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by Omega Hacker (#47226777) Attached to: California Regulators Tell Ride-Shares No Airport Runs
I try not to feed the trolls, but I just can't pass this one up:

"An order of magnitude more? 200 dollars? Really?"

Apparently you're too dumb to comprehend that he very clearly stated that $20 is *more* than the gas cost by an order of magnitude. That means he's spending $2 in gas for the trip. At the current ~$4/gal with what passes for an "efficient" vehicle in the US, that puts his round trip at ~12.5mi, or roughly 6 miles from the airport.

The depth of your illiteracy truly astounds me.

Comment: BoomerangIt doesn't offer anything anymore? (Score 3, Interesting) 250

by Omega Hacker (#46316945) Attached to: Slashdot Asks: Do You Label Your Tech Gear, and If So, How?
I was actually intrigued by BoomerangIt, until I noticed that a) "BoomerangIt Packs and Subscriptions are no longer available for purchase." and b) the cart indeed does not exist.

I'm a little fuzzy on how you a) start a business selling labels that promise long-term lookup&return, then b) stop selling new labels and thus getting new income, while c) still being required ("nominally") to provide the lookup&return service, without d) running out of money and imploding.

Am I missing something with either their site or their apparent lack of business model???

Comment: Re:Confiscate cameras (Score 5, Insightful) 478

by Omega Hacker (#46277243) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Anti-Camera Device For Use In a Small Bus?
I think you misunderstand. This has nothing to do with the passengers not wanting their picture taken. This has *everything* to do with the jackass owner trying to ensure that nobody can take their own pictures, because I guarantee he's got a photographer onboard who's taking "professional" pictures which are sold at ludicrous prices. Have you *been* to a themepark?

Comment: Re:And this is why (Score 1) 206

by Omega Hacker (#46168493) Attached to: Lawmakers Threaten Legal Basis of NSA Surveillance
Agreed. Automatic expiration of laws help weed out old crap, and force lawmakers to *actively* support reauthorization of any bill and thus face any fallout over bills that might have seemed good at the time (no, I do *not* think the "patriot" act was a good thing at a time, but a lot of morons did) but have since proved to be a bad idea. Bonus: if lawmakers were required (after radically re-arranging the congressional rules) to re-up every single bill, we'd have a *LOT FEWER* bills in total. As long as they are not given the "out" of letting their underlings ([tenured] staff) re-up old stuff, they simply have a finite amount of time to both re-up and develop new bills.

Comment: Horse... barndoor... (Score 5, Insightful) 301

While I generaly loathe our excessive use of fossil fuels, this is a case where the "market" is well in the lead of regulators. Those oils sands are already being dug up and processed, and the market is not going to let anything get in the way of that. This pipeline simply reduces the overall environmental impact and increases the safety (Casselton, North Dakota anyone?) of moving what is already being produced.

Comment: HDL (Score 1) 165

by Omega Hacker (#45623223) Attached to: Why Reactive Programming For Databases Is Awesome
Tl;DR [yet], but initially this sounds a lot like HDL's like Verilog and VHDL. The two fundamental constructs there are things that happen continuously (collections of simple logic gates) and things that happen based on a clock (registers, built around flip-flops). At a high level, this sounds like A = B+C is a continuous adder, and A is changed instantaneously with B and C. In the HDL world, this gets "compiled" down to silicon, but in a software world this would be radically harder to do, because you have to notify anybody listening to A that B and/or C has changed. Yes, it's like a spreadsheet in that sense.

Comment: Re:Skyjack only works for WiFi drones! (Score 1) 161

by Omega Hacker (#45590401) Attached to: How To Hijack a Drone For $400 In Less Than an Hour
I *highly* doubt the Amazon drones will be operated by some hobbyist Futaba or Spektrum protocol. Doing such a thing would be absolutely ludicrous from just about every angle possible. First of all, such protocols are nothing more than "stream-of-servo" positioning commands, and very badly suited to autonomous drone control. Honestly they're pretty badly suited to manual drone control IMO. Second, they are even less secure than WiFi. I'm going to take a wild guess and say that the Amazon drones will be cellular-controlled, with high-end SSL used to send the drone a set of GPS coordinates (waypoints, etc.), and the drone will handle *every* control aspect from there on out, as it should.

Comment: Re:My lab (Score 1) 215

by Omega Hacker (#45482359) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What's On Your Hardware Lab Bench?

Marvin the domestic shorthair (humane society acquisition). His younger "sister" Kaylee was probably curled up on our bed at the time, plotting sneak attacks on Marvin in her sleep...

The mess is a consequence of the ongoing debugging of the primary project being interrupted by a bug that crept into a previous product and took over my desk with various levels of fix development for that. I'm cleaning up right now because the primary project may have just had a breakthrough and I need space to test it in full scale.

Comment: My lab (Score 2) 215

by Omega Hacker (#45478037) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What's On Your Hardware Lab Bench?

First of all what I'm doing: I'm designing industrial embedded hardware, using funky data busses and high-resolution ADC's. I do all the hardware design, layout, prototype fabrication, and *all* firmware and host-side software. I'm pretty much a one-stop shop for this project (and the only engineer on it...). The hardware is all "slow" stuff at this point, with the fastest clock being the 32MHz driving the 8-bit microcontrollers scattered throughout the system.

Panorama of my office

First off I've got my computer in the "middle", nothing special except the monitor's on an arm to free up desk space. A second monitor to the right is used for debugging consoles etc. (and WoW). Several USB hubs are scattered around (some mounted) for use by both tools and the product under development.

To my left up on a shelf I have a (rented...) Agilent MSO-X 3014A scope, 4-channels plus 16 digital, unfortunately only the 100MHz version. I have a second-hand cheapy 5MHz signal generator next to that for occasional use (impedance checking etc). A simple Protek 3006B power supply (Fry's?) handles everything I can't run off USB 5V or from an LDO.

A Saleae Logic and Logic16 do quite a bit of work for me, and there's the occasional use of a BusPirate. An AVR-ISP MkII handles direct programming of the microcontrollers when possible, while the vast majority of my programming and test jigs are built around my own STK500v2 implementation multiplexed with serial debug.

To my immediate left is the main project space, while to my right is space for whatever projects crop up and don't have to have direct access to the scope.

In the window against the desk would be one or both cats.

To the far left is my soldering environment, which includes a regular temp-controlled soldering iron as well as an Aoyue Int968 hot-air soldering station (with its own soldering iron). A $25 toaster oven is used for reflowing most simple boards. Bins of loose parts cover the shelving above.

Behind me is a desk that holds a "proper" reflow oven, albeit the cheapo $300 unit from eBay, as well as a rework station of the kind used for XBox repairs (some of my boards have a *lot* of thermal mass that hot air alone can't handle). Reels upon reels of SMT parts are piled under the desk...

Lighting is provided by 2x 60/meter LED strips that side-fire to each side along the camera-window axis, plus an overhead Ikea quint-MR12 set over the main workspace when needed.
