I openly tell companies while interviewing that I will take all my available PTO every single year. I also tell them that I do not expect to work more than 40 hours in a week (and never more than 50) unless it's a 1 or 2x a year event.
If a company isn't up to these expectations during the interview they get visibly uncomfortable or tell you the interview is done right then and there. This is fine for me, no one should work for a company which demands you work more than 40 hours or won't let you take the time off you've earned.
However, I do my work and never miss deadlines (due to my own failure). I feel as long as I keep up my end of the bargain so should the company. Any that don't aren't worth my time.
---
At my company we rarely work more than 40 hours/week, and in the rare event that someone needs to come in at night or the weekend to take care of a problem, he'll get comp time that he can use to take off time in the next week.
However, if I ever interviewed someone who told me what you said that you tell your interviewers, I would quickly end the interview and move on to the next candidate. Even though I don't often ask my salaried employees to work overtime, sometimes they need to and if they express an unwillingness to do so in the interview, I'll find someone more flexible. Most of my hourly employees are more than happy to work overtime since it means more pay.
I took a three week long summer vacation last year. I am taking 5 weeks this summer. I also take many long weekends and sometimes a random week off here and there. If you're not then you need to find a new job and fast.
Oh and no, I don't care how much you love your job there's no way you can love it more than vacation.
There are many times when I enjoy my job more than a vacation. Getting $200K worth of fun toys to play with beats spending a week on the beach (believe me, I've tried the tropical vacation thing, and it's just not for me.. my wife loved it, but I want something more interesting to do).
You aren't free to not take all vacation days here! If you did so, your employer would owe you money! That's just ridiculous.
I haven't seen an employer that *requires* employees to take vacation (except maybe to encourage work-life balance). All of my employers have put a cap on the number of days I can accumulate. After I hit that cap, I no longer accumulate new vacation days.
If I leave the job, then they have to pay me for unused vacation days.
It's not that I feel like I can't take vacation, but with only 2 weeks/year, I feel like I need to save it for something special. If I had 4 weeks (or more), I'd be more likely to take more little trips here and there or even use vacation as a personal day to stay home, but as it is, I try to save up my vacation for a big trip.
I'd rather that my company moved to a paid time off pool for both sick and vacation days since I so rarely use sick days.
You could say the same thing about the Arduino vs. one of thousands of sub-$2 microcontrollers.
You could say the same thing, but I don't think that comparing the Rasberry PI to an Aduino is the same as comparing an Arduino to a raw microcontroller.
I recognize the difference between a raw microcontroller and a finished circuit board that contains standard I/O connectors. Even if the microcontroller that powers the Arduino only costs $4, I can understand that many hobbyists don't want to procure their own I/O controllers, connectors, etc and wirewrap a board themselves at home. Many people want a board that's ready to plug into their computer and start programming.
but can you run any supported version of Windows with 150Mhz CPU, 32MB of RAM and 8MB of Flash? (even ignoring the fact that it has no display)
Aside from Windows CE or Mobile (which I don't think is what the OP was asking for), I think Windows XP embedded has the lowest system requirements of any supported version of Windows, and its got the same base requirements as XP Pro:
Pentium 233-megahertz (MHz) processor or faster (300 MHz is recommended) At least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM (128 MB is recommended) At least 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available space on the hard disk CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive Keyboard and a Microsoft Mouse or some other compatible pointing device Video adapter and monitor with Super VGA (800 x 600) or higher resolution
there is no need for democracy in communist China, because the people are already represented in government by the Communist Party.
funny corollary: There is no need for independent labor unions in China, because the government controlled labor union inherently represents the people's interests - after all, it too is controlled by the Communist Party.
as for the basic facts of history about unions and working conditions, well, you are just 100%, flat out wrong. i mean, its like you have tried to lecture me on mathematics by starting out with "the volume of a sphere is r cubed". no, its not r cubed. its not, its not even close, and any 3rd grader knows it from basic examination of the universe that is plain to their god given eyeballs.
I'm not talking about China, I'm talking about the UK and USA. And I'm not talking about the history of Labor unions, they've obviously been a powerful force in shaping worker's rights in the past. I'm talking about the present day.
I don't know what you saw in my post that made you think I was talking about historical working conditions or conditions in China.
