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Comment Re:Plutonium Thermal-Electric? (Score 3, Interesting) 116

It's way too heavy. An RTG needs a lot of metal to work, encapsulation of the plutonium, radiators, and it needs size - there has to be a temperature differential for it to work, and for that you need a certain amount of distance to dissipate the heat across.

And it's way too inefficient. The RTG used on the Voyager Probes produced about 2400 Watts of thermal power, which was enough for 157W of electricity. The total weight of the device was 37.7 kg. This Parrot drone consumes 14.5 W when hovering, so even if RTGs scaled in a linear manner (which is optimistic), a large enough unit would be larger than the payload capacity.

The hydrogen tank in the structural members carries 120g of fuel. You could extend the longevity of the thing enormously by fitting a secondary fuel tank as part of that 1kg payload you're allowed.

Encryption

Online Voting Should Be Verifiable -- But It's a Hard Problem 258

An anonymous reader writes with a link to a pithy overview at The Conversation of recent uses of (and nagging difficulties with) online voting and asks Regular 'internet voting too risky' arguments don't take some approaches into account like verifiability of votes by voters, observers, and international media. Could we have end-to-end verifiable online voting systems in the future? What are the difficulties? Where is it being done already? From the linked article (which provides at least some answers to those questions), one interesting idea:Another challenge to designing verifiability in online voting is the possibility of malware infection of voters' computers. By some estimates between 30%-40% of all home computers are infected. It’s quite possible that determined attackers could produce and distribute malware specifically designed to thwart or alter the outcome of a national election – for example undetectably changing the way a user votes and then covering its tracks by faking how the vote appears to have been cast to the voter. Whatever verifability mechanisms there are could also be thwarted by the malware.

One way to try to prevent this kind of attack is to make voters use several computers during the voting process. Although this is hardly convenient, the idea is to make it more difficult for an attacker to launch a co-ordinated attack across several computers at once.

Comment Re: nature will breed it out (Score 1) 950

On the flip side, my divorce has been relatively painless. Initiated by my wife, we agreed the only financial responsibilities we share are the house and my daughter. I pay maintenance for my daughter and we're splitting the house. She earns about what I do, so why fuss?

I imagine the ferocity of your wife's attack lawyer varies depending on the grounds for divorce. In my case, we were just neglecting each other emotionally. I imagine in cases where there has been adultery, things get much worse.

Comment Re: nature will breed it out (Score 3, Informative) 950

They don't treat the guys they meet well either - ever played a MOBA game? You'll get constant accusations of being a noob, and have various curses thrown at you until your standard of play is what they demand. Of course, I've seldom seen actual advice on how to play better, which would be far more productive.

Comment Re:best option: plumbing (Score 1) 420

I liked my analysis of this in the recent "Peter Principle / PHB" story.

Aside from all the communications considerations, what you get with the Indian culture is a lot of deference and obedience. Which is precisely what you don't want, because they do exactly what managers tell them to do, and managers are by definition, people who are not competent to do their job.

It's a GIGO problem...

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