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User: The+O+Rly+Factor

The+O+Rly+Factor's activity in the archive.

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Comments · 89

  1. Re:Legislate gift cards out of existence on Amazon Patents Gift Card Parental Controls · · Score: 1

    Here in the US some states have some of the only sane consumer protection legislation in existence solely in order to protect against nefarious gift card issuers. Most states require issued gift cards to be honored as if it were cash for all transactions regardless, and I think New Jersey or Pennsylvania or one of those states made it illegal to charge a service fee within the first two years since issuance.

  2. Anti-Rich People Rhetoric on White House Proposes "Wealthy Tax" · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    This whole "fuck rich people" movement is really starting to get on my nerves. Rich people are not the problem, it's all of the tax loopholes companies take advantage of that is the problem, why not do something about them?

    Oh wait, that's right. Tax loopholes and corporate tax law are far too complicated for the average American to understand, so they need a common enemy to crowd against...cue the rich person destroyin our 'conomy...somehow.

  3. Re:Sounds like a good place to work on Making Facebook Self Healing · · Score: 1

    The same way that people who get themselves pierced and tattooed up who then wonder why nobody will hire them as an investment banker. It's all about presentation: if your company looks like its being managed by a bunch of 15 year olds, then I'm just going to assume that it is being managed by a bunch of 15 year olds. But hey, stick it to the man, trying to put us down with his suits and business casual and looking presentable for clients and whatnot, right?

  4. Re:Sounds like a good place to work on Making Facebook Self Healing · · Score: 1

    Having a multibillion dollar company pretend they are still a Stanford startup is kind of like trying to pilot an oil tanker as if it were a 30 horsepower inflatable boat. Hence, you get situations like that godawful instant message...thing that takes up a quarter of your screen and disallows you to see contacts that are actually online.

    But HEY! At least our employees feel like they are empowered and important and we still get to have a fuseball table in the conference room, right? I truly cannot take a company like facebook seriously when I see tours of their facilities and their infrastructure engineers are walking around in volcom t-shirts and skateboard shoes.

  5. This isn't very helpful on Full Duplex Wireless Tech Could Double Bandwidth · · Score: 4, Insightful

    When AT&T, et. al. are in a position where they are the DeBeers of wireless bandwidth. I think instead of actually spending money to upgrade infrastructure, they would rather just continue to artificially limit the amount of available bandwidth so they can keep it grossly overvalued. Gotta keep those profits rolling in for the shareholders somehow.

  6. Re:Sad, sad, sad. on HP Spinning Off WebOS and Exiting Hardware Business · · Score: 1

    The day HP died was the day I read an article where the journalist asked HP's HP-UX team if the company was ever going to do anything new with VMS. The team's response was "What's VMS?"

    Rest in pieces, HP.

  7. Re:Philly Flash Mob != Flash Mob on Philly Answers Youth Flash Mobs With Curfew Enforcement · · Score: 1

    Maybe I wrote that in a way where people not familiar with the area would not see the racial overtones.

    In Philly, when you ask "Who is poor and lives in North Philadelphia?" you're only going to get one particular race as an answer.

  8. Philly Flash Mob != Flash Mob on Philly Answers Youth Flash Mobs With Curfew Enforcement · · Score: 5, Informative

    As a Philadelphian, I can vouch that a flash mob in Philly is not the same thing as a flash mob that you see on AT&T advertising campaigns. While a flash mob may make you think of a bunch of people dancing in unison to some obscure pop culture reference in a large public area, a Philadelphia flash mob is a band of nearly feral minority teenagers whose parent wants to get their drink on and expels them for the night from their section 8 houses in North Philadelphia. They then flood down in droves to the Center City business district and Old City/South Street area, where they attack people at random.

    I am sorry if that comes off as bitter and slightly racist. I was involved in one of these on South Street a few months ago...the fear you feel is absolutely indescribable when you realize that kids as young as 10 were raised in a way where they feel assaulting and robbing people at random is an acceptable Saturday night activity.

  9. Re:Interns? on Boeing Employees To Man CST-100 Crew Capsule · · Score: 1

    But just think about the valuable real-word integrated collaborative work experience they receive! Surely that should be worth more to these corporate cannon fodder^H^H^Huniversity students than any amount of money or time spent with loved ones, correct?

  10. $5000 per figure??? WTF? on NASA Sends Lego Figures to Jupiter · · Score: 1

    How precisely do you spend $5000 on an aluminum figure about an inch and a half in size?? I could turn out all three of those on a vertical mill in one afternoon with about $5 worth of aluminum.

  11. Re:Brute Force Attacks from IPs in China on Governments, IOC and UN Hit By Massive Cyber Attack · · Score: 2

    Like everyone else who has ever run any sort of public facing sever in the last 10 years, I also get a disproportionate number of scripted brute force attacks that come from China. From what I understand, it's almost considered a hobby over there. Mr. Joe Citizen works for big-state-sponsored-foreign-run-computer-company, and at the end of the day before he leaves he sets his desktop computer to nmap and brute force as many addresses as possible all night. What they do when they finally get one, well...I'm not really sure, never had one get through. 99.99% of the attacks are generic brute force attacks that use generic usernames that no sane sysadmin would ever allow on their system anyway (admin, ftp, phpmyadmin, faculty, staff, etc.), and most of the scripts they use are almost always run with their default configuration, so basic security precautions stop them cold.

  12. Re:Cancelled my Face Book account on Is Google+ a Cathedral Or a Bazaar? · · Score: 1

    He doesn't care, they're a drop in the bucket. Remember: Facebook users are products, not customers.

