Real Goods catalog sells a generator that looks like a boat trolling motor or a minisub thruster, only with a bigger propeller. You anchor it in the river, and it uses the large volume of water flowing past it. I believe the river still needs to be moving at several feet per second, and has to be at least 2 feet deep- we're not talking mountain stream here. Needs to be a -river-.
The other way is to lay pipe along the river for quite some distance, to as low a point as possible. You need quite a bit of "head"(vertical delta) or a lot of waterflow; Real Goods' other generator system uses a turbine, with a customizable configuration of nozzles.
As for selling electricity back to the grid (aka intertie systems)- you can't always do that(ie, "sell" the electricity back), and even if you can, there are often limits on how much electricity can be generated. The power companies also get pretty pissy about people powering the grid, because if there's an outage, and a lineman goes to work on the lines he thinks are dead...well...fried lineman. Most inverters these days designed for intertie(which is what we're talking about) have safety features to prevent it from powering a grid by itself, but power companies still like to make excuses and may demand one of their engineers check out the system(at your cost of course).
recently bought a whole bunch of blue LEDs for $0.45 each from[long-winded advertisement snipped]
Yeeesh, this has to be the most blatant advertisement i've ever seen posted as a comment.
Blue LEDs vary anywhere from 23 cents to $2.45 depending upon brightness, lifetime, wavelength, and so on. Quoting a price without any of those specifications is worthless.
Digikey and any of a number of other electronics suppliers will always beat the guy-who-thought-he-could-live-off-selling-LEDs places, especially if you order more than 10 units, because you get a nice quantity discount. They don't nail you on shipping, either.
For the same reasons, bragging about how fast you(oops! Them, I mean, sorry!) ship things without specifying methods is pretty silly too. Oh, and Digikey stocked, when I looked...7 sizes and 10 voltages of radials in various combinations. At least that many SMD types, and still more panel-mount types...
As per SourceForge.net policy, the project has been disabled.
Huh? The policy linked to speaks of copyright violation. Was the code stolen? If not, I fail to see the reasoning.
It simply allowed fair use- it couldn't be used to unlock songs you didn't already own, right?
What about programs which are almost exclusively used for illegal activity, ie, copyright infringement? Like, say, emule? Or BitTorrent? Or any of dozens of gnutella clones? None of which require you to own a copy of anything?
One can argue that all these p2p clients CAN be used for perfectly legal purposes. The same argument applies to PlayFair, if not more so because it required ownership in the first place.
Done before his arrest, TechFocus kept the interview secret so as not to influence the outcome of his trial.
That's a nice bit of spin. They did it because they're a website, so in the eyes of the legal system, they're not decisively a "real" news organization, so they knew they'd get subpoenaed in a second by either prosecutors and have to turn over everything; it'd be a legal battle that would get drawn out for months given the stakes. The EFF would probably get involved, etc. A good deal of their notes etc would probably be very, very incriminating to Lamo, since hackers, like most stupid criminals, love to brag about their crimes.
So, in other words, they danced on the line of hiding criminal evidence. It would not be a stretch for them to get charged themselves. I'd be absolutely amazed if they didn't at least get subpoenaed within the next few days and the evidence used to file new charges against Lamo.
It really makes me sad when, if people don't understand something they assume it's magic.
They don't. They usually assume it's god. Especially in Italy, I guarantee you the first "expert" called in was the local priest, not the local college professor. I guarantee you people have spent more time praying to god than going about finding a scientific explanation or identifying what's unique. Furthermore, the assumption of "no foul play because it happened right in front of us" is absurd- there are numerous chemicals, for example, that can be applied wet, and when they dry and crystalize, become super-sensitive to contact. Of course, they're a bitch to handle, so it's a little far-fetched...
Religion has always given the weak-minded something to pacify their consciences. Why do you think some of the most religious people are often absolute morons, and many intelligent, well-educated people often aren't highly religious? Idiots need an explanation for everything, intelligent people seek answers and do not believe in what they cannot prove to themselves.
Religion:
Provides a handy universal explanation for just about anything. Which cannot be proved.
Controls the population by threatening them with eternal consequences. Which cannot be proved. Ie, you're going to hell. Or you'll be reincarnated as a rock.
Pacifies the population by giving them the hope that, no matter what shithole they're living in now, all they have to do is Be Good and they'll end up in a better place. The existence of which cannot be proved.
Is specifically structured to ensure its survival, the rest of the world be damned. Overpopulation is a HUGE crisis, but you're goin' to hell if you use birth control, says the Pope.
Is used to exploit the rich and poor alike. Everyone screams blue bloody murder about the church of scientology, but conveniently forgets that the Catholic church used to offer get-out-of-hell-free services for cold hard cash(interesting how god forgives all for $ when the church coffers are low), and is currently the wealthiest organization in the world. Not that the wealth is accessible though- when people finally started suing the church for ignoring the fact that priests were raping their kids, do you think Pope John Paul 3rd gave up his gold cup, or traded in the Popemobile for something a little less fancy? Phhbt. No, they cut back welfare programs and sold off some property in Massachusetts.
I think religion is probably the greatest scam ever invented.
I think I would like the air to last longer than the battery, you know, just in case something catastrophic happens.
