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User: White+Flame

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  1. Re:Turning CO2 into carbonates? on Australian University Unveils New Carbon-Trapping Bricks · · Score: 1

    The only reason the CO2 is sequestered is because of a particular chemical reaction, which has zero bearing on heavy metals, sulfur compounds, radioactives & other pollutants. One piece of equipment does one job, because each reaction needs its own reactants, catalysts, and general environment, and each has its cost & energy tradeoffs. One particular CO2 reaction has nothing at all to do with the other emissions.

  2. Re:Turning CO2 into carbonates? on Australian University Unveils New Carbon-Trapping Bricks · · Score: 1

    Every coal- or oil-fired power plant could have it's adjacent brick factory and become carbon neutral.

    Coal puts out tons of real pollution (toxins, radioactive particulates, etc), not just CO2. Sequestering the CO2 does not solve the even more immediate and tangible harmful emissions problem.

  3. Re:If it's cheaper it's still good on "Slingatron" To Hurl Payloads Into Orbit · · Score: 1

    before it and the payload reenter and burn up.

    If it were in danger of burning up on reentry, don't you think it's even more at risk of burning up on ascent? It's moving fastest and through thickest atmosphere at launch, instead of accelerating with further stages at altitude. And that is the entire problem behind this Wile E. Coyote idea.

  4. Re:Hold the bus on Adapteva Parallella Supercomputing Boards Start Shipping · · Score: 1

    I don't know what you read, but the 6.4GB/sec chip interface bandwidth is less than a standard PCIe graphics card at 8GB/sec. Now, you may argue that there is more latency across PCIe or something, but also note that the Parallella system assumes a shared memory architecture with the host OS on the ARM.

    Again, there are no dedicated RAM chips for the accelerator on this board, and the chip itself has no DRAM controllers. You can only load up to 32KB of RAM per core into the chip caches itself; it doesn't have gigabytes of fast memory available to it like GPGPU processing does. This entire architecture is based around it being very chatty across that shared memory & comm bus, FAR more than any GPU would ever be.

    This chip is for inexpensive acceleration of large-ish streaming data problems, like signal processing and video codecs or maybe map/reduce work, with very little state held on the actual chip. It's hard to see it having any sort of decent performance outside that, either in embarrassingly parallel or generalized multi-core problems.

  5. Re:how to delineate software patents? on Nobelist Gary Becker Calls For an End To Software Patents · · Score: 1

    They need software patents solely to give their investors feelgood vibes. Venture capitalists perceive a major benefit if a software company has a few patents covering their work. The software companies really don't care.

  6. Re:half the Gflops, 64 cores, 80% lower cost, 5 wa on Adapteva Parallella Supercomputing Boards Start Shipping · · Score: 1

    The Parallella doesn't run standalone, either. It's an accelerator chip attached to an ARM system.

  7. Re:Hold the bus on Adapteva Parallella Supercomputing Boards Start Shipping · · Score: 1

    You are aware that this chip has the exact same problems, right? But unlike a GPU it has very limited on-chip memory, and no directly attached external memory at all. All communication happens through a FPGA-driven channel to the ARM, with the ARM being the only thing with DRAMs attached.

    This is fundamentally, and properly labeled as, an external "accelerator chip" to add onto a computer.

  8. Re:Petaflops on Supercomputer Becomes Massive Router For Global Radio Telescope · · Score: 1

    Ditto. Also, in many "big data" projects, FLOPS is of little use anyway. There is a ton of textual processing and predicate matches to be done in the rest of the world. With ARM entering the HPC space, hopefully more broadly meaningful integer & IO ops numbers will be bandied about rather than just this laser-focus on vector floats.

  9. Re:Does anyone else... on When the NSA Shows Up At Your Internet Company · · Score: 1

    This isn't in the home. This is forcibly purchasing a business service, so I don't think it counts.

  10. Re:All Jokes Aside... Still No. on MIT Uses Machine Learning Algorithm To Make TCP Twice As Fast · · Score: 1

    It's a chaotic system. The optimal responses to that can be another chaotic system, which happens to hit the right symbiosis enough of the time to offer clear benefits. You do not need to understand how the chaos works, and even if you do, it could appear completely nonsensical.

  11. Re:BING = Ballmer Is Not Good. on Microsoft Is Sitting On Six Million Unsold Surface Tablets · · Score: 1

    Granted, they just want to copy Apple. Apple says "Look, this is new and original and you want it!" even though it's just some old rehash they decided to finally integrate, or some utterly minor tweak, and people stand overnight in lines to fork over their money.

  12. Re:never happen in the states on Small Town Builds Its Own Gigabyte Network; Cost To Citizens $57/month · · Score: 1

    It's because there are multiple companies, but just 1 government. If a company does something bad, they screw up and people can go elsewhere (if there aren't monopolistic lock-ins that they try to legislate into existence). If the government does something bad, there's no other options. Consider that something will _always_ go bad somewhere, and it is better to have a more distributed set of options.

