If you are watching TV or texting or screwing your girlfriend while you're driving, you risk hurting yourself AND innocent other people who are following the rules.
If you are listening to your ipod while you run across a street, you risk [mostly] hurting just yourself. I always thought it was my responsibility to look both ways and pay attention to what I'm doing. But I guess I need laws to remind me of that. This way, after I get hit by a car, I could get a ticket to boot. Sweet.
I have a Roku Netflix Player (or whatever they call it these days, one was just on woot the other day for 50$). It is an network-connected device (wireless, ethernet and also USB in the new version) which can stream Netflix and Amazon and other junk. It is about an inch high and maybe 5 inches wide and makes no noise (no fan, no hard drive, just a couple A/V ports). But also...
You can install aftermarket applications on the box, in a manner of speaking, and Roku offers an API along with detailed examples which you can modify yourself. Several people have already done so. I use the Roksbox application, despite its developer's insistence on updating the live branch of code and occasionally breaking everything. It allows me to stream live video hosted on a local (or remote, I suppose) web server. I have an Ubuntu box in the basement I use for transcoding. It works well and the UI is pretty simple, and quite end-user controllable.
After building the necessary XML files by hand for a while I wrote a couple of scripts to parse everything out of IMDB, download posters and descriptions, etc., and that goes into the display code. So when I turn on the Roku box, it pretty much "just works", so long as the network is up and I haven't mangled the XML file. My wife and baby love it; I've got tons of Elmo on there and other cartoons she can see and recognize, so there's no more playing around with DVDs and scratching them up. And we have many movies and other content on there. It's very simple to use, but the backend can take a little work unless you're a Windows person (my server is not).
I've tried using a DNS-323 NAS box as the server, which seems to work well. I just haven't switched everything over. So in short, with a Roku box, a little additional software and a server/NAS to host the files, you're good.
I'm using these devices now for R&D work. We started with the Sheeva plug, now the Guru plug. The devices are okay. If you are looking for a COTS general purpose computer, the price, size and capability cannot be beaten. If you have more specific needs, particularly consumer needs where you can give up size as a constraint, there are many other cheaper alternatives.
That said, if you open up one of these devices, the thickness of the "wall wart" is half power supply, and a lot of the space is allocated to thermal design (heat sink, space for airflow). If you don't need their (crappy) power supply, replace it with a 5 V DC-DC converter and you can run it in your car or in your custom R&D device like we are. Very few low cost (small, low power) GigE devices exist now. These are just about the only ones. Downside is that there is NO support (oh, I'm sorry, "community support"... not okay for corporate use). You have to go it alone if you want to do something that nobody else has done.
Globalscale (makers of the Sheeva/Guru plugs) are supposed to be releasing a GuruPlug "Display" device which has an HDMI port. It sounds cool, but based on my experiences buying the "Server" version on spec, wait until it is not just vaporware. They said that the "Server" version would include some things that aren't actually pinned out (so if you want, say, an I2C interface, you have to be prepared to go digging around on the circuit board, then you might have to deal with building a custom kernel, then you might have to pray on your knees before the dark god of fab, etc.).
And forget about using this as a portable device. Power draw is low but it still sucks down the juice if you're using it do actually do anything. And the ARM5 core does not, as I recall, support floating point operations, so they're emulated (at reduced speed). And last but not least you're going to be cross-compiling everything, or hooking up a hard drive so you can install a precompiled gcc and making less-common things from source.
All in all, are these show-stoppers? No. I'm still using a few of these for various jobs, like one which is going to go get pelted around in the ocean, and they're great if you can withstand the negatives. I have $200 worth of batteries to run it and a custom kernel build (and a separate board for the I2C interface, thanks a lot you jerks at Globalscale)... took a while to get going but it mostly does the job.
This is the most interesting suggestion I have read, and I hadn't seen this elsewhere. I remember reading once that "B vitamins would give me more energy" so I tried it by taking a "B complex" vitamin. It did the opposite, plus turned my pee neon yellow (that was kind of fun), but it really made me logy in the AM. I just read a few things which supported what you suggest, but I'll have to do more research before trying that again.
