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Comment Go nokia! (Score 1) 422

Many years ago, a good friend of mine dropped his Nokia 3110 in the snow outside his parents house. We lived way up in the arctic then, and we couldn't find it.

So we basically assumed it was gone forever.

Later we found out that it had gotten frozen in the snow, and covered with a huge snowpile. His dad found the phone when he ran over it with his snowblower. It got sucked into the snowblower, blown maybe 20 yards away and landed in anoter pile of snow. His dad wondered what the clunk was and found the phone.

We thawed it out, plugged it in the charger and it lit up just as new. It had been frozen in ice/snow for maybe four months, gone through a snowblower and then thawed out and the only visible damage to it was a small chunk taken out of the plastic casing by one of the snowblowers blades.

Same phone was later the following summer accidentally dropped into shallow water in a lake. He dove down after it, let it dry in the sun and it started up just as new again. Only effect of a dip in the lake was that the numberpad squeaked for a few days afterwards.

The thing that almost killed it was a three-story drop onto concrete. The phone survived with some superficial damage to the casing and a distorted frame, but you could still use it. However the display got smashed in the fall and that made it quite useless so he retired it.

Comment Assassins Creed (Score 1) 398

... had awful console-type controls. Game was probably good, but I quit and deleted it after about ten minutes because the controls were completely illogical to a PC-gamer.

They were essentially gamepad-controls that had been reassigned to keyboard keys. They made no sense to a pc-gamer used to a certain de-facto standard of controls.

It also had (as I recall) the typical you-can-only-save-when-we-say-so console conversion issues, as well as the wonderful "please don't turn off your console" while saving.

Comment Sweden has it (Score 3, Informative) 235

Sweden already has this policy. It's a blocklist implemented in the DNS structure of Swedish ISP's. Thus it's easily avoided by anyone with even basic computer skills.

Officially it's to block kiddie porn, but there's no public examination of what sites are on the list. Also, it's been demonstrated several times that there's a lot of rather odd choices when it comes to blocking - i.e. a korean site about Bonsai trees is on the list.

There's been quite a lot of controversy surrounding this list, and it's been accused of being the start of a slippery slide towards censorship.

Also, it's essentially useless since it's easily avoided.

Comment Re:Ignore it if you don't want to watch it. (Score 1) 585

The fact it's been made doesn't affect the original in any way whatsoever. Chill out.

Except that it's mere existence will taint the original. We who haven't seen a godawful sequel will still have to content with all the zombies out there running around shouting things like "the second one was soooo much better".

If there's only one movie, it will stand on it's own. As soon as a classic movie is turned into a franchise, then the quality and what made the movie a classic will disappear - no matter if you ignore it or not. It'll get turned into yet another money-machine where Hollywood chops off it's own heads in order to make a profit.

Besides, there's an outside chance it could be really good.

No, it'll be a crappy FX-driven horrorshow without any of the gravitas of the original. Just look at the crap that a majority of studios spew out. That's what we'll get. Even if Ridley himself directs it (doubtful) it'll still be a cardboard cutout in comparison.

I mean, I still cringe at the fact that there exist book-sequels to the movie. Much less would I want an actual movie-sequel to it.

Comment They can also expect... (Score 1) 511

that Logitech (and many other brands) of Webcam stops functioning, and that the CD/DVD drives inexplicably keep injecting immediately upon ejecting a disc.

That's two of the minor annoyances that I discovered the other day when I upgraded Hardy to Intrepid. One of the major bugs still is the poor I/O-performance that occurs at intense disk-usage.

And this is of course provided these bugs don't get fixed.

Comment Re:This is a classic case of... (Score 1) 482

(Such amazing IQ swings we see. Genius! Moronic! Brilliant! Ape-like! Bing-bam-boom! Sometimes several flip-flops in one day! One would almost wonder if the problem lies in the observers, rather than the observed.)
Perhaps the problem is your imagining that everyone who disagrees with you is part of a coherent group. That would certainly make "them" seem like a contradictory, hypocritical, and just plain silly group of people, instead of people with different views on how this administration is bad.
The Courts

Submission + - Cop in case against Pirate Bay gets hired by Warne

isecore writes: "Currently the Swedish blogosphere is in an uproar, since a few days ago it was discovered that an investigator in the case against The Pirate Bay was immediately hired by Warner immediately after leaving the on-going investigation. When asked if this could be considered normal, Håkan Roswall (the attorney leading the case against TPB) replied that he felt it was within reason, and that in the future we'll probably be seeing more of these things. Of course this has caused an outrage, and the leader of the swedish Pirate Party, Rick Falkvinge aka Rick Falconwing hopes that this will shed more light on what he sees as obvious corruption. The investigator in question is named Jim Keyzer, and after his name leaked out onto the 'net earlier today. Since the leak he has worked diligently threatening any blogger who publishes his name. This in turn caused several bloggers to take a stand and write even more, and currently this is the top subject on Knuff.se (who monitors the Swedish blogosphere). Interestingly enough as well, swedish Old Media-newspapers have so far completely ignored this whole story."
Democrats

Best Presidential Candidate, Democrats 947

This story is to discuss the remaining democratic candidates for president. Please keep discussions limited to talk about Hillary and Obama. Keep discussions of the other party in the other story.
Mozilla

Submission + - Firefox Adblock May Be Theft (iht.com)

cthulu_mt writes: "The International Herald Tribune reports "Adblock Plus threatens the online revenue model" based on a move by several small website to block users of the Firefox browser. On the grounds that Firefox users are stealing their content by running Adblock Plus a popular Firefox extension. In some cases users of the browser are redirected to the web page Why Firefox is Blocked; which goes on to say; "Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing.""
Yahoo!

Submission + - Yahoo! pleads guilty in Chinese journalist case (bbc.co.uk)

freakxx writes: " Yahoo! pleads guilty of supplying information to the Chinese government, which has lead to imprisonment of many journalists and pro-democracy activists in China, including Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning.

In its 40 page response of the lawsuit filed by World Organization for Human Rights, Yahoo! acknowledged releasing information to the Chinese government. It further argues that it had to comply with the local law and it was compelled by the Chinese authorities to hand-over the information. Many people have criticized this decision saying that the organization has failed to keep up with ethics and it has more responsibilities towards international laws and humanity."

User Journal

Journal Journal: Just finished HP7 - no spoilers here

I just finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. My 8 year old finished it on Monday, which was 60 hours after it was released.

It was a great book, all of the loose ends were tied up. Some of the things I had guessed after book six turned out to be true, which is satisfying on many levels.

Programming

Journal Journal: Stupid programming humor 5

So yesterday I was whipping up a quick script that was calling md5sum to generate hashes of files. Since I wanted to open a pipe to the command so I could snag the output, the obvious variable name popped into my head:

open (HASHPIPE, "/usr/bin/md5sum /tmp/foo |");

The opportunities to be creatively humorous are so few in programming.....

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