It's not just being hit directly in the eye though, especially during night flying when your vision is acclimatised to the dark. When the laser hits the glass and scatters it lights up the interior of the cockpit it makes it hard to see the instruments, and if it does happen to catch you in the eye it can blind you for a few seconds.
You can see this effect with winter sunlight in the morning in your car - even if you have the sun off to the side, your vision of things *inside* the car can be drastically reduced, even though it's not harming your eyes. (and I know, sunlight isn't a laser, the sun is more powerful than a 5mW handheld laser, etc, but the effect it analogous on a smaller scale, especially when your eyes are acclimatised to the dark).
Here's an example from a police helicopter. The guy doing it is clearly not holding it very still, but you can see the effects. When it hits the more "scarred" surface of the front cockpit glass it scatters even more than the video seen here, where it goes in through the observer's side door.
It spreads a fair amount over long ranges, and it scatters considerably when it hits the cockpit glass and when your eyes are acclimatised to the dark it is relatively very bright. It's not so much that it gets directly into your eyes, more that it changes the conditions in the cockpit at a time when you are concentrating and things that are out of the ordinary are immediately tagged by the brain as potential issues that you might have to deal with
I know it was an iMac, I was just illustrating an anecdote on remapping the location of the touch surface that also applies to the Mighty Mouse - not one of their best I agree. The ball is too small and the side buttons are too sensitive to be bound to anything useful.
I think what makes you think "no right click" is that if your index finger still rests on the left hand surface and you right click it sometimes interprets this as a left click. You have to train yourself to lift your index finger up (not ideal) or shift it slightly right when you go for right click. You could also remap the right click to a different gesture if you wanted, or a different location. I know a friend who has swapped over the right click to the left side of the trackpad on her MacBook Pro since she kept clicking it accidentally when dragging or swiping which she does with her right hand, so favours sweeping from top left to bottom right. You could do something similar on the Magic Mouse if it was problematic.
The Magic Mouse does not have a ball - the top surface is entirely a touch sensor. You're thinking of the Mighty Mouse, which did have a problem with the ball - it was too small and it gunked up too quickly and was hard to clean. The Magic Mouse is excellent though, and is what the Mighty Mouse should have been. The only time it falls down is as a gaming input device, but I have a regular Microsoft two button mouse with scrollwheel for that.
I remember back in the early 90s there was a big panel that hooked up to a computer (an Archimedes perhaps?) that was basically a big touch sensor split into a grid, with each square perhaps 15mm on a side. You could then set zones on this layout to be specific buttons, and you'd put an overlay on top.
At the time, my mum was using it as part of her teacher training - I remember her cutting out characters from children's TV shows and putting them into position on this big board (which was the size of a large graphics tablet). The key was that the shapes mapped out on the device didn't all have to be the same size, or even a 4 sided shape.
You had different profiles for different applications or modules within an application (I forget the computer side of it - I was a young kid at the time) and you'd simply swap over your overlay. So not automatic with a display underneath, but very similar to this sort of idea, just easier to implement these days.
Yes, because a summary about an Apple-bashing article couldn't possibly be wildly distorted or just plain wrong, right?
You can buy these screwdrivers on eBay and Amazon for $10. These screws are not new to the iPhone (or Apple products in general). The MacBook Air has them, and has been out for some time and a market has emerged for tools to work on them outside of taking it back to Apple.
My iMac was designed with access to the internals very low on the priority list, but it doesn't mean I don't work on it myself. The newer glass-fronted aluminium ones need a pair of suction cups to take the glass off, which are unlikely to be just lying around for the average customer until you need a set and buy some.
If you want to work on electronics yourself, be prepared to collect a bunch of tools.
Yes, there are two IDs - the vendor ID which is licenced by the USB-IF and contractually guaranteed to be unique to each vendor, and the device ID, which can be anything the vendor wants (and not necessarily unique between different vendors). This was the root of the whole Palm Pre/iTunes debacle where Palm decided that rather than write their own sync software plugin for iTunes (using the documented method) they spoofed Apple's USB Vendor ID (in breach of the USB-IF's rules) to trick iTunes into thinking there was an iPod attached.
