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User: jcam2

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  1. Re:Military uses on Swedes Dominate Counter-Strike Championship · · Score: 4, Funny

    No .. they think they are just playing CS, but in reality are remotely controlling actual teams of soldiers involved in real anti-terrorist operations (cf. Ender's Game) :-)

  2. Re:He's right on Ted Turner's Beef With Big Media · · Score: 1

    Murdoch 'owns' Australia?!? His company doesn't even have a single local free-to-air TV channel. They are only really big in the newspaper market, where they publish the only general-interest national newspaper. Pretty much every market has at least one competitor, maybe more ..

  3. Re:eMachineShop is being grossly underrated! on From Your PC to Reality in 3 Easy Steps · · Score: 1

    What I want to know is, how hard would it be to design and order a handgun and have them make and send you the parts to assemble yourself? If you ordered it a bit at a time, they might not even know what you were ordering, especially if the whole manufacturing process is automated ..

  4. Re:Dang! on Top Ten Linux Configuration Tools? · · Score: 1

    Webmin is really on a different level from other tools - it is designed for the non-expert admin, so that you don't have to remember commands and config file formats.
    For an experience admin managing multiple servers, Webmin may not be the best solution. Instead, tools like rsync, ssh and CVS are invaluable ..

  5. Re:Inevitable on Bar Coding The World Away · · Score: 1

    Australia used 0011, while other countries that I've visited (Singapore and Malaysia) use 00. In fact, I wasn't aware there even *was* an international standard for this .. apart from the + key on my mobile phone :-)

  6. Re:i didn't like the demonization of fusion on Spider-Man 2 Has Over 30 Mistakes · · Score: 1

    The list of anti-technology movies in which some machine gets out of control and wreaks havoc is nearly endless - Jurassic Park, the Terminator series, The Matrix, anything mentioning genetic engineering, and so on .. so one more is nothing new :-(

  7. Re:Satan Rocket? on 'Satan' Missile Now Launches Satellites · · Score: 1
    Why exactly does NATO call it that?

    NATO named all the Soviet missiles with code-names starting with an S. Scud, for example. I'm sure the Russians actually called it something different :-)

  8. Re:"I need to get out of here" on Senate Unanimously Passes Anti-Camcorder Bill · · Score: 1

    While there have been plenty of stupid laws passed in the USA, this doesn't seem to be one of them. What good reason can a person have for video-taping a movie in a cinema, apart from low-quality piracy? Whose rights are being infringed by this kind of law?

  9. Still positive on balance on Australia-US Free Trade Agreement Examined · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Even though I don't agree with many USA IP laws like the DCMA, their negative effect on Australia is far less than the positive effects that flow from the free trade agreement. And despite a few high-profile prosecutions, the DCMA hasn't exactly destroyed the software industry or open-source development in USA..

    Unfortunately, this issue is being used by the usual gang of anti-globalization idiots as an excuse to oppose the deal. I can guarantee that the same people would be opposing the FTA, even if these intellectual property clauses were removed.

  10. Re:Who Should Be Angry? on Canon Digital Rebel Hacked Into A Pseudo-10D · · Score: 1

    How is this fraud exactly? Even though the cheaper model can be upgraded, it can still do perform all the functions it was advertised to perform even if you don't upgrade it.

    Oh, and single-sided floppies probably aren't a great example of 'evils' of this type of sales practice. The hidden side probably wasn't made to the same quality standards as the visible side, and certainly wouldn't have been tested. Not something you would want to trust your precious data to, even though it may have worked for a while ..

  11. Re:Exploring other worlds is expensive on Beagle 2 Failure Analyzed · · Score: 2, Insightful
    It's interesting to note that Manchester United paid 30 million for Rio Ferdinand from Leeds United (this is English Premier League Football, for those not UK based) which sort of sums up the UK attitude to space travel.

    I'm sure you could find a few US baseball players whose combined salaries exceeded the cost of their mars landers .. but despite the fact that the US public is far more interested in sport that space exploration, they still managed to land two probes on mars :-)

    Maybe the real issue is the size of the US vs UK economy, which is what really determines the amount of money available to spend on mars missions.

  12. Re:bad idea in the first place on Berners-Lee on the TLD Explosion · · Score: 1

    You can do this already - just set your browser's home page to Google, and always use it to search for sites instead of entering URLs :-)

  13. Re:The point isn't the practicality of flying cars on Flying Car More Economical Than SUV · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think a more interesting and fairer comparison would be an SUV vs. a real airplane with a similar passenger capacity, such as a Cessna ..

  14. Re:Why? on Work No Longer a Place but an Activity · · Score: 1

    My theory is that the amount of work the average person does remains roughly constant, despite the fact that his output is enhanced by labour-saving technology. I could work only 3 days a week and still earn enough money to live on .. but why not make full use of my abilities to earn more?

