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User: Chad+Birch

Chad+Birch's activity in the archive.

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Comments · 86

  1. Re:Why? I don't get it... on China Bans Gold Farming · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's not illegal to have sex.
    It's not illegal to give money to someone else.

    It's not illegal to drive.
    It's not illegal to drink.

    Things aren't always just the sum of their parts.

  2. Re:Tor on Licensing Issues Shut Down Pandora Outside US · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Conveniently, Pandora does its "where are you from?" check over the www.pandora.com domain, but streams the music over a different subdomain. This means that you can use FoxyProxy to have your connection to the www subdomain go through TOR, but the music still comes directly to your machine over your normal connection.

    Weird, yes. But this is how it works. The page is very slow to load through TOR, but the music plays perfectly once it finally does load. I don't know why they did it this way, but it's certainly helpful for all us non-Americans.

    P.S. Why is this news now? Canadians have been locked out of Pandora for at least a few years.

  3. Re:Electricity and whale oil lighting? on Broke Counties Turn Failing Roads To Gravel · · Score: 1

    It's a samzenpus story, these are the only kind he posts, the ones that don't belong here. He also gets to use little pointless images that all the other editors don't get!

    Look through my past comments if you like, I had made a list of all his posts a while ago, they're all "let's see if we can slowly convert Slashdot into digg" garbage, which he generally posts once per day. I got tired of collecting them myself, but it's pretty obvious if you look back through his story-posting history.

  4. Re:Best of Arcade games on Tetris Turns 25 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Appropriately referred to as "The Tetris Effect"

  5. Re:Quite on What Free IDE Do You Use? · · Score: 4, Funny

    Well at least having bear hands will make it easier to kill the buffalo. Where do I get a set of those?

  6. Slashdot to digg Conversion Project - Day 13 on New Food-Growth Product a Bit Hairy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    samzenpus's campaign to gradually introduce awful articles that should have been in idle onto the main site continues. The plan seems to be to post one or two of these every day until we no longer think of them as odd. Then they can increase the rate a bit, eventually merge idle entirely into the main site, and voila! Slashdot can be as hip and successful of a site as digg is!

    History up to this point:
    April 28 - Tokyo Scientists Create Mobile Slime
    April 27 - Air Force One Flyby Causes Brief Panic In NYC
    April 27 - How To Have an Online Social Life When You're Dead
    April 23 - Race Car Made With Veggies And Powered By Chocolate
    April 22 - Robotic Penguins
    April 22 - Yamaha Unveils Golf Cart Powered By Cow Dung
    April 21 - Biotech Company to Patent Pigs
    April 21 - The Taste of Space
    April 17 - Philosophies and Programming Languages

    Do we really want the guy behind the worst articles I've ever seen on slashdot shaping the direction of this site?

  7. Re:Canada on Cablevision To Offer 101 Mbps Down, No Caps · · Score: 1

    I have Shaw's "High-Speed Xtreme-I" in Calgary, and regularly max my download speed out at 1.8MB/s. So I actually seem to be able to get above their "up to" limit. YMMV, etc.

  8. Re:Pointless on Yamaha Unveils Golf Cart Powered By Cow Dung · · Score: 1

    Don't take the article too seriously, it's just samzenpus' once-per-day "should have been in idle" test post to see how close to digg we're willing to let slashdot become.

  9. Re:Um... on Time Warner Pulls Plug On Metered Billing Tests · · Score: 5, Funny

    ScuttleMonkey didn't do his job as an editor properly?

    I must say, I am shocked and dismayed at this sudden development!

  10. Re:It's a Turing test on Why the CAPTCHA Approach Is Doomed · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is my favorite captcha, some are ridiculous: http://random.irb.hr/signup.php

    Refresh the page a bit, fun to see what you can get.

  11. Re:But does it improve story quality? on Achievements and Optimizations · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I'm not sure what the random "pretend you know Japanese" jab is about, but regardless, I wasn't trying to say that it should be normal for people to write posts in other languages. However, I've seen multiple instances where someone tried to clear up some details related to a story, where the only source of information is in a foreign language. They write a post along the lines of:

    "The summary isn't quite correct, because the article says '<foreign language>', which actually translates to something like '<english translation>'"

    Slashdot then totally mangles the quote they took out of the article and displays it in random ASCII characters. Is it something that's totally necessary for the site to have? No, but it's 2009, sites should be able to deal with more than ASCII. I certainly think it would have been a better use of developer time than achievements.

  12. Re:But does it improve story quality? on Achievements and Optimizations · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How about adding Unicode support so that posts aren't often filled with random garbage when commenters assume one of the major technical sites on the internet should be able to handle curved quotation marks. Never mind when someone tries to write a word/post in Japanese or any other non-English language.

