He called the police while he tried no to collide with trucks, passing them on the right. The police had to open the gates at the next toll to let him pass. After 150 km (90 miles), the car finally stopped.
Yes, that was much simpler than just taking it out of gear and braking.
You hear about this once in a while in the US too. The best solution is to just take it out of gear and hit the brakes. As soon as you're stopped, shut the engine off.
Beats the heck out of hurtling down the highway at high speed, risking death until the car runs out of gas.
www.allpar.com (Owner-run Chrysler car information site).
The Chrysler method for getting basic diagnostic codes has been around for two decades. Worked in my Grandfather's 1984 Chrysler E-Class, works in my 1998 Plymouth Neon.
In all seriousness, any additional failure rate from these systems is unacceptable. For life and death situations, you want the simplest and most rock-solid technology possible that gets the job done. Others have already expounded on the reasons, but I have to admit after I read the post I responded to, the first thing I thought of was "Beowulf cluster!".:)
Submitter said: "What's next? Plant your PC/Mac and watch a house grow?"
Even if you have Even if you need I don't mean to stare We don't have to breed We could plant a house We could build a tree I don't even care We could have all three She said -Nirvana. Breed. Nevermind. SubPop, 1991
My personal belief is vehement opposition to this kind of monitoring. Nevertheless, it is available. If she's driving a car you own, you can install it without any problem. If the car is hers, you might want to check with an attorney before installing any monitoring/spying equipment.
Rather than a top-down method of robot design, where you take a brain and make it do cool things, his idea is to decide some basic function you want to accomplish--like walking--and design the simplest circuit that is able to do that. Then pick a new function (say, seeking light) and build that circuit. Hook the two together, and now you have a walking robot that seeks light. It is a more biological method to robot evolution.
If you like the idea of making a functioning insect-robot out of the parts from an old Walkman cassette player and a pocket calculator, you'll love BEAM robotics.
My 512/384 DSL cost me $34.95/mo when I installed it in December 2002, and has since dropped to $24.95/mo and increased in speed ("unofficial" increases that just showed up when I checked the speed) to about 1500/768.
I think 1500/768 for $24.95 US is fantastic, but it's not "3-8Meg ADSL/Cable for a pitiful amount of cash per month...". To bump up to 3mb/s+ would double or triple my monthly payment.
FYI, I live in a small city (~30,000 people) and within 1000 yards of the substation. Large cities and small towns would of course differ.
I do not see where in the Constitution or Bill of Rights the power to require identification is granted to the government.
And since the power is not granted to the Federal government or to the states, Article [X.]
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
I also think Article 9 applies, Article [IX.]
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Sure, the US has a lot of free GIS data, but maybe you've heard that there people who live outside the US? And, maybe they also prefer free software, open formats and more available data?
Apparently you haven't looked. There is some free data available, from the US, on other parts of the world. Other countries and more local governments or organizations also do provide some free data.
The only datasets I have downloaded directly have been quite open format--in fact, they're completely unencoded, or they are encoded in a common format (such as a.bmp,.tif, etc.). The sofware just has to be smart enough to know how to import the various types of data, or you tell it how to do so yourself.
If you really want free GIS software, it is available--though not necessarily as powerful or easy to use as Idrisi or Arc products.
If work does not pay for it, and I do (i.e. it isn't a free service), then work does not get to benefit from it for vital job-related functions. Incidentals, such as driving to/from work or calling in sick with my phone, don't apply to this rule.
You don't get to call my cell phone for regular work-related business unless you pay for it. You don't get to use my car unless you pay for it. You don't get to host dinner parties in my house unless you pay for it. And you don't get to benefit from me having broadband access unless you pay for it.
The only other option is that work documents that they require me to have such-and-such (broadband, cell phone, whatever) and then I write it off on taxes. I will also look at these work expenses I have been asked to pick up, and be thinking of those when salary negotiations come up the following year.
I don't mean to shill for my university, but I am a graduate student in the physical sciences at Emporia State University, where we have a Geospatial Analysis program. One of our professors is heavily into KAP (Kite Aerial Photography) and other SFAP (Small Format Aerial Photography) including anchored baloons and more conventional planes and helicopters.
We generally use both color film and color-infrared, and have begun to use some digital. The hard part (aside from not crashing the kite) is the image processing. We use ground markers and GPS units to determine some reference points, and use Idrisi software to do a rubber-sheet transform on the image. We then use the same software to stitch the images together and do more detailed analysis (color channel seperation, specialized boolean operations, etc.).
