Completely agree. I have purchased 3 mp3 players, mixed between Creative and Sandisk. I have been given an iPod video when it was the hottest thing on the market. It's been sitting in a drawer 90% of the time, while the Creatives and the Sandisk have been seeing near-constant usage.
They have features, it has hip. In *my* world, features beat hip. In the real world, hip beats features. Taco was just showing which of those worlds he considers important.
To extend that to the conversation at hand, technology is somewhat hip. Owning a Prius is definitely hip. If these people can link their technology to something that makes people want it irrationally, they'll make a profit and make the world a little better. If all they can do is show purely rational reasons, it'll be outcompeted by other products with better advertising budgets.
>run of the mill piece of crap Ford (or Chevy, GM, Toyota, Honda, take your pick)
Hard to forecast, though. My friend's Honda Insight, 7 years old, is now selling for the same price it sold brand-new, for lower-mileage examples. Likewise, any reasonably intact Ford Mustang from 1964 sells for quite a bit more than it sold new. But in both cases, it would be a *terrible* investment if you were looking for a growth investment. If you're looking for something that you can get a lot of use from for a number of years, and then get some money out of it, well, then, you have a good deal.
I think either you misread or I miswrote: I never had any break until someone stepped on them and crushed them. The issue was just that we'd pull the wheels out to put them somewhere else, then leave them and they'd stay pin-up on their backs, waiting for the next bare foot to come by. (mind you: these aren't just the two-wheels-on-one-axle design they make these days, but actually a single wheel with a single short axle segment, that plugged into a standard 2x4 full-height brick with three special bearing units in it, one in each end and one in the middle that could accept a wheel from either side.) LEGO was surprisingly good at bonding those steel pins into the plastic wheel bodies, even though the rubber tires they used oxidized and split after a dozen years or so.
I think I can go one better than that: when I was quite young we had American Bricks. They were just like LEGO bricks only they were stamped out of wood. There were 2x4 and 2x2 bricks, in (painted) red and yellow, and 2x2 angle bricks, and that was all. Plus they didn't stick together, they just relied on gravity to hold them together.
On the up-side, we had a whole lot of them so we could make entire castles out of them, and once we DID get LEGO bricks we built catapults, trebuchets, and ballistae and had races to see who could demolish each other's castles with the siege equipment.
(American Bricks were made circa 1944-1960, and were apparently an inspiration for the designer of LEGO bricks.)
Not even *half* as bad as a now-discontinued LEGO piece: the detachable wheels. Round wheels, 2x2 size, rubber tire around the rim, with a steel pin sticking out, that stuck into a matching internal-bearing block. The wheels always ended up falling pin-up, just like caltrops. Those little metal pins could go through a thin-soled shoe, and certainly could go through skin. They were great for making LEGO cars that coasted well but they were terrible for parents.
I don't remember them, but I've read about them. Do you think that COINTELPRO and spying on civil rights activists was worse than an administration that has said they don't believe in habeas corpus and runs a worldwide network of secret prisons, where they torture people? The 1950's were a low point for counterculture in the US, but the government's persecution of them was legal, if unethical, and much of it was done publically. I'm not saying it was right. I'm just saying that it was done largely within the legal framework of the time (which is why the legal framework was changed, in large part.) I think you have to go back to the government suppression of the labor movement in the 1890s before you find anything similar to our current administration in widespread disregard of law and order.
Raise your hands, everyone who is surprised by this...
yeah, that's what I thought.
We need the old USSR back. As odd as this seems, there was actually a sense of competition going on back then -- competition for goodness. I remember mocking the USSR for having secret courts, secret laws, secret prisons. Now WE have those things. I think that at least in part it's because we no longer have competition to compare and contrast our government's behavior to, so people are less apt to associate this kind of totalitarian behavior with The Evil Empire. As a result, we become The Evil Empire.
I'm not cheering for Russia as it stomps around in Georgia, mind you, but an odd side-effect of it might be that we start acting like the USA, rather than Trashcanistan.
I think that's precisely *why* the injected chip is there: because you can't just toss it into the street. Think of a deadman's switch setup: the external device sends a positioning signal as long as it's within range of the chip. As soon as it isn't within range, it sends an alarm or just stops sending a position. Either way, your paid-for tracking service is getting either an accurate report of where you are, or an alert that contains your last known position when you were separated from the external device, both fairly useful pieces of data.
