This is bad because ISPs now have an incentive reveal your identity to the mega corporations who will sue you. If all ISPs in the UK are required to do this, then ISP won't need to worry about losing customers by revealing their customer names. Here's how it will work:
1) MPAA pays ISP $120 to get your name from your IP address. I don't know why people still think that the ISP account holder is necessarily the person who is sharing copyrighted material. 2) ISP profits! 3) MPAA sues you for $150000, but settles for $3000. 4) MPAA profits! ($3000 - $120 - $0.5 (stamp)) = $2879.50
YOU LOSE $3000, lot of sleep, and get stressed because you feel so powerless to stop those parasites.
I can see back at least 2 years using Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. At the end of the year I just download everything in CSV format for my taxes. The last time I did it, it was kind of hard for me to find the CSV option on the website but I found it. I think it was called "Excel" format on the site, but it was actually CSV.
Out of all the hardware that is controlled by software, I would have thought drone software would be the most scrutinized. Unbelievable. Even more reason why we should not arm robots (even remote human operated ones) with weapons such as Hellfire missiles.
Exactly. I have know idea what the hell I'm looking at since the y-axis is not labelled. Any time I see an unlabelled axis, I immediately stop reading. If the author is dumb enough to not label the axis, then I begin to question the validity of the content created by that author.
Nuff said. Besides when these kids are home, they're probably already getting hit with plenty of EM radiation from other sources such as cell towers, radio and television broadcasts, etc.
This is exciting. I played Dragon Age for about 3 hours and loved everything but gave up because I got frustrated by the camera, not being able to tilt it from 0 to 90 Degrees and zoom out far enough to see enough of the battlefield. Anyone know if they're going to unlock the camera for us in Dragon Age 2? I would rather have a more flexible camera even if it means setting the graphics to a lower quality setting.
Your calculations and assumptions are more accurate than mine. I was assuming a pretty small square spot. Still, I think we both agree the intensity has the potential to fry retinas.
Unbelievable that my post about safety concerns got modded as Troll. These toys contain real lasers, and having done GaN (blue) laser development I know how dangerous they are. Maybe in the next few years as the price of blue lasers continues to drop, we'll hear more stories about people getting blinded by them.
What you need to be worried about is not just the power, but the intensity (power density, or power/spot_size). If the spot size is 1mm diameter, then the power density would be:
"How many times can you look directly into a laser beam before going blind? Twice, once for each eye."
The last thing I want is a blue laser in the hands of a 7 year old. Don't we have laws preventing this sort of thing? I'm glad that this toy costs $200 as that will make it unaffordable for most.
This makes me want to wear orange goggles all the time.
Most of the questions I thought up. Questions may have multiple or no correct answers. Questions probably should have been ordered by difficulty (from least to most difficult), but I never got around to it.
So what if RMS eats crud off his own feet? They're his feet, it is his choice. If it bothers you, don't watch. The question you should ask yourself is why should it bother or not bother you? Many people on this planet fail to determine what should matter to them and what should not. That kind of mentality causes:
Money to get wasted
Poverty
Suffering
Think logically. Don't allow yourself to be controlled by what society tells you. Just because other people do stuff (like live in a house rather than in a tent, a cave, airplane, RV, boat, whatever) doesn't me you should too. Just because other people don't do stuff (like eat crud off their feet) doesn't me you shouldn't too. Open you mind. The fact that RMS who is brilliant can eat stuff off his foot in public just proves that he thinks deeply about what matters and what doesn't. Maybe by eating stuff off his foot he is deliberately trying to get you to expand your mind.
Some primates groom each other by picking stuff off each others backs and eating it. Perhaps there are benefits to doing that you just don't know about. Maybe RMS knows what those benefits are and you don't. RMS might be able to think more clearly when he picks at his feet. Thinking clearly is a good thing even if it means consuming some harmless foot crud. Millions of people eat crud and they don't even recognize it as such (high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, etc).
I am a parent of a diabetic child. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for going out of your way and thinking of others. You very well may have saved her life. I hope that guard really did contact the police or health services. Another thing you could have done is checked to see if she had a blood glucose meter, insulin pump, or medical alert tag, on her possession.
Another way to store the energy is to spin up giant flywheels. Then when you want to recover the energy, just allow the flywheel to spin down while turning a generator. Alternatively, if there is no wind, just allow other more steady sources of green power to pick up the slack.
