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User: KiloByte

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Comments · 4,101

  1. Not "clemency" on Counterpoint: Why Edward Snowden May Not Deserve Clemency · · Score: 5, Insightful

    He doesn't deserve clemency, yeah. For clemency, you first need to do something wrong.

  2. Re:One word: Betteridge on Senator Bernie Sanders Asks NSA If Agency Is Spying On Congress · · Score: 1

    Except that in this case the answer is 100% "yes, duh".

  3. Re:How about complete amnesty on The New York Times Pushes For Clemency For Snowden · · Score: 1

    Medal of Honor is for Bradley Manning.

  4. Re:There isn't any... on Ask Slashdot: Effective, Reasonably Priced Conferencing Speech-to-Text? · · Score: 1

    It hasn't advanced a bit since 15 years ago when IBM advertised ViaVoice. Unless you're the person a particular speech recognition tool was tailored for or someone with almost identical speech, all you get is nonsense poetry that vaguely resembles the rhythm and rhyme of what you said.

  5. Re:Subject on Linux x32 ABI Not Catching Wind · · Score: 1

    That's for selected contrived tests. For real-life cases, you get far less, like that 7% figure, or for quite a few test cases even 0%.

  6. Re:Subject on Linux x32 ABI Not Catching Wind · · Score: 1

    You get 16 registers instead of 8.

    More like 14 instead of 6: you can't exactly put IP to much use.

  7. Try it on Linux x32 ABI Not Catching Wind · · Score: 2

    debootstrap --arch=x32 unstable /path/to/chroot http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian/
    Requires an amd64 kernel compiled with CONFIG_X86_X32=y (every x32-capable kernel can also run 64 bit stuff).

  8. Re:Subject on Linux x32 ABI Not Catching Wind · · Score: 5, Interesting

    For some workloads, it's ~40% faster vs amd64, and for some, even more than that vs i386. For a typical case, though, it's typical to see ~7% speed and ~35% memory boost over amd64.

    As for memory being cheap, this might not matter on your home box where you use 2GB of 16GB you have installed, but vserver hosting tends to be memory-bound. And using bad old i386 means a severe speed loss due to ancient instructions and register shortage.

  9. Re:NSA etc on CryptoLocker Gang Earns $30 Million In Just 100 Days · · Score: 2

    You got it wrong: the NSA does cyber-terrorism, it doesn't fight it. Just like the PATRIOTUSA act was 100% promoting terrorism (spreading fear for political gain) rather than combatting it.

  10. Re: Backwards on First Hard Evidence for the Process of Cat Domestication · · Score: 3, Funny

    Oh dear god, only the insane idiot would want to keep intact female cats. The incessant yowling will make you kill things.

    How is that different from human females? *duck*

  11. Re:And google will retain that info exclusively. on Google Makes It Harder For Marketers To Collect User Data · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And if Google proxies and caches the images as soon as the service receives the mail, marketers can verify if the address is a valid gmail address or not by just sending mails and waiting for Google to cache the image. Expect more spam if this is the case.

    Verifying that foobar@gmail.com is a valid address doesn't give spammers any real information: the namespace is so full even most pwgen outputs point to existing names, as long as you don't have embedded numbers (on gmail, addresses seem to have numbers at the end).

    Thus, that check can be quite simplified to "does a Markov chain say this string of letters is pronounceable?". Not a big benefit to a spammer. On the other hand, they don't get told anything about the recipient anymore.

    While for a small mail provider this change might leak some info, for Gmail it seems to be nearly entirely positive.

    I for one don't use Gmail for privacy reasons, and don't fetch remote images, but good luck training aunt Lucy about that.

  12. Re:Regex is cool, but you can still do this... on Google Fixes Credit Card Security Hole, But Snubs Discoverer · · Score: 1

    You mean, no one thought about automating the 7 proxies trick before?

  13. Re:NIH on Canonical Moving Away From GNOME Control Center · · Score: 1, Informative

    Considering that components of Gnome demand to replace even the init system with a NIH unmaintenable un-reasonably-modifiable monstrosity, Ubuntu distancing itself from Gnome is not a NIH syndrome, it's basic sanity.

