The same holds true for our local ABC affiliate. Their analog transmitter suffered a partial failure very recently, cutting their effective power roughly in half, according to a tech I talked to. Since digital is already running and they're shutting analog off in a month, they've chosen to just leave it in its broken state.
I disagree with loaded words in the news as much as the next person, but this begs the question... At what point does it go from simply fear mongering to legitimate fear? How bad must it get for something like "catastrophe" or "crisis" to become a fair description of the problem?
Not th be pedantic here, but the warp drive as defined in a certain science fiction drama we're all familiar with doesn't create a corridor. Rather, the very fabric of spacetime around the ship is intensely deformed, causing the region of space inside the warped area to move, hence the term "warp drive". This region of space carries the starship with it, so the ship itself doesn't need to move at relativistic speeds compared to the space around it, which is also why the ship and its occupants, at least in science fiction, don't experience any time dilation.
Not to rain on your parade, but there's just no way this would work with current full-sized monitor tech.
A CRT would need to have, at the very least, some optics embedded into the tube so that the camera itself could remain outside, and then you're interfering with the beam no matter where you put those optics. Besides, CRT's are pretty much obsolete except for a few corner cases.
An LCD is out because you'd have to poke a small hole in the backlight reflector and diffusing layers for the camera to see out of, which means you'll end up with a really big dead pixel.
Front projection is out - either it'll light-fog and wash out the image the camera picks up, or the user will end up blocking part of the projected image. Rear projection is out because even the best optics will still be big enough to obscure part of the projected image. In both cases, you still have to poke a hole in the screen.
Plasma is out because the pixels are simply too big to be useful on something like a computer monitor.
An argument can be made for LED or OLED displays, since the pixel density is enough to be useful, but I don't seem to recall there being any options to cheaply replace the average full-sized monitor.
Seems to me that it would just be easier to use some kind of teleprompter setup with a half-reflective mirror, a good, sensitive webcam, and a really *bright* run of the mill monitor.
If you really want a compact unit, here's how I would do it with current (if expensive) technology:
Make an OLED display of a useful size, e.g. 17-19 inches or better. Make a 1/8 to 1/4 inch square area in the center of the screen transparent, if that's possible (I'm not sure). Put the camera behind that area of course, but sandwich in an LCD shutter that can block the lens when opaque. Seal everything against ambient light. Have the monitor's firmware logically separate a 1x1 inch area around that transparent spot from the rest of the screen, and have said firmware flick the shutter and that 1x1 area on/off together at a fairly high speed (say, 150-200 Hz), with an on-time of no less than 95%. Obviously, the LCD would be opaque when the 1x1 area is "on". Have the monitor's firmware automatically balance the rest of the screen's brightness, contrast, etc. against the now dimmed 1x1 area, so that the differece isn't apparent. The setup should look like any ordinary monitor to both the user and the video card/monitor drivers. The camera can be any ordinary consumer-grade webcam, as long as it can take good images in very low light without excessively long exposure times. It can integrate however long it likes, thanks to the LCD shutter.
I figured a 1x1 inch area would be large enough to help keep the camera from picking up glare from the parts of the screen around it that are always on. If necessary (and assuming it is even possible), erect a microscopic opaque "wall" around the 1x1 area in the spaces between adjacent pixels, to block some of the incident light.
..and with that, the discussion can now come to a close (didn't take long this time, did it?):-)
On the serious side, I agree with you. I say that not only do the people who committed these crimes deserve to be outed, I believe they should be solidly reprimanded. 10 to 20 years hard time in prison is a good start, depending on how severe the acts they committed were, as there is simply no excuse for torture, and if you ended up killing someone, I say execute the bastards. Do I sound harsh? Maybe, but I think I'm within my right to want these people punished, and there are only just so many ways to do so that wouldn't fit under "cruel and unusual punishment".
Not to mention that the bottles were already ice cold when they went in. The fridge doesn't have to expend energy cooling them down if they're already contributing to the cold mass, even if they are fully thawed by the time they're swapped out for another set. Of course, one wants to only swap bottles when the fridge is open to add or remove something else, so as not introduce extra, warm air.
