J.R. Random - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Cancel Orion, keep the Shuttle (Score 2, Insightful) 288

by J.R. Random on Tuesday December 30, 2008 @03:37PM (#26270497) Attached to: The Fight Over NASA's Future

We managed to find $25 billion to fund bailing out a moribund auto industry. It seems to me putting that money into a forward-looking industry rather than a backwards-looking one would have been a much more worthwhile use of the money.

A common logical fallacy -- "We wasted $x on A, so it's okay to waste $y < $x on B.". I am not in favor of the government bail outs. So far as I'm concerned GM should just spin off Corvette to Honda (the only GM car people actually dream about owning) and let the rest of the company die. But at least people actually get some utility out of cars -- they drive them every day. Nobody drives to the moon and we already know what's there -- a big dead rock. The actual scientific work is done far more cheaply with unmanned probes.

By the way, "we" didn't find $25 billion for the car company bailout. Every cent of every bail out is being borrowed.

How is sending people to the moon or Mars a worthwhile activity? Sci fi fantasies about settling Mars and what not are just ridiculous. Antarctica is infinitely more hospitable to human settlement than any other planet or moon in the solar system, yet nobody considers it sensible to build cities in Antarctica. As for technological spin offs, it would be far more efficient to invest the money directly in developing the spin offs rather than waste 90% of it going to Mars.

Comment Kids these days (Score 3, Funny) 276

by J.R. Random on Thursday October 23, 2008 @07:08PM (#25488689) Attached to: Dutch Court Punishes Theft of Virtual Property

If those punks had kicked, beaten and threatened that boy with a knife inside the virtual world of Runescape instead of of because of Runescape it would have been perfectly legal and they'd have gotten his stuff from his corpse and leveled up. Some punks have no common sense.

Submission + - "John Doe" ISP wins civil liberties award (pressesc.com)

Submitted by

amigoro

on Friday June 15, 2007 @09:36PM

amigoro writes: "Here's irony for you: A president of a New York Internet Service Provider (ISP) who stood up against the Patriot Act and refused to violate the privacy of his clients has won a top civil liberties award, but the recipient cannot be named because of FBI gag orders. An anonymous ISP legally challenged the NSL statute after the FBI demanded personal information on costumers using the statute, and the judge ruled that NSL violates First amendment rights. But the FBI's gag order on the ISP is still in place."

Submission + - AACS Alleged to Infringe Encryption Patents (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by

Molecular Mechanic

on Thursday May 31, 2007 @01:29PM

Molecular Mechanic writes: "Sony's getting sued (again). The NSA thinks enough of the patents to license them, why didn't Sony?"

Submission + - New AACS Processing Key Discovered

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @04:11PM

An anonymous reader writes: The movie studios recently released new HD-DVDs that can no longer be circumvented using the infamous 09 F9... AACS processing key that floated around the Net last month, but today a new key has surfaced. Like hundreds of other readers of Freedom-To-Tinker's "Own Your Own Integer" story, someone named BtCB posted his "randomly generated" number in the comments, asking, "What are the odds that this is the new processing key?" As it turns out, BtCB's key was not so random, and, a week after he posted it, the hackers over at doom9 realized that it really is the new processing key. With this kind of hacker "luck," it doesn't look like AACS will last for long.

Submission + - Feds go after E-Gold

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27, 2007 @05:13PM

An anonymous reader writes: The inevitable has finally arrived, the feds are going after E-gold and its associated digital currency exchangers. A four count indictment against owners Douglas L. Jackson, Reid A. Jackson, and Barry K. Downey was unsealed today in Washington DC charging them with conspiracy to launder monetary instruments, conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, operating an unlicensed money transmitting business under federal law, and transmission of money without a license under D.C. law. It seems E-gold will still honor existing commitments to most small account holders although the DOJ is also seeking to freeze specific large accounts.

From the article:
"The DOJ also obtained a restraining order to prevent the defendants from unloading their assets as well 24 seizure warrants on more than 55 accounts believed to be property involved in money laundering and the operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business."

links:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/04/27/HNdigita lcurrencycharges_1.html
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/state/or l-bk-brevardmoney042707,0,5539803.story?coll=orl-h ome-headlines
http://www.pr-inside.com/digital-currency-business -e-gold-indicted-r107629.htm

Submission + - WAS EINSTEIN RIGHT? SCIENTISTS PROVIDE FIRST PUBLI

Submitted by

w1z4rd

on Friday April 20, 2007 @05:04PM

w1z4rd writes: "For the past three years a satellite has circled the Earth, collecting data to determine whether two predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity are correct. At the American Physical Society (APS) meeting in Jacksonville, Fla., Professor Francis Everitt, a Stanford University physicist and principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B (GP-B) Relativity Mission, a collaboration of Stanford, NASA and Lockheed Martin, will provide the first public peek at data that will reveal whether Einstein's theory has been confirmed by the most sophisticated orbiting laboratory ever created."

