...would it have killed you, Mr. Gates, to have named the two most commonly-used directories on a Windows box "/Programs" and "/Users"?
Do you think it would help if the file was called "C:\/Users\Fred Foobar\Application Data\Stupid Company Name Here For No Reason At All\Stupid Company's Application\Configuration Data.cfg"?;)
American goes to India, and earns $5,000 per year for two years. He spends $2,500 per year on his living costs, so when he returns to America, he has $5,000 in the bank...What about the American. He is now living in America with $5,000 in the bank.
How about:
American goes to India and earns $5000 per year for two years. That makes him rich beyond the wildest dreams of his Indian peers. He lives like a king for $4,000 per year living costs, pisses another $500 per year up the wall on who knows what, and has $1000 left for his ticket home. He arrives home with the same bank balance as when he left, a big grin, and a hell of a lot of good stories...
>> It's easy to look at Fox from inside the US and think, "Wow, this is terrible..."
> As a Canadian, I would like to add that it is also easy to look at Fox from outside the US and think, "Wow, this is terrible..."
As and Australian who has visited the US a couple of times this year, I'd like to add that it's easy to look at Fox from inside the US as an outsider and think "Wow, this is terrible...".
PS - Rupert Murdoch is, AFAIK, a US citizen. He needed to become one for legal/corporate reasons. In any case, if he's doing something bad, we'll disown him. Just like we claim New Zealanders who do good things.
It's an old adage, but it remains true: there ain't no substitute for cubic inches.
...of air (at standard temperature and pressure).
The most critical thing is how many moles of oxygen your engine is ingesting.
It's a matter of personal preference whether you choose to let that air "leak" into a big engine at STP, or whether you choose to force them into a smaller engine at higher pressure.
Of course, the other option is to let the air "leak" into a small engine at STP, but run that engine at frightening speed to get more air through in less time...which is how Honda and BMW tend to get big power out of their hi-po engines. #include
I read a great interview once with a senior engineer at Saab, who was quizzed on "new" technology such as displacement-on-demand [1]. His reply was (excuse my misquoting and paraphrasing): "Saab has used displacement-on-demand for many years. We call it a turbocharger. Under light loads, we use a small engine. Under heavy loads, we force air into the engine at higher pressure, giving the same effect as using a much larger engine"
A small engine with a turbo is lighter than a big engine of the same power and torque. ET that:-P
tim
[1] Displacement-on-demand, where a big (6- or 8- cylinder engine) has fuel and spark cut off from cylinders at light loads - making it run as a small (usually 4-cylinder) engine - which has better fuel efficiency.
Ahem, that will learn me to do my research before posting!
Rewind...
The limited storage of this thing would be less of a concern if it is used in partnership with a portable HD-based bulk-storage device, of which there are many available. See parent for details.
Apparently, you can even transfer data between various flash-cards and your iPod...so we only need to carry a small number of geek-boxes when we're out in the field!
Somebody needs to...
invent (or hack) an iPod-like-device to act as a portable hard disk for all these flash-RAM-hungry devices.
I've thought of it many times for my still camera. Unless I buy lots of (expensive) flash cards, or lug a laptop with me, I can only shoot as many photos as I have room for...as we all know and have dealt with for many years already.
What I need is a pocket-sized, battery-powered intermediate storage device. When my camera (or voice recorder or tapeless video cam) gets full, I could plug it in to the USB port of my HD tranfer unit (or stick my SD card in the slot, or whatever), hit the "transfer" button; and in as much time as it would take to reload a film camera, have an empty card ready to start shooting again.
Back in civilisation, the HD tranfer unit could plug in like a regular USB drive...just like a flash card reader...so I can do what I normally would do with my photos/video/etc.
As an added bonus - now that it's established technology and lots of people carry them anyway - the HD transfer unit could hold a few GB of music (in.ogg format, of course, to keep the/. zealots happy) and have a decoder chip and headphone socket and whatever else these iPod-like devices have.
For me, being able to download data from my camera would be a digital music player's "killer app".
No, I don't want my country to join the US. I want your President to stop acting on our behalf.
And as for the rest of your sarcastic little spiel - yeah, good on you. Have you even been outside of your own country to know how things work elsewhere?
By the way - you can send as many ambassadors to Europe as you please - but they'll all be a bit far from us here in Australia to have much effect. Ass, you, me.
the only people who believe in the concept of the US President being the "leader of the democratic free world" are... Americans
True, but the crux of the problem is that the US President himself is one of them.
