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User: Cyberax

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  1. Re: Gloriously Short Bill on Bill Would Ban Paid Prioritization By ISPs · · Score: 1

    Yes, that's OK as long as CDNs are independent business entities and ISPs do not discriminate on price and hosting conditions.

  2. Re:Gloriously Short Bill on Bill Would Ban Paid Prioritization By ISPs · · Score: 1

    If they are independent entities then I don't see a problem. If an ISP starts to discriminate against them (for example, favoring one CDN) then the bill will apply to that situation.

  3. Re:Gloriously Short Bill on Bill Would Ban Paid Prioritization By ISPs · · Score: 1

    CDNs are third-party entities that provide you a service. ISPs are not allowed to discriminate against them.

  4. France will stand for freedom of speech! on Gunmen Kill 12, Wound 7 At French Magazine HQ · · Score: 3, Interesting

    President Holland declared that France will stand for freedom of speech with more than 100000 people marching out to support it.

    Meanwhile in Lithuania just today two Russian TV channels were banned because of their 'one-sided views' on lots of problems.

  5. Re:It is the taxation issue, really on Professor: Young People Are "Lost Generation" Who Can No Longer Fix Gadgets · · Score: 2

    Dude, taxes are way down since 50-s or even 60-s. Stop smoking that untaxed crack cocaine.

  6. Re:Chinglish on What Language Will the World Speak In 2115? · · Score: 1

    I speak a little bit of Udmurt which is in the same language family as Finnish so I know what you're speaking about. Simple comparisons like this are meaningless. With highly flective languages it's important to learn the grammar - it then starts helping you by giving cues to the meaning of unknown words.

  7. Re:Chinglish on What Language Will the World Speak In 2115? · · Score: 1

    You can reasonably expect to being able to read novels and newspapers after 1 year of studying an 'easy' language like French or German. You certainly won't be fluent but you'll be able to understand the general idea of any reasonable text. With Chinese it's more like 3-5 years (I've heard that Japanese is actually easier).

  8. Re:English-ish? on What Language Will the World Speak In 2115? · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Uhm, I'm a non-native English speaker. I'd say that learning that the word order in English sentences is meaningful is one of the stumbling blocks but not even the most painful one. My native language is Russian and the word order is not fixed there, so Yoda sentences like: "When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good you will not" are often completely normal for Russian speakers.

    For me the most complicated part of English is. its pronunciation. And also maybe its grammar tenses (Russian has no direct equivalent of present perfect and future-in-the-past).

  9. Re:Chinese that speak English on What Language Will the World Speak In 2115? · · Score: 1

    English is, according to the Defence Language Institute in Monterey, CA, one of, it not the most, difficult language to learn (because so much of it is irregular), but, having learned it, are English speakers at an advantage?

    Whut? English is _easy_: no grammar cases, simple pluralization rules (with a handful of exceptions), only about 100-200 of irregular verbs that are still in use, grammar tense system familiar for just about every West European language speaker and so on.

    Sure, there are problems like a disconnect between spelling and pronunciation but this is minor compared to, say, leaning the grammar case system in Finnish. And even the pronunciation problem is not so bad if you mostly communicate in _writing_.

  10. Re:Chinglish on What Language Will the World Speak In 2115? · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Mandarin as a language is not that hard to learn. It's fairly regular and very analytic (almost no word changes), even tones are not that hard to get right after you practice a little. I was able to pick up enough of Mandarin from my girlfriend in several months to be able to ask for directions in China.

    However, _written_ Chinese is unlearnable. Simply forget about it. You really need to memorize thousands of symbols just to be able to read an everyday newspaper. Writing is just as hard - imaging having to learn several completely new scripts (Russian, Greek aaand Arabic) at the same time.

    Phonetic spelling using one of many Romanization schemes is also problematic because Chinese is very homophonic - lots of words sound exactly the same.

  11. Re:RAH had this in the 50's on The Billionaires' Space Club · · Score: 1

    Platinum and other noble metals are expensive because they are genuinely hard to extract - the yearly production is measured in _tons_. If we had access to cheaper supply of these metals from asteroids then we'd be able to significantly increase their use. And that means cheaper fuel cells, more durable alloys, better catalysts in chemical plants and so on.

  12. Re:No red light cameras? Why? on Out With the Red-Light Cameras, In With the Speeding Cameras · · Score: 1

    No, I'm not breaking the speed limit on purpose, local traffic laws allow some slack for transient violations. And it certainly is nowhere near as dangerous as running red lights.

  13. Re:No red light cameras? Why? on Out With the Red-Light Cameras, In With the Speeding Cameras · · Score: 1

    I'm driving at speed limit by I might get a little bit over it during maneuvers. Traffic regulations allow for it.

  14. No red light cameras? Why? on Out With the Red-Light Cameras, In With the Speeding Cameras · · Score: 2

    I actually don't mind if there were fewer speed cameras - I don't speed more than 5-7 mph over the speed limit, but I can see that mild speeding on highways rarely cause problems. But red lights? I wish every crossing had them.

    Ok, I might be biased because I was hit by a car once (a broken arm but nothing more serious) when crossing a road (on 'walk' sign).

