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User: michelcolman

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Comments · 2,782

  1. Re:Phones yeah on Nanodot-Based Smartphone Battery Recharges In 30 Seconds · · Score: 1

    Come on, why would you need 00 gauge charge cables? Just use wireless recharging!

  2. Re:$300? on Five-Year-Old Uncovers Xbox One Login Flaw · · Score: 1

    Obviously it's an NSA backdoor.

  3. Re:People need to start with the scale on How Many People Does It Take To Colonize Another Star System? · · Score: 1

    The fastest spacecraft we built never got anywhere close to light speed. If we can somehow figure out how to get to those speeds, the univers will shrink through Lorentz contraction and, in theory, it's perfectly possible to get to another galaxy in a few hundred years. Years measured on board, that is. Of course for earth many thousands (or millions) of years will have passed.

  4. Re:The playa exit is not the problem. on Algorithm Challenge: Burning Man Vehicle Exodus · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's exactly what I thought, why don't they all just wait until everyone's gone?

  5. Re:Say what? on P vs. NP Problem Linked To the Quantum Nature of the Universe · · Score: 1

    But what if nature is running on a quantum computer?

  6. Re:Say what? on P vs. NP Problem Linked To the Quantum Nature of the Universe · · Score: 1

    You mean Nature, the journal?

  7. Re:Computable? Simulatable? on P vs. NP Problem Linked To the Quantum Nature of the Universe · · Score: 1

    They'll just restart it from a recent backup and we'll never even know it happened. If you were to start your life again yesterday, without remembering anything from yesterday or today, the whole world including your mind restored exactly to the state it was in yesterday, then time would appear uninterrupted. So if you keep trying to generate bus errors which keep getting fixed with a reboot/restore, it will appear that none of the experiments worked and you might conclude that the universe is not a simulation. In fact, there's no way these bus error experiments would ever result in anyone concluding it is a simulation.

  8. Re:As they should... on China Cracks Down On Bitcoin, Cuts Off Exchanges' Bank Access · · Score: 1

    And then that person gets arrested and tells the police where he got the coins from.

  9. Re:As they should... on China Cracks Down On Bitcoin, Cuts Off Exchanges' Bank Access · · Score: 1

    Yes, you might make a list of all bills, where they were last spent, and try to make a pattern out of that to find the bad guy. Indeed, this technique often succeeds. But compare that to "bills" that have a record on them of every transaction ever made with them. Wouldn't you agree that that is more traceable? I never said cash is completely untraceable, I'm just saying it's wrong to say that bitcoin is untraceable when in fact it is much easier to trace than cash. I'm sure the NSA absolutely loves bitcoin.

  10. Re:The Sky is falling! on China Cracks Down On Bitcoin, Cuts Off Exchanges' Bank Access · · Score: 1

    Look at the longer term chart, and look at how similar the current drop is to the drop that occurred about a year ago. Make sure you take a logarithmic chart to see the similarity. It went from $250 down to less than $50, up and down again a few times, then up to $1000 several months later. If you bought at the peak exactly one year ago, you would still have a very nice profit today.

    So what if it went from $1000 back to $400? Given the history of the prices, that's peanuts. Last year was much worse.

  11. Re:As they should... on China Cracks Down On Bitcoin, Cuts Off Exchanges' Bank Access · · Score: 1

    I would venture that the bitcoins will be easier to trace and find than the dollars/yens/whatevers. They may be in some unidentifiable wallet, but as soon as someone uses them to buy something, those bitcoins can be traced back to the illegal transactions. They may have used all kinds of trickery to disguise the transfers, but that's actually harder to do with bitcoins than with cash.

  12. Re:The Sky is falling! on China Cracks Down On Bitcoin, Cuts Off Exchanges' Bank Access · · Score: 2

    Let me guess... you're buying?

  13. Re:As they should... on China Cracks Down On Bitcoin, Cuts Off Exchanges' Bank Access · · Score: 5, Informative

    Bitcoin is more traceable than cash. The bitcoin chain contains a record of every bitcoin transaction ever made, anywhere. There are some randomizing anonymizer services which take money from lots of people and return it randomly so nobody knows exactly which amount came from which source, but that kind of services exists for other currencies as well.

