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Comment Re:Photon model broken (Score 1) 364

I But what if it is also moving and/or turning/rotating on/along one or more axis. How would we perceive that?

Perhaps as a cosmic centrifugal force that causes galaxies to fly apart from each other, interpreted as a cosmological constant causing the expansion of space itself? Oh, wait...

Comment Re:Drive conservatively! (Score 1) 374

Uniform Vehicle Code in the US says: "a car driving below the "normal speed of traffic" should be driven in the right-hand lane." though laws vary by state. See attached link for more details on a state by state basis.

Sounds like a car entering or leaving the roadway qualifies as belonging in the right lane.

Let's say I'm driving I-87 in the middle of nowhere, New York. Speed limit is 65. 3 lanes of traffic. The right lane, according to a defensive driver, would be for entering and leaving the roadway, which typically happens at speeds below 65. The center lane is typically for cruising at 70-75 and leaves plenty of room for people who can't plan to merge well. It's in excess of the speed limit, but it's the prevailing speed. The far left lane is for those wishing to pass at 75+. Defensive driving teaches us to stay out of the way by not moving around a lot-- speed differentials cause accidents. A strict adherent to the "left lane is never for traveling, keep furthest to the right and allow all traffic to pass on your left" would end up switching lanes a whole lot. A 75 mph driver would cruise in the right lane, come up behind someone doing 65, switch lanes left and potentially be an obstacle to someone coming up behind him at 85, who instead of navigating a single lane change must now change 2 lanes (he is traveling in the right lane at 85 when he's not passing, right? he's not a hypocrite?). Big lateral movements are where mistakes are made and where the margin for error goes way down. I'm not a strict defensive driving adherent, I will move to the right lane if I'm getting passed by a bunch of traffic and don't feel safe from police if I increase my speed (generally 75mph is my upper end of my practice these days) and I have been known to pass on the right if the left two lanes are matching each others' speed.

I'll freely admit that I've been the guy driving more than 25 mph over the limit (110+ in a 50 on Vermont 22A is my worst/best more than 10 years ago, retrospectively stupid given the livestock and deer I have since seen on that road), I have a bit of a taste for speed. I like to think I even have the skill to do it better than most. But let's not start claiming that it's safe by any measure. Limiting lane changes increases safety.

Heaven forbid you have to turn off your cruise control and pay attention...

That much aggression... Is it safe to say you're a male under 25? It might be a good idea to take a defensive driving class. Many states have regulated the price and you can get a free lunch by some providers.

Comment Re:Drive conservatively! (Score 1) 374

Incorrect.

I'll believe my defensive driving instructor over some guy posting on Slashdot. Here's his rationale:

Assume a three lane road and light traffic. The right lane is for entering and leaving the roadway. The left lane is for passing. The middle lane is for travel. The middle lane is the safest lane for travel under most any circumstance (some local conditions, of course, may change the general rule). Animals like deer and moose entering the roadway may do so from either side, even if you really don't expect them coming from the center median on the left. You stay out of the way of the faster traffic and need not excessively lane change for the traffic entering and leaving the roadway.

The Military

United States Begins Flying Stealth Bombers Over South Korea 567

skade88 writes "The New York Times is reporting that the United States has started flying B-2 stealth bomber runs over South Korea as a show of force to North Korea. The bombers flew 6,500 miles to bomb a South Korean island with mock explosives. Earlier this month the U.S. Military ran mock B-52 bombing runs over the same South Korean island. The U.S. military says it shows that it can execute precision bombing runs at will with little notice needed. The U.S. also reaffirmed their commitment to protecting its allies in the region. The North Koreans have been making threats to turn South Korea into a sea of fire. North Korea has also made threats claiming they will nuke the United States' mainland."

Comment Re:computers are terribly inefficient (Score 1) 312

I bet your company ends up with a noticeably higher electricity bill, more so than you'd recover in bitcoins. I ran Seti@Home for a month on a single gaming grade system and my electricity bill jumped a staggering amount. But, I'd love to hear if I was wrong.

Let's say you're turning your screen off, and the delta between your tower sitting in sleep mode vs working balls-to-the-wall is about 400 watts. I think that's a gross overestimate since the GPU is mostly idle, but it's a strawman.

