Posts by sisk

Microsoft sez soz over Windows 10 'freebie' balls-up

So, in other words:

"We want good press so we said Windows 10 would be free. We want money so we're going to make it hard to get Windows 10 for free."

This time we really are all doomed, famous doomsayer prof says

Maybe he's working on the theory that if you predict the end of mankind enough times eventually you'll be right? Either way people are about as likely to listen to him as they are to listen to Harold Camping...and Camping isn't even around anymore.

Version 0.1 super-stars built the universe – and they lived all the way over there, boffins point

Re: God is bigger than the Bible

Yes. Science concerns itself with testable facts. God is inherently untestable. Any attempt to prove his existence is pseudoscience at best and there is no way to prove a negative. Therefore God's existence or lack thereof is not a matter for science.

Think of it this way: Prove scientifically that spitting on someone for having the wrong color of skin is morally wrong. You can't do it, nor can you prove the opposite. That's because morality is not a scientific matter but a philosophical one. It's the same thing with religion.

If you're a good scientist your belief or lack of belief in God is irrelevant, as a great many religious scientists throughout history have proven. If you're a bad scientist who also happens to be religious....well how did you think we got young Earth creationists with PhDs (yes, there are some out there)?

but we do know that systemd is now capable of launching it

Ah, systemd. That explains why the karma subsystem doesn't seem to be working right.

Re: God is bigger than the Bible

First, demonstrate that God exists.

Unnecessary unless He is invoked in a scientific argument, which would be inappropriate. Like morality, the subject of God's existence or lack thereof is a matter for philosophy, not science. The origin of the universe, however, is a matter for science. Even if you believe God created the universe good science still demands looking at exactly how to determine the origins of the universe.

Basically what I'm saying here is that neither "God did it" or "Prove God exists" are statements of good science. Good science would be more like "God? Meh, who cares."

"Hey guys....is it just me...or does that look like a glass blower from a marble factory?"

Black helicopter because it's as close as I can get to a MiB icon.

How swearing at your coworker via WhatsApp could cost you $68,000

Re: Work in a third world backward nation...

...third world, a term so thoroughly debased as to be meaningless

Not to mention pretty useless since the end of the cold war. Honestly how many nations have risen or fallen since the planet was divided into three worlds? For that matter how many didn't even exist yet when the second world fell apart?

Re: Freedom of Speech....

So you are going to send profanities to someone for the sake of it?

I know quite a few people who do just that. Their speech is peppered with profanities every other sentence, not usually directed at anyone in particular. I don't like it, don't let my kids around them, and try to avoid them myself, but hey they've got a right to speak that way if they want.

However if you think you can go about saying whatever you want with impunity try swearing on a street in the UK but don't be suprised if you find yourself in a police cell.

As for insulting the monarchy, don't do it in some European countries otherwise you will also find yourself in a police cell.

Both examples of why you just think you have freedom of speech. Insulting the monarchy in particular (or government in general) is one of the things the guys who wrote the US Bill of Rights had in mind.

Think the US is any better, try defiling, defacing, insulting or even satirizing the US flag and see where it could lead you.

It's not illegal despite several efforts to outlaw it. All laws prohibiting the desecration of the American flag were invalidated in a 1989 SCOTUS decision (Texas v Johnson) and again in a 1990 decision (US v Eichman). At this point the only way to make flag desecration illegal in the US would be with a Constitutional Amendment, and none along those lines has ever passed the Senate. You don't get arrested for it, as evidenced by the fact that people are posting YouTube videos of themselves stomping on it or burning it and aren't in jail. Do it in the wrong crowd, however, and you are likely to wind up paying a visit to the nearest ER.

There is one particular exception to all the above in the US: Cops get special protections. If you cuss out a cop you're going to jail. All the more reason to treat them with the respect they (usually) deserve in my opinion.

AdBlock aims to send filthy malverts on one-way LSD trip

I find that NoScript blocks most ads for me. That was never why I run it, but it has been a nice fringe benefit.

Pirate Party founder: I wanna turn news into a series of three-line viral gobbets

Re: The Consumer.

