You can be a lot more subtle - tell them that your host is xbcd.com

I always keep an "atashi" or "eg" subdomain on my sites configured thusly ;)

Um... read the paper, page 10.....

Voltron [33] is a language designed for distributed mobile sensing. Voltron allows the developer to specify the logic to be executed at several locations, without having to dictate how the robots must coordinate to achieve the objectives...

Why did you create a brand new programming language rather than just a library? I looked at the examples and I don't see any functionality in there that can't just as easily be accomplished with current programming languages and a simple library.

The Technican Element 3 test wasn't more difficult than the Novice Element 1 and 2 together, so Technican became the lowest license class when they stopped having to take Element 1.

The change to 13 WPM was in 1936, and was specifically to reduce the number of Amateur applicants. It was 10 WPM before that. ARRL asked for 12.5 WPM in their filing, FCC rounded the number because they felt it would be difficult to set 12.5 on the Instructograph and other equipment available for code practice at the time.

It was meant to keep otherwise-worthy hams out of the hobby. And then we let that requirement keep going for 60 years.

The Indianapolis cop episode was back in 2009. It wasn't the first time we've had intruders, and won't be the last, and if you have to reach back that long for an example, the situation can't be that bad. It had nothing to do with code rules or NGOs getting their operators licenses.

A satphone is less expensive than a trained HF operator. Iridium costs $30 per month and $0.89 per minute to call another Iridium phone. That's the over-the-counter rate. Government agencies get a better rate than that. And the phone costs $1100, again that's retail not the government rate, less than an HF rig with antenna and tower will cost any public agency to install.

You think it's a big deal to lobby against paid operators because there will be objections? How difficult do you think it was to reform the code regulations? Don't you think there were lots of opposing comments?

And you don't care about young people getting into Amateur Radio. That's non-survival thinking.

Fortunately, when the real hams go to get something done, folks like you aren't hard to fight, because you don't really do much other than whine and send in the occassional FCC comment. Do you know I even spoke in Iceland when I was lobbying against the code rules? Their IARU vote had the same power as that of the U.S., and half of the hams in the country came to see me. That's how you make real change.

Google should interpret Universal's request to delist "127.0.0.1" as "We want you to delist us" and promptly oblige ;)

127.0.0.1 is clearly unresponsible to DMCA takedown efforts; legal approaches simply won't suffice. I recommend that Universal Pictures launch a coordinated effort hack into it using as many computers as possible, gain root access, and write over its hard drive.

That actually doesn't sound that bad:

"For example both alcohol (ethanol) and water produce large peaks on an IR spectrum and from the video it would seem that the user provides some background data on what the sample is via the app, so that saves a lot of work. It would be easy for the algorithm to say, 'the user says this is drink and I can see that about 40 per cent of the total spectrum is ethanol so I should give a reading of alcoholic beverage with 40 per cent alcohol content'. Or 'this is a plant and 70 per cent of the spectrum is water so it must be 70 per cent hydrated'. This could also be done with total sugar content for common sugars such as sucrose and fructose," he said.

"Similarly, it would be possible to get a spectrum good enough to recognise something like fruit or Tylenol and then send back generic data (easily found via Google)

That would hardly be useless. I presume that the person knows whether what they're looking at is a fruit or an alcoholic beverage. It's not a big deal to ask the user to do whatever degree of categorization that they can to help it out. And being able to pick out common drugs? Definitely not useless.

Thanks for your insights. Still trying to decide whether something like this should go on my wish list ;) (see above for my potential uses).

How accurate, exactly, do you think such a device could be? Obviously it's not going to be pulling out the sort of precision of a professional spectrometer. But you mention, for example, being able to identify the signatures of herbicides and pesticides. Do you mean, for example, "This contains imidacloprid", or more like, "This contains a nicotinoid of some variety"?

How useful do you think it could be on identifying mineral species - say, distinguishing between different zeolites? Or, back to food, if given, say, a mango, to get readings of, say, water, sugar (in general, or specific sugars), fat (in general, or specific categories of fats, or specific fats), protein (in general, or specific categories of proteins, or specific common protiens... obviously it's not going to be able to pull out 5 ppb of Some-Complex-Unique-Protein), common vitamins (generally found in dozens of ppm quantity - some more, some less), minerals (likewise), etc?

