Find a local radio club. Get yourself a Technician class license and do all the packet radio you want, and give the county the finger.
As long as it's unencrypted and non-commercial.
Or at least that's what Amateur Radio was like back when I had a Technician class license. Last I heard it still applied to Ham Packet Radio. Have they changed those rules?
Wow. Like you couldn't discern from the first sentence that a device having a camera, audio, and LTE Band 4 capabilities, sharing the name of one of the most-hyped phones of the year, was a phone? You must either be an idiot or a troll.
I'm with him.
What's so hard about making the headline "Some Pixel Phones Have Problems"? With just six more keystrokes the problem completely goes away.
My time is precious. When I'm reading the slashdot front page I don't want to have to read a whole paragraph and do a bunch of reasoning to determine whether this is an article I want to skip or spend still more time digging into. I want it immediately apparent what the HELL the article is about, so I can move on.
I suspect many of Slashdot's other approximately three MILLION monthly unique users feel the same way.
If a fraction of a minute spent by ONE person, making the title and/or first sentence clear as to the subject, saves an average of a minute each for three million readers, it saves 25 MAN YEARS of effort. That's the bulk of the productive time of an entire career.
So do humanity a favor and spend the moment when posting.
I like how you somehow ignore the fact that the Congressional study was started after the NRA coup in 1977 where the gun manufacturers overthrew the hunters in charge of the NRA and became a gun manufacturer lobbying firm.
Actually, it was a grass-roots uprising (by people such as myself and my wife) against the elitists who wanted the NRA to be about supporting just gun sports for the rich and stay out of protecting the gun owners' rights to actually HAVE and USE guns for things like self-defense, hunting, deterring things like Nixon's scheme to suspend elections, or just because they're neat, against a crush of anti-gun legislation.
The NRA is run by a 76-member board, of which a third are elected annually by all the members who have been members of any grade for 5 years or have life (pricey: amounts to prepaying) or higher membership status. That's pretty much all of the membership who are interested enough to vote - which runs in the millions. And we DO pay attention and "throw the bastards out" when necessary. (Fortunately, it rarely becomes necessary.)
If you think the NRA is run by gun manufacturers, you've been drinking the left-wing coolaid. They couldn't make a dent against the VERY alert, active, and LARGE membership, and their contributions (if any) are a drop in the bucket compared to the members' dues, voluntary contributions, and bequests.
Further, gun manufacturers get a lot of their money from selling to the government - military, police, and the hordes of bureaucrats authorized to carry guns - so they don't want to jepoardize the big bucks by doing anything that might tweak off those in charge of which company gets these orders. So they tend to keep a low profile on gun politics, leaving it to the millions of gun fans.
... AT&T requires police to hide its use from the public...
As does the contract Harris makes them sign to use Stingray and related devices - which investigative agencies have used as an excuse for perjury in court. As do the Executive Branch's National Security Letters - administrative subpoenas for communication or financial information with gag orders attached.
IMHO these provisions should all be blocked - struck down by courts as contempt and perjury in the first class (courtroom rules trump civil contracts when the info is relative to the case in a court of competent jurisdiction), unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech and the right to council in the second. Then this should be nailed down by legislation, as well, for belt-and-suspenders protection of civil rights.
While most people start thinking, "oh what a breath of fresh air, the government getting it right for once," I worry, "have aliens infiltrated our government? Because it seems like they are listening experts and making logical conclusions.";)
You see this a lot.
A stock thing for Congress to do when there's a lot of public pressure over some crisis is to take the pressure off themselves by commissioning a study. By the time the study is finished the crisis is old news and the pressure is gone. The results of the study can then be safely ignored and the Congresscritters can continue to vote the same way as always.
The only thing the study results are usually used for is occasional speech sound bites for proponents of the side that agrees with the conclusions. Since the conclusions don't actually matter, the study groups don't have to be packed to come up with a desired result. So sometimes they come up with something accurate and useful. But it's still noise as far as actually changing anything politically sensitive. About the best thing it does is occasionally help a legislator understand an issue better and/or formulate a better way to present his position.
One example of this is the Second Amendment. Congress commissioned a study on whether the framers intended it to protect an individual right of members of the civilian population to arm themselves as they see fit. The study went deep and came to a resounding conclusion that this was exactly the point. This was reported in 1982.
Then Congress and the executive branch completely ignored the study and continued legislating and enforcing ever more gun restrictions - to this day, nearly 35 years later. Most of the federal level legal changes that favor those who want to buy guns and use them for self defence have come from the Supreme Court, which came to the same conclusion by their own procedures.
You're saying that a company that is infamous for skirting the law and screwing people over is skirting the law and screwing people over?! How unpredictable!;)
But were they infamous for that when they were hiring the early-hire developers in question? Or did they only develop the reputation AFTER the developers had built the platform and the executives used it in ways that screwed over the "line workers".
Hindsight is 20/20. How were the engineers hired to build the infrastructure to know, at the time, that they were going to be shafted in a way even the early-hire shafting executives of most Silicon Valley startups would never dare? This strikes at the fundamental draw for engineer hiring for startups. If it becomes common practice, the startup-driven innovation cycle could collapse. Uber needs a big, public, spanking over this, to nip it in the bud.
Executive summary: disk loading trumps tip losses.
Not really, since disk loading on a ducted versus a non-ducted propeller is an apples-to-oranges comparison.
[Disk loading] is determined by dividing the total helicopter weight by the rotor disc area, which is the area swept by the blades of a rotor.
