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User: 140Mandak262Jamuna

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  1. Bio feed back and thought controls? on Bionic Arm With Muscle Emulation · · Score: 1

    Will they attach a few electrodes to someone's head and try to control that thing using bio feed back? Why not the CEO's head? I am not only Bionic Arm Club President, but also a user?

  2. Re:WTO wont grant it. Antigua will capitulate. on Antigua May Be Allowed To Violate US Copyrights · · Score: 1
    US never bothered about whether or not rest of the world agrees with it or respects. The real fight is between U.S. gambling industry using the anti-gambling religious conservatives to make Washington write laws banning internet gambling and other such competition. The internet gambling interest is using Antigua as a cats paw in the WTO. It is really these two fighting. As long as these hoodlums keep the fight among themselves, the cops will stay out of it, and they can sort it out among themselves. If the fight threatens to spill over in to the nicer neighborhoods, the cops will be sent in.

    Will it make US look more like a bully? yeah, sure. But Washington does not care. Frankly, not acting like a bully is highly over rated. For example, one large country that is very much preoccupied with world opinion and trying not to look like a bully is India. What did it get? Tiny, two bit countries like Bangaladesh and Pakistan are taking pot shots at it, routinely kidnapping its border police, and sending in terrorists to fight a proxy war. So to a certain extent, Washington's "I dont care what you think of us" attitude is justified. It might over do it and stick it to some who might help us. But world opinion, all by itself, is not worth much.

  3. WTO wont grant it. Antigua will capitulate. on Antigua May Be Allowed To Violate US Copyrights · · Score: 1

    WTO wont give a blanket permission to Antigua to violate American copyrights. As long as the dispute is between US Govt and US Gambling industry using Antigua as a cats paw, others will shrug and look the other way. Let them mess with Big Name US corporations and Hollywood the US Govt will come down on them like a ton of bricks and choke the tiny country off. Simple things like issuing a travel advisory against visiting Antigua will kill their tourism. Small amount of grit in the financial sector could harm their trade. It will be suicide for Antigua to allow the dispute to escalate. I am very sure some low level U.S. diplomats are explaining to the Hotel and Tourism minister of Antigua what bad things could happen if the law suite against USA is allowed to proceed any further. Expect the issue to die a quiet death in the coming years.

  4. Explain 1 hour access to the remote on Breaking a Car's Cipher · · Score: 0
    I glanced at the math heavy PDF. Could not find out what they do with "one hour access" to the keys. The summary says, "while stored in your pocket". But the key fob does not respond to signals. It is an emitter, not a receiver or transponder to my best knowledge. Thus they should be needing more than remote access to the key.

    If they need to press the key some 3600 times, intercept the emitted code to calculate the cipher key, and they claim "one can press the unlock once a second, so about one hour access to the key is needed" then it sounds a lot less ominous. IMO.

    Still valets, and mechanics will have access to the key fob for an hour and may be they can get the cipher key.

    The rate at which electronics shrinks, I would not be surprised by a 128 bit or even a 256 bit cipher keys coming out soon, without any other change to the algorithm.

  5. Steve Jobs is drooling already on U of CA Constructs 220 Million Pixel Display · · Score: 1

    His Grandness Stevus Jobus has ordered that this new 220MP display to be the default monitor for the next release of iMac.

  6. Wish more people would fess up their bafflement on Strange Asteroids Baffle Scientists · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I just wish people in other fields, politics, religion, law, philosophy, etc would admit when they are baffled as readily as the scientists do. For all the amount of explanations they offer and advance understanding of nature, these scientists seem to delight on admitting they are baffled at the drop of a hat.

  7. Re:The Turbo Pascal guy? on Science Blogger Sued for Unfavorable Book Review · · Score: 1

    was reading a review in amazon about this book by a reviewer named phillip khan. Not my best day confused the name of the reviewer with the author.

  8. The Turbo Pascal guy? on Science Blogger Sued for Unfavorable Book Review · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I vaguely recall the first really popular IDE for DOS machines was Turbo Pascal written by someone named like Philip Khan. Same dude?

