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User: Sneftel

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Comments · 409

  1. Man, you shouldn't miss it. Last one I was at, these two neutron stars got smashed and were totally going at it.

  2. Re:It's dead at least in the context of hacking on 8-Character Windows NTLM Passwords Can Be Cracked In Under 2.5 Hours (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    +1, redundant

  3. The same law that would give DNT legal force could also have exempted browsers that had it on by default. (Just like advertisers could have ignored DNT specifically from IE, a feature that was considered for web servers.) Whether it could have evolved into something workable is debatable, but it's clear that IE wouldn't have been enough to kill the idea outright.

  4. DNT could have become part of GDPR! That was the perfect opportunity for it to gain actual legal definition and legal force. But you'd better believe that GDPR is the result of regulatory capture. And as annoying as GDPR is for engaged, privacy-conscious consumers, it's the perfect camouflage for the advertisers.

  5. Huh, you'd think a Raspberry Pi store would come without walls or a roof.

  6. No idea what MS's intent was, but what makes the feature completely useless is that it relies on advertisers' cooperation. Are you seriously suggesting that if it had been an opt-out rather than an opt-in, advertisers would have obeyed it? That they would have foregone tracking those people who really really didn't want to be tracked?

  7. Only by default. If someone wanted to be tracked, they could easily turn the flag off. And if you had to guess, would you say a given user would want to be tracked or not?

    Advertisers aren't automatically entitled to benefit from a user's apathy.

  8. Re:Did anyone else read the headline as on Deadly Ebola Virus Is Found in Liberian Bat, Researchers Say (nytimes.com) · · Score: 2

    "Deadly ebola virus is found in Libertarian bat, which is nobody's responsibility but the bat's. Infectious diseases are a private matter, and the government has no right or responsibility to interfere."

  9. Not surprising on AT&T's Silence on 5G Speeds Screams 'Stay Away For Now' (venturebeat.com) · · Score: 2

    In other words: "Some of the equipment we bought for new and replacement cell towers is 5G, because hey, we'd have to do it eventually and this gives us some headlines. But we're going to take our own sweet time upgrading the backhaul links, so if you've got a 5G phone you'd better get ready for some throttling."

  10. People have always known that there were obvious physical limitations to Moore's law lasting forever. But it was never intended to last forever. And it was not simply an observation: Moore predicted that the pattern would continue to hold for at least ten years. I suppose you could argue that it should be "Moore's Prediction" or "Moore's Conjecture" or "Moore's Educated Guess", but surely we aren't going to quibble about what can and can't be called a law?

  11. You trailed off again there. "If there is no class, you can't predict..." ...what? Throwing around hilarious hyperboles like "devoid of meaning" and "those are your choices, order or randomness" and "you might as well jump off a building" takes the spotlight off the fact that nobody's really using the "planet" classification to predict anything specific, simply because the definition is so ad-hoc, and there's no real tweak to it that makes it significantly more useful than it is now.

  12. Basically, if you can't classify Pluto then there's no point in bothering with astronomy or planetary science since you can't predict or classify

    ...? You trailed off there. If you can't classify Pluto as a planet or a non-planet, you can't predict what about it? Seems like knowing its size, chemical makeup, etc. would be way more useful than knowing its IAU classification.

  13. Re:This is my everyday OS on ReactOS 0.4.9 Is Entirely Self-Hosting, Fixes FastFAT Crashes (appuals.com) · · Score: 1

    Good point. Perhaps some enterprising corporation on the scale of Google or Apple will put together a ReactOS-like (and, dare I dream, ReactOS-compatible) operating system for the masses!

  14. Re:What did you expect? on Google Autocomplete Still Makes Vile Suggestions (wired.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Do you, personally, get your news and personal opinions from Google autocomplete? If so, please stop doing that. That's not what it is for.

  15. Re:Lack of intrinsic value?? on Get Ready For Most Cryptocurrencies to Hit Zero, Goldman Says (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes, like paper money. His point was, certain securities have soft landings built in. The price of gold might tank if people lose confidence in it as an investment, but it won't go to zero, because other people want to buy gold to manufacture things with. Paper money and cryptocurrencies, in contrast, are subject to dropping to basically-zero (hyperinflation). "Intrinsic value" may have been an inexact way to describe that, but it's a reasonable shorthand.

