The Red Line crash was not computer-related. The signalling system for the Washington Metro is a classic electromechanical relay-based system. Just like the New York subways. The Red Line crash was caused by a failure of a track circuit for detecting trains, trackside equipment using an audio-frequency signal sent through the rails and shorted to the other rail by the train's wheels. All those components are pre-computer technology.

As with most railway systems, manual driving isn't enough to prevent collisions, because stopping distances are often longer than visual distances. That was the case here.

The Washington Metro had been sloppy about maintenance of trackside equipment. They do have a central computer system, and it logs what the relay-based signal systems are doing, although it can't override them. They had logs of previous failures, and should have fixed the problem.

Graham Chapman and Scott Thompson would like to have a word with you.

That's what they did when IE6 won the browser war!

The biggest problem I see with this is that the lens mount system appears to be purely manual. This seriously limits the lenses you can use, because these days, 99% of lenses don't have mechanical aperture control. They really need to have some sort of adaptable lens electronics in this thing, so that people can design adapters that actually support modern lenses, similar to the Metabones adapters for NEX. The absolute minimum requirement for such things is a set of electronic contacts inside the lens mount that are controllable through software.

I think if I were designing a camera system to be extensible, I'd make the lens contacts speak USB 2.0, with appropriate short-circuit protection for when the lens is being attached to the mount. That way, the adapters could be very basic USB controllers that speak a particular lens protocol, rather than having to convert one arbitrary lens protocol to another (potentially incompatible) protocol.

There is one caveat to using USB, though. You'd need to also provide a 7.2VDC pin on the lens mount. Many camera lens systems require that much voltage to drive the focus motors, and it would suck to have to boost the voltage from a 5VDC USB supply in an adapter, particularly given that you probably already have the higher-voltage DC supply floating around inside the camera.

"Hold your fire - there's no life forms aboard."

Actually, the current response to airspace incursions in the DC area is an F-16 and a Coast Guard helicopter. The F-16 is in case it turns out to be hostile, and the Coast Guard helicopter is for the usual case, which is a clueless VFR pilot who needs directions. This happens several times a week. The FAA now insists that all pilots operating within 60 miles of DC (actually 60NM of the DCA VOR) take this online course. Amazingly, there are still clueless pilots wandering into this airspace, although fewer than a few years ago.

Take a look at the video. The drone is at least 1000 feet up. If it's painted dull colors, you probably can't even see it from the ground.

Some of that info seems bogus. 10,000 CNC mills? Unlikely. 10,000 CNC machines of all types across all of Apple manufacturing, maybe.

There's a nice video about how Apple machines a round can for their round desktop computer. They're going through a lot of steps to make a can, yet they're doing it in a low-volume way. Here's how soft drink cans are made. Same shape, but much higher production volume.

Apple is doing this to justify charging $2700 for an x86-64 machine with midrange specs.

There are amusing efforts to sell disk drives to Google. Near Google HQ there is a movie theater complex. I once saw an ad run before a movie. Two minutes of sales pitch for bulk purchases of enterprise hard drives, with lots of technical detail. Clearly this was addressed to a very specific audience.

Absolutely true. Canids and felids in particular hunt more for sport than for food. Wolves have been observed having all sorts of fun killing an entire flock of sheep. Foxes hunt and kill mice and birds without eating 'em. And I used to have a cat who did nothing but hunt gophers all day long; within 3 years he'd completely exterminated them in my neighborhood.

Incidentally my neighbor runs a twice-weekly foxhunt, tho the usual quarry is coyotes (mostly chasing, they usually don't shoot 'em). The local coyotes have gotten so into being chased by dogs that they come down to the kennel the night before a hunt and get the dogs all riled up and ready to go.

Female dogs that have never had pups will often kill puppies. Presumably fewer of someone else's offspring means more resources when you have your own.

[This is a consistent enough behavior that I warn clients in no uncertain terms to never ever leave the new puppy alone with the adult dog, most especially the spayed female adult dog.]

Dogs, cats, chickens, horses, various fish, some insects...

Hmm. Maybe it's just a living organism thing.

Another scheme by the labels is to sign up promising bands who are seen as competitors... and now that they're locked into a contract, they're never let produce an album. So basically they're eliminated as potential competition for the money-acts.

See also

Researching the "Rape Culture" of America
by Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers

http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/facul...

As I understand it 30p is okay for photo work, but a pretty big compromise for general desktop use so I wouldn't do it. I have a 3840x2160@60p 28" monitor hooked up over DisplayPort 1.2 using SST (single stream transport). It works very well, I can also hook it up to my 1080p TV at the same time on my GTX 670. Just bought dual GTX 970s to replace it though.

There are three ways to support 4K content:
HDMI 2.0
DisplayPort 1.2+ over SST
DisplayPort 1.2+ over MST

Avoid MST (multiple stream transport), it's not worth the issues. DisplayPort 1.2 has been around for a while, the screen is usually the blocker on whether you can use SST. My screen (Samsung UD590) can so I do and that works great. HDMI 2.0 is brand new, the GTX 970/980 are the first graphics cards to support them but I suppose they're the only means to hook up 4K to an UHDTV as I understand most of these don't have a DisplayPort. That's what it's designed to do anyway, but if you jump on HDMI 2.0 now you'll be the first to test it really. For me that's not even an option, I hook it through the sound system and that doesn't support HDMI 2.0 pass-through. I find it's not that essential at couch distance anyway, it's sitting up real close you notice it most.