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  1. Re:Hmmm ... on 'Smart Gun' Firm Wants You To Fund Its Prototype · · Score: 1

    I've made perhaps a non-discovery, but hammer injuries really seem to go down for me as I get more fit in the sense of gaining some arm and a bit of upper body strength while working on house remodeling projects. It used to be that my hands looked like someone rolled a truck over them, these days I can go a whole weekend of banging on stuff and not only do I rarely miss, but I don't hit myself. Note that I was never overweight, just got a bit more muscle strength from actually doing stuff that's keeps you sweating for a couple hours at a time. Sanding drywall is a great exercise, it makes you and the wall look good :)

  2. Re:Safety Tools are too expensive on 'Smart Gun' Firm Wants You To Fund Its Prototype · · Score: 1

    Huh? They sell it just fine, and it has saved some fingers!

  3. Re:Small runtime? on Dao, a New Programming Language Supporting Advanced Features With Small Runtime · · Score: 1

    Say you run on a platform where a (possibly fixed-depth) PC stack is implemented in hardware and is not directly accessible as data. Say that your code has only non-recursive functions where the frames are statically allocated and overlaid by the linker. Say you're running on a low-end PIC, SX48, the Picoblaze core, and so on. Say that C compilers existed for those - well, they do. :)

    For non-recursive code you don't need stack for anything but the PC, as the frames can be statically allocated and overlaid based on the call tree. So the stack you use is a very limited one, and can be subject to strict isolation should you wish to provide one.

  4. Re:The YAPPing language is for dogs on Dao, a New Programming Language Supporting Advanced Features With Small Runtime · · Score: 1

    When both PC and data are passed through the stack that's subject to overruns, you can have perfectly good exploits that don't need executable stack. Only decoupling of the PC and data stacks can fix that. Ideally the PC stack would be protected by the MMU and only modifiable by CALL/RET, but so far no hardware supports that.

  5. Re:The YAPPing language is for dogs on Dao, a New Programming Language Supporting Advanced Features With Small Runtime · · Score: 1

    Just use a base pointer that's decoupled from the stack pointer, and use it as a hybrid base/stack pointer. There's no performance penalty for that on modern architectures. The modern implementations of push/pop are really just syntactic sugar implemented at hardware level. I bet it'd be a small patch to LLVM to add such an ABI.

  6. Re:This is getting boring on Dao, a New Programming Language Supporting Advanced Features With Small Runtime · · Score: 1

    Well, your language better supported those new paradigms in the sense that it should be flexible enough to let you express those in code, without resorting to a stack of external preprocessors. That's IMHO the feature that makes LISP so great. Myself I'd treat LISP as an archaic artifact if it weren't for its macro system. The closest approximation we have in scripting languages is eval, but that really has bad code smell, never mind that you lose any capacity for compile-time checking of the generated code.

  7. Re:My opinion and some free unsolicited advice ;-) on Dao, a New Programming Language Supporting Advanced Features With Small Runtime · · Score: 1

    Why do so many contemporary language designers choose C-style syntax and not Algol/Pascal/Ada style?

    There are two sides to the Pascal style. One is the block delimiters. That's really a matter of preference and doesn't change how the AST looks, so let's not dwell on it. The other side is about the declarations forced into "neat" little blocks. That arguably has some downsides. For one, the declarations may be far from the point of use. Another issue is that Pascal really doesn't have block-local variables at all. Local variables are local to a function. C-style local declarations can be very handy in making the code readable. Locality of reference is good for humans too! I'd take for (auto i = 0; i < 100; ++i) over var i: int; {mucho variables} begin {mucho code} for i:=0; i<100; i:=i+1;... any day. Pushing the Pascal-style to a modern type-inferring language makes the var block look silly: var i,j,k,l,m:auto; {and so on} That's one of the things that IMHO modern C++ got right. Type inference and explicit variable declaration at point of use. Keeps the code readable due to locality of reference and terseness.