It's not a problem because, like pilots, you never plan on using all your air/fuel. You always have a reserve- most divers, for example, start surfacing(depending upon how deep they are) when they hit anywhere from 1500 to 500 psi(used to be 500 psi, everyone's encouraging a much larger margin). The divemaster would take this into account when timing a dive, for example.
It's also not a problem, because as you use up the air, the tank becomes lighter and the whole thing(including you) becomes more buoyant, not less. The weight difference between a tank at 3000+ PSI and 500 PSI is quite significant in terms of buoyancy control, and is why you need to be slightly negative when you first get in the water if you're diving. If you're not, you're going to run a rather serious risk of uncontrolled ascent towards the end of your dive. It's one of the many situations that can lead to decompression sickness.
It would not surprise me in the slightest if the unit was designed to be slightly positively buoyant at all times, so that if it stops moving forward, it slowly floats to the surface. That could be used in conjunction with a low-pressure switch to shut off the unit if the air pressure gets too low.
Oh, and even if the thing did start sinking, guess what? You get out, blow bubbles and kick to the surface; it's not like you're in a sub that's gonna implode. By the way, blowing bubbles or exhaling is very important- if you don't, you're going to have a punctured lung. At the depths this thing is designed for, decompression sickness most likely won't be a problem.
The only real problems I see are a)serious potential for reef damage(it's bad enough with divers whacking things with their flippers, this thing crashing into a reef would be devastating) and b)improper training(SCUBA is very safe, but only when you know what you're doing. When you don't know what you're doing, it becomes very dangerous, which is why you can't rent equipment(or even buy it, from some shops, unless they know you're a student) without proof of certification or enrollment in a class.
I know most of us "white collar" folks despise unions, but look at what autoworkers did when Japan and Europe started taking US auto companies to the cleaners, and the Big Three started treating people like shit. They unionized. Then they striked. The motto was: we don't care if you can't do as well if you can't treat us like shit. You won't do business at ALL if you treat us like shit. Unless you want to close shop and go into making floral arrangements, you'll negotiate with us.
Honestly- what would happen if tomorrow, every IT worker simply got up from their keyboard at noon, turned off their cell phone/pager, and didn't come back for the rest of the day? We'd all be instantly fired in favor of people in India? Bullshit. Businesses are weak on the outsourcing front because they can't outsource everything. Strikes make it an all-or-nothing proposition, and contrary to popular belief, they can't just pick someone off the street; it still 'costs' quite a bit to hire someone. Unionizing doesn't make you the boss, but it does even the playing field, because as a single worker, you're rather powerless.
Today, despite HEAVY competition from Europe and Japan, UAW auto workers:
Make $45k or more
Have a health/benefits/retirement package second to none
Have incredibly safe, well-lit, comfortable workplaces, with all the ergonomics they need.
Never get bored; they don't spend years installing door panels. They get rotated, often on a weekly basis, among different tasks. Guess what? That includes the training to be able to do the new task.
Wouldn't you kill to be able to have most of that? I sure as hell would. Detroit is looking better by the second.
...and I have to say that as much as I have always despised the US auto industry for building incredible crap, they've gotten far better over the years. This is despite major manufacturers actually setting up plants here in the US, because it's cheaper! So much for the argument that worker-friendly policies make you unable to compete in the global market.
Bank of America/Fleet just announced they're laying off 12,500 people. According to a BoA rep, guess what department will be one of the hardest hit? You guessed it- infrastructure, aka, Information Technology. Even better, most layoffs will be in the Northeast, because down in Georgia, land of the 2-year-old-strip-malls, real estate(and workers) are dirt cheap.
Oh, you can also vote for politicians who support striking down at-will employment laws...
Yeah, I can still remember about the first readings of erotic material over the telegraph back in the 1800's
Hmm, is that what Marconi and Queen Elizabeth chatted about? The air must have been electric.
(okay, so it was 1900's, sue me)
"Our head engineer says..."
on
Hack Your Ride
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· Score: 1
Turbocharged: turn up the boost, wear out the engine in a hurry.
Your "head engineer" doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, and neither do you. Read on.
The extent to which an turbocharged engine varies greatly with the engine, and generally after 2-3 years, everyone has figured out what the limits are. If you want to play it safe, simply wait until the warranty has expired, and THEN chip the car.
The engines in today's cars are built to handle a specific amount of power, and when the power is increased the wear on components is exponentially increased.
Bullshit. Engine blocks and main components are designed in with quite a bit of extra margin. Not for safety/reliability, but to keep the block from being obsolete within 2-3 years. Audi's 1.8 turbo engine block for example, hasn't changed much over the last near-decade...it has, however, gone from 150hp to as much as 220hp in factory trim. There were certainly changes, but the basic block stayed the same.
Audi's old inline-5 block never really changed over almost 10 years, but was used in cars from 90hp to 220hp. It was the same block that was used in the Sport Quattro, which produced 330hp in factory trim, and 1200(yes, 1200) in full, Group B Rally form. I know people who have been running an extra 65+ hp in their 13 year old Audis, and have been doing so for 6 or more years, some since virtually the day they bought them. Intake hoses burst and you've got to keep things in good shape, but the engines will be in fantastic shape despite 200,000-300,000 miles on them.
