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Comment Re:Why yes, there is. (Score 5, Insightful) 285

No. There's not a substantial market for it. The market is for things that make it _easier_ for people to post every last second of their lives online (Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instragram, Youtube, etc). The vast majority of the public will see encryption or anything else that interferes with instant narcissism as broken.

Comment Re:This will obviously help. (Score 3, Interesting) 511

If you read the original study, you're comparing apples to bricks. From Recidivisim of Sex Offenders Released from Prison in 1994 (Langan, Schmitt, Durose)

Compared to non-sex offenders released from State prisons, released sex offenders were 4 times more likely to be rearrested for a sex crime. Within the first 3 years following their release from prison in 1994, 5.3% (517 of the 9,691) of released sex offenders were rearrested for a sex crime. The rate for the 262,420 released non-sex offenders was lower, 1.3% (3,328 of 262,420) So the rate of recidivism for the same crime is higher among sex offenders. The likelihood of being arrested for a different crime is lower (43% compared to 68%).

It should also be pointed out that all these stats are for the first three years after release only.

With that said, your point that recidivism is not a forgone conclusion as the stereotype suggests is correct, Wikipedia just made a hash of the stats.

Comment Re:Manhattan unsuitable for data centers? (Score 2) 231

The data centers are located downtown because that's where the banks and exchanges are. The banks and the exchanges originally built their data center close to them (this started in the 70's). Customers wanted to be as close to the servers as possible (and still do - high frequency trading) and it just kind of organically grew into what it is now. It also didn't hurt that AT&T and Verizon both have massive switch stations downtown and when these things were being built out high speed connections were not as easy to get as they are now.

Comment There is no reason NOT to require ID to vote (Score 0) 817

The idea that requiring ID to vote some how disenfranchises legitimate and legal voters is asinine. The contention is that low-income and minority citizens won't have ID's and will be afraid to get them or can't afford them. You need an ID to even try to get a job, claim State or Federal benefits, cash payroll checks, open a checking account, etc.

The only legitimate complaint I can see is that they may not be able to afford an ID (currently $16 in Texas and for someone without a job that is a few meals). That's easy enough to fix... just make ID's free.

The joke here is that many of the countries that represent OSCE require voter ID's in their elections.(The article also mentions issues with gerrymandering... which is a problem but that's a problem in most states... Chicago pretty much wrote the book on this.)

What's driving all of this is the rampant fraud and abuse of the system by illegal immigrants in Texas. I recently read an article that was carrying on about how Texas was a "red"/republican state and but was taking more money from the Federal government than it was giving back. The article was implying that Texas voters were hypocritical in there beliefs. They're not. They are well aware that there is a huge drain on resources and social from illegal immigration. However, the Federal government and the "blue" states are trying their best to keep them from doing anything about it. This is where the backlash and "attitude" is coming from.

Comment Re:Consistent availability is the issue (Score 1) 345

It's not enough just to "find" wind. The total sum of output across all your connected generation plants has to equal at least 100% of the demand of your serviced area at all times. Statistically you make that work out 90% of the time, 95% of the time, etc but as you close that gap to 100% output 100% of the time your costs start to climb because you have to address it by storing energy or increasing the size of your connected grid to even out the anomalies.

Comment Consistent availability is the issue (Score 3, Insightful) 345

The overriding problem with wind power is that, for large parts of the world, it is not constant or predictable. So while your wind farm may meet your energy demands for one day, it might not the next... and there is no way to predict or plan for these boom/bust periods. The only way to address this is:
1. Build backup power sources which can meet all your energy demands (for when there is no wind)
2. Overbuild the wind farms and build massive battery backups to store and distribute excess power (expensive and still no reliable)
3. Rebuild the electric distribution infrastructure to share power across much larger regions (to do effectively require tech we haven't perfected).
No matter how you cut it, building an adequate wind power infrastructure is prohibitively expensive because you have to plan for periods of your total output being zero. No matter how much technology improves, this will always be the case (well, until we can control weather).

Comment Re:Cost vs HDD Solution (Score 5, Informative) 268

It's economies of scale, tape has a high cost of entry but a relatively low maintenance cost. A 1.5TB LTO 5 tape costs 40 USD. A 1.5TB drive costs 90 USD. The VM enclave I use for testing at one client has 700TB, to back up that data set with HDD would cost 23,333 USD more than tape (for just the media). That difference alone covers the cost of a tape library. And, most corporations are going to take complete backups once a week with incremental backups during the week. Which means an extra 23,333 a week (HDD vs tape). Scale this out to petabytes of data and HDD's become prohibitively expensive.

