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User: zippthorne

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  1. Re:I'm curious to see how many retailers actually on Credit Card Swipe Fees Begin Sunday In USA · · Score: 1

    ...though both sides agreed on the need for a central bank to prevent panics.

    How convenient that it also allows the banksters to rob the value of everyone's savings, through the miracle of planned inflation....

  2. Re:I'm curious to see how many retailers actually on Credit Card Swipe Fees Begin Sunday In USA · · Score: 1

    There's no reason it can't come from the people who don't pay it off at the end of every month. The whole point of the "no fees or interest if you pay it off each month" is to get normally responsible people to get the cards and then get into a situation where they might decide to use the loan aspect some months.

  3. Re:Really? on Student Expelled From Montreal College For Finding "Sloppy Coding" · · Score: 1

    Colleges maintain "campus police" so that their students can make a minor mistake or two without lasting permanent consequences.

    As the student's intentions were not malicious, they should be extending this policy of "sweeping small stuff under the rug" rather than going with their apparent policy of "publicly embarrassing ourselves in front of an entire industry, our students, and our potential future students, while possibly ruining the career of a promising student"

  4. Re:Information wants to be free on Student Expelled From Montreal College For Finding "Sloppy Coding" · · Score: 1

    That wouldn't hurt the university as bad as it would hurt the students.

  5. Re:Try Minecraft on Ask Slashdot: How Do I Get My Spouse To Start Gaming With Me? · · Score: 1

    Problem is that Minecraft runs on Java, which has been in the news a lot lately for security holes...

  6. Re:alpha test? on TSA Terminates Its Contract With Maker of Full-Body Scanner · · Score: 1

    I'm confused..

    The President would like us to believe that they're debating whether to pay back the lenders, but if we need to raise the debt ceiling to pay them, then we're proposing paying back lenders with borrowed money.

    That can only go on for so long - one way or another, it cannot continue past the point where the we need to take on new debt in an amount equal to the portion of the debt service payments going towards principle. i.e. the point at which 100% of revenues are spent on interest. But you can't do much with the 0% that remains....

  7. Re:Clip on 3D Printable Ammo Clip Skirts New Proposed Gun Laws · · Score: 1

    The only excuses for guns are the hobbies of hunting and target shooting. It's not worth it.

    And training and stockpiling against the need to defend against outside invaders or an oppressive government.

    And preventing the continuation of a crime in progress through use.

    And preventing the continuation or initiation of a crime through display.

    And preventing the initiation of a crime through potential presence.

    Only one of these is actually delineated as the direct reason for the second amendment, and such reason implies that the right to bear arms specifically and intentionally extends to militarily useful weapons.

    If you want to change this, you should propose an additional amendment to nullify or limit the existing one. Anything else further weakens the protections provided by other articles and amendments in the constitution by making it easier for legislatures and officials to interpret or ignore provisions to their own ends.

  8. Re:Scrabble...? on Scrabble Needs a New Scoring System · · Score: 1

    It's a Zynga game. I find it more likely that it's tweaked in such a way as to be just enough change to make pursuing a copyright claim difficult for hasbro, but similar enough that they can still steal the code from some other scrabble knockoff app...

  9. Re:Nope on Chinese Smartphone Invasion Begins · · Score: 1

    Europe isn't a country (yet).

  10. Which side is the "safe" side? on Boston Declares Health Emergency Due To Massive Flu Outbreak · · Score: 1

    Is the mask supposed to protect you from others, or the other way around?

  11. Re:Seriously? on Congressman Introduces Bill To Ban Minting of Trillion-Dollar Coin · · Score: 1

    Where did you go? Is it better than the US? Are there jobs there? Are they friendly to immigrants?

  12. Re:Trusting anti-virus producers on John McAfee Explains How He Milked Information From Belize's Elite · · Score: 0

    It can be virii if you're talking about the computer version. Computer people like to weird language with wacky prefixes and suffixes and conjugations and whatnot.

    Sometimes the inside jokes go too far, like using 2^10n as an approximation for 10^3n, which was ok for the small n of the 80s and early 90s, but is increasingly getting in the way of communication, but they are accepted jargon within the various circles and cliques.

  13. The wage increase means you get more money, but it also means you pay more taxes. And if it puts you over the edge to that higher tax bracket...

    Do the countries you're comparing the US to also have state, town, and sometimes county governments taking a share as well? The states are where most of the activity is supposed to occur, btw, the federal government is only supposed to be handling the "provide for common defense," a single point for treaties, unify the state economies type stuff.

  14. Re:Money for nothing, (chicks for free) ? on Has 3D Film-Making Had Its Day? · · Score: 1

    Yeah, but they charge you the premium even if you bring your own glasses. You're not paying extra for the glasses, you're paying extra for the projector. (or.. really.. you're paying extra because you're willing to pay extra...)

