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User: guruevi

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  1. Re:Possibly useful, but... on Cocaine Vaccine In the Works · · Score: 1

    Well, maybe BEFORE you have sex with whoever you should talk about it with them and test them for it? I hope we'll have OTC tests for STD's soon just like you can for pregnancy. There is currently too much going around (about 37 different strains of HPV, not all of them have a vaccine to help) in this world that it's purely irresponsible to have sex with anybody before having them tested, that's what I hope to learn my kids (if I have them).

    If they think it would be good to vaccinate themselves against it just in case I would let them. But currently I don't trust them simply because a) they've been pushed by big med and the government without adequate testing for long term effects and b) Currently Merck is still testing Gardasil for any long-term effects c) VAERS reports several cases where people got really sick (requiring secondary help) which occurred after receiving the HPV vaccine. Off course it is possible something else was the problem but for now, I'm not going to try it. d) There has been little to no testing whatsoever to the effect the HPV vaccine has against other strains of the same or similar virii. What if within a few years a strain turns autoimmune to this or like we've seen with meningococcal bacteria becomes something we can't kill that easy?

  2. Re:Possibly useful, but... on Cocaine Vaccine In the Works · · Score: 1

    Male circumcision is still legal in the US. I wouldn't use either since it mutilates your child. I said MEDICAL treatment, you can't abuse/mutilate your kid and think to get away with it.

  3. Re:vista only on HD Monitor Causes DRM Issues with Netflix · · Score: 3, Informative

    Correction: Your iTunes music will keep working (if you off course backed them up). If they're DRM-protected, all you need is an internet connection to re-authorize your computer and de-authorize the previous setup. Maybe it's different with the combination of Amazon and Netflix because the DRM is different although I don't ever plan on buying DRM'ed stuff so I wouldn't know. My guess is that the DRM-scheme authorizes a single key which resides on the client and (another guess) that copies can not be played anywhere else. The implementation is stupid because it is basically a PKI between buyer and seller where the buyer is the sole owner of their private key, Apple's implementation has all "keys" server-side and sends them to your player which is linked to a specific account so you can re-authorize your media.

  4. Re:Possibly useful, but... on Cocaine Vaccine In the Works · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Who would decide it then if the parents can't decide for their own children? The government? A court system? We know how well that works right. The legal system allows to deny or allow any type of medical treatment to a child by a parent and it's good too otherwise the insurance company would decide what we can and cannot have.

    Although I think it's a pointless vaccine (who would want it, the point of taking in cocaine IS to get high) it's going to be marketed and sold to parents much like the HPV vaccine without thinking about the long term problems these vaccines will introduce as an alternative to good education. I choose not to vaccinate my kid against any of this new nonsense. If my kid wants to get high or an STD, that's their choice, I hope I can teach them not to before though (I didn't ever take drugs nor did I have sex without a stable, long-term relationship and I finished high-school only 6 years ago).

  5. Re:The vicious last bites of a wounded animal on Investors, "Beware" of Record Companies · · Score: 3, Informative

    Sure, the artists you hear on the radio won't immediately leave the RIAA but after a while some groups and artists notice that they are not getting what they deserve and can get much better income elsewhere. Then they'll start switching. Another problem is that once you signed up with the RIAA, you can't really go back. Everything released from then on is their property and if you leave then you can't take your own work with you.

    RIAA-safe albums as found on riaaradar.com (the top100) include some well known names though. Some artists that have actually dumped the RIAA include Madonna, Nine Inch Nails, Oasis, Jamiroquai, Radiohead, Courtney Love and Canadian labels Anthem, Acquarius, The Children's Group, Linus Entertainment, Nettwerk and True North Records and there has been some commotion between EMI and the RIAA too so they might pull out completely pretty soon too.

  6. Re:Oh no! on NASA Releases Cryptic Airline Safety Data · · Score: 1

    Computers already fly airplanes. Press a few buttons and the whole flight and landing sequence goes on autopilot. However, autopilot only goes according to a flight plan. It does not know the position of other aircrafts in it's surroundings.

