westbywest

It looks like this was nearly contemporary with the Adams Platform video compression scam. (The scammer claimed he could transmit streaming, high definition video over a 56kbit dialup modem, and he somehow collected $27Million from gullible funders.) http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/cornered/41010-th...

Indeed, there are no shortage of swindles out there, according to the most recent review of my Spam folder. There is already an appreciable amount of awareness out there of what are probably scams. Besides, there are already de-facto, and generally arbitrary, limitations imposed presently by popular crowd-funding services, e.g. Kickstarter. Kickstarter in particular seems to turn down applications it considers too entrepreneurial, and they do so inconsistently.

Perhaps this bill, albeit adjusted with some sensible yet minimal regulatory scheme, would permit crowd-funding schemes otherwise impossible. It could at least help encourage consistency in how crowd-funding could be (or not be) regulated.

Agreed on all points. I'd also recommend checking out the the Mitwohnzentrale, which was IIRC located near KuDamm. Mitwohnzentrale ("Live-Share Center") derives in spirit from the Mitfahrzentrale ("Ride-Share Center"), and it is basically a semi-formalized arrangement for subletting apartments. When I dropped by during a visit to Berlin years ago, I saw a listing for a nice apartment near KuDamm that rivaled my apartment in [mid-sized Midwest US city] in terms of rent. AirBNB inherits much from the Mitwohnzentrale. http://www.mitwohnzentrale.de/

... which also prompts the question whether the new Nook can be booted to run full Android, like its predecessor.

> How? What violent or dangerous actions have they taken?

I'm afraid I can only relate anecdotal observations, but my corner of the Midwest does sadly host an active Neo-Nazi population. A couple of my friends in the city where I live have been violently assaulted and injured by self-professed Neo-Nazis (and strangers) venturing here from rural counties looking for trouble to start.

Likewise, I have a couple times seen Stormfront host threads by individuals who disagreed strongly enough with (usually far-left leaning) political protests in this city to seek identification of the protesters in any photos, names, and where they live. Along with not terribly subtle threats of violent retribution.

I can certainly see recklessness in Wikileak's actions, especially revealing identities of covert agents, thereby endangering them.

I would hope at my least anecdotal observation above of Stormfront's connection to violent criminal behavior makes clear both organizations do indulge in recklessness, albeit in degrees being debated here.

I guess I shouldn't be that surprised to see the extent to which companies literally copy/paste their EULA's. Perhaps the silver lining is that one instance of this contract language being rendered illegal would presumably set a precedent that invalidates all duplicated instances of it.

This sort of floating-point optimization, while admittedly quite imprecise, actually does still see plenty of application in high performance, framerate-critical gaming. Especially games with require a robust physics package (my previous employment was at a now-defunct maker of hardware-accelerated physics products). For these gaming applications, or specifically for the graphics drivers they depend on, you're coding multi-threaded routines in proprietary instruction sets that run on a GPU, which is becoming more and more like a parallel vector processor.

Counter-intuitive, but yes, the article is correct. Basically, the amount of Earth's gravity acting on you is determined by the volume of earth beneath your feet. Very deep tunnels experience less gravity, and there is theoretically 0G at the planet's center.

From what I understand, the equipment needed to emit the neutrinos and then detect them amounts to enormous hunks of metal, circuitry, and plumbing, not mention vacuum- or water-filled cavities, neither of which are readily interchangeable. Not a trivial task by any measure.

Looks like there is a patch of substantially reduced gravity near Sri Lanka. I wonder if India has already taken this into account for the launch pads at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre.

"The statements that Samsung installs keylogger on R525 and R540 laptop computers are false.

"After investigating into this matter, it was found that the software installed was in fact Vipre, not the commerical keylogger called StarLogger. The confusion arose because Microsoft's Live Application multi-language support folder, 'SL' folder, was mistaken for StarLogger

"(Live Application is Microsoft's application which provides messenger, email, video, photo gallery functions. Depending on the language, under C:\windows folders 'SL' for Slovak, 'KO' for Korean, 'EN' for English are created.)"

http://www.samsungtomorrow.com/1071

Oops, caffeine + haste = poor math. Fixed.

I work on a community wireless net in St. Louis, MO (http://gowasabi.net) that was founded with an intention, among others, of attracting Google Fiber here, and I submitted a proposal to Google about it. Likewise, the city gov't sent in its own proposal to get fiber downtown, along with countless other local groups. http://stlcin.missouri.org/googlefiber/ I'm guessing many many other cities did the same.