All I'm saying is even if labor unions disappeared overnight, modern government regulations would prevent a return to the poor working conditions of the past. Perhaps worker's wages would drop, which could be a good thing (if you're an employer and want to compete internationally), or a bad thing (if you're an employee and your skills aren't in high demand).
General purpose I/O pins normally only show up on expensive prototyping boards, not on "real" computers. I think the idea is that this will allow folks who couldn't otherwise afford such prototyping hardware to experiment with such things. I could easily see this being used for school science projects like BattleBots, those computer maze projects, and so on.
I thought this was what the Arduino series computers were good at. The Arduino Uno costs $29 and includes:
a microcontroller board based on the ATmega328 (datasheet). It has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. It contains everything needed to support the microcontroller; simply connect it to a computer with a USB cable or power it with a AC-to-DC adapter or battery to get started.
I mean, I think the Rasberry is cool and all, and is certainly much more powerful than an Arduino, but I don't understand the hype around it - like the posters here who said "Looking forward to watching you revolutionize computer education!" or "The world has just changed". Do people really think the world has been waiting for a $25 computer they can plug into their TV?
heh. without unions you would see a lot of work return to the UK... like children working in coal mines and toxic garbage dumps.... just like children do in asia.
Unless the UK labor laws are lot weaker than in the USA, loss of labor unions won't result in a return to uncontrolled child labor or unreasonably hazardous working conditions (coal miners will still work underground, but risks will be mitigated when possible). Both are illegal and regulated by the government. In the USA, labor union actions seem to be centered more around issues of pay and benefits rather than working conditions. Employees with concerns about workplace safety have government channels to take their complaints to, they don't have to rely on a union to represent them.
While it looks like fun for a hobbyist to play with, is there really some greater purpose to this device? It seems that most people that can afford an HDMI capable (or even RCA/composite) TV or monitor to plug this into can probably also afford a 'real' computer.
That said, I'll probably buy one just to play around with it, but I don't think it will change my life.
Ever hear of High definition porn? Silly I know but porn sites are typically the leaders, when it comes to streaming content quality. You can practically count the ingrown hairs, from a pornstars Brazilian wax.
Hey, I grew up in the day of ASCII porn that was printed out on 132 column green-bar paper - I'd probably be appalled at what I could see in High Def video porn. And based on your comment, it does sound appalling.
Re:How about going back to flat-rate data?
on
Comcast DNSSEC Goes Live
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· Score: 3, Informative
I know I'm a heavy user, but 700+GB a month is not unusual for me and many months I've exceeded 1TB. 250GB is a good cap for an entry-level plan, but it's hilariously low when DOCSIS 3 speeds are in play.
What do you download that exceeds 700+GB? That's 25GB/day, which seems like an awful lot of data.
My household watches several hours of Netflix a day (we have no cable TV and watch Netflix streaming TV shows & movies), and as far as I know, we've never hit our Comcast cap.
except these can be easily removed at replace when saturated.
But you have to expend energy and recover the CO2 yourself once this polymer is saturated. And what do you do with the CO2 once you recover it? It's not like you can just keep it in a big pile behind the extraction plant.
With trees, people will *pay* you for the right to remove the trees once they are saturated, and they will turn them into things like lumber and paper.
So you'd need 9.1kg / 75ng = 120 billion grams of the material to absorb the CO2 output from a gallon of gas.
I don't know the density of this new material or its substrate, but if it's similar to common plastic tarps... A 20x100 foot roll of 10mil plastic film weighs 95 lbs (which probably includes the cardboard spindle).
So that's 43 kg for 20 * 100 = 2000 ft^3 = 185 m^2 or 232g/m^2
So, it would take (120 giga-grams / (232 g / m^2)) = 500 million square meters of this new plastic to absorb the CO2 from one gallon of gasoline (or 500 km^2 or a square 22 km on each side). That's about 4 times larger than the city of San Francisco.
Granted this would probably be used in a large belt that is continuously recycled to absorb CO2 then heat it and release, but still, that's a huge amount of material.
I know I don't have say this (it is Slashdot afterall), but please check my math.
To where? Still what hasn't been accounted for is the amount of energy required to produce the polymer. It's probably a petroleum based polymer which requires oil extraction, shipping, processing in a refinery and/or chemical plant, and manufacture. I want to see mass and energy balances. The softer approach of planting trees is probably still the best approach when compared to energy intense Engineering approaches. Trees also have the advantage of binding up water vapour, which is a green house gas much more powerful than CO2.
