I hate it when people make scales to grade something on, and then never use the damn entirety of the scale.
I don't think you understand the "scale" in use here. The scale is of passing grades, and it was and is used in its entirety. They've simply truncated off the bit of the scale that used to mean "passing" and now means "failing", because "failing" grades don't have a place on the scale at that school any more.
For the alphabetically-challenged, "F" is not "the letter after D" - that would be the letter "E".
"F" is an abbreviation meaning "Fail". It means "you are not within the scale of passing grades, you are below it, and you failed. No cookie!"
In programming, "F" would be equivalent to null.
Most importantly, the letters are only an abbreviation for the actual percentages, probably so they fit on a report card more easily and with less writing on the teacher's part. The actual percentages are really what count, and I assure you they still go from 0% to 100% as per standard mathematical principles.
Well, in a way, they aren't. The whole use of the letters to denote passing grades is just a distraction to what they are really doing.
What the summary (and article) SHOULD have said was that the school has raised the "passing grade" for a class from 65% correct to 70% correct.
If you get a 69.9 (D+, just under C-), you fail the class under the new rules, just as if you got a 64.9 (just under D) under the old rules, and you need to repeat the class or whatever their rules are for a fail (which may be as simple as the common solution - taking a summer-school class and retaking the exam). The letters represent specific points on the scale, and they've moved the "passing point" up one notch. You still earn the same percentage, it's just that you need a higher percentage to actually pass, and in their infinite clumsiness schools have decided to express the percentage using a less-precise letter system.
The problem with expressing it in terms of the letter, I fear, is that it will spur a whole thread about the technicalities of the standardized letter scale, which is arbitrarily chosen to start with, rather than the important point, which is that the students are being held to a 5-percentage-points higher standard to pass their classes.
I feel that if it gets on FB, it will end up public anyways somehow.
Right. I treat all of Facebook's controls as if they had no meaning.
I mean, I do secure it using their controls, but it's almost an exercise in security masturbation, and I understand that. I understand and acknowledge that the least trustworthy player in the game is the one who has the technical means to easily ignore the settings anyway.
It's like putting one of those "child on board" signs on your car to "protect your family". What, like I'm going to intentionally run into you if I don't know you've got a child in your car? Or is it to give me the opportunity to wave to the kiddies when you pull out in front of me and I can't stop in time?
A handicap ramp doesn't need to be made of titanium and carbon fiber, plywood and 2X6's will work just fine.
The ADA sets (very logical) limits on things like the incline of the ramp. You can't just lay a piece of plywood over the front steps and call it "ADA-compliant" because no human being could push a wheelchair up a 30-degree slope. It also has to be wide enough for a wheelchair and have some sort of railing to prevent a wheelchair from falling off the sides.
But if your steps are too close to the road, building the ramp could block the sidewalk or cause other nuisances.
However, I agree, it sounds somewhat implausible that a hardware store wouldn't have the wherewithal (or at least someone in their loyal customer base) to build a ramp if the building placement and layout accommodated it.
If they didn't have the space due to the way the building was situated on the street/property line/etc, then there are various rules in the law to help deal with that/grandfather in older buildings.
Agreed. This sounds like a proper place for an exception. However, those exceptions are usually up to a local code agent. Once the "cease and desist until you get it fixed" order comes in, it may be too late to save your business. Sometimes, winning is just a more bitter form of losing.
If the rules were ignored when they originally built the place, then it's hard to feel sorry for them. Although if it was a rented space, then shouldn't the landlord have been responsible for it?/quote?
If it was a second-generation, chances are it was in an old pre-ADA building. So, yeah, the ADA probably would have been ignored since it didn't exist.;)
And, if rented, the landlord may (or may not) have been responsible for it depending on the terms of the lease. If he was, the landlord might have had to say "it's not possible or not worth what I make in rental fees on that building. I can't do it, we'll have to cancel your lease and I'll find another tenant for the property that doesn't run a business that needs ADA compliance."
The foot pedals are moved up to hand controls, so the accelerator and brake become a handle conveniently located on or near the steering wheel.
With an automatic transmission, it's trivially different from driving with one foot and two hands.
Now, if they tried it with a stick shift, OK, that's a lot for two hands to manage all at the same time. Clutch, accelerator, gear shifter, steering, ummmm - wait, we ran out of appendages two appendages ago...
True, but many cars are equipped with this thing called the "back seat", and most come equipped with a matching thing called a "back window". A back-seat passenger on the driver's side can reach an ATM just as easily as the driver can.
So, while it's obviously somewhat rare, the Braille on drive-up ATMs does actually get used occasionally.
