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Comment Re: Frogs (Score 2) 314

by staalmannen (#45804821) Attached to: France's 'Culture Tax' Could Hit YouTube and Facebook
Both dubbing and re-casting with native actors take away a lot of the experience. I hate the brittish and american recasts of swedish films/series for example. For dubbing, it is quite clear that people in European countries not speaking one of the big languages (German, Spanish, French, Italian, ...) are on average better in English thanks to sub titling of the original movies.

Comment Re: AIDS is God's way of saying homosexuality is w (Score 1) 84

by staalmannen (#45752049) Attached to: Researchers Crack Major HIV Mystery
more like 1600 years old. The christian bible was assembled as a political compromize in the 400s - including the classical prayer clearly stating that Jesus was tortured at the cross (a way to exclude the gnostics from the definition of christians). Apparently there are a lot of texts available that were classified as herretic back then which are the same age as those included in the NT. According to some of the Jesus was a bully in his teens using his super powers.... then again....we could just as well discus our hero-of-preference from the Marvel universe....

Comment KDE on windows (Score 3, Interesting) 44

by staalmannen (#45743461) Attached to: KDE Releases Applications and Development Platform 4.12
I wonder if I could use the KDE on Windows effort on those asking for help with Windows 8 (right now i have just slapped classic shell on there). My "secret" hope would be that when they are comforable enough with KDE I could convert them to a proper OS (I usually give OpenSuse KDE to novice users but use Arch myself). The case for an alternative user-installed desktop environment has never been greater on Windows, so definitely an opportunity.

Comment Re:No Sympathy (Score 2) 413

by staalmannen (#45711965) Attached to: Exponential Algorithm In Windows Update Slowing XP Machines

#4 does... Namely legacy reasons.

I have a perfectly fine multipage scanner here that doesn't have drivers for Windows 7 and the manufacturer is out of business. You do know that Windows 7 implemented driver signing right? So even if you do find a legacy driver it probably won't start because it won't be signed. And don't give me this "Linux is your route" because no driver exists for it there either. So my choices are toss a perfectly working, expensive at the time and in demand scanner just to update from a working OS to one that doesn't or stick with what is working.... Hmmmm Hard choice that one.

It would have helped if you mentioned brand and model. Perhaps people could have helped you out...

Comment Re: No Sympathy (Score 1) 413

by staalmannen (#45711499) Attached to: Exponential Algorithm In Windows Update Slowing XP Machines
I can attest to that this also is a problem in academic (biomedical) research. We have two fairly expensive machines that originally were attached to a win 95 or 98. The controller software is 16-bit and I experience a lot of instability now that the computers gave up and got replaced by XP machines. Sadly the products are discontinued and the company merged/bought. As a Linux nerd I would have loved to have OSS drivers for these machines, but that will most likely never happen (too niche products for anyone with skills to care)

Comment satanists Christians too... (Score 1) 1251

I am confused... But reasonably Satanist should also be considered Christians just rooting for the other team? Personally I would have thought that something more interesting could have been erected there. BTW if I have understood philosophical satanism correctly, one of its core beliefs is that egoism is a virtue. That should make a good fit with some of the Republicans.

Comment Re:Amazon Prime Video / Netflix / Hulu - Good Enou (Score 1) 249

by staalmannen (#45397729) Attached to: Netflix, Youtube Surpass 50% Mark of Internet Traffic
The thing I still use torrents for is to find really old stuff (we are talking 20s-50s here, mostly "horror"). There are lots of old gems to be found on TPB, which I do not think will ever be offered by any commercial streaming service. To be fair, most of those fringe downloads are abmyssably slow. Because of this, I still think that the torrents will fill a niche also when the true pirates have disappeared. It would be great if there was a repository with 1) legal now public domain movies (the old stuff) 2) old movies that can be considered "abandonware", where the rights were tracked in one way or another. This would be a cultural contribution similar to the "scan all books in the whole world" thing Google is doing.

Comment Re:The paternity problem. (Score 4, Interesting) 128

by staalmannen (#44773639) Attached to: NIH Studies Universal Genome Sequencing At Birth
The scary thing is that such information is already now witheld from the fathers also when the results are negative in standard genetic screenings (genetic risk assessments, donor profile, ...). The positive part is that the frequencies are lower than commonly cited. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misattributed_paternity

Comment Re:Alas, poor Yorick (Score 1) 107

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. This bodes some strange eruption to our state. Contagious blastments are most imminent. Who is't that can inform me? (of how low England has sunk) And then it started like a guilty thing (soon Top Gear will be blocked) O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! These tedious old fools!

I know what's rotten in Denmark: their cheeze smells like old feet

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