I tried to do this back in July going from Arizona to Montana and back. My weapon of choice was a *cough* tethered *cough* iPhone and a Macbook Pro. The results were spotty at best. You don't get 3G anywhere but in the confines of a major city. In my case that was Salt Lake. Everywhere else you had to have Edge at least or you got nothing. When I did have Edge I found I was at the mercy of limited bandwidth. In one campground I barely got anything because there were a couple of teenagers next door texting constantly (my theory). As soon as they went to bed I got usable performance and by usable I mean I could check my e-mail but that was about it. Many campgrounds now have WIFI which is good...when it's working and if you're parked in a space that's far away from the office, you're SOL. I have heard of a satellite system that has the ability to track while moving but I imagine that it's not cheap.
On the pro side, this could help warn coaches/teacher/whatever that a student is about to have a heart attack which has happened a few times in the past couple of years. On the con side of things, the data could be used against you when applying for insurance or a job. It's no different than the argument over universal health care. Yay! We all get coverage and we don't have to pay for it. Boo! Your tax bill just quadrupled and you get less coverage than you did before.
If we shifted the obscene amounts of money spent on high-school athletics and college athletic "scholarships" (an oxymoron, IMHO. Emphasis on the 'moron' part) and channeled it into true academics specifically science and engineering, we'd be in a much better position in the world.
They missed a couple of cool elements
on
A Tour of Taser HQ
·
· Score: 1
That being the factory floor observation room's windows are giant LCD shutters and the fact that all the secure area doors use retina scanners.
And just to comment on all the naive peaceniks posting, I quote the immortal words of Frost "What they hell are we supposed to use? Harsh language?"
On a related note, what is a good file system for use in embedded environments where you want 1) Fast booting without file system checking 2) Fast shutdown simply by disconnecting power and 3) Removable media (SD card or USB dongle)?
IMHO, a big reason why NASA spends so much time on risk aversion is the fickle, uneducated, uninformed and misinformed nature of who they get their funding from aka Congress. I offer into evidence the fact that McGovern wanted desperately to kill off Apollo after the Apollo 1 fire. Traditional market-based sources of funding can evaporate after a major disaster but there will always be people who believe in the mission statement and they don't change with the political winds.
IMHO a little chart would be helpful here. Where to a$$holes who are usually wrong fall into the grand scheme of things? In my experience, those are the people who end up persuading the lemmings to do a Peter Pan off the cliff.
Killing off meta-data was a truly boneheaded move for Apple. Type & Creator were extraordinarily handy for a developer. Even if you eliminate creator codes and rely on some system preference to decide what app to launch when you double-click, three-character extensions aren't enough to distinguish files. You might as well go back to the old 31 character file name limit. Feh!
HR 3200 is like a big hulking piece of crap software with a terminal case of creeping featuritis. It was designed by people who have never designed software or a user-interface and whose primary education is better suited to finger-painting and deep, sustained nasal exploration. What's worse is that the marketing department won't tell you that it's riddled with bugs and hidden "features'. Just buy it and we'll fix them later. Oh and they also are using that annual upgrade fee business model so you end up paying the full price of the program every couple of years which by the way they automatically deduct from your bank account. And this piece of government software doesn't have to obey anti-trust laws so it's tightly integrated into a crappy, buggy, and expensive OS an no other software can compete because the government doesn't have to make a profit.
"Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years..." I'll tell you what it is. Read H.R.3200 on opencongress.org and you'll quickly discover that the government will need a China-sized army of people to administer it. Can't say if those will qualify as "high-paying" though. Then again, some gumint workers get paid a crapload of money for doing nothing.
I have no problem with this as long as I don't have to keep paying for the damn thing or be constantly pestered that I'm risking the fate of the free world by not renewing. I seriously can't stand being on the consumer side of the monthly fee business model. No,goddammit, I will NOT rent your crappy software!
And it's not that we are no longer the Knights who say "Ni!". Seems to me that every robot project does something totally different. DARPA Grand Challenge is one exception. You can't easily apply vacuum technology to manipulator-arm technology to walking technology to machine-vision technology. It's not like the early computer world where everybody and their mother was writing a word-processor and a spreadsheet program. Hell, even now the world is fractured into the C++ programmers, the Java-wonks, and the goofy Objective-C geeks. But besides this, if you look at the embedded hardware world, you've got the x86 world and the ARM world in in there are a half-dozen different flavors of Linux and they're not well supported in a one-stop-shopping fashion.