Blah. My sons insulin pump has a USB cable. That pump could easily kill him if it decided to pump too much insulin in him. Lots of life support systems have USB ports. Nothing new about that. Cars should too. If it is designed properly, then no signal on the USB port would put the driver in danger. The car's computer wouldn't read files off the USB drive, it would only write some plain text files onto it. They could even electrically isolate the circuitry that talks to the thumb drive with an optical link. That way if you put 10000V on the usb thumb drive, the main car computer is unharmed.
Not necessarily true. I've worked at startups and mega corps. In my experience, the startups often get stuff done faster and at lower cost. Startups don't have as much bureaucracy, paperwork, ISO9000 blah, "quality assurance" stuff to slow them down. Quality issues are usually caused by lazy incompetant employees. If you want Quality work, don't hire those kinds of people...
Startups also typically don't have ancient manual information systems that are operated by expensive humans rather than cheap machines. People who work for startups also tend to be more adaptable (willing to learn and use new technology) than people who've been working at mega corp X for the past 25 years.
Back in the old days, pretty much everything was mechanical, so you could feasibly dissect your car and see how everything worked. Now with computers, machine code, and embedded systems handling so many critical operations in your car, this has changed. Computers are much harder and practically impossible for engineers (who don't have huge budgets and laboratories) to dissect and reverse engineer. If the code were exposed, then it would be orders of magnitude easier for people who don't work at Toyota to figure out what is going on with unintended acceleration. It should be clear to lawmakers that:
1) All the code used in an automobiles or other system that can potentially threaten public safety should be required to be open source. All companies need to be subject to this law, not just Toyota. That way the code can be reviewed and studied by anyone who is interested in knowing how the systems work that they trust their lives with work. The law should apply to software driven (or hardware like microcontrollers and FPGAs that is flashed with software) medical devices or any code whose development is funded by taxpayer dollars. There should be some exceptions, such as software used in military applications. Don't want the enemy to have that. Bottom line in this case: we need to pass laws to force all automakers to publish all their code online so it can be peer reviewed by the people who use it.
2) The interface to automobile computers should be a widely used standard such as USB, not some proprietary interface that only 1 laptop in the USA can use. I should be able to just insert a USB stick in my car, wait for my car to download all the black box data, engine diagnostic codes, etc onto my USB stick in CSV (or other easily readable) files. Then once a light on my dashboard turns off, I'll know its safe to remove my USB stick so I can open up the files on my computer.
Exactly... Its all just a technology race and often a big waste of money since a large portion of the work people do developing military technology doesn't directly benefit society.
Everyone is bound by the laws of universe. Just because one country has a particular technology, doesn't prevent another country from independantly developing it (remember how China blasted that satellite to smitherines?).
If we don't want our enemies (or "frenemies") to be able to independantly develop military capabilties, then we need to reduce the amount of money they have to spend on R&D. Example: If we don't want Iran to become nuclear, then why aren't we drastically reducing our dependance on oil and encouraging (via incentives) our allies to do the same thing? We could be going green and cutting off Iran's purse strings at the same time.
The military probably wants the ability to send/receive without revealing the data or the location of its source to the enemy. For example, its nuclear subs need to surface in order to communicate, and they don't want the enemy to be able to use triangulation to pinpoint the location of the subs. So, they make the data they're transmitting appear as noise. That way if the enemy happens to be listening on that frequency, they don't detect anything.
Last week I took my 2009 Camry into the dealer. Here is what they did:
1) Chopped off about 4cm from the end of the gas pedal. It looks like they did it with a hack saw. The air near the brake pedal smelled like hard plastic that has just been cut.
2) Replaced the old floormat with looked like this:
That way there is a lower chance of the gas pedal touching the floormat. It also means, that the carpet underneath your gas and clutch pedals will get soiled.
3) Updated the firmware. After the update, I did a test where I got the car going 30Mph, and then pressed and held the accelerator. While the accelerator was depressed, I applied the brake with my left foot. After about 1.5 seconds, the engine RPM went down to idle speed. I repeated this test 2 more times. Same result each time.
The firmware update appears to work at least in 3/3 of my test cases.
What a great thing -- lots of reliably generated power that is greener than burning fossil fuels. The only bad thing about this is that it has taken 30 years for more people to realize that safe nuclear power generation is possible.
This is one step closer towards reducing the amount of our dollars that go to the middle east while also stimulating the US economy. This also moves us closer to our goal of having electric vehicles that really are green. Wind/solar are not as reliable as nuclear because you only have wind when the wind blows, and solar when the sun is shining.
Slashdot Mirror
This is bad because ISPs now have an incentive reveal your identity to the mega corporations who will sue you. If all ISPs in the UK are required to do this, then ISP won't need to worry about losing customers by revealing their customer names. Here's how it will work:
1) MPAA pays ISP $120 to get your name from your IP address. I don't know why people still think that the ISP account holder is necessarily the person who is sharing copyrighted material.
