Posts by TeeCee 9436 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007
The toy is a replica of the RQ-1 Predator....
Hmm, I was expecting a detail scale model to warrant the cobblers, not a ruddy dinky toy.
Some people really do need to pull that stick out of their arse. I don't think the collection of model tanks I had when I was a lad did me any harm. In fgact, I think I can put my hand on my heart and say that I've never even thought about invading Poland.
What if your flying machine came with a camera already built into it?
You could fly a small drone through that loophole.....
There's another bit to that.
When we have ringed the planet with humungously expensive rock detecting kit and find one that is going to blow up over New York or London...........(!)
I'm not sure that "Incredibly complicated system to cause mass panic" is likely to get its multi-billion dollar funding.
On any of these videos you find of the meteor explosion, every other word that is spoke in Russian is cursing.
Put yourself in their position. Would you look up and say; "Good grief! There appears to be an enormous meteorite flying overhead.........my, that was a loud noise, wasn't it?" or "FUCK ME! WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? LOOK AT THE FUCKING SIZE OF THAT BASTARD........JESUS H FUCKING CHRIST, THE BLOODY THING JUST BLEW UP!!!111!!!!"
All well and good, but eventually this means having a manky and heavily teastained cloth object hanging around the kitchen.
My wife introduced me to the double-skinned metal vacuum pot, like a teapot-shaped thermos flask. Does everything a pot and cosy combo does, only without the tedious faffing around.
I have to admit to coming over a bit "grumpy old luddite sod" when forced to purchase one, but I've got used to it and the tea's indistiguishable from that which comes out of my earthenware teapot with the cat pictures on it.
I think it's the things wot aren't in Thames that's the problem.
As a student placement, a good mate worked for ICI. One of the little tasks he was given was to test water. The reason was that they bought in vast quantities of purified water and were looking for the purest tap as a cheaper alternative to use for less important work where small amounts of contamination were not an issue.
He was given a set of platinum[1] dishes and a load of samples from various suppliers. Boil each sample dry in a dish and then analyse the results for quantity and content. The winner by a country mile was Thames tap, which had nigh on bugger all by way of residue. To this day he jokes that the number of kidneys it's been though by the time it reaches London is the reason.......
[1] He didn't know this until he dropped the lot and one of the bosses came perilously close to having a heart attack.
When i was young, milk came in one type and it appeared mysteriously on the doorstep each morning.
Er, three types. Your parents could shell a bit extra for "Gold Top" (out of Jersey cows IIRC) on high days and holidays, or for those completely lacking in a sense of taste there was the option of homogenised, which came in crown-corked bottles IIRC.
Correct, but the reason is the reverse of preventing cracking in cheap cups.
Putting the tea in first proved that you had actual hard-paste porcelain teacups rather than something cheaper. It doesn't do the flavour of the resulting milked tea any good but impresses your friends, should you happen to be in the late 17th / early 18th century.
Another point here. Using that point of reference (a thousand years old as seen from Earth), it did indeed occur in 1013 as seen from Earth.
The warning in the article actually serves to confuse more than enlighten, as it's only correct if you mix your temporal reference points.
Prius owners? Do not try this at home.
It will work, but turning it off also engages the parking pawl. You will get a long sizzling noise, followed by a grinding noise, then a clattering noise and finally be brought to a very sudden halt. The noises are the parking pawl attempting to destroy the teeth on the transmission's annulus gear. Fine in an emergency, but not something to be done for fun.
Owners of regular automatic vehicles can create exactly the same effect by shifting into "Park" at speed. I found this out due to a momentary lapse in concentration, forgetting I was driving an auto and trying to downshift for a bend......
..as the handbrake acts on a separate disk on the back of the gearbox...
The seperate transmission brake on Land Rover vehicles is actually a drum brake. Apart from the obvious advantages in having all the vulnerable bits inside a drum casing rather than dangling exposed under the car, drums are superior to disks as hand / emergency brakes as they are, by nature, self-servoing.
....and Toyotas definately shut down if you hold down the start/stop button for ten seconds, as is clearly stated in the handbook.
Not to mention that sticking your foot under the pedal and freeing it from the floormat (a bleedin' obvious thing to try) solves the problem.
Cause of death? Lack of interest in self-preservation.
When the car is moving the stop/start button is ignored.
I think you'll probably find, if you RTFM, that in common with other cars having pushbutton ignition, holding the thing down for a few seconds will stop the engine in an emergency, regardless of what the thing's doing at the time.
I'm afraid that the book that came with it is not provided purely to occupy empty space in the glovebox. For stupidity value though, you have to give a special mention to Mercedes (I think??) who placed the manual in a hidden compartment behind the glovebox in one of their models. The instructions on where to find the manual were written on, er, the first page of the manual.
"...what is at stake for sustainable transportmy bank balance is simply too important to the world to ignore."
A Tesla S is sustainable transport in the same way that a BMW X6 is a hatchback for the school run. The fact that some rich twat will tell you it is doesn't make them right.
My thoughts entirely. If you have a large piece of reinforced glass covering the whole of one side, using it as the chassis to save the weight of the large metal casting which normally provides rigidity is an obvious move.
