Laser are line of sight only, they can't do indirect fire. A ship would also need rail guns to launch projectiles. Its an improvement, but there will still be ammunition limits.

And how do you propose to launch this EMP attack? EMP isn't a magical thing you can just conjure up and cast at someone like a wizard. Pretty much anything you could do to a hit a ship with an EMP would be no less difficult than just blowing up the ship with something explosive. EMP is only preferable if you then intend to send soldiers on bored the ship to seize it and retrieve if for yourself, but good fucking luck with that. I imagine the crew would scuttle it before you had chance.

Erm? Care to explain how a railgun would cause an EMP?

The only New Steam Version game I own is Company of Heroes... which repairs the multiplayer services that were lost due to server shutdowns. In other words, they're restoring the engine of my car, for free, that the original supporting company allowed to die.

Which games specifically become terrible after they change to "New Steam Version"?

Is why you have backups. You need to apply the rule Total Backups = Total Backups -1

so if you have 1 you have 0.

Scheduling an emergency patch and reboot with terminal servers among all employees is a huge PITA! "Awww, do we have too. I've got all this work to...*BEEP*." Sorry guys, finger slipped when it asked me to reboot or not. OTOH, server secure :)

Scheduling an emergency patch and reboot with terminal servers among all employees is a huge PITA! "Awww, do we have too. I've got all this work to...*BEEP*." Sorry guys, finger slipped when it asked me to reboot or not. OTOH, server secure :)

Import-module activedirectory
$ComputerNames = Get-ADcomputer -searchbase (DN of you server/workstation OU here) -filter * | Select-object -expandproperty name

ForEach($ComputerName in $ComputerNames)
{
      Restart-computer -force $ComputerName
}

I agree here. This is the actions of a police state. Its quite disturbing to see complete forfeiture of assets without a trial taking place. I know normally tycoons and other scum like Madhoff and Ken Lay deserve to be tarred and feathered and pilloried for their crimes against society and shareholders, but who exactly was DAMAGED by Silk Road? Did all of the buyers receive their goods? If so, what is the DAMAGE?

How does the government have standing to claim silk road DAMAGED all those buyers?

Why doesnt the government go after Jack Ma and Alibaba? (As in they block those transactions and forbid buying off that fraud-racket-exchange)? Alibaba sells stolen fraudulent broken junk that is masqueraded as legitimate (its basically a crime mall) but we let that go and shut down silk road and seize all assets? Doesnt make sense. Criminal rackets operate eyes wide shut but it seems the Fedzilla is only angry that they couldnt collect tax off these transactions in which case he should be sued for that money.

Total forfeiture seems out of the bounds of due process.

I wonder if they couldn't get Rosetta near Philae, and use the reaction jets on Rosetta to move it (i.e., by blowing on it). Philae only weighs about as much as ping-pong ball; it wouldn't take much to move it away from where it is.

These are all Monday morning quarterbacking, but truth is that all of us should learn from the unfortunate design mistakes that ESA has made

Isn't the whole problem that they assumed a softer (ice) surface?

Look, unless you're a friggin' rocket scientist, or believe they had additional information they didn't use ... summarizing anything as "the whole problem" is kind of childish.

Based on your vast experience of landing on comets after a 10 year journey, do you think you have a better sense of what the assumptions about the hardness of the ice should have been? Maybe you should have shared that with them.

Lots of smart people worked on this, took all they knew and could surmise, and made choices with the best available information, and using the technology and money available to them.

I'm sure as heck not going to say "well, if only they'd done this it would have worked". I know I'm not qualified to do that, and I'm quite certain most of us on Slashdot aren't either. In fact, I'm betting the people who are qualified are all thinking this was a monumentally difficult task. NASA isn't sitting around going "Ha ha!"

To me, even what they did is some pretty mind-boggling engineering. But in interviews I heard over the last few weeks, they still knew there were risks and uncertainties.

It sucks, but unless you're more qualified than the entire team who did this, you have to realize this is still an incredible feat.

I won't even claim this to be an accurate analogy: But this is kind of like hitting a target in China from New York, using a home made gun, in the dark, and while both you and the target are moving.

Me, I'll applaud the ESA and everyone involved. Success for this kind of engineering includes all of the stuff that got you there. Getting far enough to have a failed landing is still a huge undertaking.

Oh, wait, you don't have a probe and wouldn't know how to make one, right?

...I kind of doubt that anybody would physically survive 10 years in zero-G, even assuming they've survived the long-shot odds of no fatal spacecraft malfunctions in 10 years.

While I haven't read the paper, the article seems to have a reasonably big "correlation for non-victim" bar. If this means false positives, it makes this technique at least a lot less useful than the "81%" deanonymization rate that they claim. It might make it useless for anything really.

Honestly, this all seems like more headline and less news. But I do still have to read the paper.