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Re:Type "bush hid the facts" into Notepad. by thunderclap · 2015-03-22 11:54 · Score: 1 · on OS X Users: 13 Characters of Assyrian Can Crash Your Chrome Tab

Since it deleted the word here is an image of it http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_TfD...

Re:Related poem by Chris+Mattern · 2015-03-21 07:41 · Score: 4, Funny · on OS X Users: 13 Characters of Assyrian Can Crash Your Chrome Tab

Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold,
Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a wolf on the fold?
In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy there are great many things.
But I don't imagine that among them there is a wolf with purple and gold cohorts or purple and gold anythings.

Ogden Nash

Re:Yeah, no. by surd1618 · 2015-03-20 06:09 · Score: 1 · on Obama: Maybe It's Time For Mandatory Voting In US

They are just going to outlaw being poor. Seattle is at the forefront of this trend.

Ironically, Seattle is big in this outlaw-being-poor trend precisely because so many people in the PNW are nice and tolerant to poor people!
Seattle is facing this argument because it's a good place to find large vocal groups on both sides of the issue. Really, the leaders on the forefront of this trend are smaller cities with wealthy white populations e.g. Ft. Lauderdale, where it's now illegal to share food on the sidewalk, it's basically against the law to not sleep under a roof there. http://homelesshatelaws.blogsp...

Re:What about the tools? by greg1104 · 2015-03-20 06:02 · Score: 1 · on Why I Choose PostgreSQL Over MySQL/MariaDB

The pgAdmin developers agree, and have already started on a full rewrite in Python. The goal of having a GUI app that's cross-platform used to take tools like C++ and wxWidgets, and that's what the current pgAdmin III is written in. The new one doesn't need to be so low-level in its library use.

Cheaper, faster, better, ... by fulldecent · 2015-03-19 03:31 · Score: 1 · on To Avoid NSA Interception, Cisco Will Ship To Decoy Addresses

Better solution: include an iPhone and backup battery in the shipment. Use Find my iPhone.

Or just use FedEx's or UPS's real time tracking :-)

Re:The only pure English is the language of Beowol by mcswell · 2015-03-16 16:26 · Score: 1 · on Why There Is No Such Thing as 'Proper English'

Chaucer's been blogging of late: http://houseoffame.blogspot.co...

Re:A Language With No Rules... by psmears · 2015-03-16 02:51 · Score: 1 · on Why There Is No Such Thing as 'Proper English'

"So being lazy and using improper English is impolite to the extreme."

Motes and beams, people! If you're going to moan about "improper" English, it's best not to make lots of errors yourself: - you started your sentence with "So". The word you ought to have used was "Thus". - you missed out the comma that should have followed the "So" - the expression is "in the extreme", not "to the extreme" - even had you used "in the extreme", it would still have made for an awkward and inelegant sentence, compared to the obvious alternate of "... is extremely impolite."

Do you have a credible source for any of these so-called rules? In particular:

There's nothing wrong with starting a sentence with "so", even without a comma.
In the extreme is a perfectly valid phrase.

Re:Yet most coding today builds online collab tool by Anonymous Coward · 2015-03-15 22:40 · Score: 0 · on Ask Slashdot: What Can Distributed Software Development Teams Learn From FLOSS?

Isn't it ironic that a great percentage of the programming that occurs today is for using the Internet to enable online commerce, collaboration, and business? And yet the Agile community (of which I am a member, and believe in Agile - although not ever single idea or practice) shuns distributed teams - the very technology that we build.

http://valuedrivenit.blogspot.com/2013/11/are-agilists-turning-their-backs-on.html

There is absolutely NO reason why software teams have to be "face to face" or even in the same hemisphere let alone country. It's ridiculous. Everyone simply has to know they are supposed to be doing and then produce it. Even when people are in the same office, a technical matter is most likely to be resolved via email or Slack (and then the reasoning process is documented and everyone can re-read it). So why do they need to be in the same office, sending emails to the guy in the next farm cubicle? Ridiculous, and all part of keeping workers chained to a desk and miserable.

Yet most coding today builds online collab tools by cjonslashdot · 2015-03-15 13:41 · Score: 1 · on Ask Slashdot: What Can Distributed Software Development Teams Learn From FLOSS?

