He used to link his stories on slashdot directly to his blog, which was an excerpt from the real article. There was a link in his blog that went to the article proper.
So, nothing too horrible, right? There's a few extra issues:
1. It pissed people off, because they went looking for the article but had to pass through Roland's blog first.
2. Further to that, he didn't even offer anything of merit when he summarised the original article. If he'd had some truly insightful commentary there, well , ok. But most of it was basically a cut'n'paste of bits of the article, with a bit of filler like, "so yeah, lots of implications there."
3. There was also rather a lot of ads on his blog, which likely got bajillions of hits/views from him linking from slashdot. I'm all for a bit of profit, but, that smacks of someone taking advantage of the slashdot crowd. Particularly irksome was the sales pitch to people to buy ad space on his site , which specifically mentioned large amounts of traffic from tech-savvy slashdot-type people.
But I will say that he's settled down over the last 6 months and has not linked directly to his blog from his slashdot postings. But the crowd here holds a grudge for a long, long time. Ask anyone with a UID under 500,000 about JonKatz.
I hope that quote was lost in translation somewhere.
When a 10 year old kid starts saying things like, "It felt like giving life to lifeless bodies." , it's time to take a step back. When he says something like that, it implies he gives life to lifeless bodies every day.....ooooooh! Creepy....
You know after he said that to the news guy, he's thinking to himself, "Yes, foolish interviewer, I will take your soul and animate your shattered corpse to join my army of the UNDEAD!!! Mwahahhahah!"
What, sticking his thumb up things? **Shrugs** Who am I to comment on the type of things someone liked and disliked? He didn't really try stick his thumb up everything he came across, you know. Just a few crocs - that's nutthin compared to what some sickos like:-P
And a man who can get away with all his extremities intact after sticking a thumb up a croc has to get at least a little respect.
he made a stunt show thinly guised as a documentary.
All artistic or directing ability aside, he really liked doing those shows. But he helped raise awareness of a lot of environmental issues, even if it was a stunt show.
maybe if he loved what he did less than his kids he'd still be with them A little troll-ish there. You could say the same for any high-rise construction worker that liked their job. For all you and I know, that was his one great ability in his life, and he sucked at more mundane things, like flipping burgers.
Maybe if he loved what he did less than his kids he'd still be there. Or maybe then he'd be a bitter child-abusing alcoholic, having been unable to follow his dreams. Or maybe he would have been hit by a bus crossing the road during the commute to his low-paying office job in the city.
You make sacrifices for your children and I'm sure Steve made plenty. He had a job that - while risky - he loved and it paid well enough for his kids. While he's not able to be there for them now, his estate alone (and no doubt about it, some serious life insurance - Steve knew the risks) would ensure that his wife and kids are well looked after.
Poor old Steve - but at least went out was doing what he loved, as opposed to getting hit by a bus or something. I met him briefly once or twice - he was a friend of a friend - and while he used to ham it up for the cameras, he was a nice guy and very passionate about wildlife.
my 2-bedroom apartment I can think of at least 30 normal bulbs off the top of my head
Jesus Christ! Do you get sunburnt when you fall asleep with the lights on? I've a 3 bedroom house here, number of bulbs - 14. Mostly compact fluoros - except for the bathroom.
And I've a bone to pick with designers. Having a room with 8 x 50W recessed halogen lights to light it does not give a 'good mood'. It reeks of over-consumption and poor efficiency. Get some decent light fittings and even without compact fluoro's you could halve the power used to light a room.
Making the assumption that all you can do is disable the GPS antenna, and not actually tamper with the logs or the device physically, don't you think the parent might notice something when the device points out that they didn't have a GPS lock (or even PRN sighting) at any time during their little trip? In other words, your scenario wouldn't work against an even-somewhat well designed device.
If you seriously think a GPS system is able to sight through a solid carpark covering, then think again. A simple ploy like that - going to a location that loses lock and claiming that you were parked there all the time is quite plausible. Disabling the speed sensor on a recent vehicle takes 20 seconds of fumbling under the car (or a few hours of installing a speedo signal line kill switch) and allows the odo readings to match up nicely.
