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User: nmos

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  1. Re:There's a difference between 'dumb' and 'trusti on Data Centers Crucial To Lehman Sale · · Score: 1

    No, you're mixing two separate things up. If you don't understand ARMs that doesn't make you dumb. But if you then buy one and you don't understand them, that definitely makes you dumb. What the hell?!

    Which is why we shouldn't be bailing them out..... oh wait you didn't mean the multi-millionare college educated investment bankers, you meant that guy driving a garbage truck for a living. The thing is that most Americans buy their first home knowing that they can just barely make the payments. The assumption has always been that you'll work hard, get raises, maybe move up in the company. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work that way anymore, you're more likely to have your job shipped to China and end up working at some service job with no benefits. When my wife broke her collar bone it ended up costing us thousands out of pocket and that was with decent insurance. Without insurance we would have been looking at $10k+. How many people can actually afford to take that kind of hit?

  2. Re:Asset valuation programmer seeks job on Data Centers Crucial To Lehman Sale · · Score: 1

    Idiots buying houses they couldn't afford so they were foreclosed and sold for cheap.

    If the financial professionals who approved these loans didn't know any better then what chance does some construction worker or X-Mart employee have? Frankly foreclosing on many of these homes is stupid anyway especially in this market. The banks would be a lot better off keeping people in their homes and arranging payments that they can afford at least until the market improves but of course that'll probably take longer than a quarter or two.

    Companies enabling idiots to buy things they can't afford have their own assets siezed and sold for cheap.

    No, when a truck driver makes a bad investment they kick him out of his house but when a company full of MBAs who invest for a living screws up they get bailed out. If it's all the same to you I'd rather take the $300 or so that I have to give to AIG and instead use it to help my neighbor stay in his house.

  3. Re:Who was it that said it would be better "if the on Scott Adams's Political Survey of Economists · · Score: 1

    It seems the problem of money and the unbelievable hassle of being vetted by the public simply drives away potentially excellent people from politics.

    Agreed, and on the flip side the lure of power tends to attract exactly the sort of folks who shouldn't have it. Personally I'm for some sort of lottery system.

  4. Re:Well, not really on DOJ Needs Warrant To Track Your Cell's GPS History · · Score: 1

    The NSA and FBI have been sniffing GPS since early 2000 and they already have access to the roving bug and triangulation for older phones.

    Cell phones in the US havn't had reliable GPS for anywhere near that long. Now, the ability to see what tower any give cell phone is connected to is another story.

  5. And 33% think they are immune? on Most Companies Admit Their Data Is At Risk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Personally I'd be more worried about the other 33% who seem to think they could not possibly have had their security breached.

  6. Re:Real questions defeat stupid ideas .... sometim on Researchers Test Drive Bus With Automated Steering · · Score: 1

    While this tech. alone won't be of much use I could see it being part of a more sophisticated automated driving system. Car makers already have automatic cruise control, colision avoidance systems, radar etc either available or in developement so I think a system combining these technologies might not be that far into the future.

    Imagine a HOV type lane that allowed drivers of compatible vehicles to travel at 100+ mph within a foot or two of each other. The fuel savings due to the aerodynamic advantages of drafting as well as the lack of stop and go driving could be substantial and if it allowed cities to put off adding additional lanes of traffic it might actually pay for itself.

  7. Re:Not that helpful on Microsoft Concedes Vista Launch Problems · · Score: 1

    It's helpful in that it gives you a big clue as to where the problem is and the tools to tell you even more so you can fix it. In my experience if a Linux machine is behaving in this way there is something wrong and it's worth fixing rather than living with it.

  8. Re:Wrong question! on Amazon Opens On-Demand Video Store · · Score: 1

    Who determines reasonable?

    In most markets that would be the customer. We'll know when they've hit a feature/price combination that is reasonable when piracy becomes the exception rather than the rule.

  9. Re:Captain Sensible is on holiday. on Redesigned, Bulkier Honda Insight to Challenge Prius · · Score: 1

    You just know that the reliability of the the old Jags was bad when being bought out by Ford actually improved their reputation :)

  10. Re:Oh God, Privacy? Get over it. on Picasa Rolls Out 3.0 — Now With Facial Recognition · · Score: 1

    I might be misunderstanding how this works but I think the problem people have is that pictures and the resulting "fingerprints" end up in Google's database rather than just on your computer. This does seem to have the potential for misuse. Remember, you're not the only one who has pictures of you.

