Mmm.... you're right, I think. And sometimes you can pin down exactly who it is, too.... like, for example, if you suddenly have 5 posts modded as "troll" (that clearly aren't trolls) the day after you call somebody out for being a self-important twat with no clue what he's actually talking about... (look at my posting history for an example, you get a cookie if you can guess who it is)....

It happens. Some people are idiots. Theoretically the meta-mod system is in place to mitigate that kind of asshattery. Practically, though, Karma really doesn't serve a purpose at this place at all, except that when it gets high enough you have the option of turning off ads on the site without buying a subscription (as if you couldn't do the same thing with AdBlock Plus :P)

You're right that the screen is the biggest drain on power... on my laptop, it accounts for about 40-50% of the juice that the system uses. Most of that comes from the backlight... in fact, battery life goes up by almost an hour by turning the backlight down to respectable levels. The system in question gets very good battery life, though... it's a 15.4" display @ 1680x1050, with a GeForce 8600M GT 256MB. 4GB of RAM, T5450 processor, 120GB 7200rpm hard drive, running Windows 7 (RTM version, from MSDN). I was able to stay online for 3h during a power failure while raiding in WoW... ventrilo, wireless network (UPS to keep home server up), and all. (it's a Dell Inspiron 1520 with the 9-cell "high capacity" battery)

But if I can get that kind of battery life out of a system that's drawing its maximum, what do you suppose would happen to the battery life if I were to swap out the 25W Centrino processor with a 2W ARM? Ok, it probably wouldn't be powerful enough to run WoW, but for something like word processing/web surfing, and a few other power efficiency changes (video card, display resolution/brightness, hard drive for SSD), we could be building laptops with a full size keyboard and screen that's big enough to do actual *work* on that can pull off 8h on a charge.

Y'know, in Canada, we use this funky invention, called pen & paper for voting. You are given a ballot that clearly lists each candidate's name, their party affiliation, and has a white circle to the side. You make your mark in the circle of the candidate you want to vote for. If you mark more than one candidate, or if you mark outside of the circle, or make any kind of personally identifying mark on the ballot, your vote is considered spoiled and rejected. It's really idiot-proof, when you think about it... there's even a placard on display in the voting booths that shows examples of how to correctly mark the ballot, and what will cause your ballot to be rejected.

Each polling station has two members of staff, and will handle between 200-500 voters. At the end of polling day, those two will unseal the ballot box, and count the ballots. Each party has a right to have two representatives serve as scrutineers to make sure the count is done correctly. Once their count is completed, they report their count in to the returning officer for the electoral district. They then make arrangements to get the ballot box and its contents to the office of the RO. As the polling stations report in, their results are updated electronically with Elections, who can announce preliminary results. In cases where the count is close between candidates, a judicial recount is required, and candidats have the right to scrutinize the recount in order to make certain that it is done transparently and correctly. All the while, the anonymity of the vote is assured, because the ballot is rejected if it's personally identifiable. After the recount period, the returning officer will announce the official winner, which *usually* matches the preliminary results. It's an expensive way to do things (EC employs about 190,000 people during the average federal election), but we have our final and official results within days of polling day, not months.

Oh, and our elections are usually done in 36 days, not the year+ that American elections campaigns can take.

So yeah. If only there was a system where the vote could be verified efficiently, quickly, and while preserving the anonymity of the elector. Having a physical ballot where telling who the vote is for is idiot-proof, and where the candidates can oversee the ballot counting and have a right to contest a ballot that is invalid or miscounted... what a concept.

That's 7,776,000 chips/day. I find that more than hard to believe.

They're not building the chips themselves. ARM licenses their chip designs out to other fabricators. When you consider that most of the cell phones in the world have an ARM chip in them, as well as many embedded devices (ATMs, fridges, programmable coffee makers, DVD players, car stereos, iPods/portable MP3 players, programmable remote controls, telephones, etc.), it's really not hard to conceive that they're shipping 2 billion units a year. Actually, I'm a little surprised the number is so low.

I do wish I had mod points...

But the parent is absolutely right, and whoever submitted TFS is either trolling or an idiot. I'm not surprised that the editors haven't read TFA or the law, but the submitter? That's a new low....

Yeah, 'blame Canada' - to put it in context, most Canadians west of Ontario, view Ontario in the same way most Americans view France - that is, hopelessly and utterly broken. So stuff like this isn't a surprise - I don't mean to troll, but those easterners are about as blissfully statist as you can get and still be called a democracy.

You do realize that this particular law is in place in Ontario and Quebec because we were following suit from Alberta and BC?

And actually, the way the law is worded, my iPhone would be exempt. It's docked into a charger/fm transmitter station.

It would be exempt. As long as you were not using it to text or write an e-mail. If you're using it as a hands-free cell phone, then you're fine. If you're using it as a media player, you're fine, as long as you aren't taking your attention from the road to browse through your collection and choose a CD. But in spite of that exemption, there are some things that are still illegal.

The law contains exceptions for EVERYONE to use a cell phone to call 911. So whether it's you calling the police, or the police calling the police, it's the same rules.

The law also contains a blanket exemption for *all* emergency vehicles. Fire/Ambulance as well as Police.

As for the why, it's because those emergency vehicles need to be able to use the radio to stay in touch with dispatch and be able to actually perform their emergency services. There's an exemption for professional uses as well... so that truck drivers and bus drivers can use their radios, too, but I don't think it applies to would-be "professionals" with a mobile office using the cell phone.