She'll dump you the minute she finds someone who is more successful and better looking than you. Oh, and you can forget about having sex once the ink on the license is dry. Seriously, you may think you know her but trust me, you don't. The moment you think you have her figured out, she changes the rules. Watch her like a hawk and be damn sure you remember everything you say and everything she says because she will conveniently forget stuff that doesn't support her beef at that moment and remember stuff that to you is insignificant. Oh, and watch your money, especially nowadays. Ask yourself if she's marrying you for the safety factor.
Ever notice that most science fiction technology assumes a really kick-ass power source? It's tiny. It delivers enough energy to slice through big steel doors or to go to hyperspace. And it lasts forever. 100 miles? Are you kidding me? Yeah sure that's fine if ALL you do is commute. But who wants to run the risk of being dead in the water because you can't find a place to charge it?
Riding a Segway makes you about a foot taller than you really are so people think you're looking down on them. People don't like to be looked down upon. Especially when the rider was previously shorter than most people. "How dare this a$$hat elevate his social standing by the application of money and technology? We must ridicule him!"
If the so-called artist quit writing absolute sh*t, people might buy it. The industry was predicated on the fact that people were willing to pay a lot of money for 11 songs they didn't want to get the one song they did. Therefore there was little incentive for the industry and the artists to make higher quality product instead of quantity. The advent of the MP3 took control away from the executives and lawyers and put it back into the consumers hands. And IMHO far too many musicians started to think they were the cat's t*ts because they sold a ton of albums. Wrong. They really sold about one twelfth.
I'll tell you why this is going to suck. Because when Alien and Aliens came out, visual effects were raw and relatively unused compared to today. People went in the theatre expecting something cheesy but got blown away by the coolness of it all. Now, people go in knowing to expect high-end CGI. It's the same feeling I have for G.I. Joe. The point was made that people are poo-pooing GI Joe when few people outside the studio have seen it. True but what I see in the trailer is bullsh*t physics. It's the same reason I think that all comic-book-turned-movies suck. Show me something I could believe actually happens.
Scottsdale and Mission Viejo are both wealthy communities. Apple has pretty much cornered the "premium" computer market now. So Microsoft feels threatened and tries to grab it back. QED.
Personally I'd love to walk in there with a Windows install on Bootcamp and tell them I've got a problem juts to see how long it takes them to blame the hardware.
Having been born in the mid-sixties, I started looking at girls in the late 70's. Scary. Then they all cut their damn hair in the 80's and decided they didn't need to have sex. Feh. By the 90's the attractive ones were all married. Now in the 2000's the really super hot girls are all teenagers so basically I got screwed and not in a good way. My mother who grew up in post-Stalinist Russia tells a story of going to summer camp and they weighed all the kids when they got there and when they left. The goal believe it or not was to GAIN weight. And then there's the whole issue of pubes. Anyone notice that pube coverage has been steadily decreasing over the last 30 years. Maybe it's an altitude thing in that the women have elevated their positions in society so high that they're now above tree-line. Or is it Global Warming? C'mon gals, show some concern for the environment and sequester a little more carbon.
Of course they're going to release this stuff now. They need to get people fired up about global warming so they can pass Cap & Tax...'scuse me...Cap & Trade. The health care bill isn't going to pass so they desperately need a major success. But be that as it may, ten bucks says anyone could photoshop those images with little effort. Oh, and how convenient it is to change the term from Global Warming to Global Climate Change. That way you can blame the fact that it's 72.00001 degrees today when yesterday it was 72.00000 on George Bush.
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I tried to do this back in July going from Arizona to Montana and back. My weapon of choice was a *cough* tethered *cough* iPhone and a Macbook Pro. The results were spotty at best. You don't get 3G anywhere but in the confines of a major city. In my case that was Salt Lake. Everywhere else you had to have Edge at least or you got nothing. When I did have Edge I found I was at the mercy of limited bandwidth. In one campground I barely got anything because there were a couple of teenagers next door texting constantly (my theory). As soon as they went to bed I got usable performance and by usable I mean I could check my e-mail but that was about it. Many campgrounds now have WIFI which is good...when it's working and if you're parked in a space that's far away from the office, you're SOL. I have heard of a satellite system that has the ability to track while moving but I imagine that it's not cheap.
