Unicomp buckling spring - if you want a traditional model M made by the same folks who produced the beasts for IBM, go there.
I have one for work and home, and they are tanks. And noisy. But they will have to bury me with mine as they will be unable to pry them from my cold dead hands.
Note - I have one with the integrated trackpoint mouse, but in the end it wasnt really worth the premium, except for those rare times I needed a console KB+M in a pinch and was out of USB ports.
I have a chip and RFID enabled card, and of course the first thing I did when I got it was to test what could be pulled from the card with tools available. Interestingly enough, the thing you can pull from both the chip and the wireless are general details of the last 10 transactions placed on the card. This in and of itself is only a small part of what you would need to get access to funds - I think you would need keys and application access (in RFID parlance) to access that part - but having the last 10 things you did open and in the clear for any reader is pretty alarming when you consider that any vendor that does an authorization or tap on the card can also collect this information and add it to their database on you as a customer.
Of course, Visa or Mastercard have that and a lot more - but having it handed to the vendor too is a bit disturbing. Handing it to the guy with a reader concealed and giving him an idea of how much cash you took out an hour ago might also be scary.
Note - I live in Canada, so US folks with their less than secure (no PIN) methods might be worse off.
I am curious about the backstory to this attempted escape more than the foolishness of his hacking that put him in the crosshairs.
Like, where did he get the boat? Was it stolen? Borrowed? Was it seaworthy? Sail or power? Where did they leave from?
My guess is that they took off and tried crossing the gulf stream during a period when the wind was contrary and got tossed. The wife then tossed her cookies and probably demanded they get rescued.
Knowing how things operate down there, they probably had eyes on them from the moment they left. The only surprise is that they did not show up on the FBI radar until they got picked up and IDd by the cruise ship. There is hella surveilance down there since the 80s to keep an eye on the smugglers. Even a wooden boat with negligible radar signature will still get scooped as that is what the Haitians are ghosting over on.
I doubt they even got spitting distance from Cuba before the gulf stream put them in the wash cycle and started hauling them backwards. If they had arrived, the Cubans would probably have taken a dim view of their arrival. Unless you have money and a specific float plan, they see any boat entering their sheltered bays and harbours as a yankee plot.
I had the same idea a while back, but instead the idea was to use a pair of glasses with arms that were antennas - the position of the tongue in the mouth was sensed in the space based on how it affected an HF field between the parallell wires, kinda like a head-theremin. There were a lot of potential issues with interference and the processing to work it out was not going to be trivial - but the idea seemed sound and would have let you use the tongue/teeth and roof of mouth as a kind of mouse pointer and keyboard.
I used to live on a boat that ran entirely on solar and wind.
I can tell you, nobody wants to live that close to, or in a dwelling attached to a wind generator like that. The 3 blade design either puts out little to no useful power (1A@13,8V on most light air days) while all the time it spins putting out a shrieking noise that makes the noise made by mega-wind gennies sound relaxing by comparison. Perhaps if you swapped it out for a multi-blade lower output unit, but for the most part the best place for these little monsters is over a hill somewhere not within earshot. Unless you love banshee wails, in which case go whole hog and get some guinea fowl and perhaps a chimpanzee for the full crazy sound orchestra.
Also, the solar panels are woefully inadequate. You will be constantly making trade offs between chilling with your fridge or charging your laptops with that level of wattage. And for the price, you can probably DIY a 20' sea container and get more bang for your buck, and more solar panel mounting area too.
It wasnt my first thought, but giving this to drug buyers to identify not the drug (which it could) but rather if there was anything horrible in what the drug was cut with, might be a terrific harm-reduction tool. Not getting burned would be how you would market it to the drug buyer - but having it set off an alarm if the stuff was cut with rat poison or something equally deadly when put in ones (nose/veins/eye/toes/orifice) could save some grief. Of course, the cloud would probably just send a text to the local DEA saying it got a hit on substance-X complete with GPS coordinates, so you might want to spring for the Developers kit and have it filter the signatures for you for privacys sake.
