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Comment Re:When will he be arrested? (Score 2) 666

No, highway speed limits, at least federal interstates, have speed limits for the purpose of generating revenue.

Reckless driving is a criminal offense, not something you're fined for. Speeding fines are there to provide some disincentive to doing stupid things prior to going to jail for it.

And revenue. As minor speeding isn't really much danger at all, but a lucrative cash cow authorities have become accustomed to suckling the milky teats of.

You'll find speed cameras and cops hitting motorists hard in places where people are likely to speed, and there for generate maximum revenue. But conspicuously absent at notorious deadly accident blackspots where there isn't a high volume of traffic.

If the primary goal was to save lives by slowing people down. Using first principals, where would you decide to put a speed camera?

Comment Re:Same as last time (Score 2) 559

When the Prius first got popular the same thing was said about it. Was soon proved false.

Indeed. The massive environmental impact of the battery pack was part of that criticism, but this is also where electric cars win, if one is being honest about the numbers and don't have a anti-electric car axe to grind: The NiMH battery pack of early hybrids is pretty much 100% recyclable. Li-ion and Li-po etc isn't properly 100% recycled at the moment but that's a infrastructure problem - theoretically 100% recyclable. (I would imagine some years down the track used battery packs would be quite valuable scrap). You just cannot say as much for the hydrocarbon fuel going through the tank of a regular automobile.

Comment My Criticism of hovercraft (Score 1) 66

Why hovercraft never caught on:

Expectation: http://www.google.com/search?q=concept+hovercraft

Reality: http://images.google.com/search?q=hovercraft

Perform this search experiment with Hoverbike/Concept Hoverbike as your search term and the disparity is worse - the real world things, even the expensive ones always look like they've been made in some back yard.

Comment Re:Why light bulb form factor? (Score 1) 314

Because

(1) you don't have to pay an electrician to remove and reinstall a lamp, but you do a fixture (2) you don't disrupt the flow of business and it takes a shorter time to re-lamp than replace a fixture (3) if you find that the LED sucks, you can go back to what you know works (4) In 10 years, when one (or more) of the 30 year life fixtures dies and they don't make that model any more, I can replace a lamp and the fixture will still look the same. If I have to replace a fixture, then I have an oddball looking spot in my ceiling. Not everything is a warehouse where aesthetics mean nothing.

Oh, and there are a good number of older consumer fixtures which either (a) anticipate a certain light pattern or (b) actually use the lamp as the structure to hold the shade. I you think it's hard to convince people to buy a $20 lamp instead of a $1 one, it's even harder to get them to buy a new $60 fixture to put it in.

But even with the same socket type and it's dimension limitations why does it still need to be round and bulb like? A spherical bulb is the worst case scenario for heat dissipation, other shapes would perform better. Many LED bulbs have a cluster of LEDs often with some lens over the top of them. To me that allows a lot of freedom for heat dissipation considerations. But it's not a lack of imagination from manufacturers, they are just are playing it safe by assuming consumers won't accept odd shaped lights.

I find LED spots and floodlights have less of a problem as there is room for a heatsink. Yet MR16's get so hot it scares me.

Comment Re:No shit (Score 1) 447

Finally a Slashdotter that understands piracy both helps and also hurts, especially when the legal means of consuming the content covers most of the intended market.

Helps mainly. Hurts barely at all. Thought we didn't get a Slashdotter that mentioned merchandise - the tangible goods (including the George R.R. Martin books) that get purchased by people who may have never paid a penny for the original content. Often a merchandising empire is a vastly bigger source or revenue than the original legal means of consuming the content. This is becoming the case with GoT.

The occasional Slashdotter will point out the war on piracy was never about lost revenue, it was about profit maximization, and in the case of DRM for example, about leverage over equipment manufacturers (any prevention of casual copying was a small bonus). Example: Apple's declaration that DRM had failed, and subsequent was not some cathartic pro-user move, but rather they are a huge content consumption equipment manufacturing when they became powerful enough to dictate terms in the opposite direction, they through DRM it right back in the freakin' content industries face.

Richard Plepler may see piracy as a background noise HBO has to live with - but one that is actually helpful, possibly lucrative if played right.

Comment Re:So, (Score 2) 112

Lots of apps latch on to a myriad of system events so they can relaunch themselves - some are fairly obscene in how they go about this.

One good solution is to install "Autorun Manager" - it allows you to disable the receivers on a per application basis. Once you kill something, it stays dead until you explicitly start it again.

Also recommend using the app freeze feature in Android. Requires root on most devices but this useful trick "Freezes" an app without actually uninstalling it, it becomes invisible to the system and cannot execute. Some apps like App Quarantine, Titanium Backup and Hide It Pro offer a convenient way of doing this. This means you can have Facebook or some such app, but prevent it from running when you aren't directly using it.

