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User: xmod2

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Comments · 61

  1. Re:Glad these things are gone on Maori Legend of Man-Eating Birds is True · · Score: 1

    Polly wants a cracker. NOW.

    Actually, I believe the Maori are darker skinned.

  2. Re:Brainless! on Pain-Free Animals Could Take Suffering Out of Farming · · Score: 1

    While this is a step towards a more sane policy on meat production, you're right in that it doesn't go far enough.

    What is the difference between kicking a stone down the street and kicking a frog down the street?

    If it's only pain, then this is far enough. I'd guess not all suffering is physical though, so I agree with the OP.

    Then again, I guess us vegetarians get grief for eating meat substitutes (seitan, wham, boca) so I'm sure some meat purists would find some way to be derogatory towards those who eat lab meat. ;)

  3. Info on Wi-Fi Allergy a PR Stunt · · Score: 1

    The PR stunt almost worked on me, until I found I was allergic to terrible music.

    A choice gem from a sidebar on The Sun's site by Carol Cooper, Sun Doctor:

    "Wi-fi waves are higher in frequency than mobile phones and are intense due to the amount of info they carry."

    Maybe the reason all these studies are failing to repeat results is because they're not transferring big enough files! One time I got between my computer and the router when I was sending a 10 GB file to the server and it almost knocked my on my arse.

  4. Re:Not many choices... on Wind Could Provide 100% of World Energy Needs · · Score: 1

    And another: Super powers, which come from radioactive spider bites.

  5. Re:nice on Wikipedia Bans Church of Scientology · · Score: 1

    Have you actually read the books? I would have to disagree that religion is 'fine' if you take the books as parables and myths.

    I guess if you're interested in a study of bronze age ethics it would be interesting. No modern value system should be based on such terrible nonsense.

  6. Re:Micropayments on Newspaper Execs Hold Secret Meeting To Discuss Paywalls · · Score: 1

    Sorry, I do not want to have to wear a fur suit to read the NY Times online.

  7. Re:A Dying Breed on "Miraculous" Stem Cell Progress Reported In China · · Score: 2, Funny

    Now if only we could prevent access to those people, the problem would work itself out in a few decades!

    You know, the same way we should prevent Creationists from getting flu shots.

  8. Re:Compromise on Texas Vote May Challenge Teaching of Evolution · · Score: 1

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment

    Intelligent Design == Creationism

    Creationism != Science

    Though I DO think they need to spend equal time teaching the "Rain Dance" theory in Earth Science and not keep polluting my children's head with all of this water-cycleist close minded atheism.

    Teach the controversy!!!

  9. Piracy in the workplace on How Do You Deal With Pirated Programs At Work? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My rule as an IT professional is that if you are making money using the software, you are obligated to reimburse the developer.

    I take a more lenient approach for software used for personal training at home for two reasons:

    1) Those people tend not to purchase the software and would just not use it as an alternative.
    2) Familiarity with the software inspires purchases in a professional environment.

    So personal piracy is freeloading with little/no negative effects on the developer. Profiting from software is a removal of a sale from the developer.

    I was a big pirate in my youth, though I become the biggest hard ass regarding licensing in the professional sphere. Cover your own ass in an email stating that you won't pirate software without a direct order/authorization from above you. In my experience though, small/medium business owners will tend to be on the 'pro-piracy' side of things, so you may want to update your resume if it's a moral issue to you.

    Personally I had pretty good experience just stonewalling them, which caused the staff to put pressure on the higher ups to get licenses purchased. If worse comes to worst, you can always lie and tell them that the license is node locked and calls home.

  10. Re:Meh on Review: Resident Evil 5 · · Score: 1

    People who can't handle relative controls remind me of the mouth breathers who play with un-inverted mouse controls.

    Seriously, there should be a camp for those people.

  11. Wario Land - Shake It on Google's Amazing Browser Experiments · · Score: 1

    The Google gravity reminds me of the interesting Wario ad for wii that was on youtube a while back.

    http://www.youtube.com/experiencewii

  12. Gifting Games on The Age of Steam · · Score: 1

    I had purchased HL2 with Episode 1 and some other expansions a while back to play Gary's mod. Recently I wanted to play Portal and saw that Orange Box was a pretty good package deal, so I picked it up through Steam.

    Steam recognized that I already had a copy of HL2 on my account, and actually added a button that allowed me to GIFT my extra copy of HL2 to another Steam user.

    I was expecting the HL2 bundle part of the package to just be wasted (since I already had it), but the fact that they recognized it as a separate product and even allowed me to give away the duplicate copy sat very well with me.

    I recently purchased DoW2 through them and my download speed was faster than what I was getting for the same product from TPB.

    Steam gets a thumbs up from me.

  13. Re:Number of reasons to make a console difficult on Sony Makes It Hard To Develop For the PS3 On Purpose · · Score: 1

    Yes, but I can probably buy an Xbox 360 and an Xbox 720 for the price of a PS3.

    So you get a longer lifespan, but you're still going to be playing on old hardware. If things continue the way they are going with parallel computing, the next gen consoles may offer non-trivial differences which make upgrading hardware in smaller increments the smarter choice than buying in on a long term investment.