As to the "Premium Fuel" thing, I'm doubtful, since all engines i've ever worked with use knock sensors, and are always running at the ragged edge of detonation anyway.
BullSHIT. The knock sensors are to prevent engine DAMAGE, not to let you run the cheapest gas possible. When the ECU detects knocking, it adjusts timing(and boost if turbocharged) until it stops. Adaptive ECUs(anything made in the last 10 years) will remember this and 'set the bar' lower, so to speak. HOWEVER, there's a timeout- with each start of the engine or over a certain period of time, the ECU goes back to what it considers normal. So you will be perpetually bouncing against the limit if running too low an octane.
You don't need a chip to take advantage of premium fuel, just a good OEM computer.
BullSHIT! If the car wasn't designed for anything over a certain octane, running anything higher will be a complete and utter waste of money unless you're running a modified engine(with raised compression or altered timing). Further proof you have NO clue what you're talking about...
I think they should have allowed postage, just required it be DIY. They could have finally determined the LD50 for stamp glue, and collected payment several times over when each successive bidder kicked the bucket(payment up front, right?)
The annual highway death toll of 50,000 in America (consistent since the 1960's and half because of drunks) will plummet.
It would plummet if we actually trained people how to drive, and that would be far easier than making robot drivers. Currently we quiz them on what a seatbelt is for, and how to parallel park...then hand them a license. Or if we took licenses away from senior citizens who are too blind to drive(but they vote en-masse, so that'll never happen). Or actually dealt with drunk drivers(say, addressing their addiction) instead of tossing them into jail for 30 days and then back on the streets(where they'll drive again, even if they don't have a license).
Give any person just a few hours with a good driving instructor to teach them the basics of car control and handling, and they'll be better than ANY robot EVER will be. We're the ultimate robot, remember- we just need good programming.
The US Postal Service, along with most of its counterpart postal authorties around the world, sells a master database of all "deliverable" addresses to vendors so that they can create services that will easily detect incorrect addresses such as streets that don't exist in the given town, or a number that doesn't exist on a real street. In short, if you have this software, you can reliably predict if the postal serivce would bounce a piece of mail as an invalid address and know why.
Most people, in fact all breathing people around the world, realize that almost any town bigger than 50 people has a "Main Street". In short, if you put "25 Main Street" and then the name of any city or town in the entire US, you can reliably predict that it will pass the deliverable address database checks with flying colors.
Apple has had this for years going back to the old System 9, 8, 7, etc
Actually, it hasn't. Ask any Mac pro; applications started making "library" files that went into the System folder(or worse, programs like Norton Utilities insisted on putting libraries into the Extensions folder, which was not what Apple told developers it was for). Apple caved in and 9.x started sprouting "Application Support" folders, a "Libraries" folder, etc. Developers just couldn't wrap their brains around the single-file, applications-don't-mess-with-the-system-folder model. Often times, commercial programs would blatantly disregard Apple's filesystem guidelines. Often times extensions has such weird names, Cassidy&Greene developed an extension manager with a database of all the known files so you could figure out what the hell stuff was.
While you tout OS X as better than Linux or Windows, as an experienced long-time Mac user I saw OS X as a step down from the old MacOS with regards to filesystem simplicity. Applications now install stuff into zillions of different places. Virtually none of their installers ask if you want to install just for your user(ie using your Library, Application etc folders), or install system-wide(a few- VERY few- do). Application installers that have no business needing my password ask for it; why does Acrobat reader need sudo to install itself into Applications? Answer- it doesn't, but it's probably saving some prefs file somewhere it shouldn't.
Even worse...you can install packages using a "package system", but Apple will be damned if they'll give you a way to UNINSTALL a package, system or otherwise. Want to remove all the localization crap you forgot to turn off during system install? You have to download a third-party app to remove almost a gigabyte of files from your system, instead of just going into a "Software" panel and clicking remove. Windows has had it for years, with its only flaw being that it calls the developer's uninstall program, which often times doesn't work, especially if you've deleted the app folder but nothing else.
Another side effect of the multiple-files problem is added complexity; the # of files in the filesystem has ballooned enormously, because instead of an application being one big file with a resource fork, it's now at least 3 folders, and often times hundreds(or even thousands) of files. Moving an application used to be easy- you moved one big file, the Finder just did a straight copy very efficiently. Now it has to copy hundreds of small files, so it takes forever(and amusingly, copying just a bunch of raw non-app files takes about 5 times longer in the Finder than it does via cp or ditto).
Don't get too uppity about not having a registry. OS X uses a number of preference files, and even though they've changed to XML and the like, users are seeing the same problems with OS 9- corrupt preference files causing odd behavior. Remove the naughty pref file, things start working again. There are now third party utils that specialize in checking these prefs; if they can do it, why can't it be part of the bootup process?
Oh, and lastly- Apple has made it even more difficult to make a boot disk for your mac to do disk maintenance. It used to be you just copied over your system folder, removed all the extensions, control panels, prefs, etc you knew you didn't need. Now? You need some stupid shareware program to do it, and half of 'em still haven't been updated for 10.3.
NYC has had these for years; they're 3-4 spaces high, you drive into the space, the guy pushes a button, the car goes up 2-3 levels in the unit. Another car drives up, goes up 1-2. Etc until it's stacked full.
