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User: itzdandy

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  1. Re: Qualcomm = patent troll on Qualcomm Asks China To Ban the iPhone XS and XR (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    well, it's not so clear cut. Qualcomm has gamed the patent system and made it very near impossible to develop an alternative radio that doesn't infringe which is legal, but douchey. Then, they have the power to push their patent portfolio as standards ensuring the next generation is locked up the same way. That's monopoly.

    It doesn't mean it's ok for Apple to ignore the patents (and the law), but it does suggest that the government modify the system so that this type of monopoly isn't allowed to form up.

  2. Re:Voyager 2 hasn't really left the solar system on Nasa's Voyager 2 Probe 'Leaves the Solar System' (bbc.co.uk) · · Score: 2

    Inertia doesn't care about the gravity from the 'void' beyond the solar system. Out in the oort, objects are orbiting so slowly that the micro-gravity from the sun still keeps them. The gravity from the void beyond is a tiny fraction comparatively. So this is about inertia vs gravity, not local gravity vs interstellar gravity.

    Also consider that the oort cloud has not been observed. 'cloud' might be a very optimistic description of what orbits out there, if anything. A single icy body out there could be the source of all of these oort cloud comets.

  3. any proxy sales soar on Pennsylvania To Apply 6% 'Netflix Tax' (allflicks.net) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...get your vpn proxy now

  4. Re:lawsuits....3...2...1...go! on Motorola Marketed the Moto E 2015 On Promise of Updates, Stops After 219 Days · · Score: 1

    difference is that Sony never really promoted 'other os' as a specific selling point. Motorola used it directly in their marketing.

  5. lawsuits....3...2...1...go! on Motorola Marketed the Moto E 2015 On Promise of Updates, Stops After 219 Days · · Score: 2

    Here's the thing, if a company says something to entice a purchase, they are likely to be sued and give refunds to everyone that purchased based on those promises.

  6. Re:Fine vs profit? on FCC Fines Smart City $750K For Blocking Wi-Fi · · Score: 3, Informative

    no, your talking criminal contempt, this is civil contempt and the punishment would most likely be commutation of the settlement and liability for court costs. This is against a corporation, not individuals, there's no specific person that is liable and it wasn't a criminal offence.

  7. Re:Fine vs profit? on FCC Fines Smart City $750K For Blocking Wi-Fi · · Score: 1

    $3/4 Million is a big chunk out of managements bonuses I think...

  8. Re:Fine vs profit? on FCC Fines Smart City $750K For Blocking Wi-Fi · · Score: 4, Informative

    Contempt of court has nothing to do with the FCC. The FCC will still come after the business for the second fine for which they are unlikely to accept any settlement. Also, you can't jail a corporation, only it's officers which is VERY hard to do, just look at the banking fiasco and how few people were jailed over it. This will likely only ever come down to fines and more fines if they repeat until the business loses solvency.

  9. Re:Fine vs profit? on FCC Fines Smart City $750K For Blocking Wi-Fi · · Score: 2

    true, but that doesn't release them from FCC liability either. And the chances of a settlement are near zero for a second offense. I've seen second FCC fines in another wireless industry, they are no joke.

  10. Re:Fine vs profit? on FCC Fines Smart City $750K For Blocking Wi-Fi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    the first fine is a slap on the wrist, but if they continue the next fine will be substantially larger, order of magnitude larger. The FCC might only slap on the wrist for 1st offense, but they get real serious when people don't follow their direct orders.

  11. its real on Consumer Reports: New iPhones Not As Bendy As Believed · · Score: 1

    I haven't seen one bent to the point of damage, but I've held the regular iPhone 6 and I can flex it with one hand. It VASTLY more flexible than my nexus5.

  12. Re: god dammit. on Solar Plant Sets Birds On Fire As They Fly Overhead · · Score: 1

    Look at the design genius, the light doesn't hit the collector directly from the sun. Obviously there is a roof too.

  13. Re:god dammit. on Solar Plant Sets Birds On Fire As They Fly Overhead · · Score: 1

    true!

    And are we talking about a full BBQ, or just a singe? I'm not too concerned that 28,000 birds a year get a suntan!