NO, but there are gadgets that can do some of those - look up XRFs - they tend to do better with bulk/surface/soil analysis of atomic species, especially the heavier ones. I worked with one of these a bit (Older Niton unit with a non-excited X source) when helping my wife with her PHd research, which involved finding the Manganese levels in soil. People use these all the time to find lead in kids toys, and alloy analysis as you queried above.
A device that can do XRF and NIRS (the one in the article) at high resolution and low cost would be a game changer, but also might be hard to buy, because anything that gives off X rays is probably never going to go consumer grade.
This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to see emerge for use in my home lab and NAS - dual 10G means I can finally stop mucking about with all those 1G lines when what I really wanted was an affordable converged net for my lab. Power requirements will keep my hydro bill under control too.
The existing variations on this tech are faster to charge because of increased interactive surface area, but they have less energy density.
As trade offs go, this puts more of a strain on the charging infrastructure, as you get batteries that charge faster, but need it more frequently. If this tech can increase the lifespan, it could bring prices down, but I would prefer to get my cake (high energy density) and eat it too (high charge/discharge currents possible).
At least folks are still getting out in the fresh air.
Seems like its only a matter of time before people can just sit in their living rooms and run an armed drone around the bush to shoot stuff for them.
It already happens a bit with the astronomy crowd - why stand shivering when you can remote your telescope from the comfort of home?
On the plus side, if you do happen to design a drone smart enough to hunt down a critter, you may have a future building dystopian tech for the defense industry.
This is a nice sentiment by Munich, but the many of the folks who are running XP and try and install Ubuntu 12 will be in for a nasty surprise -
32 bit machines without PAE will not load with most newer Linuxes. Most, including Ubuntu, no longer include 32 bit non-PAE kernels in their installers.
I found this out when I tried putting a modern albeit tiny Linux onto my FitPC 1 and an older EPIA motherboard - XP runs fine on these, but finding a linux is probably beyond the skill of most XP users. Jury rigging a different kernel in is definitely out.
A lot of older XP installs are also running on older hardware. Just giving away an OS will not magically fix this. And if these folks upgrade the hardware, it probably comes with a newer windows anyway.
I could totally use a version of this - I would wrap it around the exhaust riser on the diesel, and then cool the other side with incoming cooling seawater before it entered the cooling heat exchanger. The difference would be 400C inside vs 22C outside, and might be able to generate some more energy from the waste heat.
I also considered running ammonia through this hot spot and making it an adsorption refrigerator, but that can generate some interesting (chinese) pressures, which can be a hazard.
Of course, normal folks just put an alternator on... but why be normal!
The entire USA, but it seems to want more specific coordinates.
But seriously, a name-and-shame app for people who are afraid of firearms seems a bit futile in the USA. It would be like a Jew in early 20th century Germany making an app to tag anti-Semitic individuals, institutions, and businesses....
Lets face it, the average user and business PC are serviced well enough by Windows 7, or even XP. So who is left to chase the gains brought by Moores Law?
The PC gaming enthusiasts, thats who. And why are those guys for the most part sticking with the same PCs?
Because most PC games are locked to the performance of a game console - Xbox, et all - and those are a little long in the tooth themselves.
Until the next generation of Consoles pushes the envelope of hardware, and the game developers follow suit... PCs will have no reason to follow...
Who wants an arm that occasionally throws feces at people. Quite embarassing, and all you can say is "Sorry foks, my bionic arm is controlled by a monkey, and hes pissed today"
I dont see the point of either of these "services" when we already have a decent and open solution that solves most of the issues I had with "TV" - advertising contaminating my content.
XBMC with a few plugins (Which is basically what Boxee is) and a well stocked media library from the torrents/usenet gives me all the television I could want, all the web content I can chew - and NO fscking adverts!