Using color and infrared images, we can make high-resolution images similar to the comparitively low-resolution satellite (see: Landsat) images. Through the analysis, we can identify land usage, soil moisture, vegetation types, vegetation/crop health, and many other factors.
Now the fun part: if you like science, we have graduate and undergraduate programs in the physical sciences department where you can specialize in Geospatial Analysis. The other best part--you can do it on-line if you wish.
And we're not the only university that has such programs--do a search for "Geographic Information Systems site:.edu" or "Geospatial Analysis" and you'll find several more.
(I don't consider this too much of an ad, because anyone who thinks the kite photography is cool should see that there are education opportunities and careers to be made that involve this kind of work.)
When I had a disc that was failing under warranty, I used a bootable hard disk wiping utility as the final step before sending the drive back.
Autoclave is the one I used. It is quite nice, fits on a bootable floppy. I felt better sending my drive in for warranty replacement after using this program.
So who will regulate the non-commercial (amateur radio, Part 15 devices such as 802.11, medical comm equipment, public safety like police and fire/rescue, space communications, radio astronomy, etc.) parts of the spectrum? Who will be in charge of ensuring that some freeloader on 21cm doesn't ruin a once-in-millenia chance to capture a particular radioastronomical event?
Radio is NOT LIKE LAND. What you use here can leak right over somewhere else you might not even imagine possible. CB radios are local communications only--maybe ten miles. Ever heard of "skip"? HUNDREDS of miles, sporadic, transient, and a product of the atmospheric and solar radiation conditions.
Unlike almost all other public commons, the EM spectrum actually needs top-down policing. I'm not saying the FCC is doing everything right--but discarding it outright is not the solution.
How can somebody argue about global warming in an US magazine and not criticize the enormous waste of energy by Americans?
Hmm. My wife and I take steps to reduce our household energy consumption, including significantly reducing our cooling in the summer and heating in the winter. We experimented with using a programmable thermostat, and have found it reduces our energy costs (and therefore the amount of energy used) by about 20%. Our attic has thick blown-in insulation, and we cover our windows in the winter to reduce heat loss.
I drive a car with an efficient two litre engine and get up to about 41 mpg under ideal conditions. I also walk to destinations when I can, and ride a bike when it is convenient.
We use low-flow showerheads and faucets, and water-conserving toilets. We turn off lights, we clean our A/C coils regularly, and we raise food in a garden in our yard.
While we aren't living off the land in a backwoods home, and our electricity isn't exclusively produced by solar and wind power, we don't feel like we're abusing the resources available to us. Oh yeah, we live in the United States. Not all of our neighbors are as concerned about efficiency and conservation as us--but then, I doubt that every European can legitimately claim to be 100% eco-friendly either.
Side note: you should head over to www.neons.org, there are forums where you could post your car for sale. It sounds like you might have taken better care of it than the average driver, in which case some neons.org member may be interested.
In fact, I take ideas for collection development* from Slashdot (among other sources) and use the book reviews here as purchasing aids just as I do the NY Times book review and Library Journal.
However, libraries are ALWAYS looking for suggestions on what to buy in specific areas. My specialty is physics (I'm not a career librarian), so I've taken over collection development* in the sciences and maths, plus computer science and technology.
My suggestion: Go to your local library, look at the computer books available (they're right in the beginning of the Dewey numbers for Non-fiction, around 005-006). Look for the "holes" in the collection, and ancient materials. Then go to Amazon.com or your bookstore of choice, pick out some additions and replacement, write down the TITLE and ISBN and (if replacing) WHAT BOOK it replaces in the library.
Now, make a list of the severely out-of-date titles in the collection that should be removed and discarded. Remember that the library still needs to serve the patrons who are still running Win95 with Works 3.0. We, for instance, got rid of six of our eight copies of "Windows 95 For Dummies", but kept those two copies just in case someone needs them. The cutoff point right now was Win95, so anything Win3.11 or earlier was removed.
Now, take your list to the library. Don't just hand it to someone at the desk--ask to speak to the person who is in charge of purchasing non-fiction books in the 005-006 range. Give that person the list, and explain to them what you've done (reviewed the collection, made suggestions) and why it is important to buy those books.