What do you do once you have a forest full of trees? You can't just keep planting them indefinitely or you'd run out of room for forests. Cut them down and bury them? Is there some other way to sequester the carbon?
I thought Algae was a more efficient at capturing carbon than trees? .
Excellent idea - the tiles cost NASA around $1,000 a piece, and since an iPad is more than twice as big as an average tile, it would have been a nice cost savings. And everyone knows an iPad in an appropriate protective case can handle 2000+ degree reentry temperatures.
I bet Apple would have donated the iPads for free if they could put the Apple logo on the tail of the shuttle, *and* NASA could light up the iPads and play Goodyear Blimp style advertising for even more revenue. The advertising alone could have made the Shuttle revenue positive.
If only the iPad existed back when the shuttle was designed, it might still be flying.
this thing you're buying is to protect your ipads from the pavement. Seeing it protect from a fall from any height higher than 5 feet, while unnecessary, is still proof that it works.
I agree it would be nicer to see it fall on a corner or face down on cement or something, but that rocky cliff wasn't too far off.
Given that it was hit a grass and dirt covered hillside, and was strapped to a camera bracket (and possibly the remains of the balloon to help slow its fall), I don't think it's even a good representation of what would happen if you dropped your iPad to the hard pavement. Even if the hillside was covered with small stones, the dirt would have a certain degree of springiness to help absorb the shock.
Instead of this stunt from 100,000 feet, I'd rather have seen them drop the iPad a number of times from 5 feet in different orientations to a hard surface to see how it held up.
What are the laws for sending something high up in the atmosphere and dropping it to the earth at high speed like a poor-man's ballistic missile? Is there a law that keeps people from doing this over an inhabited area? What counts as an "inhabited area"? The last thing I'm thinking of when hiking in an uninhabited wilderness is that someone's iPad might land on my head.
It seems that these amateur baloon experiments are becoming more common (or maybe Youtube just makes them better publicized), but in any case, I'm wondering what the rules are for dropping random things from the sky.
If you were going off to college and could only have one device,
Let's turn that around:
If you were home, which device would be the first to pick?
If you were at the beach, which device would you pick?
If you were on a train which device would you pick?
It is kind of obvious that PC is for work and tablet is for fun. No clear winner here.
For home, it depends on what I'm doing. If I'm reading a book in bed, I'd pick the tablet (or more likely, the eInk book reader), if I'm browsing a few websites on the couch, I'd pick the tablet. If I'm writing an email to my mom, I'd pick the netbook.
if I'm on the beach, I wouldn't bring any electronic device at all. Maybe a book if I was going to spend the day on the sand, but if I'm at the beach I'm probably there for the water, not to read a book or send an email.
On the train, I always pick the netbook when I have a seat - much more convenient for sending an email, and the tablet is too big to use while I'm standing, I use my phone to read the online news if I don't have a seat.
There isn't even a scientific reason to justify the cost at this point.
In the long run, having our eggs in more than one basket would be nice. At the moment, humans are stored RAID 0 here on Earth.
Please don't implement earth-scale RAID-5, I don't want to be torn to pieces just so you can distribute me across different planets with an extra bucket of cloned body parts stored somewhere else for redundancy.
The obvious and simple solution is cryo-sleep. Just ship some capsules along with a rudimentary habitat, and be prepared to sleep most of the time away. The Mars explorers can't realistically bring 18 months' worth of food and oxygen and medical supplies and whatever else--tampons, contact lenses, etc. So just send a month's supply of food, and they can sleep for 17 months until the return vessel arrives.
I think that compared to the amount of fuel and supplies they're going to have to carry to travel to mars, build a habitat and survive for months (years?) on Mars' surface, supplying them with food on the trip there is not going to be a big deal. The ISS goes through around 3 tons of food per person per year.
Cooling the human body to a near-death state has been demonstrated--actually, it has happened many times when people fall into icy water and are revived many minutes later (google extreme hypothermia).
But waking them up again without a team of doctors to assist is rare.
Another concept might be to simply upload the astronaut's neural net into a very high capacity computer. Once this task is accomplished, the computer can continue to operate a space vessel and otherwise completely imitate a human being's decisionmaking and responses. One possible catch is that the computer, unlike an organic brain, lacks any stimulus from hormonal secretions, adrenaline, etc. This kind of stimulus would have to be simulated. The astronauts themselves would remain on Earth, monitoring the flight. Any mistakes or accidents would be blamed on the individual whose brain had been uploaded, obviously.
