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User: Dragonslicer

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Comments · 4,574

  1. Re:Stupid RIAA on RIAA Drops Case, Should Have Sued Someone Else · · Score: 1

    So what if someone breaks into your house while you're on vacation, stays a while and downloads a ****load of music? Do you have to find out who the intruder was? How can they prove it wasn't some unknown persons and the computer owner is innocent? What about if your daughter's bf comes over while you're out and they download or upload songs? My point is... how can they ever prove who is responsible? They don't have to. In civil cases, the burden of proof is much less. If they have a large pile of evidence that you did what they claim you did, and you claim that it was actually someone that broke into your house (even though the police have no record of your reporting a break-in), you will lose the case.
  2. Re:Terrorists buying them to make a Beowulf Cluste on Math on iPhones Just Doesn't Add Up? · · Score: 3, Funny

    Mahmoud Ahmadidntgetaniphonejad?

  3. Re:I for one on Pirate Yourself, Become a Best-Seller · · Score: 1

    How about libraries? How do these fit in with your theory of "if you want it, you need to pay for it"? Somebody pays for the library. It might be through taxes or some private funding, but it does cost money. Not working in a library, I don't know offhand if libraries have to purchase books or if publishers give them to libraries for free (I know a lot of books are donated, but I'd imagine those generally aren't new releases).
  4. Re:Patience and Hope on Big Delays, Small Laptops: OLPC XO Recipients Mad · · Score: 1

    So if I hand random hungry person #341652 an OLPC, he will suddenly have his hunger satisfied? No, he won't. But in 20 years, his children will be have the kind of education that will allow them to either produce enough of their own food or otherwise contribute to the economy in exchange for food. I know it's rare these days, but some people are still looking farther ahead than tomorrow.
  5. Re:Antiparticles / antimass? on Has the Higgs Boson Particle Field Been Hiding in Plain Sight? · · Score: 1

    Antiparticles don't have "antimass", they have normal mass. For charged particles, the antiparticle has the opposite charge. Uncharged hadrons (such as the neutron) have the opposite charge distribution (which I believe is usually/can only be detected by observing the magnetic field created by a spinning particle that has charge distributed through it). I'm not certain what property is different in other neutral particles; Wikipedia says that neutrinos and antineutrinos have opposite spins and that Z is its own antiparticle. I've never seen any theories about negative mass, so I'm not sure what physical significance it would have. As a bit of an aside, though, you could have imaginary mass (as in sqrt(-1)), which would have the interesting property of always traveling faster than the speed of light.

  6. Re:He'd best make sure he saved his receipts on MIT Student Plans to Take on RIAA · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Incorrect. RIAA needs to prove he's guilty, he doesn't have to prove he's innocent. Incorrect. The company bringing the case to court (remember, the RIAA doesn't sue people, the recording companies do) has to show that it's more likely than not that he did what the company claims he did, and he has to show that it's more likely than not that he didn't do what the company claims he did. "Proof beyond a reasonable doubt" only applies to criminal cases.
  7. Re:Subscribers? on World of Warcraft Hits 10 Million Subscribers · · Score: 1

    My wife also provided an oral distraction during my Kara run last night too. She wouldn't shut up, huh?
  8. Re:First impressions on MPAA Botched Study On College Downloading · · Score: 2, Informative

    Theft means one thing and one thing only: To remove physical property from someone so that they may no longer use it and to keep it in your possession. That's not actually true.
  9. Re:How dumb do they think schools are? on Microsoft Ties $235m IT Aid To Use of Windows · · Score: 1

    As someone whose 22 year olds Whose 22-year-olds what? How many are there, and are they female?
  10. Re:Double standards... on FBI Burying Doc Showing US Officials Stole Nuclear Secrets? · · Score: 1

    The specifications of advanced military technological research (i.e. the Manhatten Project), and the identities of covert operatives are the only two things off the top of my head that justify being classified. Just for completeness, details of specific military operations, such as troop locations and timetables, should probably also be included in this list.
  11. Re:*Shudders with fear* on FBI Burying Doc Showing US Officials Stole Nuclear Secrets? · · Score: 1

    And no, I don't believe the Government has a secret fleet of unicorns. But what Slashdot wants to know is if the government has a secret fleet of pink ponies.
  12. Re:Competition? on Interview with AT&T on BitTorrent Filtering · · Score: 1

    What stops you from making your own ISP and starting to provide internet for your customers? In short, the lack of copper wires not owned by the telephone or cable company to everyone's homes.
  13. Re:It's Free Money!!! w00t! on Copyright Lobbies Threaten Federal College Funding · · Score: 2, Informative

    Don't believe me? The Democrats created the DMCA. If Wikipedia is to believed on this, that's not quite true.

    Introduced in the House of Representatives as H.R. 2281 by Rep. Howard Coble (R-NC) on July 29, 1997 It was proposed by a Republican to a Republican-controlled Congress. Sure, all the Democrats voted for it, and Clinton signed it (not that he had much of a choice anyway), but we should try to be as accurate as possible.
  14. Re:Just what we need on A Proposal For Unionizing Bloggers · · Score: 1

    Well, say NBC wanted to use some of your blog posts as the basis for an episode of a sitcom. Without doing a lot of research on your own, and/or hiring your own lawyer (out of your own pocket), how would you ensure that NBC was offering fair compensation and not screwing you over? As soon as you're providing material for a major television network, you've left the realm of being a random idiot with a web site and entered the realm of the Writer's Guild.
  15. Re:Evolution is a theory too on Texas Creationist Museum Facing Extinction · · Score: 1

    I didn't intend to say that evolution isn't necessarily testable by the strict scientific definition, only that it isn't very feasible in most current labs. Like you said, it might take several million years, and I don't think any scientists living today plan on trying to organize an experiment that would take that long. I wouldn't say that experiments involving evolution are impossible (I'm not a biologist, and I would actually assume that small-scale experiments aren't extremely difficult), but I don't think you'll see the biology department at every medium-sized university in the country have a lab next year where they have five different species of mammals that they evolved themselves.

