...just floored the accellerator and kept it down...
What else they could do? There aren't too many options. They couldn't rock it back and forth like a car, so all they could do was floor it. I don't really understand why they had to think about it for so long - it's not like there were any other options.
We need to shoot everyone who has EVER participated IN ANY ROLE in a lawsuit, of his/her own will. Wait, that'd be too gross... Better yet, make lawsuits ILLEGAL!!
This is because you are such a responsible person. Me, on the other hand, being irresponsible, I would still have 5 kids, and go to jail when one of my kids gets drunk and drives over your (only) kid, rendering you OBSOLETE! End result - by being responsible, you effectively remove yourself from the gene pool. Here's to responsible people - gulp!
I don't need a sensor to tell me if I'm drunk. I have my own test. If I can find the keyhole on the car's door without making enough effort to get tired and fall asleep once I'm in the car, I can drive!
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs?
on
McVoy Strikes Back
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Only 15% of the programming jobs in the world are involved with commodity software, the other cool 85% of us work on custom apps. Open source can not replace the custom apps, because they are, well, custom. Even if all the commodity software ever gets replaced by open source, it's only 15% of the job market anyways.
The way they have that sheet metal with gaps between the sheets, it's not very effective against most EMI, and even if they had a good shield, it'd be no match for any other types of radiation that could creep up.
There are so many things that could cause wierd health problems, and EMI isn't very high on the list. I'd check for allergies first, then for toxic crap in the air/water, and only then for radiation, and I'd start with gamma/neutron from radon and the like before even thinking of EMI. Unless you have a power line or a radio tower in your back yard, you are just not close enough to the source to be hit hard enough to cause health problems.
I just can't get over that article last year about that woman that stuck her computer under the floorboards because she thought it was emitting toxic vapors at her, but she really was allergic to her cat. Tinfoil or sheetmetal, something probably is making them sick.
It is a matter of your rights, as one day you may be a prisoner. Claiming its not about your rights because you're not in jail is like saying slavery wasn't about your rights because you weren't black.
There is a big difference - according to your own words, you one day may be a prisoner, but you are far less likely to become black slave (unless you are black, and go back in time). You have a lot more interest in prisoner rights then in rights of black slaves. If you don't believe me, just ask yourself if you have used a p2p application lately - and I can think of quite a few other ways a normal non-criminal person might end up in jail through no fault of his own:-).
Some asshat stole a large chunk of sodium from the chemistry locker at my school once, and flushed that down the toilet. Man, was there flaming poo everywhere!! Forget that old burnig-poo-in-paper-bag prank!
Delta Song Airline has an onboard satellite TV in each seat back, and they all run linux. Yay!
How do I know? Well, one time I was flying Song, and the system hung up, and the stewardess rebooted it, and the linux boot screen came up on all the seatback displays, complete with the Tux logo. It's sooo coool!! I'm soo coool!!
Tiny dark artificial diamonds, used mostly to coat drill bits and tools, have been around for quite a while. Cheap, no use whatsoever for jewelry, but very useful for bits that cut hardest substances.
On an open road, or a quarter-mile, an unloaded tracktor would outrun a Golf easily. Pretty much anything would. We are talking about a shitty narrow country highway here, with remnants of roadwork machinery here and there, and other traffic, including slow moving farm implements:0). Golfs are small and quick to turn, and outmanuevering a fully loaded semi is not very much of a challange, really. And I wasn't chasing him, I was racing him, there is a difference.
If you look back at history, the Russians lost the race to the moon before even having put a lot of effort into it. Since there were no second prize in that race, they switched their resources to long-term manned orbital missions, one of the stated reasons being to test out long-term mission tech. So, there:-).
It doesn't function like a gun, and it doesn't have to look like one, either. There are lots of other artefacts with a pistol grip that don't look like guns at all - from old 8mm film cameras to hairdriers.
Heck, there are even guns that don't look like guns.
Besides, the classical light pen/gun design relies on the scanning of the electron beam in the CRT display to detect where the thing is pointed, so it won't work with LCD displays. And bluetooth has too much latency for the type of sync required to detect the exact moment when the electron beam crosses the spot on the screen where the pen/gun is pointed - you'd neen some means of feeding the video sync pulses to the gun electronics in real time. Or, an alternative design based on a different principle, possibly with some gizmo installed at the edge of your monitor.
The throttle on my old '91 Golf stuck a few times a week for a month or two, until I got my around to fixing it. My foolproof recovery sequence was - clutch, neutral, ignition off (engine stops), ignition back on (to prevent the steering from locking up, flashers, pull over (if have enough speed/space), stop. Pop open hood, get out of the car, kick crap out of throttle assembly while swearing loudly (which caused the throttle to unstick). Get in, continue driving.
