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User: techno-vampire

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  1. Re:Not sure what they mean... on Microsoft Runs Out of US Address Space For Azure, Taps Its Global IPv4 Stock · · Score: 1

    I'm not even talking about international travel. If I go to a convention and need to search, I want to look for things near the convention hotel; when I house sit for a friend in LA (I live in Ventura County.) I want to search for things near his home. And, when I get home, I want my desktop still set to search for things near where I live. For me, changing my settings for every single computer I have simply because I've changed it for one is Doing The Wrong Thing.

  2. Re:How? on Study: Deforestation Depletes Fish Stocks · · Score: 1

    For those who are wondering how scientists can tell the different, the Wikipedia article has a section on various Reservoir Effects, including how volcanoes can skew the dates if their effect isn't properly adjusted for.

  3. Re:cloud networking on Microsoft Runs Out of US Address Space For Azure, Taps Its Global IPv4 Stock · · Score: 1

    (think what happens with a Skype call in your house behind a NAT)

    I don't use Skype, but I do use other things, such as SSH to my desktop from my laptop when I'm on the road, that need to connect to a specific machine. I do that by giving my desktop a fixed IP on the LAN and forwarding the appropriate ports to it, while allowing other machines, such as my laptop when I need it at home, to use DHCP. As long as Skype uses a consistent set of ports, there's no reason I can see that this wouldn't work, and it's not that hard to set up, either.

  4. You can test ipv6 functionality by going to test-ipv6.org.

    Alas, the site is down and whois shows that the registration has expired. However, test-ipv6.com is up and running if you need it.

  5. Re:Not sure what they mean... on Microsoft Runs Out of US Address Space For Azure, Taps Its Global IPv4 Stock · · Score: 1

    Google may not (yet) be doing evil, but more and more I find them Doing The Wrong Thing. As an example, I'm writing this on my desktop at home. If I go to Google Maps, my home address is my default location, which is what I want. It's also the default location on my laptop. However, if I'm traveling and change my laptop's default location, it's been changed on my desktop when I get home which is exactly what I don't want it to do. The right thing, of course, would be to store the default location on the computer, so that you can have several computers with different default locations, but I guess that's too obvious for Google.

  6. How? on Study: Deforestation Depletes Fish Stocks · · Score: 1

    TFS says, 'We found fish that had almost 70% of their biomass made from carbon that came from trees and leaves instead of aquatic food chain sources.' I haven't read the article itself, and probably wouldn't get too much out of it because I never studied the right parts of chemistry, etc. to understand all of the details, but if somebody knows how they were able to determine this and can put it in layman's terms, I'd appreciate it. I'm not disputing their results, but I would like to learn how they got there.

  7. Re:Democrats voted on House Majority Leader Defeated In Primary · · Score: 1

    Years ago I used to run a precinct during elections. That precinct had about eight people who'd registered as being in the Peace and Freedom Party. You'd think that anybody who cared enough to do that would care enough to come out and vote, but for most primaries (the only time that your party affiliation mattered at the poll) not one of them came in, and none of the ever requested an absentee ballot. There were representatives of several other minor parties but again, almost none of them showed up on election day. If that's true in a closed primary, how likely is it that any of them will vote in an open one?

  8. Re:Democrats voted on House Majority Leader Defeated In Primary · · Score: 1

    Actually, no. Back before California instituted an open primary, there was a candidate in the General Election from every party that was represented in the primary. That means that for each congressional district, there was a Green Candidate, a Peace and Freedom candidate, a Libertarian candidate and so on. Now, with the open primary there are exactly two candidates on the final ballot, meaning that the minor parties have no real chance of getting anybody elected. This is just one of many reasons I voted against it, and I'd happily vote to get rid of it again because I consider it unfair.

  9. Re:Let me get this straight on Geothermal Heat Contributing To West Antarctic Ice Sheet Melting · · Score: 2

    Maybe I should have used sarcasm tags. I don't deny that the climate is changing, because I'm enough of a realist to understand that the climate is always changing. I am, however, skeptical about the cause. My personal opinion is that geothermal energy may be a factor (even, possibly a major factor) in the melting of the Thwaites Glacier, but AFAIK there's no evidence, as yet, that this is true for any other glacier.

  10. Let me get this straight on Geothermal Heat Contributing To West Antarctic Ice Sheet Melting · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The Thwaites Glacier is melting because of Geothermal heat rather than AGW? I must admit that I'm astonished. Not by the cause of the melting, but by the fact that the discovery is being announced without any attempt to spin this as proof of AGW.

  11. Re:I already have that on Robotics Engineers: "We Don't Want To Replace Humans. We Want To Enhance Humans. · · Score: 1

    That's nothing! I have ocular implants and my adjustable augmented hearing just got upgraded. I'm far more bionic than you are!

