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Comments · 315

  1. Re:Another shocker on Road To Riches Doesn't Run Through the App Store · · Score: 1

    Bill Gates is Very Very Smart, Very Very driven, and had parents who had the resources and motivation to help him be as successful as possible. Therefore he is one of the richest people in the world.

  2. Re:SSDs are ideal for servers on Performance Showdown - SSDs vs. HDDs · · Score: 1

    This is only true for reads. For random writes, Flash based SSDs are much slower than hard drives, and that's why they didn't do well in this test. The problems are surmountable, but the first step is for tests like this to be widely publicized, so that users start looking more closely at the specs of drives.

  3. Re:Modernization on Unmanned Aircraft Will Test Air Traffic Control · · Score: 1

    Gliders don't have an engine driven electrical system, yet commonly go over 10k with oxygen.

  4. Re:Peachy.... on Verizon Wireless To Open Network · · Score: 1

    They don't charge $60 a month for the basic tethered data service. They charge for the fast EVDO data service, but if you're willing to live with the 1xRTT service, which typically is 80kb/s, just hook your computer up to your modem, specify 1xRTT, and you're on the internet. Verizon bills you for the minutes that you are connected to the data service as normal voice minutes. This works very well for occasional use when out of range of Wi-Fi. If I used the data service more often I would probably get the more expensive EVDO.

  5. Re:Remaining nuclear fuel on Nanotech Battery Claims to Solve Electric Car Woes · · Score: 1

    It won't be necessary until we've constructed thousands of new reactors and run them for decades, and even then, one would have to assume that we didn't figure out a better way of extracting uranium. I have no problem with solar per se, but it's expensive, takes up a lot of space, and if it were widely used, it would require a lot of extra technology to keep a cloudy day from shutting down the grid.

  6. Re:Remaining nuclear fuel on Nanotech Battery Claims to Solve Electric Car Woes · · Score: 1

    That's not true. There is enough uranium in the earth to last us billions of years at our current rate of consumption. The only issue is how much it costs to get it out. If the price of uranium were to go up by a factor of twenty, the supply would increase by about a factor of 2000. This price difference in raw uranium would only make a small difference in the overall cost of electricity.

  7. Re:Okay? on 'No Quick Fix' From Nuclear Power · · Score: 1

    It's not speculative -- we know it's possible to get more energy out than is put in. The only problem is that the devices we have are hydrogen bombs. There was a plan back in the fifties to build a power plant by dropping hydrogen bombs into a huge underground pool of water -- transforming the entire energy of the bomb into heating the water. Supposedly you could have used about one bomb per day for a large power plant. Furthermore, I think it's pretty clear that it's at least possible to build an exothermic magnetic or inertial confinement reactor -- it just needs more time and money -- maybe a lot of both, but it's almost certain that it's possible.

  8. Re:Per Square Foot on How Much Do You Value Your Office Space? · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hate to break it to you, but office rents are almost always quoted in dollars per square foot per year, not per month. $40, even in Canadian dollars would be an astronomical price for space. They were probably spending about 8% of your salary on space, not 100%.

  9. Re:Compilations of facts on Who Owns Baseball Statistics? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Not since Feist v. Rural Telephone Service. Facts compiled without any creativity are not copyrightable. The case I mentioned above was specifically about copying phone books wholesale, and the Supreme Court ruled that the phone book could not be copyrighted.

  10. Re:Noooo kidding. on Recruiting IT Students? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That's because 60k is a bare minimum salary for the Bay Area to be able to find any sort of housing. Move to Nebraska or something, and you can probably find the same people for $30k/yr. Why do you need to be in SV to run a web hosting company?

  11. Re:excellent on Cray Supercomputers to be Based on AMD Opterons · · Score: 1

    They will make the appropriate changes. Look at the instruction set for any peculiar additions in the next rev of the opteron.

  12. Re:A Good Start on DARPA Awards $53 Million for Solar Power Research · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Obviously the issue is simply cost. He dismisses fission because he says we'd have to build a plant every other day to make it work. Well, to replace that with solar, you'd have to build something like ten gigawatts of solar panels, install them, and hook them up to the grid or to individual consumers. The question is which one is harder. In a market economy, generally the way you figure that out is which one costs more. Solar costs more than Nuclear, and we would need a lot of undeveloped technology if we were relying heavily on solar, due to its variability. Nuclear is reliable, has a nearly inexhaustable fuel supply, and is well proven technology.

  13. Re:Name ONE person who's MORE generous... on Bill Gates Donates $258 Million to Fight Malaria · · Score: 1

    That really depends on your definition of generosity. Once you have a few billion dollars, there just isn't much more that can be done to improve your quality of life. You have as many servants as are useful, private jets, helicopters, houses with every conceivable amenity, unlimited travel, and the social status that the money brings means you can hang out with just about anyone you want to. For Bill G. to give up even half his wealth has no impact on his life. In fact, it probably makes it better, since he's the type of person that likes to solve tough problems, and you can solve some pretty important problems with tens of millions of dollars. Compare him to people who give large fractions of their income to charity leaving themselves in virtual poverty. These people make genuine sacrifices in their quality of life in order to help others. So, in the sense that he's giving away more money than anyone else, yes, he's the most generous, but from a character standpoint, what does giving away that money say about him? Basically nothing, because he has nothing else to do with the money anyhow.

  14. Re:Happiness != Pleasure on The Science Of Happiness · · Score: 1

    From what I remember from college, Eudaimonia doesn't really translate as happiness, rather, it's more like "Flourishing."

