Radar primarily distinguishes by speed, not size. Objects below a speed threshold are ignored (*). Radar systems usually don't know much about the target's size, all they have is the strength of the return signal which depends on the radar cross section (i.e. reflectivity) of the target. The same object can have hugely different RCS, depending on the angle at which you're looking at the object.
*: this was a big problem in the development of the AEW radar system for the Hawker Siddeley Nimrod: the RAF had specified a speed threshold of something like 100 km/h to catch slow-flying helicopters, but the system ended up detecting cars on motorways at that speed, in large enough numbers to overwhelm the tracking software.
FYI, ctrl-l is the shortcut to select the URL bar in all the major browsers.
Damn you, sans serif!
I was going to say that ctrl-i does nothing in my browser, and I was halfway through writing my reply before I twigged you might be talking about lowercase L instead.
You assume no-one educated will ever look at them. Once the news gets out that this sort of glass disc can contain information, every single glass disc found by experts or amateurs will be examined for ancient writing.
Hang on, there seems to be something embedded in the glass. Let's point a microscope at it.
The Long Now foundation has found a nice solution to this. Put some writing around the edge of the glass disc. Make the initial few words large enough to be readable without magnification, and then make the text progressively smaller to encourage people to grab a magnifier.
Can we please not have a/. story every time Uber farts? None of these stories are 'news for nerds', and I really don't come here to read about taxi regulations and the inevitable flamewars thereabouts.
Reversible energy storage systems have been around for a while. Pumped water storage scales to GW levels with 70% efficiency, but depend on specific geography. Another scheme is to use an electric locomotive to push rail cars up a hill, and use motor braking on the downhill run to extract the energy again.
Storage in hydrogen is less efficient: electrolysis is 70% efficient, a fuel cell is 40-60%, so chain efficiency is around 35%. The advantage is it's scalable and can be made portable (which is why the DOD is interested).
Oh, I've tried that approach too. The problem with that is the limited capacity of short-term memory. You can cram just a few directions at a time, so you if you have a lot of turns in your route, you have to stop, check the map and cram the next few directions every 2 km. Which takes time and is irritating, so people tend to not stop and just drive with the map in their lap, and we're back to 'distracting and dangerous'.
When you're driving solo in unfamiliar territory, maps are a distraction at best and a menace at worst. Having had the misfortune of having to navigate by an incomplete map to a destination I've never been before, I know "Next time you're in a new place, forget the GPS device" is a line of bullshit. By all means, use common sense (e.g. do a sanity check of the computed route before setting off), but I'd much rather keep both eyes on the road where they belong, rather than have to spend my brain's CPU cycles on guessing where I might have to go next.
Thank goodness. Item #1 on my zombie apocalypse plan was always to take over a nuclear powerplant and rewrite its control system in Lumberyard, but the damn license would have thwarted that.
I live in the Netherlands, where a few years ago a new class of road was introduced. Secondary roads outside urban areas were divided in two classes:
- the existing class, speed limit 80 km/h with a line down the middle, will now be reserved for roads with no houses on either side, and no bike traffic. - some roads (with houses) were converted to the new class, with a speed limit of 60 km/h and no line down the middle, but lines at the edge making the road appear smaller than it really is. In the Netherlands, this works reasonably well.
In the UK, something similar has been done in some areas, but: - the posted speed limit often isn't lowered - the road is narrower to begin with - the edge of the road is full of potholes
The central line was helpful in keeping your vehicle close enough to the center of the road to avoid the worst potholes, without running the risk of colliding with oncoming traffic. Without it, in wider vehicles you end up micromanaging your position on the road. In a van, I spend more time making sure my side mirror won't get smashed than I am monitoring the traffic situation. My situational awareness drops when there's no central line, and I have to slow down. Cars don't have this problem as much, so the speed difference between classes of traffic (and the annoyance level at having slower traffic in front of you) rises.
It's more what they are taking away. It started with the status bar, then there was the ill-conceived move to Australis, version 44 removed fine-grained cookie permissions, next they're planning to kill off extensions. Over the past few years they've spent countless hours on integrating features few people cared for, and more hours taking away features we actually used.
