There's a serious flaw in your analysis - you're assuming a totally empty drive. You're going to be wearing the drive more and more as it gets full, and the combination of an almost-full drive and a busy swap partition might get interesting very quickly.
I agree that on the whole, flash is a lot more durable now than it used to be, but I'm not quite convinced that these will be suitable as a general-purpose replacement for magnetic disks. Aside from the NAND longevity issue, I'd be concerned about the ability to recover data in case of a controller failure or other hardware-related issue. Mag disk is relatively easy to deal with in that regard.
The point I was trying to make is that even though it may be a lower powered laser, if it's radiating at a wavelength that isn't as quickly perceived it may result in more damage simply because one doesn't turn away from it as quickly. Given a 50 mW green and a 25 mW IR, the IR is quite a bit more dangerous because you won't blink, flinch, etc. to avoid the beam, resulting in a longer exposure and more serious injury. I was just trying to say that there's more than output power to consider when judging safety issues.
I work around exposed class IV CO2 10600nm laser beams capable of putting out 100 watts (that's watts, not mW) of power.
Same here, although I also work with Nd:YAGs and small fiber units too. My favorite thing about CO2s is how you can take a beam across the hand or otherwise get burned really badly and not know it for a couple of seconds - you see the injury before you feel it. "Oh, look at that white line on my hand - that's gonna really suck in a moment..."
But how bright it looks affects the blink response. Part of the reason IR lasers are so dangerous is that you can't see them, so the blink response is totally inhibited, and the iris of the eye doesn't attempt to close at all in response to what is dangerously bright light.
As part of my job working for a laser equipment integrator, I occasionally did the maintenance training for some of our customers, part of which involved laser safety with our standard 90 watt Nd:YAG lasers. Something that I would do is have everyone put on their glasses, dim the lights, then look through an IR viewer while one of the machines was marking some aluminum plate. It usually shocked them to see how much the laser lit the entire room up with IR light that was totally invisible to the unaided eye, and to see the occasional specular reflection that could potentially blind someone in a heartbeat.
An incandecent lamp in the kW range isn't going to be much fun either.
And one generally doesn't hear a lot of bitching about the obnoxious festival of skyward-pointed multi-kW searchlights that accompany most car dealership openings.
The pump source in the common green laser is an IR diode, but it's illuminating a crystal that actually creates the beam. The beam is then sent through another, different kind of crystal to convert it into visible green light. The output from one of the green units is generally a lot higher quality than that from a diode laser, which produce a highly elliptical beam.
I'd imagine being a police helicopter and only being 500 feet away, as soon as he got lit up he turned on his searchlight and found whoever it was fairly quickly. Of course, being able to maintain that kind of control would probably tend to work against the argument that the laser was incapacitating him, but whatever.
At 1000 feet, the beam will be at least several inches across. However, that also means the beam will have a *much* lower power per unit of area, and these are not industrial-strength lasers to begin with.
The green lasers that are popping up everywhere aren't inherently more powerful than any other color, and are *extremely* inefficient due to the frequency-doubling step needed to turn the initial 1064 nm IR pump radiation into 532 nm green light. The vast majority of green units sold are rated at 5 mW, just like the cheap red keychain ones. However, human vision is most sensitive to green light, so a green laser will *look* much brighter than another colored laser of the same output power.
And the more it spreads, the less the energy is per unit area, i.e. it gets a *lot* dimmer, and we're probably talking about something that was 5mW or less to begin with. It's a non-issue.
Depends on the laser, but in general the hand-helds that are on the market are of a low enough power that the blink reflex by itself prevents any real injury. Wicked Lasers does sell some hand-helds that can be pretty dangerous at close ranges (and are horribly expensive), but working for a laser equipment integrator and having spent several years writing code to run all kinds of Class IV equipment from 1 watt UV lasers to 250 watt CO2 units and having used all kinds of smaller lasers for pointing/measurement applications, I'd be hard pressed to think of a situation where someone shining an average hand-held laser (even a green DPSS unit) directly at an aircraft would do more than very temporarily dazzle the pilot. I've unfortunately had the experience of taking some rather strong specular reflections from higher-power green units in my eyes (and no telling how many times I've been hit with IR) when equipment wasn't tagged out properly, but I've never experienced "significant pain and discomfort" and when I got my latest set of retinal photos taken earlier this year, they looked perfect.
