Garage door openers come in 1/2 and 3/4 HP (or bigger) ratings, have high torque gear reduction drives, and you can buy spare parts from whoever the maker is...
Most non-compete clauses in an employee contract are invalidated by right-to-work legislation currently enforced by most states and provinces in North America. However, if I was moving from company A to it's fierce rival Z across town, and wanted to avoid any appearance of impropriety, I would take care to purge my home office and computers of any company A documents, test data, email, and pre-production (i.e. not commercially available) product. If that negatively impacts the benefit I can have for company Z, then that's too bad - they also have to understand the optics of the situation.
If I was going from company A to new company Z and had to design a similar product, then I'd use my experience to first create the required proof-of-concept prototype, only using such materials and other tools that are available to company Z. The fact that I'd done something similar before is where my experience would pay off... not in being able to conjure up a design out of thin air and then to have to explain its workings without the benefit of any background data.
... because you can believe everything that the Chinese media broadcasts (just referring to recent Olympic opening ceremony shenanigans, not any deeper political hooey).
Mod parent up +1 for superlative irony/cynicism!
That's standard procedure straight from the Patent Troll Handbook. You build up your patent's credibility by getting a few helpless companies to roll over, and then you use that as ammunition when you go after the bigger fish.
Re:Molding makes designing your house hard
on
Inside the Lego Factory
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Really... plastics shrink as they're cooled from the mold, and how much shrinkage you get also depends on how much plastic is there. Now notice that all your long Lego trusses are exactly dead straight. Even the ones that are 20, 30, or 40 years old. And the 40 year old pieces interlock perfectly with the brand new ones. That says a lot for the plastics composition too. Go check out the dash on a 40 year old Dodge and see how much it's changed dimensionally. It's all in the details.
Analog programming has been done for decades, using analog computers. Analog computers were the tools for initial research into chaotic (strange attractor) behavior. In the analog programming world, you configure a differential equation appropriate to the problem you're trying to solve, and the system produces a solution.
Trying to recast the problems we've been solving (or creating) with digital computers in analog computer terms is an interesting exercise; some problems have analogs (pun not really intended, but oddly appropriate) that give extra insight into the nature of the problem, and others are just going to be impossible. How do you express a sorting operation in terms of differential equations?
Richard Feynman once pondered, if moisture molecules in the atmosphere scatter light, and presumably this is a random effect because the molecules are randomly distributed, why is it that buildings, etc. when they're viewed through mist, do they still have sharp edges? You'd think all the random scatter would blur the edges.
That thought train led him to do some fundamental work in particle scattering and path integrals, IIRC, and eventually to the Feynman diagrams that are now commonly used to describe some aspects of particle interactions.
So you're thinking some good deep thoughts there, but I can't give you a good answer other than "they just know". Basically the "proper" reflection is the only one that is coherent to the observer and the other reflected beams are all out of phase so they might as well not happen... and therefore they don't. Or something like that.
Because the teardrop shape is (a) hard to fabricate (b) easy to damage and (c) damn hard to maneuver with - a typical small car such as my Echo would require a ten foot (3 meter) tail to have a 'proper' teardrop shape.
The right answer is to use a Kamm tail, where the taper is cut off and vortex generators, if necessary, are used to cause a high-pressure zone to build behind the cut-off part. Many of the current crop of high-efficiency cars already have airflow management features on the rear of the car, and that is in fact why the rear ends are vertical with sharp corners.
The cool thing is that, like aerodynamic downforce, electrostatic friction would be adjustable (on the fly), and would not incur an inertia penalty relative to just using mass to increase your traction. If you could drive your car on near-bicycle size tires so as to reduce rolling friction, and still have acceptable acceleration, cornering and braking ability due to adaptive static friction control then it would be possible to get significantly higher mileage.
Exactly right. If you'd developed some new idea on your own, with little or no guidance or support from your supervisor and THEN he took credit for your innovations, then there's a problem. If you're a code monkey ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H peon ^H^H^H^H junior web programmer implementing others' ideas, then you are doing no more and no less than what your boss asked you to do. If you did it quickly and competently and showed some interest in your boss' end of the job ("Why did you choose this vs. that tutorial?", etc.) then maybe next time he'll cut you some leeway to put your own stamp on things and then you'll have something to take credit for.
