The biggest problem with motorcycle accidents is spinal cord and head injuries, which this device will do nothing to prevent.
well...how about if the jacket included a super-strong, super-stiff inflatable cervical collar? put it on a separate inflator system, make it out of something bombproof like kevlar so it'll stay inflated, and even if it doesn't spare you a broken neck, you're at least immobilized and set for extraction. and if you aren't wearing a helmet along with the jacket, well, Darwin deserves to get ya. of course i imagine you might get all sorts of new and lethal head injuries if your neck couldn't move at all during the crash, but hey, quid pro quo.
i have stickers on the back and front of my lid that says "DO NOT REMOVE HELMET IN A CRASH (unless you are an EMT)" - bold white on a black background, had to have them custom made. hopefully if they're ever needed (god forbid), at least one of them will be intact (and i won't be needing CPR). i put them on after one of my dad's highschool buddies lost the use of his legs that way; that's not how i wanna go, lying on the road with some well-intentioned person yanking at my helmet, wondering why my head spins 360 degrees...
yes it is. it wasn't a *critical* reactor; it wasn't self-sufficient, but there were nuclear reactions taking place in the pile (it got more radioactive) - so it's a nuclear reactor. QED.
no, actually i *know* they aren't crap. they're Sysco natural-casing shoestring-cut 100% idaho fries (yes, sysco is mcDs supplier) - really a very high quality product. and i happen to think mdDs fries are the greatest ever, bit i don't go for big meaty steak fries...i LIKE small crunchy greasy salty potato sticks, withOUT that hideous coatink BK uses. wendy's area touchthick, but otherwise OK. Checkers fries *0wn*, but they're spiced so they're in a whole 'nother category.
halo...it's a good game. it looks phenomenal and plays well, i'm not going to argue that it isn't a fine piece of softare. butit's really just another FPS, the latest installment in the endless string of shooters to have come down the pike in the last few years. now...grand theft auto 3 and vice city, those are truly amazing games; in fact i'd much rather call them "works of art" than halo. halo is a godd diversion for a bored night, lights and glitter and explostions, but i don't find it anywhere nearly as satifying and immersive as the grand theft auto series. i hate to say it, but newsweek was really right - rockstar has invented a whole new paradigm for what video games are and can be, and i'm perfectly happy sticking with my PS2 as long as these really killer apps come out for it. (actually, i sold my xbox and all two games i had for it - i wanted the money to buy GTAvc and SOCOM navy seals...both much better games than halo IMHO. i can deal with a graphics hit for really quality, innovative software.)
well yeah, but wouldn't an RF field oscillating at 3.06GHz emit microwave radiaton? i know at the lab, a lot of our pcs run without cases, and we have to keep them away from instruments that runa t approximately the same frequencies...
dude, if it's just a kiosk, slap a 256meg stick and jaguar into some rev b (1st-gen slotloading) imacs. hell, if you use a ram disk, you can put the hd to sleep permanently and have a totally silent station.
*bows* thankyouveerymuch, tritium's a dual 1.25ghz g4, it should be able to take somewhat of a pounding. of course we shall see what optimium online has to say about this tomorrow...;)
no, but there's a lot of convincing research showing that using antibacterial everything promotes the (massive) growth of triclosan*-resistant bugs...that's sort of an unpleasant thought..
*-common topical antibacterial, in everything from soap to toothpaste
before you all start screaming about us mere humans destroying the environment (what a streak of arrogance that is), please to be noting the flipping magentic field article, which points out that the magnetic field has decreased dramatically over the last 200 years, and the multitude of comments that intelligently put the "decreased magentic fields result in severe atmospheric disturbances and climactic changes" remarks in the article together with climactic data from the last 200 years and pointed out that we might not be responsible for global warming after all. of course, then it would have to be renamed the "Southeast Passage"...
the core of the earth is much too hot to sustain magnetization of iron.
well, the core of the earth is very hot, true, but it's also under a/huge/ amount of pressure, ~360 GPa (52,214,400 psi) at the surface of the inner core. even though iron would vaporize at core temperatures under normal pressure, at core pressures it can exist as a stable crystalline structure, epsilon-Fe, that can possibly support magentization. there's actually a theory that the entire inner core may be one giant crystal, but i don't know exactly how that would generate a field or be able to reverse at random.
