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Comment Re:"Space itself" is just a mathematical trick (Score 1) 162

It was all explained in "Bill The Galactic Hero" anyways. It's called the Bloater Drive
From Wikipedia: "The standard ways of circumventing relativity in 1950s and 1960s science fiction were hyperspace, subspace and spacewarp. Harrison's contribution was the "Bloater Drive". This enlarges the gaps between the atoms of the ship until it spans the distance to the destination, whereupon the atoms are moved back together again, reconstituting the ship at its previous size but in the new location. An occasional side-effect is that the occupants see a planet drifting, in miniature, through the hull."
Thus you can move an object to a new spatial co-ordinate without actually moving it.

"Bloater drive theory" is simply a drive space expanding relative to the time and square of the distance from installation and initialization of EULA acceptance in a local system. This is the Windows theory of drive space and time expansion. Anyone who reads /. should know this theory.

Comment Re:The quality of a lot of that feedback is suspec (Score 0) 236

I am never going to develop a website using a tablet or phone or anything other than a desktop with shitloads of memory and a full keyboard.

Anyone using .NET, which was supposed to be a big thing starting around 2003 or so, and is still a big thing, is not going to be doing this on a tablet.

I don't want to use a tablet interface to develop for your stupid tablet interface using a tablet. I'm not going to do it.

I will encourage leadership, and that means people who would be glad to spend money for me, to not update at all.

But my voice apparently goes in the bucket of "user" rather than "people who further extend our monopoly".

I can see you forward your stuff to an editor not a programmer. Nice room to put in comments there bub!

Comment Re:Bug or feature? (Score 4, Informative) 138

having had the issue myself, I stand by my statement.

  If anyone died from the key popping out, chances are they were due a darwin award anyway.

  Realistically i doubt that a single death is attributed to this "problem" but when the lawyers come out, all of a sudden that tree you hit at 100 miles of hour would not have happened if only the key stayed put

HUH? The problem is with the the ignition switch flipping to accessory because of a weak spring and pin in the design of the position set cylinder and mechanism. This causes the essential systems like power steering and brakes to shut off while driving down the road. Now lets suppose this happens at over 70 mph because the driver has a huge key chain that is heavy and some how it gets bumped or the car goes over a rough road that jostles the key chain. In my estimation that could cause some serious problems even for experienced drivers especially if you go to turn the wheel and have never driven without power steering which most people today have never done!

The worst thing that the driver could do in response is to shift the transmission into neutral or what we old school truckers call "Mexican overdrive" And this might very well be a response to sudden engine failure for an inexperience driver with either and automatic transmission or manual. So they would lose engine breaking at that point as well as power breaks and steering. If the driver is quick enough and the traffic is clear and they are on a straight stretch of road just maybe they will have time to restart the engine but modern cars will not start in gear so they will have to switch to neutral to restart the engine. Switching an automatic to park moving at 70 is also not a viable option for restarting the engine of a run away car or truck.

Yes cars are still designed by law to steer correctly if there is a sudden loss of power assist to the steering assembly. It is the law. It is also the law that cars have a working emergency brake and that is why it is called an emergency brake but again with today's drivers, who are given a license to drive without ever having had to use one in an emergency or practice slowing a vehicle with one, how many unfortunate people who died from this simple little fault in GM's ignition switches actually tried to apply the emergency brake?

Please get your facts straight and read and listen for the truth about what goes on in the real world!
If APPLE actually has decided to take a crack at redesigning the automobile GREAT it is about frigging time someone other than Tesla got down to brass tacks and kicked the industry into the 21st century!

Here is a big slice of reality to think about if you even understand or comprehend what F=V squared means. A car with a mass of over 3000 lbs traveling at 70 mph has how much kinetic energy to be expended before it stops? You do the math. That is not even considering if the vehicle is on a down slope and is being accelerated by gravity so a paltry hand brake that only works on the rear breaks for a good reason will a take huge amount of force from either the arm or foot to apply for a long period before the car actually slows down to a safe speed, if the inexperience driver is on a road with tight bends an lots of traffic chances are disaster is waiting at the next corner.

The issues with the ignition switch were a good example of stagnation in design and it is about time someone with vision and bucks to burn started to seriously think about how to wean us away from our love of gas guzzling rolling death traps that is essentially what the auto industry and today's frantic transportation methods have become.

Our passion for the auto is breaking us financially, socially and worst of all it is a huge waist of resources. It creates untold damage to the environment we live in because it requires the use of huge quantities of raw tar from oil to pave vast amounts of the land that supports us. We make road at the expense of fish rearing habitat, we kill off huge numbers of deer, elk, moose, cats, dogs. horses, cows and birds of all kinds. We pave roads and push dirt tracks through marsh lands that filter the water we drink.

Al Gore may not have created the internet and Republicans in the states have had a field day making fun of his attempt to wake up and start people thinking about the cost of what we are doing to our children's future and the dirt that sustains us. But there is a very real price to pay and it will be so costly that no one will be able to afford it not even Apple!

