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  1. Re:I bet Slashdot knows better than any engineer.. on What Would Have Happened If Philae Were Nuclear Powered? · · Score: 1

    yeah, what's one-or-two extra kilos when you're launching a mission to remotely drop a probe on a comet?

  2. What are they doing up there? on As NASA Seeks Next Mission, Russia Holds the Trump Card · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Maybe the reason more Russians are going up than Americans is because it costs $71Million to send an American.

    NASA's 2014 budget is ~$17.5B, and they do a lot of really good stuff, the ISS is kinda low on that totem pole, if you ask me. There's a lot more to space exploration than sitting in the ISS, babysitting experiments, chatting with school kids and waiting for your ride

  3. Re:The reason is private insurance on Why Can't Big Government Launch a Website? · · Score: 1

    You're assuming the information was there to be read at that time. I don't know if that is the case. It might have been, but it might have also been that insurers were waiting to see how the Supreme Court case would work out and how the states would address their issues and any number of other things before settling on a price.

    I think they should have rolled it out as an "invitation only" service like gmail. Do that for about a month to work out the more egregious problems and then open the floodgates. That is hard to do with a piece of legislation, especially in the current political environment.

    After the fact it's always obvious what should have been done. Oddly enough, it's always a different thing with each failure or accident. Things never seem to go perfectly, with even the most carefully planned projects.

    Not knowing much about it, this seems like a pretty run-of-the-mill project management failure. The same kind that afflicts nearly every private enterprise (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, IBM) you can name.

  4. Re:The reason is private insurance on Why Can't Big Government Launch a Website? · · Score: 1

    How many failed Supreme Court challenges did the Slashdot comment system face, Mr. Non-sequitor?

    We can have a discussion about the merits of the law anytime you want. This is a discussion about the difficulties of designing and implementing a website. In particular, we are discussing whether "government" (however you want to define that) is inferior to private enterprise when designing and building things. In this discussion, I pointed out a way that private enterprise we're all familiar with struggled to do something kinda similar.

    No one is facing the threat of fines for not using the healthcare.gov website. The exchanges are open. The website is working. If you have a state with a functional government, your state exchange is probably working quite well. If you don't want to use a website you can sign up by phone or with a printed application. You can also get free in-person assistance from organizations in your area. Of course, if you already have insurance from your job, you don't need to do anything.

  5. A sense a proportion on Why Can't Big Government Launch a Website? · · Score: 1

    No one is going to die because the website doesn't work. Comparing this to the moon landing is so sophomoric it could only come from USA Today. But it's nothing like landing on the moon in scale, expense, or national achievement. healthcare.gov is a website. It's important for the ACA and it's important for individuals looking to purchase health insurance, but there are alternative ways to shop for insurance on the exchanges.

    Not everything need be bandied about for political gain.

  6. Re:The reason is private insurance on Why Can't Big Government Launch a Website? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    there's nothing complicated about integrating the federal income and identity verification with state eligibility systems and dozens or hundreds of private insurers systems, ensuring that no information "leaks out" and that everything works in real time? There's nothing complicated about that?

    It should have worked. It didn't. That's life. Remember when Slashdot rolled out its new commenting system? That sucked. We all complained. Now it works fine and nobody thinks about it. But I don't remember anyone arguing that it was a sign that private web companies were incapable of designing functional websites.

  7. $136 Billion in Today's Dollars on Why Can't Big Government Launch a Website? · · Score: 4, Informative

    NASA's budget peaked in the period 1964-1966, during the height of construction efforts leading up to the first moon landing under Project Apollo which involved more than 34,000 NASA employees and 375,000 employees of industrial and university contractors. Roughly 4% of the total federal budget was being devoted to the space program.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Cost_of_project_Apollo

    My back of the envelope calculation puts 4% of the US's 2013 budget expenditures at $150 billion. So an equivalent enterprise by the United States government would be roughly half a trillion dollars.

    The failure of healthcare.gov to work properly shows what everyone here on Slashdot already knows: project planning is difficult.

  8. Apollo 1? Apollo 13? on Why Can't Big Government Launch a Website? · · Score: 5, Informative

    Our efforts to land on the moon didn't go smoothly. Also we spent a lot more money to go to the moon.

