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Comment Re:Something fishy.. (Score -1, Flamebait) 227

2000mAh = 2Amps/hr Then it is charged in 30 sec? Thats 1/120th of an hr so charge current = 2x120 or 240 Amps!
That is equivalent to approx 2 house power services. That ammont of current is carried on what looks like
lamp zip cord on dual banana plugs good for ~ 10 -15 amps on a good day.
Sorry something just aint right. Maybe the demo is not the 2000mAhr model?

The difference is in battery voltage vs service voltage. (Power = volts * amps)

Lets assume smartphone battery operates at 5 volts. (mine does anyway)

5 volts * 2 amps = 10 watts

Now lets see how much power you get from a typical wall plug in US drawing those same 2 amps.

120 volts * 2 amps = 240 watts

24 times power from wall plug vs battery at same amperage.

Power is available.. question is selection of voltage allowing for desired charge rate while optimizing design/safety/cost constraints.

Comment Re:But Terrizm! (Score 1) 233

Seriously: a major airplane "disappears" despite evidence that it wasn't really crashed. Everybody's wondering who dunnit and how, and whether or not it will become another impromptu bomb.

Every failure, mistake or design induced error you can't explain can quite often be blamed on malice. In the absence of detailed evidence there is almost always a path whereby evil human action can cause result x.

See also blame the compiler, lucky cosmic ray strike on wrong program bits, faulty hardware, magic dragons, unicorns, god.

When reasoning about what could happen when you don't really have any evidence it is important to appreciate the dangers of invoking explanations that could plausibly apply in just about any situation.

Devices like hanlon's razor exist to protect us from jumping to what are more often than not both easy and incorrect conclusions.

Comment Re:The internet of things...that might get you kil (Score 1) 128

And yet people are still willing to trade security for convenience... Driving to work will never be 100% secure.

Driving drunk is still more convenient than calling a cab or bugging a friend. Driving drunk will never be 100% secure.

Nothing is 100% safe. And this is an impossible standard to meet. Everything we do in life is a calculated risk. I think fixing safety issues as they are discovered is a perfectly reasonable course of action.

Non-Falsifiable statements convey no useful information. I can respond to any mishap or failure with the same verbiage and have no more or less a valid point.

Whether it is "driving drunk" or "driving sober to work" neither activity is 100% secure.

Yes connecting to the internet allows the possibility of my smoke detector to be hacked. It also allows me to be alerted if it goes off when I am not at home. I think the benefit of scenario 2 is worth the risk of scenario 1.

The hell it is. If a fire starts when your away chances are your still looking at significant/total loss from fire and or water damage from efforts to stop the fire.. by time monitoring company farts around with your contact list, finally calls the fire department and fire department arrives.

Shit can be replaced (e.g. filing insurance claim) people not so much.

Comment Enterprise quote (Score 1) 199

"Science Vulcan directorate has determined that time travel is....... not fair"

I have always been suspect of the the idea "god" would allow little "pissants" like us to have quantum computers with thousands or tens of thousands of entangled qbits... to me it seems too good to be true no different than pulling energy out of nothing.

Such feelings might inform a career path or assumptions about concepts currently out of reach of ones ability to experimentally check however they should never be confused with reality.

Comment No thanks (Score 1) 353

Have 32 GB of ram 18 GB of which currently used by OS disk cache. There is no disk delay to do anything. A week after starting a VMware workstation image it is always still cached in ram and resumes instantly. All of my apps and everything load instantly with no disk related delay.

Given that reality $130 for 3TBs of platters is still a much better deal.

My machine suspends to ram when not in use and reboots less than once a month to install patches. Boot times are irrelevant as is time needed to initially load applications and datasets.

Comment Re:The Internet of socket puppets (Score 1) 163

There are definite use cases for these things however.

The problem is not that use cases don't exist the problem is those use cases are mostly weak, irrelevant and otherwise impart very little actual value on the user.

For instance having your thermostat aware of when the fridge is cycling on and off can allow it to determine the best time to run the ac for the most energy efficiency.

Maximizing cycle length of AC is the only thing that will save you any cooling energy short of living with higher temperatures. Complex calculations / appliance coordination are not necessary to predict the future a simple PID loop in t-stat has same effect.

Also if you are really energy conscious and live in an area where heat pumps make sense setbacks become counter-productive costing you more energy. You set the temp once and forget it.

Having vents that can be shut off separately and remotely from other AC vents allows for each room to be a uniform temperature and can prevent the ac from working hard to cool a room that is already at a desired temperature preset.

