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User: Vreejack

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Comments · 202

  1. Re:BFD on London Tube Cleaners Don't Want Fingerprint Clock-in · · Score: 1

    Not sure what "explosives sniffers" have to do with clocking in, unless you are complaining about yet another morale-boosting privilege lost to the burning need to increase efficiency.

  2. Re:Juan Valdez on Excess Coffee May Be Linked To Early Death · · Score: 2

    In other news: doing something to excess might not be good for your health. Actually, that's not news; it's a tautology.

  3. Re:Idiot on Time Reporter "Can't Wait" To Justify Drone Strike On Julian Assange · · Score: 1

    Do you understand the difference between a personal tweet and journalism? Or did you assume that Time edits everything this idiot says? In his weak defense I would point out that he admitted it was a stupid tweet and deleted it. Now for some idiotic reason the fact that he deleted it is somehow news, as if his attempt to erase admitted evidence of his own stupidity was somehow a crime.

  4. Re:LOL on Give Zebrafish Some Booze and They Stop Fearing Robots · · Score: 1

    A robot?! Here, hold my beer and watch this.

  5. Re:So he gets to return to life I guess? on Alan Turing Likely To Be Given Posthumous Pardon · · Score: 1

    The suicide verdict at the inquest was an awful decision. It is just as likely that his death was an accident. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18561092

  6. Re:Soda Machine. on Zynga Puts Random Stranger In Customer Support Role · · Score: 1

    For almost a year I have been getting calls from the Quebec area wanting to talk to William Marshall in the US Treasury. Next one I get I'm just going to have to tell them that Mr. Marshall no longer works at the US Treasury and has been dead for almost a century.

  7. Re:If it makes you sleep well at night.... on How Old Is the Average Country? · · Score: 1

    They will be getting their bonfires ready to burn an effigy of a member of that hacker's group, Anonymous.

  8. Re:Make a different email alias for each company on Ubisoft Hacked, Account Data Compromised · · Score: 1

    I see, you meant to use an example of a personal mail server. I was confused by the fact that your example is an unused domain.

    How can I get the use of a personal mail server that will actually fool anyone? ubisoft@vreejack.mooo.com is not going to fool anyone who thinks to guess blizzard@vreejack.mooo.com, so while it will help you dodge spam, you will still have to use unique passwords, which is much of the problem.

  9. Re:Make a different email alias for each company on Ubisoft Hacked, Account Data Compromised · · Score: 1

    You need to establish a valid email address to set up an account.

  10. Re:Reminds me of the paranoid worries I had! on Ask Slashdot: Can I Cross US Borders With Legally Ripped Media? · · Score: 1

    Years ago I ordered some cheap textbook on radar theory that turned out to have come from the Phillipines; the book is already written so they would sell cheap copies in that market because no one there could afford the full US price. It was not intended for sale in the US,but the Internet company I bought it from did not care. If I am not mistaken SCOTUS has declared this legal, now.

  11. Re:Stumped my ass on Keyless Remote Entry For Cars May Have Been Cracked · · Score: 1

    I suspect it is possible to quickly open the side mirrors without actually breaking them, and without triggering an alarm.

  12. TRS-80 on How Did You Learn How To Program? · · Score: 1

    St Anthony's High School, 1978. Brother Simon was onto computers and had a museum of old donated machines as well as the PDP-8e, Commodore chicklet machines, and a few TRS-80's. There was even a block of old analog computer modules for solving differential equations. An old mainframe with platters.

    I bought a copy of "TRS-80 Assembly Language Programming" $3.95. But tried reading it over and over for months before I figured out that a "register" was part of the processor, not in RAM. Then I wrote simple flight simulators and kept the machine on 24/7 because my tape drive was bad.

    There used to be this wonderful interactive C tutorial in MS-DOS. It really worked you through the gears of C until you understood everything. It must have been on my Amiga, though. ca. 1986

  13. Re:Leg fell off on Bandages That Can Turn Off Genes Encourages Wound Healing · · Score: 1

    Matthew Hagee says that praying for healing in Jesus' name always cures everything. Except a case of the stupids.

    http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/hagee-healing-jesus-name-works-every-time

  14. Re:Depends, but will probably get it on Microsoft Unveils Xbox One · · Score: 2

    I play Netflix through my 360 and I wasn't even aware that the Live Gold subscription was required...that's really screwed up when you figure all Microsoft is doing is providing the initial reference URL for the hookup. But you know what? It doesn't matter now because I just got a RROD. Time to can-x the Xbox Live, I guess.

  15. Re:Florida resident here on Gambling-Focused Internet Cafes Now Illegal In Florida · · Score: 1

    In the late 90's "Internet cafes" were actually a means to make high interest payday loans. You would buy a membership at the cafe on credit and they would offer to front you a whole lot of money. There was one outside the naval air station at Mayport, near the strip club. I didn't know what it was until they started closing them down.

  16. Re:Evolution? Maybe... on Roadkill Forcing Cliff Swallows To Evolve · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Um, what? Are you trying to suggest that bird wings are shrinking because automobiles produce less turbulence than they used to?

