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User: fuzzyfuzzyfungus

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  1. Hmm... on Salt Lake City Police To Wear Camera Glasses · · Score: 0

    I wonder if the harsh vibrations associated with giving a 'suspect' the sound wuppin' that soft-on-crime liberals don't want his perp ass to get causes these to malfunction?

  2. Re:"Artificial Womb" sounds so awkward. on Artificial Wombs In the Near Future? · · Score: 1

    Goodbye baby Banting...

  3. Mr. Atreides to the red courtesy phone please... on Artificial Wombs In the Near Future? · · Score: 1

    Axolotl Tanks here we come!

    It would be awesome if this would allow us to implant our larvae in host animals(maybe cows, those are big and common) the way parasitoid insects do...

  4. Re:For how long though? on Battery-Powered Transmitter Could Crash A City's 4G Network · · Score: 1

    You could probably also get away with playing little tricks with duty-cycle or directional antennas, especially if "you" consists of more than one transmitter with some overlap in range.

    Pure data links, with error correction, retries, and so on, might only be slowed by intermittent jamming; but somebody attempting to run a time-sensitive application(like, oh, a simulation of a classic two-way radio) could have a much harder time of it even if only intermittently jammed...
     
      Tracking down a jammer that cuts in and out, or unpredictably changes how intensely it radiates in different directions, would be more difficult; but could still reduce throughput and really put a wrench into latency and packet loss numbers.

  5. Re:3D printer ready? on Fully Open A13-OLinuXino Single-Board Linux Computer · · Score: 1

    I suspect that you'd be stepping on the mask works rights of a number of outfits, and probably some ARM patents, if you were actually capable of printing the entire thing.

    Because low-volume production of most components is so wildly impractical, "Open Hardware" doesn't generally require any particular openness inside the bits that you solder together, just openness about how you solder them together and openness on the part of the software running on top of them.

  6. Re:Mali 400 GPU on Fully Open A13-OLinuXino Single-Board Linux Computer · · Score: 1

    It would be nice; but I'd be surprised. The Mali 400 is straight from ARM, and for what Allwinner charges for A13s, it would be impressive if they managed to cram the cost of building their own driver or buying the right to open ARM's driver into the budget.

  7. So, what's the cute trick? on French Company Building a Mobile Internet Just For Things · · Score: 2

    Hmm... Long range, works on unlicensed spectrum, low power and cheap for client devices. How, exactly, are they planning on keeping other people(either competing operators or individuals) from setting up their own gateway hardware and skipping the delightful world of the cellular data plan model and having their every device phoning home to an untrusted 3rd party?

    Do they have some sort of remarkable improvement over current low-power/low-speed RF links(zigbee, bluetooth, and friends) that is patented, proprietary, and only client chipsets are for sale, with base stations remaining in-house? If so, do they seriously plan to avoid the scrap heap of ghastly, non-interoperable unlicensed band RF links? If not, what is the new element that allows them to achieve the impressive range numbers where presently available low power links(especially if the ISM band is noisy) tend to be pretty lousy, and worse if you need to use omnidirectional antennas and deal with buildings and other clutter?

    If they can perform as promised, this seems like it would have to be based on some very neat RF tricks; but I have to wonder what sorts of hobbling they will be doing to maintain their subscriber base on a technology that runs in unlicensed spectrum...

  8. Re:"Peak Oil" on Tapping Shale Reserves, US Would Become World's Top Oil Producer By 2017 · · Score: 1

    The one possible exception might be a situation where you need oil for specific reasons(ie. as a convenient motor fuel or a petrochemical feedstock); but you have access to otherwise unsuitable energy sources that will suffice for brutalizing your tar sands or shale. I have to imagine that some optimistic industrial-dystopian has drawn up plans for a delightfully zesty nuclear thermal extraction system or similar. If the oil is just being pumped into the electrical grid, that would make no sense; but really ghastly oil materials are, in a sense, a way of converting whatever base load fuel is cheapest into oil.

    (On a different note, if one is not considering the matter apolitically, the cash left on the table of some of our oil trade partners may well be considered to be a negative externality, depending on how severe our togetherness problems with them are at the moment.)

  9. Re:3 strikes and he's out on In Mississippi: 15-Year Jail Sentence For Selling Pirated Movies and Music · · Score: 1

    Blue collar crime just doesn't pay very well, not to mention all the American scamming jobs that have been outsourced to Nigeria...

  10. And this is why... on In Mississippi: 15-Year Jail Sentence For Selling Pirated Movies and Music · · Score: 4, Funny

    Everybody must do their part to eradicate criminal scum like this by simply torrenting their pirated media, rather than propping up the repulsive trade in physical copies sold at retail... The Swarm Needs You to fight piracy today!