What are Google and Boxee except that, plus advertising put back in? What value can they possibly insert that would make it worth my while to get screaming mad ad annoying ads again? None.
True, but the intent is to characterize mental illnesses so that they can be identified and treated. My friend would have snuffed it had there not been intervention by doctors. For the people who suffer this specific form of illness, there is often little or no help from doctors until they are literally at deaths door because their dietary choices cannot be readily pidgeon-holed into a diagnosis that indicates action. If she had had classic anorexia they would have had some traction because they have that one classified already. TFA makes valid points about people who are suffering - and while Monsanto et all may try and use the disorder to stigmatize everyday people who care about what they eat it dosen't lessen the fact that it is a disease and the people who suffer from it need help, sometimes badly.
The Monsanto arguments all have a lot of merit, and we should be working to fix that aspect of our agriculture.
However, blaming them for the DSM categorization of picky eating is a bit beyond. I had a friend who suffered from this picky eating disorder and it was horrifying. It started with vegetarianism, then veganism, then avoidance of an increasingly expanding list of politically incorrect foods. Eventually she became a skeleton who had to be fed through an IV because she was eating little more than a couple very specific kinds of white rice. With treatment, they managed to get her back to a surviveable diet, but it was a close shave. It wasnt anorexia per se - it was something else that Doctors need to be aware of. Making informed choices that make the world a better place and make ones diet more nutritious is one thing - succumbing to a psychological disorder like picky eating is way different.
Slashdot Mirror
Unicomp buckling spring - if you want a traditional model M made by the same folks who produced the beasts for IBM, go there.
I have one for work and home, and they are tanks. And noisy. But they will have to bury me with mine as they will be unable to pry them from my cold dead hands.
Note - I have one with the integrated trackpoint mouse, but in the end it wasnt really worth the premium, except for those rare times I needed a console KB+M in a pinch and was out of USB ports.
I have a chip and RFID enabled card, and of course the first thing I did when I got it was to test what could be pulled from the card with tools available.
Interestingly enough, the thing you can pull from both the chip and the wireless are general details of the last 10 transactions placed on the card. This in and of itself is only a small part of what you would need to get access to funds - I think you would need keys and application access (in RFID parlance) to access that part - but having the last 10 things you did open and in the clear for any reader is pretty alarming when you consider that any vendor that does an authorization or tap on the card can also collect this information and add it to their database on you as a customer.
Of course, Visa or Mastercard have that and a lot more - but having it handed to the vendor too is a bit disturbing. Handing it to the guy with a reader concealed and giving him an idea of how much cash you took out an hour ago might also be scary.
Note - I live in Canada, so US folks with their less than secure (no PIN) methods might be worse off.
I am curious about the backstory to this attempted escape more than the foolishness of his hacking that put him in the crosshairs.
Like, where did he get the boat? Was it stolen? Borrowed?
Was it seaworthy? Sail or power? Where did they leave from?
My guess is that they took off and tried crossing the gulf stream during a period when the wind was contrary and got tossed. The wife then tossed her cookies and probably demanded they get rescued.
Knowing how things operate down there, they probably had eyes on them from the moment they left. The only surprise is that they did not show up on the FBI radar until they got picked up and IDd by the cruise ship. There is hella surveilance down there since the 80s to keep an eye on the smugglers. Even a wooden boat with negligible radar signature will still get scooped as that is what the Haitians are ghosting over on.
I doubt they even got spitting distance from Cuba before the gulf stream put them in the wash cycle and started hauling them backwards. If they had arrived, the Cubans would probably have taken a dim view of their arrival. Unless you have money and a specific float plan, they see any boat entering their sheltered bays and harbours as a yankee plot.
I had the same idea a while back, but instead the idea was to use a pair of glasses with arms that were antennas - the position of the tongue in the mouth was sensed in the space based on how it affected an HF field between the parallell wires, kinda like a head-theremin. There were a lot of potential issues with interference and the processing to work it out was not going to be trivial - but the idea seemed sound and would have let you use the tongue/teeth and roof of mouth as a kind of mouse pointer and keyboard.