I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with patented standards - I am a big fan of open source myself, but I'm just laying out how it is, and how H.264 is not some special case - it's really just like all the other open standards designed and formalised by a consortium or standards body to enable cross-vendor compatibility.
USB works *exactly* like H.264 - there is a consortium that looks after the standard, called the USB-IF and they take care of all the admin and making sure that the standard is the standard, and handle any disputes. They handle the vendor ID, for example, that is unique to every vendor that licences one. They also collect royalties from every device with a USB port on it - just like the MpegLA collects for every hardware device that can decode h.264 in hardware.
While there are other differences, they are merely in how the various standards go about collecting the money (for example, on commercial-level use of h.264 and so on). GSM works in a similar way. You pay indirectly to use it, since the phone manufacturer's costs include a licence to ship GSM-compatible radio hardware in the phone.
The only reason that H.264 has been singled out is because the FSF and the Mozilla foundation want to make an ideological point about it.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with them (although they're not handling it well in my opinion), but claiming it is different to how other open standards are handled, or that it's somehow a special case and not an open standard just doesn't cut it.
Before I go fishing for a definition that, to the best of everyone's knowledge *has* no definitive definition (yet it seems that it's totally fine for the FSF and OSI and slashdot posters to tell me what it *isn't* somehow), would you care to define "Internet-level"?
Now you seem to be trying to try to claim that h.264 is somehow different to all the other patented, but open standards that people use every day yet somehow don't get all frothy about.
GSM is the same way - you can build a GSM-compatible phone that is assured to work on the GSM standard, but don;t expect to be able to do it for free (ie, not pay any licencing costs) just because the standard is open.
Your final point is the crux of this issue, because it is a "big cause" right now. H.264 is no different to GSM or USB, and you don't hear people crying about how those are not open standards. You are correct that multiple people with various agendas are trying to define the term definitively. I am going by the definitions of the major standards bodies such as IETF.
What you think is "common sense" really has nothing to do with it, nor does Bruce Perens' attempts to specifically define it with what he "believes it should be" - if he wants to set something like that up, he needs to pick a name for it, one that is not already in use.
I am a strong supporter of open (free as in freedom) standards and open source, but it doesn't mean I have to agree with the way certain elements of that movement try to redefine things and muddy the waters (for example, the FSF, in recent years is doing as much damage as Greenpeace is doing to the green movement, with some of it's silly outbursts).
.DOC is a "standard".AAC is an "open standard".WMV was a "standard"
h.264 is an "open standard", as is GSM.
An open standard is documented and available standard that can be implemented by different companies or projects and be assured (theoretically) of compatibility because everything about how to implement it is out there in the open.
A closed standard, on the other hand, like.Doc or.wmv, and VP8 before Google opened it, is secret.
You realise that all current commercial and military nuclear reactors use fission to generate heat, right?
What exactly are you arguing against here?
Nuclear fusion is what occurs in the sun (which is a star), and in the big doughnut shaped reactor in Oxfordshire called JET among others, and is not commercially viable as an energy source for us yet; we simply cannot sustain a fusion reaction for long enough without net energy loss (at the moment). The sun is a tricky beast to mimic effectively.
So, the GP was correct in stating that nuclear reactors (in common parlance, including this proposed underwater one) are fission powered, and that the sun (and all other stars) are fusion powered.
I think you need to give him his physics badge back and go back to school.
The way you've written that, it makes me think that you have an axe to grind. He's not "dim" because you disagree with him.
"bad and reducing range"? - the argument always touted as the downside because once a year you need to drive 600 miles towing a manatee on skis to go on holiday, when for the remaining 50 weeks of the year the range of the all-electric is well inside what you use it for - commuting (which is what it was designed for).
"vast majority of energy comes from fossil sources" - and that will never change, right? In itself it's not a reason to dismiss electric vehicles out of hand. Centralised energy generation is more efficient than shipping hydrocarbons out to each individual vehicle (and yes, I know only a tiny percentage of electricity is produced by burning oil, most is coal). It also depends where you live; if you're in France a very sizeable portion of your energy comes from nuclear reactors. As time goes on, the percentage of fossil fuel-derived power will go down as the sources become scarce and greener options become available. The argument that our power infrastructure is mainly fossil fuels as a reason to ignore electric cars just doesn't hold water. That's the same as saying that there's no way HD streaming of video over the internet will ever work because who's ever going to have a fat enough pipe at home to do that? 56k is as good as it will ever get!
