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User: Ihlosi

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  1. The myth of the miracle battery. on Why Morgan Stanley Is Betting That Tesla Will Kill Your Power Company · · Score: 1
    Batteries have been a focus of research since about the time electricity was discovered. I doubt that someone will snap their fingers and pull the miracle battery out their hat which will beat existing system by about an order of magnitude in areas like price and capacity.

    Also: Name the battery technology and I'll name the resource you'll run out of if you're trying to build capacity in the TWh range. (possible exception: sodium-sulfur cells).

  2. Re:Only 90% to pass??? on Nuclear Missile Command Drops Grades From Tests To Discourage Cheating · · Score: 1
    Umm, nuclear missile command, 90% to pass? I'd expect 100%

    No, the test needs to be so difficult that no one can get 100% without cheating. Then it's easy to spot the obvious cheaters.

  3. Most accident scenarios ... on Report: Nuclear Plants Should Focus On Risks Posed By External Events · · Score: 1
    ... unfortunately only regard one major failure (e.g. main coolant feeding line failure), with other failures (e.g. one emergency generator fails) covered by redundancies.

    This might work for technical breakdowns, but not for external events. ("All coolant pumps and emergency generators fail - because the whole power plant compound is under three meters of water.").

  4. Yes, absolutely! on One Trillion Bq Released By Nuclear Debris Removal At Fukushima So Far · · Score: 1
    Would you prefer pounds (or kilograms) of X, with no measure of the rate X is releasing radiation?

    Yes, absolutely. I can look up what kinds of radiation X emits and its specific activity.

  5. Bloat vs. clutter. on Microsoft's CEO Says He Wants to Unify Windows · · Score: 1
    space shows how bad the bloat has gotten.

    You have a point. Lets put it this way: I don't really care if the OS eats up 5 MB or 50 GB of my hard drive as space is cheap these days. I do mind, however, if the OS or the software it is bundled with is annoying, obtrusive, obnoxious, useless, superfluous, unnecessary or outdated and makes me spend time to get rid of it.

  6. Hunting. And that my myopia is still getting worse on Laser Eye Surgery, Revisited 10 Years Later · · Score: 1

    My myopia is increasing by about 0.25 diopters every two years. Even if had my eyesight surgically corrected, I'd be wearing glasses again in a few years and have all the possible drawbacks of the surgery.

  7. Re:Yay.. This is easy to imagine on Microsoft's CEO Says He Wants to Unify Windows · · Score: 2
    3. Super fucking bloated edition

    Actually, that's the job of the PC manufacturer. You know, stuffing the recovery partition with four dozen marginally useful programs that make you spend two hours to remove them after a Windows reinstall.

  8. Re:I'd much rather have the option ... on New Toyota Helps You Yell At the Kids · · Score: 1
    and this cool screen that can totally isolate the driver from the passengers.

    I need to isolate the passengers from each other. Otherwise, they'll tear up the passenger compartment and/or I have to make unplanned trips to the emergency room.

  9. Re:cause and/or those responsible on Russian Government Edits Wikipedia On Flight MH17 · · Score: 1
    Certainly the government admitted to shooting down the plane.

    Admission, in a legal sense, usually implies not only admitting the facts, but also that there was an error or wrongdoing by the party doing the admitting.

    And this has not happened.

    Its also really hard for the US to offer an apology to Iran

    Oh, um, yeah. Maybe they could offer an apology to the relatives of the people that got killed? Most, if not all of them, never took any hostages in any embassy. Some of them weren't even Iranians.

    Nobody can say the US didn't admit to shooting down the airbus, and the US government did offer up an explanation.

    And that isn't an "admission" in a legal sense - since they give themselves an acquittal in the same paragraph.

    People may not like the explanation, or agree with it, but at least the US stood up for its actions.

    If you call giving yourself a complete acquittal "standing up to your actions", yes.

  10. Re:cause and/or those responsible on Russian Government Edits Wikipedia On Flight MH17 · · Score: 1
    Bullshit.

    What you're quoting isn't an apology or an acknogledgment of wrongdoing.

    "The U.S. government deeply regrets this incident,"

    To feel regret over something isn't the same as apologizing for it. You can feel sorry (i.e. feel regret) if a relative of your friend dies. That doesn't mean that you were involved in any way in the death of that relative.

  11. I'd much rather have the option ... on New Toyota Helps You Yell At the Kids · · Score: 1

    ... to separate the rear into two passenger compartments that are isolated from each other. This would remove most of the reasons for chewing out the passengers there.

  12. Re:I don't see the problem. on Russian Government Edits Wikipedia On Flight MH17 · · Score: 1
    Unfortunately, they were not trained in distinguishing civilian from military planes.

    As someone else stated, the system should be doing this automatically, and you need to override this safety to fire on planes with civilian transponders.

