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User: dirtyhippie

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  1. Re:Also See http://xkcd.com/radiation/ on The Panic Over Fukushima · · Score: 1

    Right. The horrifying thing wasn't the scale of the disaster. To say the panic was out of proportion with the scale of the disaster misses the point. The horrifying thing was that Tepco and the Japanese government totally mismanaged it, failling to release data, telling people that things were under control when they weren't, releasing bad data, and bumping up their estimates of how bad it was by an order of magnitude more than once. Fukushima was not Chernobyl (catastrophic international disaster), but it wasn't much ado about nothing like Three Mile Island either.

  2. Re:I'm still blown away on The Panic Over Fukushima · · Score: 1

    Umm, you do realize that most tsunamis happen with earthquakes, right?

  3. 737 vs concorde comparison misleading on Flight 4590 Didn't Kill the Concorde; Costs Did · · Score: 5, Informative

    Commercial airplanes use tons (literally) of fuel while taxiing. Idling a jet engine is expensive. And london-amsterdam is about the shortest commercially viable flight possible - only about 200 miles - or to put it in US terms, DC-NYC. So, yes, the concorde guzzled fuel - maybe 5 times what a 737 uses - but its fuel usage was not completely irresponsible - after all, you have to carry most of that fuel at mach 2.2...

  4. Re:Fighting the Wrong Battlefield on Windows 8 Graphics: Microsoft Has Hardware-Accelerated Everything · · Score: 1

    Interesting assertion. Too bad reality begs to differ. 10 years ago (per the wayback machine), dell's website was advertising its dimension 4500, a desktop machine featuring maximum specs of: a (UP) 2.8GHz pentium 4 with a 533MHz memory bus, memory expandable to 1GB (with then-impossible to find dimms), AGP 4X, and a PCI expansion bus. Today you'd be hard pressed to find a machine with less than 1GB offered as a minimum configuration, a far faster processor with 2-4 times as many cores, faster memory and expansion busses, and a far faster graphics interface. And let's not forget how much PATA sucked, let alone the availability of SSD disks now. What is fundamentally different about today's software compared to that of 10 years ago that makes you think it's dramatically outpaced this?

    I'm not aware of any dramatic improvements to the kinds of things people do at the OS level during that time frame. Just because most hardware specs aren't growing exponentially any more doesn't mean they aren't growing at a significant clip.

  5. Re:First Sentence on Just $10M Keeping "Red Neck Rocket Scientist" From Reaching Space · · Score: 1

    makes think does?

  6. that's nothing on Just $10M Keeping "Red Neck Rocket Scientist" From Reaching Space · · Score: 4, Funny

    this guy's offer sucks. if you give ME $10 million today, i GUARANTEE YOU that i WILL have my first test launch of a mission to jupiter. so what if it's made of rubber bands and has no chance of making it! then on to my next problem: what to do with $9,999,997 =)

  7. inertial navigation on Indoor Navigation On Your Smartphone, Using the Earth's Magnetic Field · · Score: 2

    my phone has a couple of gyroscopes. is the error from these so bad that it can't keep track of my position while i'm inside a mall? if so, why is it there at all?

  8. Re:Completely irrelevent to me on Code Name, Theming Update Announced For Ubuntu 12.10 · · Score: 1

    Some random time after logging in to a Gnome session, mouse clicks get lost (usually within 30 seconds to 5 minutes of login.) Not just clicks on menus or windows, but all mouse clicks. KDE, however, works fine. So do the lesser known non-GTK desktops that I've played with.

    [[citaiton needed]]

    I have my problems with Gnome, but I've never experienced this bug.

    Much more likely, you have some sort of hardware problem that happens to manifest itself with gnome but not KDE.

    Sounds a lot less dramatic that way.

  9. Re:Electric Drive Train? on IBM Creates 'Breathing' High-Density Lithium-Air Battery · · Score: 1

    Interesting idea ... but what happens when one of your engines produces less output than another, or god forbid, fails? Like in an aircraft, you have some serious sideways pointing motion in your vehicle. Unlike in an aircraft, you don't have gobs of room to react to the situation. That can be addressed with electronics, but that adds to complexity, cost, and weight.

    A drive train presents a solution that has many years of safety testing behind it. Eventually we may move to a system like you propose, but it won't be any time soon. There are lower hanging fruit.

  10. There's nothing magical about the B-52 on Sixty Years On, B-52s Are Still Going Strong · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Despite what the author of this article might have you believe, the B-52 is not magical. "The B-52's feat of longevity reflects both regular maintenance and timely upgrades"? Bull.

