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User: RightwingNutjob

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  1. No obvious reason on 20-Year-Old Military Weather Satellite Explodes In Orbit · · Score: 4, Informative

    What no obvious reason? Either the batteries overheated and exploded (fuel and oxidizer packed close together and sitting for 20 years) or the fuel tank vapors exploded on their own (tends to happen with monopropellant--no need to additional oxidizers, just a random injection of energy). Russian rocket bodies used to explode in orbit from time to time from fuel vapors (undesired bipropellant mixing) until they were convinced to burn off all their spare fuel after they deployed their payload into its orbit.

  2. Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt. on Xfce 4.12 Released · · Score: 2

    I'm sure there are, each with their own quirks and "language extensions." Kinda like C++11. A program that grew up around gcc's implementation needs to be ported to microsoft's implementation, even if it links in no libraries. Example: __asm__ vs asm(...); Neither is in the language spec, so both are extensions, and surprise! linux kernel code can't just be copy-pasted to windows kernel code.

  3. Re:Corporation != People on Verizon Posts Message In Morse Code To Mock FCC's Net Neutrality Ruling · · Score: 1

    Except that the emotional BS about pushing grandma off a cliff in her wheelchair and the soldiers and the retirees came after and, as usual for lefty "counterarguments" about fiscal discipline, failed to acknowledge the core point about 47% of people not having skin in the game on federal spending.

  4. Re:Corporation != People on Verizon Posts Message In Morse Code To Mock FCC's Net Neutrality Ruling · · Score: 1

    Doesn't matter. The point is they have no skin in the game wrt federal taxation, and given that the federal government has gradually crept up to about 25% of American economic activity and is 1.5 years worth of GDP in the hole, the fact that nearly half the people have nearly half the vote but zero financial obligations is unhealthy and potentially dangerous not just to the other half.

  5. All the more reason on Google Taking Over New TLDs · · Score: 3, Insightful

    that the new TLDs were a stupid idea and the only reason they were implemented is that the beancounters are in charge instead of the car guys.

  6. Re:Corporation != People on Verizon Posts Message In Morse Code To Mock FCC's Net Neutrality Ruling · · Score: 1

    Check your privelege my friend. I know the poor don't pay taxes. As Romney famously said, the bottom 47% of the economic ladder pay no net taxes, which is to say what they get deducted from their paychecks (if any) they get back in welfare and subsidies.

  7. Re:Corporation != People on Verizon Posts Message In Morse Code To Mock FCC's Net Neutrality Ruling · · Score: 1

    No, but I do think all tax rates (personal, corporate, and capital gains) should be flat and equal.

  8. Re:Corporation != People on Verizon Posts Message In Morse Code To Mock FCC's Net Neutrality Ruling · · Score: 1

    Peo[le have freedom of association and freedom of speech. The 1st amendment actually lumps them together as peaceable assembly. Corporations are a peaceable assembly of board members and/or shareholders. Therefore they have speech and property rights like people, and tax burdens like people.

  9. No dude. They don't want to end up in court for running a high speed line for a paying customer who wants equipment on both ends connected to the public internet but only their traffic allowed on the pipe.

  10. PLIP on Ask Slashdot: Old PC File Transfer Problem · · Score: 1

    Parallel line internet protocol. Get ahold of a floppy drive for your main PC and put a micro linux distro on it, including the module for the plip protocol. Then boot off the floppy. It'll take like 3 or 4 disks to hold the full kernel, but once you're there, you can rsync your drive to something else with a parallel port or a parallel port dongle.

  11. Re:Fridge door handle on Should a Service Robot Bring an Alcoholic a Drink? · · Score: 1

    And the difference between having that happen with a robot and a human caregiver is...

    The problem isn't one of ethics. The problem is one of people with no understanding about how robots work, are designed, and are programmed to act pontificating from their armchairs.

  12. Re:There is no engineering. on Ask Slashdot: Are General Engineering Skills Undervalued In Web Development? · · Score: 1

    I went to an accredited school but I work in a R&D lab so I never had cause to get a license, I still develop requirements and design and build stuff to them. I don't build bridges, overpasses, or power plants, but I'd still call myself an engineer.

  13. Re:Pointless on Removing Libsystemd0 From a Live-running Debian System · · Score: 1

    Some of us draw the line at typing in our circuits by hand into command-line Spice. Layout and such will be done on a nice GUI on whatever platform it runs on.

  14. Re:Devil's advocate of the Devil's advocate? on Nuclear Plant Taken Down In Anticipation of Snowstorm · · Score: 2

    Local power lines routed through trees. High tension lines on rotting wooden towers. Welcome to the People's Republic of Massachusetts, where the buses are always on time, the subways never stop running, and town-owned sections of the sidewalk are always the first to be shovelled.

  15. Re:Pointless on Removing Libsystemd0 From a Live-running Debian System · · Score: 1

    And these people have no business setting up servers and clusters and embedded systems and all the other sorts of techie things that initd did and does just fine as is, but with more than zero brain power required. Is it tricky to get going on the $200 PC you bought for Grandma from some Taiwanese sweat shop? Yes. Yes it is. But that's not what Linux is for. It's for real work environments where 1) people are on staff whose job is to take the day or two to work through that setup process and 2) it is very rare that you have more than 1 or 2 machine types around so you can use the same image on multiple systems.

