Posts by tacitust

Re: NewSpeak: "Fragmented Internet"

You're using the same argument the crypto bros have been making from the start, and look how well that's been going...

Yeah, we're not living in the Soviet Union, or modern day Russia, which is why you clearly don't understand what it's like to live in a truly repressive society, where you can be jailed for five years for holding up a blank sheet of paper in your local town square, and where journalists are routinely arrested and/or murdered if they don't toe the government lie.

Power abhors a vacuum, and there is nothing more ripe for exploitation than a fragmented Internet. If a fragmented Internet is really the ideal (which it might be, I don't know) then the only way it happens is through strong government regulation to keep those oligarchs you mention at bay, and also all the entrepreneurs who aspire to join them in the vast sea of wealth.

Unfettered, barely regulated capitalism got us into this mess, and we can't get out of it by neutering the only tool we have to correct it -- i.e. a government that (actually) works for the people and has the will and the strength to wrest the power away from the billionaire classes. Given the prevailing power structure, that's an extremely tough ask.

(And no, libertarianism is not the answer, since that will only free the oligarchy from any controls that are left and they we are truly screwed.)

Re: Federal Spending > Inflation > Rising Interest Rates

Blaming government spending on the failure of SVB is dumb, but it is politically convenient. Perhaps you should be asking why it's only SVB that's failed, and not the hundreds of other banks that are still functioning normally.

The simple fact is that SVB ran into a liquidity problem which was exacerbated by venture capitalist funds, including one owned by Peter Theil (a libertarian who doesn't believe the government should be regulating banks at all) started pulling their money out as fast as possible, thus precipitating the collapse.

Even now, the money isn't gone. It's just tied up in illiquid assets that will take time to liberate and return to the account holders. Those who have lost millions in uninsured funds will get eventually get most if not all of it back.

How do we know? Hedge fund managers are already offering to buy those accounts for 60-80 cents on the dollar, so they seem pretty sure the money will come back. They're certainly convinced they're going to make a killing from account holders who need the money quickly.

And let's not forget that the Republicans worked long and hard to water down the regulatory changes in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial services reform law designed to prevent this type of thing happening again after the 2008 collapse, or that Trump signed more Republican legislation into law that further weakened the safeguards.

The fact is, this latest debacle could have easily been avoided with the right safeguards in place, but Republicans and people like Theil, whose actions helped cause the whole collapse, refuse to accept (for purely ideological reasons, apparently) that government has the right to place limits on what banks can do with their customers' money. Until that changes, this will keep on happening, regardless of whether there's a government deficit at all.

Re: Collusion

But it is illegal if they at all colluded in deciding not to add capacity at the same time in order to raise prices and increase profits through keeping production artificially low.

Re: Arthur C. Clarke quote

Agreed. The odds of there being a viable short-cut across the gulf between the stars are exceedingly low. We don't know everything about the Universe as yet, but I people tend to underestimate how much we do know about the physical laws that govern it. Einstein modified Newton in edge cases, anything that improves on Einstein will be similarly limited in scope.

Our best hope for galactic colonisation lies with combining sub-light travel with some form of suspended animation and/or life-extension -- perhaps a ship loaded with frozen embryos to be raised by an AI at the destination. Who knows?

All I know is that absent an intervention from a much more advanced technological species (and if they're reading this -- what's the hold up?), we're going to be stuck on this rock called Earth for a very long time to come.

Re: It's Obama's fault, not Trump's

You appear to have taken a wrong turning.

Infowars is that-a-way ------>

Re: Ownership

No you don't understand correctly. You cannot patent naturally occurring DNA or genes, only those that do not occur in the wild (i.e. made in the lab). This was reaffirmed unanimously by the Supreme Court in 2013

Re: Tidal locking bothers me.

If the planets in the goldlocks zone are rich in water, (and simulations indicate that may be the case for many planets orbiting red dwarf stars) there is a chance life could have evolved deep underwater close to fumaroles similar to those found on Earth. Such life might not be detectable, however.

