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User: Savage650

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  1. Taget demographic? on Microsoft's Lifebrowser Is a Prosthetic For Memory · · Score: 1
    I aways wondered if there was somehow a correlation between brain damage and being a Microsoft customer.

    Mind you, I'm not saying "all Microsoft customers are brain amputees". But maybe, just maybe it is that

    • Microsoft products have a special appeal to people with pre-existing brain damage
    • Microsoft products may cause brain damage in previosuly healthy people

    Oh wait, i have been using Microsoft products in the past ...

  2. Thought crime? on Two Porn Companies Take ICANN and .xxx Registrar To Court · · Score: 1

    However, just make it part of the equal(sic) that the person buying the sight(sic) intends to us it as porn. That way the purchases will be using their definition.

    So, how do you intend to find out the "true intentions" of some other person?

    • Judges with psychic powers?
    • Brainscans using "secret patented technology"?
    • waterboard them until they confess "evil intentions"?

    In criminal proceedings "intent to ..." is when you're punished for criminal acts you didn't commit (".. yet", says the prosecution .. and guess who the judge is going to side with..).

  3. Re:Good. on Attachmate Fires Mono Developers · · Score: 1

    ... legally binding .. promise ...

    That's an oxymoron right there.

    I'm guessing you've stripped out the FAT32 support, and Samba from your linux builds too then?

    Try adding exFAT support without a patent license ...

  4. Re:So after 28 years... on After Discovery's Launch, What's Left For the Shuttle? · · Score: 1

    if you mean the first mammal cloned: British scientists?

    If I had meant that, I would have said it. The man who cloned the first animal was here in the US, and died 13 years before Dolly was even cloned.

    Again, you are citing "stuff somebody did long long ago" in order to support your "USA is #1" mantra, blithely ignoring the fact that this whole thread is about current events, namely the retirement of the space shuttle (and the implied loss of technological capability).

    .. And so on for the rest of your post - half of it wasn't even disagreeing with me.

    I'm getting the strong impression we aren't even on the same page here. You seem to define "technological leadership" in terms of "we have outpatented the rest of the world, now we can sit back and rake in the money".

    How about a reality check:

    • you need to import "hi tech" products because there are no factories left in your country
    • newer, better technologies are suppressed because they would reduce the profitability of "old" technology (Hollywood, Detroit, ...)
    • your education system fails to promote scientific thought (or even promotes the opposite, wherever the religious right manages to influence the curriculum).
    • substatial parts of your national infrastructure (power grids, factories, mines, bridges, power plants) are decrepit from age. The owners are happy to rake in any profit, but once the sh*t hits the fan it is the taxpayer/the former employees who are left holding the bag.

    Of course, none of these "local problems" matter to the people "owning" everything. Too bad for the rest of us though.

  5. Re:So after 28 years... on After Discovery's Launch, What's Left For the Shuttle? · · Score: 1

    or, lets put it another way...

    who cloned the first living animal?

    if you mean the first mammal cloned: British scientists?

    if an AIDs vaccine is found, where will that most likely be?

    NOT in the US. Big Pharma makes loads of money treating AIDS. A vaccine would destroy that lucrative market.

    Where was the Human Genome Project?

    In the US. And while the HGP (funded by taxpayer money) did not patent the resulting data, other people (Celera) did. After a short bubble, progress in the field of Biotechnology is now at a standstill due blanket patenting. (well, if you listen to the other side, it is at a standstill because patent profits are in danger)

    Apropos "patenting genes": ACLU: Breast Cancer gene patents ruled invalid covered on 60 minutes
    One thing not mentioned in the CBS coverage is the fact that Myriad's monopoly on BRCA testing also blocks any independent verification of their results. Given that their testing method is based on genetic data from (a few?) white caucasian females, how can they be sure the results also apply to women from other gentic origins? What if -after the patents have expired- new research shows that the results were wrong? Will the women whose breasts and ovaries were needlessly removed get their missing organs back?

    Where every newest generation phone designed (even the ones we don't have access to)?

    The iPhone is a nice product, but there is ZERO new technology in it (Apple's patent portfolio notwithstanding).

