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  1. Re:Know when on Employee Monitoring · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    So you find some porn on a guy's computer, or rather, files that look like they might be porn. You then open a bunch of these, make a judgement about what might be illegal, and call the authorities.

    Then you boast about it.

    If you're not just another IT drone spinning a story to inflate your apparent importance, then you're the kind of asshole who ruins a man's life for having the wrong kind of video on his laptop and then feels good about what you've done.

    Get fucked.

  2. Re:People, people everywhere on Intel Sucks Up Water Amid Drought In China · · Score: 1

    The problem is that a nuclear power plant costs something like six billion dollars to build, and that "whole lot" of water it could desalinate isn't actually very much. It's a lot by the standards of residential and even some industrial users, but it's mind-boggling how much water is required for agriculture.

    Modern agriculture is completely dependent on water too cheap to meter. If farmers had to pay even a tenth of a typical residential rate, food prices would rise dramatically.

  3. Re:Is this a giant scam? on OnLive One Step Closer · · Score: 1

    The executives running those companies are probably MBAs. If they know anything about computer hardware, programming, or tying their own shoelaces, it'd be a goddamn miracle. MBAs are, for the most part, some of the stupidest people you'll ever meet.

  4. Re:Is this a giant scam? on OnLive One Step Closer · · Score: 1

    1) Workstation class hardware is exactly the same as desktop hardware. Same CPUs except with more cores, same FSB architectures, same memory busses. The days when there was a big schism between the capabilities of consumer-class CPUs and server-class CPUs ended years ago: they're almost one and the same now. There are differences in I/O architecture, which is exactly the sort of thing that gaming doesn't really stress.

    2/3) I did in fact watch the video, though I'll admit that I didn't have the patience to watch more than the first question in the Q/A session. OK, so there's custom hardware involved... score one for the technical viability of the idea I suppose, while taking one from the economic viability of it. Now you're expecting me to believe that not only will they have high-end GPUs in every machine (which, as others have mentioned, aren't virtualizable in any useful sort of way) but they'll also have custom-fabbed video accelerator boards? Technically possible, perhaps: economically sensible, hardly.

  5. Re:Is this a giant scam? on OnLive One Step Closer · · Score: 1

    Wow. Just wow.

    Kids, don't drink and post.

  6. Is this a giant scam? on OnLive One Step Closer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I still maintain that this simply can't work, and that it's an absolutely braindead money pit of an idea if it's not a total scam.

    Idea: let's take the most latency sensitive, computationally demanding, and visually intensive thing you can do with a modern computer and try to apply the thin client model to it.

    A single instance of the application in question will demand the full resources of the most powerful PC you can throw at it, but we'll just wave our hands and mutter something about virtualization to convince stupid investors that we have magic at our disposal. Because they are morons and because we put on a good show, they'll believe that you can somehow run many instances of a game on the equivalent of a single PC. We'll also be encoding 720p video in realtime at a quality / bandwidth ratio that no codec today can deliver; this will presumably happen on the same computing hardware that's already running multiple instances of cutting edge 3D games.

    Finally, we'll throw in some shit about the iphone, because people can't stop fellating apple lately.

    Anyone who believes this is technically feasible, much less economically viable, is fucking *retarded*.

  7. Re:Stop scaremongering on FCC Lets Radar Company See Through Walls · · Score: 1

    Thermal IR imaging isn't magic.

    First off, "FLIR" is kind of a misnomer. It stands for "Forward Looking InfraRed," but that just means that it, well, looks forward... like a camera. When thermal IR detectors were first invented, they were expensive, bulky, cryogenically cooled devices. As a result, making a high resolution grid of them was impractical. Instead they made a single row of them, mounted them to the bottom of an airplane, pointed them downward, and used the forward motion of plane itself to form a 2D image. It's sort of like how a flatbed scanner works: a 2D scanning element moved over the area or interest.

    When thermal infrared detectors advanced enough to form a proper 2D grid at a semi-reasonable cost, you could aim them straight ahead as you would any other camera; thus, they became known as forward-looking infrared, a designation that persists to this day.

