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User: mikael

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  1. "My God Jim, the entire oceans of this planet are made out of household drain cleaner!".

    That explains why the planet is the same colour as a bottle of Roto-Rooter or Dranex.

  2. Re:Roads will fall apart - HV road damage on A Platoon Of Networked Self-Driving Trucks Will Be Tested in the UK (phys.org) · · Score: 1

    I've seen that happen due to the camber of the road. The bus or lorry leans to one side, pushing the weight of the vehicle onto a couple of tyres. That's enough to stress the road to cause cracks, water gets into those cracks, washes away the underlying sand and gravel, then gets squeezed out the next time a vehicle goes over.

  3. Re:UAVs (RPAS) could stop the WW3 on East Africa Leads The World In Drone Delivery (cnn.com) · · Score: 1

    There there are some that don't believe in basic night-time car safety like headlights, seatbelts or even driving on the correct side of the road, because "if an accident happens, it is God's Will".

    Then ther are those who drink and drive. Just look at the accident in the UK caused by a drunk trunk driver who overturned onto a taxi carrying eight family members.

  4. Re:Competition and Regulations on East Africa Leads The World In Drone Delivery (cnn.com) · · Score: 1

    Half a century ago, if someone was unemployed and had a flat-bed truck, they could make money simply by operating as a man-with-a-van moving company for anyone who needed stuff moved around. Now, you need a heavy-vehicle drivers license, to be a licensed haulage operator, have licenses to handle medical, chemical, biological cargo, maybe even airport parking permits and other licenses.

  5. Diamonds form when the carbon is under intense pressure. Then the atomic electron bonds are forced into a tetrahedral shape rather than regular hexagons like graphite or 3D shapes like buckyballs. Atmospheric temperature at the visible surface is -218C. Temperature at the icy rock core is 5100C. Inbetween it is possible there are altitudes where temperature and pressure are enough for water to form:

    http://www.dailyastronomynews....
    http://inspirehep.net/record/8...

  6. Re:How does the proof-of-work aspect work? on Burger King Now Has Its Own Cryptocurrency - the 'Whoppercoin' - in Russia (fortune.com) · · Score: 1

    Well, if you use solar panels to power your mining rig, then you can earn SolarCoins at the same time.

  7. Re:Regulation on Software Is Eating the Auto Industry (strategyanalytics.com) · · Score: 1

    Your vehicle crosses the equator in autonomous mode and does a U turn the minute latitude changes sign. Then you are stuck in a car doing loops until manual mode is reactivated.

  8. Re:Not trig as we understand it today. on Ancient Tablet Reveals Babylonians Discovered Trigonometry (sciencemag.org) · · Score: 1

    We were taught there are a few angles that can be defined as fractions relating to the square roots of two and three.

    Multiply those by 2, the square roots of two and three, and all those fractions would disappear and become ratios.

    That tablet looks like a reference table at the back or front of a textbook.

  9. Re: The biggest thing we need on Why We Need To Decentralize The Web (postlight.com) · · Score: 1

    The problem is that there are blacklists which include ranges of dynamic IP addresses allocated to cable companies and other broadband service providers. If you do purchase a domain name with a static IP address, then usually all your Email gets stored on servers outsourced to an affiliate of Microsoft or Google.

  10. Re:A series of connections on Why We Need To Decentralize The Web (postlight.com) · · Score: 1

    The problem is that the national and international providers moved over to a hub network architecture. Cable companies with their "head-end" servers, satellite companies with a broadcast satellite. The telecoms companies might have multiple peers but websites have to have a host, a DDNS protection service, and depend on DNS for people to find their website. Any of those can be affected by political pressure.

  11. Re:Maybe they used Ancestry.com? on Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, And It Won't Tell Me How (gizmodo.com) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I had some weirdness with Linkedin when it started sending me adverts and articles relating to living with someone with terminal cancer. Turns out one of my parents cats had colon cancer and they didn't want to tell me. So I would guess that the algorithms use a kind of diffusion process. Every person has their own unique ID number, then all bits of information about them get linked to that ID number. Each person also had links to other people. Then deductive logic can be applied. If someone is a skydiver, then all those links can be updated to have "knows someone who is a skydiver". Maybe this gets weighted by the number of people they know or how many links it takes.

    Other time, I looked up something like "protecting property from grizzly bears" while renting an apartment downtown. Then I started receiving catalogs for bear traps, camo gear and hunting rifles.

  12. Re:JavaScript should replace C on JavaScript Is Eating The World (dev.to) · · Score: 1

    C is meant to be a cross-platform low-level language that can be translated to any type of processor (CPU, GPU, DSP). That's the one and only reason for it to be created by Bell Labs. A language that would allow the source for an OS and device drivers to be ported across different hardware, particularly telephone exchanges.

    The main problem with C was that you end up rewriting boilerplate code for every new data structure you create as an ADT (Abstract Data Type). That was solved with C++ using templates and STL.

