Fuck yeah... if I were a hundred-thousandaire working a salaried position like Linus does I would definitely shove as much pizza, bacon, and Mt Dew down my gullet at possible.
Oh, wait. No I don't.
I think you mean a 10-mllion-a-year-aire with a net worth of $150M:
1) I guess it goes down until it can be fixed under warranty (same or next day depending on purchase option). Redundancy is expensive. What happens when your single instance of AWS goes down with an "oops amazon is having problems with a datacenter" message?
Well i guess the same thing that happens when the datacenter that my 1U server is colocated in goes down -- I either bring up the server n a DR region (which I can set up nearly for free with AWS), or wait until the datacenter problem is fixed. In the past 2 years, haven't experienced a single multi-AvailabilityZone outage with Amazon, and only 2 short single AZ outages that resulted in no loss of service since my servers are split across multiple AZ's. I've never had to fail over to the warm-spares in a separate region (other than during testing).
3) Reserved instance is cheaper, but at that price still more than a dedicated server and the server typically comes with a 3 year warranty and will likely last past that (Dell will warranty for 6 years). Assuming it only lasts 3 your cost for running on AWS is nearly 3 times higher even when figuring in an improved warranty and OS licensing. I concede that short duration projects or very spiky loads are a great use for the cloud, but long running relatively even loads simply don't make sense form a cost perspective, nevermind the fact that you now lose access to your database if your wan connection goes down (unless you build out multi-wan, but there is yet another expense).
Coloc space is not cheap, so don't forget to factor that into the costs. Running a datacenter in the office is even more expensive due to the costs to add the needed redundancy (power, cooling, internet) to an office tower.
The point still stands. If it's not 100% then someone who is immunized can catch and STILL give it to you. Thus both immunized and non-immunized pose the same threat to you.
The point only stands if you pretend that there's no real difference between an unimmunized person and a immunized person with 0.3% chance of catching the disease, and if you ignore the science behind herd immunity.
Vaccines are designed to generate an immune response that will protect the vaccinated individual during future exposures to the disease. Individual immune systems, however, are different enough that in some cases, a person’s immune system will not generate an adequate response. As a result, he or she will not be effectively protected after immunization.
That said, the effectiveness of most vaccines is high. After receiving the second dose of the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella) or the standalone measles vaccine, 99.7% of vaccinated individuals are immune to measles. The inactivated polio vaccine offers 99% effectiveness after three doses. The varicella (chickenpox) vaccine is between 85% and 90% effective in preventing all varicella infections, but 100% effective in preventing moderate and severe chicken pox.
Further, some individuals are unable to be vaccinated due to underlying medical conditions (allergies, compromised immune system, etc).
Sorry. While I love technology, my not-so-humble opinion is that we're nowhere near the level of reliability needed for a car that's completely free of manual control.
Simply put, having seen the arc of technology advance over the last 30+ years, I still don't trust an automated driver system with my safety. PERIOD.
Millions of people fly in airplanes every day that rely on computer controls (since there is no mechanical linkage between the pilot and the control surfaces). And 30,000 people die each year at the hands of human drivers.
While the real time image recognition may not be quite ready for prime time, it will get there and when it does, computer drivers will be safer than human drivers. Google's driverless cars have already racked up 700,000 accident free miles in autonomous mode (albeit with a human ready to take over). Their car has already surpassed my own record, it's only been about 150,000 miles since my last accident (a car changed lanes into me, while the accident was not my fault, if I'd had computer-like reflexes and perfect awareness of my surroundings to know that the lane beside me was open, I may have been able to avoid the accident by sudden braking and/or making a quick lane change)
Really? Poles and cables? The future is wireless. Actually, the present is wireless. Poles and cables for anything but electricity is archaic. Every time this topic comes up, it always boils down to the poles and cables. Get rid of the poles and cables and you get rid of 99% of this problem.
Then why is Google spending so much money on fiber to the home? As RF frequencies increase (since there's only so much bandwidth available at the lower frequencies - a 100Mhz channel at 900Mhz takes up relatively more spectrum than a 100Mhz channel at 10Ghz), cell sizes decrease due to lower propagation and penetration of the higher frequencies to a point where it takes a Wireless access point at every house (or possibly in every room in the house) to provide equivalent throughput to wired infrastructure.
