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User: meringuoid

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Comments · 4,957

  1. Re:Possible CAN SPAM implications on Toyota Claims Woman "Opted In" To Faux Email Stalking · · Score: 1
    That's exactly what happened. She didn't purposely sign up to be stalked. One of her friends signed her up. To get her to "opt-in", she was sent an online quiz, and as part of the quiz she "signed" an EULA opting in to the "marketing campaign".

    I'm puzzled by this. The emails just started coming? Surely when Toyota sent the confirmation email - you know, the one that says 'someone entered your email address to opt in to our marketing list - if this was you, click here to confirm subscription, if not, do nothing and you will not be added' - she would have realised what was going on, not clicked it and then there would have been no problem.

    Unless... wait... maybe Toyota aren't running a confirmed opt-in system? So they're sending these creepy stalker emails not only to people who've actually opted in, but also to people who never opted in at all but who have a similar email address to someone who's prone to making typos? They are in fact spammers sending out threats?

    I hope they throw the fucking book at them myself.

  2. Re:Mice? try hyperintelligent pandimensional being on Scientists Use Quake 2 To Study the Brains of Mice · · Score: 1
    Mice already know how to interface with computers, having built the greatest computer in all space and time.

    Nonsense. The mice just paid for it and operated it. The second greatest computer in all time and space designed it, and the Magratheans built it.

  3. Re:The U.S. and the EU have the same power. on China Strangles Tor Ahead of National Day · · Score: 1
    Personally I would like to see someone design something like tor that would be limited to text based protocols like IRC, Usenet, etc. That would provide a channel of anonymous communication that could be deployed without sucking up as many resources as tor does and without supporting child pornography and copyright infringement.

    Well, you can restrict the ports available on your exit node, such that only connections to NNTP or IRC services are available. Because nobody downloads cp on IRC or Usenet. It's not hard to convert a binary file into a long string of perfectly valid ASCII and pipe it through a text-only protocol. I imagine that to the child pornographer anonymity is more important than speed, so he'll accept the hit on performance if that's what it takes. Enough people do this and you'll likely find that there's a whole LOT of ASCII gibberish going through your Usenet-via-TOR service, and guess what it decodes to?

  4. Re:Well at this rate on UK Copyright Group Tells Cinemas to Ban Laptops · · Score: 3, Insightful
    You ARE a criminal

    I thought copyright infringement was a civil matter. Is that no longer the case?

  5. Re:Where do we sign up in the US?! on 1Mb Broadband Access Becomes Legal Right In Finland · · Score: 2, Informative
    An online college course is not an option when it takes >30 minutes to load a 10 second video or when you have to split a 50 mb download over 5 nights to get the data.

    Not sure how distance learning is typically organised in the US, but in the UK, the Open University is in the habit of physically mailing out videotapes. Actually they send DVDs now, I think, but I've got a stack of old astrophysics VHS tapes somewhere. From the comp. sci. courses I've been taking lately, heaps of CD-ROMs. I need an internet connection to submit assignments but I could easily do it over dialup. If I didn't have 20Mb cable, anyway. And they'll still take them by post if all else fails.

    Back in the elder days, they used to broadcast their lectures on TV, in the small hours when regular programming was switched off; students would record them and watch them at a more reasonable hour. Many an insomniac remembers the badly dressed guy with a massive beard explaining vector calculus at three in the morning; the same goes for comatose policemen hallucinating a 1970s nightmare.

  6. Re:We're going up the tech tree! on Researchers Discover "Magnetic Current" · · Score: 1
    According to the Alpha Centauri tech tree I'm reading, we can now research Unified Field Theory and Nanominiaturization now that we have Monopole Magnets!

    Only if you're playing as the aliens, or have tinkered with the settings before starting the game. Human factions can only specify the general field of research, not a specific topic. So we can't really say what we'll be getting next; depends whether we focus more on Conquer or on Build.

    What this does mean, however, is that we can begin construction of magtubes. Or at least high speed railways like they've had in France for thirty years.

  7. Re:The Measure of a Man on Why Charles Stross Hates Star Trek · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Go on, Stross, explain about how a trial to decide whether an android is a person or not, can happen in the 18th century.

    Wasn't it called 'Amistad'?

