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User: compro01

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  1. Re:Why not remotely? on LCROSS Team Changes Target Crater For Impact · · Score: 3, Informative

    We cannot spectroscopy through the moon's surface.

    That's why we're throwing a heavy object at it so we can see the stuff we're wanting to look at.

    What is crashing into the moon is the spent rocket. The sensors are on the orbiter which will fly through the plume created by that impact. To go through that, it needs to get very close to the surface and there's no way to recover that, so it crashes shortly afterwards.

    Also, rovers would not cut it for this. You would either need heavy digging equipment (Which is far too large/heavy to be feasibly boosted into space with current techniques) or (literally) a ton of TNT.

    As for cluttering, this is just another meteor impact among thousands of others, aside from that we're aiming this one for an area we're interested in examining.

  2. Re:What is the net effect? on ICE Satellite Maps Profound Polar Thinning · · Score: 1

    The ice is covering a larger area, but the ice is much thinner, and the overall volume of ice (the main concern) is shrinking.

  3. Re:Bigger picture! on Canadian ISPs Fight Back, Again · · Score: 1

    Actually, if I'm not mistaken, Shaw owns quite a bit of the backbone systems, though they obviously have to peer with Nexxia and others.

  4. Re:Goverment on Canadian ISPs Fight Back, Again · · Score: 1

    Bell holds Ontario, Quebec, and the maritime provinces (I think), Telus controls BC and Albeta, Saskatchewan has Sasktel (The only crown corporation of the bunch), and Manitoba has MTS (Formerly a crown corp, now a publicly traded company).

    None of them compete with each other.

  5. Re:Thumbs up on AIDS Vaccine Is Partially Successful · · Score: 1
  6. Re:Keep the house on Court To Scammer, "Give Up Your House Or Go To Jail" · · Score: 1

    That depends on which rules you are using. Going by the official rules, you cannot collect rent while in jail.

  7. Re:Big News? on FDA OKs First Human Trial of Neural Stem Cell Therapy · · Score: 1

    You assume they are distinct groups.

  8. Re:Wikileaks link on TI vs. Calculator Hackers · · Score: 1
  9. Re:EMP? Impending poverty? on Cursive Writing Is a Fading Skill — Does It Matter? · · Score: 1

    This is nothing new; you can go back centuries and look at historical peoples' signatures, and see that many of them are not very legible. You might make out the first character or so in each name, and the rest is just a scribble.

    Hell, you don't even need to go back in history to see that. Look at the signatures of current heads of state (Wikipedia handily has images of signatures in the articles of most politicians). Barack Obama and Stephen Harper both have such signatures, and Gordon Brown's hardly looks anything like his name. Thorbjorn Jagland's (President of the Sorting in Norway) signature is even worse.

  10. Re:Awesome on NCSoft Drops GameGuard From Western Launch of Aion · · Score: 1

    The difference being that blizzard's warden actually works properly. Gameguard is a buggy, ineffective piece of crap. It gets rebroken within days (if not hours) of being updated and causes frequent BSODs when it screws up.

  11. Re:Not suitable for 15 yr old boys? on Left 4 Dead 2 Banned In Australia · · Score: 1

    Pretty much the entire world is under such laws. The only difference of which subset of laws are in any given country.

  12. Re:Idiots on Garlic Farmer Wards Off High-Speed Internet · · Score: 1

    But fibre optic cables are flooded with terahertz band radiation! What if it leaks out!?

  13. Re:Inherintly unconstitutional on Professor Posts "Illegal Copy" of Guide To Oregon Public Record Laws · · Score: 1

    This isn't about a law, it's about a guide to interpreting the law. Still, I agree with the sentiment, as interpreting the intent of the law is key to knowing if an action is legal or not.

  14. Re:biotech rocks on Gene Therapy Cures Color-Blind Monkeys · · Score: 1

    It wouldn't necessarily be an advantage. People with colourblindness also often have the secondary effect that they have far better night vision than someone with normal colour vision. I would image it is much the same with cats.

