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User: afidel

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  1. Re:Plants eventually die on Toyota Develops New Flower Species To Reduce Pollution · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Actually the buildup of soil is in direct contradiction with your assertion that the majority of the carbon is re-released into the atmosphere. A good example of this process in action is right here where I live along the Great Lakes, the last glacial period ended only 12,000 years ago and as the glaciers retreated they completely scoured the bedrock yet today there are feet and feet of soil built up.

  2. Re:Change. on Attorney General Says Wiretap Lawsuit Must Be Thrown Out · · Score: 1

    Are they even secret at this point? I figure between the NSA and DHS anyone who leads a life that's even vaguely interesting to those in authority is tapped and all of the digital breadcrumbs of their life are being sifted and sorted. They tapped all sorts of people from the 50's on without warrants, what would ever make someone think that they would stop now that computers make it cheap to sift?

  3. Re:Does anyone know... on New Improvements On the Attacks On WPA/TKIP · · Score: 1

    Uh, On October 2, 2000, NIST announced[4] that Rijndael had been selected as the proposed AES and started the process of making it the official standard by publishing an announcement in the Federal Register what?

  4. Re:Does anyone know... on New Improvements On the Attacks On WPA/TKIP · · Score: 1

    802.11b predates AES by quite a few years.

  5. Re:Windows is fading into the background on ARM Stealthily Rising As a Low-End Contender · · Score: 1

    It's the document editing that's the key there, alternative document editing programs just haven't taken off in business because the marginal gains from going away from Office haven't justified all the downsides. I don't see netbooks with 12 hour battery lives chancing that.

  6. Re:Windows is fading into the background on ARM Stealthily Rising As a Low-End Contender · · Score: 1

    I would say WAY more people care about if their apps will run then care about if they can work for 12 hours on battery. Seriously, I've never been away from a plug more than about 4 hours except when in the backwoods camping. Even on transatlantic flights I can get a power plug to keep my laptop running.

  7. Re:Did it really go ok? on "Frickin' Fantastic" Launch of NASA's Ares I-X Rocket · · Score: 1

    Huh? You HAVE to fire separation motors or else the two stages will stay stuck together by inertia. If you are saying that they did fire separation motors but they were insufficient that is a possibility but as the GP alluded we won't know until the report comes out. Also so long as the two stages were fully separated I don't think there would be any problem lighting the second stage, nothing on the first stage is of value at that point and nothing on the bottom of the second stage that low on the rocket should be affected at all by any hot gas that might escape.

  8. Re:I've never really understood this device on The Software Router As MiFi Killer · · Score: 1

    A group of people at a client location who come and go and don't have access to the clients network. A group of people responding to an area recently hit by natural disaster where landline service hasn't yet been restored. Both are real world examples from my previous employer who worked with insurance companies, they were paranoid about security and needed our people down along the gulf coast just months after Katrina.

  9. Re:economic stupidity on "Frickin' Fantastic" Launch of NASA's Ares I-X Rocket · · Score: 1

    Spain was broke when they gave Columbus his commission, they had just finished a costly war and had severe economic problems on the domestic front, yet they paid for his exploration because they thought that it might bring future wealth. When the main driving force in your economy is new technology investing in a program that is centered around advancing knowledge and applied technology makes perfect sense.

  10. Re:economic stupidity on "Frickin' Fantastic" Launch of NASA's Ares I-X Rocket · · Score: 1

    Yes, all progress must come to an end because the pocket is tight! Oh, wait, if Quenn Isabella had had your attitude the new world might not have been explored, idiot.

  11. Re:Test flight examination? on "Frickin' Fantastic" Launch of NASA's Ares I-X Rocket · · Score: 1

    They were banned in late 1988 so I figured 25 was a good guess (I'm 31 and got to play with them before the hysteria, but I was also shooting guns by then and hunting small game not long after so my parents weren't exactly helicopter parents).

  12. Re:Test flight examination? on "Frickin' Fantastic" Launch of NASA's Ares I-X Rocket · · Score: 2, Informative

    AFAIK they aren't planning to recover the upper stage or the mock crew assembly.

