recently it has struck me as really odd that nobody makes "hands-free" devices for police radios.
They do. I fit them in all my mobile installations. There's either a little "bug" mike that clips to the A-pillar near the sun visor just like a mobile phone car kit or a mike on a gooseneck for vehicles with larger cabs, and a PTT button attached to the gearstick. This goes back to a little box with some connectors and a preamp, and off to the radio. Simple.
Sharman Multicom, if you're interested enough to google.
Okay, yes, you're right, fine. And evolution is a lie, we were all made by an intelligent being, and your SUV isn't contributing to global warming. Great. Live in your happy wee bubble, and let the rest of us get on with reality.
And how many trees are cut down so this seemingly benevolent and indigenous pastoral scene can be enacted?
Erm, none. There are no trees. You can't grow trees in six inches of rocky peaty soil. Until you actually *have* a hill farm and are at least a little aware of what goes on with running one, keep your misguided opinions to yourself.
I can't grow vegetables. I *can* raise animals for meat. Without livestock farming you cannot have arable farming because you do not have enough manure - unless you want to dump masses of petrochemical-based fertiliser into the soil.
Timmeh, you idiot! Why do you always deliberately misinterpret stories about the UK to spin them in the worst possible light? Do I detect a hint of insecurity or something?
For everyone *with* a brain (not the/. janitors), read the article and ignore the misleading headline. What they're talking about is getting companies to pay business rates for telecommunications mast sites.
Of course, this argument is actually fairly silly because it has a huge flaw. It assumes that it's equally practical to farm sheep as it is to farm soy on a given area of land.
This is exactly the point I'm trying to make. It would be *massively* more ecologically-damaging for me to attempt to grow soy beans here, because the soil type is all wrong and so is the climate - not to mention the technical difficulties of ploughing steep rocky hill farm fields.
Meat, as a whole, is incredibly inefficient. The most inefficient is beef...
That is pretty much entirely untrue outside the US, where people seem to think that cows can eat grain. They can't eat grain, and most of it gets shat out largely undigested. Cows eat grass. They have four stomachs which help them digest tough nutrient-poor grass. Sheep have two stomachs, for much the same reason. I, on the other hand, have only one stomach and that's been tweaked by millenia of evolution to break down a mixure of fairly soft plants with not much cellulose and meat.
It's far more efficient to put some sheep into a field and let them graze and then eat the sheep, than it is for me to try to work out some way to eat grass. It's also worth pointing out that very little of what farm animals eat is actually wasted. One of the best ways to compost tough grasses is to pass them through a ruminant's digestive system. You get out lots of shit that you can then spread on fields and help your vegetables grow.
The final point is that it's not really useful to talk about turning the world's farmland over to arable farming. It works where you've got hundreds of acres of gently-rolling countryside and you can actually plough it without your tractor rolling sideways down a hill or disappearing into a hundred-metre-deep bog. It does not work where the vast majority of farms are hill farms, which are more suited to grazing animals. I know this might be hard for people in the US to comprehend, but not all farms are rolling Iowa cornfields.
Not even necessarily long-haul. Packet radio works just as well over short distances, and you can do this *now* - just get an amateur radio licence and read up on it (as a licensed radio amateur I couldn't possibly condone using cheap crappy PMR446 walkie-talkies as an experimental platform for packet. It's illegal and if an FCC/Ofcom/other appropriate body inspector comes close enough - say, within quarter of a mile - you'll get caught).
In fact, here's a challenge for you. Get two Linux boxes, install soundmodem and the ax25 software on them, and get them talking over a couple of audio leads first. Once you've got that you could try getting the radios in and testing over longer distances. You need a surprisingly good signal to get it to work, and for speeds over about 2400 baud you need modified radios. On the microwave bands you can go pretty quickly - a couple of Mbps maybe.
Here's something to consider - if you had no internet, could you live with a pretty much fully mobile 1200 baud connection? Maybe 9600 baud between fixed locations such as your house? Sure you could. You wouldn't be downloading 4096x3072 images (well, not quickly) but you'd be sending emails and chatting on IRC, and possibly reading and posting on rather stripped-down websites.