I've done it some 20 times at least, and never got even so much scared, except for one time when the stupid throttle got stuck just as I was racing an 18-wheeler after flipping a birdie at him. Which was, of course, somewhat dangerous even without the throttle problems.
As someone who actually evaluated and used both linux and QNX for embedded projects, I can say - not by a long shot. QNX is a very nicereal time operating system, with predictable interrupt timing and all that. But performance-wise it suckus-dickus. Too many context switches.
Real-time operating systems have different design criteria than "normal" desktop-server OS, like linux. In general purpose OS you care about performance, which is average-case behaviour. In real-time OS you care about worst-case behaviour, which is a very different thing. You need things to be always predictable, even if they are not always efficient.
The problem is, just as I get used to a new keyboard, they stop making that model, and I have to pick a new one every time. The problem with that is, most keyboards would either feel too mushy, or too clicky, or the key layout is just a bit off from what I just got used too, so I normally have a had time replacing a keyboard unless I can find just the same model as the previous one.
This is the same syndrome that all those people are suffering from who buy the original clicky IBM keyboards. Only my choice is with $4 mushy ones.
So, to save the time and aggravation of shopping for keyboards, I put the old one in the dishwasher. Not before taking the keyboard apart and removing the circuitry, of course. The plastic parts all come out of the washer just fine.
Hah! Forget acid - laptops don't use car batteries. They use lithium batteries, so aptly called because they contain, well, lithium. Metallic lithium. Nice, cute substance that bursts into flames when exposed to air and water.
If they could make that safe, I really doubt that tritium would be a problem.
a couple months' worth of naturally-occuring tritium?
Does it really need that little? How much do you need for a battery, after all? Here, check my math:
There are 6.24*10^18 electrons in a Coulomb, thus 2.25*10^22 electrons in an amp/hour. One mole of tritium gas weights 6 grams, and contains 6.022*10^23 molecules, or about 12*10^23 atoms. Each tritium atom only decays once, producing one electron, thus 6 grams of tritium produce, all in all, 54 amp/hours of electricity. Taking leasurely 10 years or so to do that. Resulting in current of.6 milliamps.
So, here's my result: you get.1 mA per gram of tritium for 10 years. For a very modest laptop you'd need several kilos of the stuff, which would make the battery rather huge, considering that tririum is a very light gas, and the mass of a containment vessel for gas, or filler chemicals in a tritium-containing compound would be many times larger than the mass of tritium itself.
Unless I'm making mistakes in my math above - please go ahead and check.
The real challenge of capitalism is to make sure that it works out fine for EVERYONE.
This is why civilized countries tax their capitalism half-way to socialism, to try and make sure that it does.
Legislative bodies selling out to corporations can be a problem with any political system, though. Just think - if the US was a monarchy, wouldn't MPAA try and buy him too?
When you are connecting two floating pieces of equipment by a cable, something has to equalize the static charges. Normally it would be the green wire ground. Lacking that, the static would have to discharge somehow. Most cables are designed so that either a ground pin or a grounded shield makes connection first, but you can't really count on that happening every time, can you?
The electronic circuits in the equipment that connect to externally accessable pins are supposed to be designed such that they could take some static discharge, providing another degree of protection.
Manufacturers of industrial equipment use a special tester (call HIPOT, after high-potential) to zap all external connections of their equipment with 5kV charge, as a test. It takes a fairly extensive test program to certify equipment for HIPOT, one of the reasons being that static often causes latent internal damage that doesn't kill the equipment right off, but drastically reduces MTBF instead.
Can you really trust the manufacturer of every board in your homebuilt box to have done proper testing? I'd say, no...
As far as miswired buildings are concerned, every tiem I move I check all the outlets in the new apartment with a little 3-led tester - you know the kind - two green LEDs are supposed come on, and the red LED should stay off. I'm yet to move into a house where every outlet would be wired properly - and I move quite a lot. If I'm forced to use power connection that doesn't have proper grounding I always make sure that all the components of my computer system are plugged in to the same power strip, i.e. their ground pins are connected together. This way even though the safety function of the ground connection is absent, I don't have to worry about my monitor zapping my video card as I plug in the video cable.
In my experience, if your cell phone falls into water, it would stop working.
If you take the battery off right away, and don't put it back on until everything dries thoroughly, it will work fine at least for a while. If the water was dirty, some connections inside may go bad after a few months from corrosion, though, so it does make sense to take the phone apart and clean the contacts with alcohol.
If you don't take off the battery, it would probably never work again.
...just floored the accellerator and kept it down...
What else they could do? There aren't too many options. They couldn't rock it back and forth like a car, so all they could do was floor it. I don't really understand why they had to think about it for so long - it's not like there were any other options.
