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User: Nerobro

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  1. We're there - Koenigsegg has done it. on Camless Internal Combustion and the Digital Age (hackaday.com) · · Score: 1

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4p-55a3WV8

    Koenigsegg has had at least one car driving around with air/hydraulicly operated valves for a few years now. It's got tens of thousands of miles on the setup.

    Now.. someone just needs to get the system to market.

  2. Is there a market for a commodity parts laptop? on Building a Laptop Enclosure To Last (makezine.com) · · Score: 1

    I wonder if there would be a market for say.. an ITX based laptop case. ITX means you can use standard motherboards, and then the case is just a keyboard, monitor, and power. .... The most difficult part would be getting a decent cabling situation.

  3. Re:Based on Aircraft Registration on Drone Registration Is FAA's Way of Getting You To Read Their "EULA" (hackaday.com) · · Score: 1

    Airplanes can be registered to corporations. If you chose to, you can completely detach yourself from the airplane you may own. Also, most planes aren't privately owned. Your pilots license isn't publicly searchable. Neither is your drivers license. Neither is your license plate! The drone registration is a registration of pilots, versus UAVs.

    The rules "aren't" the same.

  4. How cheap is cheap? What needs to be done? on Ask Slashdot: Cheapest Functional Computer For Students? · · Score: 1

    So, how cheap is cheap? $50? $100? $200? Does it need to be a laptop? Portable?

    Is the goal to have something that can do e-mail, web browsing, and writing papers?

    I noted the suggestion of linux. Are you prepared to teach linux? Android has it's "mostly single tasking" thing going on, and it's cranky memory management, so I'm not so happy with android as a desktop environment.

    As has been suggested, the HP Stream 11's are pretty good. They're a very capable laptop. They're available at Walmart and are about $200.

    Going much cheaper sends you into some really strange territory. Annoyingly the Pi-Top is $300... Which is a lot less powerful than a Stream11. If android is vaguely OK, there's a ton of android based tablets and laptop-ish things on the market.

  5. Databases, and the associated abuse? on When Should Cops Be Allowed To Take Control of Self-Driving Cars? · · Score: 1

    This bothers me in a bunch of ways.

    First, is implementation.

    I can think of two ways of doing this. First is local radio, or light based communications. All automated cars broadcast, and then a reciever determines who's where, so the officer can direct a specific machine to stop. Then that box has to transmit the right code to casue a car to stop. I can not see how that protocol will not be hacked and abused in weeks, if not hours of implementation. That's it's own little version of hades. If "anyone" can stop your car, you won't let ANYONE stop your car.

    The second method, is with a database. Each automated car, sends it's location to a central database at all times. When a police officer wants to pull you over, he can scan the database and find your car, and tell it to do something. This method seems like it would be reliable. But then we have the database problem.

    That database could be stolen. Now someone can track you, and knowing databases, now knows where your car has been for X number of days, weeks, or months.

    Second, the police now know where you are at all times. Well, that's someone, but it's supposed to be someone safe. Third, now there's a database to sell, and a command that can be issued that stops your car. The slope gets VERY steep here... so lets tread carefully.

    Lets say you have 50 parking tickets. The private agency in Chicago that covers parking tickets wants to boot your car. They pay the Chicago PD to have access to that database, and issue the signal to boot your car. ... anywhere. Lets say you're in ohio when they do their processing run, well you could be stuck there.

    The same goes for registration. Lets say the state sees your registration expire, they'll tell your car that it can't drive legally. So it wont' drive. Sounds fine, until you look at the realities of where you can drive an unregistered car. Or transport it. GPS isn't accurate enough, property lines aren't drwan well enough, and many other factors would lead to disabled cars in legal places.

    Finally, what if your car gets registered wrong? Someone else's car is the target of disablement, and instead your car gets disabled.

    Sure, all of these things could probally be addressed with lots of time and paperwork, but nobody is going to pay me back or my time spent fixing their errors.

  6. Gesture Mosaic - best small input I've ever used.. on The Challenge of Getting a Usable QWERTY Keyboard Onto a Dime-sized Screen · · Score: 1

    I really hope gesture mosaic comes back. I could keep up with touch typists using that input method.

    http://www.pitecan.com/presentations/PenInput/gesturemosaic.html

  7. This has been done before. on UK Company Wants To Deliver Parcels Through Underground Tunnels · · Score: 2

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

    And they operated into the 1970's.

    London is going to be a hard nut to crack, ti's already got several levels of tunnels under the city.

    There are some real issues with underground tunnels, especially ones to small to be traversed by people. People are "universal power tools" and can get in there and fix unusual problems. If a rail car the size of a trash can gets stuck in a tunnel you can send a man down.. figuruing out how to get it out is going to be a real trial.

  8. And T-mobiles software is terrible... on T-Mobile Smartphones Outlast Competitors' Identical Models · · Score: 4, Informative

    And this is with t-mobiles software installed. With a clean phone, the T-mobile "my account" software is the highest usage bit of software on the phone. Disabling it was worth hours of runtime.

  9. Re:Because .. on World's Only Diesel-Electric Honda Insight · · Score: 1

    No.. not really... Through cracking we typically get something like 55 gallons of gasoline from a single barrel of oil. yes, we end up with MORE volume than we start with. Gasoline is a lighter fraction, and we can make the heavier molucules fall apart and reform as gasoline.

  10. All major clients, but it still requires talking.. on P2P Traffic Shaping For Home Use? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I love how people pimp their own client. But nearly every PTP client I've touched, has bandwidth limiting. Some of them, uTorrent included, allows you to schedule your bandwidth.

    The real problem here isn't traffic shaping, but about traffic courtesy. Your housemate may not know how much trouble their causing. Talk to them. Get them to set their max speeds to 1/2 or 1/4 of the available bandwidth.

    They may be surprised when their OWN web browsing gets better.

    Yet this does all hinge on you talking to said housemate. Go talk. I've had the "talk" and been the person talking to the housemate. It usually works out well.

  11. Re:Green Cheese Market on China Plans Moonbase · · Score: 1

    yes, it does matter...... you still have the same mass as steel on earth, so it will take much more propellant to shuffle it around. Weight is not mass ;-)

  12. a corperate anthem.. on Corporate Anthems Go Corporate · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Isn't this going a bit far... well maybe not considdering that companys can be larger than countrys...

  13. Re:Big Cases. on Improving Computer Form Factors? · · Score: 1

    The cases aren't stainless ;-) they a magnesium I think. those cases from SS would be in the hundreds of pounds instead of the 35kg they label themselves as.

  14. Where Will these be used? on Tiny Linux Computer Overview · · Score: 1

    Are we begining to see market saturation here? I mean, we have a plethora of x86 compatable systems. And we also have a slew of Linux only, or even "build your own os" SBC's.

    Who is using these comptuers? The last time I saw a SBC was inside one of the gear cutting machines at my dad's shop. And this is a device the size of a small moving van. (yea a SBC is underkill)

    I think the question comes down to, what's the ACTUALL market these guys are selling to?