What's next, patenting the layout of the 0 ~ 9 dialpad?
Given that the 0-9 dialpad layout actually WAS designed to slow people down (as was alleged with QWERTY keyboards) It might be interesting if it were blocked and phones had to go back to the adding machine layout.
The early Touch-Tone dials - using a cute one-transistor circuit to generate two tones, to save then-high semiconductor costs - only generated tones while they were pressed in. The keys had to be held long enough for the tone to have enough cycles for the central office equipment to recognize the tones. Bell deliberately laid out the keypad differently from that of adding machines, swapping the 123 and 789 rows, out of concern that people who used adding machines a lot would "type too fast" and have a bad experience, with many call attempts failing.
Though promulgated by the Bluetooth SIG and using some of the upper layer organization, at the lower layers BLE is a very different radio system and protocol.
Its definition is promulgated by being added to the Bluetooth standard, with the first version added at 4.0.
If these devices ARE BLE-based, and If your laptop or smartphone Bluetooth peripheral is 4.0 or higher (4.2 just came out), you'll be able to run stock apps (such as bluez's hcitool with the lescan option on Linux, or lightblue on an iDevice) to look for the "beacons" described in the article.
Bluetooth? Or "Bluetooth Smart" / "BLE" ("Bluetooth Low Energy")?
This sounds like a converted commodity iBeacon, which would be BLE, the new Internet of Things protocol.
Though promulgated by the Bluetooth SIG and using some of the upper layer organization, at the lower layers BLE is a very different radio system and protocol.
It's also very convenient for building stuff: The chips have powerful computers (which sleep most of the time so the batteries last), reasonable amounts of RAM and FLASH, built-in radios, several GPIO and comm ports (UART, USB, SPI,...), are dirt cheap, and can be easily reprogrammed by easy-to-get and quite cheap equipment and tools.
Note that the violation is subject to a fine. The administration has no authority to order a recall.
Doesn't the administration have the authority to fine them AGAIN, and again, and again,... if they willfully leave the cars on the road without "upgrading" them? Can't failing to apply a fix be construed to constitute an additional violation of the act, thus avoiding the multiple jeopardy prohibitions of law?
Floppy disks were cheap, even back then! They were practically a drop in the ocean when it comes to the budget of even small companies. What were these managers thinking?
They also organized groups of developers and QA people to be sure the lights in the bathrooms were turned off. Compare the cost of the time of a highly trained and highly paid (pre-H1-B flood) engineer spent on checking a bathroom light to the cost of leaving it on even over a weekend. Then think of the time spent by the lot of them in the meeting where management presented this bright idea and trained them in it. (While you're at it, think about what happens to the light, freshly shut off for the night, when the janitors arrive in the early evening.)
That one wasn't peculiar to this company, but happened to a lot of them. There was a fad going for it among management organizations at the time. Apparently the idea was to raise morale by getting the workers to feel like they were doing something to help the company. (Probably started by some clueless management consultant who thought that engineers were dumber than rocks - or at least dumber than pointy-haired bosses.)
Of course what it actually did was convince the engineers that the company was in deep financial trouble and the executive suite was too stupid to fix it and were making it worse with their counter-productive thrashing. Morale went through the floor and the talent started job-hunting elsewhere.
I'll leave the company name out (mostly to protect my source B-) )
This was in the early part of the cycle of:
- A handful of companies made graphics accelerator chips..
- A BUNCH of new companies also made graphics accelerator chips.
- There was a shakeout and only a few survived - not necessarily many - or any - of the original handful. The company in question was one of the original few.
The hardware was good. But much of the performance advantages were due to some good algorithms in the driver, which were applicable to other good, bad, or moderate capability hardware, rather than depending on special features of the company's product.
As with many Silicon Valley companies, where the value added was so high that the administration could be utterly wacky or clueless and the company would still survive for years, this one had some managers make some dumb decisions.
One dumb decision was to try to save money by limiting the personnel to one new floppy disk per month. So the developers kept reusing the disks they had, when they shouldn't.
As a result, the golden master for an object-only release of the driver was built on a used disk, which had once held the complete sources of the driver in question. Apparently the "reformat" process used didn't overwrite the sectors - but the manufacturing process that cloned the golden master DID copy those sectors.
