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Comment Re:So now that they've lost money with Oracle, (Score 1) 83

I have to think that the "owing to my naive reasonableness, I was duped" argument can't fly very well in a situation where Oregon had an attorney involved in making the contract. Perhaps, in the future, Oregon can use the "we have naive attorneys" advertisement as bait in a sting operation.

Comment Re:The real problem... isn't the weed (Score 1) 83

That was only legalized recently. It's being a state with no state income tax next to a state funded only by state income tax, which has been the ongoing situation for many years. More of the people with brains enough for a high paying job left in Oregon don't care so much about money. Among the smart people left who do care about money, there's doubtless a higher percentage of financial predators feeding on the higher percentage of financial gullibility in the surrounding population. This reinforces the "money people are evil" stereotype and the "tax 'em" response to it, maintaining the situation.

Comment Re:Radical new way to steer the car. (Score 1) 128

I have to disagree. Those take two hands, and the current crop of young drivers will want to operate the media/communications device also. Why not use one of these, give it a 9 volt battery, a bluetooth connection, and a piece of Velcro on the bottom. Then you could just put cup holders everywhere, and the driver could stick it to the one that's most convenient.

Submission + - Goldelico refunds Neo900 money - 86.8% 1

John.Banister writes: I received the following email from service@goldelico.com

Dear Neo900 customer,

You may have read on the forums and mailing lists that we need to reorganize the financial side of how the project is managed:

<http://neo900.org/news-0011-progress-update-may>
<http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=93197>

The orders Golden Delicious Computers (GDC) has received have to be "rolled back". Since the "roll back" voids your agreement with GDC, all those who sent 100 EUR or more get a refund. The amount refunded will be your original payment minus about 13% for work done in the project so far (see below for details). If your transfer was in a foreign currency, there can be additional differences due to exchange rate variations.

The refund goes either directly back to your credit card (if you used one to pay) or if you have used SEPA/IBAN bank transfer, please provide your account data where we should send the money to. Please note that we do the refund in EUR, so the resulting amount depends on the exchange rate of your local currency.

Here are the details how we have calculated the refund amount. GDC has spent (incl. VAT) so far for this project:

* 2983.66 EUR — material (e.g. PCBs, components, 1000 display connectors)
* 6924.31 EUR — engineering (R&D)
* 990.80 EUR — other expenses (e.g. shipment, credit card fees, server operation, shop, tax advisor, etc.)

Payments below 100 EUR are not refundable. They make a total of exactly 1000 EUR from 50 persons. This means that the remaining expenses of 9898.77 EUR are to be equitably shared by the customers with payments of 100 EUR or more, who donated 75 045 EUR in total. Therefore, 13.2% of the total amount has been already spent.

This amount (13.2%) will be subtracted from what you have originally paid and is equivalent to your contribution to bring the project to the status it currently has (thanks!). This includes that we make the EAGLE design files open source (under CC BY-SA) so that anyone can continue.

To view the current and complete status of your order, please open your personal order link:
[...]
We recommend to bookmark this link.

With kind regards,
Your team from Golden Delicious Computers.

Sad that they've had this problem.

Comment I wonder about other game genres (Score 1) 168

like, RTS, for example. I suspect that THC is helpful for situations where one needs to focus in, but the opposite of helpful for situations where one needs to multitask. However, that which seems like multiple tasks to one mind may well be perceived as a single (multidimensional but easily subject to simultaneous apprehension) task to another. If people play video games for job interviews as was discussed this past January, ...

Submission + - SSD breakthrough means 300% speed boost, 60% less power usage.even on old drives 1

mrspoonsi writes: A breakthrough has been made in SSD technology that could mean drastic performance increases due to the overcoming of one of the major issues in the memory type. Currently, data cannot be directly overwritten onto the NAND chips used in the devices. Files must be written to a clean area of the drive whilst the old area is formatted. This eventually causes fragmented data and lowers the drive's life and performance over time. However, a Japanese team at Chuo University have finally overcome the issue that is as old as the technology itself. Officially unveiled at the 2014 IEEE International Memory Workshop in Taipei, the researchers have written a brand new middleware for the drives that controls how the data is written to and stored on the device. Their new version utilizes what they call a 'logical block address scrambler' which effectively prevents data being written to a new 'page' on the device unless it is absolutely required. Instead, it is placed in a block to be erased and consolidated in the next sweep. This means significantly less behind-the-scenes file copying that results in increased performance from idle.

Comment Re:Measuring Disinterest (Score 1) 255

I think a lot, if not most, of driving citations result, not from people being unable to drive in a legal manner, but from people prioritizing other things over driving in a legal manner. Assuming that Google's algorithm prioritizes safety over legality if there's a conflict, their record does make a good example for the people arguing that conflicts involving risks to human life are unlikely to occur in an all driverless future, but what the rate of current traffic citations says about the human preference for having other priorities suggests that an all driverless future is, itself, an unlikely occurrence. Personally, I guess that most people who prefer driverless will be happier with trains.

Comment Re:Vs the NSA (Score 2) 225

They could be trying to show to the public the NSA doing something the public will like. I imagine that showing documented evidence of who in China ordered the foot soldiers to do their job would involve revelation of capability that they don't want to reveal. Whereas, the current business shows a favorable result of spying on international connections to domestic businesses, demonstrating why the NSA wants the access they have to the domestic network.

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