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User: amoeba1911

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  1. unlimited on Data Hogs: the Monsters Carriers Created · · Score: 1

    These idiots need to stop selling "unlimited" because there is no such thing. Even an all you can eat buffet isn't unlimited, it's limited to what you can eat. There is no such thing as "unlimited" anything, especially bandwidth. They need to specify maximum download rate, in terms of bytes per second as well as bytes per months. T-Mobile specifies their bandwidth is limited to 2GB per month (for my cheap plan) and I am very happy with that. Knowing that I have X amount of bytes is better than thinking there is no wall and running into a wall the hard way. Avoid like the plague anything that claims to be "unlimited" because it is a blatant lie.

  2. it has rounded corners on Vizio Plans To Undercut The Market For All-In-One PCs · · Score: 5, Funny

    I sense Apple lawsuit coming, Apple owns the copyright on rounded rectangles.

  3. Airbus comments... on World's Largest Passenger Plane May Be Unsafe, Some Say · · Score: 1

    NASA said it was perfectly safe for space shuttle to take off in freezing cold weather. Sometimes the managers don't want to look like idiots so they make up shit without knowing what an o-ring is.

  4. Re:Oh, Please Go Fuck Off, Police State. on Edison Would Have Loved New Light Bulb Law, Says His Great-Grandson · · Score: 1

    Thank goodness for your tin foil hat.

  5. doomed to fail? on HP Wanted $1.2B For WebOS and Palm · · Score: 2

    It was doomed to fail from the start despite being technologically superior at one point.

    It was cuter than the first iphone and was way more usable, but it lacked the cult following required to sell the cute factor. It was better hardware than whatever crappy selections android had at the time, but it wasn't as open and it didn't have the native plethora of google apps so it didn't get the geeky nerdy following. It was a million times more useful than the blackberry, but it didn't have the support of businesses.

  6. Re:Raspberry Pi on Doctorow: the Coming War On General-Purpose Computing · · Score: 1

    Apple's artificially placed restrictions don't stop the device from being a personal computer. Car analogy: A car with a boot (wheel lock) is still a car. Apple's handheld personal computers (iphones and ipads) are still personal computers, despite being dumbed down to make them usable for average joe six-pack.

  7. Re:Raspberry Pi on Doctorow: the Coming War On General-Purpose Computing · · Score: 1

    Just because it's not an IBM PC doesn't mean it's not a PC. IBM revolutionized the PC, but there were (and still are) many varieties of personal computers, including Commodore, Atari, Apple, etc. They're all personal computers, even the Commodore 64 and Apple II.

    There's a different definition of PC, and that's short for "IBM PC", and it's a personal computer with specific characteristics: x86 CPU. This is clearly not what they meant. (oddly enough, this makes all of the newer Apple computers IBM PC clones)

    Also... "locked down too much" uh no. If you can install your own rom on it, it's no more locked down than your desktop at home. Changing rom is different procedure from reformatting a hard drive and installing a different OS, but the idea is the same.

  8. no shit sherlock on Ebert: I'll Tell You Why Movie Revenue Is Dropping · · Score: 1

    Movies are a creative art form. The artistic and creative part of anything gets flushed down the toilet when it becomes an industry. The "Movie Industry" is an oxymoron, you can't have creative artistic industry any more than you can force love. So of course the latest Hollywood blockbuster feels artificial and forced. Often you have to consciously make an effort to laugh at the comedic routines and the plot is following a predictable formula to the letter and you can actually anticipate the "unexpected plot twists" which are so routine now.

    Yet, there are always the kinds of movies that few hear about: some low budget movie that barely makes money, a producer that makes the movie because he genuinely feels for his movie, the kind of producer that would rather die than release an unfinished work of art. That's not an industry, that's the heart and soul at work, making movies. These are the movies that captivate you, that make you think, that make you laugh and make you cry. These are rare, and they can't be mass produced. The Movie Industry on the other hand needs movies to be mass produced. They got billions of dollars and they want to turn that money into movies so they can take billions more on weekends when you take your girlfriend out to a movie. They're not interested in making art, they're not interested in making a movie, they're interested in their ROI. They're not running an art studio, they're running a business. It's not art, it's business as usual.

  9. Re:naysayers on New Record High Temperature At South Pole · · Score: 2

    Nobody has ever denied that the earth goes through warming and cooling cycles.

