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Technology

Submission + - Telco sues city for plan to roll out own broadband (maximumpc.com)

Submitted by Syngularity
Syngularity writes: MaximumPC is featuring an article about one broadband provider's decision to sue the city of Monticello, Minnesota after residents passed a referendum to roll out their own fiber optic system. TDS Telecommunications had earlier denied the city's request for the company to provide fiber optic service. During the ensuring legal battle, which prevented the citizens from following through with their plans, TDS Telecommunications took the opportunity to roll out a fiber system.
Space

Submission + - Intergalactic Race Shows that Einstein Still Rules

Submitted by
Ponca City, We love you
Ponca City, We love you writes: "The NY Times reports that after a journey of 7.3 billion light-years, a race between gamma rays ranging from 31 billion electron volts to 10,000 electron volts, a factor of more than a million, in a burst from an exploding star have arrived within nine-tenths of a second of each other in a detector on NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope confirming Einstein’s proclamation in his 1905 theory of relativity that the speed of light is constant and independent of its color, energy, direction or how you yourself are moving. Some theorists had suggested that space on very small scales has a granular structure that would speed some light waves faster than others — in short, that relativity could break down on the smallest scales. Until now such quantum gravity theories have been untestable because ordinarily you would have to see details as small as the so-called Planck length, which is vastly smaller than an atom — to test these theories in order to discern the bumpiness of space. The spread in travel time of 0.9 second, if attributed to quantum effects rather than the dynamics of the explosion itself, suggested that any quantum effects in which the slowing of light is proportional to its energy do not show up until you get down to sizes about eight-tenths of the Planck length. "This measurement eliminates any approach to a new theory of gravity that predicts a strong energy dependent change in the speed of light," says Peter Michelson of Stanford. “"To one part in 100 million billion, these two photons traveled at the same speed. Einstein still rules.""

Comment Re:Only useful for non-free applications (Score 1) 487

by Bazer (#29864929) Attached to: Ryan Gordon Wants To Bring Universal Binaries To Linux

In my opinion, it's a solution in search of a problem. He's proposing a system where on each and every update every client has to download a binary version for all supported platforms. Let's calculate how that would affect the binary size of my /usr/bin and /usr/lib. For the sake of the argument, let's say that the binary size for all 32-bit architectures is half of the size of their 64-bit version and every distribution ships the same binaries:

  • Fedora 11 - x86_64, 900MB - 100%
  • Fedora 11 - x86_64, i386, ppc - 2.2 GB - 250%
  • Debian - alpha, amd64, arm, armel, hppa, i386, ia64, mips, mipsel, powerpc, sparc, s390 - 7,2 GB - 800%

That's without debugging symbols for each arch. You do the math for other ditributions. Think of the cost of updates in terms of bandwidth for updates.

This problem has been already solved by package managers and those are far from the weak link he makes them out to be. Moving the architecture detection from the installation phase to the run phase will only add to the problem. Instead of relying on my system vendor's package manager, I have to rely on every application vendor to do the right thing.

Comment Re:Start charging (Score 1) 132

by thisisaccount2 (#29682837) Attached to: FBI Cracks "Largest Phishing Case Ever"
Your post advocates a

( ) technical (*) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(*) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(*) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(*) Users of email will not put up with it
(*) Microsoft will not put up with it
(*) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(*) Asshats
(*) Jurisdictional problems
(*) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(*) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(***) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(*) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Comment Re:Give up? (Score 2, Insightful) 185

by Bazer (#29526423) Attached to: Newly Declassified FBI Docs Reveal Predictive Data System
They do just that and they don't check if your qualified enough to issue such evidence. Peter Donnely gave an example in his TED Talk called "How stats fool juries". This projects result's will be no more relevant than the MIT's gaydar's but it has the backing of the FBI. You're going to have a hard time disproving it in court.

Comment Re:Human-level AI (Score 1) 903

by Bazer (#29337777) Attached to: Which Breakthrough Is Most Likely?

"scientifically proven impossible" (FTL)

I wouldn't bet on that that just yet. Within the current model, yes. But the current model has some rough corners and the sci-fi fan side of me can't help to mention what came out of the "two clouds on the sky of physics".

Comment Re:just raise the price! (Score 1) 414

by Bazer (#29337717) Attached to: iPod Fee Proposed For Canada

But why raise the price of the ipod and not the music?

Because then they'd have to make an effort in making music people want to pay for. Since artists are rare in this industry the managers have to turn to lawyers for a solution.
Businesses

Submission + - Unchain the Office Computers! 3

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "During a town hall meeting for State Dept. workers, Hillary Clinton was asked this question: 'Can you please let the staff use an alternative Web browser called Firefox?' The room erupted in cheers. But then an aide stepped in to explain that the free program was too expensive — 'it has to be administered, the patches have to be loaded.' Slate's Farhad Manjoo has had-it-up-to-here with this kind of IT tyranny, and argues that corporate IT should let us browse any way we want. 'The restrictions infantilize workers,' explains Manjoo. 'They foster resentment, reduce morale, lock people into inefficient routines, and, worst of all, they kill our incentives to work productively. In the information age, most companies' success depends entirely on the creativity and drive of their workers. IT restrictions are corrosive to that creativity — they keep everyone under the thumb of people who have no idea which tools we need to do our jobs but who are charged with deciding anyway.' Can he get an 'Amen', Brothers and Sisters?"
Space

Submission + - Astrophysicists find planet that should not exist (latimes.com)

Submitted by SpuriousLogic
SpuriousLogic writes: Scientists have discovered a planet that shouldn't exist. The finding, they say, could alter our understanding of orbital dynamics, a field considered pretty well settled since the time of astronomer Johannes Kepler 400 years ago. The planet is known as a "hot Jupiter," a gas giant orbiting the star Wasp-18, about 330 light years from Earth. The planet, Wasp-18b, is so close to the star that it completes a full orbit (its "year") in less than an Earth day, according to the research, which was published in the journal Nature. Of the more than 370 exoplanets — planets orbiting stars other than our sun — discovered so far, this is just the second with such a close orbit. The problem is that a planet that close should be consumed by its parent star in less than a million years, say the authors at Keele University in England. The star Wasp-18 is believed to be about a billion years old, and since stars and the planets around them are thought to form at the same time, Wasp-18b should have been reduced to cinders ages ago.

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