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Comments · 79

  1. Re:OK, but how is this new?: on UN Debates Rules Surrounding Killer Robots · · Score: 1

    Some cruise missiles have the ability to choose their own target. For example the Russian P-500 & P-700Anti-Ship Missile can be fired in a swarm of 4 to 8 missiles. The missiles will skim along the surface, with one popping up to identify, designate and illuminate the target for the other missiles. It can prioritise multiple targets, and choose which one to hit. So one cruise missile is choosing targets for the other cruise missiles.

    This is not new. This is 1970s-1980s technology.

    So tell me again how killer robots are new?

  2. Re:Want to understand? on Debate Over Evolution Will Soon Be History, Says Leakey · · Score: 1

    This is a very interesting post, I have always thought the debate on global warming/climate change is very similar to the creation/evolution debate. In both cases you cannot claim independence:
    1) If Climate change is true, it affects us in how we live and is a cost to us, we need to reduce pollution.
    2) If Creation is true, and there is a Creator God, that has an effect on how we live our lives.

    We need to accept that in both of these debates we are not independent third parties, but the outcome has a direct impact and cost on our lives and therefore we are likely to have a bias coming into these discussions.

  3. Re:I approve on Cell Phone Jamming Devices Enjoy an Increase In Popularity · · Score: 1

    These jammers do not only affect mobile phone users (people), but any equipment that uses the 2G/3G mobile phone network for communication. A bus may have a 3G connection for the ticketing system, for monitoring the location and/or 'vital signs' of the bus. Devices on the side of the road may be affected by the jammer - that big electronic sign may be controlled via a 3G connection. Or their might be equipment around that runs on a neighbouring licenced band. The 2G and 3G networks are not just used for mobile phone calls.

    This is why we have laws like this, it is for the benefit of the public that these frequencies cannot be blocked by anybody.

  4. Re:Invented in US? Made in China. on First Pictures of Chinese Stealth Fighter · · Score: 1

    Yes the Cobra is fairly worthless air combat wise, but there are a number of related manoeuvres, that require the same airframe capabilities which are. As for Russian radars, the Russians were the first to have an airborne PESA (Passive electronically steered array) in the Mig-31, and whilst they don't have a AESA (Active electronically steered array) airborne yet or any new fighters since the su-27/mig-29/mig-31, they have been developing a number of new radars in the last two decades. The Su-27 also has the advantage of it's size , it can fit a larger and more powerful radar unit and more fuel, the su-27 family never carry drop tanks (I have never seen a picture of one with external tanks) and it has a range that is as good as, if not better than American fighters like the Eagle fully loaded with fuel tanks. On the other hand you are correct that the have a lot of non flying aircraft due to maintenance issues, but over the last few years they have been trying to fix that, and it is not like they are short of aircraft either, they still have about 1000 modern fighter jets.

  5. Re:Someone help me out here. on First Pictures of Chinese Stealth Fighter · · Score: 1

    Supercruise is not the magic ticket you think it is. While a number of fighter jets can travel faster than the speed of sound in a clean configuration in level flight, the F-22 does have the advantage that it can get up to ~Mach 1.7, and can carry weapons internally, IIRC the PAK-FA will have supercruise as well. But supercruise is nothing special, all it takes is having enough thrust from your engines for the drag of the airframe. And don't be fooled that the cruising speed is supersonic, due to the higher drag you still consume more fuel. Now the advantage of supercruise in close combat is that you can force your opponent to use the afterburner and make them run out of fuel (the F-22 did this in some mock engagements with F-15s and F-16s). The problem here is when we put the F-22 up against the Mig-31, a Russian Interceptor without supercruise, due to the extra fuel that the Mig-31 carries, not only does it have a higher top speed of over Mach 2.8, but at the F-22's supersonic cruising speed of about Mach 1.7, the Mig-31 has more range on afterburner, so the 'advantage' of supercruise is negated by the fuel capacity of the Mig-31.