    I suspect that if fully cooked meals are dropping out of the sky at an alarming rate, there would be an issue with coyotes and other scavengers hanging out at the Sizzler. Maybe the the solution is to just add some ADA parking and a Coke Freestyle machine.

  14. Re:god dammit. on Solar Plant Sets Birds On Fire As They Fly Overhead · · Score: 1

    ok, so 28,000 per year, lets break that down.

    with about 8 hours per day of operational time, it's 10 each hour. That's the high number. 1 every 2 minutes is 30 an hour, so you've already exaggerated 3x the exaggeration in the post.

    80 birds a day? who is cleaning up the bodies? show me 1 picture of 80 dead birds at one of these facilities.

  15. Re:god dammit. on Solar Plant Sets Birds On Fire As They Fly Overhead · · Score: 1

    on the surface, 77 seems an unlikely high number.... I'd like to see the evidence of this claim. 77 birds fly through a narrow killzone in the middle of the desert each day? not the forest, the desert. show me the evidence, can't be that hard to put up a camera or two.

  16. Re:god dammit. on Solar Plant Sets Birds On Fire As They Fly Overhead · · Score: 5, Informative

    ~3 birds each day seems like a lot of KFC for a power plant....

    anyway, seems like the environmental impact is quite less than mining of coal etc etc, and more easily solved....audible chirps, clicks, etc to scare the birds away? Or maybe a little metal eagle or hawk statue on the roof..

  17. Re:Will computers ever be as smart as us? Briefly. on Understanding an AI's Timescale · · Score: 1, Interesting

    absolutely agreed. Though I don't have direct evidence to support this statement, I would guess that a neuron fires at a similar enough speed as a transistor. Consciousness is a very complex computation from billions of neurons *written in assembly* essentially. If/when we make an AI, it's likely to be compiled code running on a chip with less transistors than we have neurons, 100 Billion neurons vs 1.4Billion transistors in an i7 for instance.

    That said, this is assuming that we limit consciousness to what humans perceive, the computer may have a somewhat different version of it. I suspect that we will try to build a human type consciousness into the machine though.

  18. Re:Cheap Labor on Is Montana the Next Big Data Hub? · · Score: 2

    DUDE! Shut UP! There's no Indian food, no Thai food, no Sushi, no Lucky's or natural Grocers, no buildings over 2 stories, no stadium, the beer is really expensive, we have to look up wine in a book made from papyrus, and it's illegal to wear anything but a cowboy hat. seriously, it sucks here, don't come.

  19. Re:Monwhere? on Is Montana the Next Big Data Hub? · · Score: 3, Funny

    yes, it's miserable here. maybe the worst place in the entire world. I'd leave, but that's the thing, you can't leave. It's like prison.

  20. Re:Sunk Costs on $42,000 Prosthetic Hand Outperformed By $50 3D Printed Hand · · Score: 2

    This is really the point. The $40K+ prosthetic is simply over engineered. It's a poor argument saying that we should support engineers, their families, their companies, etc so that they can charge a disabled person $40K when we could have a single developer make a much simpler product that can be produced at a local 3D fab shop or in the garage of an enterprising neighbor.

    Clearly this is an early version, though fully functional. Improving aesthetics can certainly be an optional component. Today, a black or clear acrylic prosthetic would be of very little concern to many people and I only see that as becoming more of a non-issue.

    The other interesting part of this is that someone in need of such a device could invest in the tech to customize and produce a device specific to their needs. maybe they have a palm, or less to work with. Customizing the device to suit them at their own pace with rapid prototyping changes their disability. The thriving makers movement can facilitate the sharing of schematics so you might find a near-ready model that you can alter to fit. maybe even spawn a boutique prosthetic shop in your town.

       

  21. options... on How Do You Backup 20TB of Data? · · Score: 1

    really, there are 3 options
    1) a second array
    2) tape (biggest are 5TB right now...)
    3) online

    1* RAID6 (or raid5+hot spare) would be 7x 4TB drives and could be built for about $1200 using a cheap workstation and external drives w/ freenas
    2* tapes would be expensive and cumbersome IMHO. Also expensive!
    3* I say this is an option but it's not realistic. if you have a typical 4Mbps upload from Cox/Charter/etc then the initial seed would something like 2 year!

