Posts by Eddy Ito

So only two downvotes? Must have been Brin and Page. I'm a bit disappointed that Eric didn't come to the party but I'm guessing he's actually been in Istanbul trying to print his return boarding pass only to find out it's several thousand miles away in his printer tray at the office. Oh well, at least he wasn't trying to print with his iPad, as if it mattered.

Consider the final records of the JFK assassination aren't legally due until October 2017 and then only if the President gives it his blessing. It's pretty obvious the government has had something to hide for a long time even if it's just the expected incompetence.

Re: Backlog ?

Amerikan antipathy to government is a well established majority opinion formulated as "starve the beast then drown it in the bathtub". Unless of course it's the NSA conducting "Total Information Awareness" or the Department of "Defense" conducting endless foreign wars of aggression !!!

You need to understand where that antipathy comes from. It comes from voting against the party that started the problem of expanding the NSA and starting wars of aggression and for the party that railed against those things only to have them not only fully embrace those positions once they were handed the crown but expanding them and beginning ever more expansive and expensive pseudo-populist programs.

In short it's because the current two party cartel in which each has chosen a very small subset of 'hot button' issues to differ their respective platforms and polarize the public with the help of an obedient fourth estate and each party candidate is a special interest owned lying elitist.

Re: Ask The Physicist

It's actually an interesting problem since many types of glass are fairly opaque to IR but some types of spinel such as ALON are largely transparent. On the other side there are many materials that are visibly opaque but transparent to IR. Reflectivity represents a another set of issues so I imagine they choose their laser wavelength quite carefully.

I had already looked at the Asymco link. Those numbers are for the first three days after each individual launch and that's why the iPhone 5 shows up twice (21 September 2012 and 14 December 2012). Given the iPhone 5 was launched in different countries on seven different dates spanning three months, I don't know how anyone is supposed to interpret a 3 day launch window since I'm certain some folks traveled to nearby areas to get a phone early like the case of China where many people went to Hong Kong where it was released earlier or were actually purchased second hand from folks turning a profit on that deal. I don't know if the Asymco data balls up all other iPhone 5 launch dates and only breaks out China or not. Likewise the 5S had four launch dates spanning two months.

I understand what you're trying to illustrate by saying that 21-23 September 2012 was a better period for the iPhone 5 than 26-28 April 2013 was for the S4 but that isn't what you said previously which was;

"Makes it sound like the S4 was at some point the top seller. It never has been."

Here's a point, 26 April 2013 through 25 May 2013. Compare iPhone 5 sales to S4 sales in that period and tell me which had the greater unit market share and was the "top seller". Before you balk that it's an unfair period, it's a month and "never has" implies never, not for a month, not for a day, not for a minute, never is never. Also note that the periods referred to in this article are months, not the 3 launch days, not six months but individual, single, named months. Keep in mind market share only counts the number of units sold over a period or the revenue for a certain period, not total units sold or total revenue ever.

Re: Eddy, have an upvote...

It's a stack smash. This blog post was pointed to in an earlier article.

Re: Nice job...

Here I was thinking the 'de-confliction' teams was to make it easier to spy on NSA players. You never know if one of them is a double agent and conveniently using WoW to transfer information to their handler. Then again it could be to prevent anyone spying on the latest talks between Obama and Kim Jong Un.

Re: pre-mixed pellets

Yes, the second link in the article shows the bill of material and it is just a wire feed welder. It also includes a picture of a printed "sprocket" which I enclose in quotes because it's more a roughly sprocket shaped blob of metal than a proper ready to use sprocket. Given it is near net shape it could likely be finished with a bit of machining but it's no high volume production machine.

The best use I can see for this "printer" is as a home welding robot and in that regard, I'll take two with the second somewhat larger that will weld at least 1/4" steel please.

Apparently the driver didn't hesitate in exiting the vehicle, he merely had a bit of tunnel vision and didn't notice the car was burning prior to it being brought to his attention. Given the BMW drivers I am regularly forced to deal with on the highway it comes as no surprise the driver ignored the rest of the world revolving around him.

Re: Recovery?

On a side note, the VLS isn't that important as Tomahawk and Harpoons can be launched from the torpedo tubes. In fact the early set of Los Angeles subs had no VLS but most if not all carried both types of missiles. That means you can stow a dozen of these drones without impacting your missile or torpedo capacity.

Re: Doubt it will KILL them...

The incident in Thailand back in 2000 killed three.

Completely missed the target

Even if most can't shoot and wouldn't know a lock from a stock from a barrel at least some of us know what the whole point of the drone delivery story was but don't worry your AC head over it, I'll give you a hint. Consider exactly what he said on one of the most highly rated television shows, just after the showing of a very popular televised game which just happened to be played on the evening before a day that has come to be known in the U.S. as Cyber Monday and shortly after the start of the busiest shopping orgy of the year.

