What is with this obsession for using pedophiles to justify the erosion of rights and privacy? No, don't answer that, it was a rhetorical question.

Pedophiles are no worse than rapists, murderers and other criminals that cause physical harm to others. In fact I would rate them as a lower threat than murderers. How come we consider pedophiles so reprehensible that we go out of our way to ruin their lives forever yet we don't think twice about doing the same for a murderers or serially violent criminals? Should I have the right to know if my neighbor was in jail for killing someone? Shouldn't I be aware that someone in my neighborhood was jailed for beating a man to within an inch of his life? They don't respect life any more than a pedophile.

And the most idiotic aspect of registering sex offenders is we just lump everyone together. Sex offences can be everything from getting caught pissing on the bushes (your willy is hanging out), mooning someone (yes it is indecent exposure), a 16 y/o having consensual sex with an 18 y/o (statutory rape), right up to full blown violent 1978 "I spit on your grave" rape. So registry maps are full of useless noise.

Lets take it a step further and also make public a list of people who have: been arrested for drug possession, burglary, prostitution, and assault. This way we can all live in fear of our neighbors. Sounds great right?

I realize the EU is probably different than the US but every time this crap rolls around idiots start yammering about pedophiles and children.

I suppose I am the stereotypical geek (hate the label but whatever) and most of this is my opinion and perception of being a geek. So here goes...

Geeks are frustrated because they don't have good luck with women. Rejection and loneliness results in the misogyny and creepiness lamented here. As a matter of mental self-defense, geeks decide that women are turned off by intelligence, and they (despite themselves) go around demanding that women should smarten-up and start finding intelligence sexy. Well, this is incorrect.

I don't think many of us geeks really try to talk to enough girls to even begin to call it luck. Its hard to explain but ill try. Geeks are mostly very intelligent people. And our intelligence usually means we probably have some sort of disorder which makes us obsess over our hobbies. Its a good thing in that we have the drive to go after very complex problems. We use our knowledge and skills to solve those complex problems that many people cant even begin to understand. And sometimes it leads to a feeling of superiority: "I can design a 3 phase brushless motor drive in my sleep but these fucking pudding brained jocks get all the girls! WTF!" The problem isn't the jocks or the girls, its you. You spent all of your time obsessing over your hobbies that you never bothered to even try to say "Hey, aren't you in my class with professor Bumblebee? bla bla bla nice day today... bla bla... btw I love that book your reading there bla bla bla..." But often it is also that we aren't exactly alpha males either. So we have a poor self image and feel that we don't stand a chance. That or we are too shy/awkward/anxious etc. So we internalize and build more motor drives, software and whatnot to try and prove ourselves without ever actually proving anything to anyone but ourselves. (Am I making any sense here?) Bottom line is we need to suck it up and just go and talk to girls. Even if its just to make some small talk. But even small talk eludes us as small talk for us is Terry Pratchett, Why X programming language sucks/rules or that we bought a new FPGA dev board to implement a damn motor drive. We have to put our crazy hobbies aside and think simple. Not because the girl is simple but to give you a more common ground to lead into a conversation. Maybe it will lead to something very interesting. But that maybe wont come if we don't try.

Women aren't turned off by intelligence. They are turned off by constantly being made to feel stupid. They are also turned off by bad social skills, bad physical health, and the inclination to play video games and study all day every day (rather than going out and doing something fun with friends).

This is part of the superiority complex that develops when we get mad at ourselves for not trying. So we blame them instead of admitting we are the fuck ups. Bad social skills aren't bad social skills. We can socialize with each other just fine as we share common hobbies and therefor can comfortably talk to each other. What we consider interesting might be boring, looked down upon (the whole "this shit is for nerds" nonsense, a social problem) or beyond most peoples understanding. The sloppy hygiene is a result of poor parenting, period. I was raised to brush my teeth daily, shower regularly, wear clean clothes etc. I do let myself get a little sloppy looking but that is when I am just doing whatever. When I go out I clean up, fix my hair and try to dress nice. Most of the time us geeks look at fashion and hygiene as a nuisance that just gets in the way of another 100 lines of code or 20 more pages in a good book. We just need a little discipline.

If you want to get a real girlfriend, you are going to have to get over your sense of superiority, practice authentic humility, and be ready to give up a lot of your video-game time and study-time to instead go out on social events with a group of mutual friends, on a regular basis. Clean up your act, become what women want, and *then* you might get one. If you aren't willing to do this, then you have no business demanding that women start putting up with a bunch of stuff they don't like so they can have the privilege of being with you.

Saying all geeks have a superiority complex is simply not true and unfair. It does happen like I explained above but its an excuse for our failures. It might be anxiety, poor self esteem, self image or another disorder.

