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User: Coolhand2120

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  1. Re:9th Circuit most often overturned. on Microsoft Loses Appeal of "Vista-Capable" Lawsuit · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I'm not sure what country you live in, but in the U.S.A., judges are supposed to interpret the law, not make the law. Legislators are the law makers and the judges are the interpreters. An "activist judge" is someone who interprets the law to favour their own political ideology or other agenda.

    I'm actually quite surprised that people didn't know that there is a difference between a law maker and a judge. Judges are sworn to upload the constitution of the state and the laws of the state, as for the federal judges they are sworn to uphold the constitution of the country and the laws of the country.

    Just the fact that people obviously think that judges make laws show how easy it is to have "activist judges". I wonder how many other people are ignorant of our system of checks and balances.

    Take a gander at this links. http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/legalotln/

    "Courts are central to the legal system, but they are not the entire system. Every day across America, federal, state, and local courts interpret laws, adjudicate disputes under laws, and at times even strike down laws as violating the fundamental protections that the Constitution guarantees all Americans."


    The only time a judge may outright ignore a law is if he/she views it as being unconstitutional. Judges MUST uphold the law even if they think it's immoral or wrong. Now show me where it says judges MAKE laws in the U.S.
  2. 9th Circuit most often overturned. on Microsoft Loses Appeal of "Vista-Capable" Lawsuit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Don't get too excited the 9th Circuit court of appeals is the most often overturned court int he land. Maybe because they don't actually take the LAW into account when making their decisions. http://www.centerforindividualfreedom.org/legal/9th_circuit.htm

  3. No conflict on Ben Stein's 'Expelled' - Evolution, Academia and Conformity · · Score: 1

    Evolution and ID do not contradict each other. ID is vague to the point that no matter what science comes up with as the "meaning of life" followers of ID can turn around and say "that sounds like Genesis". Of course when you compare the study and continued theory of evolution to a few paragraphs in the bible there are bound to be some assholes that say "These two things can't be the same". The ability to form one's own opinion is the beauty of the bible, no matter what some wacko interprets the meaning as being, it's just their opinion. The same goes for the atheist/agnostic crowd, they come up with their latest theory and throw it in the face of someone they believe is religious and scream "SEE THERE IS NO GOD" as if they had finally found that incontrovertible proof. The two groups have need to stop trying to have it 100% their own way. I would say a good half way point would be to teach evolution, and if the kids ask how or why evolution is the way it is, the required answer is "God made it that way". Which is a very good answer for all sorts of questions that have yet to be answered: How long is a transcendental number? Why can't we seem to move faster than light? When will Duke Nukem Forever be released?

  4. Nuke the hypoxic dead zones! on Nuked Coral Reef Bounces Back · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Maybe we should nuke all the worlds hypoxic dead zones! That would certainly remove the waste accumulated there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology)

  5. Createive is the anti-innovator on $90 Asus Sound Card Whips Creative's Best · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've followed Creative Labs and the PC sound card evolution since the early 80's, before there was an ADLIB and I was trying to get my PC speaker to produce music. My first sound card was a Sound Blaster like a lot of people at the time. The card worked great, replaced ADLIB as the de facto standard, of which I never owned, and brought PC games into realistic sound reproduction.

    Fast forward 5 years, creative still dominates the market with their sound blaster offering and now there are a few competitors that claim 'sound blaster compatible' to work with existing games, still DOS games mind you. Most of these cards were fine replacements for the creative offering at the time, an ISA slot Sound Blaster 16 (which was stereo!), some were garbage, but most worked just like the creative card.

    Along comes windows95 and DirectX API to unify sound programming in games for windows! Yay, no more need for 'sound blaster compatible' any card with a functioning windows driver will work for any game. During over a decade of existence creative thus far has done nothing to make their sound card better than offer 'stereo' and a 16 bit ISA adapter to replace their original 8bit adapter. Now at this point the only 16bit card you've got in your system is the stupid creative SB LIVE!, or another competitor's card that might be PCI but otherwise the same.

    Everything is about to change though, a new company enters the scenes, Aurel. Right off the bat the Aureal sound card is obviously superior to every sound card on the market. They only have PCI cards and they boast something that no other card has had thus far, real time effect processor! Now you can have reverb and parametric EQ's and time delays and any sort of crazy effect you can dream up! AND IT REAL TIME! All the processing is done on the card, so no extra CPU overhead, multichannel in/multichannel out, multichannel SPDIF out, the friggin works, and this is going up against the sound blaster live which boasts ..... STEREO, minor multi out functionality and a 16 bit slot.

