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Comment Air India's "Perfect" Flight Record. (Score 1) 108

Hi. I think you are confused.

Air India crashes/fatalities:
* Air India Flight 101 CONTROLLED FLIGHT INTO TERRAIN -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
* Air India Flight 855 PILOT ERROR -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

What does the word perfect mean to you? Those are crashes. People died.

We can even add:
* Air India Flight 182 BOMBING -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Though that's also on the staff at the airport doing security screenings.

Comment Re:Sorry I just woke up⦠(Score 3, Interesting) 10

Doesn't ANYBODY but me remember that "Napster" was actually RealNetworks? You know, the old Real.com that was the Internet's first scale, commercial streamer? Real became Rhapsody for several years. Rhapsody had no name recognition, so they bought the Napster name from it's owners... BEST BUY.

It gets weirder. Rhapsody had been Sonos' partner streaming service - and Rhapsody is also... I HEART RADIO. Now the whole Napster lot got dumped in the lap of venture capital vultures.

Comment Re:We're headed for Venus, but still we stand stro (Score 1) 66

To be extra clear, here: titanium melts around 1,900 kelvin. The temperature of re-entry is 3,200 kelvin. Yes, 3,200 kelvin is "below" the temperature required to make titanium boil (by 300 kelvin), but you'll note that the 1,900 is 3,200 by 1,300.

Who honestly thinks titanium that's been heated to 'just below' its boiling point for half an hour, will be somehow intact once it's slow enough to not self-generate plasma due to atmospheric drag?

Ridiculous.

Comment Re:We're headed for Venus, but still we stand stro (Score 1) 66

How does a thing that isn't water, 'water in the ocean'? What? A thing can't water. The only thing that is water, is H2O.

Also, no -- it will not survive atmospheric re-entry. The atmosphere see to that. The heat of re-entry exceeds the temperature of Venus by *THOUSANDS OF DEGREES*.... It will not survive in 1 piece. This isn't a matter of atmospheric pressure, nor is this a matter of G-shock. It's plasma; it'll be in an envelope of super-heated plasma. Why do you think they can't use the radios on the Shuttle during re-entry? High energy plasma -- at THOUSANDS OF DEGREES.... Sheesh.

Comment It won't survive re-entry. (Score 1) 66

'"As this is a lander that was designed to survive passage through the Venus atmosphere, it is possible that it will survive reentry through the Earth atmosphere intact, and impact intact," Langbroek wrote in a blog update"'

Uh, no.

1) High-energy plasma at 3,200 K upon re-entry. This occurs for 25 minutes or so. This is why Columbia became ... a large number of pieces of wreckage strewn across multiple US states.
2) Venera probes use drag-parachutes to reduce velocity to the point that they can survive entry into the atmosphere of Venus. But, this was built by the Soviet union -- it didn't get out of low Earth orbit. Do you think that parachute functions? It doesn't, it won't.
3) The reasons cited for it 'surviving' re-entry are ... G-forces and atmospheric pressure. None of those address the fact that, though the surface of Venus is ~= 737K ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), you'll notice that the surface temperature of Venus is 2,463 kelvin 'colder' than atmospheric re-entry. What material do you think the probe is made of? Unobtanium?

Ridiculous. It will not survive atmospheric re-entry. it will not be 'a single piece' when it (or most of it, the parts that weren't vaporized by high-energy plasma), gets to sea-level.

Comment Utterly ridiculous. (Score 2, Insightful) 77

Given that humans didn't have microplastics in the environment of the past? Their hypothesis is that you have to prove they aren't doing harm (maybe they benefit). The null hypothesis is that no microplastics is the base case; and a demonstration of safety of introducing microplastics is required. The same procedure for making a drug for human use.

This is anti-science flim-flam bullshit. See also: cigarette companies saying no link to lung cancer -- and also, smoking is actually healthy.

Don't be taken in by the same lies as earlier generations.

Comment "...One has to wonder..." spoken like a true idiot (Score 1) 78

Wow, so the 'fitness function' of evolution led to the extinction of a lineage of life?

And you, "have to wonder" why scientists are exploring the possibilities of life?

it should be obvious. They are exploring the possibilities of life, to understand them. The possibilities of life.

And, let's be clear, extinction is something that happens for terrible reasons. Not everything that became extinct, became extinct for good reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is perhaps a book you should read, https://science.slashdot.org/~... ... because you assume things about the selective-fitness function which are untrue.

Things happen for reasons. They don't happen for good reasons. That's why we explore and research.

Comment Re:Windows/NT ! From the makers of edlin! (Score 4, Interesting) 167

Some quibbles: IBM prevented 32-bit OS/2 for 80386 not from bad planning, but an internal struggle to keep 32-bit PCs from biting into the AS400 mini computer business, and there were internal wars for the board approvals.

This was the end of the line for Gates's frustration with IBM, as OS/2 took resources from projects he and Balmer were convinced would take off. Publicly claiming that upcoming Windows 3.0 would not be "Presentation Manager Lite", MS still death-marched developers to produce the release, while devs allotted to IBM sat on their hands or did code reviews for IBM managers. Win 3.0 Program Manager kicked ass on Presentation Manager, it was definitely not "lite" - and it ditched all the heavy-baggage of IBM SNA requirements.

"OS/2 NT" is a bit misleading. Late in the endgame of the IBM/MS relationship, Gates discovered that Dave Cutler was being cut away from DEC, with a recalibration of Prism and the future of Alpha. Cutler had begun a 64-bit microkernel evolution of his VMS system. OS/2 3.0 was on the boards, still dragging MS resources and tying up IP. Gates hired Cutler to build an alternative, skunk works kernel from his Prism design work, with the hope of porting the Windows System 32 layer with dependencies etc. When the last bitter contract work was delivered for IBM, Cutler and the Windows team ground out the hard work of delivering their kernel, TCP stack, and Windows 3.11 port —Windows NT.

Most of this stuff is well-covered in Carroll's "Big Blues" along with Zachary's "Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT". I had a small part at the NT launch in Moscone Center, working for a ghost-writer on the Sybex NT book that launched at that event

Comment Re:Slashdot Ad Blocking Extra Broken (Score 2) 40

I'm probably the lowest UID still occasionally active on Slashdot. It's a habit, that I'd be sorry to see go. This site is still my first pinned tab in Firefox.

Hell, I still even check things out on https://everything.blockstacke..., even though they are throwing me an expired cert right now!

Remember Blockstackers?

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