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User: AKnightCowboy

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Comments · 1,793

  1. Re:Yet another repugnant violation of states' righ on House Approves Electronic ID Cards · · Score: 1, Flamebait
    But it's quite another to coerce the states into passing laws they don't want to pass, or that are contrary to their state constitutions, in order to receive highway funds.

    Nobody has to accept highway funds from the federal government. I don't understand what the big deal is anyway as I personally would rather see state driver's licenses done away with completely and just go to a national ID system that would double as your driver's license. There's no reason every citizen shouldn't have an identification card issued by the federal government.

    It could make thing so much easier and help to reduce identity theft if implemented properly. I imagine other countries have done this already without major fanfare. Besides, a strong national ID card could double as a taxpayer ID card and let you file taxes online without having to go out and buy third-party software. Go to an IRS website, use your national smart card to authenticate yourself and enter your tax information online.

  2. Re:No Case on Pfizer and Microsoft go after Viagra Spammers · · Score: 0
    Spammers are selling V|agra you silly!

    Why by V|agra when you can enlarge your penis with C1@l1s?

  3. Re:Mac mini is not marketed as a server on Mac mini Maximized With 3.5" Drives · · Score: 1
    More than powerful enough for hosting 3 email addresses, and serving a LAMP based site that gets a few hundred hits a week,

    What's the URL. ;-) Sure, it's sufficient if you don't actually use it for anything, but the minute you post a picture-by-picture slideshow of you disassembling your iBook to replace the hard drive with a SCSI drive you'll suddenly get 100,000 hits in a day in which case you'll crash it. My 386 could handle a few hundred hits a *day* easily but I don't say it's a server anymore.

  4. Re:A True Shame on FreeBSD Announces Contest To Replace Daemon Logo · · Score: 1

    Sorry, it's a joke. If someone were to refuse to run FreeBSD because it had a little daemon as the mascot they'd be as dorky as the guys that say D&D turns you into a devil worshipper. ;-)

  5. Re:A True Shame on FreeBSD Announces Contest To Replace Daemon Logo · · Score: 1
    t's a shame, NetBSD I can understand, there may be some confusion when both BSDs use the same "daemony" logo style, but the other BSDs have all moved away from beastie.

    Most people I've discussed it with see it as a satanic symbol. I've lost more than a few converts that ended up switching to Linux because they didn't feel comfortable using a satanic UNIX.

  6. Re:NASA has it wrong on NASA Announces De-Orbit Mission For Hubble · · Score: 1

    They care even less about the aeronatics side of NASA (you know, the first A in "NASA"?). The FY06 budget was briefed yesterday and it has huge aero cuts for aeronatics research centers. I wouldn't be suprised if at least 2 or 3 NASA centers close within the next 3 years to divert funds to this manned moon mission pipedream.

  7. Re:Once again... on Court Docs Reveal Kazaa Logging User Downloads · · Score: 1
    What? Like Gold Dubloons and Pieces of Eight?

    Arrrrr, since when this be talk like a pirate day landlubber?

  8. Re:New mail protocol on Spamhaus: MCI Makes $5M A Year In Spam Profits · · Score: 1
    However, ISPs are not going to want to implement a protocol that no clients can use, and email clients are not going to support protocols that are not actually in use as easily.

    And that is our problem with the Internet today. 20 years ago you could schedule a time to switch over to a new protocol and that would be that. Sorry, we didn't get your mail because we don't use that protocol anymore. Didn't you get the memo?

  9. Re:Hard disk bottleneck on 6 Firms Form Holographic Versatile Disc Alliance · · Score: 1
    But by the time we have HVDs that fast, I'm sure drive connection busses will have improved considerably.

    I'm sure people thought the same thing about tape drives too. I have 400GB of hard drive space in my desktop for $200 but if I want to back it up I need to spend thousands on a tape drive that'll back up 100GB per tape. WTF?! I would prefer if tape backup technology just caught up to our current hard disk sizes at an affordable price so I could back up my hard drive. At the prices they want for tapes it'd be cheaper to back up to an external USB hard drive for cripe's sake.

