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User: bruce_the_loon

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Comments · 785

  1. Re:Plague?!? on Black Death Discovered In Oregon · · Score: 1

    It is reasonable to expect it, yes. But it is also reasonable to expect that the immature id10t's on this board will abuse the priviledge to post that sort of crud, so society here forbids it from being possible in the first place.

  2. Re:In Remembrance . . . . on Kinect: You Are the Controlled · · Score: 1

    At which point did he ever claim Bradbury had written it? It's clearly a not-that-well written tribute to the man based on modern events, but certainly not claimed to be Bradbury's work.

  3. Re:Comes with tweezer and magnifying glass on Smaller SIM Format Standardized · · Score: 1

    OMG, you've got a phone that takes the full credit card sized SIM? Haven't seen one of those for 20 years.

  4. Re:Should read... on After Trip to ISS, SpaceX's Dragon Capsule Returns Safely To Earth · · Score: 1

    Good thing the Dragon is reusable then, isn't it?

  5. Re:Ha! on Hacked Bitcoin Financial Site Had No Backups · · Score: 1

    I'm replying to JameSH because I don't want to repeat myself to all of the replies.

    He said regulated, underwritten by government, not American!!!!!!!!!!

    Just pointing it out.

  6. Re:One ship lost for the navy on Fire May Leave US Nuclear Sub Damaged Beyond Repair · · Score: 4, Informative

    What will likely happen is what has happened before. The oldest LA class boats are the ones being replaced by the Virginia class, so they'll promote the Miami down the list to be written off against the next Virginia instead of whatever boat was scheduled for scrapping. That boat will then get an overhaul instead of being scrapped.

    Been done with destroyers, carriers and subs in the past if my history memory isn't full of holes.

  7. Re:No wrongful death? on Rutger's Student Dharun Ravi Sentenced To 30-Day Jail Time · · Score: 1

    Then you have no idea what real thoughtcrime is. Thoughtcrime is only thinking "illegal" thoughts, NOT carrying them out, NOT planning to carry them out, NOT discussing them in any seriousness with others. It is NOT victimless crimes or crimes that have a non-physical result.

    For this case to be a thoughtcrime, Ravi would have had to be arrested, convicted and jailed merely for thinking that he should record his roommate having gay sex. Having actually carried it out moves it from thoughtcrime to an actual punishible criminal act.

    The tendency to assign the label of thoughtcrime to actions like Ravi did, or to criminals caught in the planning stages waters the term down.

  8. Tell them to buy a barcode scanner. The 13 digit ISBN is encoded as the UPC code on the back of 20 random books I just checked in my library.

  9. Re:generally good news, but not entirely on Publishers Win On Only Five Claims In Copyright Case Against Georgia State · · Score: 1

    What the judge said was slightly different to the summary's take on it. Because the publishers were not offering an excerpt mechanism where a student could obtain the excerpts of the book, and when a professor assigns only one chapter or less out of a book, a student is unlikely to buy the book as a whole, the act of the university providing the excerpt did not financial affect the market in a substantial way and that factor falls into the fair use side.

    If they did have such a mechanism, then the excerpt provided by the university would be a greater segment of the published work (the excerpt published, not the whole book now) and fair use would fail.

  10. Re:guess you didn't think of a backup on Ask Slashdot: How To Secure My Life-In-A-Briefcase? · · Score: 1

    He said he he had a Kindle. Lose the Kindle, you buy a new one from Amazon, associate it with your Amazon login which can be automatic, resync your library. If you were running the back-sync function, it will even remember where you were in the books.

    The only DRM issue with Amazon is if they disappear.

  11. Re:So on Connecticut Resident Stopped By State Police For Radioactivity · · Score: 1

    I think the more weapons-grade materials are much less active at non-critical mass amounts than medical isotopes are. To reliably detect the very slow decay rates of Pu and U, the more energetic (because they are short-lived) medical isotopes would be more likely to trip the sensors than the other way around.

    It's only when you exceed the critical mass of a material that you get the heavy radiation doses associated with radiation poisoning and runaway fission.

    Citation: The "Demon Core" from Los Alamos where the chaps held the thing in their hands. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

  12. Re:What's new? on Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore · · Score: 1

    I suspect that the square/triangle/lines thing is actually from tactile days when you felt what button you were pressing on the walkman hanging behind you on your belt.