If you do this, and do this in any area of your legitimate expertise (gardening, sci-fi, etc.) you will be a tremendous friend to your librarian. Sure, they'll eventually discard the old, and buy new titles when they see them reviewed--but you can make the process MUCH more efficient. Your suggestions might not/all/ be followed, but the input is valuable anyway.
Jim
*collection development: deciding which books to throw away, which books to keep, and what books to buy.
[i]I work in a public library and my experience with the typical demographic of the library would lead me to believe that this would not be a big hit. Many of the patrons visit the library simply to use the internet, most of these people do not have a computer at home. Another large percentage are older folks, who simply want to read their mysteries. We do carry a moderately sized selection of (mostly educational) software, however that circulates very poorly.[/i]
What I've been trying to do is to build and promote our collection of the heavier CS references and beginner's guides. There are a lot of budding programmers (middle/high school) who dont have the resources to drop $400 on books--but the library can afford it.
It's been slow, but hopefully we can get them to do two things:
1. Utilize our resources, and 2. Give us input about what they need us to buy!
We have the money, we want to buy the books, but most of us are [i]not[/i] IT professionals, and those of us [i]with[/i] some IT experience have not been beginners for a very, very long time.
Slashdot Mirror
Arrgh, I wish I had mod points *and* could boost you over 5.
He called the police while he tried no to collide with trucks, passing them on the right. The police had to open the gates at the next toll to let him pass. After 150 km (90 miles), the car finally stopped.
Yes, that was much simpler than just taking it out of gear and braking.
You hear about this once in a while in the US too. The best solution is to just take it out of gear and hit the brakes. As soon as you're stopped, shut the engine off.
Beats the heck out of hurtling down the highway at high speed, risking death until the car runs out of gas.
Morons...
Jim
www.allpar.com (Owner-run Chrysler car information site).
The Chrysler method for getting basic diagnostic codes has been around for two decades. Worked in my Grandfather's 1984 Chrysler E-Class, works in my 1998 Plymouth Neon.
Jim
Does it run Linux?
:)
[terrible humor]
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
[/terrible humor]
In all seriousness, any additional failure rate from these systems is unacceptable. For life and death situations, you want the simplest and most rock-solid technology possible that gets the job done. Others have already expounded on the reasons, but I have to admit after I read the post I responded to, the first thing I thought of was "Beowulf cluster!".
Jim
I don't have mod points right now, but +1 for the reference. :)
Jim
Even if you have
Even if you need
I don't mean to stare
We don't have to breed
We could plant a house
We could build a tree
I don't even care
We could have all three
She said
-Nirvana. Breed. Nevermind. SubPop, 1991
Sorry man, looks like they have prior art.
If your question is at all serious, there are products that you can use.
For instance, The CarChip.
My personal belief is vehement opposition to this kind of monitoring. Nevertheless, it is available. If she's driving a car you own, you can install it without any problem. If the car is hers, you might want to check with an attorney before installing any monitoring/spying equipment.
Jim
That would be Mark Tilden. He is primarily responsible for the BEAM (current site here) robots, lots of which are based on the bicore circuit and other novel simple circuits(read at the sites!).
Rather than a top-down method of robot design, where you take a brain and make it do cool things, his idea is to decide some basic function you want to accomplish--like walking--and design the simplest circuit that is able to do that. Then pick a new function (say, seeking light) and build that circuit. Hook the two together, and now you have a walking robot that seeks light. It is a more biological method to robot evolution.
If you like the idea of making a functioning insect-robot out of the parts from an old Walkman cassette player and a pocket calculator, you'll love BEAM robotics.
Jim
Whoah, what _America_ are you referring to?
My 512/384 DSL cost me $34.95/mo when I installed it in December 2002, and has since dropped to $24.95/mo and increased in speed ("unofficial" increases that just showed up when I checked the speed) to about 1500/768.
I think 1500/768 for $24.95 US is fantastic, but it's not "3-8Meg ADSL/Cable for a pitiful amount of cash per month...". To bump up to 3mb/s+ would double or triple my monthly payment.
FYI, I live in a small city (~30,000 people) and within 1000 yards of the substation. Large cities and small towns would of course differ.
Jim
I do not see where in the Constitution or Bill of Rights the power to require identification is granted to the government.
And since the power is not granted to the Federal government or to the states,
Article [X.]
