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User: Maow

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Comments · 864

  1. Re:Torturing ants on Bradley Manning Makes Statement · · Score: 2

    A country that uses torture as an interrogation technique should not consider itself civilized.

    Never drop context, which in this case is the 3000+ deaths of September 11, 2001.

    Not a big deal, in the larger scheme of things. i.e.:

    London was bombed [...] for 57 consecutive nights.[7] More than one million London houses were destroyed or damaged, and more than 40,000 civilians were killed, almost half of them in London.[4]

    The bombing did not achieve its intended goals of demoralising the British [...]

    Instead of setting their hair on fire and attacking France, they adopted the phrase, "Keep Calm and Carry On."

    Spot the contrasts in intensity and devastation of attacks vis a vis 9/11, then compare and contrast the responses.

  2. Re:Goddammit, the whole tech world is going to hel on A New Version of MS Office Every 90 Days · · Score: 2

    Every company is getting way too fucking greedy, forcing upgrading when it's *really* not necessary (who needs anything since Office 2000?), general computing is going the way of the dodo in favor of Apple-esque walled gardens, every laptop has turned into a glorified VCR with shit-for-keyboards, every awesome technological development is shut down for bullshit legal reasons because paper pushing middleman jackass wouldn't get his cut for doing something useless and obviated by technology...

    Remember when tech companies used to do things because they were genuinely useful?

    Fuck this whole damn planet, we can't get to Mars soon enough and establish a technocracy ruled by logic, science and reason.

    Yeah, OK, that rant was a little off topic, so I'll balance it out by signing off with, fuck you Microsoft with your bullshit greed-based business models.

    I agree with (most of?) your point(s), but that technocracy? Most humans wouldn't be eligible (yeah, I know, that's the point), and the rest would eventually disqualify themselves too, I'm afraid to say.

    It'd end up a fairly barren location once everyone was exiled for failing to maintain logic, science, and reason.

    *sigh*, this thought about utopia has been brought to you by "human frailty".

  3. Re:Hmm on New Bill Would Require Patent Trolls To Pay Defendants' Attorneys · · Score: 2

    Loser Pays applies to virtually the entire rest of the galaxy, and, while not perfect, it is way better than the Loonie Tunes US approach. Here in the UK, it applies to both criminal and civil law in 100% of cases, unless the judge decides the loser was partly to blame - eg deliberately made himself look guilty to attract a law suit.

    Wait, if I'm charged with a criminal offence in the UK, and found not guilty, I get my lawyers fees reimbursed by Her Majesty?

    I don't think it works that way in Canada; I'd be quite interested if you could clarify that.

    We do of course have loser pays in civil proceedings, unless judge decides otherwise, and on a fee schedule applied by the judge.

  4. A lesson for HTC on HTC Unveils Revamped HTC One · · Score: 5, Informative

    Dear HTC,

    I love the hardware on my HTC Amaze 4G but I'm sorry to say that I cannot buy another HTC phone.

    I'm telling you why so you can reverse the decline you've been suffering.

    1) Allow users to remove / not load HTC Sense and opt for the pure Android experience. Sense is lovely, but sometimes I don't want to use up resources on it.

    2) Make your phones (more) hacker friendly. There is no CyanogenMod available for this phone because the drivers weren't released in a timely manner (if I understand the issue correctly), therefore the development community moved on to other phones and it isn't supported.

    3) Stop it with the non-removable batteries and lack of external SD card slots.

    4) UPDATES for Android! My phone updated from 2.3.4 to 4.0.3, but I'm still waiting for 4.1 (and doubt I'll see 4.2). Unacceptable. If you make it easier for CyanogenMod, etc. to run on your older phones, IMHO it will raise your presence in the dev community and increase your exposure / perceived value. You need the dev community to support your phones. With the ability to run CM, you then won't need to issue support for older phones if you don't desire to, as we can update our phones ourselves.

  5. Petard ready? Hoist away! on Publisher Sues University Librarian Over His Personal Blog Posts · · Score: 1

    IANAL, however...

