By that measure my cell phone is a trigger. Actually, cell phones are very popular bomb triggers. But we're not slapping every kid with a cellphone in handcuffs. Or every kid with a Casio watch (the venerable Casio F14 watch that's been sold since the 1980s is a popular trigger for IEDs). Do we cuff any kid who comes into school wearing a Casio F14?
They may wipe it down for an explosives test and then let him take it anyway.
I've taken all sorts of electronics in planes, many bare circuit boards in static shield bags, and lithium polymer batteries that actually look like bombs on the X-ray with wires sticking out. The most they do is use their explosive detector, just like they do with people's laptop computers.
There's also no way to be a geek without having "disciplinary problems", for one or more of the following reasons:
* Being bullied. If you're a geeky kid you will be bullied. When you finally get fed up of this, snap, and hurt a bully - the school will punish you. * Not taking interest in compulsory subjects that don't interest you. (Personally I lost count of the number of times I ended up in detention in French because I had spent the evening messing around with a circuit, or writing some computer program, instead of my French homework). * Answering back. Many geeks can be smart-arses and will argue with teachers and end up in detention. (Usually deserved). * Skiving mandatory sports classes to spend more time messing around with some circuit you're constructing or program you're writing.
This is often because in-car tech is terrible. The user interfaces often seem to be reminiscent of something knocked together for Windows CE in the mid 90s, they are often awkward and laggy and counterintuitive. And basically they are ossified to the car's manufacture date, and you have to pay through the nose for data updates. When I last changed my car, the car was 18 years old - would an in-car satnav/other tech still be supported 18 years after it came out?
All I want in a car today is this: some USB charging ports, some point on the vehicle interior that allows you to attach a tablet or phone holder, and a decent Bluetooth implementation. It's far easier to update my phone or tablet than anything actually built into a car, and I can also take it with me and use it in a rental vehicle, on my bicycle, in my house etc.
Until 2 months ago, I could occasionally hear the "bleeerrm bing bing bing bing" sound of Windows 95 starting up somewhere in the office. There was some ancient machine programming cartridges for some other ancient machine (not a PC, a custom franking machine) that some of our customers had.
It's not unique to programming. It's everywhere. Good looking young fresh faces sell newspapers and magazines, the older face of experience does not. For instance, take music - predominantly young acts are promoted, and older acts that are making new music that's arguably better are ignored. See the headline "21 year old entrepreneur starts X business" - but never see the headline "50 year old entrepreneur starts X business" etc. The obsession with youth is human nature, not something unique to the computer world.
They are probably not messing with the cell service, it's probably that there are so many people hitting the same cell tower that you're just running out of bandwidth.
I've seen it happen at Event City in Manchester, the quality of your cell connection is inversely proportional to the amount of people attending.
They interfere with small aircraft avionics too, I've seen it (on an instrument approach, in the rain, at night). GSM is particularly obnoxious, it's pretty much guaranteed to wipe out all the audio and has a high chance of causing course deviation indicators to deflect.
We were intercepting the localiser one night and suddenly, all the audio was obliterated by "bip b b bip b b bip b b bip b b bip bRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR" as my friend's wife called him. If ATC had given us an instruction at that moment we would not have heard it. It was also extremely distracting.
What's most inaccurate is that he says that using a MOSFET means always a really simple circuit with the microcontroller directly connected to the gate of the MOSFET and nothing else in the circuit (except the pulldown resistor). In Microcontroller And MOSFETs 101 you soon learn about inductive loads and the problems they can cause, relays are the popular example - when you turn off the current to the relay you get a big voltage spike over the MOSFET. This capacitatively couples over the gate and zaps the output pin of the microcontroller, usually causing it to crash, but it can also cause the output to latch up and destroy the microcontroller. You need some circuitry to prevent this, usually a diode across the relay and a resistor in series with the gate, but he mentions none of this.
Before high power LED bike lights were commercialized, I made a daylight visible rear light for my bike after I got rear ended, using 6 x 1 watt red Luxeon LEDs. I wanted it to flash a pattern so it would show up in a driver's vision, but for night time use I wanted it to be less bright and be a steady light. While the 555 timer is very very cheap and a PWM circuit for dimming the LEDs and flashing them could easily be made, an ATtiny13 turned out to be a cheaper way to implement the circuit because instead of potentiometers to control brightness, very cheap pushbuttons could be used to cycle through the program running on the microcontroller.
A 555 timer costs pennies, and an ATtiny13 costs about 50p (about US $0.75). Pushbuttons cost pennies, potentiometers cost pounds.
There are also some pitfalls of MOSFETs he should really mention (probably why people are using these old BJT power transistors is they are a bit more forgiving in this respect). When driving motors and relays, you often get some inductive 'kick', and this will capacitatively couple across the MOSFET's gate and go right back to the microcontroller's pin. Usually this results in just the microcontroller crashing, but it may also result in latch-up which can quickly destroy the microcontroller (I've seen it happen).
