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Comment Re:Magic Pill - Self Discipline (Score 0) 153

"what if we eat so much crap food that the wholesome hearty foods stop being produced"

There really isn't a clear line between "wholesome hearty food" and "crap food". The dosage is the problem and some foods like deserts, candy, and chips are just so calorically dense and so tasty that they're almost assured to be overeaten by the majority of people.

Comment Interviewer is extremely ignorant on power (Score 3, Informative) 92

At one point the interviewer asks "how much money you gonna save on electricity for 50 computers, $50/year"? It's clear he's never even attempted to do the math. An extra 100 watts in California is going to cost $314.91 per year at the typical rate (above baseline) of 35.949 cents per year. That's just the savings on one computer system much less 50 computers.

Comment 0.74% atmospheric pressure and trace oxygen levels (Score 1) 104

To properly test a prototype, you would need to fly a prototype helicopter (probably with very large rotor and very powerful turbine) to 33,000 meters altitude on Earth to test equivalent atmospheric pressures. The current altitude record for helicopters is only 12,442 meters.

There's another major problem posed by Mars. 96% of the atmosphere is comprised of CO2 and there is only trace amounts of oxygen. That means not only would you have to carry fuel, but you would need to carry your own oxidizer as well which adds a lot of weight.

Comment Cisco is only describing the IETF standard (Score 1) 337

"A July 1999 IETF specification (RFC 2638) discusses paid prioritization by saying: “It is expected that premium traffic would be allocated a small percentage of the total network capacity, but that it would be priced much higher.” Another specification (RFC 2475) published half a year earlier says that setting different priorities for packets will “accommodate heterogeneous application requirements and user expectations” and “permit differentiated pricing of Internet service.” (An RFC is a policy document, often accepted as standards, published by the IETF.)"

I would also add that the abstract of RFC 2474 says:

“Differentiated services enhancements to the Internet protocol are intended to enable scalable service discrimination in the Internet

http://www.digitalsociety.org/...
Security

Kids With Operators Manual Alert Bank Officials: "We Hacked Your ATM" 378

An anonymous reader writes "Two 14-year-olds hacked a Bank of Montreal ATM after finding an operators manual online that showed how to gain administrative control. Matthew Hewlett and Caleb Turon alerted bank employees after testing the instructions on an ATM at a nearby supermarket. At first the employees thought the boys had the PIN numbers of customers. 'I said: "No, no, no. We hacked your ATM. We got into the operator mode,"' Hewlett was quoted as saying. Then, the bank employees asked for proof. 'So we both went back to the ATM and I got into the operator mode again,' Hewlett said. 'Then I started printing off documentations like how much money is currently in the machine, how many withdrawals have happened that day, how much it's made off surcharges. Then I found a way to change the surcharge amount, so I changed the surcharge amount to one cent.'"
Microsoft

With the Surface Pro, Microsoft Is Trying To Recreate the PC Market 379

An anonymous reader writes "An opinion piece at ReadWriteWeb makes an interesting suggestion: Microsoft's efforts in the tablet market aren't aimed at competing with the iPad or any of the Android tablets, but rather inventing a new facet of the PC market — one Microsoft alone is targeting. Quoting: 'Microsoft wants everyone to think the Surface Pro 3 is a tablet, but its pricing gives the game away. Microsoft wants to recreate the lucrative PC market that made the company billions of dollars by repackaging a PC into tablet clothing and then hammering away at the Surface product line until everybody believes that PCs never really went anywhere, they just got a touchscreen and a cellular connection.' This is also supported by the lack of a smaller Surface tablet, which many analysts were predicting before this week's press conference. Microsoft is clearly not pursuing the tablet-for-everyone approach, but instead focusing on users who want productivity out of their mobile computing device. The Surface Pros are expensive, but Microsoft is hoping people will balance that cost against the cost of a work laptop plus a personal tablet."
Science

Siphons Work Due To Gravity, Not Atmospheric Pressure: Now With Peer Review 360

knwny (2940129) writes "Peeved by the widespread misconception that siphons work because of atmospheric pressure, physics lecturer Dr. Stephen Hughes, [in 2010] wrote a mail to the prestigious Oxford English Dictionary(OED) pointing out the error. To back his claim, Dr.Hughes tested a siphon inside a hypobaric chamber to check if changes in atmospheric pressure had any effect on the siphon and demonstrated that gravity and not atmospheric pressure was the driving principle. [This week, the] paper detailing his experiment was published in Nature. The OED spokesperson responded saying that his suggestions would be taken into account during the next rewrite."
Sci-Fi

Ask Slashdot: Are You Apocalypse-Useful? 737

An anonymous reader writes: "Young people, when choosing a profession, are often told to 'do what you love.' That's why we have experts in such abstruse fields as medieval gymel. But let's talk hypotheticals: if there's a worldwide catastrophe in which civilization is interrupted, somebody specializing in gymel wouldn't provide much use to fellow survivors. In a post-apocalypse world, medical doctors would be useful, as would most scientists and engineers. The bad news for Slashdotters is that decades without computers would render computer science and related professions useless. What do you consider to be the most useful and mostly useless post-apocalypse professions? How long would it take for society to rebuild enough for your profession to be useful?"

Comment Re:The title is a bit misleading (Score 1) 32

Capacity matters a lot in Wi-Fi as well as cellular data. Very rarely will you see mobile devices be able to leverage 2x MIMO or better because they only have one antenna. Capacity is effective peak performance for most situations. Peak throughput is great for marketing benchmarks and occasionally real life performance when it comes to wireless bridging.

Comment Re:The title is a bit misleading (Score 1) 32

MU-MIMO does effectively offer higher speeds than SU-MIMO in practice. Since most client devices are single antenna devices and only a few that are dual-antenna, MU-MIMO effectively increases the per-client throughput by improving overall capacity. If four single-antenna clients can be concurrently served by a MU-MIMO access point with 4 antennas, each client can have up to 4 times more throughput than the same 4 clients being served by a 4-antenna SU-MIMO access point. The SU-MIMO 4-antenna AP can't speed up operation for a single 1-antenna client.

Comment Re: Official cable doesn't stop dangerous chargers (Score 1) 663

I said the cables are overpriced, way overpriced I might add. It's just a freaking cable. I said the chargers at $20 aren't *that* overpriced, though they're still overpriced somewhat. The chargers that Apple sells are actually one of the highest quality chargers on the market according to this guy's tests (http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple-is.html) so they're actually worth close to $20.

So my point is that if Apple cared about safety, they'd lock out 3rd party chargers rather than the 3rd party cables. It's the charger that's dangerous when it sends 110V or 220V AC down the USB cable.

Comment Official cable doesn't stop dangerous chargers (Score 2) 663

A person can still use an overpriced official cable from Apple but used a dangerous charger and the dangerous conductive surface of the iPhone. The cable isn't the cause of the safety issue but the cable is what's overpriced so iOS 7 is forcing you to buy the overpriced cables. The official Apple chargers aren't *that* overpriced.
Australia

Australian State Bans IBM From All Contracts After Payroll Bungle 212

renai42 writes "If you don't follow Australian technology news, you're probably not aware that over the past few years, the State of Queensland massively bungled a payroll systems upgrade in its Department of Health. The issues resulted in thousands of hospital staff being underpaid or not paid at all, and has ballooned in cost from under $10 million in budget to a projected total cost of $1.2 billion. Queensland has now banned the project's prime contractor, IBM, comprehensively from signing any new contracts with any government department, until it addresses what the state says are IBM's project governance issues."

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