The train is awesome. The seats are bigger, you can get up and walk around whenever you want, and on long journeys they have a restaurant and bar... Also no dickhead in a uniform will confiscate your bottle of water.
Sure, the ride takes longer, but you don't have to get to the station 2 hours before departure to go through "security" and unlike airports, train stations tend to be close to the center of the city, so there are no time-consuming and expensive airport transfers once you arrive at your destination.
Australian/New Zealand readers can relate this to Dick Smith Electronics. Used to sell individual components, and always have at least one nerd on duty who at least knew what they were. Now they're just trying to emulate harvey norman and JB hifi selling TVs and stereos, but with a smaller selection, higher prices, and dumber staff. Component sales have also completely disappeared - at least Radio Shack can still sell a few overpriced resistors, which although expensive is a lot quicker than mail order.
Yes, I'm a former employee of Dick Smith Electronics. It's a damn shame what's happened to them, and seems to me an insane business move to move out of your niche into an already saturated market.
I've started using Ubuntu on my netbook and it seems to me this has already been done. If I'm looking for something that I'd find in Control Panel>>System under Windows, i can find it under this tab at the top of the Ubuntu screen that says "System." Simple enough.
Personally I also found Ubuntu easier to install from scratch than XP too. So far it's working "out of the box" at least as well as an XP install. In fact I HAVEN'T had to get my hands dirty with the CLI yet... I bought this system to "learn how to use linux" but so far it's been easy enough that I haven't had to go into too much detail... YMMV
You describe exactly why these new laws are a waste of time. (posting from.au where we already have the law and yes, I've already been busted)
I can be changing a CD, eating a hamburger, lighing a cigarette, and reaching around to break up my fighting kids in the back seat, all whilst trying to change gear and steer through a roundabout, but it's illegal for me to answer the phone when I'm stuck in traffic.
We already have perfectly good laws against negligent driving, all they need is to be implemented correctly.
Yes, talking on a phone can be distracting, but so can any of the other things I listed above, it seems ludicrous that only one of these activities is banned by a specific law. Stupid nanny-state.
I have an idea for a niche electronic product, and I've built a prototype. I'd really prefer not to spend the thousands of dollars involved in an international patent, not to mention the thousands more to defend the patent if I think that patent actually has been breached.
My only concern is that some "other company" might patent my idea, then sue me for infringement of that idea. Does "prior art" cover this? As long as my invention has been published/marketed/discussed/shown to my friends, the "other company" can't then go on and patent my original idea, right?
As I said, it's a niche product, custom-made to order, so I don't expect some big factory to steal the idea then churn them out by the thousand. So should I bother patenting it?
*Yes, I realise that asking for legal advice on Slashdot will have a terrible signal to noise ratio.
Maybe this sort of initiative is just what is needed to renew public interest in nuclear power. If a business like Google can show that it is clean, safe and reliable, perhaps governments and "environmentalists" can see through the FUD and support nuclear for national grid power.
They use real old bakelite phones, hacked to accept an internal cellular module and LiIon battery. It emulates the dialtone and everything. Just add a SIM card and away you go. It looks really cool.
*I am not affiliated with SparkFun except as an occasional customer. Unless they want to give me a job!
100 $100 bills is a pretty small package. Like, smaller than a paperback novel. Wads of $10000 can easily fit in a pocket or be taped to your person. These bundles of cash can bend, and are impervious to x-rays and magnetic fields. Also unless it's drug money you're unlikely to be detected by sniffer dogs*
And remember that the $100 bill is far from being the largest commonly-available denomination. Why not smuggle the same amount in 500euro notes? Or 10000 Brunei dollars? (although trying to exchange the latter might take a while)
Sure, if you have loads of time you could melt down some gold and cast it into something that looks innocent. But if you need to cross a border NOW (or within the next few days) cash is king.
*Do they even have drug sniffer dogs in airports anymore? Or are they too busy sniffing for fresh produce, pirate DVDs, and explosives (AKA nitrate heart medication?) Do those fancy mass-spectrometer explosive detectors also detect cocaine? Can a thermal swine-flu camera detect the heat of a condom full of heroin?
Amen to that. High-intensity LEDs are cool technology, but whatever form-over-function "designer" decreed that bright blue LEDs are a must-have in every product (to make it look "high-tech") should be savagely beaten.
Don't forget the other modifications from the Tahoe. You know, the extra weight, woeful aerodynamics and awful use of interior space. It's kind of like an inverse-Tardis, it's smaller on the inside than it looks on the outside.
