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Comments · 494

  1. Re:So, here's a question... on Following FEMA's Zombie Preparedness Plan Could Land You On Terrorist List · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They should just be accepted as a cost of freedom and rejected as a highly improbable occurrence.

    In addition, the U.S. gov't should stop oppressing people both at home and abroad. If they spent as much time looking after the interests of the average citizen and the common good of all Americans, and not just the wealthiest, most influential in the top one tenth of one percent of the population, we would not be the target of terrorist attacks.

  2. Re:What puzzles me... on Your Passwords Don't Suck — It's Your Policies · · Score: 1

    It's very simple. Issue certificates to your users. Only let them into your site if their browser presents certificates signed by you. You can use fields in the certifcate to identify the user of your site.

    Certificate management isn't that hard. Most private keys are protected by passwords, but still, I think it is a damned sight better than just username/password.

  3. Re:Editor AI on Could a Computer Write This Story? · · Score: 2

    In my experience, humans have a tendency to overestimate their intelligence and the intelligence of our species. I specialize in automating "knowledge tasks." The people that I work with are very often surprised at just how much of what they think of as requiring human intelligence can actually be broken down into algorithms that are then applied to the data. Very little of what people actually do on a daily basis is more than the algorithmic application of knowledge.

    I agree that there are some things computers cannot do just yet. Those jobs requiring creativity for instance. You could program a computer to imitate Picasso or a certain writer, but I doubt we'll be seeing computers creating truly original works of art or literature in the near future.

  4. Used to do this on Ask Slashdot: Assembling a Linux Desktop Environment From Parts? · · Score: 1

    I used to do this: running everything in blackbox window manager with different panels and other launcher applications. I actually stuck with blackbox for a long time because I liked being able to edit the desktop window in a text file and open applications just by right-clicking on the desktop and choosing from a menu. I gave up on using other launchers and panel applications. I really liked the minimalism of black box.

    Now, I'm using Unity with the Launcher on Ubuntu. I find it usable for the most part, and once you alter habits to work with its paradigm, it doesn't really hinder productivity.

  5. Senator Sander, you know better. on Fed Audit's Initial Report Reveals Trillions in Secret Loans · · Score: 3, Informative

    "No agency of the United States government should be allowed to bailout a foreign bank or corporation without the direct approval of Congress and the president," Sanders said.

    Since when is the Federal Reserve an agency of the United States government? Last time that I checked it was and still is a privately owned corporation.

  6. Re:UNacceptable on Man Ordered At Gunpoint To Hand Over Phone For Recording Cops · · Score: 1

    This is exactly the type of abuse of power that the Second Amendment is meant to prevent. When any and all citizens could be armed, the government agents have to deal with them as equals or risk being killed. When all of the risk is on the unarmed populace, the thugs are free to act with impunity.

    Tyrants prefer unarmed peasants.

  7. Bleeding Obvious on Americans Favor Moratorium On New Nuclear Reactors · · Score: 2

    I hate to state the bleeding obvious, but it seems that I must.

    Why would you want more nuclear power? There is only so much uranium to be mined. It really doesn't matter how long estimates say the uranium reserves will last, there is still only so much to be had, and then what? Eventually, we'll run out of uranium, just as we'll eventually run out of oil and coal. Sure, we'll have more some day, if you care to wait millions or billions of years. Frankly, I don't have the time.

    The best source of power beats us on the head every day, the Sun. We should be seriously investing in solar, wind, and tidal for power generation. These sources are not likely to run out for the lifetime of the planet, and that's a damned site better than relying on finite resources that take millions of years to replenish.

    NOTE: There are more ways to use solar power than just photovoltaic cells.

  8. Re:Is it me on Wikileaks' Assange Begins Extradition Battle · · Score: 1

    Bingo! We have a winner!

  9. Re:Yeahbut... on Spam Levels Lowest Since 2009 · · Score: 1

    My experience is that the spambots are currently more compliant with RFCs than most legitimate servers.

