Why do people bitch about memory stick and not SD, or MMC or compact flash ?
Because these other formats already existed prior to memory stick.
Additionally, memory stick itself was just a flat out shitty format. It's fundamentally limited to some size that's less than 1GB, unlike most of the other formats. This is why there's a new "memory stick pro" (I think that's the name they're using) that is incompatible with the Memory stick format.
I own devices that use each of these formats: why is it only SONY's fault that the market is fragmented and non-interoperable ?
Because they had the choice of CF, SD, MMC, Smartmedia, etc and yet they deliberately chose to fragment things further, in the hopes that you'd get trapped into using their stuff. They used their size to bully a product onto the market that there was no demand for.
the US didn't invent the Internet, because the Internet is not a thing, but a concept.
Nonsense. I don't pay $50/month to plug my computer into a "concept".
Anyways, my take is:
If Europe wants to build their own seperate network, fine.
If they want to set up their own root servers on the regular internet, fine.
Demanding that a the current root servers be handed over to the bureaucratic cluster-fuck that is the UN is over the top.
Not to mention the potential for censorship by any major power (China I'm lookin in your direction).
If they think that UN controlled root servers are the way to go, let them make their own. If they're better, I'll switch. If not, I'll ignore them.
I challenge anyone to provide a good reason why it should be otherwise.
What some open source zealots, and the vast majority of open source "consumers" don't recognize is that programmers need to eat to. Until these "consumers" stop taking advantage of open source, and start paying... Open source will stay in Microsoft's (and other big corporations) shadow, and very likely even shrink.
The problem is not the GPL, or free software, the problem is one company with a business model that didn't work.
Saying that a piece or software can't be good unless you throw money at it is just ridiculous.
I'm familiar with the Mute project but I don't use it. Still, I'd like to buy the guy a beer if I ever get a chance, his ideas are quite interesting. You can tell he's doing it because he believes it in, not to get rich.
Either help these programmers feed themselves and their families, or expect other big and large profile projects to disappear and become pay-for-play.
You completely miss one of the great things about free software:
A project doesn't disappear, it just becomes inactive. At any moment, whoever wants can step in and take over.
Did you ever think that maybe these guys were having trouble because their "for money" offerings were more expensive than their competitiors and maybe in general their planning to make money wasn't so good?
There are a bunch of different ways to make money doing free software: consulting, a bounty system, providing automatic maintence with rigorously tested updates, etc. It just sounds like the "Charging 100% more than your competitors for software with a free version avaible" business model doesn't work.
Anyways, giving examples of people who didn't make it doesn't show much. One could do the same for anything. Meanwhile there ARE people who succeed at making free software their livlihood.
One idea I consider interesting would be an organization set up specfically to make deals between programmers and businesses. A group of business would agree to fund software written to a specification, programmers would be paid to write it, and the end product would be GPL'ed, guaranteeing each company both the freedom to maintain and the freedom to modify the software, with no fear of extortionary liscense costs down the road. The organization would take a comission to cover its costs administrating the deal.
Waht if they went whole-sale to HD-DVD, charged $30 per disc, and also produced a "throw away" DVD that worked in any 'old' DVD player for $3-5.
Then they'd go to jail for antitrust violations.
That level of market manipulation simply isn't possible without illegal agreements between various companies. And without these agreements, consumers will just buy from whoever offers what they ACTUALLY WANT instead of what they want to force them to buy/rent.
people weren't serious enough about the tests that were already in place.
No, the REAL problem was a policy of giving the hijackers whatever they wanted. Even with warnings that an attack like 9/11 was being planned, they were not changed.
There's simply NO WAY you could hijack a loaded 747 with a boxcutter today, you'd have every able bodied person on the plane on top of you in no time flat.
The flaw was not that they got box cutters on the plane, it was a flaw in our policy.
Even pre-9/11 the same thing would have never worked on an El Al flight....and not due to their better security either, simply due to a difference in their policy and attitude dealing with hijackers.
Everyone on the plane would have immediately understood that their own lives were at stake and acted accordingly.
This whole fuss about nail-files and the like is just nonsense.
The problem was, and still is at the top.
You can't lose your finger NEARLY as easily as you can lose your physical token or forget your password.
Sure you can, it takes one second, hurts like hell and will make you wish you had just used a freakin password.
The real application for biometrics is when people don't want to be identified. This is pretty much the opposite of what we're taling about here.
Fingerprint readers for PC logons are just freakin retarded. The fingerprints are all over the place (like the screen next to the reader), they're easy to fake, and once I do get a fake, you're REALLY SCREWED because you can't change your fingerprints. As another poster pointed out, biometrics are really nothing more than "something you have". They are no more special than the keys on my key ring... except that I don't leave a copy of my keys on everything I touch during the course of a day.
If you want a really secure logon use a password and a smart card.
RFID cards needlessly expose you to more attacks. Even if your RFID gives you not just a ID number, but an actual challenge response authenticaion, you're still subject to other sorts of creative attacks. A big part of the problem being that it's really obvious when someone's reading your smartcard, but not when they're reading an RFID tag.
You miss the point. Humans are there by enlisting, by conscription, by choice or at the very least because it is "their" war.
You throw the conscription in there, but you basically act as if you hadn't.
You don't establish what makes it so ethically different for a person to be forced into military service and for a dolphin.
I don't think many have a problem sacrificing animal lives to save human lives, just look at how little you value enemy lives compared to your own. But if the alternatives are as follows:
a) Both use animals: 200 people and 20 dolphins dead on both sides
b) Neither use animals: 200 people dead on both sides
This reasoning really doesn't make sense.
The whole reason they're using animals is so that they either:
A) They don't need people for those jobs.
