I'm fairly sure in parts of the UK they implemented staggered green lights along busy stretches of road. If you accelerated modestly to the speed limit, or just below, the lights were timed to turn green as you got to them.
Those with lead feet would be accelerating hard, then waiting at the lights as you cruised by.
I would kill to be able to carve out an extra five hours a week for aerobic exercise. However, that would mean giving up either my job, giving up sleep, giving up (at least) one of my hobbies, or never watching another minute of TV for the rest of my life.
Everybody is busy. It's a question of priorities. For you, exercise ranks below all of the things you mention there. For me, it ranks above TV, and it counts as a hobby. I have enough fat relatives to have a good idea of what will happen if I don't stay active, and it isn't pretty.
Exactly, as I've read elsewhere, what's more inconvenient with your schedule: working out for one hour a day or being dead 24 hours a day?
Granted it wasn't a great helmet when I did those speeds - I've upgraded to a Craft RX1 Cobra which is significantly better - staying level and not lifting, but at the end of the day you're still pushing your head through air at 180mph which is quite a lot considering a human in freefall will do ~120mph...
err yes - let's not forget that he's totally exposed and his neck has to hold his head in place at that speed!
Try going above 130mph on a superbike, then lift your head above the cowl/fairing and see what that feels like. Having done a fair amount of mileage on the German Autobahns and Nurburgring on a superbike, I can tell you that above maybe 110mph is uncomfortable; 170mph (my fastest ever) was deeply unpleasant and only bearable for a few minutes, if that.
We have *very* little gun crime. I've been resident for >25 years and there's not been one shooting. One guy went a bit nuts and was waving an air rifle about and half of the main town was closed off as armed police sorted him out.
It's got to be said that despite having a relatively large number of guns on the island, gun crime is absolutely minimal.
Guns are all restricted legally to Semi-auto only, but other than that you can own whatever you like -.50cal desert eagles,.50cal Barrette sniper riles, AK's, M16s SPAS12.... whatever really.
There must just be something up with the american psyche for there to be so much gun crime...
This is actually a myth - it may be true for huge objects like weather systems, but the direction water goes down a drain is determined more by its shape.
I actually did an experiment with a friend in NZ to confirm this...
Also, hasn't just about everyone in the world seen a seagull doing a little
dance
to bring worms to the surface?
The V1 flying bomb used a pulse jet engine rather than a pulse detonation engine - the difference being that a PDE burns at a supersonic rate whereas a regular PJ wouldn't be able to get to those speeds.
Pulse jets are surprisingly easy to build, and I'm going to flagrantly link to my own build log of my engine being built with videos of it running/imploding here.
Videos are all here.
As an aside, HDD iPods also have a 20 minute buffer I believe. I found this after going for a 30 min run with my 3G iPod and having to carry it in my hand to get it working again.
this microsoft brain dump is obviously hokum, but in all seriousness, our ever growing hard drive densities, and the ubiquity of cameras nowadays, means the day is not far off when a newborn will be born and given a tiny innocuous camera implant on the side of his head, and his entire life will be videotaped
A similar thought crossed my mind last night. Within minutes of being born, a friend had taken photos of her new baby (still had blood and goo on it) and they were posted on facebook a couple hours later. If the site remains popular for ~80 years, it literally could document people's entire lives... I'm not sure if that is a good or a bad thing. Imagine meeting someone, adding them on FB (or equivalent) and boom, you know everything notable they've done over the past ~10 years, thus ruining much of the process of getting to know somoene. Perhaps I'm just being cynical: I do, afterall, broadcast a lot of what I've done on the intarweb!
I seem to remember reading about a system that used a large roating weight to conserve kinetic energy whilst a train slows and starts. Basically, a gearbox would use the kinetic energy of the train to rotate the weight. In order to continue accellerating the weight as the train slows, it might need a fancy centrifugal clutch that would work in the opposite manner to a scooter.
