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User: TheRaven64

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  1. Re:Highway Only to Speed Deployment on Autonomous Trucking · · Score: 1

    Lidar is typically used in situations where you have this kind of interference, but the solution is conceptually pretty simple. You tune the detectors to a specific wavelength and you vary that wavelength between devices. You can typically vary the wavelength in software, so if you detect a lot of interference then you just hop to another frequency. If someone is intentionally blanketing your entire band, then it's not really any different from someone shining a floodlight in the eyes of human drivers - you just point them out to the police.

  2. Re:Not Ready Yet... on Famo.us: Do We Really Need Another JavaScript Framework? · · Score: 1

    That's true on the desktop, but absolutely untrue on mobile devices. You typically have an OpenVG accelerator in the SoC that uses a lot less power than the GPU (or is part of the GPU, but uses a lot less power than the 3D mode).

  3. Re:really? on Investor Tim Draper Announces He Won Silk Road Bitcoin Auction · · Score: 2
    If you are planning on taking Bitcoins in payment for some real product then you want some assurance that you can sell the Bitcoins for more than the cost of that product. You get this implicitly with established currencies, because they have reasonably stable inflation rates and, most importantly, those inflation rates are usually tied to your local economy and so the value of the currency doesn't alter in terms of what you can buy with it in the short term (if you're hoarding significant amounts of currency, rather than investing it in your business, for example using it to pay your employees or buy stock then you're a currency speculator and so have different requirements). With an immature and volatile currency like Bitcoin, you effectively need to buy Bitcoin futures or have some other entity underwrite your Bitcoins.

    If you want to be in the business of offering payment services that accept Bitcoins, then you want to be able to do this underwriting. People will be a lot more willing to accept Bitcoins if you can say 'the value of BTC fluctuates relative to USD, but we guarantee that we will always buy them at this exchange rate. If you use this exchange rate for setting your prices then you will never suffer from these fluctuations'. To be able to do this (and not make huge losses), you need to be able to influence the market price by buying and selling in large quantities and by avoiding selling when the price is too low. Having a large initial stash of Bitcoin helps with this.

  4. Re:Dear God WHY? on Ask Slashdot: Replacing Paper With Tablets For Design Meetings? · · Score: 3, Funny

    Paper doesn't scale very well. I have a repository for a project that's been going on for a few years and has a few hundred photos of whiteboards. Trying to find one is almost impossible because there's no full-text search for photos of whiteboards. If you don't need diagrams, then running OpenEtherPad with a machine connected to the projector as a client and just saving the output is much better, but I've not found a good equivalent that supports drawing (especially not free-form drawing on a tablet or whiteboard and then automatically recognising shapes and handwriting, as the Newton's drawing program did 20 years ago).

  5. Re:do they want him to take an unpaid time off? on Amazon Sues After Ex-Worker Takes Google Job · · Score: 1

    Enforcement of non-competes varies a lot between jurisdictions, but there is some precedent for requiring the company that demands the non-compete to pay the employee's salary for the duration. This also provides a good incentive for non-competes to scale with employment time.

  6. Re:Non-compete agreements are BS. on Amazon Sues After Ex-Worker Takes Google Job · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A contract does not require a signature, it requires a meeting of minds. A signature is one way of demonstrating this. Accepting the pay cheque and showing up for work is another.

  7. Re:WTF on Seven ISPs Take Legal Action Against GCHQ · · Score: 4, Informative

    UNIT is not a British organisation, it's under UN control.

  8. Re:Perl still works, and PHP is fine on Ask Slashdot: Choosing a Web Language That's Long-Lived, and Not Too Buzzy? · · Score: 2

    That's the same logic people used for choosing C, and just past the 25th anniversary of the first remote exploit of a buffer overflow vulnerability, it's still top of the list of causes of CVEs.

  9. Re:Political/Moral on How Often Do Economists Commit Misconduct? · · Score: 4, Informative

    No one cares how much students in the UK protest, because they don't vote. Students are a demographic with one of the worst turnouts in elections. For allegedly intelligent people, it's surprising how few seem to realise the correlation between this and getting shafted by their elected officials. Go back to the '60s, and they had a lot more influence because they were much more likely to vote.

  10. Re:A popular laptop OS? on FreeDOS Is 20 Years Old · · Score: 1

    Only if you've got a really old printer. Remember, DOS predates abstraction layers and clean printer APIs. You print from DOS by opening the serial or parallel port and sending some data over it. If you've got a DOS program that can print to PostScript printers, then you're better off printing to a file from DOSBox and then printing the result from the host OS.

