Posts by virhunter

Google's .bro file format changed to .br after gender bother

Re: To others...

You didn't know what a "brogrammer" is? If you've studied pretty much any STEM field at a university in just the last five years, you've likely encountered some feminist myth of male classmates or coworkers who are at the very best rude and unhelpful and at their worst violent towards women wanting to enter the field. It's the excuse of fat humorless women with art degrees to complain about a field they have no knowledge of or other interest in and play speech police targeting every real or imagined slight in classrooms and at conferences.

The gender gap in the STEM fields is very real, but they've probably done more to scare women away from the fields by creating myths like the brogrammer than all the ignorant remarks about women not being able to do math or science.

Canadians taking to spying on their spies

Re: I hope that we're watching this in the States

I'm surprised it's like that out west. In the Buffalo-Niagara region, we didn't think twice about going to Canada for shopping, seeing the other side of the Falls or even going to a Chinese restaurant before they started requiring passports or special driver's licenses to cross the border. Those of us with them still don't.

Want to download free AV software? Don't have a Muslim name

Did they stop filtering?

After reading this article, I went to the Sophos website and signed up for a trial under the name "Osama Hussein" from Egypt who works for the Muslim Brotherhood. I got the download in spite of the fact that it's not just names, but apparently organisations and countries that can be denied Sophos software.

Hacker 3D prints device that can crack a combo lock in 30 seconds

but most of all, samy is my hero

That name immediately sounded familiar to me.

Top Spanish minister shows citizens are thick as tortillas de ballenas

Look ma, it's not just the Americans!

Where does Spain rank on those international math and science stats that always place the Koreans and Japanese at the top? I'm sure I've seen a few of those western European countries ranking surprisingly low.

The gender imbalance in IT is real, ongoing and ridiculous

Something along these lines has to be the cause of it because there are so few women in any IT courses at colleges or universities. This tells me they are not even considering going into the field, so all the promoting of women in IT is not going to close the gap.

With contraversies like donglegate and groups like the Ada Initiative (claiming to advocate for women in IT) censoring talks at conferences, I'm surprised there isn't open hostility to women in IT. I wouldn't mind seeing more women in the field, but if so many of us already in the field run the risk of losing our jobs because some over-sensitive, over-emotional (in a way that even the worst misogynist wouldn't dream of) woman gets her panties in a bunch over a joke, maybe things should stay the way they are.

James Bond's metal-toothed nemesis Richard Kiel dies at 74

Good night sweet prince.

RIP in peace

Another Samsung supplier fingered in new 'child labor' probe

Some casuals seem to have this idea of Apple as being this really ethical company, probably because of their hipster users and the evil image Microsoft has. I have told people about the Foxconn suicides and some actually don't believe it. Samsung to my knowledge has never marketed itself as a company whose devices are made on happy hippie communes where everything runs on envronmentally sustainable solar power and unicorn farts.

Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson battles bullfighting

Re: Do bulls count as sentient

My understanding of the term "sentient" is that it refers to having senses, like the ability to see and feel. The term has been corrupted by some science fiction using it where they should be using the word "sapient", which denotes intelligence.

So, yes, a bull is sentient. However, I wonder if Pam is able to make the distinction. Those PETA people are truly nuts and call any animal, even chickens, intelligent. She could very well be using sentient in the way it is more popularly known.

Win XP alive and kicking despite 2014 kill switch (Don't ask about Win 8)

Re: ReactOS?

I might be able to get on board with that. However, according to wiki, the project has been around since 1998, yet is still an alpha release. It is the same story with almost every other alternative alternative OS like Haiku and Syllable. I get the feeling a thousand new developers on the project would probably not change much.

Google study finds users ignore Chrome security warnings

tracking down malware and phishing sites

That probably explains the high numbers for Linux users going to these sites. I was probably among the 18.2% going to a malware site, and I wonder how many others of that 18.2 are doing it deliberately.

Ubuntu 13.10 to ship with Mir instead of X

Re: Fragmentation

I share the sentiment on some things, like the hundred odd distros that are just Ubuntu respins and fifty or so window managers and desktop environments. X however is one thing that I think is in desperate need of competition.

French snooping as deep as PRISM: Le Monde

Re: And in Egypt...

And the Egyptians would have learned it from the Germans, not the Americans or French. Which begs the question, what are the Germans doing and how far does it go?

http://www.statewatch.org/news/2013/may/08ger-north-africa-surveillance.html

Snowden dodges US agents in Moscow, skips out on flight

Re: The police state of America?

What incentive would Obama have to do anything but expand the surveillance powers the previous administration gave him? He inherits a lot of power(all that really matters once you get the office) and doesn't have to spend any political capital. He has the added bonus of an American public that is half asleep and half retarded, so he could do anything and still be remembered as the greatest president of our time. It is why laws never get repealed and we can only expect the next president to be even worse, regardless of party or ideology.

