cwingrav

buckkalu said:

Then there is the devastating effect the number of birds, bats and other insects killed by the blades.

Greatly over-hyped. I feel for the animals hit, but they're better off in a world with clean energy given the ACTUAL low numbers.

The number of birds killed by turbines is fairly insignificant to existing sources:

• windmills          (10k-500k)
• cars                  (60,000k-80,000k)
  
• pesticides        (~70,000k)
• power lines      (130,000k-174,000k)
• other sources: cars (hundreds of million, windows, coms towers, etc) 

Here's a link which provides references as well to its sources: https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/wind-turbine-kill-birds.htm

libertyforall said:

It is going to need something more than just UWB to be a useful tag for locating, it would need at least Bluetooth to make it locatable from further by various devices.  UWB range is pretty small.  

UWB goes through walls and is measured on the order of meters. It's the tech used in industrial RTLS systems. More than capable for indoor locating. Larger spaces (multiple shops or different departments in a store) could easily be instrumented with multiple emitters/sensors.

Makes sense to limit individual apps. Common practice for sharing resources in virtualization and such. If one app used more memory, it would impact other apps when the resource hog switched to the background. This limit sounds like making apps play nice, and the hardware feel snappy.

mike1 said:

rob53 said:

Android doesn't come with any built-in encryption so it didn't really hurt them. Windows phone is gone so who is left?

Think outside of phones.

Agreed. This wasn't so much about phones in the long run, it was about communication. If the bill had gone through as written, and Apple and others were forced to create backdoors to be exploited, then a host of Apps and websites would spring up, "claiming" to have no backdoor but with no real way to verify. All those Apps and websites would just be based outside the US and all US companies would be at an unfair advantage since the world's companies and people don't want the US government reading their transmissions. Basically, this would be bad for security AND business. I think the later part played more of a role in killing this legislation than any of the privacy arguments.

I can't believe how many of these I get in a week. I thought it was just me getting them. Thankfully they are doing something about it.

I get the feeling this could go for a LOT more. It has so much geek chic... not fashion... not trendy... true engineering geek chic. Most items are parts of a computer or such. This is so perfect to frame and put on a wall as an inspirational shrine. I hope whoever gets it smiles at it at least once a day and then gets back to work on their latest and greatest endeavor that is changing the world...

TurboPGT said:

Because this is what the world is missing? Bendable phones?

No. Next gimmick please. 

I think the eventual use will be in a flip-phone like system where you have a regular phone, and then can flip it open for twice the display space. It's not the bending that is a feature, but the ability to unfold, without bezels, into more pixels and interaction space. That said, if it doesn't have touch interaction on the flipped out part, it won't be useful.

Microsoft's Visual Studio really was an innovative product YEARS ago when I first came across it (I think version 2 or 4). It's debugging engine was amazing at the time. That innovation seems to have stopped and all i see is bloat and features that I never use. Can anyone familiar with it comment on their experience? This is just out of curiosity. These days I do my development with so many different tools and platforms that I can't use one single development environment. I'm not looking to switch or anything, just curious.