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User: bill_mcgonigle

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  1. Re:Such a Waste on The Hobbit: the Battle of Five Armies Trailer Released · · Score: 2

    sold out to the suits at Warner Brothers

    That's not going to turn out well for them. After the first steaming pile, the subsequent two aren't even on my list. Even if the next two were great, what were we going to do, show our kids only the last half of the story (well, with other random crap thrown in)? It's not like they were going to go back and fix the first one.

    Once the copyright fully expires, somebody will make a great TV miniseries of The Hobbit. The folks doing Pratchet's stories would do a good job, for instance.

    Oh, and Jackson has blown his cred with everybody. Hope the contract with WB was airtight on this trilogy because that payment's gonna have to last for quite a while.

  2. Re:Is it a legitimate collection? on 35% of American Adults Have Debt 'In Collections' · · Score: 1

    Yeah, it should be higher. People are so afraid of a credit rating problem these days that they will often pay off a "bad debt" that is fraudulent to get their score "fixed".

    Creditors know this and are abusive because of it. I tell them to go suck a big one if they pull that crap. It's better to pay cash anyway, but I've actually had very few try to report bogus charges I refused to pay (90% or so are just bluffing).

    Frankly I'd trust somebody with 'very good' credit more than somebody with 'perfect credit'.

  3. Re:Erlang is overrated crap on Programming Languages You'll Need Next Year (and Beyond) · · Score: 1, Insightful

    We rewrote this 9 months of Erlang development in 3 weeks (!) using one senior Java developer. it worked like a charm and still runs flawlessly in production today.

    Then your project was a very poor fit for Erlang in the first place.

  4. Re:Useless without measure of lossiness/distortion on A Fictional Compression Metric Moves Into the Real World · · Score: 2, Funny

    hey, "print 0" runs in O(1)!

  5. Re:What a surprise. on Satellite Images Show Russians Shelling Ukraine · · Score: 2, Insightful

    US Government: "Russia caught attacking another country - the nerve!"

    World responds with skeptical glances from all corners.

  6. Re:perfect solution. Bureaucrats won't find ways t on SpaceX Executive Calls For $22-25 Billion NASA Budget · · Score: 1

    Like they say: "The first rule of economics is that everything depends on scarcity. The first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics."

  7. Re:tor exit node on Ask Slashdot: What Would You Do With Half a Rack of Server Space? · · Score: 1

    Yeah, 10 Meg isn't tremendous, so a Tor exit is probably as good as you can get. It's too small for a mirror host or a torrent seeder.

    I'm assuming you're unwilling to incur 95th percentile charges on your burstable. Tor allows easy bandwidth limiting right in the .conf.

    Still, that's only one machine - 10 meg is easy to saturate.

  8. Re:Simple, block all ads on Nasty Business: How To Drain Competitors' Google AdWords Budgets · · Score: 1

    So much competition, but I'll second the motion.

  9. Re: Well, the GSA could start firing the contracto on Bad "Buss Duct" Causes Week-long Closure of 5,000 Employee Federal Complex · · Score: 1

    You're right - advocates of privitization have always claimed that no private person will ever screw up. Wait, no. So, better to hire somebody who cannot be fired ... because they'll never screw up? Are you sure this story isn't proving the opposite of what you think if does?

  10. Re: Alternative explanation on Enraged Verizon FiOS Customer Seemingly Demonstrates Netflix Throttling · · Score: 1

    If there are many paths to a node their system should be choosing the fastest path.Verizon obviously is not doing that and deliberately allowing congestion.

    And Netflix would happily give them OpenConnect appliances too, to avoid _their_ bandwidth costs as well. But Netflix competes with Verizon's VoD services - this isn't hard to figure out.

    There are at least three underlying problems for the congestion issue - one is the DMCA and related copyright laws that prevent any sort of sane caching, the general fear of multicast that everybody on the Internet still seems to have (half a million unicast streams of the same show is insane - where are the global warming people on this?), and the grants of monopolies and/or prohibitions on competition that prevent local competition.

    Label me shocked if the Netflix app on mobile devices does not have a P2P mode working in the lab right now, as a workaround for us running a sub-par Internet.

  11. Re:SLS and comparing to spacex on SLS Project Coming Up $400 Million Short · · Score: 1


    The SLS is not a deep space vehicle. It's a vehicle to divert tax payer money into the pocket of private enterprises that give a share to politicians. Assuming it ever takes off, it'll be an outdated overpriced piece of shit.

    Understanding this provides predictive capability - that there's basically zero chance that the project will be canceled or defunded, for the reasons you stated.

  12. So, split DNS then? on New SSL Server Rules Go Into Effect Nov. 1 · · Score: 1

    What a junk article - no explanation of what's actually going on and no link to a standard.

    It sounds like what they're inferring is that you need server.example.com, not server.local or server.somemadeupcrap.

    I think most of us cleaned up that cruft when BIND 9 came out with views support.
        This shouldn't impact anybody who hasn't been dragging their heels on fixing their infrastructure for more than a decade.

  13. Re:Wikipedia Never Bans Vandals? on Wikipedia Blocks 'Disruptive' Edits From US Congress · · Score: 1

    Looking into this, this ip address has been vandalising Wikipedia for over 4 years now...

