Wish I had mod points. Finally something informative from an actual pilot instead of a bunch of blowhards.
Hell, I only fly simulators (XPlane) and even there it's clear that automatic landings are last-choice affair. They can't deal with the unexpected (gusts, incursions) at all.
Alas, no. The reason stuff like satellites burn up on reentry is that they are moving at least 28000 km/hr (about mach 24) when they reach the atmosphere.
They had to be going that fast to be orbiting to begin with.
A very high altitude drop from initial zero speed will reach a pretty high terminal velocity where the air is thin (even mach 1), but it's nowhere near
enough to cause a burn up.
What you and others keep missing here is that the Linux kernel devs maintain the Linux kernel, not virtualbox.
Virtualbox is not part of the Linux kernel. Distros like Ubuntu will include it for your convenience, but the Linux kernel team
has absolutely nothing to do with it. It's not their project.
Do you expect the Mozilla team to fix bugs in third party Firefox plugins? Especially plugins they don't even personally use?
In this case they are simply flagging that a third party driver known to have bugs is loaded. When the virtualbox crew, or perhaps somebody
who actually uses it and has dev skills to fix it straighten it out, they'll remove the flag.
You wouldn't expect the mythtv developers to fix virtualbox bugs, would you?
Then why would you expect the kernel developers to do so? It's not their project.
This is you do it. You just break into the warden's office, find his PC, go to a command line and enter:
UNLOCK ALL INMATE DOORS
DEACTIVATE SECURITY SYSTEM
.
You left out a critical step. The computer will respond with ACCESS DENIED, at which point you type OVERRIDE
I used to drive by the Inco Superstack near Sudbury, Ontario occasionally. That's the second tallest in the world. It's one of those things that just seems to hang around the skyline forever as you drive.
The CN Tower in Toronto is similar. When sailing on Lake Ontario, you can go on multiday trips and the damn thing is still always there poking over the horizon.
It's visible from the other side of the lake, in New York state.
to generate electricity, but isn't a major hurdle for projects like this one the distance from where the electricity will be consumed? They're confining this to the desert, because of the daytime temps, but most power is being used on either coast, thousands of miles away.
It's called a "transmission line".
The James Bay Project in northern Quebec has some 4800 km of transmission line
to get the power from the arctic to the consumers in southern Quebec.
Not to nitpick here, but there's usually more than one crewmember in the cockpit.
Usually.
So you wait until the other guy goes to take a pee, and then you put the aircraft in a crash dive. It's awfully hard for anyone to get back into the cockpit
during a zero gee vertical.
Alternately, on final approach, at the last minute you do an aileron roll to invert and pull back. This takes seconds, and there is absolutely nothing the other pilot can do to recover. Really, aircraft are so close to stall on final approach that any brash manoeuvre is unrecoverable.
The point is not to scan pilots. It's to scan people *dressed* as pilots.
You exempt *foo*, and (the thinking goes) people will disguise themselves as a foo. See 'Catch Me If You Can'.
The thinking is, of course, overly simplistic, but it also provides easy-to-follow rules - scan everyone.
Pilots are allowed to carry guns these days.
I heard a complaint from one pilot how absurd things are: he shows his ID, puts his pistol in a tray for the X-ray machine, walks through the metal detector,
and picks up his pistol on the other side.
Why is the pilot's union telling them to avoid the machines? (Honest question)
Two simple reasons:
1. They get enough radiation already, thank you
2. WTF is the point of scanning the guy who is flying the airplane??? If he wanted to kill everybody, he could do it trivially by deliberately crashing the aircraft.
No, LEDs are only full brightness or off. To make an LED dim you pulse the current through it. It isn't actually dimmer, it just looks dimmer because it's turning on and off faster than you can see.
Nonsense. You can make an LED anything from barely lit to full tilt by nothing more than controlling the current via the loading resistor.
Try it yourself.
Would you buy a bicycle to commute? Many people would not, and yet millions of other people do. Just because *you* have some specific issues with this car doesn't mean there isn't a market for it. Slashdotters, in their rush to denounce everything that is new and different (cough ipod cough), seem to forget that a lot.
I am pointing out to people that the 50 mile "range" figure has to be taken with a grain of salt. I am trying to help people.
If somebody has a 40 mile total commute and buys this car because of the 50 mile range figure, I predict they are going to be sorely disappointed in a few years as the car sighs to a halt 5 miles from their house while coming back from work because the batteries are old and they were using the cabin heater. Measuring battery capacity is really quite difficult.
