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Comment Re:ATC communications (Score 1) 578

Not really. Air France pilots speak French when flying over France. Spanish pilots speak Spanish in Spain. Russians speak Russian in countries where Russian is spoken. Etcetera.

This has caused quite a few accidents already (for example, planes being cleared for take-off in the local language while another plane was crossing that runway completely unaware) but the practice continues, unfortunately. It's silly really: air traffic controllers speak English with foreign pilots, and the pilots speak English when abroad, but for some reason they insist on using their own language at home. Some even claim it's safer that way, go figure.

Comment Re:Human made (Score 4, Insightful) 465

Yep, and they also promote things that hurt the environment. Here in belgium they were actually encouraging people to burn woord for heating, since wood was renewable. Then they suddenly realised how much fine dust and smog was being created by those wood stoves. Oops.

And don't get me started on nuclear power. New designs are perfectly safe and produce almost no waste, yet we can't build them because nuclear power is supposedly dangerous and creates waste that will poison the planet forever. So, for lack of alternatives, we keep extending the life of older plants until they blow up. And we try to replace them with renewables that actually pollute more. Those solar panels don't grow on trees. More people have been killed in the construction of wind turbines than in nuclear accidents. Oh, well, looks like I've gotten myself started. I'll stop now.

Comment Re:Future lawsuits include: (Score 1) 39

As for your PS4 games on Xbox, I dunno, AFAIK you are allowed, or at least not disallowed. I don't know how that'd work exactly. Maybe you want to play them on your microwave oven too. If you can convert the object file formats and the machine instruction sets and solve the different rendering engines, and all the other physical incompatibilities then I'd be willing to bet you could play them.

And then get sued for violating the DMCA.

Comment Re:Great... (Score 3, Insightful) 377

If you're running a server for a big company (say, Google or FaceBook) and every image is only half as big, that means a huge reduction in the number of servers you need, power consumption, etc. Less congestion on the internet, more responsive servers, less wasted energy, etc...

I imagine you also have a car that guzzles up twice as much gas as other cars, but who cares since you can afford it?

Comment Re:Transparency is supported. Pronounciation? (Score 2) 377

PNG is used extensively in Apple products. It's the standard format for non-compressed images in iOS apps, along with jpg for compressed images. Apple recommends using png for user interface elements, and jpg for pictures. Which makes sense, since jpg can compress a picture to 20% of the size with very few artifacts. Size does matter for mobile apps. And I wish people would realize that it matters for servers, too. Yes, available bandwidth is enormous these days. But if your server is serving pages that are twice the size and your audience is large, you're going to need a bigger server room and use considerably more energy. Servers are on their way to becoming the biggest power hogs on the planet. Smaller images mean less hard disks and less data pipes.

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