Starter motors are not designed for anything but starting. They'll overheat and die if you use them for anything else. A motor of the size of a starter motor would need to be liquid cooled in order to do what you imply. I've just looked at online listings for PT Cruiser starter motors and they don't have any cooling fittings -- thus you've heard fiction.
What you might have heard, severely garbled, is that there are direct fuel injection engines that can do restarts by injecting compressed air into the cylinder, and supplying a spark. That way you don't even need an electrical starter, but you do need an electrically controlled valve train.
Nitpick: railroad serial hybrids don't use battery power storage for propulsion. They use a motor-generator fed from a diesel. The diesel is governed at a constant RPM where it has peak efficiency. The motor-gen set acts as a gearbox and clutch -- all electrically controlled. The motors can be installed directly on the bogeys -- you then don't have universal joints to maintain.
Yeah, I too was expecting to see a more modern CPU-controlled electronic typewriter, or even a word processor, hacked to get Zork running on it. They are in plentiful supply in some thrift stores.
The clock is bad implementation. It should use the incoming radio signal to determine when DST is in effect, not a preset table. Sigh. Things are so bad that NIST had to come up with implementation guidelines for designers of those clocks. It is an interesting read -- most of the cheap WWVB-controlled clocks miss most of the recommendations. Case in point: my wife's clock. The things it got wrong:
1. Use of a satellite icon to mark when it's synchronized: check. 2. Insufficient signal consistency checking: yep -- every 2-3 months it completely garbles its time during synchronization. 3. Synchronization at wrong time of day: check -- time should depend on the time zone *and* time of year. The default of midnight is poor. 4. No way of turning off DST: check. 5. Display delay: check - up to 1.5 seconds off right after sync is way too much. 6. Signal quality display -- none: check. 7. Doesn't allow selection from the minimum of 7 time zones (HAST, AKST, PST, MST, CST, EST, AST): check.
I'd also add to it that since the clock has a fairly accurate temperature sensor (to within 0.2C from 10C to 50C -- I checked myself), it could easily temperature-compensate its oscillator. Moreover, it could also compensate longer-term drift of its oscillator against the WWVB, thus easily improving unsynchronized accuracy by say two orders of magnitude. It's all in the firmware, so there's little per-unit cost other than having to amortize NRE.
I haven't checked how it's implemented (MCU vs. custom silicon), but these days implementing such a clock pretty much means that you use some low-power, cheap-in-quantity MCU and do the demodulation and decoding in software, and that can be quite elaborate since the bandwidth is so low. Heck, such a clock could easily interface with pretty much all LF time code stations anywhere on Earth -- they all are in the 40-80kHz band.
And whoever came up originally with this idea should be summarily executed as a warning against introducing self-perpetuating usability FAILs.
The only reason those clocks misbehave like you claim is because some doofus in the 70s designed a chip that did just that. It's not a law of Nature that those clocks should behave like that. Heck, it doesn't even make any sense. Just that that old chip still sells, and AC clock designers in Asia keep buying it, as the US population keeps buying the broken clocks because they don't care too much.
GP is talking about the bog-standard LED clocks that run off mains and seemingly use silicon that was designed in the late 70s, by someone who was stoned most of the time. Those that run fast when off the mains, and whose batteries last 1-2 days when AC is not present. You could almost get an NMOS Z80 running on a 32 kHz oscillator to use less power.
There is an abomination of an AC clock silicon that has been on the market for 2+ decades it seems. The time keeping is synchronized to the mains when mains is present. When there is no mains, there is an RC oscillator that runs fast. Why? Because some harebrain put those values on the application circuit in the datasheet. Everyone uses that silicon, and they all copy the app circuit verbatim without ever bothering to check how fast the RC oscillator works. Thus all those clocks behave like that. Moreover, the 9V battery lasts a really short time when there's no mains. 1-2 days at most it seems. Heck, it may even be a bipolar or an NMOS design, or so it'd seem from the performance.
I hope someone at the chip maker retired that design. Like lost the tapes/files and all documentation, and gave a blank stare when someone would mention it. One can dream.
The truth is that anyone can make a way better performing clock using a single chip power-conscious MCU like MSP430 or Parallax Propeller. It'd even be fully functional when running off battery -- perhaps with the display turned off by default and available when you press any UI button.
