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User: Shadowruni

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  1. Sir Issac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch on U.S. Navy Receives First Industry Built Railgun Prototype · · Score: 1
    "This, recruits, is a twenty-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight! Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to one-point-three percent of light-speed. It impacts with the force of a thirty-eight kiloton bomb — that is three times the yield of the city-buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth! That means SIR ISAAC NEWTON IS THE DEADLIEST SON OF A BITCH IN SPACE!"

    — Gunnery Chief, Mass Effect 2

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLpgxry542M

  2. ...sigh... and they worked SO hard on the book. on Hackers Steal $6.7M In Bank Cyber Heist · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Read "Stealing the Network: How to own a Continent"

    The whole book is this heist.

    Literally.

    Just check out the summary.

    The thing that makes this book series special is that they don't say, "I ran nmap and knew from the output they were running a webserver."

    They say "I ran nmap with 'sudo nmap -P0 -T3 -p 80 127.0.0.1 -oA localscan'

    And got:

    Starting Nmap 5.21 ( http://nmap.org/ ) at 2012-01-17 20:55 PST Nmap scan report for localhost (127.0.0.1) Host is up (0.000083s latency). PORT STATE SERVICE 80/tcp open http Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.07 seconds And could see from the line "80/tcp open http"

    http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-Network-How-Own-Continent/dp/1931836051

    //Has the whole series and still remembers the props I got from Blue bore.

    ///Yes I know the example is a bit contrived but that is exactly how they present information in the series and I learned a lot from it.

  3. Re:Or, translated in plain english on Renault Opens Up the 'Car As a Platform' · · Score: 1

    Cool story bro!

  4. Re:This is being whitewashed from the white house on LightSquared Disrupts 75% of GPS Connections In Government Test · · Score: 5, Funny

    But the Republicans are Right (angles)! Thank you ladies and gentlemen I'll be here all week. Try the fish!

  5. Re:Danger on Bill Gates To Help China Build Traveling Wave Nuclear Reactor · · Score: 1
    One:

    An excursion event in a reactor isn't even close to the kiloton range (the one in reactor 4 at Chernobyl was only 33GW). The explosion you mentioned at Chernobyl was enough to toss a 2200 ton slab... but guess what... it was just steam radioactive as hell due to contamination from damaged rods (normally water in reactors when irradiated creates N-16 which is a short -lived (as in a few minutes) alpha emitter) ... but still just steam. The amount of force in the explosion at Chernobyl was only about 10 tons. Enough to totally jack up the core and it's fuel/control rods but not vaporize the plant which is what would happen if you got into the kiloton range.

    Second:

    Critical mass only means you've got enough neutrons to maintain a fission reaction, that's it, scale has nothing to do with it. The neutron flux between rods is moderated by steam, water, and other neutron absorbers, adding more fissile material into the equation doens't equal more energy. In fact it can STOP your reaction as enough material will absorb neutrons but not emit them with enough energy to really do anything.

    Third:

    Yes there is such a thing as passive cooling systems that require no moving parts. Most nuclear subs use molton sodium as a coolant and natural convection moves the sodium in a loop. Fukushima had such a thing but it the command lines to that value were cut and power to open the valve wasn't there anyway. That still didn't matter as the valve could be opened by hand except that the radiation in that part of the plant was too high. Some estimates but it at almost 30Sv MINUTE and no matter how fast you ran or with how much protection you'd still be dead before you could open the valve.

    Fourth:

    Dumping cold water into a reactor, especially sea water, is a big no-no as that'll immediately cause an excursion in 99% of situations, passive cooling or not. The water would stop the reaction immediately but the excess neutrons would have no place to go, as the water attenuated the neutron flux, and would MELT the fuel rods in a few minutes. If it's sea water you also get corrosion. When ordinary water is irradiated with strong alpha it becomes corrosive, reactor piping is designed to deal with the chemical reaction (peroxide) and so isn't in any danger as long as procedures are followed. Sea water on the other hand is corrosive against the same materials that are generally inert against irradiated water.

    Fifth:

    Fukushima had a N+2 failure system, you'd need two completely isolated systems to fail before things got ugly and the odds of that happening were extremely unlikely.

    Um... what type of reactor are you an expert in as doing what you said in that last post would be a very stupid thing to do?

  6. Re:Danger on Bill Gates To Help China Build Traveling Wave Nuclear Reactor · · Score: 2
    Jesus... where to start with your post...

    First: Say it with me. Nuclear reactors ARE NOT nuclear bombs.

    Unless you're dealing with highly enriched materials with proper reflectors and shape (these things REALLY matter) you're generally not going to get any sort of supercriticality, not to mention setting off a nuclear explosion isn't something that you can do just by accident. Even a simple device like 'Little Boy' requires some extreme engineering. A multistage device with a megaton yield....by accident? Not gonna happen... this pesky thing called physics will get in the way.