The rover is now long past its theoretical life span
Make that advertised life span. If it really was that much past it's theoretical life span, chances are it'd be long dead.
We need to shoot everyone who has EVER participated IN ANY ROLE in a lawsuit, of his/her own will. Wait, that'd be too gross... Better yet, make lawsuits ILLEGAL!!
...I would have had one kid instead of five...
This is because you are such a responsible person. Me, on the other hand, being irresponsible, I would still have 5 kids, and go to jail when one of my kids gets drunk and drives over your (only) kid, rendering you OBSOLETE! End result - by being responsible, you effectively remove yourself from the gene pool. Here's to responsible people - gulp!
I don't need a sensor to tell me if I'm drunk. I have my own test. If I can find the keyhole on the car's door without making enough effort to get tired and fall asleep once I'm in the car, I can drive!
Only 15% of the programming jobs in the world are involved with commodity software, the other cool 85% of us work on custom apps. Open source can not replace the custom apps, because they are, well, custom. Even if all the commodity software ever gets replaced by open source, it's only 15% of the job market anyways.
The way they have that sheet metal with gaps between the sheets, it's not very effective against most EMI, and even if they had a good shield, it'd be no match for any other types of radiation that could creep up.
There are so many things that could cause wierd health problems, and EMI isn't very high on the list. I'd check for allergies first, then for toxic crap in the air/water, and only then for radiation, and I'd start with gamma/neutron from radon and the like before even thinking of EMI. Unless you have a power line or a radio tower in your back yard, you are just not close enough to the source to be hit hard enough to cause health problems.
I just can't get over that article last year about that woman that stuck her computer under the floorboards because she thought it was emitting toxic vapors at her, but she really was allergic to her cat. Tinfoil or sheetmetal, something probably is making them sick.
Are replacement implants going to be available any time soon?
It is a matter of your rights, as one day you may be a prisoner. Claiming its not about your rights because you're not in jail is like saying slavery wasn't about your rights because you weren't black.
There is a big difference - according to your own words, you one day may be a prisoner, but you are far less likely to become black slave (unless you are black, and go back in time). You have a lot more interest in prisoner rights then in rights of black slaves. If you don't believe me, just ask yourself if you have used a p2p application lately - and I can think of quite a few other ways a normal non-criminal person might end up in jail through no fault of his own:-).
Some asshat stole a large chunk of sodium from the chemistry locker at my school once, and flushed that down the toilet. Man, was there flaming poo everywhere!! Forget that old burnig-poo-in-paper-bag prank!
Delta Song Airline has an onboard satellite TV in each seat back, and they all run linux. Yay!
How do I know? Well, one time I was flying Song, and the system hung up, and the stewardess rebooted it, and the linux boot screen came up on all the seatback displays, complete with the Tux logo. It's sooo coool!! I'm soo coool!!
Tiny dark artificial diamonds, used mostly to coat drill bits and tools, have been around for quite a while. Cheap, no use whatsoever for jewelry, but very useful for bits that cut hardest substances.
On an open road, or a quarter-mile, an unloaded tracktor would outrun a Golf easily. Pretty much anything would. We are talking about a shitty narrow country highway here, with remnants of roadwork machinery here and there, and other traffic, including slow moving farm implements:0). Golfs are small and quick to turn, and outmanuevering a fully loaded semi is not very much of a challange, really. And I wasn't chasing him, I was racing him, there is a difference.
If you look back at history, the Russians lost the race to the moon before even having put a lot of effort into it. Since there were no second prize in that race, they switched their resources to long-term manned orbital missions, one of the stated reasons being to test out long-term mission tech. So, there:-).
It doesn't function like a gun, and it doesn't have to look like one, either. There are lots of other artefacts with a pistol grip that don't look like guns at all - from old 8mm film cameras to hairdriers.
Heck, there are even guns that don't look like guns.
Besides, the classical light pen/gun design relies on the scanning of the electron beam in the CRT display to detect where the thing is pointed, so it won't work with LCD displays. And bluetooth has too much latency for the type of sync required to detect the exact moment when the electron beam crosses the spot on the screen where the pen/gun is pointed - you'd neen some means of feeding the video sync pulses to the gun electronics in real time. Or, an alternative design based on a different principle, possibly with some gizmo installed at the edge of your monitor.
The throttle on my old '91 Golf stuck a few times a week for a month or two, until I got my around to fixing it. My foolproof recovery sequence was - clutch, neutral, ignition off (engine stops), ignition back on (to prevent the steering from locking up, flashers, pull over (if have enough speed/space), stop. Pop open hood, get out of the car, kick crap out of throttle assembly while swearing loudly (which caused the throttle to unstick). Get in, continue driving.
