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User: Gaygirlie

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  1. Re:Before the inevitable... on Two-Thirds of US Internet Users Lack Fast Broadband · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Indeed. Finland is a great example of that: we have pretty low population density, especially in the north, yet you can get a decent ADSL-connection all the way in the rural Lapland. Though, pretty much the same applies to cellular network coverage too.

    AFAIK the problem in the US isn't really the fact that the density is so low, it's rather the fact that when they laid down the wiring they didn't bother planning it for future expansions and just did it as quick and dirty as possible. And now they don't wish to publicly admit that they did that and instead try to point to other directions as the reason for connectivity issues. Of course, I could be wrong, but I've just gotten such an image of their actions and behaviour so far.

  2. Re:I want to see it from the very beginning. on Betelgeuse To Blow Up Soon — Or Not · · Score: 1

    Only if it's really close to Earth. I'm talking about placing it really far away; closer to Betelgeuse than Earth. And with faster RF technology than the old probes like Voyager.

    Radio waves move slower than light..

  3. Re:I want to see it from the very beginning. on Betelgeuse To Blow Up Soon — Or Not · · Score: 1

    Scientists should position a robotic space probe far from Earth (somewhere between Betelgeuse and us) so that when it detects the explosion it can radio back to Earth and enable us to set up cameras in advance, and prepare to watch it from the very beginning.

    Before the radio waves from the probe reached us we would already have seen the explosion.

  4. Re:Doesn't This Require an Internet Connection? on Sony Planning Serial Keys For PS3 Games? · · Score: 1

    And, just as speculation, wouldn't it be possible for someone to figure out what the server is sending the gaming console as an acknowledgment code and then setup a local area network that directs the PS3's requests to that IP address to connect to your own computer and send the same key acknowledgment notification? Sure, it's more work but history has shown that just means a little more time.

    Sure, but even that is unnecessary. Pirates can just decrypt the executables on the disc, remove the check, and create a small .pkg with the cracked executable that you install after installing the game.

    Of course online play wouldn't probably work then as the serial keys would be checked by the servers, but single-player games would work like nothing had ever happened.

  5. Re:Misguided on FSF Announces Support For WebM · · Score: 4, Informative

    You mean, except x264, which is by most accounts, one of the most *full-featured* H.264 implementations available... right?

    Feature-wise it's good, yes, but it's not legally licensed and thus it's actually illegal to use in many places, most notably the US. That's the whole point.

    Let's be very clear here: H.264 is an "open standard" - anyone may get a copy of the spec and implement it, and expect that their encoder/decoder will interoperate well with any other piece of software or hardware that implements the H.264 standard. What H.264 is *not* is a "free standard" - it's got patents, and royalty fees required for some uses of the standard- basically, if you're making money off of H.264, you need to pay a fee to the MPEG-LA consortium. There is nothing preventing Google from allowing its browser to support both types of video for playback via an HTML5 video tag, but only providing WebM-encoded videos on their hosting services. You can't say that you're dropping H.264 support in the interests of "freedom" while continuing to embed & support Flash - at least, not with a straight face.

    Of course "we" can. Dropping H.264 is an intermediary step in getting rid of Flash too. There is nothing wrong in doing things in steps.

    And what you're saying about being allowed to freely implement H.264 encoders or decoders is not correct: you may not implement either without a proper license. Consuming H.264 content is also only free if you are using it with a properly licensed decoder, and serving H.264 content to end-users is only free if you cannot make money out of it and all the content must have been created with a licensed encoder.

  6. Re:How? on Encrypt Your Smartphone — Or Else · · Score: 3, Informative

    I found myself wondering about the headline if for %99 of the phone sout there it's actually impossible.

    I guess in most cases it is indeed impossible to encrypt everything; apps simply don't have low enough access to the filesystem and there is no way to use an encrypted filesystem. Parts of your data would always remain unencrypted and be recoverable.

