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User: Doc+Ruby

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Comments · 21,318

  1. Pretty New Space Junk on ISS Dodges Space Junk For First Time In Five Years · · Score: 0, Troll

    It's only 2 years old.

    The Russian "contribution" to the ISS has been pretty much only obstacles. And that's why, ladies and gentlemen, the US plans to rely on Russian launches for our entire ISS mission programme.

  2. Re:Where's the fire? on China Sets Sights On Rail Record · · Score: 1

    Environmentalists love rail.

    People with rail in their backyards already have rail in their backyards, and of course no one wants new rail in their backyards. But if the US were serious, we'd dig rail tunnels and run rail under rivers and along coasts where it was too late to run rights of way. Or, much more practically, we'd run rail along commuter highways, making "car trains" between hubs that would use capacity a lot more efficiently.

    The rest of those complaints are just excuses. The kinds of excuses we'd mock Communists for making. But I guess if we want to let the car and oil cartels run our "capitalism", we're going to stay stuck in the 20th Centurny, while the "Communists" run circles around us.

  3. Re:Yep on US No Longer the World's Internet Hub · · Score: 2, Informative

    You're right except for "why the Internet was started". What you cited is a myth. The Internet was started as simply a way for a handful of nuke weapons labs to ship around data without literally sending around packages of punchcard decks. So they connected them by wires. The decentralized architecture came because no single center had organized a project (or its government budget) to "run the network". They got basic TCP/IP running, then email on it, then started building local network apps, which they discussed on the network in "Request for Comment" messages which spec'ed the new app/protocol. Like good scientists, they repeated each other's experiments, and apps/protocols spread. And new sites started using the TCP/IP protocol and the app protocols that ran on it as scientists and engineers found out about how easily they could share data (and email, always the killer app). The fact that the decentralized architecture could also withstand nuke hits once the network was complex enough to have multiple routing choices around any outage (like if some researcher turned off their computer while on vacation) was an unplanned benefit.

    But it makes a nice, illustrative myth. However, the real reason is much more illustrative of why the architecture is superior.

  4. Republican Government Is Smaller, Less Invasive on Appeals Court Rules US Can Block Mad Cow Testing · · Score: 1

    Feel safer?

  5. Re:Probable Cause and Warrants on A Device to Grab Data From Cell Phones · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The border has always been an exception to enforcement of government protections of our rights, even when unjustified by any actual risk response. This decade has seen those exceptions turn extremely abusive, even on totally legitimate US citizens and visitors.

    We have to fix our border to protect us from both foreign threats and domestic abuses. And we especially must reverse the trend of finding any exception to protecting our rights as an excuse to violate them elsewhere.

  6. Re:Probable Cause and Warrants on A Device to Grab Data From Cell Phones · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Like I said: we used to have requirements to protect our rights.

    Clarence Thomas, as everyone not blinded by Republican loyalty knows, isn't a "Constitutional" justice. He's a rightwing pawn.

    Which is why he and his Republican Supreme Courts have tended to throw out the requirements that the government protect our rights. Including the long-understood requirement that a warrant be produced from probably cause to be reasonable.

    But hey, if you want a "literal Constitution", let's finally dismiss that standing army and finally get the well-regulated militia instead, that the Constitution requires.

    Without due process, like reasonable cause producing warrants as the only legitimate search/seizure, the government can arbitrarily invade us. I bet King George III and his agents would have claimed all their searches and seizures were "reasonable". But that kind of "court" isn't the kind that we replaced with our Constitutional representative democracy.

    If you want a Court that operates like a cracker gang exploiting any possible vulnerability in the "operating system" to destroy our rights rather than protect them, well, Clarence Thomas is your kind of "justice".

  7. Probable Cause and Warrants on A Device to Grab Data From Cell Phones · · Score: 3, Informative

    In the US, we used to have this requirement that the government protect our rights:

    Amendment IV
    The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

    Without probable cause and a legitimate warrant based on it, there is no reasonable search or seizure, no usable evidence. There's only an armed gang assaulting and violating their victim.

    A fancy new way to invade privacy is just an expensive and effective battering ram.

  8. Re:Good Riddance on US No Longer the World's Internet Hub · · Score: 1

    Evidence?

  9. Re:Good Riddance on US No Longer the World's Internet Hub · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Of course there are Internet "hubs". I've got several of them right there in my office LAN. But that's different from something being "the" hub.

