Posts by BioTube

World shrugs as IPv4 addresses finally exhausted

Already doable

There are already sites sharing IP addresses. Not sure of the mechanism, but it's out there.

Top CEOs agree: US is down the crapper

The financial industry doesn't need 'regulation'

It needs to stopped being subsidized. One reason the bubble was so bad was because all Wall Street knew they'd get bailed out when things went south(ex, LTCM), so it was actually a low-risk industry to insiders. Knock off the corporatism, relax regulations to let smaller businesses compete(did you think Big Business pushed for those out of the goodness of its heart?) and cut unemployment benefits(get people interested in working, rather than mooching for eternity) and the economy will recover. Education also needs to be depoliticized, though what exactly that'll take is an exercise I leave to the reader.

Everything Everywhere ponders discrimination by packet

It's not that bad, people

The article's about exempting certain kinds of traffic from datacaps, not about crippling anything. This is just a nice bonus for the people who don't shell out for unlimited plans. The asbestos one, please.

Brussels quizzes UK on school kiddyprinting

@Apologists

When I was in school, we used PINs for the same reason(except one year, but that was at a school not notable for sanity). There's no excuse for using biometrics.

Primary school miss flashes porn vid at kiddies

Hopefully not brother AND sister

That would be a little more difficult to explain.

Walmart falls in with Washington's war on terror

And the terrorists are winning

People *still* think homeland security's actually making them safer. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to drink my woes away.

Governments stonewall interwebs porn domain

Except

Pornography's unlikely to disappear from non-.xxx TLDs, especially since the pron industry doesn't like the idea.

Microsoft reaches for remote control in crowded US TV market

Not really

Microsoft only owns a minority share and that's probably due to GE(owners of NBC) not feeling like spending the money to completely buy them out of the deal.

Net neut rumble flares as FCC vote looms

The real problem

Is the fact that, in any given area, there are about three options for broadband. Unrigging the game so it doesn't favor the big incumbents would do more than regulations ever would(fat chance of that happening).

US cable giant Comcast accused of internet video 'toll booth'

No, no no

"*THY* TRAFFIC SHALL NOT PASS"

Berners-Lee: Facebook 'threatens' web future

Since when

Was internet access a "fundamental right"? Continuous creation of nonsense "rights" like that are the reason we're in this mess!

Multi-colour e-ink to splash down in six months?

Color is nice

But they were talking about using this stuff in newspapers back when they first announced it, so where the fsck are the ebook readers that look like actual books? The ability to flip amongst several pages is still a pretty big advantage for dead wood.

US Marine hover-jeep to get robotic hands-off controls

State and local are irrelevant

The military's budget probably outstrips the amount of federal subsidies for non-federally mandated programs, so really bringing them in is a nonsequitor. The program itself is minuscule compared to the cost of Medicare and Social Security, which are where the feds would have to look to do much in terms of trimming the budget.

Two-faced world spends billions on climate help, fossil fuel

The point

When you subsidize something, inevitably it'll be used more than otherwise. By cutting the subsidy, you encourage the development of fuel-efficient equipment and investment into alternate energy sources with the most powerful persuasion known to man - geld.

3D printers, one-dimensional enemies

And there's the rub

With it becoming easier and easier to duplicate things, copyright and patent laws are running headlong into the fact that they're nothing more than state-granted monopolies and not any actual form of property, with no basis in anything but politics. You can't stop human ingenuity forever.

WD thrusts forth its mighty 3TB internal hardness

Come in two types

De facto, AKA what everybody does and de jure, AKA what people on high horses think everybody should do. When the high-horsed people concoct ridiculous sounding standards, they shouldn't be surprised when everybody continues to use the old standard, especially when the only point of confusion is deliberately manufactured to sell storage.

Mozilla foot soldiers unleash 'Army of Awesome' on Twitter

It's called cache

And Firefox manages it badly; simply put, when Firefox's pool of allocated memory buckets fills up, it decides which bucket to keep based on which one's bigger; not a problem if you don't need many giant buffers at once, but it can easily build up.

In layman's terms, Firefox does free memory, but in such as way that the amount used always goes up.

Microsoft confirms Russian pill-pusher attack on its network

I'll bite

Linux does nothing special to keep an application from being compromised; it merely makes it unlikely for a compromised program to elevate itself to root privileges. This isn't as restrictive as it seems - it's entirely possible for an unprivileged program to do everything described in the article, provided it avoids most ports below 1024 or so(though I'm pretty sure that restriction's limited purely to receiving and that it could send to a low port without hassle).

Feds want backdoors built into VoIP and email

@david wilson

The whole point of fascism/corporatism is that the state serves the interest of well-connected companies(as opposed to socialism, where its members act in their own interest; there's really no winning unless you're in), so even if a company new its secrets were being given to its competitor by the government, there's little they could do about it except start delivering messages in person.

US demands right to snoop the world

Actually, they're right on the last one

Nationalized healthcare's socialist by definition(and so is Obama, thank you very much), so you're the one telling fibs.

AT&T to ax unlimited data plans on iPhone Monday

@Trevor_Pott

Do you really think a company could survive if it ticked off all its customers? Business have folded because of minor indiscretions by their owners that had nothing to do with what was being sold! Besides, heavily regulated markets are harder to enter than less regulated ones.

GTA maker coughs up $20m for 'hot coffee' sex

@asdf

Clearly your knowledge of history is weak: our forebears in ancient times thought everything not obtained at the point of a stick was worthless; this has survived as a taboo against showing people getting it on voluntarily.

Telco offers 911 by txt

Actually useful

Most phones have keys quieter than the volume needed to be heard over a voicelink, so the thrown-in-the-trunk kidnap victim has a better chance.