    This is where the story gets juicy and I'm sure quite a few people recall it. Creative backwards engineered or maybe just ripped off the processor design of the Audigy card, got sued for doing so, bought Aureal, stuck the almost EXACT same chip in their emuX series (Audigy) cards and haven't done a god damn thing since then and that was almost 10 years ago! All they seem to be able to do is make continuous copies of the chip Audigy designed almost a decade ago and sit on their asses while another company surpasses them in whatever the next PC sound evolution will be, then I guess they will buy them out and stop the innovation!

  6. Things in Pakistan were going peachy until youtube on Pakistan YouTube Block Breaks the World · · Score: 1

    Oh ya, Pakistan was a great place until youtube happen!

  7. However... on China Plans to Surpass the U.S. in Nanotech Development · · Score: 1

    Most of that money is spent figuring out a way to mark "Made In China" on the nanomachines.

  8. Re:Kobayashi Maru on Mac Hack Contest Redux · · Score: 1

    Or if you were really slick you could hack the MAC address table on the switch and have the hacker's hack their own boxes.

  9. Kobayashi Maru on Mac Hack Contest Redux · · Score: 1

    Someone should pull a Kobayashi Maru and hack all the competing hacker's machines so they can win the prize.

  10. VIA Hardware is no good on New VIA x86 CPU Takes Aim At Intel Silverthorne · · Score: 1

    I've run dozens of VIA chipset motherboards and peripheral devices at the job and the hardware is so unstable it makes it not worth even trying, even adding a VIA peripheral card will cause an otherwise stable Intel chip system to break down. Constant BSODs, random freezing etc.. I've never had as many problems running pure Intel systems, where only rarely does a hardware fault occur. I admit it's been about 3 or 4 years since I've written off VIA, but why is everyone so happy about VIA when, in my experience, they have made nothing even approaching a reliable computer part?

  11. Re:Nobody uses Vista? on Microsoft Says Vista Has the Fewest Flaws · · Score: 1

    The comment was a retort to the maniacs that say Vista isn't installed anywhere and that's why it's so secure. I'm not going to sit here and try and defend Vista, I will, however, point out blatant lies, more OS X installs than Vista installs is silly.

    To address your point of market share. Anyone who buys a POS computer from Best Buy or where ever probably doesn't care what OS it's running, or for that matter WHAT an OS is.

  12. And I should be worried why? on DRM-Free Music Spells Trouble? · · Score: 1

    Has the music industry ever done ANYTHING that is worthy of praise? I for one will not cry if the whole music industry collapses, it's nothing but a morally deprived shock machine that will do ANYTHING for money, and that's just Sony/BGM! The music industry quit being about the artist/music a LOOOOOONG time ago. I say let the whole shit bucket go under, it's done nothing to earn a continued existence. Maybe then we can get some decent music.

  13. Nobody uses Vista? on Microsoft Says Vista Has the Fewest Flaws · · Score: 4, Interesting

    SO. Nobody uses Vista in comparison to OS X or Linux? ouch, looks like a whole magnitude of people use Vista over OS X or Linux. According to this link, if you took all the Linux and Apple users and put them into a single group, it STILL wouldn't be as many people who are using Vista by a good size chunk (let alone XP), so let's not repeat that lie again.

    I don't mind people being critical of anything, but please be honest in your critique. And whatever you do don't use Apple as an example of "the way things should be".

    I'm sure this will be tagged flamebait or troll. That's kind of ironic when I'm replying to all these guy's tagged 'informative' who say "Nobody uses Vista" when they are obviously providing false information. If pointing out a blatant lie makes me a troll so be it.

  14. But what about vs. death magic? on IE 8 Passes Acid2 Test · · Score: 1

    It may roll good against acid but what about vs. death magic?

  15. Mac zellots : RTFA on A Little .Mac Security Flaw · · Score: 1

    People keep saying '.mac has a logout button' and 'you can just click here and here to delete your cookies'. That's not the story! The idisk software is lacking a logout button, it is PART of .mac, not .mac. And if you didn't get that from reading the article, surely you understood it from reading other posts. In their rush to defend the indefensible, they blew past the article and and said something that is arguably moronic.

    Before you mod me troll or flamebait, it's just an observation not an attack on anyone.

  16. More evidence that global warming isn't on More Antarctic Dinosaurs · · Score: 0

    Global warming is not only not man made, it hasn't gotten warmer in the last 5 years. The only global warming anyone can actually point to is a bunch of erred NASA reports from the 80's and statistical analysis by computers of the errorous data. I'm sure everyone here on slashdot appreciates the inaccuracy of any analytical computer program predicticting the outcome of anything in the real world. These computer climate models, while entertaining, have absolutely nothing to do with reality, it's a kin to a gigantic magic 8 ball. The best proof that global warming is a crock of shit is how defencive proponents are of any skeptics : http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=c9554887-802a-23ad-4303-68f67ebd151c . This global warming farce and gone on long enough! It's time for the halfway intelligent people to say "Enough politics in science!"

