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Comment Re:Mossad connection (Score 1) 113

The relationship "is an enemy of an enemy" is so far reaching that Israel is an enemy of an enemy of Iran, Iran is an enemy of an enemy of the US and the US is an enemy of an enemy of Israel. So, Iran and the US should ally to destroy Israel, or US and Israel should ally to destroy Iran, or Iran and Israel should ally to destroy the US. Or have everyone kill each other, but it isn't easy to ensure total destruction of everyone in this scenario. More satisfying solutions are "do nothing" (no one dies), or every one nukes itself (no cheating)

Comment Re:Installable devkits (Score 3, Insightful) 69

What the fuck is a div? where did that document.this_function().that_stuff got declared?
How come that this html file works as well :
Hello World

Yea there are probably a lot of crappy tutorials on the internet, but there's no thick paper manual that came with the computer (CBM 64, Apple II, Amstrad CPC..) or a comprehensive help file integrated to the web browser (like in QBASIC) to explain all that crap in a friendly, up to date way.
All I'm seeing is a blank page experience and a hello world.. It's like saying anyone can be a dev and make little games, because there's notepad and the Windows Scripting Host.

Comment Re:Next step.... (Score 1) 65

For computers that don't have a H264 hardware decoder (or lack the driver), HTML5 video is even more CPU hungry than flash. So it's a bit early to make that transition I think (or offer both). Why not drop flash in 2017 when Adobe will fully orphan it on linux, then hopefully Firefox will have improved some more in speed. I will then worry about installing a HTML video blocker extension or something to open the video in an external player, till then I'll be happy running the flash player that only quadruples the CPU requirements for playing a video rather than octupling them.

Comment Re:The Secret of Nim (Score 1) 520

I found it great and easy to extract substrings with LEFT$, MID$ and RIGHT$. Too bad the keyboard input was shit (on PC) with 100 A$=INKEYS : IF A$="" THEN 100. Also I sucked at converting that Amstrad CPC game, spending like an hour converting the pixel coordinates from "(0,0) is on bottom left" to "(0,0) is on top left", all in vain as the program didn't work anyway. That is perhaps a bigger problem than the 1-arrays. Either way you will always have off-by-one issues, though for the demographics of pre-teen without internet access it's nice that A[1] to A[10] has ten elements.

Comment Re:every few years (Score 1) 55

On yet another hand, the US gave Saddam Hussein interpretations of satellite pictures done by military intelligence experts rather than just the pictures alone, to help during the war against Iran. I don't think the work is necessarily so easy that it just gets done on its own and the pictures may be quite unglamorous. Why not let people who can do the work do it ; setting up the web infrastructure, database access, pretty-printing the data for everyday joes and then managing the community and signal/noise ratio would be a big task. Interesting, but it would have to be funded.

Comment Re:Where's the crossover? (Score 2) 85

It should have a command line.
Note that on desktop we've had a dual interface since the days of Windows 3.0 : desktop interface and command line interface. Web could be a third, or it's just a subset of the desktop interface (ignoring lynx, elinks etc. which are only useful in specific context)

There could be a Metro/Android/Ubuntu/whatever interface, but one special "app" just gives you the command prompt (and it always works, has the unix-like programs and can access the multimedia, off-line documents files etc. if it's sandboxed from the other apps)

Comment Re:Heck, I'll settle for white light (Score 1) 64

I got one LED bulb, and it was to put it over the shitter - perfect, as the fixture sometimes flickers for an unknown reason and a LED doesn't care about it. So one bulb gave me a decade+ of shitter lighting investment, no more failures.

For the bulbs which would most need replacement - they immediately light up the room in such a way you can see shit everywhere and look for lost keys etc. - the LED bulbs would be a crappy replacement, because the cost is multiplied and there's no upgrade in lighting performance.
Availability of affordable and working 2700K LED bulbs is nice, but 4000K or 5000K with a wide and full spectrum would be nice (as opposed to spiky spectrum of CFL). 2700K with a good spectrum (I assume?) means it won't do any better job than incandescent.

For "ambient" lighting which does runs for hours on, I already have CFLs there, I give less shit about the spectrum and it's not like I have a choice there.

Comment Re:It has its places (Score 1) 64

Ethernet over the domestic mains is another obvious solution but PoE seems more simple and elegant.
I don't know if it's possible or if it's a good idea to try to fit an Ethernet-over-mains adapter in a lightbulb. BTW I say "Ethernet-over-mains" because I don't know how of a better unambiguous name, except for the French "CPL".

PoE needs the introduction of consumer PoE switches (at 48 volts?), and you need to re-wire your building or appartment, perhaps invent a new socket.
Ethernet-over-mains would work over existing cabling and lightbulb sockets!, but performance may break down with more than a handful devices on the network, and in some situations it doesn't work or doesn't work well, or it leaks out to the neighbour. PoE would be immune to these latter issues.

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