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User: Agripa

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Comments · 4,282

  1. Re:Brouhaha. on Obama Orders Feds To Study Smart Gun Technology (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    The part I find ironic is that in the recent past, the executive office has made efforts to *deny* federal firearms licenses to people if they did not meet qualifications like owning a store in an area which is zoned to allow for firearms sales. So simultaneously while denying licenses to individuals who want to follow the law by saying they are not in the business of selling firearms, they also want to make it unlawful for them to sell firearms even though they argued that they were not in the business of selling firearms which is why the license they sought was was denied. Heads they win, tails you lose.

    Clinton *bragged* about this policy since it reduced the number of gun dealers and Obama continued this processes of making it more difficult to get or hold a federal firearms license. The only result was more individuals risking a felony by selling firearms as a hobby and being forbidden by law to conduct background checks.

  2. Re: Mental Illness Reporting on Obama Orders Feds To Study Smart Gun Technology (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    What's next? Getting a knock on the door at 3 am because they found THC in a lab sample taken for something entirely medical in nature? (As opposed to a deliberate drug screen)

    They do not even need that much. Just having a state issued medical marijuana card is sufficient to have your name added to the federal database and your background check denied.

  3. Re:RF? on Obama Orders Feds To Study Smart Gun Technology (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Is this the same England that conceals their rising violent crime rate by manipulating how it is reported? In the US if someone robs multiple apartments in one building, it is multiple robberies; in England it is just one.

  4. Re: RF? on Obama Orders Feds To Study Smart Gun Technology (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately it's more likely for a gun to shoot someone in an accident or a kid getting a hold of it than for it to be fired "when needed". A good number of the times it's "needed" is for suicide too.

    A vast majority of the time when a gun is "needed", it does not have to be and is not fired. Just its presence is sufficient to stop an attacker. This complicates any official tally even if one was attempted since any individual reporting it would face procecution; they have nothing to gain by reporting it to law enforcement.

    Your statistic is further complicated because any self defensive use of a firearm which does result in the attacker getting shot is just another homicide whether justified or not.

  5. Re:Go old school... on Ask Slashdot: Jamming UK Metadata Collection? · · Score: 1

    As a practical matter I do not believe that the courts including the Supreme Court are going to be any help with this. Their previous rulings allow law enforcement to make up probable cause after an arrest, arrest for laws which do not exist, rob people of their possessions without trial, etc.

    The government says metadata is not protected so fine, let's go with that. If you use IPSEC or a number of other IP encryption methods, only the metadata is left available. Opportunistically encrypt every IP connection - every one. Since the source IP, destination IP, length, and time is still available, they will have no complaints because the metadata is still available. Right?

    Run your own local email and messaging server endpoint instead of relying on a third party like your ISP. If the government wants the content, then they can serve you with a warrant. If perfect forward secrecy was used, well, I guess that is too bad for them because any encryption keys no longer exist. They should have thought of that when they systematically undermined the 4th amendment, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and the rule of law. Fuck them.

  6. Re: Well deserved. on Kid Racks Up $5,900 Bill Playing Jurassic World On Dad's iPad (pcmag.com) · · Score: 1

    I don't think the ratio of gun defenses vs accidental gun injuries/deaths is anywhere near that good. If anything, the fact that "homeowner defends with gun" shows up in the news is that it's uncommon enough to be worth reporting.

    Some of this depends on how "defense with a firearm" is counted. That famous gun control study which said that a firearm in the home was more likely to be used against the family than an attacker only counted self defense if the attacker was killed or perhaps shot but a majority of defensive gun uses do not involve a shot being fired and those are also unlikely to bring media attention. Someone being attacked is much more newsworthy than someone successfully defending themselves especially if the later does not involve someone being shot.

  7. Re:Isn't it still DUI? on DUI Charges Dismissed Against Woman Whose Body Brews Alcohol (cnn.com) · · Score: 1

    Roadside sobriety tests are used to establish probable cause. You generally are required to comply with a breathalyzer or blood test but not a roadside sobriety test.

