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User: thegrassyknowl

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  1. Re:In other news worlds hottest pepper "discovered on Capsaicin Tested On Surgical Wounds · · Score: 1

    According to the wikipedia page it's used for cooking, eaten alone, to treat stomach ailments or for relief from summer heat?

    I'm going to presume that eating this one of these suckers fresh causes an almost instant explosive evacuation of the bowel so powerful that you'd be lucky to have any bones left. I guess that would take your mind off the summer or your stomach problems.

  2. Re:Why haven't schools switched to all Linux? on UK Schools Warned Off Microsoft Deal · · Score: 1

    If someone learned UNIX 10 years ago, they could pick up a modern Linux distro and have little trouble with it, if you take someone who learned Windows 98 and put them on a Vista system, they would be confused and have no clue how to do the most basic things.

    Some will argue that's because Unix systems are backwards and do not incorporate the latest whiz-bang feature that users need today. I don't argue becuase Unix-y systems are built on a tried and true ideas that have mostly stood the test of time.

    Microsoft buys into whatever they think will sell their OS in the short term - add a feature here, some eye candy there, make it incompatible with previous releases, so on. People are really forced to upgrade to if it they want to keep running Windows. Unix-y systems are less like that - at least the API is mostly porable across any one of them.

    I'm just glad that someone is thinking about what MS is offering rather than just blindly accepting it as the holy grail of computers and paying their "tax"

  3. Re:Oh dear on Court Strikes Down Age Verification For Adult Sites · · Score: 1

    Oh, please. I hardly let the TV and/or PC babysit them. My wife and I are very conscious about that. What does "supervised" internet use mean, anyway? Am I constantly looking over their shoulder while they play their games or do their homework? With the amount of porn available on the internet today, I pretty much have to do any google searches for them, and cannot allow them to even type in the internet address lest they make a common mispelling and come across a porn site.

    Oh please, indeed! What do you consider is porn then? Women in bikinis? A handful of topless shots? naked women spreading their bits wide? what? If you're only concerned that your 10 year old is going to see a bit of nipple then you need to rethink your views.

    It's quite difficult to stumble across real actual pornography without going looking for it. The pornographers want to protect their industry from draconian regulations like you are proposing so they do their best to keep it 'hidden' unless you're looking for it. Google does a good job of filtering porn from legitimite searches.

    As another poster warned there's more than just porn to worry about. There's hate speech, gore, etc. If you're concerned about your kids seeing that then you should be watching them - a few short accidental exposures to things won't harm them because they're not old enough to fully grasp the concepts. Just keep an eye on them instead of rallying to have everything banned. Just because you don't like something doesn't mean others feel the same way.

  4. Re:Oh dear on Court Strikes Down Age Verification For Adult Sites · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Everybody is a slave to their desires, no matter what those desires may be. Your body is wired in a certain way; that way is to stay alive and to make lots of babies. That's natures way of making sure we stay around.

    The biochemical mechanisms that make us want to make babies actually really only make us want to have sex. Making babies is a (fortunately controllable) side effect of having sex. It's only natural to go through phases where you wish to copulate and phases where you don't.

    Most religious people would argue against pornography because the very argument is driven by their desire to please $DEITY. The desire to please a "god" is larger than the desire to make babies in some people and they resist the natural urge to go forth and multiply until they are married. That's a choice some people make. I, personally, don't think it's healthy.

    I ask you, do you eat? Eating is driven by desire to stay alive. I certainly eat. I don't eat constantly and I don't usually just get up and walk out of work or meetings at bad times to eat (unless I feel my blood sugar dropping too rapidly). I am controlling my desire to eat when I am hungry.

    This is OT enough!

  5. Re:Oh dear on Court Strikes Down Age Verification For Adult Sites · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Honestly, if the masturbating perverts out there want to get their jollies off of dirty pictures, fine, just make it bloody clear that's what a site contains before the rest of us get bombarded with god-knows-what.

