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Comment A few options... (Score 2) 294

Speedtest.net used to be good at one stage. But when I tried them relatively recently, I found that they measure the speed once it gets going, and ignore the regular dropouts that may occur. Speedtest.net claimed about 1gigabit, but in reality it was a tenth or even a fiftieth of that.

I had more luck with the following:

http://speedof.me/ - HTML5 Internet speed test (no Flash or Java needed). It claims to be the "smartest and most accurate online bandwidth test".
http://testmy.net - Nice graph and intelligent picking of the size of the test file to download.

Comment Re:I think it's a power and propulsion issue (Score 1) 203

Maybe they could have some kind of guided manual mode where you could fly it wherever you wanted but a set of safety and guidance systems kept it from crashing into objects or other cars

You're on the right track. This is the second or third time I've said this in the thread, and I've said it numerous times elsewhere, but it's worth emphasizing again.

Flying a car using AI to drive would be great, but how much more enjoyable would it to drive by yourself? A solution to the safety problem is to have a repelling motion inversely squared proportional (or cubed maybe?) to the distance between your car and another object (whether it be a building, or another flying car.), and also inversely squared proportional to the relative speed of the objects (so if you're going slow, you can be quite close to another flying car, and if you're going fast, then the repelling motion would be much greater, and if you're both going fast in the same direction, you can be quite close again, because the relative speed is almost zero).

This would allow for safe, and immensely fun, freestyle flying - we'd just need decent maneuverability from the flying car.

Comment Re:You mean our nightmare could become a reality (Score 1) 203

Two flying cars needn't get close though. The higher the speed, the less a car will be able to get close to another flying car or object. The repelling force will be proportional to the distance from that other object, and also both of their speeds (so you could go at 5mph at be very close to another flying car, and that would be okay).

Comment Re:You mean our nightmare could become a reality (Score 1) 203

Not this again.

Of all the problems that flying cars actually DO have (relatively poor batteries, and terrible sound/noise pollution both to the occupants and surrounding neighbourhood), and you go on about safety.

Ignoring that AI may drive instead of humans, or that we could create a lane system in the sky to keep traffic from colliding, another simple solution is to have a 'magnetic'-style repel, where if you get too close to another vehicle or object, your craft would repel and vice versa. This would allow immense freestyle fun flying and all the practicality of a real flying car.

Comment To the core! (Score 2) 549

I love the idea, but I think it's been mentioned on Slashdot before that the best way to preserve humanity is to build a colony underneath the Earth's surface. Quite far underneath to protect against various threats, including medium sized asteroids and super volcanoes etc. We're talking about a self-contained, self-sustained system, to the furthest extent that we can manage.

Comment Re:What, no positional tracking? (Score 1) 88

I did watch it. I was pleasantly surprised to see a focus on latency and fps throughout.

Perhaps G-Sync and a high frame rate is a simpler way to reduce latency, and then we can still keep the three frame pipeline. I don't think he mentioned G-Sync which was a surprise. JIT rendering also sounds good though.

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