Last login: Thu Nov 7 10:36:03 from 130.199.52.23 Welcome to Darwin! [ool-18bc17dc:~] jnied% uptime
8:15PM up 5 days, 5:48, 2 users, load averages: 0.27, 0.31, 0.31 [ool-18bc17dc:~] jnied%
point being, you should just put the sucker to sleep at night...it wakes up and is ready to go in ~10 seconds. do you ever switch off your linux box? then why the osX box?
that's the point of the article, it is a (reasonably) reliable way to store the data on the drive. everybody's so impressed when the chip manufacturers drop the fab sizes down, but nobody really seems to appreciate how amazing hd tech is these days. chip people, even down at 90nm (nothing to sniff at!), are still dealing with bulk matter and (generally) free from worrying about quantum effects, while hd tech has runs smack into quantum-scale events - normal thermal energy kicking the magnetic states of the bits around (superparamagnetic effert). while it's not strictly a QM problem, eliminating it definitely involves quite a bit of heavy quantum work.
just looking quickly at the outershell configuration for ruthenium, and assuning they still use iron oxide as the magnetic media, it seems that the 3-layer thinck layer of atoms leaves some interesting unfilled oribitals exposed to the magnetic layer (the bonding to the middle layer of atoms will bump another electron down into the 5s orbital, filling it and leaving some vacancies in the 4d orbitals). i'd have to check the energy levels, but i'd guess that the empty orbitals on the Ru atoms can grab some of the electrons from the magnetic materials; not forming a true bond, but holding tightly enough to stabilize the induced magnetic state, increasing the energy requited to flip the polarity to well above normal thermal energy.
disclaimer: i am not a physical chemist, i just got my BS in may. did get three As in phys chem I&II and advanced inorganic, though.
further disclaimer: i have'n't had all my coffee yet so i may just be babbling, if there are any physical chemists who know better than i, feel free to tear me apart;)
unless the PC is a sony, chances are you will like the mac screen better
well...who supplies apple with pb lcd panels? i'm sure at least a couple of other laptop manufacturers besides sony would use the same panels on their topline machines...
Does anyone know exactly what they meant by the laser "destroying" the projectile?
assuming it's anything like the edinburgh MTL-3 TEA CO2 laser (somebody was asking about it last laser article) we use at work, it hits the target with 10.6um IR radiation, which is rapidly absorbed, causing the absorbing material to flash to gas-phase rather quickly. IOW, it vaporizes the target. probably the entire shell - the beam divergence would probably be at least 1 - 1.5' (or more, it looked like a big beam to begin with). i'm assuming it's an IR laser, probably open CO2...it's the only thing i can think of off the top of my head that would actually pack that much destructive force. ArF excimer laser at 193nm might work, but even the diffue UV reflection would be mad sunburny...
...aren't cheap, and i'm pretty sure the vast majority of americans believe in the lunar landings - would any congressman in his right mind want to have to stand up next campaign cycle and publically admit to spearheading a congressional investigation of valididity of the moon landings?...i know i sure wouldn't.
the OS does already check each file..at least i think typing is done by the OS. i imagine at some point when you open a file, be it from the OS or an app (i'm not a programmer, so i woudn't know for certain) the OS handles it - what's to keep m$ from just having the OS summarily delete any pdf it finds? yes, i realize this is all about as subtle as a hammer to the forebrain, but like i said before, this is/microsoft/ - subtlety isn't one of their strong suits.
until that is m$ decides that there's some incredibly pressing security reason (or drm, adobe's encryption *must* obviously be weak if a russian can crack it) to not include pdf support in longhorn.
