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User: Sique

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  1. Re:Why didn't this happen sooner? on Lawyer Jailed For Contempt Is Freed After 14 Years · · Score: 2, Insightful

    He didn't get into prison because he was convicted of withholding money, he was in prison because he didn't follow a court order. So the prison was to coerce money out of him, not to punish him for something.

  2. Re:Or may not have on Something May Have Just Hit Jupiter · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Or, as the german philosopher Schopenhauer famously put it:

    Dilletants! Dilletants! - so are called those, who are occupied by a Science or an Art out of love to it, per il loro diletto, with disdain by those who do it for profit, because they love only the money which can be earned by it. This disdain is based on the dastard conviction, that nobody would ever seriously take on a subject if not distress, famine, or another greed urges it. The public is of the same spirit and thus has the same opinion: from here comes his respect for "people of the trade", and his mistrust of amateurs. In reality for the amateur the subject is the goal, for the man of the trade as himself it is only means. Only he will carry on with earnest who is immediately interested in the subject and who is occupied with it out of love. From those, not from the paid servants, the greatest has ever started.

    (Sorry for my bad english. I am an amateur after all ;) )

  3. Re:No, not the first on Something May Have Just Hit Jupiter · · Score: 1

    Yes, they do. And there are very specific types of shock waves running through clouds and other types of shockwaves running through gas giants.

  4. It's Oetzi, not Otzi. on World's Oldest Tattoo Written In Soot · · Score: 1

    The nickname of the mummy is Oetzi, because it was found at the upper end of the Oetztal (Oetz valley). I know that many Americans ignore german umlauts and write an o instead of an ö (native speakers use 'oe', if no umlauts are possible), but in this case it's not even an umlaut. The little town which gives the valley its name is called Oetz with an oe, not an ö.

  5. Re:...But it was still funny. on EU Publishers Want a Law To Control Online News · · Score: 1

    Be that as it may, my German teacher, who is German through and through, described watching the Kennedy speech on the tube with her family in Germany and busting a gut when he uttered that line, for which her grandmother scolded her for being disrespectful.

    It gets more complicated. The speech was given in Berlin, and in Berlin the famous jelly donut is not called Berliner. So for each Berliner, to whom the speech was addressed, it was clear that it meant "citizen of Berlin". If Kennedy wanted the people of Berlin to know that he equals himself to a jelly donut, he would have said "I am a Pfannkuchen" (Pfannkuchen = pancake for most Germans, but not for people of Berlin and south of it, the pancake is called "Eierkuchen" = egg cake in Berlin).

  6. Re:What garbage on EU Publishers Want a Law To Control Online News · · Score: 1

    ...As opposed to people who would have died during Saddam's rule?

    The number of victims of Sadam Hussein's rule in Iraq over about 24 years is estimated at 300.000 people.
    The number of victims of the invasion and the subsequent civil war and the terrorist uprising after the invasion is estimated at 300.000 people.

    So between 2003 and 2009, about the same number of victims have died as between 1979 and 2003. A job well done!

  7. Re:Smirking Pluto Killer - Not My Favorite on Tomorrow's Science Heroes? · · Score: 1

    The peer-reviewed paper that showed that the "brontosaurus" was really an apatosaur was published in 1903.

    More so the alleged brontosaur was a mosaic of apatosaur and camarosaur remains, because bones of both species were found at the same place, causing the brontosaur to literally fall in place.

  8. Re:Top Gear Veyron goodness on Bugatti's Latest Veyron, Most Ridiculous Car on the Planet? · · Score: 1

    I wouldn't think so. There is the Isle of Man Trophy ;)

  9. Re:What about an AES 512 or 1024?? on New AES Attack Documented · · Score: 1

    I don't know if the size of the hash has anything to do with the package or the resultant file, but what about simply doubling (or greater) the hash?

    Here comes the irony: The attack is possible, because AES-256 and AES-192 are "extended" versions of AES-128. While AES-128 still goes strong, the extended versions are attacked, and their complexity is reduced to at least 2^119. AES-128 remains at 2^128.

  10. Re:Stop giving them power on EPA Quashed Report Skeptical of Global Warming · · Score: 1

    There are non financial benefits like the right to stay silent in court.

  11. Re:Stop giving them power on EPA Quashed Report Skeptical of Global Warming · · Score: 1

    Right, just as we allow blind people to drive.

    A person unable to handle a dangerous tool (and a car is dangerous, as the traffic accident statistics show) is an immediate life threat to his environment if he uses this tool. A gay couple living together is not an immediate life threat. Argument rejected.

    The societal benefits to married couples are essentially to promote childrearing. If the union can't produce children, it doesn't deserve the benefits, such as tax breaks.

    The financial benefits to married couples are nothing else than a subvention of the wife staying at home. But there are non-financial benefits which have nothing to do with childbearing: visitation rights in a hospital, the right to stay silent in court...

    According to your logic couples with the wife in the climacterium shouldn't get benefits. Couples with the husband infertile shouldn't get benefits. Couples who use contraceptives shouldn't get benefits. A sterilization of the husband should end benefits for the couple etc.pp.