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
I also think Article 9 applies,
Article [IX.]
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Sure, the US has a lot of free GIS data, but maybe you've heard that there people who live outside the US? And, maybe they also prefer free software, open formats and more available data?
.bmp, .tif, etc.). The sofware just has to be smart enough to know how to import the various types of data, or you tell it how to do so yourself.
Apparently you haven't looked. There is some free data available, from the US, on other parts of the world. Other countries and more local governments or organizations also do provide some free data.
The only datasets I have downloaded directly have been quite open format--in fact, they're completely unencoded, or they are encoded in a common format (such as a
If you really want free GIS software, it is available--though not necessarily as powerful or easy to use as Idrisi or Arc products.
See G.R.A.S.S., a free military-based GIS package. It's available in a bootable CD distribution of knoppix, too.
Jim
There is a /ton/ of 'free' GIS data available on the internet.
I say 'free' because in reality the US taxpayers have paid for it, but take a look at things like:
Kansas DASC,
Census Bureau TIGER data,
collection sites like Geo Community,
and an almost limitless number of other sites. Most states now have GIS sites of one form or another, with downloadable data.
Jim Deane
If work does not pay for it, and I do (i.e. it isn't a free service), then work does not get to benefit from it for vital job-related functions. Incidentals, such as driving to/from work or calling in sick with my phone, don't apply to this rule.
You don't get to call my cell phone for regular work-related business unless you pay for it. You don't get to use my car unless you pay for it. You don't get to host dinner parties in my house unless you pay for it. And you don't get to benefit from me having broadband access unless you pay for it.
The only other option is that work documents that they require me to have such-and-such (broadband, cell phone, whatever) and then I write it off on taxes. I will also look at these work expenses I have been asked to pick up, and be thinking of those when salary negotiations come up the following year.
Jim
Again, I reply to my own post, thereby reinforcing the absent-minded professor stereotype.
This link goes to the syllabus for the Small Format Aerial Photography (SFAP) course I alluded to above.
If you go into the Course Schedule you can go through some of the web lectures and information on SFAP.
Jim
I don't mean to shill for my university, but I am a graduate student in the physical sciences at Emporia State University, where we have a Geospatial Analysis program. One of our professors is heavily into KAP (Kite Aerial Photography) and other SFAP (Small Format Aerial Photography) including anchored baloons and more conventional planes and helicopters.
We generally use both color film and color-infrared, and have begun to use some digital. The hard part (aside from not crashing the kite) is the image processing. We use ground markers and GPS units to determine some reference points, and use Idrisi software to do a rubber-sheet transform on the image. We then use the same software to stitch the images together and do more detailed analysis (color channel seperation, specialized boolean operations, etc.).
Using color and infrared images, we can make high-resolution images similar to the comparitively low-resolution satellite (see: Landsat) images. Through the analysis, we can identify land usage, soil moisture, vegetation types, vegetation/crop health, and many other factors.
Now the fun part: if you like science, we have graduate and undergraduate programs in the physical sciences department where you can specialize in Geospatial Analysis. The other best part--you can do it on-line if you wish.
See The Emporia State University GSA homepage or the Physical Sciences homepage for more information.
And we're not the only university that has such programs--do a search for "Geographic Information Systems site:.edu" or "Geospatial Analysis" and you'll find several more.
(I don't consider this too much of an ad, because anyone who thinks the kite photography is cool should see that there are education opportunities and careers to be made that involve this kind of work.)
I've been checking Newsmap fairly often. It seems similar in theme.
f m
http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.c
It hasn't taken "primary" status in my daily news reading, but it is an interesting "auxilliary".
Jim
When I had a disc that was failing under warranty, I used a bootable hard disk wiping utility as the final step before sending the drive back.
Autoclave is the one I used. It is quite nice, fits on a bootable floppy. I felt better sending my drive in for warranty replacement after using this program.
Also see:
UBCSwipe
Darik's Boot and Nuke
Jim
So who will regulate the non-commercial (amateur radio, Part 15 devices such as 802.11, medical comm equipment, public safety like police and fire/rescue, space communications, radio astronomy, etc.) parts of the spectrum? Who will be in charge of ensuring that some freeloader on 21cm doesn't ruin a once-in-millenia chance to capture a particular radioastronomical event?
