-14 years, really, we do not get the reliable economical fun machines we need (you can have those, but they are so sought after they are not cheap). The manufacturers are just not anticipating what the national fleet needs to be in 5-10 years. We will have to put up with cars that have every trending hipster gizmo we don't need.
My car has a mini disc player in it's sound system, because that what was hot in 1999 when someone bought it new.
That means in 5-10 years time, pretty much every car will have a bloody iPod dock, despite that iPods won't exist anymore except as e-waste.
Reccently I had an epiphany while driving an old volkswagen kombi van I borrowed for a weekend - it made me a safer driver, because it was everything a modern car was not, noisy, unstable, harsh, and no power-assisted anything. I did something unusual ... I held on to the steering wheel with both hands, and - get this - I anticipated the road ahead because I needed to change gears myself - and even more crazy, I didn't follow slow drivers 10 feet behind. I know! right!?
So what do I want in a car now? I want a car to not be a flying couch and a sensory deprivation tank. No wonder people are driving like idiots and no wonder when kids get in a car these days they go nuts -- In the van the neices and nephews were entertained by the ride itself.
Give me, steering that feels like it's connected to something, and doesn't take one finger to turn and the other hand to talk on the cellphone with.
Brakes and that have more feel, accelerator more progressive and not so light and easy to be over zealous with.
MPG-aware cruise control... please.
For kicks, I want a proximity warning sensor - no, not for me, for the tailgaters. Something that flashes a light or illuminated sign at the guy behind
"Watch your following distance / your asking for an accident." in scrolling text.
Please.
I encountered something I couldn't explain... I found religion was even more useless at explaining it. Science at least gives you a methodology to get started. It had rather the opposite effect, because I saw something odd with my own eyes I knew it could be explained.
The only things that can't be explained are the impossible. Fortunatley the impossible never happens.
Smartphones have a magnetic compass that could be your magnetic field detector and data logger right there!
Android phones have the ability to use Tasker - a great app that lets you program phone to some extent - SMS alert perhaps when the compass moves. Multitasking means you could run multiple data loggers to cover all the various ways a smartphone can sense it's environment.
Common sense, apparently, isn't all that common.
Here is my list of equipment you need to procure or construct yourself if not available.
- Small solenoids/servos with power pack and wireless remote control( think "bump" "tap tap" somewhere or slamming door)
- Coils and small DC power supplies.
- Infrasound generators.
- Infrared thermal lamps.
- Compact source of static charged air with proximity sensor trigger (stand up hairs on back of neck)
- Powerful permanent magnets hidden in objects, hidden electromagnetic coil (think moving/falling vase). - Sources of cold air.
- Rigged sensor equipment.
Usage:
1) Use these gadgets to make the occupants REALLY think the place is haunted.
2) ???
3) Charge for each return visit until making desired profit.
Wait what? Oh you wanted to "investigate"...
Ask him to touch type without looking.
As for the mouse, that's still not beaten by touch. Touch input doesn't scale. A mouse can select a single pixel or fly right accross the screen, have several buttons and scroll wheels are indespensible.
It concerns me there's going to be a generation of kids coming that are not going to be able to keyboard, handwrite because they will be touchscreen, game controller and voice interface users.
What about all the money spent on sports and recreation? That could be better spent on feeding millions of starving children somewhere.
Infact lets ban all forms of fun and interest if it isn't directly helping disadvantaged children somewhere.
There's a reoccuring theme here: management. There are many variables, but the one constant is a failure of management to provide social structured culture that leads to the right condtuct discipline for good teamwork. I've worked with all the people described in this article and it's comments. In some work places I've witness it all go very wrong. In one work place it was never a problem. One firm I worked for had a pretty heavy handed policy on employee behaviour. It was lead by a bunch of high confrontational and perhaps slightly beligerant cult-leader like managers who stood up to the jerks, shut up the heretics got everyone else focused as a team. They lead by example with rock-star awesomeness, and motiviational speaker style hype. It was frakkin terrible. I hate to say it I prefer the hands-off corporate culture where personality traits are allowed to emerge to be a problem, because the side effects of curing the systemic dysfunction are worse than the disease.
Apollo 13: srsly HALP!!!11!!
Houston: RTFM!!
. Safety. Our walled garden is totally secure. All your interactions are done through iApps.
Huh? How can that be? Apple cannot possibly review and rigorously test every line of code to be vulnerability and malicious behaviour free. Considering it's rather trivial to hide malicious code in place sight, or introduce a deliberate coding mistake. They could only ever catch very obvious malicious behaviour and only if that emerges while in testing considering the logisitical impossiblity of Apple to thoroughly test the hundreds of thousands of App submissions, therefore it's safe to assume they've only done the most obvious and basic testing. They are also extremely tight lipped about their testing process.
That is of course, if the walled garden is about our safety at all.
Read books... nobody can monitor what you read, nor look up a history of what you may have read that some service provider has kept a record. Books can be gotten for free, borrowed, and bought for untraceable cash. Possession of the books may be incriminating but that is easy to deal with.
This kind of highlights why governments and corporates are increasingly running roughshod over our privacy online, trying to push through legislation that's something out of 1984, because it's incredibly tantalizing to be able to track parts of our lives that we're previously very private on such a massive scale.
The internet is wonderful for the deluge of information you can have on demand. Only problem is it flows both ways.