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User: bjourne

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Comments · 850

  1. Re:Placebo effect? on Do-It-Yourself Brain Stimulation Has Scientists Worried · · Score: 1

    We don't. But you may want to watch this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M53ov7Fifgo of a dystonia patient with the dbs device turned on and off to grasp how potent electric brain stimulation technology is.

  2. Re:Passwords are shit. on Deloitte: Use a Longer Password In 2013. Seriously. · · Score: 2

    My bank (not named to protect the guilty) has the following restrictions on password:

    Name and shame away! Stupid password restrictions like that is a telltale sign that they are storing your password in plain text. Probably on some really arcane or buggy system if it doesn't even handle case-sensitivity correctly. The only way that companies are going to get their act together is if customers change to a competitor because they are fed up with crappy account security.

  3. Re:I Got It! on Deloitte: Use a Longer Password In 2013. Seriously. · · Score: 1

    Possibly so, but would you take that chance? Brute-forcing passwords for some account on some site is pretty obviously illegal and it's hard not to leave a traceable trail after yourself if you have to send thousands of http requests to a single site.

  4. Re:Racism is a cause, on Racism In Online Ad Targeting · · Score: 1

    Hitler tried to eradicate all Jews, not just the small subset of the Ashkenazi that supposedly have higher than average intelligence. By the way, the Askenazi Jews are also the victim of a number of hereditary diseases because of low genetic diversity in their group. I've even heard doctors recommend Ashkenazi to breed with non-Jews and other Ashkenazi outside of their own community so that their offspring will not end up with two recessive genes that carries a genetic disease.

  5. Re:Demand More on As Music Streaming Grows, Royalties Slow To a Trickle · · Score: 1

    Now, wait a minute. Seems to me this isn't bad at all. I don't know that this is "down" from the past at all... in the radio days (not very long ago), 0.1 cents per play would have been a pretty good return.

    Really? Do you have any reference for that preposterous statement? If an artist wants to make minimum wage at about $8/hour that would entail 64 / 0.001 = 64 000 radio plays per day. Assuming an average song length of 3.5 minutes, you would need 156 radio stations ((64000 * 3.5) / (24 * 60)) doing nothing except playing this one artists music non-stop 24h per day.

  6. Re:Good on Cuba Turns On Submarine Internet Cable · · Score: 2

    They did offer compensation. The previous owners refused to accept it because of duress from Uncle Sam.

  7. Re:Or just stay single. on The Problem With Internet Dating's Frictionless Market · · Score: 1

    Getting laid is NOT as hard as people make it out to be...you just have to have confidence and know how to talk to women (most of the times, just means have them to talk about themselves)...go out a couple times and you're laid.

    If it's that easy, then why the hell are you wasting time telling us the secret on slashdot? Get out there and start your own pickup school that actually works and you can make BILLIONS. :)

  8. Re:We need gas control! on New York Passes Landmark Gun Law · · Score: 2

    No. People in that state of mind aren't thinking straight. Depressed, suicidal people aren't as ingenious as you think they are. If Adam Lanza hadn't had easy access to lots of guns, it is not likely that he would instead create some cunning plan to import assault rifles from Russia or something. Instead he would have executed his killing spree with other accessible weapons such as a knife, like a Chinese lunatic recently did. He managed to stab 23 children and one elderly woman, none of which died. Clearly a considerably better outcome than Adam Lanza's mass murder.

  9. Re:Or just stay single. on The Problem With Internet Dating's Frictionless Market · · Score: 1

    I'm separated, and I can't think of any good reasons to be in a relationship again.

    Regular sex?

  10. Re:Can't America get its acts together ? on Congressman Introduces Bill To Ban Minting of Trillion-Dollar Coin · · Score: 1

    No, the problem is with idiots like you who think that people enjoy living on food stamps. YOU consider yourself to be of good morals so YOU would never abuse the social security system. But everyone else are scumbags leeching on the system and your tax money. Nobody likes begging for aid, it is shit and dehumanising and not something you do unless you have to. People dont get food stamps because it is fun but because they would starve.

