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  1. What a fatuous, nebulous piece of crap??? on Microsoft's Missed Opportunities: Memo From 1997 · · Score: 2

    All that memo will do (and it did) is to create a regressive hierarchy of backbiting political scum, who devote their energy to their next, larger, paycheck.
    Any new ideas will be ruthlessly crushed, to avoid the risk their will succeed and toss those on high into the rubbish heap of history.
    So they have done that with the company, and it only survive because of its natural monopolies in a few software fields.

    Apple could have killed them ages ago, by allowing their OS to be licensed on any processor, and include a state machine rom with each licenced copy, said state machine being a soldered un-crackable dongle, so that Apple gets ~~$100 per copy - they would slay Microsoft.
    As it is Apple clings to their walled garden = dumb, but Apple = richer than me, so what do I know?

  2. Re:Stop throwing good money after bad. on The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane To Nowhere · · Score: 0

    I agree with you. This is a fleet of flying garbage cans. G limits on the crews means they are easy targets for the latest missiles that Russia and many others have. All the money spent is wasted in most respects, but a lot of the knowledge base can be used for a new generation of pilotless planes with fight alone capability once they reach an area to respond faster than a remote human can. Remotes can be very hard. but jamming is walys possible, so fight alone autonomy is needed. There is also a need for fight along long range missiles that can hang around and interdict an area, then come back for fuel. They also need higher energy fules, boron derivaties that still use air for these remote missiles.

  3. how can they be made faster? on 15-Year-Old Developing a 3D Printer 10x Faster Than Anything On the Market · · Score: 1

    These printers come in 3 broad types, melt a fiber , sinter a granule and cross link monomers.
    The melt a fiber you can make fastter with a jet of cold air/gas or water so the print head can pass that way again sooner, or run in a cold box = faster colling.
    The trivial answer of a 20 nozzle print head = been done.

    The sinter a granule, more power in laser to aggregate more granules?

    Monomer cross linking, higher power laser, more reactive monomer?

    I find it hard to achieve a ten fold speed ramp with rate limited physical processes standing in the way of speed ups.

  4. Re:One non-disturbing theory on Ninety-Nine Percent of the Ocean's Plastic Is Missing · · Score: 1

    The term plastic covers many materials. The ones made from hydrocarbons - polyethylene, polypropylene etc are gradually attacked by bacteria. If they are very thin as in plastic bags they are short lived. it is a little lighter than water, so it floats and gets the cross links broken by UV light unless filled with something heacvy, clay, TiO2 etc and might sink.
    These are not long lived, nor are they hard, the scraping tongues with erode them, and a few cyles = gone.

    If you replace one or more Hydrogen with fluorine or chlorine you get items that are not metabolized by any complex organism, however bacteris can colonize them and they remove an atom at a time, so they eventually go away.
    https://www.google.ca/?gfe_rd=...

    These are all soft so the scraping of tiny teeth turns them into small particles and the bacteria get at them.

    One big problem with small particles is their lack of nutrition, so the small animal wastes energy to gnaw it and gets nothing back. Too many small particles and they starve to death via metabolic losses. People can starve on some foods that take more energy to digest then they yield.

    Recently microspheres for cosmetics have been released into the water and they get through filtration plants = starvation again for the small fly if there are too many.

    The rise of biodegradable layers has helps plastic go away sooner, if we made bags from starch film, if would be eaten in weeks in the sea

  5. Re:OP is obliquely critical of Politzer on Secret of the Banjo's Unique Sound Discovered By Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist · · Score: 1

    Arrrgh, typos breed like flies with machines that that both present a tiny view and finish words for you...

  6. Re:OP is obliquely critical of Politzer on Secret of the Banjo's Unique Sound Discovered By Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist · · Score: 1

    typo, should be Feynman in my RP

  7. OP is obliquely critical of Politzer on Secret of the Banjo's Unique Sound Discovered By Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ! Interesting what Nobel prize-winning physicists do in their spare time. !

    This tells the tail of an inquiring mind that turns it's focus on many things. He reminds me of Fenman, among many similar Nobel Laureates, whose curiosity was not limited by a 9-5 mentality, but was active 24/7.

    It is this quality that produces the Nobels...

  8. Re:ICANN has changed on ICANN CEO Wants To Make Progress On Leaving US Control · · Score: 1, Insightful

    If the UN is any example, an independent ICAAN will turn into the corrupt instrument of the nations that compose it and will control the new ICANN and then a new regime will levy taxes on the users - and these taxes, which they will call fees, will be spent uncoltrollably to creat an edifice like the UN, 200% corrupt. THE US congress is similarly corrupt, as we see by the FVV and Internet lobbyists.

    I do not know how this can be prevented, apart by not letting it fall into the control of these crooks.