Only problem? Well, I remember a photo of a enraged car owner screaming at a parking attendant on the day of the massive NYC blackout; they're useless in a power outage; you're not getting your car out, and that's that.
"Oh, they must have had backup generators", you say. Ever been to NYC? Everything is done as cheaply as possible. They'd sell your car after you parked it if they thought they could get away with it. They're certainly not going to keep a backup generator around just in case there's a power outage- they're just going to tell you to walk home.
Yup, and so was Hypertalk. PHP and Perl brag about type-less variables, but few people realize that Hypercard was released almost around exactly the same time Perl was. While Perl took years to take off, Hypercard(and hence Hypertalk) were a near instant success; it used to be that a HUGE percentage of software on Infoman was hypertalk based, and people did some astounding things with it(there was an entire BBS coded in Hypertalk, for example.)
Among other things, it was fully object oriented(something that took Perl many years to get); you could send a message to any object, be it a text field, button, etc. It was also way cool that you could pretty much program it in English; very little in the way of syntax was required and programs were incredibly easy to read and understand. Unfortunately, both made it pretty slow, but fast enough for most purposes.
My college used it in the Introduction to Algorithms class, and several friends laughed and dismissed it as a joke. It wasn't, in the slightest. It was incredibly easy to pick up, which was a requirement given that the class was popular with liberal arts majors to satisfy credit requirements.
We spent very little time on "how to program in Hypertalk", because it was easy to understand. Further, the functional description(which we were trained to write completely, before even starting coding) was rather easily converted into a working program. The whole concept of message passing introduced everyone to object oriented programming, which at the time was the Next Big Thing. So, we got to focus on programming strategy and technique, without getting buried in data types, calling conventions, syntax, etc. The class was a preparation for specific programming language classes, and it worked very well; I've found the practices and methodology I learned to be very helpful whenever I've had to take on small programming projects in PHP or Perl
BannedMusic.org made a BitTorrent wrapper that installs the application and then automatically launches the download, they call it an "easy downloader" and have instructions and a script for sites that want to make their own.
And unfortunately, it's windows only, and still requires installing the software, which is 3MB+.
What is needed is something along the lines of a very small, very simple java client or a browser plugin. Azureus is java, but is huge and has massive feature-bloat for the purposes of just downloading(and sharing back) one file. However, Bram and others don't seem terribly interested in expanding possibilities; a mac developer offered up numerous improvements to the BitTorrent team for the mac client(which among other things is based on 3.3a, not 3.4.1, weeks after 3.4.1 released) and was rewarded with deafening silence.
The bittorrent protocol is http based. It's extensively documented on the bitconjurer website. Cmon folks, let's at least see a mozilla plugin or something!:-)
Bored/hate your job? Try working in an IT department(it's like programming, only you have to deal with bitchy people all day, everything is your fault, and you get paid less), or unemployment.
I'm sure I'll get slapped "flamebait" or somesuch, but I'm really tired of these "my programming job sucks because it is not emotionally fulfilling" stories that keep popping up; many of us IT geeks don't have jobs, and you programmers are whining about how rough your lives are because you're getting paid to hit "next" in find&replace? I don't have much sympathy, especially since most of you were paid significantly better than us(on average, a few years ago, a javamonkey wet behind the ears would earn 2x what I did as a sysadmin with several years experience). If you don't like your job, change fields to something you think you'd be good at and find more rewarding.
if you aren't run over by an SUV, suffocated by smog, you'll collapse from a heart attack because you weigh 300 pounds and you're body can't take the exertion.
Given that some suspect we've hit our peak in oil production, or are about 20 years from the peak- chances are you won't be in any danger of getting run over by anything. Smog won't be much of a problem either.
This is based on the lack of refinery building- they take 20 years to become profitable. Despite skyrocking demand, no new refineries? Hmm.
It's not that one day, OPEC will shrug and say "oops, sorry, none left"; it's just going to get harder and harder to find oil in new places. So oil's going to keep going up in price. That means prices will skyrocket on everything, because it'll cost more to get the energy to make it; if it's plastic, it'll cost more for the raw materials; it'll cost more to ship it, then distribute it, etc.
Sad thing is, we've known this for well over 20 years, easily...and not much is being done about it(the major effort for hydrogen power is based off the asinine assumption we'll always have natural gas to get the hydrogen from. "Renewable energy" just doesn't seem to be in Dubya's vocab).
Friendster's got 'em beat. Their technology is so good, they don't need a slashdotting to go under.
A few weeks back they implemented an emergency "how many degrees of separation do I want people to see" feature, and the default was pretty low. They had to do it because their MySQL database was choking for weeks to the point that you could log in, but any further activity would hang until the applet returned a connection-timed-out error.
A large part of why Bush isn't interested in that issue is that he's driving hard to win Hispanic voters (along with Jeb) in Flordia, which for both parties is a key battleground state.
Bullshit. Most hispanic voters are very pro-immigration-control. Why? If they're voters, they're legal citizens(which is a long process usually cherished by those who earn it who were not born with it), and they despise those who snuck in and are getting a free ride and giving the legal immigrants a bad name. Everyone is for immigration, until they get here, and then they don't want anyone else coming in and taking a piece of the pie. It's just like people who move into a neighborhood and then a year later are bitching about a new development, how they want a small neighborhood, blah blah blah.
