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User: Greyfox

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Comments · 9,116

  1. Re:Implement locally? on How One Small Company Blocked 15.1 Million Robocalls Last Year · · Score: 1
    There is no situation I could be in where an incoming call is important enough to warrant my immediate attention. There's a guy at work whose wife is expecting a baby, I assume he's made arrangements for immediate contact. Maybe his wife should have a talk with him about working for a company that lets him work from home.

    The old asterisk voice menu system I used to run was pretty good at shutting down telemarketers and robocallers while still letting legitimate callers through. I don't think it'd be so easy to implement on an android phone, although it really should be. Maybe that phone Canonical is working on will have more open standards, but I'm not holding my breath.

  2. Kentucky on Fark's Drew Curtis Running For Governor of Kentucky · · Score: 4, Funny

    If you live outside of Kentucky you might only know them for their derby. What many people don't know is that Kentucky also makes some of the finest jelly around, and that many stores outside the state carry it. So if you've never had the experience, you should pop 'round to your local grocer and ask about Kentucky jelly today!

  3. "Fewer crossbar resources"? on NVIDIA Responds To GTX 970 Memory Bug · · Score: 1

    What kind of talk is that? We need to come up with some decent excuses for why Nvidia can't access the last 500M of RAM! I'm going to suggest that it's global warming! The video card was designed for a room temperature of less than 80 degrees Fahrenheit but ever since global warming, room temperatures have been warmer than that!

  4. If they think the threat is designed to secure passenger/crew compliance for another 9/11 style attack, yeah, I think they would shoot down a civilian aircraft if it didn't respond to their orders. Of course, passengers and crew these days expect any such threat to result in another 9/11 style attack and have proven repeatedly that they will beat the shit out of and quite possibly kill anyone trying to pull shit on their airplane. So the fighter jet is still just multi-million-dollar dick waving. It's probably more to let terrorist organizations know that we will shoot a plane down if we have to, rather than because we expect that we'd actually have to.

  5. I reckon that might go a ways toward explaining why the company's doing so badly.

  6. I Don't Know What You're Talking About on Illinois Students Suspected of Cyberbullying Must Provide Social Media Passwords · · Score: 1

    I'm sorry, sir, I don't have a social media account by that name. The one you're looking at was probably created by the FBI to catch pedophiles.

  7. Re:Sensors are only part of the equation on Samsung's Advanced Chips Give Its Cameras a Big Boost · · Score: 1

    Ooh! I was just reading about this! Dunno if any of that work will actually result in a product that can get better results from simpler lenses, though.

  8. Re:I have grown skeptical of these experiments. on Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others · · Score: 1

    Good thing he didn't figure it out. Dying from radiation poisoning from all those stray neutrons would have been a bummer! Especially when you're sitting on a pile of freshly-transmuted gold (Which would also have a pretty short half-life IIRC...)

  9. No Headshots From Mars on Google Pondering $1 Billion Investment In SpaceX's Satellite Internet · · Score: 2

    90 minute ping times will kill your head shots. All the people in the Mars cities are going to have to log into the Europa WoW servers.

  10. Re:Saudi copes with low prices for at least 8 yrs on Iran Forced To Cancel Its Space Program · · Score: 2
    I remember when those fuckers (OPEC) were terrified to let it go over $25 a barrel. It's not "low" now. It's just low enough to fuck over the competition from fracking wells in North America. Maybe if they keep it where it is for two or three years, the current round of investors in North American fracking companies will lose a fuck-ton of money and be a little more shy about investing in the technology next time OPEC lets it spike up.

    They let it run a little too long this time, though. Hybrids and electrics have had a chance to get a foothold in the market, and some people are already starting to think about how pure electric vehicles and ones with fuel cells could potentially change how electric grids work. It wouldn't take a very big push for countries to start adopting electric vehicles powered with Clean Atomic Energy. And that'll plunge us into the next ice age lickety split, once global warming starts to reverse. Hah, didn't see THAT coming, did you?

  11. Blah Blah Handwave on Astronomers Record Mystery Radio Signals From 5.5 Billion Light Years Away · · Score: 1

    Reaper carrier signal.

  12. Wot? on Sid Meier's New Game Is About Starships · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Kind of like Galactic Civilizations III? I'd guess they'd better hurry if they don't want Sid Meier to steal the wind from their sails.