Production costs will also fall as economies of scale come into play.
He's against people who tout those arguments because many of them have been debunked already. They're arguing that the Earth is still flat when we've already photographed it from space and shown it rotating around.
There are issues with electric vehicles that need to be solved - improvements to the power grid to accommodate recharging large numbers of vehicles simultaneously, the time it takes to recharge a car fully compared to filling a hypothetical tank with flammable hydrocarbons, increasing the longevity of rechargeable cells (like Lithium Sulphur) and reducing their weight.
I have a friend who is on the lowest level plan that AT&T offers for the iPhone, and was able to afford one when the plans switched from unlimited only to a tiered system. She really doesn't need unlimited data, since the bulk of her data use is done via wifi with 3G/Edge for those handy times when she needs it. I say "can now afford" not in that "children going hungry" sense, but that her budget was reasonable for a new phone, but with her usage patterns the cost of an unlimited/huge plan would have been a waste.
I don't want a progress meter "buddy", I want a status bar.
Sure, progress can be displayed on it, but so can other things like URLs when links are hovered. At least, they used to be able to, before they broke it for no good reason. (yes, rah rah, netbook users wanted more vertical space but they could get that in FF 3.6 by disabling the bar).
Bah, you're totally right. My brain got Pandora from somewhere - probably looking at the windows as boxes in the screenshots of it or something like that.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just being hit directly in the eye though, especially during night flying when your vision is acclimatised to the dark. When the laser hits the glass and scatters it lights up the interior of the cockpit it makes it hard to see the instruments, and if it does happen to catch you in the eye it can blind you for a few seconds.
You can see this effect with winter sunlight in the morning in your car - even if you have the sun off to the side, your vision of things *inside* the car can be drastically reduced, even though it's not harming your eyes. (and I know, sunlight isn't a laser, the sun is more powerful than a 5mW handheld laser, etc, but the effect it analogous on a smaller scale, especially when your eyes are acclimatised to the dark).
Here's an example from a police helicopter. The guy doing it is clearly not holding it very still, but you can see the effects. When it hits the more "scarred" surface of the front cockpit glass it scatters even more than the video seen here, where it goes in through the observer's side door.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUpmLbkzyEI
The volcano that affected European air travel is in Iceland, not Greenland.
It spreads a fair amount over long ranges, and it scatters considerably when it hits the cockpit glass and when your eyes are acclimatised to the dark it is relatively very bright. It's not so much that it gets directly into your eyes, more that it changes the conditions in the cockpit at a time when you are concentrating and things that are out of the ordinary are immediately tagged by the brain as potential issues that you might have to deal with
I know it was an iMac, I was just illustrating an anecdote on remapping the location of the touch surface that also applies to the Mighty Mouse - not one of their best I agree. The ball is too small and the side buttons are too sensitive to be bound to anything useful.
That is exactly it! Blue surround and all. That takes me back.
I think what makes you think "no right click" is that if your index finger still rests on the left hand surface and you right click it sometimes interprets this as a left click. You have to train yourself to lift your index finger up (not ideal) or shift it slightly right when you go for right click. You could also remap the right click to a different gesture if you wanted, or a different location. I know a friend who has swapped over the right click to the left side of the trackpad on her MacBook Pro since she kept clicking it accidentally when dragging or swiping which she does with her right hand, so favours sweeping from top left to bottom right. You could do something similar on the Magic Mouse if it was problematic.
The Magic Mouse does not have a ball - the top surface is entirely a touch sensor. You're thinking of the Mighty Mouse, which did have a problem with the ball - it was too small and it gunked up too quickly and was hard to clean. The Magic Mouse is excellent though, and is what the Mighty Mouse should have been. The only time it falls down is as a gaming input device, but I have a regular Microsoft two button mouse with scrollwheel for that.
I remember back in the early 90s there was a big panel that hooked up to a computer (an Archimedes perhaps?) that was basically a big touch sensor split into a grid, with each square perhaps 15mm on a side. You could then set zones on this layout to be specific buttons, and you'd put an overlay on top.
