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Comment Re:And knowing is half the battle (Score 1) 48

plus FAA typically only cares when it's a powered craft being used for commercial purposes.

I agree with the rest of your comment, but this part isn't accurate, otherwise GA wouldn't even need a license.

The FAA has only pursued "drone" (R/C) pilots who stay below 700' AGL when they fly for commercial purposes (aka as a business). Plus, you can fly manned ultralights without a license; the FAA steps in with licensing when the craft is above a certain size or carries more than 1 passenger. So, yes and no. I should have said "The FAA typically only cares about unmanned flight when..."

Comment Re:And knowing is half the battle (Score 0) 48

I guess now we know who pushes those "news stories" about all the near-catastrophic near-misses

The FAA is an example of regulatory capture. It is run by aviators for the interest of pilots and aviation companies, who see drones as a threat to their businesses and jobs. So they push the stories that fit the narrative that drones are an evil threat. The FAAs regulations have become so draconian, that it is technically illegal to toss a frisbee.

You must have a hell of an arm, because the FAA is only responsible for airspace above 700 feet AGL unless you happen to be on or very close to an airport, plus FAA typically only cares when it's a powered craft being used for commercial purposes. And, until there is a standard frozen-drone-through-the-inlet test on jet engines to prove that a strike would be survivable for the aircraft, they do have a duty to take action to prevent a mid-air collision that could kill many tens or hundreds of people.

Comment Re:Unsustainable business model (Score 3, Insightful) 59

The makers won't use this service. 3 years ago every hackerspace had a 3D printer, and it was a cool reason to join up. Now, the makers just buy their own printer. The cost has gone down, and designing a 3D object is an iterative interactive process.

There was, and is, and will continue to be, a huge difference in what you can do with a 3d printer that costs a few hundred (currency units) and one that costs a few thousand or tens of thousands of (currency units). A Maker who is not interested in mass producing things but instead wants to create a few interesting objects at a time will probably see a huge benefit to being able to just order up the object (instead of outlaying a huge amount for a printer) from a service that has both a very high quality printer, and a delivery chain to get it to them very fast. How many Makers like that are there? Who knows.

Comment Re:practical-based certs hold their value (Score 1) 317

I would argue that certs with practicals (CCIE, JNCIE, RHCE, etc) tend to hold their value much better than those that can simply be gotten by taking tests.

Since he mentioned that he is more into management than programming/engineering, the other very relevant "cert" is the PMI Project Management Professional endorsement. This would be the direction to go if he doesn't want to get deeper into the technical soup of vendor-specific credentials.

Comment Re:bogus pharmaceuticals/unauthorized pharmaceutic (Score 1) 82

The FDA has rather strict quality control standards so my guess is these pharmacies have not gone through the process to be fully licensed. And another thing:

But worse than that, he believes that the single biggest reason neither the FDA nor the pharmaceutical industry has put much effort into testing, is that they are worried that such tests may show that the drugs being sold by many so-called rogue pharmacies are by and large chemically indistinguishable from those sold by approved pharmacies.

Yes...after the quality control of toys, toothpaste, dog food, and drywall from China, we're sure we can trust their quality with our pharmaceuticals.

Yeah, you know, they are "by and large" indistinguishable from the real ones. I mean, what's a few PPM of arsenic, or cyanide, or lead? The rest of the drug is still there, and that's what you ordered. You wouldn't send a gourmet steak back just because the cook brushed a little olive oil and salt on it, when it was listed on the menu as just a steak? So why are we rejecting these drugs?

/sarcasm

Comment Re:Over what time interval? (Score 1) 528

Obvisouly a while but its not out of the question. Sony pissed off North Korea several months ago when they announced The Interview. If it takes a week to download ~100TB at ~1Gbps then a couple weeks/months is all they need for all that data.

Agreed, but, isn't someone monitoring internet usage? 100 TB being downloaded even in a week to 10 days is an increase of multiple terabytes a day over whatever they normally use. One would think that would cause a spike on a graph somewhere, that someone ought to have investigated.

I've been hosting websites for years, and the only time I was ever compromised (one server turned into a spam mail server -- how embarrassing) I caught it almost immediately by a sudden spike in the network traffic.

As someone else said, since Sony has been compromised before, it just seems amazing that there wasn't some higher level of scrutiny.

North Korea would no doubt draw suspicion by having that much data going toward their country anyway, given that they dont have an open internet. No, if this was in any way related to NK it was by money trail only. They perhaps incentivized a hacking group or an insider with a few hundred thousand USD (maybe a few million if its delivered as counterfeit 20's and 50's) and the rest was done on the ground in the US, from one or many different routes over long periods.

Comment Re:Over what time interval? (Score 1) 528

"Plug in a device, let it download, then come get it the next night."

100 TB / 24 hrs... = 9259259259 bps. So, plug in a device which can store 100 TB into a 10 Gb network port which connects to every data source at full speed, and that's it? A device which can hold 25x 4 TB drives would be pretty big, and it's unlikely all their systems and interconnects are 10G.

By "next night" it was impossible for you to roll that into "in a week" or even "in a month"? Lights out facilities leave things untouched and even un-looked-at for months on end. And who says the 100TB is the compressed size? No doubt whoever did this was very skilled, packing things in compressed, encrypted chunks for easy exfiltration and minimal chance of detection. If it took them 1 night or 10 nights or 100 nights the plan would have worked the same way.

