* Posts by Trevor_Pott

6991 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2010

VMware puts a price on NSX and tells partners to open fire

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Re: SDN by MSFT! Really?!

"Distributed switch" != SDN. There's a little more to NSX than what MS is peddling...

Top Canadian court: Cops need warrant to get names from ISPs

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Re: Makes a nice change

And if you don't - as I don't - believe in objectivity of those who make and enforce the law? If you don't agree with most of the laws on the books or the rationale behind how new ones are made?

I was never given a choice to follow laws or not. I never swore an oath of allegiance to Canada, nor did I swear to follow her laws or obey her law enforcement. Men with guns threaten me with violence unless I comply. The alternatives are incarceration or death.

I don't believe in these laws enough to do time for them, or to not do time for them. Where does that put me in your black-and-white view of the universe?

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Re: E-Warrants and such

Actually, there are standards. I.E. that our judges actually give a bent fuck about Canadians, our constitution, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They do, in fact, want to look a cop in the eye and see if he's full of shit, or at least hear the voice on the phone and make sure they're on the level.

It isn't just "fill out the form, receive bacon." That's not how it works. If you want a warrant you have to convince a judge to give you one. That is done on balance of the evidence and whether or not the judge believes you're on a fishing expedition. In a lot of cases, you can get a warrant even on really thin evidence if you know the judge and he trusts you not be fishing.

As a cop, you have sources, you know the guy is guilty...you just can't reveal everything because you have to protect a source, would have to spend hours explaining several years of circumstantial evidence, etc.

In some cases, you have mountains of evidence, but you actually are fishing, because it's all circumstantial and kinda flimsy...and the judge isn't sure that you're on the level (or the right trail) with it all.

Americans would just automate away, because they give no fucks about the rights of their citizens. I think Canadian judges would have a huge problem with that.

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Re: Huh?

"Why don't you come to Ontario its a leftist paradise"

What the fuck are you on about? Next to south buttfuck Alberta, Ontario is the most conservative place in Canada. They've had conservative Premiers for bloody ages and elect a heck of a lot of conservative MPs.

Maybe you should move to America. It sounds more your style...or, are they to "leftist" for you? Maybe you prefer Australia? Or do you need an out-and-out Christian Theocracy?

Why the hell are you even in my country? You're screwing up the place for actual humans.

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Re: Huh?

Actually, Canada may be ruled by a fascist junta - and yes, we really are - but the judiciary takes no end of pleasure in striking down pretty much everything the junta gets up to. You might even call it glee.

The powers that be in this country are under the microscope for some very serious corruption and other no-no abuses of power. The mounties are eager to make arrests and the judges would like nothing better than the be known as the judge who put the Prime Minister in jail.

That's entirely understandable, because most of our country (I.E. those who are not the 30% of absolutely stalwart, slanted-forehead, would-vote-for-a-pig-if-it-was-painted-blue conservatives,) would pay absolutely incomprehensible amounts of money to be able to pop the sonofabitch right in the nose.

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Re: As to bullying ...

Warrants take to long is the complaint.

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"why do ISPs routinely record the association between IP address and account details in any case?"

It's tied into the billing and IP provisioning systems for all ISPs. This is a bigger issue as IPv4 becomes exhausted.

CIA rendition jet was waiting in Europe to SNATCH SNOWDEN

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Re: @Titus_Technophobe

I don't see the difference between a Muslim theocracy and a Christian one...and, quite frankly, I see a few of the western nations sliding way too close towards "theocracy". Australia, for example. Or the Batshit Bananas Party Republicans in the states.

Maybe some of these middle eastern nations will slip back into dictatorships. I seriously doubt they all will. At least one of them did elect a cleric as president, then had a revolution to evict him when he couldn't look beyond his own religion.

Things aren't so simple as you pain them. Brown people aren't "primitives" that need our "guidance". They're human beings, not all that different from you or I, with hopes and dreams, desires and beliefs. Some are similar, many are different.

By what right do you call yours better, and where is your evidence? Has your society solved all problems? Is it without corruption, without oppression, "-ism"s, dramatic wealth disparity, rampant unemployment and so forth?

When I look at the countries that went through the Arab Spring I see nations where the people have learned the value of their own freedom and are prepared to keep fighting for it to the bitter end. And yes, they'll fight you and your nation too if you think for a half a second you're going to waltz in there and tell them what to do.

it's their nation, and they're going to run it how they like. And that's the whole goddamned point.

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Re: @Trevor_Pott @Titus_Technophobe

Why would these countries develop a constitution similar to the USA's constitution? Why would they want to? They have completely different cultures with completely different ideas of right and wrong...and the USA failed. It was cute, at first, but there's far better examples to choose from.

Egypt has signed a new constitution. It seems sane and rational in the context of the culture that created it. It has had an election with American-levels of apathetic turn out, but an outstandingly clear mandate for the extant candidate. It has a vibrant opposition looking to assert itself and appears to be a fledgling democracy. With issues. With the potential that president what's-his-nuts the military guy won't let go when his term's up...but with a populace that demands a say in their government and is willing to die to ensure they have it.

