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Comment Re:unbelievable, yet very believable (Score 1) 492

Sony allowed Betamax to carry porn, and have (or rather had) a whole library to prove it. Playboy, swimsuits, unmentionable stuff - it was all available on Betamax

Unmentionable? On slashdot? More taboo than goatse?

Well NO WONDER no one was buying betamax porn! Once you've seen volumes 1 - 5, "Meatspin: Volume 6" just isn't worth $49.95.

Comment Re:The cat and mouse game. (Score 1) 68

The only item to fix was the version of the web server was just one behind current. The changelog indicated that it was to fix a vulnerability on a different platform, so it was completely unrelated to us...

After opening the firewall to them, and changing the version number on the web server (there were reasons we couldn't do the trivial upgrade), we passed with flying colors.

        For them, they were interested in the version numbers handed off by the server, not what they actually were. For example, if it was Apache, we could have it report Apache version 9.9.9, and that would have made us pass on that part without fail for years.

For anyone who isn't familiar with this stuff, there are reasons beyond those stated by the OP that make this "apache version number must be current" policy moronic.

There are the obvious, stated ones:
  1. You can just change the version number apache reports
  2. The latest version may not fix anything meaningful
  3. The latest version may actually introduce problems

Another, less obvious reason this is stupid:
  4. Distributions like Debian and Redhat release a single version of apache, and then continue to use it for months or years, backporting security patches ASAP. So your version number may *say* you're 12 months behind on patches, but in reality, you're only 12 months behind on functional changes; you've basically got all the bleeding-edge security patches, assuming you're keeping current with the distro-provided packages.

And of course, if you build from source, you may be doing the exact same sort of backporting yourself.

Comment Re:Sure the MPAA wasn't worried about piracy? (Score 1) 344

You can't video tape a 3D movie from your seat

I wonder, could you? If you broke the polarizing glasses they give you in two, and put one lens over each of two cameras, mounted a specific distance apart?

I suppose maybe the result might be too lossy to achieve a workable 3d effect. And of course, projecting the resulting recordings would have its own challenges.

Comment Re:This seems stupid. (Score 1, Insightful) 344

I just considered it a movie. No more. There are a lot of people drawing parallels between the RDA and $group_in_authority and the Na'vi and $persecuted_group. However, I'm sure with any popular movie which isn't using the same stale IP as before, this could be put into place. People alluded the Empire in Star Wars to groups in real life when that debuted.

Yeah, I never understood why people compared star wars to WWII. I mean, sure, the "bad guys'" troops are called storm troopers, and Darth Vader orders acts of genocide.

That's clearly nothing like Nazi Germany, which also coincidentally had troops called stormtroopers (in English), while Adolf Hitler ordered acts of genocide.

How could anyone possibly compare the two? ...Damn near all themes in science fiction are drawn from present day events, or history. As a child, I too liked to see sci-fi as stories that had no meaningful connection with real life. As an adult, I now see the connections everywhere.

Comment Re:So how do we DDoS Microsoft? (Score 1) 332

Also, the fact remains that there are links out there that point to "http://www.rosettacode.org/w/index.php?something_or_other", not all of those links will (or can) change, and I would be an absolute fool to knowingly break them, if I want people to visit RCo via referral traffic.

That can be resolved with a single, simple apache rewrite rule.

Continuing to support www. -- if only by rewrite rule -- is unfortunately a necessary evil presently. If it isn't "www.*.com", the technically unsavvy majority doesn't understand it.

Comment Re:The flipside (Score 1) 580

For what it's worth, your diatribe comes off as fairly melodramatic. You'd do well with a rewrite that puts more emphasis on the largest issues (management having no idea how long projects should take, lack of air conditioning, coworkers incapable of basic communication), de-emphasizing the most trivial complaints (manager that checks in "up to 3 times a day"? A company focused on profit? These seem par for the course), and omitting the dramatic hyperbole entirely -- especially the repeated mentions of being "almost in tears", and the paragraph of suicidal ideations.

It was clearly a lousy job, and you were right to leave, but the way you've written your account doesn't put you in a terribly positive light either.

Comment Re:conundrum (Score 1) 464

Giving information to law enforcement is not "bowing down." The police are working for us, they are our employees... Cooperating with the police to do a job we give them is not evil.

...Unless the police have been tasked with an evil job. Like, I don't know... rounding up all the Jews so they can be systematically exterminated?

I hate to play the Godwin card, but it happened. And it's an obvious, concrete example of how unconditional cooperation with whoever happens to be in power can be unquestionably morally wrong.

