The author isn't the only one who complains about iDrive. Most (though obviously not all) BMW owners who've got it in their cars complain about it. Most of the auto-Media reviewers complain about it. Some of the dealerships complain about it.
Why?
It sucks.
The concept wasn't bad. The implementation blew chunks.
(I understand the latest versions don't suck so bad, and I admit to not having worked with one on a couple of years.)
As for analog controls, in a vehicle at least, not having them change is kind of the point. Do you really want to activate the wrong thing because the manufacturer moved it? Or, worse, plow into another vehicle because you were reading the new menu rather than watching the road?
As for adding analog controls, it's trivial. Most modern cars have several places already available to add new switches as needed. Even when they don't, there's pre-fab mounting systems available. It's even possible to modify the existing ones in a lot of cases.
Sorry. Touch screens and the like are awesome for PDA's, phones, media remotes, and a bazillion other devices. They do not belong in a vehicle's control system. There is a reason that aircraft flap levers and landing gear controls -feel- like little flaps and wheels on the end. You don't need to look at them to know you've got the right control. Where you find touch screens is in the controls and devices that aren't used in situations where the operator's attention needs to be on the vehicle. (HoTaS, anyone?) Same thing goes for ground vehicles. If you've got to take your eyes off the road to operate the control it's a bad idea. Period.
Or maybe having their vehicle impounded. Which not only costs them money but also stops them doing whatever stupid thing they were doing in the first place.
That is a great idea. Sadly, it has even less of a chance to pass than the one that started this thread.
Stupidity should hurt. Just wish "stupid in a car" usually didn't involve hurting someone else.
"Seriously, aside from the fact that driving carelessly is already against the law, exactly how many "Blackberry pile-ups" have their been? I'm guessing it's a miniscule number caused by either flukes or by people who drive so stupidly that they would have had an accident whatever they were doing."
Seriously? Pileups: Few. Minor to moderate accidents I have actually witnessed: Several a year. How many near misses have I had because some bozo was too busy texting to pay attention to the road: Several - every week. Sometimes several a day. That's on top of the number of morons who are weaving while dialing, or just so engrossed in their cell phone conversations that they're not paying any attention.
Try looking at some of the studies on how badly people drive while simply on the cell phone. Even the Mythbusters tackled this one and found that using a cell phone while driving has about the same affect on your driving skills as being slightly drunk.
Texting takes MORE concentration away from the road than does talking. Should there be a law? I'd love to say "No. Too many already." But, then, I'd also like to say I don't have to worry about some yahoo running me over because they were to busy talking to pay attention.
Will a law prevent accidents? Maybe a few. You're right in that most people who are idiot enough to text while driving will do it regardless of any law. But is it worth it? From where I ride, the answer is "probably."
Sorry, Mate. As the old bumper sticker says "Motorcyclists in the US are tired of dieing to support American's right to drive poorly." Something that prevents other people from dieing (or just having accidents) isn't a bad thing. Texting and cell phone use are just two examples of the MANY things people do stupidly behind the wheel. If there is going to be a law, it should be a real DWD - Driving While Distracted - statute that covers everything from Texting to the Revlon Dashboard. A few people get $150 tickets for being idiots, they're a lot less likely to do it a again.
It'll never happen, of course.
If they'd start enforcing some of the few laws on the books that address it, maybe we'd see an improvement.
Re:People once thought that about automobile exhau
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L.A.? No, fortunately! But I see your point. Still, if there was more information available on the device it would be much easier for us to determine how much of an effect these vaporators would have. Unfortunately, there's nothing on how many CC's of water they extract per unit volume of air at what density and temperature with what vapor content, etc., etc., etc. . .
I suspect this technology would see a lot of pilot programs and small density installations before they would ever reach the level of extraction that would have a measurable impact on the environment. After all, it took a lot of years for the cars to smog in L.A.
Cheers
Re:While we're at it, we should consider investing
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This isn't like, say, hydroelectric energy production - there, the water is only slowed slightly in its natural journey to the lowest point it can find. Here, you're extracting a trace gas (water vapor) from air - not slowing it down (think: classic windmill, hydroelectric dam) but taking it out (think: pumping water out of a lake/river/well for irrigation).
True, it's not like Hydro power with it's vast expanse of resivour behind the dam that houses the turbines that extract the energe from the falling water. Proportionally, I suspect the environmental impact from these units (even hundreds of them) will be minimal compared to the impact created by a big hydro-power installation. Lake Shasta, Powell, or Mead, anyone? The volume of effect will be tiny compared to the cubic miles of air in the nearby atmosphere. Think of the impact of, say, 1000 of them in a 1 square mile area. Seems like a lot, until you picture the column of air extending several miles upward. There may be some micro-climate effects in the immediate vicinity, but they'll be tiny, and reduce further as it gets drier.
Ultimately, this seems like a pretty cool technology: assuming it's not vaporware. (damn, managed to get both Cooling and Vapor into the same sentence about a water extraction system...)
While I fully agree with you on an artist's right to restrict (or not) their creations as they see fit (regardless of the inherently abhorent idea of restricting access), part of your argument above is spurious.
Radio station licenses are a racket. Product bar codes are a racket. Liquor licenses are a racket. Marriage licenses are a racket. The whole "top-40" thing is a racket. The list is long and depressing.
None of these are related to DRM in any meaningful way. Radio station licenses exist in an effort to regulate a limited comodity: radio spectrum. Bar code technology is, as I understand it, open. The registration of UPC symbols may be limited - though it's a For Business By Business situation. Marriage licenses are a formality imposed by the government because certain legal functions depend on the status of whether or not a couple is married. That doesn't make them a "racket" any more than getting a license to drive is a "racket."