  11. Re:Low low price! on Mark Cuban: Facebook Is Driving Away Brands — Starting With Mine · · Score: 4, Funny

    MySpace will charge you $3,000 to reach all 10 people who are still using MySpace.

    Why pay that when I could just purchase a controlling interest in Myspace by digging between my couch cushions?

  12. Re:That is cheap on Mark Cuban: Facebook Is Driving Away Brands — Starting With Mine · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While I have no pity for Mr. Cuban(Oh, sure, facebook is just going to suck up the hosting bills for your web page and messaging system forever, for free...), this may well signal that Facebook has an actual problem...

    If somebody who is, and has, actually run businesses and made money, and so forth, and is facebooking for commercial purposes is willing to throw a little tantrum in public about the price, this suggests that they don't think that facebook is worth what it is charging(or they do; but are willing to piss off a valuable communications channel over $3k). That would be bad for facebook. If you are an advertising vendor(which they are attempting to be, in this case) and a potential account laughs in your face, walks out, and then publishes an open letter mocking your offer as insultingly expensive, that isn't a good sign.

    People whining about having to pay for things is largely irrelevant. People who are accustomed to paying for things refusing to pay for your product? That should make you nervous. Facebook has proven that people will flock to them at the $0 price point; but they have yet to do much testing of the demand curve at higher costs. If it turns out to be extremely elastic...

  13. Re:Cuban is bluffing... on Mark Cuban: Facebook Is Driving Away Brands — Starting With Mine · · Score: 5, Funny

    Seriously, MySpace?!

    Dude, MySpace offered him a gigabyte of complementary bling .gifs for his page. That much ice is worth, like, ten zillion internet dollars.

  14. Re:Vanila linux on Acer C7 Chromebooks Expand Chrome OS Market · · Score: 2

    Specs for the CPU itself seem oddly hard to come by. However, it looks like there are some barebones/appliance systems shipping based on it:

    This reports the 847E has having Intel HD2000. Performance should be nice and dreadful; but it should at least work fairly smoothly.

    This one isn't as informative on the spec sheet; but the VGA driver download, when I tested it, refers only to support for processors with some Intel HD graphics, not any of the atom models with powerVR crap.

    I'll wait for somebody else to bite; but my money would be on a low-clocked; but reasonably well supported, Intel GPU.

  15. Re:You do realize you can run things in 32 bit mod on Ask Slashdot: Best 32-Bit Windows System In 2012? · · Score: 4, Informative

    However you also have to deal with developers who's apps actually check what version you're running and won't even try to install.

    It isn't much fun; but the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit provides a mechanism for telling a large number of potentially useful lies to a program about the environment it is living in... Figuring out which ones you need is an exercise for the reader; but if you manage it you can then have the OS automatically furnish those little falsehoods every time the designated program runs.

    It's a more powerful and granular version of the 'run in compatibility mode' feature, designed to keep the whiny enterprise customers happy.

  16. Re:VMs are not CPU emulators on Ask Slashdot: Best 32-Bit Windows System In 2012? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A 64bit CPU can have a 32bit OS installed. That's not the point. If the 64bit CPU is what causes his applications to fail (and not some software environment problem), then running the OS in a VM won't help because it doesn't change the CPU that the application will see. VMs are not CPU emulators. The code inside the VM runs on the host CPU.

    No VM built for resource management convenience in a standard production environment is a CPU emulator, because that's horribly inefficient compared to doing passthrough. If you don't mind incurring substantial overhead, though, something like QEMU can do full emulation of an x86, ARM, MIPS, or SPARC CPU. Not at all fast, compared to passthrough(also supported with KVM or xen); but it can be done.

  17. Re:VMs are not CPU emulators on Ask Slashdot: Best 32-Bit Windows System In 2012? · · Score: 2

    The guest CPU is the same as the host CPU on all popular VM solutions. If there is something in your applications that fails in the presence of a 64bit CPU, a VM isn't going to solve your problem.

    I'm sure some thrifty assembly jockey writing vital-but-dreadful line of business applications in the 80s has a counterexample; but the mere presence of a 64bit CPU shouldn't cause any trouble for 16 bit applications. The issue is that MS dropped support for 16 bit applications on all 64-bit OS builds. A 32-bit OS on a CPU that supports 64 bits will run 16 bit applications without incident; but will only be able to use the first 4GB of address space without PAE, hence the poster's desire for a 32 bit OS with PAE support.

  18. Interesting... on Acer C7 Chromebooks Expand Chrome OS Market · · Score: 1

    According to popular report, ARM is zOMG cheaper! than Intel. However, this Acer unit is actually the cheap seats among the Chromebooks. The ARM-based Samsung is $50 more. With a mere 16GB of flash, even if it's the good stuff, not some off-brand SD card, it can't be the SSD that makes up the difference. Displays are the same size and resolution. Are Li-ion cells actually that pricey even in quantity, or did Acer really brutalize the build quality to get to this price?