    C'mon, we're working hard enough to undo the "an IP address is a person" myth, to keep the government from smashing people who have shared wifi/tor exits/etc., without perpetuating it ourselves.

    You'll notice a few helpful edits from staffers too - only most of them on Capitol Hill are psychopaths, not all of them. Probably the good editors already have accounts, though.

  14. Re:I will invest in that. on Amazon's Ambitious Bets Pile Up, and Its Losses Swell · · Score: 2

    But amazon has been telling "screw you" to investors ever since it went public in 1998. How long is their long term plan? The only reason investors are tolerating this is because the stock price has gone up as apparently there is no shortage of people who think that huge profits are just around the corner.

    It's not quite that simple - there are profits at Amazon - they are just in certain divisions that are then funding the money-losing divisions.

    Amazon takes a profitable business (remember when they sold BOOKS?) and makes it profitable, but takes those profits to invest in something crazy (like NOT BOOKS, or Kindle, or Prime) and then those divisions get profitable and the cycle repeats.

    If Amazon ever wanted to stop growing as a company it could kill off the non-profitable divisions and show a dividend in short order. This is why the stock has value. Perhaps too much, but the entire market is in a bubble, so it's hard to dice which part of the stock price is which. In some ways stock prices are relative with an absurd floor.

    Investors who have no appetite for such companies can - :gasp: - invest in other companies.

  15. Re:Gots to find more ways to avoid taxes on Rand Paul and Silicon Valley's Shifting Political Climate · · Score: 1

    unless you really though insurance costs would not skyrocket for the new services they provide

    Competition lowers costs, not monopolies.

  16. Re:Gots to find more ways to avoid taxes on Rand Paul and Silicon Valley's Shifting Political Climate · · Score: 1

    I cite every hellhole third world country in the world as my reference, where this is exactly what happens, with few exceptions

    You're citing examples of corrupt governments as reasons why we need to have corrupt governments.

    You have an extremely poor understanding of how power works.

    See above.

  17. Re:Answer needed on Verizon's Accidental Mea Culpa · · Score: 1

    If you truly believe this is the problem, then you clearly have never tried to run a business in that market.

    Incorrect assumption. Been there, done that, got the business cards of half the executive branch.

  18. Vaccine in the 2030's? on Ebola Outbreak Continues To Expand · · Score: 1

    The story I read before this one was about a malaria vaccine that was developed in the early 90's, was known to be effective by '97, and has been awaiting approval since then, while ten million people died from the disease.

    Really, though, it was only ten million families who had to lose their loved ones - that's a small price to pay for the paperwork being in order.

  19. Re:Effective communication on Ebola Outbreak Continues To Expand · · Score: 2

    Who was the sad f*ck who decided to make up a confusing three letter acronym for Ebola?

    But "ebola" has three syllables and "EVD" only has three.

  20. Re:umm duh? on Dropbox Head Responds To Snowden Claims About Privacy · · Score: 1

    Yeah, uh, because all "cloud" services aren't inherently ridiculous for anyone to consider secure or anything...

    Trust the math, not the people.

  21. Re:OK MS bashers. on Microsoft's CEO Says He Wants to Unify Windows · · Score: 2

    They tried that with FX-32 on Alpha (NT4). It wasn't worth it.

    I think Nadella is talking about a unified codebase, like Apple with OSX/iOS and Linux/*BSD, heck even Solaris (a few poor saps are still using that - those with Stockholm Syndrome might even comment here). It's really unlikely that Microsoft will drop the ARM arch - there are too many opportunities there.

    Say what you want, but Nadella seems to be making decisions like an engineer, not a fat marketing stooge or a conniving aspie beancounter.

  22. Bicycles and Jets on 'Just Let Me Code!' · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you want to bring three hundred people half way around the world, don't try to do it on your bicycle.

    If you enjoy bicycling far more than piloting a jumbo jet, then you should be in bicycling, not commercial aviation.

    What, you don't like jumbo jets and nobody wants to pay you to ride a bicycle? Maybe you should invent the hyperloop or manage a B&B instead.

  23. Re:Great on Firefox 33 Integrates Cisco's OpenH264 · · Score: 1

    I always wanted a backdoor in my browser.

    I really did try searching for how this plugin retrieval works but must not have use the right search terms.

    To stay license compliant *AND* safe, Mozilla should sign the modules as they become available, and Firefox should only download them if both Mozilla's and Cisco's signatures verify.

    That being done, there's very little difference between Mozilla shipping the code to you as part of a Firefox update and having the browser fetch it afterwards.

    But if Mozilla is _only_ trusting Cisco's signature, then, yeah, wow, holy cow, back a truck into it.

    Links welcome.

  24. Re:Secure pairing is hard on The "Rickmote Controller" Can Hijack Any Google Chromecast · · Score: 1

    Or given that it has to be connected to a TV, the security pairing code can be displayed on the TV as well and the user enters that code in.

    Anything the Chromecast can connect to is at least 720p - plenty for a QR code with a fairly beefy key.

  25. Re: Texas? on California In the Running For Tesla Gigafactory · · Score: 1

    Texas has a seaport. The other states would require extensive trucking or rail infrastructure to move the batteries in bulk. But where will the next Tesla vehicle factory be built and does the gigafactory plan to have more capacity than Motors requires?