Doesn't have to be "age/reading-level-appropriate", I got a sub to Scientific American when I was 12, best gift ever. I went and looked up a lot of stuff at first, and even if I didn't understand every bit of it, it got me thinking. A few years later I went back and re-read some of the earlier issues to pick up what I didn't get the first time.
For the purposes of keeping kids curious, it sounds like this magazine was very much at the appropriate reading level for you at age 12.:)
Many kid- and teen-oriented magazines have a recommended age range of several years. If the magazine is for "9-115 year olds" it will be a good intellectual stretch for the 9 year old, with some articles that he can easily read but most over his head. Most 12 year olds will notice some content is childishly-easy for them to understand, some is easy for them, and some is a stretch. The 15 year old should have no problem reading the whole thing. If you give a 9 year old a subscription and he re-reads the back issues at ages 12 and 15, he will probably have the same experience you did when you went back and re-read the earlier issues.
But don't buy this magazine for your 6 year old unless he's reading at a 3rd-grade level already unless it's got something to get his attention, like pretty pictures.
Very-high-demand events should sell tickets by dutch auction.
At least this way, the promoters and others running the event - who are likely to plow some of their profits back into the business - keep most of "true" value of the ticket, not the scalpers.
I would certainly want the option, at least after the movie dropped off of the the "top 3 grossing movies of the past 72 hours" list.
I can't figure out a fair pricing model: They will have to charge the same to show it to 1 person on his big-screen TV as to show it to an entire family on their big-screen TV. That will either be too expensive for single people or it will so cheap that families will abandon theaters.
Historians of the future won't just be concerned about the content, but the media, the format, and how the media degades over time as well.
After all, just because we've got copies of the Magna Carta or something more mundane like a 15th-century grocery list in digital form doesn't mean we get rid of the originals.
Supported: Supported by a vendor or reliable third party.
Old but useful: Hey, it runs and it's doing something productive.
Obsolete: No practical use except as a pile of parts, nobody else wants it, *may* have non-negative scrap value if there isn't anything hazardous in it
Vintage: There is a sucker out there who thinks it may become collectable someday.
Collectable: Apple I, single-digit-serial-numbered original Macintosh 128K, etc.
Acoustic coupler for a cell phone to have internet connection?
Don't laugh.
In about 1993 or so, I was affiliated with an organization that provided dial-up internet for people affiliated with it. When PPP was relatively new, I cranked my 14.4 modem down to 300 bps just to see if it would work.
It did. The connection was rock-solid. No dropped packets. Granted, I could out-type the character-echo in a "telnet" window (they didn't have ssh back then), but it was rock-solid. I've had worse (but still working, barely) service in the past year when my cable company was having problems and dropping 20% of packets.
A year or two later, the organization providing put out a bulletin saying they would stop supporting anything slower than 2400. I'm pretty sure the organizaiton stopped providing routine dialup service ages ago.
By the way, thanks to audio-compression and other factors, a plain-jane old-fashioned dialup modem probably won't connect at anything better than 2400 bps (historical note: acoustic-coupler modems that went faster than 2400 bps were uncommon - it was simply too hard/expensive at the time). You'll probably get a better quality connection at 1200 bps or 300 bps. If you need to use a serial connection on your computer at faster speeds, there are ways to do it, but not using an old-fashioned dialup modem.
A phone that runs on AA batteries is an idea that's past its prime for most customers. 10 years ago I would've jumped at something like this if it was under $10 for the phone and all I needed to make it work was a GoPhone-priced contract and a bunch of AA batteries.
Today, you can get a power-boosters for well under $20. If you are planning a trip outdoors and away from your car battery, get several of those and change them before you leave. Of course, if you are in an area without cell service, well, you won't be using a cell phone to communicate with anyway. I recommend a satellite phone or, depending on where you are going and if you are licensed as a ham, a ham radio, business-band radio, or even a CB radio along with the antennas you will need for your particular situation. I'm not familiar with all of the emergency-communciations equipement available for outdoorsmen, but I would be surprised if the "outdoor sports industry" didn't already have this issue covered.
1) If your battery doesn't drop below 20% it doesn't degrade as quickly. Keeping your battery always between 20% to 80% will make your battery last longer.
