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Comment Reliance on third party == Bad business model (Score 4, Insightful) 152

Let that be a lesson to all, that those who base their business model around a third party are doomed to fail... In Fring's business plan, I'm sure one of the single points of failure is the fact that at any time, Skype can choose to put them out of business by adding one or two lines of iptables filter rules to their firewall.

They should do what skype does, not attempt to piggy-back on skype. It doesn't work, because eventually your business will actually grow, and then what happens is skype becomes your competitor, rather than your friend. Once this happens, it becomes in their best interest to remove you from the equation.

Comment iphone backdoors (Score 0, Troll) 248

All I know is that I had an Iphone when it came out, I had one for about 2 years, and I had serious doubts about what was going on as far as inside the phone when it was idle. The last straw was, which was why I stopped using the iphone, is that I would be sitting there, the phone is just idle, not plugged in, and then all of a sudden, the fucking thing reboots, and then I get it back on, and all the settings have changed, they fucking remotely upgraded the OS without my knowledge or approval. They also changed various system settings, reset some others, and uninstalled some applications for me. I look at the Iphone as a computer, not a phone. To me, doing the things that Steve Jobs does with my Iphone in most states falls under criminal hacking and computer trespass laws. So, take for it what you want, but the next time I ever get a Unix-based OS running on my phone, it will be with a grsecurity.net patch on top of the OS before I turn the thing on, and I run sniffers on it to log all inbound/outbound traffic so I can know for sure what is happening. With the Iphone, stuff is happening, you have no control of it. I have compared it to a little Steve Jobs in my back pocket, who tells me what I can and can't do, and plays with my settings whenever he wants to. I really got sick of it, honestly. It's not only an invasion of privacy, its also borderline hacking. I'm surprised he hasn't been arrested yet.

Comment quite the opposite (Score 1) 1123

Not only should citizens be allowed to record police activity, but the police should be mandated to have video cameras with microphones installed on their person while they are on duty. It is fully within the law to record anything that happens in public. Police have cameras installed in their vehicles. This should be extended to force them to have cameras/microphones installed on their helmets and/or jackets. Police are in the unique position where they have lethal weapons on their person and regularly have the right to use those weapons. Arguably it is the public's right to know exactly what happened to cause a police officer to use their weapon. We pay their salaries through property taxes. They are public servants. They also regularly break the law through corruption, intimidation, and outright lies. This has been proven over and over and over. We need not look far to find every day corruption of police and collusion between police and the court system that they regularly report to. It is in the best interest of society for each police officer to be under constant video and audio surveillance. Anything less is negligent by the city government. There are procedural rules in place right now in federal civil cases where the courts require email evidence from parties to a civil lawsuit. Lawsuits have been dismissed and companies have lost lawsuits on the basis that they were unable to produce email evidence to either it not existing or it being deleted. It is only natural that police should be able to produce video and audio evidence to support their claims of interaction with the public.

Comment google is next (Score 2, Interesting) 170

inducing infringement is such a vague term, it means google is inducing infridgement by people searching for torrents on google... all you have to do is search for: torrent, and you pretty much turn google into the biggest torrent site. Are they liable for the actions of their users? The MPAA and RIAA think they are... Under that theory, gun manufacturers would be liable for murder caused by their guns. Next they'll be arresting the owners of Stanley Tools for selling tools that are used to break open windows and rob homes... Louisanna Slugger baseball bats because they can are used for hitting people instead of baseballs. Programmers for writing code that is used unlawfully. Where does it end?

Comment its a step in the right direction (Score 2, Interesting) 278

Any legal framework, if it does include a specific language, should be based on what the common languages that are currently used, i.e. they should have company XYZ submit that they are using language "ABC" and here is the source code. The problem with mandating a particular language(s) is that these are subject to change with time. A legal framework should stand the test of time, and thus not include requirements for "Python". Python might not exist in five years, or may become obsolete in five years.

Comment Why dont they archive the books first? (Score 1) 171

I find it quite ironic Library of Congress would be spending time archiving totally useless things like twitter.com postings, at the same time ignoring the thousands (if not hundreds of thousands or millions) of books in thier archive that they have yet to make public. I would say their first priority should be in making sure that everything that is in their actual Library gets put online and made public first, then after that work is done, then talk about doing other things. It is all a pretty big waste of time to do these other projects IMHO. They need to make their entire book archive public, and they have repeatedly refused to provide any timeline about when that will take place.

Comment I know this first hand (Score 5, Interesting) 217

I worked for AT&T in several parts of the country on their core networks, and in the early 2000's they had misconfigured all of their Solaris boxes and I worked with the infrastructure group to implement a startup script on Solaris to tune all the ndd settings for performance. The problem with Solaris is that by default all the TCP, UDP, Ethernet, etc settings are set for a Desktop workstation, not a server. Most system admins know to tune these settings, otherwise in a lot of cases a multi-CPU box will perform as slow as a 1 CPU box. Anyway, at specific companies I worked with (AT&T Broadband / Worldnet in St. Charles, MO was one big one), all the servers were configured without the proper settings for a server, so we had all kinds of issues as a result, a big one is that the tcp accept queue is not set high enough and so connections to daemons will drop after a low number of connections, making it appear that the box can't handle the connections...., As a result, they had spent millions on numerous servers (in one situation they had over twenty 12-cpu servers just for smtp...

These changes seem small, however, changing "ndd" kernel parameters on a Solaris box is not a single task, it is an infrastructure-wide task, and therefore requires the coordination of dozens of different groups, it really took a long long time to get this script implemented. It was called "S99nddfix" and it had all the ndd tunable parameters in it. Later when I worked at a different AT&T group in a different state, I noticed my script had been implemented on all the Solaris servers in the 200+ server environment.

PC Games (Games)

On Transitioning To an Asian-Style MMO, Such As Aion 256

A. Harvey writes "Ten Ton Hammer has an interesting article about the transition to Asian-style MMO games, specifically Aion. 'In many ways, the West is catching up to the East in terms of gaming. Per capita gaming ... and broadband proliferation is markedly higher in Asian markets. Gaming is much more social in the East as well; many players gather together in internet cafes to spend their game time with each other. Another surprising difference in most Asian-based games is that most functions of game control are mouse based.' I think the author hit the nail on the head that Aion will be a big success in North America and will introduce a lot of players to games with an Eastern feel."

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