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Comment Santrex sells bittorrent seedboxes (Score 2, Insightful) 106

This is funny because Santrex itself sells bittorent hosting services called "seedboxes". What purpose do they think seedboxes serve other than sharing copyrighted material? I know, there are many legitimate uses for bittorrent, but I have a feeling that the kind of people in the market for anonymous bittorrent seedboxes are not the kind of people who are seeding legitimate torrents.

Comment Not a bad idea, but probably won't work anyways (Score 1) 306

For those complaining about the technical aspects of this proposal, obviously anyone who views the image before the expiration date can save it forever. The point is that after the expiration date, no new people can download the image if they haven't already. Think about your potential employer downloading drunken pictures of your from a frat party 10 years ago. This scheme would prevent that.

Now the fact that this requires a 3rd party plugin to work is problematic. It creates a bottleneck, an extra point of failure, and it suffers from the chicken and egg problem -- nobody will want to post x-pire pictures if their friends can't view them without a plugin, and nobody will install the plugin because they don't need it to see the other 99% of pictures people post.

Comment Re:Kernel locking (Score 4, Informative) 135

The BKL was a hack added in Linux 2.0 to support multiprocessor machines. It was ugly but expedient (like most engineering solutions). Over time, multiprocessor support in the kernel has gotten much better, and the BKL has become less important, up until now when it's so unimportant it can be removed entirely.

Nobody, especially not desktop users, will notice any change from its removal.

Comment Re:Kernel locking (Score 4, Insightful) 135

For those that aren't aware, the BKL (big kernel lock) hasn't caused any issues except purist angst for a very long time now. All of the performance critical kernel code was fixed to use fine grained locking years ago. This change is just to satisfy the people who are offended by the architectural ugliness of the BKL. In terms of performance and everything else that matters, the removal of the BKL has absolutely no impact.

Comment Re:its important to keep in mind (Score 1) 349

For Iran to do what you propose would require that they had a large workforce of highly skilled IT people who are both willing to work for the Iranian government and considered trustworthy by the Iranian government. Iran is not exactly known for its leading edge science and technology. The article itself states that IT in Iran is abyssmal. They may be well advised to try to do as you say, but they probably can't.

Comment Re:Jury duty letters get sent to my childhood addr (Score 1) 191

I served on a jury in Wake County (NC) and my experience was the opposite. To a person all 14 of us were college educated and about half the jurors had higher than college level education. The only people who were excused were people with ties to law enforcement and people who had been on the receiving end of law enforcement in the past.

Comment TED (Score 4, Informative) 172

I use TED. It's right around your price range. It monitors whole-house power usage in real time and has a USB-Serial interface which you can easily suck data out of with Python script. I personally do all the data logging on a Linux box and export it through a web interface.

Comment Multiple antennas (Score 1) 105

They can take advantage of multiple antennas, directional antenntas, or both to lock onto the interference sources as well as the intended signal and use DSP to subtract out the noise and recover the original signal. Others have posted about how cellphones can take advantage of multipath interference to actually improve the received signal rather than degrade it. As long as the enemy is using a small number of stationary or slow-moving transmitters for their interference, you can locate them all and use DSP to remove the noise, OR if you can arrange for your signal to arrive from a different direction than the enemy's jamming just use a directional antenna. It would get more difficult if the enemy had hundreds of jamming transmitters moving around and covering your receiver from all directions. In the case of jamming a drone, your enemy would need either space-based jammers or airborne jammers to cover you from above. Space based jammers are impractical though (because of the distance) and airborne jammers are laughably easy to shoot down. It seems to me that the simple solution is to deliver your signals from above (satellites), use a directional antenna to ignore noise coming up from the ground, and then shoot anything out of the sky that makes noise which interferes with your signal.

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