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Comment Re:My main complaint about the Pro 2 (Score 4, Insightful) 101

You can thank developers who do not use manifests nor appropriate frameworks and hard code their own resolutions or use MFC 4.2 out of familiarity ... Anyway

This is why I refuse to leave 1080p and go to 4K. I don't want a cell phone on my computer so I use Win 7 which has 0 support after 100 dpi. Last I heard even Chrome had issues.

People yack about 4k being the second coming of Christ but you need a $1000 video card to play games with half the settings off and compatibility problems. Lets hope Windows 10 and Wayland address this. For me it will be a few years before I change.

Comment This Product Makes Sense (Score 0) 78

Having this week bought a new 13" MacBook Pro (tiny and light) and deciding to pass on the iPhone Galaxy 6 because it's form factor is so huge that it borders on being a mini-tablet -- I have been thinking if Apple could come out with a 10" Air and a standalone iWatch, I'd be completely fulfilled. So when I read about this Lenovo product yesterday, I was a bit jealous. If they can come out with a smaller display sized version and get some Linux drivers for the hardware and offer an Ubuntu version, I would totally leave Apple in a heart beat.

Comment Re:Sad... (Score 1) 390

Not sure about the S-Foils... but according to wookiepedia, they were deployed for "high stress situations" -- whatever that means. So considering that in space, there is no G-Force, there can be no exertion of "stresses" -- unless by "stress" they simply mean combat. But the X-Wings at least have control surfaces and afterburners -- and they show them flying in atmosphere in Ep IV and V So I can overlook that. The TIE Fighters on the other hand... totally bogus.

Comment TIE-Fighters flying in Atmosphere?!?!?!?! (Score 5, Insightful) 390

Doesn't JJ know that Ion Engines don't generate enough thrust to propel so much as a paper airplane through atmosphere, much less an entire TIE-Fighter And even if those Twin Ion Engines could generate enough thrust, TIE-Fighers don't have control surfaces or the proper aerodynamics to fly?!?!?! Is he that big of a moron or is he purposely out to make the sequels worse than the prequels? And don't get me started on the sheer stupidity and uselessness of the crossguard on that Sith's lightsaber UTTER IDIOCY!

Comment Barrage balloons. (Score 1) 116

Try flying some small helium party-style balloons on kevlar fishing line tethers, creating a forest of near-invisible strings.

Copter drones don't fly well with the blades wrapped in string.

(Indeed, I hear full-sized helicopers don't work all that well with a few hundred turns of 75-pound test line wrapped around that pitch control mechanism at the hub, either.)

This might not work against those with the bumpers all around. But the ones with the blades unguarded would have quite a time getting through.

Comment Land not suitable (Score 1) 47

Livestock require 8-20x more land per gram of protein produced than plant based protein sources. Switching entirely to plant based foods would allow returning >90% of that land to its natural state and growing crops only on the most suitable 10%.

Much of the land of the continental US is unsuitable for growing any crop suitable for human consumption, due to things like lack of water. The western range, for instance: Attempting to farm it would be an ecological disaster. Cattle, on the other hand, can make a fine living off it (at a rather low density - like four acres per cow) and ARE suitable for human consumption (and tasty!) when raised on what they chose to eat.

In fact, NOT raising range cattle on range land is ALSO an ecological disaster. US range land has a substantial infestation of invasive grass species that were accidentally introduced by European settlement. The native animals tend to avoid eating it, so it has an extra selective advantage over the native grasses and tends to squeeze them out. Cattle, on the other hand, prefer it - to the point of eating it almost exclusively when it's available. Thus they keep it under control. Meanwhile, any non-cattle attempt to eradicate it would amount to total defoliation, reseeding with native plants, crossing your fingers that the invasive species was wiped out, and repeating whenever it reappears.

Comment Also, chickens can't be free range and organic (Score 1) 47

Wait, is organic and free range supposed to be a better, that is tastier, product or just better for the environment?

While we're at it: If a chicken is free range it isn't organic. A free-range chicken eats wild bugs, and you can't certify that all the wild bugs that flew in ate an organic diet themselves.

My wife raises chickens, studies the issues extensively, and has a lot to say about free range, organic feed, organic chicken regimes, etc. They amount to animal cruelty. Some of the high points:
  - Free range means the chickens are exposed to predators and avian diseases spread by smaller birds.
  - Organic regimes forbid antibiotics and often vaccinations. A bird that catches some disease will either be dispatched to save the rest of the flock, or left to suffer and recover on its own without assistance - perhaps crippled - and meanwhile expose the rest of the flock. A number of poultry diseases are endemic among wild birds or prevalent in the enviornment. Young chicks are subject to coccidiosis and many of the survivors then live with damaged digestive systems. (Non-organic chicks are usually fed a coccidiostat in their early-weeks feed until their immune systems develop, or given a dose of antibiotic if the disease appears in the flock.) Marek's Disease, caused by a herpes family virus, is common. It produces partial paralysis, blindness, lymphoma, immune suppression, tumors, atherosclerosis, and a range of other painful and debilitating symptoms. Non-organc chicks are vaccinated against it. And so on.
  - Free range means the chickens are in large groups rather than individual cages with a handful of birds in each. Chickens can keep track of the ranking of no more than about a hundred other individuals, so life in a larger group is a constant series of battles to reestablish dominance. In small group cages, on the other hand, the heirarchy is worked out quickly and peace generally prevails (or relative peace, depending on breed). This is partiularly a problem with commercial egg-laying breeds, which are noted for intra-species violence and cannabalism.
  - Free range chickens are allowed to leave the barn in the day. But only the few who set up their teritory near the door actually get to leave. The rest are still effectively confined to the buildng in a mass of interacting birds.
  - Commercial feeds from big-name animal feed suppliers are tightly quality controlled and well tuned to the birds nutritional neefd an their taste preferences (so they'll enjoy eating it and thus eat as much as they should). Organic feeds are noted for dangerously poor nutritional qualities, from bad formulation choices, variation between batches, and the use of ingredients that quickly lose their nutritional qualities during storage. With their high metabolism, an under- or mal-nourished chicken will becomes a damaged and debilitated chicken in just a few days.v

I could go on...