A customer tried an undelete utility and found almost the entire source code. Oops!
This news got out. Over the next couple years the great algorithms went from being a valuable trade secret (much of the company's "secret sauce") to a de facto industry standard.
There shouldn't be critical cables. There should be redundant paths to make the network tolerant to any individual cut.
They ARE redundant. They're typically arranged in rings. You have to cut them in TWO places, one on each side of the area you want to darken, to cause the failure.
When the first one is cut the traffic switches to alternate routing in milliseconds. (Typically: The other way around the ring.) It's when the second cut is made that the failure occurs.
Unfortunately, it takes a lot longer to fix the first break than it takes the bad guy to go to the second location and cut the second cable.
The need to cut two cables to cause failures is a sign that the person doing it may have inside information, in order to know which lines to cut to create outages. On the other hand, he's cut a number of lines, so maybe it's just that he's lucked into creating outages by cutting enough that he isolated some areas.
Most of the cuts will occur in HPâ(TM)s long-troubled Enterprise Services unit and ay be offset by new hires in that unit.
Any bets on how many of the new hires will be H-1Bs? Or if the total of the H-1Bs hired in the "offset hiring" plus the last year or so before the layoffs will approximate the number of US citizens laid off?
A horsepower is almost exactly 3/4 kW, so 25 kW is 33 1/3 HP. That's twice what you need to cruise a full-sized car on the level at highway speeds.
Headwinds from ordinary weather don't give you THAT much of a bump, even taking into account that the major drag term goes with the cube of the speed.
Yes, substantial hill-climbing (like mountains) might mean crawling like a loaded semi once the peaking store is exhausted. But at least it's not as bad as one that was sized for JUST the level cruise load would be.
Why can't we have both? As in a hybrid with a 0 to 60 instant torque acceleration electric motor and a 500HP gas motor for sustained speed/range.
You slipped a decimal. Cruising at freeway speed (in a full-sized car with ordinary tires) only requires power levels in the teens of horsepower. So call it 20 to 25 HP to give you margin for recharging the "peaking" system and you've got what you need.
IMHO the whole POINT of a hybrid is to have a storage system to provide "peaking" power for acceleration and hill climbing and scavenge power from stopping and descending, letting the prime mover engine be low power, low weight (so you don't burn a lot of fuel carrying it around), and run either at peak efficiency or not at all. Having a prime mover means you can store energy as fuel, which can be refilled very quickly and has historically been lower weight than an equivalent fuel supply as charged batteries. Having a peaking store means stop-and-go traffic can approach the mileage of highway travel. (Also: If your peaking store is large enough, a rechargeable hybrid can double as an only(-using)-electric commuter vehicle and only run the prime mover on long trips or when stuck in traffic when the charge runs low.)
Pure electirics dispense with the prime mover, use a bigger battery, and take a hit on range and cross-country practicality. But with new ultra-fast, ultra-efficient batteries and deployment of matching charging systems, they may become as all-around effective as hybrids. (Or you might add a trailer with an engine/generator/fuel tank for cross-country expeditions, creating a two-piece hybrid. B-) )
First I note that Rand Paul is not on board as a co-sponsor. On any alleged civil-liberties-promoting Senate bill that's a big red flag saying "Look for the 'gotchas'".
Even a cursory look at the summary shows that it explicitly does not block "administrative" subpoenas and authorizes delaying or blocking the very notifications it's purported to require. "Get a warrant!" is a big so-what when they have a rubber-stamp court that gives them whatever warrants they want.
So I'm not even bothering to read any deeper. It smells (to high heaven) like a sound-good bill intended to substitute for any REAL reform and take the pressure off the legislators.
A number of people (myself included) have known for decades (and somtimes brought to the attention of auto company executives that electric cars could be capable of performance far better than fuel-driven engines and limited only by the traction of the tires, and that people might want lectric vehicles with sane levels of performance.
But the auto execs only thought of electric vehicles as appealing to eco-freaks, who would be willing to accept - and might desire - classic VW levels of performance. So when they designed electric "concept cars" they didn't do the engineering to achieve performance. Their offerings were traffic-snarling, short-range, wimpy eco-freak commuter cars.
This left the market SO open that Elon Musk (who also understood the demand) was able to build a successful new auto company from scratch (a couple billion dollars worth) and capture the market.
