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User: Venotar

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Comments · 113

  1. Should I? Wrong question: on Mark Zuckerberg Tapes Over His Webcam. Should You? (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    I'd prefer to know: how long before laptop oem's include a built in twist opening webcam lens cover, like some of the Cisco IP Phone's use (thinking of the CP-8865)

  2. It's simpler than that, really: on Facebook Is Wrong, Text Is Deathless (kottke.org) · · Score: 1

    "The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video," Mendelsohn said. "It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information."

    Video is a waste of time. You can't effectively skim video, like you can with text. If the "author" can't spend the time to transcribe their idea, why should I waste MY time listening to their verbal tics to get to THEIR point?

  3. Re:An honorable way to die on Google Executive Dan Fredinburg Among Victims of Everest Avalanche · · Score: 1

    Nice jihad, asshole

    Don't you mean: "Nice veS quv", asshole?

  4. Re:Why? on Ask Slashdot: Dealing With User Resignation From an IT Perspective? · · Score: 1
    "Play it by ear" sounds a lot to me like "let the chips fall where they may".
    Far better to spend some time:
    1. thinking through the repercussions;
    2. listing out the primary concerns;
    3. building a plan;
    4. communicating the plan, the concerns the plan is meant to address, AND the fact that those concerns are more important than the details of the plan.

    Then play any changes to the plan by ear, insuring the primary concerns are always... primary.

  5. Voice of experience on Ask Slashdot: Pros and Cons of Homeschooling? · · Score: 1
    I was home schooled, so I speak only to my own experience and what I know of my siblings' experience.
    Also, let me apologize if I rehash things already said in previous comments - I try to avoid getting to deep into the weeds in the /. comment section.
    Academic performance: Maybe. My eperience with this was mixed. In the humanities, the strength of the curriculum covered a lot of gaps in my mother's education (said gaps were why she was responsible for teaching the humanities). Unfortunately, the weaknesses in the curriculum created gaps, too - she'd selected a hyper traditional curriculum from a catholic organization, and she tended to insert her own politics into interpretations of history and literature. My father's a research geologist, so he covered math and the physical sciences. The sciences worked out ok, except that he often lacked patience communicating the foundational math concepts - if you got it on his first or second explanation, you were golden; but if you were still stuck you'd probably stay that way. This hampered my younger brother quite a bit.
    Socialization: Here's the part that's polarizing. There are definite issues with socialization. It's not that you only interact with family members - there are tons of opportunites to cavort with other kids: playing around your neighborhood (which we did back in the 90s - I gather unsupervised outdoor play is more of a rarity, these days), organized sports, organized clubs (cub/brownie/boy/girl scouts), the local YMCA swimming pool, etc, etc. The problem is most of that play is highly supervised and in small, intimate groups. You don't get any experience navigating the daunting social currents within a larger pool of people that includes a big chunk of relative strangers. The affects of this aren't always obvious, immediately. I started to show it earlier than my little brother - I became pretty withdrawn around kids I didn't know as early as 8 years old. My brother experienced more social awkardness than the norm when he hit about 11. We all stopped home schooling the same year, so my younger sister got out of it at the youngest age (about 5) and she is by far the best socially adapted of the three of us.
    Most of the homeschooling families back had some sort of motivation beyond merely "I want my kid to have the best education" - education was always what was talked about first; but a lengthy conversation would make it pretty clear that they were really most concerned about other things: sometimes it was behaviour problems resulting from peer pressure (everything from "too much flirting" to "drugs"), sometimes religion, and (manytimes) more to do with problems the parents have than anything else: including in my mother's case.
    These parental problem didn't result in undereducated kids in my family (although we had gaps we had to back fill later), but everyone I saw whose home schooling was motivated by parental issues went through seriuous struggles before they settled into their adult lives. I've kept in touch or reconnected with 3 of the home schooled friends I used to have since then and they all went through a similar trajectory.
    Recommendations:
    • 1. If you're going to home school, start off with a firm cut-off age pre-agreed to. I'd advise stopping at the end of the second grade (8-9 years old). The biggest benefits tend to come before then (early reading advances, primarily) and the biggest drawbacks really get a head of steam after then.
    • 2. don't exclusively homeschool even when you're doing it. Arrange for an hour or four a week in a traditional classroom environment - with a traditionally certified teacher and a full class of unrelated students, ideally including at least some who don't homescool.
  6. Re:Douchbags on Ask Slashdot: Convincing My Company To Stop Using Passwords? · · Score: 1