  13. Re:I'd like a few things cleared up on Ad Block Plus Filter Maintainer "rick752" Dies At 56 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Just install Ad Block Plus, after the Firefox restart associated with installing it, you'll get a popup asking you to choose a list. The default (which is EasyList, the one maintained by rick752) will do the job very well.

  14. Re:They pull a knife, we pull a gun on After Sweden's New Law, a Major Drop In Internet Traffic · · Score: 1

    Not that I'm the person you're replying to, but I'm in Canada and get exactly the same message on Hulu. Not exactly "overseas", considering I could drive to the US in less than 5 hours.

    And the other free option you mentioned? Pandora? Let's have a look:
    We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S.

    last.fm also is extremely restricted outside of the US (we get 30 second clips where you get full songs), and even YouTube blocks some videos.

  15. Re:I was so excited, for like ten seconds on Command Lines and the Future of Firefox · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Have a look at Vimperator. It's slow to get started (much like vim itself), but very efficient once you get it. Make sure you read the help/manual so you realize all the commands possible.

  16. Re:Or they're terrified on Study Finds the Pious Fight Death Hardest · · Score: 1

    You mean the latest masterpiece of fantasy storytelling from Lucasfilm's(TM) Brian Moriarty(TM)? Why it's an extraordinary adventure with an interface on magic... stunning, high-resolution, 3D landscapes... sophisticated score and musical effects. Not to mention the detailed animation and special effects, elegant point 'n' click control of characters, objects, and magic spells. Beat the rush! Go out and buy LOOM(TM) today!

  17. Re:Or they're terrified on Study Finds the Pious Fight Death Hardest · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's a quote I've always liked along these lines:

    "Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones." - Marcus Aurelius

  18. Re:Or they're terrified on Study Finds the Pious Fight Death Hardest · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The pope decided that the idea of limbo was too depressing and decided to drop it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5406552.stm

    Who knows what happened to all the babies' souls that had supposedly been in limbo up until that point. It makes absolutely no sense to me how people can believe in religion when things like this are fairly common.

  19. samzenpus has done it again! on Spider Bite Allows Man To Walk Again · · Score: 1

    C'mon samzenpus, is it really that difficult to post your crap to idle instead of slashdot's main page? I swear you screw this up at least once a week.

  20. Re:Burnout Paradise "fun to explore"?! on Building a Successful "Open" Game World · · Score: 1

    This was only added in the recent (early Feb) patch though, it was not always there. The early Feb patch did a fair amount to downgrade the exploration/world aspects of the game, between adding Retry (which they had previously been strongly against) as well as making the "collectibles" (smashables) glow extremely gaudily. HEY LOOK OVER HERE SOMETHING YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO COLLECT DON'T JUST DRIVE PAST IT. It really bothers me that even the billboards you've already smashed continue to blink bright red with an effect that looks like a clipping error.

  21. Re:interesting times on EU Says MS Must Offer Other Browsers; Now What? · · Score: 1

    I don't know why people always do this comparison.

    Apple is not a convicted monopolist. Microsoft is. There's a big difference.

  22. Re:a bit optimistic about the printed page, aren't on Cory Doctorow Calls Death To Music, Movies, Print · · Score: 1

    Have you looked at the Sony PRS-505? Both my fiancee and I own one (I bought one for her as a present, and borrowed it so often that I ended up buying my own), and it satisfies most of what you're asking for. It's not technically "open", but there are examples of people modifying it anyway, and it doesn't require any proprietary software to be installed on your PC. You plug it in, and it shows up as a drive, same as a USB key would. Put the books in the right folder and you're done.

    It supports quite a few formats natively, and there's a wonderful open-source program named calibre that will convert/format many other things to the best formats for it. Battery life is great, reading 3-4 hours a day it'll easily last over a week without charging. I'd at least give it a look, I don't really have any complaints about mine.

    One thing to note is that Sony has put out a new model, the PRS-700, but it's generally considered to be inferior to the 505. They modified the screen to add touch capabilities and a backlight, and it's not nearly as nice to read on.

  23. Re:he might be right on Cory Doctorow Calls Death To Music, Movies, Print · · Score: 1

    This is often referred to as "Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy". To quote, "Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for that rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge." Or also, "Cowboy Bebop at His Computer".

  24. Re:Obligitory Joke on The Tech Behind Preventing Airplane Bird Strikes · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yep, you sure did kill that. Apparently leaving out half of the text doesn't help.

  25. Creative Outsourcing on IT Job Market Is Tanking, But Not For Everyone · · Score: 1

    My favorite part is IBM offering to give their laid-off employees their jobs back... in India.
    http://www.informationweek.com/news/management/outsourcing/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=213000389