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User: rahvin112

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  1. Re:Call anything 3D printing on World's First 3D Printed Estate Coming To New York · · Score: 2

    Tilt up wall construction is one of the most common construction methods in the US. The concrete walls are poured on the ground in forms adjacent to their final location, once cured they are tilted up and connected, once the walls are in place the roof is added. Almost every warehouse or industrial building built these days is built with tilt up wall construction.

    It's fast, it's cheap and its low labor. Don't speak of what you dont' know.

  2. Re:Big Data on Netflix CEO On Net Neutrality: Large ISPs Are the Problem · · Score: 5, Informative

    The lie you have bought into is that destination traffic is the same as transit traffic.

    The whole point of peering agreements is to stop one provider from piggybacking on another transit providers network to reduce their costs. The agreements are structured so that to reach various end points they transit the traffic as closely as possible to the destination then hand it off to the hosting network rather than hand it off at the first available point and allow it transit the other networks system.

    This whole arrangement falls flat on it's face when one of those transit providers is also the major destination route for millions of customers. ISPs that provide residential service always have unbalanced traffic arrangement because the customer almost always requests more data then they send. As long as L3 and Cogent are handing this destination traffic off to Verizon at the closest possible peering point for their subscribers then Verizon shouldn't be able to request the the traffic be balanced.

    The problem is that unregulated market forces have allowed monopoly providers in local markets to combine with the very limited number of Tier 1 network operators resulting in the almost immediate abuse of monopoly by the Tier 1 portion of the network leveraging the monopoly side of the residential ISP business. There is rather simple solution to this problem. Bar any ISP that offers services directly to residential customers from owning or operating long haul national networks. If Verizon was forced to separate their Tier 1 transit business from their Residential ISP business (as in either divesting the assets or separating the company into two distinct companies) the problem would be solved almost immediately.

    Businesses with monopolies will abuse them, that's the whole point of regulating free markets, because without that regulation you will end almost immediately with companies abusing market position and breaking the free market. Free markets don't stay free without regulation, particularly businesses with massive capital start up costs such as residential ISPs. Without regulation you end up with Verizon's Tier 1 network business leveraging the monopoly residential ISP traffic to extract rent from competing providers. This is a rent the market would not support without the monopoly or with regulation to prevent it's abuse.

  3. Re:I thought they were evil for avoiding fiber upg on Groundwork Laid For Superfast Broadband Over Copper · · Score: 0

    Well that's your problem right there, you're a moron. No one learns anything on slashdot, people just come here to make stupid arguments and pretend this is a source of information instead of a chance to pretend you know more than someone else.

  4. Re:The Discovery channel? on Kevlar Protects Cables From Sharks, Experts Look For Protection From Shark Week · · Score: 1

    The reality TV executives showed up and everyone went "wow look at how cheap that content is". Although they failed to really grasp that whole cheap thing in the proper context.

    TV is 99% junk (repeats, realityTV, etc) now because it was more profitable. All the specialty channels are now just repeating junk rather than trying to be channels serving that actual niche. Hell the weather channel didn't show weather, SciFi shows wrestling, etc. Those channels long ago lost their real audiences.

  5. Re:probably BS on Posting Soccer Goals On Vine Is Illegal, Say England's Premier League · · Score: 1

    Derivative in what way? Did he take a video of a video or did he take a video of the actual game? I fail to see how anyone could claim video you shot yourself of live action belongs to them in the form of copyright because you are the one that took the video, they don't have a copyright on the live action and it's absurd to claim they do.

    Now as someone else said, there may have been contract language on the ticket that you agreed to by attending the game that gave them copyright on all your recordings of the game. I would suggest not attending such games in the future. This could in fact not even be tied to copyright law, this could be some special exception in UK law that gives soccer clubs rights to all video shot of their club. It would be absurd but that's never stopped the UK before.

  6. Re:Legal... sort of on Hemp Fibers Make Better Supercapacitors Than Graphene · · Score: 1

    Yea but it looks like pot and if you allow any Joe, Dick and Jane to grow it the feds would have to genetically test every plant in the crop and that's just unworkable so it should be banned to save the government effort in proving that you are growing illegal plants.

    [/sarcasm]

  7. Re:Everything hits poor people harder on Cisco To Slash Up To 6,000 Jobs -- 8% of Its Workforce -- In "Reorganization" · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Communism is a great idea as long as every actor is altruistic and interested in the welfare of the society above themselves. Because of that base assumption about human behavior it's a terrible system.

