There's dispute about what in a shock wave actually kills a person. I'm not saying that people who know what they're talking about are disputing it, but those of us who just read stuff online don't do such a credible job. However, what I've read is that it's the near-instantaneous acceleration across your chest that actually kills you. Same with falling from a tower: it's the sheer unsupported volume of the chest/abdomen that allows stuff to move enough to tear loose and kill you from the shock and blood loss. The brain does the same thing to a lesser extent, but since it's so much more delicate, even small relative displacements between the brain and skull can leave people with serious cognitive problems.
I've read that hanging is a similar problem to the motorcycle thing: not enough drop and people slowly asphyxiate, the right amount and their necks break, and a bit more yet and their heads come off. Ugh.
The guy worked in a quarry. He's found with broken ribs and a broken spine. Having suffered broken ribs and a broken spine, myself, I can say that it takes an *enormous* amount of force to do that. If the cellphone had exploded with sufficient force to break vertebrae, there'd be a big hole where his chest was and no sign of the cellphone. Much, much more likely is that he was struck by something large, that broke his back and ribs, and also crushed the cellphone, rupturing the battery compartment and making the battery melt from short-circuiting itself.
People killed by dynamite blasts don't have broken vertebrae, even when the shock wave has torn their hearts loose from their arteries.
>I don't know about you, but a 25% gain in efficiency seems pretty good to me.
A Boeing engineer of my acquaintence has quoted other aero engineers as saying that a jet designer would happily sell his grandparents for a tenth of a percent of reduced drag.
I'd pay half the value of my car for a 25% increase in efficiency, personally.
Example: the last page in the latest MAKE magazine was an article about how a guy had put a LEGO Mindstorms in an R/C plane, and wrote some software, and now he could get it to fly to waypoints. My first thought, when I saw this, was "dude, cheap homebuilt cruise missile! Rock on! This'll piss off LOTS of people!" Guy down in New Zealand has a great set of webpages about building your own pulsejets, used to have one about how to add an autopilot onto one but had to take it down following government pressure -- but the knowledge is there.
You might ask why I'm enthusiastic about this. One: I love DIY and geek hardware. Two: I think the point of the Second Amendment was to keep the government afraid of the people, because an armed populace could overthrow a hostile, intrusive government. Well, these days, that's clearly not going to happen -- people are outclassed by orders of magnitude, and the idea of a popular insurrection is pretty much hopeless. However, maybe technology will fill in the gap. It's already happened with cryptography. Individuals can implement privacy measures that the government can't break by force. Maybe another 20 years, even if we can't stand up for ourselves, we can at least keep the government scared enough to listen.
I agree with everything you're saying, but the problems are:
A: American history has shown repeatedly that expecting people to change their behavior Just Doesn't Work because we're all lazy. The only way to compel behavioral change is to make it cheaper to change than to stay the same.
B: While you're completely right about car trips being less than 2 miles, the very large majority of precisely those car trips are to go get something and in most cases bicycles are ill-equipped to return with things -- and in the few cases where you're not going to get *something*, you're probably going to an appointment and there's no good place to leave a bike. I'm a crazy bicyclist and I can tell you that loading a backpack full of groceries is a good way to piss off my girlfriend when all the apples are bruised from being packed in beside milk, and I end up locking my $3000 bike to a lightpole halfway across the parking lot from the supermarket. It is a far easier thing for me to pull a wagon to the supermarket from my house than to ride my bike there. For me, it's much easier to ride my bike 50 km each way to work, than to use the bike for local trips that involve buying lumber or sheetrock for fixing the house, taking the dog to the vet, or taking all my gf's weird expensive clothes into the drycleaner's -- and it's the daily 100km drive that really sucks up the gasoline, not the 2 km over to the drycleaners to have an annoyed elderly Chinese woman yell at me for buying leather that'll fade when she drycleans it. (I have the world's most hostile drycleaner: it's always scary walking in there with some new Armani thing that the girl found on ebay.)
