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User: thecountryofmike

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Comments · 27

  1. Why not rethink the plane? on Solar Planes Aren't the Green Future Of Air Travel (vox.com) · · Score: 1
    Solar power - lots of area needed. Not nearly as energy dense as combustible fuel. Instead of replacing the jet engine in a 747 with an electric fan, why not rethink the plane?

    Remember airships? Lot's of area for panels, plenty of lift for passengers/cargo. If the electric motor didn't have to propel the plane at 400mph to generate the lift required, solar powered forward thrust is totally doable.

    Just means air travel won't be as fast. And it'll end up even safer if the airships don't use hydrogen :)

  2. Strange Days on Student Uses Oculus Rift and Kinect To Create Body Swap Illusion · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Cool movie :) Strange Days

  3. Re:resonance on Tae Bo Workout Sent Skyscraper Shaking · · Score: 1

    Marching in-step over a bridge...I remember that episode well..

    They built a suspension bridge. Then promptly neglected to SUSPEND the damn thing. The main cables were simply attached to the ends, but it wasn't a cable-stayed design. It was meant to be anchored to the ground! It could barely support itself much less resonate.

    MythMorons

  4. Re:Get a USB line in adapter on Is the Line-in Jack On the Verge of Extinction? · · Score: 1

    +1 parent please.

  5. Cool! on Bird Navigation Based On Quantum Zeno Effect · · Score: 3, Funny

    Schrodinger's Pigeon?!?!

  6. Re:That's the plan on E-Voting Undermines Public Confidence In Elections · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "...Add to this the possibility technical faults, conflicts of interest and evidence of tampering, how long before the US vote is viewed as an electronic pantomime?"

    Ummm. Hmmmm. Gotta be 4 or 5 years ago by now.

  7. There's a trip down memory lane... on IBM Won't Open-Source OS/2 · · Score: 1
    I was doing support for OS/2 in Ottawa (for the government....I was kinda paying myself to be there I figure).

    Anyway, I remember installing OS/2 Warp on the smokin' fast 486/100's there. They had at LEAST 16 MEGS(!!) of ram, and were dual booted with windows95. The OS/2 was for the processing intensive RDBMS stuff.

    That was when I was working (kinda) for a 60 year old lady who couldn't use a computer. Every month she'd tell me to get her a new mouse. The first couple times (after which she hated me) I showed her how to clean it. After that, I just rotated 2 of them with her, replacing them without a word :)

  8. Re:a basic tutorial on Mobile Phone Projectors "Will Launch This Year" · · Score: 1
    Other posters are right about the inverse square law, but I submit that 8-10 lumens is just fine for a mobile projector.



    For the inverse square law arguers, heres the deal. 8-10 lumens is FOCUSED!!! Yes, on a 50" screen, there will be, say, 8 lumens hitting it. On 12 square feet of area. Let's say at 5 feet away from the source. At 10 feet away, the area will be 48 square feet, at 1/4 the intensity. If 8-10 lumens is the limit at 5 feet away, no way will it work at 10.



    But none of this changes the fact that focusing the light from whatever your source will allow for significant brightness at a longer distance than the 'bare candle' scenario.



    Laser's bounce off the frickin' MOON and come back, bitches...:) For laser light to open up to 1 m^2 in area, we're talking a distance on the order of millions of kilometers. And to get to 4 m^2, we're looking at twice that.


    ($0.02)

  9. Re:never use the web for such queries on Domains May Disappear After Search · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Several years ago, I mentioned to my roommate at the time that it would be cool to register thinkoutsidethebox.com. Before I knew it, he had typed the name into some website that supposedly lets you know if the name is taken or not. I was like "Dude, why would you do that? They'll just end up registering the name themselves!".

    The domain wasn't registered when he queried it. But since he didn't buy it right then and there, it WAS registered an hour or so later, by the very site he typed it into.

    This has been going on for years, but now the scammers don't even have to rely on roommate stupidity.

  10. Re:Right? on Survey Finds Canadians Support Net Neutrality Law · · Score: 2, Informative
    What I haven't seen is the argument that:

    The current state of the internet is where you know it today WITH net neutrality. That's what's currently in place.

    Net neutrality was decided years ago. The question isn't whether or not to put net neutrality in place.

    The question is "Should net neutrality be RESCINDED?"

    This Canadian votes NO.

  11. Re:0.9 TB / 4.8 Gb/s = 1500 seconds on USB 3 in 2008, 10 Times as Fast · · Score: 1
    Hee hee. My bad.

    I realized it too late. Damn bit vs. byte! Why don't they just quote transfer rates in terms of BYTES?!?! I know, I know, then the numbers wouldn't be as impressive...

    *hangs head in shame*

  12. Re:0.9 TB / 4.8 Gb/s = 1500 seconds on USB 3 in 2008, 10 Times as Fast · · Score: 1
    Hmmm. No.

    0.9TB = 900 GB

    at 4.8GB/s

    we have:

    900/4.8 = 187.5 seconds (~3 minutes). And off by 2 orders of magnitude.

  13. No, you didn't learn any lessons... on The Unfriendly Side of German Game Development · · Score: 2, Insightful
    The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. It's a land where hate speech is just dandy, and inciting violence is protected, by hiding behind the 'free speech' defense. Unless it's demonstrating against the government, which these days gets you cordoned off into 'free speech zones'.

