Posts by A Twig 144 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jan 2013
@Lamont
It isn't that simple - while one employee and another have the same job "on paper" according to HR - I have yet to ever be in a place of work where two people with identical job titles and descriptions have the same responsibilities and levels of effort required to carry them out.
Take a pub for example - two barmen (or barwomen - no gender bias implied). One works two quiet 3 hour afternoon shifts every week. The other works 5 - 11 on a Friday night. The effort, challenges and responsibilities are going to be very different, and the opportunity cost of their leisure time they are giving up is different.
According to your simple example, if they both started at the company at the same time, doing the same hours and are doing a respective "good job" - should they get paid the same?
Biggest issue with LEDs as the moment is the circuits that people run them off. Typically the LED products currently on offer benefit from running directly off 12V or 20V DC supplies.
A lot of the issues currently seen is with the cheapy power electronics bunged into the package to make then run off 240V/110V AC - which throws out noise and ultimately goes pop long before the LEDs.
While it would be the correct action, I can't forsee many people dashing to re-wire their house lighting circuits, replacing cheapo twin + earth run straight off the CU with a high quality rectifier/converter and second DC fusebox. Without this you ain't gonna see the 14 year lifetimes.
so, tracking "right down to more or less precisely where you are”.
Eh?
I've read that sentence and translated it in 3 different ways
1) I don't really have any figures but TRACKING!
2) The precision of the tracking is variable
3) The long and lat figures the tracker can get are to lots of decimal places, but the person might not actually be there. So it's precise but wrong.
Whichever of the above - Scarlett is still an arsehole...
@ Hargrove
I have worked briefly in the UAS field and totally agree with your points. I don't think a Quadcopter delivering something to your back garden will be a viable proposition for a long time if ever. However the issues you raise aren't directly what I was talking about, as these refer to issues within the airframe, not the ATC.
In context:
"Proper drones have a lot of collision avoidance etc stuff in them anyway, using SAR/LIDAR/RADAR as part of an array of sensors to give as much situational awareness as possible. So this would deal more with the routing aspects - in the same way that ATC doesn't fly a 747 nowadays, that's the captain's responsibility."
I was merely pointing out that the scope of this UAS ATC system would not extend to collision avoidance with pigeons etc, in the same way that ATC doesn't now. All it will deal with is routing for all UAS in the area. It is up to the individual UAS to be able to fly competently.
Essentially being able to fly a UAS without hitting things is the manufacturers problem, not Airwave's...
To be fair - nowhere in the article says it will be easy. They are just saying that there needs to be one, and these chaps are going to have a crack at it. If the system cannot cope with the issues you mention then I would suspect that it won't be very successful.
Proper drones have a lot of collision avoidance etc stuff in them anyway, using SAR/LIDAR/RADAR as part of an array of sensors to give as much situational awareness as possible. So this would deal more with the routing aspects - in the same way that ATC doesn't fly a 747 nowadays, that's the captain's responsibility.
In summary, air pilots and captains can talk to the meatbags at the ATC via radio links to convey the relevant info to avoid collisions with other aircraft, get wind data etc. This is looking at an M2M version of your traditional ATC to deal with the fact that the pilot is a processor, not a person. It also doesn't rule out human operators for the ground based routing system.
Personally I'm surprised that this is the only company we've heard of trying to do this, as the UAS sector will be screaming for this capability in ~5 years time.
It would, but the Union part is generally a polite way of saying "beaten the shit out of militarily at some point in the past and taken over but you put up a good fight so you can keep your name. Oh, and after a few decades we'll stop butchering the populace and maybe allow you to re-start some of your old cultural customs and re-claim your identity."
So for better or worse, it does all come back to the monarchy, who sit in England.
Before the angry down voters commence - the above is a deliberately jaundiced and tongue in cheek view of history which is not my own :P
I am really starting to regret casting my vote in the last UK General Election for a party that included an independence referendum for Scotland in its manifesto. What was I thinking?
Hold on... NONE OF THE PARTIES HAD THIS IN THEIR MANIFESTO. So much for democracy.
<sarcasm>
Quite right, I'm still bitter over the fact we let India get away with it, the blighters. How dare we not get a say in the running of a country that we took by force years beforehand. And now they have the nerve to be good at cricket as well...
</sarcasm>
The point of the article was that the design actually suits lefties, who hold the phone in their right hand (thus still being able to access the right hand controls with their thumb) and operate the pen with their left.
Right handers will either have to write left handed, or hold the phone in their left hand, making it harder to use the edge based controls.
Foreign property investment was a problem in South Africa - government simply announced a law saying that any profit made from investment in property was not allowed to leave the country.
Funnily enough, foreign property investment dropped right off. Yes there will always be ways around such things, but the sentiment itself was enough to severely dampen the foreign investment market.
It did screw over a fair few who had emigrated and were renting their houses, but then most of those that I know still had family etc in SA, so just spent the trapped money on their "returning home" holidays.
"it's shorter and narrower than a MINI"
So is a Land Rover Defender 90 - MINIs ain't really a good bench mark for small car size...
