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Comment Re:play it like golf (Score 1) 118

(this is serious) ask Tiger Woods or Jack Nicklaus what to do... my suggestion is to send some kind of impulse from an orbiting probe that would lift the whole "rover" - be it a mini-storm kind of thing or simply a wind-type blow, much like a golf player would do with a driver club from a sandpit...

maybe a disused concorde ?

Comment Re:nothing lie the real thing (Score 1) 205

on top of that, was the box heated in some way? because I don't see how an off-the-shelf camcorder can still work at sub-zero temperature like those above 3km (10,000 ft) of altitude - see chart, good luck with proving me wrong !!

air temperature

this experiment is utter rubbish, or at least so are the claims

Comment nothing lie the real thing (Score 1) 205

it looks like a fake film to me... you can notice the horizon curvature even at 100 feet and when it's at the top you can't make a single continent out of the image... is that supposed to be how it looks from 32km heights ? I highly doubt it: if you've ever been on an airplane, you'll notice how big a river or a town looks from 3 or 4 km above the surface and that's how this film looks like, a good miscalculation factor of 10, in my opinion... so the maximum altitude would be 10,714 ft, not 107,145 ft !!

Comment Re:My experiences (Score 1) 277

just a quickie on the wireless range.
i identified a few different technologies (?) which will give a varied range of control, as in:
- plain 27 MHz wireless devices can go up to 1.8 m (6 ft) - this frequency is reserved for "general use" in both the USA and Europe;
- then the 40 MHz ones that can go up to 3 m (10 ft), but it's a reserved frequency in Europe - for civilian radio-controlled (toy?) airplanes - so it's being slowly deprecated;
- and finally there are the 2.4 GHz ones for either 10 m (33 ft), 15 m (50 ft) or 30 m (100 ft) - not sure why the difference;

all of the above do not require line of sight (can work through walls), which is not true for IR (infrared) devices...

there is also a new generation of bluetooth devices that have various ranges, but a typical one is 10 m (33 ft), and sometime you'll find RF devices (for instance, audio headsets) that can really work from across the street sometime...

to conclude, my personal experience with a set of wireless mouse+keyboard connected to the same receiver: the mouse only works from 1 m (3 ft) away while the keyboard works well even from 4 m (13 ft) away... go figure!

Comment Re:Xtend, Mbrace, Litigate? (Score 1) 357

so they've patented the extention, fine by me, that seems doable or at least is copyrightable (as improvements).
now, the issue that I have is that they've been granted a patent on their specific method to store/abuse a text-processing document in XML, but what about other methods that do similar things?
the Patent Office should stop granting patents that it doesn't understand...

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