    Personally, I feel it's a cute statement and it was true with PS2 (God of War 2 was amazing), but I don't think that is what made PS2 the winner last gen. It was the huge volume of games (similar to 360 this gen) that made it the console of choice, imo.

  14. Re:This person is screwed, and should be. on Obama Helicopter Security Breached By File Sharing · · Score: 1

    I hope the document was planted. I also hope the people who use the plans use them to program their missles. Then when they fire them, they loop back around and land on them as they all run away and there are hilarious sound effects.

  15. Re:I'm in Japan for six months... on What Carriers Don't Want You To Know About Texting · · Score: 1

    Japan is also the size of California.

    Rolling out similar coverage in American would be commensurately more expensive. There is a similar problem with broadband Internet in the states.

  16. Re:Send an e-mail to EA's president on Spore DRM Protest Makes EA Ease Red Alert 3 Restrictions · · Score: 1

    http://consumerist.com/5045443/consumerists-4-most-frequently-given-ways-to-kick-ass

    The Consumerist's 4 Most Frequently Given Ways To Kick Ass. An Executive Email Carpet Bomb usually works best by sending mail to as many executive accounts as you can get a hold of.

    http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/companyOfficers?symbol=ERTS.O&WTmodLOC=C4-Officers-5

    Here is a list of executives from Electronic Arts. It's untested, but if the first.last@ea.com nomenclature holds true, it may be a good place to start for a list of addresses.

  17. Re:Ernest Borgnine says different on Research Suggests Polygamous Men Live Longer · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Only on Slashdot would this be modded "insightful".

  18. Re:I was at DEFCON - the author is confused on A Good Reason To Go Full-Time SSL For Gmail · · Score: 1

    Mike Perry's talk was similar to last years SideJacking talk, except his method is active vs the method last year being passive. It also seemed that Mike was a little pissed that the SideJacking technique got all of the press, when both techniques were presented around the same time.

    In the SideJacking attack, you would passively sniff traffic and then hijack session cookies in order to masquerade as the user.

    In Mike Perry's method, you actively inject a small img tag into an unencrypted HTTP request (ie. Place and img src="http://mail.yahoo.com/" in a request to http://www.cnn.com/). Since the 'secure' flag isn't set on the cookie, the session cookie is sent unencrypted when the users browser contacts http://mail.yahoo.com/.

    The Google fix only works if you use the "Always use SSL" option, as it forces the secure flag to be set. Just browsing to httpS://mail.google.com/ would still allow the hijacker to inject image tags to http://mail.google.com/ as soon as you browse to another unencrypted page.

    The Middler talk (a separate talk) would do something similar, though it would capture your logout requests to prevent you from expiring the session cookie and would also rewrite all httpS links as http in order to keep you trapped in an unencrypted session.

  19. Re:Electronic privacy on Archiving the History of Virtual Worlds · · Score: 1

    Even better.

    There is an addon for WoW called WoW Census which does a /who of online players and reports the information back to their servers afterwards.

    You can browse each server and see level densities, race balances, etc.

    On top of that, they have a character history function where you can track at what times each character in the system was seen and what level they were.

    http://www.warcraftrealms.com/charhistory.php

    At that link you can find out just when a person rolled, how fast they leveled, periods of inactivity, a history of guilds they've been in, etc.

    We use this tool already when recruiting to see if the recruit has a high turnover in level 70 guilds.

    I'm sure something similar could be created to parse the XML data periodically off of wowarmory.com.

  20. Re:Not Necessarily News on The Flat Earthers Are Still With Us · · Score: 1

    What is more impressive IMHO is that much more ancient cultures like the Aztec 'had it right' thousands of years before these 'Flat-Earth' ideas were new.

    Thousands of years? The Aztec Empire was established in the 14th century.

    I don't know why you would consider that ancient, though I guess they DO have around 100 years on that '500-year old debate.

  21. Re:I can only hope on Hans Reiser Leads Police To Nina's Body · · Score: 1

    I'm happy to prevent him from causing any more suffering

    Though I suggest the only people who would have had to be worried would be future spouses.

    I'm more inclined to support prison sentences for people who commit violent crimes against strangers, rather than one off occurrence between two people who have a lot of history and vitriol. Putting them in prison doesn't do anything to better protect society and is only useful to satisfy some primitive desire to punish.

  22. Re:AI is a moving target on Whatever Happened To AI? · · Score: 1

    Seems a lot like the relationship between philosophy and science.

  23. Re:Truckload? on Warhammer Online Information by the Truckload · · Score: 1

    If all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take 550,000 Truckloads of calculators.

  24. Re:And on the plus side. of plus-size.. on Fat People Cause Global Warming, Higher Food Prices · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately, based largely on our reluctance to elect people who will raise taxes coupled with our desire for government programs, it seems the only way out of the recession is with both higher taxes and a cut in government programs.

    http://www.publicagenda.org/issues/frontdoor.cfm?issue_type=economy

    Personally, I would rather tax luxuries and those who over-consume.

    Fatty.

  25. Re:Original Paper & Obvious Criticisms on Women's Attractiveness Judged by Software · · Score: 1