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User: brassman

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  1. Re:Watch the SuperBowl for the Marvel-Visa ad... on Fantastic Four Teaser Trailer · · Score: 1
    Cool! And canonical. There was an episode of Iron Man where the title character took an injured bystander to a hospital, and the admitting nurse asked "Who is going to cover this man's bill?!"

    So Shellhead whipped out his Avengers No-Limit Platinum card (issued to members by super-rich-guy Tony "Iron Man" Stark, of course) and muttered "I think I'll BUY this place."

  2. Re:I use it on crapped on WIndows boxes too.. on True Stories of Knoppix Rescues · · Score: 1

    Me Too. Win2K box customized by a maker of a scientific instrument. A few years(!) of data stored on it, and the HD ate itself -- the bootable parts, anyway. (New on the job -- had not had a chance to go around and ask everyone "Hey, do you have six years of irreplaceable data on a system that hasn't been backed up, like, ever?" Attending to that now.)

    Vendor says "Here you go, when you replace the drive just pop in our blessed Win2K CD and it will be good as new." Not exactly what we had in mind, thankyouverymuch but I'll keep it in mind once we get the data off. You know, data? The whole reason they bought this equipment from you in the first place?

    Booted Knoppix, and it not only found the data directories, it found the box's built-in CD-RW and allowed me to burn backup CDs, right then and there. Woohoo, my reputation as the new Miracle Worker in town remains intact!

    Have to say Klaus has impressed the heck out of me making it work so simply, considering the hoop-jumping that configuring xcdroast on a dedicated Linux box used to require. In fact, I figured "He's done such a nice job, why ditz around with another distro?" So last time I built a box, I just used the knx2hd installer on the CD to copy Knoppix to the hard drive. Polish it off with apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, and in less than an hour I had a box with all the juicy goodness of Debian Sarge plus those little extras that make Knoppix so sweet.

  3. Re:Collective fear on Y2K: Hoax, Or Averted Disaster? · · Score: 1
    Thank you, Blane.

    I put in quite a few airline miles doing the y2K thing, and saw sky-is-falling code in a variety of places, including a BIG phone company. A lot of it? No... enough to cause real problems, yet rare enough to make it a bitch to find.

    I still remember (and deeply resent) the PHB at the bank where I worked before that... in '97 I suggested "Hey, we've got an idle machine -- I could run the calendar forward on it and tell you exactly what will break." His response was: "Don't ever mention that to me again."

  4. Re:Aleph One = Marathon ? on Classic Mac FPS Marathon Turns 10 · · Score: 1

    When you unpack the maps tarball, there's a script file named "start". Look inside it to find out where it expects to find the maps etc.

    BTW, it's perfectly happy on a 233MHz PII (Mandrake 9.1) and looks 'way better than anything that old has any right to. This more than makes up for not being able to get Quake I running anywhere (which was going to be my holiday treat.)

  5. Re:Nothing to worry about? on Introducing Asteroid 2004 MN4 · · Score: 1

    This little sucker is practically in the same orbit we are -- 0.74 to 1.01 AU, and a 323 day "year." Which means that it's crossing our orbit twice a year every year, and no other planet is going to swat it for us. (If we got lucky, the Moon might take care of it for us.)

  6. Re:Thanks for the breakdown ... on Introducing Asteroid 2004 MN4 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I ran the calculation at the same site, but using the size of the one we're supposedly talking about, porous rock instead of dense rock or iron, and I dropped it into the mid-Atlantic, the earth being 74% covered by water after all.

    It broke up, there was no fireball, and I could make more impact overpressure (I chose to be 1,800 km from the impact site) by clapping my hands real hard.

    Then again, an impact like "mine" happens every 4,000 years or so.

  7. Shouldn't that be... on EU-Funded EDOS To Simplify Open Source Development · · Score: 1

    EDOFS?

  8. Re:Yet another challenge/response system: *yawn* on FairUCE - the Smart Email Proxy · · Score: 1
    Thus, whenever I register at a site, I use site@mydomain.com as the address (e.g. amazon@domain.com for my Amazon account).

