...it's not like there haven't been young people committing suicide after being railroaded on charges for things they absolutely didn't do, in this country, for years.
But they're minorities and poor and must have been guilty, right?
Let a tech-elite white kid run afoul of the legal mechanisms, though...
I can't speak for most. I can speak for the ten or twelve of us who compared notes at work today over the snark. Sure, we're being flip. But there's no sense being stupid. Things I'm doing which we all thought seemed like a good plan:
1) Remembering that the winds aren't a big deal. 2) Being happy I live in a high spot, so rather than evacuating: 3) Stockpiling water (1-liter thermoplastic seltzer bottles ftw) 4) Freezing some of those (thermal inertia ftw if we lose power, plus, tasty cold water) 5) Making sure we have a week of food in the house for peeps *and* cats (check, I usually do, could prob. go 2 on what we have) 6) Making sure I have cash in the house (ATMs might die if net/power goes) 7) Making sure I have candles and lighters/matches 8) Making sure I have adequate whisky!
300,000 people and the 'affected areas' are a relatively small percentage of New York City. The vast majority of New Yorkers are doing what we normally do when doom is predicted - snark, ignore, and stock up on liquor and cigarettes.
Seriously, though, there's no way New York City itself could be evacuated without something on the scale of Dunkirk. The thought of 8 million people trying to escape over a mere 4 or 5 Interstate-class roads makes a lot of us laugh at the idea of the 'go bag' that the authorities and preparedness obsessives keep talking about. If anything happened that was big enough to force a major evac on NYC, we'd be going nowhere so fast due to traffic we'd end up using all three changes of clothes just sitting in cars or in train stations or airports. So unless the 'crisis' is fairly personal, I plan on having lots of time to pack whatever's needed - or to make sure I have the requisite amount of booze and books to see me through the forting up!
Let's see. $12 million in fines, total, eh? Verizon Wireless at the end of 2009 had around 90 million subscribers. Cram a $0.99 charge onto each, take into account the fines, and...yes, profit!
At least the Chinese do something about it. Unlike Americans who sit down watching tv and drinking beer and bitching on slashdot (and never doing anything about it) while their government not only censors their internet connections, but the whole worlds.
This is why Americans are so fucking hypocrites. Do whatever you want on your own land, but leave rest of the world alone. We don't want your bullshit around here in Europe, and the rest of the world.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't approve of censoring the internet for any reason. Nor do I approve of the U.S. government's record on IP-related enforcement *or* electronic freedoms. However, I should note that your angry objection is overwhelmingly colored by the fact that all of your links seem to point to a single source - torrentfreak.com - and all seem to involve actions taken during IP related seizures and enforcement. I realize that in your anger, you won't be able to separate me from the IP apologists, but I appeal to your cooler-headed colleagues of the copyleft movement and its ilk. Understand that a clumsy and self-centered attempt at comparison like this - IP enforcement to the Great Firewall - just makes you and your cause (which I mostly agree with) look...um...selfish, self-centered, and not too bright.
Not to put too fine a point on it, it sounds like you're comparing the effects of the Great Firewall on the citizens/netizens of China to the effects on you, somewhere (as you say) other than America, because...you can't download bittorrents.
That demeans the struggle that the Chinese are undertaking.
The article presents the situation as Andrew Crossley being in conflict with ACS:Law over the use of templates. The problem with that is that Andrew Crossley is in fact the proprietor ("principal?" Don't know the correct term) of ACS:Law, so it would be difficult for ACS:Law to steal his work. To quote WikiP: "The main partner of the company, and its only registered solicitor is Andrew Crossley."
The summary and the article it was taken from are misleading and poorly written. They only use the term 'fuel efficiency' to describe one possible effect of mucking around with your tires in general, probably by increasing their pressure or using harder tires. However, the CamberTire appears to have nothing to do with tire rigidity - and hence fuel economy - whatsoever. What the article appears to describe is a tire which is optimized by shape for negative camber, in order to improve handling of the vehicle, without the faster tire wear that putting negative camber on regular symmetrical tires produces.
WIth negative camber, the tire will be able to withstand more lateral force since it is angled out at the bottom, 'into' the turns. Thus it will be able to corner harder without losing grip.