    I hope this safety is more than a pop-up window:

    Target is civilian. Fire anyway? yes/no/cancel

  13. Re:I don't see the problem. on Russian Government Edits Wikipedia On Flight MH17 · · Score: 1
    It takes a conscious effort and training in advanced operation of the Gadfly to disable the civilian IFF safety of a Gadfly system,

    And you're sure there isn't an unofficial (maybe even unwritten) checklist with things to do if the missile doesn't launch, that, somewhere close to the bottom of the list, contains the point "Try disabling the IFF decoder."?

    They managed to blow up a nuclear reactor by doing things they shouldn't have been doing while trying to make it work a certain way ...

  14. How boring ... on Seat Detects When You're Drowsy, Can Control Your Car · · Score: 1
    I want the version that gives the driver a shot of adrenaline if he or she is drowsy.

    You know, just like the jolt of adrenaline from almost running off the road, just without the almost running off the road.

  15. News flash: All drinking water is ... on Texas Town Turns To Treated Sewage For Drinking Water · · Score: 1

    ... to some extent, "treated sewage". It's called "water cycle".

  16. Re:PeridexisErrant's DF Starter Pack - Get it! on Dwarf Fortress Gets Biggest Update In Years · · Score: 1
    I often wonder how Tarn can have so much talent to create a game like DF while at the same time failing so gloriously at implementing a decent interface.

    It's easy: User interface design is a completely different skill.

    Also, if you want a program to be easily usable by someone who didn't write it, you need to let someone else design the user interface.

  17. The US isn't just unwilling to cooperate ... on US Arrests Son of Russian MP In Maldives For Hacking · · Score: 1
    unwilling to cooperate in international law enforcement

    The US actively threatens countries with military invasion if they engage in certain forms of international law enforcement.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

  18. Not quite sure if I'm following ... on Ask Slashdot: Best Dedicated Low Power Embedded Dev System Choice? · · Score: 1
    What exactly is the point of the dev system? You write/compile MCU software on it and then download the software to the MCU?

    A simple, cheap small notebook computer should be able to do this.

  19. Hate to break it to you ... on US Arrests Son of Russian MP In Maldives For Hacking · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The Russians are masters of passive aggression when it comes to law enforcement when it suits them: the place is corrupt from top to bottom, and it manifests itself in a complete lack of desire to cooperate in international law enforcement. They have a convenient clause in their constitution which lets them refuse to extradite anybody, no matter what -- but is only exercised when it suits them.

    I hate to break it to you, but the phrase above remains true if you replace "Russians" with any country powerful enough to get away with this kind of behavior.

  20. Re:useless. on Police Using Dogs To Sniff Out Computer Memory · · Score: 1
    So, when capable, do real work, when not, harass people? Why does that sound familiar? :)

    Ability and willingness to harass people are inversely proportional to the capability to do real work.

  21. Re:useless. on Police Using Dogs To Sniff Out Computer Memory · · Score: 1
    Side note, there's a shortage of dogs capable of doing real work, like search and rescue. why waste good talent on this shit?

    I'm pretty sure the capable dogs will get trained to do real work. It's the less capable ones that will become "alert on cue" and "sniff out thumb drives" dogs.

  22. Re:Get it right on Two Earth-Like Exoplanets Don't Actually Exist · · Score: 1
    No. You use basic universal truths to start.

    "Truth" is a heavily cultural thing. If anything, you use facts.

    And the Voyager record does basically exactly what I mentioned. It uses a subset of our own communication protocols with very low compression.

  23. Re:Get it right on Two Earth-Like Exoplanets Don't Actually Exist · · Score: 1
    How do you even establish a communication protocol with an entirely alien (technologically) civilization?

    You don't. You use the parts of your own protocol that aren't too compressed (think .bmp instead of .jpg, .wav instead of .mp3), and hope the other side can figure it out. Since the messages will be travelling for tens or even hundreds of years, a few decades for understand the other side's protocol shouldn't delay things too much.

    Once you think you have figured out the other side's protocol, you send them a message in (your understanding of) their protocol and hope that the other side will know that any horrible insults and breaches of etiquette you commit are only a sign that you're still learning.

  24. Photosynthesis has its disadvantages. on Solar-Powered Electrochemical Cell Used To Produce Formic Acid From CO2 · · Score: 1
    Photosynthesis offers the same advantages,

    Photosynthesis has a comparatively low efficiency, which will come back to bite you if the space for your application is limited.

    Also, only works in a fairly narrow temperature range (if it's 10 degrees below zero, fairly little photosynthetic activity will happen even you have plenty of sunlight). In addition it offers some nice byproducts, like grains, tomatoes, zucchini, etc.

    The electricity-to-hydrocarbon route can use space that's unsuited for growing plants. Also, if you want to use plants to bind CO2, you won't be using grains, tomatoes or zucchini - because these plants aren't optimized for maximum CO2 conversion.

  25. Re:Efficiency on Solar-Powered Electrochemical Cell Used To Produce Formic Acid From CO2 · · Score: 2
    Suppose, however, that you could alter the chemistry to get oil?

    Electrically-powered synthesis of methane from H2O and CO2 already exists, and the process of forming longer hydrocarbons from methane do, too.

    It's just a bit too expensive right now (or rather, oil and coal are still too cheap).