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User: kaiser423

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  1. Re:Great, open source on Could Open Source Render Facebook the Next AOL? · · Score: 5, Funny

    Huh. Are you on some irc channel of basement dwellers that got caught in a net-split back in the 90's and got stuck in that time period?

    You'd make a great find for some anthropologists.

  2. Re:Quite possible on Al Franken's Warning On Net Neutrality · · Score: 1

    and don't forget the big players not wanting competition, so kicking back money to help throttle the little guys out of the market. Hey, that's what free markets are for, right?!? What's the point if you can't throw your weight around a little!

  3. Re:Hey look, damage reduction! on An Unprecedented Look At Apple's "Black Labs" · · Score: 5, Informative

    +1. Mod parent up. I think that the iPhone is a great phone, but as an RF engineer I'm tired of two people conflating the issue. The issue with the iPhone is that some RF engineer lost a fight and there's no conductive coating, so you effectively bridge two antennas if you happen to touch a specific spot. That's a totally different problem from the "my hand is absorbing the radiation and weakly coupling to the antenna" that all phones have.

  4. Re:Was there ever FUD? on Droid X Gets Rooted · · Score: 4, Informative

    Everyone, literally everyone knew that the device was going to be rooted. That was the simple part.

    Not everyone is sure that the bootloader can be cracked. It's fully encrypted, Trusted Computing style. Some UK hackers have had a go on a similar phone and haven't made it happen. We're hoping that since the Droid X has a much broader base that the extra talent workign on it will finally break it.

    Basically, as usual, the summary was horribly wrong. Everyone thought Rooting would be simple and done within a week or two (and it was). Everyone was and still is worried about the bootloader, and how you might brick your phone or just not be able to find a weak spot. Messing with the bootloader is what could trigger the eFuse if it was enabled, but Motorola has specifically said that they have not turned it on. The only thing keeping everyone out of the bootloader is the encryption right now.

  5. Re:Call the employee daily on A Windows Phone 7 For Every Microsoftie · · Score: 1

    Huh? Talk about illegal. "If you don't answer this phone when I call, I get to void all 8 hours you worked today!" I don't see that going over well in a courtroom.

  6. Re:Numerous advantages on Warships May Get Lasers For Close-In Defense · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ah, you're correct for generic projectile to generic laser, yes.

    The Phalanx system by itself has a very good RADAR system behind it, and the outgoing bullet stream is identifiable by that RADAR. Basically, it becomes a very accurate system because the firing system doesn't need to know anything about wind, etc. It just pushes the az/el/range of the outgoing doppler objects (bullets) to the az/el/range of the incoming doppler objects (bad things). Any effects of wind, etc are just taken into account automagically.

  7. Re:Easy for hackers to fix? on Droid X Self-Destructs If You Try To Mod · · Score: 1

    Not to mention having to take the phone apart to even get to the JTAG port, and then having the fairly expensive JTAG hardware to accomplish the flashing.

    Over 30,000 unique people download custom ROMs for the original droid. I see nearly all of them passing over this phone. That's not a small loss of sales.

  8. Re:"Written in JTAG" on Droid X Self-Destructs If You Try To Mod · · Score: 1

    From what I can tell from other similar fuses (and the statement that motorola itself can reset the fuse) is that it's an area of memory that is only resettable to a 0 from the JTAG port, but can get flipped to a 1 from the software, so if they detect someone fooling around the software flips that bit. In some cases this is a bit that feeds into some logic that actually re-routes the signals, period to prevent booting. You're not going to change the ASIC/FPGA routing, so that bit literally controls the keys to the kingdom. But you can only really get at it with JTAG, which requires taking the phone apart, having the right JTAG hardware, hooking up to it, etc. Something that very few modders are going to have, and even fewer are going to try for risk of permanently bricking a $500+ piece of hardware.

    This is really pretty serious if it's all true.

  9. Re:Two words for you... on iPhone 4 Reception Recall Ruckus Roundup · · Score: 1

    Jail break and extended features use DLL injection and all sorts of fun tricks to make their stuff work. As for Android, I just download the open source from Google, hit compile and have it with whatever features I want.

    Want wireless and USB tethering enabled, just enable it. No special trickery. It is all official Android code that has been tested and checked out by the Android team. No fancy techniques to get the features that I want. Open sourced. Verified. Thoroughly tested. Supported. Hosted by a trusted entity.

    Jailbreaked iPhone? Not so much.

  10. Re:GIGO on Toyota Sudden Acceleration Is Driver Error · · Score: 2, Informative

    Do you drive in the US? I'd say that large majority of users put the pedal to the metal pretty often. Especially when accelerating onto the interstates. Lots of those merge lanes are really short and to get up to highway speeds at the time you're pushing a sedan to max acceleration to make it. I probably do it 5-6 times A DAY because I don't want to merge onto the interstate at 40mph when traffic is moving at 80mph.

