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User: bruce_the_loon

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  1. Re:Make your own choices on Ads May Soon Stalk You on TV Like They Do on Your Facebook Feed (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    You spend a couple of minutes wandering through the menus to find the Wifi diagnostics page and see if it got an IP address. Unless you think that there are two wifi cards in the TV with one connecting completely hidden from you.

    If you really want to prevent it ever getting an address by accident if an open AP wanders into range, set the mode to static, set the address to 127.1.2.3/31 and watch it trying to arp a non-existent gateway.

  2. Re:That's because... on All 500 of the World's Top 500 Supercomputers Are Running Linux (zdnet.com) · · Score: 2

    After optimizing his computer to the point the CPU couldn't produce enough heat to warm his house anymore.

  3. Re:Ok, son, let's talk VPN on A 14-Year-Old Asks: When Should I Get a VPN? · · Score: 2

    - Some of your friends might claim they have connected their VPN already, but quite likely they're only connected via their loopback adapter.

  4. Re:Today I learnt: on Best Buy Stops Selling Kaspersky Security Software (startribune.com) · · Score: 1

    Interestingly I did this with Kaspersky this year, a 4 PC box from an online retailer was half the price of 3 PC licenses bought on the Kaspersky store. Did come with a CD, but I just punched the key into the already-installed software.

  5. Re:Since you wear a spacesuit... on Elon Musk Posts First Photo of SpaceX's New Spacesuit (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Because striding out in a aesthetically pleasing suit to the launch pad is a better photo op than waddling out in a balloon suit. Or do you disagree that the Mercury astronauts in their silver suits look better and cooler than the Shuttle astronauts in their orange blobs?

  6. Re:Issue: Where are the positive questions? on Google Invites Users To 'Check If You're Clinically Depressed' (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    The reasoning behind using negative questions is to force your mind to consider the negative states honestly. Unless you are in a severely depressed state, the ability of the mind to promote positive aspects over negative aspects will skew the evaluation. Those positive questions you pose are being asked, just in a way that your mind is forced to be honest in evaluating it. That's what the 0 answer is for.

  7. Re:NO! on Microsoft Paint To Be Killed Off After 32 Years (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Fair enough.

  8. Re:NO! on Microsoft Paint To Be Killed Off After 32 Years (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Win key to open Start menu, sni, Enter. Although I am using Classic Shell to restore a Win7 menu experience.

  9. Re:NO! on Microsoft Paint To Be Killed Off After 32 Years (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Snipping Tool. Much better than PrintScreen.

  10. Re:Capacity planning on Disastrous 'Pokemon Go' Event Leads To Mass Refunds (techcrunch.com) · · Score: 1

    Besides sports events? Maybe the upcoming eclipse, reported here earlier. https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/06/27/202250/august-solar-eclipse-could-disrupt-roads-and-cellular-networks

  11. Re:100 working days, bureaucracy accounted separat on Elon Musk Promises World's Biggest Lithium Ion Battery To Australia (cnn.com) · · Score: 1

    From one of the articles linked from a reader above, it's 100 days after the signing of the grid interconnect contract with whoever runs the Aussie national grid, not the supply contract with Musk.

    Hope they have a site ready for him, leveling and concreting a section of land can take years. Yeah, yeah, I know Aussie is flat, but not that flat.

  12. Re:Couldn't find details about the battery on Elon Musk Promises World's Biggest Lithium Ion Battery To Australia (cnn.com) · · Score: 1

    So worst case Musk can build that 400MWh battery in 300 days. Bet you buy the time that one is completed in 2021, Musk has a 1000MWh one out there somewhere.

  13. Re:Visitor visas are fickle. on Afghan Girl Roboticists Denied US Visas (bbc.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Gambian team was also denied entry, and they're also not an at-risk country. More than 160 countries are taking part and only two were rejected, agreed that it is most likely a local consulate thing.

  14. Nope, it is an admission that a company that found a market for selling vegan mayonnaise has also discovered that there is a potential market for meat that doesn't involve slaughtering Ferdinand the Bull.

    The market may be that segment of vegans that don't eat meat because of animal slaughter and butchery as well as a segment of current meat-eaters whose conscience is tweaked a bit, but not enough to quit eating it.