B) The people are more effective in the jobs they're doing.
c) They're jobs a person can't do.
It's not like they're doing this for the hell of it.
If it helps one side win faster then that would be "sacrificing animal lives to save human lives".
As for getting both sides to agree not to use animals, why not get both sides to agree not to have a war in the first place?
Even if you DO get both sides to agree, I believe the only time you wouldn't be trading human lives for animal lives would be if they war was unending, a la 1984.
If there were actual goals to be accomplished, limited resources, etc, you're going to be able to get more done more quickly, which suggests that less people die.
It's like weighing whether to have ambulances and suggesting that less people will get in accidents if medical attenion is less readily availible. The two things aren't really in direct proportion to each other.
I haven't read anyone writing in this thread one word about how sick this actually is.
Maybe that's because many of us consider it about as sick as training HUMANS to kill other humans.
I think it's weird that you think that these soldier's being dolphins is the worst part of it.
You seem to have a strange sense of ethics.
If it's okay to kill humans, why should only other humans do it?
If it's not okay, then the whole other species thing is rather irrelevant.
I know in WWII dogs were trained to carry explosives and sneak under tanks to detonate themselves under the tanks, to my opinion that's pretty much the same kind of thing as the above, so i know this isn't new, but that's _NOT_ the point
"Not new" is really a severe understatement. Animals have been used in war for thousands of years. What makes this so different than riding your gallant steed into battle?
Sure, this database could be used to intrude on someone's medical conditions.
Which is a HUGE issue.
I don't like how you're just handwaving here. That's a really serious problem, lives could be ruined or even ended. There are tons of really bad things that could be done with this information. Wanna frame your politcal opponent with "airtight" evidence?
But then again, if some agent of the federal government were inclined to violate the rules governing the use of the database, what would be stopping him from following you around and collecting a sample of your saliva from a soda can or blood from a bandage?
Economics, secrecy, etc.
What's to stop me from overthrowing the entire gov't and instituting my own policies?
The list of reasons is about the same.
It's a lot easier to abuse a pre-existing database, than it is to secretly create the database and then abuse it.
We should really be heading in the opposite direction, declaring that individuals are the sole rightsholders to their DNA and placing very strong restrictions on who is allowed to collect this data and what they do with it.
Or maybe you'd just like to wait until you can't get health insurance and no one will tell you why?
if we can't intercept when and where Al Qaeda plans to nuke us (look up "Americam Hiroshima"), it could be millions.
Spreading it on a little thick there aren't we buddy?
Why not start claiming that Bin Laden himself might personally slaughter BILLIONS of people with his magic death laser?
Sure I'm worried some wacko might get his hand on a nuke, but it's WAY down there on my list of worries. It's simply not likely enough that we should suspend all rational thought and give whoever mentions nukes whatever they want (ex: Iraq).
You have no credible case for believing that millions may die if this guy is allowed to persue his case. I could just as easily come up with my own bullshit reasoning that million wills die if this information is not disclosed to the public.
I'm not going to because it would be stupid and disingenuous.
No. That only applies if 100% of the population (or close to it) applies those patches as soon as they're released.
Actually, it's true independent of the frequency of updates. (Ignoring the trivial case where one NEVER updates.)
So long as users of both programs update with the same frequency, the users of the software with the better response time will have less likelihood of having their ass hanging out in the wind than users of the other software package.
If you want to minimize the chance that you're vulnerable, then you should be updating as often as possible, but even if you aren't, you're still going to be better off with a shorter response time from your vendor.
2. Your glasses don't reflect IR, your camera lens does (actually, they all have an IR filter to prevent it reaching the CCD/CMOS).
Many types of glass do reflect IR light.
Think about it a little more, are glass or plastic eyeglass lenses really going to be made out of THAT different a material than glass or plastic camera lenses?
3. My optician is using some pretty bright light at my check-up. Enough to make a recording useless (read: saturate the CCD/CMOS), not enough to harm anyone.
It might appear bright, but you don't necessarily know what the spectra of the light actually looked like and therefore how much power was contained total.
Why would they switch the operating system at all? Not everyone loves technology, they don't all go OMFG ITS A NEW VERSION OF MY SOFTWARE!!!! I MUST HAVE IT NOW!!! Especially when it comes to the operating system, most people just leave it as is. You know how many Windows 95 and 98 computers I've been cleaning up (spyware, adware, viri) these last few years? Many of them could run newer versions of Windows, but why would the people bother when their version works?
Maybe so they wouldn't get infected with "spyware, adware, viri"?
Putting a Windows 95 or 98 box directly on the internet is just retarded. It's like continuing to use lead plumbing.
Some things need to be retired for a reason.
"Why would I want to give up my cave and my perfectly functional loincloth?"
blah blah blah
And FOSS proponents wonder why Microsoft is so successful and profitable making mediocre software. You can't see the forest for the trees.
First off, you're making a bunch of rather pointless statements about free software being "unprofessional", "unpolished", (insert whatever non-specfic emotional viewpoint here). These are both silly and anecdotal. There are plenty of open sorce packages out there that are the opposite or everything you're saying.
Fundamentally, it's like arguing all cars are shit because Pinto's blow up.
I've got a news flash for you: 99% of the computing public are not developers and have no idea how to develop nor an inclination to do so.
99% of people aren't plumbers either, yet they have plumbing. They actually go so far as to HIRE SOMEONE create plumbing for them. Sometimes these people are actually hired to work on pre-existing plumblng.
I can't begin to tell you my frustration at the current state of a lot of FOSS projects. I see some really good ideas, some fantastic concepts, some really bright people...but by and large their efforts are uncoordinated, poorly documented, and lacking in professionalism.
