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User: SuricouRaven

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  1. Re:The real reason the desktop pc is on the declin on Intel Leaving Desktop Motherboard Business · · Score: 1

    Public need, rather. Isn't it annoying when you mistype one word and it completly reverses the meaning?

  2. Re:The real reason the desktop pc is on the declin on Intel Leaving Desktop Motherboard Business · · Score: 1

    Companies never existed to meet a private need. That is the foundation of a free market society: To achieve a situation in which parties act only in their own best interests, but in doing so incidentially provide a benefit to wider society.

  3. Re:Prosecute, Prosecute, Prosecute on Andrew Auernheimer Case Uncomfortably Similar To Aaron Swartz Case · · Score: 1

    While most americans are familiar with the first and second amendments, they seem to have wildly differing ideas of what the words actually mean.

  4. Re:Prosecute, Prosecute, Prosecute on Andrew Auernheimer Case Uncomfortably Similar To Aaron Swartz Case · · Score: 1

    That depends on the state, and even then the sentence for a crime on paper often differs greatly from the time actually served.

  5. Re:I will still use my desktop computer on Intel Leaving Desktop Motherboard Business · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There will be a need for high-power professional and enthusiast machines for a long time. You'll still be able to get them - but as they become a niche product and volume goes down, there may be a corresponding rise in price.

  6. Re:OK, 35 years, then... on MIT Warned of a JSTOR Death Sentence Due To Swartz · · Score: 1

    Except for a slight legal technicality. The TOS is what gives the user (him) permission to access a computer system. Break the TOS, and that access is immediately recinded. Any further use of the service is thus unauthorised access to a computer system, and legally no different from hacking into a private server and downloading confidential documents. That's why the prosecutors were able to threaten a 35-year jail sentence and huge fine.

  7. Re:OK, 35 years, then... on MIT Warned of a JSTOR Death Sentence Due To Swartz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You forgot the bit that comes before the trial, where the prosecutor makes terrifying threats in an effort to intimidate the suspect into a guilty plea in the hope of leniency, regardless of actual guilt or likely outcome if it had gone to trial.

  8. Re:Tinfoil Hats? on India Bars ZTE, Huawei, Others From Sensitive Government Projects · · Score: 2

    It's China. As they are officially (If increasingly less so in practice) a communist country, they generally see much less seperation between the state and industry than we expect in the west. Many large companies are openly state-owned (ZTE), and even private companies (Huawei) have a very close relationship with the government, to the point that government officials sit on the board of directors. This works both ways: Just as the companies do the government's bidding, so the government works to tilt the economic playing field in their favor. See the restriction on rare-earth exports for an example.

  9. Re:This HAS to be made to have a DOWNSIDE on Student Expelled From Montreal College For Finding "Sloppy Coding" · · Score: 1

    Everyone who isn't a lawyer is hopelessly naive when it comes to the law. That's why the standard advice for anyone in legal trouble is to say nothing, do nothing, and demand a lawyer. It's also why a standard approach for a party in a dubious legal position is to try to intimidate their opponent into not asking for one by making offers of leniency that must be accepted on the spot, and warning of terrible things that will happen if the offer is rejected.

  10. Re:Old technology was awesome on Survey Suggests P2P Users Buy More Music · · Score: 1

    You're wrong, but if you want to indulge your wrongness there is a solution for your vinyl maintainance problem. You could get a laser turntable. No needle, and thus no wear on the record at all. They do cost a fortune though.

  11. Re:Idiot. on Student Expelled From Montreal College For Finding "Sloppy Coding" · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You do assume that this is going to be fought fairly. The legal system is a game of adversaries - and the objective of the college administration was not to fight a fair legal battle, but to win at all costs. If I were a bastard in their place, I'd see an obvious way to prevent him doing that: "You want a lawyer? Go ahead. But the moment you step out of this office, I'm calling the police. Either sign the NDA right now, I'll make sure you really do need that lawyer."

    It's intimidation, of course. But most of the time I'd expect it to work. What's the worst that could happen? A college student finding enough money to file a civil suit against the college, that could take years to complete and cost more than he'll earn in a decade? No, most people would recognise that they are being strong-armed, but also that they are being strong-armed by someone with both the willingness and ability to utterly screw up their life if they don't comply... regardless of the fine points of contract law.

  12. Re:A European problem? on How Much Beef Is In Your Burger? · · Score: 1

    I've been having a hard time just finding a piece of pig with the skin still on around here. I need a human analog for an experiment. Someone wishes to know what would happen were a person to touch the four-kilovolt capacitor bank I co-own.

  13. Re:Well that proves it on BEST Study Finds Temperature Changes Explained by GHG Emissions and Volcanoes · · Score: 0

    Replied to the wrong post?

  14. Re:The real issue on How Much Beef Is In Your Burger? · · Score: 3, Funny

    The best cuts are sold as cuts, because they are worth more per kilo than ground beef. Of the remainder of the cow, the grindables get turned into ground beef for burgers and the like. The non-grindables are processed into other products, mostly additives.

  15. Re:This should shock nobody on How Much Beef Is In Your Burger? · · Score: 1

    The rail speed record was once held by a service to Hamberg. It was also called the Hamberger.

