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User: blackiner

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  1. Dangerous on Harley-Davidson Unveils Their First Electric Motorcycle · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I sincerely hope they add some sort of noise generator, bikes are dangerous enough already.

  2. Git on Code Spaces Hosting Shutting Down After Attacker Deletes All Data · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is why git is such an effective code hosting solution. Everyone who has cloned the repository is a potential backup copy.

  3. Very curious on US Pushing Local Police To Keep Quiet On Cell-Phone Surveillance Technology · · Score: 2

    The more I hear about them trying to quell discussion about these things the more interested I get. What in the world is so important about them? What are they hiding? I saw a strange object on a power pole when I was out for a run the other day, it looked like tree roots laid out horizontally... I can only assume it was an antenna of some sort. Was gone the very next day, and wasn't there the day before either... I wonder if it was one of these things?

  4. Re:2 Decades on Parents Mobilize Against States' Student Data Mining · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Now, they prosecute somebody, and simply say that the defendant doesn't have a right to hear the evidence against him, and the Constitution doesn't apply.

    Oh it is worse than that. Nowadays they send in US Marshals to destroy evidence so that the courts do not even get a chance to deny access to the evidence.

  5. Re:Free Market... on Virginia DMV Cracks Down On Uber, Lyft · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It is sad really. One of the best things about America was that it was easy to just set up a company. Being able to quickly set up a business is the real answer to wage slavery. You don't like working a shit job making minimum wage and being a slave to the corporation you work for? Start up your own shop. It empowers the people, and allows them to break free of the control of mega corps. But the urbanization of just about everywhere people live makes it damn near impossible to buy a chunk of property if you want a place these days, and even if you do find a place to set up shop or have a business idea where you don't actually need land (like Uber), you get fucked by regulations. They have even come for software, which is arguable the easiest possible thing to set up a private business around. Pretty much any piece of software you write today is likely covered by some patent, and if you get big enough, they WILL come after you. Everything is perfectly set up to consolidate power in the established players, and cripples the average person.

  6. Re:PVP? on This Is Your Brain While Videogaming Stoned · · Score: 1

    Pfft. Back in MY day, we called them PKs.

  7. Re:Why not? It fits the trend. on Amazon Escalates Its Battle Against Publishers · · Score: 1

    Dunno about that. Keep in mind anything above 40% market share can be considered monopolistic. That is pretty much right where Apple is in the US: http://appleinsider.com/articl...

    But hey, if you are okay with it, then that is fine. I was just making sure we didn't have a hypocrisy on our hands. To any publishers who may be reading: get on this!

  8. Re:Why not? It fits the trend. on Amazon Escalates Its Battle Against Publishers · · Score: 1

    So would it also be ok if publishers colluded with cell phone stores to instead sell jailbroken iPhones that purchase and download the books directly from the publishers, bypassing Apple's app store? I mean, seems like a simple case of what you consider 'civil disobedience' to me.

  9. Re:Not about goodness, about evenness on Amazon Escalates Its Battle Against Publishers · · Score: 1

    There is a pretty tried and true method to handle monopolistic businesses: petitioning the government to start an anti-trust investigation and possibly taking the company to court. Just because one company is behaving badly does not mean others can become vigilantes and do whatever they please.

  10. Re:Coder Boycott on Court: Oracle Entitled To Copyright Protection Over Some Parts of Java · · Score: 2

    The mere fact that this case even exists is already proof it will be abused. And please, if the copyright regime has taught us anything, it is that fair use will continue to get shat upon.

  11. Re:Bad syllogism on Mathematical Model Suggests That Human Consciousness Is Noncomputable · · Score: 1

    It is like the researchers went out of their way to forget Alzheimer's... or maybe they just have Alzheimer's.

  12. Awful on The Upcoming Windows 8.1 Apocalypse · · Score: 5, Informative

    I ordered my parents a Windows 8 laptop to replace their old xp laptop, thinking, "Well, windows 8 can't be THAT bad." It was.