My wife is like that. It's an interesting juxtaposition. She says she wakes up every hour, checks the time on the clock, and then goes back to sleep. She can fall asleep in seconds once she's relaxed so it doesn't trouble her. It seems to take me quite some time to go down. Unfortunately (well, fortunately at the moment) it seems the baby inherited my sleeping skills.
I have one - it doesn't work very well in the summertime! And it's so gradual (because it's trying to be nice) that it's not the kind of shock that I need. Instead what I need to do is, as the sibling suggests, get a heat lamp and hook it to a timer outlet. Or maybe just a regular lamp so I don't burn down the house.
That's an interesting point, actually, although it's one of only a small handful of such examples. Normally she says I don't even change my breathing.
I had an EEG when I was a kid. Went looking around for the few pages of it they gave me to see if I could notice any similarities between it and the excerpt shown in TFA. Although I doubt I could reliably make such a comparison, it would be interesting to look at again.
I wondered the same thing. Perhaps the benefits of greater memory consolidation (ability to remember dangerous situations/locations, places where food might be found) and higher IQ (potentially improved ability to obtain food, plan attacks and defenses) can outweigh the disadvantage of sleeping heavily (reduced ability to defend oneself when asleep).
Alternatively, perhaps this capability has evolved more recently, since we moved away from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and into fixed civilizations. Obviously not too recently or it would not be widespread. And obviously, of course, I am an armchair evolutionary biologist, speaking entirely from my ass. Still fun to think about it though.
I'm one of those log-sleepers. In college I slept through fire alarms regularly despite the fact that one of the sounders was located in front of my door. I have never been able to use an alarm clock to wake up reliably, despite locating the clockS across the room so I would have to get up to turn them off - if they bothered me enough to turn them off, I would actually get out of bed, actually switch them off, and go back to sleep - all without remembering. The second night the baby was home, sleeping in a bassinet next to my bed (six feet away), my wife was pissed at me the whole next day until I finally asked her what was wrong; apparently the baby started screaming, I sat up in bed, pointed at the baby, asked my wife "Why don't you do something about that kid screaming?", laid back down and went back to sleep - I remember none of this. I can sleep with the lights on or off, although the only thing that actually does wake me is bright light when I've been conditioned to have none.
On the face of it it is far more of a curse than a blessing. Sleep is a black hole out of my life from which nothing wakes me (I have woken in the morning on the floor after my wife tried to push me out of bed to get me to take care of the baby back before she realized it wasn't going to happen). I generally don't even remember my dreams although I know I have them. As a result I so dislike sleep that I put it off as long as possible and have a light shining in my eye to wake me up in the morning.
On the upside, as the article says, people with this deep sleeping capability (perhaps such as I have) tend to have good memories and above average IQ. So maybe there's a good part to this. But I wish there were room for balance.
I've been using iFile for years now and I hear about it on Slashdot???? Unbelieveable. Well, I file my IRS taxes on paper because I refuse to pay to do it (excel1040.com rocks). And I'll go back to doing my VA taxes on paper. I can't imagine that costs them less than a buck or two to deal with. So much for saving money.
$ echo -n "USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries." | md5sum 9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a -
Is that necessarily true? If you build a bare-bones linux install that does nothing but start a web browser and uses iptables/pf/whatever to restrict access to anything but the bank, I would think you could remain pretty secure long-term. Strip it all down for a five-second boot time, don't install anything you don't need... at worst provide firewall updates from your own server, and if anything else needs updating, just send out a new CD. They're cheap and the user won't mind updating (oh, I should put this new CD in instead of the old one? okay.).
The hard part is convincing the user to validate your new CD somehow. Put a sticker with their username on it before mailing, or teach users to call to verify it's really from you?
