Comment Re: The caps are electrolytic (Score 1) 111
Eh. Except that a blue screen or if you have to do a forced power-off will lose data and require a chkdsk run. I ran my desktop that way for a little while (with a UPS) but it had problems.
Comment Re:Dutta == Idiot (Score 1) 606
"White Flight"
What a racist term. As if it is white people that keep an area valuable and crime free.
It's actually middle class and upper class flight, as well-off black, asian and hispanic people don't want to live in a blighted crime-ridden area either.
Comment Re:Pathetic (Score 1) 683
While it is an interesting technology with cool potential, a lot of folks don't want to be constantly filmed by Google Glass wearers for privacy issues. Like, the thought that all that Google Glass data will belong to the NSA on a whim of a secret court judge. Google doesn't give a rat's ass about people's privacy. They just want to sell their glasses, and they'll do it. And it's their right to do so, but don't expect people to love them for it.
People are in general, morons. Worried about Google Glass? People can be recording video from a cell phone in a pocket RIGHT NOW. I walked around with mine recording for 3.5 hours just to see what it was like. (Boring and bounced worse than the Blair Witch video.) People have dash cams in their cars. People have their houses and offices wired with security cameras that do motion detection and upload 1080p high-def video to the cloud.
Every store you walk into, every car you walk in front of, anybody holding a cell phone...
If you aren't alone inside a building that you control, you have no privacy and your face can end up on Youtube at any moment. Get over it.
Comment Since No One Has Pointed It Out Yet (Score 5, Informative) 348
'What do we get for that DRM?'
Did "we" vote on this? Let's look at their members list: Apple, AT&T, Facebook, Csico, Comcast, Cox, Google, Huawei, HP, Intel, LG, Netflix, Verizon, Yahoo!, Zynga and
And those are just the companies I recognize that have a serious amount of money to be made on DRM (hello, Netflix?!). If I examine closer, there are much smaller players like, say, Fotosearch Stock Photography and Footage that sound like they would gladly vote for DRM in order to "protect" their products/satiate content owners.
Comment I Thought It Was Clear (Score 3, Informative) 324
only about 1 trillion tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas spewed into the atmosphere. Just over half that amount has already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at current rates of energy consumption, the trillionth ton will be released around 2040
Do they honestly believe there is some total quantity of emissions that can be tolerated? I mean as opposed to a rate of emissions - like annually. We know that the system recycles carbon taking it out of the atmosphere, and we know that the rate it's removed increases as the concentration increases. So if we assume there is a limit, it should be on the rate of carbon emissions and not the total emitted over time.
If you read the "Summary for Policymakers" PDF document linked in the summary, there is no talk of "total quantity of emissions tolerated" or any of this trillionth ton idea. Instead it appears to be talking about . In fact, it appears to reside solely in that New York Times article that very clearly says:
To stand the best chance of keeping the planetary warming below an internationally agreed target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels and thus avoiding the most dangerous effects of climate change, the panel found, only about 1 trillion tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas spewed into the atmosphere.
Just over half that amount has already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at current rates of energy consumption, the trillionth ton will be released around 2040, according to calculations by Myles R. Allen, a scientist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new report.
(emphasis mine) So to answer your question: The trillion tons is an estimate of what we would need to burn in order to hit an internationally agreed limit that would likely produce the worst effects of climate change. The number of tons we burn is even an estimate. It's all estimates because we don't have parallel Earths where we can keep controls and change one variable to see what happens. If you don't accept the ability of making estimates with levels of certainty, there is no way to make any statements about the effects of putting carbon into our atmosphere on a global scale.
These guys are looking dumber all the time.
I suppose it would appear that way if you only get your information from The New York Times and throw away everything they're actually saying.
Comment Self Bootstrapping Death Ray (Score 4, Interesting) 272
Directly providing the power to vaporize a person is not the elegant way to do it. The correct, elegant mad scientist method is to use the power contained in the vaporized mass to power the vaporization.
Consider if you develop a means to "program" a plasma such that it generates a contracting magnetic field that causes fusion inside the vaporizing object and then absorbs some of the energy from this fusion reaction to power itself.
Now you're talking! Now you've got an effect that can vaporize any object provided you can provide the initial energy requirement.
There could be variants on this. Perhaps you've got an effect that flips matter into antimatter and absorbs some of the released energy to continue the effect.
If this is an expanding effect instead of a collapsing effect you've got a world killer like the weapons in Ender's Game.
Comment Re: I don't get it (Score 1) 212
Except that on a LAN FTP is almost the only protocol I can rely on to get high speed data transfers. SFTP blocks at about 30 MB/s when FTP can easily get 90.
If the Linux distros would be reasonable and enable the "none" crypto on SSH it would be a good thing. If I explicitly ask for no crypto then why are they making it hard for me to get what I want?
Yes, I know I can recompile OpenSSH for "none" crypto but it is easier to set up FTP, or even use tar and netcat.
Comment Re: not surprising (Score 1) 280
What workarounds? Even if I install the original Windows 7 with no updates on top of it, ACPI works flawlessly on most machines, both old and brand new (which didn't even exist when Win7 was released).
