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Comment Re:Or, alternately ... (Score 1) 389

It won't take a lot to achieve critical mass on this. Once people have electric, self-driving cars, the behaviors of the owners (for better or worse) will influence others.

I agree. And I think if a competent self driving car really happens (a big if), that shit will sell itself. A significant percentage of the population will jump at the chance to spend the time driving watching movies or playing games or doing work instead. Also a significant percentage of the population buys/leases a new car frequently (3 year leases are the most common).

Also, if a majority of new cars sold are self-driving, the dynamics of luxury and performance cars will change. Who needs that 500hp turbocharged V-8 when the computer is gonna drive at the speed limit anyways? People will mostly want a quieter cab and smoother ride rather than power and handling.

Comment Re:hoping the economic damage won't be too bad. (Score 4, Interesting) 20

Due to people there being less mobile and the gov't having police state-like control over the population, an outbreak in N. Korea will likely be at least as well-contained as in western nations or better.

Anyways if you wanted to kill N. Koreans by intentionally introducing a virus there (germ warfare), MERS is pretty silly. There are tons of more effective biological agents than that.

Comment Re:hoping the economic damage won't be too bad. (Score 1) 20

I have noticed zero change in the normal day-to-day life here, aside from a much larger presence of people wearing masks over their mouths.

That's pretty silly, the mask thing. It's the people INFECTED with the virus who should be wearing masks, not healthy people trying to avoid the disease. (but then infected people should be quarantined in a hospital and not walking about on the street, so...)

What people should be doing instead is wearing thick, heavy gloves in public places. Almost all flu virus transmissions happen from your hand touching a virus-coated surface and then touching your face with your hand. Wearing gloves means that your skin won't come into contact with the virus, and the thick heavy nature of the gloves means you're not likely to forget the fact that you're wearing gloves and thus will avoid touching your face with them.

Comment Still in sad condition (Score 2, Interesting) 176

I clicked on the link and saw all the pictures. Sadly the Colosseum still looks like a ruin, and the government of Italy has no money to halt the decay let alone a restoration to former glory.

As a Rome Total War player and an aficionado of all things Roman, I would love to see the Colosseum as it was originally. Yes I realize a restoration would cost billions and modern Italy as a PIIG nation cannot afford it. It really speaks to the immense power, wealth and engineering skill of the ancients that they BUILT this thing so long ago.

I still keep hoping that some internet billionaire will take it upon himself as his life achievement to do a full restoration and that I will get to see it before I die. Barring that, I hope someone will do a very high quality rendering of every inch of the original Colosseum that we can navigate freely in Oculus VR. Maybe even host virtual games with thousands of online participants and spectators.

Comment Re:Bezos is a control freak (Score 1) 46

The 3D feature was called "dynamic perspective". The heavy battery drain was not actually from the gpu processing/rendering, it was because the feature needed 4 separate cameras (one on each corner of the phone) that had its own access to the facial recognition software.

Interesting read: http://www.fastcompany.com/303...

Comment Re:Surprise, Surprise! (Score 1, Insightful) 144

Their denial by itself doesn't mean much, since as you say they would deny it if they were responsible or not. However in this case it's quite possible they had nothing to do with it. Cyber criminals living in China != government of PRC

What would the Chinese gov't possibly want with the data stolen from Office of Personnel Management? Use the employee names and social security numbers to make stolen credit card purchases? Commit identity theft and take the employees' tax refund checks?

The type of data stolen here doesn't mesh with the stuff Chinese gov't usually steals: high tech industry data to help their domestic industry, military secrets like plans to the F-22, etc. It seems unlikely they would use up a zero-day exploit to break into a employee database and steal social security numbers.

Comment Bezos is a control freak (Score 3, Insightful) 46

who used to dictate the placement of every pixel on Amazon website, according to Steve Yegge.

Fire smartphone had 3-D features that required immense processing power (which meant sacrificing battery life and other things) and therefore written off by the engineers as being not practical. But Bezos was in love with the features and he basically said the phone ships with 3-D or you're all fired.

I can't see the Amazon game ending well.

Comment I predict nothing will come of this (Score 4, Informative) 82

I hear medical breakthroughs like this all the time, where a cheap simple device will replace expensive drugs. Then nothing happens and it's not heard of again.

Is it because A. it doesn't work as well as inventors hoped or has too many side effects, or B. pharma industry silences them by killing them or paying them to hush it up? Help me out here.

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