The timing is such that users can experiment before deciding if they want to invest in Windows 8 or go with an alternative and bypass that confusing new user interface Microsoft will be shipping.
The sign do not form a valid contract, they are there so stupid people won't sue.
In your example, there is no agreement, no contract, and therefore either party is free to do as they like. For example sue the other party for damages when a mishap occurs.
In this case, there IS an agreement, which could (and likely will) be considered a legally binding contract. You have 2 choices:
1) You don't agree to it. If you are existing customer, that will probably mean you stop doing business with them, can't use their services anymore etc.
2) You explicitly agree to it - in some way or another. From that point on you're bound to the terms agreed upon, unless a court says they're invalid, unreasonable, unenforcable etc.
On a related note: what are the best licenses for libre hardware designs, that:
Allow linking smaller projects as part of larger ones, possibly with different licensing on those other parts. Think HDL re-implementations of various chips in FPGA based designs that consist of a number of them (and many other things like that). I've seen the GPL slapped on a few smaller projects that are meant to combine with other (differently licensed) parts, where in legal sense this wouldn't even be allowed as everything is linked in the same binary (FPGA programming file).
Don't require an entire evening and/or a lawyer to read (especially for hobbyists). For this reason I personally like BSD style licenses, while at the same time I'm leaning towards (L)GPL when it comes to openness of a design.
Appreciated would be a short intro on pro's/con's of specific licenses, and make / break issues why a hardware designer would pick one over the other.
Call me ignorant, but since when is Amazon a company that develops hardware?
I know Amazon has a big catalog, but customized / re-branded products aside, aren't they basically a box-moving company? What the *** are they doing in the chip development business? More specifically: what do they expect to do, that a specialist like TI can't do for them?
That's all this is about. If I excercise free speech and insult someone, that person's (or group) feelings where hurt. Or religious beliefs, whatever.
If my free speech is restricted for that reason, then you might argue that likewise, only my feelings were hurt. Oh right, so I should shut up just because I might insult people? That's should be obviously ridiculous to anyone living in a free society (of sorts). And I'd argue that the 'pain' inflicted by restricting free speech is much worse than the 'pain' inflicted if someone gets insulted. Especially long-term and in the greater scheme of things. For example: a specific religion is just one group in the population, free speech affects everyone including atheists and other religions.
For more specific issues, we already have appropriate restrictions in place. For instance, if I shout things specifically meant to cause violence, claim things that damages a person's reputation / business but which are provably untrue, etc. Such exceptions should be enough... if you are insulted so easily, grow a thicker skin.
No practical uses apart from scientific, as all isotopes of these superheavy elements have short half-lifes (mostly in the ms to a few seconds range). So it's impossible to put significant amounts of such an element together.
But if the "island of stability" theory holds true, we might see some larger amounts of yet-to-be-produced elements. Which might have practical applications (but probably extremely expensive to produce).
FreeSCO - single floppy router distro. Knew what Linux was good for by then, picked that, served its purpose well for a year or so.
Gentoo - powerful, source based, interesting concept. But after a while decided it was too much work for my CPU.
Linux-from-scratch (or more exactly: built my own) - used gained knowledge to get down & dirty and learn a lot about low level details, compiling programs manually, config files, etc, etc, etc. Got it to a stage where I'd start with ~10 MB worth of binaries, and re-compile everything from source & a few patches only. Enough for a very basic 'multimedia' system (X11 + window manager, web browser, picture viewer, a Doom clone, play MP3's etc). And all development tools needed to re-build the entire system using only stuff previously compiled from source. Something like Tiny Core Linux these days. Of course the work in maintaining this was too much, so I moved on after this exercise.
Ubuntu - easy to use & maintain. I felt like it automated / got in the way sometimes just a little too much. But biggest reason for moving on: too much focus on upgrading / looks / features as opposed to actually fixing bugs. So the natural successor after that:
Debian - the mother of all Linux distro's IMHO. Focus on stability, mostly non-commercial community behind it, cross platform, well put together & with a huge package selection. Have been back & forth between stable and testing a couple of times.
...and probably some other distro's I checked out once & forget about. Puppy Linux and other specialized mini distro's used on the side regularly.
First person to get this gene, and his/her partner simply worked out that with 1/4th the land, they could feed their kids corn, soy & stuff, rather than feeding that to a cow and use the cow's meat to feed their kids.