  9. Re:hmm. on Science Blogger Sued for Unfavorable Book Review · · Score: 1
    That is the pitfall of anecdotal evidence. For every person labeled a crackpot who was later exonerated, there would be 10 or 100 persons, labeled crackpots in their time, later confirmed as one or at least never exonerated by history.

    Statistically if a person is labeled crackpot the odds are more than 10 to 1, he/she is really a crackpot. Another thing to remember about the "labeling" is how many times the label is confirmed by independent analysis. If one clergyman declares someone a crackpot and a million of his flock repeat it, still it counts as one "crackpot" label. If 10 scientists independently call some theory crackpot, it would count as 10 crackpot labels. The odds of something labeled quackery by many many scientists being exonerated later by history, is very very low.

    The number of crackpots are so high that most patent offices will not patent a device that is a perpetual motion machine (of class I that produces more energy than consumes it, or class II a machine that runs for ever without additional energy input).

  10. Re:When Wealthy Christians and Crackpots Attack! on Science Blogger Sued for Unfavorable Book Review · · Score: 1

    OMG! You are going to be sued now ;-)

  11. Re:It is bowlderized, not censored. on Wal-Mart Ditches DRM, Keeps Censorship · · Score: 1

    I plead guilty as charged. I remember that eponym from my college GRE prep days and I misremembered what he expurgated. I even got the spelling wrong. But I did verify the link to wikipedia, and when the cursory reading of the wiki article showed I was on the right track I hurriedly posted it. Later I did read the wiki article and realized I was wrong to claim he edited the Bible. I dug up my old vocab book by Rosenblum and it too agrees with wiki. Bowdler edited Shakespere, not Bible. Sorry for the mistake.

  12. Re:It is bowlderized, not censored. on Wal-Mart Ditches DRM, Keeps Censorship · · Score: 1

    Both spellings have dictionary entries (onelook.com, wikipedia redirection).

  13. It is bowlderized, not censored. on Wal-Mart Ditches DRM, Keeps Censorship · · Score: 4, Informative
    The correct word to use is bowlderize, not censored. That word is an eponym named after Thomas Bowlder. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowlderize

    That dude thought the Holy Bible has sections too racy for children and young people and so he brought out an edited version.

    Censorship is when the Govt uses its power to silence an expression. As others have noted, Walmart is not preventing the record companies from selling profanity laden songs in other places.

  14. Re:What is it doing? on Playing Music Slows Vista Network Performance? · · Score: 1

    The packet sniffer running in a Vista machine with properly signed vista drivers reports no strange packets. Of course outside, a completely untrusted machine running on untrustable OS with unsigned drivers might report large number of packets being sent to RIAA, but who you gonna believe, holy MSFT or some strange machine?

  15. It was no gum ... on Student Finds 5000-Year-Old Chewing Gum · · Score: 0

    ...It is the fossilized apple that Eve bit into in the Garden of Eden.

  16. Loss of SSN should not be a serious issue. on Colleges Wrestle With Thumb Drives · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Why losing a drive containing SSN of some 199 old students become a serious issue? In this day and age of information storage, it is high time we view SSN as public information. The number of strangers who have legal access to my name, address and social security number is staggering. Doctor's office staff, university offices, payroll department of employers ...

    Why should I be held responsible if someone recites my name, rank and serial number correctly and obtains a loan based on that very simple trivial fact? The problem is in the credit industry that wants to lend money at a moments notice to people before their impulse to borrow fades away.

    All we need is a very simple change of law about default reporting. Let the companies lend without checks if they want to, it is after all their money. But they should not be able to report a loan as overdue or unpaid or in default without going through due diligence to verify that the person they are accusing of being a deadbeat is really the correct person.

    Let us change the burden of proof. Currently the victims of ID theft have to prove that ID theft occurred. Let us change it so that, it is the lender who should prove that ID theft did not take place.