  13. Re:I have grown skeptical of these experiments. on Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others · · Score: 1
    I thought about that as well, having done a similar exercise in a similar training. It's pretty rare that a team encounters a problem that only one member of that team can solve. I stayed on a project from 2000-2005 and got so familiar with the code base and the capabilities of my team that I could estimate the times pretty accurately based on the team member doing it. The manager could ask me how long something would take and I'd say "About 3 days for me, or about 2 weeks for John." Those numbers could easily be reversed if it was a piece of the code I hadn't looked at very much and John had. Sometimes they'd still elect to have John make that change, if I had several tasks that needed to get done, but it was pretty easy optimize the team's performance by mostly keeping them in the parts of the code that they knew.

    Were there any tasks that only one person could have achieved? Very few, really. There was some work around making the code more stable that I ended up doing. That involved changing how the code was launched, building the code base with electric fence and using a a debugger to find the locations of core dumps. I feel like that's stuff any programmer can do, but the rest of the team didn't seem to have any experience with that process. But agile is also willing to accept a half-assed job if a half-assed job meets the needs of the business. It really doesn't matter to agile if someone on the team gets pulled in every weekend because the program can't run without constant hand-holding, as long as the business' needs are being met.

  14. Yeah on Obama: Gov't Shouldn't Be Hampered By Encrypted Communications · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Just ignore that bit about being secure in your papers and possessions! The Government should be able to take what it wants, for your protection!

  15. We're Not Interested on FCC May Permit Robocalls To Cell Phones -- If They Are Calling a Wrong Number · · Score: 1
  16. Re:Time to abandon normal phones? on FCC May Permit Robocalls To Cell Phones -- If They Are Calling a Wrong Number · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I run some software on my android phone that sends calls with numbers not in my contacts list straight to voicemail. If they're important enough, I'll call 'em back. Most of the time they're some very-low-quality recruiter or the newspaper asking me to pay to have them litter in my driveway.

    Back in the ol' Landline days, I ran a SIP gateway that went to an asterisk system. It would always ask you to press 1 if you weren't a telemarketer and 2 if you were. Option 2 would politely tell you to fuck off. I never got a telemarketing call after that. I'm guessing the VRU confused most of the robo-calling software they used. After a while I got fancy with it and installed SIP software on the cellphone I was using at the time. So if my phone connected up with the wireless network, it would register with the asterisk server and the asterisk server would ring the phone. If the phone was not available because I was away from the house, calls would go straight to voicemail. If you were on a whitelist, the asterisk system would ask you to hold on and then dial out over VOIP and connect the call to my cell phone. The software on my phone now works pretty well but I miss the power I had with Asterisk.

  17. It Already Is on Google Search Will Be Your Next Brain · · Score: 1
  18. So on Micromax Remotely Installing Unwanted Apps and Showing Ads · · Score: 1

    Has anyone ported cyanogenmod to the phone yet? That's my default answer to the heaping helping of unwanted crap that always seem to get bundled with my phones.

  19. ObDilbert on Radio Shack Reported To Be Ready for Bankruptcy Filing · · Score: 1
  20. Reportedly on Google Glass Is Dead, Long Live Google Glass · · Score: 1

    Google is now working on a version of Glass that won't get you punched in the face when you wear it in public.

  21. Asked That All Chat Transcripts Include Emoticons on There's a Problem In the Silk Road Trial: the Jury Doesn't Get the Internet · · Score: 5, Funny

    And the DA was like :-\

  22. Re:Not very broad on Apple Awarded Gesture-Control Patent · · Score: 1

    Bah! I want to unlock my device by doing a sexy dance for it. Stupid Apple...

  23. Gopro 3D on 3D Cameras Are About To Go Mainstream · · Score: 1
    Gopro has one if you're into that sort of thing. It's essentially just two gopros stuck together and synchronizing their video. That might work reasonably well if you don't mind dropping $800+ on Gopro equipment. That's tiny compared to what some A/V dudes spend, but our Gopros are much more likely to not come back from any given excursion. I've lost one already, in the air over a couple miles of farmer fields and golf courses.

    There are some projects underway to adapt Gopro and other cameras to record 360 degree video for Occulus Rift users. I'm keeping an eye on those as a way to fulfill my lifelong dream of making someone wearing a VR Headset vomit. Heh heh heh.

  24. Darl MacBride on Ask Slashdot: Sounds We Don't Hear Any More? · · Score: 1

    Laying claim to all our copyrights. Rumor has it he was killed by a pack of rabid raccoons back in '06.

  25. Re: Mass perjury on Porn Companies Are Going After GitHub · · Score: 1

    So you couldn't sue them for doing it to you, but they could sue you? Seems like a pretty one-sided law.