There's nothing wrong with codes. There's nothing wrong with style sheets.
There's everything wrong with an opaque hodgepodge of both, which is the MS Word system. I'm not saying it's wrong to have both (particularly, there's very good arguments for style-based systems to include simple stuff like italics and bold, for use in verbatim quotes if nothing else), but Word makes it not only non-obvious why a particular piece of text is formatted as it is (which is bad enough) but very hard to find out at all.
Two ways to read that. 1.) A sex offender (stopped reading) overturned the decision of a hearing officer, and 2.) a sex offender overturned the decision of a hearing officer.
In the first case, the whole sex offender thing creates an opinion before anything else happens; the second way, judgement is suspended until all information is read.
What GP characterised as confusing was the notion that the sex offender overturned anything -- what actually happens in such a case is that a judge overturns the decision. Since you apparently missed the civics fail and went off on something unrelated, we're left to assume you read it in way "1. )".
It's not a compelling property for a single paper size, but it's pretty nifty when constructing a series of paper sizes.
Both the "normal" US paper sizes (A, B, C, etc., where A=letter) and the ISO A-series (A4 etc.) follow the same rule for relationship between adjacent sizes: Each size is the same as two of the next smaller size, joined along their long edge. (Or put another way: splitting a sheet in half with a cut parallel to the short edge yields two sheets of the next size down.) This has some fairly obvious reasons to make sense.
That rule means that a series will alternate between two aspect ratios, so e.g. A=8.5x11 has the same aspect ratio as C=17x22, while B=11x17 has the same aspect ratio as D=22x34. However, there's no guarantee that those two aspect ratios are the same, and in fact in the US system they're not. This means that enlarging or reducing by 2 steps always works nicely, but going up or down a single step doesn't -- you end up enlarging margins in one direction, or cropping in the other, to make up for the difference in aspect ratio. The ISO system, on the other hand, does make that guarantee (by making the aspect ratio sqrt(2) ), so that you can scale between any two sizes in the same series.
Another application, which is basically the inverse of scaling to a smaller sheet, is scaling to fit multiple pages on one sheet, particularly for the case of printing two logical pages on each sheet -- the US system requires large margins to make this work, while the ISO system uses paper much more optimally.
By having computers having power over humans, and making them perfect.
This won't work, because some hammy starship captain will show up and talk the computer to death (likely death of a mildly explosive nature). Happens. Every. Time.
So long as starship captains, or the possibility of a starship captain, exists, computers cannot have power over humans.
Fortunately, you don't have to imagine. The simplest of arithemetic will reveal that's an average of about 20kB per image. If we assume as near-worst-case an uncompressed 16-bit pixmap format, that means 100px x 100 px or so; realistically, most of them are probably jpegs, so search your hard drive...
find / -name '*.jpg' -size -25k -size +15k
And take a look at what you have in that range. Then keep in mind that that's an average -- there'll be some much better and some even smaller/compresseder.
I used to think I'd have to drink blood or something to be a vampire, but no. I've now learned that since my stomach is full when I go to bed, and gets emptier while I sleep, leaving me hungry and in need of a little refuelling in the morning... that makes me a vampire!
The whole idea of the EOMA concept should (if/when it takes off big) mean that you won't have to "hope the laptop shell's $ATTRIBUTE is $VALUE". There's two reasons for this.
First, you can build your own laptop, because a lot of the complexity that makes designing your own laptop mainboard a ridiculous proposition for almost every hobbyist is now inside the CPU card -- some professionals designed, built, and tested that 6-layer PCB, and then millions (eventually, in the big picture) were run off. For your special laptop, you could if you put your mind to it do most, if not everything, with a 2-side PCB and old-school through-hole components, the main obstacles being not that you can't fit it in a full-size laptop without SMT, but that you can't find some components in through-hole versions. You can pick whatever display you want, slightly tweak the PCB design from some other EOMA-68-based laptop to suit, and have one made. And all this is much more practical than it sounds because you invest the effort once, then keep that laptop for life (ok, realistically for a decade or more) and just swap CPU cards when you need more performance.
The other, and even bigger, reason, is because some manufacturer, somewhere, will make a shell with the characteristics you want. Sure, your concern might only occur in a fraction of a percent of consumer (actually, your concern about the backlight is IMO a horrible example, because the whole industry is moving from CCFL to LED for a number of reasons), but when some small Chinese factory is looking for a profitable niche to exploit, that fraction of a percent is a prime target. Because of EOMA, they (1) have less design work to do to make a new model (just like the hobbyist) (2) can keep selling that model without investing in a periodic redesign, and without it becoming obsolete and unsellable due to last year's CPU -- just every year buy a load of the hot new CPU cards and receive a magic spec bump, or ship it without a CPU card and let the user slot their new or old card (3) even if/when they go out of business (or just abandon your market segment) and stop selling new shells, all the used ones keep going (until they break/wear out) without obsolescence. (1) and (2) mean less cost to pick up tiny market segments, which means niches will be more profitable and thus better served; (3) means that even if you're part of a niche market that looked big enough to make a good profit, but turned out not to be, you get to reap the benefits of some company's "mistake" in pursuing that niche long after the company's learned and moved on.