    Python is more close to what you want, which allows functions and objects to be implemented as templates. As long as there is a function that matches the name in the python script it will get called. If there isn't a class member by the name requested, the script exits.

  13. Re:"Smart" TVs are stupid. on Samsung TV Owners Furious After Software Update Leaves Sets Unusable (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    They are constantly upgrading the hardware and device drivers. Within the embedded market with SoC's, every company sells the "intellectual property" for the chip logic (VHDL source files), along with C++/C/assembler device driver source code, all tested and verified to work together. These are constantly being upgraded every few months depending on the contract. Maybe they find performance enhnacements for the hardware or device driver and that upsets something elsewhere; timing, mutex, bootup sequence.

  14. Re:"Smart" TVs are stupid. on Samsung TV Owners Furious After Software Update Leaves Sets Unusable (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Smart-TV's are basically giant smartphones. Same CPU's (ARM quad-core) but with Samsung Tizen OS (Before 2015, it was something called Orsay).

  15. There was an urban legend that a man with a drill bit or titanium implant was able to hear BBC Radio 1 whenever he drove near a large national radio transmitter.

  16. Re:It's what makes me valuable to my company. on Does the World Need Polymaths? (bbc.com) · · Score: 3, Funny

    We once had some cosmetology students visit our Astronomy lab on an open day. I guess they didn't read Cosmology and Stellar Modelling correctly.

  17. Re:There is a slight misunderstanding here on Does the World Need Polymaths? (bbc.com) · · Score: 2

    More importantly, you need the track record of publishing papers. Then you have to be lucky that you aren't "stepping one someone else's toes" when you publish a paper. The Computer Science field is that tight. So many researchers stick to the soft psychology side of the field rather than the chewy meaty algorithms side.

    There just are so many researchers out in the field now. There are 30+ people working on the C++ standard specification, and about 3 million C++ developers.

    Go back to Greek times, and there are a documented handful of people researching mathematics (Aristotle, Archimedes).

  18. Re:Version Control = Good on Developer Accidentally Deletes Three-Month of Work With Visual Studio Code (bingj.com) · · Score: 1

    I briefly had to work with SourceSafe on a large team with 20+ developers. It was absolute chaos with the official workplace policy of backup everything as often as you can. The solution to the problem of "the application isn't running" was "try pulling the latest changes and do a rebuild".

  19. Re:Version Control = Good on Developer Accidentally Deletes Three-Month of Work With Visual Studio Code (bingj.com) · · Score: 1

    I'd recommend an external USB hard disk drive of the same profile as your internal drive and with a cloned version of your Linux/Windows dual boot configuration. That's saved me during a power failure that temporarily whacked the drive (caused by a relative having several beers before starting some DIY). I could just slot out the old drive and pop in the external drive, fix the boot installer and continue working.

  20. Re: Version Control = Good on Developer Accidentally Deletes Three-Month of Work With Visual Studio Code (bingj.com) · · Score: 1

    The hazard with git is that a "git pull" will overwrite uncomitted files that have been changed if someone upstream has changed those files.

  21. Re:Black Box satellite Links on New MH370 Analysis Again Suggests Plane Came Down Outside Search Area (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    The airplane engines did send diagnostics to the manufacturer. But the cost of maintaining an a "always on" link with a satellite was decided to be too expensive. The aircraft engines sent out messages when they start, reach cruising speed and stopped. It was only when they stopped that the final message was received and the flight path into the ocean was determined. This matched some of the flights that the pilot made with his home flight simulator.

  22. Re:Build more housing on A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her To Work by 7 AM (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    Because you want to change jobs without having to move house. Changing jobs in a big city, simply involves changing your commute. Changing jobs with a one company town employer involves a complete relocation of buying/selling a home, find the children a new school.

    Employers want to expand where they can recruit workers easily, ideally overnight. With a big city, they can just put out adverts. With a small town employer, they either have to keep that position open for ages or grab whoever happens to be free at the workplace at the time.

  23. Re:Build more housing on A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her To Work by 7 AM (nytimes.com) · · Score: 2

    The problem with smaller cities is that you end up with a complete relocation to another city to find a new job. Unless your industry sector has a large enough supply of employers, being an engineer becomes like Logan's Run. Then you end up with people commuting 50+ miles between smaller cities. This happens in England in the South East (Reading, Basingstoke, Oxford, Cambridge, Southampton).

  24. Re:Build more housing on A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her To Work by 7 AM (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    More apartments/flats/condo units attracts more single people. Then the bus services need to be upgraded as well as the freeways. Then all those single people want family homes.

  25. Re:I took the bus once on A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her To Work by 7 AM (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    Some places, a taxi ride is about £2.50/mile, a bus fare is £3/mile/person, taxi's can be picked up at a taxi queue, or wait 10 to 30 minutes depending on business (high demand when it is raining, cold or windy, train services have been cancelled). Then it becomes cheaper for three or more people to take a taxi than to take a bus.