"they already have such beacons which ping for 30 days after activation. Why are they not picking any of that? "

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

Typical detection range is 5 km. Say the plane can be in a 2000x2000 sq km area. Then you have to search in a search path that is 200x2000=400,000 km long. That's 10x around the earth and will take a while.

And the ocean is 4 km deep once you're well away from land; because of the vertical distance you have less horizontal range.

Why would you comment if your experience is too old to be relevant?

It's more an OS than an editor.

Heh yeah I tried installing that on my Mac. Intelli-J even offers a nice installation as a plugin. First, it simply didn't start and it turns out that the plugin installation will install an old version. Okay then I'll download it manually. That installed a kernel driver which crashed my OSX laptop.

I gave up and continued using the dog slow emulator.

I totally agree here. Compared to Xcode, development for Android is nowhere as slick.

But still, I managed to hammer out a simple (Java-based) app with a minimum of fuss. And I didn't need to screw around with Gradle.

My first job involved Java and I used Eclipse for that. In the meantime, I spot another job which involves C++, Python and Objective-C. Recently I wanted to quickly hammer out an Android app and I was pleasantly surprised by Android Studio. In three days, I got a basic five-screen app running to display a JSON-pooping web service.

It works like you expect a modern IDE to work. And that's all I needed.

"you can only extract 20% of their capacity from them before you damage the battery by sulfating the plates."

You're confusing two issues, I think. Sulfation happens if a lead acid battery is kept in a (partially) discharged state for too long (weeks). That will happen with deep-cycle batteries as well.

The issue with starter batteries is that the plates are thin and tend to crumble during a deep discharge, when a large fraction of the lead plate is electrochemically converted.

"individual phones actually *poll* towers every few seconds"

I highly doubt that. A 2G gsm phone left next to an audio cable will only generate the familiar "bidibip" noise once an hour or so. I assume it does that in response to an "are you still there" request from the tower.

The radio transmitter in a cellphone is about one watt. For battery lifetime, you really don't want the transmitter to activate every few seconds.

But he did. Another RAID array of the same size would have sufficed. Oh, now I see what you mean. He didn't want to spend the money on a good way to backup that much data.

Another issue entirely :-)

"WIth a VM you have to install, maintain, patch and monitor everything yourself"

My experience with shared hosting is that they change system configuration all the time without informing me and thereby breaking my scripts. Never have that problem with a VM, but I admit that setting up a VM with dns, apache tweaks, iptables, and so on, is a major effort for someone who doesn't do that for a living, like me. But after that it's very little maintenance.

By the way, the site in my sig runs on shared hosting, including perl CGI and ssh, for EUR 7.95/yr. Cheaper than my time in figuring out how to setup multi-domain email in CentOS on my VM. But I had to tweak my scripts to deal with the peculiarities of this hoster and live error logs only available via directadmin...

front wheel drive for bikes in any sort of slippery conditions is dangerous because of the amount of acceleration from electric motors.

One would think that this problem solves itself because the motor uses friction with the front tire. Under slippery conditions, the motor has little traction as well.

But this box DOES have lights, as the ilustration clearly shows.

I hope the inventor knows what he is doing regarding the lights. Designing headlights such that they are usable and at the same time don't dazzle oncoming traffic is not entirely trivial.

the NYC law I wonder how it'd handle an electric bicycle that uses some sort of strain sensor to decide how much 'assist' to give the rider. IE you could set it to 100% and it'd try to match the power the user is putting into the bike

Well, it says: "motor that is capable of propelling the device without human power", so that should be legal. Here in the Netherlands, e-bikes have such a strain sensor; I think it measures strain near the back-wheel axis. And it is for legal reasons -- otherwise they would count as a moped and need a license plate and liability insurance.

By the way, e-bikes are getting rather popular in Netherlands, despite our lack of hills and bike-friendly temperatures. Still feels weird to be taken over at a considerable speed difference by an old lady sitting upright catching wind, with bags of groceries.

Build your own rims. It's surprisingly easy.

Does that include asymmetrically spoked rims (back wheel with derailleur gears)?