As long as he feels entitled to run around the world "fixing" things for everybody, in his role as leader of the free world, defender of democracy, able to leap tall buildings etc. etc., there is a problem.
I'm concerned about the upcoming election because the outcome has a very real impact on me, as an Australian.
I'm annoyed that I have no political voice in a system that effects me.
I'm outraged that the leaders of this system claim to represent global democracy, when the majority of the globe have no democratic input.
Whether or not the USA is a democracy in itself is, frankly, debatable.
Better yet - can claim a mandate as the leader of the "democratic free world". Hey, if the US president wants to be the leader of the democratic free world, let's open the election up to the rest of the free world...using a sensible electoral process.
BTW - now that Iraq has been "liberated", shouldn't they also be allowed to participate in the election of the "leader of the democratic free world"?
If the US presidential candidates don't want to open the ballots to the rest of the world, they should stop claiming to be our representative, and start ceding some power to a globally representative organisation
I'm guessing the park brake on a truck is a transmission brake - locking the drive shaft and hence the rear wheels of the prime mover. I can imagine that being an... intereting... manoeuvre with three loaded trailers behind you!
Even in a car - you want to know what you're doing before you apply on the park brake while in motion.
The park brake almost [1] invariably acts on the rear wheels only. Rear wheel lock-up is a very dangerous condition, and one which all carmakers work hard to avoid. Most regulations require that the front wheels lock before the rear.
With the front wheels locked, the vehicle continues in a more or less straight line - depending what it bounces off;-). Even if you were turning, you're now going straight. The rolling rear wheels make it a stable condition. And cars are built to hit things front-on with least risk to occupants.
With the rear wheels locked before the fronts, you're most likely to start turning laps of yourself. Especially if the front wheels aren't steering straight ahead.
"Steering" with the handbrake can be fun if you know what's going to happen - and it's a standard rally technique, to induce oversteer and slide into a corner - but it's not something you want to be doing in an emergency...
And besides, with the uni-shoe "drum-in-hat" park brakes on the back of many modern disc-braked cars, the noise alone will put you off applying the park brake while moving.
[1] 80s-vintage Subarus had front wheel park brakes, just to be contrary. I'm sure there have been others. They're not much good for doing "handbrake turns".
>> I guess "emergency brake" is an Americanism, as it doesn't make sense).
>
> Or, perhaps in countries outside America they don't sell vans and trucks.
> In these you operate your so called "hand"brake with a foot.
No, in countries outside America they sell vans and trucks with predominantly manual transmissions, and these typically have a hand brake - often an "umbrella handle" type that you pull from the dashboard, if there isn't room for a conventional lever on the transmission tunnel. Sure, there are a few that have a foot-operated "hand brake" (a fourth pedal next to the clutch), but they're the exception rather than the rule.
That said, here in Australia at least, there are a growing number of (American derived/designed) cars with a foot-operated "hand brake". They are one of the factors leading to the more widespread use of the term "park brake".
Back to the article...if you cut the ignition on a car, you do NOT lose your power-assisted brakes. As another poster has pointed out, the brake booster is "energised" by manifold vacuum - but there is a non-return valve in the vacuum system, so the booster holds a vacuum even when the manifold has none (ie under high load, turbo boost, or when switched off).
With the engine switched off, you'll still get a couple of boosted brake applications before it dies. And even then, most regulatory bodies - particularly the EU - have a requirement for brake effectiveness with the booster disconnected. True, the brakes won't have the same nice feel as when they're boosted, but you can certainly stop without boost.
Most key ignition switches have several positions. These are, generally, "lock-off-on-start". Sometimes you even need to take the key out before the steering locks; on others, you need to push another button (or push the key in) to turn the key to the "lock" position. In every car I've seen, you can turn the ignition off without locking the steering.
I have no idea how one usually kills the ignition on one of these card-access cars - I would assume there's a "start" and a "stop" button. Not sure why the driver didn't try this...or why it didn't work if he did.
As for downshifting to slow down - if the cruise control was locked on, this wouldn't make any difference. The cruise control would just try to open the throttle to bring the car up to the requested speed anyway, regardless of what gear it was in...short of bouncing off the engine's rev limiter (or other system control limits). And an electronic auto would probably refuse to shift.
