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User: holdenholden

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  1. Re:Yet another rant on hollywood computers, huh? on Top 10 Things Hollywood Thinks Computers Can Do · · Score: 1

    The only real problem with this is that some people could be left thinking that computers do or can do some of these things. But that's more a case of those people not being able to tell fiction from reality, which has nothing to do with how Hollywood tells stories, it has to do with what sort of education and life experience a person has.

    In real life these people are called "judge", "senator", "congressman", and they are creating laws based on their misunderstanding of how computers work. So the Internet is a "series of tubes" and if you "send an Internet" to your staff and they do not receive it until the next day, it is because it got caught behind somebody's movie download.

  2. Re:Same? on Memorizing Language / Spelling Techniques? · · Score: 1

    Words represent abstract ideas. "Red" represents an arbitrary volume in RGB space. "Three" represents an abstraction. "Chair" represents an abstraction.

    In all human languages the number of ideas is roughly the same (except for English, which has 450K curse words in addition). Foreigners learning English (I am one) struggle to learn the correct sequence of letters that produces the word in English corresponding to a particular abstraction. You struggle to learn the particular sequence of chicken scratch that represents the same abstraction in Chinese. Thousands of words in English, thousands of characters in Chinese, I fail to recognize any meaningful difference.

    When I was learning English we were required to write each word 60 times in a row. We were learning between 50 and 120 new words every day. We were learning by heart short (one-page) texts in English which contained most of the new words for the day. As a result, we had a mechanical connection (writing) to the meaning of the word (repeating its meaning while you are writing it), and we also had it committed to memory in context. On top of that, we did weekly and monthly reviews of old words to refresh them in our memory, as well as compositions and translations to force us to apply them to new contexts.

    Then I came to the US and realized that I couldn't speak the language. Write, read: yes; but speaking takes a whole new level of understanding. To get to that level you need full immersion. It takes about 3 months or more, depending on your non-speaking knowledge. Some Chinese students never learn plurals in English even after years in the US. Us foreigners will almost always mispronounce the sound "th", as in "there". Such is life.

  3. Where are the terrorism charges? on Former TSA Analyst Charged With Computer Tampering · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If I did the same thing I would be accused of violating DMCA, across federal borders, with intent to destabilize the National Security. I would be lucky to get away with a life sentence without parole. This guy is getting as much as somebody stealing a really big TV.

  4. Re:Please turn on your electronics? on American Airlines To Offer Wi-Fi In Planes · · Score: 1

    NATO pilot sunglasses?

  5. Re:Oh, that's all right then on Facebook Scrambles To Contain ToS Fallout · · Score: 1

    More than just backups. When you "delete" something your just setting a Is_Deleted flag on their database. As far as facebook is concerned, your information is just as easily available as if you were an active member.

    What if you simply change it, say, to something bogus?

    They might have some kind of version control system, but a version control system is really a kind of backup with a particular purpose.

    This is exactly what you should do. Except that you should phase it in slowly, and the new data should be reasonable (read: believable). The only way you can fight with them having your data and refusing to delete it is to make their data useless by polluting it with noise.

  6. Re:Kudos to NSA on Cryptol, Language of Cryptography, Now Available To the Public · · Score: 1

    Every non-prime is a product of primes. Here we have a number A that is not divisible by any of the numbers in a set of primes. There are two options: 1) The number A is prime. 2) The number A is composite, and the set of primes is missing one prime. In either case we have one more prime.

  7. Re:Ah now I see... on One of the Coolest Places In the Universe · · Score: 1

    When they create a black hole and destroy the earth, they can say "but it was such a cool experiment..."

    Isn't this when the military steps in and offers additional funding?

  8. Re:What about Sony? on Nokia to Acquire and Open Source Symbian · · Score: 1

    The ETA of the UTF is ASAP AFAIK but NTTDoCoMo and MOAT just LOL because IANAL. FTFY.

  9. Re:hot water solar on Hobbyist Renewable Energy? · · Score: 1

    I visited Israel last summer, and pretty much every house is using solar energy for heating hot water.

  10. Re:captchas are obsolete on Google's Audio CAPTCHA Falls To Automated Attack · · Score: 1

    If the bot has a 90% success rate at defeating an audio CAPTCHA, 1 in 5 chance is a much better bet.

  11. Re:Exoplanets on Proposed Telescope Focuses Light Without Mirror Or Lens · · Score: 1

    I don't think 2000 is a part of this century.

    See, when they did the calendar they marked Jesus as being born in the 1st year. So the century goes from year 1 to year 100 inclusive. The new century goes from year 101 to 200 inclusive, and so on.

  12. Re:Photographers and IP on Geek Wins Copyright Lawsuit Against Corporation · · Score: 1

    There is more to photography than taking pictures.

    Equipment is expensive and breaks down. The studio is shooting digital but the prints are not free because they paid for the camera and the camera will die after 50,000 or 100,000 shots and they have to buy a new one. So each digital picture costs money

    The lenses are even more expensive than the body. It is a common practice to amortize a lens over 10 years. Various things can fail, break, and so on, and every lens eventually gets scratches on the front element, rendering it useless. So, we add the cost of lenses.