  10. Re:so this means... on National PC Recycling Plan Proposed, Again · · Score: 1

    I never did understand prohibitions against yard debris. Of all the things in the world, branches, leaves, and grass clippings are the least of our concern ending up in a landfill. They'll just biodegrade!

  11. Re:Newton - PalmPilot - iPod on PDA Sales Fall for Third Year in Row · · Score: 1
    Now I can sync my (iCal) calendars and my address book to my iPod. I take that little white gem with me pretty much everywhere anyway, and it's doing 80-90% of what my PalmPilot did. And it "just works" on my Mac OS X box.

    How do you enter phone numbers or new calendar items on your iPod without hooking it up to a laptop? Is there another interface built into it to type stuff in?

  12. Re:There can be only one... on PDA Sales Fall for Third Year in Row · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I've found that I never use my Palm anymore. It sits on the cradle for months at a time whereas I got through 2 or 3 of those yellow sticky notepad things a month. If I need to write something down I find a sheet of paper with some unused space and jot down a note. Who needs a $500 PDA for that???

  13. Re:capped to 40GB/month on Australia Gets 8Mbit/s Broadband now, 20Mbit Soon · · Score: 1
    We have better things to do with our time than spend all day, every day downloading DVDs we'll never watch. 40GB is more than enough for most mortal uses.

    Then why on earth would you need 8Mbits/sec if in reality it's capped at 40GB to give a "real world" speed of 128Kb/s? If you don't download a large amount of data then 1.5Mbits/sec or even 384Kb/sec is more than enough for checking mail or browsing the web. The only reason fast broadband took off is the large scale software, music, and movie piracy that is going on with a silent wink and a nod from our ISPs.

  14. Re:Michael is gone! on Australia Gets 8Mbit/s Broadband now, 20Mbit Soon · · Score: 1
    Secondly, he is/was an EDITOR. That means he gets to EDITORIALISE stories as well as choose them. Please look up the job description of editor for various forms of media, and learn a little.

    Slashdot "editors" are not like traditional newspaper editors. They're more like posting approvers. If they were real editors they would proofread posts and ensure there are no spelling or grammatical errors before posting them to the frontpage.

  15. Re:price drop on Apple Updates PowerBooks · · Score: 1

    Wow, I was going to buy a Powerbook last night but I was too lazy to go get my wallet to get my credit card. Now I can get a 15" machine with a 1.67 Ghz processor, 100GB 5400RPM disk drive and 1GB of RAM for $2400 (Federal Employee Purchase Plan price) which is less than the price I would've paid yesterday for a 1.5GHz powerbook with 80GB drive and 512MB of ram. Woohoo.

  16. Re:They set themselves up in a Catch-22 on Firefox Developer on Recruitment Policy · · Score: 1
    They say loudly that they are only willing to accept developers to the project that they have vetted themselves, no one need apply. And with this attitude in front of them, they drive away people who want to help but are unsure of their abilities.

    So fork the project and start your own web browser and accept whoever you want to join your developer pool.

    still can't parse Slash code for shit, but that's just a hurdle to be overcome soon

    Slash code is 6 or 7 years worth of accumulated HTML cruft that was never redesigned properly as the specs were updated. Try running this site through a validator sometime. It's not Firefox's fault that Slash code isn't compliant any more than it's Firefox's fault that it has trouble rendering IE-only broken pages. If you write non-compliant web pages then expect them to look like crap, don't expect the browser to perform hacks to make your site look correct.

  17. Re:But I thought on The Hundred-Buck PC · · Score: 1
    It's great to say that we should just send all of our old PCs overseas, except that the cost of the logistics of testing each machine (many systems of that era will have a bad part or two), installing the software on a diverse set of hardware, and shipping them gets to be greater than the cost of just making millions of $SOMETHINGNEW such as this proposal.

    Who said we had to test them? Send over 200-300 thousand old computers that people are throwing out and let them salvage what works and put Linux on them by themselves. Why do we have to handhold them through setting up stuff we're giving to them for free? They can RTFM and search Google for help. Plus it'd be a great way to keep that old shit out of our landfills.

  18. Re:myth on It's Not TV, It's MythTV · · Score: 4, Informative
    Anyone who trys linux for the first time when setting up MythTV is put off. It's a freaking NIGHTMARE to get mythTV to work witt anything.

