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User: lgftsa

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Comments · 265

  1. Bad metrics on 1 in 3 Michigan Workers Tested Opened A Password-Phishing Email (go.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    1/3 opened the email? That means that 2/3 don't read their email.

    You can't tell if it's a phish just by the subject line and the displayed sender name, you have to at least check the sender email address, path headers and link html to make an informed decision.

  2. Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant on A New Process Turns Sewage Into Crude Oil (newatlas.com) · · Score: 1

    ...and of course I typo'ed the 30Mbbl as 36Mbbl.

  3. Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant on A New Process Turns Sewage Into Crude Oil (newatlas.com) · · Score: 1

    Check TFA, the article switched units while distracting us with big numbers. In fact, they switched two sets of units just to *ahem* muddy the waters.

    The 36 million *barrels* of oil *per year* is processed from a supply that creates 34 billion *gallons* *per day*.

    365.25 days per year, 42 US gallons per barrel, mumble...mutter...kcalc

    OK, you'll get 36Mbbl oil from 295Gbbl sewage, 0.00012 oil/sewage, or 8208 sewage/oil.

    At US$45/bbl, you have to process 7660 gallons of sewage per dollar to break even.

  4. "Do not," called out Slartibartfast floating past again, and fiddling furiously with the thing that he had stuck into the wall of the Room of Informational Illusions and which was in fact still stuck there, "agree to buy anything at this point."

  5. "old money" on 10 People Arrested In the Netherlands For Bitcoin Laundering (reuters.com) · · Score: 4, Funny

    The new name for "legal tender".

  6. Re:100, not 1000 on XKCD Author's New Unpublished Book Becomes Scientific Best-Seller · · Score: 3, Informative

    That would be "ten hundred" as it is written in the xkcd banner graphic.

  7. Re:Does anyone still return faulty drives? on Enterprise SSDs, Powered Off, Potentially Lose Data In a Week · · Score: 1

    All my HP FC SAN arrays have DMR support for the warranty period and again when under maintenance. On a 25 drive chassis, with 900Gb 2.5" SAS drives, it's about 5% of the total cost. All have dual controllers and power supplies, of course.

    The disks are arranged as 4x 6-disk RAID6 sets, then presented to VMWare as 4x 3.6Tb VMFS disks.

    The 25th disk? It goes on the shelf and is the cold spare for that array. When a disk fails, it goes in straight away and a phone call to HP sees a new disk is sent out overnight.

    DMR: Damaged Media Retention. We send a load of old server and dektop media, plus USBs, etc, to a rated destruction facility once or twice a year. Yes, it will shred.

  8. Re:Kill dogs, why not people??? on WHO Report Links Weed Killer Ingredient To Cancer Risk · · Score: 1

    Boiling water is great for killing weeds/grass around bricks and pavers. Those steam wand thingies work well, too.

  9. Re:Armistice Day on How Alibaba Turned November 11 Into the World's Biggest Online Shopping Day · · Score: 1

    It's not a pubic holiday like ANZAC Day, but it's customary to observe a minute's silence wherever you may be at the time.

  10. Re:how about an objective view? on A Skeptical View of Israel's Iron Dome Rocket Defense System · · Score: 1

    "Why is he pointing his pistol at that missile? Is he arresting it? Does he have to read it's ri... Oh, he's pulling on his second glove. Never mind."

  11. Well Duh! on Organic Cat Litter May Have Caused Nuclear Waste Accident · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Just because a material has a everyday name, it doesn't mean that the original specification didn't have a chemical/mechanical/biological/radiological/whatever reason for specifying it.

    If all the material property requirements were met with a commonly available product that didn't require an expensive supply chain, then that's great.

    HOWEVER...

    I suspect that originally somewhere in the nuclear disposal system, a group identified the need, a solution was found and a materiel was specified. Along the line or through the years, the REASON for that specification was lost to the end of the purchasing chain and the poor sod who orders the stuff was given a directive to "buy sustainably" and substituted the new material without being aware of the original intent.

