Unlikely for our species, the cockroaches on the other hand...

Are you sure you are "a technical person"?

Start button?

How about Walter White (Breaking Bad) or Gregory House MD (House MD)? I'd say they are intellectual heroes (or anti-heros in the case of WW).

Interestingly House also has some of the social issues that are represented in TBBT but he's never belittled by the plot/script, far from it.

Eh? I may have misunderstood but if you are saying that the comment by Irish-DnB:

...would never work then please explain further? I grant you 10 times is a stretch but license plates aren't random so you can't assume there will be an even spread of letters/numbers.

The current UK license plate system, introduced in 2001, has two non-random groups of characters*. If these characters were at the end of the plate (they aren't but they could have been) then you could easily end up with a disproportionate number of cars whose plate ends in the same character.

* The plate starts with a two letter area code followed by a two-digit age identifier, which changes twice a year.

On another note, the article mentions there being 36 possible 'last characters' of a number plate. That may be the case in the USA but in the UK certain letters aren't used on plates (IQ) because they are easily confused with other letters/numbers (10) when being read in a hurry.

Are you sure you replied to the correct post? I can see at least three pieces of information that weren't in the OP's post:

1. To promote their system, Russia decided to make new smartphones without GLONASS support illegal
2. Major manufacturers added that capability to all their phones since there is almost no additional cost to each unit, once the capability is designed into the chipset
3. There is no major CDMA networking in Russia.

If you think any of this information is incorrect then please feel free to post your version of the facts, otherwise...

fcuk it, why am I feeding a troll with a 7 digit UID!?!

As a Brit who lives in France I'm quite pleased about this proposal.

The cost of mobile tariffs in the UK is considerably less than in France but if I used a UK SIM card in France it would cost me more than having a French SIM.

If the UK operators had to charge me the same price to use my UK SIM card in France then I'd just get a UK SIM card and save money.

BTW, I'm not talking about international calls, I'm aware that these would still be expensive.

And with that post you contributed what exactly?

This isn't stackoverflow you know, there is no requirement to 'answer the question' asked in the post you reply to, just that you have something interesting and preferably on topic.

This post is obviously off-topic but I'm hoping if you learn a bit about slashdot from it then at least it helped someone.

Or this perhaps?

I'm imagining a system where the drone's position isn't controlled by the driver/tablet app but instead it automatically stays directly above the car. The drone would have a 360deg camera underneath and the tablet app would just control the panning.

The speed of the car would also be automatically limited while the drone is in the air so that the car can't get ahead of the drone, you probably wouldn't be able to launch the drone while moving anyway.

I already posted this link above but unfortunately experienced climbers do camp in avalanche prone areas, sometimes by misjudging the risk or sometimes by necessity.

These days yes, if you're in a good sleeping bag, 50 years ago? I'm not sure but maybe.

This reminds me of an incident last year where Glen Plake survived an avalanche that hit their camp and was running around in the snow for 10 minutes before he realised he was barefoot.

I always assumed that when Americans called people an ass they meant the person was a donkey and when the rest of the world called people an Arse they were referring the the derriere.

I can't find a citation either but it wouldn't surprise me:

Bittorrent would solve the multiple back-up issue as long as the torrent was popular enough but it wouldn't solve the upload/download speed problem (for multi-GB torrents/files where your local bandwidth is the bottleneck).

The problem is that you have to trust everyone connected to the torrent not to allow an outside party to connect and gather the IPs of everyone sharing the torrent. Don't forget that the main advantage of this plan, multiple back-ups, only works with a large number of participants in the torrent which raises the exposure...

I can only see this working if it reaches critical mass, otherwise the early adopters face some pretty serious investigation...