I would have thought it rare to find a /. user who believes the promises of the government and thinks that the government handling all his data is a good thing, but there sure seem to be a lot of them posting today.

You seem to assume that a government-run ISP would be cheaper and better (e.g. faster and less congested) just because they say it would be. You seem to ignore all the examples of cost overruns and incompetence that government systems demonstrate on a regular basis and think that just this once it will be different. You seem to ignore that it is not just "internet users" who pay for a government-run internet service, and there are those who don't care if you can't download the latest warez or movie torrent as fast as you'd like. Those are the people who have other considerations than just "congestion and download speed" that you limit yourself to.

And you seem to think that reducing competition in an already limited market is a good thing. I find that an interesting shift in the environment here.

Neither of those are fact. "Better" is a purely subjective term, and there is no evidence that a government-run anything will be automatically cheaper. When you say "cheaper", you mean it may cost direct users less. That's not the total cost of the product, however. A "company" that can simply dip its hand into the general fund of a city when revenues don't cover expenses isn't worried too much about keeping costs down and those costs wind up coming from people who have no desire to be subscribers. A government-run anything is typically run by civil servants covered by a union, so they have no reason to care about the service they provide and have a union driving up the costs of their employment. (In our fair town, the largest cost increase in government is the increase in cost of union employees, most specifically for their pension and healthcare.)

The fact that this is all taxpayer supported means you lose choice. If you think having a choice between several commercial ISPs is too little choice, then consider that every taxpayer in that city will be an involuntary subscriber to what will probably become the defacto monopoly. If they don't manage to drive all the other players out by being able to undercut the prices, then the prices for all the others will have to go up to cover the fixed costs spread over fewer subscribers. (Do you see the parallel to the school system here? I do. You want to send your kids to a private school for a better education? You get to pay twice.)

I think less choice and forced participation is not better. I think having to get service from someone who doesn't really care is not better, especially when their supervisor will also be a civil servant who doesn't have to care. Example? I had a water leak. I got my bill and it said I had consumed some ridiculous amount of water. I did the calculations -- the volume of water they said I used would have covered my property to a depth of about a foot. It would have required a ridiculous flow. I got to fill out a report, they came out to calibrate my meter, and I ... heard nothing back ever. That's a government-run utility. Nobody cared because they didn't have to. I can't vote them out, they can't get fired, and I can't get service from anyone else.

Here in Oregon we've just lived through the Cover Oregon fiasco. A government-run website that was supposed to allow people to sign up for health insurance. It cost millions of dollars yet never managed to allow people to sign up for health insurance. You could download the forms, fill them in, then talk to an agent to find out what it would cost, but you couldn't sign up online. They could tell you the "partners" you could talk to -- mine was a three hour drive away in another state! They dumped a lot of money into cute jingles and ads months before the site was supposed to go online, but couldn't manage to get the job done. Better? Cheaper? Right.

Yes, democracy sucks. But as someone once said, it sucks less than everything else. The point I made, however, is that everyone is assuming that the voters were coerced into voting against their best interests, and that is not a fact in evidence.

Because the voters of those cities said they didn't want the government supplying it.

Here's a point I haven't seen anyone raise. When your ISP is managed by the same government that manages the police department, where do you think your right to privacy winds up? In the hands of someone who likely belongs to the same union that the police clerical staff belong to, and are probably on the same bowling team. And their paychecks come from the same mayor's office.

You mean when they vote against what you think their interests ought to be, you don't think they are "clever".

Not everyone believes that a government run ISP using taxpayer dollars to make up revenue shortfalls and to deliberately undercut the commercial providers is "in their interest".

The Weissman score is actually unitless. When one divides "log seconds" by "log seconds" the units cancel.

If one measures the compression ratios and times for the same data on different architectures, one is measuring the score of the different architecture, not "sidestepping" it.

Then algorithm A compared to B would have a higher Weissman score on a system with SSE.

Then the score would favor B over A when comparing the two processors. That's what the score is supposed to do. It compares two things.

Then for the former you would not care what the Weissman score is, and for the latter you would care.

That's not what the score measures. It also doesn't measure price (for commercial implementations of code), executable size, or whether the software salesman has BO or not.