    That person probably wasn't even been aware of the use of the material - they may have though it was used in the kennels for the guard dogs. It's a nuclear material disposal site. Need to know is important. (1) The suppler wouldn't have known, either.

    There's lots of complaints of expensive procedures and materials(2), but this is a perfect example of the need for a formal supply chain system with provable provenance. You may BUY a commonly available kitty litter to fulfill the order, but what arrives in the sacks will have to match the specification sheet.

    1. Yes, this is irony. The accident may have been prevented if the purchasing officer knew what it was for. Then again, maybe not.

    2. Ferrous hammers are a bad idea around strong magnetic fields. If you're in a lab with a MRI or similar and lots of delicate equipment, a hammer to undo the dog on a vacuum chamber had better be a very special hammer. The kind that you can buy today for less than a hundred bucks, but in the 60's had to be engineered from scratch. Thank someone else's R&D for the fact you can buy a (nearly) chemically inert, non-ferrous, non-sparking hammer for a pittance.

  12. Re:Tracking on Malaysian Flight Disappearance 'Deliberate' · · Score: 1

    > So you've added two or three more people to be bribed to ignore a faulty tracking device - 1 or 2 in maintenance, and someone in the control tower?

    They'd be the first people to be arrested when the syslog was backtracked on the first day of the search. I'll admit that some people are not the brightest, but looking at a red flag on a computer screen and granting take-off permission anyway is a little beyond belief.

    You'd need a sysadmin or ATC site admin to inject fake data, but that wouldn't survive the satellite data analysis.

    I don't know if it would be possible, but you might be able to have a ghost transponder in another aircraft or on the ground which pretends to be the target. You'd have to be careful to transmit at the correct time and with the correct signal drop-off if you wanted to hide the fakery from the investigation.

    It the investigators managed to get satellite triangulation data, even that wouldn't work.

  13. Re:Not a subsidy? on NASA Admits It Gave Jet Fuel Discounts To Google Execs' Company · · Score: 3, Informative

    I *think* that the meaning of the quoted words "full cost" is that NASA was selling to H2-11 at NASA's cost price. This would be less than "market rate" because NASA does not collect tax on the fuel.

    The customary difference between cost and market would be tax, handling and profit margin, none of which were added by NASA.

  14. Re:Common sense? In MY judiciary? on Judge Says You Can Warn Others About Speed Traps · · Score: 2

    Whoops, that was from the repealed/superseded regulations list. It's still illegal in Queensland and NSW, though. Here's the _current_ Qld rules:

    A driver must not switch headlights to high beam if another vehicle is closer than 200m in front of the driver's vehicle.

    A driver may flash the headlights briefly before overtaking another vehicle.

    Drivers must ensure that they do not dazzle other road users.

  15. Re:Common sense? In MY judiciary? on Judge Says You Can Warn Others About Speed Traps · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Australian road rules sidesteps the "warning" issue:

    http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/l...

      AUSTRALIAN ROAD RULES - REG 218
    Using headlights on high-beam
    218 Using headlights on high-beam

            (1) The driver of a vehicle must not use the vehicleâ(TM)s headlights on high-beam, or allow the vehicleâ(TM)s headlights to be used on high-beam, if the driver is driving:

                    (a) less than 200 metres behind a vehicle travelling in the same direction as the driver, or

                    (b) less than 200 metres from an oncoming vehicle.

                    Penalty: Offence provision.

                    Note: "High-beam" and "oncoming vehicle" are defined in the dictionary.

            (2) However, if the driver is overtaking a vehicle, the driver may briefly switch the headlights from low-beam to high-beam immediately before the driver begins to overtake the vehicle.

                    Note: "Low-beam" and "overtake" are defined in the dictionary.

  16. Re:Goodbye India, Hello China! on Nokia Takeover In Jeopardy Due To Alleged $3.4B Tax Bill In India · · Score: 1

    The report I read was that the neural net which distinguishes phonemes is trained up to the age of around 10-14.

    Out of the 110 (approx) (IIRC) human phonemes, most languages use no more than 85 (approx) (IIRC), sometimes far fewer.

