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Comment Re:Disable nvsvc32 (Score 1) 129

I just tried disabling nvsvc32, but I discovered that it doesn't exist on my system - the NVIDIA Display Driver Service is named "nvvsvc.exe" (and the Update Service Daemon is "daemonu.exe"), and while I did find an "nvsvc64.dll", I could not find a single file named "nvsvc32.exe" anywhere on my system.

Is this something that only exists in the 32-bit drivers (I'm running Win7 x64), or is it something that disappeared in the 310.70 drivers released last week?

Comment Re:In which case you're going to have to explain.. (Score 1) 230

How on earth do you translate 240p to "240 frames progressive" without making the [effectively] industry-standard terms "480i", "480p", "720p", "1080i", and "1080p" equally meaningless?

It means 240 scanlines progressive - old NTSC television sets normally like to run at 480i, but they're tolerant enough to handle video signals which don't have the extra half-scanline at the end of each frame and display it non-interlaced.

Comment Re:Reminded me of my first C application (Score 1) 241

Microsoft's compiler has a similar warning - "C4706: assignment within conditional expression", and it actually doesn't let you suppress it just by adding extra parentheses - instead, you have to add a comparison around it.
Thus, your second example would have to be while ((list = list->next) != NULL)", which is probably more readable anyways.

Comment Re:And Linux? (Score 1) 321

What you've said is certainly true... for Windows 95/98/Me, which were indeed built on top of Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS and not properly designed to be multi-user. If you think Windows 7 falls under that same category, you are sadly mistaken - that traces back not to 16-bit Windows 3.1 but to 32-bit Windows NT 3.1, which was designed to be multi-user (and even multi-CPU) from the very beginning.

Comment Re:recipie for disaster (Score 1) 391

If you did never lock up your drive wheels using engine braking, you haven't tried hard enough.

Last I checked, "wheel lock up" means the wheels cease rotation and start skidding uncontrollably, so the only way you could possibly lock up your drive wheels with engine braking would be if you stopped the engine - as long as it's still running (and the transmission is engaged), the wheels will keep turning (though they won't provide much torque unless you're driving an automatic and you're at a complete stop).

I will agree, though, that strong negative torque from engine braking (equivalent to what would cause your brakes to lock up the wheels) can definitely cause you to lose traction and start skidding, but it won't lock the drive wheels unless you define locking differently.

Science

Your Moral Compass Is Reversible 295

scibri writes "Your moral positions may be more flexible than you think. Researchers in Sweden have tricked people into reversing their opinions on moral issues, even to the point of constructing good arguments to support the opposite of their original positions (paper in PLOS ONE). They used a 'magic trick' to reverse a person's responses to such moral issues as 'Large-scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic ought to be forbidden as a means to combat international crime and terrorism,' by switching 'forbidden' to 'permitted' when the subject turned the page of the questionaire. When asked to read back the questions and answers, about half of the subjects did not detect the changes, and a full 53% of participants argued unequivocally for the opposite of their original attitude in at least one of the manipulated statements."

Comment Re:Eventually... (Score 2) 169

A man with three clocks will invariably find some convoluted way of using them to tell the time:

"This one runs ten minutes slow every two hours. This runs twenty minutes fast every four hours. The one in the middle is broken and stopped at two o'clock. I take the ten minutes on this one and subtract it from the twenty minutes on that one. Then I divide by the two in the middle."

Comment Re:effectiveness in 2011 (Score 2) 271

EAS alerts have a distinctive noise they make before the announcement.

Specifically, that noise is a data burst which encodes most of the details of the alert (who sent it, what happened, where it happened, when it happened, etc.). Wikipedia provides a reasonably detailed description of the signal structure and the data encoding.

Transportation

Mazda Stops Production of the Last Rotary Engine Powered Car 359

Hugh Pickens writes "After a 45-year production run, Mazda Motor Corp announced that the latest edition of the Mazda RX-8 will end production in June 2012. The Japanese automaker ... introduced its first rotary engine car in 1967 and is the only automaker in the world that makes rotary engine vehicles, once the darling of the automotive industry. Such engines have fewer moving parts and are quieter than comparable piston engines but are more expensive to manufacture and consume more fuel. Cumulative sales of Mazda vehicles with rotary engines total about 1.995 million but Mazda sold only 2,896 RX-8 cars last year, with 1,245 of them in North America and 963 in Japan. 'Although R-X production is ending, the rotary engine will always represent the spirits of Mazda, and Mazda remains committed to its ongoing development,' says Mazda Chief Executive and President Takashi Yamanouchi recalling the victory of Mazda's rotary engine at Le Mans 20 years ago... Mazda does not have flashy green technologies in its lineup that its bigger Japanese rivals do — such as the hybrids at Toyota Motor Corp. or electric vehicles at Nissan Motor Co. The fading away of its prized rotary engine — although largely symbolic — is yet another blow."

Comment Re:Register as a developer (Score 1) 389

Simple - make it so applications have to be signed by Microsoft, a certificate on your domain controller/equivalent (for enterprises), or a "test" certificate that's specific to your own system so you have to sign everything yourself.

To make it even more annoying, force the user to boot the system with a special option (which you can't set in boot.ini) in order to disable signature verification entirely (like you have to do when developing 64-bit device drivers, from what I recall).
Moon

Domino's Plans Pizza On the Moon 214

It may be more PR stunt than a viable expansion plan, but the Japanese arm of Domino's Pizza is making plans for a lunar store. Construction firm Maeda Corp has drawn-up the plans for the dome shaped restaurant and figures it will take 70 tons of materials and pizza-making equipment. Even with the cost cutting measure or using mineral deposits on the moon to make the concrete, Domino's estimates the costs at Y1.67 trillion ($21.7 billion). In 2001 rival chain Pizza Hut made a delivery to the International Space Station, but Domino's hopes to become the preferred pizza of space with the moon store plan.

Comment Re:Placebo (Score 1) 117

The term "homeopathic" specifically refers to medicines that are purported to be more effective the further they are diluted. Tapeworms aren't homeopathic - they're just one of many examples (another of which would be Radiation) of people using harmful things they didn't yet understand as if they were beneficial.

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