Comment Re:Yeesh (Score 1) 584

Claiming that biology cannot influence differences in the way boys/men and girls/women act is not just ignorant. It's flat out absurd.

Except no one claimed that it cannot, only that it is not likely in this circumstance. The question on the table is to what extent dimorphism influences intellectual pursuits. Numerous studies have shown that boys/girls/men/women do not have any measurable difference in cognitive function across domains like math, science, etc. so the question remains, does the fact that dimorphism leaves cognitive capability (the ability to learn and practice a given domain) completely untouched mean that the gender biases toward certain career fields exist primarily outside of genetics?

Comment Re:Most people write far less. (Score 3) 125

However my company found that in testing, the more number of writes to a flash device, the shorter time before the data is leaked out. So after 10,000 writes to the same location, I can read the data a month later with no errors, but at 50,000 writes I start getting errors after about 2 hours. It seems like flash storage is like a bucket of water, each erase pokes a tiny hole in the bucket. After awhile those tiny holes add up and the bucket leaks pretty fast. So long term storage is not as safe as a conventional hard drive.

Wear leveling will prevent any cell from getting even close to that. The article is in reference to the wonder of SSDs getting over 2,000,000GB of writes across 240GB of flash. That's 8,300 erase cycles in what is certainly considered an "Extreme" scenario. In consumer desktop usage almost no one will pass the 1,000 mark, and most will stay below the 500 mark before they scrap their PC for a new one.

Comment Re:She's _4_ (Score 1) 584

Jesus fucking christ, give it a break. Your kid is 4. Mine were still talking about being medieval knights at that age.

And this, on top of the fact that the solution is in the question ("My wife attributes her pursuit of programming to being a loner and pretty much ignoring wider society while growing up: 'Being left alone with a computer (with NO INTERNET TO TELL ME WHAT I COULDN’T DO) was the deciding factor,' she tells me.") so if you want your daughter to be a programmer you have at least two choices: raise her the same way you were raised (with the appropriate limits on external gender pressure i.e. TV) or raise her the same way your wife was raised, tell her she cant drive and buy her any bits of offline technology she wants.

Comment Re:Yeesh (Score 2) 584

the notion that it is AT ALL biological is rooted in ignorance. Ignorance of biology ...

Men and women are biologically different. Stating that differences between the two can be biological in nature is not ignorance of biology. Asserting that any differences are absolutely not biological is ignorance of biology.

Consider that when pink first took on gender connotations,

Well doesn't that just prove that all differences between men and women are because evil society is forcing pink on women.

It proves that the idea that girls will like pink things (of which the majority of products aimed at girls or the parents of girls happens to be) by some innate genetic force is completely wrong. It proves that you are wrong if you think that society is a complete reflection of innate genetic differences.

Evil? You used that word. However the early bias has a pretty simple explanation: parents deeply want their kids to be unique and excellent compared to other kids. If you put a 3 month old baby boy and a 3 month old baby girl next to each other with a diaper on, you won't be able to tell the gender at all. What good is that when your son is supposed to be the best little boy ever?! And how dumb was that lady who said you had a pretty little baby!? Can't she see that your boy is handsome, not pretty? Better get him in some blue overalls with a tiny little newsie hat.

Comment Re:Yeesh (Score 2) 584

Ever consider girls don't like girly things cause there marketed towards them, but rather, that girly things are marketed to girls cause thats there tried and true demographic? There's a chance that the marketers paid lots of money to figure out what girls and boys will get there parents to buy them might actually know there demographics. Like someone above said, I'm all about giving girls the ability to go for boy things, but trying to force them into it is going to be damaging and counter productive. Would you be disappointed in your child if they were into stereotypical things?

Nope and nope. You have a woefully optimistic view of what "marketing" means at big companies. They market what they are making, and only the tiniest bit of feedback from marketing goes to the design process (usually in the form of "change this a little bit so it looks newer vs last year's model") and the rest of "marketing" is really sales strategies and advertising. If every toy company used child behavior/psychology to drive product development they would all be making the same toy. Face it, from the time the 3 month old baby boy is in blue overalls and the 3 month old baby girl is in a pink dress, cultural bias has sunk its teeth in. The child had no hand in picking those clothes whatsoever.

Comment Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we? (Score 1) 70

It's also potentially much faster than any cable-based system

Wat?

Cable-based communication is potentially much faster than any radio based communication. Each signal pair in a cable can carry as much information that you can transfer over radio.

Station wagon full of LTO tapes, anyone?

Depends on what you mean by fast. The speed of light through air is quite a bit faster than through optical fiber or copper, thus yielding lower latency over distances. It's such a difference that the path from New York City to Chicago is now traversed by microwave/laser towers for financial institutions, in order to save a few milliseconds on the round trip and thus yield faster (read: more profitable) trades between the commodities market hub (in Chicago) and the securities market hub (in NYC).

Comment Re:numbering (Score 1) 164

who cares really?

The numbering should go 1.. 2.. 3.. etc.. thousands.. tens of thousands.. hundreds of thousands.. millions.. too many to give a fuck about.

How would you know when to cross each threshold? Tallying views/day and then looking at a moving average along with the date of the last increment? That's dumb, and I should know, I thought of it. Besides, it's a reminder that every one of those views, Google *remembers* and in 15 years it will still be bugging you with ads for Tiger Beat because of that one time you binge-watched Justin Bieber music videos.

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