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Comment Re:no free choice for gov't info like speed limits (Score 1) 1145

by foxed (#43826101) Attached to: White House: Use Metric If You Want, We Don't Care

... the "free choice" argument does not work for monopoly players, especially the government itself.

Yes, we can't choose our own individual time zone or or own personal daylight saving time. They can only be done as a community. Similarly, units of measure have major implications for society as a whole and the government should standardise them.

Comment Re:Makes sense (Score 1) 1145

by foxed (#43826085) Attached to: White House: Use Metric If You Want, We Don't Care

Not yielding an inch, are they? Imagine the impact it would have on Subway.

I agree, asking for a 30.48 centimeter sandwich instead of a footlong just wouldn't work.

When Subway offer you a footlong, that is one foot to within, what, plus or minus half an inch? Converting to 30.48 centimetres implies a precision of .1 millimetres, which is ridiculous. Just a thirty would be fine, and about the same precision.

Submission + - NVIDIA to build ARM based cores

Submitted by foxed
foxed writes: NVIDIA announced at CES that it plans to build ARM based CPU cores. The CPU running the ARM instruction set will be fully integrated on the same chip as the NVIDIA GPU.
Government

Submission + - Ex CIA Officer Arrested for Information Disclosure (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: The FBI has reported today that a former CIA officer was arrested today on charges that he illegally disclosed national defense information. From November 1998 through May 2000, he was assigned to a classified operational program designed to conduct intelligence activities related to the weapons capabilities of certain countries, including an undisclosed country “Country A” which sources are saying is Iran. The indictment alleges that Sterling took a number of steps to facilitate the disclosure of the classified information...
Transportation

Submission + - Tesla Previews an 'Alpha' of the Model S Sedan? (motorauthority.com) 1

Submitted by thecarchik
thecarchik writes: Has Tesla completed their first Model S prototype? A Tesla manufacturing team employee, appears to confirm this by commenting on blog post, though Tesla has not formally announced anything. An alpha prototype could mean the company built a running Model S using prototype parts that resemble what Tesla intends to produce. According to some investor slides released last month, Tesla planned to finish its first prototype of its hotly anticipated 2012 Model S all-electric sedan by the end of December. It looks like Tesla might have hit the December 2010 goal of getting a prototype up and running. The company has announced an aggressive production plan for the car, and will be assembling vehicles from start-to-end for the first time at its newly acquired $42 million Fremont factory. Many regard the Model S as a major testing ground for the company and the foundation for future revenues after its hot IPO last year.
Facebook

Submission + - Microsoft Tries To Patent Facebook Privacy System (bnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A newly public patent application from Microsoft is for a social network user privacy control system that looks as though it would cover what Facebook does, in which someone can choose a privacy setting for a specific type of content. But Microsoft is a Facebook investor and is unlikely to want to shut it down. Instead, this may be a way to keep Google and others from the types of privacy controls that many people are demanding.
Hardware

Submission + - Preserving Great Tech for Posterity - the 6502 (swtch.com)

Submitted by trebonian
trebonian writes: For great old hardware products like the MOS 6502 ( used in the Apple II, the C64, the Nintendo NES). the details of the designs have been lost or forgotten. While there have been great efforts to reverse engineer the 6502 from the outside, there has not been the hardware equivalent of the source code — until now. As Russell Cox states: (http://research.swtch.com/2011/01/mos-6502-and-best-layout-guy-in-world.html)
"A team of three people accumulated a bunch of 6502 chips, applied sulfuric acid to them to strip the casing and expose the actual chips, used a high-resolution photomicroscope to scan the chips, applied computer graphics techniques to build a vector representation of the chip, and finally derived from the vector form what amounts to the circuit diagram of the chip: a list of all 3,510 transistors with inputs, outputs, and what they're connected to. Combining that with a fairly generic (and, as these things go, trivial) “transistor circuit” simulator written in JavaScript and some HTML5 goodness, they created an animated 6502 web page that lets you watch the voltages race around the chip as it executes. For more, see their web site visual6502.org."

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