    Android is very malleable but I doubt even that would support such without some heavy modifications. My Nokia N900 on the other hand could sport encrypted filesystems and home directory, thus encrypting everything but it's such a unique little thing that that's of no help here.

  7. Re:Boost membership? on Dating Site Creates Profiles From Public Records · · Score: 1

    Now I'm imagining using such a site, and browsing profiles. When looking at a profile of prospective dates, the chance that this individual is also in the market for a date is less than 2% instead of 100% (assuming for the sake of the argument that members that registered themselves are all looking for dates). Add to that the chance that she may be interested to go on a date with you (which is, say, 10%) it's getting pretty horrible. Not even 0.2% chance to actually get a date!

    Hey, that sounds like a good deal! At the moment I have a 0.0% chance of actually getting a date!

  8. Security question on Man Mines Facebook For Security Questions, Nabs Nude Photos From Email · · Score: 2

    This is exactly why usually the "security question" in most places is such a poorly-thought idea: usually they only allow you to select from a limited set of questions, and usually all the questions are such that it's easy to either guess the answer, check on the user's facebook/IM/etc, or just try from a list.

    It's much better when you can specify the question yourself. And even better: big, bold letters explaining to the user NOT to fucking choose a question/answer pair that is easily guessable or obtainable from their online profiles!

  9. Re:I want the passenger pigeon on Extinct Mammoth, Coming To a Zoo Near You · · Score: 3, Funny

    Giant beaver, now that sounds interesting!

  10. Re:Understandable on RapidShare Threatens Suit Over Piracy Allegations · · Score: 0

    IMHO it's much more important that there exists a service where people can upload whatever content they need to. As it happens, there could very well be people who are for example persecuted for their believes or whatever and they have documents that they need stored somewhere without a risk of them being removed by those aforementioned persecutors..It's just one example, feel free to come up with more if you wish. But the point is, the powers that be could well misuse their powers if all the content was reviewed and monitored, and thus it's great that Rapidshare et al does provide a service where privacy is important.

    I do understand that it obviously means some people will use the service for less than honest reasons but the benefits still far outweigh those negative effects.

  11. Volunteer! on Scientist Says NASA Must Study Space Sex · · Score: 1

    I volunteer to help NASA scientists with this study! Now they just need to shoot me in space and find me some sex partners, all in the name of science!

  12. Legal ramifications on Record Labels To Pay For Copyright Infringement · · Score: 2

    Can this be used in future courts as a precedent? I mean, they were not only sharing files illegally, they were actually selling them too and thus profiteering from it, they were sharing them with not only thousands but tens of thousands, yet they only had to pay a bit over $100 per song. Thus, a person at home sharing a music file, not profiteering from it, and perhaps only sharing it with tens or at max hundreds shouldn't have to pay nearly as much per song.

    I am actually interested in knowing cos if this can be used as a precedent then MAFIAA just got shot hard in the foot.

  13. Prime example of.. on Record Labels To Pay For Copyright Infringement · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ..do as we say, not as we do ourselves.

  14. Re:But... on T-Mobile Slashes Fair Use Policy, Says Download At Home · · Score: 1

    If they don't want you doing all these gee-whiz things with your phone, they should stop featuring them in their television commercials.

    But.. that would be like actually making sense, and we're talking about T-Mobile here, you know!

  15. Re:External controllers on Razer Unveils Portable Gaming Device Concept · · Score: 1

    L4D already will pound the hell out of an older Pentium Dual or even a Core2Duo

    Uhh. I got Core 2 Duo and I'm playing L4D2 at max settings at 1600x900 perfectly fine, CPU usage never reaches even 80%. If you bring a Core 2 Duo to a grinding halt with L4D then you're doing something seriously wrong.

  16. Re:Looks fancy, but... on Razer Unveils Portable Gaming Device Concept · · Score: 1

    Who has time to look at their keyboard and decipher icons when gaming? Once you've got the basic keys down you rarely need to look down, and the letter keys are just as useful for finding your bearings when you do.

