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Comment Re:dare to hope (Score 1) 210

The RootKit fiasco was their media division, not the division that handles laptops. They were caught and punished and ceased the activity.

The Coca Cola corporation in Columbia murdered a few union leaders, and essentially got away with it. Does your place of employment have Coke vending machines? After all, if one part of a company does something bad the entire company is bad, right?

Comment Re:Not unambiguously bad (Score 2) 318

The defense force is currently defending South Korea and Japan, with the permission of those countries. I'm with you in spirit, but you should include allowing them to defend countries which ask for the help. Also since Japan isn't allowed an army (an arrangement both Japanese citizens and most of South East Asia seems to be happy with), it would be a special level of messed up to pull out of there, not to mention in violation of a treaty.

Comment Re:Dansguardian (Score 1) 260

I came here to mention exactly this. Getting the initial blocklist was somewhat of a challenge, the connection kept timing out.

My purpose was not for children so much as restricting the free wifi I provided to guests and neighbors. To "encourage" the use of the dansguardian proxy I used a wireless router that did not have a connection to the internet, and the dansguardian box was a client on both that network and the real network. Worked well enough.

Comment Re:Red Hat Network (Score 1) 755

Of course you can reconfigure yum - provided that you have an easy way to do it (try without wget or make or even unzip).

Eh, presuming you have some form of text editor (or for that matter, cat), the mount command, and the RedHat ISO, you can trivially reconfigure yum to use the DVD image. No subscription required. Just make a file in /etc/repos.d/ that looks like:
[somename]
name=some name
baseurl=file:///path/to/mounted/dvd
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1 #(or 0 if you're too lazy to import the redhat GPG key)

We do something like this on our servers that are not allowed to connect to the internet, we sync the official redhat repo to one box and the others get their updates from it.

Comment Re:I'll take the wine instead (Score 2) 480

How about lottery pools. A few years ago a group of 6 or so IT staff (all on the same team) won the mega millions, ~$200 million. What happened to the seventh guy who didn't put his cash in with the rest of the group? After a few weeks of staring at 6 empty chairs knowing why those chairs were empty, he quit and took a mall job. I'd hate to have been the manager of that team...

Comment Re:Another silly decision (Score 1) 480

Absolutely. Doesn't mean they can't increase beyond your ability to pay them. I was looking at house (short sale) which the bank had cut the price to 40k below market value, purely because the tax bill was 10k/yr (on a 1 acre plot). And there wasn't even public transit or a school nearby (or for that matter, a sidewalk). 1/2 a mile down the road the taxes are less than half that, just the wrong side of a town line.

Now let's look at apartments: an apartment dweller would theoretically have to worry about the same property tax increase. However, the burden is split among all the tenants in the building. And if the rent is still increased beyond the ability to pay, well it's a heck of a lot easier to move to another complex 1/2 mile away than to sell a house and buy another now isn't it...

Comment Re:Oops! (Score 1) 255

These 'social issues' are working themselves out at the state level. Some states have legalized weed, many recognize gay marriage, and there's enough variety of pro/anti-gun and pro/anti choice balance to satisfy anyone except hard liners in each camp. There's more important shit out there to be worrying about on the national level: healthcare, immigration, our crumbling infrastructure, and our global reputation getting flushed down the crapper.

However what the states cannot do is anything about an overbearing federal government. The only way to rein in the NSA, TSA, and other TLA's is on the federal level. So if there is a candidate ignoring the things that are already being handled by the states and only focusing on the things the feds are actually supposed to be meddling with (and getting the feds to stop meddling with things they shouldn't have meddled with in the first place).

Sony

Sony Sells Off Sony Online Entertainment 101

donniebaseball23 writes Sony Online Entertainment is to become Daybreak Game Company and turn its focus to multi-platform gaming. The company has been acquired by Columbus Nova and is now an indie studio. "We will continue to focus on delivering exceptional games to players around the world, as well as bringing our portfolio to new platforms, fully embracing the multi-platform world in which we all live," said Daybreak president John Smedley. But why did Sony shed SOE? Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter believes an online gaming company "isn't a great fit, particularly as games are shifting increasingly to a free-to-play mobile model."

Comment Re:not the point (Score 1) 375

Those bluetooth locker programs are handy for this, once your phone / headset / whatever is out of range of your computer the lock screen automatically comes on. Some can also be configured for unlock (though that seems like it would add another possible attack surface).

I feel like there would be a market for small bt keychain dongles for this exact purpose.

Comment Re:Worthless (Score 1) 248

The skylobby design works well enough - to get from the ground to any floor requires a maximum of one transfer, and elevator shafts can be stacked. The (original) NYC WTC towers for example had an elevator pattern which was:
Express elevators to floor 44.
Express elevators to floor 76.
Shuttle express elevator between 44 and 76 that didn't go to the ground level.
Local elevator banks served groups of 7-8 floors and would only take people to the nearest skylobby (or the ground for the lower third of the building).
Tourist / freight elevators which could stop at 2, 44, 76, and 107 (possibly also 106, I forgot).

The only drawback of this design was, if you wanted to go from, say, floor 77 to floor 73, you would have to take 3 elevators (with transfers on 76 and 44). But the overwhelming number of elevator trips in any building involve the ground floor anyway, so this isn't really a big deal.

Comment Re:Screenshots (Score 1) 378

That's what the quick launch bars are/were for, if you make it small enough it's just another menu. I dunno if it's in Windows 8 because I got so frustrated with the start screen's jarring appearance that I just put shortcuts to everything I run on the desktop, removed the start button and trained myself to never hit the windows key unless I'm using it in a key combination. Even though I eventually installed classic shell, my workflow had been destroyed enough by that nonsense that I haven't bothered to set the rest of that up yet. Thanks Microsoft for sending me almost all the way back to windows 3.1, at least Windows+D is a bit easier than alt+tabbing to program manager...

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