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User: bucky0

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  1. Re:Fair enough on China Calls For Even Firmer Internet Control · · Score: 1

    Reminds me of a fun story:

    A while ago, I a friend of mine's grandmother (who grew up in china and moved here during the deng xiaopeng (sp?) era) was cleaning out her place and came across her little red book from forever ago. She got really mad and wanted to throw it away, so naturally we were curious why/ To her, Mao was led astray by the gang of four and all the writings in there weren't actually Mao's but was from the GoF trying to corrupt the state. She really sincerely believed it, which from what I've heard is the view of most people from that era.

  2. Re:Fair enough on China Calls For Even Firmer Internet Control · · Score: 1

    But they're not choosing! I had a conversation related to this about countries implementing sharia law. If a country wants to implement sharia, they can knock themselves out, I have no big deal as long as the whole country gets a choice about it. If people want to implement a system of government where why have a cadre of hand-picked leaders working without accountability to its people to try and preserve peace after several hundreds (thousands?) of years of strife, then that's their choice.

    The problem ends up that usually the people who get to make the choices aren't the ones who end up with the short end of the stick. Slaveowners in the south probably loved the system they had going on, but the people who didn't like it didn't get a say in the matter.

  3. Re:Does it now? on OS X Lion Ships With Faulty NVidia Drivers · · Score: 0

    You probably have it already configured, but I used XAMPP to install the apache/php/mysql stack. I found it when I was wanting to get that installed for some local testing, and it was one of the easiest things I've done.

  4. Maybe this is a bad idea. on Borderlands 2 Announced · · Score: 1

    I'm still waiting for an ending for the previous game. Once I beat it, I called a friend complaining that my game glitched, and I didn't get an ending. They explained, "NOPE, THAT WAS IT"

  5. Re:Hardcore mode please on Borderlands 2 Announced · · Score: 1

    I always had this idea (but never the time or the skills) for a survival-horror game that behaved like nethack. Once you die, that's it. I feel like that'd make the game pretty intense.

  6. Re:Drop everything on China Mandates Wi-Fi Hotspot Traffic Monitoring · · Score: 1

    Going along with that, I seem to remember an article saying that china spends more on internal security than its military. As more people become ... informed (? not sure of the right word) of the possibilities for political freedoms others enjoy, they're going to have to up that if they want to maintain an iron grip. That can't be too sustainable in the long-run. There's a LOT of people to suppress.

  7. Re:Four boxes on China Mandates Wi-Fi Hotspot Traffic Monitoring · · Score: 1

    not sure if trolling, but despite the conflict over who actually "owns" taiwan, the PRC doesn't have any control over its behavior...

  8. Re:This just proves on Court Filing On How 2004 Ohio Election Hacked · · Score: 1

    Sorry, I wasn't really articulate. I wasn't trying to say that people collecting SS or medicare/medicaid were freeloaders. I was just frustrated at the number of people who saw the 80 million checks/month quote, then conflated it to mean that there was 80 million people getting money from the government every month, and they're obviously all idiots and we should cut all that spending, etc etc..

  9. Re:This just proves on Court Filing On How 2004 Ohio Election Hacked · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Not to comment at all on the rest of it (I've got a paper to write!) but, I thought it was strange people jumped on that number and conflated it to mean that our government is supporting 80 million freeloaders (not saying you specifically, but if you look at the rabid articles about it on the internet, that's the impression I get)

    a) There's no comparison made to other countries, so that's just an arbitrary measurement in arbitrary units (If I told you the higgs boson was 114 GeV, and didn't give you any sense of scale, would you think that was big or small?)

    b) When you look at the breakdown, 55 million of those checks come from only social security. Are we now arguing that people who collect SS are freeloaders?

    c) Of the remaining 35 million checks, 10 million checks comes from tax refunds (they obviously cluster around april 15th, but when you amortize it, it's 10 million/month)

    d) We're down to 25 million checks then, and pay for veterans benefits (4.1 mil), retirements (2.6 mil), and contractors (1.4 mil) out of that leaving us with ~16.9 million or so checks.

    The breakdown I found has more categories, but I picked off all the things that would be pretty non-contentious (I didn't include medicare or medicade, which seems to be a lot of people's big target these things). It's not like our government is a freewheeling money-printing machine like people keep making it out to be

  10. Re:Don't forget it's also the video feed on First Thunderbolt Peripherals Arrive To Market · · Score: 2

    Well, also, the video channel is separate from the data channel (there's 20gbit/sec aggregate bandwidth)

  11. Re:If you think $50 for the Apple cable is bad... on First Thunderbolt Peripherals Arrive To Market · · Score: 4, Informative

    what matters is that it is special, Apple-born and exlcusive therefore carrying high profit margin.