However, your second point is the "give the man a cookie" one. That's exactly why drive-up ATMs have Braille. Because all ATMs do. Building a separate non-Braille version would be more expensive than just standardizing on having Braille. One keyboard, one assembly line, one SKU in stock.
That's also why almost all PC power supplies can take 110V or 220V input. Even with the extra cost involved in building a dual-mode transformer, it's cheaper than building two models and tracking them separately.
That has nothing to do with ADA, it's just a tired old joke. It's a very simple application of the economy of standardization.
Let's say I build ATMs.
If I'm going to build 10,000 ATMs and I have to make the the buttons, why in the hell would I make TWO kinds of button, one for ATMs that need Braille and one for ATMs that do not? That doubles the cost of my key molds or machining equipment, and I have to keep track of separate inventory of assembled ATM models and separate replacement keyboards.
Instead, I'm going to make one ATM model, offer different casings for it depending on whether you want a standalone or one that's built into a wall, and I'm done. I have exactly one ATM model in stock, and when you call and order one, I ship one.
When one of your customers in a fit of piqued rage about the fact that he has to deal with those little dots on the buttons busts it with his ever-present whiskey bottle, I can replace that keyboard with the secure knowledge that it's ADA-compliant even if it doesn't need to be, because it's cheaper to make them ALL compliant.
Standardization leads to a lot of little things like this. It's usually a lot cheaper to standardize on a part that has ALL of the features you could possibly need across as many applications as possible than to make specific parts that fill the exact feature set for each application.
Random example:
Why do you think Southwest is almost invariably good about having working aircraft where they need them? Because they fly only one basic model of aircraft. They've centered their entire business model around flying routes that can fill the 137 seats in a 737-300 or 737-700 (they have a few 737-500s with lower seating capacity for specific routes, but it's a small amount of their fleet). Their pricing adjusts dynamically to make sure that their planes fly nearly full.
All of their mechanics can work on any of their airplanes, all of their pilots can fly any of their airplanes, and if a plane breaks down or is horribly late they can (with very few exceptions) replace it with any aircraft in their fleet without having to worry about finding one with the right number of seats, a qualified crew, etc.
Very true. I haven't gone to the trouble of setting up groups of friends, because the kind of information I share on Facebook is stuff I really don't feel the need to "segregate".
I always assume Facebook is selling everything I post or say to someone I don't like, so anything that I feel the need to keep in a smaller circle of friends is either emailed or said in person.
I actually seriously considered that, despite the fact that it was my first time in France. But there were a lot of big busy roundabouts between my hotel (the nearest available) and where I had to go for work. Roundabouts are something I'm not all that used to in a car, on a bicycle I think they'd scare the shit out of me. And it was about a 15-mile ride. Plus the company I worked for at the time didn't have showers available on the campus.
15 miles isn't much of a challenge - I actually commute part-time on my bicycle now and my ride is over 15 miles each way, and the terrain is a lot hillier here. But there were too many other factors working against it.
I think, had I known how little I really needed a car, I would have just hired a taxi twice a day or seen if someone local could chauffeur in return for a nice dinner at a decent restaurant. My hotel was very near downtown Orleans, so I just dropped my stuff off in the room, changed to comfy clothes and sneakers, and walked into town for supper.
Yup, this is less harmless than scanning the telephone book and making it available via a Torrent.
Anyone who gets the slightest bit upset about this should be hand-delivering Molotov Cocktails to www.anywho.com right now. They disclose your STREET ADDRESS AND PHONE NUMBER.
Well, if you're listed in it, that is. Personally, I'm not. One of the reasons why I dropped my landline ten years ago, actually. I saw that excellent security documentary with Steve Martin about the dangers of being listed in the phone book.
As long as Ron Bowes didn't uncheck the pre-selected checkbox "you allow random people to come up to you and give your nuts a swift kick", sure.
Look, I've been using Facebook for a couple of years now. Facebook is finally pretty forthcoming about telling their users what's accessible to the public in your profile. There's even a "see your profile as {friend|friend-of-friend|public} sees you" button so you can easily review who sees what.
It's pretty easy to mark things as "friends only", though I prefer the simpler step of not putting shit on Facebook that I don't want to become public knowledge in the first place. I still have mostly everything set as "friends only", but in case there is a leak I want to not have to care.
Having said that, I'm struggling with what Ron did that is considered kick-to-the-nuts-worthy. He published a list of URLs to people's Facebook pages that point to information that is set to be viewable by the public. From what I can see, he hasn't extracted any of the actual information. He's providing less information than Google would, and isn't caching anything.
