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Comment Re:It's about wavelength, not brightness (Score 2) 229

It's not brightness but spectral irradiance that matters. You need to compare the spectral irradiance curves for the sun at the earth's surface and that of a welding process that a welding
filter is designed to block. Only public ref I can find is this which shows some significant UV radiation around 250nm greater than 0.5 W*(1/m^2)*(1/nm). The earth's atmosphere cuts out most of the hard UV, especially at sea level and times away from high noon.

So, in fact, welding radiation is more dangerous than the sun since the earth protects us.
Privacy

Ford Exec: 'We Know Everyone Who Breaks the Law' Thanks To Our GPS In Your Car 599

Posted by Soulskill from the they-know-what-you-did-last-summer dept.
An anonymous reader sends this report from Business Insider: "[Ford VP Jim Farley] was trying to describe how much data Ford has on its customers, and illustrate the fact that the company uses very little of it in order to avoid raising privacy concerns: 'We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you're doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you're doing. By the way, we don't supply that data to anyone,' he told attendees. Rather, he said, he imagined a day when the data might be used anonymously and in aggregate to help other marketers with traffic related problems. Suppose a stadium is holding an event; knowing how much traffic is making its way toward the arena might help the venue change its parking lot resources accordingly, he said." Farley later realized how his statement sounded, and added, "We do not track our customers in their cars without their approval or consent."
Hardware Hacking

Strong Contender Already For Adafruit's Kinect Challenge 86

Posted by Soulskill from the wave-your-hands-in-the-air dept.
sammyF70 writes "Adafruit's bounty on open source drivers for Microsoft's Kinect may have been already won. Someone called 'KinectMan2' has posted videos of Kinect's output as seen on Windows 7 to YouTube. That was fast. Hopefully Linux drivers are coming soon." A few more details are available on a forum post the man made. Adafruit said the bounty could be his if he posts the source code, and they also upped the reward to $3,000 in response to another silly statement from Microsoft.
Programming

The State of Ruby VMs — Ruby Renaissance 89

Posted by Soulskill from the take-your-pick dept.
igrigorik writes "In the short span of just a couple of years, the Ruby VM space has evolved to more than just a handful of choices: MRI, JRuby, IronRuby, MacRuby, Rubinius, MagLev, REE and BlueRuby. Four of these VMs will hit 1.0 status in the upcoming year and will open up entirely new possibilities for the language — Mac apps via MacRuby, Ruby in the browser via Silverlight, object persistence via Smalltalk VM, and so forth. This article takes a detailed look at the past year, the progress of each project, and where the community is heading. It's an exciting time to be a Rubyist."

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