If more people had bike trailers, it'd make bikes much more useful. But I feel the same way about cars: I drive a little Subaru and I have an *enormous* trailer for it. Most of the time I'm getting great gas mileage, passing SUV's like they're sitting still, and when I need to carry something more than an engine block or 5 bicycles or a pallet of lumber for framing in the bathroom -- all of which I've carried around in the back of the Soob -- I hook up the trailer and then I can carry 6 cubic meters of stuff. But people generally only want to buy one thing -- one car, one bike -- and have it do everything for them. Much like people who buy high-end computers for word processing, just so that it'll play the latest game quickly the 1% of the time it's used for that, people buy their cars for the maximum requirement it'll ever be used for, and then run it into the ground with daily usage, wasting enormous amounts of energy in the meantime. That's just human nature, and it's not going to change unless that kind of behavior becomes even more expensive than it already is.
I'd like to see a much higher gasoline tax, with rebates for people whose cars get in the top 5% of fuel efficiency. Then you'd see some serious changes in buying habits.
The summary:"Although 'alien' microbes might look like ordinary bacteria, their biochemistry could involve exotic amino acids or different elemental building blocks so researchers are devising tests to identify exotic microbes."
Here's the thing: there's unlikely to be a discrete line in the sand, beyond which life occurring on Earth can be called alien. In humans, we have DNA that transcribes into RNA and then translates into protein. Viruses just use RNA, dispensing with DNA, so they have a different elemental building block. Even in humans there are different building blocks: the RNA->protein translation for our main DNA has a different code than our mitochondrial DNA. Likewise, there are many bacteria that use amino acids not seen in the rest of the animal and plant kingdoms, and extreme thermophilic bacteria use ether-linked phospholipids (as do more common bacteria), that act like rivets holding the cell membrane together, rather than the bilipid membranes other bacteria, plants, and animals use. And once you start looking at metal-ion-based coenzymes, you can't stop finding weird and unusual things, especially if it involves moving ions or specific molecules around. Once you get past things that have either fur or flowers, there are more exotic chemistries than normal ones, it seems like.
I entirely agree with what you're saying. (I think it's interesting that one of my grandmothers came from a family of twelve kids in/near Trenton, NJ. Of them, 9 died of cancer and 2 of heart disease before the age of 70, all in NJ, and my grandmother, who moved to Colorado, died of old age at 93.)
With that said, I can't let this pass:"It drives me crazy that we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars to avenge the deaths of 3,000 people"
We didn't. There was no connection between those 3000 people and the Iraq war. There isn't, there wasn't, and everyone involved *knew* there wasn't. Don't let their attempts to link the bombings and Iraq work, now or ever. We aren't throwing that money away to avenge people killed in NYC in 2001, in the 1983 Beirut bombing, in the 1998 US Embassy bombing, in the *first* WTC bombing, or in the USS Cole bombing, because Iraq had nothing to do with any of those. We're just flat-out throwing that money away.
Well, it benefits large companies, particularly those that manufacture in Mexico and sell in the US. Indirectly we're supposed to benefit because the companies are supposed to return that higher profitability to our economy (although somehow that never seems to happen, much like trickle-down economics.) What I'm wondering is: if individual entrepeneurs take advantage of price inequity, then what? I think if people started buying from wholesalers in the states and selling in Canada for a 10% markup, they'd cut heavily into small- and mid-sized business niches.
I've been wondering why someone doesn't take advantage of this and start a cross-border import/export business relying on the 5-year-out-of-date pricing scheme. I've seen a lot of books/magazines with nearly a 2:1 price differential, and when it's more like 1:1 someone with low overhead should be able to make out like a bandit.
>Borosilicate is pretty cheap, and I've seen rods of that thrown against a brick wall without taking any visible damage
Go you one better: Prince Rupert's Drops. Drip molten glass into water. The few that survive are incredibly, unbelievably tough -- I've made ones the size of peas (well, teardrop-shaped peas) and put them on a vise and hammered them with a steel hammer and left dents in the vise back and the hammer face, without hurting the glass. When that gets boring, you snap the long tail that was left when it fell off the main glob of glass, which sometimes takes a pair of pliers to snap even though it's hair-thin, and the whole drop explodes violently. Don't bother trying to make a whole bunch and keep them in a box, though: the ones I made had a half-life of about 2 days. I knew a chem grad student who dropped out because he spent all his grant money on special heat treatment stuff, dripping drops the size of lightbulbs off the roof of the chem building.