Isn't it ironic that a great percentage of the programming that occurs today is for using the Internet to enable online commerce, collaboration, and business? And yet the Agile community (of which I am a member, and believe in Agile - although not ever single idea or practice) shuns distributed teams - the very technology that we build.

http://valuedrivenit.blogspot.com/2013/11/are-agilists-turning-their-backs-on.html

Sousveilliance by riverat1 · 2015-03-15 05:49 · Score: 3, Interesting · on Senator: 'Plenty' of Domestic Surveillance We Still Don't Know About

Sousveilliance means basically watching the watchers. In this modern world collecting information about people continues to get easier, not just by governments but by the business world as well (Google and Facebook to name a couple of prominent examples). The only real defense the general public has against this is to watch back so we can stem the abuse of the data collected.

Author David Brin writes a lot about this at his blog, Contrary Brin including his current post, "Armed with Cameras". His basic thesis is that you're not going to stop all of this enhanced surveillance even if you pass laws against it. It's too easy to do. So the answer is to sousveil, watch back intently enough so we can call the watcher out on their abuse.

BTW, I'm proud to have Ron Wyden as one of my Senators. He's in a position to know an has been at the forefront of curbing government abuse of surveillance for a long time.

Sousveilliance by riverat1 · 2015-03-15 05:49 · Score: 3, Interesting · on Senator: 'Plenty' of Domestic Surveillance We Still Don't Know About

Sousveilliance means basically watching the watchers. In this modern world collecting information about people continues to get easier, not just by governments but by the business world as well (Google and Facebook to name a couple of prominent examples). The only real defense the general public has against this is to watch back so we can stem the abuse of the data collected.

Author David Brin writes a lot about this at his blog, Contrary Brin including his current post, "Armed with Cameras". His basic thesis is that you're not going to stop all of this enhanced surveillance even if you pass laws against it. It's too easy to do. So the answer is to sousveil, watch back intently enough so we can call the watcher out on their abuse.

BTW, I'm proud to have Ron Wyden as one of my Senators. He's in a position to know an has been at the forefront of curbing government abuse of surveillance for a long time.

Re: Circumcised at age 18? by bill_mcgonigle · 2015-03-14 03:33 · Score: 2 · on World's 1st Penis Transplant Done In South Africa

of course there's no chafing - the body has spent years building a keratin layer on the glans to protect the normally-sensitive skin from chafing.

Re:forget the gameplay! by DNS-and-BIND · 2015-03-13 04:32 · Score: 1 · on Rendering a Frame of Deus Ex: Human Revolution

So, because of a temporary trend, we should throw away one of the foundations of gaming as a recreational activity? WTF? You know what lies down that path, right? We've been there before. It sucks ass down there.

"Arborea was covered in several Amiga magazines, which predictably focused on the graphics, sound, and music rather than the actual gameplay elements. (The May 1991 review from CU Amiga begins by giving thanks that "the days [are gone] when a role-playing game meant little more than a great leap of the imagination, a plot with trolls and gameplay along the lines of a special maths paper." You want to know when RPGs started getting "dumbed down"? This is it, right here.)"
-- The CRPG Addict, http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com...

Re:Became ARM by Dogtanian · 2015-03-12 08:04 · Score: 1 · on BBC Returns To Making Computers For Schools

the Model A was £235, the B £335 in 1981

The price rapidly went up to £400 for the Model B (as the Wikipedia page states, lower down) due to supply issues.

It's far more likely that the price was hiked because more people were buying it than expected.

What the Wikipedia article *actually* says is that the price increase was due to "due to increased costs", same as the contemporary referenced article claims. Since UK inflation was still high by modern standards- around 11 to 12%- circa 1981/82 (albeit steeply down from the eye-watering 18% it hit in 1980), it's quite possible that the increase was at least partly legitimate.

That aside, it's also worth remembering that most people's experience and memory of the BBC Micro will have been of the more common- but also more expensive (£335/£400)- Model B which became the de facto base model. (The Model A only included 16K RAM- not even enough to use the most demanding graphics modes- and omitted many of the interfaces, and despite its cheaper price never sold as well (*))

And *that* is just the base machine- it doesn't include the disk drives and RGB monitors that many of us remember using the computer with; (**) even at my most conservative (and generous) guesstimate, both those would probably have come close to doubling the cost of a BBC B system and made it around £2000 to £2500 in today's money.

Yes, even a "bare" Model A with a tape deck and plugged into a TV was still better than the ZX81, but it was three or four times the cost. I'll always have a soft spot for the BBC Micro, but it was never cheap, and the ZX81 can be forgiven because it *was* much cheaper and affordable to people who didn't have a chance in hell of buying a BBC.

(*) Just guessing here, but since schools were a significant chunk of the BBC's sales- even the Model A was an expensive machine for home users- they may not have considered the Model A worth the saving given the loss of functionality. Especially if they were going to be adding the aforementioned expensive monitor and drives anyway.

