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Comment Carbon dating won't work for aliens (Score 1) 175

So ignoring the probability of this being a legitimate alien here for a minute - Carbon dating is based on the accumulation of Carbon-14 in tissues of life on Earth. Assuming an alien was not living out their lifecycle on Earth, it's entirely possible that they have a different native ratio of c14 in their environment. This would make any dating results (assuming the alien claim was legitimate) invalid.

Comment In case you're wondering why Pai would do this.. (Score 5, Insightful) 134

Don't worry - Pai isn't suddenly getting a conscience. Remember that Pai is basically beholden to Verizon (where he will end up at after his "public service"). Verizon is not a wireline provider (like AT&T, Comcast, Cox etc...) When 5g starts to roll out, one of the key battles is going to be over telephone poles. There are going to be tens of thousands of mini-cells mounted on poles to support this rollout - and if you don't own the poles (like Verizon), you're going to be at a disadvantage compared to the companies who do (like AT&T)

This vote isn't pro-internet or pro-freedom or anti-monopoly - it's entirely about ensuring that Verizon isn't at a competitive disadvantage in rolling out their 5g network.

Comment This isn't a victory for Behring-Breivik. (Score 3, Insightful) 491

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

Comment Re:so.. (Score 4, Informative) 161

Why not just pay attention to the European forecasts, which would cost nothing?

Actually, the NWS pays a great deal of money to see the ECMWF (the European model of choice) and are required to encrypt it before it is sent out to the various forecast offices over their NOAAPort system.

Transportation

Moscow Plane Crash Caught On Passerby's Dash Cam 253

acidradio writes "Yesterday a Tupolev 204 (Russian-made aircraft equivalent to an Airbus 321 or a shortened 757) overran the runway at Moscow Vnukovo airport and crashed into a nearby highway. A plane crash is always bad, but what makes this seem different is how well it was recorded. It seems like everyone in Russia has a dashcam, here is footage. A driver who just happened to be driving by on the nearby M3 highway (right about here on the map) is pelted by flying nose wheels and a row of coach-class seats! An accident like this has probably never been filmed so up close. We are getting better and better at recording accidents and disasters (whether by coincidence due to overuse of surveillance or maybe on purpose). What does that say about our level of documentation and recording of people's everyday lives? And what's the deal with dashcams in every Russian car?"

Comment First hand experience here (Score 4, Informative) 510

I recently had a "old" (cir 2008) 64gb SSD drive die on me. It's death followed this pattern:

  • Inexplicable system slowdowns. In hindsight, this should have been a warning alarm.
  • System crash, followed by a failure to boot due to unclean ntfs volume which couldn't be fixed by chkdisk
  • Failed to mount r/w under Ubuntu. Debug logs showed that the volume was unclean and all writes failed with a timeout
  • Successful r/o mount showed that the filesystem was largely intact
  • Successful dd imaged the drive and allowed a restore to a new drive.

After popping a new disk in and doing a partition resize, my system was back up and running with no data loss. Of all the storage hardware failures I've experienced, this was probably the most pain-free as the failure caused the drive to simply degrade into a read-only device.

User Journal

Journal Journal: in which i am a noob all over again 17

I haven't posted a journal here in almost three years, because I couldn't find the button to start a new entry. ...yeah, it turns out that it's at the bottom of the page.

So... hi, Slashdot. I used to be really active here, but now I mostly lurk and read. I've missed you.

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