Infra-red is hardly invisible though, more like "security through obscurity." For example, cheap night-vison goggles can detect IR, as can cheap, off-the-shelf digital cameras or web-cams. None of this is high-tech, or only available to the military... Even if you live in a cave in the desert, if you can afford an AK47 and some ammunition, you can probably get your hands on something that will detect a soldier's info-fuse.
You can also verfy this easily by pointing a TV remote at a webcam or camcorder. Unless the camera has *very* good filtering, you'll be able to see the LED on the remote flickering.
Instead of increasing compression (which requires mechanical mods), couldn't the ignition advance be increased instead? Especially as most modern engine management already has knock sensing and ignition retard built-in to protect the engine against low-octane fuel.
Or to put it another way, one's uniform is a stronger identifier than one's "race." You mention black people in conservative golf clothes, which is interesting and american in itself. Surely in WWII, there were oriental-looking people wearing allied uniform, fighting against Japan?
It similarly applies to sketchy-looking kids in hooded sweatshirts. I can't even see their skin colour but because of the way they're dressed, which is their own choice to make, I trust them less around my mp3 player, but value them as a potential source of drugs. If one of these kids just *happened* to be black, does that make me a racist?
Hydrocarbon fuels from soy are no more of a "magic bullet" than hydrocarbon fuels from corn-derived ethanol. As a crop, soy is no better for the land and soil than corn. Do some research about the huge increase in GM RoundUp-Ready soy crops, owned of course by Monsanto. Then have a look at what these crops are doing to to the Argentinian ecology.
There is no single solution to our fuel woes, and no one crop to supply all our biofuel. As any ecologist knows, mono-crops are generally Bad in a multitude of ways. Ethanol itself is not the problem, but the source of the ethanol should not be tied to one crop, or group of crops, that happen to have a strong political lobby. Note that this crop will vary from country to country: Corn in the US, sugar cane in Brazil and Australia, soy in Argentina.
Biofuels can potentially also come from non-food crops, as has been mentioned on SlashDot many times in the past. For example, algae, cellulose (everything from lawn clippings to paper waste) and hemp.
And of course YMMV but I have found ethanol blend to have no ill-effects on any vehicles I have driven, which are mostly high-mileage Japanese and European cars, from 2 to 20 years old. I actually make a point of running a tank of ethanol-blend through my car if it has been in storage for over a month, in order to dissolve any water that has condensed in the fuel tank.
Wow, really? You can read the manual on some "ready-available equipment and software" and assemble it the way the engineers intended?
Just because a product already exists doesn't make it any less impressive to build your own from scratch. These guys designed their own serial network and used it to switch multiple big electrical loads and it was robust enough for other students to play with. They did all this on a limited budget and also persuaded the entire dorm to let them install the hardware.
If they weren't doing cool hardware projects that interact with the real world, they would have been alone in the dorm playing WoW or doing lame quizzes on FaceBook.
A truly neat project. Are employers impressed by such feats? They should be. Does any body have more information of this? what sort of microcontrollers used, networking protocols...
Also the social engineering is impressive. I wouldn't have had much success asking other residents to put banks of lightglobes in their windows where I went to university, but at my school we did have an inordinate number of whiny law student types.
And there's the rub. In Australia (that place in the summary, I haven't RTFA either!) we don't have ubiquitous hotspots. The woeful state of our broadband has been discussed here many times before so I won't say anything more than that it's fault of those cunts at Telstra, and their douchebag former CEO (who incidentally used to be in charge of USWEST in Colorado, who were so shit they had to change their name to Qwest... OK I'm ranting here but god dammit my country does some retarded shit)
In summary, down here in.au we don't have the option of going next door because next door probably doesn't have wireless. McDonalds is generally the BEST option for public WiFi, and even they meter the usage pretty hard.
And I have to confess to occasionally getting a small coke or ice cream just to sit down and use the web for half an hour...
I miss the trackpoint, it was a much better use of space than these touchpad things. Were uses just too dumb to be able to use it, or are touchpads slightly cheaper for the manufacturer?
I'd like to see a new trackpoint that works like the trackball-thingy on BlackBerrys. That would be neat on little netbook.
Slashdot Mirror
As TFA says, because paper is cheap and renewable.
The train is awesome. The seats are bigger, you can get up and walk around whenever you want, and on long journeys they have a restaurant and bar... Also no dickhead in a uniform will confiscate your bottle of water.
Sure, the ride takes longer, but you don't have to get to the station 2 hours before departure to go through "security" and unlike airports, train stations tend to be close to the center of the city, so there are no time-consuming and expensive airport transfers once you arrive at your destination.