For example, the California "let's give all the illegals drivers licenses so they're safer!" program is hugely unpopular with legal immigrant populations, and they vote en-masse. I love it when politicians get what's coming to 'em...
If Google won't support Safari, let's make Safari not support Google; besides, I'm finding google less and less useful thanks to Google not being the slightest bit successful at fighting the companies tweaking their ranks...so I'd rather have the search bar use Teoma anyway. Is there a plist pref I can tweak or something, to do this?
Pricewatch used to be cool and useful. Now, all the vendors are using tricks in their ads. For example, search for a popular wireless router, and easily the entire first page is for some crappy no-name router with the text "JUST LIKE (insert model number of the popular router)". Do they get de-listed for doing it? Of course not, because nobody's policing it anymore.
Many vendors I used to use and like have stopped listing with pricewatch for just such reasons. Like the rest of OSDN, there's no active work; they swallowed a bunch of popular resources, and then it's just "let's go on cruise control, and sell as many ads as we can". Notice how on a regular basis we get 500 errors when trying to post? In fact, I'd be willing to bet the only development done on slashdot in the least 2 years has been a)adding subscriptions and b)adding more advertisements.
Slashdot Mirror
Real Goods catalog sells a generator that looks like a boat trolling motor or a minisub thruster, only with a bigger propeller. You anchor it in the river, and it uses the large volume of water flowing past it. I believe the river still needs to be moving at several feet per second, and has to be at least 2 feet deep- we're not talking mountain stream here. Needs to be a -river-.
The other way is to lay pipe along the river for quite some distance, to as low a point as possible. You need quite a bit of "head"(vertical delta) or a lot of waterflow; Real Goods' other generator system uses a turbine, with a customizable configuration of nozzles.
As for selling electricity back to the grid (aka intertie systems)- you can't always do that(ie, "sell" the electricity back), and even if you can, there are often limits on how much electricity can be generated. The power companies also get pretty pissy about people powering the grid, because if there's an outage, and a lineman goes to work on the lines he thinks are dead...well...fried lineman. Most inverters these days designed for intertie(which is what we're talking about) have safety features to prevent it from powering a grid by itself, but power companies still like to make excuses and may demand one of their engineers check out the system(at your cost of course).
Yeeesh, this has to be the most blatant advertisement i've ever seen posted as a comment.
Blue LEDs vary anywhere from 23 cents to $2.45 depending upon brightness, lifetime, wavelength, and so on. Quoting a price without any of those specifications is worthless.
Digikey and any of a number of other electronics suppliers will always beat the guy-who-thought-he-could-live-off-selling-LEDs places, especially if you order more than 10 units, because you get a nice quantity discount. They don't nail you on shipping, either.
For the same reasons, bragging about how fast you(oops! Them, I mean, sorry!) ship things without specifying methods is pretty silly too. Oh, and Digikey stocked, when I looked...7 sizes and 10 voltages of radials in various combinations. At least that many SMD types, and still more panel-mount types...
You're new here, right?
(and that the original poster got it a bit wrong.)
Er, um...again...you're new here, right?
Huh? The policy linked to speaks of copyright violation. Was the code stolen? If not, I fail to see the reasoning.
It simply allowed fair use- it couldn't be used to unlock songs you didn't already own, right?
What about programs which are almost exclusively used for illegal activity, ie, copyright infringement? Like, say, emule? Or BitTorrent? Or any of dozens of gnutella clones? None of which require you to own a copy of anything?
One can argue that all these p2p clients CAN be used for perfectly legal purposes. The same argument applies to PlayFair, if not more so because it required ownership in the first place.
That's a nice bit of spin. They did it because they're a website, so in the eyes of the legal system, they're not decisively a "real" news organization, so they knew they'd get subpoenaed in a second by either prosecutors and have to turn over everything; it'd be a legal battle that would get drawn out for months given the stakes. The EFF would probably get involved, etc. A good deal of their notes etc would probably be very, very incriminating to Lamo, since hackers, like most stupid criminals, love to brag about their crimes.
So, in other words, they danced on the line of hiding criminal evidence. It would not be a stretch for them to get charged themselves. I'd be absolutely amazed if they didn't at least get subpoenaed within the next few days and the evidence used to file new charges against Lamo.
They don't. They usually assume it's god. Especially in Italy, I guarantee you the first "expert" called in was the local priest, not the local college professor. I guarantee you people have spent more time praying to god than going about finding a scientific explanation or identifying what's unique. Furthermore, the assumption of "no foul play because it happened right in front of us" is absurd- there are numerous chemicals, for example, that can be applied wet, and when they dry and crystalize, become super-sensitive to contact. Of course, they're a bitch to handle, so it's a little far-fetched...
Religion has always given the weak-minded something to pacify their consciences. Why do you think some of the most religious people are often absolute morons, and many intelligent, well-educated people often aren't highly religious? Idiots need an explanation for everything, intelligent people seek answers and do not believe in what they cannot prove to themselves.
Religion:
I think religion is probably the greatest scam ever invented.