    One of the many annoying things about C2iT from Citibank (before they shut it down) was that they explicitly disallowed "c2it@(anydomain)" as your nonce (your special "I know to whom I gave this address" address).

    And of course, if you generate nonces that simply, it's easy for a spammer to make any vendor look bad. "Let's see, who do I want you to blame today? I think I'll use ebay@yourdomain.com."

  9. Re:I wonder... on Ask Wil Wheaton Anything (Part Deux) · · Score: 1
    Then again, I'm probably the only one who had a thing for Dr. Crusher.

    Hey, GET BACK IN LINE! I saw her first!

  10. Oops. on Titan's Smooth Surface Baffles Scientists · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Caption of the radar mosaic: "The smallest details seen on the image are about 300 meters (186 miles) across."

  11. MySQL part of install seems bitched up on SpamAssassin 3.0 Released · · Score: 1
    It's hard to read the docs ahead of time if you're installing off CPAN... are we supposed to set up the autowhitelist and bayes users manually before launching the install?

    I'm getting errors that seem to indicate that DBD::MySQL is just plain borked. "Database version 0 is different than we understand"... Tried to upgrade (found one hit on Google that said I might need to DOWNgrade instead)... either way, DBD::MySQL thinks the root MySQL user doesn't need a password. :rolleyes:

  12. Re:Absolutely Crowned! on Meteorite Crashes Through New Zealand Roof · · Score: 2, Funny
    Heh...can you imagine the conversation in the emergency room?

    Yeah, but I don't think it would go the way you had it.

    Doctor: Ewww! What happened to, uh, him?

    Constable: He got hit by a meteorite...

    Doctor: *choke* Good Lord!

  13. cat .signature on An Analysis Of Email Disclaimers · · Score: 2, Funny

    The author of this email states that any "disclaimer" that appears below this sentence was added without his consent.

  14. Re:Anti-Nuke on Original Godzilla In U.S. Theaters · · Score: 1
    Additionally, fast breeder reactors, or breeder-burners achieve excellent efficiency. They start with Uranium-235, but in the process of using it, they "breed" Plutonium-239, which they can then turn around and use for additional fuel.

    A quibble: The main point of a breeder reactor is that it reacts U-235 and uses the neutron flux to transmute (relatively) common U-238 to Pu-239. U-238 is other wise useless in a fission reactor. Turning it into Pu-239 makes it useful for fission reactors... and, alas, for bombs.

    U-235 is too rare. The total amount available is not really enough to run a fission economy. We need to convert that useless "depleted uranium" (U-238) if we're ever to achieve the "power too cheap to meter" economy that "they" promised us back when I was a kid.

    Damn, I'm getting old.

  15. Clie NR70, iSilo on Best PDA To Read e-Texts On? · · Score: 1
    I upgraded from a Handera 330 (no longer available, dammit; before TRG renamed themselves, they rocked). It was darn near perfect as an ebook and general PDA. Real good battery life, rechargeable or disposable AAA at a whim; CF and SD. And a hi-res 1/4 VGA screen.

    Okay, the contrast on that screen left something to be desired. The color screen on the Clie eats batteries, but black text on a white background is kinder to my eyes.

    There's a freeware hack called "ThinFont" that makes the rather weak font on the stock Clie heavier and easier to read; no stability issues that I've encountered. Just have a charger at home and office and you'll make it through a 90-minute commute... barely.

  16. Re:Lomg time. on Opportunity Rover Arrives at Endurance Crater · · Score: 2, Informative
    Apollo 12 landed at the Surveyor III landing site. They didn't pick it up, but I supposed they could have brought back parts of it.

    Yes, in fact they did -- some bits of metal and fabric, to study the effects of radiation and micrometeor pitting over time.

  17. Re:Awful press release. on Geronimo 1.0 Milestone Build M1 Released · · Score: 1

    It gets worse. I went to the site. It's no better than the press release.

    I guess if you need this, you already know it.

    ("Middleware." Oh. Okay. That, I grok. I don't need it.)