    Apollo 1 was scheduled to be the first manned mission of the U.S. Apollo manned lunar landing program, with a target launch date of February 21, 1967. A cabin fire during a launch pad test on January 27 at Launch Pad 34 at Cape Canaveral killed all three crew members—Command Pilot Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Senior Pilot Edward H. White II and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee—and destroyed the Command Module (CM).

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1

    Apollo 13 was the seventh manned mission in the American Apollo space program and the third intended to land on the Moon... but the lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen tank exploded two days later, crippling the Service Module (SM) upon which the Command Module (CM) depended. Despite great hardship caused by limited power, loss of cabin heat, shortage of potable water, and the critical need to jury-rig the carbon dioxide removal system, the crew returned safely to Earth on April 17.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13

    Complex problems are complex.

  9. Re:"Authorized cable" on Apple Starts Blocking Unauthorized Lightning Cables With iOS 7 · · Score: 1

    When the street thugs mug you for your iPhone, they might be so disappointed to get a Galaxy S3 that they just kill you. You should thank Apple for being so thoughtful.

  10. Re:God f-ing DAMMIT Slashdot, really? on Apple Starts Blocking Unauthorized Lightning Cables With iOS 7 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You're adding emphasis wrong. And you completely misquoted the article!

    First of all, the first sentence of the article says unambiguously:

    [Apple] is blocking the use of unauthorized third party Lightning cables with iOS 7

    Your quote comes from a couple lines down:

    There is word going around that some unauthorized cables with cracked chips have been working with iOS 7. Apple will probably shut the door on the usage of the latter in a future update.

    OK, inappropriate use of the phrase "the latter" but in context it's pretty clear. TFA says that Apple is currently blocking "unauthorized" cables, but despite this some unauthorized cables with "cracked chips" may still be working. Of course, since iOS 7 is blocking unauthorized cables it stands to reason that Apply will try to disable unauthorized cables that use "cracked chips".

    Whether they will be able to do so is kinda irrelevant to the main thrust here which is that Apple used an operating system upgrade to lock out third party cable makers. Wont someone think of the poor airline stewardesses!

    IMHO, this news is just piling on considering the fact that your iPhone uses a custom adapter that is incompatible with all other phones, costs 5 times as much as it should, and will be forced into obsolescence after a few generations.

  11. Re:Security Engineered Out on Training Materials for NSA Spying Tool "XKeyScore" Revealed · · Score: 1

    Because Occam's Razor suggests that the simpler explanation is that these leaked documents far overstate the capabilities of the NSA's surveillance program.

  12. Re:How do they get the data? on Training Materials for NSA Spying Tool "XKeyScore" Revealed · · Score: 1

    the part of all this reporting that's weirdly missing is the implication (to my mind) of across the board compliance of every major telco, ISP, service providers, and software company around the globe. Not only is Google/Yahoo/Microsoft/Facebook mining your searches and scanning your emails to target advertising, but they are apparently actively assisting the NSA to do even more intensive sorting, storing, and mining of your activity.

  13. Slides read like advertising copy on Training Materials for NSA Spying Tool "XKeyScore" Revealed · · Score: 1

    "No other system does this!" is repeated on practically every slide. This smells a lot like a sales pitch. Kinda like a private contractor trying to upsell a government agency. I am not saying that this isn't legit, but if a salesman tells you that their system does "unbelievable and unparalleled thing X" (ahem, decoding, storing, and indexing all VPN traffic around the world) he better have more than just a slide to prove it.

  14. Re:My oh my on "Slingatron" To Hurl Payloads Into Orbit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    TANSTAAFL

  15. Re:Where should we start? on Linus Torvalds Explodes at Red Hat Developer · · Score: 1, Insightful

    No one plays with MS and comes out ahead.

    No one? Not one of the millions of software development houses, game studios, hardware manufacturers, etc. that have built successful businesses on and around the Windows platform have come out ahead?

  16. woooooosh on Linus Torvalds Explodes at Red Hat Developer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    you wish you worked with people who suggested you like to suck dick when they disagreed with you?

  17. ... Sigh... on Stanford Study Flawed: Organic Produce May Be More Nutritious After All · · Score: 1

    Let me get this straight:

    The fact that organic produce looks, smells, and tastes so much better than conventional is just BS marketing.
    It's also just BS marketing that those foods that look, smell and taste better also have been found to contain more nutrients (despite the Stanford study's conclusions).

