Comment Re:So why'd it come back online? (Score 1) 45
It's not that common for companies to have principles to begin with, tough.
Comment Re: Satellite not needed (Score 1) 115
I find it quite believable, seeing how the Venezuelan govt simply issues orders to all ISPs to block the IP ranges of sites that make them uncomfortable; a famous victim is DolarToday.com, a site that tracks the black market currency exchange rate and now publishes unflattering news and opinion. I'd include a few traceroutes but I'm posting from my phone. Even pastebin.com was blocked for more than a year (haven't checked recently) because a list of URLs with leaked emails wad posted there.
Currency black markets are not "unconfortable", they are _illegal_. I'm sure there are examples of censorship in Venezuela, but that's not one.
Comment Re: Tiny Island (Score 1) 115
Holy crap, that's the last place I'd expect a cable. It sounds like the only reason they did that is politics because of Chavez. The latency will suck.
The latency to where?
Latency to Venezuela can be good.
Comment Re:Modern Cellular is the way to go (Score 1) 115
My city, Montevideo, an oldish city, with some similarities to Havana, was also wired by a state owned telco with fiber. Also most of the urban country is already fibered.
It's taking a bit over a couple of years, most of the city is covered, and the smallest plan is 30 dollars (or free if you a single Giga per month is enough for you).
Of course, 35 dollars in Cuba might be expensive, but also most of the cost they had here was labor, construction salaries are high. They wouldn't have that problem over there. They could even have you dig the ditches yourself if you want internet, dammit.
Anyhow, I would go with LTE. It's probably a lot cheaper, and flexible enough.
Displaced IT Workers Being Silenced 398
dcblogs writes A major problem with the H-1B debate is the absence of displaced IT workers in news media accounts. Much of the reporting is one-sided — and there's a reason for this. An IT worker who is fired because he or she has been replaced by a foreign, visa-holding employee of an offshore outsourcing firm will sign a severance agreement. This severance agreement will likely include a non-disparagement clause that will make the fired worker extremely cautious about what they say on Facebook, let alone to the media. On-the-record interviews with displaced workers are difficult to get. While a restrictive severance package may be one handcuff, some are simply fearful of jeopardizing future job prospects by talking to reporters. Now silenced, displaced IT workers become invisible and easy to ignore. This situation has a major impact on how the news media covers the H-1B issue and offshore outsourcing issues generally.
Comment So sexist!! (Score 1) 24
"It has so far been tested only on light-insensitive retinas from embryonic chicks, "
OMG!! They are called ladies, not "chicks".
Comment Re:Profit? (Score 1) 133
Why would the Chinese government pay for something western governments get for free?
Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 196
Networked is not the same. Internet connected or something like that might be better.
Also, networked _might_ imply wired for some, while IoT is more in the line of wireless, standalone.
Internet enabled is good, but already means other old, unrelated things.
It is a new trend, that is actually gaining some momentum right now, cheap systems on chip, BLE, and stuff, and it needs a name, so others what you are talking about. IoT is as good a name as any other. It doesn't really bother me, even if it's silly.
No reason to keep whining about it. There are possibly tens of thousands of tech people reading this today, if you have a better name, descriptive, not stupid, or whatever, please share it, below the line ----v , we might like it, start using it instead of IoT, and it just might catch on.
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Comment Re:Oh no (Score 2) 297
They are identical on paper, but not for a person.
It's a lot easier to get energy from doughnuts than from broccoli.
It's 5 medium doughnuts versus 5 broccoli bunches. I'm pretty sure I can have 5 doughnuts in a sitting, but not 5 broccoli bunches.
There's a lot of fiber in broccoli, so even if you manage to have all that broccoli, you will have a hard time extracting many calories from it. In any case, it will be slow, so at least it keeps you full for a longer time than doughnuts.
Comment Re:Oh no (Score 4, Interesting) 297
That's what is being done nowadays, counting calories.
The problem is that calorie consumption is not constant. It's more like household economy.
If you earn (eat) a lot every day, you will probably end up with a lot of savings (belly fat).
One way of getting rid of those savings (belly fat) is taking a lower paying job (dieting). The problem is that your savings don't magically dissappear, and you can make changes that allow you to keep your savings (fat), even with a lower income (daily calorie intake).
Another way you can get rid of your savings is just spending more daily (like exercise). The problem is that, if you have a good enough income (daily intake), and sizable savings, you will only lose capital (weight) in the long run, no sizable short term effect.