I never blamed girls or alpha males for my shyness, anxiety or poor self esteem. I just sat around thinking I just wasn't good enough. Did I get a girl? I sure did, an attractive girl too. But that was just having been in a situation where I got to know her and built up the courage to ask her out and it so happened that she liked me. For me to cold step up to her and say hi without knowing her, I would liken the feeling to what a person must feel when standing in front of a firing squad. After that relationship ended I went right back to feeling insecure and depressed, even more so. I envied and was even a bit jealous of my friends who were aggressive enough to talk to girls. Though I never had any feelings of hate or anger towards them, I just said what do they have that I don't? What am I missing? I have three friends who in their heyday were dating girls and getting laid left and right. That sure didn't help. They tried to get me to talk but I would lock up. I remember once going out and my friend told me "hey, that girl is checking you out over there. Go and talk to her RIGHT NOW before I drag you over there" I reluctantly did but I couldn't even speak. The girl look at me like I was some sort of crazy person and told me to fuck off. So you can imagine why I didn't have any luck. I was so discouraged from a few of those awkward trying to say hello moments and letting my anxiety eat me alive that I flat out gave up. My friends also gave up because if I wasn't going to make the effort why should they.

I am doing better today. Online dating has taken the anxiety part out which was my biggest hurdle. But I still feel awkward in public with a girl and I tend to talk too much which sometimes wrecks the first date. Oh well there is always next time. But I still don't make time for a next time often enough. I usually only get my guff up a few times a year. It sucks but that is my life and I am to blame for my problems. My only recourse is to work harder at making myself try harder.

Could have been the shitty card edge connector in the console. They remedied that with the vertical design after the SNES came out but it was too little, too late. And it always puzzled me as to why they made the boneheaded decision to change from the Japanese vertical cart load to the slot mess they made for the rest of the world.

My friend had a Gateway XP tablet PC. Not bad for browsing the web but not that great for much else unless you hooked a keyboard and mouse to it. It was single touch and if you used your fingers to try and press the tiny maximize button on a window, you may accidentally close it. So the sylus was a must, if you didn't loose it.

If it had multitouch, pinch zoom, and gestures to manipulate windows then it might have been better. Its on screen keyboard was also a disaster and typing URL's was painful. But I will chalk that up as a crappy design decision.

"In 1984 Vilfredo, Heloisa and their children left their home, their work and school and set off from FlorianÃpolis, the capital city of the State of Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil, to pursue their dream: circumnavigate the world on a sailboat."

Sounds like the Schurmanns had plenty of money.

You need land for that to happen. I live around the corner from a large public school in New York City. The land was almost a split between the footprint of the building and the school yard itself. As the cities population grew, there was a shortage of classrooms. The solution was to extend the school and take away half of the school yard. So now the school yard is smaller. They also did this for another public grade school not too far from me as well. I know of one school that had what little of a school yard they had left filled in with an extension. Land plots of land are scarce or prohibitively expensive in cities.

There were also three new schools built near me, a high school and two grade schools. All on land that was purchased for what I can only assume was a lot of money. The high school was built on the site of an old multistory factory building. One grade school was squeezed into a lot was between a bowling alley and railroad tracks. The other was again between some buildings and next to some abandoned LIRR tracks.

My old Catholic grade school could no longer sustain itself as the neighborhood demographic changed. The school was sold off last year, demolished and a public school is taking its place.

The city is still short on classrooms. They setup a few of those trailer classrooms on the front lawn of the local high school and they do look ugly. And do students want to change classes on a rainy or cold snowy day?

It not as easy or cheap as we all want it to be.

You forgot to add "a long time ago..."

I think it will be harder for the players seeing as how they will be constantly tripping over chairs that somehow wound up in the middle of the court.

I do a lot of industrial automation using steppers as they are very cheap and pretty robust for low speed work. In fact as we speak I am building a stepper indexer using off the self motors and drives.

Steppers stall because they are driven faster than the current can build up in the coils. As a result, the torque drops off since torque is directly proportional to the current in the motors coils. The motor can no longer move its load so it simply stalls. This happens after missing 2 or more steps and even if you remove the load the armature is stuck until the current is shut off. All of these 3D printers are probably using 12 volts to the bridge drivers which severely limits their torque curve.

One way to fix this is to increase the bus voltage to the bridge drivers. Industrial stepper drives mostly use 80-160V. Larger drives usually rectify the mains 120/240V AC and send it to the bridge drivers after some filtering. This allows the current to build faster and extend the torque curve further into the higher RPM's. But these are still stepper motors and they typically all drop torque after you go over 1000-2000 RPM. Remember, missed steps from resistance on the motor shaft is bad, it almost always leads to a stall.

Stepper motors are an indexing type motor and have physical teeth cut into the armature which line up with the stator poles. You index the motor by turning the poles on and off in sequence and the armature follows, cogging into place as the magnetic field lines up. Most steppers have 200 steps per rev, smaller steppers can vary quite a bit. There are a few stepper out there with more than 200, the 5 phase steppers from oriental motor are an example with 1000 steps per rev. The step count per rev can be increased using what is called micro stepping. The steps get divided up by varying current to the poles to hold the armature between the two poles using fast PWM.