So how come it continues to charge after hitting 80%?
Seriously though, having a "do not charge past 80% without having me answer a dialog box first" settings option would be a good thing for those of us who hardly ever drop below 40% on a normal day.
The cynic in me thinks the reason we don't have this already is that someone has patented the idea (don't bother to do a patent search, they probably used oddball terminology so they can lay in wait for infringers and hit them with $BIGBUCKLAWSUIT, sigh).
The non-cynic in me just supposes that, prior to the Samsung debacle, almost everyone cared more about "how much time do I have left until recharge" rather than "how many months left do I have before my battery needs replacing." As for me, on most days, I'd be fine with an 80% charge, but when I'm expecting to use the phone a lot in a given day without access to a charging station, I want to top it off the night before.
Perhaps it's time for reputable publishers and the academic community to get together and agree on some minimal standards about what it means to be a "reputable journal" or a "reputable publisher."
If faithless electors put Clinton over the top, or even if they send it to the House and Trump loses (the House gets to pick among the top 3 electoral-vote-getters), there will be marches in the streets. It will make what happened in Portland and other cities in the week after the election look like small potatoes.
I'm not singling out Trump supporters here: If the tables were turned and Trump won the popular vote by 2 million or so votes but lost the electoral votes by the same margin Clinton did, and faithless electors denied Clinton the White House, her supporters would also be marching in the streets.
Yes, we need to get rid of the electorial college or at least make major changes to it, but not before inauguration day. What America needs now is some predictability. If faithless electors do throw this into the House, I hope Clinton plays the statesman card and asks that the House vote for Trump.
--
By the way, there will also be marching in the streets no matter who takes office if the recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania wind up changing results of those states and deny Trump the 270 electoral votes he needs to have a clear majority.
Wow. A battery the size of a finger nail that can power an electronic vehicle for days! I'm impressed. At least I'm impressed by the quantity of bullshit that the Slashdot editors will let be packed into a lame summary.
It would take one honking-big wire connecting the charger to the "battery" and the charger would pull at least 25 amps from the wall at 120V or 12.5 amps at 240V. Realisticly, it would probably pull a lot more. Still, it's nothing a typical clothes-dryer 240V circuit couldn't handle, so don't worry about burning down the house.
So, to market this to the average joe consumer, you just make the charging take minutes instead of seconds and make sure the charger doesn't pull more than 15 amps (1800 watts) at any given time.
If I can get my phone fully charged for a week in the time it takes me to shower and get dressed in the morning, that may be worth paying a little extra for.
In every race, a recount from random sample of precincts AND a random sample of every type of voting machine needs to be done.
The main goal is to find counting equipment that is mis-configured, out of calibration, hacked, or otherwise faulty.
A secondary goal is to find MODELS or BRANDS of equipment that have higher-than-average failure rates.
Doing both will greatly increase the confidence in the outcome, which is very important in any election.
These recounts don't all have to be done by hand: They can be done using different equipment. For example, if the original ballots were scanned using Brand A equipment, re-count them using equipment from a competitor.
You need to do enough samples of precincts (to catch locally-targeted hacking or local poor upkeep of equipment) and types and brands of equipment (to catch design faults in the equipment) to have statistical confidence that the "counting-introduced margin of error" was acceptably small - that is, well below the margin-of-victory that would trigger an automatic hand-recount.
In states where there is no automatic hand recount provision, I would recommend enough testing that you can be 95% confident that the "counting-introduced margin of error" is less than 0.5% in all races and less than half of the margin of victory in races where the winner won by less than 1%.
The only good thing that can come out of this is a nationwide mandate to require paper ballots or some other "human-readable, voter-readable" official ballot like a Polaroid snapshot of the electronic voting machine's screen.
In the case of a Polaroid, the voter would inspect the Polaroid photo and say "cast ballot or void ballot and start over" as the last step when voting. This Polaroid photo would serves as the "official" ballot for recount purposes.
Absent other regulations, it's up to the federal trade commission, similar state-level bodies, and disgruntled customers filing lawsuits to keep companies from using deceptive advertising.
Where the FTC and state regulators don't act, it's up to consumers to sue or their advocates such as the press or Consumer's Union to shame them into honesty.
