Slashdot Mirror


User: Waffle+Iron

Waffle+Iron's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
6,037
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 6,037

  1. Re:Isn't "Cutting the Wind" cheating? on What Will It Take To Run a 2-Hour Marathon? · · Score: 2

    It's not cheating if it's part of the strategy of the event. See also: NASCAR, speed skating, bicycle racing, etc. It just means that in addition to raw speed, the runner needs to effectively manage the interactions with other runners.

    At any rate, this arbitrary milestone would have been achieved long ago if the wavelength of light emitted by exited caesium 133 atoms were only a tiny fraction of a percent longer.

  2. Re:Distance and Charge Time on A Garbage Truck That Would Make Elon Musk Proud · · Score: 2

    I can't wait for to be woken at 5 AM when the turbine generator fires up outside my bedroom window ;(

    The garbage trucks active at wee hours are usually emptying dumpsters. The engine noise is least of your worries compared to the sound of them slamming a half ton steel box up over the truck then down onto the pavement.

    As a former weekly 3:00am victim of this practice at an apartment I used to rent, I think that operating any garbage truck between 11:00pm and 6:00am should be made into a felony.

  3. Re:Time to retire bash! on Bash To Require Further Patching, As More Shellshock Holes Found · · Score: 1

    Python? You serious? Bye bye one liners with for loops or anything else. I really doubt anyone wants to have pretty code enforced on them for something as simple as iterating through a few numbers one time, ever.

    $ python -c 'for x in range(3): print "One"; print "Liner!"'

  4. Re:No, who cares? on Could We Abort a Manned Mission To Mars? · · Score: 2

    A single human on Mars could do in a week more than every previous rover on mars put together has accomplished to date.

    Sure. And at only 100X the cost of all those missions, it would be such a bargain.

  5. Re:I dunno about LEDs, but CFLs don't last on The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I was looking at LED replacement bulbs at the hardware store the other day ($20 each). I am suspect as to their efficiency.

    Get a Kill-A-Watt meter and test the power consumption of LEDs youself. All the ones I've checked have used just about exactly what it says on the package.

    They have large heat sinks on the which get very hot. That is wasted energy.

    They have heat sinks because the LEDs need to stay very cool to work properly. Incandecent bulbs don't use heat sinks because they need to heat up to thousands of degrees just to get a small fraction of the photons they emit into the visible range. Now which do you think is wasting more energy?

    There is no way to pack an efficient transformer into such a small space.

    I doubt that any CFL or LED on the market is using a plain 60Hz transformer. They're using switching power supplies, which can be very efficient. That's becuase they crank the frequency up to a range where a small transformer *is* efficient.

    Houses need wired seperately with a lower voltage appropriate for powering LED lights.

    You'd still need a switching power supply to match the low voltage to the exact needs and wiring pattern of the particular LEDs. That's why most every PC have a separate power supply on the motherboard just inches away from the main power supply to convert 5VDC to whatever the processor needs.

    Not to mention the power loss of low-voltage wires. If you put 100W of LED lights (about 6 bulbs) in a room at the end of a 50-foot run at 5V, you'd be pulling 20 amps. If you used 14AWG wire, at 0.25 ohms for the 100 foot round trip, you'd have a 5V voltage drop just from the resistance of the wire. You would also be violating code, which would require you to install a dedicated 12AWG circuit just to power 100W. That's obviously completely unworkable.

    In summary, all of your uninformed "gut feel" opinions on these technical issues are unsurprisingly wrong.

  6. Re:Plain solar panels cost less on IBM Solar Concentrator Can Produce12kW/day, Clean Water, and AC · · Score: 1

    Look at the frigging picture in the article. This thing is to be built like a radio telescope, probably with a price tag to match.

  7. Re:Plain solar panels cost less on IBM Solar Concentrator Can Produce12kW/day, Clean Water, and AC · · Score: 1

    which would also be used on PV

    No, most PV panels are flat and fixed in place.

  8. Re:Plain solar panels cost less on IBM Solar Concentrator Can Produce12kW/day, Clean Water, and AC · · Score: 1

    It says it's parabolic right in the summary.

    TFA shows a parabolic dish made of smaller mirrors. Those mirrors may look flat, but there's no way that they get "2000X" solar concentration unless each individual mirror is also precisely curved.

    The whole setup looks far more expensive than conventional solar panels of the same area, or even a larger set of solar collectors capable of gathering the same amount of energy.