Okay, I admit I don't know much about the magnetosphere, but why would it be a rotating magnetic field? The earth rotates, but the wire, if it's a space elevator, is rotating at the same speed. In order to induce a current in a wire, don't you have to make the wire cut through magnetic flux lines? Am I totally off base here?
However, another possible source of energy is that as you move upwards in elevation, your electric potential varies. There's roughly a 100 volt/meter electric field in the atmosphere, although I don't know how much it varies with altitude. (I know it's sufficiently linear at 'low' altitudes that a Dr. Strangelove-like friend of mine built an aircraft levelling device by sticking two radioactive sources out at the wingtips and measuring the difference in the ionization of the air as a function of the atmospheric electric field, which allowed him to determine the aircraft's absolute bank angle to within a couple degrees. Craaaaazy.)
anyway. If 100V/m holds up to 60,000 meters, well, that's a lot of potential right there, above and beyond solar cells or electromagnetic effects.
Well, it isn't *limited* to a few meters, per se. The issue is, basically, that power radiated omnidirectionally drops off as the square of the distance -- and anything that's orbital has a LOT of distance.
One way of dealing with this is using directional beamed power. The proposed space elevator wants to power crawlers that go up the tether, and that's essentially the same problem. They're considering solving it by using lasers that beam power up to the crawlers from the ground. The reason for this is we know how to make directed energy transfer devices -- lasers -- that, while they still drop off as the square of the distance, what started off as a near-point-source at the laser might be a square meter or less at several hundreds of kilometers, rather than several hundred kilometers squared (as is the case with an omnidirectional emitter like a transformer.)
So it's no surprise that these things work, and yes, they could work from orbit, at what we'd consider extremely low efficiency. That's kind of notational, though, because if the power is just going to waste, from our point of view -- all the photons that don't hit earth -- catching any of them and sending any percent of that to the earth already means you're getting more energy than you had to start with. So in a way, efficiency doesn't matter: it's a question of return on investment.
But if we could come up with *safe*, directionally beamed power, then orbital power stations would start to look pretty attractive.
Of course, one possible contender for safe orbital power would be to use the filaments of solar elevators as conductors. (Although the voltages you'd have to use to conduct with reasonable efficiency over a transmission line 36,000 km long mean you'd have to use multiple elevators, with one being your high-voltage line and the other, many miles away, being your current return path, and you run into problems with trying to insulate the HV line from the earth itself.)
It could be a nice way to live, or it could be really awful. It entirely depends on the circumstances. In fact, it's very much like prostitution (not very surprisingly.) If a woman *wants* to be in a polygamous relationship, well, why should we stop her? The government has no business legislating morality. If a woman doesn't want to, well, she shouldn't have to, and nobody's making her get married (we presume, maybe optimistically.) So that's fine, too. But here's the problem: what do you, as The State, do, when a group of people are raising their children and educating them that the way they live is the Right Way -- when that Right Way may seem harmful to people who aren't in that culture? Hence the arguments over deaf people who don't want their children who can hear, to learn speech, because it would cut them off from the deaf sign language community (I've heard people argue this.) Or cultures or groups who cut off womens' genitals, or The Family, who encouraged their (often very young) female members to go sleep with wealthy men to get them to join the church.
There's a line to be drawn. Obviously, we all draw a line at voluntary vs. coercive behavior. But the much trickier problem is where we draw the line when it comes to educating children so they'll grow up making choices that seem, to them, to be voluntary, but seem to outsiders to be coerced.
I think a main reason homeschooling is so attractive to many people is because this gives them the ability to do exactly this: raise their kids with a restricted information set so the kids will be much less likely to make choices the parents don't like. I also think that's precisely why the FLDS got raided: because The State decided they were raising their children in an environment designed to make the children accept what The State viewed as systematic abuse.
This is a silly, less-than-useful story, but I'm offering it here because I had a crisis of faith one night right before an inorganic chemistry midterm that was very heavy on electrochemistry.
