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User: wagnerrp

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Comments · 2,465

  1. Re:A win for Flash and Silverilght on RMS Urges W3C To Reject On Principle DRM In HTML5 · · Score: 1

    It's like he's on a Mac and stuck with only one mouse button, you insensitive clod.

    Wait, are you saying I can press down on that massage wheel on the top of my mouse, and things happen?

  2. Re:DRM for transient content ... on RMS Urges W3C To Reject On Principle DRM In HTML5 · · Score: 5, Informative

    DRM is bad for an open standard, as DRM cannot be implemented openly. DRM requires a central authority license anyone who wants to implement the standard. Saying it is good or bad is besides the point. It is something that is technologically incompatible with the purpose of HTML.

  3. Re:What is "GNU/Linux?" on RMS Urges W3C To Reject On Principle DRM In HTML5 · · Score: 2

    I dare say Busybox has a good chance at edging out Android as the most popular Linux distribution.

  4. Re:Support Nvidia on AMD's Open Source Linux Driver Trounces NVIDIA's · · Score: 2

    He's talking about on Linux. The old ATI Linux drivers were notoriously bad for years, and while they've gotten better since AMD bought them, they still fall short of nVidia's reliability and capability, regardless of the performance of the hardware itself. If you just want a graphics card to drive a monitor or two, AMD hardware is fine. If you want something that will do OpenGL or video playback well, you want nVidia, or at the very least Intel.

  5. Re:Took long enough... on Get Zapped While Playing Video Games · · Score: 1

    As many people have mentioned, this is not about "zapping" the user, but rather using electrical stimulation to externally control the muscles in your arms, replacing traditional force feedback motors or vibrators. There was an article several months ago about someone using a similar technique to provide force feedback in handheld gaming systems.

  6. Re:Google glasses on Google Glass Is the Future — and the Future Has Awful Battery Life · · Score: 1

    I'll have some wonderful footage to provide the cops when assault charges are filed.

    Assault is just threatening to punch someone in the face. If you carry through with it, now you have battery.

  7. Re:"Cheap?" Who's still paying for chat apps? on The Balkanization of Chatting · · Score: 4, Informative

    Infinite bucks per GB? SMS messages don't use bandwidth or data. They get carried in what is otherwise wasted padding in heartbeat packets. That's why they have a limited character length.

  8. Re:Any way to see them coming? on Speeding Object Makes Small Hole In the ISS Solar Array · · Score: 1

    Ok. I was assuming one would vaporize it at several tens of kilometers (and several seconds) out.

  9. Re:These flights have nothing to do really with sp on SpaceShipTwo Tests Its Rocket Engine and Goes Supersonic · · Score: 1

    "Terminal velocity"... I don't think that means what you think it means...

  10. Re:Any way to see them coming? on Speeding Object Makes Small Hole In the ISS Solar Array · · Score: 2

    When you vaporize it, it's not going to remain a solid chunk of gas. It will rapidly expand out to local atmospheric pressure. The vast majority of it will blow past you harmlessly on either side. Only a small amount of the matter will actually impact, and that which does impact will be spread out over a lengthened duration.

  11. Re:Orbital pickup truck on Helium Depleted, Herschel Space Telescope Mission Ends · · Score: 1

    You use radiators to dump the heat, and solar power to run your compressors. It's doable, but will be an extremely complex and heavy system, and easier to just take up a several years supply of liquid helium.

  12. Re:Orbital pickup truck on Helium Depleted, Herschel Space Telescope Mission Ends · · Score: 1

    There is one other thing. The Shuttle could de-orbit itself and its engines intact. Each launch consumed about a million dollars worth of liquid hydrogen, and a couple hundred thousand worth of oxygen. The three SSMEs were around fourth million each. A fully reusable spacecraft with modest maintenance costs would be an incredible boon to the space industry. Just because the Shuttle had too high of maintenance costs to make it economical does not mean it is a bad idea we should simply give up on. It just means we go back to the drawing board and try again.

  13. Re:These flights have nothing to do really with sp on SpaceShipTwo Tests Its Rocket Engine and Goes Supersonic · · Score: 1

    I also was a bit in error. Delta-v for SpaceShipOne was a quarter what they needed to get in orbit.

    You were right the first time. SSO only reached 112km, which is roughly equivalent to 1.5km/s of d-V. Between altitude and orbital velocity, LEO is around 9.5-10km/s. That's 6.5 times higher.

