I have a Macbook where the button is integrated in the trackpad. The pad is hinged at the top, which means that the force required to click increases as you get higher up on the trackpad. I've found the force becomes high enough to be uncomfortable, or at least noticeable. I found this annoying enough that I've ended up using two hands: left index finger for moving around, and the right index finger rests on the bottom of the trackpad for clicking. That's not ideal either: occasionally, a click (while the left index finger remains on the trackpad) gets interpreted as an option-click, which means two more clicks to remove the option menu and get the effect I wanted.
In the end, I much prefer having two buttons physically separate from the trackpad.
While complying with budgeting laws (and in line with NASA's desire to cancel Constellation), this move is also potentially in violation of a 2010 appropriations amendment by Sen. Shelby (R-AL) and Sen. Bennett (R-UT) which prohibits NASA from terminating any Constellation contracts.
The mind boggles. I've never seen politicians in other countries actively sabotaging current policy like this.
Earlier today they had a launch abort at T -0:00:00. I happened to watch the webcast on the SpaceX site; the countdown got to zero and my impression was that ignition was underway when the launch was aborted.
Had they used solid rockets, they'd have been SOL at this late stage.
Also, finding the cause and then being able to launch inside 1.5 hours is rather quick. ISTR early Shuttle launches where the slightest setback resulted in putting the clock back to T -12h.
And was the countdown off, or was the webcast not properly synchronized? I saw liftoff taking place at T -0:00:02.
I wonder if its possible to make five figures of power from a 7 litre?
No. A top-fuel drag race engine produces a bit under 10000 shp. It runs at the verge of hydraulic lock (ie the gases in the cylinder start to behave like liquids) so there's limited scope to increase power. Oh, and these engines have a lifetime of 10 seconds.
Higher amounts of power are possible, but 500 shp/litre is way off for engines that need to run reliably for 10^6 km.
An infinitely variable transmission does allow you to use extremely peaky engines - not just those tuned for very high power, but tuning for maximum efficiency also leads to an engine that only runs well at one speed.
I wonder if it'd be possible to reconstruct the signal. We know what the signal is supposed to look like, and should be able to find out what's different.
In the recent discussion about the other Lunokhod, someone mentioned the Discovery documentary Tank on the moon. I've seen it since; if you want to know more about these very impressive vehicles, this is a good starting point.
Actually, the Technikmuseum in Speyer, Germany has a Buran (OK-GLI, the jet-engined testbed). IMO outside of the Smithsonian, this is the best place to put a Shuttle.
The X-15 design doesn't scale up too well. Getting one person to Mach 8 and 30 km altitude took a B-52 launching craft. Add enough fuel to reach orbit and your space plane is too large to be launched by aircraft, and you're back to a rocket design, ie exactly what Nasa ended up developing. X-15 was interesting, but let's not get too sentimental about it.
Re:Creator of the personal computer?
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 1
Computers like the Altair were earlier, but appealed only to hobbyists. The Apple II really took off because of VisiCalc, which made it the first personal computer that businesses saw as a worthwhile investment. 'Hip' isn't a word I would use to describe the pre-Macintosh Apple. Hell, it's not until the return of Steve J and the introduction of the iMac that coolness became part of Apple's strategy.
Both points are valid. If you can generate arbitrary waveforms, you can basically match whatever waveform the enemy radar uses and send it back at the appropriate time to create false echoes that the enemy can't filter out.
But your second point is the big one here, I think. Military wireless networks are becoming more and more common. Battlespace management systems (where every asset and enemy on the battlefield is tracked and this information spread among all vehicles or even individual soldiers) are becoming popular. If you can disrupt these wifi and data radio links, or better yet, inject false information, the enemy is denied a clear picture of the battlefield.
Because there are so many of them, car crashes are by now pretty well understood. Enough of them have been thoroughly investigated that the root cause of a car crash rarely remains a mystery.
For a car crash, there's lots of easily accessible evidence at the scene of the accident (skid marks, debris trails, etc.), often including eyewitnesses. After the crash, the cars involved don't move much (compared to plummeting down from altitude).
