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Comment Re:No mention of refresh rate (Score -1) 94

Geez you could at least READ the summary. I know its the basic assumption that people didn't read the article but you would think you'd do more than the editors of slashdot and actually read the summary.

eDP v1.4a will be able to support 8K displays, thanks to a segmented panel architecture known as Multi-SST Operation (MSO).

Right there in the summary exactly what you repeated like it wasn't in there.

Comment Re:Yes (Score 2) 716

Version 1 Neatreciepts scanner. It's a rebranded common brand with a changed USB ID. Linux recognizes it fine but on windows it's a nightmare to get it working. I have lots of examples like this where I can use it on linux but not on a new version of windows.

Comment It's called and end-run (Score 5, Insightful) 85

The FBI provides a grant for the local police department to buy these because it's a legal grey area. The department purchases and runs them at the request of the FBI who reimburse the expenses. The FBI gets a copy of the data. The FBI is likely required by law to get a warrant to use these, where the locals aren't. So the FBI gets the locals to run the stuff then collects the data from the locals in normal legal data sharing agreements. (this is where the FOI requests fall flat, they should be requesting the financial agreement data between the FBI and locals to show that the FBI not only purchased the stingrays but pays the locals to run them).

This end runs around the FBI's restriction. The FOI requests are a serious threat to the program by exposing the FBI deliberately breaking the law so the FBI declares national security and covers it up even though the vast majority (and likely all) of the times these are used is against drug crime, not terrorism.

Declaring national security to avoid disclosing information is an end run around open government and allows people in government to break the law and violate peoples rights without the fear of disclosure. Every time embarrassing information or evidence of crime lays in data that should be public someone in government will declare it secret on national security grounds.

Comment Re:About time. (Score 2) 309

Back track all you want, the only that fits the items 1-6 that you listed as applying to all electrical storage is batteries.

Apparently you believe the only "good" method is one where there is no cost and 100% recovery. You must also be under the assumption that power generation itself is 100% efficient and free of all negatives.

For storage to work it must only be able to displace power from base load pricing to peak pricing at a margin that exceeds costs. Regardless of how "poor" you think that method is the fact is there are hundreds of technologies that can not only do this profitably but with very little operating costs. The hydro pumping method has been in active use for over 50 years at a particular location in the US.

But go ahead and be a negative nancy for all I care, just don't deny your list and your assumption was batteries because no one looking at that list is going to believe otherwise. Don't you wish slashdot would allow you to go back and edit that list so you can put in all the things you learned about when you actually googled energy storage technology and learned about some of the proposed methods? That way you could cover up the fact that you ranted off about something you knew nothing about.

Comment Re:About time. (Score 2) 309

Who said the only energy storage is the batteries you are talking about?

They've been storing power in various areas for 50+ years. The most common is to pump water up to a reservoir then use hydro power to draw out the stored potential energy when needed.

Storage isn't a difficult problem, it is just something we've never tried because carbon based power has always been so cheap. Once we put our minds to it I have no doubt storage will become easy to satisfy. In fact they're already doing it in Germany with thousands of good and inventive ways to store power. Ultimately I don't believe storing energy is going to be any more difficult than generating it currently. Once we build the market for stored energy there will be all kinds of methods put into practice whether that's as simple as storing potential energy in the form of water at elevation or some other method such as fly wheels or even chemical batteries.

You shouldn't assume that the only possible energy storage is 50 year old technology.

Comment Re:About time. (Score 1) 309

Solar's production curve does not match the peak user curve of electrical power.

That is a complete fabrication. Every single time someone pulls out those numbers they are talking about RESIDENTIAL power consumption, not overall total power consumption. This fits the power company agenda because they don't care at all about residential power, they make very little money on it. What they care about is commercial power where companies pay based on demand and that demand pricing is where the power companies make serious money.

Total demand does peak when solar does. That scares the power companies to death because if the peak is carved off due to low price solar energy providing a cheap excess base load during daytime then the power companies lose all their peak pricing. It could end up shifting the power demand curve such that peak power pricing is at night when there is almost no commercial or industrial load. That's what keeps the electric company directors and CEO's up at night and why they are trying desperately to discourage residential solar installations. When there are enough residential solar installations the power curve shifts rather dramatically, power during the day in Germany is sometimes negative during sunny summer days because there is so much feed in power from solar. I don't like how they've structured the subsidies in Germany but even without them we're seeing something similar in Hawaii. Solar carves off peak daytime pricing. America's industrial base would be significantly more competitive if power was free during the day.

Comment Microsoft needs SaaS to continue increasing profit (Score 1) 191

Microsoft needs SaaS for their profit to keep going up. They switched businesses to essentially the same thing a long time ago with the site license.

I really don't think it will be successful with consumers unless it's free. There are alternatives these days. I'll never forget Balmer laughing at the Chromebooks, now microsoft is so afraid of them they are trying to produce similar products that basically bring back the netbook (which is NOT what a chromebook is). The Microsoft ship can't turn this quickly, especially with what it will do to revenue. I expect whatever they do will fail abysmally with everyone but businesses.

