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User: mrt_2394871

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Comments · 55

  1. Re:Does The Paper Account For Regenerative Braking on Scientists: Electric Vehicles Produce As Many Toxins As Dirty Diesels (dailymail.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    When you use the brakes in an EV the brake pads generally aren't used, instead the motor is used as a generator converting kinetic energy into stored power. I don't see this mentioned in the abstract, are the authors really not including this?

    The paper does take account of this: regenerative braking is assumed for EVs and (conservatively) zero brake-wear is assumed.

  2. Re:Does The Paper Account For Regenerative Braking on Scientists: Electric Vehicles Produce As Many Toxins As Dirty Diesels (dailymail.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    When you use the brakes in an EV the brake pads generally aren't used, instead the motor is used as a generator converting kinetic energy into stored power. I don't see this mentioned in the abstract, are the authors really not including this?

    Having RTFP, they do take regenerative braking into account - EV cars are assumed to use regen and have effectively zero brake-wear.

  3. Re:How about ... on Ads Based On Browsing History Are Coming To All Firefox Users · · Score: 4, Informative

    How about you better give a mechanism to disable this crap?

    Click on the "gear" icon (top right of the new tab page)
    Clear the "Include suggested sites" box

  4. Re: 'simply' following rules on The Lovelace Test Is Better Than the Turing Test At Detecting AI · · Score: 2

    One of Feynman's memoirs includes the haha-only-serious observation that mathematical theorems are either unproven or trivial, and this is simply a re-statement of the same principle.

    And actually, there's a lot of speculation about whether colonies exhibit intelligence or consciousness (eg Hofstadter's Aunt Hillary, but also Jack Cohen & Ian Stewart's Heaven - they also did the Science of the Discworld series with pterry).

  5. Third level domain precedence on Britain Gets National .uk Web Address · · Score: 1

    The rules are that, for the next five years, any .co.uk owner can register the corresponding .uk domain. If there isn't a .co.uk, the .org.uk owner can register, and if there isn't a .org.uk owner, the .me.uk owner can register it.

    All other .uk subdomains don't get a bite at the cherry. Nor is there any protected time where a .org.uk or a .me.uk owner can register the .uk domain if the .co.uk owner doesn't want it.

  6. Re:Here's his problem on The Ways Programming Is Hard · · Score: 2

    a century ago, the same sorts of complaints were being made:
    see The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell.

  7. Re:What about a face recognition trick? on TrueCrypt Master Key Extraction and Volume Identification · · Score: 1

    Face recognition (at least the Android Jelly Bean/Kit-Kat version) gives too many false positives at the moment. Somewhere between 5% and 20% of the time, my face does not unlock my phone/tablet, and I need to enter a PIN.

    Also, the scope for involuntary unlocking is much larger.

  8. Re:And google will retain that info exclusively. on Google Makes It Harder For Marketers To Collect User Data · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you want to know if I've read an email:
    request a return receipt
    If I want to give you that information, I will.

    Goodness, there's an existing, non-scummy way of working all this out which preserves user expectations of privacy and provides you with the information you actually want, not a poor proxy of it.

  9. Re:I can think of one that Steve Jobs disagreed wi on What Are the Genuinely Useful Ideas In Programming? · · Score: 2

    "Quicksort is already implemented a thousand times, so there's no need to implement it again, just find which library you need."

    Yes, that's true, but we're talking about education here, not building websites.

    Also, knowing about QS implementations lets you know when it's been done wrong.

    Case in point: Microsoft's C runtime library shipped around the time of Windows NT and Visual Studio 6 had a sub-optimal qsort implementation - it took 97 seconds (on a 600MHz Athlon) to sort 260,000 integers with a constrained set of values (0-180), whereas other implementations (eg Numerical Recipes) could do it three orders of magnitude quicker.
    Delving in, the qsort() algorithm didn't exchange elements where the value equalled the partitioning element, which leads to increased comparison function calls (effectively proportional to 1/range).

  10. Re:4 years on Ask Slashdot: Suitable Phone For a 4-Year Old? · · Score: 3, Informative

    Actually, I gave my 3yo daughter an older smartphone with no SIM. [...]

    Most phones, even if you remove the SIM, will allow you to phone the emergency services (999, 911, 112 or whatever). I believe it's a requirement of the GSM standard.

  11. Error! Reference source not found. on Romanian Science Journal Punked By Serbian Academics · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Is this real? (Metallurgia International's web site appears to be gone, so there's no direct proof).

    Surely even the worst kind of journal would ask that the Error! Reference source not found broken cross-references be fixed?

  12. Re:Nature is amazing on "Ballooning" Spiders Use Electrostatic Forces To Generate Lift · · Score: 1

    What if the intelligent designer just wanted to use evolution? I've never understood why the two solutions have to be exclusive.

    Well, Intelligent she might be (gives you the afternoon off, after all), but it's a bit more dispassionate than I'd want my Benevolent Omniscient Being to be. Have you read about all those parasites? The ones that eat their host from the inside out, the ones that affect the brain, so the host goes wandering out into wide open places and gets eaten, etc.