On the other hand, you're obligated to vigorously protect against any misuse of your trademark or else it's quite easy to lose it, in which case it does you no good. One should consider beforehand whether the domain will be worth the added legal expense. IANAL, not legal advice, etc.
Having already paid, it was unclear how to back out at that point.
I think I would have walked immediately to the customer service desk for a refund, or failing that, called the manager over as I called my card issuer to have a chargeback performed.
You know, I'll bet those tools are still selling extended warranties even though they know they'll be shut down next month.
It's also possible that it's simply an Alan Ralsky-level spammer out there that doesn't like Ron Paul and is using his available resources to hurt him the best way he can at little to no cost to himself.
QR Codes are an "open" patent, the company that owns the patent has published the details so that anyone can implement it and doesn't enforce its patent except for the name.
Well yeah, sorta. QR Code is an open patent, so there's no fee for usage, but it's also an ISO standard. This means if you want to get the spec, it will cost about $200 for ISO to e-mail you the appropriate 1.2 meg PDF. There are a couple of open-source QR Code libraries out there, but they're a tad buggy and don't support all of the variations (Kanji and QR Micro, for instance). Commercial QR libraries are ridiculously expensive, and Denso Wave recently closed their North American office and refuses to sell the reference implementation to North American customers anymore.
I'm currently working on a project involving QR for another branch of Denso, and Denso.jp won't even sell the reference library to Denso.us. How silly is that?
Unfortunately the machine in question (a Gigabit G4-450 DP) has an ADC display, so I'd have to give it 28V somehow. I do appreciate the link, though, so thank you for that. In my case it's really not worth the money for a genuine Apple supply, nor worth my time to hack in a 28V feed, so I may just end up posting the machine (and display) on eBay just for parts. It's a real shame too - the display is a 17" Studio Display, which puts up an absolutely gorgeous picture.
I don't have a short memory about Apple's issues. I remember the multitude of power supplies my wife's iBook G3 went through because Apple couldn't be bothered to put a damn strain relief on the cable, the logic board replacements (under warranty, thankfully), the fact that my dual-proc G4 tower is sitting idle because I refuse to pay $250 for a replacement 300-watt power supply, Apple's adamant refusal to admit to any PMU problems with my wife's new MacBook last year and the firmware update released shortly thereafter that fixed them, the issues that 10.4.x has with the automounter spontaneously dropping connections to NFS shares whenever it damn well feels like it, etc. I'm not even considering updating my wife's machine until Leopard's been out for a while longer and the majority of issues get shaken out. The *only* Apple products I've bought in the last 10 years that have been problem-free are my 1st-gen and 5th-gen iPods, and my wife's 2nd-gen Nano.
Microsoft's getting raked over the coals re: Vista and rightfully so, but Apple's *far* from the picture of perfection that a lot of people would have you believe.
But what about SCO's other creditors? What about the poor programmers that work for SCO?
Having been in this situation myself (a creditor to a bankrupt company) back in my younger and dumber days, I'll say that I feel limited sympathy for them, because you shouldn't ever let yourself be put in such a position. The *FIRST* time your employer even makes noises like they can't make payroll, get thee the hell out - if they can't make payroll, they're also not paying their taxes, and the IRS will get first crack at the assets when things go to the bankruptcy court. No assets left after taxes? Too f'n bad - the IRS gets theirs, and to hell with everyone else.
Too many people (myself included) have gotten screwed because they were trying to help out the employer by giving them more time, only to have ended up giving them weeks' worth of free labor for empty promises. Never again will I let that happen to me.
