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User: dbIII

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  1. See also flying cars stories on UN: Renewables, Nuclear Must Triple To Save Climate · · Score: 1

    There were some idiots that went looking for such shit in what they said was in "the interests of balance", but really it was about creating a fake argument to try to have something sensational to provoke readers to read their rag instead of another publication. It all blew over within weeks. If there was as much to it as you seem to remember then there wouldn't be any need for faked magazine covers to try to pretend it was all the rage back then.
    See also articles in the same magazines predicting that we'd all have flying cars by 1990.

  2. Re:Fuck this shit! on UN: Renewables, Nuclear Must Triple To Save Climate · · Score: 1

    1970's? Global cooling? Are you serious?

    Such folk are so serious about it that fake magazine covers have been photoshopped together to support it.
    Just ignore the loyal little comrade doing what his party tells him to do. It's just a bit of soviet russia style revisionism and propaganda.

  3. Re:Anga and rah rah rah flag waving? on Russia Wants To Establish a Permanent Moon Base · · Score: 1

    They sure aren't going into space missions

    So who has the launcher and is capable of manned missions then? Not NASA is it? Instead of cheering for something broken why not hassle elected officials to stop breaking it.
    Your "nationalist" shit is way off the mark because I'm not European and NASA paid for part of my engineering degree back in the 1980s - I really want to see them succeed but political corruption has reduced them to a few skunkworks projects hiding between slabs of pork. The effort to produce a launcher for manned missions is a prime example of a project made utterly useless and abandoned because pork was the primary objective.

  4. Re:Anga and rah rah rah flag waving? on Russia Wants To Establish a Permanent Moon Base · · Score: 1

    Did you read my post at all? There's the word "pork" in there a few times that you should have noticed, and as for getting "nationalist" out of it - please pay attention before posting guys.

  5. Re:Series/Movie Reversed? on Neil Gaiman Confirms Movie Talks For Sandman, American Gods · · Score: 1

    It seems like that one would be the better one for a movie

    I think a movie is too short to get much out of American Gods. The story in the novel doesn't need much in the way of special effects or exotic locations so you could probably get a lot of episodes for the same price as one movie and be able to cover more than one major idea out of the book.
    Sandman IMHO is easier to cut a movie sized chunk out of.
    Either way, Neil Gaiman has done a lot with TV series and at least three Hollywood movies (which is why he's saying 'wait and see') so unless he gets cut out of the loop it's likely to work out well. If he gets to write the script it's likely to turn out very well, barring actors that demand more screen time with a silly "the captain's a transvestite, how interesting, can we get back to the story now please?"

  6. Re:see where your taxes go on IRS Misses XP Deadline, Pays Microsoft Millions For Patches · · Score: 1

    And they cannot shuffle profits made in the U.S. to offshore accounts

    Well in Apple's case they pretend that the US profits are made in Ireland by Apple US buying iPhones from Apple Ireland who bought them from China via Holland in some way - so the US profits are theoretically very small while in practice it's all Apple dodging tax. Google "double dutch irish sandwich apple" (safe for work even though it sounds like a rule 34 thing) if you want to read about this blatant tax evasion.

  7. Re:Windows XP did not instantly become unsafe Apri on IRS Misses XP Deadline, Pays Microsoft Millions For Patches · · Score: 1
    I disagree. A lot of recent software is stupidly resource hungry and workflows have changed to require it. A lot of webpages demand frankly insane amounts of resources to display, and some very popular ones (eg. Facebook) are major culprits so there is no getting away from it without banning web browsing.
    A old system good enough for typing up reports is going to be seen to be inadequate the second someone sends something to it in a new format or the second someone sends an amusing cat video. Telling the user that it's good enough for work purposes and they should ask for things in an old format and tell their friends to stop sending the amusing cat videos tends to put you in Bastard Operator From Hell territory or Dilbert's denier of information services. Memory, low end systems that can take a decent amount of memory and a modern OS is so cheap now that it looks insulting if you deny them something as good as the home computer they got for a low price three years ago. If they've used a decent system they probably are used to leaving programs open so they'll bring XP to it's knees if they don't learn to only have one thing running at a time. XP isn't designed to be used like a workstation, it's a toy to run one game at a time full screen with a side benefit of being able to run a word processor so you can bring the games machine into an office.

    Windows hit the maturity point with XP and now there is no reason to ever change

    It's got that step backwards into a low memory ceiling which is now a very major reason to change for anyone that likes to have more than one window open at a time.

    I do not know of any use a typical office worker could not do on a Windows 3.11 486

    Put even simple images in a document and such a system is unusable - I know that from plenty of frustrating experience back in the day.

    But HR does not utilize 4 cpu cores

    If they want to burn a CDROM they need at least two unless they just want to stare at the screen until it is finished. I've still got a single core machine around that proves that point from time to time, although now it's just doing good duty as an X terminal for a guy who does all his real work on a cluster so the single core and low memory does not matter.

    Now while I have some XP systems for users that don't need anything else, or on hardware that can't cope with anything newer (Dell laptop with a 1600x1200 screen and can't justify $5k to get something newer with as good a screen), it appears to me that the average user is getting up to stuff that needs more memory than XP can provide.

    Also your HR strawman would be on Facebook most of the time and sharing silly cat videos a lot of the rest of the time so needs a powerful PC even if it is not for work purposes :) While they probably could do their work related tasks with "ed" on a dumb terminal connected to Xenix running on a 286 the workflow would annoy the crap out of them - the same with a less extreme suggestion of yours that they would consider as antiquated as my Xenix example. Giving a new employee a slow XP box is a way to get rid of them even if the older employees like XP.

