Arduino would be nice for prototyping, but for the actual hardware to put on the plane, just use an AVR chip directly and save some space / weight. You could use the same chip as the Arduino uses, or for even less weight and power requirements (at a loss of some processing power / storage), use an ATiny chip.
Stats can tell you anything. Take for instance this email forward I received a while back:
Doctors vs Gunowners
Doctors
(A) The number of physicians in the U.S. is 700,000.
(B) Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year are 120,000.
(C) Accidental deaths per physician are 0.171.
Statistics courtesy of U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services
Now think about this:
Guns
(A) The number of gun owners in the U.S. is 80,000,000. (Yes, that's 80 million)
(B) The number of accidental gun deaths per year, all age groups, is 1,500.
(C) The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is.000188.
Statistics courtesy of FBI
So, statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.
Remember, 'Guns don't kill people, doctors do.'
FACT: NOT EVERYONE HAS A GUN, BUT ALMOST EVERYONE HAS AT LEAST ONE DOCTOR.
To start with your reference; of course more guns will lead to more gun related deaths! If there are no guns, there would be no gun related deaths. However, there are more factors you have to take into account. What about other types of deaths (knife, car, ninja, etc). What percentage of the gun deaths are due to someone going crazy and shooting up their workplace, vs. accidental (children finding a loaded gun (big no-no, BTW) vs. pre-meditated murder, etc. For the crazy guy and the pre-meditated murder, if guns are not available, there are many other ways which one can kill a lot of people. Think of mowing down pedestrians with your car GTA style, etc.
I do agree with you, though, that world leaders are not necessarily going to listen to logic when it comes to nukes. IMHO, nukes are on a completely different level than 'normal' civilian type guns. What one could actually do to remedy this current situation, though, is unclear - there will always be some nutjob who wants to nuke the rest of the world.
Ironically, this is a skill that us humans haven't done in many years (63,000-ish?) when we last domesticated animals.
Interesting, where did you hear that figure? Wikipedia's domestication article lists animals which have been domesticated all the way up to the 1900s; perhaps their definition of domestication differs from your source. Regardless, I am very interested in discussions on this sort of subject, and would love to read your sources if you have them available.
Regardless, even without the refund request, processing costs after the first thousand would be quite effective. Refunds would just be icing on the cake 8-)
Esperanto is not fictional; it is a (relatively) new, created (rather than evolved) language, but that doesn't make it fictional by any means. From what I understand, it is also very interesting language from a linguistics point of view.
Very interesting - this is the sort of thing I was wondering about. I suppose this is the technology (or at least similar to the technology) behind services like MusicBrainz or whatever it's called.
Well, personally I don't download music, so this is all theoretical anyway. I was just pointing out that hash-based file matches are finicky at best. If you have changed the tags on a given file (arguably a common occurrence), you have changed the hash. Does the software you are using account for things like that? What about when you import into various applications; I think (although I can't confirm) that iTunes will write metadata on import, to do normalization and gapless playback. That would of course mess up and bit-wise hash of the file.
This is more interesting to me as an exercise of what *can* be done in software, and what sort of 'keys' could be looked at to fingerprint files. I have heard of things like MusicBrainz, which attempts to make a hash of music based on fuzzy attributes like how it sounds, rather than bit values; this in theory could be used to tell what a given file is.
So flip the last bit on all your MP3s, and the hashes will all be off. Or flip a random bit in the middle, at most you will hear a bit of hiss or something at one point in the song.
I assume this was meant as a joke, but seriously, if you were able to take out a large portion of the power grid for any sustained length of time, it would have a huge economic impact. Just from the loss of money while businesses and industries are unable to function would add up to millions, if not billions. That's not even counting the looting and rioting (come on, you know it would happen!)
Due to the pressure and composition of outer layers, I believe that the current theory is that the core of Jupiter is composed primarily of metallic hydrogen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_hydrogen). Regardless of whether this is true or not, the conditions at the core would likely be nothing like terrestrial land and associated conditions (crust, plates, etc)
Well, the standard rebuttal to that is 'what is a good decision'? For a human (in general), a good decision will try to enhance his / her position in life specifically, and probably enhance humanity in general. (Yes there are exceptions to this).
However, what would a good decision be for an intelligent robot? The fact that it is 'intelligent' (however you may want to define that) means that it will not be blindly following its programming. Using the very simplistic assumption that an intelligent robot will follow the same basic set of rules as an intelligent human (try to better oneself / one's species), what do we do if the robot decides that it is in its best interest to remove the competition / ineffectiveness / whatever of humans?