    Libertarianism is a great idea as long as every actor is altruistic and interested in the welfare of the society above themselves.

    Laissez-fair capitalism is a great idea as long as every actor is altruistic and interested in the welfare of the society above themselves.

    Etc...

    All these "improvements" on the system we have only work if you assume people aren't self-interested greedy pricks that will screw over their own mothers for $5. As soon as you insert the real world into these system it collapses from the sociopaths gaming the system for themselves. As you said you need checks and balances, capitalism with regulation to prevent the abuse of the system that is common appears to be the most functional system, that is as long as you don't get people that are so stupid they think the regulation is the problem.

  8. Re:Impact assesment on California May Waive Environmental Rules For Tesla · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It doesn't mean it's irrelevant, it means impacts won't be prevented (which isn't the purpose of an impact study anyway) but they can still be mitigated later. You might not understand this difference but it's significant. We have a serious problem with environmental groups abusing the process not to prevent environmental damage, but to prevent development at all. Even when developers or state agencies go out of their way to protect sensitive sites/species groups like Greenpeace will still sue, not to get additional protections or to protect anything but simply to raise the costs in the hope the agency/company will abandon the project because in Greenpeace's view all new development is bad. They aren't alone, there are dozens of groups who are abusing the courts and our environmental laws as some campaign to end all new development.

    This is not the purpose these environmental rules were created to satisfy. The laws are being heavily abused and if it's not reigned in it's going to get so bad people will support abolishing the protections all together, which is a far worse outcome.

  9. Re:Took the USB organization close to 20 years... on Reversible Type-C USB Connector Ready For Production · · Score: 1

    Of course there are other circuit board connectors, but lets be honest, the reference design is the one you will see the most and the previous reference designs have a serious fatigue failure problem.

  10. Re:Of course on Study: Firmware Plagued By Poor Encryption and Backdoors · · Score: 1

    Considering the smallest recommended handout is a /64 which includes as many addresses as there are in IPv4 total there should never be a problem with the number of addressable IPs you receive. If ISPs try to hand out a /127 address to customers they'll lose many of the auto-routing functions of IPv6 that keep the router tables small and raise their own costs. My bet is they won't give you a static IP without a charge, but you will be given that /64 address and you won't be buying packages of IP addresses.

  11. Took the USB organization close to 20 years... on Reversible Type-C USB Connector Ready For Production · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So they are finally getting the connector right. After 5 different connectors and almost 20 years they are finally going to fix the USB connector problem (at least most of them). Not only that but they designed with a future awareness that will hopefully prevent the Micro-USB3 nightmare (two connectors in one) in the future.

    It's Smaller than every previous USB connection.
    It's reversible so you can plug it only one time.
    They designed it with the ability to add additional wires in the future as the standard evolves.
    The C connector supports USB 3.1 which allows up to 100watts of power transfer (enough to power smaller laptops).
    IIRC it's also designed to put less strain on the connection to the circuit board so you won't get the solder flex failure so common with USB.

    What they got wrong is it's almost indistinguishable from Micro without close examination. They didn't put in a color or other requirement that would have made the port obvious without close examination, even though it's smaller a LOT of people are going to be trying to plug USB micro connectors into these ports.

    All in all I'd say the USB working group finally fixed a few major problems with USB and it's a good standard that will probably eventually replace all A,B,Mini and Micro ports over the next few years. The beauty is finally incorporating 100watt capability, it should be possible to have standard power adapters on laptops that use 1 or 2 USB ports for power eliminating the need to replace your power brick all the time.

  12. Re:Are they "small government" republicans ? he he on 3 Congressmen Trying To Tie Up SpaceX · · Score: 1

    Who are these "centrists" you keep talking about? Your argument appears to be the same one tea party people use with RINO and Liberal which is you define those categories as slur you use against people who think differently than you.

    Your argument is silly. Republicans had filibuster proof control of Congress and the presidents office for 6 years, the policy at the time was tax cut and spend. The democrats had similar control though less sure (2 independents) during the first two years of Obama's term, their policy was mostly tax and spend though the republicans wouldn't let them do the tax part so it became just spend. The last time real negotiating took place and centrist views dominated was during the Clinton administration when Republicans controlled congress (during Gingrich's term) when neither party got what they wanted but they managed to balance the budget, eliminate welfare and reduce military spending to workable levels.