MS's only strong point could be integration
that's the truly scary thing about m$; they have the ability at will to lock out competitors from 95% of the destop market. (yes, i know i deserve an award for stating the obvious there)....i.e., their other "strong point" could simply be "you want a printed-doc file format on windows? USE THIS...no pdf for j00!" i mean, imagine if instead of simply undercutting navigator, m$ had deliberately made it completely non-funtional under win, under the guse "well, the browser accesses some pretty important system functions, so for security reasons, we're really rather only our own products do that" - "well, pdf encryption is sort of weak, and as well it's an open standard, so godless commies can easily crack it and 'share' all the copyrighted goodness inside - so we're not going to support pdf on longhorn, you'll need to use our file format."
hell, wouldn't surprise me to see m$ peddling some sort of postscript replacement for the desktop in a couple of years. sorry if this is an incoherent rant, i haven't had all my coffee yet. i think there's a good point lurking in there somwhere.
i have OptOnline; a couple of weeks ago i was downloading the mozilla source, at a sustained 789K/sec - 6.384Mbits. now, whatis says the top speed of a docsis modem is 27Mbit, so it's not *impossible*, but it's sort of...inconceivable? granted, i own the modem, and i've never actually reg'd it with OptOnline, so i don't know if it didn't have a config file loaded or what, but it looks like it's pretty much uncapped already. and despite what they say about running servers and the like, they don't seem to enforce things very much - i'm summarily banned from a load of IRC nets for "repeated abuse (sorry innocents)", and they really don't seem to care that i have a router, four computers, and a hacked webserver (listening on port 3000, gets around the incoming-blcok on 80). all in all, a good deal for $40 a month.
i do take my car out on the track, about 4-6 times a year. problem with that is a. it's only 4-6 times a year, b. it's rather expensive (track days at LRP run ~$100), and c. tracks *eat* tires (they're made of a significantly rougher pavement than roads). as well, i've only got a student SCCA license, and i need about $3000 more training to get my "real" one with unlimited track days, full race priveleges, etc. yes, i do base my assumptions about my driving on absence of proof [that i'm a bad driver], and i know that's totally absurd reasoning, but every time i'm coming up the onramp to sunrise highway, i think very carefully to myself exactly when i need to be back down to a totally reasonable speed in case a tire blows, or there's oil/ice on the road and i completely lose control. i'm firmly convinced that if i do kill an innocent pedestrian, they're going to be someplace they shouldn't be - like on the side of a freeway median, or in the middle of an empty parking lot. anyway, i never claimed to be a "safe" driver - just that i don't uneccessarily endanger other people. yes, there is a possiblity i'm going to screw up and kill somebody, but if somebody does die on the island, the odds that it's going to be me screwing up and killing them are so vanishingly small as to be virtually impossible. actually, LI is the only place i've ever driven like this, and i think it's for that very reason. i respect your opinions and concerns, but if you really have such a burning concern with making the roads safer (that's not supposed to be nearly as snide as it sounded), why not start by trying to educate the soccer moms and teenagers that are a much bigger threat, then move on to people like me?
if i were angling for a $65K deal, i'd leave/three/ emails, my paper address, any my cell #. don't have a landline, but if i did i'd leave that number, too.
erm, why pay for that shen you can get it for free fom hotmail/yahoo/etc? sure, the service is shit, but at least you're *guaranteed* that the address will always be up and you can always get to it. i actually have a hotmail address that's close to random garbage, which i use for important stuff - the spambots that just mail 100,000s of hotmail usernames never hit on it, and i don't hand it out freely, so it's actually a pretty usable. anyway.
99% of the time i'm only pushing my car to mabne 60% of its limits. i've taken it out in parking lots in dry, wet, freezing, and pretty much any other weather conditions specifically to learn when it's going to break, and how it behaves around those points. i may drive *fast*, but i don't drive *recklessly*. actually, in traffic, i'm one of the better drivers on long island - i signal, don't tailgate, don't cut off, and chack my blind spots allt he time. i'm not taking unneccesary risks - both the car and the driver are very much within their capabilities. except at 4:30 in sunday mornings on red creek road...mmm...toasty tires. anyway. all i can say is fast does not neccessarily = dangerous, only if you've got some 16-year old kid behind the wheel who *thinks* he knows how to drive.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest problem with motorcycle accidents is spinal cord and head injuries, which this device will do nothing to prevent.