Regarding the last point particularly, contrast that to the Fujitsu U820 I bought a few years ago, because I really loved the form-factor and the high-PPI screen. At the time, the 1.6GHz Atom processor was slowish and the soldered-on RAM was cramped; it's flat-out obsolete now. The "successor" UH900 is a straight clamshell, lacking the flip-screen which lets the U820 become a paperback-sized tablet, and I'm left casting about amongst gadgets like the Asus Transformer series looking for a near-enough equivalent. If the U820 had been EOMA-based, then Fujitsu could go their way, selling UH900s with better mass-market appeal, but I could keep going mine, swapping up to (say) a quad-core 1.8GHz ARM card in that same delightful chassis.
Isn't that the card that was supposed to cost even less than the RaPi?
In the literal sense (i.e. that some people did suppose this would cost less than the Raspberry Pi), yeah, pretty much; an EOMA-68 CPU card based on an Allwinner SoC was widely reported to have an estimated price of $15.
However, this figure was (1) a BOM cost, not retail price, (2) an estimate before the design was finished (e.g. at that time, I believe the A10 SoC was being considered, whereas the now-available unit has an A20), and (3) only applied to relatively high volume (100,000 units, IIRC). It was never intended to represent a retail price at any volume, but some trigger-happy bloggers repeated the number without describing what cost it represented, some other bloggers assumed it was retail, and ever since there's been a steady stream of people whose only prior knowledge of the EOMA-68 project is that "a CPU card is supposed to cost $15, so it's cheaper than a Raspberry Pi!", and who are consequently disappointed and frustrated to learn that it costs more than that.
Turns out it's not a separate FM signal as I assumed, but an extra subcarrier (beyond the stereo and RDS signals) in an existing FM signal. This does indeed require electronics skills to generate, though it wouldn't be very hard to add in to a kit transmitter like the mpx-96 we built in my advanced electronics lab.
Not necessarily. Instead of script kiddie packages this requires actual electronics knowledge. No one apart Oona bothers these days.
No, not necessarily, but given that it's in the FM broadcast band, it sounds quite likely that it can be spoofed with an unmodified FM transmitter and a script generating an appropriate audio signal.
Of course in the grand/. tradition, I haven't RTFA yet, and they could be using a modulation scheme that can't be emulated with FM (IMO unlikely, as it's probably some flavor of FSK or PSK), or too wide a modulation range, and even if it's all doable off-the-shelf, range will be quite limited without at least a little hardware competence to boost the transmit power.
By the way, while not mentioning these specific programs, CNET reports that Slashdot owner Dice supports the STEM efforts of Code.org and Donors Choose.
In that case, I guess I've no choice but to strongly oppose the STEM efforts of Code.org and Donors Choose...
Notice that even though it looks as if Atlas is supported by a tether, it isn't - as proved when it falls over at the end.
...and then proceeds to hang by its tether.
... with its center of mass at a lower altitude than when it was walking, thus proving that the tether wasn't supporting* it before, yes?
*I'm aware that proves it wasn't entirely supporting it, and there'd need to be some assumptions made about how elastic the tether is to prove it wasn't supporting it at all, but given that the point of such a tether is to arrest a fall before robot meets concrete, and also to not impose any force before the fall, I think it's reasonable to suppose it actually does that.
Every country that could actually defend itself from an army of Frenchmen led by a male member of that country which called itself socialist has become a prime example of the monstrous lengths government can go to.
Assuming you're not using "male member" as a euphemism for "penis" (In which case: Countries led by dicks don't turn out well. Duh?), the obvious explanation is that you're carefully excluding some female-led socialist country lest it be used as a counterexample. (I have no idea what country fits that bill, but it's what that sort of qualifier makes people like me think of...)
Or are you just musing a la Kim Stanley Robinson about the potential benefits of matriarchy, and regretting that some socialist state hasn't bothered to try it?
Honestly, I'm no fan of socialism (IMO it's only been shown to work well in groups small enough that the interplay of individual personalities is so distorts whatever economic system they have as to make an attempt at rigorous classification more foolishness than not), so I'm more or less on your side of that argument, but I'm rather curious what you meant by that seemingly inexplicable qualifier.
Yeah, great. So the idiots who want free movies will get DPI implemented across the board, thus dramatically lowering the bar for all other kinds of censorship in future. This whole thing reminds me of the drug war. These tele-addicts simply don't have any lines they won't cross in order to get their fix, and attempts to stop them thus spiral downards into ever harsher and more aggressive monitoring and control.
Funny, it reminds me of the war on drugs, too.
Just like the war on drugs, we see the government's efforts to stop the supposed problem cause far greater harm to society than the supposed problem itself, and yet they keep doing it.
Just like the war on drugs, popular support is rallied with (and indeed, couldn't be sustained without) base lies and disinformation.
Just like the war on drugs, the motivation of the government to pursue this costly endeavor, with no net public benefit in sight, is unfathomable -- unless/until you realize that an industry of rent-seekers is pulling the government's strings to keep the profit flowing.
And just like with the war on drugs, the assholes and trolls (which are you, anyway?) become indistinguishable in their rush to condemn the targets of government action, logic be damned, for the consequences of the government's actions against them.
