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User: Deagol

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  1. Re:Rationing is what we need. on Americans Less Healthy, But Outlive Brits · · Score: 1

    I realize this, but ignorance by the populace is not my problem. It's not like we're doing so well on that front anyway. Half the problem, of course, is medicated livestock feed. Antibiotics are used as a feed additive because it somehow lets animals put on weight faster, so many grower/starter feed rations have antibiotics in them. But a huge problem is ignorant soccer moms who insist in a round of penicillin for ever little sniffle Little Johnny gets.

    That said, my 12-year-old son has never once been administered antibiotics, as my wife and I know what a problem it is. I've only had them twice in the past 10 years, my teen-aged daughter maybe once in her life. Obviously, the ignorant reap what they sow (like in Mexico, though they've put a stop to OTC antibiotics), though it can obviously be a problem for the rest of us.

    I prefer a more libertarian solution to health care, as the current system is far too restrictive and screws over the poor (and the self-taught).

  2. Re:Though shit on Former Student Gets 30 Months For Political DDoS Attacks · · Score: 1

    Your valid criticism lost a lot a sway when you so lightly invoked prison rape. Don't be a douche and please stick to the facts.

    I will point out that a lot of people (many of whom I will assume, like myself, have never been convicted of *anything*) are complaining about other people's sentences, so it's not like only those with a rap sheet have a monopoly on decrying the joke of a justice system we currently have.

  3. Re:Rationing is what we need. on Americans Less Healthy, But Outlive Brits · · Score: 1

    The problem is that the medical establishment is a self-protectionist racket. I have no problem with astronomically-priced doctor salaries, drugs, and equipment. If the rich want to blow a $million+ on end-of-life care that buys them 1 month on life support, then who am I to argue. However, in return, I kindly ask that the AMA get kicked to the curb, licensing be a voluntary requirement for practicing, and that we allow effective OTC meds (like antibiotics) to be sold. There's no reason a retired army medic, nurse, or EMT should not be able to perform procedures for folks who want to avoid (or cannot afford) the high-price of a "real" doctor or ER. Nor is there a good reason why we shouldn't be able to effectively self-medicate if we're intelligent enough to do so. (Yes, I have successfully self-medicated with feed-store antibiotics. It's not rocket science.)

  4. Re:A sure-fire way to make me HATE your product on Fighting Ad Blockers With Captcha Ads · · Score: 1

    That's a little harsh. I personally think that *The Last Airbender* has been one of the best cartoons to be produced in recent memory, from a normal US TV source anyway. I haven't been so hooked on a cartoon since *Animaniacs* and *Batman: The Animated Series*".

  5. Re:What is he hiding? on British Teen Jailed Over Encryption Password · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's worse, given an over-zealous prosecutor. Search for the "little lupe child porn case". Poor dude had videos of an obvious, over-18 "pro" and even though a phone call and a fax would have produced the age custodial records, the prosecutor refused to cooperate and plowed head-on with trying to ruin the defendant. I hope there's a special hell for this woman (the prosecutor).

  6. Re:Good Article on Native ZFS Is Coming To Linux Next Month · · Score: 1

    I've used FreeBSD since 6.0 as my daily workstation, and I have few complaints. I'm currently running 8.1-RELEASE/amd64 on a 4-core machine, 8GB ram, and almost a TB of ZFS space. ZFS isn't the best performer, granted, but I beat it up pretty good and have nightly snapshots running, and stability has never been an issue.

    I can count the number of times FreeBSD has locked these past 5 years on 1 hand. 3 were due to the 3rd-party fuse-ntfs3 port (non-stock, try to avoid it when I can), and 2 from reading the entirety of /dev/mem with certain programs (not sure why this happens, and it surely must be a bug).

    And I don't know why people dis the ports system, as I find it far more functional than anything in the Linux arena I've ever used. Yes, gentoo fans, this includes portage.

  7. Re:Good Article on Native ZFS Is Coming To Linux Next Month · · Score: 1

    You forgot the output to "mount" or "zpool status" or "zfs list".

  8. Re:Good Article on Native ZFS Is Coming To Linux Next Month · · Score: 1

    UFS supports the geom journal (gjournal) journaling system, which reduces fsck times to something reasonable. It's not 100% absent, as with ZFS, but it works very well. Still not as fast a filesystem as straight UFS2, but faster than ZFS. I hear there's a journaling system being bolted onto soft updates, so that should prove to be an interesting development. Not sure what it offers over gjournal.

  9. Re:It's The Law! on Terry Childs Denied Motion For Retrial · · Score: 1
    Boucher was unique in that he was compelled to reveal *again* what he already revealed to the border guards: the data on the encrypted drive. Since he already gave up the evidence once voluntarily, compelling him to give the means to show them the same evidence didn't qualify for 5th Amendment protection. I personally think this makes sense. Had he never consented to the border search, the case (if any) would have hinged on the very issue we're all interested in.

