Or, since this device can control the leg muscles, what about skipping pedaling and turning it into a walking device? Using, you know, legs.
I'm guessing that getting walking to work reliably is going to be harder than getting pedalling to work reliably. DO NOT start thinking about how you walk, because you'll confuse yourself and fall over a lot. With that in mind, consider what happens when you walk up to a pedestrian crossing and start to cross. You go from walking along a flattish pavement to walking on a different surface with a bit of a step down - which must be compensated for, somehow. Now imagine you start to cross but a cyclist is (as usual) ignoring the red light and flies past you, forcing you to check your stride and stop at the kerb. How on earth do you do that "automatically"? How do you program a spine implant microcontroller to do that without dropping you, or sending you twitching off in a random direction?
Pedalling a bicycle generator type thing is easy. Sit down, make legs pedal. Have a button for fast, a button for slow, and a button for stop.
Here's an idea, which is probably patentable but I'm giving it to the world. Just remember where you read it first;-)
If these people can pedal a stationary bicycle then they can exercise the largest muscle group in the body - clearly, good for overall health. A bit bloody boring, though, sitting in the gym pedalling away. So, fit a pedal-powered generator to a conventional power wheelchair. You can lose a lot of the weight of battery, because you can just pedal it. Scoot about on battery inside, with the generator folded down out of the way, then when you go outside fold out the pedals and switch on your implant. You ought to be able to make about the same amount of power as an "able-bodied" person pedalling a conventional bike, with the advantage that you can just keep pedalling when you stop at pedestrian crossings to top off your battery, or run other goodies.
Someone with a power wheelchair tell me why this wouldn't work. There must be a flaw (apart from the lack of spine implant thing), otherwise surely someone would be doing it. Imagine the difference it would make, having a power wheelchair that isn't restricted to slow, short-range trundling about. Once you've taken the requirement for energy storage out of it (or at least out of the big heavy batteries) you could really make a big difference to people's mobility.
No, just mushed cow bone and brain gruel, mushed chicken bone and brain gruel, and bland squishy "steak" smeared with cheap hot sauce. American "cuisine" is the worst in the world, by far.
Only the first group of evildoers has been obliterated; the second has been damaged, but it's still in the game;
It's worth pointing out that legal firms that are *not* currently involved in this nonsense are scurrying around trying to consolidate their position of "Too hot, wouldn't touch it with someone else's stolen ten-foot shitty stick". If *lawyers* are prepared to stay away from a money-making scheme because it's too dirty...
it boggles my mind that people expect a search engine to read their thoughs.
Exactly. I don't expect it to try to read my thoughts, or even try to guess them. I expect it to return results for the string I searched for, not some random made-up one. If I type the wrong thing in, I get the wrong results. I'm fine with that.
... is the bloody stupid "autocorrect" thing. You know, where you type in something that doesn't have a lot of hits, and it comes back with "Showing results for . Click for results for ". A good example is "mkiss" which is a networking utility - type that in and you get millions of results for "kiss" which is totally the wrong thing.
Google has become increasingly unusable. The stupid javascript preview thing is just about the last straw. I've since switched back to Altavista.
If you're going to use Eclipse, you may as well use Arduino's own "Wiring" IDE. I mean, if you're going to put up with slow, crashy, buggy Java cruft then why make life extra hard?
At the time I started getting into using Arduino boards (about three years ago), it was by far the cheapest AVR development board with a built-in USB-to-serial converter.
You program Arduinos in C++. The IDE thing that comes with it basically wraps some boilerplate around your code, runs it through avr-gcc and uploads it with avrdude.
There's nothing to stop you writing something from scratch to run on an Arduino board, and even pulling in some of the useful libraries that people have created for it. I actually prefer to write my code in gedit and use a fairly normal Makefile to make and upload the code.
Why should a user have to bother doing this in the first place just to have a responsive desktop system?
They don't. It's helpful if you are doing certain things that show up behaviour that the patch or the commands described above can counteract. If you don't do that (and it appears to be most helpful at speeding up your desktop if you are *at the same time* compiling huge programs, and similar work, which most desktop users don't do) it won't make much difference.