If you've ever tried to navigate using a smartphone while cycling you'll know full well that you took your life in your hands. By the time you've focussed on the map and your brain has decoded what you're looking at you've travelled far enough to be sliding on gravel or go careening into the side of a car.
Actually, after making a proper bike mount for my N900, I had no trouble using satnav while cycling.
Unlike TFA author Mark Gibbs, I'm aware that my experience is not universal, as people in some other cities have to deal with worse traffic than I do.
I had a touchstone for my palm pre. It worked. BUT I never use it. It's just an extra thing to carry around with your phone if you go somewhere. And this one added utility to the phone; propped it up and displayed things. These new ones are just the same problem. Unless someone like Amazon put them all over the place, I don't see how it's more convenient than carrying cables.
Why wouldn't you just leave the charger at your home or office where you do most of your charging?
I carry a separate USB charger in my backpack for use on the go, I never bring my home charger with me. Is it common to have only a single charger that you use at home and carry around with you when you go out?
Among chronic cheapskates, it is -- the phone only came with one charger, and a second one is ten whole dollars! Otherwise, I don't think so.
I certainly didn't tote a touchstone with me everywhere after I hacked a Pre inductive charging kit into my N900 -- I had a touchstone on the nightstand at home, another one on my desk at work, and packed the original micro-USB charger whenever I felt the need to carry one around. (I used an extended battery, so I really didn't need to charge it often.) At least until the micro-USB port broke and the inductive-charging was the only option working (at which point I was very glad to have it).
It would have to travel 4 miles an hour over every possible type of terrain. Better to just live in orbit.
Or just skip the terraforming and live in huge floating bubble-cities. An Earth-standard atmosphere turns out to be a lifting gas in Venus's atmosphere, and there's a region of Venus's atmosphere where both pressure and temperature are confortably Earth-like, and it's got nice steady winds to carry your bubble around the planet much faster than the surface rotation -- depends on latitude, but on the order of 100 hours.
"All" you need is to engineer a nearly-closed biosphere (same as needed for long-term orbiting habitats), and the ability to synthesize the needed inputs from Venusian atmosphere. (In contrast to space habitats, where there's no resources with zero transport costs, but low-energy transfers permit resources from a wide range of places with nearly-uniform transport costs, floating colonies give you access to the upper atmosphere for free, decreasing altitude with increasing cost, the surface with insane difficulty and cost, and orbital (or higher) space at costs similar to those for accessing LEO from Earth's surface.)
I'm not sure why they'd need a new law. (Not that that would stop them from trying to make one!)
From 26 USC 5845:
The term "any other weapon" means any weapon or device capable of being concealed on the person from which a shot can be discharged through the energy of an explosive, a pistol or revolver having a barrel with a smooth bore designed or redesigned to fire a fixed shotgun shell, weapons with combination shotgun and rifle barrels 12 inches or more, less than 18 inches in length, from which only a single discharge can be made from either barrel without manual reloading, and shall include any such weapon which may be readily restored to fire. Such term shall not include a pistol or a revolver having a rifled bore, or rifled bores, or weapons designed, made, or intended to be fired from the shoulder and not capable of firing fixed ammunition.
Unless you chose a dinosaur bone over 26" long, the resulting weapon will be presumed to be concealable, and thus the first bolded section will apply. Since a dinosaur bone is not a pistol, you don't get exempted on the basis of the second. (It's not a pistol because it's not shaped like a normal pistol -- same reason most pen-guns are AOWs.) So, unless made with an eye to circumventing these, your dinoliberator will likely be legally classed as an "Any Other Weapon" under the NFA. Making an AOW is already illegal unless you file a Form 1 with $200, and wait for your paperwork to come back stamped before you start printing. Last I looked into it, the average wait was about 8 months.
... featuring a low persistence display, which would be great news for those of us that get the urge to hurl when playing Doom on a conventional display.
Note that many CRTs (basically all modern color CRTs and most modern monochromes) are low- (not zero-) persistence, with phosphor decay on the order of microseconds to tens of microseconds. Some of the visual effects are bound to be very different with a exponential or power law decay than with the sharp cutoff of scanning devices, but it does suggest ways for some of us who aren't in secret VR prototype labs to experiment with some of the stuff he's talking about.
I'm not about to do this now, but back when I was about 12 and could do such things without getting dizzy, I tinkered with motion perception by making programs that would scroll an image horizontally across a CRT, lay on my belly across a swivel chair with my feet in the air, and spun myself by pushing off the legs of the chair with my hands to get a near-constant speed that synced with the monitor.
If I didn't have better things that needed doing, I'd strap a CRT display and an LCD onto a lazy susan, together with an Eee or such to drive one of them (swap plugs to repeat experiment with low- or high-persistence), and spin it instead of myself. (It's kinda sad that I do have better things that need doing, and yet I'm posting this on/. instead of either doing them or doing visual perception experiments...)
You need ground stations for SBAS (WAAS is the GPS SBAS, not sure whether GLONASS currently has an equivalent and if so what it's called); there main function is to measure ionospheric delay characteristics, process the results, and upload it to the satellites so GPS/GLONASS devices with SBAS capability can receive it and use it to refine their position estimates.