I won't comment on MacGyver-like abilities of kids these days, but quite a few of my rev-head friends would have been quite capable of doing it when we were that age. And rev-heads are the ones most likely to be wanting to tool around the place un-monitored, and most likely to be ones targeted by parents wanting to keep track of their hijinks.
But yes, technical merits aside, the whole trust thing is the issue. If you really can't trust your kids enough to be in charge of a potentially lethal object.... don't lend them the car and hopefully, they'll be older and wiser by the time they can afford their own. Hopefully.
To be honest, you're probably more likely to find one standard in a European car than in a Asian or American car. Also the engines need to have electronic throttles for the smoooothest speed limiters, so generally it's diesels and fairly-upmarket cars that have them.
But I can attest that it's very handy to have - dial up the speed limit and then just plonk your foot somewhere on the accelerator and it will stay active until the ignition is turned off. On my car there's a detent a little bit past full throttle that overrides the speed limiter, so if you need to you can "unlatch" it temporarily just by putting your foot all the way down - it won't switch back on until you drop below the set limit again.
And there's nothing wrong with Peugeots - except for the whole insufferably snooty French thing. But the French do make nice cars - and as for standard features, they blow away anything in a similar price range here in Australia.
Well, you can rip it out, but your car will be useless since it's often incorporated into the engine computer.
And besides, they use this data to help who was at fault. If you're not at fault, it also indicates that. If you're stationary at a red light and someone smacks into you and claims it was you that smacked into them, well the data suggests otherwise.
If you *are* at fault, well take it like a man and admit it. Jeez.
I've used a minimax with Telstra in.au , and it has a double usb lead (a y-lead) that you can use to boost power output if you need it. Pity all the areas I went with it were just 1x and not EVDO. Bastards.
It worked ok, but the 'skinnable' software interface was dog-slow. 20 seconds at startup loading pixmaps and graphic widgets before you could even press a button on it. It was crap.
saaaay.... care to post where you got those evac tube collectors from? I'm building an off-grid house in FNQ that could use those in the hot water system.
Yes,yes, I could go *buy* a solar hot water system, but where's the fun in that?
Reply or mail me at angry.deity at some place called gmail dotcom.
But check your distance to the nearest cell tower first before building that big antenna.
GSM will not connect a call beyond 35km, due to delays due to speed of light and signal processing. There's a correction/delay factor built in, but it's only 6 bits from memory - 0-63. Once you get beyond that, it won't work. I used to drive through a spot which happened to be line-of sight to a tower about 40km away - no signal until exactly 35km, then 3 bars on the phone.
All the antennas in the world won't help you after that. You could have 40km of low-loss coax directly to the cell-tower , and it still wouldn't work.
You can get a "long-range" version of GSM, but I don't think it's that widespread.
Your CRT is a couple of feet away. Your cellphone is 1/2 an inch from your brain.
Not to mention that correctly-operating CRT's do not emit copious amounts of xrays. Or the fact that the xrays are back-scattered from the shadow mask towards the back of the tube, which is shielded with a metal coating.
Sorry. Didn't want to interfere with your CRT paranoia levels. Carry on.
I would guess that installation methods weren't perfect. Epoxy hangers are mounted in hardened concrete, which means that holes have to be drilled. Have you ever tried drilling a hole in concrete with even the best equipment?
Why yes, I have. I use a Tamrock Axera 7 drill rig, which can bore 1.5 meters a minute through solid granite. It's nice. And it's got 2 drilling arms, so while one is automatically drilling, the other is getting set up for the next hole or performing other tasks (see below).
It's not easy and extremely unlikely to get a symmetric hole.
The holes that I drill are actually quite symmetric. They're also 3 meters deep and straight enough that I can put in and pull out a drill-rod with my hands with no binding. And really, there's not much requirement for a symmetric hole. The rods and epoxy combo are quite over-spec'd. Pull-to-failure tests on a nominal 3 ton retaining rod with epoxy binding is in the order of 15 tons or so normally, generally with the rod breaking somewhere before the actual section where it's bound to the rock by the epoxy.
Then there is the whole matter of mixing the epoxy correctly and having it set properly. Epoxy does not do well attaching to wet surfaces in humid conditions, and there is definitely room for the mixtures (which require a two-part chemical combination) to be put together in inacurate quantities -- even with mixing systems.
