Comment Re:It sounds really useful (Score 1) 116
There are BMW's that do that already.
Comment Re:Summary is retarded (Score 1) 2058
The guy that refused to pay them $75, is going to pay thousands? Did he have the cash on him?
The city used to have a policy that allowed non-payers to be billed $500 (not thousands). 50% never paid.
Comment Re:Nope, not kidding. (Score 1) 2058
It's pretty likely his insurance policy was based on fire services being available. That $75 he saved may end up costing a lot more.
Comment Re:No, that's not it at all (Score 1) 2058
It's not win:win. It win for most homeowners who never experience a fire and would not feel a need to pay a yearly fee. It's lose for the fire department that doesn't have an income stream while they are waiting for your house to burn down.
It's also probably not good public policy to pay a fire department on a per fire basis.
Comment Re:No, that's not it at all (Score 1) 2058
And the morally correct thing to do is to not pay a small yearly fee to help cover the cost of fire services in your community?
Comment Re:Summary is retarded (Score 1) 2058
They responded because the neighbor DID pay for fire protection. Which is why they put out the fire on the neighbor's property.
I'm not sure what you point is: the home owner lives outside of the town. The town can't tax him to pay for fire services. The town voluntarily allows people to pay $75/year to be included in the town's fire protection services. The home owner didn't pay. The neighbor did. Everything pretty much worked the way it was supposed to.
Submission + - HDCP stream decoding in real time (h-online.com)
suraj.sun writes: Researchers, Rob Johnson and Mikhail Rubnich, from Stony Brook University have created an open source tool to find out how fast a PC would have to be to decrypt the HDCP encryption scheme in real time.
They implemented the HDCP algorithm in software and examined the result of decrypting 640 by 480 resolution images on a single core. Their results show that, using an Intel Xeon 5140 and a Intel Core 2 Duo P9600, it was possible to decode at a rate of 181 frames per second on the Xeon and at 76 frames per second on the Core 2 Duo.
In a test by The H's associates at heise online, using a Intel Core i5 750 running at 2.67Ghz, 640 by 480 HDCP content could be decoded at around 281 frames per second. According to Johnson and Rubnich, it would take seven times the processing power to the decode full 1920 by 1080 pixel 30 frame per second footage, so it would be possible, with a sufficiently powerful Core i5 processor used in conjunction with a HDMI capture card and appropriate software, to receive and decode HDCP protected HD streams.
H-online: http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/HDCP-stream-decoding-in-real-time-1099547.html
They implemented the HDCP algorithm in software and examined the result of decrypting 640 by 480 resolution images on a single core. Their results show that, using an Intel Xeon 5140 and a Intel Core 2 Duo P9600, it was possible to decode at a rate of 181 frames per second on the Xeon and at 76 frames per second on the Core 2 Duo.
In a test by The H's associates at heise online, using a Intel Core i5 750 running at 2.67Ghz, 640 by 480 HDCP content could be decoded at around 281 frames per second. According to Johnson and Rubnich, it would take seven times the processing power to the decode full 1920 by 1080 pixel 30 frame per second footage, so it would be possible, with a sufficiently powerful Core i5 processor used in conjunction with a HDMI capture card and appropriate software, to receive and decode HDCP protected HD streams.
H-online: http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/HDCP-stream-decoding-in-real-time-1099547.html
Submission + - Change to 'Bios' To Make PCs boot in Seconds (bbc.co.uk)
siliconbits writes: PCs that start in seconds could result from an update to one of the oldest parts of desktop computers. The update will spell the end for the 25-year-old PC start-up software known as Bios that initialises a machine so its operating system can get going. The code was not intended to live nearly this long, and adapting it to modern PCs is one reason they take as long as they do to warm up.
The Fruit Fly Drosophila Gets a New Name 136
G3ckoG33k writes "The name of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster will change to Sophophora melangaster. The reason is that scientists have by now discovered some 2,000 species of the genus and it is becoming unmanageably large. Unfortunately, the 'type species' (the reference point of the genus), Drosophila funebris, is rather unrelated to the D. melanogaster, and ends up in a distant part of the relationship tree. However, geneticists have, according to Google Scholar, more than 300,000 scientific articles describing innumerable aspects of the species, and will have to learn the new name as well as remember the old. As expected, the name change has created an emotional (and practical) stir all over media. While name changes are frequent in science, as they describe new knowledge about relationships between species, these changes rarely hit economically relevant species, and when they do, people get upset."
Comment Re:Physics of incandescents (Score 1) 685
Yeah. You don't live in a place that gets chilly do you? Air-to-air's lose it around 20F.