    My impression of the tea party is that originally it was a group of people that were mad about out of control spending. Almost immediately it was taken over by fringe Republicans like the Koch organizations and it turned away from balanced budget toward tax cuts and no compromise government shut down. Around the same time the anti-Obama language (birthers, etc) drew in all the stormfront and other racists and rather than turn them away as kooks the tea party embraced them but works aggressively to keep them out of sight on TV (but are very apparent if you go to any actual rallies). I'd be a tea partier if they were actually interested in a balanced budget and doing whatever it took to get there (including raising taxes) but the whole idea of responsible governance isn't what the tea party is about, nor has it been since about 6 months after it's founding.

  13. Re:What? on 3 Congressmen Trying To Tie Up SpaceX · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You don't honestly think that contract was totally preplanned for years and that the government always purchases rockets in blocks that large do you?

    IMO that contract originated because ULA went to their government handlers and cajoled them into releasing the RFP before SpaceX could qualify. It is my understanding that the government does buy rockets in groups, but a 2 year 20 rocket group is unheard of and that this was the largest rocket purchase the government has ever made. ULA's salespeople will have personal relationships with all the contracting people in government. My bet is that ULA hoped by locking SpaceX out of the market for 2 years they would go bankrupt before they could go after another contract.

    There should be a massive investigation going on for how that contract originated, why it's so large and what the relationships are between the ULA people and the government contracting officers.

  14. Re:What? on 3 Congressmen Trying To Tie Up SpaceX · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I thought ULA convincing the government to advance purchase 2 years of launches (2billion dollars) a month before SpaceX qualified their rockets was an accurate picture of how Lockheed and Boeing intend to compete which is they intend to use government to prevent SpaceX from competing.

  15. Re:Circomventing controlls on DEA Paid Amtrak Employee To Pilfer Passenger Lists · · Score: 1

    I see this as very similar to the parallel construction method. The DEA likely has controls on the information and logs requests to see it, by paying the Amtrak employee separately they can argue they never looked at the passenger information because it's not logged in the request. The defense can't say they used improper search methods because the log shows they never accessed it.

    I'd be willing to be someone is in jail right now because of this information being accessed outside normal channels and had the defense known about it they would have been able to get the evidence thrown out.

  16. Re:Across the wide Pacific? on Google Is Backing a New $300 Million High-Speed Internet Trans-Pacific Cable · · Score: 1

    Only if you are Sara Palin. (I'm not sure you understand the distance involved)

    Seriously though, it's actually probably cheaper to lay it across the equator than try to put a cable across the bearing straight. The ocean is pretty turbulent in the straight, it's pretty turbulent any time you get closer to the poles. There were articles the other day that global warming has opened up so much water this summer north of canada that they've had 15' (3m) waves. You need calm water (including underwater currents of which there is a big one in the straight) when dropping miles of cable to the bottom of the ocean.

    Consider for a moment you're in water a mile deep laying cable. The total suspended amount of cable from the boat to the bottom of the ocean is more than 2 miles, and with the armoring and other features may weigh several thousand pounds and have enough cross-sectional area that a couple mile per hour current passing over the cable could capsize your ship, drag the ship under or shear the cable in half. The forces they deal with when laying the cables is HUGE without waves and strong ocean currents. They need massive boats, calm waters and very careful monitoring to put these cables down. If you tear the cable in half while laying it you've got to find the end, drag it and several miles of cable off the bottom, cut the end and resplice everything including the power and armoring, water proof the splices and then relay the whole thing along with continuing to lay new cable.

    Where possible they run the cable over islands to make the runs through the ocean shorter. But trying to lay the cable across the bearing straight would be a major challenge. It would be an even bigger challenge once you got it across the bearing straight to get it anywhere because it's about 2000 miles from anything on either end and it would come ashore in some of the most hostile territory on earth (such as all the ground being permafrost which means you can't really bury the cable).

  17. Re:So which agencies' backdoors are in there? on Google Is Backing a New $300 Million High-Speed Internet Trans-Pacific Cable · · Score: 1

    Non-custodial kidnapping is the most common kind of kidnapping. Something like 99.99999% of all the kids on milk boxes are custodial kidnappings. But Christ, you're his Dad and he's 15, they could have asked him.