  9. Re:This has nothing to do with wasting food on Seattle Passes Laws To Keep Residents From Wasting Food · · Score: 2

    Actually, as soon as the garbage men show up, it's the governemnt's trash. I don't see why they shouldn't be free to do whatever they want with their property.

    If it's the government's trash, why are they threatening ME with a fine if THEIR trash has too much food waste in it?

    Because you have an agreement with the government that they will take possession of some types of your undesirable property in exchange for fixed fee. Part of the agreement is that different types of undesirable materials have to be segregated in order to reduce overall costs, direct and external. You did not properly segregate the materials as specified under the agreement, and therefore pay a specified surcharge. Presumably, this surcharge helps the government offset the cost of having to build a new landfill earlier because the current one is filled up with your otherwise compostable food waste.

    Nobody is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to segreagate your waste according to the government's specifications. You're always free to load your garbage in your car, find a privately run landfill who will accept it as-is, and bring it there.

  10. Re:Plain solar panels cost less on IBM Solar Concentrator Can Produce12kW/day, Clean Water, and AC · · Score: 1

    Mirrors are a whole lot cheaper than PVs.

    Flat mirrors, maybe. Parabolic mirrors on gimbals with sun tracking mechanisms, maybe not so much.

  11. Re:This has nothing to do with wasting food on Seattle Passes Laws To Keep Residents From Wasting Food · · Score: 1

    Nobody can stop you from discreetly handing your bags of spoiled food over to a man who pulls up to your front door in an unmarked service vehicle.

  12. Re:This has nothing to do with wasting food on Seattle Passes Laws To Keep Residents From Wasting Food · · Score: 1

    other blatant examples of government micromanagement (like looking through your trash)

    Actually, as soon as the garbage men show up, it's the governemnt's trash. I don't see why they shouldn't be free to do whatever they want with their property.

    If you don't like the government's terms of service, you're always free to hire a private firm to come in an unmarked van and discreetly take away your food waste.

  13. Re:Another terrible article courtesy of samzenpus on Seattle Passes Laws To Keep Residents From Wasting Food · · Score: 3, Informative

    Get them in season (early winter months), still on the stalk, and cook them properly (refer to the Good Eats episode on Brussels sprouts, for exmaple). There will still be some variations in quality based on the exact batch you have, but the best vegetables I've ever eaten have been when I found particularly good stalks of Brussel sprouts.

  14. Re:Bikes lanes are nice on Surprising Result of NYC Bike Lanes: Faster Traffic for Cars · · Score: 1

    Your statement should apply equally to pedestrians and cyclists. However, pedestrians aren't the ones arguing that they'd be safer walking down the middle of the road than on the sidewalk.

    Neither cyclists nor pedestrians travel down the middle of the road.

    Because most pedestrians that are hit by an automobile are not on the sidewalk, they're in the road.

    As I said, only a small fraction of cyclists are hit while traveling down the road not near an intersection.

    At an intersection, by definition, YOU'RE IN THE ROAD, whether you had been on a sidewalk or not. Now read that last sentence again, because you seem to be incapable of understanding that simple geometric fact.

    The issue is that motorists rarely look for objects moving faster than 0.5mph coming from a sidewalk. Maybe instead of making cyclists stop and dismount at every goddamned driveway as you want, we should address the original source of the risk and institute a nationwide comprehensive 15 mph speed limit.

    I never suggested they didn't get killed by cars all the time. I said they manage to handle intersections just fine. That is, with an acceptable surivaval rate.

    Where did you come up with that idea? Pedestrians are routinely killed at intersections, coming from sidewalks. Where do you get the idea that that's acceptable?

    I don't hear nearly as much whining from pedestrians rights groups as I do from cyclists rights groups, so I assume that pedestrians have greater success in intersections than cyclists do. Of course, it's possible that cyclists are more whiney. Could go either way.

    Maybe they're whiny because they hear unsubstantiated crap like this all the time from ill-informed people like you.

  15. Re:Bikes lanes are nice on Surprising Result of NYC Bike Lanes: Faster Traffic for Cars · · Score: 1

    Somehow pedestrians manage to handle intersections just fine, all while staying on sidewalks and crosswalks. Perhaps if navigating intersections is too challenging on a bicycle, one might dismount and walk the bike cross?

    Pedestrians get killed by cars all the time. Please stop talking out of your ass.

  16. Re:Bikes lanes are nice on Surprising Result of NYC Bike Lanes: Faster Traffic for Cars · · Score: 1

    Yet only something like 5% of bike injuries involve being rear-ended by cars on roads.

