hatcravat

7 ms·

1.
by hatcravat 13y ago
Who cares about the efficiency when solar panels weigh over 50 kg per kW? Even at SpaceX prices, the cost of launching a solar panel into space is hundreds of times the cost of the panel. If your alternatives are "buy 500 panels and
2.
by hatcravat 13y ago
Did they? It sounds like they had access to confidential Apple documents, which allowed them to rewrite their patent in a way to make it look like Apple infringed on technology they invented. Remember, the point of a patent is to disclose
3.
by hatcravat 13y ago
Yes, but how are they going to do that if they can't see the drone? How will they know when they have succeeded? Are they just going to continue driving recklessly until they run out of gas? Driving evasively seems like a very good way to
4.
by hatcravat 13y ago
Following this train of thought to its logical conclusion: Without children's entertainment, kids would be forced to read free books from the library or go play outside. The horror! Look, shared cultural nostalgia is great, and all, but I'm
5.
by hatcravat 13y ago
Doppler shift due to observer speed will almost always (i.e. for anything other than an actual ballistic missile, and even then only a missile traveling west) be less than the doppler shift due to satellite speed for a stationary observer.
6.
by hatcravat 13y ago
Small generators rarely have emissions control systems anywhere near as good as the main engine (and it most cases, far worse). They usually have a completely open-loop fuel mixture control: a carburetor set to provide an adequate air/fuel
7.
by hatcravat 13y ago
Actually, Steve Mann was doing this fifteen years ago. There are web pages describing his wearables that literally haven't been updated for a decade. Think about that for a second. Bill Clinton was president when this was cutting edge st
8.
by hatcravat 13y ago
No. This is wrong. First, sampling need not imply quantization[1]. Second, the signal to noise ratio of the continuous signal source is important. With sufficiently many bits and sufficiently many samples, you can exactly reproduce an
9.
by hatcravat 14y ago
>they convinced the labels to stop requiring it. Are you sure it wasn't the other way around? People were building huge libraries of music that only worked on Apple products (iPods and iTunes) around the time the labels allowed Amazon
10.
by hatcravat 14y ago
> Also - does he really have so much experience with that tech? Well, I, for one, was fascinated with wearable computers for a time after reading an article about Steve Mann (in MIT Technology Review, IIRC). That was about fifteen year
11.
by hatcravat 14y ago
I too think this is a very exciting sub-field. EMTs and the like already have something like this, only better: It's called a pulse oximeter, and it determines both heart rate and blood oxygen saturation by measuring the absorption ratio o
12.
by hatcravat 14y ago
> I don't 100% get the band limited signal bit. How does band limiting imply that there's only a single possible reconstruction of the digital signal? I can kind of picture the fourier transform meaning that there's only one representat
13.
by hatcravat 14y ago
The overnight stop is really a red herring: The battery only lost about 5-7% of capacity overnight, which is much less than the difference between a standard charge (90% of capacity) and how much the Times charged the battery (72%). Actual
14.
by hatcravat 14y ago
I speculate that it is a interaction of several things: 1) The current firmware assumes there is "unlimited" energy available when charging, so it can keep the battery warm with little impact on charging rate (this is not a bad assumpti
15.
by hatcravat 14y ago
You could always rent a vehicle for your remaining driving needs. For 10% of total driving that might be somewhat impractical, but 10% sounds like a pretty high estimate for trips that would challenge the Model S's range. That's one long-
16.
by hatcravat 14y ago
I'm not sure why you bring up Classic, Carbon, or PowerPC. Rosetta was dropped from Lion (two releases ago) and support for Classic was dropped when Rosetta was added. MS Office 2008 (I think it was) stopped working with OS X Lion (2011)
17.
by hatcravat 14y ago
Actually, I think you misunderstand the analogy. The color of the middle wire on the distributor is something you'd like a prospective mechanic to know, so he isn't learning on your time. It isn't, however, something that is in any way re
18.
by hatcravat 14y ago
Regarding point 2, the article gave me the impression that they used historical measurements of the the mains frequency as part of the analysis. Since Britain is on a single grid, the local conditions shouldn't affect the recorded signal.
19.
by hatcravat 14y ago
Well, you're right: It is 2012, and there are (at the time of writing) all of 6 supercharger stations, which can fill a battery at up to 120 kW. The current incarnation (heh) of the Tesla S battery limits the rate to about 80 kW for the fi
20.
by hatcravat 14y ago
I think part of the problem is also that many people underestimate the amount of time it takes to stop for gas. For city driving, you start with a full battery in the morning and never worry about stopping for gas (so the only place charge
21.
by hatcravat 14y ago
It's not so much that they need to be created in one piece [1] as that they need to be annealed after taking shape.
22.
by hatcravat 14y ago
No, they really shouldn't. Autopilots are very good at handling routine, monotonous tasks and very bad at handling unusual or unexpected tasks. See, for example, Air Canada 143, British Airways 38, Air France 447 (admittedly, the crew hum
23.
by hatcravat 14y ago
There isn't really a substitute for Excel if you want to use big spreadsheets (more than, say, a few hundred rows and a few dozen columns). Neither LibreOffice nor MS Office is really good for hard-core curve fitting, but Excel has a few o
24.
by hatcravat 14y ago
They can't add that feature because they already have it.
25.
by hatcravat 14y ago
In a word, "no." There are 3rd-party add-ons available from the App Store, but those only cover a subset of cities. Also, there don't seem to be routing plugins that can find transit directions across multiple transit agencies the way Goo
26.
by hatcravat 14y ago
Could it not be said that, "Turn-by-turn is not a very big advantage. It is only useful for the handful of people who are too poor not to have a navigation system built into their car?" It seems like the divide between the "iOS 6 maps suc
27.
by hatcravat 14y ago
I think you don't realize how politicized teaching has become. It doesn't matter if her students have good test scores: they all hate her. That one black mark is plenty for a determined administrator to get her fired. That a balanced rev
28.
by hatcravat 14y ago
You obviously haven't traveled internationally very much or you are being deliberately obtuse (or both). I'll explain anyway: Many countries have some sort of passport control both when you enter and when you leave the country. The reasons
29.
by hatcravat 14y ago
If it's anything like this woman's experience ( http://int13.net/france/blog/i-won-a-contest-to-go-to-the-lo... ), I don't think they would have had much fun. Especially if they knew what they were signing up for.
30.
by hatcravat 14y ago
>So what exactly can I do with one of these? The processor on this chip is an ARM cpu with floating point support, probably not something that most would consider exceptional. But for a microcontroller like this, the most interesting a

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