  11. Re:three letters... on Ask Slashdot: Undoing an Internet Smear Campaign? · · Score: 1

    That's not how it works. You can not sink a site by pointing lots of outgoing sites to it. You can only sink your own site that way by linking to lots of dubious sites. If you could sink sites the way you propose, I can assure you that there is a whole industry of unscrupulous marketers that would have exploited that technique already. Rankings in high-competition keywords such as poker, gambling and travel are so valuable that it would make sense to spend a small fortune downgrading a competitor a few steps. To remove them completely from the index? Invaluable.

  12. Re:Title is misleading on Automation Is Making Unions Irrelevant · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Automation is only making human labour irrelevant as long as it is cheaper. Low labour costs means there is no incentive to invest in automation. Which is why Japan and Sweden has the highest number of industrial robots per capita in the world. Evil unions that drive labour costs through the roof and forces poor companies to automate.

  13. Re:The sane option... on Is Technology Eroding Employment? · · Score: 1
    That's right and all that is possible thanks to technology. But what you don't have is more leisure time than the kings had. Likely you have less of it than even the lowly peasants of the day.

    I hear what you are saying about longer days. But then, how long was my grandfather's "farm day" where all the work on the farm was manual, no electricity, no refrigeration, and all the work was done by man and mule?

    Much shorter than yours. Keep in mind that without electricity, it's pointless to work after dark and you can't till fields in freezing weather. Your grandfather would also work with his friends and family, not strangers at the office you happen to share a skillset with. He would also stop working when there was no more chores to do, while when you are done with your work, your boss will just pile on more keeping you busy until your hours is up. He also exercised some control over when to do what work, in what order and how to do it. Stuff that your boss nowadays have control over. Technology has given us a lot, but to wage slavery there is no end in sight.

  14. Re:The sane option... on Is Technology Eroding Employment? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That's the idea with more technology of course. But in reality, we seem to be experiencing the reverse. Collectively we spend more hours at work today than we did 50 years ago and many more than we did 200 years ago. It may be more cushier jobs sitting in front of a computer for 8-9 hours per day than digging ditches or cutting trees or whatever manual labour they did. Less risk of getting hurt in an accident, higher risk of getting fat and having a heart attack I guess.

  15. Re:The taser was excessive on New Hampshire Cops Use Taser On Woman Buying Too Many iPhones · · Score: 5, Informative

    Check the video. They did indeed sit on her. It wasn't before she was laying face down to the ground that they tasered her. It looks more like the tasering was used to get her to shutup than to pin her down.

  16. Re:did you realize... on Ask Richard Stallman Anything · · Score: 1

    Wrong! He definitely works on Emacs. Just read the mailing list sometime.

  17. Re:Accuracy on Israel's Iron Dome Missile Defense Shield Actually Works · · Score: 1

    Israel is the aggressor here. They have continuously tried to provoke a response from Hamas. They are not stupid, they know that if they murder their leader, then they will retaliate with rocket attacks. That was what broke the cease fire being negotiated with Egypt. Israel does not want to negotiate, doesn't even recognize Hamas or that Palestine exists. If they want peace, then why are they so vehemently against Palestine getting observer status in the UN? Why are they hi-jacking aid ships going to Gaza on international water? Why are they expanding their settlements on the West Bank? You see, it most definitely is a numbers game as your opinions most definitely are shaped by how many dollars each side has to lobby politicians and buy propaganda for. Numbers do mean shit. If you can't by yourself deduce that if Israel manages 1200 kills in a month, Palestine 28 in 10 years, then that means that Israel hardly is an innocent victim. Good luck and continue deluding yourself.

  18. Re:Accuracy on Israel's Iron Dome Missile Defense Shield Actually Works · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There is something called "proportionality" too. Rocket attacks have taken exactly 28 lives since 2001. Compared to only the Christmas offensive in 2008 that killed over 1200 Palestinians. The planned attack is not because of rocket attacks, it is because there is an election coming up in Israel in about a month. Nothing improves the chances of an incumbent to be reelected as much as a fresh war to show he is tough on the "terrorists."

  19. Someone has to pay on EFF Wants Ubuntu To Disable Online Search By Default · · Score: 2, Informative

    Developing a Linux distro isn't cheap. Even if they are mostly just assembling free software components, it still costs money to create a reasonably polished user experience. Canonical seem like a decent enough company and have sponsored lots of conferences for example. Back in the day you could request install cd:s from them which they sent you free of charge so that you could give to friends and family. So why not be nice back and let them have some small Amazon affiliate income? If that's what it takes to keep Ubuntu running, it's fine by me.

