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Comment Re:Total Isolation? (Score 1) 139

If the likes of ESPN and the NFL make stand-alone streaming services (I believe they have the "requires cable subscription" offerings at the moment, like HBO already has) then it could be the death knell of cable subscriptions in our country

Here ya go: https://gamerewind.nfl.com/nfl...

Every single NFL game this season. Downside is you can only watch a game after it ends, but in an era of DVRs that's pretty common anyway.

Comment Re:Airplane Petri Dish (Score 2) 475

Mutation doesn't work that way. Putting the two viruses in the same person does not actually mix the viruses. They're each independent organisms.

Can anyone advise why I should not be terrified to be on the same plane with an Ebola carrier regardless of assurances by medical officials that it is not that contagious.

Because the people coming from the area with the epidemic are screened before they get on an airplane. For example, they are checked for fever.

If they have symptoms, they aren't allowed on the plane. If they do not have symptoms, they are not contagious.

Comment Re:Mod up 1000+ (Score 1) 448

Yes, you really did get that backwards.

Here's a picture of the Shah having a chat with Kennedy in the White House.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

And Nixon was so incensed by that "non-dollar oil sales" that Nixon went to visit the Shah after he was deposed.

During his second exile, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi traveled from country to country seeking what he hoped would be temporary residence. First he flew to Assuan, Egypt, where he received a warm and gracious welcome from President Anwar El-Sadat. He later lived in Morocco as a guest of King Hassan II, as well as in the Bahamas, and in Cuernavaca, Mexico, near Mexico City, as a guest of José López Portillo. Richard Nixon, the former president, visited the Shah in summer 1979 in Mexico.

And then when the Shah got sick, the USAF flew him to the US for medical treatment.

The Shah suffered from gallstones that would require prompt surgery. He was offered treatment in Switzerland, but insisted on treatment in the United States.

On 22 October 1979, President Jimmy Carter reluctantly allowed the Shah into the United States to undergo surgical treatment at the New York–Weill Cornell Medical Hospital. While in Cornell Medical Center, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi used the name "David D. Newsom" as his temporary code name, without Newsom's knowledge.

The Shah was taken later by U.S. Air Force jet to Kelly Air Force Base in Texas and from there to Wilford Hall Medical Center at Lackland Air Force Base.[75] It was anticipated that his stay in the United States would be short; however, surgical complications ensued, which required six weeks of confinement in the hospital before he recovered. His prolonged stay in the United States was extremely unpopular with the revolutionary movement in Iran, which still resented the United States' overthrow of Prime Minister Mosaddegh and the years of support for the Shah's rule. The Iranian government demanded his return to Iran, but he stayed in the hospital

So...we disappointed our good friends who deposed the hated Shah by treating him and then protecting him in the US, or you got it backwards.

Btw, written on the US/english Wikipedia page about "that Shah" is

The Shah's diplomatic foundation was the United States' guarantee that they would protect him, which was what enabled him to stand up to larger enemies.

There are three instances of the word "dollar" on that page, and none of them have to do with oil sales.

Also, Nixon wasn't president in 1963. Kennedy was until November, then LBJ was. So how, exactly, did the Shah "bluntly refuse toward Nixon" in 1963 when Nixon was not at all part of the government? All Nixon was in 1963 was ex-Vice President who lost to Kennedy.

Comment Re:What's wrong with keys? (Score 1) 448

They get in the way at very bad times.

Let's say we're in a war with an enemy that isn't woefully under-equipped. Your tank battalion pulls up to resupply and repair. Tanks are shut off while this is going on.

Then the bad guys drop a bunch of bombs on you. You and most of your tank crew survives. Unfortunately, the tank commander who had the keys is now a fine mist settling onto the ground. Alternatively, half of your crew is dead, half of another tank's crew is dead. If there were no keys, you could operate one tank. As it is, you can operate zero.

And then it turns out the airstrike was followed up by the bad guy's tanks rolling over the next hill.

Give keys to everyone? Now you've defeated the purpose of keys, because there are such a massive number of keys that "the bad guys" will find at least one.

Or if you'd like a less spectacular scenario, keys have a failure rate. You don't want to be waiting for a locksmith during a war.

Comment Re:Mod up 1000+ (Score 1) 448

If the USA had not meddled with the Shah, whom they disliked

You got that backwards.

In 1941, the Shah was deposed. Iran ended up with a secular, communist-leaning government, last run by this guy, who wanted to nationalize the oil industry.

That upset the US, so we worked with the Islamic fundamentalists to overthrow the secular government and re-install the Shah in 1953. The Shah turned against the fundamentalists, leading to the 1979 revolution.

Comment Re:an insight into the stagnation (Score 1) 157

A far greater insight can be achieved by looking at the statistics they used to declare the sales "stagnant".

Electric car sales fell 0.1% as a proportion of total car sales....during an August with more car sales than have been seen in years.

In other words, they held about the same percentage of sales when total sales massively shot up, despite the very small number of models available. That ain't stagnant.

Comment What's the point? (Score 1, Insightful) 511

The problem is what's the point of Java?

If speed is absolutely critical, you're going to go with C/C++/ASM/whatever native-compiled-language works well for your problem.

If speed is not absolutely critical, there's plenty of "scripting" languages that get the job done more easily with less code. And if you're talking about something cloud-based, you can probably handle the lower speed of these options by adding another server node.

Java seems to be in the middle ground where it's more cumbersome than the "scripting" options, yet slower than the "native" options. Leaving not much of a reason to choose it in the vast majority of cases.

Java just doesn't seem to have much a a role today beyond "Google decided to use it for Android apps".

Comment Re:But... (Score 1) 193

You either need a giant bank of HDDs to store a snapshot of the data before it's written to tape, or a system that can handle large inconsistencies in data caused by the slow write speed.

You'd still need some inconsistency handling for Blu-ray, but it's a lot faster than tape so there's a lot less to handle.

Comment Re:But... (Score 1) 193

Maybe he was just smart enough to figure out that you don't have to power HDDs when they aren't in use either, and whomever said they do is an idiot.

5 Blu-ray drives, autoloader with thousands of disks. When not operating, you are powering the SATA-or-similar interface for 5 drives and 1 autoloader.

2000 HDDs. When not operating, you are powering the SATA-or-similar interface for 2000 drives.

2000 > 5 + 1.

I know! Let's pay people to go unplug the 2000 drives. That'll make it cheaper!!!

Or we'll kill power to the entire cabinet, that way we'll have no clue how many of the HDDs are still at all operable. It'll be so much more exciting!

Even better, we can use the suggestion repeated over and over again to use laptop drives, with MTBF 1/1000th of an "enterprise" drive. That'll save thousands in power, while paying tens of thousands in maintenance personnel.

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