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Comment Re:Brilliantly simple (Score 2) 90

Assuming your phone was on in the first place. If you're going somewhere you don't expect to have cell service it makes sense to turn it off or put it into flight mode. If you're prepared for the trip you also carry spare battery packs and/or a small solar charger.

If you need to call for help you turn it on and try, or turn it on if you can hear the sound of helicopters nearby.

When I go camping, I leave my cell phone in the car, powered off. There's no point in carrying it as there won't be any signal in the back-country.

Comment Re:Airborne femtcells (Score 1) 90

You probably need something like a phased array to give some directionality sensing to the receiving antenna?

No need for that. All you have to do is fly in a pattern once you find a signal, keeping an eye on the signal strength. For example, if you get a hit while flying north, you turn around and fly south half a km to the west. Your signal is going to be weaker or stringer. If it's weaker, the transmitter is further east, and if it's stronger then the transmitter is further west. It's basically the children's game Hot and Cold, but with cellular technology. Granted, a directional antenna will make searching a lot simpler, but a simple yagi or loop antenna would suffice for that. No need to go to all the trouble and expense of a phased array.

Comment Re:I don't get it (Score 1) 67

> If they said "I successfully pirated all the movies that Universal Pictures released in 2018," for example, it might be different from saying "I think pirates are cool." Flag as Inappropriate Saying you did something on Slashdot is not proof that you actually did that thing. You are not under oath or compelled to speak the truth here. I am a lawyer in real life (and in the odd commercial), so I know what I'm talking about.

BTW, I am not a lawyer, and the only commercial I made was a promo for a play, and if you want some beachfront property in the Florida Everglades, I'm open to getting sent some gift cards for it.

Comment Nowhere close to ready for the general public (Score 3, Insightful) 134

Iâ(TM)ve been running the beta for 6 months or so. While Iâ(TM)ve seen some marginal improvements handling edge cases, I still need to intervene several times on a routine 8 mile route I take several times per week (and I report the mistakes each time to help âoetrainâ their model). In particular, FSD wants to get into turning lanes when it shouldnâ(TM)t and vice-versa. It wonâ(TM)t be ready until I would feel comfortable telling my non-techie parents to use it. Using that metric, itâ(TM)s nowhere close.

Comment Re: Is this distorting the intention? (Score 5, Informative) 174

Yes. The headline is intentionally racist to generate interest. As a person with an identifiably generic American accent, I've translated between English speakers who had vastly different accents. American English is the international high standard. Queen's English is losing out, because non-rhotic accents can be ambiguous and confusing. So a real-time accent translator would be a great help to many who have trouble with the various international accents. Translating Cockney to American isn't "racist".

Comment Re: Solution? (Score 4, Insightful) 47

The tracking of elected officials should be published on a public website. So every web page, every location dot, every thing they do that anyone in the government tracks of anyone without a warrant is published publicly for all people to see of all the elected officials. Along with the tracking data of everyone within some local distance (to identify associates). Just tracking them was obviously not the point, but also making that tracking available.

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 40

the actual combustion takes place within a wavefront at much higher heat and pressure than in the surrounding combustion chamber...

... which results in a higher exhaust velocity for a given mass of propellant.

--
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.

By all means, do. (Nice sig, by the way.)

Comment Re:What are they? (Score 1) 209

The only way for an American living outside of the US to stop having their income taxed by the US government is to give up their citizenship (as long as they have citizenship of another country beforehand).

The parenthetical is irrelevant. It is closer to relevant if "give up" was "renounce" as the paperwork for renouncing should be rejected if the applicant is not a dual citizen, but if you give up your citizenship, you don't have to have citizenship elsewhere.

It's complicated.

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