So, at noon, on a sunny day, the person that writes the DMV test for the a California Commercial Drivers License sees a fully loaded 18 wheeler moving 55 MPH on a paved road that is 426 feet away. Knowing that total stopping is about 387, the DMV writer feels safe to cross in front of the rig. The truck driver sees the pedestrian. The truck driver thinks back to the DMV test that indicates the total stopping distance for a truck is "More than the length of a football field". Not being a fan of football, the truck driver does not immediately know or remember the total stopping distance in feet, nor does the truck driver really have a perception of how long a football field is. The truck driver recalls that it is 100 yards, or is it 120 yards? Are the end zones counted or not? Wait, that's football, does the _DMV_ count the end zones? Is it even 100 or 120 yards? It might be some other number. The truck driver thinks to convert 120 yards to 360 feet for the safest number available at the moment. Like the DMV test writer, the truck driver knows that perception distance _was_ about 142 feet. They both know the reaction distance is about 60 feet. And the both know the total stopping distance would be about 387 feet. But they both know all that is considering ideal perception, reaction distance, and braking distance, so they allow for slightly more time. The truck driver cannot be certain at the moment, how much time has actually past. Anyhow, the truck driver applies the brakes as soon as humanly able and stops as quick as the situation allows. What the truck driver did not consider in the moment, is how much time was added to total stopping distance by thinking about the length of a football field. The truck strikes the DMV writer at 35 MPH. Sufficiently fatal in this case.

Problem solved.




I’m in the process of getting my CDL and am annoyed by a great deal of the DMV information that is entirely unhelpful for operating commercial vehicle safely. Such as exclusive double and triple negative questions on the test (What should you not do when situation A is not happening, but 2 is not happening, unless Q is not the case and Δ is not being applied?) Yah, I don’t even remember the question, just all the “not”s, “if”s, and “unless”es interlaced with something about a stop sign. How complicated must a question about a stop sign be? Some of the DMV’s information is blatantly false (probably because it is merely legally true). For example, DMV says halogen headlights pose no fire hazard. Really? I would think that any surface that gets three times hotter than a road flare could possible pose a fire risk in the right circumstances. I don’t care what they say, I will avoid positioning my headlights near anything flammable. Other information is completely useless. DMV’s question: why does speed increase when going downhill? The DMV’s answer is “Gravity”. WHY DOES WHY MATTER?! It could be caused by vortices, aether streams, mass pulsations, ultra-mundane corpuscles, electromagnetic radiation, non-constant planck lengths, pollution from quantum crystal-elf civilizations; drivers need to know and compensate for the fact that speed increases when going down hill REGARDLESS OF WHY! There is no situation where ‘why’ matters to this. Ada Lovelace, Einstein, Aristotle, Telsa, and Yogi Berra were all equally equipped to understand that speed increases when going down hill. It applies equally to driving on other planets! CA DMV, Please remove useless and confusing information from the written test and the CDL drivers manual. Inform and test me on safely operating a commercial vehicle, not if I paid attention in physics class, English class, or to Monday night football.

Are electric cars still a 'woman's car'?

At the turn of the century most cars were electric. 15,000 Baker Electrics were sold when it was in production. It outsold the Ford Model T during its production. Henry Ford's own wife refused to own a Model T, she had and EV. I'll say again, it outsold the Model T. Thing was, car companies made their electric cars to appeal to women drivers. Sadly, conventional wisdom of the time was that cars were too complicated to be operated by women. In reality crank start piston motors and steam powered vehicles (train engines with rubber wheels and a steering wheel) actually were physically demanding, messy, dangerous, and frightening for _any_ human to use. Looking at EV demographics over the years, in both marketing and actual customers, there is a definite female buyer trend. Trucks, 'traditionally male', were they last to get Hybrid models and last to get full EV modes (and have yet to get full EV). The Tesla Roadster would seem to be in contrast to this due to the whole macho supercar thing. While not doing anything to excluding females, Tesla marketing seems to have been meant for male buyers. But, still, my wife was totally opposed to the idea of owning an electric vehicle until she saw a Tesla Roadster. "THAT'S a car I wanna drive!" she said. The car she saw was owned and operated by a female. Infact, every Tesla Roadster owner I've ever corresponded with has been female. In ads for EVs where they show real drivers taking about their cars, seems to be more females than males. I can't image the company didn't notice that about their own adds; and approved the female to male ratio. So I'm left to wonder, are EVs still 'women cars'? Please post your opinions.

