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User: PigleT

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Comments · 962

  1. With enough short-sighted right-wing politics and populism, I wouldn't be surprised if the UK became a destination for transportation these days.

  2. Re:The monitoring services they use suck on Game of Thrones Pirates Being Monitored By HBO, Warnings On The Way (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 2

    I'm not at all surprised. Years ago (around 2002-3, I guess) I wrote a little honeypot website - it would emit random words and phrases from the titles of songs, actors/actresses, movies etc, appended with various file extensions. The kicker: all the "links" were handled by the same script that only ever emitted text/html with yet more links...

    That garnered an officious legalistic DMCA screed back in its day; my colo ISP was suitably amused when he heard the nature of the site.

    Goes to show they just ran brute-force searches for keywords and automated the sending of offensive emails. There's a word for bulk unrequited email again, isn't there? :P

  3. Just because... on Maybe You Don't Need 8 Hours of Sleep After All (theatlantic.com) · · Score: 1

    The Palaeolithic era ended 10k years ago.

    Get as much sleep as you want, use sleepbot and/or fitbit to measure it and add your own quality ratings, grab the data and run it through R to plot a histogram for yourself. It's more scientific than assuming the past should dictate such things as "people may be meant to sleep".

    FWIW I enjoy 7.2hr on average. Over 8 is nice but tends to be met by a sub-average duration the next night to compensate.

  4. Re:I think I know the question on all our minds on GNU Emacs 24.4 Released Today · · Score: 1

    This is emacs. The question is not whether it can read email, but which way you want to do it.

    One of my colo servers has a permanent screen session in which one virtual terminal is dedicated to running emacs -f gnus. I access it daily (normally when email needs rescued from procmail+bogofilter).

  5. Re:How about we hackers? on Debate Over Systemd Exposes the Two Factions Tugging At Modern-day Linux · · Score: 1

    Ten years ago I'd've laughed at you and pointed out that even experimental things have to become mainstream somehow.

    I wonder what the demographics of yea/nay-sayers are like?

  6. Re:How about we hackers? on Debate Over Systemd Exposes the Two Factions Tugging At Modern-day Linux · · Score: 1

    Reminds *me* of Slowlaris.

    Must be one of those `enterprise' things.

  7. Re:So.. on Studies Conclude Hands-Free-calling and Apple Siri Distract Drivers · · Score: 1

    *Are* rules about drunk-driving, speed limits and seatbelts actually necessary?

    The way to look at it is this: some eejit over ----> there writing a "rule" down on a piece of paper is not going to have a measurable effect on whether I crash or not in a given period. Laws are not there to prevent Newtonian physics. Accidents gonna happen. However, they *are* there in order that, when you wipe-out and take a bunch of folks with you, they then have grounds on which to prosecute your piddly ass - the same set of grounds as anyone else doing the same silly thing. That's where the fairness comes in.

    For this reason, I suggest that people chill out about use of mobiles whilst driving - stop treating the act as inherently wrong, but by all means consider it a potential contributing factor when an accident occurs.

  8. correlation my ass on Studies Conclude Hands-Free-calling and Apple Siri Distract Drivers · · Score: 1

    Has anyone made a study of how much mobile usage in a car does NOT result in crashes?

    I can guarantee that 100% of crashes involved oxygen, so we really must ban oxygen use in cars.

    It should be pretty obvious that another missing, presumed unconsidered, dimension is people's ability to choose when they might reasonably use a mobile device whilst driving, and for how long.

  9. Re:"This isn't a permanent feature" on Test Version Windows 10 Includes Keylogger · · Score: 1

    It's a lot harder to prove that something doesn't exist, especially once we know it *can* exist.

  10. Re:So what is the solution? on 'Just Let Me Code!' · · Score: 1

    I think it's pretty obvious that no one IDE is going to be the best. What's actually needed is the understanding that, no matter how many IDEs you care to standardize upon, the compiler only cares about the language. It's the fact that you're calling free() before you malloc() that causes a segfault, not whether you push F9 or F2 or type `make' to compile it. Expect text-editors to edit text and choose the one(s) that make your job easiest. The supposed integration between IDE and language just makes for a layer of glue that can come apart.

  11. Re:Who is stopping him? on 'Just Let Me Code!' · · Score: 1

    It's the large IDEs that I hate. I've tried Eclipse 3x in my life and each time has resulted in very quick uninstallation.

    Kate is quite adequate. A few "sessions" for work and evening projects, and easy switching between them, a few shell functions to build+install projects... I'm happy enough. Lets me concentrate on the project and the language(s) involved with minimal environmental fuss.

  12. "It's just metadata" on UK Gov't Plans To Push "Emergency" Surveillance Laws · · Score: 3, Informative

    The BBC news is reporting that apparently it's not as bad as it could be because it's not storing the content of phone-calls made, just who was called and when.

    Anyone who wants to know just how powerful mere "metadata" actually is should go read http://kieranhealy.org/blog/ar... .

  13. Assumption on Ask Slashdot: Are You Apocalypse-Useful? · · Score: 1

    "computer science and related professions useless"

    Hardly. All this does is show an assumption that the life of the modern geek is wasted on frippery such as social sites, etc.