And I can say the same thing about a lot of closed software "products".
A LOT of them turn out to be buggy, overhyped pieces of crap.
The thing is nothing you're arguing about is a "key characteristic" of open source. Everything you've said can be easily applied elsewhere.
So how about something that is a key characteristic: maintainability.
Sure some company might go spend X million dollars on appliaction FOOBAR, but they also get to plan on spending that much again in a few years on FOOBAR 2.0. FOOBAR 2.0 may or may not fix the old problems of FOOBAR and it will almost certainly create new ones. It may or may not add any of the new features you had requested, but you may be forced to upgrade anyways due to liscenses expiring, or the need to communicate with others using FOOBAR outside your organization. (Or maybe even due simply to growth within your organization and a refusal to support FOOBAR 1.0.)
Contrast this with a "crappy" open source app which you gave some software company X million dollars to update/upgrade. Now you can have whatever features you want, whatever release schedule you want, and whatever level of support you want.
No worries about liscenses expiring and you can give your "crappy" open source app to anyone you need to communcate with.
When you stop, you make things hot. Imagine energy that you can recoup; your car spends energy, but lots of it goes into things that we can't recapture immediately.
I'm not arguing against regenerative braking. Regenerative braking is a good idea.
My point is that if you're sitting there ALREADY stopped at a light and you decide to start charging this system, you're going to have to burn more fuel to make up for the increased load on the engine.
While Wikipedia may be useful for getting references to REAL sources of information is certainly contains bucketsful of untrue crap, whether placed there deliberately or done so by packs of morons, idiots, or looneytoons (e.g., the blasted entry on UFOs). Saying that it's "authoritative" is quite laughable; saying that it's "more authoritative and accurate than anything else out there, including print" marks you as one of the morons, idiots or looneytoons.
Wikipedia CAN be very authoritative or it can be a bunch of nonsense that some jerk added to screw things up. What they need to do is have both stable and unstable versions of wikipedia. Stable would be archived periodically and only edited to fix errors, not add new information.
Wikipedia as it is right now provides too much immediate gratification for jerks who screw with pages. If they knew that only a handful of people would ever see their nonsense, there would be much less motivation to perpetrate it.
It would be very similar to stable vs unstable Linux kernel trees.
I appreciated the joke about the alien muppet, but next time you want to be a sanctimonious prick about acronym usage, you ought to look up the acronym in question. The grandparent was talking about the Animal Liberation Front, who shares a lot more views with PETA than they do with the Earth Liberation Front
...not to be confused with the Liberation Front for Animals.
Splitters! (Ob. Python ref.)
Just for comparison, the Prius only has a 30kW motor (twice the power of what we planned). Yet they use this motor for accelerating the car up to about 20mph or so, then turn on the engine. If 30kW (by itself) can perform normal acceleration, and we're proposing to add half of that to your vehicle (which can accelerate just fine by itself), then yes, I'd call that a good performance boost.
We'll have to agree to disagree here. The name "electrocharger" is obviously meant to appeal to those who compare it with a turbocharger or supercharger. When compared to the power gains prodived by those devices, it just doesn't measure up.
This device (should it ever exist) was not meant to assist at high speeds.
I'm not so worried about high speeds as I am with stop and go traffic. Imagine I start from a stop, drive 1000 feet, stop and repeat indefinately. Current's flowing through the wires both when I'm stopping and when I'm starting. If I pick the right frequency of starts and stops, and pick the right acceleration and decelleration rates I can push the duty cycle of your system to 100%.
Either it has to sense this and shut down or the wiring has to be big enough to handle this. Anything else is a safety hazard.
(And you wouldn't really want it to shut down since this would be the condition where your system would provide the greatest possible MPG increase.)
You can burn more fuel over time, but you can not burn more fuel per cycle. More air/fuel is the RESULT of acceleration, not the cause.
This is simply not true. The amount of air you suck into your engine is a function of two things:
Your engine RPM
How far open your throttle is
This seems to be the source of your misunderstanding. The amount of air a 3L engine sucks in at 3,000 RPM depends on how much restriction there is in the intake path. Your throttle is a controlled restriction.
An engine is a pump, it sucks air in, it pumps exhaust out. A 350 will suck in 350 cubic inches of air and expell 350 cubic inches of exhaust every cycle. Wether that air comes in through the throttle body, exhaust gas recovery, or air bypass, it still is only going to suck 350 cubic inches of air.
That's just not how fluid mechanics works. Flow rate is affected both by pressure differential AND by resistance to flow.
There is one thing you need to realise, a.5liter cylinder can only burn.5l of air/fuel mixture per revolution. That's it. No matter how much power the engine is capable of, no matter how fast it's spinning, no matter how far down you have the gas, that cylinder will ONLY burn.5l of air fuel mixture.
It's funny that you would say this, right after discussing turbocharged engines. Technically, you're correct since combustion chamber volume isn't getting any bigger, but a turbo engine WILL suck in more air than it's displacment. In the cylinder the volume will still be the same, but the actual amount/mass of air is greater.
Correct, when I step on the gas, the throttle body butterfly valve opens, increasing pressure in the manifold which causes the spark to advance, so that the explosion will occur earlier, have more force and accelerate the engine, which will suck in more air/fuel mixture which will provide more power at that RPM.
The PRIMARY reason your engine has more force is because YOU'RE BURNING MORE FUEL.
When you open the valve, the engine can suck in more air mass per unit time. The carb/efi senses this and adds more fuel.
Spark advance is just fine tuning. To say that spark advance is what actually causes an engine to accelerate is just not the way it is. I'm not saying you can't get some minor change in your idle by playing around with spark advance, I'm saying it's simply a way of fine tuning the combustion, whereas your throttle is actually in control.
