No, the government just failed to manage the project to a successful completion, like they would have to manage a municipal internet service.

You mean, someone in the government? The same government that would create a perfect internet service?

I'm pointing to repeated examples of government failure to do technological things, you don't see it, and I'M myopic?

I would have thought it rare to find a /. user who believes the promises of the government and thinks that the government handling all his data is a good thing, but there sure seem to be a lot of them posting today.

You seem to assume that a government-run ISP would be cheaper and better (e.g. faster and less congested) just because they say it would be. You seem to ignore all the examples of cost overruns and incompetence that government systems demonstrate on a regular basis and think that just this once it will be different. You seem to ignore that it is not just "internet users" who pay for a government-run internet service, and there are those who don't care if you can't download the latest warez or movie torrent as fast as you'd like. Those are the people who have other considerations than just "congestion and download speed" that you limit yourself to.

And you seem to think that reducing competition in an already limited market is a good thing. I find that an interesting shift in the environment here.

Neither of those are fact. "Better" is a purely subjective term, and there is no evidence that a government-run anything will be automatically cheaper. When you say "cheaper", you mean it may cost direct users less. That's not the total cost of the product, however. A "company" that can simply dip its hand into the general fund of a city when revenues don't cover expenses isn't worried too much about keeping costs down and those costs wind up coming from people who have no desire to be subscribers. A government-run anything is typically run by civil servants covered by a union, so they have no reason to care about the service they provide and have a union driving up the costs of their employment. (In our fair town, the largest cost increase in government is the increase in cost of union employees, most specifically for their pension and healthcare.)

The fact that this is all taxpayer supported means you lose choice. If you think having a choice between several commercial ISPs is too little choice, then consider that every taxpayer in that city will be an involuntary subscriber to what will probably become the defacto monopoly. If they don't manage to drive all the other players out by being able to undercut the prices, then the prices for all the others will have to go up to cover the fixed costs spread over fewer subscribers. (Do you see the parallel to the school system here? I do. You want to send your kids to a private school for a better education? You get to pay twice.)

I think less choice and forced participation is not better. I think having to get service from someone who doesn't really care is not better, especially when their supervisor will also be a civil servant who doesn't have to care. Example? I had a water leak. I got my bill and it said I had consumed some ridiculous amount of water. I did the calculations -- the volume of water they said I used would have covered my property to a depth of about a foot. It would have required a ridiculous flow. I got to fill out a report, they came out to calibrate my meter, and I ... heard nothing back ever. That's a government-run utility. Nobody cared because they didn't have to. I can't vote them out, they can't get fired, and I can't get service from anyone else.

Here in Oregon we've just lived through the Cover Oregon fiasco. A government-run website that was supposed to allow people to sign up for health insurance. It cost millions of dollars yet never managed to allow people to sign up for health insurance. You could download the forms, fill them in, then talk to an agent to find out what it would cost, but you couldn't sign up online. They could tell you the "partners" you could talk to -- mine was a three hour drive away in another state! They dumped a lot of money into cute jingles and ads months before the site was supposed to go online, but couldn't manage to get the job done. Better? Cheaper? Right.

Yes, democracy sucks. But as someone once said, it sucks less than everything else. The point I made, however, is that everyone is assuming that the voters were coerced into voting against their best interests, and that is not a fact in evidence.

Because the voters of those cities said they didn't want the government supplying it.

Here's a point I haven't seen anyone raise. When your ISP is managed by the same government that manages the police department, where do you think your right to privacy winds up? In the hands of someone who likely belongs to the same union that the police clerical staff belong to, and are probably on the same bowling team. And their paychecks come from the same mayor's office.

You mean when they vote against what you think their interests ought to be, you don't think they are "clever".

Not everyone believes that a government run ISP using taxpayer dollars to make up revenue shortfalls and to deliberately undercut the commercial providers is "in their interest".

But 200 miles certainly covers any and all local in-town and in-area travel possibilities, and nearly everything but very long distance travel.

Nope. You need 250 plus a safety margin - on mountains for part of the trip.

In my case that's half a commute between my Silicon Valley townhouse and my edge-of-Nevada ranch. But that's virtually the same trip as between Silicon Valley / San Francisco Bay Area and many weekend vacation spots: Lake Tahoe ski resorts, Reno gambling, gold country camping, etc.

Make a car that can do 30-mile-one-way commute efficiently and has this 250-and-chage range, and a Northern Californian who works near the coast and blows off steam near the CA/NV interface only needs ONE vehicle. (So it takes four to six hours to charge when you get there and when you get back - so what? It'll be parked longer than that anyhow.) Less and he/she needs TWO, with all the environmental impact of building both. Further, the long-range one is a gas hog by comparison.

The Weissman score is actually unitless. When one divides "log seconds" by "log seconds" the units cancel.

