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User: wagnerrp

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  1. Re:fucking brits on Top Gear Fights Back At Tesla · · Score: 2

    This is a high end sports car. You are supposed to take it out on the track, accelerate and brake hard. Driving the car as it is designed to be driven will get you all of 50 miles or so on the battery. Driving the car as a typical commuter will get you over 200 miles on the battery.

    Following with your laptop comparison, think of this as a big 'desktop replacement'. Running Crysis, with the quad core processor and memory at full speed, 17" monitor at full brightness, powering your big surround headphones, charging your phone and gameboy, you might only get half an hour of battery life. Using a spreadsheet with the processor and memory downclocked, three of the four cores gated off, monitor on low brightness, no headphones, and no USB devices, you will get several hours out of the battery. The system was designed for gaming, and using it as such will drain the battery very quickly. Using it for typical office work will get you several times the battery life.

    Why buy the big heavy laptop if you're not going to play intensive games on it? Why buy the expensive sports car if you're not going to take it out on the track and have fun? The show was reporting that if you DO use it as intended, those are the consequences.

  2. Re:Use of data? on Earth's Gravitational Shape In Detail · · Score: 1

    It allows satellite orbits to be more accurately predicted. Things like geostationary satellites must carry large amounts of fuel because these differences in gravity cause them to drift outside their desired station.

  3. Re:Ooh, Shiny! =Click-ety= on Massive SQL Injection Attack Compromises 380K URLs · · Score: 1

    The article never claimed there were 380k servers hacked, it merely claimed there were 380k compromised unique URLs. If you follow the article, they are unique URLs as determined by a Google search. It could just as well be a hundred hacked servers with several thousand compromised pages each. Many of those pages could even be duplicates of one another.

  4. Re:As I and many others pointed out yesterday on Amazon's Cloud Player: We Don't Need a License · · Score: 1

    How do they even have access to your financials to know what you are and aren't buying? That has to be illegal in some fashion.

  5. Strong or tough? on Plastic Made From Fruit Rivals Kevlar In Strength · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is strong really the correct term to use here? People think of kevlar being strong because it's used to stop bullets, but they're really completely wrong. Sure, it's stronger than steel, but not as strong as fiberglass or carbon fiber. You use kevlar in armor because it is tough, toughness being defined by the area under the stress/strain curve. It can absorb more energy than any other material. If it's as strong as kevlar, well then there are plenty of other natural and synthetic fibers that are just as capable, and this is nothing impressive. If it's as tough as kevlar, well then there is something of significant interest here.

  6. Re:As I and many others pointed out yesterday on Amazon's Cloud Player: We Don't Need a License · · Score: 1

    This could mean that if you and I upload the same MP3 file to our individual personal cloud drives, they'll end up being physically stored as a single set of 0's and 1's at the lowest level.

    Funny that, where are you and I going to get the same MP3 file? Between errors during ripping, changes in compressor settings, changes in compressor revisions, changes in stored metadata, you and I will be incapable of independently producing bit perfect copies of the same song. Online stores selling DRM free music are still going to tag them against a certain user. The only way we could get the same exact file is if it were released under some open license, or if we illegally downloaded it from the source. From a legal standpoint, de-duplication of such material simply doesn't make sense.

  7. Re:As I and many others pointed out yesterday on Amazon's Cloud Player: We Don't Need a License · · Score: 1

    That's assuming the metadata block is identical from one file to the next. Different rippers use different size blocks. Users will have different sized coverart attached, which further breaks block alignment. Further, this is all assuming the users are all either storing uncompressed content, used the same revision compressor with the same settings to independently produce bit perfect replicas, or (gasp) they all illegally downloaded the same copy from the same source.

  8. Re:As I and many others pointed out yesterday on Amazon's Cloud Player: We Don't Need a License · · Score: 1

    If the files are uploaded to Amazon encrypted, then the files will not be identical, and there will be no possibility for de-duplication.

  9. Re:As I and many others pointed out yesterday on Amazon's Cloud Player: We Don't Need a License · · Score: 1

    I was watching TED yesterday and a speaker said that it takes the energy of a lump of coal to download a million bytes of data.

    WTF....

    Are you talking about lignite? Bituminous? Anthracite? They all have different energy densities. How much is a lump? Is it measured in volume or weight? Are you downloading from a local file server? Are you using wireless? Are you using copper ethernet, or fiber ethernet, or RS-232? How many hops are there to the server? What physical distance is it to the server? Are there any submarine links in between?

    Statements like that are completely absurd. They are so open ended as to have absolutely no meaning.

  10. Re:As I and many others pointed out yesterday on Amazon's Cloud Player: We Don't Need a License · · Score: 1

    So the fact that you're buying computers but not buying Windows licenses implies you must be pirating Windows?

  11. Re:Worst Formatting Ever on Newspaper Plagiarizes Blog, Taunts Real Author · · Score: 1

    When I look at the blog, it's black text on a white background, fixed width, centered.

    White backgrounds are bad. Nothing in nature is every such a bright white, and your eyes really don't handle it well. Using a light grey background like CC or DD is much better for preventing eye strain from long term use. Dark (but not black) backgrounds with light (but not white) text is even better, but is generally recommended against as it can be more difficult for users with vision problems to read. The only problem with non-white backgrounds is that it wastes a lot of ink if the site does not have a similar "printer friendly" version of the page.

  12. Re:Nuclear waste disposal on Journey To the Mantle of the Earth By 2020 · · Score: 1

    dmgxmichael said "giant fission reactor". Specifically, that much of the heat was from radioactive decay, and that the Earth was a giant fission reactor. Were the Earth a giant reactor, the heat from radioactive decay would be largely insignificant compared to that from induced fission.