Which is why I've always wondered why the truly important dialog boxes haven't been significantly redesigned so that the user *has* to read their contents first. Rather than presenting a couple of buttons to click, require the user to press a key, something mildly obscure but clearly spelled out in the dialog's text. A certain Redmond OS did this during install for the 2000 version (and I assume others) and it at least forced me to stop and read (even though I knew what I was doing). To make sure the user won't get into the same instinctive rut, the program controlling the dialog should have several blocks of text that are equivalent in meaning but wildly different from one another. Each time the dialog in question pops up, one of those blocks of text is selected and a random "OK" key is chosen. One would want to leave the "Cancel" key fixed on something like Escape.
You could even go one step further and pop up a second dialog with a message equivalent to "Hey, read the text and hit the right key!" if the user hits the wrong key (e.g. assuming "Enter" = "OK").
It isn't perfect, but I think it's better that the user's technical support team (if any) have to field a few "I don't understand this dialog!" calls and have to repair fewer user-initiated damages. At least the tech support person gets a chance to explain why the dialog is the way it is. Certainly that's what I would have preferred when I was in tech support.
Tell that to the casino that opened near me just this past December. I'm not sure how old they are, but two of the slots there are based around the first movie of the BttF series. Everything old is new again, it seems.
If they're true shutter glasses, then by extension they are resolution-independent - all they do is switch eyes rapidly. You see whatever your monitor displays, at whatever level of detail it and your software are set for.
I replaced three CRT's with LCD's, and my numbers agree with yours. While these aren't TV's, the technology is close enough that the difference shouldn't matter too much.
My replacement LCD's consume, at most, about a third of what the CRT monitors used, and they also pour out about a third of the heat energy, and that's using fluorescent backlights. So, I not only save on the electricity used directly by the displays, but also on the electricity otherwise needed to cool the room.
Granted, it isn't a huge savings, and that "waste" heat would have been useful in the winter, but my electric bill is still lower overall (about $6 a month in the summer if I remember my calculation right).
And depending on how those clicks were timed, the technique was probably pulse width modulation. It's simply the easiest way to turn a 1 bit output into something greater. At present, PWM is used commonly in CD players, motor speed controllers, and probably your PC's power supply. Hell, even a Commodore mouse uses it [1]. There's not much limit to the applications this method can be applied to. Higher drive current and/or voltage, a faster pulse rate, and finer pulse width granularity are usually better, but the fundamentals are the same pretty much anywhere a variable voltage is needed if everything is otherwise sane.
Since I don't know the intimate details of the Apple II beyond the presence of that flip flop output, I'll speak from a generic perspective, to expand on the comments made by the AC below.
Suppose you have a basic computer with a 1 MHz system clock and one or more generic I/O chips with ordinary TTL outputs, among its various other hardware.
In your code, configure a main interrupt to trigger at a fairly decent clip, let's say 25000 times a second. Each time it triggers, have it set up a second interrupt, force an I/O line high, and exit. That second interrupt should fire a short time after it is enabled, and it should do nothing but set the I/O line low and exit when triggered.
Call the second interrupt's time delay "D", as it represents the pulse's duty cycle. Structure the primary interrupt's code so that, when D is zero, the secondary interrupt code can chime in (that is, before the main interrupt can even exit) and force the I/O line to low right after the main interrupt sets it high.
On the hardware side, couple that I/O line through the usual R/C circuit and attach to a speaker. As the AC below already said, this is what was done in every Apple II, and this is what will do most of the work to turn that train of pulses into a smooth voltage. With your 10 MHz system clock, a 25 kHz pulse train gives you 40 cycles between the pulses' leading edges, so your average voltage output will be about (100*(D/40)) percent of that of the high rail.
Do something simple that makes D the same amount at all times, and you've got a configurable voltage output. Change D every so often to follow a digital sample and you've got a 25 kHz output with about 5.32193 bits of resolution.