Smartphones are still drastically slower than individual PCs, let alone cloud services.

I know they're overstating the case, and that it's a near-IR spectrometer, not a mass spectrometer. That said, I still like the general concept. Does anyone know whether near-IR spectroscopy can be used for identifying mineral species (for example, between different types of zeolites and the like)? I love rock hunting but many species have similar visual appearances.

And even on the food standpoint I find it interesting... I'm a tropical plant nut, and lots of people I know over on the forum breed unusual varieties of common fruits as well as rare fruits (some of which don't even have scientific names). It's be neat to be able to get a basic compositional profile - no, not "this fruit contains X ppb of this gigantic-complex-unique-protein", but just the major constituents. It'd help, for example, the mango breeders to know if their fruits are compositionally different from the fruit of the parent cultivar.

Because I'd rather listen to someone that didn't have the parents to hand them $200k to start a game dev studio.

I wonder how many new Slashdot accounts were created from her Twitter whining and suddenly got mod points.

That or Dice decided to pull a Reddit and just hide them so they didn't appear "unfriendly to women in industry".

And right now I'd like to point out that Randi Lee Harper is speaking at OSCON this weekend.

TL;DR: A large and prominent tech conference (3.5K attendees) run by O'Reilly Media and sponsored by major tech companies is presenting Randi as an "anti-harassment" activist. When evidence of her track record of abuse and harassment was brought to the attention of the conference organizers last month, they publicly dismissed those contacting them about her as "trolls".

WHY THIS MATTERS: This is by far the biggest venue Randi has ever appeared in and the deception that she and the conference organizers are engaged in is shameful. If enough of us post evidence of who Randi really is to the #OSCON tag, there's a very good chance that future conference organizers (and their sponsors) will think twice before embarrassing themselves by giving Randi a platform.

DETAILS:

Although #OSCON was notified of Randi's antics when news of her speaking engagement became public last month, they chose to ignore the evidence, instead of taking seriously their obligation to their attendee's well-being. Adding insult to injury, a statement by @joshsimmons dismissed those who had raised concerns as "trolls":

http://www.oscon.com/open-sour...

They followed this statement up with a fawning "interview" in their online magazine in which they didn't ask Randi a single question about her atrocious behavior:

http://opensource.com/life/15/...

The conference starts today (Wednesday) and runs until Friday. Detailed information including the list of sponsors, can be found at http://www.oscon.com./

Details about Randi's talk can be found here: http://www.oscon.com/open-sour....

Here are some links to some resources about Randi's misbehavior, such as Milo's just concluded series of articles, Ralph's followup, and Stephanie Greene's series from a few months ago. Please post links to other resources, such as blogs, articles, images, etc., which you think are worth posting to the #OSCON hashtag, in the comments.

http://www.breitbart.com/londo...

http://www.breitbart.com/big-j...

http://www.breitbart.com/big-h...

http://www.breitbart.com/big-j...

http://theralphretort.com/pill...

http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/hi...

http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/th...

http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/th...

http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/bl...

http://theralphretort.com/prol...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kotak...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kotak...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kotak...

Most recent #OSCON tweets:

https://twitter.com/search?q=%...

Yep, there are a lot of flashing lights and beeps sending code in the computer world. I still hear phones using "... -- ..." to indicate an incoming SMS.

OpenSSL has first-to-market advantage, and anyone who hasn't evaluated the quality differences will choose the simpler license. Plus there are other alternatives, like Amazon's new SSL-in-5000-lines which is also gift-licensed.

The time for OpenSSL to dual-license was when it was the only available alternative to entirely proprietary implementations. That might indeed have funded a quality improvement.

I don't know a thing about the quality of GnuTLS or the Amazon thing. I've seen enough of the insides of OpenSSL to know it's not pretty, but am not a crypto guy and this don't work on it.