So, will we be seeing regulatory action soon, or will the land sharks be filing class-action suits, or will this be just a case of public shaming?
Well, anything Federal, which includes military offenses and offenses against territorial- and similar governments such as Puerto Rico or Washington, D.C., and their respective local governments. I'm not sure if it applies to crimes against Native American tribes.
For the benefit of non-Americans not familiar with our legal system, the President cannot pardon offenses commited againts the 50 states or their respective local governments.
Some people would say that laws like this mean you've forfeited the right to call yourself a democracy.
Others define democracy to mean only how you elect your leaders (although all but the purists typically include republics in the definition), not whether you have freedom of speech, etc. With that definition, there have probably been other "democracies" with far more draconian laws.
Sure, you can do anything with physical access if you have some time on your hands.
Sure, you can be persistent if you can leave something behind, like a modified keyboard.
Sure, you can be persistent if you can install something, but that USUALLY requires either the ability to use the mouse or keyboard on an unlocked machine or tricking the user to do so for you.
The novelty here is that it's a "plug it in, wait a few minutes, unplug it, and walk away" compromise, AND it doesn't make any permanent hardware changes such as blowing up your PC by sending a few hundred volts down the USB ports.
It's also novel in that it exposes a design flaw that should've been noticed and widely discussed decades ago.
By the way, am I the only one that remembers Thick Ethernet, aka 10BASE5, and its "vampire taps"?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I realized the submitter is ... also the author of the column. So I guess that explains it.
Is this just your hunch, or is it backed up by something?
I ask, because if it is confirmed as a self-submitted slashvertisement, that will negatively influence my opinion of the piece and its authors.
While this has clear utility and in the long run it may save lives, it has a large cost in privacy which is obvious to almost everyone reading this.
Doesn't have to be "age/reading-level-appropriate", I got a sub to Scientific American when I was 12, best gift ever. I went and looked up a lot of stuff at first, and even if I didn't understand every bit of it, it got me thinking. A few years later I went back and re-read some of the earlier issues to pick up what I didn't get the first time.
For the purposes of keeping kids curious, it sounds like this magazine was very much at the appropriate reading level for you at age 12. :)
Many kid- and teen-oriented magazines have a recommended age range of several years. If the magazine is for "9-115 year olds" it will be a good intellectual stretch for the 9 year old, with some articles that he can easily read but most over his head. Most 12 year olds will notice some content is childishly-easy for them to understand, some is easy for them, and some is a stretch. The 15 year old should have no problem reading the whole thing. If you give a 9 year old a subscription and he re-reads the back issues at ages 12 and 15, he will probably have the same experience you did when you went back and re-read the earlier issues.
But don't buy this magazine for your 6 year old unless he's reading at a 3rd-grade level already unless it's got something to get his attention, like pretty pictures.
Get them an age/reading-level-appropriate magazine on some scientific topic.
Ranger Rick (National Wildlife Federation) is good for kids interested in nature.
Monthly magazines with puzzles and games are good for the math/logic-type geeks-in-training.
Comic book subscriptions and fannish magazine subscriptions are good for people whose geekdom is in literature, TV, or movies.
Why paper in the age of digital media? Because it's concrete and tangible, and it still works when the Internet or electricity goes out.
Very-high-demand events should sell tickets by dutch auction.
At least this way, the promoters and others running the event - who are likely to plow some of their profits back into the business - keep most of "true" value of the ticket, not the scalpers.
I would certainly want the option, at least after the movie dropped off of the the "top 3 grossing movies of the past 72 hours" list.
I can't figure out a fair pricing model: They will have to charge the same to show it to 1 person on his big-screen TV as to show it to an entire family on their big-screen TV. That will either be too expensive for single people or it will so cheap that families will abandon theaters.
Historians of the future won't just be concerned about the content, but the media, the format, and how the media degades over time as well.
After all, just because we've got copies of the Magna Carta or something more mundane like a 15th-century grocery list in digital form doesn't mean we get rid of the originals.
New: New.
Current: Still being sold.
Supported: Supported by a vendor or reliable third party.
Old but useful: Hey, it runs and it's doing something productive.
Obsolete: No practical use except as a pile of parts, nobody else wants it, *may* have non-negative scrap value if there isn't anything hazardous in it
Vintage: There is a sucker out there who thinks it may become collectable someday.
