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User: Obispus

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  1. Re:OK, 35 years, then... on MIT Warned of a JSTOR Death Sentence Due To Swartz · · Score: 1

    Doesn't seem to have hurt Robert Morris. He did roughly the same thing minus the copyright infringement, got convicted, and now is a professor at MIT.

    Quite different. Morris's father (Robert Morris Sr.) was Director of the NSA, no less, at the time of the worm infestation. That ensured Morris Jr. got special treatment.

  2. Mod parent up! on How the Inventors of Dragon Speech Recognition Technology Lost Everything · · Score: 1

    Why is it down at 0?

  3. Easy to fix on Verizon Adds $2 Charge For Paying Your Bill Online · · Score: 2
    The $2 fee doesn't apply to "recurrent" credit card transactions--only to one-time payments. Just go online once a month as you'd have done to pay your bill and set the payment up as "recurrent".

    Then, just after the bill's due date, go online again and disable the recurrent payment.

    Repeat next month. This will get the message across loud and clear.

  4. Is this the paper Norvig mentioned? on Google Outlines AI-Based Number Reading For Street View Photos · · Score: 1
    Is this the paper Peter Norvig (quite tangentially) referred to near the end of this article in the MIT Tech Review? Can anybody confirm?

    Thanks...

  5. Re:Medicine in America... on Wealthy Americans Turning To Europe For Medical Treatment · · Score: 1

    I had to LOL at that. The first part is because they're frazzled after being on a 36 hour working shift dealing with people taking their kids to the hospital merely because they have the sniffles. Ask a doc what "GOMER" means... get outta my ER...

    That idiotic line of reasoning reminds me of a gardening service I used to hire: they came, mowed the lawn at a breakneck pace, and left 20 min later--without doing a lot of required pruning and maintenance. When confronted with that fact, they replied "But then we'd have to spend more time at your place--and we're supposed to service so many other customers the same morning!" I don't give a rat's ass about how your boss overschedules you; I'm paying your boss (i.e., you) to do a job, and it's up to you to work out your cost structure and/or charge what the market will bear given other competitors on the same arena.

    As for "GOMER", that's another gem. I'll try it next time a client asks me for something I don't feel like providing. I'm sure that, given that physicians are cut no more slack than other professionals in the U.S., a remark of that kind will go over well and maybe even elicit a smile.

  6. "Linux" Torvalds? on Linus Goes Hollywood At Pre-Oscars Party · · Score: 1

    Good lord...

  7. Re:Vandalized? on Attacked By Anonymous, HBGary Pulls Out of RSA · · Score: 1

    Anonymous had obviously gained physical access to the booth, so the canvases, table and aluminum sticks had probably been rootkitted and were no good any more. Barr made the right decision. He's such a Security God!

  8. Google cookie stolen from other Google services? on How To Protect Against Firesheep Attacks · · Score: 1

    I know that Gmail can have a whole session over SSL, but what happens if I use another Google property, e.g., Maps, while logged into a secure Gmail session? Would Maps, Voice, etc. not pull out the cookie (created by Gmail) from my browser over HTTP, and would Firesheep not be able to sniff that transfer? Maybe the attacker could even open a non-secure Gmail session of his own over HTTP and read my email too...

  9. Re:Sounds Like Maggot Treatment on Dog Eats Man's Toe and Saves His Life · · Score: 1

    Human urine is NOT sterile when it comes out of the body during normal urination. It is sterile (in a healthy individual, of course) up to and including the bladder, but it can pick up all kinds of germs during its final trip down the urethra. To get sterile urine, you have to take it straight out of the bladder.

  10. Segale and his current influence on How Nintendo's Mario Got His Name · · Score: 1

    They are starting a huge (500-acre) development near SeaTac... and they haven't been idle all these years: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2011460764_segale28.html

  11. Re:To summarize... on China Will Lead World Scientific Research By 2020 · · Score: 1

    For this particular point, start reading at "[Yau] had no idea that Hamilton's work..."

  12. For Privoxy users on Tynt Insight Is Watching You Cut and Paste · · Score: 1
    Get rid of this tracking JavaScript by adding this to your user.action file:

    { +block{Tracking scripts.} +handle-as-empty-document -handle-as-image}
    .*tynt.com

  13. Re:Seeing Arrington's rants... on Arrington's CrunchPad Dies · · Score: 1

    Felix Dennis' "How to get rich" has many anecdotes about his climb to success. While the book is not really a recipe for getting rich :-), he makes this point over and over again: ownership and control of your venture are everything. Who controls a business can force its sale, implement a merger, fire you, take a great deal more money out of it than minority shareholders. Besides, usually not all shares are equal in power. Many tech startup founders diluted, inch by inch, their participation in their own companies to gain capital to expand and survive. Others, like Gates and Ellison, did not.

  14. Nothing to see here... on Try Out Chrome OS In a Virtual Machine · · Score: 5, Informative
    It looks exactly like the Chrome/Chromium browser, with a few more desktop icons and a weird window manager.

    The only novelty is that the lack of a "shutdown" option seems to be intentional; the local machine is supposed to be stateless in the sense that it commits all transactions remotely before announcing their completion. Plan 9 also tried to achieve that goal, at least initially.

    Kudos to the people who put these images together, though--they've saved many of us significant time.