So, a fat person body works, in what respects to calories, like a financially savvy household. Going skinny would be like going broke. Some of us could benefit from a way to teach our bodies to do a bit worse in the calorie finance department. Could be a lot easier than just dieting, exercising or both.
Tesla Teardown Reveals Driver-facing Electronics Built By iPhone 6 Suppliers 158
Lucas123 writes: The Tesla Model S gets attention because it's an EV that can go from from 0 to 60 mph (96 km/h) in 4.2 seconds and can travel 265 miles on a single charge. But, a teardown of the vehicle by IHS Technology has also revealed that Elon Musk avoided third-party design and build routes used traditionally by auto makers and spared no expense on the instrument cluster and infotainment (head unit) system, which is powered by two 1.4Ghz, quad-core NVIDIA Tegra processors. IHS called the Tesla's head unit the most sophisticated it's ever seen, with 1,000 more components than any it has previously analyzed. A bill of materials for the virtual instrument cluster and the premium media control unit is also roughly twice the cost of the highest-end infotainment unit examined by IHS.
An Air Traffic Control System For Drones 77
An anonymous reader writes: Personal drones are become more popular, and many companies are trying to figure out ways to incorporate them into their business. So what do we do in 10 years, when the skies are full of small, autonomous vehicles? NASA and a startup called Airware are working on a solution: air traffic control for drones. "The first prototype to be developed under NASA's project will be an Internet-based system. Drone operators will file flight plans for approval. The system will use what it knows about other drone flights, weather forecasts, and physical obstacles such as radio masts to give the go-ahead. Later phases of the project will build more sophisticated systems that can actively manage drone traffic by sending out commands to drones in flight. That could mean directing them to spread out when craft from multiple operators are flying in the same area, or taking action when something goes wrong, such as a drone losing contact with its operator, says Jonathan Downey, CEO of Airware. If a drone strayed out of its approved area, for example, the system might automatically send a command that made it return to its assigned area, or land immediately."
Hawking Radiation Mimicked In the Lab 66
Annanag writes *Nothing* escapes a black hole, right? Except 40 years ago Stephen Hawking threw a spanner in the works by suggesting that, courtesy of quantum mechanics, some light particles can actually break free of a black hole's massive pull. Then you have the tantalizing question of whether information can also escape, encoded in that so-called 'Hawking radiation'. The only problem being that no one has ever been able to detect Hawking radiation being emitted from a black hole. BUT a physicist has now come closer than ever before to creating an imitation of a black hole event horizon in the lab, opening up a potential avenue for investigating Hawking radiation and exploring how quantum mechanics and general relativity might be brought together.
London's Crime Hot Spots Predicted Using Mobile Phone Data 64
KentuckyFC (1144503) writes A growing number of police forces around the world are using data on past crimes to predict the likelihood of crimes in the future. These predictions can be made more accurate by combining crime data with local demographic data about the local population. However, this data is time consuming and expensive to collect and so only updated rarely. Now a team of data experts have shown how combing crime data with data collected from mobile phones can make the prediction of future crimes even more accurate. The team used an anonymised dataset of O2 mobile phone users in the London metropolitan area during December 2012 and January 2013. They then used a small portion of the data to train a machine learning algorithm to find correlations between this and local crime statistics in the same period. Finally, they used the trained algorithm to predict future crime rates in the same areas. Without the mobile phone data, the predictions have an accuracy of 62 per cent. But the phone data increases this accuracy significantly to almost 70 per cent. What's more, the data is cheap to collect and can be gathered in more or less real time. Whether the general population would want their data used in this way is less clear but either way Minority Report-style policing is looking less far-fetched than when the film appeared in 2002.
The Passenger Pigeon: A Century of Extinction 108
An anonymous reader writes On September 1, 1914, Martha, the last passenger pigeon was found dead in her aviary at the Cincinnati Zoo. When the first European settlers arrived in North America at least one of every four birds on the continent was a passenger pigeon, making them the most numerous birds in North America, and perhaps in the world. From the article: "But extinction apparently doesn't ring with the finality it used to. Researchers are working to 'de-extinct' the bird. They got their hands on some of the 1,500 or so known passenger pigeon specimens and are hoping to resurrect the species through some Jurassic Park-like genetic engineering. Instead of using frog DNA to fill out the missing parts of a dinosaur's genetic code as in Michael Crichton's story, the real-life 'bring-back-the-passenger pigeon' researchers are using the bird's closest relative, the band-tailed pigeon.
