The security at airports is not only frustrating and useless, it's making the problem worse.
The security queue at Manchester Airport a couple of weeks back, when I was struggling to catch a flight, snaked from the security desks in an intestine-shaped folding queue (with those belt barriers) all the way until it was actually outside the airport terminal. The queue was at least 90 minutes long, and in the main hall, there was probably at least a couple of 747-loads of people all tightly packed together.
The terrorist doesn't even need to get on a plane or through security. They just wait until they are in the middle of that obscenely long and tightly packed security line with their nice big backpack bomb... and they score at least as many casualties as bringing down an A320.
It has a collimating lens. Laser diodes produce highly divergent beams which aren't much use to anyone - so any laser diode to be useful will need a lens (either to focus the beam on a disk, or to produce a collimated beam for something like a laser pointer).
The reflected beam should be considered as dangerous as the primary beam. (Again, I have seen a 1,000 watt CO2 laser blast a hole through a piece of steel, so imagine what it would do to your eye !)
Forget what it'd do to your eye... you wouldn't have a head left to not stare into the beam with the remaining one!
But seriously, I'd no more play with the laser diode in the story than I'd play with a.22 target pistol - really, this laser flashlight is every bit as dangerous when you consider a reflection could quite easily be blinding.
In all probability, the batteries will probably limit the current all by themselves - AA batteries typically are fairly high impedance sources and just can't deliver an awful lot of current. I have high power LEDs without much in the way of current limiting because the impedance of the battery (plus the Rds(on) of the MOSFET that turns them on) is such that the current is a little less than nominal (300mA rather than 315mA, with an absolute max. of 550mA).
It'll be just like when SSH Inc. closed SSH. Guess what - SSH Inc's ssh implementation is no longer the reference implementation - instead, OpenSSH has become the reference implementation. BitTorrent Inc. can say they are the reference implementation as often as they like but it won't make it true - instead, an open BitTorrent implementation will probably become the reference, and just like SSH Inc. BitTorrent Inc. will fade towards irrelevance (although they may continue to exist).
The floating point performance of the new processor should be like night and day compared to the old one you had: the old one apparently only has 1 FPU for the entire device - the new one has an FPU per core.
I started with Linux with version 0.10 (IIRC), in about January 1992. The university was a SunOS shop.
A friend of mine said we should do a demo to the SunOS guys - and we did, I think by the time we did it we were up to 0.14 (and we had compiled a few real applications and installed it on the hard disk of a couple of the 386sx-16 PCs at university), and invited the BOFH and all his minions down to see what we were doing.
Not long after, both myself and my friend had been kicked off the university network - me for running a mud, and my friend for trying to crack the root password! We got back in favour after promptly reporting the exploit we found in the SunOS 'pad' command, although I think the BOFH still looked at us with great suspicion. Ah, the naievity of being a first year. Good times.
Does anyone actually *use* Magic Gate? I've seen it stamped on a few pieces of Sony kit but I've never seen content sold in the shops for it...
Re:It's all in the name
on
Blue Blu-ray
·
· Score: 1
CD was the only game in town for digital music. However, customers now have a choice: HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. They remember Betamax and other failed formats, and the association of HD-DVD with regular DVD by name will bias them towards HD-DVD and away from Blu-Ray, since they will probably want to buy something they feel confident is a "dead cert".
If it's not visible from the street...well, it's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission. Just install the rain barrels, chances are no one will notice them.
It's all in the name
on
Blue Blu-ray
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Blu-Ray won't fail because of porn, it'll fail because of its name.
Now what will Joe Sixpack think? He'll think WTF is Blu-Ray? I'll buy HD-DVD. I know what DVD is, and HD-DVD must be better DVD. So Joe Sixpack will buy the HD-DVD system because he knows what a DVD is but hasn't the faintest clue what Blu-Ray is.
Wrong. Bikes and motorcars are both subject to road law. Drivers should enact citizen's arrests on law-breaking psycho-lists. See how they like getting a criminal record and being sued for damages.
Being subject to road law does not mean you don't have the right to be there. You have the right to life, yet you are still subject to the laws of the land. If you actually read my prior message and also comprehend it, you'll notice phrases about riding predictably and following the highway code. Riding predictably and following the highway code does not make motorists take evasive action (unless the motorist hasn't been paying attention).
