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User: ais523

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  1. Re:As somebody who moved Toronto to London recentl on Geek Travel To London From the US — Tips? · · Score: 1

    Also, for short distances on deep Tube lines, you actually have to walk further to get down to the level of the train and back up again than you would just walking overland. Tube stops tend to be very close together, especially near the centre.

  2. Re:Check your voltages and frequencies! on Geek Travel To London From the US — Tips? · · Score: 1

    Worse than just that. There's currently a row over pay (as there often is), and it turns out that here in the UK the train drivers aren't forced to work on Sundays, but rather get paid double if they do. So many (most?) of them are on overtime strike (i.e. working just the minimum possible), and as a result some lines are on a reduced, or basically absent, Sunday timetable.

  3. Re:What are the implications for solar races?shoes on Solar-Powered Plane Makes Runway Debut · · Score: 1

    <a href="http://www.coolforsale.com/" title="coolforsale.com" rel="nofollow">

    Unlikely to be any search association either way, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your point of view. It's very unlikely that that spammer will ever get enough karma to avoid having rel=nofollow applied to all its links...

  4. Re:Let me get this right on Murdoch-Microsoft Deal In the Works · · Score: 1

    I get no Google results for "sensationalised news for builders" but your post. Clearly, those pages have been removed from Google's indexes already...

  5. Re:I don't get it on Murdoch-Microsoft Deal In the Works · · Score: 1

    You just put something in the robots.txt telling Googlebot not to index them, and it complies. Of course, Google could specifically override its behaviour if they wanted to, but I suspect they wouldn't; they'd just sit back as Murdoch shot himself in the foot.

  6. Re:1E3*1E5=1E9? on Mark Cuban's Plan To Kill Google · · Score: 1

    We don't use it, we use the American billion the same as everyone else. Occasionally we come across old books that describe the difference between a US and a UK billion, and ignore them because they don't match up with common usage.

  7. Re:Free on Free Software For All Russian Schools In Jeopardy · · Score: 1

    And in capitalist America, you give Microsoft a discount?

  8. Re:Questions from a non-lawyer on Microsoft Takes Responsibility For GPL Violation · · Score: 1

    As far as I know, he could even choose to not offer the license again, completely forbidding MS from distributing the code and thus forcing them to remove said code.

    There's a clause in GPLv3 that allows people and companies to automatically restore their licence after accidentally breaking it, but only the first time a particular company violates a GPL given by a particular author (as long as the problem is corrected within 30 days); additionally, it by default reinstates 60 days after a company stops infringing the licence unless the copyright holder calls them on it. (It wasn't in GPLv2, though; and I don't know if Microsoft are using it or not.)

  9. Re:Even a stopped clock is right twice a day on Bing To Use Wolfram Alpha Results · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Probably Cuil, actually (which still exists and which has been giving decent results recently). I would have considered Wikia Search too, but it's apparently shut down.

  10. Re:Flashblock on Shockwave Vulnerabilities Affect More Than 450 Million Systems · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Being a Director developer, there are some things Director can do that Flash can't:

    Make network calls through proxy servers
    Access/Modify system resources

    Director is actually capable of more than Flash, it just never caught on as well with developers. The mob rules, though.

    This may be nice for a developer, but for a user, this is really scary.

  11. Re:In a target-rich environment? Sure! on Iraq Swears By Dowsing Rod Bomb Detector · · Score: 1

    On the other hand, a clock running at the normal speed is generally never right, unless it happens to be set to exactly the right time.

  12. Re:Insightful on Iraq Swears By Dowsing Rod Bomb Detector · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Hmm... if you combine a person capable of subconciously determining the location of water with a device capable of indicating when someone has subconciously detected water, I think you do indeed have a water detection device. Therefore, I'd say on the above evidence that dowsing does indeed work, just not the way everyone thought it did.

  13. Re:Hack the judges on Contest To Hack Brazilian Voting Machines · · Score: 1

    You could hack a real election the same way. Don't hack the voting system, just the people who announce the results.