I think you overestimate how it really works. The way it really works is pretty simple: mass emailing campaigns are heavily marketed and some people are silly enough to buy into that. Spammers only spam because they have customers for their "campaigns". That's all there is to it IMHO.
BS. No one patents genes in general. One patents particular sequences used for a particular purpose. Not that I agree it should be patentable, but your argument is just silly.
What you say would make sense if the woman was 40, not 80+. Old people die from complications due to simply being in bed for a month. Really. Get a "perfectly healthy" 80+ year old into bed for two months, and the chances of them dying in the two months that follow just rose by a good order of magnitude. We're talking someone who got bedridden without any underlying medical reason. So if you add some surgery into the mix, you are into something like 1-in-5 chance of dying within a year.
Doofus, it's her family who is suing: the lawyers are not suing on their own behalf!! The family is on the hook for legal bills, I'd guesstimate anywhere between $500k to $1M. Imagine you'd suddenly become liable for that amount of money. You'd sue everyone and their mother too, it's merely a matter of self-preservation. The alternative is to go bankrupt, like many do in the U.S. due to medical bills.
Organ transplant triage is based on success rates, not the value of life. The young and those with no chemical dependencies or complicating conditions have a documented higher success rate. They can undergo the extremely traumatic procedures and will be more likely to have positive outcomes. This is, in fact, based ultimately on the fact that two lives *are* equal. Given the choice between a 70% chance of saving one life and a 40% chance of saving another, which is the more responsible choice of action? If, on the other hand, there were a surplus of suitable organs, then such procedures would be done to these less attractive patients. Triage is about preserving the most life, not selecting which is more valuable.
That's some funny weaseling I'd say. There's no such thing as saving a life. We all die sooner or later. So you mentioning a chance of saving someone is utterly meaningless. You only turn out right when you say "preserving the most life": yes, it's about how many days recipient A is expected to live vs. recipient B. The one with higher number wins. Pretty simple.
$50k for 3 months in a hospital. In the U.S.? LOL. Get real. Another dreamer off by an order of magnitude. Points of reference, all at a major U.S. academic hospital:
- outpatient impacted molar removal (all 4) under general anestesia at the dept. of dentistry: $4k - 45 minute outpatient hernia surgery: $10k - 5 days of stay after flatlining in ER due to clostridium difficile infection: $50k - uncomplicated delivery via a cesarean section, total mother + child: $40k
A mother of a friend of mine's stayed at an assisted living facility for the elderly. Monthly bill was around $7k. And that was a pretty low-key place.
Be careful. This is of course a civil suit, but there have been cases (even recent ones) in the U.S. where someone would be tried for battery etc., and then when the victim dies 10 years later from complications caused by the battery, the person gets tried for murder! No, this particular case didn't fall under double jeopardy.
If you raise your kids like that, then you will get exactly what you expect, no more. You ALWAYS need to explain the whys of every rule. Even when they are way too young to understand (say age 2). That way you'll get into a routine, and they'll get used to hearing explanations. Over the time, certainly by age 5 or so, they'll be very eager to understand why they should or shouldn't do something. If, OTOH, you get them used to no explanations, then they won't demand any, and they'll think it's OK to break the rules -- after all, there's seemingly no sense or purpose to them.
Or, to put it in perspective: an outpatient hernia procedure, lasting maybe 45 minutes, done at a major U.S. university medical center, costs on the order of $10k.
You don't realize either. You've missed the mark by an order of magnitude *at least*. Tens of thousands, LOL. If that lady wasn't insured, her medical bill may exceed $1M easy. I kid you not. If you're insured, you get a discount. I'm not kidding either.
This is a civil suit. Noone is prosecuting them for involuntary manslaughter. This is all about getting money, and of course the parents will be responsible for the payout, not the children. Moreover, most likely it'll be the parents' insurance company -- likely they have umbrella liability insurance via their renter or homeowner insurance. Naming the kids on the suit is -- in practice -- irrelevant. The money will be sucked out from parents and/or insurance company.
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Starter motors are not designed for anything but starting. They'll overheat and die if you use them for anything else. A motor of the size of a starter motor would need to be liquid cooled in order to do what you imply. I've just looked at online listings for PT Cruiser starter motors and they don't have any cooling fittings -- thus you've heard fiction.
