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User: JoeBuck

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  1. Re:The appliance on Apple's Trend Away From Tinkering · · Score: 1

    Certainly there's a role for appliances, but the iPad appears to be aimed to compete with netbooks. I'd rather see completely programmable platforms with elegantly designed hardware and multitouch capability, and without a central authority approving of each program (or "app") before it can be distributed.

  2. Re:Free Software may help... on Apple's Trend Away From Tinkering · · Score: 2, Informative

    Don't give your kids Tcl; of the scripting languages, Python will be a lot easier, and the fact that it has "advanced concepts" is a plus, not a minus, as they don't get in the way and solve problems that the programmer would otherwise have to deal with. Basic is good if you want to teach kids to write rats' nests of GOTO statements.

  3. Round numbers are not barriers on LHC Reaches Record Energy · · Score: 1
    "Even though the 1 TeV barrier per beam was first broken a week ago ..."

    Um, no. There's nothing magic about 1 TeV. It's not a barrier.

    Mach 1 was a barrier, because the aerodynamics is very different for a plane flying faster than the speed of sound. This means that new design principles had to be worked out. But nothing magic happens when you ramp up from 0.999 TeV to 1 TeV other than the flying champagne corks.

    Likewise, new principles (optical proximity correction and phase shift masking) had to be invented so that we can manufacture ICs whose feature size is smaller than the wavelength of light (UV actually) used to expose the masks. That's an example of a barrier being broken.

    But Slashdot should disallow the use of the word "barrier" just because a round performance number has been bettered. Alternatively, we can all just mock the editors every time they do it; you decide.

  4. What a good little citizen on Woman Filming Sister's Birthday Party Gets Charged With Felony Movie Piracy · · Score: 1

    She spent two days in jail over this nonsense, and she talks about how nice they were? What a good little citizen. Perhaps she'll turn in a few friends to get in better with the authorities.

  5. Re:Good test case on Woman Filming Sister's Birthday Party Gets Charged With Felony Movie Piracy · · Score: 3, Informative

    The music is public domain (because it's from an older song). The lyrics are copyrighted. So you can legally hum it in public for commercial gain.

  6. Nothing to see here, move on on Climatic Research Unit Hacked, Files Leaked · · Score: 4, Informative
    I review papers for technical conferences. I regularly try to keep papers out of the publications. It's a necessary part of the job, because the acceptance rate is typically 25%, and because most of the papers are junk. Scientific publications are not free speech platforms; to be published, an article has to meet the standards and it has to advance the state of the art of the field.

    The bar for skeptics is always going to be higher. Otherwise we'd have to rewrite the chemistry textbooks every time some student messes up his lab assignment, because this will produce data that contradicts the theory.

  7. Re:Just use a different license on SFLC Finds One New GPL Violation Per Day · · Score: 1

    GPLv3 is actually more forgiving than GPLv2 of accidental violations. GPLv2 says that you forfeit the license and you need the copyright holder to reinstate it. GPLv3 provides a mechanism to correct the violation and have your permissions automatically reinstated. If you're producing a product that does DRM, you'll need to avoid GPLv3.

  8. Re:closed up on SFLC Finds One New GPL Violation Per Day · · Score: 1
    Under GPLv2, if you violate the terms, you lose the license, meaning that you can no longer copy or modify the work at all, and there is nothing in the GPL (v2) itself to get the license back. However, the copyright holder can forgive the violation and reinstate the license.

    Likewise, under GPLv3 the copyright holder can give you additional shots to get the license back.

    It's important to remember that the copyright holder's powers go beyond the terms. This does create problems for projects with hundreds of copyright owners, like Linux: if you violate the copyright, you apparently need the forgiveness of every Linux copyright owner, or, in the case of the dead contributors, their heirs, or you can never distribute a Linux kernel again (I suppose you could try to make a cut-down kernel without the contributions of the more unforgiving developers). Some might see this as a feature rather than a bug, though.

    GPL code can import BSD code; it's only improper if the copyright notices are stripped off (which has happened, so you're right about that).

  9. Re:Overpopulation on Plowing Carbon Into the Fields · · Score: 1

    All along the back of the Sierra Nevada there is a huge valley full of decent land; the problem is water. All the water is being diverted into LA for drinking. If LA starts getting their water from the ocean, then we can begin to grow stuff there.

    The Owens Valley depended on irrigation before the water was diverted. This doesn't work long-term, as the water evaporates and leaves salts and minerals behind. Eventually the land can be ruined for agriculture.

  10. wireless Internet is much older on Happy Birthday, Internet! · · Score: 4, Informative

    See the Wikipedia packet radio article as a starting point. There was packet radio using Internet protocols back in the 1970s. The protocol that became "Wifi" was first deployed in 1991, but it was far from the first usable packet radio protocol.

  11. This is common with proprietary software on Behind the 4GB Memory Limit In 32-Bit Windows · · Score: 1

    There are any number of expensive software products where features are licensed separately, and the only different between Fubar Basic and Advanced Fubar Enterprise is a license key. The basic product has the same binary, with some features disabled. It should be no surprise that Microsoft does this.

  12. Pet peeve: round numbers are not barriers on English Wikipedia Reaches 3 Million Articles · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I guess it's too late to stop people from claiming that a barrier has been broken whenever some round number has been exceeded. The sound barrier was a real barrier, in that aerodynamics works very differently above and below the speed of sound, meaning that engineering a plane to fly stably above the speed of sound was a nontrivial undertaking. But it was no harder to write article number 3 million than article number 2,999,999. There was no barrier.