Point out my obsessive "cyclists can do no wrong" babbling, too - you are putting words into my mouth. I never mentioned that cyclists could do no wrong, merely that on the roads, in the case of someone making a mistake, if a cyclist makes a mistake it's far more likely that only the cyclist will get hurt. The vast majority of cyclists have a healthy self-preservation instinct and therefore do things such as follow the highway code, ride as predictably and as visibly as possible, observe before turning or changing lane, and don't swerve out in front of 1,000 kilogram projectiles travelling at 50 mph.
Incidentally, I also own a car (which I enjoy driving), and I've never hit anyone in my car (nor seen anyone been hit, so quit your smart-alec 'but seen thousands' remark that you are about to make). I also don't run red lights (either in my car or riding my bike), and I give cyclists at least as much room as I'd give a car, just like the highway code says. I have been hit by cars twice on my bike though - on straight roads, in broad daylight, wearing bright clothing. Once by a woman in a Fiesta who didn't look before turning right, and about three weeks ago, by a 70 year old man who rear-ended me at 50 mph (and which I was very, very lucky not to be killed - I got away with nothing but road rash). The police expect to charge the driver with driving without due care and attention. Like in my car, I have never hurt anything or anyone else while riding my bike over many thousands of miles of cycling.
In any case, it's not helpful to separate road users into 'cyclists' and 'drivers' for this debate, it's far more productive to separate road users into 'asshats' and 'non-asshats'. An asshat on a bike is probably an asshat in a car and vice versa, and there's plenty to go around, judging by how many amber gamblers I see every day, and how many people egregiously flout the speed limit and seemingly ignore other parts of the highway code. But at least an asshat on a bike is less likely to cause someone a serious injury, and will sooner or later get autodarwinated.
Since you talk of the highway code, I assume you're in the UK. While cyclists don't have additional rights, they DO have rights that cars and drivers don't.
In the UK, the public has a *right* to walk, cycle or ride a horse on the public highway (with the exception of the motorway). However, the public does NOT have the right to drive on the public highway - they must license both the car and the driver. Cycling on the public highway is a RIGHT and not a privelige; this is one reason why cyclists aren't taxed, because they are on the road by right not by privilege. Same goes for pedestrians and horse riders.
Despite drivers who think they own the road, the road is still the safest place to cycle, and "shared use" (i.e. pedestrian + cycle lane) facilities are orders of magnitude more dangerous. On a city road, a cyclist can often maintain traffic speed without much of a problem. Proper road positioning (i.e. in the middle of the lane, not the gutter, so that you are visible) and a good lookout (just like driving, observe before any manoevre) and following the highway code will help keep you alive whether you're on a bicycle or a motorcycle. Of course, this can't account for cagers who overtake and immediately turn left, or pull out of junctions without looking (the typical SMIDSY - Sorry mate I didn't see you), or rear end you at traffic lights - like a police officer did to a friend's son, totaling the motorcycle he'd bought 4 hours ago, because the police officer was too busy attending to her screaming child and not attending to the road ahead - however, it will make the situation a good deal better.
"Shared use" facilities for bikes/pedestrians are terrible - pedestrians tend to just wander all over the bike lane, and even a slow cyclist travels around 5 times the speed of a pedestrian.
In any case, a cyclist who rides badly is mostly only a danger to themselves. Why? Q. What happens when a cyclist makes a mistake? A. The cyclist dies. Q. What happens when a car driver makes a mistake? A. The cyclist dies.
This is why bikes have a right to be on the road but car drivers do not: the level of danger posed to the public by a tonne of metal that can achieve speeds of over 100mph is perhaps a dozen orders of magnitude more than the level of danger posed by an 80kg cyclist+bike combination that can sustain speeds of only 17 or 18 mph.
The car that hit me from behind at 50mph was a normal car - I didn't hear that until it hit me, so really hearing isn't adequate to rely on for what's going on behind anyway. I was cycling into wind at speed (therefore, lots of wind noise) and there was opposite direction traffic, masking the sound of the car approaching from behind. So I have a two-pronged plan to try and avoid this in the future: one is a rear view mirror, and another is a daytime rear light with half a dozen Luxeon LEDs set up in a flash pattern like an aircraft anti-collision light.
Really? Most Americans I know have at least two (if not more!) vehicles - for example, a normal car, a giant SUV and a pickup. The normal car is used for nothing but the man's commuting. The wife uses the giant SUV and the pickup gets taken on camping trips. So at least one of the vehicles is a "unitasker" already.