    I see you've never heard of young earth creationists.

  10. Re:Socialist pig! on Christmas Always On Sunday? Researchers Propose New Calendar · · Score: 1

    The metric system hasn't caught on, so Americans still use inches as their measurement. But, how big is an inch? Turns out there until 1959 there was no standard for the British units. Finally it was in 1959, the inch was defined to be 2.54cm. So you can measure everything in footsies if you want, you're still using metric system as your standard.

    By contrast, the SI units have fundamental standards that rely on things that are tied to the universe we live in: The meter is "the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1299,792,458 of a second," and a second is "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyper-fine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom."

    You can refuse to use metric system all you want, if your standard is defined as the metric system then you are using the metric system.

  11. crap quality anyway on Customers Gleefully Mock Best Buy's $1,095.99 HDMI · · Score: 1

    My media center computers have an HDMI output as well as DVI and DE15 (VGA). My TV has HDMI and VGA inputs. I have to say, the DE15 looks a lot better than the HDMI. So I use the VGA port exclusively now, it may be over two decades old but it still has the sharpest image quality.

    Can anyone explain to me why VGA looks better than HDMI? I've tried this with several computers and a few different TVs. It would seem to me HDMI is inferior, why are they pushing an inferior standard?

  12. uhhhhhhh on Apple Wins Injunction Banning Import of HTC Devices · · Score: 1

    these are supposedly the patents, although they could be dismissed as entirely being bogus:

    A data transmission system having a real-time data engine for processing isochronous streams of data includes an interface device that provides a physical and logical connection of a computer to any one or more of a variety of different types of data networks. Data received at this device is presented to a serial driver, which disassembles different streams of data for presentation to appropriate data managers. A device handler associated with the interface device sets up data flow paths, and also presents data and commands from the data managers to a real-time data processing engine. Flexibility to handle any type of data, such as voice, facsimile, video and the like, that is transmitted over any type of communication network with any type of real-time engine is made possible by abstracting the functions of each of the elements of the system from one another. This abstraction is provided through suitable interfaces that isolate the transmission medium, the data manager and the real-time engine from one another.

    A system and method causes a computer to detect and perform actions on structures identified in computer data. The system provides an analyzer server, an application program interface, a user interface and an action processor. The analyzer server receives from an application running concurrently data having recognizable structures, uses a pattern analysis unit, such as a parser or fast string search function, to detect structures in the data, and links relevant actions to the detected structures. The application program interface communicates with the application running concurrently, and transmits relevant information to the user interface. Thus, the user interface can present and enable selection of the detected structures, and upon selection of a detected structure, present the linked candidate actions. Upon selection of an action, the action processor performs the action on the detected structure.

  13. Re:Combination on Self-Contained PC Liquid Coolers Explored · · Score: 1

    I have a (Hyper 212 Plus) which is very similar to the N520, it's the size of the radiators used by these liquid coolers and it has amazing cooling ability. Even without fan it keeps CPU at only a few degrees above room temperature.

    The only problem with these is that they take up a huge amount of real estate on the motherboard, making it hard to work around it. But in terms of cooling, they are much better than liquid coolers and easier to setup and cheaper.

  14. Nexus S on Verizon's Galaxy Nexus To Launch Tomorrow · · Score: 1

    I don't know if I can afford Galaxy Nexus, but I am looking forward to get ICS firmware update for my Nexus S.

  15. Re:Please no... on Internet Explorer Users Have Low Risk Intelligence · · Score: 1

    No, you're not the only one, but we're clearly the minority.

  16. Re:77,000 years? Bah! on Earliest Human Beds Found In South Africa · · Score: 0

    Adam & Eve did that nasty on it while the snaked watched.

  17. What could possibly go wrong? on MythBusters Bust House · · Score: 0

    It's only a matter of time until one of those goofballs ends up really hurting someone or themselves. They're professional at making Hollywood effects for movies and ads, but that's about it. Adam getting his lip sucked into a running vacuum cleaner motor, burning his eyebrows off, etc etc isn't confidence inspiring.

    They remind me a bit of Humphry Davy a little bit, they have the same philosophy of "look at what happens when I combine this with that". The only difference is Humphry was clowning around at the cutting edge of science and discovery, while Adam&Jamie are just clowning around.

