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User: ogl_codemonkey

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  1. Re: Hmmm on 'SPURV' Project Brings Windowed Android Apps To Desktop Linux (androidpolice.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yuck from me since it doesn't work with nvidia binary drivers, which I need to get decent performance out of my GPU.

    Yuck, binary drivers.

  2. Re:I used to be into Macs on ASUS' ZenBook 3 Is Thinner, Lighter and Faster Than the MacBook (engadget.com) · · Score: 0

    Hey, look everyone! It's the user that expects AirDrop to work!

  3. Re:Why are people going to jail for this? on New Video Shows Shot Down Drone Hovered For Only 22 Seconds · · Score: 1

    In that case the person is still trespassing, using their agency over the drone. If you combine these examples and put the gun on the drone, a person using the gun with the drone to kill somebody is still committing murder.

    The murder statutes don't need to say "a person with their bare hands, and/or a hammer, and/or an axe, and/or a piano wire, and/or a USB cable... " just as the trespass statutes don't need to specify "a person, or a remote-controlled vehicle, or a fibre-optic camera, ..."

  4. Re:Deliverance? on New Video Shows Shot Down Drone Hovered For Only 22 Seconds · · Score: 1

    Sure. If you use Firefox or Chome on a desktop, with a cursor, install this script from "greasyfork.org" recommended by somebody who won't even put their handle behind the recommendation; which will read the source of every page you visit and inject the appropriate scripts and frames to load resources you probably don't need from third-party servers whenever somebody comments with a video link. Problem solved!

  5. Re:Why are people going to jail for this? on New Video Shows Shot Down Drone Hovered For Only 22 Seconds · · Score: 1

    That's like saying that a gun can't commit murder. It may even be true (depending on where you are), but it's not the issue in question - the drone can definitely be used by a person to commit an illegal act.

  6. Re:Deliverance? on New Video Shows Shot Down Drone Hovered For Only 22 Seconds · · Score: 1

    Link is: "Allahu Akbar theme song"

  7. Re:Really? on Why We Need Certain Consumer Drone Regulations · · Score: 1

    caseih raises more excellent points, but IMO misses the worst flaw in your reasoning: it's not okay to drive on the wrong side of the road just because if you cause a head-on collision you'll be held responsible.

    Even assuming that you identify the drone 'pilot' responsible, and manage to indict them for what they did; holding somebody responsible for damage or injury doesn't undo the fact that through act or neglect they injured somebody who was innocently going about their day, or in this case, doing their job to protect the community.

    Why apply no-fly zones where emergency services are engaged in air operations? Because they already have too much important shit to worry about. Updrafts, smoke, terrain, coordinating with other air- and ground-based personnel, flying at or near load capacity, at low speed and altitude, identifying effective deployment locations on a moving fire-front and planning manoeuvres to hit them at the right altitude and angle, ON TOP of all the usual concerns with operating an aircraft.

    Don't risk the safety of others, without need or consent. Just don't. This is why we regulate dangerous behaviour; to empower the legal representatives of society to judiciously apply appropriate corrective pressure to the anti-social behaviour of others.

    If it's big enough, stable enough, and capable enough that you can't get all your fun out of it on your own property - probably inside - it should be subject to some regulation when operating in public space. If it could be encountered by somebody who has to be aware of in-air obstructions like birds, radio masts, and power lines; it should be subject to emergency services exclusion zones, public nuisance controls, and privacy/surveillance law.

  8. Re:Like it matters on YouTube Introduces 60fps Video Support · · Score: 1

    Certainly doesn't seem to; they've just halved the bits-per-frame by the look of it.

    The image quality is just... awful.

  9. Re:Denial of use on Mt. Gox CEO Returns To Twitter, Enrages Burned Investors · · Score: 1

    Maybe I can get in with this before the entire debate falls apart... hah, yeah right. Anyway, here goes:

    The Copyright equivalent of stealing a candy bar (or a car from a dealership, to use your earlier analogy) from a grocery store is actually:

    1. Man enters a grocery store and sees a $1 candy bar
    2. He goes home and produces his own candy bar just like it, with the resources he has available; with his own time, energy, and equipment (stove, mixer, trays and moulds), and ingredients (chocolate, nougat, peanuts, whatever)
    3. He could eat this bar, give it away, or sell it without having *stolen* anything.

    The original candy bar is still available for purchase for $1 to the next customer. If the Man in the example were selling his candy bars for profit, he would have effectively created a competing business to the grocery store. If he sells them wholesale to the store, he's competing with their other distributors.

    If they are confusingly similar to the original brand, he may be infringing the manufacturer's protected trade marks. If he uses their patented process to put bubbles in chocolate or something, he may be infringing their patent; but legal competition for manufactured goods is specifically not covered by Copyright law.

    Back to the car example, manufactured goods may contain Copyright-protected work, i.e. microcode in the car's engine management unit; but if you build a functional equivalent of your own without infringing patented methods, you're good to go.

    Keep in mind that a car manufacturer will have registered 'trade marks' like "the distinctive tail light arrangement" that you won't be allowed to produce competing goods 'confusingly similar to', but you can (YMMV, consult a lawyer) build one for your own use.

    And yes, for the sake of argument a physical work *can* be subject to protection by Copyright, but would generally need to show substantial creative effort and merit to be enforced; such as a carved statue. In the case of the car example, the Copyright would apply to the manufacturer's plans, CAD/CAM files, and maybe physical prototypes; but almost certainly not the result of the process (again, YMMV, consult a laywer)

  10. Re:This just in. on Mt. Gox CEO Returns To Twitter, Enrages Burned Investors · · Score: 1

    People keep using the term "Fair Use" in a legal context as though it means what it would mean in an ordinary conversation. It does not mean that your 'use' is 'fair', but rather that it complies with the specific exceptions to Copyright law that are granted under that title. Call it whatever you like; as you say, it's still infringing copyright (and also the DMCA, due to that handy little anti-circumvention section, since you mention DRM), and the courts would find against you as such.