    It's almost Lovecraftian.

  13. Re:Attention Cinephiles on HDMI 2.0 Officially Announced · · Score: 3, Funny

    [...] Can I order a palette now and beat the rush?

    You could, but we have so many more colours nowadays.

  14. Re:Cloud 0? on Ask Slashdot: Secure DropBox Alternative For a Small Business? · · Score: 1

    I'm not the one that suggested striping on the Intenet. ...

    That happens all the time, I've seen the videos.

     
     

    Oh. "striping", not "stripping". As you were.

  15. Misread "titling" as "tilting"... on Disney's Titling Problem With Its Star Wars Movies · · Score: 1

    ... and assumed it must have been something to do with the gimbal-lock you can get if you're rotating 3D objects and not using quaternions.

    TGIF.

  16. Re:It's... OK. on Google Enables VP9 Video Codec In Chromium · · Score: 1, Insightful

    ... why bother? ...

    If VP9 wasn't there, H265 would face no competition. So then the H265 consortium would be able to pull all sorts of egregious crap. End-user licence fees, mandatory unskippable ads, you name it, they could require it.

    But VP9 does exist. So they very probably won't.

  17. Re:Snitch? on Did Google Tip Off EU About Microsoft Browser Ballot? · · Score: 1

    And if you search for "web browsers" on Bing IE doesn't show up at all except in a side bar under 'related searches'. Seems MS hasn't done any SEO for IE under the term 'web browser'.

    But if you're using IE, you're using IE, and there's no need to search for it.

    And if you're not using IE, then you're either on a platform which IE doesn't run on, or you (or your friendly BofH) have already taken steps to not be running IE. For either of those cases, you wouldn't be helped by searches for "web browser" listing IE highly.

    So any outlay of resource on SEO would be wasted.

  18. Re:Not enough, by far on Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies · · Score: 1

    There's an add-on which does this:
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/requestpolicy/

    It's annoying at first, since every site you visit needs setting up. And I really wouldn't want to try it while I was buying anything. But it can be useful and usable.

  19. Re:A Mature Local Machine Product vs Immature Clou on Google Docs Vs. Microsoft Word: an Even Matchup? · · Score: 1

    Aren't those documents created or edited by LibreOffice by any chance?

    Because in a few cases this has happened to me (with OpenOffice of course) but I don't remember a case that a document I created using word could not be opened with word. I edit very large documents (several hundred pages most of the time).

    In my case, it was a Word document created in Word, saved (repeatedly) in Word which caused Word to crash (All the same version of Word). Fortunately LibreOffice could open it, and Word didn't crash on the resaved document.

  20. Re:Carddav/caldav? on Google Nixes Some Calendar Features and Other Software Offerings · · Score: 1

    That's one of the biggest things that I've preferred iOS to Android. That, and the stupid way applications are stored on the system partition so you 'run out of free space' despite having gigabytes free.

    That was changed with the release of ICS.

    Not quite. ICS had almost seamless support for the "move to SD" model of app management, but it still got confused if you ejected any card (even one that didn't hold any apps).

    My Nexus 7 (with JB) isn't partitioned at all.

  21. Re:thunderbird has the same problem as firefox... on Ask Slashdot: Current State of Linux Email Clients? · · Score: 1

    Thunderbird with IMAP and the lightning extension installed routinely (like 20x per day) locks up for 5-10 seconds and shows wrong messages (or no message) when quickly switching between new emails.

    Check if it's caching the calendar feeds. If it is, turn the caching off. That should solve the lock-ups.

  22. Re:It isn't very different on Australian Govt Pledges Action On Google Tax Evasion · · Score: 1

    sorry. posting to cancel cack-handed moderation

  23. Re:Magnatune on Ask Slashdot: Which International Online Music Stores Are Legit? · · Score: 1

    In addition to your points above, John Buckman is a cool dude. You can write a comment on his blog and get a reply.

    I emailed him when Magnatune went subscription-only (I'd bought a dozen albums prior to that), with a bit of a moan that I could no longer buy per-album. I was astonished when I got a reply from him, setting out why he'd taken Magnatune down the route he had.

    As you say, cool.

  24. Re:Absolutely not. on Can Anyone Become a Programmer? · · Score: 1

    ... discreet math, ...

    Is that where they whisper the modulus to you?

  25. Re:theses on Microsoft Office 2013 Not Compatible With Windows XP, Vista · · Score: 1
    I wrote my thesis in Word (97, I think). There's a Master Document option so each chapter was its own individual file; equations used the default equation editor, and headings and table/figure numbering (and the tables of content, figures & tables) all used the standard Word facilities.
    That said, all my figures were created elsewhere, and imported as EMFs (for vector graphics) or PNGs; and I used Endnote for the reference handling.
    Since then, I've used Word's own referencing system. This turns out to be adequate if you:
    1. only write in a linear fashion, or
    2. never add cross-references, or
    3. don't care about [14] cropping up before [5]