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Comment The article seems to focus just on light (Score 1) 201

from TFA : "...but a cloak that perfectly hides objects at all wavelengths of radiation — including AM radio waves, visible light and X-rays — would be extremely difficult to create..."

How about ultrasonic sensors? Or rain, like another message says. Ground pressure or vibration.

I think something with enough sensitivity (like a cloaked object going past a stationary LIDAR gun beam) could see some disturbance that wasn't there before. If the light is bending around an object, it may be invisible but the light would be taking longer to make the trip.
A properly tuned laser beam frequency with matching receiver could probably detect cloaked objects too.

So much of this is by "cloaked to a person" and not to sensors.

Comment Seen before with Cogent/Sprint (Score 5, Informative) 111

The following is copied from a previous Cogent/Spint debacle posting:

Just like what happened with Level(3) a few years ago.

Cogent's history in the ISP market has been absolutely horrible. They came in to town as the Walmart of ISPs, investing in a huge new super-efficient backbone infrastructure doing everything it could to cut costs so they could offer insane deals to their customers. They were running 10Gigabit connections using existing fiber and brand new equipment. They had no 'legacy' hardware.

The hosting industry bit into the Cogent game when they had customers running multimedia sites that needed tons of bandwidth (see: porn) and were tired of paying insane rates per mbps when Cogent had this brand new network with tons of capacity.

But Cogent wasn't in the 'settlement free interconnect' game yet, they were paying for bandwidth themselves. So they went out and purchased a few ISPs that already had settlement free interconnects. The agreements are already in place, so it was a big win situation for them. But these agreements almost always come with the term that you must give as much as you receive (so you need to have a balance between hosted sites and end users.) Cogent didn't have end users, they had servers.

Think of it this way: I am an apartment complex and I have an agreement to mow my neighbor's lawn and in exchange he shovels my sidewalk. It uses approximately the same amount of work. Now imagine my neighbor and all of his agreements are bought by the local golf course. Now the golf course now expects me to mow the entire course because the agreement was that they would shovel and I would mow. Cogent was the golf course, I am an ISP.

Now in my apartment I house a bunch of golfers once I say "screw this, figure out your lawn situation yourself" the course says "ok, well, I guess your tenants are going to have to go without golf." What the hell am I to do now? Mow this golf course to keep my tenants happy?

Finally I come to an agreement, the golf course has to pay me a small amount and I will mow their grass. Everything seems OK, but then the golf course gets in to a bit of trouble and all of a sudden decides "OK, well... he doesn't want his tenants to go without golf so he will probably keep mowing our grass even if we stop paying him." Here we are again, I'm in an impossible situation because I really care about my tenants but man, I just cannot mow an entire golf course all by myself. So I send the golf course warnings after warnings, and after I reach a tipping point I just say "GFY, I'm not mowing your course anymore." I stop mowing it, and the golf course says "IT IS TOTALLY HIS FAULT THAT YOU CANNOT PLAY GOLF!!!"

Right now a lot of ISPs can hit Cogent's old pricing (and Cogent just cannot go any lower than they already are) so a lot if ISPs will just pass on Cogent and go for someone with a better record.

There is a lot more to the story that we don't know about, and since these agreements are generally done under a NDA we will never know for sure what exactly is happening at Cogent.

Just a FYI: I work for a hosting company that has had some dealings with Cogent in the past.

Comment False positve and False negative readings (Score 4, Insightful) 143

Much like detecting terrorists by facial recognition, this is vaporware until they publish some numbers.

I once had someone misplace a sales call to me, being proud his facial recognition system was 70% accurate. He had no idea how much his system is a pain in the ass when its wrong, and for the airport security business he was trying to get, 90% accuracy is considered terrible.

Comment Focus may be different (Score 1) 144

I didn't RTFA.

When I'm playing a driving game, I'm looking at the road and don't see the signs much because my focus of attention is narrowed to the road.

When playing the same game for running over pedestrians, I'm looking all over to find where they are.

They want to do advertising, then put it ON the road.

Comment Re:Right - maybe for research, not industry (Score 1) 184

I went to a seminar on robotics 2 months ago. I knew the presenter from a robot project 3 years ago, he set the robot on the table clamped it down, started it up, and it swung around to punch a hole in the wall into the other room.

The presenter later said the last time he used the robot he was demo-ing a high speed move, and for got to set it to low speed before putting it away.

Presentation hall was not pleased.... We found it hilarious.

Comment Re:Seems to work just fine (Score 1) 264

But I feel what GP was saying is that just by providing 58.44 without context which one is it?
1. mole of sodium chloride in grams
2. the area of a circle with radius 4.313...
3. double 29.22
4. anything that could include a ratio of 3,13,or 149 in any combination (factors of 5844)

And I think a more precise number for mole of sodium chloride is 58.443, so what level of precision is required to get what result????

Comment Re:Easy for you to say (Score 1) 311

Sorry to say, but crushing loneliness is only crushing because you let it do so.

I never tried to find people, and on weekends I stayed at home for the entire weekend without going outside. Loved it for 20 years.

Got married recently, spend a lot of weekends with other people I don't prefer sometimes. Love that too for 6 years now.

Comment Re:"Postini"? (Score 1) 176

While I was in IT, there would be blocked messages from employees to other employees. Flagged as spam. Usually the sales or service departments.

Each one had something like "Come look at our new product at " or some such for 3 lines as a signature. If I didn't know these people, I'd flag it as spam.

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