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User: david_thornley

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  1. Re:Probably an excuse to jack the price. on iPhone 7 To Start at 32GB Storage, Says WSJ (time.com) · · Score: 1

    I feel bad for people with so little empathy that they don't even try to understand why people make the decisions they do.

  2. Re:Probably an excuse to jack the price. on iPhone 7 To Start at 32GB Storage, Says WSJ (time.com) · · Score: 1

    My 16G 4 worked fine, but I kept putting things on it like more music and lots of apps, and it became inadequate. My wife bought a lot fewer apps and had no problems.

  3. Re:A "miniscule" problem will not get resolved. on 'New Way of Stealing Cars': Hacking Them With A Laptop (marketwatch.com) · · Score: 1

    There are actually some potential advantages to smoking, although not very impressive ones Smoking can make an asthmatic feel better temporarily (I've got some family members that report this), and there's speculation that some schizophrenics can use cigarettes to self-medicate. Cigarettes are highly addictive and expensive ways to inflict potentially lethal damage on your body in various ways, dull some of your senses, and inflict foul-smelling toxins and carcinogens on others (let's not forget that the smell lingers a long time), provided by an industry that has corrupted government regulations to its benefit. Oh, and they're fire hazards. Let's not get too carried away criticizing them.

  4. Re:Have they heard of Virtual Machines? on Linux Letting Go: 32-bit Builds On the Way Out (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    Are there [limited resources]? We are talking about open source here.

    Are you trying to tell me that there are infinitely many programmers participating in free/open source projects? As long as we have a finite number of such developers, we have limited resources.

    You also seem perfectly happy to make demands that such developers do things your way, without you actually paying them. You also seem to think that GUIs and browsers and the like should run at maximum speed, but in actuality they have to run fast enough. If a user-initiated action can happen within a tenth of a second, there's very little point in speeding it up. There are cases where performance is very important, but you haven't mentioned them, and most personal computers don't hit them very often. It's good if the kernel is efficient, since if it isn't most things can't be, but editors almost never need to be tremendously efficient.

    It would appear that you don't know much about Linux distros either, and if you knew anything you'd know that certain older versions tend to get security updates for a long time.

  5. Re:That's just great... on Linux Letting Go: 32-bit Builds On the Way Out (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    Politically, he's an outsider. If he was an insider a year ago, he's pretty much changed that. He's going to get worse cooperation than Obama.

    As far as business goes, he's an insider, and a poster child for the Occupy movement's idea of the 1%. Personally, I think the establishment should have taken the Occupy movement more seriously, as it was a forerunner of Trump and Sanders. It was partly nihilistic, as it was mostly a rejection of things without a decent idea of what they wanted done about it, but that's Trump's constituency.

  6. Re:Gross negligence == extremely careless... on The FBI Recommends Not To Indict Hillary Clinton For Email Misconduct (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Any classified documents sent to her server were probably not sent by her.

    As far as the FBI could tell, no documents were delivered in violation of trust, deliberately or by negligence. You're taking one interpretation of the law and claiming that Clinton should be imprisoned for ten years. That's a bit extreme, don't you think? Corney examined previous practice and found that such actions typically resulted in administrative sanctions, and that prosecutions usually involve much more egregious cases.

    There is no requirement for a prosecutor to prosecute every potential violation of the law, and apparently prosecuting cases such as Clinton's has not been the usual practice.

  7. I really don't think that's how a court would rule. You're being awfully picky on exactly what you consider "directing customers", and I'd think that an in-app action that gets the customer an invitation to subscribe is directing the customer to another purchasing mechanism. These are guidelines, not absolute rules, and trying to construe a guideline carefully to violate the spirit usually doesn't work.

    There's a clear intent to the guideline, and Spotify is violating it. Apple is completely in the right here.

  8. Re:So... on Password Sharing Is a Federal Crime, Appeals Court Rules (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    The FBI found no criminal intent, and could not come up with leaks. Are you saying that I'm in my private fantasy world, and nobody else believes in the FBI or the space unicorns?

  9. Re:A question of definitions? on Password Sharing Is a Federal Crime, Appeals Court Rules (vice.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Now, for the purposes of the CFAA, exactly what counts as authorization? Traditionally, putting an anonymous FTP server up has been considered to authorize access, but is this so according to the CFAA? As long as "authorization" is vague here, the CFAA will have a chilling effect on what people do.

  10. Okay:

    Apps may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than IAP.

    There was an in-app method that would result in the customer receiving notification of how to subscribe. That is a clear violation of the guideline quoted above. Since the rule says pretty much what I said, it would appear that I'm right and Spotify was violating the guidelines.

  11. Re:Gross negligence == extremely careless... on The FBI Recommends Not To Indict Hillary Clinton For Email Misconduct (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Exactly what does "removed from its proper place of custody" mean here, if it wasn't there to begin with? I'm not clear on that. As far as delivering to anyone unauthorized, the FBI didn't find that that happened. The FBI found neither criminal intent nor actual harm (harm in this case being disclosure of classified information to anyone not cleared for it). I suspect that if they'd found one of those the recommendation would have been different.

