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User: Chirs

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  1. might blind someone if you're shooting low on White House Drone Incident Exposes Key Security Gap · · Score: 1

    Unless you're shooting steeply upwards, a miss might blind someone. Heck, if it's bright enough even the backscatter from hitting the drone might cause eye damage.

  2. shooting down with laser has problems on White House Drone Incident Exposes Key Security Gap · · Score: 1

    I thought of point defence laser too, but it's got problems. You'd have to be awfully careful about where it was pointing when it fired, otherwise you'd run the risk of blinding civilians in any buildings within line-of-sight.

    Realistically you'd probably be better off with a number of lasers mounted around the perimeter so that they shooting more-or-less upwards. Less chance of collateral damage that way.

  3. and when the next one has a bomb? on White House Drone Incident Exposes Key Security Gap · · Score: 1

    Mount a claymore to the underside of a drone, fly it in at high speed doing evasive maneuvers, trigger it over the biggest group of people that it sees.

    Could be fully autonomous, and it'd be really hard to shoot down when you're worried about where the bullets end up when they fall back down to earth. I suspect a mostly-plastic drone would be hard to see on radar.

  4. and when the next one is carrying explosives? on White House Drone Incident Exposes Key Security Gap · · Score: 1

    It wouldn't take a huge drone to bring in a big enough bomb to do major damage. Heck, you could probably put a rifle on some of the bigger ones.

    It'd be really hard to shoot down a mostly-plastic drone coming in at high speed doing evasive maneuvers.

  5. would you like pie or cake? both! on OpenBSD's Kernel Gets W^X Treatment On Amd64 · · Score: 2

    In the english language itself, "or" doesn't necessarily imply "xor". Usually some other mechanism is used to imply exclusivity, either from situational awareness or from context in the surrounding text.

  6. depends what you're doing on The Legacy of CPU Features Since 1980s · · Score: 4, Insightful

    For example, I worked for a decade in the linux kernel and low-level userspace. Assembly definitely needed. I tracked down and fixed a bug in the glibc locking code, and you'd better believe assembly was required for that one. During that time I dealt with assembly for ARM, MIPS, powerpc, and x86, with both 32 and 64-bit flavours of most of those. But even there most of the time you're working in C, with as little as possible in assembly.

    If you're working in the kernel or in really high-performance code then assembly can be useful. If you're working with experimental languages/compilers where the compilers might be flaky, then assembly can be useful. If you're working in Java/PHP/Python/Ruby/C# etc. then assembly is probably not all that useful.

  7. torture can work in some circumstances on Unbundling Cable TV: Be Careful What You Wish For · · Score: 1

    From what I understand, torture can make most people talk, but can't make them tell the truth. So if you're looking for easily-verified information it might be effective. If you're looking for information that is hard to verify, then it might not work as well.

    And even if torture does make people talk, there may be other less brutal (and possibly more effective) ways of getting the same information.

  8. Only "mostly"? on Sony Thinks You'll Pay $1200 For a Digital Walkman · · Score: 1

    "Hi-res" only makes sense when recording/mixing audio. For a final product that is intended just for listening it makes no sense at all.

  9. read more carefully on Uber Pushing For Patent On Surge Pricing · · Score: 1

    *That particular" machine would charge less because they wanted to promote that beverage.

    However, Coke was also looking at machines that would charge more when it was hot out. See http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10... for one example.

  10. There is a difference. on Top Five Theaters Won't Show "The Interview" Sony Cancels Release · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A "real and present threat" on a specific mall is a very different thing from a random threat.

    There are 5300 movie theaters in the USA. If half of them show the movie, that's 2650 showings. If the terrorists attack *ten* showings (likely an overestimate), that's still less than half a percent chance of being impacted.

    I'd take those odds.

    The alternative is that random groups start making threats against everything they don't like while carrying through on just enough of them to keep people scared, and the population lives in fear.

  11. I question your numbers. on Economists Say Newest AI Technology Destroys More Jobs Than It Creates · · Score: 1

    Taking your "2 weeks" literally, currently according to Google you could fly American leaving Dec 31 and returning Jan 7 for $250.

    If you drive, its 1140 miles each way. At roughly 60 cents/mile operating costs, that's $1370 in fuel and wear-and-tear on a typical vehicle, plus about 36hrs of driving time.

  12. no-fault isn't the problem on Economists Say Newest AI Technology Destroys More Jobs Than It Creates · · Score: 1

    Around here we have mostly no-fault for the purposes of insurance payout (so you don't have to sue to get reimbursed) , but if you're considered to be at fault then your insurance costs go up. So stupid drivers do end up paying a penalty for their behaviour. And if you have too many incidents you can get your license pulled.

  13. it's amazing how cheaply you can live on Economists Say Newest AI Technology Destroys More Jobs Than It Creates · · Score: 2

    If we really wanted to, I bet you and I could live on a quarter of our incomes.

    The reason why people come from other countries to work in places like England/Canada/USA for not-great wages are that they *don't plan on staying here forever*. So they can come, work for ten years while saving every penny they can, then go back home and retire.

    I lived in Africa for a few years. The average annual income where I lived was $200 USD. Take a typical first-world retirement savings and you could live reasonably well in a third-world country. But you'd have to be prepared to give up a lot of what you're used to.

  14. not quite on Researchers Accidentally Discover How To Turn Off Skin Aging Gene · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We gain and lose traits when they affect our ability to reproduce... and at no other time.

    This isn't quite accurate. We can gain/lose traits randomly and if they don't impede our ability to reproduce they could get passed on. Also, some traits are genetically linked to more desirable traits, so they get dragged along by the other traits even if they're not necessarily desirable in and of themselves.