Nuclear submarines, and especially ballistic missile submarines, don't communicate with anyone at sea unless it's absolutely critical. Communicating gives away your position, and for such submarines, the fact that nobody outside the hull knows exactly where it is is their number one means of survivability. In addition, ballistic missile subs don't have 'allies' - they treat even the surface and submarine forces of their own navy as 'potential hostiles' when at sea in order to maximize their survivability and to continually train to avoid such threats.
Collisions between submarines were fairly common during the Cold War, and were indicative of the amount of time subs spent playing 'hide and seek' with their opponents - because in order to gain intelligence on other submarines, or even to follow them reliably, subs have to be quite close relative to how long it takes them to stop or turn. As a result, however, most collisions were between or involved attack submarines. For two SSBNs to involved in such a bump, either one or the other had to be involved in SSN-like games, or pretty astronomical odds were just surmounted in a random collision. It's a big ocean. It'll be interesting to see precisely where the damage to the two boats is, as it might tell us what aspect they collided at - I have heard it was a slight angle from head-on. Even that doesn't meant they weren't playing silly buggers - if one submarine turned to check its baffles and the other didn't maneuver out of the way, that could result in an angled head-on.
Apple has now offered us a pay-to-play 'option' which fixes the display they broke in the first place (you can get matte as an option on the new 17" Macbook Pro for I think $50 but I'm not sure).
The frustrated weaponeer in me thinks "Hey! That's how we deal with ocean levels rising! Find some basins and nuke holes between them and oceans!"
Heh.
This makes assumptions about the nature of 'games'
on
'Systems-As-Art' In Games
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
...that may not be true. For example, nothing says you can't have a game which forces Ahab to lose. See 9:05 from your favorite interactive fiction archive for an example, or for a more graphical one think about the original 'Postal'. You can make the *gameplay* the point rather than the ending, if you're good enough at it. It does, however, produce a stress on the gameplay designers which is quite different from that of the writer, and it is a mechanic which is not nearly as *common* as the twist ending in stories.
On a more serious note, I wonder if IR camera jammers work on these cameras, and if use of them doesn't trip 'concealment' alerts since it doesn't prevent any person from seeing the plate. An LED array around the plate is certainly easier to remotely control and not as suspicious looking. Might be time to actually build one of those like I've been planning...
Obviously not content to rely on his reality distortion field, Steve Jobs now looks to be even more forward-thinking than his press would have you believe.
I have no idea of the actual feasibility of this, but I remember in the early 1980s standing on a rooftop in NYC with a handheld, hand made parabolic antenna, a ham radio, and an Apple ][+ and watching the Apple draw in blocks from a really low-rez 1-bit digital signal from one of the early exploratory probes. For some more recent examples, see here or learn to talk to ham radio satellites here or Google your own!
I just want to know what's being done with it. If this device is sitting outside, that's fine. If it's in an enclosed space, then building up O2 is dangerous. If it's inside and vented to outside, that still leaves potential hazards. My basic point is that mucking around with the storage of hydrogen and (potentially) oxygen can be much more dangerous than an electrical lead.
Also, I want to know what it does with the oxygen it's going to get. There's a reason that submariners call the oxygen generator (which basically does this, splits water) 'The Bomb.' I'm sure they have an answer, but raw oxygen ain't safer. I guess you could burn it with a pilot light, but, well, no that seems dangerous around this thing. Better have good venting.
The problem with this comparison is that at standard temperature and pressure, gasoline is much less dangerous. This is because neither hydrogen or gasoline will burn as a liquid; they will only burn as they vaporize and become gaseous. Now, gasoline does this quickly enough that you can, in fact, light a puddle of gasoline easily as it is vaporizing. Fully vaporized gasoline, though, is more of a low explosive than just a 'flammable substance.' Vaporized hydrogen (also mixed with oxygen) is just as bad if not worse.
Now, let's run that experiment again. If you spill a gallon of liquid hydrogen in your garage, ambient temperature and pressure means it will almost immediately flash-evaporate into explosive gas. Try it yourself: stick two leads from a 9V battery into water in a jar and watch bubbles of oxygen and hydrogen arise from the two leads. Now place a flame over the top of the jar.