  8. Re:And may it die it's well deserved death... on Dao, a New Programming Language Supporting Advanced Features With Small Runtime · · Score: 1

    Well, at least it gave - hopefully - some fun and satisfaction to the author, so your statement that nobody needs this language is false on its face. I'd also tend to think that mental masturbation may be sometimes more productive than genital masturbation, unless you need to be working on your arm strength, that is. I'd also be a bit careful with the implication that living in one's mom's basement is always undesirable. Some moms are very good cooks :)

  9. Re:Whats Dao good for? on Dao, a New Programming Language Supporting Advanced Features With Small Runtime · · Score: 1

    Oh, you must be the author, or inspired by the author, then, due to your chronic overuse of the plural. It's not stuffs, it's stuff. It's not C interfaces, it's the C interface. It's not codes, it's code. Hint: don't learn English from forum posts where people ask for teh codes. It would also help if the web-based documentation didn't use a fixed width font and was presented in a slightly more neutral color scheme.

  10. Re:Whats Dao good for? on Dao, a New Programming Language Supporting Advanced Features With Small Runtime · · Score: 1

    The syntax macro is a bit silly. You really want arbitrary computation in macros, not just an AST-ified regex search-and-replace. LISP got it right.

  11. The documentation makes me go "aargh" on Dao, a New Programming Language Supporting Advanced Features With Small Runtime · · Score: 1

    Every time I see the word "codes" in the documentation, I throw up a little. It's an otherwise decent documentation, but man, does it have to reuse the language wart that makes us laugh and cry so hard at the clueless "show me teh codes" posts on the forums?

  12. Retarded... on Hospital Resorts To Cameras To Ensure Employees Wash Hands · · Score: 1

    This solution is absolutely retarded. All you need to detect washing of hands is a cheap inertial reference sensor on a little tag worn on the upper body. A three-axis accelerometer and a three-axis angular velocity sensor is it. The change in posture and the sways propagating to the upper body are quite a distinctive signature, especially when you couple it with the signature of walking to the sink, and all the other things that are known to happen when you use a particular sink. You could probably tell which sink you're at. You don't need anyone in India to detect it. Modern signal processing deals with it just fine. Due to low sampling rates involved (100Hz is enough), you can do real time signal processing on a relatively low-power CPU, so that the battery life can be excellent. The system needs to check-in periodically via some RF technology, possibly simply Wi-Fi that's off most of the time, but comes up only to report significant events.

  13. Re:or on Google Acquires Kite-Power Generator · · Score: 1

    I don't even know where to start. The altitude it operates at is adjustable, by, um, changing the length of the tether, and that's obviously an insurmountable obstacle to the likes of you.

    What they have so far is a 30kW proof-of-concept. As you hopefully realize, there aren't any 30kW turbines atop of dedicated 100m tall poles, because such poles cost way too much to be worth it for a small 30kW turbine! So they have clearly demonstrated that it's feasible even for a startup to do such a thing. Thanks for bringing this up, but it sorta-kinda disproves your implied beef.

    As for the craft being "mostly wing": yes, it's "mostly wing", but if you look at the scale of this device compared to a conventional 3-blade turbine, it's only the wingtip. As in the last 25-30% of the turbine's blade. So, let me get this straight: you replace a turbine with 3 blades with just the 30% of one blade, and you consider it, presumably, not big enough of an achievement?

    I don't know what you are doing, but I've went to the trouble of reading their entire website and as an engineer I certainly appreciate the concentrated effort they've put into this. This isn't just a brute-force kind of an effort, it's backed by what looks to be very solid engineering design and analysis. I have no stake in this at all, I can simply appreciate their work for what it is, without resorting to spouting bullshit.

  14. Re:Why is this here? on WeVideo Helps You Edit Your Videos Online (Video) · · Score: 1

    Do you trust them to keep their flash player updates as well?

