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User: MikeBabcock

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  1. Re:I can't remember... on EU Demands Canada Gut Its Copyright and Patent Laws · · Score: 1

    I'm sorry, the prime minister who passed more legislation as a minority leader than any other? Who has actually managed to drive the liberals like a cattle herder? Who prorogued parliament despite protests from opposition and is still running the country?

    Yeah, if there's anything you want to harp on Harper about, its probably not his lack of gonads. He's lead like a majority leader quite successfully without a majority. That takes balls.

  2. Re:I can't remember... on EU Demands Canada Gut Its Copyright and Patent Laws · · Score: 1

    You forgot "no offence" :)

  3. Re:51 st state? on EU Demands Canada Gut Its Copyright and Patent Laws · · Score: 1

    Nice.

    Umm wait, we do. And we spell colour properly too.

    And we won the only fight between our nations, captured huge amounts of land from you, and then let you have most of it back as part of a peace deal.

  4. Re:no, you are talking bullshit on EU Demands Canada Gut Its Copyright and Patent Laws · · Score: 1

    Go visit a slaughterhouse in the USA or UK sometime.

    Have a nice day.

    -- Proudly Canadian

  5. Re:Fuck their tradition, fuck their way of life. on EU Demands Canada Gut Its Copyright and Patent Laws · · Score: 1

    I'm sorry, but since when did doing cruel things to other humans equate to killing animals?

    I'm going to keep eating chicken and beef and pork too.

  6. Re:Wow on EU Demands Canada Gut Its Copyright and Patent Laws · · Score: 1

    Hate Harper as much as you want but if that were true he would've made these changes years ago. The Liberals sure wanted to, so they wouldn't have blocked it at all.

    Conservatives tend to be about personal property and freedoms at a basic level, and these types of restrictions are hard to grapple with because they're about protecting one set of rights and stomping on another.

    Its more likely we're trying to keep good trade partners while not mutilating our current system.

  7. Re:Importance on Open Source, Open Standards Under Attack In Europe · · Score: 1

    Open standards like the ones used for wiring your house to keep electrician errors down. Like the ones used for insulation, or bridge construction. Open standards like those traffic lights that aren't random colours in different cities.

    Open standards have a purpose, and enlightened people, whether financially driven or not can see what they are.

    Meanwhile, you can go sell your municipality on buying blue stop lights for the city because they're better somehow, and then have a sole license on replacing the parts for a while.

  8. Re:War on Open Source, Open Standards Under Attack In Europe · · Score: 1

    Get out of your economics class taught by the underpaid professor who has no real-world data on why his beliefs are right, and look at the facts. Making a better product got dozens (if not more) companies bought out by Microsoft's huge pockets, whose products then disappeared. Making that better product did not actually end up replacing Microsoft's products at all. Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop and is able to distribute its inferior products to users directly without any marketing energy. That's why they got in trouble, and they deserved it IMHO.

    Make Microsoft sell their browser technology like everyone else did back when they came out, and you'd see a different history of IE adoption.

  9. Re:Cry me a MS licensing costs river! on AMD's 12-Core Chip Cuts Software Licensing Costs · · Score: 1

    I worked with an Exchange server once. It actually made me want sendmail back, and I didn't think that was possible.

    Microsoft technologies are not all in the "Windows and Office" basket for sure. Windows [the basics] and Office are made for end users. Windows Server administration, Exchange, SQL server, etc. are easily as complex as their *nix equivalents, and the latter are often more well documented and easier to fix.

  10. Re:I have great respect for the OpenSSL project... on OpenSSL 1.0.0 Released · · Score: 1

    There is no mathematical difference between a date stamp and a version stamp if they both increment by arbitrary amounts over releases and programmers can't move backward in time.

    I don't understand why anyone would discuss such a difference at all.

    See the versioning scheme for TeX for another option.

  11. Re:Geee! on OpenSSL 1.0.0 Released · · Score: 1

    The problem is very simple -- browsers come with a list of signing certificates that the browser trusts implicitly. When you visit a website, you're trusting the certificate signing process between any one of those issuers represented in the browser's database and the website you're on. You of course have no way of knowing how those certificates were issued to the domains in question, or if they're reliable or trustworthy.

    Importantly, most sites don't use client certificates either, which would help prevent most MitM attacks as well. Equifax is one site I know does offer this as an authentication option for its clients.

  12. Re:Mod parent up on "Install Other OS" Feature Removed From the PS3 · · Score: 1

    Your signal is to inform other drivers of your decision so that they can also make intelligent decisions.

    You do not merge only because you're driving faster, but also because you need to exit, or to avoid a large or stalled vehicle.

    Other drivers who are deciding whether to speed up or slow down in another lane or may be planning to move into the same space you plan to occupy on a busy highway would like to know you're about to use it so they don't merge into you from the other side.