The pound or pound-mass (abbreviations: lb, lbm, lbm, [1]) is a unit of mass used in the imperial, United States customary and other systems of measurement. A number of different definitions have been used, the most common today being the international avoirdupois pound which is legally defined as exactly 0.45359237 kilograms, and which is divided into 16 avoirdupois ounces.
FORCE: To convert from pound-force (lbf) to newton (N)
The real world is not always as simple as what you learned in 5th grade science, when your teacher said "The pound is a unit of weight, not mass", he was correct and incorrect at the same time due to the ambiguous nature of the unit.
quote>Why would they use a measure of WEIGHT instead of a measure of MASS?
Ton is already ambiguous, but since it is a USA media article, its safe to assume that they meant what is also known as the short ton, or 2000 pounds. The pound is defined as 0.45359237 kg, so it is, by definition, a unit of mass.
It's not like they "forgot" that users might want to add new books, the inability of any updatable storage was a design requirement to prevent it from being used for espionage or as a channel to inadvertently bring malware aboard a ship.
This is to prevent it being used to smuggle secret military data ashore, take illicit photos, introduce computer malware or record covert conversations.
Though it seems that there are so many ways for a person to smuggle a MicroSD card into a secure area that an eReader is probably not a huge concern.
We have are 12 dev/test servers that I didn't bother to patch because they'll be decommissioned in a month or two along with the rest of the datacenter they are in, and even though they support SSL connections (with a disposable cert from our private CA), they are generally only used with HTTP and have no private data to protect, and are almost completely unused now.
If someone wants to spend time trying to steal the server's private key or steal user data from the server, that's fine with me, I'd rather have them spend time on my disposable server than someone's real server.
Yes and no. Technically, the airport is part of San Francisco, but it's geographically separate from SF -- you leave the city of SF to get to the airport, then you're back in the city when you're at the airport.
SF has put absurd amounts of money into public transit and even you acknowledge it's only just possible to get along without a car there. Few people that live there even attempt it, and fewer still succeed. So despite all the money put into public transit people still want their cars. But people are crowded together so closely already there is barely room to walk, let alone drive.
With current technology it's a dead-end. Instead of building public transit the 'planners' should be figuring out how to reduce population density.
Public transit funding is only "absurd" if you ignore the huge subsidies that go to cars.
30% of SF residents have no car, still a ways to go to catch up to NYC's 55% but that number is growing.
CIty planners have already spent decades planning low density communities across the country, But it turns out that people still need to go to the office -- telecommuting still hasn't fulfilled it's promise of letting workers stay at home, even Google with unlimited technology resources still ships its employees 40 miles from SF to GoogleHQ. It's a lot easier to get people to the office when they live and work in the same high density city than when homes and businesses are spread over a large low density area. You can see this when you look at the difference in transit effectiveness in San Jose versus San Francisco.
SF has fewer parking spots than cars. That is a fail for the city planners and people are forced to pay illegally every day because there are simply no legal spots left.
Faced with the problem of having to spend a long time looking for parking, why not pay somebody to do it for you? I bet you pay people all the time in order to save time in one way or another and you don't consider yourself a cunt.
It's only a fail if you think owning a car is necessary. SF has always had crowded narrow streets designed back when people still used horse and buggies to get around. Its way too late to create endless roads like LA and since even after devoting around a third of land area to roads, LA is still the most congested region in the country...city planners throughout the country are starting to realize that accomodatng more re cars is not sustainable and are emphasizing other forms of transit. SF has had a 'transit first' planning policy for decades so anyone that lives here and is surprised that its difficult to get around by car is in the wrong city. Transit in SF is far from perfect yet it's still one of the few cities in the country where its possible to live without a car.
>The trick is simple -- if the files are small, but too big to E-mail, PGP/gpg encrypt them, then send the links via a secure message. If the files are bigger (~50-100 megs or larger), then the file goes into a TrueCrypt volume that uses a keyfile, and the keyfile is GPG encrypted and E-mailed.