well...how about if the jacket included a super-strong, super-stiff inflatable cervical collar? put it on a separate inflator system, make it out of something bombproof like kevlar so it'll stay inflated, and even if it doesn't spare you a broken neck, you're at least immobilized and set for extraction. and if you aren't wearing a helmet along with the jacket, well, Darwin deserves to get ya. of course i imagine you might get all sorts of new and lethal head injuries if your neck couldn't move at all during the crash, but hey, quid pro quo.
i have stickers on the back and front of my lid that says "DO NOT REMOVE HELMET IN A CRASH (unless you are an EMT)" - bold white on a black background, had to have them custom made. hopefully if they're ever needed (god forbid), at least one of them will be intact (and i won't be needing CPR). i put them on after one of my dad's highschool buddies lost the use of his legs that way; that's not how i wanna go, lying on the road with some well-intentioned person yanking at my helmet, wondering why my head spins 360 degrees...
yes it is. it wasn't a *critical* reactor; it wasn't self-sufficient, but there were nuclear reactions taking place in the pile (it got more radioactive) - so it's a nuclear reactor. QED.
...a boy scout built a working breeder from junk he scrounged (for a merit badge no less!); why not two physics majors?
Anyone else think McDonalds fries are crap?
no, actually i *know* they aren't crap. they're Sysco natural-casing shoestring-cut 100% idaho fries (yes, sysco is mcDs supplier) - really a very high quality product. and i happen to think mdDs fries are the greatest ever, bit i don't go for big meaty steak fries...i LIKE small crunchy greasy salty potato sticks, withOUT that hideous coatink BK uses. wendy's area touchthick, but otherwise OK. Checkers fries *0wn*, but they're spiced so they're in a whole 'nother category.
halo...it's a good game. it looks phenomenal and plays well, i'm not going to argue that it isn't a fine piece of softare. butit's really just another FPS, the latest installment in the endless string of shooters to have come down the pike in the last few years. now...grand theft auto 3 and vice city, those are truly amazing games; in fact i'd much rather call them "works of art" than halo. halo is a godd diversion for a bored night, lights and glitter and explostions, but i don't find it anywhere nearly as satifying and immersive as the grand theft auto series. i hate to say it, but newsweek was really right - rockstar has invented a whole new paradigm for what video games are and can be, and i'm perfectly happy sticking with my PS2 as long as these really killer apps come out for it.
(actually, i sold my xbox and all two games i had for it - i wanted the money to buy GTAvc and SOCOM navy seals...both much better games than halo IMHO. i can deal with a graphics hit for really quality, innovative software.)
well yeah, but wouldn't an RF field oscillating at 3.06GHz emit microwave radiaton? i know at the lab, a lot of our pcs run without cases, and we have to keep them away from instruments that runa t approximately the same frequencies...
dude, if it's just a kiosk, slap a 256meg stick and jaguar into some rev b (1st-gen slotloading) imacs. hell, if you use a ram disk, you can put the hd to sleep permanently and have a totally silent station.
*bows* thankyouveerymuch, tritium's a dual 1.25ghz g4, it should be able to take somewhat of a pounding. ;)
of course we shall see what optimium online has to say about this tomorrow...
well, at least the closeup of a sunspot and one of the filaments. but please be nice, it's a new powermac, i don't want it melted just yet :P
no, but there's a lot of convincing research showing that using antibacterial everything promotes the (massive) growth of triclosan*-resistant bugs...that's sort of an unpleasant thought..
*-common topical antibacterial, in everything from soap to toothpaste
before you all start screaming about us mere humans destroying the environment (what a streak of arrogance that is), please to be noting the flipping magentic field article, which points out that the magnetic field has decreased dramatically over the last 200 years, and the multitude of comments that intelligently put the "decreased magentic fields result in severe atmospheric disturbances and climactic changes" remarks in the article together with climactic data from the last 200 years and pointed out that we might not be responsible for global warming after all. of course, then it would have to be renamed the "Southeast Passage"...
the core of the earth is much too hot to sustain magnetization of iron.
