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Comment This isn't ethics (Score 1) 162

This is neurotic navel gazing. Take responsibility for your own actions, which includes getting drunk in the first place because you know before the first drink that this will lead to suspension of judgement. If you choose to use a tool like a robot to get you a drink, that's your decision, even if it kills you. What next - a controlling nanny state that raises the drinking age to 21 or it makes it illegal to jaywalk?

Comment Re:I've posted this 1312 times (Score 1) 147

I switched to Chrome a few years ago because I was fed-up with Firefox's monolithic single process architecture. With a single process I have no way to tell which tab is draining my battery, which is a bigger issue than the constant memory leaking. The devs at Mozilla and Netscape before it have never really understood the benefits of multi-processing.

My laptop failed a few days ago so I'm on an old machine I haven't used for three years, but seeing as Firefox is the default I thought I'd update it and give it a shot. Mistake. One tab having trouble loading a web page blocks the whole UI leaving me wondering whether the app has hung up and needs to be killed via Task Manager. What a load of utter shit. Internet Explorer is better these days.

When did they promise that Electrolysis would be done this Feb? How many years have they been promising it full-stop? Now it seems it'll be later this year. No commitment, and apparently incapable of either running a decent engineering operation that can deliver anything sensible in a predictable and reasonable time frame.

Back to Chrome.

Comment Re:That's unpossible. (Score 2) 212

> So electric cars have electric heaters; I had not thought about that aspect before. That would be a considerable inefficiency;

To some extent. The main problem is that it flattens the battery more quickly and impacts range in winter time, the actual cost of the heater for an hour or two is generally relatively trivial compared to the other costs of running the car.

The newer electric cars have much less of an issue though. Instead of using electric heaters they run the air conditioner in reverse (it's an 'air source heat pump' in fact) and most of the heat energy then comes from the external environment rather than resistive heating. The heat pump uses about 1/3 of the power.

Comment Re:Nope, still a story. :) (Score 1) 215

Nope, even the worst case is not a deal breaker for most people.

The thing is, most people don't empty the battery most days. A lot of people do like 20 miles a day, so in practice, even with a conventional socket, the car is full again each morning; even on 110 volts.

If you have a 240 volt socket, which are very, very widely available, it's even less of an issue.

And the extra cost to install a higher current charging point is very low. Where I live most premises have a 30 amp, 240 volt circuit already for their electric cookers. That's about 6kW, and the Nissan Leaf has a 24kWh battery; it can do an 80% charge in about 4 hours.

Comment Re: Bad format in the first place (Score 3, Interesting) 65

I'm surprised you expect to hear about it here. Most people here seem to care about the codecs and whether they're free. DASH doesn't really care about codecs and really just defines how you create and use adaptive streams and is based on existing codecs/formats. It only standardised relatively recently and it's going to be big (but hopefully transparent), for example: http://www.dash-player.com/blo.... Expect to see it as a vendor neutral alternative to things like MS SmoothStreaming and even Apple's HLS, although the later requires you to have a player with your own decoders if you're sending more than a certain size to iOS devices.

That said, most implementors are doing AVC or HEVC with AAC in a fragmented MP4 container. VOD content is probably one file per stream and live is multiple files fragments) per stream.

Comment Re:so (Score 1) 220

In most cases crypto is like having the worlds best lock on your door; the people that want to get in just jimmy the window instead.

The phone thing could certainly happen in theory, but in practice the NSA may have already installed a backdoor or found an accidental backdoor that was due to a bug. And they would probably copy the flashdrive in the phone and analyse it later, possibly on a supercomputer if they're really keen; a lot of commercial crypto is deliberately weak so they can crack it that way if they really have to.

Comment Re:Nope, still a story. :) (Score 1) 215

A charge station at home is just a wall socket- you can literally just plug your car into the wall and charge it already.

So EVERY house that is on the grid is already EV infrastructure.

The numbers show that the existing grid can (with some exceptions) handle EV charging (which would and should be mostly at night where the grid is underutilised anyway.)

Comment Re:This is great! (Score 1) 215

Actually, the electricity can come from renewables.

Some places have hydroelectricity, nuff said.

Also, wind power and solar is available nearly everywhere, and electric cars do great on that; they don't normally need to charge up everyday, and when there's a glut of wind or solar they can suck it down; and (if you have the right equipment) even sell it back again.

Comment Re: Somethig wrong with that (Score 5, Insightful) 254

If there are some women who are perfectly capable of learning to do the job, and they're being steered away from tech careers by well meaning guidance counselors because "vaginas!" then it is NOT an issue. Even if it *is* an issue of emphasizing genitals over ability, that is NOT "segregation," as the GGP poster stated.

It isn't "segregation", but it is discriminatory hiring practices. If we take the view that less qualified individuals should be hired on the basis that they are "perfectly capable of learning to do the job", then Intel and other companies shouldn't be targeting women, but high school drop-outs, illegal immigrant farm workers, and convicted felons who will be cheap and easy to find. Those groups are most certainly more under-represented than women in that field.

We can debate the merits of a strategy utilizing apprenticeships for certain jobs, but the fact is that there are plenty of people who don't need to learn to do the job who are looking for work. Until it comes to pass that that's no longer the case, then hiring anyone but the most qualified for the job, especially when race, sex, or other such factors are overriding job qualifications, is prejudicial and discriminatory and it ought to be illegal. That goes both ways; excluding women or minorities as well as excluding whites and males.

If we want fairness, let's have fairness; not unfairness in the other direction.

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