    The thing would not download updates. It would just say "Downloading updates..." and stall for hours at a time. I searched as much as I could online and only found barely any help. Most of it involved stopping the windows update agent service, and then deleting cached update files. But then it would just freeze again when I started it again. After a whole bunch of attempts, I noticed it was filling up the cache folder again after every time I restarted the update service, and that if I waited a bit, and then rebooted the computer, it would apply a few patches. So... that's ultimately how I ended up getting the thing all patched up. Stop update service, delete all cached patches, start update service, wait a few hours while they download in the background with no fucking mention of what is going on, reboot machine. I guess running the windows update must have been causing some sort of deadlock with the background updater or something... What a fucking mess. How in the world did they ship an OS with a non functioning update manager... And to top it all off, I couldn't just download win 8.1 separately, like how you could download the xp service packs separately. If I could have just done that... it would have been a hell of a lot simpler to get everything working. Instead they want you to download it through the microsoft store in metro... which won't show up unless, you guessed it, you already have fully updated through windows update.

    On the plus side, everything works fine now that it is fully updated.

  13. Re:You know what worked better for me then longhan on Students Remember Lectures Better Taking Notes Longhand Than Using Laptops · · Score: 1

    +1 for doodling. I remember a slashdot article some time back that said people doodle to keep their minds occupied, since the lecture itself was simply not intellectually stimulating enough to require their full attention, and that it actually *helped* learning because it stopped them from dozing of or just completely losing concentration. I remember sitting and paying full attention for some of the more interesting classes, like advanced data structures, or chemistry. But for "How to write a resume and do a job interview" class (this was *required* for all CS students), yeah, I was doing a LOT of doodling.

  14. Re:+5 Insightful on Reason Suggests DoJ Closing Porn Stars' Bank Accounts · · Score: 1

    It really is more similar than you may think. Berlin, prior to the Nazi takeover of Germany, was something of a sex capitol. Hitler was fairly annoyed by the wanton sexuality and liberalism of the place. In fact he tried to take over the city and failed the first time... but not the second.

  15. Re:The gap seems reasonable on Microsoft Continues To Lose Money With Each Surface Tablet It Sells · · Score: 1

    I am honestly stunned that they are selling these at a loss considering how expensive they are. Is Microsoft simply incurring high manufacturing costs because this is not their normal market? How is is possible that the production costs of these tablets is so high when equivalent android tablets are sold at a fraction of the price, presumably for a profit? Why else would third party companies even sell them, after all? They don't get app sale revenue from google... It just... boggles the mind.

  16. Re:2013 N7 on Microsoft Continues To Lose Money With Each Surface Tablet It Sells · · Score: 1

    What exactly is the main problem with it? That it is slow/laggy? I would agree with that, but it is still *quite* usable. This is a two year old device, that was sold for ~$230. It completely pushed the price/performance tablet boundaries, and the small tablet form factor. It literally started its market, Apple likely wouldn't have even released the iPad mini because of it. Most importantly it works bloody great for reading websites, articles, and books. I still use it daily for this purpose. It can also handle 720p video with ease, thanks to dedicated hardware, and I watch all sorts of tv shows on it a few days a week. To top it off, the batter lasts for days if used sparingly, and can handle a full 8 hour day of web browsing/video watching as well. It is a good tablet, and it was sold at an incredible price when introduced.

  17. Re:If you make this a proof of God... on Mathematical Proof That the Cosmos Could Have Formed Spontaneously From Nothing · · Score: 1

    They came up with what they thought was a reasonable theory. It is just one theory to explain it, there are other possibilities. The key is that they make theories that are consistent with the observable universe, and if they end up being unprovable by experiments or observations, then they are discarded, and then scientists go back to the great question, Why? You can see this with string theory, a lot of it is mathematically sound, but there is no actual observable evidence of it, so quite a few scientists now just regard it as unprovable nonsense. They may well regard dark matter/energy as nonsense if evidence continues to fall short. That is the whole point of science, observe something, come up with ideas for "Why?", and then test them. If they fail to explain it, then the theory is eventually discarded, and new ones must be made.

    And that is exactly how science differs from religion. Religion is set in stone, there is only one true word of god, the bible. The mere text of it is considered divine and straight from god, written with the influence of the holy spirit. It is infallible, it cannot be questioned, and when it is proven wrong, or parts of it continue to fail the evidence test, the religious simply say "You need to have faith". There is no furthering of knowledge with religion, it is essentially a dead end that has already been decided.