Over the past few years Mozilla has made tons of unpopular changes despite vociferous complaints. Will the new release schedule give them time to find out what their remaining users actually want?
to get around an overbearing corporate firewall that forbade not only executables, but archives containing executables as well. In order to be able to e-mail new versions of a program that the overbearing company had bought, he wrote a program that packed the.exe code in a BMP file.
Unlike its predecessors, VGA was downwards compatible. You can still hook up a 640x480 monitor to today's graphics cards, and a modern monitor works on a first-generation 640x480-only graphics card.
It was the first decent standard for MS-DOS/Windows video. Everything before it was a pile of shit, where you needed a new standard every time a higher resolution became available. Remember separate modes for text and low-res graphics? Remember how painful those early PC monitors were to work on?
The stuff that made Lego look cheap. I still coveted it though; a friend of mine had a Fischer kit that included a light sensor, which was an astonishing bit of hardware around 1980.
Radiation is an issue that gets talked about, it just doesn't end up on the front page. I've seen calculations that suggest 500 kW of electric power would be enough to drive a decent magnetic shield. The ISS solar arrays supply about 120 kW of peak power. A water jacket on even a small ship ends up being very heavy. If you attach two ISS modules to each other for a volume of 3.5 x 20 m, you need 1000 tons of water for a shield 2 m thick.
Signal shares one of Whatsapp's big drawbacks: it uses phone numbers as addresses, so it only works on devices that have a phone number assigned. There is a desktop version, but "Signal Desktop links with your Android device". I want a messaging service that works everywhere, not just on mobile phones. Looks like I'm sticking with email for a while longer.
More action, including war, is exactly what the US did after 9/11. Guess what? This strategy has had no success whatsoever in reducing the terrorism problem. The world has gained various hellholes (Iraq, Afghanistan) which have become fertile breeding grounds for new terrorists. Bombing a country into the Stone Age because a few of its citizens went apeshit is not the answer.
Slashdot Mirror
Radar primarily distinguishes by speed, not size. Objects below a speed threshold are ignored (*). Radar systems usually don't know much about the target's size, all they have is the strength of the return signal which depends on the radar cross section (i.e. reflectivity) of the target. The same object can have hugely different RCS, depending on the angle at which you're looking at the object.
*: this was a big problem in the development of the AEW radar system for the Hawker Siddeley Nimrod: the RAF had specified a speed threshold of something like 100 km/h to catch slow-flying helicopters, but the system ended up detecting cars on motorways at that speed, in large enough numbers to overwhelm the tracking software.
FYI, ctrl-l is the shortcut to select the URL bar in all the major browsers.
Damn you, sans serif!
I was going to say that ctrl-i does nothing in my browser, and I was halfway through writing my reply before I twigged you might be talking about lowercase L instead.
Actually, they've switched LauncherOne to use a Boeing 747. IRC they couldn't get enough payload out of the White Knight Two/launcher combination.
You assume no-one educated will ever look at them. Once the news gets out that this sort of glass disc can contain information, every single glass disc found by experts or amateurs will be examined for ancient writing.
You underestimate archaeologists.
Hang on, there seems to be something embedded in the glass. Let's point a microscope at it.
The Long Now foundation has found a nice solution to this. Put some writing around the edge of the glass disc. Make the initial few words large enough to be readable without magnification, and then make the text progressively smaller to encourage people to grab a magnifier.
Can we please not have a /. story every time Uber farts? None of these stories are 'news for nerds', and I really don't come here to read about taxi regulations and the inevitable flamewars thereabouts.
Not only is the name too generic for an internet search, they have a name collision with Apple's Photos.
They're firmly on my 'avoid like the plague' list. Has their being bought by Toshiba resulted in any improvement?
Reversible energy storage systems have been around for a while. Pumped water storage scales to GW levels with 70% efficiency, but depend on specific geography.
Another scheme is to use an electric locomotive to push rail cars up a hill, and use motor braking on the downhill run to extract the energy again.
Storage in hydrogen is less efficient: electrolysis is 70% efficient, a fuel cell is 40-60%, so chain efficiency is around 35%. The advantage is it's scalable and can be made portable (which is why the DOD is interested).
