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Comment Re:Oh, god (Score 1) 175

I don't know that I've lost email, and my message history goes back to 2000.

I joined Yahoo for mail in about 1996, and don't recall having lost mail ever. Deleted accidentally and been unable to retrieve, yes ; lost mail on the server, no.

I have lost access due to directed spam attacks (from Creationist Muslims and hipCrime) overloading the account traffic, yes ; but mail going missing, no.

Comment Re:They should all be duel email addresses (Score 1) 149

As in, one email account connected to two email addresses, one in say Russian, and the other using the latin alphabet.

And when there is no "one-to-one", "official" transliteration from one script to the other.

My wife's Russian passport transliterated her name into Latin characters in two different ways. This cause non-trivial issues when trying to get her citizenship sorted out.

So, you add TWO Latin 2equivalents to the one Russian one? Doesn't work, does it?

Comment Re:This does pose the question: (Score 1) 195

they can put that on the requirements list for network and storage controller vendors. But that does leave the issue of where the vendors are going to find good FreeBSD hackers to write these drivers.

Isn't there a cart and horse misalignment here. If you're a hardware vendor looking to get a big (and FB are big buyers of hardware) contract, and the tendering terms include "must have drivers for [Open Source system]", then won't you look at what you've already got on the shelf in terms of capabilities, and then burn custom firmware - or even an entire new product - that fits that driver at the hardware/ register level.

Or, if you know that your NewShiny line of product is likely to be punted to FB by Sales, then you damned well make sure that it works with $FB-favoured-OS$ while you're still designing the damned thing.

Comment Re:All autmoatics are "self-driving" already (Score 1) 406

Unless you remember to slip into neutral or park,

are you driving an automatic? How peculiar.

I saw one of those a couple of years ago - even drove it for a day while my car got fixed. Very strange experience.

Of course, if you've only got a license for an automatic, then you'd struggle to find a hire car here. Maybe one automatic per hire (larger) hire centre? A percent or several of the count.

Comment Re:Submission with a spelling error, say it isn't (Score 1) 406

Need to go somewhere right fucking now?

Please clarify what you mean by "right fucking now". Is it the time to take your bicycle from the stand by the door to whichever building you're in and start cycling towards your destination, or is it the time to get into the parking area (several floors further up, down or sideways), get to the vehicle, get through the access barrier, paying your parking fee, then start to negotiate the one-way system to get to the road leading to your destination.

The time to/ from parking, and the time to find parking are things that are normally left out of the "right fucking now" equation. Being in reasonable condition, and knowing my town well in terms of non-vehicle routes, I can normally beat a car over distances of up to 3 miles - about 20 minutes door to door. That's pretty "right fucking now" if you're looking for a taxi too.

(Of course, on foot I can beat someone on a bike for really short journeys ; there's a non-trivial time to undoing the bike lock, stowing and re-deploying it.)

Comment Re:VIrus possibilities (Score 1) 353

When will we see the first virus that simply uploads a hash-matching file to your gmail, live.com, dropbox, drive, .... account and waits for the SWAT team to pounce?

They're probably already in existence. General purpose ones, and toolkits for crafting targeted attacks.

how do these "automated technologies" distinguish that?

They don't ; they flag people (OK ; accounts) for human-based investigation.

Comment Re:But they're Americans, aren't they? (Score 1) 256

It's a variant on the "Echelon" signature that has been doing the rounds since the late '80s / early '90s.

Which doesn't mean to say it's significantly wrong.

The last time I had to travel through the US - due to weather shit-canning some of my flights - I was very surprised to get one of those electronic visa things at all (what they called - ESTA, or something like that?). Which told me enough about the system's ineffectiveness.

Comment Have faith in god, but use drugs from science (Score 1) 390

Typical god-squaddie hypocrisy :

someone from the National Institutes of Health reached out to Samaritan's Purse, one of the two North Carolina-based Christian relief groups the two were working with, and offered to have vials of an experimental drug called ZMapp sent to Liberia, according to CNN's unnamed source

they claim to be able to trust in their invisible sky fairy to protect them from diseases (bullets, communists, whatever), but when they find themselves in shit, they call for the best drugs science can develop, despite science being the total antithesis of the invisible sky fairy that they have faith in when the weather is nice.

Comment Re:ORLY? (Score 1) 138

they couldn't care less that there are voles about.

If you want a bird that will eat voles, get a bird that has evolved to eat voles. Try either a falcon (kestrel, hobby, or other variants of "raptor"), or an ostrich. In either case, expect it to put "chicken" on it's menu too.

Big things eat little things ; the size difference between chicken and vole isn't enough in favour of the chicken for the vole to be considered "food" (unless it's a baby?). Few insects are that big though, so they're on "Chicken Menu v1.0"

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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