Since there will be some timing variation and latency in the interrupts, the available resolution will be slightly lower that this theoretical maximum (probably 5 bits even). Because of the large amount of CPU time consumed by the interrupt routines, this method works best if the I/O line is something like a timed shift register port. Then you only need a single interrupt that reads a sample value, sets the I/O line's timer accordingly, writes to the serial register any value that has only one bit set, and then exits.
The fact that this all requires good assembly language skills on the 8-bitters does not change the fact that it *is* full digital audio - you need good skills regardless of the type of audio output hardware you're working with.
*[1] I 'scoped it once years ago and was surprised to find that the 1351 mouse uses PWM to generate the analog signals that are sensed as voltage levels by the POTX/POTY lines in the controller port.
I'm no fan of Apple (I prefer Commodore when it comes to the 8-bit era), but a stock Apple II can do more than just beeps and clicks - it can do full digital audio using pulse width modulation. I'm not sure of the effective resolution (more than 1 bit, for sure, probably closer to 6-8 bits), but I've heard at least a couple of examples of this, including a multi-voice music player, and it actually didn't sound half bad for an otherwise rudimentary output.
As others have stated, it's all in how you promote it. Saying the car is "Collision resistant" is a lot saner than "collision proof". Probably a lot more legal too (truth in advertising, and all that).
That aside, I see four scenarios:
1. Driver is tooling along, not paying much attention to his/her following distance or the conditions of the traffic in the vicinity. Automatic braking system triggers but is unable to stop the car in time thanks to the laws of physics, and he/she slams into someone/something. There's nothing apparent wrong with the car, no excessive wear, etc. Result: driver's own damn fault for failing to pay attention, just as it would be now.
2. Driver is paying attention, but something causes the automatic braking system to kick in. The automatic system fails to stop the car in time because of some routine maintenance item like worn pads, damaged rotor, inadequate brake fluid, or something else. Result: it's the driver's own damn fault for not maintaining his/her car, just as it should be in any other situation.
3. Driver is paying attention, something unexpected causes the automatic braking system to kick in, it fails to stop the car, and also causes a general braking system fault that prevents the driver from taking over and stopping the car. Driver slams into someone/something, and the failed component is determined to be a manufacturer error that was covered by a recall that the driver failed to act on. Result: The driver's own damned fault for not acting on the recall.
4. Driver is paying attention, automatic braking system kicks in and fails to stop the car, causes some sort of general braking system malfunction that prevents the driver from taking over, causing him/her to slam into something/someone. The failed component is determined to be something the driver would normally not be responsible for (say a busted brake line that otherwise looks normal, or a software bug in the automatic braking system's computer, etc.). Result: Squarely on the shoulders of the manufacturer.
In other words, if the manufacturer didn't screw up, leave it up to the normal system for handling accidents. I.e. if some asshole cuts you off and causes an accident, it would have been their fault anyway. Otherwise, just own up to your failure and deal with it however you normally would whether or not you had the automatic braking system.
...except that this isn't about her *teaching* anything. This is about a student handing out Linux discs to other students (a good thing), and being disruptive about it (a bad thing). Regardless of what the teacher's subject or expertise is, what the students were or were not seeing has no bearing at all. The teacher overreacted, committed a couple of crimes that most of us would also rightfully retaliate against (slander and libel, specifically), and threatened to sue the maker of HeliOS, as if he were somehow responsible for the kids' behavior.
While she was right to stop the initial sharing because the student was disruptive, her actions from that point forward were 100% wrong. Period.
JFS works well for me, but lacks one thing that would have saved me a great deal of trouble recently - it is intolerant of bad blocks, to the point of outright crashing the system. Yes, one should replace bad hardware ASAP, but if you're in a situation where said hardware can't be replaced yet, it is better to be able to just get an error message and run in "limp-in" mode for a while than to end up with a useless box for that same amount of time.
Mythbusters already covered this quite some time ago. After pumping some serious decibels into the participants at various frequencies, without any results, they declared the "brown note" as busted.
(so as to not repeat Virgil Grissom's perceived mistake on Liberty Bell 7, the Mercury flight).
It has already been proven that Gus did NOT cause the accident. Had he hit the switch that blows the door open, there would have been a nasty bruise on his hand, but none was found. See also, this Wikipedia article.
