Posts by Filippo
456 posts • joined Saturday 24th November 2007 10:52 GMT
As someone who broke a phone just by going on a somewhat wet ride in an amusement park, and as someone who knows another person who broke a phone just by having it in his trouser pocket while it was raining, I wonder why this is not a standard feature. It will certainly be a pretty significant factor the next time I shop for a phone.
If the dot pointed to by the arrow is 30000LY across, then that big blue shiny thing in the top right corner should be bigger than our entire galaxy. What is it?
Special equipment?
I don't think these systems connect through wi-fi or bluetooth, so surely some special equipment is required in order to implement this hack?
Couldn't wear-levelling actually work against you in a RAID environment, by causing all drives to fail at nearly the same time?
Re: Why no shoes?
Considering what's happening with the belt, I think it's because the shoes would have obscured the feet.
They're very effective compared to not using them. Also, your numbers suggest that investing in development of improved condoms is probably a good idea.
Re: WTF radiation?
They don't*; this radiation is given off by the matter outside the black hole as it's falling in.
*except for Hawking radiation I guess
Re: So is Eadon going to have a retraction of all his anti-windows comments?
That would take a *long* time.
Re: Entropy: Big Problem!
Maybe, but not necessarily. It might be a competition problem - maybe organisms that photosynthesize red can appear, as long as red is all that's available so there are no other higher-energy organisms around.
Re: Surface - if you buy one and then jump through hoops to work around its failings
Like the Nexus, which doesn't have an SD card slot either?
Shocker news
Predator does what predators do.
other uses
Can they make a wireless, batteryless keyboard with this?
C'tan communication?
Re: When...
That's true. It will be a very, *very* long time before space-mined materials are cheaper than just recycling something or mining inhospitable places that are still not as inhospitable as space.
However, that's true if you want your material *on Earth*. If you want it *in orbit*, for example because you want to build a satellite, or a space station, or a moon base, or just refuel a rocket, it could very well be that mining an asteroid quickly becomes cheaper compared to lifting cheap stuff from Earth to orbit. Overcoming the gravity well is just that insanely expensive. This is especially true for the stuff that's really cheap but of which you need many tons, like water or common metals.
Of course, at some point someone might build a space elevator, which would upturn the costs all over again...
Asteroid mining like cold fusion?
I wonder if asteroid mining will turn out to be the next cold fusion. Investor bait.
I mean, there's no fundamental reason for which asteroid mining shouldn't work and maybe eventually become profitable. And it's something which, if it worked efficiently, could be really rather awesome. I mean, *I* really want it to work, and I think it's worth at least looking into it. These are traits which were shared by cold fusion too, which mostly turned out to be scams.
Re: Oh, come on!...
It's not sound. It's powerful EM interference making noise on the speaker system of the protagonists' ship (or whoever the camera is watching at the moment). Most Star Wars weapons and engines are based on fast-moving plasma.
What the spider is thinking
"It's ALIVE! They called me mad, but who's laughing now? BWAHAHAHAH!"
Re: Sinister
Shape has nothing to do with path. Actually, the irregular shape tells me that it's not massive enough to collapse into a sphere, which is a little bit reassuring when thinking about collisions. I'd be much more worried if anything big enough to be a sphere were to hit Earth.
@Tim Parker
In free-fall, the spring collapses towards the centre. This does not contradict the article: if you arranged this in a free-falling environment, you would have one fundamental difference - you would have to hold both sides of the slinky. Therefore, the "release signal" starts from both ends at the same time.
Posted in Kim Dotcom shows off new mega service
user-side crypto
Sounds like a good idea. In practice, people who use this to share movies will just share their keys very freely. Possibly embedding them in the URL. This obviously nullifies the security aspect, but that's irrelevant - those users actually want other people to be able to read the file.
As a bonus, if you want an online storage that has security, you can actually just use this and not share the key. But it's really a side benefit. The real point is giving Kim plausible deniability, and for that purpose the scheme seems to work well.