Whilst the train is waiting in the station, the weight continues to spin, then a clutch engages and the momentum of the spinning weight is used to get the train moving again.
It'd be interesting to see how such a system compares to a battery system, in terms of efficiency, longevity, maintenance costs, added weight, etc.
CCTV probably doesn't necessarily prevent crime, but if a criminal is caught (by whatever means), footage of his crime is invaluable in court. I'd like to see the figures comparing sentences of criminals accused of similar crimes, with some having CCTV footage of their crimes and some not. If there's doubt/no proof of their actions in court, they're likely to get away with it.
I know it's not 'a la mode' in slashdot to consider CCTV useful, but I'd imagine more assholes are put away thanks to it.
I'm not sure exactly what defines flight on solar power, but would it be permittable to have the craft gain altitude during the day and have a low rate of decent (ie like a glider) so it can remain aloft throughout the night whilst using much less power than during the day? This would mean that it wouldn't have it's motors running constantly, thus reducing the issue of the day:night ratio.
Would using thermals and whatnot to stay up be considered 'cheating'?
"Because they were depicted as penguins the artist decided for black-and-white. However common these are as animal colors around the polar circle. If these creatures were adapted to living in a hotter environment, most likely they would have followed a color scheme that would better hide them from predators."
This is true; one only has to look at the herds of zebras floating on icebergs in the artic to confirm this is the case...
Interestingly, even with the cameras in place, the crime you describe still took place, so it didn't make things any safer for the victim. Further, jokers who attack people generally find their way to prison regardless. That's just how it works.
The CCTV footage surely would have sped up their journey to the slammer and reduced the chances of them getting away with it through lack of evidence in court (chances are there was alcohol involved in the situation, so observers' memories might not have been so accurate). Having scum like this off the street one week sooner might well have saved some other unfortunate person getting a kicking the following week when this guy next went out drinking.
Will there be a way of 'upgrading' current crippled music to DRM-free, or will we have to pay and download the whole thing again if we want to be crazy and transfer it to several of our own computers?
I found myself having to recompile my kernel in Ubuntu in order to get a wireless card driver to work. This just isn't acceptable for Joe average who thinks a computer is essentially a magic box which even has a personality and can even take a dislike to certain users.
It could potentially work at first with an apple-style approach complete with limited hardware availablility to ensure that driver issues weren't a problem. But what about installing applications or new/upgraded hardware? Will we be asking users to log in as root (after enabling it and setting up a password in ubuntu) or SUDO commands in the terminal? Not cool. Already there's a massive problem with users thinking they're unable to do even the most basic maintenance and troublshooting for themselves and calling their neighbour's 15YO son over to fix their busted computer.
Asking them to bring up a terminal is totally out of the question, and is undeniably part of doing evn some of the more basic functions in a linux environment. "Double-click -> next -> I agree -> next -> Finish" is as complicated as it should get. It sucks, but it's true: people don't want to train as mechanics to be able to drive a car.
All you have to do is swap over the input and output cables on the meter and it'll run backwards. Eventually, the electricity company will give you money to use their service!
duh.
You're not kidding. In the primary school my mother taught at, they introduced a policy where the teachers weren't allowed to use red ink to mark a kid's work as red was a very negative colour and would make the kids feel bad. Blue or green ink only. They couldn't throw a crap piece of work back and tell the kid the work was appaling, oh no... they had to tell them what was good about the piece of shit work, and subtely hint at what could be improved next time. The poor little sweehearts then wouldn't get upset and feel bad over having spent 5 minutes on a piece of homework that should take an hour...
To add insult to injury, other policies were introduced such that teachers were paid in direct relation to how well their students performed in exams. Been given 35 children who refuse to learn? no bonus for you this year! Finally, to save money and to prevent upsetting the kids more, sets were abolished. Smarter kids were no longer separated from the idiots. Of course, the smart kids of a class don't bring the standard up, the dumbasses mucking around in the back drag the standard down. Everyone loses.