The thing that disappointed me the most with Ep1 wasn't the ridiculousness of Jar Jar, nor the grating performance of Jake Lloyd, nor any of the other stuff that generally sucked. It was that they introduced a truly intriguing character in the person of Darth Maul, cast a gifted athletic actor for him that brought incredible life and action to the lightsaber duels (*by far* the best saber fights in all six of the movies), and then only have him onscreen for ten minutes and kill him like a chump at the end.
This degree of "fail" in Ep1 did however set us up properly for the journey to the city of Whine that was the teenage Anakin. Maybe if Obi-Wan had back-handed the little bitch now and again and put him in his place ("You're a Jedi, goddammit - act like one! [smack!]"), the Republic could have avoided 40 years of oppression.
SUVs also have giant blind spots but SUV drivers like to pretend that they don't have giant blind spots.
They don't if the mirrors are adjusted properly and actually used. I have *much* better visibility around me in my extended-cab truck than I do in my wife's Elantra, primarily because the mirrors on my truck are large enough to actually be useful.
Assuming the car doesn't use a direct coil-on-plug design, the cabling running from the coils to the sparkplugs is generally one of the best shielded areas of the car to begin with, otherwise listening to the radio becomes a pretty tedious exercise.:-) The sparkplugs are solidly grounded to the engine block, and I'd imagine the coils themselves would act to step down any interference that is backfeeding into the ECM circuit from the plugs/wires to unmeasurable levels.
And more importantly, the 98% of the good cops won't take any kind of action against the bad ones when they do stuff that's blatantly wrong. "Thin blue line" and all that crap.
Of course they do. They generally weigh between 100 and 200 pounds (sometimes more, sometimes less) and are extremely susceptible to microwave frequencies that excite the H-O bond in water, as 80% or so of their construction consists of the stuff.:-)
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There's a serious flaw in your analysis - you're assuming a totally empty drive. You're going to be wearing the drive more and more as it gets full, and the combination of an almost-full drive and a busy swap partition might get interesting very quickly.
I agree that on the whole, flash is a lot more durable now than it used to be, but I'm not quite convinced that these will be suitable as a general-purpose replacement for magnetic disks. Aside from the NAND longevity issue, I'd be concerned about the ability to recover data in case of a controller failure or other hardware-related issue. Mag disk is relatively easy to deal with in that regard.
At work we can make music using a Q-switched laser on aluminum plate. I need to see if I can get a video of that to put up on YouTube. :-)
The point I was trying to make is that even though it may be a lower powered laser, if it's radiating at a wavelength that isn't as quickly perceived it may result in more damage simply because one doesn't turn away from it as quickly. Given a 50 mW green and a 25 mW IR, the IR is quite a bit more dangerous because you won't blink, flinch, etc. to avoid the beam, resulting in a longer exposure and more serious injury. I was just trying to say that there's more than output power to consider when judging safety issues.
I work around exposed class IV CO2 10600nm laser beams capable of putting out 100 watts (that's watts, not mW) of power.
:-)
Same here, although I also work with Nd:YAGs and small fiber units too. My favorite thing about CO2s is how you can take a beam across the hand or otherwise get burned really badly and not know it for a couple of seconds - you see the injury before you feel it. "Oh, look at that white line on my hand - that's gonna really suck in a moment..."
Then comes the profanity.
But how bright it looks affects the blink response. Part of the reason IR lasers are so dangerous is that you can't see them, so the blink response is totally inhibited, and the iris of the eye doesn't attempt to close at all in response to what is dangerously bright light.
As part of my job working for a laser equipment integrator, I occasionally did the maintenance training for some of our customers, part of which involved laser safety with our standard 90 watt Nd:YAG lasers. Something that I would do is have everyone put on their glasses, dim the lights, then look through an IR viewer while one of the machines was marking some aluminum plate. It usually shocked them to see how much the laser lit the entire room up with IR light that was totally invisible to the unaided eye, and to see the occasional specular reflection that could potentially blind someone in a heartbeat.