Musk started with the high end - to recover the development cost from the early adopters willing to pay big for the new toy - in classic Silicon Valley style. He's working his way down from the pricey prestige cars to the bulk market as fast as his engineers can bring the cost down and his financing can build the manufacturing infrastructure (and his lawyers and lobbyists can remove the legal obstacles to his not-dealer-dependent marketing).
But now the PARTIAL lesson - that there's a market at the top for a high-performance electric car - has been learned, and a prestige auto maker is trying to get a slice of that.
They're STILL not seeing the whole picture. Which is very good for Tesla. B-)
... announced today a landmark agreement from 10 of the world's biggest automakers...
They used to call such agreements "illegal collusion" or "a trust" under anti-trust law.
"Voluntarily" adding an expensive new system as "standard" (i.e. you can't not buy it and still get the car), in unison across a broad swath of the market, keeps the consumers from making their own tradeoff of cost vs. functionality and voting with their dollars.
I guess it's not supposed to be illegal if the government is pressuring them to do it. B-b
A couple laser pulses into a plasma and you can create fields that accelerate electrons to a couple GeV in as many centimetres, something that takes about four orders of magnitude more path length in classic accelerator approaches. You're talking doing on a tabletop what had been done on a "staple across the San Andreas fault".
And this technology is just getting started. Given big enough laser systems (on the scale of those at the National Ignition Facility) I don't see any reason you shouldn't be able to both get somewhat stronger and keep it up for miles. (Or, in solar orbit, for astronomical units.) Getting the timing of things like wakefilds right is just a matter of geometry, not anything fancy.
Unless some new particles screw it up, of course. But that's what you're looking for, right? B-)
Completely wrong. This has never been definitively resolved by either Congress or the Supreme Court.
To the extent that it hasn't been resolved the candidate can play it any way he wants to. The assumption is that he IS qualified until somebody - with standing - gets a court to rule he is not.
Even getting such a challenge heard, let alone heard in a timely fashion and obtaining a remedy that would eject the candidate from an ongoing electoral process or a seat in office, is a very difficult thing. (Look at the sideshow with the claims about Obama for an example.) The courts don't like to meddle with the operation of the high levels of the other branches and the selections of the electorate.
Thank God that Jeff Golblum and his trusty Mac can hack the alien hackers. And yes...they are making an Independence Day sequel.
Apparently the administration at the time was appalled when the heard that, when the scene of the saucer giant-laser-blasting the Whitehouse into oblivion screened, theatre audiences cheered. B-)
If the computer is working at all, the following tricks might make it like-new:
Open it up and vacuum out the dust. Dust accumulates, especially in the CPU heatsinks, over years, causing them to overheat. For a long time the CPUs have had circuitry that slows the clock to reduce the heat - and thus slows the machine way down, which may be why it was finally abandoned. Suck out the dust and the CPU will be back to its full speed.
Replacing the BIOS backup battery is good, too, as it may be nearing end-of-life - especially as the machine sat on the shelf waiting for a new home. Also: A little time with the battery out may clear out oddball BIOS settings in older BIOS chips that are battery-backed-RAM, rather than flash, based.
If the keyboard is dirty or a little flakey, try washing it with clean (better yet, distilled) water and drying it thoroughly. As long as you don't power it while it's still moist, and don't use hot water or the heated drying cycle in a dishwaher, you won't corrode anything.
Then installing Linux from a live disk, with the use-full-disk options, will clean out any malware and give them a modern, supported, OS with a good and easy to use word processor (Open Office) for free.
It won't work for exactly the same reason. Your average laptop owner doesn't know their device's MAC address.
There's an app for that! (Or easily could be.)
It would be trivial to build an application that would squirrel this info away for the user - like onto a database on various services (paid or free) that he subscribes to or registers for. (A good one would be the registration for the manufacturer's warranty.)
It would also be trivial to include the various device MAC addresses along with the serial number, on the label, in the databases that print the reciept at the electronics store, and in the manufacturer's records (even without warranty registration). Give the manufacturer the serial number (and your own identification or a police report number if he doesn't know you) and he gives you (or the cops) the MAC addresses of interest.