1/4th the area means 1/2 the length/width, so they didn't have to walk so far, less effort to defend that smaller plot, and could spend more time each day doing nothing (yeah peeps were lazy even back then). Kindergarten math, you know. Oh wait...
A while ago I was bored and found myself reading Wikipedia on various schemes to organize the periodic table. While reading, it was interesting to realize how many elements (chemically bonded, usually) can be found in an average household:
Noble metals in jewelry, as plating on electrical contacts (gold, mostly), some rare elements used as phosphors on the inside of a CRT tube, a variety of metals used to improve steel alloys, nuclear applications, semiconductor doping, uses of specific elements in an endless list of specialty applications, etc, etc.
Mostly because each element has unique properties, for some applications there is only 1 element that's best for the purpose (most dense, highest melting point, highest resistance to corrosion at 1000+ Celsius, doesn't react with other substance xyz, emitting light at specific wavelengths, whatever). Combined with economics of where / how elements are obtained or recycled. Some elements where world yearly production is just a few dozen tonnes, others a million-fold of that.
Agreed that's how things appear to be these days. But I'm happy to live in my own reality 'bubble' that includes this real world where you can decide truth or not by simply checking things yourself. With checking, read: set up experiment & see result with your own eyes. And use the gained knowledge to my advantage, while the rest of the world thinks otherwise. I'm interested in how things are, usually don't care much about how people think things are.
Anything you can't test yourself that way, is -to some degree- 2nd hand knowledge anyway. Which usually comes down to which sources you trust, and which not. One could do worse than believe Wikipedia, but one usually does better by checking sources cited by Wikipedia. And I've seen a number of inaccuracies myself on Wikipedia, so no blind trust there anyway (like for any medium btw, and even if you ask people directly you'll get wrong answers sometimes).
Linux works for me too, but still it's 'broken' in various ways:
Lousy support for software that's not in a distro's repository. Like: 3rd party closed source software. Linux could be a lot more popular on the desktop if it was EASY to install 3rd party software (in particular: recent / popular games). Right now it's child's play for in-repository software, get ready to be hurtin' for anything else.
Cross-distro compatibility. Right now that's basically trial-and-error, hit-or-miss, no guarantees whatsoever. Or compile from source, which is not a sensible option for 95+ % of computer users. (Binary) packages are maintained not for installation on Linux systems, but for installation on specific Linux distro's.
Related: a stable binary interface. Compile a binary today, run it without issues on a Linux distro that's released 5 years from now.
The many GUI toolkits. Yes it gives developers choice. It also makes that GUI elements behave different from application to application. Consistency (as in: pick the best toolkits / frameworks around, and stick with those) makes a system much easier to learn / more predictable / makes a user feel he/she knows it. Saves CPU and memory resources because an average working set of apps would have a smaller set of shared libraries. And doesn't waste developer time by re-inventing the wheel again & again.
Likewise for the different desktop environments.
X different distro's that only differ in default package selections, artwork etc. IMHO just a few fundamentally different distro's could cover practically every use case. The other 500 or so in existence are just minor variations on the same theme.
Documentation. That's a biggie - some documentation is very good, much is crap or non-existing. A lot is scattered. Google helps, but Google / user forums etc. are no substitute for proper documentation that's installed when the app is installed, well organized, user-oriented (as opposed to developer-oriented) and easy to access.
Some of the above can be strengths, but at the same time, weaknesses for Linux on the desktop. Saying that isn't so is ignoring the typical computer user (that just wants to get a job done). All of the above can be fixed, if developers choose to.
I personally think the plastic wouldn't be strong enough, but I don't see any reason to tempt fate by saying it can't be done.
I do: when Darwin weeds out 3D printer owners with bad performing gun designs, then chances are those 3D printers will find a new owner. Likely smarter people who have better uses for a 3D printer than making guns.
Well if it pisses off governments that aren't working the way they're supposed to work, then it can't be that bad what he's done.
In my book he's a hero. As a private person he might be an a**hole, but that doesn't change the service he's done the public (which is the more important thing anyway).
Let's re-do the math, shall we? And as much as possible, leave out time units to not complicate things any more than necessary.
The number you need is called solar constant, which according to the Wiki is around 1.361 kW/m^2. That's the combined solar energy passing through a m^2, in places with the sun directly above it, when there would be no atmosphere to get in the way.