Tiny typo blamed for massive IE security fail

Copy/Paste fail

Can happen in any language; the issue here is that C was designed when simple bounds checking was horribly expensive and as a result pushed a lot onto the programmer whose time was cheap compared to the runtime cost. C's original design as a system language helped in this error, since that role requires the ability to remove type barriers. Of course, C++'s requirement to cast to and from a void*(which I never could understand) is what made the error undetectable: a C compiler would've happily converted, but sparked an incompatible pointer warning.

Boffins 'cage the demon' of white phosphorus

@Mr. Newline-happy

For the love of God, the human body can tolerate small amounts of U-238 without problem(and the radiological effects are minimal) - perhaps you're thinking of plutonium, which is extremely combustible and for which the body lacks any tolerance. Depleted uranium has been used in everything from silverware to planes - it's safe, ya nitwit.

Ballmer! in! anything! could! happen! shocker! over! Yahoo! deal!

@Goat Jam

NT originated as a collaboration between IBM and Microsoft called OS/2; true to form, Microsoft reneged on the agreement.

Apple sued for 30¢ $5m

Another reason for giftcard use

Lack of a way to pay without one.

Opiate-crazed wallabies create crop circles

@Forename Surname

The cheapest, quickest solution would be firebombing of all nonauthorized drug farms; after all, the Taliban might be hiding in the poppies!

Gay animals going at it like rabbits

EVERYBODY CALM DOWN!

First, let's admit that our chemical dumps have probably had SOME effect on animal populations. Second, let's remember that part of being human is resisting biological impulses. Third, wasn't the gay bomb designed to start an impromptu orgy?

IBM launching American-only software support

Did anybody else see

The fact that this service meets federal security guidelines? From where I'm sitting, Big Blue created it for Uncle Sam and's letting commercial clients use it to help pay the extra cost of the phonejockies - and the Toby Keith albums.

Iran's nuke boffins prefer Opteron baby supers

Who needs nukes?

You can tip your MRBMs with gas, cluster bombs, incendiaries, lolcats, Democrats - pretty much anything, really.

Nurse Lovelace gives hardened lag 55-hour stiffy

@AC 08:32

Dysfunction is not the same as complete impotence; apparently he can rise to the occasion, but only with great difficulty and/or unpredictability.

Brits can't tell their heart from their elbow

Of course you need to know whre your organs are

How else will you put them back correctly?

Jimbo Wales: No one can make money from Wikipedia...

About that Jool-Aid

It was really Flavor Aid.

Texas cop tasers gobby granny

The worst part about this

Is that Travis county tends to be very lenient with its sentencing - even considering the punishment for refusing to sign, that tasering will probably make up the majority of her punishment. Oddly enough(or not), neighboring Williamson tends to throw the book at just about everybody and throw it HARD.

Who wants a giant poster of the history of Unix?

@AC 6:20

First, LAME stands for "Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder", though it's evolved into one and Wine dropped the acronym long ago. Second, Debian's the only distro I've used that's worth the trouble(as far as repo size goes, Debian's king - 26K+ packages is nothing to sneeze at!).

DHS to field Star Trek 'Tricorder' medscanner

I hate these Homland Security stories

They always make me think they're about the state Department of Human Services, which would have no use for a tricorder.

I know, I know: I'll get my coat.

Mozilla to breed prepubescent add-on developers

It's ideas like this

That make the browser unusable. Anybody found any use for the MySQL database that makes the browser take a few eons to close?

US military's cyberwar rules 'ill-formed,' says panel

Cyberwar

Is probably going to end up like jamming at worst, gas at best: completely useless or only useful when you don't need it.

MEPs get the fear over nanotechnology

The Big Bust is coming

If ten percent fractional reserves isn't enough to keep banks liquid, two percent will just sink the entire economy - the inevitable bust might even be our fall of Rome.

As for waiting two thousand years for digital computers(mechanical ones were well known to the Greeks), that was because Heron of Alexandria never thought to put his steam ball and knowledge of pistons together.

Wikipedia's Norwegian press officer cuffed for killing mum

His only mistake

Was forgetting to delete the edit log.

Obama pledges 3% of GDP for science

We're bitching and moaning

Because there's no money to invest. The only way to fund this is through increasing the already monumental deficit he has planned - and investors are not getting as excited about T-bills, making the Fed run the printing presses. I can't wait for Obama's youthful, energetic portrait on the new hundred trillion dollar bill.

AMD next-gen ultrathin gets early birthday

Adages

The one I always heard was "earlybird gets the worm" - and AMD seems damn intent on that worm.

Microsoft's DNA won't permit Oracle-Sun deal

@Oninoshiko

They were forced into by the moose. I always said those were evil.

Google splits with Mozilla on 3D interwebs

To those arguing for this crap

It's unneeded and very rarely helpful. Maybe after holographic displays come along, but certainly not before then. The few good uses of it can use Java applets and not flood the web with pointless crap.

Microsoft v TomTom: a GPLv3 wake-up call

Kernel license

The Linux kernel *MUST* stay GPLv2 since a large amount of code, written by several people, does not include the "any later version" option.

UK police bust lottery scam centre in Somerset

@Bleeding hearts

Most of the people who fall for these scams have the ability to figure it out. However, they're so damned greedy that they'll respond to Nigerian scams(especially those who fall for it time after time) - those who don't know better usually don't receive mail direct. So yes, most people deserve our scorn.

Obama science chief: Geo-engineer to save Gaia!

We're in an ice age

Global warming just means we're moving on. These wackos need to get over themselves.

US Defense Dept shuffles self

@Mr Smith

It's spelled "Arkansas".

Obama & Gates vs the US military-industrial complex

How dare he!

How else will we complete Plan 2100? For those not in the know, Plan 2100 has the following goals: one world, one nation, one tongue and no damn 'u' in the word 'honor'!