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User: complete+loony

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  1. Re:What an idiot on Silk Road Journal Found On Ulbricht's Laptop: "Everyone Knows Too Much" · · Score: 1

    Kill two birds, disguise an NFC chip or similar on yourself. Use that to maintain your session, so whenever you and your computer are separated, your session and encrypted files are locked.

  2. Re:Not "like Slashdot" on Facebook Will Let You Flag Content As 'False' · · Score: 1

    I'd perhaps use "+1 Underrated" for an on topic / insightful Troll....

  3. Re:So, the problem is.. on Ask Slashdot: Has the Time Passed For Coding Website from Scratch? · · Score: 1

    For a mostly static site, you could try something like Nikola. Write pages in plain text with simple markup (/ markdown), then compile to static html using some number of simple templates and css.

  4. Re:Biased to cracked sites on The Most Popular Passwords Are Still "123456" and "password" · · Score: 1

    I'd say it's the other way around. If these sites were hashing and salting passwords, these simple passwords were low hanging fruit that were easy to crack.

  5. Use hufman coding to disguise messages on To Avoid Detection, Terrorists Made Messages Seem Like Spam · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Train a compression algo using a spam corpus to build a dictionary. Compress and encrypt your message. Then use the spam dictionary to *decompress* it. Hey presto, your message looks exactly like a randomly generated spam message.

  6. Re:everytime this is tired on South Africa Begins Ambitious Tablets In Schools Pilot Project · · Score: 1

    This is South Africa, where they already have open licensed text books covering a significant fraction of their school curriculum.

  7. Re:Who gives a fuck on Chrome For OS X Catches Up With Safari's Emoji Support · · Score: 1

    You want to embrace emoji? Here, try texting using only emoji characters (including usernames).

  8. Rust in an interesting language on Rust Programming Language Reaches 1.0 Alpha · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm not completely sold on the syntax, but I find the design and runtime interesting. I'd like to find an excuse to build something with it, to see if it can live up to its potential.

    I started thinking about how I would design a language recently, then I came across rust, and I saw quite a lot of the same conclusions I came to myself. Abstract classes, multiple inheritance, Interfaces with versioning, combining 3rd party libraries... With rust, you define the layout of memory without inheritance, and the implementation of interfaces for types without defining the layout of memory. Neatly side-stepping some of the issues faced by other languages.

    All resources and object lifetimes are managed, avoiding .NET's IDisposable. You can combine structures together, which can exist exclusively on the stack, avoiding the "everything is an object on the heap" problem that Java seems to fall into.

    Since there's no NULL, there's no NullPointerException. There's no unchecked exceptions, or any exceptions at all for that matter. Though, I might prefer to have them. Sure, there's the try! macro. But that's just syntactic sugar for checking the return code of every function.

  9. Re:Better way? on Extra Leap Second To Be Added To Clocks On June 30 · · Score: 1

    If your machine is not connected to an atomic clock, your measurement in UTC is likely to be slightly off anyway. So tweaking the rate of time passing so that every day has the same number of seconds is a reasonable compromise. I remember hearing that google do this in their data centres.

    If you do have a local atomic clock, record timestamps against TAI and convert to UTC. But even there you have to deal with clock drift, though the error bar should be much smaller.

  10. Re:Win/Lose on Writer: How My Mom Got Hacked · · Score: 2

    How long will it take before that virus scanner has cost the company 36 hours of lost productivity? Sometimes the cure can be worse than the disease. You'd be better off make sure everyone is saving files to a network drive with automatic hourly snapshots. Eg connecting via samba to a linux box running btrfs, or freebsd running zfs.

  11. Re:The one mistake Forbes keeps making.. on The One Mistake Google Keeps Making · · Score: 2

    Bingo, Google have a policy of turning their competitors products into a commodity. Webmail, Office docs, Browsers, Phone OS, ...

  12. I've been playing valve games on Debian Testing on Phoronix Lauds AMD's Open Source Radeon Driver Progress For 2014 · · Score: 2

    I've been playing a fair amount of Dota 2 and TF2 on Debian testing, out of the box. The frame rate is good enough that I haven't noticed the difference between the proprietary driver, or booting into windows (ew).

