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User: smallfries

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Comments · 2,506

  1. Re:Why... on Court Shuts Down Alleged $120M Tech Support Scam · · Score: 1

    And yet this has reached a conclusion, so it did not take forever. Sounds like a win?

  2. Re:The answer is...virtual credit cards on UK Hotel Adds Hefty Charge For Bad Reviews Online · · Score: 1

    Did you know that cards can be validated for an amount as well as charged?

    When I book a hotel stay for $x and give them a card to hold it the first thing they do is validate with the CC company that the card can be charged $x. When I check out they ask how to settle the bill including charging the amount to a different card.

    So if a hotel wants a card to book a room (guaranteeing payment on no-shows) and you provide a dummy card that they could not charge for the amount then over here we call that fraud. But I guess you call them idiots...

  3. Re: Be the Change You Wish to See in the World on The Students Who Feel They Have the Right To Cheat · · Score: 1

    If the prof is no longer available then they get a replacement. Courses are phased out very slowly, when a course is cancelled the intake is capped at zero but it hangs around in the system for up to ten years to deal with resit attempts.

  4. Re: Be the Change You Wish to See in the World on The Students Who Feel They Have the Right To Cheat · · Score: 1

    Not at all - I work at a university where students cannot graduate with a failed course on their transcript. They must resit the course in a later year with the same teacher to earn credit. Ymmv

  5. Re:I have seen the factory line on Worrying Aspects of Linux Gaming · · Score: 1

    The only delay is unloading all those boxes of Half-life 3 off of the front.

  6. Re: Be the Change You Wish to See in the World on The Students Who Feel They Have the Right To Cheat · · Score: 1

    Been there.

    First student to offer proof they are the author gets a bare pass mark, the other three fail. If nobody offers proof then they get referred to the Disciplinary board (for expulsion). It's not quite a Prisoner's dilemma, but the expected payoff is close enough to push someone into action.

  7. Re:Hyperbolic headlines strike again on There's No Such Thing As a General-Purpose Processor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A lot of the value in your article is lost by trying to shoehorn "general purpose processors" into an argument about task-optimisation. The difference between properties relating to computational power and those relating to performance is really basic textbook stuff that we teach to undergraduates. Being able to run any program, and being able to run any program efficiently, is a difference taught in undergraduate architecture courses.

    The parts of your article that are interesting and valuable would have been better served by a narrative that does not rely on a straw man. Cleanly separating the issue of power / performance and explaining that task-neutral optimisation is impossible would have been a better article, and one that would have been easier to write. There is a natural analogy with representation-bias in machine learning that would have provided more explanatory power without the unnecessary rhetoric. I know its the queue, but even so I am a little disappointed in your reviewers.

  8. Re:Old saying on New Atomic Clock Reaches the Boundaries of Timekeeping · · Score: 1

    Indeed the addition of a 4th fix does not constrain the equations, I was thinking of a slightly different positioning system when I wrote that.

    The 4th signal is not historically from a ground station: most GPS receivers will generate an estimated position with a low-accuracy warning on 3 fixes, but they expect 4 in order to generate a real estimate. That 4th signal is normally another satellite. I did look briefly for the difference in CEP-50 between 3 fixes and 4, but could not find a source. You have not linked to any previous discussion on this subject, or external references, so if you have numbers on what the real difference between 3 and 4 fixes is then they would be interesting.

    Ground stations are used in d-GPS, but not only as an extra point of reference. As an known location they can be used to cancel errors in the satellites estimate of its position.

  9. Re:Old saying on New Atomic Clock Reaches the Boundaries of Timekeeping · · Score: 3, Informative

    Actually basic geometry does not say that at all. The receiver does not get given an accurate distance to each satellite, instead it is an inacurrate relative difference in distance. The intersection between the three spheres is a 3d region rather than a point. The extra fix is required to constrain the equations to a single point. There is more info here.

  10. Re:I'm not sure what bothers me more, on Ask Slashdot: Where Do You Stand on Daylight Saving Time? · · Score: 1

    The permanent fix is incredibly simple (not my idea, it was in a stand-up routine) :

    Move the clocks 30 minutes. Stop. Don't ever change them again.

    It would be good enough to stop most of the arguments.

  11. Re:Checksums on Researcher Finds Tor Exit Node Adding Malware To Downloads · · Score: 2

    Stagger is also a verb, as in to cause staggering. Specifically to cause doubt in one's own view and to leave one reeling in disbelief. Literally: that persons sheer stupidity (as demonstrated through their inability to detect sarcasm) is of such magnitude that I am starting to doubt the world around me, as previously my world view did not include people of such low intellect. The cognitive dissonance between that world view and this one has left me spinning and powerless to resist.

    Hope this helps. Additional language lessons are available for the low low price of $1.99.

  12. Re:Yes, worse on If You're Connected, Apple Collects Your Data · · Score: 1

    I would guess that it is part of a system survey. About this mac takes a snapshot of OS version / point release / software installed / modules active etc. Or it certainly does when you press More Info, but I guess it does it when you trigger the dialog. The cookie sounds like a GUID. Firing off both would allow them to build up a distribution of platforms that Yosemite is running on, similar to the Steam hardware survey. Can be useful for finding out how and where the code is used (i.e. in combination with which hardware / software). Would work better than a periodic push of the data from every machine, and it would bias the sample towards people having problems with their configuration (because that is when most people hit that menu item).

