I love playing with the button on the gear selector when I'm driving an automatic. It has a nice springy feel to it. I can completely imagine pressing that button many many times and then shifting from Drive to Park. If that activates some weird car mode, it seems kind of scary to me.

What I cannot understand at all, however, is why some important functionality is activated by some esoteric feature as this, in a car with a 200 square inch touch screen. Seems like this should be a menu option of some kind, in which the vehicle operator is able to clearly describe his intentions, with no room for ambiguity. "Want to turn on the feature that lets the car drive without you in it? Yes or no? Are you sure?" Doesn't seem hard. If they want to couple that with some actuation of "driver only" features like the gear selector, to reduce ambiguity over whether or not the driver actually wanted to enable this mode, all the better.

It's a good shell game, though. The benefit here is that by moving the energy conversion from a bunch of individual moving cars to a central location is moving a nonpoint pollution source to a point source. That's a huge improvement. You can do a much better job of filtering on a point source. I can build a large electrostatic filter and put it on a coal plant. I could even - as the government - force all plant owners to add expensive filtering to their plant. But it's much harder to do that to a million cars. Besides which, the fixed plant doesn't have to move - you have to carry all that equipment around with you while you drive. It doesn't weigh nothing, and reduces efficiency somewhat.

A lot of things get easier if you can do them in large scale in one place, than on small scale in a lot of places.

Honestly, the only reason I shop at Amazon is because they seem to have everything. As I have been noticing that they depart from that, or their prices get higher, I'm starting to look elsewhere. They were the best marketplace option but are becoming less so over the past year or so, and their competition is seeming a little better. But the competition still do not offer a really good comprehensive service... so I'm looking for other options but what I'm finding isn't great.

Thanks for that, it was interesting. IIRC getting the /system partition mounted rw was a pain on my last rooted device.

The funny thing is that the only reason I want to delete some of these apps is because it's so hard to do it - my hackles are raised and I'm too foolheaded to back down.

This is Slashdot, dude, of course I didn't RTFA. My point was to extend the summary - they may not be mandatory in an initial install anymore, but I already have a phone with this crap on it - in other words, the "included bloatware" has already been included. I'd like an easy way to remove it. And I'm far from alone. Look at the reviews on the play store for things like the HP printer service or half of the things which start with "S ". People give 1 star reviews because they hate these unremovable applications.

Personally, I've gone with the Titanium backup route, and I've deleted things using an apk terminal, but I'm a standard deviation or two above the mean android user, who just wants to unclutter the applications list. Those are scary, complicated things for Mom to do.

Be nice if I could uninstall some of that crap. I just bought a Samsung and a Motorola mobile phone. Can't believe how little extra stuff is installed on the Motorola - it's wonderful. But both of them have a lot of Google apps I just don't want. Love Gmail and calendar, but news? books? Do not want. It would be wonderful if Google would let us remove these apps via the Play store. If they could do something about all the extra Samsung junk that would be great too.

I can't believe I haven't seen anybody point out Excel:

http://www.excel1040.com/

I've been using the worksheet he provides to do my taxes for about 5 years now. He asks for donations. It's incredible. It is literally an implementation in Excel of the 1040 form set, and it turns out that those forms are incredibly easy to use if you just automate the stupid parts (if line x is greater than line y, subtract and enter result, otherwise enter zero) and tie the worksheets into the file. It's awesome.

It does not ask you a series of questions, it does not offer ways to help find deductions. It is simply an easy way to fill out the basic 1040 and damn near all of its schedules, and it turns out that doing that instead of answering an interview is really fast.

There's a huge difference between A/B testing, designed to optimize your website with the direct intent to improve sales, and performing experiments on how different news feeds affect your users' moods. A/B testing typically comprises changes in button size and color, website layout, font variations, etc; should we lead with the price, or with the benefits, or with something else? On the other hand, what FB and OKC are doing - admitting to, and proudly! - amounts to wholesale experimentation on their users, with undisclosed intent - perhaps to make the users come back more frequently for another hit.

This seems akin to me to cigarette companies manipulating the nicotine content of their products. That didn't go over well when it was finally disclosed.

You can't just tell people you "might" experiment with them, they have to know and understand that they are part of an experiment. They don't have to understand the goal, they just need to know what they are part of, and they have to consent to that experimentation. One could argue that A/B testing should submit to the same level of scrutiny as other psychological experiments, but I think people generally understand and accept corporations' profit incentive. We don't accept the idea that a company might wish to screw around with our mood or set us up on a date when they know it won't work out.

I've actually done exactly that, but not for that purpose. One eye is laser corrected to ~20/25 (degraded over about 15 years to about 20/35). The other eye can find the 'E' on the chart if you tell me which wall the chart is on. When I really need to, I put a contact lens in one eye (which gets the uncorrected eye to about 20/10). Otherwise I walk, read, work, type, drive, fly, etc. with what I believe is called monovision. It's easy. The world looks to me like normal, except that on the one ("bad") side I have very wide range of peripheral vision. I see whatever I focus on in good clarity.