    That said, there's little reason to use most DOS business applications these days. There are typically open source alternatives that are far better as they aren't written with such tight resource constraints in mind and can reuse GUI toolkits and so on (again, remember that DOS programs had to come with their own embedded GUI system and for most of them 4MB of RAM was a lot - a modern program can use more than that for the window buffer). I still occasionally fire up the Psion Series 3A emulator in DOSBox (if you tweak it a bit, it will run at 640x480) and use the spreadsheet though, because I've not found another one that's as easy to use with just a keyboard and constantly moving my hand from keyboard to mouse becomes annoying.

  11. Re:Can I play Descent on it? on FreeDOS Is 20 Years Old · · Score: 2

    EA released Command and Conquer Gold as a free download a few years ago. That's the Windows 95 version using the Red Alert engine (so high-resolution 640x480 graphics!), but with the same game as the original. It ran quite nicely in WINE when I tried it (a long time go now, may need an old version as WINE doesn't monotonically improve, but according to the apps db it works fine and is rated 'gold', which seems appropriate...).

  12. Re:Best DOS game... on FreeDOS Is 20 Years Old · · Score: 1

    As a game? I vaguely recall enjoying Doom on release more than Quake on release. I enjoyed Duke Nukem 3D a lot more than either. The thing that made Quake special wasn't the game, it was that it was an off-the-shelf game engine with a free SDK. All of the game-specific behaviour (including things like the flight paths of projectiles) was contained in a bytecode file that had the source and compiler provided. For a while, I had about 500MB of mods for Quake installed (the game itself was around 50MB). Doom had all of the game behaviour hard coded, so all that mods could do was change the visual appearance. People wrote rally games and flight simulators in the Quake engine as mods. There was nothing like QTank, AirQuake, Quake Horrorshow, or Quake Rally for Doom. There definitely wasn't anything like Team Fortress, which accounted for the majority of the time I spent playing Quake.

  13. Re:Good? on Mayors of Atlanta & New Orleans: Uber Will Knock-Out Taxi Industry · · Score: 1

    I tried taking a shuttle to the Minneapolis Hilton on my last trip to the US. I was told it would be there in 20 minutes and would take 25 minutes. For a tenth the price, there's a light rail service that runs every 15 minutes, takes about 25 minutes, and stops 5 minutes walk (or, for the exceptionally lazy, a short free bus ride) away from the hotel. I arrived at the hotel at about the same time as the shuttle. Given the price of the flight and the room, I'd have been happy to spend the money for the shuttle if it had got me there faster, but paying ten times as much for no time saving (and to sit in a more cramped form of transport - the light rail had loads of space, the shuttle was packed) didn't appeal.

  14. Re:Good? on Mayors of Atlanta & New Orleans: Uber Will Knock-Out Taxi Industry · · Score: 1

    At least in London, there are inspectors who pose as members of the public and take taxi rides. If they are refused or the driver doesn't take the most direct route, he can lose his taxi license.

  15. Re:But I thought it was already dead? on Google Kills Orkut To Focus On YouTube, Blogger and Google+ · · Score: 2

    Part of the reason for Orkut's decline in the US was that it was overrun by Portuguese speakers (mostly Brazilian) who posted (in Portuguese) in every English-language discussion, making the system unusable by anyone who didn't speak Portuguese. For the same reason, it remained popular where Portuguese was the national language or commonly spoken.

    Anyway, you've got to love the message from Google: Use social networks, you're giving a third party the ability to kill your online presence and the identity that you use for communicating with your friends on a whim!

  16. Re:A/B-Testing on Facebook's Emotion Experiment: Too Far, Or Social Network Norm? · · Score: 1

    First, no it's not, nice try.

    At the very least, the majority of advertising is aiming to make people buy things that they don't need. Beyond that, it's often stuff that's unhealthy or inferior to alternatives available at a lower price.

    Second, people are aware that it is marketing/advertising

    No they're not. For example, count the number of adverts that you're aware of in a film some time. Then look up how many careful product placements there are. See also, paid product reviews, social network endorsements, and so on. Most people are aware of a small fraction of the marketing targeted at them.