  14. Re:Orbital pickup truck on Helium Depleted, Herschel Space Telescope Mission Ends · · Score: 1

    So the scientists are telling me that rubbing myself down with moon dust was a bad idea... and that I now have cancer...

  15. Re:Orbital pickup truck on Helium Depleted, Herschel Space Telescope Mission Ends · · Score: 2

    What about a pickup truck with an extra JATO bottle?

  16. Re:3 Million Sigantures?! on EU To Ban Neonicotinoid Insecticides · · Score: 1

    Maybe you could repeatedly dilute honey in quantities of water....

  17. Re:True on EU To Ban Neonicotinoid Insecticides · · Score: 1

    Slavery has been shown over and over to be a poor economic system.

    I thought it was working quite well (for the owners) until a few people realised it might be just a little bit shady, morally.

    Actually, most slave owners in the south were heavily in debt.

    Workers work better when well treated.

    Would the increase in productivity outweigh the increase in spending the employer would have to make (decent food, accomodation, wages, etc)? And yes, before any morons jump in, I am playing devil's advocate, and no, I'm not advocating slavery.

    A slave owner has to provide food and accommodation anyway. Employees merely get paid, and have to figure out how to source all that on their own, during their own free time. Additionally, you have to BUY a slave. That means there is a significant capital investment in every worker, and if that worker isn't producing, you're simply screwed. An employee can be fired and replaced, and a laborer can often be replaced with no significant loss in training time.

  18. Re:Next step on SpaceShipTwo Tests Its Rocket Engine and Goes Supersonic · · Score: 1

    Obviously sea level. A woosh in a vacuum would be typed like _________.

    Stupid slashdot... it removes all excess white space...

  19. Re:These flights have nothing to do really with sp on SpaceShipTwo Tests Its Rocket Engine and Goes Supersonic · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think you're understating the difficulty of more d-V. Six times the d-V doesn't simply mean six times the fuel. Energy is proportional to velocity squared, so you immediately need thirty-six times the energy. When you factor in the exponential behavior of the rocket equation, and the fact that you need yet more fuel just to take up the additional fuel needed to accelerate the spacecraft itself, your fuel consumption balloons fast.

  20. Re:These flights have nothing to do really with sp on SpaceShipTwo Tests Its Rocket Engine and Goes Supersonic · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is a vast difference between SSO, or even SST, and what you propose. SSO and SST just go straight up and straight back down. There is very little ground track in their flight envelope. In order to get to orbit, you need to go straight up, and then go about double that to really get out of the atmosphere, and then tack on around 8km/s velocity. You're looking at a few dozen times more energy, and around a hundred times more fuel. A sub-orbital transcontinental flight won't need quite that much, but you're still way up there in comparison. Add in the fact that you're actually going to need a real thermal protection system for re-entry. They're not even in the ballpark.

  21. Re:Next step on SpaceShipTwo Tests Its Rocket Engine and Goes Supersonic · · Score: 2

    They likely mean the speed of sound at ~50Kft, where it was released from the mothership. The exact speed really doesn't matter. They're testing stability at transonic and supersonic Mach numbers.

  22. Re:Terribly Exciting - 10 years ago on SpaceShipTwo Tests Its Rocket Engine and Goes Supersonic · · Score: 1

    Actually, Orbital Sciences has been putting payloads into orbit since 1990, using converted ballistic missiles.

  23. Re:Speed? on SpaceShipTwo Tests Its Rocket Engine and Goes Supersonic · · Score: 1

    You're right. It's much more difficult. You need around two orders of magnitude more fuel to actually make orbit.

  24. Re:Read their website on Btrfs Is Getting There, But Not Quite Ready For Production · · Score: 1

    So you're saying if I'm editing some file, but don't want to lose the previous version, I can "make a backup" by creating a copy of that file, but that's not technically a backup? The duplicate copy is protected from user error, as well as machine error on the part of the editing program, so how is that not a backup? It's not protected against theft or physical damage, but it is protected from editing. What if I make a backup disk, put it in a vault in a bank down the street, and an asteroid hits and wipes out the whole county? One incident took out both copies. Does that mean the two duplicates too close together to be considered a backup?

  25. Re:Two words on $5 Sensor Turns LCD Monitors Into Touchscreens · · Score: 1

    It's possible it's something that cannot be covered by patents due to prior art. This is really just an implementation of Van Eck phreaking, but instead of picking up the display signal, they're using it to pick up interference to the TFT matrix.