  11. Re:What the law actually says on Don't Share That Law! It's Copyrighted · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hold up a minute. You say:
    In the most famous Supreme Court case on this topic, Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), the Justices held that no one can hold a copyright in a particular phone number. However, a company can collect tens of thousands of phone numbers, organize them alphabetically, and then claim a copyright in the finished product (i.e., the phone book).

    But that's NOT what the Supreme Court said, at not the way I read it. :

    [55] Because Rural's white pages lack the requisite originality, Feist's use of the listings cannot constitute infringement.

    So you CANNOT claim copyright on a simple alphabetical listing of names and phone numbers because it is not original or creative enough.

  12. Re:Seems to me on User Charged With Taking ISP Tech Hostage · · Score: 1

    Having been an on_site customer of a DSL company, I can assure you that on-site techs do think that they are paid to show up and aren't actually there to make sure the services their employers sells to me are working.

    All too often their job really IS just to do a very specific task and leave. Like many here I've made the mistake of doing contract work for some of the service/warranty companies and it's pretty common for them to send you out with the assurance that they've already diagnosed the problem and sent any needed parts ahead of you. Your job then is just to replace those parts (or maybe test a specific part) and that's it. They won't pay you to do anything else no matter what the real problem turns out to be (of course many of them arn't planning to pay you anyway but that's another story). Bottom line is that these companies are far more interested in technically fulfilling the requirements of their contract than resolving the customer's problem and any tech. that doesn't have their priorities in that order won't be around very long.

  13. Re:You need to use the police to get the ISP's inf on Best Way To Get Back a Stolen Computer? · · Score: 1

    Uhh, no the ISP can not tell OP who is at an IP address

    Just because they shouldn't doesn't mean they can't or won't. They may at least be able to more tech savy officer or DA that they've dealt with in the past.

  14. Re:Mr. Rogers is crying. on NBC Activates Broadcast Flag · · Score: 1

    In the digital and Internet age, most people might record for fairly benign fair use purposes, but some people are going to record, strip the commercials, put the shows on the Internet and undermine the business model under which TV networks currently function.

    No doubt you're right but which of those two groups do you think that DRM actually stops and which group does it encourage?

    One option for the advertisers/networks would be to improve the quality of the commercials. A few months back I saw one of those "best commercials of 2007" shows and I can honestly say that if typical commercials were at that level I probably wouldn't bother skipping them. I probably saw more commercials during that hour than I had during the entire previous year. Instead what we get are commercials trying to walk the ragged edge between outright lying and just being misleading. Advertisers should be thankfull that I skip their commercials because when my first contact with someone involves them trying to lie to me I'm probably not going to buy things from them.

    So, here's the point. Stop trying to force people to watch your commercials and instead try producing commercials that people want to watch. Manage that trick and you'll actually gain every time someone shares your show over the Internet.

  15. Re:Their secret revealed... on A Walk Through the Hard Drive Recovery Process · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You're better off plugging directly into a computer rather than using an external USB/Firewire adapter. In my experience anyway those adapters tend to give up the first time you run into a bad sector but if you plug in directly you can use tools such as dd_rescue to keep trying until you've recovered every scrap of data possible.

  16. Re:How is proprietary software anti-freedom? on Negroponte vs. Open-Source Fundamentalists · · Score: 1

    I know the rhetoric of the free software movement.

    Then why on earth did your post focus on cost?

    Most people while they COULD, don't want to bother learning how to fix their own cars.

    True but even non-mechanics appreciate the ability to have work done by whatever mechanic they want rather than having to go to the dealer. Would you buy a car with a EULA that only allowed you to have work performed by the dealer?

    Same with software. So this "Freedom" that free software is protecting is a "freedom" most people don't even WANT to begin with.

    The same could be said for freedom of speech. Few people ever say or publish anything contraversial but we all benefit from their ability to do so.

    I think that eventually over time proprietary software would win out over free software in terms of operating systems and office suites simply because for most folks Windows is easier to use and keep running than Linux is.

    The only "Ease of use" advantage Windows has left over Linux is inertia. Much of the software that people know about is windows only, most hardware comes with Windows drivers and a pretty click-by-click poster for Windows and of course most users know a Windows guru that they can call for help. That's why we're seeing so much resistance to Vista, it's not so much that XP is better (although it is in some respects) but that the infrastructure for Vista just isn't quite there yet and as a result people are having problems. Take away that infrastructure advantage and a modern Linux distro is every bit as easy as Windows and in many cases easier.

