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User: DulcetTone

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  1. In the C.C.C.P.... on Russia Wants To Replace US Computer Chips With Local Processors · · Score: 1

    The C.P.U!

  2. If Comcast were Exxon on Netflix Blinks, Will Pay Comcast For Network Access · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They'd be receiving money from Sears when I drove my car to the mall.

    Why do people accept this?

  3. re: In late August, Chancellorsville successfully used an SM-6 missile to hit a target drone

    Clearly, there is a history to be examined.

  4. Re:Yes, but... on Royal Navy Deployed Laser Weapons During the Falklands War · · Score: 1

    The Coriolis Effect story is a myth.

    Short take: the Royal Navy's fire control of the era did not address Coriolis Effect in any way, shape or form (nor did the German navy treat this minor effect). Not handling this effect is a minuscule factor in accuracy in an engagement along a line of fire that changes only slowly over the course of a battle.

  5. Where were these two suspects? on Crowdsourcing Failed In Boston Bombing Aftermath · · Score: 1

    What I'm confused by is the seeming absence of the two suspects in any of the photos that were pawed over by reddit users. Has anyone seen the two brothers in the photos that were so widely reviewed? It seems to me that the photos from the two men who were overlooking bomb location 1 would have had a rough time NOT seeing the older brother placing his bomb.

    Not trying to imply anything untoward, but it seems to me that although the Reddit crew had a fair number of very good photos, they were seemingly not seeing a single photo by which they could have identified the right people.

  6. Re:Slippery slope. on Bruce Schneier On the Marathon Bomber Manhunt · · Score: 1

    I misstated this. They were not ever at the 7/11. The photo taken of suspect 2 was perhaps from the Shell Station at which their hostage escaped.

  7. Re:Slippery slope. on Bruce Schneier On the Marathon Bomber Manhunt · · Score: 2

    Actually, they didn't rob a convenience store. It was later determined that the robbery was entirely unrelated to them, though suspect 2 was in the same store within minutes of the robbery. Incredible? Yes.

    http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/04/19/7-eleven-robbery-boston/2097915/

  8. Re:Slippery slope. on Bruce Schneier On the Marathon Bomber Manhunt · · Score: 1

    People who see slippery slopes everywhere should take up skiing

  9. Re:Slippery slope. on Bruce Schneier On the Marathon Bomber Manhunt · · Score: 1

    Even the Brits only "carried on" after emerging from their bomb shelters during the Blitz.

    Claims of erosion of freedom while people determine the dimension of a threat are pretty silly and reek of armchair quarterbacking (or "thimbly bobton scrubbing", in UK English, I'm guessing).

  10. It's all about swarm attack on Navy To Deploy Lasers On Ship In 2014 · · Score: 3, Informative

    These probably are not meant to kill anything but suicide attack boats.

    CIWS and even 5-in guns with optimized shells are not good at killing agile craft at ranges beyond point-blank. When a small target with judiciously applied armor jinks, it is almost unkillable until the time of flight comes under 3 seconds (about 1-2 km), as any "motivated" use of the rudder causes a wild displacement in deflection that makes perfect aim mean a perfect miss on every shot. The "best" fire control in such a condition is a pattern of fire about the projected aim point, and this actuarial risk is moderate to a determined enemy who has numbers on his side: the guy you fire at goes defensive and becomes all but invulnerable while his friend bore in with rudders centered and throttles opened wide.

    These weapons, if they can keep their power up with enough regularity, will bleed a swarm attack at the intermediate range, leaving the ballistic weapons for the few that might have bobbed past.

  11. Why use HP as a litmus test? on Why Bad Directors Aren't Thrown Out · · Score: 2

    ...when it's traditional to use pH?

  12. imprecise Dates would have been nice on Everything About Java 8 · · Score: 1

    I'd like to see a Date that can be missing some fields, such as "early january", or "2013" and have the objects be Comparable and yet not forget that their actual value is not exact. For instance, "early" in a month might mean the 5th in terms of comparison, but its toString() would say "early January", and a year without further specification might compare as June 30th.

    These sorts of things are helpful when you're recording researched data and don't want the persnickety exactness of the representation to hide the fact that you don't know all the fields.

  13. sushi? on Go To Uni, Earn a Degree In Drones · · Score: 1

    What does this have to do with sea urchins?

  14. errr on SSH Password Gropers Are Now Trying High Ports · · Score: 1

    All security is by obscurity. As in "you don't know my password."

  15. Not the length that counts, seemingly on Deloitte: Use a Longer Password In 2013. Seriously. · · Score: 1

    The issue appears to be using a password that is one of a top N passwords.

