tigeba

One could relatively easily make a prankster device for screwing with the chargers. That said they are somewhat more than just a dumb extension cord and they require a bit of negotiation (and I assume constant communication) with the car to keep the juice flowing.

The chargers available in our area lock into the charging stations to keep people from messing with them when they are not in use as well.

The 2013 and newer Leafs have a variety of options for this. The default "automatic" mode behavior is to lock the plug when charging then unlock when charging is complete. Not totally sure if you can unlock the charger.

Missouri already has a tax stamp for EV's that is ostensibly to offset the lost revenue from gasoline taxes.

The reason you have your camera at home and your smartphone with you is because it is a smartphone. I'm not totally sure it has anything to do with the form factor.

I had the same reaction. My assumption was that this camera allows for variable depth of field in post production, but virtually nothing about the video says this. They showed someone tweaking a photo but the shot was too short and subtle to notice.

Personally I'm completely turned off by the cellphone form factor, its possibly the worst possible way to hold something steady to take a photograph.

I agreed with most of these suggestions. I'm not sure the suggestion to use a struct pattern is worth the lack of JavaBeans support in argle support libraries. You can always use final properties and only provide getters.

I think asserting that Fluent interfaces are 'more readable' or better is largely a matter of opinion.

I have two kids in elementary school, K and 2nd grade. The last few years the school district has been experimenting with Chromebook carts they would send to various classrooms once or twice a week. This year, they went with Chromebooks for all students K-12. The kids bring them home in the evening and are expected to bring them to school every day. The K's have touch screen Chromebooks to help mitigate their lack of typing skills.

I'm really interested to see how they will be using them. They have already been using google docs and they have both been talking about email. Maybe they will finally come to appreciate the vanity domains I registered for them when they were born :)

Most excellent.

When they released this a couple of months ago I was pretty excited to try it out. I think the barrier to installation is a bit high. First install Windows 10, then custom install of VS, install IoT Templates, then about 30 more steps before you get the image to flash on your SD. How about a link to the image I can blast on the SD and kick the tires without a couple hours of downloading and installing prerequisites?

The Federal and State subsidies for EV's drive down the used market value of the cars substantially. I just purchased a 2013 Nissan Leaf and you can get the base models all day long for 10k, or 13k'ish for the high end model. There is probably a little bit of a FUD discount as well since nobody knows how long the batteries will last, or what will happen when you want to change them. Incidentally, my Leaf replaced a Nissan XTerra :)

You are probably largely correct. A couple of counter-examples. They are from the Apollo program, hopefully they qualify as roughly equivalent.

NASA decided they needed honeycomb composites to insulate fuel tanks, but could not come up with the correct engineering to build them properly. Hired surfers to solve the problem.

http://www.sciencechannel.com/video-topics/space-videos/moon...

The Apollo space suits were designed and constructed by Playtex, a garment manufacturer.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/neil-armstrongs-spaces...

SPOILER: Chain World is a copy of Minecraft on a USB drive.

Been using the beta for a couple of months and I love the export options w/ various code comment flavors. It makes it much easier to drop in some no-so-subtle hints. For example:

https://github.com/bigbang/HelloAndroid/blob/master/app/src/...

Kansas City, MO and Uber have worked out their differences. I believe Uber will provide background check info to the city about their drivers, and pay a flat fee to cover all their drivers in the city.

http://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2015/04/23/kansas...

This looks like a cool project. Is it just me or has Caddy carried on the grand web server tradition of using a config file format that is sort of like, but not quite any other existing format.

One of the most interesting properties of gecko technology is they are not like traditional 'sticky' adhesives. They are powered by sub-atomic attraction and are self cleaning with use. Pretty bizarre :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_setae

I'm personally torn about 192K. Some folks that know a ton more about the recording process than I swear by it. On occasion I will source things at 96/24 if the track count is going to be low. Generally I just stick with 44.1/24. The higher sample rates also use a lot more space and processing power.

This really isn't even a 'choice', it is practically a requirement for the medium. Some examples:

The outer grooves have relatively more fidelity (needle moving faster) than the inner grooves, so the master may be progressively tweaked to add more high end as the content gets closer to the inner groove. The closer you get to the inner groove, the lower the playback fidelity.

12" Singles have larger groove spacing so you can slam them way harder than an LP. There is a greater margin of error and less chance of the cutting lathe skipping or hopping during cutting the master.

The process for creating stereo vinyl recordings is pretty much a compromise that allows stereo content while maintaining compatibility with mono playback equipment. This results in another series of compromises/limitations in the mix, like severely limiting the amount of truly stereo content. Extremely loud or bass heavy content that is panned wide would cause the cutting lathe to skip, etc.

Objectively, for virtually any definition of 'fidelity' vinyl has less fidelity than digital systems. If you read about the production on vinyl you will get a pretty good idea of the series of compromises in fidelity that are required to create a release. That said, the inherent deficiencies of the medium necessitate different and typically less aggressive mastering. Many listeners, including myself prefer this. If you were to listen to a digital recording mastered the same way you might be surprised to hear even more detail.

Fun fact: Some producers that use digital recording systems will mix in analog noise because the noise itself can be very pleasing in the right dosage. In this way it is used more like an effect rather than an inherent limitation of the recording process.

