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User: Doc+Ruby

Doc+Ruby's activity in the archive.

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Comments · 21,318

  1. Where Were You? on Emergency Government Control of the Internet? · · Score: 0, Troll

    I don't know whether this newly announced policy is at all a good idea. But I can't tell from the reporting whether it's even what the headlines say. Those headlines lately have been telling us the government is going to execute grandma rather than pay for her back medicine, and other crazy talk based on nothing.

    But what I do want to know right now is where were you the past 8 years? While the government was spying on every American's email and phone. While it was infiltrating nonviolent political groups with troublemakers and spies. While it was torturing people to death around the world. While it was invading Iraq for no good reason, lying all the time. While it was kidnapping people into prisons without any charges or basis for them. While it was feeding banks as much credit and deregulation as they could stand until they went bust, then handed them more $TRILLIONS. While it stopped collecting taxes from rich people, even as bridges collapsed and cities drowned.

    Where the hell were you then? Or do you suddenly get up in arms only when your porn might get cut off during a massive cyberattack, for which you'll blame the government instead of the attackers? Or maybe it has something to do with a Black Democrat being "the government" for a while, instead of a nice White Republican.

    Where were you for 8 years? If you weren't submitting those stories or too busy stopping them to post, then go back under whatever rock you came from. The rest of us are trying to clean up that mess, and you're tracking it all over the floors.

  2. New Targets on High-Tech Blimps Earning Their Wings · · Score: 1

    So now the US military will float huge sitting ducks essential for battlefield command. Which enemies will immediately target. When the blimps pop, two mile long cables will lash the battlefied, thrashing to pieces the military, civilians and landscape helpless below.

    These things are like an unmanned trojan horse.

  3. Total BS on Who Will Fix the Internet? No One, Apparently · · Score: 1

    With no one 'in charge' of the Internet, it's almost impossible to get any sweeping technical improvements made, especially since there's no financial incentive on the part of the ISPs and telecoms to invest in basic infrastructure.

    Well, no one was "in charge" of the Internet during its period of vastly largest growth and improvement: the last 14 years since the NSF released control. And even during the years and decades before that, as the Internet became something everyone wanted and many contributed to, there was no one "in charge" of it. No one's ever really been "in charge" of the Internet, which is why it grew as fast as people wanted to participate. The "no one in charge" model is exactly why the Internet became successful.

    I notice that the cablecos, telcos and other major ISPs are not any good at innovation on their own networks they're "in charge" of. I notice that the more the Internet has become owned and controlled by fewer corporations, the less innovation, worse maintenance, more abuse and total aimlessness has taken over.

    This report was written by some authority worshipper who ignores the Internet's history of success without someone in charge. They want some authority, so they make it sound like the Internet needs one. When the more authority it's had, the worse it's been.

  4. Trademarks vs Phishing on Banks Urge Businesses To Lock Down Online Banking · · Score: 1

    These banks can call for everyone else to do all kinds of drastic things. But even though practically all phishing scams should be stopped by banks enforcing their own trademarks, banks do absolutely nothing like that.

    These banks are businesses that get paid $TRILLIONS to lose everyone else's money, all the time. Of course they'll demand everyone else do a lot of hard work to protect them, while they do none but keep all the money.

  5. FlightAware on Clojure and Heroku Predict Flight Delays · · Score: 1

    I like to use FlightAware for realtime/historical tracking maps/stats of flights. I wish there were a way to mash up these delay data services with FlightAware.

    If a Google Maps layer stream were as popular an API as RSS has become, we might see all kinds of data sources integrated into really helpful visualizations.

  6. Re:Personal 3G Hotspot on Open Source GSM Network At Dutch Hacker Convention · · Score: 1

    Will a single femtocell like that installed at my house make not just my own phone, but my neighbors phones also work? How do I get them to pay me for my service to them? Can I selectively lock out phones that don't please me?

  7. Personal 3G Hotspot on Open Source GSM Network At Dutch Hacker Convention · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't get cell reception in my neighborhood near NYC. I need a "3G hotspot" that will let my GSM phone work on my 1 acre property, but is connected to a Asterisk phone server in my home office wired to the PSTN. Where do I get the 3G hotspot?