    The classic Japanese/English "L"/"R" problem is an symptom of this, where for a Japanese person who hasn't been exposed to the "L" sound regularly at a young age, it is mapped to an "R" sound.

    Note also, that the single "R" sounds that the Japanese-language person is making instead of "L" and "R" may not be the "R" sounds that the English-language person is hearing. Different "L" and "R" sounds may spoken by Japanese-language person, but the English-language person may only hear them as a single "R" sound. Since there's no common frame of reference, the phoneme corruption could be happening in either or both directions for any phoneme mapping.

    I recall reading somewhere else that the French language has three different sounds which map to the English "R" sound. That's my excuse for scraping high-school French, anyway.

    There are people who are exceptions to the rule, of course, and there's also the possibility of learning to speak a language correctly by an external feedback loop. All you need is to make different sounds until a person who can hear the difference confirms when the sound is correct, and use that mouth/larynx shape when appropriate. Easy!

  17. Re:I'm not ashamed to admit on Asian Giant Hornets Kill 42 People In China, Injure Over 1,500 · · Score: 1

    Forget flying, these ones worked out how to weave a net.

    http://www.ozanimals.com/Spider/Net-casting-Spider/Deinopis/subrufa.html

    Here's a video: http://izismile.com/2012/08/01/nature_why_you_so_scary_netcasting_spider.html

    My parents have them in the plants around their house, and on the balcony.

  18. Re:So, don't use the same finger for on CCC Says Apple iPhone 5S TouchID Broken · · Score: 2

    eBay?

  19. Re:Can. But shouldn't on Xbox One's HDMI Pass-Through Can Connect PS4, PCs and More · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The intent may be to introduce a delay in the other consoles' UI responses.

    When a non-tech user buys a competing console in a year or so, and it's easier for them to daisy-chain it through the xbox than hunt around behind the TV, it may be enough that they tend to play the xbox more than the new console because it's more responsive and gives a better gameplay experience.

    Too paranoid? Check out the cryptographically signed charging cables from Apple, and then try to persuade me otherwise with a straight face. <sardonic grin>

  20. Re:3D printed guns don't have to look like guns on In a Security Test, 3-D Printed Gun Smuggled Into Israeli Parliament · · Score: 1

    The head would probably be a better grip, so the exit would naturally be the ... other end.

  21. Re:And they still don't know the initial vector on Backdoor Targeting Apache Servers Spreads To Nginx, Lighttpd · · Score: 4, Informative

    Worried about exposed sshd? Install pam-abl and watch the brute force attackers waste their time. With my config, three failures from any IP address in an hour (or 6 per day) and that IP is locked out for a week through PAM. They can still try, of course, but even if they somehow guess the correct password, it must be in their first three guesses each week.

    There's no indication to the attacker that pam-abl is there, and there's very little chance of a DOS attack against legitimate logins.

    Oh, and you've denied root logins from the internet, haven't you?

    Warning: Source tarball, but if I debian-ized it, then anyone can.

  22. Re:What the hell is wrong with americans? on How Much Beef Is In Your Burger? · · Score: 5, Funny

    and a few other species

    Best Typo Ever!

  23. Re:Where are the raspberry Pi?? on Raspberry Pi Hits 1GHz With Official 'Turbo Mode' · · Score: 1

    I was allowed to order (and pay for) mine in June, after the initial bait-and-switch and then a shipping hike of more than the cost of the board itself. I finally got an order number in the low 80 thousands with a nine week shipping estimate.

    Still no shipping notification, and no more updates on where they're up to in the list.

    Yet, the people claiming to be in charge of this train wreck are giving boards away as prizes. Unbelievable.

  24. NOT at video speed on UK Company Demos Color Video Animation On Electronic Paper · · Score: 2

    A maximum of 12fps is not video speed.

  25. Optional extensions? on S+M Vs. SPDY: Microsoft and Google Battle Over HTTP 2.0 · · Score: 1

    I wonder if all the options of all the extensions will be part of the spec, or is this another embrace, extend, extinguish?