The supernova associated with the Crab Nebula was observed and recorded by the Chinese and the Arabs in 1054. It was only in 1731 that the nebula itself was charted by Western astronomers and even later that it became M1 in Messier's catalog.
Now you take this stretched image and project it onto a dome. The stretched images get further streched as it is smeared along the edges of the dome.
Right... the video card needs to provide exactly the opposite kind of stretch to pre-invert the distortion that the dome projection will cause. I play Q3 at 120 degrees FOV which gives me just a bit more 'around the corner' view than default, but not enough to really distort things. The downside is that the objects at the center of attention are proportionally smaller.
I used the quotes around safety because in my opinion at least, air bags are more of a feel-good thing and contribute little to your actual wellbeing, certainly while you are doing what the car is meant for (driving) and quite possibly the airbags will do little or nothing to actually help you if you crash.
Your mirrors and ABS brakes help you to drive effectively and safely and can therefore be considered a performance item.
Airbags, on the other hand, place a bomb in your face, that may or may not go off if there is a frontal impact and thereby keep your face off the wheel.... except in doing so it has to slam a piece of fabric in your face. If you're wearing seatbelts properly, and if you're seated properly, your face wouldn't get within a foot of the wheel to begin with. Also, if you're seated properly and wearing your seatbelt, you're also protected from rear-end collisions. And rollovers. And you'll be able to control the car better every minute you're on the road. The airbag helps you with none of that.
So I have no issue with gear that factually improves your driving experience and your interaction with others on the road (mirrors and taillights/signal lights are great innovations!). But when the lawyers are looking for a way to place the responsibility for driver and passenger safety in the hands of "passive safety" devices like airbags, or self-engaging seatbelts (you remember those? As a Canadian I was never subjected to that folly), I get irritated, because people use those features as an excuse to not use their active safety devices, which are much more effective and cheaper to boot.
For what it's worth: I own a Tundra and an Echo. I'd rather drive the Echo on my country-road commute to work, even though the Tundra is obviously more likely to "win" in the event of a deer hit, because at least with the Echo I'll have the option to try and get out of the deer's way.
I agree with you on the forced legislation part. But I think that airbags, or at least the implementation of airbags, was ill-conceived and leads uninformed people to regard them as a universal lifesaver. Airbags were never (at least, not originally) intended to replace seatbelts; yet, at least some folks have the perception that airbags make it okay to be in the car without belts on. My wife, at 5'3", is short enough that she ends up sitting close to the steering wheel and would probably be injured by the airbag regardless of any "saving" feature it might have. My Tundra has a switch where I can turn off the passenger airbag if that should be prudent; my Echo and my wife's Forester don't... and so we have to drive those cars with the knowledge that the airbag might hurt or kill a small passenger (such as my wife or one of our kids, should they have to occupy that seat because the rear seats are also being used). Not a nice feeling.
The car manufacturers should focus on making the seating, steering wheel, and pedal position more adjustable for a variety of statures, and then running driver education clinics on how to fit your car to yourself for best protection.
I've built and raced several racing sedans, and so yeah, I've had a close-up look at any number of "real" race cars, up to and including GT-1, Trans-Am, Formula Atlantic, and Indy cars. I've also done a post-crash inspection of a friend's Corolla after he had a 60 MPH near-head-on with a gravel truck. That car didn't have airbags, got shortened by about 18 inches, but because the driver and passenger were both wearing seatbelts, they survived.
If you think that an airbag is going to make a difference between life and death if you have a close encounter with a semi or a full-on F350, you're deluded.
I raced sedans (and later taught as a race driving instructor) at the amateur level for about seven years, and was witness to several spectacular incidents in that time, including a near-endo and car vs. concrete wall incidents. In all these incidents, the proper use of seatbelts prevented serious injury to the driver. The helmets were secondary, and I can think of only one incident where the helmet played a significant protective role (and in that case there was an unforeseen problem with the seatbelts that allowed the driver more-than-intended movement in the crash).
