camperdave - Slashdot User

Comment Re:North Pole (Score 1) 496

by camperdave on Wednesday May 20, 2015 @07:38PM (#49740671) Attached to: The Brainteaser Elon Musk Asks New SpaceX Engineers

You are misunderstanding the starting point. The starting point is one mile north of these rings.

The other, less common answer, is that there are an infinite number of places on the Earth, where you would end up at the starting location if you were to travel one mile south, west, then north. And that is anywhere 1.159 miles north of the South Pole. You would travel south for one mile, putting you at .159 miles north of the South Pole. Then travelling one mile west would cause you to make a complete circle around the South Pole, ending where the westward mile started. Then travel one mile north and that would put you back at your original starting point.

Comment Re:Or they're just proxying their connections (Score 1) 224

by camperdave on Wednesday May 20, 2015 @04:34PM (#49739405) Attached to: Canadian Piracy Rates Plummet As Industry Points To New Copyright Notice System

They can have copyright protection for as long as they pay the exponentially increasing annual fee. First year is a dollar. Each subsequent year is twice the previous year.

Comment Re:This is a ridiculous way to make concrete. (Score 1) 94

by camperdave on Wednesday May 20, 2015 @03:13AM (#49733607) Attached to: Biologists Create Self-Healing Concrete

No, they are made by running a tool called a grooving trowel across the surface of the sidewalk. This creates a half inch (or more) deep groove in the concrete, and because the concrete is thinner at the groove, that's where the slab cracks.

Comment Re:done already, and so? (Score 1) 216

by camperdave on Tuesday May 19, 2015 @02:17PM (#49728113) Attached to: Trojanized, Info-Stealing PuTTY Version Lurking Online

I'm sure the publishers of tainted versions of PuTTY also have MD5s I can download and verify against.

Comment Re:WTF (Score 3, Insightful) 216

by camperdave on Tuesday May 19, 2015 @02:11PM (#49728053) Attached to: Trojanized, Info-Stealing PuTTY Version Lurking Online

Don't you think that a person who is making a malicious version of Putty is also capable of putting MD5 checksums of the malicious code on their download site? Checking MD5 sums against those published by the author is useless. You need to check against publicly verified, independently published checksums.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 216

by camperdave on Tuesday May 19, 2015 @02:02PM (#49727945) Attached to: Trojanized, Info-Stealing PuTTY Version Lurking Online

Um... Duplo

Comment Re:Dear DICE (Score 0) 216

by camperdave on Tuesday May 19, 2015 @02:00PM (#49727933) Attached to: Trojanized, Info-Stealing PuTTY Version Lurking Online

Dear DICE...

Slashdot doesn't belong to Dice anymore. It's DHI Group now.

Comment Re: Nuclear waste (Score 1) 150

by camperdave on Saturday May 16, 2015 @08:18PM (#49708079) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Payloads For Asteroid Diverter/Killer Mission?

Come now. How and why would we shoot Venus and Mercury into the Sun?

Comment Re:Sure, a "letter" (Score 0) 121

by camperdave on Saturday May 16, 2015 @10:36AM (#49705391) Attached to: Canadian Prime Minister To Music Lobby: Here's Your Copyright Term Extension

there is absolutely no other reason to do this than being bribed outright and openly.

I can think of a reason: The good of the country and its peoples are best served by having a long copyright.

Of course, I'm not saying I agree with that reason, or that it is true in any way. However, if it were true, then a politician would be doing exactly the right thing in supporting it.

Comment Re:This is a ridiculous way to make concrete. (Score 1) 94

by camperdave on Friday May 15, 2015 @01:31PM (#49698941) Attached to: Biologists Create Self-Healing Concrete

If you can't produce crack free concrete, there is something wrong with you.

Concrete is often deliberately cracked to allow for thermal expansion and contraction. That's why we have lines on the sidewalks and joints in the roads. These bacteria would fill those in and cause heaving.

Comment Re:Those pour [sic] souls (Score 3, Funny) 94

by camperdave on Friday May 15, 2015 @01:13PM (#49698783) Attached to: Biologists Create Self-Healing Concrete

Meh! Ship the whole lot back to Vega if they don't want to live here.

Comment Re:Floppy disk? (Score 5, Funny) 368

by camperdave on Friday May 15, 2015 @01:03PM (#49698705) Attached to: MenuetOS, an Operating System Written Entirely In Assembly, Hits 1.0

It fits on a floppy disk? We are in 2015, right? What is a 'floppy disk'?

It's an object lesson in using pure assembly. By the time you get anything useful done, technology has moved on.

Comment Re:Note to Slashdot Editors (Score 2) 115

by camperdave on Friday May 15, 2015 @02:41AM (#49695995) Attached to: Baidu's Supercomputer Beats Google At Image Recognition

Pretty soon Penny's shoe app will become a reality.

Comment Re:You cannot know WHO is voting (Score 1) 258

by camperdave on Friday May 15, 2015 @12:28AM (#49695675) Attached to: Online Voting Should Be Verifiable -- But It's a Hard Problem

The returning officer could just enter the voter's jurisdiction into a website and print a ballot, which the voter would take into the booth, fill out, and deposit into the ballot box. What's so hard about that?

Comment Re:TED talk - David Bismark: E-voting without Frau (Score 1) 258

by camperdave on Thursday May 14, 2015 @02:49PM (#49691865) Attached to: Online Voting Should Be Verifiable -- But It's a Hard Problem

What's to prevent a hacker from inserting votes into the system? Granted, there is a mechanism for detecting if votes are deleted, but it relies on people checking their vote receipt against a website. The bulk of the population is not going to do that, so a hacker has fairly high probability of being able to delete votes without being detected. And what happens when a hack is detected? Is there a way of determining how many of the ballots are tainted? Do you run the election again, or go with the results of the untainted ballots?

Maybe there is more to this system than was explained in the video, but It doesn't seem entirely bombproof at first glance.

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