    Further confusing the matter is that there's a company called FLIR that makes and sells thermal imaging equipment. But it's important to keep in mind that they're just far-infrared cameras. They detect thermal IR, emitted by every surface at a frequency and intensity proportional to its temperature. Thermal IR is emitted by everything and absorbed by pretty much everything: there are very few materials transparent to it. Let's put it this way: nothing your house is made of is transparent to IR at thermal wavelengths.

    Bottom line, you can't use thermal IR to look inside anything. It's a tool for measuring surface temperatures, and that's it. Put another way, if you properly insulate your grow-op, thermal IR won't see it.

  8. Re:Umm, what? on Program To Detect Smuggled Nuclear Bombs Stalls · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Actually, you don't. Know me, I mean.

  9. Umm, what? on Program To Detect Smuggled Nuclear Bombs Stalls · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's seriously a program aimed at developing and deploying a fleet of nuclear bomb detectors at every port in the United States?

    What kind of ridiculous bullshit is this? Did someone at the DHS watch a few episodes of 24 to come up with this? It's movie-plot anti-terrorism at its absolute worst: imaging ridiculously specific scenarios and spending enormous amounts of money to guard against them.

    As if a terrorist organization resourceful enough to obtain a *nuclear fucking weapon* would somehow have difficulty bringing it into the country. This is a nation into which several metric tonnes of cocaine and thousands of illegal immigrants are successfully smuggled every year, and someone imagines that they'll be able to erect a perfect wall to keep a few kilograms of metal out of the country?

    What congressman's nephew is being paid to make these detectors?

  10. Re:on a live computer system? on Microsoft COFEE Leaked · · Score: 1

    Mercury tiltswitch from a thermostat + relay. Cuts the power if anyone tries to move your box. It wouldn't be hard to wire it such that it sends mains voltage to your hard drives instead, but I stopped short of that because I was just doing it for fun and didn't want an accidental kick to the tower to destroy all of my data.

  11. Re:one point missed, tech lifespan on Ultracapacitor Bus Recharges At Each Stop · · Score: 1

    Everything you wrote is flat out wrong. Please educate yourself on Ohm's law before commenting further.

    I = V / R

    A common battery doesn't shock you because your skin resistance is high enough that almost no current flows through you. Your average car battery can put out hundreds of amperes, the average capacitor, perhaps thousands. Given how little current it takes to kill you, they might as well be infinite sources... but at 12V, neither will do you any harm.

  12. The great unsolved problem of modern computing on Wi-Fi Direct Overlaps Bluetooth Territory For Connecting Devices · · Score: 1

    You have two computers right next to each other. You want to get a file from one to other... good luck with that. For some totally inexplicable reason, this common situation presents us with a problem that's never been adequately solved. I've seen people sitting next to each other with laptops log on to their webmail accounts to send a file. Only to find that they can't, because the file is too large. Etc.

    Let's review your options:

    USB's architecture means two hosts can't talk to each other.

    Firewire isn't common enough a port, and there are two connector types to worry about.

    Ethernet is universal, the cables are cheap, and people might actually carry them around. You no longer need to worry about crossover cables, it's the fastest external interface on the modern PC... do we have a winner?

    802.11g/n is also universal. Making a peer-to-peer network in windows isn't exactly easy though, and then you have to convince the other guy to disconnect from whatever network he's on, search the area, connect to yours... several minutes of work and a huge pain in the ass.

    And all of the above suffer from the problem that they set up TCP/IP connections. Even with the autoconfig addresses that you'll get after Windows gives up on DHCP, two machines connected over TCP/IP have no practical way to talk to each other. What are you going to do, set up an FTP server? Connect to the C$ share of the other machine? Even if you were to do anything like that, you'd still need to ask for the guy's IP address first. Have fun teaching Ted from accounting about ipconfig.

    What we need is something that's more than just a TCP/IP connection... something that automatically discovers the devices around you and gives you the option to easily send them a file. The standard has to specify everything right up to the application layer.

