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Comment Re:Dumb fundie article (Score 1) 858

want to lower your risk of having kids with autism? have kids in your twenties, don't party and get drunk every other day, keep healthy and have kids naturally without chlamid or invitro or any other procedure

We followed every single stipulation you stated above, including natural childbirth, and our first-born was autistic anyway. Some of your assumptions are wrong. The age distribution for mothers is not weighted towards older women; it's fairly flat. Maybe you're confusing autism with Down's Syndrome?

Comment Re:This is Sony (Score 1) 293

I have a Sony blu-ray player that in order to use any feature above just playing disks I had to create an account on Sony's web site and give them a bunch of personal information. I think this is necessary to update the device as well.

I bought a brand new Sony blu-ray player a month ago. While they direct you to a website to activate the player's internet streaming and get a firmware update, I had the option of not providing personal data, so I didn't. The website merely said "enter this code into the player" and on doing so the device downloaded updates and the additional features just started working. Sony has my IP address, but not my name or other personal details.

I'm not apologizing for Sony, just relating my experiences.

I know this means they have my browsing habits now. It doesn't bother me, as every website and streaming provider already has this. Singling out Sony is myopic.

Comment Re:16550A (Score 4, Informative) 105

Floppy disk formatting requires very little CPU resources. You should have had no problem receiving bytes even at 57600 baudrate into a buffer using an 8250 UART (with one byte receive buffer) all the while formatting a floppy disk, even on the original IBM PC.

...unless the serial data came in while the floppy interrupt handler was already in progress. In such a situation, the serial handler must wait until the floppy handler is finished, and depending on what the floppy handler is doing, it could take long enough that more serial data would be delayed or lost. And for those of us who tried to do things like download files directly to floppy disks on slower PCs in the 1980s, this was a regular occurrence.

The 16550A UART's 16-byte buffer meant that several bytes could come in before the serial interrupt needed to be handled again, allowing serial communications to run at full speed for longer time periods before needing to be emptied. This made a world of difference working on slower machines writing to floppies (and faster machines trying to download something in the background while in a multitasking environment).

Comment Re:Enjoy your delusion (Score 1) 414

You're assuming that it's encryption that's the problem. In my case, it's a problem with the size of data vs. how much bandwidth I can use. I get an allocation of 20GB a month, and even that's very expensive. Backing up my 5+ TB to the cloud is simply not an option.

This doesn't prevent the OP from using local backup in the meantime. I backup to local storage as well as cloud. The local backups complete quickly in case I need to retrieve a file, and the cloud is there for if my house burns down.

The OP stated in his question that he has a lot of data but no money to buy redundant storage -- well, that's his real problem. If you have 3T of data, buy 3T of backup. I don't know what the OP is looking for other than a magic compression answer or something.

Comment Enjoy your delusion (Score 4, Informative) 414

"I'm sorry 'The Cloud' is not an acceptable nor practical solution." Not sure what brand tin-foil hat you're wearing, but there are cloud backup solutions that encrypt your data *before* it leaves the machine. I use CrashPlan (I can't speak for others) and I've verified the encryption myself by capturing the traffic leaving my machine, even when CrashPlan was backing up to other machines on my own private network. Even the data it writes to locally-attached hard drives is encrypted. So there's at least one company who gets it right.

Comment More benefits than just sound: Research, history (Score 1) 841

The author of the article completely misses the secondary benefits of 24/192 delivery: Such fidelity (if delivered uncompressed) allows the recording to be considered archival and can be used for audio research, or as a historical record of the production methods used at the time the music was mastered. The format is indistinguishable from 24/48 *for most people*, obviously, but that doesn't make it worthless. If I could own 24/192 downmixes from the studio masters, I would consider it a unique opportunity.

Comment Re:A bit outdated (Score 1) 461

I still have a 32" CRT TV, and one of the main things that's keeping me from getting a flat screen of some kind is WTF am I going to do with this beast?

Get the flatscreen anyway but hold onto your CRT for any vintage console gaming you do. Modern LCD/Plasma TVs, even with a "game mode", add one frame of latency to all analog inputs; CRTs obviously do not.

Comment Re:dongle (Score 1) 635

But crackers are able to figure out unknown algorithms when they create key generators. Why would this be any different? In one case a unique key of some kind is created by a CPU attached to your USB port. In another it is created by a secret software program that only the developer or publisher has. Either way the cracker is left guessing what the algorithm is. Anyway, all of this ignores the possibility that the cracker could just remove the dongle checks entirely from the binary.

Your understanding of dongle-protected software is incorrect. The software has several sections of code that are encrypted, stored inside the dongle, or combinations of both. Each copy of the software you get must be paired with its hardware dongle or else it can't run. Not *won't* run, *can't*. Modern methods also ensure that not all pieces of the software are loaded into memory at the same time, making it very difficult (but not impossible) to dump segements of memory in an effort to reconstruct a single unencrypted binary that will work. A decade ago there was still some software that used dongles as a simple hardware check; these dongles usually attached to the parallel port. Modern USB dongles are a lot more secure. They are also a lot more expensive, so the OP will have to weigh that against their profits.

Comment Re:Danger, Will Robinson (Score 1) 375

I guess you don't use them for outbound email since FDC Servers has a terrible reputation for hosting spammers and having a completely non-responsive abuse department. There are more than a few members of anti-spam lists that advocate a block on sight policy for SMTP as far as FDC are concerned, and I know some that kill them for web as well due to hosted malware.

I did not know this before signing up, and received a network block previously assigned to a spammer. It was "fun" getting myself off of all the anti-spam/DNSBL/RIBL/etc. etc. lists. It took about a week and was not very painful. The only holdout is AT&T/SBC -- once you're on their list, you don't get off of it. AT&T's abuse department is /dev/null, all requests go into a black hole.

I have been very happy with FDC -- I joined because I wanted bandwidth that I didn't have to worry about overage charges for, and they have been true to their word on that aspect.

Comment Re:No, it's not HTML5. It's just junk. (Score 1) 319

It contained a vast amount of hidden content, including the entire registration system for buying a subscription. All that junk appears on every page.. Inline, not in an included file.

Which reminds me: What's so bad about frames again? Is it so incredibly wacky to have static border/background/scripts downloaded only once per visit?

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