Submission + - AMD reports $611 million loss

Submitted by mpfife on Friday April 20, 2007 @04:30PM

mpfife writes: Toms hardware reports that "Declining microprocessor sales as well as dropping average selling prices for its microprocessors have pushed AMD deeper into the red. The company reported a net loss of $611 million on revenues of $1.233 billion, which is more than 20% below the guidance the company expected at the end of Q4 2006. The loss includes charges related to the ATI acquisition in the amount of $113 million, but is mainly a result of the increasing competition with Intel in the microprocessor market."

Submission + - "Dark Side" of the H1-B Program

Submitted by TheGrapeApe on Friday April 20, 2007 @04:21PM

TheGrapeApe writes: Froma Harrop examines the "Dark Side" of the H1-B Visa program, and the subtle ways that corporations are using it to dismantle and extract American programming, graphic design and other service-sector jobs to overseas economies in this piece from the Seattle Times:

Ron Hira has studied the dark side of the H-1B program. A professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, he notes that the top applicants for visas are outsourcing companies, such as Wipro Technologies of India and Bermuda-based Accenture.

The companies bring recruits in from, say, India to learn about American business. After three years here, the workers go home better able to interact with their U.S. customers.

In other cases, companies ask their U.S. employees to train H-1B workers who then replace them at lower pay. "This is euphemistically called, 'knowledge transfer,' " Hira says. "I call it, 'knowledge extraction.' "

Submission + - New Research: Embryo Adoption & Stem Cells

Submitted by

docinthemachine

on Friday April 20, 2007 @12:25PM

docinthemachine writes: "http://docinthemachine.com/2007/04/19/embryoadopti on/ When does human life begin and what is a human? Fertility specialists wrestle with this question every day as embryos are created, frozen, thawed, implanted, and discarded. Occasionally an embryo is even "adopted". Today I received the draft results of a US government Health and Human Services Research Project that I participated in on the potential for embryo adoption in the US. In 2002, the U.S. Congress authorized the Secretary of Health and Human Services to conduct a public awareness campaign to educate Americans about the existence of frozen embryos available for adoption. How many are there, where are they stored, will patients give them for stem cell reseach nad how it relates to the partial birth abortion ban"

Submission + - AMD Nearly Out Of Cash

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 20, 2007 @12:14PM

An anonymous reader writes: Following a horrible quarter and market share losses, AMD is within two quarters of running out of cash, according to EETimes. "AMD lost approximately $883 million in free cash flow in the last quarter, worse than expected, and putting the company within two quarters of running out of cash," EETimes quotes Wall Street analyst Chris Caso as saying. It gets even worse for AMD. After losing significant market share in 2006, Intel struck back in the first quarter of 2007, gaining 4.5 percentage points in the microprocessor market. Intel now holds 80.2 percent of the global chip market. Can AMD dig itself out of a hole? Maybe, maybe not. "AMD will look to lessen the capital needs of its models by outsourcing production and partnering up, though we believe this could take much longer than investors anticipate," analyst Doug Freedman of American Technology Research told EETimes.

Submission + - Easy-to-make material scratches diamond

Submitted by holy_calamity on Friday April 20, 2007 @05:59AM

holy_calamity writes: A material tough enough to scratch diamond that can be made without resorting to massive pressure has been developed at UCLA. A regular furnace and a zap of current is enough to meld boron with the metal rhenium.

Submission + - Small Server for Non-Profit FM Radio Station

Submitted by

Mark Rawlings

on Monday March 26, 2007 @03:37PM

Mark Rawlings writes: "I'm the engineer for a small college radio station and we are trying to figure out the best way to store thousounds (maybe tens of thousands) of CDs digitally. Manpower is not a problem as far as ripping goes, and we are using scott studios software (recently bought by google) to automate everything but we ran out of space fast on our 300gb of space that came with the scott studios machines. We are looking for something that is easy to run, easily upgradable, redundant, and has an ethernet interface. I'm guessing around 5 TB would be a good amount of space to max out with. Speed of drives isn't really an issue as we'll never be streaming more than one file to one source at a time."

Submission + - FreeBSD SMP greatly outperforms Linux under MySQL

Submitted by

shocking

on Sunday February 25, 2007 @07:25PM

shocking writes: "The recent work on moving FreeBSD to a new framework dealing with SMP issues (SMPng) has been finished, so developers have been benchmarking & profiling the code to find performance bottlenecks. After correcting a few, they found that a multithreaded MySQL benchmark performed extremely well under high load, maintaining throughput in situations where Linux throughput collapsed. The write-up is at http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/mysql.html "

Submission + - Drive-By Pharming Attack Could Hit Home Networks

Submitted by Rob on Thursday February 15, 2007 @05:28PM

Rob writes: CBRonline.com is reporting that security researchers at Symantec and Indiana University have figured out a way to compromise home networks using a single line of JavaScript in a web page. The attack, which they have called "drive-by pharming", would enable attackers to convincingly pretend to be any web site on the internet, making it fairly trivial to repeatedly phish for sensitive information, install malware on users' machines, or steal email.

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