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User: MichaelSmith

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Comments · 11,670

  1. Re:Not human-sustaining on More Water Out There — Ice Found On an Asteroid · · Score: 1

    Obviously it's impossible for the entire human race to relocate to an asteroid, but it would be a great place to establish the first human colony on an extraterrestrial body.

    "With just a handful of men, we'll start - we'll start all over again"

    I think it would be better if a handful of women were included as well.

  2. Re:Maybe the Augustine commission is right. on More Water Out There — Ice Found On an Asteroid · · Score: 1

    Money is just a way of counting resources. Space flight is very expensive however you count it.

    Well, yes, and I suppose the unwillingness to allocate the kinds of resources we need to truely step out into space is just a reflection of the low-priority that our beloved leaders give it. However, I can still dream of my perfect utopian society where everyone works for the greater good and no-one lacks for food, shelter and erotic massages.

    Our beloved leaders need the votes of ordinary people who have no interest in the space program. Those people would prefer that the money be directly used to give them food, shelter and erotic massages.

  3. Re:Maybe the Augustine commission is right. on More Water Out There — Ice Found On an Asteroid · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Mainly because Elon Musk came along and said "fuck it, we can do this right".

    Maybe it also has something to do with the availability of tools for doing large scale engineering. When Apollo was running it was the only project of its scale in the world. Now we have good CAD tools and tools for requirements management which can be used to track interface changes. NASA invented techniques for all of this but only in the last 15 or 20 years has the private sector really been able to pull off huge aerospace projects.

  4. Re:Maybe the Augustine commission is right. on More Water Out There — Ice Found On an Asteroid · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Money is just a way of counting resources. Space flight is very expensive however you count it. With companies like SpaceX finally emerging though, access to space might start to get cheaper.

  5. Re:Where? on More Water Out There — Ice Found On an Asteroid · · Score: 3, Informative

    Its not hard to see how water can form in free space. If you have a cloud of hydrogen going one way and it collides with a cloud of oxygen going the other way the interface between the two will be a shock wave with significant temperature and pressure. At the interface the hydrogen will combine with the oxygen and you have water.

  6. Re:It's 1996 again? on FCC Chairman Warns of Wireless Spectrum Gap · · Score: 1

    Smaller cells in busy areas. Land lines to connect cells. Sounds perfectly scalable to me.

  7. Re:scaremongering? on Candy Linked To Violence In Study · · Score: 1

    I'm not intending to be rude, but it sounds like the problem is your wife's parenting, not yours.

    Well of course I would think that.

  8. Re:Organic Food on Candy Linked To Violence In Study · · Score: 1

    Surely a study like this is not funded by the organic food industry?

    Organic food is much better than inorganic food.

    Except for salt

    Yeah and some animals (birds?) eat rocks to help grind up food.

  9. Re:scaremongering? on Candy Linked To Violence In Study · · Score: 1

    Oddly enough my sons eight year old classmate was over for dinner today. He ate his dinner without being prompted, a vast improvement over my son. He is from a bigger and less well off family, and is expected to look after himself in situations where my son would be coddled and hand fed by myself and my wife.

    So yeah its hard raising kids well. I don't claim to do the best job of it. Most of us control our offspring to some degree, getting it right at the start is an important trick. Knowing when to let go later on is important too.

    My wife will be overseas for the next three weeks so I will be flying solo, so to speak. The last time we did this his maturity improved to no end.

  10. Re:Organic Food on Candy Linked To Violence In Study · · Score: 1

    I don't know that water is considered food. Its more of a chemical we consume, like oxygen. And maybe calcium. Thinking about that because I've got a broken bone at the moment.

  11. Re:Organic Food on Candy Linked To Violence In Study · · Score: 5, Funny

    Surely a study like this is not funded by the organic food industry?

    Organic food is much better than inorganic food.

  12. Re:scaremongering? on Candy Linked To Violence In Study · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah but so do 100% of people who are not violent criminals.

