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User: spitzak

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  1. Re:No winner here, except for us all on Top Five Theaters Won't Show "The Interview" Sony Cancels Release · · Score: 2

    Except NK denied being behind the hacking.

    Now there is no reason to believe anything NK says, but I would think they would be very proud of their computer achievements if they had been behind it.

    The reason they don't falsely claim they are behind it is because they are worried the actual hackers would be found and then it would be clear they were lying.

  2. Re:What? on Federal Court Nixes Weeks of Warrantless Video Surveillance · · Score: 1

    Because they wanted to arrest him for drug trafficking.

    Deporting him would mean he would probably sneak back or arrange with his friends still in the USA to continue drug trafficking. If you assume that drug trafficking is something that you don't want (and under current USA laws is something the police are supposed to prevent) then this is a totally logical approach.

  3. Re:What? on Federal Court Nixes Weeks of Warrantless Video Surveillance · · Score: 1

    I suspect the North Korean will not have a problem getting the USA to give him a tourist visa. He *will* have some trouble getting access to ask the USA for one, and for actually getting out of North Korea to use it.

  4. Re:Zoning laws are tyranny on Waze Causing Anger Among LA Residents · · Score: 1

    http://rationalitate.blogspot....

    Seems like Houston has minimum parking requirements and minimum lot sizes, so no.

  5. Re:No on Should IT Professionals Be Exempt From Overtime Regulations? · · Score: 1

    This hit the special effects industry about 20 years ago. Artists were ruled as not being exempt employees. The companines (at least the ones I knew about) reclassified them as hourly but based their new salary on dividing the old weekly one by 55 hours, not 40.

  6. Re:No on Should IT Professionals Be Exempt From Overtime Regulations? · · Score: 1

    Do you get overtime pay?

    I would not be surprised if you get that too. You may be right about us being chumps.

  7. Re:No on Should IT Professionals Be Exempt From Overtime Regulations? · · Score: 1

    Huh? I have never encountered a programmer who was not an exempt employee.

  8. Re:Red Dwarf question on How Astronomers Will Take the "Image of the Century": a Black Hole · · Score: 1

    The Hawking radiation is very very tiny, and I am pretty certain is impossible to see. Hawking radiation is inversely proportional to the black hole size.

  9. Re:Yes on Is Chernobyl Still Dangerous? Was 60 Minutes Pushing Propaganda? · · Score: 1

    it appears that humans are worse drain than the radiation

    Um, no DUH! That does not mean the radiation is harmless, or even that it is less harmful than the worst predictions. Human settlements are pretty lethal to the reproduction of large animals like that.

    Personally I think the scare of radiation is way overblown, but when you say stupid things like this I realize that there are just as uninformed people on both sides of this issue.

  10. Re:In a Self-Driving Future--- on In a Self-Driving Future, We May Not Even Want To Own Cars · · Score: 1

    I expect a self driving car to be many many times better at lining itself up with a trailer hitch than a human driver. For instance it probably has exact detailed knowledge of the position of the hitch down to a millimeter. Don't know what in the world makes you think this is a harder problem than normal driving.

  11. Re:I'm quite surprised it wasn't on What Would Have Happened If Philae Were Nuclear Powered? · · Score: 1

    It was designed to go to a nearer comet. Due to booster failures they missed the launch window. Several risky maneuvers (such as hibernation) were added to the mission to reuse this hardware.

  12. Re:How about on Window Washing a Skyscraper Is Beyond a Robot's Reach · · Score: 1

    The coatings on the glass are not symmetric. However I guess you could clean it and flip it back. Another problem is that people like to use the area near the windows of their office and put furniture there.

  13. Re:um, no on Scotland Builds Power Farms of the Future Under the Sea · · Score: 1

    That chart is very misleading. It says solar will use many times as much silver as current energy production. However the drawing makes it look like it will use many times as much silver as it would use of aluminum. Actually it will use far more aluminum than silver. Same error applies to every comparison of different materials, whether inside a given energy source or between them.

    The text gets it right: "Solar needs much more silver and tin than other energy sources, albeit relatively little by weight". It also states "solar uses aluminum, and a lot of it, more than one gram for each kilowatt hour". Aluminum is a bigger problem for solar than silver, despite the incredibly misleading graphic.

    Another strange mistake is that the relative use of stuff is biased by the current fraction being used. An obvious one is that it shows Nuclear power as using about 8x as much uranium as "the current power mix". But that is because the current power mix is about 20% nuclear! If "the current power mix" was 0% nuclear then the uranium circle would be HUGE.

    A better graphic would be to show absolute sizes of the materials (to produce a given amount of energy), or perhaps multiply the sizes by the amount of carbon produced to make them.