Thousands rally behind teen girl cuffed, expelled in harmless 'explosion'

Re: Zero Tolerance

I totally agree. I have long thought that schools (or any institutions for that matter) with "zero-tolerance" policies should have their administration budgets cut by 50%. We pay administrators to administrate, and a greater part of administration is making decisions using one's own judgment. Zero-tolerance takes away that responsibility, so they obviously take a pay cut since they are not doing their jobs.

Farewell, Reg: This hack is hanging up her Apple jacket

Any language will do...

الله يسلمك يا سيدة ليتش! أتمنى لك الأحسن في عملك الجديد!

Pirate Bay 'seeks asylum' in, er, 'North Korea'

May not be North Korea, but Cambodia

Some of this is a little bit beyond me, so it could be BS, but maybe it's worth a look:

https://rdns.im/the-pirate-bay-north-korean-hosting-no-its-fake

SimCity Classic

I played this on the Super Nintendo, now sometimes on an emulator. Personally, SC2000 was my favourite. Arcologies were a very cool concept and the constant references to llamas were pretty amusing. I can't say I cared as much for the sequels, but they were okay.

The hoarder's dilemma, or 'Why can't I throw anything away?'

My hoard

Every version of Windows from 95 to XP (a couple copies of each, including the 15 or so floppies for 95)

An Ericsson phone (not sure what exact model, but it looks like a blue-grey TV zapper) from 1999

A couple different basic LG flip phones from 2000-2005

A Nokia E71

A Nokia 6085

Two Motorola RAZR's (one of which works)

4 Laptops (HP Pavilion, Dell Latitude, iBook G3, IBM Thinkpad 380)

7 desktops from 1998-2005 (three of which work and only one of them doesn't have some odd casing that is impossible to put back together)

A tangled mess of wires, some of which have connectors I have never seen before

3 Iomega Zip drives, one of which uses a serial connection

Countless Zip disks, a few of which make the "click of death" noise

3 keyboards (all PS/2)

5 mice (3 PS/2, 2 USB)

3 CD or DVD drives

1 5.25" floppy drive (no disks for it)

2 video cards

Several memory chips, ranging in sizes from 8 to 256 megabytes

This is just what I don't use, and it is not all of it. In addition to being a hoarder, people dump stuff on me when someone gets laid off or quits and leaves stuff. My family is guilty of dumping stuff on me too. They think must think "he's the IT guy, he'll be happier than a pig in shit to get these hundred odd zip disks and an old eMachines from 1998".

'Hypersensitive' Wi-Fi hater loses case against fiendish DEVICES

Wouldn't they be allergic to themselves?

Humans emit infrared radiation, which is on the same side of the electromagnetic spectrum from light.

40 Foxconn staff hospitalised after CAMPUS RIOT

Re: Apple Slave Owners United

While I agree partly with your sentiment, there is one huge problem. Even if you try to avoid anything made by Apple, Samsung or any other manufacturer that uses Foxconn to make their whole products, you can't avoid products with Foxconn components.

My laptot is made by Fujitsu, which still makes most of its products in Japan, an arguably modern nation with some respect for worker's rights. When I opened it up, it contained some Foxconn components. My phone is an HTC Droid Incredible, made in Taiwan, a nation on whose commitment to worker's rights I am a bit fuzzy, but is likely leaps and bounds ahead of China. I have yet to do anything with its hardware, but it undoubtedly contains Chinese, maybe even Foxconn components.

Any device you own is certainly tainted by some kind of worker or environmental abuse whether it is Chinese labourers or conflict minerals funding the Congolese army mined by children. Apple is probably the most guilty however, not for what it is actually doing, but for the image it presents. Some of my technologically illiterate friends don't want to believe what goes into making their Jesus Phones because Apple "is such a progressive company", though many of them believe the worst about every other company.

Neil Armstrong dies aged 82

Not gonna say I miss him

because I never met him. My own feelings about this (even now) are mostly a mix of admiration and envy. He lived longer than most humans on this planet can expect to and in that life he did things none of us will ever do. And he did some of those things riding a several-ton bomb, while many people are still afraid of flying.

If you never met him personally, please don't tell the world about how you miss him. The more honest thing to do would be to drink to him.

Going viral 9,500 years ago: 'English descended from ancient Turkey'

The Indo-European Urheimat is always changing

One day it's some obscure part of Kazakhstan, the next it's Lithuania, Ukraine, and now Turkey. Maybe in a few years they will say the languages all come from China.

And, @ LarsG and the half English and half Northern German Anon:

It doesn't make you ethnically Turkish, even though your ancestors may very well have come from the area now known as Turkey. Mass migrations are very common in history and in some isolated places you can find the people who either did not migrate or did not blend in with the natives.

I spent a summer a few years ago in Morocco and passed through a Berber village between Tangier and Fez. There were a lot of blonds and gingers there, but not a single one of them understood anything but their own language and just enough Arabic to sell me a bottle of water. There are quite a few theories on how there are people who look like that in North Africa, even in places untouched by Europeans in the past 1,000 years, most involving Celtic tribes or one of those -goth groups that landed there in the Roman era.

Maybe you should plan a holiday Turkey. You might find a 5,000th cousin 4,000 times removed.