The top-40 I give you hands down. It's purly a marketing construct.
The biggest difference between them is that two stroke diesels are positive displacement engines and ALL of them use some form of pressure charging: mechanical or exhaust driven, or both. Gasoline two-strokes nearly all use some form of crank case induction, where the change in volume of the crank case/underside of the piston is used to recharge the cylinder. That's what nececitates the lube oil in the fuel (keeping crankcase bearings lubricated). Positive displacement two stroke gas motors exist, but they sacrifice too much simplicity and weight to be very common. Most of the modern two stroke gas motors use some kind of direct injection, which eliminates oil in the fuel and dramatically reduces emissions.
You're certainly right about the basic simplicity of a two stroke gas motor. Piston port motors are incredibly simple though they're not exceptionally effecient, or tunable, over a broad RPM range. You're also 100% right about all diesels being direct injected. They have to be, since they use the heat of the compressed air charge for ignition.
Diesels overall are heavily built, simple, beasts; Until you get to the fuel injection system that is. Diesel fuel injection demands a level of precision that makes your average gas burner look downright sloppy and is usually the single most expensive component in the engine. At least for small to mid-sized (small marine through semi-truck) engines, and probably up through some of the larger static or marine applications.
Cheers, Bagheera
(Side note: I've worked on two and four stroke race motors, a few aircraft engines, and several two and four stroke marine diesels. Give me a two-stroke reed-valve bike motor any day.)
This sounds a bit like "Peep" the "Network Auralizer" released back in 2000. That used sound bites rather than machine generated music, but had a similar effect in that a SysAdmin could monitor multiple systems just by having the background sounds going.
I used it in a couple of places, and it worked relatively well - especially when the rest of the shop was quiet.
ANC headphones are one solution amongst several. They certainly work, but they're not perfect. Noise cancelation isn't 100%, and depending on model, the range of frequencies they can actually counter may not be effective in your environment. With most of them, you can hear a low volume 'hiss' when they're just canceling noise and not playing music. Also note that the "over the ear" type are more effecive (they provide acoustic as well as active noise cancelation) and usually more comfortable than the less expensive "on the ear" types. Finally, most models have a permenantly connected earphone cable and ALL of them lose some, if not most, effectiveness when the batteries die.
I've tried several sets, and they certainly work at the noise levels and freqs I've encountered in the DC's and computer labs I've had to work in. Also great for air travel - which is what te technology was first developed for.
The cheapest solution are the foam earplugs. They're also generally more effective than ANC at protecting your hearing. They do, however, reduce ALL the sound, so conversation (already difficult) becomes more difficult. "In the ear" headphones (Shure or Etymotic, for example) can give the same level of hearing protection and provide music. Some of them have an external mic you can use to hear people talking. I went to a set of Ety's for air travel and find I can listen to music clearly at very low set volume while blocking out more external noise than the Bose or PlaneQuite active units did.
The "ugly", but possibly best, solution, is a set of over-the-ear hearing protectors as you see on construction sites or shooting ranges. They look kinda silly, but they have great sound attenuation.
Best for you will depend on your needs.
Foams are dirt cheap. Professional grade over the ear types are $20-$50 depending on how nice you want. ANC starts under $20 and goes well over $300. Same with in the ear headphones. Top end Shure units are something like $500.
I deal with some highly confidential data with my job. On my Linux laptop, I keep all the secure data in truecrypt partitions that I mount as needed. Under Windows I used PGPDisk and they were both more then adequate for my needs. Recently, the organization started implementing HDE across all the laptops. Their solution, while quite secure, is slow and annoying. NONE of the users like it. It adds time to the boot sequence, it puts a vulnerable (and easily lost) dongle on the laptop every time it's in use, and it adversly affects system performance on a laptop that's already straining under a corporate mandated software load.
Is my data safer? Not much, in my case (my important stuff's already encrypted). But for the average user? Yes. A lot safer. Are the users happy with this situation? No. Not at all. HDE's unpopular mostly for user inconvenience issues. We won't even go into the cost issues for administration and implementation.
The real reason we don't see more of it is because for most organizations, the security benefits don't outweigh the costs and user resistance.
From reading the post, I'm guessing you're one of the folks who actually works for a living, rather than manages other people who actually work for a living. Decisions like this usually aren't handled at the "actually do it" level. This is definitely something I'd kick up through the management chain, as this is something that should be clarified at a company policy level.
Some companies make it very clear that people who work for them are subject to monitoring, etc., and can expect no privacy. Others will have the same general policy, but have other policies in place as to who can see the logs and under what circumstances. That's what you'll have to establish, and it's a decision that should be handled at a management level high enough to make it stick.
My answer, in the absense of an established policy would be "Have your boss talk to my boss, and they can hash it out with HR and Legal."
Sure it does, but half a diameter to either side, and three or four diameters down wind, it's right back where it was. I realize you're trying to be funny, but do you realize how much energy you'd need to extract from the local wind to have any noticible effect?
Though you've got a point in the air in a residential area being "dirty" (in an aeronautical sense) overall, and not especially efficient for wind power. Or neighbor-friendly for that matter.
Though I suppose you'll be coming to my place just nearby when night falls, the winds shifts a little, and your solar powered entertainment system closes down.
Side note: Wind, like solar, or micro-hydro, is a great alternative in places that are suited for it. It's all about location, location, location.
I agree that you're right for the most part. But ships this size usually aren't towed at cruising speeds, and when they are towed at all the lines are led forward pretty much level with the deck of the ship. With a kite, your best angle of sail is going to be a reach down to a broad reach (won't be worth much on a run) where the loads will be up in all cases, and fairly lateral at the most efficient points of sail.
Gotta hand it to them though for actually implementing something like this!
