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User: jefu

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  1. Re:Surprising on 5 Out of 11 Crashed Unity In Canonical's Study · · Score: 1

    I think I looked at it for a minute or two, clicked on a couple things, then fired up synaptic and loaded awesome. If awesome hadn't been available I might well have opted for twm, it is indeed that bad.

  2. Re:Satphones on US Has Secret Tools To Force Internet On Dictatorships · · Score: 1

    Instead of sat phones, just regular cell phones with built in encryption (should be configurable by user so someone can decide who to share info with). And solar powered mesh nodes, some of which go either to countries nearby which access outwards, or to satellites, or to whatever other relays might be made available. Maybe make it all wifi based. The hardware should be cheap enough these days.

  3. iGoogle vs Google News on Most Readers Don't Like Customized News · · Score: 1

    I have an iGoogle page with a number (25 at the moment) of selected RSS feeds in boxes (but no hamster gadget). Several of these are news feeds (general news, NY Times, BBC, Al Jazeera), some are tech (slashdot...), others are just interesting stuff (metafilter...). I guess this is customization (as opposed to personalization) and it works for me.

    I used to have Google News open more or less permanently in a tab, but since their new look this summer, it has become less than useful for me and I don't think I've looked at it more than twice since they changed it (once was just now to see if it had become any better). I suspect this was personalization. (Well and twittization with the "popular" cruft and adization with the "spotlight" cruft.) To echo that New Yorker cartoon - "I say it's spinach and I say to hell with it."

  4. New TV Series on FBI Prioritizes Copyright Over Missing Persons · · Score: 1

    So, "Without a Trace" would now be "Without a License". A thrilling hunt through thousands of wiretaps to prove that Little Johnny did indeed torrent "2012"!

  5. Re:From TFA on Germany Takes Legal Steps Against Facebook · · Score: 1

    The hyperinflation certainly pushed things along, but I suspect that it helps to look at things as being a long war starting essentially with Napoleon, with smaller and larger shooting wars more or less interrupting a long period of arms building, Germany was falling apart by the end of the the first world war and the Versailles treaty didn't help, but I find it hard to see it as being the the most important factor. But I'm not a historian by any means, just someone who finds that flow of events interesting.

  6. Re:Educated, not crazy and not afraid. on Unique ID In India Causes 'Fear of the Beast' · · Score: 1

    I've seen it suggested several times that if you're going to prison, finding Jesus is a Good Thing as it means that there will be guards, administrators and the like who may prefer to help out Christians as opposed to those of other religions or atheists.

  7. Re:While I agree that anonymity is a good thing... on SCOTUS Rules Petiton Signatures Are Public Record · · Score: 1

    This year in Washington state there are more than 50 initiative petitions filed. To actually get on the November ballot, each such petition needs 241,153 valid signatures. Most of these are unlikely to get anywhere near that, but if even a half dozen do, that leaves a million or so signatures to be verified between July and whenever the ballots are finalized (September?). Surely making these public would help remove invalid signatures, do it quickly and well - and how is this a bad thing?

  8. Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias? on Matter-Antimatter Bias Seen In Fermilab Collisions · · Score: 3, Funny

    That is not true at all.

  9. Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias? on Matter-Antimatter Bias Seen In Fermilab Collisions · · Score: 4, Funny

    You are correct in that.

  10. Re:Monsanto v. Schmeiser on First Superbugs, Now Superweeds · · Score: 1

    There's the solution then. Just have Monsanto sue everyone who gets superweeds on their property. Guaranteed win!

  11. Re:mustard is a chemical agent? on Another WW-I Chemical Site In Washington, DC · · Score: 1

    If you read very much about German preparations for the war (which they seem to have been working towards, though not in quite the same brutal way as the Nazis did a couple decades later) and the way that they (certainly Wilhelm and probably Moltke with Krupp stage managing more than a bit) managed the first few months of it, you may think differently.

  12. Book on the Complexity of Games and Puzzles on All the Best Games May Be NP-Hard · · Score: 2, Informative

    There is a fun book on this topic called "Games, Puzzles and Computation" by Hearn and Demaine that is well worth a read if you're interested in puzzles or complexity.

  13. Re:Great Literature != good read for most on Amazon Reviewers Take on the Classics · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is one of those things that many don't seem to realize. A book (or movie or whatever) may be great without you actually liking it. You see this in reviews all the time : "Worst movie evar! I was bored all the way through it." Reviews like these conflate the writers opinion with some kind of consensus opinion that has formed over time and usually built from thoughtful consideration of the subject. We all do it to some extent, but with time and education (good self education counts), we can separate out our personal reaction from a considered critical reaction.