    How is masturbating and looking at pornography of consenting adults considered "perverted"? That is a very limited view given that your body is wired in such a way as to encourage you to reproduce as frequently and as often as possible. It stands to reason that people need to satisfy their natural urges somehow. It's hard getting laid; people are picky about their partners and there's this stigma attached to sex still even in our modern liberated society.

    It's pretty easy to watch porn and whack off... A few people take it out on poor unsuspecting passers-by (i don't condone that kind of thing). You gotta satisfy the urges that your body has somehow. I find it somewhat offensive that you would classify the satisfying of the body's natural urges "perverted".

    I never really supported the age verification because I think a person who is old enough to know to seek out the content on their own is probably old enough to make their own decisions regarding sex. A person who wants to seek out the porn will be able to find it regardless of any age verification laws in one or two countries. Not everywhere is the USA or Australia. Lots of places don't enforce similar laws.

    Younger kids should be supervised by their parents. Someone else said "if you don't want your kids looking at it then try something called parenting". I couldn't agree more.

    I do agree that porn isn't for everyone, and a simple banner page warning is what a great-many of the porn sites have currently anyway.

  6. Re:and again in layman's terms?? on Network Monitoring Appliance Looks Below 1 Microsecond · · Score: 2, Informative

    It seems quite simple. I took the following from the article:

    They timestamp the packet at some point in the network and when it arrives at the other side they timestamp it again to work out the trip time. Not really rocket science, but they seem to have come up with ways of measuring time pretty accurately at two different places and keeping the clocks in sync or working around clock drift in their measurements.

    The other part of their system is some algorithmic work that correlates packets and tries to work out a profile of the network to allow better tuning of networking parameters or even modifying applications to perform better.

    It's all very useful information to have if you're trying to milk the last bit of performace out of your network. It's useful for single customer applications, but I see ISPs using it to really tune the larger pipes between POPs so that things like VoIP work more efficiently even with lots of customers making and receiving calls in the presence of other traffic. It often isn't enough to say "send these types of packets out first", particularly if one user or application is generating a lot of them and other users are not; you can starve other users or applications of data.

  7. Re:New Computational Models? on The Development of Ecologically Sound Jet Fuel · · Score: 1

    I agree ignoring them removes the problem of them being annoying. They are, however, not irrelevant to the global warming problem. Greenhouse gas emissions from cars contribute to the problem. Peak hour driving (the 9-5 commuters) is the most inefficient way to use fuel. It's start, stop, start, stop. Big cars are less efficient by virtue of total mass and total wind resistance. Airline travel is just one part of a much larger problem.

    A lot of these cars have no place on the road. If you're in an office 9-5 in the city then you should be on the public transport most days. It's more efficient and it's actually less stressful; you don't have to worry about all the other bad drivers. There are obviously cases where a car is needed; if you have an urgent appointment during the day or have to work very early or late.

    This is why I say someone really should be investigating ways of improving the public transport systems; during peak hours it's easy enough to get a bus or train where I live, but if you work outside of those hours or need to duck off for a bit then it's nearly impossible to make even a short journey without your car.

  8. New Computational Models? on The Development of Ecologically Sound Jet Fuel · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    So they're going to reduce the greenhouse gas output of planes in a vein bid to offset the greenhouse emissions caused by running their super computer to calculate ways of reducing the greenhouse emissions caused by planes?

    Why don't they better model the public transport systems in many cities and develop better ways of moving dumb people about. Who hasn't noticed the 9-5 suit wearing office junkie driving their SUV in peak hour to the city then complaining about the hour(s) travelling time, the cost of fuel and parking? I'd sure they could do something about those people (possibly involving gasses) and really make the world a better place.

  9. Re:I think it's habit - AND convenience on Name-Your-Cost Radiohead Album Pirated More Than Purchased · · Score: 1

    It's really quite sad but it's true. Most "consumers" are cheap-as-ass. I know someone like that. She's only to happy to pirate whatever she wants because she perceives it as cheaper than going out and buying it. Of course the cost of her slow-ass internet connection with 200M downloads before it's capped to 64k means that it takes her forever to download anything anyway, and she'd be better of just going out and spending half the cost of the Internet connection on a new DVD each month rather than downloading 1/2 a DVD then having to spend money on power for her computer and modem as well as the blank DVD to put it on.