Collectable: Apple I, single-digit-serial-numbered original Macintosh 128K, etc.
Acoustic coupler for a cell phone to have internet connection?
Don't laugh.
In about 1993 or so, I was affiliated with an organization that provided dial-up internet for people affiliated with it. When PPP was relatively new, I cranked my 14.4 modem down to 300 bps just to see if it would work.
It did. The connection was rock-solid. No dropped packets. Granted, I could out-type the character-echo in a "telnet" window (they didn't have ssh back then), but it was rock-solid. I've had worse (but still working, barely) service in the past year when my cable company was having problems and dropping 20% of packets.
A year or two later, the organization providing put out a bulletin saying they would stop supporting anything slower than 2400. I'm pretty sure the organizaiton stopped providing routine dialup service ages ago.
By the way, thanks to audio-compression and other factors, a plain-jane old-fashioned dialup modem probably won't connect at anything better than 2400 bps (historical note: acoustic-coupler modems that went faster than 2400 bps were uncommon - it was simply too hard/expensive at the time). You'll probably get a better quality connection at 1200 bps or 300 bps. If you need to use a serial connection on your computer at faster speeds, there are ways to do it, but not using an old-fashioned dialup modem.
A phone that runs on AA batteries is an idea that's past its prime for most customers. 10 years ago I would've jumped at something like this if it was under $10 for the phone and all I needed to make it work was a GoPhone-priced contract and a bunch of AA batteries.
Today, you can get a power-boosters for well under $20. If you are planning a trip outdoors and away from your car battery, get several of those and change them before you leave. Of course, if you are in an area without cell service, well, you won't be using a cell phone to communicate with anyway. I recommend a satellite phone or, depending on where you are going and if you are licensed as a ham, a ham radio, business-band radio, or even a CB radio along with the antennas you will need for your particular situation. I'm not familiar with all of the emergency-communciations equipement available for outdoorsmen, but I would be surprised if the "outdoor sports industry" didn't already have this issue covered.
1) If your battery doesn't drop below 20% it doesn't degrade as quickly. Keeping your battery always between 20% to 80% will make your battery last longer.
So how come it continues to charge after hitting 80%?
Seriously though, having a "do not charge past 80% without having me answer a dialog box first" settings option would be a good thing for those of us who hardly ever drop below 40% on a normal day.
The cynic in me thinks the reason we don't have this already is that someone has patented the idea (don't bother to do a patent search, they probably used oddball terminology so they can lay in wait for infringers and hit them with $BIGBUCKLAWSUIT, sigh).
The non-cynic in me just supposes that, prior to the Samsung debacle, almost everyone cared more about "how much time do I have left until recharge" rather than "how many months left do I have before my battery needs replacing." As for me, on most days, I'd be fine with an 80% charge, but when I'm expecting to use the phone a lot in a given day without access to a charging station, I want to top it off the night before.
Remember folks, in many cases companies will simply offshore the work if they don't perceive American labor as the most cost-effective option.
In some cases, the most cost-effective option is to cancel the project and use the money for something elsez
Perhaps it's time for reputable publishers and the academic community to get together and agree on some minimal standards about what it means to be a "reputable journal" or a "reputable publisher."
If faithless electors put Clinton over the top, or even if they send it to the House and Trump loses (the House gets to pick among the top 3 electoral-vote-getters), there will be marches in the streets. It will make what happened in Portland and other cities in the week after the election look like small potatoes.
I'm not singling out Trump supporters here: If the tables were turned and Trump won the popular vote by 2 million or so votes but lost the electoral votes by the same margin Clinton did, and faithless electors denied Clinton the White House, her supporters would also be marching in the streets.
Yes, we need to get rid of the electorial college or at least make major changes to it, but not before inauguration day. What America needs now is some predictability. If faithless electors do throw this into the House, I hope Clinton plays the statesman card and asks that the House vote for Trump.
--
By the way, there will also be marching in the streets no matter who takes office if the recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania wind up changing results of those states and deny Trump the 270 electoral votes he needs to have a clear majority.
Wow. A battery the size of a finger nail that can power an electronic vehicle for days! I'm impressed. At least I'm impressed by the quantity of bullshit that the Slashdot editors will let be packed into a lame summary.
