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User: WolfWithoutAClause

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  1. Re:Closed Room + Faraday Cage on How Do You Detect Cheating In Chess? Watch the Computer · · Score: 1

    You say it's 'purely statistical' as if this makes it completely insufficiient, but the whole of science is at root, purely statistical, and none the worse for that!

  2. Re:Nortel's cash cow was analog phone switches on Nortel Executives Found Not Guilty On Fraud Charges · · Score: 1

    They also had a line in SDH and SONET equipment. That's been or is being replaced with IP/Ethernet protocol equipment. Basically, all their old core markets evaporated, and they weren't able to adapt in time.

  3. Re:No it isn't on Wireless Power Over Distance: Just a Parlor Trick? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    > The problem is inefficiency. Power drops with the square of distance.

    Wrong!

    That's how radio works.

    Actually the resonant schemes DON'T use radio, they use inductance; which is just magnetic fields; and they work at much lower frequencies.

    By contrast, radio is a particular mixture of magnetic and electric fields that propagate to infinity, and you tend to lose them. That was the genius of Marconi, to get the mix right.

    But magnetic fields on their own don't propagate, that's partly why magnets don't go flat. The energy hangs around the transmitter and can be absorbed by a suitable receiver.

  4. Re:As it was before on Wireless Power Over Distance: Just a Parlor Trick? · · Score: 1

    Except that now the device can have chips in to measure the amount of power being supplied, and if somebody hasn't paid, can cut it off.

    And actually the original problem about how you can be billed was solved by television broadcasters; mostly it relied on people being honest, and occasionally driving around with a truck with equipment to sniff out people that were stealing.

  5. Re:Huh? on Is Silicon Valley Morally Bankrupt and Toxic? · · Score: 2, Informative

    ...but it helps!

  6. Re:Violations of Wikipedia:Ownership on Wikipedia Is Nearing "Completion" · · Score: 1

    It's likely still in copyright, so photographing it and uploading it would be a bit dodgy.

  7. Re:Violations of Wikipedia:Ownership on Wikipedia Is Nearing "Completion" · · Score: 1

    How old was the book?

  8. Re:Sorry but... on Stolen Maple Syrup Found and Returned To Strategic Reserve · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Stockpiles don't create scarcity, they help avoid scarcity; it brings the price down in poor years, and push it up in good years.

    Only if they were systematically destroying maple syrup would it create scarcity.

  9. Re:Refund how? on Bitcoin Exchange BitFloor Says It Will Replace Stolen Coins · · Score: 2

    They're only insolvent at the point that debtors can legally demand the money and they're incapable of paying.

  10. Re:if that's the question on California Legalizes Self Driving Cars · · Score: 1

    Tell that to any religious person.

  11. Re:Did they study the health effects of starving? on Roundup Tolerant GM Maize Linked To Tumor Development · · Score: 1

    Oh sure, somebody will try to replicate the study.

    The golden rule of studies is that, as a non expert, until that has happened successfully, you should pay them absolutely no attention.

  12. Re:Efficiency should kill it on Cutting the Power Cable: How Advantageous Is Wireless Charging? · · Score: 1

    Well, essentially everyone uses aluminium in the modern world, so I don't really find that disingenuous.

  13. Re:Efficiency should kill it on Cutting the Power Cable: How Advantageous Is Wireless Charging? · · Score: 1

    Yeah, everything.

    That was IRC the number for the UK. The total energy use per capita is even higher.

  14. Re:Efficiency should kill it on Cutting the Power Cable: How Advantageous Is Wireless Charging? · · Score: 1

    There's lots of electricity in things that aren't in your house, in street lights, shops, factories etc. etc.

    The total energy per capita for example is over 5kW in the UK for example (10kW in America), check out the final column in this table:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita

    Things like mobile phones are completely irrelevant really, and laptops are pretty much irrelevant.

    I saw a number which was ~2kW by an academic for the UK, that IRC would have been electricity only (presumably he took total electricity supply and divided by population).

  15. Re:Efficiency should kill it on Cutting the Power Cable: How Advantageous Is Wireless Charging? · · Score: 2

    These devices use very little power.

    A typical person in the Western world uses, on average, 2+ kW. That's not 2kWh per day, that's 2+ kWh EACH AND EVERY HOUR.

    These devices that are proposed to be charged wirelessly are usually just a few watts, about 1/1000 of what the person is using; so even if the power efficiency halved for those particular devices, it would make essentially sod-all difference.

    The other thing is that in many cases if it's easier to recharge, then you don't need such a big battery; batteries are incredibly expensive compared to wall supplied power.

  16. Re:Working as intended on When a Primary Source Isn't Good Enough: Wikipedia · · Score: 1

    You have a very rosy view. And that's not what happened in this case; for example. There are a large number of admins that will quite happily remove primary sources, even though the actual policy is much more nuanced, and ALLOWS adding material from twitter and blogs to be used in cases like this; a clear public statement by an author that something or other wasn't his inspiration, while it cannot be taken as proof of that, could easily have been mentioned in the article.

    Like:

    blah says this,[ref1] somebody else said something else,[ref2] but the author disagreed and said something else.[ref3]

    Protip: sanctions like you describe are usually more to do with other users/admins ganging up on someone, not so much not what they do right or wrong.