It's not a problem because, like pilots, you never plan on using all your air/fuel. You always have a reserve- most divers, for example, start surfacing(depending upon how deep they are) when they hit anywhere from 1500 to 500 psi(used to be 500 psi, everyone's encouraging a much larger margin). The divemaster would take this into account when timing a dive, for example.
It's also not a problem, because as you use up the air, the tank becomes lighter and the whole thing(including you) becomes more buoyant, not less. The weight difference between a tank at 3000+ PSI and 500 PSI is quite significant in terms of buoyancy control, and is why you need to be slightly negative when you first get in the water if you're diving. If you're not, you're going to run a rather serious risk of uncontrolled ascent towards the end of your dive. It's one of the many situations that can lead to decompression sickness.
It would not surprise me in the slightest if the unit was designed to be slightly positively buoyant at all times, so that if it stops moving forward, it slowly floats to the surface. That could be used in conjunction with a low-pressure switch to shut off the unit if the air pressure gets too low.
Oh, and even if the thing did start sinking, guess what? You get out, blow bubbles and kick to the surface; it's not like you're in a sub that's gonna implode. By the way, blowing bubbles or exhaling is very important- if you don't, you're going to have a punctured lung. At the depths this thing is designed for, decompression sickness most likely won't be a problem.
The only real problems I see are a)serious potential for reef damage(it's bad enough with divers whacking things with their flippers, this thing crashing into a reef would be devastating) and b)improper training(SCUBA is very safe, but only when you know what you're doing. When you don't know what you're doing, it becomes very dangerous, which is why you can't rent equipment(or even buy it, from some shops, unless they know you're a student) without proof of certification or enrollment in a class.
I know most of us "white collar" folks despise unions, but look at what autoworkers did when Japan and Europe started taking US auto companies to the cleaners, and the Big Three started treating people like shit. They unionized. Then they striked. The motto was: we don't care if you can't do as well if you can't treat us like shit. You won't do business at ALL if you treat us like shit. Unless you want to close shop and go into making floral arrangements, you'll negotiate with us.
Honestly- what would happen if tomorrow, every IT worker simply got up from their keyboard at noon, turned off their cell phone/pager, and didn't come back for the rest of the day? We'd all be instantly fired in favor of people in India? Bullshit. Businesses are weak on the outsourcing front because they can't outsource everything. Strikes make it an all-or-nothing proposition, and contrary to popular belief, they can't just pick someone off the street; it still 'costs' quite a bit to hire someone. Unionizing doesn't make you the boss, but it does even the playing field, because as a single worker, you're rather powerless.
Today, despite HEAVY competition from Europe and Japan, UAW auto workers:
Wouldn't you kill to be able to have most of that? I sure as hell would. Detroit is looking better by the second.
...and I have to say that as much as I have always despised the US auto industry for building incredible crap, they've gotten far better over the years. This is despite major manufacturers actually setting up plants here in the US, because it's cheaper! So much for the argument that worker-friendly policies make you unable to compete in the global market.
Bank of America/Fleet just announced they're laying off 12,500 people. According to a BoA rep, guess what department will be one of the hardest hit? You guessed it- infrastructure, aka, Information Technology. Even better, most layoffs will be in the Northeast, because down in Georgia, land of the 2-year-old-strip-malls, real estate(and workers) are dirt cheap.
Oh, you can also vote for politicians who support striking down at-will employment laws...
Hmm, is that what Marconi and Queen Elizabeth chatted about? The air must have been electric.
(okay, so it was 1900's, sue me)
Your "head engineer" doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, and neither do you. Read on.
The extent to which an turbocharged engine varies greatly with the engine, and generally after 2-3 years, everyone has figured out what the limits are. If you want to play it safe, simply wait until the warranty has expired, and THEN chip the car.
The engines in today's cars are built to handle a specific amount of power, and when the power is increased the wear on components is exponentially increased.
Bullshit. Engine blocks and main components are designed in with quite a bit of extra margin. Not for safety/reliability, but to keep the block from being obsolete within 2-3 years. Audi's 1.8 turbo engine block for example, hasn't changed much over the last near-decade...it has, however, gone from 150hp to as much as 220hp in factory trim. There were certainly changes, but the basic block stayed the same.
Audi's old inline-5 block never really changed over almost 10 years, but was used in cars from 90hp to 220hp. It was the same block that was used in the Sport Quattro, which produced 330hp in factory trim, and 1200(yes, 1200) in full, Group B Rally form. I know people who have been running an extra 65+ hp in their 13 year old Audis, and have been doing so for 6 or more years, some since virtually the day they bought them. Intake hoses burst and you've got to keep things in good shape, but the engines will be in fantastic shape despite 200,000-300,000 miles on them.
As to the "Premium Fuel" thing, I'm doubtful, since all engines i've ever worked with use knock sensors, and are always running at the ragged edge of detonation anyway.
BullSHIT. The knock sensors are to prevent engine DAMAGE, not to let you run the cheapest gas possible. When the ECU detects knocking, it adjusts timing(and boost if turbocharged) until it stops. Adaptive ECUs(anything made in the last 10 years) will remember this and 'set the bar' lower, so to speak. HOWEVER, there's a timeout- with each start of the engine or over a certain period of time, the ECU goes back to what it considers normal. So you will be perpetually bouncing against the limit if running too low an octane.