    So... we need bluetooth. This is exactly the kind of problem it was made to solve.

    The potential of it was ruined by two factors. First is that bluetooth continues to be a $30 option (for a $0.30 chip) on a lot of laptops. Second, and more importantly, there's the matter of the windows bluetooth stack; god help us all. Make the machine discoverable, get the other guy to search for devices in the area, pair them, exchange passkeys... all through an interface that, at least on XP, confuses the shit out of everyone.

    In order for Wi-Fi direct to be useful, it will have to be more than just another way to establish a TCP/IP connection, and it will have to let go of this ridiculous obsession with security: pairing and discoverability and pass keys and all that nonsense. Christ, just let two machines talk to each other.

    Remember IRDA? It wasn't exactly popular, but it worked. Two computers get in range, windows makes a neat little sound, and you get a systray icon you can click to immediately send files. That's the way it should be. The one time I ever managed to use it, it was glorious.

    The solution we've managed to come up with in the absence of this capability is sneakernet for the 21st century: the USB flash drive. At least they're cheap and common now... there was a time when two computers sitting next to each other really had *no* options at all. Now we have these... they're not particularly fast, you're likely but by no means guaranteed to have one lying around, and whatever disposable cereal-box prize you're likely to be using will always have just a little less capacity than you need.

    Damn it, it's the future. I want to beam files from one computer to another. Why can't I?

  13. A war of attrition... on French "3 Strikes" Law Returns, In Slightly Altered Form · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Every time you think you've defeated a bad law, it just comes back in time for the next legislative cycle. Politicians and the interests that control them are patient and persistent, while regular people can only take so much time and energy from their lives to fight these causes. Especially today, when five or six examples of gross injustice come across your average news feed every single day.

    And thus corruption and greed prevail; this is how we can all belong to something that nobody wants any part of.

  14. The actual issue... on US Says Canadian Copyright As Bad As China's, Russia's · · Score: 1

    What they're actually sore about is that the Canadian legal system isn't open to the same loophole that allows the RIAA to sue file sharers: you can't sue anonymous users, use subpeonas to get their real names, drop the original lawsuits, and then file new ones with the learned identities. I don't know enough about the legal system to know why that doesn't work, but sure enough, there haven't been any lawsuits against individual filesharers here.

    In the absence of that, they'd like laws that force ISPs to store and then divulge user info. This is a politically unpopular proposal that doesn't win a minority government any support, so it keeps getting killed. Sorry, but this is what a government looks like when you have more than two parties: minority governments have to form fragile coalitions that actually listen to their constituents sometimes.

  15. NPV is a flawed metric... on Music Copyright In EU Extended To 70 Years · · Score: 1

    ...well actually, it isn't, it's just that the appropriate discount rate for the future revenues of a private individual is zero.

    Why would 100 inflation-adjusted dollars be worth almost nothing in 70 years? It will still buy you roughly a week's worth of food and household goods.

    The reason for the discount rate in NPV calculations is that a large entity has a cost of capital, be it the interest they have to pay on bonds or just the interest they could get by investing the money in some other venture.

    It's another question whether or not anyone deserves a lifetime monopoly on their creative output, but don't make the ridiculous argument that any revenues received in 70 years are effectively worthless. They aren't.

  16. Re:Similar to Windows hate? on Comic Sans, Font of Ill Will · · Score: 1

    Fool! It must be written as "the LORD" to correspond to the tetragrammaton, the pronounciation of which is both unknown, and a mortal sin.

    Zombie Jesus shall return to cast into eternal fire those who dare to do otherwise.

  17. Genuine bandwidth scarcity? on AT&T Changes TOS, Limits Streaming, Tethering · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm the first to argue that transfer caps on fixed broadband are bullshit: nothing but thinly-veiled attempts by cable companies to strangle video downloads in the hope of protecting their broadcast revenues.

    Might mobile broadband be a different story though? There's only so much data you can push through the air on a given frequency range with a given SNR... might it be that the cellular network can't support a significant number of video-downloading mobile users? It was, after all, designed to support voice calls at somewhere around 9.6kbit/s, with data capabilities grafted on as a bit of an afterthought.

