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User: AnonymousCactus

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  1. Nothing works on Does Comcast Hate Firefox? · · Score: 1


    In order to keep getting the promotional rate, my roommates and I sign up for Comcast every 6 months with a different name through the self-install kit. It NEVER works. The thing is crap. To be fair, the last couple times I just called the number that goes direct to a reasonably knowledgeable tech that the idiot customer service person gave me a few times ago. They're great, they just hook me right up, no CD required, and then reset my cable modem so I can use it under the new name. Why they have to unlock it, I have no clue...it's not like it's a cellphone...it's way cheaper and seems way less likely to get stolen.



    Obviously, I tell a better story than: "I'm cheap, please help me do something borderline against the rules." Sometimes I have my girlfriend call. Techs will do whatever a female voice says to do.

  2. Re:If you need restraints... on NASA Purchases $19M Russian Space Toilet · · Score: 1

    Cleaner?

    If it were cleaner to sit on a toilet, would there be a need for toilet seat covers in public restrooms?

    I personally have no problem rubbing up against the bare buns of a few thousand strangers, but, you know, some people think it's gross. As for standing their squatting without touching the toilet...way too much effort when I can just stand and let'er rip!

  3. Re:It wasn't the VT100 on Are 80 Columns Enough? · · Score: 1

    That was probably fine when you didn't have Object Oriented madness with crazy-ass Camel Case names stretching off into infinity. There's a number of Java classes whose name takes about 30.

  4. Sprint Sucks on Sprint Drops Customers Over Excessive Inquiries · · Score: 1

    For 8 months in a row, I called multiple times each month because they overcharged me something silly, like 20 cents. Each time I ended up regretting it because it made me waste an hour and was hardly worth 20 cents. Yet I called because I can't imagine overpaying to such a worthless company.

    Then came time to replace my contract. I shopped around and no one could beat their prices - I've been negotiating every year with the retention department whenever my contract expires and actually get a pretty reasonable rate. Anyway, I changed about 8 things on my account all at once. My next bill comes and they gave me an $800 credit. I have no idea for what, I assume karma. I haven't paid my bill in 8 months and am still going strong.

    Sprint just sucks and while most companies try to limit the amount their suckiness hurts them relative to their customers suckiness is suckiness. If they mess up against the customer that often, they'll eventually mess up against themselves.

  5. Re:Remind me... on Google Loses Gmail Trademark Case · · Score: 1

    Maybe, at least that example suggests I can keep my email address, as froogle.com still points to Product Search.

  6. what's the point? on Google Loses Gmail Trademark Case · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I get the point of, say, not letting someone use the name GMail or Google to setup their own email or search service because they'd be unfairly profiting from Google's name. What's the point in not letting Google take a service that was launched out of the U.S. and extend it to Germany? Granted, it's bad for this guy's business, but it's not like Google is unfairly profiting from his trademark.

    Also, what affect does this have for Google in the U.S.? I mean, it's theirs in the U.S., right?

    Finally, I presume this is the guy's site: http://www.gmail.de/

  7. Top 10 on Ocarina of Time — Best Game Ever? · · Score: 1
  8. Re:robbing == theft on Allofmp3 Shut Down, Again · · Score: 2, Insightful


    More accurately, the RIAA can't prove that it's theft.



    The RIAA argues that if the person hadn't received the song illegally, that they would have purchased it. By providing an alternative means to get that song, allofmp3 are taking $X from the RIAA, which is ethically (if not semantically) the same as theft. Unfortunately, the RIAA can't prove when they actually lost sales, but I'm sure they are in some percentage of cases. Maybe that percentage is around what you'd argue (perhaps 0.0001%?) or maybe it's closer to what they'd argue (100%?). Either way, the RIAA really is losing some sales, they just overstate that loss.



    The real point is that the government has provided the RIAA with a monopoly on certain goods by the granting of copyrights. A large subset of the population, however, disagrees with their current handling of that monopoly. Fortunately, the population can wield significant input on this situation from two ends - both through their involvement in the government which granted the monopoly in the first place and their formation of the consumers who the RIAA attempts to attract to purchase music from them. This makes it inevitable that what we're seeing now is just a blip.