How many hours a day is your computer switched on? How often do you use your dryer? This IS slashdot.
From TFA: "This generator stores energy each time the vehicle breaks..."
If I had a Porsche 911 I wouldn't want to damage the thing to use the hybrid feature. Do they perhaps mean "brakes"?
Australian/New Zealand readers can relate this to Dick Smith Electronics. Used to sell individual components, and always have at least one nerd on duty who at least knew what they were. Now they're just trying to emulate harvey norman and JB hifi selling TVs and stereos, but with a smaller selection, higher prices, and dumber staff. Component sales have also completely disappeared - at least Radio Shack can still sell a few overpriced resistors, which although expensive is a lot quicker than mail order.
Yes, I'm a former employee of Dick Smith Electronics. It's a damn shame what's happened to them, and seems to me an insane business move to move out of your niche into an already saturated market.
I've started using Ubuntu on my netbook and it seems to me this has already been done. If I'm looking for something that I'd find in Control Panel>>System under Windows, i can find it under this tab at the top of the Ubuntu screen that says "System." Simple enough.
Personally I also found Ubuntu easier to install from scratch than XP too. So far it's working "out of the box" at least as well as an XP install. In fact I HAVEN'T had to get my hands dirty with the CLI yet... I bought this system to "learn how to use linux" but so far it's been easy enough that I haven't had to go into too much detail... YMMV
You describe exactly why these new laws are a waste of time. (posting from .au where we already have the law and yes, I've already been busted)
I can be changing a CD, eating a hamburger, lighing a cigarette, and reaching around to break up my fighting kids in the back seat, all whilst trying to change gear and steer through a roundabout, but it's illegal for me to answer the phone when I'm stuck in traffic.
We already have perfectly good laws against negligent driving, all they need is to be implemented correctly.
Yes, talking on a phone can be distracting, but so can any of the other things I listed above, it seems ludicrous that only one of these activities is banned by a specific law. Stupid nanny-state.
I know this is Slashdot and we don't read the articles, but even the summary had a mention of rail transport.
I have an idea for a niche electronic product, and I've built a prototype. I'd really prefer not to spend the thousands of dollars involved in an international patent, not to mention the thousands more to defend the patent if I think that patent actually has been breached.
My only concern is that some "other company" might patent my idea, then sue me for infringement of that idea. Does "prior art" cover this? As long as my invention has been published/marketed/discussed/shown to my friends, the "other company" can't then go on and patent my original idea, right?
As I said, it's a niche product, custom-made to order, so I don't expect some big factory to steal the idea then churn them out by the thousand. So should I bother patenting it?
*Yes, I realise that asking for legal advice on Slashdot will have a terrible signal to noise ratio.
Maybe this sort of initiative is just what is needed to renew public interest in nuclear power. If a business like Google can show that it is clean, safe and reliable, perhaps governments and "environmentalists" can see through the FUD and support nuclear for national grid power.
It may not be solid metal nor does it have a camera, but there is a cellular version of the old-school rotary dial phone available from http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=286.
They use real old bakelite phones, hacked to accept an internal cellular module and LiIon battery. It emulates the dialtone and everything. Just add a SIM card and away you go. It looks really cool.
*I am not affiliated with SparkFun except as an occasional customer. Unless they want to give me a job!
Please tell me where I can meet some hookers who only charge $20 an hour. That will be the best two bucks I ever spend!
100 $100 bills is a pretty small package. Like, smaller than a paperback novel. Wads of $10000 can easily fit in a pocket or be taped to your person. These bundles of cash can bend, and are impervious to x-rays and magnetic fields. Also unless it's drug money you're unlikely to be detected by sniffer dogs*
And remember that the $100 bill is far from being the largest commonly-available denomination. Why not smuggle the same amount in 500euro notes? Or 10000 Brunei dollars? (although trying to exchange the latter might take a while)
Sure, if you have loads of time you could melt down some gold and cast it into something that looks innocent. But if you need to cross a border NOW (or within the next few days) cash is king.
*Do they even have drug sniffer dogs in airports anymore? Or are they too busy sniffing for fresh produce, pirate DVDs, and explosives (AKA nitrate heart medication?) Do those fancy mass-spectrometer explosive detectors also detect cocaine? Can a thermal swine-flu camera detect the heat of a condom full of heroin?
Amen to that. High-intensity LEDs are cool technology, but whatever form-over-function "designer" decreed that bright blue LEDs are a must-have in every product (to make it look "high-tech") should be savagely beaten.