  15. might not be as good as you think on The GPLv2 Goes To Court · · Score: 1

    I take it you've never seen people arguing about what exactly the C standard means about how "volatile" should behave, or whether the defined memory model is sufficient to reason formally about visibility of variables given specific types of assembly operations, or what optimizations a compiler can legally make (as opposed to what optimizations it would actually make *sense* for it to make).

    Even a reasonably-well-defined language like C can still end up in the weeds once you start looking at edge cases...

  16. If only PJ was still running groklaw! on The GPLv2 Goes To Court · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This would have been the perfect story to get covered there....

  17. Rather not have a union, thanks on Canada Waives Own Rules, Helps Microsoft Avoid US Visa Problems · · Score: 1

    Maybe a professional organization, like the Engineers have here in Canada.

    I had friends working for a union building pipelines. It was all about seniority, not skill. My mom worked as part of a union, and they didn't represent her interests. My friend worked for a union and they made here go on strike due to issues that some other people in a totally different job had on the other side of the country.

    Meanwhile I've worked for three different companies over the past decade and a half, I've gotten along with every manager I've ever had, I've been reasonably happy with my work, I've gotten more money than I ever expected. I don't see how being part of a union would have helped.

    I respect that unions can do good things, but they have issues as well.

  18. Not the only difference. on Seagate Bulks Up With New 8 Terabyte 'Archive' Hard Drive · · Score: 1

    Drives intended to go in RAID arrays have different firmware and handle errors differently.

    They may also get different testing. I worked for a telecom equipment vendor and there were specific drives that had been tested for behaviour under high/low temperatures, high/low humidity, vibration, etc.

    If you're a big enough company then drive manufacturers will actually work with you to resolve drive firmware issues and/or answer questions about specific behaviours on their enterprise drives.

    Lastly, at least in the SSD space at least some of the "Enterprise" drives have much better handling of power outages, with sufficient capacitors to handle writing out data.

    It's not always worth buying "enterprise", but sometimes it makes sense.

  19. you're missing the technical issues on Why Elon Musk's Batteries Frighten Electric Companies · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Just randomly connecting to the grid and backfeeding power causes real problems (i.e. your generator electronics get fried, you can electrocute the guy trying to fix a power outage, etc.). You need special equipment to make sure there are no phase mismatches, it needs to detach itself from the grid if the grid-side drops in a power outage, and you need a new meter.

  20. electronics can be a cause on Ask Slashdot: Dealing With Electronics-Induced Inattentiveness? · · Score: 4, Informative

    Smartphone apps are intentionally designed to grab your attention. The human brain actually triggers the reward center each time you get a new text, or email, or social media message. The more you do those things the more your brain is trained to react instantly to a new event, thus breaking your concentration on whatever you were doing.

    If you want to really focus on something, it's probably best to disable your notifications so that only emergency events get through. (Or even turn the thing off completely if you can.)

  21. Concentration is like a muscle... on Ask Slashdot: Dealing With Electronics-Induced Inattentiveness? · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you don't actually concentrate on doing things for extended periods of time, you're going to lose your ability to do it.

    So when you have some spare time instead of flipping through slashdot or reddit why not try actually doing something for an extended period of time? Read a book, do a hobby, go for a walk, take a bike ride for fun, go to a coffee shop and casually read a big newspaper, do the crossword puzzle. I read a lot of novels and do some woodworking on the side. A quiet evening in the shop with hand tools and the radio in the background is a great way to decompress.

  22. There is no single "fair" value. on UK Announces 'Google Tax' · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How much is "fair" depends on the culture the company and government are operating in.

    You could have a libertarian society with minimal government involvement and minimal taxation, but where every individual has to pay for everything they do. (Roads, fire protection, ambulance, medical, police, education, utilities, garbage collection, etc.)

    On the other hand, you could have a more socialist society with high taxation and high government involvement, but where most of the services are paid for by the government.

    Both are viable solutions, with different tradeoffs.

  23. Why not abolish corporate taxes entirely? on UK Announces 'Google Tax' · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The basic idea is that a corporation is nothing but a bunch of people owning it, so instead of taxing the corporation you shift the tax to the individual owners (owners, shareholders, etc.) instead. Since corporations wouldn't be paying taxes, you could then get rid of all of the tax breaks/writeoffs for corporations, which would significantly simplify corporate accounting and reduce the incentive for large corporations to shift money around to avoid tax.

  24. Still need transmission in cars on Practical Magnetic Levitating Transmission Gear System Loses Its Teeth · · Score: 1

    Just like IC motors, electric motors do not provide constant power/torque across their whole speed range. There's a reason why cordless drills often have two or three speed transmissions.

    A typical universal motor generates max torque just before it stalls, and relatively little torque at high speed. This is great for fast acceleration from a standstill, not so much for trying to hit maximum speed with just a single-speed gearbox.

  25. Get rid of corporate taxes totally on UK Announces 'Google Tax' · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I know it sounds crazy at first blush, but I think it would make sense to totally get rid of corporate taxes. (Replaced by other forms of taxation.)

    The basic idea is that a corporation is nothing but a bunch of people owning it, so instead of taxing the corporation you tax the individual owners (owners, shareholders, etc.) instead. Since corporations wouldn't be paying taxes, you could then get rid of all of the tax breaks/writeoffs for corporations, which would significantly simplify corporate accounting and reduce the incentive for large corporations to shift money around to avoid tax.

    Some references:
    http://www.dailykos.com/story/...
    http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
    http://www.vox.com/2014/8/8/59...