When I lived in Houston, I was quite unusual amongst my friends having only one vehicle.
As a cyclist, I'd really like you to not rely on your ears when crossing the road. When you step out into my path, it hurts quite a bit. Especially if it's down hill or I have a following wind.
A small, efficient electric car even powered by conventional electricity sources will be pretty efficient. Unlike the diesel, it doesn't have to idle when stopped. Unlike the diesel, it can use regenerative braking and not waste energy to slow down. Unlike the diesel, one huge powerplant is much more efficient than lots of very small powerplants (our local power station, a combined cycle gas turbine which uses any remaining waste heat to heat the nearby swimming pool has a pretty amazing thermal efficiency - I think with the combined heat and power it's starting to push 80%)
As a cyclist (as well as a motorist), I really hope these things take off: if the drivers feel vulnerable, perhaps they might treat other road users with a bit of respect... unlike the idiot who hit me doing 50 mph a couple of weeks ago with the feeble excuse "sorry mate I didn't see you" (despite being broad daylight, a straight road with great visibility).
I'm currently developing some embedded code. I have 2K of program flash to play with, and a whopping 128 bytes (not K, not meg, 128 bytes, i.e. 0.1K) to play with. This is not at all uncommon on embedded devices.
It's not just proprietary drivers, it's open source ones too, especially for niche hardware. You're never going to get your kernel driver accepted by the high priests of the Linux kernel team for a piece of hardware with half a dozen users, so you are doomed to rebuilding the module every time you do a yum update, and your distro has a new point version of a kernel. It really kills the usability of Linux when this happens.
Fortunately, for USB devices, this has existed for a while. (Indeed, there's little reason to write a kernel-land USB driver these days).
You've not needed to RECOM-FUCKING-PILE the kernel for a new driver for well over 10 years now... I think modules were added back in 1993 or so. The only people who've been recompiling kernels in the last decade are either (a) unaware of modules or (b) building a statically linked kernel for a niche app. Or perhaps some vendor was too clueless to supply a driver as a module.
Non-trivial? It's extremely trivial - inverters to convert low voltage DC to higher voltage AC have existed for decades. Grid tie inverters have been around for years also (these allow you to put power back onto the grid). There's probably no need to store the energy in your house - during the day, when demand is highest, just sell to the grid, and at night (when your demand is reasonably low) buy back off the grid.
Slashdot Mirror
The security at airports is not only frustrating and useless, it's making the problem worse.
The security queue at Manchester Airport a couple of weeks back, when I was struggling to catch a flight, snaked from the security desks in an intestine-shaped folding queue (with those belt barriers) all the way until it was actually outside the airport terminal. The queue was at least 90 minutes long, and in the main hall, there was probably at least a couple of 747-loads of people all tightly packed together.
The terrorist doesn't even need to get on a plane or through security. They just wait until they are in the middle of that obscenely long and tightly packed security line with their nice big backpack bomb... and they score at least as many casualties as bringing down an A320.
It has a collimating lens. Laser diodes produce highly divergent beams which aren't much use to anyone - so any laser diode to be useful will need a lens (either to focus the beam on a disk, or to produce a collimated beam for something like a laser pointer).
Forget what it'd do to your eye... you wouldn't have a head left to not stare into the beam with the remaining one!
But seriously, I'd no more play with the laser diode in the story than I'd play with a
In all probability, the batteries will probably limit the current all by themselves - AA batteries typically are fairly high impedance sources and just can't deliver an awful lot of current. I have high power LEDs without much in the way of current limiting because the impedance of the battery (plus the Rds(on) of the MOSFET that turns them on) is such that the current is a little less than nominal (300mA rather than 315mA, with an absolute max. of 550mA).
Please remember not to look at them with your remaining eye
It'll be just like when SSH Inc. closed SSH. Guess what - SSH Inc's ssh implementation is no longer the reference implementation - instead, OpenSSH has become the reference implementation. BitTorrent Inc. can say they are the reference implementation as often as they like but it won't make it true - instead, an open BitTorrent implementation will probably become the reference, and just like SSH Inc. BitTorrent Inc. will fade towards irrelevance (although they may continue to exist).
Sigh. If we all had your attitude, we would still be living in caves.
The floating point performance of the new processor should be like night and day compared to the old one you had: the old one apparently only has 1 FPU for the entire device - the new one has an FPU per core.