The magnetic state is not likely to be a significant issue,provided the tape is not exposed to excessive heat or strong magnetic fields (like from lightning currents in a nearby structural element or having the storage box sitting on the floor next to an industrial-scale waxer's drive motor).
While really small domains can be "squeezed out" by their neighbors (perhaps eventually attenuating really high frequency material and/or resulting in a bit of cross-talk between layers in the tape as wound for storage), the larger-scale domains on mag tapes are comparable to those in the same magnetic materials as minerals: Those are stable for geological time - and indeed are how geologists tracked the Earth's magnetic field-reversals.
The problem with mag tapes is mainly the degradation of the physical media - the glue that holds the magnetic material to the tape, and the tape itself.
I recall a story about a misadventure at Mobile Fidelity Sound. This is a company that makes extremely high quality recordings from original master tapes. A typical operation was to use specialized low-noise equipment to cut a master at half-speed, and press it into ultra-pure, super-hard, "supervinyl" for low surface noise, undistorted playback, low wear, and environmental stability. Such a master, and copies made from it, are substantially more faithful reproductions of the input signals than magnetic master tapes.
They were making a new vinyl disk master from a very early rock record's master tape. As the cutting proceeded, they noticed that, beyond the playback heads, the capstain/pinch roller drive's bending of the tape was causing the oxide to fall off, leaving clean tape going onto the takeup reel and totally destroying the master tape.
Fortunately, the engineer was clueful enough to NOT stop the recording (which would have left them with neither a disk nor a master tape). Result: A new, clean, ultra-high-fidelity, master disk of the entire historic album, about as faithful a copy of what was on the master tape as it's possible to make.
You don't have to be born IN the territory of the United States to be a "Natural born citizen". There are several other ways to qualify (such as having a US citizen parent and having your birth registered with the US in a sufficiently timely fashion.)
Fugitive from (foreign) murder charges? Doesn't disqualify him from being president. Being a CONVICTED FIRST-DEGREE MURDERER IN THE US wouldn't disqualify him. (The only judicial process that disqualifies from future office-holding is conviction on a federal impeachment.)
With very few exceptions it's the right of the PEOPLE of the US, via their delegates to the Electoral College, to elect whomever they want.
Business leaders should spend at least 4 years as a representative in Congress or a state governor in my opinion, and show aptitude there. Running government and dealing with politics is too different from the private sector. You have to learn how to compromise and persuade, not just order around underlings to carry out your vision your way.
That's a bunch of "nice to have"s. But making it a requirement would be an arbitrary limit on the citizens' ability to elect a candidate of their choice. Sorry, I can't support it.
Between the constitutional limits on who can be president (natural-born, 14-year resident, 35 years or more of age, hasn't held the office for two terms already, and hasn't been convicted in a federal impeachment), and the de facto arbitrary limits by the two major parties' lock on the electoral process, we already have enough limits, thank you.
(Additionally, a requirement that someone has already succeeded in running the congressional-election gauntlet, twice, in the party-dominated electoral process, would give the established parties yet another lock on their control of the government. It would make reform movements nearly impossible, delay them by four to six years, and give the parties four years notice who the potential candidate(s) were and four years opportunity to spike them.)
If the people are convinced that congressional service, or other political officeholding, is a requirement, they are free not to vote for anyone who "doesn't qualify". On the other hand, they are also free to elect anyone they want, even a convicted crook (or some anti-establishent figure convicted of some trumped-up bull-bleep in an attempt to keep him from bothering the current power structure), as long as they pass the handful of constitutional qualifications.
Even the user switching menu being permanently on and taking space from my tab bar is enough to have me wanting to switch.
I installed Firefox and stopped using Chrome at work a couple years back, when Chrome wouldn't let me remove a not-safe-for-work typo-squatting site from the suggestions drop-down.
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What's next, patenting the layout of the 0 ~ 9 dialpad?
Given that the 0-9 dialpad layout actually WAS designed to slow people down (as was alleged with QWERTY keyboards) It might be interesting if it were blocked and phones had to go back to the adding machine layout.
The early Touch-Tone dials - using a cute one-transistor circuit to generate two tones, to save then-high semiconductor costs - only generated tones while they were pressed in. The keys had to be held long enough for the tone to have enough cycles for the central office equipment to recognize the tones. Bell deliberately laid out the keypad differently from that of adding machines, swapping the 123 and 789 rows, out of concern that people who used adding machines a lot would "type too fast" and have a bad experience, with many call attempts failing.