Am I the only one who thought of the Merrie Melodies episode, "Design for Leaving" upon reading the "on stilts" part of your comment? From the end of the episode:
.
Elmer Fudd: Say... I wonder what that wed button is for...
[Presses the initially unmarked red button, which lights a label reading "In case of tidal wave"]
[Mechanical noises, house rises high into the air]
[Elmer opens the front door to see Daffy Duck approaching in a helicopter]
Daffy: For a small price, I can install this little blue button to get you down.
The parent may be partially wrong, but you're missing the point - I think we can all agree that the source code is the important part of a project, not the packaged binaries that usually go into distributing it commercially. From v2 of the GPL:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it,
under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of
Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
[...]
(emphasis mine)
So yeah, he can charge whatever he wants for the package, but if it's under GPL v2, the source code clearly must remain free/gratis, or at worst, break-even on the cost of the media and the labor to copy it, if any. Now, from what I can see, v3 of the GPL seems to remove that restriction:
4. Conveying Verbatim Copies.
You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program.
You may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for a fee.
Was it ever actually a bastion? It hasn't been mainstream in since, well...has it ever honestly?
I used and posted on one non-binary newsgroup on USENET as early as 1994 or so, and I was definitely not a geek back then. That and email were the only two services I had access to on the Internet, both of which were provided by a BBS gateway. Sure, I programmed a little, but it was nothing anyone here couldn't have done back then as well, so I'd have to say that if I was able to use USENET back then, it was about as mainstream as it gets.
[...]but if you asked the mainstream internet user between 1999 and 2008 if they utilize usenet, the majority would probably say, "Huh".
If you ask your sample pool what "The Internet" is, the majority of them will say something along the lines of "the web" and maybe email. They would be dead wrong; the Internet is more than just web access, and will probably continue to be for a VERY long time.
Except that you're wrong. It's expected to be a flat ribbon rather than a round cable - despite the mass, most of the thing will float down like shreds of paper if it's destroyed, the heaviest pieces of which will burn up in the atmosphere long before they reach the ground.
Um...because computers are designed to make it easy to change things - rewrite, revise, edit - until the outcome is what you want it to be. You can rig an election with paper ballots, but that's pretty difficult. With computer voting systems, all it takes is one good cracker to find his/her way into one of the systems used for voting. Sneak a few hundred votes in, then move on to the next machine of the same make/model. Chances are, the software running on that machine will be the same as that which the cracker just broke into. I believe this is the case with all those Diebold systems that everyone's made so much noise over.
Wash, rinse, repeat until you've altered enough machines to affect the outcome of the vote.
Computer based vote counting is a bad idea.
Why?
It's not just bad... It's very bad. In the current Diebold systems, votes are eventually tabulated by one central system, if I remember it right. If not that, then it's several systems combined. Either way, the hypothetical cracker need only break into maybe one machine and either alter the counts after they're done, pre-set some favorable numbers before the counts take place, or alter the software that is used to tabulate the votes, so that it favors your desired candidate. Security for that machine notwithstanding, the cracker attacking the counting computer can affect even more votes than is the case with the actual voting machines.
Technology is great, but sometimes it's better to keep things simple.
Luddite. You are complaining about technology for no reason other than you don't like it.
No, he's complaining about technology being used in places where it just doesn't belong. It would be like telling someone to boot up (or wake up) their laptop just to write down someone's phone number, when pencil and paper would do the job with less hassle. Paper voting forces people to slow down, sure, but it also forces the attacker to take more drastic measures to affect an outcome - measures which probably just don't work too well today. It's a lot easier to secure a box full of paper ballots than a computer: Just bolt the table to the floor, lock the ballot box to the table, lock the lid shut, and post a guard by it. Have a couple of guards carry the full box to the counting station, where more guards are posted to oversee the counting.
I don't have to tell anyone here just how hard it can be to secure a computer system that you know nothing about the internals of, and which has to be placed in an essentially hostile environment in order for it to perform its designated function.
When it comes to elections the most important thing is that people have faith in the vote. Computers have never, and will never be able to provide this.
