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User: Heather+D

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Comments · 234

  1. Startup? on Startups a Safer Bet Than Behemoths · · Score: 1

    Apple is over 30 now. Of the four examples given in the OP only one might qualify as real innovation.

  2. Re:I'm a programmer for a major metro daily... on Newsweek Easter Egg Reports Zombie Invasion · · Score: 1

    True this. Ironically, if we had a government that was actually responsive to us we would most likely have brought it down by now.

  3. Re:Fanboy posting on Frank Zappa's Influence On Linux and FOSS Development · · Score: 1

    This is what I've found to be frightening about his work. I 'get' a lot of it. No drugs, no altered states. It just makes sense to me.

    This worries me sometimes.

  4. Re:the sound of clashing ideologies on FTC Staff Discuss a Tax on Electronics To Support the News Business · · Score: 1

    Seconded. I'd mod you up if I could. If this does pass we'll essentially be nationalizing the newspapers. Didn't we decide that that was a bad idea with the phone company? Of course, given how that turned out I'm not certain if that's a condemnation or an endorsement.

    We could certainly do worse than the BBC though and we likely would.

  5. Re:The steady slide to Police State continues on Police Officers Seek Right Not To Be Recorded · · Score: 1

    I do suspect the demographics you use here though. I don't really see that much difference between the age groups.

  6. Re:The steady slide to Police State continues on Police Officers Seek Right Not To Be Recorded · · Score: 1

    Probably true. It has become a media society and it has yet to fully grasp the consequences of that.

  7. Re:The steady slide to Police State continues on Police Officers Seek Right Not To Be Recorded · · Score: 1

    Ahh, yes, and I could have said they're people once more and made a chorus line.

    Blah.

  8. Re:The steady slide to Police State continues on Police Officers Seek Right Not To Be Recorded · · Score: 2, Insightful

    No. What we need is a dose of reality. The police generally aren't abusive thugs and they aren't paragons either. They're people and people and people sometimes abuse power when tempted to do so. The problem is the attitude we seem to have that there can be only two sides to every problem. Either you are for police power or for the criminals, or so the 'thinking' goes. As long as we have that choice we'll go for police power even past the point where it's really wise to do so.

  9. Re:Score on Pakistan Lifts Ban After Facebook Deletes Offending Page · · Score: 1

    They come from both sides, in my experience. They just tend to focus on different targets in the early stages. True leftists do in fact defend civil liberties as do true conservatives, unfortunately it's quite likely they both may be a minority in their own movements.

  10. Re:Score on Pakistan Lifts Ban After Facebook Deletes Offending Page · · Score: 1

    This is true, and it is, in fact, a significant part of what drove people away from the left in the 70's and 80's. Tolerance is fine and good but tolerating people who view tolerance as weakness to be exploited in any and all ways available is unwise.

  11. Re:Gamey, what a loaded word. on Ancient Cave Art May Depict Giant Bird Extinct For 40,000 Years · · Score: 1

    I've had emu and elk before. They're both quite good if done right as is venison. The Parent ids right though. You do need to know how to cook it to have it done right though. Well, that or know someone that does.

  12. Re:Don't know about bees, but certainly this shows on Study Claims Cellphones Implicated In Bee Loss · · Score: 1

    True, it's not at all well established to people who actually think it's important to understand what's happening before they act but it is 'well established' to the woo woos that seriously discuss the 'alien conspiracy' and what ever Bigfoot has done lately and such. The above post mentioning neonicotinoids is correct. We have the solution, now it's just a matter of verification and implementation. Well, that and opposing the paid mercenaries of the pesticide corps who want to keep making the stuff.

  13. Re:Even though Fedora is my desktop of choice on Fedora 13 Is Out · · Score: 1

    Alsa was rock solid on this computer with Ubuntu 7.04. With PulseAudio in 8.x sound was completely useless. 9.10 was fixable and now works reasonably well but it still goes into a fugue state from time to time. Did they remove the drivers for Nvidea's onboard sound? I ended up having to get an ancient C-Media card to get it working again and that's in Alsa emulation mode. It was a cheap enough fix but I'd like to get the onboard sound working as it would improve airflow to my graphics card.

  14. Re:The value of defensive patents. on Stem Cell Patent Halts Hospital's Collection · · Score: 1

    That's modern patent law for you. There's a reason why most patent-holding trusts are owned by lawyers.

    "Hey nice idea there, it'd be a shame if something unfortunate happened wouldn't it?"

  15. Re:Right on Revenge of the Cable Customer · · Score: 1

    True that. Our local DSL provider is CenturyLink which is just the old Verizon crap after a couple of name changes. Verizon was famous locally for delivering service that failed from 3 pm to 1 am and always when it rained. They recently got a friend to change their service and we ended up having to go through a mess to get them to drop their charges when it failed to work.