Radio is NOT LIKE LAND. What you use here can leak right over somewhere else you might not even imagine possible. CB radios are local communications only--maybe ten miles. Ever heard of "skip"? HUNDREDS of miles, sporadic, transient, and a product of the atmospheric and solar radiation conditions.
Unlike almost all other public commons, the EM spectrum actually needs top-down policing. I'm not saying the FCC is doing everything right--but discarding it outright is not the solution.
Jim kc0lpv
Please disregard my previous message; I found your email address.
Jim
Hmm. Your company sounds interesting. What does your company do?
Feel free to take it to email, you can reach me at kansas_physicist at sbcglobal dot net.
Jim
How can somebody argue about global warming in an US magazine and not criticize the enormous waste of energy by Americans?
Hmm. My wife and I take steps to reduce our household energy consumption, including significantly reducing our cooling in the summer and heating in the winter. We experimented with using a programmable thermostat, and have found it reduces our energy costs (and therefore the amount of energy used) by about 20%. Our attic has thick blown-in insulation, and we cover our windows in the winter to reduce heat loss.
I drive a car with an efficient two litre engine and get up to about 41 mpg under ideal conditions. I also walk to destinations when I can, and ride a bike when it is convenient.
We use low-flow showerheads and faucets, and water-conserving toilets. We turn off lights, we clean our A/C coils regularly, and we raise food in a garden in our yard.
While we aren't living off the land in a backwoods home, and our electricity isn't exclusively produced by solar and wind power, we don't feel like we're abusing the resources available to us. Oh yeah, we live in the United States. Not all of our neighbors are as concerned about efficiency and conservation as us--but then, I doubt that every European can legitimately claim to be 100% eco-friendly either.
Jim
Side note: you should head over to www.neons.org, there are forums where you could post your car for sale. It sounds like you might have taken better care of it than the average driver, in which case some neons.org member may be interested.
Jim
Librarian here, reading slashdot.
/all/ be followed, but the input is valuable anyway.
In fact, I take ideas for collection development* from Slashdot (among other sources) and use the book reviews here as purchasing aids just as I do the NY Times book review and Library Journal.
However, libraries are ALWAYS looking for suggestions on what to buy in specific areas. My specialty is physics (I'm not a career librarian), so I've taken over collection development* in the sciences and maths, plus computer science and technology.
My suggestion: Go to your local library, look at the computer books available (they're right in the beginning of the Dewey numbers for Non-fiction, around 005-006). Look for the "holes" in the collection, and ancient materials. Then go to Amazon.com or your bookstore of choice, pick out some additions and replacement, write down the TITLE and ISBN and (if replacing) WHAT BOOK it replaces in the library.
Now, make a list of the severely out-of-date titles in the collection that should be removed and discarded. Remember that the library still needs to serve the patrons who are still running Win95 with Works 3.0. We, for instance, got rid of six of our eight copies of "Windows 95 For Dummies", but kept those two copies just in case someone needs them. The cutoff point right now was Win95, so anything Win3.11 or earlier was removed.
Now, take your list to the library. Don't just hand it to someone at the desk--ask to speak to the person who is in charge of purchasing non-fiction books in the 005-006 range. Give that person the list, and explain to them what you've done (reviewed the collection, made suggestions) and why it is important to buy those books.
If you do this, and do this in any area of your legitimate expertise (gardening, sci-fi, etc.) you will be a tremendous friend to your librarian. Sure, they'll eventually discard the old, and buy new titles when they see them reviewed--but you can make the process MUCH more efficient. Your suggestions might not
Jim
*collection development: deciding which books to throw away, which books to keep, and what books to buy.
[i]I work in a public library and my experience with the typical demographic of the library would lead me to believe that this would not be a big hit. Many of the patrons visit the library simply to use the internet, most of these people do not have a computer at home. Another large percentage are older folks, who simply want to read their mysteries. We do carry a moderately sized selection of (mostly educational) software, however that circulates very poorly.[/i]
What I've been trying to do is to build and promote our collection of the heavier CS references and beginner's guides. There are a lot of budding programmers (middle/high school) who dont have the resources to drop $400 on books--but the library can afford it.
It's been slow, but hopefully we can get them to do two things:
1. Utilize our resources, and
2. Give us input about what they need us to buy!
We have the money, we want to buy the books, but most of us are [i]not[/i] IT professionals, and those of us [i]with[/i] some IT experience have not been beginners for a very, very long time.
Jim