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Comment Re:IAADP (Score 1) 37

Works poorly because of operator limitations?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it may very well be technological limitations, not operator limitations. I'm thinking that there is probably some lag in the feedback. Whether or not this can be fixed is, at least partially, going to be dependent on how far out of site the drone will be.

Comment Re:Does This Make Sense? (Score 4, Insightful) 318

There is also one more benefit that you sort of touched on a little, but maybe could use some elaboration.

One gasoline-powered car runs on gasoline. You can bend the gasoline a little by putting something somewhat comparable like ethanol in it, but in the end, you can't stray far from the basic formulation, and that formulation is made not just from fossil fuels, but from one specific fossil fuel. Synthesizing gasoline from coal or natural gas is theoretically possible, but expensive and impractical barring a crisis.

One electric-powered car runs on electricity. You can bend the "formulation" of electricity a number of ways (AC vs. DC; various frequencies, voltages, currents, phase counts) and interchange them pretty efficiently. The electricity itself can come from coal, several grades of oil, natural gas, wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, biomass, whatever. Effectively, an electric car runs on whatever is available.

For bonus points, an electric motor has torque where it counts: at the bottom of the curve. You need the torque to get the car moving, preferably before the motor has come up to speed. Electric motors will do that. ICEs, on the other hand, need you to temper your load by feathering the clutch, or using a torque converter or hybrid drive system.

Electric cars also have features in common with hybrids, to wit, regenerative braking and no idling.

Comment Re:Screw 'em (Score 1) 87

Perhaps, but realistically we now know two things:

Thing the first: there is a vulnerability to these locks, and we should be using something else. This goes double since the company has demonstrated that they are more interested in hushing it up than fixing it.

Thing the second: there is a vulnerability to these locks, and it would be interesting to try to find it. In essence, this event has enabled those amongst us who like to tinker with such things to narrow the search.

Comment All this fuss over 50 micronewtons?!? (Score 1) 416

Does anyone even realize how little 50 micronewtons is? It is approximately the amount of force that a 5 microgram mass exerts on the ground due to gravity. It takes more force than this to discernibly move a speck of dust. The background noise in just about anyplace in the world exerts several orders of magnitude more than this on your eardrums. You can't feel it.

An error of 50 micronewtons has a name: it's called "noise".

Comment Come on, Slashdot, at least get her name right! (Score 5, Interesting) 176

SurveyMonkey's CEO Dies While Vacationing With Wife Susan Sandberg

Dave Goldberg, the chief executive of SurveyMonkey and spouse of Facebook COO Sheryl K. Sandberg, died on Friday night.

Her name is Sheryl. It's fairly well-known. How do you screw this up when the correct name is in the first sentence of the summary?

Comment Re:100% of Cable company's throttle bandwidth, esp (Score 2) 182

That 20Mb/4Mb, most cable internet users are advertised was throttled to less than 300Kbps/101Kbps in every city I have ever lived in. Thanks to my dd-WRT router I know this to be absolutely 100% true. You can learn it to, but not from a lying Speedtest!

I can confirm Speedtest's results independently by uploading/downloading content to an Amazon EC2 instance. I am, in fact, getting what both the cable company and Speedtest.net have told me I'm getting, which is good, because I refuse to do business with Verizon.

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