Re: Yeah but..

Assume they were thicker - the particles outside the equatorial plane would have to cross it twice an orbit; they cannot just stay on one side. As a result, such particles would pass through the thicker bits twice an orbit, and drag from gasses and dust (and collisions with larger than dust sized objects) would eventually remove the "up and down" part of their orbital velocity, leaving them in the equatorial plane.

Re: "Professional Driver" is a rather less than specific term...

"[...]but can you really say the same about an Eastern European rig and driver?"

Or over here, the barely-trained moron behind the wheel of the semi who wants to ride 2ft off your rear bumper, who uses his Jakes (exhaust brakes) to come to a stop at a stop sign but rides his regular brakes going down a 10 mile long 10% grade, and who will pull out into the passing lane just before you get to him, and SIT THERE NOT PASSING the other truck (which is against the law in many states, not that I've ever seen it enforced).

Truck drivers will often sing the "We are professional drivers and safer than you car drivers" - I assert that is bull. Most accidents happen in the cities, not on the highways. Car drivers tend to do most of their driving in the city, not the highway, while truck drivers do most of their driving on the highway, not the cities.

Doing the Baysian:

Assume the same probability of an accident for both drivers, given the same circumstances:

P of accident given city and car = P of accident given city and semi

P of accident given highway and car = P of accident given highway and semi

P of accident given city >> P of accident given highway

P of accident given semi := P of accident given city and semi * F of time on city given semi + P of accident given highway and semi * F of time on highway given semi.

P of accident given car := P of accident given city and car * F of time on city given car + P of accident given highway and car * F of time on highway given car.

Since F of time on highway given semi >> F of time on highway given car, and P of accident given highway << P of accident given city

P of accident given semi << P of accident given car

Even though the semi and the car have the same likelihood of accident in the same circumstances.

And I also assert that P of accident given semi is actually > P of accident given car for equal cases. It's just that the semis drive in safer places more that makes it look otherwise.

"Devo-max"?

"I reckon most of the people in Scotland don't want independence. Devo-max maybe."

Soooo, a bunch of guys in kilts and Energy Dome hats, playing the Corporate Anthem on the pipes?

"Maybe give them a thick coat of red paint and a little crown logo?"

Or blue and white, with a blinking light on top?

Too big a deal for one party

Truer words have rarely been spoken:

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sea/274495936.html

Re: How does the radio work?

The frequency is low enough that it won't be much impact on the radio system - unless your phone as an AM MW receiver.

But I have to wonder about the impact on:

1) The phone's compass

2) Any MW or LW receivers in the area

and I also wonder if an evil person could make a charger that could overload a wireless charging device's coils....

Re: Your science is rubbish

Actually, the slug is the Imperial unit of mass, and the pound is a unit of force.

(as an EE, I hated Thermodynamics, because all the steam tables were still in Imperial).

But then again, this site routinely speaks of the number of grams to pull a magnet loose, so....

Reusable....

A Scottsman went into the chemists, and laid the remains of a tattered prophylactic on the counter. "How much tae fix this?"

The chemist, biting back his nausea, said "Look, I have a full box here, 20p. Why don'"

The Scottsman interrupts "Thots tae much! Just how much tae repair?"

"Look, I'm not supposed to do this, but: there's 10 in a pack, I'll sell you one for 2p"

And again, the Scottsman interrupts "I'm nae made o money, am I lad?"

The chemist finally says "OK, look, maybe with a bit of rubber cement I can fix this for 1p, but really? 2p for a new one?"

The Scottsman holds up a finger, and steps out of the shop. A few moments later, he steps back in.

"Your offer is good, but the regiment votes to repair!"

Re: Robobutler!

"Get my box of fags and a lighter there, and pour me a beer while you're at it"

Just be sure you have your robot set to en-GB rather than en-US, or you are going to have a potentially nasty surprise.

Unless you are in to that sort of thing.

Re: Where's the hardware live?

If it is based on signal strength, and not time-of-flight, it will fun to watch all the errors induced by the

a) crap RSSI indicators in most WiFi chips

b) Random variations due to all the RF-absorbing bags of dirty water moving around (including the bag of dirty water carrying the phone).

c) Crap RF leveling in the WiFi terminals themselves.

And you aren't doing time-of-flight in software only, you need hardware to timestamp the packets reliably.

Re: "...LG also hopes to attach itself both to eyeballs and to arms,..."

"As a parasite or as a symbiote, or just a helpful friend?"

Your Plastic Pal who's Fun to be with!

.

.

.

.

Dreadful, isn't it.

Re: What's Next?

Yes, those concrete shoes last the rest of your life!

Re: Say what?

"did apply" - as a land owner in the US, I can tell you I do NOT own mineral rights to my land. It will depend upon the nature of the land purchase: for a small residential lot (such as mine) you generally don't get mineral rights, for a larger acreage such as a farm you generally do, IANAL, IANYL, YMMV, VWPBL, etc.

Re: Hmm...

Technically, a FLOP is a floating (point) operation, the plural of which is FLOPs. It is legitimate to say "To compute this thing will take 2 TFLOPs" meaning 2*10^12 floating point operations. It's one of those things that does require a bit of context to parse.

That said, I agree that in the context used, TFLOPs means "teraFLOPs per second", but the other usage does appear in the literature.