    That said, ICANN is already a little crooked...

  9. Re:Here is a sheet of useful tips on Ask Slashdot: Do 4G World Phones Exist? · · Score: 1

    oops, here are all 4 pages as an album

    http://imgur.com/a/utF2P#0

  10. Here is a sheet of useful tips on Ask Slashdot: Do 4G World Phones Exist? · · Score: 1

    They are all images, so you will have to type the links.

    http://i.imgur.com/pxx6QB3.jpg

  11. Re:Don't worry on LAPD Gets Some Hand-Me-Down Drones From Seattle, Promises Discretion · · Score: 1

    yes, hidden in plain sight...

  12. Re:Don't worry on LAPD Gets Some Hand-Me-Down Drones From Seattle, Promises Discretion · · Score: 1

    that is why I directed it upwards, to minimize street level light.
    If it gets popular, so many will have them....

  13. Re:Don't worry on LAPD Gets Some Hand-Me-Down Drones From Seattle, Promises Discretion · · Score: 1

    Just buy some invisible IR light units, and shine them into the camera eyes of any spying device. Placed outside on the window ledge with a slight up angle, they will not illuminate anything on the ground, but anyone who wants to peer into your widows with night vision (NV) will find the bright IR lamps will desense their NV.
    These are often used to hinder attacking enemies with NV goggles, although this has developed into a spy vs counter spy among the various national forces that use NV.

  14. Re:Sounds awesome except.... on Patent Troll Ordered To Pay For the Costs of Fighting a Bad Patent · · Score: 1

    At first this will happen, but then judges will request a fee bond from these numbered companies, which will pay the fees to the winner if the troll loses.

  15. Re:but on Patent Troll Ordered To Pay For the Costs of Fighting a Bad Patent · · Score: 1

    Well, If you build a new house in Toronto as part of a development you are forced to pay an infrastructure fee = huge cost. If you build on an existing infill lot it is a lot less, and cheapest is if you buy a house, tear it down and build a new one.
    This process can take years because it is part of a scheme to increase housing costs

  16. Re:Of course on NASA Money Crunch Means Trouble For Spitzer Space Telescope · · Score: 1

    People seem to feel that money spent on exploration has no valuable return! Yet they spend countless billions on food stamps and welfare, yet these also have no tangible return.
    They lose sight of the fact that 99% of the money spent on exploration is for the purchase of items made on earth and represents the labor expended to produce whatever item.

    Take gold - it is free in the earth, but we pay the miners to drill, dig, break rocks, extract etc, and ever stage is almost totally for wages to deal with a raw material. Same for wood products, fibers. plastics, metals etc.

    Research means we pay thousands of people to do intellectually challenging and technically difficult tasks to gain knowledge. Welfare and food stamps means we pay millions of people to sit on their bums and do nothing. Welfare and food stamps are a $$ sink. Sure they allow people to live without effort, without intellectual challenge, yet why do we spend more and more to grow this welfare and food stamp industry? We have given excess voting power to non-productive elements of society. In Roman times, only citizens of the city of Rome had the vote - none in the others could vote, to get these few votes, the voters were bribed by the senators (the only politicians of the age) with food and entertainment, which came to be called "Bread and Circuses" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
    The huge empire of Rome declined and fell due to various forms of mismanagement and some say, lead in the wine? The USA is not immune to this.
    If the research that underpinned all the gains the USA and the world have made in the past 100 years is not continued, we will decline into a morass of welfare grubs. It might take a while, but the decline has begun and will accelerate. We need both democrats and republicans to be isolated from the lack of a private ballot.
    We thing that seeing how a politicians votes gives us accountability - it does not, it gives the lobbyist accountability - he sees his bribes at work.

    We need to break this pathway. Can we? The politicians have grown used to their well feathered nests and will peck at the hands of those who want to change things.

  17. Re:Next target, please on Driverless Cars Could Cripple Law Enforcement Budgets · · Score: 1

    True, the speed trap mentality will never die. It might have to be state run via data base access as the cams take the pix. The old manual method can co-exist with it?
    but perhaps voter outrage will help with this

  18. Re:Next target, please on Driverless Cars Could Cripple Law Enforcement Budgets · · Score: 1

    On the basis that the directing mind of the car pays for the transgressions, a small fine , in the $10-15 area is not worth fighting, yet it will act as a coercive pressure to cause that mind to limit the motion of the car to be within limits. Of course, andone can make their robotic car exceed a limit - unless these limirs are hard wired in, with location data and the settings of these limits in all dirveable areas is also hard wired in or acessable from a central data base via the computer to adapt to time and other changes (like no left turn from 4:30 to 6:30 PM, Mon to Fri).