  14. Re:Lies on 60 Minutes Dubbed Engines Noise Over Tesla Model S · · Score: 1

    They definitely need a kind of "soft horn" to warn people in a polite way. People may just stand in your way in a parking lot without knowing you're ready to drive off. Something like Knight Rider's "wuw-wuw" sound would be nice...

    But please don't make them make sound all the time, now that we can finally have quiet cars!

  15. Re:Lies on 60 Minutes Dubbed Engines Noise Over Tesla Model S · · Score: 1

    Adding noise from some random car to footage of ANY car is just unacceptable. People like to know how a car sounds. If you show a Ferrari with the sound of a Beetle, people will complain. How can anyone find this a normal thing to do?

    Why not just substitute images of other cars as well? Make an article about a Tesla but actually show video footage of a Mercedes, why not? (In fact this is done all the time with airplanes).

  16. Re:Wait a moment on Classified X-37B Space Plane Breaks Space Longevity Record · · Score: 5, Funny

    The summary just says it broke its own space endurance record.

    But it gets better: tomorrow, it's going to break its own space endurance record again!

  17. Re: I know what it's doing... on Classified X-37B Space Plane Breaks Space Longevity Record · · Score: 1

    Or it shoots black holes at them.

  18. Re:maybe Disney names this one on Small World Discovered Far Beyond Pluto · · Score: 1

    It's probably just a publicity stunt for the 50 year anniversary of It's a Small World.

  19. Yeah, whenever it's cloudy, it gets unbearably hot here. I can't wait for the sun to come out so things can cool down a bit.

  20. Re:Lasers, storage, black holes on Lasers May Solve the Black Hole Information Paradox · · Score: 1

    You just get it from the Hawking radiation. There's a bit of math involved and we aren't quite capable of actually doing it yet right now, but if you just wait in the vicinity of the black hole, mankind will figure it out for you in no time at all.

  21. Re:How/why would a black hole preserve information on Lasers May Solve the Black Hole Information Paradox · · Score: 1

    And why exactly is it so impossible for matter to become an indistinguishable state? Why can't entropy go down in such extreme conditions? Sure, all our experiments in relatively low gravity seemed to conserve "information", but what gives us the right to extrapolate that to black holes?

    It's not like the second law of thermodynamics is really a law anyway. It just says that normally, entropy is so unlikely to decrease spontaneously that, for all intents and purposes, we may safely assume it never does. As long as the system is big enough, because violations of this "law" are already causing trouble in nanotechnology. If only a few atoms are involved, nothing keeps the entropy of the system from decreasing every now and then. But for large enough collections of atoms, sure, they are very unlikely to suddenly organise themselves, temperature difference are very unlikely to evolve the "wrong" way, etcetera. In the kind of conditions we have been able to observe so far.

    But black holes... I can readily imagine them destroying information, in fact it seems extremely likely to me that they do, from an intuitive point of view. So why are scientists having such a big problem with that? Sure, entropy always increases in sufficiently large "normal" systems but black holes are anything but normal. I really don't see any compelling reason for them to conserve entropy.

  22. Re:Lasers? Black holes? on Lasers May Solve the Black Hole Information Paradox · · Score: 1

    What's the friken' shark feel like when he falls into the black hole?

    Probably a lot like a whale or a pot of petunias would in the same situation.

  23. Re:time lapse on Lasers May Solve the Black Hole Information Paradox · · Score: 1

    No, in that same video, an expert explained, "a small black hole would have swallowed up our entire universe, so we know it's not that". Thank god we have experts to clarify issues like that.

  24. Re:Mobile Porno perving apps on Google Tries To Defuse Glass "Myths" · · Score: 1

    You know, I was sceptical at first, but now I can see a great future for glass. Millions of people will buy them once those apps come out!

  25. Re:A lense cover on Google Tries To Defuse Glass "Myths" · · Score: 2

    There was a time when people using mobile phones in the street were mugged not because the thief wanted their phone, but because people using mobile phones were considered to be antisocial snobs and deserved to get beaten up. People would sometimes just take the phone and throw it onto the floor to break it. Nowadays using a cell phone is the most normal thing in the world. When you were making a call using an earpiece, people used to wonder why you were talking to yourself while nowadays, when you really are talking to yourself, people will just assume you're making a phone call. The same will happen to glass.