Oh, it's because of some perceived psychological effect on the population that you are opposed to electronic voting.
No, it's called trust. It's called fraud (or rather, the risk thereof). Pixels on a computer screen just aren't tangible enough for the average person to trust, and probably for the same reason people "want it in writing" when agreeing on something important, or prefer something to have a signature. They're tangible - they can be used as proof of something should the need arise.
Slashdot Mirror
The same holds true for our local ABC affiliate. Their analog transmitter suffered a partial failure very recently, cutting their effective power roughly in half, according to a tech I talked to. Since digital is already running and they're shutting analog off in a month, they've chosen to just leave it in its broken state.
I disagree with loaded words in the news as much as the next person, but this begs the question... At what point does it go from simply fear mongering to legitimate fear? How bad must it get for something like "catastrophe" or "crisis" to become a fair description of the problem?
Not th be pedantic here, but the warp drive as defined in a certain science fiction drama we're all familiar with doesn't create a corridor. Rather, the very fabric of spacetime around the ship is intensely deformed, causing the region of space inside the warped area to move, hence the term "warp drive". This region of space carries the starship with it, so the ship itself doesn't need to move at relativistic speeds compared to the space around it, which is also why the ship and its occupants, at least in science fiction, don't experience any time dilation.
See The Wiki article on the real life version of warp drive.
Not to rain on your parade, but there's just no way this would work with current full-sized monitor tech.
A CRT would need to have, at the very least, some optics embedded into the tube so that the camera itself could remain outside, and then you're interfering with the beam no matter where you put those optics. Besides, CRT's are pretty much obsolete except for a few corner cases.
An LCD is out because you'd have to poke a small hole in the backlight reflector and diffusing layers for the camera to see out of, which means you'll end up with a really big dead pixel.
Front projection is out - either it'll light-fog and wash out the image the camera picks up, or the user will end up blocking part of the projected image. Rear projection is out because even the best optics will still be big enough to obscure part of the projected image. In both cases, you still have to poke a hole in the screen.
Plasma is out because the pixels are simply too big to be useful on something like a computer monitor.
An argument can be made for LED or OLED displays, since the pixel density is enough to be useful, but I don't seem to recall there being any options to cheaply replace the average full-sized monitor.
Seems to me that it would just be easier to use some kind of teleprompter setup with a half-reflective mirror, a good, sensitive webcam, and a really *bright* run of the mill monitor.
If you really want a compact unit, here's how I would do it with current (if expensive) technology:
Make an OLED display of a useful size, e.g. 17-19 inches or better. Make a 1/8 to 1/4 inch square area in the center of the screen transparent, if that's possible (I'm not sure). Put the camera behind that area of course, but sandwich in an LCD shutter that can block the lens when opaque. Seal everything against ambient light. Have the monitor's firmware logically separate a 1x1 inch area around that transparent spot from the rest of the screen, and have said firmware flick the shutter and that 1x1 area on/off together at a fairly high speed (say, 150-200 Hz), with an on-time of no less than 95%. Obviously, the LCD would be opaque when the 1x1 area is "on". Have the monitor's firmware automatically balance the rest of the screen's brightness, contrast, etc. against the now dimmed 1x1 area, so that the differece isn't apparent. The setup should look like any ordinary monitor to both the user and the video card/monitor drivers. The camera can be any ordinary consumer-grade webcam, as long as it can take good images in very low light without excessively long exposure times. It can integrate however long it likes, thanks to the LCD shutter.
I figured a 1x1 inch area would be large enough to help keep the camera from picking up glare from the parts of the screen around it that are always on. If necessary (and assuming it is even possible), erect a microscopic opaque "wall" around the 1x1 area in the spaces between adjacent pixels, to block some of the incident light.
..and with that, the discussion can now come to a close (didn't take long this time, did it?) :-)
On the serious side, I agree with you. I say that not only do the people who committed these crimes deserve to be outed, I believe they should be solidly reprimanded. 10 to 20 years hard time in prison is a good start, depending on how severe the acts they committed were, as there is simply no excuse for torture, and if you ended up killing someone, I say execute the bastards. Do I sound harsh? Maybe, but I think I'm within my right to want these people punished, and there are only just so many ways to do so that wouldn't fit under "cruel and unusual punishment".