While Google is indeed the 800lb gorilla here, it's not the only provider out there. If you're successful in getting Google to lend you really fast Net, that's awesome. If you're successful in getting similar service on your own, i.e. by micro-trenching your own fiber or negotiating a deal with a local bandwidth broker, that's actually much better.

Ideally, you would do both. Cameras to help justify the cost of infrastructure, and Wifi APs to enable additional sources of revenue like captive portal advertising. Not to mention the general economic benefit of offering such Wifi to smart phone users (aka shoppers in the local business districts).

My understanding is that Google was specifically looking for smaller communities to try out its fiber service first (unwitting beta testers @ Standford U. notwithstanding). A larger urban area like KC, MO may have been considered unappealing because its population density meant more competition with incumbent providers. KC, KS is smaller, but it adjoins the larger urban core, where Google could expand when it's ready.

A 16dB+ panel antenna and Ubiquiti Networks Bullet2HP radio, and a suitably high location, would shorten that distance for you very nicely. ;)

From my own experience working on a community wireless project in St. Louis, the benefit of a 1Gbit/s fiber uplink (or several) would be that you could use newer 5GHz radios with MIMO features to build out >=50Mbit/s distribution for that uplink over a few square miles. So, 1Gbit/s could be parted out to 20 end users getting 50mbit/s each, and with an infrastructure cheaper than running fiber or some other wired medium directly to those 20 users.

I work on mesh wifi, so I'm familiar with Freenet. You can see their (admittedly quite awesome) footprint here:

https://cloudtrax.com/overview2.php?id=freenet_production

Of particular interest is that the mesh admin tool / firmware they're using, which is based on OpenWRT, actually underreports the number of clients and traffic because of its size. The operators say the real figures are order(s) of magnitude larger.

And nearby Sprint HQ, as mentioned in the other HN post about this.

Also, amusing reader comment from the article, highlighting an interviewee's remark: "the average high schooler has texted 1200 times from the time they get out of bed to when they hit school at 7:30 in the morning."

I imagine this figure off by only a single order of magnitude.

I am interested to see how this project proceeds. The article mentioned that the service will be built in conjunction with the city, suggesting a Public Private Partnership (PPP). Previous efforts with using PPPs to build municipal broadband services have faltered in conflict (lawsuits alleging anticompetitive activities) with the incumbent providers.

This happened in Philadelphia, IIRC, and more recently in North Carolina. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/the-price-of...

He mentioned the models of Samsung laptops that he had access to. Perhaps someone on this HN thread could verify?

Daylight Savings Time issues, and other time-sensitive code snafus like one, will likely rear their ugly heads periodically for the foreseeable future:

https://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/show_bug.cgi?id=5852

Especially since the SA bug was patched to "match 2020 and onwards..."

So the r-factor more or less measures the capacity of a word/phrase/blurb to propagate itself as a meme?

Reminds me of the evergreen Joseph Heller anecdote:

"At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch 22 over its whole history. Heller responds, 'Yes, but I have something he will never have . . . Enough.'"

Indeed, there are many reasons why this accident will almost certainly not reach the level of devastation which occurred at Chernobyl, many of which relate to the Japanese plant's far superior safety mechanisms and dedication of its operators.

However, don't we sell ourselves short with the implication that any nuclear accident of a scale less than Chernobyl is a tolerable accident? Although the radiation released by this latest accident is still well constrained, and the number of persons directly affected is presumed to be rather small, this power plant and very possibly a large section of the shoreline it sits on are expected to become a complete write-off to civilization at large.

A massive earthquake+tsunami at a coal-fired, gas-fired, hydroelectric, and even solar/wind/wave-motion power plant would have wrought similar damage, likely even similar casualties. However, those plants could be rebuilt at the same location, and with sturdier construction.

Although academic, and with the possible exception of geothermal, astral energy is actually our only source of energy, albeit with differing latencies.

Fossil fuels contain energy from ancient biomass supported by the Sun, and heavy radioactive isotopes (like all heavy elements) are formed in supernovae.

The bar was set at embedding a flight simulator as an easter egg, so Adobe does still have room to grow here.

Also seeing this. Getting "connection reset" errors over HTTP and HTTPS.

It would be kinda funny if this were all actually a viral advertisement for USwitch.

Agreed, this looks like hype.

Still, the hardware (a Sheeva Plug?) and consequent hack described is very possible, tho I understand that setting up a man-in-the-middle DHCP server to override that on the public hotspot is more straightforward.