I haven't owned a landline in almost a decade - I like not being in the phone book. But I'm not at all uncomfortable with this list, because it doesn't expose one goddamned thing about me that isn't already exposed by my specific request.
If anything, maybe a few Facebook neophytes will go through the handful of mouseclicks it takes to set some of their information as "Friends Only" at which point the URL will point to an empty (or at least less full) page and the user will be safer from strangers knowing every detail about their dog's bowel movements or their Farmville score.
I went to France on business a couple of years ago, and the company's French travel agent assumed that, since I was American, of course I wanted "ze very large auto with ze automatique, and you want to be picked up at ze airport, yes?"
After a very long conversation, I got train tickets from Paris to Orleans, a map of the subway system including a few markings where they had rent-a-locker places available for my luggage, and a manual-shift Yaris waiting for me in Orleans (which was an amazingly fun little car that hadn't quite reached the US at the time).
Had a great if initially confusing time riding the Paris subway system to the train station, locked up my bags at a rent-a-locker place, toured Paris on foot/subway for a good chunk of a day, then took the train to Orleans to get my car.
The woman at the train station, after I managed in my poor French to get across who I was, tried to tell me that there was some sort of mistake. The gist of what she was saying was "You are American and this is a small manual car, there must be some horrible mistake. I am very sorry that the car rental agency is closed, they only left me the key, I will call you a cab which we will pay for and the rental agency will have a larger automatic car delivered to your hotel early tomorrow morning." After nearly an hour of stumbling with funny gestures and my poor French (she was incredibly good-natured about my mangling of her language), I was able to tell her that the car was in fact what I had requested, and was told that I was pretty OK, "for an American", and got my key and directions to the car.:)
Damn good thing I got a small car, too. Those streets are NARROW. But most of my travels in Orleans were done on foot anyway. The only thing I needed the car for was to get to work on the outskirts of town.
Batteries that use a liquid to hold their energy tend to have a few characteristics:
1. They are heavy with relatively low energy density, so you'd need a lot of them. Energy/mass ratio determines range and efficiency, so these will be low-range, low-efficiency vehicles.
2. Most liquid-based rechargeables use acid, and the charge involves stripping bits of lead and lead dioxide off plates to form acid, where discharging redeposits the stuff and turns the liquid back into water. If you simply kept emptying the water and filling them up with acid, they'd probably gunge up pretty quickly.
3. Most of them use *strong* acid. And lead. Nasty stuff to handle in decent quantities. That's why most of them are sealed now.
4. Chance of contamination of the acid.
Now, there are some promising "batteries" in the form of fuel cells that use various liquid fuels to form electricity. Maybe someday one of them will be practical. But then you'll be back to some form of emissions from the vehicle rather than centralizing your emissions into electricity generation.
A trike has several advantages over a motorcycle. First, it's wider, and therefore more visible to other vehicles. Second, it's got lateral stability and would tend to be less susceptible to things like uneven road surfaces and wide-gap railroad tracks at an angle to the road. Third, because it's laterally stable, you can put wide tires on it, giving you more capacity, less chance of a tire being pulled sideways by a bad road surface, and a better ride.
The extra tire and additional size also gives you a LOT of room for extra batteries, and the ability to build a frame capable of carrying the resulting weight.
Having said that, the motorcycle is going to be more efficient in electric usage because of reduced rolling resistance (2 wheels instead of three), it'll tend to weigh less, and is a less complicated piece of machinery.
The lighter it is, the less it's going to cost to operate (in general), so for short trips in terms of efficiency you'd start with a bicycle (no fuel but food), an electric-assist bicycle (use electricity to buy you some speed), then an electric motorcycle, then a tri, then a small auto, and so on.
For longer trips, you'll need to adjust your ratio of overall vehicle weight versus energy storage capacity, and unless you want to have another power source available you're pretty much looking at bigger = higher percentage of vehicle weight is battery = longer range.
You could probably design a two-passenger electric that could get you nonstop coast-to-coast - just fill the back of a semi with batteries. But it's not terribly efficient in terms of energy per passenger-mile.
That is, if you want speed. I can throw several days' worth of food and water and my camping hammock on my not-terribly-efficient commuting bicycle and probably cover 100 miles in a solid day's riding. For my 15-mile-each-way commute, I can average about 16MPH, but if I knew I were going 100 miles I'd probably drop that back closer to 13MPH. A better bike might get me 120 miles or so in a day. The only fuel involved is food and water, and emission levels depend on whether I had chili the night before.
