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User: khellendros1984

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Comments · 1,912

  1. Re:Disappointing on Apple Announces Smartwatch, Bigger iPhones, Mobile Payments · · Score: 1

    As a form factor, perhaps that's true. As a platform, I like Android enough that it overcomes the downsides. My phone's as much of a tech toy as it is a practical device.

  2. Re:COBOL on Unpopular Programming Languages That Are Still Lucrative · · Score: 1

    That salary sounds low, depending on living expenses for your area. For that level of experience and that specialization of knowledge, I'd expect the number to be well into 6 figures, if they were working here.

  3. Re:Bullcrap on Unpopular Programming Languages That Are Still Lucrative · · Score: 1

    Are companies ever going to get off this fixation on specific programming languages?

    About the same time that they get over the fixation on specific college degrees. I was hired as a C++ developer, but I've touched code in half a dozen languages besides that, and I didn't know a few of those before I had to use them.

  4. Re:France? Artificial heart? on In France, a Second Patient Receives Permanent Artificial Heart · · Score: 1

    The Nausicaan dom-jot cheaters are strangely absent, as well.

  5. Re:I really don't my vital body parts to be on wif on In France, a Second Patient Receives Permanent Artificial Heart · · Score: 1

    The safe level varies based on the patient's physical activity at the time. Imagine that they're out swimming and someone uses their smartphone to set their heart to "going to bed" flow rate. And if the heart has a safety feature where it can read the neural signals for heartbeat speed, then why would it need to be externally controllable anyhow? Wireless access just seems like an unnecessary complication to the system.

  6. Disappointing on Apple Announces Smartwatch, Bigger iPhones, Mobile Payments · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm not a giant Apple fan, but one thing that I actually liked about their strategy up to this point was keeping their phones smaller. I've had a 4.7" phone, and that was almost too large for my (admittedly small) hands. I've got a 5" screen now, and it's notably difficult for me to use. I'm pessimistic about my future upgrade options at this point, if even Apple is jumping on the mega-sized-phone bandwagon.

  7. Re:Anthropometrics on 3 Recent Flights Make Unscheduled Landings, After Disputes Over Knee Room · · Score: 2

    I've had 4 such flights this year, 2 of which were 11 hours long. I don't see enough benefit in reclining my seat 15 degrees to inconvenience the person behind me.

  8. Re:Humans have too much on Should Cyborgs Have the Same Privacy Rights As Humans? · · Score: 1

    All of Slashdot can use the AC account, while only a subset of Slashdot (often only one person) can use any given named account. People leak information when they type, and if the same person or small group of people can be identified by an anonymized identifier like a username, then you can glean information about whoever's using that name.

    It's like the databases of "anonymized" information. Gather enough information, and eventually you'll have enough data points to uniquely identify an individual. That's pretty far off from "just as anonymous", provided someone wants to actually do the work to datamine someone else's old /. posts.

  9. Re:To the slashdotters of the world on Buenos Aires Issues a 'Netflix Tax' For All Digital Entertainment · · Score: 2

    Why not Royal Crown spiked with Crown Royal?

  10. Re:Stupid banks... US credit cards have no securit on Banks Report Credit Card Breach At Home Depot · · Score: 1

    I hear that they are finally, slowly moving to chip and pin since their losses to fraud are increasing.

    One of my recently replaced cards is chip and signature, and I think that's what most US-issued smart cards are using. Security-wise, it's kind of a half measure, but at least it's a step forward from complete reliance on the magstripe.

  11. Re:Not the correct application for this on Raspberry Pi Gets a Brand New Browser · · Score: 1

    I have 19 open, organized by task (the last 3 are just general browsing, most of the rest are references for a project I'm working on). Related things are close together. 18 of the 19 are currently visible in the bar, with the titles legible. It's a little more convenient than having them down in the taskbar would be. If I have multiple activities that each need a large number of tabs, that's why God invented tab groups.

  12. Re:Bad business practice on Australian Consumer Watchdog Takes Valve To Court · · Score: 1

    I think it's convenient, for my case. If I'm on my Linux machine but I'm looking at Steam's page, I'm most likely trying to buy games for my Windows machine (or one that I've read runs well under Wine). The search box ought to have an "only for my platform" checkbox/dropdown, and maybe it should warn you prior to purchase if your browser's user-agent indicates that there's a platform mismatch, but I'd much prefer being shown everything available.

  13. Re:G'Day Valve, on Australian Consumer Watchdog Takes Valve To Court · · Score: 1

    In college, my grandparents provided a computer, parents provided a cell phone and my food and lodging. I didn't smoke (most people don't, here) and didn't drink. That, plus no car and only occasional employment? You better believe that I pirated a fair amount of stuff while almost fooling myself that I was justified for doing it. My family wasn't impoverished, but legal additions to my game catalog were limited to a couple times per year, and the in-dorm network share starts looking mighty appealing when your roommates invite you to play a game you don't own.

  14. Re:It's supposed to look that way on Old Doesn't Have To Mean Ugly: Squeezing Better Graphics From Classic Consoles · · Score: 1

    Another thing about the NES: its output was purely composite video, even through SCART.

