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Comments · 1,798

  1. Re:Dallas? on Physicists Plan to Build a Bigger LHC · · Score: 1

    hmmm....I wonder where they could build it. Oh - I know. Dallas. The tunnel has been dug so all they have to do is drop in a few magnates.

    I'm all for putting Donald Trump underground, but shouldn't we cover the hole with dirt afterwards?

    Assuming you can tell the difference between Donald Trump and cheap backfill, once you cram him, his toupee, and his ego into that hole then it's pretty much ready to be paved over.

  2. Re:Why is he special? on French Court Orders Google To Block Pictures of Ex-F1 Chief Mosley · · Score: 3, Funny

    Hey, he managed to Godwin the Streisand Effect

    I believe it's called "pulling a Mosley". Or if it wasn't, it is now.

  3. Re:Great... on Gunman Opens Fire At LAX · · Score: 1

    You missed GP's point.

    Yes, I'm pretty sure I did.

    A guy basically walked into an airport and started shooting, and half the comments on slashdot are bent on discussing the description of the weapon used, how he got it, whether or not it was legal, what kind of magazine he was using, what kind of firing pattern he used, and/or how he acquired the weapon.

    I doubt any of that shit mattered much to the shooter, and even less to his victims. So yeah, I don't really get the point.

  4. Re:Great... on Gunman Opens Fire At LAX · · Score: 1

    In which case I'd have to wonder why someone would go through the trouble of procuring an illegal firearm for themselves ... simply to use it in a manner that any legal (and easily obtained) semi-automatic rifle would suffice for.

    I might be going out on a limb, but I'd suspect that the details of local firearms laws aren't exactly high on the list of concerns for someone planning to shoot up an airport.

    It doesn't need to be much more complicated than "what do I have and what can I get?" although I suppose he might have gone to the trouble of personalizing his weapon like that guy who shot up the Navy yard a while back.

  5. Re:Good start on Hackers Break Currency Validator To Pass Any Paper As Valid Euro · · Score: 1

    This is a great hack if your intent is to hire a large number of people to pass counterfeit bills at many machines in the same day,

    This would be a great hack if your intent was to demonstrate the simplest and least detectable attack against an anti-counterfeiting device, which is a logical follow-through on the "need a few minutes alone with the machine" attack.

    I don't find the money-making angle particularly interesting, myself, nor (apparently) do the people who came up with the firmware hack.

  6. Good start on Hackers Break Currency Validator To Pass Any Paper As Valid Euro · · Score: 1

    The next step in the attack process I'd like to see is a design for a counterfeit bill that'll trigger a bug in the firmware causing it to pass the bill. No need for pesky access to the machines in advance.

  7. Re:I'll level with you on Dell Fixes Ultrabook That Smelled of Cat Urine · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's still better than a SlashBI or Slashdot TV submission.

    Granted, it's a low bar.

  8. Re:Conflation on Full Screen Mario: Making the Case For Shorter Copyrights · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Since when did copying an existing work become innovation?

    Ah, but it's not just a copy. It's a copy of something "on the Internet" and/or "in a browser", which according to the US Parent Office is almost certainly innovation.

  9. Re:Of course ROI for iOS ads is higher! on Should Google Get Aggressive About Monetizing Android? · · Score: 2

    Devices running iOS sell at a premium, to people who don't mind paying more for goods they consider superior. Of course people with extra money will be able to buy more advertised products! People who are more cost-conscious will tend to gravitate to Android, and will also likely be more wary of advertising.

    Or, perhaps, people who are easily influenced by advertising tend to buy iOS products.

  10. Re:Too late on BlackBerry Founders May Try To Take Over the Company · · Score: 1

    Its not what I'd want in a personal phone - but for a company with people on the rode who need to check secure documents, central calendars, and corporate email there is a market for them.

    That's kind of the problem, though. When a corporation issues someone a mobile phone, there's a certain desire and expectation that they're going to be carrying it pretty much all the time.

