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User: idontgno

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  1. Re:This... on Rob Pardo Says Farewell To Blizzard · · Score: 1

    The editor shot his blizzwad.

  2. Re:Sinking ship... on Rob Pardo Says Farewell To Blizzard · · Score: 1
    Oooh building blocks? Where can I buy them?

    World of Warcraft Mega Bloks. Hypothetically, any retailer that has a large enough toy section that Legos hasn't completely pushed out any "Lego-compatible" building brick sets. On-line too, I guess, but the few I have I actually picked up out of clearance bins at places like Target.

  3. Re:Incoming international flights on TSA Prohibits Taking Discharged Electronic Devices Onto Planes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually, if you're a REALLY dedicated terrorist, replace all the cells with explosives triggered by the power switch. Kill everyone in a 10-meter radius in the security checkpoint at the specific command of the TSA agent, and make sure the post-event propaganda plays that up.

  4. Re:White collar prison on IRS Recycled Lerner Hard Drive · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If the lowly peon isn't held accountable for his direct actions, then the next time management asks him to do something wrong or illegal, there's one less reason for him to refuse. If he refuses, he can be assured of repercussions from management, but experience has shown him that threat of legal consequences is low if he complies; the path of least resistance is clear.

    What you're advocating is that the IT puke be arrested, tried, convicted, sentenced, and punished for... working an anonymous hardware ticket in the IT task management tool. Probably one of dozens added to the system in any day.

    I'm sure you're envisioning IT minion being called into Big Bad Evil Bureaucrat's office and being told "This hard drive contains crucial evidence which will destroy every Great and Evil thing I have worked for so long to accomplish. You must destroy it... use the Impractically Slow Hard Drive Destruction Machine in our Sea of Japan secret volcano base."

    In practice, I'm sure it was the IP weenie going "Huh. A hardware decommisioning ticket from Remedy. A dozen hard drives."

    Yeah. There's individual moral responsibility. But while we're at it, let's imprison undertakers for destroying murder evidence in cases where the murder isn't uncovered until after the burial.

  5. Re:Speculation... on NADA Is Terrified of Tesla · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Their purpose is to earn a reasonable profit, for any definition of "reasonable" that translates to "as much as I can get away with".

    This is capitalistic economics: "What the market will bear".

  6. Re:Chicago Blackhawks too? on Washington Redskins Stripped of Trademarks · · Score: 1

    No more than "Lincoln" would be to white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

    Actually, maybe it should be. I don't think Fox News is really upholding its duty in fomenting recreational moral outrage.

  7. Re:Chicago Blackhawks too? on Washington Redskins Stripped of Trademarks · · Score: 1

    Speaking of "Sioux", why isn't that being pilloried as derogatory? The most common etymology is that the name comes from Ojibwa for "small snake", but more recent research traces it back to a Ojibwa word roughly equivalent to "barbarian".

    Neither of which are very flattering.

    Note, indeed, that most people identified as "Sioux" often self-identify by one of the related nations (such as Lakota, Santee, or Yankton).

  8. Re:Absofuckinglutely on Why China Is Worried About Japan's Plutonium Stocks · · Score: 1

    Nice troll. Ukraine isn't a US ally

    That's funny; that's exactly what Obama said to Ukraine. Pointed out very carefully that if you read all the fine print in the Budapest Memorandum, the words "ally" and "military support" never occur. Those were just in the marketing material. Silly Ukraine for signing stuff without reading it first.

    Iraq refused to sign an agreement with the US

    Well, to tell the truth, there really isn't one Iraq, even in the government, and in they end they weren't convinced they really wanted or needed us. That's turning out pretty well in retrospect.

  9. Re:The cloud on Code Spaces Hosting Shutting Down After Attacker Deletes All Data · · Score: 1

    "Just world" hypothesis. The mental model that says "that guy got victimized because he brought it on himself, whereas I'm perfectly safe because I don't."

    Cowards blame the victim so that they can reassure themselves (falsely) that it just can't happen to them.

  10. Re:what's the point anymore on Unisys Phasing Out Decades-Old Mainframe Processor For x86 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't know much (ok, anything at all) about the Libre lines but the Dorado machines have some very unusual characteristics such as 9-bit bytes which would render anything other than hardware compatibility a total disaster necessitating a forced conversion to another platform immediately.

    Right. Goes back to the multiple-of-9-bit native word length of the the entire 11xx/22xx heritage, back to the Univac 418. Since bytes aren't the native access mode in that architecture anyway, they're an afterthought and rather harder to code for in assembler.

    That's not the only oddity of that architecture, too. 1s complement math? Negative zero?

    Yeah. I'm an old grey geek that started out on an 1180 back in the day. Mostly assembler real-time stuff.

    I'm a bit misty-eyed at the thought of that heritage code running, essentially, by run-time emulation rather than natively.

    Sic transit gloria mundi.

  11. Simple Rebuttal on Android Needs a Simulator, Not an Emulator · · Score: 1

    Only a poor craftsman blames his tools.

  12. Re: In the US they'd have been charged on Kids With Operators Manual Alert Bank Officials: "We Hacked Your ATM" · · Score: 2

    You're advocating against millennia of moral teaching and (perhaps genetic) altruism: the willingness to personally endanger one's self in order to help someone else.