Oh, I've tried that approach too. The problem with that is the limited capacity of short-term memory. You can cram just a few directions at a time, so you if you have a lot of turns in your route, you have to stop, check the map and cram the next few directions every 2 km. Which takes time and is irritating, so people tend to not stop and just drive with the map in their lap, and we're back to 'distracting and dangerous'.
When you're driving solo in unfamiliar territory, maps are a distraction at best and a menace at worst. Having had the misfortune of having to navigate by an incomplete map to a destination I've never been before, I know "Next time you're in a new place, forget the GPS device" is a line of bullshit. By all means, use common sense (e.g. do a sanity check of the computed route before setting off), but I'd much rather keep both eyes on the road where they belong, rather than have to spend my brain's CPU cycles on guessing where I might have to go next.
Project page of the Lego Accelerator
Thank goodness. Item #1 on my zombie apocalypse plan was always to take over a nuclear powerplant and rewrite its control system in Lumberyard, but the damn license would have thwarted that.
I live in the Netherlands, where a few years ago a new class of road was introduced. Secondary roads outside urban areas were divided in two classes:
- the existing class, speed limit 80 km/h with a line down the middle, will now be reserved for roads with no houses on either side, and no bike traffic.
- some roads (with houses) were converted to the new class, with a speed limit of 60 km/h and no line down the middle, but lines at the edge making the road appear smaller than it really is.
In the Netherlands, this works reasonably well.
In the UK, something similar has been done in some areas, but:
- the posted speed limit often isn't lowered
- the road is narrower to begin with
- the edge of the road is full of potholes
The central line was helpful in keeping your vehicle close enough to the center of the road to avoid the worst potholes, without running the risk of colliding with oncoming traffic.
Without it, in wider vehicles you end up micromanaging your position on the road. In a van, I spend more time making sure my side mirror won't get smashed than I am monitoring the traffic situation. My situational awareness drops when there's no central line, and I have to slow down.
Cars don't have this problem as much, so the speed difference between classes of traffic (and the annoyance level at having slower traffic in front of you) rises.
It's more what they are taking away. It started with the status bar, then there was the ill-conceived move to Australis, version 44 removed fine-grained cookie permissions, next they're planning to kill off extensions.
Over the past few years they've spent countless hours on integrating features few people cared for, and more hours taking away features we actually used.
You still need planning permission to build on private property.
Over the past few years Mozilla has made tons of unpopular changes despite vociferous complaints. Will the new release schedule give them time to find out what their remaining users actually want?
to get around an overbearing corporate firewall that forbade not only executables, but archives containing executables as well. In order to be able to e-mail new versions of a program that the overbearing company had bought, he wrote a program that packed the .exe code in a BMP file.
Unlike its predecessors, VGA was downwards compatible. You can still hook up a 640x480 monitor to today's graphics cards, and a modern monitor works on a first-generation 640x480-only graphics card.
It was the first decent standard for MS-DOS/Windows video. Everything before it was a pile of shit, where you needed a new standard every time a higher resolution became available. Remember separate modes for text and low-res graphics? Remember how painful those early PC monitors were to work on?
The stuff that made Lego look cheap. I still coveted it though; a friend of mine had a Fischer kit that included a light sensor, which was an astonishing bit of hardware around 1980.
Radiation is an issue that gets talked about, it just doesn't end up on the front page.
I've seen calculations that suggest 500 kW of electric power would be enough to drive a decent magnetic shield. The ISS solar arrays supply about 120 kW of peak power.
A water jacket on even a small ship ends up being very heavy. If you attach two ISS modules to each other for a volume of 3.5 x 20 m, you need 1000 tons of water for a shield 2 m thick.
Signal shares one of Whatsapp's big drawbacks: it uses phone numbers as addresses, so it only works on devices that have a phone number assigned. There is a desktop version, but "Signal Desktop links with your Android device". I want a messaging service that works everywhere, not just on mobile phones. Looks like I'm sticking with email for a while longer.
More action, including war, is exactly what the US did after 9/11. Guess what? This strategy has had no success whatsoever in reducing the terrorism problem. The world has gained various hellholes (Iraq, Afghanistan) which have become fertile breeding grounds for new terrorists. Bombing a country into the Stone Age because a few of its citizens went apeshit is not the answer.
Wanting unlimited freedom for yourself, damn the consequences is immoral and ignorant of how reality works.