What you might have heard, severely garbled, is that there are direct fuel injection engines that can do restarts by injecting compressed air into the cylinder, and supplying a spark. That way you don't even need an electrical starter, but you do need an electrically controlled valve train.
Nitpick: railroad serial hybrids don't use battery power storage for propulsion. They use a motor-generator fed from a diesel. The diesel is governed at a constant RPM where it has peak efficiency. The motor-gen set acts as a gearbox and clutch -- all electrically controlled. The motors can be installed directly on the bogeys -- you then don't have universal joints to maintain.
Yeah, I too was expecting to see a more modern CPU-controlled electronic typewriter, or even a word processor, hacked to get Zork running on it. They are in plentiful supply in some thrift stores.
The clock is bad implementation. It should use the incoming radio signal to determine when DST is in effect, not a preset table. Sigh. Things are so bad that NIST had to come up with implementation guidelines for designers of those clocks. It is an interesting read -- most of the cheap WWVB-controlled clocks miss most of the recommendations. Case in point: my wife's clock. The things it got wrong:
1. Use of a satellite icon to mark when it's synchronized: check.
2. Insufficient signal consistency checking: yep -- every 2-3 months it completely garbles its time during synchronization.
3. Synchronization at wrong time of day: check -- time should depend on the time zone *and* time of year. The default of midnight is poor.
4. No way of turning off DST: check.
5. Display delay: check - up to 1.5 seconds off right after sync is way too much.
6. Signal quality display -- none: check.
7. Doesn't allow selection from the minimum of 7 time zones (HAST, AKST, PST, MST, CST, EST, AST): check.
I'd also add to it that since the clock has a fairly accurate temperature sensor (to within 0.2C from 10C to 50C -- I checked myself), it could easily temperature-compensate its oscillator. Moreover, it could also compensate longer-term drift of its oscillator against the WWVB, thus easily improving unsynchronized accuracy by say two orders of magnitude. It's all in the firmware, so there's little per-unit cost other than having to amortize NRE.
I haven't checked how it's implemented (MCU vs. custom silicon), but these days implementing such a clock pretty much means that you use some low-power, cheap-in-quantity MCU and do the demodulation and decoding in software, and that can be quite elaborate since the bandwidth is so low. Heck, such a clock could easily interface with pretty much all LF time code stations anywhere on Earth -- they all are in the 40-80kHz band.
And whoever came up originally with this idea should be summarily executed as a warning against introducing self-perpetuating usability FAILs.
The only reason those clocks misbehave like you claim is because some doofus in the 70s designed a chip that did just that. It's not a law of Nature that those clocks should behave like that. Heck, it doesn't even make any sense. Just that that old chip still sells, and AC clock designers in Asia keep buying it, as the US population keeps buying the broken clocks because they don't care too much.
GP is talking about the bog-standard LED clocks that run off mains and seemingly use silicon that was designed in the late 70s, by someone who was stoned most of the time. Those that run fast when off the mains, and whose batteries last 1-2 days when AC is not present. You could almost get an NMOS Z80 running on a 32 kHz oscillator to use less power.
There is an abomination of an AC clock silicon that has been on the market for 2+ decades it seems. The time keeping is synchronized to the mains when mains is present. When there is no mains, there is an RC oscillator that runs fast. Why? Because some harebrain put those values on the application circuit in the datasheet. Everyone uses that silicon, and they all copy the app circuit verbatim without ever bothering to check how fast the RC oscillator works. Thus all those clocks behave like that. Moreover, the 9V battery lasts a really short time when there's no mains. 1-2 days at most it seems. Heck, it may even be a bipolar or an NMOS design, or so it'd seem from the performance.
I hope someone at the chip maker retired that design. Like lost the tapes/files and all documentation, and gave a blank stare when someone would mention it. One can dream.
The truth is that anyone can make a way better performing clock using a single chip power-conscious MCU like MSP430 or Parallax Propeller. It'd even be fully functional when running off battery -- perhaps with the display turned off by default and available when you press any UI button.
Wow, that's some cheap hospital you got -- consider yourself lucky.
Case law points otherwise. Remember the lady who sued McDonald's over a coffee spill and won?
You must not live in the U.S., or else you've never experienced getting medical bills.