This treats the load as if the disk is evenly loaded. Within a type of fan this is good for comparison.
In a ducted fan it is also a good approximation of the actual loading on any patch of the swept area. In a non-ducted fan the tip vortex depowers the outer portion of the blades. The inner portion has a near constant load, and a high and constant local disk loading, while the outer part (which amount to a disproportionately large amount of the swept area) is progressively more weakly loaded, thus having a lower local disk loading, and energy is dumped into the vortex. Compute the disk loading of an UNducted fan with the same partial disk loading in the central, working, portion as a hypothetical ducted replacement and you average the workng and less-to-non working swept area patches, computing a lower number than what's actually appropriate for the working area.
The point of the duct is to block the air trying to "run around the tip" and depower the airfoil by reducing the pressure difference across the blade. But you can also treat it as just keeping the inner, more working, portion of the blade and replacing the tip (and its extra drag) with a barrier. The barrier can be a stationary duct, an aerodynamic tip vane rotating with the fan (and substituting its own drag, or a duct rotating with the blade (an extension of the tip vane into a circle, with yet different drag characteristics). If the barrier doesn't have more drag than the blade tips it replaces, and does an equivalently good job, you're ahead on drag. So more of your power goes into pushing air in a useful direction, rather than making cute but useless vortex rings. Meanwhile the working part of the blade has the same disk loading it always had.
It's tempting to improve (a lot) further by taking advantage of the fact that the ducting is better than blade tips at suppressing tip vortex losses. So you'd run the blade slower (reducing drag), still achieving the same disk loading. This cuts the drag further, which is good.
But there's a "gotcha" when you're running with electric motors. Power is proportional to torque times RPM, so lower the RPM and you raise the torque. In a single-wound motor, voltage is proportional to RPM and current to torque. But voltage only affects how good your insulation must be, while copper losses are proportional to the SQUARE of current. So while going to a slower-rotating, higher-torque propeller delivers the same POWER to the shaft, doing that with the same motor design GREATLY RAISES the power drawn by the motor, lowering the efficiency. This could easily cost you more in battery life than the improved fan efficiency saves.
Switch the motor for one equivalently efficient at the lower RPM and higher torque and you're back to the same efficiency, and could realize the gains. But then you have a second gotcha: Such a motor is likely to be heavier than the lower-torque, higher-RPM model.
So you have to take these factors into account when experimenting with ducted fans. If you just do a "swap the prop" on an existing set of motors, you're likely to lose more to the increased I-squared-R losses than you gain from the improperly-tuned fan redesign. Then you'd think you're failed, or that ducted fans are worse than unducted.
Does he actually have to see it coming, or would he only have to have considered it a threat if he had seen it? I don't think that you have to have awareness for assault. I think it's the attempt to do harm that makes it assault.
I think that depends on how the particular jurisdiction defines it.
It's clear you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about with respect to life in the bay area. I couldn't find a word in your post that resonates with what it's like here today.
That's interesting.
I'm still in Silicon Valley and it's still that way. Moreso if anything.
I don't see it as controversial at all. If you knowingly do someone bodily harm, then that is assault.
IANAL, but if I understand the distinction correctly (in those jurisdictions where it exists in law):
* If you knowingly do someone bodily harm, then that is BATTERY
* If you knowingly do to someone something that would make him reasonably believe you have put him at risk of bodily harm, then that is ASSAULT.
Swing at his nose and miss by a half inch, it's assault. (So is making threats, such as by moving into his personal space and waving your fist, or just yelling into his face from an inch away.) Swing and connect, and it's battery. If he sees it coming it's assault and battery. Use a tool that can inflict damage at a level risking life and limb, and it adds "with a deadly weapon" to the assault and/or battery.
It's quite something to attach "on a computer" and then declare that somehow you can argue away both intent and harm.
I agree.
Since it's the intentional causing of bodily harm in one case, and the intentional creation of a reasonable fear of bodily harm in the other, but bodily harm is not limited to any particular subset of harm that would exclude inducing (or attempting to induce) a seizure, a charge of assault would be appropriate even if the attempt to produce a seizure did not succeed, but did cause the recipient to be reasonably afraid it might.
That link is the funniest piece of California satire I've read in years. Fortunately, it bares no resemblance to reality.
Satire my bippy! California IS the most racist place I've had the misfortune to reside within.
I came here back in the '80s from Michigan and was appalled at how the races are kept to separate neighborhoods within the cities of both Silicon Valley (with which I am most familiar) and elsewhere in the state. Even in cities with several ethnic groups the are all in clusters, like oil drops in water.
My wife-to-be came before we met, and recalls a heart-rending incident she witnessed: Two autoworker friends came to town to look for work at the NUMI plant (since shut down and now the site of Tesla). They happened to be a black and a white, and were unable to find a bar that would serve them both.
The education system is effectively re-segregated by "Bi-Lingual Education", keeping the Spanish-speaking children away from exposure to grammatical and commonly-pronounced American English until they're past the various "critical periods" for language acquisition, where their brain change from being learning engines for one or another aspect of language (and kill off the cells that aren't being used for other forms of that aspect), so they're cursed for the rest of their life with a strong accent, limited English vocabulary, distorted word choices and warped grammar (unless they struggle with relearning, much like a person recovering from a stroke). When I first arrived they were pulling the same stunt on the blacks with "Ebonics" (actually a rural-poor dialect spoken by many whites post-Civil-War).
And I could go on for pages.