I had a similar thing happen to me, in a car without cruise control. The throttle cable jammed as I crested a hill...so the car kept on accellerating. At the time, the best I could think of was to stomp on the brakes and bring the whole thing to an engine-stalling stop...in a cloud of stinking brake smoke. That said, it was a much less powerful car, and the throttle was only jammed mostly open - not under control of a crazed computer intent on applying enough power to maintain 120mph! In the heat of the moment, the option of switching the engine off never occurred to me...
That's the biggest flaw in our electoral system: we need to be allowed a preferential above-the-line vote in the upper houses.
If we could number the above-the-line boxes 1 through 9 (or whatever), that should be taken as an implied numbering of all candidates below the line, in order listed (as chosen by the party/group), for each column (the only problem is that it doesn't allow for ungrouped independents - unless they were allocated a column each).
As it stands, we have the choice of spending half a day numbering candidates 1 through 87 (or whatever), or selecting only one above-the-line box and letting somebody else's back-room deals decide our preferences for us. Not good enough.
In a party-political system, I'm happy for each party to decide how to distribute their own internal preferences. But I don't want them deciding how to distribute my vote if they're eliminated from the counting.
So, I always fill in my upper house ballot longhand - and did so this time too (postal vote - I'm interstate next weekend). I support the Democrats - so I numbered them early in the count - but I'd sooner give my vote to Satan himself than these neo-Christian whack jobs, so I save them until very very late in the count. Preference deals be damned.
I find it incredible that preference deals count for anything in the lower house. The only "direction of preferences" that can happen is on each party's "How to vote" card. Do people really follow these, blindly?! That's a disgrace.
The other thing I find incredible, although quite off-topic for this discussion, is that the USA still doesn't have a preferential voting system. For a country that is so passionately and evangelically pro-democracy...they really should try democracy themselves one day!
The other option is for the buildings to be cooled using heat-pump air conditioners.
These will dump a whole lot of heat into the Toronto atmosphere.
By other posters' comments, it would appear that Toronto is powered by burning coal. The power required to run air conditioners means more waste heat will be dumped into the lake and the atmosphere. Atmospheric warming will, in itself, raise the surface temperature of the lake by a few zillionths of a degree.
Of course, the absolute quantities of heat are negligible when compared with the thermal capacity of Lake Ontario. My point is that however you cool Toronto in summer, the rejected heat is going to go somewhere, and may have an environmental impact.
In any case, I would have thought that a bit of spare summer heat dumped into a heat tank (aka lake) near Toronto wouldn't be a bad thing come winter...
So what you're saying is that American coffee being weak as piss is for safety. If it was as strong as normal coffee, you might not survive your third super-sized (8 gallon) cup of the morning...
The issue with WAP was... the uselessly small LCD interface on phones...The standard 2004 digital mobile phone has larger and more useful display and keyboard interface
And therein lies the entire problem of "convergent technologies".
I don't want to go back to the bad old days of walking around with half a brick in my hip pocket. I don't want a larger and more useful display and keyboard. If I want to carry 30GB of MP3s and a camera, I'll get an Ipod-like-device and a camera.
But for most of the time, I just want a very small, very light, unobtrusive device for making and receiving telephone calls in the times when I'm not in front of a computer.
But experience has shown time and again that I'm out-of-step with the average user's needs.
I see parallels between WAP's return from the dead and SMS. My first GSM phone (which was a cheap out-of-date Motorola in 1997) was entirely able to send and receive SMS.
Suddenly, in about 2001, SMS was an amazing new technology that everybody wanted to use. Suddenly there was talk about SMS on landline phones, because people couldn't live without it. I'm sure most of them _had_ been living without it for the previous 5 years, carrying around a SMS-capable phone, with no knowledge of what to do with it.
By contrast, WAP had a triumphant launch, and was going to change the world. Everybody carried around WAP-enabled phones, with no knowledge of what to do with it. Now, as others have said, providers are using WAP as a medium for delivering content...and it's starting to take off, because it has a purpose.
Oh well. I just bought new phone. It's tiny, it's light, it's unobtrusive, and it has no WAP capability. I use it to make and receive phone calls when I'm not in front of a computer. It's novel, I know, but it works for me.
i never understood those virus writers
why write a virus at all if it does not destroy the victims computer?
If the victim's computer is dead, how does the virus distribute itself?
The only way I can see for a virus to be seriously destructive yet still reproduce effectively is to use a booby-trap - a virus detector detector.
