The moon isn't always at the night side of the Earth.

To extend the reverse-car analogy, the correct analogy is the use case of wanting to transmit a large movie to a USB stick so you can watch it on your TV. Doesn't matter if you have the best-of-the-best USB stick and USB 3.0 in your computer. The bottleneck is still the internet connection. So what you do is that you set your computer to download that large file while you're out doing whatever it is you're doing all day, and copy it over to your USB stick quickly when you get home. (You could even conceivably automate this process or remote control it from your cell phone.) In this scenario, having USB 3.0 *will* help since it'll cut down on the time on getting the movie from your computer to the USB stick.

Analogously, the way you'd do it for a residential charger, is that you'd have the power grid trickle charging a supercapacitor that you have at your home (ideally under some kind of control from the power company, so that they can manage the load on the electric grid) over the course of a few hours, so that when you need the power, you can just plug it in and almost instantly get your car charged up.

Although while we're on the subject of analogies, a better reverse-car analogy would be that of a flush toilet, slowly building up a reservoir of water to then quickly release it when required.

Fuck that noise. 172.16.0.0/12 baby.

If being a terrorist was a job that paid three billion dollars, I think you'd end up creating a lot of terrorists. Supply and demand.

I'm not a patent expert, although I did once watch a very informative video about how patents work. This makes me eminently qualified on the subject by slashdot standards.

The phone's SoC (system on a chip) is coupled to the touch screen. The SoC implements the invention of the patent (in software... yes... so what?). The fact that the CPU also happens to do a lot of other stuff too would not seem to be relevant.

I'm not a patent expert, although I did once watch a very informative video about how patents work. This makes me eminently qualified on the subject by slashdot standards.

Looking at the independent claims, it looks like at least the lock screen as implemented by Samsung (starting at the unlock button, drag a certain distance in any direction to unlock) and possibly other Android phones out there is safe from this patent.

1. A system comprising:

a touch screen upon which a user is to enter, by drawing, a geometric pattern in a specified direction to gain access to the system; and

a processing circuit coupled to the touch screen to compare the user entered geometric pattern to a predefined geometric pattern stored in a memory.

Since the system on Samsung phones works no matter which direction you drag, it looks like the "slide to unlock" implementation in Samsung phones is clear.

However, I think this patent may very well be applicable to the "pattern lock" of android phones.

Is there any evidence that it might? More specifically, does the change in the estimate of the mass of the object suggest this?

Why would a change in mass change the trajectory? Granted, it was a while since I took physics, but from what I remember:

1. The force of gravity follows F = GMm / (r^2) where M and m are the masses of the two objects in consideration. Here I will use m as the mass of the asteroid and M as the mass of any other object that is not the asteroid.

2. F = ma.

3. From this follows that a = (GMm / (r^2)) / m = GM / (r^2). As we can see, m (the mass of the asteroid)

This means means that the accelleration of an object due to gravity is only affected directly by the other object's mass, not by the object's own mass. However, a more massive object *could* attract other objects with a higher accelleration than expected, thus reducing r, thus over time increasing the accelleration, changing the tracjectory of not only the asteroid but also the other object.

Consider for a moment, however, how insignificant such an effect would be:

First imagine an asteroid the size of a football field. Then imagine the moon. Then imagine the earth. Then imagine the sun. Now imagine the mass of an asteroid even moving the moon more than an imperceptible amount due to gravity, let alone the sun.

You could do MCMXVII * LXIV as a calculation quite similar to 1917 * 64.

Just as:

1917 * 64 = 1000*64 + 900*64 + 10*64 + 7 * 64

in a similar way:

MCMXVII * LXIV = MM * LXIV - C * LXIV + X * LXIV + VII * LXIV

Multiplying by X for example is quite simple, you just transform I->X, V->L, X->C, L->D, C->M etc so X*LXIV (10*64) = DCXL (640). This is as an analogue to tacking a zero on the end. A little more complex, yes, but not fundamentally different.

That said, I like the system we all use today a lot better. :-)

Unless I misunderstood your comment, all you need to "balance your checkbook" are positive numbers (zero not required), addition, subtraction and the concept of equality and comparison. You just keep your income and your spendings on seperate tallies and compare them when you're done. You can handle any cases where "you've spent no money" or "you've received no money" as special cases without having to resort to the concept of zero being a number like any other.

It tells us that since autocomplete defaults to on, more people search to turn it off than do to turn it on.

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

A year or two ago everybody was happy with Gnome. Just Gnome, we didn't have to call it Gnome 2.x. Now we have Gnome 2.x, plain Gnome 3.x, Unity, Mint Gnome Shell Extensions, MATE and now another kid on the block... what the hell went wrong?

I'm still happily using Gnome 2.x (on LMDE), but it won't last forever :/

For the record: I really thought that champagne cooler was empty.

In 1997, right after Chips n' Dips had faded away, to be replaced by the enigmatically named http:///..org, all of us free software nerds hung on its every story, comment and poll like it was carved on tablet and flung from a burning bush. A year later I had started at hardware maker VA Research and /. was falling down for lack of machinery, so we rummaged through our returns piles and sent Rob and Jeff some 2u servers to help out. That was for me the beginning of some of the most important friendships in my adult life.

Its hard to explain how important Slashdot was to all of us 10 years ago. Indeed, without it it would be hard to imagine HN, Reddit, Digg, Fark or any of a thousand lesser sites. The editorial perspective of Rob and the other editors of /. is what kept people coming back and for a long time that perspective was Rob's, then Rob and Jeff and a bunch of us (some, like Timothy and samzenpus, still around!), but then Jeff left, now Rob. In some way I see this as a passing of an era in free software.

Throughout, while some have left for those greener shores, slashdot abided even while buffeted by the markets and the de/evolving internet news world, and it has remained a default tab in my and many others' browsers.

I didn't mean this post to be about Slashdot though, but about my friend Rob. I'll only say that while the site will be the lessor for you leaving, I firmly believe that computer science will gain my. While this note reads like an epitaph or the last pages of a book, it is really no more than a thank you note from me and many I know to your for your decade+ of work on the site. So...

Thanks.