Other countries are getting there. Some are dividing up. That's also good.

Look, most of Africa and especially the middle east was drawn up by a bunch of Brits who didn't give a rat fuck about the culture of the people living there. They just cared about straight lines on a map.

The thing is...those cultures are very insular, tribal and xenophobic. Think football fans, but who wrap it up in patriotism, nationalism and religion. They don't think of "nations" in the same way westerners do, with borders being so very, deeply important and the concept of national sovereignty overriding the individual's duty to their tribe.

These people are going to either shatter their nations into smaller, more easily governed ones broken along tribal lines, or they are going to break into a federal system with individual territories having large amounts of autonomy, and probably their own seat of government. Either way, they are going to create a nation where the historic groups are all represented and largely self governing...and that's what they need today.

What they absolutely don't need is some one-size-fits-all ruler imposing their will on everyone. This is why Egypt went berzerk when their duly elected post-spring president broke his promises and started getting religious on everyone's behind: because he has to be able to represent more than just the interests of the "tribe" to which he belongs.

Here then, we may well see a better form of government emerge from this chaos. One that grow beyond the tribalism that afflicts their nations...and which has ground the US itself to a partisan standstill.

So, sirrah, I submit that you are wrong. The Arab Spring was a great thing. Not because it was the first step in these nations becoming more like us...but because it was the first step in these nations stepping out from our shadows and becoming something entirely unlike us.

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@Titus_Technophobe

??? You consider the Arab Spring a bad thing? That bit where a downtrodden people took control of their own governments and slowly started to move away from repressive dictatorships towards a new culture of their own making? This is bad?

Why? Is it because the culture they wish to make is different from your own? Or because a few have stumbled and fallen? An entire generation learned the value of self-determination and you call it "a bad thing?"

I do not comprehend you.

Anything that moves a society closer to self-determination is a good thing. Even if the road is rough, it's better than dictatorship.

US allows commercial use of sharper satellite snaps

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Fritz, I don't have a boss. I'm so fat that I long ago ceased giving a fuck what others think and my entire family are shinks of one flavour or another. I know what you're trying to say...

...and you're wrong. What's "liberating" for one human is horrifying for the species. Your utopia won't manifest. Mark my words. We aren't ready for this concept. We will attack eachother with these new tools. It's our nature.

But the tools are now beyond anything that we can cope with...

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"So like you, yes, such an open "level" world scares the hell out of me too. But a world in which only those who have already seized power by any means retain sole control of the means to hold onto it, scares me even more."

Why? More to the point: what exactly do you think we can do about it? And how will surveilling everything and everyone all the time help level that playing feild?

The power of those is charge is completely asymmetric to "the muck". The American dream of picking up their precious guns and overthrowing the government is batshit bananas insane. Even in nations that are about as well armed as the LAPD, the hoi polloi either needed the military to side with the people, or other nations to help out. Who is going to help the "little people" rise up against a western government, hmm? Who is even going to force a western government to hold accountable, transparent elections?

The powers that be behave exactly how they want to behave, and the powers aren't the people elected. The PTB are the self-perpetuating bureaucracy that actually keeps the nations ticking along, and good fucking luck displacing them.

No, all publicly available mass surveillance is going to do is give the plebians one more tool to use in fighting amongst themselves. Mass surveillance is the replacement for television. It keeps the masses servile and obedient because they can direct their rage at something other than those in charge: eachother. The added bonus for the PTB is that the milled masses will spend their time tattling on one another, helping the government root out dissidents and NIMBYs that need to be watched for a lower cost.

I absolutely do not see how any of this puts norms on a level playing feild with those in charge. Please, do explain.

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Re: Surveillance or something else

Satellites are only one part of the equation. There's all the digital surveillance that exists, from someone sniffing packets at the cafe, to your employer, to your ISP, to the NSA. There's the increased use (legally and illegally) of multirotor copters and even proper drones. There's the fact that a cell phone with a multi-day battery pack can be hidden just about anywhere and contain enough sensors to do a truly terrifying amount of spying...

...I don't want to live in a society were privacy is dead. Not in law and not in practice. I don't think we're socially capable of dealing with that just yet.

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So what you're saying is that you want to give every crazy fuckwad who hates whites/men/fat people/bearded individuals/etc (subtract as necessary) the means by which to more efficiently single me out, find where I am in real time and harm me? You want my boss to be able to see when I told a little white lie about why I'm late, and instead of dropping off a package, I went for a nooner with the missus?

How about the details of my sex life? Should they be available to anyone who wants to attempt to embarrass me? Or my wife? Or my parents, sister, what-have-you? People in power generally don't need to abuse that power because they're already in power. Their indiscretions (at least in wealthy societies) are relatively minor. They don't generally have a reason to want to spy on the average citizen.

