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Comment Re: I hate quantum computers. (Score 1) 55

And supposedly it is no faster than a real computer. What gives?

It's hard to say because it's all "secret sauce" (so everybody just plunks their heels down on some position rather than admit "I don't know") but one thing that's interesting to me is that a handful of blokes out of Canada appear to have built a computer that's about as fast as a Xeon that Intel needed a few billion dollars, thousands of people, and forty years experience to create.

And that was their first commercial version. Maybe somebody will rip one apart and find out it says "Xeon 2650" on the inside, but until that happens I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt because they seem to have at least one fairly remarkable accomplishment under their belts.

If the Google guys buy the upgrade, I'd be willing to bet five bucks that it's real, just very early in the development cycle still.

Comment Re:Why is the FCC involved? (Score 1) 54

Every bureaucracy tries to expand itself, you know that. Rather than actually get the bandwidth to schools that they need (200Kbps per student or so, ballpark) to support real telelearning, which is hard to do (but arguably within FCC purview), especially given the extensive number of rural schools, they lean towards something easy - buying access points, to hook up to their too-slow Internet link because every agency has to be seen "doing something".

Comment Re:Technically, it's not a "draft notice" (Score 1) 205

At the time of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution [wikipedia.org], 90% of American's supported deeper involvement.

At the time, the American people were being lied into supporting a war, so it's hard to take that number seriously as an indication of truth.

The Maddox fired on ghost ships (RADAR errors) and the Johnson administration explained it as "another attack", insisted the NVA fired first, and sold this as evidence of a pattern of aggressive behavior that had to be dealt with.

50,000 Americans died fighting a boogey man, and killed many more innocents than that. But the MIC profited handsomely, just as Eisenhower had predicted.

The NSA's report was only declassified after the Bush Administration lied Americans into war in 2003, but now we have two documented examples of being lied into war by the USG. It's no wonder that they didn't bother seeking any authorizations for any of the subsequent wars in the Middle East or Africa.

Comment Re:Bitcoin isn't money but it's still a financial (Score 1) 135

<i> I want to be responsible for my money, and I want to be able to use it freely, without government snooping.</i>

Use cash - it's like bitcoin but it can't be tracked across the Internet.

Of course, if you take cash from some people and then give it to other people, well then you must be a criminal.

Comment Re: Actually makes good sense (Score 5, Interesting) 702

Because nobody could ever hook up an ARM SBC to the LVDS connector on a 17" laptop and play a video to fake a boot sequence that would fool a telemarketer in purple gloves, leaving the rest of the case available for whatever can be molded into plastic.

Because TSA is there to protect us from imbicilic terrorists, even though 9/11 was orchestrated by degreed engineers, physicians, etc.?

Or just maybe it's not about terrorists but rather obedience conditioning, and they need a new rule once in a while to keep the people regressing (from presumption of Constitutional rights).

Only one of those hypotheses fits the data.

Comment Distance to Harm (Score 1) 206

I remember a few years ago when a big US university rejected Gmail because they could not ensure US-only storage of data and they had data -privacy concerns about the foreign governments (whoops).

At this point I don't really care if my data is in Belarussian hands because they cannot hurt me. Russians should likewise consider wanting to store their data ovetseas.

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