Flight data recorders are used because air crashes are rare and expensive. Every single accident is analyzed on a cost-no-object basis because the accident costs in the region of $10^9. The results are fed back into everything from airplane design to pilot and ATC procedures. For car crashes, this is done in aggregate only.
The 'flight data' you want for a car accident is limited to finding out who caused it: something like 95% of car crashes are due to driver error, with no technical causes.
Speed and direction are the only technical parameters you need, and both can usually be derived from the available evidence already. So what you're really interested in is driver behavior. Your black box would need to be a video recorder, showing both the driver and the surroundings of the car. Even then you'd only get confirmation of what the available evidence already shows: that someone wasn't paying attention/made an error in judgement/filtered out the wrong information. It doesn't help very much to have more data available for every car accident.
Lexus and Audi were awful in the 80s and early 90s, but cleaned up their acts to get them to where they are today.
Huh? The first Lexus was the LS400, the only criticism you can possibly have against that is that it was bland. It was one of the best-built cars of its time.
Huh? Just set.pdf to always open with Adobe Acrobat (or whatever) and there's no 'first download, then open': just click the link and it gets auto-downloaded and handed to Acrobat. With the added bonus that your keyboard works properly (e.g. the inability to use Ctrl-W to close a browser window containing a PDF drives me nuts).
This technology may be usable to make actors look younger. But to bring back Humphrey Bogart, you need someone who acts and sounds just like HB. Just using this technology to apply HB's image over a random actor isn't going to cut it.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a Macbook where the button is integrated in the trackpad. The pad is hinged at the top, which means that the force required to click increases as you get higher up on the trackpad. I've found the force becomes high enough to be uncomfortable, or at least noticeable.
I found this annoying enough that I've ended up using two hands: left index finger for moving around, and the right index finger rests on the bottom of the trackpad for clicking.
That's not ideal either: occasionally, a click (while the left index finger remains on the trackpad) gets interpreted as an option-click, which means two more clicks to remove the option menu and get the effect I wanted.
In the end, I much prefer having two buttons physically separate from the trackpad.
Eudora had this 10 years ago (then called 'MoodWatch'). Good to see Microsoft keeping up...
There's a Greasemonkey script that will show the conversion in a tooltip:
script
Pushing power through the same cable as data is asking for problems, IMO. Especially when you're talking about this much power.
- Power spikes leak into your data channels
- pushing 10 A through tiny RJ45 connector pins generates a lot of heat.
Aren't audio tracks still encoded as an optical trace on 35mm film? I mean, sure, different format, but the basic principle is not that different.
FTS:
While complying with budgeting laws (and in line with NASA's desire to cancel Constellation), this move is also potentially in violation of a 2010 appropriations amendment by Sen. Shelby (R-AL) and Sen. Bennett (R-UT) which prohibits NASA from terminating any Constellation contracts.
The mind boggles. I've never seen politicians in other countries actively sabotaging current policy like this.
Call me when you can point to an offending element in a webpage, and have the right-click menu say 'Put this domain in my hosts file'.
Earlier today they had a launch abort at T -0:00:00. I happened to watch the webcast on the SpaceX site; the countdown got to zero and my impression was that ignition was underway when the launch was aborted.
Had they used solid rockets, they'd have been SOL at this late stage.
Also, finding the cause and then being able to launch inside 1.5 hours is rather quick. ISTR early Shuttle launches where the slightest setback resulted in putting the clock back to T -12h.
And was the countdown off, or was the webcast not properly synchronized? I saw liftoff taking place at T -0:00:02.
I don't think I've gone there ever since I started to use Firefox.
I wonder if its possible to make five figures of power from a 7 litre?
No. A top-fuel drag race engine produces a bit under 10000 shp. It runs at the verge of hydraulic lock (ie the gases in the cylinder start to behave like liquids) so there's limited scope to increase power. Oh, and these engines have a lifetime of 10 seconds.
Higher amounts of power are possible, but 500 shp/litre is way off for engines that need to run reliably for 10^6 km.