  11. Re:This assumes... on Toyota Sudden Acceleration Is Driver Error · · Score: 1

    Exactly. My 2004 Dodge Durango would always get the floormats replaced incorrectly when I took it to a particular car wash. I probably had 6-7 uncontrolled accelerations when the floormat stuck the gas pedal fully down. Usually in rush hour with lots of cars around.

    Hit the brakes and it doesn't stop, and then just put it into neutral and watch the tachometer bounce up and down from the redline while I pull over. I don't even think that my brain engaged to make that happen. It was obvious that that was what needed to be done. Of course, my parents actually gave me lessons going beyond drivers ed, but you would have thought that a cop would have extra training also.

  12. Re:Pftt on Why No Billion-Dollar Open Source Companies? · · Score: 1

    Have you ever had to load any specialty drivers in Windows XP at install time? Floppy drives suck.

    Not to mention unless you have a completely slip-streamed CD you have to be disconnected from the internet to keep it from being rooted, but you need to connect to the internet to get the updates, so you have to do some special firewall rules or have some other disk with the updates. Every time there's a patch you have to make a new install CD or something similar. Then their partition manager isn't quite as flexible as you would like if you're planning on segmenting some areas, etc.

    Then there's the huge setup you have to do after first boot that is complex and long enough that users don't typically do it, or I get bored and it takes all day because I just check on it every hour.

    Usually my graphics comes up all funky and I have to go grab the latest graphics drivers from the web manually to get a display with decent resolution, that's always fun.

    Linux just kind of installs and does everything up front without lots of other steps after the up-front install, which is way more flexible to do special things with than the Windows install. That said, Linux distros typically don't ship with mp3, flash, etc which sucks.

    But I've installed Windows about 15 times in the last 12 months on various machines, and every time I've had to bust out a floppy disk, do some security mumbo-jumbo to keep it from getting owned while updating, and then still have to download 3-4 drivers, and install a set of applications like pdf readers, office stuff, etc. It's horrible. Every machine did have different hardware since they were custom machines, so that's part of the pain. I guess if we weren't doing special stuff, then installs could just be a disk image that's pushed out or something, but I find that every machine with a different hardware configuration requires some new mumbo-jumbo upon install that I have to figure out to make it work.

  13. Re:Drones in US airspace? on FAA Adds a Study On Adding Drones To Commercial Aviation · · Score: 1

    Don't fool yourself into thinking that Border Patrol, FBI, and others aren't already flying UAV's in US airspace. This is more about making it available to everyone else.

    NASA has two global hawks for environmental science research. My understanding is that they have to bring up a full test range to watch everything and monitor all air traffic until the Global Hawk is above civilian airspace, and then it can go on it's way, but then they have the same problem landing. This is very expensive. If there was some way for them to file a plan into commercial airspace, the cost to NASA/environmental science would plummet.

    Many simple UAV's are well within University and other research institutions budget's. However, the clout and cost of resources to fly those even temporarily in civilian airspace is astronomical. If this goes through, expect lots of environmental science institutions and other places to be placing orders to UAV's.

    You want UAV's because they can fly at altitudes that plane's can't, they can loiter for insanely long periods of time, and maintenance costs don't kill you since you don't need to keep it man-rated with the pressure vessel and all of that. It would be a boon, to environmental science departments everywhere.

  14. Re:Spelling is for the bees on Why Are Indian Kids So Good At Spelling? · · Score: 1

    This is particularly important in business, where mispelling word can make one appear incompetent.

    Quote for hilarity. I assume that you meant to leave out a word in the middle there.

    But, yea, I 100% agree with you. I see papers and reports being tossed around all the time that have absolutely no care for the connotation or context of a word, which is just as important as proper spelling to me. The question for me is, are they learning all the proper context's for use of those words? That in and of itself is very valuable in conveying the desired information. I imagine so, because they probably have to use the words in sentences, read them in passages, etc quite often.

    I find that people whom read often write much better than those that don't, just because they appreciate the use of the right word at the right time rather than throwing a thesaurus at the problem when you need a new word to describe something.

  15. Re:Why so short bursts? on USAF Scramjet Hits Mach 6, Sets Record · · Score: 1

    This one went 200 seconds. At Mach 4.5 you're covering large areas and are starting to outrun all of your assets that are tracking it and gathering data. So, you either run for 200 seconds at a cost of $X for all the assets, or run for 400 seconds and cost $X*1.75. Is that extra little bit of running time worth the extra cost? Apparently not at this stage, otherwise they would have let it wander off range and had more assets further off the coast.

