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User: tsotha

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  1. Unfortunately (for them) on Microsoft, Chip Makers Working On Hardware DRM For Windows 10 PCs · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately, it looks like the advent of PlayReady 3.0 could leave older PCs in the lurch.

    Other considerations aside, this alone makes the scheme DOA.

  2. Re:Son of Sam on Joseph Goebbels' Estate Sues Publisher Over Diary Excerpt Royalties · · Score: 1

    Making a profit from writing a book about your criminal life or the criminal rife of your relatives is illegal.

    Maybe, depending on the jurisdiction. In any case I've never heard of a "Son of Sam" law that doesn't require an actual conviction, something Goebbels was too dead to get.

  3. Re:Unless on Joseph Goebbels' Estate Sues Publisher Over Diary Excerpt Royalties · · Score: 1

    No, that's not really how it works. The laws that prevent people from making money as a result of their crimes require a conviction.

  4. Re:Unless on Joseph Goebbels' Estate Sues Publisher Over Diary Excerpt Royalties · · Score: 1

    As far as I know Goebbels was never charged with a crime.

  5. Re:Everyone loves taxes on Microsoft Pushes For Public Education Funding While Avoiding State Taxes · · Score: 0

    It's way older than that. In the early 1800s people were complaining that government was wasting money on canal infrastructure projects, digging canals so shipping could travel across the US.

    You mean the canals that today sit unused?

  6. Re: Energy storage in the grid is 100% efficient! on The Myth of Going Off the Power Grid · · Score: 1

    You are wrong by many, many orders of magnitude.

  7. Re:It's useless anyways on Sen. Feinstein Says Anarchist Cookbook Should Be "Removed From the Internet" · · Score: 1

    That's what cracks me up about these kinds of stories. Of all the books to ban, the one that will get aspiring bomb makers to blow themselves up is not the one. Amazon carries much better books on the subject. Some were published by the US government, ironically.

  8. Re:Sen. Feinstein on Sen. Feinstein Says Anarchist Cookbook Should Be "Removed From the Internet" · · Score: 1

    She's not even the worst one in the California congressional delegation. Not by a long shot.

  9. Re:oh jeez. on World's Largest Aircraft Seeks Investors To Begin Operation · · Score: 1

    But only in small quantities. Not enough to affect the bottom line. In the early airships they would simply vent hydrogen if they needed lower buoyancy, so they took on hydrogen along with fuel and ballast when arriving at the destination. You don't need to do that with helium. Or rather, you don't design a helium airship such that it's necessary.

    The biggest drawback to helium is it gets contaminated by other molecules moving the other direction. Not really sure why that happens. Anyway, that's why Zeppelins undergo periodic maintenance in which the helium has to be pumped out and purified.

  10. It's the IRS on Obama Authorizes Penalties For Foreign Cyber Attackers · · Score: 1

    I knew they would get serious when people started stealing money from the government by filing false tax returns. The USG won't bestir itself for hackers stealing military secrets, but if you affect the flow of tax dollars you're in trouble.

  11. Re:Not so fast on World's Largest Aircraft Seeks Investors To Begin Operation · · Score: 1

    Might be, depending on how close the missile was. Getting sprayed with fragments (assuming the people aren't killed) isn't that devastating for an airship. They just go right through. The thing that might destroy an airship is a blast rips a giant hole in the envelop.

  12. Re:Not so fast on World's Largest Aircraft Seeks Investors To Begin Operation · · Score: 3, Informative

    Correct:

    Alois Böcker in the L-33 was the first to arrive over the capital. He dropped most of his bomb-load on the East End, around Bow and Stratford, with the airship crew reporting visible fires and explosions with each bomb burst . However, a shell from the defenses over Bromley exploded inside the ship, causing tremendous physical damage but no fires. She dropped much of her water ballast, reported by the ground spotters as a smoke screen, and made her way eastward, losing 800 feet of altitude each minute. After a dangerous encounter with a British airplane which pumped several drums of Brock-Pomeroy ammunition into L-33 to no effect, the airship came to earth at Essex, where Böcker and his men jumped to the ground and fired several flares into her. They were promptly captured as L-33 burned to the ground, mostly intact.

    Hydrogen only burns in the presence of oxygen (for our purposes, anyway). That's also why British aircraft had so much trouble setting airships alight with incendiary rounds - the rounds would pass straight through without ever getting the right H2/air mixture for ignition. Incendiary rounds performed so badly the Brits thought the Germans were putting a layer of some inert gas just inside the airship skin.

    It wasn't until they switched to a mix of explosive and incendiary bullets that they began to have success. The explosive rounds would tear big holes in fabric and allow hydrogen and oxygen to mix. It still took a couple drums to get the ship burning, though.

  13. Re:Not so fast on World's Largest Aircraft Seeks Investors To Begin Operation · · Score: 1

    There was a Zeppelin in WW I that survive the explosion of a AA shell inside the ship. And that was filled with hydrogen. The crew was able to land it safely in the UK and had to destroy it with a flare gun. Those things are a lot more durable than you'd think, since the sheer volume of the lifting gas means you've got to tear the thing apart to make it fall out of the sky.

    The reason they say it would survive a missile strike is most anti-aircraft missiles have very small warheads. An AMRAAM, for example, has either a 40 or 50 pound warhead, which is going to do less damage than an artillery shell. They only bring down airplanes because 1) airplanes are full of flammable fuel and 2) tiny changes to the shape of an airplane make it disastrously unflyable.