I think you overestimate how it really works. The way it really works is pretty simple: mass emailing campaigns are heavily marketed and some people are silly enough to buy into that. Spammers only spam because they have customers for their "campaigns". That's all there is to it IMHO.
Genes are information carriers. No one patents genes in general, just particular sequences for particular uses. You sound silly.
BS. No one patents genes in general. One patents particular sequences used for a particular purpose. Not that I agree it should be patentable, but your argument is just silly.
Wait a minute, aren't websockets like the old-fashioned SOCKS proxies, just rediscovered?
What you say would make sense if the woman was 40, not 80+. Old people die from complications due to simply being in bed for a month. Really. Get a "perfectly healthy" 80+ year old into bed for two months, and the chances of them dying in the two months that follow just rose by a good order of magnitude. We're talking someone who got bedridden without any underlying medical reason. So if you add some surgery into the mix, you are into something like 1-in-5 chance of dying within a year.
I'd guess the relatives got the bill.
Doofus, it's her family who is suing: the lawyers are not suing on their own behalf!! The family is on the hook for legal bills, I'd guesstimate anywhere between $500k to $1M. Imagine you'd suddenly become liable for that amount of money. You'd sue everyone and their mother too, it's merely a matter of self-preservation. The alternative is to go bankrupt, like many do in the U.S. due to medical bills.
Organ transplant triage is based on success rates, not the value of life. The young and those with no chemical dependencies or complicating conditions have a documented higher success rate. They can undergo the extremely traumatic procedures and will be more likely to have positive outcomes. This is, in fact, based ultimately on the fact that two lives *are* equal. Given the choice between a 70% chance of saving one life and a 40% chance of saving another, which is the more responsible choice of action? If, on the other hand, there were a surplus of suitable organs, then such procedures would be done to these less attractive patients. Triage is about preserving the most life, not selecting which is more valuable.
That's some funny weaseling I'd say. There's no such thing as saving a life. We all die sooner or later. So you mentioning a chance of saving someone is utterly meaningless. You only turn out right when you say "preserving the most life": yes, it's about how many days recipient A is expected to live vs. recipient B. The one with higher number wins. Pretty simple.
$50k for 3 months in a hospital. In the U.S.? LOL. Get real. Another dreamer off by an order of magnitude. Points of reference, all at a major U.S. academic hospital:
- outpatient impacted molar removal (all 4) under general anestesia at the dept. of dentistry: $4k
- 45 minute outpatient hernia surgery: $10k
- 5 days of stay after flatlining in ER due to clostridium difficile infection: $50k
- uncomplicated delivery via a cesarean section, total mother + child: $40k
A mother of a friend of mine's stayed at an assisted living facility for the elderly. Monthly bill was around $7k. And that was a pretty low-key place.
Be careful. This is of course a civil suit, but there have been cases (even recent ones) in the U.S. where someone would be tried for battery etc., and then when the victim dies 10 years later from complications caused by the battery, the person gets tried for murder! No, this particular case didn't fall under double jeopardy.
If you raise your kids like that, then you will get exactly what you expect, no more. You ALWAYS need to explain the whys of every rule. Even when they are way too young to understand (say age 2). That way you'll get into a routine, and they'll get used to hearing explanations. Over the time, certainly by age 5 or so, they'll be very eager to understand why they should or shouldn't do something. If, OTOH, you get them used to no explanations, then they won't demand any, and they'll think it's OK to break the rules -- after all, there's seemingly no sense or purpose to them.
Or, to put it in perspective: an outpatient hernia procedure, lasting maybe 45 minutes, done at a major U.S. university medical center, costs on the order of $10k.
You don't realize either. You've missed the mark by an order of magnitude *at least*. Tens of thousands, LOL. If that lady wasn't insured, her medical bill may exceed $1M easy. I kid you not. If you're insured, you get a discount. I'm not kidding either.
Hell yes! Finally someone who gets it!
This is a civil suit. Noone is prosecuting them for involuntary manslaughter. This is all about getting money, and of course the parents will be responsible for the payout, not the children. Moreover, most likely it'll be the parents' insurance company -- likely they have umbrella liability insurance via their renter or homeowner insurance. Naming the kids on the suit is -- in practice -- irrelevant. The money will be sucked out from parents and/or insurance company.