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User: jeffasselin

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  1. Re:It is related on Psystar Will Countersue Apple · · Score: 1

    undoing incorrect moderation - ignore.

    I actually thought your post was informative generally. I don't think OS X is "just" that, but its basis is in BSD and NextSTEP.

  2. Re:Warcraft Cinematic on Blizzard Unveils Wrath of the Lich King Cinematic · · Score: 4, Informative

    You haven't done the same quests I have. In Borean Tundra, specifically, the quest line leading to "Last Rites" is very, very good. In Howling Ford, you can also meet the Lich King and get killed by him in your 3rd quest or about. And he speaks to you in meaningful ways.

  3. Re:I don't understand... on The Ridiculous LexisNexis Search that the Justice Department Used · · Score: 5, Informative

    First and foremost, because it's illegal.

    But there are two types of nominations in the DoJ: "Career" & "Political". Political appointments are indeed open to scrutiny of political affiliation, but are temporary and remain active only until a change of administration. Career posts are normal jobs, and those people are supposed to be more neutral. Filtering people for Career jobs based on political affiliations is illegal. The issue coming to light now is that Bush administration officials used the same questionnaires and methods for both types of posts.

  4. Re:Ummm, doesn't "lying" imply free will? on Your Computer and Cell Phone Are Lying To You · · Score: 1

    It's still a retarded way of looking at things. If people looked at machines as machines instead of as if they were human beings, they would probably understand them better and get less frustrated by their workings.

  5. Re:Privacy Policy beats Google... on New Search Engine Cuil Takes Aim At Google · · Score: 1

    You looked hungry?

  6. Re:Coward. on Spam King and Family Dead In Murder-Suicide · · Score: 1

    I used to. They are expressions and expletives, figures of speech whose literal meaning is not what most people reach for when using them, but still that meaning is there.

    So I've gotten used to not use such expressions. I will say "damn it" by itself. I use the word "goodness" instead of "God" or "mon dieu" (the equivalent in french).

  7. Re:Goodness Gracious, Great Gobs of Dough! on SCO's Lawsuit Gets Even Crazier · · Score: 1

    An infinite number of non-sequential bills? Doesn't that contradict the continuum hypothesis or something? :-)

  8. Re:Reminder: this does not preserve your privacy on Google Wins Agreement To Anonymize YouTube Logs · · Score: 1

    I just re-read it. The text under "Information Sharing" seems to me to me clear, although I'm not a lawyer. They clearly state they will not transmit any personally identifiable information to unrelated third parties without opt-in.

  9. Re:Reminder: this does not preserve your privacy on Google Wins Agreement To Anonymize YouTube Logs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The difference I see is that when you go to YouTube or other Google services, you have a tacit understanding and agreement with Google that they will have access to this data, and you can read their privacy terms and agree to them when you use their services.

    You certainly don't expect other companies to also have that access.

  10. Re:There are those who could learn from this... on Blizzard Introduces One-Time Password Devices For WoW · · Score: 1

    Hmm... let's see... The average WoW addict is playing 30 hours a day, has most likely no job...

    What do you think is worth more, the account of such a person or his bank account?

    What? Almost everyone I know who plays hardcore (30hrs/wk and +) have a job. Some have a family life. It's not different than watching TV for the same amount of time. I've known one guy who didn't work and played really hardcore, and he was "financially independent".

  11. Re:flowers for algernon on Drug Reverses Retardation In Mice · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Seriously. I read that book 15 years ago and it still stands out in my mind how sad the degradation is. It is one of my worst nightmare to eventually lose my reasoning capacities.

  12. Re:What about Judah and Tamar? on Surprisingly Few People Collect On GTA Hot Coffee · · Score: 1

    FWIW, Jesus was from Bathsheba's line, not the other wives of David.

    Can I see the birth certificates implied?

    Legend and mythology is cool. I enjoy studying them, and using myth to explain esoteric matters, ethical conundrums and make thought-experiments has a definite power.

    When you start believing that a myth is real, when you actually think madmen heard the voice of their invisible friend who lives in the sky, and when you start killing other people because they won't believe the same myths you believe in, you have a religion instead of a myth. I'm not saying you would kill others. But people believing the similar things you do have done so and still do.

