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Comment Re:I see no violation here... (Score 1) 1116

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/25/politics/supreme-court-preview-obama/
June 26, 2013

President Barack Obama once believed marriage only was for one man and one woman.

He then backed civil unions for gay and lesbian couples, granting them many of the same rights and privileges as married heterosexuals.

Now he is firmly in support of a constitutional right that has put him at odds with many social conservatives.

People are outraged, just not the people you were thinking.

Comment Re:Obviously we're trying to punish the Russians (Score 1) 132

Putin want's to go back to the cold war... fine. We offered his country a clean slate... Obama even went so far as to offer that reset button thing. And what do we get? This... Well, whatever.

The problem is that you're viewing this from an American perspective.
The EU has been slowly encroaching on Russia's buffer states for years.
It finally boiled over when Russia's attempt to retain the Ukrainian Government's alignment ended with a Ukrainian revolution.

The actual participants in this dance are the EU and Russia.
The USA is a side actor. It's not about US.

Also... why... all the... ellipses?

Comment Re:looks like someones relevant again. (Score 1) 132

Russia is only as powerful as their economy, and the best way to counter them is to hobble them economically. It also is politically destabilizing internally.

The difficulty is that Russia's economy is based on natural gas, which Europe doesn't have any alternatives for.
Welcome to the global economy.

Comment Re:18 pages, really?? (Score 1) 146

These look like standard hose barbs to me:
http://media.bestofmicro.com/4/H/430433/original/radeon-r9-295x2-blown-up.png
http://media.bestofmicro.com/4/J/430435/original/radeon-r9-295x2-pieces.jpg

You can also see that the GPUs are cooled serially and not in parallel.
Tomshardware doesn't break out the GPU temps individually,
so we don't know if the second GPU is running hotter.

Comment Damages (Score 5, Informative) 141

Here's another article I read today
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/03/27/obamas-nsa-reform-package-may-hamstring-privacy-lawsuits

Conservative legal activist Larry Klayman, unlike other challengers, seeks damages from Verizon and U.S. officials â" which may keep his two cases alive, experts say. Cases brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., do not seek damages.

The request for past damages means that his lawsuit can't be mooted by legislative changes.
All the other lawsuits are only asking for injuctions, and Congress can make them go away.

Comment Re:Moo (Score 1) 469

Not all science is done in one groundbreaking leap.
This is their second study, which confirms the results of their first study.
"Results confirm our previous study, more research required" is not a surprise conclusion for any scientist.

Sometimes you have to do these small scale experiments in order to gather funding/attention for the bigger study.

Comment Re:Internet as a utility (including poles) (Score 1) 223

The government shouldn't run any utility.

Beyond anything else its a threat to our very freedoms.

I don't want the government in control of water, power, food, or the internet.

All of that is just leverage. Something they can put over you to make you comply.

Ever hear of the Tennessee Valley Authority?
It was a Depression era project by the New Deal coalition. And it worked.
It brought power, flood control, and investment funds to a desperately poor area of the country.
To this day, their power is cheaper and their communities are richer because of it.

As a matter of fact, it's been so wildly successful for the last 80 years... that, of course, they want to privatize it.

Comment Aftermarket patches already exist (Score 1) 650

The pdf seems to completely ignore that in the past, security researchers have written patches for Microsoft operating systems as a stopgap until MS could get its shit together and issue their own security updates.

I also take issue with the comparison to cars.
If you want to drive a car on the road, it requires a safety inspection, no matter how old it is.
WinXP, even patched, is the equivalent of driving around a rust bucket with bad wiring and bald tires.
It's an accident waiting to happen.

About the only thing I really agreed with was this:

For these reasons, Microsoft Windows XPâ(TM)s end of support, combined with a collective action problem stemming from individual usersâ(TM) failure to realize or internalize the costs of not migrating or upgrading their operating systems, could prove catastrophic.

The problem is definitely a failure to internalize the costs of running out of date software.
That's why the police fine people for having broken tail lights or other obvious safety issues.
There's no internet equivalent, but I don't see why this is Microsoft's problem.

Sometimes you can't convince end users there's a problem that needs fixing unless it causes them pain.
MS needs to pull the plug and the chaos that follows will sort itself out fairly quickly.

Comment Re:I saw this on HAK5. (Score 3, Insightful) 178

It shouldn't matter if you knock out the control channel.
Remote control [anything] should always be set up to fail in a "safe" manner, for various definitions of safe.

Here's a picture of the aftermath, with someone picking up the hexacopter and its pieces.
The triathlete is on the ground with blood, if you're squeamish about that kind of thing.

Comment Re:And yet they supported Obama (Score 1) 564

to be fair we dont know, he has never made a statement about it as far as I am aware.

He had ~10 days to repudiate his former position and didn't.
In that time, he's made statements, but all his statements were non-apologies and evasions.

https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/

I can only ask for your support to have the time to "show, not tell"; and in the meantime express my sorrow at having caused pain.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/01/mozilla-ceo-brendan-eich-refuses-to-quit

"So I don't want to talk about my personal beliefs because I kept them out of Mozilla all these 15 years we've been going," he told the Guardian. "I don't believe they're relevant."

Eich refused to be drawn on whether he would donate to a Proposition 8 style campaign again in the future. "I don't want to do hypotheticals," he said. "I haven't thought about that issue and I really don't want to speculate because it's not relevant."

"Tolerate my intolerance" was never really a good place to be starting from, but nowadays it's a completely unviable position to take.

There are still culture warriors out there bemoaning this trend as the end of free speech, but all that really means is they don't understand how free speech works.

Comment Re:Freedom of Speech? (Score 4, Insightful) 328

Perhaps you should read the actual first amendment, rather than the text written in invisible ink that authoritarian judges added to it.

Our legal tradition didn't start with the Constitution and you understanding of it can't start there either.

This is really important: The Constitution was not written in a vacuum.
I'll say it again: The Constitution was not written in a vacuum.

Long before the Constitution and its Amendments were conceived, there was this thing called "common law."
Slander, libel, and threatening immediate bodily harm were already illegal.
The 1st Amendment was never intended to legalize such behavior.

We know this, because the guys who authored and debated the Amendments had voluminous written correspondences on the matter.

Your approach to the Constitution is like a layman reading the Bible,
without any historical context and proclaiming "I understand the word of God."
You don't. Your interpretation is unequivocally wrong. Please don't misinform others.

Comment Re:Sure, but... (Score 0) 392

Suppose we wanted to reduce population growth by 0.1%/year by shipping people out; that's 7 million people per year, something like twenty thousand a day, or one every four or five seconds.

20,000 per day? That happens to be the rough estimate of the "Super Orion" carrying capacity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)

With modern materials, we could build lighter and possibly fit more people using the same weight constraint.
/There is the small issue of nuclear fallout being scattered throughout the atmosphere.

Comment Why corn? (Score 4, Interesting) 112

Ralph says his team is already working to insert zip-lignins into corn plants.

I know we grow a lot of corn, but why not insert the gene into kudzu or some other fast growing weed that thrives on marginal land with low fertilizer inputs?
It's not like we don't already have a use for every part of the corn plant.

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