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Comment Re:I never would have thought of that! (Score 1) 216

I would have thought the answer to that is obvious: most guns with folding stocks are a lot easier to conceal, and someone wanting to do something bad with a rifle would want to take one that they can conceal en-route. An old Lee-Enfield 303 with a wooden stock isn't so easy for the school shooter to conceal on his way to committing the crime.

Comment Custom allocator (Score 3, Insightful) 58

This sounds awfully familiar...OpenSSL had a critical vulnerability because they had decided to write a custom allocator instead of using the one provided by the OS. You would think IE developers, with their product being WIndows-only and strongly tied to Windows would never dream of reinventing the allocation wheel, especially as Windows memory management in general has had a huge amount of work done on it in the last few years to make it harder to exploit memory allocation bugs.

Comment It really depends (Score 1) 654

It really depends on where you live.

I would say 'no' where I live now. Although there is a bus stop almost outside my house, it takes three times as long to get to work by bus than it does to drive - my drive being around about 20 minutes, and the bus journey (plus walk at the end) being an hour. I can actually beat the bus journey on my bicycle, and it's 12.5 miles (hilly miles, too). The bus not only goes "around the houses" taking a route much longer and slower than my direct route, it stops all the time, and it only goes within a mile of my workplace. It would be 1.2 hours every day longer on the daily route to work.

On the other hand if I lived in a big city such as Madrid I wouldn't even bother owning a car, regardless of whether public transport was free or not. The car becomes more of a liability than an asset once you live in a densely populated city.

Comment Re:Tax dollars at work. (Score 1) 674

We likely don't know the full story here. I suspect it could have gone like this:

* Someone has their phone plugged into a socket labeled 'Not for public use'.
* PCSO notices, says "SIr, can you unplug your phone, that socket isn't for public use".
* Man gets belligerent and argues with the PCSO and refuses to unplug.

Comment Concorde (Score 4, Informative) 238

No mention of Concorde in the summary, which could do this at over Mach 2?

How have the economics changed that this will be viable where Concorde wasn't? IIRC, British Airways only managed to fly it profitably because they got the aircraft for £1 each. Concorde's engines were thermodynamically very efficient when in supercruise, and the aircraft burned as much fuel as a B747 while hauling only about 1/4 to 1/3rd of the passengers. I don't think there's much that can be done to get the fuel burn down per passenger seat, and due to the nature of supersonic flight it's always going to be more of a maintenance nightmare than a subsonic airliner.

Comment the A in ADSL (Score 1) 107

After a two weeks of trying to get comcast to fix my lack of connection I switched to DSL. I'm getting the advertised DSL speeds. What I'm wondering is why the hell is the upload speed of ADSL pegged at such a crappy ratio to the download speed. Cable has about a 2:1 ratio but ADSL is about 30:1. My upload speed is 0.8Mbs on a 20Mbs download line. Why? what's the physical limit on DSL that cable doesn't have on the asymmetric division? It used to be that this wasn't a big deal since relatively few people upload much. But these days uploading for common people is ubiquitous: your phone by default wants to push every photo to the cloud, your backups go to the cloud, and it's not uncommon to want to e-mail a 20Mb word document. So upload speed has become an issue.

It becomes a major issue when a long duration upload (say a backup) chokes off even the modest handshaking upload that other download streams require and your Amazon prime fire TV stops working smoothly.

Are the DSL companies doomed by physics or their market price point if they can't increase this without raising prices dramatically? Why would this be costly? I'd gladly trade a megabit of download for another megabit of upload.

Comcast seems to have incentivized its india based outsourced customer service to optimally work against comcasts own interests. namely they first employ an incompetent first-line who cannot reason logically what the problem is and make you follow the script even after five previous calls (which apparently are not incentivized to make notes). thus they make their money from answering calls and getting you to just give up. then the next technique is to flat out lie("we will have technical call you in 30 minutes sir, this I promise to you. Now being such a good customer I have an upgrade deal to offer you"_) and finally even in the middle of the nightmare non-performing service they take the time to offer you additional costly upgrades. This only makes sense if you consider what the service center makes its profit on as opposed to comcast (retaining customers).

The DSL company also seems confused at well but at least they make as many errors in my favor as they do against it that it can't be a deliberate strategy.

Comment Re:Paranoia (Score 1) 431

When I was at school (tr:US high school) we had a 2 litre coke bottle three quarters full of the stuff. Just sitting there in our study room...

We had bought the iodine at one chemists shop, then gone to another to get the ammonia (buying both in the same shop seemed like a bad idea to us) and then made it by the litre. I dread to think what it would have done if it had dried out.

Comment backdoor versus sidedoor. (Score 2) 102

Discussing this as a "backdoor" conflates this with the usual hidden backdoor which is a bad thing. Putting in a backdoor that is freely accessible and leaves no trace of its accession is ill advised. But I fail to see why there are no technological means to secure keys for multiple parties. you can even have crypto so multiple parties must agree so for example like my safe deposit box the bank and I both have to agree that I am me.

Now that's a different question of whether
1) I might encrypt the data on my own or use a thrird party client that uses googles services but keeps things encrypted in passage. That defeats the abililty to side door googles encryption.

2) I might off shore my data to someplace outside such laws (do I trust them is another matter).

3) the dent this might cause in googles popularity outside the US--I actually doubt this since de facto it has been the case in the past that the NSA had free range of google and no one cared deeply. But Will china also demand that google also let it have side door access as a condition of doing bussiness there? Still while a mess it's not technologically difficult.

4) an even stickier issue might be who all has to agree to unlock the data. Google+NSA. Google+China. those are doable. but Google+NSA+China is a problem. China might not want the NSA peeking at chinese national accounts without it's permission. Nor perhaps North Korean or any number of disputed places the NSA is interested in.

So there's a political mess here and some ways consumers can defeat it, but I fail to see why someone like Bruce Schneir would say there's no technical means to do this at the level of google or apple or major sites when there plainly is.

Comment Re:Unsupported assertions (Score 2) 285

I suspect processed foods are not harmful. A raw food diet is a lot likely to be less optimal (basically, cooking - which is processing food - is what made us human: processing our food allowed us to break it down a bit meaning a simpler, more efficient digestive process, allowing us to have larger brains).

If you cook from fresh ingredients, guess what you're still eating processed food. Just because the food processing happened in your home, doesn't mean it's not processed food. It doesn't matter where the processing occurred - in your home, in a factory, or wherever, so long as the food doesn't contain excessive quantities of crap. I think the real answer is avoid crap foods. Foods with large quantities of refined sugar for example. I think the main things of home cooking (processed foods processed in your home) is that you know what went into the process so it's easier to avoid the crap simply by not adding it to the recipe.

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