Slashdot Mirror


User: w_dragon

w_dragon's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
666
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 666

  1. Re:Sounds like liberal arts grad students on Which Grad Students Are the Most Miserable? · · Score: 1

    An MBA is useful if you have a couple decades experience in a field and want to jump into senior management. It's useless if it's just paired with an undergrad degree and no experience.

  2. Re:Once burned, twice shy. on Google Loses Autocomplete Defamation Case · · Score: 1

    Except all they would be doing is providing an explanation to users on why they aren't able to provide a service they previously provided. They aren't giving any opinion on the ruling, just stating that it exists (these things are public, you know).

  3. Re:Patents on The Biggest Legal Danger For Open Source? · · Score: 1

    Selling is kind of pointless if part of the license you agree to is to allow your users to redistribute so long as they also provide the source.

  4. Re:Patents on The Biggest Legal Danger For Open Source? · · Score: 1

    And you're free to go make a movie based on the same folk stories and fairy tales. In many cases you can even use the same title as they did since the title is just the name of the fairy tale and can't be copyrighted. There are several non-Disney Cinderella movies. You can't use their artwork or their modifications to the stories, but you can certainly use the same source material for the story.

  5. Re:And yet... on FSF Suggests That Google Free Gmail Javascript · · Score: 1

    It's not even that bad. You can indent it automatically, as mentioned above, then step through it with a debugger. It doesn't take that long to start to get the feel for what's going on.

  6. Re:By 2050? on Europe Plans To Ban Petrol Cars From Cities By 2050 · · Score: 1

    The Greek island of Hydra is largely car-free, other than garbage collection.

  7. Re:Sounds like a headache on US Contemplating 'Vehicle Miles Traveled' Tax · · Score: 2

    Why not put a few office buildings in the suburbs? Wouldn't that make a lot more sense? Why do you need the massive business density in the city core for things like software?

  8. Re:Not specifically due to GPLv3. on Apple Remove Samba From OS X 10.7 Because of GPLv3 · · Score: 1

    Except Linux is still GPL2 last I checked, it's the entire GNU toolchain that actually makes the Linux kernel useful that everyone has to avoid.

  9. Re:So much better.... on CS Prof Decries America's 'Internal Brain Drain' · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Not sure about Jobs, but Gates and Zuckerberg both completed a fair bit of college before dropping out to run their businesses.

  10. Re:tackling that social problem on Richard Stallman: Cell Phones Are 'Stalin's Dream' · · Score: 1

    Maybe I'm the only one who played with decompiled binaries in university? If you have the executables then you have the ability to change the behavior of the program. Open source or not, if you learn to read assembly you can read the code.

  11. Re:Why start being correct now? on Utah To Teach USA is a Republic, Not a Democracy · · Score: 1

    How democratic is it really, though? While I understand that the states each get so many votes I thought it was undefined how an individual state chooses how to select a candidate to vote for? So if Michigan decides that from now on all votes will go to the democratic representative, then so long as they follow state laws to come to that conclusion, that would be OK by US law. Is this incorrect? If this is correct then the US is only as democratic as the states choose to be, there is no guarantee of democracy for the individual person, only for the state as a whole.

  12. Re:These are people who still believe Joseph Smith on Utah To Teach USA is a Republic, Not a Democracy · · Score: 1

    Given that he's noted as reading the Torah in the temple I doubt he was illiterate. Jews have always had a pretty large emphasis on being able to read. Also he was the son of a carpenter, which would have probably been a fairly well-paid profession in those days. Odds are he would have had a fairly comfortable life growing up.

  13. Re:GPL is a problem for non-commercial, too on Android Devices Are Hives of License Violations · · Score: 1

    Depends on the definition of 'making available'. If I use a GPL javascript library am I making changes available simply by the fact that everyone who browses to my page downloads the javascript as part of loading the page? If I use a PHP library to do the identical thing server-side am I making available by virtue of the fact that everyone who uses my page 'uses' the code? If I'm using GPL'd code internally to a company am I redistributing changes if I only make something available internally? A corporation is considered a single entity in some parts of law, so that's certainly not easy to answer. As part of a large business I can go to a legal department and say 'here's the license and here's the intended use, is this legal?' and they'll tell me. If I were part of a smaller company I would have to weigh the cost difference between paying a lawyer to give me the same answer, or buying a commercial solution.