2) ISP profits!
3) MPAA sues you for $150000, but settles for $3000.
4) MPAA profits! ($3000 - $120 - $0.5 (stamp)) = $2879.50
YOU LOSE $3000, lot of sleep, and get stressed because you feel so powerless to stop those parasites.
I can see back at least 2 years using Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. At the end of the year I just download everything in CSV format for my taxes. The last time I did it, it was kind of hard for me to find the CSV option on the website but I found it. I think it was called "Excel" format on the site, but it was actually CSV.
Out of all the hardware that is controlled by software, I would have thought drone software would be the most scrutinized. Unbelievable. Even more reason why we should not arm robots (even remote human operated ones) with weapons such as Hellfire missiles.
Stallman is of Jewish descent.
Exactly. I have know idea what the hell I'm looking at since the y-axis is not labelled. Any time I see an unlabelled axis, I immediately stop reading. If the author is dumb enough to not label the axis, then I begin to question the validity of the content created by that author.
Nuff said. Besides when these kids are home, they're probably already getting hit with plenty of EM radiation from other sources such as cell towers, radio and television broadcasts, etc.
I read the article. There isn't much overlap between the two devices in terms of functionality.
I was playing it on the PC. I heard camera control was even more restricted on the console versions.
This is exciting. I played Dragon Age for about 3 hours and loved everything but gave up because I got frustrated by the camera, not being able to tilt it from 0 to 90 Degrees and zoom out far enough to see enough of the battlefield. Anyone know if they're going to unlock the camera for us in Dragon Age 2? I would rather have a more flexible camera even if it means setting the graphics to a lower quality setting.
Your calculations and assumptions are more accurate than mine. I was assuming a pretty small square spot. Still, I think we both agree the intensity has the potential to fry retinas.
Unbelievable that my post about safety concerns got modded as Troll. These toys contain real lasers, and having done GaN (blue) laser development I know how dangerous they are. Maybe in the next few years as the price of blue lasers continues to drop, we'll hear more stories about people getting blinded by them.
What you need to be worried about is not just the power, but the intensity (power density, or power/spot_size). If the spot size is 1mm diameter, then the power density would be:
sunlight = 1000 W/m^2 (intensity of sunlight)
laser_toy = 0.5 W/(0.001^2) = 500000 W/m^2
500000/1000 = 500 times brighter than the sun!
Let me know if my calculations are wrong... Haven't done this in awhile.
Like the old saying goes...
"How many times can you look directly into a laser beam before going blind? Twice, once for each eye."
The last thing I want is a blue laser in the hands of a 7 year old. Don't we have laws preventing this sort of thing? I'm glad that this toy costs $200 as that will make it unaffordable for most.
This makes me want to wear orange goggles all the time.
Most of the questions I thought up. Questions may have multiple or no correct answers.
Questions probably should have been ordered by difficulty (from least to most difficult), but I never got around to it.
http://docs.google.com/View?id=dgc7vm46_1dn83dq4g
Think logically. Don't allow yourself to be controlled by what society tells you. Just because other people do stuff (like live in a house rather than in a tent, a cave, airplane, RV, boat, whatever) doesn't me you should too. Just because other people don't do stuff (like eat crud off their feet) doesn't me you shouldn't too. Open you mind. The fact that RMS who is brilliant can eat stuff off his foot in public just proves that he thinks deeply about what matters and what doesn't. Maybe by eating stuff off his foot he is deliberately trying to get you to expand your mind.
Some primates groom each other by picking stuff off each others backs and eating it. Perhaps there are benefits to doing that you just don't know about. Maybe RMS knows what those benefits are and you don't. RMS might be able to think more clearly when he picks at his feet. Thinking clearly is a good thing even if it means consuming some harmless foot crud. Millions of people eat crud and they don't even recognize it as such (high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, etc).
I am a parent of a diabetic child. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for going out of your way and thinking of others. You very well may have saved her life. I hope that guard really did contact the police or health services. Another thing you could have done is checked to see if she had a blood glucose meter, insulin pump, or medical alert tag, on her possession.
Another way to store the energy is to spin up giant flywheels. Then when you want to recover the energy, just allow the flywheel to spin down while turning a generator. Alternatively, if there is no wind, just allow other more steady sources of green power to pick up the slack.