It can normally be prevented with a diode across the relay and a 10k resistor to the gate of the MOSFET (which will slow its turn on time, but usually we don't care all that much for these applications) but the original article mentions none of this and you'd have thought the author would have known better!
This is London we're talking about, further north than the entire continental US. It gets to 90+ about 3 days a year. At morning commute times, it's more like 60 degrees (15C) even on a day that's going to end up hot.
Utility riding can absolutely be done by the young and the elderly and the poor.
* For the poor: There are cheap bikes, Craiglist, Freecycle, garage sales etc. which are perfectly suitable for utility cycling.
* For the elderly: You can travel at 9mph on a bicycle for the same energy expenditure of walking at 3mph. A person on a bicycle is the most efficient way on Earth to move around.
* For the young: The fastest and best cyclists are the young! Most of the worlds best cyclists are under 40 years old.
* For the very young: (children) - they can't have driving licenses, and bicycle gives them an enormous amount of extra freedom.
A big barrier to cycling for a lot of the population is having to mix with cars. A segregated cycle lane will get a lot more people cycling (already London has massively increased the cycling rate with what's been done to date) which will mean fewer cars on the road, so those with no choice but to drive are now driving on streets with fewer cars.
There's no detail in the article - they may be doing this only for very small aircraft (the cited Samoan airline for example, is flying small 4 seat single engine aircraft where weight and balance is absolutely critical, and an unexpected fat passenger will mean necessarily having to leave someone or luggage or fuel behind).
For larger aircraft, standard passenger weights are used. However this can sometimes be wrong. A friend is a senior FO flying the MD-11, and his airline takes military contracts from time to time. One time leaving Hawaii they discovered they were carrying a full plane load of Marines armed to the teeth, although they didn't know that until they started coming through the door. He said the aircraft didn't climb as well as usual, and when he estimated their true takeoff weight, he reckoned they took off some 12,000 lbs overweight.
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By that measure my cell phone is a trigger. Actually, cell phones are very popular bomb triggers. But we're not slapping every kid with a cellphone in handcuffs. Or every kid with a Casio watch (the venerable Casio F14 watch that's been sold since the 1980s is a popular trigger for IEDs). Do we cuff any kid who comes into school wearing a Casio F14?
They may wipe it down for an explosives test and then let him take it anyway.
I've taken all sorts of electronics in planes, many bare circuit boards in static shield bags, and lithium polymer batteries that actually look like bombs on the X-ray with wires sticking out. The most they do is use their explosive detector, just like they do with people's laptop computers.
There's also no way to be a geek without having "disciplinary problems", for one or more of the following reasons:
* Being bullied. If you're a geeky kid you will be bullied. When you finally get fed up of this, snap, and hurt a bully - the school will punish you.
* Not taking interest in compulsory subjects that don't interest you. (Personally I lost count of the number of times I ended up in detention in French because I had spent the evening messing around with a circuit, or writing some computer program, instead of my French homework).
* Answering back. Many geeks can be smart-arses and will argue with teachers and end up in detention. (Usually deserved).
* Skiving mandatory sports classes to spend more time messing around with some circuit you're constructing or program you're writing.
Hmm. Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/936/
I'd continue working but not for a corporate overlord. There are a lot of projects I would like to do but need a lot of money to get off the ground.
This is often because in-car tech is terrible. The user interfaces often seem to be reminiscent of something knocked together for Windows CE in the mid 90s, they are often awkward and laggy and counterintuitive. And basically they are ossified to the car's manufacture date, and you have to pay through the nose for data updates. When I last changed my car, the car was 18 years old - would an in-car satnav/other tech still be supported 18 years after it came out?
All I want in a car today is this: some USB charging ports, some point on the vehicle interior that allows you to attach a tablet or phone holder, and a decent Bluetooth implementation. It's far easier to update my phone or tablet than anything actually built into a car, and I can also take it with me and use it in a rental vehicle, on my bicycle, in my house etc.
Chicken wire over the yard.
Can't the Met Office submit a tender themselves?
Until 2 months ago, I could occasionally hear the "bleeerrm bing bing bing bing" sound of Windows 95 starting up somewhere in the office. There was some ancient machine programming cartridges for some other ancient machine (not a PC, a custom franking machine) that some of our customers had.
It's not unique to programming. It's everywhere. Good looking young fresh faces sell newspapers and magazines, the older face of experience does not. For instance, take music - predominantly young acts are promoted, and older acts that are making new music that's arguably better are ignored. See the headline "21 year old entrepreneur starts X business" - but never see the headline "50 year old entrepreneur starts X business" etc. The obsession with youth is human nature, not something unique to the computer world.
Don't get me started on Die Hard 2. Argh.
They are probably not messing with the cell service, it's probably that there are so many people hitting the same cell tower that you're just running out of bandwidth.
I've seen it happen at Event City in Manchester, the quality of your cell connection is inversely proportional to the amount of people attending.