    I imagine it going something like this:

    "Your honour, we move for dismissal due to lack of jurisdiction."

    From TFA:

    And Mr. Askey was not even a librarian at McMaster when he posted on the blog. He was still an associate professor at Kansas State University, working in Hale Library, he said. He started working at McMaster in February 2011.

    Judge: "Okay, published in USA by an American; I have no jurisdiction."

    Hopefully he adds, "I award costs to defendants."

    Then, all the librarians that keep this publisher solvent by buying their books suddenly, in these days of cost cutting measures, can no longer justify the purchases.

    As for Edwin Mellen Press, this is not the first time it has responded aggressively to criticism. The publisher once sued Lingua Franca for libel when, in a 1993 article, the now-defunct magazine criticized the publisher. Edwin Mellen did not win, but it did later publish a book about the lawsuit, which can be purchased for $119.95.

    Yeah, that would be one book not purchased and $120 saved for starters.

  6. Re:Translates to on The IIPA Copyright Demands For Canada and Spain · · Score: 1

    Wouldn't putting THEM on a watch list be more effective?

    Publishing the home address, email, phone numbers, street view links of the CEO of each company that is a member, as well as each representative they send to these meetings? Maybe outing the meeting locations, and times?

    If these bozos think its fair game to try to intimidate entire countries, why is turn-about not fair play?

    Don't stoop to their level, man.

    It's practically your civic duty to pirate stuff now, in order to get your country on to this prestigious list of freedom loving societies.

    I don't want to pirate their stuff, as I have no need for the output of most of the military-industrial-entertainment complex (with exceptions for the industrial part).

    But pirating their crap makes their case stronger in some people's eyes, making it easier for them to get legislation to take away my rights.

    No, I think I like the GP's idea better.

  7. Re:No on SSH Password Gropers Are Now Trying High Ports · · Score: 1

    It's not for security.

    It's to stop the script kiddies of the internet wasting your bandwidth and cluttering your logs with thousands upon thousands of rejection messages in their futile attempts to gain access. They can't get in, but their efforts are annoying.

    I dunno, I get a small amount of schadenfreude from having fail2ban block their IPs - with luck it wastes some of their time, making the whole effort less efficient. Maybe if enough people ran fail2ban then half the attacker's time would be spent waiting for failed connection attempts.

    Plus, if they were to try to then access my web site or try some other form of attack, that would also fail as their IP is banned at the iptables level.

    Of course, your tolerance for schadenfreude may mean that YMMV...

  8. Re:It's easy to get a positive mod on The IIPA Copyright Demands For Canada and Spain · · Score: 1

    Thank you for recognizing and helping to preserve the precarious status of the critically endangered genus known as "white space" and specifically the subspecies known as "paragraph breaks".

    Your conscientiousness is appreciated by conservationists everywhere!

    Now, what did you say? I couldn't really be expected to wade through all that... And you're a writer? Egads.

    Maybe I'm being harsh, so I apologize in advance; just working on my own composition skills.

    And I can't say I disagreed with what I did gather from what you wrote, just in an effort to be fair. It's just that I refuse to put in effort to read something that appears purposefully or carelessly obfuscated.

  9. Re:An IP isn't enough evidence on The IIPA Copyright Demands For Canada and Spain · · Score: 2

    It's nice to see for a change, although it's really only the small providers like TekSavvy that are standing up for consumers. Even if there is evidence of illegal activities, there are already laws in place to deal with it. The problem is that for a media corporation, due process is 'inconvenient' and cuts into their profits.

    I agree and just wanted to add my "Thanks!" to TekSavvy for providing excellent service at a good price, and for standing up to the copyright brigade of bullies.

  10. Re:Unrelated to 2012 DA14? on Huge Meteor Blazes Across Sky Over Russia; Hundreds Injured · · Score: 1

    >As I understood this asteroid came from a different direction than 2012 DA14

    Any references?