A point in favor of red dwarfs is their sheer abundance - there are more of them than Sun-like stars so even if conditions suitable for life are much more rare around them, it's still worth investigating them, especially given the easier observing conditions they provide for the planets orbiting them.

On the downside, many red dwarfs are flare stars -- though too unstable to be conducive to life, but I don't know the numbers off hand.

Re: Ahh, guys, any of you ever hear of the Constitution?

Beginning with an ad hom attack on the intelligence of liberals and Democrats isn't a great way to convince people you're not a Trump fan.

As for the court's decision, well, we'll have to wait and see. Certainly the conservatives and Republicans who are happy to grant that Trump does have the power to determine immigration policy were just as adamant that President Obama didn't have such power, and he was blocked by that same Supreme Court you seem quite confident will allow Trump to proceed.

Re: Reply

Stephen Hawking's always doing that -- aliens, AI, nukes,global warming etc.

In reality, even if one of those things happens, we have more capability of surviving as a species now that we ever have. Whether or not you want to be one of those survivors who has to clean up the mess, is another issue.

Re: Those are some pretty detailed numbers...

Not at all. Google.com is the number one most visited website in the world. They have more than enough data just from visits their own servers to determine the overall frequency of backspace errors.

Get used to it, because voice is coming and will be here to stay, along with the connectivity it requires.

If you don't want to live in a surveillance state, refusing to adopt new technologies isn't going to help one iota. The greatest surveillance states in history didn't have any high tech gadgets, all they needed was a government with the will and power to oppress anyone who sought to oppose them. The same holds true today. The fight against totalitarianism isn't fought in the social media forums of high tech companies, it's fought at the ballot box, and in countless local, regional, and national government forums and venues nationwide.

Re: Confused

Trump, anti-politics? He's been playing the political game all his life. He's benefited to the tune of hundreds of millions from the current system.

Re: Get real!

When you start calling people idiots, it's best to get at least the basic facts right first. Google doesn't sell personal customer data to anyone. Companies pay Google to place their ads based on the data they have collected on their users. Those companies have no idea who is seeing their ads unless you click on one and go to their site. Even then, they don't know anything about you unless you give them your personal details directly.

Re: Actual reviews are ... not good

Initial reviews have not been good, but remember "slow" is a relative term. Compared with the standard 500GB HDDs that come in most laptops these days, the BX200 is still blazingly fast.

Re: I call BS on Experian's claims

Not necessarily. While obviously their security has failed in this case, there is no reason to believe they would lump everything into one database, or even use the same systems shared across multiple client accounts. It's likely, in fact, that when they won the contract with T-Mobile to handle their credit checks, T-Mobile would have required them to keep their data completely separate from their other clients.

No need to jump on the conspiracy theory train at this time. If the breach is wider, it will come out sooner or later. If Experian doesn't stay ahead of the game, they know it will cost them dearly.

Re: Doing the Sums

Probably not. I looked into it a while back and it still came out more expensive (with a risk that a sudden spurt of unexpected activity could push it higher).

On the other hand, moving to Linode's $10/month plan would definitely save you a bunch, and be a lot simpler too.

Re: Co-incidience?

Almost certainly your company got a better deal from HP, nothing else.

Re: Obvious really.

Other countries seem to do just fine without shoveling hundreds of thousands of their citizens directly into their prison system. Yes, without the 95% plea bargain rate, the court system would be overloaded, but you're missing the point. If the US criminal justice system worked along the same lines as, say, Germany or France (both major industrial nations with large immigrant populations), they could close 5 out of every 6 prisons tomorrow. The trick to not overloading the courts is to not to criminalize so many of your non-violent citizens in the first place -- decriminalizing pot possession would be an excellent start, for example.

Even conservative politicians agree than mandatory minimum sentencing has cause gross miscarriages of justice, with far too many people spending decades in prison for what were petty crimes. There are better ways to solve miscarriages of justice than to spend billions in taxpayer's money over-incarcerating thousands of petty criminals in the fear that one or two "crime lords" will avoid justice.