You have a much different definition of "simple" than most people. Few people (who are not techies) find transferring a file via GPG or TrueCrypt to be "simple". Even getting them to download the file from a cloud provider can be a chore "I clicked on the link but nothing happened! What do you mean I need to look in my Downloads folder?"
I am SO SICK of the police telling citizens they shouldn't conduct their business. Yes it can be unwise, but the constant drumbeat of 'leave it to the cops' pisses me off.
This is one case where it makes sense -- cops not only have physical protection (guns, etc), but they also have legal protection - if your phone tells you that your stolen phone is at 101 Main Street and you go to that address, bang on the door and start threatening the guy that answers to give up the phone before you kick his ass, you may find yourself in jail over the threats when it turns out that the phone was really in the basement apartment at 101A Main St (assuming, of course, that the guy you're demanding the phone from doesn't just kick *your* ass, and when he tells the cops that he felt threatened, he'll get the benefit of the doubt since you were at his house). The cops don't have to make any threats when they knock on the door -- the threat is implied.
While the smartphone itself may be trivial to replace, all the information on one may not be, and there is the whole deal of some apps that let you save your password...
Unless you were targeted for some specific espionage (you weren't), the phone thief doesn't care about the data on your phone. If they can unlock it, they might take a quick look through your pictures for naked pics of your wife, but they aren't going to use a compute cluster to try to brute force your passcode -- they are just going to wipe it and resell it.
If you have data on your phone that you can't replace, you were bound to lose it eventually anyway - phones die for lots of reasons unrelated to theft. Make regular backups (local or cloud based).
I've watched the occasional episode and it seems more targeted at "fake nerds" - the type who like "I fucking love science" on facebook. The viewer isn't made to relate with the geeky characters, they're made to laugh at.
Being said, the science usually has merit, even if it's something that geeks would never say either because it is just too obvious/cliche or doesn't make sense to say.
I dunno, I was a "real nerd" in high school and college - never played D&D or got into comic books, but spent way too much time in a computer lab (high school job gave me unlimited access to a VAX - and uunet!), and think the show is funny. Maybe because I see a lot of myself and my friends in the characters. Though we never hooked up with any women nearly as hot as Penny, Bernadette, or even Amy Farah Fowler.
My mom threw away my old Atari 2600 console in the late 1980's along with a dozen cartridges. If anyone wants to mount an expedition to recover it, I can tell you approximately where it's buried. Oh, and there were some umm... magazines with it that I used to keep under my bed, you can keep the 2600, but I'd like to have the magazines back for educational purposes --I haven't finished reading the articles.
So now that the FCC drops net neutrality, Netflix is going to play ball with the ISPs? They've basically been DOSing the ISPs local loops for nearly a decade, blaming the ISPs and now they have the brilliant idea that maybe they should address the insane amount of bandwidth they're eating up? How much do you want to bet they stop being such assholes about peering agreements now as well? Maybe a client that caches data to? Who came up with these brilliant cost saving ideas?!?!
I don't think you understand how Netflix works -- they don't push movies over my broadband connection without permission. Instead, they send me content that I asked for -- which is the entire reason I have a high speed internet connection in the first place. If I wasn't watching streaming video, instead of a 25mbit cable internet connection, I'd have a 3 - 6mbit DSL connection for less cost.
If the cable company can't afford to handle the traffic with their infrastructure, then they ought to increase their rates. I'm happy to pay the cable company a fair price for internet service, but I don't want to pay it in hidden charges for all of the bandwidth heavy websites I use, I want to see exactly how much internet service costs so I can shop around to different providers and to make it more likely that a competitor will step in as the price of service increases.
They've basically been DOSing the ISPs local loops for nearly a decade
Why do you think the local loop was the bottle neck? Netflix speeds increased literally overnight after they paid Comcast to upgrade the internet connection at the peering points, no local loop upgrades needed.
I guess it depends on the case you'll put it into. If it'll look like a regular old brick-phone, then there will be no difference between mass-produced and "DIY" one. Both of them will be subject to active eavesdropping by BTSes inside the airport and will be prevented to connect to regular ones outside the airport with jamming, so with "DIY" one you're just as "safe" as with the regular one.