  8. Canvas as Video Codec? on HTML 5 Canvas Experiment Hints At Things To Come · · Score: 1

    Canvas can't play video directly. The video tag is currently halted in the HTML 5 spec. Is there a way to deliver video in canvas anyway? Is there anything like a "video to SVG" converter that could give canvas some SVG to play instead? Or some other actual canvas feature that could be used (without resorting to ASCII art animation)?

  9. Optimum, Too on Comcast the Latest ISP To Try DNS Hijacking · · Score: 1

    My Optimum Online account at a client's site filters DNS through their webjacking SW, to return a page of spammy ad "suggestions" when your domain query doesn't resolve to a registered name (like when you typo). Which is bad because it violates the DNS spec, in spirit and because apps that expect a DNS error will fail. But what's really bad is that every webpage, each full of domain lookups, takes several extra seconds to load because of their slow filter that tries to find ads even when the domain name is correct.

    What can I do to stop this? Is there some free 3rd party DNS server I can point at, instead of the one the cablemodem sets in the LAN's PCs by DHCP? I know how to edit the DHCP file, and set the different DNS server IP# by dhclient commandline, but to which server can I point that file?

    And how do I join with others to stop this substantial violation?

  10. Easy to Copy on Murdoch Says, "We'll Charge For All Our Sites" · · Score: 1

    Murdoch, owner of Fox "News", the NY Post and other hysterical tabloids, should know better than anyone else that his news is popular because it's easy to distribute, not because it's any good, or at all accurate.

    Making his content hard to redistribute, even by linking, will make it entirely worthless.

    Hooray and good riddance to bad rubbish.

  11. Frivolous Lawyer on Student Sues University Because She's Unemployable · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Her lawyer is supposed to tell her that her case is frivolous, because there's no reasonable argument that the liability is the school's, not hers. But instead her lawyer is suing. They're supposed to protect the court, and thereby the public which funds and depends on the court, from frivolous lawsuits.

    Courts should be throwing out a lot more of these cases as frivolous. Opposing lawyers should be arguing that the other lawyer's case is frivolous. When a lawyer brings a case ruled frivolous, they should pay a fine equal to the average judgment award in cases of that type. A second frivolous ruling should suspend the lawyer for six months, and require they pass the bar exam again in that state to continue practicing. A third frivolous ruling should strip them permanently of their license in that state, disbarment. And any frivolous ruling in any state should cause them to go through hearings in every state in which they're licensed to determine whether that strike should count in that state too, towards eventual disbarment there. Not to mention what their insurance policy should charge once they've demonstrated their high risk.

    Being a lawyer is a privilege that is equal to easy profits (there's never a shortage of drunk driving cases for money). Abusing the privilege that the public subsidizes at every step, in the delivery of justice essential to a functional society, should see that privilege stripped as soon as it can justly be stripped. Let these frivolous lawyers get jobs in the circus, where clowns are to be laughed at instead of respected.

  12. No Battery? on Intel 34nm SSDs Lower Prices, Raise Performance · · Score: 1

    These SSDs contain a RAM cache that's powered by the host PC IO bus. Why don't they have a battery in the SSD? The OS thinks that everything ACKed as sent to the storage unit is written, but a power failure kills the cache before it's flushed. A little battery charged off the host PC IO bus would make these drives even more reliable than spinning discs.

  13. Re:Come On on Visualizing False Positives In Broad Screening · · Score: 1

    Yet you failed to learn from that post that making insulting jokes about how anyone wearing a turban in the US can be beaten senseless "because they're a Muslim terrorist" is unacceptable in public (and probably in private, depending on the quality of the company you keep).

  14. Knowing Their Ass from Their Al Qaeda on Visualizing False Positives In Broad Screening · · Score: 1

    How can this counter-intuitive fact be communicated effectively to people unschooled in statistics?