  8. Re:WinMe drove me towards Linux on Revisiting the Original Reviews of Windows Vista · · Score: 1
    Why do you need to set up a custom kernel? I have ran linux years, never felt the need.

    He was running Gentoo, so I suppose setting up custom kernels is part of the appeal. My question is that if his problem was that k3b wasn't working, how did he manage to burn the Windows 7 disc images to install?

  9. Re:They aren't patented here on BSA Says 41% of Software On Personal Computers Is Pirated · · Score: 1
    So, so much great software is published by people in this country yet, we are third world because we want to protect it from infringement?

    Pretty much. It's quite common for developing nations to be heavily dependent on a single industry - the classic example is the 'banana republic'. Naturally such nations impose all kinds of laws protecting this industry. As they develop and join the developed nations, they tend to approach more closely to the free market and open up their industries to competition.

    In America's case, the vital industry being protected is that of music, movies, microcode and high-speed pizza delivery. Software patents are America's attempt to protect a small number of local corporations from competition.

  10. Re:What about ethnicity codes? on Avatars To Have Business Dress Codes By 2013 · · Score: 4, Funny
    My avatar's dress code is dark suit, brown skin, big black afro.

    It's pretty much standard issue for a pool attendant.

  11. Re:Barber of Seville on New Comic Book About Logic, Math, and Madness · · Score: 1
    The answer is obvious, and has been obvious to me since I was a teenager (in the 1960's)

    Well, the way I heard the paradox, the question was phrased 'Who shaves the barber?', not 'Does the barber shave himself?'. A subtle but important difference, for when phrased the first way, it's quite possible that the barber does not shave herself.

  12. Re:I grew up with the space program, but... on Lawmakers Voice Support For NASA Moon Program · · Score: 1
    How about making long-term livable space environments (i.e. containing viable organic ecologies)

    You don't need to go to space to do that experiment. You can try it on Earth. You could build a vast, sealed greenhouse and try to get it so have a self-sustaining ecology to support human inhabitants.

    In fact it's been done. Biosphere 2 was far larger than any orbital habitat that could plausibly be constructed with available hardware. It failed spectacularly. The carefully planned ecosystem collapsed, the oxygen levels crashed, air repeatedly had to be supplied from outside... Until you can get this stuff right on Earth, you can forget your fantasies about O'Neill cylinders.

  13. Re:There are TWO kinds of hate-speech: on Canadian Hate-Speech Law Violates Charter of Rights · · Score: 1

    Censorship causes me severe emotional pain.

  14. Re:It's time for the people to act. on UK Plans To Monitor 20,000 Families' Homes Via CCTV · · Score: 3, Informative
    They've already screwed up, they've let their government take their guns away

    We never had guns in the first place. When handguns were finally outlawed, it affected only a few thousand people out of sixty-odd million. As far as I know the mainland UK has never had a culture of individual gun ownership.

  15. Re:How about... on Panel Advises Longer Life For Space Station · · Score: 3, Insightful
    do you just send up a new part? That will cost a lot more than sending the part down, having it repaired, and sending it back up.

    I suspect it will cost insignificantly more. The launch is usually the expensive part, not the construction of whatever it was that broke.

    The Space Shuttle was designed to be able to capture and to return to Earth satellites in orbit. It even did so a couple of times. Just enough to demonstrate that it wasn't worth doing, and that it was far more cost-effective to let dead satellites go and just put up a new one.

  16. Re:Subject on We Were Smarter About Copyright Law 100 Years Ago · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Whatever happened to Winnie the Pooh in Canada? I remember a big deal was made of the fact that Canadian copyright expires 50 years after the death of the author, which would put Winnie in the Canadian PD sometime in 2006, but I never heard anything after the fact.

    Not a clue. If you're in Canada, take the initiative: go fish out your copy of Winnie-the-Pooh from the big box of relics of your childhood you have in the attic, transcribe it, and upload it to gutenberg.ca. Then do The House at Pooh Corner, When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six.

    Funnily enough, these are the works that formed my views on copyright - when I was four years old or so, and we took the audio tapes of these books out from the local library, and dear old Dad showed me how to copy them on his tape decks, and we returned the originals and kept the copies...

  17. Re:Was Copyright or Technology Better Understood? on We Were Smarter About Copyright Law 100 Years Ago · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Nobody knows how Communism would have turned out if it had a more benevolent dictator than Stalin.