    In this area cable beats them easily not just in speed but service and reliability. I really don't know how they stay in business unless its just by taking advantage of the 'Internet is always flaky' crowd. Apparently they decided that the old name change and run an ad campaign routine is more profitable than fixing the network. That's why we left them years ago.

  16. Re:What the fuck is wrong with you people? on Steve Jobs Says PC Folks' World Is Slipping Away · · Score: 1

    It's Slashdot: Arguments for people who are bored and have nothing better to do right now.

    Ok, ok, seriously, it is an opinion site. We're not deciding policy here. Relax.

    My problems with the iPad have much more to do with the fact that it seems to be trying to be too much, rather than too little. I like the concept and I like the physical implementation but the battery life is going to be a problem. It's bad enough to need batteries to read books to begin with, but 10-12 hours on a charge makes it useless on a hike. Good battery life for a reader begins in days, not hours. Sure I can plug it in if I'm not hiking, but I can do that with anything and chances are good that I don't want to carry a charger around with me anyway.

    For stuff like ssh and other admin duties I'll use a netbook or even my old pda. A pda is as usable as an iPad for this and it's smaller too. For everything else the netbook just works better. It's not good enough a reader to pull me off of a purpose built reader nor is it good enough at the rest to pull me off of my current gear.

    They're also talking about 15$ for books. That's a pretty hefty mark up from the $7-$9 that I usually pay now for new books let alone the price of a used one.

  17. Re:An Ode to the Beauty and the Horror! on Steve Jobs Says PC Folks' World Is Slipping Away · · Score: 1

    I've never understood the need to jailbreak a device that's working properly. Why bother? I don't really care about the argument over freedom vs. walled gardens because if I want to do something that Jobs don't allow I'll have the sense to do it on something else.

  18. Re:Vertical panel on Canonical Bringing an Instant-On Ubuntu · · Score: 1

    I'd rather it strip the icons than the text. Like someone mentioned above there are so many icons now and they're so similar to some other icon that there is really no info there. Yes, I'll eventually get use to doing it by memory, at least in readers and other simpler devices, but for a desktop or a laptop this would be a regression in usability.

  19. Re:Brilliant! on Canonical Bringing an Instant-On Ubuntu · · Score: 1

    Seconded. This is a wonderful idea. I've tried it on and off for decades but it never seemed to last. There was always some thing or other that broke it to the point that just using autohide was better. If they can make it really work it'll be great but that top bar needs to be on the right.

    Or better yet, the other way around.

    Oh and they both need to be wide enough that the widgets remain useful. And there needs to be room for optional text labels as icon-only buttons are both unintuitive and nearly useless on complex devices.

  20. Re:I have seen the comparisons... on Canonical Explains Decision to License H.264 For Ubuntu · · Score: 1

    That link has more cogent info than I've seen anywhere else in this little pissing contest. I'd mod you up If I could right now.

  21. Re:My test... on Ubuntu Linux 10.04 Review (Lucid Lynx) · · Score: 1

    It would be nice to have a distro that uses 0SS4 by default. Pulseaudio fails on most of the machines I've tried it on. It seems to do better on Intel hardware. It didn't like the NVidea boards that we have at all.

  22. Re:pulse, flash, java on Ubuntu Linux 10.04 Review (Lucid Lynx) · · Score: 2, Informative

    9.10 was the first version of Ubuntu that I could get sound up on since 7.04. The developers of Pulseaudio supposedly said "We will break your sound." They certainly did. I'd tried no fewer than 5 distros and had decided to go back to WinXP when a last-ditch effort got 9.10 working right. Usually. It still goes into a 'funk' sometimes.

  23. Re:Don't pick on Time Warner! on Time Warner Shelves Plans For Tiered Pricing · · Score: 1

    I'd still be on Verizon if they could actually get their service to stay up. It went out two days before Christmas last year. Given that it was the season I gave them two weeks to get it back up and they couldn't manage it. It had done something similar before and it turned out to be intermittent line noise coming from a particular source near a local restaurant. It took them several hours to track it down last time but they did fix it. This time they switched out the bridge, tested the line for 5 minutes and pronounced it done. It dropped out about half an hour after they left and stayed down until noon the next day. I could not get them to do a more thorough examination.

    Thank god for Charter. I've heard bad things about them too but the connection does actually work now which is a distinct improvement.

  24. Re:((((((56.6/8)*60)*60)*24)*30)/1024)/1024 = 17.4 on Time Warner Broadband Cap Trial Rescheduled In Texas · · Score: 1

    Because games on dial-up suck. They're going after the gamers and the movie downloaders and are using the P2P abusers to justify it. Of course they're also trying to leverage their media services by creating a walled garden. This lets the attack piracy and lock out their competition with one move.

  25. Re:Griefers. on Was the Amazon De-Listing Situation a Glitch Or a Hack? · · Score: 1

    Seconded. That's an excellent analysis.