  22. terrible request/idea on Ask Slashdot: Anti-Camera Device For Use In a Small Bus? · · Score: 1

    Don't be a jerk! This is an absurd request. You get to record but your 'clients' cannot? I'm guessing the owners don't actually want to be in business. Even a no-camera policy is completely ridiculous for a fore-hire limo service.

    How did this post get pass the sniff test?

    Any self respecting geek will reject this and refuse to post anything helpful. troll away friends, troll away.

  23. common carrier on Time Warner Deal Is How Comcast Will Fight Cord Cutters · · Score: 1

    This is where I'd like too see the defacto monopoly of cable companies broken by making them common carriers. Basically, do what the gov' did to telecos creating the iLEC and cLEC system. This way other carriers can buy fiber and get on the wire.

    for many cities, the cable lines are actually owned by the municipality and managed by the cable company, so this would be a somewhat simple transition. DOCSIS already has the ability to allow this explicitly in the standard.

  24. Re:Bittorrent Sync + NAS-of-some-kind on Ask Slashdot: Distributed Online Storage For Families? · · Score: 1

    I'm using btsync as well. I have about 20 sites with various synced folders. I have two primary nodes at my office and at my home that have all folders synced, they are essentially where I create all folders. People each get their own folders (actually zfs volumes). I run ubuntu w/ zfs and dedup the storage pool.

    When I create a small NAS, I use a refurb computer with ubuntu, zfs even for a single disk (for compression, dedup, snapshots), and samba to share the files at the site.

    I use apache w/ webdav and a link for the .zfs/snaphosts directory to a history directory and to once daily snapshots. Can access the files through webdav AND access historical copies..

  25. Re:given its failure out of the gate. on HP's NonStop Servers Go x86, Countdown To Itanium Extinction Begins · · Score: 1

    Nope. itanic eliminated PA-RISC and Alpha, because both those architectures were owned by HP, and HP wanted to work with intel to make the itanic and replace those older architectures, and that's exactly what happened. Alpha was canned immediately after HP bought out the remnants of DEC in Compaq, and moved all the Alpha engineers to HP and Intel to work on itanic. (Remember, itanic was a joint venture between HP and Intel.) PA-RISC was eliminated sometime later after itanic got good enough to do so. Price/performance was not that much of a factor here; HP management wanted to move to itanic for various pie-in-the-sky reasons, and they couldn't simply backtrack and dump the itanic after pouring so much money into its development, since that would make HP management look stupid.

    MIPS was indeed wiped out by x86-64.

    That may have been HP's motivation, but the market did not care and Itanium did not displace non-x86* servers, rather the availability of commodity hardware with ECC RAM and other 'server' type options. It's really a give and take of hardware getting a bit better, vendors offering server solutions on that improving hardware, and hardware vendors upping the ante again etc etc.

    In other words, had Itanium never been drempt up, the server market would look basically like it does today but with HP dropping support for HPPA right now instead of Itanium. Actually, the environment might look much different in that Oracle may have never purchased sun because sparc may have survived(as in maintained market share) having that little itanium slice of the market and butterfly effect that out to MariaDB not existing and java being less controversial.

    MIPS really killed itself IMHO. x86 certainly kavorkianed it along, but nothing came out of the MIPS architecture to compete in a timely manner. MIPS is actually quite good, but like Alpha it had the wrong gameplan. Alpha was a trendsetter and Alpha boxes were amazing (formerly admin of a cluster of ES45 machines, Digital Unix) but digital/compaq got bought by HP and lost the war.

    Not to say that x86 actually won though, the only thing x86 about and x86 CPU is that it happens to have some x86 decoders on effectively RISC core(s), so in the end RISC wins and gets no credit. MIPS (a RISC) owns the embedded router market today, ARM owns mobile, and x86 is very RISCy. Heck, the 'R' in arm used to mean RISC (still applies but the name is now just 'ARM')