Slashdot Mirror


User: WillAdams

WillAdams's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
1,850
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 1,850

  1. Re:How about a BICYCLE with this tech? on It's Not a Car, It's a Self-Balancing Electric Motorcycle (Video) · · Score: 1

    The problem is that there isn't that much energy to harvest --- look at some of the electric conversions --- every one which I've seen which has considered regenerative energy has rejected it 'cause it doesn't make up for the added weight.

  2. Re:One Problem on 2 US Senators Propose 12-Cent Gas Tax Increase · · Score: 1

    The bad thing is the per-axle nature of the vehicle taxes actually encourages the design of tractor-trailor designs which do even more damage --- change it to a tax based on GVW divided by the contact area of the tires (and do a tire tax based on the mass of the tire) and you'd encourage the design of vehicles which aren't so hard on the roads.

  3. Re:FF Motorcycle Solved? on It's Not a Car, It's a Self-Balancing Electric Motorcycle (Video) · · Score: 1

    Agree, it's an interesting solution.

    If the price point were more like to that of Elio Motors, $6,800: http://www.eliomotors.com/

    it'd be a lot more interesting, and I'm certainly looking forward to seeing someone make an electric version of the Elio or something like it.

    William
    (who rode his daughter's bicycle in to work today)

  4. Re:Tired of this country being a PRC province. on Chinese-Built Cars Are Coming To the US Next Year · · Score: 1

    And looking forward to Elio Motors as well:

    http://www.eliomotors.com/

  5. Re:interesting on Mayday Anti-PAC On Its Second Round of Funding · · Score: 1

    Agreed.

    I think it'd be a reasonable start to limit political contributions to:

      - no amount larger than $100 (make this a multiple of the current minimum wage so that the law doesn't need to be up-dated)
      - must be done as a check or money order written out by hand
      - must arrive in an envelope w/ no other funds (though as many pages of letter as the sender deems fit).

    And/or, let's repeal the 17th amendment and go back to having state legislatures electing Senators --- but put in some checks and balances that the voters' will needs to be followed.

  6. Re:Problem1: Police don't think they are civilians on America 'Has Become a War Zone' · · Score: 1

    Good argument for living where the local police is a Sheriff's Department overseen by an elected official.

  7. bloodless revolution (was Re:Get used to it.) on US Marshals Seize Police Stingray Records To Keep Them From the ACLU · · Score: 1

    Imagine if there was a bloodless, non-violent revolution and the media chose not to broadcast it:

    http://guardianlv.com/2013/12/...

  8. Re:Lazy. on Kickstarter Expands Allowed Projects, Automates Launches · · Score: 1

    Except they also ban weapons and weapons accessories, to include, but not limited to axes, and knives, and archery gear.

  9. Re:looks decent on Apple Announces New Programming Language Called Swift · · Score: 1

    Yes, but GNUstep is still waiting in the wings --- curious to see how this plays out long-term and if it becomes necessary for the GNUstep folks to implement a version of this, and if it does, if this results in the jump start that project needs.

  10. Re:Probably possible on 'Curiosity' Lead Engineer Suggests Printing Humans On Other Planets · · Score: 1

    That would be Vernor Vinge's science fiction short story ``Long Shot'':

    http://books.google.com/books?...

  11. Go volunteer in an iron lung ward on Mutant Registration vs. Vaccine Registration · · Score: 1

    Then, tell me you don't want your kids vaccinated.

  12. Re:Why not ask for a Jet Engine on a Motorcycle? on I Want a Kindle Killer · · Score: 1

    Jet engine on motorcycle --- MarineTurbine 2000: http://www.marineturbine.com/d...

    Agree, the OP would be better served by a Surface or similar device --- my problem w/ the most recent crop of them (I need to replace my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121):

      - display not daylight viewable --- no one seems to use a transflective LCD aside from some ruggedized units intended for military/police use
      - moving away from Wacom stylus technology --- the Surface 3 uses an N-Trig digitizer, and I've had my fill of AAAA batteries and weird driver support issues

  13. Re:Come again? on Printed Circuits as Part of a 3-D Printed Object (Video) · · Score: 1

    You forgot to insert ``3-axis'' before CNC mills at the beginning of your comment.

    A 5-axis machine can make pretty much anything which the tooling is appropriate for, and they're getting much more affordable: http://www.pocketnc.com/produc...