    The B-52's feat of longevity reflects two things: 1) the shift to ICBMs as primary mechanism to ensure mutually assured destruction in the cold war 2) the miserable failure of the USAF to solicit new bomber designs that don't cost orders of magnitude more than the B-52.

    If the USAF had ever solicited designs to replace the B-52 with something *modestly* better, using cost as a priority, the B-52 would be long gone, and there would be a more capable aircraft in it's place. The fact that there's no need for such a plane does not make the B-52 magical. It's a pustule that's lanced regularly, that's all.

  11. Re:Still working on it. on Chrome OS Introduces Aura Window Manager · · Score: 1

    /. causes the Android browser (is it not Chrome as well?) to crash on limited and cheap Android tablets.

    I've logged in and posted to /. on my ICS phone, and read /. many many times on my gingerbread phone. I believe what you meant to say is that things crash on cheap Android tablets (or cheap anything else).

  12. Re:Sci-Fi is Reel again on After 60 Years, Tape Reinserts Itself · · Score: 1

    Actually, it won't. Read the article - getting rid of the likes of tar is what LTFS is all about.

  13. GPU on Amiga Returns With Lackluster Linux-Powered Mini PC · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Serious question: what do people need a beefy GPU for on a machine with an alternative OS? You already can't run the latest PC/windows games, and you don't need a spec-tastic GPU for running 99% of other applications. Am I missing something, or is this just hardware lust?

  14. Re:Salami tactics on Edward Teller: Father of the Hydrogen Bomb · · Score: 1

    MAD may be outdated, but the new doctrine is pretty similar. If you launch nukes at another country, the rest of the world will turn against you. Whether that would involve nukes or not is an open question, but the point remains the same: If you nuke someone, you're going to get destroyed yourself.

  15. Re:Communists != Muslims on Edward Teller: Father of the Hydrogen Bomb · · Score: 1

    This new evil is *way* more evil than any evil we have seen before, so the old rules do not apply.

    Now get back to your cubicles and build me some more dual-use technologies, whee!

    Americuh, fuck yeah!

  16. You should grow up on Ask Slashdot: Best Practices For Leaving an IT Admin Position? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's unrealistic to expect everything to just work smoothly under a new person after 5 years working (I presume) mostly by yourself. It's not laziness or incompetence for the FNG to consult the person who architected the system when the documentation inevitably falls short. Grow up, be a professional, and help the new guy out.

  17. This just in... on Rearview Car Cameras Likely Mandated By 2014 · · Score: 2

    Breaking news: The guy who tries to upsell you at the car dealership has a tenuous grip in economics.

  18. what about ie? on Sandboxed Flash Player Coming To Firefox · · Score: 1

    subject says it all, really. it's nice to have it for chrome and firefox, but where it's really needed is in ie.

  19. Re:Yes! on Are Programmers Ruining the Design of eBooks? · · Score: 1

    wget is way faster than firefox, too.

  20. Re:Yes! on Are Programmers Ruining the Design of eBooks? · · Score: 1

    Yeap. Lynx is way faster than firefox.

  21. Re:Many reasons why devs did iOS first... on Why Developers Still Prefer iOS To Android · · Score: 1

    Actually, the 10 cent promotion was launched as a celebration of hitting the 10 billion mark.

  22. Re:Don't take it seriously on Site Offers History of Torrent Downloads By IP · · Score: 1

    But the data is legit - at least in my case - they got me pegged:

    JSTOR_01_PhilTrans (32.48 GB)

    I'm not sure why they don't list my "legal" downloads like ubuntu and debian releases. It'd be more interesting if they listed all file sharing activity, not just torrents from usually-pirate sites.

  23. Re:Actually it probably will wither and die. on HP Making webOS Open Source · · Score: 1

    Good points, but what do you have against finishing your

  24. doesn't work any more. on Facebook Timeline Shows Who Has Unfriended You · · Score: 4, Informative

    i just tried it. i even gave fb my phone number to do it. There was someone i know who unfriended me in 2009 (long story!), but after following all the steps, they don't show in any of the boxes. My guess is FB changed the UI to have the box show friends made that year *that are still friends* recently. Nothing to see here (anymore), move along.

  25. Re:This is a lot more complicated... on Brain Power Boosted With Electrical Stimulation · · Score: 1

    The entity is called "natural selection" .... There's no such thing as a free lunch, so the cost (in extra food input) of maintaining extra neurons or what have you just to remember what kind of sandwich you had 823 days ago is not worth it. And by "not worth it", I mean that in the competition between a hypothetical species with the trait and one without the trait, the one without the trait will more easily survive, breed, and conquer.