The virus would need to sit quiet and benign in the background, reproducing itself, until a virus detector starts to notice it - and _then_ flash the bios to death.
why would any linux user use MS Office, especially when they have to pay for it?
I would.
My wife is not a geek, but she has used MS Office, at a very high level, for many years. Those 95% of features that 5% of users use? - she's that 5%.
Whenever I make mutterings about switching over to Linux, her first question is "does it run Office?".
She doesn't want to start from scratch learning OpenOffice.org. And that's her prerogative.
In my household, Linux's "killer ap" will be MS Office. Not "an office package that is largely but not entirely file-compatible with MS Office"...the real deal, with functionality and interface the same as the real deal.
You may as well ask "why would any WINDOWS user use MS Office, especially when they have to pay for it". People do. People prefer it. People will pay money for it.
I've ridden a few different wheelsets in my day, and it's pretty easy to tell the difference.
Quite likely - but "feeling a difference" and "going faster" are not necessarily the same thing;-)
A heavier rim will have more of a gyroscopic effect than a lighter one - and that will certainly be noticeable. At the same time, it will take _slightly_ more power to accelerate...but as I said, with the angular accelerations we're looking at, it won't be significantly different whether the mass is at the rim (big mass moment of inertia), in the hub (rotating, but with small MMI), or in the axle (not rotating at all).
Aerodynamics are another issue altogether...and that's nothing to do with weight. In fact, lots of popular deep-vee "aero" TT rims would be heavier (and have a higher MMI) than a less aerodynamic rim - but the aerodynamic benfits make up for the extra grams (and gram-metre-squareds).
every bit of rotating weight you shave off the wheels counts far more than the relatively stationary weight on the frame or componentry
I suggest you do the maths and confirm this for yourself.
"Rotating mass" (mass moment of inertia) is only significant when accellerating - a massive flywheel will not make the bike any slower at constant speed in the flat. With the magnitudes of accelleration possible on a bike, and the size of the wheels, the difference in accelleration possible with a set of bling-bling (or throw-away mountain-stage race wheels) is finite but miniscule.
There's always a benefit in reducing weight. Whether it's in the rims or the frame, you still have to drag those grams up the hill. But from a purely analytical perspective, it's better to save 6 grams from the frame than 5 grams from the wheels - contrary to the conventional wisdom that rotating mass is worth several times as much as stationary mass.
reduce the amount of weight placed on the tires to increase fuel efficiency while cruising
That's something I'm having trouble to get enthused about. The articles go on about the fuel efficiency benefits of rail operation, due to reduced rolling drag.
By far the biggest contributor to fuel consumption on a truck or bus at 100km/h is aerodynamic drag.
The most effective way for trucks and busses to reduce their fuel consumption is to slipstream. Other than a token futuristic streamlining job, this Bladerunner system does nothing to reduce aerodynamic drag - so total fuel consumption wouldn't be significantly reduced compared with on-road operation.
If we could get a whole fleet of blade-runner trucks and busses, rolling on rails, closely coupled to reduce aerodynamic drag...
...it would look just like a conventional train, with the efficiencies and limitations of a conventional train.
Re:Americans are not all litigious bastards
on
By Road and Rail?
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· Score: 2, Funny
I'm not a litigious bastard yet am an American. Please, let us refrain from blanket stereotypes.
I am a litigious bastard, and I'm not an American.
Retract your statements, or I'll see you in court!
installing brand new hardware is a lot cheaper than getting 500 PCs retrofitted with RAM/HDD/burner whatever.. Say a technician costs $50/hour, and it takes 15 minutes to fit new RAM per machine
...that means you're paying $12.50 per machine to install $100-worth of RAM.
What are you going to do with the other $387.50 of your $500 hardware budget?
Back on topic, my (teacher) wife's school is 100% Windows. Each kid with a laptop, work submitted by email, on floppy disk or CD if the kids get too enthusiastic with the eye-candy.
It's enough of a struggle getting computer-illiterate teachers with 30 years chalk-and-ink experience to cope with, let alone support a roomfull of kids on, one operating system...while the kids are IR-beaming games across the classroom to each other and trying to hack through the school's firewall to their favourite pr0n sites.
"Mrs Smith, Johnny changed my IPtables rules and I can't get the assignment off the network, can you fix it?"
*shudder*
As I understand it, if a kid's laptop gets corrupted, infected, or detected with games on it, it goes to the IT workshop and is "slurped" - the HD is re-imaged with the default Windows install, and they lose anything that was on the local HD.