  8. Re: Those who would give up essential Liberty... on Majority of Americans OK With Warrantless Internet Surveillance (ap.org) · · Score: 2

    The main problem with this idea is the notion that the national guard, who are a bunch of citizen-soldiers (they're not full-time professionals), would willingly assault and oppress their own countrymen this way.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

  9. Re: Who would plug into a random USB port? on New York Begins Public Gigabit Wi-Fi Rollout (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Thus you have Motorola chargers that won't charge a Sanyo phone, LG phones that won't charge from generic chargers, etc. (Names used for example only.)

    That's a valid issue but a temporary one. Even now, USB 3.1 is pretty much standardizing charging. There was a recent PC World article testing this. Interesting read

    And as soon as USB Type-C became available, NXP started advertising their charging solutions for it which include DRM as a feature. So yes, it is standardized in the sense that DRM is or can be effectively part of the standard.

  10. It's "voluntary" in the same way that the drinking age being 21 is voluntary. The federal government actually does not have the right to regulate drinking age: that actually falls to the states.

    That would be a power not not a right and insofar as a nexus may be created by including in the law "drinking while driving a vehicle that has moved in or that otherwise affects interstate or foreign commerce", it is within the power of the federal government thanks to the courts. What is there that has not "moved in or otherwise affected interstate or foreign commerce"?

  11. Re:More platters please on HAMR Hard Disk Drives Postponed To 2018 (anandtech.com) · · Score: 1

    Quantum tried that with their Bigfoot line of drives and it was not economical even with the surplus 5.25" infrastructure and supply chain purchased at a low cost. There are also mechanical problems with doing this; the larger platters require more power to spin at a given speed and vibration which affects tracking becomes a greater issue with the heads further from the spindle.

  12. Re:Stupid writing on HAMR Hard Disk Drives Postponed To 2018 (anandtech.com) · · Score: 1

    Areal density matters for magnetic recording on a surface because all of the other costs are largely fixed.

    For SSDs, the cost per bit is what matters. I could happily devote more space to bulk storage but hard drives are much cheaper than SSDs except where access time is important.

  13. Re:Not reliable enough? on HAMR Hard Disk Drives Postponed To 2018 (anandtech.com) · · Score: 1

    They might be more reliable; heat assisted recording allows for a "harder" magnetic recording media. Magneto-optical recording technology uses heat assisted magnetic recording to good effect and is highly reliability. Hard drives have the advantage of using a closely spaced magnetic reading head which allows for much higher density than would be achieved with only optical reading.

  14. Re:Random access speed more important than through on HAMR Hard Disk Drives Postponed To 2018 (anandtech.com) · · Score: 1

    Most of my time these days is spent waiting for Java or Javascript garbage collection. I use a 4 drive RAID controlled by an Areca 1210 and most processing throughput is limited be either CPU or sometime the PCIex4 connection to the Areca.

  15. Re:Random access speed more important than through on HAMR Hard Disk Drives Postponed To 2018 (anandtech.com) · · Score: 1

    If I need to store more data than will fit onto an SSD, I cannot just wait for the process to finish no matter how much faster the SSD is.

  16. Re:Constitutionally, the FAA should lose on FAA's Drone Laws Clash With Local Regulations (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    and there is no nexus which can be stretched to create one.

    If sufficient nexus can be established for Gun-Free School Zones Act the by adding "has moved in or that otherwise affects interstate or foreign commerce", then Congress will have no trouble establishing it for the FAA if it has not already done so.

    http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-...

  17. Re:whatever China wants on China Passes Law Requiring Tech Firms To Hand Over Encryption Keys (betanews.com) · · Score: 1

    To say it is China 'only', is really inaccurate, there are a whole bunch of countries with similarly repressive regimes.

    And while these smaller countries may not have the moxie to enforce key recovery on the manufacturers, they will not need to if the US (or China?) does it for them.

  18. Re:whatever China wants on China Passes Law Requiring Tech Firms To Hand Over Encryption Keys (betanews.com) · · Score: 1

    They can just slap the suspects in jail and start applying electro-shock therapy until they spit out the passwords they require.

    That doesn't work when you have 1.3 billion suspects. This is not about investigating a few specific individuals, but about mass surveillance of the entire population.

    It also does not work if I took steps such that when my hardware was seized, the encryption key in physical form like the ordering of a deck of cards or bills was destroyed.