(**) Again, often in schools.

Re:Steampunked by iluvcapra · 2015-03-11 17:22 · Score: 2 · on Swatch Co-Inventor Predicts Apple Will Bring an 'Ice Age' To Swiss Watch Market

They're on it

Think of the children by rwa2 · 2015-03-11 11:01 · Score: 2 · on Steam On Linux Now Has Over a Thousand Games Available

Ironically, I finally gave up running Linux on my main home machine about a decade ago so I could play Left4Dead, which was one of the first "big" Valve titles ported to Linux. Now I'm sorta addicted to World of Tanks, which works under Linux with wine/PlaysOnLinux but isn't a very good experience.

I have 2 kids, though, and I'm not going to buy them each a Windows gaming PC, so I set them up with a multiseat Linux box for their minecraft:
http://trumblings.blogspot.com...

Steam works pretty well, so my son has started playing other stuff... TF2, War Thunder, and I think I'll gift him my extra copy of Portal 2 and Goat Simulator.

So yeah, maybe still have one Windows PC as the gaming box for the "Windows exclusive" titles, but Steam on Linux will certainly open a broader market for them for secondary / multiplayer LAN setups.

Re:Go nuclear by mbone · 2015-03-11 00:07 · Score: 1 · on Dry-Ice Heat Engines For Martian Colonists

Could not compact nuclear engines (eg. similar to those on submarines or on earlier probes like Voyager) not solve the energy problem for Mars? Are we so superstitious of nuclear power that we'd give up a perfectly good, long-term, powerful source without even considering it as an option? Nuclear power can and has been launched into space before, and as long as the risks of launch failure are mitigated (eg. launch over open ocean) then dry ice sublimation engines are not needed.

The SNAP 10A reactor weighed 300 kg, was flown in 1965, and produced 30 kW of heat power. In the Apollo days, there were serious plans to power lunar bases through the long lunar night with CANDLE type reactors, also known as traveling wave reactors, which have no moving parts and could be just stuck in a hole in the ground to provide 10's or 100's of kW for decades. These reactors are not particularly "hot" before they are turned on, and shouldn't produce an unusual launch risk (as they would not be launched hot).

liga Champion by Anonymous Coward · 2015-03-09 17:28 · Score: -1 · on Exploiting the DRAM Rowhammer Bug To Gain Kernel Privileges

Prediksi Real Madrid vs Schalke 04 11 Mar 2015
Prediksi Reading vs Brighton & Hove 11 Mar 2015
Prediksi Porto vs Basel 11 Maret 2015
Prediksi Real Madrid vs Schalke 04 11 Maret 2015
Prediksi Reading vs Brighton & Hove Albion 11 Maret 2015
Prediksi Skor Real Madrid vs Schalke 04
Ualasan Prediksi Real Madrid vs Schalke 04 Liga Champions 2015

liga Champion by Anonymous Coward · 2015-03-09 17:28 · Score: -1 · on Exploiting the DRAM Rowhammer Bug To Gain Kernel Privileges

Prediksi Real Madrid vs Schalke 04 11 Mar 2015
Prediksi Reading vs Brighton & Hove 11 Mar 2015
Prediksi Porto vs Basel 11 Maret 2015
Prediksi Real Madrid vs Schalke 04 11 Maret 2015
Prediksi Reading vs Brighton & Hove Albion 11 Maret 2015
Prediksi Skor Real Madrid vs Schalke 04
Ualasan Prediksi Real Madrid vs Schalke 04 Liga Champions 2015

Okay, you've got my attention. by jeffb+(2.718) · 2015-03-08 06:46 · Score: 4, Informative · on China's Arthur C. Clarke

The Clarke comparison certainly grabbed my attention. My next question was "where can I find these works in English?" I see that one of the links above leads to English translations of a couple of stories.

Thanks for the tip!

Re:What for? by phantomfive · 2015-03-05 15:30 · Score: 5, Insightful · on Apple, Google, Bringing Low-Pay Support Employees In-House

This is why.

"Google, which has been under rising pressure along with other tech companies to release diversity data"

And here:

"Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity,"

Now, by in-sourcing their "low-pay employees," they are instantly closer to where they want to be.

Insurance-based licensing scheme by Anonymous Coward · 2015-03-05 07:05 · Score: 0 · on Would You Need a License To Drive a Self-Driving Car?

We need an insurance-based licensing scheme for self driving vehicles, as outlined here.