But the world is full of truly crazy people who absolutely do get it in their heads to harm others. White power types hunting for [insert racial epithet] here. Minorities looking for revenge. Bored bosses looking for staff to fire or jealous lovers looking for an excuse to get the partner abuse on.

If I could watch every corner in the city, what prevents me for picking a secluded neighborhood, watching every night and logging who goes by? What if I see the same female every Thursday at the same time? Couldn't I plane a rape? Or a murder?

What if I see that kid who made fun of me in school going by that one dark alley every single night as he walks home from school? Or I find that my boss always drives too fast on the rather dangerous road where spike strips could easily be places and then removed?

I don't think you understand how horrible people are. People in power don't need to resort to most of the truly sadistic and horrible stuff because they have so much power that they can do whatever they want. People without power - and that's most of us - need to do our dirty deeds either in secret, or only in our own heads.

Give these people the power to observe everything, everywhere and "in their own heads" will become "in secret" more and more often. Especially as we start to find out what is in people's heads and regulate against it! (Thanks, UK. You guys are pro.)

What % of society needs to abuse these technologies before it's no longer "okay?" What excuses will we use? Cameras are a "level playing field" because everyone watches them? How many of use watch them to catch bad guys for free? How many of us watch the spaces between the cameras? How many of us use the cameras just to catch our hated neighbor putting out one extra bag of trash?

Are all laws worth enforcing, and worth enforcing equally? If so, we're all criminals, because modern laws are designed such that you break several of them during any given day, even if you are going out of your way to be law abiding. Who runs society when we're all in jail? Who pays the fines for all minor infractions when none of us can get jobs because we all have unpaid fines?

How does our society function when every minor slight - real or imagined - can be reciprocated to with completely disproportionate surveillance-enabled retribution?

You are advocating a society in which the most devious, the most douchy and the most morally able to execute dramatic preemptive strikes wins...because everyone else absolutely will lose.

If Google can see everything I do they can advertise at me more effectively. That's not something I'm comfortable with, but it's narrow and targeted. If the NSA can see everything I do, they can make my life hell every time I try to cross the US border to go to a conference. I'm even less okay with this, but they have a lot of very big men with even larger guns.

If my neighbor or my boss can see everything I do they can ruin my life in a similarly completely legal manner. I may or may not have the time and resources to fight that war and win.

If the crazy racist down the street can see everything I do, then he might Treyvon Martin my ass...and apparently, get away with it. This is a thing that you can do now.

I don't know man, your idea of a "level" society terrifies the shit out of me. It really does.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

The ability to obtain 10cm imagery is not, in and of itself, "a new era of surveillance." That said, it's general availability in an easy-to-use form (read: Google Earth) absolutely is a "new era of surveillance."

Depending on how frequently these images are updated we're talking about taking surveillance capabilities once restricted to governments and "those in the know and who have the means" and given them to everyone. One extra tool for society's sociopaths and stalkers.

Oh, technology is neutral, and there are good arguments to be made for this. For example, I think it will make planning certain kinds of outdoor events much easier. The question we have to ask ourselves is "just because a technology can be commoditised, should it?"

It's 2014 and we still haven't solved the social issues of copyright infringement that the commoditisation of simple recording technology brought to the 80s, let alone digital distribution of the 90s! Yet here we are plunging headfirst into a society where we track everything, everyone, all the time and are even now making available the ability to judge the relative size of all objects on earth to within a penis-length from space.

I just don't think we're ready to handle this responsibly. Our laws, our mediation methodologies, our ability to solve differences...they haven't grown as fast as our technology. We're a dissatisfied and tribal bunch of miserable apes each clawing and scheming our way to an advantage over other apes...but now with the technology to do some Really Scary Stuff.

This one advancement won't make a world-ending difference...but where do we say "halt, we need time for our hearts to catch up to our heads"? That's the question with which I struggle...

Tom Hanks NICKED my COPYRIGHTED PIC, claims Brit photog

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Re: WTF

Oh, and yes, I'm lumping in together a bunch of extremist copyright stances together to make a point. It's a general disparagement of the collective inability to even consider compromise. Just for those who can't grok that bit...

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Re: WTF

Ah, but you don't seem to understand anything. What's important here is that one of two things happen: A) society rewind technological advancement so that we can't possibly violate copyright or B) anyone who violates copyright should have their lives ruined, be made financially destitute for what remains of their sad existence and thrown in a federal ass-rape prison for longer than a murderer.

Only if one of these two things happens will society have honored the fundamental moral rights of Creators(*).

Oh, wait, I lied. The world isn't a fuzzy and beautiful place until we recognize the fundamental moral right of creators to perpetual copyright. You see, Creators(*) are just fundementally different from you and I. If you go to work and create a script that saves your company $2M every year you don't have a fundamental moral right to make a living off that script forever. That's a couple day's salary, at best.

Obviously, you knew this when you signed up, and you have no right to dine on that forever because you're not a Creator(*). Now a Creator(*) deserves perpetuity. That's just and moral. It's how proper societies comport themselves. Everyone else, however, has to generate fresh value every single day if they want to survive. Creators(*), however, are morally entitled to dine on that one thing forever, as are their descendants, and their descendants...at least until the world loses interest.