  20. Re:I can only assume on The Text Message Typo That Landed a Man In Jail · · Score: 2, Insightful

    All operators log text messages so it would be trivial to see if his story checks out or not.

  21. Re:But the moon is full of cheese on Space Vs. Poverty Debate In India · · Score: 1

    After they've done that, you can expect them to start doing new things - and probably much more cheaply then the US, since they won't be quite so obsessed with the safety of their X-nauts.

    And why the hell wouldn't they be just as obsessed? Are Indian astronauts worth less than American ones? You seem prejudiced.

  22. Re:The problem with GNOME on Torvalds Takes Issue With De Icaza's Linux Desktop Claims · · Score: 2

    Here is the documentation for GObject. This is just some of the stuff you have to read up on because c doesn't have classes like every other modern language. Good luck writing abstract classes and interfaces in GObject. It's doable but you need to really know all the arcane details about the type system before you get it right. You'll need about 150 lines of boilerplate in one .c and one .h file, maybe 100 if your code is compact. Stuff that isn't funny at all to write because you could accomplish the same thing with about 10 lines of Python or C#. It's ok if you think I'm an unskilled programmer and that is why it takes me longer to code c. That is beside the point. The point is that most programmers either don't want to program in c (like me) or can't. They are not going to contribute to gnome.

  23. Re:The problem with GNOME on Torvalds Takes Issue With De Icaza's Linux Desktop Claims · · Score: 1

    That's exactly what I meant. Vala is one of those things that could, not "save" Gnome, but at least make it much more fun to develop for. If one has taken the time to compare the huge amount of boilerplate you need to implement basic GObjects in C compared to the equivalent Vala code, the huge benefits become obvious. Vala is even binary compatible with plain C code, yet it is treated as the unwanted step child of the Gnome project. It's stuff like that that could make Gnome so much attractive to developers, yet if the idea doesn't originate from within Redhat, former Sun or Novell the probability of it suceeding is close to nil.

  24. The problem with GNOME on Torvalds Takes Issue With De Icaza's Linux Desktop Claims · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Is C. GNOME is still 98% built using C which is crazy in this day and age. And not modern, pretty nice c99, but ancient c89 because the latest GNOME has to compile on some 20 year old Solaris workstation otherwise Sun wont support the project. Now Sun is gone and Oracle doesn't give a shit. Novell has given up on using GNOME as a way to push Mono and only Redhat remains. Maybe stuff will change now because previously gnome has been incredibly resistant to change that is not initiated from within one of those three companies.

    I want to see more changes in Gnome not less. And I want them to finally realize that they are spending 10x as much effort writing gui components in C as they would have in C#, Java or any other managed language.

  25. Re:Unmanageable on The Truth About Hiring "Rock Star" Developers · · Score: 2

    Having an ego runs completely counter to being a great developer or engineer, because if you have an ego you're not capable of introspection, you're not capable of noticing your flaws, your weak areas, and improving them. If your devs have an ego then they're never going to be as good as the ones who quietly and happily just self improve. Take John Romero and John Carmack, one of these has a massive fucking ego, an ego so big it can fill a football stadium, the other has a long history of writing pretty impressive cutting edge code without ever displaying an ounce of ego. The latter has had an impressive career developing cutting edge tech, the former, when he went it alone became probably the biggest flop in the industry and his studio was only saved by a bunch of other previously nameless devs who worked on a separate project away from him. Egos are a trait of wannabes, real superstars just get the fuck on and do what they do.

    I dont think the parent is talking about the same kind of "ego" as you. Unfortunately, it is not only the arrogant jerks that are seen as having an "overinflated sense of ego," even the most humble developer can have that accusation thrown at him or her in the wrong environment. You may be very good at something, you may also be aware of it and that most of your peers aren't as good at it. That's all it takes to have an overinflated ego because people will sense that you know it and will feel inferior. Doesn't matter if you are as friendly and humble as can be. And that is why people like us want to work at Google.