  16. Re:The difference isn't subtle on No More Pancake Syrup? Climate Change Could Bring an End To Sugar Maples (sciencemag.org) · · Score: 1

    De gustibus non est disputandum.

  17. Re:Bitcoin is no longer about being "money" on Here's Why People Don't Buy Things With Bitcoin (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    As an example, Visa and Mastercard themselves handle a million or more transactions every second. And that's not peak - peak shopping times can easily reach tens of millions of transactions per second.

    Err... you sure about that? Back of the envelope says that for an average of a million transactions per second, every man, woman, and child on Earth would have to carry out about Visa/MC 12 transactions per day. As a reasonably affluent person in a first-world country, I don't even come close to that.

    Not saying that BitCoin has anywhere near the capacity of Visa/MC... just that those numbers don't work out.

  18. Re:Shade 14 welding glass on Solar-Eclipse Glasses On Amazon May Not Meet NASA's Safety Requirements (qz.com) · · Score: 4, Funny

    According to Revlon, it's mauve. Seems like a poor choice; it's not even after labor day.

  19. If you don't think that people are going to use the keyboard, then surely selling it separately, rather than bundling it, is the opposite of gouging?

  20. Re:Makes me wonder... on Die-Hard Sysops Are Resurrecting BBS's From The 1980s (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    The point of a BBS is community, and open communication. FFS, the name comes from a physical device for posting messages for everyone to see. Why would you think that *privacy* would make BBSes better?

  21. Re:no it won't "take control" on It's Possible To Hack a Smartphone With Sound Waves, Researchers Show (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    The input side would be a way to open the device OS in some way to accept malware once its security was altered and a network opened.
    How would a device respond at code at 15 to 20 bits per minute in its own trusted hardware?

    Probably somewhat slower than it would if you were communicating with it at 5-100 megabits per second over that network connection you've already opened up.

  22. no it won't "take control" on It's Possible To Hack a Smartphone With Sound Waves, Researchers Show (cnbc.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wellll. Okay, let's walk back some of that.

    You can't "hack" a phone with sound waves (or, at least, no method for that has been demonstrated as yet. What is being demonstrated here is a method of artificially biasing the input to a MEMS accelerometer using audible (!) and not-incredibly-loud (!!!) sound waves. Make no mistake, that is impressive. But it's still just input. Unless your phone will reveal its passwords to anyone who shakes it in a particular way, there's no real attack surface here.

  23. Publicly and destructively reminding sysadmins to secure their data, rather than issuing sub rosa demands for bitcoins, is in some sense a reasonable approximation of internet philanthropy. And I notice that -- in contrast to standard ransomware procedure -- backups weren't targeted. More power to them.

  24. Re:Odd name for a supermarket on Iceland is Suing a Supermarket That's Using Its Name (cnn.com) · · Score: 2

    On the substantive point of the trademark infringement, I had the impression that if you don't defend a trademark then you lose it. Iceland have been displaying their name in huge illuminated signs all over the UK for decades so how the Country can now come along and act shocked I can't imagine.

    It's not the defense itself that's the important part. If you don't defend a trademark and it's used more and more to refer to things other than those you're selling, you risk the trademark becoming a generic term for... well, refrigerated food in this case, but w/e. The law cares only minimally about the amount of vigor with which you've defended the trademark against genericity; the important thing is whether it's still a trademarkable word or not. In this case, "Iceland" isn't used by anyone as a generic term, so the genericity stuff doesn't come into play.

    What might come into play is "laches", the legal doctrine that if Iceland-the-country has let Iceland-the-store spend decades opening stores and advertising and building brand awareness, it's no longer equitable for a judge to simply take the trademark away from Iceland-the-store. IANAL and I certainly ANA international trademark L, though, so it's possible that laches cannot bar this claim.

  25. Re:Rod Blagojevich needs one on WikiLeaks Calls for Pardons From President Obama -- Or President Trump (wikileaks.org) · · Score: 1

    Regardless of Trump's views on the matter, politically speaking he can't pardon Rod Blagojevich. It would give the impression he was beholden to the Terrifying Hair interest group.