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User: roca

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  1. Re:I May Not Agree on Mozilla CEO Firestorm Likely Violated California Law · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You should know very well that more justifications have been proposed than "it's gross". You may have good arguments against those justifications but what you have presented here is a pretty pathetic straw-man.

  2. Re:The Re-Hate Campaign on Mozilla CEO Firestorm Likely Violated California Law · · Score: 1

    Those of us at Mozilla who haven't quit over this --- which is, as far as I know, all of us --- believe that pursuing our mission of the open Web is more important than quitting to express our disgust. And I think Brendan believes that too.

    Sticking with Mozilla for the sake of our mission, in the face of all this turmoil, requires great strength of character, and I am proud to say that Mozillians have been demonstrating that in spades. Making angry comments on the Internet, on the other hand, requires no strength of character at all.

  3. Re:CSS variables? on Firefox 29 Beta Arrives With UI Overhaul And CSS3 Variables · · Score: 3, Informative

    CSS Variables are actually better described as CSS Custom Properties. They aren't just SASS-style global macros, they're far more powerful. Different elements can have different values for the same custom property, and custom property values set on an element are inherited by its descendants, respecting dynamic DOM changes etc. Custom property values can be set dynamically by scripts and those changes are of course automatically inherited.

  4. "Isolate from the Internet" is hard on Is Analog the Fix For Cyber Terrorism? · · Score: 2

    Air-gap alone is not enough. Stuxnet travelled via USB sticks. And if your hardware (or anything connected to it) has a wireless interface on it (Bluetooth, Wifi, etc), you have a problem ... an operator might bring a hacked phone within range, for example.

    Simplifying the hardware down to fixed-function IC or analog reduces the attack surface much more than attempts to isolate the hardware from the Internet.

  5. Re:LOL on Neil Young's "Righteous" Pono Music Startup Raises $1 Million With Kickstarter · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, we already know it's snake oil. See for example Monty's writeup:
    http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmo...

  6. Re:I wish they would focus on WebP instead on New Mozilla Encoder Improves JPEG Compression · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately WebP isn't all that good for a next-gen format.
    http://people.mozilla.org/~jos...

  7. Re:first on N. Korea Could Face Prosecution For 'Crimes Against Humanity' · · Score: 1

    They were all planning to die, and they had no reason to care about the impact on other Saudis, so it makes perfect sense they would take the simple safe option and carry their own ID.

  8. Re:first on N. Korea Could Face Prosecution For 'Crimes Against Humanity' · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Note, if the NK regime was demonstrably reasonable --- let's say, anywhere between China's government and South Korea's --- it would make a lot of sense to drawn down the US presence. So there is no impasse here.

  9. Re:first on N. Korea Could Face Prosecution For 'Crimes Against Humanity' · · Score: 1

    The US is not occupying South Korea. South Korea has its own democratically elected government running the country.

    A subset of South Koreans don't like the presence of US bases. But with the constant, explicitly stated threats from North Korea, as a nation they'd be suicidal to push US forces out.

  10. Re:first on N. Korea Could Face Prosecution For 'Crimes Against Humanity' · · Score: 1

    Too many people have already died. China's support for North Korea is about their worst sin at the moment.

  11. Re:They're atheists... on N. Korea Could Face Prosecution For 'Crimes Against Humanity' · · Score: 1

    Atheists certainly can behave morally, ethically, and decently, and most do. The problem is, in most cases they do so in defiance of their professed epistemology.

  12. Re:They're atheists... on N. Korea Could Face Prosecution For 'Crimes Against Humanity' · · Score: 1

    Thanks for being honest about the implications of your position in that last sentence.

    The fact that religion, politics, and anything else people care about can be abused to build a power base does not mean those things are in themselves bad. Nor does it mean we should abolish them and become apathetic drudges. Even if the latter was desirable and worked, it's a Prisoner's Dilemma where the first defector conquers the world. So much for freedom.

  13. Re:If on The Ultimate Hopes For the New Cosmos Series · · Score: 2

    Please, no, not more squandering of funds on meaningless manned missions driven not by science or long-term goals but by absurd "human spirit" PR to get more funding for more meaningless missions.

    We need a self-sustaining human presence off this planet, but all paths to get there require robotic mining and construction outside the Earth's gravity well, and that is what we need to be investing in.

