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User: Xiph1980

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  1. Re:Isn't that -more- expensive? on Americans Abandoning Wired Home Internet, Shows Study (seattletimes.com) · · Score: 1

    This, and the fact that huge areas have only 1 provider to choose from for land lines, and the providers know that so prices are very high, and customer service is non-existent.

  2. Re:Consider on Canadian Startup Uses Trump to Lure Tech Workers (siliconbeat.com) · · Score: 1

    Yeah, go from one extreme to another, surely there's absolutely no way to find some nice middle point?

  3. Re:Great! We will trade hated devices on The Internet of Things Comes To Your Garden · · Score: 2

    I'm pretty sure most kids know the difference between a weed and a flower... Flowers don't come in little baggies or paper bags...

  4. Re: I have to put my feet down again! on It's Not a Car, It's a Self-Balancing Electric Motorcycle (Video) · · Score: 1

    I could've gone into details about centrepetal forces and gyroscopic precession, but I chose not to, because it's not important from a rider's stance. Interesting from a phycisist's stance perhaps, but when riding, what matters is what forcefully steering or weight-shifting does to your bike, and to rest DocSavage64109's concerns about balance in crosswinds with a reclining motorcycle.

    Also, the gyroscopic precession effect plays a large part with big wheeled motorcycles, but plays little to no part on motorscooters and other small wheeled two-wheelers, and this device has very little wheels so I doubt it has any noticeable effect.

  5. Re: I have to put my feet down again! on It's Not a Car, It's a Self-Balancing Electric Motorcycle (Video) · · Score: 1

    If you're balancing your motorcycle by only shifting your weight around, you're doing something wrong.
    It's actually not even possible to do that, because if you shift your body to the left, the motorcycle will tilt to the right and the center of mass will be on the exact same vertical line as it was before, exactly above the wheels. You balance by steering. If you get a crosswind from the left, you'll steer to the right slightly, moving the center of mass a tad to the right, but the point of contact with the ground even moreso. That way your motorcycle (and you with it) will lean a bit to the left counteracting the crosswind. This works exactly thesame on any two-wheeler like a motorcycle, scooter or a reclining motorcycle. You intuitively do thesame while steering. You don't steer the motorcycle left to go left. You steer it right, resulting in a controlled tilt to the left which you compensate by going round a bend. And knowing this can help you when you end up in a tight spot when you underestimated a bend. If you threaten to go off in a bend, pull the handlebar on the "wrong" side of the steeringwheel. This'll jolt you even flatter, and you will very likely make it through unscathed.

  6. No shit, Sherlock.. on Data Mining Shows How Down-Voting Leads To Vicious Circle of Negative Feedback · · Score: 2

    In the category of "No shit, sherlock" research....

    Don't feed the trolls. Thought this was fairly common knowledge...

  7. Re:The Religious Right will have your head on a pl on It's Time To Bring Pseudoscience Into the Science Classroom · · Score: 1

    I'm no American either, nor have I ever lived, or do I live there, but yeah, those ANSI codes aren't generic knowledge I guess. :) btw: AZ is Arizona, AL = Alabama :)

  8. Re:The Religious Right will have your head on a pl on It's Time To Bring Pseudoscience Into the Science Classroom · · Score: 1

    Bleh, I ment AL, not AZ :)

  9. Re:The Religious Right will have your head on a pl on It's Time To Bring Pseudoscience Into the Science Classroom · · Score: 1

    Not quite all of us live in TX (or AZ, OH for that matter) mate...

  10. Re:What's wrong with gathering data? on Rigging Up Baby · · Score: 2

    Yup, reminds me very much of Tim Minchin's section on "How babies sleep"
    (Tim Minchin - Ready For This, ca. 2:05 - 3:48)

  11. Re:Conversion? on The Human Brain Project Kicks Off · · Score: 1

    Sorry, accidentally picked the wrong mod out of the list... Undoing by replying.

  12. Re:Simple. Don't. on Ask Slashdot: How Do I Request Someone To Send Me a Public Key? · · Score: 1

    Why? Just use a passphrase like "My purple dog talked pancakes". Easy to transfer via phone, extremely hard to break as it makes absolutely no sense semantically.

  13. Re:Simple. Don't. on Ask Slashdot: How Do I Request Someone To Send Me a Public Key? · · Score: 1

    That GPG plug-in worked fine as long as you didn't use Exchange. However most companies do use exchange, and therefor that plugin became useless. That windows skin example is moot. I use the default windows skin as well. Why? Not because I especially like how it looks. But simply because I don't care about it. It looks good enough. As long as it doesn't look like Windows 3.11, why should I spend time on changing the skin? Why should I care about that? I prefer changing things like using the SysInternals Process Explorer, Notepad++ etc. Scripting with python... Things that actually make my life easier. A GUI skin? Not on my todo list.