Of course, this would be possible (even easier) with a Linux monoculture...but who's going to train the hundred non-techy teachers and 1500-odd students, who have only ever seen Windows? By my understaning, the entire IT staff is one teacher-geek and about two technicians...
This is one of the things that keeps Windows on my home system(s). She knows Office inside out, uses it every day, spends most of her "spare" time teaching teachers and students how to use it, and won't look at any option that won't run Word and Excel natively.
Slashdot Mirror
(In Soviet Russia...) In this case, it looks more as though Linux 0wn3rZ them!
...would it have killed you, Mr. Gates, to have named the two most commonly-used directories on a Windows box "/Programs" and "/Users"? Do you think it would help if the file was called "C:\/Users\Fred Foobar\Application Data\Stupid Company Name Here For No Reason At All\Stupid Company's Application\Configuration Data.cfg"? ;)
How about:
American goes to India and earns $5000 per year for two years. That makes him rich beyond the wildest dreams of his Indian peers. He lives like a king for $4,000 per year living costs, pisses another $500 per year up the wall on who knows what, and has $1000 left for his ticket home. He arrives home with the same bank balance as when he left, a big grin, and a hell of a lot of good stories...
Just to clarify - are you referring to Microsoft, SCO, or the American troops in Iraq?
>> It's easy to look at Fox from inside the US and think, "Wow, this is terrible..."
> As a Canadian, I would like to add that it is also easy to look at Fox from outside the US and think, "Wow, this is terrible..."
As and Australian who has visited the US a couple of times this year, I'd like to add that it's easy to look at Fox from inside the US as an outsider and think "Wow, this is terrible...".
PS - Rupert Murdoch is, AFAIK, a US citizen. He needed to become one for legal/corporate reasons. In any case, if he's doing something bad, we'll disown him. Just like we claim New Zealanders who do good things.
...of air (at standard temperature and pressure).
The most critical thing is how many moles of oxygen your engine is ingesting.
It's a matter of personal preference whether you choose to let that air "leak" into a big engine at STP, or whether you choose to force them into a smaller engine at higher pressure.
Of course, the other option is to let the air "leak" into a small engine at STP, but run that engine at frightening speed to get more air through in less time...which is how Honda and BMW tend to get big power out of their hi-po engines. #include
I read a great interview once with a senior engineer at Saab, who was quizzed on "new" technology such as displacement-on-demand [1]. His reply was (excuse my misquoting and paraphrasing): "Saab has used displacement-on-demand for many years. We call it a turbocharger. Under light loads, we use a small engine. Under heavy loads, we force air into the engine at higher pressure, giving the same effect as using a much larger engine"
A small engine with a turbo is lighter than a big engine of the same power and torque. ET that :-P
tim
[1] Displacement-on-demand, where a big (6- or 8- cylinder engine) has fuel and spark cut off from cylinders at light loads - making it run as a small (usually 4-cylinder) engine - which has better fuel efficiency.
Rewind...
The limited storage of this thing would be less of a concern if it is used in partnership with a portable HD-based bulk-storage device, of which there are many available. See parent for details.
Apparently, you can even transfer data between various flash-cards and your iPod...so we only need to carry a small number of geek-boxes when we're out in the field!
invent (or hack) an iPod-like-device to act as a portable hard disk for all these flash-RAM-hungry devices.
I've thought of it many times for my still camera. Unless I buy lots of (expensive) flash cards, or lug a laptop with me, I can only shoot as many photos as I have room for...as we all know and have dealt with for many years already.
What I need is a pocket-sized, battery-powered intermediate storage device. When my camera (or voice recorder or tapeless video cam) gets full, I could plug it in to the USB port of my HD tranfer unit (or stick my SD card in the slot, or whatever), hit the "transfer" button; and in as much time as it would take to reload a film camera, have an empty card ready to start shooting again.
Back in civilisation, the HD tranfer unit could plug in like a regular USB drive...just like a flash card reader...so I can do what I normally would do with my photos/video/etc.
As an added bonus - now that it's established technology and lots of people carry them anyway - the HD transfer unit could hold a few GB of music (in .ogg format, of course, to keep the /. zealots happy) and have a decoder chip and headphone socket and whatever else these iPod-like devices have.
For me, being able to download data from my camera would be a digital music player's "killer app".
No, I don't want my country to join the US. I want your President to stop acting on our behalf.