    We know that all modern cars can have their chips accessed to change the performance curves to accelerate quicker. The OEM chip is patterened for conformity with emission limits. We know it is illegal to change them. We also see the brisk sales of 'modded' chips and programmers to 'mod' these chips. We also know that the police are not equipped to easily inspect a car to determine if it has been modded, and so these mods excape the law. Will driverless cars also get modded, to go faster, make left turns at all hours, or whatever? One might expect a power on self test would stop this, but, if the test procedure has been hacked - what then? We will then need anti-hacker laws and sealed boxes to control this aberrant behaviour, or have we reached the millenium and none of us will do this in the future? I expect a sealed data unit will deter most, but some will fiddle.

  19. Re:Next target, please on Driverless Cars Could Cripple Law Enforcement Budgets · · Score: 1

    They ticket the car, if the person wants to challenge in court, he must admit to driving the car. If he defeats it, he has spent a few hours to save $10-15 = the purpose of the ticket has been met.
    That is why I sad no points etc, and $10-15 set fine

  20. Re:Next target, please on Driverless Cars Could Cripple Law Enforcement Budgets · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As we speak, we have large penalties for all the driving offences, speeding, not stopping, bad lane changes and signal failures. The main reason is the large cost of the police and court system.
    I suggest they impose a summary fine amount, with no points or other consequences, of $10 on each offence and use traffic cams to impose them. The ticket would have a choice of $10 pay and be done with it or $300 for a court appearance, plus driver demerit points and insurer notification of a trial discovers guilt. Usually guilt with a cam is quite easy to establish = sure to lose.

    I feel most people with pay the $10 and it will act as a deterrent. They could also mandate a court appearance if over 5 of these occurred within 30 days to eliminate rich scofflaws.

    As it is now, people are forced to fight and win/lose, the system costs rise.

  21. Re:As Margaret Sanger Slee always wanted on Percentage of Elderly In Japan Continues to Grow as Number of Children Drops · · Score: 1

    Japanese women, from what I read, simply do not want the aggravation of childbearing, now it is fully within their control. In time the last Japanese female will grow too old to bear a child and the race will pass into extinction as the elders pass on.
    Will all women, once freed of mandatory pregnancy follow the same path?

    Could Japan grow children in an animal uterus, or an artificial one? Would any chemicals from the mother cross the placental barrier and affect the child if the uterine animal was a pig or sheep, or cow? Is mammalian chemistry sufficiently plastic to tolerate these cross species internal fostering? We know that chemicals from the foetus trigger child birth in humans - will the same signal work with foster animals? Are there brain development chemicals in the mothers blood that are essential to normal human brain development?
    An animal would be a lot less costly than a fully artificial uterus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
    more here http://bit.ly/1mOsaw7

  22. Re:Global Warming Standards? on Wyoming Is First State To Reject Science Standards Over Climate Change · · Score: 1

    Wyoming coal is as white as the driven snow....

  23. Re:Just because... on NASA, France Skeptical of SpaceX Reusable Rocket Project · · Score: 1

    Yes, usually they start into an equatorial orbit at launch and head downrange of the launch pad, so any safe abort would involve a downrange foot print of some kind. There will be varied aborts, depending on where they are which can save anything from the whole rocket to the payload. It all depends on these later stages having soft landing capability. Having soft landing for all stages will invoke a payload penalty, and might mean only a limited safe abort capability. The lightest part is the payload and a parachute save with floats might be affordeable in efficiency for that, but it is also the lightest, so a lander might be doable.
    At some point the weight penalty gets too big for a rocket landing and a parachute descent is the only viable way.
    I am sure paceX and the others will be optimizing all these choices over the next 5 years.

  24. Re:Just because... on NASA, France Skeptical of SpaceX Reusable Rocket Project · · Score: 1

    LOL, I can suggest you read a little more background.
    This is a high performance craft. It has 9 engines. Each flight will differ in payload and fuel load to attain that payload to destination. They say they can fly on 8 engines. They do not say it can reach orbit on 7 engines? 6? With a light load they may be able to fly on 6 engines - unknowable.
    The company may know this, but I do not.

    From the way they speak, it appears they are going to explore this topic in detail because if they can do it, they can become more competitive.
    Time will tell.

    As for weasel words, I use them only to weasels....;)

  25. Re:Just because... on NASA, France Skeptical of SpaceX Reusable Rocket Project · · Score: 1

    If one engine stops, the other engines will burn longer to reach orbit and they might have less fuel as they reach orbit since the change of one engine from creating thrust to deadweight will change the specific impulse of the system as a whole. With 2 failed engines, it might not reach orbit and might then decide to soft land while it has the fuel to do it.
    Each situation will differ and will have a point after which it can no longer make a soft landing and will have to go for crew emergency escape procedures. (if crewed)