    This is the reason that science-fiction fantasies of a world in which nobody works are bogus. No matter how high a standard of living machines can provide for us, that standard can still be improved by additional human labour.

  15. Re:You're missing the real ones. on The Politics of the Video Game · · Score: 1

    Have you heard they are releasing a new free-market version of SimCity, in response to all the complaints about how the current versions idealize central planning?

    The difference is, in this new version you don't get to do anything - all roads, subdivisions, stadiums and train lines are provided by the market :-)

  16. Re:Allofmp3.com on Russian Music Site Offering Legal Songs By The MB · · Score: 1

    I'm sure you can blame EU regulation for most of these price differences and import problems :-)

  17. Re:Other issues. on Smart Breeding to Beat Biotechnology? · · Score: 1
    It is morally repugnant to me to allow the patenting of food. It is blindingly stupid in my opinion to allow patented foodstuff to become the main body of supply for us.

    How is it immoral for companies to benefit from new products that they have created? They are only patenting new creations, not existing crops, which will of course remain patent-free. If the company starts charging too much for its new crops, farmers can always switch back to the 'natural' variety.

    And what do you think it does to biodiversity? Did you ever hear about the Irish Potato famine? Most of the population depended on a single food crop derived from a small number of imported ancestors. The potato blight came and they were all but wiped out in a stroke.

    The potato famine was as much a political problem as an agricultural one. And if monoculture was the problem, why hasn't any similar famine occurred recently, when modern agriculture is far more dependent on single-species crops?

  18. Re:Is there such a thing as a reputable blacklist? on Spanish Internet Provider's SMTP traffic Blocked · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Personally, I've found that many blacklists are getting rather over-zealous lately. For example, one of my ISP's mail servers is on the SpamCop and Dynablock lists, causing pretty much everything I (and many hundreds of thousands of other people) send out to be classified as spam!

    Fortunately, I can work around this by relaying mail through a non-blacklisted server, but most subscribers won't have the ability or access to do that. And if the ISP ever turns off port 25, I may have no choice but to relay through their servers :-(

  19. Re:Cars and the US on Virginia MagLev Project Back on Track · · Score: 1

    It's not just a US thing - Australia has very similar low-density cities, in which most people get around by car. And I imagine Canada is pretty similar ..

    Perhaps the reason is that many US and Australian cities are more recent, and were expanded after the automobile became commonly available, making low density living practical. Or perhaps it's because car ownerships is not regarded as a crime that has to be punished with high taxes, unlike on certain other continents :-)

  20. Re:Electric cars, I hope on How Will We Get Around Near-Future Earth? · · Score: 1
    Also I hope that cities start being designed to be anti-car, meaning they are designed to be accessed on foot or by public transit systems. If you've ever been to Singapore you know what I'm talking about.

    I lived in Singapore for 2.5 years without a car, and I can tell you I was really glad to move back to Australia where cars are cheap. Catching buses and trains might be fun for tourists, but imagine carrying 5 bags of groceries back from the market on a bus or train on a regular basis .. certainly NOT fun!

  21. Re:YaST - great for newbs but... on YaST to Become Open Source · · Score: 2, Insightful

    > GUI config tools should follow three simple rules:

    Interestingly, those are the same rules that I followed when developing Webmin, yet another administration GUI. Other programs that keep their own databases of settings from which the actual config files are built annoy me, as they make it hard to interoperate with other tools. Some of Redhat's control panels and Linuxconf are guilty of this ..

  22. Re:Try this the next time you buy. on Microsoft Customers Get No Bang for Buck · · Score: 1

    'involuntary human extinction project' .. that's probably what the next Hitler/Stalin/Pol Pot will call his plan for mass genocide.

  23. Re:well on Get Listed Free In Gov't Open Source Directory · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Whoever said that open source 'threatens capitalism' clearly doesn't know the meaning of the word. A true threat to capitalism would be a specific program of government funding for open source projects.

    Not that this directory seems to be anything like that ..

  24. What about languages people no longer want to use? on Extinction Of Human Languages Affects Programming? · · Score: 1

    If someone no longer wants to speak a dialect that only a few hundred others use, who is to say that they are doing the wrong thing? Should they be 'protected' from outside cultures and technologies that may actually benefit them? If so, doesn't this mean that they are being effectively forced to retain their existing languages, most likely to their detriment?

    These days, the loss of languages is not happening due to imperial conquest or forced re-education like in the past, but due to people changing their behavious for their own benefit. After all, given a choice wouldn't you prefer to use English and have the ability to potentially communicate with billions, versus some dialect only used in your village?

    Oh, and New Guinea is hardly a good example of the benefits of multiple languages - the country is corrupt and impoverished, and many people in the highlands live a practically stone-age existance.

  25. Re:Bochs? on Windows XP 64-Bit Customer Preview Program · · Score: 1

    It'd probably take about that long to boot, given the speed of Bochs last time I used it.