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Comment Re:Call me racist and evil and bigoted and everyth (Score 3, Informative) 158

"innocence of muslims" really?

what an awkward for this to come up as people are held hostage by extremist muslims

Yes I know, not all muslims are like that, religion of peace, vocal minority, blah blah blah

You can defend a bear all you want, it's still gonna rip your face off

Then you will probably be happy to learn that the video is actually anti-Islamic.

Comment The best technology has been at home for years (Score 1) 241

Who's old enough to remember when the best technology was found at work

For as long as I've used a personal computer (as opposed to dialing in to the school/work mainframe), I've had a better computer at home than at work. I had a color monitor at home while still using monochrome at work, I've had fast graphics cards (sometimes dual) at home while my work computer was using a cheap integrated card, I had an SSD in my home computer long before I got one in my work computer. There was a brief time when work had a better internet connection than my 56kbs modem, but ever since I got DSL and then a faster cable connection, I've had a better connection at home than at work. Instead of a fractional T1 shared among the office, I had 768 or 1.5mbit DSL... instead of a 10mbit dedicated internet connection at the office, I had a 25mbit cable modem connection.

It's only quite recently that work has surpassed what I'm willing to pay for at home -- now my office has a gigabit pipe to the internet and on my desk I have a 27" iMac (maxed out on CPU and RAM with a 1TB SSD) and two 27" monitors (in addition to the iMac display). My home environment is not even close to my work environment.

Comment Re:How crazy (Score 2) 135

Oh cute. You think a VM is going to protect you from the host.

I think he runs everything in a VM -- different VM's for different tasks, the only thing the host does is run the VM's.

If this is the case, this does give him good protection from malware - even if the VM used for downloading pirated software gets infected by malware, it's going to be hard (but not impossible) for it to infect the host then then jump to his online banking VM.

Comment Re: How crazy (Score 1) 135

Then buy a work PC for home use.

Next problem?

That's not the right answer, the right answer is "Tell your employer to buy you a computer for work use at home." I don't mind using my home computer to do work, but not if my employer is going to mandate what software I run on it. If they are worried enough about my computer being a risk unless I run their security software, then they ought to be worried enough about my computer to want to manage the entire computer - both hardware and software... not just the security software.

Comment Re:2% is nothing (Score 1) 121

Or just drop the F-35 program entirely, use drones and cruise missiles for most of what the F-35 would do, and keep the A-10's for close in air support.

You can do that as long as you're willing to start replacing all of your C++ compilers for application development with NTFS filesystems and X-Windows.

Those weapons platforms don't really overlap that much in their capabilities. Maybe by 2115 instead of 2015 .....

2115? They still won't have the F-35 combat ready by then.

Comment Re:2% is nothing (Score 4, Insightful) 121

Warthogs? A-10s are some of the least-expensive, easiest to maintain aircraft in the USAF inventory, and their role in CAS is unrivaled.

Cut a handful of F-35s and you've saved about as much money and probably made our military more combat ready.

Or just drop the F-35 program entirely, use drones and cruise missiles for most of what the F-35 would do, and keep the A-10's for close in air support.

Comment Re:From Jack Brennan's response (Score 1) 772

How do they know that those Americans are not American spies that know of plots against the state of the captors until they torture them? Isn't that the same rationale that the USA used to lock prisoners away in Guantanamo Bay (where tortures took place) without a trial -- many were victims of circumstance, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but we just locked them away with no real recourse for release since they *might* have been enemy combatants.

You think after 5 years in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, etc that the "wrong place wrong time" headcount was only 750!? For real? Those guys weren't just random brownies they scooped up in order to look busy. The guys that made it to Gitmo (despite what it says in the article I am sure you are about to reference about the one guy who swears he is totally innocent and he just happens to have the same name as some other terrorist) were into some next level shit.

I'm just saying that if the US government is going to scoop up "suspected terrorists" and lock them up indefinitely with no trial (not to mention torture them), then they have no moral high ground to stand on when other entities do the same thing when they capture USA citizens.

Comment Re:From Jack Brennan's response (Score 2) 772

So, hey, if a couple of your CIA agents or citizens end up getting offed or tortured, don't suddenly say that's unfair. Because it's kind of the bar you set.

The question is, were the Americans tortured with the intention that they should reveal knowledge they possessed about plots against the state of the captors? If that's the case then sure, it sucks, but it's war. We hate them, they hate us, and the gloves are off. If they are torturing certain Americans completely unrelated to the military, as a form of collective punishment, then no *fuck that* we are still on the high ground and we are good to go on dropping a few thousand more bombs on those barbarians.

How do they know that those Americans are not American spies that know of plots against the state of the captors until they torture them? Isn't that the same rationale that the USA used to lock prisoners away in Guantanamo Bay (where tortures took place) without a trial -- many were victims of circumstance, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but we just locked them away with no real recourse for release since they *might* have been enemy combatants.

Comment Re:Good grief. (Score 2) 135

The City of London has 9000 residents but about 500,000 people actually working there during the day.

9000 residents and 619 security cameras sounds like OMG BIG BROTHER TROLOLOLOLWTFBBQHAX.

The more realistic, 509,000 people and 619 cameras sounds much less dramatic.

The definition of the City of London being in this case the boundary of the City of London.

Another way to look at is in terms of area.... The City of London covers about 1.12 square miles... If the cameras all cover ground level, them then the cameras could cover a grid with a camera spaced every 225 feet, or about one minute's walking distance.

Comment Re:NIH (Score 1) 161

The Google vs. Oracle lawsuit made a business case for not-invented-here syndrome. I think every major platform vendor will have there own programming languages in the future. Custom APIs and programming languages stops entire classes of patent/copyright lawsuits dead. It stops developers from moving between eco-systems. It even prevents your employees from stealing top-secret software and moving to a competitors. (And if they do steal the software, it becomes really obvious when law-enforcement shows up.)

I do agree from a portability/programmer perspective, NIH programming sucks. However, the legal perspective - it's great!

Also, the funny thing with lawsuits - even if you win, you still lose.

Given the permissive BSD style license that both Google and Facebook use for their respective languages, I don't think that they created these languages for any of these reasons.

It seems that detecting stolen software would be easier if the code was stolen and used as-is. If someone steals secret Go language code from Google and moves to Facebook and rewrites it in Hack (after all, the the actual coding is the easy part of any software project so rewriting it is much easier than creating the project from scratch), it's going to harder to prove it's stolen than if someone steals secret Python code and moves to Facebook and runs it there. They *could* rewrite the python code, but they don't have to, whereas they'd *have* to rewrite software that's written in some proprietary language.

Comment Re:$900 Flashlight? (Score 1) 191

What makes these flashlights worth $900?

Ruggedness. You can literally beat someone to death with these flashlights and they still work afterwards.

I'm pretty sure I could do the same thing with a $40 maglite. People just aren't that rugged.

I can't believe someone spent a mod point downmodding this post as 'redundant' -- how can it be redundant when it's the only post on this article talking about a maglite being able to beat someone to death!? Offtopic I could see, maybe overrated, perhaps even flamebait. But redundant!?

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