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User: billstclair

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  1. I despise password rules on Why Gmail Has Better Security Than Your Bank · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Picking a secure password is the user's responsibility, not the web site's. I use Diceware to generate my passwords. A five-word Diceware password has 77 bits of entropy. That's equivalent to a 15-character password chosen randomly from upper and lower-case letters, numbers, and 13 special symbols. Most can memorize the Diceware password in a few minutes. Few of us can ever remember the random password. Yet many web sites refuse to allow spaces between diceware words, and demand that I use an upper case letter and a number or special symbol. I curse every time.

  2. Re:If you have the opportunity on U.S. Drone Attack Strategy Against Al-Qaeda May Be Wrong · · Score: 1

    The US Army: creating terrorists since 1968, or was it 1945?

  3. Re:Autism Schmautism on Measles Outbreak In NYC · · Score: 1

    I know the theory. I just don't entirely believe it. Measles, mumps, chicken pos, and rubella are all normal parts of growing up. Filling young children with so many vaccines in such a short period isn't good. See Agent0013's comment.

  4. Re:Autism Schmautism on Measles Outbreak In NYC · · Score: 1

    Thanks for your voice of reason. People are so incredibly afraid of disease. It's a natural part of life. I don't think we really know what we're doing trying to short-circuit so many diseases.

  5. Re:Autism Schmautism on Measles Outbreak In NYC · · Score: 1

    Thanks for the details. I said that Tetanus is an exception. You gave a better reason.

  6. Re:Autism Schmautism on Measles Outbreak In NYC · · Score: 1

    Sounds like "the science is settled" from the globular warming lemmings. A million people can claim that two plus two is five, and it remains steadfastly four.

    You don't get to decide ANYTHING about my children. Ever.

    Herd immunity isn't. Plenty of vaccinated people get Measles. Almost nobody who has gotten Measles gets it again.

    My son is grown and very healthy. My daughter has Lyme, which sucks balls.

    I maintain that so many vaccinations are destroying the natural immunity of the human race. At our great peril.

  7. Re:Autism Schmautism on Measles Outbreak In NYC · · Score: 1

    Er... Not rubella. Pertusis. Rubella is only immunized against because it can cause problems with pregnant mothers, who get it due to partial immunity from immunizations.

  8. Autism Schmautism on Measles Outbreak In NYC · · Score: 0

    Autism wasn't the reason I didn't vaccinate my kids. I wanted them to have REAL immunity to childhood diseases, which you only get by catching them and getting over them. The only exception is Tetanis, which often causes permanent damage. Measles is good exercise for a developing immune system. Chicken Pox is a joke, unless you get it later in life, because you got only partial immunity from a childhood immunization. Polio is usually not even noticed, expressing only as a cold. And it started disappearing BEFORE the vaccinations started. Rubella (Whooping Cough) is a hard one. The disease is no fun (the Chinese call it the "100 day cough", and I can attest to that accuracy), and can be harmful to children less than a year old. Older children get over it, and adults have no problem with it. Diptheria really IS dead in the west. HEPA and HEPB don't happen in children. Flus are good for you, mostly.

    Now. Everybody flame away. I have a very thick skin.

  9. Constitution? What Constitution? on House Committee Approves Bill Banning In-Flight Phone Calls · · Score: 1

    For the life of me, I can't find anything about airplanes or phones in the Constitution. But then, I can't find Constitutional authority for 95% of the legislation that comes out of the swamp or for 99% of the federal bureaucracy. "Congress shall make no law...", "... shall not be infringed": ignored daily.

  10. Profitable or worthless on Neil deGrasse Tyson Says Private Business Will Not Open the Space Frontier · · Score: 1

    If it isn't profitable enough for private enterprise to do it, it's not worth doing. End of story.

    Of course, that's true of everything.

  11. Wrote My Own on Slashdot Asks: How Will You Replace Google Reader? · · Score: 2

    In a few days of spare time, I added an RSS Aggregator to my blogging engine. Only tracks a single list of feeds per blog, and only works in Lisplog, which is currently not easy for non-wizards to get bootstrapped, but it serves my purposes.

      https://billstclair.com/blog/aggregator/
      https://lisplog.org/aggregator/

  12. Re: Visual Studio on Taking the Pain Out of Debugging With Live Programming · · Score: 2

    Lisp has been supporting this for over 3 decades.