While the boat in Water World was quite cool, no it wasn't kite powered. They actually used two former French Forumla 1 (if I remember the class right) racing tris. One with it's original rig largely intact, and rigged so it could be sailed by a concealed crew while Costner jumped around on the multi-crank-tiller-thing at the back. The second, with it's rig replaced with a simulated egg-beater style vertical axis wind turbin that supposedly provided power for the boat's electric motors.
Those real world tri's are FAST!
I can't seem to find a link to it, but I've seen pictured of a group out of Hawaii who's experimenting with a tow-kite setup for yachts. They were testing on a cat that had it's normal rig replaced with what amounted to a kite-surfer's rig in jumbo size. The setup mentioned in the article is probably quite similar.
I'd just have to wonder about the incredible tension the kite's main lead would be under. We're talking HUGE forces here. One of those "if it snaps, someone's gonna die" kind of tensions.
And here I was so proud of myself for finally completing Adventure on the PDP11.
Kids . . .
Seriously though. When guys our age started playing computer games, they were all text based. The earliest graphics games were such a leap visually it was like night and day. The graphics now are like watching a movie.
Gotta wonder what it'll be like in another 20 years.
Depends. It's certainly the company's laptop, but the NON-work-related data may not be theirs. Every company I've worked in that allowed the use of a laptop had allowances for "limited personal use" in their acceptible use policies. That meant that it was cool for me to use the laptop to check my webmail accounts during lunch, etc. That information was mine, not theirs. It was also assumed reasonable for me to delete my personal data that was left on the system.
Operative word being "Reasonable."
It would all depend on whether his company's acceptible use policy had an allowance for limited personal use or not. If they did say it was OK to use it for personal use, they had no legal grounds upon which to try and recover HIS personal (not work related) data since it was HIS.
Your analogy implies that EVERYTHING in a workspace is company property, when in most cases it's not. Having personal effects in my office, and removing them when I leave the employer, is no different form having some personal data on a computer.
...one overweling popular distro making up 80% of the Linux marketplace...
*caugh*RedHat*caugh*
While their percentage may not actually be that high, from my experience it appears that RHEL has become the 800 pound gorilla of the Linux world. My experience may not be representitive, but in three sectors where I had encountered Linux in production (Public Utility, Private sector hardware manufacturer, Financial) RedHat Enterprise was the distro of choice, albeit mostly in the server space.
RHEL good or bad? Anyone's call. It's probably easier to support one homogenous distro than it is to let everyone use their favorite, but then that's the difference between Corporate Desktop, server farms, and home users.
Of course, there's also no reason Dell couldn't roll their own distro based on whatever they thought their support department could best handle. It's really not that hard. I know at least one "small equipment manufacturer in the valley" who rolled their own off RedHat.
It would be easy (and I'd even say fair) for thier support policy to say "you mess with it, you fix it." After all, when you frag your Windows installation now, they tell you to rebuild from the restore disk.
The problem with cable modem service is the same as the problem with consumer level DSL: Oversubscription. DSL providers are famous for pointing out how much better their speeds are than cable. And they are - up to the CO. DSL just moves the bottleneck from the 16Meg/second shared cable (that data rate is from memory, and probably doesn't represent many cable modem installations) unto their internal routers. A particularly well known DSL provider liked to advertise 1.5M/sec or better access. They had it, too. At least from your machine to the router, where it was promptly aggregated with 8000 other users who shared the two OC3's coming off the router.
You do the math.
The cable companies are no better, and I'm sure many of them are worse. The bottlenecks don't change. They just move around. If you want consistant, guaranteed service, spring for a T1.
As for BPL . . . Don't even go there. BPL is an abomination. There are so many problems with the technology, both technical and environmental, that deploying it should never be allowed. (Picture miles and miles of radio antenna broadcasting, randomly, across large swaths of the RF spectrum. Now there is a good idea!) The power utilities see the internet as a big cash cow, and they think BPL is the way to get their slice of the pie. Please don't buy into the hype about it being a good, or even worthwhile, technology.
Want new technologies? Some of the wireless ones show promise. But the real problem is ISP's concentrating on Profit over Service. But what the hell, isn't that the (Corporate) American Way?
Incredibly good point... It would be like your phone company sending a bill to everyone that you call...
You mean like they already do for SMS messages? You are charged to send a message, and the receiver gets charged to get it. So, in essense, a 32 character burst of text costs about as much as a 3 minute pay phone call.
This is just another example of TelCo greed run rampant. And, perhaps, a bit of fear over the new technology that threatens to make their century-old business model obsolete.
The Dynalifter isn't a Zeppelin (rigid airship): It's a heavier than air aircraft that incorporates some static lift into its design. It's not a new idea, as they point out on their site. Their patent is for the structure itself, not the concept of a "not much heavier than air" aircraft.
It's not just the technology that "endangers" broadcast radio: it's the industry itself. There are so many things wrong with commercial terrestrial radio, that it's become a joke, and the broadcasters themselves don't seem to realize they've worked themselves out of the market and over-valued the stations so much that no one else could possibly come in an FIX broadcast radio.
Could it be fixed? Certainly. FM Broadcast technology is not inherently sucky. It's quite possible to set up transmitters to provide a killer sound with a nice broad range. Does it happen? Rarely. Station managers want it LOUD so they get heard, and to do it the compress the crap out of the signal and lose all the quality. But it sure is loud when you tune past it! It -sucks- too, but they only care about the advertising dollars their LOUD station brings in.
It's no surprise people have migrated to MP3 players, Sat radio, etc., etc., etc. It's a better alternative. Better sound, and no 40% commercial load.