Re: Terminaly dim...

But look at all the other Apple features it infringes upon:

1) It is made of baryonic matter.

2) It occupies 3 large spatial dimensions and one time dimension.

3) It uses EM radiation from 680nm to 420nm to communicate to its user.

4) It uses sound from 20Hz to 20kHz to communicate to its user.

5) If not acted upon by an outside force, it follows Einsteinian geodesics.

6) It curves space-time in proportion to its mass.

No mass storage: 2 reasons

There are 2 reasons for the removal of USB mass storage from Android:

1) To support large files (e.g. HD media files bigger than 2G) you need a file system other than VFAT32. However, NTFS is not well supported outside of Microsoft OSs (yes, Linux can read and write it, sort of, maybe, if you hold your tongue right), and Windows doesn't support other file systems well (Forget any Linux FS, forget HPFS for Mac, and Windows really doesn't like doing UFS on anything that isn't a DVD).

2) For any of the above file systems, they don't like having 2 independent entities frobbing them at a sector level at the same time, so using USB file storage means unmounting the file system from the phone's OS, making the low-level "pile of sectors" available over USB Mass Storage, then when the host is disconnected, remounting the file system to the phone's OS, and then doing a lengthy rescan to see what changed.

Moving to MTP means a) the phone can use EXT3 or EXT4 for the file system, allowing for big files, and b) the phone mediates all access to the file system, so it doesn't have to unmount it.

Now, why Google didn't use a better interface than MTP (hell, NFS over USB networking would be better IMHO)... I guess it is Microsoft's intransigence on allowing other plug-in file system drivers to be a common part of the Windows install (or even to be installed by default by device driver INF files) - using something that Microsoft won't support by default is a non-starter.

Re: ...

"I do hope it can make and recieve [sic] calls!"

If you are talking about the watch, then you really haven't thought through the ergonomics of the situation (just like too many on the Pebble forums).

Try this. Hold your cell phone on your wrist. Don't put it on speakerphone mode just yet. Turn on a small amount of noise in your area - a stereo on low, a fan, whatever. Nothing loud, just enough that you would have to talk in a normal level to somebody else in the room. Now, call a friend on your phone. Try holding the phone to your ear to hear, while keeping your phone on your wrist. See how awkward that is?

Now, turn on speakerphone mode. Think about what this would be like on a bus, having everybody listening to both sides of the conversation. Think about everybody else doing it at the same time. Then ask yourself if this is any better than just using your phone in speakerphone mode as it is.

No, the ergonomics of using a wrist mounted phone suck. Wrist mounted controls and displays are OK, but you really don't want the audio there. And if you are going to use an earpiece, why not just use a regular Bluetooth earpiece, and let the watch be just a display and control point?

Re: Obligatory Python reference!

And the fact somebody down-voted you is evidence of the truth of the last line....

Re: I'm gonna start up my own social network

There is a network connecting all of us, no matter how socially isolated. This network is growing in complexity, and no-one fully understands it in all its complexity; but it links us all - our homes, our businesses, our theaters, our places of worship. Without this network, modern society as we know it would not be possible.

This network is

Modern Plumbing.

(I don't have the full thing memorized, but thank you Blue Man Group.)

Re: Prior art

"[...]Romans were doing it on public noticeboards at road junctions about 2000 years ago."

Damn, you ranked my example by thousands of years.

I was going to say

CQ CQ CQ

(The standard call on radio for "any station receiving").

Re: This just in

I have my SSH on a non-standard port, AND I have my firewall configured so that any attempt to access the standard port immediately adds the offending IP to a blacklist for a period of time. And of course, I have SSH set for keypair-only (no tunneled passwords), as well as several other measures to increase security.

Re: @David D. Hagood

We were given 1 significant digit of precision, any conversion expressing more than one significant digit of precision is wrong. Go back to science class.

Re: So long...

"Did the dolphins leave a message by any chance?"

Well, I did get this nice goldfish bowl....

Re: I was going to post a comment

or "some Bussard buzzy thing" - damn EM fields wiped everything else out! And BOY was it moving!

Re: Bonkers? Yes... Overpriced? Most definitely

This reminds me of the PCs that Tired^W Wired magazine would build back in the days when I could be bothered to care about them: "We are so hip we cannot see over our pelvis, so here's a machine an order of magnitude more expensive than anything you would build. Remember, ever dollar over $5K is a millimeter of penis!"

Re: Pork holster.

It's always reminded me more of sliced roast beef.

Was it crack?

Being Oklahoma, likely not - it is more probable it was meth.

So rather than crack crack, it was messy meth.

Re: A revolver?

Yes, and that also addresses the "was the safety on" question (a small revolver like this is not likely to have a safety at all). Given the statement it had one spent and 3 live rounds, I'd assume it's a 4 shot revolver, which in .22 could be quite small (esp. if it is .22 short, rather than .22 long rifle, which is the more common round).

Re: 150MB per page!?

Look at it like this: Assume 24 bit color. That's 50MPixel. Call it 7000x7000 pixels. At 1200 dpi (a good modern scanner) that's only about 6 by 6 inches. Considering old manuscripts were much larger than that, and 150MB/page, even with lossless compression, doesn't sound like so much.