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Comment Re:In the US. (Score 1) 904

Again, this works in the US with big suburbs where everyone has a parking lot with an electric outlet. In other countries (like good old Europe), where most people live in apartments and there is just no way you can plug your car at night, it doesn't work.

Apartment buildings and fixed parking spots are far from mutually exclusive, either through a parking cellar or dedicated garages/parking spots. Granted, Norway is a cold country where a garage may be more useful than down south but by household:

58% have a garage or carport
25% have a private parking spot
17% have no parking

Of the last 17% only 38% have a car, so in practice it's only 6.5% that don't have a fixed spot for their car. And that probably includes people that have rented a parking spot nearby, in practice few wants to be nomads trying to find free street parking every day. Of course you would have to get an electrician to mount an outlet, but beyond that it's not really a problem.

Comment Re:settled cannon for about a decade now (Score 1) 83

Part of me wonders if this is deliberate. No graphics drivers that are useful, no games. No games, no Linux desktop.

Why? AMD has no stake or interest in what OS you game on, they're just looking to sell their hardware. They get no benefit from enabling or pushing a migration to Linux unless they can steal customers from nVidia/Intel that way, which seems highly unlikely. You don't need a conspiracy to explain why companies don't do things that don't benefit them.

Comment Re:wrong question (Score 1) 54

Honestly, I'd beg to differ. When you cut a human body open you're likely to find a relatively standard set of organs. Even with all conditions and permutations it is a whole less open-ended than say driving a car, where arguably a lot of odd conditions could happen at any time. In short, there's a few vital functions that that the body must uphold and if a robot surgeon does he's not making anything worse. He might not cure everything, but that's not the point.

Comment Re:What we have vs. what we want (Score 1) 318

A conversation about the internet that is long, long overdue: Is what we *have* what we *want*, and if not, what can be done about it? What we HAVE is a global network that will never, ever let you forget that silly thing you did whilst young and drunk that everyone thought was so hilarious at the time. Is that really what we want?

Maybe not. But it's kinda meaningless to quibble about the negative side effects when it's obvious the positive effects are so huge there's no way we'll give up on it, nobody likes drive-by shooting but it's obvious we're not going to give up cars. Yes, we would like a free global information-sharing network.

Comment Re:No (Score 2) 318

This. By far most embarrassing things you've said or done are laid dead when you own up to it and say I was young and foolish, okay? Most of the problem actually comes from shielded youngsters who are still too mentally immature to blush, cope and move on. Of course there are situations you might be caught in that would be genuinely embarrassing, like revenge porn but then you're typically dealing with malice and an army of Internet trolls who won't let it go away anyway. In short, either you ought to grow a thicker skin or you have to grow a thicker skin.

Comment Re:Kickstarter? (Score 3, Interesting) 552

Except that they're coming in way below their yearly outlook which said:

Revenue:
$18 - $20 mm
Adjusted EBITDA:
$5 - $6 mm
Net income:
$3 - $4 mm

But later they're giving Q2 figures saying for the last 6 months:

Revenue:
7,667 mm
Adjusted EBITDA:
0,852 mm
Net income:
0,316 mm

If the last half of the year is the same, they're only making about 15%-20% of their planned net income. In fact, the last quarter they made no money at all. So I'm thinking way, way less.

Comment Re:Is it going to matter much? (Score 1) 172

Even if it's a thousand times more durable than NAND it's not much in a loop, if you just write to the same memory location over and over with DDR4 you can write every 5 cycles @ 1.25ns/cycle = 160,000,000 writes/second. I would think the greatest advantage would be a write cache which could return ~1000 times faster from a flush() making sure it's committed to non-volatile memory. The SSD can then work "behind the scenes" to move it to slower SLC/MLC/TLC.

Comment Re:Here's the list (Score 1) 119

Mainly he's confusing a project which uses an open source licence for a project that wants a community based development model. Google doesn't release the Chromium source so that they can get contributions, they do it to be open so that nobody can claim they're creating another proprietary web like IE did with their closed source, non-standard implementation. And that is all. I mean, he's talking about the source code to the world's most popular browser so it's obviously a very narrow definition of "failure", I doubt neither Google nor the users see it that way.

Comment Re:I have no fear of AI, but fear AI weapons (Score 1) 313

But, aren't there enough 'morally flexible' drone operators available that it doesn't really matter?

There are, but drones are only a small part of the armed forces easily reached by radio requiring powerful jammers that would be easy targets and they're usually support for people on the ground - not necessarily your people but affiliated forces. If you want to do a door-to-door search it would be extremely hard to do that by droid remote control, no matter how many operators you have. The goal of autonomous robots is genuine remote warfare, where you have the ability to run an occupation without having boots on the ground. Apart from AI sci-fi stories we do expect somebody to give the robots commands and accept their behavior even though the robot is working out the details of who to shoot itself.

Comment Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$ (Score 1) 75

Anyone paying $300-540 for a processor is not likely to cheap out and ONLY use the integrated graphics. These i5 and i7 processors are turning into a pretty big disappointment. You can get far better graphics with just about the lowliest available sub $100 graphics card, but the options ditch the graphics and get a couple more cores explode in price.

Well if you are gaming when are you ever CPU limited with a 4+ GHz quad core? It would be nice if they dropped the integrated graphics and sold it for less, but the six/eight core processors are typically for people who do video encoding, 3D rendering, lots of VMs or some other semi-pro use. Even GTX 980 Ti in SLI should run fine on an i7-4790k, I guess for triple/quad-SLI you need the extra PCI lanes but then you're extremely far out of the mainstream even for gamers.

Comment Re:I don't think it's a ho-hum (Score 2) 256

Actually, most European countries are divided as well but we typically have a proportional representation with a 4-5% minimum which means we have more than two choices which creates an entirely different dynamic. Now naturally it divides itself into blocks it means there can be 2-3 different directions and 2-3 specialist parties that support their side and their relative strength matters. I'm guessing with a European system you'd have Democrats, Liberals, Republicans, Christians, Tea Party, Libertarians and Greens. Suddenly you're not losing just a few swing voters, you can lose voters in any direction.

Forming a new party actually has meaning as a 30% party and two 25+5% parties have the same power, unlike the US system where starting a party competing for the same voters spells doom for everybody. I used to think our system was worse because of all the compromises and coalitions and in-fighting, but really all the US system does is bring all those warring factions together in the same party. All the bargain-making is just done between factions in Congress, not between parties.

And the voters don't get to be a part of that process, here there's different shades of red and blue that shift far more easily in the polls. If the voters think the conservatives aren't being very conservative or the liberals very liberal or don't think you're doing a very good job, there are other parties with similar politics that would be happy to take over. The politicians have to work all the time to convince the voters that their party is the right one, there are relatively few genuinely safe votes. Typically only 50-75% will vote for the same party twice in a row.

So I think it's the system, of course the only way to change the system would be getting an amendment through Congress so.... yeah, you're pretty much stuck with a two-party state that will flaunt a few divisive political issues while making sure their campaign contributors are happy. They're quasi-monopolists on each half of the political spectrum, they got no reason to want to change and the third parties don't have the power to change anything.

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