Modern production cars are amazingly crashworthy, with crushable corners and most of the components designed to avoid penetration of the passenger compartment, which is itself designed to avoid presenting sharp or non-yielding objects to the occupants. The airbag is an explosive device put inside that otherwise safe passenger compartment, and has on occasion caused severe injury to an otherwise properly restrained passenger or driver.
There will always be exceptional cases where the occupant escapes serious injury only due to the function of an airbag, but there are many documented cases where the airbag caused as much injury to the occupants as the crash itself, or where the proper use of the seatbelts (and adjusting the seat) would have prevented injury in the first place.
Stock cars (the Nextel Cup or-whatever-it's-called-these-days variety) don't have airbags.
F1 cars don't have airbags.
Thousands of racing sedans don't have airbags.
Instead, the driver wears a safety harness that fits, sits in a seat that fits, and doesn't spend time hunched over sideways fiddling with the radio controls. And they only die in exceptional circumstances.
Airbags are, like many other "safety" inventions, needless complications foisted on the car-buying public at large because a small percentage of lawyers insist that, as an occupant of a vehicle, you should be protected from yourself, regardless of any lack of common sense you might exhibit in the car.
If there is a legal avenue by which carmakers can choose not to equip certain vehicles with airbags, then power to them.
It's got nothing to do with ignorance. A live wire looks the same as one that has zero potential. Electricians and line workers take precautions, but they also necessarily make basic assumptions about How Stuff Works: I trip a breaker between the source and the load, and after that I expect the load side to be dead. Not generating random amounts of power depending on the wind or sunshine.
What if the main line supplying your grid-tied juryrigged safe-to-you system goes down for an unrelated reason, in the middle of the day while you're away? How will the linesman shut down your end so they can fix their problem?
The grid power isn't totally "clean" at 60 Hz, because it typically contains harmonics at multiples of the 60 Hz fundamental, but it is kept at very close to 60 Hz at a long term average. When you're tied into the grid, your generator or inverter is kept at 60 Hz because it costs a decent amount of power to stray away from the reference, but as soon as the grid reference disappears, your local power source will drift away from the reference phase. When the power comes back on, your local system has to resume its connection to the grid only when the phase difference is near zero, or very bad things will happen to the circuit breakers and/or your local generating equipment.
The local electrical engineering school has a Power Lab experiment where you synchronize your 3-phase experimental generator to the University's grid. The year after I went through, one lab group misunderstood the procedure and tried to close the breakers when their generator was 180 degrees out of phase. They killed power to the building wing for most of the afternoon, and the basement smelled like burning insulation for about a week.
You can't tie into the net with non-approved gear.
on
Hobbyist Renewable Energy?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Tying into the grid (i.e. anything where you need to dig into the hardwired electrical system of your house) legally requires a development permit and inspection. In my location (Calgary) the homeowner can pull a permit and do the work themselves, provided it gets inspected after the fact. However, I'm pretty sure that installation of non-certified (UL or the Canadian equivalent) is strictly forbidden.
The consequence of doing things like that without permits and/or inspection is that on the off chance that there was ever a problem, you'd be financially liable for any consequences.
There are opportunities to do strictly off-grid stuff, or at least you could keep to the low-voltage side of things. If you have a UPS for your computer or phone/router infrastructure, you could put up a solar panel to keep the standby battery charged. To the extent that the system runs off of DC power, you could supplant the power drawn from the grid with a panel, and reduce your electrical footprint that way.
Runner's World says (and an increasing number of over-60 runners bears this out) that Running Is Good For You. Good for your bones, because your bone density doesn't reduce as much. Good for your muscles, because if you don't use them, you lose them. Good for your joints, because the impact of running (in moderation) keeps things lubricated. And also good for your brain because exercise releases endorphins and other hormones that keep things in balance.
The problem is that folks generally have this view that they could never run a marathon, so why run at all (extend that to any given sport)? The answer is to recognize that pretty much anyone can improve their fitness from where it's at today, and it's amazing to see how quickly the body can become accustomed to an increased level of activity, so long as the increase is kept within reasonable bounds. Being more fit makes just about every daily activity more fun and less stressful, and it amazes me that in so many of the 'self-help' TV shows that are on the tube these days, they turn to surgery for what is really just a lack-of-exercise problem.
