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Comment Re:clunky software? (Score 2) 143

Most people just want to be able to download an object from the internet and print it out. Missing a part for that new 'some assembly required' doodad that you bought? Hit their website and print it out. Cheap plastic part snapped under abusive strain? Print out a new one.

Exactly. I have a battery with a broken latching mechanism. A replacement battery is $50. I could print a replacement plastic part for pennies if I had a model for it.

Comment Re:Read the summary a couple times (Score 1, Interesting) 465

Not only is it English, it is British English from English Britain, the original and still the best English since 1066.

More like the tortured English of Murdoch's London headline writers. I don't think they are required to have a complete understanding of the language. I could write a book entitled "How to turn any sentence into meaningless gibberish with just a Thesaurus" using just London newspaper headlines as examples.

Comment Re:ZRAM (Score 1) 132

I would rather have my kernel only swap when needed and this is when it runs out of memory.

You really don't want your kernel swapping when it runs out of memory. That is too late and will kill performance. Instead, your kernel moves pages that are not used to swap so that it can be freed for other, more important things when the need arises. That is a much more efficient way to manage memory.

That said, the kernel provides tuning parameters that will give you what you want.

sysctl vm.swappiness=0

Comment Re:ZRAM (Score 1) 132

Compressing/decompressing the data in RAM is faster than writing/reading from disk. CPUs are getting much faster than disk. And flash/SSDs have a limited number of write cycles. It improves performance and preserves the life SSDs. What's not to like?

Comment Re:To make it easier: (Score 1) 285

Jalapenos shipped in from areas who where more stressed will be hotter, And that is pretty much he only way to know.

Agreed. And you can look for signs of stress on the skin of the Jalapeno. There will be white striations on the pepper. The more the merrier in my book. It's only a guideline -- there will still be lots of variation in heat. But, in general, the more skin damage the hotter the pepper.

Comment Google Cloud is Way Too Limited (Score 1) 43

Google has a *long* way to go. Unless they allow their customers to select the operating system (by providing IaaS), this just won't fly long term. We looked at using Google, but we need Windows Server 2012 for some of the things we wanted to move out of our datacenters. And SQL Server. They provide/allow neither.

Comment Re:Geneva Convention (Score 2) 623

Not sure they can be unlawful combatants unless there is actually combat taking place.

Ah, yes. It was vacationing Russians that took over the Crimean peninsula. They saved some money by parachuting in rather than taking a commercial flight to Sevastopal. (The checked bag fees are brutal!) And I hear combat gear is the newest fashion statement out of the Moscow fashion district this year.

Comment Re:Geneva Convention (Score 2) 623

Citation? I have a hard time believing the Geneva Conventions condone a bullet to the head for anyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summary_execution#Exceptions_to_prisoners_of_war_status

According to Article 4 of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949, irregular forces are entitled to prisoner of war status provided that they are commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates, have a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance, carry arms openly, and conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war. If they do not do meet all of these, they may be considered francs-tireurs (in the original sense of "illegal combatant") and punished as criminals in a military jurisdiction, which may include summary execution .

Emphasis mine.

Comment Re:Unregulated currency (Score 1) 704

No, it's what we get from the pro-bitcoin crowd. The people who think impossible-to-regulate transactions are a good idea happen to have a 100% overlap with the set of people who have a novice's understanding of economics, and apply that cudgel to all ideas.

I don't know that I agree with that 100%. I've seen people that think they understand economics be all for it. I see it as driven by engineers (among others) with no education in the Humanities, having a complete lack of understanding about fundamental aspects of human nature.

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