Let's say the latitude of an average location in the US reduces that with a factor 1.5, and that only half the sun's energy reaches the surface. Then you're left with around 450 W / m^2. That's 450 MW / km^2, or just over 2 square km to produce the equivalent of a 1 GW power plant.
Also according to the Wiki, the US consumes about 29,000 terawatt hours per year. That's an average of 79.5 TWh / day, 3.31 TWh / hour, or simply said: 3.31 TW (3311 GW, about 10.5 kW per person in the US). Combining with above number, you'd need some 7400 km^2 to cover that (a square of 86 x 86 km, roughly the area of Death Valley). Or some 23 m^2 per person.
Now correct for nighttime/daytime, cloudy skies, solar cell efficiencies etc. I'll leave that up to you. But I'd say it's pretty obvious that there's more than enough sunlight hitting the US to cover all its energy needs. The rest is technology, economics and politics.
Besides folks on eBay also people scrapping old electronics will realize the value of some of the parts on old boards. I'm mostly thinking of poor chaps in China that demolish e-waste from the west with their hands & crude tools. But it might apply to others in this chain.
The next step is firing up an old IC production machine, produce a few batches of different parts, put the newly produced IC's in housings that are made to look like they're 30 years old, and apply markings to suggest the same. Wouldn't surprise me if that's already been done for some sought after / expensive vintage IC's, it has been done for modern IC's (fake IC's are a well known problem in the electronics industry).
Next step after that is do the same, but acknowledging what was done, like sell such IC's as actual reproduction IC, with correct (current) date codes etc. Which AFAIK, has not been done yet. Perhaps the market for these is too small, who knows.
Checking the article, "reproduction" is indeed a more accurate description than "clone".
Usually, a clone copies functionality of the original machine, using whatever tech is available / preferred currently. For example you could replace rows of old RAM chips with 1 larger, modern RAM chip.
In this case it seems they copied the original board, used same components etc. Which is a very unusual way to produce a 'clone'. I guess it's not so much for people who want to run Apple I software on real hardware, but rather for those who want to have an 'Apple I motherboard' in their hands. Which is understandable if an original is extremely rare and expensive.
(..) so the clamshell makes the best use of space.
Considering today's power/heat constraints, I find the usual "CPU/GPU under keyboard" configuration illogical. Why not a CPU / GPU / RAM board behind the screen, with a large/thin (passive, if possible) cooling plate at the rear? Or draw air in near the hinges, let air out near the top of the screen (again, passive if possible). Those 2 cooling methods wouldn't bite each other... Then just battery, keyboard, hard disk and peripherals like DVD drive (if fitted) under the keyboard. A few serial connections like USB / SATA + power between the two halves. Likely would leave more space such that a larger battery is possible.
Much better than packing heat-producing CPU/GPU right next to a heat-sensitive battery (+ a tiny blower to pull that heat out).
Or popular use of the word becoming a generalization for a class of items, as opposed to a specific item in that class. In other words: the average Joe might care to know what malware is (and use "virus" to describe it), but doesn't care enough to devote brain cells in keeping virus / trojan / backdoor etc apart.
We might expect better from/. editors, but then again...;-)
Although some may call it such (and in some contexts it might qualify), don't confuse searching the web with "research". At least not in the scientific sense.
Search = discover things that others discovered before.
Research = discover things that no-one else discovered before.
What's so special with this one? Is it bringing down the net? Infected millions of machines in a matter of days? Clogging some high-profile sites with junk traffic? Never-seen-before technique for gaining entry?
Open source software in general has (among others) some practical advantages:
You can keep using it as long as people are interested in doing so, even if underlying hardware or software platforms change.
Any feature / improvement can be put in, when someone feels like putting in the effort.
With a closed source driver, those 2 options are thrown in the trash. This is especially important for hardware drivers, if there's no way to patch drivers to work with newer versions of an OS (or another OS), then no further driver releases basically means: "throw away your graphics card".
The net result may work fine for many people, but it tells me NVIDIA puts their roadmap before their user's roadmap(s). I read that as marketing, not user support.
There's no legitimate reason for anyone (who's not a researcher or a nuclear plant employee) to be carrying a radiation detector around with them all the time.
I call BS. You might as well say "There's no legitimate reason for anyone (who's not a researcher or a nuclear plant employee) to be carrying a detector for NOx levels" or something like that.
You live in an environment, and you're interested (for whatever reason) to measure 1 aspect of that environment's condition. That's all there is to it, and that's all the 'legitimacy' you need.