As for the Sixth Amendment, there are thousands (if not tens of thousands) of prisoners locked up around the country who have been waiting more than a year for their day in court. Prosecutors seem to have no problem with the Sixth Amendment when it comes to getting judges to agree to multiple postponements, as several high profile cases involving juveniles in the New York system shows.

Your arguments are based on fear mongering and little else. You need to explain why you believe the US needs to incarcerate many times more its citizens than any other western nation on Earth in the first place. Plea bargains are not the only problem, of course, but unless you believe Americans are many times more criminally inclined than people in other nations, you must agree there is something badly wrong going on with the US criminal justice system, and it's costing all American tax payers dearly.

Re: 2nd Gen owner

I just bought my third phone in ten years. First was the Motorola SLVR L7, the first phone I could surf the web on. Five years later, when I could no longer load any websites, not even mobile ones, I bought a refurbished LG Optimus T for $100. Another five years on and it can barely load websites anymore, so it was time for a new phone. I opted for an unlocked, off-contract LG G2, for $219 off Amazon. (The Moto G was a serious contender.)

Wow. Now, I finally understand why El Reg uses the word fondleslab to describe these devices. I would be very surprised if it can't load webpages five years time. The only question is whether I'll be able to replace the non-serviceable battery successfully when the time comes.

Re: At least WordPress' updating system is good...

Don't know that offering auto updates of plugins (or to a lesser extent, themes) is a good idea. The majority of plugins are written and maintained by a single programmer without the time or resources (or inclination, sometimes) to perform proper regression tests or provide a safe and secure upgrade path.

I suspect that plugin auto-updates would cause more problems than they prevent. With the exception of major security issues, I always recommend that WordPress users delay upgrading their plugins for a few days, at least. That way, you allow other, keener (less savvy?) users to test the updated plugin and report problems back to the developer. Then if anything did break, it should be fixed by the time you install it.

Re: Puzzled

Microsoft doesn't ship the source code for Windows to its OEMs. Android phone manufacturers get the entire source code base for Android to do with what they will (with the exception of some of the device drivers). That's a huge difference, and explains why it's a lot harder to maintain a unified update system for Android.

Re: All your attention are belong to the google!

So would you rather Google not lobby for Net Neutrality and let the ISPs and telecoms have their own way -- i.e. soaring prices, low data caps, throttled traffic, toll-lanes, etc.?

Yeah, the system is broken beyond belief, and lobbyists with deep pockets have far too much say, but while this system exists, if companies like Google don't get their say in, others far less scrupulous will be more than happy to step into the gap.

The US electoral system desperately needs serious campaign finance reform (amongst a host of other reforms), and sadly it seems very unlikely anything will happen in the near future, but absent a real solution, I'd rather companies like Google remain (transparently) engaged, if only because much worse could and will happen if they don't.

Re: Ban Hammer

That's all very well to say, but Linux fans have been telling people for years, "come on over, you can do everything with Linux that you can do on Windows." Removing one of the most popular browsers from Linux distros isn't going to help sell that message to the masses.

And no, most people don't care about the privacy and security issues this incident raises.

Yet for millions of ordinary users, the cloud provides more security than they have on their home systems (i.e. often, very little to none at all). Perspective is key.

Re: How about the part that matters?

"If it doesn't have it, it is UTTER CRAP"

I love it when people make these emotional, nonsensical claims. It's as though they know better than the entire Crucial research and development, who have been working on the product for years...

Re: hex

So, you took a low resolution frame from the animation, blew it up, enhanced it, and remapped the outline of a crater from the surface of a sphere onto a flat surface and found it had six perfectly straight sides all of exactly equal length separated by precisely equal angles.

Quite a feat, all being told.

Or, maybe, just maybe, you spotted an old, heavily eroded crater that looks a little like a hexagon if you squint at it the right way? I believe NASA found a smiley face on Mars, too... (true story).

That's for class action lawsuits. I doubt the government lawyers who worked on this case are being paid a percentage of the settlement.

I'm curious. What keeps you at Rackspace for professional use given that Linode does have so much more bang for the buck?