Except you're more likely to be eaten by a politician than a grue.
Not to mention that the bottles were already ice cold when they went in. The fridge doesn't have to expend energy cooling them down if they're already contributing to the cold mass, even if they are fully thawed by the time they're swapped out for another set. Of course, one wants to only swap bottles when the fridge is open to add or remove something else, so as not introduce extra, warm air.
Which is why I've always wondered why the truly important dialog boxes haven't been significantly redesigned so that the user *has* to read their contents first. Rather than presenting a couple of buttons to click, require the user to press a key, something mildly obscure but clearly spelled out in the dialog's text. A certain Redmond OS did this during install for the 2000 version (and I assume others) and it at least forced me to stop and read (even though I knew what I was doing). To make sure the user won't get into the same instinctive rut, the program controlling the dialog should have several blocks of text that are equivalent in meaning but wildly different from one another. Each time the dialog in question pops up, one of those blocks of text is selected and a random "OK" key is chosen. One would want to leave the "Cancel" key fixed on something like Escape.
You could even go one step further and pop up a second dialog with a message equivalent to "Hey, read the text and hit the right key!" if the user hits the wrong key (e.g. assuming "Enter" = "OK").
It isn't perfect, but I think it's better that the user's technical support team (if any) have to field a few "I don't understand this dialog!" calls and have to repair fewer user-initiated damages. At least the tech support person gets a chance to explain why the dialog is the way it is. Certainly that's what I would have preferred when I was in tech support.
Tell that to the casino that opened near me just this past December. I'm not sure how old they are, but two of the slots there are based around the first movie of the BttF series. Everything old is new again, it seems.
If they're true shutter glasses, then by extension they are resolution-independent - all they do is switch eyes rapidly. You see whatever your monitor displays, at whatever level of detail it and your software are set for.
I replaced three CRT's with LCD's, and my numbers agree with yours. While these aren't TV's, the technology is close enough that the difference shouldn't matter too much.
My replacement LCD's consume, at most, about a third of what the CRT monitors used, and they also pour out about a third of the heat energy, and that's using fluorescent backlights. So, I not only save on the electricity used directly by the displays, but also on the electricity otherwise needed to cool the room.
Granted, it isn't a huge savings, and that "waste" heat would have been useful in the winter, but my electric bill is still lower overall (about $6 a month in the summer if I remember my calculation right).
And depending on how those clicks were timed, the technique was probably pulse width modulation. It's simply the easiest way to turn a 1 bit output into something greater. At present, PWM is used commonly in CD players, motor speed controllers, and probably your PC's power supply. Hell, even a Commodore mouse uses it [1]. There's not much limit to the applications this method can be applied to. Higher drive current and/or voltage, a faster pulse rate, and finer pulse width granularity are usually better, but the fundamentals are the same pretty much anywhere a variable voltage is needed if everything is otherwise sane.
Since I don't know the intimate details of the Apple II beyond the presence of that flip flop output, I'll speak from a generic perspective, to expand on the comments made by the AC below.
Suppose you have a basic computer with a 1 MHz system clock and one or more generic I/O chips with ordinary TTL outputs, among its various other hardware.
In your code, configure a main interrupt to trigger at a fairly decent clip, let's say 25000 times a second. Each time it triggers, have it set up a second interrupt, force an I/O line high, and exit. That second interrupt should fire a short time after it is enabled, and it should do nothing but set the I/O line low and exit when triggered.
Call the second interrupt's time delay "D", as it represents the pulse's duty cycle. Structure the primary interrupt's code so that, when D is zero, the secondary interrupt code can chime in (that is, before the main interrupt can even exit) and force the I/O line to low right after the main interrupt sets it high.
On the hardware side, couple that I/O line through the usual R/C circuit and attach to a speaker. As the AC below already said, this is what was done in every Apple II, and this is what will do most of the work to turn that train of pulses into a smooth voltage. With your 10 MHz system clock, a 25 kHz pulse train gives you 40 cycles between the pulses' leading edges, so your average voltage output will be about (100*(D/40)) percent of that of the high rail.