To see this from another viewpoint, consider a turbocharged engine. These often need to have the ignition retarded WHILE they are accelerating. If spark advance is the cause of acceleration, this simply would not work.
I have, and you have two. I have been purposfully glancing over the physics of this because it is vastly deeper then you are thinking. Like I said, you are applying "partial armchair physics." You have applied Newtons first law to part of the equation, but you are completely ignoring gas dynamics. We are dealing with expanding gas. That is the premise that gas engines opperate under. When gasious gas oxidizes, it expands rapidly. If there is nothing opposing that force, then the energy is wasted in the form of heat.
Are here's where you start going WAY off track. If you're in an equilibrium state and you add more drag on the engine's rotation, you're simple going to have to push the engine harder to make up for the additional force. I never said an engine can't operate more efficiently than when it's operating at idle, just that you're going to have to add more fuel to overcome the extra drag. The energy to power this thing is not "free" except in the case of regerative braking.
So what happens to the extra.04 seconds of burn? tossed out the exhaust when the exhaust valves open at the end of the power stroke. stroke 4 then pushes the spent and unspent fuel out the exhaust.
But then what? You advance the spark timing. Advancing the spark timing by.01 second allows you to have the combustion starting before TDC, which means you will have expansion occuring while the combustion chamber is at the smallest size, which means more pressure (force) which accelerates the engine. The engine spins faster, sucks more air per minute, but still sucks the exact same amount of air/fuel per rotation that it always did.
Using spark advance as a means of controlling your idle would be silly and is not the way it is done. It's smarter to use the best value for spark advance that you have at all times and adjust to amont of air and fuel entering the engine via the bypass air control valve and the fuel injectors.
You seem to know where the parts are and have an idea what they do, but if you do some research, I'm sure you'll eventually see the light on this particular issue.
Yes, 1000W is only 83.3 amps, but that's just barely over one measly horsepower. I was talking about 10kW. This is why I said 833 amps. One horsepower is a freakin joke.
This isn't even much of a concern because you'd only use this much current if you try to add a lot of torque at when the car is redlining. Most people tend not to redline their car.
Is or is not this thing being billed as a performance upgrade? I thought it was.
the motor does not need a very large power rating to do it's job well.
A starter is a really bad choice to use for an example. It only needs to be able to operate for a few seconds, your system does not. If you ran your starter continuously, bad things would happen. Raising the voltage to 42 definately helps, but even then you're talking about pounds of copper. Given that you have to deal with underhood temperatures, that's probably 00 guage or thicker copper wire.
That, or you're going to have to track the duty cycle of you system (lost utility) or use high temp wiring (lost efficiency).
because this was an aftermarket product, and we didn't want people killed during installation, we had to limit the voltage for safety reasons.
That sucks. IMO you guys would have been better off with a much higher voltage and a really good safety system, but at that point you would have hit mechanical problems, so i suppose it's a wash.
I can see the potential for modifying an aletnator to generate more power under enginer braking, it's a cleaver idea, but some one the calim being made are irresponsible.
Given that logic a vehicle may be able to start moving, but as soon as the momentum from the flywheel was effectively countered the car would stop moving.
No.
You missed the point.
Your engine needs to run at a certain minimum RPM in order to sustain operation. If your flywheel has enough momentum, it can allow your car to stay within that range under a temporary load that is greater than the engine's ability to create torque and stay within that range.
Of course it's possible to set you idle ridiculously high, waste gas, and therefore have significant extra power at idle (a "high" idle) but this just means your engine is being managed poorly. The solution to that is to manage the engine properly. There's no reason to install an expensive hybrid system if you're not coing to control the engine properly in the first place.
Okay, here's one for you guys. If I put my car in neutral, and put the gas half way to the floor, it will spin up to 4000+ rpms.
Which means that *gasp* IT ACCELERATED!
Now if you were to increase the load on the engine, guess what? It's going to decellerate.
Eventually you'll reach an equilibrium state where the forces balance out. This is what I've been saying all along. If your engine is running at a constant RPM, all the forces are in balance, period.
You guys are both trying to apply partial armchair physics.
I'm trying to explain a very simple concept to someone who isn't getting it. It's called "Newton's First Law". (You may have heard of it.)
LOL! That is the funniest thing I have ever heard!!! Even the oldest of the old cars had spark advance.
I didn't say CARS, I said engines. There is no reason for me to limit myself to cars to point out your obvious total failure to understand the subject. A simple, bare bones lawnmower engine is all it takes to show how completely off base you are here.
How else could the engine accelerate? Gas burns at the same rate wether you have 1 part fuel or 20 parts fuel.
BY CHANGING THE AMOUNT OF AIR AND FUEL YOU'RE BURNING!
Man, you've got no freakin clue. Keep digging, this is great!
That is incorrect. If you have extra torque at the WHEEL the car will accelerate, if you have extra torque at the CRANK the force is wasted by spining the torque converter.
This is nonsense again. It you add all your forces together and there's some left over, SOMETHING'S going to accelerate. This is really basic physics. It may be true that there's no reason you would want the engine to spin any faster than it currently is, but that doesn't change the fact that it WILL change speed in the presence of unbalanced forces.
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Having said that, electronic locks in addition to manual gives best of both worlds (like incar central locking
Except that you're now subject to the vulnerabilities of BOTH systems.
Why do people bitch about memory stick and not SD, or MMC or compact flash ?
Because these other formats already existed prior to memory stick.
Additionally, memory stick itself was just a flat out shitty format. It's fundamentally limited to some size that's less than 1GB, unlike most of the other formats. This is why there's a new "memory stick pro" (I think that's the name they're using) that is incompatible with the Memory stick format.