Now personally, I think we have a long way to go before we can even get close to something with this level of reasoning, but I could still see it happening sometime in the future. It will be interesting at that time to see how we adjust.
(And of course, all the optimism of 'the robot will be used for good' is most likely naivety; if just one sociopath gets his hands on the plans, and is able to change the 'base programming' (to blatently steal a science fiction term) from 'do good' to 'destroy all humans', then we have an even bigger problem on our hands).
You're correct about cell phones, but WiFi *is* in the microwave range, and both base stations and WiFi cards give off more than 50mW. Regardless, the fact remains that there are lots of small radiation sources out there. Even the sun gives you a non-neglible amount of higher frequency radiation (more energetic than microwaves), and humans have long ago evolved to tolerate that.
Regardless, I wish you the best with your cautionary viewpoint on acceptable radiation levels, and I don't want to start a flame war here. Doubtless, you will have the last laugh when I die of cancer at the age of 40 due to my excessive WiFi radiation exposure.
Well, chances are you are a very angry man. More than 50mW of microwave radiation is given off by any number of devices, including 802.11 laptops / base stations, cell phones, etc. Even when taking the inverse squared falloff of EM radiation, there's still a fair bit of microwave-ranged radiation hitting you right now.
While you could argue that those are not constant radiation, I would counter that it is close enough to constant - a cell phones in your pocket for 8+ hours / day, a wireless laptop on the desk in front of you for, say 7 hours a day, etc.
Hmm... perhaps I could market a faraday cage for children - keep the kids in (and out of trouble), and the radiation out! Good for ages 1 to 18!
Slashdot Mirror
Arduino would be nice for prototyping, but for the actual hardware to put on the plane, just use an AVR chip directly and save some space / weight. You could use the same chip as the Arduino uses, or for even less weight and power requirements (at a loss of some processing power / storage), use an ATiny chip.
Cheers
Nah, I'm just recently domesticated ;-)
Cheers
Stats can tell you anything. Take for instance this email forward I received a while back:
Doctors vs Gunowners
.000188.
Doctors
(A) The number of physicians in the U.S. is 700,000.
(B) Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year are 120,000.
(C) Accidental deaths per physician are 0.171.
Statistics courtesy of U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services
Now think about this:
Guns
(A) The number of gun owners in the U.S. is 80,000,000. (Yes, that's 80 million)
(B) The number of accidental gun deaths per year, all age groups, is 1,500.
(C) The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is
Statistics courtesy of FBI
So, statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.
Remember, 'Guns don't kill people, doctors do.'
FACT: NOT EVERYONE HAS A GUN, BUT ALMOST EVERYONE HAS AT LEAST ONE DOCTOR.
To start with your reference; of course more guns will lead to more gun related deaths! If there are no guns, there would be no gun related deaths. However, there are more factors you have to take into account. What about other types of deaths (knife, car, ninja, etc). What percentage of the gun deaths are due to someone going crazy and shooting up their workplace, vs. accidental (children finding a loaded gun (big no-no, BTW) vs. pre-meditated murder, etc. For the crazy guy and the pre-meditated murder, if guns are not available, there are many other ways which one can kill a lot of people. Think of mowing down pedestrians with your car GTA style, etc.
I do agree with you, though, that world leaders are not necessarily going to listen to logic when it comes to nukes. IMHO, nukes are on a completely different level than 'normal' civilian type guns. What one could actually do to remedy this current situation, though, is unclear - there will always be some nutjob who wants to nuke the rest of the world.
Ironically, this is a skill that us humans haven't done in many years (63,000-ish?) when we last domesticated animals.
Interesting, where did you hear that figure? Wikipedia's domestication article lists animals which have been domesticated all the way up to the 1900s; perhaps their definition of domestication differs from your source. Regardless, I am very interested in discussions on this sort of subject, and would love to read your sources if you have them available.
Cheers
Or even better, VNC over an SSH tunnel (don't know if you can set Windows up to do this, but on any *nix machine it is trivial).
Cheers
Nah, that's Mercury.
Hey, feel free to send me a million dollar bills in separate envelopes; I wouldn't complain! ;-)
Cheers
Regardless, even without the refund request, processing costs after the first thousand would be quite effective. Refunds would just be icing on the cake 8-)
Cheers
Esperanto is not fictional; it is a (relatively) new, created (rather than evolved) language, but that doesn't make it fictional by any means. From what I understand, it is also very interesting language from a linguistics point of view.