  15. Re:What's ITSM? on What's the Future of Corporate IT and ITSM? (Video) · · Score: 1

    It's similar, but much less fun.

  16. Re:Skeptical on Being Colder May Be Good For Your Health · · Score: 1

    66F (18.8C) is _cold_? It's a nice warm temperature - it might feel a little bit cold if you spend all of your time simply sitting in one place, but even with minimal movements it's just fine.

    As a child I lived in a house made of logs and had to wear woolen socks during winters - the floor was too cold otherwise. The air temperatures at night was around 14C - I slept just fine, but I hated to wake up and dress quickly. To this day, I prefer sleeping with the air conditioner set to 16-17C, though I program it to go back to 22C around the time to wake up.

  17. Re:How about mandatory felony sentences instead? on Drunk Drivers in California May Get Mandated Interlock Devices · · Score: 1

    Rehabilitation is a different topic entirely. And DUI is no different in that regard than theft or assault. I think that somebody arrested for a theft should have the same chance to be rehabilitated (eventually, after serving time or doing community work) as a drunk driver who is arrested for a repeated DUI.

    And just as with a theft, I think that the first offense should not lead to a felony conviction if it was not linked with injuries or large material damage.

  18. Re:I think its gonna be a long long time on New Proposed Path for Manned Trips to Mars: Let Mars' Gravity Capture Spacecraft · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The best idea I've heard is to make use of aerodynamic lift for that, so instead of falling down on a purely ballistic trajectory you make large enough surfaces to actually _fly_.

    You won't be able land like airplanes (or Space Shuttles) do on Earth, but you'll be able to use the lift to cause a stall. If you are careful then you can make your vertical speed to be zero at that moment and your horizontal speed will just be subsonic (I remember reading calculations proving that) for a reasonably shaped airfoil. Then you can use retro rockets to bleed away the remaining speed.

    It's complicated, but we have some experience with Space Shuttles that we might be able to reuse.

  19. Re:How about mandatory felony sentences instead? on Drunk Drivers in California May Get Mandated Interlock Devices · · Score: 1

    Is it OK if I go and juggle flasks full of nitroglycerin in a kindergarten? No? I guarantee that there is only a fairly small chance that one of them will explode and kill everybody in the room.

  20. Re:"pioneer inventor of new technology" ??? on Bill Gates Sponsoring Palladium-Based LENR Technology · · Score: 1

    1. OpenLDAP + Samba can handle millions of _objects_ just fine. And tree structures are implicit in LDAP. Amazon even offers a hosted version of it!

    2. Exchange is overrated crap.

    3. Sure, if 'management' is limited to pretty much locking the desktop background. Try to install and configure non-trivial third-party software through GPOs. Hell, even try to install Microsoft's own VisualStudio.

    4. BitLocker is indeed nice.

    5. RefuseFS is still very experimental. BTFS supports integrity checking on the filesystem level and DM supports it on block level.

    6. DHCP - the original RFC states that is was written by Ralph Droms ( droms@bucknell.edu ) in 1993, when Microsoft didn't even have their own IP stack!

    8. BTRFS has dedup. NTFS doesn't support dedup, it's done on the block level.

    9. Is anybody still even interested in file sharing?

  21. Re:As Russian on Serious Economic Crisis Looms In Russia, China May Help · · Score: 1

    Yes, the USSR tried to populate the Eastern territories by giving incentives to move (in some cases incentives included such things as 'not being shot'). After the USSR collapse people started moving back to more hospitable regions. There is also a large number of mine towns that are now depopulating because the mines are either downsized or not profitable enough to support the infrastructure around them.

    I don't know about Canada, but the same processes happened in the US quite often. Just look at abandoned coal mining towns in Virginia as an example.

  22. Re: I never have understood on Serious Economic Crisis Looms In Russia, China May Help · · Score: 1

    No, we are not in a stagflation. Stagflation is characterized by high inflation and stagnant economy, it happens when the economy is constrained by the external pressure (like high energy price) and does not have enough real resources to support growth.

    Right now the US is slowly crawling from a liquidity trap (and Europe actually crawls in the wrong direction), so we have unusually low inflation and low growth.

  23. Re:Move over USA, it's China's time to shine now.. on Serious Economic Crisis Looms In Russia, China May Help · · Score: 1

    That's a fairly insignificant amount for the economic purposes. Yearly exports of military equipment amount to less than 1% of total Russian exports while natural resources amount to about 80%.

  24. Re:I never have understood on Serious Economic Crisis Looms In Russia, China May Help · · Score: 2

    Ok, agreed.

    Except that I think that smallish inflation (around 2-3%) is actually good for the economy - it motivates people to invest the money rather than hoard it on low-interest deposits. And in a growing economy there ALWAYS will be people working on products that are not competitive - because there are companies constantly improving their products, so at any given time there'll be some outcompeted players. And purely from empiric studies it seems impossible to have robust economic growth with low inflation unless you are a resource exporting country.

  25. Re:As Russian on Serious Economic Crisis Looms In Russia, China May Help · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There's a reason why Eastern territories of Russia are sparsely populated. The chief reason is that it simply makes no sense to live there. Just look at Canada - it has huge tracts of land, yet almost nobody lives north of Edmonton.