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User: grcumb

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  1. Re:why not work for wall street? on Particle Physicists Facing Insane Competition For Work · · Score: 1

    No, we need a program to divert them from destroying society.

    A program?!? Nuh-uh, just put them in the same room with Triangle Man. Everybody knows Triangle Man beats Particle Man.

    ... And, uh, let's keep Universe Man in the wings just in case Triangle Man gets outta hand....

  2. Re:You could speed up your current solution on Ask Slashdot: Speeding Up Personal Anti-Spam Filters? · · Score: 1

    Write something that uses a regular expression library (RE2 would be ideal, if your expressions are actually regular), and keeps the compiled patterns resident. Most of your time is likely spent parsing the patterns.

    I'm probably going to get shat on by kids who don't know any better, but....

    Use Perl. If a complex set of regular expressions is taking 15 seconds per email, then there's clearly something wrong with the implementation. I suspect you're doing too much backtracking. I've been guilty of the same in the past. In one case, simply anchoring my regular expressions to the start and end of the string reduced running time literally by two orders of magnitude. Just glom the whole message into a string and go nuts.

    And before someone makes a 'write-only' joke about Perl regular expressions, I'd suggest you take a look at Perl 6 regex grammars, which provide you with the ability to lay out complex rulesets with ease - and makes them vastly easier to read.

    As with any programming issue, it's horses for courses, and when it comes to parsing text with regular expressions, Perl is still at the head of its class.

  3. Re:As usual. on Measles Outbreak Tied To Texas Megachurch · · Score: 1

    Americans are renounced for not knowing their geography, but thinking that Indonesia is within US borders is still astonishing.

    Heh, shyeah it is. It's where the Indonapolis 500 is run.

    Fuh, had me almost tricked there....

  4. Re:Speed, yes. Latency... NO. on NASA Testing Frickin' Laser Communications · · Score: 1

    The latency will be absolute shit. Useless for most bandwidth-intensive internet applications. Imagine trying to play a game with twice the lag of a dialup modem. Not only that, but one cloud in the sky and it's game over, man.

    Not reliable at all.

    Besides, they haven't even begun development on space sharks, and without space sharks, what good is a frickin' space laser?

  5. Re:Yes, and? on Report: Britain Has a Secret Middle East Web Surveillance Base · · Score: 1

    But why set up your shop in an unstable country lime Egypt, when following your own map shows that the bulk of those cables continue on to Palermo and then Gibraltar, then to the rest of Europe.

    Because they want to get the stuff that's bound for your Good Friend [sic] France, and because they're not 'setting up shop', they've been there since the early 19th Century. This is just a continuation of their strategic look-in on the canal and the global traffic that passes through it. Oh, and Gibraltar's not in the Middle East. :-)

    ... But none of this is to say they don't have similar facilities in Gibraltar.

  6. Re:"...not disclosing....where the base is located on Report: Britain Has a Secret Middle East Web Surveillance Base · · Score: 1

    So, it's in Israel.

    No, it's Egypt.

    They're not spying on the Middle East; they're spying in the Middle East... on all the data traffic running through the Suez canal. And that's basically everything between Asia and Europe.

    Britain have had a watch on all traffic going through the canal pretty much from day one of its existence. And they've probably had communications taps in since the very first telegraph cables were installed.

  7. Re:Yes, and? on Report: Britain Has a Secret Middle East Web Surveillance Base · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why ?

    Does the UK need to spy on the middle east ?

    The British Empire of the past is OVER. The UK is just a formerly great power which is sinking into oblivion by its own greed, incompetence, arrogance, sense of entitlement, and stupidity.

    Er, the UK is home to one of the most important financial centres on the planet. It's got a huge (commercial and strategic) incentive to know what other countries are doing. And it's not just spying on the Middle East - it's spying in the Middle East on all the Europe-Asia traffic that passes through the Suez Canal. Which is pretty much all of the Europe-Asia traffic there is (Russia excepted).

    And you can rest assured that at least some of the US$100 million that the NSA gives GCHQ is being used to maintain these facilities. Draw what conclusions you like.

  8. Re:Yes, and? on Report: Britain Has a Secret Middle East Web Surveillance Base · · Score: 2

    Yeah, and it wouldn't bee too hard to figure out where this secret location is either. You could just pick likely places from here: http://www.telegeography.com/telecom-resources/submarine-cable-landing-directory/ Gibraltar would be a good guess.

    For the more visually inclined, a graphical map.

    And based on that, I'll give dollars to doughnuts that it's Egypt. Virtually all traffic between Europe and Asia transits through the Suez canal.

