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User: MightyMartian

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Comments · 19,559

  1. Re:Balancing trademark enforcement with antitrust on Microsoft's Windows 8 App Store Is Full of Scamware · · Score: 2

    Does anybody actually buy apps for Metro?

  2. Re:Renaming never worked to improve reputation on Microsoft Considered Renaming Internet Explorer To Escape Its Reputation · · Score: 1

    If backwards compatibility is so damned important to Microsoft, why does IE11 ignore IE7 compatibility mode settings?

  3. Re:Ubiquitous Common Denominator on Email Is Not Going Anywhere · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There is still some faxing going on at our office, but the ubiquitousness of easy-to-use scanners means more and more of the documents that we used faxes for are just being sent via email. We won a contract a few years ago and literally had the hundred page document faxed to us, and then we signed and witnessed the back sheet and sent it back via fax. The last amendment was done via email. When even the lawyers are walking away from fax machines, it is definitely a technology on the wane.

  4. Re:Reduced rights on Watch a Cat Video, Get Hacked: the Death of Clear-Text · · Score: 1

    Well, there have been a whole host of attacks associated with vulnerable versions of Flash and Java that could at least cripple a profile. I ran up against one of them around 2010. One of the staff at one of our remote locations suddenly had all their files supposedly disappear, desktop wiped out and the like, and a notification about a ransom if they wanted the files back. The user had no admin privileges, so I checked, and sure enough, the other profiles were untouched. What had happened is the auto updater for the workstation had failed.

    Now, while it's true that the operating system itself was not compromised, and no other systems or users on the network were compromised, certainly there was enough control to potentially view confidential data on shared drives. While this was relatively unsophisticated ransomware, it did teach me than merely obsessing about privilege escalation does not lead to a secure system. User profiles and directories can still potentially be vulnerable even if the malware can't root the system.

  5. Re:In before on T-Mobile To Throttle Customers Who Use Unlimited LTE Data For Torrents/P2P · · Score: 1

    If you can ingest it... yes.

  6. Re:In before on T-Mobile To Throttle Customers Who Use Unlimited LTE Data For Torrents/P2P · · Score: 0, Troll

    Silly bastards! You thought Unlimited meant Unlimited... When what it really meant was "This is an awfully good way to part some gullible fuckwit and his cash."

    God bless America, where sociopaths not only succeed, but have in fact become masters of all they survey. Soon will be thanking them for harvesting our organs.

  7. Re:Compelled to freely license? on Larry Rosen: A Case Study In Understanding (and Enforcing) the GPL · · Score: 1

    Thanks to the Supreme Court of the United States, one does not have to physically sign any agreement to be bound by it. Use alone, such as putting a commercially-produced DVD in a DVD player, is sufficient for you to have agreed to the terms.

  8. Re:Compelled to freely license? on Larry Rosen: A Case Study In Understanding (and Enforcing) the GPL · · Score: 1

    The copyright part of the GPLv2 doesn't allow that remedy, but the GPL isn't just a statement of copyright, but is also a license, and the license part of the GPLv2, which you agree to if you use GPL code, does specify what must happen if GPLv2 code is incorporated.

    And if software companies are suddenly saying licenses aren't enforceable, then wow, we've entered a brand new age.

  9. Re:What if it were Microsoft code on Larry Rosen: A Case Study In Understanding (and Enforcing) the GPL · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Indeed. I fail to see why GPL software is being picked on here. You lift someone else's copyrighted code without permission and without abiding by any licensing agreements, you are SOL if you get busted.

  10. Re:Never let the truth on Is "Scorpion" Really a Genius? · · Score: 1

    I have an uncle who is an extremely bright man... and insufferably arrogant and lazy. It's as if he has come to believe his high IQ is an end unto itself, and that somehow the universe was supposed to just bow down and hand him everything on a silver platter. He's an alcoholic who was abusive to his wife and kids (until she finally got up and left). But for years all I'd hear from my aunt was how awfully bright and tortured he was, and if you pointed out he'd barely made a living for years, you got some nonsense about him being a member of Mensa thrown in your face.

    I have no idea what my IQ is, never really cared. Good at some things, struggle with others, but the one thing I'm not is a complete dick. I'll take happiness and a measure of success over some number on a piece of paper any day.

  11. Re:Its nonsense on Is "Scorpion" Really a Genius? · · Score: 1

    Another Shiva Ayyadurai, except with even fewer verifiable accomplishments.