There are two part epoxy cartridges that contain the correct amount for each hole ready to go. In my case, I insert the cartridge (about the size of a large salami) into the hole, insert the bar to be epoxied in and activate my drill rig rotation using a PLC for the correct sequence (rotate for 20 seconds, delay 20 seconds, rotate 20 seconds, disengage). I remove the coupling from the end of the bar and 8 hours later it can (and does) support 3 tons just fine, and it will continue to do so for quite a few years in crappy, loose, wet, corrosive ground conditions.
Quality assurance failure. It's a design failure from paper-tiger engineers. Give me a break!
Sounds more like "lowest bidder" failure to me. All the equipment is readily available. It just costs money.
Anyone who has to build something that will be used by someone else should be subscribed to the Risks-Forum digest.
It's titled, "Forum On Risks To The Public In Computers And Related Systems", and relates a lot of computer and general engineering related risks. Risks that either wind up killing or seriously injuring people. It's been going since 1985, and is a good read just to open your mind to what might happen.
As so many headlines on Fark read, "What could possibly go wrong?". This should always be the first thought for any engineer when they are tasked to do something.
Re:Not even funny anymore
on
The Hybrid Scooter
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Australians are in a similar situation - fuel here is the equivalent of USD3.90/gal. It's a 9 hour drive to the next largest population centre of 200,000 people. Forget rail/bus/air transport.
The most popular large sedans in Australia have 6 cylinder engines that get about 27-30mpg highway. V8's are becoming, well, not 'rare', but they're a lot less visible than they used to be. While there's plenty of large cars and 4WDs, but theres none so large as what I've seen in the states as 'common'. For example, there's one (1) F350 truck in my town of 25,000 people.
You're going to have to adapt. Your cars will shrink, they'll become more fuel-efficient and their total horsepower will reduce. But saying that, you'll still be driving them everywhere for a long time yet.
And it is reall *wasted*, because that money is mbasically lost to the enconomy, since a large portion of it is expensses the power company incurrs aquiring a non-renewable resource. It's not like it is money going from A -> B -> C, it is money going from A -> B ->
Oh noes, it is wasted! So, can I tell the power company not to bill me for all the idle currents that my appliances use? Not-Fricken-Likely. That cash isn't lost to the economy, it's given to the power company for all those electrons that they routinely push into and out of your home at 50/60Hz.
Until some dumbass sent a wrong command to the viking lander and shut it off permanently. Not a good thing to put on your resume. "Desk jockey in extended viking science mission, until I completely screwed myself out of a job."
Funny, all the NASA references these days seem to edit that little bit of info out, and merely say that it was shut off due to impending battery failure. Other sources - and my memory suggest otherwise.
Ah! Here's a reference from the RISKS digest Volume 3, Issue 60 - 1986. (A digest that is still running today, and is a highly insightful window into how technology screwups mess with daily life.)
Ground control lost contact with Viking 1, apparently due to a software change transmitted to the lander that was accidentally overlaid upon some mission-critical software already in the lander's computer. (Bruce Smith, "JPL Tries to Revive Link with Viking 1", @ux(Aviation Week and Space Technology), April 4, 1983, Volume 118(14), page 16.)
I'm fairly sure that if you were drifting away at 2km/hr, the rest of the crew could unhook the shuttle quickly enough to pick you up before your air ran out. Or use one of the soyuz capsules to go out and give you something to hang on to while they redock.
I know if *I* was one of the guys on the station and someone did get unhooked, I'd be in the shuttle/soyuz flipping switches and closing the hatch pretty quick.
And you'd have to be discreet about it, because forming porn into discrete patterns for your kids is something that you generally don't want people to know about.
So, is discreet a common synonym for discrete worldwide? They're two separate things here in.au
Slashdot Mirror
He used to link his stories on slashdot directly to his blog, which was an excerpt from the real article. There was a link in his blog that went to the article proper.
So, nothing too horrible, right? There's a few extra issues:
1. It pissed people off, because they went looking for the article but had to pass through Roland's blog first.
2. Further to that, he didn't even offer anything of merit when he summarised the original article. If he'd had some truly insightful commentary there, well , ok. But most of it was basically a cut'n'paste of bits of the article, with a bit of filler like, "so yeah, lots of implications there."