  14. Re:GPL is a problem for non-commercial, too on Android Devices Are Hives of License Violations · · Score: 1

    I don't think it's so much that the commercial licenses are simpler (ever read your Windows license? Me neither.), so much as there's a single entity you can call up and say 'am I allowed to do this with your software?'. If they say yes then it is a definitive answer. They would probably have a hard time suing you for doing something they told you was legal, even if the license disagrees. With GPL it's much more of a gray area. You can't assume that anything anyone tells you is true, unless it's based on case law in the country you're operating in.

  15. Re:Get over it. on A Letter On Behalf of the World's PC Fixers · · Score: 1

    After spending 40+ hours per week fixing computers at work, when I get home, I don't particularly want to touch another computer until I get back to work.

    Aren't you glad you didn't become a gynecologist?

  16. Re:Delays on George RR Martin Finishes A Dance With Dragons · · Score: 1

    There are a lot of different character threads in Ice and Fire, if he's working on one it may be easier to keep writing even if he goes beyond the timeline of the current book. On the other hand, maybe he just does it to piss off his readers.

  17. Re:So much for build quality... on New MacBook Pro Teardown Reveals 'Shoddy Assembly' · · Score: 1

    The nice thing about this is that it is a limited-time problem. Give it another generation or two and all the cheap labor in the world will be used up. Africa, parts of South America, and then what? India and China represent a sizable portion of the world population, as they get out of poverty manufacturing is going to get more expensive. No big deal, we'll just automate it all since the robots will be cheaper than humans in the end.

  18. Re:Hurray! on Betty Boop and Indefinite Copyright · · Score: 2

    There are sites that show a lot of the old Disney stuff - steamboat willie, silly symphonies, victory through air power. Youtube has full versions of most pre-2000 Disney movies - snow white, cinderella, mulan, aladdin. For all that Disney makes sure their movies never leave copyright, they are good at turning a blind eye to copyright violations that don't cost them anything.

  19. Re:Depends... on Is Attending a CS Conference Worth the Time? · · Score: 1

    That's far more expensive than the hookers...

  20. Re:It's a good disconnect on IT Graduates Not "Well-Trained, Ready-To-Go" · · Score: 1

    Every single major project I've ever worked on had a performance target. One of them had a requirement that an encryption phase have its time reduced by at least 50%. One had a interpretation phase that was required to be reduced by around 80%. We got closer to 90% on that one. Normally they're more along the line of 'operation X must not take longer than Y time'. And yes, lots of companies worry about them. They don't care how you get that time, but they care that their real-time system isn't going to choke when it gets a lot of data at once.

  21. Re:Or possibly... on Retro Browser War: IE6 Vs. Netscape In 2011 · · Score: 4, Informative

    They thought of that. He went to great lengths to get a version of IE6 that was released in 2001, no patches allowed. It's in the first page of the article. I know, I must be new here.

  22. Re:TL;DR Version on Why Google Wants Your Kid's SSN · · Score: 1

    A US citizen does not lose their citizenship by becoming a citizen of another country. Even in cases where the person signs something indicating that the give up all other citizenships, the US has determined that that alone is not enough evidence to remove their citizenship.

  23. Re:How else do you uniquely identify USAsians? on Why Google Wants Your Kid's SSN · · Score: 1

    Yes, but it should be unique ID for the government *only*. If someone wants to impersonate me to pay my taxes I'm not nearly as concerned as when they try to impersonate me to get a bunch of credit cards and trash my credit record. Make them public and make it possible to sue banks and credit reporting agencies for fraud if they allow someone else to open accounts as you based on name, DOB, and SSN alone.

  24. Re:Could it be something else? on Cell Phone Use Tied To Changes In Brain Activity · · Score: 0

    Good to know, thanks for keeping me lazy :D

  25. Could it be something else? on Cell Phone Use Tied To Changes In Brain Activity · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Too lazy to RTFA, did they move the antenna away from the speaker, or is it possible that the sound waves or even the brain interpreting the sound from the ear, is responsible for the increase?,