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User: bill_mcgonigle

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  1. 20 years, eh? No more excuses on MIME Attachments Are 20 Years Old Today · · Score: 2

    For no option for MIME-formatted mailing list digests!

    It's so silly that I usually have to subscribe to instant mails and write a procmail filter for lists I only read once in a while.

  2. Not Your Photos on The Lytro Camera: Impressive Technology and Some Big Drawbacks · · Score: 1

    Ugly:

    Much of the LFC experience is mediated via Lytro's website - at present there's nowhere else that can interpret the files or present them.

    As a result of someone hacking the version of the 'light field' that is sent up to the Lytro site, it has become known that the camera analyses the depth information in each image and the desktop software renders a series of JPEGs representing the key depths in the image. ...

    The downside is, of course, that you are currently dependent on Lytro not just to host, but to provide any form of interactive online access to your own images. The trustworthiness of Lytro - which we've no reason to doubt - and its long-term business viability aside, this presents some real concerns for early adopters. Lytro insists that it does not claim ownership of your pictures that you upload - 'they are yours' - but reserves the right to refuse to host or remove your images if it believe they conflict with the company's terms and conditions.

  3. Re:Better 3d? on The Lytro Camera: Impressive Technology and Some Big Drawbacks · · Score: 1

    Ok, but then you have to watch it alone

    Marty McFly Jr. showed us how this works, but really it's bad manners at the dinner table.

    With stereo depth and eye tracking, it does explain how it's reasonable to use while driving, though, especially while scanning for oncoming traffic in six directions.

  4. Re:ICANN's corruption finally has consequences on US Government Withdraws IANA Contract From ICANN · · Score: 3, Interesting

    And nobody needs hundreds of additional TLDs, either. There is no clamor of voices among the billion people on the Internet for .pepsi or .google or .dell.

    Dozens or hundreds of additional TLD's are indeed a dumb idea. But thousands is a great idea - it would put an end to squatting and most WIPO domain disputes. Really specific ones like .coop and .museum are a step in this direction. They need to continue with .plumber and .geek.

  5. Re:Too bad it's Affero on LastCalc Is Open Sourced · · Score: 1

    Since you seem to know, can you give a brief description of the difference between AGPL, GPL

    By way of example:

    With GPL, if you want to take a web project, modify it heavily, and sell a service based on that software and its modifications, you can do that. You have no further obligations.

    Under AGPL, to do the same thing, you need to contribute changes back to the project (effectively).

  6. Re:Looks like you could use an update on Iran War Clock Set At Ten Minutes To Midnight · · Score: 1

    Thank you for the current references.

  7. Re:Ides of March on Iran War Clock Set At Ten Minutes To Midnight · · Score: 1

    I'll also ask this: If Iran's program is peaceful, then there's no reason for them to limit access to UN inspectors. Yet, they are limiting access to UN inspectors. Why would they do that? Occam's Razor --> Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

    Is that an exact quote from the lead up to the Iraq war or just a paraphrase?

    Not everybody acknowledges the sovereign supremacy of the UN, you know. Kinda like how the US won't let the UN people talk to Bradley Manning.

  8. Re:California on Coca-Cola and Pepsi Change Recipe To Avoid Cancer Warning · · Score: 1

    I WISH I could get coke with sugar in it. It tastes so much better than that High Fructose Corn Syrup bullshit.

    Go to the Mexican grocery, but it doesn't really matter, they're both about 50/50 glucose/fructose.

  9. Re:California on Coca-Cola and Pepsi Change Recipe To Avoid Cancer Warning · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Everybody knows that everything causes cancer in California.

    I suspect that the 12t of sugar in a can of Coke will do far more health damage than the 4-methylimidazole. Possibly even cancer-related.

    Oh, but California would rather you die of complications of diabetes or heart disease than cancer. No, really, that's the unavoidable conclusion.

  10. Re:Should do that with Matrix 2 and 3 on Topher Grace Screens Star Wars Prequel Re-edit · · Score: 0

    I thought Part 3 was a good ending

    I guess tragedy does have its fans.