Looks like he might be able to fit it into an old Motorola MicroTAC phone body:
Or maybe we could just use the meaning that the damn word was intended for in the first place! If I meant "unusual," I'd just say "unusual!"
But let's continue muddying up the language until everyone can only communicate using the 200 most common words. Then we can have more fun articles like that time we spent 90% of the comments section arguing about abbreviating "Supreme Court of the United States" to "Supremes." We all want that, right?
Ahh, so you're on a crusade to stop the evolution of the English language.
Alack, I fear your wood gardyloo shan't end in a fain result, meseems evolution is too puissant and your quest will end in wanion.
Netflix is not the carrier. You're not paying Netflix to deliver the data into your house, but for some reason you think that's the case. I don't know how you got this notion.
I see where you're confused, Comcast is the carrier, and I am paying *Comcast* to deliver the data to my house. That's the entire reason I pay Comcast for internet, if I wasn't watching Netflix I'd use a much cheaper ADSL provider that can only give me 3mbit of bandwidth.
I've already paid Comcast for 20mbit of bandwidth, why does Netflix have to pay them money to send me data over a pipe that I've already paid for when Netflix is willing to drop that data off at Comcast's front door?
Netflix is not willing to drop that data off at "Comcast's front door".
Sure they are -- Netflix's CDN will deliver the data directly to Comcast's network. Or Comcast can set up some content caching servers to further reduce bandwidth demands.
And "you've paid Comcast for 20mbit of bandwidth", to where? Everywhere on earth? The moon? Gee, maybe you think you're paying for 20mbit of bandwidth to Comcast's network, under the expectation that they have decent connectivity to other major networks.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm paying for. I don't expect 20mbit to every place in the world, but I'd expect 20mbit to well connected sites.
How is Comcast going to deliver 20Mbit from me in NZ, should you so choose, when my ADSL upstream is not even that fast? Do you expect them to jump on a jet and install for free, a fat pipe into my house to satisfy your desires. Talk about a false sense of entitlement.
That's a strawman argument, that's not what I said and you know it.
How did it become Comcast's fault that Netflix is too cheap and stingy to pay for peering with Comcast or one of Comcast's many fast transit providers? I'm sure if Netflix was using a quality carrier like Layer3, they wouldn't have any problems, but they choose to shop around for the most bargain basement transit provider, and then blame their customers ISP (who are infact blameless in this whole shenanigans), when their bottom rung transit provider doesn't deliver.
Comcast can peer with Netflix's CDN just like other large ISP's do (like Google Fiber) -- it's Comcast's customers that are demanding Netflix traffic, Netflix isn't forcing it on anyone.
Or is there a way to prevent it from phoning home? I'm interested in getting one, I just don't feel like feeding more information to Google than I have to.
It still uses cloud based software, but at least it's not Google's cloud, and since it's open source, you can see exactly what it's sending to the cloud.
this is horrible, imagine if they could build out for peak capacity in the right locations for the right times so there wouldn't be anymore rolling blackouts in july and august
presumably the next step is for the power companies to control your thermostat to cut back your A/C during peak times.
this is horrible, imagine if they could build out for peak capacity in the right locations for the right times so there wouldn't be anymore rolling blackouts in july and august
Gee, you'd think they could put some metering on their *own* equipment to figure out peak demand and plan accordingly.
Where do you live that you have rolling blackouts? That sounds like a huge failing on the part of the power company - they already know how much power an "average" house uses in each neighborhood (so they can plan capacity for new customers), and they already know how aggregate power usage correlates to temperature, so they can plan for 100 degree summer days.
Of course, the big problem is getting them to actually *make* the investment in new power generating capacity where it is needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Fuck yeah... if I were a hundred-thousandaire working a salaried position like Linus does I would definitely shove as much pizza, bacon, and Mt Dew down my gullet at possible.
Oh, wait. No I don't.
I think you mean a 10-mllion-a-year-aire with a net worth of $150M:
http://www.celebritynetworth.c...
1) I guess it goes down until it can be fixed under warranty (same or next day depending on purchase option). Redundancy is expensive. What happens when your single instance of AWS goes down with an "oops amazon is having problems with a datacenter" message?