    The Cybercrime link above elaborates a bit on U.S. v. Kirschner, which supports the assertion that divulging unknown passwords constitutes testimony which can qualify to be protected under the 5th.

    The specific issue of passwords may be unclear, but I think that the generic question of testimony of unknown facts leading to unknown incriminating evidence is pretty straight forward. It would be nice to see the SCOTUS address this issue once and for all, but I'm thinking it will take a while before this happens.

    Not sure why you mentioned typing the password vs reciting it, but the same blog had an interesting article about how typing a cellphone password was ruled to have the same protections under Miranda as verbal testimony. I love that blog; it makes for some very interesting reading.

  10. Re:It's The Law! on Terry Childs Denied Motion For Retrial · · Score: 1
    Fortunately, you are wrong. See this Cybercrime blog entry (written by a law professor) for the gory legal details. The meat and potatoes of the post:

    The Supreme Court has held, basically, that you're giving testimony - testifying - when you're communicating, i.e., when you're revealing your knowledge of certain facts or sharing your thoughts or opinions with the government. U.S. v. Kirschner, supra. You can't claim the 5th Amendment privilege to refuse to surrender physical evidence such as your blood, hair or saliva; it only applies to communications, i.e., to something that look like what a witness does when she takes the stand at trial.

  11. Re:Private? on Google Found Guilty of Australian Privacy Breach · · Score: 1
    I don't know about that.

    I've recently begun following the Cybercrime blog, and this article talks about legal expectations of privacy, and (as I see it) the bar seems set pretty high. As usual with her blog entries, lots of supporting case law sprinkled throughout, so don't expect to coast through or skim these posts (unless you happen to be a lawyer). Sadly, the trend I've seen over my time of reading her stuff is that the courts seem to provide law enforcement with most of the wiggle room based on legal minutia, while denying that same wiggle room to the defendants. To my layman's eye, the system seems skewed in favor of the state.

    In any case, if you have the time I heartily recommend adding this site to one's daily reading regimen. I think admins and users alike could stand to have a half-decent understanding of how the laws are currently being applied to our trade/hobby.

  12. Re:First on Firefox 3.6.4 Released With Out-of-Process Plugins · · Score: 1

    FreeBSD/amd64 8.1-PRERELEASE with firefox-3.6.3,1. Uptime 2.75 days, with the browsing being open almost as long without shutdown. At this moment, I have 11 tabs split across 2 windows (one fullscreened on 2 different virtual desktops). Virtual: 1252M. Resident: 1100M. It starts fresh at between 200 and 400MB, then continues to climb. By the end of the week, it'll be pushing 2GB resident. Glad I have 8GB to throw around.

    Plugins: WikiLook, Web Developer, User Agent Switcher, Screengrab, Noscript, Linkchecker, HTTPS Everywhere, Ghostery, Font Finder, Firebug, Download Helper, Adblock Plus, and Customize Google.

  13. I thought this was well established? on Airplanes Unexpectedly Modify Weather · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The data from the near-universal grounding of US airspace the days following the 9/11/01 attacks shows pretty conclusively that air traffic has a non-trivial affect on weather patterns. Or at least that's what's I recall from the time.

  14. Re:There are no other questions on Will Your Answers To the Census Stay Private? · · Score: 1

    What practical purpose does genealogy have? Why would I give up my privacy to help those in the far future satisfy idle curiosity?

    For one thing, it helps Mormons to baptize the dead that haven't been saved yet. Whether this wretched practice is "practical" I leave as an exercise to the reader.

    As for the Census, I only answered the 1st question (number of household members) and sent it in. A head count is all that's required for population-based allocation of representatives. Anything more is fodder for gerrymandering, and I won't be a party to such.

  15. Re:Really... on Adobe Warns of Reader, Acrobat Attack · · Score: 3, Interesting

    > A spreadsheet app is also substantially larger than a PDF reader.

    This *is* Adobe we're talking about here. For grins, I just installed Adobe Reader 9.2 and Gnumeric 1.9.16 on a XP VM, and for the informal survey of the "Program Files" directory, Adobe (203MB) weighs in at almost twice that of Gnumeric (106MB).

    I vote for using the best app for the job. In the case of this thread, I wholeheartedly think the spreadsheet is that tool.

  16. Re:Use Tax on Calling B.S. On Amazon's Taxation Arguments · · Score: 1

    That's because there's an assload of taxes lost/avoided in Utah due to tithing (10% off the bat), LDS churches and stake houses *everywhere* occupying prime otherwise-taxable real estate, and the fact that the chain of Deseret Industries thrift stores counts as a double whammy (no sales tax on the goods *and* a way for people to deduct "donations" by offloading their garbage). Never mind the above average family size, which means more kids and thus more child credits and deductions.

