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Comment Human hearing is amazing (Score 4, Informative) 40

This is simply using our amazing ability to spatially locate sounds. We can spatially locate sounds in front of us side-to-side with an accuracy of around 1 degree. That's pretty incredible. For comparison, cats and dogs cannot spatially locate sounds with nearly that accuracy (about 5 degrees for cats, 8 degrees for dogs), even though they can physically pan their ears around to focus sound collection where they want.

To give an idea of just how incredible that is, 1 degree accuracy means that a sound (or echo) from 20 feet away can be determined with 4 inches accuracy side to side (or in metric, an object 6 meters away can be located to 11 centimeters accuracy).

Using this innate ability for echolocation just makes sense.

Comment Re:A watershed moment (Score 1) 65

Doom was amazing tech, way ahead of its time,

I think Wolfenstein 3D was really the groundbreaking tech. It introduced the entire 2.5D fast-paced shooter FPS. Doom was just a big refinement and flushing-out of those concepts that Wolf 3D introduced and proved.

Really, from a technological standpoint, I argue that Quake was the biggest leap, most ambitious and largest technological breakthroughs id software (IE John Carmack) achieved. It is a full 3D game engine, with advanced internal scripting and tons of other capabilities, that is a quantum leap above the 2.5D rendering of Doom. Truly it set the stage for all modern FPS games. The rendering pipelines and so on were entirely different from anything in Doom so it was a total creation of itself, and not an incremental improvement (like Doom was to Wolf 3D).

I ported both Wolf3D and Quake (and Quake 2) to Pocket PC back in the day, so I was intimately familiar with the code, especially the software rendering pipelines.

Comment Re:What's the motivation? (Score 3, Informative) 181

. If you look at how fast renewables are growing

Solar is, by far, leading the growth of renewables. Solar is not a good source of energy in Canada, due to their high latitude (the angle of the sun is much less thus passing through more atmosphere), the disparity in amount of daylight received from season to season, and then the amount of snowfall they get, which covers solar panels.

Nuclear is one of the better sources of clean energy for a country like Canada.

Comment Re:Scary as hell (Score 1) 347

Tiny drones lack range, though

True, which is why Ukraine has developed "mother" drones that carry smaller drones into the theater of battle. They have also deployed cargo container type boxes full of drones, that not only got the drones geographically close to their target, but also served as a communication and charging hub for them near their targets.

Comment Not specific to Steam (Score 1) 26

I feel like this is an excuse to do away with physical gift cards to save money. If the "scamming" is primarily just a method of moving money, then ANY other gift cards for any other services can be used. This includes debit gift cards, Walmart gift cards, on and on.

Unless someone knows how this is only specific to Steam in some way?

Comment Scary as hell (Score 4, Insightful) 347

This should scare the hell out of most everyone, as this is really about as bad as biological warfare. Just to put some numbers in perspective, China produces around 40 million drones annually. Consider how easy it would be to produce, say, one million drones that include an explosive device. Since these drones are autonomous the usual methods of interfering with their RF, or even for fiber controlled drones, the cutting of the fiber cable by a powerful laser, will do nothing.

This is the future, and it will revolutionize warfare. Pure volume of drones can defeat anything we currently have to defend against them. You just send a swarm of drones, or a drone one after another after another spaced 10 seconds apart, until whatever they are targeting has been destroyed. 10k drones targeting the US's ports on both coasts... destroy the bulk of imports and exports. 10k drones targeting tractors and other agricultural equipment in the US's breadbasket - famine. Really, it's hard to understate what these could potentially do.

Comment Re:Cross-discipline issues (Score 1) 82

Well this is just classic medicine. If you go to an internist with an issue, they will try to address it with medications. If you go to a surgeon, they will try to address it with surgery (or do exploratory surgery to try and figure it out). Each works within their own area of expertise. My 94 year old grandma had a lump that was breast cancer. The surgeon wanted to do a full mastectomy at her age, which was ridiculous. Meanwhile the oncologist said, no, let's do a less invasive lumpectomy because I better know what her long-term prognosis is and what other tools (hormone therapy and the like) are available.

This is just a classic thing, and hopefully you have a general practitioner that is involved and can help make informed decisions, or you do that task yourself weighing the options.

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