Closing vents increases total static pressure of the system which wastes energy and increases risk of damage to cooling system. Much better to do the necessary calculations up front to design buildings with the proper airflows so this is unnecessary. No short supply of well meaning people who "close" vents in unused rooms thinking it will save them money yet more often than not the opposite occurs.

It can be aware of when you are returning home and automatically cool the house just before you arrive.

What is the value of this heightened awareness vs standard setback features of your average programmable t-stat? My guess very little.

Other things too like self monitoring alarm systems that message you whenever a system intrusion occurs and allows you to decide weather the police get called or not based on snapshots taken by the tripped sensor.

Unfortunately I am already forced to pay homeowners insurance which covers theft and damage caused by break-ins. I don't get a discount for self-monitored systems I have to pay $$ monthly for professional monitoring to qualify.

There really are a bunch of use cases but id rather see this stuff be open and controlled by the hardware owner rather than all of the data ending up on a facebook cloud server. We really need control of the devices we own before we let everything get so connected.

I'm not saying everything is useless or there are not nice to have reasons for automation... yet to be viable they do need to provide more value than the consequences of ignoring "KISS"

Comment Re:Embarrassingly poor idea (Score 1) 277

The minute they said that a single-round digest of a salted password is standard practice, I stopped reading. Apparently they've never heard of PBKDF2 or scrypt. I now have zero confidence that these researchers know anything at all about password security.

Real security is achieved with large exponents. Anything short of that (multiplication, assorted amplification techniques) exist to make people feel better. But but but my password is a thousand times more secure now!!

Comment Re:Wrong, Expectations Must Change (Score 1) 163

The most explosive *recorded* invention in the history of mankind was the printing press.

You can't put the genie back in the bottle.

What is going on now with the internet and mobile devices and communication in general --- like the printing press or like radio or television --- is going to upset the status quo in 57 different ways.

Cost of global communication has already dropped to the point of saturation in much of the world. With low hanging fruits already plucked wouldn't hold my breath on disruptive change arriving anytime soon.

I expect to see a lot of crap with questionable or negative value prop so I will not be blindly embracing anything.

Comment The Internet of socket puppets (Score 4, Interesting) 163

Apparently what the Internet needs most is yet another buzzword so nebulous, context free and ill defined nobody really understands what it is your talking about.

If "Internet of things" means home automation the technology has been around for decades yet remains a small niche market. "you can ..." scenarios are fun and cool and functional and all yet tend to impart very little useful value to the owner. I don't need or want Internet connected thermostats, light bulbs and toasters. As for security we can't even communicate securely. Email, Telephone/SMS are wholly insecure and trivially spoofed by anyone. Securing a mythical buzzword is not a problem I chose to spend my time perusing.

Comment Legislation to reign in mobile insurance companies (Score 1) 218

580 million is a small price to pay for not having to worry about your gear getting "rendered useless" by social engineers, hax0rs, oppressive governments and carriers.

Besides there are plenty of outstanding fellow citizens selling phone parts online (displays, touch sensors, batteries, housings..) less noble sort are still able to make money one way or another.

What TFA seems to be asserting IMEI blacklists and software features are not "good" enough... we need the kill switch to handle specific case of thieves selling their wares across international borders.

As for saving consumers money $2.6 billion collected for $580 million in payouts to replace stolen handsets is either a false twisted metric used by TFA to further an agenda or direct evidence of insurance racket showing petty thieves how real theft is done. You can't have it both ways.

Comment Banned cell phones = instant 25% crash reduction (Score 1) 367

"The National Safety Council is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to save lives by preventing injuries and deaths at work, in homes and communities and on the road through leadership, research, education and advocacy"

Just want to make sure I understand correctly a non-profit organization with a mission to "save lives" is pay-walling the contents of a report that _could_ save lives.

Obviously all hinges on what "tied to" means. If means anyone talking on phone at time of accident reader would have needed to consider statistical data regarding time spent on phone while driving by each class (driving experience, age group, regional factors) of drivers. In absence of this necessary contextual information statistic would end up as useful as "driving causes car accidents". Even more problematic intent expressed by including such a statistic in a summary is disingenuous at best and willful deception at worst.

Now if "tied to" actually means "caused by" then why would they not have selected the stronger language?

Comment Wisdom of allowing children to police themselves (Score 2) 183

Should have saved this for April 1st to go with "Dice holdings apologizes for beta and promises to deploy IPv6"

"The system also adjusts for false reports from people that might intentionally report someone of greater skill or for other griefing purposes."

Well then nothing to worry about. I suppose this system also implements RFC3514 on every game packet to ensure fair play.

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