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Comment Re:TFA isn't about trolls (Score 1) 728

Huh? I don't think I'm mistaken at all. The previous poster said this trolling was "rampant against males as well", and then provided a list from Wikipedia of males who had been SWATted, except that Miley Cyrus was also in that list. Unless she's had a sex change very recently, I'm quite sure Miley is female. The comment about Justin Bieber is supposed to be a joke.

Comment Re:Alternative headline (Score 1) 429

There's no indication here that this tool isn't also meant to be used by network (store) owners. How else are store owners going to prevent people from using BitTorrent? If they were really savvy they'd know how to do so with the router's configuration tool (by looking for offenders and banning their MAC addresses), but that's laborious (they'd have to constantly attend to it as customers come and go, and a consumer router only has so many entries for blocked MACs) and requires specialized knowledge. This tool supposedly makes it automatic, though it of course it works in an entirely different way.

Comment Re:TFA isn't about trolls (Score 1) 728

And once again, this is not a feminist issue. Doxxing an SWATting are rampant against males as well. From Wikipedia:
* In the past, there have been swatting incidents at the homes of Ashton Kutcher, Tom Cruise, Chris Brown, Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber and Clint Eastwood.

Miley Cyrus isn't a male.

I'm not sure about Justin Bieber....

Comment Re:Alternative headline (Score 1) 429

What a fucktard (the submitter, not you). Seriously people, just because you don't agree with what someone's doing doesn't make it right for you to attack them. Two wrongs do not make a right.

So if I own a coffee shop and one of my customers (I don't know which one, it's not like I look over their shoulders to see exactly what they're doing on their computers) is running BitTorrent and hogging all the bandwidth on the free WiFi connection I've provided for all the customers to share, it's "wrong" for me to use an enforcement tool to stop him?

Fuck you.

Comment Re:Alternative headline (Score 3, Insightful) 429

Exactly right. No one should have the right to beat up on a bully, and if they do, they should be punished greatly for it. Only the first bully is allowed to be a bully, and he shouldn't face any repercussions at all for his actions. But if anyone tries standing up to him because the authorities aren't bothering to do anything, or are actively encouraging him, those people should be brutally put down.

That's the way we handle bullying in schools, after all.

Comment Re:It's okay when I do it... (Score 5, Insightful) 429

Of course it's more efficient. It's the classic centralization vs. decentralization problem. Centralization is always more efficient overall. However, it has disadvantages: single point of failure, inflexibility, etc. In this case, one big disadvantage is cost: cloud distribution requires signing up for and paying for an account somewhere to store all this data. Peer-to-peer tools don't have this (though they do have the problem of how to distribute the .torrent files, which is semi-centralized but doesn't have to be since anyone can send them around to anyone else directly). Cloud distribution puts the data at the mercy of a single provider; peer-to-peer tools let everyone share data willy-nilly, and as long as one person, anywhere, has the data, it can be replicated to everyone else easily.

Similarly, it would likely be more efficient if we all gave up our PCs and went back to using mainframes of some sort (or some kind of centralized server infrastructure, not an actual zOS mainframe), with our "PCs" just being thin clients, and us all having user accounts on them. The administration would be much easier and more effective, and the power usage would probably be much less than what we're doing now. However, that would put us at the mercy of a few providers, would likely cost more long-term, at least for those of us who manage our own computers and don't have to regularly call the Geek Squad for personal visits like my dumb neighbor, and would massively limit flexibility since we'd only be able to do things that are pre-approved for the most part.

Comment Re:Already in use but not so wonderful (Score 1) 315

Yeah, I've read about both of those. It's really interesting to me that these very direct methods are so much less efficient than going through a more roundabout process the way heat pumps do (i.e., heat pumps are far more efficient than peltier coolers).

Maybe there's other things that need to be discovered to come up with more efficient direct methods, much like photovoltaics have been made far more efficient in recent years than they were several decades ago.

Comment Re:I quit using Belkin years ago, (Score 1) 191

You really need a router today??? Please. That sounds like someone who's seriously spoiled. How much time are you going to waste on a POS router that has all kinds of problems, when you could wait a couple of days and get a good one? If your POS Belkin router craps out because of this bug, and your internet connection is now down for a week, was it really worth it to not wait an extra day or two when you bought the device, when you could have gotten some other router (like a Buffalo) that wouldn't have this problem?

Comment Re:"will present results Oct. 17 (Score 1) 315

Cool, thanks for the link.

However, at the end, I did find a small problem:

Experiments and computer simulations to investigate the capability of DPF for fusion power are underway at Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (LPP) under the direction of Eric Lerner, who explained his "Focus Fusion" approach in a 2007 Google Tech Talk.[13] On November 14, 2008, Lerner received funding for continued research, to test the scientific feasibility of Focus Fusion.[14] On October 15, 2009, the DPF device "Focus Fusion-1" achieved its first pinch.

Lerner needs a new name for his approach; his current one sounds like a Ford car.....

