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Comment Re:Chromebook Shmomebook (Score 4, Informative) 169

Wake me up when they post a useful article on how to run Unix on my Macbook Pro.

Mac OS X *is* UNIX. It's certified. Wake me up when Linux passes conformance testing.

PS: We even put UUCP on the damn thing to pass the tests; it's definitely UNIX, so feel free to spin up your own NetNews node on your MacBook Air.

Comment And now... 3... 2... 1... (Score 2) 110

And now... 3... 2... 1...

(1) Find a journalist you don't like who has linked to a vulnerable site they don't control
(2) Replace the content at the link target with illegally obtained material about someone powerful
(3) Sit back and watch how well the new SWATting works!

Journalistic shield laws anyone? The new first amendment-resistant law enforcement looks like we need something to replace the old antibiotics...

Comment Re:Bye_bye, Blackberry (Score 1) 307

No one wants to switch from a Mac/Windows to a Windows/Mac system if their files or programs are not 100% guaranteed to work.

Most businesses use this same example:

"No one wants to switch from a Windows XP system to a Windows [inset non-XP Windows here] if their files or programs are not 100% guaranteed to work."

Comment William Gibson and others have prior art. (Score 1, Insightful) 171

If they have good patents on it, they should be able to control a large and growing market 5-10 years out.

William Gibson and others have prior art. Not sure if you watched "Minority Report", or if you have read Gibson's "Virtual Light", but both describe this sort of thing in immense detail. It's basically a straight forward interposition strategy with slightly smaller hardware than has typically been used in the past.

The real issue that's going to come up is idiots wearing these things while driving, and so on, which is actually not as idiotic as it sounds, but will definitely be illegal as hell for no reason involving reported accident rates. Sort of the same thing that happened with Google Glass 1.0, when people didn't undertand that it couldn't film 24x7 because they didn't understand the concept of "connectivity" nor the concept of "battery life".

Comment The conclusions are bogus. (Score 5, Insightful) 210

The conclusions are bogus. The numbers they run only examine public posting, because the data on private posting is inaccessible to them, and then they draw conclusions based on that. Most Google+ activity is private and/or takes place within groups.

One of the people involved stated "just 9% of Google+'s 2.2 billion users actively post content", (emphasis added) and then from that the article concludes no one uses it.

They also picked the first 18 days of the year to analyze the data; this is prime vacation time for most people for 7-14 of those days.

His distribution assumptions are not evidence based, they are straight assumptions about uniform distributions, and they are all drawn from a single file of 45K profiles, which is the same thing as saying "If you want a straight line fit, only select a single data point".

It'd be much more useful if he had verified the distribution uniformity through an analysis of other sitemap files, and even better if he'd just spun up an EC2 instance and looked at *all* of them.

But I'm sure he got a lot of clicks out of this.

Comment Re: The white in your eyes (Score 1) 219

Fitting in with other people is one of the most important aspects of most jobs.

I keep hearing this. And not believing it.

The most important part of a job is being able to do the job.

Nothing GREAT comes from "just fitting in". If you can't handle DOING THE JOB then screw you. You suck. Live with it.

Comment Re:no thanks (Score 1) 172

Caller: "I didn't say I wanted to use less energy, dumbass, I said I wanted you to charge me less for the energy I *do* use!"

That's an illogical reaction. Gas stations won't charge you less for using the same amount of gas. Your cable bill won't go down when you have the same channel package. (Yes, many of us want a la carte, but that's the moral equivalent of "use less electricity".)

It's an artificial scarcity used to inflate value. Generating "just enough" electricity, rather than "more than enough", when you are using a nuclear plant, is more about what you do with the heat (do you turn it into electricity, or do you shunt it to the cooling towers, because you can't throw it on the grid), rather than whether or not the heat is going to be relatively constant, unless you are in a changeout cycle.

Thankfully your ala carte cable is coming to pass (i.e. the unbundled ability to get some channels online is now there).

Comment Re:Prepare for more (Score 2) 257

I really do not care if there was revisionist history or not. Japan had shown themselves to be pretty ruthless, and as I recall, they started the whole mess.

Though only after US inflicted crippling economic sanctions on them. I'm not a US basher, but large powers (US, Russia) tend to act like school bullies.. they push you and push you, and then when you push back, it's suddenly "a surprise attack".

Granted, it was a surprise attack, but it should not have come as such.

And by "crippling economic sanctions", you mean we stopped selling them scrap steel for them to use in pursuit of their war on China, where they were attempting to seize territory so that, among other things, they had the ability to mine to produce their own steel.

They were kind of expansionist, empire-building, belligerent asses at the time. A conflict was inevitable, even if we'd enabled them to take China, other areas in Asia, and the Philippines.

Comment Re:no thanks (Score 1) 172

Do you think that energy prices are NOT going up anyway?

That's the great thing about smart meters ... if you are a power company.

You get to work around the PUC tariffed rates by showing that *on average* electricity price haven't actually gone up, while increasing revenue by 20% without having to go back to the PUC and make any concessions to get the tariff changed.

Well, that and you can charge differential rates from what you pay for solar power generated when no one is home during the day to use it. That's a lot harder to do, if you used an electromechanical meter that actually ran backwards when generation exceeded consumption.

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