What? Electronic components are easier than ever to get hold of. At my fingertips, I can search the whole of Farnell, Digikey, RS and co. in seconds for a component I want, and have it arrive the next morning - not many years ago, these companies wouldn't even deal with individuals - they only dealt with companies and so all the hobbyist was left with was whatever they could scrape together from Maplin's or Radio Shack - but these days, Farnell and RS and co are quite happy to have mail order hobbyists. If I need surplus junk or obsolete stuff, chances are it's for sale on eBay. New components I can get in a choice of forms - surface mount, pin through hole, leadless - whatever suits the project I'm working on. For a very reasonable price I can have my own 4 layer PCBs manufactured. If I just need a 1 or 2 layer board, I can make it cheaply at home using a laser printer, glossy paper, a clothes iron, copper clad board and some ferric chloride. I can essentially make custom chips in my own home (CPLDs and FPGAs). The internet is far better than the old electronics mags, it can be *searched*. It has discussion forums where you can get advice off people more experienced.
Electronics is a thousand times better today than it used to be - it's just so much more accessable.
With his economic policies, there won't be any workers to have rights (Chávez's economic policies and price controls means that, for instance, a used car is significantly more expensive than a new car...)
Now I personally think golf is a waste of time... but guess what Chávez also wants to ban?
The trouble is with that theory is that if there were to be a big die-off right now, it'd be countries like Africa who would get it in the shorts. The nations that use vast, unsustainable quantities of fuel and materials would probably be largely unaffected.
For what looks like a demo that people did on 8 bit computers with 4MHz processors, Safari uses 80% CPU on a 1.3GHz PowerBook G4 (although the animation is smooth) to run this. Trying to draw stuff on the screen with fragments of HTML and JavaScript, HTML5 or not, seems to be enormously inefficient, setting us back to 80s levels of performance.
I also note that recently the YouTube flash player has become a lot less efficient, even in standard definition mode. It used to run completely smoothly on my PowerBook, but now drops frames and really struggles. The BBC iPlayer is the same - that used to run fine in high quality mode full screen on a 1.3GHz PowerBook, but now is unwatchable except in low quality mode - this all happened after a recent upgrade done to Flash...
There probably is one, somewhere. This may be a smaller piece of a much larger impact - I'd expect bits of the meteorite to bounce and land some distance from the main impact site.
Even when I lived in the United States, I perhaps did more than 100 miles in a day perhaps once every 2 years. I could easily rent a car for those times. Most trips of >100 miles, I flew. I don't think I was particularly atypical, either.
There are an awful lot of people who live within 10 or 15 miles of work, and for them, a car like this would be ideal. It's not going to be for everybody, but then again, the Toyota Camry isn't for everyone either, evidenced by the fact that only a small percentage of the population drives a Camry.
Battery technology is only half the task - we'll also need to beef up power distribution, or put in place specialized charging stations (which after all, would be feasable with a 15 minute charge time).
Consider 9.2kWh in 15 minutes - that'll require a 138kW hookup. At 220 volts that's nearly 630 amps! Even McMansions probably only have max. 100 amps to the home. (I live in 240 volt land, and my household main breaker is 40A...)
So in reality, slow charging (or at least the option for slow charging) will be absolutely essential, and fast charging pretty unimportant for years to come - since you can leave the car to charge overnight off the household electricity and don't need any more new infrastructure other than perhaps a bit of cable, a socket, and trunking out to the parking space. Fast charging will require brand new infrastructure to be built (and a chicken and egg situation - the infrastructure won't be profitable without the vehicles, and the vehicles won't come till the infrastructure exists).
His case quite clearly met the requirements for extradition - even in Britain, what he did carries a potential jail sentence of more than one year.
If I were in his shoes, I'd have been on my way to Venezuela within minutes of getting discovered. Even that country has to be better than US federal prison.
The smallest nuke that was in production was the US 'Davey Crockett'. Not exactly a briefcase nuke, either - it'd take two guys to carry the warhead.
Furthermore, you can't launch a "crude nuke" from a scud. One really obvious attribute about crude nukes is that they are HEAVY. A crude nuke is the Hiroshima style gun-type weapon, and a B29 could barely lift it. A Scud has no chance. It would actually need an advanced, well engineered nuke.