Morality and legality may frequently overlap, (e.g. killing and stealing are generally both illegal and morally wrong), but they are nonetheless distinct, and there are many areas in which they don't overlap -- illegal actions that are moral, immoral actions that are legal, etc.

Comment Re:Does it have Adblock? (Score 1) 274

Install 6 extensions (especially firebug), and actively browse in at least 6, if not 12 tabs for a day. If your memory utilization doesn't hit AT LEAST 500 meg after 8 hours, call the editors of the Guiness Book.

This may sound like an extreme usage pattern, but it's all to common for anyone doing any sort of web development.

Comment Re:Why a video (Score 1) 629

Who's going to watch a video review, much less a 70 minute one? Write it up on a web page with some illustrative clips.

I'm not sure why there's this trend to having high bandwidth video for stuff that the simple written word can handle. The Apple site comes to mind with the "Learn Your Way Around the Mac in Minutes" videos, that would take only seconds if it were text. Some of us still remember how to read.

Who's going to watch a movie trilogy filmed 20 years ago, much less a 5 hour one? Write it up in a book with a handful of pictures.

I'm not sure why there's this trend to having high bandwidth film for stuff that the simple written word can handle. Some uf us still remember how to read.

Comment Re:Should be (Score 1) 572

If they change the terms of the contract then those contracts are no longer valid, allowing customers to cancel them prematurely.

Given that those contracts are used to subsidize the cost of the phones, I don't think it's going to happen.

Changes to the contract do give the consumer the right to terminate without penalty, but few people are aware of this, or take advantage of it. It's not like they call you up and ask "Hey, we've changed the contract. Do you want out of it for free?".

Think back to the SMS rate hikes over the last few years, from 10 cents to 15 to 20. How many people canceled their contracts then? It certainly wasn't many.

Granted, I'd expect *more* response to any sort of data-usage billing change -- it's obviously a higher-profile issue -- but frankly, I wouldn't expect even 10% of iPhone users to cancel their contracts in such an event.

Comment Re:My god. (Score 4, Insightful) 806

Typically I'd agree with you, but this statement here...

"Tatro said she was 'looking forward to Monday's embalming therapy"

Is reason enough to be concerned. When some kind of school shooting happens, there is typically a message before hand. Sure, you can shrug off the "I wana cuta bitch" but when you make statements like the one posted above, there needs to be some kind of action.

Let's take for granted that "When some kind of school shooting happens, there is typically a message before hand". That does not, in any way, imply that every time you encounter such a "message", there's a statistically significant chance that a violent act will follow.

In fact, most people will agree that most "threats" of this nature do *not* result in violent acts. There thousands, if not millions of "threats" like these, uttered idly every day -- a simple hyperbolic expression of frustration. Meanwhile, school shootings happen a handful of times a year, at worst.

Similarly, I can guarantee that almost every school shooter will have imbibed some form of liquid before committing their heinous crimes. It does not follow that everyone who has a drink with their breakfast is going to shoot up their school.

"A usually precedes B" does not necessarily mean "A has occurred, therefor B MUST occur."
It doesn't even necessarily mean "A has occurred, therefor B is even 1% likely to occur".

Comment Re:Wouldn't be necessary if... (Score 2, Informative) 242

Good URIs are just a good idea, period. That's not advice from some shady SEO scumbag, either. That's tim berners-lee and the w3c.

Surely:

http://example.com/articles/man-bites-dog

is vastly superior from the user's point of view to:

http://example.com/cgi-bin/article.php3?PHPSESSID=0983sdf0er888fsd&article_id=73522

Which one are you going to remember? Which one would you rather read over the phone?

Comment Bandwidth isn't the problem. (Score 2, Informative) 102

It's not the bandwidth. It's the latency.

Ping on a cell connection runs around 200 ms, in my experience. *That's* the part that makes tethering suck -- with pages requiring dozens of images and javascript files these days, waiting for a 200ms round trip for each request adds up FAST.

Comment Re:Pretty soon... (Score 2, Interesting) 169

Pretty soon, Google will BE the Internet.

They already are:

Credit Suisse made headlines this summer when it estimated that YouTube was binging on bandwidth, losing Google a half a billion dollars in 2009 as it streams 75 billion videos. But a new report from Arbor Networks suggests that Google's traffic is approaching 10 percent of the net's traffic, and that it's got so much fiber optic cable, it is simply trading traffic, with no payment involved, with the net's largest ISPs

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