  15. What it is for on Eminent Domain Applied to IP Due To State Secrets · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This looks to me like it would be useful for attaching two cables using an ROV. The inventor in the article mentions that the other solution was like a thermos bottle and was inferior. If you look at the way the pieces mate, regardless of the initial orientation, they will slide into each other properly. The "thermos bottle" solution might be two cylinders, one of which slides into the other making a tight fit. Suppose you have an ROV which has to mate two cables. The grapple may have an error in mating in rotation, translation, and angle. If you push these connectors together with reasonable errors in any of these parameters, the connectors will properly mate and make a seal. Robots have a hard time doing things like putting keys in locks, but this doesn't have that problem. Also, a human doing the mating might have trouble with other connectors because of the suit he would have to wear in very high pressure has limited maneuverability.

    This could be useful for tapping cables if they used the widely known technique the NSA used of storing data in a recorder and coming back periodically to retrieve it. You have to connect a cable to the recorder when you come back to read out the data. It would make sense to have an ROV do this. Also, ROV capability has been emphasized in the public information about the Jimmy Carter. Another possibility is that the submarine would hold a shortish length of cable from the tap site due to limited capacity (although the Carter has quite a bit), pay that out, and have a cable laying ship drop an ROV to connect to a longer cable which would go to shore. If you had a connector that you could connect with an ROV, you could do the long cable lay with the surface ship after the sub was done to make it harder to figure out what cable was being tapped.

  16. Re:That's the least of the problems on Skype Security and Privacy Concerns · · Score: 1

    What leads you to believe that academic cryptographers are ahead of NSA, in particular in the field of breaking relevant crypto with practical hardware?

  17. Re:1024 bit is inadequate on Skype Security and Privacy Concerns · · Score: 1

    I'm sure the NSA and the FBI cooperate in these sorts of cases. If the government is after you, and they have the capability to crack your crypto, they're going to do it. There have been numerous news stories about the FBI being able to crack various crypto. It never specifies the method, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of them were direct attacks on RSA. The machines are cheap enough that it is also possible that NSA built the FBI a machine to do the cracking. Certainly the FBI's budget is big enough to get that in there.

  18. 1024 bit is inadequate on Skype Security and Privacy Concerns · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you're actually worried about the government listening in, 1024 bit RSA is inadequate. Adi Shamir published a paper describing a device that for $1.1 million could crack 1024 bit RSA. You can bet that the NSA has a better device than that.

  19. Re:Since this is obviously a common misperception. on FCC May Push Bells to Unbundle DSL · · Score: 2, Informative

    Analog lines have power for your phones built into them. This is maintained by generators at the switching station if the power goes out. If you have an IP phone at your home, you need another source of power.

    Furthermore, the technology in your IP phone is much more complicated and error-prone than the technology in conventional circuit switched telephony. A big reason for this is that conventional telephone reliability was historically and continues to be highly regulated. 5ESS switches actually achieve six nines reliability. IP is much newer, more complicated, and has not been subjected to the same degree of regulation, and so the reliability standard is lower.

  20. Re:Doomed from the beginning on Denver Airport Automated Baggage System Abandoned · · Score: 1

    Perhaps you should brush up on your theory. Getting a bag from point a to point b with a cost function for each edge is O(n log n). You could easily do all of the routing in real time even if you calculated all of the paths in real time. In reality, what you would do is what the internet does, and have a routing table pre-computed. Every node has a list of final destinations, and the direction to go for each one. All that is needed is a central database of bags and the destination for each. Do the lookup at each node, send to the appropriate next node. If the destination changes, the bag will continue on the proper path as soon as it hits the next node.

  21. No on Small Town USA Competing With India · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This argument is constantly floating around, but it makes no sense. Oil being traded in dollars makes almost no difference. It's the goods that are purchased that is the issue. Suppose I am a Chinese oil company. I have yuan to buy oil with. I go to the currency market, and exchange my yuan for dollars and pay the dollars to Saudi Aramco. Now suppose the Saudis want to buy some of those $29 DVD players. They go back to the FX market, convert the dollars back to yuan, and buy the DVD players. The only benefit that the U.S. gets from this situation is that both parties briefly held Dollars. This is called Seignoriage. Suppose the money is in dollars for three months while the trade is completed, then if all world oil were traded in Dollars (which it's not), then the seignoriage is only about two billion dollars a year. Two billion dollars doesn't keep a 10 trillion economy floating.

  22. Re:Not from dell on Building Secure Computers? · · Score: 1

    I doubt that putting the hard drive in another computer is an issue. The reason the hard drive has to be removable is so that it can be taken out and put in a safe overnight.

  23. Re:Uh-huh. on Super Door of the Future · · Score: 1

    The Honda Civic HX had a CVT for a number of years.

  24. Re:Vortex Generators on Musical Wings Reduce Aircraft Stall Risk · · Score: 1

    The reason some planes have Vortex Generators is to make the air turbulent rather than in the boundary layer. As the air goes down the wing, at some point it's going to become turbulent, no matter how smooth you make the wing. You can't make it perfect, and the imperfections add up at some point to turbulence. At the point on the wing that this happens, you have the "boundary layer", which is the boundary between laminar and turbulent flow. The problem is that air in the boundary layer produces more drag than either laminar or turbulent flow. Furthermore, the boundary layer tends promote the flow detaching from the surface of the wing. If you put Vortex Generators just before where the boundary layer would naturally occur, you kick it into fully turbulent flow without the boundary layer.

  25. Re:Not just Australia's largest Telco on Australia's largest telco to be split · · Score: 2, Informative

    Perhaps this is because investors presume that Telstra's lessened ability to exploit its monopoly position will result in less profits, due to increased competition. Unless the businesses are much less efficient in providing services as separate entities, those reduced profits will be directly seen as reduced prices. How is it bad for consumers if prices go down due to competition?