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User: CyberK

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Comments · 47

  1. Finally! on Andromeda On Collision Course With the Milky Way · · Score: 2

    At last, mankind will have a convenient and cheap way of intergalactic travel: Wait for it to come to us.

  2. TFA claims Norway celebrates Memorial Day on Is Facebook Going To Buy Opera? · · Score: 0

    Way to go with the fact checking. Sure, Norwegians celebrate the end of the American Civil War. Just like the US Independence day and Thanksgiving. (We do have a day off for Pentecost, though.)

  3. 1366x768 on Windows 8 and Screen Resolution: WXGA Still Most Popular · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Also known as the cheap laptop screen.

  4. Re:The truth slowly comes out on US Sentinel Drone Fooled Into Landing With GPS Spoofing · · Score: 1

    Indeed, if you want to spoof an encrypted military GPS signal you're limited to relaying genuine signals with a time delay (as mentioned in the paper linked from TFA), which requires a very specific geographic setup of transmitters and spoofing targets in order to resolve. With civilian, unencrypted GPS you can just pretend to be a satellite and send completely bogus information, which is a lot easier. So it's possible to spoof military GPS without the encryption keys, but it's much harder. It could work though, since Iran and Afghanistan would be covered by the same satellites. So either this is down to careful and well executed planning from the Iranians (which is scary), or total incompetence from the Americans who may have built a drone using civilian GPS (not likely and kind of scary) or lost their encryption keys (hopefully very unlikely and extremely scary).

  5. Well duh on Life Possible On 'Large Regions' of Mars · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Since Earth is a lot larger than Mars, and the habitable regions typically lie somewhere near the surface, it's no surprise that a larger proportion of Mars's volume is habitable. (The outer layer of an onion is larger in comparison to the onion when the onion is smaller.) The real question is that of absolute size: How many cubic metres of life-bearing volume is there on Mars in comparison to Earth?

  6. I'm disappointed on Cracker-Size Satellites To Launch With Endeavour · · Score: 1

    When I read "cracker-sized", I thought of petroleum crackers and was very impressed by the sudden audacity.

  7. Re:Link? List? on Five of the Best Free Linux Disk Encryption Tools · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The submitter had the link (check Firehose), but it seems that the edititors deemd the submission to be too long and chopped it off. After all, this is Slashdot and nobody RTFAs anyway.

  8. Re:This is why I have given up on Adobe on Inducement To Piracy, Adobe Style · · Score: 2

    I totally agree, and with Scribus coming along nicely for your InDesign needs, there really isn't any reason why a "occasional photoshopper" can't do just fine with free tools instead of pirating Adobe. Plus, free software rarely breaks compatiblity without any sort of migration path, so you don't even have worry about repirating once a year.

    Maybe someone should package all these tools into a Free Creative Suite?

  9. As a video games lawyer... on Original GTA Design Docs, Dated March 22nd 1995 · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm disappointed that the words "Murder Simulator" aren't in there anywhere.

  10. Obligatory ...PHD on Is Attending a CS Conference Worth the Time? · · Score: 3, Interesting
  11. Re:Consumer choice on Intel CEO: Nokia Should Have Gone With Android · · Score: 1

    Well, the N900 does Maemo, Meego and Android (if you don't mind a bit of broken stuff). As always, it really is only a question of the hardware drivers being available. Something I'm sure the average Linux user about ten years ago could relate to, but everything gets better with time. Nokia dropping the ball is a bit of a setback in the short term, but I believe that eventually commonality of components means it will go the way of the PC. In X years installing your own OS will be a viable option.

  12. Re:What an ugly move to discredit wikileaks on WikiLeaks Nominated For 2011 Nobel Peace Prize · · Score: 1

    Because he was killed by a very bad man before the world recognized how awesome he was, and the prize can't be awarded posthumously.

  13. Re:The meaning of NIMBY on Another WW-I Chemical Site In Washington, DC · · Score: 1

    What, you don't agree that the town needs a new chemical weapons dumping site?

  14. Re:asinine on Another WW-I Chemical Site In Washington, DC · · Score: 4, Informative

    Back then it wasn't close to the capital. It was rural farmland and houses weren't built there until the nineties, according to the article.

  15. Re:A high speed railway on China To Connect Its High-Speed Rail To Europe · · Score: 1

    Goodness me, I would have thought that the trade between France and Germany was significantly reduced after France declared war in 1939. Or maybe, you know, after Germany invaded France in 1940. If you had said before 1939 you would have been correct, remember that the USA arrived late for the party that was WWII.

