Coke is rolling out their Freestyle fountain dispensing machines worldwide. Each one has the ability to phone home about inventory levels, maintenance logs, and what drinks are trending where. Coke doesn't do anything small - everything they do is done on a global scale. There are 100,000 - 200,000 fast food restaurants in the United States alone. It doesn't take much imagination to see how that could scale up to 16 million machines worldwide over the product life cycle.
But on the other hand, after sitting through the first one, there is no way on Earth I am going to sit through the second one in a cinema
I'm with you. What I'm actually looking forward to is the eventual fan-edit. After the third one comes out, some enterprising person will take the bloated 9 hours of cinematic release, then (1) cut out anything or anyone that didn't appear in the book, and (2) cut every fight/chase scene in half. You'll end up with a perfectly watchable, engaging film that clocks in around 2:45.
is it stable enough to get as close as possible then drive out to rescue them
The ship got trapped because broken sea ice got crunched together by wind and waves around them, then froze in place. Moving ice does not freeze together into nice smooth sheets that are amenable to driving on. As the wind and waves continue to work, the ice surface will buckle, heavy, split, reform, and generally create a confused mess that make for difficult headway even afoot. Check out some of the pictures from Shackleton's Endurance expedition.
Then, too: how many ocean going ships just so happen to have big burly motorized vehicles for just such an occasion? An ice breaker is more likely to have a helicopter than a 4x4 Jeep.
When the Feds bust a drug dealer, they might find an expensive car, and a large stash of heroin. They are certainly OK to auction the car, and certainly not OK to auction the heroin. Bitcoins falls in the middle somewhere. We don't know yet whether it is OK to auction them off.
Heroin and other drugs have (street) value, and perhaps the government could get a pretty penny by selling them. The reason the government doesn't, moral issues aside, is because it's illegal to sell or even posses them, so there's no legal way to offload them. Letting them sit around in a storehouse forever is a liability, so they destroy them.
There are some seized assets that are, more or less, legal to sell and possess, but cumbersome to do so. For instance, a stash of prescription drugs that someone was trafficking. Sure, the government could try to sell or auction them, but that raises all manner of thorny questions about traceability, purity, and running afoul of the FDA. Nope, it's easier (and ultimately cheaper) to just dispose of them.
Bitcoin is much more clear cut; it is not illegal to possess or sell, and is easy to offload. It has value out on the open market, just like a bar of gold or that drug dealer's expensive car. I think that, after everything's been litigated, they'll sell the stuff off at market value.
In very real ways programming is becoming ever less accessible to the average person or at least less open to the sorts of spontaneous discovery and experimentation that attract new people into the field. For example, it's difficult now to have the sort of VIC-20, Commodore-64 or Apple II experience that inspired well know programmers like Linus Torvalds and many others to become interested in computing and programming at an early age.
Bollocks. There are still plenty of ways a person can tinker with general-purpose computing on their home PC, and what novices are able to do blows my mind. You can get free BASIC environments for all major computer platforms out there. There are browser-based IDEs for all kinds of languages. Hell, you can even get emulators for a C-64 or Apple II. Even better: pick up an Arduino for $25 and start coding an embedded system. Want more power, connectivity, and GUIs? Try RaspPI or BeagleBone. What makes the current age awesome for those that want to start learning and tinkering is that, unlike 30 years ago, everything you need - IDEs, libraries, reference docs, user communities, example projects with source code - are just an internet search away, and free.
I can't overexaggerate how much I love the zone of silence in my daily bus and train rides, or the pristine calm of the city sidewalks.
Airplanes are a bit of a special case, owing to the fact that you are in tighter and more stress-inducing quarters, for longer periods of time, and can't get up to move to a different seat if you get stuck next to the asshat who wants to shout at his sister in Des Moines.
You could just hire a drone to clean up the changelog before release
Since it is a document that will be seen and read by your customers, competitors, and (depending on the market you are in) regulators, you DO NOT assign that kind of a task to a drone. You give it to someone who has technical expertise and the ability to write coherently. Barring that, you give it to a senior developer or systems engineer, who has ultimate technical responsibility for it anyway, and ought to have the best understanding of what's in the new release.
