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User: 1u3hr

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Comments · 8,173

  1. Re:"An Universe"? on The Death of A Universe · · Score: 4, Insightful
    It's called "epenthesis"--the insertion of a sound becuase the language seems to dictate it.

    No, it's called a mistake, because the language doesn't dictate it, a semi-literate "editor" does, who remembers half the rule he learnt in primary school. It's the mindless extension of a rule, like putting an apostrophe before every final "s" when it's neither a possessive nor a contraction.

  2. Re:"An Universe"? on The Death of A Universe · · Score: 1
    I believe "it's" has now become an acceptable way to write the possesive of "it," for example, given that nearly everyone does it.

    No it aint. I make a lot of typos, but I don't try to excuse them by saying "nearly everyone does it". It's still a mistake, and it's not really that hard to remember, is it?

  3. Re:Diversity is a survival factor on Apple's School Days are Numbered · · Score: 1
    The Trash icon changes...

    Wel, it didn't in Mac OS. And even now, it seeems not just obscure, but perverse, to use the same action that deletes a file to burn one -- ie, make a copy.

    Back in OS7 days, I once tried to explain that to eject the floppy you moved it to Trash. The user just refused to believe me, and said that would delete her files, so continued to use the instant eject key (Command E, I think), though it screwed up any open files on the desktop.

  4. Re:Diversity is a survival factor on Apple's School Days are Numbered · · Score: 1
    Yes, and who would honestly think, "I should click 'special' in order to shut down my computer?"

    Or that you put a CD or floppy in the Trash to eject? And now it has the action of burning files to a CDR! -- what kind of metaphor is that? Not everything is "intuitive" on a Mac.

  5. Re:Dangerous in the wrong hands? on Satellite Views Of The Blackout · · Score: 1
    >>Well, that's where my money is, based on history. "Terrorists" want to evoke terror.
    >No, its the fulfillment of their goals. The most recent ones want US troops out of their homelands.

    If you mean that terrorism isn't an end in itself, of course. Terror is the method terrorists use to achieve their goals.

  6. Re:Dangerous in the wrong hands? on Satellite Views Of The Blackout · · Score: 1
    But will it compell them to remove their soldiers from the other guys homeland? News at eleven.

    It has worked; for instance it got the British out of Palestine.

  7. Re:Dangerous in the wrong hands? on Satellite Views Of The Blackout · · Score: 1
    Hmm, I'd have to disagree. For just the two days that we were out, it's not a big deal... it's actually kind of novel, an adventure. But it sounds like you weren't here:

    No, I wasn't anywhere near the WTC either, but that terrified me. This doesn't.

    you can live off peanut butter & jelly, and canned tuna for a few days; but that's going to get old really quick

    That's terrifying? Not much more than a slightly interesting anecdote in a year or two.

  8. Re:Dangerous in the wrong hands? on Satellite Views Of The Blackout · · Score: 1
    terrorists...just aren't interested in economic damage, only initial body count.

    Well, that's where my money is, based on history. "Terrorists" want to evoke terror. Economic damage isn't terror.

    Guerrillas, however, do inflict economic damage as a tactic to weaken the government, which they hope to replace.

  9. Re:Dangerous in the wrong hands? on Satellite Views Of The Blackout · · Score: 1
    they'd be spat upon for installing another "US puppet" government (cough)shah;marcos;noriega(cough). So I guess there was no way to win there, eh?

    Well, maybe they could have tried to install democracy (as was done in Japan and Germany) rather than corrupt dictators. It seems to work out better in the long run.

  10. Re:Dangerous in the wrong hands? on Satellite Views Of The Blackout · · Score: 2, Insightful
    OTOH, cutting off power immediately before an "actual" attack could cripple the response.

    Actually, the opposite. I bet the military went on high alert as soon as the power went off. Of course, civil disaster response would be hampered. But it would add a layer of complexity -- the timing has to be perfect, and it's more people in the loop, and more likelihood of leaks.

    The US had weapons specifially designed to attack the Iraqi power grid, but I don't think the US has to worry about a conventional military attack on its mainland.