  9. Re:Does this mean no more trolling homeopathic cra on Huffington: Trolls Uglier Than Ever, So We're Cutting Off Anonymous Commenting · · Score: 3, Funny

    What is the condition where a person thinks a word has a different meaning because it sounds like something totally unrelated?

    Homonymic?

    Why did you have to bring gay people into this, you insensitive clod?!?

  10. Re:"Expert" ? on Canadian Military Developing Stealth Snowmobile · · Score: 1

    As we speak, you need to transit via Greenland by plane to reach the far north, and you cen expect delays if there is a storm on the way.

    Uh, no. We have domestic service. You can get charters to pretty much anywhere in the eastern Arctic from Iqaluit as well.

    Some military flights to CFB Alert do pass through Greenland, but aside from that....

  11. Re:Cross Country Skiing on Canadian Military Developing Stealth Snowmobile · · Score: 3, Interesting

    has been used for arctic warfare for hundreds of years as a cheap, effective way of stealthily moving a snowy environment. Hopefully the stealth sled won't ruin those capabilities.

    Not always useful in the Canadian Arctic. Pack ice sometimes extends for miles out to sea. It's a maze of 3-10 metre ridges that are an absolute bitch to navigate. Trying to pull ammo and supplies through on skis would be absolute torture. Hell, just crossing on a snowmobile through the pack ice on each side of the bay in Cape Dorset (maybe a kilometre and a half) left me sweating like a horse in -25 degree weather.

    There's not a lot of pack ice on the old Finnish/Soviet border....

  12. Re:Amazing Development on MS Researchers Develop Acoustic Data Transfer System For Phones · · Score: 1

    Well, clearly you'd want to come up with a name that combines the traits of modulating the signal and then demodulating it on the receiving end. I'll suggest... oh... the sigulator.

    How utterly uncromulent. What you're describing is clearly an insoundenator.

  13. Re:Ah, the circle of technology on MS Researchers Develop Acoustic Data Transfer System For Phones · · Score: 1

    It's amazing what comes back as "new developments"

    What are you talking about? This is the absolute bleedingest razor edge of science! Science, I say!

    First, you'd need some kind of sonic waveform manipulation device, capable of turning mere electronic impulses into sound. Think of the ramifications of this! It's literally earth-shattering!

    And then, you'd have to had a device that responds to auditory stimuli, transmuting sensory inputs into purest energy and then making sense of the electron stream! I need more exclamations points for this! Here!! Take these!!!

    And finally, before we decide just how many Nobels we want to award (I know, I know: all of them), they would have to create some means, not only of MOdulating the signal, but DEModulating it as well. What brave new world is this, to have such inventors in it!!

    As the great Thomas Huxley said, on reading Darwin's Origin of Species, 'How very stupid of me not to have thought of this before.'

  14. Re:Information shouldn't be free on YouTube Co-founder Calls For Global Access To TV Online · · Score: 1

    Free information is the death of all culture.

    That's an interesting way to put it, but there's some truth in the statement. Essentially, many struggles we're involved in right now, from ISOC v ITU to Manning/Snowden v Secrecy, from Apple v Samsung to SOPA/PIPA v The World... all of these derive from the impact of sharing, a thing that many aspects of our respective cultures protect us against. The mere presence of the internet implies that, by giving them away, we do in fact lose our differences. And that is the very essence of subversion.

  15. Re:wget on Bradley Manning and the 'Hacker Madness' Scare Tactic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In the Manning case, the prosecution used Manning's use of a standard, more than 15-year-old Unix program called Wget to collect information, as if it were a dark and nefarious technique.

    Maybe it's not quite that, but if it's used to download information that shouldn't be collected by an individual, it certainly bears watching.

    Dude, what the fuck?

    wget is a web client - you know, like the one you're using to read this comment. It bears watching just like any other web client bears watching.

    Now, one could argue it might profit them more to pay attention to what data they make available to web clients.... But that would be all... I dunno, sensible.

  16. Re:Samsung, Apple, Phhft on Samsung Offered StackOverflow Users $500 For "Organic" Publicity · · Score: 3, Funny

    Samsung, Apple, Phhft. All the same

    How dare you compare Apple users to such crass, capitalistic attention whores!

    Sent from my iPhone

  17. Re:In Browser on Remember the Computer Science Past Or Be Condemned To Repeat It? · · Score: 5, Funny

    We marvel that the runtime environment of the web browser can do things that we had working 25 years ago on the Mac.

    Did the Mac, 25 years ago, allow people to load code from a remote server and execute it locally in a sandbox and in a platform independent manner all in a matter of a couple of seconds? No. No it did not.