I've done it some 20 times at least, and never got even so much scared, except for one time when the stupid throttle got stuck just as I was racing an 18-wheeler after flipping a birdie at him. Which was, of course, somewhat dangerous even without the throttle problems.
[QNX]...performance is far better than Linux...
As someone who actually evaluated and used both linux and QNX for embedded projects, I can say - not by a long shot. QNX is a very nicereal time operating system, with predictable interrupt timing and all that. But performance-wise it suckus-dickus. Too many context switches.
Real-time operating systems have different design criteria than "normal" desktop-server OS, like linux. In general purpose OS you care about performance, which is average-case behaviour. In real-time OS you care about worst-case behaviour, which is a very different thing. You need things to be always predictable, even if they are not always efficient.
The problem is, just as I get used to a new keyboard, they stop making that model, and I have to pick a new one every time. The problem with that is, most keyboards would either feel too mushy, or too clicky, or the key layout is just a bit off from what I just got used too, so I normally have a had time replacing a keyboard unless I can find just the same model as the previous one.
This is the same syndrome that all those people are suffering from who buy the original clicky IBM keyboards. Only my choice is with $4 mushy ones.
So, to save the time and aggravation of shopping for keyboards, I put the old one in the dishwasher. Not before taking the keyboard apart and removing the circuitry, of course. The plastic parts all come out of the washer just fine.
burning battery acid
.6 milliamps.
.1 mA per gram of tritium for 10 years. For a very modest laptop you'd need several kilos of the stuff, which would make the battery rather huge, considering that tririum is a very light gas, and the mass of a containment vessel for gas, or filler chemicals in a tritium-containing compound would be many times larger than the mass of tritium itself.
Hah! Forget acid - laptops don't use car batteries. They use lithium batteries, so aptly called because they contain, well, lithium. Metallic lithium. Nice, cute substance that bursts into flames when exposed to air and water.
If they could make that safe, I really doubt that tritium would be a problem.
a couple months' worth of naturally-occuring tritium?
Does it really need that little? How much do you need for a battery, after all? Here, check my math:
There are 6.24*10^18 electrons in a Coulomb, thus 2.25*10^22 electrons in an amp/hour. One mole of tritium gas weights 6 grams, and contains 6.022*10^23 molecules, or about 12*10^23 atoms. Each tritium atom only decays once, producing one electron, thus 6 grams of tritium produce, all in all, 54 amp/hours of electricity. Taking leasurely 10 years or so to do that. Resulting in current of
So, here's my result: you get
Unless I'm making mistakes in my math above - please go ahead and check.
The real challenge of capitalism is to make sure that it works out fine for EVERYONE.
This is why civilized countries tax their capitalism half-way to socialism, to try and make sure that it does.
Legislative bodies selling out to corporations can be a problem with any political system, though. Just think - if the US was a monarchy, wouldn't MPAA try and buy him too?
Whatever...
When you are connecting two floating pieces of equipment by a cable, something has to equalize the static charges. Normally it would be the green wire ground. Lacking that, the static would have to discharge somehow. Most cables are designed so that either a ground pin or a grounded shield makes connection first, but you can't really count on that happening every time, can you?
The electronic circuits in the equipment that connect to externally accessable pins are supposed to be designed such that they could take some static discharge, providing another degree of protection.
Manufacturers of industrial equipment use a special tester (call HIPOT, after high-potential) to zap all external connections of their equipment with 5kV charge, as a test. It takes a fairly extensive test program to certify equipment for HIPOT, one of the reasons being that static often causes latent internal damage that doesn't kill the equipment right off, but drastically reduces MTBF instead.
Can you really trust the manufacturer of every board in your homebuilt box to have done proper testing? I'd say, no...
As far as miswired buildings are concerned, every tiem I move I check all the outlets in the new apartment with a little 3-led tester - you know the kind - two green LEDs are supposed come on, and the red LED should stay off. I'm yet to move into a house where every outlet would be wired properly - and I move quite a lot. If I'm forced to use power connection that doesn't have proper grounding I always make sure that all the components of my computer system are plugged in to the same power strip, i.e. their ground pins are connected together. This way even though the safety function of the ground connection is absent, I don't have to worry about my monitor zapping my video card as I plug in the video cable.
What kind of electronic device was it and why did it have BeO in it?
In my experience, if your cell phone falls into water, it would stop working.
If you take the battery off right away, and don't put it back on until everything dries thoroughly, it will work fine at least for a while. If the water was dirty, some connections inside may go bad after a few months from corrosion, though, so it does make sense to take the phone apart and clean the contacts with alcohol.
If you don't take off the battery, it would probably never work again.
The kid pierced the Li Ion battery with a screwdriver.
How do you know? It doesn't say that in the article. He might've just shorted the battery, which could also cause it to explode.
..if your cell phone falls into the toilet... duck and cover...