I own devices that use each of these formats: why is it only SONY's fault that the market is fragmented and non-interoperable ?
Because they had the choice of CF, SD, MMC, Smartmedia, etc and yet they deliberately chose to fragment things further, in the hopes that you'd get trapped into using their stuff. They used their size to bully a product onto the market that there was no demand for.
the US didn't invent the Internet, because the Internet is not a thing, but a concept.
Nonsense. I don't pay $50/month to plug my computer into a "concept".
Anyways, my take is:
If Europe wants to build their own seperate network, fine.
If they want to set up their own root servers on the regular internet, fine.
Demanding that a the current root servers be handed over to the bureaucratic cluster-fuck that is the UN is over the top.
Not to mention the potential for censorship by any major power (China I'm lookin in your direction).
If they think that UN controlled root servers are the way to go, let them make their own. If they're better, I'll switch. If not, I'll ignore them.
I challenge anyone to provide a good reason why it should be otherwise.
What some open source zealots, and the vast majority of open source "consumers" don't recognize is that programmers need to eat to. Until these "consumers" stop taking advantage of open source, and start paying... Open source will stay in Microsoft's (and other big corporations) shadow, and very likely even shrink.
The problem is not the GPL, or free software, the problem is one company with a business model that didn't work.
Saying that a piece or software can't be good unless you throw money at it is just ridiculous.
I'm familiar with the Mute project but I don't use it. Still, I'd like to buy the guy a beer if I ever get a chance, his ideas are quite interesting. You can tell he's doing it because he believes it in, not to get rich.
Either help these programmers feed themselves and their families, or expect other big and large profile projects to disappear and become pay-for-play.
You completely miss one of the great things about free software:
A project doesn't disappear, it just becomes inactive. At any moment, whoever wants can step in and take over.
Did you ever think that maybe these guys were having trouble because their "for money" offerings were more expensive than their competitiors and maybe in general their planning to make money wasn't so good?
There are a bunch of different ways to make money doing free software: consulting, a bounty system, providing automatic maintence with rigorously tested updates, etc. It just sounds like the "Charging 100% more than your competitors for software with a free version avaible" business model doesn't work.
Anyways, giving examples of people who didn't make it doesn't show much. One could do the same for anything. Meanwhile there ARE people who succeed at making free software their livlihood.
One idea I consider interesting would be an organization set up specfically to make deals between programmers and businesses. A group of business would agree to fund software written to a specification, programmers would be paid to write it, and the end product would be GPL'ed, guaranteeing each company both the freedom to maintain and the freedom to modify the software, with no fear of extortionary liscense costs down the road. The organization would take a comission to cover its costs administrating the deal.
Waht if they went whole-sale to HD-DVD, charged $30 per disc, and also produced a "throw away" DVD that worked in any 'old' DVD player for $3-5.
Then they'd go to jail for antitrust violations.
That level of market manipulation simply isn't possible without illegal agreements between various companies. And without these agreements, consumers will just buy from whoever offers what they ACTUALLY WANT instead of what they want to force them to buy/rent.
people weren't serious enough about the tests that were already in place.
No, the REAL problem was a policy of giving the hijackers whatever they wanted. Even with warnings that an attack like 9/11 was being planned, they were not changed.
There's simply NO WAY you could hijack a loaded 747 with a boxcutter today, you'd have every able bodied person on the plane on top of you in no time flat.
The flaw was not that they got box cutters on the plane, it was a flaw in our policy.
Even pre-9/11 the same thing would have never worked on an El Al flight....and not due to their better security either, simply due to a difference in their policy and attitude dealing with hijackers.
Everyone on the plane would have immediately understood that their own lives were at stake and acted accordingly.
This whole fuss about nail-files and the like is just nonsense.
The problem was, and still is at the top.
Don't forget, not being able to bring in shit you just bought at other places in the mall because some theatres have instituted a "no bags" policy.
...it's for your safety....really
You can't lose your finger NEARLY as easily as you can lose your physical token or forget your password.
Sure you can, it takes one second, hurts like hell and will make you wish you had just used a freakin password.
The real application for biometrics is when people don't want to be identified. This is pretty much the opposite of what we're taling about here.
Fingerprint readers for PC logons are just freakin retarded. The fingerprints are all over the place (like the screen next to the reader), they're easy to fake, and once I do get a fake, you're REALLY SCREWED because you can't change your fingerprints.
As another poster pointed out, biometrics are really nothing more than "something you have". They are no more special than the keys on my key ring... except that I don't leave a copy of my keys on everything I touch during the course of a day.
If you want a really secure logon use a password and a smart card.
RFID cards needlessly expose you to more attacks. Even if your RFID gives you not just a ID number, but an actual challenge response authenticaion, you're still subject to other sorts of creative attacks. A big part of the problem being that it's really obvious when someone's reading your smartcard, but not when they're reading an RFID tag.
You miss the point. Humans are there by enlisting, by conscription, by choice or at the very least because it is "their" war.
You throw the conscription in there, but you basically act as if you hadn't.
You don't establish what makes it so ethically different for a person to be forced into military service and for a dolphin.
I don't think many have a problem sacrificing animal lives to save human lives, just look at how little you value enemy lives compared to your own. But if the alternatives are as follows: a) Both use animals: 200 people and 20 dolphins dead on both sides b) Neither use animals: 200 people dead on both sides
This reasoning really doesn't make sense.
The whole reason they're using animals is so that they either:
A) They don't need people for those jobs.
B) The people are more effective in the jobs they're doing.
c) They're jobs a person can't do.
It's not like they're doing this for the hell of it.
If it helps one side win faster then that would be "sacrificing animal lives to save human lives".