    Making laws "for people to follow" is something of the past. Laws nowadays should be something made by people to protect themselves and keep society cohesive and adhering to the principles we choose to base such a society on. Laws don't come from "gods", from "above" but from the people. Laws should change as the society it delineates changes. We don't need mythological constructs of supposed higher beings anymore to make us respect the laws, we have other mechanisms that work much better and don't require any supernaturalism.

  13. Re:You have nothing to fear! on Electronic Transaction Reporting Slipped Into Senate Bill · · Score: 1

    Nice theory. I didn't even notice or think of the party affiliations. I don't care that much, being Canadian. When I do take notice, it seems to me that there are members of either party who are obviously in the pay of the Corporate Oligarchs.

    Our right-most politicians up here make your liberals look like fascists, so I don't think any of the presumptive candidates for the US presidency, or any US politician of the two major parties is someone I'd vote for (if I were to somehow be eligible), but I think Obama is probably the "least bad choice" of the two big guys.

    McCain, with his recent outburst against the decision of the US Supreme Court to reaffirm the Habeas Corpus rights of the Guantanamo prisoners, has clearly shown he stands against many civil liberties, and he seemed like a good target for the joke.

  14. You have nothing to fear! on Electronic Transaction Reporting Slipped Into Senate Bill · · Score: 4, Funny

    There is no danger if you have nothing to hide obviously.

    But just to be safe, might want to hold out on that "McCain is evil" book purchase. Just in case, you know?

    Note to moderators: this entire post, barring this line, is sarcastic.

  15. Re:McCain making steps in the right direction late on McCain Backs Nuclear Power · · Score: 1

    Abrogating civil liberties sure is a great step. Hey what do YOU have to fear? You're an upright consum^w citizen right?

    Stop talking about how exploiting more oil will solve the issues. Oil IS an essential resources, and is needed, and we would have plenty of it for the foreseeable future if we stopped burning the damn stuff for single-person transportation.

    Nuclear power isn't a bad thing, I will concur. But other avenues have to be explored as well.

  16. Re:Why does it matter? on Graphics Advances Make Identifying Real Images Difficult · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The problem with laws that target crimes mostly committed by mentally unstable people is that those people are mentally unstable, and will not be deterred by respect for the law, fear of justice any more than they would be by standards of morality, or their conscience.

    So yeah, many of those laws are for show, as in they can be used to punish and try to prevent recidivism, they will not prevent most of such crimes in the first place.

  17. Re:Paper Tiger on Net Neutrality Bill Introduced In Canadian Parliament · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Generally, whatever makes the most money is most beneficial to the people when there is no gov't interference in the market place. If you enjoy living in a cesspool of pollution, getting 10cents for an 85 hour-week, you're welcome to it, but not in my country.

    Has the brainwashing gone so deep? Libertarians are the worst kind of corporate-enslaved drones, because they have somehow been convinced being ruled by oligarchic, greed-driven, psychopathic organizations is a good thing.
  18. Re:The obvious question follows, on Net Neutrality Bill Introduced In Canadian Parliament · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is the NPD, not the US Republican Party. Unbelievable, maybe, to a jaded American, but some politicians do actually have the best interests of the public and of their voters in mind.

    Exceptions are a necessary part of any rule. Absolutes are (almost) never a good idea. Any amendments to the exceptions would have to go through the parliamentary process, just as this law will have to go through, just as an abrogation of this law might eventually go through.

  19. Re:Has Obama been selected on McCain vs. Obama on Tech Issues · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's something a lot of people don't understand and never figured out; something which I figured out before I could even vote. For most elections and high-profile posts, you should obviously look at the character of the person who you are voting for, but we should understand people in such positions don't make most decisions or even implement the decisions they take themselves, their subordinates do.

    Which is why one of the most important qualities in a leader is to be a good judge of character and be able to select good, skilled, and honest subordinates to whom they can delegate important tasks. So look at the people they have working for them right now in their campaign, look at the people they associate with now, or have worked for them in the past as well as at the people they are likely to nominate once they are elected/chosen. This applies to presidents, prime ministers, as well as CEOs in fact.

