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Comment Re:FCC (Score 1) 173

Well, you see, when I retire from the FCC, I will have a paid position at AT&D and as a consumer I will be able to have more choices. And my money trickles down to the rest of the country, growing the money supply for everyone. This is how capitalism works and I can't really see how blocking the merger would benefit anyone. It clearly wouldn't benefit me. -- Any FCC Commissioner

Comment Re:Comply with the law (Score 1) 370

If your information is out there, it's out there whether Google indexes it or not. This is an unenforceable law. It's as simple as that. I mean, I could mention somebody's name right here and say they went bankrupt. We all know who I'm talking about. Should slashdot be shutdown as a result unless they remove my post?

How about you comply and delete your comment? I don't like it. Even though you posted before me, and had no intention of addressing it to me, it is insulting to me and I don't wish to see it ever again. It pains me. If I lived in Europe and asked them to remove your comment, would they do it? I'd argue they shouldn't. But it really does pain me.

And finally, if I do business in Europe, how am I supposed to know what I can publish? Am I allowed to publish everything and just wait for the requests to come in? Or will there be some list of facts which may not be published on the internet? I wonder if anyone, such as yourself, could compile such facts into a book, or some sort of index of some sort to help new businesses comply with the law. Such a list would surely help prevent people from publishing facts no one needs to know. Oh the irony!

Comment Re:probabilities? (Score 1) 238

That's what I don't understand. All this metadata, and yet they couldn't prevent Boston bomber? This is a guy who got away with murdering people. He should have been in prison. Instead "statistics say we need to invade everyone's liberties". I haven't seen a single reporter ask about the metadata they had on the Boston bomber. If they couldn't prevent that attack, what attacks are they actually preventing?

Comment Re:Cloud needs server huggers (Score 1) 409

Instead of "server huggers" we think of cloud sysadmins as Lakitu, a helpful koopa that rescues your applications when they've gone off track. Lakitu also throws spiny eggs at those suspender-ed and unshaven hackers who try to penetrate your kingdom's defenses. True, Lakitu can be knocked offline allowing such hackers to steal your bitcoins easily while your cloud floats along unattended, but this rarely happens. Given the success rate of Lakitu in the literature, I think we can easily agree that it's koopas all the way up for cloud computing.

Comment Google.eu Homepage (Score 3, Insightful) 153

Dear Europe,
      You have been forgotten by Google.

Seriously, that's what I would do. How long would this law stay around? I mean I understand there are people who wish annoyingly stupid things in the past weren't tied to their names, but the legalization of the right to forget is a slippery slope (i.e. Stalin photoshopped Trotsky out of his photos) with plenty of examples of why revisionism is a bad idea. I sympathize with the originator of the idea, but if we are led to believe that most people are honest and decent, then a simple explanation is all that would be in order to understand his plight. To those ignorant who would see something on Google and blindly discriminate against individuals forever, I think it says more about society's inability to have mercy, then the need to enforce an unenforceable right to be forgotten. What next? When we determine how to erase memories, everyone will have to sit in the chair to forget about stuff like this?

Comment Re:Can't Tell Them Apart (Score 1) 466

I hear you. It was hard for me to get past the technical interviews even when I was fresh out of school. My brain doesn't work that way at all. I had one question where they asked me about biographic numbers, and I struggled for 30 minutes about. Got back to the hotel afterward and solved the problem in about 5 min. on paper. Or many times the answer is some kind of way of breaking the problem down into a part that can be recursed, but I have trouble with those in a short time too.

Yet I'm very good at taking some theoretical complicated models and putting them in code. It's harder for me to come up with samples because I really only have proprietary software from work. But I agree that is beyond frustrating they won't even look at your code.

Comment Re:From a legal perspective, Swartz is probably wo (Score 1) 139

How is Swartz worse? He may have intended to commit massive copyright violations, but he DID not. And he had rights to this information per JSTORs own terms of service. He was going to be prosecuted for 50 years to life for a thought crime. If thought crime is worse than actual crime, that is a big problem.

OSVDB says there is a debate about whether this information is copyrightable, but they aren't pursuing that angle.

If McAfee workers read these documents to improve software that they are developing, then that's a commercial use and it violates the terms under which the information was provided.

Comment Ummm (Score 2) 116

I thought that regularly changing one's password was unnecessary https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/11/changing_passwo.html. I thought that it needs to be changed if found to be hacked, but otherwise as long as its strong, there's no need to change it. So while promoting good password habits is a good idea, I'm not sure that "annually change all your passwords on the same day every year so that any eavesdropper/keylogger can look for possible password change activity on one day" is one of them.

Comment Re:Can someone explain something to me? (Score 1) 227

You just said it yourself. The problem is that Comcast is a monopoly, has abused their position, and other ISP/Content creator combos are planning to follow suit.

Title II Common Carrier status would force Comcast to not discriminate. It can't charge Netflix more than what it charges any other customer.

I suppose another solution would be forcing Comcast to split its lines of business, but that is not a task the Government tends to want to do.

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