  8. Re:Isn't the point of going to the moon... on Russia Wants To Establish a Permanent Moon Base · · Score: 1

    That's one point. Another is we know buggerall about the moon and have only sent one geologist for a few days.

  9. Re:Russia wants a lot of things. on Russia Wants To Establish a Permanent Moon Base · · Score: 2

    Russia's manned space program basically consists of announcing plans to do amazing things

    Like Bush's Mars announcement followed by cuts?
    OK then, almost nobody took that seriously but that idiocy did happen. Maybe it's the same story in Russia with this, an empty statement setting a goal for somebody else to do the hard work if it ever happens.

  10. Anga and rah rah rah flag waving? on Russia Wants To Establish a Permanent Moon Base · · Score: 1

    Von Braun's body is a mouldering in the ground so you aint got the moon no more.
    The USA had their chance and is not showing any sign of taking another one. There's no point being a sore loser when the game has been given up on. The Russians are at least still trying even though they've had more economic problems to slow them down than the US had when Nixon sidetracked NASA into being a pork factory that could only get anywhere via skunkworks hiding between the slabs of pork.

    Instead of bitching about others why not get off your arse, make some noise and make NASA funding an issue worth votes?

  11. Re:The guy is demented... on Russia Wants To Establish a Permanent Moon Base · · Score: 2

    Just a few hours ago he said that by 2020 Russian army will be one of the most hi-tech and powerful armies in the world

    If the US economy crashes again all he has to do is wait and that will come true.

  12. Re:Talk is cheap on Russia Wants To Establish a Permanent Moon Base · · Score: 1

    All these problems you attribute to NASA are actually congressional problems

    That's been obvious since Feynman threw a spanner in the works of a whitewash that tried to hide that, yet those problems have worsened. So far the current low point was some twenty something catamite of a powerful Republican being rewarded for his services by getting put in charge of a major part of NASA and forbidding any publications about climate change.

  13. Re:There isn't enough rubles in Moscow on Russia Wants To Establish a Permanent Moon Base · · Score: 1

    Internal doors often are like cardboard. I kicked through a door when I was a weedy ten year old.

  14. Re:Why pretend to be blind? on UN Report Reveals Odds of Being Murdered Country By Country · · Score: 1
    It's very easy to see such a link if you open your eyes long enough to read about the topic from any source.

    the high homicide rate among African Americans cannot be explained by poverty

    Why? Because it doesn't fit the message you want to spread? It certainly fits with the data because the ones doing the killing and dying are poor.

    Of course since you are the sort of person that called my simple two word reply "fabrication and lies" you are clearly not interested in the truth but instead pushing some fucking stupid white supremacy agenda.

  15. Re:Windows XP did not instantly become unsafe Apri on IRS Misses XP Deadline, Pays Microsoft Millions For Patches · · Score: 1

    It is a limited toy compared with Microsoft's own products available at the same time.
    Your suggested workflow is also available on an Atari ST or first generation Mac, but people expect more than those or a ten year old PC can offer.

  16. Re:WTF slashdot on Linux 3.15 Will Suspend & Resume Much Faster · · Score: 1

    Maybe if you get a username and log in you can be like me and never see beta.

  17. Re:parallelism on Linux 3.15 Will Suspend & Resume Much Faster · · Score: 1

    He's missing a "y" in there somewhere and describing what happens when problems reading optical media on such systems bring the things to a screeching halt :)

  18. Re:Windows XP did not instantly become unsafe Apri on IRS Misses XP Deadline, Pays Microsoft Millions For Patches · · Score: 1

    What can you do on a nice shiny new i5core Dell box that your XP system can not?

    Anything that requires more memory than the artificial memory ceiling on XP. Something as trivial as editing a few photos from a camera on a phone can use all that up these days.
    And it's not a Microsoft problem it's an XP problem - I've got an old Win2k system at work that gets fired up every year or two with more memory than XP can use. XP is a toy that got used long enough that people got used to it but it's still a toy made to run computer games at home.

  19. Re:Windows XP did not instantly become unsafe Apri on IRS Misses XP Deadline, Pays Microsoft Millions For Patches · · Score: 1

    Correct - it's been unsafe for many years but third party stuff helps to make it usable.

  20. Re:see where your taxes go on IRS Misses XP Deadline, Pays Microsoft Millions For Patches · · Score: 1

    The sad thing is almost nothing is coming back from that direction due to the practice of shuffling profits offshore into tax havens and pretending they don't exist. Completely illegal of course but laws are selectively enforced when you pay rent on people in politics.
    So there you go guys - lots of representation without taxation.

  21. Re:Just about anything on Ask Slashdot: Are You Apocalypse-Useful? · · Score: 1

    You do not seem to understand

    I understand that the topic is really quite silly (the end of the world when you are not having the end of the world) so I've written about things related to real disasters.

  22. Re:Why pretend to be blind? on UN Report Reveals Odds of Being Murdered Country By Country · · Score: 1

    You got all that out of two truthful words where you can clearly see the evidence yourself even in your own example? Wow. You really are working hard to push the party line there comrade. Keep it up and you may make Commissar.

  23. Re:Some of the oldest trades become useful. on Ask Slashdot: Are You Apocalypse-Useful? · · Score: 1

    Or ask someone that was in the infantary in WWII, but they probably won't like to talk about it. Recent soldiers who have done bayonet practice but never had to use it in combat are happier to talk about it.

  24. Re:Some of the oldest trades become useful. on Ask Slashdot: Are You Apocalypse-Useful? · · Score: 1

    They say a club is a very good defensive weapon - and if your club has enough people in it one guy with a sword can't do much other than get dragged down by the mob :)

  25. Re:magical scenario where on Ask Slashdot: Are You Apocalypse-Useful? · · Score: 1

    Maybe get out a bit more :(