    The Bad Astronomy blog deals with it. The author, Phil Plait, is not a "bad" astronomer, he worked on Hubble images for quite a while. The blog name is because he started it to counter "bad" astronomy.

    [Update (Feb. 15, 15:45 UTC): The European weather satellite METEOSAT-9 caught images of the meteor trail blowing away due to winds high in the air. An animation was created from the images, displayed below. Note that the trail is oriented northeast to southwest, again very different than the orbit orientation of 2012 DA14 (south to north), indicating this is meteor is unrelated to the previously-known asteroid. Thanks to Timothy Patterson for the tip.]

  11. Re:Alternative videos on Huge Meteor Blazes Across Sky Over Russia; Hundreds Injured · · Score: 2

    http://www.standartnews.com/videos/watch/meteorit_padna_i_rani_desetki_v_rusiya-276.html
    Here's a link with video from more places. (Best i've found so far)

    Here's another good aggregation:

    http://say26.com/meteorite-in-russia-all-videos-in-one-place.

    I like the apparent "crater" in an ice covered lake. It's a hole punched through the ice. I'm hoping that someone will be able to recover a significant part or parts of the thing from the lake bottom eventually.

  12. Re:See ya, Slashdot. on Reasons You're Not Getting Interviews; Plus Some Crazy Real Resume Mistakes · · Score: 1

    We're getting this every day? And Dice is apparently deleting comments? Fuck that. Slashdot is done. Nice work, Dice.

    PS: I'm on my way over to delete my Dice profile too, since the company is clearly incompetent and unethical.

    You mean this post: NO idea....?

  13. Re:Choices on Obama Proposes 'Meaningful Progress' On Climate Change · · Score: 1

    1) Fix the Economy

    or

    2) Fix Global Warming

    please choose one......

    1) Think

    or

    2) Type & submit

    Please choose one....

    News flash; sometimes one can do both. See: Germany.

  14. Re:I didn't watch the speech on Obama Proposes 'Meaningful Progress' On Climate Change · · Score: 1

    Global cooling was taught in my middle school science text books. I remember the "Igloo Effect" specifically.

    Popular press seized on it as well. You may not be old enough to remember, but it was out there in the MSM.

    I really like the new rationalization, "blizzards and snow are caused by global warming." Or just cover all the bases and stick with "Climate Change" so you are always right.

    You're probably remembering Nuclear Winter, where it says:

    Nuclear winter (also known as atomic winter) is a hypothetical climatic effect of nuclear war. It is theorized that detonating large numbers of nuclear weapons has a profound and severe effect on the climate causing cold weather and reduced sunlight for a period of months or even years, especially over flammable targets such as cities, where large amounts of smoke and soot would be ejected into the Earth's stratosphere.

    Similar climatic effects can be caused by comets or an asteroid impact,[1][2] also sometimes termed an impact winter, or by a supervolcano eruption, known as a volcanic winter.[3]

    Wikipedia has no entry on this "Igloo Effect" that you claim was taught in middle school, popular press, and the MSM. CO2's possible role in affecting climate was postulated > 100 years ago, it's not something that was just invented.

    Or, you're a poor student and rationalizing your bias against climate science in favour of your political bias, because you imagine that you're always right. I dunno.

  15. Re:Mea Maxima Culpa? on Pope To Resign Citing Advanced Age · · Score: 5, Informative

    Reading between the lines, I think HBO's recent "Mea Maxima Culpa" was probably a significant factor. His resignation will stave off the worst of the public outcry and demands for deeper revelations from the church about the matters raised there. Hopefully the Catholic Church will be pressed about the issues raised regardless, but his specific, key role in it all is the point at the moment.

    To recap what I read elsewhere: prior to being Pope, he was the head of the modern (renamed) Inquisition, assigned there by the previous pope. In that role, he "took charge" of the recent wave of priest sex abuse scandals since the 90s, ordered all evidence be centralized in his department's archives, and then basically hid it all and did little to actually act on the mountains of evidence they still haven't revealed to prosecutors or the public. It's pretty damning stuff.

