That's what I'm trying to explain. Either you dissipate 50 W into the air drag on a road bike, or 50 W into a generator on a stationary bike. Someone who's trained can do 150 W for a few hours, but for people who don't exercise regularly, 50 W is more realistic.
10MPH isn't at all hard to maintain (especially with no wind), and if that gives you 75-100w,
Unfortunately, power due to air drag (the major resistance for a lightweight road bike) scales with the 3rd power of the velocity. 75 W amounts to 22 km/h (14 mph). I used the equation P=0.2 v^3 + 4 v with v in m/s, which accounts for the air drag and rolling resistance of a typical racing bike. The numbers are different for bikes with a less aerodynamic posture and thicker tires, but I would say easy-going on a bike will give you 50 W max, which would be about 40 W with generator and voltage conversion losses.
Still enough to power a laptop as long as the cpu and harddisk usage isn't maxed out.
A bicycle generator can fairly easily output 150-200W.
Yes, if it is a well-trained cyclist who is riding the bicycle. On a road bike, 200 W is equivalent to cycling around 33 km/h (20 mph), assuming that the generator itself has 100% conversion efficiency. No way that someone who's in a bad or mediocre shape will do that for more than 5 minutes.
One thing I've done on my site is bayasian filtering of new comments.
Interesting idea. How well does it work as expressed in false/true positive/negative rates?
I can use those two corpuses (corpii?) to filter against.
Corpora. In Latin there is no such thing as an -ii ending, which is only used in l33tsp34k virus/virii. Corpus is a 3rd declension word with neuter gender.
New stories should cost more to moderate than old ones. Moderating a post in a day-old story should only cost 1/10 of a moderation point.
After second thought I'll add to my previous comment that it might be better to hand out moderation points more often and make only 2 out of 5 points valid for new discussions (for example younger than 6 hours).
Even small residential units could be tremendously benefited. The average person requires 125 gal/day.
What?? Here in the Netherlands, which does not exactly have a water shortage, the water consumption for residential use is about 125 liters per day per person.[1] That is about 4 times less! What do you do with all that water?
This post will almost certainly get modded into the basement, but what the hell.
I wish people didn't use this type of karma-whoring phrases. If the post is not utter flamebait or troll, it has a fair chance of being modded up by a moderator who wants to prove to himself that he can value a comment that doesn't agree with his own opinion. (I think I've done that myself one of the first times I had mod points. Now I never mod such posts, even if I think they deserve it based on the rest of the content.)
Some days I wish I could set the threshold to a range from 1 to 3 so that I could block out the pointless shiny comments that got moderated to 5 by the crack users.
You can use your Slashdot preferences to give bonus points to "offtopic" and "flamebait", and penalty points to "insightful", if you want. I browse with flamebait +2 because sometimes posts are modded down for disagreeing with the moderator, but it turns out to be justified 9 out of 10 times IMHO.
in the Netherlands... would require the thief to change the SIM card, which would make his action less than free (gratis).
Well, they used the IMEI number of the phone that is tied to the hardware, although someone with the rights skills might be able to change the flash memory where it's stored. (By the way, you can see the number by typing *#06#). It requires cooperation of the mobile phone providers though, that should have a blacklist of stolen IMEI numbers and take appropriate action as soon as a stolen phone connects to the network.
If this is a private initiative, it seems unlikely that all providers are going to cooperate with keeping track of IMEIs. It's more likely to work by sending a special SMS message to the phone number, which can easily be circumvented by the thief if he recognizes that it is a "screaming" phone and replaces the SIM directly after the theft.
And never mind that you have to figure out the call center phone number to report the loss because all your phone numbers are stored inside the handset. By the way, how is this going to help you get back your phone? The thief will get rid of the phone, and it might be found by someone. But you need a secure system to make sure that only the rightful owner can de-scream it.
I hate sites that require registration to access "free" content.
