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Comment Re:Fake "success" is fake (Score 1) 92

Assuming you're the manager, compare: the time (or cost) it takes in highly skilled security specialist to identify 50 security issues, to: the time (or cost) it takes to a bug wrangler to filter out 1450 invalid reports and identify 50 security issues. I assume a bug filtering employee is probably less expensive than a security consultant.

Is there any justification for that assumption, the hard part is identifying the problem, the input only gives you hints, the arguments the AI makes can be highly deceiving, but it can indeed have found a bug. Remember, AI is very poor in explaining what it is doing.

Also, 1500 candidates is a fixed (even if large) number that ensures you can manage the task with your resources, for example you can cap the time they spend on each so that you finish in fixed time. With the security consultant it's possibly more difficult to plan.

So basically you only want to find the easy to see bugs, not the hard ones. This assumption is also on shaky ground, as often the subtle, hard to identify problems are the important ones and limiting time spent on each candidate can exclude important problems.

Comment Re:This will end in disaster (Score 1) 60

If the Germans open fire on these "mystery lights" then there is a huge potential for tragedy here because they really won't listen to people much smarter than them who on two previous occasions (NY/NJ and Lakenheath) provided all the information needed to debunk the allegations of "drones".

German police is not armed like the US counter part. They usually have rifles at most, though there are some assault rifles. So they will definitely not be able to reach a plane flying at some altitude and they probable recognise a starting or landing plane, as those appear most often around airports and you can phone them and ask. Also they are not that trigger happy to shoot at first sight.

Additionally consider that this is just some politicians doing a publicity stunt, because law experts are of the opinion, that the new law is not really necessary, but that the real problem is, how to get the drones down safely.

Comment Re:There are two inconvenient questions (Score 1) 74

There are two inconvenient questions which matter to this subject, and which Slashdot will not cover, either editorially in the selection of stories or in the comments from the regulars.

Question One: what will the output from wind and solar be in Germany or the UK in December, at about 5pm on a weekday, during one of the usual stalled high pressure episodes that last a week or ten days every winter? And what percent of faceplate is this number?

Question Two: what sources of generation are you then going to use to meet demand?

Those are not inconvenient questions, they are dumb.

One: does more production from solar and wind reduce the demand for coal and gas? If so it means less emissions.

Two: do coal and gas fired plants vanish when solar or wind provide power? If not, then they are available when necessary and there obviously will be some subsidies and regulation necessary to keep it that way.

Comment Re:Searching underground? (Score 1) 42

Yes and no. The idea behind WIMP is, that it very, very rarely interacts with normal matter. So it doesn't really matter where you place the detector and can place it, where you have less background noise. A simple number example, if 99,99% of all WIMPs would pass earth without interaction, it simply doesn't matter, how much rock is above and under the detector, as less than 0,01% of the particles would be eliminated until they could reach the detector. And the true percentage is probably orders of magnitude higher, so most of the particles would reach the detector.

Comment Re:Oil smuggling? (Score 1) 84

Could you please cite the international law allowing you to inspect a vessel as long as it is not in your territorial waters? And they are all legit, they are not registered as Russian ships, but for example are registered in Panama, as is most of the fleet of western countries. Russia is doing what it can to make it as hard as possible to know, if a ship is owned by them for obvious reasons, so just because you see some ship leaving a Russian port does not mean, that is part of the shadow fleet, it could be from one of the countless countries not imposing sanctions, like Greece.

The best solution would be disallowing ships in that bad shape from all your territorial waters and ports, but that is something most countries don't want to do, as they also have a lot of ships in bad shape.

Comment Re:Hired gun CEOs with MBAs are wrecking balls (Score 1) 78

So basically you know nothing, but known for sure, that his business skills were lacking. So let's speculate, how about ASML told him "either buy >n machines now or wait in line. Oh, the line means you get them in >3 years"? Or perhaps he just knew, how many lines and therefore machines they would need to produce their own chips and have at least some capacity so that someone would actually choose Intel to produce their chips, as that was the new direction they were trying to go into.

Quite honestly, I don't think we should second guess decisions where we are lacking all information, we simply don't know, why it was done and we are not likely to get that information. But I am sure that the CEO knew, that Intel has to move fast to get back on track and knew, how much reserves there are, so if you have the money, you have to take the risk and spend it now. Waiting will not save Intel.

So it might have been a very bad decision or a very good one or anything in between, but I don't see, how we could judge.

Comment Re:Cool so... (Score 1) 124

Thanks for pointing it out. But I see no mention of concrete numbers or even which architecture they attached it to in the "white paper". I also don't understand, how they intend to work without recompilation and just detecting the pthread stuff in a CPU and quite honestly who writes code like that?

But at least I got reminded of that stuff, I remember the foundations of that from a remote presentation by Danny Hillis for the Connection Machine back in the 90's. But they at least used some extensions to C to designate the parallel operations. The claims of speed ups were similar, they just conveniently forgot to mention, that the speed up was only for the parallel part. I wonder if that might be the case here, the connection network also reminds me of the hyper cube configuration CM used.

Comment Re:I get it but (Score 5, Insightful) 29

With your attitude towards them I cannot blame anybody for ignoring your input. Let me guess, you cannot be bothered to report the version or the steps necessary to reproduce. Do your bug reports contain more then something along the lines of "You morons, a three year old wouldn't make this bug. Fix it."?

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