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User: jra

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  1. Re:RTFA, PEOPLE. on Tesla Will Discontinue the Roadster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And I think it's time to take away Samzenpus's keys, for letting that summary out.

  2. RTFA, PEOPLE. on Tesla Will Discontinue the Roadster · · Score: 2

    The summary is -- as is so often the case, but I really would expect better here -- not only wrong, but *exactly wrong*.

    It is Pessimal.

  3. Re:Facebook + $ on More Users Are Shunning Facebook · · Score: 1

    Why is it "interesting" that they achieved saturation with *3/4 of the adult humans in the US*?

    That's a pretty damned impressive number...

  4. Good thing... on The End of Paper Books · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Since after the EMP bombs all go off, no one's eReaders are gonna be working all that well anymore.

    Doesn't *anyone* read science fiction anymore?

    You people just aren't *near* paranoid enough.

  5. Lots of people are thinking about it, on Will Capped Data Plans Kill the Cloud? · · Score: 1

    David... it's just that -- just as with everything *else* important over the last 3 decade (SCADA security, anyone), *no one important is listening to us*.

    Good think we like saying atojiso.

  6. Re:Ad Hitlerum on IBM Did Not Invent the Personal Computer · · Score: 1

    And to reply to Cringley's comments on identity theft, if everyone put their foot down and *forced service providers to stop using unchangeable, researchable authenticators like SSNs and Maiden names, all of that problem would dry up in a heart beat.

  7. Ad Hitlerum on IBM Did Not Invent the Personal Computer · · Score: 1

    "Press hard, you are making 6 million copies."

    Naw; Godwin's Law concerns *comparisons* to Hitler and Nazis. If you're *actually talking about them for a reason*, it trips out, to avoid a recursive black hole in the fabric of the Universe.

  8. C'mon... on Personal Electronics May Indeed Disrupt Avionics · · Score: 4, Informative

    ILS receiver antennas aren't "hidden inside the passenger compartment".

    They're "attached to the outside of the friggin airframe".

    Any story that gets the details that wrong, that fast, receives no credence at all. And if airplanes are having this much trouble with my 2mw iPad, what the *hell* are they doing about getting hit by 2GW of lightning?

    (And don't tell me "Faraday cage"; that protects the occupants, but not necessarily the things connected to antennas outside the cage.)

  9. Re:Ahhh crime. on Man Ordered At Gunpoint To Hand Over Phone For Recording Cops · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm fairly certain this gent has a 42USC1983 claim against all of the individual officers involved, and I *certainly* hope he's taking advice on that point.

  10. Re:Software Patents. on HTC Is Paying Microsoft $5 For Every Android Phone · · Score: 1

    Not with a Slashdot ID with that many digits in it, you can't... :-)

  11. Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much on KDE 4.7 – a First Look At Beta 1 · · Score: 1

    Basic statistics: ~10% of the desktop audience is on a Mac, well under 5% on Linux. So *by definition*, people coming to KDE as their first Linux desktop are coming there from Windows.

    Yes, yes, he doesn't actually say that in the quote, per se, but he implies it, and you accept it in your reply.

    So the *real* question is: who set those machines up, and what did *they* prefer.

    And yes, KDE (3, and now 4) was the preferred desktop on SuSE, all the way back to, I think, 9.0, which was my first version of that work.

    Note that what you're *really* replying to is an assertion he did not *make* in the section you quote: that people coming from windows are *going to* KDE. He's talking about the people *already on KDE*, a different proposition entirely.

  12. Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much on KDE 4.7 – a First Look At Beta 1 · · Score: 1

    Oh. I see that they *haven't* fixed Plasma. Got it.

    Since there seem to be some KDE devs here, I will engage.

    I concur with some posts below me that KDE3.x was much more similar in UX design than Gnome to the post-95 Windows's, which is what the entrenched user base is coming from, in large part. I always preferred it to Gnome myself for that reason.

    Plasma? Can't figure it out at all. I'm sure it's The Cutting Edge, but it left me bleeding. And while I see that the Trinity project is still chugging along on it, SuSE dropped KDE3 after 11.2, so I can *either* ship to clients a desktop that they can understand without a 3000 level college course, *or* I can ship an OS that's still getting security upgrades (SuSE 11.1, the last release to offer KDE3 from the installer, is EOL).