Comment How about doing something usefull. (Score 1) 273

Like extending the life of some computers and hardware beyond the life cycle dictated by the world according to Microsoft and their planned obsolescence specialist "hardware partners"! Thank God the geniuses in Silicon Valley have not figured out how to transfer the engrams of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer onto micro chips just yet.

YIPES just maybe they already did it and that is why we are stuck with operating systems that expire! Perhaps they are keeping the real human interface software, networking, bandwidth and available memory space all to themselves and are really just herding the plebs from somewhere out on the net called silicon heaven and are not even human beings anymore!

Comment Re:Almost true from 1995-2000 (Score 1) 153

> If I want to include an RCMP officer in full dress uniform in a stage play even in the country where they come from then I have to get permission from Disney to use the image.

That was almost true for a few years, from 1995-2000. The RCMP had a merchandising contract wherein Disney Canada would manage whatever rights RCMP had to the mountie image. They figured Disney is pretty good at managing the branding of a character, so they contracted with Disney to manage the Mountie character.

Does the RCMP have the right to control whether or not you have an RCMP officer in a play? Probably not. The image wasn't a registered trademark, and you're allowed to use other people's trademarks in certain ways. Therefore, they couldn't have Disney manage that right for them.

To the extent they did have Disney managing their licensing for merchandising, that deal ended fourteen years ago.

Thank you for informing me that the deal is over. However it would not at all surprise me if there are deals that are not public knowledge currently in force. Our conservative government does this sort of thing all the time and the management decisions of the Mounties are under their direct control, unlike in the US where the FBI was a distorted organization run by a Tzar that was appointed essentially for life because he had dirt on all the political parties.

What is really disgusting is that Corbis has essentially done damage long term to the free dissemination of digital images of the worlds great art. I am sure that all the artists who painted the masterpieces are turning in their graves. As are Leonard Bernstein, Igor Stravinsky, George Szell and a host of other greats who produced great recorded arts that are now owned by the assholes at Sony.

My original statement still stands, these assholes are doing more damage to the arts than they are good, period.

Comment Re:The day the music and freedom died. (Score 1) 153

Sums up the mickey mouse laws that Sony, Disney and their ilk have created in the industry. It has nothing to do with copyrights it has everything to do with control of content.

I don't see a problem with Disney still retaining full rights to Mickey. The company still exists and actively uses the character in their works.

What would you do if your kid decided to get creative then you were sued by Disney? All because he or she did a doll based cartoon using Mickey and Mini and then posted the results online?

It will take something like this happening to expose these crooks for what they really are. I am sorry I have no respect for Sony or Disney as they more than any other corporations have stifled creativity and have become anti-creative and destructive to the arts in many ways. Youtube and other sites scare the shit out of the hats at Sony and Disney for a very good reason. It is a place where real creativity can happen and they do not control all the content. The leaked e-mails revealed this fact and I have no doubt that Google gets plagued with take down requests from these morons. In the long term the United States will become one of the worst places to create anything new if these corporations have their way. Perhaps they do not see it yet but their policies will bite them in the ass in the long term.

It is almost as if they are deliberately destroying the creative end of their organizations.

I would guess what is really happening with them is that the bean counters point to how much of their business is coming from old moldy rehashes of the stuff in the vaults and then board and CEO cave in and cut the budget for new ventures. And at the same time increase the legal budget to fight for extensions to their copyrights.

Sony and Disney have become little more than a disease upon the arts, the fact that the attack from North Korea is seen by the media as a "national security crisis" instead of a minor annoyance speaks volumes to how much power they wield.

Comment The day the music and freedom died. (Score 5, Insightful) 153

Sums up the mickey mouse laws that Sony, Disney and their ilk have created in the industry. It has nothing to do with copyrights it has everything to do with control of content. If I want to include an RCMP officer in full dress uniform in a stage play even in the country where they come from then I have to get permission from Disney to use the image.

It is time for someone to challenge this nonsense and expose the practices of these charlatans for what they really are. Then perhaps the public will wake up to the real damage to freedom of expression in the entertainment industry that these corporate thieves and their myrmidons in government have foisted upon the audience.

Comment Re:Genetic viability is also a long term concern (Score 1) 118

"You'd rather just whine in complete ignorance rather then read something interesting and become more knowledgeable. Pathetic."

A complete ignorance of native species within an ecosystem is the problem sir. The use of the word "trout" is symptomatic of the ignorance of the general populace, especially in the east. The native char species of the Great Lakes have a tendency to be slow growing variants, in fact the actual age of mature Salvelinus that were the predominant top shelf predators of Superior and Huron are very poorly understood. Some have a life span that is many times longer than any Oncorhynchus. And as for ignorance well what can I say, other than it is extremely unfortunate that we tend to ignore the individuals who warned against these interventions in the first place.

No matter how well intentioned, putting an artificial construct into a robust ecosystem by completely ignoring how it works in the first place is the problem and those who advocate this policy usually have a very short term monetary interest in mind not the environment especially some idiots out west here that have actually illegally planted all sorts of eastern species.