    The RIAA can't keep going like this and will adapt their model. The unfortunate collateral damage, however, is the vast number of people who have be sued, shut down or otherwise harassed by the RIAA while they adapt. Not to mention the large amounts of money being spent to prevent what is inevitable.

  9. is Google doomed? on Internal Microsoft Email about Life at Google · · Score: 1

    As many have pointed out, many successful companies have started off similarly.

    So is Google doomed? Doomed to be a bureaucratic mess with 800 levels between me and, say, Bill Gates with the only people who can really profit off of my work being closer to the top of the pyramid. I've interned a lot of places, but haven't actually had a job. Friends who have tell me such horror stories. Are the creme of the crop CS people destined to either pinball around the tech companies as the are founded and inevitably turn crappy hoping that once they'll get in early enough to ride the wave for the rest of their lives? Or is there a better way? :)

  10. Re:Hope she has money on RIAA, Safenet Sued For Malicious Prosecution · · Score: 1

    long way = 10,000 / $250 = 400 hours = 10 lawyers for a week = not nearly enough

  11. is CS different? on Faster and Open Access to Scientific Results · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's important to note that the primary way of relating new work in computer science is through peer-reviewed conference proceedings, which tend to be a bit faster. Is there a reason to use a service like this if you're a computer scientist?

    Also, will people be concerned about releasing docs to something informal like this? There are already issues with people "stealing" ideas or perhaps arriving at the same idea independently. A service like this may make the distinction even harder to characterize. I've known people to scoop others by posting a tech report on their web page, which are incredibly difficult to search. This would at least make that better.

  12. Useless on Hilarious Antique IT Advertisements · · Score: 1

    That site is horrid. I could hardly find the joke adds among all of the regular ads and popups and requests to complete surveys.
    /. should have a policy against pointing to such crapilicious sites.

  13. Re:Excellent news :-) on Safari for Windows Downloaded Over 1 Million Times · · Score: 1

    What about another browser that will target a similar userbase as FF and divide up its market share?
    Just saying, there's a large group of people that won't use anything other than IE. Then there's people who will. A lot of those people are using FF now and seem more likely to switch to Safari. I mean, the true Mac fans have Macs, right?

  14. Re:Who funded this? on Bones Could Become Conduits For Data Swaps · · Score: 1

    That's sorta' what research is about. Studying problems that most people don't think have an immediate business case or that most businesses think aren't likely enough to succeed to warrant investment. Sometimes you find something that is practical, sometimes you find something that is interesting and a lot of the time all you take away is a little more knowledge than you had going in. In this case, they've found that it's reasonable to transfer information through bones. I can think of a million of (unlikely) alternative uses from improving bone health, to medical monitoring, to sending information along other materials that conduct sound well.
    And, the likelihood is, that none of these will actually be used either.

  15. Re:Not a surprise on US Falls to 24th Place For Broadband Penetration · · Score: 1

    Could it be that a whole lot of Canada is inhabited by basically no one because it's too damn cold?
    All the empty land leads to low density.

  16. Re:Fair enough - tax refunds? on Blogger Removed From NCAA Game for Blogging · · Score: 1

    My guess is that this kind of event actually saves you tax dollars. Basketball and football usually turn a nice profit.

  17. puking, barfing... on Probe Shows Jupiter Moon 'Puking' Into Space · · Score: 1

    I prefer Ralphing.
    For a science that's so concerned about nomenclature (i.e. Pluto) how does puking or barfing even get used by a writer?

  18. Re:ID theory to the rescue on Venter Institute Claims Patent on Synthetic Life · · Score: 1

    This is great.
    Either you get the politicos to agree and patents like this are made void, or you get them to admit ID is crap. Either way, nerds win!
    Oh wait, we've made the common flawed assumption: People reason logically.