  13. Re:I don't get it... on Stopping Spam Before It Hits the Mail Server · · Score: 1

    Spam is almost exclusively produced by botnets. Vulnerable computers exist all over the world, so it shouldn't be surprising that more spam comes from outside your country (wherever you live) than inside. You, personally, have no one in China or Russia that you correspond with, but a debtor nation like the US is in a rather poor position to f*ck with the legitimate mail traffic of its main creditor. The most effective way to kill spam would be to aggressively eliminate botnets, wherever they are. A machine determined to be a member of a botnet could be isolated, blocked from sending email any place other than the support address of its ISP. Access could be restored when the machine is disinfected.

  14. Clearly the lawyer never saw Run Lola Run on Lawyer Offers $1M For Proof His Client Could Have Done It; Oops · · Score: 1

    Franka Potente would have made it in 20 minutes flat, and if she failed she'd rewind the world to give herself two more tries.

  15. Re:sanctions? on Lawyer Offers $1M For Proof His Client Could Have Done It; Oops · · Score: 1

    Although I think OJ was guilty, I also think that the prosecution failed to meet their burden of proving the case beyond a reasonable doubt. I was amazed at how incompetent they were, which is why OJ's lawyers managed to run rings around them. They made several massive errors: the gloves that wouldn't fit, and there was evidence that blood evidence was mishandled, and the cop who collected the blood evidence perjured himself about his use of racial slurs. The prosecution could have countered all this and really proved its case, but they preferred to try the case in the press instead, yelling "mountains of evidence" a lot. Whenever you hear a prosecutor say "mountains of evidence", watch out. What they are saying is that they have lots of circumstantial evidence, but they either aren't able, or can't be bothered, to distill it down into a clean proof that the charged party actually did the deed.

  16. Use the Google on Small, High-Resolution LCD Monitors? · · Score: 1, Informative
    Go to goggle.com. It will give you a little box. In that box, type

    small high resolution lcd monitor

    You will immediately find a number of monitors that match your requirements.

  17. People often ignore depreciation on Your Commuting Costs By Car Vs. Train? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's mainly the cost of buying a car. The value of a car goes down the more you drive it. Drive it 200,000 miles and the car you might have bought new for $22K is now worth $2K. That's ten cents per mile. If you don't drive your car into the ground, and buy a new one after five years or so, then you probably lost value equivalent to 20 cents per mile. And then there's the cost of insurance. To get the big savings, you'd have to be able to do without a car, or if you're in a couple, share one car instead of having two.

  18. Re:So they committed a felony? on Torpig Botnet Hijacked and Dissected · · Score: 1

    What are you going to charge them with? It appears that what they did was to register a domain that the botnet wanted to use and intercept the traffic. They didn't load code onto anyone's computer, or issue any commands to the botnot. So where's the felony?

  19. Re:Left hand, meet right hand on Iranians Outwit Censors With Falun Gong Software · · Score: 1

    Yes, and I'm sure plenty of Iranians are using this kind of technology to download software from US sites, despite attempts by those sites to honor US export control laws that require the boycotting of Iran. Not that any of this really matters from a security point of view, as the Iranian government would always be able to get what it wants.

  20. Re:How about a security review? on F-Secure Suggests Ditching Adobe Reader For Free PDF Viewers · · Score: 1
    The very existence of a huge number of features means that there will be more security bugs. Also, black hats tend to focus their attacks on the dominant player, unless there's a #2 that's super-easy to beat. Obscurity isn't sufficient to provide security but it does help.

    It's true that many of the alternatives lack certain features, but most PDF files don't use those features either. You can use a simpler reader except in cases where you need all the features.

  21. Re:Already there on F-Secure Suggests Ditching Adobe Reader For Free PDF Viewers · · Score: 5, Funny

    What about those of us who don't update because we're too lazy?

    You might be lazy, but your computer isn't; it's been sending out spam 24/7 for a while now.

  22. Re:This is how the news controls us on US Electricity Grid Reportedly Penetrated By Spies · · Score: 1

    This is great. When power systems go down because of poorly designed software, we can blame Chinese superhackers instead of incompetence.

  23. Re:Since when on US Electricity Grid Reportedly Penetrated By Spies · · Score: 1

    Since the NSA decided that they want to run cyber-security for everyone, not just the government. First they have to scare us before we turn over the Internet to them. The wingnuts at the Wall Street Journal are happy to get their story out. You did notice that there are no specifics about which facilities were attacked?

  24. NSA wants to control cybersecurity on Pentagon Cyber Defense Bill Comes To $100M For 6 Months · · Score: 3, Interesting

    And that's why you're seeing stories like this one, plus the other one claiming Chinese penetration of software controlling power plants. Fear, fear, fear. Only the spooks can save us. Turn over the internet to people who will stamp "classified" on what they do.

  25. Re:they should not turn it on on Princeton Student Finds Bug In LHC Experiment · · Score: 4, Informative

    You are ignorant; the universe is already conducting high-energy physics experiments. They are called cosmic rays, and some of them are billions of times more powerful than the LHC. Yet the earth is still here. And your notion that we delay until we completely understand the laws of physics is comical. What do you think the LHC is for? It's to help us understand the laws of physics! You don't discover laws of physics by just thinking deeply. You discover them by experimentation.