Personally, I'm waiting for the bubble to burst in that media and the bottom to fall out. Once it does, the stations may get into the hands of people who can actually -do- something good with it.
"You had the time. You had the power. You're yet to have your finest hour. Radio." Freddie Mercury: Radio Gaga
"In this case, the US is meddling in the affairs of everyone else by controlling the name servers that everyone uses."
Not really. The root servers, bind itself, in fact, were developed in the United States and were under the control of US organizations from their inception. It's not the US meddling in the affairs of others here. It's others wanting to meddle in the affairs of the internet as a whole and the US telling them "No."
As others have pointed out before in this argument, there is nothing whatsoever stopping other countries from setting up their own root servers and forcing their population to use them. It will proabably break things, and no one else will use them, but there's no real reason they can't.
The trouble is that Governments, all governments (US included) feel the need to have some kind of control. Getting everyone to agree on just how to use that control is an exercise in futility. Would China do a better job with the root servers? France? The UK? Zimbabwe?
EnCase is a greate forensics tool. It is not, however, designed as an decryption tool. It's used to coax information out of a drive, using an exact duplicate (dd with a fancy interface) of the original, with a collection of tools that let it search through the data for whatever information you want (grep with a fancy interface). It also lets you use the target machine's configurations to run the target's software. E.G. If the machine you're analyzing has some kind of funky software setup, you can run the software as if you're in the target's environment.
As I recall (I haven't used EnCase for forensics in over a year now) it's decryption tools were weak. If you didn't already know the keys, EnCase was unlikely to produce them for you. What it -was- good for, was reconstructing files that were deleted, combing through hidden directories for various data types, and doing it all in a forensicly sound manner that the US courts were willing to accept.
The advantage to it was that a forensic analyst in court could say "I used EnCase and I'm a certified user" and not have to go though explaining the details of "I mounted the drive on a write-protected bus, ran dd to create a duplicate of the original drive, and . . ..". The courts like "certified tools".
Of course, as others have pointed out, holding someone "90 days so we can decrypt their drive" is a farce. If the encryption is any good, they're not going to crack it in 90 years. If the encryption is crap, or the suspect uses weak passwords, they'll have it in a lot less than 90 days.
Mercury has enough gravity to maintain a thin atmosphere, but loses it to the solar wind, and it's "one face world" status. (I seem to remember Mercury actually has a barely measurable atmosphere) Comets have far too little gravity to maintain an atmosphere, but have what amounts to one during their approach to the sun due to outgassing. By your definition, this would make them planets.
Personally, I find your idea interesting, but a little silly. A Moon is any object orbiting another non-stellar body, where the center of orbit is within the diameter of the gravitationally sominant body (or near to it). Where the objects are of similar mass, or there's no clear dominant body, they'd become a combinedd object, or twin planets/asteroids/whatever.
Basing the definition on a characteristic like "having an atmosphere" is too limiting. Far better the other proposals: basing it on sufficient mass for the object's gravity to be the dominant factor in its shape.
Not that long. By having USB devices to start cars, soon hackers will be doing more than writing viruses and "testing" websites. They will be stealing your car.
Assuming, of course, they can get past the physical layer to actually access the ignition system. This is a USB to start the car, not to open it. Since the other site was alread/.ed, I don't know what they're actually planning.
Fact is, they need physical access to steal your car, and it's not difficult to implement the system so making a "copy" of the key would be very difficult.
But this is a larger problem than meets the eye. If software is used to start a car, how long until government gets creative? What kinds of algorthims can be put in the car computer?
* If there is a gas outage, the new flash only allows the car to be driven 100 miles per week, then you can't start it until next week?
And they'll upload this into your physical device how, exactly?
* Since there is an algorithm that makes each car unique, how long until the car broadcasts its VIN number to anyone who wants to listen? Will cops knock on your door because you parked in a mall, next to a store that had shoplifters?
That's seperate from a USB car key, now isn't it. Putting a transponder on a car is ALREADY being done. That's essentially what a FastPass is now. Ping it, and it gives you a serial number.
* How long until my car decides I am driving to fast, and calls the police to mail me a ticket. Before you write this off as never_gonna_happen, consider that many highways now have radar guns attached to cameras, and they mail out tickets in the mail.
You mean like an automated radar system that takes pictures and sends you a ticket? Old news. Plus (as others have noted) some rental car companies already do that with GPS now.
* And how long until a bank robber and hacker changes your flash to mask the car that robbed the bank. Imagine the extra people the police will need to hire to straighten out the messes. And imagine how many more tickets they will need to write to pay for those new employees.
How, exactly, do they change MY flash to mimic their car? How is it going to take "extra people to sort out the mess" when this magic transponder is tracking two cars at the same time, one of which is obviously mine because it's the one parked at my house, while the other one obviously ISN'T mine because it was busy robbing a bank at the time.
The only good thing for software like this is we can keep track of kids. We can program cars that are started with certian USB keys, that the car will stop if it drives to a certain area. For example, we can have zones the car is not allowed to enter. We can also have software on the computer, to know what family member has the car, and where they are. Maybe we can even set up cars, so if the 16 year old daughter is going out with her friends, that the radio really listens to what is going on in the car to make sure she is not picking up a 18 year old drop out weed head. And if we hear something we don't like, we can drive to where the car is with out shotgun and have an old fashioned lynching.
Ok, repeat after me. "USB is not GPS." If you're going to get paranoid, at least keep your technologies straight. You're essentially ranting here and it doesn't wash. Numerous manufacturers already use microchips in their keys to effectively make sure they're the right key for the car. This USB key is really nothing more then adding some accessible memory to an existing technology.
Insightful?
Paranioid.
Mazda's doing something reasonably cool here. There's nothing wrong with it.
