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User: ttyRazor

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  1. Re:Beyond three dimensions on Quickies, Coast to Coast · · Score: 1

    That's not prophecy, that's Pavlov. Smacking into the tree simply reinforced the behavior of avoiding the car when you reach that point in the road, possibly in conjunction with subliminal cues like barely hearing the car as it backs out.

  2. Re:This could be on PCI Card Lets You Watch HDTV (And Save To Disk) · · Score: 1

    bah, it's late, please be merciful, grammar/spelling nazis.

  3. Re:This could be on PCI Card Lets You Watch HDTV (And Save To Disk) · · Score: 2

    Actually, they have a lot in common since they both use MPEG2 compression, so you're essentially getting the same level of quality that dvds offer. While broadcaast channels might be worth it, if permium channels mad hdtv broadcasts of full length movies, you'd essentially be getting free dvd quality movies in a nice unencrypted fair-use protected format.

  4. Re:Windows 2000 not all that great on Nautilus 0.5 PR2 Released · · Score: 1

    actually holding the "soft power" button down for ~5 seconds usually works. If it doesn't though, you're REALLY screwed. A hard power switch isn't bad though anyway.

  5. today's overkill is tomorrow's garbage on Debunking The Need For 200FPS · · Score: 1

    the argument for higher framerates isn't to actually get imperceltibly faster graphics, but to give room for the really slow scenes. if the lowest your framerate dips to is ~70 fps, then you will be getting a much more consistent experience than if everything drops down to ~15 fps every time the action heats up. It also gives room for the Carmacks of the world to do even more stuff in future titles.

  6. Re:Anti-Circumvention on DMCA Anti-Circumvention Provisions · · Score: 2

    God didn't come down from heaven and tell me how the laws of physics work, but that's not going to stop me from figuring them out myself.

  7. Re:The part that gets me... on DMCA Anti-Circumvention Provisions · · Score: 2

    People aren't necessarily asking for a free lunch, they just want to choose who they buy it from.

    Or better yet, plant a garden and grow your own damn food. Just because farmers won't be able to sell me their own veggies shouldn't stop me from growing it myself.

  8. Re:The part that gets me... on DMCA Anti-Circumvention Provisions · · Score: 2

    Holes are only as big as the thing you try and squeeze into them. Unfortunately, oening that hole all the way is a lot more difficult and expensive than walking into court and saying "this law desn't apply to me, right here it says my gizmo's exempt" and going home that same day. The MPAA will say until the end of time that it is effective and will submit as many glossy ads and pamphlets saying it is for evidence, until someone runs out of money and shrivels up (most likely you) or the judge says "fuck it, he's right, your wrong, now get out of my court"

  9. Re:Hello this was on Kernel Traffic a long time ag on Patch To Allow Linux To Use Defective DIMMs · · Score: 2

    This is news to ME, and I'm glad it was here to hear it. Sites like /. are meant to bring attention to a wide range of topics, while others aim to provide prompt coverage of narrower topics. Sure, it's annoying to see a story about something you already heard elsewhere a while ago, but it's important for those that missed it the first time.

  10. Re:Oh god. on 'Hacking' To Be Declared Illegal · · Score: 2

    But if a safe cracker gets his own safe and figures out the internals himself, hiding the diagram would be a useless gesture. The only solution is to design the safe in a way that even when it is obvious how it works, it would still be impossible or impractically difficult to open. Computer security is even riskier since the very difficult tasks can be reduced to a stupid little script (hence script kiddies), so therefore computer security needs to be in the "impossible" category.

    Only the system itself can tell you that its secure, and not the back of the box, and the only way to find out is to take it apart.

  11. Great minds must think alike on Walking Around In Spherical VR · · Score: 1

    damn, a friend of mine and I just thought of maing something like this two weeks ago! I hope they didn't patent it...

  12. Re:Expand your world view of human suffering on Why Does The Universe Exist? · · Score: 1

    Maybe if things were balanced so that the bright shiny metals were somewhat more abundant on Earth, there'd be fewer excuses to screw each other over for 'em. Of course, I'm sure we'd find something else to fight over ;)

  13. Re:Of course... on Why Does The Universe Exist? · · Score: 2

    It's not that only we couldn't exist if these conditions were any different, but that the entire universe couldn't support anything more complex than a dim glow if a physical constant was off by the slightest bit. Everything would be either a uniformly diffuse blob or a crunched up ball of chaotic nonsense. The latter might have room for something "living", but the other is essentially inert, and without the ability for matter to clump together and form anything nearly complex enough to be even called dust, let alone a living conciusness. It's on this razor-thin edge that our existance is balanced, and although there might be other arrangements of values that can support something more complex than a cloud of hydrogen, they are probably no more likely to occur than our own.

  14. Re:The electoral college on Politics, Assassination, and Debates · · Score: 2

    If I were in their place today I still wouldn't trust them. By going for a pure majority, the candidates only have to pander to the majority of voters who share similar backgrounds. With an electoral college, they have to address regions with heterogeneous opinions and concerns. They could ignore all minorities in their policies and only address the concerns of the %51 of the population that matters, leaving the bottom %49 with the short end of the stick.