How would you do this? Dissect a live astronaut's brain cell by cell to determine each neural connection?
Lastly is the idea of telecommuting (similar to the second idea expounded above). A completely automated vessel with remote controls would allow a team of astronauts to "work from home". Unlike an actual trip into space, this virtual exploration would be much safer.
The 6 minute to 45 minute round trip communications lag makes this difficult (but not impossible as demonstrated by the mars rovers).
I think a hybrid of your last two approaches is better than sending men right now - send smart robots to build a base, they can be largely autonomous, and when they need help, they await communications from earth.
Or, maybe instead of sending a large team of men to live on the surface and build a habitat, send a large team of drone robots controlled from orbit by a small team of humans.
FYI many "conventional" cars have timing chains instead of belts.
That's true, but my point was that a $2000 battery replacement (after 100K miles? 150K miles? 200K miles?) is used a proof that hybrids are not economical, but many people accept a nearly $2000 required maintenance item on non-hybrids without question.
In an electric going downhill you shouldn't be using any fuel of any sort. Most gas engines will still need to burn some fuel to idle the engine if you're coasting. You aren't burning much fuel, but so long as the engine is still running you're burning some.
In most modern cars, the ECU will use deceleration fuel cut off (DFCO) to cut off fuel to the engine when it's being driven by the drive wheels.
Slashdot Mirror
I openly tell companies while interviewing that I will take all my available PTO every single year. I also tell them that I do not expect to work more than 40 hours in a week (and never more than 50) unless it's a 1 or 2x a year event.
If a company isn't up to these expectations during the interview they get visibly uncomfortable or tell you the interview is done right then and there. This is fine for me, no one should work for a company which demands you work more than 40 hours or won't let you take the time off you've earned.
However, I do my work and never miss deadlines (due to my own failure). I feel as long as I keep up my end of the bargain so should the company. Any that don't aren't worth my time.
---
At my company we rarely work more than 40 hours/week, and in the rare event that someone needs to come in at night or the weekend to take care of a problem, he'll get comp time that he can use to take off time in the next week.
However, if I ever interviewed someone who told me what you said that you tell your interviewers, I would quickly end the interview and move on to the next candidate. Even though I don't often ask my salaried employees to work overtime, sometimes they need to and if they express an unwillingness to do so in the interview, I'll find someone more flexible. Most of my hourly employees are more than happy to work overtime since it means more pay.
I took a three week long summer vacation last year. I am taking 5 weeks this summer. I also take many long weekends and sometimes a random week off here and there. If you're not then you need to find a new job and fast.
Oh and no, I don't care how much you love your job there's no way you can love it more than vacation.
There are many times when I enjoy my job more than a vacation. Getting $200K worth of fun toys to play with beats spending a week on the beach (believe me, I've tried the tropical vacation thing, and it's just not for me.. my wife loved it, but I want something more interesting to do).
You aren't free to not take all vacation days here! If you did so, your employer would owe you money! That's just ridiculous.
I haven't seen an employer that *requires* employees to take vacation (except maybe to encourage work-life balance). All of my employers have put a cap on the number of days I can accumulate. After I hit that cap, I no longer accumulate new vacation days.
If I leave the job, then they have to pay me for unused vacation days.
It's not that I feel like I can't take vacation, but with only 2 weeks/year, I feel like I need to save it for something special. If I had 4 weeks (or more), I'd be more likely to take more little trips here and there or even use vacation as a personal day to stay home, but as it is, I try to save up my vacation for a big trip.
I'd rather that my company moved to a paid time off pool for both sick and vacation days since I so rarely use sick days.
You could say the same thing about the Arduino vs. one of thousands of sub-$2 microcontrollers.
You could say the same thing, but I don't think that comparing the Rasberry PI to an Aduino is the same as comparing an Arduino to a raw microcontroller.