  14. Re:This article needs fact checking on Scotland Builds Power Farms of the Future Under the Sea · · Score: 1

    Tidal flow is not sinusoidal.

  15. Re:Not a good week... on Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo Crashes · · Score: 1

    It's always fun to see rabid extreme and nonsensical left-wing opinions here. Provides some balance to the right-wing trolls. Thank you.

  16. Re:I call BS on Apple Pay Competitor CurrentC Breached · · Score: 1

    I believe you are correct.

    I think the reason no store charges a credit card more than the cash price is because it will reduce sales. If you go to the store and see an object for $100 you might say "I don't have $100 cash on me right now, and if I use the credit card it will cost $105. So I will go away and come back tomorrow with $100 in cash." Then what happens is you either forget about it, purchase somewhere else, or realize you probably did not need the object anyway. The store has now lost an entire sale, which is a much bigger loss than paying the credit card companies cut.

    People looking to buy gas probably will factor in the fact that they may run out of gas before they can acquire the cash, and thus will buy the gas anyway.

    I think some other items like utilities where you pretty much have to buy from them will also offer discounts for cash.

  17. Re:Unconstitutional for redistricting on Taking the Census, With Cellphones · · Score: 1

    He was talking about the CENSUS, not press freedom, you idiot.

    And I think there were more advanced weapons than flintlocks in 1968.

  18. Re:Opinion are wortheless on Creationism Conference at Michigan State University Stirs Unease · · Score: 1

    The best scientific minds, in their times said the world was flat and that everything revolved around the earth.

    Sorry you are wrong. The earth was known to be a sphere long long ago. It way predates the knowledge that the center of mass of the system was not inside it.

    Showing your complete ignorance of history and science does not help your argument one bit.

  19. Re:Alphabetical order across columns on The Classic Control Panel In Windows May Be Gone · · Score: 1

    "ls" on Unix used to do that (alphabetize across columns). I think it was fixed mid-80's.

  20. Re:Probably the wrong way to fight it anyway on How Lobby Groups Rejected the Canadian Government's Plan To Combat Patent Trolls · · Score: 1

    The patent was not on aspirin, it was on combining aspirin with another drug.

  21. Re:First taste of Mac OS X on OS X 10.10 Yosemite Review · · Score: 1

    It's an issue with their file system (HFS+), which has been made semi-case-sensitive. For example, you can do "mkdir tEsT\ dIrEcToRy" and you'll get a directory called "tEsT dIrEcToRy", maintaining the case that you types in. However, if you then type "rmdir 'Test Directory'" then it will delete it. Essentially, it's case-sensitive when writing but not case-sensitive when reading.

    What it is doing is called "case-preserving". That's what Windows does too. It is always "case insensitive".

    The problem with this is that the rule for whether two strings identify the same file is obscenely complex if you want full Unicode support (plus it will change as Unicode is updated). Most systems give up and only are "case insensitive" for a subset of possible case matches, such as only the ASCII letters. Not using the same rules in different places causes further problems. OS/X has a lot of problems by insisting on "normalization" of filenames, resulting in completely unexpected collisions and renames for files from Unix and Windows.

    I think Unix has the best system: if the strings of bytes are different then they are different files. This moves all problems out of file system support and up to the application level where it is much easier to deal with.

  22. Re:First taste of Mac OS X on OS X 10.10 Yosemite Review · · Score: 1

    Since it considers different numbers of spaces to be different filenames, and considers greek and russian letters that look identical to latin ones to be different filenames, and lots of other things that are much easier to confuse, yes this is a good idea. At least it is consistent.

  23. Re:Not Invented Here on Lead Mir Developer: 'Mir More Relevant Than Wayland In Two Years' · · Score: 2

    I agree that development on Wayland is at a glacial pace. I think Mir is serving a purpose: it actually got the Wayland developers to speed up considerably. But then they slowed down over the last year, so bringing up Mir again may be a good idea.

  24. Re:Open Source in commercial products on Confidence Shaken In Open Source Security Idealism · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, bash was NOT working as expected.

    The expectation was that a bash shell function could be defined by starting an environment variable value with "() {". The purpose of the code was to do exactly that, no more and no less. Yes it did assume the string came from a trusted source and the idea is questionable, but that was not the hole.

    The fact that the code could cause arbitrary commands in the value to be executed at startup was certainly not intended.

    I think it is interesting that this bug was visible in source code for 20 years and until now nobody found it. This includes the black-hats. Not sure what this means...

  25. Re:Ok, but on FBI Says It Will Hire No One Who Lies About Illegal Downloading · · Score: 1

    Burn in hell, you copyright violating scum!