Now, everyone go out and study for your amateur radio licence. 73s de MM0YEQ
The Citroën CX, SM and XM, and various Maseratis had DIRAVI - a fully-decoupled system where the steering wheel had no mechanical connection to the steering rack under normal conditions. If the hydraulic system lost pressure, then you got really heavy steering with about a quarter turn of play in the centre because there was a loose safety coupling to keep it together in such an event.
There was a variant of the control unit built with a joystick, which is pretty simple if you study how the DIRAVI system works. The engine ran a big hydraulic pump, and a hydraulic motor in each wheel provided the drive controlled by the fore-and-aft movement of the joystick.
The project was scrapped because it was too damn weird to drive. I don't know if any of the prototypes still exist, but at the time Citroën management had a habit of destroying all evidence of unsuccessful projects.
Surprisingly, the mic and speakers of many laptop computers are sensitive to ultrasonic frequencies.
For anyone who actually knows about how microphones and speakers work, it's not particularly surprising at all. Timothy needs to go to school, and learn a little bit of physics.
You mean more illegal than monitoring the entire population through cameras and microphones,
What, like in the US? Except over there you have a gun pointed at your head whenever you're out in public and the police can shoot and kill you for any reason they like, with no repercussions?
Firstly, this is the Daily Mail - a rabid right-wing tabloid newspaper that typically has headlines about how Polish immigrants are going to knock down all our schools to open up christian vegan lesbian holistic bomb-making camps, or something.
Secondly, it would be entirely illegal to do this under UK law. We have things like the Data Protection Act.
Re:Do we need the anti-smoking jab
on
A Geek Funeral
·
· Score: 1
I knew someone would cry "[citation needed]" so I went looking for the printout. It's long gone I suspect, but I could try doing it again.
1988 Citroën CX 22TRS, 17 gallon tank, 475 mile range and over 500 if I drive gently. This is a carb=fed contact-breaker ignition 1970s-era engine design, 2.2 litres and 115bhp. I used to get 32mpg for over 500 miles range but something's a little sick under the bonnet.
2008 Mercedes Vito 111 van, around 17 gallon tank, over 500 mile range, 116bhp diesel in a medium-size panel van. Again, about 30mpg.
It's worth noting that these are UK gallons, so 20 US gallons.
Re:Do we need the anti-smoking jab
on
A Geek Funeral
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
All of those things put vastly more stuff into the air than my cigarettes do.
Have you ever blown into an automotive gas analyser? One lungful of cigarette smoke contains as much unburnt hydrocarbon as a 1988 Volvo 340 produces in three minutes of running at 2500rpm.
Not to mention, you can actually *see* as well as smell cigarette smoke. You can't see (or shouldn't be able to see) car exhaust gases, and they don't really have much of a smell unless your engine is broken.
Only if you're eating lots of raw vegetables, typically with a fairly low energy content. Meat is pretty energy-dense stuff, and you don't need a lot of it to supply your daily energy requirements. Vegetables tend to be less energy-dense but stuff like grass and leaves is pretty poor indeed - which is why large herbivores spend all their time eating. The key is that cooking food - both meat and vegetables - breaks down proteins in them. This makes them easier to digest, so we spend less energy digesting food and more energy thinking up clever new ways to hunt animals and grow vegetables.
If you switched to eating only raw meat, you'd need your stomach to expand a bit too. Of course, you'd have to evolve for a good few thousand years before any really noticeable difference showed up.
He is the one who thinks that going backwards through Pearly Gates is a good way to die.
Sounds like a pretty good way to die to me. I mean, compared to dying in a hospital unable to wipe your own arse or recognise your wife with a tube up your dick and a pint of morphine in your bloodstream, just for example.
Having all these bills with names like "USA-PATRIOT" and "JUSTICE" (and a few I can't remember offhand) does sound rather Orwellian. If Britain is "sleepwalking into 1984", then the US seems to be racing towards it as fast as possible...