How to select a non-proprietary license.

Over the years I've come across several tutorials with detailed information on how to select from the list of Free Software (or Open Source) licenses and implement that selection. Here's mine: Before you start, if you already have any copyright notices concerning your software, delete them. Step 1: Download this file http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl2.txt and follow the instructions within. Before moving on to the next step, let us review. You have now absolved yourself or your company of all problematic legal entanglements. Should anyone cause you any legal grief, inform FSF.org, they'll handle it. There are no other steps. So stop wasting time on legalities and release your software already.

Gauntlet Legends inspired Heroes Of Forevia aims to create a less disconnected multiplayer experience

Multiplayer games these days can make one feel like all the other players are just there doing their own thing, not really people you're playing with. Heroes Of Forevia devs want online games to feel more like a local same-screen co-op. And with enough funds they'll do so for Android, iOS, and Linux as well. Note, Heroes Of Forevia will be proprietary.

Netbook Resolution too small -- Not a problem

Some applications, especially games, simply will not run when that encounter an exotic resolution. Even ones that support resolutions smaller than the one you have (its oddly expected you will run the app and adjust the resolution to a smaller one, even though the app will not run). This is easy to fix using Linux. You can use this to run stubborn DOS & Windows applications as well using emulation (DOSbox & wine respectively). Here are some instructions for an LCD screen on a netbook with a flashing native resolution of 1024x576 (not 1024x600). This example sets a virtual resolution of 1024x600 which is suitable to satisfy most 800x600 minimum apps. If you don'r have it, you'll need to install xrandr (in x11-xserver-utils)
Open a Linux Terminal (its on the GUI menu if you are not in one already)
type the line below:
xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1024x576 --fb 1024x600 --panning 1024x600

Done. There are 24 lines of resolution you can see in this arrangement (the top and/or on the bottom bits of the screen), but you may scroll this as needed by moving the Linux cursor to the edge that's hidden. If the app does not let you do this, then scroll the screen into an optimal view port _before_ running it. This trick can cause problems for apps that are expecting the computer to be set to its native resolution. So here is how to change back:

xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1024x576 --fb 1024x576

This works for even large minimum screen sizes, and for horizontal scrolling as well. 

Child's Play Charity shows Gamers Really Are Antisocial and Violent

Child's Play Charity was founded to improve the lives of sick children by donating toys and games to hospitals worldwide and as a rebuttal to those accusing gamers of being anti social and violent. How ironic that they give them things that are fun and bring them happiness on the condition that they must not try to understand how it works, must not try to improve it, discouraged from contributing to it, and above all they must not share it with their neighbor. I'm talkig of course about proprietary software. Most games that are copyrighted and by default; unsharable; because it is import to set that example to children at an early age¡ Were this the only way to bring joy into the lives of any children, then it would have to be so. But there's a better way. But children can be given games that are fun, bring them happiness and teach them how to be an improvement to society rather than a selfish cog in it. Games that encourage them to understand how they said games work. Games that encourage them to make improvements to said games. And most important of all, games that they can freely share their own sake's as well as the sake of their neighbor.
So am I saying "Think of the children"? Not at all; JAVA for children, lets think of everybody!
We don't need some organized charity, just people. He's how:
You, that is the reader, YOU, download the lite version of live.linuX-gamers.net (lite edition is sure not to offend anyone). You can get it at live.linuX-gamers.net. I STRONGLY recommend use the torrent download from the top of the list there. Write it to a CD-R using Infra recorder for Windows, Applications → Utilities → Disk Utility for Mac, or Brasero for Linux (or your preference). Write "Share Freely" on the disk. Give it to a child. Repeat.

