stevep98

Thunderbolt was supposed to go optical. You can read about it here, under "Copper vs. optical":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)

Those battery swap stations were mixed (... For now?)

http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/news/a25...

Reminds me of the Amiga Boing Ball demo from 1984.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ga41edXw3A

Very interesting read. Thanks!

I think they could improve things by controlling the audience more. The presentation wasn't helped by people yelling and interrupting (yes, they were enthusiastic).

Apple handles this a lot better, they get applause and cheers, but it always seems to be at the right time. Is it because their audience is apple employees highly trained to give feedback on cue?

Yes, now what we need is a programmer's keyboard with some nice 'alt-keys' for those sigils.

I clicked on "This presentation is available at..." and got a 404. So, yes, I was confused.

Today they are taking a $1000 refundable deposit. They will release some specs tonight, and the rest of the specs before you place your order. If you don't like it, take your deposit back.

He also came up with FischerTechnik, which is a superb building-block system far sturdier than Lego.

http://www.fischertechnik.de/en/Home.aspx

Had a lot of fun with this in my childhood.

Although the other explanations in this thread are correct, I fear an analogy might be better.

Yes, you can reach mercury quite quickly, but in order to land on it (or get captured into its orbit) you need to match its speed and its direction of travel. (speed and direction together are velocity, remember).

It's like I'm a stuntman jumping from one car to another on the freeway. If one car is going 60mph and one is going 20 mph it's going to end badly.

You'll start with a certain velocity on earth, and end up with a target velocity when you reach your destination. That's the delta-v. The type of rocket and how much propellant you have determine the delta-v.

Once you've made your rocket burn, you just have to wait until your paths cross. So, that's why it can take a long time for these missions. That's why people always talk about a journey time of 235 days to mars.

This is not the only possible way to do it though, it just uses the least fuel. If you're willing to use a lot more fuel, you can speed things up significantly, but generally we don't do that.

Missing child...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exigent_circumstance

"An exigent circumstance, in the criminal procedure law of the United States, allows law enforcement, under certain circumstances, to enter a structure without a search warrant or, if they have a "knock and announce" warrant, without knocking and waiting for refusal."

Sounds like you have a water-pipe central heating system. You probably have thermostatic valves on each radiator, which control the flow to each radiator.

That's why the main thermostat doesn't do much.

I was going to link to this too. It's almost as if the internet is calling for us to write an app called "here, the internet wants to help you researchers... have a video..."

There is plenty of life on this planet, yet we are still alone, in that we can't have any meaningful communication with a single other species.

What is it going to feel like when we find little cockroaches on Mars, or fish in the oceans of Europa? It's going to be profound in that we're not the only place where life has developed. It will be scientifically interesting because we will want to know how life developed differently, is there an alternative to DNA, for example. Is it non-water based, non carbon-based?

But many many people are going to have a 'meh' reaction. We have plenty of life surrounding us that we can't talk to. What's the big deal.

What if life developed on the remote planet that is 99% as sophisticated as us, like chimps for examples, but didn't make the final step to civilization because they didn't have opposable thumbs or something. They won't be able to comprehend us, or what we are.

There's a recent Onion article covering this topic:

"Nation Demands NASA Stop Holding Press Conferences Until They Discover Some Little Alien Guys"

http://www.theonion.com/article/nation-demands-nasa-stop-hol...

I'm pretty sure there was a light that did this in Virginia. Possibly on Route 7 North of Reston. Long stretch of road with no intersections, and a light seemingly for no purpose.

I love the TED talk by James Kunstler on urbanism. Here's the bit where he addresses blank walls:

https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...

A nature Band-aid?

https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...

How about this: When a cemetery is "full", temporarily remove all the headstones, add 10 feet of dirt over the whole site, then replace all the headstones in the original positions. Now you can start burying more people. What's wrong with that? People are still buried, you don't have to dig people up, what difference does it make if people are 6 feet under or 16 feet or 26 feet.

It seems to take a couple of extra seconds to process the transaction, compared to a swipe. I'm surprised that this bothers me so much. I might use Apple Pay more often if this doesn't get improved.

I see this too, in the bay area. There are so many intersections with green left-turn arrows that drivers forget the rules when they encounter a regular light without a left-turn arrow.

The particular case is that a driver going straight will yield to a driver approaching from the other direction who wants to turn left across them. They should not yield. They have a green light.

I agree you overdid it. Also on the table view, the highlighted row spins too fast.

But other than those minor quibbles, it's neat!

> You are never asked to enter a password, or type in "Remove Everything" as a fail-safe.

Some people will still do that and be surprised at the result.

My dad once reformatted his memory card on his camera, losing all his pictures from his vacation. He wanted to 'Change the Format' of the image (why? who knows), but instead he reformatted the card. "Are you Sure? Yes!"

I once copied an empty partition over a full partition instead of vice versa. I knew I only had one copy of this important data, and was trying to back it up. Are you sure? double-check.. YUP!

There's a famous Bush Sr debate moment when someone asks him how the economy has affected him personally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBrW2Pz9Iiw

It was considered a turning point in the debate, from what I understand.

not blocking for me

I went to school with Fred's Nephew!

Fred was well known around the area as a steam-machine-tinkerer extraordinaire.

I can imagine this being useful to show how buildings and bridges move in the wind or earthquakes. Could be quite alarming though.

As a french citizen, he has freedom to live and work wherever he wants in the EU without having to deal with getting a visa. I imagine that plays into it somewhat.

An friend of mine told me a story about excel abuse in her company. She's in HR, and it was annual review time. They were passing around a spreadsheet with 'employee name' and 'raise %'. Each manager was supposed to enter the raise for their employees.

So, a few days later, the spreadsheet came back, and the HR director was ready to process all these raises into payroll. My friend took a look at the sheet, and nothing made sense. Low performers were getting high raises, and vice versa.

After some investigation it turned out that some of the managers had sorted the spreadsheet so that they could find their employees better. But someone had screwed up, and only selected the name column. So, everything got messed up.

What was amazing that even after this was pointed out, the HR director was still pushing for the raises to go through as-is, because it would take too much time to do everything again.

Anybody know why they don't leave the trunk behind in the first place? It seems like a waste of fuel.