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Comment Re:still speculation (Score 1) 475

Actually it could be both. TFA doesn't say "warrant canary"; it says "duress canary". Duress could be anything from NSA to Russian Mob to simply getting sick of working on the project.

Furthermore, if the "duress canary" was set up right, inaction would cause it to appear. So it would be the default result of a "rage quit". And maybe they were too sick of the project to bother with anything better.

Comment Re:Git? (Score 1) 141

Besides Git we have Mercurial and Bazaar. All born around the same time so solve the same problem.

I don't know about Mercurial, but have you ever used Bazaar? While Git is written in C, Bazaar is apparently written in Python, and it's even slower than that implies.

Comment Re:One thing the writers missed (Score 1) 112

This idea would only work if either the planet's moon was right in front of it from out point of view, just going behind it or just coming out from behind.

Well...yes, and no. I'll start with the no: The idea is that if the planet and moon are both in front of the star at the same time, no matter how they're aligned, the spectrum will look like it's being filtered through their combined atmospheres. They're just so far away that everything blurs together.

But it does seem like there should be ways to tease them apart. If the planet and moon are widely separated, there should be a brief period when only one atmosphere is filtered at the beginning of the transit and again at the end. This may be too brief for current technology to detect. It could also be mistaken if the planet is really a single planet that is somehow highly asymmetrical. (Perhaps something evaporates by day and condenses by night?)

The other thing that comes to mind is that a moon orbiting a planet will likely have to move fast. Astronomers are good at calculating speeds, especially relative speeds, with redshifts. They've measured the very slow motion of stars as large planets orbit them. So if they detect that the signatures of the two gases have significantly different redshifts, they can conclude that one gas is on a planet while another is on a moon. This doesn't eliminate all false positives - the planet and moon could be close together, and thus not moving much toward or away from Earth, when the transit happens. But multiple transits are likely to have different alignments, unless either the moon's orbital period is synchronized to the planet's, or the planet and moon orbit in a plane perpendicular to our line of sight. Both of these are not impossible, but are unlikely. An asymmetrical planet with a high rotational velocity could also produce a false negative, but this is also unlikely.

Comment Re:Cache money (Score 2) 353

SSDs aren't actually very good for caching. (Though they sell drives and software specifically to do that.) They're better at WORM (Write Once Read Many) or Write Rarely Read Many (WRRM?) tasks. Like installing an OS and other programs there and not modifying them often. (Where "often" = "every few minutes".)

That said, I do have my computer's swapfile on my SSD. But only because I only have 4GB RAM and can't upgrade.

Comment Re:Max RAM? (Score 1) 353

I disagree on 'maxing' it out. ... 8 GB will be fine for the next 4-6 years at least.

And 640k ought to be enough for anyone.

"Enough" RAM is not noticeable. "Not enough" is very noticeable. What "enough" is is likely to continue to increase. More than enough RAM can also improve disk caching, though this has diminishing returns.

Also, Lorizean said:

Put the 64GB in and use it as a ramdisk. Be blown away by the speeds.

Which is better than caching for something like a temp directory.

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