    What about studio rent, cost of computer to process your pictures, cost of HDD space to archive the pictures?

    What about the time of the photographer? He also needs to eat and somehow needs to make a living.

    I agree with you that the business model where you sell prints (residual income) is outdated, but very few photographers are ready to release the full resolution images (I am one of the latter) . Practically nobody will release the RAW file because whoever owns the RAW is the copyright holder. Good luck trying to enforce copyright claims if the other side already has the RAW.

  13. Politician don't work out? on Some Schools Ending Laptop Programs · · Score: 1

    "Apparently, politicians embracing technology as a quick fix for social problems doesn't always work out."

    So, does that mean that politician don't work out?

  14. Re:Sorry, couldn't resist ... on Gary Kasparov Arrested Over Political Fight · · Score: 2, Funny

    Bin Ladens? I don't understand these units. What is it in Libraries of Congress or football fields?

  15. Re:time to modify the hosts file on Microsoft WGA Phones Home Even When Told No · · Score: 2, Informative

    Add an entry in your (hardware) firewall or router. Most modern routers allow "Block by URL" and "Block by IP" for outgoing connections.

  16. Re:Would this disprove either [a]theism? on Humans Hardwired to Believe in Supernatural Deity? · · Score: 1

    This is essentially Descartes's argument from the "Meditations"

    "I have the notion of perfection, but nothing around me is perfect. Therefore, the idea of perfection was instilled in me by a higher being. Ergo, God exists." (I believe it was in the 5th or 6th meditation).

    Many philosophers have responded to Descartes, but to me his argument is incorrect. In addition to the notion of perfection, we have the notion of "redness". However, there is nothing around us that is perfectly red, in the sense that you can take two red things and most likely they will have different shades of red. So where does the "redness" notion come from? How do we know what is red if we cannot have a basis for comparison? The answer that I can give is that we abstract from multiple instances of things being red to a general notion of being red.

    Now apply the same reasoning to perfection. There are good and bad things and we simply collect all the good ones and based on those we abstract a notion of superior goodness, or perfection. No God necessary. As further support, my notion of perfection is probably different than yours, so this necessarily means that they were either instilled by different Gods, or we just arrived at them through individual (and different) processes.

  17. Re:Nope on IE and Firefox Share a Vulnerability · · Score: 1

    Didn't work for me. Maybe I should have set NoScript to "Allow Scripts (Globally)". Stupid me. As soon as I finish typing this, I will.

  18. Re:How's this work then? on The Taxman's Web Spider Cometh · · Score: 1

    I may be missing something, but I assume that this spider will not be respecting the robots.txt directives.

    If I have a honeypot link on my website that human users don't click, then I would expect the spider to fallow the bogus link and tell me about itself: its IP address, user-agent string, etc.

    I can either deduce the IP block that it is coming from, or the user-agent pattern, if there is some, and then block them on the .htaccess level. I seriously doubt that the robots will be coming from multiple networks, but if they do, repeat the above procedure with the next robot.

    At some point somebody will build a list of IPs or user-agent strings. It is not like the INS will use TOR to hide its IP addresses. So it is just a matter of time. I for one am not afraid to welcome this robot on my site.

  19. Re:still on Why the iPhone Keynote Was A Mistake · · Score: 1

    Try the students you TA first ;-). Next stop: the first year students in your group...

  20. Re:One New Expansion per Year?? on Blizzard Hints At New StarCraft, Launches Burning Crusade · · Score: 1

    I think GP wanted to say that you need to do something other than play WoW. I don't play it myself so I am not completely sure what you are saying, but I got the gist of it. That is not the point, the point is that it is still a game, and there is a whole "real life" thingy out there.

  21. Virtual Credit Card Anybody? on Just Cancel the @#%$* Account! · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is precisely why I use virtual CC numbers. My bank (MBNA, now bought by B of A) allows me to set a limit on the amount of money that can be used, and the expiration date is usually two months in the future. A few companies (most recently Time Magazine) have tried the old trick "Submit a new card number to ensure uninterrupted service", but the truth is, they know that as long as they have a valid CC number they are in a much stronger position.

    On a different thread, I personally found Paypal to be the hardest to cancel. The link is buried deep in the Options menu, good luck finding it, aunt Mary.

  22. Re:Wow! It found exactly what it was paid to find? on Bad Web Sites Can Cause "Mouse Rage" · · Score: 1

    I know this is offtopic, but this close to the end of the discussion I doubt that anybody will care ;-). Anyways, I am surprised you know about the Bulgarian nurses. I thought nobody outside of Bulgaria knew or cared. Kudos!

  23. Re:Missing the point... on Silicon Superconductors · · Score: 1

    Balmer teaches music???

  24. Re:Frequently. on How Often Do You Replace Your Hard Drives? · · Score: 1

    Main screen turn on...

  25. Re:Your Mom would! on Preview of Vista On Old Hardware · · Score: 1

    I admire your use of parentheses.