An incandecent lamp in the kW range isn't going to be much fun either.
And one generally doesn't hear a lot of bitching about the obnoxious festival of skyward-pointed multi-kW searchlights that accompany most car dealership openings.
The pump source in the common green laser is an IR diode, but it's illuminating a crystal that actually creates the beam. The beam is then sent through another, different kind of crystal to convert it into visible green light. The output from one of the green units is generally a lot higher quality than that from a diode laser, which produce a highly elliptical beam.
I'd imagine being a police helicopter and only being 500 feet away, as soon as he got lit up he turned on his searchlight and found whoever it was fairly quickly. Of course, being able to maintain that kind of control would probably tend to work against the argument that the laser was incapacitating him, but whatever.
At 1000 feet, the beam will be at least several inches across. However, that also means the beam will have a *much* lower power per unit of area, and these are not industrial-strength lasers to begin with.
A white stick works just as well
No, it doesn't.
The green lasers that are popping up everywhere aren't inherently more powerful than any other color, and are *extremely* inefficient due to the frequency-doubling step needed to turn the initial 1064 nm IR pump radiation into 532 nm green light. The vast majority of green units sold are rated at 5 mW, just like the cheap red keychain ones. However, human vision is most sensitive to green light, so a green laser will *look* much brighter than another colored laser of the same output power.
And the more it spreads, the less the energy is per unit area, i.e. it gets a *lot* dimmer, and we're probably talking about something that was 5mW or less to begin with. It's a non-issue.
Depends on the laser, but in general the hand-helds that are on the market are of a low enough power that the blink reflex by itself prevents any real injury. Wicked Lasers does sell some hand-helds that can be pretty dangerous at close ranges (and are horribly expensive), but working for a laser equipment integrator and having spent several years writing code to run all kinds of Class IV equipment from 1 watt UV lasers to 250 watt CO2 units and having used all kinds of smaller lasers for pointing/measurement applications, I'd be hard pressed to think of a situation where someone shining an average hand-held laser (even a green DPSS unit) directly at an aircraft would do more than very temporarily dazzle the pilot. I've unfortunately had the experience of taking some rather strong specular reflections from higher-power green units in my eyes (and no telling how many times I've been hit with IR) when equipment wasn't tagged out properly, but I've never experienced "significant pain and discomfort" and when I got my latest set of retinal photos taken earlier this year, they looked perfect.
On the other hand, you're obligated to vigorously protect against any misuse of your trademark or else it's quite easy to lose it, in which case it does you no good. One should consider beforehand whether the domain will be worth the added legal expense. IANAL, not legal advice, etc.
Having already paid, it was unclear how to back out at that point.
I think I would have walked immediately to the customer service desk for a refund, or failing that, called the manager over as I called my card issuer to have a chargeback performed.
You know, I'll bet those tools are still selling extended warranties even though they know they'll be shut down next month.
It's also possible that it's simply an Alan Ralsky-level spammer out there that doesn't like Ron Paul and is using his available resources to hurt him the best way he can at little to no cost to himself.
QR Codes are an "open" patent, the company that owns the patent has published the details so that anyone can implement it and doesn't enforce its patent except for the name.
Well yeah, sorta. QR Code is an open patent, so there's no fee for usage, but it's also an ISO standard. This means if you want to get the spec, it will cost about $200 for ISO to e-mail you the appropriate 1.2 meg PDF. There are a couple of open-source QR Code libraries out there, but they're a tad buggy and don't support all of the variations (Kanji and QR Micro, for instance). Commercial QR libraries are ridiculously expensive, and Denso Wave recently closed their North American office and refuses to sell the reference implementation to North American customers anymore.
I'm currently working on a project involving QR for another branch of Denso, and Denso.jp won't even sell the reference library to Denso.us. How silly is that?