The horse is kind of out of the barn on this one since anyone with access with a decent 3D printer can make an un-registered gun, but making them legal means what little regulation we have on the gun industry falls apart because none of those plastic guns will need to be registered before they leave the factory. They're untraceable.
What FUD is this?
The Undetectable Firearms Act has nothing to do with requiring firearms made for sale to be serial numbered, and for the manufacturers to maintain a registry of serial numbers. It merely bans "undetectable" firearms (with suitable definitions for undetectable, intended to ensure they're both X-ray visible and metal-detector detectable.) with narrow exceptions for military/CIA/etc. use and for manufacturers developing them for such military/CIA/etc. use; if it is not renewed, such "undetectable" guns will be legally the same as any other gun -- same rules about serial numbers, registration, etc..
The only thing stopping a manufacturer of steel guns from refusing to serialize their guns is that, sooner or later (mostly sooner) the BATF would find out, and the manufacturer would be shut down and people would possibly go to jail. Since that seems to be working for metal guns, and the same consequence would apply to manufacturers of plastic guns, I really don't see why it wouldn't work equally well there.
Note that any individual may lawfully make a steel gun (or 3D-printed plastic gun with a chunk of steel to satisfy detectability requirements) for their own use (they may not "manufacture for sale" without an FFL, so while it's technically legal to sell the gun later, as long as you didn't have that in mind when you made it, most people recommend you never sell it at all, so you don't find yourself in court trying to prove what you were or weren't planning) with no requirement to serialize, register, etc., and if the UFA were repealed, you could make your own all-plastic guns under the same rules -- but again, as these rules haven't flooded our streets with unregistered homemade steel guns (despite the ever-lowering cost of CNC machines), it seems unlikely that permitting plastic guns and 3D printers will change this.
Let's for the sake of argument say that law enforcement is actually legitimately with a court order eavesdropping on Joe The Suspected Assassin's Internet use and monitoring his credit card use. They find out that he has bought a 3D printer + materials and also downloaded the files needed for printing it. Without this ban his actions have not yet yielded much more for law enforcement to go on but with this Joe's actions could be enough for law enforcement to get a search warrant since he can reasonably be suspected of committing a crime.
First, you don't need a search warrant at that point (though you'll get one, to look for evidence of other crimes), you can just arrest the guy! The BATF will be enforcing this, and they have a long-standing rule of "constructive possession", which is to say that they consider possessing all the pieces of an illegal gun to be the same as possessing that illegal gun* -- while this is a dubious doctrine legally, to my knowledge it's never been successfully challenged in court, in part because they pick what cases to use it on in court (cases where the defendant won't have a good defense team that might successfully challenge it), and in part because courts have a policy of assuming that the agency in charge of enforcing a given body of law (this goes for BATF, EPA, OSHA, etc.) is correct in their interpretation of that law, rather than the judge reviewing the law and overruling their interpretation. (Ostensibly, because it's better for everyone if the law is uniformly interpreted the same way in every court, so we accept an interpretation maintained by a single bureaucracy, rather than a dozen judges making different interpretations of the same poorly-drafted law.)
Now the problem with that rule is a problem with that rule, and with the BATF for making it, and with the courts for letting it stand, and we should fix it on those levels. However, until we do fix it, it's foolish not to take it into account when examining the consequences of the law. Any combination of law and agency rule that seems likely to practically criminalize possession of certain information (even if only when possessed in conjunction with a 3D printer) shouldn't be passed -- we need to fix the rule first, or change the law to explicitly rule out constructive possession.
*In case that sounds like a decent rule (considering the simple case where a thug disassembles his illegal weapon when he's not actively engaged in a job), an example of where this rule comes up: Say a guy has an AR-15 rifle (i.e. it has a buttstock and a >16" barrel), and wants to assemble an AR-15 pistol (which is essentially the same gun, except with no buttstock and a shorter barrel, perhaps 7"). He knows you're not allowed to build a pistol from rifle parts (particularly from the receiver, or in the case of the AR-15, the lower receiver, of a rifle), so instead of modifying his rifle, he orders a new 7" upper receiver+barrel assembly, and a new lower receiver that's virgin (i.e. never been made into a rifle, thus legal to build a pistol on), and miscellaneous parts needed to assemble these. Due to variations in shipping speed, and the requirement to have the lower receiver mailed to an FFL holder (i.e. gun store) and pick it up in person, let's suppose the 7" upper+barrel assembly arrives first. Now, according to the BATF, he possesses an illegal short-barrel rifle, because if he were to remove the >16" barrel assembly and replace it with the 7" barrel assembly, that's exactly what he'd have. (Once the other parts get here, he's clear again, because the BATF considers having a legal collection of fully-assembled guns accounting for every part to be legal -- to qualify for constructive possession, unassembled parts must be involved, either building an illegal weapon entirely from unassembled parts, or building one by swapping unassembled parts with their counterparts in an assembled weapon. To me this makes no bloody sense and looks like a transparent effort to make an unjust rule seem more reasonable in court, but YMMV.)
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing wrong with codes.
There's nothing wrong with style sheets.