Well i guess the same thing that happens when the datacenter that my 1U server is colocated in goes down -- I either bring up the server n a DR region (which I can set up nearly for free with AWS), or wait until the datacenter problem is fixed. In the past 2 years, haven't experienced a single multi-AvailabilityZone outage with Amazon, and only 2 short single AZ outages that resulted in no loss of service since my servers are split across multiple AZ's. I've never had to fail over to the warm-spares in a separate region (other than during testing).
3) Reserved instance is cheaper, but at that price still more than a dedicated server and the server typically comes with a 3 year warranty and will likely last past that (Dell will warranty for 6 years). Assuming it only lasts 3 your cost for running on AWS is nearly 3 times higher even when figuring in an improved warranty and OS licensing. I concede that short duration projects or very spiky loads are a great use for the cloud, but long running relatively even loads simply don't make sense form a cost perspective, nevermind the fact that you now lose access to your database if your wan connection goes down (unless you build out multi-wan, but there is yet another expense).
Coloc space is not cheap, so don't forget to factor that into the costs. Running a datacenter in the office is even more expensive due to the costs to add the needed redundancy (power, cooling, internet) to an office tower.
The point still stands. If it's not 100% then someone who is immunized can catch and STILL give it to you. Thus both immunized and non-immunized pose the same threat to you.
The point only stands if you pretend that there's no real difference between an unimmunized person and a immunized person with 0.3% chance of catching the disease, and if you ignore the science behind herd immunity.
How can you get infected if YOU have been inoculated??? So how are they a public risk to you?
Because no vaccine is 100% effective, even if you're immunized, you can still catch the disease.
http://www.historyofvaccines.o...
Why aren’t all vaccines 100% effective?
Vaccines are designed to generate an immune response that will protect the vaccinated individual during future exposures to the disease. Individual immune systems, however, are different enough that in some cases, a person’s immune system will not generate an adequate response. As a result, he or she will not be effectively protected after immunization.
That said, the effectiveness of most vaccines is high. After receiving the second dose of the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella) or the standalone measles vaccine, 99.7% of vaccinated individuals are immune to measles. The inactivated polio vaccine offers 99% effectiveness after three doses. The varicella (chickenpox) vaccine is between 85% and 90% effective in preventing all varicella infections, but 100% effective in preventing moderate and severe chicken pox.
Further, some individuals are unable to be vaccinated due to underlying medical conditions (allergies, compromised immune system, etc).
Sorry. While I love technology, my not-so-humble opinion is that we're nowhere near the level of reliability needed for a car that's completely free of manual control.
Simply put, having seen the arc of technology advance over the last 30+ years, I still don't trust an automated driver system with my safety. PERIOD.
Millions of people fly in airplanes every day that rely on computer controls (since there is no mechanical linkage between the pilot and the control surfaces). And 30,000 people die each year at the hands of human drivers.
While the real time image recognition may not be quite ready for prime time, it will get there and when it does, computer drivers will be safer than human drivers. Google's driverless cars have already racked up 700,000 accident free miles in autonomous mode (albeit with a human ready to take over). Their car has already surpassed my own record, it's only been about 150,000 miles since my last accident (a car changed lanes into me, while the accident was not my fault, if I'd had computer-like reflexes and perfect awareness of my surroundings to know that the lane beside me was open, I may have been able to avoid the accident by sudden braking and/or making a quick lane change)
Really? Poles and cables? The future is wireless. Actually, the present is wireless. Poles and cables for anything but electricity is archaic. Every time this topic comes up, it always boils down to the poles and cables. Get rid of the poles and cables and you get rid of 99% of this problem.
Then why is Google spending so much money on fiber to the home? As RF frequencies increase (since there's only so much bandwidth available at the lower frequencies - a 100Mhz channel at 900Mhz takes up relatively more spectrum than a 100Mhz channel at 10Ghz), cell sizes decrease due to lower propagation and penetration of the higher frequencies to a point where it takes a Wireless access point at every house (or possibly in every room in the house) to provide equivalent throughput to wired infrastructure.
A pound is a unit of weight and can correspond to any kg mass, determined by the gravity of the place where it is being measured.