  10. Re:A Way To Get Around Regulations on Goldman Sachs Says No Facebook Shares For US Investors · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No. G-S are not "trying to be good guys." They are trying to make money in a scam investment in a way that is illegal in the U.S. They are obeying U.S. law to avoid being sued or whatever. This is purely a cover-your-ass move.

  11. Re:You're kidding, right? on Scientists Advocate Replacing Cattle With Insects · · Score: 1

    I mean, what happened to fish?

    Have you had a look at the ocean lately? We've eaten or poisoned the fish to near extinction.

    It is also my suspicion, supported by research that I'm too lazy to look up, that farm-raised fish are fatter and less full of the lovely acids that makes their wild counterparts so healthy to eat.

  12. Re:12 years? on Open Source After 12 Years · · Score: 1

    In my day, we just called it "software."

  13. Re:So i love the sarcastic comments on TSA Investigates Pilot Who Exposed Security Flaws · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm going to do the same thing about it that we do about the 40,000 odd traffic fatalities every year: Nearly nothing.

    We don't invade privacy and remove freedoms because so many people die in traffic accidents. Why should we because of some vague "terrorist" threat? Honestly, airport security never has and never will stop a determined terrorist. We need to simply have an adult conversation with the American people and perhaps increase the educational investment in mathematics education. Perhaps, if they understood statistics a bit better, then they wouldn't run around like idiots demanding that something be DONE about what amounts to a non-threat.

    Yeah, I know....

  14. Re:Information wants to be free. on Why Money Doesn't Motivate File-Sharers · · Score: 1

    You know, everyone keeps quoting "information wants to be free" out of context. Stewart Brand also said in the same breath that information wants to be expensive. He was talking about two sides of the equation, the consumer side that wants to be free, and the producer side, that wants to be expensive.

    I personally get very tired of the producer/consumer economic model that keeps getting shoved down our throats by the old economic models and the industries that cling to them.

    The Internet and affordable technology enable us all to be producers and consumers of each others' digital works. The whole tired argument of information wants to be free/information wants to be expensive should really be a moot point by now.

  15. Heh. on Panda Dung Statue Sold for $45,000 · · Score: 1

    I should probably make some kind of joke here, but words fail me.

  16. Re:Education is the best medicine on The Golden Hour of Phishing Attacks · · Score: 2

    Quoth Bruce Schneier:

    There's nothing we can do to educate users, and anyone who has met an actual user knows that.....Rather than focus on what can we do to educate users, we need to focus on building security that doesn't require educated users.

    Reference: http://www.schneier.com/news-055.html

  17. Re:obligatory joke for president on Wikileaks DDoS Attacker Arrested, Equipment Seized · · Score: 1

    You my good sir, or madame, are a poet!

  18. Re:I think I'll pass on this on KDE 4.6 Beta 1 – a First Look · · Score: 1

    I worked on KDE 2.0, did some coding for KMail, and then because of time constraints from job and family had to give up on it. I quit using KDE soon after because I realized that other than one or two applications, I spent 90% of my day doing command line stuff. I used the BlackBox window manager for many years. Then, last year, I tried KDE 4.something again. Man, was I disappointed. The environment may have been nice and the look much improved, but very basic stuff was missing from a lot of the applications. Konqueror was hardly useable as a browser. There was no way to manage certificate and key stores, even using the dedicated application for that. Basic stuff that was there in 2.0 was simply missing. I don't know what discussions were had or what decisions were made since I left the community but someone seriously screwed the pooch on version numbering. To my mind, 4.4 or whatever I was using should have been a 4.0 pre-release. I got the impression that KDE's focus now is on the gee-whiz bells and whistles and they are less concerned with shipping something that works.

    These days, I really don't give a crap about "desktop environment." I use the applications that I use, and again, I still spend a lot of my day writing command line applications to get real work done, mostly shuffling data from place to another or fixing problems created by user or programmer error. Frankly, KDE 4 felt like it was getting in the way, and its native applications (and I know some are written by the KDE team and some not) were lacking in features. I was forced to use applications that didn't integrate with the environment just to do something useful.