    The Internet is so diverse and capable of so much decentralization that it even includes lots of hubs. But that's different from the majority of the world's traffic going through a single country that isn't at an endpoint. The US being "the world's Internet hub" was a temporary historical artifact, at odds with actual Internet architecture once the Internet was truly global, and not just "the USA's extranet".

  10. Re:Good Riddance on US No Longer the World's Internet Hub · · Score: 3, Informative

    "Sealevel" is "the surface" only at sea. There's practically no one living 400m above or below the actual surface of the sea.

    The rest of the world lives within 400m of the surface, even if that surface is a mile above "sealevel".

    And the ones outside that narrow shell aren't on the Internet. Except for a tiny few in another shell inhabited briefly by airplanes, and another orbital shell inhabited by fewer people than the sampling margin of error.

  11. Re:Good Riddance on US No Longer the World's Internet Hub · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Moderation 0
        50% Interesting
        50% Flamebait

    I explain that the Internet is supposed to be decentralized, and that the US should benefit from its growth, and that's "Flamebait". Why do TrollMods hate America? Why do they hate the Internet?

  12. Re:Good Riddance on US No Longer the World's Internet Hub · · Score: 5, Funny

    The Earth has a center, because it is a sphere. But no one lives outside a small band +/- 400m from the surface, so "the world" is a shell that has no center.

    No one except the Mole Men, and they've got their own Internet. Which is really more an "Infranet", but that's their problem.

  13. APT Repos, Not "App Stores" on Google Awards Android Dev Prizes, Introduces App Store · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Android software would be much more available if it were served to machines from Debian (or Ubuntu) style APT repositories, rather than Apple style "App Stores". Not just because free software is basically more popular and available than $pay software. But also because anyone can set up an APT repo, and anyone can point their machine at it. The machines ship with a list of tested/approved repos, but the machine's admins can easily add/delete from that list. They can even make their own local repo, or one shared among a user group or developer group, or a website of fanboys.

    These repos make SW deployment trivial, even with complex interdependencies (though with some exceptions when the repos and packages are managed badly). Simple, reliable SW management is perhaps Debian-style OS'es best feature, and even more important on something like a mobile "phone", that's supposed to be super-simple for even the lightest weight users to master without thinking too hard.

    Since Android is supposed to be a major OSS platform, I hope it quickly gets a F/OSS repo system that all its users can easily use if they want. Because that would kill the "all-proprietary only" SW model that phones now support.

  14. Good Riddance on US No Longer the World's Internet Hub · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The Internet isn't supposed to have a "hub". It's supposed to be completely distributed and decentralized.

    Besides, why should the US carry all the rest of the world's traffic? The world is a globe, which doesn't have a center. Why should Europe / East Asia connections pass through the US? Let them build their share of the interconnects. They've got way more people, and we need all our bandwidth for ourselves, just like anyone else.

    The US invented the Internet. We should be exporting equipment and expertise, so the rest of the world can do business with us (and with each other our way), and get paid right to do it.

  15. Is This Effect a Power Source? on Nuclear Decay May Vary With Earth-Sun Distance · · Score: 0, Redundant

    If the Solar System does indeed contain a field which inhibits radioactive decay, even a little, and is dynamic, then can't motion through that field be harnessed as a power source?

    Like how the Earth's magnetic field, which is very weak compared to the electromagnetic phenomena that humans generate with which it interacts, still has enough power to drive effects in very tiny devices, like magnetized compass needles, and even smaller microelectronics. Except that we're not really orbiting very much through Earth's magnetic fields that are either really small, or don't have lots more power available from other sources, like solar power or precharged batteries.

    But on Earth, though, really small devices that could harness this effect for power are all already flying through this field, showing its effects. And plenty of them aren't candidates for solar power, because they're not reliably hit by sunlight.

    If we can understand and engineer this force, can't we make perhaps nanotech with embedded atoms or molecules that are pushed around by this force enough to power the rest of the devices? At a cost of slowing the Earth's orbit by an imperceptible amount, but which is enough wattage to really make a difference in usable machines.

  16. Re:Languages as APIs to Bytecode on The State of Scripting Languages · · Score: 0

    Well, if .NET can do it, then something that runs on platforms I like, like Linux, can do it. Thanks for the proof of concept.