  13. Re:this report is inconsistent on New Paper Claims Neutrino Is Likely a Faster-Than-Light Particle · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Imaginary isn't "negative mass squared"

    The sentence is slightly ambiguous, however;

    The result relies on tachyons having ... a negative (mass squared)

  14. Re:good news for ECC memory makers on Many DDR3 Modules Vulnerable To Bit Rot By a Simple Program · · Score: 1

    Worse problem; VM server farms. If you can run arbitrary code, you might be able to flip bits in the hypervisor or another VM.

  15. Re:I never have understood on Serious Economic Crisis Looms In Russia, China May Help · · Score: 1

    Our deficit spending is now coming home to roost.

    Government spending is only part of the picture, and it isn't the biggest part. Sure debt is a problem, but government debt is no worse than business and household debt.

  16. Re:In other news... on Thunderbolt Rootkit Vector · · Score: 1

    And what checks that signature? Code running from ROM perhaps?

  17. Oblig... on How a Wildfire Helped Spread the Hashtag · · Score: 1

    So then the hashtag spread like wildfire?

  18. Re:Statistical studies on Does Journal Peer Review Miss Best and Brightest? · · Score: 2

    So build a wiki / forum -ish system where "accepted" papers are published. Anyone can submit a paper, or criticism, or a review, or a meta-review... With a collection of editors & "reviewers" try to keep the whole thing honest.

    In other words, a wikipedia that *only* accepts original research.

  19. Re:Venomous vs. poisonous on Librarians: The Google Before Google · · Score: 1

    But would the snake die? That question is still potentially interesting either way.

  20. Re:Why bother? on Ask Slashdot: Is an Open Source .NET Up To the Job? · · Score: 1

    Visual Studio keeps forgetting that it is primarily a text editor. Never, ever, ever do stuff in the main thread that would stop me from entering text. I suspect this is mostly because they allow 3rd parties to run code within the editor process.

  21. Re:War, what is it good for? on Economists Say Newest AI Technology Destroys More Jobs Than It Creates · · Score: 1

    Well the Great Depression set us up for one. An angry out of work population, looking for scapegoats and easy answers.

  22. Re:That's amazing on A New Law For Superconductors · · Score: 1

    So trying to parse the formula from the English description; [thickness] * [critical temp] = A / ([sheet resistance] ^ B), where A = [crystalline structure] * B + C

  23. Re:Debt is not the cause of wage stagnation on Economists Say Newest AI Technology Destroys More Jobs Than It Creates · · Score: 1

    Sorry, that's got nothing to do with the point I was trying to make. Though I'm sure I rushed over a few details. I'm not talking about government debts at all. I'm talking about the total debts of the entire nation compared to GDP. The ratio of debt to GDP is higher than it has ever been. Higher than the peak in the 1930's (which was mainly because income fell). How are business and households going to pay back their debts to the banking sector? These are the debts that will not be repaid.

  24. Stagnation is the result of private debt, not tech on Economists Say Newest AI Technology Destroys More Jobs Than It Creates · · Score: 2

    Paraphrasing the work of Steve Keen;

    Taking out a loan to buy something, increases the income of the seller and the supply of money in circulation. A constant velocity of new loans, would result in a constant influence on economic activity. An accelerating amount of new loans will boost the economy and create jobs. The reverse is also true, decelerating loans will cause spending power to shrink and jobs will be lost. And this is borne out in economic data, there's a strong correlation between debt acceleration and change in employment.

    Now, since the 60's the level of private debt has been growing, to become a significant force driving the economy. While borrowing more to buy an existing asset does nothing to create real wealth, it does push up asset prices giving us the illusion of rising prosperity. While rising interest payments are draining real wealth from borrowers.

    The banking system should eventually go bust. Probably not tomorrow, but all we have managed to do so far is delay the inevitable. The loans they have issued cannot be repaid. The only question is how we are not going to repay them. Either we go bankrupt, or we find some other way to wipe off the debt.

    The Great Depression started with the stock crash of 1929, lasting for the next 10-ish years. But it was the rising debts of the 1920's that were the real problem. Through the depression, those debts started to reduce. But it took the huge spending effort and industrialisation, fighting WWII to really eliminate them. Setting us up for the boom years of the 50's and 60's.

    Our economic woes will not go away until we deal with the problem of our private debt. We may see another Depression, some parts of the world already are. Or we may see an extended period of stagnation. History doesn't repeat, but it sure does rhyme.

  25. Re:Are there any good alternatives? on Swedish Police Raid the Pirate Bay Again · · Score: 1

    Google. Just throw the word "torrent" into your search query.