What will the range be like after 5-10 years? And what if it's a really cold winter day? I have to heat the cabin
somehow.
This is my main problem with all-electric vehicles. You never really know how much range you have.
And if you live in a cold climate like I do, gasoline engines are really quite efficient in the winter since the "waste"
heat is not wasted at all; it heats the cabin.
Why on earth should I have to pay some random extortionist bloke just to have an encrypted connection?
Seriously, your whole gambit is all about that. Why can't I just have a D-H exchange and be done with it?
Why should I have to involve and pay some random corporation just to have an encrypted connection?
I honestly don't understand your hatred or self signed certs. Obviously it's not a lot of money, but I see no reason to pay $10 yearly to some
random company for encryption that I can do myself. Furthermore,
I see no reason to trust startssl.com any more than my own site, and I don't see why any of my (admittedly very few, but that's irrelevant) users should either.
In C++ methods don't have a this pointer in the argument list.... in Pythons the methods have and you can name it like you want even...
My point is: you have this extra thing, that hangs around all the time which a newbie likely don't really grasp in the beginning... so a language which offers less might be easier for a beginner.
One could argue that pedagogically it makes more sense for the this/self to be explicit.
I'm using "." for indentation here because slashcode removes leading spaces in ecode tags for some stupid reason.
Anyway, here we have a module-global counter, a class counter, and an instance counter.
Because the instance is explicitly passed in, it is obvious which counter the "add" method is modifying.
Personally I don't have much of a preference either way, but it does cause confusion when I switch between C++ and python.
Self signed certs are not ideal, but they are definitely better than plain http. All I ask is that the browsers don't make quite such a big fuss about them. They could simply say "This connection is using weak encryption. No bank or large institution would do this. [Ok this time] [Cancel] [Ok forever]" instead of the big fuss that Firefox currently does. That message isn't entirely accurate, but it more or less explains it to a normal user. If it's just some free webmail site (like mine), that's fine.
The above is all I want. To summarize:
Signed TLS is terrific.
Self-signed TLS is less so.
Plain http is terrible.
My entire complaint is that browsers are currently not reflecting this.
They are reversing the last two. If you maintain that plain http is
equal or better than self-signed TLS then we have nothing more to disuss.
Personally, I'd like to see some WWVB-style relays, for better signal strength in buildings and other areas that don't normally get good signal (particularly during the day).
I once built a WWVB generator.
Some years back before WWVB boosted its power, the reception was awfully spotty where I am.
So I wrote a program to emulate the WWVB protocol and had a ntp-synchronized PC play it out at 60kHz (WWVB's frequency) via a soundcard
into a fairly ordinary car audio amp outputting into a coil tuned to roughtly 60kHz. Now, soundcards and audio amps don't really expect 60kHz,
but I figured that since my watch's radio receiver was probably insanely sensitive it shouldn't take much.
Much to my surprise, it worked. I'd leave the watch nearby and it actually synchronized.
but the truth is that WWVB is obsolete. Nowadays, the best way to get accurate time is via GPS. You can buy a GPS module to pull the time from for about $25-$35 to build into your clock.
Do they have modules that fit in a wristwatch? My wristwatch syncs to WWVB and I love it.
I've seen reasonably small GPS modules, but none as small as a WWVB receiver/decoder. It's such a simple protocol that it takes
very little silicon to decode it.
We have recently been testing a data acquisition system and were initially using some PC's built-in clock. After seeing discrepancy with a quality oscillator used in the DAQ (and making sure no packets are lost) we traced it to an awful RTC - it had a few seconds drift over an hour or two. This was easy to check against NIST. And no, it was really the RTC, not the CPU timer..
I think some manufacturers have stopped putting quartz crystals on board and just use a silicon oscillator assuming that the user will use NTP.
Some cheaper embedded CPUs use an internal RC oscilllator for the RTC, with the 32.768kHz external xtal as an option.
I've done development on one; with the RC oscillator the error is literally minutes per day.
In one of our products space and cost is tight, RTC is not important, so we're using the built-in RC oscillator.
How do you explain to a new programmer the _self_ thing in Python?
Gee I dunno, how do you explain "this" in C++ which just appears out of thin air?
How do you explain that "x += 3" within a "method" or whatever the hell you might call it in your language magically touches one x but not another?
Slashdot Mirror
Wish I had mod points. Finally something informative from an actual pilot instead of a bunch of blowhards.