And as for the rest of your sarcastic little spiel - yeah, good on you. Have you even been outside of your own country to know how things work elsewhere?
By the way - you can send as many ambassadors to Europe as you please - but they'll all be a bit far from us here in Australia to have much effect. Ass, you, me.
True, but the crux of the problem is that the US President himself is one of them.
As long as he feels entitled to run around the world "fixing" things for everybody, in his role as leader of the free world, defender of democracy, able to leap tall buildings etc. etc., there is a problem.
I'm concerned about the upcoming election because the outcome has a very real impact on me, as an Australian.
I'm annoyed that I have no political voice in a system that effects me.
I'm outraged that the leaders of this system claim to represent global democracy, when the majority of the globe have no democratic input.
Whether or not the USA is a democracy in itself is, frankly, debatable.
Regardless, the USA is a global dictator.
Americans love democracy so much...they really should try it some time.
It puzzles me how somebody who won the vote of less than 25% of the population can claim to be democratically elected.
Better yet - can claim a mandate as the leader of the "democratic free world". Hey, if the US president wants to be the leader of the democratic free world, let's open the election up to the rest of the free world...using a sensible electoral process.
BTW - now that Iraq has been "liberated", shouldn't they also be allowed to participate in the election of the "leader of the democratic free world"?
If the US presidential candidates don't want to open the ballots to the rest of the world, they should stop claiming to be our representative, and start ceding some power to a globally representative organisation
I'm guessing the park brake on a truck is a transmission brake - locking the drive shaft and hence the rear wheels of the prime mover. I can imagine that being an... intereting... manoeuvre with three loaded trailers behind you!
Even in a car - you want to know what you're doing before you apply on the park brake while in motion.
The park brake almost [1] invariably acts on the rear wheels only. Rear wheel lock-up is a very dangerous condition, and one which all carmakers work hard to avoid. Most regulations require that the front wheels lock before the rear.
With the front wheels locked, the vehicle continues in a more or less straight line - depending what it bounces off ;-). Even if you were turning, you're now going straight. The rolling rear wheels make it a stable condition. And cars are built to hit things front-on with least risk to occupants.
With the rear wheels locked before the fronts, you're most likely to start turning laps of yourself. Especially if the front wheels aren't steering straight ahead.
"Steering" with the handbrake can be fun if you know what's going to happen - and it's a standard rally technique, to induce oversteer and slide into a corner - but it's not something you want to be doing in an emergency...
And besides, with the uni-shoe "drum-in-hat" park brakes on the back of many modern disc-braked cars, the noise alone will put you off applying the park brake while moving. [1] 80s-vintage Subarus had front wheel park brakes, just to be contrary. I'm sure there have been others. They're not much good for doing "handbrake turns".
>
> Or, perhaps in countries outside America they don't sell vans and trucks.
> In these you operate your so called "hand"brake with a foot.
No, in countries outside America they sell vans and trucks with predominantly manual transmissions, and these typically have a hand brake - often an "umbrella handle" type that you pull from the dashboard, if there isn't room for a conventional lever on the transmission tunnel. Sure, there are a few that have a foot-operated "hand brake" (a fourth pedal next to the clutch), but they're the exception rather than the rule.
That said, here in Australia at least, there are a growing number of (American derived/designed) cars with a foot-operated "hand brake". They are one of the factors leading to the more widespread use of the term "park brake".
Back to the article...if you cut the ignition on a car, you do NOT lose your power-assisted brakes. As another poster has pointed out, the brake booster is "energised" by manifold vacuum - but there is a non-return valve in the vacuum system, so the booster holds a vacuum even when the manifold has none (ie under high load, turbo boost, or when switched off).
With the engine switched off, you'll still get a couple of boosted brake applications before it dies. And even then, most regulatory bodies - particularly the EU - have a requirement for brake effectiveness with the booster disconnected. True, the brakes won't have the same nice feel as when they're boosted, but you can certainly stop without boost.
Most key ignition switches have several positions. These are, generally, "lock-off-on-start". Sometimes you even need to take the key out before the steering locks; on others, you need to push another button (or push the key in) to turn the key to the "lock" position. In every car I've seen, you can turn the ignition off without locking the steering.
I have no idea how one usually kills the ignition on one of these card-access cars - I would assume there's a "start" and a "stop" button. Not sure why the driver didn't try this...or why it didn't work if he did.