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The author isn't the only one who complains about iDrive. Most (though obviously not all) BMW owners who've got it in their cars complain about it. Most of the auto-Media reviewers complain about it. Some of the dealerships complain about it.
Why?
It sucks.
The concept wasn't bad. The implementation blew chunks.
(I understand the latest versions don't suck so bad, and I admit to not having worked with one on a couple of years.)
As for analog controls, in a vehicle at least, not having them change is kind of the point. Do you really want to activate the wrong thing because the manufacturer moved it? Or, worse, plow into another vehicle because you were reading the new menu rather than watching the road?
As for adding analog controls, it's trivial. Most modern cars have several places already available to add new switches as needed. Even when they don't, there's pre-fab mounting systems available. It's even possible to modify the existing ones in a lot of cases.
Sorry. Touch screens and the like are awesome for PDA's, phones, media remotes, and a bazillion other devices. They do not belong in a vehicle's control system. There is a reason that aircraft flap levers and landing gear controls -feel- like little flaps and wheels on the end. You don't need to look at them to know you've got the right control. Where you find touch screens is in the controls and devices that aren't used in situations where the operator's attention needs to be on the vehicle. (HoTaS, anyone?) Same thing goes for ground vehicles. If you've got to take your eyes off the road to operate the control it's a bad idea. Period.
Or maybe having their vehicle impounded. Which not only costs them money but also stops them doing whatever stupid thing they were doing in the first place.
That is a great idea. Sadly, it has even less of a chance to pass than the one that started this thread.
Stupidity should hurt. Just wish "stupid in a car" usually didn't involve hurting someone else.
"Seriously, aside from the fact that driving carelessly is already against the law, exactly how many "Blackberry pile-ups" have their been? I'm guessing it's a miniscule number caused by either flukes or by people who drive so stupidly that they would have had an accident whatever they were doing."
Seriously? Pileups: Few. Minor to moderate accidents I have actually witnessed: Several a year. How many near misses have I had because some bozo was too busy texting to pay attention to the road: Several - every week. Sometimes several a day. That's on top of the number of morons who are weaving while dialing, or just so engrossed in their cell phone conversations that they're not paying any attention.
Try looking at some of the studies on how badly people drive while simply on the cell phone. Even the Mythbusters tackled this one and found that using a cell phone while driving has about the same affect on your driving skills as being slightly drunk.
Texting takes MORE concentration away from the road than does talking. Should there be a law? I'd love to say "No. Too many already." But, then, I'd also like to say I don't have to worry about some yahoo running me over because they were to busy talking to pay attention.
Will a law prevent accidents? Maybe a few. You're right in that most people who are idiot enough to text while driving will do it regardless of any law. But is it worth it? From where I ride, the answer is "probably."
Sorry, Mate. As the old bumper sticker says "Motorcyclists in the US are tired of dieing to support American's right to drive poorly." Something that prevents other people from dieing (or just having accidents) isn't a bad thing. Texting and cell phone use are just two examples of the MANY things people do stupidly behind the wheel. If there is going to be a law, it should be a real DWD - Driving While Distracted - statute that covers everything from Texting to the Revlon Dashboard. A few people get $150 tickets for being idiots, they're a lot less likely to do it a again.
It'll never happen, of course.
If they'd start enforcing some of the few laws on the books that address it, maybe we'd see an improvement.
L.A.? No, fortunately! But I see your point. Still, if there was more information available on the device it would be much easier for us to determine how much of an effect these vaporators would have. Unfortunately, there's nothing on how many CC's of water they extract per unit volume of air at what density and temperature with what vapor content, etc., etc., etc. . .
I suspect this technology would see a lot of pilot programs and small density installations before they would ever reach the level of extraction that would have a measurable impact on the environment. After all, it took a lot of years for the cars to smog in L.A.
Cheers
This isn't like, say, hydroelectric energy production - there, the water is only slowed slightly in its natural journey to the lowest point it can find. Here, you're extracting a trace gas (water vapor) from air - not slowing it down (think: classic windmill, hydroelectric dam) but taking it out (think: pumping water out of a lake/river/well for irrigation).
True, it's not like Hydro power with it's vast expanse of resivour behind the dam that houses the turbines that extract the energe from the falling water. Proportionally, I suspect the environmental impact from these units (even hundreds of them) will be minimal compared to the impact created by a big hydro-power installation. Lake Shasta, Powell, or Mead, anyone? The volume of effect will be tiny compared to the cubic miles of air in the nearby atmosphere. Think of the impact of, say, 1000 of them in a 1 square mile area. Seems like a lot, until you picture the column of air extending several miles upward. There may be some micro-climate effects in the immediate vicinity, but they'll be tiny, and reduce further as it gets drier.
Ultimately, this seems like a pretty cool technology: assuming it's not vaporware. (damn, managed to get both Cooling and Vapor into the same sentence about a water extraction system...)
Cheers
Bagheera
While I fully agree with you on an artist's right to restrict (or not) their creations as they see fit (regardless of the inherently abhorent idea of restricting access), part of your argument above is spurious.
Radio station licenses are a racket. Product bar codes are a racket. Liquor licenses are a racket. Marriage licenses are a racket. The whole "top-40" thing is a racket. The list is long and depressing.
None of these are related to DRM in any meaningful way. Radio station licenses exist in an effort to regulate a limited comodity: radio spectrum. Bar code technology is, as I understand it, open. The registration of UPC symbols may be limited - though it's a For Business By Business situation. Marriage licenses are a formality imposed by the government because certain legal functions depend on the status of whether or not a couple is married. That doesn't make them a "racket" any more than getting a license to drive is a "racket."
The top-40 I give you hands down. It's purly a marketing construct.