  12. Re:Read Asimov on The Sci-Fi Myth of Killer Machines · · Score: 1

    To quote from your post: "But if you want to talk about the guy who invented Robots you should check out RUR by Karel ÃOEapek ..." You may have meant to refer to the term Robotics, but what I responded to was what you actually wrote.

  13. Re:Read Asimov on The Sci-Fi Myth of Killer Machines · · Score: 1

    Don't think that the idea of a robot only goes back to RUR! How about The Golem of Prague, from the late 16th Century? How about Talos, the bronze man that Hercules fought during the Quest for the Golden Fleece? And, of course, there are the metal servants that Hephaestus built, and that helped him forge the new armor for Achilles in the Iliad. The idea of artificial workers goes far, far, back in history, much farther than most people realize, because the older stories don't use the term "robot."

  14. Re:If I was the Judge.. on US Marshals Seize Police Stingray Records To Keep Them From the ACLU · · Score: 1

    the attorney general even went so far as to say "think of how this will look on your permanent record after you are reversed."

    I do hope that that attorney general got to spend some time in jail for that because threatening the judge like that is clearly contempt of court, and a simple slap on the wrist, or a small fine just isn't enough to make the point clear.

  15. Re:"the ACLU wrote in a blog post today." on US Marshals Seize Police Stingray Records To Keep Them From the ACLU · · Score: 1

    Just because it was posted on 06/05/2014 doesn't mean that that was when it was submitted. It may well have taken two days to get to the front page.

  16. Re:Why go to another gravity well? on NRC Human Spaceflight Report Says NASA Strategy Can't Get Humans To Mars · · Score: 1

    There's another excellent reason for a Moon colony: we can learn how to build, maintain and live in an environment where there's little or no atmosphere and is close enough to Earth that extra supplies can be shipped there on fairly short notice. Once we know how to build a self-sufficient lunar colony, we can use what we've learned there on Mars, the largest asteroids and possibly some of the Jovian or Saturnian moons.

  17. Re:C strikes out again on GnuTLS Flaw Leaves Many Linux Users Open To Attacks · · Score: 1

    Yes indeed. And, of course, make sure that if the maximum number of bytes are copied the \0 will still be there. Avoiding buffer overruns in C isn't rocket surgery, it's just a matter of common sense and good programming habits.

  18. Re:ME and Vista on Windows 8.1 Finally Passes Windows 8 In Market Share · · Score: 1

    That may be true, but it's not the fault of Linux itself; it's caused by developers who either don't know how to write lean code or simply don't care. Personally, I use Xfce, but not because it's lean or minimalistic. I use it because I find it very easy to customize and personalize so that my desktop looks the way I want it to rather than the way whoever wrote the DE thinks it should look.

  19. Re:C strikes out again on GnuTLS Flaw Leaves Many Linux Users Open To Attacks · · Score: 1

    I haven't done any programming in years, but when I did, I worked in C. On every project that I worked on, we were expected to use strncpy() instead of just strcpy() to make sure that we didn't copy more bytes than we had room for. AFAIK, not one of those projects ever had a buffer overflow issue. Why this isn't the standard now is beyond me.

  20. Re:ME and Vista on Windows 8.1 Finally Passes Windows 8 In Market Share · · Score: 2

    We're the dumb ones though. We buy the Vistas, the Win8s, the MEs... we BUY that crap. We're to blame!!

    I run a Linux-only household. I don't have to buy a new computer every two or three years because my OS is too much of a resource hog for what I've got. Don't blame me because you keep on drinking the MS kool aid.

  21. Re:False comparison on The Energy Saved By Ditching DVDs Could Power 200,000 Homes · · Score: 2

    I presume, then, that you have no children. Kids often want to see the same movie over and over, even though they know what's going to happen. If you own the DVD, you can let them watch it whenever they want; if you have to stream it, they can only watch it again if the streaming service still offers it.

  22. Re:The fad of the future on Can Cyborg Tech End Human Disability By 2064? · · Score: 1

    Why wait? I already have a pair of ocular implants and adjustable augmented hearing.

  23. Re:Ridiculous on German Court Rules That You Can't Keep Compromising Photos After a Break-Up · · Score: -1, Troll

    So what you're saying is, your last girlfriend was (to you, at least) a Big Beautiful Woman. Nothing wrong with that, as long as that's what floats your boat. Just because today's fashion industry equates skinny with good looking doesn't mean that you have to follow their standards.

  24. Blaming outside influences goes back a long way on Teachers Union: Computers Can Negatively Impact Children's Ability To Learn · · Score: 1

    The basic idea was expressed brilliantly in 1957 along with a great way to combat it.

  25. ...children have lost the ability to concentrate...

    No. Today's children haven't lost the ability to concentrate, because they've never been forced to learn it. People who, unlike you, let their children spend all of their time playing games, fooling around on social networking sites and, in general, use computers as electronic babysitters have never given their children a reason to learn how to concentrate on a task until it's completed, just as an earlier generation let their children use TV the same way. Computers aren't the problem, the misuse of them and lack of parental supervision is.