    And therefore I'm a sucker for buying into that BS marketing hype and paying more for food that tastes better and is better for me. Gotcha.

  18. Re:This is how we do science? on Stanford Study Flawed: Organic Produce May Be More Nutritious After All · · Score: 2

    no, a well publicized Stanford study by people working outside of their fields of expertise is found to have obvious mistakes and draws sweeping conclusions from a curiously limited examination. Those conclusions also contradict other published studies.

    But you know, calling organic food "snake oil" is certainly a tip that your opinion has solidified regardless of any actual research.

  19. Re:A flawed rebuttal on Stanford Study Flawed: Organic Produce May Be More Nutritious After All · · Score: 1

    what if the Standford researchers chose the nutrients they did because they were the ones least effected by organic. The Newcastle research suggests that their are nutritional benefits to organic produce. The Stanford research says there aren't, mainly by excluding or mis-spelling the nutrients from the Newcastle study.

  20. Re:Did anyone else notice on Stanford Study Flawed: Organic Produce May Be More Nutritious After All · · Score: 1

    hmm, missing the link to the article from which I got the Brandt quote:
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/13/stanford-organics-study-public-health_n_1880441.html

    which links to the summary of Brandt's research, which says:

    A meta-analysis of the published comparisons of the content of secondary metabolites and vitamins in organically and conventionally produced fruits and vegetables showed that in organic produce the content of secondary metabolites is 12% higher than in corresponding conventional samples (P

  21. Re:Did anyone else notice on Stanford Study Flawed: Organic Produce May Be More Nutritious After All · · Score: 1

    Organic food is more nutritious. Along with tasting better and having fewer chemicals and being better for the environment in general, organic food is healthier and contains more nutrients than conventional food. And it says as much in the linked article:

    Last year Kirsten Brandt, a researcher from Newcastle University, published a similar analysis of existing studies and wound up with the opposite result, concluding that organic foods are actually more nutritious. In combing through the Stanford study she’s not only noticed a critical error in properly identifying a class of nutrients, a spelling error indicative of biochemical incompetence (or at least an egregious oversight) that skewed one important result, but also that the researchers curiously excluded evaluating many nutrients that she found to be considerably higher in organic foods.

    Brandt wondered how the Stanford team, led by faculty from the School of Medicine and Center for Health Policy, could have found no difference in total flavanols between organic and conventional foods when her own results showed organics carried far more of the heart-healthy nutrient. Upon further inspection, she noticed that the team had actually calculated the difference in total flavonols, a different nutrient, and reported the result with the swap of an "o" for an "a".

    The Stanford study was flawed and their conclusions were just flat-out wrong.

  22. Re:Soooooo... on Hitachi Develops Boarding Gate With Built-In Explosives Detector · · Score: 1

    So you're saying you'd need someone to make the bomb and another completely different person to carry it to the airport? There's no way a terrorist organization could pull off that kind of complex operation! I feel safer already.

  23. Re:Unemployment is at 14%.. on Poll-Based System Predicts U.S. Election Results For President, Senate · · Score: 1

    the problem is that U6 is not what most people use when discussing unemployment. while 14% is a bigger number, it's not more informative than the U3 number. as similar_name points out, both numbers tell a very similar story.

  24. Re:Must be true... on Poll-Based System Predicts U.S. Election Results For President, Senate · · Score: 1

    open secrets, maybe? though it's more like 10-to-1, so you're only off by a factor of 10.

    and while union donations are down 50%, I'm failing to see any evidence that Obama is having trouble raising money this cycle.

  25. Re:What, you thought "cloud" meant "no outage"? on More Uptime Problems For Amazon Cloud · · Score: 1

    Cloud computing is nothing more than 1960s timesharing services with modern operating systems. Unless you design for resilience, you're not resilient to problems.

    Cloud computing a little more than 1960s timesharing services. Some miniscule differences such as being accessible from anywhere in the world, providing enormously more power and exponentially more capacity, and priced by they penny, but those are tiny differences that matter. Not to mention that as other commenters have mentioned, the Amazon Cloud does provide more redundancy, the people using it just didn't want to pay for it.

    The parent is the single stupidest comment possible for this thread and it's modded +5 insightful.