  11. Re:International Competition for Microsoft on China Upgrades from Microsoft Office · · Score: 3, Informative
    Wrong, wrong, wrong. WPS Office 2003 is for Windows, not linux. So this isn't a victory for Linux, as the Chinese Government will run the office suite on windows.

    Not the whole story, from your link:

    The three teams are developing three versions of WPS Office: one is WPS for Linux, another is WPS Office 2003 for Windows, and the other is WPS Office V6 for both Linux and Windows.
    So assuming that the original story is exactly true, even if the initial order is for the Win version, it would be much easier to transition to the Linux version from the same company in a year or so, perhaps in lieu of buying the next Windows upgrade, or when hardware is replaced. The same strategy as Sun in releasing Star Office for Windows as well as Linux and SunOS. First break the MSOffice umbilical, then changing OS isn't so hard. No need to mess around with Crossover and such.
  12. Re:Dangerous in the wrong hands? on Satellite Views Of The Blackout · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Come on. 'Sensitive' information can be found in any street map you buy from the corner store.

    IN SOVIET RUSSIA they used to "hide" whole cites such as the "Atomic City" full of nuclear bomb workers; they weren't on any maps. Of course, the CIA knew exactly where they were -- by satellites if not otherwise. So who were they keeping it secret from? Their own citizens.

    The power grid is composed of enormous power stations, with thousands of workers, the power lines are either huge pylons you can see for miles, or if underground, emblazoned with warning signs. If they tried to hide these, the first thing you'd notice would be a large increase in outages due to lines being cut by backhoes, etc.

    As for whether "terrorists" would target the power grid, I don't see it. Not much bang for the buck. How many died in this, the biggest outage in the US for decades? A half-dozen. It'll be forgotten in a few weeks. Blowing stuff up and killing lots of people is much simpler and does a much better job of terrorising the population. Cutting the power off for a few hours just pisses them off. (With apologies to anyone on a heart-lung machine.)

  13. Re:Great Post! on Chemical Element 110 To Be Named · · Score: 4, Informative
    I must have missed the part where the professor explained WHY we have unstable elements. We have so many stable elements that I've always wondered why everything on the table >92 is unstable?

    I remember a little more: nuclei are made of protons (positively charged) and neutrons (no charge), usually in roughly equal numbers (except Hydrogen, which is usually just a proton). The protons repel each other. The nucleus is held together by a very powerful, but very short range nuclear force between both protons and neutrons. As the nucleus gets bigger, the electric repulsion starts to overcome the nuclear force, and the nucleus becomes more and more likely to decay. But I don't remember why you can't just have a pile of neutrons...

    Actually #92, Uranium, is unstable, but U238 has a half-life of 4.4 billion years, which is why it's not that hard to find (about half of it has decayed since the creation of the earth). I think all elements above 83 (Bismuth) are unstable. The short-lived ones are found in nature as the result of decay of Uranium or the other longer-lived ones. See this table of isotopes.

  14. Re:"Based on". on Renegade Reverse Engineering - John Woo Style · · Score: 1
    And "Lord of the Rings" the movie was, I think, not penned by Tolkien. Yet there may be a strong resemblance. But hey, you probably think that's just a coincidence, because he's been dead almost... well, lots of years.

    Your point is? Tolkien died in 1975, and he didn't write the script. I'm trying, without success apparently, to make a distinction between the writer of a book, and the writer of a screenplay based on that book. That's why there is an Oscar for "Adaptation". Even if Tolkien was alive, Peter Jackson, not Tolkien would have been the one up for that. It becomes an important distinction when the movie is a steaming pile of crap &/or bears little or no resemblance to the story it putatively was based on.

  15. Re:Looks like a good one on Renegade Reverse Engineering - John Woo Style · · Score: 1
    Uh, he did write Paycheck. It's a short story (my favourite of them).

    He didn't write the script (of that or any of his other stories that were filmed), as was stated by the original poster.