    That's a pretty coffin corner situation, folks, for a desktop manager that breaks as much new ground (read: been at this for 3 decades, really sat down and tried to understand what they were on about, failed miserably) as Plasma does...

  13. Re:The interface doesn't need to be changed much on KDE 4.7 – a First Look At Beta 1 · · Score: 1

    "should look similar [to Windows]"

    Did I miss something? Or did they finally fix Plasma so mere mortals can figure it out?

  14. I don't think the problem is that they didn't... on RadioShack Trying To Return To Its DIY Roots · · Score: 4, Insightful

    cater to DIYs.... it's that there *weren't* any.

    Make is changing this, of course, but we *all* turned into appliance operators over the last 50 years; no surprise Rat Shack went with the flow...

  15. Re:Abuse? on Google Deprecates Translation API · · Score: 1

    Presumably, by using it for commercial purposes, in violation of what I assume are the ToS for that service. Just like people who try to use Googlemaps as a realtime dispatching service...

  16. Well.... on AT&T To Launch LTE Network In 5 Cities This Summer · · Score: 1, Interesting

    They think that people are unaware of the fact that LTE *is not 4G*, according to the international organzation who hold that namespace (ITU) ... and they're *right*. So...

  17. Re:Take a cue from Iowa on Redistricting 2.0: Cloud Lets Voters Take Part · · Score: 1

    In fact, from the research I did back in 2008, I think the best alternative vote-counting method, from a technical standpoint, considering the requirements of a public plebiscite, is Cloneproof Sequential Schwarz Dropping... or whatever they've (I think) renamed that now.

    Problem is that voters *can't understand it*.

    These days, that trumps "does what I actually want".

  18. Which is not to say that on Rooted Devices Blocked From Android Movie Market · · Score: 1

    Google's Android crew isn't *privately* rooting for you to find a way to do it anyway.

    Just shut up about it already, so you don't get them in dutch with the studios, alright?

  19. Re:Since when on NC Governor Allows Anti-Community-Broadband Law · · Score: 1

    Oops, sorry: "Letting a co-op have that right against other commercial comers gets a bit murky, legally, *I think*."

  20. Re:Since when on NC Governor Allows Anti-Community-Broadband Law · · Score: 1

    You know, a non-municipal co-op is an idea I don't actually think I've heard put forth before. The *general* argument is that the municipality has to itself install (or have installed at its instance, as the telco guys used to say) the fiber, and allow all comers on it at non-discriminatory terms, as compensation for *denying any other comers* the franchise right to dig up all the yards *again*, which is the *real* goal here: last-mile fiber is a Natural Monopoly, and should -- and can -- be run in a fashion which *benefits* the municipalities residents (which is the goal of the muni itself, and is *decidedly* not the goal of any of the Public Corporations[1] which might want to trench their own fiber).

    [1]Public Corporations Suck.

  21. Re:Ummm on NC Governor Allows Anti-Community-Broadband Law · · Score: 1

    That was my reaction too. Lessig overreact on this one?

  22. Will this finally shut up on An IP Address For Every Light Bulb · · Score: 1

    all the people who say that the desire for NAT in a native IPv6 environment is broken, and surely you can't want that, much less will we give it to you?

  23. Re:The burning question. on Boot Linux In Your Browser · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Like Everest, because it was there.

    There was a GIF out several years back, which I haven't been able to find any time recently (and would love a pointer to) of some guy who had something like *19* hardware emulators running on one monitor simultaneously, in 4 or 5 separate stacks.

    TRS-80, C-64, T/S-1000; everything you've ever seen an emulator for, he had running on Linux all at the same time; some hosting others.

  24. Engineers on Comcast Helps Fix Pirate Bay Connection Problems · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's who fixed this.

    I guarantee you that, just like in television and telephony, *once you get to the actual engineers*, they're really nice, sane, helpful people, who want to give you what you want to get, and are paying good money for (as long as you, yourself, are sane -- this is why there's 3 tiers of triage before you get to one).

    But their job is not to worry about content, it's to worry about transport.

    And, by and large, we don't.

  25. Re:No "Space Precautionary Act" on FAA Wants Your Opinion On Commercial Space Rules · · Score: 1

    Ironic that your post immediately followed mine, isn't it? :-)