  16. Re:Thank you. on For GUIs, Just the Right Degree of Realism · · Score: 1

    Thank you for the tip, I checked out The Non-Designer's Design Book and promptly ordered it!

  17. Re:Metaphors on Multi-Button OpenOfficeMouse At OOoCon 2009 · · Score: 1

    Well, at the moment the article is slashdotted, so all we can do is speculate wildly based on the introduction. Which, if you think about it, is what we do best anyway.

  18. Re:A Good Thing on Facebook To Preserve Accounts of the Dead · · Score: 1

    That is a good idea, but on the other hand it might not be so cheery for the average Facebooker to have to answer questions when registering about what to do when they (inevitably) die... The logic is obvious, people's reaction to something that might be called morbid is a lot harder to gauge.

  19. Re:Smart move! on Facebook To Preserve Accounts of the Dead · · Score: 1

    The article states that the memorializing function is in part to prevent exactly that from happening.

  20. Re:Everything is a Novelty at first. on First Look At Acer's 3D Laptop · · Score: 1

    Your job blocks a PC magazine but not slashdot? As far as time spent/wasted goes, I would have thought this was the site to block.

  21. Re:Plot on Soviets Built a Doomsday Machine; It's Still Alive · · Score: 1

    The movie Space Cowboys had a similar device, a satellite that would launch a bunch of warheads at the USA when it lost contact with the Motherland (or was approached by other spacecraft). Obviously it started failing, which also would trigger the launch, and the only ones old enough to know how to fix it were Clint Eastwood and his gang! One helluva movie.

  22. Re:Calling BS on Bullet-Proof Sheets of Carbon Nanotubes · · Score: 1

    But I dare say that military perspective is not on saving fuel costs. After all, why save money by putting in a smaller fuel tank when you can keep it the same size and use the fuel savings to fly further/faster?

  23. Re:Linux's greatest strength = greatest weakness on Harsh Words From Google On Linux Development · · Score: 1

    Windows and Mac OS provide a devoloper with a guaranteed stable platform development-wise, and as such are much safer bets.

    Pretty much every major release of Windows or of OS X is guaranteed to break someone's application. More stable than Linux? Maybe so. Really, truly stable? Not so much.

    Quite true, but that brings us to another of Linux's double-edged swords. Windows and Mac OS have many years between each monolithic release, whereas typical distributions make new semi-major releases twice a year. Great for geeks like me who like the bleeding edge, another headache for developers who have to cope with constantly shifting goalposts.

  24. Linux's greatest strength = greatest weakness on Harsh Words From Google On Linux Development · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Let's face it, one of the things all Linux evangelists like to emphasise is the opportunity to use whatever you want and even build it yourself if you want to. But it's maddening for developers to create something that will work on every kind of linux desktop in existence. From political choices of free vs. non-free, to preferred distribution, version numbers, favourite window manager and a host of other choices, no two desktops will be the same. Linux isn't an operating system, it's an operating eco-system. Taking Google as an example, today I tried to install Google Earth on my Ubuntu 9.04 laptop to no avail, despite it having installed without a hitch on my Xubuntu 7.04 Pentium III plaything in my room back in my parent's house. The exact same version of the program with dramatic differences depending on where you try it, that quickly becomes a support nightmare.

    Now for the dedicated GNOME/KDE/xfce/whatever volunteer this does not pose much of a problem because your target audience has broadly the same machine makeup as you do, but for a commercial developer looking for a good ROI it quickly becomes untenable. Windows and Mac OS provide a devoloper with a guaranteed stable platform development-wise, and as such are much safer bets.

    I agree that the only way Linux can make itself more attractive to commercial desktop program developers is with a mighty amount of consolidation, but the problem is that I don't think it will happen. The great OS wars that went before the dominance of Windows had winners and losers because they were systems of a closed nature, and so if you held with a losing team they closed down because it wasn't economically viable and you had to move to something more mainstream, thus consolidating the market. With Linux a project will never close down as long as someone like it more than something else.

  25. Re:hey Asus on Asus Slaps Linux In the Face · · Score: 1

    If we do accept that, we are still left wondering why the (possibly fake) Asus site is so polished and the windowsisbetter site is so crap by comparison. If someone is pulling a prank, I don't understand his reasoning.