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User: dbIII

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  1. Work on that attention span on O3b Launches Four More Satellites To Bring Internet To 'Other 3 Billion' · · Score: 1

    Second sentence FFS: "Other stuff is lower but lag is expected"

  2. Once satellite is mentioned on O3b Launches Four More Satellites To Bring Internet To 'Other 3 Billion' · · Score: 2

    Once satellite is mentioned there is no need to mention ping times, if you went to high school you probably already know about the speed of light and that it's a long way up to geostationary orbit. Other stuff is lower but lag is expected whenever satellite is mentioned.
    So while you are correct there is probably not a single reader here that needed to be corrected.

  3. Re:Can't eat Internet on O3b Launches Four More Satellites To Bring Internet To 'Other 3 Billion' · · Score: 4, Insightful

    and you want them to get the Internet

    Substitute "books" or a video of "how to get clean water with scrapped parts" for that last word and you'll see what the big deal is.

    If you can't get in their shoes think of Hurricane Katrina and how the big deal in the aftermath is the lack of communications that resulted in food rotting when there were plenty of hungry people but the communications to direct the supply efforts were not there.

    How about you invest that money in getting rid of local warlords

    By investing the money in giving people the ability to talk about how to get rid of local warlords without having to gather in a public place and get hacked to death by machettes - something like this internet thing perhaps?

  4. Another bright point to the story on O3b Launches Four More Satellites To Bring Internet To 'Other 3 Billion' · · Score: 1

    This is a very international effort; a Russian Soyuz rocket went up from South America, carrying satellites built in France.

    And the launch vehicle burnt up quite spectacularly over the south of Australia recently after it had done it's job.

  5. Re:Requirements for a DMCA takedown. on "Internet's Own Boy" Briefly Knocked Off YouTube With Bogus DMCA Claim · · Score: 1

    Since the notification was clearly not check for accuracy then you'd hope perjury should apply - but so far in the life of the DMCA it has NEVER applied. Shortcuts should be dealt with and eliminated instead of being the normal situation.

  6. Perjury charges were promised for false claims on "Internet's Own Boy" Briefly Knocked Off YouTube With Bogus DMCA Claim · · Score: 1

    Perjury charges were promised for false claims. If the DCMA can't be repealed why not amend it to what was promised when it was being voted on?

  7. A bit too late on Asteroid Mining Bill Introduced In Congress To Protect Private Property Rights · · Score: 1

    Such a bill belongs in Russia, China or some other place that hasn't given up on space.

  8. Re:Forcing some of the costs on others on The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane To Nowhere · · Score: 1

    I shouldn't have used big words like "austerity" :(
    To sum up, a government that is crying poor and cutting spending everywhere else has brought forward the purchase of F35s without seeking military advice. There are not many conclusions that can be drawn from that, the least immoral being caving in to outside pressure due to inexperience with international relations.

  9. Re:Forcing some of the costs on others on The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane To Nowhere · · Score: 1

    Personally I think it's like the Sea Sprite (and tank with too short a range to be useful to Australia, and torpedoes that are not made any more and don't fit) rushed deal all over again. A new and naive bunch that see US representatives as rock stars are swallowing whatever deal is shoved down their throats without listening to their own experts.

  10. At least read as far as sentence number 2 on Dubai's Climate-Controlled Dome City Is a Dystopia Waiting To Happen · · Score: 1

    Talk about a short attention span. Also evaporative cooling - "look it up", especially on which side of the system the water goes.

  11. Re:Goal Post: Mysticism on The Lovelace Test Is Better Than the Turing Test At Detecting AI · · Score: 1

    This is like looking at obscurity and declaring it a soul

    That's the undergraduate view of AI that gets repeated at times in this place.

    The measure of intelligence is that we can't understand it?

    Not just yet, so instead of waiting until years of work is done understanding the physical basis of thought the impatient want some sort of measure now.

  12. Re:Global warming is only the start on Dubai's Climate-Controlled Dome City Is a Dystopia Waiting To Happen · · Score: 2

    It's also hard to explain how the increasing challenge of getting enough oil and gas is a result of a "false" scarcity

    Here's the trick, the people who say there is plenty of stuff are throwing coal, shale, tar and anything else they can think of into the mix and pretend it's the same as easy to extract liquid oil. Another common trick is to pretend that all that unsurveyed land in Iran, the arctic, wherever has huge oil basins when we do not know one way or another. There's plenty of fossil fuels. Oil we can get out of the ground - not so much. The only reason I have the job I have is that the more computing power you have the easier it is to find the stuff from survey data.

  13. Re:Not about jealousy, but ... on Dubai's Climate-Controlled Dome City Is a Dystopia Waiting To Happen · · Score: 1

    Humidity is very low in the air in that place now. With a bit of outside air circulating under a dome it should stay relatively low.

  14. Re:More F-35 Hate on The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane To Nowhere · · Score: 1

    Sorry you feel that way. But if you look at my account I've been active since 2009, rather dedicated for an astroturfing account

    That's about when PR companies decided to put money into "social media" and this place started to get astroturfed, but it does appear that your comment was wrongly labelled by Exitar.
    Let's consider what is now a very old example of this sort of contraversy. The F111 also had a variety of early problems, as mentioned by others here, yet despite all those problems decades ago they were useful enough in some roles that there were retained in service long enough that I saw one flying the year before last. There are none flying now but nearly 40 years of service is enough for a jet fighter isn't it?

