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User: tylernt

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Comments · 846

  1. Re:Bring it back to earth? on B612 Foundation and 2004 YD5 Asteroid Capture? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Hmph. I would hardly call "The Andromeda Strain" a B movie!

  2. Re:Checking the weather. on Texas State Parks Offer Wi-Fi · · Score: 1

    Uh, all you need is a radio with "W/X" or weather band capability. NOAA broadcasts weather information 24/7 and you can receive them just about anywhere except maybe in a canyon surrounded by mountains. Most police scanners, shortwave radios, survival radios, and ham radios have the ability to receive the weather band. I found a portable AM-FM-TV-W/X radio on Froogle for $7.

  3. Re:Uhm on "Dark Alleys" on the Internet · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But who's going to read all those logs? If there are 1 million people online at any given point of time, you're going to need about 1 million people reading logs. The task would be overwhelming.

    Throw some nice 2048-bit RSA encryption in there, and the whole thing is impossible.

    You know, it's stuff like this that the terrorists want. They want us to lose our freedoms to overzealous anti-terrorism laws, they want us to live in fear. Suggestions like this article must make Bin Laden smile.

  4. Re:Damn it! on TorrentBits.org and SuprNova.org Go Dark · · Score: 1

    "(or at least they do in the movies)"

    Well, we all know that movies==reality, so that's a good argument.

  5. Re:Informative? WTF? on Revolutionary Tower in Brazil · · Score: 1

    It's not the mods that are insane, it's the kooks who run Slashdot. They set it so that Funny does not earn Karma. More intelligent Mods, combatting this silly policy, sometimes mod funny posts Informative etc. so humorous posters are rewarded with Karma.

  6. Re:Weather data weak on Weather Monitoring Frequencies Subject to Pollution · · Score: 1

    "Library of Congresses"

    Erm, if there are multiple libraries, shouldn't that be "Libraries of Congress?"

    I don't really know, but it sounds funny either way.

  7. Re:missing items on Bad Science Awards · · Score: 3, Informative

    The only L. Ron Hubbard book I've ever read was 'Battlefield Earth', and it was quite good (I know the movie sucked though). It's straight SF that has nothing to do with Scientology. I don't know anything about that other Scientology crap he wrote, but at least *one* book of his is worth reading.

  8. Re:Is it worth it? on Interceptor Missile Fails Test Launch · · Score: 1

    Wish I had mod points, this is actually insightful in sick and frankly, depressing way.

  9. Re:Vote with dollars on MPAA to Sue BitTorrent Tracker Servers · · Score: 1

    Yeah, you may have a point. Having my computer monitor set at 60Hz has never bothered me, but it drives some people I know completely bonkers. So I guess picture quality is somewhat in the eye of the beholder.

  10. Re:Vote with dollars on MPAA to Sue BitTorrent Tracker Servers · · Score: 1

    "Also, I'm pretty certain that your sound system and screen for that DVD don't come anywhere close to seeing it in a theater"

    Perhaps, but the gap is quickly closing. True, a Home Theater screen is smaller, but you sit closer and usually you get to sit on a sofa or Lazy Boy of your choice instead of a sticky fold-down chair with plastic armrests (if you get armrests at all). Put together an inexpensive LCD or DLP projector and a Dolby 5.1 system with a nice sub, and I think you'd prefer a home viewing over a public one. Another plus: no traffic, no parking. Another plus: pause the show to go take a leak.

    The only reason I go to a movie at the theater is I don't want to wait for it to come out on DVD (or unless I go to a dollar theater because it's cheaper than renting). If you ask me, the theater is a wounded and dying animal propped up with artificial life support by the studios withholding DVD releases of movies until after their theatrical releases have been bled dry of any further revenue.

  11. Re:Drug Smugglers on Solar-Powered Autonomous Underwater Vehicles · · Score: 1

    One method of sub detection is their magnetic signature. Which is why, periodically, each U.S. sub goes into this big demagnetizaion machine.

    Another way is via thermal signature. Subs with those nice, hot, nuclear reactors tend to leave a trail of slightly warmer water.

  12. Re:There missions must not go very deep. on Solar-Powered Autonomous Underwater Vehicles · · Score: 1

    You are correct of course, the temperature difference between the surface and at depth is what OTEC technology is built around. However, I fail to see a good way for a miniature sub to make use of it. OTEC requiers a really, really long pipe extending from the surface to several hundred feet deep and even then doesn't produce much net power).