On the pro side, this could help warn coaches/teacher/whatever that a student is about to have a heart attack which has happened a few times in the past couple of years. On the con side of things, the data could be used against you when applying for insurance or a job. It's no different than the argument over universal health care. Yay! We all get coverage and we don't have to pay for it. Boo! Your tax bill just quadrupled and you get less coverage than you did before.
If we shifted the obscene amounts of money spent on high-school athletics and college athletic "scholarships" (an oxymoron, IMHO. Emphasis on the 'moron' part) and channeled it into true academics specifically science and engineering, we'd be in a much better position in the world.
That being the factory floor observation room's windows are giant LCD shutters and the fact that all the secure area doors use retina scanners.
And just to comment on all the naive peaceniks posting, I quote the immortal words of Frost "What they hell are we supposed to use? Harsh language?"
Apple Computer.
Yes, Mondale, thanks.
On a related note, what is a good file system for use in embedded environments where you want 1) Fast booting without file system checking 2) Fast shutdown simply by disconnecting power and 3) Removable media (SD card or USB dongle)?
IMHO, a big reason why NASA spends so much time on risk aversion is the fickle, uneducated, uninformed and misinformed nature of who they get their funding from aka Congress. I offer into evidence the fact that McGovern wanted desperately to kill off Apollo after the Apollo 1 fire. Traditional market-based sources of funding can evaporate after a major disaster but there will always be people who believe in the mission statement and they don't change with the political winds.
IMHO a little chart would be helpful here. Where to a$$holes who are usually wrong fall into the grand scheme of things? In my experience, those are the people who end up persuading the lemmings to do a Peter Pan off the cliff.
Killing off meta-data was a truly boneheaded move for Apple. Type & Creator were extraordinarily handy for a developer. Even if you eliminate creator codes and rely on some system preference to decide what app to launch when you double-click, three-character extensions aren't enough to distinguish files. You might as well go back to the old 31 character file name limit. Feh!
HR 3200 is like a big hulking piece of crap software with a terminal case of creeping featuritis. It was designed by people who have never designed software or a user-interface and whose primary education is better suited to finger-painting and deep, sustained nasal exploration. What's worse is that the marketing department won't tell you that it's riddled with bugs and hidden "features'. Just buy it and we'll fix them later. Oh and they also are using that annual upgrade fee business model so you end up paying the full price of the program every couple of years which by the way they automatically deduct from your bank account. And this piece of government software doesn't have to obey anti-trust laws so it's tightly integrated into a crappy, buggy, and expensive OS an no other software can compete because the government doesn't have to make a profit.
"Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years..." I'll tell you what it is. Read H.R.3200 on opencongress.org and you'll quickly discover that the government will need a China-sized army of people to administer it. Can't say if those will qualify as "high-paying" though. Then again, some gumint workers get paid a crapload of money for doing nothing.
I have no problem with this as long as I don't have to keep paying for the damn thing or be constantly pestered that I'm risking the fate of the free world by not renewing. I seriously can't stand being on the consumer side of the monthly fee business model. No,goddammit, I will NOT rent your crappy software!
And it's not that we are no longer the Knights who say "Ni!". Seems to me that every robot project does something totally different. DARPA Grand Challenge is one exception. You can't easily apply vacuum technology to manipulator-arm technology to walking technology to machine-vision technology. It's not like the early computer world where everybody and their mother was writing a word-processor and a spreadsheet program. Hell, even now the world is fractured into the C++ programmers, the Java-wonks, and the goofy Objective-C geeks. But besides this, if you look at the embedded hardware world, you've got the x86 world and the ARM world in in there are a half-dozen different flavors of Linux and they're not well supported in a one-stop-shopping fashion.
She'll dump you the minute she finds someone who is more successful and better looking than you. Oh, and you can forget about having sex once the ink on the license is dry. Seriously, you may think you know her but trust me, you don't. The moment you think you have her figured out, she changes the rules. Watch her like a hawk and be damn sure you remember everything you say and everything she says because she will conveniently forget stuff that doesn't support her beef at that moment and remember stuff that to you is insignificant. Oh, and watch your money, especially nowadays. Ask yourself if she's marrying you for the safety factor.