    For example, I quite like the movie "Jumping Jack Flash". But I also know that it is far from being a great film. On the other hand, "Rashomon" is a very very good film indeed, but I find it difficult to watch and don't like it all that much, though I can appreciate why it is considered great.

  14. Re:One place where they could mess up... on Bill Would Require Public Information To Be Online · · Score: 1
    PDFs are pretty bad for reading in many ways. All the paging bits (numbers, margins) takes up space and the margins and flow tend to be inflexible, so resizing a PDF reader window tends to just chop off bits or add whitespace on the edges. Worst are double column documents which (especially in PDF readers with noisy toolbars and on monitors that don't have lots of vertical resolution) often mean you need to scroll to read the bottom of one column, then back up to get the top of the next one, then down again. Aaarggghhh! (I just read a 130 page document like this, would have printed it, but it was just a draft).

    Be nicer to have them in a well designed xml markup (I know, I know...) with support for real semantic markup (this term gets indexed, this one goes in the glossary, this refers to court decision X, this sentence refers to this marker in document Z) and a toolset to produce PDF, HTML and other formats as required. Support for reader generated annotations could also be useful.

  15. Re:Papers Please! on US Immigration Bill May Bring a National Biometric ID Card · · Score: 1

    "Now repeat after me as we say our next three words in Turkish...
    Towel
    Bath
    Border
    May I see your passport please? "

  16. Re:simple reason. on USPTO Won't Accept Upside Down Faxes · · Score: 1

    In the comments to TFA one suggestion is that the patent office people may not be allowed to modify the submitted forms in any way (which seems a good idea in general to prevent fraud) and that even a simple rotation of the text could be interpreted as modification, so they can't rotate the text. Taking a good idea a step too far, I suspect, but such is the nature of bureaucracy.

  17. Re:Doublethink on Ursula Le Guin's Petition Against Google Books · · Score: 1

    I suspect that the publisher (and related folks) who own the rights to her works are wining and dining her, and in the process telling her how awful this whole situation is. A bit of operant conditioning as it were - training her that certain stances result in pleasurable times, do that often enough and I suspect the subject will not only support the conditioned stance, but even find better justifications for it.

  18. Re:Silly password requirements on Analysis of 32 Million Breached Passwords · · Score: 1

    The password strength checkers seem odd to me sometimes. I recently had to generate a new password for a site and used my standard method, pick a sentence related to the site (sometimes rude, sometimes nonsensical), then use the first letters, changing one or two to numeric or symbols (so the first sentence in this post might have given me "Tpscs02ms"). My first picked sentence gave me 16 characters (even all lower case that would probably have been good as there were no dictionary words or other simple patterns). The site told me that that password was seriously insecure - and playing around a bit I discovered that the same string truncated at 13 characters was rated highly secure. I should have looked at the code (javascript) to see why adding three characters made it so much worse but was trying to get things done.

  19. Re:ADA? on US DOJ Says Kindle In Classroom Hurts Blind Students · · Score: 1

    At my university we get notes from the Disabilities Office, one for each student with a disability, saying what we need to be able to do to make the course accessible. I think that is becoming more or less standard practice.

  20. Re:Oblig. Futurama reference on 2010 AL30, Asteroid Or Space Junk, To Pay a Close Visit · · Score: 2, Funny

    You mean Bruce Willis? (oblig Armageddon reference).

  21. Re:Not an asteroid? on 2010 AL30, Asteroid Or Space Junk, To Pay a Close Visit · · Score: 1

    And the lengths of the various dimensions are in the ratio of 1x4x9 !

  22. Re:I don't get it.... on Windows 7 Has Lots of "God Modes" · · Score: 1

    Heh. Someone told me yesterday that Unix is all voodoo and yet Windows has XXX.{BB64F8A7-BEE7-4E1A-AB8D-7D8273F7FDB6}!

  23. Re:Huh? on Fixing Security Issue Isn't Always the Right Answer · · Score: 1

    Perhaps he regularly has common sex and uncommonly has irregular sex.

  24. Re:I wish they would on IT Workers To Get Fewer Perks, No Free Coffee · · Score: 2, Funny

    Careful that you don't get the coffee bushes and the coca bushes mixed up.

  25. Re:Great quote in the article on Russia Plans To Divert Asteroid · · Score: 1

    "If it goes in, it must come out." Teslacles deviant to Fudd's First Law