    The late, lamented Christopher Hitchens had possibly the ultimate take on the cover-up at Slate.com.

    To quote the appropriately entitled "The Great Catholic Cover-Up: The pope's entire career has the stench of evil about it":

    Very much more serious is the role of Joseph Ratzinger, before the church decided to make him supreme leader, in obstructing justice on a global scale. After his promotion to cardinal, he was put in charge of the so-called "Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith" (formerly known as the Inquisition). In 2001, Pope John Paul II placed this department in charge of the investigation of child rape and torture by Catholic priests. In May of that year, Ratzinger issued a confidential letter to every bishop. In it, he reminded them of the extreme gravity of a certain crime. But that crime was the reporting of the rape and torture. The accusations, intoned Ratzinger, were only treatable within the church's own exclusive jurisdiction. Any sharing of the evidence with legal authorities or the press was utterly forbidden. Charges were to be investigated "in the most secretive way ... restrained by a perpetual silence ... and everyone ... is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office under the penalty of excommunication." (My italics). Nobody has yet been excommunicated for the rape and torture of children, but exposing the offense could get you into serious trouble. And this is the church that warns us against moral relativism! (See, for more on this appalling document, two reports in the London Observer of April 24, 2005, by Jamie Doward.)

  16. Re:Not this again. on When 1 GB Is Really 0.9313 Gigabytes · · Score: 1

    I really do pity you people with an American education. Really. Who is "noone", by the way?

    http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/noone since

    Origin:
    1595–1605

    And, taught in Ontario, Canada schools in the '60s an '70s.

    All though I personally prefer the disambiguated "no one", "noone" is not incorrect.

  17. Re:No. on Should the Start of Chinese New Year Be a Federal Holiday? · · Score: 1

    Another angle is, we need a break in the dark, dreary months between Xmas / New Year and ... Easter.

    Then maybe you should do what we do down here - Mardi Gras ftw!

    Which is day after tomorrow, so tomorrow and Tuesday will be a nearly nonstop party....

    Mardi Gras sounds like a blast!

    It's also based on Lent, a religious holiday, from my understanding. But never-the-less, sounds freaking great. Enjoy!

  18. Re:No. on Should the Start of Chinese New Year Be a Federal Holiday? · · Score: 1

    Please. No.

    I like paid days off as much as the next guy, but seriously, we are not in China.

    Slippery slope, blah, blah, blah...

    We're not in Palestine / Bethlehem / where-ever, but Christmas & Easter are among our biggest sets of holidays.

    Also, Chinese New Year is celebrated in a lot more countries than just China.

    Another angle is, we need a break in the dark, dreary months between Xmas / New Year and ... Easter.

    A strike against Chinese New Year is that it's not on a constant day, but floats around the calendar.

    Also, since all the factories in China are closed for a week, a fair number of westerners whose work is liaising with these manufacturers haven't got a lot to do around this time of year...

  19. Are we in China or some place like it? on Sony Rootkit Redux: Canadian Business Groups Lobby For Right To Install Spyware · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's getting pretty hard to differentiate between living in North America under corporate controlled government and China under government controlled corporatism.

    If only there were a similarity that I could put my finger on, it seems there is but it escapes me.

    I guess we'll see how similar if this passes. I doubt it will, but it indicates we have more in common that I'm comfortable with. Hell, just the fact that this has been proposed is a lot more egregious than I'd have ever imagined possible just a few years ago.

  20. Re:Meh on KDE 4.10 Released, the Fastest KDE Ever · · Score: 1

    I'll stick with Windows 8, thanks.

    Area man offered free high-performance sports car, chooses rust bucket with seats made of plywood with nails driven up through it.

    Film at 11.

  21. Re:Sneaky scientists on Paper On Conspiratorial Thinking Invokes Conspiratorial Thinking · · Score: 1

    Isn't it obvious? The researchers paid dozens of bloggers to come up with these conspiracy theories. The blogs were used as evidence to support the hypotheses in the follow-up paper, which will earn the researchers enough cash to pay more bloggers. And so on.