Easy fix - don't use DNS, hard code the IP address instead. Provide some means by which the user can change that if needed upon instructions over the phone. Realistically there is no reason why you want this image to be able to access anything other than that IP address, so set up your iptables to prevent any access to other sites. This is not supposed to be super-convenient, it's supposed to be secure. Strip out everything from the image that you can so that it boots ultra fast and pops up the bank login screen. The bank would have to run an update server, with the sole purpose of providing security updates only, and only for iptables (maybe the kernel too assuming it exposes a security hole that iptables can't limit).
And by "strip out everything" I meant *everything* - take out basic system tools like ls. Provide the most bare bones shell you can dream of, in fact perhaps you can completely remove the shell since there's no need for a user to be able to execute anything custom.
This is a pretty neat idea though and I hope to see real online banks start considering it. Like mine, for example, which uses that weakass cookie based authentication scheme. I wish they would just sell me an RSA key.
Not true. $89/month may be employer subsidized, but is not the actual price. I was recently offered a Blue Cross DC/VA plan for three insured at the low price of $1100/month.
As I recall you're also likely to blow a cartridge cutting wet wood. I rarely cut wet wood but some people will, and when they return their "broken" saw to the store it raises the cost for everyone else to buy a new saw.
I still design lots of equipment with serial interfaces inside. It is much easier to connect to a low-end microcontroller which may barely have even a single UART. And even for a higher-end processor, it's so much easier to build the interface. Developing a USB interface requires a pretty detailed understanding of USB - selecting endpoints, which transfer protocol to use, etc - so there's a big software investment and often a significant additional hardware investment to implement a USB interface. Serial is often damn close to free, so easy that it's a no-brainer to put in. And for ethernet devices like switches I can't imagine why anyone would want to bother with a USB interface when you already have 8/16/48 copies of an ethernet interface available, just plop down yet another copy of the ethernet PHY design and make that your console interface.
Point is - serial's EASY to give you, so you're gonna keep getting it for a while.
Gotcha beat - 3 states AND got married to a girl from another state one year. Because of the change in marital status I had to prepare different versions of each state form to have all the necessary information (not to file, but to complete the partial year tax forms). Worked out to something like 8 different state/federal 1040 versions. I finally gave up and hired somebody to do my taxes that year - at least he had to sign his name next to mine as the paid preparer.
I don't know a thing about any of these guys. But the nice thing about science is that - at least typically - you can look at the data and make your own conclusion. And one particularly nice thing about this type of analysis is that it doesn't take, well, a climate scientist, to look at the data and make some initial conclusions.
Have a look at the National Data Buoy Center at http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/ , if you're so inclined, and you can pull down CTD cast data and surface buoy temperature measurements. The Brits have a hydrographic office as well which collects such data. Once nice thing about the CTD data is that I cannot fathom (pardon the pun) how there is room for measurement bias, such as that described for land-based temperature measurement stations.
The disturbing thing about the entire topic is that the scientists publishing papers about climate change have not released large portions of their data sets on which they base these papers. You just can't do that. It would be one thing to write a short paper saying that the data suggest something, and within a reasonable period of time release a set of papers describing the analysis of the data and the full data set. Astronomers and particle physicists do this all the time because it's fair for those involved in putting together a major research program to get first cut at analysis. But they take a year or two and then release everything. I've been hearing complaints about this for years now.
Anyway, my original point was - it's tough to really bias science. You can have an opinion on the importance of a result, but the result should be independent of the researcher's political beliefs. If it's not, the researcher deserves to be discredited and that is exactly what happens once others have a chance to review the raw data.
Oh, I don't know. If I were able to measure instantaneous power usage at a house, I'm pretty sure it would be feasible to determine the type and probably even model of electric appliances. For example, an electric stove will have a certain power profile at turnon which you could detect. Many modern higher-power devices actually control that behavior using a technique called soft start. The amplitude and duration of current drawn by a device are probably a fingerprint for the type and even model of that device. You'd need to collect a database of such information to be useful and it would take time to collect that information (when two devices are turned on at the same time the signatures will convolve). But I think I could do this.