  15. Re:Watermarks? on GOG Introduces DRM-Free Movie Store · · Score: 1

    That should be easy to test; sha1sum a bunch of the installers, and compare the results to someone else's list. I've got some DOS games, both on the original CD and via GOG; the game files themselves weren't modified in those cases, so any watermark would have to be contained elsewhere, in the GOG-provided files (which aren't strictly necessary to run the games, if you provide your own DosBox and configuration).

  16. Re:Not worth it on New Windows Coming In Late September -- But Which One? · · Score: 1

    The last Windows PC I bought didn't come with any crapware installed (other than Windows itself), just the OS and the device drivers necessary to support the hardware. "Fact is" if you're willing to do your research beforehand and maybe buy from a less well-known vendor, you don't necessarily have to deal with bloat.

  17. Re:What's so American on Net Neutrality Is 'Marxist,' According To a Koch-Backed Astroturf Group · · Score: 1

    The ISP has customers paying for bandwidth, and those customers have decided to stream video. That's data that the customer has already paid for. If the ISP sold bandwidth to their customers, and the network is congested because the ISP can't provide the level of service that it sold, then why should it get rewarded by charging for the same data twice, rather than punished for false advertising?

  18. Re:First step to SkyNet on Robo Brain Project Wants To Turn the Internet Into a Robotic Hivemind · · Score: 1

    Battlestar Galactica turned out so much better for humanity than Terminator did.

  19. Re:The real crime here on 33 Months In Prison For Recording a Movie In a Theater · · Score: 1

    At some point the threat of jail time for people responsible for certain actions is a necessity.

    I agree that force is necessary, but I disagree that jailtime is always the ultimate expression of that force. So, I suppose thanks for forgetting what the focus of your argument was.

  20. Re:The real crime here on 33 Months In Prison For Recording a Movie In a Theater · · Score: 1

    It seems like your argument is that a government doesn't have any authority over banks or employers. Both of those are licensed by the government (in most places). If the bank doesn't comply, their license can be suspended, and they won't be able to do things like hold deposits for their customers. If a business' license is suspended, they won't be permitted to operate in that jurisdiction. If they continue to do so anyhow, the government will shut them down by force.

    The employer has more to lose than the employee; they'll garnish the employee's wages or risk being shut down. The bank is in the same situation.

    Now, if the offender doesn't have a job, bank accounts, or other financial assets that could be seized to pay off the fine, then some alternative method of punishment could apply. Governments are experts in applying various kinds of force effectively, and they generally don't like getting "no" as their answer.

  21. Re:Incorrect assumption on Smartphone Kill Switch, Consumer Boon Or Way For Government To Brick Your Phone? · · Score: 1

    What I was imagining was that the phone gets shipped with a manufacturer-signed and device-specific bootloader, and the first time the key is written (by the end-user of the device), the firmware encrypts the entire contents of the storage, including the bootloader.

    Write a known key? OK, the bootloader is illegible, and you can't replace it because you don't have the manufacturer's signing key. Verification key is burnt into the silicon so you can't replace that. Analyze the signal coming out of the decryption chip? Maybe the crypto, storage, and SoC are sealed in epoxy.

    The manufacturer could send out a phone where they already set the key (as well as signing the bootloader), but why would an informed customer buy that?

  22. Re:Incorrect assumption on Smartphone Kill Switch, Consumer Boon Or Way For Government To Brick Your Phone? · · Score: 1

    If you can initially set the key, then the key is capable of being reset or even read.

    Unless it's stored in memory that the user is only given write-only access to, and the only thing that can read it is the chip it got burned in to (and which provides black-box encryption/decryption). It's technically readable, if you wish to de-cap the chip an analyze it.

  23. they hold you at gunpoint until you unregister the phone from iCloud.

    Sucks for you if the honest answer to that demand is "My password is a 20-character random string, stored on my computer 2 hours away".

  24. Re:Living in the country is an anachronism on Helsinki Aims To Obviate Private Cars · · Score: 1

    Personally, I don't like having that many people around me. I enjoy live bands, but I'd prefer them to be far enough away that I specifically have to seek them out. Having the optional opportunity to be around other people is great; feeling close enough that you can't completely get away is just stifling.

    Where I am now feels near-optimal. There's enough around that I can get to restaurants and stores without much effort, LA is about an hour and a half away, so the more big-city attractions are reachable if I want them, and it's not like I'm living in the absolute middle of nowhere. For me, it's a kind of middle ground, with a lot of the benefits of city living without the things that would make it unlivable for me. I don't want to live on a farm, but I don't want to live surrounded by humanity either.

  25. Re:Windows 8 app store? on Microsoft's Windows 8 App Store Is Full of Scamware · · Score: 1

    Lets face it ARM only has 2 things going for it

    I think you missed a third point. They sip power, compared to x86 chips. Well, that, and apparently recent ARMs compare favorably against low-end Intel chips.

    And anyhow, I've got a PC from circa 1998 that I use to run some older software, and I wouldn't expect much argument that that's a general purpose computer, even though my last 2 phones far outclass its performance in every measurable way. Performance level doesn't have much to do with whether something's a real computer or not.