  17. Re:A/B-Testing on Facebook's Emotion Experiment: Too Far, Or Social Network Norm? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A significant amount of marketing is intended to cause harm to 100% of the user-base, so being ethically unsound doesn't appear to be a problem.

  18. Re:California also legalized using polished turds on California Legalizes Bitcoin · · Score: 1

    That depends on the volatility. If the price of bitcoin today is $600, but judging by previous trends, might swing to $200 tomorrow, then I'd probably just take the money. If it were a really sound choice, then my friend would be an idiot to offer it: he'd just sell the bitcoin, give me the $400, and pocket the $200. Volatility in a market is generally related to the ratio of speculators (people who just buy and sell the commodity but neither produce nor consume it) to producers and consumers. You need some speculators to provide liquidity (when you produce something, it's good if you can find a buyer now, even if no one wants it yet and it's someone who's just buying it in the hope that they can sell it later), but if their trades start to dominate the market then you get lots of volatility.

    The volatility of bitcoin has dropped off a bit recently, but it wasn't long ago that it was considered stable if it only had 25% swings in the value over the course of a day. That is the last thing that you want form a currency. If someone pays me a token in exchange for some work, then I hope to be able to exchange that token for something of approximately equal value when I need to. A small amount of inflation is fine (you don't want people hoarding the tokens, you want an incentive for people with spare capital to invest it in real things), but it should be predictable.

  19. Re:Sounds about right... on Researchers Claim Wind Turbine Energy Payback In Less Than a Year · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's also possible with smartgrid things to tweak the demand curve a bit. For example, a fridge or freezer needs to keep the contents in a temperature range with a little bit of leeway. It will typically let things warm until they're near the top of the range, then run the compressor until they're close to the bottom of the range. If your freezer knows about the spot price of electricity, then you may set it to an economy mode, where it will start the compressor early if power is sufficiently cheap, so by the time the price goes up (i.e. supply drops) you're effectively storing energy by having the entire contents of the freezer at the bottom end of its temperature range. The same is true for electric cars - if you're using one to commute and the battery will last a few days, then the amount that you're willing to pay for electricity varies based on how low the battery charge is. If it doesn't have enough for tomorrow's commute, then you'll pay more. If it does, then you'd happily top-up the charge cheaply when there's some surplus supply.

  20. Re:Sounds about right... on Researchers Claim Wind Turbine Energy Payback In Less Than a Year · · Score: 4, Informative

    Transmission losses matter a lot less when generation doesn't cost you anything. If you have a coal power plant and demand drops, you burn less coal and lower your costs. When demand increases, you burn more coal and make more money. With a wind power plant, if the wind is blowing but demand drops then your choice is either 100% loss by just wasting the power, or something less than 100% loss by transmitting it. For very long distances, the same transmission mechanisms that we use for fossil fuels are applicable: store it in chemical form and put it in trucks / trains / boats. Whether the chemical form is hydrogen, diesel, aluminium, or something else is up to you.

  21. Re:California also legalized using polished turds on California Legalizes Bitcoin · · Score: 1

    Little discs of metal and rectangles of paper / fabric / plastic are also quite lacking in use. There's nothing wrong with Bitcoin (aside from the tracking aspects) if you think of it as a digital coin. The problem is thinking that just because you can stamp out a load of coins that you now have a lot of wealth. The US dollar has a value because the Federal Government will enforce your ability to use it to settle debts held by US citizens and will accept it as payment in taxes. Cryptocurrencies are a good way of exchanging tokens, but just being able to exchange tokens doesn't mean that you've exchanged something of value.

  22. Re:Use cell or GPS location to turn on Wi-Fi on Google Demos Modular Phone That (Almost) Actually Works · · Score: 1

    Cell gives you far too coarse-grained information for that to be useful. GPS uses more power than leaving the WiFi on in receive-only mode.

  23. Re:Good. on Google Starts Removing Search Results After EU Ruling · · Score: 3, Informative

    If by 'valid fear' you mean 'prejudice-inspired paranoia', then your statement may be true.

  24. Re:Turn off WiFi on Google Demos Modular Phone That (Almost) Actually Works · · Score: 1

    Turning off WiFi when you're out of range of a base station is easy. Turning it back on when you come back in range is hard...

  25. Re:Been there, done that. on Google Demos Modular Phone That (Almost) Actually Works · · Score: 1

    I'd rather have a Thunderbolt port on the phone and put everything else (external GPU, SATA controller, GigE controller, and so on) in a PCIe dock.