  15. Re:No. on Has 3D Film-Making Had Its Day? · · Score: 1

    I wouldn't say 100% flicker free, but it was definitely worlds better than 24fps, which being the minimum speed that motion is perceived for "most" audiences should hardly be surprising.

    I have been sick of 24fps since the first time I saw a movie had a pan over a stunning vista, a technique that was entirely ruined by the significant motion blur and also by the choppiness of the frame rate. Based on the Hobbit, I think I'd be satisfied with somewhere around 90fps, and maybe make some the pans a little longer over the cool scenery so we can take in more of the details.

  16. Re:No. on Has 3D Film-Making Had Its Day? · · Score: 1

    How will a horror movie work if half the audience can already see the guy hiding behind the rock before he leaps out?

    Pretty well. That's how horror movies already work. The audience can see the guy behind the rock, but the victim can't.

  17. Re:EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes on Defending the First Sale Doctrine · · Score: 1

    Not in the US. Most in the US basically ignore copyright and insist that whatever their idea of what a reasonable copyright would be, actually is the case.

    If they cannot imagine that a particular rule could exist, they will go on doing the thing that they think is perfectly reasonable and therefore allowed, and be surprised when "suddenly" facing a lawsuit or shakedown.

  18. Re:I quit on New York Paper Uses Public Records To Publish Gun-Owner Map · · Score: 1

    You'd think so, but the problem is that sometimes the safety obtained is not only imaginary, it's negative. If you're going to balance in that situation, you have to go even further from one party's position....

    The Newtown mass shooting happened in a gun-free zone, but even that shooting was ended by a citizen with a gun using it against the shooter. If there had been more citizens with guns present, perhaps the death toll would have been lower. Ann Coulter had an interesting list in an essay pointing out the dangers of selection bias when looking at the statistics involved.

  19. Re:So Proud of Gun Ownership on New York Paper Uses Public Records To Publish Gun-Owner Map · · Score: 1

    Your friends can pay to do that: Tough Mudder, although it doesn't also include gun quals. I don't think they're the only ones doing that kind of race, either.

  20. Re:vi and cc on Ask Slashdot: Android Apps For Kids Under 12 Months? · · Score: 0

    Vi is a powerful text editor that will make you more efficient at writing tasks term papers to code. It includes a procedural scripting language for advanced editing and text processing.

    Emacs is a powerful text editor that will let you play chess or watch it solve puzzles instead of writing your term papers or code. It includes a lisp dialect scripting language to give you another thing to do instead of writing or coding your real project.

  21. Re:6 months? on Ask Slashdot: Android Apps For Kids Under 12 Months? · · Score: 2

    * play some of those never-ending games where time == success and get your reality-view completely screwed up.

    Training the kid for a career in "public service" or a union job might not be too bad for the kid, assuming that not too many parents do it that there aren't enough of the rest of us left to pay for things....

  22. Re:Irony on The New Ethanol Blend May Damage Your Vehicle · · Score: 1

    They're happy for you to give up your car and upgrade to a bus. Buses are more efficient than cars (when full, and when they don't take passengers too far out of their way, but they're always full and convenient, right?), so they're much better for everybody. You'll thank them later.

  23. Re:Time on BLAKE2 Claims Faster Hashing Than SHA-3, SHA-2 and MD5 · · Score: 1

    You have to do that anyway...

    For passwords, I'd assume (but probably be wrong...) that you'd convert the password to the new hash either when the user signs in next, or when the user changes their password next, but you still have to be able to check against the old hash, so you'd always need to know what type of hash that is. Seems to me that the best place to store that is in a field in the database right next to the hash itself.

    One would assume that hashthis() would be implemented to either be aware of the hash's algorithm (a property of its object, perhaps?), or take an argument that indicates the hash.

    I would assume that the feature, "able to change the hash algorithm" would tend to get added either around the first time that it needed to be updated, or by experienced developers who have already experienced that event in other applications.

  24. Re:FUD on The New Ethanol Blend May Damage Your Vehicle · · Score: 1

    A stepping stone to what, though? A crop that isn't readily available here? Ethanol works in brazil because they get it from sugar cane and sugar cane happens to grow quite well in brazil's climate.

    Here, we can get almost as much energy from corn ethanol as we put in from the petro feedstock (fuel for the machines and fertilizers, etc), and corn already grew pretty well in the US before we started using petro fertilizers and machine harvesters. What crop do you suggest we could use instead, on the land that we have, that would be better?

  25. Re:Vehicle range on The New Ethanol Blend May Damage Your Vehicle · · Score: 1

    You're thinking about the problem wrong. What we should do is electrify the highways (induction charging lanes, perhaps?) so that cars going over them don't need to rely on stored energy. Then it doesn't matter if your car only has a 40 mile range battery, since any trip that approaches that would probably require using a highway anyway.