    "Why yes officer, I will be happy to hand over my encryption key. The key was encoded in the stack of bills which was in the envelope next to the computer so I will need those to recover it ... Um, these are out of order and the higher denominations are missing."

  19. Re:whatever China wants on China Passes Law Requiring Tech Firms To Hand Over Encryption Keys (betanews.com) · · Score: 1

    So tech companies will have at least 2 product lines.

    a. for everywhere EXCEPT China
    b. for no place BUT China

    The difference could amount to no more than a change in firmware or configuration.

  20. Re:Apple should NOT leave China on China Passes Law Requiring Tech Firms To Hand Over Encryption Keys (betanews.com) · · Score: 1

    When Apple doesn't have the keys in the first place, is that really non-compliance? And if so, how would they be expected to *POSSIBLY* "comply"? How can they hand over encryption keys they do not have?

    US law and court decisions matter not one whit to China however in the more restrictive US, I expect it would go something like this at least as far as the courts:

    The US already has a court decision which says ephemeral data, that which was stored in RAM even momentarily, is subject to court ordered seizure even if that requires alteration the programming. This could just as easily apply to any temporary state used to setup encryption. So at least in the US, the court can order Apple to change the programming of its devices to record and seize the ephemeral state used by the encryption which can then be used to provide any encryption keys.

    I assume Apple would fight this in court but a secrecy order would prevent any of their customers from knowing about it even after resolution.

    The problem as I see it as least in the US is more political. Unless this could all be done in secret through the executive branch and the courts, a law passed by Congress would create widespread resistance either in the form of challenges or subversion. The ideal situation for the government is where everybody *thinks* that their private communications are protected by the 4th amendment when in reality they are secretly monitored.

  21. Re:Only for weirdos and 4x4s on For a Missouri Cassette Tape Factory, Obsolesence is Just a 12-Letter Word (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    There are plenty of cases where MP3 totally shits the bed even at 320kbps.

    This is why I included saying that I used LAME for the encoding.

    MP3 encoding was new at the time (and MP3 players were still over the horizon) but there were still several different encoders and all of them which I tested except LAME suffered from that high frequency and percussion reverberation malady. I ran my own A/B comparison tests between the digitized and cleaned source and the MP3 encode to find the point where I could no longer tell the difference between the LAME encode and the source, which was about 128 kilobits/sec, and then used a higher bit rate than that for margin. In practice that ended up being double the bit rate which still allowed enough compression to be worthwhile.

  22. Re:Did they find the "Object"? on Seattle's Behemoth Boring Machine, Idle Since 2013, Makes Some Progress · · Score: 1

    I hope it is not one of those Martian colony ships. Or since this is Seattle, maybe I hope it is.

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...

  23. Re:Only for weirdos and 4x4s on For a Missouri Cassette Tape Factory, Obsolesence is Just a 12-Letter Word (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Only weirdos continue to make magtapes in the age of the mp3. Audio magtapes have shit quality (at least, typical audiocassette tape does) and degrade over time, and they break. The ONLY reason AT ALL that they still exist is for 4x4s. A cheap mp3 player often doesn't remember your song position. A cheap tape deck is even cheaper, if you don't cheat and just install an el cheapo amp with an mp3 player directly connected to it.

    What I fine funny about this is that I have old 256 kbit/sec MP3s encoded by LAME which were made from cassette tape which was used to transfer the audio from the sound board to the computer. These MP3s and the original cassette tapes sound a hell of a lot better than much modern music simply because they are not dynamically compressed all to hell. Experimentation at the time showed that 256 kbits/sec was necessary for transparent MP3s.

  24. This is a person after my own heart. on Pirate Bay Cofounder Utterly Bankrupts the Music Industry (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 1

    I refurbished an Intel OR840 and for years have had it generating random numbers using the dedicated hardware built into its chipset to deliberately create entropy and hasten the heat death of the universe.

  25. Re: Hyberbole much? on TSA Body Scanner Opt-out No Longer Guaranteed (slashgear.com) · · Score: 1

    It's basically a form of synthetic aperture radar using millimeter wave radio.

    If they were only using millimeter wave RF then I would have no complaint about physical effects (as long as they are either regularly tested for output power or incapable of producing dangerous levels of millimeter wave RF) but many of the scanners they installed use x-rays and TSA is remarkably opaque about everything they do.