    (Yes I know the Mig-31 is an interceptor and not a dog fighter, and is inferior in it's dogfighting ability - it was not designed for that - but it's dammed fast)

  6. Re:Remember Macrovision scrubbers? on HDCP Encryption/Decryption Code Released · · Score: 1

    Not necessarily,

    Previous posters have mentioned that a lot of the costs in the software version is bitwise operations (reversing buses and the like). These are very expensive in software, but in hardware they can be implemented very cheaply. Encryption is particularly efficient on either a dedicated chip or a FPGA because it is a reasonably straight forward (if complicated) process. There is no need for the branching and general purpose processing of a computer, on a FPGA you could set up the decryption in a pipeline so that you can be decrypting multiple words at once - basically what you are doing is reimplementating the ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) chips that are already in use on a FPGA. Granted a FPGA won't have the same performance of a ASIC, but I would imagine that the HDCP ASIC are not very big.

  7. Re:So what if it's a cat? on Don't Like EULAs? Get Your Cat To Agree To Them · · Score: 1

    With quite a few installer programs the licence is stored as a text file licence.txt, what is stopping me from modifying or replacing the license file with something else? I also recall either a program or registration on a web page where the licence was in a text box that was editable - so you could just select the whole license and delete it or change it as you saw fit.

    To me it seems that you can't prove that someone accepted a EULA - or with a computer with multiple users, who accepted it. I think at least when you agree to an EULA, it needs to record your name and what you agreed to, and send it back to the company, ignoring the privacy issue for the moment, just so that the licenser has a copy of the agreement the licensee agreed to and who that licensee is.

    IANAL, but I think that you need to agree to the license before you get the software, rather than after.

  8. Re:SI units on Seagate Offers Refunds on 6.2 Million Hard Drives · · Score: 1

    I understand people complain because everywhere else in the SI system is base 10, except with computers who like to count in base 2. So therefore people think to be compatible with the SI system bytes need to be counted in base 10 instead of base 2. The obvious problem is that computers count in base 2, but what I find interesting is that bytes are not SI units nor could they be derived from the SI base units. Furthermore SI units are not always that consistent, for example, there are seconds and micro seconds, but never kilo or mega seconds. Also the base unit for mass is the Kilogram, not the gram, yet we don't have a milikilogram or a kilokilogram, maybe we should fix these up first before we look at bytes and bits.

    It does not make sense for people to demand that bytes be scaled as a SI unit when they cannot even be related to the SI base units, and are not expressible in the SI system.

  9. Re:100%? on Red Hat Boosts SELinux With RHEL 5 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I run fedora and on *many* message boards I see the first trouble shooting idea is to turn off SELinux. What most people forget is that you can set SELinux to be permissive, so it is still turned on, and it lets you know when applications would be doing something that would be prevented. I think changing to permissive mode SELinux is more useful than turning it off as it lets you know what applications are misbehaving. I think part of this problem is that previously there has been no easy way to look as SELinux messages and manage the policies.

    The main disadvantage of AppArmor is that it relies on file paths, not the inodes. All you need to do is be able to create a hard link in the right directory to get around it.

  10. Re:Original headline was correct... on Radiation-eating Fungi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Er, Ukraine. Chernobyl is in Ukraine. Ukraine most definitely is not Russia. Yes these days Chernobyl is in Ukraine, which is not in Russia, but in 1986 when the melt down occurred, it was in Russia and back then it was Soviet Russia, the the GP was correct:

    Remember, Chernobyl was in Soviet Russia. and that's my two cents
  11. Re:My Nomination on Sysadmin of the Year · · Score: 1

    So?

    That minor technicality will not stop the BOFH

  12. Re:Prove It on Microsoft to Turn to Driver Quality Ratings System · · Score: 1

    you need to include some headers and possibly
    you also may as well use a while(0) or while(1==1) or even while(fork()).
    as there is only one statment in the loop, you can remove the brackets
    so you get:

    #include

    int main(void) {
            while(0)
                    fork();
            return(0); //to get rid of warnings
    }

    I prefer this version though as you dont need to compile it and it looks more innocent:
    [weapon@weapon]$ :(){:|:&};:

    Weapon

  13. Re:Flamebait on A Fresh Look at Vista's User Account Control · · Score: 1

    fstab and mtab and passwd all need to be modified (well maybe not fstab) for a system to function correctly, maybe you need a seperate /etc/ for files that need to be changed

  14. Re:On XBox Power platform? Passing Text Arrays? on Microsoft PowerShell RC1 · · Score: 2, Funny

    >They will probably have to call it Power Microsoft Shell.

