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Comment 20th Century Witchcraft (Score 5, Informative) 282

Over the years I've seen 3 investigative reports on TV, and read many articles on the topic. It all comes down to the same thing: The polygraph is just a stage prop in an interrogation, for the purpose of scaring the ignorant into confessing. Here is Penn & Tellers report:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NLf7XwLpyQ

Comment Re:How it works (Score 4, Interesting) 330

It trades one addiction for others: religion, caffeine, and nicotine.
It trades personal responsibility for not drinking, and thus drinking, to an imaginary higher power.

There is an athiest/agnostic sub-group of AA, but judging by things found on their FB page, they are having an uphill battle with the powers-that-be in AA.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Agnostics-and-Atheists-in-AA/168374259840358

http://www.aa-atheists.com/

Comment Re:No Cartwheeling (Score 1) 506

Pictures show the aircraft sat on the ground with the tail missing and the forward roof burnt out but it certainly did NOT cartwheel...

I happened to check news just as this story was breaking. The word "cartwheel" came from the first eyewitness report. The next two eyewitnesses said it "spun". So I'm guessing that the guy who said "cartwheel" doesn't really know what the word means, and that instead it spun on its belly.

The aviation term for such a rotation is "ground loop": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_loop_(aviation)

Comment Re:This bill is an *excellent* bugfix (Score 1) 133

Seriously, read it. It starts out by truly fixing some of the most egregious brain damage and expansiveness of DMCA, making it into a legitimate copyright law. The cellphone unlocking technicality is just one a thousand bugs this fixes; the bill would also legalize making/selling/using ink cartridges, legalize the playing the DVDs that you have bought, etc. If DMCA had passed originally in this form, it would be much less destructive and hated.

After the first part, then it looks like it does something benevolent related to phones specifically, but to some code I'm unfamiliar with. Then it takes a shot at WIPO.

Overall, this is a no-brainer, and anyone who opposes it, will be outed. That means they'll kill it in some committee, but just in case they don't, remember names and who votes for/against. Reward and punish, based on this one, right here.

Pssst! Jared Polis is already "out". ;-)

Comment Re:I have CenturyLink (Score 1) 69

And all I get is 1.5mbps DSL because they are still using ancient copper out in my neck of the woods. C'mon... PLEASE.

There's nothing wrong with copper or its age. You're too far from the CO.

I'm just 2500' from the CO, and the best they offer me is 7Mbs. So after having CenturyLink/Qwest DSL service for over 10 years, I switched to Comcast and now get 22Mbs *and* native IPv6 for less than I was paying 1.5 Mbs DSL.

Firefox

Emscripten and New Javascript Engine Bring Unreal Engine To Firefox 124

MojoKid writes "There's no doubt that gaming on the Web has improved dramatically in recent years, but Mozilla believes it has developed new technology that will deliver a big leap in what browser-based gaming can become. The company developed a highly-optimized version of Javascript that's designed to 'supercharge' a game's code to deliver near-native performance. And now that innovation has enabled Mozilla to bring Epic's Unreal Engine 3 to the browser. As a sort of proof of concept, Mozilla debuted this BananaBread game demo that was built using WebGL, Emscripten, and the new JavaScript version called 'asm.js.' Mozilla says that it's working with the likes of EA, Disney, and ZeptoLab to optimize games for the mobile Web, as well." Emscripten was previously used to port Doom to the browser.

Comment I considered it, then did it. (Score 1) 397

This is a big, well-known company, and there is a story related to it on the /. front page right now.
The problems:

- No network documentation whatsover.

- IT dept fragmented into multiple competing divisions, and each division was
  sub-divided by device type. So there were no *network* engineers, there were
"firewall engineers", "router/switch" engineers, etc, even though everything
was interconnected. So no single network engineer could solve a problem, it
always required dragging people from multiple divisions/depts into an issue.

- Workload imposed on one person that should have been distributed across three.

- Engineers not allowed to make any engineering decisions whatsoever.
    Nonsensical procedures mandated by management wasted huge amounts of time and
    staff, but no engineers were allowed input into the system.

- Change control procedures that made it impossible to get the job done *and*
    follow mandated procedures. Everything required many levels of approval,
    but the approvers couldn't be bothered to approve in a timely manner,
    (if at all), and 50% of the time the change was never fully approved, so the
    only way to get the work done was to do it anyway and run the risk of getting
    caught in a change audit.

- Clueless managers that believed every IT person is interchangeable and anyone
    can be dropped into any role, regardless of education, experience,
    certifications, or interest. e.g a network engineer with multiple Cisco
    certifications was expected to be a software developer, and a Linux admin,
    and not even allowed to work on Cisco equipment.

I turned in my resignation several months ago.

Comment Re:I... don't understand this at all. (Score 2) 125

On my home network, I use the private 24-bit block 10.x.x.x, in case I buy more than 16 million devices. Is the article saying that they decided to map public IPs they didn't own to internal devices? Notwithstanding the confusion such cases like the above would cause, this bank could conceivably leak banking data out to that Chinese ISP!

All the articles I can find are equally uninformative.

At at previous job we found some idiot had done this. We didn't know this until troubleshooting a complaint of not being able to reach a certain portion of the Internet. It really isn't a security issue, because a corporate network will first route to it's internal networks, and only if the destination is not internal will it fall back to the default route to the Internet. The default route will always have a shorter mask, therefore it will be the last chosen. The biggest problem is that doing this stupid trick means you have blackholed a portion of the Internet from your own users.

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