I don't really see any magic involved. You won't get all the energy back, for sure -- turning the oil into plastic and the plastic into fuel will result in far less net energy than just turning the oil into fuel products to begin with, but that's factored into the cost.
The point is that at the cost of some energy, you turn plastic into fuel that you can use, instead of costing rather less energy to turn plastic into a big pile of toxic rubbish in a hole.
Even if the net energy cost was quite high, having less plastic waste lying around is an overall win. Maybe we could do this with the Great Floating Garbage Patch...
Let's take a look at today's scores, then, shall we? In about two hours of driving (light town traffic):
1) Cyclist went up the left side of a van that was signalling left - narrowly avoided getting squished (0815, junction of Maryhill Road and Ruchill Street). Avoidable, if the cyclist had not tried to squeeze through the narrow gap and put himself in the vans blind spot.
2) Old guy in car narrowly avoided a school minibus after seemingly grossly misunderstanding the road markings and turning right across oncoming traffic at a No Right Turn (0825, junction of Hawthorn Street and Ashfield Street - No Right Turn Except Buses, clearly marked)
3) Different Old Guy in car narrowly avoided (luck rather than skill) a cyclist who crossed a junction against the lights at speed - estimated 20mph (1710, junction of Balmore Road and (unsure of name) Stronend Street?
4) Cyclist weaving through slow traffic on Maryhill Road near Canniesburn, went to cut through some roadworks and fell in a hole about 6" deep - looked sore (1750, Maryhill Road)
So it's 3-1 to the cyclists, and that's just in *one* day.
I do feel a bit sorry for the idiot that tried to cut through the roadworks. It really did look like he landed badly and he definitely bent his front wheel.
You are really saying that 43 year old me on a Brompton riding to work is more dangerous than a beered up 17 year old with no insurance driving an Astra with more power going to the woofer than an African village uses in a year?
Yes. Every day you come close to causing an accident. Think carefully about that next time you ride dangerously.
Slashdot Mirror
recently it has struck me as really odd that nobody makes "hands-free" devices for police radios.
They do. I fit them in all my mobile installations. There's either a little "bug" mike that clips to the A-pillar near the sun visor just like a mobile phone car kit or a mike on a gooseneck for vehicles with larger cabs, and a PTT button attached to the gearstick. This goes back to a little box with some connectors and a preamp, and off to the radio. Simple.
Sharman Multicom, if you're interested enough to google.
Okay, yes, you're right, fine. And evolution is a lie, we were all made by an intelligent being, and your SUV isn't contributing to global warming. Great. Live in your happy wee bubble, and let the rest of us get on with reality.
And how many trees are cut down so this seemingly benevolent and indigenous pastoral scene can be enacted?
Erm, none. There are no trees. You can't grow trees in six inches of rocky peaty soil. Until you actually *have* a hill farm and are at least a little aware of what goes on with running one, keep your misguided opinions to yourself.
If you want to save the planet, eat vegetables
I can't grow vegetables. I *can* raise animals for meat. Without livestock farming you cannot have arable farming because you do not have enough manure - unless you want to dump masses of petrochemical-based fertiliser into the soil.
Timmeh, you idiot! Why do you always deliberately misinterpret stories about the UK to spin them in the worst possible light? Do I detect a hint of insecurity or something?
For everyone *with* a brain (not the /. janitors), read the article and ignore the misleading headline. What they're talking about is getting companies to pay business rates for telecommunications mast sites.
Of course, this argument is actually fairly silly because it has a huge flaw. It assumes that it's equally practical to farm sheep as it is to farm soy on a given area of land.
This is exactly the point I'm trying to make. It would be *massively* more ecologically-damaging for me to attempt to grow soy beans here, because the soil type is all wrong and so is the climate - not to mention the technical difficulties of ploughing steep rocky hill farm fields.
Meat, as a whole, is incredibly inefficient. The most inefficient is beef...