  12. Re:The Register hit the nail on the head on Microsoft Surface Drowning? · · Score: 1

    Don't vote for this kind of garbage with your money.

    And nobody has...

    Whatever happens with the Surface Pro series (and I'd say the odds are stacked against it), RT is dead in the water. It's sitting in the same dark, dank purgatory that the Blackberry Playbook is, and largely for the same reasons.

  13. Re:Politically Correct Science on Geneticists Decry Book On Race and Evolution · · Score: 1

    You do have actual evidence of this, right? I mean, you wouldn't simply be lying to bolster *your* agenda.

  14. Re:Politically Correct Science on Geneticists Decry Book On Race and Evolution · · Score: 1

    Sounds like scientists complaining that they're research has been misused.

  15. Re:Too much cheap hardware out there on Microsoft Surface Drowning? · · Score: 1

    And you don't think Microsoft is trying to do the same with cod services being turned on by default in Windows 8?

  16. Re:Electric Universe on Do Dark Matter and Dark Energy Cast Doubt On the Big Bang? · · Score: 1

    Dark energy is needed to explain the rapid inflation of the universe. Dark matter is matter we know is out there but can't yet identify because it so weakly interacts with normal matter. One is extremely important to explaining big bang cosmology as we currently understand it. The other in certainly is part of the big bang story, but is as much an interest to particle physicist as cosmologists because it represents the possibility of physics beyond the Standard Model.

  17. Re:Oh good lord. on Do Dark Matter and Dark Energy Cast Doubt On the Big Bang? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    First of all, aspects of big bang cosmology were predicted before observation, and second of all, WTF? Theories have to fit observation or they are, by definition, wrong.

  18. H1Bs from New Jersey get a lot of grief.

  19. Re:Piheads are like the guy with a Hammer... on Ask Slashdot: Life Beyond the WRT54G Series? · · Score: 2

    If someone were to come up with a ARM-based board with at least the capability of three or four NICs and a WiFi access, and could run a decent distro like Debian, even if it cost a couple of hundred bucks, I'd snap up three right now. I've built Linux-based routers/VPN appliances using Debian, iptables and OpenVPN, and I can't complain, but they still suck a lot of electricity, and quite frankly, are rather large. I have three Asus RT-N12 routers with TomatoOS on them, and they work great but I've never been able to get the onboard ethernet switch to reliably work as two routed network segments, and they are getting a bit long in the tooth WiFi-wise.

  20. Re:C is replaced on Oracle Hasn't Killed Java -- But There's Still Time · · Score: 1

    There's a helluva lot of C code being written and maintained out there, so no, not even C has been replaced.

  21. Re:Oh noes! on Oracle Hasn't Killed Java -- But There's Still Time · · Score: 1

    From an executable (if I can use the word for byte code) point of view, yes Java is the most portable. I compile once, run in many places. That doesn't really apply to Android or iOS, of course, but since I don't write mobile apps, I don't fret. But I do write apps that run on Windows boxes, Macs and *nix machines, and, as I said, as long as I'm careful to keep things version and platform neutral, my jar file can run on all these platforms. Code portability and executable portability are two different things.

  22. Re:Pauses my 16 GB desktop working on 4K program on Oracle Hasn't Killed Java -- But There's Still Time · · Score: 1

    Jesus. I'm running the Kepler version of Eclipse on a five year old Windows 7 box with 4gb of RAM and I'm not experiencing anything like that kind of slowdown.

  23. Re:Oh noes! on Oracle Hasn't Killed Java -- But There's Still Time · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Java is becoming the new COBOL. It may not get much respect with the hip young cats, but it's ubiquitous and those that know how to code well in it will always have employment.

    To me, it's just a programming language and library ecosystem. There are aspects I don't like, but, providing I don't get too damned clever, I can run my code on all the major platforms, which makes it better than just about anything else out there. For portability, it remains the king.

  24. Re:Objection! on Massive Russian Hack Has Researchers Scratching Their Heads · · Score: 1

    It strikes me that the entire purpose of their pricing structure IS to avoid peer review. They're not letting anyone in the community see the data, or even some statistically useful amount of the data to actually judge what they have.

    It's a scam, pure and simple.

  25. Re:Objection! on Massive Russian Hack Has Researchers Scratching Their Heads · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm getting pretty dubious of the entire claim. Some company wants to sell its security monitoring service, declares "we've got a huge database of stolen credentials, but we're not going to let you see it without paying up first, or at least signing up for a service that will bill you after 30 days."

    I call BS.