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User: mikeplokta

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Comments · 166

  1. It Worked! on Snoozing Pilot Mistakes Venus For Aircraft; Panic, Injuries Ensue · · Score: 3, Funny

    The good news is that the evasive action was successful, and the plane did not hit Venus.

  2. Public Data on Disaster Strikes Norwegian Government Web Portal · · Score: 1

    All Norwegian tax returns are published publicly on the Internet, so Kenneth's information was already available to anyone who cared to check it. There's been no privacy violation here that I can see.

  3. Opt-in is not an option on Google To Allow Location Service Opt-out · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There's no point saying "It should be opt-in", because it can't possibly work on an opt-in basis. There's no way to get a sufficient number of opted-in wireless access points. The available options are "Opt-out is OK" or "The service shouldn't exist".

  4. iPhone/iPod Touch on It's 2010; What's the Best E-Reader? · · Score: 1

    If you want it to act as a phone as well, the best eReader is the iPhone. If you don't, it's the iPod touch.

    Everything sold as an eReader has two fatal flaws. First, they're all way too big, in order to have a page size big enough that they can pretend they're like paper books. An eReader should fit in a shirt pocket.

    Second, e-Ink displays are horrible. They're grey-on-grey text, and the half second flash and delay on page turning is terribly distracting. LCD is the only way to go at present.

    (Yes, I actually do read on my iPhone; I've read over thirty books on it so far this year.)

  5. Re:Increases Fraud on Why the IRS Should Automatically Fill In Returns With What It Knows · · Score: 1

    How, exactly, do you propose to build an infrastructure that will ensure that transactions taking place outside US jurisdiction (but taxable within the US) are reported to the US government?

  6. Increases Fraud on Why the IRS Should Automatically Fill In Returns With What It Knows · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If the IRS pre-fills what the government knows about on the form, then that tells you what the government doesn't know about, and thus can safely be omitted. If you get a blank form, there's always the risk that the government knows about your offshore account and will prosecute you for omitting it.

  7. Re:Consumer? Pah. on Regulator Blocks BBC DRM Plans · · Score: 1

    They can no longer have different release dates in different places; once content is released somewhere, it's released everywhere.

  8. Re:Consumer? Pah. on Regulator Blocks BBC DRM Plans · · Score: 1

    Here's a response that the film and TV industries have never yet tried; how about letting people pay them money for legal downloads without DRM on the day of release? It's impossible to stop people downloading content, so you'd think they could at least experiment with letting people pay them for it rather than giving consumers who want unencumbered and timely content no choice but to pirate.

  9. Re:Always the same story on eBay Denies New Design Is Broken, Blames Users · · Score: 4, Informative

    PayPal most certainly is a bank. In Europe. If you want entities that hold your money to be regulated as banks in the US as well, then tell your Congressman, not Slashdot.

  10. Re:What I don't get... on Examining Chrome's Source Code · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Cross-platform widget sets are always dreadful. An application developed using cross-platform widgets will, at best, work well on one platform, and more usually on no platforms. OS X and Windows have different UI philosophies, and an OS X application needs a different UI from a Windows application.

  11. Names are not Identities on How to Fight Name Scraping Scammers? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The US in general seems to have a big problem with mistaking names for identities, hence "no-fly lists" and other such idiocies. The solution here is to spread the meme that a name is not an identity, and you should make no assumptions if you see someone's name in an unfamiliar context.

  12. Too Vulnerable on Best Home Network NAS · · Score: 1

    The last thing you want for backup is a home-based anything. If your backups are at your home, a single fire or theft can destroy the original and the backup at the same time. Don't buy new hardware, buy an offsite backup service of some kind -- I use Jungledisk.

  13. Re:How is this possible? on Apple's OS X Leopard In Depth · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Two main factors here.

    First, Microsoft is fanatical about backwards compatibility, and Vista has to continue to support every crufty little hack that worked on Windows 3.0 fifteen years ago. Apple will throw you overboard after five years or so -- for example, Classic mode has been removed completely from Leopard and so Mac programs from before the OS X era will no longer run on Macs.