Well I would say look through a list of Asimov's short stories, but that could take all week.

How much info did hackers steal on US spies? Try all of it

Well at least they don't ask if you're gay. Some secrets are safe!

Wait....they know whether your ex was Bob or Megan? Or both? Well so much for that.

Nobel bro-ffin: 'Girls in the lab fall in love with me ... then start crying'

The way he stated this wasn't the best, but I will say this much: There's a reason that most people who could be considered experts in such things advocate avoiding romantic relationships with coworkers. I don't think there's any need to go so far as to make single-sex labs since adults should have the sense to either avoid letting the relationship get un professional or request a transfer if it is headed that way, but there's a lot to be said for avoiding romantic entanglements in the workplace, be that a lab or an office or a server room.

I once had to request a transfer to another work area because a romantic relationship was budding with one of my coworkers. Another time I made a go of it with a coworker without requesting a transfer. I've been there, and trust me. It's better not to work in the same area as your SO.

Chips can kill: Official

Oy, don't get me started on the scientific misquotes I've been seeing on FB lately. I swear someone's glancing at headlines and making "This week in science" infograms without even understanding what they're writing.

Don't forget the nasty burns caused by it's gaseous form!

LIFE causes cancer

If you start avoiding everything you could that causes cancer you're going to have a very dull, bland life. Heck, even AGING causes increased cancer risk. You can spend your life worrying about cancer and avoiding everything that increases your risk or you can just get on living and deal with the blows life sends you as they come. Personally I'll take the latter.

Soon your car won't let you drink. But it won't care if you're on the phone

What if I'd taken NyQuil (which has alcohol in it, too)?

Personally I'd never dream of driving after taking NyQuil.

Well, OK I might dream about it, since dreaming is basically all I'm capable of doing about 15 minutes after taking that stuff. It's pretty much the only thing short of hospital grade anesthetics that can reliably knock me out.

Isn't this technology already around? I know that around here they will sometimes require habitual drunk drivers to get a device in their car that requires them to pass a breathalyzer test before the car will start. It's been around for years. It doesn't get used terribly often because it's a whole lot cheaper to just revoke their licenses, but every once in a while they do it.

Ed Snowden should be pardoned, thunders Amnesty Int'l

he has not committed any crime.

By the letter of the law he did. However it should be noted that under the circumstances it was impossible for him NOT to commit a crime. As he was aware of national secrets that revealed crimes committed by the NSA his choices were to ignore his legal duty to reveal those crimes (in which case his crime would have been ignored) or reveal those national secrets as is his legal duty and thereby commit the crime of revealing national secrets (which, as we all know, is what he did).

I've been saying he should be pardoned since the beginning. I've been called some pretty nasty names for saying it in the wrong places too. Sadly a lot of people seem to not get that all he did was expose the illegal activities of the government.

New US bill aims to zap patent trolls with transparency demands

Re: I'd hate to see some trolling venture capitalist lose his claim for "imaging technology"

I think any troll should need to put up a large sum of money (10 times demanded?) and be ready to forfeit if they lose the suit.

That would work except for one slight problem: not all infringement claims are trolling. It's already hard enough to wring money out of a major corporation that violates some independent inventor's patent because of legal fees. This idea would make it downright impossible for the little guys, the ones who need the patent protection the most, to enforce their patents. Sure, it'd stop trolls too, but at too high a price.

Science teacher jammed his school kids' phones, gets week suspension

Re: @AC

You're losing touch with reality. My wife was fired from Wal-Mart (long story - the short version is that even the store manager said it wasn't her fault but the termination came down from the corporate headquarters so his hands were tied), then a couple years later flunked out of her fourth attempt at college (after having dropped out 3 times - Don't get me started, but it's her own fault). Now she works a very good job in a retail back office.

Bethesda all out for 'Fallout 4', fallout for global productivity foretold in countdown

Re: Fallout 4 In China

Fallout 2 had a significant "Chinese presence" in that the later parts of the game

I never got very far into Fallout 2 actually. That was about the time this wonderful thing called "Real Life" decided to slap me upside the head and more or less force me to stop spending more than a few minutes a day playing games for a couple years.

