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Comment: Re:Forget the customer (Score 1) 108

It undermines the whole point of having a locked in operating system on the system and all the security features. Now you can poke and prod at one OS from the other. I like the idea - if one OS gets bricked by some update you received the minute you got off the plane, you can flip to the other one.

Comment: Re:The real puzzle (Score 2) 357

2005: Greek 737 crew succumbed to cabin de-pressurization, plane flew on until out of gas & crashed. Helios Airways Flight 522: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Story of multiple pilot errors on top of ground mechanic's stunning mistake. I suspect something similar happened in this case.

Comment: Re:BTDT (Score 1) 266

by mikael (#46478401) Attached to: Is the New "Common Core SAT" Bill Gates' Doing?

We did that in the UK. Starting in the 1980's, politicians tinkered with the education system. Replaced all the different competing exam boards with one standard national exam board. The only problem is that the party of the day would issue edicts like 50% of the population must go to university. To achieve this goal, they had to improve high-school exam grades. So how did they do that? They started merging high school subjects (physics, chemistry and biology became general science, arithmetic and mathematics became general math). They invented an exam system where there were foundation, general and credit exams for the same subject. Employers wouldn't consider anyone with foundation and general exam grades so those were dropped. That left the universities to sort out the mess once the students started arriving.

Having separate state and county exam boards compartmentalizes the education system and restricts the amount of damage any vote-desperate education minister or party can do.

Comment: Re:Using this to solve a problem (Score 1) 171

by mikael (#46477499) Attached to: Power Cables' UV Flashes Apparently Frighten Animals

At night-time, birds tend to fly towards light. Many downtowns with skyscraper office blocks end up with flocks of dead birds at street level due to birds flying towards the office lights. If anything you would need bright lights at either side of the wind turbines, so the birds could see a safe path to fly along.

Comment: Re:Godwin Time! (Score 1) 89

by mikael (#46457813) Attached to: Volkswagen Chairman: Cars Must Not Become 'Data Monsters'

The concept of the Internet of Things thrives on the fact that there will be literally "billions and billions" of embedded devices with internet connectivity, sensors, all sending back to servers, which then use Big Data processing methods to discover hidden information.

Knowing the traction on car wheels and vibration on suspension systems will allow councils to determine which segments of road need resurfacing.
Knowing the speed of cars will tell them which areas of freeways are starting to clog up (before they gridlock).
Knowing the usage pattern of roads allows them to adjust traffic lights accordingly.

Maybe traffic light systems could be made smarter by dynamically adjusting the timing due to motion on the roads.

Comment: Re:How fine is this distinction? (Score 2) 62

by mikael (#46451001) Attached to: Study: Elephants Have Learned To Tell Certain Languages Apart

If you draw a graph of brain size vs. number of words an animal can learn (parrot = 200, cat = 50, dog = 1000), an elephant should be able to learn hundreds of words. A wild animal like an elephant is going to have to be aware of every possible sound from every possible creature (crocodiles snapping, toads croaking, hyenas fighting, vultures crying, lions fighting, as well as watery sounds like thunderstorms, rain, waterfalls and rivers. Then they can also hear infra-sound as they communicate using low frequency.

Some brain scans were done of elephants and it seemed they had larger brain regions related to hearing.

Comment: Re:Way to shoot the messenger (Score 1) 167

For instance, I can post anonymously right now on this very platform. How is that wrong?

At the first level, slashdot will log all the IP addresses of all submissions - that's part of the general infrastructure of discussion forums. At a second level someone can contact the maintainers if anything offensive has been written. Then at the third level, they can hire a lawyer and request the IP address of the person submitting the comment. From there they can escalate the complaint with the originating ISP, the authorities and the individual concerned.
