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User: rwiggers

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  1. OhNo! on BIOS Will Be Dead In Three Years · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Am I the first to say that dumbing down low level config is a bad idea?

    --
    big idiot operating the system

  2. Re:Drug leads are cheap. this profits glaxo on Glaxo Open Sources Malaria Drug Search Data · · Score: 1

    That's good anyway.
    Probably they don't invest much in these (malaria drugs) anyway, since the main use of it would be in countries that have written in law that the government can break the patent if the cost of the medicament is too high.

  3. Re:I disagree! on The Secret of Monkey Island Shows Evolution of PC Audio · · Score: 1

    Current audio codecs are the crappiest analog front ends available now.
    I read the grandparent mostly as "analog used to be better on PC sound". My view is that's somewhat true, they had a larger budget back then and the audio analog could really be physically apart from the digital noisy part. Bitrates have gone up, sample depth have gone up, background noise level have gone up as well. Analog was expensive back then, analog is expensive right now. Audio budget has decreased a lot.
    I've tried to find a reasonable audio codec sometimes for use as a cheap analog interface, since they're more than 10x cheaper than an instrumentation converter. Never worked, too high noise level, too unstable references.

    --
    No Sig.

  4. Re:Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense on UK University Researchers Must Make Data Available · · Score: 1

    Almost right.
    Privately funded research (very common in engineering) may withhold the data, which can ever be industrial secret.
    As I see, public funded research is public, so the data is also public.
    But there are gray areas...

  5. Re:I don't want to say it's not serious on Photos of Chinese Sweatshop Used By Microsoft · · Score: 1

    I'm very far from china, but if you look at an office here after lunch, it won't be very different.
    Most people here take a nap after lunch. Really, this photo means nothing without a context. Not that china has nearly decent work conditions, but this kind of article is only political FUD.

  6. Re:It was a farce... on Digital Economy Bill Passed In the UK · · Score: 1

    A vote can be wasted by voting in someone you actually like in some scenarios. Maybe you fail to see them because of the two-parties problem.
    This seems to be one such scenario. If you have parties A, B, C and D and you like D the most, C is reasonable and A and B are crap but lead the election by a small margin over C, you may waste your vote by voting on D, since a vote on C may give them a lead over A or B.

  7. Re:A better test file. on New Method Could Hide Malware In PDFs, No Further Exploits Needed · · Score: 1

    Just adding, tested it on windows, firefox and adobe reader plugin.
    If opened by the plugin, nothing is done. I need to save the file and open it from the file system.

  8. Re:Why they tell you to turn off your phone... on Do Car Safety Problems Come From Outer Space? · · Score: 1

    No, I haven't. Notice you just say that to interfere with a digital circuit it must be ionizing radiation. Than you said that this radiation had to get through shielding.

  9. Re:Why they tell you to turn off your phone... on Do Car Safety Problems Come From Outer Space? · · Score: 1

    In order for it to interfere with a digital circuit, it first has to be radiation of the "ionizing" category, and then it has to get through whatever shielding the electronics are in. (I presume they are in some kind of can; no shielding at all would be plain stupid.)

    Really?
    Good to know. Now we can ditch that pesky EMI/RFI tests, since they're non-ionizing radiation and no problem will arise. Good to know...

  10. Re:What about water meters? on Security Holes Found In "Smart" Meters · · Score: 1

    I don't know in your locality, but here you can charge back to the water company if you have an invisible leakage. Therefore, they have all the needed incentive to warn you as soon as possible that the consumption is abnormal.

  11. Re:A 6 foot fall on Flaw In Emergency Response System May Have Killed Hundreds · · Score: 1
  12. Re:Ambulance Service on Flaw In Emergency Response System May Have Killed Hundreds · · Score: 1

    I don't know in England, but here I had a friend that had just the car stolen. Called the police immediately and got the response that he would need first to fill in an application for the message to be passed to the cops. Obviously it was too late at that point. (it was in a region that the police knew, and he didn't, that there was a steep ramp up in this crime for a couple weeks)
    Too much people dicking around with the system and making false calls led to this absurd and ridiculous situation. If you lose some emergencies because of some assholes, the remedy is not to insure no one gets the response on time.
    (\rant)

  13. Re:Don't assume all people will/have access on Google Readying To Pull Out of China · · Score: 1

    I'm pretty sure the money doesn't go to the farmers in china...