Re:Forget fair use. Call it parody or commentary. by mr_mischief · 2015-03-04 09:27 · Score: 1 · on Gritty 'Power Rangers' Short Is Not Fair Use

From your sources:

parody:

A form of speech protected by the First Amendment as a "distorted imitation" of an original work for the purpose of commenting on it.

satire:

Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Acronyms, Encyclopedia, Wikipedia.
See also: caricature, distortion, irony, parody, ridicule
Burton's Legal Thesaurus, 4E. Copyright © 2007 by William C. Burton. Used with permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

I would trust Black's over TFD, and a lawyer over either of us. Still, there's nothing at either of those URLs that appears counter to the work being parody or satire. The definition is even more broad than that of Webster's.

There's a legal blog post (which is not by me and is not case-specific legal advice by anyone) from Legal Process Outsourcing Services that has much more about the topic. The "Elements of Parody" is exceptionally clear and important here.

First Ever? by dccase · 2015-03-02 06:46 · Score: 2 · on World's First Lagoon Power Plants Unveiled In UK

First ever tidal power lagoon?

Prior art: http://boston1775.blogspot.com...

Get off my lawn by fulldecent · 2015-03-01 14:44 · Score: 5, Interesting · on How Do You Handle the Discovery of a Web Site Disclosing Private Data?

I was in a similar situation a few years ago. It involved write access to other people's brokerage accounts.

FINRA, SEC, and FBI are all good points of contact and they have a straightforward complaint/action process. Assuming that you mailed a letter to the CEO first. Otherwise, I just now post live exploits to my blog at http://privacylog.blogspot.com... and usually give the vendor a heads up.

You will not get credit for the find. The TLAs will not invite you to give a speech. You will not get a career out of this, or even consulting money. Your end game is getting the thing fixed and moving on. Do this by posting your story which proves how innocent you are and giving the people an honest chance to fix it. Imagine you are in front of a jury of idiots. If you are saying "I wrote down this URL, then I typed it back in and some else's bank records came up... then I found out I made a typo". This is a perfectly reasonable story, there is nothing to be afraid of.

Re:Stomp Feet by Anonymous Coward · 2015-02-27 18:42 · Score: 0 · on Verizon Posts Message In Morse Code To Mock FCC's Net Neutrality Ruling

Was that a jab at the Verizon math billing issue?
http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html

Re:Some Real Advice by Burz · 2015-02-27 06:58 · Score: 1 · on OPSEC For Activists, Because Encryption Is No Guarantee

- Firejail. Google it. Won't protect you against local kernel privilege escalation attacks, though.

Yes, contingency planning is good. Yes, single points of failure are bad. But you can get very, very good communication security if you really try.

Qubes OS should protect you against privilege escalation *and* VM breakout attacks where sandboxes like 'Firejail' do not. Its a hardened hypervisor-based desktop OS that isolates elements like graphics and network IO from each other using a system's IOMMU if necessary. Its single-user, and all security is implemented using the hypervisor.

Qubes is put out by white-hat hacker group Invisible Things Lab who switched their focus when they saw the need to do something about endpoint security. Their philosophy is to use the strongest means possible for isolation short of airgapping as a way to manage the complexity (large attack surface) of the personal computing environment; The security models of monolithic OS kernels

A bonus of isolating all the risky activities away from the graphics system is exposition: The windowing system becomes a reliable means to represent security context using window-frame colors and domain labels assigned by the user to the various VM domains.

Re:BS aside, is the K-XL a good thing or not? by rwa2 · 2015-02-25 10:05 · Score: 1 · on Obama Vetoes Keystone XL Pipeline Bill

Heh, I get your point, but the google search on "Fareed Zakaria oil" is pure comedy...

Zakaria: Why oil prices will stay high – Global Public Square ...
globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/.../zakaria-why-oil...
Fareed Zakaria GPS
Jan 15, 2012 - By Fareed Zakaria, CNN The next time you pay $3.50 dollars for a ... So why is oil trading high at $113 a barrel, more than twice the price it was ...

Zakaria: 2015 the year of America? - CNN.com
www.cnn.com/2015/01/05/opinion/zakaria-year-america/
CNN
Jan 5, 2015 - Falling oil prices and a vibrant society could help make 2015 America's year, says Fareed Zakaria.

There are some good graphs of US production vs. imports at: http://cassandralegacy.blogspo... ... but having trouble finding a good graph showing that US oil consumption also fell due to the recession, and that's just as much responsible for the reduction in US imports as the increase in US production.