I started with Linux with version 0.10 (IIRC), in about January 1992. The university was a SunOS shop.
A friend of mine said we should do a demo to the SunOS guys - and we did, I think by the time we did it we were up to 0.14 (and we had compiled a few real applications and installed it on the hard disk of a couple of the 386sx-16 PCs at university), and invited the BOFH and all his minions down to see what we were doing.
Not long after, both myself and my friend had been kicked off the university network - me for running a mud, and my friend for trying to crack the root password! We got back in favour after promptly reporting the exploit we found in the SunOS 'pad' command, although I think the BOFH still looked at us with great suspicion. Ah, the naievity of being a first year. Good times.
Does anyone actually *use* Magic Gate? I've seen it stamped on a few pieces of Sony kit but I've never seen content sold in the shops for it...
CD was the only game in town for digital music. However, customers now have a choice: HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. They remember Betamax and other failed formats, and the association of HD-DVD with regular DVD by name will bias them towards HD-DVD and away from Blu-Ray, since they will probably want to buy something they feel confident is a "dead cert".
If it's not visible from the street...well, it's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission. Just install the rain barrels, chances are no one will notice them.
Blu-Ray won't fail because of porn, it'll fail because of its name.
Now what will Joe Sixpack think? He'll think WTF is Blu-Ray? I'll buy HD-DVD. I know what DVD is, and HD-DVD must be better DVD. So Joe Sixpack will buy the HD-DVD system because he knows what a DVD is but hasn't the faintest clue what Blu-Ray is.
Being subject to road law does not mean you don't have the right to be there. You have the right to life, yet you are still subject to the laws of the land. If you actually read my prior message and also comprehend it, you'll notice phrases about riding predictably and following the highway code. Riding predictably and following the highway code does not make motorists take evasive action (unless the motorist hasn't been paying attention).
Point out my obsessive "cyclists can do no wrong" babbling, too - you are putting words into my mouth. I never mentioned that cyclists could do no wrong, merely that on the roads, in the case of someone making a mistake, if a cyclist makes a mistake it's far more likely that only the cyclist will get hurt. The vast majority of cyclists have a healthy self-preservation instinct and therefore do things such as follow the highway code, ride as predictably and as visibly as possible, observe before turning or changing lane, and don't swerve out in front of 1,000 kilogram projectiles travelling at 50 mph.
Incidentally, I also own a car (which I enjoy driving), and I've never hit anyone in my car (nor seen anyone been hit, so quit your smart-alec 'but seen thousands' remark that you are about to make). I also don't run red lights (either in my car or riding my bike), and I give cyclists at least as much room as I'd give a car, just like the highway code says. I have been hit by cars twice on my bike though - on straight roads, in broad daylight, wearing bright clothing. Once by a woman in a Fiesta who didn't look before turning right, and about three weeks ago, by a 70 year old man who rear-ended me at 50 mph (and which I was very, very lucky not to be killed - I got away with nothing but road rash). The police expect to charge the driver with driving without due care and attention. Like in my car, I have never hurt anything or anyone else while riding my bike over many thousands of miles of cycling.
In any case, it's not helpful to separate road users into 'cyclists' and 'drivers' for this debate, it's far more productive to separate road users into 'asshats' and 'non-asshats'. An asshat on a bike is probably an asshat in a car and vice versa, and there's plenty to go around, judging by how many amber gamblers I see every day, and how many people egregiously flout the speed limit and seemingly ignore other parts of the highway code. But at least an asshat on a bike is less likely to cause someone a serious injury, and will sooner or later get autodarwinated.
Since you talk of the highway code, I assume you're in the UK. While cyclists don't have additional rights, they DO have rights that cars and drivers don't.
In the UK, the public has a *right* to walk, cycle or ride a horse on the public highway (with the exception of the motorway). However, the public does NOT have the right to drive on the public highway - they must license both the car and the driver. Cycling on the public highway is a RIGHT and not a privelige; this is one reason why cyclists aren't taxed, because they are on the road by right not by privilege. Same goes for pedestrians and horse riders.