3. There was also rather a lot of ads on his blog, which likely got bajillions of hits/views from him linking from slashdot. I'm all for a bit of profit, but, that smacks of someone taking advantage of the slashdot crowd. Particularly irksome was the sales pitch to people to buy ad space on his site , which specifically mentioned large amounts of traffic from tech-savvy slashdot-type people.
But I will say that he's settled down over the last 6 months and has not linked directly to his blog from his slashdot postings. But the crowd here holds a grudge for a long, long time. Ask anyone with a UID under 500,000 about JonKatz.
I hope that quote was lost in translation somewhere.
....ooooooh! Creepy....
When a 10 year old kid starts saying things like, "It felt like giving life to lifeless bodies." , it's time to take a step back. When he says something like that, it implies he gives life to lifeless bodies every day.
You know after he said that to the news guy, he's thinking to himself, "Yes, foolish interviewer, I will take your soul and animate your shattered corpse to join my army of the UNDEAD!!! Mwahahhahah!"
What, sticking his thumb up things? :-P
**Shrugs** Who am I to comment on the type of things someone liked and disliked? He didn't really try stick his thumb up everything he came across, you know. Just a few crocs - that's nutthin compared to what some sickos like
And a man who can get away with all his extremities intact after sticking a thumb up a croc has to get at least a little respect.
he made a stunt show thinly guised as a documentary.
All artistic or directing ability aside, he really liked doing those shows. But he helped raise awareness of a lot of environmental issues, even if it was a stunt show.
maybe if he loved what he did less than his kids he'd still be with them
A little troll-ish there. You could say the same for any high-rise construction worker that liked their job. For all you and I know, that was his one great ability in his life, and he sucked at more mundane things, like flipping burgers.
Maybe if he loved what he did less than his kids he'd still be there.
Or maybe then he'd be a bitter child-abusing alcoholic, having been unable to follow his dreams.
Or maybe he would have been hit by a bus crossing the road during the commute to his low-paying office job in the city.
You make sacrifices for your children and I'm sure Steve made plenty. He had a job that - while risky - he loved and it paid well enough for his kids. While he's not able to be there for them now, his estate alone (and no doubt about it, some serious life insurance - Steve knew the risks) would ensure that his wife and kids are well looked after.
Poor old Steve - but at least went out was doing what he loved, as opposed to getting hit by a bus or something.
I met him briefly once or twice - he was a friend of a friend - and while he used to ham it up for the cameras, he was a nice guy and very passionate about wildlife.
*sigh*
He will be missed.
Hmmm. Guess I don't really need swap after all.
my 2-bedroom apartment I can think of at least 30 normal bulbs off the top of my head
Jesus Christ! Do you get sunburnt when you fall asleep with the lights on?
I've a 3 bedroom house here, number of bulbs - 14. Mostly compact fluoros - except for the bathroom.
And I've a bone to pick with designers. Having a room with 8 x 50W recessed halogen lights to light it does not give a 'good mood'. It reeks of over-consumption and poor efficiency. Get some decent light fittings and even without compact fluoro's you could halve the power used to light a room.
Making the assumption that all you can do is disable the GPS antenna, and not actually tamper with the logs or the device physically, don't you think the parent might notice something when the device points out that they didn't have a GPS lock (or even PRN sighting) at any time during their little trip? In other words, your scenario wouldn't work against an even-somewhat well designed device.
If you seriously think a GPS system is able to sight through a solid carpark covering, then think again. A simple ploy like that - going to a location that loses lock and claiming that you were parked there all the time is quite plausible. Disabling the speed sensor on a recent vehicle takes 20 seconds of fumbling under the car (or a few hours of installing a speedo signal line kill switch) and allows the odo readings to match up nicely.
I won't comment on MacGyver-like abilities of kids these days, but quite a few of my rev-head friends would have been quite capable of doing it when we were that age. And rev-heads are the ones most likely to be wanting to tool around the place un-monitored, and most likely to be ones targeted by parents wanting to keep track of their hijinks.
But yes, technical merits aside, the whole trust thing is the issue. If you really can't trust your kids enough to be in charge of a potentially lethal object.... don't lend them the car and hopefully, they'll be older and wiser by the time they can afford their own. Hopefully.
Couldn't be bothered reading TFA.
