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  1. Re:missing the point on Major Security Flaws Discovered In Internet HDTVs · · Score: 1

    As for setting up a DMZ... you mean people don't already have this?

    I didn't say DMZ, I said a guest network. A DMZ is a subnet that is intended to expose your servers to _incoming_ connections from the internet.

    I'm talking about a NATted subnet can only initiate outgoing connections. Basically another private lan that is partitioned from your sensitive machines.

    And BTW there are plenty of ways to root a machine that don't involve compromising the router. Trojans being the most obvious example.

  2. missing the point on Major Security Flaws Discovered In Internet HDTVs · · Score: 1

    If you are worried that someone can change what's on your TV you are missing the point. The real concern is that by rooting your TV (which might have a linux shell for example) this can then be used as a vector to access anything on your home network that would otherwise be protected by NAT/FW. More sophisticated users would be well advised to set up a separate guest LAN that can only get straight out to the net.

  3. Re:reporting income on Study Says Software Engineers Have the Best US Jobs · · Score: 1

    Fucking write offs, how do they work?

  4. Re:Redundant troll is redundant on Apple Passes $300B Market Cap, 2nd In the World · · Score: 1
    Apple has been trading for a very long time at about 15x trailing earnings ex cash. Do you think that is high for a growing company?

    If you wanted to argue that, say, AMZN is overvalued that is an easier case to make. But seriously I can not think of a single profitable, growing, stable company that is as _stingily_ valued as apple.

    Instead of hand-waving, why don't you actually tell us which smarter investments you have actually made that have fared better since before the dip. Keep in mind Apple was one of very few companies that grew through the whole recession (unlike most blue chips they recovered quickly and just kept going).

  5. Redundant troll is redundant on Apple Passes $300B Market Cap, 2nd In the World · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why does someone have to be a "chump" to pay more for it? If the company's earnings have grown 10x then the company ought to be worth about 10x. Those earnings... do you realize they belong to the shareholders even if they just accumulate in the company's bank account? Dividends are a "feel good" disbursement for companies that aren't supposed to grow. If you want to invest in dividend paying companies go for it. Or you could buy apple and any time your holding is worth more than your basis, just sell some. You'd have done quite nicely even with that conservative approach, and yet still enjoy the feel of 0% capital appreciation that you crave.

  6. Re:Oh dear... on Has the Industrialized World Reached Peak Travel? · · Score: 1

    Is "peak" the new "-gate"?

    If you follow peak oil theory, yes. Basically it implies peak-everything. All resources become more scarce as the cost of energy rises. Not only the cost of production and distribution but even the raw feedstock for many products is fossil based, eg fertilizers, plastics, asphalt.

  7. Re:Heat retention for how long ? on CA's First Molten Salt Energy Plant Approved · · Score: 1

    It's less about dealing with locally cloudy days than producing for 24 hr baseloads and being able to respond quickly to demand variance. Most importantly you want this plant to be able to pick up the slack for _other_ renewable energy generators when they get cloudy days or unpredictable winds. The only large-scale technology we have that can do that now is hydro.

  8. Re:My thoughts exactly on All-Analog DIY Segway Project · · Score: 1

    it doesn't hold water in the case of a gyroscope.

    I was speaking to professionally designed products as opposed to just a demonstration of the gyroscope principle. You sound like you have some EE experience but I wonder if you are seriously suggesting that someone would attempt an all-analog control system for such a thing. Even little remote controlled toy helicopters now use DSP for that purpose, and their part count is extremely low.

    Sure you _can_ do a gyroscope with a few op amps, but if you're actually going to make a segway-style product then you also need steering, low battery safety, tip-over safety (ie jog it back upright if you're going too fast), and so on. It also needs to be reliable and manufacturable, and with a micorcontroller-based design that is a lot easier to do because you can have self tests (factory and power-on) that sanity-check your inputs and such. And you can do all of that very easily in a $2 micro.

    I'm curious what actual products you can think of where such low-speed analog control systems are preferable to a nearly-free microcontroller. I have the habit of reverse engineering nearly every new electronic device I buy and have not seen that kind of implementation for a loooooong time.

  9. Re:Electronic currency on WikiLeaks, Money, and Ron Paul · · Score: 1
    The computing proof-of-work is a way to make the money non-free for the purpose of initial allocation _without any central authority_. Once a unit of currency exists, that processing is over and done with. And eventually the whole space is allocated.

    Do you have a better way to do it? I'm not following how your proposal works.

  10. Re:My thoughts exactly on All-Analog DIY Segway Project · · Score: 1

    Troll? Wow. I was just explaining for the benefit of non-EEs why it isn't usually done this way since the advent of inexpensive microcontrollers. This is hardly controversial.

  11. Re:My thoughts exactly on All-Analog DIY Segway Project · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's not amazing but it's certainly harder. Probably higher part count, more electrical noise to deal with, harder to debug, harder to implement delays and state machines, more wiring etc. It's just impractical for most purposes.

