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Comment Re:Not if you use the Virtuix Omni (Score 1) 154

That depends on whether the sickness is caused by the lack of leg movement or not. It think there's a good chance the problem is tied to the inner ear (or more precisely your sense of movement vs. visual feedback), or possibly something else, in which case a treadmill might not help at all.

Indeed - the Virtuex Omni is more likely to make things worse. Your eyes say one thing, your feet another[*], and your inner ear disagrees with the two.

Think about it - when you drive a car, you don't have to move your feet like a mad runner in order to avoid feeling sick. Your inner ear gets the cues from the accelerations, and those match what you see, as long as you look out the windows. If, on the other hand, you're a kid that reads or play in the back seat, your visual cues don't match your inner ear, and you may get sick. No matter what your feet do.

[*]: Unless adjusted so 1 m in the game is exactly 1 m on the treadmill, and unless you only move on flat surfaces, it is safe to say that your legs will disagree with your eyes.

Comment Re:Ugh... (Score 1) 83

They may slow down the world if this gets hyped to the point that it sells.
The problem is T.ANSTAAFL. This is Yet Another Implementation that seeks to reduce the average latency, without thought to the fact that what really hurts is the worst case latency bottleneck. This, like many other approaches before it, will worsen the worst case in order to buy the average case lunch.
You either have to come up with a solution that reduces the worst case, which is what really hurts, or make Pareto improvements, i.e. those that hurts no-one, even in corner cases.

This is not it. And yes, I have looked at it.

Comment Re:Systemd? Not on my system... (Score 1) 226

If they were in released software, well, it is normal that SysV get replaced eventually

I guess that depends on your definition of eventually. Good working designs don't have to be replaced any time soon.

We still have steering wheels on cars, despite some people in the 70s thought that joysticks and hand controlled throttles would be much better. Most of my clothes have buttons, despite Velcro and Ziploc. Heck, even zippers did not replace buttons.
Change for the change of change is seldom a recipe for success. The number of admins who complained about sysv init and not having an octopus program with hooks into everything were not really high. In fact, most admins have praised the toolbox approach where mounting is a completely separate thing from starting a daemon, and where nothing is truly integrated but everything is as separate as possible. The Unix mantra is "do just one thing but do it well".
I don't really care whether systemd shaves twenty seconds off the boot. My systems run for years, and take ten or more minutes from power-up doing hardware checks and RAID enumerations until they even start booting. That the boot process isn't abstracted and can be troubleshot by a human is far more important. So is the ability to easily have different systems with the same installation base do different things. Or make changes that you know won't take effect immediately. Or replace one thing without replacing ten more. Or use config files that you can do a simple search/replace on, unlike MSDOS .ini files where you have to be aware of the "section" abstraction.
K.I.S.S., and avoid abstractions like the plague it is.

Comment Re:Systemd? Not on my system... (Score 2) 226

No, generally emacs users are happy with systems that have both emacs and vi, and emacs won't prevent vi (and all the tools depending on ex/ed) from working.
This is more like replacing ISC bind with samba domain controller. It's incomplete, broken by design, and has so many levels of abstractions that no sane person can admin it without specialized tools.

I'm already boycotting Red Hat 7 because of the poetterification that changes simple things that work to complex things that don't. Now Xorg will have to go too.

Comment Re:Cashless can't happen, here is why ... (Score 5, Insightful) 753

The ONLY thing required for this to happen is secure communications.

That's like saying "the ONLY thing required is world peace".
What admins and engineers have known for a long time, and which people like Snowden provided evidence for is that secure communication is not a given, and highly unlikely to be an option for the masses.

If the government won't let people have a shadow economy they can't monitor or control, expect physical alternatives to take their place. There's plenty of precedence for turning to valuable metals when the currency cannot be trusted. And there are examples of governments banning both gold and silver trade as a kneejerk reaction, but that just moves the market to something else.

Comment Re:LEDs (Score 1) 278

I'm switching out my lightbulbs - to halogen lights.
I can't stand the visible flickering of LED lights, nor that they don't light in a continuous spectrum. Some colors will show stronger and some less in LED light, which irritates me.
It's like listening to music with an 18-band equalizer, and three random knobs turned all the way up, and the rest down.

Halogen lights don't have that problem, and you can get them in many color temperatures. They're far more efficient than regular incandescent bulbs, while still having the advantages of an unbroken spectrum and little flickering. They're also safer for the environment to dispose of than LEDs.