Posted in Kim Dotcom shows off new mega service
Re: Pseudo-random?
I don't think I have a "true random" number generator in my PC. Picking up a pseudorandom number and adding some noise from devices and some noise from mouse movements is the next best thing. Yeah, mouse movements aren't random, but that doesn't mean you can't use them to add some entropy to a number.
Posted in Kim Dotcom shows off new mega service
Re: if you could...
In this case, "entropy" means "randomness". It has nothing to do with physical energy.
reliability
I hope it works. I bought a Vertex 2 and I've had a lot of problems; from what I learned, early Sandforce controllers were crap. When I sent in under warranty, the only solution they managed was... sending me a Vertex 3. Yay, but next time they'd better get it right straight away.
Posted in Chips in spaaaaace: old tech is in
size?
I guess the component size has something to do with it as well? Modern processors have transistors made of a few dozen atoms; that must also mean that it takes far less ionization events to wreck a transistor compared to an older one made of thousands of atoms.
Worth every second.
Re: Sensationalistic title
From reading the article, I gather that UDID is not present in iOS5. So it is true that you can track people in iOS6, while you couldn't in iOS5.
Posted in Is lightspeed really a limit?
Re: It's my understanding.....
That's as I remember it too... I think the idea that the math can work for speeds *above* c, only it's impossible to go *at* c, was already well-known.
It's in the owner's right to ban people from his restaurant. The other customers will have to decide for themselves whether this affects their own decision to keep going there or not.
Personally, I think all-you-can-eat places need to take into account that a certain percentage of customers will eat more than what they pay for.
However, overeating at an all-you-can-eat and at the same time only getting water to drink feels... rude. Especially if you end up actually emptying the buffet. I can't think of any excuse for that. I can image that the place might just have a small buffet, but in that case I'd just go somewhere else rather than annoying the other customers.
Posted in Toyota kills city 'e-car for everyone'
Re: Re: Obvious
He's talking about Finland in winter. I'd wager that lack of heating in the car doesn't mean "must use warm clothes", it means "cannot use the car for long trips or at night without risking death".
Re: 2nd failure
I had the misfortune of getting a free trial of Alice IPTV back when the service was first launched, and I can say that although the crap infrastructure was a major problem, there were two other issues that were just as big, if not bigger. First of all, the selection of movies was crap; they were few and mostly old.
Secondly, the quality of the software in the IPTV box was also crap - very unresponsive and prone to streaming issues. This last problem in particular is significant because it effectively made the infrastructure issue much worse; a good box could at least have the decency not to crash just because it lost connection for a moment.
Re: Helium?
Hydrogen is reactive. When concentrated like this, or over a sufficiently long time anyway, it does nasty stuff. Helium is inert.
"junk"
If the creationists believe that non-coding DNA is really important, why don't they just pick a simple eukaryote, make a bunch of changes in its non-coding DNA, and see if they end up with a different organism? Seriously, it's a relatively easy claim to prove or disprove, just go ahead and test it!
Human manure...?
I'll take something grown with fertilisers and weedkillers any day before I eat something that had excrement of my own species on it. Most viruses and lots of parasites are species-specific and some are notoriously hard to reliably kill.
Re: Why it's "better"/
I know some people who produce organic food. They don't care about food quality any more or less than the people who produce standard food. In fact, they are very often the same people. The notion that "organic" implies "small scale" is a marketing delusion; organic food is just like any other industry.
downloading
I can't say that I care much about Ethernet speeds as long as all I can get is a 7mb/s ADSL that in reality tends to give me 2mb/s.
Re: What about...
I'd bet pet rocks don't result in tons and tons of refund claims.
Re: Lets all cross our fingers....
No. No, we don't. We don't have to do with less. That's just something you're saying. I mean, I agree with you that we're wasting a lot of power and that we should do something about this, but nobody can confidently say that we can't just go on like this for the next ten thousand years. Maybe we can, maybe we can't, but this rhetoric that there is an energy ceiling, that we're close to it, and that those who disagree are obviously insane really needs to stop. Every single person who predicted apocalypse in the last ten thousand years has always been wrong; consider the possibility that you could be wrong too.