As for downshifting to slow down - if the cruise control was locked on, this wouldn't make any difference. The cruise control would just try to open the throttle to bring the car up to the requested speed anyway, regardless of what gear it was in...short of bouncing off the engine's rev limiter (or other system control limits). And an electronic auto would probably refuse to shift.
I had a similar thing happen to me, in a car without cruise control. The throttle cable jammed as I crested a hill...so the car kept on accellerating. At the time, the best I could think of was to stomp on the brakes and bring the whole thing to an engine-stalling stop...in a cloud of stinking brake smoke. That said, it was a much less powerful car, and the throttle was only jammed mostly open - not under control of a crazed computer intent on applying enough power to maintain 120mph! In the heat of the moment, the option of switching the engine off never occurred to me...
That's the biggest flaw in our electoral system: we need to be allowed a preferential above-the-line vote in the upper houses.
If we could number the above-the-line boxes 1 through 9 (or whatever), that should be taken as an implied numbering of all candidates below the line, in order listed (as chosen by the party/group), for each column (the only problem is that it doesn't allow for ungrouped independents - unless they were allocated a column each).
As it stands, we have the choice of spending half a day numbering candidates 1 through 87 (or whatever), or selecting only one above-the-line box and letting somebody else's back-room deals decide our preferences for us. Not good enough.
In a party-political system, I'm happy for each party to decide how to distribute their own internal preferences. But I don't want them deciding how to distribute my vote if they're eliminated from the counting.
So, I always fill in my upper house ballot longhand - and did so this time too (postal vote - I'm interstate next weekend). I support the Democrats - so I numbered them early in the count - but I'd sooner give my vote to Satan himself than these neo-Christian whack jobs, so I save them until very very late in the count. Preference deals be damned.
I find it incredible that preference deals count for anything in the lower house. The only "direction of preferences" that can happen is on each party's "How to vote" card. Do people really follow these, blindly?! That's a disgrace.
The other thing I find incredible, although quite off-topic for this discussion, is that the USA still doesn't have a preferential voting system. For a country that is so passionately and evangelically pro-democracy...they really should try democracy themselves one day!
These will dump a whole lot of heat into the Toronto atmosphere.
By other posters' comments, it would appear that Toronto is powered by burning coal. The power required to run air conditioners means more waste heat will be dumped into the lake and the atmosphere. Atmospheric warming will, in itself, raise the surface temperature of the lake by a few zillionths of a degree.
Of course, the absolute quantities of heat are negligible when compared with the thermal capacity of Lake Ontario. My point is that however you cool Toronto in summer, the rejected heat is going to go somewhere, and may have an environmental impact.
In any case, I would have thought that a bit of spare summer heat dumped into a heat tank (aka lake) near Toronto wouldn't be a bad thing come winter...
So what you're saying is that American coffee being weak as piss is for safety. If it was as strong as normal coffee, you might not survive your third super-sized (8 gallon) cup of the morning...
In Soviet Russia, source opens you!
And therein lies the entire problem of "convergent technologies".
I don't want to go back to the bad old days of walking around with half a brick in my hip pocket. I don't want a larger and more useful display and keyboard. If I want to carry 30GB of MP3s and a camera, I'll get an Ipod-like-device and a camera.
But for most of the time, I just want a very small, very light, unobtrusive device for making and receiving telephone calls in the times when I'm not in front of a computer.
But experience has shown time and again that I'm out-of-step with the average user's needs.
I see parallels between WAP's return from the dead and SMS. My first GSM phone (which was a cheap out-of-date Motorola in 1997) was entirely able to send and receive SMS.
Suddenly, in about 2001, SMS was an amazing new technology that everybody wanted to use. Suddenly there was talk about SMS on landline phones, because people couldn't live without it. I'm sure most of them _had_ been living without it for the previous 5 years, carrying around a SMS-capable phone, with no knowledge of what to do with it.
By contrast, WAP had a triumphant launch, and was going to change the world. Everybody carried around WAP-enabled phones, with no knowledge of what to do with it. Now, as others have said, providers are using WAP as a medium for delivering content...and it's starting to take off, because it has a purpose.
Oh well. I just bought new phone. It's tiny, it's light, it's unobtrusive, and it has no WAP capability. I use it to make and receive phone calls when I'm not in front of a computer. It's novel, I know, but it works for me.
why write a virus at all if it does not destroy the victims computer?
If the victim's computer is dead, how does the virus distribute itself?
