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Comment: Harald Bluetooth, he dead (Score 1) 322

by billstewart (#46485001) Attached to: Lies Programmers Tell Themselves

Bluetooth is dead - Netcraft\\\\\\\
I've seen his tomb - he's buried in Roskilde Cathedral. It's about 30km west of Copenhagen, but you can get there with the Copenhagen city transit pass, and don't need to burn a trip on your railpass. Good museum of Viking ships there, which they'd found sunk in the harbor.

Comment: My cats know when I'm up to something. (Score 2) 62

by billstewart (#46452595) Attached to: Study: Elephants Have Learned To Tell Certain Languages Apart

Sure, they're nowhere near as smart as elephants, but my cats generally know when I'm up to something, whether that's something that could be used to talk me into giving them treats, or something that might get them locked up into the bathroom and maybe shoved in a box and taken to the vet. One of my cats is better at figuring out treats, and usually pretty dumb about being herded somewhere, while the other one's better at figuring out potential bad stuff, but most cats have at least some clue.

Comment: Snowden revealed metadata about NSA (Score 1) 116

by billstewart (#46452581) Attached to: SXSW: Edward Snowden Swipes At NSA

Metadata about you is unimportant and can be obtained by an NSA/FBI/DEA/police/dog-catcher letter saying "please".

Metadata about the NSA is CLASSIFIED NATIONAL SECURITY NOFORN BURN-BEFORE-READING SOURCES AND METHODS that COULD TELL TERRORISTS HOW TO KILL YOUR MAMA and needs to be protected from anybody untrusted, like you, or journalists, or the American public, or the Congresscritters that set their budget.

It's really not that hard, citizen!

Comment: Blog cred, and easier than Arduino (Score 2) 70


This is an application where you don't need a lot of speed - if it takes a second to cough up a password, that's fine, so you don't need a $3 hardware crypto chip to go with the $1 ARM CPU, though of course you certainly could make a much cheaper piece of ARM hardware if you wanted.

Comment: Words are MUCH less secure than random chars (Score 2) 70


128 bits is theoretically sort of secure today, as long as it's used in ways that aren't susceptible to birthday attacks (probably not an issue here), and as long as there's enough real entropy used to generate those bits. Even that's a realistic problem here - are you going to remember a passphrase that has 8-10 random words from the OED? Or are you going to have to keep them written on a yellow sticky note in your office, or dogear the pages in your dictionary that have words highlighted in 7 different colors so you know what order they're in?

Comment: Salaries are public records (Score 1) 235

by billstewart (#46438437) Attached to: Facebook To Pay City $200K-a-Year For a Neighborhood Cop

You can look them up; I saw them in the local newspaper a few years ago. I don't remember what the grunt officers made, but the police chiefs in Palo Alto and Mountain View make about $300K (and I think even the second most expensive cops were over $200K.) And that's in a town where almost all the crime is white collar.

On the other hand, Facebook's closer to East Palo Alto, which is across the county line from Palo Alto, and is the town where the poor people were allowed to live back when there was racial segregation.

Comment: Actually cheap for Palo Alto (Score 1) 235

by billstewart (#46438431) Attached to: Facebook To Pay City $200K-a-Year For a Neighborhood Cop

Not only is there the cost for insurance and pensions, and equipment like police cars, but also 1/N the cost of their boss, and 1/N**2 the cost of their boss's boss.
And if you look up the salaries of Palo Alto employees (which are public record), you'll find that cops in Silicon Valley get paid a lot; I think the police chief makes $300K (which probably includes benefits), but I may be mixing that up with Mountain View's police chief. And yes, these are towns where almost all the crime is white collar. I doubt Menlo Park is cheaper.

Comment: Radio Shacks in Silicon Valley (Score 1) 423

by billstewart (#46406051) Attached to: RadioShack To Close 1,100 Stores

I started playing with Arduinos a couple of years ago (no, not "before it was cool", but before Radio Shack started carrying them ;-) While I've gotten many of the parts I use off the Internet, or at Fry's, it's been really convenient to be able to go to the neighborhood Radio Shack and pick up a couple of components (e.g., when I need some more resistors, or when I just fried the last green LED.) They all have a couple feet of cabinets with drawers full of components. Yeah, they cost more than Fry's, but the gas for driving an extra 5 miles will get you lots of green LEDs.

(Of course, it's much more interesting to get components at Hal-Ted or Weird Stuff, but that's a much different market.)

Comment: Army may be downsizing, War Machine not (Score 1) 506

by billstewart (#46365133) Attached to: US War Machine Downsizing?

No, lifehacksaur111, this doesn't mean that the military-industrial complex is being dismantled or that the war machine is being downsized. It just means that the military understands that they aren't going to be able to get enough budget to pay for both the important stuff (pork-barrel military-industrial-complex spending) and having lots of soldiers around needing pay, housing, and medical care, so they're prioritizing how they'll spend the money.

And if later they need more soldiers for cannon-fodder in a large war, they'll see about cranking up a draft or something, but for now they don't want to lose the pork barrel.


Apple Urges Arizona Governor To Veto Anti-Gay Legislation 917

Posted by Soulskill
from the getting-involved dept.

Comment: Proof-of-Wasted-Work vs. Useful Work (Score 3, Interesting) 156

by billstewart (#46314763) Attached to: Riecoin: A Cryptocurrency With a Scientific Proof of Work

Most of the proof-of-work systems out there are really demanding that you waste some amount of money, time, or both, to prevent people from just generating arbitrarily high numbers of coins (as opposed to the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy use of leaves as coins.) Bitcoin number-crunching is purely wasteful potlatching. Dogecoin is such wow, so calculation!

At least this one is doing a kind of work that's potentially valuable to the world, assuming the system collects all of it in a way that can be used to contribute to mathematical knowledge. (Yeah, yeah, this is /., and I'm commenting on the article without reading it :-) There may be other kinds of calculations that are both useful and verifiable out there. Unfortunately, protein folding and most other non-mathematical real-world applications probably aren't easily verifiable except by having N people redo the same calculation, which is a problem for currencies that need to prevent double-spending. (I ran Folding@Home for a while, as well as the GIMPS Mersenne Prime Search. For SETI@Home, which for some years was a far larger supercomputer than anything on the Top-500 list, sure, you can contend that there really aren't aliens in the chunk of sky your system was testing, but that's not the kind of verification we're looking for...)

Comment: NIF was really for weapons research (Score 1) 143

by billstewart (#46272157) Attached to: What Would You Do With the World's Most Powerful Laser?

Hey, what's your serious response doing here, in between all the suggestions about sharks with frikkin' lasers?

NIF was always really about fusion research for the nuclear weapons programs, just as almost everything else at Livermore Labs was either related to weapons research & development, or infrastructure for the R&D folks (e.g. they did some good development on email systems back in the 80s because their R&D folks needed good email.) Some of it's more direct development, some of it's more basic science, but even then it's basic science intended to help weapons research. They've occasionally done other things (some solar energy research or whatever), but that's a drop in the bucket, and a lot of the environmental research they did was either trying to figure out how to clean up the messes their weapons folks made or the messes left over from the previous Navy base at that location.