It's pretty insulting to the democratic process to accuse the winners of being "[expletive deleted] sheeple" when you don't agree with a result.

I suspect there are a lot of people who feel the same way. Some of them may have participated in the vote and not voted the way you wanted them to.

Were a corporation a person, it certainly could hold public office.

However, the people who make up corporations and who retain their civil and Constitutional rights despite being part of a corporation can, and sometimes do, hold public office. On our local city council, we've had people who work for the local newspaper, the local university, the local large manufacturer, and other corporations.

"We" make software for many reasons.

I was using "free" as in "freedom". How is it "freedom" if you start putting restrictions on who can use the software and for what purposes? And who decides what those disallowed purposes are? The programmer or someone else? Suppose I'm a programmer who doesn't like abortions. Can I say "you can use free software unless you are an abortion clinic" because I've got some patches in some free software packages?

Does "free software" truly represent free software if there are so many limits on who can use it that nobody can use any of it?

That is not a restriction on who can use the code and for what purposes. The Army is not changing the code, they are using the code to produce other things. I have a router or two that has FOSS code in them, but that doesn't mean that I have to send hand all the data I send through those routers off to the EFF for their use. I have programs I compile with gcc, but that doesn't mean I have to hand over that code to everyone who asks for it. And IIRC, even the GPL doesn't require release of local modifications to GPL code unless you're trying to distribute that code. I could be wrong, I don't care, the point is irrelevant to this discussion. The Army isn't writing code.

I'm sorry, what? The GPL doesn't say that any data that you manage or create using GPL code must be released back to the community. Not even close. You speak very fancy words, but I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

Yes. So? Freedom means freedom. Freedom doesn't mean "anyone except YOU can use this code".

Then don't do any of those things. But when you create a free tool you give up the right to say "you may not use my tool", because that is in itself a lack of freedom.

Why don't you test your ability to keep people you don't like from using your "tools"? I betcha there are a lot of Apache web servers in use by the military. That's a clear violation of "freedom", isn't it? Why are you not in court today? I know there are linux systems in .mil domains. Get your lawyer busy.

FTFY.

Free software means free. Exactly how many riders and amendments to FOSS licenses do we want to have? "Cannot be used by anyone in Canada." "Cannot be used to make ugly things." "Cannot be used on the Sabbath."

"We" make software for any number of reasons, and "we" give up the right to tell people how they have to use it when we make it free. And, if I recall correctly, "we" explicitly tell people that what they make with our software is not covered by the license. I.e., code you compile with gcc doesn't have to be licensed under GPL.

It isn't criminal, and it isn't incompetence. It is because the people who want to buy the devices don't care about security. They want to do what they want to do.

I want to listen to online radio stations on my cell phone. AM1710, Antioch Radio, in particular. I started to download some app called "TuneIn" and was shown the list of privileges it wanted. I was flabbergasted. Location, identity, contacts, photos. Why does a streaming audio app need access to my location? Why does it need access to my contacts? (So I can see if any of my friends are using TuneIn and what they're listening to, which means they can see if I'm using it and what I'm listening to.) And this app has 50,000,000 (fifty MILLION) downloads. Apparently, people want to be able to see what their friends listen to and don't care if others see what they are doing. Thus also Facebook.

Don't blame the companies who make the stuff people want for making stuff people want.

And yet people won't buy simple FRS radios that cost much less and allow open communications in an emergency. Your description of Serval is interesting, but it is one of the last things you want in a real emergency. During an emergency, phones are good when there is a known phone number to call for help, or for individual communications between pre-arranged parties. That's why there is '911' or '999' or whatever it is in your country. Phones lack something called "interoperability". If you don't know the other guy's number, you ain't talking to him.

Radio, however, allows anyone to talk to anyone else with a simple "I need help" as a call. That's if you don't layer on all kinds of interfering crap like trunking and talkgroups and digital network access codes (NAC) and things designed to KEEP people from talking to each other instead of helping them do it.

That's why I program my emergency services radio with no CTCSS on receive, and put 0xFE (IIRC) as the NAC for 25 on at least one channel so I can at least hear everyone else if I need to. And this interoperability lesson is something the fire service learned in some large California fires, and is why there are a number of federally assigned interoperability channels authorized for anyone in one organization who needs to talk to someone in another. Every public service radio is supposed to have those channels, but many of them still don't even after a decade or more of existence.