Hell, I only fly simulators (XPlane) and even there it's clear that automatic landings are last-choice affair. They can't deal with the unexpected (gusts, incursions) at all.
"Please do not mention non-free GNU/Linux distros (for instance, Ubuntu) in the publicity for the event."
What's behind this? What's non-free about Ubuntu?
Alas, no. The reason stuff like satellites burn up on reentry is that they are moving at least 28000 km/hr (about mach 24) when they reach the atmosphere. They had to be going that fast to be orbiting to begin with.
A very high altitude drop from initial zero speed will reach a pretty high terminal velocity where the air is thin (even mach 1), but it's nowhere near enough to cause a burn up.
Canon EOS cameras can do just that (See OSK-E3). Unfortunately it's been cracked so it is no longer very useful.
Do you expect the Mozilla team to fix bugs in third party Firefox plugins? Especially plugins they don't even personally use?
In this case they are simply flagging that a third party driver known to have bugs is loaded. When the virtualbox crew, or perhaps somebody who actually uses it and has dev skills to fix it straighten it out, they'll remove the flag.
take it out of the mainline kernel until the major bugs are fixed.
It's not in the mainline kernel. That's the entire point.
The Linux kernel devs deal with the mainline kernel, not random third party drivers.
You wouldn't expect the mythtv developers to fix virtualbox bugs, would you? Then why would you expect the kernel developers to do so? It's not their project.
"If you take a walk I'll tax your feet".
Prophetic words indeed
This is you do it. You just break into the warden's office, find his PC, go to a command line and enter: UNLOCK ALL INMATE DOORS DEACTIVATE SECURITY SYSTEM .
You left out a critical step. The computer will respond with ACCESS DENIED, at which point you type OVERRIDE
And I have a slide rule and I know how to use it
Cool story, bro.
I used to drive by the Inco Superstack near Sudbury, Ontario occasionally. That's the second tallest in the world. It's one of those things that just seems to hang around the skyline forever as you drive.
The CN Tower in Toronto is similar. When sailing on Lake Ontario, you can go on multiday trips and the damn thing is still always there poking over the horizon. It's visible from the other side of the lake, in New York state.
to generate electricity, but isn't a major hurdle for projects like this one the distance from where the electricity will be consumed? They're confining this to the desert, because of the daytime temps, but most power is being used on either coast, thousands of miles away.
It's called a "transmission line".
The James Bay Project in northern Quebec has some 4800 km of transmission line to get the power from the arctic to the consumers in southern Quebec.
Las Vegas is only a few hundred km away.
Not to nitpick here, but there's usually more than one crewmember in the cockpit.
Usually.
So you wait until the other guy goes to take a pee, and then you put the aircraft in a crash dive. It's awfully hard for anyone to get back into the cockpit during a zero gee vertical.
Alternately, on final approach, at the last minute you do an aileron roll to invert and pull back. This takes seconds, and there is absolutely nothing the other pilot can do to recover. Really, aircraft are so close to stall on final approach that any brash manoeuvre is unrecoverable.
The point is not to scan pilots. It's to scan people *dressed* as pilots.
You exempt *foo*, and (the thinking goes) people will disguise themselves as a foo. See 'Catch Me If You Can'.
The thinking is, of course, overly simplistic, but it also provides easy-to-follow rules - scan everyone.
Pilots are allowed to carry guns these days.
I heard a complaint from one pilot how absurd things are: he shows his ID, puts his pistol in a tray for the X-ray machine, walks through the metal detector, and picks up his pistol on the other side.
Why is the pilot's union telling them to avoid the machines? (Honest question)
Two simple reasons:
1. They get enough radiation already, thank you
2. WTF is the point of scanning the guy who is flying the airplane??? If he wanted to kill everybody, he could do it trivially by deliberately crashing the aircraft.
No, LEDs are only full brightness or off. To make an LED dim you pulse the current through it. It isn't actually dimmer, it just looks dimmer because it's turning on and off faster than you can see.
Nonsense. You can make an LED anything from barely lit to full tilt by nothing more than controlling the current via the loading resistor. Try it yourself.
Would you buy a bicycle to commute? Many people would not, and yet millions of other people do. Just because *you* have some specific issues with this car doesn't mean there isn't a market for it. Slashdotters, in their rush to denounce everything that is new and different (cough ipod cough), seem to forget that a lot.
I am pointing out to people that the 50 mile "range" figure has to be taken with a grain of salt. I am trying to help people.