But that's 8 hours of hard riding to cover the distance that my car could easily cover in 2 hours using 3 gallons of Diesel, so the extra 6 hours of my time is rarely going to be worth it. 15-20 miles is about the maximum practical commute for a no-fuel vehicle.
If this takes off your car will trickle-charge to 100% directly off the grid overnight the vast majority of the time, when power demand is at its lowest. You get home, you plug it in, and if you know you are going back out soon you push a "charge the car now, I know it'll cost me more" button and it'll draw whatever it can get to load up the batteries as quickly as possible.
Most of the time, you'd plug it in and the charger would start itself at 10PM or whenever you get better rates, and it would know it had 6 hours or whatever to charge the batteries, so it would use a more efficient charging method.
The 5-minute charge will only be used at charging stations for long drives, which will probably be located where gas stations are today - in more industrial areas where more power is available. They'll probably charge up capacitors or batteries or use some similar technology to level out the load where possible.
A 5-minute charge is hugely convenient for long trips. But for most users, the car would rarely be charged that way.
The heat ray appears to work fine - for crowd control. Where you have a peaceful demonstration going on. In other words, it works great in every circumstance where it is not necessary.
If you have an unruly crowd who is hell-bent on violence, this will hurt a few of them, but may not even slow the crowd down. High-pressure water doesn't have the range, but is at least capable of repelling larger numbers of people for longer so you can get the hell out. Tear gas debilitates large numbers. This unit appears to be basically a long-range taser with fewer capabilities.
But, to your point...
For guerrilla warfare in an urban environment with people who are geared up to live in the desert and (in many cases) willing to blow themselves up to reach a target?
umm, not so much.
For remote/rural guerrilla warfare? Not at all.
However, the technology behind this could be useful.
I don't know the technical feasibility, but ramping it up so it can disable a car without running the risk of killing the occupants, and now we're talking. Bullets have a nasty habit of not disabling engines and (even with a good shot) ricocheting around the engine compartment and entering the cabin. And shots to disable moving targets where the driver/passenger and the engine aren't that many degrees apart aren't terribly accurate even for shooters not concerned about imminent death.
Because they, like voting machines, are written with piss-poor software that has so many holes anything any of them do would be inadmissible if anyone with half a brain cell really knew how much guess work was in... hey, who are you guys?
Sorry, what was I saying? Oh, yeah, because if we do that the terrorists win. Now look directly into the 4 vertical lines at the end of paragraph for a few seconds and it'll all become clear to you.
since nobody will be exposed more than a few seconds
I'm betting that's not actually in the design, but is covered in the Owner's Manual, in the same area as famously-ignored nonlethal weapon instructions like "continuous application of pepper spray after victim has already clawed their skin off their face is not recommended", "baton is not for anal insertion into suspect", and "Taser should not be used repeatedly on suspect, and especially not until such point that a strong desire for barbecue sauce sets in due to the smell of cooking meat."
Then the "whale wars" boats get them, too, as a non-lethal extended range deterrent to keep whalers from approaching the whales. Then it becomes an arms race.
"On the next episode of Whale Wars, Captain Dumbass uses his first vX canister. The whalers just got a shipment, and it looks like some sort of missile. This could get interesting. Be sure to watch next week for the next exciting installment of... (dramatic pause) WHALE WARS."
PS: Never seen the show. Never even seen the previews. But if it's anything like the dangerous catch fishing show or that one about the truckers who drive over ice (each of which I have seen once), it's going to be predictable drama queenery. WWE, now with new backdrops.
Publicity stunt, yes. Environmental statement, absolutely. Specifically espousing recycling bottles into building materials for oceangoing use, doubtful. They did highlight a lot of "green" technologies (solar power, wind, towed turbines, and bicycle generators) for their internal power. But the actual ship design was pretty impractical.
Thor Heyerdahl died in 2002. Maybe it took Olav eight years to help put this all together as a fitting second tribute to gramps. The name is certainly a tribute to Kon-Tiki.
His first tribute was pretty cool - he recreated and finally successfully completed Thor's failed "Kon-Tiki" voyage in the "Tangaroa" in 2006.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate it when people make scales to grade something on, and then never use the damn entirety of the scale.
I don't think you understand the "scale" in use here. The scale is of passing grades, and it was and is used in its entirety. They've simply truncated off the bit of the scale that used to mean "passing" and now means "failing", because "failing" grades don't have a place on the scale at that school any more.
For the alphabetically-challenged, "F" is not "the letter after D" - that would be the letter "E".