  15. Re:Whoa... on Congressional Panel Says No To Filters · · Score: 2

    That would all be fine if filters actually worked as advertised, but they do not, throwing out all that stuff mentioned above and more. Can a filter tell the difference between porn and just talking about porn? Could it tell that this entire thread was simply discussing porn and not porn itself? Watch the movie Boogie Nights; it's set in the environment of porn films, but itself is not porn (at last by my standards), and in fact shows just what can be wrong with porn and why it's considered harmful in the first place. The movie cannot do that unless it actually shows the subject matter it's dealing with in unfiltered detail. Software cannot tell the difference, and if it could you'd also be able to discuss the merits of Rennaisance art with it.

  16. Re:It's better than that on Cybercrime Treaty Fight Begins · · Score: 4

    Just look at the DeCSS case to see an example of how "primary use" can be twisted to mean just about anything. Even in the face of clear intent by a large group of users to use it non-infringingly, the remote possibility of abuse was enough to ignore the fair use exemptions.

    Software is a tool, no different than anything that you'd find in a hardware store. Although imaginative individuals can think of any number of ways to bash, stab, and slice someone with anything you could find at Home Depot, that's no reason to outlaw or restrict them.

  17. Re:It would make sniffers illegal! on Cybercrime Treaty Fight Begins · · Score: 3

    This is effectively taking the tools to protect ourselves from illegal or otherwise undesired activity and placing it in the hands of law enforcement via Carnivore. Of course they could be used to perpetrate "crimes", but they can just as easily be directed to preventing them. Charlton Heston doesn't sound so crazy any more...

  18. Re:Remember - the richest 10% pay most of the taxe on A Minor Political Screed · · Score: 2

    All money was someone's taxed income at one time or another. Consider this; someone who inherited enough money to live off of it without working is one less person with taxable income. That money gets taken out of taxable circulation, potentially for hundreds of years. So the only taxable money is the stuff that is trading hands in the middle and lower class segments, and the income that gets added to the pile for the upper class. Aslong as they make more money than they spend, that money will stay within the family prepetually, and any taxes on them will only be on the part that's added to the large amount of wealth they already have. Without inheritance tax, money slowly trickles out of the taxable domain and into a pool that cannot be taxed.

  19. Re:Reading too much into it, as usual on Obfuscated Circuitry? · · Score: 2

    It doesn't make it any less insulting, and it is insinuating to the target audience that they are somehow entitled to not be the victim of this sort of "theft". He might as well call people who overclock hardware child molestors.

  20. Is some anonymous coward really that credible? on Anonymity · · Score: 4

    All this boils down to a simple bit of advise that people seem to forget every time they look at a computer: "don't believe everything you read". The flood of lawsuits like this all work under the assumption that anything joe-schmoe AOL user says is as authoritative as if Alan Greenspan himself decreed that so-and-so company "sucks ass". Guess what lawyers, people have these conversations privately all the time, and not all of them are professional stock analysts. The reason why you have the option to sue in the first place is because someone with credibility might say something false against you and others might actually believe it in a way that measurably hurts your reputation and your ability to do whatever you do.

  21. Re:Two Words: on Sony/Transmeta Video Laptop · · Score: 1

    Last I heard NeoMagic got out of the laptop video business, so I would imagine that these newer ones will have something else. I'm pretty sure the specs for the transmeta picturebook claimed to have an ATI rage mobility or something.

  22. Nothing to worry about on SDMI *NOT* Cracked!? · · Score: 2

    Even if it wasn't cracked yet, these people seem to be in too much denial to admit it's even possible, let alone inevitable, and if they "manage" hard enough, they can make their echnology do anything they want, including dividing by zero and taking the square root of negative numbers. The results, of course, would be nonexistant and imaginary.

  23. Re:eloquent, informative, WTG Shawn! But... on Shawn Fanning's Account Of Napster · · Score: 1

    All that does is introduce a middle man where there doesn't need to be any, whose only job is to take a cut of the money your music makes in exchange for extorting money out of consumers for something that doesn't cost anything to distribute. That's like poisoning the world's drinking water so bottled water companies can get a monopoly on drinkable water, and then installing credit card activated sinks that charge 50 times what your normal water bill woudld be in every home once they buy the water utilities and put in their own filters. We wouldn't need to pay them anything if the water wasn't poisoned in the first place

  24. Re:wow on Shawn Fanning's Account Of Napster · · Score: 2

    Correction, it costs the record industry hundreds of millions of dollars to distribute and promote their product. The Internet has reduced the cost of distribution to mere bandwidth and storage, and Napster has improved even that by utilizing users' own bandwidth and storage that would otherwise go idle, and included a forum for word-of-mouth promotion to boot.

    Believing that artistic expression would somehow disappear if people didn't get paid is preposterous; Art was around long before anyone got paid for making it. If anything, cutting off the profits of obnoxious industry engineered pop stars will make room for true artists who are dedicated enough to make a living form what they do by making good music that people will pay for whether its free or not.

    The cost of distributing music and media in general got a whole lot cheaper. Railroads were the evil corporations of a century before because they controlled the only means to move goods over long distances. With the advent of the automobile, people could move their own goods without paying the robber barons, and the railroads went to the brink of ruin.

  25. So... on An Open Letter From Bob Young · · Score: 1

    ...Redhat's better than Microsoft because we can tell them exactly what's wrong with their software? It would help if that actually made a difference, since nothing seems to stop them from releasing flakey x.0 distros.