    Or probably earlier on something else I cannot recall.

  13. Re:How the money could better have been spent on West Virginia Buys $22K Routers With Stimulus, Puts Them In Small Schools · · Score: 1

    Our Telkom telco is deploying in-streetbox micro-dslams all over the place, so they do exist and are cheap enough.

  14. Re:My favourite part of the article... on How Romanian Fortune Tellers Used Google To Fleece Victims · · Score: 2

    Dear Cris, sorry if I touched a nerve there, but that was a joke dude.

  15. Re:My favourite part of the article... on How Romanian Fortune Tellers Used Google To Fleece Victims · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Any equipment of a better quality than what the government is using. In Romania, that's probably a satchel VHS camera with a stage microphone taped to the window.

  16. Re:Bad enough I pay for microtransactions in MMO's on Windows 8 Won't Play DVDs Unless You Pay For the Media Center Pack · · Score: 1

    XP supported DVD playback out the box with Media Player 8 onward, although complex menus sucked for a long time.

  17. Re:Sustainable MS OS Pricing? on Microsoft Raises UK Prices By a Third and Can't Rule Out Future Hikes · · Score: 1

    Volume licensing like this covers all versions. A desktop enterprise licensing can be 98, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 or 8, same for server enterprise licensing. You can license based on perpetual intance of a version, but then you can't go to the next version without a new purchase. The treadmill still applies as you have to keep paying each year for this right.

  18. Re:Well... on Discovery Channel Crashes a Boeing 727 For Science Documentary (latimes.com) · · Score: 4, Informative

    According to the accident report, this was for National Geographic's Seconds from Disaster. http://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/wiki.php?id=145323

  19. Re:stall == high AOA, and no AOA indication on Fly-By-Wire Contributed To Air France 447 Disaster · · Score: 1

    AOA is not indicated by the horizontal status of the aircraft body. It is a complex number derived from the airspeed, physical angle of the wing design, shape of the wing and the horizontal status. A simple bubble won't give you any indication of AOA.

    http://www.av8n.com/how/htm/aoa.html

  20. Re:Just check what the guy's doing on Fly-By-Wire Contributed To Air France 447 Disaster · · Score: 1

    If you look at these pictures of the cockpit, it is feasible that the sticks might be obscured by the body of the pilot in the seat with the seat in the forward position.

    http://largest-plane.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/airbus-a330-cockpit.jpg http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3264/2905717075_e06553d20f_z.jpg

  21. Re:Attention, screeching children on Fly-By-Wire Contributed To Air France 447 Disaster · · Score: 1

    Pitot tubes are warmed, and there are warning stickers around them to avoid the hot tubes. The problem was that a certain model of tube was insufficiently heated to avoid the extreme icing that occurred. Airbus and the pitot tube supplier were replacing these tubes with ones that worked at the extremes.

  22. Re:Failed experiment? on Navy To Auction Stealth Ship · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Go and read Ben Rich's Skunk Works for the history of the Sea Shadow. Lockheed-Martin developed this one on their own and the Navy rejected the design because it didn't look like a ship an admiral would be seen dead in. Like the Royal Navy still insisting on sails and sail drill in the mid to latter days of steam.

    As far as their stealth was concerned, Skunk Works had to increase the radar reflectivity profile because the effect was so good, it appeared as a flat line against the shifting waves on radar and was visible as a result.

  23. Re:I'm impressed on Key Test For Skylon Spaceplane Engine Technology · · Score: 1

    Doesn't have to be consumable, could be a self-landing and resuable jet-engine drone. But it does defeat their goal of single stage to orbit.

  24. Re:Paywall ... on Is Extraterrestrial Life More Whimsical Than Plausible? · · Score: 1

    Whether you assume the values are zero or assume the values are high doesn't make the assumptions any different or stronger. They are still assumptions and will remain that way until proven.

    Also, absolute waste of research money, they probably started out on religion and then did a find/replace with alien life.

  25. Re:Infected? on One In Five Macs Holds Malware — For Windows · · Score: 1

    Actually it doesn't pay to show false positives as the default action is to destroy the infected file. If an AV company got caught deleting clean data, they would be ridiculed publically and possible be open for civil action.

    Citation, McAfee and Microsoft's relatively recent debacles with false positives.