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Comment Re:Missing important attack detail (Score 1) 6

when criminals obtain a victim's phone number through social engineering techniques

Like every f*cking business demands that I put my phone number on checks, on-line forms and every other thing before they will do business with me.
Just use a credit card or phone pay, you say? They already have your phone number attached to your account and will hand it over to every merchant (or person claiming to be one) that asks.

My trick: The phone number I give out is a land line. Have fun uploading your crappy app to a Western Electric Model 2500. My cell phone does nothing but make voice phone calls. There is no 2FA, BitCoin trading password or other shit on it.

Comment I don't follow. (Score 1) 130

Wait, so let me see if I can get this straight: because Wayland is an inherently pointless project championed principally by the same people who have been systematically removing all useful features from Gnome since just before the release of version 1.0, this guy decided, based on that, that the main X11 implementation that almost everyone uses, that has absolutely nothing to do with Wayland, needs to be forked again, because... because WHY?

Where is the logical connection between those two entirely unrelated ideas? I agree that Wayland is not now and probably never will be a viable substitute for X11. That premise, is fine. What I don't understand, is how that leads to the conclusion that the X server needs to be forked yet again. Frankly, I'm still not even entirely sure I understand why XFree86 needed to be forked the first two times, but at least those times there was a stated reason for forking. It didn't make any sense to me (as far as I know, there's no particular reason for other software running on the system to _need_ to be license-compatible with the X server), but at least there was a reason given. This time... what was the reason again? Because Wayland is bad? What does Wayland have to do with anything? If Hurd is still useless after all this time, will you fork the Linux kernel, as well? What?

Comment Re:Erm... (Score 2) 140

It will never cost that little. A Falcon 9 has about 400 tons of propellant. If it were all commercial diesel, it would cost $400,000, or $17 per kg of weight launched to LEO. But of course it's not commercial diesel. Liquid oxygen and RP1 are both much more expensive.

Starship burns methane, not RP1.

Between SuperHeavy and Starship, a fully-loaded stack needs 3500 tons of LOX and 1000 tons of CH4. So what do those cost?

Well, oxygen is easy to get from the atmosphere, so the cost of LOX is really just some equipment (which isn't terribly expensive to buy and maintain) plus electricity, and the cost ends up being dominated by the cost of electricity. It takes between 150 kWh and 800 kWh to separate and liquify a ton of oxygen, so if you're paying $0.10 per kWh, LOX costs $15-80 per ton. There are some other costs to handle and store it, so let's say $100/ton.

CH4 can be created many ways. The cheapest is probably to purify natural gas, which costs about $190 per ton (that site shows ~$5 per 1000 ft^3, and a ton is 38k ft^3). Add some costs for purification and cooling, so call it $250/ton.

3500 tons LOX * $100/ton + 1000 tons CH4 * 250/ton = $600k. Musk usually calls it $1M, which seems pretty reasonable, since they're probably not separating/purifiying it themselves and there transportation costs. 150 tons of payload to LEO with $1M worth of fuel means the fuel-only cost is $6.67/kg.

Comment Re:Erm... (Score 1) 140

we have enough accumulated knowledge that just getting to orbit shouldn't be accompanied by a string of failures like Starship has been having

Nonsense. Our only experience with reusable orbital rockets is the space shuttle, which was an unsustainably-expensive and complex beast that was more refurbishable than reusable and had a payload one fifth of what Starship is designed for. It's all of the differences that aim to make Starship both reusable and cheap that make it hard. It's possible that it's just too ambitious, that we don't yet have the technology to make a cheap, fully-reusable (not refurbishable, reusable) orbital rocket with massive capacity. No one else has done it... no one else is even trying, that's how hard it is.

Failure is expected. If they managed to launch and land both Starship and SuperHeavy in less than a dozen test flights, that would be the surprise.

Comment Re:Whose resumes did they use? (Score 1) 54

Does the DoJ notify people?

Notify who? The people whose resumes have been borrowed? What are they going to do?

Notify the prospective employers? Maybe. But FBIs counterintelligence unit doesn't typically operate to build court cases. Most of the evidence they accumulate is inadmissible due to the methods of collection. They are more interested in watching foreign ops.

Comment Re:jebait (Score 1) 38

Here's the game plan. MS jebaits sony into releasing an $800 base PS6 because, why not, no competition. MS then swoops in with a $500 xbox next gen to wild cheers for saving gaming from greed. or some shit.

Erm... you're not familiar with Microsoft.

Sony is going to release an expensive Playstation because they can't afford to keep selling them at a massive loss. They've already released a $700 one to test the waters, $700 will get you a decent but entry level gaming laptop.

Microsoft doesn't need to release a $500 Xbox in response to a $800, they only need to release a $750 Xbox. Microsoft can keep eating losses by subsidising the games and entertainment division from scraps of the OS and application divisions. Sony doesn't have a similar cash cow that they can rely on, the Playstation was their flagship and standout product.

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