    Second: We don't care about using unenriched uranium. That's a good thing to use as enriched uranium is incredibly dangerous to make (Bing uranium hexafloride), and dealing with weapons-grade anything is always dangerous.

    Third:

    Traveling wave reactors are fairly hands off deals. Most other reactors require constant attention to maintain their "balance" and if intimate knowledge of the system (along with piss poor planning and bad control rod design) is lacking then you can end up with situations like Chernobyl. If your DR plan doesn't account for a completely passive cooling system, as in Fukushima, or a dark plant... again see Fukushima.

  7. Re:The scam of Siri on Siri Protocol Cracked · · Score: 5, Funny

    Crickey! Will you loo' at that. We're so very lucky! You almost never see a four digit this far from its native habitat of lurking an' she's being stalked by this five digit that's almost as rare. It's times like this I'm gla' I don't work with lizards that might eat me! //Window seat please...

  8. Re:The scam of Siri on Siri Protocol Cracked · · Score: 1

    Thanks!

  9. Re:The scam of Siri on Siri Protocol Cracked · · Score: 5, Funny

    Crickey! Loo' at that. We're very lucky! You almost never see a four digit this far from its native habitat of lurking. Ah she's a beaut!

  10. An Iron Man 2 quote comes to mind on Phishing Site Discovered On Sony Thailand Servers · · Score: 2

    Ivan Vanko: [laughs] If you could make God bleed, people would cease to believe in him, there will be blood in the water, the sharks will come. All I have to do is sit back and watch as the world consumes you. Not that Sony was ever a God but the idea holds for any giant corporation with enough money buy the best security in the world. They were made to bleed and this won't be the last of these.

  11. Is it me... on Arizona Governor Proposes Flab Tax · · Score: 0

    Is it me or does the governor of AZ wake up and say, "What civil liberties can I shit on today? Oh! I know! I'll start enforcing medical programs just like Big Brother did in 1984. Winston seemed to like it so much!"

  12. Re:Needs more Xbox on Microsoft Says Kinect Left Open By Design · · Score: 1

    Stop making sense on a Slashdot MS two minutes of hate!

  13. Re:Oh yeah on Microsoft Says Kinect Left Open By Design · · Score: 1

    I wish I could disagree with you but I know this is what happened.

  14. Re:Hidden volumes? on Whitehat Hacker Moxie Marlinspike's Laptop, Cellphones Seized · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yes, there is money to be made as an investigator... a lot more to STOP the investigators. You could take every machine in my home (assuming you could find them all which is a lot harder than it sounds - take a notebook out of its case and slurp off of a line in the wall and unless they are REALLY motivated, someone generally won't find it). For all of the respect a lot of agencies get, you've got to remember that the best and brightest DON'T WORK FOR THE GOVERNMENT. Why would they? I've worked with the government enough to know this. For every competent INFOSEC professional, there're 10s if not 100s of incompetent ones. The smart ones get a clearance on their resume and then go work for six figures in the private sector. Just one thing to remember.... crypto isn't meant to stop someone... only delay them. In 1973-1974 IBM came up with a crypto algorithm based on Lucifer, the NSA took it, played with it some (they swapped the S-boxs), and gave it back, it later became known as DES. For years (and even now... which is really silly) people thought that the NSA weakened the code or put in some kind of backdoor. Why the NSA did it (and IBM knew of this method but agreed to keep it secret) didn't come out until about 20 years later. Eli Biham and Adi Shamir published a paper on differential cryptanalysis, the best method for breaking block cryptos. The changes the NSA made actually the code RESISTANT to the attack. This tells us two things. One, the NSA (and IBM) had attacks that others didn't figure out for almost 20 years. Two, they managed to keep it a secret. Hidden volumes, crypto, and solid tradecraft are all good things but when against and enemy with nearly limitless resources (and the tax-free money to rent... er hire for consultation the ones they need) you really don't stand a chance.

  15. Re:One of Many on "Father of Java" Resigns From Sun/Oracle · · Score: 2, Informative
    He was given the silly interview questions. You know like, "How many quarters does it take to reach the top of the Empire state building?". He took offense to that being:

    1. Who he was

    2. What he was

    3. He help CREATE A LANGUAGE

    I've always hated those questions, not becuase I couldn't answer them, but because they don't show WHAT I KNOW, only how I solve problems. Sure you COULD say that if you know how to solve a problem you can apply it anywhere but in my experience, knowing not only how to solve a problem, but actually creating a viable solution is far more important.

    Just my two cents...

  16. But will it run... on AMD's 12-Core Chip Cuts Software Licensing Costs · · Score: 1
    Anything better? My biggest gripe with this Core War (yes I know, old school game fun as hell) is that almost nothing seems to really benefit. The only apps I know are SQL, some web servers, rendering, cubes, and code breaking/intense math. Beyond that, many things aren't embarassing parallel enough to make this matter.