  13. Re:Test flight examination? on "Frickin' Fantastic" Launch of NASA's Ares I-X Rocket · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They only planned to recover the first stage from what I had read. As the NASA official stated it the second stage and mock crew capsule would splash into the ocean like a giant lawn dart and sink to the bottom. I thought the analogy was funny because thanks to the government some large percentage of the population (those under say 25) have no idea what a lawn dart IS.

  14. Re:Good luck on What is the Current State of Home Automation? · · Score: 1

    At 10x more the ROI vs CFL's is going to be looooong so consumers would either have to have altruistic intentions in the purchase or you are going to have to show significant improvements AND likely offer a 3rd party warranty on them (further increasing costs).

  15. Re:They've taken a leaf out of the UK's book on No Hand-Held Devices In Ontario Cars · · Score: 1

    Meh, I've had several driving infractions thrown after speaking with a magistrate, as long as you offer a sound argument and some shade of proof it's possible to win in traffic court. Still had to pay court costs to have my argument heard, but cheaper than taking the hit to my insurance rates.

  16. Re:They've taken a leaf out of the UK's book on No Hand-Held Devices In Ontario Cars · · Score: 1

    Then wouldn't it be easier to amend the language of the driving without due attention statute to explicitly state this? The law is often amended with such clarifications and definitions so I go back to the GP's point that it is attention seeking politicians who came up with yet another law to put on the books.

  17. Re:Lesson learned? on Trojan Kill Switches In Military Technology · · Score: 1

    BS, there are plenty of fab plants still in the US. Micron, IBM and Intel definitely have production US plants and those are just the ones I know of off the top of my head.

  18. Re:Its dumb on Microsoft Opening Outlook's PST Format · · Score: 1

    Or OWA or RPC over HTTPS with OST cache files. I never let my users have PST's because they are a legal liability. If you have a sane document retention policy and you don't allow PST's it's very easy to say to the lawyers whether or not you have a particular email or set of emails, if you allow PST's then a good lawyer for the opposition can cause you lots of time, money, and pain in discovery costs and possibly miskept information.

  19. Re:Never even heard of it on Microsoft Opening Outlook's PST Format · · Score: 1

    Hahaha, yeah SQLite better than Jet Blue, *laugh*. Sorry but while Exchange data store corruption CAN occur it doesn't very often, and hasn't much at all since Exchange 2003. In fact for systems that lack the care and feeding that a DBA gives to your typical large scale database I think they do remarkably well. I have a love hate relationship with Exchange (I've been certified since 5.5) and while I did on occasion get called in to clean up a nasty Exchange related problem, I only had to deal with two major data problems in all those years. I've seen much worse problems with Notes, Groupwise, and Maildir based solution then I have with Exchange.

  20. Re:Oh no... on Microsoft Opening Outlook's PST Format · · Score: 1

    I can see it being useful for backup apps, take a VSS backup of the pst file then parse out just the change items, gives you the ability to do new message (differential) backups whether Outlook is open or not.

  21. Re:Too bad on Geocities Shutting Down Today · · Score: 1

    Just add the info to wikipedia if it's not already there.

  22. Re:N00b thing? on Geocities Shutting Down Today · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Some of us predate UID's and only got one to banish John Katz from our homepage.

  23. Re:They pay some on Microsoft Freeloading In Washington State Courts · · Score: 1

    Wow, combined 9% sales tax and no income tax, nice area. I pay 7.75% sales tax AND state income AND local income tax both where I work and where I reside AND about 6% property tax.

  24. Re:Yep on Tilera To Release 100-Core Processor · · Score: 2, Interesting

    10Gb ethernet is fairly low latency and obviously has plenty of bandwidth, using remoteDMA you can get pretty damn good results. Obviously if latency is your #1 performance blocker then it's not going to produce the fastest results, but you can still get good results out of a fairly inexpensive cluster using 10Gb fat trees for most workloads. Basically commodity computing technology has shrunk the gap between what can be done on a moderate sized commodity cluster and what can be done on a purpose built supercomputer, the result being what has happened to Cray and SGI.

  25. Re:BIOS password on Of Encrypted Hard Drives and "Evil Maids" · · Score: 1

    IBM laptop's and HDD's have an additional HDD level password which won't allow access to the HDD without a separate password and AFAIK it's based on part of the SATA/ATAPI standard so you would have to replace the controller (I think it's stored in the controller not on the platter) to get around it (doable but not exactly fast or convenient).