    The main issue in airline safety (in my opinion) is not a single pilot or airliner nor terrorists or passengers causing mayhem but it's miscommunication and over-stressed traffic controllers and too much traffic in specific airports (some airports have a plane take off and land every 3 seconds). If you then get a pilot that barely speaks English and/or doesn't know where to taxi or somebody misdirects them (or 2 traffic controllers specify the same lane at the same moment) then you get accidents. It's much better than car safety still because of the guidance, but if somebody ignores or doesn't understand the guidance then you're still SOL.

  7. Re:Life's good on Dvorak Looks Back At 'Another Crappy Tech Year' · · Score: 1

    We probably do have such people among us (maybe the Google founders, maybe Linus Torvalds, maybe even RTS) but it takes a while for those people to get recognized (usually once they're long gone) and by then we'll all be dead anyway to correct any mistakes and misconceptions. So for all we know, Bill Gates or Steve "Chairthrower" Ballmer might be the symbol of 'enlightenment' for our generation to our grand-grand-grandchildren just as we see with the 'inventors' Bell and Edison, not all has to be clean and good business practice to get a note in history books.

  8. We'll see on Social Network Aggregation, Killer App in 2008? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I think social networking sites are going to gain and then lose a lot of momentum, maybe not over the next year but over the next decade we'll soon see that social networking sites are going the way of the MUD.

    I don't want to manage a social networking site let alone have an app that collects all the data and sends it to multiple sites at once.

  9. Re:awww jeez, not this $#!^ again on TSA Limits Lithium Batteries on Airplanes · · Score: 1

    It doesn't matter that you have holes in your plane, just land as soon as possible and/or go to a lower altitude. The plane won't explode or implode because of a minor hole (unless you're blowing a whole side out using a sawed-off shotgun).

  10. Re:Already Dead on AOL to Shut Down Netscape Support/Development · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I used it. It beat Internet Explorer 5 and early 6 back then (and still does) in stability, security and compliance with W3 standards and back then Opera was still charging you for their browser (or you had to put up with a screenwide banner taking up 1/8 of your screen).

    Although Mozilla and other players came up a few moments after 4.x, they were still in it's infancy (or alpha/beta).

  11. Re:What? on Google Apps Slow to Replace Competition · · Score: 4, Interesting

    But, the upside is, everybody can work at it from any location, no more reason to give (expensive) laptops with sensitive data that can be 'lost' or 'stolen' when they can use their own home computer/laptop and use https to work on documents.

    Yes, the internet-thingy going down is a downside but I noticed that wherever I work, if the Internet goes down, the company grinds to a halt, even for people that aren't really involved on the internet for business (why does the cleaning crew or even hr need internet access anyway?)

    And hardly anybody in a company uses all the functionality that MS Office, OpenOffice or iWork has to offer. For those people, you can stick to buying them the Office suite but for a lot (maybe 90%) just typing in a document or setting up a spreadsheet is as far as their business-related computer work goes.

    And as for the 'cheap' part: $50/user/year for a full (or somewhat full) functional office package that is accessible anywhere with collaboration and central storage is fairly cheap. Just the licensing costs for Office are higher even for educational and then you haven't even started setting up ShitPoint, Dead Office Collaborator or a simple file storage for each department.

  12. Re:NAS and Locks on Windows Home Server Corrupts Files · · Score: 1

    In any application I ever wrote, if my application can't get the right access to a file, it should give you an elegant error message saying it can't get a lock. That's like opening a read-only file in a text editor and then just throwing away the edits instead of giving an error message.

    If the file system that you are trying to write to doesn't support a certain action that you need to make it work, you shouldn't make it available to the user, this isn't 1980 where everybody who had a computer also knew the system to the last details.

  13. Re:Required, Sorry on Russian GPS Alternative Near Completion · · Score: 3, Informative

    You don't necessarily need (and probably shouldn't) rely purely on GPS for weapon delivery. Even the US hardly does it (they rather use laser tagging for 'small' devices and for large devices it hardly matters but they use separate GPS channels and other navigational sources including aircraft-based guidance and the good-ol' compass) since GPS is easily jammed by a bigger version of this: http://www.phrack.org/archives/60/p60-0x0d.txt (and yes, I have all the Phrack articles, Anarchist Cookbook and Steal This Book on my keyring USB, eat that security in the airport) and is more difficult to acquire an accurate signal when you're flying long distances at high speed. The "GPS for terrorists" scare is just another scam being run by our government to make us scared of a better version of GPS technology.

