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User: xenophrak

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  1. Re:Experiment? on Lost Nuclear Bomb Found Off Georgia Coast? · · Score: 2, Insightful


    I'm not sure where you get thorium in smoke detectors. Most that I know are based off of Americium-241.

    You'd more likely detect Thorium in your gas lamp mantle, or from antique glassware.

    Americium-241 comes directly from PU-241 as it decays. The byproducts of AM-241 are Np-237, decaying in turn to Pa-233 and U-233. The AM-241 decay chain ends with bismuth-209, a stable (non-radioactive) element.

    BTW, the halflife of AM-241 is 432.7 years. :)

  2. Re:I agree (but slightly OT) on Mysterious Force Affects Pioneer 10 & 11 Probes · · Score: 1


    I know it's not sound or scientifically reasonable, but I like to think of the speed of light as a maximum velocity through a medium.

    To prove this, and why time travel doesn't have to happen with faster velocity, I use an analogy:

    If our universe was a pool of water, and we wanted to send a message from one side to the other, how could we accomplish that? One way is to send sound waves (analogous to radio waves we use currently to search the cosmos) to reach a point in the distance. Now, knowing that sound travels pretty quickly through water, we might be convinced that this is the fastest way to send data.

    What if, someone in our pool-verse, then created a laser-based transmitter. This would increase the transmission rate (analogous to light-speed travel). Now, it was then discovered that we could "lift" the transmitter out of the water and into the air above (although it would technically be outside of our universe), and the light would travel faster until its destination point, returning back into the pool. (FTL travel)

    The speed difference isn't appreciable in this scenario for the light beam, but it is tangible for velocity in a medium.

    What if the same was true for this universe and the speed of light?

  3. Re:Insurance? on Man Stalks Ex-girlfriend With GPS · · Score: 1


    I just remember the license system in "The Fifth Element" where you had credits which were revoked upon impact (and probably sent to law enforcement in real-time).

    Kooky stuff.

  4. Re:How does it know... on Insurance Companies Try Out Auto Black Boxes · · Score: 1


    If you're involved in an accident, you won't need GPS.

    The cops will take note of where it happened, and note the posted speed limit. If the box says you were over that speed, when impact occurred, you're fucked.

  5. Re:I'll Wait. on Human Powered Helicopter · · Score: 1

    Some places you might want to check out are:

    The Mosquito helicopter, a true ultra-light helicopter as designated by the FAA

    The HeliCycle, which is the worlds smallest turbine-powered rotorcraft capable of transporting a person.

    I would steer clear of Rotorways, I know several people who have crashed theirs. The fault always is in the engine with those kits.

  6. This isn't what you think on Database Glitch Grounds American/US Airways · · Score: 3, Interesting


    Even though this sounds dire, I have a feeling that this does nothing to compromise airline safety.

    From the sounds of it, the flight planning system went down. This is a ground-system only, often a terminal next to the ticket checking counter. The purpose is to file flight plans, check weather airport conditions, etc. It is not an onboard system. This would not have likely decreased passenger safety.

    The reason that the FAA got involved was because AA decided to ground the planes because the pilots most likely couldn't file flight plans electronically. If left to the filing flight plans the old way, it would have delayed things more and caused more headaches to just wait out the system outage.

    However, when any business runs and depends on a particular piece of software to generate revenue and to provide a service, I would be more inclined to host such a system on something like a mainframe or at least a big Unix server.

  7. Re:Why is it surprising? on Mars Had Surface Water for Eons · · Score: 1


    That's why I said it was common dogma...truth is that we really don't know why just yet.

  8. Re:Why is it surprising? on Mars Had Surface Water for Eons · · Score: 5, Interesting


    I think the common dogma is that a catastrophic event happened some billion years ago where Mars lost its magnetic field. The loss caused the upper atmosphere to be evaporated from solar radiation that was then allowed to pass into the lower levels.