No, on second thought, don't do that unless you're in a lab with a flame cabinet and are experienced with lab techniques. But still.
So the issue to me is this: Which is easier to prevent from vaporizing into an explosive? Easy. Gasoline. Just put it in a vessel that's airtight at STP. Make it somewhat sturdy if it gets warm out, but even heavy plastic will work. Hydrogen? Much harder. It's going to be under pressure, or a liquid which is hard to keep cold/pressurized enough to keep it so.
Now, if this system has some way of sequestering the hydrogen into a safe delivery and storage mechanism, that'd be one thing...but...heh.
I'll try to stick to ones I didn't see on a fast pass through the topic...
George R.R. Martin's Tuf Voyaging
Lester Del Rey's Runaway Robot is one for late pre-teens I fondly remember
C.J. Cherryh's Chanur books
Scott Westerfeld's The Midnighters series (more urban fantasy, I guess)
Christopher Anvil's Interstellar Patrol stories
It's really hard to find, but This Time of Darkness by H.M. Hoover
Roger Zelazny's The Last Defender of Camelot story collection, which includes both the more adult Damnation Alley but my favorite short novel ever, For A Breath I Tarry.
John Varley's Red Thunder is a Heinlein juvenile homage
Alexander Key's Rivets and Sprockets (also hard to find but wonderful)
Eleanor Cameron's The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451
Madeleine L'Engle's The Young Unicorns
Steven C. Gould's Jumper and Wildside
Andre Norton's Star Guard
L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz (dammit!:-))
Brian Daley's Han Solo books (the older ones, pre-Star Wars licensing craze - Han Solo at Star's End, Han Solo's Revenge, Han Solo and the Lost Legacy).
John M. (Mike) Ford's excellent Star Trek novel The Final Reflection and his excellent Princes of the Air
As always, vet for yourself! Good luck! I envy your kids, just starting out with all the wonder out there.
...covered here on Slashdot. I don't know if Linuxcare still has the posters, but that post generously offers links to the Postscript, and to code to generate the imagery from kernel source (I haven't checked the links). I have this framed in my office in 36"x48" and it looks great, in my nerdy eyes.
The handprint is there, claims the patent, in order to facilitate the 'proper carrying' of the 'computing device.' However, I don't think I've ever carried my laptop balanced like a waiter's tray, or held it to my side while closed without wrapping the carrying hand around the edge underneath it for support. What they do say, buried in the patent, is that the patent also covers the use of 'biometric devices' inside the handprint, presumably for identity verification. If so, I"m not sure how this any better than a fingerprint port, unless they plan to have biometrics cover the entire print or even all five fingers - which will be more expensive for dubious additional security.
Doesn't necessarily follow. That would only be true if plastic was oxidized fuel, which it's not. Plastic will burn, so there's net positive energy bound up in it. The question is whether that energy is more or less than the energy required to rearrange/break enough bonds to convert it to a state which is handy to consume in engines.
One of the truisms of humans - they'll *always* find a way. I recall reading an excellent story online by a programmer who was working on a 'child-safe' online interactive environment; after being forced to abandon live chat, the sponsoring company went with text chat. Then they went with selection of pre-programmed words. When an eight year old swiftly produced something like 'I want to put my tall giraffe in your fluffy bunny' that was right out, and bang went communication. Not to be deterred, their li'l alpha testers swiftly realized you could take the adorable objects in the game and make, um, *interesting* shapes on the ground (and each other) with them, which was way more fun than the design gameplay. The sponsor gave up.
The only way to ensure a child-safe environment is to police it. The problem is that getting people to agree on what their children can be exposed to will never happen; someone's perfectly 'of age for the project' child will always know (or just have heard and faithfully attempt to repeat) something that someone else will find it a crime that their child has been exposed to. Realistically, the only way to prevent situations from getting out of control is to have an active and dynamic response to situations like that arising...which, traditionally, has meant teacher or chaperone. Unless LEGO wants to spend a crapload of money on nannymoderators, I just can't see this working.
Of course, I'm a pessimistic shmuck who is obsessed with tall yellow stiff giraffes and soft fluffy inviting bunnies.