If somebody has a 40 mile total commute and buys this car because of the 50 mile range figure, I predict they are going to be sorely disappointed in a few years as the car sighs to a halt 5 miles from their house while coming back from work because the batteries are old and they were using the cabin heater. Measuring battery capacity is really quite difficult.
What will the range be like after 5-10 years? And what if it's a really cold winter day? I have to heat the cabin somehow.
This is my main problem with all-electric vehicles. You never really know how much range you have. And if you live in a cold climate like I do, gasoline engines are really quite efficient in the winter since the "waste" heat is not wasted at all; it heats the cabin.
Why on earth should I have to pay some random extortionist bloke just to have an encrypted connection?
Seriously, your whole gambit is all about that. Why can't I just have a D-H exchange and be done with it? Why should I have to involve and pay some random corporation just to have an encrypted connection?
I honestly don't understand your hatred or self signed certs. Obviously it's not a lot of money, but I see no reason to pay $10 yearly to some random company for encryption that I can do myself. Furthermore, I see no reason to trust startssl.com any more than my own site, and I don't see why any of my (admittedly very few, but that's irrelevant) users should either.
In C++ methods don't have a this pointer in the argument list .... in Pythons the methods have and you can name it like you want even ...
My point is: you have this extra thing, that hangs around all the time which a newbie likely don't really grasp in the beginning ... so a language which offers less might be easier for a beginner.
One could argue that pedagogically it makes more sense for the this/self to be explicit.
I'm using "." for indentation here because slashcode removes leading spaces in ecode tags for some stupid reason. Anyway, here we have a module-global counter, a class counter, and an instance counter. Because the instance is explicitly passed in, it is obvious which counter the "add" method is modifying.
Personally I don't have much of a preference either way, but it does cause confusion when I switch between C++ and python.
I will repeat myself:
Self signed certs are not ideal, but they are definitely better than plain http. All I ask is that the browsers don't make quite such a big fuss about them. They could simply say "This connection is using weak encryption. No bank or large institution would do this. [Ok this time] [Cancel] [Ok forever]" instead of the big fuss that Firefox currently does. That message isn't entirely accurate, but it more or less explains it to a normal user. If it's just some free webmail site (like mine), that's fine.
The above is all I want. To summarize:
Signed TLS is terrific.
Self-signed TLS is less so.
Plain http is terrible.
My entire complaint is that browsers are currently not reflecting this. They are reversing the last two. If you maintain that plain http is equal or better than self-signed TLS then we have nothing more to disuss.
Personally, I'd like to see some WWVB-style relays, for better signal strength in buildings and other areas that don't normally get good signal (particularly during the day).
I once built a WWVB generator.
Some years back before WWVB boosted its power, the reception was awfully spotty where I am. So I wrote a program to emulate the WWVB protocol and had a ntp-synchronized PC play it out at 60kHz (WWVB's frequency) via a soundcard into a fairly ordinary car audio amp outputting into a coil tuned to roughtly 60kHz. Now, soundcards and audio amps don't really expect 60kHz, but I figured that since my watch's radio receiver was probably insanely sensitive it shouldn't take much.
Much to my surprise, it worked. I'd leave the watch nearby and it actually synchronized.
but the truth is that WWVB is obsolete. Nowadays, the best way to get accurate time is via GPS. You can buy a GPS module to pull the time from for about $25-$35 to build into your clock.
Do they have modules that fit in a wristwatch? My wristwatch syncs to WWVB and I love it.
I've seen reasonably small GPS modules, but none as small as a WWVB receiver/decoder. It's such a simple protocol that it takes very little silicon to decode it.
We have recently been testing a data acquisition system and were initially using some PC's built-in clock. After seeing discrepancy with a quality oscillator used in the DAQ (and making sure no packets are lost) we traced it to an awful RTC - it had a few seconds drift over an hour or two. This was easy to check against NIST. And no, it was really the RTC, not the CPU timer..
I think some manufacturers have stopped putting quartz crystals on board and just use a silicon oscillator assuming that the user will use NTP.
Some cheaper embedded CPUs use an internal RC oscilllator for the RTC, with the 32.768kHz external xtal as an option. I've done development on one; with the RC oscillator the error is literally minutes per day.
In one of our products space and cost is tight, RTC is not important, so we're using the built-in RC oscillator.
How do you explain to a new programmer the _self_ thing in Python?
Gee I dunno, how do you explain "this" in C++ which just appears out of thin air? How do you explain that "x += 3" within a "method" or whatever the hell you might call it in your language magically touches one x but not another?
Don't trivialize OO programming.