  20. Re:Rename the topic to say INTEL drivers on AMD sy on XP SP3 Crashes Some AMD Machines · · Score: 1

    You are completely missing the point. The point is not about having every driver available, but about being able to dynamically load them if they are needed on the system you're booting on.

  21. Re:Rename the topic to say INTEL drivers on AMD sy on XP SP3 Crashes Some AMD Machines · · Score: 1

    You speak in ignorance.

    It's not bloat. It's sound operating system design. I know Mac OS X better, so I can give a good example of how it works on that platform. On Mac OS X, the system has on disk every driver for every system and built-in hardware it supports. From the old G4 modems to the current iMac video cards. The folder containing those "kernel extensions" as they are known is a bit more than 200MB in size on PPC Leopard (10.5.2). That is a pretty insignificant amount of space used on modern systems, I'm sure you'll agree. it would obviously be bloated and inefficient if the system were to load every single one of those extensions every time it booted up. Which is why it doesn't work that way.

    When MacOS X boots for the first time, it will scan each and every one of those kernel extensions, and check if the hardware they support is present. If it is, it will load the extension. As it is loading the extensions, it's also building up a cache file of those it needs on this specific system. As it is done, it generates a system-specific UUID with the cache information.

    On each subsequent boot, it regenerates the UUID (a quick operation) and compares it to the one stored in the cache. This essentially allows it to see if any hardware changes were made to the system. If it detects no changes, it then loads the extensions listed in the cache file. If it detects that the system has changed, it flushes the cache and starts the process anew as if it had never booted up.

    This has the effect of making the first boot after installation of a new system or major update slower, but every boot after is quite fast. It makes for a system that can be universal without any "bloat" loaded in memory, and totally removes the chance things like this SP3 bug would occur.

    This works for both built-in kernel extensions and third-party ones, obviously. I'm not saying there's no bloat in OS X, or that it's perfect. But this system of loading drivers only as needed and to refresh the cache as needed is a very nice one, which works very well. Microsoft might do well to learn from it.

  22. Re:Rename the topic to say INTEL drivers on AMD sy on XP SP3 Crashes Some AMD Machines · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's certainly Microsoft's fault that their operating system can't figure out at boot-time which drivers are appropriate for the platform it's booting on and only loading those.

    Mac OS X and Linux both do this. Why can't Windows?

  23. Re:It's time, boys and girls, for on Microsoft Internal Emails Show Dismay With Vista · · Score: 1

    About #2, I don't think mplayer's memory usage is a good indication of the memory usage of the application most windows xp users will use for music/movie playback, i.e. Windows Media Player 11. I think it takes 200MB just to load its user interface.

    Seriously, though, I agree that Windows XP is fine for most people with 512MB. Vista, on the other hand, requires at least 1.5GB to be usable.

  24. Re:Better login into wikipedia host asap on Muslim Groups Attempt to Censor Wikipedia · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The problem is that religion is inherently *irrational*. There are crazy, stupid, irrational atheists, no one would dispute that.

    But if you follow and believe in (almost) any religion, it means you believe things that are by definition unprovable, irrational, and supernatural. A person who is ready to believe such things might be more ready to believe other irrational things than someone who bases his thoughts on rational explanations.

    The other problem is that in logic, if you allow a contradiction or paradox, you can prove about anything you want. Positing the existence of an omnipotent, sentient, all-powerful being as an axiom of any system of logic and thought will necessarily result in a system that can be used to prove anything whatsoever. So even though most believers might be considered "moderate", religion can always be used as an excuse for about any crazy thought you have.

    Skeptics and atheists, on the other hand, will usually require more rational logic, facts and proof before believing you.

    Unless they're lunatics/crazy, in which case your religious beliefs (or absence thereof) will not change the results much.

  25. Re:PBKAC on Antivirus Inventor Says Security Pros Are Wasting Time · · Score: 1

    Anyone claiming he can implement 100% security is lying. The only 100% secure computer is the one buried 6 feet under in a cement block.