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Comment Re:Really? (Score 4, Informative) 577

As a counterpoint to this; I had a reasonable machine for work. Win7 Pro, then IT got hold of it and connected it to the new domain etc; now it is much slower. Booting, shutting down, launching programs...everything is slower then the day before.

Well known problem. Once attached to a domain, Windows attempts to do all kinds of stupid things. One of the most common problems is the open/save file dialog. The OS attempts to display it, then blocks until it contacts the domain servers to look up the user's actual name. Then there are similar delays that happen as it goes out and probes each drive, which is a problem if they are mapped network drives as the display waits until everything is built before the UI appears.

On a machine that is disconnected from the domain, perhaps a laptop away from the office, it gets even worse. Internally there is a 45 second delay on each of the network probes, and between Windows 2000 through Windows 7 they all fired sequentially. So if you had your own friendly name plus three mapped drives, that's three minutes of waiting for network connections to time out. It is somewhat faster under Windows 8, but in bad cases can still take ages.

For these specific issues they will not fix the root problems of the shell blocking until after data is loaded or probing the domain for security settings as it would break many shell plugins. It can be made partially better by disabling some of the features; they include disabling certain group policies on shell extensions, turning off certain domain security and SCAPI settings, and disabling drive mappings whenever possible. When disconnected, removing all VPN lookups and disabling proxy detections can also help. Even with those improvements, attaching a machine to a domain introduces an immediate performance penalty on everything shell-related.

Another similar set of problems is apps that try to probe the MRU file list when files are on the network. Many parts of the OS try to cache things based on prior use, and once you're wired in to the corporate network these probes (which stupidly are often blocking tasks) can take seconds to run while on the network, or minutes to run when they time out when off the corporate network.

Comment Re:Update to Godwin's law? (Score 4) 575

I don't know, we call just about everything a terrorist act these days. Anything high profile they try to announce that it WASN'T called a terrorist attack. Look at the Chicago airport issue last week, many news outlets lead with "In what is not a terrorist attack, a fire in an ATC building..." I've seen news reports that call simple street vandalism and muggings "domestic terrorism".

However, I completely agree with you. Holder's statement basically says personal devices should be inherently insecure, but it is okay for corporations to have a little bit of security. How many companies have BYOD policies? How many companies buy consumer parts?

Is he thinking the government can compel Apple to make "iPhone 7 Unencrypted Consumer Edition", and "iPhone 7 Corporate Secure Edition"? Or similarly force Android, with Google and LG and Samsung and others to split into an insecure consumer version and a more secure corporate version? I don't know, maybe they could. Of course, even the non-technical sheep could be taught to notice and push back.

Comment Re:More eugenics propaganda? (Score 4, Insightful) 192

meh.

My interpretation of the article: You can't teach height, but tall untrained basketball players can be beaten by shorter experts. To be the "world's best" you need both.

There is a difference between "expert" and "world's best".

When it comes to expert, guided practice and training is generally enough. Even if you are short I can still teach you to be an expert at basketball. Others can still teach you how to block, how to dribble, how to pass, how to shoot, how to referee, how to coach, and how to be an expert.

When it comes to world's best, sure, there is often a genetic component. Most people, no matter how much you train them, will never become the world's best. They can be expert and still judge and teach and work the field, being expert is not the same as being world's best. Similarly, some people, no matter how much they try to work with numbers, struggle to handle them intuitively. Given enough effort they can be taught all the way through college math and become experts, but that doesn't mean they'll become the world's expert on mathematics. Just because someone is tall doesn't make them a world-class basketball player, training is still needed. Just because someone has a pretty voice doesn't make them an automatic world's best vocalist, just because someone has a more intuitive grasp of spatial representations doesn't make them a world renown mathematician, training is still needed.

You can become expert with guided practice, even without much natural ability. To become world's best you need both guided practice AND a genetic predisposition.

Comment Re:Tesla is worth 60% of GM ! (Score 1) 267

That's exactly the trouble.

If you buy today and the stock goes down, people like those in TFA will continue to say it was overpriced and you are a bad investor.

If you buy today and the stock keeps going up, then you become praised as an early adopter.