    If Stalin had been replaced by some humane Communist who wasn't prepared to liquidate millions of kulaks in the cause of collectivising Soviet agriculture and freeing up labour for industrial work in the cities building tanks, well... I have a funny feeling that quite a lot of us would be speaking German today.

    Mind you, if he'd been replaced by some moderate Communist who wasn't monumentally gullible and who actually read Mein Kampf before signing treaties with Hitler, then the Soviets might have been better prepared for a fight in the first place.

  18. Re:Who downloads music on Music Industry Wants a Cut of Pirate Bay Sale · · Score: 1
    I mean really what's the use of using torrents for 5 meg files.

    It's not 1998, and we're not using Napster over 56 kilobit dialup connections any more. We have multi-megabit download capacities, and hard disks in the terabyte range, and torrent sites have long since gone beyond carrying whole albums for download, instead now offering complete compilations of an artist's entire back catalogue.

  19. Re:Sue and be subject to radioactive publicity on UK's National Portrait Gallery Threatens To Sue Wikipedia User · · Score: 1
    Well done for completely glossing over that the images themselves are British, located in Britain.

    The originals are in Britain. But the copies that the gallery claim are unlawful are located on a server in America, where they are in the public domain.

  20. Re:These plaintiffs are being very reasonable on UK's National Portrait Gallery Threatens To Sue Wikipedia User · · Score: 1
    database right to the set of images as a whole

    Ah, wait... that doesn't exist in the US either. So unless they can show he's violated the Computer Misuse Act in accessing their server in the first place - which will be damn hard to do if it's a web server making the images publicly available - I think their lawyers might profitably refer to the famous case of Arkell vs. Pressdram.

  21. Re:These plaintiffs are being very reasonable on UK's National Portrait Gallery Threatens To Sue Wikipedia User · · Score: 2, Insightful
    U-huh. So, which US-based server did the images originate from?

    Does it matter?

    The server in the UK is owned by the copyright holder. The images stored on it are legitimate under UK copyright law because they're in the possession of the lawful owner.
    An American connects to the UK server and downloads the images. He creates copies of them on his US computer. The copies would be illegal in the UK, but are public domain under US copyright law.
    The American then uploads those images to a US server. The images are still public domain under US copyright law.

    Now if the American bypassed some access control system - brute-forced a password maybe, or used an SQL injection, or exploited some fault in the web server code - then they might have a case. And perhaps the database right to the set of images as a whole might hold: copyright in the same sense as a phone book, a mere agglomeration of uncopyrightable facts can be copyrighted as a whole because of the effort of assembling it into a whole collection.

  22. Re:flat on Study Highlights Gap Between Views of Scientists and the Public · · Score: 1
    Columbus had difficulty getting his expedition funded not because people thought the world was flat, but because they thought it was sufficient large that he would run out of supplies in the middle of the ocean. They were right; if there hadn't been a continent in the way then he'd have starved to death.

    Which is, of course, why Columbus met the Caribs on Hispaniola and thought they were Indians.

  23. Re:Cities breed misplaced self-righteousness on Bike Projector Makes Lane For Rider · · Score: 1
    stupid flashing lights which are NOT legal* in the UK

    From the Highway Code:

    60

    At night your cycle MUST have white front and red rear lights lit. It MUST also be fitted with a red rear reflector (and amber pedal reflectors, if manufactured after 1/10/85). White front reflectors and spoke reflectors will also help you to be seen. Flashing lights are permitted but it is recommended that cyclists who are riding in areas without street lighting use a steady front lamp.

  24. Re:They need to find the money now on Madoff Sentenced To 150 Years · · Score: 1
    oblig snpp quote -- 2F19

    That was 'It's a Wonderful Life', you bleedin' philistine. Of course the conventional wisdom on /. is that the universe was created in 1980...

  25. Re:Was that really written by a 13 year old? on 13-Year-Old Trades iPod For a Walkman For a Week · · Score: 1
    That part sounded more like a nostalgic review rather than from someone who see the functionality for the first time.

    A 13-year-old might not remember audio cassette tapes, but he'd probably remember the VCR. Even today those things are still in widespread use; recordable DVDs and PVRs haven't quite ousted the old-fashioned video tape for making recordings from the TV.