So I went downstairs, lit up a bunsen burner, took a small crucible, filled it with 1/2 tablesalt and 1/2 baking soda, and started heating it. Pretty soon it melted (because the combination of them lowers the melting point to something fairly reasonable.) I hammered out a little titanium spoon-looking thing, and another flat strip of ti, put them in the melt, and hooked up a power supply with a couple volts, and made sodium metal. You could see a little shiny sphere of the stuff in the titanium spoon every once in a while, for a moment, until the oxygen in the air got through the (poor) protective burned-gas mantle and destroyed it.
Still, it made me decide that Science was still cool and worth pursuing.
(I presume the other electrode was bubbling out chlorine gas. Ew.)
Oh, it is, it is. There was a reason (kind of): Dodge wanted to keep the battery out of the engine compartment so if it started bubbling out hydrogen or acid it would do less damage. But ya measure the PITA factor against how often batteries malfunction these days, and you see why nobody else does that.
Toyota does a *good* job of engineering. I've worked extensively on two Corollas and was very impressed. Honda... good reliability, but some of their cars were very difficult to diagnose, particularly the late '80's/early '90's cars that had what was in essence analog pneumatic computers running the climate control, cruise control, and power assist circuits. One little bit of grunge in any of those tubes and suddenly the defroster would stop working and all sorts of other things would go awry, and trying to make sure all those little tubes and valves were clean was nigh-impossible. I really liked working on my three old Nissans: they were well-engineered, even if sometimes of questionable overall design. Any car post-1964 that still requires you to relash the valve clearance every couple thousand km is saving money in the wrong place. (Datsun 1200, Nissan Sentra, both required valve lashing.) Soobs are designed by craaazy mechanical engineers. Sometimes I think they find people in Fuji Heavy Industries who have never even looked inside a car and say "build a car." They're very nicely designed but just fundamentally unlike anything else I've ever seen. The '91 Soob Loyale brakes were designed by circus aliens. You replace the pads and shoes and think "every car should be designed like that: that's BRILLIANT"... the second time. The first time you're like "what the HELL??!? This is completely crazy!"
And, by the way, that dumb Harbor Freight scanner comes with a 30 page booklet listing all the error codes and what they mean, and the Soob Haynes manual (finally! five years after the car hit the market) also lists them, so you can work around its cheapness.
You can buy an OBDII scanner from Harbor Freight for $40. If you're handy you can build your own that interfaces to a laptop and gives you full access to the internals, allowing you to make GTK-based virtual instrument panels.
And while I generally agree that American cars are hard to work on, so are many Japanese cars. They're better-engineered, true. You don't have to take off a wheel to change the oil (like on my mom's Saturn) or change a battery (like on my friend's Dodge) but on my Subaru I have to remove the windshield wiper fluid reservoir to change the spark plug.
The BBC says they've been using detector vans for 50 years and have gone through ten different types. Earlier ones had visible antennae on top *and* big signs on the sides, but now apparently they're allowed to make unmarked vans. There are apparently about 26 detector vans in all of the UK. Here is a purported picture of a 1950's detector van.
What justice? Bob Jacobsen has paid Katzer $30,000 in judgments against Jacobsen, as well as his own legal fees. Katzer's made money off his product and gotten his legal costs paid for, and as I read the judgments, has yet to actually lose anything other than three of his 12 patents. Katzer isn't winning, but JMRI is suffering a lot more than Katzer is.
I'm glad the court ruled the way it did but a lot of JMRI people have gotten pretty badly ground up along the way. This is only justice insofar as the rest of FOSS has dodged a bullet.
The K+ and Na+ is freely available in the bloodstream and intracellular fluid. Nerves use selective ion channels to establish the ion gradients used for depolarization but they don't require a specific source for them: they're everywhere in the body. In contrast, without glucose your nerve cells will die. They require glucose to power aerobic metabolism and produce the ATP that they use to maintain the ion gradient.
Interesting. I use a gmail address specifically because I think it's classier than yahoo or whatever, and easier to remember than the address I've had for 15 years or so. Anyone can remember joesmith@gmail.com, while joesmith588@yahoo.com sounds like a loser and joesmith@mail.onrampsacramento.com isn't going to stick in someone's head for even three seconds.