    If we were talking about a full-blown keyboard then sure, but you quite obviously missed this is about portable systems where space is limited. And in such cases being able to change the glyph the button represents is actually useful.

    I think it maybe would actually just act as a hindrance as people come to rely on looking for the icons rather than their muscle memory and spacial awareness.

    There is no loss of muscle memory or spacial awareness here. Again, I don't think you checked the announcement at all: it has physical keys. The glyphs on those keys can be changed, but the physical keys remain there. As such a user would still be perfectly able to develop muscle memory.

  17. Looks fancy, but... on Razer Unveils Portable Gaming Device Concept · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ..it looks like the game needs to support this thing for it to work properly, and that's where all these fancy ideas usually fail; it'll get 2-3 games that supports it, but in a year everyone's already forgotten about it and moved on. It'd be different if they went ahead and developed an actual standard API that games could use to display parts of their UI on other devices and that API worked with every manufacturer's devices, it might actually catch on! But.. well, given how short-sighted and greedy companies usually are they will just try to lock people to their own devices and then wonder why it didn't work.

  18. Re:"Machine Language for Beginners" on Preserving Great Tech For Posterity — the 6502 · · Score: 2

    I too bought my C64 the same way, delivering newspapers and ads :) Had a helluva time with it, too: played a few games on it, but mostly taught myself BASIC and then moved on to assembly. Could spend whole nights up just coding and learning. It really kindled my interest in computers, their internals and programming, and my life would have been quite different without those first contacts with a C64.

    Though, it died then suddenly one day, got an old 286 from my uncle, and that's where my story differs from yours: I immediately went on to teach myself x86 assembly :)

  19. Re:What's next? on Man Arrested For Exploiting Error In Slot Machines · · Score: 1

    Oh, this website didn't secure their Logins for SQL injection, it's not MY fault the series of buttons I pressed resulted in me accessing their database records. Oh, metasploit showed me a new Microsoft zero day exploit, its not MY fault I got admin access to the webserver by simply pressing the correct keys!

    Experiencing a glitch in a slot machine and taking advantage of it is quite a different thing.. He is not accessing any part of the machine or its software that he isn't meant to access, whereas in the case of for example someone using SQL injection and gaining system admin he would be accessing parts that were clearly not meant for general access. Then there's the whole breach of security thing and all that, whereas none of that applies to a slot machine. Using someone else's credentials for logging in to parts of a system which you know weren't meant for general access simply is a whole different thing.

    IMHO if there is a glitch in the slot machine and the glitch can be accessed by using the machine as it was intended then the whole fault lies with the owner, not the user. If the glitch was accessible through a method that clearly wasn't intended, or through unsanctified modifications to the system, then it would lie with the user. In this case all the things he did were wholly sanctified and not a single step in the process was illegal or uncondoned of or unintended and it's really not his fault that they resulted in an unexpected outcome.

  20. Re:wow on Running Your Own Ghost Investigation? · · Score: 1

    I really, really like the parent's comment. Wish I could mod him up even higher. Ah well.

    Anyways, I too am a complete skeptic; I don't believe in ghosts, gods, deities, or anything supernatural or something that has to do with dead entities causing things. It plain and simple sounds rubbish. But since there is no way to prove the existence of such as false then it would make sense to try and prove their existence instead. If even after very well and cautiously conducted experiments at multiple sites, multiple times, and both during they day and the night you still cannot prove it then that's quite a lot of circumstancial evidence to the contrary and thus has been time and money well-spent.

    Atleast I would like to try to prove their existence and fail at it. It would be a great way to have something meaningful to do without sitting in front of the computer all day long. And hell, if I actually did come up with evidence of something that I nor anyone else could explain then that'd be awesome. I still wouldn't believe it to have anything to do with dead entities, it could well be some sort of a previously unknown natural phenomenon, and then the whole trip would have been even more worth the while. After all, that's how people used to discover things: set out to do experiments, get unexpected results, and investigate them, and all thanks to healthy curiosity.