Though promulgated by the Bluetooth SIG and using some of the upper layer organization, at the lower layers BLE is a very different radio system and protocol.
Its definition is promulgated by being added to the Bluetooth standard, with the first version added at 4.0.
If these devices ARE BLE-based, and If your laptop or smartphone Bluetooth peripheral is 4.0 or higher (4.2 just came out), you'll be able to run stock apps (such as bluez's hcitool with the lescan option on Linux, or lightblue on an iDevice) to look for the "beacons" described in the article.
Bluetooth? Or "Bluetooth Smart" / "BLE" ("Bluetooth Low Energy")?
This sounds like a converted commodity iBeacon, which would be BLE, the new Internet of Things protocol.
Though promulgated by the Bluetooth SIG and using some of the upper layer organization, at the lower layers BLE is a very different radio system and protocol.
It's also very convenient for building stuff: The chips have powerful computers (which sleep most of the time so the batteries last), reasonable amounts of RAM and FLASH, built-in radios, several GPIO and comm ports (UART, USB, SPI, ...), are dirt cheap, and can be easily reprogrammed by easy-to-get and quite cheap equipment and tools.
Note that the violation is subject to a fine. The administration has no authority to order a recall.
Doesn't the administration have the authority to fine them AGAIN, and again, and again, ... if they willfully leave the cars on the road without "upgrading" them? Can't failing to apply a fix be construed to constitute an additional violation of the act, thus avoiding the multiple jeopardy prohibitions of law?
Floppy disks were cheap, even back then! They were practically a drop in the ocean when it comes to the budget of even small companies. What were these managers thinking?
They also organized groups of developers and QA people to be sure the lights in the bathrooms were turned off. Compare the cost of the time of a highly trained and highly paid (pre-H1-B flood) engineer spent on checking a bathroom light to the cost of leaving it on even over a weekend. Then think of the time spent by the lot of them in the meeting where management presented this bright idea and trained them in it. (While you're at it, think about what happens to the light, freshly shut off for the night, when the janitors arrive in the early evening.)
That one wasn't peculiar to this company, but happened to a lot of them. There was a fad going for it among management organizations at the time. Apparently the idea was to raise morale by getting the workers to feel like they were doing something to help the company. (Probably started by some clueless management consultant who thought that engineers were dumber than rocks - or at least dumber than pointy-haired bosses.)
Of course what it actually did was convince the engineers that the company was in deep financial trouble and the executive suite was too stupid to fix it and were making it worse with their counter-productive thrashing. Morale went through the floor and the talent started job-hunting elsewhere.
I'll leave the company name out (mostly to protect my source B-) )
This was in the early part of the cycle of:
- A handful of companies made graphics accelerator chips..
- A BUNCH of new companies also made graphics accelerator chips.
- There was a shakeout and only a few survived - not necessarily many - or any - of the original handful.
The company in question was one of the original few.
The hardware was good. But much of the performance advantages were due to some good algorithms in the driver, which were applicable to other good, bad, or moderate capability hardware, rather than depending on special features of the company's product.
As with many Silicon Valley companies, where the value added was so high that the administration could be utterly wacky or clueless and the company would still survive for years, this one had some managers make some dumb decisions.
One dumb decision was to try to save money by limiting the personnel to one new floppy disk per month. So the developers kept reusing the disks they had, when they shouldn't.
As a result, the golden master for an object-only release of the driver was built on a used disk, which had once held the complete sources of the driver in question. Apparently the "reformat" process used didn't overwrite the sectors - but the manufacturing process that cloned the golden master DID copy those sectors.
A customer tried an undelete utility and found almost the entire source code. Oops!
This news got out. Over the next couple years the great algorithms went from being a valuable trade secret (much of the company's "secret sauce") to a de facto industry standard.
There shouldn't be critical cables. There should be redundant paths to make the network tolerant to any individual cut.
They ARE redundant. They're typically arranged in rings. You have to cut them in TWO places, one on each side of the area you want to darken, to cause the failure.