Actually, I meant "sorted according to a gradient". Graduated would work, but would imply that once passed, the test would not have to be taken again, which would allow for cheaters and nogoodniks. I think they -- well, we -- should have to take the test every time.
To one side of the 'getting online safely test' are a bunch of random Google ads. One is for a "See Natalie Portman Naked! Click here! (requires installation of viewer software)" link. We'll be nice and give them the benefit of the doubt -- they have to click on both that *and* the subsequent screen, that says, "install natalie.exe? Y/N" and only then does the shaped charge in the keyboard go off and blow off both their hands.
Imagine an outbound firewall that poses a series of questions to anyone who tries to use it. If you can't solve a grammar problem that requires you to know the difference between "their", "there", and "they're" you don't get to use email. If you can't choose the correct definitions from multiple choices for "intellectual property", "piracy", "flame", and "rtfm" you don't get to use the web. If you can't solve a quadratic equation, your computer is set to inbound traffic only.
I do know that -- I can read a bit of OE. However, just because they had a degenerate (by which I mean non-unique-mapping) set of pronouns doesn't make it sound any better now. There are rules in languages that are Just Stupid: how many programmers have been bitten by 'if (c=0)'? I think that's a bad design decision. Likewise, the quasi-degeneracy between 'lay' and 'lie' in English is Just Stupid even though it's based on historical accidents of etymology. It's still stupid.
In Danish, the word for 'beer' is not very far removed from the word for 'oil', and 'oil' sounds much more like their word for beer than their word for oil. Imagine me, 16 years old, knowing about fifty words of Danish, riding my bike through Denmark, and walking into a hardware store and asking them for beer for my bike ride, because it made noise, as best I can reconstruct. They stared at me for a while and then refused to talk to me anymore.
While I agree with the sentiment, the problem is all too often finding the broken bits. Cases in point: girlfriend's beautiful, high-end CD/DVD player, failed, because the motor drive circuitry failed, and it's a custom ASIC that integrates the H-bridge and tracking into that one chip, and nobody in the world lists that chip. Or another: I want to build a computer interface to my cheap R/C car. I take apart the remote control, look at the design, look at the chip that runs the whole thing, download the datasheet, design a nice parallel-port-driven interface, and then try to find that chip. I can buy it in lots of 10,000, minimum. So I bought a second R/C car and tore it apart. One of my oscilloscopes has a failed input buffer on the EXT channel. It's a mini board based on an op amp that hasn't been made since 1994. Speaking of which, on the same oscilloscope, one has a whole bunch of neato software for doing FFT math, and the other doesn't. It'd sure be nice to copy that material... except that it's all stored in a PAL, and how exactly do I manage to copy a PAL?
It's easy to fix mechanical things. It's complicated but possible, with a bit of creativity, to fix electromechanical faults. But as more and more stuff gets shunted into software that's stored in custom hardware, it becomes less and less possible to deal with these things. I think within a few years we'll see MP3 players that consist of three chips: a big memory chip, a big power management chip, and a big chip that handles all the decoding, audio, video, front-panel I/O, computer I/O. Plus two dozen passives for the switching power supply. There won't be anything to fix, because the fault will be within one of those three big chips, and only the memory chip will be available to anyone other than the original manufacturer.
My Commodore Amiga 1000 and 2000 came with full schematics, in 1986-89, respectively. Ditto my HP Thinkjet printer from the same period, plus part numbers and ordering information for where to get every IC. Last night I was working on an HP function generator from the same period. The individual circuit boards have silkscreen notations telling what different functional groups of circuits do: one section will be circled in white with "GPIB controller" written within it, and adjacent to that, another group with "GPIB controller clock" labelled. Sure makes it easy to figure out where the frequency calibration gain stage is.
