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User: fremsley471

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  1. Re: When will 3D maps... on Google's Street View Cars Are Now Giant, Mobile 3D Scanners (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Lots of HUGE assumptions about DPRK's capabilities. Even if they had no artillery pieces, they certainly could deliver an atomic payload to Seoul- doesn't have to be on a missile.

    So the US is suddenly willing takes a chance on millions of people's lives in Korea, plus hundreds of thousands more as DPRK could theoretically nuke the US, for what gain? To stop him building ICBMs? Too late. To stop him going thermonuclear? Too late. So why? Because he's rude to the government? 'Regime change', a sudden concern for the North Korean people after 60 years of this bunch of gangsters running the show? Or because of the all to familiar 'Wag the Dog' scenarios?

  2. Re:Frost piss. on PC Shipments Hit the Lowest Level In a Decade (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Bang on, especially that they were seen as only way to do things. Several threads to pick up.

    Firstly, unless you've a graphics-heavy job, why buy an expensive Mac? If you are a light internet user, why live your life in fear of Windows viruses?- recent ransomware headlines have underlined this.

    A _decent_ tablet costs 50% of all web traffic now non-desktop. So you don't literally need a p.c. somewhere in your life to be able to fully interact with the web, which was the case even in 2015.

  3. Re:Processes hanging before updates on CNET Editor Rails Against Non-Consensual Windows Updates (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    All that you write is correct.

    My complaint really was that if even if it doesn't 'update' (i.e. automatically reboot), the upcoming change makes itself so unstable that it has to be updated, as the OS is now not functioning correctly. You'd think that when it asked you when you wanted updates not to occur, instability caused by the binary clashes would be part of that choice, not just an afterthought.

  4. Processes hanging before updates on CNET Editor Rails Against Non-Consensual Windows Updates (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    The timings of the updates are only part of it. I'm running linux at home, but previously used Windows 7 and still do at work. When an update is due, Windows goes all wobbly. Last week's update, which didn't reboot, left me unable to connect to the interweb due to a 'socket error'. Updated, rebooted and all fine.

    Now this could be good ol' coincidence, but it follows on from years of similar flaky performance when delaying an update. Not all of them, but plenty enough to plot on a graph and have confidence in a line of best fit.

  5. Cost of the target. on Long-Range Projectiles For Navy's Newest Ship Too Expensive To Shoot (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 5, Funny

    Reminiscent of the remark made regarding firing $1 million cruise missiles at Afghanistan in 1998. "I can't think of anything in Afghanistan worth $1 million".

  6. Re:Signal triangulation = GPS on Russians Seek Answers To Central Moscow GPS Anomaly (yahoo.com) · · Score: 1

    Yes, agreed, it's unlikely that plates can be read and illumination angles of 30 degrees make it much more difficult. But this received wisdom allows information more realistically obtained from in situ personnel to be helpfully explained away.

  7. Re:Signal triangulation = GPS on Russians Seek Answers To Central Moscow GPS Anomaly (yahoo.com) · · Score: 1

    There's an odd throw-away line from a book on the construction of the Hubble telescope, purportedly from someone at Perkin-Elmer, who made it and the satellites who point the other way. "Turns out things are a lot clearer looking into the atmosphere than looking out of it."

  8. Re: You made it, Syrians! on BBC: UK Votes To Leave The European Union (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Really, troll? Massive net contributors. Only positive side is we actually get a lot more 'cash', especially when there's pressure to stop paying farmers 1/3-1/2 the budget (apparently market forces don't count in agriculture).

    Otherwise, today is a huge loss socially, culturally and, as warned hundreds of times by the Remain side, economically.

  9. Slightly off topic, but China Lake related. My rusty memory says that there was an odd series of tests in the eighties where scientists on the west coast thought that they were hearing infrasound from meteors and such like, then realised it was happening once a week at the same time. Speculation was it was related to the testing of a SR71 replacement, but unless I'm much-mistaken. nothing came of it. Thirty-plus years on, can anyone say what it was?

  10. Re:Not welcomed by some government agencies on Researchers Generate Electricity Using Seawater and Sunlight · · Score: 1

    I didn't realise Alfred made a car driven by TNT. Thanks for the tip, I'll pop down to the garage and stock up on a few kg.

  11. Not welcomed by some government agencies on Researchers Generate Electricity Using Seawater and Sunlight · · Score: 1

    Widespread and common storage of hydrogen peroxide won't be welcomed in some quarters, as it's is a very well known agent of homebrew bombs.

    URL:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6274299.stm/

    They got 33 years.

  12. Re:Welp on Where Does America's E-Waste End Up? GPS Tracker Tells All (pbs.org) · · Score: 4, Interesting
  13. Re:obviously on Manufacturing Jobs On Decline Around the World (ampproject.org) · · Score: 1

    Really? You're bright enough to read this article, or at least the headline, to type words in, and what you bring to the discussion is supporting Black Lives Matter, i.e. being politically active, is the problem?

    Mindless, knee-jerk idiocy. Please depart and leave the discussion to grown-ups.