At the time, my mum was using it as part of her teacher training - I remember her cutting out characters from children's TV shows and putting them into position on this big board (which was the size of a large graphics tablet). The key was that the shapes mapped out on the device didn't all have to be the same size, or even a 4 sided shape.
You had different profiles for different applications or modules within an application (I forget the computer side of it - I was a young kid at the time) and you'd simply swap over your overlay. So not automatic with a display underneath, but very similar to this sort of idea, just easier to implement these days.
Yes, because a summary about an Apple-bashing article couldn't possibly be wildly distorted or just plain wrong, right?
You can buy these screwdrivers on eBay and Amazon for $10. These screws are not new to the iPhone (or Apple products in general). The MacBook Air has them, and has been out for some time and a market has emerged for tools to work on them outside of taking it back to Apple.
My iMac was designed with access to the internals very low on the priority list, but it doesn't mean I don't work on it myself. The newer glass-fronted aluminium ones need a pair of suction cups to take the glass off, which are unlikely to be just lying around for the average customer until you need a set and buy some.
If you want to work on electronics yourself, be prepared to collect a bunch of tools.
Yes, there are two IDs - the vendor ID which is licenced by the USB-IF and contractually guaranteed to be unique to each vendor, and the device ID, which can be anything the vendor wants (and not necessarily unique between different vendors). This was the root of the whole Palm Pre/iTunes debacle where Palm decided that rather than write their own sync software plugin for iTunes (using the documented method) they spoofed Apple's USB Vendor ID (in breach of the USB-IF's rules) to trick iTunes into thinking there was an iPod attached.
I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with patented standards - I am a big fan of open source myself, but I'm just laying out how it is, and how H.264 is not some special case - it's really just like all the other open standards designed and formalised by a consortium or standards body to enable cross-vendor compatibility.
USB works *exactly* like H.264 - there is a consortium that looks after the standard, called the USB-IF and they take care of all the admin and making sure that the standard is the standard, and handle any disputes. They handle the vendor ID, for example, that is unique to every vendor that licences one. They also collect royalties from every device with a USB port on it - just like the MpegLA collects for every hardware device that can decode h.264 in hardware.
While there are other differences, they are merely in how the various standards go about collecting the money (for example, on commercial-level use of h.264 and so on). GSM works in a similar way. You pay indirectly to use it, since the phone manufacturer's costs include a licence to ship GSM-compatible radio hardware in the phone.
The only reason that H.264 has been singled out is because the FSF and the Mozilla foundation want to make an ideological point about it.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with them (although they're not handling it well in my opinion), but claiming it is different to how other open standards are handled, or that it's somehow a special case and not an open standard just doesn't cut it.
Before I go fishing for a definition that, to the best of everyone's knowledge *has* no definitive definition (yet it seems that it's totally fine for the FSF and OSI and slashdot posters to tell me what it *isn't* somehow), would you care to define "Internet-level"?
Now you seem to be trying to try to claim that h.264 is somehow different to all the other patented, but open standards that people use every day yet somehow don't get all frothy about.
Where did I imply that it was free?
GSM is the same way - you can build a GSM-compatible phone that is assured to work on the GSM standard, but don;t expect to be able to do it for free (ie, not pay any licencing costs) just because the standard is open.
The two things are not mutually exclusive.
Your final point is the crux of this issue, because it is a "big cause" right now. H.264 is no different to GSM or USB, and you don't hear people crying about how those are not open standards. You are correct that multiple people with various agendas are trying to define the term definitively. I am going by the definitions of the major standards bodies such as IETF.
What you think is "common sense" really has nothing to do with it, nor does Bruce Perens' attempts to specifically define it with what he "believes it should be" - if he wants to set something like that up, he needs to pick a name for it, one that is not already in use.
I am a strong supporter of open (free as in freedom) standards and open source, but it doesn't mean I have to agree with the way certain elements of that movement try to redefine things and muddy the waters (for example, the FSF, in recent years is doing as much damage as Greenpeace is doing to the green movement, with some of it's silly outbursts).
Ah, yes the OSI - how objective!
