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Comment So what (Score 1) 160

I think that could, in the modern American political discourse, be the refrain. Have a look at a map. Generally speaking, urban areas vote blue and in favor of some sort of a national vision, whereas rural areas consistently lap up a steady diet of misinformation that says they are supporting the cities when every outlay from the state capitals to even the federal government suggests the opposite is true. The rural areas say they hate government and redistribution of wealth - fine - then let them do without the wealth redistributed to them and maybe cities, unshackled by them, can begin to turn their own finances around.

Comment Enough of the anti-city agenda (Score 5, Insightful) 160

Laws prohibiting municipal broadband are entirely anti-city. In a country where politics is such that cities are routinely decried (while ironically states redistribute their tax revenues to rural areas and suburbs), I think it is time to frame broadband rights as a freedom from government for cities.

Cities should be allowed to be more independent from the states that hold them. They should not be stripped of the competitive advantages that localized economies of scale provide. They should be allowed to offer their own utilities, to toll the interstates that cut through them, and they shouldn't have to pay a gasoline tax that largely serves rural interests, and above all, part of that independence should be to allow them to offer broadband.

Comment There's no such thing as externalities. (Score 1) 441

You invent externalities as if there is some kind of mandate that "Society has to bear the solution to some problem." Here's the reality. I absolutely do not. You can't argue in generalized terms about the affairs of humans in a digital age where everyone is perfectly capable of understanding their economic interests. If I live on a big hill, I don't have to care if your beachfront sinks. If it is cheaper for me to burn coal to heat with, I'm going to burn coal. It's that simple. Raising the taxes on my energy is really, to me, you screwing up my life so that you can have your fancy beachfront house. It's equally not fair, either way, and there's not so much as the notion of external costs as it is you are looking to raise a rent on the poor to preserve your beach property and fancy solar sailboats while the rest of us try and buy bread. We don't need you. We don't need your coasts. There's too many people already, as your side is fond of saying!

Comment Bring it. (Score 1) 441

Your theory of damages is entirely ridiculous. If I burn a mount of coal in Kentucky, then the best you can say is that technically, perhaps, I helped make global sea levels rise. That would suck if you were living in New York or on the coast.

But, let's review the science:

a) CO2 is making sea levels rise and warming the planet and changing the climate. But no mathematical or climate model has been remotely accurate. The models do NOT actually predict climate, and that's really a huge problem. So you can't remove my burning coal mountain, then re-add it, and hold me culpable for anything, with any degree of certainty at all other than your lunatic religion.

b) Any contemplated action proposed by the environmental left, from carbon taxes to transaction taxes, has the effect of creating an enormous economic problem for the poor and middle class. If I 'm poor, I don't care if the coastlines sink. I don't own my building. Landlords do. So screw them! I'll move! Why should I care about your solar panel house in New Jersey with your scenic rich yardwork, when I'm poor in Kentucky? Answer is, I don't. All I see is that you want to make my fuel more expensive, my food more expensive, everything more expensive, when I'm trying to get the basics, and that cuts into whatever savings I have... makes me poorer, and having your cronies take those taxes to build a library for "me" doesn't cut the rusk as some kind of compensation.

So the bottom line is that. If you really want to save the planet, then go right ahead and invest your money in whatever it takes to make green stuff. If it is cheaper, I'll buy it. But if you are going to spend your life making my life miserable to save your beachfront property, when I don't even have property worth saving other than a burning pile of coal and a rifle, then show up claiming you are coming after me, then you're gonna get the rifle, and deserve it!

Comment Re: No control experiment (Score 1) 132

Not everyone has the same harm vs benefit outlook. You might want a perfect green earth but I like cheap energy today and can live with the health risks. We are all going to die someday and at least I want to be warm. So the short answer is, I don't care about your genes and you don't care if people freeze. To each his own. There is no "we".

Comment Re:islam (Score 1) 1350

Seriously, you cannot kill as a Christian, because 1. you can't kill

Actually you can. Because the religious hypocrites who scribed the bible realised that they still needed people to fight wars for them they added a clause which said you can kill as a Christian without sin if you're a soldier fighting in a war and in other circumstances even civilians. David is praised for killing Goliath and one of his men credited for killing 800.

