Slashdot Mirror


User: Enigma2175

Enigma2175's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
1,409
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 1,409

  1. Re:More skeet targets for me on Amazon Seeks US Exemption To Test Delivery Drones · · Score: 1

    So are you going to take potshots at police and medical helicopers as well? Because they are "invading your privacy" just as much as a drone (police probably more, they tend to have powerful optics).

  2. Re:Not about jealousy, but ... on Dubai's Climate-Controlled Dome City Is a Dystopia Waiting To Happen · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you buy gasoline, it was probably your money they used.

    No, it is their money that they used. Once you traded your money for gasoline, it's no longer your money. If you don't like that then don't make the trade, nobody is forcing you to do so.

  3. Re:What about range on this smaller car? on Tesla Aims For $30,000 Price, 2017 Launch For Model E · · Score: 1

    I've always wondered how big of a generator you would need to keep an electric car running continuously, and whether it would be feasible to just tow it behind you on a trailer. Maybe make those available to rent so that people can make long trips on their electric car. It would probably be cheaper to rent than an actual car, and the money you'd save from using an electric car for most of the year would easily offset the cost of renting the generator once in a while.

    Back when they first made the RAV4-EV there was a trailer that you could pull behind it to extend the range. It used a 500cc motorcycle engine and was not too big. I have been interested in this concept for a long time, it seems to be a great way to alleviate range anxiety.

  4. Re:On this 4th of July... on Qualcomm Takes Down 100+ GitHub Repositories With DMCA Notice · · Score: 2

    No, it is not. It sounds like a great way to earn a whole bunch of money from somebody who is having repeated brain farts about what the law actually says.

    Even if you win (and that's a big if, considering you are an individual vs. a company with armies of lawyers on staff) the most you will ever see is that your copyright gets upheld and you MAY recover attorney's fees. Unless you can prove Qualcomm maliciously and purposefully filed an false DMCA claim you aren't getting jack. If you are a contributor to an open source project are you really going to give up hundreds of hours of your life and thousands of dollars out of pocket to defend your portion of the copyright on the code? On the slight chance that judge says "yep that's your code" and pays your lawyers? Seems like a huge risk for a very modest reward, if you win you are only out the years it took to litigate the matter but if you lose you could wind up liable for damages for infriging copyright on your own code (now Qualcomm's code).

    This is why the DMCA is bullshit, it's not enough that corporations have extended copyright to life+infinity, even if they don't own the copyright laws like this allow large corporations to abuse the already fucked-up system. Like global thermonuclear war, the only winning move is not to play.

  5. Re:David Hahn on Site of 1976 "Atomic Man" Accident To Be Cleaned · · Score: 1

    "He was studied extensively by doctors for the rest of his life and died of coronary artery disease in 1987 at the age of 75. "

    You sure about that 2007 thing?

    GP was referring to the arrest of the Radioactive Boy Scout, not Atomic Man.

  6. Re:So not a total ripoff anymore? on Germany's Glut of Electricity Causing Prices To Plummet · · Score: 1

    That's because the U.S. makes no attempt at incentivizing energy conservation through the tax system.

    Why would not incentivizing energy conservation make it CHEAPER, if the US is not conserving energy wouldn't supply and demand make it more expensive?

  7. Re:OP is obliquely critical of Politzer on Secret of the Banjo's Unique Sound Discovered By Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist · · Score: 1

    Really, you're going to fix Feynman but not going to fix "Tell the tail" or Politzer?

  8. Re:Be polite on What To Do If Police Try To Search Your Phone Without a Warrant · · Score: 1

    Really? You think we need to raise pay for cops? While it's true that the base salary is kind of crappy cops get all kinds of other income from other places. For example This New York Times article says this about the NYPD:

    "annual pay for city police officers ranges from $43,062 for a cadet entering the academy to $90,829 for an officer with five and a half years on the job, including overtime and other earnings"

    What other job do you know of that doesn't require a college education where you'll be making 90k after 5 years? That's disregarding the very generous pension and insurance benefits that police receive. Plus other benefits, like the guy who walked down that line ssssof non-violent protesters during an occupy rally at UC Berkeley getting $38,000 for "depression and anxiety" instead of being fired like he should have been. Police get paid plenty, the solution isn't more money for them the solution is independant oversight.