An infinitely variable transmission does allow you to use extremely peaky engines - not just those tuned for very high power, but tuning for maximum efficiency also leads to an engine that only runs well at one speed.
I wonder if it'd be possible to reconstruct the signal. We know what the signal is supposed to look like, and should be able to find out what's different.
In the recent discussion about the other Lunokhod, someone mentioned the Discovery documentary Tank on the moon. I've seen it since; if you want to know more about these very impressive vehicles, this is a good starting point.
Actually, the Technikmuseum in Speyer, Germany has a Buran (OK-GLI, the jet-engined testbed). IMO outside of the Smithsonian, this is the best place to put a Shuttle.
The X-15 design doesn't scale up too well. Getting one person to Mach 8 and 30 km altitude took a B-52 launching craft. Add enough fuel to reach orbit and your space plane is too large to be launched by aircraft, and you're back to a rocket design, ie exactly what Nasa ended up developing. X-15 was interesting, but let's not get too sentimental about it.
Computers like the Altair were earlier, but appealed only to hobbyists. The Apple II really took off because of VisiCalc, which made it the first personal computer that businesses saw as a worthwhile investment. 'Hip' isn't a word I would use to describe the pre-Macintosh Apple. Hell, it's not until the return of Steve J and the introduction of the iMac that coolness became part of Apple's strategy.
Both points are valid. If you can generate arbitrary waveforms, you can basically match whatever waveform the enemy radar uses and send it back at the appropriate time to create false echoes that the enemy can't filter out.
But your second point is the big one here, I think. Military wireless networks are becoming more and more common. Battlespace management systems (where every asset and enemy on the battlefield is tracked and this information spread among all vehicles or even individual soldiers) are becoming popular. If you can disrupt these wifi and data radio links, or better yet, inject false information, the enemy is denied a clear picture of the battlefield.
One of the first events seen in Atlas:
http://imgur.com/ugwnl.png
Bottom right of that picture: LegoPlot Projection? Is that what the LHC is made of?
No. RTFA.
It may be 720p, but if the file is no larger than 7.5 GB, it'll be compressed all to hell, and no better than DVD.
Because there are so many of them, car crashes are by now pretty well understood. Enough of them have been thoroughly investigated that the root cause of a car crash rarely remains a mystery.
For a car crash, there's lots of easily accessible evidence at the scene of the accident (skid marks, debris trails, etc.), often including eyewitnesses. After the crash, the cars involved don't move much (compared to plummeting down from altitude).
Flight data recorders are used because air crashes are rare and expensive. Every single accident is analyzed on a cost-no-object basis because the accident costs in the region of $10^9. The results are fed back into everything from airplane design to pilot and ATC procedures. For car crashes, this is done in aggregate only.
The 'flight data' you want for a car accident is limited to finding out who caused it: something like 95% of car crashes are due to driver error, with no technical causes.
Speed and direction are the only technical parameters you need, and both can usually be derived from the available evidence already. So what you're really interested in is driver behavior. Your black box would need to be a video recorder, showing both the driver and the surroundings of the car. Even then you'd only get confirmation of what the available evidence already shows: that someone wasn't paying attention/made an error in judgement/filtered out the wrong information. It doesn't help very much to have more data available for every car accident.
Lexus and Audi were awful in the 80s and early 90s, but cleaned up their acts to get them to where they are today.
Huh? The first Lexus was the LS400, the only criticism you can possibly have against that is that it was bland. It was one of the best-built cars of its time.
Huh? Just set .pdf to always open with Adobe Acrobat (or whatever) and there's no 'first download, then open': just click the link and it gets auto-downloaded and handed to Acrobat. With the added bonus that your keyboard works properly (e.g. the inability to use Ctrl-W to close a browser window containing a PDF drives me nuts).
This technology may be usable to make actors look younger. But to bring back Humphrey Bogart, you need someone who acts and sounds just like HB. Just using this technology to apply HB's image over a random actor isn't going to cut it.
[citation needed]
Apparently, mixing them up is.