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Comment Re:Great! (Score 4, Insightful) 630

Exactly.

I'd say about a quarter of the kids I knew in school drew pictures of guns or tanks or other violent things.

Adam Lanza was also an honer student. While about 25% of kids draw weapons, only about 10% of kids are honor students. For higher specificity on their correlational targeting, they should arrest honor students.

Comment Re:Oracle? SPARC? (Score 4, Interesting) 98

Five years ago your comment would have made a lot of sense to me, but now you're talking about how everyone's gone X86 during the first massive movement away from X86 the industry's seen... smartphones and tablets are all computers that run on ARM processors, they're cleaning X86's clock in the only rapidly expanding market. And ARM's next core design is aimed at servers.

For the first time, Windows compatibility is mattering less and less as many users only use the web and web apps on their computers - opening the door to competing processors for the first time since the late 80's. At the same time, PC's continue to represent a smaller and smaller share of new CPU's, which are migrating to data centers, smartphones, and pads, which are even less dependent on X86 compatibility.

For the first time, the computational penalty of X86 instruction set translation for RISC cores may not outweigh the compatibility benefit for a significant portion of users. Increasingly, customers don't care about compatibility with existing X86 codebases. Like ARM, anyone with a new processor with compelling performance per watt might actually be able to sell the thing, without everyone assuming it's worthless if it won't run Windows.

Also, I wouldn't quite characterize POWER as a strictly legacy product, since IBM introduced the latest iteration, the power 7+, in August 2012, and is currently selling 15 different systems using Power7 processors. Not to mention the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii, and not-even-out-yet Wii U that are all POWER based systems.

Comment Re:Simple but effective (Score 1) 348

Dave's Insanity and it's many varieties are very effective. For a friend's birthday we just got him a bottle of Dave's 2012 Private Reserve ghost pepper sauce. At 650,000 scoville units, it's no slouch. Really hot. I got to try it, and while I apply it with a toothpick, the guy we gave it to will eat a couple of teaspoons of it with a meal.

I joke that next year for his birthday, we're just going to kick him in the teeth, it seems about as pleasant of a gift to most people.

Still, if you're just looking for pure, ludicrous, incapacitating heat, it goes way beyond anything Dave's Gourmet has made. The above, the hottest sauce ever by Dave's, is only about the 45th hottest on Scott Robert's list of hot sauces/extracts. Blair's owns the top of the list, selling things right up to pure capsaicin, 16 million scoville. More of a novelty than anything else.

Comment Re:Selll your stock. (Score 1) 398

That's a common theory, but Apple's P/E is 15.6. For context:
Microsoft: 15.4
IBM: 14.5
GE: 18.2
Walmart: 15.2
Toyota: 17.87

Do most of the biggest companies in the world also hold most of their value in the expectation of further rapid growth?

Apple makes unreal amounts of money. Their profitability increased so fast, it outpaced their stock value despite its growth. Early this year Marc Andreessen made the investment news pointing out that Apple's profits had so far outpaced their stock price that they had the P/E of a steel company that was about to go out of business.

Compared to other companies, their stock price is pretty much what one would expect it to be for a company that investors expect to stagnate right where it is.

Comment Re:I wouldn't (Score 3, Insightful) 265

You nailed it in pointing out that the current TLD system is already a "point of stupidity." The point of having different TLD's would be to allow otherwise identical URL's to be usefully differentiated by a TLD. In practice, this is very rarely the case. Most domain owners do not want otherwise identical domains at other TLD's, so they feel they need to register their domain at a bunch of TLD's and forward them. The nearly ubiquitous need to do this among major websites demonstrates that the whole idea is flawed. Most of the public only knows about ".com" and basically think that means "on the internet." Only a few geeks are even aware of what the TLD system was intended to accomplish.

The best answer to the TLD problem is to abandon it - grandfather it out. Stop adding new ones. They should do this by making the final period a non-special signifier in addresses. Anyone can pick anything they want and put any number of periods in their address they want. Every current address would still be unique and valid. But you can register new addresses with no TLD, just use whatever non-owned string makes the most sense for you. If you like TLD's and actually think they're useful, nothing's stopping you from registering new sites with a period followed by the three letters of any current TLD or any new one you want to make up. The process of handing out new addresses with no TLD fairly - you know, like "http://www.google," or "http://sex" would be a bit messy, but grandfathering out official TLD's would be the best system for the future internet.

