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User: AlecC

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  1. The Economist has a Christmas edition to do, which includes extra materiel which is "interesting" but not current news, to compensate for not producing an edition next week. Even if you got it in marketing 101, not everybody dis, and the Star Wars release makes it topical.

  2. Re:All electric for performance on Porsche Is Building a Tesla Competitor (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    Nobody buys a Porsche roadster to carry groceries and kids. That is a different market, which Porsche as a brand will never enter, electrically or fossil powered. They do make SUV type vehicles, but even so, their buyers are not thinking kids and groceries.

  3. Re:Decades? Really? on Disease Threatens 99% of the Banana Market (washingtonpost.com) · · Score: 1

    The problem is that the Cavendish is sterile and only reproduces from cuttings. The seeds, those little dots inside, do not develop at all. So every Cavendish banana plant in the world is, in one sense, the same plant: genetically identical and cannot be bred from.

    So you have to go back to another variety and breed in any of the qualities of virus resistance, productivity, size, flavour, edibility etc. which it does not currently have. Which is not impossible, but no such varieties have been produced in the last thirty years or so, so an estimate of decades dies not strike me as unreasonable.

  4. Re:How about IMPRISONING those responsible on $600k Fine Over Data Center Death (datacenterdynamics.com) · · Score: 1

    I imagine there has been such an investigation. But first, you have to decide what was "the decision" that caused the accident. In aviation they say that an incident is none things going wrong at once, an accident is ten. If five people each believe that one of the other four had put the safety locks in place, and none had, which of the five made the decision which caused the accident?

  5. Re:How about IMPRISONING those responsible on $600k Fine Over Data Center Death (datacenterdynamics.com) · · Score: 2

    The company was certainly liable, and has been fined. The question is, was any person liable, to the extent that the could be imprisoned for manslaughter?

  6. Re:How about IMPRISONING those responsible on $600k Fine Over Data Center Death (datacenterdynamics.com) · · Score: 2

    The problem being, apparently, that nobody made "the decision". Due to lack of communication, one crew thought that status was A, and the other that it was B. Should you sent to prison the person who allowed live power in an area he thought there was nobody working, or the person who sent people to work where he thought the power was off? Or the bosses in the two different companies involved? Or the bosses in the employing company, a bank, the only place the chains of command met, who though they were employing competent contractors? The problem is that the structures were so confused that, though they didn't realise it, there was no-one in control. Finding someone guilty "beyond reasonable doubt" is almost certainly impossible.

  7. Re:The fine won't hurt the DC owners. on $600k Fine Over Data Center Death (datacenterdynamics.com) · · Score: 2

    But to know to turn it off, you have to know it is on. And that appears to be the problem here - people didn't know what was on.

  8. Re:The fine won't hurt the DC owners. on $600k Fine Over Data Center Death (datacenterdynamics.com) · · Score: 1

    Reading the article, it appears that it is not that "somebody made the call", it is that communications between the teams working on the project, from two companies, was so bad that one crew didn't realist that people would be working in the area, and the other crew didn't realise it was live. Incompetence, not risk-taking.

  9. Re:Wrong Priorities on Pentagon Picks Northrop Grumman For Next Gen Bomber (theatlantic.com) · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    No, to eliminate most healthcare, you have to eliminate ageing. Cancer is not a hunger related disease, nor is Alzheimers. Only somewhat cardiac. It is alleged that 50% of health spending is in the last six months of life. Hunger is a major problem, and hunger has health consequences. But it is not the major driver for healthcare demand.

  10. Re:Researchers Use ONE WEIRD TRICK to Hack Your Wi on Tattling Kettles Help Researchers Crack WiFi Networks In London (pentestpartners.com) · · Score: 1

    Nonetheless, you need to get file access to such devices to read the passwords. The trick here was that they managed to get the kettle to, effectively, spit out the WiFi password. Until you compromise the network, lots of things may have lots of files inside them, but without physical access you can do nothing. This allowed them to compromise the network without physical access.

  11. Research continues, but not successfully on Ask Slashdot: What Non-lethal Technology Has the Best Chance of Replacing the Gun? · · Score: 1

    The armed forces have been spending big bucks on researching this sort of thing for a long time. They, too, do not actually want to kill people, especially when it is some brainwashed kid sent out on a suicide mission. While obviously prepared to kill, their ideal is a complete victory with no casualties on either side. So they have spent a lot of money on researching pain rays, stopping foams etc.Unfortunately with essentially no success. It seems that anything capable of stopping somebody armed and ill-intentioned has a high probability of killing them.

    Which make sense. The human body is not a single co-ordinated machines, but a number of semi-autonomous subsystems working on a team job - of making the body of which they form part a success in the world.

  12. Re:This is why we like C on Air Traffic Snafu: FAA System Runs Out of Memory · · Score: 1

    Many display systems are. It sounds like a heap problem to me. If you are building a display which only selects and monitors an underlying database, which may well be managed in C, it is plausible to use a higher level language, But C can have heap leaks, too.