Also, one of the primary reasons to use tape is you can store them offsite for disaster recovery. You can put a box full of tapes in the back of a panel van and drive them down a bumpy gravel road without any big worries, you just can't do that with HDD's with out protective housing.

Comment Cost vs HDD Solution (Score 5, Informative) 268

The overwhelming issues with latency aside, a 1.5TB (native not compressed) LTO drive will set you back ~1800 USD and you'll need an extra ~100-150 for a SAS controller that can drive it. For that price you can by yourself 24TB of HDD storage (12 x 2TB) with enough money left over for a decent SATA/SAS RAID controller. If you setup a RAID 10 array you'll have 12TB exponentially faster access times and better data security (unless you make copies of every tape).

Comment Re:Nonsense... it is 100% effective (Score 4, Insightful) 490

The F-22 is ultimately meant to protect our AWACS planes. If the AWACS are taking out, the USAF loses their view of the airspace and controlling it becomes much more difficult. The F-22 are meant to loiter a distance away from the AWACS and take their targeting instructions from them. The enemy aircraft get popped and if it's done right the F-22 are still hidden.

If they know its going to be a true dog fight, they're going to send in the F-15s which have proven time and again that it can hold it's own (b/c despite their size, they were designed to be close in knife fighters). The F-15's won't always maintain this superiority and newer Mig's and Sukohi's have closed much or all of the gap... but it's still one of the best out their.

Anyway, using a ground based analogy... the F-22 is meant to a sniper, supporting the F-15's and F/A-18's are the grunts who will be doing the close in work.

Comment Capital Gains Taxes (Score 3, Informative) 267

I see a lot of comments here about how this is all a dodge to get around income taxes with capital gains taxes.

1. This is a Chinese CEO in Hong Kong, not the U.S.
2. Carter _decreased_ capital gains tax rates, Reagan _increased_ them and Clinton _decreased them (to be fair, Bush Jr. decreased them even more).
3. Capital gains are taxed at a higher rate based on your income (again to be fair, people with a lower income can't take advantage the same way).

Capital gains taxes have a place, the idea is to encourage investment, which is why long term capital gains taxes are lower than income taxes rates but short term capital gains taxes pretty much mirror income tax rates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax#United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maximum_Federal_Tax_Rate_on_Long_Term_Capital_Gains_(1972_-_2012).jpg

Comment Re:hmmm (Score 2) 326

The logistics don't work quite like this. First, for companies like HP, Apple and Nintendo, they work with their logistics provider to setup a Customs pipeline months before the product actually ships. U.S. Customs has a process for this and FedEx and UPS have departments dedicated to just setting it up. The end result is a rubber stamp process that clears the product through in hours, not days or weeks. Also, ships aren't practical for shipping small electronics. A 747 or 777 can carry a metric crap load of iPhones and the shipping costs distributed over all those phones is a fractional part of the overall cost. You need to get up to something where the packaging is the size of a TV for ships to become the better option.

Finally, as many have pointed out.. this is just assembly of parts made else were. For the just in time assembly to work as you described, your still going to have to have a large volume the parts on hand to avoid shortages, which means if the product doesn't sell you going to be setting on an overstock of parts instead of final products. Many of those parts (screens, batteries, logic boards) are customized for your product and have no practical resale value.

There are a lot of people who have put a lot of thought into trimming the cost (and risk is a cost) of this entire process and off-shoring remains the cheapest and most practical option. Changes in the world economy will eventually shift this around (just as it dictated the US the world's produce in decades past).

Comment We have a word for these people. (Score 1) 125

Celebrities (which is a superset of Politician). And yes... a large portion of the population bases their decisions/vote off of what someone says simply because they look good on TV... and before that b/c they sound good on radio... and before that b/c they wrote what they wanted to hear.
Space

Submission + - Near-record Number of Astronaut Applicants (livescience.com)

thesandbender writes: FTFA — "More than 6,300 individuals applied to become part of NASA's next generation of astronauts. It was the highest number of applications ever received by the agency since 1978, and the call garnered more than 8,000 submissions. Typically, the agency receives between 2,500 and 3,500 applicants for astronaut vacancy announcements."

What's cool about this is that even though the U.S. space program is in a bit of stasis, there are still thousands of people eager to drive it forward.

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