    Intel made it and owns the rights to it, apple just helped develop it. It's hardly "apple-born"

  12. Re:or maybe on First Thunderbolt Peripherals Arrive To Market · · Score: 1

    You do realize that this was technology developed by intel, right? Also, there's a LOT more to thunderbolt than just the physical layer that makes it sexy.

  13. Re:5.0 is much better on Skype Forcing Mac Users To Upgrade Client · · Score: 1

    This is literally as small as I can make the window horizontally and vertically.

    screenshot

    There's the "contacts monitor", but it's always on top, and is still really wide (I can't see where to make it remove the profile pictures)

  14. Re:No, they won't. on Skype Forcing Mac Users To Upgrade Client · · Score: 1

    fair enough :)

  15. Re:No, they won't. on Skype Forcing Mac Users To Upgrade Client · · Score: 1

    The plural of "anecdote" isn't "data". Pretty much my entire group of friends has moved from every other network to almost gchat exclusively.

    Without some actual numbers, we're just guessing.

  16. Not for me on Skype Forcing Mac Users To Upgrade Client · · Score: 4, Informative

    I quit, restarted and even did check for updates. It didn't force me to do upgrade. *shrug*

  17. Re:5.0 is much better on Skype Forcing Mac Users To Upgrade Client · · Score: 1

    Have you seen the interface? No thanks, I'll stay with 2.8.x

  18. Re:P = NP? on Forty Years of P=NP? · · Score: 1

    Also, in the general case, NLP is hard, but for subsets of the language, with specific vocabulary and grammatical constructs aren't (they're still not trivial, but it's not the same level of difficulty of general NLP).

    You just have a language barrier. Being on both sides of the divide (I'm a physicist who started out with, and am still good at CS), there's a number of problems that physicists (or in your case, engineers) have that would map well to things programmers/CS types would know how to solve, but nobody knows how to map the problems to the solutions right.

  19. Re:Like Java, without the JVM on Google x86 Native Browser Client Maybe Not So Crazy After All · · Score: 1

    Read the paper, but to ruin it for you, the code is compiled in a way that the client can verify quickly and accurately the safety of the code. Bad binaries can be detected on load by the client.

  20. Re:Crazy smart ISA portability on Google x86 Native Browser Client Maybe Not So Crazy After All · · Score: 1

    I honestly think you should read up on what they're doing. I had the same questions, read their pages and it makes 9x more sense

  21. Re:Light on details on Google x86 Native Browser Client Maybe Not So Crazy After All · · Score: 1

    I read another article, and it's actually pretty slick, I'll quote it so I don't screw it up:

      Native Client sets up x86 segments to restrict the memory range that the sandboxed code can access. It uses a code verifier to prevent use of unsafe instructions such as instructions that perform system calls. In order to prevent the code from jumping to an unsafe instruction hidden in the middle of a safe instruction, Native Client requires that all indirect jumps be jumps to the start of 32-byte-aligned blocks, and instructions are not allowed to straddle these blocks.

  22. Re:Where are the routers for IPV6? does comcast ma on Comcast Activates IPv6 Trial Users · · Score: 1

    "data" isn't the plural of "anecdote", but where I am in the chicago area, that isn't an issue. Before my roommate and I got our router (both of us thought the other was bringing one, then we had to order one off the internet), we swapped out without an issue.

  23. Re:Einstein figured out what gravity was. on Italian Scientists Demonstrate Cold Fusion? · · Score: 1

    Umm.

    Quantum physics works, and general relativity works (both are experimentally verifiable to all kinds of accuracy).

    The problem is you can't write a theory of one in terms of another.

  24. Re:No sympathy for Sony on PS3 Root Key Found · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's a good explanation except for the fact that there's a minimum OS version required to play online. One USED to be able to run otherOS and play online, and after a certain cutoff date, you had to choose to lose one or the other. That's where (some of) the contention comes from.

  25. Re:Can't blame him on MS Asks Google To Delay Fuzzer Tool · · Score: 1

    You don't have somewhere you can SSH tunnel or VPN to? Maybe your home machine?