  11. Re:Ides of March on Iran War Clock Set At Ten Minutes To Midnight · · Score: 4, Informative

    they have no desire to get nuked

    Fortunately for them Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program, just a civilian nuclear energy program. Even Israeli intelligence feels attacking Iran is a bad idea. Though, it'd be real good for the military industrial complex and the financiers.

    I'd like to think we'd go along as a show of support

    Really, we should kill people in far off lands who don't threaten us because some war-mongers are creating propaganda about fake weapons of mass destruction? Didn't we just learn this lesson?

  12. Declare Victory on NASA Boss Says Mars Colonization Will Be Corporate Only · · Score: 1

    NASA should declare victory on getting space into commerce and throw a party before their funding is completely eliminated.

  13. Ides of March on Iran War Clock Set At Ten Minutes To Midnight · · Score: 1

    except the US has now been at war for almost 11 years and most people are tired of it and the 5000 or so dead soldiers. there is close to 0 public support for another war

    The Iraq war stared on March 20th and the Libyan War started on March 19th.

    This can go one of four ways:

    1) it happens now, in the hopes that it's over by the election
    2) it happens shortly after Obama is re-elected
    3) it never was going to happen - it's all a ruse to get the Republicans spitting crazy so that come election season, Obama can look like the reasonable voice on War (assuming Dr. Paul isn't the nominee)
    4) Israel goes nuts at a random date and the US has to decide whether to light off WWIII.

    I suggest erring on the side of not killing more brown children for political agendas.

  14. What, no torrent? on Topher Grace Screens Star Wars Prequel Re-edit · · Score: 5, Funny

    He also seems to want to favor storytelling over merchandising, which is a strange and unusual concept.

  15. EFF/CCIA/Redhat taking it to SCOTUS on Apple Wins Patent For "iWallet" · · Score: 1
  16. Re:Doomed on New Programming Languages Come From Designers · · Score: 1

    ad 2) But what does the finest Haskell help me if I can't access a CD, Bluetooth or a XMPP server...

    See also, "scriptability".

    ad 3) .... Also, this determines the amount of help and easy-to-access documentation. Which again makes a language popular or not.

    And in the case of an Internet-connected language, it's so much more. I still use perl a lot, not because of the syntax (which is OK, but sometimes a bit frustrating) but because of CPAN (the module collection), CPAN the software to install it, the RPM guys who care to package all that for me, the CPAN admins who ages ago got contributors to sign their packages, the perlmonks guys who always are eager to help, and the community that is intolerant of inconsistent interfaces and crummy performance. And not only intolerant about such issues, but willing to help make it better. "Lazy with a capital 'L'," as Larry says.

    I keep trying all the others and the new ones, but the lack of the above keeps me from jumping ship and becoming less efficient.

    If I use a different language, it's only because it's really so much better of a tool for the job, and then sometimes I'll still use perl for glue (just learned a new DSL yesterday and used this model...).

  17. Re:Pneumonia Wins Again on Training an Immune System To Kill Cancer: a Universal Strategy · · Score: 1

    when your kids hit retirement age, SS will be swimming in money -- if Congress doesn't steal it from them like it has from us.

    You're assuming no major medical advances (gene therapy, replacement organs, stem cell therapy, telomere extension, cancer vaccines, etc.?) It's likely that we'll both have people on SS longer than they were contributing, and that we'll have 5-6 generations on simultaneously with 3-4 generations supporting them.

    The only potential bright spot is that those advances might cut down on Medicare cost, which is the far larger unfunded mandate. Unless there are age wars or some sort of Logan's Run society. SS has long since ceased to be a social safety net for the last couple years of life and has morphed into a country-club retirement entitlement (for those with some independent savings, of course).

  18. Re:So you'll feel the same way about Bradley Manni on Details Of FBI Surveillance In Lulzsec Takedown Emerge · · Score: 1

    After all that's what he did. Worse still he had actually taken a formal and solemn oath (written and oral) not to reveal the secrets he did.

    But his duty to report war crimes is higher than his oath of secrecy. His oath to the Consitution is higher yet.

  19. Re:Worst association ever... on George Takei Helps Facebook Troubleshoot MySQL · · Score: 2

    Oh, come now, Sulu was helmsman, not engineering.