This is a practice that has been drilled into my head: any half-thoughts, offhand comments, or speculation can very, very easily be manipulated by a lawyer to make you or your company look like a guilty guilty liars in a courtroom. One excerpt from a change log, blown up onto a 4' x 6' poster, displayed in front of a jury, can result in a multimillion-dollar loss for you or your company. Never mind that the full context would exonerate you or that there's a larger story surrounding that comment - the opposing lawyer only needs to keep pointing to that poster to make you look like an idiot that's got something to hide.
Now, it is bad enough for such potentially dangerous content to exist in materials that are discoverable once a lawsuit has already begun. It is downright stupid, as a business practice, to just put those materials out in the wild for anyone to examine and look for something that could be sued over. If you want to keep your customer informed about what's changed, by all means produce a formal document that does that, with detail to the nth degree. The change logs are for internal use; they aren't for your customers.
The failed legislation was a modification to require inclusion of metal components that would be hard to remove. If you think about it, that doesn't make much sense....its either detectable or its not. Those with criminal intent would not likely be deterred by this minor modification.
The modification would have made the metal component essential to the function of the gun, the idea being that if you remove it to make the gun undetectable, you also end up with a gun that can't fire. This is aimed largely at people who might manufacture and sell such guns and could perhaps be used as a legal tool against those that might design and publish plans for 3D-printable guns. One can debate the enforceability of such a requirement, but it has a purpose. It won't deter individuals, but that's nothing new.
Leaving something to someone who is not legally related to you is much more expensive to that person than leaving it to a child/spouce. The tax rates are completely different, and in some cases there would be no taxes.
Good point, I never thought about the inheritance tax angle.
Which was the crux of one US v Windsor, one of the cases which struck down DOMA this past year
However, there's "simple" for some people and then there's "simple" for everybody else. It's dead-simple *IF* you have a lathe, drill press, sheet metal brake, and maybe a mill depending, along with multiple other ancillary tools and pieces of equipment like an arbor press.
*AND* you *also* have the requisite training, skills, & experience to operate that fabricating equipment well enough to produce more than a modern-art piece or a way to assure that you never need worry if you lose one of your mittens and/or your sunglasses. It's not a trivial skill set in the least.
The difference here is that you basically only need the printer instead of a pole-barn full of expensive machine tools, plus you don't need any advanced machining & metal fabrication skills or training to fabricate high-quality components.
This machine they are touting is a MIG welder on a 3-axis stage. Whatever it makes will be a large pile of weld bead. Just how good of a gun do you think you could make with that? (Or most any part, for that matter.) The number of finish operations required will be long and arduous - and require most of the machine tools and skills you've just mentioned. You may as well start with billet.
Maybe a low-cost metal 3D printer will come along that makes it "simple for everybody else," but this one sure ain't that.
That was my thought exactly: "Say, didn't Adafruit just have an article in Make Magazine about using a Raspberry Pi to make a wireless Tor proxy?" Why yes, they did.
But one problem that IEEE754 can't address is when and where rounding errors show up calculations. If in my code I write A * B / C, one cannot guarantee whether that's executed (A * B) / C or as A * (B / C). If the exponents of the different numbers are substantially different, then you can indeed end up with different results. Different platforms may compile and execute the problem differently, and that I think is the problem that submitter is getting at.
I often see other cars with Partial Zero Emissions stickers. This confuses me as any part of zero is zero.
you are mathematically correct. It's bureaucratic gobbledygook.
The PZEV rating basically means that the car's emissions of everything *other than* CO2 are about as close to zero as you can get within the limits of chemistry. So the catalytic converters are top notch, the fuel handling system allows for ~0 vapor loss, NOx and CO out the tailpipe are nearly zero, particulates are avoided or captured.
PZEV is all great for air quality metrics like ozone and PM2.5, but doesn't do squat in terms of CO2, which is the emission that most people think about these days.