  15. Re:APT-Cacher, Squid on Ask Slashdot: Safe Learning Environment For VMs? · · Score: 1

    Better yet, use squid and iptables to set up a transparent proxy. Then there's no need to configure any end-user systems at all.

  16. Re:Set up VLANs on Ask Slashdot: Safe Learning Environment For VMs? · · Score: 1

    The whole point of VLANs is that they are separate ethernet broadcast domains, duh.

  17. Re:It's not illegal already? on Australian Police Move To Make 3D Printed Guns Illegal · · Score: 1

    The problem is that there's no line to be drawn at the moment that doesn't make almost any computer-produced ("clean") set of drafts machine readable. What was a hypothetical slippery slope some 20 years ago is here and now. The lawmakers and courts can't draw any line at the moment that wouldn't be absurd. I simply think that possession of plans can't be prosecuted, unless the law would clearly apply to possession with criminal intent, and then only with intent to produce a gun whose ownership is illegal under other laws. Possession of the plans for other, possibly criminal, reasons, should not be punishable. Say if you used the plans to blackmail someone - blackmail would be punishable, but not possession of plans.

  18. Re:or on Google Acquires Kite-Power Generator · · Score: 1

    Oh, I get it, you think that towed gliders are kites. Well, might as well call an unborn mammal tethered with the umbilical a kite too, then.

    On another thought, though, that would make the pro-life vs. pro-choice debates even more hysterical.

    (Must be that I invoked The Son of Godwin, or something.)

  19. Re:or on Google Acquires Kite-Power Generator · · Score: 1

    Exactly.

  20. Re:smaller version? on Google Acquires Kite-Power Generator · · Score: 1

    For 10-100W? The tower you speak of is otherwise known as a telescopic fishing pole.

  21. Re:or on Google Acquires Kite-Power Generator · · Score: 1

    An airplane on a tether is not a kite.

  22. Re:WTF? Why? on Google Acquires Kite-Power Generator · · Score: 1

    You're absolutely silly. The space is much smaller than that occupied by a turbine (DUH). The system is actually less fragile because a light flying wing passively deals with wind gusts by the virtue of having a tail. A big fucking turbine is more fragile than you think - a wind gust of sufficiently high acceleration (change in velocity over time) is guaranteed by design to break the blades. The blade pitch control system is slew-limited and uses humongous high-torque servos to adjust the blade pitch. Never mind that all the load can't but be transmitted through the narrowing base of each blade. In Makani's flying wing, the forces that contribute to generation of power are partly internal, and partly passed through the tether. It's much easier to control the flow and distribution of those forces than in a big wind turbine where the propeller base is the most structuraly loaded part of the system and you can't help it.

  23. Re:smaller version? on Google Acquires Kite-Power Generator · · Score: 1

    For that kind of power, you don't need anything but a small classical turbine. Now if you wanted to have a 50kW generator, then their approach is the only way to do it and still have it light enough to carry by two people.

  24. Re:How? on Google Acquires Kite-Power Generator · · Score: 1

    You can't see that because you didn't bother educating yourself, that's why. It's a problem with you, not their technology (unless you implied that). Aerodynamically what they are doing is absolutely no different than taking a big three-bladed classical turbine and only leaving the outermost segment of one of the blades. The rest of the dead weight is replaced as follows: the turbine in the nacelle by smaller high-speed turbines on the wing, the propeller is replaced by the control system that keeps it flying in a circle, and the fucking huge tower is replaced by a lightweight tether. There you go.

  25. Re:or on Google Acquires Kite-Power Generator · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Their way of doing stuff shouldn't be called a kite. What they have is a tethered airplane, not a kite. They started with a kite-based approach and dropped it. Their flying wing can hover under its own power, for example. Look at their videos. It's pretty damn impressive top-notch engineering. I'd probably hire any of their engineers sight unseen, except that the projects I work on may not be as exciting after you've worked on a flying wing wind energy harvester.