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Comment Re:Illegal and Dangerous? (Score 1) 200

I say try because in a battle between a jet engine with the power to push 400 tons of steel into the sky VS a drone I'm going to put my money on the jet engine lasting long enough for them to turn around and land again.

You might want to rethink that after being reminded of jet airliners being brought down by birds - not an ounce of metallic content, just a few pounds of meat and soft lightweight bones - or the 747 which almost crashed after all four engines failed from ingesting some ash. (Fortunately, they happened to be relatively near an airport and were high enough to glide for over a hundred miles, which bought them just enough time to restart an engine while they had been preparing to ditch in the ocean, buying them enough time to limp to the nearest runway - although all four engines were damaged beyond repair.)

For that matter, the French Concorde which crashed in 2000 was destroyed by a single thin strip of metal, 17 inches long and just over an inch wide, less than four ounces: essentially, a slightly larger than average metal ruler. It didn't even go into an engine, it just burst a tire - violently enough that the ten pound lump of rubber ruptured the wing and number 5 fuel tank, causing the crash which killed everyone on board.

That was a single 4 oz strip of metal hitting a tire. A pound of bolts or nails will destroy the engine - or a metal drone engine that size.

Comment Re:Good luck with that (Score 1) 272

Some of the stupid interviewing criteria that my colleagues and me [sic] had to deal with boggles my mind.

Ahh, reminds me of the Angry Aussie and his response to pointless interview questions:

For instance, there was the putz I had to see this week who thought he was being really clever. It seems as though someone gave him the book of Microsoft interview questions and he was eager to show off his new "knowledge". This style of interviewing gives you abstract questions that have no relationship whatsoever to the work you'll be doing. Or to the real world.

Proponents say they're trying to see how creatively you can think. Normal humans say it's a waste of time.

Comment Re:Come on Google (Score 1) 71

For the random people that use Orkut like others use Facebook, it really is not a lot of time to figure out what to do with potentially gigabytes of information. That holds particularly true for anyone that is not technically savvy.

How long does it take to slide over to Google Takeout and download all of your data?

A few minutes? An hour?

When Goog crushed Wave, I downloaded all my stuff in a matter of minutes. Couldn't really do much with it, but it lowered my White Hot Rage down to Red.

Comment How to Fail (Score 1) 536

  1. 1. Rewrite your code
  2. 2. Fix all the bugs you introduced that didn't exist in the original
  3. 3. (and ongoing) Run into all the edge cases that were discovered and solved years ago in the original code.
  4. 4. Spend tons of manhours and tie up your talent pool rewriting just to get where you are now instead of adding new features.
  5. 5. Embrace your FAIL

Comment Re:False Warnings? (Score 2) 135

The alternative I would like to see would be to forbid the company from doing business for a time equivalent of what the prison sentence would be.

Imagine if the US wasn't bought and paid for? If an oil company poisoned the gulf like what happened with the Deepwater Horizon (11 dead and massive damage to the fishing industry and the environment), the US government would simply pull its charter and be done with it: that company would cease to exist.

All the other corporations would thereafter straighten up and fly right, lest the same thing happen to them. (Or they would try to buy the government and defang it like it is now).

Comment Re:Except, of course, they have to prove you can (Score 5, Insightful) 560

He should have remained silent. Being a lawyer he should have known that.

He must be a pretty shite lawyer. (Hopefully he isn't a criminal defense lawyer, because then he really IS a shite lawyer.)

FTFA:

“During his postarrest interview with State police Trooper Patrick M. Johnson, the defendant stated ... ‘[e]verything is encrypted and no one is going to get to it.’ The defendant acknowledged that he was able to perform decryption.”

What a dumb-bumble-fark. He deserves to burn for bragging/taunting the cops.

Rules for Talking to Cops

ONE
Don't talk to cops, except what you are legally required to say (you must ID yourself, to whatever extent your state's laws specify)
TWO
The only thing that should come out of your piehole from the time your are arrested (especialy during any "post-arrest 'let's get the suspect to incriminate himself' interview") are the words: "I wish to remain silent and I want a lawyer."
TREE
STFU until you get a lawyer
FOUR
Remember that Everything you say will be used to burn you. Cops can lie and get away with it, and if you lie to a cop, you're fried. Do not believe anything they say, and don't try to talk your way out of it because you'll lose.
NaN
Getting (and following) legal advice from random people on the internets is about the stupidest thing you could do.
Space

Evidence of a Correction To the Speed of Light 347

KentuckyFC writes: In the early hours of the morning on 24 February 1987, a neutrino detector deep beneath Mont Blanc in northern Italy picked up a sudden burst of neutrinos. Three hours later, neutrino detectors at two other locations picked up a second burst. These turned out to have been produced by the collapse of the core of a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud that orbits our galaxy. And sure enough, some 4.7 hours after this, astronomers noticed the tell-tale brightening of a blue supergiant in that region, as it became a supernova, now known as SN1987a. But why the delay of 7.7 hours from the first burst of neutrinos to the arrival of the photons? Astrophysicists soon realized that since neutrinos rarely interact with ordinary matter, they can escape from the star's core immediately. By contrast, photons have to diffuse through the star, a process that would have delayed them by about 3 hours. That accounts for some of the delay but what of the rest? Now one physicist has the answer: the speed of light through space requires a correction.

Comment Re:Genius! (Score 1) 132

There are many arguments against adding the IDE, but I don't agree with this one. People said the same thing when Google came out with Gmail. "We've already got hotmail and yahoo and a million other free email services. Why do we need another?" If this tool is good enough or simple enough to use that it becomes ubiquitous, then it doesn't matter what's already out there.

Submission + - Does Slashdot deliver Malware?! (getfree-soft.net)

sandro writes: I have been a regular reader of Slashdot for decades, and it is my home page. I always have one tab open to slashdot, and that's why I have noticed over the past few days a troubling trend. I find numerous tabs open to http://lp.getfree-soft.net/ trying to get me to download their new "free open source cross platform media player". Of course I don't click on the link, it's got to be bad, but what gives?! It looks like slashdot's new advertising model is open to malware, and that can't be good...

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