And to whoever's excellent anecdote I just thefted, my apologies, I'll try to find the link.
This seems to assume that the iPods were the proximate cause of these pedestrians' deaths. What were the full circumstances? i.e. were they jaywalking? Were the vehicles moving against traffic regulations? While I may not like current NYC traffic regs, they do presently exist for that purpose. If the pedestrians were in a crosswalk, moving with the light, then *technically* it's not their responsibility to avoid traffic - it's the vehicle's responsibility to avoid them, according to NY State law. If they *weren't* in a crosswalk and moving with a light, they were *already* in violation of traffic regulations for which they can be punished, iPod/gadget or no. Why another whole layer of government legislation to interfere with my behavior which, if I'm obeying the law, does nothing but raise my personal risk vs. others (drivers) who aren't?
Slashdot Mirror
...it's not like there haven't been young people committing suicide after being railroaded on charges for things they absolutely didn't do, in this country, for years.
But they're minorities and poor and must have been guilty, right?
Let a tech-elite white kid run afoul of the legal mechanisms, though...
...sandcasters!
I can't speak for most. I can speak for the ten or twelve of us who compared notes at work today over the snark. Sure, we're being flip. But there's no sense being stupid. Things I'm doing which we all thought seemed like a good plan:
1) Remembering that the winds aren't a big deal.
2) Being happy I live in a high spot, so rather than evacuating:
3) Stockpiling water (1-liter thermoplastic seltzer bottles ftw)
4) Freezing some of those (thermal inertia ftw if we lose power, plus, tasty cold water)
5) Making sure we have a week of food in the house for peeps *and* cats (check, I usually do, could prob. go 2 on what we have)
6) Making sure I have cash in the house (ATMs might die if net/power goes)
7) Making sure I have candles and lighters/matches
8) Making sure I have adequate whisky!
DONE.
300,000 people and the 'affected areas' are a relatively small percentage of New York City. The vast majority of New Yorkers are doing what we normally do when doom is predicted - snark, ignore, and stock up on liquor and cigarettes.
Seriously, though, there's no way New York City itself could be evacuated without something on the scale of Dunkirk. The thought of 8 million people trying to escape over a mere 4 or 5 Interstate-class roads makes a lot of us laugh at the idea of the 'go bag' that the authorities and preparedness obsessives keep talking about. If anything happened that was big enough to force a major evac on NYC, we'd be going nowhere so fast due to traffic we'd end up using all three changes of clothes just sitting in cars or in train stations or airports. So unless the 'crisis' is fairly personal, I plan on having lots of time to pack whatever's needed - or to make sure I have the requisite amount of booze and books to see me through the forting up!
KEEP CALM
AND
CARRY ON
Let's see. $12 million in fines, total, eh? Verizon Wireless at the end of 2009 had around 90 million subscribers. Cram a $0.99 charge onto each, take into account the fines, and...yes, profit!
At least the Chinese do something about it. Unlike Americans who sit down watching tv and drinking beer and bitching on slashdot (and never doing anything about it) while their government not only censors their internet connections, but the whole worlds.
This is why Americans are so fucking hypocrites. Do whatever you want on your own land, but leave rest of the world alone. We don't want your bullshit around here in Europe, and the rest of the world.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't approve of censoring the internet for any reason. Nor do I approve of the U.S. government's record on IP-related enforcement *or* electronic freedoms. However, I should note that your angry objection is overwhelmingly colored by the fact that all of your links seem to point to a single source - torrentfreak.com - and all seem to involve actions taken during IP related seizures and enforcement. I realize that in your anger, you won't be able to separate me from the IP apologists, but I appeal to your cooler-headed colleagues of the copyleft movement and its ilk. Understand that a clumsy and self-centered attempt at comparison like this - IP enforcement to the Great Firewall - just makes you and your cause (which I mostly agree with) look...um...selfish, self-centered, and not too bright.
Not to put too fine a point on it, it sounds like you're comparing the effects of the Great Firewall on the citizens/netizens of China to the effects on you, somewhere (as you say) other than America, because...you can't download bittorrents.
That demeans the struggle that the Chinese are undertaking.
Suck it up.
