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Comment Re:Need a transparent government (Score 1) 87

That is interesting, but doesn't change anything on the point of replacing a vandalised window or cheapness of glass :)

But, yeah, my main point was, I don't get why the parent, way back up there, was so worked up about a store window having advertising. That's what those large front store windows are *for* and even today are often filled with transparent plastic decals, paper posters, store merchandise, TV screens, even animatronics.

And certainly if this comes down in price it could be worth augmenting all the other storefront stuff with. Assuming storefronts still exist :)

Comment Re:Need a transparent government (Score 1) 87

That occurred to me to, but I think it is a safe bet that a pane of glass will *always* be cheaper than glass plus nanoparticles plus circuitry and power. That being said, I'm sure there's a point where it'll eventually become cheap enough to make an entire storefront window out of it, and realise some benefit from the visuals over more traditional forms of advertisement.
Assuming storefronts still exist then, and assuming it becomes common to use, I'd move on to the main point. What's the big deal? Store windows basically are nothing *but* advertising...

Comment Re:They don't go outside (Score 3, Insightful) 635

When I was a teen, one of the main functions of driving (and borrowing my parent's car) was to go be with my friends, hanging out or whatever. Otherwise I was stuck at home by myself.

My own kids are constantly texting, emailing, playing online with, or using other means to interact with their friends without physical proximity. They can do it from anywhere they have wireless connectivity, even when traveling out of town.

Again, back when I was a teen, we had a single land line telephone. If it wasn't in use, It was possible to call and just talk to one of my friends at a time, provided they were home, their line wasn't busy, and they were willing to be tethered by a cord to the phone's location in the house.

Comment Re:Tiny little airbags like the polystyrene foam? (Score 1) 317

With regards to minor impacts damaging the helmet, like your "getting banged around in the trunk example" such that bike owner might not realise it and fail to discard it. Surely this could be accounted for in the design? Some outer stiffer sheathing of maybe thin layer of plastic and polystyrene to shield the cardboard from minor impacts?

Comment Re:Perhaps it's just that I'm ignorant... (Score 1) 213

You might also find this article interesting.
http://hackademix.net/2010/03/24/why-noscript-blocks-web-fonts/

Personally, I find stuff like web fonts a bit more worrying since the content is served remotely, unlike installing this font, which you'd need root to do in the first place.

Comment Re:There's a question about that at Skeptics (Score 1) 294

Well, our body is well evolved to handle natural sources of radiation which, nonetheless, can absolutely harm us.
We can handle a surprising amout of damage from UV, which luckily does not penetrate our entire body. And we've evolved to handle certain other kinds of radiation damage, heck, there's that evidence of hormesis. I don't know how that applies across the wholebody, nor how persistently high levels over a lifetime might cause an issue.

I also don't know how to address all the sources you listed because, well, I don't know much about this, that's why I was asking here. I did look for solar flux at radio frequencies here: http://www.astro.ethz.ch/people/pdf_files/benz/LBReview_thermal.pdf and if I'm reading the units right, it is not even close to being on the same scale, but... not sure really.
And I certainly don't know the power of all those other various sources.

But, this was interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBm

So, seems to me from that chart and inverse square estimate, that a cellphone up close against you would have 500x the wattage of an FM radio station 10km away. Not that that dude's research was necessarily exculpating FM radio stations.

Glancing at the technical data here...
http://www.bag.admin.ch/themen/strahlung/00053/00673/03012/index.html

Seems like a baby monitor transmits about 100mW which is about 1/5th the power of the phone and of course not pressed against the flesh. Sooo.... if the cellphone is cranking out 500mW at say 1cm from some part of the body you might be concerned about, and the baby monitor is cranking out 100mW but 100cm away, then presumably the baby monitor is 1/50,000th the concern of the cell phone, right?

Comment Re:There's a question about that at Skeptics (Score 1) 294

Seems as good a place to ask it as any.
What does /. think of:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21457072

http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=7520940937

http://www.physiology.columbia.edu/MartinBlank.html
"
â EMR accelerates the reaction rate, i.e., electron transfer rate
â EMR competes with the chemical force driving the reaction, so the effect of EMR varies inversely with the reaction rate
â Interaction thresholds are low, comparable to levels found in EMR-cancer epidemiology studies
â Effects vary with frequency, and there appear to be different optima for the reactions studied: ATPase (60Hz), cytochrome oxidase (800Hz), BZ (250Hz)

These properties, in addition to stimulation of DNA in the cellular stress response, are consistent with EMR effects on many biological systems through interaction with electrons moving during redox reactions and also within DNA"

I ran into it a couple of weeks ago and it ran contrary to what I was expecting to find.
Curious if there's any problem with his work.

Comment Re:Maximum precision? (Score 1) 289

Oh, and for asm.js (and, for the JS jits in general when they are sure of the types), floating point is not used if the number known to be int, so, there's another win outside of the main one from the article.

Comment Re:Maximum precision? (Score 1) 289

That's only true for fractions.
1+2 == 3 is always going to be true.
As is 123456789 + 987654321 == 1111111110

You can absolutely express a 32 bit integer in a double with no approximation ever.
We rely on this in our lua scripting as a matter of fact.

http://asmjs.org/spec/latest/ relies on this for the 32 bit integer parts of their spec.

Actually, you can go a lot further than 2^32 - all the way up to 2^53-1.
This is taken advantage of in non-asm.js places. See:
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7781/satoshis-genius-unexpected-ways-in-which-bitcoin-dodged-some-cryptographic-bullet/

And, you'll be happy to know (well, we were), that Mozilla is adding 64 bit ints to their JS as well, although when that'll be widely available, who knows.

Comment Re:Entries still have to work in Firefox (Score 1) 55

Browser driver blacklists vary a bit across hardware.
On my computer/driver, Firefox rendered webgl by default, while Chromium requires a forced override.
(I say did, haven't checked recently, and ditched fglrx for the foss driver)

Anyway, if you want to try webgl in Firefox anyway, blacklists of unstable drivers be damned, go to about:config
search for webgl
and set webgl.force-enabled to true

You'll probably have to restart.

You might also want to try another driver. Do you have jockey-gtk ? If you're on intel, can check for newer updates from the Intel team. xorg-edgers is an option..

Comment Re:IT's just a study being done nation wide (Score 1) 783

The actual article the lady tried to request to drive on, and the police officer ordered her off the road anyway.

Once she was there, she noted that they were doing passive breathalyser analysis of the air she was exhaling even before the consent form was presented.

So, yeah, "no thank you" was apparently not an option.

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