  14. Re:Everything that has a beginning, has an end. on World's First Dedicated Gaming Magazine Is Facing Closure · · Score: 2

    Ted Nelson wanted to do that (bill content reader and pay content creator) w/ Xanadu --- well worth reading up on.

  15. Outdoor viewable display? on Surface Pro 3 Has 12" Screen, Intel Inside · · Score: 1

    Does anyone make one?

    I still haven't found a replacement for my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121 (I use it as a map-reader when travelling, and to control my Shapeoko (hobby-level CNC mill) when I'm using it on my back porch) --- the transflective display seems the best option, but no one seems to be making units w/ it outside of ruggedized units for the police and military (which are heavier than I'd prefer).

  16. Loudest sound in the world on Gun Rights Groups Say They Don't Oppose Smart Guns, Just Mandates · · Score: 1

    hearing ``click'' when you want to hear ``bang''.

    How many instances will there be of a firearm refusing to fire and thus endangering the life of the user?

    How many of those 4,000 children had firearms safety training?

    Given that shooting is the only academic sport which has _never_ had an injury in the U.S., why not mandate that it be a part of the curriculum, and that all children receive firearms safety education appropriate to their age each year?

    It's just like requiring backup cameras on cars --- it might prevent a handful of injuries statistically (and 4,000 incidents for over 300,000,000 firearms is rather a small handful, no?) --- but it will increase the expense for everyone.

  17. Re:Only Creative Cloud? on Adobe Creative Cloud Is Back · · Score: 1

    Have fun monetizing your project w/o being able to bill U.S. clients.

  18. Re:Only Creative Cloud? on Adobe Creative Cloud Is Back · · Score: 2

    The problem is, Adobe has bought up so much of the industry that they have a huge warchest of patents.

    They also aren't terribly nice about sharing information to competitors --- look at how poorly FreeHand handled .pdfs for one example --- the devs complained that Adobe was _not_ forthcoming about aspects of the format which were needed to improve it.

  19. Re:The best part... on Adobe Creative Cloud Services Offline (Again?) · · Score: 2

    It's nice that there are alternatives for some of the apps, but things don't look so good for other apps:

      - InDesign --- Quark still hasn't caught back up, and Scribus is painful to use, w/ bizarre feature limitations --- I use LyX and xelatex (and moving to lualatex) instead, but not many people are willing to do that
      - Illustrator --- I'd rather have FreeHand, but still find Illustrator more capable than Corel Draw and Inkscape
      - PhotoShop --- fortunately, these are just pixel files, so anything will work, but the blunt truth is, if one is billing by the hour, you're probably leaving money on the table if you're not using PhotoShop

    &c.

  20. Re:The best part... on Adobe Creative Cloud Services Offline (Again?) · · Score: 1

    The sad thing is, I'm pretty sure that Adobe has had this in the works for over a decade now --- it's pretty obvious that for each application they identified a couple of killer features and set them aside to not be implemented for any version w/ perpetual licensing, implementing them only after the move to pay-as-you-go.

    It also makes the ``release'' of CS2 when the activation servers were taken off-line look like an effort to take the wind out of the sails of competing products, incl. free and opensource ones.

  21. Re:My experiences don't line up with this at all.. on Your Old CD Collection Is Dying · · Score: 1

    The first CD I ever bought was Bob Dylan's _Real Live_ back in 1984 --- still plays fine.

  22. -2000 lines of code (was Re:Average) on Ask Slashdot: Minimum Programming Competence In Order To Get a Job? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My favourite take on lines of code as a metric is from the early days of the Macintosh:

    http://www.folklore.org/StoryV...

    In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.

    Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementor, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.

    He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.

    He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.

    I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.

  23. Re:Environmentalists eat your heart out. on Feds Issue Emergency Order On Crude Oil Trains · · Score: 2

    Contemporary industrial farming practices consume (via combustion or conversion into fertilizer) 10 calories of petro-chemical energy for every 1 calorie of food energy produced.

  24. Re:Not Just Parking.... on In SF: an App For Auctioning Off Your Public Parking Spot · · Score: 1

    Why don't they require that ID be presented when showing up for the game, and that it match a name used to make the reservation?

  25. selling firearms state-to-state (was Re: Hey Tim) on First Arrest In Japan For 3D-Printed Guns · · Score: 1

    You can sell firearms across state lines just fine --- the transaction just has to take place at an FFL in the state-of-residence of the purchaser and be legal in the destination state.