  14. Re:informed decisions? on Microsoft Giving Rival Browsers a Lift · · Score: 1

    This leads me to ask who wrote the descriptions of the various browsers.

    It's something that is trivial to find out on your own. Here is the ballot page. If you click on "Tell me more" buttons, you'll see that all links lead to web pages hosted on a domain owned the company behind the browser (mozilla.com, apple.com, opera.com, google.com etc).

    Sorry if that didn't provide any substance to yet another "evil MS" conspiracy theory...

    I read it not as "yet another "evil MS" conspiracy theory", but as "yet another bashing on poor marketing from other companies than microsoft. (Granted apple has superb marketing as well, but that's not a target market).

  15. Re:Yeah Not Really on Algebra In Wonderland · · Score: 1

    How can math be unrigorous? Either something adds up, or it doesnt, or both.

    Or neither.

  16. Re:FFS! on Chilean Earthquake Shortened Earth's Day · · Score: 1

    I don't think it would save him any time, since he mentioned posting on slashdot.

  17. Re:Mars on Senators Blast NASA For Lacking Vision · · Score: 1

    For me it's as simple as survival. As long as humanity is confined to a single planet, we're vulnerable to being wiped out by a planetary scale disaster. Move some of us to a self-sufficient base on Mars, and even if Earth turns back into molten slag, humanity will continue to exist.

    Out of curiosity, why is the survival of the human race so important?

    I mean, I really want to know... what is the foundation of the idea that the human race must survive at all costs? Why should we not accept that if the earth gets hit by a quasar pulse, our time is up and that's all she wrote? Are we that important to the galaxy or the universe that the survival of the human race is of such paramount importance? Seems like a bit of hubris to me.

    I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious about the philosophical underpinnings of your common mentality. I'm not saying I disagree with it, I haven't completely thought it out... so I'd like to read why it's a given that we need to ensure the survival of human life.

    It doesn't matter if we're that important to the universe. It really matters that we're that important to ourselves.

  18. Re:"Self-powering" on Creating Electric Power From Light Using Gold Nanoparticles · · Score: 1

    Surely not a weapon.

  19. Re:"Self-powering" on Creating Electric Power From Light Using Gold Nanoparticles · · Score: 1

    No. Any reasonably focused laser would achieve such density, but over a much smaller area.
    You'd need to focus one of those 50mW laser beam pointers to something like a 150um diameter round spot. Not that hard, even givem the bad mode these lasers have.

    --
    lalalalala

  20. Re:Yawn on Quality Concerns For Kingston microSD Cards · · Score: 1

    Just two details:
    You forgot Micron for DRAM.
    These guys don't sell in the corner store. Some (most?) of them don't even sell the finished products, like memory cards and RAM modules.

    --
    it's raining...

  21. Re:Conversion to mass in kg on New Bounds On the Higgs Boson Mass · · Score: 1

    You should consider cosmology. That's the only field I know of where errors at the 10^27 level might be acceptable.

  22. Re:ha ha suckers!!! on Windows Patch Leaves Many XP Users With Blue Screens · · Score: 1

    You must be really good to install RAM without rebooting. That's one thing I never managed to do.

  23. Re:Yeah, this is going to be a major problem... on Hardware TPM Hacked · · Score: 1

    In that case it's known to the industry that only storing the keys with battery-backed RAM can minimize this kind of attack.
    It's although an interesting breakthrough see someone achieve this without sophisticated lab equipment.

  24. Re:When will they learn on Hardware TPM Hacked · · Score: 1

    Do you REALLY consider any form of encryption as impossible to crack? I'd say all of them are a matter of time.

  25. Re:Wait, I take it back on Android and the Linux Kernel Community · · Score: 1