When the first one is cut the traffic switches to alternate routing in milliseconds. (Typically: The other way around the ring.) It's when the second cut is made that the failure occurs.
Unfortunately, it takes a lot longer to fix the first break than it takes the bad guy to go to the second location and cut the second cable.
The need to cut two cables to cause failures is a sign that the person doing it may have inside information, in order to know which lines to cut to create outages. On the other hand, he's cut a number of lines, so maybe it's just that he's lucked into creating outages by cutting enough that he isolated some areas.
Software becomes malware whenever it does anything the user, had he been given an informed choice, would have chosen to reject.
(This includes surreptitious installation, hidden misfeatures, information leakage, etc.)
Most of the cuts will occur in HPâ(TM)s long-troubled Enterprise Services unit and ay be offset by new hires in that unit.
Any bets on how many of the new hires will be H-1Bs? Or if the total of the H-1Bs hired in the "offset hiring" plus the last year or so before the layoffs will approximate the number of US citizens laid off?
A horsepower is almost exactly 3/4 kW, so 25 kW is 33 1/3 HP. That's twice what you need to cruise a full-sized car on the level at highway speeds.
Headwinds from ordinary weather don't give you THAT much of a bump, even taking into account that the major drag term goes with the cube of the speed.
Yes, substantial hill-climbing (like mountains) might mean crawling like a loaded semi once the peaking store is exhausted. But at least it's not as bad as one that was sized for JUST the level cruise load would be.
Why can't we have both? As in a hybrid with a 0 to 60 instant torque acceleration electric motor and a 500HP gas motor for sustained speed/range.
You slipped a decimal. Cruising at freeway speed (in a full-sized car with ordinary tires) only requires power levels in the teens of horsepower. So call it 20 to 25 HP to give you margin for recharging the "peaking" system and you've got what you need.
IMHO the whole POINT of a hybrid is to have a storage system to provide "peaking" power for acceleration and hill climbing and scavenge power from stopping and descending, letting the prime mover engine be low power, low weight (so you don't burn a lot of fuel carrying it around), and run either at peak efficiency or not at all. Having a prime mover means you can store energy as fuel, which can be refilled very quickly and has historically been lower weight than an equivalent fuel supply as charged batteries. Having a peaking store means stop-and-go traffic can approach the mileage of highway travel. (Also: If your peaking store is large enough, a rechargeable hybrid can double as an only(-using)-electric commuter vehicle and only run the prime mover on long trips or when stuck in traffic when the charge runs low.)
Pure electirics dispense with the prime mover, use a bigger battery, and take a hit on range and cross-country practicality. But with new ultra-fast, ultra-efficient batteries and deployment of matching charging systems, they may become as all-around effective as hybrids. (Or you might add a trailer with an engine/generator/fuel tank for cross-country expeditions, creating a two-piece hybrid. B-) )
It is a pacifier. There is no milk.
I agree.
First I note that Rand Paul is not on board as a co-sponsor. On any alleged civil-liberties-promoting Senate bill that's a big red flag saying "Look for the 'gotchas'".
Even a cursory look at the summary shows that it explicitly does not block "administrative" subpoenas and authorizes delaying or blocking the very notifications it's purported to require. "Get a warrant!" is a big so-what when they have a rubber-stamp court that gives them whatever warrants they want.
So I'm not even bothering to read any deeper. It smells (to high heaven) like a sound-good bill intended to substitute for any REAL reform and take the pressure off the legislators.
A number of people (myself included) have known for decades (and somtimes brought to the attention of auto company executives that electric cars could be capable of performance far better than fuel-driven engines and limited only by the traction of the tires, and that people might want lectric vehicles with sane levels of performance.
But the auto execs only thought of electric vehicles as appealing to eco-freaks, who would be willing to accept - and might desire - classic VW levels of performance. So when they designed electric "concept cars" they didn't do the engineering to achieve performance. Their offerings were traffic-snarling, short-range, wimpy eco-freak commuter cars.
This left the market SO open that Elon Musk (who also understood the demand) was able to build a successful new auto company from scratch (a couple billion dollars worth) and capture the market.
Musk started with the high end - to recover the development cost from the early adopters willing to pay big for the new toy - in classic Silicon Valley style. He's working his way down from the pricey prestige cars to the bulk market as fast as his engineers can bring the cost down and his financing can build the manufacturing infrastructure (and his lawyers and lobbyists can remove the legal obstacles to his not-dealer-dependent marketing).