The article presents the situation as Andrew Crossley being in conflict with ACS:Law over the use of templates. The problem with that is that Andrew Crossley is in fact the proprietor ("principal?" Don't know the correct term) of ACS:Law, so it would be difficult for ACS:Law to steal his work. To quote WikiP: "The main partner of the company, and its only registered solicitor is Andrew Crossley."
The summary and the article it was taken from are misleading and poorly written. They only use the term 'fuel efficiency' to describe one possible effect of mucking around with your tires in general, probably by increasing their pressure or using harder tires. However, the CamberTire appears to have nothing to do with tire rigidity - and hence fuel economy - whatsoever. What the article appears to describe is a tire which is optimized by shape for negative camber, in order to improve handling of the vehicle, without the faster tire wear that putting negative camber on regular symmetrical tires produces.
WIth negative camber, the tire will be able to withstand more lateral force since it is angled out at the bottom, 'into' the turns. Thus it will be able to corner harder without losing grip.
Nuclear submarines, and especially ballistic missile submarines, don't communicate with anyone at sea unless it's absolutely critical. Communicating gives away your position, and for such submarines, the fact that nobody outside the hull knows exactly where it is is their number one means of survivability. In addition, ballistic missile subs don't have 'allies' - they treat even the surface and submarine forces of their own navy as 'potential hostiles' when at sea in order to maximize their survivability and to continually train to avoid such threats.
Collisions between submarines were fairly common during the Cold War, and were indicative of the amount of time subs spent playing 'hide and seek' with their opponents - because in order to gain intelligence on other submarines, or even to follow them reliably, subs have to be quite close relative to how long it takes them to stop or turn. As a result, however, most collisions were between or involved attack submarines. For two SSBNs to involved in such a bump, either one or the other had to be involved in SSN-like games, or pretty astronomical odds were just surmounted in a random collision. It's a big ocean. It'll be interesting to see precisely where the damage to the two boats is, as it might tell us what aspect they collided at - I have heard it was a slight angle from head-on. Even that doesn't meant they weren't playing silly buggers - if one submarine turned to check its baffles and the other didn't maneuver out of the way, that could result in an angled head-on.
Apple has now offered us a pay-to-play 'option' which fixes the display they broke in the first place (you can get matte as an option on the new 17" Macbook Pro for I think $50 but I'm not sure).
The frustrated weaponeer in me thinks "Hey! That's how we deal with ocean levels rising! Find some basins and nuke holes between them and oceans!"
Heh.
...that may not be true. For example, nothing says you can't have a game which forces Ahab to lose. See 9:05 from your favorite interactive fiction archive for an example, or for a more graphical one think about the original 'Postal'. You can make the *gameplay* the point rather than the ending, if you're good enough at it. It does, however, produce a stress on the gameplay designers which is quite different from that of the writer, and it is a mechanic which is not nearly as *common* as the twist ending in stories.
On a more serious note, I wonder if IR camera jammers work on these cameras, and if use of them doesn't trip 'concealment' alerts since it doesn't prevent any person from seeing the plate. An LED array around the plate is certainly easier to remotely control and not as suspicious looking. Might be time to actually build one of those like I've been planning...
Obviously not content to rely on his reality distortion field, Steve Jobs now looks to be even more forward-thinking than his press would have you believe.
I have no idea of the actual feasibility of this, but I remember in the early 1980s standing on a rooftop in NYC with a handheld, hand made parabolic antenna, a ham radio, and an Apple ][+ and watching the Apple draw in blocks from a really low-rez 1-bit digital signal from one of the early exploratory probes. For some more recent examples, see here or learn to talk to ham radio satellites here or Google your own!
I just want to know what's being done with it. If this device is sitting outside, that's fine. If it's in an enclosed space, then building up O2 is dangerous. If it's inside and vented to outside, that still leaves potential hazards. My basic point is that mucking around with the storage of hydrogen and (potentially) oxygen can be much more dangerous than an electrical lead.
Also, I want to know what it does with the oxygen it's going to get. There's a reason that submariners call the oxygen generator (which basically does this, splits water) 'The Bomb.' I'm sure they have an answer, but raw oxygen ain't safer. I guess you could burn it with a pilot light, but, well, no that seems dangerous around this thing. Better have good venting.