    The XKCD comic is laughably inaccurate, .e.g, in that it says that the presence or absence of capitals is one bit of entropy. Of course it is -- if you regard the first character ONLY as the candidate for capitalization.

    tone

  16. Hysterical drama queens on First City In the US To Pass an Anti-Drone Resolution · · Score: 1

    People who see these slippery slopes everywhere should take up skiing

  17. Version names vs numbers on Typing These 8 Characters Will Crash Almost Any App On Your Mountain Lion Mac · · Score: 1

    Why can't Apple stop using these hokey names for their software versions after release? There is no means of knowing what version it is, and it requires out-of-band knowledge of the most useless type. "About this Mac" quotes the grown-up version number. The names are 100% pure loss

  18. Freedom of speech, yes. Freedom to gate-crash, no on Anonymous Hacks Westboro Baptist Church · · Score: 1

    Freedom of Speech doesn't necessarily imply freedom of speech AND TIME AND PLACE.

    A funeral is one of those things we all will have, and at which none of us will be free to speak back against those who might speak against us. The air should be tuned, on those occasions, to the interests of the deceased and the sensitivities of those who love them. If you are not on the speaker list, you're in the audience, mate. You have the rest of the world and the rest of time to express your caustic views. That's a lot of space and time. It's an uncommon mind that can fill both. Really.

    If you cannot come up with something nice to say, and find yourself utterly unable to shut your maw, I can spot you one positive thought: be thankful this isn't YOUR funeral, and think what you might wish that moment to be like.

  19. More precisely... on Google Develops Context-Aware Voice Search For TV · · Score: 2

    "'Context aware' is the key to revolutionizing the TV-watching experience: you can say the name of a TV show, the name of a channel, the description of a show, or the description of a kind of video you'd like to find on YouTube, and the TV will tell you it's not available in your country or requires upgrading to a package of subscription."

    Fixed it.

  20. Re:recovering an RFC 1149 "lost packet"??? on WW2 Carrier Pigeon and Undecoded Message Found In Chimney · · Score: 5, Funny

    It flue in

  21. Failing? Make crypto easier. on Phil Zimmermann's New App Protects Smartphones From Prying Ears · · Score: 1

    I have found in my own limited use of cryptography code that I was entirely unsure if I were using it correctly or as intended, owing to a completely new lingo used for everything, which was nowhere bound to a comprehensive explanation of what it meant, why it was needed, and what practices should be avoided.

    I came off thinking the big advance would be to avoid sending out under-documented code in the first place. The average user is not a cryptologist, but a vanilla coder-of-things, and to avoid heartache at the user level, these coders must find the libraries straightforward.

  22. Re:Is this news? on The US Navy's Railgun Program · · Score: 1

    Weren't very first CIWS systems focused primarily on skimmers? Pop-up attack modes appeared in later missiles primarily as a means to confound the core strength of these. The RN wanted them for ships heading to the Falklands where sea skimming missiles were the threat for which they had the thinnest countermeasures.

    The latest CIWS shows a 25 degree depression angle limit on Wikipedia (earlier ones, 20). I'm not sure how many ships installations permit that, but I'd think the sponson mounting would permit it.

  23. Obsolete? They constitute the Navy's value on Why Aircraft Carriers Still Rule the Oceans · · Score: 2

    The carrier is, by far, the most useful ship in the fleet in the wars we fight. Its theoretical weaknesses only become actual in the wars we don't fight.

    Their greatest downsides are their expense and operating costs.

  24. Wikipedia as guardians of the Urban Legend on When a Primary Source Isn't Good Enough: Wikipedia · · Score: 1

    The restriction against use of primary sources is silly, and one of the main reasons I have my own wiki (for naval history).

    I had to beg and plead to correct the page on USS Constitution which asserted that the ship's wheel was still one removed from HMS Java in 1812 because some idiot wrote that in a book. You can look at the wheel and tell that it is plainly under 30 years old. You can email the very person at Navy History and Heritage Command who is in charge of maintaining the vessel who can tell you when that wheel was installed, and when the one it replaced was installed, and... they want someone to write a book. And what exactly would that do except create "a lack of consensus"?

    Wikipedia is a great thing, but when it becomes a means of preserving and disseminating falsehood, a great opportunity is grossly diminished.

  25. We're doing this backwards on Comments On Code Comments? · · Score: 1

    We should have environments that compile the comments and ignore the code, because that is where the bugs are.

    Who ever read a comment that read anything like the following?

    // iterate through the list of records, but be off-by-one at the end