Posts by Eddy Ito

Re: Donald Trump is a plonker

Besides, Donald doesn't actually plan to win. If ever there was a false flag campaign this is it and it's been known for over a year. Just ask yourself who he supported in the NY Senate races of 2000 and 2006, Hillary. What about the 2008 Presidential campaign? Hillary. Why do you suppose he began all his birther nonsense to push Obama back? Hillary. Which foundation did he contribute to? The Clinton Foundation. Who did he invite to his wedding in 2005? Bill & Hillary Clinton. Not convinced? Who did he consult with at length in mid-2015 just before throwing his hat in the Republican race for President? Nope, it wasn't Hillary, it was Bill Clinton. After years if not decades of support are we supposed to believe that he's serious about defeating Hillary?

Come now, I may have fallen off the corn wagon at harvest time but it wasn't this year.

Re: Shorter process?

That's easy. The process is rigged so that only super rich folk get to fight all the way to the top while the poorer folk have all their money sucked dry by lawyers long before it becomes a real issue. Can't have the hoi polloi getting the issue resolved once and for all without picking their pockets clean, now can we?

Re: Lithium!

It's not straight lithium metal used for the electrodes in LiIon batteries as it is in disposable lithium batteries. The most common variety uses lithium cobalt oxide which decomposes at high temperature giving off oxygen which reacts splendidly with the electrolyte or other nearby combustibles. As a result the goal is to reduce the temperature as rapidly as possible to stop the oxygen generation and copious amounts of water does the job nicely.

Having said that I assume the fire extinguishers aboard an airplane aren't filled with water if for no other reason than its weight. I assume they had halon or halotron extinguishers.

Re: Software luminary?

- he designed, built and flies the Sunseeker series of solar-powered, self-launching aircraft.

Actually that's Eric Scott Raymond who is part of Solar Flight. I don't believe there is a relation with Eric Steven Raymond who wrote "The Cathedral and The Bazaar".

Re: Their advisors should be fired

This is what happens when two over the hill megalomaniac dinosaurs win the primary elections. You have to remember these are two people whose understanding of all things digital came from watching The Terminator and War Games.

Re: workaround?

Maybe a dumb question but couldn't they just point the nozzle down when starting?

Re: Only 1 year?

Agreed, they should make him read and memorize the CARs and when he's done follow with the FARs followed by EASA and JAA regs. He doesn't get out until he writes a thesis comparing and contrasting all four.

Oh, he should also give all the passengers a refund plus a nice dinner for their troubles.

Re: "unlikely that President Obama would allow a government shutdown over the IANA issue"

The difference between this year and 2014 is that there will be 10-20% greater turnout this time around. Most folks skip the mid-term elections and slightly fewer folks skip the big-P elections. That said, I'd say it's about even money on who winds up controlling the Senate. The House isn't going to change much due to the simple fact that the large cities that drive Senate races and tend toward the blue team lose their power. Case in point, here in California the Senate race¹ is down to the San Francisco blue and the Los Angeles blue due to the odd new primary system the state has chosen which essentially pits the two large metro areas against one another and dismisses everyone else. Of course a cynical person might think that depriving large cities of this kind of mob rule power was the whole point of not having Senators directly elected in the first place.

_{1 Spoiler Alert - Bet on San Fran as LA is a lost cause.}

Re: Handling the G's

It's largely a height issue but there's also a build issue. A short person who is well conditioned resists black-out better because in addition to the G-suit, which effectively squeezes the person, a short person has a shorter distance to pump blood to keep the brain in adequate oxygen supply. Being fat is bad and fit is better because in addition to the lower probability of restricted arteries a fat person isn't as capable of tightening their muscles to push as much blood toward their brain as a slender fit person and it comes down to only the suit squeezing the fat. In the end, your ideal fighter pilot would look a lot like a well toned jockey.

Of course, that isn't what the typical fighter pilot looks like and in order to accelerate the typical amount of beef of the larger pilots and clear the tail it has to be a rather good shove and you want the parachute to deploy quickly because you never know what orientation the plane will be in or how close it is to the ground, yes that would leave a mark. So you get a really healthy shove out followed by a quick jerk back which would likely break our jockey's neck. Delaying the rearward jerk while reducing whiplash will also increase the odds of splatting on the ground in the hopefully rare case of an inverted low altitude ejection. Perhaps a simple¹ tether to the back of the helmet that goes taut when ejecting would ease the problem while keeping the quick chute deployment.

