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Comment Re:Friends have better gear (Score 1) 201

The most interesting astronomy gear I've seen the results of recently are from a Pentax digital SLR camera that does image stabilization by moving the sensor, and has a GPS in it. Apparently there's a mode you can use to tell it to track the sky for a really long exposure, so my friend who had it was able to take some good galaxy pictures.

Does your friend post any of these pictures? I'd love to see some.

Comment Re:Money (Score 1) 211

The difference is that the antenna isn't on land that you own or lease.

(ipso facto) why does the location of the antenna matter if you are paying a local for that service? what supersedes your ability to find someone that has better reception? especially that this service is _only_ given to others from the same locale (who may not be able to get good reception)?

Comment Re:Custom Builds (Score 3, Insightful) 564

After friends/relatives/neighbors wanted me to work on their pos dell/gateway/emachines/sony.. I talked most of them into building one for their next upgrade instead of going back to shit companys who won't support you anyway unless you pay. alot.

Most of them went for the custom machine easy. Half the price. Better preformance. No crapware on top. And if i have to 'support' them. I don't want to do it for shitty machines. I built more than a few of them for people too. $50.. an hour of my time picking parts. an hour assembling and installing windows. $25 an hour for something i enjoy doing. Everyones happy and it ends up alot less work and downtime/problems for everyone in the future.

You sound like me ten year ago. I know everyone is different, but get out while you can. If you get more friends and family coming to you, you'll find more and more things breaking, more problems coming up, with expectations that your weekends are no longer yours. And more often than not, over time, these same friends and family will begin expecting you to just fix it, and may even get rude or cause you issues if you expect much more than a "Thank You! Till next time I my smoking causes my GPU to fail due to the dust gunk that caked over the heatsink causing it to overheat for the last few months". And somehow, again over time, they'll come to blame you for these problems that you should have been able to warn them about or prevent. I still assist close friends with anything I can help them with, because they aren't assholes, but some "friends" and definitely some family will take advantage of you. If you feel the desire to pursue this line of work, find a way to do it professionally, and only deal with customers.

Comment Re:this is like (Score 1) 397

Actually...Netflix does quite a lot of research.

Indeed. If you are unaware of Chaos Monkey or the Simian Army, look it up. I've nothing but respect how they've effectively eliminated single points of failure in their environment.

I've heard stories of their dev/qa system that is equally awesome, that allows for rapid code development, regression testing, and deployment into live systems, thousands of times a day.

Comment Re:Lol@fads. (Score 1) 213

How do you turn those coins into money? All the online credit card things accepted by mtgrox or something like that look like russian scam sites.

You trade them on an exchange, like vircurex.com or others. You send your coins into the exchange and trade them for bitcoins (or litecoins if the exchange does that).

Now you take your bitcoins to some place like localbitcoins.com and find someone willing to send you $$$ for them. You find a buyer on the site, for me I find someone that'll do cash deposits into my bank, once you post the sell your bitcoins go into escrow. The buyer then confirms they can do the trade, at which point your bitcoin gets locked into escrow until you release it. The buyer then walks into a branch of your bank and deposits cash to your bank acct #. You validate you see the money hitting your account and then release the bitcoin from escrow.

It is amazing that people will walk into your banks branch and give you hundreds of dollars for fractions of a bitcoin.

The Internet

Time For a Warrant Canary Metatag? 332

An anonymous reader writes "With the advent of national security letters and all the NSA issues of late perhaps the web needs to implement a warrant 'warrant canary' metatag. Something like this: <meta name="canary" content="2013-11-17" />. With this it would be possible to build into browsers or browser extensions a means of alerting users when a company has in fact received such a secret warrant. (Similar to the actions taken by Apple recently.) The advantage the metatag approach would have its that it would not require the user to search out a report by the company in question but would show the information upon loading of the page. Once the canary metatag was not found or when the date of the canary grows older than a given date a warning could be raised. Several others have proposed similar approaches including Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic and Cory Doctorow's Dead Man's Switch." What problems do you see with this approach?

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