As for getting both sides to agree not to use animals, why not get both sides to agree not to have a war in the first place?
Even if you DO get both sides to agree, I believe the only time you wouldn't be trading human lives for animal lives would be if they war was unending, a la 1984.
If there were actual goals to be accomplished, limited resources, etc, you're going to be able to get more done more quickly, which suggests that less people die.
It's like weighing whether to have ambulances and suggesting that less people will get in accidents if medical attenion is less readily availible. The two things aren't really in direct proportion to each other.
I haven't read anyone writing in this thread one word about how sick this actually is.
Maybe that's because many of us consider it about as sick as training HUMANS to kill other humans.
I think it's weird that you think that these soldier's being dolphins is the worst part of it.
You seem to have a strange sense of ethics.
If it's okay to kill humans, why should only other humans do it?
If it's not okay, then the whole other species thing is rather irrelevant.
I know in WWII dogs were trained to carry explosives and sneak under tanks to detonate themselves under the tanks, to my opinion that's pretty much the same kind of thing as the above, so i know this isn't new, but that's _NOT_ the point
"Not new" is really a severe understatement. Animals have been used in war for thousands of years. What makes this so different than riding your gallant steed into battle?
Sure, this database could be used to intrude on someone's medical conditions.
Which is a HUGE issue.
I don't like how you're just handwaving here. That's a really serious problem, lives could be ruined or even ended. There are tons of really bad things that could be done with this information. Wanna frame your politcal opponent with "airtight" evidence?
But then again, if some agent of the federal government were inclined to violate the rules governing the use of the database, what would be stopping him from following you around and collecting a sample of your saliva from a soda can or blood from a bandage?
Economics, secrecy, etc.
What's to stop me from overthrowing the entire gov't and instituting my own policies?
The list of reasons is about the same.
It's a lot easier to abuse a pre-existing database, than it is to secretly create the database and then abuse it.
We should really be heading in the opposite direction, declaring that individuals are the sole rightsholders to their DNA and placing very strong restrictions on who is allowed to collect this data and what they do with it.
Or maybe you'd just like to wait until you can't get health insurance and no one will tell you why?
if we can't intercept when and where Al Qaeda plans to nuke us (look up "Americam Hiroshima"), it could be millions.
Spreading it on a little thick there aren't we buddy?
Why not start claiming that Bin Laden himself might personally slaughter BILLIONS of people with his magic death laser?
Sure I'm worried some wacko might get his hand on a nuke, but it's WAY down there on my list of worries. It's simply not likely enough that we should suspend all rational thought and give whoever mentions nukes whatever they want (ex: Iraq).
You have no credible case for believing that millions may die if this guy is allowed to persue his case. I could just as easily come up with my own bullshit reasoning that million wills die if this information is not disclosed to the public.
I'm not going to because it would be stupid and disingenuous.
No. That only applies if 100% of the population (or close to it) applies those patches as soon as they're released.
Actually, it's true independent of the frequency of updates. (Ignoring the trivial case where one NEVER updates.)
So long as users of both programs update with the same frequency, the users of the software with the better response time will have less likelihood of having their ass hanging out in the wind than users of the other software package.
If you want to minimize the chance that you're vulnerable, then you should be updating as often as possible, but even if you aren't, you're still going to be better off with a shorter response time from your vendor.
In short, I doubt there's any deterimental health effects from this system.
Actually, strong IR light is bad for your eyes.
link 1
link 2
link 3
2. Your glasses don't reflect IR, your camera lens does (actually, they all have an IR filter to prevent it reaching the CCD/CMOS).
Many types of glass do reflect IR light.
Think about it a little more, are glass or plastic eyeglass lenses really going to be made out of THAT different a material than glass or plastic camera lenses?
3. My optician is using some pretty bright light at my check-up. Enough to make a recording useless (read: saturate the CCD/CMOS), not enough to harm anyone.
It might appear bright, but you don't necessarily know what the spectra of the light actually looked like and therefore how much power was contained total.
Why would they switch the operating system at all? Not everyone loves technology, they don't all go OMFG ITS A NEW VERSION OF MY SOFTWARE!!!! I MUST HAVE IT NOW!!! Especially when it comes to the operating system, most people just leave it as is. You know how many Windows 95 and 98 computers I've been cleaning up (spyware, adware, viri) these last few years? Many of them could run newer versions of Windows, but why would the people bother when their version works?
Maybe so they wouldn't get infected with "spyware, adware, viri"?
Putting a Windows 95 or 98 box directly on the internet is just retarded. It's like continuing to use lead plumbing.
Some things need to be retired for a reason.
"Why would I want to give up my cave and my perfectly functional loincloth?"
blah blah blah
And FOSS proponents wonder why Microsoft is so successful and profitable making mediocre software. You can't see the forest for the trees.
First off, you're making a bunch of rather pointless statements about free software being "unprofessional", "unpolished", (insert whatever non-specfic emotional viewpoint here). These are both silly and anecdotal. There are plenty of open sorce packages out there that are the opposite or everything you're saying.
Fundamentally, it's like arguing all cars are shit because Pinto's blow up.
I've got a news flash for you: 99% of the computing public are not developers and have no idea how to develop nor an inclination to do so.
99% of people aren't plumbers either, yet they have plumbing. They actually go so far as to HIRE SOMEONE create plumbing for them. Sometimes these people are actually hired to work on pre-existing plumblng.
I can't begin to tell you my frustration at the current state of a lot of FOSS projects. I see some really good ideas, some fantastic concepts, some really bright people...but by and large their efforts are uncoordinated, poorly documented, and lacking in professionalism.
And I can say the same thing about a lot of closed software "products".
A LOT of them turn out to be buggy, overhyped pieces of crap.
