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Comment Re: incorrect (Score 1) 101

The only justifiable reason to tolerate coal is because it is one of the few energy sources that can store, independent of weather and other factors, large amounts of "fuel" at the project site. Generally sites will hold 1-3 months worth on the coal pile. The only other energy sources which can do this at a reasonable cost are nuclear, biomass, and geothermal, all of which are more expensive than coal (if you exclude health impacts).

Comment Re: Oh look. (Score 2, Insightful) 342

The most likely outcome is that we will end up with the same deal as the previous one which Trump canceled. Arguably worse because Iran has demonstrated that they can indeed close the straight for all practical purposes. 60+ days of bombing by the most powerful nation on the earth accomplished basically nothing. A few more days will surely do it though.

Comment Re: Out of control demand for power (Score 2) 107

It's worth noting that nuclear reactors don't really explode in the way people think of. What they can do is turn into radioactive lava, melt through the floor, and release the highly carcinogenic dust from their system into the environment. They're generally big water heaters without pressure release valves (because the water has the carcinogenic dust in it), so they can burst like any water heater, and they contain zirconium, which reacts with steam at high temperatures to release hydrogen gas, which can make fireballs, but the accident risk is much less about a shock wave destroying the site than airborne radioactive particles getting out. And, even if the reactor design is incapable of producing enough heat to damage itself without first shutting down, you still have to worry about whether the site is safe enough from external damage. The traditional thick concrete walls are as much about keeping runaway trucks out as keeping steam explosions in.

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: Waiting (Score 1) 47

The cost is different if you hold an airline credit card. Almost all (all?) award a free checked bag and carry on bag for cardmembers. Given the high cost of checked bags now the cards are often worthwhile after just 1 trip. Plus, while taking advantage of ultra no-frills fares is technically possible, most people need to travel with clothes. The only person I ever saw on ultra budget airlines with no bag at all was a guy going from his home to his second home.

Comment Re: Hmmmmm... (Score 1) 65

It's pretty close to being an MP3 marked as a BMP, actually. It's the result of taking a reversable transformation of the audio signal that separates out the different perceptible components and then discarding the ones that matter least, and keeping the important ones in a convenient form for accessing them. It's the first step you'd take if you wanted a computer to identify speakers or what they were saying. The only part that's image-related is making the diagram, but getting back to the data is just taking the pixel values.

I suspect that they started using spectrograms in reports at a time when getting back the data from the image would have lost too much quality to printing and scanning to hear anything as quiet as voices, but PDFs with lossless images retain all of that.

Comment Re: Disclosure Timing Drama Part 2.0 (Score 1) 23

I suspect part of it is that the mitigation for DirtyFrag covers it, so everyone who blocked all the modules in question when that had only an incomplete patch probably hasn't unblocked them yet. I think this is the 4th patch for these modules, and only got a new name rather than just "there's still a way to get this code to do the wrong thing" because a different outside team found this one.

Comment Re: Embargo intrigue (Score 1) 44

Yeah, and the person who released the information first was operating in an "if I noticed this, doing only as much as I'm doing, surely attackers would also notice" mode. Possibly some patches these days are sufficiently obvious as to their correctness and also effect that they should first become public as a set of stable releases. This was a kind of special case, as CopyFail was the combination of some code doing something strange with one user not being prepared for it, and fixed the user. If there are other users that also aren't prepared, fixing them isn't going to be subtle.

Comment Re: Gun cam, in a maneuvering jet (Score 1) 83

How shadows and reflections move when you're 10 milies from a mostly flat surface a thousand miles across is legitimately hard to analyze for a visual system that evolved on the ground, especially if you throw in small periodic surface orientation variations. Given how complicated it is to explain rare rainbow-related phenomena like sun dogs, it would be surprising if we'd identified and explained everything that can appear when flying above the ocean.

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