So why have such a rating at all if it doesn't include CO2? As far as I know, this came largely out of California, which has had really stringent car emissions standards for decades. The California Air Resources Board wanted a large number of "Emissions Free" vehicles on the road - battery-electrics and fuel-cell vehicles - but realized they weren't going to get anywhere close to that. So they created the PZEV rating as a "close enough" standard.
Most of the time a charger (proper one anyway) will set a certain voltage on the DATA+ and DATA- pins of the USB cable and the charging device senses this to know when it is appropriate to draw more power
Unfortunately, that method is not reliable, because every manufacturer implements it differently - it is not a part of the USB spec.
Following the spec, the only way to know the current rating is to either negotiate with the host (not usually possible for a standalone, "dumb" charger) or to have the data pins shorted together (a DCP according to the USB spec), in which case the available charge current should be 1.5 A min.
The USB spec - ya know, that thing that every device carrying the USB logo is supposed to follow - permits a connected device to draw a maximum of 100 mA until it is properly recognized (enumerated) by the host. This is probably what the GP is referring to: 0.5 W of available power (less after conversion efficiency) isn't a whole lot for a device like a Nexus 7.
After being enumerated, the connected device can request higher current levels, up to 500 mA max. It isn't supposed to draw more unless the host permits it. For many modern portable electronics (e.g., smartphones) that have a 3-10 Whr battery, a 2.5-W maximum charge rate isn't much.
There are amendments to the spec that allow for greater power: in 2009, the spec created a Charging Downstream Port, which allows for up to 1.5 A from the host after enumeration; and the Dedicated Charging Port (DCP), which shorts the two data lines together and allows for 1.5 A charge power without enumeration.
Individual companies, such as Apple and Samsung, supply their own USB chargers that allow for even greater charge current, but do so in a way that technically violates the USB spec.
Pedantically you may be correct. Cartographically, however, Antarctica is, in fact, divided into East and West. The feature that divides them is the Transantarctic mountains. See this map. West Antarctica contains the Antarctic Peninsula (which stick out towards South America) and most of the floating ice sheets. East Antarctica contains the broad, high plateau containing most of the land ice.
More generally, the dividing line could be said to be the prime meridian. Places whose coordinates are given using west longitude are generally part of West Antarctica. Most maps of Antarctica are oriented with the prime meridian pointing up towards England. Things on the left side of the map are West Antarctica, the right side is East. Again, this is just a general convention - a way to get yourself oriented. (Even though McMurdo Station (77.8 S 166.6 E) would be in East Antarctica by this definition, it is traditionally part of West Antarctica because it lies on that side of the Transantarctic mountains.)
This is a cartographer's convention - giving names to places - and it has a particular European bias. But everyone that works in Antarctica uses the same naming convention, so there you go.
The tunnel, while expensive, is probably a small portion of the overall cost. The bulk of the cost will be in the magnets, experiments, and computing. Locating a VLHC at the SSC tunnel in Texas probably wouldn't save a lot of money, especially when one factors in the other costs of putting it there.
Slashdot Mirror
Coke is rolling out their Freestyle fountain dispensing machines worldwide. Each one has the ability to phone home about inventory levels, maintenance logs, and what drinks are trending where. Coke doesn't do anything small - everything they do is done on a global scale. There are 100,000 - 200,000 fast food restaurants in the United States alone. It doesn't take much imagination to see how that could scale up to 16 million machines worldwide over the product life cycle.
I'm with you. What I'm actually looking forward to is the eventual fan-edit. After the third one comes out, some enterprising person will take the bloated 9 hours of cinematic release, then (1) cut out anything or anyone that didn't appear in the book, and (2) cut every fight/chase scene in half. You'll end up with a perfectly watchable, engaging film that clocks in around 2:45.
The ship got trapped because broken sea ice got crunched together by wind and waves around them, then froze in place. Moving ice does not freeze together into nice smooth sheets that are amenable to driving on. As the wind and waves continue to work, the ice surface will buckle, heavy, split, reform, and generally create a confused mess that make for difficult headway even afoot. Check out some of the pictures from Shackleton's Endurance expedition.
