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User: fatphil

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  1. Re:Good News for Blizzard, bad news for copyright on Blizzard Wins Major Lawsuit Against Bot Developers · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yes, it appears so. And, as someone insightfully said above, if you let your virus scanner ever scan the WoW binaries, then you're infringing copyright too.

  2. Re:Wow... on Blizzard Wins Major Lawsuit Against Bot Developers · · Score: 1

    "a licence is a contact" - nope, pretty much the opposite. See discussions about the GPL, etc., for more info. In brief, a licence offers you conditional rights that you wouldn't otherwise have; however, you're not obligated to satisfy those conditions as you're not obligated to exercise those rights.

  3. Re:Ouch. on Blizzard Wins Major Lawsuit Against Bot Developers · · Score: 1

    And backup software too, it seems.

  4. Re:Proof of Concept Slashdot Trojan on Two Trojans For Mac OS X · · Score: 5, Funny

    Obligatory: http://www.bash.org/?244321

  5. Re:US Satellites? on Artist/Astronomer Exhibits Photos Of Spy Satellites · · Score: 1

    The satelites' missions? "Climate research".

    And the supercomputers at LLL, they're for "Energy Research".

  6. Re:DRM and Freedom don't mix. on How Nokia and Linux Can Live Together · · Score: 2, Informative

    You completely misunderstand GPL3. They can distribute any GPL3 programs they like on their device as long as they honour the GPL3. GPL3 does not say "you must not ship this on a device which also contains non-GPL programs".

  7. Re:Lower is better! on The Smartest Browser and OS · · Score: 1

    Given that the HTML source contains a form with a field parameter that contains some very interesting base-64 encoded stuff (including javascript source - yup, that you send back to it, and the answer (and an explanation)), I say sod the cookie - just write a perl script to decode the base-64, and automatically answer every question quickly and correctly.

  8. Re:I was close to participation on Expert Dissects Estonian Cyber-War · · Score: 1

    There *was* a Nazi war memorial - you moved it 5 or 6 years back.

  9. Re:I was close to participation on Expert Dissects Estonian Cyber-War · · Score: 1

    From the small sample of European countries with which I'm familiar, such as the ones where I've lived, you are not wrong. Every single one has had such a requirement.

  10. Re:I was close to participation on Expert Dissects Estonian Cyber-War · · Score: 1

    If you're going to compare the Estonians' views on Nazis and Soviets, then how do you explain the fact that the Estonians moved the Nazi war-memorial statue years ago?

  11. Re:Expert? on Expert Dissects Estonian Cyber-War · · Score: 1

    Don't take either's word - read their words, and then form your own conclusion. It is clear from Gadi Evron's document that he has very little useful to say. Someone being derogatory about him and it because of what they read within is certainly someone with a better grasp of fact and logic than the laughably-titled "expert" Gadi Evron.

  12. Re:$1,000 market dominance... on 66% Apple Market Share For Sales of High-End PCs · · Score: 1

    Obviously some pee-cee users are very behind the times by using a bus working at 19.2kb/s to carry six 3-byte frames each second rather than having a 12Mb/s capacity bus instead!

  13. Re:This is a GOOD thing on Shape-Shifting Malware Hits the Web · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Bzzzt! In order to do that we have to first solve the Halting Problem.
    It is impossible, for arbitrary code, to even tell which parts of the code are code, and which are data. Working out which bits of the code are a morphing routine is unimaginably harder.

  14. Re:Cult. on Mormon Church Goes After WikiLeaks · · Score: 1

    "If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth; Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage."

    So if you're thinking of leaving Judeism, you'd better not tell anyone else about your decision (well, Jews, that is), lest thou be smitten by his hand. And don't forget to smite anyone who tells you anything positive about their chosen faith.

  15. Re:hype alert on Quantum Cryptography Broken, and Fixed · · Score: 1

    Of course, one thing that's often forgotten is that an evesdropper is indistinguishable from noise, so as long as the evesdropper is prepared to snoop on a proportion of the signal that's less than the noise floor, he'll not get detected. Of course, he won't get much information either.

