Slashdot Mirror


User: BlueParrot

BlueParrot's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
1,259
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 1,259

  1. Re:Where are you going to go? on EA Building Microtransactions Into All of Its Future Games · · Score: 1

    There's nothing stopping you from setting the difficulty a bit lower and just using items you found yourself. The game has a 10 point difficulty scale, so if you find it too difficult without using AH items, just set the difficulty down. This is by design. People who want to use the auction house can set the difficulty high and bid for items. If you don't like that just set the monster power a bit lower so you can beat the game without resorting to auctioned items.

  2. Re:Radioactive material != Nuclear weapons on How To Safeguard Loose Nukes · · Score: 1

    If you were to steal it, grind it up

    You know, of all the things I might try to steal, a Co-60 source is not exactly the most attractive. May as well try to french kiss a black mamba.

  3. Re:Cloud on Tesla, Ford, Amazon Hint At Cloudy Future For Cars · · Score: 3, Insightful

    To be honest I would trust amazon more than the average driver.

    The main issue is probably privacy, but the internet is doing a good
    job of getting rid of that anyway.

  4. Re:I Got It! on Deloitte: Use a Longer Password In 2013. Seriously. · · Score: 1

    My preference is to mix a few languages and technical terms.

    nekozuki catbus ibuprofen shutzpa

    Even if you know how I generate these passphrases the number of combinations is staggering.
    Since the majority of language can use latin script you easily have a million or more possibilities
    for each word, giving more than 10^24 potential combinations, and that does not take into consideration
    that I am more than happy to include things like "catbus", which is not a real english word.

  5. Re:Wonder how? on Bangladesh Slaughters 150,000 Birds After Worst H5N1 Virus Outbreak In 5 Years · · Score: 1

    It was the other way around.

    The companies that built the ovens for Auschwitz and the other concentration camps originally built crematoria ovens for disposing of livestock carcasses. When the Nazis needed to dispose off large numbers of bodies from the concentration camps they initially burned them on pyres, but eventually they contracted the company A.J. Topf & Sohne which had experience with building crematoria ovens for livestock carcasses.

    This was fairly typical for the holocaust. German companies profiteered extensively from the camps. A subsidiary of IBM produced the machines which kept records of prisoners. IG Farben, which was part owned by Bayer, held the patent for Zyklon B, the Cyanide pesticide used in the gas chambers (the poison was actually produced by ther companies however ), and many other german companies profited from slave from the camp's inmates.

    That's part of what made it one of the worst genocides in history. They did not simply kill millions of people. They turned mass murder into an industrialised business venture.

  6. Re:Excellent. on Swedish Pirate Party Presses Charges Against Banks For WikiLeaks Blockade · · Score: 1

    It's a political move. FI may not have any teeth, but by forcing them to address the matter it is bound to get at least some publicity. If they actually end up doings omething about it then that's just a bonus.

  7. Re:Yeah right... on MPAA: the Impact of Megaupload's Shutdown Was 'Massive' · · Score: 1

    You can do quite a bit more than that as Colbert showed.

    Step1: Donate to charity controlled by your friend/uncle/misstress
    Step2: Claim tax deduction
    Step3: Charity buys service from shell company A
    Step4: Shell company A donates to SuperPAC
    Step5: Super pac spends a small fraction of acquired money on campaigning to seem legitimate
    Step6: SuperPAC closes and sends the money to shell company B
    Step7: Shell company B send money to shell company C, not even the IRS needs to know
    Step8: Enjoy your tax free income.

  8. Re:Canada on Phil Zimmermann's New Venture Will Offer Strong Privacy By Subscription · · Score: 4, Informative

    Sweden has few effective laws for private citizens. It's explicitly codified into law that the authorities are allowed to snoop on your communications. It's a bit better than England ( where you can be jailed for not giving police your encryption keys ) , but there's really no good way to defend against a hostile government. If you truly want to avoid government meddling with your communication your best bet is probably hiding in plain sight. I.e, make sure you and your communication appear dull enough that your government can't be bothered to look at it.

  9. Re:Cannot Understand his Customers on Online Pharmacy Pioneer Arrested In Florida · · Score: 1

    5. Local regulatory agencies have treated doctors like drug dealers, making them reluctant to prescribe medicine to people who need it, forcing patients to turn to the black market simply because doctors are forced to care more about covering their own ass than treating the sick.