    Install Debian, apt-get install mythtv. It's not very hard. Took me an hour including the FTP install of Debian to setup my last MythTV system. The only complicated part is if you want to use Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250 or 350 cards in which case you have to screw around with the kernel modules because Hauppauge isn't very open with these proprietary mpeg-2 encoder cards so they've had to be reverse engineered. If you're just using a generic tuner supported by Video4Linux out of the box like a Hauppauge WinTV 401 model that uses the bttv kernel module and btaudio module (included with any vanilla Linux kernel) for capturing the audio then the Debian install and MythTV debs are all you need really.

    MythTV has not even been updated for a whole year.

    Quit making stuff up. The last stable release was in September and they put out a new stable release every 4-5 months. In the mean time nothing is stopping you from running the CVS version of it if you're so inclined. I'm still running MythTV 0.15.1 from May because it's very stable and 0.16 has no new features I require. The box is up 24/7 and it's simple enough that my wife has no problem figuring out how to use it to record her shows.

  19. Re:myth on It's Not TV, It's MythTV · · Score: 1
    Sure, but don't you expect at some point the Media Powers That Be will divulge their ultimate plan, when the ask US Congress to approve certain requirements for recording Television and effectively criminalize unapproved PVRs (those which don't erase stuff after so much time, those that don't automatically include some sort of DRM to prevent you burning DVDs of shows to give to your friends, etc.)?

    VCRs are still legal. I think the Supreme Court would have a field day with anyone trying to impose the kinds of restrictions you're talking about.

  20. Re:Is sure is a good thing, then... on Why Apple Makes a One-Button Mouse · · Score: 4, Insightful
    ...that you can use any USB or Bluetooth (if your computer is equipped) mouse or input device on earth, for as little as $5, and they will instantly work for left/right/center/scroll without any additional drivers or configuration of any kind, or even any requirement that you have any kind of administrative privileges.

    The problem is that doesn't help Powerbook or iBook users who are stuck with a trackpad with a single button for clicks. Sure, I can attack an external mouse to my laptop but then suddenly I have yet another thing to haul around and they're not exactly easy to use when you're sitting on a bus with the laptop balanced on your legs.

  21. Re:Indeed on Microsoft Claims Linux Security a Myth · · Score: 4, Funny
    Care to elaborate? Just what part of the software stack is missing?

    The entire .NET Framework is missing from the Linux kernel!!! My Visual Basic kernel modules won't even compile under Linux.

  22. Re:More important than Sir Berners-Lee is ... on Sir Tim Berners-Lee Named Greatest Briton · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Let us not fall for the socialist fallacy that the only good thing one can do in life is to give away ones money. People like Tim Berners Lee CREATE wealth, which is a greater virtue then passing it around!

    People bitched when Bill Gates gave $750 million to support immunization programs too. Most people need to tear other people down or they're just not happy. It's life.

  23. Re:Read the fine print on Verizon and Microsoft Partner for IPTV · · Score: 1

    What does "3 standard TV signals and 1 HD channel" mean anyway? My coax cable connection to my Cable company gives me over 500 channels... is Microsoft saying you'll only be able to watch 3 standard channels or 1 HD channel at a time over this thing? That seems ridiculous.

  24. Re:He only gave LINKS on Norwegian Student Ordered to Pay for Hyperlinks to Music · · Score: 1
    He only provided the links and didn't host any of the files? What a sad day for freedom on the net. Soon it will be a crime to link to bittorrent or eMule's respective homepages.

    Don't steal copyrighted music, don't get sued into oblivion. When are people going to accept that fact? I stopped downloading pirated music years ago when the RIAA started cracking down on "sharing". Either stop listening to commercial music (there's plenty of free music out there by artists that would love for you to share their work) or buy it like you're expected to. Personally I'd prefer to give a big old "fuck you" to the RIAA and see that nobody ever buys another commercial album, but that'll never happen.

  25. Re:Give DirecTV and Dish a little competition?!?!? on XM and Sirius Merger? · · Score: 2, Funny
    It's a hoax.

    It is most certainly NOT a hoax. My brother's neighbor's cousin's roommate works for Sirius and he's positive he overheard something in the lunchroom about this.