Anyway, by all reports, US gas consumption will shoot up again since everyone's been out buying gas-guzzling these past couple of months:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/oi...

Re:git blame by swillden · 2015-02-25 05:58 · Score: 1 · on Moxie Marlinspike: GPG Has Run Its Course

Blame Google for not implementing it in Gmail -- Then they wouldn't be able to get ad revenue and user metrics from their "free" email service.

Google is working on it: http://googleonlinesecurity.bl...

Re:What would a Nurse Do by StikyPad · 2015-02-25 04:46 · Score: 1 · on Should a Service Robot Bring an Alcoholic a Drink?

it would be very difficult to create a robot that could determine if someone is drunk

That's a solved problem.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/...

Re:git blame by Liquid-Gecka · 2015-02-25 04:36 · Score: 1 · on Moxie Marlinspike: GPG Has Run Its Course

wait wait wait.. Give google the credit it deserves.. It actually (accidentally) launched a pgp feature in gmail in 2009 See this blog posting.. Problem was that it was only validation of signatures. There was a bunch of talk on making this a full GPG install but the authors were such crypto nerds that they couldn't get past a "pure" implementation.. which basically breaks if you are using web mail the way it was intended. They wanted a Gears app to read your keys, perform the crypto, then upload messages to Gmail.. etc. I wanted them to implement a "first step", meaning that google would keep the keys for people that wanted PGP in a web mail like experience.. Google could sign the keys at level 1 (minimal trust) and never expose them to end user so the private keys remain private to Google. My argument was that this would get hundreds of millions of users to start having at least a chance to understand encryption, and will provide a way to encrypt for @gmail.com addresses in a way that at least protects up until Google. Now, I know this is nowhere near perfect, but for "perfect" why not just use an IMAP client that actually supports full PGP. I wanted this option pushed because it would have introduced users to the concepts without requiring them to eat the sun completely so to speak.

Re:I got a butt chewing for giving my daughter hon by Morpeth · 2015-02-24 08:38 · Score: 1 · on Study: Peanut Consumption In Infancy Helps Prevent Peanut Allergy

Actually there IS some justification on holding off on honey until 12 months, floppy baby syndrome is a real thing. Not saying you did anything wrong, but that's one that does have some scientific reasoning behind it (not just some 'I read it on Natural News blog' kind of pseudoscience)

http://pediatric-medical.blogs...

He Looks Familiar by Anonymous Coward · 2015-02-24 01:46 · Score: 1 · on Police Use DNA To Generate a Suspect's Face

It was either this guy or this guy.

Re:How do you confirm somebody's gender online? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-02-22 09:17 · Score: 0 · on An Evidence-Based Approach To Online Dating

Hole is a hole.

Then why don't you go and stick your dick in this.

Re:Anyone wonder why this isn't hitting Wyoming? by topology · 2015-02-19 09:26 · Score: 1 · on Resistant Bacterial Infection Outbreak At California Hospital

Voter ID laws are about much more than illegals. In the last presidential contest, Romney get not one vote from 59 voting divisions in Philadelphia. Not one single vote. 19,605 to zero. Same with 9 precincts in Cleveland. Many of these voters are not even literate. This is a statistical impossibility. St. Lucie County in FLA had 141% voter turnout. Without fraud like that, the election might have had a different outcome.

It would help to actually do some research as to how it was probable that Romney would get 0 votes in these 59 districts.

This page: http://hatthief.blogspot.com/2012/11/other-precincts-where-romney-got-0-votes.html

Has the best explanation.

I will summarize:

-The precincts were primarily black, and we had our first black president running
-The precincts were centered in democratic territory.
-The precincts had small numbers of voter turn out.
(Obama 4, Romney 0 is hardly statistically significant for proving fraud.)

I know its fun to take information and use it to support the worst possible interpretation, but you should probable check the contexts to make sure you have the right expectations set. I would expect tight, mono-culture communities to have uniform political views and voting behavior.

Re:Whenever you want something other people have.. by riverat1 · 2015-02-18 13:42 · Score: 1 · on The Burden of Intellectual Property Rights On Clean Energy Technologies

Ugo Bardi at his Resource Crisis blog has a commentary on peak oil and the exploitation of unconventional sources. Bardi has done a number of posts lately on what he calls the Seneca Cliff. The name comes from a quote from the Roman Seneca:

"It would be some consolation for the feebleness of our selves and our works if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid." Lucius Anneaus Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, n. 91

It's all pretty interesting and indicates our civilization is in for a hard fall in the not too distant future. It makes me glad I'm over 60 years old and probably won't have to face the worst of it.