HCIdivision17

The guide doesn't turn off or remove Cortana so much as uses a race condition to break it. Basically, you attempt to rename the Cortana directoy, inevitably fail, then kill the Cortana process and-then-quickly-click-retry in the error dialog that showed up. If you're fast, you can rename the directory before Cortana can boot and lock it in use again. (I assume you can then purge the directory afterward. Bonus points if there's a way to fubar the directory so that it can't be restored (violent symlinking?))

When I worked in plants, I remember gangs of battery charging stations that had a crane to swap batteries out on the forklifts. I can't imagine distribution centers not installing something like that for these trucks (eventually). Even if swapping isn't a feature in all electric trucks to start, there's almost certainly going to be some sort of conversion kit to make it possible in the future.

Oh that was at a stop light shortly after it started raining in a Texas winter. I'm fully layered and geared up with leathers and full rain suit - I can walk a bit like a robot and look 150 pounds heavier. So I pull up to the light and just before I fully stop, my Dyna just ... slides out from under me. It's rush hour, a busy intersection, and my bike just sorta falls over in place while I'm sitting on it. Nothing you can do can stop it once it slowly starts properly tipping over, so it plonks onto the roll bars and bags (which are wide and leather, thank god). I scramble to haul it back upright on this oil slicked crowned lane, hop back on, and act like nothing at all happened.

I just want to note that this also happens on motorcycles. On a cold winter day my bike dumped me off as I lost traction at a stop light. It started to fall over, bumped its saddle bags, and before the tilt sensor could stall the engine it righted itself in second gear and idled its way through the intersection... with me literally running after it. It hit a curb and eventually stalled upright.

Second most embarassing thing the bike ever did to me.

There's a sort of subtle difference that plays out in how effective the turning is. In countersteering, you don't move the center of mass of the motorcycle-human system; the wheels pull out from under the bike and it naturally turns into the capsizing. Body steering actually moves the center of mass of the system out of the bike's vertical axis. (That is, you're no longer in plane with it.)

Because motorcycles are so massive (at least mine is), body steering is much less effective, but it does help if you want to lean the bike a bit further. That's sort of where the advice to "push down with your legs comes from", since it shifts the bike down as you push yourself up - voila, bike wheels make a deeper u shape, capsizes a bit more, and turns harder. It's a trim knob for turning, kind of how the rear brakes add stability while the front do most of the work.

Like a lot of the points in the MSF course, it's a useful detail to internalize so that when something inevitably dumb/awful happens on the road a poorly trained snap decision doesn't lead to panic (ohgodohgodohgodthebikeisntswervingfastenoug-), but in everyday life you won't be thinking about it directly.

Don't take it personally - I was always just a terrible rider when I was young; I meant that in a mildly sarcastic way. I never really figured out how to properly steer until I got a motorcycle, and that just about ruined my feeling of force in the other way. Put me on a bike and in 15 feet I'll accidentally steer so hard you'd think I was dodging semis / saw a hundred dollar bill on the pavement. (I assume as a kid I just always manhandled the bike so hard I never noticed. Always standing on the pedals and pumping them like I was running, wobbling the bike's center of gravity the whole way.)

There's a really cool video demonstrating the idea [0]. They took a set of handlebars and welded them to the frame. You'll see that you can affect a motorcycle, but only poorly. On a bicycle, you're much more top heavy and can force the vehicle to capsize far faster. On my motorcycle though? If I lightly increase the throttle it'll go absolutely straight (which is nice if you need to reseat your gloves, but scary if the road starts to veer to the side!)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PbmXxwKbmA

It's wildly unintuitive, so don't feel bad. When I was first learning to ride a motorcycle with the MSF, I damn neared dumped the practice bike a few times trying to manhandle it. You'll really quickly internalize push-left-go-left. And it turns out to work great on regular bikes, too. (But it's terrifyingly more responsive - I actually can't relax pedaling a bicycle because of the fear of how easy it is to flip the things and capsize them from countersteering.)

EDIT: There's a neat heuristic that was brought up in the course: the center of mass of the bike is above the bottom of the wheels, and a turning bike must lean into the turn (weird road geometries excepted), therefore to turn the stuff under the center of mass must counter the top leaning in. Thus to go left, you push left, causing the front wheel to pull out from under the bike right-wards, which starts to capsize the bike leftwards! Like I said before, a bicycle reacts really really hard to this, but a hefty motorcyle has a far lower center of mass and leans into it more gracefully.