Weight is dependent on gravity, mass is not. Welcome to 5th grade science class
Which is why the metric system has separate units for mass and weight/force.
But that's not the case with the pound, it is used for both (sometimes, but not always more specifically as pound-force or pound-mass)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
The pound or pound-mass (abbreviations: lb, lbm, lbm, [1]) is a unit of mass used in the imperial, United States customary and other systems of measurement. A number of different definitions have been used, the most common today being the international avoirdupois pound which is legally defined as exactly 0.45359237 kilograms, and which is divided into 16 avoirdupois ounces.
Don't believe Wikipedia? How about the NIST?
http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/S...
MASS and MOMENT OF INERTIA: To convert from pound (avoirdupois) (lb) to kilogram (kg)
http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/S...
FORCE: To convert from pound-force (lbf) to newton (N)
The real world is not always as simple as what you learned in 5th grade science, when your teacher said "The pound is a unit of weight, not mass", he was correct and incorrect at the same time due to the ambiguous nature of the unit.
quote>Why would they use a measure of WEIGHT instead of a measure of MASS?
Ton is already ambiguous, but since it is a USA media article, its safe to assume that they meant what is also known as the short ton, or 2000 pounds. The pound is defined as 0.45359237 kg, so it is, by definition, a unit of mass.
It's not like they "forgot" that users might want to add new books, the inability of any updatable storage was a design requirement to prevent it from being used for espionage or as a channel to inadvertently bring malware aboard a ship.
This is to prevent it being used to smuggle secret military data ashore, take illicit photos, introduce computer malware or record covert conversations.
Though it seems that there are so many ways for a person to smuggle a MicroSD card into a secure area that an eReader is probably not a huge concern.
We have are 12 dev/test servers that I didn't bother to patch because they'll be decommissioned in a month or two along with the rest of the datacenter they are in, and even though they support SSL connections (with a disposable cert from our private CA), they are generally only used with HTTP and have no private data to protect, and are almost completely unused now.
If someone wants to spend time trying to steal the server's private key or steal user data from the server, that's fine with me, I'd rather have them spend time on my disposable server than someone's real server.
Is the airport in a city?
Yes and no. Technically, the airport is part of San Francisco, but it's geographically separate from SF -- you leave the city of SF to get to the airport, then you're back in the city when you're at the airport.
SF has put absurd amounts of money into public transit and even you acknowledge it's only just possible to get along without a car there. Few people that live there even attempt it, and fewer still succeed. So despite all the money put into public transit people still want their cars. But people are crowded together so closely already there is barely room to walk, let alone drive.
With current technology it's a dead-end. Instead of building public transit the 'planners' should be figuring out how to reduce population density.
Public transit funding is only "absurd" if you ignore the huge subsidies that go to cars.
30% of SF residents have no car, still a ways to go to catch up to NYC's 55% but that number is growing.
CIty planners have already spent decades planning low density communities across the country, But it turns out that people still need to go to the office -- telecommuting still hasn't fulfilled it's promise of letting workers stay at home, even Google with unlimited technology resources still ships its employees 40 miles from SF to GoogleHQ. It's a lot easier to get people to the office when they live and work in the same high density city than when homes and businesses are spread over a large low density area. You can see this when you look at the difference in transit effectiveness in San Jose versus San Francisco.
SF has fewer parking spots than cars. That is a fail for the city planners and people are forced to pay illegally every day because there are simply no legal spots left.
Faced with the problem of having to spend a long time looking for parking, why not pay somebody to do it for you? I bet you pay people all the time in order to save time in one way or another and you don't consider yourself a cunt.
It's only a fail if you think owning a car is necessary. SF has always had crowded narrow streets designed back when people still used horse and buggies to get around. Its way too late to create endless roads like LA and since even after devoting around a third of land area to roads, LA is still the most congested region in the country...city planners throughout the country are starting to realize that accomodatng more re cars is not sustainable and are emphasizing other forms of transit. SF has had a 'transit first' planning policy for decades so anyone that lives here and is surprised that its difficult to get around by car is in the wrong city. Transit in SF is far from perfect yet it's still one of the few cities in the country where its possible to live without a car.
