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User: Alioth

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  1. Re:Cycling not the Answer on How Safe Is Cycling? · · Score: 1

    Perhaps not, but not many people are going to drive to work in 3 feet of snow either. Does that make cars useless?

    When the weather is conducive, people getting on bikes and reducing motor vehicle exhaust will make the city a more pleasant place to be. There are many places where people can walk or cycle enough that it is worthwhile. Take a look at Cambridge in the UK - the bicycle park at the train station has approximately two orders of magnitude more parked bikes during the day than the car park has parked cars, and there's plenty of wet weather in Cambridge. During the evening, the majority of traffic is bicycles not cars, which means residents get quieter streets since a bike makes a lot less noise (while waiting for the bus after pub kicking out time, I think I counted ten bicycles for every car).

  2. Danger on How Safe Is Cycling? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Cycling carries its dangers, but cycling (even in a city) is probably less dangerous than not exercising at all.

  3. The article is pretty light on details, but it's entirely possible that this capacitor type will have a too high equivalent series resistance (ESR) to work well as a decoupling capacitor.

  4. Re:There should be a mandatory one second delay. on How To Lose $172,222 a Second For 45 Minutes · · Score: 1

    > This level of trading does not do the market any good, and puts individual investors at a severe disadvantage against firms like this.

    But does it really? HFT has reduced the spread from the seller's price to what the investor pays by a large amount, meaning the investor (the person who buys shares and holds onto them for a long time) gets a better deal.

  5. Re:$400 billion / year is "essentially zero"? on How To Lose $172,222 a Second For 45 Minutes · · Score: 1

    There's another important difference between Greece and the US - Greece doesn't have its own currency. The US can inflate itself out of debt. Greece was as trapped as an individual who maxed out their credit cards.

  6. Re:3D print a new dash. Remember DIN? on Automakers Struggle With Pairing Smartphones To Car Infotainment Systems · · Score: 1

    Yes. I have a 100MHz Tektronix digital storage oscilloscope which is probably from around the mid 1990s, a Phillips function generator with a label proudly marking its last calibration date as being somewhere in 1981, and a Thurlby Thandar logic analyzer that's probably from the late 90s. Clearly these things are lab equipment and not consumery...so... ...my hi-fi I bought new in about 1996 or so. I've seen no reason to change it. The amplifier still amplifies perfectly well and the CD player still works fine (not that I use it a lot - I tend to plug a tablet in these days). I bought my Roland A90 keyboard the day after Lady Di died in that car crash in Paris.

    But for car stuff - if I were to buy a new car, all I would want would be a simple Bluetooth interface that allows me to use the audio controls and displays the basic information on what's playing. Satnav I can do with the TomTom app rather than paying stupid money for one built into the car (which is awkward and expensive to keep up to date). I'd even prefer just a simple line in and dumb amplifier rather than all the shite.

  7. Re:1000 new medals please on Would-Be Tesla Owners Jump Through Hoops To Skirt Wacky Texas Rules · · Score: 1

    An AR-15 for personal protection? Why would you buy one of them for personal protection? Not much use for concealed carry, and for home defense a pump action shotgun is much more useful.

  8. Re:This says more about the categories... on Most IT Workers Don't Have STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering, Math) Degrees · · Score: 1

    Perhaps diagnose why the motherboard is broken. For example, a few years ago we had increasing problems with some brand new PCs, and swapping them out wasn't doing any good. Probing the DC rails with an old analogue scope revealed the problem (excessive ripple) and the cause (capacitor plague) so the faulty part could be replaced rather than just swapping the PC and hoping for the best. The scope wouldn't have been necessary in the end, the capacitors on the motherboards soon started to show obvious signs of faults. HP ended up swapping out all the motherboards with a batch which used different manufacturer's capacitors.

