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User: utopianfiat

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Comments · 512

  1. Re:A watermelon, eh? on Schneier Asks Why We Accept Fax Signatures · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I mean, a fake signature may be fraud, but at the end of the day your argument is like arguing that you should be alive after getting hit by a drunk driver because he broke the law.
    "Just because you're right doesn't make you any less dead/injured/royally boned"

  2. Re:First time Bush has posted something sane. on President Bush Signs Genetic Nondiscrimination Act · · Score: 2, Informative

    Little bit offtopic from my parent, but I figure the mods will forgive me for providing the Text of the GINA.

  3. Re:Do you really need their support? on Smartphones For Text SSH Use — Revisited · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The FCC's doing a lot of things wrong- in fact they're doing the same thing wrong that every other governmental organization is doing.
    "Deregulation" increases competition in undeveloped markets. When there are already big players, all deregulation does is increase the competitive power of those players to squash and purchase smaller startups. What the government needs to do is to subsidize the startup capital and regulate the big players. THAT will increase competition because it will lower the barriers to market entry.
    The biggest problem with the FCC is that as a regulating body, they are not. Instead what's being done is state and local governments move in to tax the startup capital for telcos (which should be bought and paid for by tax dollars which are going to Iraq), and the FCC pussyfoots around with their "deregulation" to make sure that men with money don't have to pay shit to anyone.

    This is how your small ISP in buttfuck, new jersey can get raided by FBI and have your server taken straight off the rack, but AT&T is rewarded for illegal wiretapping.

  4. Re:Context? on Fermilab Calls For Code Crackers · · Score: 1

    Well, at the very least the first and last parts are base-three and the middle part is hex. You see there's nothing higher than a triplet in the first and last parts? Then in the middle, we know the symbols are mapped to hex values straight up. You could actually take the entire number, concatenate it, and convert it into ascii if you wanted to.

    NOTE: it looks like you have two conveniently unmapped symbols in the middle bit, A and 1- which could be mapped to S or that little squiggly bit. Tricky, eh?

  5. Re:Is it just me? on Code Quality In Open and Closed Source Kernels · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well, it's the second link. At any rate, the highlights of the data are that for the most part the kernels are tied in the important material, except:

    % style conforming lines: FBSD:77.27 LIN:77.96 SOLARIS:84.32 WIN:33.30
    % style conforming typedef identifiers: FBSD:57.1 LIN:59.2 SOLARIS:86.9 WIN:100.0
    % style conforming aggregate tags: FBSD:0.0 LIN:0.0 SOLARIS:20.7 WIN:98.2

    (I'm far too lazy to clean up the rest)

    % of variable declarations with global scope 0.36 0.19 1.02 1.86
    % of variable operands with global scope 3.3 0.5 1.3 2.3
    % of identifiers with wrongly global scope 0.28 0.17 1.51 3.53

  6. Re:Reality has no party or bias. on Windows in Brazil Costs 20% of Per Capita Business Income · · Score: 1

    I mean, most computer science departments love to use unix/linux because the OS lets you get down and really teach and use the core components, basically providing a much more solid development model for a lot of people.
    Windows, however, has the benefit of being able to pay lots of money and not have to worry about donations or grants to fund its progress.
    The only question is whether or not you think we're moving to stable free software as a workable model for most platforms.

  7. Re:Possibilities... on Xerox Demos Self-Erasing, Eco-Friendly Paper · · Score: 3, Funny

    congratulations, Xerox! You've just invented the eraser!

  8. Re:Just how is Canonical making money, anyway? on Is Ubuntu Selling Out or Growing Up? · · Score: 1

    1) Make a free Open Source and highly successful Linux Distro.
    2) Slashdot effect
    3) ?
    4) Profit!
    5) When you begin to profit, slashdot slams you

    fixed

  9. Re:Would you buy a Metallica online album...? on Metallica May Follow In Footsteps of Radiohead, NIN · · Score: 1

    You do realize that every single album Metallica has released in the last 20 years has peaked at #1 ?
    So did Chocolate Rain, what's your point?

    (Somewhere, deep inside the band's studio...)
    Lars: James! James, check this shit out! It looks like Radiohead is making money on that thing we got all pissed off at ten years ago!
    Hetfield: Well, it would be nice to get some hipster groupies for once... Our fans are starting to get cellulite.

  10. Re:C/C++ is dying! on Are C and C++ Losing Ground? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I was convinced that in the scientific programming world, people were still into Fortran as it grants a slight increase in speed over C for certain algorithms. Of course, this wouldn't have a broad _web presence_ due to the fact that realtime and mission critical applications aren't posted on the web. I think the limit of the fortran that still exists publicly would be the open source ATLASes and MATLAB clones (ie:matplotlib), as well as, of course, Linux itself.

  11. Re:Nice and all but... on The Javabot Combines Engineering and Coffee · · Score: 1

    I don't see what impressionism has to do with any of this.
    Get it? Degas?

  12. Re:Mods on crack on Iron Man's New Villain — an Open Source Terrorist · · Score: 1

    How is the parent a troll? Sigh. The moderators must be smoking up again.

    I've always found that toking before modding just makes me call every post +5, Funny
  13. Re:Electricity source? on Laser Triggers Electrical Activity In Thunderstorm · · Score: 1

    Picture this, you could spend Petawatts of energy in two seconds to have lightning strike precisely where the leader of country X is standing.
    Can you? You will.

