Well IBM are making a big push in Lithium air, there was an article about that here on/. a while back, but even they were only predicting products on the street between 2020-2030 (link), and probably a while more before they are price-competitive with existing tech. That's a couple of generations of cars at least, so yeah, hardly "around the corner".
"They already have. Most don't like the video, but also don't like the rioting. Problem is, how can they stop it? And how are they supposed to make a statement disowning them? "
Trouble is, there seem there don't seem to be enough of the non-crazy Muslims in some countries. When you have a government minister in Pakistan offering a $100000 bounty for the murder of a foreign civilian, and he's not instantly dismissed, you have a serious problem. He can do that because a large majority of the population back those views, and he knows it. In Pakistan, not so long ago considered an ally of the west, the crazy extremist types are very much in the ascendant, and a lot of Muslim countries seem to be heading that way. It's not just a small minority of crazies making a lot of noise, it's a large majority of them.
Yeah, I was with the summary right up until it proposed Windows 8's mixed-up hash of an attempt to bolt a tablet UI and a desktop UI together as a superior alternative.
This. I've never broken a phone, even though I've never used cases or screen protectors, so while I can't be bothered to work out exactly how much I might have saved by not insuring them over the years, I'm pretty sure that even if my luck changes for the worse, I'll have to write off a fair few before I come out negative
FTA: "Any sane person would have put a few minutes thought into the matter and realized that such an obvious phrase as Carnival of Souls would likely have been used as a title many times before. In fact, Bookfinder turned up at least a couple dozen different books, movies, TV episodes, and more – some of which dates back to 1962. And if you look inside books, Google says that it found the phrase no less than 5600 times (with some duplication, obviously)."
You do get that, right? A phrase used dozens of times as the title of books, movies, and TV episodes. If it was an original phrase that had never been used before, then his case might have some merit, but it's not, and he's just trolling.
The problem with that is there seem to be a lot of people who say, and possibly even believe, that their code is clean and self documenting, when in fact it is anything but. I would say that such people outnumber those who actually do write clean and self-documenting code by a significant margin. In those cases, where you find yourself looking at this code and realise you have no idea whatsoever what it's trying to achieve, much less whether it's doing it right or not, and you're thinking "just give me a f*@king clue, goddammit", any sort of comment, even a cryptic, half-assed effort, can be a lot better than nothing.
If you're an Android power user, and you want to see reasonable OS updates, then you know to buy a Nexus device, that's the point of them. Google can't force the various carriers and handset makers push out updates, and it's not in their interests to do so since they want you to buy a new handset every year, so you should understand what's going to happen there. OTOH my Nexus S had ICS and Jelly Bean almost from day one, no hacks, and running perfectly, and that's a pretty old phone now.
ISTR the "walkers" used in Red Mars were along the lines of the suits described in the article, i.e. a form-fitting mechanical resistance suit, rather than a pressure suit. There was also some sort of open-cycle breathing system that was much less bulky that what we have today, but I can't remember the details.
I used to print very little, it could be several weeks between prints, and pretty much every time I tried to print with the Lexmark inkjet I had, I would have to mess around trying to get the dried up nozzles to work, before usually bowing to the inevitable and using a new cartridge. If I had left it with the feed open, the slightest amount of dust seemed to mess up the feed rollers, so that it would feed multiple sheets instead of one, and it was hard to clean that shit out. Of course I might have the same with other brands of inject if used that infrequently, but it certainly didn't leave a good impression. These days I don't print at home at all.
Forget LTO, I recommend a massive array of Sinclair Microdrives. I mean, if you're going for a silly and impractical tape solution, you might as well push the boat out.
Can? Ever? Yes. The resources are there for a self-sustaining colony. You need the technology to access and work with those resources, and the funding to bootstrap the entire chains of resource extraction and processing, but if the raw materials are there, then the potential is there.
Will? Soon? Not fully self sustaining. You could look to build a colony that can produce basics - water, air, staple food, rocket fuel, energy - locally, but they'll be doing it using equipment shipped from Earth, that will need spares etc from Earth, and they'd still need a whole bunch of enabling material shipped out. So it would be partly self-sustaining; I guess the question you're really asking is to what degree.