Do something simple that makes D the same amount at all times, and you've got a configurable voltage output. Change D every so often to follow a digital sample and you've got a 25 kHz output with about 5.32193 bits of resolution.
Since there will be some timing variation and latency in the interrupts, the available resolution will be slightly lower that this theoretical maximum (probably 5 bits even). Because of the large amount of CPU time consumed by the interrupt routines, this method works best if the I/O line is something like a timed shift register port. Then you only need a single interrupt that reads a sample value, sets the I/O line's timer accordingly, writes to the serial register any value that has only one bit set, and then exits.
The fact that this all requires good assembly language skills on the 8-bitters does not change the fact that it *is* full digital audio - you need good skills regardless of the type of audio output hardware you're working with.
*[1] I 'scoped it once years ago and was surprised to find that the 1351 mouse uses PWM to generate the analog signals that are sensed as voltage levels by the POTX/POTY lines in the controller port.
I'm no fan of Apple (I prefer Commodore when it comes to the 8-bit era), but a stock Apple II can do more than just beeps and clicks - it can do full digital audio using pulse width modulation. I'm not sure of the effective resolution (more than 1 bit, for sure, probably closer to 6-8 bits), but I've heard at least a couple of examples of this, including a multi-voice music player, and it actually didn't sound half bad for an otherwise rudimentary output.
As others have stated, it's all in how you promote it. Saying the car is "Collision resistant" is a lot saner than "collision proof". Probably a lot more legal too (truth in advertising, and all that).
That aside, I see four scenarios:
1. Driver is tooling along, not paying much attention to his/her following distance or the conditions of the traffic in the vicinity. Automatic braking system triggers but is unable to stop the car in time thanks to the laws of physics, and he/she slams into someone/something. There's nothing apparent wrong with the car, no excessive wear, etc. Result: driver's own damn fault for failing to pay attention, just as it would be now.
2. Driver is paying attention, but something causes the automatic braking system to kick in. The automatic system fails to stop the car in time because of some routine maintenance item like worn pads, damaged rotor, inadequate brake fluid, or something else. Result: it's the driver's own damn fault for not maintaining his/her car, just as it should be in any other situation.
3. Driver is paying attention, something unexpected causes the automatic braking system to kick in, it fails to stop the car, and also causes a general braking system fault that prevents the driver from taking over and stopping the car. Driver slams into someone/something, and the failed component is determined to be a manufacturer error that was covered by a recall that the driver failed to act on. Result: The driver's own damned fault for not acting on the recall.
4. Driver is paying attention, automatic braking system kicks in and fails to stop the car, causes some sort of general braking system malfunction that prevents the driver from taking over, causing him/her to slam into something/someone. The failed component is determined to be something the driver would normally not be responsible for (say a busted brake line that otherwise looks normal, or a software bug in the automatic braking system's computer, etc.). Result: Squarely on the shoulders of the manufacturer.
In other words, if the manufacturer didn't screw up, leave it up to the normal system for handling accidents. I.e. if some asshole cuts you off and causes an accident, it would have been their fault anyway. Otherwise, just own up to your failure and deal with it however you normally would whether or not you had the automatic braking system.
Not to be pedantic, but given that we all want to remember her, I think the Trek cast would have stated it more like this:
Computer, save and end program.
Run program "pearly gates 1"
...except that this isn't about her *teaching* anything. This is about a student handing out Linux discs to other students (a good thing), and being disruptive about it (a bad thing). Regardless of what the teacher's subject or expertise is, what the students were or were not seeing has no bearing at all. The teacher overreacted, committed a couple of crimes that most of us would also rightfully retaliate against (slander and libel, specifically), and threatened to sue the maker of HeliOS, as if he were somehow responsible for the kids' behavior.
While she was right to stop the initial sharing because the student was disruptive, her actions from that point forward were 100% wrong. Period.