  15. Forcing some of the costs on others on The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane To Nowhere · · Score: 1

    For instance Australia's new and inexperienced government is shelling out billions for these F35s in the middle of an austerity budget - presumably because someone in the US leaned on them and they don't know how to do anything other than completely cave in yet.

  16. Cultural confusion on US Tech Firms Recruiting High Schoolers (And Younger) · · Score: 1
    Due to being in a different place and quite a few years older than most here it appears I misunderstood "SAT scores" to be equivalent to an accurate measure of high school achievement averaged over at least two years. Other places do not do a single test.
    So I'd better update my statement to make things more clear.

    Raising your score in a single type of test is easy - just do a lot of that sort of test as practice. Raising your actual intelligence is a lot harder.

    Real IQ tests aren't like most of the stupid things you find on the internet

    The sort of things used by lazy fad driven HR idiots are until you tell them to either do their job or get out of the way.

    I'm no pychologist, but I'm been told by some that at least in the field of education IQ tests are pointless and can vary widely with the same child over several years. It was described to me in the 1980s as being nothing but a measure of how good people are at doing that sort of test and translating poorly to other situations. It's still an artifact of that time that only remains due to management fads.

  17. Re:seems like snowden did the exact same thing. on Thousands of Leaked KGB Files Are Now Open To the Public · · Score: 1

    If he had this "decency" you speak of, he would have only alerted his own people and not the foreign governments

    He notified a couple of newspapers. If you want to hassle people about letting foreign governments know then your problem is with them and not with Snowden.

  18. Re:Once upon a time in America... on US Tech Firms Recruiting High Schoolers (And Younger) · · Score: 1

    I run into too many technical people who hate learning new things even though they are in a field where learning new things is mandatory

    That sounds like people who followed the money - the same problem that turned a "woman's profession" of sitting inside and typing into what's close to a boy's only club and an industry with a high turnover and short attention span. I got away from that problem by working with scientists instead of a bunch of "programmers" that were scared of 64bit, multithreading, and anything that wasn't fucking Visual Basic.

  19. Re:Not new on US Tech Firms Recruiting High Schoolers (And Younger) · · Score: 2
    University forces you to push through the boring shit that you need to know before you can even begin to grasp the meaning of the interesting stuff. If you learn by keyword search you can end up with a list of facts about the thing but not enough understanding to make use of it properly.
    A good example on this site was a programmer asserting that "single bit operations are faster" presumably due to him bypassing all the boring stuff about hardware and clock cycles that many others here learnt in high school.

    To get down to it, while it is possible few people when leaving high school have the self-discipline to learn a lot of difficult subjects just by going through textbooks or other resources. If nobody is talking to us about it we don't know where to get started - so University or similar provides that start.

    And college may be heavy on the theory behind computer science concepts it does not put much effort into teaching the intricacies and pros and cons of the various frameworks floating around today.

    Which is just as well because who uses Modula-2 today? How about the godawful VB of 15 years ago? Both apparently looked like winners instead of the weird Java thing and that antiquated C.

  20. Cog or crafter? Low potential or high? on US Tech Firms Recruiting High Schoolers (And Younger) · · Score: 1

    If you want somebody to follow standard operating procedures, sure, put them in a cube, give them a job and forget about them. If you want someone capable of writing new procedures you need to either train or apprentice them yourself or get someone else, like a university, to do it for you.
    It's the technician versus engineer argument. You only actually need an engineer (or a very experienced technician with a wide range) when you want to change things, such as solve a problem or do something new. So in the short term sticking a kid in a cube with a clipboard of "how we do things here" makes sense for the company and the kid.
    In the long term they could both do better.

    Where I am the current vocational approach to programming means there's no "real" programmers in the place, since too tight a focus means we have no chance explaining the mathematics to them in under a couple of years. So we have scientists who "spent 4 years doing calculus", and even if their code is crap they at least can estimate and work out when their code is spitting out noise instead of answers. Following the list on the clipboard is not for everyone. You need at least a few people capable of thinking up that list.

  21. Re:What is the use of school to Facebook? on US Tech Firms Recruiting High Schoolers (And Younger) · · Score: 1

    and he has to use the proxy of SAT scores

    Which, though still flawed, are a vastly better way of measuring ability to reason than IQ tests and more difficult to game.
    Raising your IQ is easy - just do a lot of IQ tests as practice. Raising your actual intelligence is a lot harder.

  22. Re:Pity about systemd on CentOS Linux Version 7 Released On x86_64 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It can be argued that an OS really isn't much more than a kernel and init with everything else as userspace.

  23. Re:air density on ESA Shows Off Quadcopter Landing Concept For Mars Rovers · · Score: 1

    Not any current conventional one just like conventional fixed wing aircraft can't get up to the same altitude as the U2. I think it's more impractical than impossible, although generating that much lift from huge rotors may require materials that we don't or may never have.
    Besides, this copter was just a platform for a vision system instead of a serious lander design.

  24. Re:GPS on Mars? on ESA Shows Off Quadcopter Landing Concept For Mars Rovers · · Score: 1

    What's wrong with Aphrodite?

    Doesn't work well with Apples.

  25. Re:GPS on Mars on ESA Shows Off Quadcopter Landing Concept For Mars Rovers · · Score: 1

    Which is why this is so interesting.