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User: stewsters

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Comments · 475

  1. Re:Fourth Amendment on Fifth Circuit Upholds Warrantless Cellphone Location Tracking · · Score: 1

    So is anything that has crossed state lines. Don't live in a state with paper production? Well, there goes the rest of your papers too.

  2. Re:Misleading summary on Obama Praises Amazon At One of Its Controversial Warehouses · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You cant easily track who buys what books at an indie bookstore if they use cash. Amazon purchases are way easier to add to the NSA data.

  3. Re:Incredible on Bradley Manning Convicted of Espionage, Acquitted of 'Aiding the Enemy' · · Score: 4, Insightful

    For me it wasn't that they were shooting at samaritans who were trying to help the wounded, its that they were covering it up after it happened.

    Which is what this whole thing is about. A democracy needs to know how the people it voted into office are doing. If the government makes it all top secret and you can only see videos of the candidates hugging puppies, then how do you know you voted correctly? How will you vote for the best candidate if performance is hidden by journalists to afraid to tell the truth?

  4. Re:I see an obvious problem with this concept: hea on "Slingatron" To Hurl Payloads Into Orbit · · Score: 1

    Also, they will need to fire it at far greater than re-entry speeds. Im pretty sure that would create a greater than hypersonic boom. I tried to see what that was called, but the table on wikipedia didnt go up that high. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_speed

  5. Re:Limited cargo use on "Slingatron" To Hurl Payloads Into Orbit · · Score: 1

    You cannot launch a cannonball on an orbital trajectory, assuming you are launching on the planet you plan to orbit. Changing the name of the cannon does help, because the name secures funding.

  6. Re:Cargo is expensive on "Slingatron" To Hurl Payloads Into Orbit · · Score: 1

    Lets say you make a spherical tank that holds oxygen and try sending to the ISS. You could fire it at a precise orbit to get near the space station, but unless the tank has some kind of maneuvering jets, you will need to chase it down and capture it. The tank most likely will be spinning rapidly and be a pain to capture.

  7. Limited cargo use on "Slingatron" To Hurl Payloads Into Orbit · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That sounds cool for launching tungsten balls into space, but probably wont work if you put any astronauts in it.

  8. Re:pretty broad on Massachusetts Enacts 6.25% Sales Tax On "Prewritten" Software Consulting · · Score: 1

    This is my problem. They don't draw the line on what is pre-written and what is not. If you are not writing your own assembly code, are you going to be liable because your code is mostly pre-written libraries? If I write a .Net or Java application there probably is more code in the libraries than anything I customized.
    It seems like this is fairly arbitrary, if they need money they should just put a small tax on all services. If you tax on something so arbitrary, only the honest companies will pay. The other ones will find a way to weasel out of it.

  9. Re:Magnetite? on New Alternatives To Silicon May Increase Chip Speeds By Orders of Magnitude. · · Score: 1

    You can still use limonite or hematite i believe. You should also consider upgrading your facilities to produce something nicer.

  10. There must be something better to do with that on Hackers Using Bots, Scripts To Lock Down Restaurant Reservations · · Score: 3, Insightful

    God damn hipsters.

  11. interesting take. on Mozilla Labs Experiment Distills Your History Into Interests · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It makes sense if advertising companies were nice people, but please never turn this on by default. Most likely they will just add the info that you supply them to their trove of tracking data.

  12. A bit of change is needed on Blizzard Breaks For Independence As Kotick Plans $8.2 Billion Dollar Buyout · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Blizzard's WOW numbers are tanking hard, Diablo 3 preorders where through the roof, but most people abandoned it after playing it once. Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm single player was pretty good, but perhaps a bit expensive for an expansion. They need to do something big if they want to stay relevant.

    They need to take some risks.

  13. Re:I guess I don't know how these things work on Cybercrooks Increasingly Use Tor Network To Control Botnets · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Its pretty easy to take away the anonymity of tor if you could hypothetically record all traffic to and from each computer in the network. You can then see Alice send the message to Carlos who then forwarded it to Bob. Luckily in the US no one is recording every encrypted message you send... oh shit.

    The only way to protect yourself would to use garlic routing and make sure you send a lot of traffic. Turn your bandwidth up. To improve this, you need to create a widely used sharing client for your network to get as many others to create decoy traffic as you can.

  14. Might save taxpayers money... on Fake "Speed Enforced By Drones" Signs On California Freeways · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Have the police take them down and keep them. I'm sure they will be useful again in about 2 years at the rate privacy is going over here.

  15. Re:Mandatory Reading on Ask Slashdot: Setting Up Non-Obnoxious Outdoor Lighting? · · Score: 2

    You beat me to it. Comedic gold.

  16. Read the article. on How Joel Spolsky Shot Down a Microsoft Patent In 15 Minutes · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Here is some more prior art: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mipmap

  17. Re:lock out? on PIN-Cracking Robot To Be Showed Off At Defcon · · Score: 3, Funny

    By default all you need to is swipe to unlock. That's a far simpler robot.

  18. Conways Game of life on Star Wars City Doomed By Sand Dunes · · Score: 1

    These remind me of Gliders. I wonder if we can make a self replicating spaceship with these dunes if we had a few bulldozers.

  19. Re:XNA or Unity on Ask Slashdot: What Is the Most Painless Intro To GPU Programming? · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't think he is looking at making a game, I think he is looking for some cheap parallel processing. I have done some cuda, it was a pain to set up a few years back. There probably are better tutorials now.

  20. Re:Not goint to solve the problem on C|Net Reporter Declan McCullagh Talks About Privacy (Video) · · Score: 1

    "How they came to that conclusion is a secret."

    It does seem to run contrary to how they behaved before they had much power.

    The NSA has every conversation they have made since ~2000 recorded and analyzed. You can see from this article that the NSA has been interested in controlling politics with blackmail for some time.

  21. Re:Wow ... on Blackberry 10 Sends Full Email Account Credentials To RIM · · Score: 1

    Google does it with wifi passwords. I assume they do it with other credentials too.
    http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/07/does-nsa-know-your-wifi-password-android-backups-may-give-it-to-them/

  22. Re:Is there an open-source alternative? on BitTorrent Sync Beta Released · · Score: 1

    Yeah, its requires an Apache server with php. Which if you have that you can just use webdav. It would be nice to get a decentralized, easy to use client for multiple platforms.

  23. Open source it. on BitTorrent Sync Beta Released · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The BTSync team has been perfectly clear that they do not intend at any time to open BTSync to the public. We were told that when we were using Skype, that it was safe and encrypted. Now we learned that it wasn't. Open source Sync and we will trust you.

  24. Re:Bravo EFF on EFF Sues NSA, Justice Department, FBI · · Score: 4, Informative

    Then go here to launder your money:

    https://www.humblebundle.com/

    And give 100% to the EFF. You get the XKCD book too.

  25. Re:Looking at the generated assembly code on Former Sun Mobile JIT Engineers Take On Mobile JavaScript/HTML Performance · · Score: 1

    Some people also do (in a sense) use C when they use Dalvik. The NDK is really useful for tight loops for things like physics.