Power cuts *are* the goal. There is a substantial, and very vocal, subset of the environmentalist movement which believes that using large amounts of energy is intrinsically evil and will cause the apocalypse, and also that technological solutions are always intrinsically flawed.
Basically, the real problem is that modern life is too complex to deal with - we have oceans of possibilities in front of us every day, we can interact with the whole planet, and if we want to make the right choices we need to develop an increasingly more complex mental model of how the world works. Some people can't deal with that and would love to turn back the clock to a time when your world was roughly ten miles wide, and could be easily understood - local production of all basic necessities, very little long-range travel, not many foreigners around, no large-scale projects. Not needing to know the internal politics of Iraq in order to figure out who to vote for. Not needing to learn new things every day just to keep your job.
Of course, you can't just drop everything and go live in a commune, because then you would see that other people can keep on living happily in the modern world without you, and that would be like admitting that you're dumber than them. No, *everybody* needs to switch to the low-gear lifestyle. Constraining energy supply is one of the best ways to achieve that scenario. And threatening megadeath is one of the best ways to get people to constrain energy supply.
But make no mistake - if solar suddenly became as economic and practical as coal, these guys would start finding something wrong with solar within five days.
ew, sandforce
I've had bad experiences with SandForce controllers, as have lots of others. Have they stopped dying randomly?
Oh God, I have a client that's exactly like that.
Re: Models? Pfft
True, but this is still a great accomplishment. A simple biological entity is probably much, MUCH more complex than the world's climate. I have considerable experience in computational biology, and the complexity is simply staggering.
If company A is guilty of slandering company B, then yes, a judge can force them to correct that slander publicly and pay for it. Companies are not above the law, nor they should be.
Re: What a ridiculous situation
MS and Google don't have monopolies? Sorry, do you even understand what "monopoly" means? Do you think it's some kind of state-backed status?
Posted in iPhone 5 to be skinniest Apple yet SHOCK
thinner
I'd have used the extra millimeter for a bigger battery. It's a higher priority for me.
not just CO2
I'm so tired of the environment debate being dominated by the CO2 issue. There are plenty of other good, well known, urgent, undeniable reasons to get rid of coal-fired stations and petrol engines as quickly as possible - why is everyone fixating on something poorly understood that may or may not cause trouble in a hundred years' time? If the media invested half as much time talking about how many people get killed every year by coal and petrol, we'd have electric cars powered by nuke plants by now.
Re: Hang on…
No, no. I think he's saying that there's a very good chance that a machine three times as powerful (and twice as costly) as the LHC would not be any more useful than the LHC, because a 3x increase in energy is nowhere nearly powerful enough to find anything beyond the Higgs boson. That's what the "nightmare scenario" is - not that we run out of things to discover, but that the next thing to discover just takes too much energy to be seen in any collider we can build. In this sense, it was better to build the LHC and drop the SSC, because they would obtain the same results anyway.
Kudos for using the term "God particle" only once, and not in the title. I've seen other sites posting "GOD PARTICLE FOUND" with their comments sections swarmed by people who feel the need to say several variations on the theme "science is useless because God is unknowable". My desire of slapping them in the face is only mitigated by my desire of kicking the "a waste of money" crowd in the nuts.
Re: The tyranny of "Every little helps"
LP's position is that we can and should produce lots and lots of energy without harming the environment, which would in turn make the reduction of energy consumption a secondary concern. You may disagree with nuclear power, but LP's position is at least self-consistent. The same cannot be said for the standby warriors who leave the shower running.
Re: Brilliant stats
Maybe they believe that the secret is that UFOs don't exist.
Statistics fail. Extrapolating a straight line for an increase of three orders of magnitude is beyond useless. For example, nearly all of those 200,000 reactors would be based on new designs, which have never had any accident at all.
