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Comment Re:Favorite =/= Celebrated in my case. (Score 1) 157

by Platinumrat (#42439725) Attached to: My favorite New Year's celebration:

Personally, I love the Thai New Year (in April).

You gotta love a New Year Celebration that involves an entire country in a Water Fight for a week. Everyone is fair game. I once saw a police sergeant on a motocycle, covered from head-to-toe in white powder and drenched in water. His service revolver and radio were encased in zip-lock plastic bags. As he rode past, everyone was throwing water at him.

Comment Re:Humour and irony (Score 2) 225

Actually, I spent a lot of time in Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia and can say that following is my experience:

a) Chinese generally don't get sarcasm, except those brought up abroad

b) Indonesians sometimes understand it, but seem to think more about the next meal

c) Thais live for Sarcasm. They do it so well, you can't tell sometimes.

Comment Re:The Maths (Score 1, Troll) 328

by Platinumrat (#42283111) Attached to: Is It Worth Investing In a High-Efficiency Power Supply?

I'd like to add to the above. It truly depends on circumstances.

If you're trying to be energy neutral or positive in your living (e.g you want to be off the grid with a wind/solar setup) then every efficiency gain will more than offset the cost of producing / storing the power required).

If you're just wanting to view movies / ebay / email an live in a McMansion, with the full home theater setup, then there's no point because the rest of your lifestyle says "Fuck the planet, I'm all right"
Apple

Submission + - Russian iTunes Store shows porn images (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by another random user
another random user writes: Users accessing Apple's iTunes Store in Russia have been getting porn images when searching for films to rent.

Movies without images have been linking to xxx.xxx web address. The intention might have been to link to a placeholder, said one IT expert, but addresses ending in .xxx are real websites with explicit content.
Earth

Submission + - The Moons local gravity mapped (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Dupple
Dupple writes: "If you look at how highly cratered the Moon is — the Earth used to look like that; parts of Mars still do look like that," explained Prof Maria Zuber, Grail's principal investigator from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US.

"This period of time when all these impacts where occurring — this was the time when the first microbes were developing.

"We had some idea from the chemistry [of ancient rocks] that Earth was a violent place early on, but now we now know it was an extremely difficult place energetically as well, and it shows just how tenacious life had to be to hang on," she told BBC News.

Prof Zuber was speaking in San Francisco at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the world's largest annual gathering for Earth and planetary scientists..
Moon

Submission + - Battered Crust Reveals Moon's Violent Past

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "AFP reports that new images from a pair of spacecraft that are orbiting the Moon and measuring its gravitational field point to a violent past in which it was battered by comets and asteroids during its first billion years. "It was known that planets were battered by impacts, but nobody had envisioned that the (Moon's) crust was so beaten up," says Maria Zuber, the MIT scientist leading the mission. "This is a really big surprise, and is going to cause a lot of people to think about what this means for planetary evolution." As the pair of spacecraft named Ebb and Flow flew over areas of greater and lesser gravity, caused both by visible features such as mountains and craters and by masses hidden beneath the lunar surface, they moved slightly toward and away from each other. An instrument aboard each spacecraft measured the changes in their relative velocity very precisely, and scientists translated this information into a high-resolution map of the Moon's gravitational field. Unlike the Earth's crust, which is repeatedly recycled through the process of plate tectonics, the Moon's hard crust dates back billions of years, offering clues to the formation of the solar system, including Earth. Around 98 percent of the crust is deeply fragmented, porous material, the result, scientists say, of very early, massive impacts. Scientists say the beating was far more extensive than previously thought. "This is interesting for the Moon," says Zuber. "But what it also means is that every other planet was being bombarded like this.""
Power

Submission + - Australian researchers develop promising new approach to hydrogen storage (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: Scientists at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia, are developing a novel way to store hydrogen that could help turn it into a viable portable fuel source. The research centers on using synthesized nanoparticles of the compound sodium borohydride (NaBH4 for those who love chemistry), which when encased inside nickel shells exhibits surprising and practical storage properties including the ability to reabsorb hydrogen and release it at much lower temperatures than previously observed, making it an attractive proposition for transport applications.
NASA

Submission + - Space Jump man Junks Space Exploration (americaspace.org)

Submitted by Platinumrat
Platinumrat writes: I find it sad when newborn celebrities dish out against the very people and organisations that made them famous in the first place. The fact is that Felix Baumgartner, used technology developed from space exploration and is now saying that exploration is a waste of time and money.
In my books, I agree with Amy Shira Teitel
(http://amyshirateitel.com/2012/10/28/felix-baumgartner-unwitting-role-model/) when says that Felix went from a postive to a negative role model in just weeks.

Comment Re:This is a good idea with countless benefits. (Score 1) 165

by Platinumrat (#41673735) Attached to: Kaspersky To Build Secure OS For SCADA Systems

It won't work. SCADA was built off the assumption of physical security. It would take firing everyone who ever worked in SCADA to design the next generation of applications to get anything with security in it. Why would anyone switch to this "secure" system, when it's already more secure (physically) than any "program" can make it?

That's a bit of a stretch. I work in SCADA and it's not the developer's who are the problem. I, myself, harp on about security every other week. However, the marketing and development managers don't give a rats arse. If it's not a new "shiny" or something the competition has, then no money gets put into it.

Even when security is called out in the standards or client specifications, it's usually just security theater. The maintainers and end users don't want security and tend to bypass the token methods implemented anyway.

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