Irregardless, TFS is completely wrong and FUD. The law applies to hand-held devices. Cell phones, Nintendos, portable DVDs, GPS devices, etc.. It does not apply to drinking coffee, changing the radio station, or even people who like to drive with one arm hanging out the window.

That's insulting to Neanderthals, many of whom would look like Rhodes scholars in comparison to the majority of /b/.

How can the DoD release software under a copyleft license when the federal government is incapable of holding copyrights in the first place? I thought it was all automatically PD if it's not secret? Not that that's stopped anyone from asserting copyright when it suits them.

Just because the DoD develops software doesn't mean they have to release it at all. You can request the software under Access to Information (FOIA in the US, I think?), but they can always cite national security reasons for not releasing, say, the guidance code for the Tomahawk missile.

Without having read the memo in full, I would presume that they're talking about what license to use when releasing stuff. I'd sincerely doubt that they would use something like the GPL/LGPL to release code, but there are other open source licences that are more in line with what the government does. The ones that leap immediately to mind are the BSD and MIT licenses, both of which had their births in the need to keep government-funded developments in the public domain.

Considering the number of posts you've made that've been modded troll, you might consider correcting your language. Either that, or pulling your head out of your ass.

Since you're throwing videos at me, I'd suggest you watch this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlGnKPpOpbE ... A modern GPU is a *hugely* parallel manycore ecosystem (some of nVidia's mainstream offerings are operating with 240 logical cores, and ATi/AMD isn't far off that mark), and is optimized for floating point and matrix operations. They're very specialized for certain kinds of operations that are best for graphics performance (and happen to be damned good for things like databases/indexing), but for certain applications a modern GPU is easily as fast as a modern CPU, and in some ways, it's significantly faster. Are you *trying* to sound like a self-important ass with no clue what he's actually on about? People like that are why I left academia to work in the government... at least there, people are honest about not having a clue what they're doing. You really do need to stop thinking in terms of offloading processes through a bus, which is the limiting factor, and start thinking of a processor that's optimized/designed in the same way as a GPU operating as the CPU of the system. It's a purpose-built specialized processor that's intended for one specific type of operations, and it just so happens that said operations would be useful for database applications.

Irregardless, this'll be the last time I waste bandwidth trying to speak with you. I do wish that Slashdot would give users the ability to outright ignore everything another user were to post, every single time.

Right now I am torn between the Samsung Moment and the HTC Hero I just hope that we see them get 1.6 and 2.0 updates very soon.

FWIW, I've got an HTC Dream and am quite happy with it. And one of the main reasons I'm so happy with it is because it's got a fold-out QWERTY keyboard. I couldn't imagine trying to type out text messages or e-mails using an on-screen touch keyboard. Nowhere near efficient enough.

On the other hand, between the two you've listed, I'd go for the Samsung. Built-in 3.5mm jack is what sells me, but having a d-pad instead of the trackball is also a major plus. My biggest annoyance with the HTC phone is that it uses a single mini-USB connector for everything... charger, headphones/hands free, etc. It doesn't actually have any other input/output ports besides the single mini-USB. That means I can't charge the phone while listening to music on the headphones, or I can't transfer files to/from the computer while listening to music. On the plus side, at least, it does charge directly from the USB on a computer, meaning I don't need to bring the wall wart with me to work in order to charge it. :)

Actually, the focus is fixed to about 10 feet with those.

The image may appear as though it's a big screen 10 feet away, but the physical display device is an inch away from your eyes, not to mention the frame itself. Your eyes are focusing at a fixed focal length an inch away from the eye for prolonged periods of time. That causes eye strain at best, and permanent damage to your eyesight at worst.

So... would the logic then extend to smaller LCD panels being EASIER to make in higher resolutions? It seems reasonable. However, if that's the case, why isn't the market full of high resolution small LCD panels that can be used to make these $900 into $100 units that everyone could be using instead of massive LCD monitors?

There's a practical limit to useful pixel density for most computer uses. Some, the higher your resolution the better... things like photo editing and medical imaging, for example. For something like text display, even a 100dpi font would look pretty small/squished on a 300dpi display, unless you were artificially increasing its size so that it takes up more physical real estate on screen. Now, Windows Vista and 7 already do that for icons... they automatically adjust the size of the icon based on the dpi of your display, as detected through plug & pray. It's not impossible to do this for fonts, and with modern computers it's not even a serious hinderance to performance, even if you start doing anti-aliasing to get rid of jaggies from the enlargement. But if all you're doing is displaying text, why spend the extra money on a screen with a super-high pixel density?

Plus, the fabrication of high density screens is always going to be harder than low density screens. There *may* be some merit to what you're saying, in that it could be easier to make a high density small screen than a high density large screen -- I haven't looked into that, but my cell phone has a pixel density of 140dpi on its screen, and my netbook is 180dpi, whereas my 15.4" laptop is only 120dpi -- but just from a physics standpoint, it's going to be easier to make a 20dpi screen than a 120dpi screen.

I wouldn't buy a pair of those even if you paid me. 1024x768 maximum effective resolution, with the native resolution on the screens being 640x480. It's cool and all, but that's nowhere near enough pixels for me to actually get some work done. My laptop's got a 1680x1050 LCD and I complain that *that's* not enough pixels for me to effectively multitask. Not to mention the harm you're doing to your eye by trying to focus on something that's an inch away from your face.

They're a cool toy, and might be fun for gaming, but not really any good for actual work, IMO.