  13. Emacs to the rescue on Google Bumps Up Search a Notch With Google Nose BETA · · Score: 2

    I think this is the first time I've used the Emacs m-x rot13-region command.

  14. What a Racket! on The Zuckerberg Tax · · Score: 1

    The parasites are ever thinking of new ways to extort more money from the productive. Atlas gonna shrug.

  15. Speakers, Compression, DAC on Why Your Dad's 30-Year-Old Stereo Sounds Better Than Yours · · Score: 1

    Good sound doesn't have to cost a lot. I first upgraded my computer sound a little over a year ago. Bought some M-Audio AV40 powered monitors for $150. There are lots of choices in that price range, all much better than the cheap speakers you get from your computer dealer. The next important thing is to replace your compressed music with FLAC or ALAC. That means buying CDs and ripping them, or downloading from HDTracks or one of a few other places that sells uncompressed downloads (there are also plenty of FLACs available as torrents, if you swing that way). I've been accumulating CDs since 1984, so I already had plenty, and just had to re-rip them without compression. Once you've done that, you can make a third improvement by buying an external Digital-to-Analog convertor (DAC). I use the NuForce Icon uDAC, for $100 (or a little more for the HD version), but there are lots of choices there, too. An external DAC routes your music through your computer's USB port, routing around the cheap DAC inside most computers. That $250, plus ripping time, brought my computer music up to very near the level of the $2,000 system I bought in 1984.

    The next step up is to buy $400-$500 speakers, an HD (96KHz/24-bit) DAC, and HD music (from, e.g. HDTracks.com). But most people won't care enough to go that extra step. That made my computer music much better than I ever had in the eighties.

  16. Deja Vu on Google Ties Employee Bonuses To +1 Success · · Score: 1

    Reminds me of a certain fruit-logo company, who hired a soft-drink marketer as CEO in the nineties. He tied employee profit sharing to market share, instead of, well, profits. Nearly ran the company into the ground. Until the wunderkind who made the mistake of enticing the soft-drink marketer returned and realized that no matter your market share, if you're profitable, you get to stay in business.

  17. Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree on 9/11 Made Us Safer, Says Bruce Schneier · · Score: 1

    We could certainly use that money better. Give it back to the people who earned it, from whom it was taken by extortion (taxation).

  18. 43? More like 5 on Google Street View Shoots the Same Woman 43 Times · · Score: 1

    I guess if you count all the photos at each location, you might get 43, but I can see the lady and her dog from only 5 locations. Start at Anonymous Coward's Direct Link, back up a couple of steps, go north on Cooks road, rotating to look south, and back up a couple more steps. The cop car keeps following for a little while, but the lady disappears.

  19. Re:purell on Why Kindle 2's Screen Took 12 Years and $150 Million · · Score: 1

    Another way to save trees would be to make paper out of hemp. But darn, it's illegal to grow hemp, even the non-psychoactive industrial variety, in the US. Bunch of neanderthals.

  20. Squash tyrants like bugs on Students Put UCLA Taser Video On YouTube · · Score: 1

    Too bad any of those pigs is still breathing.

    Remember, folks, if you decide to resist a nazi in any way, you've got to be ready and willing to kill it.

  21. Re:Speaking of PGP... on PGP Is 15 Years Old · · Score: 3, Informative

    The free trial is also hard to find, likely intentionally so.

    http://www.pgp.com/downloads/desktoptrial2.php

    It's fully functional for 30 days, then falls back to the functionality of the old PGP Freeware product, i.e. you can encrypt and decrypt files, windows, and the clipboard, and you can create, import, and manage keys.

  22. Register Story on Palm To Purchase Be's IP · · Score: 2, Informative

    The Register has the story at www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/21080.html. Palm will pay $11 million in stock. Be's shareholders still have to approve the deal.

  23. Many happy memories on Infocom's Dave Lebling Interviewed · · Score: 1

    This article brings back many happy memories. I worked at the MIT Lab from 1976-1978, while Zork was being created. I was an undergraduate. I wrote Fortran and PDP-11 assembler code to collect data for the morse code decoding project. Also wrote my very first Life game there, displayed by frobbing two D/A converters connected to the X & Y inputs of an ocscilloscope. I remember late nights sitting in front of the Imlacs, shooting at each other in the maze game that PDL (Dave Lebling's login) helped write.