It'd be useful to see what other people think about the perceived value/worth of a domain name, and what running your own domain says about you. The guy who made the LEGO Babbage engine has his page up at woz.org, which *I* think is just the coolest thing ever, but normal people aren't going to recognize that, so that's a gamble: if someone DOES know what that means, the person is going to be very impressed indeed.
Yep. I chose the email address most of my friends to contact me, 20 years ago. Guess what? I've grown up a bit since then, and 'swordsman' (it's not, but it's close) just doesn't cut it, so to speak, for job searches.
Here's a weird thing, though: I have several email addresses, and I use them specifically for different purposes. The old one I've used forever is how I run my webpages/chat with old friends. My name is the one I use for jobs. A cheesy yahoo-sounding name, fastfreddy588 or whatever, is what I use when I'm poking around on places that sound dubious and I expect they're going to send me spam. So here's the thing: I tend to use the latter one when I check out dating sites or what-have-you, and when I actually interact with someone I use an actual-name email because it doesn't sound like I'm some cheap loser who couldn't get a name without a bunch of numbers in it. Which is to say: I semi-consciously rely on the email name I'm using to form an impression. That tends to support their silly study.
Yes, but... that ATP has to come from somewhere. In the case of the brain, it comes originally, and almost solely, from glucose-6-phosphate, which comes from glucose. I don't think you could survive just eating ATP. For their specialized function, yes, nerve cells require a Na/K gradient, but to establish and maintain that gradient, they need calories -- thermochemical energy -- that they get from sugar. They then use that to drive the ADP->ATP synthases, and use the energy generated by ATP->ADP to maintain their ion gradients.
>could not "weaponize" the anthrax (WTF does that even mean anyway?)
In this context, what it means is managing to take Bacillus anthracis growing in culture, getting it to form spores, extracting those spores in a way that they're still viable, drying them, physically separating them into a homogenous fine powder (called 'milling') and in this particular case, apparently then uniformly coating the powdered bits with a hydrophilic silica that had an associated surface electric charge. Above taken from this wall street journal article (which says these weren't physically milled but were particularized in some other way.)
There's a *lot* of work involved in making these samples, and it requires access to large amounts of very high-tech equipment, stuff that a microbiologist who is making vaccines doesn't have. The equipment doesn't exist anywhere outside of the old US bioweapons labs at Fort Dettrick, according to multiple other people.
It's a PITA but if you talk to people and volunteer to install the shielding yourself, a lot of people will be happy to let you. They just can't be bothered to do it themselves.
I agree -- but under what grounds do you 'fine' someone? You can't fine someone unless the person is breaking a law: that's called either taxation or theft. What I'd like to see is a reasonable, blanket law about keeping your house in acceptable condition, as regards eyesores, noise pollution, and stink. Those laws already exist, though. In this case, it looks to me like they were trying to pass a law to specifically target this guy and his airplanes, while letting people who rebuild cars, just as messily, continue to do what they were doing, and that's why it sucks. Not because of the general idea, but because of the specific implementation.
To be fair, what I've read about it in comparatively nonbiased sites, it sounds like he had an airplane junkyard in his front and back yards: several planes in various states of disrepair/disassembly, that he was using as donors for another project that was shaping up in the driveway.
I have no problem with people making airplanes at home -- hey, I'm going to do the same thing. But I'm pretty irritated at my neighbors for having multiple dead cars on bricks in the front yard. How is dead airplanes any better? At least put up a fence and don't rivet at 2 AM. (He was also accused of late-night noise, and bucking rivets *is* mindblowingly loud.)
The 'invisible' part specifically refers to the negative productivity of resource-hoarding. In traditional tragedy-of-the-commons situations it's easy to quantify the value of the meadow that's now a barren desert. But when development isn't happening, you have no idea what didn't happen: the stuff choked off is invisible.
Now, this is somewhat akin to arguing that if you don't have all the kids you can, you might be missing the next Einstein: while true, it also makes silly assumptions.
Slashdot Mirror
Completely agree.
I have purchased 3 mp3 players, mixed between Creative and Sandisk. I have been given an iPod video when it was the hottest thing on the market. It's been sitting in a drawer 90% of the time, while the Creatives and the Sandisk have been seeing near-constant usage.