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Garage door openers come in 1/2 and 3/4 HP (or bigger) ratings, have high torque gear reduction drives, and you can buy spare parts from whoever the maker is...
I've seen some pretty high density on the highway already... we don't need more of that.
If I was going from company A to new company Z and had to design a similar product, then I'd use my experience to first create the required proof-of-concept prototype, only using such materials and other tools that are available to company Z. The fact that I'd done something similar before is where my experience would pay off... not in being able to conjure up a design out of thin air and then to have to explain its workings without the benefit of any background data.
... because you can believe everything that the Chinese media broadcasts (just referring to recent Olympic opening ceremony shenanigans, not any deeper political hooey). Mod parent up +1 for superlative irony/cynicism!
That's standard procedure straight from the Patent Troll Handbook. You build up your patent's credibility by getting a few helpless companies to roll over, and then you use that as ammunition when you go after the bigger fish.
Really... plastics shrink as they're cooled from the mold, and how much shrinkage you get also depends on how much plastic is there. Now notice that all your long Lego trusses are exactly dead straight. Even the ones that are 20, 30, or 40 years old. And the 40 year old pieces interlock perfectly with the brand new ones. That says a lot for the plastics composition too. Go check out the dash on a 40 year old Dodge and see how much it's changed dimensionally. It's all in the details.
"it", of course, being c.
English also doesn't have a word (or phrase) equivalent to "Bon appetit". Definitely because the English have no use for such a phrase.
Trying to recast the problems we've been solving (or creating) with digital computers in analog computer terms is an interesting exercise; some problems have analogs (pun not really intended, but oddly appropriate) that give extra insight into the nature of the problem, and others are just going to be impossible. How do you express a sorting operation in terms of differential equations?
That thought train led him to do some fundamental work in particle scattering and path integrals, IIRC, and eventually to the Feynman diagrams that are now commonly used to describe some aspects of particle interactions.
So you're thinking some good deep thoughts there, but I can't give you a good answer other than "they just know". Basically the "proper" reflection is the only one that is coherent to the observer and the other reflected beams are all out of phase so they might as well not happen... and therefore they don't. Or something like that.
The right answer is to use a Kamm tail, where the taper is cut off and vortex generators, if necessary, are used to cause a high-pressure zone to build behind the cut-off part. Many of the current crop of high-efficiency cars already have airflow management features on the rear of the car, and that is in fact why the rear ends are vertical with sharp corners.
I have mod points, but there is no category for "oddly appropriate gratuitous abuse". Whadya think?
The cool thing is that, like aerodynamic downforce, electrostatic friction would be adjustable (on the fly), and would not incur an inertia penalty relative to just using mass to increase your traction. If you could drive your car on near-bicycle size tires so as to reduce rolling friction, and still have acceptable acceleration, cornering and braking ability due to adaptive static friction control then it would be possible to get significantly higher mileage.
Exactly right. If you'd developed some new idea on your own, with little or no guidance or support from your supervisor and THEN he took credit for your innovations, then there's a problem. If you're a code monkey ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H peon ^H^H^H^H junior web programmer implementing others' ideas, then you are doing no more and no less than what your boss asked you to do. If you did it quickly and competently and showed some interest in your boss' end of the job ("Why did you choose this vs. that tutorial?", etc.) then maybe next time he'll cut you some leeway to put your own stamp on things and then you'll have something to take credit for.
The supernova associated with the Crab Nebula was observed and recorded by the Chinese and the Arabs in 1054. It was only in 1731 that the nebula itself was charted by Western astronomers and even later that it became M1 in Messier's catalog.
Right... the video card needs to provide exactly the opposite kind of stretch to pre-invert the distortion that the dome projection will cause. I play Q3 at 120 degrees FOV which gives me just a bit more 'around the corner' view than default, but not enough to really distort things. The downside is that the objects at the center of attention are proportionally smaller.