  15. Re:Inherintly unconstitutional on Professor Posts "Illegal Copy" of Guide To Oregon Public Record Laws · · Score: 4, Informative

    All works of the federal government are public domain, but whether the work of state governments are depends on the state's constitution.

  16. Re:OBD - On-Board Diagnostics on "Right To Repair" Bill Advances In Massachusetts · · Score: 1

    Did you even read your own link? I count 189 "UNKNOWN CODE" entries in your "complete" list. Those are what is at issue there. And that only covers the powertrain and emissions control stuff, not anything else the ECU handles and doesn't report to your generic non-dealer scan tool.

  17. Re:Bigger fish on Heart Monitors In Middle School Gym Class? · · Score: 1

    No, but noticing that their heart rate is spiking higher than it should under exertion or is quite high at rest for no obvious reason would give reason to look closer (EKG, etc.), as I don't imagine most regular checkups include a stress test.

    Anecdotaly, this occurred when I was in high school with a guy in my class. His heart rate would spike to over 200 while running (though he felt and appeared fine the whole time and was in seemingly good shape). The instructor had him get his doctor to check it out and his doctor ordered further testing and they found an undiagnosed heart defect which was then surgically corrected.

  18. Re:Can only apply the patches you get on SANS Report Says Organizations Focusing On the Wrong Security Threats · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't think the problem is lack of application patches being provided, but the lack of them being delivered well.

    The problem as I see it is there is no good method of application patch delivery on Windows (And Mac for that matter). On Linux and BSD, you have package managers built into the distro that handles everything from the repositories (either the distro repositories or the application's repositories). On Windows, there is no such thing (Yes, there package managers available, but they are not included stock and aren't widely used) and every application has to handle things itself, either by checking on startup or adding yet another background process taking up resources, both of which are decidedly non-optimal solutions.

    In the former, with infrequently used apps (Stuff like Adobe Reader comes to mind), you're going to have infrequent (and thus large) updates, which would result in something like "What? A 15MB update? I don't have time for that, I need to read this PDF." with the obvious consequences or the file being opened before the update option is presented, with the same result.

  19. Re:why can't folks pay for their own devices? on Insurance Won't Cover Smartphones, When Pricey Alternatives Exist · · Score: 1

    Aside from you're missing the entire point of the story that the iphone is the best deal by more than an order of magnitude.

  20. Re:Health Insurance: Broken Incentives Abound on Insurance Won't Cover Smartphones, When Pricey Alternatives Exist · · Score: 1

    Expanding on the above, the problem is that the pricing is stuck in a positive feedback loop.

    Let's say Joe comes into the emergency room for something major (an actual emergency). Joe is uninsured/not covered by medicaid/medicare/insurance declines to pay/something and will not be able to pay for the treatment, but the hospital is (ethically and legally) required to treat him, so the hospital has to eat the cost and then raises other prices to compensate for that loss.

    This then results in more people being in the above situation as the cost passes their threshold for ability to pay, which continues to rise with each cycle.

  21. Re:bad plan on eBay Denies New Design Is Broken, Blames Users · · Score: 1

    FYI, ebay has had a 25% stake in craigslist since 2004.

  22. Re:DOK on Which Filesystem Do You Use On Portable Media For Linux Systems? · · Score: 1

    Some of the earliest ones in early 2001 were called the DiskOnKey and they were made by a company called M-Systems (Who were later bought by Sandisk).

  23. Re:Wait a sec... on Microsoft Launches Its Own Open Source Foundation · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Russia only had one czar at a time. The US currently has about 30 of them.

  24. Re:Duh. on Why Anonymized Data Isn't · · Score: 1

    What extension is that?

  25. Re:Why don't people with ponytails on Teenager Invents Cheap Solar Panel From Human Hair · · Score: 1

    Because this is replacing silicon, which is a semiconductor.