So, to be a little more clear - a sufficiently sophisticated "smart meter" could likely determine not just that you have a dishwasher, dryer and TV, but also that the dishwasher is a $1500 Fisher and Paykel (not sure of the spelling... mine's a Maytag), the dryer is a $1200 high-efficiency unit, and the TV is a 60" plasma. Hm. What's the value of that information to... advertisers?...thieves?...the IRS (or its Australian equivalent)?
I always have the same privacy issue regarding data collection. This data has definite value and should be mine to control or sell or give away as I see fit. The existence of companies who collect and control this data and won't even let me see what they're collecting (here's looking at you, Choicepoint) is ridiculous to me. At least the stuff I give away to Google and Slashdot gets me something of immediate and personal value in return (although in the case of Slashdot that value is pretty limited lately).
Apparently the best bunks were above the torpedo tubes in the bow of the submarine because they're furthest away from the diesel engine. Bunks elsewhere were stacked three high about a foot apart and only wide enough for your shoulders. Cramped!
That's pretty much still the case on modern nuke boats. The bunks in the torpedo room are roomier and more open. Some guys get "coffin sickness" from their racks (they wake up screaming at night) so they are allowed to sleep in the torpedo room.
Absolutely mod parent up. This is the way to go. You aren't going to get the 9 or 26 year old to go to Ubuntu - they "need" windows.
A few years ago I set my parents' computer up with XP and created three accounts - one for each parent and one Admin account. My parents' accounts were regular, non-admin user accounts. I told them, very clearly, that they were not accounts like they are used to and that they would need to "do something different" to install stuff. Then I let them deal with it for a few months like that, and ignored all complaints.
After a few months I came back and updated all the flash and adobe crap, and then told them the administrator password, but they were so used to running as regular users they had changed their usage patterns and didn't need it, except to install new programs or updates.
The difference? Instead of having to fix their computer monthly, I had over a year in which I didn't have to do anything at all. Much easier. When I did this on my personal computer (before doing it to my parents) I went from spending an hour a week "cleaning stuff up" to nearly no time doing computer maintenance at all.
The only problem they have is that each account has about 5 different IE searchbars. Maybe I shouldn't have told them the administrator password after all.
Well exactly. This is a classic mistake. They are still selling DVDs and so I can compare the price of the BD and DVD directly (without my memory of prices of yore, they're sitting right next to each other on the shelf). And it doesn't feel like I'm getting something special for my money to buy the BD version - it's pristine but to be honest I don't really notice it that much. Yet I won't buy the DVD version because it's of lower quality and I know this; I also won't purchase the BD version because it's too expensive. So instead, I netflix.
Cut the BD prices and I'd buy some. I'm not replacing any movies like I did from VHS to DVD - that was a big difference. But I would buy a copy of something new, at $15-20 a pop.
Tempted to reply http://justfuckinggoogleit.com but I'll answer instead of being a [total] dick.
You are probably not interested in the "best" "compass" technology today, since you want something for your phone. There are plenty of solid state solutions to magnetic field detection, one cheap one is available from Honeywell, a magnetoresistive bridge circuit which provides 3D field measurement - the HMC1043. I had a watch with one in it for awhile. It's a 1kohm bridge, which explains why it's not in your cell phone and why my watch battery never lasted very long. Much easier to use the older style watch with the little needle in it. I could wind that up and know which way is North forever (except at night).
Back on topic, I am tempted to build a device which would provide real-time haptic feedback of direction. I wonder if the constant tapping that "this side is North" would feel weird. Or when I would get tired of charging the battery.
Sorry for the late post. I actually didn't mean to suggest that the conductivity of silicon was particularly important there, though the documentation provided by the FA was poor and I could not detect any indication of metallization on the hair. There are some posts later discussing the use of melanin as a semiconductor; perhaps the different colors could demonstrate different doping. I certainly have no idea. But that article did not inspire any sort of confidence that this is a "real thing." Too bad, the idea of some Indian kid as a modern-day Thomas Edison is appealing, I'm sure that's a good portion of what sucked in the reporter.
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If you are watching TV or texting or screwing your girlfriend while you're driving, you risk hurting yourself AND innocent other people who are following the rules.
