Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:What difference now does it make? :) Sunk costs (Score 1) 364

I have no idea what I'm talking about here, but how many "modern air wars" have there been in (say) the last 50 years? The Falklands war is one - how many more have there been? How many do we expect in the next (say) 50?

It seems to me that conflict is getting smaller. That is, it's less about taking over entire continents and more about killing a few people at the train station to get in the media and get some fear going. AFAIK, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan used some air support, but there was no "air war" as such (maybe some people trying to shoot down planes, but that's entirely different from dog-fighting).

That said, if another state of reasonable size was to decide it wanted another state's land, then things scale up quite quickly. However, how much of that really causes "air wars"? The issues in Ukraine suggest that the implications of state-based action is more financial than it would be military.

When the Eurofighter project was in full swing, I wondered the same thing - I mean, how many times do we think we're going to need such a thing? That said, it came up with (what looks to me at least) as a pretty cool aircraft with some cool tech inside it. Shame it's all classified :-(

Comment Re:Maybe something sensible? (Score 2) 94

We can expect millions of euros spent on months and months of wrangling to try to keep the most corporate-sponsored parts of the plan to be kept in whilst wording them in such a way that they don't look so corporately sponsored. All the features that the ordinary people of Europe might want will be watered down in wording that looks like it's all good but actually gives no power to those clauses.

If you want shitty legislation, you've really got to pay for it. If you want good legislation, look elsewhere :-(

Comment That's nothing! (Score 2) 96

I'm a mathematics genius too. I counted all my money, and I've managed to amass 23 billion pounds, just in my wallet (and that's after I bought lunch). That doesn't include all the money in my penny jar at home and the stuff that's down the back of the sofa. If we add all that, I'm pretty sure I'm the second richest person in the world.

Comment Re: Whoops (Score 1) 239

...like the BBC? All you need to do is search there instead of Google: http://www.bbc.co.uk/search/?q... Or even frikkin' Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?q=S...

And there is the ridiculousness of this law. It's not about "being forgotten" it's about breaking Google's market dominance. Either way, it's complete bullshit and should never have been made into a law.

Comment Re:One non-disturbing theory (Score 1) 304

One place I worked had some branded water bottles made up for some event or other. Some of them didn't get used and got put in a cupboard for a year or two. When we found them, just about all of them had sort of "over inflated" a bit (and were past their use-by date). Given they were in the office, it seems unlikely they got heated to such an extent that the contents would have expanded that much purely due to temperature. I'm not qualified, but I'd imagine they'd begun to degrade, releasing a bit of gas into the water and reducing the structural integrity of the bottle allowing the "over inflated" look.Needless to say, no one was keen to try drinking any of the water ;-)

Comment Re:Age of the earth (Score 5, Insightful) 98

Day 0 - Our sun is puked into existence, with a shit-tonne of rubble floating around it.
100 million years later, a big rock hits earth - thus earth must have been there, so we know earth was made on or before 100 million years after the sun. Previous measurements of our atmosphere from rocks suggests this to be true.

French people look at all the observations, and saw that the calibrations were a bit off, and then worked out that collision took place 60 million years earlier than previously thought. Therefore, the earth must have formed 60 million years earlier than first thought, and been solid and "finished" enough to be able to produce the moon from the impact. That suggests the earth was formed in 40 million years, not 100 million years - that makes quite a difference to our understanding of how planets are formed. From the French perspective, this means the FSM didn't have as many RTT days in his contract as was previously thought, and possibly worked many of the days we now consider public holidays too.

Comment No problem - Deny access to the SD Card (Score 1) 249

I just found out last night that my Galaxy Note 8 can't write to it's SD card any more (after a KitKat update). This also is some brain-dead move by Google to make my tablet "more secure".

What it's actually done is pissed me off so much that I'm now going to spend the time rooting the thing. I can understand limiting apps to certain areas of the system, but giving them 100% unfettered access to the internal storage, and deny just about anything from the SD card isn't it.

I'd like to be able to see the list of permissions an app needs (in groups, if you like), and then deselect any I don't think it should have - if an app I don't like the look of wants to use my SD card, then I should be able to turn it off. I know this is possible with a rooted system, so it seems that's the only way to go for me (particularly as I quite like being able to use my SD card that Samsung took the time to bundle with my tablet).

If my phone asks me to upgrade to kitkat, I'm gonna say no. I'm sure that doesn't make me more secure. I'm sure rooting my tablet isn't really Google's idea of "more secure" either. Assuming I'm right about that, then they should find a way to let me override their brain-dead missteps.

Slashdot Top Deals

1 + 1 = 3, for large values of 1.

Working...