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User: cant_get_a_good_nick

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  1. Re:I wonder why... on North Carolina Still Wants To Block Municipal Broadband · · Score: 2

    Though this may be a bit Godwin's laws ish....

    Remember that State's Rights were used as a justification for secession.

    But, in the Confederate Constitution, it pretty much was a copy of the US Constitution.... three exceptions. 1) anything based on age was of course reclocked to start of Confederacy. 2) anything based on number of states was reset to number of Confederate states 3) you HAD to allow slavery. No choice.

    So, the US Constitution allowed various slavery modes (not that this was good, but we're arguing something else), but the Confederacy didn't allow the state that right. "State's Rights" south had less rights for the state. States Rights is basically an excuse for "do what I want at any given time" rather than follow any actual ruleset. In this context the inconsistency above hypocrisy fits.

  2. Re:More than money on Harry Shearer Walks Away From "The Simpsons," and $14 Million · · Score: 1

    Another thing is residuals I dont think they get a backnd A show can go to syndication profitably after 100 episodes or so. The Simpsons have over 500 shows

    think of this in context of: 1) the shit-ton of money FX paid for syndication, and no voice actor gets a penny, and 2) the shit-ton of money handed over for Seinfeld.

    Shearer probably has more money than he needs, but his contract still may be "unfair" in that hes not getting a percentage where many other people are.

  3. The Internet of never updated easily pwn3d things on Beware the Ticking Internet of Things Security Time Bomb · · Score: 1

    No message needed.

  4. Nuked from *THE* orbit? on Microsoft Is Confident In Security of Edge Browser · · Score: 1

    Doesn't anyone watch classic movies anymore? And they said that line TWICE.

  5. Re:Good luck with that... on Ask Slashdot: Moving To an Offshore-Proof Career? · · Score: 1

    Not so much with the lawyers. Imagine spending tens of thousands, possibly up to hundreds of thousands of dollars for your degree, and you can't get a job to pay it off. It's happening now.

    Imagine a world where most of the day to day stuff is paperwork. Now you get that paperwork on the Internet. Your $500 document fee is now a $29 download.

    A friend works for a volunteer agency that gives out legal advice. They have a waiting list for lawyers to give their services. Anything to get their name out, even free, since they can't get a job.

    So now we have jobs that need accreditation going away thanks to the Internet. Im not sure what's safe anymore.

  6. Re:Stone soup on Why Was Linux the Kernel That Succeeded? · · Score: 2

    wow, thanks anonymous person... and I like Danny Kaye...

  7. Stone soup on Why Was Linux the Kernel That Succeeded? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When I was a kid, i read a book called Stone Soup. It was about these guys that wanted to eat, had nothing but a pot. They put in some stones... called it stone soup.

    Eventually people got curious, and added things.. the soup became real. Going from water and rocks, to where real ingredients went in, and the stones just fell away. A seed, but then dropped when something real came.

    I always thought of Linus as a guy who managed the Stone Soup well. It wasn't specially good in .01 version. But he made people want to add to it. The GPL helped some. Linus chose that license, not as a "hey Im a zealot and you need to give me everything you write" but he thought "if people do cool things they need to let me see their cool things"

    That, and FreeBSD had a few handicaps. The biggest one was the AT&T lawsuit. Linus himself once said he'd probably not have bothered with Linux if BSD was clean. The second, BSD had a slower model of improvement. You needed to have the commit bit to do anything constructive. Meanwhile Linus (later Cox) took code from pretty much anyone that made sense. Third, BSD5 had a radical new kernel design that added a lot of complication for threading with little gain. DragonFlyBSD was forked because of this.

    So, IMHO, there were a few things... all of them dented (Free)BSD, and there really wasn't another competitor out there.

  8. Re:Ask Mel on The BBC Looks At Rollover Bugs, Past and Approaching · · Score: 1

    I already posted, so I can't mod... one of the coolest geek stories around.

  9. Re:We encountered a similar bug on The BBC Looks At Rollover Bugs, Past and Approaching · · Score: 1

    Why didn't/couldn't you use GMT?

  10. Windows one is my fave on The BBC Looks At Rollover Bugs, Past and Approaching · · Score: 2, Informative

    There was a counter in Windows that rolled over after 28 days I think (like the 787 bug, but 1000 ticks.second not 100).