I recognize the difference between a raw microcontroller and a finished circuit board that contains standard I/O connectors. Even if the microcontroller that powers the Arduino only costs $4, I can understand that many hobbyists don't want to procure their own I/O controllers, connectors, etc and wirewrap a board themselves at home. Many people want a board that's ready to plug into their computer and start programming.
but can you run any supported version of Windows with 150Mhz CPU, 32MB of RAM and 8MB of Flash? (even ignoring the fact that it has no display)
Aside from Windows CE or Mobile (which I don't think is what the OP was asking for), I think Windows XP embedded has the lowest system requirements of any supported version of Windows, and its got the same base requirements as XP Pro:
Pentium 233-megahertz (MHz) processor or faster (300 MHz is recommended)
At least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM (128 MB is recommended)
At least 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available space on the hard disk
CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive
Keyboard and a Microsoft Mouse or some other compatible pointing device
Video adapter and monitor with Super VGA (800 x 600) or higher resolution
there is no need for democracy in communist China, because the people are already represented in government by the Communist Party.
funny corollary: There is no need for independent labor unions in China, because the government controlled labor union inherently represents the people's interests - after all, it too is controlled by the Communist Party.
as for the basic facts of history about unions and working conditions, well, you are just 100%, flat out wrong. i mean, its like you have tried to lecture me on mathematics by starting out with "the volume of a sphere is r cubed". no, its not r cubed. its not, its not even close, and any 3rd grader knows it from basic examination of the universe that is plain to their god given eyeballs.
I'm not talking about China, I'm talking about the UK and USA. And I'm not talking about the history of Labor unions, they've obviously been a powerful force in shaping worker's rights in the past. I'm talking about the present day.
I don't know what you saw in my post that made you think I was talking about historical working conditions or conditions in China.
All I'm saying is even if labor unions disappeared overnight, modern government regulations would prevent a return to the poor working conditions of the past. Perhaps worker's wages would drop, which could be a good thing (if you're an employer and want to compete internationally), or a bad thing (if you're an employee and your skills aren't in high demand).
General purpose I/O pins normally only show up on expensive prototyping boards, not on "real" computers. I think the idea is that this will allow folks who couldn't otherwise afford such prototyping hardware to experiment with such things. I could easily see this being used for school science projects like BattleBots, those computer maze projects, and so on.
I thought this was what the Arduino series computers were good at. The Arduino Uno costs $29 and includes:
a microcontroller board based on the ATmega328 (datasheet). It has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. It contains everything needed to support the microcontroller; simply connect it to a computer with a USB cable or power it with a AC-to-DC adapter or battery to get started.
I mean, I think the Rasberry is cool and all, and is certainly much more powerful than an Arduino, but I don't understand the hype around it - like the posters here who said "Looking forward to watching you revolutionize computer education!" or "The world has just changed". Do people really think the world has been waiting for a $25 computer they can plug into their TV?
heh. without unions you would see a lot of work return to the UK ... like children working in coal mines and toxic garbage dumps.... just like children do in asia.
Unless the UK labor laws are lot weaker than in the USA, loss of labor unions won't result in a return to uncontrolled child labor or unreasonably hazardous working conditions (coal miners will still work underground, but risks will be mitigated when possible). Both are illegal and regulated by the government. In the USA, labor union actions seem to be centered more around issues of pay and benefits rather than working conditions. Employees with concerns about workplace safety have government channels to take their complaints to, they don't have to rely on a union to represent them.
While it looks like fun for a hobbyist to play with, is there really some greater purpose to this device? It seems that most people that can afford an HDMI capable (or even RCA/composite) TV or monitor to plug this into can probably also afford a 'real' computer.
That said, I'll probably buy one just to play around with it, but I don't think it will change my life.
Even if you did create a $25 x86 computer that could run Windows, you'd have to add $100 for the Windows License.
Ever hear of High definition porn? Silly I know but porn sites are typically the leaders, when it comes to streaming content quality. You can practically count the ingrown hairs, from a pornstars Brazilian wax.
Hey, I grew up in the day of ASCII porn that was printed out on 132 column green-bar paper - I'd probably be appalled at what I could see in High Def video porn. And based on your comment, it does sound appalling.
I know I'm a heavy user, but 700+GB a month is not unusual for me and many months I've exceeded 1TB. 250GB is a good cap for an entry-level plan, but it's hilariously low when DOCSIS 3 speeds are in play.
What do you download that exceeds 700+GB? That's 25GB/day, which seems like an awful lot of data.
My household watches several hours of Netflix a day (we have no cable TV and watch Netflix streaming TV shows & movies), and as far as I know, we've never hit our Comcast cap.
