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Comment I want a passenger car like that (Score 1) 67

Where do I sign up?.

No infotaiment or GPS, maybe an AM/FM radio. Optional cruse control. I'd live with hand cranked widows, but some sort of air conditioning would be nice. Pick some second party sourced drive train and engine. Only open source microprocessor hardware/software.

Time to take my meds because I'm clearly hitting a manic phase and need to come down.

Submission + - Bill Gates: Sex Machine (battleswarmblog.com)

Nova Express writes: "Bill Gates was accused of having more than 20 extramarital affairs in the fallout from his divorce from ex-wife Melinda, the billionaire told Gates Foundation staffers during a sullen town meeting earlier this year, according to a new report." I don't think anyone had Bill Gates, sex machine on their 2026 bingo card. Or any other year's bingo card.

Comment Really? (Score 2) 24

Some conversations should never be done using devices that you or your organization doesn't fully understand and control.

If this means meeting in person or going to fixed locations that have secure communications channels, so be it.

If this means using only using devices that your organization can verify are secure enough to meet its needs, so be it.

Comment "The reason why" lost in final work product (Score 2) 86

Look at most instruction manuals. Look at most architectural blueprints. Look at a schematic. Look at a recipe book. Look at most other "work products" that amount to human-readable instruction manuals.

Now look for the "why". "Why are we doing this in the first place." "Why did we do it this way vs. the various alternatives." Etc.

Sometimes you will see the "why" but most of the time you won't.

At least code has the advantage of having a mechanism to put the documentation near the relevant portion of the final work product.

Comment Re:Everybody Hates Documentation (Score 2) 86

I am reminded of some source code for a company-specific program that I saw in the late 1990s. I don't remember why I was perusing it, as I was in IT and absolutely not a developer. But I remember being tickled at one of the comments before a block of code. It was something like, "I have no idea why or how the following code works. But every time someone tries to change it, everything breaks, so please don't touch it."

Comment Cookie storage is a file system (Score 1) 111

My browser should have zero knowledge of what a filesystem is.

If your web browser didn't store a session identifier in a small file called a cookie, how would Slashdot's server know that you're logged in as ArchieBunker (132337)? Otherwise, I'm not sure where you've mentally drawn a line between cookie storage and "a filesystem" proper.

Comment Re: No, based on the summary (Score 3, Interesting) 140

It sounds to me like the input to the algorithm is truly random, but not unbiased, and the algorithm perfectly unbiases output from the particular source they are using. The rest of the article goes into the type of flaw they're addressing, and talks about very slightly unfair dice, which you could correct, but you'd need to know exactly how unfair they are, and you're always going to be very slightly wrong and end up correcting not quite perfectly. The obvious quantum RNG is to generate polarized light and measure it perpendicular to the polarization, but you'd still need to get it perfectly perpendicular. It sounds like they've built something that doesn't rely on precise alignment to give a known distribution, which they can then use to unbias the output perfectly.

Comment Re:Thanks to Trump (Score 1) 185

That's not the reason that both bombs were dropped. They were dropped because the military saw them as just another tool in the toolbox, just like the bombs dropped on all the other cities that continued to be dropped on other cities until the surrender. Truman ended the military's control of atomic bombs after Nagasaki, when the USAAF was preparing to use a third bomb, establishing civilian control of atomic weapons. Firebombing continued, though, right up to Kumagaya, Akita, and Osaka getting hit in the 24 hours prior to Hirohito taking to the airwaves.

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