    I drive on 6 to 10 lane highways regularly, and a lack of signalling often leads to near-misses that the unsignalling driver ignores and doesn't notice because they're too arrogant to look back and see the havoc they almost caused.

  13. Re:Mod parent up on "Install Other OS" Feature Removed From the PS3 · · Score: 1

    Amazingly if you merge anyway, people are most hesitant to get a scratch on their vehicle.

    If you have the space to merge when you signal that you want to merge, then just do it.

    The person who hits you from behind is /always/ at fault (at least here).

    IANAL.

  14. Re:Bummer ... (1st on "Install Other OS" Feature Removed From the PS3 · · Score: 1

    I saw this coming as soon as Geo blogged how he'd managed to get around some of the protection on the PS3.

    The community who wants PS3-like computing power can still purchase it. You can purchase cell processor plug-in PCI cards for PCs too.

    The whole feature was a bit of a novelty, except in some computing circles where it was used to save money on clusters (since the PS3 was/is sold as a loss-leader).

    its a shame. I used the feature. But I hardly see it as horrible or anything.

  15. Re:The legal system understands anything... on Canada's Top Court Quashes Child Porn Warrant · · Score: 1

    I'm Canadian. I wasn't referring to Canada. I'm sorry you misunderstood what I was trying to get across -- namely that appointment by merit leads to better judgments, like this one.

  16. Re:The legal system understands anything... on Canada's Top Court Quashes Child Porn Warrant · · Score: 1

    You've never tutored have you? There are people who either refuse or are incapable of understanding certain concepts. Some judges fall into this category in certain areas, and one would hope it wasn't the case, but it happens, especially when judges are elected based on popularity and not appointed on merit.

  17. Re:Wow, Savvy Judge on Canada's Top Court Quashes Child Porn Warrant · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm proud of being Canadian when judgments like this come down. We've had a number of other salient ones in the last number of years too.

  18. Re:The unit tests are a bad joke - age and sex on ISC Releases the First Look At BIND 10 · · Score: 1

    lmao, and the cause of most of the Internet's DNS issues in the last 10 years. Most of which were predicted and warned about by the very same DJB. This is software -- doing it right is valuable. Doing it wrong when you're shown how to do it right is stupid.

  19. Re:What's so hard about this? on ISC Releases the First Look At BIND 10 · · Score: 1

    They could've learned from how fast one of their detractors' systems work -- tinydns uses a BDB-like database system for storage as well, and is extremely fast. I think there are even more problems with how BIND handles memory management and historically doesn't understand that resolving and serving are completely different concepts.

  20. Re:DJB might agree on ISC Releases the First Look At BIND 10 · · Score: 1

    Have you found a DNS program that works faster and is more stable and secure than the current version of tinydns yet? Just curious.

    Dan's very possessive of his software, like most people who write 99% of their own code, and doesn't believe in modern Copyright (thus the unofficial open source status of his software), but he does write very good code, and its in use by a lot of people for that reason.

  21. Re:Great. Just what the DNS infrastructure needs on ISC Releases the First Look At BIND 10 · · Score: 1

    That's arguably why DJB wrote tinydns -- do the simple things well and correctly.

    The caching resolver portion however is what allows for cache poisoning attacks and some other interesting Internet security holes in the last decade.

  22. Re:Great. Just what the DNS infrastructure needs on ISC Releases the First Look At BIND 10 · · Score: 1

    Actually I'm pretty sure BIND 9 was advertised as a near-complete rewrite too.

    That said, I'm not touching either version ever again after using http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html

  23. Re:Well, Yes on The Movie Studios' Big 3D Scam · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And colour has nothing to do with story telling, and pictures have nothing to do with story telling and audio has nothing to do with story telling.

    That said, each adds its own twist on the telling of a story and changes how and what one can do as a story teller or artist for their audience.

    As movies became a dominant form of media, the experience of those producing allowed for new and interesting ways of making movies that hadn't been considered before. 3D, like adding colour, or audio to those original moving pictures, adds another tweak that can be used by the director to do something different with their camera work, and at the same time, restricts them from doing others.

    Just as high definition is going to mean the end of actors with skin blemishes (imho), 3D will mean the end of certain camera angles that cause eye strain. Current 3D movie direction is still in its infancy.

  24. Re:It can be confusing... on Making Sense of CPU and GPU Model Numbers? · · Score: 1

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_AM2

    The AM2 socket's been out four years. If you'd bought one four years ago with a mid range processor then, upgraded again two years later, and then this year again, you'd have achieved six years lifespan out of one socket in two years from now.

  25. Re:they aren't very well going to admit defeat. on NSA Still Ahead In Crypto, But Not By Much · · Score: 1

    Those 256 bit keys are 256/8 bytes just FYI. Also,in typical usage they're randomly generated keys which are themselves encrypted by public key encryption.