Go here http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ja2100005 for slightly more accurate information. It's about 13:1 adsorbent:CO2 by weight. Not pretty, but not catastrophic.
Ahh yes, there appears to be a typo in the article linked from the summary. The article from the summary says:
each gram of the material sopped up an average of 1.72 nanomoles of CO2
While your article (which was linked to from the other article) says:
1.71 mmol CO2 per g or 75 mg CO2 per g of adsorbent.
Which makes it 1000 times better than it appears to be in my post above.
icebike:And then you are still left with the CO2 you captured. What to do with that?
Article :..could harvest atmospheric CO2 and combine it with hydrogen stripped from water to generate a methanol fuel for myriad uses..
CO2+3H2 <-> CH3OH+H2O
CO2 is carbon and oxygen btw.
But doesn't that just temporarily store the CO2 in this new fuel until it's burnt, then it gets liberated into the atmosphere as CO2 again?
If you have a ready supply of Hydrogen, wouldn't you be better off just using that as a fuel in the first place?
except these can be easily removed at replace when saturated.
But you have to expend energy and recover the CO2 yourself once this polymer is saturated. And what do you do with the CO2 once you recover it? It's not like you can just keep it in a big pile behind the extraction plant.
With trees, people will *pay* you for the right to remove the trees once they are saturated, and they will turn them into things like lumber and paper.
Or, to look at it another way, each gram of the material sops up (44 g/mole * 1.72 x 10e-9 moles = ) 75nano-grams of CO2.
A gallon of gas produces 20 lbs or 9.1kg of CO2
So you'd need 9.1kg / 75ng = 120 billion grams of the material to absorb the CO2 output from a gallon of gas.
I don't know the density of this new material or its substrate, but if it's similar to common plastic tarps... A 20x100 foot roll of 10mil plastic film weighs 95 lbs (which probably includes the cardboard spindle).
So that's 43 kg for 20 * 100 = 2000 ft^3 = 185 m^2 or 232g/m^2
So, it would take (120 giga-grams / (232 g / m^2)) = 500 million square meters of this new plastic to absorb the CO2 from one gallon of gasoline (or 500 km^2 or a square 22 km on each side). That's about 4 times larger than the city of San Francisco.
Granted this would probably be used in a large belt that is continuously recycled to absorb CO2 then heat it and release, but still, that's a huge amount of material.
I know I don't have say this (it is Slashdot afterall), but please check my math.
*CO2 floats away*
To where? Still what hasn't been accounted for is the amount of energy required to produce the polymer. It's probably a petroleum based polymer which requires oil extraction, shipping, processing in a refinery and/or chemical plant, and manufacture. I want to see mass and energy balances. The softer approach of planting trees is probably still the best approach when compared to energy intense Engineering approaches. Trees also have the advantage of binding up water vapour, which is a green house gas much more powerful than CO2.
What do you do once you have a forest full of trees? You can't just keep planting them indefinitely or you'd run out of room for forests. Cut them down and bury them? Is there some other way to sequester the carbon?
I thought Algae was a more efficient at capturing carbon than trees?
.
Excellent idea - the tiles cost NASA around $1,000 a piece, and since an iPad is more than twice as big as an average tile, it would have been a nice cost savings. And everyone knows an iPad in an appropriate protective case can handle 2000+ degree reentry temperatures.
I bet Apple would have donated the iPads for free if they could put the Apple logo on the tail of the shuttle, *and* NASA could light up the iPads and play Goodyear Blimp style advertising for even more revenue. The advertising alone could have made the Shuttle revenue positive.
If only the iPad existed back when the shuttle was designed, it might still be flying.
this thing you're buying is to protect your ipads from the pavement. Seeing it protect from a fall from any height higher than 5 feet, while unnecessary, is still proof that it works.
I agree it would be nicer to see it fall on a corner or face down on cement or something, but that rocky cliff wasn't too far off.
Given that it was hit a grass and dirt covered hillside, and was strapped to a camera bracket (and possibly the remains of the balloon to help slow its fall), I don't think it's even a good representation of what would happen if you dropped your iPad to the hard pavement. Even if the hillside was covered with small stones, the dirt would have a certain degree of springiness to help absorb the shock.