I learned something interesting from an ex-boss, when I was working at a place that made circuitry. We had a tour of customers and we had to cover up the manufacturer nameplates on some of the machines, because we were afraid our customers would see those and be able to just go straight to the source and duplicate our efforts. My boss said "when you have to hide what you're doing, you're no longer innovating: we need to start looking for another job." I think that goes straight to the source of the amazing vanishing schematics: back when HP and Commodore were doing brilliant things, they could open-source their hardware because by the time it was copied, they would've already moved on to something even better and wouldn't care. These days, the manufacturing cycles have become so rapid and the amount of hardware innovation has dropped enough that people have to keep their hardware designs obfusticated (yeah, it's a word, no it's not in the dictionary) to stay competitive. That, coupled with an urge to cut costs anywhere possible, leads to removing schematics and any way of getting repair information, which could be used to duplicate the item.
The relay I'm most familiar with is just under one cubic inch and dissipates about 150mW during operation, based on my own measurements -- 5V@20mA is not sufficient to latch it, but 30mA is. It's this relay, which, admittedly, is a monster power relay.
Point being, I think the truth is somewhere between the two positions. This thing's drawing an eighth of a watt and it's a *tiny* relay, physically, but it's vast overkill for any relay you'd find in any consumer electronics device outside heaters and ovens.
And your pun is reVolting: all it does is hAmper your argument. Seriously, cohm on: you can do better.
Slashdot Mirror
There's dispute about what in a shock wave actually kills a person. I'm not saying that people who know what they're talking about are disputing it, but those of us who just read stuff online don't do such a credible job. However, what I've read is that it's the near-instantaneous acceleration across your chest that actually kills you. Same with falling from a tower: it's the sheer unsupported volume of the chest/abdomen that allows stuff to move enough to tear loose and kill you from the shock and blood loss. The brain does the same thing to a lesser extent, but since it's so much more delicate, even small relative displacements between the brain and skull can leave people with serious cognitive problems.
I've read that hanging is a similar problem to the motorcycle thing: not enough drop and people slowly asphyxiate, the right amount and their necks break, and a bit more yet and their heads come off. Ugh.
>So now we got a huge guy theory, and a serial crusher theory.
I've had dates like that.
The guy worked in a quarry. He's found with broken ribs and a broken spine. Having suffered broken ribs and a broken spine, myself, I can say that it takes an *enormous* amount of force to do that. If the cellphone had exploded with sufficient force to break vertebrae, there'd be a big hole where his chest was and no sign of the cellphone.
Much, much more likely is that he was struck by something large, that broke his back and ribs, and also crushed the cellphone, rupturing the battery compartment and making the battery melt from short-circuiting itself.
People killed by dynamite blasts don't have broken vertebrae, even when the shock wave has torn their hearts loose from their arteries.
And the intelligent programmer has the other half of the water backed up in a glass in another room, preferably in another city in a fireproof safe.
>but simple things like communicating how freakin' easy it is to get non-Amazon content on to the device, for free, remain horribly misunderstood.
And it is in Amazon's interest to show people who might otherwise buy material how to avoid buying material... how?
>I don't know about you, but a 25% gain in efficiency seems pretty good to me.
A Boeing engineer of my acquaintence has quoted other aero engineers as saying that a jet designer would happily sell his grandparents for a tenth of a percent of reduced drag.
I'd pay half the value of my car for a 25% increase in efficiency, personally.
Example: the last page in the latest MAKE magazine was an article about how a guy had put a LEGO Mindstorms in an R/C plane, and wrote some software, and now he could get it to fly to waypoints. My first thought, when I saw this, was "dude, cheap homebuilt cruise missile! Rock on! This'll piss off LOTS of people!" Guy down in New Zealand has a great set of webpages about building your own pulsejets, used to have one about how to add an autopilot onto one but had to take it down following government pressure -- but the knowledge is there.