The biggest difference between them is that two stroke diesels are positive displacement engines and ALL of them use some form of pressure charging: mechanical or exhaust driven, or both. Gasoline two-strokes nearly all use some form of crank case induction, where the change in volume of the crank case/underside of the piston is used to recharge the cylinder. That's what nececitates the lube oil in the fuel (keeping crankcase bearings lubricated). Positive displacement two stroke gas motors exist, but they sacrifice too much simplicity and weight to be very common. Most of the modern two stroke gas motors use some kind of direct injection, which eliminates oil in the fuel and dramatically reduces emissions.
You're certainly right about the basic simplicity of a two stroke gas motor. Piston port motors are incredibly simple though they're not exceptionally effecient, or tunable, over a broad RPM range. You're also 100% right about all diesels being direct injected. They have to be, since they use the heat of the compressed air charge for ignition.
Diesels overall are heavily built, simple, beasts; Until you get to the fuel injection system that is. Diesel fuel injection demands a level of precision that makes your average gas burner look downright sloppy and is usually the single most expensive component in the engine. At least for small to mid-sized (small marine through semi-truck) engines, and probably up through some of the larger static or marine applications.
Cheers,
Bagheera
(Side note: I've worked on two and four stroke race motors, a few aircraft engines, and several two and four stroke marine diesels. Give me a two-stroke reed-valve bike motor any day.)
This sounds a bit like "Peep" the "Network Auralizer" released back in 2000. That used sound bites rather than machine generated music, but had a similar effect in that a SysAdmin could monitor multiple systems just by having the background sounds going.
I used it in a couple of places, and it worked relatively well - especially when the rest of the shop was quiet.
ANC headphones are one solution amongst several. They certainly work, but they're not perfect. Noise cancelation isn't 100%, and depending on model, the range of frequencies they can actually counter may not be effective in your environment. With most of them, you can hear a low volume 'hiss' when they're just canceling noise and not playing music. Also note that the "over the ear" type are more effecive (they provide acoustic as well as active noise cancelation) and usually more comfortable than the less expensive "on the ear" types. Finally, most models have a permenantly connected earphone cable and ALL of them lose some, if not most, effectiveness when the batteries die.
I've tried several sets, and they certainly work at the noise levels and freqs I've encountered in the DC's and computer labs I've had to work in. Also great for air travel - which is what te technology was first developed for.
The cheapest solution are the foam earplugs. They're also generally more effective than ANC at protecting your hearing. They do, however, reduce ALL the sound, so conversation (already difficult) becomes more difficult. "In the ear" headphones (Shure or Etymotic, for example) can give the same level of hearing protection and provide music. Some of them have an external mic you can use to hear people talking. I went to a set of Ety's for air travel and find I can listen to music clearly at very low set volume while blocking out more external noise than the Bose or PlaneQuite active units did.
The "ugly", but possibly best, solution, is a set of over-the-ear hearing protectors as you see on construction sites or shooting ranges. They look kinda silly, but they have great sound attenuation.
Best for you will depend on your needs.
Foams are dirt cheap. Professional grade over the ear types are $20-$50 depending on how nice you want. ANC starts under $20 and goes well over $300. Same with in the ear headphones. Top end Shure units are something like $500.
Figure out what you want to do, and experiment.
. . . don't like it.
I deal with some highly confidential data with my job. On my Linux laptop, I keep all the secure data in truecrypt partitions that I mount as needed. Under Windows I used PGPDisk and they were both more then adequate for my needs. Recently, the organization started implementing HDE across all the laptops. Their solution, while quite secure, is slow and annoying. NONE of the users like it. It adds time to the boot sequence, it puts a vulnerable (and easily lost) dongle on the laptop every time it's in use, and it adversly affects system performance on a laptop that's already straining under a corporate mandated software load.
Is my data safer? Not much, in my case (my important stuff's already encrypted). But for the average user? Yes. A lot safer. Are the users happy with this situation? No. Not at all. HDE's unpopular mostly for user inconvenience issues. We won't even go into the cost issues for administration and implementation.
The real reason we don't see more of it is because for most organizations, the security benefits don't outweigh the costs and user resistance.
From reading the post, I'm guessing you're one of the folks who actually works for a living, rather than manages other people who actually work for a living. Decisions like this usually aren't handled at the "actually do it" level. This is definitely something I'd kick up through the management chain, as this is something that should be clarified at a company policy level.
Some companies make it very clear that people who work for them are subject to monitoring, etc., and can expect no privacy. Others will have the same general policy, but have other policies in place as to who can see the logs and under what circumstances. That's what you'll have to establish, and it's a decision that should be handled at a management level high enough to make it stick.
My answer, in the absense of an established policy would be "Have your boss talk to my boss, and they can hash it out with HR and Legal."
Sure it does, but half a diameter to either side, and three or four diameters down wind, it's right back where it was. I realize you're trying to be funny, but do you realize how much energy you'd need to extract from the local wind to have any noticible effect?
Though you've got a point in the air in a residential area being "dirty" (in an aeronautical sense) overall, and not especially efficient for wind power. Or neighbor-friendly for that matter.
Though I suppose you'll be coming to my place just nearby when night falls, the winds shifts a little, and your solar powered entertainment system closes down.
Side note: Wind, like solar, or micro-hydro, is a great alternative in places that are suited for it. It's all about location, location, location.
I agree that you're right for the most part. But ships this size usually aren't towed at cruising speeds, and when they are towed at all the lines are led forward pretty much level with the deck of the ship. With a kite, your best angle of sail is going to be a reach down to a broad reach (won't be worth much on a run) where the loads will be up in all cases, and fairly lateral at the most efficient points of sail.
Gotta hand it to them though for actually implementing something like this!