    Where was every major operating system in use on the planet designed?

    OS have been relegated to commodity by now. (and, contrary to Microsoft Advertising, there has been actually very litte technological advance in that field.)

    (even Linus came here to make Linux go from pet project to something real)

    SCO called. They want their #1 FUD meme back.

    Where was almost every major computer hardware component originally designed and conceived (NICs, math processors, video processors, storage tech, etc etc).

    "originally designed and conceived": ages ago. Today most of that stuff is imported.

    Again...who is it you think is leading us?

    if by "us" you mean "the USA":

    • automobile: Japan & Europe (GM could not afford to lose the european R&D labs)
    • consumer electronics: Japan,Korea
    • commodity hardware: Taiwan,Korea
    • space technology: Russia,China,India,....
    • nuclear power: Europe,Japan

    The US might have the lead on atomic bombs, stealth fighters and Aircraft carriers, but -given the geopolitical situation- all of these are white elephants.

  6. Re:So after 28 years... on After Discovery's Launch, What's Left For the Shuttle? · · Score: 1

    we've lost the world's tech leadership position? Really? And who made the Internet?

    That was 40 years ago.

    [..] We have most the patents, our problem is that many countries don't respect patents.

    No (sane) country "respects" US patents unless forced by military or economic pressure. The US patent system (that had originally been introduced to protect inventors) has been completely subverted into legalized racketeering.

    BTW: the patent mess is just a symptom of the real problem: big money has long since abandoned the idea of "making stuff" (i.e. creating value through work) in favor of "selling licenses" (i.e. collecting monopoly rent on imaginary property).

  7. Re:Oh, it's more sinister than that... on EU Overturns Agreement With US On Banking Data · · Score: 1

    [..]. Distrust of one's government has always been a key component of American patriotism.

    Since when? Or do you make a distinction between "government" as an abstract entity ("they") and the actual person? ("Der Fuehrer", er, pardon, the "Commander-in-Chief").

  8. Re:missing tags on The FBI Wants To Know About Your IT Skills · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Bigbrother, snoop, and even Stasi perhaps but KGB, Gestapo? No, as tempting as it may be, the FBI is not rounding up all IT people and sending them to the showers....

    For now, they are just recruiting "volunteers" to watch for "suspicious behaviour" and report "unreliable elements".

    Just the most obvious problems (as mentioned in other posts)

    • how long until "not volunteering" is deemed "suspicious behaviour"?
    • how long until people wronly accuse others for financial gain or just for fun?
    • how long until you'll have to prove your "reliability" by filling your snitching quota?

    Another thing to keep in mind: The so-called "War on Terror" can be used to outlaw anything and anyone.

    Soon after a high-profile Cyber-Attack all knowledge of critical infrastructure(tm) will become classified. Too bad for those lacking the official clearance for things they already know. The state will have to place such persons in "protective custody" camps to keep the terrorists from expoliting their knowledge. Unfortunately, even a short time spent in a such a camp will disqualify you from ever getting back to your former life: While they could'nt prove any previous contacts to "unreliable elements", now they know where you have met them. Finally, once the "unrecovereable elements" are confined to the camps it wont be long until some politician wants the money wasted on their upkeep be spent on his constituency instead. That is where the "showers" come in ..

  9. Signal Strength != Capacity on A Possible Cause of AT&T's Wireless Clog — Configuration Errors · · Score: 3, Informative

    My phone almost always shows five bars at home, yet frequently calls don't cause the phone to ring - they go to voicemail after pretending to ring. The jaded amongst us could suspect a deliberate misconfiguration of phones and signal strength monitoring.