There's a season where the best press is free and Bezos sure knows a turkey shoot when he sees one sets one up.

Re: A bodacious attempt, it sits well with this commentard.

"Recouped by a few bets with fellow students about getting the article published."

If he was cunning enough to make the bets with sufficiently vague wording, he may have won already.

Re: NOT "stolen"

The bird will never get it because the kitten said, "you can have my camera when you prise it from my cold..."

Re: When I "floated" this as a use of technology...

I find it odd they thought the infrastructure cost was the big hurdle. In most ventures like this the capital cost of the equipment is fairly trivial unless they go through drones like bubble gum and I don't think it's fair to judge a drone by a video. The killer is going to be the cost of competing services and I find it likely that they have no interest in doing urban delivery this way at all.

Consider in a population dense city there are likely couriers and delivery vehicles every few blocks. In an urban environment there might be 'hot drop' zones where a drone would drop a set of packages in front of the roving delivery vehicle which then goes the last mile. Where I see the most benefit is in rural areas where you don't have to send out a three ton truck some twenty plus miles to deliver a package weighing a kilo or so. Lets be honest, the long legs are going by traditional means and it's only the odd delivery leg that gets a drone because there isn't a standard delivery route that way.

As far as nearby airports are concerned, stay out of any nearby TRSA/TCA just like most every other small/sport plane or ultralight would and be done with it.

The question then becomes, how long will it be before the big players start doing the exact same thing? It seems to me the lines could be injected into any EULA including ones from Apple, Google or Microsoft and it could be written into the OS or worse, anything produced with Xcode, Visual Studio, etc.

Re: Ouch

Perhaps Apple is angling to have another handful of sand thrown in the vaseline.

Re: Nanny state.

It's just good wholesome getting back to basics. Think of it as the internet during the early AOL and Compuserve days only with less available content; sort of like a BBS or usenet without .alt or much else for that matter.

Re: Suppose Apple gave a contract

Is it me or does this sound an awful lot like the contract they did with e-book publishers.

Re: Obligatory

It seems some have started to answer this question.

Re: I love innovation

Ok, pretend the last sentence in the first paragraph above reads "Note that channels are typically separated by 20 MHz in the 5 GHz range so overlap isn't as much of a problem."

Re: @ AC 14:14

Oh, here I thought the take-away from the article was that the most secure OSs were Novell Netware and AS/400 but it seems TheVogon is right in that IIS 8 and 8.5 were invulnerable a few years before they were released. Seriously it really would be nice for sites like this to have unrestricted information and access to all the data on a single page so you could get useful metrics, perhaps one that indicated the area of the target surface and not just the number of hits on the target. Also if "Heh…just for fun!" and "I just want to be the best defacer" make up 79% of the reasons for defacing a site, it means there are a lot of bored skiddies out there.

Re: Columbus?

"Sometimes its easier just to run along with what the average Seppo thinks is their history than try to explain it to them yet again."

A bunch of thieves stumbled across a place they didn't know existed and proceeded to rape and pillage in the name of some far off king and god destroying the culture and impoverishing the people that existed before they arrived and continue to do so. Before that it was likely a bunch of nomads looking for a place to find new and interesting plants and animals and eat them. What's to explain?

Re: don't they know any anatomy?

It's ok, they don't know boats either. A Dhow is a lateen rig and it's pretty clear that building has a wishbone boom and I do believe that's a whisker pole on the genny.

Re: Other uses

3D printing is certainly for those situations where hard tooling is too expensive or when several iterations with slight changes need to be done before the design is finalized.

You might want to check out a process called powder forging that has become very common for automotive components.

Re: In light of this

This is actually a rather poor example that "corporations have to be lashed by legislation". Following a few simple links you can find out that you are free to install the software yourself. Well, free meaning $2.50/month. The question is what was the actual deal that was offered and rejected? Could it be one that shifts most of the burden to the network operators and the profits to Sammy and the software company?

Perhaps some company went running to outspoken DA Gascón and whinging about the operators not accepting their lousy deal because they are mean and aren't thinking of the children and the hero of the hour then dutifully ran to the NY Times to proclaim how evil the network operators are. Don't get me wrong, the network operators are likely evil but no more so than any other company. The problem is that most people buy the phone on the operator's plan, don't see the true cost of the phone and probably don't want to know. In the end, the consumer is usually capable of caring for himself albeit at the cost of self education of how the system works. Our superhero DA, like the corporations, don't really want the consumer to be so educated because both lose power.

I get that phone theft is akin to disease and near universal kill switches on the phones will provide herd immunity but that isn't going to happen if only a handful of Sammy phones are so equipped. It has to be something standardized and portable in order to make it universal, or nearly so, and easy for anyone to implement so you don't get locked in to a single company.