lambda

There's a picture on the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Dconnexion and there's a patent you can look at: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050172711A1/en?oq=2005...

It's flexible, and there are LEDs and linear optical sensors set up with an occluder in between that casts a shadow (or passes a light through a slit, according to the patent). The sensor detect where along the sensor the shadow or light falls, which indicates how much you have translated or rotated the control in a particular axis.

Worked fine for me on Firefox on an old Android phone. You might want to upgrade your computer

The original poster in the thread was suggesting that if power usage were low enough, it could be powered by the power provided by the NFC in the phone; where the phone provides power for an NFC circuit that is entirely unpowered. If you could power an eink display that way, you could have a completely unpowered frame, which you could set via NFC.

So yes, of course NFC can be isolated from the displays power usage, the originator of this thread was just suggesting it would be neat if you could power it via NFC.

But NFC doesn't provide nearly enough power, nor likely enough bandwidth to do that in a reasonable amount of time.

What is your native language, and if English, what dialect?

For me, the "foo" in "foobar" has the same vowel as "toot", which is different than "foot". Do "toot" and "foot" rhyme for you.

I speak American English, from Boston/New England but without a strong Boston accent.

Failure doesn't work that way.

It's not the case that there's a constant 1/5 probability of failure each year. Many failure modes are based on cumulative stress/degradation; so the probability of failure can go up over time.

Some failure modes go down over time; maybe there's some manufacturing defect, and those that have the defect fail early, while those that survive past the first year will have lower chances of failure early on.

But in this kind of environment, the cumulative stresses are much more likely than the early failures.

Don't look up!

But seriously, what relevance does a minority scientific hypothesis (even in the 70's, the majority of climate science focused on global warming from greenhouse gasses, not cooling from aerosols) from 50 years ago have when better data and 50 more years of experience show a clear warming trend, that is entirely anthropogenic, and which is today causing deadly heat waves, wildfires, flooding, storm surge, and more?

Your weather forecast for next week is already impacted by the global warming that has already happened.

Did you just create three new accounts to ask this series of questions? These questions, and account names, all seem to share similar patterns.

I have been couch-potatoing more than I should recently, so when I had some time off but was alone at home, I decided to use that time to try and get back in the habit of getting regular exercise.

I must have pushed myself a bit too hard, because I ended up with flu-like symptoms for a week afterwards, which completely broke the intent of getting started on forming the habit again.

Yes it is. They have four 16 thread pipelines, and two single thread pipelines per core. 4*16=64 and 64+2=66

What a weird set of concerns.

Civilian aircraft aren't generally expected to be able to withstand midair collision or war. Why would this drone be any different?

Most aircraft today contain some kind of power storage that can ignite dangerously; 100LL or Jet-A in the case of airplanes and helicopters and some drones, lithium-ion batteries in the case of many drones and upcoming eVTOLs (and for aux power in many modern airplanes as well).

Regulatory frameworks and engineering practices are absolutely able to be used to consider the risks of fires in energy storage systems.

I prefer Xitter, where the "X" is pronounced "sh" like in Xibalba.

Corollary: P does not mean easy.

Most things that you do on the computer, you want to be O(n) or less; maybe O(n log n) or even O(n log^x n), but no slower than that. That means if you get a bigger problem, you can generally just get a proportionally bigger computer and be all set.

Now, sure, there are plenty of O(n^2) problems where the n stays small enough, or you don't mind waiting or spending a ton of money on it. But just because something is in P doesn't mean that you want to be solving it with a polynomial time algorithm on a regular basis.

I think it's funny that the majority of causes you list (isolation, not enough physical activity, little vitamin D/Sun exposure) wouldn't apply at all to the group you cite as having widespread issues (girls HS volleyball team).

As someone who struggles with mental health issues, and frequently not getting enough of many of those things mentioned, I've worked to try to do better about some of that; and it can sometimes help a bit. But the whole "get more exercise, touch grass, see a friend" isn't the magic cure-all that some people make it out to be; and worrying about doing enough of it can become a stressor all on its own. Additionally, seeing them as the solution can sometimes lead to harmful obsessive behaviors of trying too hard to seek them out, at the expense of other things like work or family time.

Anyhow, not saying that getting more of these things is bad, or that they have no effect. Just that a lot of times discussions of mental health online feel very reductive. More exercise, more outdoor time, more time with friends, more antidepressants; each of these could potentially have positive effects, but they can also have negative effects, or be unobtainable, or there could be one of myriad other issues that need to be addressed, or there could be situations, either mental, physical, or social that are so broken that they can never really be addressed, just lived with or in some cases not even that.

And even when it doesn't block you completely, it delays website loading, makes you jump through frustrating captchas, etc.

It's probably third in the list of frustrating web behaviors in the past couple of years (behind GDPR popups and registration/paywalls that seem to have gotten much worse recently).

And somehow there are some sites that I get CF delay walls on every time I visit.

This feature is utterly broken for a good web experience; it pushes users away from sites which use it.

Every time that "checking your browser" page comes up for a legitimate user should be considered a failure. Sure, it can maybe happen a few times in a thousand, but the feature is utterly broken if it comes up every time I visit the same site from the same browser not in private mode.