But now the PARTIAL lesson - that there's a market at the top for a high-performance electric car - has been learned, and a prestige auto maker is trying to get a slice of that.
They're STILL not seeing the whole picture. Which is very good for Tesla. B-)
... announced today a landmark agreement from 10 of the world's biggest automakers ...
They used to call such agreements "illegal collusion" or "a trust" under anti-trust law.
"Voluntarily" adding an expensive new system as "standard" (i.e. you can't not buy it and still get the car), in unison across a broad swath of the market, keeps the consumers from making their own tradeoff of cost vs. functionality and voting with their dollars.
I guess it's not supposed to be illegal if the government is pressuring them to do it. B-b
There is nothing preventing us from building something bigger than the LHC.
Like building it in orbit - or solar orbit. B-)
But that's just scaling up a particular method of accelerating particles. There are other ways to get to higher energies in MUCH shorter distances.
For instance: plasma acceleration, both wakefield and other approaches.
A couple laser pulses into a plasma and you can create fields that accelerate electrons to a couple GeV in as many centimetres, something that takes about four orders of magnitude more path length in classic accelerator approaches. You're talking doing on a tabletop what had been done on a "staple across the San Andreas fault".
And this technology is just getting started. Given big enough laser systems (on the scale of those at the National Ignition Facility) I don't see any reason you shouldn't be able to both get somewhat stronger and keep it up for miles. (Or, in solar orbit, for astronomical units.) Getting the timing of things like wakefilds right is just a matter of geometry, not anything fancy.
Unless some new particles screw it up, of course. But that's what you're looking for, right? B-)
Don't use a vacuum cleaner to clean the dust. The static will kill it.Don't use a vacuum cleaner to clean the dust. The static will kill it.
Thanks. I never heard about that. (Was your friend in a cold state during winter, so the humidity was low, or is this an issue generally?)
Completely wrong. This has never been definitively resolved by either Congress or the Supreme Court.
To the extent that it hasn't been resolved the candidate can play it any way he wants to. The assumption is that he IS qualified until somebody - with standing - gets a court to rule he is not.
Even getting such a challenge heard, let alone heard in a timely fashion and obtaining a remedy that would eject the candidate from an ongoing electoral process or a seat in office, is a very difficult thing. (Look at the sideshow with the claims about Obama for an example.) The courts don't like to meddle with the operation of the high levels of the other branches and the selections of the electorate.
Thank God that Jeff Golblum and his trusty Mac can hack the alien hackers. And yes...they are making an Independence Day sequel.
Apparently the administration at the time was appalled when the heard that, when the scene of the saucer giant-laser-blasting the Whitehouse into oblivion screened, theatre audiences cheered. B-)
If the computer is working at all, the following tricks might make it like-new:
Open it up and vacuum out the dust. Dust accumulates, especially in the CPU heatsinks, over years, causing them to overheat. For a long time the CPUs have had circuitry that slows the clock to reduce the heat - and thus slows the machine way down, which may be why it was finally abandoned. Suck out the dust and the CPU will be back to its full speed.
Replacing the BIOS backup battery is good, too, as it may be nearing end-of-life - especially as the machine sat on the shelf waiting for a new home. Also: A little time with the battery out may clear out oddball BIOS settings in older BIOS chips that are battery-backed-RAM, rather than flash, based.
If the keyboard is dirty or a little flakey, try washing it with clean (better yet, distilled) water and drying it thoroughly. As long as you don't power it while it's still moist, and don't use hot water or the heated drying cycle in a dishwaher, you won't corrode anything.
Then installing Linux from a live disk, with the use-full-disk options, will clean out any malware and give them a modern, supported, OS with a good and easy to use word processor (Open Office) for free.
It won't work for exactly the same reason. Your average laptop owner doesn't know their device's MAC address.
There's an app for that! (Or easily could be.)
It would be trivial to build an application that would squirrel this info away for the user - like onto a database on various services (paid or free) that he subscribes to or registers for. (A good one would be the registration for the manufacturer's warranty.)
