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Linux

According to Linus, Linux Is "Bloated" 639

mjasay writes "Linus Torvalds, founder of the Linux kernel, made a somewhat surprising comment at LinuxCon in Portland, Ore., on Monday: 'Linux is bloated.' While the open-source community has long pointed the finger at Microsoft's Windows as bloated, it appears that with success has come added heft, heft that makes Linux 'huge and scary now,' according to Torvalds." TuxRadar provides a small capsule of his remarks as well, as does The Register.
Privacy

MIT Project "Gaydar" Shakes Privacy Assumptions 508

theodp writes "At MIT, an experiment that identifies which students are gay is raising new questions about online privacy. Using data from Facebook, two students in an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person's online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. The project, given the name 'Gaydar' by the students, is part of the fast-moving field of social network analysis, which examines what the connections between people can tell us, from predicting who might be a terrorist to the likelihood a person is happy, fat, liberal, or conservative." MIT professor Hal Abelson, who co-taught the course, is quoted: "That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information — because you don't have control over your information."

Comment Re:Greentech! (Score 1) 552

Well, I don't hear any other message from any other environmental groups, so what am I supposed to believe?

Probably because you're intellectually lazy and don't bother looking for other environmental groups or doing some basic research about environmental issues. I guess the problem is that you absorb whatever "knowledge" is placed in front of you, without regard to its legitimacy or source.

Comment Re:Got any Gonads (Score 1) 550

An amorphous blob consisting of people who know basic physics, physics experts, knowledge gleaned from experiments, and people who observe things beyond the confines of this planet say you're absolutely wrong about everything you discuss on that "nasty little truths" page.

No ad-hominem here. Happy now?
Also, why do you need to know who he is or what he has done in order to defend your claim? It doesn't matter whether a world-renowned physicist or a schoolchild proves you wrong, as long as the rebuttal is based on facts.

Comment Re:Greentech! (Score 1) 552

they still have the views I pointed out in my post, and are extremely loud and abrasive about them.

...

I agree with you entirely. Most environmentalists do not.

Greenpeace does not even come close to representing the views of "most environmentalists".

Like you said, they are loud and abrasive. So is the Westboro Baptist Church.

Comment Re:Greentech! (Score 1) 552

You must have flunked basic English. Read that post again, paying careful attention to this part:
"...so they are grown for shipping and not nutrition, and then often picked unripe and gassed to give the appearance of freshness"
Shipping doesn't significantly affect nutritional value, but nutritional value is affected when crops are specifically grown for "durability" during shipping (rather than optimal nutritional value) and picked when not fully ripened (further reducing their already crippled nutritional value).

Comment Re:It's not the business model that is broken. (Score 4, Insightful) 552

The capitalist system IS the business model. There's no money to be made in basic research when you can sell shitty packaged "solutions" consisting mostly of off-the-shelf hardware.
An example: The Army uses mobile PCs with touchscreens that are given out to soldiers in the field. They're made by Toshiba, I believe. What do they run? Windows with some shitty full-screen GUI. Yes, they do crash. The defense budget takes the biggest chunk of the USA's budget. Even with all that money, they still get utter crap peddled to them by "system integrators". How can this be?

Business plan:
1. determine how to maximize profit no matter what
2. repeat indefinitely

Comment Re:Impossible (Score 2, Informative) 272

You don't get it.

Dogtanian is talking about the cost of service vs cost of hardware. The phone (hardware) has a certain determinable cost that is based on component and manufacturing costs, both of which are determined by the "free market".
The "value" of the service (call minutes), however, is almost completely arbitrary and is *very* loosely based on actual costs of transmission, cell tower cost, operation cost, etc.

This is just like those commercials that sell "bonus gifts" along with some shoddy product. The product is worth $19.99, but it comes with "$100" worth of extras. These extra products make it seem like you're getting a great deal when in reality you're getting a box of crap that's really worth $5 at most.

Compare this to the "cost" of sending and receiving text messages. It costs the company almost nothing (and often literally nothing), but some charge upwards of 10 cents per message sent/received (T-Mobile Prepaid)!

Comment Re:Self credit check (Score 1) 543

"but you can't forge anything when you present it from a website"

Uh, what? Somebody is greatly misinformed...

I meant that if you go to a website such as MyFICO from one of THEIR (the phone company's) computers, log into your account (allowing access to the credit report you paid for), and show them the credit report then it is reasonable to expect that the data presented is legitimate and that it is coming from MyFICO and not something you concocted. Sure, I can poison their DNS or do pull some kind of zany man-in-the-middle attack, but what I am talking about is a reasonable expectation of the legitimacy of the data.

Comment Self credit check (Score 2, Interesting) 543

What about running a credit check on yourself (costs ~$12) and presenting them a copy of it (maybe with the non-essential details redacted)? I mean, you get the same information they do, so what's the big idea? You can forge a printout, but you can't forge anything when you present it from a website (such as MyFICO). In fact, looking at the credit report I printed earlier, I can see that the SSN is redacted automatically and only the last 4 digits are shown. The rest of the information is public knowledge (current address), or innocuous (birth month and year). Giving out your SSN is total bullshit. Tinfoil hat or not, I go out of my way to avoid it.

Comment Re:new year Resolution (Score 1) 877

I no longer reply to those that are too chicken shit to be logged in.

Bush is probably one of the worst presidents, rivaling even Hoover. I'm not the guy who replied to you, but I'll give it a shot with my own (more constructive) reply:
-Why, exactly, do I owe Bush "for keep us safe"?
-What "crisises" has he kept from "going realy bad"?

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