You might ask why I'm enthusiastic about this. One: I love DIY and geek hardware. Two: I think the point of the Second Amendment was to keep the government afraid of the people, because an armed populace could overthrow a hostile, intrusive government. Well, these days, that's clearly not going to happen -- people are outclassed by orders of magnitude, and the idea of a popular insurrection is pretty much hopeless. However, maybe technology will fill in the gap. It's already happened with cryptography. Individuals can implement privacy measures that the government can't break by force. Maybe another 20 years, even if we can't stand up for ourselves, we can at least keep the government scared enough to listen.
I agree with everything you're saying, but the problems are:
A: American history has shown repeatedly that expecting people to change their behavior Just Doesn't Work because we're all lazy. The only way to compel behavioral change is to make it cheaper to change than to stay the same.
B: While you're completely right about car trips being less than 2 miles, the very large majority of precisely those car trips are to go get something and in most cases bicycles are ill-equipped to return with things -- and in the few cases where you're not going to get *something*, you're probably going to an appointment and there's no good place to leave a bike. I'm a crazy bicyclist and I can tell you that loading a backpack full of groceries is a good way to piss off my girlfriend when all the apples are bruised from being packed in beside milk, and I end up locking my $3000 bike to a lightpole halfway across the parking lot from the supermarket. It is a far easier thing for me to pull a wagon to the supermarket from my house than to ride my bike there. For me, it's much easier to ride my bike 50 km each way to work, than to use the bike for local trips that involve buying lumber or sheetrock for fixing the house, taking the dog to the vet, or taking all my gf's weird expensive clothes into the drycleaner's -- and it's the daily 100km drive that really sucks up the gasoline, not the 2 km over to the drycleaners to have an annoyed elderly Chinese woman yell at me for buying leather that'll fade when she drycleans it. (I have the world's most hostile drycleaner: it's always scary walking in there with some new Armani thing that the girl found on ebay.)
If more people had bike trailers, it'd make bikes much more useful. But I feel the same way about cars: I drive a little Subaru and I have an *enormous* trailer for it. Most of the time I'm getting great gas mileage, passing SUV's like they're sitting still, and when I need to carry something more than an engine block or 5 bicycles or a pallet of lumber for framing in the bathroom -- all of which I've carried around in the back of the Soob -- I hook up the trailer and then I can carry 6 cubic meters of stuff. But people generally only want to buy one thing -- one car, one bike -- and have it do everything for them. Much like people who buy high-end computers for word processing, just so that it'll play the latest game quickly the 1% of the time it's used for that, people buy their cars for the maximum requirement it'll ever be used for, and then run it into the ground with daily usage, wasting enormous amounts of energy in the meantime. That's just human nature, and it's not going to change unless that kind of behavior becomes even more expensive than it already is.
I'd like to see a much higher gasoline tax, with rebates for people whose cars get in the top 5% of fuel efficiency. Then you'd see some serious changes in buying habits.
The summary:"Although 'alien' microbes might look like ordinary bacteria, their biochemistry could involve exotic amino acids or different elemental building blocks so researchers are devising tests to identify exotic microbes."
Here's the thing: there's unlikely to be a discrete line in the sand, beyond which life occurring on Earth can be called alien. In humans, we have DNA that transcribes into RNA and then translates into protein. Viruses just use RNA, dispensing with DNA, so they have a different elemental building block. Even in humans there are different building blocks: the RNA->protein translation for our main DNA has a different code than our mitochondrial DNA. Likewise, there are many bacteria that use amino acids not seen in the rest of the animal and plant kingdoms, and extreme thermophilic bacteria use ether-linked phospholipids (as do more common bacteria), that act like rivets holding the cell membrane together, rather than the bilipid membranes other bacteria, plants, and animals use. And once you start looking at metal-ion-based coenzymes, you can't stop finding weird and unusual things, especially if it involves moving ions or specific molecules around. Once you get past things that have either fur or flowers, there are more exotic chemistries than normal ones, it seems like.
I entirely agree with what you're saying. (I think it's interesting that one of my grandmothers came from a family of twelve kids in/near Trenton, NJ. Of them, 9 died of cancer and 2 of heart disease before the age of 70, all in NJ, and my grandmother, who moved to Colorado, died of old age at 93.)