As the son of two teachers who taught in rough areas and a volunteer at a youth club, I can tell you that teachers aren't the power hungry 'wardens' that you might be describing. The attitude of youngsters these days is massively different to the way it was maybe 10 or 15 years ago. Especially in the UK, it's fashionable to become yobbish, aggressive and generally a lout at a disturbingly young age. The kids learn what powers they have (they're always seen as the victims in the eyes of the law) and what few powers teachers and youth workers have (basically none, and they know that if they claim you've hit them or whatever, you're going to be dragged through a pile of shit. Mud sticks.).
Have a little think about what you would do if you're alone in a class of thirty 16 year old kids who only care about who screwed who on the weekend and who got drunk and beat the crap out of 14 year old kid walking home, putting them in hospital for several days. You ask them to be quiet and they openly tell you to fuck off, right to your face. They can hit you and may get suspended (to them it's a free holiday and a step higher in their social status - you can't exclude them from education as it's their human right), but if you lay a finger, you're out with a very black record. Parents side with the kids and actually threaten the teacher with physical violence if their kid has complained about you. The kids will mock the teacher in the street, gathering in large groups knowing that they're practically immune to the law being minors under the age of 18. What would you do on Monday morning when every one of these kids has had a good laugh over the video of your window being smashed and you walk in to them openly mocking you about it?
Too many people think teachers should be good buddies to the sweet little children, but it's just not that way any longer. I'm sure every teacher would like to be the respected educator to a class of keen fresh young minds, but they really are up against the wall at the minute and it's not getting easier. Kids hate any figures of authority and will take any opportunity they can to undermine them. Youtube are right to remove the video, but I fear the emotional damage and massive loss of respect will already have been done to the teacher.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe those annoying 'Baby on board' stickers will finally have a use?!
I'm fairly sure in parts of the UK they implemented staggered green lights along busy stretches of road. If you accelerated modestly to the speed limit, or just below, the lights were timed to turn green as you got to them. Those with lead feet would be accelerating hard, then waiting at the lights as you cruised by.
I would kill to be able to carve out an extra five hours a week for aerobic exercise. However, that would mean giving up either my job, giving up sleep, giving up (at least) one of my hobbies, or never watching another minute of TV for the rest of my life.
Everybody is busy. It's a question of priorities. For you, exercise ranks below all of the things you mention there. For me, it ranks above TV, and it counts as a hobby. I have enough fat relatives to have a good idea of what will happen if I don't stay active, and it isn't pretty.
Exactly, as I've read elsewhere, what's more inconvenient with your schedule: working out for one hour a day or being dead 24 hours a day?
Granted it wasn't a great helmet when I did those speeds - I've upgraded to a Craft RX1 Cobra which is significantly better - staying level and not lifting, but at the end of the day you're still pushing your head through air at 180mph which is quite a lot considering a human in freefall will do ~120mph...
err yes - let's not forget that he's totally exposed and his neck has to hold his head in place at that speed! Try going above 130mph on a superbike, then lift your head above the cowl/fairing and see what that feels like. Having done a fair amount of mileage on the German Autobahns and Nurburgring on a superbike, I can tell you that above maybe 110mph is uncomfortable; 170mph (my fastest ever) was deeply unpleasant and only bearable for a few minutes, if that.
You can do it with a motorbike....
I'm from Jersey (not new jersey). We have a population of ~90,000 and about 11,000 guns in circulation.
.50cal desert eagles, .50cal Barrette sniper riles, AK's, M16s SPAS12.... whatever really.
We have *very* little gun crime. I've been resident for >25 years and there's not been one shooting. One guy went a bit nuts and was waving an air rifle about and half of the main town was closed off as armed police sorted him out.
It's got to be said that despite having a relatively large number of guns on the island, gun crime is absolutely minimal.
Guns are all restricted legally to Semi-auto only, but other than that you can own whatever you like -
There must just be something up with the american psyche for there to be so much gun crime...
water drains the other way if you're in Australia
This is actually a myth - it may be true for huge objects like weather systems, but the direction water goes down a drain is determined more by its shape.