    Signal strength alone does not guarantee the ability to make/receive calls. Even if your mobile is registered in the network, making and receiving calls depends on the availability of various scarce resources, namely:

    1. a "slot" on the over-the-air network (# of active connections per cell is limited)
    2. a "switching path" inside your operators network
    3. a "switching path" inside one or more transfer networks (owned by someone else)
    4. a "switching path" inside the network the caller/callee is connected to
    5. a "slot" on the over-the-air network on the others side (if the caller/callee is mobile)

    In case of "lots of missed calls" in a particular area (your home) one could assume that

    • your home cell is overcrowded (all slots in use) or
    • there is a bottleneck in the upstream network

    Note: outgoing calls should have the same problems; if they "fail less" it could be because your operator has chosen to reserve a (possibly large?) percentage of the slots/lines for outgoing calls. (Which obviously reduces the chances of incoming calls even more)

  10. Re:MMS is pretty pointless after all on MMS Arrives For the iPhone — Will It Crash AT&T's Network? · · Score: 3, Informative
    First of all: as a technology, MMS is just "emails with multimedia attachments". Thus, it becomes is pointless once the majority of handsets that can send and receive mail either natively or by accessing a webmail server.

    The majority of phones that I have used required some special set up to use MMS and GPRS; usually sending a SMS to register for those services then receiving a message back containing automatically installing settings.

    What happens when you "register for MMS" (either explicitly or implicitly by sending a MMS using the known settings) is that a MMSC (MMS Center, one of possibly many your carrier operates) is assigned to you (or rather, your Subscriber ID). Once that assignment is committed to the HLR database, incoming MMS for you will be forwarded tho that specific MMSC; without this assignment, you will only get a text message ("A MMS was received but we don't know how to reach you").

    Sending a MMS is simply a "HTTP post" that uploads a "MMS Send request" (including your content as as MIME-Multipart Message) to the MMSC (Which then has to figure out how to forward it to the recipient(s) listed).

    Receiving a MMS is the hard part: the MMSC sends a binary short message to your mobile, telling it "please fetch MMS at "http://$addr-of-mmsc/some-unique-but-hard-to-guess-id". (Insert lots of cursing about MMSC vendors whose software creates URLs so bloated that the Notification message gets longer than ~120 Bytes, causing it to be split into two SMS that need to be reassembled on them mobile).

    If/When you decide to download the message

    • the mobile will do a "HTTP GET $theURL" (including headers describing the Capabilities and limitations of the UserAgent (i.e. your mobile)
    • the MMSC tries to re-encode the Message to conform with those limitations (e.g. by shrinking or transcoding images and videos)
    • your mobile receives the transcoded Message (as the response to the GET)
    • your mobile must upload a "receive confirmation"; otherwise the MMSC will keep sending those notifications.
    • your mobile might send a separate "read confirmation" when the message has been displayed.

    The MMS protocol contains a lot of functionality (message forwarding, permanent storage for messages, reverse charging, user selectable send/expiry times, ...) that never reached the customer. And with the limited features offered by the carriers (at premium prices nonetheless) MMS was dead in the water even before the advent of email-capable mobiles and "unlimited data" options.

  11. Your mother in law will be delighted to help .. on The Battle Between Google and Facebook · · Score: 5, Funny

    Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline.

    And those family members, friends and peers will be utterly delighted to become an integral part of your private life. Just imagine having your private questions forwarded to your least favorite family member (lets say, your mother-in-law)

    • need a doctor? what kind of doctor? GP? VD? need a Shrink?
    • need a lawyer? what for? want a divorce? what have you done this time?
    • need another mortgage? You were never good enough for my son/daughter!

    And that's just one immediate drawback. Other posters have already listed various long-term problems (cultural stratification, deprecation of "outside" information, etc.)

    All in all, its a profoundly dumb idea. The fact that some schmuck (excuse me, CEO) calls it "his vision for the internet" just illustrates the kind mental vacuum that accompanies plans like this one:

    1) Facebook
    2) ???
    3) Profit

    The Internet is too important to be in the hands of the CEOs

  12. Re:How is that insightful? on FBI and States Vastly Expand DNA Collection, Databases · · Score: 1

    Just because your DNA is at a crime scene, does not mean you are considered guilty. It doesn't even make you a suspect.

    Being hauled in because your DNA was found at a crime scene is a serious matter.
    Having an airtight alibi MIGHT keep you out of jail, but without other suspects the cops will lean on you until you break ...