    Just anal-probe every American at football games and airports, then tell a random 9.99% of them they've got AIDS from the procedure (though they don't).

    We'll develop an intuitive sense of empathy for falsely accused Muslims, other turban-wearers and lots of other people "with nothing to hide".

  15. Issue Problem on Main Toilet On ISS Craps Out · · Score: 2, Insightful

    the toilet troubles were 'not going to be an issue' for now.

    No, they are definitely, unavoidably an "issue". Otherwise we wouldn't have a story. It might not be a "problem", though really this is also a problem, but one with a solution. But anything that people can legitimately talk about, that anyone agrees is worth talking about, is an "issue".

    The computer world has turned everyone into a coward afraid of admitting something might be a "problem". Instead, everything's an "issue", which might not be a problem. That's nice: no problem, no blame; just some chitchat and a "resolution". Or it's "unresolved", but that's still not as bad as a problem. Except that's all a bunch of words in denial that there's a problem without a solution. Which makes it hard to solve the problem.

    There is no doubt that losing toilets in orbit, to the point of relying on a backup, across an international divide that was itself a political problem for months, is a "problem". If we can't call that what it is, I don't know if we can take the problems that space exploration brings with it. And that issue is a real problem.

  16. No They Didn't on Computerized Election Results With No Election · · Score: 1

    No, the army seized him and drove him in his pajamas to the airport. Then wouldn't let him back, even in the company of the UN, the OAS, and other Latin American presidents.

    That's not anything like impeachment. That's a textbook coup d'etat, even if he pissed people off enough to bring it on. Pissed some people off. And then the coup pissed a lot more people off, worldwide.

    Chavez has nothing to do with it. Unless of course all you can see in this world is "with us or against us", and are still too attached to Bush's BS to actually care about the rule of law.

  17. And This Is the Government of a Country on Computerized Election Results With No Election · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nobody's saying electronic records can't be faked through physical access to the machines. You're the only one who seems surprised at that, in order to deny it should be surprising. Which is a straw man argument.

    This story is important because it crossed the line from possible, to (evidently) actual. Which has consequences. Not the expected consequences of helping keep a president in power, but (even more notably) in helping to keep one ousted by a coup this past week out of power, boosting arguments of his corruption.

    Next you'll be sarcastically moaning "oh, noes, presidents are corrupt". FYI: Yes, and when they are, the people need to be outraged about it, and get rid of them.

  18. So Impeach Him on Computerized Election Results With No Election · · Score: 1, Insightful

    There's a lot of reason to believe Zelaya is corrupt, and shouldn't be Honduras' president. But that means Honduras should impeach him, or convict and imprison him, removing him from office, if that's how their constitution works (which is what appears to to be the case).

    Any government process that features the army forcing a president out on a plane in his pajamas is at least as unacceptable as a crooked election keeping one in power.

  19. Why No Internet? on Six Men Endure 105-Day Mars Flight Simulator · · Score: 1

    They had no television or Internet and their only link to the outside world was communications with the experiment's controllers -- who also monitored them via TV cameras -- and an internal e-mail system. Communications with the outside world had 20-minute delays to imitate a real space flight.

    Why would we subject astronauts to "no Internet"? OK, they couldn't use our "World" -wide apps that depend on low latency. But an "internet" (small "i", not the unified public one) would be a perfect tech to keep their mission LANs communicating with NASA networks on Earth. And making such an internet would be a very valuable product of such a mission. Extending the Internet into space while it's still basically "American style" would be a huge dividend for getting both the Internet and the space colonization global industries (and human endeavors) started and fully under way. America's national interest coinciding with furthering the global interest of everyone already riding the momentum of America's earlier pioneering.

  20. Chinese "Nationwide Controversy?" on China Bans Shock Treatment For Internet Addiction · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    its use at one hospital sparked nationwide controversy.

    Does China even have such a thing as "nationwide controvery"? Or is the "nation" here the United States? Or maybe Canada?