Comment -457 farenheit is nothing to sneeze at. (Score 4, Insightful) 145

What the material is doing (or is claimed to do, anyway) is to re-radiate incident radiation at a wavelength that can pass through through the atmosphere back out to space without being absorbed (i.e. it won't heat up the atmosphere).

More importantly: If the wavelength were one that was absorbed by the atmosphere, it is also one where the atmosphere radiates heat back toward the paint.

If your frequency slot is one with "absorption", you "see" the temperature of the atmosphere - a bit cooler than the surface of the (greenhouse-effect boosted) planet, but not by enough to be exciting.

If your slot is one that is essentially fully transparent, you "see" the cosmic background (except for the tiny part of the sky that shows the sun's or moon's disk). That's about 2.7 degrees K, call it -457 Fahrenheit. Liquid helium is substantially warmer at -452.2.

The slow radiation of heat at the sky is almost completely overwhelmed by conductive and other transfers of heat into the paint, of course. Of the 530ish degrees F difference from room temperature, only nine are left.

But that's nothing to sneeze at. The inside of my well-insulated desert house gets up to about 85 in the day without air conditioning. If I could drop that by nine degrees it would be a relatively comfortable 76. (It would likely actually drop more, because the lower temperature of the surface would slow the heating and tend to even the daily cycle of temperature out further.) 85 or more is debilitating. 76, with drastically low humidity (dew point typically about 35), is actually comfy.

Comment Re:So that means we're still gonna be buying (Score 0) 215

The question is will your 3 TB ever get filled? That is a lot of storage.

Also dropbox and MS Onedrive built into Windows 8.1 both offer 1 TB of cloud storage too. This will decrease demand for consumers.

We are nerds and not typical users but even I have a similar setup ... well with a cloud for extra backup in my case. I have 1 TB for my profiles and backup data. 2 ssds in raid 0 for OS and virtual machines and some games. Increasing storage space for a mechanical disk to me is like trying to sell me yet a larger tape drive.

My prediction is hard disks will turn into tape drives of today for backups and long term storage. SSDs are the wave of the future. My prediction also is many Walmart pc wil use disks for years to come due to OEMs being greedy about costs and not value. Joes who do not know what an SSD is will like the bigger storage in the specs and cheaper price not knowing it will significantly slow him down. The same ones who bought Pentium IVs because they had higher MHz a decade ago thinking they were better.

Comment Re:How about transfer rate and reliability? (Score -1, Troll) 215

Why would I upgrade to a mechanical disk just because it is bigger.

1 TB has enough data for every man woman and child who ever lived to write a 1500 page book! Will Joe Six Pack really need to have that 30 TB drive when his circa 2012 1 TB drive has 70% free space on it?

SSDs I see now are much faster and are limited in storage but already there for a lot of people. ... and please do not give your niche use case in a reply. I am sure there is a database developer reading this or a 4K video editor who has a crappy version of Premiere where each undo creates a copy of the whole movie at 1 TB each but are not typical.

Comment Re:How about transfer rate and reliability? (Score 0) 215

Not to mention the grandparent has a backward idea of reliability too. Though the very newest SSDs are significantly more reliable you can ask any shop owner what he thinks of SSDs. They do die more frequently than a disk based on customers bringing them in. Linus Torvalds lost his too out of nowhere with no warning.

I have a raid with some SSD's on the system I am typing this on but I have my swap and personal data/profile on a mechanical disk still for this reason

Comment Not zero cost. (digression on my sig line) (Score 1) 29

Make a basic income available to everyone (funded by the Fed, not the taxpayer, at zero cost).

The point is that it's not zero cost. Every penny of money "funded by the Fed" comes from your and my pockets - sometimes with a big multiplier - by paths that are not as obvious, but just as costly, as a tax bill.

The biggest one is inflation: If the Fed just prints money, it dilutes the rest of the money. Your wages go down (though the numbers don't change.) Got retirement savings? They go down, too. Your investments go down - but the numbers make it look like they wen't up, and the government taxes the fake "gain". Everything you buy gets more expensive.

Comment Fusion power applications? (Score 1) 29

It will be interesting to see whether this research on the phenomenon in the large scale produces insights useful at the smaller scale of fusion plasma confinement.

In case it's not clear, magnetic reconnection is a phenomenon of magnetic field/plasma interaction. (Without the plasma and its currents (or extreme accelerations like those around black holes) the magnetic field wouldn't be simultaneously twisted up and bent around so it can reconnect differently.

I see two ways this might apply to plasma confinement in fusion systems:
  * It may give insight into the details of plasma instabilities and lead to ways to suppress them - enough for a practical reactor.
  * It might lead to a way to use the phenomenon deliberately, to produce a (probably pulsed) past-breakeven plasma confinement, along the lines of Dense Plasma Focus.

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