    I'd argue these youngsters, and other white hats, are modern Good Samaritans. Everyone familiar with the Parable of the Good Samaritan picks up on how the Samaritan was socially unlikely to help the Jew, and under no real obligation to do so, and therefore a moral exemplar. But one of the subtexts of the story is that the Samaritan put himself in personal peril to help the victim: the robbers that nearly killed the Jew could have still been in the vicinity, and the Samaritan (with travelling funds and a valuable donkey) could have been their next victim... and he had to know it.

    The fact that modern robbers make being a good Samaritan dangerous is no reason to teach people to avoid helping others.

  13. Re:Fundamental problem . . . on After the Belfast Project Fiasco, Time For Another Look At Time Capsule Crypto? · · Score: 1

    The unavoidable weakness of which is pad recovery. As in, the adversary prevents you from destroying your pad and recovers it. Or, not you; someone else trusted with the pad (such as your corresponedent, who's languishing in a jail as an imposter receives your encrypted messages and decrypts them with the captured pad).

    This is why self-destructs are so popular in "no-kidding" grade crypto gear, and why they often don't get an opportunity to work.

  14. Re:nonsense on The Ethics Cloud Over Ballmer's $2 Billion B-Ball Buy · · Score: 1

    And the Inquisition was torturing to improve society too. Funny how extremism looks exactly the same at nominally opposite ends of the spectrum.

  15. Re:Double edged sword on Local Police Increasingly Rely On Secret Surveillance · · Score: 1

    If the idiots think you're guilty, you'll spend the truncated portion of what was the 1/3 remaining of your life in incarceration. How're you going to work around that?

    I'd personally hate to be a first-time loser after midlife. Prison life is a game for the young.

  16. Re:What does IBM do these days anyway? on Tech Worker Groups Boycott IBM, Infosys, Manpower · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Selling "nothing" for a high hourly billable over an extended contract term is the pinnacle of selling. Don't minimize IBM's profit-generating prowess in this respect.

  17. Re:Is this a cliché? on Whistleblowers Enter the Post-Snowden Era · · Score: 1

    Aaaaaaand.... there's the inevitable guest appearance by our favorite Alliance Mon Calamari admiral.

  18. Voltaire got it right, 260 years ago on Whistleblowers Enter the Post-Snowden Era · · Score: 2

    Il est dangereux d'avoir raison dans des choses où des hommes accrédités ont tort.
    (It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.)

  19. Re:The shareholders will be impressed on Apple Says Many Users 'Bought an Android Phone By Mistake' · · Score: 1

    You've highlighted the fundamental issue of Apple, post-Jobs.

    Tim Cook may or may not be a fine CEO if executing the business plan is all you want. But he can't market for shit. If The Sainted Steve had yanked that speculative crap out of his skinny ass, his RDF would have Jedi-mind-tricked the tame press into believing it, evangelizing it, and providing any post-hoc justification he needed.

    Apple stopped being a religion with the passing of Steve Jobs.

  20. Re:How about the build tools and the OS? on TrueCrypt Cryptanalysis To Include Crowdsourcing Aspect · · Score: 1

    "compile by hand" and "assemble by hand" means "write out the results on paper".

    After that, you have to get the machine code into core. That's what the front panel is for.

    Is this somehow new to you? Are you really that young, and that unfamiliar with computing history?

    Of course, if you have a functional operating system you think you can trust, you can poke the machine code into a file using a binary editor (that you think you can trust), and then execute that file as the compiler.

    Read about bootstrapping. It's a real thing, or at least was. Cross-compiling has kind of eliminated the need, except in the rather exotic use case that you don't trust the compiler (à la Ken Thompson).

  21. Re:How about the build tools and the OS? on TrueCrypt Cryptanalysis To Include Crowdsourcing Aspect · · Score: 2

    Hand-compile, then hand-assemble, and finally poke opcodes into RAM with front-panel switches.

    No, I'm not kidding.

  22. In an unrelated story, on Security Researchers Threatened With US Cybercrime Laws · · Score: 4, Funny

    the mayors of several crime-plagued cities release a joint announcement that reporting apparent crimes in progress to police would result in the arrest and summary punishment of the person making the police report.

    "If you losers would stop reporting crimes, we wouldn't have so much crime," one prominent mayor stated to this reporter. "We're going to push down crime rates the only way that works: make it impossible to report a crime."

    When asked for a comment, the aforementioned mayor's Chief of Police muttered "Whaddyawant, I'm busy here" through a mouthful of donut while pocketing a thickly-stuffed brown paper envelope proffered by an unidentifed man flanked by several apparent bodyguards.

  23. Re:Because At The End Of The Day on Wikia and Sony Playing Licensing Mind Tricks · · Score: 1

    What you call "honesty", sharp players call "foolishly giving away tactical surprise."

    Cuz, you know, some of the suckas making them rich might object if someone explained to them that they were being suckas.

    Never forget that "dumb" fits nicely between "fat" and "happy".

  24. Discovery solves a related mystery on The Light Might Make You Heavy · · Score: 3, Funny

    This breakthrough finding also explains why photography adds 10 pounds to its subjects. Flash photography, probably even more.

  25. Re:Sue everybody ... on Zazzle.com Thinks Depictions of Pi Are Protected Intellectual Property · · Score: 1

    Surely (well, hopefully) there is more to the legal system than "I know you are but what am I?". Someone please tell me there's more to it than that.

    Well, sure, Citizen, rest assured that it's much more substantial than that.

    In fact, the legal system is "I know you are, and I can afford better laywers."

    One of the first "pay to win" games.