Your mirrors and ABS brakes help you to drive effectively and safely and can therefore be considered a performance item.
Airbags, on the other hand, place a bomb in your face, that may or may not go off if there is a frontal impact and thereby keep your face off the wheel.... except in doing so it has to slam a piece of fabric in your face. If you're wearing seatbelts properly, and if you're seated properly, your face wouldn't get within a foot of the wheel to begin with. Also, if you're seated properly and wearing your seatbelt, you're also protected from rear-end collisions. And rollovers. And you'll be able to control the car better every minute you're on the road. The airbag helps you with none of that.
So I have no issue with gear that factually improves your driving experience and your interaction with others on the road (mirrors and taillights/signal lights are great innovations!). But when the lawyers are looking for a way to place the responsibility for driver and passenger safety in the hands of "passive safety" devices like airbags, or self-engaging seatbelts (you remember those? As a Canadian I was never subjected to that folly), I get irritated, because people use those features as an excuse to not use their active safety devices, which are much more effective and cheaper to boot. For what it's worth: I own a Tundra and an Echo. I'd rather drive the Echo on my country-road commute to work, even though the Tundra is obviously more likely to "win" in the event of a deer hit, because at least with the Echo I'll have the option to try and get out of the deer's way.
The car manufacturers should focus on making the seating, steering wheel, and pedal position more adjustable for a variety of statures, and then running driver education clinics on how to fit your car to yourself for best protection.
If you think that an airbag is going to make a difference between life and death if you have a close encounter with a semi or a full-on F350, you're deluded.
Modern production cars are amazingly crashworthy, with crushable corners and most of the components designed to avoid penetration of the passenger compartment, which is itself designed to avoid presenting sharp or non-yielding objects to the occupants. The airbag is an explosive device put inside that otherwise safe passenger compartment, and has on occasion caused severe injury to an otherwise properly restrained passenger or driver.
There will always be exceptional cases where the occupant escapes serious injury only due to the function of an airbag, but there are many documented cases where the airbag caused as much injury to the occupants as the crash itself, or where the proper use of the seatbelts (and adjusting the seat) would have prevented injury in the first place.
F1 cars don't have airbags.
Thousands of racing sedans don't have airbags.
Instead, the driver wears a safety harness that fits, sits in a seat that fits, and doesn't spend time hunched over sideways fiddling with the radio controls. And they only die in exceptional circumstances.
Airbags are, like many other "safety" inventions, needless complications foisted on the car-buying public at large because a small percentage of lawyers insist that, as an occupant of a vehicle, you should be protected from yourself, regardless of any lack of common sense you might exhibit in the car.
If there is a legal avenue by which carmakers can choose not to equip certain vehicles with airbags, then power to them.
What if the main line supplying your grid-tied juryrigged safe-to-you system goes down for an unrelated reason, in the middle of the day while you're away? How will the linesman shut down your end so they can fix their problem?
The local electrical engineering school has a Power Lab experiment where you synchronize your 3-phase experimental generator to the University's grid. The year after I went through, one lab group misunderstood the procedure and tried to close the breakers when their generator was 180 degrees out of phase. They killed power to the building wing for most of the afternoon, and the basement smelled like burning insulation for about a week.
The consequence of doing things like that without permits and/or inspection is that on the off chance that there was ever a problem, you'd be financially liable for any consequences.
There are opportunities to do strictly off-grid stuff, or at least you could keep to the low-voltage side of things. If you have a UPS for your computer or phone/router infrastructure, you could put up a solar panel to keep the standby battery charged. To the extent that the system runs off of DC power, you could supplant the power drawn from the grid with a panel, and reduce your electrical footprint that way.
The problem is that folks generally have this view that they could never run a marathon, so why run at all (extend that to any given sport)? The answer is to recognize that pretty much anyone can improve their fitness from where it's at today, and it's amazing to see how quickly the body can become accustomed to an increased level of activity, so long as the increase is kept within reasonable bounds. Being more fit makes just about every daily activity more fun and less stressful, and it amazes me that in so many of the 'self-help' TV shows that are on the tube these days, they turn to surgery for what is really just a lack-of-exercise problem.