Instead of this stunt from 100,000 feet, I'd rather have seen them drop the iPad a number of times from 5 feet in different orientations to a hard surface to see how it held up.
What are the laws for sending something high up in the atmosphere and dropping it to the earth at high speed like a poor-man's ballistic missile? Is there a law that keeps people from doing this over an inhabited area? What counts as an "inhabited area"? The last thing I'm thinking of when hiking in an uninhabited wilderness is that someone's iPad might land on my head.
It seems that these amateur baloon experiments are becoming more common (or maybe Youtube just makes them better publicized), but in any case, I'm wondering what the rules are for dropping random things from the sky.
If you were going off to college and could only have one device,
Let's turn that around:
If you were home, which device would be the first to pick?
If you were at the beach, which device would you pick?
If you were on a train which device would you pick?
It is kind of obvious that PC is for work and tablet is for fun. No clear winner here.
For home, it depends on what I'm doing. If I'm reading a book in bed, I'd pick the tablet (or more likely, the eInk book reader), if I'm browsing a few websites on the couch, I'd pick the tablet. If I'm writing an email to my mom, I'd pick the netbook.
if I'm on the beach, I wouldn't bring any electronic device at all. Maybe a book if I was going to spend the day on the sand, but if I'm at the beach I'm probably there for the water, not to read a book or send an email.
On the train, I always pick the netbook when I have a seat - much more convenient for sending an email, and the tablet is too big to use while I'm standing, I use my phone to read the online news if I don't have a seat.
In the long run, having our eggs in more than one basket would be nice. At the moment, humans are stored RAID 0 here on Earth.
Please don't implement earth-scale RAID-5, I don't want to be torn to pieces just so you can distribute me across different planets with an extra bucket of cloned body parts stored somewhere else for redundancy.
The obvious and simple solution is cryo-sleep. Just ship some capsules along with a rudimentary habitat, and be prepared to sleep most of the time away. The Mars explorers can't realistically bring 18 months' worth of food and oxygen and medical supplies and whatever else--tampons, contact lenses, etc. So just send a month's supply of food, and they can sleep for 17 months until the return vessel arrives.
I think that compared to the amount of fuel and supplies they're going to have to carry to travel to mars, build a habitat and survive for months (years?) on Mars' surface, supplying them with food on the trip there is not going to be a big deal. The ISS goes through around 3 tons of food per person per year.
Cooling the human body to a near-death state has been demonstrated--actually, it has happened many times when people fall into icy water and are revived many minutes later (google extreme hypothermia).
But waking them up again without a team of doctors to assist is rare.
Another concept might be to simply upload the astronaut's neural net into a very high capacity computer. Once this task is accomplished, the computer can continue to operate a space vessel and otherwise completely imitate a human being's decisionmaking and responses. One possible catch is that the computer, unlike an organic brain, lacks any stimulus from hormonal secretions, adrenaline, etc. This kind of stimulus would have to be simulated. The astronauts themselves would remain on Earth, monitoring the flight. Any mistakes or accidents would be blamed on the individual whose brain had been uploaded, obviously.
How would you do this? Dissect a live astronaut's brain cell by cell to determine each neural connection?
Lastly is the idea of telecommuting (similar to the second idea expounded above). A completely automated vessel with remote controls would allow a team of astronauts to "work from home". Unlike an actual trip into space, this virtual exploration would be much safer.
The 6 minute to 45 minute round trip communications lag makes this difficult (but not impossible as demonstrated by the mars rovers).
I think a hybrid of your last two approaches is better than sending men right now - send smart robots to build a base, they can be largely autonomous, and when they need help, they await communications from earth.
Or, maybe instead of sending a large team of men to live on the surface and build a habitat, send a large team of drone robots controlled from orbit by a small team of humans.
FYI many "conventional" cars have timing chains instead of belts.
That's true, but my point was that a $2000 battery replacement (after 100K miles? 150K miles? 200K miles?) is used a proof that hybrids are not economical, but many people accept a nearly $2000 required maintenance item on non-hybrids without question.
In an electric going downhill you shouldn't be using any fuel of any sort. Most gas engines will still need to burn some fuel to idle the engine if you're coasting. You aren't burning much fuel, but so long as the engine is still running you're burning some.
In most modern cars, the ECU will use deceleration fuel cut off (DFCO) to cut off fuel to the engine when it's being driven by the drive wheels.