  14. Standards-olatry on Google Planning To Remove CSS Regions From Blink · · Score: 1

    I thought standards were there to implement not argue with

    This sentiment is very wrong. It's easy to generate a standard that is no good, and the W3C is often not good at keeping out bogus standards. If we followed this sentiment browsers would burn resources implementing all kinds of useless things like XHTML2, XSL-FO, etc etc etc. "Browsers implement it" is an important and completely reasonable test of validity for any spec, alongside "Web developers use it".

  15. Re:Job limit. on If I Had a Hammer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The pace of innovation and automation is only going to speed up, but people's ability to retrain isn't going to speed up much. At some point, maybe not far away, we'll be eliminating classes of jobs faster than people can train for new ones. What happens if, by the time you've learned to do a new job well, it's likely to be obsolete? And then at some point we'll reach the situation where most people simply aren't capable of doing any useful job as well as a machine no matter how much they train.

    It's ironic that both extreme left-wing and extreme right-wing people believe the fallacy that people are endlessly reprogrammable labour units. Extreme right-wingers believe it because they want to believe people who aren't successful are lazy. Extreme left-wingers believe in a mythical world where every person is a special soul who can achieve anything if they're just given the right assistance.

  16. Works in Firefox on Real-Time Face Substitution in Javascript · · Score: 1

    It works in Firefox for me. The start button remains grayed out for some reason, but you can click on it.

  17. FWIW the NSA did not weaken DES on Unintended Consequences: How NSA Revelations May Lead To Even More Surveillance · · Score: 2
    From the article:

    Nor are reports of intelligence agencies weakening encryption systems anything new -- concerns about NSA influence over the Data Encryption Standard (DES), reach back about four decades.

    While this is true, it's a dumb example to bring up, since it turned out those concerns were misplaced. The serious concerns were that the NSA's choice of S-box values had somehow introduced a backdoor, but since the early 1990s we've known that the NSA's S-box values actualy *strengthened* DES against differential cryptanalysis (an attack which was not publicly known at the time).

  18. Re:YouTube on Firefox Gains Support for VP9 Video Codec · · Score: 3, Informative

    I think you're confusing VP8 with VP9.

  19. What's the point? on Microsoft's NSA 'Transparency' Push Remains Pretty Opaque · · Score: 1

    The moment they receive a National Security Letter, the backdoor is added and pushed out in a regular software update. Or, on the server side, they add a tap anywhere they touch plaintext. Or they hand over keys.

    Every US corporation is an arm of the NSA, except for those that follow Lavabit and choose to shut down rather than cooperate.

  20. Re:I disagree. on Why Are Some Hell-Bent On Teaching Intelligent Design? · · Score: 1, Informative

    Your third paragraph is quite wrong. Well, maybe some Christians believe that people wouldn't know murder is bad apart from the Bible, but traditionally Christianity teaches otherwise, via the concept of "general revelation". It's clear in the New Testament (e.g. Romans 2:15).

    In the fourth and fifth paragraphs I think you vastly overplay your hand. I'm a Christian and was in the USA for 10 years and never met anyone like that, even though I did meet a good number of "creationists".

  21. Re:War! on Mystery Intergalactic Radio Bursts Detected · · Score: 1
  22. Re:It's... OK. on Google Enables VP9 Video Codec In Chromium · · Score: 1

    VP9 will be better than H265 for you as an end user because Youtube will support VP9 and not H265. Google has said so.

  23. Another false dichotomy on Fear of Death Makes People Into Believers (of Science) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The abstract and the commentary imply the canard that faith in science and faith in religion must be at odds. This isn't the case in theory or practice. There is no philosophical incompatibility in believing that science and God both work, or even that God works through science. And in practice, most religious believers exhibit plenty of faith that science works and are comfortable with it.

  24. Re:All we ever wanted... on Epic and Mozilla Bring HTML5 OpenGL Demo To the Browser · · Score: 1

    Leaked IE11 builds support WebGL.

    Chrome has some pretty bad bugs with the element in gaming contexts. But the real solution to audio in HTML5 games is the Web Audio API. This is still a work in progress, but we'll get there. The Citadel demo uses it. If you stand on the bridge over the river and turn around 360 degrees, you should get a nice stereo effect.

  25. Re:Actually ran pretty slick on Firefox OS Phone on Display at LinuxFest NorthWest (Video) · · Score: 1

    Android's entire Java stack --- Dalvik, SurfaceFlinger, stuff like that.