  14. Re:Simple. Don't. on Ask Slashdot: How Do I Request Someone To Send Me a Public Key? · · Score: 1

    I'm not allowed to go into details, but I've been around the block, having worked as an engineer in oil&gas, finance, electricity utility and now waste recycling, so I kinda do know what I'm talking about. Nowhere did they use PGP or any email encryption scheme. You'd be surprised how much information goes back and forth via unsecured email. And yes, US Health care uses something like PGP but only since that's made mandatory by law not too long ago. Can't comment on law offices though.
    And no, these are not statements made by someone who doesn't know how to use a computer.

  15. Simple. Don't. on Ask Slashdot: How Do I Request Someone To Send Me a Public Key? · · Score: 2

    I'm sorry to say, but the simple fact of the matter is that PGP/GPG isn't used anywhere in corporate life. Not even in banking-related companies.
    For one, people don't perceive email as something that can easily be snooped, and if they do they'll think it's something like a chance encounter as if it's a regular piece of mail where you have to be at a certain point at a certain time to be able to snatch the mail, plus have to have a reasonable idea what you're looking for as a mail thief.
    Secondly, and I cannot stress this enough, it's a f'ing drag to use. It's not easy to install. It's not easy to set up, and it's far from user friendly on a day to day basis.

    Besides the fact that email encryption isn't commonplace, as long as you aren't sending you pin number or medical data on a regular basis (daily), why bother to be honest. You'll get a stamp as "that weird guy" if you start about PGP etc, and that'll last. If you want to send it securely, just wrap it in an encrypted container, like a ZIP or RAR file and phone them the password.

  16. Re:How? on WY Teen Cut From Science Fair For Entering Too Many · · Score: 2
    In what universe is nuclear energy free energy? There's no such thing as free energy. There's such a thing as usable energy, and as you say he might not even have reached that point:

    Granted I get that this kid probably didn't exceed the energy output needed to make this plausible, <snip>

    Nuclear energy generation isn't something "magical" or especially difficult per sé. What makes it difficult, is the containment you need to prevent radiation from escaping and measures put in place to prevent the reaction from going out of control (something you also need by the way for conventional power sources) and I seriously doubt that he got hold of such pure radioactive materials that a runaway reaction was any danger. Anyway, all you do for the rest is replacing the heat source of burning wood, coal, oil or anything chemical / mechanical with a radioactive source of heat. The rest of the system, whether that be a peltier pad, stirling engine or steam turbine is pretty much the same.
    Now, about that "free energy" you mentioned... As I said, there's no such thing. There's only usable/functional/however-you-wanna-name-it energy, i.e. where you gain more energy from the reaction than you expel to mine and collect the materials and to start and monitor the reaction. Wood is an easy example of that. Takes relatively little energy to chop down a tree, and you gain a lot when you burn it in a fireplace.

  17. Re:How? on WY Teen Cut From Science Fair For Entering Too Many · · Score: 2

    You don't need a stirling engine for that. Just some ammonia, water and stuff, and you can use the heat directly to cool your house...
    How stuff works - gas burning refridgerator

  18. Re:A few things to watch out for on Ask Slashdot: Wiring Home Furniture? · · Score: 2

    Not quite. The skin effect isn't really noticeable at 60Hz yet, unless you use really thick wire for high voltage / high current applications. That's why they use 2, 3 or 4-bundles in high voltage power transmission lines, instead of a bigger cable.
    Also, stranded wires are generally to prevent metal fatigue, and due to the fact that the individual strands aren't insulated, act as a lower capacity solid core conductor as there are holes inbetween the individual strands if you look at it from a cross-section. As long as you're not flexing the cable too much during or after installation, there's absolutely no need to use the much more expensive stranded wire.

    Neither the skin-effect or the proximity effect are any real issue here. Heat is much more important to take care of. e.g. add a fused plug to prevent overcurrents in the wire, and test how hot a wire gets with all that upholstery, because with enough insulation you could overheat a wire even on only one-tenth of its current rating. When in doubt, install the cables in a tube or hose or anything, and force air through it. Just a tiny bit of moving air will make a lot of difference.

  19. Re:I have a Galaxy Note on Smartphone Screen Real Estate: How Big Is Big Enough? · · Score: 1

    I know, I have looked at it, but Motorola is hard to get a hold on in the Netherlands, if you want it bundled with the contract. Would've gone for that one otherwise. :-)

  20. Re:I have a Galaxy Note on Smartphone Screen Real Estate: How Big Is Big Enough? · · Score: 2

    Hmm, I think current smartphones are far too big.
    I'd kill for a nicely sized 3.5" android phone like the HTC Rhyme, but then with the innards of a current smartphone, e.g. "high" resolution screen (minimally apple's 960x640), dual- or quad-core snapdragon, good battery life (minimally 2 days high usage), and bonus if it's a core android system, so nexus style, rootable, no proprietary stuff nor bloatware. Extra props if it has that water-proofing those new sony phones have.
    I don't really care about phones being 7.5mm thin, I don't mind having a few millimeters extra if that means I actually have a battery worth its salt, because realistically you don't really notice those two millimeters extra during usage. It's just a bragging thing between producers really. It's not like phones nowadays are the refrigerator models of ye olden days.

