Slashdot Mirror


User: 2muchcoffeeman

2muchcoffeeman's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
123
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 123

  1. Re:Maybe it's just me ... on The "Rickmote Controller" Can Hijack Any Google Chromecast · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's not what it says in the post: "The 'Rickmote,' which is built on top of the $35 Raspberry Pi single board computer, finds a local Chromecast device, boots it off the network, and then takes over the screen with multimedia of one's choosing. ... But it gets worse for the victims: If the hacker leaves the range of the device, there's no way to regain control of the Chromecast."

    So ... yeah, it's never gonna give you up.

  2. Strictly answering the topic here on Ask Slashdot: Will You Start Your Kids On Classic Games Or Newer Games? · · Score: 1

    Because I want to be the cool uncle ... Leisure Suit Larry.

  3. Wait. I can ask for whatever I want in 12.04? on Shuttleworth: Trust Us, We're Trying to Make Shopping Better · · Score: 2

    Fine, let's try that.

    2muchcoffeeman@thisbox:~$ sudo sandwich -ham -swiss -dijon -mayo -lettuce -tomato -bacon

    I wonder how long it will take ...

  4. Re:My solution Works most of the time on Firefox: In With the New, Out With the Compatibility · · Score: 1

    Maybe Add-on writers should push it up a few versions and hope it works? I dunno.

    Sir (or miss, or ma'am, or droid ... what are you?), you have no business implying that add-on authors should test in the Aurora channel (or even Nightly) to make sure that their add-on continues to work. Clearly, the old Mozilla method in which base versions were allowed to stagnate for months and even years — allowing add-on developers to relax and not worry about things like version updates — must be catered to!

  5. Re:wait a minute... on Chinese Writers Sue Apple Over IP Violations · · Score: 1

    A publisher holds some form of copyright on the work. That's not true in this case, despite what the troll plaintiffs claim.

  6. Re:Haha! That's hilarious on Chinese Writers Sue Apple Over IP Violations · · Score: 1

    Apparently people and groups in China suing Apple for cash (which has close to $100B on hand) is now a thing — witness the lawsuit filed by flat-ass broke Proview over the iPad name it gave up the rights to years ago (via a Taiwan subsidiary so it could try to hide the money Apple paid it from its creditors).

    This sounds like a nuisance lawsuit filed against a big company specifically to try to extort a cash settlement out of convenience, rather than suing the actual copyright infringer (which is probably not as well-financed and may not even be known to the "authors' group"). I think they're in for a surprise when they get to court.

  7. Re:wait a minute... on Chinese Writers Sue Apple Over IP Violations · · Score: 1

    As Apple isn't mailing out physical books, but instead is creating a copy on every sale, they are a content "creator" (as in distributor/copier), and thus are exactly who the copyright laws were written to cover.

    Apple is serving as a retailer here, not a publisher like Random House or Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Apple is not the content creator nor is it the publisher of said content. In this instance, it's a retail outlet only.

  8. Re:Peh. on Paper On Super Flu Strain May Be Banned From Publication · · Score: 1

    Imagine just getting on a plane while carrying this superflu in say London? How far would you have it spread before you were no longer able to continue?

    I believe that novel was already written by a Mr. S. King of Maine.

  9. Re:Beowulf cluster? on Ask Slashdot: Clusters On the Cheap? · · Score: 0

    Of course this is the topic of the first reply. Of course it is.
     
    Because if it were any other answer it would mean that /. had changed so completely that it had morphed into something unrecognizable as its former self.
     
    Thank you for upholding my faith in humanity. Or, at least, in my fellow /.ers.
     
    (Obvious and therefore obligatory follow-up questions: But does it run Linux? And how many Libraries Of Congress will it have in storage capacity? And can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these clusters? Oh, wait ... )

  10. Re:Ron Paul 2012 on Fed Audit's Initial Report Reveals Trillions in Secret Loans · · Score: 4, Informative

    The gold standard is overrated. The longer a country stayed on the gold standard during the Great Depression, the longer it took that country to get out of the Great Depression.
     