JFS works well for me, but lacks one thing that would have saved me a great deal of trouble recently - it is intolerant of bad blocks, to the point of outright crashing the system. Yes, one should replace bad hardware ASAP, but if you're in a situation where said hardware can't be replaced yet, it is better to be able to just get an error message and run in "limp-in" mode for a while than to end up with a useless box for that same amount of time.
Mythbusters already covered this quite some time ago. After pumping some serious decibels into the participants at various frequencies, without any results, they declared the "brown note" as busted.
It has already been proven that Gus did NOT cause the accident. Had he hit the switch that blows the door open, there would have been a nasty bruise on his hand, but none was found. See also, this Wikipedia article.
.
Elmer Fudd: Say... I wonder what that wed button is for...
[Presses the initially unmarked red button, which lights a label reading "In case of tidal wave"]
[Mechanical noises, house rises high into the air]
[Elmer opens the front door to see Daffy Duck approaching in a helicopter]
Daffy: For a small price, I can install this little blue button to get you down.
(emphasis mine)
So yeah, he can charge whatever he wants for the package, but if it's under GPL v2, the source code clearly must remain free/gratis, or at worst, break-even on the cost of the media and the labor to copy it, if any. Now, from what I can see, v3 of the GPL seems to remove that restriction:
That's okay, I'm sure Kenwood and others will make more than enough amps to compensate.. wait, what?
I used and posted on one non-binary newsgroup on USENET as early as 1994 or so, and I was definitely not a geek back then. That and email were the only two services I had access to on the Internet, both of which were provided by a BBS gateway. Sure, I programmed a little, but it was nothing anyone here couldn't have done back then as well, so I'd have to say that if I was able to use USENET back then, it was about as mainstream as it gets.
If you ask your sample pool what "The Internet" is, the majority of them will say something along the lines of "the web" and maybe email. They would be dead wrong; the Internet is more than just web access, and will probably continue to be for a VERY long time.
Except that you're wrong. It's expected to be a flat ribbon rather than a round cable - despite the mass, most of the thing will float down like shreds of paper if it's destroyed, the heaviest pieces of which will burn up in the atmosphere long before they reach the ground.
Um...because computers are designed to make it easy to change things - rewrite, revise, edit - until the outcome is what you want it to be. You can rig an election with paper ballots, but that's pretty difficult. With computer voting systems, all it takes is one good cracker to find his/her way into one of the systems used for voting. Sneak a few hundred votes in, then move on to the next machine of the same make/model. Chances are, the software running on that machine will be the same as that which the cracker just broke into. I believe this is the case with all those Diebold systems that everyone's made so much noise over.
Wash, rinse, repeat until you've altered enough machines to affect the outcome of the vote.
It's not just bad... It's very bad. In the current Diebold systems, votes are eventually tabulated by one central system, if I remember it right. If not that, then it's several systems combined. Either way, the hypothetical cracker need only break into maybe one machine and either alter the counts after they're done, pre-set some favorable numbers before the counts take place, or alter the software that is used to tabulate the votes, so that it favors your desired candidate. Security for that machine notwithstanding, the cracker attacking the counting computer can affect even more votes than is the case with the actual voting machines.
No, he's complaining about technology being used in places where it just doesn't belong. It would be like telling someone to boot up (or wake up) their laptop just to write down someone's phone number, when pencil and paper would do the job with less hassle. Paper voting forces people to slow down, sure, but it also forces the attacker to take more drastic measures to affect an outcome - measures which probably just don't work too well today. It's a lot easier to secure a box full of paper ballots than a computer: Just bolt the table to the floor, lock the ballot box to the table, lock the lid shut, and post a guard by it. Have a couple of guards carry the full box to the counting station, where more guards are posted to oversee the counting.
I don't have to tell anyone here just how hard it can be to secure a computer system that you know nothing about the internals of, and which has to be placed in an essentially hostile environment in order for it to perform its designated function.
No, it's called trust. It's called fraud (or rather, the risk thereof). Pixels on a computer screen just aren't tangible enough for the average person to trust, and probably for the same reason people "want it in writing" when agreeing on something important, or prefer something to have a signature. They're tangible - they can be used as proof of something should the need arise.