    When that person owns a personal phone that they perceive as "better" than the Blackberry, they start to leave the BB in their jacket/in the car/at home/at the office more and more often, effectively undermining the reason it was issued in the first place. After all, who wants to carry two phones?

    So yes, corporations would prefer that phones work a certain way, but they definitely would prefer that they have a presence on the phones their employees actually carry. There's a huge market there for whoever comes up with a feasible way to balance all that.

  11. Re:Why do we bother with the barbarians? on Saudi Justice: 10 Years and 2,000 Lashes For Internet Video of Naked Dancing · · Score: 2

    What else do they need to do before we decide to stop tolerating their shit?

    Run out of oil.

  12. Re:Why? on Samsung Creates Phone With Curved Display · · Score: 1

    What possible reason is there for this?

    I get this feeling that Samsung's using this sort of thing as a way to drum up business for their display components side. Rather than just banging out a reference device and showing it to device makers (and competitors), they're going the extra few steps to crank out a finished device and put it on the market.

  13. Re:RIP on HP CEO Meg Whitman To Employees: No More Telecommuting For You · · Score: 5, Funny

    The HP Way died on a dark winter's day in 1999, when Bill Hewlett experienced a failure of willpower reminiscent of the fall of Isildur, and failed to drown Carly Fiorina in his swimming pool.

    Well, that's perfectly understandable. If her effect on the pool water quality was anything like what she did to HP, he'd have been stuck with 30000 gallons of toxic waste in his backyard.

  14. Re:Hard to say. on Digital Revolution Will Kill Jobs, Inflame Social Unrest, Says Gartner · · Score: 1

    If Microsoft's demand for MSOffice doubles, they might need a bit more bandwidth but there is no real spiderweb of increased jobs. They just allow more downloads or print more copies.

    Well, that's a gross simplification. There's no spiderweb of increased jobs for a manufacturing surge to directly meet the increased demand, but corporations that get massive bumps in revenue do tend to invest a large chunk of that revenue into jobs, office buildings, sales networks, etc, however indirectly they may be tied to the product undergoing the new level of demand.

    It's also worth pointing out that if the demand for MSOffice doubles, then implicitly the number of users (i.e. jobs) has probably increased significantly. So you're looking at an overall increase (or maybe just reallocation) of wealth happening that enables people to demand a lot more MSOffice licenses.

  15. Re:Regular Expressions on What Are the Genuinely Useful Ideas In Programming? · · Score: 1

    No... if it's perl, there's more than one way to do it, and usually a few more ways to do it wrong. Conservatively, I'd say they've got at least six or seven problems.

  16. Re:Stuff you should learn on What Are the Genuinely Useful Ideas In Programming? · · Score: 1

    I don't know if that's really good advice anymore.

    I'd say that the ability to think at least a couple levels deeper than the abstraction provided by the interface you're using is critical. You may not have to think down to the machine level, and you almost certainly can't outthink the compiler (although you will learn a lot about efficiency using a non-optimizing C compiler), but you should have at least a sense of what things are hard or easy for a given language/system, how those things go wrong, how to diagnose failures, and how to fix them. That, in my opinion, is one of the most fundamental differences between actually programming versus just operating a computer, and that's something you can really only get from grasping how things work under the hood.

  17. Re:After 30 years of programming on What Are the Genuinely Useful Ideas In Programming? · · Score: 1

    Concurrent programming isn't hard especially if concurrency was taken into account when the system was designed. Adding concurrency to a non-concurrent system though is a huge, difficult and trouble-prone process. Especially once bit-rot has set in and you find 10 different ways of getting at the variable.

    This. I find it utterly baffling that in this day and age (and I mean in the last approx 15-20 years when multi-threading support in commercial operating systems has been available, if not quite perfect), there are still computer programmers who have trouble grokking it.

    I was talking to someone about how they were saying the next version of a rather large Java application was going to be a lot faster.

    me: How's that going to happen?

    him: Because they're going to add multi-threading.

    me: Why in the world didn't they make it, a large Java application, multi-threaded in the first place?

    him: They said they were kinda new to Java and multi-threading is really hard to get right.

    me: (once I picked up my jaw) They're about to discover an entirely new level of "really hard"

  18. Re:What moron judge allowed this? on Lavabit Case Unsealed: FBI Demands Companies Secretly Turn Over Crypto Keys · · Score: 1

    Protecting *all* of your users or shutting down to avoid betraying one of them has a philosophical elegance about it in my mind.