The thing is nothing you're arguing about is a "key characteristic" of open source. Everything you've said can be easily applied elsewhere.
So how about something that is a key characteristic: maintainability.
Sure some company might go spend X million dollars on appliaction FOOBAR, but they also get to plan on spending that much again in a few years on FOOBAR 2.0. FOOBAR 2.0 may or may not fix the old problems of FOOBAR and it will almost certainly create new ones. It may or may not add any of the new features you had requested, but you may be forced to upgrade anyways due to liscenses expiring, or the need to communicate with others using FOOBAR outside your organization. (Or maybe even due simply to growth within your organization and a refusal to support FOOBAR 1.0.)
Contrast this with a "crappy" open source app which you gave some software company X million dollars to update/upgrade. Now you can have whatever features you want, whatever release schedule you want, and whatever level of support you want.
No worries about liscenses expiring and you can give your "crappy" open source app to anyone you need to communcate with.
Not that crappy after all, is it?
When you stop, you make things hot. Imagine energy that you can recoup; your car spends energy, but lots of it goes into things that we can't recapture immediately.
I'm not arguing against regenerative braking. Regenerative braking is a good idea.
My point is that if you're sitting there ALREADY stopped at a light and you decide to start charging this system, you're going to have to burn more fuel to make up for the increased load on the engine.
While Wikipedia may be useful for getting references to REAL sources of information is certainly contains bucketsful of untrue crap, whether placed there deliberately or done so by packs of morons, idiots, or looneytoons (e.g., the blasted entry on UFOs). Saying that it's "authoritative" is quite laughable; saying that it's "more authoritative and accurate than anything else out there, including print" marks you as one of the morons, idiots or looneytoons.
Wikipedia CAN be very authoritative or it can be a bunch of nonsense that some jerk added to screw things up. What they need to do is have both stable and unstable versions of wikipedia. Stable would be archived periodically and only edited to fix errors, not add new information.
Wikipedia as it is right now provides too much immediate gratification for jerks who screw with pages. If they knew that only a handful of people would ever see their nonsense, there would be much less motivation to perpetrate it.
It would be very similar to stable vs unstable Linux kernel trees.
I appreciated the joke about the alien muppet, but next time you want to be a sanctimonious prick about acronym usage, you ought to look up the acronym in question. The grandparent was talking about the Animal Liberation Front, who shares a lot more views with PETA than they do with the Earth Liberation Front
...not to be confused with the Liberation Front for Animals.
Splitters!
(Ob. Python ref.)
Just for comparison, the Prius only has a 30kW motor (twice the power of what we planned). Yet they use this motor for accelerating the car up to about 20mph or so, then turn on the engine. If 30kW (by itself) can perform normal acceleration, and we're proposing to add half of that to your vehicle (which can accelerate just fine by itself), then yes, I'd call that a good performance boost.
We'll have to agree to disagree here. The name "electrocharger" is obviously meant to appeal to those who compare it with a turbocharger or supercharger. When compared to the power gains prodived by those devices, it just doesn't measure up.
This device (should it ever exist) was not meant to assist at high speeds.
I'm not so worried about high speeds as I am with stop and go traffic. Imagine I start from a stop, drive 1000 feet, stop and repeat indefinately. Current's flowing through the wires both when I'm stopping and when I'm starting. If I pick the right frequency of starts and stops, and pick the right acceleration and decelleration rates I can push the duty cycle of your system to 100%.
Either it has to sense this and shut down or the wiring has to be big enough to handle this. Anything else is a safety hazard.
(And you wouldn't really want it to shut down since this would be the condition where your system would provide the greatest possible MPG increase.)
You can burn more fuel over time, but you can not burn more fuel per cycle. More air/fuel is the RESULT of acceleration, not the cause.
.5liter cylinder can only burn .5l of air/fuel mixture per revolution. That's it. No matter how much power the engine is capable of, no matter how fast it's spinning, no matter how far down you have the gas, that cylinder will ONLY burn .5l of air fuel mixture.
This is simply not true. The amount of air you suck into your engine is a function of two things:
Your engine RPM
How far open your throttle is
This seems to be the source of your misunderstanding. The amount of air a 3L engine sucks in at 3,000 RPM depends on how much restriction there is in the intake path. Your throttle is a controlled restriction.
An engine is a pump, it sucks air in, it pumps exhaust out. A 350 will suck in 350 cubic inches of air and expell 350 cubic inches of exhaust every cycle. Wether that air comes in through the throttle body, exhaust gas recovery, or air bypass, it still is only going to suck 350 cubic inches of air.
That's just not how fluid mechanics works. Flow rate is affected both by pressure differential AND by resistance to flow.
There is one thing you need to realise, a
It's funny that you would say this, right after discussing turbocharged engines. Technically, you're correct since combustion chamber volume isn't getting any bigger, but a turbo engine WILL suck in more air than it's displacment. In the cylinder the volume will still be the same, but the actual amount/mass of air is greater.
Correct, when I step on the gas, the throttle body butterfly valve opens, increasing pressure in the manifold which causes the spark to advance, so that the explosion will occur earlier, have more force and accelerate the engine, which will suck in more air/fuel mixture which will provide more power at that RPM.
.04 seconds of burn? tossed out the exhaust when the exhaust valves open at the end of the power stroke. stroke 4 then pushes the spent and unspent fuel out the exhaust.
But then what? You advance the spark timing. Advancing the spark timing by .01 second allows you to have the combustion starting before TDC, which means you will have expansion occuring while the combustion chamber is at the smallest size, which means more pressure (force) which accelerates the engine. The engine spins faster, sucks more air per minute, but still sucks the exact same amount of air/fuel per rotation that it always did.
