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User: j-b0y

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Comments · 98

  1. Fuck the Mozilla Foundation on Firefox 57 Will Hide Search Bar and Use a Uni-Bar Approach, Like Chrome (bleepingcomputer.com) · · Score: 0

    Congratulations on fucking up a once great product, as you once did with Crashscape. Die now please.

  2. Re:Not going to happen on Australia To Compel Technology Firms To Provide Access To Encrypted Missives (reuters.com) · · Score: 4, Funny

    Will happen, eventually. But it will not solve the underlying problem of encryption technology being widely available. That stable door has been open for so long that the horse has bolted, galloped, cantered and eventually settled down to raise a family somewhere in Wyoming.

  3. Re:Declining intelligence of Slashdot users on ESA Approves Gravitational-Wave Hunting Spacecraft For 2034 (newscientist.com) · · Score: 1

    Slashdot has become a desolate wasteland, just like much of the general interest part of the internet. Specialist forums are still fine.

    Wait. Slashdot has always been a desolate wasteland, it was just a much more enjoyable wasteland.

    "Reasonable arguments beget angry screeching" - Plague of Gripes

  4. Re:They cancelled it back in 2012 on ESA Approves Gravitational-Wave Hunting Spacecraft For 2034 (newscientist.com) · · Score: 5, Informative

    LISA was cancelled because JWST was eating the NASA astrophysics budget; ditto IXO cancellation. LISA survived in a much reduced form as NGO, and IXO as ATHENA.

    There wasn't any real chance of LISA scooping LIGO/E-LIGO if gravitational waves were really detectable, but the sensitivity of LISA will open up detection of many more classes of GW emitters.

  5. Re:Why are they waiting 17 years? on ESA Approves Gravitational-Wave Hunting Spacecraft For 2034 (newscientist.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    Because the technology involved will take some time to develop. You have to have 2 spacecraft pointing a laser at another spacecraft 2,500,000 kilometers away, and measure the change in distance between the two arms to an incredible precision. That's... not easy.

  6. Re:Keep Factories Humming? on GM Hooking 30,000 Robots To Internet To Keep Factories Humming (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    Or:

            Now the world has gone to bed,
            Darkness won't engulf my head,
            I can see by infra-red,
            How I hate the night,
            Now I lay me down to sleep,
            Try to count electric sheep,
            Sweet dream wishes you can keep,
            How I hate the night.

  7. Java has a robust and widely used and robust frameworks for applications so in many cases the developer can focus on the business code; several mature development environments which hook into the reflection capabilities of the language to make coding quite pleasant; a rich set of tools useful for program qa and developer support; a massive developer pool. As a language it's OK, but language wars are so 90s.

    For a business that needs to get stuff done that's pretty important. For projects with lifetimes potentially in decades Java is an easy choice. A good programmer is a good programmer in any language; Java can make mediocre programmers productive. That might sound deeply unsexy to the slashdot crowd, but I think that's the reality of an awful lot of SW development, which is internal or contracted development for businesses.

  8. Re:Build an ark on US Scientists Scramble To Protect Research On Climate Change (cnn.com) · · Score: 1

    I suggest they build three arks.

  9. 15 years in the future on Mars One Delayed Its Mars Mission -- Again (time.com) · · Score: 1

    And it always will be.

  10. Well, fuck you too on Phil Schiller Says the MacBook Pro Doesn't Need an SD Card Slot (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Reality Distortion Field in full effect, but you're no Steve Jobs, fool.

  11. I think I more than doubled the useful life of my phone by being able to replace the battery easily but probably would not have benefited from waterproofing. I really think there is a market for both types of devices, even if some companies would prefer that one of those markets disappears.

  12. Dumb as bricks on Microsoft To Kill The Lumia Brand In Favor of a New Surface Phone, Says Report (thenextweb.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I have trouble understanding why MS even want to try to get back into the smartphone market at this stage, except wounded pride. Investors demanding growth, pissed that they have seen their stock stagnate compared to Apple?

    They have failed utterly to execute on any strategy they had, they looked indecisive and uncommitted. It's such a huge bag of fail.

  13. Re:I suppose they prefer a anarchosyndicalist comm on A Majority Of Millennials Now Reject Capitalism, Poll Shows (washingtonpost.com) · · Score: 1

    Come and see the violence inherent in the system!

  14. If it was IT Manager Barbie on "Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer" Pulled From Amazon · · Score: 1

    with Ken, Preventer of IT Services, then it would be pretty realistic and quite gender-unspecific.

  15. So much armchair engineering on What Would Have Happened If Philae Were Nuclear Powered? · · Score: 1

    It was looked at and rejected in favour of high efficiency solar cells. At the time of the design of Philae (early-mod 90s?) there were no European designs for an RTG nor any expertise in building them. If the Philae consortium wanted an RTG they would:

    - Source it through the US -- you couldn't exact buy them off the shelf and have all the attendant ITAR baggage that would go with it. Since it would practically work as a US contribution to Philae there would be some science exchange in return. Not impossible, but at that time was there any US money to fund a further contribution to Rosetta from the US on what was quite a high-risk project? Not clear... It also goes right against one of the core principles of ESA which is to invest in/support European technology development.