Yes, that was my first thought, you can of course already hook up a tablet/phone/Rikomagic to your TV and play Android games on the big screen. But I guess this console can stay permanently hooked up to the TV, which has some advantages, and if they can get enough units shipped, maybe developers will do some optimization with their controllers, as games developed for a touchscreen may not translate well to traditional sofa gaming.
Yes; from the NSS labs report: "Recent studies show that users are four times more likely to be tricked into downloading malware than be compromised by an exploit." and " Note: This study does not evaluate browser security related to vulnerabilities in plug -ins or the browsers themselves.".
Seems quite a stretch to claim IE9 is the "safest web browser" based on a report that specifically does not test browser or plug-in vulnerabilities, even if PEBKAC vulnerabilities are more prevalent, although maybe the poster who claimed that had some other source.
That doesn't work, they're obviously doing more than just DNS redirecting. Entering the IP address directly or via your hosts file still gets redirected to the block page. Good guess, and it would be nice if everything in life was the simplest possible case, but sadly it isn't.
The wikipedia article you linked to says that Al-air batteries are non-rechargeable, which puts them immediately into a much smaller niche of applications, especially since many of the applications for non-rechargeable batteries aren't all about energy density, but also about charge-retention etc. There's so much more demand for better rechargeables, with electric vehicles, intermittent power generation (solar, wind etc), that there's a lot more mileage (sorry) in researching anything that might deliver.
Unfortunately, even when they are up-front about their bandwidth management policy, sometimes they make it so complex that it's still hard to know if you're complying. Check out the policy for my ISP, Virgin Media. Props to them for publishing the policy, although you do have to keep checking that it hasn't changed while you weren't looking. But give me a break - two different periods during which traffic is metered, one including an upstream cap, one not, with different levels in each. Plus separate DPI-based management of P2P "between 5pm and midnight on weekdays and midday and midnight on weekends". And if you do exceed one of the caps, they throttle you to 25%, which would be fine, except that however they've implemented that throttling, it makes your connection almost unusable. Download a game from Steam at the wrong time, and you might basically lose the ability to stream video from the web for the rest of the day. Fun.
"Anyone who thinks I'm going to 'discard' my TV just to buy a GoogleTV (or an Apple or Ubuntu TV for that matter) is fooling themselves. Okay, sure, if I was so inclined I could sell my 'old' TV on craigslist, but you know what, even that's more than I want to do."
I understand that you're not very interested in Google TV, but if you're interested enough to post a comment on it, you should be interested enough to spend ten seconds finding out that it's available primarily via STBs, as well as being built into TV sets. Selling your TV is not necessary.
I was wondering the same thing. I guess if there was a "killer app" for white space spectrum, we'd have heard about it. This page summarises it so; "Unlicensed spectrum opens the door to all kinds of uses, but the use most commonly talked about is to provide fixed and wireless broadband Internet services. It could also prove a good technology for moving video and other bulky data types around the home."
"They're actually more incompetent now, both technically and in customer service, than they were as NTL."
Sorry, but as a former NTL and current Virgin customer (few years gap in-between), I just don't believe that is possible, although Virgin are pretty bad. But with NTL, every single time I changed anything about my account, they fucked something up, from day one. It took 2 months to get my cable modem out of them when I first signed up; I would phone up and say I hadn't received it, they'd say "sorry, it hasn't been sent, don't know why, we'll have it sent tomorrow". It wouldn't turn up, I'd phone again, same thing over and over, never got an explanation. I got free broadband from them for half a year after changing package once, they just stopped billing me; they'd cut off my connection every month, I'd phone up and say did they want some money from me, they'd say "Sorry, your account is in credit, I don't know why you've been cut off, I'll reconnect you." That went on until I changed package again. You simply cannot find a less competent organisation than NTL was back in the day.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd be amazed how clever some idiots are.
Well IBM are making a big push in Lithium air, there was an article about that here on /. a while back, but even they were only predicting products on the street between 2020-2030 (link), and probably a while more before they are price-competitive with existing tech. That's a couple of generations of cars at least, so yeah, hardly "around the corner".