    We should then pay homage to the Mac 25 years ago, when it basically did what Doug Englebart demonstrated 45 years ago. Nice logic you have there.

    Dude, just ignore this guy. Of all people who have the right to indulge in a good, old-fashioned 'get off my lawn' rant, Dave Winer ranks last. This is the man who, for our sins, gave us XMLRPC and SOAP, paving the way for the re-invention of... well, everything, in a web browser.

    Port 80 died for this man's sins....

  18. Re:We don't shun those who should be shunned. on Remember the Computer Science Past Or Be Condemned To Repeat It? · · Score: 2

    I Googled "A poor worker blames his tools". All I got was links to Craftsman and Harbor Freight.

    I bet you're blaming Google for this.... :-)

  19. Re:Its obvious on Moscow Subway To Use Special Devices To Read Data On Passengers' Phones · · Score: 2

    Tracking "stolen" phones not is it about.

    Thanks for the insight, Yoda.

    All my base are belong to you now. :-)

  20. Re:Broken leg? on If a Network Is Broken, Break It More · · Score: 1

    OK, I'll try to put it into a language /. understands. If I have one smashed up car, will smashing up the road make it fixed?

    Not necessarily, but blocking traffic completely, rather than trying to allow vehicles to crawl past the crash site on the shoulder, will have less impact on traffic overall.

  21. Re:fourth amendment vs. first amendment on EFF Sues NSA, Justice Department, FBI · · Score: 1

    Yes, but it's not entirely clear that "monitoring makes that impossible". For example, as long as the government doesn't interfere with a political rally, can you really show harm to 1st Amendment rights by the mere fact that the government databased everyone who attended?

    In a word, yes. Here's an excellent legal argument from the Harvard Law Review that details how surveillance influences the exercise of First Amendment rights. From the abstract:

    Surveillance is harmful because it can chill the exercise of our civil liberties, especially our intellectual privacy. It ialso gives the watcher power over the watched, creating the the risk of a variety of other harms, such as discrimination, coercion, and the threat of selective enforcement, where critics of the government can be prosecuted or blackmailed for wrongdoing unrelated to the purpose of the surveillance.

    The author goes on to explain in detail how the chilling effect applies, citing sources for his claim that knowing you're being watched influences even how you think. The practice of widespread, untargeted surveillance has an insidious effect on freedom, and should therefore be subject to significant legal constraints.

  22. Re:What has this got to do with Microsoft? on Office 365, Amazon, Others Vulnerable To Exploit Microsoft Knew About In 2012 · · Score: 1

    Is this entire article some kind of joke? If you have physical access to a machine and are able to "steal" the cookies from their logged in browser session, then on another machine replicate that browser session and utilize that same logged in cookie so that the site can't tell the difference between the machine you HAVE PHYSICAL LOGGED-IN ACCESS TO and the replicated session, so you're able to continue using the site? Isn't this behaviour "as intended"? This would only be a "flaw" if another site could remotely copy my cookies and continue my session 'as me'. (Well, actually, I have Java installed, so they probably can *cough*). Otherwise, it's exactly how a logged in cookie is meant to work. The only tacit connection to "Microsoft" seems to be that "Microsoft, like some other companies.. have websites on the internet."

    Well, for services sending clear, unencrypted HTTP traffic, local access isn't necessary. The data interception could be some random Joe or Jane sitting at the same Starbucks as you. Or it could be your friendly neighbourhood ISP, or your telco, or your government.

    So yeah, knowing about it and not working out a fix is a problem. It's evidence that, contrary to advertising claims, Microsoft (and others) are not really taking your privacy as seriously as they should.

  23. Re:Why exclude 1984? on Sci-Fi Stories That Predicted the Surveillance State · · Score: 2

    Given that Orwell got so very much right about the future, why exclude 1984 from the list? Just to make an interesting discussion that would have been largely already well-hashed-out otherwise?

    It's just to be fair to the rest of them. There are some artists who simply dominate their genre. A famous singer was once asked who her favourite Jazz vocalist was, and she said, 'You mean, besides Ella Fitzgerald?'

  24. Re:That's why I have been giving my internal on Generic TLDs Threaten Name Collisions and Information Leakage · · Score: 2

    ...and nobody will bother you if you use, for example, ".invalid" for your internal domains.

    Some CEOs and PHBs might ;).

    Indeed. The proper usage these days is .challenged.

  25. Re:Coming To Windows XP, 8, RT & Server on Critical Security Updates Coming To Windows XP, 8, RT & Server · · Score: 1

    ...but if you're running Vista or 7, you're on your own.

    If you're running Vista, you've been on your own for a while now.... :-)