In the USA, prosecuting child molesters is the last bastion of the bureaucratic tyrant.
No punishment is too severe and no 'right' is too sacred to revoke in the pursuit of their private, twisted concept of justice.
Your friend is a good person but is at once fooled, since many clever countries as the US, Russia, China, India and many others have always hoped to reach the vast wealth and resources of Somalia
(It may have been used by somebody to spy on somebody, but it's probably a totally-local issue)
Do they have some secondary, "hidden" job, like, looking out for shoplifters or the like?
They don't just greet people.
They can generally direct customers to where stuff is in the store. Which isn't rocket science, but it is nice if one is in a hurry and the store is the size of three soccer pitches (which some are).
Another task they do is when you bring an item in to return it, they put a tag on it so that the people at the returns counter know that you really brought it in from outside.
Last but not least:
It allows Wal-Mart to employ some elderly people in a position that doesn't require much of any physical labor other than standing up. The greeter is usually a senior citizen (pensioner).
Due to US hiring laws companies need to be able to show that they are employing (or attempting to employ) people of all ages... and this is a job that is fairly easy for older people to do.
The door greeters are usually way too frail to attempt to stop any shoplifters. They just call for someone else for that if they see it.
This quote seems oddly familiar:
" There's a saying in the auto industry that hydrogen is the future of transportation and always will be."
I distinctly recall reading that Lee Iacocca (or some other big-US-auto-industry maven) said this many years back, but he was speaking about ELECTRIC cars. Not hydrogen.... ?
The time I remember this from was YEARS before fuel cells for cars were even considered a practical thing for cars at all.
I am middle-aged so this could have been quite some years ago. IIRC the person was commenting on the GM Impact program and EVs in general. By 2002 Iacocca was marketing ebikes and NEVs so it would have had to be before then.
Yea,,,, I hate to rag on people trying to be nice, but this thing doesn't seem to have any advantage over a lot of already-available options.
If we can dream, here is what I would propose:
1. A roughly-credit-card sized board powered by 3v, so they can just hook up a couple 1.5v cells (maybe attach the board to a plastic battery holder--they don't cost much).
2. some capacitive button sensors right on the PCB, so some human-interface input is already present (at least 8 - 10 buttons),
3. an SMD LED next to every button to show when the button is pressed (this could be code-operated, these LEDs don't need to be hard-wired. coding it could be the second assignment, after "hello world")
4. A visual-output display, right on the board. This could be a 2x16 character LCD, or just a matrix of enough SMD LEDs to show some printed characters--maybe 8 x 32 LEDs or whatever....
5. and this is the big one: do something to break the requirement of a PC for programming the thing...
My own suggestion here would be to have two photocells mounted on the face of the board, one is the CLK and one is for DATA input. And then you could write a program/phone app to write your code on, hold the board up to the screen with the photocells over two squares on the screen, and the app blinks the squares white and black to transmit the code to the board optically. This method would work on a PC or a cell phone, as long as you could run the app.
Having a USB connection on there is nice but a lot of people in the world can't afford a PC. A lot of schools in the world can't afford a PC. Most places you can get phones now tho, and there is Android phones that only cost $25. You are way more likely to see a cell phone in the 3rd world that you are to see PCs.
Also--having a few I/O pins on there is nice, but a lot of schools won't be able to use them much due to the cost of obtaining all the pieces. (mail service in many 3rd-world countries is pretty much a combination of 50% crapshoot and 50% extortion. The product needs to come complete if at all possible; you should not assume that they can mail-order anything).
Ultimately it would be best if you didn't need any external hardware (other than power) to program the thing at all. That is a pretty big jump tho, requiring a better display and probably at least 2 processors on there instead of one (assuming you stick to using tiny85-type chips... some little processors can modify their own runtime code--{Propellers can, IIRC. can ARMs do this trick? } ).
Maybe someday: it would have on-board solar cells for power, to finally remove even the battery requirement. I have little doubt this can be done now, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it.
Yea, like,,,, I don't have a playstation 4, so I'm not familiar with the controls. But the pictures of the normal controllers look just like the picture in the article and on facebook?... The article doesn't really explain what got changed very well.
Buses and (short-distance/commuter) trains both suffer from nearly the exact same drawbacks; buses have traffic issues but can be rerouted according to needs (such as re-evaluating the route layouts on a yearly basis). Trains don't suffer from road traffic, but are far more expensive to reroute if changes in demand calls for it.
