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Comment Re:Startups should not be at CES, or CeBIT (Score 1) 89

If you are looking at a physical product I find it's MUCH easier to gauge both the product and the company by seeing the object, even if just a prototype, in person. Can it still be junk or vaporware if they have a booth and demo? Of course, even from major companies sometimes. But it's still vastly more information talking to a person, getting a card, and looking at the physical item then some random spec-sheet from a company you've never heard of.

Also sometimes searching through a stack of papers for that random product you remember glancing at 3 years ago rather then trying to search through browser bookmarks works a lot better, for me at least.

What i don't need though is a huge stack of paper spec sheets for every single product and iteration, that I can get online, thank you.

Comment Well don't post about it! (Score 1) 465

If you post about it, there will be a record of how we will find you. What you have to do is not tell anyone how you are looking, then not tell anyone when you -do- find them. That way, they will never find out in the future how they were fond in the past and try to avoid it when they travel back in time.

Logically, since nobody has ever posted proof of time travelers, that means they must have found some.

Comment Less the 5 years? (Score 2) 361

It would almost be easier for me to list the ones that have broken then put a lifespan to them.

Ever since I have moved to optical USB mice, of the dozens that I have used at home or work, only 3 no longer work. Ironically 2 of those were "high end" mice. The budget Microsoft and Logitech mice seem to last forever. I only just replaced the original Microsoft optical wheel mouse my grandmother had after ~10 years of use after a button broke. My other ones of that era are still going fine.

Comment Re:Message (Score 2) 1010

People die every day because another driver is going unsafe speeds on the road, but despite what all those deaths add up to it's only in the most extreme cases of reckless driving is anything more then a ticket given.

I agree with the sentiment that this is a behavior is one that should be curbed for countless good reasons. This though is clearly a case where an arrest is completely inappropriate. A citation would likely have stopped the offender with a net gain for law enforcement rather then the cost of an arrest and the fighting and bad publicity that this is going to lead to.

Stopping the unwanted activity at a net gain to the tax payer seems like a much better deal to me.

Comment Re:Industrial look get industrial looking cable tr (Score 1) 250

Yes, this exactly.

Keep the tray as small and unobtrusive as possible, you actually want to see as much of the cable as possible. Don't try to hide the but find a professional installer that will make the cables neat, tidy as possible. Belden and cables and others have a wide range of colors that you could offer and you could probably find a nice bold one to go with what the designer might like. It could actually be something of a feature if this is a design/tech kind of company.

Transportation

With Burning Teslas In the News Ford Recalls Almost 140,000 Escapes 293

An anonymous reader writes "Tesla received a lot of attention over the Model S fires recently, but they're not the only car company having issues with spontaneous combustion. Ford has issued a recall on almost 140,000 Ford Escapes for potential engine fires. With little media attention on the recall, Musk might have a point about the unfair treatment Tesla gets in the news."

Comment Re:The public Internet is NOT a government project (Score 1) 1030

It wasn't just that private people became interested after investment in the infrastructure. Government institutions like many public universities had a major part in making use of that infrastructure in a way that was interesting to private people.

Big companies aren't much interested in risky bets when they have a stable business, and little generally companies don't have the resources unless they have some other source of money. Big bets need to be made sometimes for big success, but the flip side is also sometimes they don't pay off. Losing bets once in a while isn't a failure, it's just the cost of progress.

Comment Re:Too cool for NASA (Score 2) 205

Why? The universe doesn't need us, and won't miss us when we're gone. Whether we're on one planet, or a million, nothing lasts forever.

Frankly deferring massive amounts of resources to putting some people in cans on a frozen rock will probably worsen our chances for progress and survival. If we are concerned about our fate and want humankind to do something interesting with our future we should be putting our money in research and pure sciences. I think some sort of manned spaceflight program is probably an important part of those sciences, but massive engineering projects as a monument to our narcissism just seems like a waste of our resources.

Comment Re:The public paid for them, the BBC threw them aw (Score 1) 184

At the time it was normal not to save TV shows. There was no home video market then, and for a long time not even really 'reruns'.

I'd bet that if you had some sort of time traveling box and went back to talk to people paying their TV tax then, they'd complain that the BBC would be wasting their money on all the storage of a TV show for no reason. Then you would have to fight some sort of robot men. At least I'm pretty sure how that would go.

Patents

US Shutdown Is Good News For Patent Trolls 84

judgecorp writes "It's just a sidebar on the US government shutdown but, while agencies including NASA and NIST are displaying blank websites, the US Patent and Trademark Office is running as normal because its funding is guaranteed by the US Constitution. Thus, patent trolls can continue to file bogus business patents, while the FTC is closed and can't combat them, and the Department of Justice can't handle appeals and enforcement."

Comment Re:And how many new restrictions? (Score 1) 293

Getting rid of other sorts of outputs such as analog, DVI or HD-SDI (which already had audio with video) certainly is all about DRM. We are forced to use HDMI, even where it is not the appropriate transport. It's a big, expensive problem for commercial and even some residential installations that now have to deal with short signal ranges and the extra points of failure that go with the two-way authentication protocols.

HDMI is being pushed, forced, in these areas that have nothing to do with having audio and video on the same cable for no other reason then DRM.

Comment Re: How? (Score 1) 401

The reboot is indeed more accessible, but only by making it yet another summer action movie. I'm not really sure what it contributes to the plethora of other summer action movies other then some familiar characters and some references and homages thrown in. Frankly, in fact, I think the last movie went beyond homage or reboot well into rip-off Territory.

I don't find anything bad about movies and other forms of entertainment that are made to have wide appeal. I enjoy a great many of them, but the change in direction of ST is only a gain for ticket sales, not for what made it a unique work. At the end of the day of course, studios are there to make money, so I don't begrudge them exactly, or think they are going to change on my smaller opinion, but I do think a loss more then a gain by other metrics.

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