Now, the world losing interest is a problem. But this is where that perpetuity comes in. Derivative works must be stamped out(**). The mere idea that someone might take Mickey Mouse and start evolving the character is sacrilege! I mean, you might get Mickey Mouse, Warfighter or Gay Mouse or even Steamboat Slaughterhouse 14: Pluto gets Dead.

Hell, maybe you'd see an entire series about Mickey Mouse in space, where our beloved childhood hero attempts to colonize another world, and deals with existential contemplation alongside Minnie and Pluto and Donald Duck. Holy shitballs, that would be a moral travesty so dire that our society would never recover from it.

That's as crazy as someone taking a bunch of children's stories from before modern copyright existed, then twisting and perverting them beyond recognition in order to coldly and callously extract every last cent of profit from another culture's mythology. Then suing anyone into the ground that tried to use that same mythology for their own works!

Don't you understand why derivative works must be prevented, and copyright must exist forever, and why, above all, copyright must be defended to the point of jailing or ruining millions? No? Then you're obviously immoral. Set yourself on fire, you heathen bastard.

Of course, sane and rational approaches to dealing with copyright are verboten. Reasonable limits on copyright that mean copyright holders have to work for a living are heresy. Any sort of global copyright pool and actually using technology to determine who gets what % of it is madness. It's better to rail against modern technology and human nature than attempt to use that same technology to solve the problem in a cost efficient and user-friendly way.

Anyone who uses a carrot is immoral; you must use the stick and beat the sin out 'em, or they'll never learn.

So here was have a case where copyright was violated. It's a pretty clear cut example of a photgrapher not getting the tuppence he was due, along with his name in letters on the bottom corner. Someone - probably the website used, not Tom Hanks - made a boo boo.

Instead of sitting down and having a real talk about copyright and coming up with a compromise that suits all members of society, the incident is used for browbeating and the digital copyright equivalent of "slut shaming."

Stick, stick, stick...and never even a hint of a carrot.

The thing is - and your comment spells it out beautifully - the average person doesn't give a shit about copyright. Those of us with shrew-like mothers who use guilt as a weapon know why: eventually, you become completely immune to religious-inspired attempts to guilt-trip you into doing something purely for the benefit of someone else.

The problem here is that there's a bunch of us in the this world who simply don't agree that Creators(*) have a fundamental moral right to perpetual copyright, controlling derivative works and a bunch of other legally sanctioned thuggery. Many of us engage in digital hooliganism because of this, others simply tune out moralistic preaching from copyright maximalists, even when they have a legitimate grievance.

Bad blood has developed, and the only hope for rapprochement is to set down the stick and start hunting for wild carrots.

Sadly, this isn't likely to happen. Actual discussion about how to shape copyright in the 21st century to deal with both human nature and the explosive growth of technology will remain stymied until the old guard finally die off. Like science, it seems the evolution of rights must proceed one funeral at a time.

So expect a lot of this sort of thing. One side or the other holding up every infraction they can find as somehow emblematic and indicative of all of society's ills. Hatred and vitriol, sniping and guilting.

We have to wait for extremists on both sides to die off before we can reach a compromise that doesn't require enforcement of it's policies upon the masses at the barrel of a policeperson's gun.

*Actually, what needs defending is the rights of large content pigopolies. You see, these are actually fantastic organizations for reasons that change daily and are difficult to articulate. I think it has something to do with "content creators know what they're doing when they assign copyright to a pigopoly" and "the pigopoly is morally entitled to elevteen squillion times the amount they actually pay artists because of the horrible burden of marketing and producing anything in this era of automated marketing and production." Your milage will vary depending on which copyright maximalist you talk to and how many bits of circular reasoning you've called them out on so far.

**Ignore the part where everything created since our antecedent species started scratching on walls and banging sticks together is derivative of that which went before. Creators(*) are special in that everything they do is non-derivative, unless someone is deriving from them. Don't look for logic here, this is about morality, damn it!

Splash! Three times as much water as ALL of Earth's oceans found TRAPPED underground

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Re: Re Christoph: Equilibrium?

Yes. Sea levels change with the glacial cycles. That's a very different thing than "global flood". Or even different from the kind of cataclysmic flooding (say a collapsing pro-glacial lake) that could have embedded this meme into our racial memory.

Virtually every culture has a flood myth. Our species has been on the receiving end of some pretty big ones at various points. Maybe the post-glacial oceanic rebound is part of it, for some cultures. (Probably the Polynesians.) For most, however, I suspect that's not the trigger. "Catastrophic" flooding with few survivors seems to be the key...that usually indicates a large body of water having a major barrier give way, a-la lake Bonneville.

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Re: Re Christoph: Equilibrium?

Noah's Ark was a racial memory of a localized catastrophic event. Possibly this one. Like most people "the world" consisted of that which they could experience.

