It doesn't really matter. I was responding to a statement that said that if something receives signals and fires thrusters, then it must be a computer. Any definition that broad would be indistinguishable from "circuit" and would make the word "computer" redundant. I hate it when language evolves to a point where it's hard to express thoughts accurately.

This is the same problem I have with people accepting the phrase "I could care less" as meaning "I don't care". It makes language much harder to use. Imagine trying to explain the meaning of that phrase to someone learning English, they would come away thinking that each collection of words has some fungible meaning that is totally separate from the meanings of the individual word and the rules or grammar.

A collection of discreet electronic components hardly qualifies as a computer. Receiving radio signals was something done long before the first computer was invented.

Serious answer: it's kinda sad, because the guy obviously is suffering from dementia of some sort.

Yes, he and his wife both seem to be racist jerks that don't realize that. But in the past, he's had the mental facilities to stop himself before he said something stupid or inciting. I think it just spills out and he has no control over it. This is apparent from the conflicting statements he makes from one sentence to the next.

Dementia: turning racist jerks into really racist jerks.

Like Steve Ballmer isn't going do anything controversial or embarrassing...

"Players, players, players, players, players, players, players!"

What will be throw in the clubhouse? Certainly, something more destructive that mere chairs!

Which leads to the summary's statement of "They have to install dependencies, compile code, start servers and open ports. At each step the errors are difficult to diagnose and time-consuming to fix." Visual Studio runs the servers and opens ports for you based on what type of program the project says it is.

One of my rules at work is: "If I check it out in Visual Studio and press 'Start', it better compile and run". It's not acceptable to make the next guy figure out how to run a program. Everyone I work with thinks I'm overreacting at first, but when they go to fix an issue in four-year-old code they've never seen before, they suddenly get it. Bonus points for starting the test suite by default instead of the actual program.

Looks like we have some NSA mods here.

Every post suggesting that this won't work because the electronics will just be covertly re-designed are being modded down.

No.

The intelligence agencies will just plant engineers in the companies that make the sensors, and will stealthily add circuitry that will alter the data to make it non-random in a known way.

On my former Dodge, you popped the button off and stuck the key in the recess. The key is inductively powered by the car in this mode. On my current Mazda, you walk.

... then you push the button twice without your foot on the brake. It goes to run mode just like the second detent of a traditional key. Pressing once goes to accessory mode. More presses simply cycles between accessory...run...off.

But that's only because Intel let the marketing department make engineering decisions and kept making chips with higher and higher clock frequency. As soon as they regained their sanity, they once again dominated the benchmarks.

I do love how AMD brilliantly capitalized on the blunder. By labeling their chips according to the clock speed of the performance equivalent Intel chip - every time Intel put insane engineering effort into ratcheting the clock up 10% and only getting 1% better performance, AMD simply made their chips a tiny bit faster and labelled theirs the same as Intel's.

It's not win-win. If you lease a $50K car, pay 25K over three years and buy out for $25K (with a three year term), you are essentially getting a six year loan, but paying extra lease acquisition fees up front. If you don't buy out, then you lose by paying disposal fees (or the manufacturer uses that as a lever to get you into one of their cars next, reducing your ability to make the best deal). The only cases where you win are if it has some tax advantage for you, or if the market changes and the residual is way higher than you could ever get without the contract.

Also, the process only works if the water is frozen. That takes about 120 Watt-hours per liter of water. If the entire bottled water industry were converted to this process, that's about 3.6 billion kilowatt-hours used to produce bottles, or about 5% of the total world electricity usage.

I'd say this process needs some improvement before it will make the world a better place.

Most posters here seem not to have read the details on the Github page, and are missing the point.

This is a way to have encrypted point-to-point communication or (in some cases) network using any radio (or other) transmission equipment that will transmit/receive audio signals and allow you to tap-into the analog audio circuit of the transmitter and receiver. You could use it with:

- telephones (landline kind)
- mobile phones
- radio transceivers (legal or illegal - the protocol doesn't *require* that you break the law!)
- optical communication equipment - free air/fibre
- etc. etc. etc.

It just defines a common protocol and means of modulation/demodulation.

They take a whole lot of words to say this, and throw in a lot of revolutionary rhetoric.

And yes, it's very similar to amateur packet radio, except encrypted. So, lots of existing code to draw from.

It's well within the capability of any PC or smartphone today. Although I let my ham license lapse many years ago, I do have a couple of receivers squirreled away somewhere, and a few years ago I experimented with listening-in on amateur packet radio. You just run the output from your receiver into the input of a Soundblaster card (I SAID this was a few years ago...) and the application handles the decoding.

An interesting side-note: If you're near an airport, you can use similar software to decode VHF ACARS transmissions. (The kind that hasn't helped much in locating MH370). Just install some open-source software, hook your scanner up to your PC, tune to the right frequency, and it turns the squawks into somewhat-readable messages.

It's biggest drawback is it's biggest strength, IMO. It DOESN'T define a common frequency, some complex frequency-hopping or spread-spectrum scheme, or even common transmission media. It would be extremely hard for it to gain critical mass. On the other hand, it means there are an awful lot of places one would have to look to find it. It's up to whatever group that wants to communicate to settle on a transmission media and (if applicable) frequency.

Well, yea, except for losing a few letters...

(V G E R)