What's even worse is if they let in the search engine spiders (Googlebot etc.) but require registration (and sometimes even payment) from human visitors. Whenever I encounter such a site, I report it to http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html as a cloaked page. If enough people do this, maybe Google will do something about it.
It's like this: You're looking into the bedroom window of the hot naked girl across the street, and she pulls the blinds to stop you. Who if anyone committed a crime here?
I'm not so sure about the answer if she shines a laserbeam equivalent to 100 laser pointers into your eyes. (By the way dvd burners contain fairly powerful lasers)
OK, we've heard from the report that the Chinese have tried to blind a satellite.
Lasers that can deliver 10 J of visible light in a pulse of a few tens of nanoseconds are reasonably standard products nowadays, available commercially for less than $100,000. Such lasers can produce 532 nm (green) pulses at 10 Hz repetition rate. You can easily steer a laser beam with 10 microrad accuracy, which means 5 meters at 500 km altitude where the spy satellites are. If you design the optics such that the laser pulse strikes an area with a 5 meter diameter, and the camera on the satellite has an aperture of 20 cm, the camera will receive about 15 mJ that is going to be focused down to a single pixel on the camera sensor. There's no doubt that that will cause significant damage to the sensor, if the camera happened to be looking at the laser source. Otherwise, the pulse will probably not do more create an overexposure if the camera happened to be taking a photo at that very moment. (Disclaimer: these numbers don't take atmospheric disturbances into account)
The question is whether you can reach this beampointing accuracy on a target that moves at 10 km/s. That shouldn't be too hard, since the trajectory of a satellite is known well in advance and you only have to trigger the laser pulse with an accuracy of a few tenths of a millisecond. You can use the same optical telescope that you use to fire the laser to observe the satellite's trajectory. The only problem is that you would have to do it during the night when the camera is likely to be switched off.
So the "system" relies on a user's ability to click a button at the exact millisecond of a complete 360 degree revolution of a rapidly spinning device?
No, but it is enough if the computer can predict on which half of the wheel the ball will end up. If that means that the chance of picking the right number (and winning 36 times your bet) increases from 1 in 37 to 2 in 37, it is the difference between 1-36/37 = 2.7% loss and 72/37-1 = 95% profit.
After all, the ball is being released by a HUMAN while the wheel is turning the other way, and the wheel's starting point varies every time a new gambling round is launched (the wheel isn't placed in a predetermined way before being spun).
TFA explains that the cheater is supposed to push a button every time the 0 (or some other point on the wheel) makes a full turn. This way the computer knows the position and velocity of the wheel with a fairly high accuracy. If it is statistically likely that the ball hits the wheel on the left side of the table, the computer can calculate what part of the wheel will pass the left side of the table by the time it has slowed down enough to catch the ball.
1) No one will see what comes after that unless you like viewing the source of a webpage as opposed to an actual page.
Common web browsers (I just tried Opera, FF, and Lynx) will happily display everything after the closing tag. You would have to put it inside <!-- --> comment delimiters, but then it doesn't matter whether it is before or after the closing tag. Unless the attack doesn't work if the --> has to come at the end, but then you can just omit the closing tag. Only an XHTML-compliant browser would complain. From cursory scanning TFA it is not clear to me what the reason is for mentioning the closing </html.
you'll have one where all that stuff goes into a deep body of water where no odor can escape
Splash!
The American toilets don't splash because the water level is much higher than the modern European style, but OTOH they consume much more water for each flush (at least I think so).
I would not use thermocouples. They need expensive wiring and they are not particularly accurate if you want to measure differences of less than 1 C. A thermistor with a four-wire cable (2 for voltage supply, 2 for measuring voltage over the thermistor) is more suitable for such applications. With a thermocouple will need a thermistor anyway for the cold/warm junction compensation. There are companies that make cheap USB thermometers ($30 per piece) based on thermistors. I have positive experience with Papouch. The sensor cables can be up to 20 m or so and the USB cable up to 128 m. I think there are USB-over-ethernet convertors for longer cable runs. Of course, you still have to make sure that the electronics work at low temperatures, but it's easier than a whole computer.