0.4 kW x 20 hours per day (24 hours minus the 4 hours you actually game) x 30 days (per arbitrary billing month) = 240 KWh. At 10 cents per KWh, it sets you back 24 dollars to run SETI for a month. Maybe I shot high for the power delta, maybe you game for 8 hours per night, maybe your heat is helping heat only the room you sleep in so you can turn the thermostat down in the rest of your house (net saving you money) or maybe your air conditioner has to work a little harder to throw that heat outside (half that $24 may be an additional adder to your power bill from the additional air conditioning for a total of $36).

Maybe you enjoy the project and the $20-$40 per month is worthwhile or maybe it's enough of an education that you now sleep your system as fully as possible in the cooling season.

Comment Re:Ahh, Pentium. (Score 1) 197

It ran on a full TTL +5V. So it sucked down power. Lots of power. I've disassembled first generation Pentium chips, removing the golden cover that protects the die beneath. The die is HUGE! Much bigger than any current production CPU.

It may have run on a TTL +5V, but it was BiCMOS. Weighing in at 300mm2, it's less than a Westmere Xeon's 500mm2 and I think that's a pretty fair comparison of potential customers.

Comment Re:Sigh (Score 1) 612

No longer "News for Nerds" Now "Inaccurate insights for imbeciles".

Your userid doesn't look new, but you talk like you are. It's been a number of years since people came here for the insightful commentary of the "editors", and even then it was pretty sparse. We all know why we come here, and it's not the editor who suggests that a diesel limo is the ideological diametric opposite to a solar powered car.

Honestly, I think /. got burned when they tried to stretch into editorialism and ended up with Katz. That guy could rant, and generally about things nobody agreed with. I think a better choice entrant into that field would have made /. a far more interesting site today, and I still hope they get a good commentator/ editor.

Comment Hardly "close", certainly "big". (Score 2) 176

With a make up of 7.1 billion transistors and a 551 mm^2 die size, GK110 is very close to the reticle limit for current lithography technology!

I believe there are two modern lithography lens manufacturers, one at 32mm x 25mm and the other at 31mm x 26mm, although I'm having trouble seeing publicly available information to confirm that. Either way, 800mm2 is the approximate upper bound of a die size, minus a bit for kerf, which can be very small. Power7 was a bit bigger. Tukwila was nearly 700mm2. Usually chips come in way under this limit and get tiled across the biggest reticle they can. A 6mm x 10mm chip might get tiled 3 across and 4 up, for example.

Comment Another example of feature creep (Score 1) 203

GIS worked just fine before they decided to "improve" it. Now I cannot turn "Safe search" off, and now I cannot quickly search for a particular image size.

If I'm really fast, I can get to the links at the (ever moving away) bottom of the page and find my way back to the old GIS, but only if I'm fast enough.

Please, Google, put these coders on a project that NEEDS improvement, and give us a useable GIS back. Thank you.

Comment Re:One word: Lawsuits (Score 5, Informative) 253

Not that you asked me, but I'm using the Roadhawk DC-1: http://www.roadhawk.co.uk/roadhawk-dc-1-car-black-box-camera/prod_18.html

The Roadhawk is the best implementation of a black box camera I have seen. It has enough on-board backup power to write the necessary EOF so that the actually crash video isn't corrupted (that's where the dod-tec apparently fails). It stores incident (accelerometer triggered) video files in a separate folder so that aren't eventually written over. It creates 60 sec. standard MP4 video files that can be played anywhere, yet those same files when read with Roadhawk's Windows software also show accelerometer graphs, speed of travel, and GPS maps. "Incident" files get written as 20 sec MP4 files with the triggering incident at the 10 second point in the file. Yes, they sell to US customers also.

Submission + - FreeBSD Project Falls Short of Year End Funding Target By Nearly 50% (freebsdfoundation.org)

TrueSatan writes: Perhaps a sign of our troubled times or a sign that BSD is becoming less relevant to modern computing needs: the FreeBSD project has sought $500,00 by year end to allow it to continue to offer to fund and manage projects, sponsor FreeBSD events, Developer Summits and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers but with the end of this year fast approaching it has raised just over $280,000...far short of its target.

Comment Re:Lisp (Score 1, Flamebait) 536

I don't see how Lost In Stupid Parentheses needs to be brought up in a discussion on how to avoid cruft and verbose error handling. Unless you're trying to point out that academics void of any tangible goal ended up in the same place.

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