    Maybe we won't have electricity for a while. We'll remember, and recreate it. Meanwhile, a knowledge of computability, efficiency and optimization, security and ethics is transferable to other fields.

  14. Don't block anything on Ask Slashdot: User-Friendly Firewall For a Brand-New Linux User? · · Score: 1

    Security by blocking bad things is a very bad idea, a completely false sense of security.

    Couple these together instead:
    default-deny (got that much correct);
    incoming, open stateful continuations of established connections;
    incoming, open ports for services you run (e.g. web- and dns-servers, etc), with rate-limiting per source.

    iptables will allow this, no problem.

    There is no point in "automatic" firewalls that detect bad things and block sources; all they do is clutter-up your firewall rules for the sake of an event that (1) comes under default-deny and (2) is already history - people doing bad things are mostly operating fire-and-forget.

  15. Ineptitude as well on English High Court Bans Publication of 0-Day Threat To Auto Immobilizers · · Score: 1

    This is the same VW that have failed to diagnose my faulty immobilizer 3 times now, is it? If I knew the exploit then at least I could disable the blasted thing myself and get moving again when it plays up!

    Or maybe I'm being hacked remotely and don't know it...

  16. Re:P2P had no effect on music sales? on What Various Studies Really Reveal About File-Sharing · · Score: 2

    You're right that artists invest time to produce a product. Where the remuneration-via-IP argument falls down, however, is in the proportion of sales their agents rob them of in practice - see http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/

  17. Re:P2P had no effect on music sales? on What Various Studies Really Reveal About File-Sharing · · Score: 1

    I have two suggestions:

    1) Counter-sue the RIAA for the fraction of broadband spent upstreaming free publicity for them.

    2) {Jamendo, etc} {stumbleupon, etc}

  18. Not humanity... on Is Humanity Still Evolving? · · Score: 1

    I'm not surprised the species is evolving. However, humanity isn't doing very well given the tenor of news in the YRO section on here, for starters.

  19. Re:If you have something that you don't want on Data Engineer In Google Case Is Identified · · Score: 1

    Three key words: You have the *right* to leave your house doors open, but if you do, you'll find your *insurers* take a dim view of your sense of *responsibility*.

    The analogy may or may not apply well to wifi.

  20. Re:How many of those where linux pc's again? None on Researchers Say Kelihos Gang Is Building New Botnet · · Score: 2

    It's a simple case of majority-ism. Most facebook users will be on Windows and probably IE, so if you're going to make a trojan, to make your job easy that's who you target.

    Security isn't limited to exploits in the scope of a user's OS; it's all about privacy, and messing in their web-identified spaces also counts as a security violation.

  21. Re:Why is everyone picking on Toyota? on Do Car Safety Problems Come From Outer Space? · · Score: 1

    Those of us who own a toyota have been to their website and checked the system that tells us whether our cars are affected.

    I'm lucky - my Rav4 is a particular vintage that claims not to have the problem.

    The greater majority of other Toyota owners probably do have the problem, if a check of the affected models (most) and vintages (most) is anything to go by.

    The fact that they have a webpage addressing the problem tells me (a) it's got big publicity (b) they sort of care (c) their investigations have led them to find some criteria whereby they can tell a particular car is susceptible or not. That tells me maybe they know what it is, and that talk of cosmic radiation is just speculative BS.

  22. Re:Is there realy a problem? on Do Car Safety Problems Come From Outer Space? · · Score: 1

    Scary anecdote, although the plural of anecdote is not data(TM).

    There may still be the effect of brakes failing "suddenly" - in this past winter, I left the car for 3 days, probably with damp brakes and it froze overnight etc. Sure enough, setting off, the first couple of corners had no brakes (insert scared yelling here) but they came back with increased use just fine.

    So you'd need a bad coincidence: wet/damp/frozen brakes, not burnt in, *and* a runaway accelerator. That reduces the chances some.

  23. Re:Why they tell you to turn off your phone... on Do Car Safety Problems Come From Outer Space? · · Score: 1

    We once had a honda civic in the family that flipped half its valves off as it felt the urge.

    Cruising at 70mph along a flat bit of motorway: suddenly it decided it needed more valves and sidled up to 85mph, all without moving my foot at all.
    Same journey, trying to overtake up the middle of a motorway, going uphill: it decided it didn't need the "power" and halved the valves, killing the speed to barely 50mph forcing an apologetic swerve back into the slow lane.

    Never driving one of *those* again.

  24. Re:Glossy only? on Apple Announces New MacBook, Pro, Air · · Score: 1

    Under what circumstances would you actually try to do colorimetry off a screen, instead of analyzing the source data? I can't imagine why you would measure an analog rendering of digital data, confounded by ambient light, dirt on the screen and so forth, instead of just going to the digital data.

    Hmm. Just about every time I take a photo to the printer's, I think.

  25. Re:But all decent pirating services... on The Pirate Bay's Plans To Encrypt the 'Net · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That way all traffic appears to be going to the same port, regardless of service. Because it's encrypted, no DPI can be applied.

    Maybe not but your local friendly government of choice could legislate something like the RIP Act and demand keys to the traffic on that one port.

    A sensible solution would be to promote the spread of IPv6 which I gather has scope for IPSEC built into the specs.