  14. Re:Traffic James? on MS Clearflow To Help Drivers Avoid Traffic Jams · · Score: 1

    or early-english horse and carriage, thes information coud bee usefull for avoideng manie trafic jammes

  15. Re:I want to sell mine on Your Identity Is Worth Less Than $15 · · Score: 1

    With those prices, I wonder how often they pay more for the bank account than is actually in it?

    how do you find sellers? I want to sell my bank account info fro $1000.

    1) Never
    2) GFL

    The price is directly related to how much money is in the account. Big accounts are $1000 (you can't just sell the money because it needs to be laundered and obfuscated- you need to have a trick to get the money out of the account, basically).
    People who sell bank accounts aren't dumb- they've just dumbed down the process; and if someone dumb enough to get caught buys one of their accounts, well... sucks to be them.

  16. Re:In case anyone wonders on HP Admits Selling Infected Flash-Floppy Drives · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Does anyone here have a problem with the fact that HP is clearly not checking the contents of their drives before they leave the factory? Because I think that's pretty important.

    Someone's going to reply "blah blah chain of supply blah blah limited liability" but (back in my day) a manufacturer was liable for tainted/poisoned product that originated at the manufacturer. Everyone should be able to demonstrate that a product works before selling it.

  17. Re:Complete change of strategy on Collective Licensing for Web-Based Music Distribution · · Score: 1

    and neither is repeating "come on" and "fuck that shit"


    No, but it did get me a 5, Insightful :)
  18. Re:This makes me so ANGRY! on Engineers Make Good Terrorists? · · Score: 1

    The fact is, men are more prone
    I'd like to see your (god damned) evidence, troll.

  19. Re:Then you had better lower those prices! on Sony Thinks Blu-ray Will Sell Like DVDs by Year End · · Score: 1

    uh, you're misunderstanding a bit.
    Think about it like this: the signal that the DVD player holds is the "purest" A/V signal, since it is the closest to representing what's actually on the DVD. When it upscales the image, you don't (really) "lose" any information because you're just filling in gaps where there was no data before. When you compress the signal for the cable, you lose a bit of information simply by compression (unless you use HDMI).

    As opposed to upscaling in the television, which means you're sending the original "pure" signal over the cable, losing information once when it's compressed, and then upscaling the bogus information loss on the television end, which incurs more data loss than losing scaled information.

    Basically:
    (Picture * 10) - 2% is closer to the original than
    (Picture - 2%) * 10

    Because the first picture offsets some of the data loss into "guessed" pixels anyway.

    I know this sounds confusing as hell but I hope this helps.

  20. Re:Throttling on Comcast Blocks Web Browsing · · Score: 1

    No, fuck that.
    If I pay for x mbps of internet, I want x mbps of internet regardless who else is using the internet.
    Cable.
    Is.
    Greedy.

  21. Re:This makes me so ANGRY! on Engineers Make Good Terrorists? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Serious business, dude. I doubt you sincerely see this as anything more than FUD to silence smart people with prudent objections to the actions of the people in power.

    I could stand in front of you and say that the charitable nature of Jesus's teachings make Christians good communists. It may even be true that Christianity is compatible with socialism, but that doesn't even imply that the vast majority of Christians are socialists. However, because of the stigma associated with terrorists and communists, I can start to shake your faith in Christians because of their socialist ideas.

    Yeah, Engineers make good terrorists. You know who else makes good terrorists? Marines.
    See Charles Whitman, Lee Harvey Oswald.
    You know who else makes good terrorists? Mathematicians. Ted Kaczynski.

    You know what else makes people terrorists?
    MURDERING LOTS OF PEOPLE.
    People act as if they can build a formula for finding at risk people, as if prevention is the number-one priority.
    No, we should be mitigating risk and increasing SECURITY. If we can figure out a way to do this without OPPRESSING A FUCKING SOCIAL GROUP, I would call it the biggest advance of the millenium.

  22. Re:Red Alert Counterstrike? Re:Old news on Engineers Make Good Terrorists? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. There are people who think that the oppression of the English state justifies the actions of the IRA. For them, the IRA fights for freedom. For England, the IRA are terrorists.
    Buddhist monks are "terrorists" to the red Chinese- they certainly use tactics we would consider "terrifying", such as pouring gas on a reverend monk and lighting him on fire in opposition to the southern Vietnamese regime.

  23. Re:SAY NO TO THE GAY AGENDA on Ray Tracing To Debut in DirectX 11 · · Score: 1

    touche. you beat me to that one, sir.

  24. Re:Complete change of strategy on Collective Licensing for Web-Based Music Distribution · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Right on AC.
    Seriously, I don't see why everyone's got such a hard-on for protecting the music industry. Maybe we're obsessed with this idea of the small musician being able to make it big, maybe we just like the sound of a corporation making money, but seriously, guys, SERIOUSLY.
    CUT THIS SHIT OUT. I'm sick and fucking tired of people defending the damn RIAA while they continue to make off with money they didn't earn. Did they compose the song? Is it part of their soul? A creation of their own? No! They sit there and exploit their artists so they can exploit their consumers. It cheapens the value of art, it destroys the beauty of sound, and it fucks us all over in a giant corporatist blood orgy.

    Why is it corporatist? The entire legal backing behind a record distribution company- the idea of COPYRIGHT, is a law intended to CREATE a market for something unmarketable. Why can the music industry continue to use old, outdated media (CDs, record stores) when there is a BETTER media around? (FLAC, the internet)
    Because we are CORPORATISTS. We feel like we have the right nay the OBLIGATION to protect something someone made up in their heads. Fuck that shit. Music is meant to be enjoyed, not exploited.
    Seriously, FUCK that shit.

  25. Re:Goatse on SCO's "Least Supported Idea Yet" · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    It doesn't send me to goatse... Sounds like a failed troll.