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Comment Re:I'm shocked! (Score 1) 278

Whilst I can't say I've mentioned ECHELON, I've certainly known about it for at least 13 years. And why would anyone bother mentioning it when you would just have been labelled a tin-foil hat loon.

Dated 2001:
http://textuploader.com/kxe7

It's been on Wikipedia since then too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I think the consensus (amongst people who knew about ECHELON) back then was that all calls were recorded but they couldn't keep them for long.

How much evidence do you need considering that the NSA habitually lie and that whistle-blowers have said they record everything. They are spending a billion plus on a data centre when $27 million is estimated to be enough for the hardware to record all calls. If that doesn't sound like an attempt to record everything then I don't know what does.

And a couple of slashdot links for good measure:
NSA Tapping Underwater Fiber Optics

One mentioning ECHELON:
http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

Comment Re:motive? (Score 4, Insightful) 80

These aren't exaclty lucrative potential customers...
Who's paying for this and why?

Cruise ships. Especially in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, and South China Sea. Two years from now, fast and semi-affordable shipboard internet will be a selling point and competitive advantage. Five years from now, it will be something every ship needs just to be taken seriously.

Comment Re: I hate quantum computers. (Score 1) 55

And supposedly it is no faster than a real computer. What gives?

It's hard to say because it's all "secret sauce" (so everybody just plunks their heels down on some position rather than admit "I don't know") but one thing that's interesting to me is that a handful of blokes out of Canada appear to have built a computer that's about as fast as a Xeon that Intel needed a few billion dollars, thousands of people, and forty years experience to create.

And that was their first commercial version. Maybe somebody will rip one apart and find out it says "Xeon 2650" on the inside, but until that happens I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt because they seem to have at least one fairly remarkable accomplishment under their belts.

If the Google guys buy the upgrade, I'd be willing to bet five bucks that it's real, just very early in the development cycle still.

Comment Re:Why is the FCC involved? (Score 1) 54

Every bureaucracy tries to expand itself, you know that. Rather than actually get the bandwidth to schools that they need (200Kbps per student or so, ballpark) to support real telelearning, which is hard to do (but arguably within FCC purview), especially given the extensive number of rural schools, they lean towards something easy - buying access points, to hook up to their too-slow Internet link because every agency has to be seen "doing something".

Comment and... (Score 4, Insightful) 157

as activists are all too aware, false copyright claims can can knock legitimate content offline.

As not only activists but almost everyone aware of the rampant abuse going on has been claiming for years, it is high time that the "under penalty of perjury" part of the DMCA claims is actually enforced. Mistakes can happen, nobody is perfect, but some companies have been taking down large amounts of content for years, repeatedly and with not even a slap on the wrist.

Comment Re:Why is this news? (Score 4, Insightful) 443

Cyclists ARE a menace, to themselves.

I recently saw a cyclist come from the sidewalk on my right, cross an intersection diagonally across me (between two left-turning lanes of north/south traffic), get back up onto the sidewalk, and then later get into the bike lane going the wrong way, at an alarming speed.

As a motorist and a cyclist, I was completely stunned. It's cyclists like that why motorists hate cyclists.

Nobody can avoid killing you if you don't even pretend to follow the rules of traffic. But many many drivers forget that they are required by law to not run over cyclists, even if they are inconvenient.

I have seen more cyclists do ridiculous things than I could count. I give them a wide berth, but, I have to admit, some of them seem like they're trying to get killed.

Likewise, a lot of drivers more or less don't give a damn and will practically run them over, or off the road, or door them. Sometimes buses don't even obey bike lanes.

I won't ride a bicycle on city streets anymore.

Comment Re:Sounds like a bad idea ... (Score 1) 265

Oh, I automate deployments, and I automate some monitoring. Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to automation.

Like all programmers, I'm lazy and would rather code it once instead of doing it by hand many many times.

That doesn't mean I'd walk away from it and leave it unattended. To me, that's just asking to get bit in the ass.

These days, anything which is low risk maintenance is stuff I do during the daytime because it's not Production. For our Production environments, everything is considered high risk because the systems are mission critical. Any change at all is high risk, because if it breaks, it costs the company large amounts of money to be down.

You have to understand what your threshold of risk is, and what your actual risks are before you do any automation. Some systems you can play fast and loose with. Others, not so much.

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