They have features, it has hip. In *my* world, features beat hip. In the real world, hip beats features. Taco was just showing which of those worlds he considers important.
To extend that to the conversation at hand, technology is somewhat hip. Owning a Prius is definitely hip. If these people can link their technology to something that makes people want it irrationally, they'll make a profit and make the world a little better. If all they can do is show purely rational reasons, it'll be outcompeted by other products with better advertising budgets.
>run of the mill piece of crap Ford (or Chevy, GM, Toyota, Honda, take your pick)
Hard to forecast, though.
My friend's Honda Insight, 7 years old, is now selling for the same price it sold brand-new, for lower-mileage examples.
Likewise, any reasonably intact Ford Mustang from 1964 sells for quite a bit more than it sold new.
But in both cases, it would be a *terrible* investment if you were looking for a growth investment. If you're looking for something that you can get a lot of use from for a number of years, and then get some money out of it, well, then, you have a good deal.
I think either you misread or I miswrote: I never had any break until someone stepped on them and crushed them. The issue was just that we'd pull the wheels out to put them somewhere else, then leave them and they'd stay pin-up on their backs, waiting for the next bare foot to come by. (mind you: these aren't just the two-wheels-on-one-axle design they make these days, but actually a single wheel with a single short axle segment, that plugged into a standard 2x4 full-height brick with three special bearing units in it, one in each end and one in the middle that could accept a wheel from either side.)
LEGO was surprisingly good at bonding those steel pins into the plastic wheel bodies, even though the rubber tires they used oxidized and split after a dozen years or so.
I think I can go one better than that: when I was quite young we had American Bricks. They were just like LEGO bricks only they were stamped out of wood. There were 2x4 and 2x2 bricks, in (painted) red and yellow, and 2x2 angle bricks, and that was all.
Plus they didn't stick together, they just relied on gravity to hold them together.
On the up-side, we had a whole lot of them so we could make entire castles out of them, and once we DID get LEGO bricks we built catapults, trebuchets, and ballistae and had races to see who could demolish each other's castles with the siege equipment.
(American Bricks were made circa 1944-1960, and were apparently an inspiration for the designer of LEGO bricks.)
Not even *half* as bad as a now-discontinued LEGO piece: the detachable wheels. Round wheels, 2x2 size, rubber tire around the rim, with a steel pin sticking out, that stuck into a matching internal-bearing block. The wheels always ended up falling pin-up, just like caltrops. Those little metal pins could go through a thin-soled shoe, and certainly could go through skin.
They were great for making LEGO cars that coasted well but they were terrible for parents.
I don't remember them, but I've read about them.
Do you think that COINTELPRO and spying on civil rights activists was worse than an administration that has said they don't believe in habeas corpus and runs a worldwide network of secret prisons, where they torture people? The 1950's were a low point for counterculture in the US, but the government's persecution of them was legal, if unethical, and much of it was done publically. I'm not saying it was right. I'm just saying that it was done largely within the legal framework of the time (which is why the legal framework was changed, in large part.)
I think you have to go back to the government suppression of the labor movement in the 1890s before you find anything similar to our current administration in widespread disregard of law and order.
Raise your hands, everyone who is surprised by this...
yeah, that's what I thought.
We need the old USSR back. As odd as this seems, there was actually a sense of competition going on back then -- competition for goodness. I remember mocking the USSR for having secret courts, secret laws, secret prisons. Now WE have those things. I think that at least in part it's because we no longer have competition to compare and contrast our government's behavior to, so people are less apt to associate this kind of totalitarian behavior with The Evil Empire. As a result, we become The Evil Empire.
I'm not cheering for Russia as it stomps around in Georgia, mind you, but an odd side-effect of it might be that we start acting like the USA, rather than Trashcanistan.
I think that's precisely *why* the injected chip is there: because you can't just toss it into the street. Think of a deadman's switch setup: the external device sends a positioning signal as long as it's within range of the chip. As soon as it isn't within range, it sends an alarm or just stops sending a position. Either way, your paid-for tracking service is getting either an accurate report of where you are, or an alert that contains your last known position when you were separated from the external device, both fairly useful pieces of data.
Okay, I admit I don't know much about the magnetosphere, but why would it be a rotating magnetic field?
