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Comment to be fair..charities not supposed to be political (Score 1) 116

I dislike Harper as much as most of us, but to be fair it has always been the case that charitable organizations were not supposed to engage in significant amounts of political activities.

Yes, many of them (of all political stripes) have been doing just that for quite a while, but the law has been on the books for a long time (just not enforced very strictly).

Comment lockless multithreaded not exactly common (Score 1) 85

It should be noted that most programmers will never write or directly use a lockless multithreaded algorithm. The number of things on a phone or tablet that need (or even would benefit significantly from) such an algorithm is relatively small.

Most of the time I suspect that the various cores on a mobile device are doing independent things. The percentage of time that the average phone/tablet is going to be doing massively parallel cpu-bound work is tiny.

Comment virtual machines (Score 2) 118

I'm writing this on a Dell Latitude with 16GB of RAM. I'd like twice as much. I do OpenStack development and regularly run a couple of controller nodes and a couple of compute nodes. That uses pretty much all of my RAM.

I'd like to be able to simulate a couple of storage nodes as well, and I'd like to be able to have multiple NUMA nodes per compute node to test out the code for simulating NUMA in the OpenStack guest instances.

Comment harder to read if there is no consistency (Score 1) 220

Generally speaking each project has a coding style that most code in the project adheres to, for the simple reason that it's easier to maintain when the code all looks more-or-less similar.

If one area uses lowercase with underscores, and the other area uses CamelCase, and one area typedefs the heck out of everything while the other is explicit, then for someone coming in and trying to understand the code it makes it harder than necessary to figure out what's going on.

So if you look at the linux kernel, or glibc, or firefox, or Chrome, or any other similarly large project, there will be some sort of coding style that applies. This is not to say that the style applies blindly. For example there are areas in the kernel where they basically imported a driver that is written in a different coding style. Since that driver is maintained out of the linux kernel tree and is largely self-contained, that was deemed to be acceptable. And even in that case, the driver used an internally-consistent coding style for all the files involved.

Comment disagree (Score 1) 236

The most powerful IED that could be transported by a recreational drone would be one carrying a model rocket engine. These contain PETN solid fuel, which is a high explosive. With clever design, this solid fuel engine could be used to make a small explosion. The problem? This would be at most enough to damage a few windows, and maybe maim somebody at point blank range.

What's "recreational" in this context?

The M18A1Claymore mine weighs under 4lbs and fires roughly seven hundred steel pellets like a shotgun. The proposed Amazon Prime Air drones could carry a bit over 5 lbs, so could easily mount a Claymore.

Comment movie stars too... (Score 1) 236

Apparently there is a company doing booming business selling drone detection systems to movie stars and other famous people. Gives them enough warning to cover up or go inside.

So anyone with money can get drone detection already. Drone destruction might be another story...though I wouldn't be surprised if that comes eventually too.

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