    It's really not about the actual cost of getting the stuff. It's about the perceived cost. She perceives it as free because she's not paying anyone for it but she overlooks all of the other incidental costs that she wouldn't have if she didn't want to pirate movies off the Internet. The cost of running the computer day and night as well as the cost of the Internet connection far outweighs the cost of a new DVD but she doesn't see it that way.

    I've been meaning to give radiohead some dollars for their new CD. I heard it in full on the radio the other night and i was really impressed!

  10. Re:No kidding on PC The #1 Choice For Kids Gaming · · Score: 1

    I started out on consoles and there were plenty of slower paced games. The NES had a few things. My 3 year old son has two games for the PS2 that are both educational and run at his speed. I haven't had the time to find him any more because he's pretty much satisfied playing the handful of games that he does have. Some of the faster paced ones are good for him to learn hand-eye coordination.

    I'm trying to keep my son off the PC for obvious reasons. I don't want him learning the "Windows" way of doing things. I'll teach him Linux when he's a bit older.

  11. Re:holding you back from what? on Best Way To Teach Oneself Math? · · Score: 1

    About the only people who don't use math are the ones with a degree in it! The OP was talking about general mathematics - basic algebra and the like. Those things apply to me on a daily basis as a software engineer / systems admin (yes I told 2 roles in a large company. It sucks). It's amazing how often the ability to solve a basic set of linear equations saves you the effort of trial and error to get a solution by brute force.

    I would suggest the way to go about it is go back to school. You could find an adult entry high school, or take a university bridging course for something like a science or engineering degree. There's plenty of highschool level mathematics in those courses and they're designed for people in the same situation as you.

    You'll have trouble teaching yourself if you are like most of the rest of us. It's not that you're not capable, but because at the first hurdle it will seem insurmountable without a tutor or guidance to show you that you can climb it in small steps. If you do want do teach yourself from books, consider enlisting the services of a tutor on occasion to make sure you're really learning the right things and to keep you honest.

  12. Re:Not the first time on The Russian Mafia Doesn't Like Spam Either · · Score: 1

    > Welcome to my life

    Welcome? Dude, I've been living this life for a long while. I can remember back in the days when a firewall was something that protected you from the high probability of the engine in your car spontaneously combusting, not from the dangers of the fuckwads on the network!

  13. Re:Not the first time on The Russian Mafia Doesn't Like Spam Either · · Score: 1

    The shitty part is that you can't turn away a single email but you spend most of your day dealing with complaints from the boss about spam. When you implement filtering and start rejecting stuff with really high scores his Aunt Tilly sends some crap chain mail that looks like spam to 500 people in the To: field and it's rejected and it's all your big bad fault.

    No sleep lost for me now 1/3 of my spam stopped.

  14. Re:Not the first time on The Russian Mafia Doesn't Like Spam Either · · Score: 2, Insightful

    > I actually felt sorry for him by then end:

    You don't get much spam do you? I administer a business network. We can't use draconian spam filtering to just drop it all at the MTA because one false positive and I'm out of the job. SPAM is a huge pain in my ass on a daily basis. I don't advocate vigilante justice but it seems in this case it's only fair. Spammers get fat and rich by being lazy and incompetent. They get others to make their botnets, they use software that's written for them. They only have to type ONE email at practically zero cost to receive a million hits.

    Now, let's see more spammers taken down this way. It might be an incentive for them to stop.

  15. Re:From one side of the mouth, then the other on Microsoft Flip-Flops On URI Protocol Handing Flaw · · Score: 0, Troll

    "There's nothing wrong with it" ---(M$ To English)---> "We're too stupid to be able to fix this bug so we'll claim it works as expected and is a feature then tell the users that it's their fault. At least our users are stupider than us."

  16. Re:When will it end?! on Canadian Mint Claims Rights To Words "One Cent" · · Score: 1

    Nope, people really are getting stupider in their conquest for one cent!

