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Comment Re:charge what? (Score 1) 75

Qi (the current spec) basically induction coil based and limited to about 5 watts. It is AC in nature and thus in a car requires DC->AC (and the associated losses) from the electrical system, then AC->DC rectification (and associated losses) on the device being charged.

AFAIKT, the open dots alliance is a dc charging system (with a diode rectifier bridge to handle the polarity swap) capable of up to 160 watts. Presumably there would be less loss leaving things DC and fewer components required on the device being charged and in the case of a car electrical system fewer components on the charger.

Comment Re:Apple... (Score 3, Insightful) 84

If I had to speculate (and /. is the place to do so), I would guess that it was likely that at least one of the Engineers...

* Recruited another employee in violation of a no-solicitation agreement.
* Had a "choice-of-law" provision attached to their employment agreement (and were originally employed outside of California)
* Had some ownership stake in the A123 which had some restrictions which Apple volunteered to buy-out. (which would be stupid for apple to do, but you never know).

As I understand it, Apple was in process of petitioning for a change of venue (to California). Although California law is clear that no-compete employment agreements cannot be enforced, it less clear when no-competes agreements are entangled with ownership changes or in the case of no-solicitation so as to avoid any distraction to their new employees, they probably just decided to settle (for the right price)...

Comment Re:On Individuality (Score 4, Interesting) 42

I don't know if simply following the crowd is a form of cowardice, more often an expression of human make as social beings.

You may argue that humans are at the top of the food chain, but more often than not, it takes a village to assure long term survival and being social beings is one behavior designed to gain acceptance in a village.

On the other hand, we tend to detest what is too similar to ourselves, so in a sense humans are like skyrmion (bosons that sometimes exhibit fermion exclusion statistics). At least that's one way to look at it if you extrapolate things from the behavior of sub-atomic particles ;^)

Comment Re:Republican fever (Score 1) 186

Ebola gets its name from a River in the Republic of Congo

Well it could have been far given a far more offensive then. Imagine if they had called it Republican fever.

Well, since the country is actually officially the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I guess your suggestion isn't as offensive as it could have been ;^)

Comment Re:sampling bias (Score 1) 405

Hmm, Socrates didn't actually write/say this (apparently someone else wrote this as part of their thesis in the 1900's and it's been misattributed many times since then) as there are no actual surviving works of Socrates (most of our information about Socrates comes from Plato, one of his disciples).

It is also seems highly unlikely he would say something anything like this except as part of the losing part of a Socratic argument exploration. As I recall he was essentially tried on charges like corrupting the youth and blasphemy and generally being a devil's advocate and disavowing being a teacher which would seem to put his politics on the other side of this quote...

Comment Re:sampling bias (Score 0) 405

Hell, my parents in today's society likely would have hand child services called on them...they spanked my ass when I was bad. They both worked and I entertained myself much more...I played with the other kids in the neighborhood. I often left the house (unescorted) during the summer in the morning and showed back up at home in time for dinner. I rode my bike and skateboard for miles away from home.

4 o'clock every morning with no shoes on, uphill, both ways, in 5 feet of snow.

FTFY

Comment Re: Screwed either way these days. (Score 1) 111

There has never been any problems with the algorithms in OpenSSL. It's only the SSL part that have shown weaknesess.

It's because the algorithms are the easiest parts to get right (because they are mostly just math and have been successfully ported and rewritten into many different programming languages many times). How you use the algorithms are the biggest part of the problem (e.g., actually getting random numbers to use as keys, or not having buffer overrun issues).

One of the issue with OSGP is that they used RC4 incorrectly (well, to be fair they probably weren't up on a weaknesses of RC4 discovered in 2001) in addition to the fact they were attempting to roll some of their own algorithms...

Comment Re:Yep, they were... (Score 1) 369

Corporation may not deserve punishment, but what about the people that made the decisions? If the people making decisions are attempting to stand behind the anonymous shield of the corporation, does that negate that punishment can be attempted?

