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User: mikael

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  1. Re:Is it dead yet? on Nvidia Is Giving Up On the Cryptocurrency Mining Market (latimes.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In the very beginning, one man paid for two pizzas using 10,000 bitcoins, which at the highest price would have been $80,000,000

    https://www.investopedia.com/n...

  2. In France, you can buy PAYG Mobicarte, but when you top up that SIM card, you have to use the money up within six months, otherwise the mobile phone company deactivates that SIM card and confiscates the money.

  3. “The first ten million years were the worst," said Marvin, "and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”

  4. There's an alloy known as "Electrum". It's been around since the time of the Pharaohs and was used to decorate the capstones of pyramids as well as to make coins. It's a mix of gold, silver and copper.

    But on the periodic table, none of those elements are superconducting. That's due to those elements only have one free electron in the outer shell and two electrons are required to form a Cooper pair.

    http://www.superconductors.org...

  5. Re:Didn't they just start running their own buses? on Apple Argued That Buildings at Its Headquarters Were Worth $200, Not $1B, To Reduce Its Tax Bill: Report (sfchronicle.com) · · Score: 1

    Given the size of the Bay Area, it can take three hours for a bus to get from San Jose to San Francisco if it were to go through all the residential streets in a space filling curve. A shuttle bus service goes on a direct route between pick-up points and a campus building.

  6. Re:Didn't they just start running their own buses? on Apple Argued That Buildings at Its Headquarters Were Worth $200, Not $1B, To Reduce Its Tax Bill: Report (sfchronicle.com) · · Score: 2

    Back around 2000, many companies (Sun, Google) had their own shuttle services that went between the different corporate buildings and Caltrain stations. They were needed to allow employees to get between buildings for meetings and many didn't want to drive along freeways each day.
    Google now runs luxury coach buses through San Francisco.

    There was a big hoo-hah about how these buses were using bus-stops but not actually making any payments to the cities, so there was a deal made that involved Google making a $7 million donation for free childrens rides on public buses:

    http://time.com/10315/google-b...

    https://www.wired.com/2015/11/...

  7. Re:Open source crypto to the rescue on Australia To Pass Bill Providing Backdoors Into Encrypted Devices, Communications (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    They only need enough backdoors to view the contents of your screen, listen to the microphone and speaker output. How you stream data to your phone doesn't matter.

  8. Let the Army join in on Should the US Air Force Bomb Forest Fires? (popularmechanics.com) · · Score: 1

    If the Air Force can get to bomb forest fires, then the Army should be allowed to shoot down thunderstorms.

  9. Unless one company has a monopoly through patents or private data.

  10. Re:To little, to late and to expensive! on Intel's 9th Gen Processors Rumored To Launch In October With 8 Cores (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Supply and Demand and as marketeers say, "the sweet spot" - maximum price with supply matching demand. They do this with their CPU's. The old stock is set at bargain ban prices, while the new stock is sold at premium prices (higher clock speed, larger cache, more cores, multi-core systems).

  11. Re:Wear birds at Trillions of micrometers on land on Watch Fish Swim By Petabytes of Data At Microsoft's Underwater Data Center (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    Sea water maintains a constant temperature compared to land. Coastal areas have a more moderate climate than those inland.

    The modules seem to be designed from oil industry technology - designed to survive in a salt environment like the North Sea. That will corrode just about any metal. The winter storms with 30m ocean waves won't help either.

  12. Modern aircraft carriers are more hydrodynamic, use lighter metals, are designed to have fewer staff and make use of greater automation.

  13. Re:Should the government require audit of designs? on Researcher Finds A Hidden 'God Mode' on Some Old x86 CPUs (tomshardware.com) · · Score: 1

    These days, the processors come as the actual silicon with firmware (microcode and nanocode) uploaded on power up. These can be changed at any time, so it wouldn;t matter.