And anyway,,,, all mass-transit suffers from two major utilization issues that are inherent in the very concept. One is that to be useful during peak-use times the carrying capacity runs nearly empty the rest of the time. How can that ever be considered efficiency? The other is that to be useful to lots of potential riders, mass-transit must be accessible (with lots of boarding and exiting locations) but increasing the number of stops lowers the average speed until the service overall becomes undesirable compared to other methods.
The way of the future is not mass-transit at all, but individual transportation. That is--motorized vehicles built for JUST one person.
The problems of individual vehicles are technological and can be easily improved upon. Smaller 1-2 person vehicles, less cost, lighter weights, better safety in crashes, better fuel economy, and so on.
The utilization problems facing mass-transit are inherent in its design and cannot be solved.
The guy is a jerkwad and deserves to get reamed for this. If he would have kept it hid, he would have had his quiet-time and nobody (there) would have known who to blame. ,,,,,
I am making a mental note of this incident tho: if I am somewhere similar and my phone (and everyone else's) appears to be dead, then Imma going to pull out my phone, pretend to call somebody and just keep on talking like normal.
It seems like Hackaday is just throwing a bone to the places offering turnkey mini CNC machinery.
You can still get a bigger machine cheaper by DIY-ing it, but that depends on if you have more time or money really.
That, and the fact that with CNC {metal} machining,,,, it really isn't possible to get a fast & accurate machine by bolting together pieces of t-slot beams. (I don't think I've seen even one you-built-it CNC router that used ballscrews).
Despite your attempt at hand-waving, Bitcoin is already significant. Wishful thinking won't change that.
No, not really. Not compared to say,,,, the US dollar.
A major portion of the way that bigger countries control their citizens is by manipulating the value of currency. How long you work until you retire, what sort of work pays well, where and how you can spend your money and so on.
The people who run the governments of these countries know how critical this ability is, and they will never give it up willingly.
If bitcoin is a good concept for individuals is beside the point. It's a bad thing for governments trying to manage economies, and governments can change the rules of the game whenever they want.
Delrin is a thermoplastic; my first thought would not be to glue it with some other substance.
(assuming you are in the USA, which you may not be)
Harbor Freight makes a plastic welder for $65. There's better name-brand ones around for $300-$700.
Two other possibilities for cheaply welding plastic: cheap soldering irons (~15W - 30W heat, $20) and mini heat guns ($10 - $30).
If it is not a cosmetic issue, I have also seen thermoplastic parts repaired the following way... You get a small piece of aluminum screen, place it over the break and rub it in with a hot soldering iron.
I had electronics in high school--"analog" electronics, I guess you could say. That was a lot of years ago and I never bothered with it since.
I got into Arduino-controlled stuff a couple years back, because I had a need to build some machines that would benefit from being digitally-controlled. I picked Arduinos for a few reasons:
1--they didn't need a separate programmer at all, just a USB cord. This makes them a lot more convenient for newbies to experiment with.
2--They were available cheap. The Italian ones cost some money but the copies on the direct-orient sites are available very cheap. And these are not just chips, but ready-to-use boards. Unos for $5, Megas for $9, Dues (ARM cpus!) for $15 and the shipping is free. They cost even less if you don't need the USB cable.
3--I had a need for such a device. Ever see where people post "I bought this Arduino (or rPi), what can I do with it?" ***
I'll never choose a PIC for hobby use, nor would I recommend them. Arduinos totally beat them on both cost and convenience.
***(By the by, the only two things that can be built with a rPi are (1) a MAME cabinet, and (2) a home file server. Any other claims are merely gratuitous falsifications)
... I have no doubt that an open source toolchain will be a great step forward in lowering that barrier..
Yea, because open-source software is famous for having well-designed, easy-to-use comprehensive instructions.;>)
After building a few things with atmel-chip Arduino boards in the last couple years I gave in to my curiosity and bought a couple cheaper CLPD and FPGA boards. On electronics forums there's always people moaning "oh god not another arduino user" and whining how "there's so many other boards that are faster/have more cores/ect ect/why are you still using atmel shit". I ended up choosing Altera-chip boards, for no particular reason. Lower-end Altera or Xlinix boards can be had for $10-$15 from the orient-direct sites. A USB JTAG programmer costs another $5, if one wasn't included. The cost isn't the problem here.