  13. Re:Step one on White House Wants Ideas For "Bootstrapping a Solar System Civilization" · · Score: 2

    If you want to make the serious money, look into frozen concentrated orange juice futures.

  14. Re:Einstein's Nobel was for Photo-electric effect on Independent Researchers Test Rossi's Alleged Cold Fusion Device For 32 Days · · Score: 1

    You should have a slashbox on the right hand side with your user details and recent messages. I believe it's the default although it is possible that I turned it on long ago and forgot. Every reply to something that you have posted will appear as a message in the box. In particular old messages and new messages are distinguished by your browser colouring in visited links. The messages are in chronological order so you do not need to skim a whole story to check for replies in different branches. Makes things a bit easier.

  15. Re:Quite useless article on New OS X Backdoor Malware Roping Macs Into Botnet · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well I'm a mac user and I think that you'll find that I am quite superior to you in every way.

  16. Re: Here's the solution on Will Windows 10 Finally Address OS Decay? · · Score: 1

    So basically what your saying is that unix has fixed the OS decay problem by removing the uninstall feature. Well that sounds reasonable :)

    The solution to the other problems that you describe is not shrinkwrapped / easy. My latest attempt is a dual install with one partition for stable, one for unstable and a shared home. This allows disk snapshots of the not running system to allow primitive versioning and rollback.

  17. Re:May I suggest an Etch-A-Sketch? on Ask Slashdot: Remote Support For Disconnected, Computer-Illiterate Relatives · · Score: 1

    The original didn't come with network access, but you can buy DHL for it.

  18. Re:Thank GOD on Intel's 14-nm Broadwell CPU Primed For Slim Tablets · · Score: 1

    Are you sure that you are average? Perhaps you should not entirely discount the idea that you are in the 50% of the population with better than average vision.

    I have no trouble seeing the difference between 720p / 1080p on a 55" screen at 5m (15'), what I find strange is that I notice that many other people do. I always thought the figures for average vision must be underestimates, but other people seem to roll with them.

  19. Re:Any questions? on SRI/Cambridge Opens CHERI Secure Processor Design · · Score: 1

    Is the code for the LLVM support publically available / do you have a link for it?

  20. Re:Xiki Sucks.. on Meet Carla Shroder's New Favorite GUI-Textmode Hybrid Shell, Xiki · · Score: 4, Informative

    Also I went through a phase of doing most of this inside vim anyway. It was a time when I was doing a lot of string manipulation in bash with long complex pipelines and I needed to explicitly show the state / track the output of each component.

    In vim you just need to keep a :r! at the beginning of each command line, to execute just check that you are in command mode with esc then select the cmd line and middle click to execute, allows piping in results by selecting the input and dropping the r to get :!. There is no support for custom hit regions for the mouse, but in compensation it works everywhere already.

    If you already use vim, then having access to vim motions and commands to edit output makes for a surprisingly good shell.

  21. Re:About time. on SpaceX To Present Manned Dragon Capsule · · Score: 1

    Hmmm, I saw that in a movie once. Wonder how much the air will cost?

  22. Re:Easy to solve on Sifting Mt. Gox's Logs Reveals Suspicious Trading Patterns · · Score: 1

    FYI - it is more politically correct to refer to them as Tea Baggers.

  23. Re:No Threat To Thunderbolt on Can Thunderbolt Survive USB SuperSpeed+? · · Score: 1

    So, I'm having trouble understanding this. The OS has a buffer somewhere in memory, and the the host controller has full R/W acess to the entire memory space so that it can try and write into that little buffer? Never mind the security implications, what about reliability? It seems nice and easy to take a system down through some really simple address arithmetic bugs. I really can't see the advantage they were trying for.

  24. Re:Memories do decay on Mathematical Model Suggests That Human Consciousness Is Noncomputable · · Score: 1

    Not strictly true.

    Sometimes a particular item can be degraded by the the storage of another item. For example, artificial neural networks store trained stimuli in the weights between nodes. This storage is global in the sense that storing a new pattern causes a shift in all weights and so alters every other stored item slightly. No idea how it works in the human brain, but it seems completely plausible that storing a memory changes all of the others slightly up until saturation at which point they all get erased.

    The idea that (in the article) that human memory should be lossless is bizarre and has no basis in any neuroscience whatsoever.

  25. Re:More or less than bitcoin? on EVE Online's Space Economy Currently Worth $18 Million · · Score: 1

    There is a little under $6B of bitcoin in circulation, and it has a much wider range of uses. The thing to bare in mind about this story is:

    Economist who studies Eve says it is very important and interesting to have economists studying Eve. Srly?

    The article contains little or no value (cough, bit like the Eve economy then, cough) and the only vaguely interesting point that he makes is glossed over. Apparent ISK is not a fiat currency because CCP closely control the supply by tying it directly to... *stuff*. Remarkable.