    BTW: Once your DNA is in the system you'd better keep a detailed diary (and avoid spending your night alone..)

    BTW: if the cops tell you

    "You are not a suspect, we just hope you can answer a few questions."

    what they're actually saying is:

    Calling you a suspect would confer some rights to you (Miranda? representation by a lawyer).
    So we'll call you a "possible witness" right until we've obtained your confession.

  13. Massawyrm's doesn't get it at all on Why Fear the End of the R-Rated Superhero Movie? · · Score: 1
    Speaking of Massawyrm's review ..

    Everything that was cut didn't belong in the feature. Not the Black Freighter, not the newsstand, not the cops, not the Psychiatrist's wife.

    Excuse me? Ripping out major parts of Volume VI? Butchering THE ONE pivotal moment where Kovacs becomes Rorschach?

    [spoiler alert] How is the movie version of the kidnapper/murderers death (man handcuffed, having his head split with a meat cleaver) better than the original (man handcuffed to stove, given a hacksaw, but not enough time to saw through the metal)?

    The movie makes Rorschach into a mentally unstable kook that one day flips and kills a (defenseless!) man. Murder one. End of Story.

    In the Comic Rorschach gives the man a (small) chance to get out (admitting his lack of humanity by "gnawing off its paw"). The man fails this 'trial by fire' and Kovacs -watching the house burn down like a funeral pyre for humanity as a whole- turns into Rorschach.

    By the way: The Psychiatrist losing his sleep, his illusions, and eventually his wife .. all from "gazing into the abyss"? IMHO he's a symbol for the reader of the comic. Us. How do WE cope with that final truth? "we are alone. there is nothing else".

    What's your way of blocking out the darkness? Religion? Booze? Dope? Anti-acids against the growing Ulcers? Cowboy Neal?

  14. This Flight sponsored by Travel-eze on Replacing Metal Detectors With Brain Scans · · Score: 1

    If showing signs of stress will get you detained, the prudent terrori^Wtraveller shows up doped to the gills.

    I can see the sales of tranquilizer-laced chewing gum skyrocketing!

  15. No ISP could afforrd the legal risk on Making BitTorrent Clients Prioritize By Geography? · · Score: 1

    The problem is not "getting the software developed" but getting its deployment okayed by the legal department. The risk of being seen as "helping the pirates" will keep ISPs away from this kind of "optimisation".

  16. FSI not wery much longer on Fujitsu Offers Free Laptop Upgrades For Life · · Score: 1

    Fujitsu-Siemens is huge.

    "Hugeness" notwithstanding, the entity named "Fujitsu-Siemens" (a joint venture founded in 1999) wont last much longer: Siemens is selling their share to Fujitsu.

    That doesn't necessarily mean that the company or its brands will vanish, but a change of management could likely result in a decision to get rid of "this kind of contracts".

  17. Time in Advance (1956 short story by Philip Klass) on A Year In Prison For a 20-Second Film Clip? · · Score: 1
    One of my favourite SF stories: Time in Advance. First published in Galaxy Science Fiction, August 1956.

    Two guys return to earth after voluntarily serving seven years in various (deadly) offworld penal colonies as advance payment for a murder they intend to commit (pre-crime is 50% off the sentence, but most applicants die or drop out of the program).
  18. Beer and Food? on Congress Considers Forcing Travel Registration · · Score: 1

    Yes, but fortunately beer and food are still beer and food.
    Ever heard of Victory Gin?
  19. You're out! on iPods Becoming Entrenched In Major League Baseball · · Score: 2, Funny

    I smell an opportunity for microsoft to tout their "squirt" feature on the zune to try to penetrate this segment.

    Says the Umpire: You're out! ... Spitballs have been outlawed since 1921.

  20. Re:Begun this Patent War is on SGI Sues ATI for Patent Infringement · · Score: 1
    ... The patent system doesn't need reform, it needs to be scraped and rethought. I'd say cap em at 1000 per year. With a number that low only real inventions would make it through and the number in any particular industry would be small enough anyone in that industry could be expected to be aware of them.

    A cap won't work. They will simply file the extra patents using a shell company.