"They already have. Most don't like the video, but also don't like the rioting. Problem is, how can they stop it? And how are they supposed to make a statement disowning them? "
Trouble is, there seem there don't seem to be enough of the non-crazy Muslims in some countries. When you have a government minister in Pakistan offering a $100000 bounty for the murder of a foreign civilian, and he's not instantly dismissed, you have a serious problem. He can do that because a large majority of the population back those views, and he knows it. In Pakistan, not so long ago considered an ally of the west, the crazy extremist types are very much in the ascendant, and a lot of Muslim countries seem to be heading that way. It's not just a small minority of crazies making a lot of noise, it's a large majority of them.
Yeah, I was with the summary right up until it proposed Windows 8's mixed-up hash of an attempt to bolt a tablet UI and a desktop UI together as a superior alternative.
This. I've never broken a phone, even though I've never used cases or screen protectors, so while I can't be bothered to work out exactly how much I might have saved by not insuring them over the years, I'm pretty sure that even if my luck changes for the worse, I'll have to write off a fair few before I come out negative
FTA: "Any sane person would have put a few minutes thought into the matter and realized that such an obvious phrase as Carnival of Souls would likely have been used as a title many times before. In fact, Bookfinder turned up at least a couple dozen different books, movies, TV episodes, and more – some of which dates back to 1962. And if you look inside books, Google says that it found the phrase no less than 5600 times (with some duplication, obviously)."
You do get that, right? A phrase used dozens of times as the title of books, movies, and TV episodes. If it was an original phrase that had never been used before, then his case might have some merit, but it's not, and he's just trolling.
The problem with that is there seem to be a lot of people who say, and possibly even believe, that their code is clean and self documenting, when in fact it is anything but. I would say that such people outnumber those who actually do write clean and self-documenting code by a significant margin. In those cases, where you find yourself looking at this code and realise you have no idea whatsoever what it's trying to achieve, much less whether it's doing it right or not, and you're thinking "just give me a f*@king clue, goddammit", any sort of comment, even a cryptic, half-assed effort, can be a lot better than nothing.
If you're an Android power user, and you want to see reasonable OS updates, then you know to buy a Nexus device, that's the point of them. Google can't force the various carriers and handset makers push out updates, and it's not in their interests to do so since they want you to buy a new handset every year, so you should understand what's going to happen there. OTOH my Nexus S had ICS and Jelly Bean almost from day one, no hacks, and running perfectly, and that's a pretty old phone now.
ISTR the "walkers" used in Red Mars were along the lines of the suits described in the article, i.e. a form-fitting mechanical resistance suit, rather than a pressure suit. There was also some sort of open-cycle breathing system that was much less bulky that what we have today, but I can't remember the details.
They claimed "faster", not "more powerful"; clock frequency is the only thing they need to reference for that claim.
I used to print very little, it could be several weeks between prints, and pretty much every time I tried to print with the Lexmark inkjet I had, I would have to mess around trying to get the dried up nozzles to work, before usually bowing to the inevitable and using a new cartridge. If I had left it with the feed open, the slightest amount of dust seemed to mess up the feed rollers, so that it would feed multiple sheets instead of one, and it was hard to clean that shit out. Of course I might have the same with other brands of inject if used that infrequently, but it certainly didn't leave a good impression. These days I don't print at home at all.
Forget LTO, I recommend a massive array of Sinclair Microdrives. I mean, if you're going for a silly and impractical tape solution, you might as well push the boat out.
Can? Ever? Yes. The resources are there for a self-sustaining colony. You need the technology to access and work with those resources, and the funding to bootstrap the entire chains of resource extraction and processing, but if the raw materials are there, then the potential is there.
Will? Soon? Not fully self sustaining. You could look to build a colony that can produce basics - water, air, staple food, rocket fuel, energy - locally, but they'll be doing it using equipment shipped from Earth, that will need spares etc from Earth, and they'd still need a whole bunch of enabling material shipped out. So it would be partly self-sustaining; I guess the question you're really asking is to what degree.
