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Comment Re: Try looking at all of them. (Score 2, Insightful) 85

Wow. I mean, really, BFW. What are they going to do? Monitor my viewing habits? Record me sitting on my couch? Geez they must live boring lives if *mine* is of any interest.

Do you have shades or curtains in your house?
Why?
What are they going to do? Monitor your eating habits? Record you on the toilet? Geez, they must live boring lives if yours is of any interest.

Comment I call bullshit. (Score 1, Informative) 67

I call bullshit on that one.

They claim a 42,225 mm^2.
That's over 4 dm^2, a rectangle 20 cm x 20 cm, roughly 7 in x 7 in.

And the biggest available wafer only sports 64,000 mm^2.

So it cannot be a single chip. Now they may packages a bunch of smaller chips into a single package, but that's been done before and is much less impressive. It cannot be the largest chip ever built. Possibly the largest number of chips in a single package, but they lost all cred at this stage.

Comment Re:ISIS much? (Score 1) 192

Being afraid of a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant is an unreasonable fear. A nuclear reactor isn't a nuclear bomb. Suppose they actually access the plant, how are they suppose to turn it into an actual cataclysmic event? The amount of logistic, knowledge and luck required to turn it into an actual threat is higher than many other alternatives.

Are you so sure?
What if someone blew up the primary loop pumps and emptied or blew up the cooling pools?
That's 2 bombs and then you have an uncooled pressure cooker full of fissile material and other nasty fission byproducts in a place that's become out of reach because of the massive radioactivity from the uncovered used fuel.
It may not go full Tchernobyl, but it definitely may go Fukushima-style.

This fear of a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant is again largely exagerrated and fed by the anti-nuclear activists. They want the mass to perceive the nuclear plants as a perpetual, constant and actual threat against the human kind.

Agreeing with you here.

Comment They got it all wrong... (Score 1) 116

Page 9 of the linked PDF, on the Mr Obvious decision diagram, the conclusion if there's too much radioactivity inside the reactor building is:

Feed&Breed / [*] Cooling the reactor core by feeding and breeding

I certainly hope they're talking about feed and bleed.... There no need breeding any more isotopes at this point.

Wow, Slashdot is lame, I pasted some japanese characters and slashdot does not render them properly. They are where the [*] is.

Comment Easy as pie in 3 firefox extensions (Score 2, Informative) 533

Install the following:

Then configure CookieSafe to "Deny Cookies Globally" (you can easily make exceptions for some sites). BetterPrivacy and TrackMeNot come with suitable defaults.

With this set-up, no cookies will be created. DOM Storage (super-cookies) and flash cookies will be wiped whenever you close your browser. And you will gently spam Google and other search engines with random searches, just in case they do tracking by IP addresses.

You may also want to throw in:

  • FlashBlock and AdBlockPlus, to make the web more... uh... readable.
  • NoScript, if you're paranoid.
Graphics

Nvidia Fakes Fermi Boards At GPU Tech Conference 212

fragMasterFlash writes with this excerpt from SemiAccurate: 'In a really pathetic display, Nvidia actually faked the introduction of its latest video card, because it simply doesn't have boards to show. Why? Because it didn't get enough parts to properly bring them up, much less make demo boards. ... Notice that the three screws that hold the end plate on are, well, generic wood screws. Large flat -head Phillips screws. Home Depot-grade screws that don't even sit flush. If a card is real, you hold it on with the bolts on either side of the DVI connector. Go look at any GPU you have; do you see wood screws that don't mount flush or DVI flanking bolts? ... If you look at the back of the fake Fermi, [from this PC Watch picture], you can see that the expected DVI connector wires are not there, just solder-filled holes. No stubs, no tool marks from where they would be cut out. Basically, the DVI port isn't connected to anything with solder, so they had to use screws on the plate."
Software

Getting Through the FOSS License Minefield 96

dotancohen writes "Here's an exercise: Write a GPLed server for solving Freecell that the graphical game would communicate with using TCP/IP or a different IPC mechanism. Easy, right? Except for that pesky licensing bit. Our own Shlomi Fish gives an overview of the various options in picking up a licence for one's FOSS project, and tries to give some guidelines choosing one."
Music

Financial Crisis Soundtrack 31

German musician Johannes Kreidler made a soundtrack of the global economic crisis composed by running financial graphs through SongSmith. It gets political in a few spots, but is bleakly funny.

Comment CGS WTF? (Score 1) 260

He must be setting NASA up for an other "Mars Climate Orbiter" kind of disaster.

Whatever may be the reason, on most of the paper, his calculations and figures are in the obsolete CGS system (Centimeter, Grams, Seconds). Forces are in dynes, pressures in g/cm^2, etc.

And then you see later in the paper Amperes and Watts (which are SI units).

CGS and SI (or MKS) don't mix.

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