California TALKS the non-racisim talk and walks the racist walk. However, thanks to the media studios it has the world's greatest P.R. department. So it has a lot of (far more integrated) people, living far enough away that all they know about it is how it's portrayed, convinced that it's a sweet multi-racial heaven, rather than the racial war zone it actually is.
Why risk damaging internal organs without first trying a few good thumps on the back?
Because thumps on the back risk dislodging the obstruction when it may be pulled, by gravity or attempted inhalation, further into the airway, lodge more firmly there, and then be UNremovable by the maneuver or other methods that might be applied in time, and/or result in damage to the lung.
I recall the early days of publicity of the maneuver, when the Red Cross published instructions in which they'd added three sharp thumps on the back of an erect victim before performing the chest thrust. Heimlich had to go on publicity tours in an attempt to correct that misinformation and avoid needless death.
If further research has shown Heimlich was wrong about this, I'd appreciate a pointer to it.
There wouldn't have been any copyright infringement if the downloaders were only downloading, but the bittorrent protocol is specifically designed to upload while it downloads, and uploading infringes copyright.
But it also is designed to upload only little pieces of content.
My gripe is with the legal claims that EACH torrent participant is responsible for MANY or ALL of the downloads. On the average, each is the source of a tiny fraction less than the data in ONE other person's download. (Earlier participants and those on faster lines, more, later ones less, many none at all.)
The claim of responsibility for all the downloads might be valid against the person who SEEDED the torrent. But it seems to me that, unless the plaintiffs have explicit evidence that a particular participant sourced more than one copy's worth of data (or the courts go with "joint and several" responsibility), their claim should be limited to the (still steep, but not astronomical) liability limit for ONE other person's copy.
Which, coincidentally, is the same amount as they'd owe for the ONE copy they explicitly downloaded for themselves.
Alternatively, how would the courts deal with a situation where, instead of a fanout, there was a series string of many users, each of which downloaded a copy for themselves then allowed one other person to download a copy from them?
They do when you copy it into memory to execute a program though!
As I recall, the legal status of the copying of a program into memory to execute it is explicitly NOT a copyright violation (though improperly obtaining a copy to copy FROM is a violation).
I would be more concerned about the incoming administration using antitrust powers to attack businesses it doesn't like than I would be about a general decrease in antitrust activity which happened decades ago.
Don't be afraid of it. USE it to fix the problem.
This non-neutrality is incentivized by the vertical integration of the ISP (transport) with the TV provider (competitive transported service). Such vertical integration is clearly anticompetitive, and the result hurts consumers.
Antitrust law could be used to break up such vertical integration of ISPs and service providers - including content providers - as an anticompetitive practice. (It wouldn't eliminate these incentives in ALL situations, but it would cover a LOT of them, and could serve as a model for going after others.) Once there's a clear separation between service and transport providers, the service providers will all be on a level playing field, so antitrust wouldn't be such a big issue among them.
But how to get the Trump administration on board? What do we think Trump and friends hate?
Well, gosh. The mainstream media went all "alt-left" on him during the campaign and did a gang pile-on, didn't they? I bet he'd LOVE to return the favor.
Think about the various ISPs. Most of them are (a small) part of a conglomerate, with a much bigger part being content generators, who run services over the ISPs as part of their distribution networks (and/or want to hamstring competition who might do so) - the source of just those perverse incentives to be non-neutral that we're griping about.
Then think about the content generators. In addition to the people driving network non-neutrality, they're anticompetitive and hurting us in a lot of other ways. They're the members of MPAA and RIAA, just for starters. And they're also the mainstream news media mentioned above.
Don't you think that a Trump administration would LOVE to return the favor by cutting them apart from their ISPs, who have a lock on the last mile of Internet transport? Don't you think such an administration would LOVE to encourage alternate content providers (which include those more favorable to him) by giving them a level playing field to compete with the entrenched old-guard?
Don't you think that, if they could force such a disvestiture in the name of consumer protection and internet fairness (while simultaneously maintaining their stand that explicit FCC "fairness" regulations are a camel's nose for government control of the Internet), they'd do it in a New York Minute? B-)
Well if you don't, consider this: During the campaign Trump EXPLICITLY came out OPPOSING the merger of AT&T and Time Warner. This would let him not only put that into law and spike it solidly, but do the same to the OTHER, EXISTING, similar partnerships. And it would have the side effect of creating a legal doctrine that could be used against many of the other drivers of non-neutrality. Win for him, double win for us.
Trump doesn't like the media companies that are driving much of network non-neutrality. We don't like the same media companies that are driving network non-neutrality, copyright extension, and unfair competition against new-tech service startups.
Politics makes strange bedfellows - usually through opposition to common enemies. As long as you're in the same bed, you might as well have some fun together.
I wonder why drones always seem to have open-ended propellor blades, rather than ducted fan blades
Simple: a free spinning prop is roughly twice as efficient as a ducted fan and weighs considerably less.
Actually, it's the other way around. Props can be better than ducted fans while cruising, but ducted fans are considerably better for high-thrust low-speed operation such as Ntra-copters.
In some cases, a shrouded rotor can be 94% more efficient than an open rotor. The improved performance is mainly because the outward flow is less contracted and thus carries more kinetic energy.... Advantages:
* By reducing propeller blade tip losses, the ducted fan is more efficient in producing thrust than a conventional propeller of similar diameter, especially at low speed and high static thrust level (airships, hovercraft)....