And don't forget cars with built in phones. Hopefully the government will reimburse all the buyers of luxury vehicles and hands free headsets..
Don't forget that mobile phones are used for more than just talking. Most modern AVL systems use GPRS for the bearer channel for location and status information. If you jam mobile phones, you make the vehicle untrackable.
Oh, not to mention that you won't just jam phones inside the car - if it's powerful enough to reliably jam phones *inside* the car, it's powerful enough to jam phones for quite some distance *outside* the car. Better not try to use that phone when you're standing near a road.
So you'd rather listen to someone drivelling on endlessly about whatever shit comes into their heads, just because you want a one-word answer to a question?
... would you want a phone that couldn't send or receive SMSes? I'd prefer to have a device that could not make or receive phone call, and only did SMS.
Demonstrate how much your soul doesn't need your body by donating your heart.....right now.
I think the point was that once you're dead, your soul doesn't particularly need your body. I don't know if we have an immortal soul or not, but when I'm dead I want to donate my body to science - with the proviso that when medical students have finished practicing on me, they leave bits of my body around as a prank, with the label "Hi, I'm Gordonjcp and I'm dead now - but I am still doing it for the lulz."
You are pretty much famous for Monty Python, Winston Churchill, cars with strange electrical systems, and security cameras. ... and USians are pretty much famous for having no sense of humour, bad teeth, bad food and armed police. Doesn't mean you don't have CCTV everywhere.
No, there is something wrong with your doctor if they are not screening you properly for skin cancer or checking your prostate or giving you a mammogram or screening you for cervical cancer.
None of which require you to strip naked.
No, no - you just put 90% of your country on closed-circuit TV!
Uhm, no. A tiny bit of the country is covered by CCTV, far less than the blanket coverage in American cities.
Make it more uncomfortable for him than it is for me. Just some suggestions for those who have to go through this bullshit.
When you come back from your "pat-down" be sure to tell all the other passengers to ask for *that* particular screener, because he give excellent hand-jobs. See how red you can make him turn.
If you have to strip naked when you go to the doctor, there's something wrong and you should get another doctor.
We live in a world where airplanes attract way more than their fair share of terrorism - we need to accept that fact
The US hasn't really had any significant experience of terrorism. We had it for decades in the UK, thanks to the Irish Republicans (and indeed the various loyalist groups, although they mostly kept themselves to NI without going into the rest of the UK). We didn't find it necessary to strip-search everyone who went into a hotel, or onto a train.
My 1989 Citroen XM had six or seven ECUs depending on whether or not you count the heater and aircon ECU separately - engine, ABS, suspension (hydraulic suspension with electronic stabilisation), heater, aircon, central locking (which also dealt with windows, courtesy lights and immobiliser) and the dashboard and instrumentation controller. That doesn't include all the little motor drivers, sensor amplifiers and assorted other little boxes dotted around the vehicle.
Surprisingly enough, although much of it was somewhat ahead of the technology curve it was pretty reliable once you replaced the rather poor quality earthing connectors in the engine bay - the suspension ECU tries to switch about 10A for the stiffness electrovalve through the same earth tag as everything else, which usually resulted in *something* locking up and misbehaving.
They are so damn cheap it's hilarious what they will do to keep those machines going.
It's almost always because it would be far, far more expensive to replace an old PC than keep it running.
Have you got the couple of million $local_currency that it could cost to replace an aging 486-DX100 - and the custom software that won't run on anything faster, the custom IO cards that drive the multi-million piece of machinery it controls, *and* all the approvals process to make sure it's not going to break anything or start cranking out defective products?
Slashdot Mirror
Or, since this device can control the leg muscles, what about skipping pedaling and turning it into a walking device? Using, you know, legs.