Then, too: how many ocean going ships just so happen to have big burly motorized vehicles for just such an occasion? An ice breaker is more likely to have a helicopter than a 4x4 Jeep.
+1 Underrated.
[no real mod points today. Do you accept virtual?]
Heroin and other drugs have (street) value, and perhaps the government could get a pretty penny by selling them. The reason the government doesn't, moral issues aside, is because it's illegal to sell or even posses them, so there's no legal way to offload them. Letting them sit around in a storehouse forever is a liability, so they destroy them.
There are some seized assets that are, more or less, legal to sell and possess, but cumbersome to do so. For instance, a stash of prescription drugs that someone was trafficking. Sure, the government could try to sell or auction them, but that raises all manner of thorny questions about traceability, purity, and running afoul of the FDA. Nope, it's easier (and ultimately cheaper) to just dispose of them. Bitcoin is much more clear cut; it is not illegal to possess or sell, and is easy to offload. It has value out on the open market, just like a bar of gold or that drug dealer's expensive car. I think that, after everything's been litigated, they'll sell the stuff off at market value.
[no body]
Bollocks. There are still plenty of ways a person can tinker with general-purpose computing on their home PC, and what novices are able to do blows my mind. You can get free BASIC environments for all major computer platforms out there. There are browser-based IDEs for all kinds of languages. Hell, you can even get emulators for a C-64 or Apple II. Even better: pick up an Arduino for $25 and start coding an embedded system. Want more power, connectivity, and GUIs? Try RaspPI or BeagleBone. What makes the current age awesome for those that want to start learning and tinkering is that, unlike 30 years ago, everything you need - IDEs, libraries, reference docs, user communities, example projects with source code - are just an internet search away, and free.
Yes, were indeed?
Airplanes are a bit of a special case, owing to the fact that you are in tighter and more stress-inducing quarters, for longer periods of time, and can't get up to move to a different seat if you get stuck next to the asshat who wants to shout at his sister in Des Moines.
+1 for obscure firefly reference.
Since it is a document that will be seen and read by your customers, competitors, and (depending on the market you are in) regulators, you DO NOT assign that kind of a task to a drone. You give it to someone who has technical expertise and the ability to write coherently. Barring that, you give it to a senior developer or systems engineer, who has ultimate technical responsibility for it anyway, and ought to have the best understanding of what's in the new release.
This is a practice that has been drilled into my head: any half-thoughts, offhand comments, or speculation can very, very easily be manipulated by a lawyer to make you or your company look like a guilty guilty liars in a courtroom. One excerpt from a change log, blown up onto a 4' x 6' poster, displayed in front of a jury, can result in a multimillion-dollar loss for you or your company. Never mind that the full context would exonerate you or that there's a larger story surrounding that comment - the opposing lawyer only needs to keep pointing to that poster to make you look like an idiot that's got something to hide.
Now, it is bad enough for such potentially dangerous content to exist in materials that are discoverable once a lawsuit has already begun. It is downright stupid, as a business practice, to just put those materials out in the wild for anyone to examine and look for something that could be sued over. If you want to keep your customer informed about what's changed, by all means produce a formal document that does that, with detail to the nth degree. The change logs are for internal use; they aren't for your customers.
The modification would have made the metal component essential to the function of the gun, the idea being that if you remove it to make the gun undetectable, you also end up with a gun that can't fire. This is aimed largely at people who might manufacture and sell such guns and could perhaps be used as a legal tool against those that might design and publish plans for 3D-printable guns. One can debate the enforceability of such a requirement, but it has a purpose. It won't deter individuals, but that's nothing new.
Which was the crux of one US v Windsor , one of the cases which struck down DOMA this past year
But but but... if I have to be an attention whore on private property, no one is going to SEE ME!
This machine they are touting is a MIG welder on a 3-axis stage. Whatever it makes will be a large pile of weld bead. Just how good of a gun do you think you could make with that? (Or most any part, for that matter.) The number of finish operations required will be long and arduous - and require most of the machine tools and skills you've just mentioned. You may as well start with billet.
Maybe a low-cost metal 3D printer will come along that makes it "simple for everybody else," but this one sure ain't that.
