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Comment Or maybe it's used to change speed limits (Score 1) 422

In the US, speed limits are legally to be set after the 85th percentile of actual speeds. So if everyone is speeding, the speed limit should legally be changed such that at most 15% of drivers will be speeding at that stretch of road.

This kind of data might just as well be used to help determine areas where the speed limit is wrong.

Comment Re:Confusing symbols (Score 1) 1268

I remember seeing this kind of notation in my grade school textbooks. (I'm from Denmark by the way.)
Though usually it'd be presented with otherwise marked fields, rather than parentheses, and accompanied by short instructions. In earlier grades accompanied by a drawing representing the kind of problem solving needed, instead of written instructions. Like this:

Fill in the blanks, so both sides are equal:
4 + 3 + 2 = ___ + 2

In later grades, regular equation notation was then introduced, substituting x and y for blanks to fill in. Then you'd get a question like this:

Find the value of x in each equation:
4 + 3 + 2 = x + 2
x = ___

GNU is Not Unix

GCC Moving To Use C++ Instead of C 546

An anonymous reader writes "CodeSourcery's Mark Mitchell wrote to the GCC mailing list yesterday reporting that 'the GCC Steering Committee and the FSF have approved the use of C++ in GCC itself. Of course, there's no reason for us to use C++ features just because we can. The goal is a better compiler for users, not a C++ code base for its own sake.' Still undecided is what subset of C++ to use, as many contributors are experts in C, but novices in C++; there is a call for a volunteer to develop the C++ coding standards."

Comment Re:FLOSS software? (Score 1) 356

My following argument might not work if you follow it through, but consider it anyway.

Every time you consume a plant, you might deny an animal a source of food or a space for living. What if you eating an apple caused a sparrow to die of hunger, who could otherwise have survived off that apple? In this way, consuming plants might also negatively affect animals.

Comment Closed source? No. (Score 5, Insightful) 372

Huh?

H.264 is not "closed source", it's an open standard with open source encoders (famous x264, everything points to it being the best quality encoder available anywhere) and decoders (libavcodec), it's just that a bazillion companies have patents that cover every corner of video coding. It might be "unfree", but it's certainly not "closed source" or "closed standard" or "proprietary".

Comment Re:14k buys a lot of film. (Score 1) 347

Last time I had a 35mm film developed (which was late last year), apart from the negatives, I got digital prints of it. I didn't ask for it, but it's what I got. Naturally the negatives were developed chemically, as that's required, but after that most shops will scan the negatives and produce digital prints from that. And it isn't even cheap. Don't get me started on the price of getting low-resolution (about 5-6 MP JPEG) scans burned onto a CD, it's ridiculous.

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