    As this article notes,

    ... 13 other countries besides the U.K. had decided to abandon their currencies' gold parity in 1931. Bernanke and James' data for the average growth rate of industrial production for these countries (plotted in the top panel above) was positive in every year from 1932 on. Countries that stayed on gold, by contrast, experienced an average output decline of 15% in 1932. The U.S. abandoned gold in 1933, after which its dramatic recovery immediately began. The same happened after Italy dropped the gold standard in 1934, and for Belgium when it went off in 1935. On the other hand, the three countries that stuck with gold through 1936 (France, Netherlands, and Poland) saw a 6% drop in industrial production in 1935, while the rest of the world was experiencing solid growth.

    A gold standard only works when everybody believes in the overall fiscal and monetary responsibility of the major world governments and the relative price of gold is fairly stable.

    Enough with the gold standard nonsense already.

  11. Re:Recruiting? on Queen Elizabeth Sets a Code-Breaking Challenge · · Score: 4, Funny

    Yeah, you and everyone else that works there.

  12. Okay, hold on a minute. on NASA Finds Family of Habitable Planets · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Can we call them "potentially habitable planets" instead of going all the way to "habitable" that quickly? I think I'd like to make sure of certain things before being so definite -- for instance: water, temperature, oxygen levels, lack of poisonous gases making the oxygen-level issue moot, edible flora and/or fauna, radiation levels ... hmmm, could be here awhile ...

  13. Re:"Profesional"? on BYTE Is Coming Back · · Score: 1

    You may already be aware that the correct spelling is "professional" ... instead of what they put up there. And they seem to have lost their apostrophe.
     
    Much like Caius, I'm not optimistic.

  14. Re:Let's just encrypt everything all the time on How To Protect Against Firesheep Attacks · · Score: 1

    There's a couple of Firefox extensions that actually do encrypt everything all the time ... or, at least, they redirect everything that has an encrypted SSL to that HTTPS URL instead.

    HTTPS Everywhere | Electronic Frontier Foundation

    (which is also here: HTTPS Everywhere :: Add-ons for Firefox)

    Force-TLS :: Add-ons for Firefox

  15. Re:Must burn. on Freetype Lands In... Microsoft Office? · · Score: 1

    Apple's never been the best of friends with Microsoft in the first place. No big deal.

  16. Re:Must burn. on Freetype Lands In... Microsoft Office? · · Score: 3, Informative

    If they were switching the Windows version to Freetype that would actually be a story.

    Good point. I was presuming there already was a Mac version of TrueType. If there isn't one already, you are absolutely right.

    Oh, there's definitely a Mac version of TrueType. Apple developed it 20 years ago to compete with Adobe Type 1 and licensed TrueType to Microsoft for Windows 3.1. It forced John Warnock to open Type 1 and eventually killed Adobe Type Manager. Remember when ATM was something other than a place to get cash or something dirty?

  17. Re:Oh great on Look For AI, Not Aliens · · Score: 1

    So let's have The Matrix come to us ... how is that such a good idea? Does nobody think about Fred Saberhagen's Berserker novels?
     
    This will not end well.

  18. Re:For a day? on Local Newspapers Use F/OSS For a Day · · Score: 1

    Kind of like using a fork to eat tomato soup, isn't it? I mean, you can do it but you'll really annoy yourself. Vector-graphics programs have so many advantages over raster-graphics programs for drawing it's almost ridiculous.

    In the commercial space, there's Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw. In the free space, there's Inkscape — a software package I like a lot.

  19. Re:For a day? on Local Newspapers Use F/OSS For a Day · · Score: 1

    I'd love to hear some examples -- because again, GIMP is all I know.

