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Comment Re:The solution (Score 1) 324

The difference is that if NSA manipulates all hardrives, that would be easier to spot. I know that some organizations actually check the firmaware of devices before they use these.

By the non-buy list of the

If they do do what they did up to now (namely patching some high-profile targets) it wil ltake years before it is discovered and analyzed.

Comment The solution (Score 1) 324

should be that firmware is firmware. Please test rudimentary blocks of computing devices before you produce 100 of millions of a series.

I expect the manufacturer actually does something like a read/write test for typical conditions.

I may even accept or wish to get HDs which are one year behind SOTA, if they were not pushed out of the door in whatever shape the SW is due to a marketing deadline.

For such device i happily would pay more, if the "programmable" fuses are set/burnt.

Comment Re:Climate change phobia (Score 0) 341

Paint a sphere black, and it gets hotter than a white sphere. Emitting CO2 makes the Atmosphere "black" in the infrared, thus you increae the energy input to the system.

If the local effects have a little bump or not does not matter to the fundamental equation.

Nowadays we use modeling with great success. The models which were used to procude the processors you type on are complex. The planes you fly in are modelled. The controller in the stabilization system in you car was modelled.

Should you severly doubt that for something (globally long >100years, not locally) as simple and an energy conservation equation is not reliable, is suggest that you dont use a plane, dont use a car, and move into the forest.

Comment Re:Climate change phobia (Score 1) 341

I am not worried if humanity survives, but if you look into history, provoking wars was never a good idea.

What happens if, e.g. China falls apart in an uncontrolled fashion, or Russia, or India? Or even the US? limate change is a economic risk on a global scale.

I hope that this does not happen withing my lifetime.

Comment Re:Sony should return to its roots (Score 1) 188

Yes. I think they should focus at what they are really good: Design of working products (typically for me, the smaller stuff like Headphones, Bluetooth headsets, etc).

The deisgn of the subnotebook (down to the Vaio P series) was excellent (over 10 years, whenever i wanted to buy a notebook they were always in the last round of competitors due to the excellent design).

One problem of sony was that it was focused on Japan (i lived there for four years and Sony has many Products which were taergeted at the Jp market)

Comment As a former scientist: (Score 1) 233

Any scientific organization taking part in this effort, under the prepositions which are assumes now, is, in my opinion, unethical. The life and health of humans involved must be the first priority in any experiment; and this is what it is - its an badly planned, underfunded, and dangerous experiment.

My wife works in pharmceutical research, and if they did the same thing to mice (namely put them in a badly expected experiment without a clear purpose, but a high change of dying in an uncontrolled and unpleasant way), they would not get the approval.

Comment Your experience? (Score 1) 323

In my experience, web development is a cocktail of....

Big project with complex database bindings and backends are usually written in Java. They may not make up most of the web (if counted as pages) or accesses (since facebook etc is highly optimized), but if you need to get a real medium sized project out of hte door in a controllable fashion (and not-perfomance optimized), Java is your friend.

Forget interpreted loose-typing languages. Forget OO by instance copy shit. Take a decent EE and refactor if something is wrong. Use XML bindings where you see fit (without additional cost). And so much more. I know many programming languages, but Java is my favourite from the vievpoint of controlled delivery and SW Quality tools.

That being said yes, i believe that general engineering skills are undervalued, but i have the serious feeling that the original poter understands something different than I do, which is the mindset to dissect problems in systems, where each system prevents imperfections of other systems to pass trough.

Comment I am a physicist (Score 1) 439

And yes, i used some measurement techniques which required a lot of computational power (fitting procedures which ran over days).

And no: if your signal is too weak, no computation in the world can bring back the lost information. If i know that you will try to detect me optically, i paint the ship using another colour.

As far as i understand submarines are anyway not meant t o go close to any coastline.

Comment Sounds good to me (Score 1) 148

As somebody who really likes the price/performance point of samsung *Hardware* i have to say that I appreciate if they stop to put their randomly changing (sometime functions vanish when you update) office suite and their completely weird and buggy "communications" crap on the device.

If they have a long-term thing with MS that wil mean that Office mobile will get better because there is money to make for MS, and that they replace their useless bloatware with thing which i alreaady use.

Comment So strange! (Score 4, Insightful) 252

I mean, this guy really seems not to get that the excercise was not meant to demonstrate how to print 123456, but that printing 123456, as opposed to e.g. 654321 is a tool to demonstrate/show the order of the execution of command in a self-recursive function.

I mean, i have seen bad coding practices in courses (nervous handling of null pointers, and strong binding OOP comes to my mind), but this question has nothing to do with coding, but is purely the shortes way to test is the student understands what happens if the print comes after the call of the self recursive function.

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