  14. Re:oh jeez. on World's Largest Aircraft Seeks Investors To Begin Operation · · Score: 1

    In practice airships are quite practical using helium. It's not that expensive, and you don't consume it as part of normal operations. A modern design will only vent lifting gas in an extreme emergency.

  15. Re:As long as it's not windy on World's Largest Aircraft Seeks Investors To Begin Operation · · Score: 1

    When I rode the Zeppelin NT they told us it can safely fly under the same condition helicopters are safe, though they did say they wouldn't carry passengers once the winds started to get gusty since it tends to make people sick.

  16. Re:Hindenburg? on World's Largest Aircraft Seeks Investors To Begin Operation · · Score: 1

    The airship cost $300,000 to buy. It doesn't matter if it cost someone else $90,000,000 to build it; the loss of $89,700,000 is the government's loss, not the current owners.

    Well, the company bought it back from the government for $300k. That doesn't mean customers can buy it for $300k. Based on what other players in the market are charging if this company doesn't go bankrupt first the airship will probably sell for a whole lot more than that.

  17. Re:Disagree on Apple's Tim Cook Calls Out "Religious Freedom" Laws As Discriminatory · · Score: 1

    It's different if we're dealing with a place that can (and by its very definition and the general idea behind it should) be frequented by visitors and other strangers you have no direct connection to, i.e. a business. What do you think would happen if someone made a "White only" restaurant? Or how about "Muslim only"? Think that would sit well?

    I'd be perfectly okay with it. I think the right to choose with whom you associate should trump group rights.

  18. Re:And why not? on Nation's Biggest Nuclear Firm Makes a Play For Carbon Credit Cash · · Score: 1

    The explosions at Fukushima are pretty well understood to be a result of hydrogen buildup in the enclosures. So what? Those explosions resulted in a handful of deaths, which isn't even a really bad day as far as industrial accidents go. The Bhopal disaster killed between 5000 and 8000 people. Are you against pesticides as a result?

  19. Re:And why not? on Nation's Biggest Nuclear Firm Makes a Play For Carbon Credit Cash · · Score: 1

    Do you have any evidence to back up this suspicion, or is it just casual slander?

  20. Re:And why not? on Nation's Biggest Nuclear Firm Makes a Play For Carbon Credit Cash · · Score: 2

    Well, the problem is not in the current reactor designs. Those are as good as it gets.

    I'm not sure how you can make a statement like this. Are you saying there's no room for improvement?

    I would like to hear more about thorium reactors. But India is working on those and here in the USA there is a tremendous NIH problem.

    I see no evidence this is true. The reason we don't get newer designs in the US is purely regulatory - it would cost billions to certify a new reactor technology, so companies find it cheaper to just build another copy of the last one that got through the regulatory process.

  21. Re:And why not? on Nation's Biggest Nuclear Firm Makes a Play For Carbon Credit Cash · · Score: 1

    You couldn't kill millions of people with a nuclear reactor if that were the goal.

    That's why Republicans support it. They're not ignorant.

  22. Seems unlikely to work on Australian Government Outlines Website-Blocking Scheme · · Score: 1

    Do copyright holders really think they can win the game of whack-a-mole as people bounce from domain to domain downloading whatever they please?

    One has to wonder if this is really about copyright.

  23. Re:I'd put a 'may' there on Taxpayer Subsidies To ULA To End · · Score: 1

    I have believed for some time now SpaceX is going to lose its big commercial advantage over time. Congress views these kinds of contracts as political plums to be parceled out on a district-by-district basis - the company is not going to be able to continue manufacturing everything in Hawthorne without losing government contracts.

  24. Re:Really? on Win Or Lose, Discrimination Suit Is Having an Effect On Silicon Valley · · Score: 1

    If a company never hires women it's pretty easy to catch them in a sting where you send two more or less identical CVs, one with a woman's name and one with a man's. If the women's is rejected and the man gets an interview it's lawsuit time.

    It doesn't really work that way in the real world. You can certainly embarrass a company that way, and it makes for a good "report" to release to the media. But you're not going to be able to build a lawsuit on a "sting", since you have to show actual harm. You can't sue over a job you never intended to take. Well, you can sue over anything, but you won't win.

    The only way to avoid being sued for discrimination is to stop discriminating, not to do more of it.

    The system can't be perceived by managers as capricious. If hiring women exposes you to more legal risk than not hiring them, and you don't think you can mitigate that risk, you don't hire women. Or rather you hire only enough women that it's not obvious you're deliberately not hiring women.

  25. Really? on Win Or Lose, Discrimination Suit Is Having an Effect On Silicon Valley · · Score: 4, Insightful

    People are second-guessing and questioning whether there are exclusionary practices [and] everyday subtle acts of exclusion that collectively limit women's ability to succeed or even to compete for the best opportunities. And that's an incredibly positive impact.

    Are people really that stupid? Huge payouts in these sorts of lawsuits isn't going to demonstrate to companies they should spend all their time policing their "everyday subtle acts". It's going to convince them women are legally dangerous and shouldn't be hired at all. It's a hell of a lot harder to bring a suit against a company that never hires you than against one for which you're employed, and business owners know this.