Blah. My sons insulin pump has a USB cable. That pump could easily kill him if it decided to pump too much insulin in him. Lots of life support systems have USB ports. Nothing new about that. Cars should too. If it is designed properly, then no signal on the USB port would put the driver in danger. The car's computer wouldn't read files off the USB drive, it would only write some plain text files onto it. They could even electrically isolate the circuitry that talks to the thumb drive with an optical link. That way if you put 10000V on the usb thumb drive, the main car computer is unharmed.
Not necessarily true. I've worked at startups and mega corps. In my experience, the startups often get stuff done faster and at lower cost. Startups don't have as much bureaucracy, paperwork, ISO9000 blah, "quality assurance" stuff to slow them down. Quality issues are usually caused by lazy incompetant employees. If you want Quality work, don't hire those kinds of people...
Startups also typically don't have ancient manual information systems that are operated by expensive humans rather than cheap machines. People who work for startups also tend to be more adaptable (willing to learn and use new technology) than people who've been working at mega corp X for the past 25 years.
Back in the old days, pretty much everything was mechanical, so you could feasibly dissect your car and see how everything worked. Now with computers, machine code, and embedded systems handling so many critical operations in your car, this has changed. Computers are much harder and practically impossible for engineers (who don't have huge budgets and laboratories) to dissect and reverse engineer. If the code were exposed, then it would be orders of magnitude easier for people who don't work at Toyota to figure out what is going on with unintended acceleration. It should be clear to lawmakers that:
1) All the code used in an automobiles or other system that can potentially threaten public safety should be required to be open source. All companies need to be subject to this law, not just Toyota. That way the code can be reviewed and studied by anyone who is interested in knowing how the systems work that they trust their lives with work. The law should apply to software driven (or hardware like microcontrollers and FPGAs that is flashed with software) medical devices or any code whose development is funded by taxpayer dollars. There should be some exceptions, such as software used in military applications. Don't want the enemy to have that. Bottom line in this case: we need to pass laws to force all automakers to publish all their code online so it can be peer reviewed by the people who use it.
2) The interface to automobile computers should be a widely used standard such as USB, not some proprietary interface that only 1 laptop in the USA can use. I should be able to just insert a USB stick in my car, wait for my car to download all the black box data, engine diagnostic codes, etc onto my USB stick in CSV (or other easily readable) files. Then once a light on my dashboard turns off, I'll know its safe to remove my USB stick so I can open up the files on my computer.
Exactly... Its all just a technology race and often a big waste of money since a large portion of the work people do developing military technology doesn't directly benefit society.
Everyone is bound by the laws of universe. Just because one country has a particular technology, doesn't prevent another country from independantly developing it (remember how China blasted that satellite to smitherines?).
If we don't want our enemies (or "frenemies") to be able to independantly develop military capabilties, then we need to reduce the amount of money they have to spend on R&D. Example: If we don't want Iran to become nuclear, then why aren't we drastically reducing our dependance on oil and encouraging (via incentives) our allies to do the same thing? We could be going green and cutting off Iran's purse strings at the same time.
If the enemy uses this same technology against us, then the military wants to be able to recover as much information as they can.
The military probably wants the ability to send/receive without revealing the data or the location of its source to the enemy. For example, its nuclear subs need to surface in order to communicate, and they don't want the enemy to be able to use triangulation to pinpoint the location of the subs. So, they make the data they're transmitting appear as noise. That way if the enemy happens to be listening on that frequency, they don't detect anything.
Last week I took my 2009 Camry into the dealer. Here is what they did:
1) Chopped off about 4cm from the end of the gas pedal. It looks like they did it with a hack saw. The air near the brake pedal smelled like hard plastic that has just been cut.
2) Replaced the old floormat with looked like this:
+-----------+
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
+-----------+
To one that looks like this:
+---+
| |
+---+ +---+
| |
| |
| |
| |
+-----------+
That way there is a lower chance of the gas pedal touching the floormat. It also means, that the carpet underneath your gas and clutch pedals will get soiled.
3) Updated the firmware. After the update, I did a test where I got the car going 30Mph, and then pressed and held the accelerator. While the accelerator was depressed, I applied the brake with my left foot. After about 1.5 seconds, the engine RPM went down to idle speed. I repeated this test 2 more times. Same result each time.
The firmware update appears to work at least in 3/3 of my test cases.
What a great thing -- lots of reliably generated power that is greener than burning fossil fuels. The only bad thing about this is that it has taken 30 years for more people to realize that safe nuclear power generation is possible.
This is one step closer towards reducing the amount of our dollars that go to the middle east while also stimulating the US economy. This also moves us closer to our goal of having electric vehicles that really are green. Wind/solar are not as reliable as nuclear because you only have wind when the wind blows, and solar when the sun is shining.