That is pretty much entirely untrue outside the US, where people seem to think that cows can eat grain. They can't eat grain, and most of it gets shat out largely undigested. Cows eat grass. They have four stomachs which help them digest tough nutrient-poor grass. Sheep have two stomachs, for much the same reason. I, on the other hand, have only one stomach and that's been tweaked by millenia of evolution to break down a mixure of fairly soft plants with not much cellulose and meat.
It's far more efficient to put some sheep into a field and let them graze and then eat the sheep, than it is for me to try to work out some way to eat grass. It's also worth pointing out that very little of what farm animals eat is actually wasted. One of the best ways to compost tough grasses is to pass them through a ruminant's digestive system. You get out lots of shit that you can then spread on fields and help your vegetables grow.
The final point is that it's not really useful to talk about turning the world's farmland over to arable farming. It works where you've got hundreds of acres of gently-rolling countryside and you can actually plough it without your tractor rolling sideways down a hill or disappearing into a hundred-metre-deep bog. It does not work where the vast majority of farms are hill farms, which are more suited to grazing animals. I know this might be hard for people in the US to comprehend, but not all farms are rolling Iowa cornfields.
Not even necessarily long-haul. Packet radio works just as well over short distances, and you can do this *now* - just get an amateur radio licence and read up on it (as a licensed radio amateur I couldn't possibly condone using cheap crappy PMR446 walkie-talkies as an experimental platform for packet. It's illegal and if an FCC/Ofcom/other appropriate body inspector comes close enough - say, within quarter of a mile - you'll get caught).
In fact, here's a challenge for you. Get two Linux boxes, install soundmodem and the ax25 software on them, and get them talking over a couple of audio leads first. Once you've got that you could try getting the radios in and testing over longer distances. You need a surprisingly good signal to get it to work, and for speeds over about 2400 baud you need modified radios. On the microwave bands you can go pretty quickly - a couple of Mbps maybe.
Here's something to consider - if you had no internet, could you live with a pretty much fully mobile 1200 baud connection? Maybe 9600 baud between fixed locations such as your house? Sure you could. You wouldn't be downloading 4096x3072 images (well, not quickly) but you'd be sending emails and chatting on IRC, and possibly reading and posting on rather stripped-down websites.
Now, everyone go out and study for your amateur radio licence. 73s de MM0YEQ
The Citroën CX, SM and XM, and various Maseratis had DIRAVI - a fully-decoupled system where the steering wheel had no mechanical connection to the steering rack under normal conditions. If the hydraulic system lost pressure, then you got really heavy steering with about a quarter turn of play in the centre because there was a loose safety coupling to keep it together in such an event.
There was a variant of the control unit built with a joystick, which is pretty simple if you study how the DIRAVI system works. The engine ran a big hydraulic pump, and a hydraulic motor in each wheel provided the drive controlled by the fore-and-aft movement of the joystick.
The project was scrapped because it was too damn weird to drive. I don't know if any of the prototypes still exist, but at the time Citroën management had a habit of destroying all evidence of unsuccessful projects.
Fabric.
http://www.gjcp.net/articles/fabric/
Saves so much hassle and buggering about.
Surprisingly, the mic and speakers of many laptop computers are sensitive to ultrasonic frequencies.
For anyone who actually knows about how microphones and speakers work, it's not particularly surprising at all. Timothy needs to go to school, and learn a little bit of physics.
You mean more illegal than monitoring the entire population through cameras and microphones,
What, like in the US? Except over there you have a gun pointed at your head whenever you're out in public and the police can shoot and kill you for any reason they like, with no repercussions?
Firstly, this is the Daily Mail - a rabid right-wing tabloid newspaper that typically has headlines about how Polish immigrants are going to knock down all our schools to open up christian vegan lesbian holistic bomb-making camps, or something.
Secondly, it would be entirely illegal to do this under UK law. We have things like the Data Protection Act.
I knew someone would cry "[citation needed]" so I went looking for the printout. It's long gone I suspect, but I could try doing it again.
1988 Citroën CX 22TRS, 17 gallon tank, 475 mile range and over 500 if I drive gently. This is a carb=fed contact-breaker ignition 1970s-era engine design, 2.2 litres and 115bhp. I used to get 32mpg for over 500 miles range but something's a little sick under the bonnet.