There was no global flood, unless you count the two "snowball earth" events. But those were solid water, not liquid. And significantly before humankind. (Thus no way they could have made it into some random sky-fairy peasant control document.)

Come off it, Moon, Earth. We know you're 60 million years older than we thought

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Re: @Trevor_Pott #2

Bullshit. Teaching children religion absolutely is child abuse. Abuse has many facets, from the physical to the psychological. Religious indoctrination is all about denying children the right to think for themselves. It is about taking away their ability to choose before they are even old enough to realise that what the right to choose is and why it matters.

Teaching children facts, figures and critical thinking gives them the tools they need to make informed choices. It gives children the knowledge required to understand people who think differently and to deal with them in a way that doesn't involve violence.

I do not have any problem whatsoever with an adult who has reached the age of majority choosing to pursue one or more faiths of their choice. There is plenty of peer-reviewed science to show that faith is an important component to the psychological well being of a significant percentage of our species. If they need spirituality to feel whole, more power to them.

But I absolutely and vehemently disagree with the concept that parents "own" their children. That child's mind is not yours to do with as you please. It belongs to the child themselves and you've no right to remove their right to choose or their ability to think critically.

There is absolutely no moral or ethical argument you can make for indoctrination of children to any belief system before their brains have fully developed. Belief in a structured faith must be a choice, one made in full knowledge of the alternatives.

You're absolutely full of shit if you think I want other peoples' children "indoctrinated" in any specific way. I emphatically do not. I want them trained to think critically, to be aware of all options before they make a choice.

I don't pass judgement on the choice itself, if that choice is made after full cognitive development has occurred, with full exposure to alternatives and of the free will of the individual in question.

If you honestly believe that the above is "indoctrinating" a child to "my way of thinking" you're a liar or a fool. You can decide which.

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Go

Re: @Trevor_Pott

I have no problems with homeschooling, so long as very stick guidelines are observed, and there's a damned good reason. The reason pretty much has to be "there isn't an adequate public school system available." In Canada, in a major city, that's a line of bullshit, and almost always trotted out by people who want to homeschool in order to indoctrinate their children.

Which brings me to the next item: homeschool should never include religious indoctrination. No child should be exposed to any religion until they are in secondary school. At which point, religious instruction should be mandatory: all major religions and beliefs should be covered, as well as where they have been (or not) disproven by science.

At that point, children should have a solid foundation of science, mathematics and critical thinking that allows them to make a rational, informed choice as to whether or not they want to believe in a given religion. No family should have a "right" to commit child abuse by forcibly indoctrinating their children before they are old enough to understand.

Where and when homeschooling is used as an excuse to isolate a child from science and increase their religious indoctrination children should be placed in custodial care and parents jailed ad aeternum.

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I don't just dislike creationists, sirrah. I believe they are dangerous, and that teaching that shit to youth is child abuse.

Believe what you want, but don't teach lies to children and call it the truth.

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Re: "Earth and its smallish satellite."

Pluto and Charon really should be considered a double dwarf planet with 3 minor satellites.

Microsoft in hunt for the practical qubit

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Re: "whoever successfully builds a reliable, mass-producable qubit"

"Erm, you *do* realize that quantum computers won't replace those companies "bread and butter" product lines, don't you?"

Um...yes they will. "Bread and butter" for HP, IBM and their ilk does not mean "sells the most volume of". "Bread and butter" means "is the most high margin. For HP/IBM/etc that isn't the commodity x86 servers that they're currently losing their shirt on. It's things like mainframes, custom interconnects, HPC ASICs and other tools of the very, very high-end and specialized trade.

To keep this short: these are the exact places where quantum computers will go. Your high-end mainframe will end up replaced by a combination ultra-resiliant x86 cluster and an quantum computer to handle the hard questions/big database/big data problems. You won't need all the high-margin custom gear HP/IBM/etc makes. You can use a quantum computer and a handful of PhDs to achieve the same thing.

That's the problem. This means the "mundane" portions of the workloads can get off the really high-margin mainframes and the tricky stuff can be farmed out to the pile of qbits in the corner. If those qbits are supplied by a startup then there's a damned good chance that the Big Customers will be able to bully the startup (rather than the other way around) and get a Great Deal.

That's the end for HP and IBM, at the very least. If someone comes out with this stuff and they don't control it, they're done. And frankly, whichever of those two can manage to get a working proper quantum computer first...wins. The other one will fold, as there won't be a need for their high-margin services.

Without their high margin services, they can't compete against the likes of Lenovo, ZTE and Quanta. They'll go quietly into that good night and nobody will notice.

Except the thousands upon thousands that don't have a job, of course.

"Bread and butter" is what keeps the company going. If you think that's commodity servers, you're mad.

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Re: Practical?

To be fair, you reboot Windows monthly nowadays, and with a core install of Server (or when using Hyper-V) that can be stretched to 3 or even 6 months, on average. Plus, for their servers at least, they have cluster-aware updating.

