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Comment Re:Passenger Drones are the clear answer (Score 1) 428

The military have converted many of their air operations to drones, and that must be part of the pilot shortage story. If we can operate in Afghanistan from a comfy seat in Reno, isn't this the inevitable future of air transport? It's much like the self-driving car situation, only a mistake kills ~300 people at a time. What would it take to convince YOU to fly on an automatic airplane?

Submission + - SPAM: Ovshinsky and Optane

bromoseltzer writes: A high-school educated inventor led an improbable life. His discovery of the switching properties of amorphous semiconductors now seems to be behind Optane, though Intel has been reluctant to give credit.

"On 11 November 1968 a surprising announcement sent shock waves through the field of solid-state physics. That month Physical Review Letters published Stanford Ovshinsky’s “Reversible electrical switching phenomena in disordered structures.” The paper described an extremely fast threshold switch and an electronic memory made of amorphous materials, feats that had not been thought possible."

Read through to the end!

Link to Original Source

Comment Ham radio? Users need skin in the game. (Score 2, Insightful) 490

Some of us amateur radio people will tell you that ham radio was the first social network. That may be a stretch, but there are some points to think about.

It's good to have a medium that's free to use by the message, but still has a price. You have to qualify by taking an exam, or by putting up some capital funds, or by paying a monthly fee.

The problem of FB, G+, Reddit, /., etc. are that they are free. So the purveyors have to find revenue from corporate sources - selling your info, your preferences, and your friends.

If a service has value to you, and you want to have control of your data, why aren't you willing or even eager to pay $10 a month?

Comment Server only (Score 1) 431

Last time I looked WSL (and therefore Linux OS's) have very limited interaction with Windows. No graphics, no IPC. It's fine if you want to debug something for Linux server use, but until it integrates with Windows desktop and peripherals, there's nothing to worry about for typical desktop users.

Comment Containers / VMs / ... (Score 1) 359

What is an OS? If you use containers or VMs or Snaps or whatever to carry all the local-system-dependent stuff, what really needs to run on bare metal? That's the hypervisor, which can be pared down from your favorite current OS.

But if each app then carries around its own GUI system, what's to keep them coherent for the poor user? So maybe you need to think of the GUI as part of the hypervisor... And then you're back to ground zero, where we are right now.

If you don't have a common user experience, you don't have much compatibility.

Comment What if booster loses control on landing? (Score 1) 446

One is a little nervous about those incoming boosters. If they lose thrust or attitude control, how do you protect life and property? I could imagine some bad PR there. I suppose there's a range safety procedure with some explosives, but that would convert one big bomb into lots of mid size bombs.

Comment Re:It's why I'm dumping Quicken (Score 1) 660

Not so much. The Quicken upgrade did not require me to store my data on their server. The data still resides on my hard drive. (They even gave me a good size introductory Dropbox account for backups.) You do have to have a Quicken account on their server in order to get your software updates and to manage the billing. I had been in the habit of upgrading every other year. Now, it's continuous upgrades for an annual cost that's comparable for me, and there's a no worries update experience.

There are questions, like how long could I operate if the network goes down and how portable is the data? Quicken's data format has always been proprietary AFAIK, but there are export options.

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