  20. Re:This is why I have DSL on Ask Slashdot: What Is an Acceptable Broadband Latency? · · Score: 1

    You are lucky as hell. Comcast in Michigan was delivering 1200ms delays to most sites on AT&T endpoints

    What Comcast's network is seems to be largely based on who owned it before Comcast bought it up. I happen to be on an 'Adelphia' network, as far as wires on poles goes.

    But Comcast could certainly have installed VOIP-thwarting traffic shapers in the past 4 years or so since they acquired Adelphia and they haven't.

    Broadvoice ws actively reccomending it's customers to avoid Comcast at that time because Comcast was also intentionally screwing with VoIP traffic.

    If they had any evidence, there would be an FCC action. More likely is your area uses crappy old traffic shapers; I had that problem on a local ISP before Comcast - VOIP was horrible.

  21. Re:Hitachi (IBM) Deathstars on Western Digital's Hitachi Storage Takeover Approved With Restrictions · · Score: 1

    My personal favorite is when you're trying to RMA the hard drive, and the person on the other end has you run a bunch of diagnostics that say the drive is fine.

    Why would you talk to a human about this? I just fill out the web form and mail them back.

  22. Re:foxnews? really? on LulzSec Leader Sabu Unmasked, Arrested and Caught Collaborating · · Score: 1

    a more respectable source

    Multiple sources, as usual. I'm happy to have TFS summarize those multiple sources, but we shouldn't single-source anything - everybody is biased.

  23. Re:it's a mole! on LulzSec Leader Sabu Unmasked, Arrested and Caught Collaborating · · Score: 1

    So, attempted murder should not be a crime? Say, you know, if you miss with the gun you use, and just hit the brick wall next to the person you were trying to kill? No victim! No crime.

    The standard test under the 'no victim, no crime' doctrine is whether the prosecution can produce an aggrieved party.

    If you attack my servers, even if you don't get in, I'm aggrieved,

    If you smoke a joint on your couch, I'm not.

  24. Re:Latency has a couple of sources... on Ask Slashdot: What Is an Acceptable Broadband Latency? · · Score: 1

    http://www.bufferbloat.net/

    Just a note on running the cerowrt distribution (where the bufferbloat research is implemented) - you need to run a wndr-3700v2 (I've been consistently successful getting v2 refurbished units) but now that the wndr-3700v3 is out, that doesn't work with cerowrt - you'll need the wndr-3800 if you're buying new (I haven't seen 3800's available as refurb yet).

    It closely parallels the WRT-54G and then WRT-54GL situation (without Netgear having learned from the headaches Linksys caused us with that one). The wndr-3[7,8]00 does appear to be the heir apparent to the 54G series, though. I'm happy I bought mine.

  25. Re:This is why I have DSL on Ask Slashdot: What Is an Acceptable Broadband Latency? · · Score: 1

    Comcast builds in buffering in the modems to cause latency and jitter.

    this is my cross-town ping - both corps on Comcast:

    64 bytes from example.com (172.16.217.57): icmp_req=6 ttl=60 time=13.6 ms
    64 bytes from example.com (172.16.217.57): icmp_req=7 ttl=60 time=15.9 ms
    64 bytes from example.com (172.16.217.57): icmp_req=8 ttl=60 time=20.2 ms
    64 bytes from example.com (172.16.217.57): icmp_req=9 ttl=60 time=18.6 ms
    64 bytes from example.com (172.16.217.57): icmp_req=10 ttl=60 time=18.8 ms
    64 bytes from example.com (172.16.217.57): icmp_req=11 ttl=60 time=14.5 ms
    64 bytes from example.com (172.16.217.57): icmp_req=12 ttl=60 time=19.0 ms
    64 bytes from example.com (172.16.217.57): icmp_req=13 ttl=60 time=14.2 ms
    64 bytes from example.com (172.16.217.57): icmp_req=14 ttl=60 time=22.9 ms
    64 bytes from example.com (172.16.217.57): icmp_req=15 ttl=60 time=16.0 ms
    64 bytes from example.com (172.16.217.57): icmp_req=16 ttl=60 time=17.5 ms