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User: Bradmont

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  1. Re:Star Trek covered this on Time Dilation Drug Could Let Heinous Criminals Serve 1,000 Year Sentences · · Score: 1

    This was also the first thing I thought of. While the summary crosses ethilcal lines with talk about virtually limitless sentences, I think this is a potentially *more* humane form of punishment than what we do now. Of course in the DS9 episode, it was unjustly administered and the virtual prision conditions were awful, but this sort of treatment could mitigate some of the reintegration problems that people coming out of prison experience. They could serve a 10 year sentence without missing 10 years of their family's life, of cultural advance, of lost wages, and so on.

  2. How? on NSA Can Retrieve, Replay All Phone Calls From a Country From the Past 30 Days · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So do they have the cooperation of the target country? Or have the infiltrated the entire communications infrastructure of the world? This is really creepy.

  3. Re:Firefox OS is great... on Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat · · Score: 0

    Install Emacs. All you'll need then is a text editor.

  4. Re:*Shrug* on Adobe's New Ebook DRM Will Leave Existing Users Out In the Cold Come July · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You can also get the paper books far cheaper if you buy them used. You can also sell them after you're done with them. It's called ownership, and it's becoming less and less accepted by the copyright industry.

  5. Re:Arnold Rimmer sir... on Startup Out of MIT Promises Digital Afterlife — Just Hand Over Your Data · · Score: 1

    He's Arnold, Arnold, Arnold Rimmer
    Without him life would be much grimmer...

  6. Re:Canadian driving on Atlanta Gambled With Winter Storm and Lost · · Score: 1

    No. My car is seven years old with 170 000km on it (a little over 100k miles), and we're on our 2 1/2th set of tires (long story why, but we wind up replacing 2 at a time). This is in a province where winter tires are required from December 15 to March 15.

  7. Why do we pubslish these comments? on VC Likens Google Bus Backlash To Nazi Rampage · · Score: 1

    The man is obviously an idiot. Why do news sites carry these sorts of comments? If it weren't for the, "OMG LOOK WHAT THIS GUY SAID!!!" reactionary attention grab, these sorts of comments would get exactly the response they deserve: being ignored by everyone.

  8. Re:Unfortunately, More to Come on Facebook Is a Plague That'll Burn Out In a Few Years, Says Study · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately spaceface.com is already registered. Here I thought I had my one shot at making millions...

  9. Re:Get off my lawn? on Stop Trying To 'Innovate' Keyboards, You're Just Making Them Worse · · Score: 1

    I use capslock to switch keyboard layouts, as I need to regularly type in two different languages. It's quite handy for that.

  10. Re:Isn't just the keyboards on Stop Trying To 'Innovate' Keyboards, You're Just Making Them Worse · · Score: 2

    Or... a TV...

  11. Re:The hard part on Building an Open Source Nest · · Score: 1

    Don't forget a "humedify" button, which is integral in colder climates. When it's below -20C for weeks on end, the dryness is unbearable...

  12. Copyright implications? on Programmer Debunks Source Code Shown In Movies and TV Shows · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So if the code is taken, used, and redistributed without acknowledgement, is that copyright abuse? I imagine tiny snippets would fall under fair use, but if a substantial block of code from, say, a GPLed project is reproduced without acknowledgement or attaching the license, what are the chances the filmmakers could be held liable?

  13. Re:It's 2013 on Panoramic Picture Taken By China's Moon Lander · · Score: 3, Funny

    Yea, like, couldn't they, like, just stick an iPhone on that thing, LOL?!?

  14. Re:Dropbox drop-in replacement? on Owncloud 6 Brings Collaborative Open Document Format Editing to the Web · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The significant differences would be:

    1) it's open source, and
    2) it's self hosted, so you don't have to trust Google with your data (but at the same time, you probably wont have the reliability that comes with trusting Google with your data).

  15. When is American Thanksgiving? on China's "Singles Day" Is the World's Biggest Online Shopping Blitz · · Score: 4, Funny

    As a Canadian, I want to prepare for my online shopping discounts, but I can never remember when it is...

  16. TAS on 5-Year Mission Continues After 45-Year Hiatus · · Score: 3, Informative

    Didn't The Animated Series finish off the last two years of the five year mission? With the original cast and everything.

  17. Re:Pretty darn useful little machines on Acer Officially Announces C720 Chromebook · · Score: 1

    Does netflix work when you have dev mode on? This is the main hesitation I have to setting crouton up on my wife's C7.

  18. Re:Lazaridis is insane on BlackBerry Founders May Try To Take Over the Company · · Score: 2

    No, it's that he feels he hasn't finished beating the horse. It's not quite dead yet.

  19. Re:What will this mean for Steam on other distros? on Valve Announces Linux-Based SteamOS · · Score: 2

    Many modern games are pretty enormous to install; often taking 5-10 gigs or more of hard drive space. In comparison, my entire / partition, including all* the software I have installed on my laptop (kernel, X, KDE, productivity software, web browsers, SQL servers, and thousands of other things), weighs in at 8.8gigs. In cases where a game absolutely requires a certain version of a library, it would be much more sensible to just statically complie them for distribution via steam. Maybe it would increase download sizes by 1%. Even if it cost an extra 10% (it wouldn't), making a consistently functional experience would be well worth it for Valve.

    *except steam games, which are installed on a different partition

  20. Cylon Basestar on AquaTop Immersive Display System: Get Your Hands Wet to Sink Some Files · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Sounds like the UI on the Cylon ships in the new BSG series

  21. Re:What exactly have they opened? on NVIDIA Open Sources SHIELD's Operating System · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Really? I'd love to read more about that.

  22. Re:Apple is overrated on Apple Isn't the Next Microsoft (and That's a Good Thing) · · Score: 1

    Try KDE? Or LXDE? Or E17? Or OpenBox? Or xmonad? Or the command line? Or any of the myriad other UI options you have available to you in any Linux distribution?

  23. Re:2 points on Other Agencies Clamor For Data NSA Compiles · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The "It hasn't actually caught any terrorists!" argument (also applied to the TSA), while tempting, is an error on the part of anti-spying advocates. This is a mistake for two reasons:

    1. It puts the emphasis on the incidental situation, and not the actual violation of rights. So it makes it easy for the opposition to straw-man the civil liberties point of view, for example, that they're arguing based on a waste of money.
    2. The technology may well advance to the point where it does work. If our argument is frequently presented as "it doesn't work," when that changes, the civil liberties cause will take a massive hit to its credibility.

    So, it's better to stick to the real issue, which is that these programs are a violation of peoples rights.

  24. More about the ideal than the phone on Ubuntu Edge Smartphone Funding Trends Low · · Score: 4, Interesting

    While this looks to be a great phone, the crowdfunding campaign is about a lot more than getting a cool phone; it's about proving an idea: that there is a market for special-run, innovative devices. If they succeed, they could seriously change the way phones are produced, and we could see an influx of really cool hardware projects in the future. This is important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the opin hardware movement. While using open hardware is not a goal of this project, if they manage to succeed, we could see something similar for fully open smartphones not too far down the road. Shuttleworth said in his Reddit AMA that this might be an idea for the next iteration (though I wouldn't put too much stock in that). However, if the concept is proven, others could follow suit pretty quick. So, it's not so much $800 for a cool phone, but an $800 investment in the future of computing.

  25. Open Source on Why Netflix Is One of the Most Important Cloud Computing Companies · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It frustrates me that a company that relies so heavily on open source technologies on the server totally snubs users of those same open source technologies on the Desktop.