    Oh yes I'm bitter. If you had been left to suffer and forced to buy medicines from shady sources you'd be pissed too. No, I'm not a hypocondriac, I eventually found a doctor with some spine, and now I can get help legally. No, she didn't just give me a prescription because I demanded it, she did so because offical guidelines say that is how people with condition should be treated.

    I can go buy hundreds of cigarettes whenever I want and smoke my lungs to ash, but a comparably safe and non-adictive medicine is treated as if I were doing heroine.

  10. Re:Alternate interpretation on Online Pharmacy Pioneer Arrested In Florida · · Score: 1

    Transsexual here.

    I was denied treatment for years due to the psych community having quite a few medieval-minded assholes in it ( no, I'm not just refusing to listen to them, we're talking about the kind of people who think there's something wrong with a girl who doesn't liek mascara ). As a consequence I basically had the choice between spending every night wishing I was dead or obtaining estrogen in alternative ways. Four years afterwards I finally managed to find a psych with a somewhat more sane attitude towards gender, and now I can get the medicines legally, but frankly I have a hard time blaming these people for filling a void that authorities have created with very little regard for those who get fucked over because of it.

  11. Re:Scientific review on Why Groundwater Use May Not Explain Half of Sea-Level Rise · · Score: 1

    Clue: No one was putting forth the theory that the Earth was warming due to mankind's actions 120 years ago, so unless you can post a paper stating otherwise, trot that troll elsewhere.

    That's wrong. Arrhenius himself noted that human activities would likely prevent another ice-age from ever happening. He figured this was a positive thing, but did not considered the consequences of excessive warming.

  12. Re:utter pointlessness on Blocking Gun Laws With Patents · · Score: 1

    DNA evidence ought to be admissable, but it should not be presented as conclusive proof.

    Basically people watch too much CSI where the whole case comes down to one amazing
    science trick. In the real world cases frequently rest on several pieces of evidence, each
    one of which may not be enough on its own to secure a conviction, but when taken together
    make up damning amounts of evidence.

  13. Re:Why is a bonus a problem? on European ISPs Ask ITU To Limit Net Neutrality · · Score: 1

    Here's a final question - name a single network neutrality bill that would prevent Comcast from doing what they are doing, and why.

    Strenghten antitrust legislation adn start to actually enforce it with some teeth.

  14. Re:obligatory xkcd.... on How Many Seconds Would It Take To Crack Your Password? · · Score: 2

    My personal favourite is to translate some of the words into random languages after I have made the passphrase. It's not difficult to learn a few foreign words, but since the attacker doesn't know which languages you used he gets the fun task of trying ALL languages that use the latin script. Since there is more than 100 languages using latin characters in the world, even a moderate dictionary size of 10000 or so would give you a total of more than a million words, resulting in the generated passphrase having in excess of 10^24 possible combinations. If the attacker can try a billion passphrases per second, it would take 31.7 million years to try them all.

  15. Re:Time for CorrectHorseBatteryStaple to catch on on MD5crypt Password Scrambler Is No Longer Considered Safe · · Score: 1

    Just generate pass phrases for your users. That way they can't use the same shitty password on every site.

  16. Re:Bad math on MD5crypt Password Scrambler Is No Longer Considered Safe · · Score: 1

    There are 95 ASCII characters, which makes 95**8 = 6,634,204,312,890,625 possible 8 character passwords

    Or you can use 6 random words from the oxford english dictionary, which gives you more combinations that the number of nanoseconds in the estimated lifetime of the universe, while still producing a passphrase that is feasible for a human being to remember.

  17. Re:Options on Windows 8: More EULA, Fewer Rights. · · Score: 1

    You do if you are a gamer.

    Never stopped me: http://i.imgur.com/qG2qw.jpg

    Mass Effect 3, World of Warcraft and Heroes of Newerth also run just fine.

  18. Re:Sure, but... on Sidestepping Tactical Nuclear Weapons Limits With Strategic Bombs · · Score: 1

    There are, certainly, some unambiguously 'strategic' weapons, of the 'bloody huge thermonuclear warhead on an ICBM'

    Many of the ICBM's have selective yield, and even with the max yield they are not particularly powerful for nukes to be. The most powerful weapons are the ones dropped by aeroplanes, and they typically have megaton yields.