  16. Re:SystemD may not be what we think it is. on Removing Libsystemd0 From a Live-running Debian System · · Score: 1

    Meh. Those who know don't talk and those who talk don't know. Sometimes it's coordinated evil, sometimes it's just a single idiot who manages to gain influence by a combination of dumb luck and people being to disgusted to argue.

  17. Re:Pointless on Removing Libsystemd0 From a Live-running Debian System · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This post is the prime example of the way people on opposite sides of the debate are talking past each other. Given Linux's historical roots as a hobbyist OS, with almost all of the mid-late 90's spent as an academic OS that gradually worked its way into the enterprise environment by displaying commercial Unix distributions, a very large part of the folks who use Linux use it because it is "harder" to work with which is to say "easier" to tailor to their particular applications away from the desktop.

    I use it on my desktop because I like it, but I learned to like it because I used it in scientific applications where I needed something I could customize and go deep on without being forced to follow Microsoft's or Apple's design decisions or having to fork over tens of thousands of dollars for VxWorks or QNX or HPUX or whatever and some more for ports of software that just happen to already exist in the GNU/Linux/FOSS ecosystem.

    Did it take me a good couple of hours of googling to figure out how something worked? Sure. Lots of times. I'm pretty sure it would have taken me days to get the same result with Windows or Mac, if it was at all possible, becaues those were commercial OS's geared toward nontechnical consumers, with all the ambiguity and flexibility taken out. The most famous example is Steve Jobs deciding that the average luser was too stupid for more than one button on their mouse. But that's cosmetic. There are deep technical places where that sort of limitation does matter.

    So why the bitching about systemd? Well, that core of people, few of whom really cared about widespread desktop adoption to begin with because their attention was spent on backend or niche scientific and technical applications, are seeing the push for Linux On The Desktop take the predictable direction of removing flexibilty from the system and, here's the important bit, forcing other software in the echosystem to remove flexibility to conform to The SystemD Way. Speaking for myself as a decade-long user of Linux, this came out of left field and looks like trying to solve a problem that never really existed for the Linux userbase by removing the very characteristics of the system that attracted folks like myself to use it for scientific and technical applications where Windows and Mac don't cut it and Big Blue and its equivalents are too damned expensive to be worth it.

    So here's how we're talking past each other: you're trying to solve a problem I don't think needs solving, and you don't understand why people who use Linux now use it at all.

  18. Re:Attack Submarines Not Backbone of US Navy on Will Submarines Soon Become As Obsolete As the Battleship? · · Score: 1

    I know that, and you know that. But you use the magic words and there's a type of person that thinks the boat can change mission profiles at the push of a button transformer-style.

  19. Re:Attack Submarines Not Backbone of US Navy on Will Submarines Soon Become As Obsolete As the Battleship? · · Score: 1

    Oh how I love an infusion of managment speak. You get full credit for "modular" but only partial credit for "capable of being reconfigured" when the correct incantation of buzzwords is "reconfigur(ation|able) capabiilty"

  20. Re:Pure expected value analysis misses the point on The Mathematical Case For Buying a Powerball Ticket · · Score: 1

    Nevermind the cost of admission and probability of losing money as a knock against risk/expected value as a performance metric for an investment. Both probability and risk only make sense when you're talking about something where you're not subject to small number statistical fluctuations (aka shot noise, poisson noise...pick your poison...hehe) the way you are with buying one ticket or a dozen tickets. In general, risk is only sensible for lots of uncorrelated and independent events. Like investing in 100 different lemonade stands in 100 different cities far apart. Then it makes sense to talk about risk. Playing the lottery, even if you're an institutional investor capable of buying up half the numbers, doesn't make sense because it'd be like having all those 100 lemonade stands in one town with fickle weather. If it's hot and dry, you win. If it's nice and mild, you lose, regardless of the probability of an individual lemonade stand making a profit and its expected return.

  21. Re:As long as it's only one ticket on The Mathematical Case For Buying a Powerball Ticket · · Score: 1

    I can get less than $2/cup by brewing my own coffee. Government might object to me running my own lottery though...

  22. Re:System Bug? on Tracking System Bug Delays SpaceX's DSCOVR Launch · · Score: 1

    What? Haven't you heard that software-defined radar will be in the next systemd feature set?

  23. Re:Recursion is best used on AP Test's Recursion Examples: An Exercise In Awkwardness · · Score: 2

    Which is not the example in TFS. It says recurseivePrint(n-1); print(n);, which does NOT build up the solution from the simple case, but swaps a for loop for a loop up and down the stack.

  24. Re:TL;DR People doesn't understand the Turing test on Replacing the Turing Test · · Score: 1

    understanding jokes is probably not the most economically useful target for current AI research.

    A joke detector? That's funny. I mean a sarcasm detector? That's real useful.

  25. Re:Jail forever on Swatting 19-Year-Old Arrested in Las Vegas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Agreed. Some things you don't fuck with. Like pulling the fire alarm for kicks or calling the cops on innocent people.