I actually did an experiment with a friend in NZ to confirm this...
Also, hasn't just about everyone in the world seen a seagull doing a little dance to bring worms to the surface?
The V1 flying bomb used a pulse jet engine rather than a pulse detonation engine - the difference being that a PDE burns at a supersonic rate whereas a regular PJ wouldn't be able to get to those speeds.
Pulse jets are surprisingly easy to build, and I'm going to flagrantly link to my own build log of my engine being built with videos of it running/imploding here.
Videos are all here.
Cheers.
I remember hearing of a director asking whether the current IT setup was really neccessary considering nothing ever went wrong...
As an aside, HDD iPods also have a 20 minute buffer I believe. I found this after going for a 30 min run with my 3G iPod and having to carry it in my hand to get it working again.
this microsoft brain dump is obviously hokum, but in all seriousness, our ever growing hard drive densities, and the ubiquity of cameras nowadays, means the day is not far off when a newborn will be born and given a tiny innocuous camera implant on the side of his head, and his entire life will be videotaped
A similar thought crossed my mind last night. Within minutes of being born, a friend had taken photos of her new baby (still had blood and goo on it) and they were posted on facebook a couple hours later. If the site remains popular for ~80 years, it literally could document people's entire lives... I'm not sure if that is a good or a bad thing. Imagine meeting someone, adding them on FB (or equivalent) and boom, you know everything notable they've done over the past ~10 years, thus ruining much of the process of getting to know somoene. Perhaps I'm just being cynical: I do, afterall, broadcast a lot of what I've done on the intarweb!
I seem to remember reading about a system that used a large roating weight to conserve kinetic energy whilst a train slows and starts. Basically, a gearbox would use the kinetic energy of the train to rotate the weight. In order to continue accellerating the weight as the train slows, it might need a fancy centrifugal clutch that would work in the opposite manner to a scooter.
Whilst the train is waiting in the station, the weight continues to spin, then a clutch engages and the momentum of the spinning weight is used to get the train moving again.
It'd be interesting to see how such a system compares to a battery system, in terms of efficiency, longevity, maintenance costs, added weight, etc.
CCTV probably doesn't necessarily prevent crime, but if a criminal is caught (by whatever means), footage of his crime is invaluable in court. I'd like to see the figures comparing sentences of criminals accused of similar crimes, with some having CCTV footage of their crimes and some not. If there's doubt/no proof of their actions in court, they're likely to get away with it.
I know it's not 'a la mode' in slashdot to consider CCTV useful, but I'd imagine more assholes are put away thanks to it.
I'm not sure exactly what defines flight on solar power, but would it be permittable to have the craft gain altitude during the day and have a low rate of decent (ie like a glider) so it can remain aloft throughout the night whilst using much less power than during the day? This would mean that it wouldn't have it's motors running constantly, thus reducing the issue of the day:night ratio. Would using thermals and whatnot to stay up be considered 'cheating'?
now my evil twin is going to clear out my bank account...
"Because they were depicted as penguins the artist decided for black-and-white. However common these are as animal colors around the polar circle. If these creatures were adapted to living in a hotter environment, most likely they would have followed a color scheme that would better hide them from predators."
This is true; one only has to look at the herds of zebras floating on icebergs in the artic to confirm this is the case...
Interestingly, even with the cameras in place, the crime you describe still took place, so it didn't make things any safer for the victim. Further, jokers who attack people generally find their way to prison regardless. That's just how it works.
The CCTV footage surely would have sped up their journey to the slammer and reduced the chances of them getting away with it through lack of evidence in court (chances are there was alcohol involved in the situation, so observers' memories might not have been so accurate). Having scum like this off the street one week sooner might well have saved some other unfortunate person getting a kicking the following week when this guy next went out drinking.