  16. Re:Looks like a good one on Renegade Reverse Engineering - John Woo Style · · Score: 2, Interesting
    The real crime here is that yet another PKD story has been twisted beyond recognition
    and in the article: "Written by Phillip K Dick of Blade Runner and Minority Report"

    And where does the "reviewer" get off saying "written by" PKD? He's been dead almost 20 years. "Based very loosely on". If you're going to mention Dick, how about listing some books he actually DID write?

  17. Re:Uhm, right... on Microsoft Code at Fault for Half of all Windows Crashes · · Score: 1
    Out of all the professions, engineers have the ability to kill the most people in the least amount of time through incompetence

    Except for milititary professionals.

  18. Re:Uhm, right... on Microsoft Code at Fault for Half of all Windows Crashes · · Score: 1
    Is it true that the Railroads have a huge swath of high bandwith spectrum?

    Never underestimate the bandwidth of a locomotive full of tapes.

  19. Re:Bahh!!! DirecTV has no case! on EFF Coordinates Fight Against DirecTV · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Funny thing, copyright is... No, if software comes with hardware you can NOT do with it as you wish. If you buy an HP computer (with windows on it), you can't decompile windows. It's in the EULA

    Copyright has no realtion to a EULA, and EULAs are not laws, at most they're contracts which you may or may not be a party to.

  20. Re:usable but not the same on Translated KDE/Linux Usability Report Available · · Score: 1
    I think for the most part, "useability" is 90% familiarity. If you make a person use any system for 6 months, they will get used to it and it will, at least to an extent, "make sense".

    If you're familiar with any WIMP GUI, it shouldn't take more than a week to get the hang of it, as long as you have someone nearby you can yell out to: "How the fuck do I delete/find/open this?" "Where's email/Solitaire?" etc... After that, it's application specific, same problems everywhere.

  21. Re:This is stupid on Gentoo Package Accused of Violating DMCA · · Score: 2, Insightful
    "please delete it without reading it"

    A bit Zen -- "this statement is a lie"-like. How could you know you're not allowed to read it until you've read that you're not allowed to read it?

  22. Re:shutdown /a on Win32 Blaster Worm is on the Rise · · Score: 1
    Zone Alarm is a great second level of defense

    Well, it's my only defence, but it seems to be hoding up. Looking at its log, it's blocking an increasing number of port 135 packets as we speak.

  23. Re:This is stupid on Gentoo Package Accused of Violating DMCA · · Score: 1
    Who thinks this shit up?

    Lawyers, of course.

    They've had that stuff on their letters and faxes for decades. Now every corporate drone has it in his sig file, without thought.

    Where it gets annoying is that first, it often is longer than the actual message, and more so, when people have it quoted in their reply, and sometimes several times, making their messages totally impenetrable -- encouraged by the quote-everything-and-reply-at-top style that seems to be the corporate (that is, Outlook) standard.

    Personally, with Eudora, I can edit incoming messages, and though it's quite illegitimate, I routinely strip all formatting and boilerplate from messages before archiving them. Saves about 75% of space altogether.

  24. Re:Flavor/Flavour on Flavor vs. Flavour · · Score: 1
    Yup, americans are just evil, nasty and should be reviled.

    While I sympathise with that view, it isn't what I said. As you are claiming indulgence for exercising irony, try to see that others also are capable of subtlety of expression.

    What I said was that when an American sounds obnoxious, we generally take him at face value, rather than assume he is being ironic (the last few years of GWB makes it hard to think outside that box). That however says nothing about how many Americans actually are obnoxious -- actually I'm often surprised on meeting them in the flesh that they are surprisingly polite.

  25. Re:Flavor/Flavour on Flavor vs. Flavour · · Score: 1
    It was originally named by the US and the Brits changed the naming to be consistent with other elements.

    Your source for this?

    Actually, Americans had nothing to do with it. This page on the history of aluminium says "Sir Humphrey Davy [English] in 1808... gave it the name "Aluminum". His spelling is still used in North America but elsewhere in the world the spelling "Aluminium", following the suggestion of Henri Sainte-Claire Deville [French], is used."