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Comment Re:Not about ease, about authority (Score 1) 231

As it is, you can't 'forget' to bring your fingerprint with you, or lose it on the bus, or have it stolen.

You can have your fingerprint stolen, although that's unlikely for school lunches. You can also lose your fingerprint from simple mechanical wear or chemicals. You can also simply not have fingerprints to start with.

Comment Re:LOL (Score 1) 213

And since nothing bad happened, what exactly is your point?

I think that was exactly the point.

It's sort of like how, when North Korea attempted a satellite launch not too long ago, the news was full of stories about how incredibly irresponsible it was since a satellite breaking up in orbit could turn into a chain reaction that would scour all orbits of all satellites. These stories were coming, of course, from the propaganda machines of countries which have, on more than one occasion, intentionally blown up satellites in orbit to demonstrate military power.

Comment Re:Batteries? Seriously? (Score 1) 491

1. Swappable electric car batteries are the sane solution for fast-charging electric cars. Good to know it's actually on someone's radar. As for the cost, a city bus costs on the order of half a million dollars with operating costs around a quarter of a million dollars a year. With numbers like that, the batteries don't sound all that expensive. How many batteries you would need per bus depends on a number of factors. Charge time is a big one.

2. The trailer would be for mostly highway driving on fixed routes. Not a lot of tight twists and turns. The trailer also wouldn't have to be very long, and it's not as if segmented buses don't already exist. Aside from trailers, there's the possibility of roof mounting, or having some removable seats at the back and putting the extended battery storage inside the bus.

Comment Re:I really don't my vital body parts to be on wif (Score 1) 183

Encryption, message signing ... does it ring any bells?

All of which is meaningless if the cell phone is compromised. Most indications are that, these days, even without viruses, most cell phones are already intentionally compromised straight from the factory. This really is a job for a dedicated device.

Comment Re:Batteries? Seriously? (Score 4, Insightful) 491

It's also a question of flexibility. Sure, the bus doesn't need to go down every road, but they more or less can, providing flexibility

A electrically powered bus with overhead wires _and_ a battery could go down every road, more or less. There's still the problem of long haul trips. I'm still a little unclear on why the buses have to have a fixed battery capacity that has to charge in place as opposed to swappable, extendable batteries. Buses travel around on fixed routes with set schedules. Why can't there be multiple batteries for each bus, left charging at swap stations along the route. Make them automated. The driver can drive up, hop out, put a key into the swap station, position some forks onto the battery in the bus, push a button and have the used battery hauled out and a charged one slotted in. The whole thing shouldn't take more than five minutes. For long trips, why can't a bus haul a battery trailer with extra capacity?

Comment Re:Competition is good. (Score 1) 211

If the Soviet Union had managed LEO or the moon, do you think they would have not used it?

Where you wrote "do you think they would have not used it?", you were referring to your previous sentence, so the meaning was "do you think they would have not used it to gain a huge strategic and tactical advantage?" Which basically means "do you think they would have not used it to gain command of LEO militarily. So, if "managed" means "command of LEO militarily", then the sentence boils down to: "If the Soviet Union had gained command of LEO militarily, then do you think they would have not used it to gain command of LEO militarily. "If X, then do you not think X" is a tautology.

Comment Re:Meteorite my ass (Score 1) 107

I actually took a look at the airport in google maps to see if I could identify the spot. There isn't enough to go on from the article. Some parts seem to definitely have ground-covering vegetation between the trees, but it's less clear in other parts, where it does look fairly brown between the trees. That could just be brown vegetation, however. Overall, the ground in the pictures seems far too devoid of small plants close to the crater. I'm definitely thinking that there's a layer of dirt there covering everything.

Comment Meanwhile. . . (Score 4, Interesting) 533

Meanwhile, other providers are testing 10_G_bps FTTD (fibre to the desktop) for deployment, because they see the future isn't in cable TV but in providing TCP/IP (Internet, basically) connectivity. That is 10x the bandwidth any one PC you can buy off the shelf can handle without adding in a 10GbE server network card. Yes, ten GIGABITS PER SECOND over epon/dpon.

AT&T and Comcrap are just whining and clawing because they know the future is here (streaming video on demand from providers that are NOT THEM) and they don't want it. They should do what my employer is doing and embrace the ISP side of the business as their meat and potatoes and treat cable video as gravy. Cable TV is not only a zero-growth industry, but a dying industry.

Comment Re:Meteorite my ass (Score 2) 107

Trees being uprooted by sinkholes tend to be falling into the hole, not away from it. It's hard to see in the photo, but that tree looks like it's had most, but not all leaves blown off it. As for where the ejecta vanished to, it looks like where it vanished to is the area immediately around the crater. We don't have any sort of before and after picture or a picture of another part of the same wooded area, but the part that we can see seems to be all dirt except for where there are taller trees. It might be the case that there's normally nothing but bare dirt visible, or it might be the case that all the ground covering vegetation is covered in the thick layer of ejected dirt. There also seem to some loose, recently deposited, rocks outside the crater.

Comment Re:Competition is good. (Score 1) 211

The part where you said "If the Soviet Union had managed LEO or the moon, do you think they would not have used it?" is the confusing part. It's confusing because you seem to have written it from a parallel universe where the Soviet Union never "managed LEO". If by "managed" you meant using taking command of LEO militarily, then the sentence in question is a tautology and one wonders why you even wrote it.

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