  13. Re:Why? on Volunteer Towns Sought For Nuclear Waste · · Score: 4, Funny

    Don't you know? Terrorists are super smart completely invincible secret agents that can escape any jail and break into any nuclear fuel processing facility in the world and take whatever they want and they can't be stopped by anything known to man. Therefore we can't recycle it otherwise we're putting America's children, or something...at risk. Also because Jesus.

  14. Re:Prima facie evidence? on Ask Slashdot: Dealing With the Business Software Alliance? · · Score: 1

    This is a civil case, where most of the time the defendant is assumed guilty and needs to prove themselves innocent. I can file a civil lawsuit saying "Harold Halloway stole my car, burned down my house, and raped my dog and I want $1,000,000,000 from him in restitution", and it is up to you to prove that you didn't do any of those things.

  15. Microsoft Backing Database Projects on Unified NoSQL Query Language Launched · · Score: 1

    Step 1: Structured query databases exist for four decades, show they are perfectly capable of scaling, load balancing, and anything else you want them to do.

    Step 2: Microsoft writes a structured query database, it can hardly do any of these.

    Step 3: "Rararara structured query sucks lets support some half-baked DB idea and as soon as there is a breakthrough buy it up."

    Step 4: ???

    Step 5: Profit!

  16. Re:Put the internet on the screen on What Happens After the Super-Hero Movie Bubble? · · Score: 2
  17. Had a choice between ISS and particle accelerator on Space Station To Be Deorbited After 2020 · · Score: 1

    Glad to see our money was put to such good use as a permanent base for scientific research for many generations to come, and totally was not a big fat trough of pork for contractors to chow down on. Then again, with costs that ballooned from $4 billion to $12 billion due to contractor greed from poor management and oversight, I guess the other choice was the same exact thing. ( For anyone who doesn't have a damn clue what I am talking about)

    Moral of the story: You just can't do science in the United States anymore, because knowledge for the better of humankind simply isn't profitable.

  18. Re:It's not money, or teachers unions, or parents on Gates: Not Much To Show For $5B Spent On Education · · Score: 1

    I'll agree with this. I remember being in high school and having a math teacher that was bad. I mean really bad, to the point where there were endless complaints pouring in to the school about how ineffective of a teacher this man was. The school responded by making him an assistant principal.

    I also remember a member of the school board who threw a whole lot of money into the election and got himself elected just solely so he could defund a project to construct light towers for the school's football field, because he was afraid that the potential for light pollution would cause the value of his property to drop.

  19. Re:Diaspora... where are you? on Facebook Is Most Hated Social Media Company · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Can we stop with the Diaspora nonsense already? It was vaporware pure and simple, and a bunch of really dumb investors got trolled out of a couple hundred thousand dollars. It wasn't even that nice, you needed a fuckton of gem dependencies just to get it to kinda sorta function, and it won't even run on Apache.

    It'll come out on the same day that Microsoft finally releases a good version of Microsoft Bob.

  20. Re:And Lemme Guess... on Police To Begin iPhone Iris Scans · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Because it seems like the equivalent of being booked, fingerprinted, and mugshot every time you get pulled over for a traffic violation. If you don't like the picture and the information on my ID, then go fuck yourself.

  21. And Lemme Guess... on Police To Begin iPhone Iris Scans · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Telling the cop that he's gonna need a warrant to use it on you will get you slapped with an obstruction of justice and resisting arrest charge, right? That's usually the crime given to those rouge renegades that dare try to use their rights.

  22. Re:No Such Agency on Judge Says You Can't Know If Google Spies For NSA · · Score: 2

    Those are some pretty contradicting words for someone whose sig says "Free Julian Assange."

    "He who is willing to sacrifice essential liberty for a little bit of temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety."
    -- Benjamin Franklin

  23. Re:It's infrastructure on The Cost Of Broadband In Every Rural Home · · Score: 1

    It's all about bandwidth and latency. Roads don't need to worry about it, they're piles of asphalt flattened to the dirt, the bandwidth and latency come from how much stuff you can put in your car and how fast you can drive over it. Same goes for mail and parcels.

    Electricity doesn't care about latency by the nature of how it works. It doesn't have to go from generating point all the way to consumer due to the nature of alternating current, so it arrives at precisely 60 Hz every single time.

    POTS doesn't really need much bandwidth to run, it only needs about 3 KHz to function perfectly.

    Now you want to send broadband data service out to the sticks, which requires exponentially higer bandwidths to transmit data correctly. This is where the real challenge lies, since you just simply can't send that thick of a data transit medium that far without incurring phenomenial expenses to keep the signal in good condition. To put it into perspective, the 3 KHz of POTS bandwidth frequencies that are truly reliable over long distances is good enough to modulate and send ~6 kilobytes of data per second, hence the common modem transit speed 56Kbps. (The additional 20 KHz used for DSL service distorts and fades and becomes unreliable after relatively short distances, if anyone who has ever lived far from the DSL office knows all too well)

  24. Hurray for some stable Linux left in this world on CentOS Linux 6.0 Released · · Score: 3

    Moved all of my machines that weren't already CentOS to CentOS from Fedora over the last two months. I used Fedora 15 for all of about ten minutes before I got tired of Fedora's attempt to pretend that they are the Ubuntu project.

  25. It's All About Appeasing the Clueless CTOs today on Standards Make Rapid Software Releases Workable · · Score: 1

    "Well we can go with Internets Explorer 9 or Mozzarella Foxfire 5 and 9 is a bigger number than 5 so therefore that means it must be better right?"

    Footnote: I actually have heard an executive refer to Firefox as "Mozzarella Foxfire"