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User: RightwingNutjob

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  1. Re:Non story, headline should read on Transformer Explosion Closes Nuclear Plant Unit North of NYC · · Score: 1

    Well, there is a story, but it's more about a single point of failure between the generating plant and the customer. No failover transformer? No spare on site? Did the old one give up the ghost of old age when it should have been rotated out and rebuilt a long while ago?

  2. Re: More religious whackjobs on Native Hawaiian Panel Withdraws Support For World's Largest Telescope · · Score: 1

    Haleakala, not Mauna kea. And those operators with security clearances don't always have to be uniformed military.

  3. Re: More religious whackjobs on Native Hawaiian Panel Withdraws Support For World's Largest Telescope · · Score: 1

    I run the park, therefor I am an expert. I am the CEO therefor I know the business best. I am the emperor, therefor I am not naked. Appeals to authority only work when the audience has just fallen off the turnip truck within the last minute.

  4. Re: CHANGE EVERYTHING! on My High School CS Homework Is the Centerfold · · Score: 1

    Not code for. Is equivalent to. Still holds water though. Sorry, try again.

  5. Re: More religious whackjobs on Native Hawaiian Panel Withdraws Support For World's Largest Telescope · · Score: 1

    True, but/and the reason for keeping the state and church apart is so that you the free citizen can run your life in a way compatible with your understanding of God, for there is no real meaningful godliness without a real chance at failure. If the church has a say in public policy, that takes away some of your ability to make the correct choice.

  6. Re: More religious whackjobs on Native Hawaiian Panel Withdraws Support For World's Largest Telescope · · Score: 0

    This is true. Daniel Inouye used to rule those mountaintops with an iron fist. I hear through my grapevine that he nixed an upgrade to make some of the military's satellite tracking telescopes up there back in the 80s because the automation would have cost some of the native Hawaiian telescope operators their jobs.

  7. Re: More religious whackjobs on Native Hawaiian Panel Withdraws Support For World's Largest Telescope · · Score: 3, Funny

    Illegal my ass. We occupied and annexed it fair and square, replacing tribal savagery where might made right on the scale of every day life with actual laws and courts and civilized institutions. The fact that we also brought modern religion (that is to say a small-L liberal judeo-christian tradition) to replace this "the colors of the wind" bullshit is all the more icing on the cake.

  8. Re: Oh come on. on Long Uptime Makes Boeing 787 Lose Electrical Power · · Score: 1

    Not like Ada, where you can fuck up much easier by choosing the wrong floating point type for your altitude indicator.

  9. Re:This again? on New Test Supports NASA's Controversial EM Drive · · Score: 0

    TL;DR; if White didn't understand the issues with his setup the first time around (vacuum wasn't the biggest), I don't trust him to make a meaningful measurement this time either.

    The biggest question I had wasn't whether this would work in a vacuum, it was whether this was really an "anomolous" electromagnetic torque against the steel vacuum chamber due to improper shielding of the RF the thing radiates out combined with the effect of piping the RF in from outside the balance (ie the wires carrying the RF lines stiffenning in a weird way when carrying current).

  10. Re: Is that proven? on Debian 8 Jessie Released · · Score: 2

    Which is not the correct behavior for a headless server. The correct behavior is to start anyway and for any user processes that depend on access to the unavailable filesystem to exit with a -1 status and log whatever perror() spits out to standard error, at which point it is clear to the sysadmin what happened and without having the other stuff on the box held up. LP really must have grown up with Win95, because real Linux servers often do more than one thing at a time and hold more than one service at a time, and this behavior of systemd breaks that functionality on a logical level (that is it's not a bug, it's an error on the part of the designer).

  11. Re:systemd sux on Debian 8 Jessie Released · · Score: 1

    They would not have used systemd if it threatened the system's existence.

    Sure. Let's assume that because it's the emperor, he must be wearing the finest of clothes.

    As comrade Reagan used to say: Trust but verify

  12. Re:Much Ado About Nothing on Concerns of an Artificial Intelligence Pioneer · · Score: 1

    Mod parent up. All technology can be used, misused, over-applied, and under-applied. Sci-fi type AI will never be a threat. All computers only do what they're programmed to do, and only effect what they're allowed to effect. If you think it's a stupid idea to hook up a random number generator to a time bomb, then Congratulations: you have all the sense necessary to avoid AI Armageddon. If you aren't afraid to point out when other people are about to do the same thing, then Congratulations Again: you have all the courage you need to prevent your neighbor from causing AI Armageddon. Some things really *are* that simple. I speak as someone who's worked on and around "artificial intelligence" for the better part of ten years, though not as an academic researcher.