The earth rotates, but the wire, if it's a space elevator, is rotating at the same speed. In order to induce a current in a wire, don't you have to make the wire cut through magnetic flux lines? Am I totally off base here?
However, another possible source of energy is that as you move upwards in elevation, your electric potential varies. There's roughly a 100 volt/meter electric field in the atmosphere, although I don't know how much it varies with altitude. (I know it's sufficiently linear at 'low' altitudes that a Dr. Strangelove-like friend of mine built an aircraft levelling device by sticking two radioactive sources out at the wingtips and measuring the difference in the ionization of the air as a function of the atmospheric electric field, which allowed him to determine the aircraft's absolute bank angle to within a couple degrees. Craaaaazy.)
anyway. If 100V/m holds up to 60,000 meters, well, that's a lot of potential right there, above and beyond solar cells or electromagnetic effects.
Well, it isn't *limited* to a few meters, per se. The issue is, basically, that power radiated omnidirectionally drops off as the square of the distance -- and anything that's orbital has a LOT of distance.
One way of dealing with this is using directional beamed power. The proposed space elevator wants to power crawlers that go up the tether, and that's essentially the same problem. They're considering solving it by using lasers that beam power up to the crawlers from the ground. The reason for this is we know how to make directed energy transfer devices -- lasers -- that, while they still drop off as the square of the distance, what started off as a near-point-source at the laser might be a square meter or less at several hundreds of kilometers, rather than several hundred kilometers squared (as is the case with an omnidirectional emitter like a transformer.)
So it's no surprise that these things work, and yes, they could work from orbit, at what we'd consider extremely low efficiency. That's kind of notational, though, because if the power is just going to waste, from our point of view -- all the photons that don't hit earth -- catching any of them and sending any percent of that to the earth already means you're getting more energy than you had to start with. So in a way, efficiency doesn't matter: it's a question of return on investment.
But if we could come up with *safe*, directionally beamed power, then orbital power stations would start to look pretty attractive.
Of course, one possible contender for safe orbital power would be to use the filaments of solar elevators as conductors. (Although the voltages you'd have to use to conduct with reasonable efficiency over a transmission line 36,000 km long mean you'd have to use multiple elevators, with one being your high-voltage line and the other, many miles away, being your current return path, and you run into problems with trying to insulate the HV line from the earth itself.)
It could be a nice way to live, or it could be really awful. It entirely depends on the circumstances.
In fact, it's very much like prostitution (not very surprisingly.)
If a woman *wants* to be in a polygamous relationship, well, why should we stop her? The government has no business legislating morality.
If a woman doesn't want to, well, she shouldn't have to, and nobody's making her get married (we presume, maybe optimistically.) So that's fine, too.
But here's the problem: what do you, as The State, do, when a group of people are raising their children and educating them that the way they live is the Right Way -- when that Right Way may seem harmful to people who aren't in that culture?
Hence the arguments over deaf people who don't want their children who can hear, to learn speech, because it would cut them off from the deaf sign language community (I've heard people argue this.) Or cultures or groups who cut off womens' genitals, or The Family, who encouraged their (often very young) female members to go sleep with wealthy men to get them to join the church.
There's a line to be drawn. Obviously, we all draw a line at voluntary vs. coercive behavior. But the much trickier problem is where we draw the line when it comes to educating children so they'll grow up making choices that seem, to them, to be voluntary, but seem to outsiders to be coerced.
I think a main reason homeschooling is so attractive to many people is because this gives them the ability to do exactly this: raise their kids with a restricted information set so the kids will be much less likely to make choices the parents don't like. I also think that's precisely why the FLDS got raided: because The State decided they were raising their children in an environment designed to make the children accept what The State viewed as systematic abuse.
This is a silly, less-than-useful story, but I'm offering it here because I had a crisis of faith one night right before an inorganic chemistry midterm that was very heavy on electrochemistry.
So I went downstairs, lit up a bunsen burner, took a small crucible, filled it with 1/2 tablesalt and 1/2 baking soda, and started heating it. Pretty soon it melted (because the combination of them lowers the melting point to something fairly reasonable.)