I came here to say the same thing. This move probably has everything to do with making sure people don't have to constantly change the volume when shifting between music videos and random amateur cat videos. The simple fact is YouTube can't change the average loudness of a given audio track without applying some form of 'destructive' processing, either compression or expansion. A more dynamic track will always be on average, quieter than a less dynamic track. Re-processing a bunch of audio tracks with just normalization does not change their average loudness, unless of course they are selectively applying compression to audio they find in need of a boost.

Goerig and Hughes? Hughes became seriously addicted after his plane crash and spent the rest of his life a recluse, no doubt fueled by a combination of drug use and mental illness. This is an individual who wouldn't bathe for weeks (or more) at a time, peeing in bottles and other quite unusual behavior. I think it is fair to say only his enormous wealth shielded him from being a 'broken junkie' as you say.

Goering was forcibly institutionalized for six months due to his morphine addiction. During his institutionalization he was strait-jacketed due to his violent behavior to the staff. He was already a leader of the NASDP that this time, having been injured during the Beer Hall Putsch.

He gained an enormous amount of weight and his behavior was viewed as increasingly bizarre and erratic over the course of his 'career'. He didn't quit until be was forced after his arrest and imprisonment at Nuremberg, where I believe he quickly lost 80-100 pounds.

It is really unclear how either of these individuals represent an example of the positive power of opiates. At best they seem to have managed to hang on despite their addition to opiates.

No comment on Keith Richards :)

Victorian-era solution http://www.neatorama.com/2013/08/03/Urine-Deflectors/

Vocal music major here. It is quite likely that by the time they reach university age, students who are majoring in vocal music have had years of experience singing in a variety of languages. These would typically be Latin, Italian, French and German, along with their native language. This might include choral and solo performance experience.

I suspect they have a combination of experience, learned 'coachability', and a greater than average awareness of how to produce the correct sounds.

Anecdote: I'm an English speaker, and traveled to The Netherlands on business a few years ago. It was my impression that just about all the Dutch speak English ( and a few other languages ) and it is very difficult for a non-native speaker to attempt to engage them in a conversation in Dutch. They will usually just flip over into English. After a bit of practicing on the plane, I was able to do a few things like order tickets for a movie, and some snacks, and even order food in a restaurant in Dutch (I cheated a bit here, it was a Mexican place, so all the food was in Spanish :) ). It is possible they were just being polite, but my perception was that I came off like a maybe-fluent non-native speaker. In fact I knew about 20 words, but I had a pretty good accent.

The current incarnation of the bots are programmable with JavaScript. We would like to potentially extend them to include some visual programming as well, like MIT Scratch or Blockly. The lack of updates on the site is just a bit of laziness on my part, we have done events with the robots a few times in the last couple of months. If you have an EV3 kit and are interested in trying it out, let me know.

The OWI arm takes a couple hours to assemble. A bunch of injection molded parts you have to pop out and snap together, along with a few screws in some places. The motors are just plain DC motors, no feedback or anything like that. My kids love playing with it.

I created a very simple Node API for working with the OWI Robot Arm + USB kit, you can get it from npm or from github.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/owi-robot-arm

https://github.com/bigbang/owi-robot-arm

I also had some fun with a project this summer turning LEGO Mindstorms EV3 kits into connected devices. They can send realtime telemetry to your mobile device, browser or other robots. We have done a couple pilots with them in classrooms as well as taking them to places like Maker Faire and Mozilla Hive events.

http://thegigabots.com/

The Mirobots look really interesting, I definitely will check those out. I can also confirm the Snap Circuits kits are tons of fun, and my kids love playing with them as well.

I came here to say the same thing. I have also been performing music since I was a child. I never really experienced any sort of anxiety about it because I have always associated the feeling with excitement. I accept the feeling will arrive, generally shortly before the performance, and that it usually helps push me to do better. If the performance is really short I find that I can feel a bit jittery afterwards since I don't get enough time to burn off the extra adrenaline.

I can contrast this with rehearsals, where I typically feel no 'excitement' when working with familiar musicians. In this situation the music might feel a little flat, and sometimes I look forward to the actual performance where the adrenaline will help carry the weight.

I believe this was done by PJ for a couple of reasons. 1) Practical, increasing the shutter speed means either increasing the amount of light for scenes, using faster film stock ( or higher ISO on your RED camera ) or some combination of both. 2) This shutter speed was a compromise between the exposure time 180-degree shutter shooting at 24 -vs- 48 fps, and would still retain some of the blur so that 24fps screenings would appear relatively 'normal'

The effects in the battle sequences of SPR are not a result of high-speed film per se, but the result of altering the effective shutter speed of the camera to reduce motion blur (switching from 180 degree shutter to 90 or 45 situationally). The scenes were still shot at 24fps. If you have a digital video camera with manual shutter control, set the framerate to 24fps and set the shutter to 1/200 and you have instant SPR.

This effect is now very common for action scenes in movies and also tons of music videos. Very easy to spot once you are aware of it.

Just riffing on your Matrix example, the now 'classic' example of using a temporal shift to aid story telling is the use of 45 or 90 degree shutter in "Saving Private Ryan" during combat scenes. Changing the shutter angle on a motion film camera is analogous to changing the shutter speed, in this case opting for a faster shutter during the action sequences. This reduces motion blur the same way shooting at a higher frame rate would, albeit keeping the 24p.

Just my opinion here, but for context you can include virtually any television program that originated as NTSC and was not shot on film and telecined. Just about any soap-opera for example. A more recent example would be NBC's Peter Pan Live, which looked like it was done in native 60p to my eye. Paradoxically it was a play but really would have benefitted greatly from 24p.