There's everything wrong with an opaque hodgepodge of both, which is the MS Word system. I'm not saying it's wrong to have both (particularly, there's very good arguments for style-based systems to include simple stuff like italics and bold, for use in verbatim quotes if nothing else), but Word makes it not only non-obvious why a particular piece of text is formatted as it is (which is bad enough) but very hard to find out at all.
Two ways to read that. 1.) A sex offender (stopped reading) overturned the decision of a hearing officer, and 2.) a sex offender overturned the decision of a hearing officer.
In the first case, the whole sex offender thing creates an opinion before anything else happens; the second way, judgement is suspended until all information is read.
What GP characterised as confusing was the notion that the sex offender overturned anything -- what actually happens in such a case is that a judge overturns the decision. Since you apparently missed the civics fail and went off on something unrelated, we're left to assume you read it in way "1. )".
It's not a compelling property for a single paper size, but it's pretty nifty when constructing a series of paper sizes.
Both the "normal" US paper sizes (A, B, C, etc., where A=letter) and the ISO A-series (A4 etc.) follow the same rule for relationship between adjacent sizes: Each size is the same as two of the next smaller size, joined along their long edge. (Or put another way: splitting a sheet in half with a cut parallel to the short edge yields two sheets of the next size down.) This has some fairly obvious reasons to make sense.
That rule means that a series will alternate between two aspect ratios, so e.g. A=8.5x11 has the same aspect ratio as C=17x22, while B=11x17 has the same aspect ratio as D=22x34. However, there's no guarantee that those two aspect ratios are the same, and in fact in the US system they're not. This means that enlarging or reducing by 2 steps always works nicely, but going up or down a single step doesn't -- you end up enlarging margins in one direction, or cropping in the other, to make up for the difference in aspect ratio. The ISO system, on the other hand, does make that guarantee (by making the aspect ratio sqrt(2) ), so that you can scale between any two sizes in the same series.
Another application, which is basically the inverse of scaling to a smaller sheet, is scaling to fit multiple pages on one sheet, particularly for the case of printing two logical pages on each sheet -- the US system requires large margins to make this work, while the ISO system uses paper much more optimally.
By having computers having power over humans, and making them perfect.
This won't work, because some hammy starship captain will show up and talk the computer to death (likely death of a mildly explosive nature). Happens. Every. Time.
So long as starship captains, or the possibility of a starship captain, exists, computers cannot have power over humans.
Fortunately, you don't have to imagine. The simplest of arithemetic will reveal that's an average of about 20kB per image. If we assume as near-worst-case an uncompressed 16-bit pixmap format, that means 100px x 100 px or so; realistically, most of them are probably jpegs, so search your hard drive...
find / -name '*.jpg' -size -25k -size +15k
And take a look at what you have in that range. Then keep in mind that that's an average -- there'll be some much better and some even smaller/compresseder.
I used to think I'd have to drink blood or something to be a vampire, but no. I've now learned that since my stomach is full when I go to bed, and gets emptier while I sleep, leaving me hungry and in need of a little refuelling in the morning... that makes me a vampire!
The whole idea of the EOMA concept should (if/when it takes off big) mean that you won't have to "hope the laptop shell's $ATTRIBUTE is $VALUE". There's two reasons for this.
First, you can build your own laptop, because a lot of the complexity that makes designing your own laptop mainboard a ridiculous proposition for almost every hobbyist is now inside the CPU card -- some professionals designed, built, and tested that 6-layer PCB, and then millions (eventually, in the big picture) were run off. For your special laptop, you could if you put your mind to it do most, if not everything, with a 2-side PCB and old-school through-hole components, the main obstacles being not that you can't fit it in a full-size laptop without SMT, but that you can't find some components in through-hole versions. You can pick whatever display you want, slightly tweak the PCB design from some other EOMA-68-based laptop to suit, and have one made. And all this is much more practical than it sounds because you invest the effort once, then keep that laptop for life (ok, realistically for a decade or more) and just swap CPU cards when you need more performance.
The other, and even bigger, reason, is because some manufacturer, somewhere, will make a shell with the characteristics you want. Sure, your concern might only occur in a fraction of a percent of consumer (actually, your concern about the backlight is IMO a horrible example, because the whole industry is moving from CCFL to LED for a number of reasons), but when some small Chinese factory is looking for a profitable niche to exploit, that fraction of a percent is a prime target. Because of EOMA, they
(1) have less design work to do to make a new model (just like the hobbyist)
(2) can keep selling that model without investing in a periodic redesign, and without it becoming obsolete and unsellable due to last year's CPU -- just every year buy a load of the hot new CPU cards and receive a magic spec bump, or ship it without a CPU card and let the user slot their new or old card
(3) even if/when they go out of business (or just abandon your market segment) and stop selling new shells, all the used ones keep going (until they break/wear out) without obsolescence.
(1) and (2) mean less cost to pick up tiny market segments, which means niches will be more profitable and thus better served; (3) means that even if you're part of a niche market that looked big enough to make a good profit, but turned out not to be, you get to reap the benefits of some company's "mistake" in pursuing that niche long after the company's learned and moved on.