1. Simple in concept as I'm fairly sure it would require a bit more than installing a seat belt auto-tensioner since the "gravity" vector can change radically in a fighter aircraft.

The whole reason the OEM auto companies have been so much slower than Tesla on many of these technologies is that they have a

slow plodding process that has only recently started to pick up pace and have been hamstrung by ridiculous regulations written by lawyers who don't understand how vehicles work. As example of the slow plodding I give you the humble audio cassette tape which pretty much was dead and replaced by CDs in 2001 when music companies dropped it but the auto industry kept it around largely as standard equipment for another ten years. For the regulatory silliness I offer up the sealed beam headlamp which was mandatory in the US for an absolutely absurd amount of time.

Now of course things have changed and the car makers will adopt any insecure, internet connected, gee whiz IoT morceau de merde and stick it in without regard to the consumer. But that's ok, self driving or driven by some cracker on the internet, what's the difference really?

Re: lighttpd..

I don't know that it's abandonware. It seems to me that it's embedded in lots of other software both open source and commercial. Of course that doesn't mean it's getting anything back or if those packages aren't just stripping out the bits they need.

Oh AC, somehow I don't see how winning the battle for parked domains is much of a feather in anyone's cap or what your comment has to do with the topic.

Of course the flip side....all those that, for whatever reason cannot drive now, may be allowed to have a car. After all, if they are truly self driving, why can't blind people, children, severely physically disabled people all be allowed one?

In most US states there is no law that disallows anyone from buying a car with perhaps the exception of minors who aren't legally allowed to sign a contract but even then I'm sure there are some states who would allow anyone with adequate cash from buying one regardless of age. As to whether they can register it, insure it, or drive it on a public way that's a different story but buying a car in many states is little different from buying a bicycle other than the cost.

Re: Puzzled

Does anyone know something about the reasoning behind this? Has this something to do with cooling the jet exhaust "because stealth"?

No, I doubt it has nothing to do with cooling the exhaust. Typically the coolant, which in this case is essentially a type of synthetic oil, is used to cool high power electronics such as the radar system. Microwave radar is highly efficient at producing heat and also does a reasonable job of providing detection of other objects in the relative vicinity. The use of poly-alpha-olefins, introduced some 20-30 years ago, was because previous coolants were silicate ester based and would absorb water, break down and ultimately create a rather flammable alcohol to which bad things were prone to happen.

Interestingly this might partially explain a few things such as the need to "reboot" the radar by turning it off and on again. Perhaps it simply overheated because the coolant lines were too heavily insulated, undoubtedly due to non-conforming insulation which is the fault of a subcontractor, and didn't give off enough heat as they passed through the fuel. Shutting it off for a moment or two allowed it to cool enough so that it would restart normally. Of course that's just a bit of speculation on my part.

To address the comment of why the lines aren't on the outside of the aircraft, it's likely that at higher altitude there isn't sufficient air mass to dissipate the heat in a timely manner without using the entire skin as a heat exchanger. Of course that might raise issues with coolant loss when confronted with things like bullets.

For those wishing to know...

Why would anyone care? Well, anyone other than Kanye. Oh wait... Nope, still don't care. Maybe you should ask Kim.

Re: Who is buying this?

I don't know that diminishing returns applies. Diminishing returns is about getting reduced incremental output for a given increase in marginal input. So adding 10% more power may not result in going 10% faster or adding 10% more workers may not result in getting 10% more product. Fundamentally it applies to things you can measure and I don't see how one can measure things like "better".

Certainly the examples of wine and hi-fi¹ don't apply as those are highly subjective and individualized depending upon the individuals palate or ears and preferences. For instance some folks may actually prefer a flabby bitter wine or excessive bass which can be felt more than heard by everyone within a hundred meters of the car. Cars too get a quite a bit fuzzy when speaking of 'better' because one person may prefer a more plush ride while another may like the feel of a taut and sporty suspension or the utility of a one ton truck.