When we were on a contract for the USPS some idiot *did* send some documentation FedEx... nearly cost us what was a $100M contract (later significantly more than that... and there was further idiocy that nearly lost that, too - like the project manager who was an ex-Navy guy who decided that the customer was effectively the enemy and to mobilize the users into badgering the USPS into keeping the project...)
The electrical interface for IDE, for example, is very simple. You can build an interface for IDE to USB with a USB FIFO chip like the FTDI FT245R and a handful of discrete logic. *Someone* will be able to build a device to read an IDE drive in decades time because of the simplicity of the interface; so long as someone can do it the data can be recovered (even if the user has to go to someone to ask for help to do it). IDE is simple enough that most electronics hobbyists would have no trouble making a device to read the disc.
SATA may be a different kettle of fish - you're now talking high speed digital design which is considerably harder for a hobbyist to do, but it's a certainty that data recovery services will be able to read SATA for a long time.
Yes. I have a fair number of 5.25 inch discs for my BBC Micro, and these are around 25 years old. All but one are readable (the actual media for the one that failed still works - I reformatted the disc so I could put Elite on it a year or two ago). The hardware to read them is still pretty easy to find, thousands of these drives were made - they are simple and robust and last years.
It's really more recently that removable storage has become less reliable. In the last few years that floppy discs were commonly used, the quality went through the floor (most were unreadable after a couple of times in the disc drive). My neighbour has come to me twice to recover as much data as possible from CD-Rs only three or four years old. At the moment it looks like the most reliable way of keeping stuff is either external hard discs or flash memory.
Q: Is this Community Promise legally binding on Microsoft and will it be available in the future to me and to others? A: Yes, the CP is legally binding upon Microsoft. The CP is a unilateral promise from Microsoft and in these circumstances unilateral promises may be enforced against the party making such a promise. Because the CP states that the promise is irrevocable, it may not be withdrawn by Microsoft. The CP is, and will be, available to everyone now and in the future for the specifications to which it applies.
Personally, I'll still be using Java - you're a "second class citizen" developing C# on Linux, always trailing Windows. But you're a first class citizen on Java regardless of what platform you have on your development machine. And I like Netbeans:-)
The best bit about the ads were they were the "Highly Reliable Times" ads, touting how reliable the LSE was running Windows. How we laughed when it all collapsed in a pile of shite. Pride cometh before a fall... he who crows loudly about their own reliability is sure to crash hard.
Compared with the total, it's a drop in the ocean. It may make the seas a little bit calmer in the vicinity by reducing the surface winds. The amount of energy in the moving atmosphere is probably hundreds of thousands of times larger than what could be taken out by wind farms; the atmosphere isn't 100 metres thick.
It's a *tiny* scale compared to the sheer amount of energy in the wind. It's unlikely to change weather patterns or create deserts any more than trees do. Don't forget that all that energy is being absorbed anyway - by trees, terrain, ocean waves.
Virtually all phones in the rest of the world are tri or quad band GSM, my European phone has always worked fine in the US. It's only really the US who has significant carriers who do not use GSM.
I wouldn't call him an idiot, just an out of touch old fart who's let his mind get old.
The internet has enabled me to do so many things that just were not practical without it. Last year, for example, I started learning Spanish. To compare with my pre-internet experience - learning French at school. 7 years of French lessons taught me less French than 3 months of learning Spanish on the internet (part of this is an indictment on how badly languages are taught in this country - no wonder most British people only speak English)... and supposedly as an adult you aren't supposed to be able to learn new languages easily. I can easily access material in Spanish over the internet - radio, TV, newspapers, books - in a way that is simply impossible in a traditional library. I can access native Spanish speakers. I can get immersed in the language. Without the internet, to get that level of language immersion would require me to quit my job and move to Spain which simply isn't practical.
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OT: Why do people write MM to mean million instead of the more usual M? I've never had a satisfactory answer to that question.
