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User: wordsnyc

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  1. Re:She's a little crazy on A Naysayer's Take On Windows 10: Potential Privacy Mess, and Worse · · Score: 1

    "She"? Lauren Weinstein is a man. With a motorcycle. A manly motorcycle man.
    Who inexplicably trusts Google just 'cause they pay him every so often.

  2. Re:NIMBY at its finest on US Army To Transport American Ebola Victim To Atlanta Hospital From Liberia · · Score: 1

    Samaritan's Purse, the employer of the two patients, is an evangelical missionary outfit run by Franklin Graham. My guess is that at least part of this trip is due to the Democrats not wanting to have to explain to the electorate why they let two of God's Favorites expire in some sweaty jungle hut. If it's really "for study," they could have flown a couple of African victims over months ago.

    And yeah, it's a really stupid idea.

  3. Re:The FBI is mostly entirely comprised of Mormons on The Sudden Policy Change In Truecrypt Explained · · Score: 1

    Yeah, absurdly non-true today. OTOH, Hoover did prefer Mormons in his inner circle, and the FBI agents I had occasion to meet in the 60s & 70s definitely came across as uptight and straitlaced Mormon types. Fun Fact: in the 60s, FBI agents helpfully drove AMC/Rambler sedans as undercover cars and used sturdy but crappy Beseler Topcon 35 mm cameras.

  4. Re:did you checked the video? on Firefox 29: Redesign · · Score: 1

    You may well know this, but Tab Mix Plus allows you to set custom tab text and background colors for current, unloaded, unread, read, etc., tabs. Quite handy. My "current" tab is always bright green.

  5. Re:The real puzzle on Engine Data Reveals That Flight 370 Flew On For Hours After It "Disappeared" · · Score: 2

    2005: Greek 737 crew succumbed to cabin de-pressurization, plane flew on until out of gas & crashed. Helios Airways Flight 522: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

    Story of multiple pilot errors on top of ground mechanic's stunning mistake. I suspect something similar happened in this case.

  6. Re:nothing new on Large DDoS Attack Brings WordPress Pingback Abuse Back Into Spotlight · · Score: 1

    Which makes you wonder how seriously to take his comment. After all, someone apparently found it cheap, easy and effective to use xml-rpc to commandeer 162,000 WP installations.

  7. Re:Change on "Microsoft Killed My Pappy" · · Score: 1

    But then the dogs would end up in a stir-fry and Uncle DNA would end up causing a weird dog variant of BSE and the top leadership would go insane.

  8. Re:Canonical hires only morons. on Why Do You Need License From Canonical To Create Derivatives? · · Score: 1

    Lighten up. He's just fixing linux until it's broken. For you. And money, of course. Hey, fucking with free software 'til you can convince a few people that it belongs to you beats writing stuff from scratch.

  9. Re:no on An Iowa ISP's Metered Pricing: What Will the Market Bear? · · Score: 1

    Rural Ohio, 35 miles east of Columbus. Our only choice is Frontier DSL, less than 3.5 Mb most of the time, often drops completely if it rains or there is "squirrel activity" on the lines. Netflix works, sorta, on a very small screen. We have DirecTV but soon won't be able to afford it. I read a lot of books.

  10. Headline of the friggin' year. on Millions of Dogecoin Stolen Over Christmas · · Score: 1

    They shoot unicorns, don't they?

  11. Re: OMG enough on The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003 · · Score: 2

    Thousands of contract employees in the past few years have had access to what Snowden revealed. It is likely that all those "secrets" were old news to every major foreign intelligence service. The NSA is like a vacuum cleaner with a punctured bag: they sweep up info and then leak it like a sieve.

    And if Snowden were interested in selling info, he would never have gone public.

  12. Re:HOW?? on Silk Road Shut Down, Founder Arrested, $3.6 Million Worth of Bitcoin Seized · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One of the more significant recent revelations is that the govt uses "parallel construction" in building a cae. If possibly illegal surveillance is used to catch you, they -- after the fact -- construct a legal scenario for how they MIGHT have caught you that will pass muster w/ a judge.

