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User: sheriff_p

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Comments · 217

  1. Re:placebos work only on certain conditions. on Placebos Work -- Even Without Deception · · Score: 1

    That's simply not true. It's time for you to read up on placebos!

  2. Re:Trent 900's dont worry me, on China To Build Its Own Large Jetliner · · Score: 1

    It's the safety aspect that will stop this ever being a problem, realistically.

    You can't land an unsafe plane in Europe. They won't let you:

    http://ec.europa.eu/transport/air-ban/list_en.htm

    Don't be amazed when Boeing and Airbus lobby the shit out of the EU to declare all Chinese-made aircraft unsafe. Problem solved.

  3. Re:Why the paywall won't work on NY Times Confident of 'First Click Free' Paywalls · · Score: 3, Informative

    Depends. I already pay for The Economist as a news source. Sure, there are plenty of other places to get "breaking news" online. If I want to read high quality journalism ... less so. When the NYT goes proper paywall, I'll pay. When the Daily Mail does, I'll rejoice ;-)

    -P

  4. FTFY on High-Tech Microphone Picks Voices From a Crowd · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Surely that would be better written as "terrifying" rather than "impressive"

  5. Re:Get a kitchen timer on Best Mobile Computing Options For People With RSI? · · Score: 2, Informative

    I like this idea. Also, here are the tricks I use to manage mine:

    - Enforced break software like AntiRSI for the Mac, or WorkRave for the others
    - Either lying in bed with a laptop or using a Natural Keyboard
    - Regular shoulder dislocates

  6. Indistinguishable from magic... on Translating Brain Waves Into Words · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This + cellphone technology + in-ear speaker = telepathy

  7. 3d aspect on Radiohead Helps Fans Make Crowd-Sourced Live Show DVD · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I skim-read this, and was disappointed on closer reading when I realized they hadn't created a 3d montage from the video shot from all the different angles :-/

  8. Re:I speculate... on Knuth Plans 'Earthshaking Announcement' Wednesday · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Remember when we were all agog about Linus working for some breakthrough company that was going to change everything forever, and in fact, was just TransMeta?

  9. Re:Invisibility means no readers on UK Newspaper Websites To Become Nearly Invisible · · Score: 1

    I think you're mostly right here.

    If I enjoyed reading The Times like I enjoy reading The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Economist, and they made a half-decent iPad/iPhone app for it, I'd subscribe and not look back. Easily worth £2 a week, which seems to be their pricing model. And while I currently get my news from the first two for free (and subscribe to the dead-tree version of the third), if they want to start charging me £2 a week for it, I'll be first in line to pay.

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

    Asia's a big damn place. I live in Thailand, I've been to lots of factories, and none of the conditions you're mentioning apply. Do you actually just mean 'China'?

  11. Re:GUI applications on Facebook's HipHop Also a PHP Webserver · · Score: 1

    No, you're wrong.

    True: it's very fast to deploy a dynamic web-page with PHP, and all the complexity of request handling are hidden. This is PHP's killer feature. This + a large number of pre-written open-source applications is the ONLY benefit PHP has over almost any other dynamic language.

    Don't get me wrong - it's a HUGE benefit. It's a huge enough benefit that people are willing to work with PHP in order to have it. But it's really the only one. Everything else about PHP is bloated, inconsistent, and poorly designed when compared to its cousins (Python, Perl, Ruby, etc).

    -P

  12. Re:IE6 comes with XP, IE8 with Win7 on Firefox 3.5 Now the Most Popular Browser Worldwide · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As someone has said elsewhere, the more important issue here is here:

    http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-weekly-200827-200951

    The previous graph shows something we already know: that people happily flit between versions of the same browser, especially home users. This graph shows browser-family usage. And it shows a steady decline of IE against FF and Chrome.

    But again, actually, that's not the important issue here. Here's what matters: the browser war was won when IE's monopoly was broken. Developing for just IE used to be a legitimate business practice - you were only alienating 10% of your customers, and most of them had IE on their system anyway. I remember when all my online banking required IE, as did a bunch of other sites I wanted to use.

    I couldn't care less if Chrome eats FF's market-share. If Safari trumps them both. What matters, what's important, is the forced interoperability that comes from not having one browser with 90% coverage. And when that happens, everyone wins: as is rapidly becoming that case. Each new version of IE becomes more and more standards compliant, because they can no longer abuse their monopoly.

    -P

  13. Re:What am I missing? on Facebook Founder's Pictures Go Public · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hey buddy,

    I have my account on the highest level of lock-down. However, if you get the URL to my profile, or you're a friend of a friend, you can still see (and I can't block this):

    - My friend list, in its entirety
    - Pages of which I'm a fan
    - Profile photo
    - An option to send me a friend request
    - Some other stuff

    None of which I wanted. My circumstances are somewhat special, because not everyone needs or wants this level of security, but I do, and I used to have it, and now it's gone away.