The only way I can see for a virus to be seriously destructive yet still reproduce effectively is to use a booby-trap - a virus detector detector.
The virus would need to sit quiet and benign in the background, reproducing itself, until a virus detector starts to notice it - and _then_ flash the bios to death.
Not that I'd want to give anybody ideas...
I would.
My wife is not a geek, but she has used MS Office, at a very high level, for many years. Those 95% of features that 5% of users use? - she's that 5%.
Whenever I make mutterings about switching over to Linux, her first question is "does it run Office?".
She doesn't want to start from scratch learning OpenOffice.org. And that's her prerogative.
In my household, Linux's "killer ap" will be MS Office. Not "an office package that is largely but not entirely file-compatible with MS Office"...the real deal, with functionality and interface the same as the real deal.
You may as well ask "why would any WINDOWS user use MS Office, especially when they have to pay for it". People do. People prefer it. People will pay money for it.
Quite likely - but "feeling a difference" and "going faster" are not necessarily the same thing ;-)
A heavier rim will have more of a gyroscopic effect than a lighter one - and that will certainly be noticeable. At the same time, it will take _slightly_ more power to accelerate...but as I said, with the angular accelerations we're looking at, it won't be significantly different whether the mass is at the rim (big mass moment of inertia), in the hub (rotating, but with small MMI), or in the axle (not rotating at all).
Aerodynamics are another issue altogether...and that's nothing to do with weight. In fact, lots of popular deep-vee "aero" TT rims would be heavier (and have a higher MMI) than a less aerodynamic rim - but the aerodynamic benfits make up for the extra grams (and gram-metre-squareds).
I suggest you do the maths and confirm this for yourself.
"Rotating mass" (mass moment of inertia) is only significant when accellerating - a massive flywheel will not make the bike any slower at constant speed in the flat. With the magnitudes of accelleration possible on a bike, and the size of the wheels, the difference in accelleration possible with a set of bling-bling (or throw-away mountain-stage race wheels) is finite but miniscule.
There's always a benefit in reducing weight. Whether it's in the rims or the frame, you still have to drag those grams up the hill. But from a purely analytical perspective, it's better to save 6 grams from the frame than 5 grams from the wheels - contrary to the conventional wisdom that rotating mass is worth several times as much as stationary mass.
That's something I'm having trouble to get enthused about. The articles go on about the fuel efficiency benefits of rail operation, due to reduced rolling drag.
By far the biggest contributor to fuel consumption on a truck or bus at 100km/h is aerodynamic drag.
The most effective way for trucks and busses to reduce their fuel consumption is to slipstream. Other than a token futuristic streamlining job, this Bladerunner system does nothing to reduce aerodynamic drag - so total fuel consumption wouldn't be significantly reduced compared with on-road operation.
If we could get a whole fleet of blade-runner trucks and busses, rolling on rails, closely coupled to reduce aerodynamic drag...
...it would look just like a conventional train, with the efficiencies and limitations of a conventional train.
I am a litigious bastard, and I'm not an American.
Retract your statements, or I'll see you in court!
...that means you're paying $12.50 per machine to install $100-worth of RAM.
What are you going to do with the other $387.50 of your $500 hardware budget?
Back on topic, my (teacher) wife's school is 100% Windows. Each kid with a laptop, work submitted by email, on floppy disk or CD if the kids get too enthusiastic with the eye-candy.
It's enough of a struggle getting computer-illiterate teachers with 30 years chalk-and-ink experience to cope with, let alone support a roomfull of kids on, one operating system...while the kids are IR-beaming games across the classroom to each other and trying to hack through the school's firewall to their favourite pr0n sites.
"Mrs Smith, Johnny changed my IPtables rules and I can't get the assignment off the network, can you fix it?"
*shudder*
As I understand it, if a kid's laptop gets corrupted, infected, or detected with games on it, it goes to the IT workshop and is "slurped" - the HD is re-imaged with the default Windows install, and they lose anything that was on the local HD.
Of course, this would be possible (even easier) with a Linux monoculture...but who's going to train the hundred non-techy teachers and 1500-odd students, who have only ever seen Windows? By my understaning, the entire IT staff is one teacher-geek and about two technicians...
This is one of the things that keeps Windows on my home system(s). She knows Office inside out, uses it every day, spends most of her "spare" time teaching teachers and students how to use it, and won't look at any option that won't run Word and Excel natively.