  14. Re:Win7 wtf?! on Ubuntu "Karmic Koala" RC Hits the Streets With Windows 7 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Not just for fun. They deliberately choose rather unusual names so they can be used as search terms in search engines; searching for "8.10" is rather difficult due to the numerical nature of the version number, and clashes with lots of other programs; searching for "Karmic" works a lot better (especially if the other search terms limit the results to be Ubuntu-related).

  15. Re:Possible CAN SPAM implications on Toyota Claims Woman "Opted In" To Faux Email Stalking · · Score: 1

    And the real moral of the story is, don't opt in to stupid online quizzes.

  16. Re:Roguelikes on Linux Games For Non-Gamers? · · Score: 1

    One issue is that the controls in Vulture's are rather clunky; to someone used to the text-based or tiles versions of NetHack, it's almost unplayable. This seems to be a general disease amongst graphical ports of NetHack; the SDL port is the only one I've found that has decent controls, and it's rather hard to find (e.g. it tends not to be packaged by distros).

  17. Re:Autodestruct? on Microsoft Plans Largest-Ever Patch Tuesday · · Score: 1

    That isn't just common to Windows. Linux and other UNIX-alikes frequently have the rather paradoxical "Error: Success" (which I have also seen on Windows). I suspect there's something similar on the Mac. The reason behind this, incidentally, is when a command reports an error but doesn't give the reason (or it does give the reason, but it gets clobbered before being shown to the user because it's stored in a global variable: yay C design faults). This leaves the error code at "no error", which is translated into "Success" (or "the operation completed successfully") by the (standard library) code that translates error messages into strings.

  18. Re:The more crap you add... on Microsoft Plans Largest-Ever Patch Tuesday · · Score: 1

    Maybe you could compare everything updated by Microsoft Update, to the equivalent programs in a typical Linux distro (take the most popular if more than one does the same thing?) Or Windows kernel patches to Linux kernel patches?

  19. Re:Quick! on FBI Cracks "Largest Phishing Case Ever" · · Score: 1

    The homepage of the place I currently work has four dots: "www.department.organisation.secondleveldomain.country". Of course, pretty much everyone here will know that it's hugely crazy that the site doesn't work without the www, but there's often legitimate need for URLs like those. (You probably forgot that country codes are used in many non-american domains...)

  20. Re:That was fast on FBI Cracks "Largest Phishing Case Ever" · · Score: 1

    ( ) Asshats

    There must be something wrong with you: I've never seen one of these forms before where "Asshats" wasn't ticked.

  21. Re:Time to reevaluate on London Stock Exchange Rejects .NET For Open Source · · Score: 1

    Ah, we live in highly reliable times...

  22. Re:Analysis of Miguel's article on De Icaza Responds To Stallman · · Score: 1

    But not purely functional, because it allows assignments to variables. It does have first-class functions, though, so it's an impurely functional language. (Of course, C# is not purely functional either.)

  23. Re:Actually... on Did Chicago Lose Olympic Bid Due To US Passport Control? · · Score: 1

    I'm British too; it's mostly the media who gets upset about the Olympic Games being here (I have no idea why; they may be trying to attack the Mayor of London indirectly via it). And when enough of the media are upset about something, it's common for many of the men on the street to get upset about it, even without knowing why. (Things like the stupid logo that cost a lot to create don't help either; the logo is really garish, and one of the promotional videos featuring it had to be banned because it was triggering epilepsy in people.)

  24. Re:It's been a while since math was relevant to CS on Red Hat Files Amicus Brief In Bilski Patent Case · · Score: 1

    If you can find a method in which it's solvable in polynomial time on a conventional computer, then you've just solved P=NP. So, any known solution to do it in polynomial time would earn its discoverer a lot of money. (There is, obviously, one or more optimal strategies for solving it, because there is at least one strategy for solving it. Unless there are an infinite number of strategies and none of them are the best in the same way that no positive real number is the smallest.)

  25. Re:Autodesk will lose on Company Uses DMCA To Take Down Second-Hand Software · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    That's really a false trichotomy, as the AC listed 3 options. Which don't come anywhere near to being exhaustive, of course.