Posts by GBE 569 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Sep 2010
'there are no language and educational barriers"
I'm not so sure about that. I went to dinner with a bunch of people during a world-wide sales organization meeting at a corporate headquarters in Minnesota (which is where I'm from). I could understand the folks from South America, Europe and Asia a lot better than I could understand some of the folks from Louisiana.
"All this is already ancient news"
That was my reaction. We've known they are attacted to CO2 for ages. That's why people buy propane powered CO2 generaters to put in the far corner of the back yard to draw the mosquitos into traps.
http://www.amazon.com/Mosquito-Magnet-MM4100-Patriot-Trap/dp/B002RMBDIM/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
I've been a Niel Young fan for decades, but he's just plain fooling himself if he thinks AM radio sounded better than even the lowest bit-rate streaming services.
A good song is still a good song regardless of the audio quality.
And a bad song is still a bad song -- even with a lossless megabit-per-second codec hooked up to thousands of dollars worth of amps and speakers.
Just write good songs, Niel. If they're worth listening to, they're still worth listening to through via a 9-transister AM radio with a 2" speaker or via an 32Kbps lossy codec.
I don't understand the refereneces to the wet winter and heavy rains. Isn't the barrier _downstream_ from London in order to defend against high tides and storm surge? In order to defend against heavy rains, it would have to be upstream from London to hold back the rainwater that's coming down the river.
"something was expecting standard US units of inches per day"
No, it's changed, the standard is now furlongs per fortnight. It's much more poetic.
$ units
Currency exchange rates from www.timegenie.com on 2014-04-02
2866 units, 109 prefixes, 79 nonlinear units
You have: 1 inch/day
You want: furlong/fortnight
* 0.0017676768
/ 565.71429
You have:
One of the units supported by a liquid flow controller for which I wrote the firmware was acre-feet per fortnight. OK, though it rolls of the tongue in a lovely manner, it didn't make much sense for the size of the controller and the industry for which it was targetted. But that unit actually does make sense to somebody managing a reservoir.
Just be cause it was "honored" in parts of the US don't mean it isn't a symbol of bigotry, ignorance, hatred, racism, and slavery. It should have been hidden in shame 150 years ago. They're just a bit slow in some of those southern states. The Southern Baptist church only officially renounced its pro-slavery position in 1995. Yes that's a NINETEEN. They split with the rest of the Baptist church in the US when the rest of the church came out against slavery.]
From the article: "Boffins have developed a biodegradable semiconductor chip made almost entirely of wood."
Except that according to what I've read, the chip is still made of GaAs or Silicon or whatever it used to be made of. It's only the substrate on which the chip is mounted that is made of cellulose and epoxy.
I'm just glad that (for once) a story like this is about somebody who isn't from the US.
Having said that, I suppose karma is going to smack me upside my head with the revelation that this ignoramus was born and raised in Florida, or Texas, or Arkansas or somewhere like that....
Mostly it translates to
"Wooops! Sorry folks, some of your money's gone."
If you read up on goodwill (the accounting term) in wikipedia, there's a pretty good description. It basically means you paid X for something, and it was only worth Y (where X > Y). In order for the books to balance, when you spend X amount of cash, you've got to put X worth of assets onto the books. If what you bought is only worth Y, then you also put (X-Y) worth of "goodwill" onto the books. Or something like that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_%28accounting%29
"Not mentioned however was the fact that the mission was using a Russian designed and made Atlas V rocket"
I call bollocks. The Atlas-V was designed and built by Lockheed-Martin in the US.
The RD-180 first stage booster engine currently used on the Atlas-V is Russian. I don't think that makes the Atlas-V a "Russian designed and made rocket".
I suppose the Boeing 747 was a British designed and built airliner? After all, it had R-R engines didnt' it?
First sentence in the the article:
"A new vulnerability discovered in the QEMU virtualization hypervisor has left virtual machines open to attacks for over a decade, security researchers have disclosed."
How is it a "new vulnerability" if it's been there for over 10 years?
former Michigan congressman Mike Rogers:
"I don't understand why we can't have both," he complained. "I think we can have both, and we should have it."