What? Electronic components are easier than ever to get hold of. At my fingertips, I can search the whole of Farnell, Digikey, RS and co. in seconds for a component I want, and have it arrive the next morning - not many years ago, these companies wouldn't even deal with individuals - they only dealt with companies and so all the hobbyist was left with was whatever they could scrape together from Maplin's or Radio Shack - but these days, Farnell and RS and co are quite happy to have mail order hobbyists. If I need surplus junk or obsolete stuff, chances are it's for sale on eBay. New components I can get in a choice of forms - surface mount, pin through hole, leadless - whatever suits the project I'm working on. For a very reasonable price I can have my own 4 layer PCBs manufactured. If I just need a 1 or 2 layer board, I can make it cheaply at home using a laser printer, glossy paper, a clothes iron, copper clad board and some ferric chloride. I can essentially make custom chips in my own home (CPLDs and FPGAs). The internet is far better than the old electronics mags, it can be *searched*. It has discussion forums where you can get advice off people more experienced.
Electronics is a thousand times better today than it used to be - it's just so much more accessable.
I think the VAX beats M68K boxes as being viable commercial Unix machines.
The only response I have is an URL.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGE8LzRaySk
All the neon lamps I've used take over 100v to strike, and at least 90 to maintain. Nixie tubes at least need 135v to maintain.
With his economic policies, there won't be any workers to have rights (Chávez's economic policies and price controls means that, for instance, a used car is significantly more expensive than a new car...)
Now I personally think golf is a waste of time... but guess what Chávez also wants to ban?
The trouble is with that theory is that if there were to be a big die-off right now, it'd be countries like Africa who would get it in the shorts. The nations that use vast, unsustainable quantities of fuel and materials would probably be largely unaffected.
For what looks like a demo that people did on 8 bit computers with 4MHz processors, Safari uses 80% CPU on a 1.3GHz PowerBook G4 (although the animation is smooth) to run this. Trying to draw stuff on the screen with fragments of HTML and JavaScript, HTML5 or not, seems to be enormously inefficient, setting us back to 80s levels of performance.
I also note that recently the YouTube flash player has become a lot less efficient, even in standard definition mode. It used to run completely smoothly on my PowerBook, but now drops frames and really struggles. The BBC iPlayer is the same - that used to run fine in high quality mode full screen on a 1.3GHz PowerBook, but now is unwatchable except in low quality mode - this all happened after a recent upgrade done to Flash...
There probably is one, somewhere. This may be a smaller piece of a much larger impact - I'd expect bits of the meteorite to bounce and land some distance from the main impact site.
Even when I lived in the United States, I perhaps did more than 100 miles in a day perhaps once every 2 years. I could easily rent a car for those times. Most trips of >100 miles, I flew. I don't think I was particularly atypical, either.
There are an awful lot of people who live within 10 or 15 miles of work, and for them, a car like this would be ideal. It's not going to be for everybody, but then again, the Toyota Camry isn't for everyone either, evidenced by the fact that only a small percentage of the population drives a Camry.
Battery technology is only half the task - we'll also need to beef up power distribution, or put in place specialized charging stations (which after all, would be feasable with a 15 minute charge time).
Consider 9.2kWh in 15 minutes - that'll require a 138kW hookup. At 220 volts that's nearly 630 amps! Even McMansions probably only have max. 100 amps to the home. (I live in 240 volt land, and my household main breaker is 40A...)
So in reality, slow charging (or at least the option for slow charging) will be absolutely essential, and fast charging pretty unimportant for years to come - since you can leave the car to charge overnight off the household electricity and don't need any more new infrastructure other than perhaps a bit of cable, a socket, and trunking out to the parking space. Fast charging will require brand new infrastructure to be built (and a chicken and egg situation - the infrastructure won't be profitable without the vehicles, and the vehicles won't come till the infrastructure exists).
His case quite clearly met the requirements for extradition - even in Britain, what he did carries a potential jail sentence of more than one year.
If I were in his shoes, I'd have been on my way to Venezuela within minutes of getting discovered. Even that country has to be better than US federal prison.
It would be better if we were not so wasteful - approximately 50% of all food in western nations is thrown away, perfectly good but uneaten.
The smallest nuke that was in production was the US 'Davey Crockett'. Not exactly a briefcase nuke, either - it'd take two guys to carry the warhead.