"F" is an abbreviation meaning "Fail". It means "you are not within the scale of passing grades, you are below it, and you failed. No cookie!"
In programming, "F" would be equivalent to null.
Most importantly, the letters are only an abbreviation for the actual percentages, probably so they fit on a report card more easily and with less writing on the teacher's part. The actual percentages are really what count, and I assure you they still go from 0% to 100% as per standard mathematical principles.
Well, in a way, they aren't. The whole use of the letters to denote passing grades is just a distraction to what they are really doing.
What the summary (and article) SHOULD have said was that the school has raised the "passing grade" for a class from 65% correct to 70% correct.
If you get a 69.9 (D+, just under C-), you fail the class under the new rules, just as if you got a 64.9 (just under D) under the old rules, and you need to repeat the class or whatever their rules are for a fail (which may be as simple as the common solution - taking a summer-school class and retaking the exam). The letters represent specific points on the scale, and they've moved the "passing point" up one notch. You still earn the same percentage, it's just that you need a higher percentage to actually pass, and in their infinite clumsiness schools have decided to express the percentage using a less-precise letter system.
The problem with expressing it in terms of the letter, I fear, is that it will spur a whole thread about the technicalities of the standardized letter scale, which is arbitrarily chosen to start with, rather than the important point, which is that the students are being held to a 5-percentage-points higher standard to pass their classes.
(notices thread below)
Oops, too late.
I feel that if it gets on FB, it will end up public anyways somehow.
Right. I treat all of Facebook's controls as if they had no meaning.
I mean, I do secure it using their controls, but it's almost an exercise in security masturbation, and I understand that. I understand and acknowledge that the least trustworthy player in the game is the one who has the technical means to easily ignore the settings anyway.
It's like putting one of those "child on board" signs on your car to "protect your family". What, like I'm going to intentionally run into you if I don't know you've got a child in your car? Or is it to give me the opportunity to wave to the kiddies when you pull out in front of me and I can't stop in time?
A handicap ramp doesn't need to be made of titanium and carbon fiber, plywood and 2X6's will work just fine.
The ADA sets (very logical) limits on things like the incline of the ramp. You can't just lay a piece of plywood over the front steps and call it "ADA-compliant" because no human being could push a wheelchair up a 30-degree slope. It also has to be wide enough for a wheelchair and have some sort of railing to prevent a wheelchair from falling off the sides.
But if your steps are too close to the road, building the ramp could block the sidewalk or cause other nuisances.
However, I agree, it sounds somewhat implausible that a hardware store wouldn't have the wherewithal (or at least someone in their loyal customer base) to build a ramp if the building placement and layout accommodated it.
If they didn't have the space due to the way the building was situated on the street/property line/etc, then there are various rules in the law to help deal with that/grandfather in older buildings.
Agreed. This sounds like a proper place for an exception. However, those exceptions are usually up to a local code agent. Once the "cease and desist until you get it fixed" order comes in, it may be too late to save your business. Sometimes, winning is just a more bitter form of losing.
If the rules were ignored when they originally built the place, then it's hard to feel sorry for them. Although if it was a rented space, then shouldn't the landlord have been responsible for it?/quote?
If it was a second-generation, chances are it was in an old pre-ADA building. So, yeah, the ADA probably would have been ignored since it didn't exist. ;)
And, if rented, the landlord may (or may not) have been responsible for it depending on the terms of the lease. If he was, the landlord might have had to say "it's not possible or not worth what I make in rental fees on that building. I can't do it, we'll have to cancel your lease and I'll find another tenant for the property that doesn't run a business that needs ADA compliance."
How does this freak you out, exactly?
The foot pedals are moved up to hand controls, so the accelerator and brake become a handle conveniently located on or near the steering wheel.
With an automatic transmission, it's trivially different from driving with one foot and two hands.
Now, if they tried it with a stick shift, OK, that's a lot for two hands to manage all at the same time. Clutch, accelerator, gear shifter, steering, ummmm - wait, we ran out of appendages two appendages ago...
True, but many cars are equipped with this thing called the "back seat", and most come equipped with a matching thing called a "back window". A back-seat passenger on the driver's side can reach an ATM just as easily as the driver can.
So, while it's obviously somewhat rare, the Braille on drive-up ATMs does actually get used occasionally.
However, your second point is the "give the man a cookie" one. That's exactly why drive-up ATMs have Braille. Because all ATMs do. Building a separate non-Braille version would be more expensive than just standardizing on having Braille. One keyboard, one assembly line, one SKU in stock.
That's also why almost all PC power supplies can take 110V or 220V input. Even with the extra cost involved in building a dual-mode transformer, it's cheaper than building two models and tracking them separately.
