Posts by DropBear 4735 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
Or people hanging onto the cable to see if they can drone surf
How sure are you there isn't (won't be) some sort of safety decoupler link attaching the cable to the drone (less than the drone's max. lifting capacity) that just cuts the cable if it starts feeling like an anchor...?
Come on now, the guy has a point. All that about TVs *IS* rubbish.
A simple TV show could never be thought of as being populated by anybody at all, let alone anyone capable of experiencing it from within; a computer game would be a much better analogy - indeed, in a sophisticated enough simulation agents within the game would "perceive" space around them and might possibly even be self-aware - except in that case, a 3D simulation would be perceived *AS 3D* by said agents, and the fact that *WE* might be looking at it through a 2D projection on a monitor would have absolutely no impact as far as they are concerned - that world *DOES NOT* "exist" on that 2D surface; we could detach the monitor and even completely shut down the renderer, and the internal physics simulation would continue to run, in "3D", for all participants living inside that simulation.
There might be interesting and profound implications of the science discussed, but illustrating it with a TV is a fail.
Indeed. There's nothing to support you falling backwards if you'd actually tried to "sit". Tell you what - let's add two more segments to the existing ones, in parallel, so they form a parallelogram then a rectangle when deployed (and thus a proper chair with hind legs), then fold back along the existing two segments when stowed.
I can haz my "patent" for blatantly obvious stuff (so basically just like 99% of all patents these days) now, please?
But fans? Really?
Allow me to translate.
"- Boss, the cooling of the LED headlights as designed is proving to be inadequate. They're getting too hot!
- A re-design is absolutely out of the question. Slap some fans on them! Why are you still bothering me with this?!?"
At least long-life LEDs may* end the ludicrous situation where we're required by law to carry spare bulbs, yet many modern cars are designed so that you can't change a headlight bulb without considerable dismantling which isn't a DIY roadside effort.
Come now, how is this an even remotely new thing...? The first thing one thinks of contemplating a lightbulb change on a 1995 VW Passat is that removing either the battery or the whole air filter box will probably be unavoidable, unless one has tentacles instead of hands...
And just what exactly might anyone hope to find on any investigator's computer, ONE DAY after the plane went missing...? Short of stumbling upon a dead-on admission of "we know what happened because it's our doing" there's no investigation committee on earth that will turn up ANYTHING AT ALL in that amount of time! Unless of course one were to hope the malware would stay undetected for the painfully prolonged periods over which such committees do their work, but that sound a bit far fetched for a team of "sophisticated hackers" who would be well aware what time-frame they can realistically hope for.
Tell us, do: when you are booking an aeroplane ticket on line or looking up the train time table or doing a bank transfer, what level of support, design, testing, maintenance, security, user interface etc. do you expect?
Same shitty one as everyone else has: the occasional bluescreen, all over ATMs, cash registers, arrival/departure panels, LED road signs etc. Do I need to actually link a few thousand pics of those? Seriously? Because I could if you insist...
PS - I'm willing to believe that the Space Shuttle used to run fairly hardened code - probably most modern avionics do too... maybe. These days, everything else is ready to crap itself at the drop of a hat as long as it runs software. That's just how it is.
I reserve judgement about those being of any use until after the first couple of cases where people claim injustice and the tape actually backs it up and leads to proper punishment (which, just to be clear, is not "we left the back door open, Jim, walk out and retire now with full benefits, and the matter needs not be mentioned again"). As opposed to, say, the public screaming for the tape while the cops go "What's that...? We can't hear you..."
If you forget it, can you reset it. Will it be emailed to you, in plain text ? You have no idea.
Oh, but you do... it's mind-blowing how often I sign up to some new site just to immediately receive a greeting mail, with a cheerful "Welcome to XYZ, your login name is ABC, your password is 123..." - by which point I'm working very hard indeed trying to escape an attack of apoplexy...
Is there space in the market, for something you can use on a phone ?
You might want to check out InputStick...
Well, yes. Going by the general tone of comments every time similar issues are discussed, unless you've written half of the code of Firefox yourself (and at least three of the top ten apps in the app store) you're not even to be considered for hire as a janitor in an IT business. Riiiight...