While the boat in Water World was quite cool, no it wasn't kite powered. They actually used two former French Forumla 1 (if I remember the class right) racing tris. One with it's original rig largely intact, and rigged so it could be sailed by a concealed crew while Costner jumped around on the multi-crank-tiller-thing at the back. The second, with it's rig replaced with a simulated egg-beater style vertical axis wind turbin that supposedly provided power for the boat's electric motors.
Those real world tri's are FAST!
I can't seem to find a link to it, but I've seen pictured of a group out of Hawaii who's experimenting with a tow-kite setup for yachts. They were testing on a cat that had it's normal rig replaced with what amounted to a kite-surfer's rig in jumbo size. The setup mentioned in the article is probably quite similar.
I'd just have to wonder about the incredible tension the kite's main lead would be under. We're talking HUGE forces here. One of those "if it snaps, someone's gonna die" kind of tensions.
And here I was so proud of myself for finally completing Adventure on the PDP11.
Kids . . .
Seriously though. When guys our age started playing computer games, they were all text based. The earliest graphics games were such a leap visually it was like night and day. The graphics now are like watching a movie.
Gotta wonder what it'll be like in another 20 years.
Depends. It's certainly the company's laptop, but the NON-work-related data may not be theirs. Every company I've worked in that allowed the use of a laptop had allowances for "limited personal use" in their acceptible use policies. That meant that it was cool for me to use the laptop to check my webmail accounts during lunch, etc. That information was mine, not theirs. It was also assumed reasonable for me to delete my personal data that was left on the system.
Operative word being "Reasonable."
It would all depend on whether his company's acceptible use policy had an allowance for limited personal use or not. If they did say it was OK to use it for personal use, they had no legal grounds upon which to try and recover HIS personal (not work related) data since it was HIS.
Your analogy implies that EVERYTHING in a workspace is company property, when in most cases it's not. Having personal effects in my office, and removing them when I leave the employer, is no different form having some personal data on a computer.
...one overweling popular distro making up 80% of the Linux marketplace...
*caugh*RedHat*caugh*
While their percentage may not actually be that high, from my experience it appears that RHEL has become the 800 pound gorilla of the Linux world. My experience may not be representitive, but in three sectors where I had encountered Linux in production (Public Utility, Private sector hardware manufacturer, Financial) RedHat Enterprise was the distro of choice, albeit mostly in the server space.
RHEL good or bad? Anyone's call. It's probably easier to support one homogenous distro than it is to let everyone use their favorite, but then that's the difference between Corporate Desktop, server farms, and home users.
Of course, there's also no reason Dell couldn't roll their own distro based on whatever they thought their support department could best handle. It's really not that hard. I know at least one "small equipment manufacturer in the valley" who rolled their own off RedHat.
It would be easy (and I'd even say fair) for thier support policy to say "you mess with it, you fix it." After all, when you frag your Windows installation now, they tell you to rebuild from the restore disk.
The problem with cable modem service is the same as the problem with consumer level DSL: Oversubscription. DSL providers are famous for pointing out how much better their speeds are than cable. And they are - up to the CO. DSL just moves the bottleneck from the 16Meg/second shared cable (that data rate is from memory, and probably doesn't represent many cable modem installations) unto their internal routers. A particularly well known DSL provider liked to advertise 1.5M/sec or better access. They had it, too. At least from your machine to the router, where it was promptly aggregated with 8000 other users who shared the two OC3's coming off the router.
You do the math.
The cable companies are no better, and I'm sure many of them are worse. The bottlenecks don't change. They just move around. If you want consistant, guaranteed service, spring for a T1.
As for BPL . . . Don't even go there. BPL is an abomination. There are so many problems with the technology, both technical and environmental, that deploying it should never be allowed. (Picture miles and miles of radio antenna broadcasting, randomly, across large swaths of the RF spectrum. Now there is a good idea!) The power utilities see the internet as a big cash cow, and they think BPL is the way to get their slice of the pie. Please don't buy into the hype about it being a good, or even worthwhile, technology.
Want new technologies? Some of the wireless ones show promise. But the real problem is ISP's concentrating on Profit over Service. But what the hell, isn't that the (Corporate) American Way?
Incredibly good point... It would be like your phone company sending a bill to everyone that you call...
You mean like they already do for SMS messages? You are charged to send a message, and the receiver gets charged to get it. So, in essense, a 32 character burst of text costs about as much as a 3 minute pay phone call.
This is just another example of TelCo greed run rampant. And, perhaps, a bit of fear over the new technology that threatens to make their century-old business model obsolete.
The Dynalifter isn't a Zeppelin (rigid airship): It's a heavier than air aircraft that incorporates some static lift into its design. It's not a new idea, as they point out on their site. Their patent is for the structure itself, not the concept of a "not much heavier than air" aircraft.
It's not just the technology that "endangers" broadcast radio: it's the industry itself. There are so many things wrong with commercial terrestrial radio, that it's become a joke, and the broadcasters themselves don't seem to realize they've worked themselves out of the market and over-valued the stations so much that no one else could possibly come in an FIX broadcast radio.
Could it be fixed? Certainly. FM Broadcast technology is not inherently sucky. It's quite possible to set up transmitters to provide a killer sound with a nice broad range. Does it happen? Rarely. Station managers want it LOUD so they get heard, and to do it the compress the crap out of the signal and lose all the quality. But it sure is loud when you tune past it! It -sucks- too, but they only care about the advertising dollars their LOUD station brings in.
It's no surprise people have migrated to MP3 players, Sat radio, etc., etc., etc. It's a better alternative. Better sound, and no 40% commercial load.