Part of the problem (as I see it) is the complexity of using the programming toolchains, yes. The boards seem to work, but I haven't actually gotten mine to 'do' anything yet.... I have not gone through the available Altera tutorials however.
But another part of it is that most people are hard-pressed to think up anything that would require an FPGA, so there's not a lot of incentive to learn. Myself included. Most of the projects that most people build with Arduinos probably have the atmel processor sitting there idle most of the time. If an Uno isn't fast enough, the Mega is twice as fast as the Uno. And then the Due (with an ARM chip) is ~5x or more times faster than the Mega, depending on what your program does... And there are other ARM boards that are faster/have more cores than the Arduino Due.... so there are a lot of other easier-to-use options for a 'faster' board, if an Uno or Mega just can't handle the task.
So I think that FPGA's aren't going to advanced into the hobbyist market any time soon. At least. no more than they already are. The concepts of FPGAs and CLPD's intrigues me, but currently it's a lot of hassle to learn just to gain processor speed that most projects I can imagine simply don't require.
If they don't rule in favor of allowing non-killing weapons they will have more people carrying killing weapons.
Yea, but,,, what effective non-killing electrical weapons are there?
The cheap stun-gun devices are not effective, and the only brand that is effective (Taser--the only one that the [US] police bother to use) regularly results in deaths*.
*('course, a lot of those deaths involve aggravating circumstances (obesity, drugs, ect),,,, but it is a rather odd concidence that a lot of people seem to..... die..... of heart-related causes.... after being shocked with Tasers)
This is what I have seen with a lot of free/OSS also: the instructions weren't written for someone who doesn't know how to use the program; the instructions were written as reminders for someone who already knew how to use the program...
Or even more charming is when the instructions are very brief and just tell the 'new' differences with the previous version. So then the changelog becomes part of the help files...?
Lousy help files have cause me to uninstall more than a few open-source programs, and I bet I'm not the only one. If it costs money for decent documentation then I'm one of those corporate sheeple drones that's likely to pay.
... or a half-assed programming model for turning on and off gpios?
Why so mad?
I've seen this many times--where people insist that Arduino-related anything is somehow "not real electronics/programming". As if it were only a lot harder to use, it would somehow "build programmers with better morals and ideology, like me." ???
It's not the best hardware or software but it doesn't cost much to try. And if people are doing it for fun, it doesn't need to be difficult or result in the adaptation of rigorous enterprise-level programming habits. If all they want is to blink the LEDs their way and it does that, how is that a bad thing?
There seems to be an odd perception that "the whole hobby of electronics would be better without all these Arduino people". If you feel this way, what is it they do that interferes with anything you wanted to do?
Japan has long used forced auto obsolescence as a means to drive its economy, being prevented from significant military spending (as the USA does). Laws concerning cars in Japan make it prohibitively expensive for average people to keep any car more than a few years before replacing it, despite how good of condition it is still in.
Is it really that surprising that car owners there are being forced into using the latest/most-expensive option currently available?
This is really the problem with evaporative coolers: they work best in desert/arid environments, where water is (usually) already in (relatively) short supply.
In humid climates water is plentiful--but they barely work at all in humid environments, where they mainly cause mildew growth (inside the home).
there was a book about that: The Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business ~~~ by Graham Hancock --- Jan 10, 1994
it is the same reason there's always trouble in Israel/Gaza: there are people getting paid to "deal with the problem" (some of them quite wealthy). If the problem goes away, these people would stop getting paid.... So certain people in key positions make sure that the problem never goes away.
The problem with foregoing handwriting for typing, is that typing itself should already be a dying skill. It is known to cause a particularly difficult-to-treat injury (RSI) and there is already voice recognition software available for PCs and even mobile phones.
The more-modern solution would be to skip intensive typing instruction in favor of using systems that mostly work on voice recognition or touch screens. It is acceptable to have a keyboard present, but for desktop computing it shouldn't be the primary means of character/text input anymore.
1) All the participants had metabolic syndrome so the results might not be generally applicable.
...Except that the Eskimos have been eating zero-carb for 5000+ years. (search "zero carb diet" on wiki) Conversely, vegetarian diets have been a fad for thousands of years, but there has never been an established vegetarian or vegan culture for any sustained period. The only times ancient people didn't eat lots of animals was when there wasn't any animals to eat.
2) The meals were fixed portions, so we don't know how it affected appetite or how it compared to previous eating habits.
