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User: goombah99

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  1. 2.3M? gosh! on NASA Drops $2.3M On Supersonic Aircraft Research · · Score: 5, Insightful

    2.3M isn't much for even one supersonic research project. 2.3M for 8 is 300K. That's less than the cost of 2-engineer years at most companies. If they need an actual lab forget it.

  2. Difference between lifetime and energy recovery on Company Extends Alkaline Battery Life With Voltage Booster · · Score: 2

    The voltage curve for most Alkaline batteries hits 1.3 volts after about 20 to 30% of it's usefully extracable energy. then the curve flattens out dropping the next 0.3 volts to 1 volt after about 70 to 80% of the energy after which is drops like a rock.

    So if you could reclaim that 80% energy that might seem like 4x more or a total of 5x energy recovery. But the boost to 1.5v takes the energy out faster so in terms of time rather than energy recovery the lifetime is not increased so much.

    let's make some guesses and see where that gets us. Assume that there is a 0.2 volt diode drop somewhere in the system--- this seems pretty likely for any active circuit. So that means it's effectively boosting to 1.7 volts then the diode takes a cut. I can't do the integral in my brain so lets assume that the mean voltage it is boosting from is 1.1volts. So going from 1.1v to 1.7 volts means it is extracting about 33% more current than is actually in use. Thus it seems like this thing is going to suck down the battery pretty fast.

    So yeah it recovers all the energy which might be 5x a normal 1.3 volts cut out. But it wont last 5x longer cause it takes a big cut.

  3. Re:Please start uning my new site: Slashdot.com on Steve Albini: The Music Industry Is a Parasite -- and Copyright Is Dead · · Score: 1

    No I use a bigger font so it's an new work of art

  4. Re:Unintended consequences on China Unveils World's First Facial Recognition ATM · · Score: 1, Troll

    I suspect that the ATM won't recognize your personally unless you have your mouth open and your eyes closed.

  5. Please start uning my new site: Slashdot.com on Steve Albini: The Music Industry Is a Parasite -- and Copyright Is Dead · · Score: 2, Funny

    Since copyright is dead I just created an new web site called slashdot.com. It copies all the content from slashdot.org and uses that site as its backend. I just replace the ads with my own, but you won't notice any difference really. Oh and it also deletes all the Dice Astroturf articles for added value to you my viewers. So please start using my new site instead of the old one. You can check it out while you are pirating some music or videos in this age of copyright nullity.

  6. this is exactly what subsidies are for. on How Elon Musk's Growing Empire is Fueled By Government Subsidies · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Subsidies are policy implementation devices. When people take the subsidies under the condition the subsidies are offered the result is that something the government wants to happen happens. Theoretically its an inexpensive way to get things done without the government doing it and assuring private investment in the outcome. (so there's vested interest in successes and usually commercialization).

    Just because one guy happens to feed at the trough isn't a problem neccessarily. It could be. But that's why you have oversight.

  7. Re:C is not what people think it means on Ways To Travel Faster Than Light Without Violating Relativity · · Score: 1

    sure it does: you can travel 100 light years in less than 100 years. that's the only thing that is meaningful. Arguing about whether you can go faster than light is not meaningful.

  8. Re:C is not what people think it means on Ways To Travel Faster Than Light Without Violating Relativity · · Score: 1

    Wrong. But you illustrate perfectly what I meant when I said the way relativity is taught confuses people. You are actually a member of the vast majority of people that think you can't travel to a destination in less time than it would take light. You can!

  9. Re:Android to iDevice on The Tricky Road Ahead For Android Gets Even Trickier · · Score: 1

    I think you are making apple's point about fragmentation for them. Apple does not offer craptastic products. If you buy apple you know you are getting a fine product. THere used to be a saying that No one ever got fired for buying IBM. It means that even if you don't or cant do the due dilligence to become an expert there's one company you can trust not to give you a bad experience. Most people don't have your power of perception so that can't discriminate what's really different about the cheap android, the poorly thought out androiud and the perfect android. You can. But for everyone else it's much simpler and even less costly to just buy an apple and not have to spend the time and money it takes to become the expert. You also know that apple will always give you a path forward to the next iphone. When your uber phone becomes obsolete you have to do the research again to find its replacement. There's a lot of peace of mind in going apple. Fragmentation has hidden costs. that's why people get mad about it.