Personally, I'm waiting for the bubble to burst in that media and the bottom to fall out. Once it does, the stations may get into the hands of people who can actually -do- something good with it.
"You had the time. You had the power. You're yet to have your finest hour. Radio."
Freddie Mercury: Radio Gaga
"In this case, the US is meddling in the affairs of everyone else by controlling the name servers that everyone uses."
Not really. The root servers, bind itself, in fact, were developed in the United States and were under the control of US organizations from their inception. It's not the US meddling in the affairs of others here. It's others wanting to meddle in the affairs of the internet as a whole and the US telling them "No."
As others have pointed out before in this argument, there is nothing whatsoever stopping other countries from setting up their own root servers and forcing their population to use them. It will proabably break things, and no one else will use them, but there's no real reason they can't.
The trouble is that Governments, all governments (US included) feel the need to have some kind of control. Getting everyone to agree on just how to use that control is an exercise in futility. Would China do a better job with the root servers? France? The UK? Zimbabwe?
Probably not.
EnCase is a greate forensics tool. It is not, however, designed as an decryption tool. It's used to coax information out of a drive, using an exact duplicate (dd with a fancy interface) of the original, with a collection of tools that let it search through the data for whatever information you want (grep with a fancy interface). It also lets you use the target machine's configurations to run the target's software. E.G. If the machine you're analyzing has some kind of funky software setup, you can run the software as if you're in the target's environment.
.". The courts like "certified tools".
As I recall (I haven't used EnCase for forensics in over a year now) it's decryption tools were weak. If you didn't already know the keys, EnCase was unlikely to produce them for you. What it -was- good for, was reconstructing files that were deleted, combing through hidden directories for various data types, and doing it all in a forensicly sound manner that the US courts were willing to accept.
The advantage to it was that a forensic analyst in court could say "I used EnCase and I'm a certified user" and not have to go though explaining the details of "I mounted the drive on a write-protected bus, ran dd to create a duplicate of the original drive, and . . .
Of course, as others have pointed out, holding someone "90 days so we can decrypt their drive" is a farce. If the encryption is any good, they're not going to crack it in 90 years. If the encryption is crap, or the suspect uses weak passwords, they'll have it in a lot less than 90 days.
Mercury has enough gravity to maintain a thin atmosphere, but loses it to the solar wind, and it's "one face world" status. (I seem to remember Mercury actually has a barely measurable atmosphere) Comets have far too little gravity to maintain an atmosphere, but have what amounts to one during their approach to the sun due to outgassing. By your definition, this would make them planets. Personally, I find your idea interesting, but a little silly. A Moon is any object orbiting another non-stellar body, where the center of orbit is within the diameter of the gravitationally sominant body (or near to it). Where the objects are of similar mass, or there's no clear dominant body, they'd become a combinedd object, or twin planets/asteroids/whatever. Basing the definition on a characteristic like "having an atmosphere" is too limiting. Far better the other proposals: basing it on sufficient mass for the object's gravity to be the dominant factor in its shape.
Not that long. By having USB devices to start cars, soon hackers will be doing more than writing viruses and "testing" websites. They will be stealing your car.
/.ed, I don't know what they're actually planning.
Assuming, of course, they can get past the physical layer to actually access the ignition system. This is a USB to start the car, not to open it. Since the other site was alread
Fact is, they need physical access to steal your car, and it's not difficult to implement the system so making a "copy" of the key would be very difficult.
But this is a larger problem than meets the eye. If software is used to start a car, how long until government gets creative? What kinds of algorthims can be put in the car computer?
* If there is a gas outage, the new flash only allows the car to be driven 100 miles per week, then you can't start it until next week?
And they'll upload this into your physical device how, exactly?
* Since there is an algorithm that makes each car unique, how long until the car broadcasts its VIN number to anyone who wants to listen? Will cops knock on your door because you parked in a mall, next to a store that had shoplifters?
That's seperate from a USB car key, now isn't it. Putting a transponder on a car is ALREADY being done. That's essentially what a FastPass is now. Ping it, and it gives you a serial number.
* How long until my car decides I am driving to fast, and calls the police to mail me a ticket. Before you write this off as never_gonna_happen, consider that many highways now have radar guns attached to cameras, and they mail out tickets in the mail.
You mean like an automated radar system that takes pictures and sends you a ticket? Old news. Plus (as others have noted) some rental car companies already do that with GPS now.
* And how long until a bank robber and hacker changes your flash to mask the car that robbed the bank. Imagine the extra people the police will need to hire to straighten out the messes. And imagine how many more tickets they will need to write to pay for those new employees.
How, exactly, do they change MY flash to mimic their car? How is it going to take "extra people to sort out the mess" when this magic transponder is tracking two cars at the same time, one of which is obviously mine because it's the one parked at my house, while the other one obviously ISN'T mine because it was busy robbing a bank at the time.
The only good thing for software like this is we can keep track of kids. We can program cars that are started with certian USB keys, that the car will stop if it drives to a certain area. For example, we can have zones the car is not allowed to enter. We can also have software on the computer, to know what family member has the car, and where they are. Maybe we can even set up cars, so if the 16 year old daughter is going out with her friends, that the radio really listens to what is going on in the car to make sure she is not picking up a 18 year old drop out weed head. And if we hear something we don't like, we can drive to where the car is with out shotgun and have an old fashioned lynching.
Ok, repeat after me. "USB is not GPS." If you're going to get paranoid, at least keep your technologies straight. You're essentially ranting here and it doesn't wash. Numerous manufacturers already use microchips in their keys to effectively make sure they're the right key for the car. This USB key is really nothing more then adding some accessible memory to an existing technology.
Insightful?
Paranioid.
Mazda's doing something reasonably cool here. There's nothing wrong with it.