One of the odd effects of eating low-carb is that you can go much longer periods without eating, and yet you don't feel hungry. You have to try it for at least a few weeks to understand it.
Going 12 hours without eating isn't unusual, and even 18 hours is easily possible without discomfort. It kinda destroys the concept of meals as social settings, because you aren't eating every ~5 hours like everyone else is.
3) We don't know what would happen long term.
See #1 above
Eating low-carb all the time is still considered an extreme diet by medical standards, so (US) doctors won't tell you to try it. And they think you're borderline nuts if you ask about a zero-carb diet.... It is helpful to be under medical care to get your blood numbers tested because there are some conditions that it could easily aggravate instead of improve. Don't be too surprised if they get better however.
If you do try it, the easy rule to remember is that anything from plants is carbs, and is to be avoided--even fresh fruits and vegetables. Basically you can eat any meat (with fat!), milk, cheese and eggs. Lean meat is to be avoided; the traditional Inuit diet was over 50% fat.
The health books in school lied to you. If low-carbs and high-fat was bad for you, there wouldn't be any Eskimos today.
... Our current culture in the US, where unsustainable transportation (driving personal automobiles) is prioritized over sustainable transit, needs to change, and the sooner the better....
It would have been easier to just type "Stop liking what I don't like...."
Mass-transit is itself unsustainable, though most advocates ignore the realities of it:
1) Most mass-transit systems have peak usage that is very high, but is rather low the rest of the time. To be utilized it must be operating as much hours of the day as possible and must be sized to handle the peak usage, but that also means that in many cases they run essentially empty most of the rest of the hours of the day. Running empty trains and buses in circles isn't efficient by any measure.
2) The usefulness of mass transit relies on the ability of it to transport people from where they are to where they want to go--but the more stops that are added, the slower the speed becomes, making it undesirable for that reason alone. So mass-transit engineers are forced to decide between making it inaccessible (with few stops) or making it slow (with too many stops).
The most efficient means of transporting one person is to move them from wherever they are, to wherever they want to go, as quickly and directly as possible, so they will favor using that transportation. It takes an individual vehicle to do that. A 1-person vehicle always has a 100% occupancy rate, and it isn't on the road at all when it's not actually being used. The only issue is technical matters of small vehicle design. It is easily possible right now to build a 1-person vehicle that can get 100 MPG and over 200 MPG is easily possible without any advances in technology.
Summary:
Mass-transit suffers from utilization problems that are inherent in its use, and that cannot be solved.
Individual vehicles suffer from technological limitations that can be improved with engineering advances.
Slashdot Mirror
In the USA, prosecuting child molesters is the last bastion of the bureaucratic tyrant.
No punishment is too severe and no 'right' is too sacred to revoke in the pursuit of their private, twisted concept of justice.
Your friend is a good person but is at once fooled, since many clever countries as the US, Russia, China, India and many others have always hoped to reach the vast wealth and resources of Somalia
(It may have been used by somebody to spy on somebody, but it's probably a totally-local issue)
They don't just greet people.
They can generally direct customers to where stuff is in the store. Which isn't rocket science, but it is nice if one is in a hurry and the store is the size of three soccer pitches (which some are).
Another task they do is when you bring an item in to return it, they put a tag on it so that the people at the returns counter know that you really brought it in from outside.
Last but not least:
It allows Wal-Mart to employ some elderly people in a position that doesn't require much of any physical labor other than standing up. The greeter is usually a senior citizen (pensioner).
Due to US hiring laws companies need to be able to show that they are employing (or attempting to employ) people of all ages... and this is a job that is fairly easy for older people to do.
The door greeters are usually way too frail to attempt to stop any shoplifters. They just call for someone else for that if they see it.
This quote seems oddly familiar:
" There's a saying in the auto industry that hydrogen is the future of transportation and always will be."
I distinctly recall reading that Lee Iacocca (or some other big-US-auto-industry maven) said this many years back, but he was speaking about ELECTRIC cars. Not hydrogen.... ?
The time I remember this from was YEARS before fuel cells for cars were even considered a practical thing for cars at all.
I am middle-aged so this could have been quite some years ago. IIRC the person was commenting on the GM Impact program and EVs in general. By 2002 Iacocca was marketing ebikes and NEVs so it would have had to be before then.
Yea,,,, I hate to rag on people trying to be nice, but this thing doesn't seem to have any advantage over a lot of already-available options.