  14. Re:great... on Firefox 26 Arrives With Click-To-Play For Java Plugins · · Score: 1

    CookieMonster is almost perfect, the only thing I miss is retroactively accepting cookies that were marked as session-only by my default policy. I guess this would need to store the original expiration date in the cookie itself, which at that point is overwritten by "till the session ends".

  15. Re:xterm? root? on Jolla's First Phone Goes On Sale · · Score: 1

    If all you type is a SMS here and there, a touchscreen keyboard might be adequate and the device ends up lighter. But for any semi-serious use... forget it.

    N900 suffers from Nokia's brain-dead default layout that requires using a pull-up on screen keyboard for anything but basic letters and digits, but fixing that is trivial (here's my version that uses Shift and Fn).

  16. Re:xterm? root? on Jolla's First Phone Goes On Sale · · Score: 2

    Sadly, this Jolla thing has no keyboard and thus is a non-starter for me.

    But add one and I promise to be the first in line to buy it. My N900 is starting to fall apart...

  17. Re:Creationism = religion, not science. At all. on Getting Evolution In Science Textbooks For Texas Schools · · Score: 2

    Ask pretty much every scientist in ~1500 years that started from the reigns of Constantine the "Great" and Theodosius the "Great". The start of this near-total collapse of science can be dated exactly to these two reigns, while the end is quite spread out, with most remnants lasting well into 20th century, with even some bits left in 21th.

    Science has seen a brief respite around years 1000-1200 in the islamic word, until the mullahs clamped down on it hard, science remaining pretty much forbidden to this day. For a comparison: with a world muslim population of 1.2B, they had 4 Nobel prize winners, while jews got 129 with a population of mere 14M. The christian/ex-christian world is somewhere in-between.

  18. Re:So long on BlackBerry's CFO, CMO, and COO Leave Company · · Score: 1

    Neither Bush nor Obama got kicked out, both got re-elected despite their achievements.

    And while Bush managed to get the prestigious place as the worst president in US history so far, Obama proven that yes, he can, and topped out Bush taking this precious spot from him. That's about it about either faction of the NeoCon party being any better than the other.

  19. Re:The internet is for porn on CMU AI Learning Common Sense By Watching the Internet · · Score: 2

    If the AI suffers a breakdown after seeing /b/, I'd say it emulates regular people well enough.

  20. Re:MarkLogic is an XML repository, not a RDBMS on NYT: Healthcare.gov Project Chaos Due Partly To Unorthodox Database Choice · · Score: 1

    Even if you ship around data in XML it's still not a remotely sane format for storage of large amounts of data.

  21. Re:Yes. on Should the US Copy Switzerland and Consider a 'Maximum Wage' Ratio? · · Score: 1

    There's a difference between owning a business, and being merely a hired officer. Who somehow gets to set his own salary.

  22. Re:Alternatve hypothesis? on Cute Cat Photos Are Data-Driven Science Behind Cunning New Language Learning App · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Dogs want a competitive pack with rivalry as a basis for its social order, and lots of physical exercise. All cats want from a pack is watching over them when they're sleeping.

  23. Re:Can someone dumb-down the comment... on Ubuntu Wants To Enable SSD TRIM By Default · · Score: 1

    Even on non-crap SSDs it's better to do this in batches rather than in tiny fragments every time a sector gets freed.

  24. Re:Liberty is the only thing in danger here. on Sen. Chuck Schumer Seeks To Extend Ban On 'Undetectable' 3D-Printed Guns · · Score: 1

    Check the discussion on the high score page. Such "gun free zones" are considered to be "easy mode" as all victims are already disarmed and there's no risk of interference anywhere early.

  25. Re:BTRFS stable when on Linux 3.13 Kernel To Bring Major Feature Improvements · · Score: 1

    BTRFS has been used in production on many sites. Including mine, but this might be too small to count for you.

    And as for data safety features: a good part are shared with ZFS, including checksums and send/receive, but some rely on BTRFS' internal format, which resembles log-structured filesystems more than classical ones. One that saved the bacon of an under-backuped disk of a customer of mine was that BTRFS never overwrites data in-place but always writes the new version of both data and metadata to a random place on the disk. The newest version of the root node and some recently written stuff was in the area that got corrupted, but older generations of the data existed elsewhere.