It would also be trivial to include the various device MAC addresses along with the serial number, on the label, in the databases that print the reciept at the electronics store, and in the manufacturer's records (even without warranty registration). Give the manufacturer the serial number (and your own identification or a police report number if he doesn't know you) and he gives you (or the cops) the MAC addresses of interest.
Buy vinyl it lasts the longest. Recall that 78s from over 100 years ago are often playable.
And there are new turntables that play vinyl (and other disk) recordings without touching the groves, using laser light rather than a needle.
The magnetic state is not likely to be a significant issue,provided the tape is not exposed to excessive heat or strong magnetic fields (like from lightning currents in a nearby structural element or having the storage box sitting on the floor next to an industrial-scale waxer's drive motor).
While really small domains can be "squeezed out" by their neighbors (perhaps eventually attenuating really high frequency material and/or resulting in a bit of cross-talk between layers in the tape as wound for storage), the larger-scale domains on mag tapes are comparable to those in the same magnetic materials as minerals: Those are stable for geological time - and indeed are how geologists tracked the Earth's magnetic field-reversals.
The problem with mag tapes is mainly the degradation of the physical media - the glue that holds the magnetic material to the tape, and the tape itself.
I recall a story about a misadventure at Mobile Fidelity Sound. This is a company that makes extremely high quality recordings from original master tapes. A typical operation was to use specialized low-noise equipment to cut a master at half-speed, and press it into ultra-pure, super-hard, "supervinyl" for low surface noise, undistorted playback, low wear, and environmental stability. Such a master, and copies made from it, are substantially more faithful reproductions of the input signals than magnetic master tapes.
They were making a new vinyl disk master from a very early rock record's master tape. As the cutting proceeded, they noticed that, beyond the playback heads, the capstain/pinch roller drive's bending of the tape was causing the oxide to fall off, leaving clean tape going onto the takeup reel and totally destroying the master tape.
Fortunately, the engineer was clueful enough to NOT stop the recording (which would have left them with neither a disk nor a master tape). Result: A new, clean, ultra-high-fidelity, master disk of the entire historic album, about as faithful a copy of what was on the master tape as it's possible to make.
You don't have to be born IN the territory of the United States to be a "Natural born citizen". There are several other ways to qualify (such as having a US citizen parent and having your birth registered with the US in a sufficiently timely fashion.)
Fugitive from (foreign) murder charges? Doesn't disqualify him from being president. Being a CONVICTED FIRST-DEGREE MURDERER IN THE US wouldn't disqualify him. (The only judicial process that disqualifies from future office-holding is conviction on a federal impeachment.)
With very few exceptions it's the right of the PEOPLE of the US, via their delegates to the Electoral College, to elect whomever they want.
Business leaders should spend at least 4 years as a representative in Congress or a state governor in my opinion, and show aptitude there. Running government and dealing with politics is too different from the private sector. You have to learn how to compromise and persuade, not just order around underlings to carry out your vision your way.
That's a bunch of "nice to have"s. But making it a requirement would be an arbitrary limit on the citizens' ability to elect a candidate of their choice. Sorry, I can't support it.
Between the constitutional limits on who can be president (natural-born, 14-year resident, 35 years or more of age, hasn't held the office for two terms already, and hasn't been convicted in a federal impeachment), and the de facto arbitrary limits by the two major parties' lock on the electoral process, we already have enough limits, thank you.
(Additionally, a requirement that someone has already succeeded in running the congressional-election gauntlet, twice, in the party-dominated electoral process, would give the established parties yet another lock on their control of the government. It would make reform movements nearly impossible, delay them by four to six years, and give the parties four years notice who the potential candidate(s) were and four years opportunity to spike them.)
If the people are convinced that congressional service, or other political officeholding, is a requirement, they are free not to vote for anyone who "doesn't qualify". On the other hand, they are also free to elect anyone they want, even a convicted crook (or some anti-establishent figure convicted of some trumped-up bull-bleep in an attempt to keep him from bothering the current power structure), as long as they pass the handful of constitutional qualifications.
Even the user switching menu being permanently on and taking space from my tab bar is enough to have me wanting to switch.
I installed Firefox and stopped using Chrome at work a couple years back, when Chrome wouldn't let me remove a not-safe-for-work typo-squatting site from the suggestions drop-down.