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Comment Re:Impressive. (Score 1) 410

Wrong. Per default, Autobahn has not speed limits.

Unless indicated otherwise, if you enter the autobahn, NO LIMIT.

Yes, there are speed limits quite commonly, but if you discount Stadtautobahn stuff and the Ruhrpott, 2/3rds of it are unlimited. Case in point: You can drive Stuttgart/Berlin and have all but 50km or so of the distance unlimited.

Comment Re:Great... (Score 1) 297

In theory. In practice, helium will interact with, for example, iron alloys (steel), ending up with de-electonized protons migrating through the bulk metal, and at the other end snatching up some of the fermi-gas and going their merry way.

The same way, in vacuum systems, getting rid out of the stupid hydrogen magically appearing out of nice stainless steel enclosures that have been ultrasonic cleaned and baked under vacuum is a real problem. I have seen suggestions of burning the whole chambers under vacuum at 650C to get the protons out, and even that isn't really the end of things.

Comment Drinking Water Isn't So Easy As You Think (Score 3, Interesting) 247

When I was a kid I did Unicef collection every Haloween. We got an orange cardboard coin box at school, and collected donations to it along with our trick-or-treat. Unicef used these funds to build water wells for people in Africa who had only access to contaminated surface water.

A decade or two later, we found that many of these wells accessed aquifers that were contaminated by arsenic. And that thus we kids had funded the wholesale poisoning of people in Africa, and that a lot of them had arsenic-induced cancers that were killing them.

OK, we would not make that mistake again, and today we have access to better water testing. But it caused me to lose my faith that we really do know how to help poor people in the third world, no matter how well-intentioned we are.

And we had better not go around curing disease withoput also promoting birth control. Despite what the churches say, and the local dislikes and prejudices. Or we'll just be condemning more people to starve.

Comment Re:Uses of Java applets (Score 1, Insightful) 362

Are you posting in Bizarro land?

Your own link tells us that over 91% of the users of chrome didn't even encounter a SINGLE java applet in a whole MONTH.

Thats an absolutely overwhelming sign that java is almost extinction-level rare in the web. Hell, I would bet that the rate of people encountering embedded MIDI files was much higher.

Comment Re:Er, wait, what? (Score 5, Insightful) 140

Well, nuclear reactions that we can turn off like laser-initiated fusion are a lot nicer than the alternatives. The inside of your car engine is a raging inferno shot with electric sparks and compressed with inexorable steel cylinders. That doesn't keep you from going on a nice drive with your sweetie.

Comment Just Blackberry? (Score 1) 278

This might as well be how Blackberry, Nokia, and Palm blew it. And I'm probably leaving off a few companies.

IMO it all comes down to arrogance about your own platform. In Nokia's case that was Symbian.

Comment IOMMU (Score 4, Informative) 125

Yes, when I saw this I thought that this was a reason to make motherboard IOMMUs a security feature. Also, the DMA destination memory pages should not have the executable bit turned on. Recent generations of Intel/AMD CPUs have provided the ability to turn that bit off.

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