I'm guessing that getting walking to work reliably is going to be harder than getting pedalling to work reliably. DO NOT start thinking about how you walk, because you'll confuse yourself and fall over a lot. With that in mind, consider what happens when you walk up to a pedestrian crossing and start to cross. You go from walking along a flattish pavement to walking on a different surface with a bit of a step down - which must be compensated for, somehow. Now imagine you start to cross but a cyclist is (as usual) ignoring the red light and flies past you, forcing you to check your stride and stop at the kerb. How on earth do you do that "automatically"? How do you program a spine implant microcontroller to do that without dropping you, or sending you twitching off in a random direction?
Pedalling a bicycle generator type thing is easy. Sit down, make legs pedal. Have a button for fast, a button for slow, and a button for stop.
73s de MM0YEQ
Here's an idea, which is probably patentable but I'm giving it to the world. Just remember where you read it first ;-)
If these people can pedal a stationary bicycle then they can exercise the largest muscle group in the body - clearly, good for overall health. A bit bloody boring, though, sitting in the gym pedalling away. So, fit a pedal-powered generator to a conventional power wheelchair. You can lose a lot of the weight of battery, because you can just pedal it. Scoot about on battery inside, with the generator folded down out of the way, then when you go outside fold out the pedals and switch on your implant. You ought to be able to make about the same amount of power as an "able-bodied" person pedalling a conventional bike, with the advantage that you can just keep pedalling when you stop at pedestrian crossings to top off your battery, or run other goodies.
Someone with a power wheelchair tell me why this wouldn't work. There must be a flaw (apart from the lack of spine implant thing), otherwise surely someone would be doing it. Imagine the difference it would make, having a power wheelchair that isn't restricted to slow, short-range trundling about. Once you've taken the requirement for energy storage out of it (or at least out of the big heavy batteries) you could really make a big difference to people's mobility.
73s de MM0YEQ
No, just mushed cow bone and brain gruel, mushed chicken bone and brain gruel, and bland squishy "steak" smeared with cheap hot sauce.
American "cuisine" is the worst in the world, by far.
Only the first group of evildoers has been obliterated; the second has been damaged, but it's still in the game;
It's worth pointing out that legal firms that are *not* currently involved in this nonsense are scurrying around trying to consolidate their position of "Too hot, wouldn't touch it with someone else's stolen ten-foot shitty stick". If *lawyers* are prepared to stay away from a money-making scheme because it's too dirty...
Has what? I hope they didn't accidentally it!
They accidentally a whole USB stick of it on a bus.
it boggles my mind that people expect a search engine to read their thoughs.
Exactly. I don't expect it to try to read my thoughts, or even try to guess them. I expect it to return results for the string I searched for, not some random made-up one. If I type the wrong thing in, I get the wrong results. I'm fine with that.
Doesn't make any difference. It *still* auto-corrects to "kiss".
... is the bloody stupid "autocorrect" thing. You know, where you type in something that doesn't have a lot of hits, and it comes back with "Showing results for . Click for results for ". A good example is "mkiss" which is a networking utility - type that in and you get millions of results for "kiss" which is totally the wrong thing.
Google has become increasingly unusable. The stupid javascript preview thing is just about the last straw. I've since switched back to Altavista.
If you're going to use Eclipse, you may as well use Arduino's own "Wiring" IDE. I mean, if you're going to put up with slow, crashy, buggy Java cruft then why make life extra hard?
At the time I started getting into using Arduino boards (about three years ago), it was by far the cheapest AVR development board with a built-in USB-to-serial converter.
You program Arduinos in C++. The IDE thing that comes with it basically wraps some boilerplate around your code, runs it through avr-gcc and uploads it with avrdude.
There's nothing to stop you writing something from scratch to run on an Arduino board, and even pulling in some of the useful libraries that people have created for it. I actually prefer to write my code in gedit and use a fairly normal Makefile to make and upload the code.
Why should a user have to bother doing this in the first place just to have a responsive desktop system?
They don't. It's helpful if you are doing certain things that show up behaviour that the patch or the commands described above can counteract. If you don't do that (and it appears to be most helpful at speeding up your desktop if you are *at the same time* compiling huge programs, and similar work, which most desktop users don't do) it won't make much difference.