It's amazing what your brain can compensate for. I can't wear glasses, though, that causes headaches.

Not such a big breakthrough as you'd think. As you increase the switching frequency you can decrease the value of inductor and capacitors required. Last CPU supply I built - 10 years ago! - used 100 nH inductors at 300 kHz per phase. I skimmed the PSMA article but there was mention of MHz operating speeds, not at all unheard of these days, so the components ought to be much smaller. A 10 nH inductor and some hundreds of pF of capacitance seems very feasible without stretching the bounds of silicon technology at all.

That's some amazing work. The current state of the art in CPU power supply designs hasn't changed in 15 years. 12V in, low voltage out, and the output voltage has been moving lower and lower for years, with designs below 1 V. If you figure you had a few percent of tolerance in the early years when everything ran off 2.5V and that few percent remains constant, then at 1 V you have almost no room for slop. So there are a lot of output capacitors there, both those electrolytics (you always hear people complaining about them but they're CHEAP) and ceramics. The ceramics cost a fortune and you need a lot of them to get your tolerance down - the first half microsecond of a load step is entirely the ceramic capacitor's response, not the controller or anything else. Moving part of the VR onboard allows them to reduce the parasitics significantly and they can probably tolerate a little higher tolerance as a result, but moreover they can get rid of some of those ceramics in the whole system - ultimately many of those on the motherboard.

So this is taking a lot of cake out of company mouths. Analog, Intersil, IRF, ON, who else - manufacturers of controllers, MOSFETs. Inductors, ceramic and 'lytic vendors are all going to lose out a bit here. Potentially Intel can reduce the platform cost vs. AMD as well, which is interesting. There is still an onboard VR but it will be 12 - 2.4 V, wherever they think the sweet spot is for efficiency and size. And the first real change in this industry for a long time. Cool work.

But reviews online are certainly corrupt. I don't use the star ratings for anything, unless an item only has a few reviews and all bad, and rely almost entirely on the BAD reviews for everything I purchase. If the bad reviews follow a common theme, it's a believable problem, and if I care about that problem vs. the price of the item, then I look for another item. Honestly I put less faith in the good reviews than the bad ones, especially when they're all glurge - no book, no product is perfect.

The IEEE standard for papers is still a two-column format, and the paper is only downloadable in PDF, so the first problem is that the paper is completely unreadable on anything other than your printed paper. PDF sucks, and therefore Kindle, ipad, etc. will all suck. This is totally fixable but I haven't seen an application yet that does it.

Other problem is that I like to literally draw on papers as I read them... to check the math, to call attention to something, etc. Nothing I have seen has as simple and easy to use of an interface as a pen and paper. Relatedly, when I desire to draw up a schematic or other technical drawing documentation, I have found that trying to do it on a computer is so complicated that it ruins my train of thought. It's not hard, per se, but compared with a marker on a whiteboard it sucks. Take a cell-phone-camera picture afterwards and it's preserved and digitized for ever.

Perhaps if Windows 8 takes off, and touch screens become the norm for all computers, and we can get rid of this ridiculous abstraction of a "mouse", we'll be able to accomplish more of these tasks on a computer. Still, for brainstorming or putting simple thoughts to paper, I don't know if I can see a future use case where the tablet takes over from pen and paper/whiteboard and marker. Unless doing it on a tablet adds something, it's just not worth it.

So what if the video is transmitted in the clear? What does that get you...

- against a sophisticated enemy? They already know you're there (radar, DF on the transmitted signal). You're flying around in a racetrack centered on your target, so even without the video they know roughly what you're looking at. Problem is solved by an enemy air-to-air missile, or they ignore you and watch you watching them.

- against an unsophisticated enemy? They don't even know to look for the signal in the first place.

- against an enemy marginally capable of receiving the video signal? Use more channels, change encoding schemes so that COTS equipment can't pick it up so easily. Or yeah, encode it. But encoding video is fairly difficult considering the need to do it in realtime with limited processing capability and no tolerance for latency (and this is the real reason video is still transmitted in the clear - it's expensive to do anything but!). Or embrace it. Maybe your enemy can see you watching him - that can be played to an advantage.

Just to hit on the basic point parent was discussing - that digital filtering is undesirably slow yet perhaps the best way to go...

I am not a hearing aid designer, but I've built lots of sensors. It would not be difficult to build an all-analog circuit with an ability to tune the gain on specific frequency bands via a digital potentiometer. When you have a lot of different, narrow bands it becomes challenging to fit all that in a tiny package. If it were just that, you could have the electronics for ~$50. Of course there's much more to a hearing aid than a few transducers and gain stages though.