Grope has the same meaning in American English, and used in that context could be fine ("grope around").

But I have never heard "groper" used for anything other than some engaging in sexual assault. The benign sense of "grope around" isn't a sufficient part of an identity to ever use the word "groper", while he sexual assault sense is, so "groper" implies the sexual assault meaning.

It's entirely likely that the original author of this phrasing was thinking about it in the benign sense, but didn't realize that the phrasing would make many readers interpret it in the sexual assault sense.

Yeah, I was responding to the "why wasn't it ever official even when it was reasonably popular", not why it's not now. Those threads I linked to were from 10 years ago or more.

I tried looking for any direct discussion in the past of making it an official architecture, and didn't find it, but I did find that it seems to have been slightly lower activity, and with some hurdles, and that there didn't seem to be much of a push to make it an official Debian architecture, while there's been active effort to make RISC-V an official architecture, that's been going on for several years.

Anyhow, I'm not a DD or DM, I've made a few contributions via maintainers, so you're clearly more involved than I am. I was just trying to shed some light on the question of why SuperH never was official, and as far as I can tell it's because no one ever put enough effort in to make it official, while they have done so for RISC-V. But maybe I missed some drama somewhere.

Even in its prime, it simply didn't have enough interest from Debian developers for maintaining an official port.

With each release there are roll-call emails to help judge whether a port has sufficient maintenance to be included in the official release, and I generally see a single developer for SuperH/SH4: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/10/msg00134.html

There are a few more developers listed on the qualification page, but they don't seem to be responding to the roll-call messages: https://wiki.debian.org/ArchiveQualification/sh4

Debian doesn't sit down and do market research on amount of hardware shipped, and then allocate developers and resources based on that; they base whether there's an official port on whether there are already enough developers and infrastructure to maintain it, as builds failing on that port can block work on packages.

And besides the developers, the SH4 port had infrastructure issues, such as taking 6 days to build GCC: https://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2011/04/msg00173.htm...

So the answer to "why wasn't SH4 an official port" is likely "there simply weren't enough developers and infrastructure for supporting it."

Where are you getting the "vastly larger installed base"? On popcon riscv64 is a lot higher than sh4: https://popcon.debian.org/stat/submission-1year.png

There may be more hardware out there with SH4 processors, like some NAS boxes, but are they using or contributing to Debian? And when I look at a list of hardware with SuperH processors, half of the links are broken links: https://elinux.org/Processors#SuperH

SuperH seems like a niche architecture mostly supported by a single vendor and available in a few devices mostly in the Japanese market, without a huge amount of use in the Debian community.

RISC-V may not yet have as much extant hardware available, but there's tons of active development, and the open licensing model means that a lot of companies are working on RISC-V chips, which will then flow into hardware.

John Goodenough, one of the inventors of the lithium ion battery, also kept working this long; just passed away a month ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough

My favorite "accidentally load bearing" artifact that I've found was a misconfigured sudo that would easily allow arbitrary code execution as root (it allowed passwordless sudo for a find command, which could be used with -exec), which a number of important support scripts for the product had been written to use. Load bearing privilege escalation!

I have had one issue related to systemd; at one point when doing a routine update there was some dangling symlink issue that caused systemd to crash. This wasn't catastrophic; a lot of things didn't work, but I was able to cleanly save and exit out of applications, manually run a sync to make sure everything was flushed to disk, and then hard reboot.

This was the issue, I think: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742322

systemd hasn't been without issue, but I've definitely had fewer issues with systemd than I did dealing with broken init scripts or upstart prior to moving to systemd.

Generally, the displaced threshold is not because of the load of touching down, but because of clearance of obstacles. When landing, where you are aiming to land, and a standard glideslope, puts you over obstacles at a certain height. In some cases if you landed on the very end of he the runway, that would cause you to collide with (or have too low a margin of safety) over obstacles before the runway. The displaced threshold moves the glideslope further forward, allowing for better clearance over obstacles.

Source: Advisory Circular 150/5300-13B Airport Design, 3.5.3 (https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...)

  When it is impractical to locate a threshold at the beginning of the runway, it may be
  necessary to apply a displaced threshold. A displaced threshold reduces runway length
  available for landings in one direction. The portion of the runway prior to the displaced
  threshold typically remains available for takeoffs. Depending on the circumstances
  surrounding the displacement, operations from the opposite runway end may or may not
  be affected. Refer to Appendix H for related information on declared distances.
  Generally, a runway threshold displacement provides:
  1. A means for obtaining additional RSA prior to the threshold.
  2. A means for obtaining additional ROFA prior to the threshold.
  3. A means for locating the RPZ to mitigate incompatible land uses.
  4. A means for obstacle clearance prior to the threshold.
  5. Increased arrival capacity with certain parallel runway approach procedures. See
  FAA Order 7110.308, Simultaneous Dependent Approaches to Closely Spaced
  Parallel Runways

Glossary:

  RSA: Runway Safety Area
  ROFA: Runway Object Free Area
  RPZ: Runway Protection Zone

Note that all of the given reasons are for clearance of obstacles or various other mandatory safety areas based on clearance from taxiways or other runway traffic, not for durability of the runway.