    I dont think he meant 1000 per year per applicant but 1000 per year total.
    Thus, people (and companies) could apply for as many patents as they wanted,
    but the applications would be kept stack orderd by "importance" (or "usefulness").

    At the end of the year, only the "Top 1000" applications would actually be granted.

    That in itself wouldn't protect the system from being flooded with patents.
    Thus it becomes critically important what happens to the remaining applications
    (the bottom of the stack). I'd say they should

    • be kept in public record
    • be inelegible for resubmission or (trivial) extension

    that is, they should enter the public domain at once.

  21. Unlikely on Soft Tissue Discovered In T-Rex Bone · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Is T-Rex Kosher?
    Probably not (All reptiles are non-kosher). Maybe if the researchers could prove they were actually "birds" ...

    But even then it would depend on how the concept of a "genetic clone" is seen by Talmudic lore.

    • If clones were seen as "new and individual" animals, they might become kosher meat (if slaughtered the right way).

    • If clones were seen as "part" (or "extensions") of the original being (to allow the use of cloned replacement organs?) each clone would "inherit" the kosher-ness of that one individual that died there long long ago. And because it is highly unlikely that this prehistoric animal was slaugthered in the kosher way (e.g. bled dry) the clones wold be declared non-kosher (or even "statuatory carrion").
  22. funny you should mention the Germans .. on You Have Been 'Randomly' Selected? · · Score: 1
    You mean that Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden showed the Germans that a war wasn't worth fighting ..

    Very bad example. The bombing war against the civilian population caused immense suffering but it did NOT stop the fighting (quite contrary). The war ended only after germany was completely occupied.

    ..and Germany is now probably Europe's most secure democracy

    Apropos democracy: why do you think it is that the germans (both the populace and the politicians) are worried about the current US Government?

    Could it be because the Germans actually remember history and their experience with

    • living in totalitarian regimes
    • an ideology of "they all want to destroy us, so we have to destroy them first"
    • a Fuehrer/a Party who is above the law
    • propaganda about the impending "Endsieg" while the situation deteriorates day by day
    • a secret police that can arrest/detain/vanish everyone at will?
    • a judical system rubberstamping the camps, the torture, the domestic spying, ..
    • ..
  23. stat-of-the-art registration form? NOT! on Hifn Restricts Crypto Docs, OpenBSD Opens Fire · · Score: 2, Insightful
    A few messages down in the thread, we find this gem: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&m=115 021494129899&w=2

    As soon as one submits one's private information to Hifn, the submitted data indeed no longer could be considered private. Look at Hifn's HTML on the registration page:

    <form action="http://extranet.hifn.com/home/anonymous/De fault.asp" method="post" name="userEdit" onSubmit="return validate(this);">

    Is Hifn running low on supplies of cryptography hardware accelerators? Or do these accelerators no longer work in recent operating systems due to the lack of documentation?

    Oh the Irony ;-)
  24. Re:They need to quit over selling pipe! on HD Video Could 'Choke the Internet'? · · Score: 4, Insightful
    ISPs make money from end users by over-selling. Their commitment will be throughput burstable to 6 MBps down, 1 Mbps up, 24/7 connectivity. The keyword here is burstable. If you want to use that bandwidth all the time, feel free to buy a T1 or better.

    In that case (IPTV being infeasible on normal Broadband) the ISPs / the Media Industry / Microsoft should stop hyping it.

  25. Ungrateful Europeans? ... on Sci-Fi Weapons to Join US Arsenal? · · Score: 1
    [.. America going to war in Europe ..]to save millions of Europeans who are now largely ungrateful

    If by "ungrateful" you mean "refusing to support a war of agression" then we are probably ungrateful. But then, we still remember the nuremberg trials, where YOUR judges convicted the former german leaders for (amongst other things) "planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crime against peace"

    Actually, even some people in the US seem to remember that (hence the The Hague Invason Act) to protect all "American Servicemen" (up to and including their Commannder-in-Chief) from "unjust" or "politically motivated" persecution by, say, "ungrateful" former allies.