    BTW, I feel pretty much the same way about Gnome, but I suppose that I am using Gnome since I switched from Kubuntu to Ubuntu. I really don't care, since the applications that I use don't integrate with any desktop environment.

  19. Re:That's nothing! on Student Googles Himself, Finds He's Accused of Murder · · Score: 1

    Yeah. That's one of the best films ever.

  20. Re:That's nothing! on Student Googles Himself, Finds He's Accused of Murder · · Score: 1

    Heh, "file directory" should be film director.

  21. Re:That's nothing! on Student Googles Himself, Finds He's Accused of Murder · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You laugh, but a man, with the same first and last name as I, was murdered in Jamaica several years ago in a rather brutal fashion: he was decapitated with a machete. He was leading a ring of phone scammers and some of the other members of the ring had a disagreement over the money.

    Another man with the same first and last name is serving a prison sentence for weapons charges.

    Another man with the same first and last name is a doctor.

    Another is a low-budget file directory.

    I could go on.

    Its fun having a common name.

    No, I didn't google myself as a result of this story. I do from time to time when bored with nothing else to do. If you google my name now, you don't get the murder story until very far into the results, but it was among the top results when it happened four or five years ago.

  22. Re:Of course... on Google Warns Irish Government Against Tax Increase · · Score: 1

    If Ireland is going tits up with a national debt at 14% of annual GDP, then the US must already be a fathom under with a national dept equal to 95% of annual GDP! When Reagan instituted his "trickle down" economics in the '80s our national debt was roughly 25% of GDP, after Reagan was done it was closer to 40%. If anything this shows you are both right and wrong. "Trickle Down" economics won't "get them back soon enough" because the American experience suggests it will only make things worse.

  23. Re:Have a little pity on the magazine on Cooks Source Magazine Apologizes — Sort Of · · Score: 1

    Actually, from where I sit, the answer is "No."

    The problem with copyright infringement with music is that the RIAA is going after the wrong people. They're going after downloaders, when it is actually the uploaders who are infringing copyright.

    Read the law, Title 17 of the US Code. In America, copyright is all about distribution. It is the distributor of the copyrighted work who is breaking the law, and not the recipient.

    Now, you can make complicated arguments one way or the other about what distribution means in a legal context, but traditionally it has meant diffusing the work and not receiving the work. This of course works with physical copies. I make a copy of a CD and give it to you. I am the one violating the artists' and/or publishers' rights, but you are not. In a digital context, the RIAA seems to argue that downloading equals distribution to yourself. Sounds crazy to me, since actually making a copy of something for your own use has never AFAICT been ruled a violation of copyright (cf. the BETAMAX decision).

    With applications like BitTorrent, you are both downloading and uploading the content at the same time. You are infringing copyright if you or the person(s) from who you are getting the data do not have permission to distribute said data.

    IANAL, but I have worked in the publishing industry and my main job when I did work in publishing was filling out the copyright registration forms and providing the deposit copies to the Library of Congress. I have read the relevant publications from the Library of Congress as well as Title 17 of the US Code (cited above). Everything that I say above applies to the United States and may be different in other jurisdictions.

  24. Re:Jehova witnesses on USB Is the Devil's Connection · · Score: 1

    It helps if you're chopping/pruning branches on a tree in your yard and you're holding a lumber ax when they approach your house. When you tell them you're not interested in whatever they have to sell, they tend to leave and not come back.

  25. Re:The web is public domain? on Cook's Magazine Claims Web Is Public Domain · · Score: 1

    Well, actually, it might not be illegal to get the copies, but giving them to others definitely is illegal.

    You see copyright law is all about distribution. There's nothing that overtly states it is illegal to make a copy for your own use.

    It does overtly state that distributing copies (giving them to others) is illegal.

    As always, IANAL, but I have read the statutes in question, the circulars from the Library of Congress, and handled the copyright registrations when I worked for an academic publisher.

    There is a lot of misunderstanding when it comes to copyright, even among lawyers.