    Beans and lettuce bunny huggers won't change, neither will proper carnivores. But enough may will do so if the price and taste is right.

    Now please excuse me while I go and tuck into a prime rack of pork ribs with sticky sauce.

  15. Re:Wait, they got one right? on Offensive Trademarks Must Be Allowed, Rules Supreme Court (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    And no charges were laid, the police investigated and found nothing worthwhile. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-13218522

  16. Re: real world on British PM Seeks Ban On Encryption After Terror Attack (boingboing.net) · · Score: 1

    In politics I think it might, you rinse out the government by voting in a new one, they get you into a lather while in office and then you repeat. :)

  17. Re: real world on British PM Seeks Ban On Encryption After Terror Attack (boingboing.net) · · Score: 1

    The core idea behind the Westminster parliament and the Prime Minister is that the parliament can vote on their confidence or lack thereof in the PM. This is a binding vote and results in the resignation of the PM if there is no confidence.

    In the current environment, there is no clear majority, so to gain the majority, either a coalition must be formed or the party needs to rely on the goodwill of the other parties. A coalition is a formal agreement between the parties that guarantees the vote of confidence, whereas the goodwill option is potentially unreliable and is a true minority government.

    As the holder of the most seats, the Tories have the traditional right to try and form a government first. However she will face a confidence vote and will only survive if the Tories can muster enough support. If that fails, then the next largest party can try.

    Now as the confidence vote requires an absolute majority, it should be technically impossible for two coalitions to have enough votes for a tie. If the Tories fail and Corbyn forms a government successfully, then the Tories would have the right to call a no-confidence vote in Parliament later. For that to succeed though, they need to be certain of sufficient backing from other parties to reach the majority, parties who backed the other guy in the first place. That would only be the case if Corbyn stuffs up completely. Brit MPs tend not to be malicious enough to toy with the system for shits and giggles.

    Hope that clears it up a bit.

  18. Re: real world on British PM Seeks Ban On Encryption After Terror Attack (boingboing.net) · · Score: 1

    They didn't give May the boot, she won her own constituency. However her party now hold less seats than the majority required for them to form their own government (executive branch for the US), but with help from other like-minded parties, they can gain that majority. Of course that help comes with promises and agreements and favours to be called in later.

    IF the Tories can't find enough friends, then the other parties can try and club together to get the majority required and put their own chaps in. If that doesn't work, then new elections. Rinse, lather, repeat.

  19. Re:Did someone do the math on this first? on Tesla Plans To Disconnect 'Almost All' Superchargers From the Grid In Favor of Solar and Battery Power (electrek.co) · · Score: 1

    Your last assumption is out, you don't need enough panels to charge all 156 vehicles, you need enough to power the 6-20 stalls at the same time while there are vehicles present. When there are stalls open, the same panels can recharge the local battery banks for when there is no sun.

    I can't find a decent voltage/current breakdown of the Tesla Supercharger, only 130kW at maybe 248VDC, you can't vary the voltage, so it looks like each charger pulls 525A at 248VDC. Taking a 325W Renewsys panel, it can supply 37.2VDC at 8.61A at full power, so you need 7 panels in series to push 248VDC out and then 61 sets of 7 panels to hit the 525A current load to provide the 130kW charge capacity. Being a DC charge system, you don't need inverters, just a suitably sized voltage regulator.

    That panel is 2m x 1m, so you'll end up with 855m^2 of panels per charger bay, plus sundry space for cables, mounts etc. Still a lot of space, but certainly feasible if your solar panels are forming covered parking areas at the mall where the Supercharger is.

  20. Re:Don't UPSes also act as surge protectors? on British Airways Says IT Collapse Came After Servers Damaged By Power Problem (reuters.com) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They do, but some surge protection devices have a limited number of surges they can absorb before they have to be replaced. If there were a number of surges, it's certainly feasible for the protection chain to fail at some point.

    An anecdote from a few weeks ago with a data center I help manage. It has a backup generator, automatic switch gear and a Schneider Electric Galaxy double conversion UPS. Yes we don't have two, but we ain't an airline. We do have another data center on another site to take over if needed though.

