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Comment Nuclear only sustainable for 5B years (Score 2) 964

The problem with nuclear, besides technical safety factors which we can overcome by not being stupid and putting backup generators and pumps in a sub-basement in a tsunami zone, is that its not "sustainable" - we can only scrape enough fissionable material off the Earth and from sea-water to last 5B years. Oh wait, the Sun will red-giant an burn the Earth up in about 5B years... Maybe it is sustainable if we develop some good solar cells by then - and solar shields...

Comment Its called a SWATS detector. (Score 5, Interesting) 257

Its called the Soldier Wearable Acoustic Targeting System (SWATS) - and as a former Army Ranger (and a current QinetiQ employee) - I can tell you its a very cool and useful item. Bullets can whiz by you without you knowing where they came from. This little device at least gives you an estimate based on the sonic shockwave and gives you a heads up as to where a shooter might be. Not super high-tech, but super-useful if you're being shot at.

Comment Re:The pen[cil] is mightier than the sword! (Score 1) 426

Japan has a homicide rate of 1.1 murder per 100,000 compared to the USA of 8.7 per 100,00 - far less murder and mayhem. We average about 11 firearm deaths per 100,00 (accidents account for much of this) while Japan averages less than 1 death per 100,00. We're leading in homicides and firearm death - USA! USA! USA! Now about pencils, kids don't seem to have a big problem there... lets start with reducing the guns freely available.

Comment Its a bad trend (Score 1) 2

If you're not sure where these trends are going, see my analysis slide here: http://photos-b.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak-snc1/v4737/98/32/1489056585/n1489056585_30373265_1693711.jpg IPv6 transition is going too slow, so we are going to have many painful bandaids, like NAT in Carrier Cores, trading and splitting large address blocks, and other fixes that will lower QOS and raise operational expenditure (OPEX) for the Internet - and especially the Internet Service Providers who have been operating a slim margins for some time. How do you avoid this? Deploy IPv6 for your perimeter services and outward facing systems (www server, ecommerce servers, external application servers, VPN, DNS, etc) now and get your IPv6 security in place. This is what Google has done now. In 2012 when this becomes an issue, you can enable IPv6 to your desktop users and hopefully, if anyone besides you and Google has their external services ready, you can see everyone elses external IPv6 services!!!

Comment Quick, spend money - China is going to get us! (Score 1) 347

It's about time that we upgrade the old Internet from the late 1970s designed ARPANET standards of TCP/IPv4. Just as we uprgaded from NCP to IPv4 in the late 70s to early 80s. We need a more powerful and flexible network paradigm to simplify creation of new innovative software. Sure, we have lots of patches and backfixes to IPv4 to make a decent client server model, but true secure peer-to-peer and scalable mobility are a too hard to achieve in the V4 model.

This article was written by tech guys trying to scare our China obsessed politicians into upgrading our infrastructure. It's terrible to see what it actually takes to motivate Washington. It's not a sound technical discussion by Internet engineers, but a bunch of "China is going to get you" scary stuff that gets the crowd running Washington these days to get off their butt and do something.

Comment Re:hmm? (Score 1) 36

SLED 10 is to OpenSuSE 10.1 as NLD9 was to SuSE Pro 9. The primary difference is the long release cycles and longer support cycles for the Enterprise version. OpenSuSE these days is basically becoming the proving ground for future SLES/SLED releases.

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