* Ducted fans are quieter than propellers: they shield the blade noise, and reduce the tip speed and intensity of the tip vortices both of which contribute to noise production.... Disadvantages:
* Less efficient than a propeller at cruise (at lower thrust level).
They also turn more slowly, reducing bearing wear without increasing bearing load. (That does mean a high-torque motor, which may be slightly heavier.)
Note that much of the advantage of ducted fans can be had with the duct consisting of a light ring around the tips of the blades, attached to and spinning with them, rather than a heavy, unmoving, ring airfoil structure surrounding them.
Seems to me that ducted fan rotors and Ntra-copters (high thrust, low speed or hovering), are a natural match.
(My reply ended up as a peer rather than a child, so I'm repeating it...)
I'm not going to believe you automatically, please show me evidence for your claim.
Go to youtube and search for "project veritas" (I through III or so) for hidden camera videos of the operatives explaining what they did. (The Clinton campaign fired them immediately after this came out, of course.)
There's corroboration in the WikiLeaks data dumps, but that takes more digging.
There was lots of news coverage on it. (But not much in the mainstream media, of course. B-) )
I'm not going to believe you automatically, please show me evidence for your claim.
Go to youtube and search for "project veritas" (I through III or so) for hidden camera videos of the operatives explaining what they did. (The Clinton campaign fired them immediately after this came out, of course.)
There's corroboration in the WikiLeaks data dumps, but that takes more digging.
There was lots of news coverage on it. (But not much in the mainstream media, of course. B-) )
Reminds me of the current EPA standards mandating ethanol in gasoline.
Also the earlier standards that (at least in California) mandated MTBE. That rotted out the rubber gas lines in older cars, leading to engine fires. (It also contaminated a lot of ground water - it is very persistent, costly to clean out, and microgram quantities give water a bad taste. This is why it was eventually banned.)
But the engine fires got a lot of older, more polluting, cars off the road (leaving mostly low-income people carless or needing to buy a new car). So the envirowackos score it as a win.
I wonder how these drones avoid collision with other air users?
I wonder why drones always seem to have open-ended propellor blades, rather than ducted fan blades. Multiple spinning knieves, a hazard to all around (even if light and soft).
Aren't ducted blades more efficient, even when the "duct" is a ring fused to the ends of the blades and spinning with them.? (That's like a continuous tip vane, reducing the air that goes around the tip, so you can use it in place of the last portion of the blade, which provides negligible thrust or lift.)
Even if not, it seems to me that they'd be both safer for anything they hit and less subject to damage when bumping into sonething.
The emails revealed nothing special, just stuff everyone does, Trump's campaign too.
Hiring people to pretend to be supporters of the other side and disrupt public events by initiating felonious physical attacks on other people?
1) Please show evidence that Trump's operation EVER did this.
2) Since when is "Everybody else does it too!" a defence for committing a felony? (There are a LOT of criminals who would like that to work in court.)
Sorry, mrclevesque, but statements like that say more about your own ethics than they do about those of people who either did not do, or at least did not get caught doing, the actual crimes the people you're defending DID get CAUGHT doing.
The torture argument falls apart once they start using fMRI machines to interrogate your brain without a) your consent, or b) appreciable pain.
And when that's ready for prime time I'm sure there will be court cases about it.
I expect it will go the same way as the polygraph and voice stress analysis : Courts will treat it as unreliable medical quackery and reject it. Police will use it to develop leads and innocent suspects (and psychopaths, who don't have the reactions the equipment looks for) will use it to convince prosecutors and police to stop wasting time and hunt elsewhere.
The real argument needs to be that the contents of one's mind is sacrosanct regardless of technology. Then one says that having exclusive control of a device to compute or remember is legally the same as having an augmented mind, e.g. someone's "iPhone 25" is legally the same as their memories.
But the same argument can be made for paper records, computation scratch paper, letters, pamphlets, and other "papers": They're a prosthetic augmentation for memory, computation, rational thought, and protected speech and communication. While it might be nice to extend the fifth amendment to your "prosthetic mind aids", I suspect the courts will find a closer correspondence with the fourth.
The 4th and 5th Amendment need to be consolidated into a single amendment that states that the contents of one's mind, papers, computers, etc., may nokt be searched under any circumstanseces.
Since the Fourth currently says that your papers and effects can be searched under SOME circumstances, I'd worry that combining the two would weaken the protections of the Fifth more than strengthening those of the Fourth.
What I'd really like to see is interpreting the Third to ban installibang keyloggers and other spyware on your computer.
The point of banning "quartering troops" in subjects' homes was not just that they were a tax to support the army deployment at the colonists' expense: Using the guest bed, eating the family's food, taking up space, etc. It was that they served as spies on the activity of the family members and their guests: Listening to conversations, searching home contents and files, reading letters both incoming and outgoing, reporting what they find back to the military and governmental intelligence services and investigative agencies, possibly leading to prosecution or martial law attacks. They could also disrupt your activities, forge documents with your seal, arrest you, steal anything of interest, destroy anything you have that they think you shouldn't, and so on. It's hard to oppose the current government's policies, even legally, with such a spy in place.
Spyware in your computer has a precisely analogous position: It is "housed" on premises you own, taking up space. It feeds on your machine's processing power to "live". It searches files, both records and programs (your "papers and effects") records your "speech" (in the form of keystrokes) and mail (email coming and going), and reports what it finds to its controllers (also consuming your purchased network bandwidth). It could also alter or delete files and programs, forge email, and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
Find a local radio club. Get yourself a Technician class license and do all the packet radio you want, and give the county the finger.