Minor quibble aside that looks a pretty capable 4x4 for the money, a lot cheaper than your usual "City Adventurer" suspects (LR, Jeep etc). The video of its performance was surprisingly impressive.
Only issue I can see is if it really is big enough and hard wearing enough to dump all your wet/heavy/grubby kit in without worrying about scratches/stains/smells etc. Do the back seats fold flat to give a bigger loadspace?
Precisely - my frustration with the limited amount of economics I studied was the focus on maximisation rather than "enough", and rationality with a total lack of account for FIF - Fuck It Factor.
In the taxi example - if the weather is horrible it isn't as nice to be driving. So once the cash is made for the day - "The weather's shit, it's cold, I want to go home. I've got my £xx for the day, fuck it, that's enough."
We need a new field (apathonomics?) which can accurately take into account that lots of people are happy with "enough" / want the easiest way. And if then a subset can be developed that can also account for the FIF, such as getting blind drunk one Tuesday evening, and winding up buying an expensive and knackered old car off ebay at 3am (inefficient price, low utility etc), then we would be getting somewhere.
I can't wait for driverless cars.
I love driving and restore the occasional old car for fun. On the weekends I enjoy a drive out in the countryside, and equally enjoy a jaunty cross continent driving holiday.
But the majority of my driving (roughly 80% per year) is my commute. Which I hate. I'm invariably tired while doing it. On the way in I'm un-interested because I'm going somewhere I don't want to go. On the way home I'm probably not driving as safely as I should because I'm in a hurry to get home. All of which means that my commute is when I'm most likely to have an accident thus the risks are at their highest for the majority of my driving time.
Multiply that by the however many million people in a similar boat across the country, and the possibility for safer roads and less congestion must be huge - which in my opinion can only be a good thing?
My understanding was - when a Doctor completes their initial education, they have the Bachelor of Medicine or Bachelor of Surgery degrees. They can then go out to be a GP or whatever. They can then go on to get further education - usually done while working - to become an MD.
If they decide to specialise, doing Research to cure cancer etc via a PhD program, they have to renounce the Doctor title in the medical sense, as they are no longer a general Doctor, they aren't keeping up to date in the wide field of general medicine - hence why if you are really screwed illness wise, you suddenly start meeting very highly paid specialist consultants with the title Mr...
To further muddy the waters though, there are a lot of surgeons who as members of the RCS are referred to as Mr...
Short version, if you're in hospital, and you suddenly start being seen by medical professionals who aren't surgeons but are being called Mr, you're probably very ill...
Agreed, what's sold as SDR now is effectively a hybrid, with a good chunk of the "work" done in the software domain, but still a good few hardware components (switched band pass filters etc).
True SDR (where the receiving antenna is just dumping everything into a software package via an ADC and the converse for the transmitter) will require some serious computing heft and a bloody good ADC / DAC (very high rate and accuracy). The technology isn't anywhere near there yet.
Nice try - unfortunately using a retail bank division to cover losses of an investment banking division is illegal under the Banking Reform Act...
What is actually happening is that with the ring-fencing of retail operations, retail banks now have to be more profitable on their own - a quick way to do that is cost reduction, which is much more likely to be the reason for this shift to automation, redundancies & more branch closures...
I really don't get the IoT Home Automation thing - this isn't just a "it doesn't suit my lifestyle so it's rubbish" - I've gone through as many scenarios I can think of and I can't find a good argument for using it.
Unlike the small electric cars thing, where it is currently clearly unsuitable for long distance or rural drivers, but there's a good case for having one in a city, I just cannot think of a situation where this home automation is useful. There may possibly be some limited application in mobility restricted markets but other than that I'm struggling.
I don't see how controlling lights/heating/door locks(!?) remotely via an app offers anything significantly better than the current methods of control? With PIR light switches you can be pretty efficient, with a zoned heating system and a decent controller you can make your heating pretty good, and what is wrong with a physical key (or pin pad) as an entry system?
Honest question - have I missed something?
Dependant on the rate and efficiency of the wireless charging, they could have an F Zero X style charging lane on the main straight, so drivers have to weigh up the pros and cons of losing some speed on the main straight against the ability to go a couple of laps further?
Trying to judge if they can make one more lap and maintain their position.
That'd be awesome seeing the carnage as some drivers on their last few millivolts desperately trying to eke it around the final corner and dive onto the charging zone, while others diving across to the outside to try and overtake them.
They will have to prise Snow Leopard out of my cold dead "holding it wrong" fingers...
For me just the right mix of point & click simpleness for day to day, but with the useful stuff (including Rosetta!) not too far under the hood for when it's required.
But then I'm still on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, so what do I know...
"reported one style of skimmer that used audio waves to transmit captured card details"
What does it do, wait until you've walked away and then start singing your card details to anyone passing by?
Oh wait, on re-reading, it needs decoding apparently, so maybe it just nonchalantly whistles the details in Morse code when it detects no-one is nearby?
All joking aside I'm actually quite intrigued! How does this work?
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