  9. Re:IF.. on Match.com, Mensa Create Dating Site For Geniuses · · Score: 1

    The fact that a computer can beat a human at chess does not mean that chess ability isn't correlated with intelligence. A computer can also easily multiply several 10 digit numbers together and "remember" a list of one million items, if a human performs those feats there is a good chance they have a high intelligence. Nobody says Usain Bolt is a slow runner because my 1975 Pinto can go faster than him.

  10. Re:why would I want to hang with a buncha cunts on Match.com, Mensa Create Dating Site For Geniuses · · Score: 3, Funny

    Even in high school, I'd read the textbooks, and then sit in class, kinda bored.
    But while most concepts needed explained several times,
    Suddenly, not the stops,

    You should have read the English book again.

  11. Re:huh on What Happens If You Have a Heart Attack In Space? · · Score: 1

    Does your average voyage contain a zip-lock bag big enough to house a body?

    Weight is a huge concern for space voyages. It's something like $10,000 a pound. Quite a lot for a even a simple bag that doesn't have a dual, or tri, purpose.

    I know nuclear submarines don't have airtight bags big enough to hold a body and they're much more free with what they can bring aboard. I was reading an article about one where a guy, what do you know, had a heart attack and died while they were submerged for a long duration. They ended up having a "feast" as a wake, because they cleared out one of the food freezers and chucked him in there.

    Yes, the big zip-lock back is called a space suit and most missions will have several onboard.

  12. Re:For fuck's sake, how does this get a 5, Insight on The EPA Carbon Plan: Coal Loses, But Who Wins? · · Score: 4, Informative

    The coal plants can still be "plugged in" and operated during times of peak load (weekday summer afternoons and winter mornings); what they can't do is operate much the rest of the time.

    The problem with this is that coal plants can't operate this way. A typical coal plant takes 4-8 hours to reach full power from a warm start and can take 24 hours to cold start. This is why we currently use them for baseload power and use other sources (mostly natural gas and hydro) for load following.

  13. Re:It's Chicago on Chicago Adding Sensors For Public Monitoring · · Score: 1

    I figured with your sig you would realize there is a lot more to the political spectrum than just the left/right false dichotomy that the US system presents. The voting system ensures that the system will never change from 2 dominant political parties, but it would be nice to at least get a better party than the two shitfests we have now.

  14. Re:Ocean garbage patches? on Continuous System For Converting Waste Plastics Into Crude Oil · · Score: 2

    Why even bother with the landfills? There are massive garbage patches floating around in the oceans, the vast majority of which are plastics. If you can get a big enough tanker and implement this system on it, you could probably cut the amount of fuel needed even further - the tanker goes into a garbage patch, melts all the plastic down, keeps the oil, and uses some of it to get back to land. It would probably be more effective than loading fleets of trucks.

    You are vastly overestimating the density of these patches, probably due to media sensationalism. For example, the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" has a density of 4 particles per cubic meter of water. These particles are quite small, even microscopic. I know the news stories make it sound like it is just this mass of garbage floating around but that's just not how it is. From the Wikipedia article linked above:

    "and the relatively low density of the plastic debris at, in one scientific study, 5.1 kilograms of plastic per square kilometer of ocean area"

    I doubt it would be cost-effective to process a square kilometer of seawater to get that paltry amount of plastic, even assuming you could recover 100% of it.

  15. Re:This just in. on Mt. Gox CEO Returns To Twitter, Enrages Burned Investors · · Score: 1

    How was it legal? He stole people's property.

    So, bitcoins are now property that you can steal?

    Please show me a law that shows bitcoins are any more real or worth any more than virtual gold in World of Warcraft.

    The IRS says Bitcoin is legally property, if you think that doesn't hold the force of law go ahead and try to defy them on that.

  16. Re:Read between the lines on TrueCrypt Author Claims That Forking Is Impossible · · Score: 1

    If he suspects the code has a vulnerabitlity, he doesn't want it copied.

    It's funny how open source is always bragged as being the antidote against vulnerabilities and backdoors (as "anyone can verify it"), but here we still are worrying about TrueCrypt code possibly containing something vulnerable.

    The difference is that if it is open source you can actually do something about it. If you are using a closed-source solution there is no way to verify if it backdoored or not. With open source there are the same possibilities for backdoors (especially on a product like Truecrypt which has very few core developers) but you have a much better chance of finding the backdoor if you suspect it exists.