  10. Re:C is not what people think it means on Ways To Travel Faster Than Light Without Violating Relativity · · Score: 1

    Or the pesky part that at relativistic speeds hydrogen atoms rip through the ship as if it was tinfoil.

    well yes that too.

  11. C is not what people think it means on Ways To Travel Faster Than Light Without Violating Relativity · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's very easy to travel 100 light years in less than 100 years. Thus for all intents and purposes, one can travel distances at faster than the speed of light. The theory of relativity does not prevent this. You can without violating any laws accelerate a rocket ship at a comfortable 1g for as long as your fuel holds out. You will not get more massive. It will not take increasing amounts of fuel to maintain the 1g acceleration. If you accelerate for 1 year at 1g then you will know that you covering the distance to your destination at faster than the speed of light.

    What is true about relativity is this: and OUTSIDE observer will see you traveling at less than the speed of light. But from your perspective you can travel across galaxies in your lifespan with ease. So for all intents and purposes, you can go faster than the speed of light provided we everything from your point of view (which is all that matters). We define speed as the distance to your destination measured in an inertia frame, divided by the time it takes you to get there, all measurements from your perspective.

    the way reletivity is taught totally confuses people on this point: A HUMAN COULD EASILY TRAVEL ANYPLACE IN THE MILYWAY WITHIN THEIR LIFETIME WITH EXISTING TECHNOLOGY, except for the part about bringing your own fuel. we just don't know how to bring enough fuel to maintain a 1g acceleration for 50 years. This is why these new reactionless EM drives that NASA and others are toying with are really interesting. No doubt they are bullshit since they seem to defy newtons laws, but if it turns out they work.... see you on on the other side of the galaxy baby.

  12. Up Next: Monster Cable Ethernet Protocol on Microsoft Edge To Support Dolby Audio · · Score: 4, Funny

    Microsoft will no doubt partner with Monster Cable to come up with a new IP Layer for transporting web pages with perfect fidelity, much the way that Monster Cable CAT-5 provides perfect Ethernet.

  13. Dolby??? What's that. on Microsoft Edge To Support Dolby Audio · · Score: 0

    Dolby means zip in the age of AAC et al. In the 80's dolby was a useful compander for your cassette tapes. Anyone could make a compander, but there had to be a standard. Dolby did the research, came out with a good one, and there ya go. Way better than no compander because of the physics of writing audio to magnetic media. In the 90s when the world had moved onto CDs and no compander was needed, They kept the name alive by introducing multi-channel stereo and big base to movie theaters. Again it was a standard and backed by research so it worked great. The shaking big base sound was novel too. So we got all the disaster movies, like who can forget Towering Inferno?
    But we've been in the digital age since the 2000s and there's just nothing left for them to add. There's all sorts of formats for pristine audio (PONO) or streamed audio or 1000 songs in your pocket (AAC). these days your headphones matter more than the avialability of a good sound storage algorithm.
    Dolby is just a name that people of a certain age will buy because if it's reputation from the days of Cassettes.

  14. what's reassuring about this on SpaceX Cleared For US Military Launches · · Score: 2

    I love it that the Military is making this a level playing field. In the past there have been instances where the Military industrial complex promised jobs to retiring Majors close to the purchase reccomendation process, tilting things. Then there's the stockholm syndrome and the nobody-ever-got-fired for buying IBM decision.
    But for the past decade the military has gone very pragmatic. It's all about what protects the warfighter. What works. It even tells congress it doesn't actually want a lot of the boondoggles congress shoves down its throat. Not that it's in any way perfect or there aren't some empire builders left in the system. But it's really nice to see evidence of this in things like Space-X cutting in on these dance partners.

