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User: Twon

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  1. Re: This on Facebook Comment Prompts Arrests In Cyberbullying Suicide Case · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I love how /. has truly grown up from being the "Voices From The Hellmouth" crowd to the "waaah, poor baby can't handle a little teasing" crowd. It's the classic "fuck you, got mine" but for advancing through life rather than up the income ladder. Where's the line for deserving sympathy, or even empathy? Does she have to shoot some classmates and THEN kill herself? Does she have to play video games first, and do people have to make that a public issue?

  2. Re:"Recycling" on Apple Now Offering Free Recycling For PCs · · Score: 4, Informative

    Actually, their recycler is apparently certified by these guys:

    http://e-stewards.org/certification-overview/

    which looks substantially better than that.

  3. This is a stupid thing to complain about on 35% Consumers Want iPhone 5... Sight Unseen · · Score: 1

    Of course they do! The iPhone has gotten progressively better from the original to the current version; it's not like you're going to open the box for the eventual iPhone 5 and have it contain nothing but a loose collection of wires and poster tack, with a little sign saying "HAHA PWNED." My wife is squarely in this category, since she's still fighting with an increasingly balky 3G whose apps are getting crashier as they expect to have more modern amounts of memory.

  4. Re:Logical conclusion of this on Data-Mining Ban Struck Down By US Supreme Court · · Score: 2

    They'd have to figure out who the insured is, first, as well as their relatives are -- I'm not sure it'd be impossible with a sufficient quantity of data, but the patient's name gets stripped out of the data in question. I think this is a bad idea for other reasons, but at least there's that. FTFA:

    When filling prescriptions, Vermont pharmacies collect information, including the prescribing physician's name and address; the name, dosage, and quantity of the medication; the date and place where the prescription was filled; and the patient's age and gender.

  5. Re:Birthers still unconvinced Obama white enough on The Internet's New Alternate Reality · · Score: 1

    *slow clap*

    This belongs in the trolling hall of fame. I've read a lot of things on the internet, but this is the first time I've run into an anti-Hawaii screed. That's very creative.

  6. Re:Princeton has very short leases. on Bug Forces Android Devices Off Princeton Campus Network · · Score: 1

    Since you probably know more about this than I do, what are your assumptions about network topology for the nodes in your system? Ad-hoc? NAT? It seems like expecting address stability for a portable device is kind of a losing proposition.

  7. Re:Princeton has very short leases. on Bug Forces Android Devices Off Princeton Campus Network · · Score: 1

    Yeah, that was my reaction as well. While they've done a good job documenting the bug (and it really does sound like Android's DHCP client is broken), they sound like they're missing the forest for the trees. Why does Princeton assign such short leases, you ask?

    "Shorter leases allow us to recover unused IP addresses rapidly, in turn permitting us to assign globally-routable IP addresses to clients without requiring Princeton to impose a NAT between wireless clients and the Internet."

    So my smartphone can have a globally-routable IP address! You know, for the servers I'm going to run on it.

  8. Re:Lets Stop Expanding This Rights Nonsense on Berners-Lee: Web Access Is a 'Human Right' · · Score: 1

    The price you pay for having a society that backstops the quality of life of its least fortunate is that you have a society that does the same for the occasional freeloader. That's the kind of society I wish I lived in, so I'll support changes to that end regardless of the fact that someone less deserving might benefit.

    Do you think your utter lack of motivation to achieve anything beyond "continued metabolic activity" is the default?

  9. Re:They've been sloppy and lazy for years on McAfee's Website Full of Security Holes · · Score: 1

    That fits my limited observations pretty much exactly. We looked at their enterprise stuff during the same project and were completely confused why the straightforward, correct stuff over there didn't make it into the consumer version.

  10. They've been sloppy and lazy for years on McAfee's Website Full of Security Holes · · Score: 1

    About 5 years ago, I contributed to a paper that brought up a particularly brain-dead thing they did with the auto-update mechanism for their then-current consumer version of VirusScan:

    http://www.usenix.org/events/hotsec06/tech/full_papers/bellissimo/bellissimo.pdf

    Long story short -- their ActiveX control exported a wrapper around the Win32 ShellExecute API. What could possibly go wrong? The XSS thing in their help here seems to be of the same "do the simplest thing, damn the consequences" variety; it looks like they've tried to patch the XSS issue but it's pretty weak sauce. Hint to McAfee: Did you know most browsers will load "HTTP://example.com" as readily as "http://example.com"?

  11. Re:Android/iPhone UI performance on Nexus S Beats iPhone 4 In 'Real World' Web Browsing Tests · · Score: 1

    Does the perceived responsiveness of the device count for anything? I'll happily eat that fraction of a second longer the app will take to start up if it means I won't be wondering whether or not I tapped the wrong icon (or missed completely) and the phone can't be bothered to tell me. Similarly, the feeling I get when I see choppy (or worse, stuttery) animation isn't "I'm glad they're using these cycles to compute something more important!" It's "I could be doing this faster myself on an abacus." This is, of course, utterly subjective and irrational, but it's the squishy human factors stuff that Apple's got figured out.