I have a router that takes a 3G/4G USB dongle. It has a built-in 4 port ethernet switch (as well as a wifi access point).
They interfere with small aircraft avionics too, I've seen it (on an instrument approach, in the rain, at night). GSM is particularly obnoxious, it's pretty much guaranteed to wipe out all the audio and has a high chance of causing course deviation indicators to deflect.
We were intercepting the localiser one night and suddenly, all the audio was obliterated by "bip b b bip b b bip b b bip b b bip bRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR" as my friend's wife called him. If ATC had given us an instruction at that moment we would not have heard it. It was also extremely distracting.
That kind of treatment is actually illegal where I live. It would open the employer up to a whole world of legal hurt.
What's most inaccurate is that he says that using a MOSFET means always a really simple circuit with the microcontroller directly connected to the gate of the MOSFET and nothing else in the circuit (except the pulldown resistor). In Microcontroller And MOSFETs 101 you soon learn about inductive loads and the problems they can cause, relays are the popular example - when you turn off the current to the relay you get a big voltage spike over the MOSFET. This capacitatively couples over the gate and zaps the output pin of the microcontroller, usually causing it to crash, but it can also cause the output to latch up and destroy the microcontroller. You need some circuitry to prevent this, usually a diode across the relay and a resistor in series with the gate, but he mentions none of this.
Maybe not a microcontroller, but a whole circuit.
Before high power LED bike lights were commercialized, I made a daylight visible rear light for my bike after I got rear ended, using 6 x 1 watt red Luxeon LEDs. I wanted it to flash a pattern so it would show up in a driver's vision, but for night time use I wanted it to be less bright and be a steady light. While the 555 timer is very very cheap and a PWM circuit for dimming the LEDs and flashing them could easily be made, an ATtiny13 turned out to be a cheaper way to implement the circuit because instead of potentiometers to control brightness, very cheap pushbuttons could be used to cycle through the program running on the microcontroller.
A 555 timer costs pennies, and an ATtiny13 costs about 50p (about US $0.75). Pushbuttons cost pennies, potentiometers cost pounds.
There are also some pitfalls of MOSFETs he should really mention (probably why people are using these old BJT power transistors is they are a bit more forgiving in this respect). When driving motors and relays, you often get some inductive 'kick', and this will capacitatively couple across the MOSFET's gate and go right back to the microcontroller's pin. Usually this results in just the microcontroller crashing, but it may also result in latch-up which can quickly destroy the microcontroller (I've seen it happen).
It can normally be prevented with a diode across the relay and a 10k resistor to the gate of the MOSFET (which will slow its turn on time, but usually we don't care all that much for these applications) but the original article mentions none of this and you'd have thought the author would have known better!
I use a Pi as an AVR programmer. The Pi has SPI on its GPIO interface (or you can bitbang, avrdude supports both)
This is London we're talking about, further north than the entire continental US. It gets to 90+ about 3 days a year. At morning commute times, it's more like 60 degrees (15C) even on a day that's going to end up hot.
Utility riding doesn't mean you have to race around at the speed of Chris Froome.
Cycling at 9mph takes the same power as walking at 3mph, plus you get a lot more airflow.
The south east of England (where London is) is actually relatively dry. I lived in the SE for a few years, droughts weren't all that uncommon.
Utility riding can absolutely be done by the young and the elderly and the poor.
* For the poor: There are cheap bikes, Craiglist, Freecycle, garage sales etc. which are perfectly suitable for utility cycling.
* For the elderly: You can travel at 9mph on a bicycle for the same energy expenditure of walking at 3mph. A person on a bicycle is the most efficient way on Earth to move around.
* For the young: The fastest and best cyclists are the young! Most of the worlds best cyclists are under 40 years old.
* For the very young: (children) - they can't have driving licenses, and bicycle gives them an enormous amount of extra freedom.
A big barrier to cycling for a lot of the population is having to mix with cars. A segregated cycle lane will get a lot more people cycling (already London has massively increased the cycling rate with what's been done to date) which will mean fewer cars on the road, so those with no choice but to drive are now driving on streets with fewer cars.
There's no detail in the article - they may be doing this only for very small aircraft (the cited Samoan airline for example, is flying small 4 seat single engine aircraft where weight and balance is absolutely critical, and an unexpected fat passenger will mean necessarily having to leave someone or luggage or fuel behind).
For larger aircraft, standard passenger weights are used. However this can sometimes be wrong. A friend is a senior FO flying the MD-11, and his airline takes military contracts from time to time. One time leaving Hawaii they discovered they were carrying a full plane load of Marines armed to the teeth, although they didn't know that until they started coming through the door. He said the aircraft didn't climb as well as usual, and when he estimated their true takeoff weight, he reckoned they took off some 12,000 lbs overweight.
A mile wide and an inch deep is still the volume of just over 25 Olympic sized swimming pools.