    Second, Apple controls the hardware, and so has to do vastly less programming of device drivers for every motherboard, graphics card, disk controller, etc. that has ever existed. They really just have to worry about third-party USB devices.

  14. Re:Without Ethics, You Have Nothing. on United Makes Plans to Drop 'Baggage Neutrality' · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Actually, any listed company has only one primary responsibility, which is investor return. Pursuing job security or customer service where those conflict with investor return is not only unethical, it's illegal. Of course, good customer service generally leads to a better investor return.

  15. Project Management on Making Your Code OSS-Appealing? · · Score: 1

    It's about 1% about how good the code is and 99% about how good you are as a distributed project manager, so I'd stop worrying about the code and start working on your project management skills. If you don't want or plan to be a project manager, then your code is going nowhere if and when you release it, no matter how good and useful it may be.

  16. UK Too on iPhone Business Model Hits a Snag in France · · Score: 1

    If this is true, it's going to scupper the UK deal as well. You don't have to provide the phone unlocked in the UK, but you do have to unlock it for the customer for no charge at the end of the contract -- which may be well before the end of the original contract period if, for example, charges go up during the contract.

  17. Re:The EC will love the iPhone on Does the UK iPhone Plan Add Up? · · Score: 2, Informative

    But they are required to unlock the phone for no charge at the end of the contract (which may be well before the end of the initial contract period if the terms & conditions are changed to the user's detriment partway through). So they're going to have to provide an official mechanism for unlocking iPhones.

  18. Re:Let's just hope that.. on Software Patent Debate Over in Europe For Now? · · Score: 1

    No one has patented the letter i or a number. To the extent that they are protected by IP law, the letter i is trademarked and the AACS key is a trade secret -- neither is or could be patented, even in the US.

  19. Re:NOT a matter transporter on Quantum Dots Might Be Key For Teleportation · · Score: 1

    In order to teleport an object, you don't need to actually transmit its matter, as long as you have some matter at the destination that you can use. All you need is to teleport the information about the quantum states of the matter so that the matter you already have at the destination can be put into the exact same state as the matter at the source.

  20. Implicit Licence? on Students Sue Anti-Plagiarism Service · · Score: 1

    Their case is actually weaker because they knew what was going to happen -- one could presumably argue that they implicitly licensed their work to be stored and used for that purpose, in the same way as you implicitly license it to be cached by Google if you put it on a website.

  21. Don't Do This In The UK on Do You Allow Webmail Use on Your Network? · · Score: 1

    In the UK, it has been established that employees have the right to privacy in their personal phone calls and emails while at work. So if you don't give employees a private way to send and receive personal email that doesn't use their corporate email account, you can not access their corporate mailbox for any purpose, even if they leave the company or die.

  22. It Can Only Hurt The Ad Sites on Yahoo Mail Forcing Ads Through Adblock? · · Score: 1

    If a significant number of sites with ads start checking to see if you've downloaded the ad, then the ad blockers will simply be changed to download the ad but not display it. So they'll lose bandwidth without actually gaining anything (well, they might gain if they're paid per ad displayed, but presumably the rates paid per ad will eventually drop a bit to match).

  23. No Point on Is DRM Intrinsically Distasteful? · · Score: 1

    It's a pointless question, because it's a counterfactual. There can never be a DRM system that allows legal use but not illegal use, at least until we have human-equivalent artificial intelligence, because the boundary between legal and illegal can only be determined by human beings, not an algorithm. In fact, it can sometimes only be determined after several years of legal proceedings, so even a human-level AI couldn't do the job.

  24. Re:Argh!!! on Professor Comes Up With a Way to Divide by Zero · · Score: 1

    Actually, you don't know what a field is, in the algebraic sense. These "transreal numbers" do not constitute a field, because by definition nullity and +/-infinity do not have additive or multiplicative inverses.

  25. Re:In My Opinion This is Good for Everyone on Democrats Take House, Senate Undecided · · Score: 1

    The "fourth estate" is not related to the three branches of the US goverment. The first three estates are the nobility, the clergy and the commoners.