    So why do we allow old people to marry? Why do we allow career people to marry? Why don't we send tax inspectors to each couple and stop the benefits if they don't get children after two years?

  12. Re:And we want the gov to run health care? on EPA Quashed Report Skeptical of Global Warming · · Score: 1

    The NHS is a system developed by Margaret Thatcher. So this means that it tried to do privatization for privatizations sake (and to get rid of any trade union control) without thinking about the consequences. Subsequent repairs by John Major and Tony Blair didn't really helped it.

  13. Re:Stop giving them power on EPA Quashed Report Skeptical of Global Warming · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As long as the government decides to give benefits for being married, it is up to the government to define what they accept as "proof of marriage". So either you have a religious ceremony with no legal implications at all, then who are you to forbid other people to have a similar ceremony with a similar name? Or you have something which has legal implications, then it has to be fair and open to all to qualify.

  14. Re:Isn't this antithetical to GNU in general? on Richard Stallman Says No To Mono · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, Richard Stallman was always very concerned with NOT violating patents. For instance gzip was developed especially to avoid a patent clash over compress, the commercial compression utility shipped with UNIX.

  15. Re:Sold "non-open" license? on Atari Sub-Sub-Contractor Used ScummVM For Wii Game · · Score: 1

    I suppose the ability to do this would depend on what software/libs SCUMMVM uses and whether they're GPL, but isn't it often possible for a company to sell a license which permits the use of GPL'ed code without revealing sources (dual-licensing, etc).

    Exactly that is not possible for the SCUMM engine, and thus not for the ScummVM. Either GPL or no license at all.

  16. Re:Backwards, I hope on Licensed C64 Emulator Rejected From App Store · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's easy if you are allowed to emulate a second per hour.

  17. Re:Standing on the shoulders of giants on What Open Source Shares With Science · · Score: 1

    But, as Richard Feynman points out in Q.E.D., Isaac Newton was correct with his corpuscular theory of light.

  18. Re:Standing on the shoulders of giants on What Open Source Shares With Science · · Score: 1

    First, the sentence itself is much older and gets attributed to Bernard of Chartes (died around 1124).
    Second, using Isaac Newton as an example for a scientist is complicated, because at this time, there wasn't a scientific method. Isaac Newton for instance was very interested in Alchimy and Astrology and even calculated (like Bishop James Ussher) the age of the earth according to the bible. In some way this was a hobby to many of the scholars at the time, even Johannes Kepler published his findings.

  19. Re:Which one was it? on Default Passwords Blamed In $55M PBX Hacks · · Score: 1

    Because a lot of customers do some maintenance work like administration of extensions, and for that they need the password.

  20. Re:Feh. on Default Passwords Blamed In $55M PBX Hacks · · Score: 2, Insightful

    But that's just because we are pretty good at labelling everything "terrorist" right now. It always was a tactic of the organized crime to either make the local policy part of the organization or assasinate the policemen who didn't conform. Today assasinating a local police officer surely gets labelled "terrorism".

  21. Re:Which one was it? on Default Passwords Blamed In $55M PBX Hacks · · Score: 1

    It has nothing to do with the type of PBX, but with the admins using it. And yes, the company I work for mostly keeps the original passwords on the PBX they deploy, because most customers have a lousy policy when it comes to keep passwords.

  22. Re:12345 post on Default Passwords Blamed In $55M PBX Hacks · · Score: 1

    And it nearly matches the default password on most phone stations I am working with (not the PBX though). And because most customers have a very lousy password retainment and password storing policy, the colleagues keep the phone systems on their default passwords. If you know the extension for the modem that connects to the admin console, you could dial in from outside and go forward to administrate...

  23. Re:Bolognium on Periodic Table Gets a New, Unnamed Element · · Score: 1

    What has Bologna to do with the element? It was created in Darmstadt, but Darmstadtium (110), Hassium (108, Hassia is the state where Darmstadt is located) and Germanium (32) are all taken.

  24. Re:Henrich Hertz on Nokia Developed Wireless Power-Harvesting Phones · · Score: 2, Informative

    No, Mahlon Loomis may have invented a kind of long wave radio with his kites, but he had the theory behind it wrong. He was theorezing about layers in the atmosphere that carry a current, while Heinrich Hertz was correctly pointing out that it was electromagnetic waves he was demonstrating. Of course, Heinrich Hertz had the big advantage of knowing James Clerk Maxwell's Theory of Electromagnetism (1879), and he was indeed looking for an experiment that could test if radio waves have the same characteristics (e.g. transversal wave travelling at the speed of light) as light waves.

  25. Re:City planning on Analysis Says Planes Might Be Greener Than Trains · · Score: 1

    1. I never claimed HAFAS containing all schedules. I explicitely said nearly all.
    2. The anecdote happened in Austria (where I am living since about six years). The bus schedule has been slightly thinned out since then, the busses now run each hour during the night, and only on weekends. During the week the busses run until midnight and start again at 6.00 am. The current schedule is here with Volders being the village in question.
    The village I am still living in, Rum (yes, like the liquor), is still better connected with four local bus lines from the neighbouring town, one bus line going through whole of the village itself, a train station and several overland bus lines.