This will never happen though, because there's too much money in selling new imaginary property with every new TLD they roll out. The majority of that money is not coming from people looking to take advantage of a new useful identifier, but from people looking to defend their identifier from others in the new domain - revealing the whole problem with the TLD sytem.

Comment Re:What do SEALs have to do with privacy? (Score 5, Insightful) 219

They may have any amount of legitimate expertise to contribute. Even if it's just on the business/managerial side of things and not the software/encryption side, not that that's necessarily the case.

But you know one big thing they contribute just by being there? This company will be accused of being anti-American, of "helping the terrorists win." There's nothing that will help inoculate them against that as much as having a couple of combat veterans as founders.

And to those who will say the presence of veterans means you can't trust this organization because they will provide a backdoor for the feds, the people in our armed forces hold a range of political opinions, they are not all clones. And there are a lot of them who agree with a libertarian or traditional conservative view of highly restricted government power and lots of freedom. A lot of people in the military are there to fight for our freedom, and that includes opposing the Orwellian encroachments of our own government.

Comment Re:Zero Because: (Score 1) 280

I added a $60 64GB OCZ SSD drive to my computer for just the OS and applications, and the speedup is amazing.

Twice now, things got crappy and I realized the thing was full because some idiotic program was writing out some inane 30GB cache file to it, and I had to fix the program to not do that or else redirect the cache file to my spinny HD's. Otherwise it's been great. Really fast, and I hardly ever hear my HD's spin up unless I'm working with large files.

Comment Re:Defense (Score 5, Insightful) 238

There's another option here. Think, what if you were a bomber who wanted to maximize the terror you could cause? How about get a good voice scrambler and an anonymous email account and then call and email in bomb threats through several layers of proxies, TOR, etc. They evacuate buildings, cause fear, lots of inconvenience. Keep sending the threats, just keep doing it over and over, more frequently, relentlessly, until they end up with no choice but to ignore you, after incalculable time and expense on the fake threats. Maybe for fear of liability for NOT evacuating for threats, they will go to extremes, but just keep sending them until they're disrupting half the class schedule if they have to... make them cancel major sporting events, whatever it takes to make your threats impossible NOT to ignore. THEN, once they're ignoring you, you actually blow some people up exactly when and where you called in a threat.

Then start up with the threats again, and now what do they do?

The idea that a real bomber won't call in the threat to maximize impact isn't valid, because this scenario involves calling in the threat, and maximizes fear over a random non-reported explosion.

For very few actual bombs, you will cause much more fear and inconvenience this way.

Comment Re:Does staring at a Computer Screen all day count (Score 5, Interesting) 149

Everybody in this thread - The natural 25-26 hour schedule is completely normal for most diurnal mammals. They've done research with humans giving them NO time queues for days, and it turns out EVERYBODY falls into a slightly over 24-hour schedule.

The conclusion here is that our chemical engines are too imprecise for us to evolve a dead-on circadian cycle. So instead evolution gave us an unaided circadian cycle that's calibrated with a mean of about 25 hours, so that people with a naturally extremely short cycle are still just over 24 hours, and it goes up from there. Then we get a natural reset cue to adjust the cycle every day to keep it in sync with the world. The primary component of the reset signal is sunlight exposure in the morning. If you get up at a reasonable time (near or after sunrise) and GET OUTDOORS for about 15 minutes, then you will feel like going to bed at the right time to get enough sleep and want to get up at about the same time the next day. We and our ancestors spent tens of millions of years with no choice but to receive natural light in the morning, so it was a pretty good system before we evolved to live in our parent's basements and stare at little screens all day.