  15. Quantitative results from the London experience on Chicago's Camera Network Is Everywhere · · Score: 1

    Admitted by the London police in this article: the extensive monitoring (each person can expect to be filmed ~300 times during a normal day) helps solve less than one crime/(1000 cameras*year).
    It's not worth giving up your privacy, and spending the money that could be spent on putting more policemen on the street, for such an ineffective program.

  16. Heads should roll at Adobe on Adobe Pushing For Flash and PDF In Open Government Initiative · · Score: 1
    From TFA

    the entire site--designed in Flash--is practically inaccessible. After just a cursory browsing, here are some of the usability and data accessibility issues we observed. You can't select, copy, or paste any text. Your browser's font override features won't work, so you can't adjust the font or its size to be more readable. Your browser's built-in in-page search won't work, and you can't use the keyboard to scroll through the text. You can't parse or scrape the data in any way; the design is fixed-width, so it's not going to work well on different screen sizes; and browser plugins, like Greasemonkey, can't adjust anything. Basically when it comes to text at all, if you don't like the style or are visually impaired, you're screwed.

    Way to go to convince government and its constituents that Flash and PDF will help them put together open websites and follow "ADA Guidelines for the Web" aimed at ensuring accessibility...

  17. The study's methodology... on MIT Project "Gaydar" Shakes Privacy Assumptions · · Score: 1

    ...is just another form of traffic analysis. Good for them that they thought about applying it for this particular purpuse, though.

  18. Clearly... on Microsoft Poland Photoshops Black Guy To White One · · Score: 1

    ...this is a case of a Reverse Polish "Soul Man".

  19. This is more worrying on Inside the AP's Plan To Security-Wrap Its News Content · · Score: 3, Insightful
    From the Ars Technica article:

    Down the road, of course, the AP might go to Congress and ask that whatever tracking and rights system it settles on be given the force of law. It's not as crazy as it sounds; European publishers already hope to get a law enforcing the Automated Content Access Protocol.

    If content providers get the ability to enforce moronic schemes like this one, many people may find themselves in the receiving end of lawsuits--even some who just followed older fair-use provisions.

  20. What happened to the annotations? on Amazon Pulls Purchased E-Book Copies of 1984 and Animal Farm · · Score: 1, Informative

    I'm not familiar with the concrete capabilities of the Kindles, but I seem to recall that it's possible to annotate the ebooks. If Amazon deletes the ebook, do all its annotations get deleted as well? Annotations are the property of the person who wrote them (presumably, the device owner), so Amazon can't pissibly have a right to delete them.

  21. Re:Why not a laptop? on Is the Kindle DX Worth the Money? · · Score: 0

    Right on the money. Add to the list of advantages: - Screen perfectly readable outdoors, even under direct, bright sunlight.

  22. Re:There's plenty of BPA in bottles on BPA Leaches From Polycarbonate Bottles Into Humans · · Score: 0

    Sandbags (964742), if you were replying to my post, then you did a great job at coming up with a rant full of caps that is as long as it is irrelevant. If you were not, disregard what follows.

    Your statements, which I quoted in my post, were that (a) a bottle has a fixed amount of BPA to leach (fairly obvious), and (b) that after several uses and cleanings in a dishwasher, the BPA present (i.e., remaining) in the bottle should become negligible.

    The study I cited found that a regular bottle has the capacity to generate big amounts of BPA during a long lifetime. So your point (a) is obvious and your point (b) is false. QED.

    Regarding the separate and orthogonal discussion about whether realistic household usage would result in the release of significant multiples of the BPA released when the bottle gets used at standard room temperatures: the evidence we have is that exposure to high-temperature liquids is positively correlated with BPA release. You have any evidence that lower, but still high, temperatures such as the ones applied to dishwasher loads do not result in significant increases in BPA release? Let's see it.

  23. Re:half-life on BPA Leaches From Polycarbonate Bottles Into Humans · · Score: 0

    You'll be drinking a lot of BPA until the bottle runs out of it, and it's not clear that the bottle will be usable as such by the time BPA release drops to a reasonable level. See this paper for the effects of repeated cleanings in a dishwasher: the bottles released an average of 31 times the amount of BPA released by a new, unwashed bottle during the first 169 washes--and that's when the scientists stopped measuring, so there's no reason to believe that concentrations would plummet after any known, higher number of washes.

  24. There's plenty of BPA in bottles on BPA Leaches From Polycarbonate Bottles Into Humans · · Score: 0

    Also, a new bottle only has a fixed amount of BPA to leech.

    True, but...

    After several uses (especially after being washed in a hot dishwasher several times) the amount of BPA present should be negligible.

    that depends on your definition of "several". This study showed that bottles exposed to a normal dishwasher process leaked an average of 36 times the amount of BPA released by new bottles during the first 51 washes, which went down slightly to an average of 29 times the baseline for the subsequent 118 wash cycles.

    Those don't seem acceptable levels of leakage to me.

  25. Re:Mortality rates and the flu on New Study Finds Flu Virus "Paralyzes" Immune System · · Score: 2, Informative

    You don't seem to have understood TFA. A cytokine storm consists of an excess of cytokines, and study participants were indeed found to have elevated cytokine levels, presumably as a the response to the flu virus--although not at the point of actual storms occurring. Concentrations of toll-like receptors were found to be lower than normal, therefore indicating an immune system less resilient to other opportunistic pathogens (e.g., bacteria) that might ultimately cause the death of the patient.