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User: RickHunter

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  1. Re:A couple of factors are important here... on Broadband Is The Secret To South Korea's Success · · Score: 1

    Actually, Canada's got really impressive broadband deployment. Even in sparsely-populated areas, like the praries or the east coast, broadband's near-universal. It's much more unusual to find someone without broadband than with it.

  2. Re:A couple of factors are important here... on Broadband Is The Secret To South Korea's Success · · Score: 1

    In theory, yes. It's a nice theory, and one that a lot of pseudo-intellectual geeks like to drown themselves in. But the reality is that it hasn't worked out. After the forced deregulation, all the companies that were supposed to be competing said "Oh! We're free to compete!" and then started collaborating to screw over the customer in the most efficient manner possible.

    Government needs to own or heavily regulate base infrastructure. This includes roads, power, water, and telecom.

  3. Re:Is this supposed to be a new form of mass trans on SpaceShipOne and Wild Fire to Go For the Gold · · Score: 1

    Precisely. van Allen might've been right when he said there was no scientific point to manned spaceflight... But he completely ignored the engineering point. Some of the stuff Scaled Composites has come up with is positively brilliant.

  4. Re:Make an Example Out of This Guy on DVD-Watching Driver Charged with Murder · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I think a better statement would be that an in-dash movie player is too distracting, and it'd be true. When most people watch a movie, they focus in on the screen and tune out everything else. When you're driving, this is very probably lethal - either for you or for whoever else happens to be around. Cars should be (and most are, or were) designed to eliminate unnecessary visual distractions within the vehicle. (Some, like the "Engine About to Explode!" light, are necessary visual distractions)

  5. Re:Outsourcing & H1B on Open Source a National Security Threat · · Score: 1

    Oh, that's interesting. I'd just been wondering if the assorted certification processes might preclude foreign work on the software. I guess it doesn't - and thinking about that, it should've been obvious. Versions of Linux have been certified, and they've definitely been touched by the hands of our filthy Scandinavian enemy. ;)

    But at least in the case of Linux, the additions are reviewed before they're added. In the case of Green Hills, their employees probably have direct revision commit access.

  6. Outsourcing & H1B on Open Source a National Security Threat · · Score: 1

    Of course, Proprietary Software is, again, under the same risks. Especially given the massive trend towards outsourcing (which has few quality controls and little oversight) and replacing skilled employees with H1Bs. In fact, with proprietary software, it's even worse - you don't have a community of eyes that can look over the code and possibly find the trojans. They'll never get found.

  7. Re:Keeping Wages Down on Africa Enters Global Market For IT Outsourcing · · Score: 1

    they move on to higher-paid work

    The problem is that assumption right there. As the mathematical gymnastics the US Gov't is going through right now to try and keep the unemployment rate down show, they DON'T move up. They never have and they never will, because the "higher-paid" work gets moved around with the call centers. Afer all, quality doesn't matter anymore, so why not?

    I predicted this over a year ago - it's corporate piracy, pure and simple. They drain a country dry and then move on.

  8. Re:GNOME is moving backward somehow since 1.0 on Project GoneME Fixes Perceived Gnome UI Errors · · Score: 1

    Agreed. The KDE developers have just ignored all the trolls and proceeded to give us a sane, stable, and above all, usable desktop environment. It comes prepackaged with sensible defaults, but makes it easy for power-users to change these to fit their style. And the developers just keep adding more and more useful features with every release.

  9. Re:Users! on Are You Annoying? · · Score: 2

    No, they don't, because the user is usually a PHB. That means that they are, by definition, in their own minds, the smartest person in the department. If they weren't, they wouldn't be a middle manager. So since they can't understand the error message, none of their employees can either. Any information contradictory to this will be ignored.

    High-ranking corporate users make so much more sense when you realize that they've all got massive inferiority complexes. They're absolutely terrified of anyone who appears smarter than they are, and most techs could, with a week or so of training, do their job better than they can. And they know it.

    Why do you think outsourcing to India's so popular?

  10. Re:XML on web sites sucks on Why You Should Use XHTML · · Score: 1

    Okay, so how does XML compare to HTML? Remember that HTML does not require closing tags, nor does it require tags be closed in the same order they're opened, nor does it require combo end/begin tags to be explicitly noted.... Are you claiming this is somehow easier for the browser to parse than XHTML?

    Or are you proposing that all web servers be replaced with databases, with their horrifically insecure client/server interfaces exposed to the world?

  11. Re:Apollo 11 on Apollo 11 Photographs Unfrozen · · Score: 1

    Again, how does this imply that anything was "CUT OUT"? As the grandparent said, the stars were simply too dim to show up at that exposure setting. That doesn't mean there aren't 'hints' of them that would be brought out by increasing the overall brightness, or (MUCH more likely) imperfections in the film or artifacts of the digitization that show up as 'stars'.

  12. Re:Apollo 11 on Apollo 11 Photographs Unfrozen · · Score: 1

    What, exactly, about those two pictures indicates that something has been "CUT OUT"?

  13. Re:This is over the line on Is Sveasoft Violating the GPL? · · Score: 1

    I doubt the FSF stated this was not a violation. I rather suspect that Sveasoft did not tell the FSF the full story about their policies. RMS is usually absolutely fanatical about adhering to the precise wording of the license, which this is clearly violating.