    One might surmise that since the Earth has a molten fluid core and routinely undergoes magnetic reversal that Mars once had the same type of core, but it may have cooled and solidified, rendering the field inoperable.

    Whatever it's worth, I think that the ammonia presence is far more interesting than the traces of water.

  9. Re:Joss Whedon is not perfect on Star Trek XI: Romulan Wars? · · Score: 1


    Yeah, what about Titan A.E.

    Talk about stories that sucked.

  10. Re:Longer?? on Will LOTR:ROTK Extended Edition Hit Cinemas? · · Score: 5, Insightful


    As with the two films before ROtK, I felt that there were places that were cut poorly, or didn't fit well together.

    Once I saw the finished extended editions, they were a more pleasant experience.

    After the "two-hour" limit is removed (even though ROtK was > 2 hours) it made a good deal of difference to the final output.

    I expect that ROtK EE will be in the same vein.

  11. Re:Wierd on Rescuers Prep for Hybrid Car Accidents · · Score: 1


    BMW and Mercedes have had this for quite a while. Little explosive charges that sever the battery connection on impact, but a second lead still allows for the flashers to work.

  12. Wish people wouldn't have NS collisions on Nvidia Releases Hardware-Accelerated Film Renderer · · Score: 1

    Cool! My distro already has m4. But is has some bugs in it still.

    m4 ./movie.mpg
    =moovlmvhd-3A-3EX@"trak\tkhd -,-3EF@$edtselstF mdia mdhd -3A-3A+w-9hdlrmhlrsounappl?Module de gestion sonoreminfsmhd;hdlrdhlrali sappl@KGestionnaire dOalias Apple$dinfdrefalisHstbl4stsd$raw +wstts -àstsc
    m4: ERROR: EOF in string

  13. Sounds a lot like RSA SecurID on Analysis of Spam, and a Proposed Solution · · Score: 1


    The core idea from the article proposes to use a formula to generate a code that is inserted into the email subject line to "authenticate" the message based on time and knowledge of the formula.

    This is the same concept that RSA uses for the SecurID token-based authentication scheme.

    I think the author might run into patent issues with this approach, but it sounds good so far.

  14. I RTFA!! on SCO Complaint Filed -- Including Code Samples · · Score: 1


    It all makes sense now. Read the transcript, and SCO details how if it wasn't for those pesky Linux kids snooping around that the SCO Project Monterey would have been the premiere Unix on Intel hardware. So, they find a patsy (IBM) to blame that Linux somehow unfairly ate their lunch.

    Well SCO, goes to show...sometimes you don't win the prize, and whining about it isn't going to help.

  15. Re:Except on G5 vs Opteron, Finally · · Score: 1


    Well, not quite...

    Solaris is still largely a 32-bit O/S from a userland perspective. The kernel and drivers are selectable as 32 or 64-bits at boot, but must take the same driver bitness as the kernel.

    There are both 32 and 64-bit libs for all things, but there are no special 32-bit hacks needed to natively run 32-bit code on the 64-bit kernel. This is one place where Sun did a good job and made the whole 32/64-bit thing a total non-issue for most applications that don't need memory > 4GB.

    Generally speaking, 64-bit code on an US-II/III is slower than it's 32-bit counterpart by some microseconds per instruction.

    This is normal for 64-bit architectures, X86-64 being an exception because they finally removed the bottleneck in register addressability.

    Just look at a Solaris 9 installation on Sparc, and see that most of your tools are still 32-bits.

  16. Re:Dates are gonna hurt! on Company Claims Patent on CD Writing · · Score: 1


    Yup. 1994 to be exact. Phillips/Kodak 1x writers attached to SunOS 4.x sparc station 1's.

    The software was proprietary, and did session recording (that was the only way back then).

    This patent might be valid if it just relates to packet recording.

  17. Motorcycle gauges of any type are a distraction on Heads-Up Displays for Motorcyclists · · Score: 1


    I've been riding for 12 years, mostly V-Twin sportbikes, (not the Harley type).