As long as it's unencrypted and non-commercial.
Or at least that's what Amateur Radio was like back when I had a Technician class license. Last I heard it still applied to Ham Packet Radio. Have they changed those rules?
Wow. Like you couldn't discern from the first sentence that a device having a camera, audio, and LTE Band 4 capabilities, sharing the name of one of the most-hyped phones of the year, was a phone? You must either be an idiot or a troll.
I'm with him.
What's so hard about making the headline "Some Pixel Phones Have Problems"? With just six more keystrokes the problem completely goes away.
My time is precious. When I'm reading the slashdot front page I don't want to have to read a whole paragraph and do a bunch of reasoning to determine whether this is an article I want to skip or spend still more time digging into. I want it immediately apparent what the HELL the article is about, so I can move on.
I suspect many of Slashdot's other approximately three MILLION monthly unique users feel the same way.
If a fraction of a minute spent by ONE person, making the title and/or first sentence clear as to the subject, saves an average of a minute each for three million readers, it saves 25 MAN YEARS of effort. That's the bulk of the productive time of an entire career.
So do humanity a favor and spend the moment when posting.
I like how you somehow ignore the fact that the Congressional study was started after the NRA coup in 1977 where the gun manufacturers overthrew the hunters in charge of the NRA and became a gun manufacturer lobbying firm.
Actually, it was a grass-roots uprising (by people such as myself and my wife) against the elitists who wanted the NRA to be about supporting just gun sports for the rich and stay out of protecting the gun owners' rights to actually HAVE and USE guns for things like self-defense, hunting, deterring things like Nixon's scheme to suspend elections, or just because they're neat, against a crush of anti-gun legislation.
The NRA is run by a 76-member board, of which a third are elected annually by all the members who have been members of any grade for 5 years or have life (pricey: amounts to prepaying) or higher membership status. That's pretty much all of the membership who are interested enough to vote - which runs in the millions. And we DO pay attention and "throw the bastards out" when necessary. (Fortunately, it rarely becomes necessary.)
If you think the NRA is run by gun manufacturers, you've been drinking the left-wing coolaid. They couldn't make a dent against the VERY alert, active, and LARGE membership, and their contributions (if any) are a drop in the bucket compared to the members' dues, voluntary contributions, and bequests.
Further, gun manufacturers get a lot of their money from selling to the government - military, police, and the hordes of bureaucrats authorized to carry guns - so they don't want to jepoardize the big bucks by doing anything that might tweak off those in charge of which company gets these orders. So they tend to keep a low profile on gun politics, leaving it to the millions of gun fans.
Also:
Prosector: Objection! (Any of several didn't show relevance to this case or otherwise admissible type complaints.)
Judge: Sustained. (Yawn.)
... when the info is relative to the case in a court of competent jurisdiction ...
Argh! 'Relevant", not "relative".
... AT&T requires police to hide its use from the public ...
As does the contract Harris makes them sign to use Stingray and related devices - which investigative agencies have used as an excuse for perjury in court. As do the Executive Branch's National Security Letters - administrative subpoenas for communication or financial information with gag orders attached.
IMHO these provisions should all be blocked - struck down by courts as contempt and perjury in the first class (courtroom rules trump civil contracts when the info is relative to the case in a court of competent jurisdiction), unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech and the right to council in the second. Then this should be nailed down by legislation, as well, for belt-and-suspenders protection of civil rights.
While most people start thinking, "oh what a breath of fresh air, the government getting it right for once," I worry, "have aliens infiltrated our government? Because it seems like they are listening experts and making logical conclusions." ;)
You see this a lot.
A stock thing for Congress to do when there's a lot of public pressure over some crisis is to take the pressure off themselves by commissioning a study. By the time the study is finished the crisis is old news and the pressure is gone. The results of the study can then be safely ignored and the Congresscritters can continue to vote the same way as always.
The only thing the study results are usually used for is occasional speech sound bites for proponents of the side that agrees with the conclusions. Since the conclusions don't actually matter, the study groups don't have to be packed to come up with a desired result. So sometimes they come up with something accurate and useful. But it's still noise as far as actually changing anything politically sensitive. About the best thing it does is occasionally help a legislator understand an issue better and/or formulate a better way to present his position.
One example of this is the Second Amendment. Congress commissioned a study on whether the framers intended it to protect an individual right of members of the civilian population to arm themselves as they see fit. The study went deep and came to a resounding conclusion that this was exactly the point. This was reported in 1982.
Then Congress and the executive branch completely ignored the study and continued legislating and enforcing ever more gun restrictions - to this day, nearly 35 years later. Most of the federal level legal changes that favor those who want to buy guns and use them for self defence have come from the Supreme Court, which came to the same conclusion by their own procedures.
You're saying that a company that is infamous for skirting the law and screwing people over is skirting the law and screwing people over?! How unpredictable! ;)
But were they infamous for that when they were hiring the early-hire developers in question? Or did they only develop the reputation AFTER the developers had built the platform and the executives used it in ways that screwed over the "line workers".
Hindsight is 20/20. How were the engineers hired to build the infrastructure to know, at the time, that they were going to be shafted in a way even the early-hire shafting executives of most Silicon Valley startups would never dare? This strikes at the fundamental draw for engineer hiring for startups. If it becomes common practice, the startup-driven innovation cycle could collapse. Uber needs a big, public, spanking over this, to nip it in the bud.