You're highlighting the perverseness of time management. At its best it's a giant confusing mess, and that's before we get to all the bizarre business logic that's built up over time.

I actually think it may simply be that we have signs and large printed things with times on them, and it'd be onerous to have to replace each multiple times a year (or make them bigger with a layer of conditionals based on date). Instead, we push that complexity onto the backend and deal with time there. It's certainly easier from the customer and business owner, and we've merely make life much more difficult for the programmers and engineers... which is probably how it should be. It's the job of the technical people to deal with the technicalities, so to me, it seems like everything is working properly.

Still a nasty, messy problem, though.

Those sort of things are always a bit grey and (IMHO) a bit sketchy, but it's worth noting that it's a bit costly to even test the ideas. Starting a business is a decent way to raise the capital to run the experiment, since grant money is likely far harder to get. But, yeah, doing it that way also really makes it basically impossible to be unbiased.

Let a few more rounds of experimentation and refutation go through, and if it's clear it can't work at all, and they stay in business without pivoting, then we can breeze right past hoax and jump to fraud. Time will tell about it, I guess.

Holy mackeral, that is cool. I really appreciate the "well, let's just try it" approach. I can't wait to see what happens when he launches his little satellite. If it shows positive results, lots of people will replicate it.

This is win-win: if it works awesome happens. If it fails then you're left with the experience of having built a little satellite!

The critical detail here is that this is neither free energy nor free momentum in this setup. Energy is pumped in, and some momentum is generated - that's incredibly boring and not at all something that should raise any skepticism. The question of what in the hell was being pushed against to convert that energy to momentum, on the other hand, is a really interesting question, but not one to deeply pursue until we're actually sure it's happening. Which seems like the cavity wasn't the interesting bit in the end. A shame and a bit boring after so much careful testing, but nothing to get worked up over.

And the experiments didn't make it obvious that the setup didn't work. I mean, I don't think anyone took the inventor's theoretical claims seriously, but the device did generate some small thrust in a difficult to explain way.

Besides, we know that space isn't nothing, so being able to tractor against whatever is there would be a rather intersting engineering find; physicists would then likely take the experiment and go "oh, there's a neat edge case in this system of equations that explains it". There are a lot of interesting edge cases left to find and engineer.

That's sort of an unnecessary dichotomy. Enthusiasm doesn't mean hoax, and the mistake was propagated by more than just the inventors.

Everything suggests that it was just science in action. There was an experiment, and it failed to reject the null hypothesis of 'no thrust'. A few groups have repeated the experiment, but not to the experimental power needed to thoroughly reject it. This test seems to be a more definitive rejection of it, but we're still not sure why there was any thrust measured in the first place, though there are some pretty reasonable leads on that.

How... how in the name of Science are you supposed to keep track of an attometer-wide object?! The dang thing would be so easy to lose I imagine that misplacing the drive would be the biggest problem such a ship would have! We always imagine spaceships with these brilliant, impressive reactors and drives, and here's one that is so underwhelming it may as well not be there. (Save for the petawatt energy flowing off it...)

Yes, but it's not terribly useful. It was theorized that the LHC could possibly generate a micro black hole that caused a bit of brouhaha, but it turns out they evaporate exponentially faster as they get smaller. (This is due to the surface area being more domininant as the volume shrinks.) So the damn things just evaporate before they get to any detecting equipment.

Of course, if we could make bigger ones, well, that'd take some significant mass, and at that point you'll have some rather impressive innovations in crushing stuff. (After all, particles are darn near point masses already, but crushing matter down past neutronium is gonna be hard.)

And the screen's text are fairly similar regardless of what it's asking, and if there was some sort of error inserting it (damn things often trip before the card's fully inserted), then it makes the same gosh damned sound to remove it. I even had one beep to get my attention to not take the card out.

I feel awkward and foolish with it, since it's ostensibly so simple, but so inconsistent. Add in a watching-water-boil time delay, and it's just a great recipe for social anxiety. One wrong move can jam the works. (Like, I once pulled the card out too early when I heard it beep at a Target and the register had to cancel the order and restart.)

From the little I could find on it, it sounds like the rocket actually landed... and then sorta kept landing until RUD. Is that right? There was more slam than hover in this particular maneuver?

Drats - I didn't mean to downvote! I actually really appreciate the obligatory utility comments referencing where to get the docs.