  21. 4*$25 SATAx4 Cards Instead of 1 $1200 SAS/SATAx20 on Building a 10 TB Array For Around $1,000 · · Score: 1

    This article is stupid mainly because it spends over $1000 (something like $1200) on the RAID card, while spending another $1000 on 12 drives. A RAID card that supports 20 drives, not just 12, and mixed SAS and SATA drives instead of just the SATA it needs. Not to mention that the RAID itself can go in SW under the Linux kernel instead of spending on HW to do it. And that single card is a single failurepoint, making the 12x redundancy of the drives kinda irrelevant.

    Instead, 4 $25 4-port SATA cards are enough. If you want parallel throughput, go for PCI-e, but just the parallelism from 4 cards in old PCI is enough for most apps. Spend 10*$80=$800 on 10 1TB drives, the $100 on the SATA cards, $50 on a 400W power supply (plenty for 10 drives each pulling about 15W, + motherboard), $20 on a 10-bay case, and blow past $1000 a little by putting a P4/2.4GHz/1GB-ethernet motherboard in there for $50. Now you've got almost 1TB capacity, good thruput. Install Ubuntu server, config your SW RAID, ethernet/webserver and whatever NAS server SW you prefer (sshfs, NFS, whatever). Presto! for just over $1000 (for real), you've got almost 10TB (spend $1100 for the full 10TBs).

    The only tricky part might be staggering the drives' spinup kickoffs so the 400W power supply doesn't catch all their load spikes at once. But I'm sure someone can post a bootloader config or patch that will handle the only really wizard part of this whole challenge.

  22. Re:Cursing, Not Swearing on Swearing Provides Pain Relief, Say Scientists · · Score: 1

    I'm from NYC and Long Island.

    We also call Pittsburgh "West" and DC "the South".

  23. Cursing, Not Swearing on Swearing Provides Pain Relief, Say Scientists · · Score: 3, Interesting

    These effects of making foul expletives show why it's more properly called "cursing" than "swearing". Cursing is a verbal counterattack on the source of the pain, which is more like the practice of placing a curse on an enemy than the practice of making a holy vow - because the vow here is profane. I expect researchers will find that cursing puts the curser in an attack state that suppresses the experience of pain. I also expect we'll find that cursing releases physical and mental stress, relaxing physical and mental parts of us so they can return to normal sensation, not the disarray that is the basis of our feeling pain to begin with.

    On the US East Coast, we call it "cursing". I know on the West Coast they call it "swearing", and evidently do in the UK. The East Coast is known for its advanced research, typically in the streets, in coping with pain of all sorts, especially by talking. Maybe once they get the right names on these effects, they'll be able to use our informal groundwork to curse better, or perhaps an upgrade to swear off cursing entirely, just as bandaids have replaced blisters.

  24. !stealing on Unsung, Unpaid Coders Behind Federal IT Dashboard · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Whoever tagged this story as "stealing" doesn't understand Free Software. The Federal CIO deserves extra credit for properly understanding and using it. Which, in turn, promotes it in the most powerful way.

    Remember that the Feds have given away more software and other tech than any other single source. Including the Internet itself, and indeed jumpstarting computers, microprocessors, and even universal telephone service. Your tax dollars at work - in a way that private industry cannot claim. Events that have changed the world into a much freer place, both for software and for everything else.

  25. !thoughtcrime on British Men Jailed For Online Hate Crimes · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Publishing words that incite hatred is not "thoughtcrime". Words are not thoughts. You can think whatever hatred or whatever else you want. But speech is an action, a real act in the world that affects other people. Not all acts, not all speech or expressions, particularly in public, are protected. You do not have the right to speak in a way that harms people. And currently, as always in history, published hate speech forms links in the critical path from protected hateful thoughts to non-protected violent acts that physically harm people. Those links are on the action side of the thought/action boundary.

    You can't tell someone that you're going to kill them and expect to get away with it. You likewise can't threaten everyone who's a member of a group, racial or otherwise, and expect to get away with it. You can think about genocide, but the moment you do something, including organizing or inciting others to carry it out, you've crossed the line. And that's when we have governments to protect us from you, not you from the consequences of your speech.