If we can dream, here is what I would propose:
1. A roughly-credit-card sized board powered by 3v, so they can just hook up a couple 1.5v cells (maybe attach the board to a plastic battery holder--they don't cost much).
2. some capacitive button sensors right on the PCB, so some human-interface input is already present (at least 8 - 10 buttons),
3. an SMD LED next to every button to show when the button is pressed (this could be code-operated, these LEDs don't need to be hard-wired. coding it could be the second assignment, after "hello world")
4. A visual-output display, right on the board. This could be a 2x16 character LCD, or just a matrix of enough SMD LEDs to show some printed characters--maybe 8 x 32 LEDs or whatever....
5. and this is the big one: do something to break the requirement of a PC for programming the thing...
My own suggestion here would be to have two photocells mounted on the face of the board, one is the CLK and one is for DATA input. And then you could write a program/phone app to write your code on, hold the board up to the screen with the photocells over two squares on the screen, and the app blinks the squares white and black to transmit the code to the board optically. This method would work on a PC or a cell phone, as long as you could run the app.
Having a USB connection on there is nice but a lot of people in the world can't afford a PC. A lot of schools in the world can't afford a PC. Most places you can get phones now tho, and there is Android phones that only cost $25. You are way more likely to see a cell phone in the 3rd world that you are to see PCs.
Also--having a few I/O pins on there is nice, but a lot of schools won't be able to use them much due to the cost of obtaining all the pieces. (mail service in many 3rd-world countries is pretty much a combination of 50% crapshoot and 50% extortion. The product needs to come complete if at all possible; you should not assume that they can mail-order anything).
Ultimately it would be best if you didn't need any external hardware (other than power) to program the thing at all. That is a pretty big jump tho, requiring a better display and probably at least 2 processors on there instead of one (assuming you stick to using tiny85-type chips... some little processors can modify their own runtime code--{Propellers can, IIRC. can ARMs do this trick? } ).
Maybe someday: it would have on-board solar cells for power, to finally remove even the battery requirement. I have little doubt this can be done now, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it.
Yea, like,,,, I don't have a playstation 4, so I'm not familiar with the controls.
But the pictures of the normal controllers look just like the picture in the article and on facebook?...
The article doesn't really explain what got changed very well.
"We know electric vehicles cost much and many people are poor, but we will pass laws to make them be rich"
Buses and (short-distance/commuter) trains both suffer from nearly the exact same drawbacks; buses have traffic issues but can be rerouted according to needs (such as re-evaluating the route layouts on a yearly basis). Trains don't suffer from road traffic, but are far more expensive to reroute if changes in demand calls for it.
And anyway,,,, all mass-transit suffers from two major utilization issues that are inherent in the very concept. One is that to be useful during peak-use times the carrying capacity runs nearly empty the rest of the time. How can that ever be considered efficiency? The other is that to be useful to lots of potential riders, mass-transit must be accessible (with lots of boarding and exiting locations) but increasing the number of stops lowers the average speed until the service overall becomes undesirable compared to other methods.
The way of the future is not mass-transit at all, but individual transportation. That is--motorized vehicles built for JUST one person.
The problems of individual vehicles are technological and can be easily improved upon. Smaller 1-2 person vehicles, less cost, lighter weights, better safety in crashes, better fuel economy, and so on.
The utilization problems facing mass-transit are inherent in its design and cannot be solved.
The guy is a jerkwad and deserves to get reamed for this. If he would have kept it hid, he would have had his quiet-time and nobody (there) would have known who to blame.
,,,,,
I am making a mental note of this incident tho: if I am somewhere similar and my phone (and everyone else's) appears to be dead, then Imma going to pull out my phone, pretend to call somebody and just keep on talking like normal.
It seems like Hackaday is just throwing a bone to the places offering turnkey mini CNC machinery.
You can still get a bigger machine cheaper by DIY-ing it, but that depends on if you have more time or money really.
That, and the fact that with CNC {metal} machining,,,, it really isn't possible to get a fast & accurate machine by bolting together pieces of t-slot beams. (I don't think I've seen even one you-built-it CNC router that used ballscrews).
No, not really. Not compared to say,,,, the US dollar.
A major portion of the way that bigger countries control their citizens is by manipulating the value of currency. How long you work until you retire, what sort of work pays well, where and how you can spend your money and so on.
The people who run the governments of these countries know how critical this ability is, and they will never give it up willingly.