  12. Re:Where is wikileaks when you need them on Ex-Goldman Sachs Programmer Found Guilty · · Score: 1

    How can anyone have access to a company's share price in the future??? Do you have even the slightest understanding of what you're talking about? Longer latency to exchange, for real trader vs HF trader. Seriously, that gives HF a few milliseconds view into the "future" because he knows what price is going to be offered immediately after his trade.

  13. Re:WTF? What's the threat to national security? on DHS Seizes 75+ Domain Names · · Score: 1

    They might also be trying to break the internet just ahead of the next Wikileaks release.

  14. Re:This is well known to a small community on Google, Microsoft Cheat On Slow-Start — Should You? · · Score: 1

    If their TCP implementation kept a cache of recent final congestion window sizes by IP address, they could legitimately start off the next connection with the value from the last one.

    Wouldn't it also be necessary to cache the _rate_ of transmission so you don't overflow some intermediate queue? Eg imagine your sever is on gigE, feeding into a 1 Mbps uplink, and then a loooong pipe to the client who is on the other side of the world. In this case you might want to have an initial cwnd of a few dozen packets, but if you were to fire them all out immediately at 1gbps you would lost most of them at the first hop even though it's less than the available bandwidth*delay.

    So as I understand it this problem is more than just choosing the initial congestion window, it is also a matter of how fast you fill it. Normally that timing is driven by the acks coming back, but in the absence of that the sender needs to originate the timing.

  15. Re:Tax credit on GE To Buy 25,000 EVs, Starting With the Chevy Volt · · Score: 1

    electricity demand could increase significantly.

    If it's night-time load that's not a bad thing per se - it means we're making better use of our capital.

  16. Re:patents/capita on Tide of International Science Moving Against US, EU · · Score: 1

    Don't the Chinese do a spectacular amount of "grunt" lab work such as gene sequencing? I agree there could be a notable disparity in lab hours per dollar but it still fails to measure the amount of innovation and/or value that is produced. They may well be far head of us, but this sort of thing defies such a ham fisted analysis.

  17. patents/capita on Tide of International Science Moving Against US, EU · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Judging scientific productivity in terms of patents filed is like measuring software value in lines of code. I realize that's not the only metric here but the fact that they're even looking at it this way is ridiculous.

  18. Re:Internet2 was great for academia.. on Net Pioneers Say Open Internet Should Be Separate · · Score: 1
    Watts are a _rate_ of consumption, thus Watt-hours is a _volume_ of energy transferred. For example if a 100-watt bulb is turned on for two hours, then you have consumed 200 watt-hours.

    Whether to use hours/minutes/seconds, and kilo/mega/giga, is just a matter of convenience - that's chosen based on whatever multiple people are most comfortable working with. For home usage "kilowatts" and "hours" are pretty sensible, don't you think?

  19. Re:Internet2 was great for academia.. on Net Pioneers Say Open Internet Should Be Separate · · Score: 1

    kWh (dumbest unit ever...)

    What's wrong with kWh? Would you prefer coulomb-volts, therms, equivalent-snickers-bars-worth-of-calories, or what?

  20. Re:What happened to the Dark Fiber? on Will Netflix Destroy the Internet? · · Score: 1

    The extra dark strands are free by the time you run the cable you need to connect any two points. They do NOT indicate an over-investment per se.

  21. No, it's just static content. on Will Netflix Destroy the Internet? · · Score: 1

    All they need is a few file servers colocated at major ISPs to handle the most popular movies - this is way cheaper than serving the same enormous files repeatedly around the world. Make a deal with Akamai - problem solved. Or hell just acquire them.

  22. Re:Cheaper than silicon? on Cheap Metal-Insulator-Metal (MiM) Diode Created · · Score: 1

    The most abundant element in the universe is Hydrogen.

    For Si vs H, does it matter if we're talking about by mass versus by number of atoms? It never occurred to me to consider which metric people might be talking about.

  23. Re:Cheaper than silicon? on Cheap Metal-Insulator-Metal (MiM) Diode Created · · Score: 3, Informative

    er never mind, the point is _higher performance_ done more cheaply than before, not a cheaper diode in general.

  24. Cheaper than silicon? on Cheap Metal-Insulator-Metal (MiM) Diode Created · · Score: 0

    the most abundant element in the universe? Or is it cheaper somehow in terms of production process?

  25. weight on UAV Helicopter Flies 12 Hours Charged By Laser · · Score: 1
    If you have ever played with RC helis you would realize that they have to be extremely light to even be maneuverable, let alone have any meaningful battery life. So what's interesting here is not just the rate of power transfer by laser, but that the receiving unit is light enough to support its own weight as payload in addition to keeping the heli in the air.

    I'm not clear the significance of 12 hours. That's a far cry from "indefinitely" so I wonder if they just got tired of running the experiment or if there is some other limiting factor.