  12. Re:Oh boy on FCC Commissioner Blasts Verizon On Net Neutrality · · Score: 1

    (Parent post is mine as well, wasn't logged in earlier.)

    Yes, I have watched MSNBC, and no, I managed to miss the incident you're describing on CNN. This largely misses the point -- the fact that it's POSSIBLE to miss whatever "Bush=Hitler" incident you saw on CNN, while I can turn on Fox or spin the AM dial pretty much at random and land in a positive feedback loop of "liberals are destroying America."

    I don't watch much Olbermann, but I have seen conservative guests on Rachel Maddow's show (plus a lot of "so-and-so declined our request for an interview"). You can object to her tone during her solo segments if you want, but I have yet to hear her be less than respectful to a conservative guest, even if she's doing her damnedest to dismantle his or her argument at the time (note: calling out bullshit is not the same thing as disrespect). Compare this with the O'Reilly "cut his mic!" shoutdowns over at Fox.

  13. Re:Yes, this has been a problem for Nmap too on Are AV False Positives Hurting You? · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm pretty sure they hate netcat as well; I had to convince my IT guys to whitelist it after it kept getting quarantined/deleted from my machine. Apparently it's a "hacker tool." I wonder when they'll come for tcpip.sys...

  14. Same reason business apps are so expensive on Why Are Tech Books So Expensive? · · Score: 1

    The expectation is that you use the knowledge you gain from using the product/reading the book to go off and make money. Look at the absurd licensing cost of ClearCase, for example -- there is no way that's worth thousands of dollars a seat, but they want a slice of the pie since you're using their software in your development process.

  15. Re:Got any MTA code? Prepare for pain on A .Net 2.0 Migration Strategy? · · Score: 1

    You are absolutely correct, and if I were actually designing this system instead of merely struggling to maintain it, things might have been different. I'm certainly not arguing with the library's good intentions -- however, I'm still stuck in the unenviable position of having to work around them. You mention bad concurrency design -- the problem is that there is NO concurrency design. This app would be perfectly happy in a STAThread -- except for a dependency on a MTA COM object that pukes when you try to use it from a STA context. The guy who wrote the COM object is long gone... :(

  16. Got any MTA code? Prepare for pain on A .Net 2.0 Migration Strategy? · · Score: 1

    I'm migrating code from 1.1 to 2.0 now that uses legacy MTA COM objects to do a lot of its work, and it's been a colossal pain in the neck. Any event handlers that access form controls now throw exceptions unless they're specifically commanded not to, since the controls aren't thread-safe. It also becomes somewhat harder to debug concurrency issues when one of those zillion Invoke() calls that now litter your code decides to deadlock, since things that weren't waiting to join() other threads now are, and it's out of your hands.

  17. Stats on Searchable C/C++ DB surpasses 275 million lines · · Score: 1

    Number of gotos per project would probably be amusing.

  18. Well, THIS sure is helpful... on Apple and MS Battle For Desktop Search Supremacy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Instead of being a static graphic indicating the type of document a file is, an icon in Longhorn will be a smaller representation of the first page of a document." ... so I'll have to read the filenames carefully if I'm trying to grab all the .pdf's I've made of my Word documents if they're in the same directory! Wheee, thanks!

  19. Many, many ways to do this on Multi-Room Wireless Sound System? · · Score: 1

    Hopefully, someday I'll have as much spare stuff as you do! I recommend one central machine running iTunes, so you can share your music collection through the house to satellite machines (also running iTunes). Also, why not put Shoutcast on the same machine? You could then either tune into the house stream from different rooms, or use iTunes to grab specific stuff from the shared library if you wanted something in particular.

  20. Will you people make up your minds? on No Pictures, Thanks · · Score: 1

    It's either "HELP, Big Brother is installing cameras on the light poles and tracking my every move! I DEMAND PRIVACY!" or "isn't there an expectation that, if you're in a public area, you're fair game for being photographed?"

  21. Wait, what? on Russia, China World's Biggest Spammers · · Score: 1

    Wasn't there an article here a few days ago that said 90% of spam was getting send through compromised zombies? Are most of them colocated in China?

  22. Brood War on Diablo II Gets Native Mac OS X Installer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Hopefully they'll do this for Brood War soon, so I can do a proper install on my iBook (which is Classic-free), rather than ditto-ing my desktop install and being stuck with that CD-Key. They have an OS X installer for SC itself, but you can't patch to BW without Classic.

  23. Yet another recommendation... on Online Gaming for Couples? · · Score: 1

    ... for Starcraft, which my girlfriend and I have been playing a lot of recently. You'll probably want to take the advice of some other people here and get a program to do the voice chat if you're going to be playing PC games. Apparently, voice chat in games that have it built in is godawful. There are lots of stories about pimply-faced 13-year-olds squeaking "OMG F*** U N00B" in the most annoying tone of voice imaginable. Just don't do it.

  24. Um, yeah on iTunes Disables MusicMatch · · Score: 1

    It says this RIGHT IN THE INSTALL WIZARD.

    You did READ the screens, didn't you?

  25. But what I really want is... on Mac OS X Dec 2002 Developer Tools · · Score: 1

    ... autocomplete. Minor improvements are nice, but something that would save me huge amounts of time running laps around the devdocs would really make my day.