    I'm going to go with narrow mindedness, or perhaps a lack of imagination. The requirements that led your IT leaders to the environment you describe could lead to far less onerous (and less costly!) setups.
    Blocking "all" filesharing sites? If your company is like mine, both federal regulators and clients regularly perform third party security audits. "How do you protect our data from exfiltration?" is a stock question. I've also seen "demonstrate you block viral vectors" lead to similarly unnecessary restrictions. Hell, I could see the above two answers explaining ALL of the symptoms your leadership has created.
    It doesn't have to go that way, though. Leadership at my company had the same silly knee jerk reaction. I argued against it; but we did the same thing, for a while. About 15 months. It took 12 months for me to accumulate comparative data and about a month to polish it into a pretty presentation. It took another 2 months to cross fiscal quarters and then we immediately ripped all that none sense out and replaced it with a properly architected solution. We moved the critical data and all the workflow that touched it into secured remote VM's running on in house Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. All desktops/laptops are basically dumb terminals for accessing the work VMs. You VPN in to do that, regardless of where you come from - including our "internal" office vlans, which only have access to the internet and our VPN server.
    Have work to do? Use your VM. Wanna fuck around on slashdot? Use your local machine.
    Problem solved, and with MONUMENTALLY fewer man hours spent managing the ridiculously complex filtering mechanisms the previous authoritarianism had required.

  7. So Larry Buchanan was right? on NASA's HI-SEAS Project Results Suggests a Women-Only Mars Crew · · Score: 4, Funny

    Mars does need women.

  8. I don't think those words mean.... on Ask Slashdot: VPN Setup To Improve Latency Over Multiple Connections? · · Score: 0

    The role I've been in for the last 13 years requires me to wear a number of hats, including network engineer and network architect in medium sized environments.
    I say that to provide some context for this statement: it is not at all clear to me what you're actually asking for.

  9. Re:Unusual in a huge system ... on Information Theory Places New Limits On Origin of Life · · Score: 1

    The Universe is only about 26 Billion Light years in diameter.

    Here, let me fix that for you:

    The Observable Universe is only about 26 Billion Light years in diameter.

    There ya go. We don't actually know if the universe is infinite or not. We do know the Universe is Euclidean, my layman's understanding of that concludes that we live in one of two universes:

    • 1. A flat (infinite) universe
    • 2. A torus (bounded) universe
  10. Insert obligatory Streisand Effect joke here... on Tor Project Sued Over a Revenge Porn Business That Used Its Service · · Score: 1

    Because, seriously, how frequently does this lesson have to be retaught?

  11. Re:Texas Barely Registers on Map of Publicly-Funded Creationism Teaching · · Score: 1

    The map is misleading. LA's schools simply MAY teach creationism - the law allows it, but not all necessarily do. Those charter schools? They ALL do: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/01/creationism_in_texas_public_schools_undermining_the_charter_movement.single.html http://www.salon.com/2013/10/25/christian_textbooks_darwin_inspired_hitler/

  12. Re:New meaning to blue screen of death? on Former Microsoft Exec To Lead HealthCare.gov · · Score: 1

    Citation?

  13. Re:Pay for Laundry jobs with it on Why Charles Stross Wants Bitcoin To Die In a Fire · · Score: 4, Insightful

    From skimming the same article about him I see no reason that his opinion on bitcoins should carry any more weight than mine, or anyone elses. An we all know how much my opinion on bitcoins mean, jack and shit. Which is what Charles Stross opinion means on the subject.

    All I know about your opinion on bitcoins is what you've posted about it in this comment (that you think it's worthless).

    Charles Stross, on the other hand, has posted more than merely his opinion: he's also posted a cogent rationale for that opinion - one that contains details (with specific citations) that many a technically qualified geek may not have yet considered.

    Taken in the context of his demonstrable interest in and fondness for the idea of decentralized societies and you have a critique that's worth considering - particularly by his reasonably large fan base (many of whom are slashdot readers, as evidenced by many of the above comments).

  14. Re:"because it originated from the wireless networ on Harvard Bomb Hoax Perpetrator Caught Despite Tor Use · · Score: 1

    Rather than gleaning, you should simply read some more. These questions have all been answered. If you're targeted well in advance and if you make one of a number of mistakes, it is possible to track you through TOR.
    Retroactively?
    No, very clearly no.