  21. Re:Broken? on Google's Next Challenge, Spam Results · · Score: 2

    Indeed. I do try the other search engines every now and then, but even when searching for something rather obscure Google returns more relevant results than the others. The problem is of course that Google's database has literally bajillions of webpages indexed and thus it's hard to come up with exactly correct results if you only use one or two keywords. But then again, the fault mostly lies with the users: they need to learn to make more coherent searches. Even adding two more keywords helps to narrow the search down, and using the minus-sign in front of one for excluding websites with that keyword helps a LOT.

    Making good searches simply is something one must learn, no search engine can read your mind and find exactly what you mean.

  22. Re:Epic Fail? WTF? on Playstation 3 Code Signing Cracked For Good · · Score: 1

    So why were the first exploits on any major console piracy related?

    It's a bit hard to sift through all the content available on Google and Wikipedia, but it seems the first hack for Wii was "Twilight hack", exactly with the intent of allowing one to run homebrew. Subsequent hacks built on the experience learned from it, and from previous experience from Gamecube.

    XBOX360 has some similarities with XBOX so tha too helped a tad, but it seems somewhere towards the end of 2005 there was the first breakthrough in hacking the firmware. And then too it was by a group of people who just enjoyed hacking, they didn't even release their hacked version of firmware. I couldn't find any references worth noting to earlier accomplishments, they seemed to mostly be hype or fake.

    As for PS3.. well, even the group discussed in the announcement say they started seriously hacking only once they lost access to OtherOS. There was this one guy who managed to get some limited access to the hypervisor through OtherOS, but even he said he did it just for the heck of it, not to play pirates. PSJailbreak came a lot later, and even then it seems to have been an accidental discovery simply made possible by them gaining access to the development console and studying it.

    Thus it unfortunately seems these things do not support your claims.

  23. Re:Epic Fail? WTF? on Playstation 3 Code Signing Cracked For Good · · Score: 2

    Really? people haven't been trying to get to accelerated video in linux on the ps3? Or access to the GameOS FS just to tinker with it? Or piracy(Piracy was a big BIG motivator on Xbox, 360, PS2 and Wii; also Dreamcast but, the DC's security was even bigger epic fail than Sony's).

    The people who want pirates are most often not the same people who have the skills, knowledge and hankering to do hacking. Pirates usually just ride with whatever tools those hackers have created, and hackers on the other hand most often create their tools and hacks just for personal pleasure and/or for running homebrew software. Two very different camps.

    Sure, there were some people who were trying to get access to accelerated video, but not the most determined hackers. Most determined hackers were already quite happy with having a completely new CPU to toy around with in OtherOS. It was only after OtherOS got removed that they lost all their toys and decided to crack the whole thing open.

    My point is, the people with skills create hacks and jailbreaks mostly because they want to run homebrew and usually the tools for running homebrew either allow for pirates, or require little work to enable piracy, and then pirates just ride along as they themselves most often than not lack the skills to create such jailbreaks themselves.

  24. Re:Primary Programming. on Greed, Zealotry, and the Commodore 64 · · Score: 2

    we still have the choice of which fork of the decision tree is taken. That's free will.

    If god doesn't know what decision we will make then god is not omnipotent, simple as that. Omnipotent means knowing everything, past, future and present, but if god doesn't know what we will do then he doesn't know everything and is not omnipotent.

    That's what I've been saying all the time. Knowing all possible outcomes but not knowing the actual choice being made simply means he doesn't know everything.

  25. Re:Primary Programming. on Greed, Zealotry, and the Commodore 64 · · Score: 2

    Therefore -- God is certainly aware of all potential sins by humanity - but free will allows the choice not to sin. Simply put, God knows the worst we can be -- and simply wishes us the best possible world (and future).

    You're not quite thinking this through. If god created us with free will he wouldn't know what the outcome is, and thus god wouldn't be omnipotent. If he was omnipotent he would already know the final outcome. It is not possible to have both, they exclude eachother.