  9. Re:Personally on Most IT Workers Don't Have STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering, Math) Degrees · · Score: 1

    I came across something (very true) in a precalculus textbook only last night, in a chapter on functions:

    "We believe it is in your best interest to learn the analytic way of doing things so that you are always smarter than your calculator"

    This. The problem with the maths education I got (I only went up to GCSE level which you do at 16 years old here) is that it was all taught by rote. For example, in trigonometry the fuctions sin, cos, tan etc. were just treated as black boxes - you put something into you calculator and get something out and you can use it to solve a problem with a right angle triangle. No one went into the unit circle definition or even drew the sine function on a blackboard (let alone talk about radians). In other words, there wasn't even the most simple attempt to try to encourage students to be smarter than their calculator.

    And this is why I'm doing maths again, because I want to get into signal processing, and to get into signal processing you need to know something about calculus, but to learn calculus you actually have to understand algebra and trigonometry etc. and be smarter than your calculator - not just be able to follow a set of steps by rote.

    (The other problem with my maths education as a teenager is that I was basically very lazy).

  10. Re:Outdated trains on New York City Considers Articulated Subway Cars · · Score: 1

    But you can make it clean, and make the stations not depressingly grey and dull which just goes to make them seem even dirtier than they actually are. The London Underground is even older but for the most part, the stations are clean, most of them are decorated nicely, and most of them are bright.

  11. and eBay trouble on Facebook Isn't Accepting New Posts, Likes, Comments... · · Score: 1

    ...and I've also noted that eBay isn't working correctly - no searches seem to be working. Potentially more upsetting to someone because I bought what I was after off Amazon instead (so some ebayer lost a sale)

  12. Re:Reputation killing them on OCZ May Be On Its Last Legs · · Score: 1

    Nope. Under the Sale of Goods act they are responsible for considerably longer. Don't let them fob you off.

    In short, a seller can be responsible for up to SIX YEARS (not six months) for the product they sold and the customer may still have legal rights AFTER a warranty has expired. In particular a hard drive that fails that quickly is clearly not fit for purpose and the seller must take it back. If they refuse take them to the small claims court. They will generally capitulate at that stage.

    http://www.oft.gov.uk/shared_oft/738369/738375/OFT002_SOGA_explained.pdf

  13. Re:Tiniest violin on OCZ May Be On Its Last Legs · · Score: 1

    I won't excuse OCZ (they are obviously crap) but you don't have to install Linux to use it - use a LiveCD image or a bootable USB image. Even if you're a true blue stamp on the head Microsoft fan, a Linux live CD can be something very handy to have around - things like the Trinity Rescue Kit which can help you un-bork a Windows install.

  14. pf on NFTables To Replace iptables In the Linux Kernel · · Score: 4, Informative

    Can't we have OpenBSD pf instead? Powerful, nice, decent documentation on how to use it, syntax that makes a lot more sense than iptables.

  15. BA on Redesigned Seats Let Airlines Squeeze In More Passengers · · Score: 1

    Every so often I fly on BA from London to Houston. I swear that the seats in economy on BA have less room than the seats on easyJet. Also after about 4 hours, the BA seats feel like slabs of concrete.

    I'm not complaining though, the round trip on BA is stupidly cheap, and it includes free booze (which alleviates the concrete seat problem somewhat).

  16. Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle on Why Small-Scale Biomass Energy Projects Aren't a Solution To Climate Change · · Score: 2

    The energy payback of a wind turbine is 3-6 months *not* 15 years. A solar panel will pay back in 6 years or less.

    The EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) of a wind turbine is about 18:1 (conservative, other sources say 25:1), the EROEI on a solar panel is about 6:1. By comparison the shale oil in the US only has an EROEI of 5:1.

  17. Re:8% reduction by chaning lifestyle on Why Small-Scale Biomass Energy Projects Aren't a Solution To Climate Change · · Score: 1

    The US does have a massively subsidised public transport infrastructure: they are called the airlines.

  18. Re:14%, says the EPA. Electricity and cars are 68% on Why Small-Scale Biomass Energy Projects Aren't a Solution To Climate Change · · Score: 1

    Lithium batteries generate no heat during charging (unless there's a problem with them). NiCd and NiMH did, but no one uses those for motive power any more.

