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Comments · 6,671

  1. Re:Live Footage! on Space Station Crew Prepare For Emergency Spacewalk · · Score: 1

    Aren't they small kinda by definition? :)

  2. Re:Who pays? on ATMs Compromised, $45M Taken · · Score: 1

    Every car loan I've ever had was with a credit union, and the rates were always fabulous. 6.5% back in 2000 :) I'll be moving my checking there shortly.

  3. Re:Live Footage! on Space Station Crew Prepare For Emergency Spacewalk · · Score: 1

    I mostly agree, although you can certainly have whatever velocity difference you want if you are not in a circular orbit anymore. A single hit to ISS big enough to deorbit it would certainly not leave it in a circular orbit by definition. There's no solution, I think, for a single momentum transfer that would lower the instantaneous orbital altitude by 100 metres while still keeping the track somewhat parallel to the previous one -- if that's what the visuals implied.

  4. Re:Live Footage! on Space Station Crew Prepare For Emergency Spacewalk · · Score: 1

    Alas, I didn't notice -- did the entire station actually deorbit, or was it only some collision debris that got deorbited?

  5. Re:Live Footage! on Space Station Crew Prepare For Emergency Spacewalk · · Score: 1

    To change the ISS's velocity that much in a single impact would destroy the entire station.

    That's of course right. Whatever hits the station would need to do so at a minimum of 150m/s velocity difference, and then only if it were much more massive than the station. Unless it had a big honking spring attached to it, that is :) 150m/s is half the muzzle velocity of many small firearms.

  6. Re:Unscheduled != Emergency on Space Station Crew Prepare For Emergency Spacewalk · · Score: 2

    When you have an emergency of such magnitude on ISS, you don't get to wear the spacesuits, you haul your ass into the Soyuz and head back to Earth.

    To the braindead mods: The parent is not a troll, just uninformed about ISS procedures. That doesn't make him a troll.

  7. Re:Live Footage! on Space Station Crew Prepare For Emergency Spacewalk · · Score: 1

    From what I've seen of the trailer, it seems believeable enough. What gripes do you have, as I wasn't looking very closely?

  8. Re:Great on ATMs Compromised, $45M Taken · · Score: 1

    Um, you do understand that interbank loans in the U.S. are pretty much free? The current federal funds rate that the depository banks use to lend their fed deposits to each other is 0.25%, and the discount rate used to cover liquidity requirements is 0.75%.

  9. Re:I guess US banks will re-evaluate.. on ATMs Compromised, $45M Taken · · Score: 1

    Nope, you're not insightful here. How on Earth would secure smart cards have helped? We're talking prepaid debit cards here. It's perfectly legal to distribute them. The nefarious folk would simply need to go to the country where their target bank was, buy some prepaid cards, ship them abroad, and only then launch the scheme. Magstripe-only cards have let them skip this step, but it's no big deal, really. They'd be in the hole for $1k or so to ship the cards around, and perhaps another couple $k to travel to buy the prepaids -- assuming they had to buy them themselves, vs. asking someone local to do it for them for a small profit.

  10. Re:Not ATMs, the debit card system on ATMs Compromised, $45M Taken · · Score: 1

    Well, you don't earn enough to understand that there's plenty of people who do in fact withdraw $10K in cash from ATMs. There's no way for an ATM to have enough information to decide whether a withdrawal is suspicious or not. The ATM would need to pull in a lot of data to make that determination. That'd be a gaping security hole. The upstream systems were, apparently, a gaping hole too, but you seem to think that moving that hole to the ATM proper would have helped any. You're delirious.

  11. Re:Petty thieves on ATMs Compromised, $45M Taken · · Score: 1

    So, what bank do you work for, again?

  12. Re: Surely this sort of thing is better than Bitco on ATMs Compromised, $45M Taken · · Score: 1

    There is absolutely no reason at all for banks to "store" the bitcoins. The block chain does the storage, and it's not only distributed storage, but also quite secure storage. Whoever holds bitcoins holds a part of what would be considered a bitcoin bank. If bitcoins were ubiquitous, there'd be no need for banks at all. Yeah, you could have lenders, but they wouldn't need to be banks at all.

  13. Re:Who pays? on ATMs Compromised, $45M Taken · · Score: 2

    They don't generally say "Oh, we're making enough money"

    Enter the concept of a credit union, stage left :)

  14. Re:About time! on NIMH Distances Itself From DSM Categories, Shifts Funding To New Approaches · · Score: 1

    There are risks and trade-offs, whether in engineering or in life in general. I'd say whatever a biopsy might mess up is nothing compared to life-long depression.