I do, however, agree that "a bandaid on top of a band-aid on top of a band-aid" is Microsoft's default approach to this...and that's bad.

Windows RT should have been the opportunity to do it from scratch, and do it right. New chip architecture, new guts, no legacy cruft. Less application support, sure...but that will get solved if you make the thing not suck (and charge a reasonable price for it.)

Sadly, what Windows RT ended up as was the worst of both worlds: all the badness from the x86 line ported into their ARM line, with none of the app support.

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Re: "whoever successfully builds a reliable, mass-producable qubit"

"Not sell"

You're a funny, funny man.

Also, how the hell is a 5 man startup with $0.5M in angel funding going to take a mass producible qbit to market? That isn't going to run classical tasks. Or classical OSes. You'll need massive R&D just to get the right questions to ask. You'll need to develop a OEM partnerships, a channel, a developer community, a support network...and all of it while fighting off massive amounts of FUD from established players.

Christ man, companies today doing nothing more revolutionary that iterating a technology so that you can defer your purchase of a big shiny by another year or two (thus saving your company a few million) get buried under the power of the establishment. Do you honestly think that an HP or an IBM is going to let Bob's Bit Shack and Hot Dog Emporium come to market with a technology that could render them obsolete, or at least threaten to take away the high-margin portion of the market?

Really? You honestly believe that? I want whatever you're on.

If someone who is not a major comes out with a technology this revolutionary the only chance they have of bringing it to market is if one of the founders is an Elon Musk-class osmium-testicled billionaire willing to bet their entire fortune on a roll of the proverbial. And so far as I know, there's only one Elon Musk.

That means they'll sell. Even if they're a crazy high-end VC that normally rolls the hard six looking for a multi-instagram payout, they'll sell. They might take it to Nutanix size, but they'll ultimately sell.

Mark my words. Bookmark this comment. Throw it in my face if I'm wrong...but I promise you, I'm not.

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Re: Practical?

Windows 8 was an unmitigated disaster...and not the only one. But Microsoft has a massive R&D department of incredibly smart people that does a truly fantastic job of coming up with great tech. Even practical tech.

Admittedly, a lot of what they do is take someone else's work and refine it (see: Kinect), but they do have a talent for finding ways to take otherwise PhD-level stuff and beating it into something the average prole can use.

...or they did. Today's Microsoft seems to think that PowerShell is the answer to everything, and we all are able to memorize entire tomes by rote. The company is a schism: one side focusing on the end user too much, to the point that they focus on their vision of what's 'easy' and to hell with everyone else. The other side focusing on pragmatic, practical technologies that the average user is never going to be able to use.

...but somewhere, deep inside that company...there are a great many people who damned good at taking any technology you could imagine and making it approachable. They just need to be given the reins.

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Re: Needs better explanation

Uh...what? There's lots of quantum computing problems. Natural language comprehension is one. There's a lot of research going into the idea that mammalian neural processing employs a certain quantum component that allows us to solve "hard" problems faster than we should be able to, given the number of synapses, and our limited storage capacity.

A quantum computer isn't going to play Crysis...but it might well be an important part of a true AI. Another place it could come in handy is simulating human behavior. Quantum-assisted SimCity anyone?

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Re: A quantum computer running Windows?

"MS are no doubt up to the challenge of bloating even a quantum computer to death"

Uh...what? Windows 7 consumed fewer resources than Vista. Windows 8 fewer than 7 and 8.1 fewer than 8. Say what you will about Microsoft, but they have done a damned fine job of delivering ever more functionality while requiring less and less horsepower to drive it. (Though they still have that "storage footprint" problem.)

IoT cup claims 'instant' identification of what's in it

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Re: Amazing!

"There is no difference between water and Budweiser."

Yes there is. The latter contains more-than-trace quantities of horse urine.

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Re: Tracking hydration levels ...

The problem is that those most likely to need it - the ill, elderly and infirm - will have trouble peeing in the cup. Make a toilet that can do this and you'll sell millions. Make something that can retrofit an existing toilet with this capability and you'll sell hundreds of millions.

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Re: Another Frank Herbert prophecy comes to pass

Doesn't everyone employ a Bene Gesserit for this purpose? You don't? Oh...how terribly common...

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Re: Ah.. explains it all.. IoT.

Hey, IoT where the data goes into "the cloud" for the yanks to sell? Bad. IoT where I get info to make my life better? Good!

Why does it all have to be "bad" just because the yanks making it want your privacy? Wait for some nice Nordic folk to come out with some IoT stuff. It won't try to sell you and your family for a bent pittance, and it'll have all the benefits. :)

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Re: Actually, this may have a use.

This is only the beginning. A cup that could set off an alarm if you drink something your allergic to? Plates/forks/spoons with the same abilities? That gets into the real of saving lives.

Will this particular device be that good? Oh, I doubt it. But it's a 1.0. 10 years from now, I fully expect that trips to the hospital due to some poor child eating nuts where he wasn't supposed to being down to "virtually nonexistent" in first world nations.