If you are listening to your ipod while you run across a street, you risk [mostly] hurting just yourself. I always thought it was my responsibility to look both ways and pay attention to what I'm doing. But I guess I need laws to remind me of that. This way, after I get hit by a car, I could get a ticket to boot. Sweet.
I have a Roku Netflix Player (or whatever they call it these days, one was just on woot the other day for 50$). It is an network-connected device (wireless, ethernet and also USB in the new version) which can stream Netflix and Amazon and other junk. It is about an inch high and maybe 5 inches wide and makes no noise (no fan, no hard drive, just a couple A/V ports). But also...
You can install aftermarket applications on the box, in a manner of speaking, and Roku offers an API along with detailed examples which you can modify yourself. Several people have already done so. I use the Roksbox application, despite its developer's insistence on updating the live branch of code and occasionally breaking everything. It allows me to stream live video hosted on a local (or remote, I suppose) web server. I have an Ubuntu box in the basement I use for transcoding. It works well and the UI is pretty simple, and quite end-user controllable.
After building the necessary XML files by hand for a while I wrote a couple of scripts to parse everything out of IMDB, download posters and descriptions, etc., and that goes into the display code. So when I turn on the Roku box, it pretty much "just works", so long as the network is up and I haven't mangled the XML file. My wife and baby love it; I've got tons of Elmo on there and other cartoons she can see and recognize, so there's no more playing around with DVDs and scratching them up. And we have many movies and other content on there. It's very simple to use, but the backend can take a little work unless you're a Windows person (my server is not).
I've tried using a DNS-323 NAS box as the server, which seems to work well. I just haven't switched everything over. So in short, with a Roku box, a little additional software and a server/NAS to host the files, you're good.
I'm using these devices now for R&D work. We started with the Sheeva plug, now the Guru plug. The devices are okay. If you are looking for a COTS general purpose computer, the price, size and capability cannot be beaten. If you have more specific needs, particularly consumer needs where you can give up size as a constraint, there are many other cheaper alternatives.
That said, if you open up one of these devices, the thickness of the "wall wart" is half power supply, and a lot of the space is allocated to thermal design (heat sink, space for airflow). If you don't need their (crappy) power supply, replace it with a 5 V DC-DC converter and you can run it in your car or in your custom R&D device like we are. Very few low cost (small, low power) GigE devices exist now. These are just about the only ones. Downside is that there is NO support (oh, I'm sorry, "community support"... not okay for corporate use). You have to go it alone if you want to do something that nobody else has done.
Globalscale (makers of the Sheeva/Guru plugs) are supposed to be releasing a GuruPlug "Display" device which has an HDMI port. It sounds cool, but based on my experiences buying the "Server" version on spec, wait until it is not just vaporware. They said that the "Server" version would include some things that aren't actually pinned out (so if you want, say, an I2C interface, you have to be prepared to go digging around on the circuit board, then you might have to deal with building a custom kernel, then you might have to pray on your knees before the dark god of fab, etc.).
And forget about using this as a portable device. Power draw is low but it still sucks down the juice if you're using it do actually do anything. And the ARM5 core does not, as I recall, support floating point operations, so they're emulated (at reduced speed). And last but not least you're going to be cross-compiling everything, or hooking up a hard drive so you can install a precompiled gcc and making less-common things from source.
All in all, are these show-stoppers? No. I'm still using a few of these for various jobs, like one which is going to go get pelted around in the ocean, and they're great if you can withstand the negatives. I have $200 worth of batteries to run it and a custom kernel build (and a separate board for the I2C interface, thanks a lot you jerks at Globalscale)... took a while to get going but it mostly does the job.
This is the most interesting suggestion I have read, and I hadn't seen this elsewhere. I remember reading once that "B vitamins would give me more energy" so I tried it by taking a "B complex" vitamin. It did the opposite, plus turned my pee neon yellow (that was kind of fun), but it really made me logy in the AM. I just read a few things which supported what you suggest, but I'll have to do more research before trying that again.