Don't forget the other modifications from the Tahoe. You know, the extra weight, woeful aerodynamics and awful use of interior space. It's kind of like an inverse-Tardis, it's smaller on the inside than it looks on the outside.
Infra-red is hardly invisible though, more like "security through obscurity." For example, cheap night-vison goggles can detect IR, as can cheap, off-the-shelf digital cameras or web-cams. None of this is high-tech, or only available to the military... Even if you live in a cave in the desert, if you can afford an AK47 and some ammunition, you can probably get your hands on something that will detect a soldier's info-fuse.
You can also verfy this easily by pointing a TV remote at a webcam or camcorder. Unless the camera has *very* good filtering, you'll be able to see the LED on the remote flickering.
Can I have a big government grant now please?
Instead of increasing compression (which requires mechanical mods), couldn't the ignition advance be increased instead? Especially as most modern engine management already has knock sensing and ignition retard built-in to protect the engine against low-octane fuel.
Or to put it another way, one's uniform is a stronger identifier than one's "race." You mention black people in conservative golf clothes, which is interesting and american in itself. Surely in WWII, there were oriental-looking people wearing allied uniform, fighting against Japan?
It similarly applies to sketchy-looking kids in hooded sweatshirts. I can't even see their skin colour but because of the way they're dressed, which is their own choice to make, I trust them less around my mp3 player, but value them as a potential source of drugs. If one of these kids just *happened* to be black, does that make me a racist?
Link to the app or it didn't happen.
Hydrocarbon fuels from soy are no more of a "magic bullet" than hydrocarbon fuels from corn-derived ethanol. As a crop, soy is no better for the land and soil than corn. Do some research about the huge increase in GM RoundUp-Ready soy crops, owned of course by Monsanto. Then have a look at what these crops are doing to to the Argentinian ecology.
There is no single solution to our fuel woes, and no one crop to supply all our biofuel. As any ecologist knows, mono-crops are generally Bad in a multitude of ways. Ethanol itself is not the problem, but the source of the ethanol should not be tied to one crop, or group of crops, that happen to have a strong political lobby. Note that this crop will vary from country to country: Corn in the US, sugar cane in Brazil and Australia, soy in Argentina.
Biofuels can potentially also come from non-food crops, as has been mentioned on SlashDot many times in the past. For example, algae, cellulose (everything from lawn clippings to paper waste) and hemp.
And of course YMMV but I have found ethanol blend to have no ill-effects on any vehicles I have driven, which are mostly high-mileage Japanese and European cars, from 2 to 20 years old. I actually make a point of running a tank of ethanol-blend through my car if it has been in storage for over a month, in order to dissolve any water that has condensed in the fuel tank.
Wow, really? You can read the manual on some "ready-available equipment and software" and assemble it the way the engineers intended?
Just because a product already exists doesn't make it any less impressive to build your own from scratch. These guys designed their own serial network and used it to switch multiple big electrical loads and it was robust enough for other students to play with. They did all this on a limited budget and also persuaded the entire dorm to let them install the hardware.
If they weren't doing cool hardware projects that interact with the real world, they would have been alone in the dorm playing WoW or doing lame quizzes on FaceBook.
Why the hell would you live in a dorm if you didn't want noise, light and disturbance?
A truly neat project. Are employers impressed by such feats? They should be. Does any body have more information of this? what sort of microcontrollers used, networking protocols...
Also the social engineering is impressive. I wouldn't have had much success asking other residents to put banks of lightglobes in their windows where I went to university, but at my school we did have an inordinate number of whiny law student types.
And there's the rub. In Australia (that place in the summary, I haven't RTFA either!) we don't have ubiquitous hotspots. The woeful state of our broadband has been discussed here many times before so I won't say anything more than that it's fault of those cunts at Telstra, and their douchebag former CEO (who incidentally used to be in charge of USWEST in Colorado, who were so shit they had to change their name to Qwest... OK I'm ranting here but god dammit my country does some retarded shit)
In summary, down here in .au we don't have the option of going next door because next door probably doesn't have wireless. McDonalds is generally the BEST option for public WiFi, and even they meter the usage pretty hard.
And I have to confess to occasionally getting a small coke or ice cream just to sit down and use the web for half an hour...
I miss the trackpoint, it was a much better use of space than these touchpad things. Were uses just too dumb to be able to use it, or are touchpads slightly cheaper for the manufacturer?
I'd like to see a new trackpoint that works like the trackball-thingy on BlackBerrys. That would be neat on little netbook.