    I should note that this would probably be fine if Sveasoft actually held copyright on any of the code involved. Unfortunately for them, they don't.

  14. Re:Or... on 'That's All Right' Soon To Enter UK Public Domain · · Score: 1

    There'd be fewer complaints not because it's somehow more "fair" for copyright extensions to be non-retroactive, but because it's easier to fight.

  15. Re:Eat food? on TMBG on DRM · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Pull your head out of the sand. Clinton balanced the budget and generated a small surplus that could have, under a competent President, been used to reduce national debt. Under the Governmental Oppression Party, the Federal Government's got a $500 billion deficit, and your taxes are going up, up, up! (Though at the local level, to make up for cuts in Federal funding, and through other insidious, behind-the-scenes means, like increasing payroll taxes and cutting rebates used by middle- and lower-class citizens)

  16. Re:Eat food? on TMBG on DRM · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Amen and thank you! The Republican Spin Machine's managed to indoctrinate a lot of otherwise-intelligent people into believing that Republicans care about your civil rights. They don't give a damn - they're in it for the money. Democrats care about your civil rights... Unless by "civil rights" you mean "ability to pound my fellow citizens into a pulp financially and steal their money through large-scale corporate fraud". (Enron, Haliburton, etc.)

  17. Re:I'm with Microsoft on this one. (EGAD!) on Japanese FTC Warns Microsoft · · Score: 1

    Er. Your scenario is fundamentally unrealistic and foolish. Before implementing a patented feature like that, Microsoft would have to obtain a patent license from Sony. Such a license would likely have a clause specifying that Microsoft was not responsible for patent infringement committed by other hardware vendors. So that if some other vendor reverse-engineered Sony's feature and implemented it on their platform to take advantage of existing software support, they'd be the ones liable, not Microsoft.

  18. Re:You bought it, we own it. on StorageTek Blocks 3rd Party Maintenance with DMCA · · Score: 1

    I'd agree with you there, the legal system doesn't. Apparently, you can still agree to something without knowing you've agreed to it, or even having any chance to disagree. Yes, this has been confirmed in several cases where trojanware makers sued companies making software to remove unwanted trojanware.

  19. Re:A few points from a StorageTek user on StorageTek Blocks 3rd Party Maintenance with DMCA · · Score: 1

    I'd say that's perfectly legit, or would be in a sane legal environment. After all, the toolkits are in your possession. There's no technical reason why they couldn't be left out and transferred to the customer upon purchase of them, after all. That said, in an insane legal environment like that of the United States, where using software counts as not only copying but redistributing it... And you have things like the DMCA...

  20. Re:A few points from a StorageTek user on StorageTek Blocks 3rd Party Maintenance with DMCA · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Except:

    1) They sold you the device. What right do thay have to prevent you from modifying your own property to take advantage of capabilities they built into it then proceeded to disable? This is like Intel suing someone for overclocking a processor!

    2) Good for StorageTek. If they want to cut their margins in anticipation of future business, that's their problem.

    3) If they don't want people to be examining it, they should lock it away in a secure room. Trade secrets have no legal protection as long as they're not leaked in violation of contract - so if I get a StorageTek device and reverse-engineer the trade secrets out... They can't do anything. If they want legal protection and truly have an innovative invention, they can do what everyone else does: patent it.

  21. Re:You bought it, we own it. on StorageTek Blocks 3rd Party Maintenance with DMCA · · Score: 1

    Technically, SAYING "Hold down the shift key when inserting that CD" is a violation of the DMCA.

  22. Re:MSN's new search will be HUGE... on Microsoft Employee Allegedly Hacked AltaVista · · Score: 1

    Also, the reason Google's search tech is so good is because they employ an absolutely insane number of talented PhDs. These people have done loads of research on graph theory, information theory, and other related fields and how they link back to searching, and all that has been incorporated into Google's engine.

    MS isn't going to squish them unless they've managed to match them brain-wise, and from what I've heard, that just isn't happening. Add to this the fact that Google started small DB-wise and grew incrimentally, while MS seems to be trying to suck down the entire web all at once...

  23. Re:Been there before on Microsoft Employee Allegedly Hacked AltaVista · · Score: 1

    Precisely. The illegally copied W2K source code was never released to the public, and certainly never looked at by anyone with sufficient authority to make pronouncements about how much GPL'd code was illegally incorporated into it.

  24. Re:Well I'll start an actual discussion... on KDE 3.3 Beta "Klassroom" Released · · Score: 1

    There were comments on bugs.kde.org about replacing Arts in 3.3, but I guess that didn't come to pass. Hopefully, gstreamer will work out better for them. Right now, some KDE apps (Juk) suppot gstreamer, but the backend is really hard to configure. One of the things I love about KDE is the config interface.

  25. Re:New features on KDE 3.3 Beta "Klassroom" Released · · Score: 1

    Juk's pretty close - I think there's bug reports there now for gapless playback. If there's not already one for categorizing stuff based on other fields, you really should file one. As for recognizing every format going, that's somewhat more difficult, as the metadata each can store and how it stores it varies greatly, and many formats simply do not have Free decoders available. (AAC)