    Diesel submarines use diesel because of the tremendous energy density of the diesel. This is compounded by most diesel submarines being built when lead acid batteries were the best batteries we had for motive power. Lead-acid is cheap but it's not at all energy dense, therefore to carry enough fuel to operate for the duration of the mission they need the very high energy density of the diesel. This is probably still true with lithium batteries. The military don't care an awful lot about efficiency, they care about speed and duration, efficiency be damned (unless it's so bad the ship can't actually complete the mission).

  19. Re: Everything they say is true. on China's State Press Calls For 'Building a De-Americanized World' · · Score: 1

    Since Russia have shown they have no problems with meddling with energy supply for political ends, and damn the collateral damage (such as a spat with countries through which pipelines travel, they just cut that pipeline, plunging all the non-involved countries downstream into darkness) no one really wants to deal with Russia if they can help it.

  20. Re: And the pilot? on Passenger Lands Plane After Pilot Collapses and Dies At the Controls · · Score: 2

    Rubbish. I started flying when I was 24. I'm not rich (pretty typical middle class). One of the guys in our flying club when I lived in Houston was a cable guy. He owned a modest Cessna 150 which he kept looking very nice, and made some sacrifices such as not driving a brand new car. Another owner of a Cessna 150 that I knew out there was a lineman for the power company. Both of those guys are as far from "rich" as you can get, but by not spending on conspicuous consumption they could afford it.

    While you certainly can't go out and buy a jet or even many decent light twins on a normal income, there's actually a great deal of GA that's available to people on normal incomes, and quite a bit available to working class incomes. Where I live now fuel is a lot more expensive, but I can still afford to own a light aircraft on a pretty typical middle class income.

  21. Re:Dubious Market? on Kickstarter For Open Source GPU · · Score: 1

    Clearly they aren't looking for markets otherwise it would be closed source and they would be proposing to sell IP licenses or actual hardware.

    What they are doing is making a freely available Verilog implementation of a graphics chip. This means electronics designers (whether they be hobbyists or people designing embedded hardware for their business) have an accelerated graphics core that they can use with their design. Given it's an LGPL and open source design, they can adapt it to use something other than PCI (for example, whatever internal bus their embedded system may use) or given that PCI is something that's well documented, they could implement PCI in their design.

    As such it doesn't matter if the market is one person or ten million. The goal is to produce an open source graphics core that electronics designers can use, not to market something to PC users. Finding a market is up to the users of the Verliog code.

  22. Re:Cockroach rights? on Cyborg Cockroach Sparks Ethics Debate · · Score: 1

    Mine do. They tend to leave the giblets lying around.

  23. Re:Cockroach rights? on Cyborg Cockroach Sparks Ethics Debate · · Score: 1

    I often joke that we'll create self-aware AI by accident. In the arms race between spammers and spam filters, either the spamming software or spam filtering software will one day become self-aware...

  24. Re:Don't we have one already on Fusion Reactor Breaks Even · · Score: 2

    There are some interesting developments on solar with respect to stored energy (the sun going down problem). In Spain they've been running an experimental solar plant that melts salt (instead of using PV panels). The salt is heated to a very high temperature and remains hot enough for several hours after sunset to continue to run the turbines.

  25. Re:$200 per pound = millions of tons of coal on Fusion Reactor Breaks Even · · Score: 1

    One prominent fusion researcher didn't say that - he said it's often said "we're X years away" but in reality mostly we're "$x billion dollars away" (where x was about 80 a couple of years ago). The problem is that fusion power generation research money has been declining since the 1970s so we're moving a lot slower than expected in earlier years.

    Now $80bn is a lot of money and people often say "why should we spend that on something that might not work". Well, we know it'll work (ITER will have a gain of 10) and it's mainly now an engineering problem, not a basic science research problem, to get it to a working power plant. Considering $750bn (that's the DoD's estimate - so guaranteed to be the low estimate) cost of the Iraq War, $80bn is only just over 0.1 Iraq Wars. The Iraq War didn't exactly work. So all we do is have to not go to war one time and put the money into fusion research. Perhaps the money that has been saved by not going to war in Syria can be put into fusion research.