The PRIMARY reason your engine has more force is because YOU'RE BURNING MORE FUEL.
When you open the valve, the engine can suck in more air mass per unit time. The carb/efi senses this and adds more fuel.
Spark advance is just fine tuning. To say that spark advance is what actually causes an engine to accelerate is just not the way it is. I'm not saying you can't get some minor change in your idle by playing around with spark advance, I'm saying it's simply a way of fine tuning the combustion, whereas your throttle is actually in control.
To see this from another viewpoint, consider a turbocharged engine. These often need to have the ignition retarded WHILE they are accelerating. If spark advance is the cause of acceleration, this simply would not work.
I have, and you have two. I have been purposfully glancing over the physics of this because it is vastly deeper then you are thinking. Like I said, you are applying "partial armchair physics." You have applied Newtons first law to part of the equation, but you are completely ignoring gas dynamics. We are dealing with expanding gas. That is the premise that gas engines opperate under. When gasious gas oxidizes, it expands rapidly. If there is nothing opposing that force, then the energy is wasted in the form of heat.
Are here's where you start going WAY off track. If you're in an equilibrium state and you add more drag on the engine's rotation, you're simple going to have to push the engine harder to make up for the additional force. I never said an engine can't operate more efficiently than when it's operating at idle, just that you're going to have to add more fuel to overcome the extra drag. The energy to power this thing is not "free" except in the case of regerative braking.
So what happens to the extra
Using spark advance as a means of controlling your idle would be silly and is not the way it is done. It's smarter to use the best value for spark advance that you have at all times and adjust to amont of air and fuel entering the engine via the bypass air control valve and the fuel injectors.
I sugeest you take at look at either one of there books:
How to Tune and Modify Engine Managements Systems
Bosch Fuel Injection and Engine Management
You seem to know where the parts are and have an idea what they do, but if you do some research, I'm sure you'll eventually see the light on this particular issue.
First, double check the math. 1000W/12V = 83.3A
My math is correct.
Yes, 1000W is only 83.3 amps, but that's just barely over one measly horsepower. I was talking about 10kW. This is why I said 833 amps. One horsepower is a freakin joke.
This isn't even much of a concern because you'd only use this much current if you try to add a lot of torque at when the car is redlining. Most people tend not to redline their car.
Is or is not this thing being billed as a performance upgrade? I thought it was.
the motor does not need a very large power rating to do it's job well.
Power is power.
Ah yes, here's the quote:
Yes, it decreases your 0-60 time by a minimum of 3 seconds and sheds at least 3 seconds off your 1/4 mile time, over stock vehicle performance.
*cough* bullshit *cough*
17 peak horsepower is going to drop 3 seconds off my zero to sixty time?
a starter can draw up to about twice that much
A starter is a really bad choice to use for an example. It only needs to be able to operate for a few seconds, your system does not. If you ran your starter continuously, bad things would happen. Raising the voltage to 42 definately helps, but even then you're talking about pounds of copper. Given that you have to deal with underhood temperatures, that's probably 00 guage or thicker copper wire.
That, or you're going to have to track the duty cycle of you system (lost utility) or use high temp wiring (lost efficiency).
because this was an aftermarket product, and we didn't want people killed during installation, we had to limit the voltage for safety reasons.
That sucks. IMO you guys would have been better off with a much higher voltage and a really good safety system, but at that point you would have hit mechanical problems, so i suppose it's a wash.
I can see the potential for modifying an aletnator to generate more power under enginer braking, it's a cleaver idea, but some one the calim being made are irresponsible.
Given that logic a vehicle may be able to start moving, but as soon as the momentum from the flywheel was effectively countered the car would stop moving.
No.
You missed the point.
Your engine needs to run at a certain minimum RPM in order to sustain operation. If your flywheel has enough momentum, it can allow your car to stay within that range under a temporary load that is greater than the engine's ability to create torque and stay within that range.
Of course it's possible to set you idle ridiculously high, waste gas, and therefore have significant extra power at idle (a "high" idle) but this just means your engine is being managed poorly. The solution to that is to manage the engine properly. There's no reason to install an expensive hybrid system if you're not coing to control the engine properly in the first place.
Okay, here's one for you guys. If I put my car in neutral, and put the gas half way to the floor, it will spin up to 4000+ rpms.
Which means that *gasp* IT ACCELERATED!
Now if you were to increase the load on the engine, guess what? It's going to decellerate.
Eventually you'll reach an equilibrium state where the forces balance out. This is what I've been saying all along. If your engine is running at a constant RPM, all the forces are in balance, period.
You guys are both trying to apply partial armchair physics.
I'm trying to explain a very simple concept to someone who isn't getting it. It's called "Newton's First Law". (You may have heard of it.)
LOL! That is the funniest thing I have ever heard!!! Even the oldest of the old cars had spark advance.
I didn't say CARS, I said engines. There is no reason for me to limit myself to cars to point out your obvious total failure to understand the subject. A simple, bare bones lawnmower engine is all it takes to show how completely off base you are here.
How else could the engine accelerate? Gas burns at the same rate wether you have 1 part fuel or 20 parts fuel.
BY CHANGING THE AMOUNT OF AIR AND FUEL YOU'RE BURNING!
Man, you've got no freakin clue. Keep digging, this is great!
That is incorrect. If you have extra torque at the WHEEL the car will accelerate, if you have extra torque at the CRANK the force is wasted by spining the torque converter.
This is nonsense again. It you add all your forces together and there's some left over, SOMETHING'S going to accelerate. This is really basic physics. It may be true that there's no reason you would want the engine to spin any faster than it currently is, but that doesn't change the fact that it WILL change speed in the presence of unbalanced forces.