Here's some good old hypocrisy from the Bible in Deutronomy 20:10-18 for killing civilians which seems quite familiar with what the Islamic Fundalmentalists say:
- the population of cities outside of the Promised Land, if they surrender, should be made tributaries and left alive (20:10-11)
- those cities outside of the Promised Land that resist should be besieged, and once they fall, the male population should be exterminated, but the women and children should be left alive (20:12-15)
- of those cities that were within the Promised Land, however, the population should be exterminated entirely (20:16-18), specifically "the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites" (20:16-18). Deuteronomy 25:19 further commands the extermination of the Amalekites.

Submission + - Lizardsquad member Vinnie Omari arrested, home raided. (neowin.net)

Computershack writes: The South East Regional Organised Crime Unit (SEROCU) has arrested a 22-year-old man from Twickenham on suspicion of fraud by false representation and Computer Misuse Act offences.


The arrest yesterday (30/12) is in connection with an ongoing investigation in to cyber fraud offences which took place between 2013 and August 2014 during which victims reported funds being stolen from their PayPal accounts. The arrested man was released on bail until 10 March.

Submission + - UK Arrest over Xbox Live and Playstation Network outages (neowin.net)

An anonymous reader writes: Neowin.net is reporting the arrest of one Vincent Omari, a UK citizen, in the Christmas Day DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on the Sony's PSN and Microsoft's XBL systems: 'In documents sent to Neowin, Vinnie Omari has been accused of "hacking of the Playstation Network and Xbox Live systems over the Christmas Period"... While this is the first arrest related to the recent service disruptions, it may not be the last... In further conversations with those who are familiar with the investigation and the arrest, Omari believes that the police will not find anything of substance on his computers. He's alleged crime is that he helped coordinate the DDOS attack on the service. Further, Omari believes that this arrest will give him more credibility in the cyber security space.'

Comment Re:Amount could be reduced, not increased... (Score 1) 75

Do realize that they could be uncomfortable because the amount of data Apple wants to collect is greatly REDUCED from what credit cards collect - the statement does not state which direction of the amount goes.

Credit cards in the UK don't work like they do in the USA. The only thing the credit card company knows is how much you've spent and what retailer you've spent it at. They don't know what you've bought. My credit card company online statements break down spending into categories. Quite a lot of the time its in the wrong category because I've bought something somewhere which is not that company's main line of business. An example would be buying screenwash at Tesco for my car. It doesn't go through as automotive but groceries if I buy it from the store and not the supermarket forecourt.

Comment Re:But what laws are they breaking? (Score 1) 139

They certainly do have laws against this. Here in the UK there is the Computer Misuse Act which is the most obvious. As regards to a solution, you can't really defend against a DDoS. There is no way to distinguish a legitimate request to www.google.com from one from a machine that is part of a Botnet until its done a certain number of retries which makes it obvious.

Comment Re:Who cares about rotational speed these days? (Score 1) 190

Grab an LSI controller off eBay (IBM or Dell-branced) for <$100 and you can have another 8 SATA/SAS ports.
I've got 10 drives (6x2.5 + 4x3.5) in one of my Microservers.
Unfortunately ZFS shows up the weak CPU under heavy load, but most of the time (with an additional dual-port ethernet card as well) it's a real trooper.

Comment Re:"NAS" hard drives? (Score 1) 190

As I understand it, the differences are mostly mechanical. It's worth noting that the weights of the Green, Red and Black drives are all identical (1.5kg for the 4TB), despite the latter being 7200rpm and the former two being "Intellipower" (5900rpm ?). This suggests they're all mechanically identical. The "Datacentre" drives are heavier (1.66kg @ 4TB), so they are definitely mechanically different. I haven't looked into the specs in depth, but I assume it's an extra platter. If it's not, it's probably a better motor. They're difficult to find these days, but those who have handled 15k 3.5" drives will know they are substantially heavier than 7.2k SATA drives (which I always attributed to better mechanicals). I think you will find the difference between the different consumer-level drives is entirely in firmware (things like TLER, idle head parking, etc).

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