  13. When the clue phone had a dial on Everything You Needed To Know About the Internet In May, 1994 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    [posted as comment to article] I wrote a book for Random House in 1996 called "The Book Lover's Guide to the Internet." I spent the first half of the book explaining how the net worked and how to access it through AOL, CompuServe, Genie, Prodigy, et al. I think I still have a press account on AOL, for what that's worth. Somewhere I even have a pc with Mosaic on it.

    I did an author appearance at a B&N in NYC in '97 that was covered by C-SPAN. First question from the audience was "Isn't it true that the government is watching everything you do online?" I think I answered, "Yeah, probably."

    [Actually, since it was the Village, the questions veered into computers and mind control a bit later on.]

  14. Re:congratulations on RMS On Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before · · Score: 4, Informative

    The man is the real deal. Seriously.

  15. Re:I wonder... on Snowden Nominated For Freedom of Thought Prize · · Score: 1

    I wish you could take a step back and grasp at least a bit of the big picture because this is not some shitty LeCarre or Tom Clancy novel ...

    "Shitty Tom Clancy novel" is redundant.

    John LeCarre is at the other end of the spectrum. His novels happen to be about "spies" for the most part, but they stand on their own among the finest of 20th century English literature.

  16. I wonder... on Snowden Nominated For Freedom of Thought Prize · · Score: 4, Interesting

    how a prize named after Andrei Sakharov is gonna go over with Snowden's landlord, a veteran of the KGB that tormented Andrei Sakharov.

  17. Re:Hey look at us, we are still relevant! on Wikileaks Releases A Massive "Insurance" File That No One Can Open · · Score: 1

    The "conference call" story was bullshit. http://harpers.org/blog/2013/08/anatomy-of-an-al-qaeda-conference-call/

    Quelle surprise.

  18. Re:Obligatory comment on Linux Mint 15 'Olivia' Release Candidate Is Out · · Score: 1

    Using Mint 13 LTS with Mate -- I had been using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, but they stopped updating it in any useful way. Mate is like an improved version of Gnome 2: not beautiful, but no drama, and it lets me easily put things in the panels. Most of what I do is writing, so I figure I'm good until 2015 or whatever.

  19. Re:10 LET M$ = "Microsoft" on Possible Cure For MS Turns Common Skin Cells Into Working Brain Cells · · Score: 1

    I was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis one year after I dumped Windows XP for Linux. Coincidence, or punishment?

    I am also allowed to make New Jersey jokes because I was born there.

  20. Re:Two Reviews Worth Reading on GNOME 3.8 Released Featuring New "Classic" Mode · · Score: 1

    Thanks. I think the Gnome developers should get together for a group picture. They'd sell a million dartboards. I'm just gonna stick with MATE.

  21. Rural Ohio: fuhgeddaboudit. on ITU Aims At 20Mbps Broadband For All By 2020 · · Score: 1

    We get 360 Kbps on a good day with Frontier DSL, the only choice aside from satellite. Frontier bought Verizon's rural operations a few years ago and they refuse to upgrade. You can pay more (~$60-70/mo.) for a "high-speed" tier, but people report that your speed actually drops. Frontier is scum, the poster child for crap internet service.

  22. Re:It's been decades. on Gnome Founder Miguel de Icaza Moves To Mac · · Score: 1

    " In Linux or free unix desktop land you're a slave to software dependencies and chasing down half-assed solutions to common desktop application type tasks."

    Name a few. Seriously. I've used linux for ten years and never spent time "chasing down half-assed solutions to common desktop application type tasks."

    Drivers for obscure novelty items don't count.

  23. She was warned not to on The Accidental Betrayal of Aaron Swartz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    by every lawyer she encountered. Swartz's family pleaded with her not to talk to them. She was an arrogant fool.

  24. Re:Just had a look at the Decatxt keyboard... on CES: Another Chording Keyboard Hits the Market (Video) · · Score: 1

    Wow. It's like Gnome 3 for keyboards. On the bright side, it will now be possible to drop your keyboard in the toilet.

  25. Re:They're already messing with ThinkPad on Change the ThinkPad and It Will Die · · Score: 1

    They've actually been messing with the definition of a ThinkPad. The SL510, a decent consumer-grade machine that looks and feels like a ThinkPad, doesn't have ThinkPad firmware -- it's actually an IdeaPad under the skin. So the Thinkfan fan control utility in Linux doesn't recognize it.