Neat oxygen is, of course, very dangerous. It can be combined with pretty much any fuel to produce an explosive.
In the overhead compartment of the plane, there are big bottles of pressurized oxygen. Just pretend you're taking out your luggage and disconnect the bottle. That's much easier than synthesizing it from you contact lens solution.:)
And what percentage of the cupboard space below the display shelves?
No idea. But I know people with a digital audio player, and I see them in the train on a daily basis. The iPod really isn't that popular in this part of Europe.
The iPod is practically [...] synonymous with "portable music player"
Maybe in the US. Here in Netherlands they are commonly called 'mp3-speler' (=mp3 player).
nearly all - over 92% - of all hard drive-based portable music players actually are iPods.
Again, maybe in the US. The US is not the whole world. From what I have seen a typical electronics store here devotes some 5 to 10% of the digital audio player shelve space to iPods. For HD-based players is might be a bit more, but nowhere near the majority. It might have to do with the fact that in the first few years, the iTMS would not sell outside the US.
My mp3 player is an iAudio which I use almost exclusively for Ogg Vorbis files. Maybe Apple should also go after them for using the 'i'?
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That's what I'm trying to explain. Either you dissipate 50 W into the air drag on a road bike, or 50 W into a generator on a stationary bike. Someone who's trained can do 150 W for a few hours, but for people who don't exercise regularly, 50 W is more realistic.
Unfortunately, power due to air drag (the major resistance for a lightweight road bike) scales with the 3rd power of the velocity. 75 W amounts to 22 km/h (14 mph). I used the equation P=0.2 v^3 + 4 v with v in m/s, which accounts for the air drag and rolling resistance of a typical racing bike. The numbers are different for bikes with a less aerodynamic posture and thicker tires, but I would say easy-going on a bike will give you 50 W max, which would be about 40 W with generator and voltage conversion losses.
Still enough to power a laptop as long as the cpu and harddisk usage isn't maxed out.
Yes, if it is a well-trained cyclist who is riding the bicycle. On a road bike, 200 W is equivalent to cycling around 33 km/h (20 mph), assuming that the generator itself has 100% conversion efficiency. No way that someone who's in a bad or mediocre shape will do that for more than 5 minutes.
You do know that Sony is a Japanese company and that iPods are assembled in China, don't you?
Not that I know. Actually, I had switched off the +1 karma bonus for that post because I didn't think it deserved that. :)
Interesting idea. How well does it work as expressed in false/true positive/negative rates?
Corpora. In Latin there is no such thing as an -ii ending, which is only used in l33tsp34k virus/virii. Corpus is a 3rd declension word with neuter gender.
After second thought I'll add to my previous comment that it might be better to hand out moderation points more often and make only 2 out of 5 points valid for new discussions (for example younger than 6 hours).
What?? Here in the Netherlands, which does not exactly have a water shortage, the water consumption for residential use is about 125 liters per day per person.[1] That is about 4 times less! What do you do with all that water?
I wish people didn't use this type of karma-whoring phrases. If the post is not utter flamebait or troll, it has a fair chance of being modded up by a moderator who wants to prove to himself that he can value a comment that doesn't agree with his own opinion. (I think I've done that myself one of the first times I had mod points. Now I never mod such posts, even if I think they deserve it based on the rest of the content.)
So in your system, with just one moderation access I can moderate somebody's karma from 'excellent' down to 'terrible'?
You can use your Slashdot preferences to give bonus points to "offtopic" and "flamebait", and penalty points to "insightful", if you want. I browse with flamebait +2 because sometimes posts are modded down for disagreeing with the moderator, but it turns out to be justified 9 out of 10 times IMHO.
I did that as a kid. The records were ruined. My father was not happy since he borrowed the records from the library. :-)
Well, they used the IMEI number of the phone that is tied to the hardware, although someone with the rights skills might be able to change the flash memory where it's stored. (By the way, you can see the number by typing *#06#). It requires cooperation of the mobile phone providers though, that should have a blacklist of stolen IMEI numbers and take appropriate action as soon as a stolen phone connects to the network.