    I don't get how they can expect to own the phrase "one cent" given that other countries have similar denominations also called "one cent" and that the phrase "one cent" is actually an abbreviation of a mathematical term in common usage (one percent).

    The exact design of the coin, maybe, but not even the mint really owns that because they're just government owned company and the people are supposed to own/be the government in a democracy (the politicians are elected to represent the people because not everyone would fit in the government house). By default the people own the copyrights on any government generated work and can choose to do as they see fit with them.

    Go figure?

  17. Re:interesting software project that is just borin on What is the Best Way to Start a Paid GPL Project? · · Score: 1

    I work in this industry, and it's not as simple as a 2 week piece of crap. The POS software is relatively simple; it just has to total up the sales, add any discounts, manage tax (annoying in itself, given that some items are taxable, some aren't, some attract a different level of tax, etc), generate/manage any store discount funds, and generate receipt tickets for all of that. It takes a lot longer for a real developer to do this right.

    It's not some P.O.S that you hack together in PHP then run in a web browser in the client. While I'm at it, did you ever think about designing it to change and meet evolving needs? Two weeks of thought went into our database designs for a really simple system to guarantee that if we needed to extend it later that we could do so without major rewrites. Your engine should be configurable by scripts so that you can adjust it to different taxation regimes, etc without rewriting the code.

    As for actually receiving payments, you need to talk to a EftPOS machine. Some are easy, some are hard, all speak different languages. All require accreditation from the manufacturer before they'll actually sell any to work with your system. This means you software has to be bullet proof because they test against all sorts of extreme cases that you could never think of. You won't know about interfacing unless you're willing to enter into NDAs either.

    For some EftPOS machines you also need to talk to the switch/bank to get the funds. The machine generally creates the messages for you and you must act as a router. Different banks have different requirements too.

    You could write some P.O.S (as in Windows) POS application that nobody wants to use in 2 weeks or you could spend a year and write a reliable and stable application that people are actually interested in using and will be certifiable to interface to payment gateways.

    I agree on one thing though; if you cant afford the 2-5k for a pre-built POS system but still feel you need one you either need to rethink the size of your business or rethink your business model/budget.

  18. Re:wanking around on Torvalds On Pluggable Security Models · · Score: 1

    I've just been wanking around for years because finding some one to plug into is just too hard as a bonafide nerd.

  19. Re:Cheap webhosting account = 1TB of remote backup on Coppola Loses All His Data · · Score: 1

    The problem with web hosting for backups is two-fold. First is you are trusting your web host with your data - are they going to look after it, protect the files you don't want private, etc. Who is to say that they won't suddenly remove .htaccess support (for example) and all of your private data that was once protected by a mere password is now available to all who stumble along.

    Like most of us I keep a lot of things that I don't want to lose and a lot of things that I don't want to share; nothing really risque or illegal but I don't fancy sharing the family photos or anything along that line with the world.

    I keep an 80G usb hard disk in my laptop computer bag. I plug it in every few days and rsync a subset of important things to it. The plus is that it's "hot" so I can recover from stupid mistakes like deleting the wrong file. Its not ideal but it keeps my data with me at all times - I'm never more than a meter from my laptop bag.

    I don't generally like USB hard disks. Many have flaky chipsets in them and seem to crash if you copy too much data in one session to them, leaving you with a borked backup and possibly requring a reboot to get the USB stack back to operational.

    I'm currently looking at 40 or 80G tapes so I can back up all of my data rather than the subset I currently back up. The cost of tape drives is prohibitive though.

  20. Re:MPPA thuggery on Canadian Copyright Official Dumped Over MPAA Conflict · · Score: 1

    I've been watching a DDOS on our public IP block for about 2 weeks now. I can't say for sure that it's these guys but it's certainly causing me grief. Not the least of which is that all the connection attempts to the firewall are logged. It's eating disk space and CPU time as well as network bandwidth.