  16. Re:No April Fools articles this year. on New 20" iMac Screens Show 98% Fewer Colors · · Score: 1

    But the colour space _is_ 98% smaller. The colour space in both cases is _discrete_, not continuous.
    The bounds might be almost entirely identical, but no-one's claimed otherwise.

  17. Re:No April Fools articles this year. on New 20" iMac Screens Show 98% Fewer Colors · · Score: 1

    Bang to rights. That's the second time for the very same offence. Recidivists.

    I'd like to stress (even though you've clearly stated this yourself) that the above is specifically referring to the actual display unit, and not the graphics card or colour model supported by the GUI. So "they dither" (in time or space) is irrelevant - that's an OS/driver issue. The real issue is the final output device and nothing else.

  18. Re:The Real Motorola Split in the 90s on Will Motorola Rise From the Ashes? · · Score: 1

    That's nice to hear. I do like to think that even though it had a new name I worked for the 'real' motorola, and that the thing with the M logo is just some consumer electronics unit-shifter!

  19. Re:The Real Motorola Split in the 90s on Will Motorola Rise From the Ashes? · · Score: 5, Informative

    Moto split earlier this decade. Half of it (the semiconductor, comms stack, and automotive parts) became Freescale Semiconductor.

  20. Re:Experience it first hand on The Wrath of the Apple Tribe · · Score: 0, Troll

    Yup. I was leaving that as the little puzzle for those in the U.S. to work out. Of course, upon working it out, they'd reject the notion immediately, and go back to complaining how public transport just doesn't work in places as sparsely populated as the U.S.A. Lather rinse repeat... ;-)

  21. Re:Experience it first hand on The Wrath of the Apple Tribe · · Score: 1

    The population density of Finland is half that of the US, yet we've got great public transport. So it's not just the sparseness of the population that's important.

  22. Re:so what on GCC 4.3.0 Exposes a Kernel Bug · · Score: 1

    Your post needs to be made in all caps, it seems to have been overlooked. (Hmmm, I'll see if my troller account has mod points...)

    Not just assembly, of which there are at least 3 commonly used dialects; even a different C compiler such as icc or tcc. And of course. Then let's not forget that there are other high level languages entirely.

    The ignorance of some of the loudmouths on the kernel discussion forum is exemplified by this post by "khim" near the end of the page:
    """
    Yes, from formal POV kernel is wrong and GCC is right, but in reality you can fix either GCC or kernel - it does not matter which:
    """
    That's a completely blinkered attitude, 'khim' obviously is completely oblivious to the fact that there are any other languages apart from C and any other C compiler apart from gcc. The sensible people more closely involved with the kernel, such as HPA, have a diametrically opposite oppinion, fortunately.

  23. Re:It's not the average speed that matters on Firefox 3 May Be More Memory Efficient Than Either IE or Opera · · Score: 1

    Your 'fact' is false. Firefox doesn't know the difference between real RAM and virtual RAM, so when it grabs vast swathes of RAM for its cache on my poor outdated memory-starved machine, it does cause unwanted swapping. Sometimes when I use other applications (GNUS/emacs, a few ssh sessions in terminals, and running a few perl scripts) when I finally flip back to Firefox again, it can take longer for Firefox to redraw its window with the cached rendering than it would do to either re-fetch the page (if it were a GET), or to re-render the HTML from scratch.

  24. Re:the pirated version is better on Olympic Web Site Features Pirated Content · · Score: 1

    And runs on an older version of the flash plugin.

  25. Re:Not just a copy... on Olympic Web Site Features Pirated Content · · Score: 2, Funny

    I can't verify that because the chinese one works on flash 7 (which I do have installed), but the "original" runs only on flash 8 or above (which I don't have installed). So hoorah for the chinese for making more portable games, and ptooey to the original author who was unable to animate a few freaking sprites without using version 8 of the flash API.