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User: idunham

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  1. Re: Mehh on You Will Get DirectX 11.2 Only With Windows 8.1 · · Score: 1

    Its 8.1 not 8 that's the upgrade you plank

    .and therefore the most numerically advanced version yet.

    I thought 2000 was higher than 8 or 8.1?

  2. Thoughts on Alpha? on Interview: Ask Jon "maddog" Hall What You Will · · Score: 1

    I'm wondering what you think looking back at the whole Alpha scene.
    -were there any major failings?
    -what were the nicest features?
    -while the hardware is now abandoned and slow, do you think it could have remained competetive?
    -favorite stor(y|ies) related to Alpha or Linux/Alpha?
    -are you still interested in Alpha, or have you moved on?

  3. Re:War of the Operating Systems on PlayStation 4 Will Be Running Modified FreeBSD · · Score: 4, Informative

    PS4 is on FreeBSD, X1 is on a Windows-kernel abomination, and the Steam box is going to be Linux. Interesting. Any chance the WiiU has secret Mac lineage to complete this?

    It uses IOS.

    Not Apple's iOS, but the "Internal Operating System"-note that capital I.

  4. Re:Sony Hackstation on PlayStation 4 Will Be Running Modified FreeBSD · · Score: 2

    But why? When the PS3's came out with its cell processor, it was very unique and unlike any other processor available. The AMD processor in the Playstation 3 (and XBox One) is just a garden-variety commodity part.

    You just answered yourself. If you already have an AMD system, why not run Orbis on it, getting access to the games written for the PS4? Some might prefer to not get a second computer potentially with less but faster RAM.

  5. Re:Communist China on China Says Serious Polluters Will Get the Death Penalty · · Score: 1

    Who knows, you may even start getting invited to parties again!

    I thought China only had one party.

    Wrong. In the pedantic sense, that is.

  6. Re:Thou hast angered thy King on China Says Serious Polluters Will Get the Death Penalty · · Score: 1

    If you read your link, you would see he did more than report it: he spent a year running a website that made more of an issue of it than the government saw fit, and encouraged others to consider the government compensation inadequate.

    Arbitrary, yes; but it wasn't for reporting the contamination. It was for publicising it.

  7. Re:But a BYTE Is a letter on Introducing the NSA-Proof Crypto-Font · · Score: 1

    IIRC, part of the problem is that the font tables may include arbitrary character numbers; if you use characters a-e and m-p, it's fine for the application to write a PDF that maps those like it would map a-i. (Source: my best recollection of the notes in either xpdf or mupdf, I forget which, that I read a year or two ago...)

  8. Re:attempted murder is not 'drama' on Security Researcher Attacked While At Conference · · Score: 1

    Ahem...Having RTFA, I see nothing about attempted murder; I see attempted rape, actual assault and battery (his attack), and self defense, with a vague reference to fearing "something worse" (which from the context, sounded more like "more serious injuries" than like death).

    And really, I'd see your first step (kill the man who attempts rape) as an entirely justified act of self defense, but what you proposed after that is not self defense. It's on a par with staking the heads of murderers up outside town, or wearing scalps.

  9. Re:Innocent until blogged about on Security Researcher Attacked While At Conference · · Score: 1

    This is the kind of determination to be done at trial time, as any one knows. That, is unless you are hell bent on letting this presumed rapist go scott-free.

    So is that second sentence. If you're going to try claiming "x is something for the courts to determine", be consistent; it's not reasonable to say that a supposed refutation of guilt should be left for trial time, while accepting the claim of guilt.

    Note that I'm not saying that either side is correct.

  10. Re:Thou hast angered thy King on China Says Serious Polluters Will Get the Death Penalty · · Score: 1

    I know that last part is sarcastic, but...finding scapegoats seems to be human nature.
    Which should NOT be construed as saying it's good, or even good enough. But it is preferable that scapegoats not get executed.

  11. Re:Compulsive gamblers on Data Miners Liken Obama Voters To Caesars Gamblers · · Score: 1

    +1, Insightful.

  12. Re:Compulsive gamblers on Data Miners Liken Obama Voters To Caesars Gamblers · · Score: 1

    WOOSH!

  13. Re:Thou hast angered thy King on China Says Serious Polluters Will Get the Death Penalty · · Score: 1

    That may prevent more crimes, but it's not deterrence. Deterrence means that someone who did not commit the crime decided not to, not that someone who did commit it is not able to repeat the offense.

  14. Re:It says "environmental crimes" on China Says Serious Polluters Will Get the Death Penalty · · Score: 1

    I imagine this would be reserved for people dumping tons of toxic chemicals into the local water supply on a daily basis. Provided the right person is prosecuted and not some joe schmoe that was thrown under the bus, I like this idea. I'd like it even more if it was extended to senoir bank employees and politicians in equal measure.

    I expect (a) you're wrong, (b) it's the reverse, and (c) that will only happen when the bank/politician gets in the way of the politicians who actually run the show.

  15. Re:Thou hast angered thy King on China Says Serious Polluters Will Get the Death Penalty · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So who do you execute, then? The entire board of directors, the guy(s) that did it directly, or all of them?

    Whoever you feel like. Including the fellow who happens to have not been involved, but can't pull the strings to get out.

  16. Re:A fine piece of writing on Pro Bono Lawyer Fights C&D With Humor · · Score: 1

    I'm wondering which of Scalia's opinions that was. Can't find it on Google.

  17. Re:If you don't want people to see the source... on Ask Slashdot: Self-Hosting Git Repositories? · · Score: 1

    That "as in the beer sense" is likely a misrepresentation; have you heard of auditing code or patching it yourself?
    I've applied new kernel patches before they became available on the branch I follow; it could have been 2-3 days or more to get the security fix as a compiled update (backport, test, and release).