What an amazingly, astoundly stupid and arrogant thing to say in public. [OK, maybe if I knew the guy, I wouldn't be as amazed.]
Some random Joe (or Mike) doesn't understand why something is impossible, therefore it must be possible.
Hey! I don't understand why nuclear fusion isn't cheap and easy! I think it can be, and we should have it!
Well, Mike how about you "don't understand" in one hand and sh*t in the other. We'll see which hand gets full.
A couple years ago a got a phone call claiming to be from a large brokerage and financial services firm. The caller said there was something in my account that needed to be updated, but first she needed my birth date, account numbers, and social security number to confirm my identity.
I said I'd call back on the corporation's toll-free number. She said she'd put a note in my account so that whoever got my call would know what needed to be done. Before I hung up, I asked her if people usually provide all that information over the phone when she calls them out of the blue like that.
She said "always".
At that point, I realized that Bruce Schneier was right. Crypto can't solve the problem: the weak point in computer and network security is in the the wetware.
[I then hung up, called the company's toll-free number, the
aforementioned note was on my account, and we took care of whatever it
was that needed to be done.]
That's it, there, in front of Paul Allen, next to the Commodore PET. A Heathit H19 terminal.
And mine still works. :)
There's space inside for a Z80 CPU board (in addition to the Z80 that does the "terminal" stuff) which turns it into an H89 CP/M computer. But if it were an H89, there would be a floppy drive above the numeric keypad (to the right of the CRT). So I'm pretty sure that's an H19 terminal.
"We’ve consistently offered the most speeds to the most homes"
Since it's Comcast, god only knows what they mean by that. Comcast probably doesn't, and wouldn't admit it if they did.
Perhaps they are being literal, and they offer the largest number of tariff options. There's a long tradition in advertising of bragging about stuff that's true but doesn't matter (it's even better if it sounds like it matters).
Perhaps they mean they offer higer speeds than their competitors. In most Comcast markets, they offer up to 20-30Mbps. The competition is almost always the local phone company flogging ADSL that maxes out at 3-7Mbps).
I've been a Comcast broadband customer for a few years, and they do a decent job of shifting packets to/from the internet and seem happy enough to let me use my own mode. But, nobody in their right mind would depend on them for email, DNS, or anything else.
Where I've live, we've got a third option: municipal WiFi, but it maxed out (theoretically) at 3Mbps. I tried to use that for a few years, and it was miserable. It worked (mostly) in one neighborhood I lived in, but typically ran at 1-1.3 Mbps. After I moved to a different neighborhood, it often didn't work at all in the evenings.
Huh?
It wasn't a minivan. It was a Ford Explorer. Until a few years ago that was a station wagon (aka estate wagon) style body on a mid-size Ford truck frame. It's sort of like a range rover. Fairly large wheels and good ground-clearance. I think the past few years they've switched to a unibody design with a lower CoG (so it wont' be quite as likely to flip over), but it is still more "truck-like" than the traditional station wagon.
Though I still don't think planning and rational forethought were the strong-points of the two guys involved...
Even if this is simply a realignment of the FCC with new corporate overlords, I'd have to say that so far the interests of Netflix/Google/etc have always seemed much more aligned with my interests as a consumer than those of Comcast/Verizon/etc ever were.
Nobody thinks that the new network wold order (in the US) isn't going to suck, but we're somewhat hopeful that it might suck a little less. We'll see how long that hope lasts...
When they talk about optimizing the game by bundling a JRE, what they're actually optimizing is probably support costs. [I assume if you pay for a copy of Minecraft, you get some modicum of support.] I wouldn't be surprised if Minecraft's customer support staff spend 3/4 of their time dealing with borked Java installations.
....that dark and dangerous place outside the US known as "the rest of the world" (AKA "terrorists").
I think you're oversimplifying things a bit implying that the US goverment thinks everybody outside the US is a terrorist. We here in the US are quite aware that not all foreigners are terrorists: there are also Communists, drug dealers and white slavers.
"Webpioneer Vint Cerf has warned – once again – that our digital lives are in danger of being wiped from human history."
Good god, I hope so. Has he _seen_ what comprises "our digital lives"? It's pretty much all cat videos, selfies, and tweets that should have been wiped from history before they were even posted.
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