That was my thought exactly: "Say, didn't Adafruit just have an article in Make Magazine about using a Raspberry Pi to make a wireless Tor proxy?" Why yes, they did.
But one problem that IEEE754 can't address is when and where rounding errors show up calculations. If in my code I write A * B / C, one cannot guarantee whether that's executed (A * B) / C or as A * (B / C). If the exponents of the different numbers are substantially different, then you can indeed end up with different results. Different platforms may compile and execute the problem differently, and that I think is the problem that submitter is getting at.
Well, mathematically it'll end sometime, when the final Norwegian woman - call her Helga the Valkyrie - dies without a single daughter.
you are mathematically correct. It's bureaucratic gobbledygook.
The PZEV rating basically means that the car's emissions of everything *other than* CO2 are about as close to zero as you can get within the limits of chemistry. So the catalytic converters are top notch, the fuel handling system allows for ~0 vapor loss, NOx and CO out the tailpipe are nearly zero, particulates are avoided or captured.
PZEV is all great for air quality metrics like ozone and PM2.5, but doesn't do squat in terms of CO2, which is the emission that most people think about these days.
So why have such a rating at all if it doesn't include CO2? As far as I know, this came largely out of California, which has had really stringent car emissions standards for decades. The California Air Resources Board wanted a large number of "Emissions Free" vehicles on the road - battery-electrics and fuel-cell vehicles - but realized they weren't going to get anywhere close to that. So they created the PZEV rating as a "close enough" standard.
Unfortunately, that method is not reliable, because every manufacturer implements it differently - it is not a part of the USB spec.
Following the spec, the only way to know the current rating is to either negotiate with the host (not usually possible for a standalone, "dumb" charger) or to have the data pins shorted together (a DCP according to the USB spec), in which case the available charge current should be 1.5 A min.
The USB spec - ya know, that thing that every device carrying the USB logo is supposed to follow - permits a connected device to draw a maximum of 100 mA until it is properly recognized (enumerated) by the host. This is probably what the GP is referring to: 0.5 W of available power (less after conversion efficiency) isn't a whole lot for a device like a Nexus 7.
After being enumerated, the connected device can request higher current levels, up to 500 mA max. It isn't supposed to draw more unless the host permits it. For many modern portable electronics (e.g., smartphones) that have a 3-10 Whr battery, a 2.5-W maximum charge rate isn't much.
There are amendments to the spec that allow for greater power: in 2009, the spec created a Charging Downstream Port, which allows for up to 1.5 A from the host after enumeration; and the Dedicated Charging Port (DCP), which shorts the two data lines together and allows for 1.5 A charge power without enumeration.
Individual companies, such as Apple and Samsung, supply their own USB chargers that allow for even greater charge current, but do so in a way that technically violates the USB spec.
Pedantically you may be correct. Cartographically, however, Antarctica is, in fact, divided into East and West. The feature that divides them is the Transantarctic mountains. See this map. West Antarctica contains the Antarctic Peninsula (which stick out towards South America) and most of the floating ice sheets. East Antarctica contains the broad, high plateau containing most of the land ice.
More generally, the dividing line could be said to be the prime meridian. Places whose coordinates are given using west longitude are generally part of West Antarctica. Most maps of Antarctica are oriented with the prime meridian pointing up towards England. Things on the left side of the map are West Antarctica, the right side is East. Again, this is just a general convention - a way to get yourself oriented. (Even though McMurdo Station (77.8 S 166.6 E) would be in East Antarctica by this definition, it is traditionally part of West Antarctica because it lies on that side of the Transantarctic mountains.)
This is a cartographer's convention - giving names to places - and it has a particular European bias. But everyone that works in Antarctica uses the same naming convention, so there you go.
Somewhere, someone can make a joke about razor blades in here.
inspiration
The tunnel, while expensive, is probably a small portion of the overall cost. The bulk of the cost will be in the magnets, experiments, and computing. Locating a VLHC at the SSC tunnel in Texas probably wouldn't save a lot of money, especially when one factors in the other costs of putting it there.