Executive summary: disk loading trumps tip losses.
Not really, since disk loading on a ducted versus a non-ducted propeller is an apples-to-oranges comparison.
This treats the load as if the disk is evenly loaded. Within a type of fan this is good for comparison.
In a ducted fan it is also a good approximation of the actual loading on any patch of the swept area. In a non-ducted fan the tip vortex depowers the outer portion of the blades. The inner portion has a near constant load, and a high and constant local disk loading, while the outer part (which amount to a disproportionately large amount of the swept area) is progressively more weakly loaded, thus having a lower local disk loading, and energy is dumped into the vortex. Compute the disk loading of an UNducted fan with the same partial disk loading in the central, working, portion as a hypothetical ducted replacement and you average the workng and less-to-non working swept area patches, computing a lower number than what's actually appropriate for the working area.
The point of the duct is to block the air trying to "run around the tip" and depower the airfoil by reducing the pressure difference across the blade. But you can also treat it as just keeping the inner, more working, portion of the blade and replacing the tip (and its extra drag) with a barrier. The barrier can be a stationary duct, an aerodynamic tip vane rotating with the fan (and substituting its own drag, or a duct rotating with the blade (an extension of the tip vane into a circle, with yet different drag characteristics). If the barrier doesn't have more drag than the blade tips it replaces, and does an equivalently good job, you're ahead on drag. So more of your power goes into pushing air in a useful direction, rather than making cute but useless vortex rings. Meanwhile the working part of the blade has the same disk loading it always had.
It's tempting to improve (a lot) further by taking advantage of the fact that the ducting is better than blade tips at suppressing tip vortex losses. So you'd run the blade slower (reducing drag), still achieving the same disk loading. This cuts the drag further, which is good.
But there's a "gotcha" when you're running with electric motors. Power is proportional to torque times RPM, so lower the RPM and you raise the torque. In a single-wound motor, voltage is proportional to RPM and current to torque. But voltage only affects how good your insulation must be, while copper losses are proportional to the SQUARE of current. So while going to a slower-rotating, higher-torque propeller delivers the same POWER to the shaft, doing that with the same motor design GREATLY RAISES the power drawn by the motor, lowering the efficiency. This could easily cost you more in battery life than the improved fan efficiency saves.
Switch the motor for one equivalently efficient at the lower RPM and higher torque and you're back to the same efficiency, and could realize the gains. But then you have a second gotcha: Such a motor is likely to be heavier than the lower-torque, higher-RPM model.
So you have to take these factors into account when experimenting with ducted fans. If you just do a "swap the prop" on an existing set of motors, you're likely to lose more to the increased I-squared-R losses than you gain from the improperly-tuned fan redesign. Then you'd think you're failed, or that ducted fans are worse than unducted.
Does he actually have to see it coming, or would he only have to have considered it a threat if he had seen it? I don't think that you have to have awareness for assault. I think it's the attempt to do harm that makes it assault.
I think that depends on how the particular jurisdiction defines it.
It's clear you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about with respect to life in the bay area. I couldn't find a word in your post that resonates with what it's like here today.
That's interesting.
I'm still in Silicon Valley and it's still that way. Moreso if anything.
But maybe your particular oil drop looks fine.
Do you live in a "walled community"?
I don't see it as controversial at all. If you knowingly do someone bodily harm, then that is assault.
IANAL, but if I understand the distinction correctly (in those jurisdictions where it exists in law):
* If you knowingly do someone bodily harm, then that is BATTERY
* If you knowingly do to someone something that would make him reasonably believe you have put him at risk of bodily harm, then that is ASSAULT.
Swing at his nose and miss by a half inch, it's assault. (So is making threats, such as by moving into his personal space and waving your fist, or just yelling into his face from an inch away.) Swing and connect, and it's battery. If he sees it coming it's assault and battery. Use a tool that can inflict damage at a level risking life and limb, and it adds "with a deadly weapon" to the assault and/or battery.
It's quite something to attach "on a computer" and then declare that somehow you can argue away both intent and harm.
I agree.
Since it's the intentional causing of bodily harm in one case, and the intentional creation of a reasonable fear of bodily harm in the other, but bodily harm is not limited to any particular subset of harm that would exclude inducing (or attempting to induce) a seizure, a charge of assault would be appropriate even if the attempt to produce a seizure did not succeed, but did cause the recipient to be reasonably afraid it might.
Satire my bippy! California IS the most racist place I've had the misfortune to reside within.
I came here back in the '80s from Michigan and was appalled at how the races are kept to separate neighborhoods within the cities of both Silicon Valley (with which I am most familiar) and elsewhere in the state. Even in cities with several ethnic groups the are all in clusters, like oil drops in water.
My wife-to-be came before we met, and recalls a heart-rending incident she witnessed: Two autoworker friends came to town to look for work at the NUMI plant (since shut down and now the site of Tesla). They happened to be a black and a white, and were unable to find a bar that would serve them both.
The education system is effectively re-segregated by "Bi-Lingual Education", keeping the Spanish-speaking children away from exposure to grammatical and commonly-pronounced American English until they're past the various "critical periods" for language acquisition, where their brain change from being learning engines for one or another aspect of language (and kill off the cells that aren't being used for other forms of that aspect), so they're cursed for the rest of their life with a strong accent, limited English vocabulary, distorted word choices and warped grammar (unless they struggle with relearning, much like a person recovering from a stroke). When I first arrived they were pulling the same stunt on the blacks with "Ebonics" (actually a rural-poor dialect spoken by many whites post-Civil-War).