  19. Re:XKCD on Your Passwords Don't Suck — It's Your Policies · · Score: 1

    My PRNG yielded:
    74019,69542,70792,42388,32916,63978,55632

    which maps to:
    purchasing persecute platitudes escalations consummation mum intoned

    Your pass-phrase is quite tricky to remember and type reliably. A better approach is to use different languages in order to increase the dictionary size. If you pick at random among the languages that use latin script, you can easily get a dictionary size above a million words. Just 4 such words would give a number of combinations exceeding 10^24. Even if you could try a thousand trillion combinations per second, it would still take in excess of thirty years to try them all.

  20. Re:My prof dranks coffee like water on NIH Study Finds That Coffee Drinkers Have Lower Risk of Death · · Score: 1

    Sometimes things that are harmful in one way can help in other ways.

    Taking coffee as an example, it is known that heavy coffee consumptions
    stunts breast development in women. As it happens, the same effect also
    reduces her risk of developing breast cancer.

  21. Re:False positives and false negatives ... on FDA Panel Backs First Rapid, Take Home HIV Test · · Score: 1

    If you RTFA, for every 100 actual cases, it misses 7. That's 7 people who will think that they're HIV-free, and possibly spread it to others.

    7% false negatives is a *terrible* number.

    No it isn't. If everybody used this test, and the people who tested positive seek treatment, then you just reduced the transmission rate among the people who would not otherwise get tested by 93%.

    I often run in to arguments like this when it comes to vaccinations as well. Many vaccines don't offer perfect protection. They just reduce the probability that a disease will spread in the population by a sufficient amount that you don't get major outbreaks, and thus the illness eventually dies out since it cannot spread effectively. More specifically, if new infections occur at a rate that is lower than the rate at which infected people are discovered and treated, the the total number of infections decrease. Since untreated HIV will eventually start showing symptoms, people will eventually get diagnosed, so the trick is to bring the overall infection rate down enough that you're more likely to be diagnosed and treated than you are to spread it to others.

    Thus while highly preferable, it need not be perfect. If your measures to combat the illness cause a persistent decrease in the number of people infected, then the disease will eventually die out simply because it cannot spread.

    As it happens that is also one of the reasons why you want everybody to have access to healthcare.

  22. Re:HIV transfer. on FDA Panel Backs First Rapid, Take Home HIV Test · · Score: 2

    It's been found through studies of cases like yours that 'vanilla' couples sex, where the partners are otherwise healthy apart from one being HIV+ have well under a percent (.3% IIRC) rate per act of transmitting HIV.
    For anal, this rises to 30%.

    Your numbers are WAY off. The figures are closer to 0.1% and 1% respectively. See this study for details:
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1881672/?tool=pmcentrez

    Other studies have been done for Gay couples and various groups, and the numbers come off similar. They may be off by a a small factor depending on exactly how the study was done, but that 30% figure you quote is nonsense.

  23. Re:Will it work? on Inexpensive Nanosheet Catalyst Splits Hydrogen From Water · · Score: 5, Informative

    Your way to do it probably had shitty efficiency. 1-2% of the electrical energy probably ended up used to produce hydrogen. With fancy catalysts and carefully controlled temperature, it's possible to improve that efficiency by a factor of 30 or so, with the best methods now getting efficiencies between 30 and 60%. The problem is that those schemes tend to either rely on very expensive catalysts (like platinum ), or they are chemical processes which produce CO2 as a by-product ( steam reforming, in which hydrocarbons are reacted with water to form hydrogen and CO2 ).

    What the article seems to speak of is that they've found a catalyst that drastically improves the efficiency of electrolysis, without resorting to expensive materials.

  24. Re:Define "charges" on Auto Makers Announce Electric Car Charging Standard · · Score: 1

    Better question is how many KWh can it deliver in 15 mins? Since vehicle battery capacities vary significantly, that's the relevant question.

    Dunno about this particular technology, but the Japanese are standardising on a system that can deliver 60kW, with experimental designs up to 120kW.
    In comparison, the Tesla's battery pack is about 50kWh, so the 120kW system should be able to charge it to 80% in 20 minutes.

     

  25. Re:Its mass is comparable to that of a lithium ato on New Particle Discovered At CERN · · Score: 4, Informative

    It gets even more amusing when you consider that a proton has a mass of about 938MeV/c , whereas the three quarks it is made up doesn't even add up to 10MeV/c. The binding energy of protons and neutrons is immense compared to the particles they are composed of.