Posts by Stoneshop 5951 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009
actually, electrical connections CAN catch fire if they corrode internally or are subjected to any kind of high current fault that exceeds the capability of the system to manage the surge [that includes the CAR, not just the thing you plug into it]. And don't EVEN get me started on the dangers of improperly charging batteries that contain Lithium..
The charger and safety systems are part of your car..
And there's the chance of electrocuting yourself. What happens if some dim-bulb decides to take a KNIFE to the thing, or someone runs it over and it's cracked, and then the insulation falls off, etc.. Lots of potential here for mayhem.
The cable is yours and stays with your car. Whatever happens to it it under your control.
and 25 minutes is WAY too long waiting for a "fillup".
Which you only need if today's trip is over the charge range, because you leave home fully charged. And if you run into that often, then EV is not (yet) for you.
If you have an EV with a range of 240 miles, and never do more than fifty miles a day, you might be cool with that. If you make frequent 100+ mile trips, you might feel a bit vulnerable plugging in a nearly flat EV, hoping they'll be good enough to grant you the range for whatever tomorrow's plans involve.
In which case you would want your electron rental company to offer you a non-interrupted plan. There's also the option to augment the charging process with locally-stored and/or -generated power; ISTR FIAT once selling TOT(al)E(nergy)M(odule) units that you could hook into your central heating, while also providing electricity. And even though it burned hydrocarbons (natural gas IIRC), the use of its heat as well as running pretty optimally meant that efficiency would be way better than running an IC car.
If Samsung truly violated a valid patent, I would say the proper award is $1.
I'd say US$0.785398163397 per corner.
Stress concentration at sharp corners was discovered after 4 De Havilland Comets broke up in mid-air because of fatigue failure (early 1950's).
Just two (G-ALYP and G-ALYY). A third (G-ALYU) was destructively tested to find out the exact failure mode, and the G-ALYV suffered a wing spar failure
Trump is what the American people asked for.
The popular vote numbers suggest that's not quite the case.
But f**k me sideways it's cold day in Hell when the best the only 2 parties with a serious shot at holding the Oval Office can spew up is Hilary and Donald.
Why choose the lesser of two evils? Chtulhu for President: let Putin try to manipulate HIM.
"things like kettles probably won’t be able to use it, so you can't even make a cup of tea with it"
Well, for brewing a cup of brown joy you actually need a remote controlled socket into which the kettle is plugged, a robot arm for pouring the water from the kettle into the pot and adding the tea, then removing the tea container again after sufficient steeping. In the meantime you have to get home from wherever you are to actually enjoy the cuppa at its optimal temperature. One may additionally need a electrical valve fitted to the tap, also controlled remotely, in case the kettle is empty.
Most of this functionality is offered by the venerable Teasmade.
A simple Push-It isn't going to do that job. Not even a dozen of them.
And for pushing the Any key in the middle* of the nightly backup job, that was solved four decades ago already with a clockwork alarm, a few bits of Meccano and two Lego pieces. The Meccano was made into a hinged arm, poised vertically, with the alarm to go off a reasonable time after the prompt usually appeared, pulling on the arm via a piece of string. Arm drops, Lego 'finger', fitted to the arm, hits the Any key, backup proceeds. After hitting the key the finger snaps in two, so that it doesn't hold the key down.
* just an annoying "Press Any Key To Continue"., not a request for acknowledging that the next tape was loaded or something
Blow a (500mA?) fuse, the meter never turns on, no power delivered to the house.
Only if the meter incorporates a circuit breaker, which is not universally the case. And if there's a crowbar circuit in the supply for the meter electronics it should be autonomous, not controllable from the circuit it's trying to protect. Same with the voltage regulator(s), so good luck trying to get that part of the circuit to go poof under software control.
and if they want to do a whole area then a few well placed explosives under pylons should sort that without any fannying around hacking into things.
Explosively disassembling a few pylons is not something you can do sitting at your computer in Outer Elbonia, at least not without some prior onsite preparation..
Someone in the audience, someone with knowledge of the engineering, challenged the presenter on "blowing up meters by remote control". Answer: bluster.
I know the guy who tore into that "explode" nonsense (guessed who it was before I opened the video, and indeed). Worked for a company building, testing and certifying electricity meters and related gear until recently, and knows his stuff. Ran into him yesterday, so I got an accurate and first-hand description of the way the presenter was full of it.
Trials are being run, using video footage from a quadcopter as a way to do a primary inspection of railway bridges, as that can be done without taking the tracks out of service. That would only be necessary if something is spotted warranting further inspection. Though in the case of this trial they used a live HD video feed, so that the operator could close in on particular features in real time.
Recording onboard the 'copter versus transmission has its pros and cons such as weight, link reliability and power usage.
Now you need to tell people to put out their hairbrushes and god knows what else out of the room too their misery.
Reprogramming, axe, the usual process.
Or will the act of vigorously brushing your hair charge it up, not unlike those emergency torches?
If your hair is too dry it'll charge that way.
Those rules go out the window in a gridlock because everyone will be cramming for every inch of space. Leave that much space and someone will move into it.
Getting rear-ended by a car at speed in a traffic jam logically means you're the rearmost car in your lane, and only the rearmost car in the other lane may be wanting to move into the gap, so not very much cramming at all. But even with space ahead to move into, sufficiently mitigating the impact from another car doing 65mph is as good as impossible if you're at or near standstill..
When on a motorcycle I'll try to move between the lanes in such a way that at least I'm not the rearmost vehicle. Not having a crumple zone tends to make one aware of how to keep not getting crumpled.
Hell, at [redacted] we implemented an exchange between secure and nonsecure parts of the ground network where the nonsecure part would ask for new data using an SNMP packet, and the secure part would eject the data as needed. It's not rocket science!
Tsk. Just blast the data every $num seconds over a physical one-way link. And if you really need event-driven data collection, create a specific link whose binary state signals whether new data is wanted.
Or try one of those bank 'night safe' type drawers - do they still use those?
Insofar as there are still banks with a physical presence: yes. The same kind of mechanism is often used on underground rubbish containers, so that people can insert one (1) Standard Bin Bag of Rubbish into a cylinder through a slot, which then rotates and drops the bag into a much larger bin when you close the lid. This is so that you can't put random Very Large Stuff in, and they can even be equipped with a reader for an access token, so that only Authorised Neighbourhood Waste Dumpers can put their waste in.
All of which could be achieved more simply with a standard hasp lock which you leave unlocked so the delivery person can open it, put stuff in and then lock it.
Bit of a bother if you expect to have more than one delivery the same day, or when some joker either locks the box before any delivery is made or nicks the lock.
A remotely controlled latch wired to a Pi or something would be what I'd start with.
One would assume that the reasons for opening a safe include putting things in it or taking things out, both of which require physical presence at the safe door.
The (perceived) downside of physical keys is that they each add a certain weight and volume to your keychain, where an implementation using an item you're already carrying anyway (smartphone) doesn't. Of course, as you're already at the safe door, the better solution would be a keypad, a display and a challenge/response system if some random fixed long unlock code stored in your phone's vault is too boring, but hey. Wireless! Smart (err, not)! Shiny!
Nineteen up votes for something that should not happen on a Unix like system?
And why exactly do you think that's the case? In a lot of situations, including Harold's, there's all kinds of links with other systems, such as redacted, redacted and redacted. Those links may be based on user IDs, named tokens, user-associated keys, you name (harhar) it.
I suppose it could be used for site visits without having to go to the site but that would take an horrendous amount of mapping.
For site visits you want some sort of telepresence as you usually want to see the situation as it is at this moment, not at however many months in the past the mapping was done.
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