    - ... or fund the development of a European RTG; high risk and probably prohibitively costly for the money available to support the mission and meet the mass budget available for Philae. No doubt that mature designs probably do not have a huge mass penalty, but a new design? Who knows, or would want to take the risk?

    - There was at the time quite considerable political resistance in certain European countries to RTGs in space. IIRC Germany was one of them and this would have put a big obstacle in the way. Development of solar panel technology was and still is considered an important goal and improved solar cell technology would be an important spin off.

    In the end it really does come down to politics; the safety issues could have been mitigated (at some cost), but there was no political will to go in the direction of RTGs. It will be interesting what will be selected for JUICE...

    Incidentally Rosetta itself suffers to a certain extent from choosing solar panels - the long array is turning Rosetta into a windmill that is quite difficult to steer. RTGS would have allowed a smaller array.

  16. Already has 147 'Terrible' ratings on UK Hotel Adds Hefty Charge For Bad Reviews Online · · Score: 1

    So maybe this couple should have checked Trip Advisor before staying there...

    Nonetheless, I think this hotel has pretty much fucked itself now. If anybody wanted to stay there before, they surely won't now.

  17. second picture on Philae Lands Successfully On Comet · · Score: 4, Informative

    Rosetta solar panels at the top of the image, with the main body of the probe top right. The sun was causing lots of straylight in the image and it was quite saturated, so they had to do some major fix-up work to get anything sensible, hence the wierdness that you see on the left hand side.

  18. Paging Hagunenon Admiral on Scientists Have Developed a Material So Dark That You Can't See It · · Score: 1

    Your Flagship is ready after its respray.

  19. Re:Mad Scientists' Dream on 'Curiosity' Lead Engineer Suggests Printing Humans On Other Planets · · Score: 1

    And some Allitnil's handy, just in case.

  20. Re:Except it is not actually in space on ESA Taking Applications for Summer of Code in Space · · Score: 1

    Since ESA depends on it's member states for it's funding and the funding is given on the basis of the political objectives of the states, ESA it by it's nature a political one and always has been. But that does not exclude being a technical one as well, which is it, and quite deeply.

    The "rich old white men" are in fact the european space industry, which ESA supports and promotes as one of it's primary functions.

    Your ignorance appears boundless.

  21. Re:Total map size on Billion Star Surveyor 'Gaia' Lifts Off · · Score: 2

    Very little that Gaia observes is truly discarded -- just the main astrometric system needs a mix of stable, well behaved stars and very distant quasars, that could be between 10% and 50% of the objects detected. There will be an attempt to classify objects -- which you need to do in order to grab the quasars for the astrometric system

  22. Re:The real test... on Billion Star Surveyor 'Gaia' Lifts Off · · Score: 1

    Well, Gaia won't ever observe the Moon, nor Venus and Mercury which are always on the sun-ward side of the solar-shield. Jupiter is so bright that it really messes with the detectors when it transits the focal plane, but it should be possible to do some interesting general-relativity experiments with the light-bending effects of Jupiter's mass for stars that are close (not not too close) to Jupiter when Gaia observes near it.

  23. I think a necessary step is to make sure that there is a general understanding that this is a problem -- here we must not merely preach to the choir but reach a wider and maybe technically illiterate audience) Who are we dealing with

    1. People who willingly forgo their right to privacy (and therefore understand the issue at hand)
    2. People who are ignorant their privacy rights are not respected (and therefore do not understand the issue at hand)
    3. People who are aware that their privacy rights are not respected but wish to interact with 1) and 2) and therefore give up some or all of their privacy rights (and therefore understand the issue at hand)
    4. People who will protect their privacy rights at the cost of limiting their ability to interact with at least those in 1) and 2) (and therefore understand the issue at hand)

    We cannot save those in category 1), they know the risks and accept the "terms and conditions" of using the internet with public and private data mining/surveillance in place. These people are lost to the Dark Side.

    People in category 2) need education on what the consequences of their actions are, and may then resolve into one of the other groups.

    People in category 3) should accept that their permissiveness strengthens the hand of the NSA et al. If a practical alternative solution is presented they will probably help to bring people in category 2 away from the Dark Side.

    People in category 4) are probably a small population already using Tor, Freenet, PGP, etc. They can help by adopting new technologies that do not compromise (too much) their desire for privacy.

  24. New rating: the Snyder scale on The Book That Is Making All Movies the Same · · Score: 2

    One point for each beat present, with a bonus point for being in the right place

    Then we can easily tell how generic the structure is...

  25. See also News Wipe on A Critique of the Boston Bombing News Coverage (Video) · · Score: 1

    Charlie Brooker did a longer series (NewsWipe) on the problems of reporting in the 24h rolling news world and the overall decline of TV news journalism over the years; check them out on YouTube.