Unfortunately the machine in question (a Gigabit G4-450 DP) has an ADC display, so I'd have to give it 28V somehow. I do appreciate the link, though, so thank you for that. In my case it's really not worth the money for a genuine Apple supply, nor worth my time to hack in a 28V feed, so I may just end up posting the machine (and display) on eBay just for parts. It's a real shame too - the display is a 17" Studio Display, which puts up an absolutely gorgeous picture.
I don't have a short memory about Apple's issues. I remember the multitude of power supplies my wife's iBook G3 went through because Apple couldn't be bothered to put a damn strain relief on the cable, the logic board replacements (under warranty, thankfully), the fact that my dual-proc G4 tower is sitting idle because I refuse to pay $250 for a replacement 300-watt power supply, Apple's adamant refusal to admit to any PMU problems with my wife's new MacBook last year and the firmware update released shortly thereafter that fixed them, the issues that 10.4.x has with the automounter spontaneously dropping connections to NFS shares whenever it damn well feels like it, etc. I'm not even considering updating my wife's machine until Leopard's been out for a while longer and the majority of issues get shaken out. The *only* Apple products I've bought in the last 10 years that have been problem-free are my 1st-gen and 5th-gen iPods, and my wife's 2nd-gen Nano.
Microsoft's getting raked over the coals re: Vista and rightfully so, but Apple's *far* from the picture of perfection that a lot of people would have you believe.
But what about SCO's other creditors? What about the poor programmers that work for SCO?
Having been in this situation myself (a creditor to a bankrupt company) back in my younger and dumber days, I'll say that I feel limited sympathy for them, because you shouldn't ever let yourself be put in such a position. The *FIRST* time your employer even makes noises like they can't make payroll, get thee the hell out - if they can't make payroll, they're also not paying their taxes, and the IRS will get first crack at the assets when things go to the bankruptcy court. No assets left after taxes? Too f'n bad - the IRS gets theirs, and to hell with everyone else.
Too many people (myself included) have gotten screwed because they were trying to help out the employer by giving them more time, only to have ended up giving them weeks' worth of free labor for empty promises. Never again will I let that happen to me.
The thing that disappointed me the most with Ep1 wasn't the ridiculousness of Jar Jar, nor the grating performance of Jake Lloyd, nor any of the other stuff that generally sucked. It was that they introduced a truly intriguing character in the person of Darth Maul, cast a gifted athletic actor for him that brought incredible life and action to the lightsaber duels (*by far* the best saber fights in all six of the movies), and then only have him onscreen for ten minutes and kill him like a chump at the end.
This degree of "fail" in Ep1 did however set us up properly for the journey to the city of Whine that was the teenage Anakin. Maybe if Obi-Wan had back-handed the little bitch now and again and put him in his place ("You're a Jedi, goddammit - act like one! [smack!]"), the Republic could have avoided 40 years of oppression.
SUVs also have giant blind spots but SUV drivers like to pretend that they don't have giant blind spots.
They don't if the mirrors are adjusted properly and actually used. I have *much* better visibility around me in my extended-cab truck than I do in my wife's Elantra, primarily because the mirrors on my truck are large enough to actually be useful.
Assuming the car doesn't use a direct coil-on-plug design, the cabling running from the coils to the sparkplugs is generally one of the best shielded areas of the car to begin with, otherwise listening to the radio becomes a pretty tedious exercise. :-) The sparkplugs are solidly grounded to the engine block, and I'd imagine the coils themselves would act to step down any interference that is backfeeding into the ECM circuit from the plugs/wires to unmeasurable levels.
And more importantly, the 98% of the good cops won't take any kind of action against the bad ones when they do stuff that's blatantly wrong. "Thin blue line" and all that crap.
Of course they do. They generally weigh between 100 and 200 pounds (sometimes more, sometimes less) and are extremely susceptible to microwave frequencies that excite the H-O bond in water, as 80% or so of their construction consists of the stuff. :-)