    Then it wont matter if some department loses a hard disk containing million SSNs. Will it?

  17. Is it significant? on ODF Vs. OOXML File Counts On the Web · · Score: 1
    How long will it be before MSFT posts a massive number of ooxml docs on line to spin the numbers? How long will it take to write a script to convert a bunch of doc files and translate them into ooxml and post it in some site or the other?

    What would be significant is, if public in some county or school district sues the Govt agency claiming, they have a fundamental right to get Govt documents in a format that is not saddled with proprietary burdens, they should have the right to process these docs and forms without paying royalties, license fees or even signing EULA with private third parties. That would be significant.

    Count the number of docs, MSFT has enough money to churn out and post a million ooxml docs in two days.

  18. One way memory gets erased is by taking oath on Another Way To Erase Memories · · Score: 1, Funny

    There is some anecdotal evidence that when people take the oath to tell the truth and nothing but the truth in front of Senate investigation committees, their memory gets instantly erased. Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld, Casper Weinberger, George Schultz, Robert McNamara, ...

  19. War on standards on The CD Turns 25 Today · · Score: 2, Interesting
    It was the time of the war between Betamax and VHS. Surprised CD side too was not racked by similar warfare.

    Now a days people are so confused by so many warring, deliberately incompatible media. CD-R, CD-RW was one schism, that looks trivially comprehensible compared to the acronym soup of DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD-ROM, etc. Then the HD/Bluray war.

    People eschewed Betamax, the memory stick, the mini-DVD all Sony offerings. One would think people really understand the need for open standards, supported by multiple vendors, all fighting to get your business and thus delivering all the glorious things free markets and competition are supposed to deliver. But when Microsoft deliberately muddies the waters by confusing the "choice among vendors and products" with "choice in standards" people don't reject it summarily.

    May be because hardware is tangible and people get a feel and they have demanded and obtained complete interoperability in brake fluids, car tires, radios and garden hoses, they expect the same in electronics. It would take a while before the consumer understands the similar need for fully open standards for software too. Till then MSFT will continue to rake in , wait a minute. When did I go so off topic?

  20. Re:Dilbert photocopies on Share a News Story With Coworkers, Pay a Fine · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You are no Wally, Maximum Prophet. If you were, you will post Dilbert strips in your own office and rat on your employer to collect that six grand. If the employer tries to collect that money from you, you would dodge it by saying the company had no explicit policy prohibiting it.

  21. Simple deal coming soon on Adobe May Launch Office Rival · · Score: 1

    MSFT will decide to softpedal Silverlight. And Adobe will let the "office suite" remain a vaporware. Like some underhanded deal that must have happened between Intuit and MSFT about Quicken.

  22. Re:HuH? on A First Look At Red Hat Developer Studio · · Score: 2, Funny

    You think he knows more about the words than you do? Those who know, do. Those who don't talk.

  23. What if the customers became savvy? on Cross-Platform Microsoft · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What if the third party developers develop tools for Silverlight in Linux and these tools become very important for the customers? MSFT can release the next version and wait for the previous one in Linux to die a quiet death. But if the customers refuse to budge? Could this happen. I know it is almost wishful thinking but still, why would the customers continue to play the same game after knowing so much about the tactics of MSFT?

  24. What? Why is this on the front page? on Verizon vs. the Needham Fire Department · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I thought this would not even merit a place in the Firehose. Come on guys, if you keep posting such rubbish, I have to log out and do some work.

  25. Reality check time for Linux fans. on Olympic Committee Chooses XP Over Vista · · Score: 2, Interesting
    If a company with that much cash at hand and a willingness to break rules and fight a no holds barred battle finds it this difficult to dislodge XP from the desktop, Linux fans, we have a much more formidable task ahead. When people are asking, "Will 2009 be the Year of Vista?", it is difficult to take the talk about "the year of Linux Desktop" seriously.

    I don't know what would be a reasonable expectation for Linux market share at consumer level in the year 2010. 3%? 6%? 12%?