I suffer big time from this - every day I want to stay up and get up about an hour or so later than I did the day before - but not if I'm spending much time outdoors, especially in the morning. When I'm backpacking, wholly cow do I just want to go to bed when it gets dark, and get up just after sunrise. If we spent the day exercising outdoors like evolution intended, we wouldn't have this problem... but good luck being able to/wanting to do that all the time. But if you just drag yourself out of bed and take a 15 minute walk outdoors, even if it's cloudy or right around sunrise, problem solved. It does get tricky if you have to be at work before sunrise. Or if you work night shift (which I did for about 2 years) you're just *'ed.

I think the light exposure causes melanin production on about a 14 hour delay, making us want top go to sleep about 16 hours after exposure. This is why melanin supplements near bedtime are somewhat functional as a surrogate for actual light exposure in the morning.

Or as an alternate solution, since the day gets longer by about 1.7 milliseconds per century, by my calculations you could just wait about 200 million years for the earth to get in sync with your natural clock.

Comment Re:Ubuntu is Linux for Hipsters (Score 3, Interesting) 155

I've been saying that this is where Apple's going for a while. Either the iPhone 5 or the one after it will only have a Thunderbolt port, no other dock connector (the Thunderbolt port can take a USB2 or Firewire to Thunderbolt cable for everyone with old computers/pc's and all.) And I be that after Mountain Lion, about two years from now, iOS and OSX will merge into one OS. The OS will know what hardware it's on and provide an appropriate user interface.

Phones will have all the power and storage most users need for everything they do. All many people will need is their iPhone and docking monitor, and the phone will behave like a phone when it's not docked, and like a computer when it is docked. At that point, yes it will cannibalize their PC sales, but the writing has been on the wall for PC sales since before the PC as we know it was even invented -since 1965 when Gordan Moore formulated his law. It's been inevitable that all the computing power and storage the average user needs will eventually be cheap and tiny, it's just amazing how long we've managed to come up with higher needs for power and storage space. But for the past 10 years usage requirements haven't kept pace with progress. Lower and lower end machines increasingly handle everything most users do. Apple is a smart enough company that they'd rather cannibalize their own sales and be the market leader in something than hold back on selling an inevitable progression for fear of cannibalization, like Kodak.

I wish Ubuntu luck with being first to market here, but I think it's a little early (not quite enough power and memory in this generation phone to be a good desktop), not a complete solution (this doesn't let you run the monitor off the phone and replace the guts of the computer entirely, it just lets you use a desktop interface for the phone when it's docked to a computer), and probably not going to be hugely successful.

Comment Re:Are you crazy?!? (Score 4, Interesting) 184

Snow White (1937), Fantasia (1940), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), Song of the South (1946), Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Robin Hood (1952), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Mulan (1998), Sleeping Beauty (1959), 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Sword in the Stone (1963), The Jungle Book (1967).

Steamboat Willie, Mickey Mouse's first success, was a parody of Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill.

And this entire comment is taken from Lawrence Lessig's work Free Culture, let's hope he doesn't issue a DMCA takedown notice for this comment ;)

Comment Re:Resolution (Score 1) 60

I used some of the nicest CRT's ever made - Noxia 445xi, Sony GDM-FW900 - and they're great and all, but LCD's are better now if you actually buy a good one. Yes, TN film is just cheap and crappy - though good enough for most people's web browsing at lower power use and much less space that a CRT. But if you just buy a nice LCD - I'm on a Dell U3011 - it's sharper, bigger, higher resolution, faster and has wider color gamut than any CRT I've ever seen. Plus it still takes less power and less space. And you don't need to re-profile it every month. And you don't have to watch the contrast ratio fall each month after it gets to be six years old like heavily used CRT's do.

The only thing I can find not to like is that the stand sticks out in front of the display (to stop it from falling over forward since it's so thin, not a problem with an 85 lb 20" deep CRT) so I can't put my keyboard as close to the screen as I like it.

Comment Re:Adobe complaining about bloat? (Score 1) 477

I built a new middle-end system a couple of weeks ago - i5 2500k processor, $60 60GB solid state drive just for the OS and aps, regular cheap slow drives for everything else. Total system build about $800.

Photoshop CS5 launches in under 2 seconds. Illustrator is about the same. So while Adobe and the Creative Suite apps have a history of long load times where you stare at splash screens until you've memorized the names of the developers so you can punch one if you see them, with a new machine and new apps, it's nearly instant.

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