If bitcoin is a good concept for individuals is beside the point. It's a bad thing for governments trying to manage economies, and governments can change the rules of the game whenever they want.
Now I can get more brain chips for all these Cherry 2000 robots I have lying around.
Delrin is a thermoplastic; my first thought would not be to glue it with some other substance.
(assuming you are in the USA, which you may not be)
Harbor Freight makes a plastic welder for $65. There's better name-brand ones around for $300-$700.
Two other possibilities for cheaply welding plastic: cheap soldering irons (~15W - 30W heat, $20) and mini heat guns ($10 - $30).
If it is not a cosmetic issue, I have also seen thermoplastic parts repaired the following way... You get a small piece of aluminum screen, place it over the break and rub it in with a hot soldering iron.
I had electronics in high school--"analog" electronics, I guess you could say. That was a lot of years ago and I never bothered with it since.
I got into Arduino-controlled stuff a couple years back, because I had a need to build some machines that would benefit from being digitally-controlled. I picked Arduinos for a few reasons:
1--they didn't need a separate programmer at all, just a USB cord. This makes them a lot more convenient for newbies to experiment with.
2--They were available cheap. The Italian ones cost some money but the copies on the direct-orient sites are available very cheap. And these are not just chips, but ready-to-use boards. Unos for $5, Megas for $9, Dues (ARM cpus!) for $15 and the shipping is free. They cost even less if you don't need the USB cable.
3--I had a need for such a device. Ever see where people post "I bought this Arduino (or rPi), what can I do with it?" ***
I'll never choose a PIC for hobby use, nor would I recommend them. Arduinos totally beat them on both cost and convenience.
***(By the by, the only two things that can be built with a rPi are (1) a MAME cabinet, and (2) a home file server. Any other claims are merely gratuitous falsifications)
Yea, because open-source software is famous for having well-designed, easy-to-use comprehensive instructions. ;>)
After building a few things with atmel-chip Arduino boards in the last couple years I gave in to my curiosity and bought a couple cheaper CLPD and FPGA boards. On electronics forums there's always people moaning "oh god not another arduino user" and whining how "there's so many other boards that are faster/have more cores/ect ect/why are you still using atmel shit". I ended up choosing Altera-chip boards, for no particular reason. Lower-end Altera or Xlinix boards can be had for $10-$15 from the orient-direct sites. A USB JTAG programmer costs another $5, if one wasn't included. The cost isn't the problem here.
Part of the problem (as I see it) is the complexity of using the programming toolchains, yes. The boards seem to work, but I haven't actually gotten mine to 'do' anything yet.... I have not gone through the available Altera tutorials however.
But another part of it is that most people are hard-pressed to think up anything that would require an FPGA, so there's not a lot of incentive to learn. Myself included.
Most of the projects that most people build with Arduinos probably have the atmel processor sitting there idle most of the time. If an Uno isn't fast enough, the Mega is twice as fast as the Uno. And then the Due (with an ARM chip) is ~5x or more times faster than the Mega, depending on what your program does... And there are other ARM boards that are faster/have more cores than the Arduino Due.... so there are a lot of other easier-to-use options for a 'faster' board, if an Uno or Mega just can't handle the task.
So I think that FPGA's aren't going to advanced into the hobbyist market any time soon. At least. no more than they already are.
The concepts of FPGAs and CLPD's intrigues me, but currently it's a lot of hassle to learn just to gain processor speed that most projects I can imagine simply don't require.
Yea, but,,, what effective non-killing electrical weapons are there?
The cheap stun-gun devices are not effective, and the only brand that is effective (Taser--the only one that the [US] police bother to use) regularly results in deaths*.
*('course, a lot of those deaths involve aggravating circumstances (obesity, drugs, ect),,,, but it is a rather odd concidence that a lot of people seem to..... die..... of heart-related causes.... after being shocked with Tasers)
This is what I have seen with a lot of free/OSS also: the instructions weren't written for someone who doesn't know how to use the program; the instructions were written as reminders for someone who already knew how to use the program...
Or even more charming is when the instructions are very brief and just tell the 'new' differences with the previous version. So then the changelog becomes part of the help files...?
Lousy help files have cause me to uninstall more than a few open-source programs, and I bet I'm not the only one. If it costs money for decent documentation then I'm one of those corporate sheeple drones that's likely to pay.
Why so mad?
I've seen this many times--where people insist that Arduino-related anything is somehow "not real electronics/programming". As if it were only a lot harder to use, it would somehow "build programmers with better morals and ideology, like me."