DEWEY DECIMAL CLASSIFICATION (DCC)

Born 1876 in the mind of Melvil Dewey who has long since passed away. His Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) is a system for classifying and organizing works in libraries in such a way that almost anyone who can count can find and return books in their proper place. Not as much as a problem for chained libraries with hand written books. But in a modern libraries with the number of books ever increasing, this system is quite useful. Its only real competitor (in the real world) is the Library of Congress Classification (LCC). The DDC is widely known to be the easier of the two systems. The LCC systems is also extremely American-centric as evidenced in its categories such as "Class D - World History (everyone except American History)", "Class E American History" AND "Class F - American History", and "Class F - Local History of the United States and British, Dutch, French, and Latin America". The DDC was of course a product of the USA also, yet open enough to diverge from it's roots to be used in over 200,000 public and private libraries in 135 or more countries while the LCC remains mainly used US university libraries. So why does the LCC remain in use? I'll come back to this question.

Its proprietary. Yup, 134 years since its invention, the better system is still locked up in trademarks and copyrights. One would think its not possible. But some searching will reveal that current combinations of laws and congressional acts make it possible hold innovation hostage over 300 years (proprietaries can outlive nations). Many of the libraries using DDC are doing so illegally. The copyrights and trademarks supposedly designed to encourage Mr. Dewey's mind to create such a system in exchange for the US government's guarantee that it remains his to buy, sell, and trade have been acquired in a corporate takeover. Its not entrusted to his descendants. Not a foundation or charity. Its sold out to a corporation.

Meanwhile, librarians are worried. Books are being digitized and libraries are closing down due to lack of visitors and support. The Internet has taken a big share of the market. Never mind that Internet access costs money and libraries are free to customers or at least its much cheaper to pay for a library card. While the apparent majority can afford the expense, what of the ones who cannot? Some of the librarians seem willing to do almost anything to save their real world books on real world shelves in their real world buildings. This seems to be why they've willingly allowed the current state of affairs.

When I was a teen, I loved going to the library. Yes, I was a geek, still am. When I was relocated to a middle of a desert trailer park, I thought I might not get to a library for many years. But, there was a county library branch just a few blocks away; open from sunrise to sunset. Very small. Very, very small, but they could get any book there for me within a week by picking up the phone and asking for it. How did I know which book to ask for? They had a DDC index. They had a building, tables, chairs, a few shelves, a few books, a phone, a librarian, a type righter, and a DDC index. They did not have, electricity. Thus no computers, thus the hours of operation.

Currently libraries are under the thumb of the Online Computer Library Center of Dublin, Ohio. On the surface its non-profit membership corporation. Yet they are putting competitors out of business and/or acquiring libraries and other corporations. That should raise red-flags. A single corporation is gaining control of more and more libraries. Their software systems take control away from the libraries and centralize it to themselves. No longer can librarians search for and checkout books at the library. Now everything, even locating the book in the library, must be done on the computer over a network, even if your *at* the library. You see the librarians are compelled to input all the records into the system and _delete_or_physically_removed_ the old catalogs. Now only the OCLC knows where to find the books. But there is a charge to access the data. There's even a charge for using a scanner too many times. The very data the librarians provided is sold back to them. It is reminiscent of the lesser known variety of the chained libraries, sometimes called the "cadged library". In these, the books are unchanged but the readers are forced to be locking into a cage with them until they are finished reading. Now, its the librarians, chained to the OCLC through the computers. "Exaggeration" you say? Librarians must carry an RSA SecurID key fob that creates a new 6-digit number every 60 seconds. It keeps them bound to the computer. And, they must use the key along with their personal pin to access their own computers for *any* use.

So who's the members in this 'membership' corporation? The chained librarians of course.