Dear Washington state police,

Piss off. Now, as much or more than ever before, is the time to keep tabs on you since your kind has proven again and again that you can't/won't do so yourselves.

When you earn back the trust you've demolished, perhaps the People won't be quite so concerned with what you're doing.

xXBatmanXx wrote on Aug 3, 2014, 08:33:
The city or state puts a camera up somewhere and everyone cries about privacy, yet everyone wants to put a camera and mic on a cop and record everything we do.

Gonna cherry pick this. Sorry.

Politicians and enforcement officers need to get one thing straight. You work for the People. You have only the authority and trust we provide you. If the People will that you are recorded at all times, that is our prerogative. If the People will that we are recorded at no time...again, that is our prerogative. If you are uncomfortable with that, you are welcome to find work that better suits you.

Many of your fellow officers have violated the trust of the People and abused the authority given to them. That's not your fault, but you should certainly expect that the People will now be putting your work under more scrutiny than in the past in order to protect our interests.

I've wondered for a few years now why fiber optic transmission has to be done in binary. You have a huge spectrum of wavelengths to choose from yet only use "black and white". Would it not be faster to send single bursts of varying colors to represent Bytes (and letting the systems on either side do the encoding/decoding) rather than sending 8 bursts of a single color?

They got me to change, but only through a good number of perks and the ability to look back at my data usage for the previous year. I never even come close to the data cap. In exchange they dropped my bill by $30/month, changed voice from 400min to unlimited and gave me a phone upgrade. Seemed worth it to me.

Somewhat unrelated: The phone that was getting replaced died from a massive static shock at a crappy hotel 2 days before the new one arrived.

Cutter wrote on Jul 14, 2014, 20:06:
Pilots and Air Traffic Controllers texting...seems like many disasters just waiting to happen.

The article states that the system is for aircraft at cruising altitude only. Radio communication is still an option and mandatory under 29,000 feet. At cruising, most pilots aren't even flying the plane so it's not a distraction from the next to nothing they were already doing and certainly no more distracting than radio comm. It's mainly for relaying alt, speed and heading changes. If you've listened to any LiveATC recordings, you know that radio comm can be spotty at best.

...a Chinese electronics firm.

This shit happens alot. As things get easier to do, and thus more people do them, government starts getting worried about them.

For instance, anyone with a small mill and lathe could manufacture a plastic gun as far back as the invention of plastics...yet 3d printers are apparently the scourge of the 21st century because a few dudes printed some really shitty guns.

R/C aircraft have been around since 1937, and yet now that quadcopters are easy to fly, they're a national emergency. You've been able to attach small cameras to R/C helicopters for at least a decade...how is this just now a problem? Because it's easier.

Isn't the whole using measles to treat cancer thing the basis of I Am Legend?

That is literally impossible. I know, I know. Nothing's impossible and everyone uses literally wrong. No. It would be literally impossible for ISPs innovate less and spend less on upgrades. They'd have to go back in time to be less innovative...but even then, they'd have to have invented a time machine!

I post this through a Frontier DSL connection which (after a storm on Sunday) has been running at .2mB/s connection which is down from the blazing fast .8mB/s I would normally be getting at $40/month. Frontier is the only ISP that will service my road in an area of nearly 40,000 people. It would only be a 1/4 mile run for Comcast from US-6, but they refuse to do so unless everyone on the road subscribes.

A twisted copper pair is technology from the telegraph age. There's nothing less innovative than that.

Yeah...not even free games could get me to install origin.

[VG]Reagle wrote on May 10, 2014, 09:21:
Wrong. It needs to not be nationalized. The only way it will stay free and working right is to be free market. The government screws up everything they touch. Nationalized means "governemnt owned". As soon as they own it they will pass ridiculous laws. Not to mention the NSA will go ape shit.

Free market works (fairly) well when there are many competitors in the marketplace. Yet there are very few ISPs. When there is no competition, the market is not free...it is controlled. If users could tell Comcast to piss off and choose an ISP that doesn't throttle services like Netflix, then I'd have no problem with the FCC staying out of it. But in many if not most areas, there is no other competing choice of ISP. In my area (which is by no means small or rural), for instance, Frontier is THE ONLY option. If they decide to throttle certain traffic, I have no recourse. I'm at their whim because they have no competition.

