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Comment Re:Don't really see the market (Score 1) 240

A lot of the replies here are incredulous about Nexus 7 power.

My Nexus 7 2012 edition would charge up, even if the screen and wifi was on, if left on a 500mA laptop USB port (usb debugging / storage enabled).

My Nexus 7 2013 edition would not charge up, even if the screen and wifi was off, if left on a 500mA laptop USB port (even with usb debugging / storage disabled). It would drain slowly. It required a 1A from a wall-wart to tread water with the screen on. It took a 2A wall-wart to actually charge up while using it. I still have to find a powered hub that will give more than USB standard 500mA, so I can pass debug/storage data while charging.

Comment Re:It's all about the stock price (Score 1) 487

You can see this if you watch the Google News links related to a given stock. All year, "ValueWatch" has been beating Tesla up at every opportunity, and when there is no opportunity, they make up a reason. Someone's in a squeeze, so they try to hit the stock. Someone wants to buy, so they try to hit the stock. Even with all this brouhaha, TSLA is up 300% this calendar year.

Comment yeah, thanks (Score 1) 666

As the "dept" byline heading says, thanks for endangering so many people.

My grandfather was a leadfoot, and crossed from NC to AZ a couple times a year under 48 hours. My dad was to follow him in a second vehicle once, and ended up slowing down and going his own pace, when he saw just how irresponsibly granddad was rushing things just for the sake of rushing. Grandpa never killed anyone but I'm sure it's been very close a couple of times.

Comment Re:interesting that a newbie is telling the world (Score 5, Interesting) 226

When I was an undergrad with a part time job helping out in a graduate chemistry lab, there was a suite of utilities written in FORTRAN. People depended heavily on this suite to calculate all manner of things related to their crystallography research.

The problem was, it was mostly written during one of those years where Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit were massively popular again, and people were learning to program with hunt-the-wumpus teletype programs. The original author "amused" himself by naming pretty much anything he could after some fantasy concept. CASTLE, FRODO, DRAGON, and so on. Okay, so to map out van der Waals surface strength, you ran CASTLE. Many things have quirky codenames, you get used to it. But all the variables followed suit. Now it was a bit more obscure to maintain the program or trace the logic.

Worst of all, the comments. In FORTRAN, columns 1 to 72 were for your program, and anything after 73 was a comment. The author wrote an "epic" of his own, all word-wrapped in the column space from 73 to 132 (the width of common teletype paper and long Hollerith punch cards). What a waste of his time, you might think. But it was also a huge impediment to maintenance; you see, people in the lab LIKED his story (for a while), so they had to figure out how to patch the logic without breaking the flow of the story. It took years before someone stripped all the prose and got the rest of the lab to follow the maintainable fork instead o the prosaic one.

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 2) 157

If you want a visual analogy that works, think of the "WOPR guesses launch codes" scene in War Games. In that movie, it's really just eye candy to drive tension in the plot, but it works in that general way for larger texts. If WOPR could somehow compute or infer that the third digit of the launch code is A, and can't be any other letter, then it "locks" that digit down and looks for other inferences it can make. Code breaking and sudoku overlap here too.

Comment One Megapixel Per Fist (Score 2) 414

I once did the back-of-napkin calculations to make a scale-independent metric. Astronomers know that if you hold your fist at arm's length, your fist occludes roughly ten arc degrees in whatever direction you measure across your fist. My search found that someone's 20/20 eyes can generally resolve details to about 1 arc minute (didn't read Wikipedia's rationale). If that much screen area contains one megapixel or more, then the screen is well within the definition of a "Retina" display (at the given viewing range).

Comment Re:Not worth answering (Score 5, Insightful) 768

Agreed.

Logic: The Fifth Amendment is the extension of the Fourth Amendment into the mind. You cannot be compelled to prosecute yourself, for two reasons: (1) it's unethical to compel a sentient being condemn themselves, and (2) you cannot trust any direct product of a person's mind, like you can trust objective verifiable evidence. This already exists, but I expect more and more encryption tools will support a duress or plausible deniability passcode: give the wrong key and a less-damning content is revealed.

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