    Thousands and thousands of hits a minute... and the real interesting log events are just being drowned out :(

    Somebody here was downloading videos about a bunch of guys in a prison before I got out the big stick and ended that. Didn't stop the DDOS happening though.

  21. Re:Tags on Canadian Copyright Official Dumped Over MPAA Conflict · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    *rolls eyes* my last mod point just expired too - mod parent up Funny +5 hehe

  22. Re:Article Does Not Make Much Sense on Thinking about Rails? Think Again · · Score: 1

    7. Programming languages are like girlfriends?

    Programming languages are nothing like girlfriends. Geeks want to have a lot of them and know several intimately at any one time but only ever get to know one at best?

  23. Re:Remote access on What To Do When Broadband is Not An Option? · · Score: 1

    > GPRS (cell phone) - 64K, but generally very poor latency. SSH is barely
    > tolerable over GPRS. Forget GUI access.
    >
    > 3G (cell phone) - megabit speeds possible, but still with ghastly latency.
    > SSH is tolerable. GUI access is probably frustratingly laggy. Exhorbitant
    > unless you can get an unlimited data plan (and these typically are
    > pretend unlimited).

    I've been testing some 3G stuff for a large national provider. I'm in the
    heart of the CBD with the latest gear. They claim megabit speeds are possible
    but I'm almost sure that's only if you plug the Ethernet port of the "modem"
    into a switch and plug another switch into their Ethernet backbone. Best I've
    seen is in the 300kbps range and we have what the "modems" claim is a "100%"
    signal.

    Latency is really really poo too. I'm seeing up to 500mS round trips from
    one wireless device to a wired point connected to the provider's backbone.
    It's simply terrible. Forget talking between two wireless devices with good
    latency (not only that but it's variable from 250mS up to about 2S).

    I can't even tolerate running SSH over these beasties; it's what you might
    call painful. Press a key (or series of keys). One second later the text
    appears on my console, complete with a typing mistake and I have to rinse/
    repeat.

    Yes I'm aware that latency can have some effect on throughput, but that only
    applies for TCP data, not unacknowledged raw UDP streams.

    As I understand it GPRS provides lower bandwidth and lower latency then 3G
    because it's not trying to do things with the phone network that it was
    never meant to do (fit huge amounts of data into unused spectrum/TDM slots).
    Latency is still quite high for the most part though.

  24. Re:ISDN, your friend from the past on What To Do When Broadband is Not An Option? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ISDN worked for me her ~4km from the local exchange. Our big monopoly telco refused to provision my line for DSL for years. ISDN was the only option. It's faster than dialup, latency is better and because it's digital there are less dropouts. Having an ISDN card in the machine was neat for 2 reasons; not the least of which was I had two lines, 3 incoming numbers and could make the whole lot talk to asterisk to do voice and fax from my PBX as well.

    Now that ADSL2+ is an option with a non-monopoly carrier I get speeds over 4M all of the time with zero dropouts (current connection active for 7.5 days and the onyl reason it went down is because a backhoe operator dug out the power cables in our street last week. Try pushing the ADSL2 issue if it's available on your exchange. It can work really well depending on the quality of the copper to your house (and 26.4 sounds like you might have reasonable copper).

  25. Re:Kind of makes sense. on German Police Arrest Admin of Tor Anonymity Server · · Score: 1

    So you have illegal traffic coming from your machine and intentionally can't point out who it came from, and you chose to do this willingly

    He chose to use his system to help protect his and other's privacy from snooping at any level. You do realise that anyone on the network path between you and your connected host can snoop on the data you transmit/receive and can form a profile on you and who you talk to even if you use encryption don't you?

    Tor and Freenet are not about being able to serve illegal data without getting caught. They are about protecting privacy. Vanilla encryption doesn't provide anonymity because if one end is compromised then it's still easy to know where the data went (and possibly just go there to find out what was transmitted/received). Tor and Freenet increase anonymity. It's much harder to find out that person A is talking to person B, without compromising every node along the path, regardless of whether persons A and B are trading pictures of naked underage bombs or talking about the weather in East Idontgiveashitsville.