Regarding the last point particularly, contrast that to the Fujitsu U820 I bought a few years ago, because I really loved the form-factor and the high-PPI screen. At the time, the 1.6GHz Atom processor was slowish and the soldered-on RAM was cramped; it's flat-out obsolete now. The "successor" UH900 is a straight clamshell, lacking the flip-screen which lets the U820 become a paperback-sized tablet, and I'm left casting about amongst gadgets like the Asus Transformer series looking for a near-enough equivalent. If the U820 had been EOMA-based, then Fujitsu could go their way, selling UH900s with better mass-market appeal, but I could keep going mine, swapping up to (say) a quad-core 1.8GHz ARM card in that same delightful chassis.
Isn't that the card that was supposed to cost even less than the RaPi?
In the literal sense (i.e. that some people did suppose this would cost less than the Raspberry Pi), yeah, pretty much; an EOMA-68 CPU card based on an Allwinner SoC was widely reported to have an estimated price of $15.
However, this figure was (1) a BOM cost, not retail price, (2) an estimate before the design was finished (e.g. at that time, I believe the A10 SoC was being considered, whereas the now-available unit has an A20), and (3) only applied to relatively high volume (100,000 units, IIRC). It was never intended to represent a retail price at any volume, but some trigger-happy bloggers repeated the number without describing what cost it represented, some other bloggers assumed it was retail, and ever since there's been a steady stream of people whose only prior knowledge of the EOMA-68 project is that "a CPU card is supposed to cost $15, so it's cheaper than a Raspberry Pi!", and who are consequently disappointed and frustrated to learn that it costs more than that.
Ignore above, I just RTFAed.
Turns out it's not a separate FM signal as I assumed, but an extra subcarrier (beyond the stereo and RDS signals) in an existing FM signal. This does indeed require electronics skills to generate, though it wouldn't be very hard to add in to a kit transmitter like the mpx-96 we built in my advanced electronics lab.
Not necessarily. Instead of script kiddie packages this requires actual electronics knowledge. No one apart Oona bothers these days.
No, not necessarily, but given that it's in the FM broadcast band, it sounds quite likely that it can be spoofed with an unmodified FM transmitter and a script generating an appropriate audio signal.
Of course in the grand /. tradition, I haven't RTFA yet, and they could be using a modulation scheme that can't be emulated with FM (IMO unlikely, as it's probably some flavor of FSK or PSK), or too wide a modulation range, and even if it's all doable off-the-shelf, range will be quite limited without at least a little hardware competence to boost the transmit power.
By the way, while not mentioning these specific programs, CNET reports that Slashdot owner Dice supports the STEM efforts of Code.org and Donors Choose.
In that case, I guess I've no choice but to strongly oppose the STEM efforts of Code.org and Donors Choose...
Notice that even though it looks as if Atlas is supported by a tether, it isn't - as proved when it falls over at the end.
...and then proceeds to hang by its tether.
... with its center of mass at a lower altitude than when it was walking, thus proving that the tether wasn't supporting* it before, yes?
*I'm aware that proves it wasn't entirely supporting it, and there'd need to be some assumptions made about how elastic the tether is to prove it wasn't supporting it at all, but given that the point of such a tether is to arrest a fall before robot meets concrete, and also to not impose any force before the fall, I think it's reasonable to suppose it actually does that.
The bolded part is a little perplexing...
Every country that could actually defend itself from an army of Frenchmen led by a male member of that country which called itself socialist has become a prime example of the monstrous lengths government can go to.
Assuming you're not using "male member" as a euphemism for "penis" (In which case: Countries led by dicks don't turn out well. Duh?), the obvious explanation is that you're carefully excluding some female-led socialist country lest it be used as a counterexample. (I have no idea what country fits that bill, but it's what that sort of qualifier makes people like me think of...)
Or are you just musing a la Kim Stanley Robinson about the potential benefits of matriarchy, and regretting that some socialist state hasn't bothered to try it?
Honestly, I'm no fan of socialism (IMO it's only been shown to work well in groups small enough that the interplay of individual personalities is so distorts whatever economic system they have as to make an attempt at rigorous classification more foolishness than not), so I'm more or less on your side of that argument, but I'm rather curious what you meant by that seemingly inexplicable qualifier.
Yeah, great. So the idiots who want free movies will get DPI implemented across the board, thus dramatically lowering the bar for all other kinds of censorship in future. This whole thing reminds me of the drug war. These tele-addicts simply don't have any lines they won't cross in order to get their fix, and attempts to stop them thus spiral downards into ever harsher and more aggressive monitoring and control.
Funny, it reminds me of the war on drugs, too.
Just like the war on drugs, we see the government's efforts to stop the supposed problem cause far greater harm to society than the supposed problem itself, and yet they keep doing it.
Just like the war on drugs, popular support is rallied with (and indeed, couldn't be sustained without) base lies and disinformation.
Just like the war on drugs, the motivation of the government to pursue this costly endeavor, with no net public benefit in sight, is unfathomable -- unless/until you realize that an industry of rent-seekers is pulling the government's strings to keep the profit flowing.
And just like with the war on drugs, the assholes and trolls (which are you, anyway?) become indistinguishable in their rush to condemn the targets of government action, logic be damned, for the consequences of the government's actions against them.
If you've ever tried to navigate using a smartphone while cycling you'll know full well that you took your life in your hands. By the time you've focussed on the map and your brain has decoded what you're looking at you've travelled far enough to be sliding on gravel or go careening into the side of a car.
