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Comment Re:It's good to be the charity (Score 1) 34

in 2013, the selected charity siphoned (heh) off about $10M from a $35M cash flow for "operations", of which 70% went for the salaries of 67 people. That's about $100K per person...not bad for a...er..."nonprofit."

Where did you get the idea that "nonprofit" means, "we don't pay our employees"? Or, "we pay our employees shit"?

It's as dumb as thinking "for-profit" means, "we pay all of our employees well".

Harvard University is a non-profit, and last I checked, they're paying their professors pretty well. Rush Presbyterian hospital is a non-profit, but the head of surgery probably makes more than minimum wage.

Comment Re:Public Shaming the Red Chinese ? (Score 2) 52

And even with the 'cannon' in China, do we know who lit the fuse?

Almost certainly the same people who arranged for NXDOMAIN on github.com a few weeks back. They really hate that there are open source anti-censorship tools on there.

They had to stop breaking DNS for github since most of China's Internet developers couldn't get any work done anymore.

That Chinese developers are freely using a California hosting service which has benefits to everybody in the world, and everybody recognizes that the "damage" here is government, it actually gives me a bit of hope. People do prefer to cooperate on all things, until a few sociopaths get a set of keys.

Comment Nightshades (Score 2) 104

So that's why I see bumble bees trying really goddamn hard to try to crawl inside of the little blossoms on my pepper plants* that they totally don't fit inside of at all.

It reminds me of myself, shaking down the couch for change for tobacco money before ATMs and credit cards became commonplace. Or rather, groping for the cigarette at the bottom of the recliner that I can see with a flashlight, but can't reach at all without looking like a monkey fucking a football and even then it isn't easy.

Or, as Rammstein said, "like an elephant in the eye of the needle." Whatever, you get my point.

*: Pepper plants, as all nightshades, produce nicotine in their foliage and presumably their flowers.

Comment Re:clickbait headline.... (Score 3, Interesting) 31

Basically what a cell signal already does when a user moves between towers, but Over The Internet. So probably already patented by 30 different companies.

This is why I would love to see a cheap data only service. There is no reason for smartphones to have dedicated voice/text service when it could all be taken care of by a data connection and a VoIP provider.

This is why cheap data service can't exist right now.

Someone has to build the towers, string the cables, install the radios and antennas. Someone has to change the oil in the genset, and (depending) rotate out the diesel. Someone has to maintain the aircraft warning lamp. Someone has to handle ESD (lightning) damage. And still, someone has to deal with farmers and their backhoes.

And mitigate interference and overlap issues. And deal with routing issues. And. And. And.

There's no way for a data service to be cheap: With modern codecs, voice (which is much, much better than my first digital/non-AMPS cell phone) already uses very little data, and Youtube uses lots. Which is why unlimited voice/text service is cheap, and genuinely unlimited data is like a hen's tooth.

I used to get consistently better bandwidth with my OG Droid on genuinely-unlimited 3G than on any public hotspot, so when I was stuck in one place for awhile (selling/"donating" blood plasma, for instance) I'd just stream Netflix over 3G instead of using Biolife's carrier-grade TDM-sourced Wifi.

But in doing so I knew that I was squandering a limited resource: Actual bandwidth, aka spectral capacity.

And the only way to increase that total available bandwidth is to have more towers with smaller footprints AND maybe an institution of like-minded people who securely open up their home routers for the world to use (didn't Vodaphone do this on the other side of the pond?).

But the first case involves lots of money (see above), and the second case involves cooperation and trust and hardware that is smart enough to configure itself to deal with interference mitigation autonomously.

Both concepts can have traction and will work with existing technology, though the latter will fall apart with non-stationary users since there's a -lot- to be desired in a given Wifi client device's ability to handle roaming between multiple disparate networks.

Comment Re: Unity next (Score 1) 494

One Debian unstable breakage due to systemd is understandable.

Two Debian unstable breakages due to systemd is disgraceful.

A Debian unstable installation that will likely not boot properly after each update due to systemd, month after month, is unacceptable.

Unacceptable according to whom? The description says:

'"sid" is subject to massive changes and in-place library updates. This can result in a very "unstable" system which contains packages that cannot be installed due to missing libraries, dependencies that cannot be fulfilled etc. Use it at your own risk!'

Comment Re:privacy? (Score 1) 276

The cost would seem proportional to the users.

Of course. Did you not see in my sample calculation "$3.5M given 1M users"?

However, the economies do not scale linearly. You make an investment in infrastructure, and it's good up to X users. Then you make another investment, it's good up to X times 10 users. Etc. In practice it's mostly a step function, not a straight line.

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