/huge/ amount of pressure, ~360 GPa (52,214,400 psi) at the surface of the inner core. even though iron would vaporize at core temperatures under normal pressure, at core pressures it can exist as a stable crystalline structure, epsilon-Fe, that can possibly support magentization. there's actually a theory that the entire inner core may be one giant crystal, but i don't know exactly how that would generate a field or be able to reverse at random.
well, the core of the earth is very hot, true, but it's also under a
Last login: Thu Nov 7 10:36:03 from 130.199.52.23
Welcome to Darwin!
[ool-18bc17dc:~] jnied% uptime
8:15PM up 5 days, 5:48, 2 users, load averages: 0.27, 0.31, 0.31
[ool-18bc17dc:~] jnied%
point being, you should just put the sucker to sleep at night...it wakes up and is ready to go in ~10 seconds. do you ever switch off your linux box? then why the osX box?
that's the point of the article, it is a (reasonably) reliable way to store the data on the drive.
;)
everybody's so impressed when the chip manufacturers drop the fab sizes down, but nobody really seems to appreciate how amazing hd tech is these days. chip people, even down at 90nm (nothing to sniff at!), are still dealing with bulk matter and (generally) free from worrying about quantum effects, while hd tech has runs smack into quantum-scale events - normal thermal energy kicking the magnetic states of the bits around (superparamagnetic effert). while it's not strictly a QM problem, eliminating it definitely involves quite a bit of heavy quantum work.
just looking quickly at the outershell configuration for ruthenium, and assuning they still use iron oxide as the magnetic media, it seems that the 3-layer thinck layer of atoms leaves some interesting unfilled oribitals exposed to the magnetic layer (the bonding to the middle layer of atoms will bump another electron down into the 5s orbital, filling it and leaving some vacancies in the 4d orbitals). i'd have to check the energy levels, but i'd guess that the empty orbitals on the Ru atoms can grab some of the electrons from the magnetic materials; not forming a true bond, but holding tightly enough to stabilize the induced magnetic state, increasing the energy requited to flip the polarity to well above normal thermal energy.
disclaimer: i am not a physical chemist, i just got my BS in may. did get three As in phys chem I&II and advanced inorganic, though.
further disclaimer: i have'n't had all my coffee yet so i may just be babbling, if there are any physical chemists who know better than i, feel free to tear me apart
unless the PC is a sony, chances are you will like the mac screen better
well...who supplies apple with pb lcd panels? i'm sure at least a couple of other laptop manufacturers besides sony would use the same panels on their topline machines...
Does anyone know exactly what they meant by the laser "destroying" the projectile?
assuming it's anything like the edinburgh MTL-3 TEA CO2 laser (somebody was asking about it last laser article) we use at work, it hits the target with 10.6um IR radiation, which is rapidly absorbed, causing the absorbing material to flash to gas-phase rather quickly. IOW, it vaporizes the target. probably the entire shell - the beam divergence would probably be at least 1 - 1.5' (or more, it looked like a big beam to begin with). i'm assuming it's an IR laser, probably open CO2...it's the only thing i can think of off the top of my head that would actually pack that much destructive force. ArF excimer laser at 193nm might work, but even the diffue UV reflection would be mad sunburny...
...aren't cheap, and i'm pretty sure the vast majority of americans believe in the lunar landings - would any congressman in his right mind want to have to stand up next campaign cycle and publically admit to spearheading a congressional investigation of valididity of the moon landings? ...i know i sure wouldn't.
the OS does already check each file..at least i think typing is done by the OS. i imagine at some point when you open a file, be it from the OS or an app (i'm not a programmer, so i woudn't know for certain) the OS handles it - what's to keep m$ from just having the OS summarily delete any pdf it finds? /microsoft/ - subtlety isn't one of their strong suits.
yes, i realize this is all about as subtle as a hammer to the forebrain, but like i said before, this is
It is perfectly cross platform
until that is m$ decides that there's some incredibly pressing security reason (or drm, adobe's encryption *must* obviously be weak if a russian can crack it) to not include pdf support in longhorn.
