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Comment Re:Awful headline. (Score 3, Informative) 356

I am a farmer in southern Saskatchewan, Canada. I do not, and have never worked for Monsanto or any other pesticide company. I have in fact used pesticides including some of Monsanto's glyphosate products (Roundup, Rustler and most recently RT540). Rates of application I have used range from 0.5-1.0 liters (0.13-0.26 US gallons) per acre of product mixed in 5-10 gallons of water. My use, though, is restricted to pre-seeding burnoff as I do not grow any glyphosate-tolerant crops.

Cloud

US Gov't Demands For Google Data Up 37% Over the Last Year 77

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "Governments are sticking their noses into Google's servers more than ever before. In the second half of 2011, Google received 6,321 requests that it hand over its users' private data to U.S. government agencies including law enforcement, and complied at least partially with those requests in 93% of cases, according to the latest update to the company's bi-annual Transparency Report. That's up from 5,950 requests in the first half of 2011, and marks a 37% increase in the number of requests over the same period the year before. Compared with the second half of 2009, the first time Google released the government request numbers, the latest figures represent a 76% spike. Data demands from foreign governments have increased even more quickly than those from the U.S., up to 11,936 in the second half of 2011 compared with 9,600 in the same period the year before, though Google was much less likely to comply with those non-U.S. government requests."
Microsoft

Why Visual Basic 6 Still Thrives 406

theodp writes "Microsoft recently extended 'It Just Works' compatibility for Visual Basic 6 applications through the full lifetime of Windows 8, so VB6 apps will have at least 24 years of supported lifetime (VB6 shipped in '98). So why has VB6, 'the un-killable cockroach' in the Windows ecosystem, managed to thrive? 'Cockroaches are successful because they're simple,' explains David S. Platt. 'They do what they need to do for their ecological niche and no more. Visual Basic 6 did what its creators intended for its market niche: enable very rapid development of limited programs by programmers of lesser experience.' But when Microsoft proudly trotted out VB.NET, the 'full-fledged language' designed to turn VB6 'bus drivers' into 'fighter pilots,' they got a surprise. 'Almost all Visual Basic 6 programmers were content with what Visual Basic 6 did,' explains Platt. 'They were happy to be bus drivers: to leave the office at 5 p.m. (or 4:30 p.m. on a really nice day) instead of working until midnight; to play with their families on weekends instead of trudging back to the office; to sleep with their spouses instead of pulling another coding all-nighter and eating cold pizza for breakfast. They didn't lament the lack of operator overloading or polymorphism in Visual Basic 6, so they didn't say much.'"
Spam

Twitter Files Suit Against Spam Software Authors 56

An anonymous reader writes, quoting Network World: "As with any platform that sees a meteoric rise in popularity, it's only a matter of time before spammers throw their hats in the ring and try and exploit the masses for financial gain and other sinister purposes. As the relatively new kid on the block, Twitter is still busying itself trying to tackle and ultimately prevent spammers from destroying the user experience. While Twitter's previous efforts centered exclusively on engineering-based solutions, the company today announced that they are also pursuing legal avenues to fend off spammers." From the Twitter blog: "With this suit, we’re going straight to the source. By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter."

Comment Re:Wyse? Wow. (Score 1) 95

I had one, too. It was my first "real" computer and I bought it at an auction for a farm equipment dealership that was going out of business in 1991. It was a cool machine with the CPU on a card plugged into a daughterboard. It aso has a 70MB hard drive which was pretty big for those days. I had to pull a tape drive to install a 3.5" floppy drive. I still miss the keyboard.

Comment Re:Crime solved when Police do their job, News at (Score 5, Insightful) 195

This is so true. I live near a major highway and hear all the time about major drug busts that occurred because less-than-intelligent traffickers got pulled over because of something stupid like speeding. They never seem to learn. If you're going to haul a metric shitload of dope across the country, make sure all your lights work and stay close to the speed limit!

Comment Re:Less US-centrism maybe? (Score 1) 80

Agree completely. First I wanted a Nook Color. Sorry, not in Canada. Then I wanted a Kindle Fire. Sorry, not in Canada. If Kobo can get this thing selling in Canada, they might just get my hard earned money just to save me jumping through fire-ringed hoops to get one of the others.

Comment Would love to but... (Score 1) 697

I've got two strikes against me before we can truly be free of subscription TV (BellTV satellite service). One, we're in Canada, so we lack much of the "Hulu-type" streaming options. Two, we're on a farm well away from decent bandwidth, stuck with satellite internet service. We do the best we can with torrents downloaded overnight (the FAP doesn't cut in in the middle of the night), Zip.ca DVD rental-by-mail and recently discovered there's quite a lot of true FTA content on the old C-band dish (using an Openbox S9 receiver) and have really gotten into watching the RTV affiliates that way. Emergency! and Magnum PI are far and away better viewing than Survivor and Dancing with the Stars!

So anyway, the BellTV subscription is just the minimum plus sports and threatening to quit made them give us a better rate for the next year.

Comment I'm all for quad-core on a phone but... (Score 1) 336

I hope we don't find ourselves in a situation as we do with full-size computers where ads and sales-droids are telling us that SuperMultiCore Machine X is "perfect for email, web browsing and organizing your recipe collection". I don't want to see multicore phones trying to make up for sloppy coding and configuration.

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