My wife is like that. It's an interesting juxtaposition. She says she wakes up every hour, checks the time on the clock, and then goes back to sleep. She can fall asleep in seconds once she's relaxed so it doesn't trouble her. It seems to take me quite some time to go down. Unfortunately (well, fortunately at the moment) it seems the baby inherited my sleeping skills.
I have one - it doesn't work very well in the summertime! And it's so gradual (because it's trying to be nice) that it's not the kind of shock that I need. Instead what I need to do is, as the sibling suggests, get a heat lamp and hook it to a timer outlet. Or maybe just a regular lamp so I don't burn down the house.
That's an interesting point, actually, although it's one of only a small handful of such examples. Normally she says I don't even change my breathing.
I had an EEG when I was a kid. Went looking around for the few pages of it they gave me to see if I could notice any similarities between it and the excerpt shown in TFA. Although I doubt I could reliably make such a comparison, it would be interesting to look at again.
I wondered the same thing. Perhaps the benefits of greater memory consolidation (ability to remember dangerous situations/locations, places where food might be found) and higher IQ (potentially improved ability to obtain food, plan attacks and defenses) can outweigh the disadvantage of sleeping heavily (reduced ability to defend oneself when asleep).
Alternatively, perhaps this capability has evolved more recently, since we moved away from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and into fixed civilizations. Obviously not too recently or it would not be widespread. And obviously, of course, I am an armchair evolutionary biologist, speaking entirely from my ass. Still fun to think about it though.
I'm one of those log-sleepers. In college I slept through fire alarms regularly despite the fact that one of the sounders was located in front of my door. I have never been able to use an alarm clock to wake up reliably, despite locating the clockS across the room so I would have to get up to turn them off - if they bothered me enough to turn them off, I would actually get out of bed, actually switch them off, and go back to sleep - all without remembering. The second night the baby was home, sleeping in a bassinet next to my bed (six feet away), my wife was pissed at me the whole next day until I finally asked her what was wrong; apparently the baby started screaming, I sat up in bed, pointed at the baby, asked my wife "Why don't you do something about that kid screaming?", laid back down and went back to sleep - I remember none of this. I can sleep with the lights on or off, although the only thing that actually does wake me is bright light when I've been conditioned to have none.
On the face of it it is far more of a curse than a blessing. Sleep is a black hole out of my life from which nothing wakes me (I have woken in the morning on the floor after my wife tried to push me out of bed to get me to take care of the baby back before she realized it wasn't going to happen). I generally don't even remember my dreams although I know I have them. As a result I so dislike sleep that I put it off as long as possible and have a light shining in my eye to wake me up in the morning.
On the upside, as the article says, people with this deep sleeping capability (perhaps such as I have) tend to have good memories and above average IQ. So maybe there's a good part to this. But I wish there were room for balance.
Holy crap, you guys are right:
http://www.c-ville.com/index.php?cat=1991704080566501&pid=12031404103099267&act=post
I've been using iFile for years now and I hear about it on Slashdot???? Unbelieveable. Well, I file my IRS taxes on paper because I refuse to pay to do it (excel1040.com rocks). And I'll go back to doing my VA taxes on paper. I can't imagine that costs them less than a buck or two to deal with. So much for saving money.
$ echo -n "USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries." | md5sum
9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a -
Is that necessarily true? If you build a bare-bones linux install that does nothing but start a web browser and uses iptables/pf/whatever to restrict access to anything but the bank, I would think you could remain pretty secure long-term. Strip it all down for a five-second boot time, don't install anything you don't need... at worst provide firewall updates from your own server, and if anything else needs updating, just send out a new CD. They're cheap and the user won't mind updating (oh, I should put this new CD in instead of the old one? okay.).
The hard part is convincing the user to validate your new CD somehow. Put a sticker with their username on it before mailing, or teach users to call to verify it's really from you?