For that purpose the range seems appropriate... I've got a radiation chart here, some figures from lower end of the scale:
0.1 microSv - airport security scan (backscatter X-ray)
0.25 microSv - airport security scan maximum permitted
1.0 microSv - using a CRT monitor for a year
5.0 microSv - dental X-ray
7.5 microSv - per day in Tokyo, 250 km SW of Fukushima plant
40 microSv - Flight from New York to LA
100 microSv - chest X-ray
So that sensitivity range seems reasonable - note the "per hour" in there. Not radiation levels that would put you in hospital with 3 weeks to live, but the kind of levels above background that might be a concern longterm. Having a sensor that allows you to measure that throughout the day, wherever you go, sounds more useful than spot checks or relying (solely?) on government-provided figures.
Whether you should bother, what levels are safe, etc, let people figure that out for themselves. I don't see any harm in adding some datapoints...
Slashdot Mirror
From the announcement:
The timing is such that users can experiment before deciding if they want to invest in Windows 8 or go with an alternative and bypass that confusing new user interface Microsoft will be shipping.
(emphasis mine)
The sign do not form a valid contract, they are there so stupid people won't sue.
In your example, there is no agreement, no contract, and therefore either party is free to do as they like. For example sue the other party for damages when a mishap occurs.
In this case, there IS an agreement, which could (and likely will) be considered a legally binding contract. You have 2 choices:
1) You don't agree to it. If you are existing customer, that will probably mean you stop doing business with them, can't use their services anymore etc.
2) You explicitly agree to it - in some way or another. From that point on you're bound to the terms agreed upon, unless a court says they're invalid, unreasonable, unenforcable etc.
On a related note: what are the best licenses for libre hardware designs, that:
Appreciated would be a short intro on pro's/con's of specific licenses, and make / break issues why a hardware designer would pick one over the other.
Call me ignorant, but since when is Amazon a company that develops hardware?
I know Amazon has a big catalog, but customized / re-branded products aside, aren't they basically a box-moving company? What the *** are they doing in the chip development business? More specifically: what do they expect to do, that a specialist like TI can't do for them?
That's all this is about. If I excercise free speech and insult someone, that person's (or group) feelings where hurt. Or religious beliefs, whatever.
If my free speech is restricted for that reason, then you might argue that likewise, only my feelings were hurt. Oh right, so I should shut up just because I might insult people? That's should be obviously ridiculous to anyone living in a free society (of sorts). And I'd argue that the 'pain' inflicted by restricting free speech is much worse than the 'pain' inflicted if someone gets insulted. Especially long-term and in the greater scheme of things. For example: a specific religion is just one group in the population, free speech affects everyone including atheists and other religions.
For more specific issues, we already have appropriate restrictions in place. For instance, if I shout things specifically meant to cause violence, claim things that damages a person's reputation / business but which are provably untrue, etc. Such exceptions should be enough... if you are insulted so easily, grow a thicker skin.
No practical uses apart from scientific, as all isotopes of these superheavy elements have short half-lifes (mostly in the ms to a few seconds range). So it's impossible to put significant amounts of such an element together.
But if the "island of stability" theory holds true, we might see some larger amounts of yet-to-be-produced elements. Which might have practical applications (but probably extremely expensive to produce).
SuSE 6.x - long ago, wtf is Linux?
FreeSCO - single floppy router distro. Knew what Linux was good for by then, picked that, served its purpose well for a year or so.
Gentoo - powerful, source based, interesting concept. But after a while decided it was too much work for my CPU.
Linux-from-scratch (or more exactly: built my own) - used gained knowledge to get down & dirty and learn a lot about low level details, compiling programs manually, config files, etc, etc, etc. Got it to a stage where I'd start with ~10 MB worth of binaries, and re-compile everything from source & a few patches only. Enough for a very basic 'multimedia' system (X11 + window manager, web browser, picture viewer, a Doom clone, play MP3's etc). And all development tools needed to re-build the entire system using only stuff previously compiled from source. Something like Tiny Core Linux these days. Of course the work in maintaining this was too much, so I moved on after this exercise.
Ubuntu - easy to use & maintain. I felt like it automated / got in the way sometimes just a little too much. But biggest reason for moving on: too much focus on upgrading / looks / features as opposed to actually fixing bugs. So the natural successor after that:
Debian - the mother of all Linux distro's IMHO. Focus on stability, mostly non-commercial community behind it, cross platform, well put together & with a huge package selection. Have been back & forth between stable and testing a couple of times.