  18. Google is stealing my monies on Google To Seek Dismissal of Suit Against Google Books · · Score: 2

    by indexing my website and listing it in their search engine!

    Seriously, people are working tooth and nail trying to get their content indexed on the world's biggest search engines so they can enjoy the extra visitors, but these idiot ass-backward authors can't wrap around their head that getting indexed is a good thing.

    Google is fighting an uphill battle to make the authors richer in the long run? How idiotic. Someone slap some sense into these authors please.

  19. Click to Download on Download.com Bundling Adware With Free Software · · Score: 1

    It's bad enough without the malware. If you're trying to download a 40kB file, they make you download a MB of ads, and you have to navigate through half a dozen links to "Download" which just go to more advertising. Good luck finding that tiny link that actually goes to the file you want... but now even that doesn't go to the file you want. Greedy bastards.

  20. 380V DC makes sense on Are Data Centers Finally Ready For DC Power? · · Score: 1

    This actually makes perfect sense... almost every new power supply is designed to accept 100V to 240V AC. Fully rectified 240V AC RMS is already very close to 380V DC, so their proposed system would simply be feeding pre-rectified DC electricity to the power supplies.

    Before you go home and try plugging your own computer power supply into a 380V DC power supply, I'll tell you it will not work. The computer power supplies you get have an active power factor correction circuit which will not work with DC input, so you would need to dissect the power supply to remove these parts. After that it should work just fine with DC input.

    The good thing about going DC: you need less parts in the switching power supplies, meaning cheaper power supplies.
    Also with 380V, you can use a cable diameter 1/5th of the size to carry the same power (compared to 110V RMS).
    And backup devices (UPS) use batteries to store electricity in DC form, in case of power failure, heavy and expensive MOSFET circuits have to drive transformers to convert the DC back into AC, so changing the computers to DC would completely eliminate the need for DC to AC converters, you could store 380V directly in the batteries.

  21. Re:Important distinction for those who don't RTFA on EU Court Adviser Says Software Ideas Can't Be Copyrighted · · Score: 1

    They reimplemented the idea.

    You shouldn't need to say any more than that, copyright law explicitly declares that ideas are not protected by copyright, only expressions of an idea are copyrighted. Furthermore, the law clearly states that the creative expression must not be a functional part.

    So many people are completely oblivious to this very basic stuff. I know people who don't know the difference between copyright and patent. "IP Law 101" should be a required course in middle school.

  22. Re:Peh. on Paper On Super Flu Strain May Be Banned From Publication · · Score: 1

    The Hebrew bible has mainly the name Yahweh, but it also has an alternate name, Elohim.
    God is just the bastardization of the Hebrew letter Yod (first letter of Yahweh because translators couldn't read YHVH).
    Allah is the bastardization of Elohim, which is one of many alternate names in Hebrew Bible used to reference god.

  23. prisoner labor on California Going Ahead With Bullet Train · · Score: 1

    They should just use prison labor for fuck's sake. Chain gangs have worked for centuries, too many sissies in this country get upset when prisoners aren't treated like kings with their air conditioned rooms and cable TV. Put the damn prisoners to work, it will be done in one tenth of the time at one tenth of the cost. Prison system in this country costs too much to run, this would finally make the damn thing pay for itself. This country finally might be able to catch up with the progress seen in China and India.

  24. like in the toilet? on In the EU, Water Doesn't (Officially) Prevent Dehydration · · Score: 1

    I think instead of drinking water they should switch to Brawndo!
    Brawndo's got electrolytes!

  25. useless for me on Whither the Portable Optical Drive? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah, optical drive is useless for me. I hardly ever use the optical drive on my desktop, let alone on my laptop. Optical drives are useless for professionals who know what they are doing, but for computer novices optical drives are still a necessity. If you ever buy a game or an application it comes on an optical media. You even need to have it in the drive to use the software.

    For now, it is cheaper to ship software on optical media instead of some kind of read-only usb drive. There are huge benefits to that though, first of all, a microsd card takes up much less space and weighs a lot less than a dvd. So, maybe one day we will see software that comes on usb drives instead of dvd. That day will mark the death of the optical media, except perhaps for long term archival, stuff i never want to see again but can't get myself to delete i burn on a dvd and throw the dvd into the basement. :)