Re: Fallout 4 setting confirmed

If we're looking at non-American settings I would think China would be the most likely other nation. After all China and the US were the opposing sides in the nuclear exchange that flattened the world, so it stands to reason that they'd be the two most torn up. Plus being set on the other side of the planet in a world where very few people have the ability to cross an ocean opens up a lot of possibilities. China would likely have very different mutations than the US, so instead of death claws and radscorpions we may have some completely different monsters.

All that said I think it most likely they'll stay in America. There's a lot of backstory to build on that way.

What a Zuckin' drag! 'Frisco queens protest outside Facebook HQ over 'real names' policy

Re: Why not

It is disturbing how many people see fb as compulsory

Not cumpulsory. Just very, very convenient. Especially for performers, who use it as an advertising tool. I know one indy musician (who doesn't use a stage name so it's a non-issue for him) who got a record deal just because he had a Facebook page with demos that a talent scout found.

Hardcore creationist finds 60-million-year-old fossils in backyard ... 'No, it hasn’t changed my mind about the Bible'

Re: Evidence.

How else do you interpret 60 million year old rocks?

Quite simple: First, the 5000 year mark is based on genealogies which contain NUMEROUS gaps. The time of Genesis could therefore quite easily be much, much further back on the timeline than what these young Earth idiots believe, say around 4.5 billion years ago or so.

Second, Genesis has an account of the creation of the universe as given to Moses, a man who by his own admission wasn't very smart. Don't you think that rather than try to make a not-very-smart man from a time before anything smaller than what you can see with the naked eye was known understand the complexities of cosmology that God might have dumbed it down into a metaphor that sufficed to get across the point that he created the whole thing?

In short, I interpret 60 million year old rocks as proof that (shocker) young Earth wonks contribute to giving my religion a bad name.

Now as to how a young Earther would explain it, I believe the standard explanation is that various factors (such as volcanic activity) can throw off carbon dating and therefore render it unreliable. That claim doesn't hold up under scrutiny though.

WOODEN computer chips reveal humanity's cyber elf future

Re: This is so exciting

Someone will no doubt find some problem with this to bark about.

Your CAR is the 'ultimate mobile device', reckons Apple COO

Oh dear lord no. That's the last thing we need. A car that you'll have to take to the dealership and pay twice as much as you would anywhere else every time it needs new tires or an oil change.

Creationist: The Flintstones was an accurate portrayal of Dino-human coexistence

can you point out some of those examples

I actually can point out some of the examples he's talking about. There's the numerous mentions of dragons and/or serpents. I think it's safe to say those are all metaphorical. Unless, of course, you're ready to believe that dinosaurs breathed fire. There's Jonah's great fish, but that was more likely a whale. There's the Leviathan, which is only vaguely described but was definitely sea-bound and probably metaphorical.

Then there's the Behemoth of Job. That one I can't explain. The language around it makes me think it's not meant to be a metaphor and I'm not real sure what it's supposed to be describing. Still, I have trouble accepting it as the only dinosaur described in all of recorded history if they ever walked beside us.

And, frankly, I think only a fool would discard all the scientific evidence we have to say that man and dinosaur walked together based on an incomplete genealogy and one obscure passage. In fact the very idea that God would even try to explain the process of creating a universe in detail to a man who had no idea that subatomic particles existed is absurd. I think it's safe to say the whole account is dumbed down to an extreme degree.

he is on the verge of proving that dinosaurs and humans coexisted only a couple of thousand years ago

Yes, absolutely. Because a historical record that talks about cats and dogs and freaking dodo birds and the various animals our ancestors hunted would totally leave out any and all references to dinosaurs.

I may share their religion (in a very broad sense, apparently), but sometimes I have to wonder what these guys are smoking.