I hammered out a little titanium spoon-looking thing, and another flat strip of ti, put them in the melt, and hooked up a power supply with a couple volts, and made sodium metal. You could see a little shiny sphere of the stuff in the titanium spoon every once in a while, for a moment, until the oxygen in the air got through the (poor) protective burned-gas mantle and destroyed it.
Still, it made me decide that Science was still cool and worth pursuing.
(I presume the other electrode was bubbling out chlorine gas. Ew.)
Oh, it is, it is. There was a reason (kind of): Dodge wanted to keep the battery out of the engine compartment so if it started bubbling out hydrogen or acid it would do less damage.
But ya measure the PITA factor against how often batteries malfunction these days, and you see why nobody else does that.
Toyota does a *good* job of engineering. I've worked extensively on two Corollas and was very impressed. Honda... good reliability, but some of their cars were very difficult to diagnose, particularly the late '80's/early '90's cars that had what was in essence analog pneumatic computers running the climate control, cruise control, and power assist circuits. One little bit of grunge in any of those tubes and suddenly the defroster would stop working and all sorts of other things would go awry, and trying to make sure all those little tubes and valves were clean was nigh-impossible. ... the second time. The first time you're like "what the HELL??!? This is completely crazy!"
I really liked working on my three old Nissans: they were well-engineered, even if sometimes of questionable overall design. Any car post-1964 that still requires you to relash the valve clearance every couple thousand km is saving money in the wrong place. (Datsun 1200, Nissan Sentra, both required valve lashing.)
Soobs are designed by craaazy mechanical engineers. Sometimes I think they find people in Fuji Heavy Industries who have never even looked inside a car and say "build a car." They're very nicely designed but just fundamentally unlike anything else I've ever seen. The '91 Soob Loyale brakes were designed by circus aliens. You replace the pads and shoes and think "every car should be designed like that: that's BRILLIANT"
And, by the way, that dumb Harbor Freight scanner comes with a 30 page booklet listing all the error codes and what they mean, and the Soob Haynes manual (finally! five years after the car hit the market) also lists them, so you can work around its cheapness.
You can buy an OBDII scanner from Harbor Freight for $40.
If you're handy you can build your own that interfaces to a laptop and gives you full access to the internals, allowing you to make GTK-based virtual instrument panels.
And while I generally agree that American cars are hard to work on, so are many Japanese cars. They're better-engineered, true. You don't have to take off a wheel to change the oil (like on my mom's Saturn) or change a battery (like on my friend's Dodge) but on my Subaru I have to remove the windshield wiper fluid reservoir to change the spark plug.
The BBC says they've been using detector vans for 50 years and have gone through ten different types. Earlier ones had visible antennae on top *and* big signs on the sides, but now apparently they're allowed to make unmarked vans.
There are apparently about 26 detector vans in all of the UK.
Here is a purported picture of a 1950's detector van.
What justice?
Bob Jacobsen has paid Katzer $30,000 in judgments against Jacobsen, as well as his own legal fees. Katzer's made money off his product and gotten his legal costs paid for, and as I read the judgments, has yet to actually lose anything other than three of his 12 patents.
Katzer isn't winning, but JMRI is suffering a lot more than Katzer is.
I'm glad the court ruled the way it did but a lot of JMRI people have gotten pretty badly ground up along the way. This is only justice insofar as the rest of FOSS has dodged a bullet.
Glucose is the form of sugar that travels in your bloodstream to fuel the mitochondrial furnaces responsible for your brain power. Glucose is the only fuel normally used by brain cells. Because neurons cannot store glucose, they depend on the bloodstream to deliver a constant supply of this precious fuel.
Complete glucose deprivation has been shown to induce neuronal apoptosis, but the effect of moderate glucose deprivation under normal and pathological conditions is not fully understood.
Glucose is the only source of energy usually available to the brain. Without oxygen or glucose, neurons will die.
The K+ and Na+ is freely available in the bloodstream and intracellular fluid. Nerves use selective ion channels to establish the ion gradients used for depolarization but they don't require a specific source for them: they're everywhere in the body.
In contrast, without glucose your nerve cells will die. They require glucose to power aerobic metabolism and produce the ATP that they use to maintain the ion gradient.
Interesting.