  15. Re:Yawn on Printable Gun Downloads Top 100k In 2 Days, Thanks to Kim Dotcom · · Score: 1

    Careful: those who wanted to be woken up when 3D printing in general were to get affordable are not asleep anymore.

  16. Re:Kids These Days... on 80FFTs Per Second To Detect Whistles (and Switch On Lights) · · Score: 1

    You of course miss the point that it's not a mechanical switch. It's a switch that detects whistles. The major reason why previous "simple" solutions similar to that (clap-activated keyfobs and switches) never gained marketshare is simple: they never worked correctly. You need a CPU/MSU and DSP techniques. I have no idea what makes you think DSP is somehow overcomplex. Manufacturing semiconductor ICs is a horribly complicated process. Running some FFTs got nothing to what it takes to make the chips. Are you going to argue now that we should not use semiconductors either?! Once you've got semiconductor ICs in your project, it's not a big deal to have an MCU with some DSP code running on it.

  17. Re:Kids These Days... on 80FFTs Per Second To Detect Whistles (and Switch On Lights) · · Score: 1

    They are less of an overkill than you think. Many "simple" devices like light dimmers and power supplies, do in fact have a built-in microprocessor, even if it's just an 8-pin part. They do far more DSP than you might imagine. A power supply controller does DSP filtering so that you don't depend on analog components for the frequency response of the control loop. I'd take an 8-pin microcontroller over an 8-pin switcher controller that needs a dozen external components just to set the operating conditions. The MCU-based solution, if properly engineered, can be more reliable in presence of faults. Many analog power supply controller chips happily run a power supply into failure - working around their limitations requires adding external active components, quickly making the whole thing cost too much in parts, assembly, testing, returns, etc.

  18. Re:Yawn on Printable Gun Downloads Top 100k In 2 Days, Thanks to Kim Dotcom · · Score: 1

    You are aware that you can 3D print from metals too, right?

  19. Re:Yawn on Printable Gun Downloads Top 100k In 2 Days, Thanks to Kim Dotcom · · Score: 1

    Oh, so when you print a page on your printer, you now amortize the cost of the entire printer on every page printed? Get real, please.

  20. Re:Kids These Days... on 80FFTs Per Second To Detect Whistles (and Switch On Lights) · · Score: 1

    The problem is: doing it reliably in analog domain is not as simple as you might think. The various "solutions" presented in books or in various forums share the common feature: they generally don't work. They work in very controlled circumstances only. It's not merely about detecting a sine wave. It's about detecting a fundamental frequency in a possible wave of harmonics, and detecting its frequency, and then detecting the frequency of another sine wave, and comparing the two. FFT is nowhere near an overkill. It's a standard building block of modern DSP systems, just like strcpy would be expected in a C library.

  21. Re:Kids These Days... on 80FFTs Per Second To Detect Whistles (and Switch On Lights) · · Score: 1

    Yep, but the tones are arbitrary and I just can't help how people miss this key property. The tones can by at any of a range of frequencies.

    BTW, you can do FFT in analog domain quite simply, it just requires a lot of buffers. Multiplication by a constant is done by resistor dividers, addition requires a buffer stage. Easy-peasy. A bare bone time-discrete but voltage-continuous, lower accuracy FFT could probably be done with emitter followers for buffers :)

  22. Re:Kids These Days... on 80FFTs Per Second To Detect Whistles (and Switch On Lights) · · Score: 1

    Not only that, but really FFTs and similar transforms are everywhere. Long FIRs? You need FFT. Correlators? Too. Polynomial multiplication? Yep. Long integer multiplication? Yep. The list goes on and on.

  23. Re:Kids These Days... on 80FFTs Per Second To Detect Whistles (and Switch On Lights) · · Score: 1

    And how do you propose to do autocorrelation? The way it's done today is by doing convolution using - wait for it - FFTs. Same goes for multiplying long polynomials or long numbers together, or even running FIR or IIR filters. An FFT is necessary for efficient digital processing of almost any kind, no matter whether you are actually interested in the frequency domain version of the inputs!

  24. Re:Ever thought it might be a good idea? on Using YouTube For File Storage · · Score: 1

    But it's an entirely true line. Is it called stupidity to "fall" for truth?

  25. Re:Ever thought it might be a good idea? on Using YouTube For File Storage · · Score: 2

    QRCode is stupid. What is not stupid, though, would be leveraging the fact that if you upload in a correct format that's not subject to reencoding, you can pretty much fill it with arbitrary data at 90%+ efficiency. You need to wrap it in the codec data structure format, and massage it a bit so that various bits of the codec consider it valid. It'll look like "noise", but it gives you what you want, at an efficiency orders of magnitude better than QRCode.