Comment Re:Garbage In (Score 1) 231

Out of the 2 Android phones that I have had, zero of them came with Facebook preinstalled. I blame the mobile phone provider.

Your blame is at least partially misplaced. Manufacturers also bundle software, regardless of the carrier. The last two Android phones I had were bought directly from the manufacturer as never-locked phones (not to be confused with unlocked, which means the carrier lock has been removed). Yet there still was plenty of bundled and uninstallable software, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Drive, Hangout and Picasa apps and integration for pretty much everything. I have disabled more than 20 bundled apps.

The manufacturer assumes that everyone uses the big social media sites and want to tell their friends (and their friends) about everything they do, including what music (or audio books) they play, what pictures they take, and where they currently are.

It's good that social exhibitionism became acceptable (thanks to Jennifer Ringley more than anyone), but that it became the norm to the point that it's bundled is something I strongly object to. It's like buying a toilet and finding out that it (unadvertised) comes with wan connected crotch cams that can't be removed, just temporarily disabled.

Comment Re:Why are the number of cabs [artificially] limit (Score 1) 92

It's rather the opposite. When people take a cab, they don't take a car, and won't spend time driving around looking for a parking space.
Having enough taxicabs also reduces the amount of drink driving, which is a serious problem here in the US.
And you free up parking lots and parking garages, which can be used for other infrastructure, which reduces the need to travel even more.

I've lived in cities with plenty of taxis, and I've lived in cities with next to none. The cities that had a surplus of taxis also had the least amount of traffic problems.
London has around twice as many taxicabs as New York City, for a comparable population size. Other European cities have an even higher ratio of taxis per citizens, with a 1:100 ratio not being uncommon. And those cities have the least amount of problems with automobile traffic too.

Comment Re:I hate to imagine it (Score 1) 126

If the reinfection is also from the mother (which is what is most likely)

How can you say that is most likely?
HIV does not spread easily. The panic times when people wore gloves and masks around the HIV infected are long gone, thankfully. The HIV virus spreading to family members is quite rare.
Diseases staying dormant for a long time is, however, not unusual at all.
So again, on what basis do you draw the conclusion that a re-infection is most likely?

Music

Ode To Sound Blaster: Are Discrete Audio Cards Still Worth the Investment? 502

MojoKid (1002251) writes "Back in the day (which is a scientific measurement for anyone who used to walk to school during snowstorms, uphill, both ways), integrated audio solutions had trouble earning respect. Many enthusiasts considered a sound card an essential piece to the PC building puzzle. It's been 25 years since the first Sound Blaster card was introduced, a pretty remarkable feat considering the diminished reliance on discrete audio in PCs, in general. These days, the Sound Blaster ZxR is Creative's flagship audio solution for PC power users. It boasts a signal-to-noise (SNR) of 124dB that Creative claims is 89.1 times better than your motherboard's integrated audio solution. It also features a built-in headphone amplifier, beamforming microphone, a multi-core Sound Core3D audio processor, and various proprietary audio technologies. While gaming there is no significant performance impact or benefit when going from onboard audio to the Sound Blaster ZxR. However, the Sound Blaster ZxR produced higher-quality in-game sound effects and it also produces noticeably superior audio in music and movies, provided your speakers can keep up."

Comment Re:And Joe Schmoe wont care. (Score 1) 364

Half our registered voters don't even want to pay for healthcare for our citizens, why do you think we would pay for this?

I haven't met many fellow Americans who are willing to pay for healthcare for anyone. Half of them are willing to subsidize private health insurance, which is still a right-wing approach seen from a world perspective.

It seems like another way to move money from the middle class to corporations, giving the lower income workers extra expenses they can ill afford, even subsidized. It doesn't help to have health insurance if you cannot afford the co-pay and OOP expenses.

The very idea of funding healthcare directly, not going through private insurance intermediates who milk the maximum amount of money from both sides, is one that seems alien to Americans, no matter what party they claim to support.

Comment As you ask... (Score 1) 57

Someone should have vetted the questions. The very first one was painful to read:

Samzenpus: I'm sure you had great hopes for Voyager but did you or others working on the program dream that it would be so successful or travel so far?

Um, "it"? Is Samzenpus unaware that there are more than one?
And of course they expected them to travel so far. They're not like cars which can run out of gas. The risk of something stopping them is astronomical, so they'll of course travel on.

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