    Germany, and these other countries (which of course you don't name, or can't spell, or just haven't heard of before) all have lower crime rates than the US. Their people are more aware of fascistic behaviour. And they make a distiction between free speech and hate speech.



    Somehow you concluded:

    Many European nations have anti-free speech laws preventing various forms of 'blasphemy', racism, and ideology. This isn't an effective way to confront these forces.


    Clearly, you've lost your mind. You're mixing blasphemy, RACISM, and ideology?!?! Western European countries with hate speech laws are clearly different than religious theocracies with laws against blasphemy and ideology. These hate speech (or 'anti-free speech', doubleplusgood) laws you conflate with fascism aren't the only thing controlling crime, but they don't hurt. And yet you 'conclude' that they're ineffective! Guess I'll just have to take your word for it, right?


    Oh, and another thing. Intelligent people were driven to the US during WWII because there was a fucking war going on. Bombs weren't landing all over the fucking US during WWII!



    .....................
    Having said that, the cops clearly overreacted, and whatever reason they were there for, should have handled it professionally and proportionately...it's a video game company, for crying out loud, not the Hell's Angels headquarters.

  14. Re:OverHear on "Always On" Impromptu Video Conferencing Solution? · · Score: 1

    Perhaps you want to work for the NSA. :)

  15. Make your own... on TV Set Doubles as a Mirror · · Score: 1

    With an LCD or a flat screen and a piece of mylar. Shiny side out, voila! Might have to turn the brightness up a bit, but the effect is the same.

  16. Umm, geeks can spell? on Extinction Of Human Languages Affects Programming? · · Score: 1
    Newspeak is upon us...just the natural progression of language. The only way to stop a language from dying is to put some political will behind its preservation - like Icelandic, a language that hasn't changed for several hundred years.

  17. Keeping up with the Glens' on Space Burial · · Score: 2, Funny

    Great, now my neighbors can be better than me even when they die.

  18. When does the movie come out? on Still More on the DARPA Grand Challenge · · Score: 5, Funny

    Cannonball run. For robots. Cool.

  19. The hypochondria pill... on Cyberchondria · · Score: 5, Funny
    Sooner or later, the marketing guru's at Pfizer will figure out they can sell sugar pills to cure hypochondria.

    Wait, that's a GREAT idea! I need to become a marketing guru for Pfizer...

    oops, time for my soma...

  20. OktoberLinux? on Linux in Munich Followup · · Score: 2, Funny
    Cool. Does this mean we can get Oktoberfest-flavoured linux?

    Where do I sign?

  21. A rose by any other name... on Diamond Age Coming Soon · · Score: 3, Funny
    Diamonds are a really cool material, especially for engineers. Look at thermal conductivity graphs...there's diamond, showing off as the best thermal conductor. Now look at graphs of modulus of elasticity (~hardness)...again, diamond is showing off. Want a material with a high refraction index? Diamond has the highest

    I say enough of this. I'm tired of diamond being the best at everything. Let's all surround diamond after posting, and set it straight. Maybe we can go all Orwell on this holier-than-thou tetrahedral structure, and erase it from history. Now who's the hardest, huh?

    Diamond thinks is so tough....

  22. 1/x = 1 + x .... solve... on The Golden Ratio · · Score: 1

    so that's the golden ratio? I figured that number out years ago, just for kicks. Were my thoughts guided by a supernatural force? Nahhhhh... Seriously, math is NOT magic. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something...

  23. The sign of the beast? on The Trouble with RFID · · Score: 1

    What was that? Something about revelations? Damn, time to start getting religious... Oh yeah, and RFID tags are already the size of a grain of rice...and getting smaller all the time. Once they're pervasive, who'll bother with destroying all of them?

  24. Reasonable Imperial Units... on Another English/Metric "Spacecraft" Problem · · Score: 1

    The top speed of my truck is around 10,000 furlongs per fortnight. And the fuel economy is about 1000 chains per dram. Pretty slick, eh? A perfectly cromulent system, to be sure.

  25. Great, the libraries will be next... on Congressional Committee Approves Database Bill · · Score: 1
    I hope everyone will remember the renaissance of the internet, a brief period of the late 20th/early 21st century when the libraries of the world could be 'googled', and information was free and readily available. Knowledge, set free at last!

    But information can't remain free, not if the status quo is to be maintained. So multinationals and rich dickheads now struggle for control of all information, relying on the apathy of the general public to let them. And sure enough, the general public watches these things happen with no more than a shrug and a 'but what can I do?' attitude. While the pocket-politicians recklessly pass these insane, freedom-restricting laws.

    Next, the government will stop funding libraries, claiming the internet has made them obsolete, much book burning will ensue (get your genuine Library of Congress fire logs, while quantities last!), and then these copyright laws can rip all useful info from said internet. Leaving the unsuspecting public with the advernet.

    *adjusts tin-foil hat*

    Oh yeah, and as for phone books - most phone companies put in bogus names/numbers throughout the white pages to prevent 3rd parties from blindly copying...which means a 3rd party has to do their own compilation anyway, else they'll prove their own plagiarism by republishing that bogus info.