Or, that's one honkin'-big fingernail.
600 amps at 5V would be about 3kW.
It would take one honking-big wire connecting the charger to the "battery" and the charger would pull at least 25 amps from the wall at 120V or 12.5 amps at 240V. Realisticly, it would probably pull a lot more. Still, it's nothing a typical clothes-dryer 240V circuit couldn't handle, so don't worry about burning down the house.
So, to market this to the average joe consumer, you just make the charging take minutes instead of seconds and make sure the charger doesn't pull more than 15 amps (1800 watts) at any given time.
If I can get my phone fully charged for a week in the time it takes me to shower and get dressed in the morning, that may be worth paying a little extra for.
In every race, a recount from random sample of precincts AND a random sample of every type of voting machine needs to be done.
The main goal is to find counting equipment that is mis-configured, out of calibration, hacked, or otherwise faulty.
A secondary goal is to find MODELS or BRANDS of equipment that have higher-than-average failure rates.
Doing both will greatly increase the confidence in the outcome, which is very important in any election.
These recounts don't all have to be done by hand: They can be done using different equipment. For example, if the original ballots were scanned using Brand A equipment, re-count them using equipment from a competitor.
You need to do enough samples of precincts (to catch locally-targeted hacking or local poor upkeep of equipment) and types and brands of equipment (to catch design faults in the equipment) to have statistical confidence that the "counting-introduced margin of error" was acceptably small - that is, well below the margin-of-victory that would trigger an automatic hand-recount.
In states where there is no automatic hand recount provision, I would recommend enough testing that you can be 95% confident that the "counting-introduced margin of error" is less than 0.5% in all races and less than half of the margin of victory in races where the winner won by less than 1%.
The only good thing that can come out of this is a nationwide mandate to require paper ballots or some other "human-readable, voter-readable" official ballot like a Polaroid snapshot of the electronic voting machine's screen.
In the case of a Polaroid, the voter would inspect the Polaroid photo and say "cast ballot or void ballot and start over" as the last step when voting. This Polaroid photo would serves as the "official" ballot for recount purposes.
Absent other regulations, it's up to the federal trade commission, similar state-level bodies, and disgruntled customers filing lawsuits to keep companies from using deceptive advertising.
Where the FTC and state regulators don't act, it's up to consumers to sue or their advocates such as the press or Consumer's Union to shame them into honesty.
So, will we be seeing regulatory action soon, or will the land sharks be filing class-action suits, or will this be just a case of public shaming?
Or, will nothing happen at all?
Well, anything Federal, which includes military offenses and offenses against territorial- and similar governments such as Puerto Rico or Washington, D.C., and their respective local governments. I'm not sure if it applies to crimes against Native American tribes.
For the benefit of non-Americans not familiar with our legal system, the President cannot pardon offenses commited againts the 50 states or their respective local governments.
... democracy.
Some people would say that laws like this mean you've forfeited the right to call yourself a democracy.
Others define democracy to mean only how you elect your leaders (although all but the purists typically include republics in the definition), not whether you have freedom of speech, etc. With that definition, there have probably been other "democracies" with far more draconian laws.
but turn off i-Magellanic-Cloud first.
laptop with ... no actual moving parts
I assume you mean fanless and optical-drive-less in addition to the SSD hard disk that you mentioned.
Convection cooling is nice but sometimes I miss the optical drive.
I guess circulating air, circulating electrons, and vibrating atoms don't count as "moving parts" in this context.
$5 hammer, $5 Pi. Well played sir, well played.
Sure, you can do anything with physical access if you have some time on your hands.
Sure, you can be persistent if you can leave something behind, like a modified keyboard.
Sure, you can be persistent if you can install something, but that USUALLY requires either the ability to use the mouse or keyboard on an unlocked machine or tricking the user to do so for you.
The novelty here is that it's a "plug it in, wait a few minutes, unplug it, and walk away" compromise, AND it doesn't make any permanent hardware changes such as blowing up your PC by sending a few hundred volts down the USB ports.
It's also novel in that it exposes a design flaw that should've been noticed and widely discussed decades ago.
By the way, am I the only one that remembers Thick Ethernet, aka 10BASE5, and its "vampire taps"?