2008 Mercedes Vito 111 van, around 17 gallon tank, over 500 mile range, 116bhp diesel in a medium-size panel van. Again, about 30mpg.
It's worth noting that these are UK gallons, so 20 US gallons.
All of those things put vastly more stuff into the air than my cigarettes do.
Have you ever blown into an automotive gas analyser? One lungful of cigarette smoke contains as much unburnt hydrocarbon as a 1988 Volvo 340 produces in three minutes of running at 2500rpm.
Not to mention, you can actually *see* as well as smell cigarette smoke. You can't see (or shouldn't be able to see) car exhaust gases, and they don't really have much of a smell unless your engine is broken.
It can also silence any police radios.
... the sort of thing that can work both ways.
The trojan will intercept the 6-digit code mentioned above when you type it into the computer.
And do what with it? Squirrel it away to be used later, when it's no longer valid?
Only if you're eating lots of raw vegetables, typically with a fairly low energy content. Meat is pretty energy-dense stuff, and you don't need a lot of it to supply your daily energy requirements. Vegetables tend to be less energy-dense but stuff like grass and leaves is pretty poor indeed - which is why large herbivores spend all their time eating. The key is that cooking food - both meat and vegetables - breaks down proteins in them. This makes them easier to digest, so we spend less energy digesting food and more energy thinking up clever new ways to hunt animals and grow vegetables.
If you switched to eating only raw meat, you'd need your stomach to expand a bit too. Of course, you'd have to evolve for a good few thousand years before any really noticeable difference showed up.
He is the one who thinks that going backwards through Pearly Gates is a good way to die.
Sounds like a pretty good way to die to me. I mean, compared to dying in a hospital unable to wipe your own arse or recognise your wife with a tube up your dick and a pint of morphine in your bloodstream, just for example.
Having all these bills with names like "USA-PATRIOT" and "JUSTICE" (and a few I can't remember offhand) does sound rather Orwellian. If Britain is "sleepwalking into 1984", then the US seems to be racing towards it as fast as possible...
I don't really see any magic involved. You won't get all the energy back, for sure -- turning the oil into plastic and the plastic into fuel will result in far less net energy than just turning the oil into fuel products to begin with, but that's factored into the cost.
The point is that at the cost of some energy, you turn plastic into fuel that you can use, instead of costing rather less energy to turn plastic into a big pile of toxic rubbish in a hole.
Even if the net energy cost was quite high, having less plastic waste lying around is an overall win. Maybe we could do this with the Great Floating Garbage Patch...
Let's take a look at today's scores, then, shall we? In about two hours of driving (light town traffic):
1) Cyclist went up the left side of a van that was signalling left - narrowly avoided getting squished (0815, junction of Maryhill Road and Ruchill Street). Avoidable, if the cyclist had not tried to squeeze through the narrow gap and put himself in the vans blind spot.
2) Old guy in car narrowly avoided a school minibus after seemingly grossly misunderstanding the road markings and turning right across oncoming traffic at a No Right Turn (0825, junction of Hawthorn Street and Ashfield Street - No Right Turn Except Buses, clearly marked)
3) Different Old Guy in car narrowly avoided (luck rather than skill) a cyclist who crossed a junction against the lights at speed - estimated 20mph (1710, junction of Balmore Road and (unsure of name) Stronend Street?
4) Cyclist weaving through slow traffic on Maryhill Road near Canniesburn, went to cut through some roadworks and fell in a hole about 6" deep - looked sore (1750, Maryhill Road)
So it's 3-1 to the cyclists, and that's just in *one* day.
I do feel a bit sorry for the idiot that tried to cut through the roadworks. It really did look like he landed badly and he definitely bent his front wheel.
You are really saying that 43 year old me on a Brompton riding to work is more dangerous than a beered up 17 year old with no insurance driving an Astra with more power going to the woofer than an African village uses in a year?
Yes. Every day you come close to causing an accident. Think carefully about that next time you ride dangerously.