This is largely why I really like Sublime. But! It's worth remembering that it wasn't always that way. One of the huge wins for Sublime Text 2 was that it started up much faster than before; nowadays it's almost as snappy as Notepad!

So I'm fairly hopeful for Atom. It took years for Sublime to get to where it is today, and Atom looks like it's on track to be a great contender. ... Until then though, I'll still cherish Sublime as my go-to text editor: it's got a well earned head start.

True, but when you have an awful lot of layers, you can play some silly buggers with it. Even if you botch a layer, it won't neccesarily ruin the whole thing, since the interference betwen the sets of layers also act as filters. I haven't worked on these sorts of stacks, personally, but I'd be surprised if the whole stack dies because one layer was a bit screwed up (I'd expect a degredation in the efficiency, but not necessarily a total reversal - now ask me what happens if your goal is to tune to neutral color and you make a slight error and then I'll flip sides and say "rainbow").

What I'd really expect is that if you make one layer slightly larger, your process almost certainly making all the repititions of that layer larger too, and now yeah, your bulk properties are just hosed.

The good news is that the processes I described above are already well established. The trick is always in the dirty, nasty details, but in this case I'd be bullishly optimistic. I haven't personally worked on a large batch coater, so I can't attest to how hard it is to tune the things in, but your typical coater engineer is a bit eccentric anyhow and will no doubt make it work.

See, the weird bit of how these coatings work is that it's fairly easy to empirically tune the damn things to be angstrom accurate (-ish), but the geometry of how the material is sprayed messes up the uniformity, which in turn ruins your yields (one square centimeter in the center is good, chuck the rest!). But if the coating can withstand some variation between layers, tuning it such that the layers sorta cancel out in the bulk, you'll lose the efficiency, but your yield can absolutely skyrocket. There will likely be key layers at the optical half, quarter, eighth, etc. thicknesses, but if you get enough layers you can probably get away with a lot. You can also just build really neat source geometries to sorta flatten out the spray over a larger area, but that's something I never worked on.

My ignorance of this sort of coating has me worry about it immediately destroying itself from the insane material stresses... Though no idea how well it'll anneal after 1000 hours of constant heat (or worse: on-off heat-cooling cycles!) But since they're all oxides and likely put down together while the substrate stays hot, I bet it works out ok.

The manufacturing costs won't be too bad, I'd imagine. At least, in terms of the normal shocking costs of manufacturing. If the design is simple enough, that 300 layers may be just 75 repititions of four layers (no doubt not actually the case, but the machine spraying material onto the plates can adapt).

I'm a bit disappointed that the recipe wasn't included; I would have liked to see what the design entailed. All the layers are on dialectrics, and they're all oxides, so the process chambers won't be too hard to control. And I say that knowing full well some poor coater engineer is actually just going to have a devil of a time with it (or not! quarter wave filters are fairly standard stuff).

Most of all, the thing I'd be intersted in is how resistant to error is the design? It sure looks like it doesn't need to be too perfect per layer. For a pair of microscope lenses, precision is everything. In a lightbulb you can probably get away with a lot of error (per layer: as a whole you could easily make the color something goofy). Of course, if it's color swings wildly with minor errors in certain layers, well, that could hole the product up in R&D hell.

To follow up and mix in a few other sentiments noted elsewhere with my own experience, I'll partially agree.

For me, it's a bit like Monty Python's Holy Grail. I saw it alone as a young teenager and I just didn't really get what the fuss was about. But there were a few things that struck me as brilliant, like the glimpse of the guards just about to throw a cocunut attached to a pigeon just to settle once and for all the movie immersion-breaking issue of how that coconut got there (we don't see if it works). On further watchings the Holy Grail seems more brilliant than I expected, and I've gotten more out of it, but it's... well, hype is hype.

The HGttG style is also a bit unique, often inverting and twisting ideas in a way uncommonly stated. Needlessly so, often. And it just absolutely revels in it.

A word of caution about the series: it starts off with a silly apocalypse and really eventually gets dark. Like you, I may also be placed in the Total Perspective Vortex for this, but I really recommend slogging it through to the sixth book. It's only half Adams or so, but it's certainly a necessary palate clenser after the fifth book and I think it revives the spirit of the first. (By the way, I am absolutely certain both the Question and Answer show up in context with each other, but you've really got to get to the end of Mostly Harmless, and that story is anything but.)