That has nothing to do with ADA, it's just a tired old joke. It's a very simple application of the economy of standardization.
Let's say I build ATMs.
If I'm going to build 10,000 ATMs and I have to make the the buttons, why in the hell would I make TWO kinds of button, one for ATMs that need Braille and one for ATMs that do not? That doubles the cost of my key molds or machining equipment, and I have to keep track of separate inventory of assembled ATM models and separate replacement keyboards.
Instead, I'm going to make one ATM model, offer different casings for it depending on whether you want a standalone or one that's built into a wall, and I'm done. I have exactly one ATM model in stock, and when you call and order one, I ship one.
When one of your customers in a fit of piqued rage about the fact that he has to deal with those little dots on the buttons busts it with his ever-present whiskey bottle, I can replace that keyboard with the secure knowledge that it's ADA-compliant even if it doesn't need to be, because it's cheaper to make them ALL compliant.
Standardization leads to a lot of little things like this. It's usually a lot cheaper to standardize on a part that has ALL of the features you could possibly need across as many applications as possible than to make specific parts that fill the exact feature set for each application.
Random example:
Why do you think Southwest is almost invariably good about having working aircraft where they need them? Because they fly only one basic model of aircraft. They've centered their entire business model around flying routes that can fill the 137 seats in a 737-300 or 737-700 (they have a few 737-500s with lower seating capacity for specific routes, but it's a small amount of their fleet). Their pricing adjusts dynamically to make sure that their planes fly nearly full.
All of their mechanics can work on any of their airplanes, all of their pilots can fly any of their airplanes, and if a plane breaks down or is horribly late they can (with very few exceptions) replace it with any aircraft in their fleet without having to worry about finding one with the right number of seats, a qualified crew, etc.
Very true. I haven't gone to the trouble of setting up groups of friends, because the kind of information I share on Facebook is stuff I really don't feel the need to "segregate".
I always assume Facebook is selling everything I post or say to someone I don't like, so anything that I feel the need to keep in a smaller circle of friends is either emailed or said in person.
Oh, yeah, there were two documentaries about that. I'd forgotten. Silly me!
I think it's because neither documentary ever had a sequel.
I actually seriously considered that, despite the fact that it was my first time in France. But there were a lot of big busy roundabouts between my hotel (the nearest available) and where I had to go for work. Roundabouts are something I'm not all that used to in a car, on a bicycle I think they'd scare the shit out of me. And it was about a 15-mile ride. Plus the company I worked for at the time didn't have showers available on the campus.
15 miles isn't much of a challenge - I actually commute part-time on my bicycle now and my ride is over 15 miles each way, and the terrain is a lot hillier here. But there were too many other factors working against it.
I think, had I known how little I really needed a car, I would have just hired a taxi twice a day or seen if someone local could chauffeur in return for a nice dinner at a decent restaurant. My hotel was very near downtown Orleans, so I just dropped my stuff off in the room, changed to comfy clothes and sneakers, and walked into town for supper.
Yup, this is less harmless than scanning the telephone book and making it available via a Torrent.
Anyone who gets the slightest bit upset about this should be hand-delivering Molotov Cocktails to www.anywho.com right now. They disclose your STREET ADDRESS AND PHONE NUMBER.
Well, if you're listed in it, that is. Personally, I'm not. One of the reasons why I dropped my landline ten years ago, actually. I saw that excellent security documentary with Steve Martin about the dangers of being listed in the phone book.
As long as Ron Bowes didn't uncheck the pre-selected checkbox "you allow random people to come up to you and give your nuts a swift kick", sure.
Look, I've been using Facebook for a couple of years now. Facebook is finally pretty forthcoming about telling their users what's accessible to the public in your profile. There's even a "see your profile as {friend|friend-of-friend|public} sees you" button so you can easily review who sees what.
It's pretty easy to mark things as "friends only", though I prefer the simpler step of not putting shit on Facebook that I don't want to become public knowledge in the first place. I still have mostly everything set as "friends only", but in case there is a leak I want to not have to care.
Having said that, I'm struggling with what Ron did that is considered kick-to-the-nuts-worthy. He published a list of URLs to people's Facebook pages that point to information that is set to be viewable by the public. From what I can see, he hasn't extracted any of the actual information. He's providing less information than Google would, and isn't caching anything.
I haven't owned a landline in almost a decade - I like not being in the phone book. But I'm not at all uncomfortable with this list, because it doesn't expose one goddamned thing about me that isn't already exposed by my specific request.