With that said, I can't let this pass:"It drives me crazy that we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars to avenge the deaths of 3,000 people"
We didn't. There was no connection between those 3000 people and the Iraq war. There isn't, there wasn't, and everyone involved *knew* there wasn't. Don't let their attempts to link the bombings and Iraq work, now or ever. We aren't throwing that money away to avenge people killed in NYC in 2001, in the 1983 Beirut bombing, in the 1998 US Embassy bombing, in the *first* WTC bombing, or in the USS Cole bombing, because Iraq had nothing to do with any of those. We're just flat-out throwing that money away.
Well, it benefits large companies, particularly those that manufacture in Mexico and sell in the US. Indirectly we're supposed to benefit because the companies are supposed to return that higher profitability to our economy (although somehow that never seems to happen, much like trickle-down economics.)
What I'm wondering is: if individual entrepeneurs take advantage of price inequity, then what? I think if people started buying from wholesalers in the states and selling in Canada for a 10% markup, they'd cut heavily into small- and mid-sized business niches.
I've been wondering why someone doesn't take advantage of this and start a cross-border import/export business relying on the 5-year-out-of-date pricing scheme. I've seen a lot of books/magazines with nearly a 2:1 price differential, and when it's more like 1:1 someone with low overhead should be able to make out like a bandit.
>tax and spend IS a shitty economic policy, and the last few years are too complicated to really say how much better democrats would have done.
I think it's pretty clearly shown that 'reduce taxes and spend *more*' is an *amazingly* shitty economic policy.
>Borosilicate is pretty cheap, and I've seen rods of that thrown against a brick wall without taking any visible damage
Go you one better: Prince Rupert's Drops. Drip molten glass into water. The few that survive are incredibly, unbelievably tough -- I've made ones the size of peas (well, teardrop-shaped peas) and put them on a vise and hammered them with a steel hammer and left dents in the vise back and the hammer face, without hurting the glass. When that gets boring, you snap the long tail that was left when it fell off the main glob of glass, which sometimes takes a pair of pliers to snap even though it's hair-thin, and the whole drop explodes violently.
Don't bother trying to make a whole bunch and keep them in a box, though: the ones I made had a half-life of about 2 days.
I knew a chem grad student who dropped out because he spent all his grant money on special heat treatment stuff, dripping drops the size of lightbulbs off the roof of the chem building.
Actually, I meant "sorted according to a gradient".
Graduated would work, but would imply that once passed, the test would not have to be taken again, which would allow for cheaters and nogoodniks. I think they -- well, we -- should have to take the test every time.
To one side of the 'getting online safely test' are a bunch of random Google ads. One is for a "See Natalie Portman Naked! Click here! (requires installation of viewer software)" link.
We'll be nice and give them the benefit of the doubt -- they have to click on both that *and* the subsequent screen, that says, "install natalie.exe? Y/N" and only then does the shaped charge in the keyboard go off and blow off both their hands.
Imagine an outbound firewall that poses a series of questions to anyone who tries to use it.
If you can't solve a grammar problem that requires you to know the difference between "their", "there", and "they're" you don't get to use email.
If you can't choose the correct definitions from multiple choices for "intellectual property", "piracy", "flame", and "rtfm" you don't get to use the web.
If you can't solve a quadratic equation, your computer is set to inbound traffic only.
Problem solved.
I do know that -- I can read a bit of OE. However, just because they had a degenerate (by which I mean non-unique-mapping) set of pronouns doesn't make it sound any better now. There are rules in languages that are Just Stupid: how many programmers have been bitten by 'if (c=0)'? I think that's a bad design decision. Likewise, the quasi-degeneracy between 'lay' and 'lie' in English is Just Stupid even though it's based on historical accidents of etymology. It's still stupid.
>Maybe people should just realize that "he" is the gender-neutral pronoun in English!
Yeah, because "Man is an unusual mammal because his breasts are much larger in proportion to his size than other mammals" makes *perfect* sense.