    I think there may be a correlation between consumption of unhealthy food, and quality of parenting. Parents who do a good job tend not to encourage consumption of junk food. The same parents steer their kids away from becoming criminals.

  13. Sell it on What To Do With a Free Xbox 360 Pro? · · Score: 5, Informative

    Its worth less to you than somebody who would use it for gaming.

  14. Re:Seems like Adobe is waking up on Decoding Adobe's Big Device Push · · Score: 1

    Awesome. I can't wait until they partner with Cisco and rewrite IOS in Flash :P

    Any CCNA should know that the IOS is already in flash.

    But not the configuration....

  15. Re:Cool on Debian Elevates KFreeBSD Port to First-Class Status · · Score: 1

    The way Linux is going at the moment we pretty much need a microkernel in the next major version (3, I assume). Linus pretty much stated that a couple of weeks ago.

  16. Re:I'm ready to place my order on Startup Offers Pre-Built Biological Parts · · Score: 1

    By "volume discounts" I hope you don't mean if she turns out to be 250lbs, you don't have to pay as much?

    No, weight has to be 110.

    (not enough Neil Young fans here apparently).

  17. Re:I'm ready to place my order on Startup Offers Pre-Built Biological Parts · · Score: 1

    5' 5", 110lbs, female, further details can be found in attached magazine. Do you give volume discounts?

    Should the mood code be rotary adjustable?

  18. Re:off the rez on The First High-Definition TV, Circa 1958 · · Score: 1

    They had finite bandwidth.

  19. Re:Simple on Is Cloud Computing the Hotel California of Tech? · · Score: 1

    You can export all your data from Ubuntu; it just isn't in the same format Windows wants

    Ubuntu and Windows support the FAT file system. Online applications hide their file systems.

  20. Re:L.C.D on Apple Takes Action Over Australian Logos · · Score: 1

    But since practically everything in that same Woolworths store will have the same W logo the difference between the W logo and the Apple, inc logo should be obvious. Its not like I mirrored the Apple product catalog and used that W logo.

  21. Re:Dunno, I'm no Apple fan, but they look alike to on Apple Takes Action Over Australian Logos · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Dunno, I'm no Apple fan, but they look alike to me. Uncanny valley alike. Sure one is green and the other one is silver, but pretty much you could put one over the other and get almost the same outer edge, minus the bite on Apple's logo.

    IMHO you could give two graphic designers independent tasks to design apple derived logos and get designs as different as these. The outlines are not the same beyond representing apples. The aspect ratio is different. The woolworths logo is much more abstract.

  22. Re:Just Ban IPs after failed login attempts? on Sloppy Linux Admins Enable Slow Brute-Force Attacks · · Score: 1

    Quite possibly but anything which looks for a failed attempt and revokes a service from the originating host could be used for a DOS. There are lots of tools which do that.

  23. Re:Logistics on Miniature Stonehenge Discovered In Wiltshire, UK · · Score: 1

    I am not convinced the labour supply was limitless. A lot of manpower was needed for hunting, agriculture, building shelter, raising children, etc. I imagine that the people transporting these rocks may have spend their entire short lifespans on that one job.

    So what economic structure ensured that they had food to eat?

  24. Re:Just Ban IPs after failed login attempts? on Sloppy Linux Admins Enable Slow Brute-Force Attacks · · Score: 1

    Yeah but does it even help you? Because the botnet shares information about your host, it is possible that no host will attempt more than one connection.

    I would be reluctant to ban a million IP addresses in a packet filter such as pf because I can't be sure what the impact on the kernel would be. I normally limit my ban lists to a couple of thousand.

  25. Re:If it's SSH it's really easy to rate limit atta on Sloppy Linux Admins Enable Slow Brute-Force Attacks · · Score: 2, Interesting

    All you need to drop any unsuccessful SSH logins for a specified period of seconds.!

    With a distributed attack each attacker may only try once.