    It seems to me that any functionality and interoperability missing from GIMP could be addressed with Script-Fu

    For newspaper purposes, image-editing software must have true CMYK color support — not just the ability to convert the RGB file into four-color separations at the end of design and layout for the offset printing process, but the ability to convert an RGB image to CMYK and work within the true CMYK colorspace for editing and color-balancing. In my experience, it's a completely different (and easier) process then trying to do it in RGB and there are colors available in CMYK that cannot be reproduced in RGB.

  20. Re:For a day? on Local Newspapers Use F/OSS For a Day · · Score: 1

    The version of The GIMP I have on my Ubuntu laptop (2.6.8) is remarkably like older versions of Photoshop in its interface, so it's hard to call out The GIMP on its interface anymore. It's vastly improved over even a couple of years ago. Anyone with a modicum of Photoshop experience can make that transition very easily.

    Scribus, on the other hand ... oy vey. Compared to the proprietary desktop publishing software used in the newspaper industry (Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress, CCI Layout Champ, the dead-but-not-soon-enough Harris/Baseview system), Scribus' GUI still needs a lot of work ... or, even better, a massive overhaul (at least, so long as it doesn't look like CCI, which has its own Facebook unfan club called "fuck cci" for well-deserved reasons).

    Of course, CCI and Harris/MediaSpan's JazBox and NewsEditPro products (front end for InDesign and Quark) have database-based advertising- and copy-management systems built in to make things easier on the staff. They frequently suck hard, but at least they're there. A straight-ahead free-software solution isn't going to have that, especially since there's no way in hell JRC would hire anybody to design that software.

    And let's not pretend this is some high-and-mighty moral and/or ethical effort by a newspaper corporation. JRC is considered the worst newspaper to work for. Its corporate philosophy is to squeeze a penny until it bleeds, then waterboard the penny to see if there's anything left in it.

  21. News stories were retracted, as well on Climategate's Final Days · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The story in The Sunday Times of London that kicked all this off has been fully retracted with several uses of the phrase "We apologise." The German newspaper that reported that the IPCC erred in its assessment of climate impact in Africa also retracted that story.
     
    Speaking as a journalist, the most damning phrase I see in The Times' retraction is this one (boldfaced emphasis mine):

    A version of our article that had been checked with Dr Lewis underwent significant late editing and so did not give a fair or accurate account of his views on these points. We apologise for this.

    So what really happened there? It sounds suspiciously like somebody high up at The Times or News Corporation didn't like the point of view presented and changed it to fit his or her own worldview, facts be damned.

  22. The thing with Facebook is this ... well, *these* on Facebook Calls All-Hands Meeting On Privacy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Last year, which seems like the last time this bubbled up, Facebook took input from its members and eventually came up with a statement of Facebook Principles, which its members voted in favor of adopting by about a 3:1 margin. So what happened to that?

    Well, as Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out today, Facebook's management didn't even pay lip service to those principles when it came up with the latest evolution of its privacy policy and things like Instant Personalization.

    I haven't decided if this is a separate reason to dislike Facebook or part of the same reason for disliking Facebook. One thing I have decided: I'm glad I blew up my Facebook account.

  23. Re:Cannonical is just trolling us on Ubuntu Will Switch To Base-10 File Size Units In Future Release · · Score: 1

    Well, it should be obvious what the mebibyte's sexual orientation is . . .

  24. But will Congress bollux the whole thing? on US and Russia Conclude Arms-Control Treaty · · Score: 1

    Earlier this week Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said that his party would not cooperate with the Democrats for the rest of the year.

    So if they stick to that, how could it end? Well, badly. I just hope common sense breaks out at some point.

  25. Re:And that kind of attitude is why... on What Free Antivirus Do You Install On Windows? · · Score: 1

    I've found that while lattice is good for interior (and exterior) design work, it's not particularly nutritious and also doesn't taste as good as a properly-prepared hamburger. However, lattice probably has higher fiber content. That said, lattice made of pressure-treated lumber would probably be really bad for you in terms of toxic chemical content.

    I do, however, suspect that lattice made of untreated cedar would have an interesting flavor . . .