    -P

  14. Re:Can we please stop with the "denialist" crap? on The Limits To Skepticism · · Score: 1

    Awesome points; this is the kind of post that we need a "Best Of" flag for.

  15. Re:It's not a patent for Sparklines themselves on Microsoft Applies For Patent On Tufte's Sparklines · · Score: 1

    Did you look at the link? It links to a website that ... provides the technology to embed Sparklines in Excel.

  16. Re:VPS hosting + VPN on Hulu Blocks International Access Via Witopia · · Score: 5, Funny

    And where would I, a Canadian, get a US IP?

    Anyone remember when Slashdot used to be News for Nerds?

  17. Recaptcha on Looking To Spammers To Solve Hard AI Problems · · Score: 1

    Hasn't Recaptcha pretty much solved the captcha issue? Only words that OCR can't read are shown ... by definition!

    -P

  18. Re:Oh, look, fanboy whining on Mac Tax, Dell Tax, HP Tax · · Score: 1

    It's nice that you have the time to deal with Windows and/or Linux. Three hours of my time spent fighting XF86Config / working out why Flash doesn't work on some Linux machine, or dealing with Windows' little monkey fingers ... urk.

    I buy Mac hardware because it works with OS X with the minimum amount of hassle. My dev server and occasional-use Windows machine live nicely sandboxed in VMWare fusion...

  19. Re:I hate to say it, but MS had a good point on Mac Tax, Dell Tax, HP Tax · · Score: 1

    You know, I think MS are missing the point. That part where 'Lauren' says: "I'm not cool enough to own a Mac!" ...

    If people were driven by price over form-factor/design/advertising/SteveJobsMagicSauce then iPod's wouldn't be as dramatically popular as they are. People own iPod's because they're cool, because they're a premium product, because they're heavily marketed, and because, in my experience, they're a joy to own.

    The $300 she's saving in this advert pales in comparison to tuition fees she'll be paying. For a machine she'll be using every day for three years...

    -P

  20. Re:Fanboy reacts to negative Apple publicity... on Mac Tax, Dell Tax, HP Tax · · Score: 1

    News at 11.

    Apple is a very successful company with steadily increasing market share. You live in a basement. So I mean, it's nice that you took the time to share your deep thoughts about "WHAT MAC IS DOING WRONG FOR ME!?!? LOLOLOL".

    I'd love to hear any thoughts you might share about:

    - How to fix the world economy
    - Israel/Palestine
    - How to pick up chicks

    Perchance you have a newsletter?

  21. This is ... a good thing? on London Police Seek To Install CCTV In Pubs · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    I don't understand why people get so up in arms about this stuff.

    Total times CCTV coverage in the UK has been abused in some Orwellian circle-jerk fantasy like people are always warning it is: 0

    Total times CCTV coverage has put bad people away: hundreds

    Seriously, what are you guys doing that means you mind being on camera?

  22. Simplest Way on How To Encourage a Young Teen To Learn Programming? · · Score: 1

    Help him to find a project he's interested in, in a language/environment where he can get damn-near instant results, and then let him run with it, offering guidance only if he asks for it.

    Hell, I got in to programming when I saw my brother playing on a BBC Micro, and asked him to teach me. I was 8 at the time. He helped me draw a picture of a door (using grid paper to sketch it out, and then copious LINE() or whatever statements). It was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. Next I drew a space-ship (and a pretty piss-poor one too ;-)

    No-one needed to teach me after that. I read all the programming books I could find and old Micro World or whatever it was called magazines... And, I still love programming :-D

    Get him started with Javascript. It's an awesome little language that scales up to all sorts of useful programming concepts, but best of all, you can get visual results reeeally quickly. There are lots of tutorials on the web, even if most are shitty. If he's still on it after a week, buy him the ORA book.

    -P

  23. Heh! on Proposed IPv6 Cutover By 2011-01-01 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I love how the guy uses the word 'must' and 'Internet' in the same sentence!

  24. Good idea but on Bill Gates Should Buy Your Buffer Overruns · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think this is a good idea, but it's unlikely to happen - by buying such a thing, Microsoft sets themselves up in a position of liability - something that software vendors have so far largely managed to avoid.

    Say they buy one exploit, but not another, and some company gets caught by the other. Microsoft have put themselves in a pretty nasty legal liability position there.

    Additionally, it'll look a lot like endorsement of black-hat practices, something MS will want to avoid... ...

  25. Re:Adverts... on BBC Strikes Deal With YouTube · · Score: 1

    IMP is dead and not coming back. The replacement project is called iPlayer, which uses DRM'd WMV, and is intended to be the central stream through which all BBC multimedia content comes through.

    The idea is to push through all content on the BBC channels, at some point. I can assure you that:

    - The BBC in the UK does not show only BBC content
    - There are a great many cases of 'complicated ownership'
    - The fact that the license payers own the content strongly restricts what they can do with it