  19. Re:320GB hard drive on Acer C7 Chromebooks Expand Chrome OS Market · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A subset of the full features are supported offline. I don't know if the 320GB is actually anywhere near filled in common usage scenarios, or whether that's just the sweet spot for spinny disks these days; but going offline doesn't brick the thing.

  20. Re:Vanila linux on Acer C7 Chromebooks Expand Chrome OS Market · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If I could get vanila linux on this, it's a fair price.

    You can kick it into dev mode fairly easily, and it ships with fairly orthodox linux already on it('ChromeOS' has a deeply impoverished userland; but its kernel and such are much closer to normal desktop linux than Android is), so hardware compatibility will probably be OK-ish.

    What I don't know, and haven't seen anybody mention one way or the other, is if you can(once you've entered dev mode) modify the UEFI to get rid of the scare-screen on boot.

  21. Re:Fair enough I suppose on UW Imposes 20-Tweet Limit On Live Events · · Score: 1

    That's what makes the whole thing sort of pathetic.

    It'd be unpleasant(especially for a state school that probably has a lot of taxpayers in the stands at a given game); but perfectly logical if they had some sort of "Due to the increasing non-suckiness of consumer video gear, our lucrative broadcasting deal partners want you over there with the video camera to GTFO".

    Tweets, though? Are your partners really so awful at churning out material that people want, in the formats they want it, that a bunch of teeny text snippets are serious competition? And are they specifically so awful that 20 or fewer text snippets they can handle; but 30 totally ruins their business model, man? Sounds like somebody needs some new 'content partners'...

  22. Re: Not Really News on Evidence for Unconscious Math, Language Processing Abilities · · Score: 2

    That's why I'm curious to know what the authors mean by 'semantic violation'. I would also be fairly unsurprised to hear that we flag grammatical violations, at least in languages we speak fluently, unconsciously. Being able to flag grammatically perfect, but non-meaningful, sentences would imply unconscious access to grammar and vocabulary, and an unconscious understanding of category errors and the like. Certainly not impossible; but rather more notable than just flagging grammar.

  23. Re:It's a sad sign of the times on Tapping Shale Reserves, US Would Become World's Top Oil Producer By 2017 · · Score: 1

    If we don't have to buy oil from the Middle east, we can set back and watch them kill themselves over their petty differences without much intervention from us.

    Can we include Israel in that bargain? And neither we or Mexico grow enough poppies to leave Afghanistan/Pakistan yet.

    As entanglements in ghastly foreign sandboxes go, opiates are pretty trivial compared to oil. With just a few minor regulatory tweaks, we could have the heroin users of the first world Doing Their Patriotic Duty by switching to synthetics like Fentanyl and away from foreign terrorist-poppies!

  24. Re:"Peak Oil" on Tapping Shale Reserves, US Would Become World's Top Oil Producer By 2017 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Personally, if the US has these sorts of reserves, we're idiots to tap them today. Use it as leverage to keep the Saudis pumping THEIR oil at moderate prices, and exhaust the supplies outside the US before touching our own.

    Unfortunately that's not how Capitalism works. This would be the definition of collusion or the United States government directing private industry not to make money. We're quite far from China in this respect and that's one area I'd like us to stay away from.

    Did you know we get more crude oil from Canada than Saudi Arabia?

    You are missing one important point: not all 'oil reserves' are created equal. Some are nice, clean, sweet, crude conveniently buried in relatively uncomplicated rocks at moderate depth. Others are a zillion feet underwater, badly dispersed through some formation that makes geologists cry, or in the form of dubiously flammable shale or tar sands that can be coaxed into releasing just slightly more energy than required for the coaxing if you are willing to put up with ghastly byproducts.

    The exploitation of different classes of reserves creates externalities of differing severity. Because markets suck at dealing with externalities, we impose some level of regulation designed either to internalize the externalities or to simply forbid activities that cause excessive negative externalities.

    It is entirely possible that, if the US oil reserves are nastier, or if the Saudis need the oil money sufficiently badly to impose the externalities on themselves before we do, we would see a situation where less desirable US reserves remain in reserve until foreign reserves are tapped out.

    This would be a situation created by regulatory pressures(which I would argue is hardly a bad thing, if it keeps us from experiencing the... cost insensitivity... that accompanies oil development in places like the Niger delta...); but it would hardly require the establishment of the First People's Patriotic Petroleum Five Year Glorious Plan.

  25. Re:so let met get this straight on Tapping Shale Reserves, US Would Become World's Top Oil Producer By 2017 · · Score: 5, Funny

    The idea that the US 'imports' oil is a myth promulgated by isolationists.

    We simply 'repatriate' American oil that had the ill fortune to be buried under somebody else's sand.