  17. Re:Wrong photo! on Seagate Ships Billionth Hard Drive · · Score: 1

    The ST506 was full-height, (remember the squeaky monkey-like noise it made?)

    Oh Crap! Was I supposed to feed it? That actually explains why, in it's last days, I could get it going again by wacking it with a screwdriver handle . Not to mention the awefull smell when it finally died for good. Poor monkey.

  18. Re:Double Standard Standard on A New Family of High-Temperature Superconductors · · Score: 1

    In fairness most proposals for perpetual motion machines (actually all that I've seen) actually claim decreasing entropy, not just zero change. IANAP but I do wonder if superconductivity will turn out not to be completely lossless but just very very nearly lossless. Of course, in practice we're not talking about closed systems anyway.

  19. Re:Hot! on A New Family of High-Temperature Superconductors · · Score: 3, Funny

    Where do you get $1k/L? A quick google search turns up $3-5 per liter

    Well duh! He's talking about MEDICAL liquid HE which is obviously much more expensive than normal liquid HE. Ever get a bandaid put on at a hospital?

  20. Re:Nothing here, move along. on "Judicial Scandal" In Pirate Bay Case · · Score: 1
    From TFA:

    Monique Wadsted, laywer at MAQS law firm, representing Hollywood in the case, comments on the story this way:
    - I suppose this is Warner Bros way of expressing how they feel about the good work Jim Keyzer has done. But nothing inappropriate has been going on during the preliminary investigation.


  21. Re:Fantastic on End of the Internet's Tax-Free Ride? · · Score: 4, Informative

    It isn't that simple. There isn't a single "State" sales tax, at least in the states I've lived in. Often there is a base rate for the state + an additional rate for the county and another rate for each city. In addition different taxing authorities (city/state/county) have different ideas of what kinds of items are taxable and at what rates. For example, in a nearby city you wouldn't pay any tax on a hamburger patty and a bun from a supermarket but those same items purchased from a restarant are taxed, and at a much higher rate than other kinds of items. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the cost of complying with this mess ended up being more than the taxes themselves.

    The only real negative effect for internet businesses is that they've been evading sales tax for years

    That's just not true. Here in AZ at least, our "Sales Tax" (really a use tax) is considered a tax on the business rather than the consumer. What that means is that I already have to pay taxes to AZ on everything I sell no matter where the buyer is so in effect I'd be taxed twice if I had to pay again to the buyer's state as well. If anyone has been evading taxes it's the citizens that havn't been reporting their out of state purchases and paying the relivent taxes to their own state.

  22. Re:Unauthorized software on Young Employees Pose Increasing Risk to Networks · · Score: 1

    Did the larger amount of work to avoid the problems associated with a lack of administrator privileges make this "unauthorized"?

    I don't know about your workplace but I'd say installing software for your own personal use during your downtime is over the line. The problem is that far too often stories like yours end in "and now my computer wont boot and payroll needs to be finalized in the next 20 minutes or else no one in the company is going to get paid so drop what you're doing and come help me right now!"

  23. Re:why is texas a win for her? on Clinton Takes Ohio, Texas; McCain Seals The Deal · · Score: 1

    I love it how Randians try to blame corporate corruption on governments. "There's only corruption because of government regulation!!". It's like saying: "There's only murders because the police are trying to prevent crime!!".

    Of course if the police were essentially owned by organized crime then it might actually be a net benefit to reduce their funding.

  24. Re:Hmmm. on Yahoo Offers All-You-Can-Eat Storage and Bandwidth · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You'd think Yahoo would learn better than start a huge marketing campaign on a service they can't possibly keep profitable. Think about it- Yahoo Music Unlimited just closed! It was a nice idea, except it wasn't making them money! This is a huge PR disaster waiting to happen.

    Maybe the two are connected. It could be that closing their music service is leaving them with some extra bandwidth/storage/servers and they'd rather bring in some revenue then let those resources sit idle.

  25. Re:Instead of sending DVDs home on Best Laptop for Going Around the World? · · Score: 1

    If he's not going to be burning DVDs then I'm not sure there's much point in bringing a computer at all. Blogging is going to have to be done from places with Internet access so presumably there will already be computers around and other kinds of writing can still be done on paper. Between the weight, risk of theft, and battery issues, I think carrying around a bunch of electronics seems like more trouble than it's worth.