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Comment Re:Is this story for real? (Score 1) 487

> Most alarm clocks are way less reliable,

Quote your source. I think you just made that up. Anecdotally, all my phones have been very unreliable as alarms (an iPhone's battery only lasts about 2 days for starters, so frequently goes flat). In fact on many mobile phones, the alarm doesn't even sound if you've accidentally turned the phone off or if it's battery is too low (ancient Nokia's excepted). My mains alarm has never failed - even during a 3 day power cut (it's lithium battery back up lasts around a 4 years or so and can sound the alarm even when the display is off). Many are also not daylight-savings aware resulting in the same glitch featured in this article. Many get their time off the cell network, which frequently seems to balls-up and sets your phones time to be something random while they're playing with the phone network during the night.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 183

> Ok, but I live in an apartment in an old (historic, something like 117 years old so far)

Historic?! You must be American! My building was built in 1810 and has 18" thick solid walls (try getting WiFi to go through that - or a drill bit long enough to run the Cat 5 though).

But yes, we have the same problem - no dishes or even aerials are allowed on our building, so hopefully this technology will allow those of us in listed/protected buildings to get satellite-based services.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 183

Because you can't easily use a parabolic dish which needs to be aimed accurately on a car, caravan/RV/mobile home etc. This technology could potentially make it easier to resolve the weak satellite signals which would normally require a dish, resolvable by a static antenna array which could be omnidirectional. As the article implies, it might mean that digital radio actually *works* :)

Comment Re:And it's great for sysadmins (Score 1) 104

> Doesn't conduct electricity and it will cool those servers down.

Pure distilled water certainly does conduct electricity! Throw a hair dryer or toaster in it and it will go bang. The hope you'd have of keeping equipment up and running in water is to keep the high voltage power supplies out of the way. 12 and 5V lines probably won't be affected much but 110V and 240V PSUs will simply go bang the second they hit the water.

Comment Re:This is how train and air travel began, too. (Score 2, Informative) 164

> for traveling between two earth-based locations space is mostly a big detour.

Not if you do the maths - the altitude becomes insignificant compared to the distance travelled. What's 30 miles of altitude if you're travelling 5000 or 10,000 miles? You also need to take into account how much faster you could feasibly get there if inconveniences such as air aren't getting in your way. If they could make a self-launching vehicle which could get out of the atmosphere we could do London to New York in an hour or so, instead of 6-7 because travelling at Mach 10 wouldn't be a problem. Obviously intercontinental travel is not the purpose or aim of SpaceShipTwo, but it could lead to that through engineering breakthroughs. I see the day when the Concorde will seem like a WW2 biplane to us :)

Comment Re:Nothing to see here (Score 1) 214

Huh? Those places are all public places where people can see you anyway. Again, another non-argument...

> would behave differently if the footage of a camera at such places entrance
> was publicly available

RTFA - this is about CCTV not public broadcast television! The C in CCTV means "Closed" and not even YOU (the one on camera) can see it.

Comment Re:Nothing to see here (Score 0, Troll) 214

> Cue the stupid people in the UK who will say the tired out line "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear."

It's still said, because nobody ever seems to have a counter-argument for it, so it still stands. At the end of the day, if you don't commit a crime, the presence of a camera will not affect you.

Comment Re:just a guy (Score 1) 119

I tried using a TomTom but found it useless. TomTom snaps to roads wherever possible and doesn't really handle off-road navigation at all well. It has no idea about cycle paths and footpaths, or any terrain features which are important to cyclists. Even many streams and lakes are missing!

I wish they'd add a "pedestrian" or "cycling" mode which turns off all the snapping and just gives you an arrow to your destination (or lets you draw it on the map dot-to-dot style).

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