Unfortunately my crystal ball is broken so I cannot tell which direction the investment will go. I'm either making a bad investment or becoming an early adopter, only time will tell which.

Comment Re:Police?? (Score 2) 302

You are right that they are operating outside their area, and they ought to be going after things inside their area.

But if they are going to go after infringement, let's have them start going after corporations that are engaged in wholesale copyright violations, not just individuals involved in it.

Sites like Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Upworthy, and other clickbait sites that take images from the little guys, use the images in their clickbaiting business, and profit from the copyright infringement. Just take a moment to search for the assorted sites, " stolen images". Buzzfeed and HuffPo are currently fighting many such lawsuits, yet they continue to use random images found online without permission and without compensation to the photographers.

It would be nice if the City of London police started by black holing those sites, too.

Comment Re:4-8 LITERS?! (Score 2) 90

So those medieval barber-surgeons were right, and blood-letting has health benefits after all?

Simply: Yes.

Regular donations help (causal relationship) with iron balance since you cannot donate if iron is low and it reduces your iron if it is high, can (causally) help slightly with weight loss as you lose a glob of body material without kidney filtering plus it works to replace it, is associated with (correlation) reduced risk of certain cancers, associated with (correlation) reduced risk of heart attacks, and is associated with (correlation) a slightly longer, higher-quality life. There are also short-term benefits for issues like high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and other metabolic problems.

Comment Close, but I think it's simpler and more normal (Score 3, Insightful) 460

than that.

It's not that the public doesn't trust the abilities of scientists.

It's that they don't trust their motives. We have a long literary tradition that meditates on scientists that "only cared about whether they could, not whether they should," and the politicization of sciences makes people wonder not whether scientists are incompetent, but whether they have "an agenda," i.e. whether scientists are basically lying through their teeth and/or pursuing their own political agendas in the interest of their own gain, rather than the public's.

At that point, it's not that the public thinks "If I argue loudly enough, I can change nature," but rather "I don't understand what this scientist does, and I'm sure he/she is smart, but I don't believe they're telling me about nature; rather, they're using their smarts to pull the wool over my eyes about nature and profit/benefit somehow."

So the public isn't trying to bend the laws of nature through discourse, but rather simply doesn't believe the people that are telling them about the laws of nature, because they suspect those people as not acting in good faith.

That's where a kinder, warmer scientific community comes in. R1 academics with million-dollar grants may sneer at someone like Alan Alda on Scientific American Frontiers, but that sneering is counterproductive; the public won't understand (and doesn't want to) the rigorous, nuanced state of the research on most topics. It will have to be given to them in simplified form; Alan Alda and others in that space did so, and the scientific community needs to support (more of) that, rather than sneer at it.

The sneering just reinforces the public notion that "this guy may be smarter than me, but he also thinks he's better and more deserving than me, so I can't trust that what he's telling me is really what he thinks/knows, rather than what he needs to tell me in order to get my stuff and/or come out on top in society, deserving or not."

Comment Re:I still don't get this. (Score 0) 304

I frankly don't see any difference. Big, fat force, tiny little space. That's not good for a sheet of glass, a sheet of metal—hell, you've seen what happens to a sheet of paper after spending all day in your pockets. People learn that in grade school.

If it really has to be on your waist somewhere, get a holster. Otherwise, just carry the damned thing, or put it in a shirt or coat pocket, briefcase, backpack, etc.

Since the '90s, I've never regularly carried a mobile device in my pants pockets. Obviously, it would break, or at least suffer a significantly reduced lifespan. On the rare occasions when I do pocket a device for a moment, it's just that—for a moment, while standing, to free both hands, and it is removed immediately afterward because I'm nervous the entire time that I'll forget, try to sit down, and crack the damned thing.

Comment I still don't get this. (Score 5, Insightful) 304

Who thinks it's okay to sit on their phone? Why do people think they ought to be able to? It literally makes no sense. It's an electronic device with a glass screen. If I handed someone a sheet of glass and said, "put this in your back pocket and sit on it!" they'd refuse.

But a phone? Oh, absolutely! Shit, wait, no! It broke?!?!

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