    We'd all like a future in which cellular companies are generic wireless bit pipes, carrying voice, video, and everything else the internet has to offer at the best possible quality... but what kind of cellular network would it take to make that a reality? With the spectrum we have available, would we need a low-power cell on every street corner?

  18. Re:Conflict of interest on Time Warner Expanding Internet Transfer Caps To New Markets · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I can't emphasize how important a point you've just made.

    The cable and telecom providers have collectively decided to create in peoples minds the idea that a "reasonable" cap is a few dozen GB, give or take: a level set so as to discourage the small but growing number of users who download much of their video and don't bother spending $1000/year on broadcast cable / satellite. From the cableco's perspective, the worst of it is that the users downloading video are exactly the technically literate sort that want, and under other circumstances might be willing to pay for, high-end cable packages with HD channels.

    Bandwidth is just not that expensive, nor is it anywhere near as scarce as the cable companies are suggesting. This issue is being framed in terms of cost and scarcity to hide the fact that this is just protecting an old business model and its rather generous revenue stream.

  19. Re:Hot Drill Bit on Drilling Hits an Active Magma Chamber In Hawaii · · Score: 4, Informative

    You're picturing a drill bit like you'd find on the end of your drill at home, with grooves running all the way up the bit that transport the cuttings to the surface. In rock drilling there's a bit at the bottom of the hole(either percussive or rotary), connected to the drill rig by a pipe of smaller diameter than the bit. Cuttings are forced up through the space between the drill pipe and the wall of the borehole by either high pressure air or water.

  20. Re:How well would for example... on Cray's CX1 Desktop Supercomputer, Now For Sale · · Score: 0, Troll

    It's spelled LOSE, you fucking moron. Learn the fucking english language before you use it to make your banal and obvious points.

  21. Re:And that, boys and girls... on New Map of Carved Up Arctic · · Score: 1

    "Canada already doesn't control its resources. It's sold a controlling stake to pretty much everything of value to various large foreign interests."

    Actually, Canadian companies control not only most of the natural resources in Canada, but those of many other countries. A short list: Syncrude, Suncor, Teck Cominco, Barrick, CNRL, Cameco, Agrium... Their shareholders are all over the world, as with every company these days, but they are headquartered in and managed by Canada.

  22. Re:Home outlet? on GM, Utilities Partner To Advance Plug-In Hybrids · · Score: 1

    Next thing you know we'll be selling volatile, flammable, and carcinogenic hydrocarbons by the gallon on every street corner. Imagine the chaos that would ensue: any deranged lunatic could swipe a credit card and start immolating the people around him. Consider the liability issues: there's no way an idea this stupid could ever get off the ground.

  23. Re:CACert on What Would It Take To Have Open CA Authorities? · · Score: 1

    You say that encryption without authentication is useless, but that ignores the fact that setting up MITM attacks is hard, and that we're not always trying to protect our communications from dedicated spies. Sometimes we just want to stop bulk data mining by ISPs, thwart the local sysadmin's petty snooping, or frustrate the NSA's dragnet surveillance.

  24. Re:Civilian use? on Stealth Paint From German Inventor Werner Nickel · · Score: 1

    Much more useful: radar absorbing paint for cars, to defeat police revenue enhancement activities. You can detect and jam laser, and you can detect radar... but the FCC tends to frown on jamming the latter. This is the next best thing.

    Of course that won't stop Them from outlawing it, just as states are already banning laser jammers, which are nothing more than a photo sensor, a few high power IR LEDs, and some software.

  25. Re:Composting... on GPS Used To Find Graves In Eco-Burial Sites · · Score: 1

    Survey-grade GPS units using RTK corrections from a base station are centimeter accurate; they're the primary survey tool in the mining / road construction industry. They're generally backpack sized units with a ~10cm circular dish antenna, so they're not what visitors will receive to locate their relatives' bodies, but such units are probably what the operators would use to keep track of burial locations.