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Comment Re:Subs as aircraft carriers (Score 2) 75

The purpose of a submarine like this is be able to deliver their aircraft close to the enemy without being seen, launch the attack (which will appear to have come out of nowhere, with little or no warning) and then leave again without being seen

This is exactly what is done today - Just with submarine-launched cruise missiles. Cruise missiles also have the advantage over human-piloted bombers of not needing to be recovered once the mission is complete.

Comment Re:This never works (Score 4, Insightful) 304

the piracy the Industry fears most is that which occurs solely in the home, without the use of file sharing sites, cause it is ultimately the hardest to police.

I find this hard to believe. If I buy Big Hero 6 on DVD and then rip it so my kid can watch it on my tablet I can't imagine the industry would care that much - Certainly much less than if if I didn't buy the DVD and instead just torrented it.

Comment Not about saving money (Score 3, Informative) 622

Where I live (Vancouver, Canada) the purchase of an electric car is never about savings over gas prices. Even here, where gas costs ~$1.25 CAD per liter and hydroelectric residential power costs $0.0797 CAD per kWh for first 1,350 kWh ($0.1195 CAD per kWh over the 1,350), with a car like the Nissan Leaf you'll never save enough over the life of the car in fuel costs to offset the higher price for the car.

For the people I know with Leafs and Volts it's about doing their bit to reduce pollution and CO2 output, not saving money.

Comment Re:Hooray for druggies! (Score 1) 409

The dogs are consistently abused

Please cite some actual examples of police dogs being constantly abused. You have no idea what you're talking about.

I think "The doges are used in away to abuse the 'suspects'." was closer to what was meant, rather than that the dogs were being mistreated. There are numerous studdies to suggest that the potential for abuse exists:

http://nevergetbusted.com/neve...
http://www.informationliberati...
http://www.wayne-county-forfei...

Comment Re:Hooray for druggies! (Score 1) 409

Or they can be trained to alert on whatever signal their handler wants to give them. Hell, they are dogs, they want to please their handler.

That sentence was valid with "their": "Hell, the handlers dogs, they want to please their handler."

" handler's ", or perhaps " handlers' " but that is less likely as the final "handler" is not plural.

Comment Re:Decent (Score 1) 482

If he is married, $70,000 puts him in a federal tax bracket where his long-term capital gains rate becomes 0%. He is doing this to pay 0% taxes on his stock that he cashes out and any other investments he has.

Really? A quick look at Wikipedia seems to support your statement, but surely this type of obvious loophole is easily plugged by putting some minimums or maximums into the tax code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Can I really gather in all of my cap gains tax free by just making sure that year I have a low enough salaried income? So every decade or so I get my employeer to give me a $1 salary and make sure that in that year I liquidate all of my holdings and then reinvest them, and have thus avoided any tax on my millions of Cap Gains?

Of course, I actually do not have millions in unrealized gains to take advantage of this type of thing...

Comment Re:Fine theoretical work but.... (Score 1) 136

...how many systems let you try new passwords ad-infinitum, rapidly? I know back when I was in college I could brute force Windows shared folders (script kiddie style), but nowadays I'd expect any semi-serious authentication system to limit the number and frequency of login attempts.

I am not an IT professional engaging in rhetoric; I'm actually curious.

No online system is fast enough to brute force an account even if they did allow you to try new passwords ad-infinitum - each attempt would take a second or two and that's just too slow for effective "cracking" I would think.

I believe that the concern is for when there has been a data breach of some sort, and the "bad guys" have gotten the username/password file. The data in this file has been run through some sort of a one way function and thus you cannot just read the usernames and passwords out of it, but since the attacker knows what the one-way function is, they can test to see if any username or password that they want to know about is in the file, and they can do this with all the computing power at their disposal. "Rainbow" tables are pre-calculated results of this one-way function for common usernames and passwords.

The data in the file can be "salted" adding an extra bit of information to the password before running it through the one-way function - even if the "salt" is known by the attacker, this prevents rainbow tables from being useful. There are probably also ways of combining unique salt values, usernames, and passwords so that even "insecure" passwords are difficult to recover from the file, but of course the longest passwords drawn from the largest possible set of characters will always be hardest to "crack".

Comment Re:Game of Thrones (Score 1) 106

Why in the name of fuck would any fucking company want to fuck over its customers?

You misunderstand who the "customers" are.

I live in Canada. Up here in America's hat, GlobalTV Canada has given NBC $X million dollars for the rights to air Saturday Night Live. In exchange, NBC has agreed to not distribute SNL up here - So most of the videos I might want to watch online are regionally blocked.

NBC's 'customer' isn't me - It's GlobalTV Canada.

Ditto all the other regionally blocked content here in the Great White North.

Comment Re:C64 had a cassette drive (Score 1) 74

The TRS-80 Level 1 only had 64k ram. I remember having to trim code to get it to fit and run.

Believe it or not, the Model I "Level 1" had 4K of RAM. The Level II brought it up to 16K. If you added an "Expansion Interface" (also knows as the "Expensive Interface") you could increase the RAM to it's maximum: 48K.

So the Model I never got up to a whopping 64K...

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