  13. Somebody do some back-of-the envelope calculation for me (it's late an I'm tired): is it actually possible to cut down enough plantlife so dip the atmospheric O2 levels down and CO2 levels up to a dangerous place? My instinct says that there's just too big of a critical mass of photosynthesizing organisms out there and the buffering effect of fewer plants now making more room for growth for what's left makes it impossible to actually get into a dangerous situation through anything other than global thermonuclear war, and even then...

  14. Re:Way too many humanities majors on Why America's Obsession With STEM Education Is Dangerous · · Score: 1

    Uh huh. Associates degrees in $BUZZWORD Engineering Technology explain a lot of that, but they still count as the T and E in STEM. Excluding those, if you can spell 'engineer' you have a job. At the height of the recession 5 years ago, it was record low unemployment for real engineers.

  15. Re: 9 whole billion? OUTRAGEOUS! on GAO Denied Access To Webb Telescope Workers By Northrop Grumman · · Score: 1

    The perpetual fallacy in procurement of both the private and governmental sort is that it is possible to quantify innovation. If the original bid was 1.6, then yes it was dishonestly low and the NASA bureaucrats were incomeptent for not spotting it. On the other hand, find me a civil servant who thinks it's a good thing for his career to inflate the cost of an underbid contract, even if he does see it for what it is? It always takes two to tango.

  16. Re:Money on Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina Near Launching Presidential Bid · · Score: 1

    Not if she outsources it to the lowest foreign bidder it wouldn't

  17. Re:Money on Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina Near Launching Presidential Bid · · Score: 1

    With a pretty solid centrist record as governor, if I remember my history books correctly

  18. Re:Echo chamber on Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina Near Launching Presidential Bid · · Score: 1

    Yeah, but it's the add, subtract, multiply and divide that must be missing...

  19. Echo chamber on Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina Near Launching Presidential Bid · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What sort of echo chamber does this woman live in to think she's got a good record as a manager to run on? Romney at least made real money and ran a real state government. Fiorina started lots of pissing contests, got booted by the shareholders for loosing money and assets, and lost a senate (not even governor's) race. Wow.

  20. Re:The Russians poisoned the well on Russia Wants To Work With NASA On a New Space Station · · Score: 1

    No, Russia is to blame for thinking that it has a say over where their neighbors' alleigances lie, and for referring to engagement as "meddling"

  21. Re:Tent Cities on Ikea Refugee Shelter Entering Production · · Score: 1

    Depends on the price and how easy it is to modify. There's a (small) mobile shelter and enclosure market mainly for military and disaster relief already, and there's pre-fabricated buildings and sheds you can buy that go on concrete pads. The question is how much would this cost relative to those for the given mission. My guess is that housing displaced people for a long time is sufficiently different from what we tend to need in the US that the design choices made in these units make them less than the ideal choice for other applications given the other available options.

  22. Re:*sigh* on Iowa's Governor Terry Branstad Thinks He Doesn't Use E-mail · · Score: 1

    no. people know politicians are evil. so which do you want: evil and stupid or evil and competent?

  23. Re:Who's being censored? on Notel Media Player Helps North Koreans Skirt Censorship · · Score: 1

    Same reason people go "hey, that's a good idea" when I tell them about how soviet-made cars in the 70's and 80's had backup handcranks stored in the trunk that you'd insert into a slot hidden behind the front license plate when your engine wouldn't turn over on its own. Western stuff just doesn't need those sorts of workarounds built ruight into it.

  24. Good to see on Notel Media Player Helps North Koreans Skirt Censorship · · Score: 1

    the fruits of civilization bringing freedom of information into the dark corners of totalitarianism.

  25. Re:Still not as bad as Perkin-Elmer... on GAO Denied Access To Webb Telescope Workers By Northrop Grumman · · Score: 1

    No, the other ten probably had the same problem. Just no one in government could tell the difference.