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Submission + - Software error caused Soyuz/Galileo failure 3

schwit1 writes: A report today in Russia says that the investigation into the Soyuz launch failure last week that while the Russian Fregat upper stage fired correctly in attempting to place the two Galileo GPS satellites into orbit, its software was programmed for the wrong orbit.

Submission + - Anita Sarkeesian Death Threats a Hoax

bluefoxlucid writes: It appears the Anita Sarkeesian death threats (covered earlier on slashdot) are a hoax. The tweets all appeared rapid-fire across three minutes; and the screenshot was taken 12 seconds after the final tweet, logged out, directly on the user's page, without a search. A redittor has posted an annotated screenshot debunking the hoax.

Comment Re:Is it so hard to say "Dodecagon"? (Score 1) 202

Actually, I'm pretty sure that when I looked at TFA while it was still in the submission queue, it did say dodecahedron. (And FWIW, I'm pretty sure submitter is the article author for this and quite a few other medium.com articles, which is how the error got propagated.) It was probably fixed after being pointed out. Which, of course, is more than you can say for the Slashdot (non) editors.

Comment Re:GPS Accuracy (Score 3, Informative) 90

Because that's its accuracy for knowing your absolute position in a short period of time. If you use it to determine relative position over a long period of time, it's much more accurate. Apparently there's something called "Carrier phase tracking" which has an accuracy of 2mm for surveying. Or they could have augmented it with ground-based transmitters.

Still, 4mm is quite a small distance to measure with GPS, even with a 2mm accuracy mode.

Comment Blast from the past (Score 3, Interesting) 87

Blocking access to the memory space of other processes has been a solved problem since timesharing in the '60s and '70s, right?

I assume they aren't running in a flat address space with no MMU, so maybe the problem is that the apps all operate under the same user ID, which bypasses the usual multi-user protections. Perhaps "run each app with a unique user ID" will be something we'll see a lot of in the next few years, like the no-execute bit and ASLR were in the 2Ks?

Comment Re:That model really helped Cable TV (Score 1) 611

I don't know how "very early" in the '80s you're talking about, because I remember being intrigued by the appearance of a strange new channel that played music videos. MTV started in mid-1981. And we had a big city cable company, not "two guys with a spool of RG-6". (At the time it was UA Cablevision; later the franchise was sold to Rogers and then Time Warner.)

The early '80s were the glory days of C-band TVRO satellite. Maybe it was just that your cable company at first only had access to channels which just happened to mostly be commercial free. Or maybe you watched a lot of C-SPAN.

Comment Re:That model really helped Cable TV (Score 1) 611

Premium (as in pay $5 or $10 or more per month) movie channels run movies all the way through. The rest of them are just networks without OTA broadcasters. And "early" cable-only channels were just that, experiments like on the internet in the early 2Ks.

I refuse to get pay TV, and now that I've upgraded my DSL to Uverse without TV, the phone company has switched from half a dozen mailings a month to get me to switch to Uverse to half a dozen mailings a month for me to add pay TV. The thing is, I was amused to see that qubo was only in the highest of their three tiers, because in the next market over, it's being broadcast on an OTA channel.

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