  14. Re:Is it on the die? on Researcher Finds A Hidden 'God Mode' on Some Old x86 CPUs (tomshardware.com) · · Score: 2

    With fuzzing, you just send random data to whatever input stream you are trying to test. This could be text processing, TCP/IP packets sent to a server socket, or machine-code instructions to a CPU. In this case, every bad instruction should be trapped and good instructions should be processed.

  15. Ocean waves are caused by the strong winds from storms. The storms may be hundreds of miles away, but the energy will be transferred through the water as waves with minimum loss. Thunderstorms have strong downdrafts as well as shock waves from lightning and microbursts. At the location of the storm, the wave amplitude can easily be 100 meters. This will reduce as the waves travel away from the storm.

    Perhaps a shockwave could travel through the air at the same time. Fighter jets going supersonic can be heard from 200 miles away.

  16. Re:Apple has been treading water for years with Ma on Hollywood Goes Open Source: Academy Teams Up With Linux Foundation To Launch Academy Software Foundation (variety.com) · · Score: 1

    That was happening 20 years ago. Back then, startup VFX companies were building their own render farms out of commodity PC's and 3Dmax. They didn't care about the failure rate vs. reliability against a high-end workstation. A cluster of five commodity PC's matched the reliability/performance of one workstation/server. Renderfarm management software took care of the rest such as making use of idle PC's.

    There are many open source libraries like OpenEXR (for high dynamic range images). It saves an great deal of pain if everyone can use the same image loaders/savers rather than having a dozen different variations based on what each company interprets the specification as the most commonly used features).

  17. Re:They'll get what they asked for. on Artificial Intelligence is Coming for Hiring, and It Might Not Be That Bad (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    Those firms just get you to change your employer descriptions from "I did this, that and a bit of twiddly stuff" to using buzzwords "Achieved", "Led", "Successfully", "Developed new", and all that high-achiever keyword things.

  18. Re:More applicants than jobs on Artificial Intelligence is Coming for Hiring, and It Might Not Be That Bad (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    What programming languages do you use? There are some areas that programmers won't dare to go because the API's are undocumented and undebuggable, or the employers don't give out references when you leave.

  19. Re:Excellent on Chemists Discover How Blue Light Speeds Blindness · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Blue light in this context is just that - regular blue pixels on a computer screen. There are night-safe modes which tone down these pixels.

    Your retinas has around seven layers of rods, cones and processing neurons. Light is refracted through the lens so that infra-red light hits blood vessels, red light which has a longer wavelength and travels less deeper into the retina hits the upper layers. Blue light in this context is goes into the deepest layer of the retina because the wavelength is shorter and has more energy. UV light gets filtered out by the lens (but causes cataracts in the long term).

  20. Re:Changing the way storage is delivered. on Intel Announces the 'World's Densest' SSD (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    It would be a simple way to update your OS and personal disk space. A single SSD for each partition. Just doing an upgrade would require swapping or adding an OS SSD.

  21. There is so much turbulence inside a fireball with volumes of gas expanding and compressing faster than sound waves can travel across them. However, with the Sun, there are sound waves that travel across the interior:

    https://www.livescience.com/62...

  22. Between 8000 and 9600 meters/second. But there is so much turbulence and magnetic field flux that it is like wanting to know the speed of sound inside a fireball.

  23. Re:Terrible Summary on Europe's Heatwave is Forcing Nuclear Power Plants To Shut Down (qz.com) · · Score: 1

    When plankton get too hot, they release chemicals into the ocean and atmosphere that encourages cloud formation.

  24. Re: uhhh cool the water then? on Europe's Heatwave is Forcing Nuclear Power Plants To Shut Down (qz.com) · · Score: 1

    I meant that the human body generates about 100w/heat an hour. Even been in crowded room? It gets quite hot rapidly. Add a few million new residents, and it's like installing patio heaters all over the place.

  25. Re: uhhh cool the water then? on Europe's Heatwave is Forcing Nuclear Power Plants To Shut Down (qz.com) · · Score: 1

    Given that the average person generates 1kw of heat/hour, adding millions of new citizens to Europe each year must be the equivalent of adding a nuclear reactors all over the continent.