  12. Whose authorization? on Password Sharing Is a Federal Crime, Appeals Court Rules (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    The case as given is clear: someone used social engineering to break into a database of a former employer. This is clearly unauthorized access.

    What I worry about with laws like this is where they end. It's fairly common to password-share between employees to get some damn work done, and it's not unheard of to share social site passwords, and I don't think we want these cases to be against the CFAA.

  13. Re:So... on Password Sharing Is a Federal Crime, Appeals Court Rules (vice.com) · · Score: 0

    Seriously, the Secretary of State you're talking about exists only in your imagination. Clinton didn't violate security willfully, and shared state secrets with those authorized to see them, not wantonly. What she did wasn't good, but if you have to stretch things that far you've lost touch with reality.

  14. Re:Continue to get killed on Pod Planes Could Change Travel Forever (cnn.com) · · Score: 1

    Cars aren't really designed to survive collisions. Cars are designed so the humans survive collisions.

  15. Re:No need on Pod Planes Could Change Travel Forever (cnn.com) · · Score: 1

    Sounds very unpleasant. I don't know how smooth the transition from rail to aircraft would be, and aircraft nowadays tend to be pretty darn uncomfortable. I'd rather have more room on the rail transport, where more space is relatively cheap.

  16. Re:Elizabeth was just being extremely careless. on Theranos Faces Congressional Inquiry Over Faulty Blood Tests (techcrunch.com) · · Score: 1

    Meaning, of course, that she stayed this side of criminal prosecution, and not anything more favorable?

  17. Re:Small Government? on Theranos Faces Congressional Inquiry Over Faulty Blood Tests (techcrunch.com) · · Score: 1

    There's a very wide array of people who call themselves libertarians, and you don't represent all of them.

    You claim that the government will, in theory, enforce contracts between individuals and multinationals. One problem is that that's expensive and inefficient, and someone will have to pay for investigation and the court system. It's cheaper to have something like the FDA, imperfect as it is.

  18. Re:That's just great... on Linux Letting Go: 32-bit Builds On the Way Out (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    It's far too early to claim that the Republicans will keep the House. There's a distinct possibility of the Democrats winning very big indeed.

  19. Re:That's just great... on Linux Letting Go: 32-bit Builds On the Way Out (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    One take-home message if Trump wins is that outsiders are ineffective. Trump would get less done than Jimmy Carter.

    Sanders was his counterpart in the Democratic race, and Sanders did a lot better than most people would have expected. I think the Brexit vote is more of the same.

    In the very likely contingency that Clinton is elected, she's going to have to deliver something good to the Trump/Sanders constituencies, or they'll be back and in greater numbers.

  20. Re:That's just great... on Linux Letting Go: 32-bit Builds On the Way Out (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    Typically, people with really old computers don't pick up new shinies to plug in. In most cases, if they were interested in new shinies they'd be on a 64-bit system now, and Ubuntu will be supporting 32-bit systems for quite a few years to come.

  21. Re:Not Everybody Buys A New Computer Every Year on Linux Letting Go: 32-bit Builds On the Way Out (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    If what you have right now works, do you really need to run the latest version of Ubuntu? Particularly when there's going to be a LTS version for quite some time?

  22. Re:64 bit builds are a waste of resources on Linux Letting Go: 32-bit Builds On the Way Out (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    If you're trying to economize on hardware in your embedded or mobile device, what are you doing running a desktop distro? Certainly you could shave off some money by not running all of Ubuntu. TFS implies that this is for desktop distros like Ubuntu.

  23. Re:Have they heard of Virtual Machines? on Linux Letting Go: 32-bit Builds On the Way Out (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    There are limited resources, and the question is whether it's better to spend them to get maximum performance out of old hardware or to take advantage of newer features. As hardware becomes cheaper relative to software, it's overall more economical to use additional hardware to make the software tasks easier, and less economical to insist on supporting the older and rare hardware.

    If you have an old machine, try an old version of whatever Linux distro you like. It still should work.

  24. Re:Have they heard of Virtual Machines? on Linux Letting Go: 32-bit Builds On the Way Out (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    What's there to "find"? You can kick-off a 32-bit VM under any hypervisor — both on the cloud or on your own desktop. You can automate the VM-creation and tear-down on your build-farm quite easily.

    Which is not testing on the appropriate hardware, which you'd want to do for at least some cases (like the kernel). The idea is to stop supporting 32-bit computers and use VMs instead, which is in line with what you're saying.

  25. Re:Bit optimistic on the human pay on Uber Hires a Robot To Patrol Its Parking Lot and It's Way Cheaper Than a Security Guard (fusion.net) · · Score: 1

    Yup, which will make the guard cost maybe 30% more than what the guard is paid. If your security firm is spending more on a guard than the guard makes, it's either doing something highly specialized and expensive or it's highly inefficient. This doesn't mean the firm isn't billing out more than twice what the guard makes, because that's not a function of cost of the guard. It's a function of what the security firm is able to get from the client, and does have to average more than the loaded cost of the guard.