  17. Re:Come Out on TrueCrypt Author Claims That Forking Is Impossible · · Score: 1

    In the very near future 'coming out' won't be the declaration of your sexual orientation, but the refusal to knuckle under to the fascist pricks of the Spook-Industrial complex via an NSL.

    Yes, it will be hard, yes, it may even be prison time but this is the whole point of repressive intimidation tactics: the hope of the power-mad that individuals stay cowed and powerless, not unified and unbowed in the face of true oppression - that actual freedom isn't free.

    Can you imagine if a project of TrueCrypt's successor got an NSL and _every_ person even remotely connected to the project all appeared together in the live-streamed press conference exposing and denouncing FedGov... they're gonna prosecute all of them? All together? In a show trial, perhaps? Cockroaches hate exposure to the light.

    Nope, it won't be a show trial -- it will be a secret trial because "terrorism". The Truecrypt devs wouldn't be able to speak out because they would be in jail.

  18. Re:Too bad they can't put a kill switch on hand gu on Google and Microsoft Plan Kill Switches On Smartphones · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Too bad they can't put a kill switch on hand guns. That would stop a lot of crime.

    They can. Unfortunately the NRA is against such technology because "Obama wants to confiscate our guns!".

  19. Re:Who has the big red button? on Google and Microsoft Plan Kill Switches On Smartphones · · Score: 1

    you don't
    you trade your phone in to a legit business and they have a deal with apple and everyone else to reformat the phone and disable any kill switches

    Sure, conducting a transaction with another citizen is doubleplusungood. What we really need is more middlemen inserting themselves into every transaction, because we don't have nearly enough of that.

  20. Re:NOT. GODDA. HAPPEN. on Elon Musk: I'll Put a Human On Mars By 2026 · · Score: 1

    There is no good reason to bring anything, or anyone, back to Earth.

    A sample return would be valuable. Even if we have geologists (or aresologists) on-site, we will probably be able to do a better analysis on Earth.

  21. Re:Fox News? on IRS Recycled Lerner Hard Drive · · Score: 1

    We already have answers to many of those questions, why would we need to ask them again?

    The IRS policy is to keep email for 6 months. Users may keep email for longer than 6 months in local PST files. It doesn't appear that individual workstations were backed up, assumably the server is (but the 6 months of email from the server is not missing). The rest of your questions are also about backups, if they aren't backing up individual computers then they probably aren't relevant.

  22. Re:The cloud ; how would a good admin handle this? on Code Spaces Hosting Shutting Down After Attacker Deletes All Data · · Score: 1

    Also, lets say you do have an off-line back-up, but you have a situation where a hacker has access to the usernames and passwords because they somehow got root access. How do you protect all their data once you decide to turn back on-line? Do you send out notice to all your users over their email accounts?

    I'm curious about how admins deal with this in the real world.

    If a hacker can recover plaintext passwords by compromising your admin account you have failed as an admin. The most they should be able to recover is a (hopefully salted) password hash.

  23. Re:Thyroid problem on EU's Top Court May Define Obesity As a Disability · · Score: 1

    You could eat half the calories a healthy skinny person eats and not lose weight.

    That's inaccurate. People with larger bodies have a higher basal metabolism rate than skinnier people. If a fat person and a skinny person are eating the same amount of calories, either the fat person will lose weight or the skinny person will gain weight (with all other things being equal). This is why people who are dieting and losing weight often plateau at a lower weight, once they lose some weight their body isn't working as hard (the heart is more efficient, the skeletal muscles have to lift less weight, etc.) and their intake starts to equal their burn rate rather than having a deficit.

  24. Re:Lay dark fiber on Portland Edges Closer To Google Fiber · · Score: 2

    Salt Lake CIty has some other things going for it, like being right next to Utopia cities and being close to Google Fiber's existing network in Provo. Google already interconnects with Utopia so it would probably not require as much infrastructure for Google to deploy in Salt Lake as it would in other cities.

  25. Re:Who's to say we're not being watched now? on Aliens and the Fermi Paradox · · Score: 1

    That's the level of discourse you're offering? You've been watching too much television, friend. Sigh.

    If you don't trust the word of The Phantom Mensch, how about Stephen Hawking, he's pretty smart:

    "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans,"
    "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet."