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User: Electricity+Likes+Me

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Comments · 2,098

  1. Re:Helium? on Google Project Loon Balloons To Blanket Indonesia With Internet (thestar.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    There's no practical reason you couldn't fill unmanned high altitude balloons with hydrogen.

  2. Re:Annoying update process on Apple Usurps Oracle As the Biggest Threat To PC Security · · Score: 1

    Judging by Oracle's previous updater efforts, nothing. This is the same company which couldn't be bothered to make a Java updater which could check for updates without producing a UAC pop up.

  3. "a power transfer rate of 6.9 kilowatts" is absolutely meaningless. Rates involve Time. 6.9 Kilowatts per _what_ exactly?

    You might want to look up the definition of a kilowatt.

  4. Re:The kilogram is based on a chunk of metal? on Kilogram Conflict Resolved At Last (nature.com) · · Score: 1

    "People" don't do that.

    Americans do that.

    Countries with the metric system use metric as natural units because its what they're familiar with.

  5. Re:Swarm, not sphere. on Mysteriously Variable Star Causes Speculation About Dyson Sphere (slate.com) · · Score: 1

    It is however a threshold situation. The tools and technology to build a solar panel to sustain us like that would make it cheaper to build the next one. Once we can do it once, economic growth would dictate that we pretty obviously should build another to get the most out of the investment. Repeat to the logical conclusion...

  6. Re:Swarm, not sphere. on Mysteriously Variable Star Causes Speculation About Dyson Sphere (slate.com) · · Score: 1

    It could also simply be *not a dyson sphere*. A matroshka brain would actually be somewhat more consistent - clouds of thinly spread dust, punctuated by a few planets or planet remnants in the process of being disassembled.

    Seeing as how the star is never completely occulted, but the predicted object sizes for some scenarios have to be substantially larger then the star, then it would be somewhat more consistent.

  7. Re:why build a Dyson sphere? on Mysteriously Variable Star Causes Speculation About Dyson Sphere (slate.com) · · Score: 1

    Planets are inefficient at providing living space.

  8. Re:Given Distance on Mysteriously Variable Star Causes Speculation About Dyson Sphere (slate.com) · · Score: 1

    "dark matter" is never used in astronomical terms these days to refer to cold objects. They're called "cold" for that reason.

  9. Re:Swarm, not sphere. on Mysteriously Variable Star Causes Speculation About Dyson Sphere (slate.com) · · Score: 1

    The only problem is there's no actual excess of IR emission from the star - which is one of the reasons they've ruled out a lot of conventional dust-cloud and asteroid belt explanations.

  10. Re:Lots of other possibilities on Mysteriously Variable Star Causes Speculation About Dyson Sphere (slate.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    Except if this were the case we would see diffraction spectra from the edge of the occluding object. We would also be able to find the object and measure it directly: in the attached paper they do a detailed follow up where no such occluding objects are discovered.

  11. Re:Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice on Charge Rage: Electric Cars Are Making People Meaner In California · · Score: 1

    You only need to be able to supply enough current to eventually charge all the cars. So you only need to meet enough load to get them all charged by the end of the day.

  12. Re:Stay away from git for "inexperienced team" on Ask Slashdot: Selecting a Version Control System For an Inexperienced Team · · Score: 1

    Force Push doesn't delete data from Git you realize. It's still there, the commits are still there, until you GC them out. Maybe - assuming they're not pointed to by anything. There are ways to do it, but this is not one and if your project is public in anyway then it's dangerous advice that this works.

    Also ff someone force pushes to a git repo you rollback the reflog to before the push to get to a known good state. Which again: is why force push doesn't delete things.

  13. Re:git on Ask Slashdot: Selecting a Version Control System For an Inexperienced Team · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No you're not? With Git its not at all distributed unless you really really work at it. The simplest and most naive git model is "get latest head, edit, commit and push". This is what everyone is going to be doing with any other tool.

    The difference is, when they get more advanced, you'll be in the good company of the *massive* git ecosystem and featureset which will make your life a lot easier. If you're dealing with people who don't know version control, then it doesn't matter what you pick - they are not going to understand it and you will be doing a lot of support.

  14. Re:We should not protect them on How Academia Still Struggles With Sexual Harassment (buzzfeed.com) · · Score: 1

    Conversely you definitely aren't a professor at all.

  15. Re:The 1980s called... on There Is No .bro In Brotli: Google/Mozilla Engineers Nix File Type As Offensive · · Score: 1

    Eh....it's a cumbersome word to write though.

    ls *.brotli is a bit awkward. The b-r transition is what gets you. bl would be nicer because its one handed and once you're over the b your ring finger is over the l.

  16. Re:Figure out how to keep the NSA out. on Vint Cerf Wants Help Figuring Out the Future of the Internet and Communications · · Score: 1

    End to end encryption is fundamentally incompatible with historical archives. Copyright and DRM will eventually lead to some, easily duplicable works of art being lost forever because the servers are shutdown and encryption keys not released.

    E2E encryption is the same - it working is *fundamentally* about the death of archival.

  17. Re:Effects of Sex Ratio on Chinese Tech Companies Hire 'Cheerleaders' To Motivate Programmers · · Score: 1

    Except rural to urban migration in China at the moment is massive. That cultural attitude is going to have a long and harmful and impact.

  18. Re:Testing on Can Living In Total Darkness For 5 Days "Reset" the Visual System? · · Score: 4, Informative

    There's a long history of doctors and scientists in medicine testing their ideas on themselves.

  19. Re: Short answer? on Ask Slashdot: Can Any Wireless Tech Challenge Fiber To the Home? · · Score: 1

    Any wireless improvement is implicitly a wired a improvement.

  20. Re:Did anybody notice... on Systemd Absorbs "su" Command Functionality · · Score: 1

    Yes I'm sure this is exactly how it happened, and not at all is explicitly wrong as shown in one of the first screenshots where a password is being prompted for. But I'm also sure you'll do no further research before commenting loudly.

  21. Re:Thinking about leaving any systemd linux behind on Systemd Absorbs "su" Command Functionality · · Score: 1

    How burdensome that you're forced to use all this free software. You'd think the volume of you and people like you would have amassed enough that the "obvious" alternatives you all think should be done could be combined into a serviceable Linux distribution. How is Devuan going?

  22. Re:What's with all the awkward systemd command nam on Systemd Absorbs "su" Command Functionality · · Score: 1

    If you're writing a shell script you should be writing it once, in which case 10 extra characters is not a burden.

  23. Re:BSD is looking better all the time on Systemd Absorbs "su" Command Functionality · · Score: 2

    Yes and init scripts are just a bastion of race-free stateful design, and service monitoring. Except not at all those things.

  24. Re:BSD is looking better all the time on Systemd Absorbs "su" Command Functionality · · Score: 1

    Seriously?

    You're saying this: /etc/init.d/servicename stop

    is harder to parse then this (correct because you also managed to mispell the command invocation):
    systemctl stop servicename

    The problem with people who hate systemd is that all of them only manage to come up with, at best, utterly petty complaints like this and "binary logs" (guess my syslog-ng configuration doesn't exist).

  25. This is the noose Uber hangs itself by... on Uber Hires Hackers Who Remotely Killed a Jeep · · Score: 2

    The self-driving car is very much going to project that sinks Uber. It's an enterprise so far outside their core business, with such a sheer volume of money required to bring to fruition, and they're just not going to get there. Moreover, it's not at all clear that their financials support being able to back a project like this if it doesn't bring quick and immediate success.

    Google are probably the current leaders in this field. And to their credit, there's a logical value there - Google's business is, essentially, AI - which is what the problem boils down to (and integrates nicely with the rest of their search business - object identification, categorization etc.).

    When investors start wanting to cash out, Uber is going to wind up sliced and diced and a lot less valuable then it looked on paper due to projects like this which they can't possibly fulfill.