    So a few weeks back our phones go wild with texts fired off by the UPS tossing SNMP traps around. One sprint later, the UPS console is showing no input power and our in-house electricians lay rubber from one end of the campus to the other to get to the sub in time. As we wait for the UPS to hit that magic 5 minutes when it triggers the auto-shutdown sequences on the servers, the sparkies discover the sub's output is fine and the generator isn't running.

    Then all shit breaks loose, ten power cycles on the UPS input, some lasting long enough to switch from battery to mains, some not. With ten minutes left on the batteries, the UPS gives up, shuts the inverter and charger down and switches the load to static bypass. Room goes silent except for the UPS alarms, and then the eleventh return cycle comes and goes in about three seconds. We hear PSU fans starting and then winding down. I dropped the master breaker on the DB and isolated the room from the UPS. Down until the sparkies figure it out. There goes three hours of our lives.

    Turns out that the automatic switch gear had some arc damage on the utility-side contactor feeding the control boards, probably caused by the eight months of load-shedding (read utility driven power cuts to ration power) we had experienced two years ago. That was enough to drop the voltage in one sensor to below the trigger threshold and caused that contactor and the main load contractor to open. Before it could start the generator up, the control board then decided the utility had returned, so it closed the contractors again. And open again, and close again. The sound of a 3-phase 480V 500A contactor switching twice a second is enough to make the sparkies use words a sailor would be proud of.

    We had to lock out the sensors, rig a temporary bypass on the contactors to power the room from the generator feed side and replace the damaged contactors before we were fully safe again. We lost 2 PSUs out of 90 and no data. We were lucky.

    I relate this to show that no matter how good the power protection architecture is, multiple UPSes, twin feeds etc, shit can and does happen. We were lucky we had people on the site who knew what trouble sounds like and were willing to isolate the room.

    So I'm willing to accept that BA lost a data center to power problems. But I'm not willing to accept that the loss of a single data center can shut down global operations. BA must have multiple redundant data centers with a seamless failover mechanism. And that is a failure of IT pure and simple.

  21. Alternative competitiveness on Microsoft Just Showed Off Exactly What Salesforce Was Worried About (cnbc.com) · · Score: 5, Informative

    Oh boo-hoo Salesforce, MS has had a CRM for decades, just not a particularly good one. Now it has a somewhat better one, all of a sudden you can't compete in an open market with what you've got? Build a better one then.

    And while you're at it, can anyone build a CRM that doesn't require signing off souls to all three Hells to make it work? I've only got one and Satan, Cthulhu and Kali all require exclusive rights to it.

  22. Re:Are actual globes wrong? on Boston Public Schools Map Switch Aims To Amend 500 Years of Distortion (theguardian.com) · · Score: 2

    http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/Normal/ProjInt/projInt.html has some examples of this, looks odd and tends to split countries into pieces when flattened out.

    Anything looks distorted when flattened out from a globe, and a globe would be the best thing to use, but having one for each desk for kids to measure and plot on is infeasible. A single flat projection like Gall-Peters is more useful, but the level of distortion is more jarring than some others.

  23. Re:This is the problem with corporate income tax. on Apple Paid $0 In Taxes To New Zealand, Despite Sales of $4.2 Billion (nzherald.co.nz) · · Score: 1

    But those profits still enrich the company. Which means the value of the shares go up and shareholders pay capital gains taxes. No matter how you look at it, corporate income tax is double taxation.

    And what about companies that hold profits in a corporate purse against future. Not all of that profit goes to shareholders and can be taxed as income/capital gains.

    And on the EU Apple issue, Ireland helped create a situation where Apple could avoid paying taxes in other EU countries that did need that tax income and the other EU countries were pissed at that. If it was just Ireland's share of Apple's business that went untaxed, it would have been less of an issue, but Apples (EU!Ireland)'s profits went there as well.

  24. Re: Divide a circle with radians... on This Is How the Number 3.14 Got the Name 'Pi' (time.com) · · Score: 1

    What kind of barbarian cuts their pizza with a circular blade? It's a meat cleaver from above the shoulder or nothing. How else are you expected to get the proper ratio of pizza to shattered pizza stone right?

  25. Still there, called AppLocker and can be set to lock down whatever you want. Whitelist, blacklist etc.