???
It's not the best hardware or software but it doesn't cost much to try.
And if people are doing it for fun, it doesn't need to be difficult or result in the adaptation of rigorous enterprise-level programming habits. If all they want is to blink the LEDs their way and it does that, how is that a bad thing?
There seems to be an odd perception that "the whole hobby of electronics would be better without all these Arduino people". If you feel this way, what is it they do that interferes with anything you wanted to do?
Japan has long used forced auto obsolescence as a means to drive its economy, being prevented from significant military spending (as the USA does). Laws concerning cars in Japan make it prohibitively expensive for average people to keep any car more than a few years before replacing it, despite how good of condition it is still in.
Is it really that surprising that car owners there are being forced into using the latest/most-expensive option currently available?
This is really the problem with evaporative coolers: they work best in desert/arid environments, where water is (usually) already in (relatively) short supply.
In humid climates water is plentiful--but they barely work at all in humid environments, where they mainly cause mildew growth (inside the home).
there was a book about that:
The Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business ~~~ by Graham Hancock --- Jan 10, 1994
it is the same reason there's always trouble in Israel/Gaza: there are people getting paid to "deal with the problem" (some of them quite wealthy). If the problem goes away, these people would stop getting paid.... So certain people in key positions make sure that the problem never goes away.
Sometimes, ignorance is the answer.
The problem with foregoing handwriting for typing, is that typing itself should already be a dying skill. It is known to cause a particularly difficult-to-treat injury (RSI) and there is already voice recognition software available for PCs and even mobile phones.
The more-modern solution would be to skip intensive typing instruction in favor of using systems that mostly work on voice recognition or touch screens. It is acceptable to have a keyboard present, but for desktop computing it shouldn't be the primary means of character/text input anymore.
One of the odd effects of eating low-carb is that you can go much longer periods without eating, and yet you don't feel hungry. You have to try it for at least a few weeks to understand it.
Going 12 hours without eating isn't unusual, and even 18 hours is easily possible without discomfort. It kinda destroys the concept of meals as social settings, because you aren't eating every ~5 hours like everyone else is.
See #1 above
Eating low-carb all the time is still considered an extreme diet by medical standards, so (US) doctors won't tell you to try it. And they think you're borderline nuts if you ask about a zero-carb diet.... It is helpful to be under medical care to get your blood numbers tested because there are some conditions that it could easily aggravate instead of improve. Don't be too surprised if they get better however.
If you do try it, the easy rule to remember is that anything from plants is carbs, and is to be avoided--even fresh fruits and vegetables. Basically you can eat any meat (with fat!), milk, cheese and eggs. Lean meat is to be avoided; the traditional Inuit diet was over 50% fat.
The health books in school lied to you. If low-carbs and high-fat was bad for you, there wouldn't be any Eskimos today.
It would have been easier to just type "Stop liking what I don't like...."
Mass-transit is itself unsustainable, though most advocates ignore the realities of it:
1) Most mass-transit systems have peak usage that is very high, but is rather low the rest of the time. To be utilized it must be operating as much hours of the day as possible and must be sized to handle the peak usage, but that also means that in many cases they run essentially empty most of the rest of the hours of the day. Running empty trains and buses in circles isn't efficient by any measure.
2) The usefulness of mass transit relies on the ability of it to transport people from where they are to where they want to go--but the more stops that are added, the slower the speed becomes, making it undesirable for that reason alone. So mass-transit engineers are forced to decide between making it inaccessible (with few stops) or making it slow (with too many stops).
The most efficient means of transporting one person is to move them from wherever they are, to wherever they want to go, as quickly and directly as possible, so they will favor using that transportation. It takes an individual vehicle to do that. A 1-person vehicle always has a 100% occupancy rate, and it isn't on the road at all when it's not actually being used. The only issue is technical matters of small vehicle design. It is easily possible right now to build a 1-person vehicle that can get 100 MPG and over 200 MPG is easily possible without any advances in technology.
Summary:
Mass-transit suffers from utilization problems that are inherent in its use, and that cannot be solved.
Individual vehicles suffer from technological limitations that can be improved with engineering advances.
Gaming is never going to "take off" on Linux, because most Linux users don't like paying for software or DRM,,,,, and making games costs money.
The Valve/Steam experiment was just that--a way to test the waters, since nobody else had. Enjoy it while you can, because it's not a permanent thing.