If you think carefully of why you make any purchase from a corporation (be it single serve coffee, acetaminophen, or hamburgers), it's often related to brand and your personal view of their corporate history. Should a restaurant be punished for food poisoning you by you never visiting there again? How about if a restaurant bribes kids with happy meal toys? Or if the CEO directs the WinShape Foundation which contributes to causes you don't like? Why not boycott if the company doesn't happen to make you happy and their are other viable alternatives. Why should we forgive a faceless entity? It's not like it's a human.

Even with humans we have institutionalized "revenge". Why even punish humans who commit crimes at all? It doesn't generally net out for society (e.g., look at the cost of the death penalty or even simple incarceration). Most animals don't seek revenge. Often businesses don't even do revenge (business is business as they say). Institutionalized revenge really is all about maintain civil society by bleeding away our desire for revenge. The issue you should be addressing isn't the target of the punishment (e.g., a company or a human), it's how/why to satisfying our desire to punish something or someone for insulting our sensibilities...

FWIW, the organizers of our society have recognized there are different type of corporate organizations (e.g, non-profit, Benefit, or B-corporations, etc). But the "standard" type of corporation is really just a limited liability construct for the benefit of the owners (e.g., stock holders), nothing more, or less. You might even say a standard corp is more akin to a totally amoral superorganism (to use your terminology) than the other type of corps. You might imagine how you might relate to (or be afraid of) a human you knew to be amoral...

Comment KOLD = Karbonator (Score 1) 369

I can't see what need they may be filling with cold beverages, and I don't see people adding another appliance unless it is something quite "revolutionary." Am I missing an obvious need?

Basically KOLD is a SodaStream like product. The reason they think it's revolutionary is that they got CocaCola to sign on to it.

AFAIK, unlike SodaStream, KOLD will creates CO2 from a chemical reaction and pressurizes it with a pump (not feeding it from a proprietary pre-filled canister). Not sure how much DRM they were planning for this part, but I'm guessing not much now ;^)

Comment Re:Yep, they were... (Score 2) 369

In other words, you're advocating to never forgive them for their mistakes. If you can lead a huge multinational business and never make a single mistake, ever, then congratulations to you, but the rest of us are only human. The idea may have been stupid, yes, but everyone screws up at some points in their life. If they continue to make these choices, then yes, I'm sure people will switch, but one failed marketing line shouldn't prevent you from ever using their coffee makers again. Seems a shame to lose a very convenient and otherwise decent coffee maker over a petty grudge - although, since I don't own one, I am admittedly only assuming it's convenient.

Well some of still believe huge multinational businesses aren't human beings therefore do not need or deserve forgiveness.

If a business dies, another one will take over (or do you still buy your drygoods from FW woolworths and not Amazon). Sure it might be a shame that some people lose their jobs, but it's not like we a shunning another human being from society where they starve and die. I'm not advocating holding petty grudges, but I'm saying we need not anthropomorphize corporations. Corporations are simply limited liability constructs created to facilitate the concentration of capital for investment purposes, not living entities that can have their feelings hurt.

Although of course certainly employees of such an entity are human, they can (and usually do) associate with different companies over a lifetime. For most individual humans, your identity is constant for your lifetime, you cannot easily make a fresh start (w/o moving to a new place and with the internet maybe not even moving will help) and concepts like forgiving a mistake makes more sense (although I'm sure there will be many that debate this for some individuals).

So maybe a corporation is more like a family? Corporations dump their leaders on occasion (often do with bad news). Why not have this leader (Mr Kelley) dive off with a golden parachute for approving this mistake (maybe he could get one of his old jobs back at Coca-cola or North American Van Lines, GE, Ford or Procter and Gamble) to attempt to regain trust? If a family was known for doing that would you even forgive them? Maybe this is better at illustrating how corporations don't deserved any sympathies granted to humans, right?

Comment Re:Meh (Score 1) 469

Not sure. Try sticking a fork() in it.

If you put a fork() in HURD it won't be heard...
(AFAIK, fork() is an emulated syscall in hurd.glibc because it must manually dup all the open file descriptors on the underlying mach port objects)

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