Solution :
1. Drive into covered car park at mall.
2. Fit alfoil to GPS antenna.
3. Proceed to drive as fast as you want, wherever you like.
4. Drive back to mall.
5. Remove alfoil from antenna.
6. Drive home.
7. Tell parents you spent a few hours lounging listlessly at the mall, suffering in your teenage angst.
If it logs ignition on time, it would be trickier. But not that much trickier for the average teen.
To be honest, you're probably more likely to find one standard in a European car than in a Asian or American car. Also the engines need to have electronic throttles for the smoooothest speed limiters, so generally it's diesels and fairly-upmarket cars that have them.
But I can attest that it's very handy to have - dial up the speed limit and then just plonk your foot somewhere on the accelerator and it will stay active until the ignition is turned off. On my car there's a detent a little bit past full throttle that overrides the speed limiter, so if you need to you can "unlatch" it temporarily just by putting your foot all the way down - it won't switch back on until you drop below the set limit again.
And there's nothing wrong with Peugeots - except for the whole insufferably snooty French thing. But the French do make nice cars - and as for standard features, they blow away anything in a similar price range here in Australia.
What, you mean like the speed limiter on my car fitted as standard, which lets me pick any speed I like and will throttle off when I reach it?
:-P
They've been around for more than a few years now - go buy a better car
Well, you can rip it out, but your car will be useless since it's often incorporated into the engine computer.
And besides, they use this data to help who was at fault. If you're not at fault, it also indicates that.
If you're stationary at a red light and someone smacks into you and claims it was you that smacked into them, well the data suggests otherwise.
If you *are* at fault, well take it like a man and admit it. Jeez.
There's another EVDO usb modem around - I wonder if they share the same asian chipset.
.au , and it has a double usb lead (a y-lead) that you can use to boost power output if you need it. Pity all the areas I went with it were just 1x and not EVDO. Bastards.
I've used a minimax with Telstra in
It worked ok, but the 'skinnable' software interface was dog-slow. 20 seconds at startup loading pixmaps and graphic widgets before you could even press a button on it. It was crap.
saaaay.... care to post where you got those evac tube collectors from? I'm building an off-grid house in FNQ that could use those in the hot water system.
Yes,yes, I could go *buy* a solar hot water system, but where's the fun in that?
Reply or mail me at angry.deity at some place called gmail dotcom.
Cheers,
Colaman
But check your distance to the nearest cell tower first before building that big antenna.
GSM will not connect a call beyond 35km, due to delays due to speed of light and signal processing.
There's a correction/delay factor built in, but it's only 6 bits from memory - 0-63. Once you get beyond that, it won't work. I used to drive through a spot which happened to be line-of sight to a tower about 40km away - no signal until exactly 35km, then 3 bars on the phone.
All the antennas in the world won't help you after that. You could have 40km of low-loss coax directly to the cell-tower , and it still wouldn't work.
You can get a "long-range" version of GSM, but I don't think it's that widespread.
Your CRT is a couple of feet away.
Your cellphone is 1/2 an inch from your brain.
Not to mention that correctly-operating CRT's do not emit copious amounts of xrays.
Or the fact that the xrays are back-scattered from the shadow mask towards the back of the tube, which is shielded with a metal coating.
Sorry. Didn't want to interfere with your CRT paranoia levels. Carry on.
I would guess that installation methods weren't perfect. Epoxy hangers are mounted in hardened concrete, which means that holes have to be drilled. Have you ever tried drilling a hole in concrete with even the best equipment?
Why yes, I have. I use a Tamrock Axera 7 drill rig, which can bore 1.5 meters a minute through solid granite. It's nice. And it's got 2 drilling arms, so while one is automatically drilling, the other is getting set up for the next hole or performing other tasks (see below).
It's not easy and extremely unlikely to get a symmetric hole.
The holes that I drill are actually quite symmetric. They're also 3 meters deep and straight enough that I can put in and pull out a drill-rod with my hands with no binding. And really, there's not much requirement for a symmetric hole. The rods and epoxy combo are quite over-spec'd. Pull-to-failure tests on a nominal 3 ton retaining rod with epoxy binding is in the order of 15 tons or so normally, generally with the rod breaking somewhere before the actual section where it's bound to the rock by the epoxy.