    Power Microsoft Shell - PMS, would this be a description of the shell's behavior?

  15. Re:Xbox points to the future on Microsoft Licensing Fee Intended To Reduce Hobbyists · · Score: 1

    but you are forgetting developers, who will need to run unsigned executables because they are writing games, or virus scanners or simmilar which run better compiled into binaries. this would meen that there would be a version of windows which would not require signed binaries, but this would be the number one target for warez and piracy because it would also be able to run cracked executables

  16. Re:So now... on Microsoft FAT Patent Upheld · · Score: 1

    IANAL but I dont see who this would affect except Operating Systems.

    * The patents cover long file names pointing to short file names.

    * Most cameras will not need long file names, they save files as IMG12345.jpg a 8.3 file name

    * USB Drives themselves are block devices, as long as the the files you place on there are not long file names pointing to short file names.

    * I believe it is posible to turn off support for short file names but i am not sure how this works with these patents

    So it ends only in the operating system that the small large filenames are used when you copy files/read files on the disk

    I still beleive the patents are a waste of time as the concept is trivial, a file that points to annother file, this is familiar as in C a integer can point to a integer (pointers are stored as integers IIRC)

  17. Re:DEP? on Intel to Develop Hardware Rootkit Detection · · Score: 1

    check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_bit basicy DEP is a switch to turn on NX (or emulate it in software if not avalible in hardware i believe)

  18. Re:The floppy on The Mother of All CPU Charts · · Score: 1

    not all sata drives require the floppy disk, i know from expericence that nForce4s dont need the disk but the via 8237 southbridge (comes with the via 600 northbridge) does

  19. Re:And another one.... on The Boot Loader Showdown · · Score: 0

    The way I have gotten around this (for linux boot disks only) is to copy the boot parts off the cd and use grub to boot them with grub.

    When I installed FC3 + FC4 I just coppied the boot folder to the hard drive and rebooted and loaded up the other kernel and intrd from the Grub command line, (When I installed FC3 It was on a fat32 drive with 98 installed booting from a Grub floppy disk)

  20. Re:Outstanding on Longhorn to Require Monitor-Based DRM · · Score: 0

    More like: "you want to be gang raped, today!"

  21. Re:Yup. on Linux on Nintendo DS, Update · · Score: 0

    If you mount before you fsck her wouldn't you run the risk of screwing her up?

    Remeber kiddies unmount before fsck

  22. Re:Fedora Core 4 is great... on Fedora Core 4 Available · · Score: 0

    Core 4 comes with Eclipse and a JVM
    http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc4/#s n-devel-gcc

    What you end up needing is flash, acrobat (including plugin) mplayer or xine

  23. Re:Without a good Toolset, it can never be better on Windows to Have Better CLI · · Score: 0

    Not only does it need a good toolset, but also:

    1) Ample docs for all tools (ie. man, to show how to use the command and all the switches, and the docs would need to be accessed the same way for all programs. ie. just one of --help -help -h -? ? or just use man)

    2) All programs able to be launched without having to give the directory, (ie. typing 'word' will start microsoft word no matter what your working directory is)

    3) Be able to shell into your windows box and be able to configure anything without a gui (ie. edit AD ). If this is possible, scripts can then be made to do allot of the work

    But I do agree the best part of a command line is that you have all these programs avalible for you

  24. Performance Enhancing? on Permormance-Enhancing Contact Lenses · · Score: 0

    Sounds a bit dodgy if you ask me, I mean where else have you read that phrase?

    Weapon

  25. Re:The buttons make perfect sense on Longhorn Beta is Disappointing · · Score: 0

    You obviously have not used windows enough, a restart does make windows go faster.

    Seriously, I would say they choose the other colours first, like red for stop, yellow for slow down, the background is blue, etc. etc. Black may have been a snsible colour, but it would not have looked right, so they settled on green.

    Weapon