Actually, after making a proper bike mount for my N900, I had no trouble using satnav while cycling.
Unlike TFA author Mark Gibbs, I'm aware that my experience is not universal, as people in some other cities have to deal with worse traffic than I do.
Hey, the Russians beat them by about 40 years.
I had a touchstone for my palm pre. It worked. BUT I never use it. It's just an extra thing to carry around with your phone if you go somewhere. And this one added utility to the phone; propped it up and displayed things. These new ones are just the same problem. Unless someone like Amazon put them all over the place, I don't see how it's more convenient than carrying cables.
Why wouldn't you just leave the charger at your home or office where you do most of your charging?
I carry a separate USB charger in my backpack for use on the go, I never bring my home charger with me. Is it common to have only a single charger that you use at home and carry around with you when you go out?
Among chronic cheapskates, it is -- the phone only came with one charger, and a second one is ten whole dollars! Otherwise, I don't think so.
I certainly didn't tote a touchstone with me everywhere after I hacked a Pre inductive charging kit into my N900 -- I had a touchstone on the nightstand at home, another one on my desk at work, and packed the original micro-USB charger whenever I felt the need to carry one around. (I used an extended battery, so I really didn't need to charge it often.) At least until the micro-USB port broke and the inductive-charging was the only option working (at which point I was very glad to have it).
I'm a farmer on the moon
I till with a harpoon
But there ain't water
So I have my daughter
Moonshine in lieu of water? Ensuing drunken incest?
Let's face it, you're actually a farmer on the Ozarks, not the Moon.
It would have to travel 4 miles an hour over every possible type of terrain. Better to just live in orbit.
Or just skip the terraforming and live in huge floating bubble-cities. An Earth-standard atmosphere turns out to be a lifting gas in Venus's atmosphere, and there's a region of Venus's atmosphere where both pressure and temperature are confortably Earth-like, and it's got nice steady winds to carry your bubble around the planet much faster than the surface rotation -- depends on latitude, but on the order of 100 hours.
"All" you need is to engineer a nearly-closed biosphere (same as needed for long-term orbiting habitats), and the ability to synthesize the needed inputs from Venusian atmosphere. (In contrast to space habitats, where there's no resources with zero transport costs, but low-energy transfers permit resources from a wide range of places with nearly-uniform transport costs, floating colonies give you access to the upper atmosphere for free, decreasing altitude with increasing cost, the surface with insane difficulty and cost, and orbital (or higher) space at costs similar to those for accessing LEO from Earth's surface.)
I'm not sure why they'd need a new law. (Not that that would stop them from trying to make one!)
From 26 USC 5845:
The term "any other weapon" means any weapon or device capable of being concealed on the person from which a shot can be discharged through the energy of an explosive, a pistol or revolver having a barrel with a smooth bore designed or redesigned to fire a fixed shotgun shell, weapons with combination shotgun and rifle barrels 12 inches or more, less than 18 inches in length, from which only a single discharge can be made from either barrel without manual reloading, and shall include any such weapon which may be readily restored to fire. Such term shall not include a pistol or a revolver having a rifled bore, or rifled bores, or weapons designed, made, or intended to be fired from the shoulder and not capable of firing fixed ammunition.
Unless you chose a dinosaur bone over 26" long, the resulting weapon will be presumed to be concealable, and thus the first bolded section will apply. Since a dinosaur bone is not a pistol, you don't get exempted on the basis of the second. (It's not a pistol because it's not shaped like a normal pistol -- same reason most pen-guns are AOWs.) So, unless made with an eye to circumventing these, your dinoliberator will likely be legally classed as an "Any Other Weapon" under the NFA. Making an AOW is already illegal unless you file a Form 1 with $200, and wait for your paperwork to come back stamped before you start printing. Last I looked into it, the average wait was about 8 months.
... featuring a low persistence display, which would be great news for those of us that get the urge to hurl when playing Doom on a conventional display.
Note that many CRTs (basically all modern color CRTs and most modern monochromes) are low- (not zero-) persistence, with phosphor decay on the order of microseconds to tens of microseconds. Some of the visual effects are bound to be very different with a exponential or power law decay than with the sharp cutoff of scanning devices, but it does suggest ways for some of us who aren't in secret VR prototype labs to experiment with some of the stuff he's talking about.
I'm not about to do this now, but back when I was about 12 and could do such things without getting dizzy, I tinkered with motion perception by making programs that would scroll an image horizontally across a CRT, lay on my belly across a swivel chair with my feet in the air, and spun myself by pushing off the legs of the chair with my hands to get a near-constant speed that synced with the monitor.
If I didn't have better things that needed doing, I'd strap a CRT display and an LCD onto a lazy susan, together with an Eee or such to drive one of them (swap plugs to repeat experiment with low- or high-persistence), and spin it instead of myself. (It's kinda sad that I do have better things that need doing, and yet I'm posting this on /. instead of either doing them or doing visual perception experiments...)
Land or land not; there is no attempt.
Besides, what does GPS need ground stations for?