  19. another way on Terminator Gene Ban Suggested in Canada · · Score: 1


    Coming from a small, rural town in Ohio, I'm somewhat familiar with farming practices. I know that farmers are already forced (and have been for years) to buy the seeds for corn from the producer every year. I *believe* it has to do with the people selling the seeds only licensing the seeds for one season, combined with the difficulty in getting a good crop the next year out of the seeds you planted. I'm not sure if the low quality of second-generation seeds is an issue of cross-pollination or of the seeds themselves which have been maximized for yield in a single season.



    I've heard of farmers attempting to use seeds that they've collected from their crops and being sued for it. It really does sound like the RIAA. After finding that it's difficult to control the spread of the breeds they have copyright on, they tried technological solutions to thwart piracy. I wonder how long it will be until the farmers come up with a method for reversing this T gene.

  20. Re:humanity vs capitalism on Brazil Voids Merck Patent On AIDS Drug · · Score: 1

    They're assuming that the poor would have to pay for it. In a country like Brazil where most of the wealth is concentrated in the top 0.001% (or something even worse than the U.S.), or so I understand, maybe the government should have stepped in and subsidized it? There is benefit to drug companies making a good profit off of an advanced drug unless they take advantage of it. Unfortunately, I don't think we know enough to know what's happening here.

    Just a thought. Maybe it would still have been too expensive.

  21. Re:Can't beat em, join em? on Vista Protected Processes Bypassed · · Score: 1

    It's a lot easier to break a system than to make sure it's totally secure.
    If you're Microsoft, then it's even more difficult because you have to support tons of third-party outfits, legacy crap, and who-knows-what that the Office team requires.
    I think you'd be amazed to see how many exploits they prevented pre-emptively.
    Microsoft gets a lot of crap, but what they're trying is really hard. Implementing secure software is hard enough, now try doing so in a way that agrees with thousands of companies that you rely on, and which every hacker in the world will try to break. If Linux tried that, it wouldn't hold up either. Thank God, it doesn't...

  22. Re:Probability on New Algorithms Improve Image Search · · Score: 2, Informative

    The probability isn't zero or one because the system doesn't have perfect knowledge and the probability is with respect to what the system 'knows'. Probability here is estimated based on the limited representation of the algorithm, so it's saying that based on the things I've seen before with similar features that were labeled 'tiger', X% were labeled 'tiger.' I would then expect this new thing to be a 'tiger' with a probability of X. (Exactly how they come up with their estimate is a bit more complicated :)) Confidence is a reasonable way of describing what that probability represents, but it's correct to say probability.

  23. Why is it better? on New Algorithms Improve Image Search · · Score: 2, Informative

    I wish the article would mention more about why it is better than similar techniques that have been proposed in the past. (For example, http://luthuli.cs.uiuc.edu/~daf/papers/WAP-fin.pdf seems similar) For instance, where do they get their labels for the training data? A lot of people have tried using contextual words drawn from surrounding web text to limited success due to noise. It's also questionable how well their techniques can do if they need to pre-build a separate classification for each keyword. Finally, there are words that it seems impossible that they could ever distinguish. For example, 'man' vs. 'woman,' would be incredibly complicated for anything but a human. Where are the details? Oh yeah, it's a news story! Here's a link to the paper http://www.svcl.ucsd.edu/publications/journal/2007 /pami/pami07-semantics.pdf

  24. Re:Internet access is integral to education... on Internet Curfew for College Students? · · Score: 1

    A what?
    I graduated from college 4 years ago and spent my time in the library socializing and trying to accidentally end up working next to cute girls.
    I did work in my room in my pajamas, usually after the libraries closed.

  25. Re:Exercise in Futility on The Student vs Hacker Security Showdown Rematch · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It seems like the most reasonable step when someone is starting with a totally messed up system is to disconnect it from the network. Obviously, it's less than ideal, but it seems better than letting secure data get taken or allowing the hacker to get a stronger foothold. Obviously, you can't always bring down all IT systems in order to fix them, but, then, you probably also would have fixed these problems before the machines were attacked...