  17. Languages as APIs to Bytecode on The State of Scripting Languages · · Score: 0

    I really wish that I didn't have to learn different languages that all do basically the same thing with different syntaxes and styles. Especially since they all get compiled into highly optimized code that is basically the same for the same jobs, data structures and algorithms, regardless of the different language in which the source is written. I'd like to write in whatever language I want, see it compiled into corresponding bytecode, and then later reconstruct it into source in a different language that's functionally identical.

    The really hard part is not so much getting all the different source codes in the different language into the same bytecode. It's getting that bytecode into readable source in different source languages.

    Perl's Parrot VM is supposed to execute bytecodes in all these different languages. I wonder whether we'll see anytime soon a decompiler that can let us use any related language we want, and de/recompile automatically into fairly clear and simple source in different languages, so other programmers can collaborate with us, each in our own favorite idiom. Or even better, import code in any language (of a limited set of closely functionally related ones), not just the one we're actually programming in, and see it converted. Not just link to a library, but actually convert and merge the source code files together.

  18. Re:120GB is too much. on SSD Won't Make Sense In Laptops For Two Years · · Score: 1

    No, the action of software is not always entirely a subset of the functionality of the hardware. Not the default HW functionality, anyway. There's lots of software that works around or compensates for limitations of the hardware. Except in the purely academic sense, which is not what software developers work against, anyway.

  19. Re:120GB is too much. on SSD Won't Make Sense In Laptops For Two Years · · Score: 1

    Any software solution that requires googling it, then manually installing it on both servers and all clients, and configuring it, is also another set of problems.

    AFS is a component of the solution, just like Flash chips were a component of an SSD solution. Until someone packages it into plug & play, it's still a solution waiting to happen. Yes, it can be solved, but it isn't yet solved.

    When Ubuntu ships with SSD and that caching system I described enabled by default, perhaps it will have been solved. It's good to know we're close, but no cigar yet.

  20. Re:120GB is too much. on SSD Won't Make Sense In Laptops For Two Years · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Networking makes the 16GB local drives plenty big enough. If the network is completely transparent, with automatic network drives available for the less frequently used files. That kind of local caching should be automatic, and the Gb ethernet a hassle-free bottleneck (no "login", etc).

    Then 16GB for $50 means that SSD has fully arrived. Even if the SSD vendors still want $200 for whatever they'll try to sell you.

    Which means that really, now, it's a UI and software problem to solve. The HW is ready. Isn't that always the case?

  21. Re:99KBps on Comcast To Cap Data Transfers At 250 GB In October · · Score: 1

    They'd just lie to me.

    But I am indeed paying $50 a month for up to about 18Mbps (sometimes it's only 8-10Mbps), with no other quotas. That ain't Comcast.

    "Broadband" that's less than 1.5Mbps minimum is not "broadband". But that's Comcast.

  22. 99KBps on Comcast To Cap Data Transfers At 250 GB In October · · Score: 1

    (250 gigabytes) / (2,629,743.83 seconds in a month) = 99.6842343 KBps

    I know that if my ISP tried to charge me $50 a month for 100KBps, and I didn't have a competing ISP to turn to, I'd take it.

    And then I'd try to rip them off any way I possibly could. Like download as much media as possible at every home and office I could get to, and go around picking up full DVDs for dumping into my HDs back home.

  23. Re:10 million digits on 45th Known Mersenne Prime Found? · · Score: 1

    4 isn't prime.

  24. Re:So *That's* How They Do It on The Internet's Biggest Security Hole Revealed · · Score: 1

    It's not so easy to decrypt all of our traffic. In fact, there's so much of it that decrypting all of it, or even a substantial amount of it, is prohibitively expensive for even the wastefully spending US government.

    The point of encryption is to make it a lot harder, but not impossible, to snoop than it is to just talk. Combined with the massive parallelism of the Internet's very many users, even the NSA is overwhelmed.

    Real security is not theater, it's real. Security theater is indeed fake, but that's the minority that we do what we can to eliminate.

    But hey, since you're not afraid to discard security, just post your bank, account# and PIN. I'll act like I didn't rob you.

  25. Re:Local Generation/Consumption on The Power Grid Can't Handle Wind Farms · · Score: 1

    I didn't say any of that bullshit you just made up, Anonymous fucktard Coward.