  16. Re:Evolution is a theory too on Texas Creationist Museum Facing Extinction · · Score: 1

    And it was labeled a "theory", as all good scientific explanations are. At the time. I think by now, "theory" is a misnomer when it comes to evolution. Scientifically speaking, it's on the same par as the "laws" of gravitation, planetary motion, and thermodynamics. Note I put these things in quotes, because even laws are subject to change, such as when Newtonian gravity was altered and enhanced by Einstein's theories.

    I think the difference is that physical laws can be tested, measured, and verified repeatedly in almost any university lab. You can demonstrate gravity pretty easily by dropping various objects from the top of a ladder and measuring positions. You can design all kinds of controlled experiments to test gravity. Evolution is much more difficult to place into a controlled experiment, especially with the mechanism being random mutation, so it probably won't become more than a theory any time soon.
  17. Re:consequence of bad computer crime laws on Some DNS Requests Ruled Illegal in North Dakota · · Score: 1

    With both ads and google JS stats. stuff you'd be making direct requests to *.google.com servers, to download the ads or do the XML-RPC JS requests. They could try bringing a case against you, but I doubt it would stick. Your browser making a request to *.google.com because the page that you're on told it to probably wouldn't constitute intentionally contacting the server, especially when you (never mind the average user) have no way of knowing that any given site will request something from *.google.com. Some kind of software and/or DNS entry that blocks all requests to *.google.com might be used as part of the injunction/protection order, but I have no idea how likely that would be.

    Maybe most currently, but certainly not all. And with always on DSL etc. it's not obvious that it's a good idea for people to use caching DNS servers at their ISP. I doubt that a DNS server owned by any given company is any user's only option. Even if you're prevented from directly using any Network Solutions server, there are plenty of other public DNS servers if for some reason your ISP's servers aren't good enough for you. You may also be able to argue that your computer contacting a DNS server as part of its normal operation (e.g. by putting "www.google.com" into your web browser, as opposed to using dig or nslookup) doesn't constitute intentionally contact, but that probably depends on not having pissed off the judge.
  18. Re:consequence of bad computer crime laws on Some DNS Requests Ruled Illegal in North Dakota · · Score: 1

    If you "harass" your electricity company and they get an injunction, are you then not allowed to use electricity? Maybe not from that company, depending on if there's another company that you can use. Electricity is a special case, though, since it's considered a basic necessity in many jurisdictions, so there are laws that try to make sure that people aren't blocked from getting electricity service.

    If you harass AT&T and move to another phone company, are you then not allowed to phone anyone on AT&T? I would guess that your phone call would be considered to be aimed at the other person, since you have no feasible way of knowing what telephone company everyone that you might call has.

    What about google, they get an injunction and you aren't allowed to visit any site that uses google or doubleclick ads, or google JS stats.? Assuming you don't mean a *.google.com web site, see above. You aren't the one explicitly using Google, the site that you're visiting is.

    Get an injunction from Network Solutions and you can't use DNS at all? Again, you probably aren't the one explicitly contacting anything owned by Network Solutions. Most people use their ISP's DNS servers, so your ISP is the only one that you're directly contacting. Any other servers that your ISP contacts to perform a DNS lookup is between your ISP and the server.
  19. Re:It is kinda disterbing on Nanotubes Form The Darkest Material Yet Created · · Score: 2, Funny

    While this is interesting it isn't the kind of thing that is going to make those sleeping RPI students say, "Oh my God, why didn't I know about this sooner?" You sure about that? This is the school where the athletics teams are the RPI Engineers.
  20. Re:I just love clueless polititions on Some DNS Requests Ruled Illegal in North Dakota · · Score: 0

    I would guess that you aren't from the United States (or are just trolling). Judges are generally not politicians.

  21. Re:doesn't matter on New Hampshire Primaries Follow-Up Analysis · · Score: 3, Informative

    In most cases the electors have absolutely no legal obligation to vote by the will of the people. For relatively small values of "most". 27 out of 51 states (and the District of Columbia) require electors to vote for the winner of the popular vote (Maine and Nebraska can split the electors, but they are still required to vote for the candidate that they are assigned to).

    Source: http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/laws.html
  22. Re:The problem wiht usability experts on UI Designers Hired by Mozilla · · Score: 1

    Many of us vi fanatics find everything else hard to use by comparison. Of course you do. That's what happens when the only thing anyone ever compares it to is emacs.
  23. Re:Why not both? on HD DVD Prices Slashed By Toshiba · · Score: 1

    LG has a combo HD-DVD/Blu-ray SATA drive for $300. The standalone player is currently $800. Hopefully a couple other manufacturers will also release combo drives, which should drive prices down enough that the format war will end with most people being able to play both formats anyway.

  24. Re:Statistics on Parents To Block Kids From Joining MySpace · · Score: 1

    Also, since when did we place the responsibility on the WEBSITE to prevent an IP address from reaching it? And what about DHCP? What about the next person that gets your IP in a few months? Of I course I didn't read the article either, but if the summary is correct (I know, it's a stretch), the block is on email addresses, not IP addresses.
  25. Re:Tag this article 'showmeyourpapers' on National ID Cards Mandated in the US, If You're Under 50 · · Score: 1

    We really need a "Non of the above" option on the ballots. Every ballot should have a space for you to write in your own candidate. I actually wrote in "None of the above" for one position in 2006.