But hey, for 90% of the world, it's all a great joke. Internet of Things! Ha-ha! What could electricity horseless carriages moving pictures sensors ever do for the common man?

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Thumb Up

Yeah, snark aside, sign me up. "Don't remember if that's your 18th cup or your 8th?" Yep, that's me. Clinically diagnosable ADHD, right here. Also, I work a lot. Also, I have many jobs. Also...when at parties, it's be cool to have a widget that kept track of how many drinks I've had, because I'm the first to admit that I'm not good at remembering.

In addition, I have a lovely genetic mutation where I don't actually feel thirst. It might sound stupid to those not born with it, but I actually do not feel thirsty. When others would feel thirst, I feel a desire to consume carbohydrates. You can't just "think yourself better" from that; it's genetic, and it's a Very Bad Thing.

I usually have little reminders go off every so often to remind me to drink water. Combined with putting a cooler at my desk, I can mostly stay hydrated. But hey, how much of what do I drink? Coffee? Alcohol? Water? Gatorade? Gathering empirical evidence and then being able to tailor my alerting system to optimize my hydration (and caffination!) might bump my productivity up a few notches. Especially since dehydration = distracted = lost revenue to opportunity cost.

We aren't all perfect specimens of human normalcy. As a representative of the "damaged" members of species, I welcome this tool that is so casually dismissed as a mere vanity item.

Apple, Cisco line up to protect offshore data

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Constitution changes typically require a referendum or at least a majority of provinces to agree to the change. In what western nation is that likely to occur? On what topic can any of our nations find unity?

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Okay. You're still left with the question of "what would the suits in question choose to do?"

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Okay, let's say for a moment that you're right. That someone (we'll use Mrs Merkel as our example) has the osmium gonads required for such a move. Let's ask the tough questions.

If you're the Apple exec, do you cave? If you give that data to German authorities then you're in violation of US law. If you don't, you're in violation of German law.

From an economic standpoint: the US is the larger market. If you have to pull out of any market in order to protect you US revenue, then you do so. It sucks, but that's politics. You lobby, you whine, you carry on until you're allowed back in...but the US gravy train is the one you protect.

From a personal perspective: if you risk jail directly in either nation then the one you don't want to end up in is the US jail. More to the point, you have to look at "how long will you be in jail" and "how much of your wealth do you get to keep so that when you come out of jail you can Live Well." Also: how will your family be affected. Where does this piercing of the corporate veil start, where does it end?

"We'll levy fines against you" is a hell of a lot simpler maths than "we're going to enforce our viewpoints with guns." It sucks to no longer be able to do business in Germany, but it sucks a lot more if anyone is facing any jail time.

Now, would they? Where? In what nations is that true? Under what circumstances?

These are the issues that we, as a society, are having to hash out.

Powerful people say that copyright should be enforced at the barrel of a gun. And they get their wish. Why not surveillance? And why not privacy? This isn't just about money: these clashes are starting to get into fundamental philosophical differences between nations about the type of society that their people would like to see built. Those rarely end well, especially when the disputes are amongst allies.

I wouldn't want to be caught in the middle of it (I.E. being the above discussed Apple exec,) but I certainly don't think that any individual business interests are going to make a substantive difference to US policy in this matter. American Exceptionalism exists in many forms, not the least of which is this insular belief that "not America" cannot be considered in their law. (And frankly, many other nations are the same.)

To change that you need to start making fundamental changes to how the nation perceives itself, how the judiciary and government is organized, the role of the citizen and the role of a nation-state itself in today's more interconnected world. There's no reason whatsoever to believe that the US - or any other nation - will be "forced" to adapt. Nations have tried to take over the world for reasons more petty than resistance of social change...I do believe they'll fight and resist and struggle to the dying breath of last among them that believe in this vision of their nation.

Time is the only thing that will change that nation. Society evolves one funeral at a time...and we're decades away from being able to see any meaningful change towards openness, transparency or multilateral recognition of human rights...at least from the USA, and those nations most heavily influenced by her.

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I believe the response is likely to be "the judge was wrong, but only due to this minor esoteric error in the application of the law." No precedent will be set, nothing will in fact be decided.

The issue here is that US law doesn't allow for the consideration of other countries, their laws or the rights of non-Americans. The only definitive ruling to be made in this case is that the laws of other countries don't matter because other countries don't matter...as a point of law. If, however, that ruling were made publicly at this juncture, the feedback would be catastrophic.

Thus this will be punted, and then handled discretely during some other trial in the future, when the rest of the world isn't looking quite so closely.

Toyota catches up to William Gibson with LED hood

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Re: Attention getter

And yet, if it were showing advertisements it'd be legal.

Join me, Reg readers, and help me UPGRADE our CHILDREN

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Re: Yes it is CompSci

"what do you call CS"

The "Dev" in "DevOps". Generally raised with both a complete inability to grok the "Ops" part of the equation combined with such a deep and ingrained scorn for "Ops" that when they "Dev" it becomes a nightmare to actually "Ops" the shite that "CS" produces.