If anything, maybe a few Facebook neophytes will go through the handful of mouseclicks it takes to set some of their information as "Friends Only" at which point the URL will point to an empty (or at least less full) page and the user will be safer from strangers knowing every detail about their dog's bowel movements or their Farmville score.
Tell me about it. Sheesh.
I went to France on business a couple of years ago, and the company's French travel agent assumed that, since I was American, of course I wanted "ze very large auto with ze automatique, and you want to be picked up at ze airport, yes?"
After a very long conversation, I got train tickets from Paris to Orleans, a map of the subway system including a few markings where they had rent-a-locker places available for my luggage, and a manual-shift Yaris waiting for me in Orleans (which was an amazingly fun little car that hadn't quite reached the US at the time).
Had a great if initially confusing time riding the Paris subway system to the train station, locked up my bags at a rent-a-locker place, toured Paris on foot/subway for a good chunk of a day, then took the train to Orleans to get my car.
The woman at the train station, after I managed in my poor French to get across who I was, tried to tell me that there was some sort of mistake. The gist of what she was saying was "You are American and this is a small manual car, there must be some horrible mistake. I am very sorry that the car rental agency is closed, they only left me the key, I will call you a cab which we will pay for and the rental agency will have a larger automatic car delivered to your hotel early tomorrow morning." After nearly an hour of stumbling with funny gestures and my poor French (she was incredibly good-natured about my mangling of her language), I was able to tell her that the car was in fact what I had requested, and was told that I was pretty OK, "for an American", and got my key and directions to the car. :)
Damn good thing I got a small car, too. Those streets are NARROW. But most of my travels in Orleans were done on foot anyway. The only thing I needed the car for was to get to work on the outskirts of town.
Sounds great, but a few thoughts come to mind...
Batteries that use a liquid to hold their energy tend to have a few characteristics:
1. They are heavy with relatively low energy density, so you'd need a lot of them. Energy/mass ratio determines range and efficiency, so these will be low-range, low-efficiency vehicles.
2. Most liquid-based rechargeables use acid, and the charge involves stripping bits of lead and lead dioxide off plates to form acid, where discharging redeposits the stuff and turns the liquid back into water. If you simply kept emptying the water and filling them up with acid, they'd probably gunge up pretty quickly.
3. Most of them use *strong* acid. And lead. Nasty stuff to handle in decent quantities. That's why most of them are sealed now.
4. Chance of contamination of the acid.
Now, there are some promising "batteries" in the form of fuel cells that use various liquid fuels to form electricity. Maybe someday one of them will be practical. But then you'll be back to some form of emissions from the vehicle rather than centralizing your emissions into electricity generation.
A trike has several advantages over a motorcycle. First, it's wider, and therefore more visible to other vehicles. Second, it's got lateral stability and would tend to be less susceptible to things like uneven road surfaces and wide-gap railroad tracks at an angle to the road. Third, because it's laterally stable, you can put wide tires on it, giving you more capacity, less chance of a tire being pulled sideways by a bad road surface, and a better ride.
The extra tire and additional size also gives you a LOT of room for extra batteries, and the ability to build a frame capable of carrying the resulting weight.
Having said that, the motorcycle is going to be more efficient in electric usage because of reduced rolling resistance (2 wheels instead of three), it'll tend to weigh less, and is a less complicated piece of machinery.
The lighter it is, the less it's going to cost to operate (in general), so for short trips in terms of efficiency you'd start with a bicycle (no fuel but food), an electric-assist bicycle (use electricity to buy you some speed), then an electric motorcycle, then a tri, then a small auto, and so on.
For longer trips, you'll need to adjust your ratio of overall vehicle weight versus energy storage capacity, and unless you want to have another power source available you're pretty much looking at bigger = higher percentage of vehicle weight is battery = longer range.
You could probably design a two-passenger electric that could get you nonstop coast-to-coast - just fill the back of a semi with batteries. But it's not terribly efficient in terms of energy per passenger-mile.
That is, if you want speed. I can throw several days' worth of food and water and my camping hammock on my not-terribly-efficient commuting bicycle and probably cover 100 miles in a solid day's riding. For my 15-mile-each-way commute, I can average about 16MPH, but if I knew I were going 100 miles I'd probably drop that back closer to 13MPH. A better bike might get me 120 miles or so in a day. The only fuel involved is food and water, and emission levels depend on whether I had chili the night before.
But that's 8 hours of hard riding to cover the distance that my car could easily cover in 2 hours using 3 gallons of Diesel, so the extra 6 hours of my time is rarely going to be worth it. 15-20 miles is about the maximum practical commute for a no-fuel vehicle.