I used to live on a boat that ran entirely on solar and wind.
I can tell you, nobody wants to live that close to, or in a dwelling attached to a wind generator like that. The 3 blade design either puts out little to no useful power (1A@13,8V on most light air days) while all the time it spins putting out a shrieking noise that makes the noise made by mega-wind gennies sound relaxing by comparison. Perhaps if you swapped it out for a multi-blade lower output unit, but for the most part the best place for these little monsters is over a hill somewhere not within earshot. Unless you love banshee wails, in which case go whole hog and get some guinea fowl and perhaps a chimpanzee for the full crazy sound orchestra.
Also, the solar panels are woefully inadequate. You will be constantly making trade offs between chilling with your fridge or charging your laptops with that level of wattage. And for the price, you can probably DIY a 20' sea container and get more bang for your buck, and more solar panel mounting area too.
It wasnt my first thought, but giving this to drug buyers to identify not the drug (which it could) but rather if there was anything horrible in what the drug was cut with, might be a terrific harm-reduction tool. Not getting burned would be how you would market it to the drug buyer - but having it set off an alarm if the stuff was cut with rat poison or something equally deadly when put in ones (nose/veins/eye/toes/orifice) could save some grief. Of course, the cloud would probably just send a text to the local DEA saying it got a hit on substance-X complete with GPS coordinates, so you might want to spring for the Developers kit and have it filter the signatures for you for privacys sake.
NO, but there are gadgets that can do some of those - look up XRFs - they tend to do better with bulk/surface/soil analysis of atomic species, especially the heavier ones. I worked with one of these a bit (Older Niton unit with a non-excited X source) when helping my wife with her PHd research, which involved finding the Manganese levels in soil. People use these all the time to find lead in kids toys, and alloy analysis as you queried above.
A device that can do XRF and NIRS (the one in the article) at high resolution and low cost would be a game changer, but also might be hard to buy, because anything that gives off X rays is probably never going to go consumer grade.
This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to see emerge for use in my home lab and NAS - dual 10G means I can finally stop mucking about with all those 1G lines when what I really wanted was an affordable converged net for my lab. Power requirements will keep my hydro bill under control too.
We really should be careful of what video our young impressionable robots are watching.
Only a matter of time before a nature/firmware versus nurture/experience debate becomes a thing for machines too.
The existing variations on this tech are faster to charge because of increased interactive surface area, but they have less energy density.
As trade offs go, this puts more of a strain on the charging infrastructure, as you get batteries that charge faster, but need it more frequently. If this tech can increase the lifespan, it could bring prices down, but I would prefer to get my cake (high energy density) and eat it too (high charge/discharge currents possible).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93titanate_battery
At least folks are still getting out in the fresh air.
Seems like its only a matter of time before people can just sit in their living rooms and run an armed drone around the bush to shoot stuff for them.
It already happens a bit with the astronomy crowd - why stand shivering when you can remote your telescope from the comfort of home?
On the plus side, if you do happen to design a drone smart enough to hunt down a critter, you may have a future building dystopian tech for the defense industry.
I spent a lost year of my life working for a similar agency. The systematic fear and redundant covering of asses made for endless meetings.
The only thing worse than busywork is busywork with a profound sense of importance attached to it.
This is a nice sentiment by Munich, but the many of the folks who are running XP and try and install Ubuntu 12 will be in for a nasty surprise -
32 bit machines without PAE will not load with most newer Linuxes. Most, including Ubuntu, no longer include 32 bit non-PAE kernels in their installers.
I found this out when I tried putting a modern albeit tiny Linux onto my FitPC 1 and an older EPIA motherboard - XP runs fine on these, but finding a linux is probably beyond the skill of most XP users. Jury rigging a different kernel in is definitely out.