If one measures the compression ratios and times for the same data on different architectures, one is measuring the score of the different architecture, not "sidestepping" it.

Then algorithm A compared to B would have a higher Weissman score on a system with SSE.

Then the score would favor B over A when comparing the two processors. That's what the score is supposed to do. It compares two things.

Then for the former you would not care what the Weissman score is, and for the latter you would care.

That's not what the score measures. It also doesn't measure price (for commercial implementations of code), executable size, or whether the software salesman has BO or not.

Does a loaded F-150 even get 500 miles on a single tank of gas?

Yes, it does.

But it's a 37 galon tank.

I love everything about my F-150 Lariet EXCEPT the gas mileage (and the refusal to pan the weather map except when the vehicle is stopped). Unfortunately, when you have to haul several tons up and down a mountain or across an unpaved desert from time to time, it's hard to avoid a tradeoff in that department.

It's pretty insulting to the democratic process to accuse the winners of being "[expletive deleted] sheeple" when you don't agree with a result.

I suspect there are a lot of people who feel the same way. Some of them may have participated in the vote and not voted the way you wanted them to.

Were a corporation a person, it certainly could hold public office.

However, the people who make up corporations and who retain their civil and Constitutional rights despite being part of a corporation can, and sometimes do, hold public office. On our local city council, we've had people who work for the local newspaper, the local university, the local large manufacturer, and other corporations.

... the induced DC from a solar storm isn't as instantaneous as a lightning strike. It takes minutes to develop, which leaves time to disconnect the lines and affected transformers if they are properly monitored.

But ARE they monitored for DC? It's not a usual problem.

Warnings on the order of minutes might be useful if the transmission line were the only one invoved. Unfortunately, the power grid is a GRID. Lots of multiple, parallel, transmission lines, and many, many, more going elsewhere and often creating loops.

Redundancy is a good thing in most situations. But when you have to drop a high line, and don't drop all the others simultaneously, you shift the load onto those that are still connected. When you're cutting off because you're near the limit - either due to heavy load at the time or because of the DC issue - you can drive the others beyond their limits (or throw things out of sync and add a bunch of "reactive current" to the load) and create a cascading failure. (Indeed, this is how the first Great Northeast Blackout occurred: Three of a set of four high-lines crossing the St. Lawrence Seaway near Niagra tripped out, and the redistributed load put one after another generator above its limits, blowing its protective breakers and making it progressively harder on those remaining.)

Gracefully shutting down the grid is not something you do on a couple minutes' notice, even if you have a plan in place.

As I understand, the induced DC is something on the order of hundreds of volts, which is much less than the tens of thousands of volts transmitted across ordinary high voltage transmission lines; disconnecting them should not result in arcing problems across the switches.

First, the problem with the induced near-DC is not the voltage, but the current. Transformers and transmission lines have as little resistance as possible, because it's pure loss of valuable energy. The magnetizing alternating current (i.e. the part of the AC that's there all the time, not just when there's a load) is also limited by the inductance of the transformers, but that doesn't impede the direct current at all. A couple hundred "DC" (very low frequency - fractional cycle per minute) volts, induced for minutes around the loop, can drive a hysterical amount of current.

Once the transformer is saturated, most of the damage comes, not from the direct current, but from the line power, which ends up dissipating lots of energy in the transformer. Meanwhile, at these voltages and currents, the switches that interrupt the AC are largely dependent on the momentary off time as the cycle reverses to quench the arc. If, say, the event happened when the line was running at about half its rated load, the direct current will be higher than the alternating current, so there will be no off time. This can keep the current flowing even through an open breaker (while dissipating megawats IN the breaker). Interrupting DC is MUCH harder than interrupting AC.

Heck, at these voltages even interrupting AC is hard. (The video is of an interrupter where the jet of arc-suppressing gas failed for one leg.)

High induced votlages in open wires are a problem, but they're not the big one.

The biggie is common-mode currents in long high-voltage transmission lines adding a strong DC component to the current in the substation transformer windings - high enough that when the same-direction peak of the AC's cycle adds to it, the core saturates. Then the inductance of the transformer drops to the air-core value and no longer substantially impeeds the current.

The current skyrockets. The resistive heating of the windings (and the force on the wires from the magnetic fields) goes up with the SQUARE of the current. The windings quickly soften, distort, form shorted turns, melt, open, short out to the frame, etc. The transformer is destroyed, or committed to a self-destructive progressive failure, in just a handful of such cycles - too fast for the circuit breakers to save them (even if they DO manage to extinguish the arcs with the substantial DC component to the current.) Even if the transformer doesn't explode and throw molten metal, gigawatt sustained arcs, and burning oil (or burning-hot oil replacement) all over the substation area, it's still dead.

