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Comment Re:Ha (Score 1) 391

I remember a time when Sony was a maker of quality consumer electronics. They were usually more expensive than the competition, but usually better made as well. Then at some point in the '90s they sort of followed Bose down the path of compromising engineering and quality for marketing more and more while keeping their prices the same. Since the death of the CRT and Discman I can't think of a Sony product I've been able to comfortably recommend over its competition for it's primary purpose.

The PS2 and PS3 both had a time where they were a great choice if you wanted a player for their respective movie formats before the ultra-cheap players hit the market, but I'd never recommend either as a game console unless you are tied to the platform by exclusive games or more of your friends you want to play with having one.

Comment Re:huh? (Score 1) 300

I think the main reason supersonic passenger flights are unlikely to make a return is what you're using right now. The internet has eliminated a lot of the business cases where such things could actually be justified rather than just being a novelty/luxury. It used to actually matter that you could wake up in New York, have a meeting in London, and be back home in time for dinner. Now most situations that would have previously required such things can be done over a videoconference and a few emails.

Yeah there are still a few situations where getting a person or airplane-carryable thing across the ocean in three hours is worth the extra cost, but for the most part Concorde was down to the novelty by the 2000s. Those who cared about luxury would more likely be on a jumbo with the semiprivate or private seat/suite arrangements and those who cared about speed were making things happen digitally.

Comment Re:Wall Street Precedent (Score 1) 182

When a Wall Street program loses money for the owners, they eat it.

Not always...

http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/0...
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a040...

Not saying this is common, Knight provides a good example in the other direction and I honestly don't care enough about the markets to know of anything that didn't make national news, just that it seems it depends on the situation.

If I fuck up and code a program that goes out and buys or trades and buys illegal shit, then it's my fault for being stupid.

Legally of course this depends on the jurisdiction, IANAL. Morally I believe this is very grey area and depends primarily on intent. Obviously it's sort of hard to judge intent in most cases, though in this case unleashing it specifically on a "Dark Web" type site does imply at least some knowledge that it'll happen these days.

Then again I have to imagine part of the point of this exhibit was to counter that assumption, that all these sites are good for are illegal things.

By displaying them in such a conspicuous location also changes things compared to if one had tried to use "the computer did it" as an excuse when caught with the same things in their home.

Basically it's probably legally wrong, but I'd have a hard time being convinced that they should actually be punished for it.

Or let's put it this way, I code a program that looks for and downloads kiddie porn. Cops nab me and I just say, "Oopsie. The robot did it, not me!" So, I should get off...I mean let go?

Again depends on the context and the intent. If you wrote a bot that went out looking for anything it thinks is porn to display automatically in an art installation and it happened to come across kiddie porn, it'd certainly be illegal in a lot of jurisdictions. That said, due to the context of displaying the results of a search automatically as art I'd still be unconvinced that punishment is appropriate. The same excuse deployed by someone caught with a collection of images on their own machine should get laughed out of court and them right in to jail.

Comment Re:The wireless router is the bottleneck. (Score 1) 110

A PC Engines APU1C can "route" (NAT/gateway) around 6-700mbit/sec with pfSense on a 1GHz AMD A-series CPU with no hardware acceleration. That's nothing, hardware-wise. It has Realtek network cards which aren't great from a performance standpoint. I don't disagree that 10G+ service is going to take a fair bit of hardware compared to average home "router" hardware, but that's because those boxes are trash for the most part.

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