Then there is the whole matter of mixing the epoxy correctly and having it set properly. Epoxy does not do well attaching to wet surfaces in humid conditions, and there is definitely room for the mixtures (which require a two-part chemical combination) to be put together in inacurate quantities -- even with mixing systems.
There are two part epoxy cartridges that contain the correct amount for each hole ready to go. In my case, I insert the cartridge (about the size of a large salami) into the hole, insert the bar to be epoxied in and activate my drill rig rotation using a PLC for the correct sequence (rotate for 20 seconds, delay 20 seconds, rotate 20 seconds, disengage). I remove the coupling from the end of the bar and 8 hours later it can (and does) support 3 tons just fine, and it will continue to do so for quite a few years in crappy, loose, wet, corrosive ground conditions.
Quality assurance failure. It's a design failure from paper-tiger engineers. Give me a break!
Sounds more like "lowest bidder" failure to me. All the equipment is readily available. It just costs money.
Anyone who has to build something that will be used by someone else should be subscribed to the Risks-Forum digest.
It's titled, "Forum On Risks To The Public In Computers And Related Systems", and relates a lot of computer and general engineering related risks. Risks that either wind up killing or seriously injuring people. It's been going since 1985, and is a good read just to open your mind to what might happen.
As so many headlines on Fark read, "What could possibly go wrong?". This should always be the first thought for any engineer when they are tasked to do something.
Australians are in a similar situation - fuel here is the equivalent of USD3.90/gal.
It's a 9 hour drive to the next largest population centre of 200,000 people. Forget rail/bus/air transport.
The most popular large sedans in Australia have 6 cylinder engines that get about 27-30mpg highway. V8's are becoming, well, not 'rare', but they're a lot less visible than they used to be. While there's plenty of large cars and 4WDs, but theres none so large as what I've seen in the states as 'common'. For example, there's one (1) F350 truck in my town of 25,000 people.
You're going to have to adapt. Your cars will shrink, they'll become more fuel-efficient and their total horsepower will reduce. But saying that, you'll still be driving them everywhere for a long time yet.
And it is reall *wasted*, because that money is mbasically lost to the enconomy, since a large portion of it is expensses the power company incurrs aquiring a non-renewable resource. It's not like it is money going from A -> B -> C, it is money going from A -> B ->
Oh noes, it is wasted! So, can I tell the power company not to bill me for all the idle currents that my appliances use? Not-Fricken-Likely. That cash isn't lost to the economy, it's given to the power company for all those electrons that they routinely push into and out of your home at 50/60Hz.
Until some dumbass sent a wrong command to the viking lander and shut it off permanently.
Not a good thing to put on your resume.
"Desk jockey in extended viking science mission, until I completely screwed myself out of a job."
Funny, all the NASA references these days seem to edit that little bit of info out, and merely say that it was shut off due to impending battery failure. Other sources - and my memory suggest otherwise.
Ah! Here's a reference from the RISKS digest Volume 3, Issue 60 - 1986. (A digest that is still running today, and is a highly insightful window into how technology screwups mess with daily life.)
Ground control lost contact with Viking 1, apparently due to a
software change transmitted to the lander that was accidentally
overlaid upon some mission-critical software already in the lander's
computer. (Bruce Smith, "JPL Tries to Revive Link with Viking 1",
@ux(Aviation Week and Space Technology), April 4, 1983, Volume
118(14), page 16.)
A scanned image of the mentioned article, right at the bottom of the page.
Revisionist history, indeed.
cement the internet as a viable distribution vehicle.
You know, like cement overshoes that helps distribute Jimmy the Squealer to the bottom of the sea bed.
I'm fairly sure that if you were drifting away at 2km/hr, the rest of the crew could unhook the shuttle quickly enough to pick you up before your air ran out. Or use one of the soyuz capsules to go out and give you something to hang on to while they redock.
I know if *I* was one of the guys on the station and someone did get unhooked, I'd be in the shuttle/soyuz flipping switches and closing the hatch pretty quick.
And you'd have to be discreet about it, because forming porn into discrete patterns for your kids is something that you generally don't want people to know about.
.au
So, is discreet a common synonym for discrete worldwide? They're two separate things here in
Hell, I'm only 2700km east of you. I'll drop in next week sometime.