    Secondly, you should perhaps look at the rhetoric associated with "open source" (the term originally used) before you judge someone a hypocrite for their attitude towards "FOSS" (your choice of terms). The two may be similar in meaning, but the mentality isn't.
    Open source is not "Everyone, you included, should release source and use FOSS, because it's the right thing" but "Open source is better, but still, you can take your pick".

    For example, ESR in Why I hate proprietary software:

    More precisely, I hate the proprietary software system of production. Not at the artisan level; Iâ(TM)ve defended the right of programmers to issue work under proprietary licenses because I think that if a programmer wants to write a program and sell it, itâ(TM)s neither my business nor anyone elseâ(TM)s but his customerâ(TM)s what the terms of sale are.

  18. Re:Why is it odd? on Supreme Court: No Patents For Natural DNA Sequences · · Score: 1

    You seem to be missing something:
    "A gene you have" is preexisting and natural (at least for anyone who can post now...); hence, it is not patentable.
    "My genome" refers to the genes and alleles I have collectively.
    Genes do not spring into existence as a result of sex.
    Rather, sexual reproduction takes preexisting genes and recombines them to create a new collection of genes.

    Unless someone other than one's parents gave birth to a person as genetically equivalent to you as an identical twin and patented the genome before one's birth (otherwise, prior art comes into play), the situation you refer to could not happen.
    In other words: The probability of the first happening is approximately null, with a potential variation less than one quadrillionth (I don't know the real number off the top of my head, but one quadrillion is what 50 genes having two alleles would result in. That's probably a tremendous underestimate of the variation.)
    Also, any offspring one had would not be covered by the patent, because they would have a different set of genes.

    And finally, one could argue that any given combination of preexisting genes is obvious in light of prior art.

  19. Re:It'll do a lot for pre-installed Linux too... on XP's End Will Do More For PC Sales Than Win 8, Says HP Exec · · Score: 1

    Recovery mode? chroot? I would expect anyone who could use a terminal for recovery to know about those.

    For your information, I would chroot in like this:

    mount $ROOTDEV $TARGET
    cd $TARGET
    for d in sys proc dev dev/pts run
    do
    mount --bind /$d $d
    done
    [ -e etc/resolv.conf ] || cp /etc/resolv.conf etc/
    chroot ./

  20. Re:And where have they put the power button on the on Apple Updates MacBooks and Mac Pro Desktop With Haswell, "Unified Thermal Core" · · Score: 1

    And you think a CAD package (which really needs GPU acceleration) is not one of those?

  21. Re:Not Upgradeable? on Apple Updates MacBooks and Mac Pro Desktop With Haswell, "Unified Thermal Core" · · Score: 1

    A couple-year-old Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet card, which works fine with a 2000 Dell Dimension.
    And there's this video card that uses PCI (Fermi, not Kepler, but it's NVIDIA's 2012 entry-level card)

  22. Re:Misread the title... on When Will My Computer Understand Me? · · Score: 1

    Argh. "this"== OP ("Why should a computer understand me when we can't understand each other?")

  23. Misread the title... on When Will My Computer Understand Me? · · Score: 1

    Saw this article and the one about PRISM, thought for a moment thaat it said:
    "When Will My Government Understand Me?"

    And no, Offtopic is not what this is.

  24. Re:Blackstone's ratio, and the burden of proof on Seeking Fifth Amendment Defenders · · Score: 1

    "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."

    That's all there is to it, really.

    +1 Insightful.
    I would give you my last mod point if I hadn't already posted.

  25. The fifth is more than you think on Seeking Fifth Amendment Defenders · · Score: 1

    Here's a scenario you probably didn't think about:
    I (hypothetically) own a farm on a river, where the state wants to put a reservoir.
    With the Fifth:
    State purchases the land from me. I go buy another farm.
    Without the Fifth:
    State compels me to give them title. I have to go find land, sell off my livestock and equipment to pay for it, and end up broke.

    Yes, that is the Fifth. Last clause of it, to be precise.
    As a Libertarian, you should be conviced of its importance by now.

    OK, OK, I'll give you something that's relevant to the right of silence as stated in the Fifth Amendment. Example is drawn from the previously linked video (Never talk to police), but modified because I know this context.
    I buy gas with cash, and so I often have no proof I did so (real fact). I come home on Fridays, and often couldn't provide "admissible" evidence (ie-beyond my family) of having done so until Sunday (past fact).
    Now here's the scenario from the video (purely hypothetical):
    I am accused of having robbed a store in a town a hundred miles away, where I stay and go to college during the week.
    That store happens to be one I purchased goods at previously, and tossed the receipt because hey, I buy with cash, it's something small, there's no way I'll need the receipt.
      But that robbery happens to have been done on Saturday, while I was home.
    A former acquaintance thinks they see me near the store, ten minutes before the robbery. (You should know that mistaken identity happens a lot.)
    I'm accused and brought in for questioning.
    Fifth:
    I say nothing. At court, the case gets thrown out because they have no evidence (except maybe something that from all the law can tell may have been purchased or stolen there)
    No fifth:
    I hear the brief accusation (someone stole goods from such-and-such store on Saturday), protest "I was a hundred miles away! There's no way I could have done that! And I don't have the goods!"
    The mistaken testimony of the former acquaintance is used to establish that I lied, then they produce the goods I bought and threw away the receipt for (not that that would have helped, my name being absent).
    Prosecution says: "As you can see, Mr. So-and-so lied about both his location and having the goods."
    Jury convicts me.