A lot of older XP installs are also running on older hardware. Just giving away an OS will not magically fix this. And if these folks upgrade the hardware, it probably comes with a newer windows anyway.
I find it unlikely that the Salvation army or Value Village would bother with this technology, let alone actually be able to offer clothes that match.
Just sayin....
I could totally use a version of this - I would wrap it around the exhaust riser on the diesel, and then cool the other side with incoming cooling seawater before it entered the cooling heat exchanger. The difference would be 400C inside vs 22C outside, and might be able to generate some more energy from the waste heat.
I also considered running ammonia through this hot spot and making it an adsorption refrigerator, but that can generate some interesting (chinese) pressures, which can be a hazard.
Of course, normal folks just put an alternator on... but why be normal!
Call me when it supports Gigabit Ethernet, USB3, and ZFS multi-disk.
The entire USA, but it seems to want more specific coordinates.
But seriously, a name-and-shame app for people who are afraid of firearms seems a bit futile in the USA. It would be like a Jew in early 20th century Germany making an app to tag anti-Semitic individuals, institutions, and businesses....
Lets face it, the average user and business PC are serviced well enough by Windows 7, or even XP. So who is left to chase the gains brought by Moores Law?
The PC gaming enthusiasts, thats who. And why are those guys for the most part sticking with the same PCs?
Because most PC games are locked to the performance of a game console - Xbox, et all - and those are a little long in the tooth themselves.
Until the next generation of Consoles pushes the envelope of hardware, and the game developers follow suit... PCs will have no reason to follow...
So when can we use this to induce selective amnesia?
You quipped -
"What, why do we need a SAN? Remember how you wired those netbooks together for our web farm! Figure something out for us. KTHXBYE.'"
- I think the guy who got that line went on to invent iSCSI.
Not that I have anything against Fibre Channel --- as long as the buffer credits dont run out.
Neat technology, but the use of cadavers is a little disconcerting.
Now we will have to fight off bluetooth and WiFi enabled zombies in the coming apocalypse.
Luckily for us the Zombies will probably be content to use WEP and 2GHz. No worries!
Who wants an arm that occasionally throws feces at people. Quite embarassing, and all you can say is "Sorry foks, my bionic arm is controlled by a monkey, and hes pissed today"
I dont see the point of either of these "services" when we already have a decent and open solution that solves most of the issues I had with "TV" - advertising contaminating my content.
XBMC with a few plugins (Which is basically what Boxee is) and a well stocked media library from the torrents/usenet gives me all the television I could want, all the web content I can chew - and NO fscking adverts!
What are Google and Boxee except that, plus advertising put back in? What value can they possibly insert that would make it worth my while to get screaming mad ad annoying ads again? None.
True, but the intent is to characterize mental illnesses so that they can be identified and treated. My friend would have snuffed it had there not been intervention by doctors. For the people who suffer this specific form of illness, there is often little or no help from doctors until they are literally at deaths door because their dietary choices cannot be readily pidgeon-holed into a diagnosis that indicates action. If she had had classic anorexia they would have had some traction because they have that one classified already. TFA makes valid points about people who are suffering - and while Monsanto et all may try and use the disorder to stigmatize everyday people who care about what they eat it dosen't lessen the fact that it is a disease and the people who suffer from it need help, sometimes badly.
The Monsanto arguments all have a lot of merit, and we should be working to fix that aspect of our agriculture.
However, blaming them for the DSM categorization of picky eating is a bit beyond. I had a friend who suffered from this picky eating disorder and it was horrifying. It started with vegetarianism, then veganism, then avoidance of an increasingly expanding list of politically incorrect foods. Eventually she became a skeleton who had to be fed through an IV because she was eating little more than a couple very specific kinds of white rice. With treatment, they managed to get her back to a surviveable diet, but it was a close shave. It wasnt anorexia per se - it was something else that Doctors need to be aware of. Making informed choices that make the world a better place and make ones diet more nutritious is one thing - succumbing to a psychological disorder like picky eating is way different.