If I were in charge of decoy design
I would be sure to equip a few of them with retro-reflectors. Seems like that would take some of the fun out of flying one of these puppies.
120 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Nov 2007
It is Gaussian elimination, where the matrix elements are chosen from a finite field (e.g., polynomials of degree N with 1/0 coefficients, modulo an irreducible polynomial (see linear feedback shift register for an example of this)). Take an N+K row (*), N column matrix, multiply it by a length N column to get a length N+K column, and that is your protected data. If you lose any K items of your protected data, you remove the corresponding rows from the N+K by N matrix to get a N by N matrix -- invert it, multiply that by the subset of the protected data column, and you recover your original data.
(*) the rows need a special property, than any N of them form a full rank matrix. A Vandermonde matrix has this property.
It's all algebra.
If your choice is burn the oil in the car or in the power plant, then indeed, there is not too much point in an electric car, except for the possibility of improvement single-point control of emissions.
However, we can built solar, wind, tidal, nuclear, and biomass-powered electric plants, but those technologies are not so practical when applied directly to auto transport (a "tidal car", that would be useful). "Smart" car-chargers could be made responsive to fluctuations in load/supply, so that your car could charge overnight using power as it was available (thus dealing with the issues of "but wind power is unreliable, tidal power has dead spots").
All of the problems with cars (of either sort) are improved by making the cars smaller. A half-size car needs a half-size battery, consuming half the resources per car, etc.
Firefox has been unstable as heck for me. There's one site in particular (work-related open-source project) that, about 10-20% of the time I visit it, Firefox crashes -- and this started after I upgraded a bunch of plugins. Mere correlation? or cause?
So yes, effing well cut this crap out. Software's buggy enough without this added nonsense.
I find that cycling helps the Bad Attitude (ensures a steady supply, while nonetheless allowing me to enjoy it), so please don't stop on account of my experience.
I read, very recently (Bicycling Science, 3rd ed, a recent birthday present) that if we wish to burn fat, that we should engage in longer but somewhat less energetic bicycle rides. Shorter, faster rides tend to burn more glycogen. Unfortunately, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we bike with the commute that we have, not the commute that we wish we had.
Note, however, in support of shorter people, that the "best size" for competitive cycling of the Tour de France sort, is not so tall. So clearly, we are dinosaurs.
You did not mention the Danes; as I understand it, they are on average the tallest nation, yet are relatively "green" in their energy consumption, certainly when compared to us in the USA.
I am surprised also that the article would fail to note that (generalized) effects of malnutrition on mental development. Clearly, rather than reducing size through starvation, we should preserve good nutrition, but instead embark on a research program to induce early cessation of physical growth through use of drugs or hormones. Couple this with a marketing campaign to enhance the social stature of short people, and the future looks quite green. Air travel, in particular, will benefit.
In more extreme latitudes, truncating the population and reducing BMI might be a false economy. Looking at my own family's use, apart from electricity (which can be greened, or not, at the generation site) the greatest production of CO2 comes from home heating. Smaller, thinner people, are more easily chilled; all else being equal, a big fat guy will feel warmer, and thus may be able to set his home thermostat lower.
yours, 6'0", 16 stone, despite 50 miles cycling every week, which is another way to reduce the carbon footprint.
Is that the benefits are not uniformly distributed. Perhaps Canada (ignoring their Inuit population) would like things a little warmer. Perhaps Mediterranean countries would like things a little cooler (in theory, it helps their rain, which has been down). Countries dependent on glacier-melt for a steady supply of water might like it cooler, Russia might like it warmer.
Where do we set the thermostat?
Above and beyond the cost, there's the issue of being held hostage to products you don't control, ensuring that all citizens have no-to-low-cost access to the data, and that the use of non-open formats doesn't constrain other product purchases or development, and that data formats remain readable in the future.
In the world of standards, I was not terribly surprised the first time Microsoft Excel failed to understand an ISO8601 date, but it still doesn't (Mac, 2008). At least not, as well as OpenOffice.
