Lasers battle cattle burps

Most of the methane from a cow is emitted via burps, not bottom burps.

(as to which end of an apatasaurus the methane came from - good question.)

Kickstarter!

OK, if they are that sure of themselves, let the start a Kickstarter project!

(a battery driven helo making 100km - pull the other one, my ass is crooked.

And assuming this is true - why not use smaller batteries and something like a Capstone turbine generator - batteries for take-off power, turbine to make electricity for cruise. This is an aircraft: every kilo's sacred, every kilo's great, if a kilo's wasted, God get quite irate!)

His and hers pr0n

There was a short story I read a long time ago: movies were projected using polarized light, with his and hers tracks: so when the steamy luuuurve scene came on, the guys would see the camera zooming on on the hot starlet's longing face, and the girls would see the camera zooming in on the studly leading man's mug.

A reporter was at the screening of the newest flick, starring the current male icon of studlyness and the current female icon of hawtness, both of whom were in attendance for the premier. Everybody gets their gender-color coded glasses (blue for boys, pink for girls, natch). The lights dim, the movie starts - and the reporter sees the Stud and the Babe switching glasses.

Obviously, this TV, like all new tech, is being driven by that driving, pulsating engine of all innovation, porn: this allows his and hers viewing.

Teaching Angry Birds is a bad idea

Orangs are smart - smart enough to build a catapult from the ropes and trees in their enclosure.

Do we really want to be planting that idea in their head?

(could be worse: chimps. Catapult. Poo. 'nuf said.)

"Right Turn, Clyde!"

Jumbo Shrimp?

Mini Mammoth? Is that like Jumbo Shrimp?

System76

A while back I was in the market for a new laptop/desktop replacement. I looked at Dell, and their Linux offerings.

I was not amused.

Then I looked at System76: https://www.system76.com/

Much better machines, much better support for Linux (as in, that's ALL they do), and I am much happier with my choice.

Why?

The biggest single problem with IPv6 is what I call the 90% problem: until 90% of the world is using it, it provides no benefit. Since it provides no benefit, there is no reason to adopt it until it hits 90% - so it never hits 90%.

This is NOT to say that IPv6 doesn't have benefits - with RSVP, better flow control, better multicasting and anycasting and so on - it could make streaming video services finally "work" with no more "buffering" messages (and conversely, no more "buffer bloat"). It could greatly improve cellular data (cell phones could get routable IPv6 addresses and hand out routable addresses to devices served by hot spot mode), and it could greatly improve security (since encryption is much more built-in to IPv6).

However, NONE of those benefits have been communicated to J. Random User. And since JRU is not aware of why he should be demanding IPv6 support from (his ISP|his OS vendor|his equipment vendor), he DOESN'T demand it - and so ISPs, Microsoft, and equipment vendors are not strongly motivated to make it happen.

TRS-80's in high school

I wrote a bouncing ball program on the TRS-80's back in high school.

In assembly. In the timer interrupt.

I had a basic program that would poke it into high mem (and adjust high mem to protect it).

So here was the bouncing ball on the screen. People would hit BREAK, expecting it to stop - and it wouldn't.

Enigma is nice, but...

Having an Enigma emulator on my phone is nice, but I want the code breaker engine on my phone - that, and a port of Maple. That, the ballistics app I have, and a time machine, and I am ready for my trip back to 1939!

But it reproduced whalesong perfectly!

This must truly be an amazing device: it has such purity of reproduction, I could hear the whalesong from the review all the way from Kansas!

But it cannot be any good - it doesn't have Genuine Oxygen Free Copper, nor 24k Gold plating, nor Extra-Virgin Yak Wool insulation, nor $5k/ft sooper-grade USB cables, nor a harmonic-neutralizing rock pad to sit on, nor was it properly "trained" by 20 hours of Tibetan Throat-singing monks! And not a single fire-bottle in sight! - don't you know you simply MUST have tubes in the outputs!

Of course, since cadmium is such a harmless element

And this is going to go over very well with the various environmental protection entities and organizations, since cadmium is such a harmless element.

Oh wait, I forgot: cadmium isn't harmless at all (despite what some Chinese toy manufacturers think) - it is very carcinogenic, which was one reason behind NiCad batteries being largely removed from the market.

Call the cops. On the parents

IMHO the correct answer is:

1) restrain the child from kicking anybody. This may require a degree of physical contact (grabbing and lifting the child clear of the ground). Ideally a quick swat to the backside with an open hand as well, to deliver the "short, sharp shock" to bring the child back into contact with reality. Then you place the kid in a room with as little to destroy as possible, and don't let them act out.

2) You call the parents and inform them that they are to pick the kid up and take him home - he is suspended for a week. If the parents give you any guff about "I'm at work and I cannot/will not come get the kid" - you send the police around to their place of employment and have them informed that they are either going to pick the kid up or be picked up themselves for child abandonment.

3) You tell the parents that until the child can be controlled the child is not allowed to come back to school, AND that the parents are responsible for seeing the child is properly supervised during the day (either one of the parents, or a responsible adult), and that this WILL be checked up on by social services.

4) You inform the parents that a requirement of the child being allowed back in school is that the parents agree, in legally binding writing, that the school may use needed force to prevent the child from hurting itself or anybody else. NOTE: needed force for a 6 year old is physical restraint by an adults hands, a swat to the backside by an adults hands - NOT tasering, Mace-ing, straps, etc.

