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3pac

Re:Deep dive into the UK air traffic control meltdown on Monday September 11, 2023 @11:40AM (#37468912)
SABRE is pretty good compared to the card file it replaced.
SDI is not really comparable. The numbers for the orbital parameters did not add up at the time, but they had Edward Teller behind them.
It's just a heavy metal umlaut for someone who could have written "state-level" or "country". Like forcing the word "geopolitical". I would not get too worked up about it.
The more recent US hegemony in radio communications technology was held by pioneering Bell Labs work leading to patented implementation as 3G standards. I think the US rested on the laurels of those patents for too long. Microwave RF basebands were not too long ago considered advanced as alien technology. Now China has re-developed them on their own terms.
Won't errors due to cosmic rays be an increasing issue at these process sizes?
You can't be sure what's in it these days, especially if it looks super professionally packaged.
Re:Amazon insisted I report my missing package to the police on Thursday August 31, 2023 @03:08PM (#37342224)
My bank just said that there was "no error" when I did this after Amazon failed to deliver something last year. I imagine that Amazon makes up a good portion of their chargeback complaints now.

Separately, I had my bank block Amazon Prime from charging my debit card. It shows up as a different merchant so they were do it and I can still make one-off purchases (which I don't like to any longer). I did this because the UI to cancel Amazon Prime did not work on my new, updated MacBook. It did not respond to clicks on the "confirm cancel" or whatever button.

Re:Longtime 'Price Is Right' Host Bob Barker Dies at 99 on Saturday August 26, 2023 @08:46PM (#37278319)
Is church/temple out of the question too? Where do people go these days?
Re:California's Weapons of Math Destruction on Monday August 21, 2023 @01:19PM (#37212554)
On a printed receipt at a restaurant, I once saw suggested tip percentages where the corresponding currency amount was greatly inflated and nowhere near the actual percentage.
Re:The ancient technology keeping space missions alive on Saturday August 19, 2023 @03:33PM (#37192276)
There is a heater for the vidicon which had to be shut off due to power budget. This heater had been on since launch. After being switched off, turning on this heater back on, or the vidicon's cathode filament (itself a separate heater) would have cracked the tube due to the cold of space.
Re:The ancient technology keeping space missions alive on Friday August 18, 2023 @03:34PM (#37180951)
It also has a vidicon tube for gathering images, although that can no longer be switched on.
Re:In Norway, you can browse everyone’s tax returns on Friday August 18, 2023 @12:27PM (#37178017)
You have to be logged in, so you can also see a register of who has browsed your own tax returns. I once saw that somebody I had dated 7-8 years prior had checked up on mine. It was a hoot.
Growing tensions over whether US employers interview process represents a good-faith effort to hire
Re:NP-hard does not mean hard (2017) on Thursday August 17, 2023 @07:41AM (#37160119)
Where does 2.73 come from?
This cannot be the "the first time such rock-and-roll acoustic engineering has been employed in a church" if it is referring to digital delays. The other weekend I visited a gospel church which used maybe ten dbx DriveRacks, along with the finest mixing console I have ever seen in a house of worship, a top-line analog Soundcraft. The use of a horizontal line array sounds unique to me! James B. Lansing of JBL did a lot of this work long before DSPs became economical, using huge, carefully-engineered tractrix horns. A brilliant and tragically-ended life who contributed enormously to loudspeaker engineering.

https://audioxpress.com/assets/upload/images/1/2021061320392...

Re:Ask HN: What is the best sporting moment of all time? on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @12:13PM (#36880143)
'92 Olympic Dream Team (US) in basketball. Asking anybody to play against them was pushing the boundaries of ethics.
Apollo 11 command module computer did receive a patch from Houston to the running executive in core memory while in flight to the moon.
UFOs are as American as baseball and Elvis. Spies not from an open society might waste a lot of time on a want-to-believer who has watched The X-Files and is having a laugh.
Re:AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals on Thursday February 09, 2023 @03:30PM (#34730934)
"We will provide you with vast riches when we arrive, if you build the receiving end of this matter transporter according to these instructions/accept us as gods/wear Nikes/tell nobody else."

Plot twist: it's not a matter transporter.

Seems difficult to defend against.