    The world's gotten a bit insane.

  18. Re:Finally some Asian LPBs on Google Is Backing a New $300 Million High-Speed Internet Trans-Pacific Cable · · Score: 1

    Yes, A LOT. I'm not sure of the rule number, but the minute you think you've listed all fetishes you didn't actually get them all.

    Loli, Vore, TS, transformation, gassy, and on and on and on.

  19. Re:14 nanometers? on Intel's 14-nm Broadwell CPU Primed For Slim Tablets · · Score: 1

    I will be highly surprised if the quantum effects ever let them get close to one atom thick, at that small electrons start doing very weird things that are hard to compensate for. We've pushed process technology just about to it's limit.

  20. Re:Are You Kidding? on Geneticists Decry Book On Race and Evolution · · Score: 1

    I'm willing to bet that the light skin adaption was acquired from Neanderthals, not evolved by Homo Sapian. We know that the first humans remains found in Europe were dark skinned. All the human groups that encountered Neaderthals and the Denisovans have light skin (Europeans, Russians, Northern Asian). The gene that causes white skin is highly dominant, even with only 5% neanderthal DNA we still carry it.

  21. Re: Politician thanks company for doing his job on Chicago Mayor Praises Google For Buying Kids Microsoft Surfaces · · Score: 0

    And the average white collar worker you are comparing against works far more than the 2080 hours that is the standard non overtime hours in a year. Considering the average white collar office worker is working 50 hours a week 52 weeks a year without vacations (2600 hours a year) teachers have it seriously easy given the total pay and the time off.

    Everyone wants to be paid more but for the most part teachers have it pretty easy. Most of the teachers I knew wrote lesson plans once and used them every year for subjects that don't change (history, match, science, health, etc) Their only out of class work was grading papers. Heck, maybe you were one of the better teachers that was constantly writing new lesson plans and stuff but if you did you were the exception, not the rule. As one of those white collar workers pulling 50 hour weeks, only requiring 990 hours of time for $52k a year is a total joke IMO. You won't find a lot of sympathy from my side.

  22. Re:Does anyone blame them? on Floridian (and Southern) Governmental Regulations Are Unfriendly To Solar Power · · Score: 1

    Discount the news due to the source even though the news can easily be validated with the easiest of Google searches. Great demonstration of your bias. Cheers!

  23. Re:Dark matter on Do Dark Matter and Dark Energy Cast Doubt On the Big Bang? · · Score: 1

    We measure and effect and we call that dark matter because it exhibits gravitational effects but we really have no idea what it is or what's causing it. It could be super strings or worm holes or even singularities far from other matter.

    This is the problem I have with the entire speculation about Dark Matter, we have no idea what it is. People spend a lot of time talking about it like we know what it is and what it means and all that and it could be nothing more than isolated gravitational anomalies like super strings in interstellar space that we've located. We need a better understanding of how prevalent these effects are and a lot more data about the entire phenomenon before we start theorizing about what's the cause.

  24. Re:Try a TRILLION DOLLARS, for starters. on Floridian (and Southern) Governmental Regulations Are Unfriendly To Solar Power · · Score: 0

    In about 6 years Solar PV will be cheaper than Coal.

    It's funny that as Solar PV gains traction all the people jump out of the woodwork trying to tell everyone how horrible it will be. In 10 years Solar is going to totally dominate all new power generation (all the dirty coal generation is going to be decommissioning as fast as they can bring new solar plants online) and the challenges it's intermittent generation presents will long be solved by the market.

    But people like you and the power company sock puppets run around screaming how the world is going to come to an end (the grid will fail, we'll have rolling blackouts, etc) and that the only solution is to use government regulations to stop Solar.

  25. Re:Does anyone blame them? on Floridian (and Southern) Governmental Regulations Are Unfriendly To Solar Power · · Score: 3, Informative

    He's correct and the article you point to doesn't say what you think it does.

    Utility grade PV is cheaper than nuclear power without subsidy. With continued price drops that solar has been experiencing for the last 4 years Utility grade solar PV will be cheaper than coal by 2020.

    Companies like First Solar have their entire production for the next 4 years already sold to utility scale power plants. A Utah power company just purchased all the power out of a solar plant being built nearby because it was the cheapest power available.

    http://thinkprogress.org/clima...