    It's kinda like the way McAfee and Symantec have secret programmers who strategically release new viruses when business is slow.

    No, don't you see?!?11?

    The first paper was to draw teh conspiracists out of the woodwork, trick 'em to expose themselves, man.

    Then, the 2nd paper is infected with a virus or a bio-cromulantic-warfare attack, which targets, flags, and tags the brave conspiracists from the first paper so they can be taken away and [... ATH0 ... No Carrier ...]

  22. Re:mysqldump - storage engine info discarded?!? on MySQL 5.6 Reaches General Availability · · Score: 1

    Try --create-options:
    http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysqldump.html#option_mysqldump_create-options

    mysqldump by default aims to dump valid SQL for any DB (which is why the MySQL-specific options are within special comments). The ENGINE= attribute of the CREATE TABLE query is MySQL-specific so left off by default, --create-options should include it.

    Thanks - that's a good explanation.

    However, I just tested it and it didn't work.

    A-ha! I was using --compatible=ansi and that was the issue.

    Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction.

    "Duh"


    CREATE TABLE `test` (
        `kkeeyy` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
        `a` varchar(10) DEFAULT NULL,
        `b` varchar(10) DEFAULT NULL,
        PRIMARY KEY (`kkeeyy`)
    ) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=3 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

  23. Re:mysqldump - storage engine info discarded?!? on MySQL 5.6 Reaches General Availability · · Score: 2

    That won't work unless he knows what to search for. I'm not running the latest mysql. Maybe they neutered mysqldump, if so that would probably be dumb.

    Interesting: did mysqldump ever support the storage engine specified? I dumped & loaded some DBs on the replication server and ... all InnoDB. Huh, some of these ought to have been MyISAM. Looked into it further, and it appears dependant on the default-storage-engine= in my.cnf.

    However, specifying --xml to mysqldump forces it to specify the storage engine. I haven't yet looked into how to load the XML file(s) into MySQL (for that I'll read man pages / search internet).

    I keep thinking that I'm missing something obvious but ... not finding it. Almost convinced it's a bug / oversight.

    On the other hand if they neutered mysql to not store engine type that would just be moronic. It won't affect me when/if I upgrade to 5.6 because I store my schemas as part of the program sourcecode (not in the sourcecode, next to it, like running mysql somedb something.sql will create the table "something" requires if its not already there. In a way this actually would save effort when converting from one DB engine to another.

    The existence of one anecdote that once happened to me years ago which I might not even be correctly remembering does not imply no other cause could exist. But its a start and better than the reply of RTFM noob.

    Restored / loaded tables have the default-storage-engine in effect.

    And the earlier poster - did he think concern over the storage engine in a mixed environment, or replication, are noob topics?

    Here's a sample created by mysqldump:


    CREATE TABLE "test" (
        "kkeeyy" int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
        "a" varchar(10) DEFAULT NULL,
        "b" varchar(10) DEFAULT NULL,
        PRIMARY KEY ("kkeeyy")
    );

    Note that no storage engine is specified.

  24. Re:mysqldump - storage engine info discarded?!? on MySQL 5.6 Reaches General Availability · · Score: 2

    Seriously, read the manpage or search the internet. Slashdot is not your command line argument support forum.

    Further more, putting my question out there might just notify some sysadmins that their mysqldumped data might not be quite what they expected if they rely on a mix of storage engines' features for their various tables...

    Idiot.

  25. Re:mysqldump - storage engine info discarded?!? on MySQL 5.6 Reaches General Availability · · Score: 0

    Seriously, read the manpage or search the internet. Slashdot is not your command line argument support forum.

    Done and done.

    Been considering a bug report but WTF, why not ask since this thread is about MySQL which happens to have new replication features that I'm reading about in another tab right now.

    You think Slashdot is going to get filled up or something?

    Idiot.