Easy fix - don't use DNS, hard code the IP address instead. Provide some means by which the user can change that if needed upon instructions over the phone. Realistically there is no reason why you want this image to be able to access anything other than that IP address, so set up your iptables to prevent any access to other sites. This is not supposed to be super-convenient, it's supposed to be secure. Strip out everything from the image that you can so that it boots ultra fast and pops up the bank login screen. The bank would have to run an update server, with the sole purpose of providing security updates only, and only for iptables (maybe the kernel too assuming it exposes a security hole that iptables can't limit).
And by "strip out everything" I meant *everything* - take out basic system tools like ls. Provide the most bare bones shell you can dream of, in fact perhaps you can completely remove the shell since there's no need for a user to be able to execute anything custom.
This is a pretty neat idea though and I hope to see real online banks start considering it. Like mine, for example, which uses that weakass cookie based authentication scheme. I wish they would just sell me an RSA key.
Not true. $89/month may be employer subsidized, but is not the actual price. I was recently offered a Blue Cross DC/VA plan for three insured at the low price of $1100/month.
As I recall you're also likely to blow a cartridge cutting wet wood. I rarely cut wet wood but some people will, and when they return their "broken" saw to the store it raises the cost for everyone else to buy a new saw.
I still design lots of equipment with serial interfaces inside. It is much easier to connect to a low-end microcontroller which may barely have even a single UART. And even for a higher-end processor, it's so much easier to build the interface. Developing a USB interface requires a pretty detailed understanding of USB - selecting endpoints, which transfer protocol to use, etc - so there's a big software investment and often a significant additional hardware investment to implement a USB interface. Serial is often damn close to free, so easy that it's a no-brainer to put in. And for ethernet devices like switches I can't imagine why anyone would want to bother with a USB interface when you already have 8/16/48 copies of an ethernet interface available, just plop down yet another copy of the ethernet PHY design and make that your console interface.
Point is - serial's EASY to give you, so you're gonna keep getting it for a while.
Gotcha beat - 3 states AND got married to a girl from another state one year. Because of the change in marital status I had to prepare different versions of each state form to have all the necessary information (not to file, but to complete the partial year tax forms). Worked out to something like 8 different state/federal 1040 versions. I finally gave up and hired somebody to do my taxes that year - at least he had to sign his name next to mine as the paid preparer.
I don't know a thing about any of these guys. But the nice thing about science is that - at least typically - you can look at the data and make your own conclusion. And one particularly nice thing about this type of analysis is that it doesn't take, well, a climate scientist, to look at the data and make some initial conclusions.
Have a look at the National Data Buoy Center at http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/ , if you're so inclined, and you can pull down CTD cast data and surface buoy temperature measurements. The Brits have a hydrographic office as well which collects such data. Once nice thing about the CTD data is that I cannot fathom (pardon the pun) how there is room for measurement bias, such as that described for land-based temperature measurement stations.
The disturbing thing about the entire topic is that the scientists publishing papers about climate change have not released large portions of their data sets on which they base these papers. You just can't do that. It would be one thing to write a short paper saying that the data suggest something, and within a reasonable period of time release a set of papers describing the analysis of the data and the full data set. Astronomers and particle physicists do this all the time because it's fair for those involved in putting together a major research program to get first cut at analysis. But they take a year or two and then release everything. I've been hearing complaints about this for years now.
Anyway, my original point was - it's tough to really bias science. You can have an opinion on the importance of a result, but the result should be independent of the researcher's political beliefs. If it's not, the researcher deserves to be discredited and that is exactly what happens once others have a chance to review the raw data.
Oh, I don't know. If I were able to measure instantaneous power usage at a house, I'm pretty sure it would be feasible to determine the type and probably even model of electric appliances. For example, an electric stove will have a certain power profile at turnon which you could detect. Many modern higher-power devices actually control that behavior using a technique called soft start. The amplitude and duration of current drawn by a device are probably a fingerprint for the type and even model of that device. You'd need to collect a database of such information to be useful and it would take time to collect that information (when two devices are turned on at the same time the signatures will convolve). But I think I could do this.
...thieves? ...the IRS (or its Australian equivalent)?