Beta ALIA-250, an eVTOL, and CX300, a conventional takeoff and landing aircraft that's basically the ALIA 250 with the lift motors and supporting structure deleted to get through certification sooner, and serve a few markets that don't need VTOL.

We're a little bit quieter than some of the other players, as we're still a private company and are focusing more on engineering than marketing right now.

edit: Oh, hey, just checked your profile and I guess your firm is one of our investors, so I guess you already know about us.

It's true that energy density of batteries is a lot lower than gasoline, but electric motors are a lot more efficient. It doesn't make up the whole difference, but it does make up some of it. Also, battery technology is improving pretty rapidly.

Electric aviation is not yet viable commercially, but it will be soon. I'm working at a company building electric aircraft, and one of our prototypes has done a flight of more than 380 miles. Note that this is a prototype, in ideal conditions, with a tailwind, last few miles were circling the airport within the glide cone, etc. The actual production vehicle range, with all of the safety margins, seats for passengers, passenger weight, etc, will be a lot less; but still, 150 miles is enough for many commercially viable trips, especially in dense areas like the BosWash corridor, or getting from suburbs to a long haul airport, or many others.

Electrification can also make viable new architectures, like VTOL, and the extra efficiency and longer maintenance intervals can drastically drive down operating costs; so there will be many trips that are economically viable in an eVTOL that wouldn't be in conventional airplanes (due to needing an airport) or helicopter (due to high fuel and maintenance costs).

I'm a big proponent of EVs, I drive an EV car and work on EV aircraft, but they aren't yet ready to replace every segment of the market.

Electric motorcycles are only just becoming viable, and are a lot more limiting compared to electric cars.

And an ICE motorcycle can be a lot more fuel efficient, and is also lower carbon impact to manufacture, and takes up less space on the street and to park. For a single occupancy vehicle, an ICE motorcycle is a lot cooler than an ICE car; and depending on the use, could even be better than an EV car.

I am hopeful that within about 5-10 years, battery technology and prices will improve to the point that electric motorcycles actually become viable. But for now, buying a gas sipping Honda Monkey and commuting to work on it could be a big step up over a car.

Ah, sorry, I'd missed that you were discussing completely synthetic fuels. Yeah, those are a possibility, but a lot further out; those are not going to be showing up in production quantities in the next 5-10 years. And an ICE engine is already way less energy efficient than an electric motor, it's hard to imagine that the entire cycle of synthetic fuel production to useful energy at the vehicle could ever compete on efficiency with current green energy production and battery electric vehicles.

These kinds of solutions are useful to do research and development on for cases where we're not sure if battery electric vehicles will ever have a path to replace, like long haul aviation.

But for surface transport, it's really hard to see much being competitive with battery electric vehicles; they are already commercially viable, and can be powered with 100% green energy, and green energy prices are already lower than fossil fuel. My EV is charged with 100% carbon neutral power when I charge at home or work. Sure, the mix of sources varies across the grid, but given how cost effective renewable energy is, and incentives, the share of renewables is growing fast.

The infrastructure and production capacity are rapidly developing. And while energy density and specific energy of batteries are a bit limiting now, there are a lot of developments that are nearly ready for mass production that will get rid of many of the remaining limitations of battery electric vehicles for all but the most demanding of applications (like long haul air transport).

I think you might be surprised by how fast ICE vehicles become obsolete for all but niche use cases. As infrastructure develops, production ramps up, and battery technology improves, it won't be long before EVs start to outsell ICE vehicles. EVs already outsell ICE vehicles in Norway, in China they're at about 25% of new car sales, and worldwide they're at about 12% of new car sales; and these numbers are growing rapidly, they may already be out of date by now. Once they are outselling ICE vehicles, it will only be about a decade before EVs are the majority on the road.

I would find it hard to imagine a way in which synthetic fuel would ramp up to production readiness and be cost-effective in the same kind of time scale.

Growing crops for biofuel is more land intensive, and thus involves cutting down more forest and removing carbon sinks, than the equivalent solar power.

Yes, bioruels are better than fossil fuels, but worse than clean electricity.

Anyhow, it's not an either/or. ICE vehicles will be with us for a while, so it's better to use more efficient ones, but we also need to be replacing as many as possible with electric.

Biofuels are better than fossil fuels, but most ICE engines run on gasoline, and can't run on 100% biofuels efficiently and cleanly.

Don't forget walking, bicycles, e-bikes, electric motorcycles, working from home, buses, etc.

Yes, we are behind schedule, and we can't get there just by replacing ICE cars one for one with electric cars, but there is plenty more we can do.

Living in walkable neighborhoods. Demanding better infrastructure for more than just cars. Working from home if you have a desk job.

And of course personal transport is only part of it. Electricity generation. Industrial precesses like steelmaking, and concrete will need to go carbon neutral as well.

Electric cars will be part of it, though. Those infrastructure changes won't happen overnight, we need all possible options at our disposal, it's not either/or, it's "yes, and."

But it can be done.