  17. Mozilla Sides with the evil of our time. on Mozilla Inks Deal With Chinese Search Giant · · Score: 1

    So now the proud Chinese people can more easily redirect your filthy capitalist searches http://slashdot.org/articles/07/11/18/1824230.shtml. Hurry, go buy your new PC http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/12/2235200 from walmart it will come preinstalled with the Communist government's favorite browser! What a deal for the Chinese! Free software for EVERYONE! At least when they pirated Ubuntu and FireFox we tried to give it to them first.

    COMON JOE YOU BUY YOU BUY HAPPY FUN WEB COMPUTER! YOU GOOD CUSTOMER JOE! SPECIAL PRICE FOR YOU! AHHHH, COMES WITH SPEICAL CHINESE MAGIC OPERATING SYSTEM AND WEB BROWSER FOR FREE!

  18. Ad cash cow on PDF Is Now ISO 32000 · · Score: 1

    Is that with or without the new PDF ad scheme? I wonder how many other ISO standards have a clickable ad in the document as part of it's specifications. Is that a coincidence or what? Less than a month after they reveal the ad specs they are an ISO standard! What a racket!

  19. Unscientific on Half a Million Database Servers 'Have no Firewall' · · Score: 1

    What random blocks were dipped into? What % were dynamic and what % were static? What % of the hosts scanned were 'fake' computers, honeypots? How can you tell if a server isn't behind a firewall that 'looks' just like another server? A lot of people, myself included, use loads of honeypots to confound hackers. For each REAL service I may have 2 or 3 honypots. I have a mail server that reports itself as no fewer than 5 different types of mail servers, and it's not even a real mail server, just something for the script kiddies to bounce off. Same with www, sometimes it's an Apache server, sometimes it's an IIS server, sometimes it's an Apple, sometimes it's a Sun. Knowing how much deception I place in my own network I wouldn't be surprised to find that half of the 'stats' dude has gathered (using what? nmap? eeye? who knows?) are just honeypots. And No, I don't keep the ports up to date on the fake machines, they are there to waste the time of, and identify, a would be hacker.

  20. Re:Chinese computers for sale. on Wal-Mart's $200 Linux PC Sells Out · · Score: 1

    You need to do a little homework. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff A communist government OWNS all the companies that originated in that country. A "traditional" communist government will simply not allow retail stores to sell items they don't want sold to their people. Simple. No 'shoring up' the foreign item just doesn't exist.

    Oh did you think that in a communist government you can pick and choose what and who you buy from and where your money goes? Nope! If you're not a card carrying party member you can stand in line and get whatever your GOVERMENT offers. There are no private party resellers, every company is beholden to any whim of the government. There is nothing stopping them from saying "You know what? NO INTEL!, and now THIS guy owns your company, and we think you should GO TO A WORK CAMP." That's what WE (the U.S.) are competing against!

    The whole reason VIA competing with Intel is unfair is because Intel is bound by the laws and regulations of the U.S., VIA can have sweatshops and dormitories full of farmers daughters manning their plants, Intel is beholden to the EPA, labour unions, and the radical environmentalist movement in the U.S.. VIA is held to no standard, if they were to pay their workers $.05 an hour, nobody would say a damn thing about it. If Intel did the same thing they would be run out of town by the same people that are cheering on VIA. VIA can dump waste into the local waterways or bury hazardous waste anywhere, nobody in China cares, and yes, sorry, even the U.S. recognizes Taiwan as a Chinese colony, and I'm pretty sure everyone in Taiwan is Chinese and at least half of the 'Democratic' Chinese are... communist!

    I don't even know why I'm arguing, any computer tech. worth his weight in salt knows that VIA chips are horrible and will crash unexpectedly, not work when you need them, cause random hangups and just plain suck. If you haven't had that experience with them then you haven't really used them. Say nothing about supporting a communist government that is very hostile http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/14/world/main2179694.shtml towards our country.

  21. Re:Chinese computers for sale. on Wal-Mart's $200 Linux PC Sells Out · · Score: 1

    Yes, a fraction of the 694 that are available in the U.S.A.. What's your point? Intel is STILL a U.S. company and VIA is still a Chinese company. How many jobs is VIA offering in the U.S.? How many jobs does Intel allready provide in the U.S.. If VIA intends on selling their cheap computer for $200 less than a comparable computer made in the U.S. the government should place a $200 tariff on the computer, that's what tariffs are for, so foreign companies don't dump their cheaply made goods in our markets and drive the U.S. manufactures out of business, I think the focal point of this article is: don't buy that wintel computer, but this VIA computer for less! We don't care WHY it's less, but hey it doesn't have the hated MS on it so it must be good.

