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Comment Re:Slow CPU, crippled network, too little RAM (Score 1) 202

A 5v regulator, the 7805, costs about 50 cents a piece even when you buy them in very small quantities.

The problem is not going down to 5V, it's the problem of getting up. Three AA alkaline or NiMH cells will get you around a 3.6 - 4V working range. Lithium is 3.6-3.9V depending on exact chemistry. Therefore you need a boost circuit, and boost circuits waste power. It's not an insurmountable problem, but the wasted energy is not insignificant compare to what the RPi itself, using a tickless low power kernel, consumes.

Take a look at people running an RPi on solar power to see what I mean.

Comment Re:Much better board layout (Score 1) 202

The layout is mostly dictated by the pinout of the CPU. If you have a look at the schematics and board layout files you can see that in order to keep the number of layers down and density down they pretty much just routed everything outwards from that one part.

Comment Re:Any cell phone is a security risk. (Score 4, Insightful) 134

The Chinese security services are not as bad as the NSA. They freely admit that they monitor everything happening on their networks as they have no reason to hide it. In fact they are proud as it shows they are protecting their people.

There is a genuine security concern with any American products now, thanks to the NSA. Don't try to divert people by saying everyone else is as bad or making excuses. The NSA is harming US companies and US citizens through its actions, and other countries are right to treat it as a major security threat.

Comment Re:noone trusts their cya legalese (Score 2) 134

it taps the connections between their datacenters and it gets the data in transit

...

There really is nothing that Apple can say to convince foreign users that their data is safe.

How can it be safe when the NSA is intercepting it? Some companies have said they are now encrypting data as it flows between datacentres, but we don't know how competent they are at doing it or if the NSA has some work-around. The bottom line is that any data stored in the USA has to be assumed to be compromised.

It's not just Apple, all US companies have this problem. It's hard to see how they can ever recover now.

Comment Re:Must vote remain underlings (Score 1) 151

Precisely how long should the remaining 91% of the population delay the running of the country to satisfy something like 4.5%?

Well, since the delay would have only been two months, I'd say at least two months. Considering it's a long term project and a short delay loses us almost nothing, and would actually have saved us time and money spent looking at Scottish sites which may not be available in the near future I'd say that's a reasonable thing to do.

Should the UK Pariliament pretend that Scotland never receives the benefit of large projects (e.g. the two aircraft carriers, the proposed endpoint of HS2, a bunch of milirary bases and so on) in order to artificially benifit the YES camp? Would that be fair or equally biased?

Interesting you should mention those things. The SNP has said they would still work with the rest of the UK on HS2. The UK government has threatened to take away all ship building, which is an odd threat after they closed the Portsmouth yards in favour of Scottish ones (another bribe). Maybe they will reverse that decision in the event of a yes vote. They also threatened to grab the land where Trident is based so they don't have to move it.

Basically the UK government have acted like complete dicks at every opportunity, fear-mongering and offering blatant bribes as often as possible.

Still if you guys vote yes and joing the EU you'll have to put up with hoardes of students from the remaining UK heading over there for free education in a nearby, English speaking country.

I'm not Scottish. Also, foreign students in Scotland have to pay tuition fees and get a loan from their home government. Even students from the rest of the UK do. It's only Scottish students that get a free education.

Comment Re:Here's a better article with actual photos (Score 1) 238

When I clicked on it there was provocative picture of a 16 year old in the sidebar. Technically legal in the UK but it still creeps me out to think of the old men at the Daily Mail admiring it.

Now I feel dirty for giving them advertising revenue. At least I had AdBlock turned on.

Comment Re: Not France vs US (Score 1) 309

Maybe not. The law says they need to charge shipping costs, so unless their couriers are charging them â0.01 they are probably not complying. They are just hoping that it takes the authorities a long time to get around to forcing them to charge the real price, which will be obfuscated as much as possible, by which time the will have forced even more of the competition out of business.

Comment Re: Not France vs US (Score 2) 309

They looked over the channel and saw what has happened in the UK. Most places are what we call "clone towns", which all have exactly the same set of chain shops. There are very few independents left in most places. Choice is non-existent, as even where there are multiple chains they both tend to carry the same products and only differentiate (slightly) on price.

Displays

Nano-Pixels Hold Potential For Screens Far Denser Than Today's Best 129

Zothecula (1870348) writes "The Retina displays featured on Apple's iPhone 4 and 5 models pack a pixel density of 326 ppi, with individual pixels measuring 78 micrometers. That might seem plenty good enough given the average human eye is unable to differentiate between the individual pixels, but scientists in the UK have now developed technology that could lead to extremely high-resolution displays that put such pixel densities to shame."

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