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Comment Re:Maybe, but risks offending high paying customer (Score 1) 318

Why would Comcast mess you over more than AT&T DSL/Landline?

Down here in South Florida, Comcast is 10x faster than AT&T at about the same price, and they have always billed me honestly. AT&T, by contrast, has added huge, incomprehensible fees to their bills, making $50 or so in announced charges turn into $80.

D

Submission + - x86 Computation Without Executing Any Instructions (usenix.org)

jones_supa writes: Trust Analysis, i.e. determining that a system will not execute some class of computations, typically assumes that all computation is captured by an instruction trace. A team at Dartmouth College shows that powerful computation on x86 processors is possible without executing any CPU instructions. They demonstrate a Turing-complete execution environment driven solely by the IA32 architecture’s interrupt handling and memory translation tables, in which the processor is trapped in a series of page faults and double faults, without ever successfully dispatching any instructions. The 'hard-wired' logic of handling these faults is used to perform arithmetic and logic primitives, as well as memory reads and writes. This mechanism can also perform branches and loops if the memory is set up and mapped just right. The lessons of this execution model are discussed for future trustworthy architectures.

Comment Re: Hand over your fingerprint! (Score 1) 773

Look at it from the NSA/FBI's point of view: they already have backdoor access to your phone's data, so the fingerprint scanner isn't about keeping Them out, but about securing biometric data from users voluntarily. If They tried to fingerprint or retina-scan a whole nation Themselves (like our troops do to occupied Afganistan and before in Iraq) there would be resistance; we only got away with it in Afghanistan and Iraq because we were an armed, occupying force. At home, they'll start integrating biometric scanners into cheap, gaudy (GOLD!) baubles so the Sheeple fingerprint themselves instead.

Your government already has my fingerprints. Every time I travel to the US, I have to leave my fingerprint at the border controls in the airport. Several years back, it was just a thumb print. But last time I went, it was all ten fingerprints.

Comment Evolution (Score 1) 400

I wonder if humans would evolve further, maybe producing their own beta carotene or Vitamin A? I do not condone the suffering of millions of people, but I wonder if giving our bodies everything in plenty is good in the long run (like generations).

Also, can't this deficiency be solved with existing crops and/or vegetables? The rice looks nice, though...

Comment ISP is ok-ish, Mobile ISP is bad (Score 2) 290

I am using German Telekom for my mobile ISP. They cap after 300MB. Way, way too low. After that it's 64kbit/s!

My DSL ISP is ok. No caps, but the uplink is tiny. I've got 6 MBit downlink, but only 512kbit uplink. Terrible for uploading photos or other stuff.

Comment GNUStep is a great project (Score 2) 131

I like this campaign. Objective C is continually in the Top 5 of the most widely used languages (http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html). It is a very nice, simple object oriented C dialect. It is used on OS X and iOS, the latter of which is installed on hundreds of millions of devices (http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/23/apple-over-500-million-ios-devices-sold/). Both operating systems heavily utilize Cocoa as their framework

Having better or even any Cocoa support on Linux would help to get developers to target both world. Linux on the one side, and iOS/OS X on the other side. I think this is well worth for all Linux users to chip in some money (even if it's only $1).

Comment Re: Oh you and your sentimentality. (Score 3, Interesting) 390

This, this, a thousand times this! "The Late Philip J. Fry" is my favorite Futurama episode. So witty and full of good jokes and quotable lines. ("Just slow it down, I'll shoot Hitler out the window.")

But I must concur, the quality of the episodes varies in the last two seasons. I hope there'll be new, excitong shows around the corner.

Comment Re:Reversed in America? (Score 2) 758

Please stop. You're suggesting that the brains from one country are somehow different from that of another country. If we change 'country' out for 'race', it should be painfully obvious what the problem here is.

Maybe the brains actually are different from country to country, depending on cultural and environmental influences. What you shouldn't suggest is that either brain would be better than another. Difference doesn't mean that actually something has to be better, just that it works differently, while maybe achieving the same goal.

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