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User: afidel

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  1. Re:Don't break the referrer on Firefox 59 Will Stop Websites Snooping on Where You've Just Been (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    You'll break sites that only show you the full content when coming from Google but throw up an interterrestrial when direct linking if you do that, setting referrer to be only domain if doing cross-site is probably the best option.

  2. Re: US wide spectrum is in the national interest on FCC Undoing Rules That Make It Easier For Small ISPs To Compete With Big Telecom (vice.com) · · Score: 2

    I take it you don't spend much time in rural America? The number of times you get a "I can see a tower but can only use it for 911 because your Telco and the tower owner don't have a roaming agreement" is fairly high and highly infuriating, and that's with large license blocks, with lots of podunk ISPs it would be worse because they would try to extract as much as possible from their license and so would jack fees to the point where the Nationals would just block them.

  3. Re: US wide spectrum is in the national interest on FCC Undoing Rules That Make It Easier For Small ISPs To Compete With Big Telecom (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    Or we could spend the hundred billion once to wire every property in the country and let ISPs offer services instead of being rent seekers on cherry picked local monopolies. Fiber is even more durable than copper telephone line and we made the investment in that technology, why can't we seem to function as a country to do big projects that will help everyone today?

  4. Yup, the tracking built-in to ghostery is why I switched to privacy badger from EFF, at least that way I'm 99.9% confident that the next update isn't going to be to sell all my info to an ad company or data aggregator.

  5. Re: Why the fuck is their thermostat exposed to th on Piracy Notices Can Mess With Your Thermostat, ISP Warns (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 1

    You can connect most smart thermostats to OpenHAB and then control them through your own OpenHAB cloud instance in whatever PaaS provider you want to use to host it (or even not use the cloud component, OpenHAB works just fine with only local hub running). There are a few other projects out there if you want just local hub operation but AFAIK none of them have a self-controlled cloud component for non-local control.

  6. Re:"Smart" devices on Piracy Notices Can Mess With Your Thermostat, ISP Warns (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 1

    Yup, there's been so much fuckery with IoT stuff and companies closing I'd never trust cloud dependent stuff. I am looking at OpenHAB though for some home automation, you run your own local Hub and can even your own cloud service (ie they make the cloud portion open source too!). Combine that with an open source project I found for ESP8266 based smart devices and now I can do everything that the commercial programs do (and more) without giving up control to anyone else. The local hub will allow everything to work even if the internet goes down, you just lose remote access. The only real downside to the ESP route is that they don't have enough ram to run IPv6 with TLS and anything useful so currently the devices are unencrypted on the WLAN.

  7. Re:This is why we need net neutrality on Piracy Notices Can Mess With Your Thermostat, ISP Warns (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 2

    Unless his house has zero insulation a load shedding programs shouldn't be a big deal. In every case I've seen the maximum time period an individual subscriber should be shed is 2 hours and even my 1963 low insulation house only has a delta T of about 1 degree F per hour, 2 degrees of rise is barely noticeable.

  8. Re: Why the fuck is their thermostat exposed to th on Piracy Notices Can Mess With Your Thermostat, ISP Warns (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 2

    This summer I set our thermostat to 86 while we were away for 3 weeks. When we got home it took the AC about 2 hours to get the house back down to sleeping temps, not exactly a hardship that requiresan always on internet connection to solve. Now if you worked highly variable hours and were single and wanted to avoid that 2 hours of uncomfortable temps while maximizing energy savings I can see it being worthwhile, but that's probably a niche application.

  9. Re:Then the cars aren't truly self-driving on China Blocks Foreign Companies From Mapping Its Roads for Self-Driving Cars (thedrive.com) · · Score: 1

    China is the worlds largest car market, outstripping both North America and the EU. Heck China is almost big as the EU and North America combined (24M vs 32M (15+17))

  10. Re:But can it pay for itself mining Coin? on Nvidia Announces 'Nvidia Titan V' Video Card: GV100 for $3000 (anandtech.com) · · Score: 1

    EPYC has 128 PCIe lanes so it can support 16 8x cards and it has 2 cores for each of those cards. I doubt there are any motherboards that support that many lanes but one could be built (most I've seen is 8 full length slots).

  11. Re:Built for number crunching on Nvidia Announces 'Nvidia Titan V' Video Card: GV100 for $3000 (anandtech.com) · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What's interesting is the difference between the NVidia approach and Google's TensorFlow approach. NVidia is beefing up FLOAT64 performance while Google focused on 8bit and 16bit performance (OPS/W) which is why Googles newest gaming challenge used a single TPU running at 40W to run the AI (after training on 5,000 TPUs and thousands of cores).

  12. Re: How many government jobs were added? on November Jobs Report: Economy Adds 228,000 Jobs; Unemployment Steady (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    Not Georgia Tech or any of the major research universities. If you want to look at destructive debt creation look at private for profit colleges, they're almost universally a drag on society.