No sir the ignorance is much deeper and problematic than my rant, the problems start by taking the easy way out by creating artificial fisheries that cannot work in the long term instead of embarking upon long term habitat stewardship and is the core of the issue here.

Comment Genetic viability is also a long term concern (Score 1) 118

Out west, where the original Oncorhynchus (so called Great Lakes salmon and Rainbow trout) stock came from we are experiencing a decline in the viability of stocks because of hatchery methods. Perhaps the decline in stocks in Lake Huron is partly due to this problem as well as a drop in feed levels. The entire marine habitat of the Georgia Straight as well as the Straights of Juan de Fuca is losing resident native strains of Oncorhynchus because of the loss of viable in stream rearing habitat on the rivers and creeks that are essential to the life cycle of west coast salmon.

In turn we are seeing a drop in populations of many native species that predate upon the salmon, including the resident Orca pods.

Out here our answer to the problems is to use the few remaining herring and instead feed it to farmed salmon in pens. In fact one of the arguements for the expansion of the fish farming industry is the fact that we have screwed up the viability of the existing one, so go ahead mess it up completely! As the genetic viability of the hatchery stocks declines over the next few decades then just maybe we might start to take action in the place where it is needed most, kicking out the idiots who are doing the damage and exposing the practices of fish farming for what they are not what they pretend to be.

Just maybe the loss of the sport fishery in the Great Lakes will serve as a wake up call to the idiots who oversee the fisheries, if not it is time to turf them out of their fat chairs in Ottawa, Washington and the provinces of BC, Ontario and states like Michigan where the management of our fisheries has become the realm of short sighted morons who bend to industrial interests.

Comment Re:What about long-term data integrity? (Score 0) 438

Surely it protects against data loss due to (some) hardware failures.

It doesn't protect against rm -rf /* type data loss.

rm -rf /dev/sd(*)"whichever drive you mounted that has been infected by the manufacturer with windows", can protect the user against infections by Windows 8 very nicely indeed though. Or for those who like to watch a drive slowly kill it off, a good session of dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sd(*)"whichever drive you mounted that has been infected by the manufacturer with windows"

Either way a very satisfying result and a sense of real accomplishment happens, without any serious data loss.

These simple actions are the best known method to increase the life span of old computers with less than 8 gig of ram with hdd drives and a primitive OS that constantly overtaxes drives by constantly indexing a pagefile.sys section to disk for no good reason other than to kill the drive in a short period of time, so the consumer will go out and buy a new 'puter ever other year! GRRR

Comment Re: In an unrelated news item... (Score 1) 334

Perhaps, but Europe isn't exactly the engine of growth powering the world, either. Maybe EuroParl should think about fixing employment and debt along its southern periphery instead of trying to dismantle Bing's competitor.

LOL the first post that mentions anything about the competition. Perhaps the EU is just trying to get special software seat costs for member countries from Redmond. A simple case of "the Mouse That Roared" strategy to get special treatment from the real monopolists on the block!

Either way the truth about why the EU are trying to oust Google is most likely well and truly hidden from the tech journalists and the tech journalists that are reporting on this perceived strategy to dismantle Google as a company are in the pocket of the people behind the scenes.

If Google is successfully dismantled and restricted in access by a segment of the internet as large as the domains of Europe then chances are what we will see happen in the future is new routing hardware and nodes being built. The results of breaking up Google in a big way will be a case of "All Roads Lead To Redmond" not Rome along with huge bandwidth cost increased not real competition as some officials in Europe may think.

The other possibility is that the net will split up and we will see disconnected local nets firewalled in the same way China does. This could be easily done with hardware based domain blocking technologies the way cell phones can be made to lock out competing providers network pipes.

Either way the network traffic and services including ad revenues will be controlled in Washington State instead of California. The revenues conveniently off shored by the lords of Redmond to avoid paying American corporate and state taxes regardless of which who is on the top of the heap.

Or just maybe Suse will get more money and build a competitor search engine based upon Bing's search engine software, perhaps this explains the recent love affair with Linux that is happening in Redmond.

Comment Re:Who cares (Score 2) 77

I'd say "who cares about Windows Phones" because that's kinda not the problem here. It's not Windows Phone 8 that the 10 upgrade is sorely needed on. Windows 8 (the desktop OS) is the failure that needs to be fixed here. Precisely because a computer isn't a phone.

I have a wonderful cell for sale if anyone is interested. The radio is absolutely excellent and rarely drops calls even in remote locations. The hardware has not given me any issues at all over 5 years of use and the battery is interchangeable by the user! Really it is called a Samsung Omnia 910. Trouble with the phone though is the OS which is essentially useless for web surfing with html 5 multimedia content.

The offending OS is unfortunately a Windows mobile mashup of xp and double unfortunately even though it will easily run an early Android release the carrier has the thing locked down to the point where there is no way to change the OS.

"Someone buy my phone PLEASE!"

To quote a famous comedian.

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