    Not directing this at david_thornley, it's just a clarification that I feel should be made more often; particularly on Slashdot.

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

    I imagine that Google thinks it far more common for one person with more than one of [ PC | laptop | phone | tablet ] to have the majority of same in the country they are in, than to only take one of the above to another country.

    If you took your laptop, phone, and tablet with you, you'd be thinking that you should only have to change your location preference on one.

    Really, I think changing my 'home' location exactly once for each time I stay somewhere new is pretty much exactly what I'm looking for.

  12. Re:In their defence. on School Tricks Pupils Into Installing a Root CA · · Score: 1

    I suspect that there's a big fat legal difference between "Jimmy looked at a naughty site on his phone while at school" and "The school's network and it's operators facilitated Jimmy's access to naughty sites."

  13. Re:Blame the kids on NY Police Get Tall SUVs To Combat Texting While Driving · · Score: 1

    It's the 9 to 5 cube jockeys and wage slaves who are bored to hell with sitting in traffic for cumulative days of their lives.

    So the law should instead be encouraging people who live more than X distance from work to be using mass transit? Sounds good to me!

  14. Re:Sigh on Ask Slashdot: Does LED Backlight PWM Drive You Crazy? · · Score: 1

    A hundred times this.

    Far from a PWM issue, most likely the cheap displays that illustrate this issue have insufficient power smoothing, and the culprit is likely the 100 or 120 Hz fluctuation from rectified AC, or (yes, some are really this bad), 50 or 60 Hz from clipped AC.

    The duty cycle of a CRT phosphor group is in the order of 1/1,000,000 for an SDTV resolution - the point intensity of the energised area is unimaginably bright; look for high-speed footage of a TV to get some idea of it; or if you have a digital camera of some worth, take a pic at 1/2500 and see how many lines are still saturating the CCD.

  15. Re:Windows 7 on Ask Slashdot: Mac To Linux Return Flow? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Having long been a fan of minimalist window managers like Fluxbox, a friend recently recommended xmonad, which I promptly installed; and since doing so I have been amazed at how much time I can spend not managing windows.

    There's apparently also osxmonad for the 'traitors,' but I haven't tried that out yet.

  16. Re:underwhelmed on Linux 3.8 Released · · Score: 1

    ... you'll be recompiling everything it depends on right down to the widget set plus everything that depends on any of that plus anything that depends on those things, and so on, recursively.

    I always saw it as a feature than when a library maintainer fixed a bug, it'd get fixed in all the software that was using said library; or a any libraries that was wrapping that library, or any software that was using that wrapper...

  17. Re:Use inode space for 1st part of large files? on Linux 3.8 Released · · Score: 1

    The obvious solution to my own argument would be to instead duplicate the data into any space left in the inode

    Very interesting... continue.

  18. Re:Use inode space for 1st part of large files? on Linux 3.8 Released · · Score: 1

    There are plenty of disk-sensitive applications that deliberately do block-aligned accesses into a file; and I imagine a lot of those would be very put out by such a change.

  19. Just do the damned test on French Police Unsure Which Twin To Charge In Sexual Assaults · · Score: 1

    Sometimes justice is expensive; and sometimes it makes mistakes - but if you can get a definitive answer from a reliable, available test; do it.

    Perhaps then bill each of them for half the cost, for not cooperating.

  20. Re:Cut out the intermediary step. on USMA: Going the Extra Kilometer For Metrication · · Score: 1

    Perhaps, but even in metric countries, gigameters is an uncommon unit.

  21. Re:But... on Some Apple iMacs "Assembled In America" · · Score: 2

    Of course! It's to complement the use of the possessive apostrophe.

  22. Re:Environmentalists on Huge Geoengineering Project Violates UN Rules · · Score: 1

    Okay, firstly; your math is out - a far smaller number of people would have to walk into gas chambers on a daily basis to reduce our population to your arbitrary target well within 20 years. Currently significant population factors (birth rate and death rate) are compounded as a ratio (i.e. about 20 per 1,000) onto the existing population; any fixed-amount reduction that outweighs the initial difference in geometric components for population increase and decrease will become the dominant factor very quickly.
    365 million out of (I'm assuming your starting number was 20 * 365.25m + 200m = ) 7.5 billion isn't much of a decrease in the first year (a little under 5%) but I'm sure you can see from here the compounding nature of the figure; once you're down to 500 million, another year would take over half your population.

    Perhaps more egregiously, are you saying that a significant amount of our environmental impact as a species is our own poop?

  23. Re:Unionize on Ask Slashdot: When Does Time Tracking at Work Go Too Far? · · Score: 1

    How that place manages to stay in business in this crappy economy, selling massively overpriced poor-quality drinks, I have no idea.

    I've suspected for a while now that people become accustomed to Starbucks and forget what coffee is supposed to taste like.

  24. Re:yikes! on 8th Circuit Upholds $220,000 Verdict In Jammie Thomas Case · · Score: 1

    I,m sorry, I'm not anti-ms anti-apple pro-google pro-Linux etc.

    We're anti-Google now - did you not get the memo?

  25. Re:Wow on Ask Slashdot: Best *nix Distro For a Dynamic File Server? · · Score: 1

    I once solved a similar problem with FLAC; seems to work great on most environmental data. YMMV.