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Comment My wife has one and loves it, for one reason. (Score 3, Interesting) 242

There aren't any current cellphones that fit in the pockets of the sort of clothes she wears. Size zero/one fashion clothing often doesn't even have pockets, much less ones that'll fit the half-tablet-sized cellphones these days. She had an HP Veer, the size of a credit card, that she loved, until it died. So now she has the same smartwatch and has what she calls a GIANT cellphone in her purse or stuck in her desk at work, and takes calls using her watch.

Size zero clothing is probably not on Woz's radar, but there are people who want tiny connectivity.

Comment Re:Which CAD software? (Score 1) 251

This is currently what I'm struggling to find. The main thing I've established is FreeCAD just isn't ready yet - very buggy and I can not get it to work, but parametric modelling is an interesting concept.

What else are people using for dimensioning parts which need to fit together? (i.e. part design, rather then modelling I guess?)

I've been using freecad, personally. I just did a series of adapters that allow me to attach RC servos to LEGO bricks for some inverse kinematics robots. It worked reasonably well. I've had it crash and do unexpected things, but what I've found is that if I work in the part design toolbar, build sketches that are fully constrained, and then use extrude/pocket operations to build my final parts, it seems pretty robust. Then I can switch to mesh and turn those into exportable meshes individually, and get parts that interact the way I want to. Half the stuff I'm doing I 3d print and the other half I mill on my cnc mill, and when I'm processing stl's I find again that having started from fully constrained sketches means the stl's are more robust and less likely to crash the cam programs I use.

Comment Re:Yeah right (Score 1) 769

My guess RFID. By one regular pod, cut RFID chip out of it, tape to the bottom of subsequent generic pods.

FWIW we tried that with our Stratasys 3d printer. It remembered the RFID number and remembered that the print cartridge was out of print material, so sticking the rfid tag to a new, third-party, 1/4 the price, filled to the brim container of print material did precisely nothing for us. I have no idea if the keurig will do the same. Oh, it was also a pain in the butt because they'd built it into the side of the cartridge, so when we cut it out it wouldn't simply stick on the new cartridge as it had a flat side and the resultant cartridge+rfid tag wouldn't fit in the printer, so we had to bodge something up by putting it on the front where the door closed and hoping it would be detected. It was, but see above.

Comment Re:flow = pressure/resistance (Score 1) 362

Why not simply lower the water pressure by 10% to curb water usage?

I dunno about everywhere else, but where I live -- next door to the local water tower -- there isn't any sort of water pressure regulation mechanism. You pump water into the water tower, and it flows by gravity to all the houses that are lower than it. And, in the summer, when everyone down in the valley is running their sprinklers, my water pressure is low enough it's difficult to take a shower, so even if you did manage to regulate pressure it would have a disproportionately large effect on some of the people and very little on some others.

Comment Re:Not plastic, titanium (Score 1) 82

This is purely anecdotal, but the two indie framemakers I know who have worked with 3d printed lugs have both said the lugs broke very quickly and they only used them for prototypes, didn't consider them safe to ride. One said he thought he could make a 3d printed lug (this was stainless steel, through shapeways, silver-soldered to Reynolds SS tubing) that would be durable but he guessed it would weigh about 4x as much as equivalent forged columbus lugs.

Comment Re:False choice society (Score 2) 388

It's the same as how Congress's approval rate is extremely low, yet in the last election most seats didn't change hands. In both cases, people are saying "everyone else is the problem, not me!" -- they said "vote out your incumbents" but still voted for their incumbents claiming their incumbent isn't the problem.

What makes this complicated is that I think that's a reflection of America. My congressman _is_ a really good representative for me: he's a smart gay liberal who has started several successful tech companies. I vote for him because he's doing stuff I like. My aunt's congressman is a good representative for her: a pro-life, pro-gun conservative creationist pastor. She votes for him because he's doing stuff she likes.
We'd like to think that there's a logical disconnect between "congress is crazy" and "my congress person is awesome" but that's not necessarily true: we, as a country, have an extremely wide spectrum of opinion. Jim Hightower used to say there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. If congress is a dead armadillo, midway between what I want them to be and my aunt wants them to be, my aunt and I can both be contemptuous of congress while liking our personal representatives, and both of us can be logically consistent in doing so.

Comment Re:Not found in "humans" in general (Score 5, Informative) 202

Lactose intolerance is complex. The Tuareg of Saharan Africa have lower lactose intolerance rates than Finnish people, for instance. It mostly has to do with whether a group has spent a long time as nomadic herders or not, and adult persistence of lactase activity appears to be caused by several different mutations, that arose spontaneously. http://s1.zetaboards.com/anthr... has a nice list of adult lactase activity in different ethnic groups.

Comment Re:Fancy technology (Score 1) 96

There was a fairly interesting Radiolab podcast about a program that shipped New York City's biosolids to Colorado for use as fertilizer: http://www.radiolab.org/story/...
It includes a significant discussion of waste treatment, pathogens, and the economics of shipping what some municipalities call hazardous waste cross-country.

Comment Re:I find this strange (Score 2) 397

Pure speculation, but it could very well be a knock-on effect from off-shoring manufacturing. You want at least some of your engineers to be close to the manufacturing line to debug when things go wrong. The designers might stay in the US, but manufacturing, test, packaging, etc., will shift towards the factories. And then, some years later, you'll want the designers to be near the mfg/tst/pkg guys to allow easier communication.