    More power to the state of Utah for trying to get its fair share in taxes.

    Personally, I opt for the "estimated" use tax option when filing. Since it's based on a percentage of income, I likely come out ahead since my income is low but I buy a huge amount online (even food). Besides, I don't keep records of much of anything, so it's not like I could come up with the actual numbers anyway.

  17. Re:Slaves wear collars on Are You a Blue-Collar Or White-Collar Developer? · · Score: 5, Funny

    A telecommuter I hope?

  18. Re:I don't get the phone obsession on Verizon Doubles Early Termination Fee and More · · Score: 1

    The term "incommunicado" came into being for *some* reason. Hmmmm.... I wonder what it could have been. "Impossible" my ass. My family hasn't had a cell phone for 3 years, and it's great. If we're not home, we're, you know, not reachable. It's great! We even have kids, and when the wife and I go out for lunch or a dinner and we leave the kids home, we can't even be reached by them. ZOMG! I know, I know... having the neighbor's and restaurant's phone number on a refrigerator post-it note is *so* archaic.

  19. Re:While I don't have any use for the program on Microsoft COFEE Leaked · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They'll get you, one way of the other.

    I'm too lazy to find links, but there was a case a while back of some minor who was accused of accessing child porn from one of Yahoo's services. By all accounts I've read, the defense correctly used the high probability of malware infection to introduce doubt that he actually downloaded the CP himself. Facing a harsh, drawn-out legal battle (as most defendants in these cases do), the family took a plea. The boy plead to a count of (something like) corruption of a minor. His "crime"? He apparently gave (or displayed -- can't recall) some adult magazine to one of his fellow under-aged buddies.

    That's right, folks, some kid ended up with a criminal record and a listing on his local sex offender list for looking at nude pin-ups with a friend, something countless curious teen boys have done since nude centerfolds have been around.

    Won't somebody think of the children?!?

  20. Re:What about the banks? on Washington Post Says Use Linux To Avoid Bank Fraud · · Score: 1

    Ugh... my credit union takes not only my login/password, but displays a picture and phrase that I picked out of a list, *and* asks me a question. Kinda inconvenient, but I'm pretty sure I won't be logging into a bogus server in the near future.

  21. Re:Its a Server OS... on OpenSolaris vs. Linux, For Linux Users · · Score: 1

    I'm running Flash on FreeBSD/amd64, by way of the Linux emulation layer. It's documented in the handbook, and it's pretty easy to get going. As much as I despise Flash's abused ubiquity, I've found it worthwhile to have it installed for guilty pleasures like Pandora, Hulu, and RagDoll Cannon. In fact, it runs more smoothly on my machine than natively on the OpenSUSE box in the living room.

  22. Re:And next they'll want them to get off the lawn on Has Texting Replaced Talking For Teens? · · Score: 1
    "For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life -- I wrote this some years ago -- that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest."

    Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

  23. Re:Obligatory XKCD on Kernel 2.6.31 To Speed Up Linux Desktop · · Score: 1

    PCLinuxOS is a pretty good KDE-based distro.

  24. Re:back in my day on School System Considers Jamming Students' Phones · · Score: 1

    What's your definition of success? Mine is pretty much not ending up in jail or on the street homeless. If people didn't feel the need for the lavish "middle class" lifestyle we all seem to think we are entitled to by merely drawing breath, then they could get buy with a GED or less. The propagation of this "get a college education or you'll die a crack whore on the street" boogeyman seems to lead to a lot of needless stress and suffering.

  25. Re:back in my day on School System Considers Jamming Students' Phones · · Score: 1

    Concerning the hypothetical you've pulled out of your ass, the intelligent parent would simply call the school's office and have them notify the student. You know, the way it used to work for the 50 years or so before cell phones were the norm.

    Seriously, folks, why make this such an intractable problem?

    Many a person's grandfather took a rifle or shotgun to high school, either for ROTC practice or fragging some dinner on the walk home. I sharpened pencils in the hallways of my high school with the Swiss army knife I've been carrying daily for 25 years now. Somewhere along the way, we decided those utilitarian devices were more of a problem than a benefit in schools, and even suspicion of having one will get you patted down by a cop today. The cell phone has apparently become a disruptive device in the school environment, so let's accept it and move on with educating the kids.

    Did parents cry foul when told their kids couldn't take boom boxes to school? ZOMG! Little Johnny won't be able to tune into the emergency broadcast system if there's a Russian attack! Of course not, that's a silly bullshit excuse, just like all the ones we're hearing now. If it wasn't a necessity before it became ubiquitous, then it's not a *need* now.

    Don't like it? Pull your kids out of school and teach them yourselves. That's what I did.