>The trick is simple -- if the files are small, but too big to E-mail, PGP/gpg encrypt them, then send the links via a secure message. If the files are bigger (~50-100 megs or larger), then the file goes into a TrueCrypt volume that uses a keyfile, and the keyfile is GPG encrypted and E-mailed.
You have a much different definition of "simple" than most people. Few people (who are not techies) find transferring a file via GPG or TrueCrypt to be "simple". Even getting them to download the file from a cloud provider can be a chore "I clicked on the link but nothing happened! What do you mean I need to look in my Downloads folder?"
I am SO SICK of the police telling citizens they shouldn't conduct their business. Yes it can be unwise, but the constant drumbeat of 'leave it to the cops' pisses me off.
This is one case where it makes sense -- cops not only have physical protection (guns, etc), but they also have legal protection - if your phone tells you that your stolen phone is at 101 Main Street and you go to that address, bang on the door and start threatening the guy that answers to give up the phone before you kick his ass, you may find yourself in jail over the threats when it turns out that the phone was really in the basement apartment at 101A Main St (assuming, of course, that the guy you're demanding the phone from doesn't just kick *your* ass, and when he tells the cops that he felt threatened, he'll get the benefit of the doubt since you were at his house). The cops don't have to make any threats when they knock on the door -- the threat is implied.
While the smartphone itself may be trivial to replace, all the information on one may not be, and there is the whole deal of some apps that let you save your password...
Unless you were targeted for some specific espionage (you weren't), the phone thief doesn't care about the data on your phone. If they can unlock it, they might take a quick look through your pictures for naked pics of your wife, but they aren't going to use a compute cluster to try to brute force your passcode -- they are just going to wipe it and resell it.
If you have data on your phone that you can't replace, you were bound to lose it eventually anyway - phones die for lots of reasons unrelated to theft. Make regular backups (local or cloud based).
I've watched the occasional episode and it seems more targeted at "fake nerds" - the type who like "I fucking love science" on facebook. The viewer isn't made to relate with the geeky characters, they're made to laugh at.
Being said, the science usually has merit, even if it's something that geeks would never say either because it is just too obvious/cliche or doesn't make sense to say.
I dunno, I was a "real nerd" in high school and college - never played D&D or got into comic books, but spent way too much time in a computer lab (high school job gave me unlimited access to a VAX - and uunet!), and think the show is funny. Maybe because I see a lot of myself and my friends in the characters. Though we never hooked up with any women nearly as hot as Penny, Bernadette, or even Amy Farah Fowler.
My mom threw away my old Atari 2600 console in the late 1980's along with a dozen cartridges. If anyone wants to mount an expedition to recover it, I can tell you approximately where it's buried. Oh, and there were some umm... magazines with it that I used to keep under my bed, you can keep the 2600, but I'd like to have the magazines back for educational purposes --I haven't finished reading the articles.
So now that the FCC drops net neutrality, Netflix is going to play ball with the ISPs? They've basically been DOSing the ISPs local loops for nearly a decade, blaming the ISPs and now they have the brilliant idea that maybe they should address the insane amount of bandwidth they're eating up? How much do you want to bet they stop being such assholes about peering agreements now as well? Maybe a client that caches data to? Who came up with these brilliant cost saving ideas?!?!
I don't think you understand how Netflix works -- they don't push movies over my broadband connection without permission. Instead, they send me content that I asked for -- which is the entire reason I have a high speed internet connection in the first place. If I wasn't watching streaming video, instead of a 25mbit cable internet connection, I'd have a 3 - 6mbit DSL connection for less cost.
If the cable company can't afford to handle the traffic with their infrastructure, then they ought to increase their rates. I'm happy to pay the cable company a fair price for internet service, but I don't want to pay it in hidden charges for all of the bandwidth heavy websites I use, I want to see exactly how much internet service costs so I can shop around to different providers and to make it more likely that a competitor will step in as the price of service increases.
They've basically been DOSing the ISPs local loops for nearly a decade
Why do you think the local loop was the bottle neck? Netflix speeds increased literally overnight after they paid Comcast to upgrade the internet connection at the peering points, no local loop upgrades needed.