It's exactly this. You want your chip designers to be working right next to the mask layout people because layout needs designers to correctly optimize the layout. You want your test people to be able to walk through the whole test program design with the designers, who will be involved throughout the test hardware and program design, because test engineers know how testers work, and designers know how the chip works, and matching those is tricky. And you don't really want to be shipping tested wafers overseas for packaging and then waiting for them to come back to test packaged parts, and the product engineers need tester access and parts access to characterize the parts and produce the datasheet info, so at that point you have the whole silicon design team, from conception to finished parts, in one place. It can be done remotely but with a significant time adder or lots of evening/midnight phone meetings. It's easier to separate applications and project engineering from the design/manufacture group, but there's still some value in having them colocated. At that point, all that's left is middle management... and that's even easier to outsource.

Comment Re:In all seriousness.. (Score 1) 397

If private organizations can't use drones to help with natural disasters, such as those in Colorado, how do you suppose this will get approved to fly near local airports and various cities and towns won't outlaw the flying of drones?

Of course, there's always the question: How do you deliver to high-rise apartments and other high-density dwellings?

During the Colorado flood, the area around it was under temporary flight restrictions, as determined by the FAA, and no unauthorized aircraft were allowed to fly in it.
While TFR's are getting vastly more common as every penny-ante promoter wants to make every event seem so big it needs special FAA protection to allow it to run, the reality is that 99% of the time, 99% of the airspace is available for private and commercial air operations.

Comment Re:Porn browsing? (Score 1) 415

If anything, I'd mistrust the people who make a big deal about never looking at internet porn. Just look at the frequent revelations involving vocal evangelists.

In general, I've come to the conclusion the louder someone screeches about the morality of other people, the higher the likelihood they'll get caught in a scandal.

Which has more or less confirmed for me that people are lying douchebags, who mostly want to point the finger at everyone else.

The more rigid and extreme the position, the more they're full of shit.

While I entirely agree with your position, something to consider is that there is a logically consistent stance embedded in there. If you believe that everyone is a sinner and should try to reduce the amount that they sin, then it's consistent to sin while being vocally opposed to sinning: the person may regret the behavior and pray for forgiveness and all those other weird things people to do try to make themselves feel better about natural impulses that their churches have told them are bad. I think that situation is practically universal among evangelical religious types of most religions. They're all trying to force themselves and everyone else to hold high standards of living, and while failures to do so are inevitable they're still bad.

Comment I use the scope as a logic analyzer (Score 1) 215

Sure it doesn't do what a good logic analyzer does, but it's fast. Current project: trying to get an Ohaus digital scale's RS232 output talking via an FTDI serial-to-usb to my computer. Scope-to-computer works great. Computer-to-scope doesn't work at all. Hook up probes to the TX and RX lines and I can immediately see that something's going from minicom to the Ohaus, and the voltage is roughly what I'd expect. On RS232 that's a serious question, and one that most of the usb logic analyzers I've worked with don't address: is the voltage high enough to trigger something that may be expecting 12 volts?
And I'd like to see what it's actually sending. Hit the trigger button and type something in, and there it is on the screen. Save it, type in something else, overlay them. Hey, the FTDI is stripping off the terminal linefeed! That's good to know, given that the Ohaus absolutely requires CR,LF.
That took me about thirty seconds with a scope. It'd take me longer to start up the USB logic analyzer program and get it set up.

Comment Re:incandescent != sodium (Score 3, Interesting) 372

Another advantage, if purchasers care to implement it, is that you can have somewhat intelligent LED lights that dim down to 30% when there's no traffic around, so it's still light, but much lower power, then run back up when traffic is a block away. It doesn't add much to the system cost to add motion detection and communication with nearby lights, particularly since some industrial/commercial LED lights are adding selftest health/failure reporting already.

Comment yay for pre-emptive flood prep (Score 1) 85

I work in south Longmont. Where I cross the Boulder Creek, it's usually 3 meters wide and so shallow the rocks on the bottom emerge from the surface of the water. When I was hauling out yesterday after our workplace got an evacuation notice, the creek was a kilometer wide, backed up against the bridge, which is probably 15 meters wide by two meters deep.
Longmont spent eighteen months reworking the Lefthand Creek drainage, deepening it and tearing out all the trees beside it, through the middle of the city. At the time, local citizens were outraged at the expense, writing nasty letters to the newspaper and showing up at city council meetings yelling about what a waste of money it was and how debit spending was the devil. Lefthand filled right up to the top and moved like a freight train, but didn't overtop through much of the town. The place where they stopped the rework, and the creek returns to its shallow, cottonwood-tree-filled drainage, is where it spread out and started flooding basements, according to pictures my friends who live there are sending me. I'm hoping this experience will motivate the city of Boulder to do the same for Boulder Creek. One of my friends lived in a house across from Naropa University, right beside Boulder Creek, that had a big metal sign on the front warning the inhabitants that they lived in a flood zone. That should never happen. That should be parkland, not places where kids live. (She moved, thankfully, because that house had close to two meters of water in the main floor, from pictures I've seen, and I'd hate for her and her two toddlers to still be living there.)

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