Posts by CypherDragon 14 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Mar 2009
Is this where you tell us "Macs don't get viruses"?
EVERY OS has vulnerabilities, and every OS can have malicious files run on them. Not even air-gapped industrial control networks are safe, as Stuxnet proved. For the average user, antimalware is a requirement...unless you like just wiping your computer every few months because it got infected, again.
Simple, just have the phone turn off voice and text functions if the accelerometer picks up more than 5 MPH/KPH, and the altimeter is less than a preset value which can be modified by the subscribed base stations (since you would need different values in the mountains than you would in the lowlands). Put a priority escape for emergency calls (911/999/etc) and call it job done. Still can make calls on airplanes (when the captain allows it), GPS and data functions will still work, and shouldn't affect crash situations since you're already stopped.
Hold on...what's the USPTO's address again?
""I'm willing to bet that public perception would have been different had McKinnon been a conservative Muslim."
There would a different public perception in a change to the entire circumstances? Well...er...yes! Your point isn't very pointy."
So how would him being a conservative Muslim be a "change to the entire circumstances"? I don't see how his religious beliefs or ethnicity have any bearing on this issue at all.
Or are you one of those that believes that Muslim == Terrorist, thus invalidating your entire post?
To be more on-topic, while I may disagree with the one-way nature of the treaty and believe that judicial oversight should be a requirement on *both* sides of the pond, 4 years worth of appeals is enough. He has confessed to a crime, and should have his day in court. I would say that his own confession would serve as valid evidence even if the treaty was equal in both manners.
Remember, he has never denied accessing the Pentagon's computers...quite the opposite in fact. Regardless of what he claims he was looking for, he accessed a private computer network without permission or warrant. If you leave the door open to your house, and someone walks in and looks around, are they not still on the hook for trespassing? I will admit ignorance of UK law in this case and IANAL, but in the US the person can be prosecuted for trespassing at the minimum...
Actually, full electrics are less complicated mechanically than petrol/diesel powered cars. There's no need for a torque-balanced, completely synchronized array of parts being used to generate power from small controlled explosions occurring hundreds of times a second. Electronically, it's a different story. But if your electronics go tits up, even in a modern petrol car, you're going to need to take it to a shop to fix...and you were talking about maintenance anyway :)
>And targeting is a KEY requirement now that click-through rates have fallen so low.
And why are click-through rates so low? Because everyone is getting tired of having advertising, promotions, and "product placement" thrown at them every time they turn around! To hear the ad companies, unless everything that you do (including the time you get up to use the loo, what color it was, and how many times you wiped) is recorded, analyzed, and stored in a database indefinitely, then every business will soon be bankrupt and the internet will go dark.
I wouldn't mind subtle, appropriate advertising on the pages I browse...but I do have a problem with adverts that get thrown in front of the content I'm trying to see (pop-ups and flash ads), surprise me (pop-unders and on-unload popups), are annoying (just about every form of banner ad I've seen), or are malware-laden (a smaller, but still significant, percentage of ads). Until the ad companies figure out some way to serve adverts that aren't intrusive and they adopt very stringent privacy practices (including information anonymazation with a very short shelf-life), AdBlock and NoScript will remain staples to install on every single machine I touch.
I would like to know, how did businesses every survive, let alone turn profits, before this wonderful ad-machine called the internet?
If those screens are actually as big as they look (maybe equivalent to a normal 8"x10" sheet of paper) I would be all over an e-Ink version for book reading. That's my only problem with the current ebook generation - they can't handle the larger formats that -ahem- "Tech Manuals" come in...
@All who have posted that the OEMs are charging for the install service for XP rather than the XP license: where's your proof? Do you think that the OEMs have people that sit around and install the OS for each machine? Not bloody likely!
A more reasonable theory is that they have different stacks of pre-loaded and pre-imaged hard drives...one stack labeled "Vista Home," another for "Vista Business," and somewhere along the line, a stack labeled "XP Pro BUSINESSES ONLY!" or some such. There is not any extra effort put in on the OEM side to install XP rather than Vista, just slotting a different hard drive to the chassis. All the hard drives used for assembly are probably all formatted and have a ghost image mass-installed by a copying device (the one I used for massive deployments was able to copy a ghost image of 2000 to up to 12 different hard drives at a time, and that was years ago during the NT4 to 2000 upgrade we did). So where is this "service charge" coming from again?
>Users know Office, Explorer, IE, etc. They do not know KDE, HuggyBear, BouncingPanda (or >whatever childish names the Linux apps have)
Surely you mean OpenOffice, File Explorer, and Firefox don't you? Please don't confuse the somewhat wacky names associated with a somewhat wacky Linux distribution to be the end all of Linux application naming conventions. Besides, "Ubuntu Intrepid Ibis" is no more childish than "Mac OS X Leopard" or "Windows Longhorn," now is it.
At least do some research before spewing your anti-Linux vitrol here. Horses for courses and all that...
Heart...because all OS want to be UNIX in their kernels :)
Something that I witnessed this weekend that made me wish that apathy was illegal. My wife and I are at the local GameStop looking for family-appropriate games for our Wii (we have an 8-year old son). Another woman walks in with her 3 children, 2 boys a little younger than our son (I would say about 6-7) and a daughter around 5ish. What do the boys want? Halo. What does the idiot mom ask the store clerk for? Halo for her boys. The only thing that saved this woman from my involvement (and ensuing verbal thrashing) was the fact that she was clueless enough about the game to not know that it's an Xbox exclusive...and they have a PS3.
This is what's wrong with this country...parents that will give their "precious little children who could never do wrong" what ever they want...gods forbid the idiots spawning actually take a few seconds to research a game, maybe even look at the box and see that there is a parent-friendly rating on there? Most of these parents wouldn't take their children to see a "PG-13" rated movie, let alone an "R" rated one...why the hell would they buy a "T" or "M" rated game for their "lil' schnookums"? These are also the first ones to jump in to court about how "video games turned my kid into a homicidal, sex-addicted maniac!"
Grow a bleedin' pair and step up to your kids and tell them "NO". They don't deserve everything they want, and definitely don't need it. Be a fookin parent even if that means you're not their friend now. If you don't care enough to look at the box, then get rid of the game system, and for gods' sake never purchase a computer or subscribe to the internet. QUIT TRYING TO USE THE TELEVISION AND GAME SYSTEMS AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR PARENTING!
As for the kid dying, tragic but the blame doesn't lie with Blizzard or Warcraft. It lies where it always has...with the parents/guardians of the kid.
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