In Danish, the word for 'beer' is not very far removed from the word for 'oil', and 'oil' sounds much more like their word for beer than their word for oil. Imagine me, 16 years old, knowing about fifty words of Danish, riding my bike through Denmark, and walking into a hardware store and asking them for beer for my bike ride, because it made noise, as best I can reconstruct. They stared at me for a while and then refused to talk to me anymore.
While Twain may have said that, he must not've been convinced because he later on wrote his own version: The Jumping Frog: In English. Then in French. Then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil. It's a brilliantly funny book, especially inasmuch as Clemens, himself, did the translation back into English, carefully choosing his idioms for maximum effect.
>NOTHING is all that complicated.
While I agree with the sentiment, the problem is all too often finding the broken bits.
Cases in point: girlfriend's beautiful, high-end CD/DVD player, failed, because the motor drive circuitry failed, and it's a custom ASIC that integrates the H-bridge and tracking into that one chip, and nobody in the world lists that chip.
Or another: I want to build a computer interface to my cheap R/C car. I take apart the remote control, look at the design, look at the chip that runs the whole thing, download the datasheet, design a nice parallel-port-driven interface, and then try to find that chip. I can buy it in lots of 10,000, minimum. So I bought a second R/C car and tore it apart.
One of my oscilloscopes has a failed input buffer on the EXT channel. It's a mini board based on an op amp that hasn't been made since 1994.
Speaking of which, on the same oscilloscope, one has a whole bunch of neato software for doing FFT math, and the other doesn't. It'd sure be nice to copy that material... except that it's all stored in a PAL, and how exactly do I manage to copy a PAL?
It's easy to fix mechanical things. It's complicated but possible, with a bit of creativity, to fix electromechanical faults. But as more and more stuff gets shunted into software that's stored in custom hardware, it becomes less and less possible to deal with these things. I think within a few years we'll see MP3 players that consist of three chips: a big memory chip, a big power management chip, and a big chip that handles all the decoding, audio, video, front-panel I/O, computer I/O. Plus two dozen passives for the switching power supply. There won't be anything to fix, because the fault will be within one of those three big chips, and only the memory chip will be available to anyone other than the original manufacturer.
My Commodore Amiga 1000 and 2000 came with full schematics, in 1986-89, respectively. Ditto my HP Thinkjet printer from the same period, plus part numbers and ordering information for where to get every IC.
Last night I was working on an HP function generator from the same period. The individual circuit boards have silkscreen notations telling what different functional groups of circuits do: one section will be circled in white with "GPIB controller" written within it, and adjacent to that, another group with "GPIB controller clock" labelled. Sure makes it easy to figure out where the frequency calibration gain stage is.
I learned something interesting from an ex-boss, when I was working at a place that made circuitry. We had a tour of customers and we had to cover up the manufacturer nameplates on some of the machines, because we were afraid our customers would see those and be able to just go straight to the source and duplicate our efforts. My boss said "when you have to hide what you're doing, you're no longer innovating: we need to start looking for another job." I think that goes straight to the source of the amazing vanishing schematics: back when HP and Commodore were doing brilliant things, they could open-source their hardware because by the time it was copied, they would've already moved on to something even better and wouldn't care. These days, the manufacturing cycles have become so rapid and the amount of hardware innovation has dropped enough that people have to keep their hardware designs obfusticated (yeah, it's a word, no it's not in the dictionary) to stay competitive. That, coupled with an urge to cut costs anywhere possible, leads to removing schematics and any way of getting repair information, which could be used to duplicate the item.
The relay I'm most familiar with is just under one cubic inch and dissipates about 150mW during operation, based on my own measurements -- 5V@20mA is not sufficient to latch it, but 30mA is.
It's this relay, which, admittedly, is a monster power relay.
Point being, I think the truth is somewhere between the two positions. This thing's drawing an eighth of a watt and it's a *tiny* relay, physically, but it's vast overkill for any relay you'd find in any consumer electronics device outside heaters and ovens.
And your pun is reVolting: all it does is hAmper your argument. Seriously, cohm on: you can do better.
Everything I said was true, but for a different molecule: butadiene, not butanediol.
*sigh*
To do: get more sleep, read before hitting 'submit'