Shuttleworth delivers death blow in Umbongoland dispute

Um....correct me if I'm wrong....but isn't this somewhat like if Stallman were to tell Torvalds that he was no longer the head of the kernel dev team? I mean I get that Kubuntu is a derivative of Ubuntu, but surely forking an open source project doesn't give the original control over the derivative's community structure.

Backpage child sex trafficking lawsuit nixed thanks to 'internet freedoms'

Faith in humanity....

Gone.

Milking cow shot dead by police 'while trying to escape'

Re: Lots of stupid in this thread

Ever tried herding cattle?

Personally? No, but as a kid I watched my grandfather herd dozens of cattle by himself or occasionally with one of my aunts helping him all the time. It doesn't take 20 people to herd three cows. If it did ranches would go out of business trying to pay for all the cowboys.

If this had been published on April 1 there's no way I'd ever believe it. As is....I'm still not sure I believe it. 20 cars and a helicopter seems an excessive response to what is, after all, one of the more docile animals you can encounter on a farm. Frankly a big turkey is more dangerous than a cow under most circumstances.

You've come a long way, Inkscape: Open-source Illustrator sneaks up

Re: open source video editor

What about Kdenlive

It's hard to beat its capabilities and performance without dropping several thousand dollars on a proprietary program. At least I've not found anything that compares. It even beats Premiere in my opinion.

Re: Context

Graphics professionals working on Linux… are as rare as mermaids?

You'd be surprised at how many there actually are. If you count web designers then I'm one, and that already makes them more common than mermaids.

Anything that takes 4 years to fix 700 bugs is not being used by professionals.

In this particular case, you are most decidedly wrong. Inkscape IS being used by professionals and has been for several years now. Last time I checked it was second only to Illustrator in professional usage for vector graphics.

That DRM support in Firefox you never asked for? It's here

Re: DRM in open source couldn't work?

They'll own the playback equipment, but like I said there are ways to prevent tampering: one-way suicide switches, epoxy blocks, lead shields to block x-raying, and so on. A prominent label with bold letters saying, "DO NOT OPEN! THIS DEVICE WILL STOP FUNCTIONING!" should server as adequate warning.

There's no such thing as foolproof. There's always a way to get around the protections and eventually someone will find it. It's a basic rule of security of any kind: unbreakable doesn't exist. There is only greater and greater difficulty. It's just like trying to make an unpickable lock. Just like every "unpickable" lock ever built has been picked by someone, every copy protection you can conceive can be circumvented. And, given the number of people interested in doing so and their skill levels, certainly will be.

someone once made a bomb no one could defuse and they had to detonate it in place, severely damaging the casino it was in

Bad example. They don't take chances with bombs because of the consequences of not getting it right the first time. The consequences of failing to break copy protection are, at worst, the loss of a $50 blu-ray player, much much lower than a bomb blowing up in your face. Probably someone could have disarmed it given the chance to screw up the first few times.

Re: DRM in open source couldn't work?

Ah, but users will own the equipment, and there is a certain demographic for whom "unbreakable" is a challenge. It will be broken sooner or later, just like every other DRM scheme ever conceived. That or pirates will simply stick with 1080p.

Re: DRM in open source couldn't work?

What's to prevent an enterprising coder writing a module that intercepts the video stream after decryption and spooling it to disc instead of displaying it?

When you get right down to it, absolutely nothing. I can think of at least 2 ways to do it off the top of my head that wouldn't even require a coder and wouldn't be at all detectable to the system. And I'm not even trying. Those are just ideas that jumped unbidden into my mind as I read the article. This is why I'm opposed to DRM: it doesn't and can't work. If the end user can see/hear the media then someone somewhere will figure out a way to copy it and share their knowledge. At the end of the day the user controls the client system, and a user who understands this and knows how the system works can get around any protections you put in place. Even that black box has to run on a client system controlled by a user.

@h4rm0ny

Oh I get it. I know why they use DRM. The problem with that train of thought though is that it doesn't work. No DRM yet conceived has managed to so much as put a dent in the piracy problem.I don't condone piracy in any way, but here's how I see it: DRM is an expensive solution that isn't working. Should they A) keep pumping money into DRM and living with the bad publicity that comes from it or B) look for a solution that does work?