  17. Re:Working as intended on When a Primary Source Isn't Good Enough: Wikipedia · · Score: 1

    It really doesn't really work like that, although it might seem like that if you're a novice.

    The admins have a rough set of rules they actually use, that are somewhat disconnected from the real rules; admins rarely read the rules.

    The way it works is that each admin basically makes a decision what the rules 'really' mean, and any given admin will hardly ever override what another admin decides (they call this 'wheel warring').

    The admins, by and large, have a pretty hazy understanding of the rules; usually it seems like they've just read the title of the rule, and imagined what it said, and they are in deep contempt of anyone that really does understand the rules (they call that 'wikilawyering' and it's an insult.) If you quote the rules to them, you will get absolutely nowhere. The admins will very often apply rules in a way that the rules themselves explicitly say is not what they mean.

  18. Re:Hold still on The UK's New Minister For Magic · · Score: 1

    I once had a really sore throat, it hung around for a few weeks. Seemed to be some kind of yeasty type thing.

    It disappeared when I had a pack of sugarfree gum, peppermint has antibacterial properties, and the xylitol tends to help bacteria wash away.

    It felt about 50% better immediately, and 80% better in 24 hours, and was gone in a couple of days.

    But i tried it again with similar symptoms a few months later and nothing happened.

    I suspect it did do something the first time, but I wouldn't be shocked if it was just coincidence or placebo.

  19. Re:Good on ISPs Throttling BitTorrent Traffic, Study Finds · · Score: 1

    Yup. And charge you more to recoup their greater investment.

  20. Re:Perspective, people, perspective on Ask Slashdot: How Would Room-Temp Superconductors Affect Us? · · Score: 1

    OK I need wooden stakes, shotguns and grenades, stat!

    With his room temperature body, it's clear that we have among us one of the undead!

    It's not clear whether it's a vampire or the start of the zombie apocalypse.

    But trust no-one, and watch your backs!

  21. Re:Communication as a form of intelligence on John Nash's Declassified 1955 Letter To the NSA · · Score: 1

    It didn't look like there was anything new in his paper to me. When he wrote it, the theory of cryptography would have been much further advanced than that, the idea that cryptographic strength can at its best go up exponentially with key length is pretty obvious.

    It didn't look like he'd come up with a strong crypto system either; I suspect that the only reason anyone even looked at it was because he was a professor of mathematics and so they would have given him the benefit of the doubt, but the contents were very amateurish, and I doubt Campaigne would have had trouble cracking it.

    If I've understood it correctly, it's an embarrassingly weak LINEAR encryption system, which is trivially crackable with matrix operations in N bits of known plaintext and encyphered text where N is the key length.

  22. Re:Greenhouse gas emissions on Sergey: In Soviet Russia, Rocket Detonates You! · · Score: 1

    Almost all of the people that have looked at the evidence for AGW carefully enough with any kind of open mind (including some skeptics) have come to the conclusion that it's almost certainly happening. There's virtually no scientific controversy, but that doesn't stop people trying to give the impression (often very successfully) that there's a lot of controversy.

    But there isn't.

    This fact, that there's little controversy over the basic facts, is not well known in America in particular, and that's really pretty sad.

  23. Re:Greenhouse gas emissions on Sergey: In Soviet Russia, Rocket Detonates You! · · Score: 1

    Its a false idea that in absolute terms space tourism releases a lot of CO2.

    That's a bit like saying that Concorde was a massive creator of carbon dioxide. While it produced a few times that of a 700 series flying London/NY, in global terms it was utterly insignificant. And that would have been true even if the aircraft had sold in quantity, there just weren't going to be enough aircraft.

    And space tourism is the same, nobody is going to be building the hulls in sufficient quantity for them to EVER use a globally significant amount of CO2.

    The real battle for CO2 isn't in these exceptional activities it's in the everyday. Driving, heating your houses, the energy embodied in food. These are massively bigger because you do them everyday, for your entire life, as opposed to for a few hours, on very, very rare occasions.

  24. Re:There are no vague threats on A Defense of Process Patents · · Score: 2

    >ALL software that is written was intentionally made possible by the hardware manufacturer.

    That's like saying that all books are made possible by the people that sold you the paper and pen; it's a false argument.

    > Add to this that all software is reducable to math, and there is no valid arguement left to patent software.

    Actually, in most cases it is possible to patent maths, provided it's a *part* of a design, not the whole thing. The whole point of patents is to commercially exploit an idea for money, and pure maths isn't exploitable, you have to build it into a system of some kind that has an interaction with the real world to do that.

    The real argument against patenting software is to do with its effects on society when you do that kind of thing, and the general impossibility of people working out whether software does or does not violate any software patents or not.

  25. Re:Hey DCTech on A Defense of Process Patents · · Score: 1

    The problem is that you have to patent ideas, because if you patent a particular thing, that's the same as copyright, and modifying it in relatively trivial ways that work exactly the same, but look exactly different means that it's not infringing copyright.

    So you end up having to protect the idea behind something, not the thing itself.

    I agree with 3. There should be some kind of way to work out what compensation the patent deserves rather than just rely on the patentee saying no.