  14. Re:Exchange integration? on Google Mobile Phones Debut in Feb? · · Score: 1

    I think it will do IMAP quite well. Oh, you mean that closed IMAP-over-RPC rip-off that doesn't even work well across a firewall? Does any of you even expose that mess to the internet?

  15. Re:Cite your sources on The Economist's Technology Predictions For 2008 · · Score: 1

    A small tip: filter before it even hits the spam engine. My spam engine takes about 20 ms (standard e-mail) to 2s (with attachments that need virus-scanned) to process an e-mail. With 8 processes running on a dual core, we're talking about 10-50 messages per second (1-4M messages/day) that are able to be scanned by the engine and that machine also runs a web server, some applications and IMAP all over SSL. All-in-all we only get about 10000 e-mails (spam included) in a day for this server (one domain) so we have quite some space.

    A few months ago I started noticing that e-mail got delayed because it was taking too long to process and there was all kinds of crap coming through. So I fixed Postfix to check some rbl's and immediately we dropped to about 10% of e-mails that passed through to the filter. Some extra filtering (SARE) and teaching the bayesian database was enough to have virtually no untagged spam coming through to the end-users and I have only had one complaint of a newsletter sent by some ass-hat on a dynamic IP with fake headers that was tagged spam. My users are getting 1000 e-mails in a day, 400 are tagged spam, 100 are too large to be spam and the rest is genuine e-mail.

  16. Re:Question about platform security on Inside a Modern Malware Distribution System · · Score: 1

    There are two reasons for that:

    Windows on XBox is not the same Windows as Windows XP or Windows Vista. It's a very much trimmed down version of Windows 2000. It has parts of the kernel but has none of the shenanigans that are called Internet Explorer, the Explorer shell or ActiveX. Also, you can't surf the internet or send/receive e-mails on an XBox nor can you run executables that have not been sanctioned by Microsoft (it's what we call DRM).

    Now if we had a Windows that was trimmed down to the bones, didn't come with Internet Explorer or ActiveX or other stuff that's easily exploitable so that the browser can be sandboxed or at least modularized, if the user couldn't run anything on the system except for specific programs (well, WE wouldn't like that now would we so forget that) and if we block all HTML e-mail then we would at least be safer and Microsoft would have a good track record regarding security. The problem with their Windows suite is that everything is included and all made by the same company. One exploit in a single component (eg. a media exploit) can be exploited in all programs of the same company since they all share the same code to do the same things (IE, WMP and OE for example). If it was made by a different company that does not trust the external component, it could have been sandboxed and the exploit wouldn't work.

  17. Re:High End customers will not go to this. on Intel Announces Open Fibre Channel Over Ethernet · · Score: 1

    FibreChannel has a lot of copper in a lot of installations, all you need to do is get an SFP module that terminates copper instead of fiber optics. Especially for direct connects between servers and storage (Apple XRAID and Dell solutions for example) or direct connects between switches and storage in the same rack. The interconnects for large SAN's (between switches and backbones) are usually fiber though. Fiber is very expensive and the SFP's themselves are not cheap as well neither are the switches any cost savings are good.

    Copper transceiver is ~$90 for 3m (10ft) including SFP modules while fiber solutions easily costs the same for a single SFP module (you need 2 + cable)

  18. Re:Danger Will Robinson on Bees Can Optimize Internet Bottlenecks · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you've ever "herded" bees, you would know that even if you have a full suit, they'll attack you and be successful if you agitate them. So too with us nerds, if we figure out (and it's quite easy) that you're herding us to a specific patch for ad-revenue or whatyouwant, it will sting no matter who you are and what protection measures you have.

  19. Re:Open source the government on Congressman Hollywood Wants To Make DMCA Tougher · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Theoretically they are somewhat decent forms of rulership. However, as it stands today, practically, the ones with the most money can buy their way into the legislature. And the division of powers and the creation of laws by the rich combined with years and years of bureaucracy have made it so difficult for the poor to which some legislature is against (the rich benefit from stuff like the DMCA because they are the ones that own or can buy the intellectual property these laws protect) that they can't protect themselves against it. Ever noticed how many individuals can get an audience before the supreme court (that's where you go to get federal legislation overturned)? Usually it's an organization with deep pockets and loads of knowledge with people dedicated to that process (like the ACLU, religious groups or companies).