  13. Re:Software error ... on Air Traffic Snafu: FAA System Runs Out of Memory · · Score: 2

    The loose description sound like something not being garbage collected when it should have been. So no single change cause the problem. It might well have been caused by controllers playing with a new toy, in a way they would never do once it had settled in and testers would not do, It is difficult to observe heap leakage - even if you check free space after a run, it is not clear what the right value is.

  14. Overdramatic on Galaxies Die By Slow "Strangulation" · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Strangulation" seems to me an over-dramatic way of putting it. "Starvation" would be better. The supply of fresh hydrogen stops, so new stars stop being created. The old stars continue burning, some go supernova and blast out metals.Like when you stop adding wood to a fire, the logs already on the fire continue burning and the amount of ash increases.

    All this suggests that there is not an indefinite supply of intergalactic hydrogen, so once the galaxy has pulled in all the hydrogen in its immediate vicinity, it will slowly starve.

  15. Re:You Congresscritters just don't understand on Amazon Blasts FAA On Drone Approvals, Regulations · · Score: 2

    Except that this is the FAA, which is not part of Congress, and Congress is trying to kick the FAA into moving faster.

  16. Re:Rome Is Burning on Game of Drones: As US Dithers, Rivals Get a Head Start · · Score: 1

    Why blame Obama? This is the FAA, an independent authority. He pushed them as far as I thing a President should go in interfering with what should not be part of his personal fief. Then Congress ordered them to pass regulations, which they have grumpily done.

  17. Re:I have said it before on French Nuclear Industry In Turmoil As Manufacturer Buckles · · Score: 2

    Is there a working large scale CCS project to demonstrate the truth of those facts? The only working project I know of are demonstration scale.

  18. Re:Implement locally? on How One Small Company Blocked 15.1 Million Robocalls Last Year · · Score: 1

    Yesterday I got a call with number withheld which turned out to be the hospital making an appointment for me to attend for a scan. I would not have wanted to miss that call, but they withhold their number for reasons I can understand.

  19. Re:No on Proposed Space Telescope Uses Huge Opaque Disk To Surpass Hubble · · Score: 1

    The telescope body, free flying tens to hundreds of miles away, can adjust ti stay in the focus.

  20. Re:Hm on Man Saves Wife's Sight By 3D Printing Her Tumor · · Score: 1

    So you think neurologists should be spending a lot of time keeping up to the State of the Art in all new technologies? I would rather they were good neurologists, and waited for people with advanced new technology to offer it to them - as happened in this case. The only difference from what I would expect to be the normal process is that an end user rather than a manufacturer looking for a market came up with the idea. But I do not think skilled medial staff should spend their time surfing the technology scene for possibly good ideas.

  21. Not a reasonable complaint on Skeptics Would Like Media To Stop Calling Science Deniers 'Skeptics' · · Score: 1

    I am afraid that, as I use the language, deniers are skeptics. Illogical or irrational skeptics, maybe, compared to the rational skeptics that the complainants would like to reserve the word for. Denying the evidence of your eyes is both skeptical and sometimes foolish.

  22. Re:Burial customs? on Health Advisor: Ebola Still Spreading, Worst Outbreak We've Ever Seen · · Score: 1

    And how do you achieve this? You need to block land borders, plus control a coast along which piracy is growing. There is no navy big enough to blockade that coast, and putting the army in to block the land exposes them to the disease.

  23. Re:Roomba for skyscrapers on Window Washing a Skyscraper Is Beyond a Robot's Reach · · Score: 1

    And how will such a Roomba avoid the problem described in TFA, the grimy bits in the corner?

  24. Re:Of course you can have self cleaning windows! on Window Washing a Skyscraper Is Beyond a Robot's Reach · · Score: 1

    Which, as detailed in TFA, is exactly what has been tried. And those rotating thingies leave grimy patches in the corner. That idea doesn't work: a better one is needed - and not yet available.

  25. Not getting overexcited on Department of Justice Harvests Cell Phone Data Using Planes · · Score: 1

    I don't get overexcited by this. It is just observing stuff in a public place. We don't get upset by policemen looking at the faces of all passers by, when searching for a miscreant. If you want to use the cellphone system you are going to broadcast and anybody, good or bad, can pick up your transmissions. It is a downside of a technology we didn't have thirty years ago, and a technology with a lot of advantages.You similarly "broadcast" your car's registration number all the time.

    My problem, so far as it goes, is with the various authorities secrecy about it. I think the police should be "keeping an eye" on the neighbourhood - and they should be open about it. If what they are doing it, they should be open about it. If it needs to be hidden, they shouldn't be doing it - in broad principle, if not the details. The police should not have dirty secrets (applies less to counter-intelligence agencies). If they are ashamed of this program, they should not be doing it. If they are not ashamed, tell us what it does.