Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Information lacking from summary/article (Score 4, Informative) 44

Artemis II is breaking Apollo 13's record by about 4100 miles. The primary reason they're going further is because they're passing much farther from the moon, about 4000 miles, compared to 158 miles for Apollo 13. The moon is also a little further from Earth, accounting for the other 250 miles.

Comment Re: Messages app? (Score 1) 34

That was the only Samsung app I routinely used, not least because I did not want to give Google my meta-data, but then I decided they had it anyway and it was getting to be time to get a new phone - and I wanted the freedom to move away from Samsung if I found anything better. I did not find anything better, and my replacement is good for OS updates for several years.
Rather amusingly, a few years ago they announced that their browser was one of the most popular ones worldwide based on the number of times it had been downloaded. That for a browser on a dominant player in the Android market's devices, a browser which could not be deleted and which received frequent updates. Don't trust any statistics you did not fake yourself!

Comment Re:And nothing of value was lost... (Score 3, Informative) 34

Used the Samsung App up until around two years ago, then switched to the Google one (my old Samsung was going out of OS support and I was not sure its replacement was going to be the same make). Switching was trivially easy, and my messaging history was then available under both apps.
I don't use messaging much anyway and as far as I could discern, Google Messages was marginally better than the Samsung version.
My newer phone is another Samsung (a year old now) but does not appear to have that messaging app of theirs.

Comment Re:This idea seems solid (Score 5, Interesting) 72

But this idea seems solid and worth pursuing. It’s a real market, for real goods, that probably could benefit from some tech.

Agreed. I live in the mountain west, and our forest and mountain landscapes are just covered with fencing, even though most of it is public land, because it's BLM "multi-use" land -- a lot of cattle graze on it. Fences are expensive to build and expensive to maintain. If you think a fence is something you build once and then ignore, you've never dealt with cattle.

Cowboys (and sheep herders) have a term "ride fence" as in "Bob, you're gonna ride fence today", and it's a regular and tedious task that means "get on your horse (or ATV) and ride past miles and miles of fenceline, looking for places where the fence is broken or going to break, and fixing them". It's necessary and expensive drudgery and having all of those fencelines is bad for other uses, and bad for wildlife. I've put down a few deer that jumped a barbed wire fence and didn't quite clear it, slicing their guts open and leaving them in agony as they slowly die.

In addition, there's an obvious tension between the cost of building and maintaining fences and the cost of rounding up cattle when it's time to move them. Obviously if you slice the land up into lots of small fenced areas, the cattle will be easy to find -- but they're also going to graze it out fast, so you're going to have to move them more often. If you use very large enclosures (common on BLM land), then your cows may have hundreds of square miles to roam and feed... but when it's time to move them you have to find them. Luckily they're herd animals so when you find a few you've found them all, but still. And occasionally, singles get separated from the herd and you just lose them, which isn't great since a cow is worth about $2k.

So... if we can replace those miles of expensive and constantly-breaking fences with virtual fences, that's good news for everyone. Wildlife and outdoorsmen can roam unimpeded, cattle can be far more tightly controlled, strays quickly identified, located and reunited with the herd -- via remote control!. This is an innovative idea that is worth quite a lot.

Slashdot Top Deals

MESSAGE ACKNOWLEDGED -- The Pershing II missiles have been launched.

Working...