  22. Chinese computers for sale. on Wal-Mart's $200 Linux PC Sells Out · · Score: -1, Troll

    What Walmart is trying to promote here is not just a totally free operating system, that's been usurped by someone who wants to make a quick buck off of Linux, thrown into what amounts to a pile of rubbish from a Chinese sweatshop. They are trying to promote removing the "PC" from making any money what-so-ever in the U.S., ironically the country that invented the PC. These PC's are putting people out of business. Not just MIK$OSF!T1!@. But a lot of hard working hardware engineers and a lot of other people who use MS's API's and operating system to pay the rent. So before you go and cheer on our new communist rulers take into account that sometimes it's not such a bad idea to drop a few bucks on an Intel chip. You know the chip is better, and your money will go back into the wallet of your fellow countrymen (my apologies to the Chinese national readers). The same goes for MS. It's not just a OS you're trying to kill, but a whole house of cards that a LOT of the software industry has built itself upon. Let's never be technological slaves to another country whom is bashing us over the head with our own inventions! What can a decent manufacture do against a POS $200 computer when they have to sell their POS computer for $400+ computer who's only fault is having a great deal of the hardware and software made in the U.S.A.? You can't be FOR labor unions and AGAINST labour unions at the same time. You can't be for shafting MS then complain when they try and recoup the losses by pricing their OS higher than it would have been sans litigation. You can't be FOR extra government regulations and AGAINST the result, higher prices. You can't be for technological innovation and then pay off the guys who ripped it off from the inventors, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureal_Semiconductor Creative Labs vs. Aureal. What it comes down to is us vs. them. If we choose to place our money in VIA don't be surprised in another 5 years when VIA acquires Intel. But, hey, yay Linux, and Ubuntu I'm running a few FREE copies myself. Just won't do it on a commie VIA chip.

  23. Google is the source of all evil on Google Announces "Open Phone" Coalition, No gPhone [Updated] · · Score: 1

    Google has always been in it for Google. Don't for a second Google isn't going to take advantage of every unfair and underhanded method to gain, keep and manipulate their users. They have turned 'searching' into a two tier system. They claim their organic searches are uninfluenced by how much you advertise with them, but rather the importance of your site. Then Google turns around and 'accidentally' crawls all the 'copies' of your ad on the tens of thousands (millions?) of sites that broker ads from Google, and "OOPS! Looks like your site just went up 1000 places in the organic search because hey look it's on all these sites that just happen to broker ads from us." Want to stop advertising with Google? It will cost you your organic ranking! "Oh well", you say, "let's just rely on our organic ranking on it's own merit?" Try telling that to all your competitors who are willing to give Google $1000 a week and push your organic ranking into obscurity. Google's search has 1% to do with ranking by importance or how many important sites link to your site and technical issues with the site and 99% to do with if you give Google money on a daily basis.

    If you think this rather cool sounding phone is anything but a huge vector for Google to make a lot more dishonest money than you're living in la-la land. If MS was doing something like this it would be front page news, but since it's Google I'm probably the only one who thinks it's a bad thing. I'm not stupid though, so the companies I work for give lots of $$$ to Google every day just so we can show up in a search. I'm sure their phone will be very much the same, less a phone and more a conduit through which Google can serve up ads or their special 'search results' or whatever they are pushing with it, and you can be sure whoever gives Google the most money will be the ones who show up first in your searches using the phone.

    What's this lead to? You search for 'pizza' and even though there are three or four places CLOSER and CHEEPER and MORE POPULAR, this other pizza place gave Google some money so guess which one shows up on top of the list? Searching for an attorney? How about a new car? Hope you don't need to search for "Google phone replacement". Google is USING EVERYONE LIKE A TOOL! I'm not sure how I feel about that but it's the truth that will set you free. Spread the word that Google = 2 tier plutocracy.

  24. Napster software broken and napster doesn't care on Napster - Music Subsciptions Are Overrated · · Score: 1

    I was subscribed to napster until I started using vista ultimate at home for a media center instead of XP. The napster plugin for vista's media guide does not work. You can download the plugin and run it but the first thing the stupid plugin informs you is that you need to upgrade to DX7 to make the napster plugin work. Well napster, you lost a customer, because you don't care if your stupid plugin works, and how simple would it be to fix that. I refuse to use your lame ass application, I'll use the one built into the OS that works with all the other subscription services thank you very much. And you can stick your 'you need to upgrade to DX7' right up your ass. That's too bad too because the media center kicks ass with a subscription service.

  25. Great game on BioShock Review · · Score: 1

    If I only get to play it once all the way thru it's worth $50.00.