What's a "Coolio"?

I'm reading these comments wondering, we have an issue with NSA being able to intercept cell calls and various countries supporting cyber attacks against various things today, and we're looking forward to a day when there is ubiquitous, automated, hidden-to-the-user networking connecting and controlling every significant device we bring into our homes and which is configurable by external command to create those networks? That makes our refrigerator a router for emergency messages from one of our next door neighbors out to someone somewhere through another neighbor's air conditioner? And some people here seem to be welcoming our new IoT overlords?

You've got to be joking.

Mesh networks are neither self-assembling nor zero maintenance. You really think that people are going to accept a "self-assembling" network that extends anywhere past their own homes into those homes? My God, man, we have people who are opposing wireless gas and electric meters in a neighboring city because they can be used to remotely turn service off, they emit dangerous radio waves, and they will "self-assemble" into a mesh that can be used to spy on people. (And "self" is in scare quotes because they assemble only because the electric utility programs them to, and the electric utility will maintain them.)

The next time your county infrastructure is taken out by, say, an ice storm, and the only way you can get information into and out of that county is by amateur radio, why don't you walk up to someone providing that service and let them know you think they are just "playing amateur radio", ok? Or ahead of time, make sure you let everyone know that those people who are volunteering their time training to provide emergency communications for your benefit are just "playing". You'll be the hit of the party.

Fascinating idea. So that satellite dish we have on our mobile command center vehicle should be used only for "Help" if we get stuck, but we shouldn't use it for "housekeeping" things. We shouldn't, say, pull the vehicle up next to a county building, pop the dish up, run a few phone lines, and supply telephone service to manage a flood to the people who need to do housekeeping things like keeping track of water levels or doctors who need to get to the hospital.

You truly have a lack of clue when it comes to what can and will be done in a disaster, and what will be useful and what won't.

Who cares about the wires when you're going to dissipate at least 160W from that 10 ohm resistor in series with the input, and have a 40V drop to go with it?

And explain again how you keep an input ripple of less than 3% when you will be dropping anywhere from 0 (no load) to 40 (full load) volts on that 450V input?

If this is intended for houses, then you certainly have sufficient space for a shoebox or larger sized inverter. I have several of them in my house -- they're called a UPS, and a couple of them are 1.5kW. I haven't spent the money or they could be larger.

This challenge turns out to be to convert 450DC into 240VAC true-sine-wave. The intent seems to be to waste time converting DC into AC so it can be converted back into the DC needed to run the electronics. A lot of the items shown in the challenge don't inherently need AC, and some of them only need AC because they were built with AC motors in them. The laptops, TVs, monitors, desk lamps, toasters, automobile, radios, coffee makers -- all can be trivially designed to use AC or DC. (In fact, the very first radios sold in the US were AC/DC. That's because the AC/DC power wars weren't over yet.)

And even the excuse that converting from one DC voltage to another is harder than AC conversions is long gone. There are so many DC/DC converters in use today that nobody can seriously argue that those conversions are anything but trivial. When all we had were linear regulators it was inefficient to lower the voltage and hard to increase it, but with switching buck and boost regulators now ubiquitous that concern is moot.

So. Other than "it is cool", I still ask "why"? This size of device would be required for portable use, perhaps in poorly developed areas, but who is going to be carrying 450DC with them and need 240AC true-sine-wave to power the microwave in their pocket?

No. Efficiency in conversion translates to efficiency. You can have a box the size of a car that is is 95% efficient. And high efficiency means low heat output, not the other way around. I can build an inverter that is 0% efficient and remains at room temperature. I usually throw them out when the efficiency drops like that.

There are already very efficient small scale devices.

Inverters don't move power, they convert it from one form to another. In this case, it is converting 450VDC to 240 AC true-sine-wave. It's already dealing with only "the last mile".

This is nothing of the sort. "Lighter smaller cheaper" packaging has effects in resource use in production and shipping and sales of every item in that packaging. Having a tiny inverter does not. There was never a "packaging war".