Furthermore, you can't launch a "crude nuke" from a scud. One really obvious attribute about crude nukes is that they are HEAVY. A crude nuke is the Hiroshima style gun-type weapon, and a B29 could barely lift it. A Scud has no chance. It would actually need an advanced, well engineered nuke.
When we were on a contract for the USPS some idiot *did* send some documentation FedEx... nearly cost us what was a $100M contract (later significantly more than that... and there was further idiocy that nearly lost that, too - like the project manager who was an ex-Navy guy who decided that the customer was effectively the enemy and to mobilize the users into badgering the USPS into keeping the project...)
The electrical interface for IDE, for example, is very simple. You can build an interface for IDE to USB with a USB FIFO chip like the FTDI FT245R and a handful of discrete logic. *Someone* will be able to build a device to read an IDE drive in decades time because of the simplicity of the interface; so long as someone can do it the data can be recovered (even if the user has to go to someone to ask for help to do it). IDE is simple enough that most electronics hobbyists would have no trouble making a device to read the disc.
SATA may be a different kettle of fish - you're now talking high speed digital design which is considerably harder for a hobbyist to do, but it's a certainty that data recovery services will be able to read SATA for a long time.
Yes. I have a fair number of 5.25 inch discs for my BBC Micro, and these are around 25 years old. All but one are readable (the actual media for the one that failed still works - I reformatted the disc so I could put Elite on it a year or two ago). The hardware to read them is still pretty easy to find, thousands of these drives were made - they are simple and robust and last years.
It's really more recently that removable storage has become less reliable. In the last few years that floppy discs were commonly used, the quality went through the floor (most were unreadable after a couple of times in the disc drive). My neighbour has come to me twice to recover as much data as possible from CD-Rs only three or four years old. At the moment it looks like the most reliable way of keeping stuff is either external hard discs or flash memory.
Or how about just not using RFID at all? I don't see why passports can't use the same style chip as used widely in credit cards and debit cards.
From the horse's mouth itself:
Q: Is this Community Promise legally binding on Microsoft and will it be available in the future to me and to others?
A: Yes, the CP is legally binding upon Microsoft. The CP is a unilateral promise from Microsoft and in these circumstances unilateral promises may be enforced against the party making such a promise. Because the CP states that the promise is irrevocable, it may not be withdrawn by Microsoft. The CP is, and will be, available to everyone now and in the future for the specifications to which it applies.
Personally, I'll still be using Java - you're a "second class citizen" developing C# on Linux, always trailing Windows. But you're a first class citizen on Java regardless of what platform you have on your development machine. And I like Netbeans :-)
The best bit about the ads were they were the "Highly Reliable Times" ads, touting how reliable the LSE was running Windows. How we laughed when it all collapsed in a pile of shite. Pride cometh before a fall... he who crows loudly about their own reliability is sure to crash hard.
It seems like virtually all Venezuelan foreign policy is designed for the express purpose of trying to annoy the United States.
Compared with the total, it's a drop in the ocean. It may make the seas a little bit calmer in the vicinity by reducing the surface winds. The amount of energy in the moving atmosphere is probably hundreds of thousands of times larger than what could be taken out by wind farms; the atmosphere isn't 100 metres thick.
It's a *tiny* scale compared to the sheer amount of energy in the wind. It's unlikely to change weather patterns or create deserts any more than trees do. Don't forget that all that energy is being absorbed anyway - by trees, terrain, ocean waves.
Virtually all phones in the rest of the world are tri or quad band GSM, my European phone has always worked fine in the US. It's only really the US who has significant carriers who do not use GSM.
I wouldn't call him an idiot, just an out of touch old fart who's let his mind get old.
The internet has enabled me to do so many things that just were not practical without it. Last year, for example, I started learning Spanish. To compare with my pre-internet experience - learning French at school. 7 years of French lessons taught me less French than 3 months of learning Spanish on the internet (part of this is an indictment on how badly languages are taught in this country - no wonder most British people only speak English) ... and supposedly as an adult you aren't supposed to be able to learn new languages easily. I can easily access material in Spanish over the internet - radio, TV, newspapers, books - in a way that is simply impossible in a traditional library. I can access native Spanish speakers. I can get immersed in the language. Without the internet, to get that level of language immersion would require me to quit my job and move to Spain which simply isn't practical.