That's not a free market system. It's just a gnat's eyelash away from a straight up monopoly.

I can throw a rock and hit the high school in the largest city in my county (pop. 36,860), yet the ONLY service I can get is Frontier at 800KB/sec. Comcast refuses to run a quarter mile of copper cable unless every single home on our street subscribes.

I've been to one of the local hubs for Frontier on an unofficial tour with one of their techs...and to say that they need to upgrade their infrastructure is an extremely drastic understatement. They're still running relay boards from the early 80s for certain services (hardline telephone) and have to send them out for custom repairs when they fail because they aren't made anymore. I laughed when he showed me the fiber section: In room as big as my house filled with rows and rows of hardware, the fiber took up 1/4 of a rack.

jdreyer wrote on Apr 30, 2014, 15:24:
Don't think Boeing had anything to do with the NSA scandal, but they're paying the price. Still, the Gripen NG is a sweet ride.

Actually, this might be kinda good for the people. No one fights harder against the government than gigantic businesses. If the NSA's impropriety is seriously hurting the bottom lines of big ass companies like Boeing and Cisco, they're likely to bring the hurt to DC...money talks real damn loud.

This Man Has Survived on Pizza Alone for 25 Years, but Says Domino's Pizza Burned Him When He Had Sex With It.

Agent.X7 wrote on Feb 20, 2014, 19:14:
I think there are still a couple of holdouts from the EU in what is generally considered Europe, but yeah, pretty much. Most people don't say Europe and think that Russia is grouped right in there.

You are well beyond missing the point. I was simply trying to explain to InBlack that running fiber in Croatia is a less daunting task than running it in the US because our country is nearly as big as a continent. I figured someone in Croatia would have a decent grasp of that scale.

Agent.X7 wrote on Feb 19, 2014, 16:46:
Uh, our country is bigger than all of Europe. By quite a bit. And that's not even including Alaska and Hawaii.

USA - 3,794,101 sq mi

Europe - 3,930,000 sq mi

I looked it up before posting

InBlack wrote on Feb 19, 2014, 09:49:
Well said Pigeon. The article is complete and utter paid-for-shill bullshit. In my country (Croatia) the biggest cable company is currently promoting and provding a six month 120MBIT connection FREE trial for new users. Unrestricted, unlimited broadband with NO caps. For less than a dollar. If I wasnt already a customer I would be signing up ASAP. If a shitty east european country can do it, there is NO REASON whatsever that this should be a problem in the US. The infrastructure investment is just SPIN. Dont believe a word of it, optic-fibre is realtively cheap. The real reason for the terrible caps on broadband in the states is PERCIEVED PIRACY. The digital publishers, retailers, distributors, record companies, etc. are working in collusion with ISPs on this.

The scale of the US is so much larger than people realize. The state I live in (Indiana) is 50% larger with 50% more people than your entire country. Indiana isn't among the largest states in the US. Our country is nearly as big as ALL of Europe. That's a crapton of fiber to run.

That said, the communications companies running them certainly aren't hurting for money and could easily do the upgrade if they had to...but they don't because there's not enough competition.

This comment was edited on Feb 19, 2014, 16:03.

What this needs is an animation of a golden mech jump-jetting over a mechanical shark.

I think Creston has the right line of thought here because the blurb specifically says that at least one of the planets lie on the event horizon of the black hole (the chthonian world). At that point, you would not even be able to see the planet from outside the event horizon, assuming that it wasn't already being disintegrated, because light is being pulled inwards.

The gas giant is more plausible.

But I agree, if they could do the effects right and suspend disbelief for a bit...it could look insanely awesome with time and optical dilation.

Whoa. Uhhhh...I guess there was always going to be a time when my 4 year old build was going to become obsolete, I just didn't realize it was going to be by a game that historically has 10 hours of gameplay.

I'm short on the proc, RAM and just barely passing on the vid card.

But I have a solution! I never planned to buy the damn game in the first place, so my machine is safe...for now.