    Even Microsoft knew that no Windows box could stay up that long.

    (And before you mod me as a troll, think about it and know that MS could have made a bigger counter, but didn't feel the need to)

  11. Re:Viable 3rd Party Candidate?! on Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina Announces Bid For White House · · Score: 1

    Not because he'd achieve anything (the machine will lock him out anyway)

    I remember when Nader ran. Subtract the fact that the one campaign promise, he reneged on, he'd be a horribly ineffective President. Besides no direct experience, Nader trashed both Dems and Republicans. Who controls power in Washington? Dems and Republicans. Nothing constructive done.

    I know politics is messy. It's about humans fighting for things. OF COURSE it's messy. It's baked in. It reminds me of Fawlty Towers... "this business would be great except for the customers". It's part of it.. you can't have politics without mess. Want to ignore it? then you'll be screwed, bitching about it just as if you're bitching about the weather.

    I really don't get the "oh he's got no experience in politics, he's PERFECT". if i go to a sushi restaurant, i don't say "oh, this guy has no preconceived notions of food or cleanliness...YAY lets see what interesting things he washes his hands with" Running a big organization, like the federal government, is a big management job. What has stalman done that shows he can manage things? gcc got out of control. emacs? big fight with Lucid emacs. Hurd? not shipping for real yet.

  12. Re:ESPN can go eff themselves. on ESPN Sues Verizon To Stop New Sports-Free TV Bundles · · Score: 1

    Where is The Ocho when you need it.

  13. Re:Incorrect. on Pandora Paying Artists $0.0001 More Per Stream Than It Was Last Year · · Score: 1

    The best metaphor I could come up with was Indentured Servitude... that oddball period of time in colonial days where you sold yourself for a few years for someone to give you a ticket to the Colonies.

    In music, you get an advance, and the studio sets up all the people you need to produce your record. But, the advance comes out of future sales. and all those production people take a cut of your ability to pay back the advance. You're property of the music label for a few years until everything gets settled out.

    The real fear of digital music was the ability to get away from the leeches. when you can set up a home studio for a few thousand and then push your own music on iTunes, less need for labels. They covered themselves by saying "piracy" but it was really a loss of control.

  14. "Shot across the bow" effect on Google Launches Project Fi Mobile Phone Service · · Score: 1

    I don't want a new phone, so the plan is a non-starter right there.

    But the pricing seems more of a shot across the bow of ATT&T and Verizon. TMobile, and other MVNOs can be cheaper at some levels, but this has the weight of Google behind it. For better and for worse Google is flexing it's muscles in the ISP arena. Google Fiber really is causing changes with AT&T and Comcast. I see this as that - you'll never get Google Fiber/Google FI in every home every phone, but it makes people realize there are other things out there.

  15. Re:c++ 14 eh? on GCC 5.1 Released · · Score: 1

    Will C++20 be C++ Venti?

  16. Re:Instead... on 'Mobilegeddon': Google To Punish Mobile-Hostile Sites Starting Today · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Google has an agenda. Their agenda may or may not be the same as mine. More and more recently, their agenda certainly doesn't match mine. They can be "right" for Mr Brin, just not for me.

    Google Wave? Google Plus? Forcing Google plus on absolutely everyone then abandoning it? Orkut? Not honoring do-not-track in Safari. The list of places where Google was wrong is non-zero.

    Google has the "don't be evil" pledge. That's so weak to be a joke. Imagine an unsafe mining company trying to pull that. "We only killed 3 people this week, so we're not so evil." I'd rather they have "don't be corporate". Their governance structure is specially created where they don't have the pressure of the shareholders - all the power is with the founders and super special stock voting rights.

    (An aside - Alibaba could NOT pull the same voting structure in Communist China... the government felt it took away too much power from the shareholder... imagine Google's governance structure being not free enough for Communist China)

    Because of the immunity from those pesky shareholders and their short term view, above pretty much all other large publicly traded companies, they have the power to "don't be corporate", but instead they pull things here and there that prove they're just a big corporation and not the panacea they'd like you to believe.

  17. Re:Doesn't work on ISS Could Be Fitted With Lasers To Shoot Down Space Junk · · Score: 1

    Just like The Last Starfighter! (Did I date myself too much...)

    Dunno why but I was just thinking about this movie. Death Blossom FTW.