    The government is also _bound_ to do things inefficiently, because they are run under rule of law and voted policy; you can't have people using their own judgment and have the liability of just "making things happen" when they represent the people, their tax dollars, and varying interests. This policy-driven model is _good_ for certain things that must be handled with legislative care, but is always going to be more expensive than what private business _could_ offer, pretty much by definition, and again a central point of failure.

  13. Exactly what IBM did, but IBM did it easy. on ASUS PQ321Q Monitor Brings Multi-Stream Tiled Displays Forward · · Score: 1

    IBM's T221 monitor, the now ancient 3840x2400 22" 200dpi display, did the exact same thing.

    It had 4 DVI inputs (newer models can support 2 dual-link DVIs), splitting up the screen into 1-4 stripes, depending on your bandwidth and setup. It's also directly plug & play, with no setup issues whatsoever on Linux, for what it's worth, and max frame rate is simply bound to how large each link is offering.

    I've got a single card driving 2 T221s at a whopping 12Hz (single-link DVI each), and some low-res 30" 2560x1600 monitor with the displayport connector. 22 megapixels from 1 card is pretty nice, and I could be driving the T221s at 24Hz if I had the dual-link DVI connectors.

    They were very flexible in their setup, not sure what Asus did here to make it a pain to set up.

  14. Re:Can we discuss the fourth amendment now? on NSA Admits Searching "3 Hops" From Suspects · · Score: 1

    If it takes 10,000 illegal activities to achieve one thing of value, should the law let it slide?

  15. Re:Yeesh. How cheap do people expect things? on Why Microsoft Shouldn't Worry About Cannibalizing Their Userbases · · Score: 1

    The thing is, when it comes to inexpensive devices, say under the $300 mark, that $50-100 fee is a very significant expense, as opposed to "free" Android or in-house iOS.

  16. Re:Sound doesnt move a thing on Scientists Use Sound Waves To Levitate, Move Objects · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Because resonances can often get you more bang for your energy buck than direct impulse.

    That, and they want to move things carefully and precisely. This seems like it would be a lot more stable than using air flows.

  17. Re:wrong on TV Programmers Seek the Elusive Dog Market · · Score: 1

    Point is, there is no flicker in non-CRT displays, and thus the flicker fusion frequency isn't involved at all. Having picture motion seem fluid & realistic, and color range & perception, are separate issues.

  18. How powerful? on Scientists Use Sound Waves To Levitate, Move Objects · · Score: 1

    Can the bottom of my car be a flat surface which vibrates sprayed water droplets, thus slightly levitating the vehicle and allowing forward movement via those particles?

  19. Re:False Flag on Apple Sued For Man's Porn Addiction · · Score: 1

    The fact that it was implemented poorly...

    That's not the problem. The problem is the fact that humanity does not work that way in any scale beyond small clan/tribe units.

  20. Re:This is only possible at the moment on Angela Merkel Tells US Firms To Meet German Privacy Rules · · Score: 1

    This is no different than doing business with any foreign entity. If you buy physical product from some offshore supplier, local business & warranty laws don't apply to them.

    If you're dealing in data with a foreign entity, that entity is not bound to your local data laws. The only difference is that now in the "information age" regular home users are exposed to the risks involved.

  21. Re:This vs Tor in Layman's Terms? on Open Source Tortilla For Tor To Be Released At Black Hat · · Score: 1

    Currently, to use Tor a program must be written to communicate through Tor's SOCKS proxy, which apparently Windows doesn't support well.

    This, in theory and if I'm reading the bits of the description properly, would allow you to run any program that talks basic internet protocols and route its traffic through Tor without any changes to the program. That's similar to how a firewall can change the internet permissions of a program without touching the program itself.

  22. Re:Typical console developer rant, IMO. on An Interesting Look At the Performance of JavaScript On Mobile Devices · · Score: 1

    The funny thing is that he's recommending Automatic Reference Counting instead, which destroys cache much more than GC during regular processing.

  23. Re:Time To KIll DHS on DHS Chief Janet Napolitano Resigns · · Score: 1

    What makes you think the republicans want to kill DHS? For some reason, "conservative" too often means desiring to blow everybody else up in the name of security/freedom/whatever, foreign or domestic. There are too many terrorized politicians and predatory opportunists on both sides of the entrenchments.

  24. Re:Ground effect on Aerovelo's Human-Powered Helicopter Wins $250,000 Sikorsky Prize · · Score: 1

    ...reclaim steampunk from the dorks that think gluing a couple of gears on a USB stick is something to be proud of.

    Obligatory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFCuE5rHbPA.

  25. I wouldn't necessarily credit the American education system, but American culture (which in turn does effect educational style). We're in theory the pioneers, the free people forging our own destinies from the unknown, etc. We are supposed to be new-problem solvers by cultural definition.