IMHO, there is merit to this. I have two degrees in engineering yet I had a helluva time finding a job. Why? Quite simply, the curriculum was about two years out of date. This was 1990 and what they were teaching lent itself well to working for a defense contractor. Problem was that defense spending had been cut severely and companies weren't hiring much let alone people with no full-time work history. They spent years teaching us to program in Pascal and Ada when the companies that were hiring wanted people with C and C++ experience. The recruitment experience at the school was a joke. You didn't have the internet to help you find prospective employers or post your resumé. So ultimately I had to lower my standards and move from Boston to St. Petersburg, Florida (IMHO, the WORST possible place for a single guy in his early 20s to be). And truth be told, they hired me to do Macintosh programming which I had never done before so clearly they were desperate. IMHO, if you are getting a technical education, it is the school's responsibility to teach current marketable skills.
Ever notice that most science fiction technology assumes a really kick-ass power source? It's tiny. It delivers enough energy to slice through big steel doors or to go to hyperspace. And it lasts forever. 100 miles? Are you kidding me? Yeah sure that's fine if ALL you do is commute. But who wants to run the risk of being dead in the water because you can't find a place to charge it?
Riding a Segway makes you about a foot taller than you really are so people think you're looking down on them. People don't like to be looked down upon. Especially when the rider was previously shorter than most people. "How dare this a$$hat elevate his social standing by the application of money and technology? We must ridicule him!"
If the so-called artist quit writing absolute sh*t, people might buy it. The industry was predicated on the fact that people were willing to pay a lot of money for 11 songs they didn't want to get the one song they did. Therefore there was little incentive for the industry and the artists to make higher quality product instead of quantity. The advent of the MP3 took control away from the executives and lawyers and put it back into the consumers hands. And IMHO far too many musicians started to think they were the cat's t*ts because they sold a ton of albums. Wrong. They really sold about one twelfth.
I'll tell you why this is going to suck. Because when Alien and Aliens came out, visual effects were raw and relatively unused compared to today. People went in the theatre expecting something cheesy but got blown away by the coolness of it all. Now, people go in knowing to expect high-end CGI. It's the same feeling I have for G.I. Joe. The point was made that people are poo-pooing GI Joe when few people outside the studio have seen it. True but what I see in the trailer is bullsh*t physics. It's the same reason I think that all comic-book-turned-movies suck. Show me something I could believe actually happens.
Just block text messaging. And perhaps every phone number but 911. If it's an emergency, the phone can still be useful.
Scottsdale and Mission Viejo are both wealthy communities. Apple has pretty much cornered the "premium" computer market now. So Microsoft feels threatened and tries to grab it back. QED.
Personally I'd love to walk in there with a Windows install on Bootcamp and tell them I've got a problem juts to see how long it takes them to blame the hardware.
Having been born in the mid-sixties, I started looking at girls in the late 70's. Scary. Then they all cut their damn hair in the 80's and decided they didn't need to have sex. Feh. By the 90's the attractive ones were all married. Now in the 2000's the really super hot girls are all teenagers so basically I got screwed and not in a good way. My mother who grew up in post-Stalinist Russia tells a story of going to summer camp and they weighed all the kids when they got there and when they left. The goal believe it or not was to GAIN weight. And then there's the whole issue of pubes. Anyone notice that pube coverage has been steadily decreasing over the last 30 years. Maybe it's an altitude thing in that the women have elevated their positions in society so high that they're now above tree-line. Or is it Global Warming? C'mon gals, show some concern for the environment and sequester a little more carbon.
Of course they're going to release this stuff now. They need to get people fired up about global warming so they can pass Cap & Tax...'scuse me...Cap & Trade. The health care bill isn't going to pass so they desperately need a major success. But be that as it may, ten bucks says anyone could photoshop those images with little effort. Oh, and how convenient it is to change the term from Global Warming to Global Climate Change. That way you can blame the fact that it's 72.00001 degrees today when yesterday it was 72.00000 on George Bush.
Where is Barney Frank when you really need him? Those guys make entirely too much money.