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Comment Re:Old news, ask Tesla (Score 2) 63

While Tesla did manage to transmit power wirelessly over a short distance, there is no evidence that he succeeded going further despite devoting a large part of his life to this problem.
However, we can thank Tesla for allowing us to light light bulbs from 100km... with wires. He can be considered the father of the modern power grid.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 484

The nuclear waste problem is highly overblown. We could dump it all into a big hole for minimal cost and minimal risk. I think the main reason why we don't do this is that the "waste" might prove useful someday. Additionally, France already recycles a significant part of it.
What is more significant is that most reactors were built in the 80s and start showing their age. It means that they will either require costly maintenance or even more costly decommissioning and replacement.

Comment Re:Pretty much (Score 1) 153

Facebook hate was around by the time G+ was released. Had they simply released an Ad-free, private clone of FB it would taken the world by storm. Instead they thought they knew better and now have yet another failed product to add to a very long list.

No. People love to hate Facebook but they don't really want to leave. So unless a competitor offers a really superior product or Facebook messes things up badly, people will stay.
As for privacy, the truth is : very few people give a shit. So if it is your main selling point, you will only attract a small minority. Ads ? People who really don't want ads use AdBlock so again, you can't really use "no ads" as a selling point. And these are clearly not arguments that can effectively be used by Google.

Comment Re:Nitpick (Score 1) 196

First of all, the hiragana "no" is always Japanese, not Chinese, not Korean. The CJK unification is only about han characters (in Japanese, that's kanji).
As for maths, there are usually markers to indicate we are in an equation, which makes sense because Unicode is not powerful enough for this : fractions, integrals, matrices, etc... cannot be rendered with just code points. So in this case Unicode provide the characters (roman and geek letters, numbers, mathematical symbols, the hiragana "no", etc...) and a higher level language (like MathML or LaTeX) deal with the structure. Because of this, Unicode doesn't have to dedicate a special page for mathematical version of regular characters : the software can easily differentiate. If it is MathML / LaTeX "$" block, render it with the math font, otherwise, use the regular font.

Comment Re:Missing the point again... (Score 1) 25

See also Glide vs OpenGL.

Good analogy.

At the time Glide was still relevant, OpenGL was designed for expensive workstations and supported plenty of features like geometric transforms and lighting. Game oriented GPUs couldn't do this in hardware and software emulation was painfully slow. As for Direct3D, it was a massive PITA for developers and wasn't that efficient either.
This is the reason why 3Dfx made Glide. It was a thin layer that is sufficient for the developer to use all the hardware features without hassle but nothing more. For instance there was absolutely no geometric computations. As a result it was very efficient. Its popularity declined as CPUs and GPUs became powerful enough to fully support OpenGL. The original NVIDIA GeForce, which could do geometry in hardware, was the killing blow.

How it applies to VR ? VR demands low latency. And abstraction layers, which often form the basis of open standards, tend increase latency. That's why manufacturers turn to proprietary APIs that are strongly tied to their hardware, like 3Dfx with Glide. Maybe, when we have something that works really well, they will think about standards.

Comment Re:This run at driverless cars will fail (Score 1) 114

We don't need to be 100% safe, safer than human drivers is enough.
Plus, if there are indeed neural nets, they are not necessarily relied upon in life-or-death situation. In fact, they most likely aren't.
For example, the prankster tricking the car into thinking the bridge abutment is a road may fool some advanced AI until another, much simpler piece of code tied to a proximity sensor triggers an emergency maneuver. Rough ride but you are safe.
And, I wouldn't call these people pranksters. Murderers would be a more correct term, and thankfully, they are rare. The "push you on the tracks while the train is coming" prank may be an easy one but I don't see it performed very often...

Comment Re:What a waste of time... (Score 1) 53

These larger pieces of space junk are easy to track, few in number, and thus are not that dangerous.

While they may be easy to avoid by themselves, if, for some reason, they collide with other space junk, they may break up into a large number of smaller pieces, possibly triggering a chain reaction. Bigger debris also typically experience less drag and stay in orbit for longer.

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