    Almost all other cases would involve intersections of some sort, where being on the sidewalk doesn't help or is counterproductive. You're still vulnerable to the high-speed cars while crossing roads, and you're more likely to collide because they're not looking at where you're coming from.

  17. Re:Bikes lanes are nice on Surprising Result of NYC Bike Lanes: Faster Traffic for Cars · · Score: 1

    If we could only arrange for every segment of every bike trip to enjoy a 3% downhill grade, a stiff tail wind, 40 degF dewpoint and partly cloudy skies, then almost nobody would even bother to buy a car.

  18. Re:Bikes lanes are nice on Surprising Result of NYC Bike Lanes: Faster Traffic for Cars · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You are not kept away from cars on a sidewalk.

    Since drivers rarely look for traffic on sidewalks as they go in and out of driveways and side streets, you run a high risk of getting run over at every curb cut. At least when you're on the road, drivers usually see you when they bother to glance up from their cellphones.

  19. Re:Include a intro programming language in Windows on Code.org Discloses Top Donors · · Score: 1

    Once upon a time DOS came with Basic.

    Better still, it also came with DEBUG.COM.

  20. Re:Interesting line from TFA: on Radioactive Wild Boars Still Roaming the Forests of Germany · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It seems odd that the pigs are too irradiated to eat but seem to thrive and breed just fine.

    Most people these days prefer to live a good deal longer than their earliest possible breeding time.

  21. Re:Stupid metric system on 2 Galileo Satellites Launched To Wrong Orbit · · Score: 1

    In fact 'imperial' system is stupid. It is even retarded.
    12 inches to 1 foot, 3 feets to 1 yard, 1760 yards to 1 mile, ...
    This is just moronic.
    Compare to 1km = 1000m = 100000cm

    My theory is that the illiterate medieval peasants who invented those systems had an intuitive knowledge that a duodecimal number system would make a lot more sense than decimal, and they ended up creating various half-assed implementations of it for their measurements. (The mile thing is different; it's a Roman decimal measurement of steps).

    Unfortunately we did end up using decimal, and reinforced it with Arabic numerals, which makes those intuitions worse than useless in the modern world.

  22. Re:My two cents on New EU Rules Will Limit Vacuum Cleaners To 1600W · · Score: 1

    All you have to do is to tell people. People are not stupid.

    Then how do you explain the fact that after well over a decade of people being "educated" that Triclosan in hand soap is useless and probably dangerous, almost every soap on the market is still laced with it?

    I'll explain it: such education simply doesn't work. The average person can not hold enough factoids in their brains to make the correct decisions on all of the things they need to purchase in modern life. Morever, the manufacturers are constantly bombarding those same people with misinformation and half-truths to promote their products. (This soap is Antibacterial!!!)

    Without a ban, tax tweaks, or large mandatory warning box on the package that says "This vacuum an ineficient power hog. Do not buy.", then absolutely nothing will happen. (I'll also point out that the difference between increasing the tax on one thing and rebating it on something else is purely academic. They're both effectively raising the share of overall tax burden on one set of goods and reducing it on the complementery set.)

  23. Re:"Anything more than a runtime and a language" on Oracle Hasn't Killed Java -- But There's Still Time · · Score: 1

    Just look at the havoc that ensues if your filesync software accidentally removes the whitespace from the beginning of the lines.

    In that case, you're not running file sync software. You're running a file transformation program.

    The same thing would happen to Java files if you had a file transformation program that removed curly braces.

  24. Re:Fucking anti-social Millennials on Hotel Chain Plans Phone-Based Check-in and Room Access · · Score: 1

    I bet you're that guy at the front of the line who misremebers the price of what you bought and makes them send the bagger sauntering to the back of the store for a price check, and then doesn't even start to open his 19th century checkbook until the final tally is rung up, and then fills the whole check out glacially topped off by a pointlessly legible signature, then finally hands the check over so that the cashier can slowly scribble the entire contents of your drivers license over it.

    And you wonder why I'm so thankful for self checkouts, even though I'm not even nearly a "millenial".

  25. Lab conversation on The Problems With Drug Testing · · Score: 3, Funny

    Unlicensed doc: "The police called about a murderous drug-fueled rampage. Who did you say that test subject #37 was?"

    Assistant: "Abby someone."

    Doc: "Abby who?"

    Assistant: "Abby... Normal."