And I could go on for pages.
California TALKS the non-racisim talk and walks the racist walk. However, thanks to the media studios it has the world's greatest P.R. department. So it has a lot of (far more integrated) people, living far enough away that all they know about it is how it's portrayed, convinced that it's a sweet multi-racial heaven, rather than the racial war zone it actually is.
Why risk damaging internal organs without first trying a few good thumps on the back?
Because thumps on the back risk dislodging the obstruction when it may be pulled, by gravity or attempted inhalation, further into the airway, lodge more firmly there, and then be UNremovable by the maneuver or other methods that might be applied in time, and/or result in damage to the lung.
I recall the early days of publicity of the maneuver, when the Red Cross published instructions in which they'd added three sharp thumps on the back of an erect victim before performing the chest thrust. Heimlich had to go on publicity tours in an attempt to correct that misinformation and avoid needless death.
If further research has shown Heimlich was wrong about this, I'd appreciate a pointer to it.
There wouldn't have been any copyright infringement if the downloaders were only downloading, but the bittorrent protocol is specifically designed to upload while it downloads, and uploading infringes copyright.
But it also is designed to upload only little pieces of content.
My gripe is with the legal claims that EACH torrent participant is responsible for MANY or ALL of the downloads. On the average, each is the source of a tiny fraction less than the data in ONE other person's download. (Earlier participants and those on faster lines, more, later ones less, many none at all.)
The claim of responsibility for all the downloads might be valid against the person who SEEDED the torrent. But it seems to me that, unless the plaintiffs have explicit evidence that a particular participant sourced more than one copy's worth of data (or the courts go with "joint and several" responsibility), their claim should be limited to the (still steep, but not astronomical) liability limit for ONE other person's copy.
Which, coincidentally, is the same amount as they'd owe for the ONE copy they explicitly downloaded for themselves.
Alternatively, how would the courts deal with a situation where, instead of a fanout, there was a series string of many users, each of which downloaded a copy for themselves then allowed one other person to download a copy from them?
They do when you copy it into memory to execute a program though!
As I recall, the legal status of the copying of a program into memory to execute it is explicitly NOT a copyright violation (though improperly obtaining a copy to copy FROM is a violation).
(IANAL. Where's New York Country Lawyer?)
I would be more concerned about the incoming administration using antitrust powers to attack businesses it doesn't like than I would be about a general decrease in antitrust activity which happened decades ago.
Don't be afraid of it. USE it to fix the problem.
This non-neutrality is incentivized by the vertical integration of the ISP (transport) with the TV provider (competitive transported service). Such vertical integration is clearly anticompetitive, and the result hurts consumers.
Antitrust law could be used to break up such vertical integration of ISPs and service providers - including content providers - as an anticompetitive practice. (It wouldn't eliminate these incentives in ALL situations, but it would cover a LOT of them, and could serve as a model for going after others.) Once there's a clear separation between service and transport providers, the service providers will all be on a level playing field, so antitrust wouldn't be such a big issue among them.
But how to get the Trump administration on board? What do we think Trump and friends hate?
Well, gosh. The mainstream media went all "alt-left" on him during the campaign and did a gang pile-on, didn't they? I bet he'd LOVE to return the favor.
Think about the various ISPs. Most of them are (a small) part of a conglomerate, with a much bigger part being content generators, who run services over the ISPs as part of their distribution networks (and/or want to hamstring competition who might do so) - the source of just those perverse incentives to be non-neutral that we're griping about.
Then think about the content generators. In addition to the people driving network non-neutrality, they're anticompetitive and hurting us in a lot of other ways. They're the members of MPAA and RIAA, just for starters. And they're also the mainstream news media mentioned above.
Don't you think that a Trump administration would LOVE to return the favor by cutting them apart from their ISPs, who have a lock on the last mile of Internet transport? Don't you think such an administration would LOVE to encourage alternate content providers (which include those more favorable to him) by giving them a level playing field to compete with the entrenched old-guard?
Don't you think that, if they could force such a disvestiture in the name of consumer protection and internet fairness (while simultaneously maintaining their stand that explicit FCC "fairness" regulations are a camel's nose for government control of the Internet), they'd do it in a New York Minute? B-)
Well if you don't, consider this: During the campaign Trump EXPLICITLY came out OPPOSING the merger of AT&T and Time Warner. This would let him not only put that into law and spike it solidly, but do the same to the OTHER, EXISTING, similar partnerships. And it would have the side effect of creating a legal doctrine that could be used against many of the other drivers of non-neutrality. Win for him, double win for us.
Trump doesn't like the media companies that are driving much of network non-neutrality. We don't like the same media companies that are driving network non-neutrality, copyright extension, and unfair competition against new-tech service startups.
Politics makes strange bedfellows - usually through opposition to common enemies. As long as you're in the same bed, you might as well have some fun together.
Nice theory, but reports of increased duration due to changing from free spinning to ducted fans appear to be conspicuously absent.
Are there reports of trying and failing? (I'm not a drone flyer or engineer myself and am not hooked into the rumor mill.)
BTW, what's an ntra-copter?
Partly a typo (of Nra-...). Partly intended to be a generic for "quadra-, hexa- octo-, etc- copter".
Maybe "N-copter" might be better?
Actually, it's the other way around. Props can be better than ducted fans while cruising, but ducted fans are considerably better for high-thrust low-speed operation such as Ntra-copters.