In short, you do that most horrible of things: you make people TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for their actions. The parents have primary responsibility for teaching their feral fonication-fruit how to live in this world we find ourselves in, and if they will NOT do that willingly, society WILL make them.

Anybody want this garbage

1: Given how so many countries see fit to complain about how other countries handle their internal affairs (and I will admit the US is right up there in doing so), how about saying "Here we have a grade-A bona fide serial killer named Dennis Rader a.k.a. BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) - admitted his guilt, plead guilty, victims' belongings in his shed as souvenirs, said he was going to start working out to get back in shape so he could kill more people - Does any country want to take responsibility for him for the rest of his days? No? OK then, shut up about what we do with this garbage."

2: Some people (e.g. BTK) are going to be a clear, present, and continuing threat to society for as long as they shall live. Since we do not yet have the ability to re-wire their brains to fix that, all we can do is lock them away from society for the rest of their lives. So the question is "how long is the rest of their life?" - 50 years or 50 minutes? Sorry, but in this case I have no problem with putting them down like the rabid vermin they are.

3: Other people may not have such a clear cut case against them: they may be maintaining their innocence. But then, very few people will get up on the stand and say "I did it, I'll do it again given the chance, so what?".

Many people assert that "We cannot put them to death, because that is not reversible." I have some bad news for you sunshine: neither is locking them up for 10 years before you find they are not guilty - you can release them, but you cannot give them those 10 years back. That's why a cornerstone of American jurisprudence is "If you have reasonable doubt about their guilt, you MUST find them not guilty." Whether the penalty is death or imprisonment *shouldn't* make a difference in deciding guilty or not guilty.

4: If somebody ISN'T a clear (as in "no question about it"), present (as in "this isn't just a theoretical risk"), and continuing (as in "sure he's whacked now - but get him off the drugs and he'll be right as rain") risk to society, they should NOT be executed (and likely not imprisoned, either.)

I am NOT in favor of executing somebody save in cases of out-and-out premeditated murder. In cases of premeditated murder, you have to examine if the person can be salvaged. If not, then life in prison - and that should be 50 minutes.

RMS?

Sorry, but without RMS, Linus wouldn't be on that list.

Like him or not, he IS a pioneer.

Silly

Asteroid mining is silly if you are planning on bringing the material to Earth. Even if you find a rock that's 10% platinum, 10% uranium, 10% thorium, 10% Helium 3, and the rest is "only" stuff like iron and titanium, the cost to get it, drag it to Earth's atmosphere, and de-orbit in in a controlled fashion greatly exceeds the sale price. And as noted in the article, while platinum is expensive now, bring in that much and the price plummets.

The only way asteroid mining makes sense is if you are using it in situ, to make space based "stuff" cheaper than making it on Earth and launching it. But the demand for space based stuff is pretty small right now.

The only way I could see this making sense in my projected lifespan would be to make solar sats beaming power down - but since the first thing you'd have to do would be to get all the BANANAs (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything) out in the middle of a desert and have an "accident" with the power beam, I don't see this happening.

More's the pity.

Gets a bit iffy at the end

It seems to get a bit iffy there at the end of the video.

They need to get some 8 inch drives, some 3.5 inch drives, and maybe an old dot matrix printer, so they can get a better range.

Maybe even an old daisy wheel, or better still, an old band printer.

I've always wanted

I've always wanted to get 2 acoustic couplers, 2 300 baud modems, 4 cans, 2 strings, and set up a PPP connection across the modems using the cans and string to connect them.

Then put the helpless system on the far end up on the Internet, and post it to the appropriate sites.

Just because.

No Soylent green jokes yet?

No Soylent green jokes yet?

What is the world coming to?

Use case?

What is the use case for this?

If you want to hide data, carry a standard micro-SD to USB adapter, with a card in it full of innocuous data.

Place microSD with interesting stuff under a fake fingernail.

Resolution?

Having done a bit of work on touch screen inputs before, I wonder about the resolution of the screens. Generally, capacitive screens don't have the spatial resolution that resistive screens have, so while this may "work" in that it may trigger the screen, is the screen really going to have enough resolution to do handwriting recognition?

The systems that I have seen that support both capacitive touch and stylus use a second inductive system to sense the stylus, just to provide the resolution needed for handwriting or drawing.

Bling? I GOT YOUR BLING RIGHT HERE!

I want somebody to make a phone with a vapor-deposition diamond case. Great thermal conductivity, Insanity-Wolf level scratch resistance, you can see the guts.

So what if it would be insanely expensive - isn't that what bling is all about, showing you have more money than sense?

Cool - but scary!

On its own, this is a very cool technology. Combine this with high dynamic range, throw enough resolution and field-of-view, and you might get a camera that can do things like the Grand Canyon justice.

But think of this: cameras like this, coupled with the sound field big-array-of-microphones, and you get a tech to make Big Brother cream his pants: a system that could watch over a large public space, recording everything, and allowing a Ministry of Privacy officer to, after the fact, select anybody in the crowd, and have clear video and audio of that person.

Time to short Cray

Given the stellar(*) results Nokia has had with an ex-Microsoft person in a C-Level position, I'd say it's time to short Cray stock.

(*) black holes are stellar, as are supernova.

How long until it breaks itself?

Any bets on how long this is out before Sony rams a "Upgrade to this version or else - and you know that feature you liked? Sucks for you, it's gone" down everybody's throat?

Or how long until it turns out this is reporting your every move to Sony?

I say 18 months.

Sorry Sony - never again.