Will there be a way of 'upgrading' current crippled music to DRM-free, or will we have to pay and download the whole thing again if we want to be crazy and transfer it to several of our own computers?
Atheism IS religion...
Atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
I found myself having to recompile my kernel in Ubuntu in order to get a wireless card driver to work. This just isn't acceptable for Joe average who thinks a computer is essentially a magic box which even has a personality and can even take a dislike to certain users.
It could potentially work at first with an apple-style approach complete with limited hardware availablility to ensure that driver issues weren't a problem. But what about installing applications or new/upgraded hardware? Will we be asking users to log in as root (after enabling it and setting up a password in ubuntu) or SUDO commands in the terminal? Not cool. Already there's a massive problem with users thinking they're unable to do even the most basic maintenance and troublshooting for themselves and calling their neighbour's 15YO son over to fix their busted computer.
Asking them to bring up a terminal is totally out of the question, and is undeniably part of doing evn some of the more basic functions in a linux environment. "Double-click -> next -> I agree -> next -> Finish" is as complicated as it should get. It sucks, but it's true: people don't want to train as mechanics to be able to drive a car.
I used to chat online a LOT). Especially in the event that something happened to me (some kind of fatal accident etc.)
They got Windows Live messenger in hell these days, then?
All you have to do is swap over the input and output cables on the meter and it'll run backwards. Eventually, the electricity company will give you money to use their service!
duh.
You're not kidding. In the primary school my mother taught at, they introduced a policy where the teachers weren't allowed to use red ink to mark a kid's work as red was a very negative colour and would make the kids feel bad. Blue or green ink only. They couldn't throw a crap piece of work back and tell the kid the work was appaling, oh no... they had to tell them what was good about the piece of shit work, and subtely hint at what could be improved next time. The poor little sweehearts then wouldn't get upset and feel bad over having spent 5 minutes on a piece of homework that should take an hour...
To add insult to injury, other policies were introduced such that teachers were paid in direct relation to how well their students performed in exams. Been given 35 children who refuse to learn? no bonus for you this year!
Finally, to save money and to prevent upsetting the kids more, sets were abolished. Smarter kids were no longer separated from the idiots. Of course, the smart kids of a class don't bring the standard up, the dumbasses mucking around in the back drag the standard down. Everyone loses.
As the son of two teachers who taught in rough areas and a volunteer at a youth club, I can tell you that teachers aren't the power hungry 'wardens' that you might be describing. The attitude of youngsters these days is massively different to the way it was maybe 10 or 15 years ago. Especially in the UK, it's fashionable to become yobbish, aggressive and generally a lout at a disturbingly young age. The kids learn what powers they have (they're always seen as the victims in the eyes of the law) and what few powers teachers and youth workers have (basically none, and they know that if they claim you've hit them or whatever, you're going to be dragged through a pile of shit. Mud sticks.).
Have a little think about what you would do if you're alone in a class of thirty 16 year old kids who only care about who screwed who on the weekend and who got drunk and beat the crap out of 14 year old kid walking home, putting them in hospital for several days. You ask them to be quiet and they openly tell you to fuck off, right to your face. They can hit you and may get suspended (to them it's a free holiday and a step higher in their social status - you can't exclude them from education as it's their human right), but if you lay a finger, you're out with a very black record. Parents side with the kids and actually threaten the teacher with physical violence if their kid has complained about you. The kids will mock the teacher in the street, gathering in large groups knowing that they're practically immune to the law being minors under the age of 18. What would you do on Monday morning when every one of these kids has had a good laugh over the video of your window being smashed and you walk in to them openly mocking you about it?
Too many people think teachers should be good buddies to the sweet little children, but it's just not that way any longer. I'm sure every teacher would like to be the respected educator to a class of keen fresh young minds, but they really are up against the wall at the minute and it's not getting easier. Kids hate any figures of authority and will take any opportunity they can to undermine them. Youtube are right to remove the video, but I fear the emotional damage and massive loss of respect will already have been done to the teacher.