The problem with this comparison is that at standard temperature and pressure, gasoline is much less dangerous. This is because neither hydrogen or gasoline will burn as a liquid; they will only burn as they vaporize and become gaseous. Now, gasoline does this quickly enough that you can, in fact, light a puddle of gasoline easily as it is vaporizing. Fully vaporized gasoline, though, is more of a low explosive than just a 'flammable substance.' Vaporized hydrogen (also mixed with oxygen) is just as bad if not worse.
Now, let's run that experiment again. If you spill a gallon of liquid hydrogen in your garage, ambient temperature and pressure means it will almost immediately flash-evaporate into explosive gas. Try it yourself: stick two leads from a 9V battery into water in a jar and watch bubbles of oxygen and hydrogen arise from the two leads. Now place a flame over the top of the jar.
No, on second thought, don't do that unless you're in a lab with a flame cabinet and are experienced with lab techniques. But still.
So the issue to me is this: Which is easier to prevent from vaporizing into an explosive? Easy. Gasoline. Just put it in a vessel that's airtight at STP. Make it somewhat sturdy if it gets warm out, but even heavy plastic will work. Hydrogen? Much harder. It's going to be under pressure, or a liquid which is hard to keep cold/pressurized enough to keep it so.
Now, if this system has some way of sequestering the hydrogen into a safe delivery and storage mechanism, that'd be one thing...but...heh.
I'll try to stick to ones I didn't see on a fast pass through the topic...
As always, vet for yourself! Good luck! I envy your kids, just starting out with all the wonder out there.
...covered here on Slashdot. I don't know if Linuxcare still has the posters, but that post generously offers links to the Postscript, and to code to generate the imagery from kernel source (I haven't checked the links). I have this framed in my office in 36"x48" and it looks great, in my nerdy eyes.
They need to get cracking on this. A universe from my closet? Fan*TAS*tic! My rent/sq. ft. is going down as I write...
The handprint is there, claims the patent, in order to facilitate the 'proper carrying' of the 'computing device.' However, I don't think I've ever carried my laptop balanced like a waiter's tray, or held it to my side while closed without wrapping the carrying hand around the edge underneath it for support. What they do say, buried in the patent, is that the patent also covers the use of 'biometric devices' inside the handprint, presumably for identity verification. If so, I"m not sure how this any better than a fingerprint port, unless they plan to have biometrics cover the entire print or even all five fingers - which will be more expensive for dubious additional security.
Doesn't necessarily follow. That would only be true if plastic was oxidized fuel, which it's not. Plastic will burn, so there's net positive energy bound up in it. The question is whether that energy is more or less than the energy required to rearrange/break enough bonds to convert it to a state which is handy to consume in engines.
The only way to ensure a child-safe environment is to police it. The problem is that getting people to agree on what their children can be exposed to will never happen; someone's perfectly 'of age for the project' child will always know (or just have heard and faithfully attempt to repeat) something that someone else will find it a crime that their child has been exposed to. Realistically, the only way to prevent situations from getting out of control is to have an active and dynamic response to situations like that arising...which, traditionally, has meant teacher or chaperone. Unless LEGO wants to spend a crapload of money on nannymoderators, I just can't see this working.
Of course, I'm a pessimistic shmuck who is obsessed with tall yellow stiff giraffes and soft fluffy inviting bunnies.
And to whoever's excellent anecdote I just thefted, my apologies, I'll try to find the link.
This seems to assume that the iPods were the proximate cause of these pedestrians' deaths. What were the full circumstances? i.e. were they jaywalking? Were the vehicles moving against traffic regulations? While I may not like current NYC traffic regs, they do presently exist for that purpose. If the pedestrians were in a crosswalk, moving with the light, then *technically* it's not their responsibility to avoid traffic - it's the vehicle's responsibility to avoid them, according to NY State law. If they *weren't* in a crosswalk and moving with a light, they were *already* in violation of traffic regulations for which they can be punished, iPod/gadget or no. Why another whole layer of government legislation to interfere with my behavior which, if I'm obeying the law, does nothing but raise my personal risk vs. others (drivers) who aren't?