The car industry figured this out years ago. Try driving a modern car with its bonded-in windscreen removed. You'll be amazed at the amount of body flex you get.
At least you can release a 'leccy brake with the manual override, if you bother to RTFM.
For real fun, look at the Toyota / Lexus Hybrid range. Parking is engaged with a button and happens automatically when you switch the things off. This immobilises the transmission with a parking pawl in the conventional manner. The only way to move one, if the electrics crap themselves completely and jumping to the emergency power terminal does no good, is to jack it up and remove the parking pawl and its actuator from the transmission assembly.
Oops.
I asked the salesman how the hell you were supposed to do hill starts without either stalling it or rolling back.
The answer's simple. You just set off and it disengages automagically. The reason you can spot 'leccy handbraked cars by the dent in the back is that not enough people RTFM before driving off in their new toy.
Including it would seem your BMW salesman, who should be sacked.
BTW, they all have a manual override somewhere, usually in the boot, to permit recovery when the electrics have failed.
What I did see the other day though is that now these things are available, the safety nazis have got in on the act. I saw a complaint from a larger gentleman who had bought an Audi. He was in the habit of taking off his seatbelt so that he could turn around when reversing and was highly pissed off to find that a) it automagically engaged the handbrake when the seatbelt was disengaged and b) it wasn't possible to override this behaviour.
The one built into my car already does it.
It knows how fast its going (speed sensor) and which direction it's going in (steering angle sensor)[1], both of which are standard on most cars these days. Given a recent fix to start from, what else do you need?
It's always amusing to watch it trying to match the maneuvers I'm making in an underground car park to the roads above....
[1] Ok, most of the time. Presumably it wouldn't have a clue what was going on if I were to four-wheel drift it round a corner.....
According to a bloke I met who was around at the time, it's looking after the wires that's the problem.
He told me about one that "lost it" on ice one winter on a one-way system where half-a dozen routes converged. Above it at the time was a rat's nest of intersecting and crossing cables. Once it had stopped spinning, the whole lot was wound around its trolley pole like a giant, metallic candyfloss.
Apparently North London was damn near paralysed for weeks while they restrung that lot.
D-A-M, this is how we know we're getting old.
Those who weren't around at the time believe the socialist claptrap and start talking about how wonderful BT and British Rail were in comparison to what we have now. I'm sure that the only reason that they're not regaling us with how wonderful British Leyland was is that enough of their products survive to remind us how godawfully shite they were.
Those who refuse to learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.
Actually I tend to find that most vehicles' trip computers' estimation of remaining range is quite accurate. Certainly to within the odd percentage point or two of the overall range.
Sounds like Tesla have borrowed their estimation algorithm from Vista's copy dialogue.
Tesla do need a warning sticker, but it should say; "This is a rich bastard's toy, not a practical car.".
I suspect that when they're talking about 500J merely deforming the case, they mean as long as that is distributed over the casing. e.g. as per the horse's hoof alluded to.
I'll bet your Armalite round still goes straight through one, partly because all its "oof" is concentrated in one place, but mostly because a bit of checking reveals that the Winchester .308 round used in the civilian Armalite packs 1,947 foot/pounds, which is about 2600 joules.......
....especially how they ramp up the sound levels.
Actually they don't as they're not allowed to. What they do do is apply dynamic range compression to the sound in adverts like it's going out of fashion. There are no "loud" bits, no "quiet" bits and the whole shebang comes out at "average" volume.
When compared to the programme they're stuck in the middle of they seem louder, but that's only because they're more likely to grab your attention with the continuous stream of mid-level sound resulting.
Whenever I start to think that ads are a PITA, I consider how much subscription telly would cost without them and then STFU a bit sharpish.
I saw him play live at the Hammersmith Odeon once.
About halfway through the evening he got the guitar feeding back nicely. carefully placed it on the floor of the stage and buggered off for a piss. After a few moments, half-a-dozen roadies shot out of the wings carrying towels and proceeded to fan the living daylights out of the amp stacks, to prevent the whole shebang going up in smoke before he got back.
He was the fourth loudest thing I've ever heard. Third was a basement full of LPG bottles going up less than a mile from my house. Second was Motorhead at the same venue. Top spot goes to Blue Oyster Cult, who shoehorned their PA for the Reading festival into the Dunstable Queensway Hall and gave Krakatoa a run for its money.
Entirely adequate for the purpose though.
I've been running one for a couple of years now. Very, very quick indeed once it's had a couple of weeks of use for the cacheing algorithm to get used to what you access frequently.
I'd go as far as to say that in general use it's pretty much indistinguishable from an SSD. Bonus feature is that it doesn't need defragmenting to maintain performance[1], unlike conventional spinning disks. Presumably that's because frequent small-file access, where seek times make a significant contribution to speed, all occurs from flash.
[1] So a huge plus for corp environments with the users locked down.
It's nice to see how Apple now try to do the " Wasn't Me! " routine, and try to pin the whole thing on someone who is dead and buried.
That's risky. I know there's a principle that you can't libel the dead, but if there's anyone capable of sueing from beyond the grave......
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