  13. Re:Nuclear waste disposal on Journey To the Mantle of the Earth By 2020 · · Score: 1

    No. Spontaneous fission is a type of radioactive decay, but it is just that, spontaneous. By definition, it is an event completely independent of its environment. There is no bombardment needed to trigger it. All radioactive decay is just a series of independent events. Contrast this with a fission reactor where neutron bombardment triggers subsequent fission events, releasing more neutrons. This is a chain reaction and not spontaneous decay.

    So yes, radioactive decay and a fission reactor are not the same thing. That said, there have been cases where a sufficient mass of fissionable material was collected in once place, and a natural reactor was started up.

  14. Re:I want one on Journey To the Mantle of the Earth By 2020 · · Score: 1

    This hole would make a terrible geothermal energy source. Sure, there's a several hundred degree temperature difference, but that temperature difference is several kilometers apart. Bringing that differential together would likely cost more energy than you might be able to recover.

  15. Re:Heat issues on Journey To the Mantle of the Earth By 2020 · · Score: 1

    My experience is with machining, but the concepts are going to be largely the same. When machining, you want as hard a bit as possible. The harder the bit, the slower it will dull against your material. A given bit working on a given material will be limited to a feed rate, above which you will start tearing through your bit. As you machine faster, the bit will heat up and soften, and as explained, the softer the bit, the faster it will dull.

    Cheap bits use mild steel. More expensive bits will use ceramic carbide tips, allowing faster feed rates on harder material. More expensive still will be diamond tipped. You will never machine fast enough to melt any of these materials, but it is certainly easy to get them up above their usable working temperatures. With higher ambient temperatures, it just means you have to machine that much slower to keep bit temperatures within that functional range.

  16. Re:Nuclear waste disposal on Journey To the Mantle of the Earth By 2020 · · Score: 1

    Radioactive decay and fission are not the same thing.

  17. Re:It's quite simple on UK ISPs Hatch Plan To Block the Pirate Bay and Other File Sharing Sites · · Score: 1

    Merchandise and concert proceeds go primarily to the band and crew. While its great information for them, it is of little worth to the studios and 'music industry'.

  18. Re:It's quite simple on UK ISPs Hatch Plan To Block the Pirate Bay and Other File Sharing Sites · · Score: 1

    Why would you want to base a chart on popularity? If it doesn't result in financial gain, who cares how many people listen to it? If the people who like that kind of media are not the type to spend money or otherwise use ad-supported services, who cares what they think?

  19. Re:this really ticks me off... on AT&T Cracking Down On Unofficial iPhone Tethering · · Score: 1

    My DSL provider still hands out a /29 to any new user. One address goes to the modem, allowing six more machines to be connected directly to the internet and pull addresses over DHCP. Since 'using a router' is just what you do these days, nearly all subscribers only ever get allocated those first two addresses.

  20. Re:Detection on AT&T Cracking Down On Unofficial iPhone Tethering · · Score: 1

    They have to prove it if they want to charge you another $45/mo, or claim you are in breach of your contract.

  21. Re:Detection on AT&T Cracking Down On Unofficial iPhone Tethering · · Score: 2

    From what I've read, it seems like they're really just looking for people who use up tons of data per month, on the suspicion that they're tethering.

    Why do they care how much traffic a user is consuming? There was a report a year or two ago about AT&T having network troubles due to the iPhone, because while the average user actually consumed 1/8th the bandwidth of one with a laptop modem, the type of traffic they were sending actually put more load on the equipment. The only real reason they meter by data is it's a lot easier to explain to a user than packet throughput.

  22. Re:Added bonus: on NASA Wants To Zap Space Junk With Lasers · · Score: 1

    If you read the article, they themselves say this would never be anywhere near enough power to de-orbit anything. The purpose of this is merely to nudge things into another orbit, specifically one that does not cross that of the satellite they are trying to protect. Now whether those minute changes in velocity a week out would be enough to significantly change the trajectory, and whether they would even be able to predict an orbit that accurately that far out, I can't say. It's been too long since my orbital mechanics classes, and we never did anything with such precision micro-maneuvering.

  23. Re:Added bonus: on NASA Wants To Zap Space Junk With Lasers · · Score: 1

    Looking at this from a different angle, the maximum intensity of a standard class IIIa laser pointer is 2.5mW/cm. In order to achieve that density at that power rating, the reflected beam must be no larger than 50ft wide. That's two hundredths of an arcsecond. We just aren't that good, and through the atmosphere it's simply not possible.

  24. Re:Added bonus: on NASA Wants To Zap Space Junk With Lasers · · Score: 1

    Actually, less than a mW of sustained exposure would be sufficient to cause permanent damage. Somewhere up to around 5mW is considered "safe" as your blink reflex will happen fast enough to protect your eyes. Also, we've already got this nice stellar object about a hundred million miles out that will cause damage if you stare at it.

    At just a few kW, there is absolutely no risk of harm from this. The beam will scatter and spread on the way up through the atmosphere, hitting the object at something far less than full intensity. It will hit the object, which is not perfectly flat, nor perfectly reflective, further spreading the beam. It will have to pass back through the atmosphere, scattering further. That full 800mi+ trip will easily drop the beam the 6-7 orders of magnitude power needed to render it safe.

  25. Re:Added bonus: on NASA Wants To Zap Space Junk With Lasers · · Score: 1

    Well there is also the fact that those laser pointers paint a target half the size of the airplane at a mile out. Even were they to aim correctly, the beam would be too diffuse to be more than a nuisance.