KDE5 Plasma is superb. I wish that it ran on OpenBSD. However I do not wish to run Wayland, D-Bus, or any sound server on an OpenBSD installation. So, I wish that it were light as twm, fvwm or OpenStep.
I did not care to talk about it with even my more open-minded friends at the time, and even now I feel so lame posting about it. Maybe if I'd had a full-frame camera with super telephoto lens on a stable platform. I mentally went through possibilities like: Was that a jet liner? No, it was much larger and holding still above the ground and shaped nothing like a jet liner. Was it a dirigible? No, it was perfectly still in the wind. I thought, huh, that happened, that's such bullshit, I want to get on with my life now.
I saw a UFO maybe 12-13 years ago. It did not look like anything a human would design, even with advanced technology. It looked something like the oblong silver blob in The Flight of the Navigator, just hanging there, "much in the way that a brick doesn't." It must have been 5 km away so it would have been pretty large. It was a breezy overcast day with low clouds, and the moving clouds obscured but never completely revealed it. Its stillness contrasted with the movement of the air, or any aircraft I have ever seen. I stared at it for a few minutes to make sure that my eyes were not deceiving me. I had not been taking drugs. When I came back outside from fetching my camera, it was gone, and I thought, well, this is how it goes, nobody will believe me, so I won't even bother talking about it. I never had more than a passing, pop-culture interest in UFOs.
Another man, physicist Dr. John C. Clark, personally disarmed and dismantled an atomic bomb which failed to detonate at testing time.

https://www.naav.com/assets/2011_11_NAAV_Newsletter.pdf

He was also at the control point of test Castle Bravo, which due to an error, detonated with much more power than expected.

https://www.sonicbomb.com/content/atomic/docs/trapped_by_rad...

I think that centralization of power is a spurious correlation. It may be part of the equation, but there is more to it.

Norway has a single national police organization which extends the local level. It is well-regarded by the citizens who are also big on free-range parenting. In Oslo you can find teenagers practicing skateboard on the steps of parliament during the day. On the other hand Americans might find certain means of protective services, for adults and for minors, overreaching.

Also, didn't absolutely everybody in the US rally around James Comey, during his unjust firing?

I do not consider logging into iCloud to be part of "finishing setting up" my computer. In fact, I would like more out-of-the-box visibility into the phoning-home that Mac OS X performs.

With Xcode specifically, I think a computer should be immediately programmable, like a BASIC interpreter used to be included. Especially to encourage young people.

I forgot Xcode, it should be included, plus all the Dictionary files, considering how much storage is on even the base configurations being sold.
I think that MacOS is terrific and keeps getting better.

It's well past time to include Pages, Numbers, Keynote, GarageBand and iMovie in the base install image. Also mkv, ogg, opus codecs for QuickTime. I prefer to do as much as I can from the trusted base install. I also wish that the base install included a few CLI packages like nmap and bsd-games. Also some public-domain humanities (Snow Leopard included classic paintings) and texts from Project Gutenberg. I do not wish to install Homebrew or anything else.

There is a new globe symbol on my keyboard which makes me feel like meta-keys are starting to accumulate. That is going in the wrong direction. I do not want a space cadet keyboard.

iCloud still needs some work. I wish that I could stay logged into iCloud, but disable remote wipe, in case my iCloud account gets hacked.

Re:Three seconds of audio could end up costing Fox $500K on Monday January 30, 2023 @08:37AM (#34579380)
It's called a beat. The very greatest composers have struggled with what causes it.

Try going to a piano, and playing two notes, black or white, that are immediately next to each other at the same time (a half-step interval).

Further listening: Modest Mussorgsky's The Hut of the Baba Yaga, or Miles Davis' Someday My Prince Will Come.

Re:Steve Wozniak used to tip from printed sheets of $2 bills on Sunday January 29, 2023 @02:44PM (#34571913)
Counterpoint: Their job is to protect with the highest professionalism, indeed with their life, a democratically-elected person whose opinions and actions they may personally disagree with or even resent. It is a very honorable position if you ask me.
HN does not let me edit, but I regret using the even mildly derogatory term "keyboard nazi", lest somebody read it and take it to mean they should prove they are more than that.

Everybody has very common insecurities. The key is to find out what is really bothering these disaffected people (housing, job, normal human relationship and sexual issues, etc.) and address it, rather than allowing blame-shifting and scapegoating to fester.

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