I use a gmail address specifically because I think it's classier than yahoo or whatever, and easier to remember than the address I've had for 15 years or so. Anyone can remember joesmith@gmail.com, while joesmith588@yahoo.com sounds like a loser and joesmith@mail.onrampsacramento.com isn't going to stick in someone's head for even three seconds.
It'd be useful to see what other people think about the perceived value/worth of a domain name, and what running your own domain says about you. The guy who made the LEGO Babbage engine has his page up at woz.org, which *I* think is just the coolest thing ever, but normal people aren't going to recognize that, so that's a gamble: if someone DOES know what that means, the person is going to be very impressed indeed.
Yep.
I chose the email address most of my friends to contact me, 20 years ago. Guess what? I've grown up a bit since then, and 'swordsman' (it's not, but it's close) just doesn't cut it, so to speak, for job searches.
Here's a weird thing, though: I have several email addresses, and I use them specifically for different purposes. The old one I've used forever is how I run my webpages/chat with old friends. My name is the one I use for jobs. A cheesy yahoo-sounding name, fastfreddy588 or whatever, is what I use when I'm poking around on places that sound dubious and I expect they're going to send me spam. So here's the thing: I tend to use the latter one when I check out dating sites or what-have-you, and when I actually interact with someone I use an actual-name email because it doesn't sound like I'm some cheap loser who couldn't get a name without a bunch of numbers in it. Which is to say: I semi-consciously rely on the email name I'm using to form an impression. That tends to support their silly study.
Yes, but... that ATP has to come from somewhere. In the case of the brain, it comes originally, and almost solely, from glucose-6-phosphate, which comes from glucose. I don't think you could survive just eating ATP. For their specialized function, yes, nerve cells require a Na/K gradient, but to establish and maintain that gradient, they need calories -- thermochemical energy -- that they get from sugar. They then use that to drive the ADP->ATP synthases, and use the energy generated by ATP->ADP to maintain their ion gradients.
>could not "weaponize" the anthrax (WTF does that even mean anyway?)
In this context, what it means is managing to take Bacillus anthracis growing in culture, getting it to form spores, extracting those spores in a way that they're still viable, drying them, physically separating them into a homogenous fine powder (called 'milling') and in this particular case, apparently then uniformly coating the powdered bits with a hydrophilic silica that had an associated surface electric charge.
Above taken from this wall street journal article (which says these weren't physically milled but were particularized in some other way.)
There's a *lot* of work involved in making these samples, and it requires access to large amounts of very high-tech equipment, stuff that a microbiologist who is making vaccines doesn't have. The equipment doesn't exist anywhere outside of the old US bioweapons labs at Fort Dettrick, according to multiple other people.
Standard way... aside from a high-power BB gun?
It's a PITA but if you talk to people and volunteer to install the shielding yourself, a lot of people will be happy to let you. They just can't be bothered to do it themselves.
I agree -- but under what grounds do you 'fine' someone?
You can't fine someone unless the person is breaking a law: that's called either taxation or theft.
What I'd like to see is a reasonable, blanket law about keeping your house in acceptable condition, as regards eyesores, noise pollution, and stink. Those laws already exist, though. In this case, it looks to me like they were trying to pass a law to specifically target this guy and his airplanes, while letting people who rebuild cars, just as messily, continue to do what they were doing, and that's why it sucks. Not because of the general idea, but because of the specific implementation.
Here's an article about the ban.
To be fair, what I've read about it in comparatively nonbiased sites, it sounds like he had an airplane junkyard in his front and back yards: several planes in various states of disrepair/disassembly, that he was using as donors for another project that was shaping up in the driveway.
I have no problem with people making airplanes at home -- hey, I'm going to do the same thing. But I'm pretty irritated at my neighbors for having multiple dead cars on bricks in the front yard. How is dead airplanes any better? At least put up a fence and don't rivet at 2 AM. (He was also accused of late-night noise, and bucking rivets *is* mindblowingly loud.)
The 'invisible' part specifically refers to the negative productivity of resource-hoarding. In traditional tragedy-of-the-commons situations it's easy to quantify the value of the meadow that's now a barren desert. But when development isn't happening, you have no idea what didn't happen: the stuff choked off is invisible.
Now, this is somewhat akin to arguing that if you don't have all the kids you can, you might be missing the next Einstein: while true, it also makes silly assumptions.