Nononono - that's how UFOs work; multiple guidance systems will eventually tend to disagree on the course to take, and if you have many enough of them, there will always be one pulling in any given direction - you just end up hovering in one spot. If you want to move, you just disconnect the ones that vote against the direction you want to go in...
Similarly you have only have one active "sender" on the network...
Beg pardon - CAN itself says nothing about "one" sender - anybody can talk at any damn time they wish to any number of other nodes, and there's certainly no such thing as "directionality" about the bus - all the spec promises is that the message with the highest priority gets through and the rest back down, and that every listening node receives a message correctly (hopefully*); various flavours of CAN take this in various arbitrary directions, but that's up to the specific higher level chosen.
*actually there's no such guarantee seeing as how any node might be "error passive" or "bus off" at any given time.
...we, as a society, bestow HUGE amounts of power in these people...
Well, there's your problem. Honestly, when was the last time you saw ANYONE being bestowed with ANY power and fail to abuse it shortly...? There's this spot on the map of our brain loosely labelled "the centre of with great power comes great responsibility", except the corresponding spot invariably turns out to be just a cauterized void (if you're lucky; if not, it's occupied by the functional equivalent of an endorphins-crazed monkey hitting the "pleasure" button again and again and again).
I'm pretty sure any enforcement officer (of any kind) would feel mortally offended if you took them aside and explained to them that it's not actually their job to decide anything, considering any necessary course of action is supposed to be fully defined by what actually has been committed (or not) by a suspect - their role is to recognize / establish that, not decide it - their freedom of decision on this is supposed to be ZERO. Except we all know it never is, and they expect nothing less to come with the power they oh so much enjoy...
...whose signal is only reliable if stood on top of one of the self-checkout machines
If you want an even horizontal coverage, the easiest way to get it is to use a vertical whip antenna - but coincidentally, that has a null coverage exactly along its axis: on top and below. Based on what you're saying, the idiots clearly mounted the RF box sideways...
You must have a quite high-en supermacro phone then - I find the typical 1x1cm QR codes on bottles are quite impossible to get close enough to to scan them. Something like 3x3cm is the absolute minimum I can scan with a macro-enabled Galaxy S2, and I have never seen one that big on any bottle...
[CITATION NEEDED]
Citations are only ever any use if one is capable of reading them. In this case, the article linked in one of the posts above. Oh, and even attempting to claim that mere ownership of the means implies automatic copyright in whatever they produce without one's significant creative involvement is simply so ludicrous it beggars belief - don't bother...
To be honest, these days I'm quite weary of those exact people - allegedly disinterested enough to let you use their software for free, but not enough to actually let you make proper use of it by also giving you the source ("please let me put my hand into your pocket, I promise I won't take anything! Well, maybe later, just a little bit..."). I prefer to use as few such 'gifts' as I can (as opposed to fully open source ones), so as far as I'm concerned, good riddance...
It's neither China nor Russia who's living in the past - it's the people who insist that anything coming from China has to be a cheap, lousy knock-off of some vastly superior western product. That used to be true to some degree, but it isn't for quite some years now. One should ask himself how come mobile review sites recently started to dedicate more reviews to Indian and Chinese phones than to all traditional vendors combined? I'll give you a clue - the fact that the phones are indeed cheaper wouldn't matter one damn bit if they'd be truly inferior (and exactly what chipset they are running on is beside the point of this example, but we can discuss, say, Allwinner chips all day if you insist)...
Crowdsourced fish tank watching. You may just have invented the Next Big Thing
Tsk, tsk, tsk... Disconcerting lack of vision. You SELL the webcam feed, as the most realistic aquatic screen saver ever, and award "points" (in a "hall of fame") to anyone who spots an "issue" (then SMS it to the owner, of course, who's paying for the service). It's not really profit if you can't tax both ends...
I'm quite unconvinced too. In my experience, any technology thrown at this sort of "problem" invariably does exactly one of three things:
- utterly fails to solve the original problem, or
- kinda solves it but creates a brand new one, or
- kinda solves it but creates a bunch of new ones...
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