No, we're clearly in the Veblen territory because it doesn't cost Apple any more than anyone else to make minor changes that may or may not be ever so slightly "better". You see it's the production costs that diminishing returns addresses, not the sale price.

1. Yes I understand that noise and distortion can be measured as can frequency response but again it's ultimately going to depend on the individual's ears.

Re: Newton's Third Law of Motion

I was just thinking the same thing. If you're that close then certainly something like a Fairbairn-Sykes has it all over any pen gun with perhaps the chief advantage being the ability to reuse it immediately.

Re: Erm

Don't be silly, that means next time the likes of Sony get their pound of flesh from the shop owner for failing to provide due care if he doesn't cough up the names of the folk who used his wifi.

Re: Voluntary

For the consumer nearly all recalls are voluntary in that if you don't make an appointment to get it fixed they aren't going to come to your house and force the repair on you. The voluntary part here is that GM voluntarily performed the recall as opposed to having the recall the vehicles mandated by the NHTSA.

If I recall correctly it's the equivalent of 'drop a deuce', 'lay some cable', 'pinch off a loaf', 'back one out', 'feed the sewer gator', 'lay a brick', and depending on the burrito 'mud butt fire storm'. I'm sure there are lots of others but these are what I can recall from when I was a millennial's age.

@alain williams Sure, you can easily buy a barebones laptop and mod it.

Granted it's a bit harder of late as manufacturers are becoming more enamoured with glue.

Re: Do printers really need to be connected to the internet?

The internet, probably not unless you have to use Google Print or some such nonsense but the intranet, yes, definitely, even if that is via VPN. As far as printers that want to access the internet that's what firewalls are for.

Re: Well ...

Depends on what you mean by *market*. Harvard, MIT, Caltech, etc. are all in the hands of the *market* and tend to do as well if not better than schools in the hands of government. We won't even bother to address local public schools such as elementary or secondary which tend to be between abominable and wretched.

Re: Oh good grief

It isn't a patent yet, only an application at this point. It should be a year or two before it's rubber stamped approved.

Re: Pronounced...?

It will tell you. In English near the 1:20 mark.

Re: Non Microshit OS??

Going by the graph it looks like the sum of the bars is fairly steady. Also summing up the tables has NetMarketshare showing a slight increase in Windows usage, 85.98% in June to 87.52% in August and StatCounter a slight drop from 79.07% to 78.52% over the same period.

No, it just means different things to different people. In the US (short scale) trillion = 10¹² where in the UK (long scale) trillion = 10¹⁸.

That said, you were looking for billion not trillion.

Re: So, to sum up...

I would guess that Bradley Kuhn is trying to become some sort of an important "High Priest" in the community. Having them too involved is a risk hardly worth taking, easily poisonous indeed.

I found it funny that Mr. Kuhn isn't even a lawyer. Perhaps he is actually looking to become the next RMS.

Re: My pet gripe is

My personal favorite was when someone either accidentally or as a prank formatted the date something along the lines of yyyy-mm-ddd.

10 kWh is energy, for quicker acceleration you need more power not necessarily energy. In fact 10 kWh is about one liter of diesel fuel but we know adding another liter to the tank won't make a car quicker.

The difference in power output is likely coming from reduced internal resistance and perhaps enhanced thermal management. The reduced internal resistance will give more power and have the added benefit of bumping up the overall capacity. Consider that if the internal I²R losses are reduced it will contribute to slower heating and its associated increase in resistance allowing more power to be pulled from the cells. Now since there are only so many joules stored in the cells the slower heating means you aren't losing as many of them to heat which ups the capacity.

Re: Politics?

"according to sme(sic) reports"

Do you have a link? I'd be interested in reading it.

Re: @Eddy Ito - voter fraud

But this isn't absentee ballots as such, in Cali we're asked whether we prefer to vote by mail when we register to vote. Literally anyone can ask to vote by mail and so many do that it isn't actually difficult to walk in and out of a regular polling place in a few minutes. On top of that the ballot is perhaps the worst I've seen in several decades of voting in over a half dozen states. Plus anyone can set up a polling station practically anywhere by simply filling out a bit of paperwork, there's no requirement for cameras or anything really, it's pretty much a joke.