Kids started finding porn, I used OpenDNS to block. Found them (much later) visiting a site that somehow seemed to have porn on it, asked OpenDNS to block that site, and they helpfully asked "that's a proxy server. Would you like to ban all proxy servers?" Why, yes I would, thank you very much.
I also block doubleclick, and some other overly obnoxious advertising site.
OpenDNS + Little Snitch + WOT, it helps.
YES. Shared out about a terabyte when we had DSL, before noise on the line made it unusable. Only downloaded legal stuff: SXSW showcased artists, Star Wreck/In the Pirkinning, Helmholtz Reciprocity, A Decemberists video from their site.
Last time I checked, P2P uploads ran at about 5% (4KB/s) of potential maximum (80KB/s), 10% of what I limited rate to (40KB/s). If I could switch I would; FIOS ends at my neighbor's house.
The issue, for Comcast, is that their infrastructure can't support widespread use of P2P, but they can't say that, so they talk about piracy and try to imply that P2P users are hogs. I was amused to read recently that Verizon has made nice with some P2P people, and they probably intend to start promoting services that work best with P2P, so as to gain a (well-deserved) competitive advantage over Comcast.
My prox card for work, if you hold it up to the light, you can see the brains. Just apply a hole punch, and it's gone. I also disabled it once by accident punching a small hole in the edge, because I nicked the antenna.
As long as you can swipe the magnetic strip and don't mind doing so, there's your security. As a bonus, you can thread a string through the brain-hole and use it for a tether.
- So; kids running out in front of cars is now the fault of sat-nav? -
No, it's just a fact of life that kids do things like that; it's the fault of sat-nav if it routes many drivers onto residential streets for a short-cut. I'd expect a reaction if it's not fixed -- in the U.S., I've known parents who threw things (eggs, beachballs) at speeding cars, and also that have "parked" their cars in ways that substantially obstruct the roads. For my own part, I drive ve-ry care-ful-ly in residential neighborhoods, especially if someone is impatiently tailgating me (I slow down until their following distance is safe).
If things get bad enough, roads tend to get cut in the middle to break the through connection, or speed bumps/humps are installed, or extra stops and signals are installed.
At first, it looks pretty bad for the cell phone users:
20 hrs/yr/commuter x 6 x 10^6 chatty commuters x 10 yrs = 1.2 x 10^9 hours lost.
3000 deaths/attack x 10^4 hrs/year x 40 yrs/death = 1.2 x 10^9 hours lost.
Not worse that terrorists, but no better, and that assumes that only 2% of the US population commutes and talks on the phone.
But they're multitasking! If they weren't talking on their phone while driving, they'd be talking when they reached their destination, and that would use just as much of their time, if not more. If they're only losing 5% of their speed, they're multitasking pretty well, so those apparent terror-scale time losses, are actually time saved. By chatting on our cell phones while driving, in ten years we will gain back 95% of the hours of life lost to 9/11. People who chat while driving, are actually winning the GWOT, right here at home. If we could double the (assumed) drive/chat rate, we could endure a 9/11-sized attack every 5 years with no net loss of time. Take that, Al Qaeda! While you hang out in caves and sandy places, we're kicking your butt with cell phones and cars and yellow magnetic ribbons. USA! USA! USA!
I suppose that qualifies as waste-not-want-not, but it takes a huge amount of corn (fertilizer, and water) to produces a small amount of animal fat. I recall reading that it's so inefficient that if you ride a bicycle, but get the extra calories by eating beef, you'd be better off driving an SUV.
One good reason for proper flex-fuel vehicles it that it will reduce the barrier to entry for methanol OR ethanol whenever oil prices rise too high, and get the infrastructure in place. The only downside to methanol is that stuff is deadly poison; the wonderful thing about ethanol is that our bodies tolerate it in relatively large quantities.
A little conservation sure wouldn't hurt, either.