Yes, that was my first thought, you can of course already hook up a tablet/phone/Rikomagic to your TV and play Android games on the big screen. But I guess this console can stay permanently hooked up to the TV, which has some advantages, and if they can get enough units shipped, maybe developers will do some optimization with their controllers, as games developed for a touchscreen may not translate well to traditional sofa gaming.
Yes; from the NSS labs report: "Recent studies show that users are four times more likely to be tricked into downloading malware than be compromised by an exploit ." and " Note: This study does not evaluate browser security related to vulnerabilities in plug -ins or the browsers themselves.".
Seems quite a stretch to claim IE9 is the "safest web browser" based on a report that specifically does not test browser or plug-in vulnerabilities, even if PEBKAC vulnerabilities are more prevalent, although maybe the poster who claimed that had some other source.
"This will all become more interesting when Charles becomes king, since he's much more forthcoming about his own political views."
If and when Charles becomes king, I become a republican. I suspect I'm not alone.
When the imperfection means you can casually walk onto a plane with a pocketful of 12 inch blades, then it's worth taking a bit of notice.
That doesn't work, they're obviously doing more than just DNS redirecting. Entering the IP address directly or via your hosts file still gets redirected to the block page. Good guess, and it would be nice if everything in life was the simplest possible case, but sadly it isn't.
Solid as a rock?
IGMC
The wikipedia article you linked to says that Al-air batteries are non-rechargeable, which puts them immediately into a much smaller niche of applications, especially since many of the applications for non-rechargeable batteries aren't all about energy density, but also about charge-retention etc. There's so much more demand for better rechargeables, with electric vehicles, intermittent power generation (solar, wind etc), that there's a lot more mileage (sorry) in researching anything that might deliver.
I feel even older - I don't remember it.
Unfortunately, even when they are up-front about their bandwidth management policy, sometimes they make it so complex that it's still hard to know if you're complying. Check out the policy for my ISP, Virgin Media. Props to them for publishing the policy, although you do have to keep checking that it hasn't changed while you weren't looking. But give me a break - two different periods during which traffic is metered, one including an upstream cap, one not, with different levels in each. Plus separate DPI-based management of P2P "between 5pm and midnight on weekdays and midday and midnight on weekends". And if you do exceed one of the caps, they throttle you to 25%, which would be fine, except that however they've implemented that throttling, it makes your connection almost unusable. Download a game from Steam at the wrong time, and you might basically lose the ability to stream video from the web for the rest of the day. Fun.
"Anyone who thinks I'm going to 'discard' my TV just to buy a GoogleTV (or an Apple or Ubuntu TV for that matter) is fooling themselves. Okay, sure, if I was so inclined I could sell my 'old' TV on craigslist, but you know what, even that's more than I want to do."
I understand that you're not very interested in Google TV, but if you're interested enough to post a comment on it, you should be interested enough to spend ten seconds finding out that it's available primarily via STBs, as well as being built into TV sets. Selling your TV is not necessary.
I was wondering the same thing. I guess if there was a "killer app" for white space spectrum, we'd have heard about it. This page summarises it so; "Unlicensed spectrum opens the door to all kinds of uses, but the use most commonly talked about is to provide fixed and wireless broadband Internet services. It could also prove a good technology for moving video and other bulky data types around the home."
"They're actually more incompetent now, both technically and in customer service, than they were as NTL."
Sorry, but as a former NTL and current Virgin customer (few years gap in-between), I just don't believe that is possible, although Virgin are pretty bad. But with NTL, every single time I changed anything about my account, they fucked something up, from day one. It took 2 months to get my cable modem out of them when I first signed up; I would phone up and say I hadn't received it, they'd say "sorry, it hasn't been sent, don't know why, we'll have it sent tomorrow". It wouldn't turn up, I'd phone again, same thing over and over, never got an explanation. I got free broadband from them for half a year after changing package once, they just stopped billing me; they'd cut off my connection every month, I'd phone up and say did they want some money from me, they'd say "Sorry, your account is in credit, I don't know why you've been cut off, I'll reconnect you." That went on until I changed package again. You simply cannot find a less competent organisation than NTL was back in the day.