  15. Re:Look to the past on Ask Slashdot: Practical Bitrot Detection For Backups? · · Score: 1

    Tape MUST be sufficiently stable. Reading the reliability specs off the box in front of me and running a few calculations shows that

    You didn't use sarcasm tags and sometimes the subtler jokes are a tad hard to discern in text.
    You are joking, aren't you? Because if not, have I got a great deal for you - I just need your bank account to transfer the money my uncle, a Nigerian prince, is trying to export. PM me!

  16. Re:New meaning to blue screen of death? on Former Microsoft Exec To Lead HealthCare.gov · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The socialists in Canada pay almost $4500 per capita for healthcare, or more than 11% of GDP. Because of the waste inherent in socialist systems, we should not be surprised that healthcare costs in Canada are 7th highest on the planet, yet for all this outrageous expense, they are only tied for 4th in life expectancy and something like 24th in infant mortality

    I'm sorry - how is 7th highest cost for 4th highest life expetancy not a deal?
    If life expectancy was less than 7th, I might see your point. Beyond that, the US already spends 17.2% of it's GDP on healthcare (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_the_United_States) and has an infant mortality rate around 34th in the world , so moving to an infant mortality rate of 24th in the world for a cost of 11% of GDP is a huge improvement for your southern neighbors.

  17. Re:New meaning to blue screen of death? on Former Microsoft Exec To Lead HealthCare.gov · · Score: 1

    This is good news, guys. By now MS is an expert in receiving and dealing with DoS.

    Yeah, they're very experienced at hiring Akamai to deal with DoS attacks :)

  18. Re:Look to the past on Ask Slashdot: Practical Bitrot Detection For Backups? · · Score: 2
    The tapes may be stable (I'm suspicious of that claim: their temperature tolerances aren't as high as modern hard drives, they actually care about dust, and I would expect them to be more susceptible to magnetic interference); but the tape drives are not. Over time drive heads become misaligned. They continue to write fine and can read what they write; but sufficient misalignment prevents other drives of the same type from reading the tape. That tape then becomes only as useful as the drive that wrote it. Lose the drive, you lose the use of the data on the tape. Unless you test reading the tape in a different drive than it was written from (while the writing drive is still available for pulling the data out), this condition's effectively undetectable until you actually need the data.

    There's a reason so many shops have moved to disk based backups. Tape simply isn't reliable. Tape is cheap; but definitely NOT reliable.

  19. Edges of the Bell Curve on Mobile Phone Use Patterns Identify Individuals Better Than Fingerprints · · Score: 1

    I wonder how this research would have shifted if they'd only sampled geo-cachers and Ingress "agents"

  20. Clearly on Ask Slashdot: Which Google Project Didn't Deserve To Die? · · Score: 1
  21. No one wants "Gigabit" that's really 2mb x 15mb on Time Warner Cable: No Consumer Demand For Gigabit Internet · · Score: 1

    I can tell Irene why she sees no consumer demand for her "high end" offering: it's only PRICED as a high end offering. I "upgraded" my residential service through them (to the tune of $100/month) and didn't see a single change in my up or down speeds. It's basically a scam. Yeah, you have to be able to provide what you're currently offering before trying to offer the next generation.

  22. Re:There are several options here on Ask Slashdot: Linux Mountable Storage Pool For All the Cloud Systems? · · Score: 2

    How do you mount Google Drive on Linux? It seems simple to the designers of Dropbox but it's eluded those at Google.

    Insync: https://www.insynchq.com/#112472431252847033039/settings An official agent would be better - preferably something that provides a FUSE driver. Something OpenSource would be even better; but Insync works fine. Behaves very dropbox like and even supports multiple google accounts. You're correct, though - without Insync or a better option Google drive might as well not exist, as far as Unix users go.

  23. Re:Surprised it was available on CyanogenMod Domain Hijacked · · Score: 1

    Don't give up on that 501(c)3, though - avoid those single points of failure, where you can.

  24. Re:Surprised it was available on CyanogenMod Domain Hijacked · · Score: 1

    Although, if you REALLY want to know who's the suspect, it's easy enough to find out just by reading some of the social media posts further down in this story's comments.

  25. Re:Surprised it was available on CyanogenMod Domain Hijacked · · Score: 2

    They did mention "filing charges". IANAL, and I doubt Steve is either. If I were in his shoes, I'd be hesitant to publish clearly identifying details until I'd consulted an attorney.