Also note you linked to a definition of "free AND open" - nowhere did I say that h.264 was free (as in beer or otherwise). It is open though.
The open source movement can try to "own" the word as much as it wants, but it doesn't get to change the definition as it pleases.
.DOC is a "standard" .AAC is an "open standard" .WMV was a "standard"
h.264 is an "open standard", as is GSM.
An open standard is documented and available standard that can be implemented by different companies or projects and be assured (theoretically) of compatibility because everything about how to implement it is out there in the open.
A closed standard, on the other hand, like .Doc or .wmv, and VP8 before Google opened it, is secret.
You realise that all current commercial and military nuclear reactors use fission to generate heat, right?
What exactly are you arguing against here?
Nuclear fusion is what occurs in the sun (which is a star), and in the big doughnut shaped reactor in Oxfordshire called JET among others, and is not commercially viable as an energy source for us yet; we simply cannot sustain a fusion reaction for long enough without net energy loss (at the moment). The sun is a tricky beast to mimic effectively.
So, the GP was correct in stating that nuclear reactors (in common parlance, including this proposed underwater one) are fission powered, and that the sun (and all other stars) are fusion powered.
I think you need to give him his physics badge back and go back to school.
Yes it is. You can't redefine the term "open standard" just because you don't think it should mean what it means.
Open source =/= open standard
It *is* an open standard. It may be patented, but that does not change the fact that it is an open standard, just like something like GSM.
Open standard =/= Open source
For a technology site, people seem to conflate and confuse those two things so much.
The way you've written that, it makes me think that you have an axe to grind. He's not "dim" because you disagree with him.
"bad and reducing range"? - the argument always touted as the downside because once a year you need to drive 600 miles towing a manatee on skis to go on holiday, when for the remaining 50 weeks of the year the range of the all-electric is well inside what you use it for - commuting (which is what it was designed for).
"vast majority of energy comes from fossil sources" - and that will never change, right? In itself it's not a reason to dismiss electric vehicles out of hand. Centralised energy generation is more efficient than shipping hydrocarbons out to each individual vehicle (and yes, I know only a tiny percentage of electricity is produced by burning oil, most is coal). It also depends where you live; if you're in France a very sizeable portion of your energy comes from nuclear reactors. As time goes on, the percentage of fossil fuel-derived power will go down as the sources become scarce and greener options become available. The argument that our power infrastructure is mainly fossil fuels as a reason to ignore electric cars just doesn't hold water. That's the same as saying that there's no way HD streaming of video over the internet will ever work because who's ever going to have a fat enough pipe at home to do that? 56k is as good as it will ever get!
Production costs will also fall as economies of scale come into play.
He's against people who tout those arguments because many of them have been debunked already. They're arguing that the Earth is still flat when we've already photographed it from space and shown it rotating around.
There are issues with electric vehicles that need to be solved - improvements to the power grid to accommodate recharging large numbers of vehicles simultaneously, the time it takes to recharge a car fully compared to filling a hypothetical tank with flammable hydrocarbons, increasing the longevity of rechargeable cells (like Lithium Sulphur) and reducing their weight.
I have a friend who is on the lowest level plan that AT&T offers for the iPhone, and was able to afford one when the plans switched from unlimited only to a tiered system. She really doesn't need unlimited data, since the bulk of her data use is done via wifi with 3G/Edge for those handy times when she needs it. I say "can now afford" not in that "children going hungry" sense, but that her budget was reasonable for a new phone, but with her usage patterns the cost of an unlimited/huge plan would have been a waste.
Not every customer needs an unlimited/giant plan.
So, what? The thief buys 200 coffees on your account and sells them for cash to punters outside?
I think it would just be easier to sell the phone itself if you're going to go to the trouble of stealing it.
I don't want a progress meter "buddy", I want a status bar.
Sure, progress can be displayed on it, but so can other things like URLs when links are hovered. At least, they used to be able to, before they broke it for no good reason. (yes, rah rah, netbook users wanted more vertical space but they could get that in FF 3.6 by disabling the bar).
Bah, you're totally right. My brain got Pandora from somewhere - probably looking at the windows as boxes in the screenshots of it or something like that.