  14. The world on Slashdot Asks: Does It Matter That We've Reached Peak Smartphone? · · Score: 1

    Realistically, what more do you want one to do?

    Peak smartphone may be here for people willing to stump up the moolah, but the world's becoming more and more connected because of cheaper, better devices. For most of the seven billion people, $700 isn't what they can splash on a nice phone, it's over half their annual income. Better value smartphones are bringing capable computers to the masses.

  15. Re:Why? on Ask Slashdot: Alternatives To "Atomic" Clocks? · · Score: 1

    Before before home internet made NTP possible, my £5 (US $7) kitchen analogue quartz wall clock from IKEA kept perfect time. Changed with the seasons, twice year as necessary, but it never needed correcting. It always felt ironic with all the other digital equipment (especially the pc) that this cheap and relatively unsophisticated AA battery-powered mechanism was superior.

  16. Bank security compromised? on How Common Is Your PIN? (datagenetics.com) · · Score: 1

    El Reg a few years back had a story that in the nineties, one of the big four banks in the UK had its security team compromised. New cards had a PIN set from only one of three choices. That meant that anyone intercepting a card who knew the three could go haywire with the account. The customer wouldn't know and the bank couldn't explain it.

    Could have been cock and bull, but it's a possible small source of non-randomness.

  17. Re:"for non-technical users" on Linux Mint Hack Is an Indicator of a Larger Problem (techrepublic.com) · · Score: 4, Informative

    Oh for mod points. Amen.

    "Non-technical users"? Fuck off. It's an OS that is designed to be used, not endlessly fiddled with. But for some self-appointed gatekeepers, that's somehow become an unbearable eternal-September thing for linux.

  18. Re:Er, because it's UK? on U.K. Researcher Receives Permission To Edit Genes In Human Embryos (sciencemag.org) · · Score: 3, Informative

    No. The UK's regulator is the first in the world to give permission.

  19. Re: Paper doesn't account for successful theories on Math Says Conspiracies Are Prone To Unravel (bbc.com) · · Score: 2

    Absolutely. In the TV series "The World at War", the producer's aunt, who he was close to and conversed regularly, had worked at Bletchley Park and she never even hinted at its work. The series, filmed in the early seventies, made a programme on the Battle of the Atlantic and put the British success down to radar and better training.

  20. Re:Online ad czar throws toys out of pram on Online Ad Czar Berates Adblockers As Freedom-Hating 'Mafia' (thestack.com) · · Score: 1

    You can be absolutely sure that he runs Adblock on all his machines.

  21. Re:An Oscar in the works? on Filmmaker Forces Censors To Watch 10-Hour Movie of Paint Drying (ibtimes.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    Copyright would cost too much (I kid you not).

  22. Scary looking things on B-52s: The Plane That Refuses To Die · · Score: 2

    Only time I've felt terror from above was glancing up and seen five of these flying in close formation. It turns out their air base was having a long [runway] overhaul and they did a little tour of nearby cities as they departed. Had some evolutionary flashback to being some meerkat-like creature. Also appreciated why civilian jets are called 'wide-bodied'.

  23. Re: Even harder to find footage of other tests on Movies of Cold War Bomb Tests Hold Nuclear Secrets (wired.com) · · Score: 2

    If Soviets hit first, then they'll aim for the missile bunkers that are scattered all over the Mid-west. They'll also lob in a load at 'Command and Control' centres (cities). The nukes hitting the midwest will create enormous amounts of radioactive fallout as they're aiming for hardened bunkers so nukes won't be airburst, CONUS is uninhabitable.

    A retaliatory strike means only cities are hit, with air bursts. Result, devastation, but not complete annihilation. The remaining 10-20 million could plan WW IV with bows and arrows. So it's 'better' to strike first.

  24. Re:Even harder to find footage of other tests on Movies of Cold War Bomb Tests Hold Nuclear Secrets (wired.com) · · Score: 1

    There's a great clip of Tsara Bomba I've only seen once. It's taken from a building in a town at the end of a street of wooden houses. A Russian/Siberian old man is walking down the dirt in the centre of the road towards the distant mushroom cloud and is blown off his feet (more surprised than hurt). My memory says the footage was something like 100 miles from detonation. Love to find that again, mainly as it's the only filmed example I can remember a civilian hit by the power of an atomic weapon, even this lightly (which in itself is telling).

    One thing Slashdot provided and I've lost was a link to some Usenet posts from the mid-nineties by an ex-RAND guy. In four pages, he chillingly outlines the most cynical decision possible in humanity; a first strike on Soviet cities would then lead the USSR to blow up 80% of the US popl, but crucially not hit the now empty bunkers in the dirt of Montana et al., so making the smoking ruin of the USA at least partially habitable through massively reduced levels of fall-out.

  25. "An enthusiastic researcher" on Pwned Barbies Spying On Children? Toytalk CEO Downplays Hacking Reports (bt.com) · · Score: 1

    Another one to add to the list of great euphemisms.