(..) there is little reason not to filter their services out completely.
Sure there is: how are Iranians going to find their anti-US propaganda on the Irantranet, if they don't have Google to find it? </sarcasm>
DVD != CD (and in case those Windows ME disks are originals: DVD-R != CD-ROM)
Duh... kids are expensive and time-consuming.
First person to get this gene, and his/her partner simply worked out that with 1/4th the land, they could feed their kids corn, soy & stuff, rather than feeding that to a cow and use the cow's meat to feed their kids.
1/4th the area means 1/2 the length/width, so they didn't have to walk so far, less effort to defend that smaller plot, and could spend more time each day doing nothing (yeah peeps were lazy even back then). Kindergarten math, you know. Oh wait...
A while ago I was bored and found myself reading Wikipedia on various schemes to organize the periodic table. While reading, it was interesting to realize how many elements (chemically bonded, usually) can be found in an average household:
Noble metals in jewelry, as plating on electrical contacts (gold, mostly), some rare elements used as phosphors on the inside of a CRT tube, a variety of metals used to improve steel alloys, nuclear applications, semiconductor doping, uses of specific elements in an endless list of specialty applications, etc, etc.
Mostly because each element has unique properties, for some applications there is only 1 element that's best for the purpose (most dense, highest melting point, highest resistance to corrosion at 1000+ Celsius, doesn't react with other substance xyz, emitting light at specific wavelengths, whatever). Combined with economics of where / how elements are obtained or recycled. Some elements where world yearly production is just a few dozen tonnes, others a million-fold of that.
Agreed that's how things appear to be these days. But I'm happy to live in my own reality 'bubble' that includes this real world where you can decide truth or not by simply checking things yourself. With checking, read: set up experiment & see result with your own eyes. And use the gained knowledge to my advantage, while the rest of the world thinks otherwise. I'm interested in how things are, usually don't care much about how people think things are.
Anything you can't test yourself that way, is -to some degree- 2nd hand knowledge anyway. Which usually comes down to which sources you trust, and which not. One could do worse than believe Wikipedia, but one usually does better by checking sources cited by Wikipedia. And I've seen a number of inaccuracies myself on Wikipedia, so no blind trust there anyway (like for any medium btw, and even if you ask people directly you'll get wrong answers sometimes).
Linux works for me too, but still it's 'broken' in various ways:
Some of the above can be strengths, but at the same time, weaknesses for Linux on the desktop. Saying that isn't so is ignoring the typical computer user (that just wants to get a job done). All of the above can be fixed, if developers choose to.
I personally think the plastic wouldn't be strong enough, but I don't see any reason to tempt fate by saying it can't be done.
I do: when Darwin weeds out 3D printer owners with bad performing gun designs, then chances are those 3D printers will find a new owner. Likely smarter people who have better uses for a 3D printer than making guns.
Well if it pisses off governments that aren't working the way they're supposed to work, then it can't be that bad what he's done.
In my book he's a hero. As a private person he might be an a**hole, but that doesn't change the service he's done the public (which is the more important thing anyway).
Let's re-do the math, shall we? And as much as possible, leave out time units to not complicate things any more than necessary.
The number you need is called solar constant, which according to the Wiki is around 1.361 kW/m^2. That's the combined solar energy passing through a m^2, in places with the sun directly above it, when there would be no atmosphere to get in the way.
Let's say the latitude of an average location in the US reduces that with a factor 1.5, and that only half the sun's energy reaches the surface. Then you're left with around 450 W / m^2. That's 450 MW / km^2, or just over 2 square km to produce the equivalent of a 1 GW power plant.
Also according to the Wiki, the US consumes about 29,000 terawatt hours per year. That's an average of 79.5 TWh / day, 3.31 TWh / hour, or simply said: 3.31 TW (3311 GW, about 10.5 kW per person in the US). Combining with above number, you'd need some 7400 km^2 to cover that (a square of 86 x 86 km, roughly the area of Death Valley). Or some 23 m^2 per person.
Now correct for nighttime/daytime, cloudy skies, solar cell efficiencies etc. I'll leave that up to you. But I'd say it's pretty obvious that there's more than enough sunlight hitting the US to cover all its energy needs. The rest is technology, economics and politics.