The music industry has found their solution. Piracy still happens, but the musicians are getting at least some ad revenue from it (mostly from YouTube, some from the likes of Patreon). It's far from perfect but it does a whole lot more than DRM ever did to mitigate the problem.

"Nearly everyone who implements DRM says they are forced to do it" the FSF said at the time, "and this lack of accountability is how the practice sustains itself."

No, that's reality. They ARE forced to do it. If everyone dropped DRM the movie industry would happily refuse to allow any form of movie delivery other than copy-protected discs. If DRM were even dropped from those the industry would gleefully go back to the last century and force us all into the theater every time we wanted to watch a movie. The accountability for the travesty that is DRM lies squarely on big media. In this regard Firefox, Netflix, and even Microsoft are the little guys who are having policy dictated to them by the big boys with little choice but to comply.

The music industry has pretty much caught on that DRM causes a net decrease in profits and given up. The market voted with dollars and the point got across. We need just one studio to give us the chance to vote with dollars for DRM-free movies and we'll get the point across to the movie industry to. Unfortunately none of them will give us that chance.

Heartbleed, eat your heart out: VENOM vuln poisons countless VMs

I can see the concern with Xen, but Qemu itself is hardly a major player in the virtualization market. In fact I've never seen or heard of anyone using it for anything other than virtualizing an OS on their workstations. It's not exactly server-centric on its own. I can't see any vulnerability affecting it being in the same league as heartbleed in terms of penetration.

Apple Watch HATES tattoos: Inky pink sinks rinky-dink sensor

Re: Hardly a bug, is it...

Remember your body is a temple.

If so then I need to point out that I've yet to see a temple that didn't have painted wall and decorations. That reasoning when applied to an anti-drug use argument makes sense. When applied to tattoos, not so much.

Re: Hardly a bug, is it...

People who abuse their bodies by getting tattoos: plonkers

How very two generations ago of you. Most people these days have realized that tattoos are not long-term harmful and are a valid form of self expression. Judging someone because they choose a form of self expression you don't happen to agree with? Care to guess what that makes my opinion of you?

US hospitals to treat medical device malware with AC power probes

Medical device malware

I've got a pretty low opinion of malware authors in general, but anyone who writes malware targeting medical devices is the lowest of the low.

Light the torches! NSA's BFF Senator Feinstein calls for e-book burning

I've read the anarchist cookbook. I came away with the distinct impression than anyone trying to use it for more than minor mischief was more likely to blow themselves up than anyone else. Some of the recipes were shockingly and obviously dangerous to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of chemistry.

Jailed Brit con phishes prison, gets bail

Gotta hand it to him

I have as low an opinion of phishers and scammers as the next guy, but I've got to respect someone who can pull this off. Granted some gullibility of the jailers helped, but still it's a good bit of scam work.

Apple is picking off iOS antivirus apps one by one: Who'll be spared?

Those who don't learn from history....

Apparently Apple doesn't. Will we have to wait 5 years after iOS malware is in the wild behind the walls of the garden for them to admit such software exists like we did with Macs?

Zuck: Get your FULLY EXPOSED BUTTOCKS off my Facebook

Re: NSFW flag or different pic needed

It's a factual example that includes nudity, though admittedly mild. Very few workplaces are OK with employees viewing such things at work. On top of that, I work for a school district, so the standards are even stricter than usual. Articles are ok so long as they don't interfere with my work. A picture of several bare butts, not so much.

NSFW flag or different pic needed

Had my boss been walking by when I opened that I'd have been in trouble.

Is there a cure for cancer sitting at the back of the medicine cabinet already?

Medical pot?

Hold the downvotes and hear me out.

The research isn't there. I know this. Some valid research on cannabis as a cancer cure has been done, but the results are too preliminary and the sample groups too small to draw any real conclusions. But what we do have is enough to suggest that maybe we should be looking deeper into pot as a treatment. Not a cure on its own by any means, but as a possible companion to other treatments that may (emphasis on may) be able to increase effectiveness.