  13. Re:The U.S. economy added 228,000 jobs in november on November Jobs Report: Economy Adds 228,000 Jobs; Unemployment Steady (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    No, at that rate if we didn't have new people entering the workforce we'd be at full employment in just under 2.5 years (6.6M/228k=29 months). Full employment is not really a good thing for the economy as it means that employers seeking new employees to meet any rise in demand are unable to find them and it means virtually nobody is looking for a better job. If labor force participation was closer to the norm from the last 30 years I'd say 4% unemployment is just about perfect. Whta's odd though is that unemployment is that low but wage inflation is so low. Perhaps it's a combination of global competition and the relatively weak labor force participation that's keeping wage growth in check, historically with 4% unemployment you'd expect wage growth about twice the current rate (which is barely beating low inflation).

  14. Re: "Internet as an appliance" again.. and again.. on Amazon Launches Web Browser For Fire TV (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    They proxy everything for Silk through their datacenters so yeah the whole thing is a big monitoring system. But that's a different question about whether they get updates out to their devices.

  15. Re: "Internet as an appliance" again.. and again.. on Amazon Launches Web Browser For Fire TV (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Amazon has been very good about FireOS upgrades because it runs so many of their devices. And Silk is regularly updated from their app store.

  16. Re: How do browsers not work with TVs? on Amazon Launches Web Browser For Fire TV (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Can't use the m570 with the tv stick or TVs but you could use the new trackball since it finally talks standard Bluetooth.

  17. Re:Obvious question is obvious on Samsung Develops 'Graphene Ball' Battery With 5x Faster Charging Speed (digitaltrends.com) · · Score: 1

    The only way you're getting 500 miles (~130kWH) in 5 minutes is using liquid cooled cables and I'm not so sure that's going to fly from a safety perspective (yes, gasoline filler hoses aren't exactly safe but they're established tech that is well accepted by the consumer through familiarity, that doesn't mean that a new tech can be just as dangerous and be accepted.

  18. Re:Not Buckyballs? on Samsung Develops 'Graphene Ball' Battery With 5x Faster Charging Speed (digitaltrends.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    Buckballs are the entire family, Buckminsterfullerene is specifically C60 but the family contains C20 through C2160 (and probably larger).

  19. business code on Why ESR Hates C++, Respects Java, and Thinks Go (But Not Rust) Will Replace C (ibiblio.org) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There's enough business logic programmed in C++ and Java to keep both languages around until my kids retire and they're not yet in the workforce. Rust and Go, yeah doubt there's a single company of any size running their business processes on either.

  20. Cobalt on UCLA Researchers Use Solar To Create and Store Hydrogen (phys.org) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Cobalt is the limiting agent for mass production of current chemistry lithium batteries so starting research on a new energy storage system and relying on Cobalt is stupid. Cobalt is currently only produced as a byproduct if Aluminum smelting and without a massive uptick in Aluminum usage there isn't going to be enough to electrify more than ~10 of world-wide vehicle fleets yet we have politicians deciding we're going to ban ICE vehicles in 20 years or less. Trying to divert that limiting resource from a competing tech that has a 20 year head start on economic development is a sure way to fail.

  21. Re:So, Linux turned the Top500 into a Monoculture on All 500 of the World's Top 500 Supercomputers Are Running Linux (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    The BSDs I run into mostly in embedded applications, mostly security and network appliances. The primary drawback to the BSDs in my experience is driver availability and that doesn't really apply if you're building your own appliance so long as your upstream providers can be convinced to supply a BSD driver for your application.

  22. Most of the control surfaces are still mechanical but the spoilers are now fly-by-wire.

  23. Re:Legacy aircraft on Boeing 757 Testing Shows Airplanes Vulnerable To Hacking, DHS Says (aviationtoday.com) · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually the 737 is just as modern as any aircraft being produced. The current airplane with the designation 737 shares virtually nothing with the first plane to carry that designation. The fuselage is different, the wings are different, the engines are different, the avionics are different, and the interior packages are different. The currently produced aircraft with the designation (The Max series) is actually the 4th generation of 737. Basically saying it's a 737 is like saying it's a Ford Mustang, other than size and maybe some styling cues it's fairly meaningless as it tells you nothing about what's in the car/airplane.

  24. Re:It remains... on What Happens to Open Source Code After Its Developer Dies? (wired.com) · · Score: 1

    Well, in the future it will be very difficult as Windows 7+ require either an internet connection or an activate by phone call in order to run for more than 30 (?) days. Once MS makes them EOS then you won't be able to activate them at all and at that point no new VM can be spun up.

  25. Re:So much for Apple's [incredible] design... on The iPhone X Becomes Unresponsive When It Gets Cold (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Um, I've only had one but my Toughbook refused to boot below about 36F. It came up and told you that it was too cold and to try again in a few minutes. If I had left it out in the car in single digit temps it would take 20-30 minutes in a 70 degree room before it was warm enough to boot. Apparently the fully ruggadized ones come with a HDD heater but the semi-rugged ones just have the sensor and won't allow it to boot until the drive comes up to operating temp (newer ones I'm sure just use an SSD to avoid the issue).