    I have seen some really stupid write-ups in Science, but this one was concise and accurate. Roadkill birds have longer wings and the average wingspan has decreased over the decades of the study. It is known that birds with shorter wingspans are more agile in the air. The conclusion is that roadkills are placing a selection pressure on the birds for shorter wingspans. Turbulence is not actually believed to play much of a part, as death is caused when the birds are struck by cars, not when they get caught in their wake.

  17. Article is brain-dead on Manga Girls Beware: Extra Large Eyes Caused Neanderthal's Demise · · Score: 1

    Since the visual region of a species' brain will tend to grow to be exactly as large as it needs to be, I do not see how this would lead to cannibalization of other organs. What is important is whether or not the other organs of the brain exist in the first place. Once they do exist, natural selection will tend to expand them appropriately. The notion that birth canal places a limit on the size of the human brain, implying a competition for space in the skull, does not appear to be correct. There is nothing limiting the width of the birth canal, which is free to adapt to the size of newborn skulls. Therefor the only thing limiting the size of our brains is our metabolism. We have a smaller occipital region in our skulls than neanderthals because we have smaller retinas. If neanderthals have not been able to keep up with us cognitively it is because either they were unlucky, or they lacked some of the specialized organs of the brain that we possess.
    It is true that having more brain mass for any reason will require more nutrition, but the fact that neandertals had larger eyes in the first place suggests that it was adaptive, and gave them an advantage. Where the article really falls flat on its face is that on the one hand it argues that the expanded neanderthal visual system is adaptive (else why would they have it?) and on the other hand it argues that the expanded neanderthal visual system is non-adaptive. You cannot have it both ways. If having more visual power was not adaptive then selection pressure would have favored smaller eyes and more energy spent on the rest of the brain.

  18. Tool broken? on Testing an Ad-Free Microtransaction Utopia · · Score: 2

    Aaaand, it doesn't actually seem to work. Turns the current URL into file address, and adds that to your server IP,... For example, trying to use it on SMBC results in: "http://penny.1889.ca/www.smbc-comics.com/#comic", which results in a very good impression of a 404.

  19. Re:and people on Caffeine Improves Memory In Bees · · Score: 1

    Other studies have already shown that coffee has no effect on human memory unless you are exhausted, in which case it helps. As any stimulant might.

  20. Re:I'm not even a fan, but on Orson Scott Card's Superman Story Shelved After Homophobia Controversy · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Didn't push his agenda?

    He is a member of the Board of Directors of the The National Organization for Marriage--an American non-profit political organization established in 2007 to work against legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States. He also wrote an essay titled, "Homosexual Marriage and Civilization," in which he wrote:

    The dark secret of homosexual society—the one that dares not speak its name—is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.

  21. Re:I'm not even a fan, but on Orson Scott Card's Superman Story Shelved After Homophobia Controversy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    On the other hand I am "shocked" to discover his position, given the homoerotic undertones in some of his works. Can we have more naked adolescent boys fighting in the shower? Preparing to fight the "buggers," no less. The man has unresolved issues.

  22. Re:More Info Please... on Ancestor of All Placental Mammals Revealed · · Score: 3, Informative

    The characteristics of the first placental are not really controversial. The real news here is that a lot of the work on placentals and eutherians is wrong and must be re-evaluated. Granted, a lot of the placental work was already merely tentative. Molecular phylogenetics estimates had placentals appearing about 105 Mya, This new work ignores the molecular results and comes up with a later date. From what I can see, dating of the relevant available fossils is equivocal.

    Also curious is that according to this interpretation, the ancestral afrotherian (elephants, aardvarks, manatees, etc.) originated in South America and somehow migrated across the then 1000-mile ocean to Africa. Prepare for further revision.

  23. Re:You're joking, right? on Blimps To Help Protect Washington DC From Air Attack · · Score: 1

    Speaking as a DC resident, this talks of defensive blimps is actually making me very uncomfortable. But if the threat is real then so be it.

  24. Re:Brilliant! on Blimps To Help Protect Washington DC From Air Attack · · Score: 2

    "Fire retardant" actually means, "burns too slowly to be a hazard under most conditions." Helium is completely inert with respect to everything, and will not even form a stable compound with itself. In a closed container helium will put the fire out. Not so much in an open system as it has a low heat capacity compared to something like water, and it fails to smother like CO2 because it tends to float away. It won't interfere with reactions like PKP because it remains unreactive. But inside a blimp? Nothing will burn.

  25. Re:change the battery on Life After MS-DOS: FreeDOS Keeps On Kicking · · Score: 1

    EEPROM is not maintained by the battery. "Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory" is supposed to be non-volatile. It is written to in-circuit by driving it with a special higher voltage that is not otherwise used. I cannot think of any reason why removing power would affect it (other that extreme incompetence by the engineers). Or the message is wrong and it is not EEPROM but ordinary CMOS. In which case you might be missing a battery. Maybe they forgot to design it in :-)

    CMOS* and a battery are often used to record system settings for the BIOS. You do NOT need to flash the PROM if it gets corrupted, just reset it to default and reenter the data by hand.

    *Do they still use CMOS? It runs on very low power as it only draws current when it switches. Ideal for storing system specs that need to be changed once in a while and need to be available before any devices can be accessed.