Very rarely are steppers closed loop. If you command a stepper to move 200 counts, you will get 200 counts. The only reason you would need it is if you want to detect a few missed steps and compensate for it in your motion loop or detect a stall. The controller cant fix a stall unless it stops the current flows and starts over. And at that point you just ruined a part so its not much help.

Servo motors on the other hand can run at very high speeds. Servo drives can supply extra current when necessary to overcome resistance and keep the motion smooth and on track. This is done via the velocity loop which calculates the speed from the encoder feedback. When the motor slows, current is bumped up to overcome the resistance. But its usually only for a fraction of a second. Too much resistance and the drives will stop with an over current fault. You need to slow your system down, reduce the load or up the motor size.

Servo motors don't stall unless you lock up the output shaft which is usually a mechanical fault (hard limits hit, shaft coupler failure, bearing failure, etc.) or an undersized motor. And if you really want performance you get rid of the lead screws and rotary motors and go balls out with linear motors. They can achieve accuracies greater than 1 micron and speeds to 2+ meters per second. I have seen a few systems using them in person and its scary how fast they can gracefully accelerate and position a load.

And torque? Man they have torque. I had a large XY table with little NEMA 23 500W motors snap the aluminum couplings like a twig. The drive went bad, lost sync and tried to launch the table to the moon. Even jammed the table guides and ball screw nut requiring me to un-stick it with a come-along. A real mess. A similar sized stepper would have stalled. That table can easily position 500+ pounds though most of our motion is low speed so we don't need huge motors.

Ah, so about half a football field. Thanks!

I would like to point out that meter placement is quite random in America. I own two commercial buildings and both buildings have their water, electric and gas meters inside. My home has its gas and water meters inside but the electric meter is on the outside. A family friend has his electric meter inside his home as well as his water and gas. Some new "brick shit box" multifamily homes that were hastily erected to cash in on the housing bubble have both the electric and gas meters right out in the open. Often right in the front of the house next to the entrance. My brother lived in an apartment where the gas meter was actually inside one of his overhead kitchen cabinets and was only for the stove. The electric and water meters are probably in the basement.

The only meter that you will never find outside in a region that has cold winters is the water meter as they will freeze and burst in the winter. I imagine in some warm parts of the US (that never see freezing) could have their water meters outside.

Also, most meters are electronic and do not require entrance to your property.

Also you can't send out a signal along a pipe that is exposed to earth. Its like burying an antenna and then wondering why you cant get a reception. They also now use plastic pipes for gas mains.

I was assuming $1000 per year as the GP did not post any information. And while $1000/yr sounds crazy, a yearly fee to drive an EV on public roads does make sense. How else do they charge you for using the roads? And before you say log miles via odometer checks or GPS, think of the privacy concerns and fraud opportunities that come with it. I would say make it a flat rate depending on the vehicles class or weight.

If the vehicles are autonomous EV's, they will loose even more money. If they are loosing money from fuel taxes and traffic violation the next line of budget defense is the DMV. Think about it, your registration fees can be used as a method to reclaim lost revenue. It could be a yearly, monthly or quarterly charge and if you fail to pay, your cars registration is suspended. That right there could lead to more fines and fees so the cycle of plundering continues. They move to a direct method for funding the roads.

This system might also get more people off the roads and on to bikes, buses, trains and taxis. If a person does not drive much per year yet has to pay a fixed road use rate, it might not be worth it for them and they will forgo owning a car.

Negative. K-9 would be a better example.

The Cybermen have living human brains. They are cyborgs, not robots.

$1000 sounds more like a punishment for buying an EV. Can you post a link to the proposal?

The average driver travels about 15,000 miles (~24.000km) each year in the US. Even if it were a gas hungry van or SUV getting 12 MPG you are looking at only $618 in fuel tax for 15,000 miles using the national average* of 49.5 cents/gallon. You would need to buy about 2000 gallons of gasoline (using the national average) before you hit $1000. With a fuel efficient car getting at least 30MPG combined you will only pay $~247 if you drove 15,000 miles each year.

I am not familiar with the EV/MPG stuff but I look at it in terms of battery capacity and miles per charge. I used the leaf as an example.

The Leafs battery pack is 24kWh and has a range of 75 miles. So that right there is a rough estimate of 24kWh consumed from your homes electric system per 75 miles driven. It probably more depending on driving conditions, weather and efficiency but lets ignore that. to drive 15,000 miles you need (15,000/75)*24 = 4800kW hours of electricity. The national average* cost per kWh is about 12 cents. That works out to $576 per year in electric for 15,000 miles. Not bad.

Now lets compare that to a vehicle getting 30 MPG combined and driving 15,000 miles using the national average fuel price of $3.53. That will cost an estimated $1765 per year.

An EV fee of $1000 will raise your yearly operating cost to $~1600 (not including insurance and air freshener costs). At that price the advantage of owning a an EV and its lower energy cost almost goes out the window. I'd imagine a more efficient diesel car would break even with the electric car.

So an autonomous EV will will really put a dent in their pockets unless they cut the fat or just charge more money to register each year.

And yet we have multiple open source web servers, each with varying levels of complexity, feature sets and usage cases.