You need ground stations for SBAS (WAAS is the GPS SBAS, not sure whether GLONASS currently has an equivalent and if so what it's called); there main function is to measure ionospheric delay characteristics, process the results, and upload it to the satellites so GPS/GLONASS devices with SBAS capability can receive it and use it to refine their position estimates.
The horse is kind of out of the barn on this one since anyone with access with a decent 3D printer can make an un-registered gun, but making them legal means what little regulation we have on the gun industry falls apart because none of those plastic guns will need to be registered before they leave the factory. They're untraceable.
What FUD is this?
The Undetectable Firearms Act has nothing to do with requiring firearms made for sale to be serial numbered, and for the manufacturers to maintain a registry of serial numbers. It merely bans "undetectable" firearms (with suitable definitions for undetectable, intended to ensure they're both X-ray visible and metal-detector detectable.) with narrow exceptions for military/CIA/etc. use and for manufacturers developing them for such military/CIA/etc. use; if it is not renewed, such "undetectable" guns will be legally the same as any other gun -- same rules about serial numbers, registration, etc..
The only thing stopping a manufacturer of steel guns from refusing to serialize their guns is that, sooner or later (mostly sooner) the BATF would find out, and the manufacturer would be shut down and people would possibly go to jail. Since that seems to be working for metal guns, and the same consequence would apply to manufacturers of plastic guns, I really don't see why it wouldn't work equally well there.
Note that any individual may lawfully make a steel gun (or 3D-printed plastic gun with a chunk of steel to satisfy detectability requirements) for their own use (they may not "manufacture for sale" without an FFL, so while it's technically legal to sell the gun later, as long as you didn't have that in mind when you made it, most people recommend you never sell it at all, so you don't find yourself in court trying to prove what you were or weren't planning) with no requirement to serialize, register, etc., and if the UFA were repealed, you could make your own all-plastic guns under the same rules -- but again, as these rules haven't flooded our streets with unregistered homemade steel guns (despite the ever-lowering cost of CNC machines), it seems unlikely that permitting plastic guns and 3D printers will change this.
Let's for the sake of argument say that law enforcement is actually legitimately with a court order eavesdropping on Joe The Suspected Assassin's Internet use and monitoring his credit card use. They find out that he has bought a 3D printer + materials and also downloaded the files needed for printing it. Without this ban his actions have not yet yielded much more for law enforcement to go on but with this Joe's actions could be enough for law enforcement to get a search warrant since he can reasonably be suspected of committing a crime.
First, you don't need a search warrant at that point (though you'll get one, to look for evidence of other crimes), you can just arrest the guy! The BATF will be enforcing this, and they have a long-standing rule of "constructive possession", which is to say that they consider possessing all the pieces of an illegal gun to be the same as possessing that illegal gun* -- while this is a dubious doctrine legally, to my knowledge it's never been successfully challenged in court, in part because they pick what cases to use it on in court (cases where the defendant won't have a good defense team that might successfully challenge it), and in part because courts have a policy of assuming that the agency in charge of enforcing a given body of law (this goes for BATF, EPA, OSHA, etc.) is correct in their interpretation of that law, rather than the judge reviewing the law and overruling their interpretation. (Ostensibly, because it's better for everyone if the law is uniformly interpreted the same way in every court, so we accept an interpretation maintained by a single bureaucracy, rather than a dozen judges making different interpretations of the same poorly-drafted law.)
Now the problem with that rule is a problem with that rule, and with the BATF for making it, and with the courts for letting it stand, and we should fix it on those levels. However, until we do fix it, it's foolish not to take it into account when examining the consequences of the law. Any combination of law and agency rule that seems likely to practically criminalize possession of certain information (even if only when possessed in conjunction with a 3D printer) shouldn't be passed -- we need to fix the rule first, or change the law to explicitly rule out constructive possession.
*In case that sounds like a decent rule (considering the simple case where a thug disassembles his illegal weapon when he's not actively engaged in a job), an example of where this rule comes up: Say a guy has an AR-15 rifle (i.e. it has a buttstock and a >16" barrel), and wants to assemble an AR-15 pistol (which is essentially the same gun, except with no buttstock and a shorter barrel, perhaps 7"). He knows you're not allowed to build a pistol from rifle parts (particularly from the receiver, or in the case of the AR-15, the lower receiver, of a rifle), so instead of modifying his rifle, he orders a new 7" upper receiver+barrel assembly, and a new lower receiver that's virgin (i.e. never been made into a rifle, thus legal to build a pistol on), and miscellaneous parts needed to assemble these. Due to variations in shipping speed, and the requirement to have the lower receiver mailed to an FFL holder (i.e. gun store) and pick it up in person, let's suppose the 7" upper+barrel assembly arrives first. Now, according to the BATF, he possesses an illegal short-barrel rifle, because if he were to remove the >16" barrel assembly and replace it with the 7" barrel assembly, that's exactly what he'd have. (Once the other parts get here, he's clear again, because the BATF considers having a legal collection of fully-assembled guns accounting for every part to be legal -- to qualify for constructive possession, unassembled parts must be involved, either building an illegal weapon entirely from unassembled parts, or building one by swapping unassembled parts with their counterparts in an assembled weapon. To me this makes no bloody sense and looks like a transparent effort to make an unjust rule seem more reasonable in court, but YMMV.)