Besides folks on eBay also people scrapping old electronics will realize the value of some of the parts on old boards. I'm mostly thinking of poor chaps in China that demolish e-waste from the west with their hands & crude tools. But it might apply to others in this chain.
The next step is firing up an old IC production machine, produce a few batches of different parts, put the newly produced IC's in housings that are made to look like they're 30 years old, and apply markings to suggest the same. Wouldn't surprise me if that's already been done for some sought after / expensive vintage IC's, it has been done for modern IC's (fake IC's are a well known problem in the electronics industry).
Next step after that is do the same, but acknowledging what was done, like sell such IC's as actual reproduction IC, with correct (current) date codes etc. Which AFAIK, has not been done yet. Perhaps the market for these is too small, who knows.
Checking the article, "reproduction" is indeed a more accurate description than "clone".
Usually, a clone copies functionality of the original machine, using whatever tech is available / preferred currently. For example you could replace rows of old RAM chips with 1 larger, modern RAM chip.
In this case it seems they copied the original board, used same components etc. Which is a very unusual way to produce a 'clone'. I guess it's not so much for people who want to run Apple I software on real hardware, but rather for those who want to have an 'Apple I motherboard' in their hands. Which is understandable if an original is extremely rare and expensive.
(..) so the clamshell makes the best use of space.
Considering today's power/heat constraints, I find the usual "CPU/GPU under keyboard" configuration illogical. Why not a CPU / GPU / RAM board behind the screen, with a large/thin (passive, if possible) cooling plate at the rear? Or draw air in near the hinges, let air out near the top of the screen (again, passive if possible). Those 2 cooling methods wouldn't bite each other... Then just battery, keyboard, hard disk and peripherals like DVD drive (if fitted) under the keyboard. A few serial connections like USB / SATA + power between the two halves. Likely would leave more space such that a larger battery is possible.
Much better than packing heat-producing CPU/GPU right next to a heat-sensitive battery (+ a tiny blower to pull that heat out).
Or popular use of the word becoming a generalization for a class of items, as opposed to a specific item in that class. In other words: the average Joe might care to know what malware is (and use "virus" to describe it), but doesn't care enough to devote brain cells in keeping virus / trojan / backdoor etc apart.
We might expect better from /. editors, but then again... ;-)
Although some may call it such (and in some contexts it might qualify), don't confuse searching the web with "research". At least not in the scientific sense.
Search = discover things that others discovered before.
Research = discover things that no-one else discovered before.
Gonna cover every OS X exploit now ???
What's so special with this one? Is it bringing down the net? Infected millions of machines in a matter of days? Clogging some high-profile sites with junk traffic? Never-seen-before technique for gaining entry?
Yeah, there's malware on OS X too. Get over it.
Open source software in general has (among others) some practical advantages:
With a closed source driver, those 2 options are thrown in the trash. This is especially important for hardware drivers, if there's no way to patch drivers to work with newer versions of an OS (or another OS), then no further driver releases basically means: "throw away your graphics card".
The net result may work fine for many people, but it tells me NVIDIA puts their roadmap before their user's roadmap(s). I read that as marketing, not user support.
There's no legitimate reason for anyone (who's not a researcher or a nuclear plant employee) to be carrying a radiation detector around with them all the time.
I call BS. You might as well say "There's no legitimate reason for anyone (who's not a researcher or a nuclear plant employee) to be carrying a detector for NOx levels" or something like that.
You live in an environment, and you're interested (for whatever reason) to measure 1 aspect of that environment's condition. That's all there is to it, and that's all the 'legitimacy' you need.
For that purpose the range seems appropriate... I've got a radiation chart here, some figures from lower end of the scale:
0.1 microSv - airport security scan (backscatter X-ray)
0.25 microSv - airport security scan maximum permitted
1.0 microSv - using a CRT monitor for a year
5.0 microSv - dental X-ray
7.5 microSv - per day in Tokyo, 250 km SW of Fukushima plant
40 microSv - Flight from New York to LA
100 microSv - chest X-ray
So that sensitivity range seems reasonable - note the "per hour" in there. Not radiation levels that would put you in hospital with 3 weeks to live, but the kind of levels above background that might be a concern longterm. Having a sensor that allows you to measure that throughout the day, wherever you go, sounds more useful than spot checks or relying (solely?) on government-provided figures.
Whether you should bother, what levels are safe, etc, let people figure that out for themselves. I don't see any harm in adding some datapoints...
Sudden death because you failed to observe the [throw grenade -> explosion] interval?