Comment Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score 1) 517

People have been predicting the death of the carrier for a long time now, since well before WWII. The only problem with all these carrier killer weapons is you have to actually be in range of the carrier battle group to fire one.

And then people like you forget that the purpose of the carrier group is to protect the carrier, even if that means taking the missile hit for them. In the battle for the Falklands the Argentinians had a couple supersonic carrier killer French Exocet missiles. And just as is their responsibility one of the picket ships moved in front of the carrier and took the missile hit for them. After firing 7 carrier killer missiles at the British carrier they succeeded in sinking a couple picket ships.

These hypersonic missiles are interesting, but just like their supersonic brethren they will likely make no difference to the carrier because to be in range of firing one you are going to be in range of the carrier groups attack. Your best shot is a surprise attack and even then all might you accomplish is sinking one of the picket ships.

Comment Re:Thanks Obama (Score 1) 223

Utah is the prefect example actually, there are enough democrats in Utah that one to two of the four representatives should be democrats. They've carved the urban area into little slices to try to eliminate that. Matheson finally gave up trying to fight after they moved him from district to district and kept slicing chunks off to try to get rid of him.

Comment Re:Thanks Obama (Score 1) 223

The only solution to improve fairness in the US political system is a vast reworking of the entire electoral process. We've got a system right now designed around electing people not parties but have a party based election anyway. If we moved to a weighted party vote system like used in europe rather than an individual based system with a party thrown on top we would do much to return the elections to represent the people.

Now that we have the internet the first thing we should do is an amendment to return the house to a system where each representative only represents about 30,000 people. Then we allow them to vote on bills via the internet. In such a system the staff would be reduced to almost nothing eliminating the problem of the staff in Washington actually doing everything with congresscritters just being the face on the work the staff does. You could even set it up where only two representatives from each state get to go to washington and the rest vote from home. In such a system we'd return the house to a system that represents the actual people. Parties would become almost meaningless in such a system because the house rep would probably actually know everyone in their district.

Comment Re:Impressive emails (Score 1) 73

Regardless of how LE feels about following the law if they commit a felony whilst undercover they can kiss any prosecution of anyone other than the agent goodbye, especially if there are witnesses (hence the 2 independent witness requirement).

Law enforcement can commit misdemeanors and minor crimes while engaged in undercover work but they cannot commit felonies. The typical situation would be to deny the felony took place but with two witnesses they will have a hard time convincing anyone of that. Keep in mind that felonies are generally very serious crimes that usually have jail time associated with them and commission of one while an officer of the court (LE's are considered officers of the court which means their testimony is given higher weight than someone elses) generally blows all credibility.

After nearly two decades of trying to get evidence against the hells angels they only succeeded because they were able to get someone close to the organization without actually joining by pretending to be from another club. Not only that but the undercover was able to get close to the leader of the HA so they were able to take down almost all of the leadership at the time.

Comment Re:Impressive emails (Score 1) 73

The entrance exam for the Hells Angels involves the commission of a Felony in front of at least two members. This is how they keep LE out of their organization.

HA used to control much of the meth production/distribution business in the western US until the Fed's gutted their leadership in the 90's though a well placed undercover that was able to get close to the leadership without joining. They even made a movie about him staring Charlie Sheen that's a pretty good movie though it went straight to tape/dvd.

Comment Speculated at for over a year (Score 4, Informative) 331

The speculation is that IBM is trying to push the dividend to a record level. In the process they may very well destroy the company. Because the only way to get the dividend to that level is to basically wipe out long term profits for a short term boost.

That's probably the goal, the new MBA generation from the baby boomers is taking the point of view of taking every dime out of the company and giving it to the insiders even if it guts a major American corporation and hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost to China.

It's funny but the CEO from the Movie Dick and Jane reminds me so much of these CEO's that are only out for themselves, yet he was supposed to be fictional.

Comment Re:You're joking, right? (Score 1) 471

More like the majority of the linux community.

Good luck proving that because you couldn't even if it were true which it's not. The best people like you could manage was ~30% of the Debian developers supported a position that could be seen as favorable to your opposition but the vote wasn't really structured as popularity contest so much as a Debian policy.

My bet is that you people compose a fairly major minority, somewhere in the 10-20% range. Many of you will be happy simply to switch to a distribution that won't use systemd. Many of the rest of us would be happy if you just switched to one of the BSDs so you stop trying to tell the rest of us what to do.

Comment Re:My FreeBSD Report: Four Months In (Score 1) 471

The best thing about FreeBSD are the FreeBSD Ports and how much commitment there is to make every possible application work on the system. You have basically far more possibilities and options than on Linux distributions thanks to the great job they are doing on this system.

More available software? Are you kidding? Gentoo has a similar "ports" system and more available software than FBSD and it's not even a top 5 distribution. I'd even wager the Gentoo community has far more help available.

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