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Comment Re:You can apparently get GIMP on Android (Score 1) 415

Photoshop 4.0.1, (c) 1996, I run it everyday. Only later features I miss are unlimited undo and editable text. Text always becomes raster. No plugins, but I do re-save files before they go out, using command line imagemagick scripts! That fixes the one big sneaky annoyance of PS 4.0.1: it saves PNG's with a weird color profile.

Comment Re:So much for all those awards (Score 1) 301

Does your stat for 747 include hostile attacks? The 747 seems to have a few outliers, like the shoot-down of KAL007 (269 lives) and Tenerife (583 lives, chaos at a small airport due to a bombing at a large airport), Air India 182 (329 lives, bomb), and Sept 11, 2011. Also, there is the massive JAL123 (520 lives, maintenance error). Airbus came along later, but did get hit by the U.S. attack on Iran Air 655 (290 lives).

Comment Re:Here's my question: (Score 1) 301

Two things come to mind. In previous bad battery situation, the initial run of batteries were fine. Then when they went into production, perhaps with other subcontractors, they got the garbage.

Also, with the extensive testing of the planes, we've got to assume they run them under max power load, with every seat running laptops, playing movies on seatbacks, etc., right? And max use of air circulation, etc. And whatever else makes the batteries cycle to make up for generated power, however it works.

Comment Plane power, Li-ion, Colbolt Oxide batteries (Score 4, Interesting) 301

This plane uses a tremendous amount of electricity, see: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/01/boeing-787-electric-fire-grounding/
The li-ion batteries are from a company in Japan, but I wonder where they were manufactured. In the past, subcontractors outside Japan have done shoddy jobs making batteries, such as replacing mylar with paper. Once it's sealed up, how do you test it? Additionally, these batteries use cobolt oxide and are even more prone to overheating than tradition li-ion batteries. The batteries took a long time to certify.

A notorious SwissAir crash over the Atlantic was due to an overheated electrical bus. In a rush to get gambling devices onto seat backs, the airline had gone with a system that required a full computer for each display, which required more power than a more centralized system.

Comment Re:Wish I knew why (Score 1) 589

An indictment, esp. in the U.S. system, is necessarily one-sided, even if endorsed by a grand jury. I don't disagree with reading source material, I just wanted to point out the usefulness of journalism, or whatever that ZDNet article was. Probably I came off too harshly.

As I understand it, in civil code countries (not the U.S.), charges are brought only after some deliberation by a magistrate, after which a trial before a judge results in a likely conviction. In the U.S. the prosecutor leads the grand jury to an indictment (supposedly "could indict a ham sandwich"), and makes a maximal case. At trial it's more likely the charges get denied by the judge or petit jury, compared to a trial in a civil code country. But things have changed over time. U.S. prosecutors once used more discretion rather than trying to rack up convictions even if unjust. Or that's what I've read.

So reading an indictment is roughly equivalent to reading a blog arguing one side of the case.

Comment Re:Good move. (Score 5, Insightful) 180

Linksys did not precisely compete on price value. In the realm of stores like Office Dept, Linksys was top end. After Cisco, the packaging and casing got more extreme, comparative prices went up, all the while bargain basement brands went from unreliable to fine. Didn't help that Linksys alienated the tech-savvy segment of the mass market by killing the routers that could easily be converted to open source community firmware.

Comment Re:7:30pm ET techincal difficulty? (Score 1) 409

And in fact:

It looks like Busboys and Poets are having tech difficulties. We are looking for an alternative feed that we can pick up.

Sorry for the connectivity problems, we are currently working on the broadband issues. The full sound and video will be available on YouTube tomorrow. Stay tuned.

http://nader.org/2012/11/03/to-view-third-party-debate-at-busboys-and-poets-nov-4/

Comment Re:Uhhh.... This is it? (Score 2) 281

The U.S. National Weather Service seems careful not to overstate. Then again, few people seem to even understand the difference between a Watch and a Warning. For this storm there is an oddball bureaucratic classification thing keeping the NWS's Hurricane Center from posting tropical warnings north of North Carolina. Kinda amusing... it's a PDF at the top of the Hurricane page... http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ They are handing off to local offices and two more obscure divisions mid-storm: http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/ and http://www.opc.ncep.noaa.gov/

Comment Re:See what happens? (Score 1) 281

Agree there's too much crying wolf but the actual numbers are pretty bad. Here is an analysis of why the predicted 11 foot tide at the Battery in lower Manhattan is bad news for the subway: http://kottke.org/12/10/hurricane-sandy-comin The alarms have been indiscriminate though, so there is a lot of noise in the signal. The recent eagerness to close the subway is particularly irksome. The "officials" would never close a large road system because in 24 hours it would be covered in seawater. The people making these decisions see things from the tinted windows of limousines. The first time the subway was closed for weather was only in 2011: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway#Subway_flooding

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