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Comment " Foley's killers may have thought of him as less" (Score 1) 11

I can guarantee he didn't think of them the same way they thought of him. Completely different philosophical and metaphysical underpinnings to the theology, Jesuits are anti-Islamics.

My question is, if ISIL, just for a second, isn't a CIA plant, what makes them think a few beheadings will STOP the bombings? Given the evil of American Secularism, it is far more likely to turn the Levant into tritonite than it is to stop anything at all.

Comment Re:Overkill much... (Score 1) 210

Nope-- they would drop frames. The write speed is not sufficient for raw 4k video. It's good for about 1.5 hours of video, perhaps even more since 95MB/sec is the read speed, and not the (almost certainly) slightly slower write speed, and of course, it's unlikely that the camera will produce data at this exact speed.

The blackmagic cameras are typically used with SSDs. even though some SanDisk extreme Pro SDCards support 280 MB/s reads. This 512 GB card is hogtied by its slow speed, even though 95 MB/s would ordinarily be regarded as pretty speedy.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Give me Catholic Heaven, Islamic Paradise is too hard 10

this guy is clearly NOT a mathematician, but if he was:

You have 4 wives on earth. Each one of those wives has 70 black eyed virgins for you in paradise. Each one of those black eyed virgins has 70 servant girls. That is 19,884 women for you to have sex with in paradise.

But it gets worse. Each one of those women has been given YOU by Allah for a term of 70 years. That means you will be having sex, no

Comment Re:How about (Score 2) 210

So sure, it's easier to hang up on them but you are actually doing them a favor and helping them out by doing so.

No, failure to take hostile action isn't a favor; it's neutrality. Installing their malware would be a favor. I can appreciate those with the time and energy to take fight to this enemy (good on you!), but I have other battles to fight with my (however high) limited anger.

The problem with this enemy, which makes it so hard to care, is how irrelevant they are. So they call people about bullshit, wasting their time. That can be annoying, but there are so many more annoying things.

I suppose some people would say this enemy is worse that that, because the call is just a way of performing a SE attack, but I disagree. I just can't help but get blame-the-victim-y with SE attacks like that. I think many of our society's real problems are caused by SE, much of it legal (e.g. "vote for me, because I'm a member of the correct party," or "believe our religion's dogma, because your parents did") and that we'd all be a lot better off with more "scam antibodies" in ourselves. So part of me hopes these scammers flourish, thereby teaching people to stop being so fucking gullible. Maybe you can't fix stupid, but we can try, and an environment full of con artists is good for that. These assholes are evil, but they're good for us.

No, I'm not fully committed to that outlook (sure, I wanna hurt the bad guys too) but I'm conflicted enough that it evens out. And while we're at it, don't knock lazy! So a position of neutrality, it is.

Comment How about THIS? (Score 1) 210

I have never gotten one of these calls. But I have gotten a few calls like this:

[Phone vibrates. I see the non-local calling number. Reject and block.]

That's the new, lazy version. Until a few weeks ago, I had many of these:

[Phone vibrates. I look at the non-local calling number and wonder who that could be. Google the number and apparently every non-local number that ever calls me, is associated with robocalling. Reject. They call again a few days later. Reject and block. Then a few days later I look at my Visual Voicemail which my shitty Galaxy S4 software never tells me has new entries until I refresh it, and some actual human speech may happen.]
ME: "Fuck."
[And I see they left a few messages containing nothing but silence. Delete.]

But that second scenario doesn't happen anymore. Robocallers have successfully trained me.

Comment Re:Example? (Score 2) 370

(I still do things the classic way: filesystem on lvm on luks on mdadm. not using ZFS yet.) I'm not sure it's exactly about what's required.

Consider wear leveling on SSDs. Only the filesystem really understands which blocks need to preserve data and which ones are don't-care. So to do SSDs right, it needs to pass info about unallocated storage down to the volume manager, whch then passes it to the encryption, which then passes it to the RAID, which then gives it to old-school "real" block device (which then passes it to the wear-leveling firmware, I guess). Sure, that can work. But when the filesystem can talk to the physical block device, it's easier. If you're writing block devices that implement things like volumes and encryption and RAID, from your PoV, things that are allocated vs not-allocated are totally different than how the filesystem sees it. To you, a block is just a block and a whole bunch of ioctls are totally irrelevant and not related to what you're working on. You're going to find this type of information to be pesky and you might not handle it right (or more likely, it takes a long time before you handle it at all). And in fact that has happened a few times, where certain block devices' feature set lagged a bit, behind what people with SSDs needed.