  18. Re:Fight back! on Paid To Spam · · Score: 3, Informative

    One catch -- if you read through their "agreement," they have the right to round the time you "work" downwards, they have the right to defer payment until you reach a certain amount accrued, and they have the "right" to LOSE YOUR ACCOUNT INFORMATION. Really. "Sorry, we lost your info, so we don't owe you anything."

    In short, after you sell your soul and your internet access, you get nothing in return. Zero, zilch, nada. Find someone who has received a nickel from these guys, if you can.

  19. Re:Here I am, wanting to RTFA, on Mobile Wifi Backpack · · Score: 1
    Got in to the "Scenarios," finally, and it turns out that it's about subverting the dominant paradigm. Really.

    They suggest the backpack should be taken to places where there are existing hotspots to stir things up. They illustrate this with cute little graphics of the universal "NO" slash through Starbucks, McDonalds, and a bubble labelled "The Internet."

    Sample scenario: The Bedouin broadcasts a "provocative" SSID: "My Girlfriend Can Surf" When someone sees the access point and tries to connect to the Internet, they instead get further pages in the "surfing girlfriend story."

    If you try to use the Bedouin to go to Google, you silly person, you instead get a spoof page that looks sort of like Google. This, by them, is "art."

    If you ask me, a much better description would be "a nasty practical joke, with some sinister overtones of betrayed trust."

  20. Re:You aren't missing too much. on Linux & Mac UT2004 Demos · · Score: 1

    Smart kid.

    The characters in UT2Kx look as though they were pasted onto the backgrounds, especially compared to the original UT. And what's with them running around with their feet two meters apart at all times?

    Haven't been this disillusioned with an "upgrade" since Delorme ruined the Street Atlas UI.

  21. Re:"scalability" on Review Of LinuxWorld 2004 · · Score: 1

    Two nice ladies from Ogilvy buttonholed me over in .org land, looking for a few words from a "Linux Lover" -- perhaps it was my Red Hat fedora that attracted them. Odd, I didn't see anyone else with one this year.

  22. Re:Hrmm on Student Fights University Over Plagiarism-Detector · · Score: 1

    I had to block turnitin at the firewall because they don't obey robots.txt -- they were scraping my whole site to add to their corpus.

  23. Re:What's the problem? on Woman Ticketed For Nude Pics On Internet · · Score: 1
    Yet if someone was arrested based on photographic evidence of their marijuana plantation, I don't think we'd be hearing people make the same argument they are making in this case.

    A "marijuana plantation" would involve literally tons of physical evidence, not just a photo.

    Take the bank robber example -- just a photo? No stolen bags of loot, no note, no teller to testify (and no dead body to explain why there is no teller to testify).... You might arrest on a photo alone, but you haven't established that a crime even occurred. You can't convict anyone until you've established that.

    Someone said "If you speed you still get a ticket even if you don't hit someone" -- but not if you aren't caught. She was not caught by a cop. Not even by the bar owner. The charges were brought after the fact and ONLY on the basis of the photos. There is no supporting physical evidence.

    If you (or anyone else) take a photo of a speeding car, that driver doesn't get a ticket, because you're not a cop and your camera is not a radar gun; a photograph by itself does not satisfy reasonable doubt. That's what is making so many of us roll our eyes -- even those of us who don't BELIEVE they're fakes. They could be, and that means they are not enough.

  24. Re:fakes? on Woman Ticketed For Nude Pics On Internet · · Score: 1
    Nice try, but you're talking about a "security camera" situation, and we are not. This may be the one type of case where it could work.

  25. Re:If a tree falls in the woods..... on Woman Ticketed For Nude Pics On Internet · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Your honor, the defense introduces into evidence this box of computer software, labeled 'Photoshop,' and these three photos which purport to show the defendant flying over the Washington monument in the fashion of a comic book superhero, sitting in Abraham Lincoln's lap, and landing a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf alongside President Bush. These events are entirely fictional. As we have demonstrated that photographs can be created even though no such event actually occurred, we now submit that inasmuch the defendant was not 'caught in the act,' the prosecution has failed to meet its burden of proof that any of the events in their complaint actually happened."