  18. Re:Why the hell ... on Remote Code Execution Vulnerability Found In Windows HTTP Stack · · Score: 1

    They probably saw that FreeBSD has been doing it for 15 years [freebsd.org] and thought it might be a good idea.

    Though I thought of this too, it's a majorly different level of parsing, and therefore much smaller attack surface.

    MS has a full HTTP stack in the kernel. FreeBSD accept filters (including the http_filter) do a minimal check, then pass the full request to userspace - no heavy parsing in the kernel. I think the http_filter just looks for GET/HEAD/WHATEVER_SCHEME and a few other minimal things, and then tells httpd "here ya go"

  19. Re:HTTP.SYS? on Remote Code Execution Vulnerability Found In Windows HTTP Stack · · Score: 1

    You could have apache installed by default (witness MacOS X) and run from userspace, you don't need it in the kernel by default.

  20. Re:HTTP.SYS? on Remote Code Execution Vulnerability Found In Windows HTTP Stack · · Score: 1

    1) Literally?

    2) This is actually pretty common, witness the TUX Linux kernel web server a few years ago.

    Why? the same reason anything is dumped into kernel mode. Speed. Got a few thousand hits per second? Drop your userspace code into kernel space, and now you're eliminating a few thousand user-kernel space swap outs per second. Problems? Yeah, lets have a fairly complicated protocol that is designed to be poked at (and therefore hacked at) remotely dropped into the kernel. That and complicated data structures and kernel memory management don't mix well sometimes.

    I agree with you. I thought TUX was a bad idea when it came out. Now imagine a new protocol without all the design bugs sorted out, without all the implementation bugs sorted out (i'm looking at you HTTP/2.0 SPDY) dropped into the kernel.. Oy Vey! the pain!

  21. Re:Decent on Seattle CEO Cuts $1 Million Salary To $70K, Raises Employee Salaries · · Score: 1

    Mo money mo problems

    See "Broke" from 30 for 30. Hell, see all of 30 for 30.

  22. Historical Traffic times? on Google Sunsetting Old Version of Google Maps · · Score: 2

    One of the best features of the "old" maps was the historical traffic times. Say I need to be somewhere at 10AM; I can get my route, then some clicketty-click and get what the normal transportation time, with traffic, is. Use that as a guess, with some extra slop and you;ll probably get there on time. I haven't seen this feature in the new maps.

    Though hard to bitch about "you get a pretty useful GPS as a (pseudo) freebie*" I hate when Google thinks "yeah, you really want this" when I really don't. Their idea of "you really want this" tends to not be as often as they seem to think. Eg: my distaste for all things Material Design now. Too much wasted space, a big saturated color header with a thin white font inside making it hard to read, too much effort to make that little circle at the bottom right do too many things.

    Anyway, rant over.

    (*) Free as in "Every google app wants access to your location every second... from Maps (makes sense) Google Now (a bit more sense, but location turned off) to GooglePlus (only google engineers go there anyway) to Google Hangouts (no thanks)"

  23. Not the only dark side on Fifty Years of Moore's Law · · Score: 1

    Electronics are progressing faster then us meat puppets can deal with. We're going to have issues as electronics have the capability to take over more and more of what us humans do.

    When you ask someone, what do you do? You generally get an answer of their job. it's part of our internal definition. what happens when you do nothing (and get paid nothing)?

  24. C64 had a cassette drive on 1980's Soviet Bloc Computing: Printers, Mice, and Cassette Decks · · Score: 4, Insightful

    My C64 had a cassette recorder (DataSette I think it was called). It wasn't being Soviet, it was being cheap when the floppy disk drive more expensive than the computer.

  25. Re:Oh this is easy .... on Ask Slashdot: Living Without Social Media In 2015? · · Score: 2

    I've no facebook. I purposely use G+, since no one is on it, and I get some good tech feeds on it. I don't miss social media (and yes, i said I have G+ and say I don't really have social media).

    I was on the Internet in pre-web days. FTPspace back then. Sumex-aim anyone? Does anyone else know that Wuarchive is not about the Wu-Tang? Sadly neither responds to pings anymore.....

    But even though i saw the web grow, then web 2.0, and now the "everything needs a social network angle" web, I never thought that I'd want to have my personal interactions filtered by and "monetized" by a corporation. If I want to talk to you, we talk, I don't try to get in your newsfeed between the mayonnaise ad and the facebook game.