I suppose another easily-contrived example would be if you have a few gigabytes of data on a few terabytes of RAID, and need to [re]build the RAID. If your RAID doesn't know which blocks actually have data, then it'll need to copy/xor a few terabytes. If it's a unified system, then it can be complete after copying/xoring a few gigabytes.

Comment Re:hmmmm (Score 1) 275

..contracts requiring NDA's that now allows customers to review secret details of products or company practices on public forums.

Can someone who favors this, explain why this might be a good thing instead of a bad thing? Maybe an example? It sounds to me like endangering such a (seemingly, to me) bad practice might be an intended consequence, not an unintended one.

I can't even see how a review made under an NDA might be useful. The premise is that the reviewer is withholding information. "The spaghetti was excellent. [censored]I am prohibited from saying anything about the sauce.[/censored]"

Comment Consider owner !=user (Score 2) 471

I started trying to think of situations where a person can have a wrist-worn PC but cannot have a handheld PC with them -- situations where people are constrained for some reason.

The obvious thing most people come up with, is where it's a natural or convenient constraint. You don't want to be holding something extra while you're swimming or swinging an axe or climbling a cliff. I think the related applications are already well-discussed.

What about when it's an artificial constraint? I initially drew a blank on how such a constraint would emerge, until I considered situations where the served parties by the two PCs are different, so that the handheld (if one is present) might serve the user (or manufacturer) but the wrist-worn serves someone else.

Once you start thinking of situations where the user is in an adversarial (or seemingly or potentially adversarial) relationship with the owner then it gets easier to see the applications.

Prisoners, parolees, etc. It's not so much that you let them wear the Pebble or iWatch, as you make them wear it. And your prisoner doesn't need to be surfing the web or otherwise doing things where the PC needs to communicate things to the user, so many of the disadvantages relative to handhelds, become totally irrelevant. The application, of course, is monitoring: being an open spy for the government.

Somewhat similarly: children. Mom wants to know where you are, but isn't really interested in giving you Yet Another porn terminal. Quit fapping and get back to your homework at the libra-- your friend's house?!? Get back to the library!

Marketing. Get 'em cheap enough, and these could replace your "frequent shopper" cards as your cookie. Wear our wrist PC as you walk around our store and check out, for a 2% discount. The application is spying, again. And I guess as long as it has a speaker, it can play location-triggered ads. "Whoa, you just walked right by our delicious canned spoo and instant flarn. Are you sure you don't want some?" The idea here is that you could perform the application with a handheld, but the existing handheld PC would be too pro-user so it might not really play the ads out loud and it might report false travel data. So you want the pro-store computer to be a physically different one. Then it becomes a wrist-worn simply because that's smaller and cheaper ($10 instead of $100).

Sweatshops. The Slurm factory employees are spending too much time on bathroom breaks, and texting their friends. Well, the employee wearable PC doesn't do texts, and it delivers a shock after 90 seconds in the bathroom. If a supervisor ever sees you without your wearable, you're fired.

Jealous spouses. Hubby's "Love Watch" chemical sensors are picking up interesting volatiles: perfume? My, he sure is breathing hard and the GPS has him in a residential neighborhood, not at the mid-town office. Oh, those are just fringe use cases: everyone knows the real purpose of the Love Watch is that it instantly relays every time you speak "I love you" into it. (OMG, that last part is so sickening that I bet a variant of this product already exists today.)

Think in terms of why you might want to "plant" (though not necessarily with subterfuge) your computer on someone else, to be your agent rather than the wearer's. Those may be the best applications for wrist-worn PCs.

Comment Re:12 buses, at $million each . Fare: $150 (Score 2) 491

The range is 30 miles. Periodically, the busses will fully recharge in seven and half minutes.

StarMetro in Tallahassee, which has a fleet of 72 diesel buses, found itself coping with budget problems when the price of diesel spiked in 2007. Fuel is typically the second-highest cost for a transit system, behind labor. StarMetro was Proterra’s third customer, ordering three buses in 2010 and two more in 2011, backed by federal funds. “We put them on our most visible route,” said Ralph Wilder, superintendent of transit maintenance. The buses can easily handle the 18-mile loop, which runs from Tallahassee Community College to the Governor’s Square Mall. On this route, all buses stop for 10 minutes in the middle, to wait for connections, so charging up the electric ones doesn’t add any time to the trips. Recharging takes about 7.5 minutes.

So, $825,000 for the electric bus, but only $80,000 in fuel costs over 12 years, vs $447,000 for a diesel bus with $500,000 in fuel costs. In theory, economical, but there are also air quality improvements-- depending on how the electricity is sourced.

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