You don't need a chip to take advantage of premium fuel, just a good OEM computer.
BullSHIT! If the car wasn't designed for anything over a certain octane, running anything higher will be a complete and utter waste of money unless you're running a modified engine(with raised compression or altered timing). Further proof you have NO clue what you're talking about...
I think they should have allowed postage, just required it be DIY. They could have finally determined the LD50 for stamp glue, and collected payment several times over when each successive bidder kicked the bucket(payment up front, right?)
It would plummet if we actually trained people how to drive, and that would be far easier than making robot drivers. Currently we quiz them on what a seatbelt is for, and how to parallel park...then hand them a license. Or if we took licenses away from senior citizens who are too blind to drive(but they vote en-masse, so that'll never happen). Or actually dealt with drunk drivers(say, addressing their addiction) instead of tossing them into jail for 30 days and then back on the streets(where they'll drive again, even if they don't have a license).
Give any person just a few hours with a good driving instructor to teach them the basics of car control and handling, and they'll be better than ANY robot EVER will be. We're the ultimate robot, remember- we just need good programming.
Most people, in fact all breathing people around the world, realize that almost any town bigger than 50 people has a "Main Street". In short, if you put "25 Main Street" and then the name of any city or town in the entire US, you can reliably predict that it will pass the deliverable address database checks with flying colors.
Yes, but does it rip off its shirt after a cup-winning goal shot? Everyone knows that the crowd likes it when the players hamm it up.
(ducks, runs for cover)
Actually, it hasn't. Ask any Mac pro; applications started making "library" files that went into the System folder(or worse, programs like Norton Utilities insisted on putting libraries into the Extensions folder, which was not what Apple told developers it was for). Apple caved in and 9.x started sprouting "Application Support" folders, a "Libraries" folder, etc. Developers just couldn't wrap their brains around the single-file, applications-don't-mess-with-the-system-folder model. Often times, commercial programs would blatantly disregard Apple's filesystem guidelines. Often times extensions has such weird names, Cassidy&Greene developed an extension manager with a database of all the known files so you could figure out what the hell stuff was.
While you tout OS X as better than Linux or Windows, as an experienced long-time Mac user I saw OS X as a step down from the old MacOS with regards to filesystem simplicity. Applications now install stuff into zillions of different places. Virtually none of their installers ask if you want to install just for your user(ie using your Library, Application etc folders), or install system-wide(a few- VERY few- do). Application installers that have no business needing my password ask for it; why does Acrobat reader need sudo to install itself into Applications? Answer- it doesn't, but it's probably saving some prefs file somewhere it shouldn't.
Even worse...you can install packages using a "package system", but Apple will be damned if they'll give you a way to UNINSTALL a package, system or otherwise. Want to remove all the localization crap you forgot to turn off during system install? You have to download a third-party app to remove almost a gigabyte of files from your system, instead of just going into a "Software" panel and clicking remove. Windows has had it for years, with its only flaw being that it calls the developer's uninstall program, which often times doesn't work, especially if you've deleted the app folder but nothing else.
Another side effect of the multiple-files problem is added complexity; the # of files in the filesystem has ballooned enormously, because instead of an application being one big file with a resource fork, it's now at least 3 folders, and often times hundreds(or even thousands) of files. Moving an application used to be easy- you moved one big file, the Finder just did a straight copy very efficiently. Now it has to copy hundreds of small files, so it takes forever(and amusingly, copying just a bunch of raw non-app files takes about 5 times longer in the Finder than it does via cp or ditto).
Don't get too uppity about not having a registry. OS X uses a number of preference files, and even though they've changed to XML and the like, users are seeing the same problems with OS 9- corrupt preference files causing odd behavior. Remove the naughty pref file, things start working again. There are now third party utils that specialize in checking these prefs; if they can do it, why can't it be part of the bootup process?
Oh, and lastly- Apple has made it even more difficult to make a boot disk for your mac to do disk maintenance. It used to be you just copied over your system folder, removed all the extensions, control panels, prefs, etc you knew you didn't need. Now? You need some stupid shareware program to do it, and half of 'em still haven't been updated for 10.3.
NYC has had these for years; they're 3-4 spaces high, you drive into the space, the guy pushes a button, the car goes up 2-3 levels in the unit. Another car drives up, goes up 1-2. Etc until it's stacked full.
Only problem? Well, I remember a photo of a enraged car owner screaming at a parking attendant on the day of the massive NYC blackout; they're useless in a power outage; you're not getting your car out, and that's that.
"Oh, they must have had backup generators", you say. Ever been to NYC? Everything is done as cheaply as possible. They'd sell your car after you parked it if they thought they could get away with it. They're certainly not going to keep a backup generator around just in case there's a power outage- they're just going to tell you to walk home.
Yup, and so was Hypertalk. PHP and Perl brag about type-less variables, but few people realize that Hypercard was released almost around exactly the same time Perl was. While Perl took years to take off, Hypercard(and hence Hypertalk) were a near instant success; it used to be that a HUGE percentage of software on Infoman was hypertalk based, and people did some astounding things with it(there was an entire BBS coded in Hypertalk, for example.)