MS's only strong point could be integration
that's the truly scary thing about m$; they have the ability at will to lock out competitors from 95% of the destop market. (yes, i know i deserve an award for stating the obvious there)....i.e., their other "strong point" could simply be "you want a printed-doc file format on windows? USE THIS...no pdf for j00!" i mean, imagine if instead of simply undercutting navigator, m$ had deliberately made it completely non-funtional under win, under the guse "well, the browser accesses some pretty important system functions, so for security reasons, we're really rather only our own products do that" - "well, pdf encryption is sort of weak, and as well it's an open standard, so godless commies can easily crack it and 'share' all the copyrighted goodness inside - so we're not going to support pdf on longhorn, you'll need to use our file format."
hell, wouldn't surprise me to see m$ peddling some sort of postscript replacement for the desktop in a couple of years.
sorry if this is an incoherent rant, i haven't had all my coffee yet. i think there's a good point lurking in there somwhere.
i have OptOnline; a couple of weeks ago i was downloading the mozilla source, at a sustained 789K/sec - 6.384Mbits. now, whatis says the top speed of a docsis modem is 27Mbit, so it's not *impossible*, but it's sort of...inconceivable? granted, i own the modem, and i've never actually reg'd it with OptOnline, so i don't know if it didn't have a config file loaded or what, but it looks like it's pretty much uncapped already.
and despite what they say about running servers and the like, they don't seem to enforce things very much - i'm summarily banned from a load of IRC nets for "repeated abuse (sorry innocents)", and they really don't seem to care that i have a router, four computers, and a hacked webserver (listening on port 3000, gets around the incoming-blcok on 80). all in all, a good deal for $40 a month.
i do take my car out on the track, about 4-6 times a year. problem with that is a. it's only 4-6 times a year, b. it's rather expensive (track days at LRP run ~$100), and c. tracks *eat* tires (they're made of a significantly rougher pavement than roads). as well, i've only got a student SCCA license, and i need about $3000 more training to get my "real" one with unlimited track days, full race priveleges, etc.
yes, i do base my assumptions about my driving on absence of proof [that i'm a bad driver], and i know that's totally absurd reasoning, but every time i'm coming up the onramp to sunrise highway, i think very carefully to myself exactly when i need to be back down to a totally reasonable speed in case a tire blows, or there's oil/ice on the road and i completely lose control. i'm firmly convinced that if i do kill an innocent pedestrian, they're going to be someplace they shouldn't be - like on the side of a freeway median, or in the middle of an empty parking lot.
anyway, i never claimed to be a "safe" driver - just that i don't uneccessarily endanger other people. yes, there is a possiblity i'm going to screw up and kill somebody, but if somebody does die on the island, the odds that it's going to be me screwing up and killing them are so vanishingly small as to be virtually impossible. actually, LI is the only place i've ever driven like this, and i think it's for that very reason. i respect your opinions and concerns, but if you really have such a burning concern with making the roads safer (that's not supposed to be nearly as snide as it sounded), why not start by trying to educate the soccer moms and teenagers that are a much bigger threat, then move on to people like me?
if i were angling for a $65K deal, i'd leave /three/ emails, my paper address, any my cell #. don't have a landline, but if i did i'd leave that number, too.
...to read my email over the web.
erm, why pay for that shen you can get it for free fom hotmail/yahoo/etc? sure, the service is shit, but at least you're *guaranteed* that the address will always be up and you can always get to it.
i actually have a hotmail address that's close to random garbage, which i use for important stuff - the spambots that just mail 100,000s of hotmail usernames never hit on it, and i don't hand it out freely, so it's actually a pretty usable. anyway.
99% of the time i'm only pushing my car to mabne 60% of its limits. i've taken it out in parking lots in dry, wet, freezing, and pretty much any other weather conditions specifically to learn when it's going to break, and how it behaves around those points. i may drive *fast*, but i don't drive *recklessly*. actually, in traffic, i'm one of the better drivers on long island - i signal, don't tailgate, don't cut off, and chack my blind spots allt he time. i'm not taking unneccesary risks - both the car and the driver are very much within their capabilities. except at 4:30 in sunday mornings on red creek road...mmm...toasty tires. anyway. all i can say is fast does not neccessarily = dangerous, only if you've got some 16-year old kid behind the wheel who *thinks* he knows how to drive.