This happens to MANY of the giant transformers in the power grid. Each set of three transformers that has one or more failed members means a high-voltage transmission line that is shut down until the transformer is replaced.

There are essentially no spares - these are built to order. Building one takes weeks, and there are few "production lines" so little parallelism is available. What is destroyed overnight will take years to replace, while each intercity power transmission line is not functioning until the transformers at its end ARE replaced.

The current occurs because the transformers are organized in a "Y" arrangement, and the center of the Y is grounded at each end (to prevent OTHER problems). The transformers have enough extra current handling capacity to avoid saturation from the DC through that center connection to/from ground from ordinary electrical and solar storms - just not a giant one like we get every couple centuries.

The solution is to put a resistor in that ground connection, to limit the DC in the lines (and dissipate the energy it represents). Indeed, a few lines have such resistors already.

But a suitable resistor is a box about the size of one of the transformers. It's very expensive. And it only makes a substantial difference to the operation of the lines in such a once-in-centuries event. So most executives don't spend the money (and get dinged for costing the company millions) to put them in, to prevent a failure mode that hasn't happened in the generations since Tesla and Westinghouse invented the three-phase long-line power grid.

Or at least they don't until the regulators or their stockholders require it. Which means said decision-makers need a little educational push to decide it's worth the cost and get it done.

Thus articles like this. B-)

"We" make software for many reasons.

I was using "free" as in "freedom". How is it "freedom" if you start putting restrictions on who can use the software and for what purposes? And who decides what those disallowed purposes are? The programmer or someone else? Suppose I'm a programmer who doesn't like abortions. Can I say "you can use free software unless you are an abortion clinic" because I've got some patches in some free software packages?

Does "free software" truly represent free software if there are so many limits on who can use it that nobody can use any of it?

That is not a restriction on who can use the code and for what purposes. The Army is not changing the code, they are using the code to produce other things. I have a router or two that has FOSS code in them, but that doesn't mean that I have to send hand all the data I send through those routers off to the EFF for their use. I have programs I compile with gcc, but that doesn't mean I have to hand over that code to everyone who asks for it. And IIRC, even the GPL doesn't require release of local modifications to GPL code unless you're trying to distribute that code. I could be wrong, I don't care, the point is irrelevant to this discussion. The Army isn't writing code.

I'm sorry, what? The GPL doesn't say that any data that you manage or create using GPL code must be released back to the community. Not even close. You speak very fancy words, but I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

Yes. So? Freedom means freedom. Freedom doesn't mean "anyone except YOU can use this code".

Then don't do any of those things. But when you create a free tool you give up the right to say "you may not use my tool", because that is in itself a lack of freedom.

Why don't you test your ability to keep people you don't like from using your "tools"? I betcha there are a lot of Apache web servers in use by the military. That's a clear violation of "freedom", isn't it? Why are you not in court today? I know there are linux systems in .mil domains. Get your lawyer busy.

FTFY.

Free software means free. Exactly how many riders and amendments to FOSS licenses do we want to have? "Cannot be used by anyone in Canada." "Cannot be used to make ugly things." "Cannot be used on the Sabbath."

"We" make software for any number of reasons, and "we" give up the right to tell people how they have to use it when we make it free. And, if I recall correctly, "we" explicitly tell people that what they make with our software is not covered by the license. I.e., code you compile with gcc doesn't have to be licensed under GPL.

I'm up around retirement age. My eyes don't chage focus much at all. So I have to swap lenses to go from distance to close-up vision. (Yes I could use some kind of bi/tri/progressive-focal lenses. But at the moment swapping is adequate for me.)

Until they find a way to correct presbyopia (and they don't see to be even researching it), I'd still have to don/remove glasses anyhow. With my extreme astigmatism, extreme nearsightedness, and substantial age, I'm not a good candidate for lasic and stand a substantial chance of visual artifacts from it. I'm also a target shooter, so my glasses double as eye protection.

Given all this, the potential benefits for me would be small and the risks and cost oughtweigh them.

But if they ever find a way to fix presbyopia the equation could change substantially.

It isn't criminal, and it isn't incompetence. It is because the people who want to buy the devices don't care about security. They want to do what they want to do.

I want to listen to online radio stations on my cell phone. AM1710, Antioch Radio, in particular. I started to download some app called "TuneIn" and was shown the list of privileges it wanted. I was flabbergasted. Location, identity, contacts, photos. Why does a streaming audio app need access to my location? Why does it need access to my contacts? (So I can see if any of my friends are using TuneIn and what they're listening to, which means they can see if I'm using it and what I'm listening to.) And this app has 50,000,000 (fifty MILLION) downloads. Apparently, people want to be able to see what their friends listen to and don't care if others see what they are doing. Thus also Facebook.

Don't blame the companies who make the stuff people want for making stuff people want.