So why not just start changing down gears until you get to 1st?
And don't forget cars with built in phones. Hopefully the government will reimburse all the buyers of luxury vehicles and hands free headsets..
Don't forget that mobile phones are used for more than just talking. Most modern AVL systems use GPRS for the bearer channel for location and status information. If you jam mobile phones, you make the vehicle untrackable.
Oh, not to mention that you won't just jam phones inside the car - if it's powerful enough to reliably jam phones *inside* the car, it's powerful enough to jam phones for quite some distance *outside* the car. Better not try to use that phone when you're standing near a road.
The article is rather short on details.
So you'd rather listen to someone drivelling on endlessly about whatever shit comes into their heads, just because you want a one-word answer to a question?
Because you never send or receive SMSes.
Why bother having a phone at all then?
... would you want a phone that couldn't send or receive SMSes? I'd prefer to have a device that could not make or receive phone call, and only did SMS.
Demonstrate how much your soul doesn't need your body by donating your heart.....right now.
I think the point was that once you're dead, your soul doesn't particularly need your body. I don't know if we have an immortal soul or not, but when I'm dead I want to donate my body to science - with the proviso that when medical students have finished practicing on me, they leave bits of my body around as a prank, with the label "Hi, I'm Gordonjcp and I'm dead now - but I am still doing it for the lulz."
These "enhanced" pat downs are offensive and illegal and until someone is willing to stand up and take the damn thing to court
I'm Scottish. I have a kilt. I have a passport.
Come on, keep sliding that hand up until you meet "resistance". I dare you.
You are pretty much famous for Monty Python, Winston Churchill, cars with strange electrical systems, and security cameras.
... and USians are pretty much famous for having no sense of humour, bad teeth, bad food and armed police. Doesn't mean you don't have CCTV everywhere.
No, there is something wrong with your doctor if they are not screening you properly for skin cancer or checking your prostate or giving you a mammogram or screening you for cervical cancer.
None of which require you to strip naked.
No, no - you just put 90% of your country on closed-circuit TV!
Uhm, no. A tiny bit of the country is covered by CCTV, far less than the blanket coverage in American cities.
Make it more uncomfortable for him than it is for me. Just some suggestions for those who have to go through this bullshit.
When you come back from your "pat-down" be sure to tell all the other passengers to ask for *that* particular screener, because he give excellent hand-jobs. See how red you can make him turn.
do they avoid the doctor's office as well?
If you have to strip naked when you go to the doctor, there's something wrong and you should get another doctor.
We live in a world where airplanes attract way more than their fair share of terrorism - we need to accept that fact
The US hasn't really had any significant experience of terrorism. We had it for decades in the UK, thanks to the Irish Republicans (and indeed the various loyalist groups, although they mostly kept themselves to NI without going into the rest of the UK). We didn't find it necessary to strip-search everyone who went into a hotel, or onto a train.
My 1989 Citroen XM had six or seven ECUs depending on whether or not you count the heater and aircon ECU separately - engine, ABS, suspension (hydraulic suspension with electronic stabilisation), heater, aircon, central locking (which also dealt with windows, courtesy lights and immobiliser) and the dashboard and instrumentation controller. That doesn't include all the little motor drivers, sensor amplifiers and assorted other little boxes dotted around the vehicle.
Surprisingly enough, although much of it was somewhat ahead of the technology curve it was pretty reliable once you replaced the rather poor quality earthing connectors in the engine bay - the suspension ECU tries to switch about 10A for the stiffness electrovalve through the same earth tag as everything else, which usually resulted in *something* locking up and misbehaving.
They are so damn cheap it's hilarious what they will do to keep those machines going.
It's almost always because it would be far, far more expensive to replace an old PC than keep it running.
Have you got the couple of million $local_currency that it could cost to replace an aging 486-DX100 - and the custom software that won't run on anything faster, the custom IO cards that drive the multi-million piece of machinery it controls, *and* all the approvals process to make sure it's not going to break anything or start cranking out defective products?