  15. Re:Falling forward not backward on Can Bad Scientific Practice Be Fixed? · · Score: 1

    wouldn't it make more sense, if there was an addendum to the peer review process that would be more along the lines of a peer priority publication review process? Something where the ignored gets to shout about it (if it's sound science, replicatable, testable, etc)

    Try reading "Faculty of 1000" it is close to what you seek. Also Nature and Science also have small articles flagging cool results even if they are in other journals with informed comementaries.

  16. Falling forward not backward on Can Bad Scientific Practice Be Fixed? · · Score: 3, Informative

    I agree it's not a problem. As can be seen at Retraction Watch, lots of bad science if found out and retracted. That's a good thing not a bad thing. One could ask how much of published science is made up and undetected but a better question would be how many results are simply crappy in the data or crappy in the analysis. It surely dwarfs the latter. But who cares. If the result is important it will be replicated. if it's not important then no one will cite it.

    ultimately it's the well cited articles that also get vetted by reproduction. Those constitute the body of science moving forward. the rest goes into the gutter of history.

    In skiing the saying is, if you fall and your fall isn't forward your not being aggressive enough. It's the same in science. People will make errors. If they weren't then then were not paying for aggressive enough research.

  17. Ghostery and adblock on Firefox's Optional Tracking Protection Reduces Load Time For News Sites By 44% · · Score: 1

    I use several anti tracking plugins and I've noticed that when I switch to a different browser without them the page load time is much faster. I also have googled safe surf turned on which blocks evil sites. In starting to think these tracking blockers and stuff slow things down. They don't really stop tracking since the blockers or google safe surf are middlemen who can track you.

    Thus I would welcome a unified approach to protecting myself that was actually faster

  18. Crypto is NEVER the answer if the question is Vote on Researchers Devise Voting System That Seems Secure, But Is Hard To Use · · Score: 1

    yES!! if the TYPICAL voter does not understand why the vote is secure the method fails. this is virtually the turing rest for any proposed schema.

    Someone needs to write one of those form letters we have for why someones proposal to end spam will fail for all these stupid people who think the problem is crytography.

  19. Maurice, you naughty little monkey on New Class of "Non-Joulian" Magnets Change Volume In Magnetic Field · · Score: 2

    King Joulian says he expands the mostest and has a magentically attractive mating dance.

  20. Re:python white space on The Reason For Java's Staying Power: It's Easy To Read · · Score: 1

    What about "other peoples code" did you not understand. I'm not talking about reading my own code.

  21. Re:python white space on The Reason For Java's Staying Power: It's Easy To Read · · Score: 1

    yes everyone gets burned by that one time. then it's a non-issue.

  22. swift on Ask Slashdot: Career Advice For an Aging Perl Developer? · · Score: 1

    If there were one single language to distinguish yourself it might be Swift. it's currenlty apple specific so this will limit your platforms and it's not a sysadmin language. it's an application language. But like perl it is suited for rapid development for small niches like the other languages you know. So you could sell it on a first to market sort of basis that might be consistent with your other skills. The advantage is it's new and thus a level playing field for the short dinosaur arms of an over-the-hill 40 something.

  23. python white space on The Reason For Java's Staying Power: It's Easy To Read · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Like most people I thought pythons enforced white space and avoidance of braces and elimination of semicolons was constricting. Then I realized how easy it was to read other people programs. Python used to be even simpler to read when it only provided one idioms for one job (avoiding a dozen way to do the same thing resulting in dialects). Now it's adding new idioms and genres so it's a little more opaque. But it's still easier to read than any language with comparable expressiveness. (Lua is refreshing for similar reasons).

  24. Goatse, now in tone on New Chrome Extension Uses Sound To Share URLs Between Devices · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'm going to create a goatse tone-code emitter and leave it running on the library computer.

    it used to be on the internet no one could tell if you are a dog. now they will know.

  25. I use the "strangers on a train" plug in. It exchanges all your facebook cookies every 5 minutes with another random person. It doesn't hurt your facebook login itself since you still need your password for that. It just scrambles your identity when you press like. If everyone used this then the "likes" would still add up to being meaningful but the user profiles would be completely homogenized and have no tracking value.