Despite drivers who think they own the road, the road is still the safest place to cycle, and "shared use" (i.e. pedestrian + cycle lane) facilities are orders of magnitude more dangerous. On a city road, a cyclist can often maintain traffic speed without much of a problem. Proper road positioning (i.e. in the middle of the lane, not the gutter, so that you are visible) and a good lookout (just like driving, observe before any manoevre) and following the highway code will help keep you alive whether you're on a bicycle or a motorcycle. Of course, this can't account for cagers who overtake and immediately turn left, or pull out of junctions without looking (the typical SMIDSY - Sorry mate I didn't see you), or rear end you at traffic lights - like a police officer did to a friend's son, totaling the motorcycle he'd bought 4 hours ago, because the police officer was too busy attending to her screaming child and not attending to the road ahead - however, it will make the situation a good deal better.
"Shared use" facilities for bikes/pedestrians are terrible - pedestrians tend to just wander all over the bike lane, and even a slow cyclist travels around 5 times the speed of a pedestrian.
In any case, a cyclist who rides badly is mostly only a danger to themselves. Why?
Q. What happens when a cyclist makes a mistake?
A. The cyclist dies.
Q. What happens when a car driver makes a mistake?
A. The cyclist dies.
This is why bikes have a right to be on the road but car drivers do not: the level of danger posed to the public by a tonne of metal that can achieve speeds of over 100mph is perhaps a dozen orders of magnitude more than the level of danger posed by an 80kg cyclist+bike combination that can sustain speeds of only 17 or 18 mph.
The car that hit me from behind at 50mph was a normal car - I didn't hear that until it hit me, so really hearing isn't adequate to rely on for what's going on behind anyway. I was cycling into wind at speed (therefore, lots of wind noise) and there was opposite direction traffic, masking the sound of the car approaching from behind. So I have a two-pronged plan to try and avoid this in the future: one is a rear view mirror, and another is a daytime rear light with half a dozen Luxeon LEDs set up in a flash pattern like an aircraft anti-collision light.
Really? Most Americans I know have at least two (if not more!) vehicles - for example, a normal car, a giant SUV and a pickup. The normal car is used for nothing but the man's commuting. The wife uses the giant SUV and the pickup gets taken on camping trips. So at least one of the vehicles is a "unitasker" already.
When I lived in Houston, I was quite unusual amongst my friends having only one vehicle.
As a cyclist, I'd really like you to not rely on your ears when crossing the road. When you step out into my path, it hurts quite a bit. Especially if it's down hill or I have a following wind.
A small, efficient electric car even powered by conventional electricity sources will be pretty efficient.
Unlike the diesel, it doesn't have to idle when stopped. Unlike the diesel, it can use regenerative braking and not waste energy to slow down. Unlike the diesel, one huge powerplant is much more efficient than lots of very small powerplants (our local power station, a combined cycle gas turbine which uses any remaining waste heat to heat the nearby swimming pool has a pretty amazing thermal efficiency - I think with the combined heat and power it's starting to push 80%)
As a cyclist (as well as a motorist), I really hope these things take off: if the drivers feel vulnerable, perhaps they might treat other road users with a bit of respect... unlike the idiot who hit me doing 50 mph a couple of weeks ago with the feeble excuse "sorry mate I didn't see you" (despite being broad daylight, a straight road with great visibility).
I'm currently developing some embedded code. I have 2K of program flash to play with, and a whopping 128 bytes (not K, not meg, 128 bytes, i.e. 0.1K) to play with. This is not at all uncommon on embedded devices.
It's not just proprietary drivers, it's open source ones too, especially for niche hardware. You're never going to get your kernel driver accepted by the high priests of the Linux kernel team for a piece of hardware with half a dozen users, so you are doomed to rebuilding the module every time you do a yum update, and your distro has a new point version of a kernel. It really kills the usability of Linux when this happens.
Fortunately, for USB devices, this has existed for a while. (Indeed, there's little reason to write a kernel-land USB driver these days).
You've not needed to RECOM-FUCKING-PILE the kernel for a new driver for well over 10 years now... I think modules were added back in 1993 or so. The only people who've been recompiling kernels in the last decade are either (a) unaware of modules or (b) building a statically linked kernel for a niche app. Or perhaps some vendor was too clueless to supply a driver as a module.
Slashdot is /. - i.e. Unix style slashes. IE doesn't run on unix. If you want a Microsoft closed source site, then go and start Backslash dot.
Non-trivial? It's extremely trivial - inverters to convert low voltage DC to higher voltage AC have existed for decades. Grid tie inverters have been around for years also (these allow you to put power back onto the grid). There's probably no need to store the energy in your house - during the day, when demand is highest, just sell to the grid, and at night (when your demand is reasonably low) buy back off the grid.