I guess it depends on the case you'll put it into. If it'll look like a regular old brick-phone, then there will be no difference between mass-produced and "DIY" one. Both of them will be subject to active eavesdropping by BTSes inside the airport and will be prevented to connect to regular ones outside the airport with jamming, so with "DIY" one you're just as "safe" as with the regular one.
Looks like he might be able to fit it into an old Motorola MicroTAC phone body:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Or maybe we could just use the meaning that the damn word was intended for in the first place! If I meant "unusual," I'd just say "unusual!"
But let's continue muddying up the language until everyone can only communicate using the 200 most common words. Then we can have more fun articles like that time we spent 90% of the comments section arguing about abbreviating "Supreme Court of the United States" to "Supremes." We all want that, right?
Ahh, so you're on a crusade to stop the evolution of the English language.
Alack, I fear your wood gardyloo shan't end in a fain result, meseems evolution is too puissant and your quest will end in wanion.
I pay that carrier just like I pay Netflix,
I see where you're confused.
Netflix is not the carrier. You're not paying Netflix to deliver the data into your house, but for some reason you think that's the case. I don't know how you got this notion.
I see where you're confused, Comcast is the carrier, and I am paying *Comcast* to deliver the data to my house. That's the entire reason I pay Comcast for internet, if I wasn't watching Netflix I'd use a much cheaper ADSL provider that can only give me 3mbit of bandwidth.
I've already paid Comcast for 20mbit of bandwidth, why does Netflix have to pay them money to send me data over a pipe that I've already paid for when Netflix is willing to drop that data off at Comcast's front door?
Netflix is not willing to drop that data off at "Comcast's front door".
Sure they are -- Netflix's CDN will deliver the data directly to Comcast's network. Or Comcast can set up some content caching servers to further reduce bandwidth demands.
And "you've paid Comcast for 20mbit of bandwidth", to where? Everywhere on earth? The moon? Gee, maybe you think you're paying for 20mbit of bandwidth to Comcast's network, under the expectation that they have decent connectivity to other major networks.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm paying for. I don't expect 20mbit to every place in the world, but I'd expect 20mbit to well connected sites.
How is Comcast going to deliver 20Mbit from me in NZ, should you so choose, when my ADSL upstream is not even that fast? Do you expect them to jump on a jet and install for free, a fat pipe into my house to satisfy your desires. Talk about a false sense of entitlement.
That's a strawman argument, that's not what I said and you know it.
How did it become Comcast's fault that Netflix is too cheap and stingy to pay for peering with Comcast or one of Comcast's many fast transit providers? I'm sure if Netflix was using a quality carrier like Layer3, they wouldn't have any problems, but they choose to shop around for the most bargain basement transit provider, and then blame their customers ISP (who are infact blameless in this whole shenanigans), when their bottom rung transit provider doesn't deliver.
Comcast can peer with Netflix's CDN just like other large ISP's do (like Google Fiber) -- it's Comcast's customers that are demanding Netflix traffic, Netflix isn't forcing it on anyone.
Or is there a way to prevent it from phoning home? I'm interested in getting one, I just don't feel like feeding more information to Google than I have to.
You can build your own Nest-like thermostat:
http://blog.spark.io/2014/01/1...
It still uses cloud based software, but at least it's not Google's cloud, and since it's open source, you can see exactly what it's sending to the cloud.
this is horrible, imagine if they could build out for peak capacity in the right locations for the right times so there wouldn't be anymore rolling blackouts in july and august
presumably the next step is for the power companies to control your thermostat to cut back your A/C during peak times.
They already do:
http://www.pge.com/en/myhome/s...
this is horrible, imagine if they could build out for peak capacity in the right locations for the right times so there wouldn't be anymore rolling blackouts in july and august
Gee, you'd think they could put some metering on their *own* equipment to figure out peak demand and plan accordingly.
Where do you live that you have rolling blackouts? That sounds like a huge failing on the part of the power company - they already know how much power an "average" house uses in each neighborhood (so they can plan capacity for new customers), and they already know how aggregate power usage correlates to temperature, so they can plan for 100 degree summer days.
Of course, the big problem is getting them to actually *make* the investment in new power generating capacity where it is needed.