    But then, I don't have a degree in engineering or thermal dynamics, so maybe I'm missing some finer points. :)

  13. Re:There missions must not go very deep. on Solar-Powered Autonomous Underwater Vehicles · · Score: 1

    "When you reach the depth you want, pump the ballast out (or use electrolysis to make gas?)" This was covered on /. before: IIRC, the subs pumped oil into a bladder that increased their volume and made them positively bouyant (and vice versea).

  14. Re:Perhaps someone should tell them on Solar-Powered Autonomous Underwater Vehicles · · Score: 1

    "It would be economically beneficial to mine the ocean floor"

    Probably not. Countries only have a few hundred miles or so off their coasts that they can rape for resources, which is only a small fraction of the world's oceans. The rest is international waters and international treaty, for the most part, makes it difficult or impossible to harvest resources there. See http://www.luf.org/artisle.html for more info.

  15. Re:Not to mention... on Solar-Powered Autonomous Underwater Vehicles · · Score: 1

    Erm, they didn't exactly "control" their subs with ELF like a remote control, they used it to send orders to the sub commanders. Usually it was an order to come to periscope depth so a more traditional radio link could be established -- ELF transmissions were extremely slow, somewhere around 50 baud.

    IIRC, the sub had to be pretty close to the surface and/or deploy a floating antenna in order to receive the transmissions anyway. This with a transmitter that was what, a megawatt or so? Nowadays supposedly there is blue-green laser technology that enables communications with subs at depth, but I doubt that's available for an application such as the article describes.

  16. Re:Legally on BitTorrent Gives Hollywood a Headache · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There are plenty of anonymous web proxies, I wasn't aware that proxies even existed for BitTorrent though? Anyways, they would soon be flooded with traffic. The reason BT is so fast it you're downloading and uploading in parallel. Send everything though a proxy and now you've got a choke point; kind of defeats the purpose.

  17. Re:Push on Is RSS Doomed by Popularity? · · Score: 1

    "Do you really think of "ok, now my client makes a http request, that travels through the call hierarchy of the libraries, gets a tcp socket open, gets a kernel call of the driver to send a SYN packet??"."

    Er... yeah, actually, I do think that. Is that bad?

  18. Re:No McJob for me. on Massive Layoffs At AOL · · Score: 1

    "because US companies aren't going to outsource the executive managment positions..."

    Hah! That's what we all said about tech jobs 10 years ago.

  19. Re:How they become? on The Illiteracy of Corporate American E-Mail · · Score: 1

    Aaauugh! I shouldn't ever read the posts to /. stories that have anything to do with spelling, grammar, or literacy. At least half the posts inevitably make fun of the spelling, grammar, or literacy of other posters.

    It's too bad I don't have 200 'Redundant' mod points to award right now...

  20. Re:How they become? on The Illiteracy of Corporate American E-Mail · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It seems like I see/hear 'prolly' frequently in British media, so maybe it's a perfectly normal slang term there?

  21. Re:Yet another challenge/response system: *yawn* on FairUCE - the Smart Email Proxy · · Score: 2, Informative

    "My solution was simply to pay for an account at an ISP where they aggressively filter spam."

    Yeah, but sometimes agressive spam filters accidentally filter legit mail. You may still be missing out on freelance opportunites thanks to your agressive spam filter.

  22. Re:Oh crap.... on FairUCE - the Smart Email Proxy · · Score: 1

    "one could turn a challenge-response set up into a harrassment too"

    True but unlikely to happen on a wide scale. Spammers don't spam to annoy you, they spam to make money. They can't make any money from harassing people, so most spammers won't do that -- as long as they cannot put any text of their own choosing into the challenge response. If they can, they'll just put their advertising there and the system is useless.

  23. Re:What a waste... on Make Your Own Cluster Balloon · · Score: 1

    It most certainly does not float off into space. Earth's gravity prevents it from doing so. It may float up to several miles above the surface, granted, but it's hardly lost.

  24. Re:What a waste... on Make Your Own Cluster Balloon · · Score: 1

    Informative?! Uh, FYI, helium does not float off into space. I kinda doubt the oil well thing too.

    I think it was meant to be funny.

  25. Re:What... on Military Robots Get Machine Guns · · Score: 1

    You too can own fully automatic firearms... and for free! Just join the Army.