You will sometimes see motherboard driver files for Windows which are simply ugly hacks to fix things without doing a BIOS update by hot-patching the board's ACPI, or overriding some Windows default so it works properly with the buggy board.
The right thing to do would be to issue a BIOS update or recall the board. But no, as long as they can hack in a software fix for Windows they go ahead and ship it.
Comment Re:linux has bugs? (Score 2) 280
I assume you would like security bugs specially marked so that you can prioritize fixing them and releasing the changes.
Look at the number of bugs found and fixed which have much later been discovered to be security bugs.
So now you didn't push "non-security" bug fixes to your production servers and they get owned by bad guys.
The lesson is that you should treat all bugs as security bugs.
Submission + - Russia Proposes Banning Foul Language on the Internet (pravda.ru)
eldavojohn writes: In a country where it's illegal to insult a government official, State Duma Deputy Yelena Mizulina has proposed an amendment to ban swearing on social networks, bulletin boards and all websites. The website would be blocked if the offending material had not been removed within 24 hours. The name of the law this would be added to? "On the protection of children from information harmful to their health and development." Mizulina's title in regards to this legislation? Chairwoman of the Committee on Family, Women and Children (No joke!). Of course, Yelena Mizulina is no stranger to unwarranted censorship as she was behind the law banning gay propaganda to minors and invoked laws to try to silence critics on twitter. The article also notes, 'United Russia deputy Vitaly Milonov put forward a similar initiative on 25 July. He proposed to tighten control over social networks and allow people to dating sites through their passports.'
Comment Apples to Oranges (Score 5, Informative) 158
If it wasn't for all the false reporting about conditions at Foxconn, I might take this seriously.
"All the false reporting" was one nutjob who was confusing journalism with stage performance. A stark difference between Mike Daisey and China Labor Watch is their falsifiable report that, unlike Daisey's heart wrenching anecdotal stories, can be checked.
Examples:
At Pegatron, over 10,000 underage and student workers (interns), from 16 to 20 years of age, work in crowded production rooms, doing the same work as formal, adult workers. But some students are paid lower wages because schools deduct fees for the internship, while other students will not have their wages paid to them on time.
CLW’s investigations revealed at least 86 labor rights violations, including 36 legal violations and 50 ethical violations. The violations fall into 15 categories: dispatch labor abuse, hiring discrimination, women’s rights violations, underage labor, contract violations, insufficient worker training, excessive working hours, insufficient wages, poor working conditions, poor living conditions, difficulty in taking leave, labor health and safety concerns, ineffective grievance channels, abuse by management, and environmental pollution.
Did you read the report? It's got hard numbers and straight up accusations with defined conditions that can be checked. It's not like "I met a little girl who polished my iPhone." Instead it's like "A dorm room at Pegatron can accommodate 12 people. From Monday to Friday, residents have to clock-in within 24 hours or else they will be considered checked out of the dorm." or "The Pegatron factories had a list of discriminatory hiring practices, including refusing to hire people shorter than 4 foot 11 inches tall, pregnant women, those older than 35, people with tattoos, or people of the Hui, Tibetan, or Uighur ethnic groups."
Comment MSRP of $62,400 Though? (Score 4, Insightful) 452
For all the whining and moaning about rich people, that seems to be how society advances often. A rich person's fad then becomes a commodity.
Yeah
Comment Two Other Outspoken Politicians (Score 4, Insightful) 424
Mod parent up. We need more brave politicians to finally speak their minds about this instead of fearing the surveillance machine.
What are you talking about? There are plenty of politicians speaking their minds about Snowden -- but I don't know if I'd call them "brave." Looking at just the previous administration, George W. Bush:
I think he damaged the security of the country
And Dick Cheney:
I think he's a traitor
Of course, as another poster mentioned, they've got nothing to lose same as Carter.
Jimmy Carter Calls Snowden Leak Ultimately "Beneficial" 424
eldavojohn writes "According to RT, the 39th president of the United States made several statements worth noting at a meeting in Atlanta. Carter said that 'America has no functioning democracy at this moment' and 'the invasion of human rights and American privacy has gone too far.' The second comment sounded like Carter predicted the future would look favorably upon Snowden's leaks — at least those concerning domestic spying in the United States — as he said: 'I think that the secrecy that has been surrounding this invasion of privacy has been excessive, so I think that the bringing of it to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial.' It may be worth noting that, stemming from Zurcher v. Stanford Daily, Jimmy Carter signed the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 into law and that Snowden has received at least one nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize."
Submission + - Jimmy Carter Calls Snowden Leak Ultimately "Beneficial" (rt.com)
eldavojohn writes: According to RT, the 39th president of the United States made several statements worth noting. Carter said that 'America has no functioning democracy at this moment' and 'the invasion of human rights and American privacy has gone too far.' The second comment sounded like the Carter predicted the future would look favorably upon Snowden's leads — at least those concerning domestic spying in the United States — as he said: 'I think that the secrecy that has been surrounding this invasion of privacy has been excessive, so I think that the bringing of it to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial.' It may be worth noting that, stemming from Zurcher v. Stanford Daily, Jimmy Carter signed the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 into law and that Snowden has received at least one nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.