If this is a private initiative, it seems unlikely that all providers are going to cooperate with keeping track of IMEIs. It's more likely to work by sending a special SMS message to the phone number, which can easily be circumvented by the thief if he recognizes that it is a "screaming" phone and replaces the SIM directly after the theft.
And never mind that you have to figure out the call center phone number to report the loss because all your phone numbers are stored inside the handset. By the way, how is this going to help you get back your phone? The thief will get rid of the phone, and it might be found by someone. But you need a secure system to make sure that only the rightful owner can de-scream it.
What's even worse is if they let in the search engine spiders (Googlebot etc.) but require registration (and sometimes even payment) from human visitors. Whenever I encounter such a site, I report it to http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html as a cloaked page. If enough people do this, maybe Google will do something about it.
I'm not so sure about the answer if she shines a laserbeam equivalent to 100 laser pointers into your eyes. (By the way dvd burners contain fairly powerful lasers)
Lasers that can deliver 10 J of visible light in a pulse of a few tens of nanoseconds are reasonably standard products nowadays, available commercially for less than $100,000. Such lasers can produce 532 nm (green) pulses at 10 Hz repetition rate. You can easily steer a laser beam with 10 microrad accuracy, which means 5 meters at 500 km altitude where the spy satellites are. If you design the optics such that the laser pulse strikes an area with a 5 meter diameter, and the camera on the satellite has an aperture of 20 cm, the camera will receive about 15 mJ that is going to be focused down to a single pixel on the camera sensor. There's no doubt that that will cause significant damage to the sensor, if the camera happened to be looking at the laser source. Otherwise, the pulse will probably not do more create an overexposure if the camera happened to be taking a photo at that very moment. (Disclaimer: these numbers don't take atmospheric disturbances into account)
The question is whether you can reach this beampointing accuracy on a target that moves at 10 km/s. That shouldn't be too hard, since the trajectory of a satellite is known well in advance and you only have to trigger the laser pulse with an accuracy of a few tenths of a millisecond. You can use the same optical telescope that you use to fire the laser to observe the satellite's trajectory. The only problem is that you would have to do it during the night when the camera is likely to be switched off.
Or 28,000 kWh per year, i.e. $2800 at $0.10 per kWh (not sure what the going rate is nowadays).
Common web browsers (I just tried Opera, FF, and Lynx) will happily display everything after the closing tag. You would have to put it inside <!-- --> comment delimiters, but then it doesn't matter whether it is before or after the closing tag. Unless the attack doesn't work if the --> has to come at the end, but then you can just omit the closing tag. Only an XHTML-compliant browser would complain. From cursory scanning TFA it is not clear to me what the reason is for mentioning the closing </html.
The American toilets don't splash because the water level is much higher than the modern European style, but OTOH they consume much more water for each flush (at least I think so).
I would not use thermocouples. They need expensive wiring and they are not particularly accurate if you want to measure differences of less than 1 C. A thermistor with a four-wire cable (2 for voltage supply, 2 for measuring voltage over the thermistor) is more suitable for such applications. With a thermocouple will need a thermistor anyway for the cold/warm junction compensation. There are companies that make cheap USB thermometers ($30 per piece) based on thermistors. I have positive experience with Papouch. The sensor cables can be up to 20 m or so and the USB cable up to 128 m. I think there are USB-over-ethernet convertors for longer cable runs. Of course, you still have to make sure that the electronics work at low temperatures, but it's easier than a whole computer.
In the overhead compartment of the plane, there are big bottles of pressurized oxygen. Just pretend you're taking out your luggage and disconnect the bottle. That's much easier than synthesizing it from you contact lens solution. :)
My mp3 player is an iAudio which I use almost exclusively for Ogg Vorbis files. Maybe Apple should also go after them for using the 'i'?