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Comment Re:No more time travel! (Score 1) 735

The AC comment has merit. I see the novellas "By His Bootstraps" (Anson McDonald~Robert Heinlein) and Henry Hasse's "He Who Shrank" (1936) deal with, respectively, time travel and dimensionality in original ways, not as a cheap shot but as a thoroughly thought out, mind bending, scrape the stars with your mind kind of story.
He Who Shrank was immortalized poorly in the Incredible Shrinking Man movie http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050539/ but never approached Hasse's stunning conclusion. That is a property (in the Hollywood sense) that has never been explored.
There are a lot of concepts out there that only the imagination can create and understand, way beyond those concepts foisted upon us by Sci-Fi writers who distinctly lack imagination.

Comment Re:recharging the Solar car at work (Score 1) 177

A small car engine is rated at ~200 KW (i.e. Ford Focus Spec at 223 KW)

A normally aspirated 2 litre motor is around 100-110 KW with around 200nm of torque, nowhere near a 200kw spec. Maybe if you add a turbo you'll get close to it and you really don't need that much power. Also the power output whilst maintaining acceptable speed can be little as a few kw.

Comment Re:Crap (Score 1) 177

I think this is almost like the flying car scenario. A true Solar car would generate its own power and store the excess for night driving (when it's parked for example). And let's not assume for now that Solar = electrical.
The fact that this is impossible to do today, doesn't make the concept stupid. We don't have solar cars as yet - they are electric cars and they don't need solar energy to operate.

Networking

Submission + - Domestic Network Expansion? Some strategies please

Whiteox writes: "The problem is which would be the most efficient way of increasing my WiFi capacity. I have approximately 10+ devices connected and I'm feeling the strain. I'm not sure whether I should buy a few more WiFi routers or firewall off some of the devices. Do you have any suggestions of how to proceed with a $500 budget.

I'm running a BiPac 7404VNPX which is a +2 modem/4 port LAN and 2 voip lines. All went OK until the modem part fritzed itself and so now I get internet access via another modem serving the BiPac."
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook's Graph Search Is a Privacy Test For Internet Users (nytimes.com)

An anonymous reader writes: An article in the NY Times makes the case that Graph Search, Facebook's recently unveiled social search utility, will be a test for users of the social networking site which will have consequences for the internet at large. The test will show whether people are willing to take the next step in sharing parts of their lives, and whether social search is the future for online interaction. '...the company engineers who created the tool — former Google employees — say that the project will not reach its full potential if Facebook data is "sparse," as they call it. But the company is confident people will share more data, be it the movies they watch, the dentists they trust or the meals that make their mouths water.' CompSci professor Oren Etzioni says it's a watershed moment for the social internet because of the scale at which Facebook operates. A decade ago, people began making the choice to share their lives online; buying into social search would be the biggest step since then.

Comment How to play the Flute? or The Setup (Score 1) 313

Here's a free Monty Python reference - How to play the flute. Just blow in one end and move your fingers on the outside.
That's just what I see happening here. If you think about it, there is a complicated procedure just to be able to get up and start running.
1. Download a (free) programming language.
2. Install it (watch out there... some humps to consider).
3. Find and install dependencies - like an editor, utilities and other tools.
4. Get book(s), reference materials and start collecting links to help sites, forums etc.
5. Learn about APIs, drivers, I/O interfaces
6. Make sure you've got a printer.....
7. Start programming your idea

It's probably simpler to enrol in a course (if one exists) and use that to give you some basis to set yourself up.

But somehow I don't think the author is talking about classical programming. You can't just pick up a programming language that can demonstrate your idea and if you try, it's bound to be the wrong one.
Better advice would be to find out how programming works, what each language can and can't do, what elements you need, what you need to interface with and what you expect as a result. Is it doable?
Maybe all you need is server side knowledge and some html? Certainly easier than playing a flute.

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