  20. How about XP? Confusing? on Microsoft Re-Brands PlaysForSure · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So now we're going to have Certified for Windows Vista on things that have nothing to do with Vista? Will it work on XP? That's going to be really confusing for their consumers (Microsoft doesn't have customers) especially since that logo will be found on software and hardware.

    I also don't know what music and music players have to do with Vista other than the DRM. They should rename it: "Plays only on Vista, bitches" and then say like... bitches.

    Apparently the front page is now also infected with DRM since I can't post anything and it keeps logging me out.

  21. Re:Kids and computer on A Child's View of the OLPC · · Score: 1

    not "normal" in any sense of the word

    As a fellow autistic person, I take offense that you label your own son under that. Autistic persons are quite normal, they just have certain capabilities further developed while other capabilities have been lagging behind or not at all. The problem that he has getting into first grade is most likely that he simply does not get the idea why he should follow along or he is too bored to put any effort into it. There are schools and lesson plans these days that are made for such persons, back in my day there weren't so I think even now they must be experimental. I remember myself also getting bored in classes, simply not wanting to go to school because I would get yelled at because I couldn't repeat what the teacher has been saying and getting teased for being 'abnormal'. But at tests (which I understand were quite important for my parents and teachers) I performed very well, finishing all tests before anybody else and scoring 100% (my averages were 98% from 1st through 6th grade).

  22. Re:Disaster response? on FCC Requires Backup Power For 210K Cell Towers · · Score: 1

    Well technically it should be simpler and more effective to run a "small" single-site tower (esp. in an emergency) than to run a grid that covers the same area that has random lines running under and above ground that could randomly be cut, over- or abused, short circuited, damaged and that needs extensive operations to be totally replaced. That the cell phone companies cheaped out on their customers while landlines have been installed, regulated and supported historically by local and federal governments (so lots of taxpayers money was sunk in those things) in the time that businesses still were run by a human (and not by an organization of crooks and lawyers (redundant)) that can be held accountable.

  23. Microsoft is like the MAFIAA on Linux To Take Over The Low-End PC Market? · · Score: 1

    They can only compete through shady business practices, bribery and plain old crookery unless they change their ways. They (still) have enough money to stop business for a few years, work on a lightweight kernel (you know, those that run on any x86 with 16MB RAM) and some good software practices that makes it more open (maybe not open source, but at least more transparent) and more within the legal constraints of today's anti-trust requirements. As soon as anyone can build another shell around Windows we'd be far better off since there are a lot of smart people outside of Microsoft.

    I hate Microsoft, not because of their products (although they could do better) but because of the way they treat their CUSTOMERS (we're not consumers) and partners and the way they treat the market ever since they gained major market share. They have to change though, they had it for the last 12 years, they can be happy. If Microsoft doesn't pull an Apple they will go the way of SCO or if they're lucky IBM.

  24. All men are born with that on Gene Found to Explain Repeated Mistakes · · Score: 1

    You can see the result from our repeatedly going to get a girl, getting stung by them (they run off with your money and your best friend) and then trying to find another (or the same) girl to get back with us.

    If you don't have 2 missing genes, you must be gay off course. For most geeks it is unknown whether or not they are missing some genes.

  25. Re:Not a spec of Bias. on Jimmy Wales Says Students 'Should Use' Wikipedia · · Score: 1

    Anybody that is researching stuff and either uses Wikipedia or another encyclopedia (Brittanica) as a single source should indeed be failed for their research project. To ban Wikipedia all together is just a knee-jerk reaction by people that don't know what's going on and don't want to know (kinda like Christian fundamentalists). Schools much rather ban something than to have to do the extra work to verify more than one reliable source. It's bad practice in general and I would not like to be in such school surrounded by incompetent educators (probably why I left school and learned everything I know about computer science, data technology, electronics etc. by myself).

    I myself do use Wikipedia occasionally as a source to make a point, however I also include the sources that Wikipedia sources and there are plenty of other sources where you can find information about a subject.