Keep in mind too that nothing about the Hitchhiker's Guide is canonical. It always changes when adapted to TV or radio or movie, and it has a damn hard time being consistent with itself. Which is also part of the fun.

Yup. You've heard of defense in layers? Well, VB is a leaky sieve that you can try from different angles as each layer fails.

So... you didn't hear this from me. This certainly was from some other engineer tasked with getting $THING done in a corporate environment where everything was locked down and noone had admin. (Never mind that anything on the floor had to have the password taped under the keyboard - or to save time, monitor.) I mean, someone had admin, but it wasn't really obvious who in the plant did and the ones who supposedly did had bad privileges set.

So you try to do something absurd like copy a log file automatically in the event of a line crash to a network store. But you can't run the nice application that shadow copies without admin. So you try a batch file, but no dice. Then you try VBA via Excel, and that sorta works, but now you've got to keep Excel running as a monitor, and that garfs up occasionally when the operator alt-tab-resets-power-to-everything. So you try a VBscript, and find that you can plonk that down in the Windows Startup folder and it sorta just works and thank god that's not an issue anymore we can just get back to fixing the line.

Every time it fails you can try again from a slightly different vantage point, retreating further as it fails, perhaps appropriately, you need to spend a day on the phone with tech support and get the damn thing done right.

I work in industrial automation, and you really don't want to know what an awesome impact VB6 had on manufacturing. As `sjm-lbm noted below [0], it fills that essential niche between stuff that's useful and stuff that's too important to kludge. And I think as programmers/engineers, we should all kinda grok that you can get away with a lot of kludge before the world ends.

My favorite take on this idea is a guy in a forum replying about how vilified VBA is. I can't find the note for the life of me, but basically he said "You may work out and find the perfect tool for the job, but sometimes you just need a turbo-powered pneumatic nail gun to bang out something that mostly works." Skilled carpentry is a thing of beauty, but sometimes you just want the goddam floorboard held in place so the painter can get to work.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11756195

PS: I've perpetrated my own intellectual violence upon the world via VB, and generally it's what got me programming in my job. I learned C in high school, did some C++ in college, but I really got started in VB6. Eventually I escaped to Python, but man, I still appreciate how ubiquitous VB is. In Windows land, you can always fail back to some absurd version of VB (either in some VBA in a remnant Office installation, or VBscript, or the like - they're all a bit different, but not enough to stop an enterprising hacker).

To be fair, the top comment here calls out Poe's Law. You can see this best by how "A Modest Proposal" was recieved: the anonymous author was villified and many powerful people were outraged. People were repulsed and offended and everything'd else by it.

One of my favorite Asimov quotes is "It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety." It's a damn shame that it's helpful to put blaring giant signs that say SATIRE on it and ruin the joke a bit, but there's just a ton of people out there who just never really got up to speed on detecting it. Many - possibly most! - people really don't look that deeply into things and tend to take stuff at face value (or don't know that there is a deeper meaning to spot), no matter how outlandish.

All that as a mea culpa, as I read the OP's README and thought, "man, that seems like a bit of a mess... under what circumstances would you need to do that?" The answer is NO DO NOT DO THIS but I, lacking experience, kinda didn't get that right off the bat.

I actually meant MTA workers in midwest subways (of which there should be none), but your reversal makes sense given how my snark could parse. Basically, I was just disappointed that the article clickbaited me into reading about costs that really are local and specialized. Felt like "America's costs are out of control! Let's look at a an unusual and globally unique city to show how!"

The author notes at the outset it's embellished to be entertaining, but nothing in the actual big seemed outlandish. The only thing that struck me as unlikely was that someone would actually work out and notice the radius. But I also know people like that, so I'd give the story the benefit of the doubt.

I haven't read Childhood's End. I really enjoyed Seveneves, though. But there's just a lot of cool stuff in the story that is worth the exposition. As others note, the book is written in sections; if you really don't want to go through the triumph and heartbreak of the outplaying story, it wouldn't be awful to jump to a later section. I may be a bit heretical saying so, but some ideas later in the book are just wonderful. You'll lose out fast forwarding, but I'd recommend that over skipping it :)

I was initially just snarking, since I ain't done seen no subways when I lived in Indiana, but instead I learned about population distribution.

Personally, I would have figured a majority would have been rural (since there's just so much rural land area). I hadn't realized it was so sparse.