  16. Re:A European problem? on How Much Beef Is In Your Burger? · · Score: 1

    Blame urbanisation. People who grow up in cities never get a good look at any animal other than pets - even the local vermin usually stay out of sight. They never witness predation first-hand. They never have to look at an animal and know it is destined for the dinner plate. Meat arrives from outside in unidentifiable shapes, safely divorced from the production process. It results in a very emphathetic relationship with animals, something most rural dwellers would consider soft and naïve.

  17. Re:54% believe angels are real. on Survey Suggests P2P Users Buy More Music · · Score: 1

    The really silly thing is that angels as most people see them aren't actually in the bible. The text does describe many denizens of heaven, including some usually referred to as angels, but none of the descriptions are anything like the traditional image of the man in white robes with a pair of wings and a halo. That is a figure from pagan mythology - like so much, early Christian artists took inspiration from what came before and adapted it into their own works.

  18. Re:Old technology was awesome on Survey Suggests P2P Users Buy More Music · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Converting to digital at CD standard loses nothing you can hear. The frequency range covers all of human hearing, and the quantitisation noise is too small to notice on a properly normalised track. What you hear isn't anything inherent to the CD medium: It's just that the preferred style of mixing has changed in the intervening years, something commonly referred to as the 'loudness wars,' as labels seek to make the music stand out more in a public setting by increasing the average volume at the expense of dynamic range.

    With MP3s, you get as good as you allocate bits for. 64kbit music is going to sound like rubbish, but you'd need superhuman hearing to notice anything changed at 384kbit. Better, newer codecs can easily match that quality at a lower bitrate - MP3 is quite dated now, technologically. It achieved such dominance while it was the best around that when better codecs came along it was too entrenched to displace.

  19. Re:Justice system reform on Edward Tufte's Defense of Aaron Swartz and the "Marvelously Different" · · Score: 2

    Libertarianism in general seeks to abolish most laws, leaving in place only those relating to the protection of property and life. If your computers are hacked, it's your own fault for not having good enough security. Sounds almost good, except that they apply this everywhere. Your house burn down? That's your own fault for not paying the local private fire service to send the fire engine around to put it out. Rival business flooding your phone lines with fake calls, posting advertisments in your name promising ridiculous prices and DDoSing your website? Your fault for not paying enough for hosting, but you're free to do the same back. Go to a restraunt and got food poisoning because the chef lets his precious dogs run loose in the kitchen? That's your own fault too for not inspecting it personally, but don't worry - the invisible hand of the market will close the business down, once word gets around.

    As with so many political ideologies, it's the core of a potentially good idea - that the role of government has grown excessive, expensive and invasive, and needs to be tamed - but taken to a ridiculous extreme.

  20. Who hasn't? on Edward Tufte's Defense of Aaron Swartz and the "Marvelously Different" · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm guessing every half-decent engineer working in computing has some of this in their past. It's part of the process of how someone becomes an engineer - exploring, testing limits, finding way to use things in ways they weren't intended to be used. I know I did, I know my coworkers did. I work in education, and we've caught a student there trying to hack our network. Give him another ten years, and he'll be the admin trying to keep out the next generation of engineers-to-be. I'm not even an engineer: I'm a lowly technician.

  21. Re:back to "how secure can it be if it's deduped" on Kim Dotcom's 'Mega' Storage Site Arrives · · Score: 1

    Making a wild guess, they might be keeping the hash of the unencrypted file. That way if someone else tries to upload the same file they can still detect it, and just supply a link to the already-encrypted file.

  22. Re:Honeypot on Kim Dotcom's 'Mega' Storage Site Arrives · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The site can't be monitored directly. That's the whole point. I'm sure they will be watching, but not directly. Were I in their place, I'd be looking for sites that link to files uploaded to Mega. A few careful google queries, a custom crawler, even entering into a few sneaky agreements with ISPs to do DPI and see where people are going. The idea not being to catch all the pirates, but to catch all the highly-visible pirates and the communities they form around. So only private, invite-only forums can survive.

  23. Re:Wow, I thought we (the US) was the only standou on Turkey's Science Research Council Stops Publication of Evolution Books · · Score: 1

    I said a slim chance. I know creationists well: Their general approach to legal issues varies, but they generally consider the notion of a secular government to be nothing but liberal revisionism of the constitution - a view they support by pointing out that in the days of the founders when the constitution was written, Christianity did indeed permeate every aspect of public life including government. Thus to them the Dover decision is nothing but a perversion of the constitution by revisionists and activist judges,and it is their duty to either ignore it, overturn it or work around it. Remember that very close to all creationists also believe that public schools should host a daily Christian school prayer: They outright reject the notion that church and state were to be seperate, and believe that the provision in the first amendment was actually intended only to prohibit the government from establishing any single denomination of Christianity as the state religion, not to prevent the government from promoting Christianity in a general sense.

  24. Re:Wow, I thought we (the US) was the only standou on Turkey's Science Research Council Stops Publication of Evolution Books · · Score: 1

    Most of them now have switched to a legally safe deny-the-religion form of creationism for public school. Teach that the earth was formed six thousand years ago, but don't ask how. Teach that life could not have occurred naturally, but don't suggest a theory. All the basics of creationism but with a God-shaped gap the students are left to fill in themselves so it has at least a slim chance of getting past the lawyers and inevitable day in court.

  25. Re:alpha test? on TSA Terminates Its Contract With Maker of Full-Body Scanner · · Score: 5, Funny

    Because if you respect people's privacy and safety, the terrorists win.