  18. Re:If you make this a proof of God... on Mathematical Proof That the Cosmos Could Have Formed Spontaneously From Nothing · · Score: 1

    The difference is people are looking for actual evidence of it, and come up with theories and experiments to prove its nature. They only reason physicists came up with it in the first place is because... they did experiments and observed space, and noticed that there was too much gravity compared to observable objects. There is a pattern here, observation, theory, experiment, confirmation or denial of theory. How does one currently unexplainable scientific observation suddenly equate to "scientists own version of god"?

  19. Re:A lot of hunters are asshats on Drone-Assisted Hunting To Be Illegal In Alaska · · Score: 1

    Is that not how humans traditionally hunted bears? I keep seeing people deride all this hunting business as using too much technology or insight to trick the animals... but that is precisely what got us to the top of the food chain in the first place. The simple fact of the matter is that killing animals is a solved problem, so these people just self impose rules to make things more 'fun'. Their time would be better spent solving actually challenging problems, but oh well, everyone needs to find entertainment from some place...

  20. Re:Precisely how... on Shuttleworth Wants To Get Rid of Proprietary Firmware · · Score: 2

    Isn't device tree pretty much declarative firmware? It has gained quite a bit of ground in the ARM on Linux world recently too. Seems like the solution already exists, it just need a bigger push.

  21. Re:Obvious response from Gates on Snowden A Hero? Gates Says No, Woz Says Yes · · Score: 1

    The earth is capable of sustaining everyone one of us.

    This is not really true, though. Sure the land can grow enough food to support quite a bit more population, but the energy needed to harvest and distribute it? And how do we know it won't eventually turn into desert as we push it more and more? But by far the most important factor is that society itself cannot support more population, we already vastly out populate meaningful social roles. See: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org...

    So what exactly happened in Universe 25? Past day 315, population growth slowed. More than six hundred mice now lived in Universe 25, constantly rubbing shoulders on their way up and down the stairwells to eat, drink, and sleep. Mice found themselves born into a world that was more crowded every day, and there were far more mice than meaningful social roles. With more and more peers to defend against, males found it difficult and stressful to defend their territory, so they abandoned the activity. Normal social discourse within the mouse community broke down, and with it the ability of mice to form social bonds. The failures and dropouts congregated in large groups in the middle of the enclosure, their listless withdrawal occasionally interrupted by spasms and waves of pointless violence. The victims of these random attacks became attackers. Left on their own in nests subject to invasion, nursing females attacked their own young. Procreation slumped, infant abandonment and mortality soared. Lone females retreated to isolated nesting boxes on penthouse levels. Other males, a group Calhoun termed “the beautiful ones,” never sought sex and never fought—they just ate, slept, and groomed, wrapped in narcissistic introspection. Elsewhere, cannibalism, pansexualism, and violence became endemic. Mouse society had collapsed.

  22. Re:Combined with the ringing phones ? on Engine Data Reveals That Flight 370 Flew On For Hours After It "Disappeared" · · Score: 4, Funny

    Was this actually Oceanic flight 815?

  23. They really do charge a lot for their courses... I haven't taken any of them, but I can't imagine them being particularly better than the free stuff available online, a google search away. I feel kinda bad because they support a good cause (I believe they help fund Torvalds to maintain the kernel, among other things), but their income sources are just kinda ridiculous.

    And in case anyone wants some good intro to Linux material right away, check out this series by Daniel Robbins: http://www.funtoo.org/Linux_Fu...

  24. Re:Yeah...whatever you believe today... on Low-Protein Diet May Extend Lifespan · · Score: 1

    I cut down on soda, and other than that, ate whatever I wanted, and worked out daily. Lost a lot of weight, then gained a lot of weight in muscle. If you aren't a fat inactive pile of crap... it really doesn't really matter what you eat as long as you get enough of what you need.

  25. Re:Sigh - what the heck ... on Routers Pose Biggest Security Threat To Home Networks · · Score: 1

    Depends... many consumer versions of OSs have very lax firewall configs by default. It may very well allow it. I certainly have never had to open the port when running transmission on Fedora, it seems like it just allows it regardless. And on Windows you get those little *this application wants to connect to the internet* popups, and if you hit allow it opens up the firewall for that app, for ALL ports I believe. And, I have sat there and not hit the button, and it looks like it just allows the traffic anyway.