But that's a bitter "Ops" guys speaking...

Shiny happy people holding DIMMs: Plus Facebook's data centres are going all-flash

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Yes they are. Diablo Technologies makes ULLtraDIMMs, which are indeed flash. They are NAND flash in a DIMM form factor.

Where have you been?

Google in talks to nail Virgin as 'partner' in satellite internet plan

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Google want their own satellite network. Google use a lot of Linux. So basically, they're the movie Antitrust?

Microsoft promises no snooping in new fine print for web services

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Re: Target advertising?

If you honestly believe that Microsoft don't have a machine "reading" every single e-mail, text, chat, etc that goes through their network you're a fucking idiot. Of course they do. They know as much about you as Google does, they just use it in different ways.

Frankly, I find the uses Microsoft engages in scarier than Google's attempts to sell me more accurate tat.

FCC launches probe into Verizon/Netflix spat

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Re: Of Course They Did

Yo, Canuck from out west here. We got nothing but Telus and Shaw, and no hope of FTTP except in greenfields aimed at rich white folks. (Greenfields aimed at poor people are still on copper.)

I don't know where you are getting your info, but the situation is getting worse out here, not better. Prices are skyrocketing, connectivity is dropping, everything's congested and they've no interested in last mile investment whatsoever.

Sorry mate, but this isn't out east, where there are enough liberals to make a difference for the little guy. There is no forced line sharing. No TekSavvy for ADSL and Cable, no a lot of things. You've got Shaw that you can't afford (and doesn't work) and Telus that you can only barely afford and barely works. There's crappy microwave backhaul and terrifyingly bad sattelite. That's it.

Want to get a consistent >5Mbit upstream? That'll be $900/mo just to light the fibre, and that's after $30K to bring the fibre in, and $90/mo/mbit on 95th percentile billing. Oh, and a minimum 5 year contract.

Bell Alliant is amazeballs, but it just covers the coasties out east. Bell proper is shite and Telus + Shaw are criminally asstastic. You start out with "Awesome!!111!!oneoneone" out east, and it steadily gets worse as you go west.

Capitalism! Yeah!

Déjà spew: US would accept higher bills for less CO2 by two-to-one

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Re: Bad poll?

Well the rabid antelope comes in because I share John Oliver's opinion of internet commenters. He calls them "monsters", and they are. I don't claim to be any better, just honest. Quite frankly, I think the climate deniers are dangerous. They are not only distorting the truth, they are preventing us from engaging a very real threat.

The actions of deniers are driving up the very real cost of dealing with the tangible effects of climate change and virtually eliminating any chance we have to minimize the damage caused by acting proactively. To put it in terms they can understand "they fuckers are taking money out of my wallet by refusing to actually understand science all in the name of fear of someone taking from their wallet"!

Using science hasn't worked. Being polite hasn't worked. So far, not a single thing anyone has done has caused them to accept the truth of the world and we are collectively all the poorer for it. So yeah, it's them or us. In that context, I do entirely hope they all get eaten by rabid antelope before the damage done creates a planet unable to sustain a population of ten billion humans.

Even if you lop off the more fantastic potential long term effects of climate change, the picture is pretty bleak. Most especially the changing rainfall patterns (especially as so much of the human population is dependent on groundwater that has a miserable enough recharge rate as it is.)

It's time to be done with this ridiculous "teach the controversy" movement and get on with the business of coping with reality. There is no Santa Claus, your deity doesn't exist, and you have to be biologically incapable of understanding both maths and statistics to deny the reality of climate change.

Maybe it makes me a bad person that wish ill on others...I'm increasingly okay with that. There are bigger things to worry about than bent feelers or even entire individuals. Humanity is about to pass through the crucible; we'll have the best chance of it if we enter the journey with the maximum number of us capable of understanding basic science.

Besides, I think we've achieved a high enough species-wide fertility rate that we can jettison the sociopaths, don't you? Those who would sacrifice the future for a few cents off a tank of gasoline...

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Pint

Re: Bad poll?

"doncha think?" No. Deniers don't. That's the problem.

No rational person debates the fact of climate change. If you feel inclined to debate either that climate change is occurring or that humans are playing a lead role, click that link, watch the video and then fuck the hell off...because you are objectively wrong.

The only rational question is "what do we do about climate change?" There are two possible answers: "fuck the future, I want mine and that's all that matters" or "let's all work together to leave the world a better place for those that follow than we found it."

Which you choose defines the kind of person you are. If you choose the former, then I hope you get eaten by a rabid antelope. If you choose the latter, hey, beer for you.

Nutanix vs VCE: Battle of the converged upstarts rages on

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Re: Nutanix? Really?

Prove it.

Psst. We've got 400Gb/s Ethernet working - but don't tell anyone

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Re: All very well but

Not while playing crysis...

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@JeffyPoooh

You must die. My 15 / 2 demands a sacrifice.