    The other part is that until we have better tools (or devs as many of the ones I know are REALLY dependent on Visual Studio and .NET languages doing the hard stuff for them. I know that with the advent of the newer proc archs ASM is damn near impossible, I don't think it's unreasonable for someone other than kernel or driver guys to understand the ramifications of multithreaded app design. I've been looking at what it'd take to consider each proc it's on VM and use transparent memory sharing (like VMWare does) to treat each proc like a system unto itself and then treat things more like a distributed computing problem.

    My only issue is that it's NOT a distributed compute problem so maybe I'm approaching it incorrectly but this highlights my problem, not many are well trained and experienced in this type of dev.

  17. Command Centers on Forget LCDs and LEDs, Here Come LPDs · · Score: 1
    Screw a command center, though whenever I'm evaluating a new display tech that IS the first thing that comes to mind.

    I'm waiting on my transparent screen that displays XXXGA graphics and yet somehow I don't get distracted by everything happening BEHIND the screen. (

    Looks cool on screen but just like Gorilla arms from Minority Report, I think it wouldn't really be practical unless you....)

  18. Re:...why? on Spider-Man 4 Scrapped, Franchise Reboot Planned · · Score: 1

    Umm... actually yeah I did. Don't answer Slashdot posting while figuring out an Active Directory FUBAR....

  19. ...why? on Spider-Man 4 Scrapped, Franchise Reboot Planned · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I think we could forgive them for the 3rd movie since the 2nd one rocked so hard.

    It's rather annoying that so many franchises and movies are getting the reboot/rewrite treatment. It's almost like Hollywood is afraid that most multimillon dollar investments won't turn a buck.

    Oh,wait....

    BTW, I thought the Batman reboot was needed but am not ashamed to say I loved the first hulk (Eric Bana not Nick Cage). Hulk was never really about mass destruction,as awesome as it is to watch, but his inner conflict.

  20. This current tactic will end badly for Amazon on Wal-Mart, Amazon Battle For Online Retail's Future · · Score: 1

    I don't see this as a pricing war. This is a war on the control of Internet commerce. A war in which Amazon is going to lose if they allow it to be a war of attrition. He who has the larger war chest will win. Hearts and minds sounds great on paper but Walmart can give away stuff and lose a quarter or two and take the stock hit. Amazon can't do that on the same level because of what they sale. The also at as an eBay with no bidding for smaller companies that want a very public web presence but can't afford large scale advertising and shipping logistics overhead. Amazon does that for them. As a comparison Walmart can demand that suppliers use particular technologies (cough-UPC-cough, cough-rfid-cough) or they won't do business with them or levy "handling charges" (read:fines). Who do you think will win *THAT* sort of fight. For Amazon to win, they've got to reach into middle America and sell nicer things at a rate near Walmart's and offer free shipping. To make that work they'd need a VERY good distribution network set up, which Walmart already has, and Walmart has buddy-buddy deals with FedEx and UPS. It'll be a *VERY* bloody battle and the only way I see this working is if Costco and Amazon leverage each other's strengths. Just my two cents though.

  21. Re:Arrr Matey! Here there be Market Share?! on Chinese Gov't Pushing Linux In Rural China With Subsidies · · Score: 1

    Just think, somewhere right now, Ballmer is kicking a Chinese pirate in the nads right now.

  22. Re:I'd re-build my kernel from scratch... on Chinese Gov't Pushing Linux In Rural China With Subsidies · · Score: 1

    ...a quote from HHGTTG fits this very well: "to Arthur's embarrassment he found himself curled in a ball on the floor"

  23. Re:13 percent? on Chinese Gov't Pushing Linux In Rural China With Subsidies · · Score: 1
    Are they in a position to:

    A: buy ANYTHING? (being a rural Chinese peasant doesn't pay too well I hear)

    B: *KNOW* that it's a bad deal and go to the China equivalent of NewEgg and build a better machine (being a rural Chinese peasant doesn't pay too well I hear)

  24. Arrr Matey! Here there be Market Share?! on Chinese Gov't Pushing Linux In Rural China With Subsidies · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Seriously, where do people get these numbers? My thing about this is this. We know many small companies don't pay for their software HERE in the states (one of my biggest challenges as a small biz IT consultant/freelancer). We also know that Chinese piracy is considered an art form in some places. Taken together, the market share statement makes little sense. How can you know what the share is, if you've no legit data? One other thing, to someone who NEVER USED a computer and just want web, email, and simple things like YouTube or word processing(most people don't use even a tenth the total capabilities of Word or Excel). They will see nothing special about Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD as they all can do that with no real issue. Let me preface this with, I'm writing this on my Ubuntu powered notebook, that's authed against my 2008 AD that also auths my kid's Gallery running on another Linux server. Most people will cry, "But those other OSes have hardware issues please help us", and I'll whisper, "No." .... and then remember that these machines came with Linux and thus should already work fine since it's 2009 and not 1999.

  25. Re:Ron Moore???? on Why Charles Stross Hates Star Trek · · Score: 1

    I think this was the most subtle Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference I've seen for awhile!!!