    Pretty much my line of thought.

    Unfortunately, as a practical, sustainable business plan it depends on your users to not do things that would cause someone force you to make the choice.

  19. Re:What moron judge allowed this? on Lavabit Case Unsealed: FBI Demands Companies Secretly Turn Over Crypto Keys · · Score: 2

    In other words, when LavaBit wouldn't provide them information on a single account, the fed escalated to the nuclear option.

    It sounds like LavaBit's security was essentially an "all or nothing" situation, though. If they compromised just one of their users, then effectively none of their users were secure anymore.

    Obviously, the feds weren't too keen on getting "nothing".

    Not sure how LavaBit could have architected things to not be in this position. Maybe giving each individual user a subdomain with its own separate SSL server key would allow a specific user to be targeted without breaking everyone's encryption. But quite frankly, who in their right mind would depend on a secure e-mail provider who'd design things for their own legal convenience?

  20. Re:Remember all those times Bush blocked... on German NSA Critic Denied Entry To the US · · Score: 1

    Yup. No abuse of power or civil liberties there. Nosirrre bob.

    Hmmm... This "Norisrrre bob" you're speaking to sounds like an Islamic name. Are you communicating with terrorists, citizen?

  21. Re:Why all of a sudden? on Why iOS 7 Is Making Some Users Feel 'Sick' · · Score: 1

    But this has to be a very tiny percentage of iOS users.

    With Apple's sales, a very tiny percentage of iOS7 users is a heckuva lot of people. If the iOS7 versus iOS6 changes increased that number by, say, a factor of five, you might be looking a decent size city worth of people suddenly finding iOS uncomfortable to use.

  22. Re:Why all of a sudden? on Why iOS 7 Is Making Some Users Feel 'Sick' · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not to be insensitive to people with vestibular disorders, but why is this the first I'm hearing about this?

    In a nutshell, vestibular disorders are weird and the triggers are subtle. Certain movements won't bother most people, but if you smooth them out, adjust the speed, tweak the effect, things get weird.

    I went through an episode of labyrinthitis (an inner ear problem) a few years ago, and it was crazy what would and wouldn't trigger problems. For example, I could watch videos of someone running a dog in agility, but first-person video of any kind was nasty and when that tsunami trashed Japan, I nearly hurled trying to watch footage of the waves on Youtube. I could actually run my dog in agility, spinning and sprinting and and dodging and pretty much anything physical while standing up, but being in a moving vehicle or even just bending over... ugh.

  23. Re:I might not be here for Hurd 1.0 on GNU Hurd 0.5, GNU Mach 1.4, GNU MIG 1.4 Released · · Score: 2

    30 years for Hurd 0.5, so 1.0 will be available in 2043?

    Well, no. Being a Unix replacement, I'd expect it sometime around 1975.

  24. Re:Add this to Cars on Microsoft Shows Off Its Vision For Gesture-Controlled PCs · · Score: 3, Funny

    Now, imagine, if you will, that same freeway with half the 'drivers' gesticulating wildly trying to get the last Justin Bieber track to play again.

    Violence will ensue.

    If things even get so bad that half the drivers on the freeway want to hear Justin Bieber again, I'd think a good culling would be a desirable outcome...

  25. Re:Oh for crying out loud on Google's Scanning of Gmail To Deliver Ads May Violate Federal Wiretap Laws · · Score: 1

    So, the fix for a system receiving smtp traffic is to force the sender to use http in real time?

    No, it's to reply with an e-mail containing a link to an EULA they have to agree to before the intended recipient sees what was sent. Unfortunately, it's not ideal if the e-mail isn't originated by a person; welcome to the Internet-of-lawyers-and-or-idiots...

    You understand smtp is a store and forward protocol right?

    Yep.