Comment Re:"will present results Oct. 17 (Score 2) 315

"Mini-suns" are not part of the plan.

I can see what he's getting at though: if power becomes too cheap, then instead of X amount of heat generated by current means, we'll have X*1,000,000 amount of heat generated by fusion. Now whether that actually affects the environment, I'm not sure.

The heat is used to create steam in most power generation schemes.

This is why I've sometimes wondered if there isn't a way to directly convert nuclear energy to electricity, instead of going through a thermal cycle where at least half the energy is wasted. We do this already with wind and solar (photovoltaic) energy: there's no thermal cycle at all there, and instead they're converted directly to electricity through either rotary motion (wind) or the photovoltaic effect (sunlight exciting electrons in a semiconductor material). If there were some way of doing with nuclear power (either fission or fusion) what we can do with sunlight and the photovoltaic effect, that would greatly reduce the amount of nuclear fuel needed.

Comment Re:We want to see the results ... (Score 1) 267

A bunch of young women got paid for some make-work projects, what's not to like about that? Doesn't that make you want to open your wallet and send in a nice, fat donation so you can sponsor more make-work projects?

However, to be fair, I thought that a good portion of that spending was actually given to them specifically for that purpose, and was not allowed to be redirected to other tasks.

Comment Re:Can't forgive. (Score 1) 267

I didn't rant and rave about the Gnome guys though because the way I see it, they're volunteers.

Actually, they're not. Most of them are employed by Red Hat. Why RH thinks that the broken-by-design Gnome3 desktop is going to help them earn the business of corporations (Red Hat's target market), I have no idea at all; a Windows clone makes far more sense here if you want to get corporation to adopt desktop Linux, and Gnome3 doesn't make any sense at all for servers, their primary market.

I suppose you could argue that almost no Gnome users are actually paying for Red Hat, and instead are using the free Fedora distro or some other free distro like Debian which includes it, but still, it's not like the prominent Gnome devs like Jon McCan't are working on this stuff in their spare time for free.

However, it's not their responsibility to do things the way you want.

No, but they do seem to have a desire to increase their userbase, and be the most popular Linux desktop environment. They're failing horribly at those goals, so criticism is well-deserved.

These guys have an offering and they're competing with a number of others.

Competing how? It's not like desktop Linux is a multi-billion dollar market and corporations are switching en masse to desktop Linux. There are some positive stories here and there, which usually seem to involve European towns and a city or two (namely Munich), but there doesn't seem to be much money to be made in pushing desktop Linux or else we'd see a lot more companies getting involved. Yes, for mindshare they're competing with other DEs like KDE, LXDE, XCFE, etc., but they just shot themselves in the foot by greatly increasing their competition by pushing others to make not one, but two forks of Gnome in the form of MATE and CInnamon, which have won a large portion of their userbase.

If they get that wrong too many times then nobody will use their product and people will flock to the better alternatives.

That seems to be what's happening. But that doesn't mean people aren't going to sit around and talk about the whole fiasco, and point to them as an example of how not to run a successful open-source project.

Comment Re:Change (Score 1) 267

systemd
Nvidia Optimus
Touch pads with no buttons
Cars infested with unwarranted tech

This is where all tech is heading.

No, it isn't. Maybe most Linux distros are heading towards systemd, but the other examples are pretty lame.

Nvidia Optimus is not making its way into all laptops, it's geared solely at higher-end laptops. If you don't want it, just don't buy it. Get a laptop with Intel video instead. Intel video supports Linux just great BTW.

Touchpads with no buttons are the same. Don't get a laptop like that; get one with buttons, or better yet a trackpoint. They aren't going away. But you'll probably have to get a nicer (business class) laptop, not a cheap-as-possible consumer laptop.

As far cars, there's still plenty of low-end cars out there without touchscreens and the like. Go to any non-luxury car dealer and ask to see the cheapest car on the lot.

Comment Re:And systemd had nothing to do with it. (Score 1) 267

From everything I've read, Gnome is horribly slow while KDE is quite fast, even on older machines as long as they have sufficient memory (it's not "lightweight" though like some of the truly lightweight desktops). C++ just doesn't carry the performance penalty you think it does. In addition, Qt is very popular on embedded devices; why would that be the case if it were slow? Finally, at least one project (LXDE) has actually switched from GTK to Qt. Considering that LXDE is a low-resource desktop, they wouldn't do that if Qt were a hog. Obviously it's not.

Properly-written C++ is just as fast as C code, and writing code in C is no guarantee of high performance.

Why Debian likes Gnome so much, I really have no idea. The old Qt/GPL thing is just dumb; that was over a decade ago, and Qt *is* GPL now, so it's no different than GTK. Yes, you can purchase a commercial license if you want, which gives you more flexibility; with a GPL-only project, you don't have that luxury, so you have to keep your project GPL to use other GPL code. Qt gives you the option, which obviously many embedded commercial users prefer, and which keeps the project afloat financially.

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