If this takes off your car will trickle-charge to 100% directly off the grid overnight the vast majority of the time, when power demand is at its lowest. You get home, you plug it in, and if you know you are going back out soon you push a "charge the car now, I know it'll cost me more" button and it'll draw whatever it can get to load up the batteries as quickly as possible.
Most of the time, you'd plug it in and the charger would start itself at 10PM or whenever you get better rates, and it would know it had 6 hours or whatever to charge the batteries, so it would use a more efficient charging method.
The 5-minute charge will only be used at charging stations for long drives, which will probably be located where gas stations are today - in more industrial areas where more power is available. They'll probably charge up capacitors or batteries or use some similar technology to level out the load where possible.
A 5-minute charge is hugely convenient for long trips. But for most users, the car would rarely be charged that way.
In other words:
Less voltage than Li-Ion, lower capacity than Li-Ion, charging doesn't scale easily, lame.
It's even got a misplaced lower-case "i" in the name.
Absolutely.
The heat ray appears to work fine - for crowd control. Where you have a peaceful demonstration going on. In other words, it works great in every circumstance where it is not necessary.
If you have an unruly crowd who is hell-bent on violence, this will hurt a few of them, but may not even slow the crowd down. High-pressure water doesn't have the range, but is at least capable of repelling larger numbers of people for longer so you can get the hell out. Tear gas debilitates large numbers. This unit appears to be basically a long-range taser with fewer capabilities.
But, to your point...
For guerrilla warfare in an urban environment with people who are geared up to live in the desert and (in many cases) willing to blow themselves up to reach a target?
umm, not so much.
For remote/rural guerrilla warfare? Not at all.
However, the technology behind this could be useful.
I don't know the technical feasibility, but ramping it up so it can disable a car without running the risk of killing the occupants, and now we're talking. Bullets have a nasty habit of not disabling engines and (even with a good shot) ricocheting around the engine compartment and entering the cabin. And shots to disable moving targets where the driver/passenger and the engine aren't that many degrees apart aren't terribly accurate even for shooters not concerned about imminent death.
Because they, like voting machines, are written with piss-poor software that has so many holes anything any of them do would be inadmissible if anyone with half a brain cell really knew how much guess work was in... hey, who are you guys?
Sorry, what was I saying? Oh, yeah, because if we do that the terrorists win. Now look directly into the 4 vertical lines at the end of paragraph for a few seconds and it'll all become clear to you.
||{begin code mindwipe
brain.goback(10 seconds);
brain.wipeRecentMemory(permanent);
}||
I just hope Slashdot supports embedded code.
since nobody will be exposed more than a few seconds
I'm betting that's not actually in the design, but is covered in the Owner's Manual, in the same area as famously-ignored nonlethal weapon instructions like "continuous application of pepper spray after victim has already clawed their skin off their face is not recommended", "baton is not for anal insertion into suspect", and "Taser should not be used repeatedly on suspect, and especially not until such point that a strong desire for barbecue sauce sets in due to the smell of cooking meat."
Then the "whale wars" boats get them, too, as a non-lethal extended range deterrent to keep whalers from approaching the whales. Then it becomes an arms race.
"On the next episode of Whale Wars, Captain Dumbass uses his first vX canister. The whalers just got a shipment, and it looks like some sort of missile. This could get interesting. Be sure to watch next week for the next exciting installment of... (dramatic pause) WHALE WARS."
PS: Never seen the show. Never even seen the previews. But if it's anything like the dangerous catch fishing show or that one about the truckers who drive over ice (each of which I have seen once), it's going to be predictable drama queenery. WWE, now with new backdrops.
mildly tingle and warm the marshmallow
I don't know exactly what "tingle and warm the marshmallow" means, but I don't think it belongs in this discussion. :)
this isn't the wikipedia
[citation needed] :)
Publicity stunt, yes. Environmental statement, absolutely. Specifically espousing recycling bottles into building materials for oceangoing use, doubtful. They did highlight a lot of "green" technologies (solar power, wind, towed turbines, and bicycle generators) for their internal power. But the actual ship design was pretty impractical.
Thor Heyerdahl died in 2002. Maybe it took Olav eight years to help put this all together as a fitting second tribute to gramps. The name is certainly a tribute to Kon-Tiki.
His first tribute was pretty cool - he recreated and finally successfully completed Thor's failed "Kon-Tiki" voyage in the "Tangaroa" in 2006.
But of course. They used glass bottles back then. See the important documentary "The Gods Must Be Crazy" for further details.