    If anything like that is thrown on the market, I'd buy it. Got a SGS2 now, but it's just a bit too large for my taste, and I doubt I'm the only one that thinks this.
    I really wonder why the producers don't offer real choice, instead of having 200 small and underpowered devices, and 10 oversized and nicely powered devices.

  21. Re:It's a silly proposition on Should Microsoft Switch To WebKit? · · Score: 1

    Correct on IE, it is just using some weird design choices but I don't see how anybody can argue that Win 8 isn't wrong when this is the average user response I saw at the shop.

    I didn't mention windows 8 and that's quite off-topic, but I agree, it's not great. I think blogphilofilms explains it perfectly in his review. Especially the part about the four C's:
    Control: The user should be the person in control of the computer at all times;
    Conveyance: The user should be able to figure out where to go and what to do;
    Continuity: Users should be able to expect that similar actions will yield similar results;
    Context: Users should be able to see information and options at a glance.

    IE's biggest problem isn't the UI, its the giant fucking bullseye painted on it by hackers because they know the clueless rubes that are still running that 30 day Norton trialware from 6 years ago and think that works is using IE. Add to that the fucking braindead choice to not port back to their supported OSes so that the ONLY way you can use the same browser across XP/Vista/7 is to NOT use IE and you have a browser made of fail.

    Microsoft has done a lot in recent years to make Internet Explorer a lot safer, and the latest version has actually become reasonably safe, especially considering where it was coming from. But yeah, the inability to install the latest version on older operating systems isn't helping at all, because despite the fact that people really shouldn't be using XP anymore, as it's EOL now, they still do. Especially large corporations have been and are reluctant to upgrade. Only being able to run a lower version IE on those systems is quite the security risk. IE 10 won't even run on Vista...

    I was against the "works best in IE" horseshit and I'm against the "works best in Webkit" horseshit, <snip>

    I use a webkit based browser (Comodo Dragon) but even I don't want a world where the only engine we have is webkit, that is how we get nasty zero days that can infect the whole damned planet. Did we not learn anything from IE 6?

    Completely agree on the fact that a single option is the worst thing we could get.

  22. Re:He Is Free Now on Aaron Swartz Commits Suicide · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You assume death represents zero freedom, which is incorrect. Death doesn't represent zero freedom, it represents am empty collection of freedoms. It's not zero, it's not one, it's not infinite, it's nothing.

    I know nothing about the lawsuit or the whole scientific paper stuff, but it's a shame that such a bright mind is lost to the world now. All we can do now, and all I'll do is wish his family and friends all the best in the coming difficult time.

  23. Re:It's a silly proposition on Should Microsoft Switch To WebKit? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's your opinion that you don't like the interface of Internet Explorer. I agree with you on that, it doesn't hold my preference either, but that doesn't make it a shitty interface. There's a reason why many people still use Internet Explorer.
    You may call it what you will, (inertia, stubbornness, laziness, unwillingness to change,) but truth is that many people just prefer it and Internet Explorer is still popular amongst a big group of users, and in the same way you and I could be called the same for not wanting to change our opinion of browsers. Be it Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or whatever way you browse the web.

    Just because you don't like a certain interface, doesn't make it shitty.

  24. No, they simply should adhere to the standards. on Should Microsoft Switch To WebKit? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why should Microsoft move to WebKit? I mean, yeah, it's a more secure browser engine perhaps, but it's still their prerogative to use their own. I think it'll be more important for Microsoft -- and any browser (engine) for that matter -- to follow the W3C standard accurately, possibly with their own extensions if they want, but in the basis they should support the standard to make sure web sites render uniformly and accurately over all browsers.
    That'll finally bring more choice to the user, in stead of the pseudo-choice now.
    I prefer opera and have that installed as my default browser, but still have IE and Chrome installed because some websites will only work on either of those. Between the three I can open all sites that I need, but it shouldn't be necessary if all just follow the standards, and consequently, all web sites only need to be written to that standard as well.

  25. Re:0.001km = 0.01hm = 1m = 10dm = 100cm = 1000mm on USMA: Going the Extra Kilometer For Metrication · · Score: 0

    You're not entirely correct.
    Kilogram is a SI base unit. Newton is a SI Derived unit.
    Furthermore, kilogram is most often used for weight, but Newton for force. Slightly different use.