Cheers
I don't what else ... makes no sense at all.
Ahh.... Irony at its best... ;-)
Very interesting - this is the sort of thing I was wondering about. I suppose this is the technology (or at least similar to the technology) behind services like MusicBrainz or whatever it's called.
Cheers
Well, personally I don't download music, so this is all theoretical anyway. I was just pointing out that hash-based file matches are finicky at best. If you have changed the tags on a given file (arguably a common occurrence), you have changed the hash. Does the software you are using account for things like that? What about when you import into various applications; I think (although I can't confirm) that iTunes will write metadata on import, to do normalization and gapless playback. That would of course mess up and bit-wise hash of the file.
This is more interesting to me as an exercise of what *can* be done in software, and what sort of 'keys' could be looked at to fingerprint files. I have heard of things like MusicBrainz, which attempts to make a hash of music based on fuzzy attributes like how it sounds, rather than bit values; this in theory could be used to tell what a given file is.
Cheers
So flip the last bit on all your MP3s, and the hashes will all be off. Or flip a random bit in the middle, at most you will hear a bit of hiss or something at one point in the song.
Do you have any idea how many chicks I've lured back to my mom's basement
My guess.... zero. ;-)
Whoosh!
Come now, those were worms, not bacteria!
Whoosh!
I assume this was meant as a joke, but seriously, if you were able to take out a large portion of the power grid for any sustained length of time, it would have a huge economic impact. Just from the loss of money while businesses and industries are unable to function would add up to millions, if not billions. That's not even counting the looting and rioting (come on, you know it would happen!)
Cheers
Due to the pressure and composition of outer layers, I believe that the current theory is that the core of Jupiter is composed primarily of metallic hydrogen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_hydrogen). Regardless of whether this is true or not, the conditions at the core would likely be nothing like terrestrial land and associated conditions (crust, plates, etc)
Did I miss something, or did you mean 100% RAM utilization, not 100% CPU? I can't think how 100% CPU use would affect page / swap files at all...
Cheers
can't even show a window inside a window to get MDI
That's a feature, not a bug. MDI should have died a long time ago.
Cheers
Well, the standard rebuttal to that is 'what is a good decision'? For a human (in general), a good decision will try to enhance his / her position in life specifically, and probably enhance humanity in general. (Yes there are exceptions to this).
However, what would a good decision be for an intelligent robot? The fact that it is 'intelligent' (however you may want to define that) means that it will not be blindly following its programming. Using the very simplistic assumption that an intelligent robot will follow the same basic set of rules as an intelligent human (try to better oneself / one's species), what do we do if the robot decides that it is in its best interest to remove the competition / ineffectiveness / whatever of humans?
Now personally, I think we have a long way to go before we can even get close to something with this level of reasoning, but I could still see it happening sometime in the future. It will be interesting at that time to see how we adjust.
(And of course, all the optimism of 'the robot will be used for good' is most likely naivety; if just one sociopath gets his hands on the plans, and is able to change the 'base programming' (to blatently steal a science fiction term) from 'do good' to 'destroy all humans', then we have an even bigger problem on our hands).
Cheers
Fair enough - that I can agree to.
Cheers
You're correct about cell phones, but WiFi *is* in the microwave range, and both base stations and WiFi cards give off more than 50mW. Regardless, the fact remains that there are lots of small radiation sources out there. Even the sun gives you a non-neglible amount of higher frequency radiation (more energetic than microwaves), and humans have long ago evolved to tolerate that.
Regardless, I wish you the best with your cautionary viewpoint on acceptable radiation levels, and I don't want to start a flame war here. Doubtless, you will have the last laugh when I die of cancer at the age of 40 due to my excessive WiFi radiation exposure.
Cheers
Well, chances are you are a very angry man. More than 50mW of microwave radiation is given off by any number of devices, including 802.11 laptops / base stations, cell phones, etc. Even when taking the inverse squared falloff of EM radiation, there's still a fair bit of microwave-ranged radiation hitting you right now.
While you could argue that those are not constant radiation, I would counter that it is close enough to constant - a cell phones in your pocket for 8+ hours / day, a wireless laptop on the desk in front of you for, say 7 hours a day, etc.
Hmm... perhaps I could market a faraday cage for children - keep the kids in (and out of trouble), and the radiation out! Good for ages 1 to 18!
Cheers