Comment So if they lost over 20,000... (Score 1) 356
... How many are left? You cant crumple them unless it is over 85% of their customer base I'd say.
Comment I think the real problem is people (Score 1) 1003
Which is the fact that humans shouldn't be allowed to drive. Clearly they are too fallible.
I am a professional driver, which does not necessarily make me better than all of you, just the ones who do idiotic things (like pass me on a double yellow and cut me off to take an exit).
Comment Reminds me of something... (Score 1) 218
"We have access to virtually every kind of information. I found your name on the passenger list of the [plane] that crashed."
Arthur was astonished.
"You mean they knew about the crash?"
"Well, of course they knew. You don't have a whole [airplane disappear into the Atlantic] without someone knowing about it.'
"But you mean, they knew where it had happened? They knew I'd survived?'
"Yes."
"But nobody's ever been to look or search or rescue. There's been absolutely nothing."
"Well there wouldn't be. It's a whole complicated [airliner manufacturing] thing. They just bury the whole thing. Pretend it never happened. The [airliner] business is completely screwy now. You know they've reintroduced the death penalty for [airliner manufacturing] company directors?'
"Really?" said Arthur. "No I didn't. For what offence?'
Trillian frowned.
"What do you mean, offence?"
"I see."
Comment Really? (Score 1) 208
Makes learning easier? I WANT ONE!!
Comment Re:What about real city driving? (Score 1) 572
I say that people are the problem. If people were courteous enough to follow the Stop Sign rule and not get angry and impatient then we would not need traffic lights. Traffic lights in turn cause the problem of the backups you just described, because of the lag of one driver hesitating and starting the positive feedback loop.
Like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwHfibl1AoI&translated=1
Comment How about... (Score 1) 647
...opting out by not flying?
http://www.amtrak.com/
or, 1-800-USA-RAIL
Comment Well... (Score 1) 252
At least they aren't blaming Harry Potter for children converting to Wicca or trying to practice witchcraft, and that it is a tool of Satan.
Comment I thought /. was fast... (Score 1) 63
...but I heard this on the RADIO two days ago.
But anyway, if you're stupid enough to rob a bank or whatever and then update your facebook or twitter status "i just robbed a bank lol" then you deserve whats coming. I only bother with facebook about once every two weeks, and I find twitter to be absolutely useless.
Comment How about high orbit? (Score 1) 246
Why not put one into an unmanned high orbit that will be stable for the next 500 years? Classify it as an orbiting Time Capsule. To be opened 2510. No quibbling over who gets it, etc etc.
Comment Re:You know what they say... (Score 1) 71
Well, depends on the quality of the video. If we assume that video is 30 frames a second, that would make 30,000 words a second and 1,800,000 words a minute. A full length movie at this rate (assuming 1.5 hours) 162,000,000 words, plus dialog.
This is of course high-quality video, but its pretty amazing how quickly that adds up.
Ten Gadgets That Defined the Decade 313
Corpuscavernosa writes "As 2009 winds down and we try to come up with new and clever ways of referring to the early years of this century, there's really only one thing left to do: declare our ten favorite gadgets of the aughts and show them off in chronological order. It's arguable that if this wasn't the decade of gadgets, it was certainly a decade shaped by gadgets — one which saw the birth of a new kind of connectedness. In just ten years time, gadgets have touched almost every aspect of our daily lives, and personal technology has come into its own in a way never before seen. It's a decade that's been marked the ubiquity of the internet, the downfall of the desktop, and the series finale of Friends, but we've boiled it down to the ten devices we've loved the most and worked the hardest over the past ten years. We even had some of our friends in the tech community chime in with their picks on what they thought was the gadget or tech of the decade."
Comment At least it wasnt a nuke plant going up... (Score 5, Insightful) 236
...Like in 1986 when it took radiation alarms going off in fucking SWEDEN before they admitted that they had literally nuked a city or two...
Comment well... (Score 2, Funny) 201
You could just get a magical eye like Mad-Eye Moody....
Tapering Waveguide Captures a Rainbow 72
SubComdTaco passes along news of researchers in the US who have trapped a rainbow in a tapering waveguide. The research is described (PDF) on the arXiv. "In 2007, Ortwin Hess of the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK, and colleagues proposed a technique to trap light inside a tapering waveguide [made of metamaterials]... The idea is that as the waveguide tapers, the components of the light are made to stop in turn at ever narrower points. That's because any given component of the light cannot pass through an opening that's smaller than its wavelength. This leads to a 'trapped rainbow.' ... Now Vera Smolyaninova of Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland, and colleagues have used a convex lens to create the tapered waveguide and trap a rainbow of light. They coated one side of a 4.5-mm-diameter lens with a gold film..., and laid the lens — gold-side down — on a flat glass slide which was also coated with film of gold. Viewed side-on, the space between the curved lens and the flat slide was a layer of air that narrowed to zero thickness where the lens touched the slide — essentially a tapered waveguide. When they shone a multi-wavelength laser beam at the... gilded waveguide, a trapped rainbow formed inside. This could be seen as a series of colored rings when the lens was viewed from above with a microscope: the visible light leaked through the thin gold film."
Comment Re:WA-5H? (Score 1) 40
Crybaby, cry, make your mother sigh...