Comment Re:so WTF are normal temperatures then? (Score 1) 422

There's a reason most scientists use the more accurate term climate change.

And not "Weather change"!
Weather != Climate. Some mention of Weather extremes inevitably gets linked to Climate extremes. Some comment that ammounts to "It's colder today than and by next week it will be an ice age!"
There is huge difference between Climate and Weather.

Comment Re:Depends on the source (Score 1) 749

Your preference for 24/96 audio as a listener is entirely due to the placebo effect.

Well, in all fairness, listeners may actually hear perceptible differences between 24/96 and 16/44.1 audio sources due to different mastering, but of course that says nothing about whether they can actually tell the difference between the two bitrates when everything else is equal.

This article is a pretty good explanation of why 16/44.1 is as good as anyone needs for playback.

There's plenty of articles from "experts" on why 16/44.1 is all you need, however these kind of opinions risk being being wrong: What about actual data? I see little solid data where the hypothesis has been put to the test.

I think the point is, some say 24/96 survives lossy compression better, it also produces less artifacts as the higher frequencies have less data points to describe their waveform. Perhaps some won't hear the difference in uncompressed audio, but I bet some can hear the difference in compressed.

Comment Sony already makes a smartwatch. (Score 1) 196

Sony already makes and sells a SmartWatch. This seems to have gone completely unnoticed by the blogosphere, who keep using terms like "first to market" and "new category" and don't seem to be able to use a Google search to see whats already out there. Sony's Smartwatch also is the benchmark that Apple will copy pretty much everything from, including the way it syncs with your existing Android phone and bluetooth gadgets. (You can bet it will do less cost too much, just prettier, and sell millions more).

Apple seems to pick on poor Sony, they already stole Sony's idea with a one-brand retail outlet. (Sony Style stores opened in the 1980s - decades before Apple Stores). Apple's original iPhone was almost as similar to some of Sony's touch screen concept phone, that you you wonder. Now they'll copy the Smartwatch.

Samsung has some very cool display tech though, such as flexible screens - there's a damn good reason why they aren't in Sammy's new phones (S4 etc). I would put good money on Smartwatches being the first use of these screens and that's where production resources are being directed right now.

Unless Apple uses AMOLED for their watch, Samsungs going to be the winner.

Comment Re:Change your e-mail address (Score 1) 239

All that asside, the author of TFA seems to be under a very specific individually targeted attack, rather than some kind of automated attack.

My tip: LONG passwords. make them really really long.

Many people think they are clever with symbols and numbers by doing something like P@55w0rd.

I can't think how many times I've seen something like that for some kind of critical system.

Avoid using guessable common $ubs!tutions for l3tt3rs and numbers, along with 123, 666, 69 etc etc.

Comment Re:Not gonna happen (Score 1) 291

You can't spend your way out of debt, it's ludicrous

Isn't this what every start-up company that accepts venture capital is trying to do?

This article isn't talking about spending on food stamps or fallacious broken windows. It's talking about spending on fundamental research - the kind chase-the-quarter capitalism doesn't do very well - so as to yield a return in new industries to create employment years and decades from now. This isn't that much different than what start-ups are trying to do, except the government can think on a much longer scale - something that I'm glad a government can take time to do.

I would have just said spending is the only way out of debt. (Where spending = investment)

Comment Re:How about a different headline.... (Score 1) 419

Discredited does not equal falsified. He hasn't been discredited, in fact there's an absence of results showing the claims as falsified. This doesn't automatically mean it won't turn out to be crackpot science but there is not much to demonstrate that it is. In contrast Cold Fusion was fairly well falsified quite quickly.

This actually smacks of a recent cock-up by skeptics, I cite thus:

Many credentialed aerodynamicists (in chorus with most of the internet's "experts") swore black and blue that a wind powered land vehicle could not sail dead down wind faster than the wind (DDWFTTW). It would violate the laws of physics it said. So someone built the thing ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(land_yacht) ... and it worked and went 2.8x windspeed even (!) ... repeatedly. What's more the theory was sound all along, no change of the laws of physics was needed.

Indeed, boldly, emdrive are not claiming any physical laws are violated, that any new physics is required or that any well tested institution is being challenged. When was the last time you heard a antigravity/cold fusion/levitating sasquatch crystal skull claim do that kind of thing? It's a little encouraging no?

Ultimately I think skepticism not backed by proof is just as crazy and as the opposite with the same amount of proof. I wonder if it is just a different manifestation of the same underlying cognitive & personality problem. We'll have to wait and see for real-world results. They'll build it, and it will work or it wont!

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