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Comment Re:Just buy an iPhone Mini (Score 1) 167

Install the app "nrfConnect". There's an iOS and an Android version. With the Android version you can craft and advertise your own bluetooth beacons. With the iOS version this option is not available because iOS doesn't let you do this. It's a software block, not a hardware limitation.

This is one example of why I prefer Android.

Comment Re:Lawyer up. (Score 5, Informative) 242

They are not counterfeit. There is a growing market in China of refurbishing old hardware. Essentially taking old and broken Macbooks and either repairing them or parting them out and reselling the components. This includes batteries.

The batteries he had purchased were refurbs taken from old Macbooks.

Not counterfeit.

Comment Board models? (Score 1) 369

I wish they had shared the model of the board(s) that were compromised. It'd be interesting to see independent researchers get their hands on a few examples and look for this magic chip, maybe even reverse it.

There are tons of Supermicro boards on eBay with IPMI/BMCs, but are any of them the same as the compromised model(s)?

Comment Only 1 inhabitable planet exists. (Score 1) 519

And it's Earth.

Which is what a lot of people thought up until very recently where we now have dozens known to us and the potential for many, many more to be discovered.

We didn't have data to prove otherwise, so we viewed Earth as unique. Now we have data and Earth is proving to be far from unique.

I think how we view the potential for "life" to exist "out there", in whatever form you want to consider life to be, will follow a similar path.

Comment Re:I've got Karma to burn (Score 1) 225

First launch of any rocket is typically done with mass simulator (usually a tank of water). You don't typically launch with a real payload because the risk is far too high. Once you have one or two test launches, and all the data from those launches analyzed to make sure there are no surprises to what your simulations predicted, then you start taking on real payloads.

Rather than use a water tank as a mass simulator, SpaceX is using a Tesla roadster.

And those 'useful things' can go up on later launches, when they know the rocket works, rather than risk destroying those 'useful things' on an untested rocket.

Comment Just a Novelty? (Score 1) 102

Since the article points to something about bitcoins, I can't readily respond to the specifics, but stuff like this has been around a while. You can even find cheap little kits on eBay that power an LED from GSM RF, although those don't work very well in the states. And there are the classic crystal radio kits that have no battery at all.

The most important thing to develop for something like this is ultra low-power technology, like displays and CPUs that run on less than a microvolt and antennas that can transmit and receive low power signals over long distances. In which case a modern battery could run a cell phone for years on a single charge (or be replaced with a much smaller battery). Which begs the question, why bother with a battery-less device with all the components (read: cost) that would need to go into it to harness electricity from RF when you can just plug in a battery that'll run for years? I don't think you would. I think this is more novelty than something for mass-market.

I hope to be proven wrong.

Does solar count as RF power? Since radio and light are both EM radiation...

Comment Unlocking the feathers during powered flight (Score 5, Interesting) 150

Why unlock the feathers during powered flight?

Because if you get into space and find you can't unlock them, the aircraft is going to burn up on reentry. So you unlock them during powered flight. If they don't unlock, you can shut down the engines and still have enough atmosphere to control the aircraft and direct it out of its trajectory into space.

Why do this during powered flight and not before, perhaps just before the aircraft is released from its carrier?

Because the aerodynamics and stress on the aircraft at engine start are dynamic to say the least. Once under stable, powered flight there's much less risk in unlocking the feathers. The aerodynamic loads should not be high enough that they would overcome the hydraulics keeping the feathers in place after being unlocked.

The big question right now is why did the feathers deploy. The NTSB says they saw nothing to indicate the pilots had tried to deploy them; the handle used to do this was untouched based on the internal cockpit video they have.

It's way too early to even speculate that it even might be pilot error. That the unlock happened a couple seconds early should not have caused the feathers to deploy on their own. Unless the transition to supersonic speed induces stresses that could overcome the hydraulics and force the feathers to deploy and the unlock happened just before or during that transition.

We need to find out why the feathers deployed before we start blaming anyone or anything.

Comment Doesn't CloudFlare Scare Anyone? (Score 4, Insightful) 67

You've got a single company who is encouraging web site operators to direct all traffic through CloudFlare's network. Now we don't need things like 'web bugs' to track you as you browse the internet, CloudFlare has your IP and can watch you as you go from one CloudFlare site to the next. Even if the site uses SSL, it's being decrypted now inside CloudFlare's network where they can watch everything you do.

And the NSA/CIA/etc must love that too. They don't have to subpoena many different web sites, they just subpoena CloudFlare or even work with CloudFlare like they do with AT&T and Verizon, stick an NSA black box on the network just after the connection has been decrypted, and watch everything you're doing while you think you're protected with an SSL connection to the web site you're visiting.

Comment Bookmark buttons a bad UI change (Score 1) 688

The button to quickly bookmark a page, and the button to pull up your list of bookmarks, are now paired together. This is not a good UI design choice. Now when I try to pull up my bookmarks I'm bookmarking pages and vice versa. I wish they were separate. I also wish that the button to bookmark a page was back in the address bar where its position provided better context.

Comment Re:It has a combined address/search bar (Score 5, Interesting) 688

Type a single-word search query into the address bar in Firefox. Instead of searching for the word right away the browser attempts a DNS lookup. With the search bar that DNS lookup step is removed. For the more privacy-conscious this is an important thing. Especially if you've got an ISP that redirects a failed DNS response to their own search engine.

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