  16. Re:I already had my revenge 10 years ago. on Revenge of the Cable Customer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have internet and cable. I wanted only internet. I called to cancel cable. I'm now paying $5/month for cable. Guess I'm still a customer, but that $5 is good value for being able to watch some sporting events and the wife's occasional show. They asked me how much cable was worth to me a month, I told them, they charged me that. That made me fairly happy.

  17. Re:Your money is not yours on Long Odds For Online Gaming Legislation In US · · Score: 1

    3. Poker is only slightly gambling. If you can show that everyone at the table has those "100k hands" in their experience, then I'll agree they're playing on skill alone (some good, some fish). But until someone knows their own abilities, it's purely gambling.

    4. Online poker and gambling are wide open to cheating, either by the server operators or by teams of players.

    Item 3: Huh? It's gambling until you're good at it? What type of weird justification is that?!? Is hitting a fast ball gambling until I put in 1,000 hours in the batting cage, or is it a game of skill always? You can't arbitrarily define some cutoff...

    Item 4 sounds like a reason why the government should step in. Lots and lots (hundreds of billions) of dollars are going to be used in online poker. If people have to go to shady overseas operators, that just makes sense that the government should help out. Some online gambling sites operate from real jurisdictions with real rules and enforcement of fairness which means that it is not wide open to cheating.

  18. Re:So... on Australia Air Travelers' Laptops To Be Searched For Porn · · Score: 1

    Rather than add this on as an extra charge that might also affect a not insignificant portion of the population, just add extra years to a child pornographers sentence?

    Oh wait, that sentence is already long enough to probably be life in prison? Then why do we need to tack on anything extra?

  19. Re:I work on SM3... on Critics Say US Antimissile Defense Flawed, Dangerous · · Score: 1

    Yes. Can't this professor just go to mda.mil and view the videos? I see no real difference between the post-impact scenes for ones that he determined were successful and the ones that he determined were not. Both seemed to totally obliterate the target object.

  20. Re:The main danger is on Scientists Question Safety of New Airport Scanners · · Score: 3, Informative

    Have you ever been through one? They're slower than a metal detector. You still have to put your bags through the conventional scanner. Then rather walk through and wait for your bags on the other side, you have a 30 second procedure to get yourself scanned also.

    And everyone stands in there wrong, or is used to carrying their wallet (which you can't do into these), and so on and so forth. Based upon standing in line and counting numbers at Albuquerque, NM the millimeter wave system is anywhere from 2x-5x slower than traditional systems largely based upon the ability of the people going through it to understand advanced instruction....

    All of this to see if you have a conformal bomb strapped to you. Something that, obviously, a bomb-sniffing dog would be very good at doing......But you can't build a job program around bomb sniffing dogs.

  21. Re:MORE on Amiga Demonstration Helps Win Against Patent Troll · · Score: 1

    Huh?

    The level of innovation in software moves so fast precisely because it doesn't take millions to develop new concepts. Almost any software innovation, you can bang out a basic demo or proof of concept over the weekend and tweak it some for show and comment next week. We're talking investments in the single or double digit thousands to show off a sweet new software innovation. It might cost less than the CEO's desk cost to prove out and "invent" the innovation.

  22. Re:Why then on Firefox Arrives On Android · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Because you might want to help make it better by submitting feedback and tracking bugs as it heads into alpha/beta stage and reporting them?

    Because tinkering is cool, and it doesn't replace your webkit browser?

  23. Re:"journalist" on Police Seize Computers From Gizmodo Editor · · Score: 1

    Simply stated, California law requires anyone picking up lost property to make a good-faith effort to return it to it's rightful owner.

    Not that I'm siding with Giz here, but if I have a party at my house, someone loses something and I push up a notification on my blog about how I found it, and it's really neat, and cool and stuff, is that illegal.

    What is someone else at the party found it, and then gave it to me to find the rightful owner, since I had connections to the likely owner?

    What if I paid the dude who found it at the party a finder's fee for his time/hassle/good naturedness in giving it back to me to return to my friend?

  24. Re:Journalist? on Police Seize Computers From Gizmodo Editor · · Score: 1

    The dude whom found it has an apple ticket number from when he called reporting that he found it....

    That seems like pretty good proof to me.

  25. Re:Hard to have a debate on Health Care Reform · · Score: 1

    Look at the numbers. We already can't afford our current system. It making our companies uncompetitive and it's driving the federal government into massive debt all the while our population becomes less healthy, and therefore, less competitive.

    I don't necessarily like this plan, but to do nothing at this point is pull a Nero and fiddle while the country burns.