So, to be a little more clear - a sufficiently sophisticated "smart meter" could likely determine not just that you have a dishwasher, dryer and TV, but also that the dishwasher is a $1500 Fisher and Paykel (not sure of the spelling... mine's a Maytag), the dryer is a $1200 high-efficiency unit, and the TV is a 60" plasma. Hm. What's the value of that information to... advertisers?
I always have the same privacy issue regarding data collection. This data has definite value and should be mine to control or sell or give away as I see fit. The existence of companies who collect and control this data and won't even let me see what they're collecting (here's looking at you, Choicepoint) is ridiculous to me. At least the stuff I give away to Google and Slashdot gets me something of immediate and personal value in return (although in the case of Slashdot that value is pretty limited lately).
Apparently the best bunks were above the torpedo tubes in the bow of the submarine because they're furthest away from the diesel engine. Bunks elsewhere were stacked three high about a foot apart and only wide enough for your shoulders. Cramped!
That's pretty much still the case on modern nuke boats. The bunks in the torpedo room are roomier and more open. Some guys get "coffin sickness" from their racks (they wake up screaming at night) so they are allowed to sleep in the torpedo room.
Absolutely mod parent up. This is the way to go. You aren't going to get the 9 or 26 year old to go to Ubuntu - they "need" windows.
A few years ago I set my parents' computer up with XP and created three accounts - one for each parent and one Admin account. My parents' accounts were regular, non-admin user accounts. I told them, very clearly, that they were not accounts like they are used to and that they would need to "do something different" to install stuff. Then I let them deal with it for a few months like that, and ignored all complaints.
After a few months I came back and updated all the flash and adobe crap, and then told them the administrator password, but they were so used to running as regular users they had changed their usage patterns and didn't need it, except to install new programs or updates.
The difference? Instead of having to fix their computer monthly, I had over a year in which I didn't have to do anything at all. Much easier. When I did this on my personal computer (before doing it to my parents) I went from spending an hour a week "cleaning stuff up" to nearly no time doing computer maintenance at all.
The only problem they have is that each account has about 5 different IE searchbars. Maybe I shouldn't have told them the administrator password after all.
Well exactly. This is a classic mistake. They are still selling DVDs and so I can compare the price of the BD and DVD directly (without my memory of prices of yore, they're sitting right next to each other on the shelf). And it doesn't feel like I'm getting something special for my money to buy the BD version - it's pristine but to be honest I don't really notice it that much. Yet I won't buy the DVD version because it's of lower quality and I know this; I also won't purchase the BD version because it's too expensive. So instead, I netflix.
Cut the BD prices and I'd buy some. I'm not replacing any movies like I did from VHS to DVD - that was a big difference. But I would buy a copy of something new, at $15-20 a pop.
hahaha, great response to me being a jerk. Still doesn't work so good at night though. :) Neat site, I enjoyed the animation.
Tempted to reply http://justfuckinggoogleit.com but I'll answer instead of being a [total] dick.
You are probably not interested in the "best" "compass" technology today, since you want something for your phone. There are plenty of solid state solutions to magnetic field detection, one cheap one is available from Honeywell, a magnetoresistive bridge circuit which provides 3D field measurement - the HMC1043. I had a watch with one in it for awhile. It's a 1kohm bridge, which explains why it's not in your cell phone and why my watch battery never lasted very long. Much easier to use the older style watch with the little needle in it. I could wind that up and know which way is North forever (except at night).
Back on topic, I am tempted to build a device which would provide real-time haptic feedback of direction. I wonder if the constant tapping that "this side is North" would feel weird. Or when I would get tired of charging the battery.
Sorry for the late post. I actually didn't mean to suggest that the conductivity of silicon was particularly important there, though the documentation provided by the FA was poor and I could not detect any indication of metallization on the hair. There are some posts later discussing the use of melanin as a semiconductor; perhaps the different colors could demonstrate different doping. I certainly have no idea. But that article did not inspire any sort of confidence that this is a "real thing." Too bad, the idea of some Indian kid as a modern-day Thomas Edison is appealing, I'm sure that's a good portion of what sucked in the reporter.