    I have come to the conclusion that there are those people that need help to determine what their vehicle is doing, and those that intuit from visceral cues.

    The ones that can intuit are at a great advantage since they *never* have to take their eyes off of the road. And, yes, you can judge your velocity without a speedometer with surprising precision when trained correctly.

    By simply following the flow of traffic, you are almost guaranteed to not get a speeding ticket, and driving sanely is simpler to recover from. That being said, I still like to get out of town and open it up on the twisties.

    BTW, if you don't take an MSF course or two, or if you're going to speed, a track instruction course or 10 then you are a fool.

  18. That's about the number of Starbucks in LA on Warflying 2013 Access Points in Los Angeles · · Score: 3, Funny

    Sure those weren't just Starbuck's/TMobile hotspots?

    Which do not support WEP anyway.

  19. How about the other way around on Batteries Continue To Suck · · Score: 2, Interesting


    There are two ways to increase the life of a portable device. Either give it more juice, or cut the current draw.

    It seems to me, that there is a brighter future in making existing technologies more energy efficient, rather than increasing the load of the power source.

  20. Re:This isn't anything special on Matrix Revolutions To Be Released On Imax · · Score: 1

    Wrong you are.

    The conversion to IMAX from the normal film is now using IMAX's patented DMR digital remastering process.

    The process takes the original studio print and scans it as VERY high resolution and then formats it and re-prints it at the native IMAX resolution, while cleaning up the image noise.

    Go see Matrix Revolutions when it comes out, you will be suprised at the quality!

  21. Re:sweet on HyperSCSI Examined · · Score: 1

    Yes. It's called multi-initiator SCSI. Suns (or any other SCSI or FC computer) use this when in a small cluster with a product like Veritas Cluster Server.

    Ultimately you get better performance and scalability with Fibre Channel, but cost is a factor.

    Here is a small document describing the practice:

    http://docs.sun.com/db/doc/816-2027/6m8dg246h?a=vi ew

  22. Re:but...does it work? on AMTP as an Alternative to SMTP · · Score: 1

    All of which can already be done with Milter.

    See http://www.milter.org

    I am currently working on a project to do what AMTP wants to do. TLS + Milter is about as effective as you can get today for policy enforcement. AMTP has the possible benefit of having faster code (if written in C) but then again, you could code your milter in C as well.

    I'm more waiting for SASL and reverse MX's to take off. That will be just as good IMHO as root CA chain singing.

    Hrrrumph.

  23. Obligitory ST reference on Pentagon Lets You Bid on Terrorism? · · Score: 0, Offtopic


    WOW!

    Who let the Ferengi in?

  24. Re:This isn't such a big deal on How To Make Dual Booting A (Bigger) Pain · · Score: 1


    Actually, the disks contain a small set of scripts to re-format the disk, and then dump a ghost image onto the drive.

    There are only a sum total of about 10 files on the 3 CD's.

    YMMV however.

  25. This isn't such a big deal on How To Make Dual Booting A (Bigger) Pain · · Score: 5, Informative


    I have a Toshiba laptop with the same recovery disks (3 CD's instead of the DVD, but the same concept).

    It was a bit of a pain at first, as I did have to buy System Commander (which is very cool as a boot-loader and as a utility) to get around this. Since the install image is NTFS you'll need Partition magic 7 or 8 or SC7. Not sure if there is a freeware utility to munge NTFS partitions.

    Once up and running, I took a snapshot of the resized XP partition and now I don't need the recovery disks. It is nice though that Toshiba installs all of the drivers for you, and that the system works out of the box after re-imaging.

    As for running another O/S on this laptop, Linux and Solaris are VERY well supported, so I don't think I'd give up this laptop just cause of this slight inconvenience. The laptop is a 1415-S173 Celeron 1.8GHz which has a beautiful screen and was $850.00 new with rebate and 512MB. In short, it kicks price/performance ass.