From Wikipedia article on Ducted Fan:
In some cases, a shrouded rotor can be 94% more efficient than an open rotor. The improved performance is mainly because the outward flow is less contracted and thus carries more kinetic energy. ... ... ...
Advantages:
* By reducing propeller blade tip losses, the ducted fan is more efficient in producing thrust than a conventional propeller of similar diameter, especially at low speed and high static thrust level (airships, hovercraft).
* Ducted fans are quieter than propellers: they shield the blade noise, and reduce the tip speed and intensity of the tip vortices both of which contribute to noise production.
Disadvantages:
* Less efficient than a propeller at cruise (at lower thrust level).
(My reply ended up as a peer rather than a child, so I'm repeating it...)
I'm not going to believe you automatically, please show me evidence for your claim.
Go to youtube and search for "project veritas" (I through III or so) for hidden camera videos of the operatives explaining what they did. (The Clinton campaign fired them immediately after this came out, of course.)
There's corroboration in the WikiLeaks data dumps, but that takes more digging.
There was lots of news coverage on it. (But not much in the mainstream media, of course. B-) )
I'm not going to believe you automatically, please show me evidence for your claim.
Go to youtube and search for "project veritas" (I through III or so) for hidden camera videos of the operatives explaining what they did. (The Clinton campaign fired them immediately after this came out, of course.)
There's corroboration in the WikiLeaks data dumps, but that takes more digging.
There was lots of news coverage on it. (But not much in the mainstream media, of course. B-) )
Reminds me of the current EPA standards mandating ethanol in gasoline.
Also the earlier standards that (at least in California) mandated MTBE. That rotted out the rubber gas lines in older cars, leading to engine fires. (It also contaminated a lot of ground water - it is very persistent, costly to clean out, and microgram quantities give water a bad taste. This is why it was eventually banned.)
But the engine fires got a lot of older, more polluting, cars off the road (leaving mostly low-income people carless or needing to buy a new car). So the envirowackos score it as a win.
I wonder how these drones avoid collision with other air users?
I wonder why drones always seem to have open-ended propellor blades, rather than ducted fan blades. Multiple spinning knieves, a hazard to all around (even if light and soft).
Aren't ducted blades more efficient, even when the "duct" is a ring fused to the ends of the blades and spinning with them.? (That's like a continuous tip vane, reducing the air that goes around the tip, so you can use it in place of the last portion of the blade, which provides negligible thrust or lift.)
Even if not, it seems to me that they'd be both safer for anything they hit and less subject to damage when bumping into sonething.
The emails revealed nothing special, just stuff everyone does, Trump's campaign too.
Hiring people to pretend to be supporters of the other side and disrupt public events by initiating felonious physical attacks on other people?
1) Please show evidence that Trump's operation EVER did this.
2) Since when is "Everybody else does it too!" a defence for committing a felony? (There are a LOT of criminals who would like that to work in court.)
Sorry, mrclevesque, but statements like that say more about your own ethics than they do about those of people who either did not do, or at least did not get caught doing, the actual crimes the people you're defending DID get CAUGHT doing.
The torture argument falls apart once they start using fMRI machines to interrogate your brain without a) your consent, or b) appreciable pain.
And when that's ready for prime time I'm sure there will be court cases about it.
I expect it will go the same way as the polygraph and voice stress analysis : Courts will treat it as unreliable medical quackery and reject it. Police will use it to develop leads and innocent suspects (and psychopaths, who don't have the reactions the equipment looks for) will use it to convince prosecutors and police to stop wasting time and hunt elsewhere.
The real argument needs to be that the contents of one's mind is sacrosanct regardless of technology. Then one says that having exclusive control of a device to compute or remember is legally the same as having an augmented mind, e.g. someone's "iPhone 25" is legally the same as their memories.
But the same argument can be made for paper records, computation scratch paper, letters, pamphlets, and other "papers": They're a prosthetic augmentation for memory, computation, rational thought, and protected speech and communication. While it might be nice to extend the fifth amendment to your "prosthetic mind aids", I suspect the courts will find a closer correspondence with the fourth.
The 4th and 5th Amendment need to be consolidated into a single amendment that states that the contents of one's mind, papers, computers, etc., may nokt be searched under any circumstanseces.
Since the Fourth currently says that your papers and effects can be searched under SOME circumstances, I'd worry that combining the two would weaken the protections of the Fifth more than strengthening those of the Fourth.
What I'd really like to see is interpreting the Third to ban installibang keyloggers and other spyware on your computer.
The point of banning "quartering troops" in subjects' homes was not just that they were a tax to support the army deployment at the colonists' expense: Using the guest bed, eating the family's food, taking up space, etc. It was that they served as spies on the activity of the family members and their guests: Listening to conversations, searching home contents and files, reading letters both incoming and outgoing, reporting what they find back to the military and governmental intelligence services and investigative agencies, possibly leading to prosecution or martial law attacks. They could also disrupt your activities, forge documents with your seal, arrest you, steal anything of interest, destroy anything you have that they think you shouldn't, and so on. It's hard to oppose the current government's policies, even legally, with such a spy in place.
Spyware in your computer has a precisely analogous position: It is "housed" on premises you own, taking up space. It feeds on your machine's processing power to "live". It searches files, both records and programs (your "papers and effects") records your "speech" (in the form of keystrokes) and mail (email coming and going), and reports what it finds to its controllers (also consuming your purchased network bandwidth). It could also alter or delete files and programs, forge email, and so on.