Among other things, it was fully object oriented(something that took Perl many years to get); you could send a message to any object, be it a text field, button, etc. It was also way cool that you could pretty much program it in English; very little in the way of syntax was required and programs were incredibly easy to read and understand. Unfortunately, both made it pretty slow, but fast enough for most purposes.
My college used it in the Introduction to Algorithms class, and several friends laughed and dismissed it as a joke. It wasn't, in the slightest. It was incredibly easy to pick up, which was a requirement given that the class was popular with liberal arts majors to satisfy credit requirements.
We spent very little time on "how to program in Hypertalk", because it was easy to understand. Further, the functional description(which we were trained to write completely, before even starting coding) was rather easily converted into a working program. The whole concept of message passing introduced everyone to object oriented programming, which at the time was the Next Big Thing. So, we got to focus on programming strategy and technique, without getting buried in data types, calling conventions, syntax, etc. The class was a preparation for specific programming language classes, and it worked very well; I've found the practices and methodology I learned to be very helpful whenever I've had to take on small programming projects in PHP or Perl
And unfortunately, it's windows only, and still requires installing the software, which is 3MB+.
What is needed is something along the lines of a very small, very simple java client or a browser plugin. Azureus is java, but is huge and has massive feature-bloat for the purposes of just downloading(and sharing back) one file. However, Bram and others don't seem terribly interested in expanding possibilities; a mac developer offered up numerous improvements to the BitTorrent team for the mac client(which among other things is based on 3.3a, not 3.4.1, weeks after 3.4.1 released) and was rewarded with deafening silence.
The bittorrent protocol is http based. It's extensively documented on the bitconjurer website. Cmon folks, let's at least see a mozilla plugin or something! :-)
Bored/hate your job? Try working in an IT department(it's like programming, only you have to deal with bitchy people all day, everything is your fault, and you get paid less), or unemployment.
I'm sure I'll get slapped "flamebait" or somesuch, but I'm really tired of these "my programming job sucks because it is not emotionally fulfilling" stories that keep popping up; many of us IT geeks don't have jobs, and you programmers are whining about how rough your lives are because you're getting paid to hit "next" in find&replace? I don't have much sympathy, especially since most of you were paid significantly better than us(on average, a few years ago, a javamonkey wet behind the ears would earn 2x what I did as a sysadmin with several years experience). If you don't like your job, change fields to something you think you'd be good at and find more rewarding.
Yeesh, talk about not being able to see the forest for the trees. Make sandwiches, of course!
Given that some suspect we've hit our peak in oil production, or are about 20 years from the peak- chances are you won't be in any danger of getting run over by anything. Smog won't be much of a problem either.
This is based on the lack of refinery building- they take 20 years to become profitable. Despite skyrocking demand, no new refineries? Hmm.
It's not that one day, OPEC will shrug and say "oops, sorry, none left"; it's just going to get harder and harder to find oil in new places. So oil's going to keep going up in price. That means prices will skyrocket on everything, because it'll cost more to get the energy to make it; if it's plastic, it'll cost more for the raw materials; it'll cost more to ship it, then distribute it, etc.
Sad thing is, we've known this for well over 20 years, easily...and not much is being done about it(the major effort for hydrogen power is based off the asinine assumption we'll always have natural gas to get the hydrogen from. "Renewable energy" just doesn't seem to be in Dubya's vocab).
Friendster's got 'em beat. Their technology is so good, they don't need a slashdotting to go under.
A few weeks back they implemented an emergency "how many degrees of separation do I want people to see" feature, and the default was pretty low. They had to do it because their MySQL database was choking for weeks to the point that you could log in, but any further activity would hang until the applet returned a connection-timed-out error.
Bullshit. Most hispanic voters are very pro-immigration-control. Why? If they're voters, they're legal citizens(which is a long process usually cherished by those who earn it who were not born with it), and they despise those who snuck in and are getting a free ride and giving the legal immigrants a bad name. Everyone is for immigration, until they get here, and then they don't want anyone else coming in and taking a piece of the pie. It's just like people who move into a neighborhood and then a year later are bitching about a new development, how they want a small neighborhood, blah blah blah.
For example, the California "let's give all the illegals drivers licenses so they're safer!" program is hugely unpopular with legal immigrant populations, and they vote en-masse. I love it when politicians get what's coming to 'em...
If Google won't support Safari, let's make Safari not support Google; besides, I'm finding google less and less useful thanks to Google not being the slightest bit successful at fighting the companies tweaking their ranks...so I'd rather have the search bar use Teoma anyway. Is there a plist pref I can tweak or something, to do this?
Pricewatch used to be cool and useful. Now, all the vendors are using tricks in their ads. For example, search for a popular wireless router, and easily the entire first page is for some crappy no-name router with the text "JUST LIKE (insert model number of the popular router)". Do they get de-listed for doing it? Of course not, because nobody's policing it anymore.
Many vendors I used to use and like have stopped listing with pricewatch for just such reasons. Like the rest of OSDN, there's no active work; they swallowed a bunch of popular resources, and then it's just "let's go on cruise control, and sell as many ads as we can". Notice how on a regular basis we get 500 errors when trying to post? In fact, I'd be willing to bet the only development done on slashdot in the least 2 years has been a)adding subscriptions and b)adding more advertisements.