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Comment Re:So what (Score 1) 160

The rural areas say they hate government and redistribution of wealth - fine - then let them do without the wealth redistributed to them and maybe cities, unshackled by them, can begin to turn their own finances around.

Oh, how I hate this simplistic meme about how "blue" cities support the "red" suburbs and rural areas. One thing that it ignores is that a great deal of the wealth generated in cities is created by people who live (and vote) in suburbs and rural areas. it's called "commuting."

Or try this thought experiment: cities stop "distributing their wealth" to the suburbs and rural areas, and the suburbs and rural areas stop distributing their wealth to the cities... as well as "their" food, water, oil, gas, and electricity. Now who needs who more?

Comment Thank you, President Obama! (Score 3, Insightful) 105

Thank you for having dealt with all the other more pressing problems, domestic and foreign, so that now you have extra time for these folks! I'm sure they'll have lots of informed, trenchant, challenging questions for you, the answers to which will be informative and enlightening. It'll be the adversarial press speaking truth to power!

Comment Re:Prediction: another Google flop (Score 1) 61

I agree that "too thin" is an issue. I'd be happy if Apple stopped making iPhones thinner and instead used the space for more battery.

I'm not sure you're right about technological advances, though. While I'm not obsessed with the latest and greatest, I think it's impressive and meaningful that phones are getting to have near desktop-level processors, excellent cameras, etc. But I find it hard to image that Google will be able to create modules 1) with more impressive specs than an iPhone 6, and 2) be able to sell them at a competitive price.

Comment Prediction: another Google flop (Score 3, Insightful) 61

This has all the earmarks of another sounds-cool-at-first Google project that won't amount to much in the end.

Modularity sounds like a good idea, but in practice, in cellphones, I don't think it'll work. In objects of that size every millimeter counts, and modularity takes up quite a bit of space at that scale, because each part needs to be enclosed, securely attach to the others, etc. The trade-offs will mean you'll be able to pick one or two things (e.g. speed, battery life, extra features, etc.) but not all at the same time. And the prices won't be good, because manufacturer(s) will not have economies of scale: it'll be hard to compete with Apple and Samsung making millions and tens of millions of identical units.

Comment Re:people are idiots (Score 1) 463

I've been reading for 20+ years about these things called Macs that are far safer than Windows, and yet, somehow, nobody actually uses them.

"Nobody"? Even in the enterprise?

The rest of your comment misses my point: Perhaps in theory, OS X is "just an vulnerable," and maybe the OS X market share means malware authors don't bother. But whatever the causes, in the real world today, the results are undeniable: less malware on Macs.

Comment Re:people are idiots (Score 3, Informative) 463

The mechanisms of Cryptowall work under any OS.

Except, as the AC said, it doesn't presently work under OS X. I've been reading for 20+ years how "Macs are just as vulnerable as Windows," and yet, somehow, that malware parity never seems to happen. Sure, every now and then there's a headline about Mac malware, but when you read the article it's either a theoretical vulnerability or, at worst, something that happened to a handful of people. You can claim it's because malware authors don't want to bother with Macs or whatever, but the end result is the same: Windows users are always dealing with more malware than Mac users, and, I'll bet, always will. So the modded-down-to-oblivion poster above is not wrong: getting a Mac would have prevented this attack, and many others.

Bitcoin

Fraud, Not Hackers, Took Most of Mt. Gox's Missing Bitcoins 108

itwbennett writes Nearly all of the roughly $370 million in bitcoin that disappeared in the February 2014 collapse of Mt. Gox probably vanished due to fraudulent transactions, with only 1 percent taken by yet-to-be-identified hackers, according to a report in Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, citing sources close to a Tokyo police probe. The disclosure follows months of investigations by police and others into the tangled mess surrounding the disappearance of the 650,000 bit coins.

Comment Re:Ugh, WordPress (Score 1) 31

Seriously, though: aren't WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal the three free open source CMSs? I think Joomla is far more powerful than WordPress in many ways, avoids at least some of the failings of WordPress listed by the OP, and is easier to use than Drupal. I'd like to hear what you and others have to say about the three of them.
The Almighty Buck

Julian Assange Trying To Raise Nearly $200k For a Statue of Himself 171

Rei writes Julian Assange, from his refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy, has recently taken to Twitter to try to raise nearly $200,000 for a life-size bronze statue of himself. The statue would have him standing front and center between Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning (with Manning pictured as male); the art piece would be then shipped around the world on tour.
Hardware

Samsung SSD 850 EVO 32-Layer 3D V-NAND-Based SSD Tested 127

MojoKid writes Samsung just took the wraps off a new family of mainstream solid state drives, targeting the market segment previously occupied by its popular SSD 840 EVO series. The new Samsung SSD 850 EVO series is the follow-up to the company's current flagship SSD 850 PRO, but the new EVO is Samsung's first to pack 32layer 3D VNAND 3-bit MLC flash memory. The move to 32layer 3D VNAND 3-bit MLC flash brings pricing down to the .50 to .60 per GiB range, but doesn't adversely affect endurance because the cell structure doesn't suffer from the same inherent limitations of planar NAND, since the cells are stacked vertically with the 3D VNAND. The new 850 EVO drive performs well with large sequential transfers and also offered very low access times. The compressibility of the data being transferred across the Samsung SSD 850 EVO had no impact on performance and small file transfers at high queue depth were fast. Small file transfers with low queues depths, which is what you'd expect to see with most client workloads, were also very good. The Samsung SSD 850 EVO drives also put up excellent numbers in trace-based tests like PCMark 7.

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